Finally have managed to solve the blog jhol. Could see my blog after ages. Saakshaat Vithu paavla asa vatle. No thats a hyperbole because I am partly opiated by sleep at an unearthly hour, and partly disabled by the synaesthesias created by a tab of Ativan.
My sense of coordination has gone for a toss.I can feel the ataxia of my drunken fingers....so it shall be an acheivement if I can type sometihing compos mentis out of this.The mosambi peel seems thicker than usual...and the bibs set my jaw in to a jigThe ease with which the bolus of half masticated mosambi pulp slides through the esophagus creates a musical whoosh, thud as it lands into the fundus of the stomach.GLP sears through,stomach distends and opium flushes the gray gyri and sulci again.
Dont trip me, I shall fall. But it wont hurt. My feet feel like rubber.
Anyways: I know I am not as sugarily endowed or DENTally delectable as my cousin Denty...but i do need to say thanks to many soulkeepers who bore with my passive aggressive rants while I stayed with them in the US.
Ramu--had never lived so long with my brother since 10 years. And I have had a friends in the past where distance led us apart.
To Shalini...to whom I might have been a pain in the back. But I was very frustrated by all the inactivity, and would unconsciously project it on to her.But she was gracious and forgiving and .........no I never cooked when she did.
Lakshmi: aap mahaan ho.In all the stress of your painfully overkill schedule you did so well. Tumhara khana naseeb hua, bahut hua.
Rajesh- never knew you , hadnt seen much of you before.But I thoroughly enjoyed the one month I spent at Reading......have chitappa also to thank.
Ananya: I had the opportunity to see your toddler years which I might not get to see again.Everyone here still misses you.
Denish:You have had hard times.But the effort of travelling 2 hrs to make it to Norwood and be with us was heartening.
Vidya and Kiruba: Aapki shaadi mubarak.I told you once Vidya...jitna door tum ghar se raho, utne paas tum gharwalon ke ho jaate ho.This country rocks
At 17000 ft above ground level, I had written a different post to publish on blogger later.It was an assesment of my stay there as a summary. Shall post it some time later.Abhi my eyes are droopy.My touch on my skin feels unusually smoothened out.My nostrils are roomy with smells of the night.Getting arrectores pilorum -----feels like some Rushdiesque surreal mangrove forest with gods and heath and flies.And even thoughts wafting around like ghosts, randomly, unhindered.If you want to experience it go into the small cirrus of neurotransmitter puff.Maybe the midnight's children are transmitting waves through arabesque walls of Allhambrasque mosques and lapis lazuli laden spitoons.Not the best of times to reflect on gains and losses and existentialist kitsch.
Abu Reboir.Hic Hic. --(diaphragm ka bhi muscle relax ho gaya Ativan se)
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Phunny
This is odd. I am able to post on the blog, but not view it. Anyone more enlightened on the subject to help? This is the ultimate karma cola - keep posting, not to see what shows to others.
Long time
Having some problems accessing my blog from home. Unable to post anything.Hope this goes through.As activity trundles along at varying pace, life and time go on incessantly, prefrontal lobotomised.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Good times, bad times
Good times, bad times; retribution, karma and consequence, 'form and class' are all ways of thinking that we have developed around the random assortment in which events occur in our realm.
Because our powers of statistical prediction of a p,0.05 or intuition ( 'gut feeling','work experience')do not serve us well all the time
and because
there is some regularity in irregularity( or so the brain is trained to think- we always look for patterns unconsciously, link up events- thats the way we are trained to remember, to assign significance to mundane everyday events. A someanyone is a somesignificantone of someknownONE; a random thing sticks in memory because of the nebula around it that we probed to link up with some other thing we know of)
we develop this sometimes absurd linking of events.
That a present was a consequence of an earlier.
