Travesty of our Criminal Justice System!

Ruchika Girhotra was 15 year old in 1990. I too was 15 year old in 1990 busy in my studies for class-X board exams. There was no cable TV and no Internet at that time. So I was not aware of the ghastly circumstances that she passed through in August 1990. I heard her name 19 years after that incident. Most of my fellow countrymen will be ignorant about her likewise till two days back.

Ruchika committed suicide in 1993. But she was again murdered by the criminal justice system of our country this week.

Ruchika, a 15 year old promising tennis player, was lured by a senior police official into his room and molested. This officer named SPS Rathore (an as..ole) was posted as a DIG and was also the president of Haryana Lawn Tennis Association. It was August 12th, 1990. Ruchika filed a written complaint on August 16th. But this as..ole Rathore harassed the family of Ruchika. Finally Ruchika committed suicide three years after that incident.

Our criminal justice system took 19 years to pronounce the verdict that Rathore was indeed guilty! But he was given a sentence of just 6 months in jail. I was completely aghast to see Rathore coming out of the court smiling and joined by his wife.

Now this case will take another 20 years in higher court. By that time, Rathore will be gone from this world.

Ruchika's friend Aradhana has fought a lonely battle against this powerful Rathore till now. But with the widespread media coverage about this news, entire country will stand behind Aradhana and the family of Ruchika.

The mighty and powerful people always manipulate the system and manage to get away scot-free. Unless our criminal justice system is reformed, common people like me will lose faith in the system.

Read more on this:

1. Statement from Ruchika's father
2. Ruchika's case
   

Parthajit's birthday and 10 years of our arrival in IITK

It was Partha's birthday yesterday. This day has one more special significance for us. Exactly 10 years back on this day, we arrived in IIT Kanpur for admission to M.Tech course. Partha and I travelled by North-East Express. We met Rajarshi there in the admission counter. We all got rooms in the top floor of D-block of Hall-IV. Next year Suman joined us in D-top.

We had a great party last night at Partha's residence. Rajarshi-Munmun, Suman-Sangeeta and Jyotirmoy-Gitika joined Partha-Aparajita. There were two little kids too - Rup and Krishu. While the ladies spoke about the real-estate market in Bangalore over coke, the guys went to their D-top days with the King of Good Times. Partha-Aparajita prepared very good foods. Overall we enjoyed a lot.

Budget for 2009-10

The Union budget for 2009-10 was presented to the Parliament by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. Personally, I'm happy with the followings:

1. Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) to be scrapped
2. Surcharge on Income Tax, currently @10%, to be abolished
3. Income tax exemption limit to be increased by Rs 10k from 1.5L to 1.6L. Here is the new I-T slab.
4. IT returns to be made simpler.
   

I had been expecting some benefits for home loan also, by way of increasing the current Rs 1.5L exemption in interest component of home loan. It didn't come though.

One bad news that came from the budget is that fiscal deficit will increase from 2.5% of GDP to about 6.8% of GDP. It's due to the Govt's stimulus to kickstart the economy which has slowed down from about 9% to 7%.

Another key point that I saw in the budget is the priority of government in rural development and poverty alleviation. They call it inclusive growth. Three things worth mentioning:

1. NREGA: allocation increased by 144% to Rs 39,000 crore. Govt is committed to providing Rs 100 a day for rural household.
   
2. Allocation for Bharat Nirman to be raised by 45%. There are six schemes under this. Fund for the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), one of the 6 schemes, has been increased by 59% to Rs 12,000 crores. Indira Awaas Yojna, another scheme, hiked by 63% to Rs 8883 crores.

The complete budget speech is available here: http://business.rediff.com/special/2009/jul/06/budget09-finance-ministers-budget-speech.htm

The various schemes for rural development are conceptually good. But I doubt how much benefit actually goes to the poor and needy. I don't know about other states; but in my native state Assam, I know for sure that there is rampant corruption in DRDA (District Rural Development Agency), the nodal agency for implementing these schemes. Already the ongoing session of the Assam Legislative Assemby has been discussing anomalies in NREGA in Assam. (I read about that in the Assam Tribune last week.)

A few other highlights of the budget are:

1. Funding to NHAI hiked by 23%
2. Rs 2113 crores for new IITs and IIMs.

Coming soon

Many of the TV channels show their own promo titled Coming Soon. I was watching HBO last night and saw its Coming soon in HBO where it showed its upcoming movies. I'm inspired by this and want to present or plan my future posts now :-) . So, coming soon in Beberibang:

1. Do we need God and religion?: I'm 99% atheist and 1% religious. Coming from a deeply religious family, why did I choose to be free from God and religion? Perhaps religion itself is not a bad idea; but I hate the middle-men in religion who spread hatred in the name of religion -thereby dividing the humanity.
   
