The 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi (CWG) has thankfully ended, that too on a high note - the games went fairly well on the whole and India came second in the overall medals tally thanks to a gold-medal-winning match on the last day by Saina Nehwal. It was a big relief, coming as it did after revelations of shocking mismanagement, massive corruption and utter callousness of the concerned officials, which were threatening to derail the games and bring shame to India.
Showing posts with label india. Show all posts
Showing posts with label india. Show all posts
2009-11-25
"Terror In Mumbai"
Mumbai was attacked by ten terrorists a year ago in an incident that has since become known in India as "26/11". The attacks were accompanied by hysterical, and at times quite misleading, media coverage here in India. The subsequent media coverage didn't get any better and was more often than not filled with pointless analyses. This was especially noticeable on television where the news channels would feature endless rounds of debates among the usual bunch of bickering "guests", none of whom would ever get to complete a point before being interrupted by another guest or the anchor. Thankfully there is now a documentary film titled "Terror in Mumbai", made by Dan Reed, that rectifies this situation. This film is a must-watch, but we don't know if/when it will be shown here in India.
2009-09-01
"Capital Gains"
The latest issue of Granta has an article by Rana Dasgupta titled "Capital Gains". It talks about the huge wealth and power recently accumulated by a few in Delhi, their unabashed flaunting of this new-found wealth and power, their displacement of the previous elite who are now disgusted and the resulting class divisions in the society. It is a long article, but well worth the read.
2009-05-05
Driving Directions for Bangalore
Some time back I noticed that Google Maps has now started provided driving directions for Bangalore (and some other Indian cities). This is a very useful feature if you live in Bangalore and wish to avoid its awful traffic as much as possible. It's invaluable if you are new to the city and trying to figure your way around it.
2009-01-29
"We, The Bloggers"
Chyetanya Kunte dared to criticise Padma Shree Barkha Dutt of NDTV for her coverage of the recent attacks by terrorists on Mumbai. He had to pay for this by having to apologise and withdraw his post. His post (copy in Google Cache - see the post at the bottom titled "Shoddy Journalism") seems to have irked NDTV into gagging him, despite their professed belief in "free speech and expression".
2009-01-01
Hampi
Anusha and I recently visited Hampi to take a short break. Hampi is what remains of Vijayanagara, the capital of the Vijayanagara empire. It is about 350 kms north of Bangalore and is famous for its splendid ruins. Many of these ruins are very well-preserved and are made of granite that is found in abundance in the surrounding hills.
2008-10-13
Indian Edition of the Purple Dragon Book
After a long wait, the low-priced Indian edition of the Purple Dragon Book ("Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools", 2nd Edition, by Alfred Aho and others) is finally available in bookshops. The ISBN for this edition of the book is 9788131721018.
2008-08-19
Investment Basics for Indians
My colleague Ryan stumbled upon a nice guide that explains the basics of equity and debt investment for Indians. It is available via the web-site for the National Stock Exchange (NSE) as the study material for the "Financial Markets (Beginners)" module of its certification programme.
2008-06-15
Firefox 3
I have been using the release candidates of Firefox 3 on Linux for some time now. The experience has been quite good so far. I would encourage you to try it out for yourself - in fact, download it on the 17th of June and help Mozilla set a world record.
Firefox 3 comes with quite a lot of fixes and improvements. The "Field Guide to Firefox 3" is a nice page summarising the more important improvements. It seems to have improved a lot in terms of memory usage and speed. You just have to use Gmail to see the difference in speed for yourself. Since I never open too many tabs, use too many extensions or keep the browser open for too long, I have never personally run into memory-usage issues with previous releases of Firefox and I can't really say if the improvements in this area are that drastic.
Devanagari Text Rendering on Linux: Firefox 2 (left) v/s Firefox 3 (right)
The composite screen-shot above shows the difference between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 when rendering Devanagari text (from Josh18) under Linux. I have circled some of the words that were rendered incorrectly by Firefox 2 and correctly by Firefox 3. (Click on the image above to see a larger version.)
It has not been all wonderful though. There are still some issues that make my experience with Firefox 3 less than ideal. The most egregious of these is how some web pages using Flash either cause Firefox 3 to freeze up or just crash with a segmentation fault (of course, this could be due to a badly-written Flash Player plug-in). The other issue that has persisted from Firefox 2 but now seems to have become worse for me is how Firefox would just freeze for a second or so every now and then, especially noticeable while scrolling up and down large web pages. This might be related to garbage-collection cycles, but I am not sure about it.
