Hyderabad ( Impressions of India-4)

Hyderabad was a pleasant detour. The city is picturesque and looks like a phoenix of a modern technopolis rising from the ashes of the feudal Nizams.

• The city is at its glamorous best at night. Jeweller’s shops in every nook and cranny of Nampali, the old city. They are lit up like soaring flares, the glam-sham of the gold and diamonds luring you inside.
• Moti bazaar is a unique experience. The ‘pearl market’ is a dense haphazard medieval quarter of Hyderabad where pearls spill out of every little ramshackle building. White and yellow, king sized or micros, plain or dyed in rainbow colors, its possible to get pearls t suit anybody’s taste. Even fake pearls forced into you hands by brazen streetside hawkers are yours for the picking.
• Char Minar, the heart of the city, sits imposingly at a crossroad and lords it over streets where the crowds are so thick you cannot glimpse the ground. The buildings are straight out of a sketch of Baghdad in the Arabian Nights and the hordes of burkha clad ladies, covered head-to-toe in black veils draw you into a secret medievalish fantasy land.
• The Mecca Masjid is right next to the Char Minar and is one of the biggest and grandest in India.
• Hussainsagar, the Lake of the Sultan, separates the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad. It is a shimmering turquoise green reflection of Hydebrabad’s skyline. With a long promenade, landscaped parks and a mammoth statue of Buddha in its center, the lake lords it over the city.
• Swarming lemon yellow autorickshaws are a speciality of the city. Buzzing all around you, this cacophony of rickshaw engines going phut-phut-phuta-phut and the swirling yellowish masses all hypnotize you in no time.
  

Impressions of India - 3

Things change. It is a law of nature, of fluxions. And looking back at change is one of the most difficult challenges life throws at you. Trivially, you may wonder why you ever liked Hindi remixes while you scold yourself for not listening to Bach sooner. From semester to semester, relationships are ever changing. Some friends are no longer friends, some fast friends are now just friends. Some new friends are made, unexpectedly, hidden facets revealed. A handful of treasured moments are stowed away, a few slip away into nothingness and leave behind a void. Meaningless emptiness coexists with rewarding raison-de-etres. You find a purpose in life and priorities take a roller coaster ride. But out of these chaotic experiences, there are sometimes those moments where you enter a time warp, where you just come back after a year and slip effortlessly into your past life. You become you, just time shifted a year backwards. A haven where you can shrug away the detritus of frayed humanity and come out rejuvenated, reaffirm your purpose in life, and look upon everything with a fresh perspective anchored in constancy. That place is home.

Yere Yere Pausa

Impressions of India : Episode Two

The monsoon deluge is on. It rains like it does only in India. The sky darkens from end to end and the clouds hang menacingly. Then it starts raining and doesn’t stop for a long long time. The red mud outside forms messy puddles. People walk on the streets with their trousers tucked up and the sarees held up meticulously in their hands. I sit on the porch having a steaming hot cup of chai and some khari biscuits and feel at one with the world streaming past.

The Return

Impressions of India - Ep I

I got a taste of India even before I left the United States. The JFK gate where the non stop flight to Mumbai was to depart from, was chock full of Indians. There was disorder, chaos, families sprawled messily all over the place, old gentlemen behaving like king of the castles, haughty ladies collecting some forms and it looked like no one had ever heard about a creature called a queue. People disregarded all baggage rules and stipulations, the overhead bays were spilling out and most women just ignored all the announcements to wear their seat belts. The air hostesses had to check if each and every person was indeed wearing her seat belt. Gluttony was rampant throughout the flight, even indulged in by respectable looking middle-aged businessmen. After landing in Mumbai, the very first thing I thought was "I am home!", the second thing was "There is no air conditioning!". The air in the airport gate was muggy and humid. This was a very apprehensive return indeed.

