Things Ravi Pratap Is Up To

During my brief layover in Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport, I figured getting online for about 30 minutes would be a nice way to wait at the gate for my flight to Chennai. 6 Euros and 2 minutes later, I was connected and going about some of my tasks when I chanced upon a headline on the BBC News South Asia.

India to implement caste quotas

I blinked for a second. I started feeling the rage build up inside me. Maybe this was something I was dreaming up? I looked at some other headlines popping up on Google News.

India to hike lower-caste quotas despite protests (Boston Globe)

India to hike lower-caste quotas despite protests (Reuters)

Govt to implement 27% quota for OBCs from June 2007 (Times of India)

Oh it’s happened alright. Inspite of ear-splitting level of protests in the country. Inspite of all the raging debates that clearly indicate the Government is implementing what is arguably the most idiotic and ineffective solution to a genuine problem without in the least giving a thought to whether it even makes sense. And to make things even more ironic, we have all the political parties in complete consensus! If there ever was a more blatant disregard for public opinion, this was it.

You’d think that given everybody, from the CEOs of India’s largest and most successful corporations to political analysts and economists to students in colleges, has made clear their opposition to the idea (and presented convincing arguments), it would make the Government stop and think. Perhaps engage in working out a solution that actually achieves what it aims to do instead of merely being an extension of 50 years of other such short-sighted laws passed “to correct historical wrongs.” [1]

But we forget that Indian politics is a dirty game of vote banks and divisive caste politics. How does it matter if all these people who’re protesting right now (mostly urban, educated elite that can’t take advantage of any quotas – a relatively small fraction of the population) are going to have an even slimmer chance of getting into the publicly-funded educational institutions? How does it matter that the Union Minister for Human Resources Development, Arjun Singh, who started all this is clueless about the actual percentage of the Indian population that will benefit from such a measure?

Now if you were a politician who only cares about being voted back into power (like Mr. Arjun Singh) when the elections come around next, would you give a damn about the protests from people who won’t make a difference to your re-election? Does it matter that what you’re doing doesn’t actually solve the problem of providing equal opportunity to disadvantaged classes at all? Does it matter that all this will only drop standards in these top institutions and further divide India along caste lines? Does it matter that you’re actually doing all this in a bid to mask the tragedy that primary education in India is and your complete failure in being able to fix it? Certainly not. You will do everything it takes to put yourself back in Parliament the next time round, sound logic and India’s welfare be damned.

Any way you look at it, the fact remains that reservations are completely the wrong way to undertake the cause of improving universal access to education. To quote Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who resigned from the Knowledge Commission set up by the Prime Minister, in his open letter to the PM:

As a society we focus on reservations largely because it is a way of avoiding doing the things that really create access. Increasing the supply of good quality institutions at all levels (not to be confused with numerical increases), more robust scholarship and support programmes will go much further than numerically mandated quotas. When you assumed office, you had sketched out a vision of combining economic reform with social justice. Increased public investment is going to be central to creating access opportunities. It would be presumptuous for me to suggest where this increased public investment is going to come from, but there are ample possibilities: for instance, earmarking proceeds from genuine disinvestment for education will do far more for access than quotas. We are not doing enough to genuinely empower marginalised groups, but are offering condescending palliatives like quotas as substitute. All the measures currently under discussion are to defuse the agitation, not to lay the foundations for a vibrant education system. If I may borrow a phrase of Tom Paine’s, we pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird.

Even 10 years from now, somebody that I meet, in their curiosity about India will ask me that same question, “Does India still have the caste system?” And I know that the answer will be no better than it is today. That, to me, is the saddest part.

—

[1] A lot of different people have written about why reservations are the the wrong solution to the problem of providing equal access to opportunity to economically and socially disadvantaged classes. Of note are Atanu Dey’s recent pieces on the India Economy Blog.