Incidentally while Firefox 3 itself mercifully does not require GNOME (I am a happy KDE-only user), its new crash-reporting tool does need a few of the GNOME libraries. This tool is now based on Google Breakpad. I found that the crash reporting tool itself would crash while trying to send a crash report to Mozilla. That was fixed only after I installed GConf, ORBit, libIDL, D-Bus and dbus-glib. It still failed to send the crash reports and it turned out that I must also install and configure Curl. Of course, ordinary Linux users with a typically-bloated Linux distribution would not run into such issues.
By the way, there is now a new pseudo-URL named "about:crashes" that would let you to lovingly admire the crash reports that your instance of Firefox has generated and submitted to Mozilla.
Firefox 3 comes with quite a lot of fixes and improvements. The "Field Guide to Firefox 3" is a nice page summarising the more important improvements. It seems to have improved a lot in terms of memory usage and speed. You just have to use Gmail to see the difference in speed for yourself. Since I never open too many tabs, use too many extensions or keep the browser open for too long, I have never personally run into memory-usage issues with previous releases of Firefox and I can't really say if the improvements in this area are that drastic.
One of the more important fixes for Indian users of Firefox on Linux is its improved support for complex text layout, which is used in quite a few Indic scripts. I have complained about it before and I am happy to report that it now seems to work fairly well:
Devanagari Text Rendering on Linux: Firefox 2 (left) v/s Firefox 3 (right)
The composite screen-shot above shows the difference between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 when rendering Devanagari text (from Josh18) under Linux. I have circled some of the words that were rendered incorrectly by Firefox 2 and correctly by Firefox 3. (Click on the image above to see a larger version.)
It has not been all wonderful though. There are still some issues that make my experience with Firefox 3 less than ideal. The most egregious of these is how some web pages using Flash either cause Firefox 3 to freeze up or just crash with a segmentation fault (of course, this could be due to a badly-written Flash Player plug-in). The other issue that has persisted from Firefox 2 but now seems to have become worse for me is how Firefox would just freeze for a second or so every now and then, especially noticeable while scrolling up and down large web pages. This might be related to garbage-collection cycles, but I am not sure about it.
Incidentally while Firefox 3 itself mercifully does not require GNOME (I am a happy KDE-only user), its new crash-reporting tool does need a few of the GNOME libraries. This tool is now based on Google Breakpad. I found that the crash reporting tool itself would crash while trying to send a crash report to Mozilla. That was fixed only after I installed GConf, ORBit, libIDL, D-Bus and dbus-glib. It still failed to send the crash reports and it turned out that I must also install and configure Curl. Of course, ordinary Linux users with a typically-bloated Linux distribution would not run into such issues.
By the way, there is now a new pseudo-URL named "about:crashes" that would let you to lovingly admire the crash reports that your instance of Firefox has generated and submitted to Mozilla.
2008-04-06
Stop Taxing the Interest from a Savings Account
It is utterly unfair for the Indian government to impose an income tax on the interest earned by an individual on a savings account. The government merely adds insult to an injury caused by low rates of interest, lower effective yields and high inflation.
2007-12-26
Indian Cuisine
The latest issue of The Week has an article titled "The Taste of India" by Vir Sanghvi, where he tries to explain why most foreigners do not appreciate Indian cuisine. Apart from being a famous journalist and a television interviewer here in India, Vir Sanghvi has also been writing about food for some time. He also hosts the show "A Matter of Taste" on Discovery Travel & Living. In this article he argues that what the foreigners normally get to taste is not the real Indian cuisine and that Indian cuisine is far too varied and subtle when compared to other cuisines.
Many of us realise that Indian cuisine is not considered in the same league as, say, French or Italian cuisine by most foreigners.
Why does our food invite this epicurean derision? More importantly, have these foreigners had a chance to taste the real Indian cuisine?
This is something that I have noticed as well. The food that you get in the restaurants, even here in India, rarely comes close to what people actually prepare in their homes. Restaurants in five-star hotels are particularly pathetic in that they serve utterly bland dishes for exorbitant prices and call it Indian cuisine. On the few occasions that I have travelled abroad and eaten in an "Indian" restaurant, the dishes didn't even come close to what we Indians would recognise as our cuisine. I am told that the same problem plagues the Chinese cuisine - what we get in "Chinese" restaurants, especially here in India, is far from what the Chinese actually eat in their homes. You really must eat in an Indian's home to get a feel for Indian food.
There are also some nice titbits about the evolution of Indian cuisine in the article.
Many of us realise that Indian cuisine is not considered in the same league as, say, French or Italian cuisine by most foreigners.
All Indian dishes look the same, a sort of brown mess; the level of spices is so high that you can never taste the flavour of the original ingredients; the cuisine has not evolved over the decades unlike French food; and Indians have no understanding of texture.