2. Why do I blog?: What is the reason that I blog? What motivates me in writing these posts? Let me introspect.
   
3. Are you multi-core savvy: How many cores do you have in your PC or laptop? People have already started talking of a thousand core chips! How much are you ready to embrace this?
   
4. Aim in life: what do you want to be in life?: This used to be a very common question to me during my pre-school or early school life. What was my answer then? Then in high-school, this was a common topic for essay-writing. Did I become what I wanted to be? What is my aim in life now?
   
5. How did we buy an apartment in Bangalore?: We moved to Bangalore in September 2007. We wanted to buy an apartment immediately on relocating to Bangalore. Finally we bought an apartment in December 2008. How was our hunt for an apartment? What was our criteria for a dream home? How did we finally buy one?
   
6. The joy and challenges of new parents: We were blessed with a baby boy in December 24th, 2007. We named him Ekagra, with a pet-name as Krishu. Ekagra means focussed, concentration. The tremendous amount of joy that Krishu brought to our lives cannot be described in words. Along with joy, what challaneges did we face?
   
7. Deuta: Ode to my father: My tribute to deuta, the person who has influenced me most till now.
   
8. My relocation to Bangalore: I was a happy guy at Cadence till June 2007 and never thought of changing a job, forget about relocating to Bangalore. Then I happened to get in touch with Dr Rohit Kapur and finally landed up in Synopsys, Bangalore in September 2007.
   

I hope I can actually write on all of the above topics. I'll try my best. But I've a tighter work schedule next month.

Once upon a time when gay meant merry, joyous, cheerful, happy; but now..

I go back to my high-school days in a time machine. It was late 1980s and early 1990s. I read a story that has the following two sentences:
Once upon a time there was king. He was always gay...

Being gay at that time meant being cheerful, full of merriment. I use my time machine to come back to the current time. Today is June 29th, 2009. This morning the newspapers were full of news and photo-graphs of many gay people. It was a front-page news in all the news papers. Many gay people organized a parade (all the newspapers made a spelling mistake and they printed it as gay-pride. I think nowadays there is scarcity of good proof-readers in news-paper houses!) in Bangalore yesterday and it got full media attention. I was happy thinking that finally newspapers have started writing stories about some happy people in the front-page instead of the daily dosage of news full of murder, rape, bomb-blast etc. I was happier when I came to know that similar gay-parades took place in major cities across the world. I felt that at least some happy people wanted to display their happiness strongly and collectively to the enemies of the humanity - the terrorists, religious fundamentalists, racists, and many other evil elements that threaten humanity these days.

I turned my newspaper and saw the picture of a very beautiful girl (along with some other girls) with a placard in her hand with the message "repeal IPC 377". I thought that this girl must be from IT industry and writing system software code. She is probably appealing to IEEE or USENIX to do away with certain Inter Process Communication technique. My Linux-friendly-mind quickly translates 377 to --wxrwxrwx. But then I was flummoxed by the news that said that Veerappa Moily, Cabinet Minister in the Department of Law, Government of India, will soon take a decision on IPC 377. Then I read that certain Muslim cleric has opposed repealing IPC 377! I was completely at sea. I wondered when Veerappa Moily and the Muslim cleric started writing Unix Inter Process Communication code! Due to recession, our programming jobs (I call it thinking-typewriter's jobs) are in peril. Now we're threatened by our in-house politicians and clerics too! I was calculating how much agricultural land my dad has in his village. I see no future but to go back to farming if everyone starts writing software programs in India. I was lost in my thought when G's banter about my absent-mindedness woke me up. I told her: it's time for us to pack up and go back to our native village and start farming. She asked me what did I drink last night that the hangover was still not over. I told her that I was frightened of the job prospects since everyone around now was talking about IPC. I showed her the news items, including statements of Moily and the cleric. She said they were talking about Indian Panel Code and chided me for being a nerd all the time!

I then went back to my all-weather, trust-worthy buddy named Google and ask him what was the section 377 of Indian Panel Code. Google told me Indian Panel Code 377 considers gay activity as a criminal case. Come on, why on earth the IPC section impinges upon someone's right to be joyous and cheerful! I smelt something wrong. I then approached another buddy Dictionary.reference.com and asked what was the meaning of the word gay. Amongst several meanings, one is described in uppercase letters and underlined: HOMO.....L!

