Sunday, September 14, 2008

In honoriam

Waking up after a late-afternoon siesta on Saturday , one saw 2 different news stories playing out in the media - one about 6 blasts in New Delhi and the other about hurricane Ike tearing its away across Houston , Texas and the mid-west of the United States. With near and dear around both places, specifically with an aunt in Delhi who in someways is a creature of habit and visits a temple on Saturday evenings in one of the areas around where the bombs went off. Phone calls made quickly thankfully ascertained the safety of all concerned.


Seeing the pictures of the attacks on Saturday on the junk box, anyone who'd been a resident of Delhi would have recalled happier times . Indeed, many moons ago with nothing much to achieve on a Saturday evening, yours truly would have been found loitering about Connaught Place, walking around , looking out for some bookshop to get hold of some books or having an aloo tikki from the variety of hand-cart sellers ending up with a hot chocolate fudge sundae at Nirulas in the Inner Circle. I am sure of such memories for others about the market in GK - I and Ghaffar Market in Karol Bagh. Trying to think of one's reaction to the whole thing this morning, other than the sadness caused by the deaths of 30 people and injuries to 70 people it's a feeling of angst against attacks on what are held dear by a lot of people . The Delhi-waala is particularly fond of shopping and the amount of honest bargain that can happen on the streets or in the stores. In tribute to this spirit of Delhi, the only response as is the cliched one is that of getting back up and running immediately the next day and show that we can't be bowed as a people by such acts of terror. It's time the powers be did something tough and visible against the perpetrators of this heinous crime rather than making sanctimonius statements about the lack of need for tough anti-terror laws and appealing for peace. Remember it took Bush one 9/11 to toughen his country up . How many more innocent lives and how much more attack will we take on our psyche before the so-called statesmen of this country wake up? It is said that a child found an unexploded bomb on Barakhamba Road. Now , do children in this country have to go through such times where unexploded bombs are found in what can be said is pretty much the core of India's capital. It's not the border with a hostile country, it's not a war zone or the DMZ in Korea where you have a number of land mines but the core of Delhi.

Friday, September 12, 2008

Education or the lack of it in the Indian Colleges

So, I've been sitting and talking to a young 'un in the family who's studying in one of the better women's colleges in Nungambakkam ,Chennai that contains the word Vaishnava in its name. A recent assignment that had this young 'un worried was about inserting into and deleting from linked lists. After nearly an hour or so we'd nailed down the insert, delete routines into singly and doubly linked lists and I was rather proud of my student.

Now is when things got interesting, the assignment involved 4 applications of linked lists to different situations in life. So, the smart 'un came up with innovative ideas like managing employees data in a firm, students marks in a college, room checkins in a hotel and one more that I now forget. When I heard this I burst out laughing wondering if Philips or any of the Audio CD player manufacturers made different CD players for Audio CDs for Pop, Jazz, Indian Classical and Western Classical . However since it was an assignment and worth 20 marks, she had to sit for nearly 4 hours writing the same thing with different conditions based on the data being stored.

The best part was that she took it to college today and the program got rejected by the teacher who wanted 3 * 4 = 12 programs that took care of inserting into a linked list in the start , middle and end of a linked list. However since her program took care of all the cases with a single routine it was not correct and she had written too much to solve the problem. However can someone explain to me on what basis you reject such a routine - efficiency , readability , modularity or what and ask for 3 separate routines to do this. And all this for what, a linked list insertion. For those readers of my blog who are computer illiterate this is akin to being forced to buy 3 different machines for playing English Audio CDs, Tamil Audio CDs and Hindi CDs when there is no difference in the file formats of the CDs under consideration and all 3 machines would be able to play the same ! No, don't bring in region protection for DVDs.


I didn't believe that education was this bad in India until today but having heard this horror story today I can't believe that no one else faces such issues. If this is the state of education in one of the so-called "good" colleges in Chennai, then what would happen in a small village in a remote part of the country.

This particular student cannot appeal to the management regarding such arbitrary decisions because the college is autonomous and the same teacher will decide whether she passes this course or not and will affect her marks in every single test hence. When there is no method for recourse or appeal what do intelligent students do in such "autonomous colleges" ? The question is , is anybody listening ?