Why does our food invite this epicurean derision? More importantly, have these foreigners had a chance to taste the real Indian cuisine?
First of all, most of the so-called 'experts' who are sniffy about Indian food haven't actually eaten it in India. They rely on British-Indian cuisine, a bastard school of cooking invented by Bangladeshis tinkering around with the Punjabi menu. Secondly, even those who have eaten in India have never experienced the diversity of our nation's cuisine. Foreign foodies like countries such as Thailand where they can tour the length and breadth of the whole nation in one week and declare themselves 'experts' on Thai cuisine.
[...]
Foreigners rarely recognise this unique characteristic of Indian cuisine because they either eat their meals in Indian restaurants abroad or stick to hotel restaurants where chefs faithfully reproduce the standard recipes they were taught at catering college.
[...]
That is a tough one because when most people talk about great cuisines they talk about restaurant food. And, let's face it; there aren't many great Indian restaurants. If you want amazing south Indian food, you need to go to people's homes. If you want good Lucknawi cuisine your best bet is still one of the wedding caterers from an old Muslim family. Rarely, if ever, will you get food of that calibre at restaurants.
This is something that I have noticed as well. The food that you get in the restaurants, even here in India, rarely comes close to what people actually prepare in their homes. Restaurants in five-star hotels are particularly pathetic in that they serve utterly bland dishes for exorbitant prices and call it Indian cuisine. On the few occasions that I have travelled abroad and eaten in an "Indian" restaurant, the dishes didn't even come close to what we Indians would recognise as our cuisine. I am told that the same problem plagues the Chinese cuisine - what we get in "Chinese" restaurants, especially here in India, is far from what the Chinese actually eat in their homes. You really must eat in an Indian's home to get a feel for Indian food.
There are also some nice titbits about the evolution of Indian cuisine in the article.
But if we are talking about adaptability, then consider this: until the European colonists got to India, we had never heard of the chilli and had never seen a potato. Can anybody imagine modern Indian cuisine without these ingredients?
[...]
The tandoori chicken is now the world's most famous Indian dish. But how many people recognise that tandoori chicken, its cousin the chicken tikka and their ill-begotten offspring the butter chicken, were all invented in the 1940s and sprang to fame only in the 1950s and 1960s. If that is not culinary evolution, then what is?
2007-08-21
Tools for Indians by Google Labs India
The Google Labs India folks have just announced a couple of cool new tools for Indians. This includes being able to search in a number of Indian languages as well as a transliteration tool for easily typing in Devanagari using an ordinary keyboard.
The transliteration tool is especially nice. For example, it automatically converts "ramesh" to "रमेश". If you did not want the word automatically put in by the tool, you can select the desired word from a set of alternatives or explicitly type it out yourself.
Note that you might have to tweak things a little to correctly display Indic scripts.
Update (2007-08-23): QuillPad seems to have been in existence for some time now and has support for more Indian languages than the Google transliteration tool (which only supports Hindi at the moment).
Update (2007-08-29): Raftaar also allows you to search in Hindi using a transliterating interface.
The transliteration tool is especially nice. For example, it automatically converts "ramesh" to "रमेश". If you did not want the word automatically put in by the tool, you can select the desired word from a set of alternatives or explicitly type it out yourself.
Note that you might have to tweak things a little to correctly display Indic scripts.
Update (2007-08-23): QuillPad seems to have been in existence for some time now and has support for more Indian languages than the Google transliteration tool (which only supports Hindi at the moment).
Update (2007-08-29): Raftaar also allows you to search in Hindi using a transliterating interface.
2007-07-02
Dragon Ball Z
Many years ago, a cartoon TV channel in India started showing Dragon Ball Z. They showed 53 episodes of this series comprising the Vegeta Saga and the Namek Saga. Just as the series got really interesting, they yanked it off the air without notice and without even a word of apology.
Loyal viewers of the series were aghast. They pleaded with the channel to show them the rest of the series as well, rather than leaving them on tenterhooks. The channel could not care less. The viewers were frustrated and cursed the channel using the choicest of expletives. They did not have much choice.
Several years later, the same cartoon channel starts showing Dragon Ball Z once again. Some of the old viewers hope the channel would show the entire series this time and watch the episodes once again to revive their memories.
They were naïve. The channel showed the same 53 episodes of the series and then abandoned it yet again at the same critical point in the story.
They were idiots. The channel as well as the viewers.
Loyal viewers of the series were aghast. They pleaded with the channel to show them the rest of the series as well, rather than leaving them on tenterhooks. The channel could not care less. The viewers were frustrated and cursed the channel using the choicest of expletives. They did not have much choice.
