ICC Cricket World Cup…All Set to Rock !

The next 20 days will be treated as the most exciting & entertaining days for India & other cricket playing countries as ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 is all set to rock the world of its own. West Indies (Caribbean Islands) are hosting 2007’s world cup.

Most of the matches will be played in St Lucia, Trinidad & Tobago, St Kits & Jamaica. The live telecast of these matches will be done in India by Sony Max TV channel. All these matches will start at 7pm IST (Indian Standard Time) and All matches those are being played in Jamica will start at 8pm IST.

You can subscribe to the ICC WorldCup 2007 Google Calendar with IST timings.

Hiring India, it’s IBM turn now !

According to the recent IBM’s annual report, their workforce was increased by 8%. Most of this is coming from their recruitment in India center. IBM has stated that at the end of year 2006, they have employed over 350k, up from 320k last year (2005).

IBM’s India center has the current staff of 52,000 people, which was 36,000 in the previous year. This makes India as the largest hub for IBM next to their USA center.

Read more @ Physorg

Indian’s are not happy :-)

Via Guy Kawasaki…and the Original Story

Yes, Indians are not being considered as happy people around. According to a new survey/study conducted by Adrian G White, a psychologist at University of Leicester, produced a map of happy people around the world. This study considered the data from UNESCO, CIA , New economics foundation, the WHO, and Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the UNHDR.

The top 10 countries are as follows…

1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan (Asian)
9. Brunei
10. Canada

Other notable countries

23. USA
35. Germany
41. UK
62. France
82. China
90. Japan
125. India
167. Russia

ISRO has launched the first Re-Entry PSLV

Wow, what a good news for Indians :-). Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has successfully launched it’s first Re-Entry model Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle PSLV-C7 in to a 637 km high polar orbit at today morning 9:30 am IST .

PSLV-C7 is a milestone for ISRO. With this launch India has become the 4th country to launch Re-Entry Space Capsule experiment. PSLV – C7 was launched with a payload of 1292 Kg (4 satellites).

According to ISRO Press news : “The 680 kg main payload, CARTOSAT-2, mounted over DLA, was the first satellite to be injected into orbit at 981.3 sec after lift-off at an altitude of 639 km. About 45 sec later, DLA with the 6 kg PEHUENSAT-1 mounted on it, was separated. 120 sec later, the 550 kg Space capsule Recovery Experiment (SRE-1) mounted inside DLA was separated and finally, 190 sec later, the 56 kg LAPAN-TUBSAT, mounted on the equipment bay of PSLV fourth stage was separated.

The four satellites have been placed in a polar orbit at an altitude of 637 km with an inclination of 97.9 deg with respect to the equator. The initial signals indicate their normal health.”

Read more here

Indian Democrasy : Now Impersonated

We all know that, agree that Indian democracy is the most flawed democracy. Is’nt it? You wanna disagree with me? In the words of software world, no other system in this world has got the defect density that Indian democracy (so called) got. A democratic country with no proper human rights, heavy beauracracy, land lords, corruption, illegitimate politics, child labour, illitarcy and what else…

Economic Intelligence, a division of leading magazine The Economist has published a new index of flawed democracy and India stands at 9.58 out 10 score. Congratulations to all the politicians who made thier contributions to India’s achivement. Jai hind…(Hail India)

Read more here

India Outsourcing 101

eWeek has published a video hosted by Stan Gibson that talks about setting up outsourcing shops in India and managing the budgets as per expectations. As there are much publicity happening on India losing it’s low salary edge, this talk seems to be very interesting. In this talk stan talked about various factors like Wage inflation, Turnover, Cultural Factors.

Read more stories on Outsourcing in India here

En route in India

Via Ankit Fadia…

Bingo ! A new shiny fully functional mapping website is ready for India. MapmyIndia.com allows you to find out a route and directions to near by market or the famous park in your city. This is the first interactive map guide built for India.

I am too much impressed with this website and excited with the results too. Happy to see a map guide atlast for highly unmanaged roads, and routes of India.

India Rising

One Billion Reasons to care…What makes India so diversified in this World ? What is the secret behind it’s power of economy? Watch this..

India Live !

Thanks to uday for pointing this cute collection of snaps…one collection per each state in India…Hats off to Claude…

My favourite collection is offcource… Andhra Pradesh 🙂

Enjoy the colourful My India here

Technorati tags: India, photos, myindia

Be a lion at home

I got this from one of the fun mailer threads, though it sounds very funny, it reflects the actual situation that most of the Indian developers are facing in US on H1-B visas.

