Polama
[105]
Dilip Panicker was 2 years my junior in college but we are about the same age. While at college aside from his passion for computers he was and continues to be an avid musician. He was an integral part of the college band that would end up winning almost any competition they entered.
He joined a company called Madras Computer Laboratory (MCL) after his graduation. They had an Apple Mcintosh. My colleague V Balaji and I were allowed to use it at night when the rest of the staff had left. Having never used a computer before both Balaji and I were worried we would damage the machine. Dilip spent about 10 minutes with us and we were, off writing our first proposal on a computer.
Dilip left along with his colleague Shirish Purohit and started Texel Systems along with the flamboyant P G Mohan Rao. Texel did some very exciting work in Industrial Automation on the PC platform. Dilip had intimate knowledge of the hardware and software aspects of the PC and could coax incredible performance by coding almost at the machine language level. Texel Systems was acquired and dismantled(there is a longer story on Texel systems that I may write some other time). Dilip went off to Bangalore and started on a track saying “Now I want to make money”.
Dilip and his business partner built a 50,000 sq.ft. office space in Electronics City from the earnings of their company Siri Technologies. The company did back office work for larger companies and Bank of America was one of their bigger clients.
Dilip left Siri and is currently pursuing his passion for travel, building the backend software for Polama (http://www.polama.com/). Polama is run by another IITM B-Tech, M D Ramaswamy (who is also a serial entrepreneur). They recently raised their first round of funding. See http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Polamacom_gets_Angel_Funding-nid-91381-cid-100.html
Benchmark
[104]
B-Tech’s in Business (the ones I know) – I had promised to write some of these in the blog dated November 10, 2011 No. 86. These are not social entrepreneurs but B-Techs who took the risk and became entrepreneurs when it was unconventional.
Raghu Rajagopal was my senior by 2 years and around 1983-1984 he gave me work after office hours writing software. This was on a machine made in Taiwan called Microprofessor II.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprofessor_II). I was in trainee mode but working with a chartered accountant who wanted a low cost electronic, double entry, book keeping system. My software programme became unusually large (written In BASIC) and would often crash the Microprofessor II.
Raghu and his classmate Senthil incorporated a company called Benchmark Systems in 1988. I believe they might be the first company to be created and incubated from IIT Madras. Under the guidance of Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala and with technical inputs from the Electrical Engineering Department, Benchmark built and sold electronic kits. The kits were to be used in engineering colleges to teach the basics of micro processors. Each time a new processor was released a new kit would be made. This was a good business model as repeat sales were possible to the same customer as each new processor appeared. Benchmark and its current business can be seen at http://www.benchmarkgroup.com/
Raghu and Senthil were amongst the first B-Techs I encountered in Chennai who took the leap to become entrepreneurs at a time when entrepreneurship was unpopular and unfashionable.
Internet banking
[103]
I hate standing in queues. I like to pay for all my utilities and purchases on the internet. I do all my banking on the net. I have a cheque book that was issued to me 7 years ago and I have yet to go through half of it. The only services that haven’t adopted internet banking payment are Aavin and the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board. The latter is however moving in that direction of late ( see https://www.tnebnet.org/awp/login ).
The down side is that since I live near the coast our computer breaks down every month and all this bliss goes away. Has anyone figured out how to protect the computer against dust and salty moist air?
Vinod Khosla on his latest investments
[102]
There is an interesting interview with Vinod Khosla in the Economic Times (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/interviews/need-to-produce-products-at-chindia-price-vinod-khosla/articleshow/10669053.cms?curpg=1)
He makes many interesting statements on innovation.
“We are probably doing, in my little portfolio and with our five or six partners 10 times the amount of innovation that GE and Siemens are doing combined with all their resources”
“I, for one, never compute the returns on an investment. I don’t even allow it. I think it is a bad idea to do so, in fact, in all class of investments. I’m always about taking any area, understanding the fundamentals and building up from there instead of relying on whatever traditional wisdom there is. People follow rules that others have created. Everybody does it this way, but I don’t.”