Several years later, the same cartoon channel starts showing Dragon Ball Z once again. Some of the old viewers hope the channel would show the entire series this time and watch the episodes once again to revive their memories.
They were naïve. The channel showed the same 53 episodes of the series and then abandoned it yet again at the same critical point in the story.
They were idiots. The channel as well as the viewers.
2007-05-26
Indic Scripts and Linux
If you have the fonts for Indic scripts (for example, the Lohit fonts), Firefox on Linux is able to display the Devanagari text on sites like BBC Hindi and Google News in Hindi. (Devanagari is the primary writing system for languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, etc.) However, if you are using the builds released by mozilla.com, you would notice that the matras (diacritics) are not applied properly to form the correct ligatures. For example, the word "हिन्दी" ("Hindi") itself is not rendered properly. Konqueror does not suffer from such problems.
It turns out that Firefox does not support complex text layout because it doesn't use Pango in the officially-released builds (Firefox 3 will support it by default). You have to either compile it yourself from the source and enable the support for Pango by using --enable-pango, or use a build that has Pango enabled - for example, the builds provided by the Fedora Project. (Setting the environment variable MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO to "1" had no effect for me with Firefox 2.0.0.3.)
On Fedora Core 6 (FC6), it is very simple to get this working:
By the way, I recently came across Omniglot, a site about the writing systems of almost all known human languages, existing or extinct, naturally-evolved or artificially-created. I found it extremely fascinating and insightful. For example, I did not know that Devanagari was not considered to be an "alphabet" but an "abiguda". Check out the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that can represent almost all spoken languages. How about Loglan (and its freer derivative, Lojban) that claims to be a "logical" language? (I first came across the IPA on Wikipedia, where it is used to provide the pronunciation for some terms. xkcd is where I first read about Lojban.)
It turns out that Firefox does not support complex text layout because it doesn't use Pango in the officially-released builds (Firefox 3 will support it by default). You have to either compile it yourself from the source and enable the support for Pango by using --enable-pango, or use a build that has Pango enabled - for example, the builds provided by the Fedora Project. (Setting the environment variable MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO to "1" had no effect for me with Firefox 2.0.0.3.)
On Fedora Core 6 (FC6), it is very simple to get this working:
- Install the fonts for the Indic scripts you are interested in. For example, "sudo yum install fonts-hindi" , "sudo yum install fonts-malayalam", "sudo yum install fonts-kannada", etc.
- Install a Firefox build for Fedora using "sudo yum install firefox". Note that FC6 installs Firefox 1.5 by default - if you prefer Firefox 2.0 instead, you can install it using "sudo yum --enablerepo=development install firefox".
By the way, I recently came across Omniglot, a site about the writing systems of almost all known human languages, existing or extinct, naturally-evolved or artificially-created. I found it extremely fascinating and insightful. For example, I did not know that Devanagari was not considered to be an "alphabet" but an "abiguda". Check out the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that can represent almost all spoken languages. How about Loglan (and its freer derivative, Lojban) that claims to be a "logical" language? (I first came across the IPA on Wikipedia, where it is used to provide the pronunciation for some terms. xkcd is where I first read about Lojban.)
2007-05-23
"Superstition Reigns"
"Superstition Reigns" by Rahul Singh, published in The Times of India today:
"Amitabh Bachchan, an icon for tens of millions of Indians, makes his daughter-in-law [Aishwarya Rai] perform outlandish ceremonies because she is supposedly under the evil influence of Mars. Politicians routinely consult astrologers before taking important decisions, despite abundant proof that astrology is no science at all, just quackery. Horoscopes continue to be cast in most families and palmists consulted. A newly-inducted cabinet minister insists that her bungalow be completely redesigned because it does not follow vaastu principles, a system nobody had heard of till only a few years ago."
Superstition in all its ugly forms is sickeningly pervasive in India, even among educated people who ought to know better. We waste a lot of time and money and unnecessarily make life difficult for ourselves as well as others, all in the name of something that doesn't withstand rational scrutiny.
2007-05-09
Wayanad
The Labour Day holiday last Tuesday, combined with a day's leave off work on Monday, offered us a four day long weekend that Anusha and I used for a mini vacation in Wayanad in Kerala.
A couple of Anusha's friends, along with their spouses, also joined us on this trip. We drove from Bangalore to Wayanad via Mysore, Nanjangud, Gundlupet and Sultan Battery, taking SH-17 and NH-212 and passing through the Bandipur wildlife sanctuary. The roads were quite good in general and the road from Bangalore to Mysore was excellent in particular. We covered the distance in about 5.5 hours, including a couple of short breaks. We stayed in Edakkal Hermitage, a resort quite close to the Edakkal Caves.
