If there is a tennis player who strongly refutes that you need to be physically stronger to win in contemporary women’s tennis, it must be Justine Henin. Among the serenas,venuses and sharapovas , Justine stands out. As expected the world no 1 easily won the french crushing Ivanovic 6-1 6-2. Sport(for that matter life) is about judging your opponents quickly and forming a strategy to overcome them. Justine sized up Ivanovic quickly after the first game of the match and adopted an ever agressive style to pull of a nicely scripted win. She was indeed helped by a nervous and wayward Ava Ivanovic.



This was Henin’s third consecutive french open title. This was actually meant to be the fifth but a hiatus in 2004 where she exited in the second round makes it three. Infact,that reminds of me the cytomegalovirus she suffered in 2004. She was so much affected and tired by the virus that she spent sleeping for about 14-18 hours a day. Everybody including herself doubted whether she could play tennis again. Cytomegalovirus is common among humans and is mostly innocuous. But sometimes it becomes harmful when it finds itself in the bodies of people who are less immune which was the case in Henin. I admire Henin for being able to fight off the virus and being able to achieve the results as of today. Ofcourse she has the best backhand in contemporary tennis(even better than Federer’s I mean).



I would like to see her win wimbledon, the only slam she hasn’t won till now.



Go for it, Justine!!!!

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This week, I read an article in Outlook Business about IndianRailways.

I remembered a mail which i sent to my friend in 2004. Here is the email.



From:

Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 9:17 PM

To:

Subject: Getting India’s railways on track by Christoph Wolff

Check this attached Mckinsey article.

When i was returning back to hyd in train,was thinking that Indian Railways is one typical example of a govt Organization

1.with Huge employees and hence with less productivity.

2.with lot of untapped growth areas like goods carrying.

And this thought got strengthened,when i saw the Railway goods area last week,when i went to get the vehicle sent from CBE.

Strangely,it is still not computerised and the godown is just so horrible with improper maintainence and they track the goods by the sketch writings on the sack.

There were so many old uncollected goods and the place was a real mess.

This author has captured all the thoughts and expressed it in such a structured manner…it’s really great.

(maybe thatswhat they’ll learn in MBA!!)

But at the same time,he hasn’t covered or expressed the varying fields in which Railways can earn revenue.(maybe this will be explained,when the government appoints them for consulting :))

Below one is an example of a missed out thing.

There were plans of laying down fiber optics cables across the railway network…such a great idea…but don’t know to what extent it’s really happening now…check this site for further details on this…

http://www.tenet.res.in/rural/rail.html

Hope our government does something to Railways soon,instead of trying to split into several more regions.It’s a great organization with untapped potential.

rgds,



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And strangely the article which i read about Railways was how IT is changing the way Railways is working….Below mentioned are 3 such cases…

It talks about something called CRIS(Center for Railway Information Systems). Strangely as per this website, http://www.indianrail.gov.in/abcris.html this was established in 1986 and the effects are slowly seen only now…

The another one mentioned is FOIS (Freight Operations Information System). Railways has made good profits this year thanks to the improvements due to these systems in place..

A good case study about this is present in CMC website..

http://www.cmcltd.com/case_studies/transportation/fois.htm



And one other obvious example of IT in Railways is IRCTC website. Nowadays, i think anybody who has access to Internet, books tickets only thru the website. And this is supposed to the No.1 online website in India. Imagine how much revenue can be achieved by advertisements, reducing resources…



Infact after reading the article, i really felt happy that not everything is bad in our system.



Thinking is in the right direction…but the problem lies in planning and execution.



Why does a CRIS setup in 1986 took so much time to really execute things?

This delay would’ve costed thousands of crores as loss to Railways and also the productivity of the industries which are dependent on Railways.



And i think this is the one of the problems in Infrastructure development side…



First of all, there are not many highways being constructed….still the major blunder is, the few parts where highways are being constructed, it is only 4 lane…this is not right, it should be atleast 6 lanes..



the cost involved in making a 4 lane highway to 6 lane might be equivalent to coming up with a new one…and 4 lane is really not enough in a country like india where we have all type of vehicles being driven on the highways…



when something of this scale is being done, it should be done right at the first time..

somehow i never believe in the Exit interviews…

what is the use of these feedbacks?



yes, we can give general fundas that feedbacks will help in improving the team, the working environment and stuff…

but the points mentioned in these feedbacks will never be something new…if it was new, ppl will not quit for that..they’ll try to convey it and try to change the system.



People quit because things are not working even after feedbacks were given or because they are just fed up with things and want to try something new…



maybe few people might feel happy that the company wants to know feedback from him/her, so company values the individual’s opinion…



so from this emotional point of view, it feels good…but if we think of the usefulness of this feedback,atleast i donot see any.

The old wall sodden with moss. That funny smell. The wall, crumbling under its own weight. Wondered what kept it together for all these years. Why would it stand through this relentless, all drenching rain. And those large deep brown bricks, don’t see them around anymore. Inside the house was even more depressing. The old tiled roof- i could actually see the chinks in the tiles, and patterns of moss underneath them. Yes, this roof leaked. I felt like i was in the last century. And how could i forget that old black and white television. The kind with the shutter in front you could pull and close. But that wasn’t what i set out to tell you, no.. Describing that house was the last thing on my mind. But the feeling of the place had seemed to have seeped into my skin, almost like that constant moisture you could feel inside the plaster, and the sand which seemed to be like an invisible grit carpet under your feet.