“I fail often. I’m not afraid of failure; it doesn’t embarrass me. I’d rather try something and fail at it than not try at all. It is ok to fail. I lose only one times my money. I can make it back a 100 times. So why should I care what others think?”
In this same article he talks of his most recent investment that is about to issue a 1 billion dollar Initial Public Offer, a company called KiOR (http://www.kior.com/). The company shows how it is going to produce petrol and diesel starting with wood chips. The technology is not new. Their claim from what I understand is a catalyst that makes the process better in some way. I could not find the efficiency of the conversion.
Readers may want to check the figures from the website as a back of the enevelope calculation as I have done below.
It is stated in the site (http://www.kior.com/content/?s=6&s2=56&p=56&t=Production-Facilities)
1) “500 tonnes of bone dry wood (hope this is in kgs) per day will be treated”
2) “11 million gallons of gasoline, diesel, and fuel oil blend stocks annually. (assuming all put together not individually)
3) Assumption 365 days per annum
4) Calorific values of Wood at 16000 kJ/kg
5) Calorific value of Diesel at 45000 kJ/kg (http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fuels-higher-calorific-values-d_169.html)
6) Converting gallons to litres (4.5 litres to the gallon and density of diesel .8 kg/litre)
I am getting an energy conversion efficiency of 60 %
It takes roughly 3.7 kg of wood to make 1 litre of fuel.
Hope someone will check my calculation.
Prank calls and bus journeys
[101]
Many people don’t realize that the 108 ambulance service in India was invented and propogated by Mr. B Ramalinga Raju of erstwhile Satyam Computers. He may have been at folly with his self admitted creative accounting but nobody should deny him the credit for creating a service that has saved, by now, more than a lakh of lives. The call statistics for the Tamil Nadu call centre were published in the Hindu today. See (http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Chennai/article2614182.ece)
It reminded me of an argument I had with my colleague in the 90’s. He would catch a bus to go to his home town every weekend returning by Monday morning. I said he did this only because the bus service was there and not because there was a need for him to travel. I said that majority of the travelers were doing so out of choice and the availability of the bus rather than the necessity to make the journey for personal or official work. I further stated that I would prove to him that what I said was true. Making use of a group of students from the Madras Institute of Technology interviews of passengers booking long and short journey tickets was conducted. The results were collated, entered and I proved my point. 80% of the travelers had no official or personal work that necessitated travel. I even published a small article based on the results saying that subsidies on the operation of these buses should go. On seeing the article I got a call from one of the members of the PPST group who commented “It is precisely for that reason that there should be the subsidy on travel. Imagine the havoc these people could potentially cause if they were not traveling”.
The staff at EMRI should take heart, on an average EMRI in Chennai receives 25,000 calls and 85% are nuisance/abusive or prank calls. The valiant staff at EMRI has prevented those 85% of callers from creating even greater havoc. It is just like switching channels on TV. 80% is junk you would never watch and about 20% tolerable. The EMRI example is a classic one for the Pareto principle. “The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
In the case of EMRI 80% of the ambulance movement is based on 20% of the calls.
Ethics, morals and value bases
[100]
Where is a student supposed to acquire his or her ethic, morals and values from? Traditionally it is assumed that a child from a good family will have these traits drummed into them in various ways by the parents and relatives. The sad fact today is that there is an expectation that teachers at school and colleges must do this.
I think this expectation is wrong. But if you see the young people who go to higher education you get the feeling that there may be a problem that needs to be addressed. In the modern world we are seeing more and more of families where both husband and wife are working. In this situation there is every chance that a young mind may not pick up on the right system of values. Does that make it the job of the educator? I don’t think so. If this is a real issue each school and college may have to conduct classes on ethics, morals, values, behaviour in public and much much more. This may not be possible in the modern day education system and its unlikely to be effective. Short of the guru-sishya parampara where these things were built in I cant think of any existing method to do this.