I consider myself lucky in that from a fairly young age, I knew that I absolutely loved science and technology and that there was absolutely nothing else on the planet that I would rather do.

Although my encounters with machines began at a young age , my parents inform me that I started life out as kid known to be the singular cause of the destruction of many machines that had the misfortune of crossing paths with me. When I was 14 months old, I was in some distant relative’s house somewhere in Andhra Pradesh, India, when I took a fancy for their rather expensive LP record player and ended up breaking it merely by touching the needle. When this story was recounted to me many years later (when I was still a kid), I remember feeling rather proud that at 14 months, I was strong enough to wreak so much damage!

As I grew older, I would assist my father in various repair tasks around the household. The opportunity to work with tools and to see things in action always excited me , probably one of the many reasons I love engineering. One thing led to another and before long I was working on mini projects of my own. In the 6th grade, alongwith some friends of mine, I made a still projector using a cardboard box, a lens, and a light bulb. Our next project was to make a moving film projector and although we started off with great gusto, it turned out to be far more complicated than we had imagined and so we quickly had to give it up. It was those small things, as a 10 year old, that established many years in advance what I would end up choosing for a career.

Alright, so I’m all gung-ho about being an engineer but will I ever know what it’s like to do some other job? It was a conversation the other day with a friend, Nandana, that brought to my attention that I’ve never had the opportunity to work in a non-corporate environment.

I don’t know what it’s like to work in a restaurant, or a bookshop, a music store, clothing store, or even a library. I guess a lot has had to do with growing up in India where the concept of school or college kids doing part-time, mostly unskilled jobs is completely alien. The emphasis here, of course, is on unskilled. You want to make some money writing code as a whizkid? Not a problem – you’ll find yourself praised to the skies. Want to work in the coffee shop down the street? Rest assured, you will find your parents (and anybody else you suggest the idea to) positively choking on the thought that their child wants to do such a “menial” job. Sure, India’s economy is booming and creating many different jobs, fuelled by a massive growth in consumerism. But will the bigshot IT executive like to see her teenager work at a Pizza Hut, Barista, or Music World? I don’t think so.

But I digress. My point is that there are many jobs that a lot of us would love to be able to try out but have probably not had the opportunity to. For instance, I would love to work at a Music World or a Blockbuster kind of store. I would have loved to be an apprentice at a sound mixing studio, or a helper at a bookshop. Maybe I would get to meet a different bunch of people (vs. the corporate, highly educated folks I meet everyday, given what I do) and appreciate the effort that goes into each of those jobs.

It’s definitely not too late. Maybe a part-time job at the local Barnes and Noble or Borders store would let me experience something I never have so far

What interesting jobs (outside of your mainstream career, i.e.) have you had a chance to do? Leave me a comment if you’d like to share your experiences.

Are you or anybody you know interested in joining a technology startup company? Read on to learn more about open positions in the company that I work for.

Hillcrest Labs, a fast-growing technology startup located in the Washington, DC metro area, is looking to hire bright people with a passion for building great products.

Hillcrest Labs has developed a revolutionary new system for navigating multimedia on the television that we call Spontaneous Navigation™. Our innovative approach incorporates proprietary application software, database and remote control technologies to deliver a highly intuitive, visually rich and exciting set of products that will change the way consumers watch television. Hillcrest’s products will be marketed and distributed by consumer electronics and PC companies through retail stores and by television service providers (e.g. cable, satellite and telco) as part of their future offerings. Hillcrest is financed by some of the top venture capital firms in the country, including New Enterprise Associates, Columbia Capital and Grotech Capital. These positions offer candidates the opportunity to join an incredibly talented and high-energy team to bring our revolutionary new products to market.

Current open positions at Hillcrest include:

• Software Engineer – Client Team
• Software Engineer – Server Team
• Senior Software Engineer with expertise in computer graphics
• Senior Technical Writer
• Test Engineer
• User Interface Interaction Designer (must possess 5 yrs. of experience in UI design and development)
• Usability Engineer (5 yrs. of experience in usability engineering is required)
• User Interface Application Developer (experience with JavaScript, Macromedia Flash and ActionScript is a must)

(Positions are open to candidates currently resident in the United States.)

