Professional Blog

           We people were contemplating to take an introduction session of our juniors. So, there were we at 10’o clock awaiting their arrival.
           We were awaiting the arrival of our juniors in the atrium at sharp 10’o clock, waited for them for 5 minutes and thought to adjourn the meet. Later they called us and said they were waiting at basketball court for us.
           Nevertheless, we started the intro session and welcomed the accession of our juniors into SCIT. Asked them to sit on the staircase. We had earlier planned that we would show our resentment on them for first fifteen minutes but even that was spoiled by Dhruva and Rachna. Earlier it was implicated anonymously that no body would cut anyone in the middle of his/her speech because it gives a wrong impression. But destiny had something else to offer. As we commenced, most of the time somebody or the other was cut in middle of their speech and it would have obviously given a bad impression of seniors on them.
           We asserted that you should include five things, “name, qualification, place, hobbies, USP and their expectation from seniors and SCIT”. Most of the replies were not authenticated and it seemed that those were neatly fabricated and moulded with words.
          They chosen a CR who wasn’t articulate enough to convey his thoughts and the reason they gave to select him as CR was that they wanted someone who could be a rubber stamp.
          When Gunpreet (a contemporary from Punjab) was about to commence her intro I reiterated, “Are you comfortable with intro? ” because the other day she had done the walk out. And she reiterated “that was a different thing”. And Nidhi was like “I keep myself busy usually”. Siddharth asked her “how do you keep yourself busy” and she prompted by saying “I do this and I do this and I do this and and and………….”then I said “I can see you really keep yourself busy”.
           It doesnt take much time to ponder over the fact that our junior batch is not that great, that we had expected.

This is one of the auspicious day of our journey that we do daily to reach our office in Kalyani Nagar.

          We get down from our college bus at atur centre to go to our respective office. Sushant, Kaushik and myself go in one auto. This is a typical day of our journey. “Sushant, kahan hai yaar tu?” This was Kaushik or Bhooka, as his friends call him. He is christened this name because he literally chases every girl in sight.

         “Bhaiya, Kalyani Nagar chaloge” asked a harsh voice of Kaushik. “Nahi” Came the prompt reply. And me and sushant could not stop laughing. And Kaushik was like “sale inke baap ka auto hai kya, itna bhaav khaate hain ye log”.

          We get in the auto, Sushant and Kaushik sat on side seat and I grab the middle seat. As soon as we get in auto, Kaushik verbalized “la yaar sandy, kuch gane suna de” (FM station in mobile). I vent out anger and mumble “saala, kamina” and unwillingly share my earphone with him.

         “Bhandiya hu, Bhandiya hu (khuda ke liye)” Auto was filled with music. “I love this song“ claimed Kaushik. Another good song comes up but he didn’t like it and changes the station and I curse myself to be with him.

          (Auto stops at railway station red light)

          And our Kaushik bhaiya start staring a foreigner, “kya maal hai yaar. Kitni sexy hai”. And we were like “saale chilla kyun raha hai, aaram se bol le ”. And he retorted by saying “for girls I go like drooling” and he shows the action. I bet he couldn’t  have articulated better than that.

          Between the journey I dooze off and seeing it Kaushik asks Sushant “Ye room par sota nahi hai kya, Jab dekho sota hi rehta hai”. (Kumbhkarna still exist on this earth, at least some of his relatives)

         “Sandy, we are at our place now” said Sushant. And I wake up rubbing my eyes and say “itni jaldi aa gaye”. And we get down and ask the charge usually its 65-75 depending on the traffic. Generally its Sushant who pays the money and we give him our share in evening or the next day.

The futures of India are stepping outside to go to their office.

             Dont be amazed by the name PTC, its neither a place nor a palace, its the name of my company where i am currently doing interns. PTC( Parametric technology corporation) is one of the market leaders in PLM(Product Lifecycle Management). Most of you might be knowing about Product lifecycle management (PLM). It is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal.

The profile that i have got here is that of software developement in language C++. This language is not going to leave me, its been there with me since 11th class. Anyways they are paying me a handsome 10,000 as a stipend and taking no work out of me. And the cool thing is that my mentor is also a jolly person. Somebody has rightly verbalized “you enjoy your work if you get company of good people”.

 

          This is one of the debated issue in India. Despite achieving unparalled growth, children get negligible health care facilities. Report after report damns the state of health-care facilities in India. The latest data on child health care paint a shameful picture. About 53 per cent of children aged below five — that’s a huge 67 million of them — make do without basic medical facilities. That includes access to prenatal care, skilled childbirth, immunisation and treatment for diarrhoea and pneumonia.

 
        The report brought out by a reputable global NGO — Save the Children — compared 55 countries. And India, a country that has superpower aspirations and is proud of its robust growth, ties with Ghana and Eritrea for the 27th rank. According to the study, 66 per cent of the poorest children in India receive negligible or no health care. The figure stands at 31 per cent for those who are well off. The statistics only get more shocking: over a million children die annually before they turn a month old. That’s mostly because they have no access to primary health centres. Even when they do, what greets them is often a woefully ill-equipped shed. Poor maternal health — caused largely, but not exclusively, by malnourishment — only compounds the problem.