Pre-historic Carvings of the Edakkal Caves
Kerala is one of the most beautiful states in India. Even for someone from a generally green city like Bangalore, the lush and pervasive greenery of Kerala is an exhilarating change. As with The Tall Trees Resorts in Munnar that we had visited earlier, the cottages of Edakkal Hermitage were located on the quiet slopes of a mountain in a way that allows one to soak in the beauty of nature in relative privacy while affording a fantastic view of the valley below. The two resorts were also very similar in the amazing service provided by the respective staff and the delicious food that were served by them.
Our Cottage
On the first day, after having refreshed ourselves and having had lunch at the resort, we drove down to the Pookote Lake. This lake turned out to be a disappointment. It was small, filthy and full of tourists. We didn't stay there long, moving on to a view-point and then returning to our resort. Later in the evening, we had our dinner in a cave in the resort that was beautifully lit by more than a hundred candles.
The next morning, we visited the Edakkal Caves and admired the pre-historic carvings on the walls of the caves. The climb to the caves is a bit difficult and is not everyone's cup of tea. Three of our party, including me, wanted to climb further up the mountain and on to the summit, while the others preferred to stay back on a landing waiting for us to come back. We kept climbing up till we reached a rock-face that was a bit steep. There was a single rope for support and not many footholds. Not being experienced climbers and only having our ordinary shoes for support, we chickened out. We tried to find an alternate route to the summit and turned back on not finding any. I regret this now and wish I had mustered the courage.
Our only consolation was spotting a huge butterfly on the way back. It was the biggest butterfly I had ever seen and must have been about 20 to 25 centimetres (8 to 10 inches) across. We were able to get very close to the butterfly and even touch it - it just moved its wings and continued to sit on its tree.
The Butterfly
Tired from our trek, Anusha and I chose to relax in our cottage that afternoon while the rest of the party drove to the Suchipara waterfalls. In the evening we had our dinner in an amphitheatre in the resort.
The next morning we went for a safari through the Muthanga wildlife sanctuary. The safari was utterly disappointing for the most part with not many animals in sight (as has been our luck on all such occasions), when it suddenly turned rather interesting towards the end. Our way was blocked by a herd of at least seven elephants, one of which was a baby elephant. The driver of the Jeep was evidently quite scared and was ready to scoot at the slightest hint of trouble. Retreating was a bit difficult since the path was rather narrow (you had to either retreat in reverse gear or find a clearing large enough to turn the Jeep around) and there were other Jeeps behind us. We had to wait for about half an hour before the herd moved away and we could proceed. Other than the elephants, we were able to spot a Malabar Squirrel, different types of deer, langurs and peacocks.
The Elephants
That afternoon we headed back to Bangalore, regretting that we could not stay longer and dreading the plunge back into the daily grind of our lives.
A couple of Anusha's friends, along with their spouses, also joined us on this trip. We drove from Bangalore to Wayanad via Mysore, Nanjangud, Gundlupet and Sultan Battery, taking SH-17 and NH-212 and passing through the Bandipur wildlife sanctuary. The roads were quite good in general and the road from Bangalore to Mysore was excellent in particular. We covered the distance in about 5.5 hours, including a couple of short breaks. We stayed in Edakkal Hermitage, a resort quite close to the Edakkal Caves.
Pre-historic Carvings of the Edakkal CavesKerala is one of the most beautiful states in India. Even for someone from a generally green city like Bangalore, the lush and pervasive greenery of Kerala is an exhilarating change. As with The Tall Trees Resorts in Munnar that we had visited earlier, the cottages of Edakkal Hermitage were located on the quiet slopes of a mountain in a way that allows one to soak in the beauty of nature in relative privacy while affording a fantastic view of the valley below. The two resorts were also very similar in the amazing service provided by the respective staff and the delicious food that were served by them.
Our CottageOn the first day, after having refreshed ourselves and having had lunch at the resort, we drove down to the Pookote Lake. This lake turned out to be a disappointment. It was small, filthy and full of tourists. We didn't stay there long, moving on to a view-point and then returning to our resort. Later in the evening, we had our dinner in a cave in the resort that was beautifully lit by more than a hundred candles.
The next morning, we visited the Edakkal Caves and admired the pre-historic carvings on the walls of the caves. The climb to the caves is a bit difficult and is not everyone's cup of tea. Three of our party, including me, wanted to climb further up the mountain and on to the summit, while the others preferred to stay back on a landing waiting for us to come back. We kept climbing up till we reached a rock-face that was a bit steep. There was a single rope for support and not many footholds. Not being experienced climbers and only having our ordinary shoes for support, we chickened out. We tried to find an alternate route to the summit and turned back on not finding any. I regret this now and wish I had mustered the courage.
