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The Best In Four Years Of Journalism

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Interviewing the Father of the Internet 25 January 2005 O n 4 January, a section of the press made it appear that people would soon interact with ‘Martians’, though no life is known to exist on that planet. Two days later, Vinton Cerf , after his plenary lecture at the recent Indian Science Congress, appeared flustered by such an ornamented report. Excerpts from an interview and subsequent Internet chat with Cerf, who is known as the Father of the Internet, by Surajit Dasgupta When you created the Internet, did you ever think it would take off as it has? Many of us who worked on the early technology of the Internet and its predecessors knew that we were working with extremely powerful concepts. But I could not in all honesty say that we were conscious of the magnitude of the impact it would have. I think that realisation has come with time as the Internet has penetrated more and more deeply. This is truly a telecommunications revolution in the making. Don’t you think that all this tal

Don't Dare Show Your Versatility in Public

Lesson learnt well in The Pioneer I n my new office the other day, after I finished preparing company literature on products like power interface unit, phase change material, nano-cooled green shelters, filter-less air conditioner, compressor-less AC, etc, our department needed a French translation of the product descriptions for the overseas market. As I volunteered to translate the matter, my boss looked amused. Immediately I remembered what a curse my versatility had proven in The Pioneer . I laughed and consciously changed the topic of discussion. Eventually, our company had to pay a translator at the Alliance Française de Delhi an exorbitant Rs 6 per word for more than 30,000 words in the company literature, a task I could have done for free — my job profile does not include translation; therefore, no part of my salary can be considered to be the fee for the task — without compromising on quality. That night I asked my wife to interpret the look on my boss's face when I had of

प्रतिबिम्ब

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आ ज की युवा पीढ़ी एक तरफ़ तो अल्हड़ लगती है और दूसरी तरफ़ संजीदा भी । यदि उन में राजनीति की समझ या उसके प्रति रुझान कम है तो विभिन्न तकनीकी विषयों में उन का ज्ञान हमें अक्सर मंत्रमुग्ध भी कर देता है । अतः उन पर कोई अन्तिम टिप्पणी करने से पहले उन के जीवन के अन्य पहलुओं की जांच कर लेनी चाहिए । यदि युवा वर्ग राजनैतिक विचार-विमर्ष में अपरिपक्व है तो इसके लिए न सिर्फ़ युगों तक की मलिन राजनीति ज़िम्मेदार है , बल्कि पिछले दशक में हुए पत्रकारिता के स्तर में पतन का भी दोष कुछ कम नहीं । पर पत्रकारों की ज़िम्मेदारी कहाँ तक है ? क्या प्रसार माध्यम बाज़ार के नियमों से परे काम कर सकता है ? बाज़ार तो यही कहेगा कि जो बिकता है वही बेचो । पिछले दो सालों में कंप्यूटर पर सामाजिक मेल-मिलाप के लिए बने वेबसाइट orkut पर राजनैतिक चर्चा करते हुए मैंने पाया कि अधिकतर युवक व युवतियाँ विशेषतः टीवी पर पत्रकारिता के नाम पर होते हुए तमाशे से काफ़ी नाराज़ हैं । पूछने पर पता चला कि जहाँ राष्ट्रीय स्वयंसेवक संघ के अनुयायी NDTV और CNN-IBN से असंतुष्ट हैं क्योंकि उनके अनुसार ये चैनल नक़ली धर्म-निरपेक्षता के प्रसार वाहक हैं

Sauham: I Am He

T here are people who believe in God. Some believe in gods. Some believe in neither. Some say it is beyond human beings to be able to conclude ever whether God exists or not. This simple monotheist-polytheist-atheist-agnostic classification is as simple as Western philosophy (after the end of the era of Greek thinkers) generally tends to be. The differentiation becomes complicated in India whose philosophy says that to be an atheist is akin to not believing in oneself -- God or no God. Leave aside theology, in simple English, what do you mean when you say, "My spirit is high"? There is another school of thought that says whether God exists or not is a secondary question. There is no harm in trying to be one! Now, this should not be construed as super-ego. The philosophy simply means that when you consider yourself of yesterday, yourself of today and yourself of tomorrow, you see a tremendous process of evolution -- mental evolution especially. For one, you know and can do a

Google’s Googlies

People were happy when it became the most popular search engine. When it offered virtually unlimited space in email accounts, only the competitors cribbed. Then it scared Governments with GoogleEarth and mobile phone operators with Rs 4,000 web-surfable cellphones. Here are two of its latest ‘Googlies’ G oogle is coming up with Google Health, its latest service — this time of personal health records management. This is how the service will appear on your computer monitors. You first have to be a ‘user’; in web service’s parlance this means registering at the site with personal details — in this case, your medical history as your physician has diagnosed. On the right section of the screen, the user’s health profile will appear in a sidebar containing the medical conditions he has experienced, the medications he has used for treatment, allergies (if any) and procedures adopted for cure. On the left hand side will appear another sidebar with URLs to the subscriber's profile data, medi