In a poor zoo of India, a lion was frustrated as he was offered not more than 1 kg meat a day.

The lion thought its prayers were answered when one US Zoo Manager visited the zoo and requested the zoo management to shift the lion to the US Zoo.

The lion was so happy and started thinking of a central A/c environment, a goat or two every day and a US Green Card also. On its first day after arrival, the lion was offered a big bag, sealed very nicely for breakfast.

The lion opened it quickly but was shocked to see that it contained few bananas. Then the lion thought that may be they cared too much for him as they were worried about his stomach as he had recently shifted from India.

The next day the same thing happened. On the third day again the same food bag of bananas was delivered.

The lion was so furious, it stopped the delivery boy and blasted at him,
‘Don’t you know I am the lion…king of the Jungle…, what’s wrong with your management?, what nonsense is this?, why are you delivering bananas to me?’

The delivery boy politely said, ‘Sir, I know you are the king of the jungle but .. did you know that you have been brought here on a monkey’s visa!!!

Moral of Story : Better to be a Lion in India than a Monkey elsewhere!!!!!

India…and the ingredients

What makes a true “India”? a country that breaths on its rich culture, heritage and diversity in and out…If I ask this question to myself, the answer would be this…”Empowered Villages”, “Empowered Villages”, “Empowered Villages”.

There is a famous saying in Telugu (a regional major language in India)…”Graamale desaaniki pattugommalu”. That means…villages are everything for a country. This statement was made by a famous guy dated way back before independance was posessed.

This statement holds good and very much true even now. The dreams of india are built upon grameena vikas (welfare of villages) long back but never been executed successfully. A country is like a big baniyan tree. The baniyan tree makes it’s roots go across acres and live upon the resources it gets from miliions of small small child roots. These are nothing but villages for any country. A country like India where people & land are core competency requires the empowerment of villages as good as townships and metros.

Today I have visited this cool website called “SmartVillages.org”. The main initiative behind this website is to bring e-goveranance and manage the progress of a village using internet. This brings lot of transperancy and visibility to the village administration.

The first model village which was empowered by this project is “Hansdehar“, a village from Haryana. The website looks pretty cool and neat. My hearty congratulations and best wishes for the website owners and people of Hansdehar.

Democracry…

GOOD News : Ban was lifted….:-)

http://www.ibnlive.com/news/government-lifts-ban-o…

The Department of Telecommunications of the Government of India has lifted the ban on blogs  following pressure from the Indian blogger community and the media. Even with the lifting of the ban several bloggers from BloggersCollective are getting ready to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court of India against the Government censorship of the Internet.

Flash News : Blog Blockade will be lifted in 48 hours (Source : Rediff)

Helping hand from Pakistan :  This is a great gesture….The pakistani bloggers community is giving its helping hand to support all Indian bloggers to route thier blog links to pkblogs using a cool-nifty script…find more about it here….

Heard from friends : Blockade still continues…seems some ISPs have removed the restrictions already and the banned blog sites are now accessible. well, the real good news is not yet out 😦

Wired Coverage :

“In its efforts to shut down extremists blogs, the government ended up blocking all access to several websites, including the popular Blogspot.com. That brought calls from angry internet users and software executives on Wednesday. They called for the Indian government to reopen access to the sites.

“The Indian internet service providers don’t have the technological wherewithal to block specific blogs on a blogging site. Consequently, they ended up blocking the entire site,” said technology expert Pawan Duggal.

Gulshan Rai, director of the state-run Computer Emergency Response Team of the Information Technology Ministry, said the government order targeted four blogs hosted on blogspot.

“There’s no attempt to block blogspot.com from our side,” the Hindustan Times quoted him as saying.

On Wednesday morning it was still difficult to access blogs on that website from India. Angry Indian internet users exchanged e-mails and flooded message boards with postings in protest.

Kiran Karnick, president of The National Association of Software and Services Companies, the country’s main information technology trade group, said his organization would take up the matter with the government.”

India is the world’s largest democratic country…once upon a time. It’s a shame to add the last part, but it seems we are successfully heading towards that destination.

Indian government now successfully have shutdown the access to all blogspot, typepad and geocities blogs at ISP level. This is a serios violation of primary rights possessed by all indians by means of Indian Constitutional Law.