Things do not turn out always as we expect, unexpected events factor in, performance varies - we did good or we did not do so good. This creates uncertainty that gives you the sweaty palms and queasy belly- autonomic responses that we are instinctively uncomfortable with.Uncertainity is also an uncomfortable emotion for the psyche.And because we attach a sense of morality or even fear to many things we do-thats the origin of the punitively conscientious 'kar bhala so ho bhala' or 'as you sow..'These are good comforters.Then we change thinking patterns to we did good or we did BAD.Punitive conscience becomes a nonpunitive ego-ideal.
Another form of linking of events that we do subconsciously but have prided as creation of human ingenuity/intelligence is the 'law of averages'That you have good times and bad times. This is contradictory with the above point in that if one keeps doing good then there should be no bad times at all.Kar bhala .....ho bhala should go in a positive feedback loop.But events do occur in a way that they are at times good for us and sometimes not so good for us.What sustains through is how one handles the events and what adaptive lessons one learns from them.Why someone has a longer cycle of good times and bad times while others seem to hop, skip and jump out of them is not a question of morality but stochastic probability.If we think so( it is tough to go against what is drilled into the id though) then it creates preparedness for events- not a false sense of security or hopelessness.
Because our powers of statistical prediction of a p,0.05 or intuition ( 'gut feeling','work experience')do not serve us well all the time
and because
there is some regularity in irregularity( or so the brain is trained to think- we always look for patterns unconsciously, link up events- thats the way we are trained to remember, to assign significance to mundane everyday events. A someanyone is a somesignificantone of someknownONE; a random thing sticks in memory because of the nebula around it that we probed to link up with some other thing we know of)
we develop this sometimes absurd linking of events.
That a present was a consequence of an earlier.
Things do not turn out always as we expect, unexpected events factor in, performance varies - we did good or we did not do so good. This creates uncertainty that gives you the sweaty palms and queasy belly- autonomic responses that we are instinctively uncomfortable with.Uncertainity is also an uncomfortable emotion for the psyche.And because we attach a sense of morality or even fear to many things we do-thats the origin of the punitively conscientious 'kar bhala so ho bhala' or 'as you sow..'These are good comforters.Then we change thinking patterns to we did good or we did BAD.Punitive conscience becomes a nonpunitive ego-ideal.
Another form of linking of events that we do subconsciously but have prided as creation of human ingenuity/intelligence is the 'law of averages'That you have good times and bad times. This is contradictory with the above point in that if one keeps doing good then there should be no bad times at all.Kar bhala .....ho bhala should go in a positive feedback loop.But events do occur in a way that they are at times good for us and sometimes not so good for us.What sustains through is how one handles the events and what adaptive lessons one learns from them.Why someone has a longer cycle of good times and bad times while others seem to hop, skip and jump out of them is not a question of morality but stochastic probability.If we think so( it is tough to go against what is drilled into the id though) then it creates preparedness for events- not a false sense of security or hopelessness.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Article from the NYT
Here's an article from the NYT that I was forwarded.Very interesting read. Ironic that it figures in the NYT instead of the TOI.Maybe it requires an outside observer's viewpoint to figure out where we go wrong?
Was a time medicos in India found it fashionable to discuss Gawande's article in the NEJM about hospitalist practice in India when it really was a viewpoint of an alien on what is common practice in our country given the pathetic resources we have and priorities that are more pressing than say pumping dollars into a luxury like say screening in the way it is done in Gawande's country.Still bear the hurt from the words of a visiting observer from UK who was posted with me in the general wards at KEM while I was junior resident: " you guys dont have resources to perform ACLS on a dying patient in the wards of a tertiary referal center in the biggest city in India.We have facilities to do that in Victoria Train Station in UK!"
Here goes:
Anand Girdharadas
NY Times, Nov 30th 2006
MUMBAI, India, Nov. 29 The job market for Indian college graduates is split sharply in two. With a robust handshake, a placeless accent and a confident walk, you can get a $300-a-month job with Citibank or Microsoft. With a limp handshake and a thick accent, you might peddle credit cards door to door for $2 a day.