There may have to be a whole new approach to conditioning the young mind to be a “model citizen”. In the fiction book ‘Clock work Orange’ by Anthony Burgess there is an experimental behaviour modification technique called the Ludovico Technique. The technique is a form of aversion therapy in which the subject is injected with a drug that makes the subject feel sick while being forced to watch graphically violent films, eventually conditioning the subject to suffer crippling bouts of nausea at the mere thought of violence. I fervently hope society will not adopt such methods but realise that relatives and friends must work together to eschew the right values, ethics and morals for a youngster to become a functional and useful member of society.
Our National Policy on Organic Farming
[99]
Umesh Chandrasekhar is a B-Tech from IIT Madras. After he finished his B-Tech we became friends since he worked in and around Chennai. He first worked in a bubble gum factory, then for a fire extinguishing company, then moved to Auroville, met his future wife and, after marriage moved in to a 12 acre farm in Dharmapuri where he still lives today. Around 1997 he was starting up the Indian operations of IMO Control a German/Swiss an Organc Farming Inspection and Certification agency. He was running short of inspectors and asked me if I could help. After taking permission from the Chairman of the Shri AMM Murugappa Chettiar Board of Directors, I did inspect farms for IMO Control for 3 years (1997 to 2000).
Towards the end of this period the Government of India was looking to frame its own organic standards. They outsourced the work to the Biotech Consortium of India Limited. Dr PVSM Gowri took the lead in framing the National Programme on Organic Production. Though this has not been made into law in India it is accepted as the Standards document for India and can be seen at http://agmarknet.nic.in/NPOPStandards%28English%29.pdf
Sanjay Bansal, a dashing and dynamic tea estate owner from Darjeeling, Umesh and I spent many hours of intense discussion with Dr. Gowri on how the standards should look like. Umesh was particularly concerned that the small and marginal farmers should not be overlooked in the standard.
The Union Minister of State for Agriculture, Professor K.V. Thomas stated, ”Nine States, including Kerala, had drafted policies for organic farming promotion. Among them, Sikkim, Mizoram and Uttarakhand have declared intention to go 100 per cent organic in due course”. See http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-agri-biz-and-commodity/article1028571.ece
The hope should be that if individual states go organic, then the rest of the country may follow suit.
Spirulina and Large Scale Nutritional Supplementation with Spirulina Alga (LSNS)
[98]
Just as the commercial cultivation and marketing of Spirulina was about to start there was a international scare that Spirulina could be a cancer risk for heavy smokers. It turned out to be one of those flawed reports on a study with little significance. The controversy surrounded the beta carotene molecule and its isomers. Many scientists internationally woke up and challenged the study with the World Health Organisation in Geneva.
Back here in Tamil Nadu the Shri AMM Murugappa Chettiar Research Centre got funding, from the Department of Biotechnology, Governement of India to undertake what would be (and still is) the world’s largest feeding trail with Spirulina.
This was to me one of the most dangerous and delicate assignments we had ever undertaken. In the design of the survey we had to coordinate with the government and its Integrated Child Development Programme (consisting of over 750 anganwadi workers), 3 teams of medical doctors from 3 different organisations and many other local government functionaries, aside from the 5000 pre school children who would be eating the Spirulina for one year.
The doctors came in at the beginning middle and end of the feeding trails. There was a control group that was easier to handle. The spirulina had to be delivered and unused stock withdrawn to avoid any deterioration in quality. All aspects of Spirulina preparation were tightly controlled to avoid contamination. The combination of icing sugar, ajwain and Spirulina extruded as a noodle and pan dried at around 80 degree centigrade gave us confidence that the product would be safe and palatable while retaining all its nutrition.
All this was fine until one day we heard that a child had died in one of the villages were the feeding trial was ongoing. Senior project staff rushed to the site to meet the medical doctor in charge of the Primary Health Centre. As soon as they entered the doctor told them to relax and explained that the child had a history of ailments and its demise had nothing to do with the feeding trial.