A Shot In The Dark

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The US claims that destroying one of its defunct satellites with a missile was necessary for the hazard its toxic fuel posed to life on Earth. It's an understatement that the world isn't convinced; neither are American experts. Here is an exposition of a six-week (perhaps more) long drama K eep aside the game of American and international politics surrounding the recent shooting down of a defunct spy satellite by the US; the logistics and science involved in the exercise was simply fascinating. Once, not giving two hoots to international concern, the US Administration gave the order to demolish with a missile the 'dead' National Reconnaissance Office satellite, the Department of Defence needed to re-programme the weapons -- outfit three Navy cruisers, the USS Lake Erie, USS Decatur and USS Russell, with remodelled Aegis anti-missile defence systems and a total of three SM-3 missiles -- within a few weeks. The confusion: Too many cooks spoil the broth, they say. Much bef

Board Exam HOTS Up

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While our educationists’ endeavour to increase the content of reasoning in school curricula is welcome, an examination hall is the last place students would like to be taken by surprise. CBSE must wait for a year to let students develop Higher Order Thinking Skills before testing them A ll those who had been lamenting for decades that academic education in the country is all about devouring bookish matter and regurgitating it in the examination hall must welcome the new format for AISSE and AISSCE question papers, especially those of physics, chemistry and biology. But a basic doubt remains: Shouldn't such a scheme have been announced last year in April so that the students could practise analytical questions the whole year and, if announced now, shouldn't it be implemented not before the session 2008-09? It's good that 'reason' has finally prevailed, though only up to 20 per cent! Well, that's the weightage for questions of reasoning. What can be philosophicall

Polemic Articles

Are book fairs serving their purpose? W e are told that books are important, and they indeed are. However, what comes across from the sight of authors and poets -- some singers and actors too, if you consider the Kolkata Book Fair -- chatting in circles inside and outside the stalls, taking themselves for Socrates, is the fact that intellectuals are perhaps more important. Indians who have lived in the eastern parts of the country will recall that once upon a time parents used to exhort their children to read The Statesman to improve their English, if nothing else. Trying to please the parents thus was quite tasking for the li'l ones though. If allowed to celebrate the naïveté of this nincompoop a little, I'd recollect how painful it was those days to sit with both the newspaper and a voluminous dictionary, underline the most unusual of words -- curse the self-indulgent reporters/sub-editors who had a fascination for them -- in order to enhance one's vocabulary instead of

A Racket In Caesar's Name

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Illicit trafficking in human organs is shocking news. But there's a much older racket that is thriving - unnecessary Caesarean section for childbirth. I expose a nine-month long conspiracy to create a medical situation that leaves women with no choice N ot only to medical practitioners, but also to the huge population of lay people who must see a doctor for the treatment of apparently routine to dangerous diseases, the recent arrest of five kingpins, including a doctor, in a kidney trade racket should come as no surprise. This is not because many tend to presume that organ trade must be thriving "somewhere out there", but because when it comes to manipulation of patients, including those who are highly educated -- education serves no purpose when at the eleventh hour your doctor turns livid and says, "You may go to any other doctor if you don't trust me!" -- it has perhaps become fait accompli. Never mind if you are a PhD in cryogenic technology; anybody who

Headless Chickens

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Government is once again displaying its shocking lack of preparedness to prevent bird flu from entering the country and containing its spread among poultry thereafter. If people have not been infected so far, thank luck, not authority A s this article is being written, an Associated Press report filed at 5.30 pm, Saturday, January 19, informs that Government officials in West Bengal, despite accepting that the disease they are trying to fight and control is avian influenza, are "still waiting for test results to determine whether it is the H5N1 strain of the virus, which has been blamed for the deaths of 217 people worldwide since 2003". This shocking laggardness of the health department, which could -- let's pray it does not happen -- lead to the deadly virus crossing the species barrier to infect human beings, is unpardonable. "If some initial sign, initial indication a pandemic happens, we have to immediately pick up, detect this initial sign or signals and imple

Indian Railways: An Anachronism

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T he Indian Railways’ act of using signal detonators (crackers) about a quarter kilometre away from outermost signal points to warn train drivers of approaching stations and yard’s staff of incoming trains under foggy conditions is a ludicrous anachronism in this high-tech era. The news comes in the wake of a recent Press release by the Railways that talked of a laser technology to be developed jointly by IIT, Kanpur, the Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) and other industry partners on a “fog vision instrumentation” project, which will allow trains to run unhindered in foggy conditions. This is nothing impressive. The largest public sector employer has never suffered from a dearth of ideas. But converting science into practicable technology has always been a problem with it. Browsing the documents of the Commission of Railway Safety, one comes across a plethora of ideas for safety that were either not implemented at all, or were meant only for privileged trains like Raj

The Joy Of The Precocious

{ Excerpted from my autobiography } An immense hunger for knowledge that about a dozen of us had ensured that we kept ourselves abreast with the latest that was happening around the world not in the fields that comprise matters of general knowledge interest, but ones that the students learn reluctantly. We found mistakes in the suggested academic curricula. We suggested improvement in teaching techniques. In the third quarterly issue of the school magazine, Panorama HCS , for which I was entrusted the task of editing, I brought in features – like interviews and debates – that were hitherto inconceivable for school-goers. As teachers from Kerala were slowly replacing the European ones, we feared our perfect Surrey accent would go for a toss. When the brown mem-sahib s came to know of our consulting the ex-English teachers at their homes, a sense of inferiority got the better of them. The school library was a favourite spot for unwinding. Curiously, our relaxation too was fuelled by expl