It seems the world has changed a lot since my high-school days. Dictionaries still say that gay means merry, joyous, cheerful, happy etc. But then there is a more powerful meaning to this word. The later meaning has come to be associated with the word gay predominantly now.

I do have a liberal mind. But I still cannot accept the new meaning of the word gay. I consider it to be unnatural, against the law of the Nature. But at the same time, I don't deem it as a criminal offence too. Section 377 of IPC is too draconian.

I read the same story of my high-school days about the king who was gay. But hey, my impression of the same king is different now. I soliloquy - the king too was gay!

EDA-I: what is EDA?

I work in the EDA industry. It's a very small and niche sector. The total EDA revenue is about US$ 4 billion. There are four major players here: Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and Magma. Besides these, there are many small companies specializing in some nicher area of EDA. Examples of some these smaller companies are: Atrenta (focussing on early design closure), SequenceDesign (focussing on low power and Parasitic Extraction), Calypto, Denali, NuSym, Synfora etc. Here is one long list of EDA companies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EDA_companies

Many of my friends work in the IT industry. But most of them are ignorant of EDA. Almost every one of them has different notion on what I do. Some of them think that I'm into DSP. Some other guy thinks that I work in the hardware design. Someone thinks that I work in the embedded software domain. Then I've another friend who thinks that I'm into firmware development.

I have another category of friends who are aware of EDA; but they just don't know what we do in EDA. They think I write Verilog or VHDL code. They ask me: what is the input to my tool and what is its output.

Then someone came to know that I work in VLSI Test in EDA. Since Testing in the software industry is called QA (Quality Assurance), some of my friends believe that I do some kind of QA work!

I plan to write a series of articles here on what we do in EDA industry. I'll write it in a very simple language.

First of all, EDA stands for Electronic Design Automation. We're VLSI CAD guys. Many people know about AutoCAD : the CAD tool for mechanical design. EDA plays a similar role for semiconductor design & manufacturing.

If you're a civil engineer designing and constructing bridges, you don't start building the bridge right away when you get the assignment. You first design it in a software, simulate it, analyze various engineering aspects of it. You deal with a model of the bridge during the design phase. A model might be a software model, a mathematical model (truss etc), or just a design that you drew with a pencil. Once you finalize the design, then the construction of the bridge starts. Same is the case with a mechanical engineer working in an automobile industry. When a new car is to be launched, the automobile company just doesn't start manufacturing the car. The design engineer will first model the car in a software and take it through all the phases of the design.

EDA plays the similar role for electronic design. EDA industry creates CAD tools for electronic design engineers (both chip and board). They take a chip from design to manufacturing using various EDA tools.

There are two large forums for EDA folks:

1. CEDA (IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation)
2. SIGDA (ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation)
   

I think the biggest conference (and broadest - covering all aspects of EDA) in EDA industry is DAC (Design Automation Conference). DAC might possibly be the oldest conference also in EDA industry. Its 46th conference will be held in July 2009. (DAC is 46 year old whereas EDA as an industry is probably in its twenties now!)

Is there any person who can be called as father of EDA? IMHO, Prof Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli of EECS department of Berkley definitely fits into that role. He was a co-founder of Synopsys and Cadence, the two leading companies in the area of EDA. He was a Director of ViewLogic and Chair of the Technical Advisory Board of Synopsys. He is the Chief Technology Advisor of Cadence Design System. His paper Tides of EDA explains the evolution of the EDA industry.

There is a power-point presentation on EDA titled EDA-story-so-far that also explains the EDA industry nicely.

In my next post, I'll describe how we can categorize different EDA tools (Implementation, Verification, Frontend, Backend, ASIC/FPGA/SoC, PCB/SiP, IP, Design Services etc. Strictly speaking, IPs are not tools, but small designs. More about that in my next post.)

Falsehood sucks!

I hate liers. I don't challenge someone's right to lie. You're free to lie. But it hurts when you assume that the person to whom you're lying is a stupid person. When you start lying to me and consider me to be fool, then you suck! I feel pity with such lier.

A lie breaches many things: integrity, trust, friendship -which take a longer time to build. In the shorter time, you may consider yourself as smart because you could hoodwink someone with a lie. But in longer time, a lie is more expensive thing than the truth. You have to follow-up the first lie with many other lies and then you lose your integrity, trust and friendship. So do consider the longer scenario before you lie next time.