India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudge like jobs.
Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories
rather than memorize them.
But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India's upper castes - the few thousand students who
graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.
In the shadow of those marquee institutions, most of the 11 million students in India's 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on
obedience and light on useful job skills.
Students, executives and educators say this two-tier education system is locking millions of people into the bottom berths of the economy, depriving the country of talent and students of the chance to improve their lot. For those who succeed, what counts is the right skills.
"It's almost literally a matter of life and death for them," said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade body that
represents many leading employers. "The same person from the same institution with the same grades, but not having these skills, will either not get employed at all or will probably get a job in a shop or something."
India is that rare country where it seems to get harder to find a job the more educated you are. In the 2001 census, college graduates had higher unemployment - 17 percent more than middle or high school graduates.
But as graduates complain about a lack of jobs, companies across India see a lack of skilled applicants. The contradiction is explained, experts say, by the poor quality
of undergraduate education. India's thousands of colleges are swallowing millions of new students every year, only to turn out degree holders whom no one wants to hire.
A study published by the software trade group last year concluded that only 10 percent of graduates with nonspecialized degrees were considered employable by
leading companies, compared with 25 percent of engineers.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former Harvard professor who recently resigned in frustration from the National Knowledge Commission, which advises the Indian government on
overhauling the education system, said, "The real crisis for me is the place where 70 percent of your graduates are students who do basic science, bachelor of arts and
bachelor of commerce."
Bijal Vora, a commerce student at Hinduja College here in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, would welcome a redesign of the system. "We have not done this to become salespeople," she said.
Hinduja is in one of India's richest enclaves, but it is a second-tier, little-known school, and so it exemplifies a middling college experience - neither the best nor the worst.
Between lectures there, dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education.
"What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different," a commerce student, Sohail Kutchi, said.
Kinjal Bhuptani, a final-year student who expects next year to make $2 to $4 a day hawking credit cards, was dejected. "The opportunities we get at this stage are sad,"
she said. "We might as well not have studied."
The students said they were not learning to communicate effectively, even as the essential job skills evolve from pushing papers to answering phones to making
presentations. They said their courses offered few chances to work in groups or hold discussions. And in this supposedly English-language college, the professors often
used bad grammar and spoke in thick accents.
Across India, half of graduates are not taught in English, effectively barring them from the high-end labor market, said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at
Infosys, a leading outsourcing company. And where English is taught, it is not necessarily the kind employers need.
"Depreciation nikal diya, assets ko less ho gaya." So went a lesson being given by the accounting professor at Dahanukar College in suburban Mumbai - removing
depreciation reduces assets , an example of the widespread use in supposedly English-language colleges of Hinglish, an amalgam of Hindi and English.
A lack of communications skills may be the most obvious shortcoming, but it is not the only one. A deeper problem, specialists say, is a classroom environment that treats students like children even if they are in their mid-20's. Teaching emphasizes silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis and debate.
"Out! Out! Close the door! Close the door!" a management professor barked at a student who entered his classroom at Hinduja two minutes late. Soon after his departure, the door cracked open again, and the student asked if he could at least take his bag.
The reply: "Out! Out! Who said you could stand here?" A second student, caught whispering, was asked to stand up and cease taking notes.
Then there is the matter of teaching style. At Hinduja and Dahanukar, the mode of instruction at times evokes a re-education camp of some sort. In a marketing class at Hinduja, the professor paced in front, then pressed her chalk to the board.
She drew a tree diagram dividing it into indirect and direct marketing, then divided those into components, and those further into subcomponents. As students frantically took notes, she kept going, and before long she was teaching them that each region of Mumbai would have its own marketing representative: eastern Mumbai, western Mumbai, central Mumbai. There was no discussion, and
there was little to discuss.
The professor then led the students in a chant: "What is span of management?"