If you’re interested, please write to me at ravi@rpmduplex.net with your resume. I’d be happy to furnish more information about the company and the positions mentioned above.

(We also have internship positions that we’re looking to fill. Please write to me for more information.)

Hillcrest Labs was recently in the news for the buzz that we generated at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2006. You can read what’s being said about us in the media here (via Google News)

2006 started out for me with quite a bang. One of the things I decided to do this year – something I don’t think I have ever done before – is make some new year resolutions. Why not me, I ask. It is after all the most fashionable thing to do at the turn of the new year, and what else could be more apt when I actually have some things about my life that I want to change?

Let’s see what I’ve resolved to do this year.

My first resolution is to become a more social person (again). It’s been 5 months since I moved to the DC area and I have made (outside of my colleagues at work) exactly 0 friends! You could attribute this to a number of things. One, I have been far busier at work than I was when I was with Morgan Stanley. Two, I have spent nearly half my weekends driving up and down Interstate 95 (to New York). To make friends, one needs to first be in the general area Three (this is the best), I have mysteriously morphed into a person completely content with spending most of my weekends by myself, within the confines of my apartment (of which I am the sole occupant). On being asked (by my numerous friends around the country) about how my social life was looking, I would usually launch into an elaborate explanation of how living the suburban life almost completely precludes you from running into people.

It must be noted, though, that there is some truth to my last sentence. When in New York, people are all around you. I would run into people everywhere – on my daily commute to work, in office building elevators, and so on. I lived in an apartment building with 33 floors and only 3 elevators servicing it – the math should tell you how likely I was to bump into the same people over and over again, in the elevators. I had a huge bunch of friends thanks to my training program at Morgan Stanley so that definitely helped. That, and running into people in the elevator. Let’s not forget, too, that the likelihood of meeting people my age was extremely high around where I lived what with most people in their twenties, all dapper Wall Street professionals. So when it comes to meeting people in suburbia, since I (naturally) don’t run into people in elevators or subway trains, I have no real way of meeting new and interesting people in my age group. That’s been my excuse.

But this year I plan to put more effort into it all – meet people from high school who live in the area, alumni from IITM, attend cultural events, etc. I have already begun so we shall see how successful my strategy is as time passes.

My second new year resolution is to resume music lessons. Back when I was in New York, I was an amateur student of drumming. I’ve been playing with the thought of resuming but two things have been coming in my way. One, sheer laziness. Two, I’m not quite sure if I want to go back to Carnatic vocal or if I am brave enough to buy myself a drum set and practise in my apartment – something that is sure to drive all my neighbours nuts. Right now, given my love of percussion, I am thinking hard about taking tabla lessons so let’s see how that pans out.

My third resolution is about bucking up on the blogging front. I have been trying hard to coax myself into getting back into it all but you can probably see that it clearly isn’t happening. Sure, I could go ahead and fashionably attribute it to writer’s block or a dearth of interesting things to write about, but I know in my head that there’s something else that’s been stopping me. This year I want to set myself reasonable targets. Like, maybe, write once a week.

It is ironic that it took me until the 4th week of January to get down to starting on resolution number 3

So there you go. My new year resolutions for 2006.

Before I go, I’d like to mention one other thing. The astute reader would have noted that I mentioned (in the first sentence of this post) 2006 beginning with a bang. Well, the bang in this case turned out to be a business junket to Las Vegas to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2006 as part of the Hillcrest Labs contingent. When you see something the size of CES (with 2500 exhibitors and 150,000 attendees), you learn a thing or two about scale.

Hillcrest Labs had one heck of a show (we even won a ‘Best Innovation – Design and Engineering’ award in the Video Accessory category) and I had a great time being essentially a marketing dude.