Our only consolation was spotting a huge butterfly on the way back. It was the biggest butterfly I had ever seen and must have been about 20 to 25 centimetres (8 to 10 inches) across. We were able to get very close to the butterfly and even touch it - it just moved its wings and continued to sit on its tree.
The ButterflyTired from our trek, Anusha and I chose to relax in our cottage that afternoon while the rest of the party drove to the Suchipara waterfalls. In the evening we had our dinner in an amphitheatre in the resort.
The next morning we went for a safari through the Muthanga wildlife sanctuary. The safari was utterly disappointing for the most part with not many animals in sight (as has been our luck on all such occasions), when it suddenly turned rather interesting towards the end. Our way was blocked by a herd of at least seven elephants, one of which was a baby elephant. The driver of the Jeep was evidently quite scared and was ready to scoot at the slightest hint of trouble. Retreating was a bit difficult since the path was rather narrow (you had to either retreat in reverse gear or find a clearing large enough to turn the Jeep around) and there were other Jeeps behind us. We had to wait for about half an hour before the herd moved away and we could proceed. Other than the elephants, we were able to spot a Malabar Squirrel, different types of deer, langurs and peacocks.
The ElephantsThat afternoon we headed back to Bangalore, regretting that we could not stay longer and dreading the plunge back into the daily grind of our lives.
2007-03-11
Investing For Retirement
(Note: This post might not be of interest to those not from India.)
Most of us do not even think about planning for retirement until we reach the age of 30. Some of us "live for the moment" and don't care for the future, some of us feel uncomfortable thinking about retirement and pretend like the proverbial cat that closing our eyes to the problem will make it go away and some of us just do not know how to assess our financial requirements three decades into the future.
Unfortunately for us, there is not much of a government-provided social security in India for old folks, we cannot realistically expect our children to take care of all our expenses, inflation constantly lessens the value of our savings and interests on assured-return investments (fixed-deposits, EPFs, etc.) keep falling. We must have some idea of our needs at the time of our retirement and know how much to invest now to be able to afford the same lifestyle that we are currently used to.
The good news is that we can use basic mathematics to calculate these figures. We will make use of two equations. The first equation (call it "E1") tells us the final amount "S" that an initial amount "P" grows to if it grows at a compounded rate of "r" over "n" years:
The second equation (call it "E2") tells us the final amount "S" that a regular annual investment of "P" over "n" years gives if it grows at a compounded rate of "r":
Note that since the rates are usually quoted as percentages, you need to divide them by 100 to get the value of "r" usable in these equations. For example, a quoted rate of 8% translates to "r" equal to 0.08.
Now assume that you are aged 30 years, plan to retire at the age of 60 years, have a montly expenditure of 20,000 rupees and the rate of inflation is about 5% on the average. Using E1, you can see that at the time of your retirement 30 years hence, your monthly expenditure would become about 86,438.85 rupees simply because of inflation! That translates to about 10,37,266 rupees in annual expenditure. With old age come many an ailment for which you would need to spend money - at about 1,00,000 rupees per year at today's rates, you would need about 4,32,194 rupees at the time of your retirement to meet medical expenses. So you would need an annual income of at least 14,69,460 rupees at the time of your retirement just to sustain your current lifestyle and cope with the inevitable medical expenses!
How will you generate an income like this at that time? It is very likely that your appetite for risk would have considerably diminished at that time and you would only be willing to invest for assured-returns and thus lower rates of interest, say, about 5%. This in turn means that you would need a sum of 2,93,89,200 rupees (5% of which is the amount you need per year) at the time of your retirement. You need to have raised about 3 crore rupees by the time you retire just to be able to afford your current lifestyle!
To raise this kind of money, you either need to invest a certain amount annually till the time you retire or do a one-time investment. If you assume an annual return of 8% on your investments, you either need to invest about 2,59,431 rupees annually for the next 30 years (using E2) or about 29,20,620 rupees at a single shot (using E1). If you assume a more aggressive (though riskier) annual return of 15% on your investments, the amounts change to about 67,601 rupees and about 4,43,867 rupees respectively.
If you had started at the age of 25 years, you would have had 35 years to raise the money. At a per-annum return of 8%, you would have either invested about 1,70,533 rupees annually or about 19,87,725 rupees at a single shot. At a per-annum return of 15%, these figures become about 33,352 rupees and about 2,20,680 rupees respectively.
If you postpone investing for your retirement by another five years, you would have 25 years to raise the money. At a per-annum return of 8%, you would need to either invest about 4,02,008 rupees annually or about 42,91,349 rupees at a single shot. At a per-annum return of 15%, these figures become about 1,38,112 rupees and about 8,92,774 rupees respectively.