I rarely lie. I find it very difficult to lie. In order to substantiate one false statement or conceal some fact, I then have to say many other untrue things. I find that to be the most difficult consequence of a lie. Rather than saying one lie and concocting many other follow-up lies, I'll prefer to say the truth in the beginning.

National Anthem in movie theater

Two days back I went to watch a movie in a theater with some of my colleagues. It was after quite a long time (about two years) that I went to a movie theater and first time after coming to Bangalore in September 2007. Once both G and I used to watch movies on every weekend in PVR Spice in Noida. But then we were without kids. Once Krishu was born, we have stopped going to theaters to watch movies.

Ok, that is the background. Now let me come to the main point of this post. Just before the start of the movie, a message on the screen said that the national anthem would be played and requested us to stand. It was something new for me to see the national anthem being played in movie theater. So I was a bit surprised initially. But then I remembered some news about it.

The natioanal anthem then started and all of us stood. It was the most melodious Jana Gana Mana I've ever heard till now. Many of the most renowned musicians and singers were there - Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, A. R. Rahman, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Pandit Jasraj, Kavitha Krishnamurthy, Dr Bhupen Hazarika, Jagjit Singh etc. I was completely spell-bound by this beautiful rendition of our national anthem.

After coming home, I did some google search on the video. I found this in YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh26zOjIh9I

The video itself is old. It was released in 2000 to mark the 50th year of the Indian Republic. It was a Bharat Bala production and music was arranged by A.R. Rahman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jana_Gana_Mana_Video

The video has got two parts: first part is instrumental and the second part is vocal. What I saw at the theater was the second part.

MS Office 2007 MIME types

I was looking for the MIME types for MS Office2007 file extensions. After some Google search, I found the followings:

• .docx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
• .pptx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation
• .xlsx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet

Trip to Doddamakali

This weekend we went to Doddamakali with some friends. We stayed in the Doddamakali nature camp owned by Jungles Lodges & Resorts (JLR) . We had great fun there. We stayed there closest to the nature, on the banks of the Cauvery river surrounded by hills.

We started at 6:30AM from our home at Hoodi Circle near ITPL on Sunday morning. Soon we reached Mysore road. Since it was Sunday morning, the road was not crowded. At 8AM we reached Kamath Loka Ruchi which was the meeting point with our friends. Kamath Loka Ruchi was 70km from our home. Some of our friends had already reached there. We had a good (and heavy) breakfast at Kamath. It was buffet breakfast that costs Rs 70/- per person. You need to buy the coupon first. It was not very crowded when we reached. But by the time we finished breakfast, that place started getting crowded. There was a growing queue to buy the coupon for breakfast.

After breakfast, we started for Maddur town towards Mysore. This was my first drive in Mysore road after a long time. Last time I went in Mysore road was six years back. The Mysore road is quite good now. There are different eating point all along the way. Cafe-Coffe-Day (CCD) set-up many shops all throughout the road. I saw one Barista and McDonald also. One thing I didn't like about the road (compared to the expressway to Chennai) is that the road passes through many small towns and villages on the way. So you can't really drive that fast compared to the way you'll be driving along the road towards Chennai. I have a Santro and the maximum speed that I could drive was 100kmph; but that was only for a small stretch of the road. Most of the time I was driving at 80kmph.

In about 30km from Kamath Loka Ruchi, we reached the diversion from Mysore road that would take us towards Malavalli. (It was exactly 100km from our home). The road from Maddur to Malavalli was not that good compared to Mysore road. There were yellow coloured sign-boards along the way that told us the distance to Doddamakali and some other tourist destinations in that route. We crossed a village named New York on that road! We then found a big lake full of lotuses on our right. Soon we reached Malavalli. We continued straight and saw the junction where Kanakpura road meets this road. In 31km from Maddur in Mysore road, we reached Pantharhalli. Here is a board indicating left to Doddamakali and a huge gate displaying ‘Welcome to Shimsa Hydro Electric Project’. This was a small tarred road. We kept going on that road straight for 10 km when we reached a forest check-post. There we had to enter details about our car, number of people traveling, our names and phone numbers. From that check-post, we took right turn. This road was through the jungles. It was a narrow road. We drove for about 7km and then reached the Jungle Resort camp. The last one km was a downhill road with several hair-pin bends. I drove my Santro comfortably. G was enjoying all the scenery outside. But one of our friends got scared in the last one km. He stopped his car on the road and walked with his family till the camp. Then somebody from the camp brought his car till the camp. There were seven cars in our group: 3 Santo (including mine), one Alto, one Opel Corsa and one Pajero.