I would give you more details but you know what – what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!

The New York Times published a fascinating story on India’s highway modernization project and some of the radical changes it is bringing about in its rapidly evolving society:

Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Road to Its Future

An interesting read.

I came across the following this morning (thanks to Atul Chitnis):

The Indian National Portal aims to be a gateway for all government services and was launched as part of the national e-governance plan.

PHP on Linux, excellent design, well-organized content and super-clean formatting. And works out of the box with Firefox!

You’ve gotta give it to the govt. this time!

So a few weeks ago (Oct 15, actually), I was in Boston for ~18 hours, attending Startup School, a conference for budding entrepreneurs organized by Paul Graham’s Y Combinator.

The conference aimed mostly to demystify the business side of starting up and had numerous speakers talking about raising venture capital, incorporation, co-founders, finance, intellectual property, etc. Most speakers were entrepreneurs themselves so it was interesting to hear their take on things to avoid, things to remember, etc.

I am glad I got accepted to attend the one-day session (which had some pretty famous speakers) at the Harvard Science Center, although I found out with less than a week to go and no cheap tickets in sight.

Thank god for all those United frequent flyer miles!

Many thanks to Lou Huang, who took this picture without quite intending to put me in it, I imagine . I’m seen with Stan Reiss, General Partner, Matrix Ventures.

Most NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) like myself make it a point to read Indian newspapers everyday to keep in touch with goings-on back home. Unfortunately, the most popular ones (The Times of India, Rediff, The Hindu, etc.) have numerous problems. They’re either too sensational (ToI, Economic Times) or are too drab (The Hindu) or have no idea what news is really worthy of reporting (Rediff). A common problem that all of them have is that they have terribly designed web editions. Having no idea whatsoever about usability on the web (I doubt if their designers have even heard the term), they make reading news a painful exercise, what with subjecting readers to numerous pop-ups and flashing images that are complete eyesores, in addition to requiring 10 page loads to read 1 article.

But today, quite by accident, I was pleasantly surprised by how usable Daily News and Analysis’s web edition is. Clearly, the designers of this website know what they’re doing. The layout is clean, simple, and most importantly, elegant. I like the colour scheme, the fact that they have RSS feeds, and stick to one of the fundamental principles of web design – present as much as you can in one page without requiring the user to scroll.

Although it’s Mumbai-based, the sheer pleasure of reading such a website makes me want to give it a shot. Now let’s hope their reporting and analysis is as good!

When the cab driver in my last post was telling me about his weekend trips to New York, I think he was being prophetic in a sense. Having driven to NY 3 times in the 4 weeks that I have been here, I am clearly heading for some kind of record. Although, to be fair, not all trips were purely for my amusement.

I moved to Gaithersburg, Maryland on August 6th (with a lot of help from Krish) and began work at Hillcrest Labs the following Monday. There was this sense of deja vu as it began to sink into me that I was going to live the suburban life again. I did it before in St. Louis and I can do it again, I told myself.

I thought I was doing pretty well for the first few days but it wasn’t until the weekend, though, that the depression began to sink in. When you live in New York, it’s easy to forget that the rest of America is nothing like it at all. America really lives in its suburbs. It’s the people in the suburbs (and small towns and rural areas) all over America that elect George W. Bush and care most about being able to drive giant SUVs (have you seen a Hummer in real life? It’s a travesty of the modern, efficient, and environment-friendly automobile that one can buy from any of the other auto makers). It’s also a place where contact with humans is minimized to the maximum possible extent. So much so that if all you want to do is see some men and women looking dandy and just hanging around, being cool, and eating at restaurants, you need to go to the most American thing of them all – the mall.