To this day I can remember waiting with the entire project staff (more than 20 youngsters) for my colleagues to come back. Only after they explained that everything was ok did everybody leave for home.
Everything was a challenge during the project. We were gathering so much data during each round of medical examinations and we had one PC-AT to store the data in. Processing the data was to be done later. Managing the 20 plus youngsters who were fresh out of 10th and 12th standard, in their first job, having to use a combination of public transport for the girls and two wheelers for the boys to make pick up and delivery of the Spiru-om from the different Anganwadis, all these were social challenges.
Though it was the scariest project we ever did it gave some of the best results, by proving spirulina’s effectiveness as a beta carotene substitute.
Medicinal & Aromatic plants and Tissue Culture
[97]
If it weren’t for the Foundation for the Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) and its latest avatar The Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine(I-AIM: http://www.iaim.edu.in/) whatever residual knowledge we had on medicinal and ayurvedic plants would have been lost forever. This means that data and prescriptions developed over thousand of years would have been lost and/or, pirated and then sold back to us. Below is an extract from http://www1.american.edu/ted/turmeric.htm.
“Turmeric is a tropical herb grown in East India, and the powdered product made from the rhizomes of its flowers has several popular uses worldwide. Turmeric powder, which has a distinctive deep yellow color and bitter taste, is used as a dye, a cooking ingredient, and a litmus in a chemical test, and has medicinal uses as well. In the mid-1990s, this product became the subject of a patent dispute with important ramifications for international trade law. A U.S. patent on turmeric was awarded to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in 1995, specifically for the “use of turmeric in wound healing.” This patent also granted them the exclusive right to sell and distribute turmeric. Two years later, a complaint was filed by India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, which challenged the novelty of the University’s “discovery,” and the U.S. patent office investigated the validity of this patent. In India, where turmeric has been used medicinally for thousands of years, concerns grew about the economically and socially damaging impact of this legal “biopiracy.” In 1997, the patent was revoked. But for two years the patent on turmeric had stood, although the process was non-novel and had in fact been traditionally practiced in India for thousands of years, as was eventually proven by ancient Sanskrit writings that documented turmeric’s extensive and varied use throughout India’s history. Many developing countries are concerned that the globalization of intellectual property rights under the WTO’s TRIPs agreement, and the negative consequences it has for traditional indigenous knowledge and biodiversity.”
This is just a simple example of what the West wants to with our indigenous knowledge.
India has had to fight to retain basmati rice, neem, sandalwood and many others as within an Indian traditional knowledge system. One solution being proposed is to “claim protection for indigenous products and processes as geographic indications (GIs). GIs are defined in the TRIPS agreement as “indications which identify a good as originating in the territory of a Member, or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality, reputation, or other characteristic of the good is essentially attributable to its geographic origin.” ”
If you go to the Geographical Indications Registry at http://www.ipindia.nic.in/girindia/ you will find over 150 products including foreign products registered there. I read recently that the humble lungi has also got registered.
The Ministry of Translations
[96]
Dr V Balaji was my only friend who attended my wedding in my home town. Currently he works for the Common Wealth of Learning and is stationed in Vancouver, Canada. He was my friend and colleague at the Shri AMM Murugappa Chettiar Research Centre (MCRC) and we continue a long friendship by either writing or meeting up whenever we can.
While at MCRC we would often discuss how the various states in India would harmonise without sacrificing language or culture. These concerns were always espoused by politicians and rarely by technologists. Both of us firmly believed that all state governments would need to build a very large team of translators. Thus official documents would be in the local language and anyone could request a translation that was certified as true by the government for a fee.
If the backend of the government is properly computerized this can be done with greater ease. Today’s technology will actually allow the states to retain their language and cultural identity but also promote the same with no section of the people being disadvantaged.