          One disturbing fact the report throws up is the gender survival gap, which is widening. Between the ages of one and five, for every five boys who die, eight girls die. The report cites less money spent on girls’ health compared with boys as one of the major reasons for the survival gap. For instance, in Punjab the expenditure on medical care in the first two years after birth for boys is 2.3 times higher than that for girls. This is a telling comment on the deep-rooted gender bias in our society, which cuts across economic classes and does not spare even those who are well educated.

             Many Indians might be adopting modern lifestyles but mindsets remain largely medieval. It is clear that education alone is not going to help us bridge the divide. Our education system is part of a prejudiced sociocultural matrix and often reflects it. Gender bias is further reinforced by skewed representations of women in popular culture, as seen in our movies, television soaps and advertisements. If we are to close the gap, the realm of popular culture might be a good place to start effecting change, not in drinking habits but in social attitudes.

        Stephen S Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, had warned that Asia and India will be hit hard due to a likely recession in the US in 2008, saying “if US sneezes, Asia will catch a cold”. And this has indeed become true if stats are to be believed.

        For young engineering graduates, getting a job has never been tough in the past few years. While multiple job offers were pretty much the norm earlier, engineering graduates now consider themselves lucky if a company shows up for campus recruitment at all. And those who have got offer letters have been asked to wait for six months to a year before reporting to work.

        Some fresh graduates say they are yet to receive offer letters from IT companies, which include many top-tier ones, even after the selection and placement season ended in February 2008. Others say they are receiving offer letters, which have a date of joining mentioned as late as six months to one year. Anxious students across India have even formed online communities around companies that have issued them offer letters.

        Students in tier-II institutes in Non Metro towns have been the most affected. Ritesh Pahuja, a placement officer at Greater Noida Institute of Information Technology said: “All major IT companies have been slow on placements this year. Only 60% of the total batch has been placed so far, although the placement process is still on. Students who have been placed were supposed to get their offer letters by the first week of April. However, most of the students have not got any letter as yet. The delay might be the result of a slowdown in the US, which is impacting the IT industry in India.”

        Even if the companies are hiring students, they either keep the students on bench or if you are very unlucky they will fire you. Recently, Sapient Technologies lay off 160 employees which included 10 classmates of mine. And even in the first quarter of this year TCS had cut salary packages of its employees by 1.5%.

        On the other hand, top-tier IT companies maintain that they will stick to their annual guidance of hiring the announced numbers (25,000 in case of Infosys). Wipro Technologies has made close to 14,000 offers to fresh engineering graduates in the current year. But Satyam has outrightly denied participating in the placement process this year for the 2009 batch, according to an institute in NCR.

        In India, the reason behind delayed job offers is because of the reduction in new business from the US and Europe due to a downturn in the economy. Industry leaders expect the slowdown to be over in 12-18 months, by which the demand for IT employees may again peak due to a sudden jump in offshoring.

          Yesterday, in Gujarat (and perhaps elsewhere too), protestors and activists burnt effigies of US president George Bush in protest against his statement that the rising prosperity of India’s huge middle class was responsible for spiraling food prices the world over.
          However, a survey reveals that the total food grain consumption per person is five times more in the US, than in India. The average American eats more than the average Indian, and due to prosperity, the wastage of food is also more in the US. So it is obvious, who the real culprit is.

          However, another major cause for spiraling food prices could be the world’s rush for producing biofuels.

          Immediately an argument will ensue that biofuels are a boon to the mankind. They are the best alternative fuel source. They help in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They are better for the earth’s environment than the fossil fuels. They will help reduce global warming. True. However, these benefits get far outweighed by the drawbacks, as more and more land is being used to grow corn, palm oil, rapseed oil, sugar cane, soybean and other crops for making biofuels. Valuable rainforest is being cut down to make way for fuel crops.
          Converting cultivable land to grow biofuel crops would destroy the food system. The first fall out would be food shortage in the developing countries. This could also cause worsening water shortages, as these biofuel crops require large amounts of water.
It is increasingly being felt that biofuels could do more harm than good. Instead of protecting the environment, energy crops destroy natural forests that actually store carbon and help to fight global warming. Another fear is that poor farmers would be forced off their land as big industrial farmers rush to cash in on the biofuel bonanza. This could destroy the livelihoods of these poor farmers, cause exploitation of workers and affect food availability and their prices. Scientists also think that it takes a lot of energy to produce some biofuels, and it would be cleaner to use petrol in our vehicles.
          Brazil is the world’s largest producer of biofuel ethanol from sugarcane and accounts for around half of the world’s total output. The United States is the world’s biggest oil user and is the second-largest biofuel producer from corn and woody biomass materials. The European Union produces biofuel from rapeseed oil, soybean oil and palm oil.
India plans to grow 30 million acres of jatropha trees by 2012 for biofuel, but is facing criticism because this would encourage deforestation and could force communities off their land. It is also felt that dependence on a single type of plant is dangerous and an outbreak of pests and diseases could wipe out entire plantations at once.
          The National Consultation on Biofuels in India comprising of farmers, people’s movements, NGOs and concerned individuals, recently issued a statement regarding biofuels – “Will they deliver or destroy?”. They believe that promotion of large-scale corporate-sponsored biofuels and widespread plantation of Jatropha called as “oil from soil” would be more destructive than helpful.
          They have cited some facts about the biofuels:

1. The extraction of oil or gas from such crops is not very energy efficient and therefore not very climate-friendly.
2. Jatropha, sugarcane & other such crops consume huge quantities of water. Therefore, in places such as Rajasthan, which already face severe water shortages, jatropha can really become a “hell crop”.
3. Biofuels are a way of bringing genetically engineered crops from the back door.

          So what is the solution? It seems that more research on biofuels is needed. Plants can be converted to fuel more cleanly and cheaply by doing some R&D using Biotechnology. Biofuels could become a boon for the environment, but wrong policies might make them a bane.

          Perhaps the world needs to do a rethink.

The moment we read the line ‘Discipline in Parliament’ many weird pictures gush through our mind and the most prominent of them would be MPs and MLAs throwing mikes at each other. If that is not enough, a brilliant spectacle is watching them shouting slogans at the drop of a hat. Sadly, this has been the state of the our parliament members which were chosen by we people to run our country.

               But there has been some enlightment and the result is few intellectual person are taking corrective measures to stop this nuisance. Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee has decided that he has had enough of MPs disrupting Parliament. He has referred cases of “disorderly” conduct by 32 MPs to the House privileges committee.

               There is some substance to these charges since all parties have been guilty, at some time or other, of stalling Parliament. But a start needs to be made on checking disruptive behaviour. In recent years, there has been a sharp decline in business conducted in the House. The number of sittings of Lok Sabha has come down from an yearly average of 124 in the first decade of 1952-61 to 81 between 1992 and 2001, a decline of 34 per cent. For the same period, the decline for Rajya Sabha was 20 per cent. This has had a direct impact on the number of Bills passed by Parliament. The annual average of the number of Bills passed has come down from 68 in the first decade to 50 between 1992 and 2001. Last year, Parliament worked for the least number of days in non-election years in the last eight years.

               The drop in the number of working hours is directly related to unruly behaviour in Parliament. Slogan shouting, walkouts and periodic rushing to the well of the House have too often resulted in the Speaker adjourning the House. To compound matters, MP absenteeism is rampant. This is not only a blot on Indian democracy, but also a waste of the taxpayer’s money.

               If the MPs referred to the privileges committee by Chatterjee are hauled up, it could send a strong signal against such behaviour in future. Other measures could be considered. The vice-president, who is the Speaker of Rajya Sabha, has suggested that Parliament should sit for a minimum of 130 days. Chatterjee has mooted the idea of docking a day’s pay from MPs who disrupt House proceedings.

               I hope these strict measures could be a stepping stone towards a well behaved and mannered parliament.

Let me give you a brief overview of VoIP for those who don’t know what it is.

          Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is an IP telephony term for a set of facilities used to manage the delivery of voice information over the Internet. VoIP has become popular largely because of the cost advantages to consumers over traditional telepone networks. VoIP calls can be placed across the Internet. Most Internet connections are charged using a flat monthly fee structure. Using the Internet connection for both data traffic and voice calls can allow consumers to get rid of one monthly payment. In addition, VoIP plans do not charge a per-minute fee for long distance.

          But in addition to these advantages, there are certain security threats too. For instance, two protocols widely used in VoIP-H.323 and Inter Asterisk eXchange-have been shown to be vulnerable to sniffing during authentication, which can reveal passwords that later can be used to compromise the voice network. Implementations of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) can leave VoIP networks open to unauthorized transport of data.

          In addition, tools that can help find vulnerable deployments have been published online by a VoIPSA, an industry group dedicated to securing VoIP. The VoIPSA tools are intended to help businesses test and secure their networks, but these and other online tools can be used to probe for weaknesses as well.

          Still, there have been few exploits so far and none that have been widespread or crippling to businesses. “We are not hearing about attacks. We don’t think they are happening,” said Lawrence Orans, an analyst with Gartner.

          Part of the reason may be that the largest VoIP vendors use proprietary protocols, such as Cisco’s Skinny, Nortel’s Unistim and Avaya’s variant of H.323, Orans said. That makes them difficult to obtain and study for potential security cracks.

          SIP, which is gaining popularity, is a mixed bag, Orans said, because it is readily available to those who might want to exploit it. “I would say that SIP is a good-news, bad-news story. It’s easy to get your hands on, and that includes the bad guys. The good news is there are more options to protect SIP,” he said. These options include firewalls and intrusion-prevention systems that support SIP.

          Another reason for the lack of broad exploits is that there isn’t enough ROI for attackers’ development time. Meanwhile, not everybody agrees with the assessment that VoIP will remain unbreakable in 2008.