"Span of management is the number of subordinates a supervisor will manage." She chanted the refrain four times.
Rote memorization is rife at Indian colleges because students continue to be judged almost solely by exam results. There is scant incentive to widen their horizons to read books, found clubs or stage plays.
That is not good news for Indian companies, which are hiring these days. Infosys will take on 25,000 people this year from a pool of 1.5 million applicants. The ranks of the rejected are likely to include smart graduates who lack qualities like poise, articulateness and global exposure, Mr. Pai of Infosys said.
And even if rigid teaching ways are changed, experts say the rigidity of Indian households will continue.
"When we are raising our children," said Sam Pitroda, a Chicago-based entrepreneur who is chairman of the Knowledge Commission and was an adviser to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, "we constantly tell them: 'Don't do this, don't do that. Stand here, stand there.' It creates a feeling that if there is a boundary, you don't cross it. You create boxes around people when we need people thinking outside the box."
Was a time medicos in India found it fashionable to discuss Gawande's article in the NEJM about hospitalist practice in India when it really was a viewpoint of an alien on what is common practice in our country given the pathetic resources we have and priorities that are more pressing than say pumping dollars into a luxury like say screening in the way it is done in Gawande's country.Still bear the hurt from the words of a visiting observer from UK who was posted with me in the general wards at KEM while I was junior resident: " you guys dont have resources to perform ACLS on a dying patient in the wards of a tertiary referal center in the biggest city in India.We have facilities to do that in Victoria Train Station in UK!"
Here goes:
Anand Girdharadas
NY Times, Nov 30th 2006
MUMBAI, India, Nov. 29 The job market for Indian college graduates is split sharply in two. With a robust handshake, a placeless accent and a confident walk, you can get a $300-a-month job with Citibank or Microsoft. With a limp handshake and a thick accent, you might peddle credit cards door to door for $2 a day.
India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudge like jobs.
Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories
rather than memorize them.
But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India's upper castes - the few thousand students who
graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.
In the shadow of those marquee institutions, most of the 11 million students in India's 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on
obedience and light on useful job skills.
Students, executives and educators say this two-tier education system is locking millions of people into the bottom berths of the economy, depriving the country of talent and students of the chance to improve their lot. For those who succeed, what counts is the right skills.
"It's almost literally a matter of life and death for them," said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade body that
represents many leading employers. "The same person from the same institution with the same grades, but not having these skills, will either not get employed at all or will probably get a job in a shop or something."
India is that rare country where it seems to get harder to find a job the more educated you are. In the 2001 census, college graduates had higher unemployment - 17 percent more than middle or high school graduates.
But as graduates complain about a lack of jobs, companies across India see a lack of skilled applicants. The contradiction is explained, experts say, by the poor quality
of undergraduate education. India's thousands of colleges are swallowing millions of new students every year, only to turn out degree holders whom no one wants to hire.
A study published by the software trade group last year concluded that only 10 percent of graduates with nonspecialized degrees were considered employable by
leading companies, compared with 25 percent of engineers.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former Harvard professor who recently resigned in frustration from the National Knowledge Commission, which advises the Indian government on
overhauling the education system, said, "The real crisis for me is the place where 70 percent of your graduates are students who do basic science, bachelor of arts and
bachelor of commerce."
Bijal Vora, a commerce student at Hinduja College here in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, would welcome a redesign of the system. "We have not done this to become salespeople," she said.
Hinduja is in one of India's richest enclaves, but it is a second-tier, little-known school, and so it exemplifies a middling college experience - neither the best nor the worst.
Between lectures there, dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education.
"What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different," a commerce student, Sohail Kutchi, said.
Kinjal Bhuptani, a final-year student who expects next year to make $2 to $4 a day hawking credit cards, was dejected. "The opportunities we get at this stage are sad,"
she said. "We might as well not have studied."