What did interest me was that old clock on the wall. Not a grandfathers clock, but those nondescript kind with a pendulum inside the glass case. Chimed at the half hours and the hours. Sounding out the time to an empty house. Empty. That’s the feeling you got when you went inside it. You could feel the hollowness in your own existence. Like that God damn moisture I kept feeling under my skin. God, it was as if the place was inside my veins. The house was far from empty ,it was full as it could be, with rotting furniture and random items strewn about the house which time had failed to rot like the rest of the unidentifiable things stuck to the walls or floor. Like the entire place had been soaked in a giant layer of spit, and everything had congealed into a uniform mass.

And that dampness.

I draw a deep breath as I feel the oxygen in my bloodstream run shallow. Its more like short gasps being all i can afford. I look across the dimly lit rooms. The humidity was so thick, you could feel the air making its way into your lungs like a liquid. A broken window pane looked out into an overgrown backyard. There was the crumbling remnants of a well there , and its paved surroundings. Moss there too. Even the old pulley with the frayed rope was there. Thick undergrowth. You could lose your soul in that vegetation. I push open the window. A shard of glass falls to the cement. It shatters the silence. I look at the millipedes crawling there get smashed by the glass. One of them curls itself up making it look like a wound up spring. The damp earth near pavement, with nothing but saplings pushing their way out, trying to crumble the cement as they continue their pitiful existence. I get the feeling someone is with me in this room. How many lives and deaths did this old hovel see. And how many different feelings did it harbour. My great grandfather whispering sweet nothings to my great grandmother. My uncle and aunt as teenagers courting by the door. My pitiful existence in solitude by the window. The cloudy sky offered no sighs of blue, just the dull white light that preserved this place a few centuries behind the world. An old clothes line sagged between two sticks. A dull red rag was tied to one of them.



The nurse walked into the dimly lit hospital room. She took the warm towel off the patients head and wiped it dry. She turned on the lights and went to check on the other patients. The bedside table had a bunch of faded flowers on them. They would never be seen anyway, by the patient. They would be taken away and replaced by fresh ones the next month. And the next one. Till he would die someday.



The sun finally managed to cut through the clouds and started drying the place up. That feeling of warm moisture under my skin stared departing.



Tomorrow I think I’ll go to the beach and bring back some old memories. I wish I could imagine people there as well. I feel so lonely sometimes.

The past ten months or so, my writings have mostly dealt with nostalgia, depression, and occasionally,some cheerful things like entropy (only mech engineers need try to understand how entropy can be cheerful,of all things.In fact,if you think my senses are isotropically atrophying,you are probably right:-)That atrocious sentence is just a taste of things to come in my future posts.

But you will live through this one all right.For am going to write about the things that I find quite admirable here, something that I should have done quite a while ago.

Karmanya vadhikaraste, ma faleshu kadach na. Perhaps the essence of The Gita. And yet, I comprehend those lines only after coming here,in a capitalistic country,ironically.Nothing exemplifies what I say better than exam/submission time. Americans work diligently and come what may, they wont pull the typical Indian stunt of a nightout.Once night falls, they will leave at that point,irrespective of how they have done. The code may or may not run.The plots might be wrong.The proof may be awful.But they wont go on.They start work early and finish on time. In contrast Indians, typically will let the grass grow under their feet first.Once enough has grown,they will then toil night and day, colonise the computer lab, all the while keeping their eye fixed on what they want,namely the output/grade.Hardly the followers of The Gita, are we? The American’s careless indifference to grades and results is something that I admire. Of course I also understand that in India now we cant survive without being result oriented.Its the way we are brought up, and incidentally most last minute desi submissions often turn out better than the others. In India academic success is almost the only way to make a career.Yes, there are very successful people in other careers too,but lets not kid ourselves and be romantic. For every successful cartoonist, sportsman, artist, or people like that, there are thousands who have fallen by the way side. In the U.S.A, you can make your living as a carpenter or plumber, and live comfortably. Also, the fact that we have come so far for an education means that we obviously are more driven to succeed.So if seen that way, perhaps our behaviour can be rationalised.

However no rationalisation can excuse unethical behaviour,of the kind that am about to describe.

The true meaning of honour and ethics too I discovered after coming here. There is a code of honour that we sign on every assignment and I used to do that with typical cynicism .However during exams I found there were no invigilators!We were just left to ourselves !It was understood, and taken for granted, that nobody would resort to unfair means. To repose such trust made me feel rather ashamed of my earlier cynicism. And there were a few infamous instances that I came to hear about, in classes, with a predominantly Indian population.Assignments were copied en masse , and instructors had to take drastic measures.In one of my courses, two desis had suspiciously similar(correct) answers to a crucial problem, one that had felled the best. The professor called them and asked about it,and these two fed him a cock and bull story.However their story was taken at face value,which again told me something.It is so easy to take advantage of this trust,and I really find it most disgusting when people do that. Not everyone does it , only some do, but almost everyone who does seems to be Asian, which doesnt do us or our country any favours. But it is a wonderful thing isn’t it, to pass the responsibility onto you , and assuming that you will act ethically. Such a change from back home!