So the earlier you start investing for your retirement, the better it is for you. The folks at Personalfn.com have a report titled "Retirement Planning and You" that provides a more detailed analysis of this situation as well as the available investment options suitable for retirement planning.
Of course, these are simplified calculations. They do not take into account the fact that you will very likely have to pay income tax on the returns from this investment. They also do not take into account the fact that because of inflation, you would need slightly more and more every year after you retire instead of the fixed amount assumed here. Hopefully the average rate of inflation for India for the next 30 years will be less than the 5% assumed here.
Most of us do not even think about planning for retirement until we reach the age of 30. Some of us "live for the moment" and don't care for the future, some of us feel uncomfortable thinking about retirement and pretend like the proverbial cat that closing our eyes to the problem will make it go away and some of us just do not know how to assess our financial requirements three decades into the future.
Unfortunately for us, there is not much of a government-provided social security in India for old folks, we cannot realistically expect our children to take care of all our expenses, inflation constantly lessens the value of our savings and interests on assured-return investments (fixed-deposits, EPFs, etc.) keep falling. We must have some idea of our needs at the time of our retirement and know how much to invest now to be able to afford the same lifestyle that we are currently used to.
The good news is that we can use basic mathematics to calculate these figures. We will make use of two equations. The first equation (call it "E1") tells us the final amount "S" that an initial amount "P" grows to if it grows at a compounded rate of "r" over "n" years:
S = P × (1 + r)n
The second equation (call it "E2") tells us the final amount "S" that a regular annual investment of "P" over "n" years gives if it grows at a compounded rate of "r":
S = P × ((1 + r)n - 1) / r
Note that since the rates are usually quoted as percentages, you need to divide them by 100 to get the value of "r" usable in these equations. For example, a quoted rate of 8% translates to "r" equal to 0.08.
Now assume that you are aged 30 years, plan to retire at the age of 60 years, have a montly expenditure of 20,000 rupees and the rate of inflation is about 5% on the average. Using E1, you can see that at the time of your retirement 30 years hence, your monthly expenditure would become about 86,438.85 rupees simply because of inflation! That translates to about 10,37,266 rupees in annual expenditure. With old age come many an ailment for which you would need to spend money - at about 1,00,000 rupees per year at today's rates, you would need about 4,32,194 rupees at the time of your retirement to meet medical expenses. So you would need an annual income of at least 14,69,460 rupees at the time of your retirement just to sustain your current lifestyle and cope with the inevitable medical expenses!
How will you generate an income like this at that time? It is very likely that your appetite for risk would have considerably diminished at that time and you would only be willing to invest for assured-returns and thus lower rates of interest, say, about 5%. This in turn means that you would need a sum of 2,93,89,200 rupees (5% of which is the amount you need per year) at the time of your retirement. You need to have raised about 3 crore rupees by the time you retire just to be able to afford your current lifestyle!
To raise this kind of money, you either need to invest a certain amount annually till the time you retire or do a one-time investment. If you assume an annual return of 8% on your investments, you either need to invest about 2,59,431 rupees annually for the next 30 years (using E2) or about 29,20,620 rupees at a single shot (using E1). If you assume a more aggressive (though riskier) annual return of 15% on your investments, the amounts change to about 67,601 rupees and about 4,43,867 rupees respectively.
If you had started at the age of 25 years, you would have had 35 years to raise the money. At a per-annum return of 8%, you would have either invested about 1,70,533 rupees annually or about 19,87,725 rupees at a single shot. At a per-annum return of 15%, these figures become about 33,352 rupees and about 2,20,680 rupees respectively.
If you postpone investing for your retirement by another five years, you would have 25 years to raise the money. At a per-annum return of 8%, you would need to either invest about 4,02,008 rupees annually or about 42,91,349 rupees at a single shot. At a per-annum return of 15%, these figures become about 1,38,112 rupees and about 8,92,774 rupees respectively.
So the earlier you start investing for your retirement, the better it is for you. The folks at Personalfn.com have a report titled "Retirement Planning and You" that provides a more detailed analysis of this situation as well as the available investment options suitable for retirement planning.
Of course, these are simplified calculations. They do not take into account the fact that you will very likely have to pay income tax on the returns from this investment. They also do not take into account the fact that because of inflation, you would need slightly more and more every year after you retire instead of the fixed amount assumed here. Hopefully the average rate of inflation for India for the next 30 years will be less than the 5% assumed here.
2006-12-21
"LtU Books" In India
There are some books on computer science that I had never heard of until I had started reading "Lambda the Ultimate" (LtU). I found these books being mentioned and recommended in various posts and forum topics on LtU from time to time. As I found out more about these books, I became interested in reading them. Since they were relatively obscure, I had no hopes of finding them here in India. The prospect of having to fork out hefty sums of money for buying the books via something like Amazon.com made me apply the brakes on my normal impulse of buying an interesting book when I come across it.