I decided I needed to just see some life for a change so I spent a majority of my Sat’day that weekend at the Barnes & Noble bookstore looking at books. And well … people

Before I go on, I’d like to digress a bit to note something that I realized only since I moved. New York easily has the highest concentration of hot women in the country (at least, in my humble opinion). In NY, my morning commute involved being squeezed into packed subway cars with good looking women some of who are probably the models you see in the Victoria’s Secret ads. Even if most of them are not models, they sure looked like they could all easily pass for them Trust me when I say this – you don’t know what you’re missing until you move to a city like Gaithersburg and only see cars all around you on your daily commute to work!

Anyway, my first trip back to NY was the following weekend. It was Sharat (my former roommate) who suggested that I spend the weekend over there. I didn’t need much prodding, of course, and I merrily made my way on I-95 N in 4 hours on a Friday evening.

My parents arrived in DC the following Monday after spending 2 weeks with Rahul in St. Louis (my parents were visiting us in the US and the four of us had had a lovely vacation in California in July, right after I quit Morgan Stanley. More on this in a later post). My father had to advance his ticket and leave earlier than expected so I drove to JFK and back the following weekend. That was my second trip.

My mother stayed with me for another 2 weeks and that is when I actually ventured into Washington, DC. We saw the White House (from a distance, of course) and the Washington Monument. We went to the Museum of the American Indian, the Holocaust Memorial museum and the National Gallery of Art. We even went to the Kennedy Center for a performance.

Having my mom around was a welcome change and I’m glad that she decided to spend that extra week. I eventually drove again to JFK to see her off in what was my 3rd trip in 4 weeks. This time though, I didn’t drive back immediately. I attended Jui’s (a friend who works in Reuters) birthday party and spent time chatting with Sharat. I headed back home around 10:30 pm and made it in 3 hours and 20 minutes flat!

Although the trips to NY are always welcome, I don’t intend making them a habit. I really am growing to like the DC area and although I don’t have many friends around here, I am sure with time I will make some. I am looking forward to fully furnishing my 2 bedroom apartment (that’s right, I indulged myself just so that I could have a separate study!) and living by myself for the first time since I arrived in the US.

NY might be the coolest city in the world, but I think it’s time I began discovering the charm of DC.

I guess I never really imagined that there would come a day that would actually be my last in New York . This Monday, I flew into LaGuardia for probably the last time, after spending a week in California on a trip with my parents (who are visiting the US) and brother, Rahul.

As is usually the case when I fly into LGA, I decided to take a cab into Manhattan and get off at the PATH station near 32nd St. and 6th Ave. I flagged one down and rode in silence until we came to the Midtown Tunnel when I started a conversation with the cab driver about how so many people in the Greater NY area don’t bother getting themselves E-ZPass and instead prefer waiting in long lines at toll booths to pay in cash. The cab driver, who turned out to be Pakistani, started talking to me (mostly in Hindi) about where in India I was from and what I was doing in NY. I came to mention that I was moving to DC in about a week and :

“Oh, you are moving? Is it the same company or a different one?” he asked me.

“I got a job with a different company, ” I told him.

“You know, I once moved to Philadelphia,” he went on. “I stayed there 3 months and then came back to New York.”

“Why did you come back?” I asked him although I knew the answer much too well.

“I missed New York a lot. I actually drove here every weekend! I even did my groceries in Queens!”

I laughed and for a second wondering if I would keep coming back to NY just as often too.

“New York is that kind of a place. Once you come and live here, you don’t feel like going anywhere else.”

I thought about what the driver had said as I got off at 34th and 6th and made my way into the PATH station. It was certainly true. I didn’t feel like leaving New York. I loved every bit of it. My life in New York was nearly perfect. I had made the best of friends and met the most interesting of people. My two rommates – Danny and Sharat – had been perfect companions in addition to being people who exposed me to worlds completely outside my own. I had found the true passion of my life while living here. I had lived in a city that is the centre of America, if not the world. But it’s time to leave all that and say goodbye.

Will I ever get a chance to come back to New York?

I sure hope so.