Before starting the journey, we heard from several online reviews that there was no electricity at the camp. We have an electric rice cooker that we carry whenever we go out so that we can cook some food for our our one and half year old son Krishu. But then some of our friends who went to Doddamakali earlier told us that there is electricity. On reaching the place at around 11:30AM, I came to know that there is a generator for electricity; but they will start that at around 2:30PM. So the rice cooker was useless. We carried a little quantity of rice, dal (lentils), some vegetables and ghee. We also carried corn-flakes, Cerelac, Nestum, Lactogen, some fruits etc for Krishu. I asked the JLR staffs there if they could prepare some plain dal with some potatoes without any chilly. They instantly agreed to do so. That helped us a lot as we didn't have to use our rice cooker.

The camp site was very beautiful. The air was very fresh. The Cauvery was flowing through the hills. After having a cup of tea, I went to the river-side with Krishu. This is the first time he saw a river. He loves water. He plays a lot in the bath-room in his bath-tub. Whenever we open any tape in our bath-rooms, he just runs to play the water. Now he was amazed to see a river full of water. He kept saying something to me while pointing his small fingers to the river. Soon we were there at the river. Krishu played a lot.

At about 1PM, it was time for lunch. There were many south-Indian style vegetables, sambar, rasam, roti, and chicken. I like sambar and rasam; but I don't like the sabjis (cooked with coconut). But the chicken was very good. I had rotis with chicken and then rice with rasam. Then we went for a siesta. The tents were very good. There were total 10 tents. All of these were booked for our team. Tent number 10 was given to my family. It was a very neat one, with three cots, attached toilets. There was fan and lantern-style light inside it. We slept for sometime. Some of us played volleyballs. Then we had tea and it was time for some coracle ride. G and I didn't go for the coracle ride. We went for a walk and then sat at the river bank.

It was slowly getting dark. Then one JLR staff came and told us that it's time for snacks. There was a barbeque. We had grilled chicken, peanuts, pakoras and some drinks. There was a good truth-and-dare game there. It was great fun. But I can't write much about that here - censored staffs :-) . After a really long time in life, I was laughing loudly. But I couldn't participate in the game for long as it was time for Krishu's dinner. So I excused myself. It is always a tough task to feed Krishu. I must admit the enormous patience of G. He eats very less. G keeps feeding him in frequent intervals.

Next morning Krishu woke up early at around 6AM (and he does that every day!). I wanted to sleep more (and I do that every day). But Krishu won't let us sleep anymore. We finally got up at 6:30AM. Some of our friends were getting ready for a guided-trek. I wanted to go with them; but it was difficult to leave Krishu before his breakfast. (He loves fruits and water. He resists all other foods). I had a cup of tea. The JLR breakfast starts at 9AM. It was 7AM and I was already hungry. We carried some breads. So I had tea with breads. Then Krishu and I went to the river bank. He started playing with the sand. He played a lot for about half-an-hour. Then G came to the river bank with Krishu's breakfast. After his breakfast, three of us went for a walk. We took the winding road through which we came to the camp. We went for about half-a-kilometer up. The Cauvery looked so beautiful. We took some pics. We came back to the camp at 9AM for breakfast. It was a good breakfast, with idli, vada, sambar, poha, chutney, bread, butter, omelet and tea/coffee.

After our breakfast, we went to the river. Many of us started swimming. G knows swimming. Her native village is on a river bank and learned swimming in her childhood days. She was initially reluctant to swim. But I told her to swim. I brought life-jackets for G, Krishu and me. Soon she was in full swing in water. I too wore the life-jacket and tried to float in the water. But I was very scared. Krishu enjoyed a lot. Unlike me, he was not scared. He was in water which was deep enough till his stomach. After all the fun, we came back to our tents and had bath. Krishu went to sleep. At 1:30PM, it was time for lunch. There was grilled fish and mutton and many other items.

The JLR staffs told us that their drivers would drive the difficult portion of the road for the first 1 km. I wanted to drive my car. But when I saw everyone giving their car keys to the JLR drivers, I also decided to give them my car key. Before that, I put our luggage in the car. Then we woke up Krishu and fed him his lunch. The JLR staffs took us in their jeep to our cars. At about 3:30PM, we started our journey for Bangalore. On our way back, we stopped at New York and took a photo in front of the pillar that claims the name of the place as New York.