Imagine my delight then, when I stumbled upon the fact that all of these books had an Indian reprint available at an extremely affordable price. Incidentally, all of these books were originally published by MIT Press and the Indian reprints are published by Prentice-Hall of India.
Here are the "LtU Books" along with the ISBNs of their Indian reprints and the corresponding price:
Imagine my delight then, when I stumbled upon the fact that all of these books had an Indian reprint available at an extremely affordable price. Incidentally, all of these books were originally published by MIT Press and the Indian reprints are published by Prentice-Hall of India.
Here are the "LtU Books" along with the ISBNs of their Indian reprints and the corresponding price:
- "Types and Programming Languages" by Benjamin Pierce, ISBN: 81-203-2462-5, 350 rupees.
- "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi, ISBN: 81-203-2685-7, 450 rupees.
- "How to Design Programs" by Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt and Shriram Krishnamurthi, ISBN: 81-203-2461-7, 325 rupees.
- "Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages" by Benjamin Pierce, ISBN: 81-203-2792-6, 425 rupees.
- "The Elements of Computing Systems" by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken, ISBN: 81-203-2885-X, 195 rupees.
2006-12-14
Articles by Dheeraj Sanghi
Dheeraj Sanghi is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department at IIT Kanpur. Our batch, the CSE class of 1996, studied "Computer Networks" under him and he was an active patron of the Association of Computer Activities (ACA).
Recently I stumbled upon a collection of his articles on various topics, including career counselling for students who want to study CS in India, improvements to the undergraduate programme in IIT Kanpur, views on the recent move by the Indian government to impose quotas in the IITs, etc.
Though I found myself disagreeing with some of his points, I found these articles quite interesting as they touch upon topics that I have been thinking about in recent times.
Recently I stumbled upon a collection of his articles on various topics, including career counselling for students who want to study CS in India, improvements to the undergraduate programme in IIT Kanpur, views on the recent move by the Indian government to impose quotas in the IITs, etc.
Though I found myself disagreeing with some of his points, I found these articles quite interesting as they touch upon topics that I have been thinking about in recent times.
2006-11-27
FOSS.IN/2006: Impressions
FOSS.IN/2006 is over. This year the event was held in the J. N. Tata Auditorium complex of IISc, Bangalore. This meant that we had much better seating arrangements and acoustics compared to last year, though some of the halls were awfully musty and for some reason the airconditioner in every hall was set to too low a temperature for my comfort. The food was much better than what was there last year and there were enough pure water dispensers to quench everyone's thirst throughout the day every day.
The scale of the event however was much smaller this year compared to last year. It was held for just three days instead of four days as in last year and there were just five simultaneous talks through the day instead of six as in last year. While many of the American hackers chose to skip the event this year due to its unfortunate overlap with the Thanksgiving weekend, I don't know what would explain the much lower turnout of Indian delegates and exhibitors.
I didn't find that many interesting talks this year so it was a bit depressing for me. In addition, there were many a glaring error in a couple of talks that I attended. Among the talks that I did like were the ones by Christof Wittig and Russell Nelson on the first day, the one by Aaron Seigo on the second day and the one by Tim Pritlove on the third day.
In a talk on OpenAlchemy, I asked why anyone in India should buy an Amida Simputer when it has a bulky form factor and is more expensive than a Palm Tungsten E2 which at first blush seems to have many a desirable feature and looks far more polished. Another member of the audience asked where it stands now that the OLPC project is here. I wasn't happy with the answers provided for either of these questions.
The scale of the event however was much smaller this year compared to last year. It was held for just three days instead of four days as in last year and there were just five simultaneous talks through the day instead of six as in last year. While many of the American hackers chose to skip the event this year due to its unfortunate overlap with the Thanksgiving weekend, I don't know what would explain the much lower turnout of Indian delegates and exhibitors.
I didn't find that many interesting talks this year so it was a bit depressing for me. In addition, there were many a glaring error in a couple of talks that I attended. Among the talks that I did like were the ones by Christof Wittig and Russell Nelson on the first day, the one by Aaron Seigo on the second day and the one by Tim Pritlove on the third day.
In a talk on OpenAlchemy, I asked why anyone in India should buy an Amida Simputer when it has a bulky form factor and is more expensive than a Palm Tungsten E2 which at first blush seems to have many a desirable feature and looks far more polished. Another member of the audience asked where it stands now that the OLPC project is here. I wasn't happy with the answers provided for either of these questions.
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