Impressions of India - Ep 0

A month long vacation. India seen after an year. New view, new opinions, new lifestyles and new experiences of the past one year. How will they affect what I see and how I feel? I want to explore this unique experience, that of a returnee, a traveller passing through, in this series of blog posts. Impressions of India.

SF Panorama

This blog was written last fortnight while I was lounging in a public square on the Embarcadero, San Francisco's Waterfront District. Again, this is an unedited version reproduced below.

As I look around me, I wonder how can 'all this' be put into words. I am in an idyllic scene, transported straight out of Medici's Florence, but not quite. A huge paved plaza at the heart of a great city. San Francisco, the city by the Bay. And the Bay is there, right across the street to live upto its name. A giant 2 storeyed fountain, which is like the Trevi morphed into a Rube Goldberg fantasia, cascades down, its harsh murmurings make their way across the length of the plaza. The ferry terminal and the ferry building is across the street, the Stars and Stripes fluttering atop it. In the middle of the road, is the tram line F. And the Unicyclists, the trumpet players and the street artists are having a fiesta time on the sunny bay side evening. The office goers are rushing back from work towards the subway, valises clutched tightly in their hands, while the fashionistas strut more slowly with their Gucci purses. The sea food restaurants throw off aromas which waft to where I am, leaning over the railing, looking at the tiny waves trying to budge the pier. The Alcatraz looms ominously out of the distant mist as the seagulls' cries reach a crescendo and then subside into a momentary lapse, before resuming the cacophony. A lone trumpeter serenades some love-lorn tune while a few tourists linger on to hear him out. Inside the Hyatt Regency, the buffet is about to start, and I have to get up and attend, but I am loath to leave.

Birth of A Technology

This blog was written a few months back. I wanted to explain my area of research in a language suitable for a layman. I was a novice then too, with just a few weeks of exposure to the field of cognitive radios and IEEE 802.22, I would not write it the same way now, but just for the sake of record, here it is.


People talk about being at the forefront of technological change. Well, now I can tell you, it feels awesome.

Joseph Mitola III. first proposed Cognitive Radios as an extension of Software Defined Radios. These radios are envisioned to be autonomous, intelligent motes, who are clever enough to take all the decisions for their users. Imagine a HAL in your cellphone and you start getting a feel of the paradigm shift being brought about. These radios will be guerrillas. They will legally break laws, they will encroach on licensed spectrum, steal their RF cycle-time and sneak away before the cops arrive!

Now how do you go about setting up such a potentially USPish technology? It starts with a brilliant technologist at KTH, the Sweedish Royal Institute of Technology, coming out with a PhD thesis. The idea is picked up by the young university based dons in a jiffy. They think laterally and come out with path breaking papers which prove that the technology is viable. Still in incubatory stage, an exploratory conference is held, IEEE DYSPAN 2005(Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks). Its not even an year yet but the buzz is already in the air. Then the Federal Communications Commision steps in. Though a government agency, it has guts enough to realize that the spectrum licensing in use now is leading to a dead alley. It churns out a far sighted proposal to libearalize spectrum use. Anyone can theoretically use anyone's spectrum , with the rider that he doesnt disturb the existing licensed user. The practical introduction is still allmost a decade away. Now, its the IEEE's turn. The Institue of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is the premier standards making body in the field of communications. After Ethernet, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi it sets up the IEEE 802.22, a committeee charged with coming out with a standard for Wireless Regional Area Networks.

Meetings are held, all the leading companies send their R&D teams, so do the universities. No one wants to be left behind, not this time. Everyone knows that the future is going to come sooner than expected. Groups set up, minutes submitted, alternative techniques proposed, and disposed, blocs being formed, provisions made for future expansion, potential legalities sorted out, testbeds created, reports sought. The place is a hotbed for activity. A framework is being set up right in front of our eyes whereby innovation can proceed in a directed way. And the cellular and television companies are shuddering in their shoes. One wrong move and the complete industry will be shaken.
(Incomplete draft...)