The students said they were not learning to communicate effectively, even as the essential job skills evolve from pushing papers to answering phones to making
presentations. They said their courses offered few chances to work in groups or hold discussions. And in this supposedly English-language college, the professors often
used bad grammar and spoke in thick accents.
Across India, half of graduates are not taught in English, effectively barring them from the high-end labor market, said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at
Infosys, a leading outsourcing company. And where English is taught, it is not necessarily the kind employers need.
"Depreciation nikal diya, assets ko less ho gaya." So went a lesson being given by the accounting professor at Dahanukar College in suburban Mumbai - removing
depreciation reduces assets , an example of the widespread use in supposedly English-language colleges of Hinglish, an amalgam of Hindi and English.
A lack of communications skills may be the most obvious shortcoming, but it is not the only one. A deeper problem, specialists say, is a classroom environment that treats students like children even if they are in their mid-20's. Teaching emphasizes silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis and debate.
"Out! Out! Close the door! Close the door!" a management professor barked at a student who entered his classroom at Hinduja two minutes late. Soon after his departure, the door cracked open again, and the student asked if he could at least take his bag.
The reply: "Out! Out! Who said you could stand here?" A second student, caught whispering, was asked to stand up and cease taking notes.
Then there is the matter of teaching style. At Hinduja and Dahanukar, the mode of instruction at times evokes a re-education camp of some sort. In a marketing class at Hinduja, the professor paced in front, then pressed her chalk to the board.
She drew a tree diagram dividing it into indirect and direct marketing, then divided those into components, and those further into subcomponents. As students frantically took notes, she kept going, and before long she was teaching them that each region of Mumbai would have its own marketing representative: eastern Mumbai, western Mumbai, central Mumbai. There was no discussion, and
there was little to discuss.
The professor then led the students in a chant: "What is span of management?"
"Span of management is the number of subordinates a supervisor will manage." She chanted the refrain four times.
Rote memorization is rife at Indian colleges because students continue to be judged almost solely by exam results. There is scant incentive to widen their horizons to read books, found clubs or stage plays.
That is not good news for Indian companies, which are hiring these days. Infosys will take on 25,000 people this year from a pool of 1.5 million applicants. The ranks of the rejected are likely to include smart graduates who lack qualities like poise, articulateness and global exposure, Mr. Pai of Infosys said.
And even if rigid teaching ways are changed, experts say the rigidity of Indian households will continue.
"When we are raising our children," said Sam Pitroda, a Chicago-based entrepreneur who is chairman of the Knowledge Commission and was an adviser to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, "we constantly tell them: 'Don't do this, don't do that. Stand here, stand there.' It creates a feeling that if there is a boundary, you don't cross it. You create boxes around people when we need people thinking outside the box."
LIJjat hai...
Goin to NY.Second look at Long Island Jewish Med Center.Shall make my pitch for a PM.Plan to catch my 40 winks on a Greyhound bus.Wish me Best of Luck!
Astra Castra Numen Lumen.........the sky is my roof, the earth, my playground.
Causes of persistent kaluretic hypokalemic alkalosis: Diuretic abuse, early vomiting, Schwarz Bartter syndrome and hypomagnesemia.
Sometimes horrified that migraine is really a neurological abnormality and not a vascular one. By the look of it, on a T1 weighted MRI, my brain looks okay.My kidneys must be bruised though- have exhausted my stock of combiflam already.Some consolation...there's something inside there to ache so much yeah!
Astra Castra Numen Lumen.........the sky is my roof, the earth, my playground.
Causes of persistent kaluretic hypokalemic alkalosis: Diuretic abuse, early vomiting, Schwarz Bartter syndrome and hypomagnesemia.
Sometimes horrified that migraine is really a neurological abnormality and not a vascular one. By the look of it, on a T1 weighted MRI, my brain looks okay.My kidneys must be bruised though- have exhausted my stock of combiflam already.Some consolation...there's something inside there to ache so much yeah!
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