Shiv Visvanathan is currently a Professor at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. He was a regular visitor to the Shri AMM Murugappa Chettiar Research Centre (MCRC). He was very interested in picking the brains of my guru Dr. C V Seshadri. While waiting for CVS to get free, Shiv and I would chat. I found him an exceptional thinker with an original world view. Many of things I have written about are from my engineers’ view point. Shiv always had a higher level of understanding that I sometimes could not keep up with. In the link below there is a fairly detailed piece on his thoughts, impressions on Dr. CVS and the work done at MCRC. http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/cvs-shiv.pdf

Shiv’s current areas of interest: Sociology of Science and Technology, Violence and Globalisation, Corruption, Sociology of Disasters, Culture and Communication, Futures.

I admire the unstinting and dedicated work of Dr. Bideshwar Pathak. There can’t be a better example of converting your area of concern to an action oriented social enterprise.

He founded Sulabh International in 1970. Sulabh was the first organisation to prove that pay and use toilets could work in India. He and his organisation have many laurels to their credit see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bindeshwar_Pathak

This recent story on Sulabh was kind of sad and ironical at the same time. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-11-11/news/30387149_1_countries-kabul-complexes

Is there any connection between Nobel Prize winners and the countries they are from? For instance, you would expect that they are from developed nations largely and that they have a profound and dramatic impact on the nation as well.

So a young innocent asked the other day how come the United States of America (USA) is in shambles. Why are there so many economic and other problems when they have so many Nobel Prize winners from the USA. I went and checked. The economics Nobel Prize was instituted in 1969 and since then they have awarded the prize to around 70 intellectuals.  http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/

At the following wiki site there is a list of winners by country - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country

I counted around 40 winners from the USA.

40 Nobel Prize winners out of 70 come from America. The American economy is in shambles. Should we be happy that there is only one Indian who has won the Nobel Prize, namely Amartya Sen?

“The Cog” is the name of one of the longest advertisement films ever made for the launch of a car. This advertisement that appeared in 2003 is iconic. It does not use any Computer Graphics and is shot in real time using various parts from the Honda Accord. It cost around a million british pounds to produce and took 7 months of shooting. Though it appears as one long 2 minute shot, it was actually done as two separate shots and is stitched together somewhere during the halfway mark. It will stay in your mind and you really will enjoy it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ve4M4UsJQo. The action is akin to that of a Rube Goldberg machine and is started by a “cog”.

There is a detailed description of the history and making of this advertisement at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cog_%28advertisement%29

I am a big movie fan and am always astounded by the creativity exhibited by directors and cameramen in bringing spectacle to the screen. My latest “Hey you must see this” is the opening sequence of the movie called “Limitless”. The opening starts on the top of a high rise building, runs down the side of a building, levels out on the street and has a continuous zoom through multiple streets in real time and ends up moving through a billboard at which point the Computer Graphics take over.

You can see the opening shot at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h_ILxg-Qek. There is an interview with the team that made that shot what the director called a “fractal zoom” at http://www.pcworld.com/article/223108/infinite_zoom_lens_how_the_opening_scene_of_limitless_was_created.html

The movie has many other trick shots and is well worth watching. The story of the movie revolves around a magic pill that allows you to utilize every part of your brain and memory.

For those who have not heard of Ramar Pillai, he was the epitome of the rustic Indian who makes a breakthrough unprecedented in the annals of science. Using water herbs and some secret ingredient he claimed he could make a petrol like fuel. This was in 1996. The local government, and anybody who was anybody lauded him and he gave several demonstrations of how he made his fuel. He became internationally famous. Reports of his “discovery” even made it to TIME magazine.

The secretary of the Department of Science and Technology Dr. V Ramamurthy requested Ramar Pillai to demonstrate his method at IIT Madras campus. The faculty scrutinised all his equipment and materials. At the end of the demonstration they redid their scrutiny. Their final verdict was that it was a hoax. Ramar Pillai admitted to it as well much later http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/20000315/ina15002.html

I heard that he has made a comeback recently with similar claims. P T Barnum is often credited as saying “There’s a sucker born every minute” and Ramar Pillai must believe that it takes 15 years to create a nation of new suckers.

After the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act came in to force, the cost of labour increased in rural areas. Large farmers had adopted machines like tractors and combined harvesters either by buying them or mostly on a rental basis. For a good analysis of the increase in mechanisation see this presentation http://www.ibef.org/download/Agricultural_Equipment_171109.pdf

The majority of our farmers are in the category of small and marginal farmers. They were dependent on low cost farm labour to keep their production costs down. In the case of small and marginal farmers, technology adoption for farm mechanization was low. Their ability to pay for equipment is low even with the many subsidies available. These farmers are now looking at mechanization as a must.

A new kind of enterprise is growing in rural areas, hiring of farm equipment for small holdings. This is successful wherever there are good roads. There is also a move to create “cooperative agricultural equipment banks”.  See http://www.hindu.com/2011/06/02/stories/2011060262160300.htm

I think I did my first teleconferencing call in 2002. It was an unusual experience for me and a disturbing one. I could not put a face to many of the participants and they were spread out across the world. I was also left with the feeling that it was a waste fo time as nothing was achieved during that particular call.

Now almost ten years later I have found that teleconferencing can be very useful and extremely cost effective. This year alone we had a committee meeting with 3 members calling in, of which one person was in Canada. A second call had participants from the United States of America. In that call one participant was actually commuting. In both instances there were very good outcomes and a feeling of accomplishment. I suppose it takes time to get used to some technologies. As I grow older I want to learn fewer things and therefore may not be a good judge, but it seems to me youngsters adapt to new technology much faster than older people. There may be an underlying research question regarding the rate of technology adoption.

The integration of your credit card features into a cell phone is one application of near field communication. Just wave or tap your phone to make payments, this is the promise of the technology. NFC technology is used in smart cards that allow travel on the Delhi metro by just touching the card at a terminal. Rural banking would certainly benefit from this technology.

“Nokia and online payment services provider PayMate have joined hands to develop a solution which allows user pay bills by just touching NFC-technology enabled handset on a point.” http://ibnlive.in.com/news/nokia-incorporates-paymates-nfc-technology-for-india/200995-11.html

In 9 quick simple slides the status of NFC in India is given at this site http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/itslideshow/10693521.cms

I wondered why the government wanted Nandan Nilekani to head the UIDAI project. It seems to be an inspired decision. The UIDAI intends to give each one of us as a citizen of India, a unique number. The number gives us identity. The objective of this identity is

• Overcome problem of duplicate and bogus identity
• Act as a  useful source for online verification and authentication
• Target social security schemes better
• Take business services to the remotest parts
• Help weed out illegal immigrants

What I want to highlight here is that no other country has attempted anything at this scale before. It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, USA that has built a database of 50 million plus. The UIDAI is looking at making a data base of 1.2 billion people. Once the field work is complete and all citizens have their unique identity, as a country we can feel proud of this achievement.