Sunday, October 28, 2007

Going Live

Last night when the world was sleeping my collegaues working on the project for a prestigious Colombo bank sent me an SMS - "We are going Live". Apparently the final round of testing went on till wee hours in the morning. I happened to read it at 4:30 am ( I am an early riser) and promptly sent a quick reply "Great". Indeed this is a great achievement to have this day stare at us. When I first drew the project plan I wasn't sure if we would see this day so quickly considering the that we had to customise the applications in two flavours - one set of features made its way into the core application while another set were delivered as separate artefacts; migrate the legacy data; and implement and configure the application. All the while working with people of different culture and paradigm. We missed the date in the schedule, however within a span of 30 days we were on track and are ready to transition the application to "Business As Usual". Thats about a month behind the original schedule of 9 months thats a delay of about 11%.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Colombo

My trip to Colombo this time was rather hurried. To make it worse there were meetings scheduled throughout the day. I hardly had the time to explore the city. "Explore SriLanka", which I picked up at the arrival lounge listed a new restaurant "Thambapani" on Duplication Road however incessant rains kept me indoors. I had to skip even my regular stops - Barefoot, Lanka Ceramics, Paradise Road. I had Shashsi Tharoor's, Bookless in Baghdad for company.

"Bookless in Baghdad" is a collections of essays and personal reflections of Shashi Tharoor on matters literary, several of which have been published in newspapers like The Hindu and New York Times in the past.

The book gives has an excellent start and the prose is fluid, spiced with anecdotes, quotes, humour and unconsciously a bit of trivia. Tharoor's writing is light as he approaches each essay without prejudice; difficult for someone who is a writer and a reviewer of books himself. He refers to his own works - The Great Indian Novel, Show Business, Riot in several of these essays, the motivation for writing them and the reviews each of them have received. However these have been without literary blasphemy, which usually creeps in when an author talks or writes about his own work.

There is an essay for Wodehouse fans aptly titled "Right Ho, Sahib" capturing the Author's fascination for the master from his days in College at the prestigious St. Stephens, Delhi. The pleasure he derived from reading the Masters oeuvre is evident from the casual introspection of his collegiate days as a member of the Wodehouse club and his near attempt to write a letter to the Master himself.

In one of the essays the Author dismisses Nirad C Chaudri's Anglophone affiliation by dissecting the Autobiography of an unknown Indian (pun intended) and mocks his xenolatrous allegiance. "The committed Poet" is about the Spanish diplomat and Nobel Prize winning Litterateur Pablo Neruda. I must mention the piece on Sir Naipaul is particularly illuminating and goes on to trace Sir Vido's humble beginnings and the days in Oxford, particularly the correspondence between Sir Vido and his fond Pa, as he used to call his father. Salman Rushdie makes his appearance in several essays and the Authors description of Rushdie's first public appearance after emerging from hiding lets you relive the moment. Very interesting though is the Author's take on Indianness and his attempt to answer the question, Who is an Indian? The author traces the roots of the INC and systematically demolishes the statements of several politicians and takes pride in the rich diversity of our Rashtra. This critical commentary has me convinced, and has helped change my perspective on what is true nationalism while it has also made me realise there are still others waiting to be educated on this.

I must emphasis "Illiteracy in America", a shocking account of how 50 million Americans cannot read or comprehend things above the 8th grade level. What that means is that, these people don't possess the comprehension ability to understand the instructions for an antidote on an ordinary can of cockroach poison. Astonishing? Worse, to quote the author functionally illiterate which means they don’t have the ability to understand traffic signs or product labels. which makes these people unequipped for life in a modern society. And these it seem exist predominantly in the inner cities. All in a country with a single major language. Compare this with a developing nation like ours with 1200 officially recognised languages and about 22,000 dialects, we seem to be better off with the illiteracy being relegated to the rural areas. Paradoxically the following essay 81% of Americans feel that they should write a book! In several essays the theme is to portray India and its culture and dispel the western notion of India being a chaotic, poor and sluggish country though I am unsure if the Author set out to achieve this.

There is a hilarious account of the making of 'Show Business" by a Blondie Singh who called the Author from his bath tub. I cant imagine someone can have the arrogance of calling an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations during his ablations. So Blondie Singh, Mr. Bikram Singh to some and BJ (no mischievous smiles please!) to several others was excited and wanted to make a movie of the novel "Show Business" after the deal was signed Blondie showed the first draft of the screenplay - it was almost the entire novel, verbatim! The final movie had the credits "Lyrics by Shashi Tharoor"!

The book is an eclectic mix of Indian culture, Authors, Book Bazaars, about reading, writing and reviewing and is a delightful read especially in moments of solitude. Once you are done with the book you are likely to add items to your reading lists. I for sure did. I hope to read this book again in a few months.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Current Reads

Picked this up at the Landmark sale along with several other books last week. Onto the 4th chapter. Dylan Jones describes his adolescent years with LP's and Cassettes and his graduation to the MP3 era with an iPOD. As an ardent music fan with a collection of over 200 cassettes and an equal number of CD's its not very difficult to understand his plight. I got my 80GB iPOD a little over 6 months back, Only last week did I manage to complete loading all my CD tracks onto this. A good read if you grew up listening to Brian Ferry, Fleetwood Mac, Floyd...etc. The book has some interesting bits of Trivia LP : Longer Programming, iPOD : Internet Portable Object Device. The book is loaded with Dylan's experiences with alternate chapters covering the iPOD. Wish Dylan had a much wider coverage of the iPOD and kept his experiences to a bare minimum.

If you own an iPOD guess you should download the iPOD book and iPOD buyers guide from iLounge