I didn't stop on our return journey. That was the only negative side of our whole trip. By the time we reached home at 8PM, Krishu was hungry and tired. I thought that we'd reach home early if we don't stop. But there was lot of traffic jams on Monday evening as we entered the city. It took us almost two hours to reach our home from the outskirts.

We enjoyed our stay very much at the JLR resort. I was specially very thankful for them for cooking the special food for our baby. They were very courteous too. I'd definitely love to come back to the Doddamakali camp once again.

Purpose of life

This morning one of my good friends S asked me how is life. Usually I answer this question with a smile saying that life is good. I was in a pensive mood today. I didn't immediately answer that life is good. Instead, I wanted to introspect: what is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of life? Why am I here - money, fame, recognition, love, education, work, spiritualism or what else?

According to my friend P, purpose of life is simple: Survive-Reproduce-Be Happy. He believes that Survive and Reproduce are in our gene and it is more to do with the animal part of us. He thinks that there is only one way to be happy.. and it is "be happy".

But can you be mechanically happy this way?

Sometime life seems to be meaningless! Sometime everything around you just seems to be an illusion.

Boroline: Old is gold

Boroline is an antiseptic cream that I've seen since my childhood days. I thought that Boroline is used only when we have some small cuts or wounds. I've almost forgotten about it until I rediscovered it recently.

I often suffer from cracked lips. Sometime I have cracked heel also if I don't wear shoes continuously for many days. I used to apply different creams for these. These include: vaseline lip guard, Nivea lip guard, Lotus lip balms etc. For cracked heels, I used to apply some Crack, Dr Scholl etc. But I didn't recover from the cracked lips or heels.

Then someone (my wife or my mom) told me about Boroline. I tried it and I was so impressed with it. Boroline was magical. The crack in my lip or heel were gone after applying Boroline.

Then we found its usefulness as a rash-free cream also for our one year old baby boy. A few days back, we found that the diapers caused some rashes in his legs. There is a special cream named Rash-Free cream for this purpose. We applied that. But his rashes were not completely gone. The skin also turned rough as a result of the rashes. Then my wife applied Boroline and
the rashes vanished in a few hours!

I was curious about Boroline and so googled on it. I found some interesting facts about Boroline:

• It's a very old product. It was launched in 1929.
• It has a website too. It claims that Boroline works wonders to smothen cracked lips, cure cracked heels, soften elbows etc.

Now I'm a big fan of Boroline.

Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research

I came to know about IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) today. I was not aware of this before.

The govt of India has set up 5 IISERs in Bhopal, Kolkata, Mohali, Pune and Thiruvananthapuram last year. They offer 5 year integrated MS program in basic science. The way IITs were established for technical education, I think IISER have been established for science.
http://www.iiser-admissions.in/

I think it's a very good step by govt.

Read this article: http://casi.ssc.upenn.edu/iit/Bhattacharya

The lazy guy that I'm

I'm so good at procrastination. In last six months, I felt many times that I should continue jotting down my beberibang thoughts in my blog. But every time I just procrastinated. Many things happened in my life and around my surroundings during the last six months since my previous post:

1. I added one more year in my life on August 20th. :-(
2. My good, old friend Parthajit's relocation to Bangalore and his joining Synopsys's ATPG R&D team as my colleague in September. (When I use the phrase my old-friend-Parthajit, he reminds me that he is not old; it's just that our friendship is old. I always admire Partha's sense of humour.)
3. My two week's vacation in Assam in September-October 2008. There are many things that I wanted to write about this trip - Jaanmoni's wedding, our search for Moina's bride,
   
4. My brother Moina also got engaged during my trip to Assam.
5. Then my trip to US in October-November. There are many good topics related to this trip. ITC 2008, US Presidential elections, the economic recession, Diwali parties etc. ITC was a very good experience for me. There I met many of the renowned people of our industry. Also, I attended some of the very interesting sessions (Test Compression, Test Power etc).
6. Our patent on Test Compression was filed in US patent office.
7. The 26/11 terrorists attack in Mumbai.
8. Our baby boy Ekagra turned one year on December 24th.
9. Then we purchased a flat on December 30th. That was just the beginning of so many other works (bank loans, agreements, study of many other related things)

Yes, on each of the above-mentioned occaisons, I had many thoughts in my mind and I wanted to write those in my Beberibang. But then I was just lazy. It's very easy to say that I didn't get the time to write. But in reality, I was just lazy. Now I've all these topics in the pipeline.