Google and the Indic Web

Google says it is building the Indic web. Now they support transliteration in 5 languages — Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. I checked out their automatic English to Hindi translation. I typed “What is your name” and got back “kya aapkay naam” — not terribly impressive.

Go waste some time

Someecards are funny. I like the way they put a tiny label on top of the ads. The top banner ad says “Some advertising” and the side banner ad “Some more advertising.” And at the bottom of the page:

Someecards.com is possibly to probably the best site on the Web for free, funny ecards. We have greeting cards for every occasion – from important to utterly pointless. Send greetings for apology, birthday, baby, breakup, congratulations, encouragement, farewell, flirting, friendship, get well, sympathy, thanks, thinking of you, wedding, workplace, and holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We suggest you e-mail them to friends, family, coworkers, loved ones, liked ones, and anyone else with fingers.

Mr Ambani’s Home

How much would you spend on your home if your net worth was estimated by Forbes a few months ago to be around $43 billion? If you were Mukesh Ambani, you would spend a couple of billion dollars on a place you’d like to call home. Sounds reasonable to me. For most people, their home is the most valuable possession, often accounting for a very significant portion of their net wealth. Mukesh Ambani is spending a very small — almost insignificant — part of this wealth in building a home.

India’s Desperate Talent Search

Ramesh Menon’s article “India’s Talent Crunch” in DNA makes shocking reading but is news only if one has not been in touch with the reality of the desperate situation that employers face in India in their search for employable people.

A bit of Chicago

A few pictures from Chicago. I was there 30th April — May 3rd.

Mouse-over the picture to see the controls. Clicking on the second icon from the left at the bottom shows the picture captions. Note especially the Art Institute of Chicago building where Swami Vivekanand gave his famous talk in 1893. What looks like a huge drop of mercury is The Cloud Gate:

Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor’s first public outdoor work installed in the United States. The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above. A 12-foot-high arch provides a “gate” to the concave chamber beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected back from a variety of perspectives.

Solar or Nuclear: Which is the better option for India?

It is easy to argue that energy is the binding constraint that faces all of humanity, not just the developing economies. Of course, given the projected increase in demand and the decline in the supply of fossil fuel energy, the price of energy will continue to move up–with predictable adverse effects on the growth prospects of the emerging economies.