The right to freedom is one of the most important fundamental right that have been granted to us by the founders of Indian Constitution. This right allow every citizen of India to be free from the ancient form of slavery. This fundamental right is described in the constitution as:

All citizens shall have the right-

• “To freedom of speech and expression;”
• To assemble peaceably and without arms;
• To form associations or unions;
• To move freely throughout the territory of India;
• To reside and settle in any part of the territory of India;
• to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business.

India Uncut coverage on this Disaster

My heart feels burnt when I see India beside countries like Pakistan, China where freedom and democracy has no meaning.

This is what you will see on pkblogs.com homepage

Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran or China?

If Yes then you can still access your blog anytime using pkblogs free Blog Gateway.

Updates & Tracking:

Scoble Says “It Sucks” : http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/07/17/blockin…

Global Voices Online : http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2006/07/17/india…

Desipundit : http://www.desipundit.com/2006/07/15/blogspotcom-b…

Protests by Bloggers : http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/Protests_By_Blogg…(add your protest here)

Coverage by The Hindu : http://www.hindu.com/2006/07/19/stories/2006071902…

Join Blogger’s Collective @ Google Groups : http://groups.google.com/group/BloggersCollective

RTI Petition against Telecom & Dept of Information Technology : http://baxiabhishek.spaces.msn.com/blog/cns!8A8DB0…

List of Banned Sites in India : http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Sites_Ban…

India is getting expensive…

yes, according to the CEO of SAP, Mr  Henning Kagermann.

An excerpt from the above URI

“India is beginning to get expensive,” the group’s CEO Henning Kagermann told the Financial Times Deutschland. “We have decided to hire only a certain number (of people) there and then commence to look around for other locations,” he declared. India has to date been one of the major research and development locations of SAP.

”

“Mr. Kagermann is also aiming to expand the company’s research and development capacities in Eastern Europe. Compared with India, costs there were not as high and there was less fluctuation of staff, he said. In addition, unlike the case of India, infrastructure in Eastern Europe was fairly well developed throughout, he added.”

IT Biggies in India…This should ring some bells in your heads…

India ! We have a problem here

‘India does not produce enough good computer engineers and those it does are good at theory but not very well equipped to handle the practical aspects.’ — Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie

the above statement looks scary to me. I feel this statement was made with out any further inspection of the coin’s otherside. I am not breaking in to this like a pseudo indian supporter as such, but there are eminent proofs in computer industry to consider indian scientists and engineers contribution. Indian computer engineers are not only working for software firms like microsoft, but many areas like Opensource, hardware orgs also.

I agree to one point on the educational model which is being adopted by many Indian institutes. Still we are on the oldest educational base system , but trying to evolve in to a corporate, privatized and job oriented educational model, which is going to make things worser than ever. I have seen and heard of many IITians hunting jobs like application developer kind of positions in india. May be all these software firms who are gaining hell of money by recruiting indian engineers for lesser salaries should concentrate on funding universities in India to produce best out of them.

Exhaustion = Zero Innovation..So ? Who cares about it?

Read this today morning…

http://www.indicthreads.com/content/view/316/0/1/0/

I got this FWDMail from one of my collegue…as an Indian IT worker, I must agree that even I have gone through this once a while in my career, but its not permanent at all…bottom line is “Its your life and you have chosen it…” If you dont want to live with it, just quit the job and open a candle shop near you house or migrate to US or some country where you get the position to threaten offshore indian workers to work 12 hours a day 🙂

I have observed few of my collegues who got used to this kinda stuff. Most of them are bachelors and live in working men/womens hostel. Most of them expressed a crazy concern to go home..”What I will do by going home?” LOL…yes they do get coffee, coke and Internet/Phone in an airconditioned office but never in home…It means they do not have a good personal life style to manage thier life @ home…at the same time I have seen married folks expressing concerns over working late, since they have a good personal life waiting after working hours every day.

I do agree that top companies like Infy, wipro, satyam etc provide very good office atmospehere and facilities. But do they survey on them? very rare…Most of these facilities are provided as part of standardizing the vendor profile for big clients. But the employees who really live with work (work with life) are rare. Very few companies like google, amazon, microsoft are exception to this.

My last words on this are : This is a problem of COIN with same face at both sides…there are problems with companies and there are problems with in mindsets of Workers too. Workers should set thier mind free and become professional, and it will for sure change the way companies behave.