Sudipta's Life

Disclaimer:  I don't work for Yahoo, nor should the following be taken up as a commentary about my company's work-from-home policies. These are just my opinion about working remotely in general. TL;DR : If you want to stop work-from-home policies, let there be absolutely no work done after 5 pm. No late night email exchanges, no after-hours conference calls, etc. The latest brouhaha over Yahoo's no-work-from-home policy has its fair share of support as well as opponents. Working mothers are up in arms against this policy, and so are some parents who don't want to miss their kids' school plays or just stay at home one day to attend to their sick child. But as some people admit, the policy is abused more often that not. You can get your afternoon siesta, run errands, and literally run a side job/startup while putting in minimal effort for the stuff that you actually get paid for. I would personally prefer a little more flexible policy. This makes sense: No ...

I keep getting ideas from time to time. These little moments of inspiration usually occur out of nowhere. Sometimes, the idea that pops into the head is related to something I am working on, such as: "Oh perhaps if this screwdriver had a magnetic tip, it would be easier to use". Most of the times, though, these are just random ideas which pop up during absolutely irrelevant times. For example, when working on one software project, I am reminded of the exact configuration on some totally unrelated machine that would solve someone else's problem. The point being: they come aplenty, and they are not necessarily related to the task at hand. Now, such ideas are of two kinds. One kind are improvement ideas, or "feature enhancements" in software engineering lingo. The others are quick fixes to problems that I might have been pondering about for a while. The third set of ideas (which, although I began the paragraph with "two kinds" still makes sense), is th...

The theme of the post is from a Hindi poem a friend of mine discussed with me in my undergraduate college. I don't remember the poem or its author, and would be grateful if any of you can actually send me a link to them. For those of you who do not know the story, let me play Aesop for a while. Panna Dhai was the nurse of Udai Singh, lawful heir to the throne of the royal Mewar dynasty in Rajasthan. She had practically played mother of the baby, breast-feeding him from birth and taking care of him along with her own son (Chandan) who was almost of the same age. The political scenario of the Mewar throne, however, was very uncertain at this time. A distant cousin of the ruling dynasty, Banbir, was the operational regent for the throne and had the teenage crown prince Vikramaditya under house arrest because of his juvenile ways while at the seat of power. Banbir thought that he could usurp the throne amidst all this turmoil and therefore, one night murdered Vikramaditya, the 14-year-...

You will not understand this book unless you've lived away from home sometime. You will never catch the little nuances of the story or the vast hollows in the hearts of the characters if you haven't lived alone, faced the world in all its wilderness all by yourself. You must have felt the need to find your roots, reminisce about your near and dear ones, missed them for the simple comfort and warmth of their welcoming smiles to be able to feel the theme of this book, The Namesake. The story traces the life of a child born to Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, who migrated to the USA when Ashoke came there to pursue his doctoral degree and post-doctoral faculty work. Through a quirk of fate, the name Gogol which they had originally thought of as a pet name for their son sticks with him for life. We see the life of this immigrant family through the eyes of their son as he grows up. Somehow the confusion of his name points to a more fundamental identity crisis in his generation. He never u...

I did my secondary schooling in a Ramakrishna Mission school. Those four years of my life drilled a lot of good things into my character --- I'd say a large part of my present personality: whatever good is in there, is due to them. However, there is also a lot of crap and bullshit that got into me during that time. Part of the responsibility lies with the management and they way they interpreted and enforced the sayings of the wise; but far more significantly I have been responsible myself for learning and clenching on to some bullshit --- perhaps it was easier to just do what everyone said was good without evaluating it. I remember my parents trying to make me see sense: but I was too haughty to understand what they meant. Besides, my biases, prejudices, and insecurities made me build a firm and orthodox wall around myself; a wall of denial of the world and that good and bad co-existed everywhere. I buried my head behind the self-learnt pedagogies and pretended that nothing else e...

I have always been confused about how the system of the age of a person works with respect to his or her birthday. So lets say if you were born on 1st March 1980; what would you say your age is right now: 26 or 27? After several bouts of finding myself suddenly ineligible for Air Force exams or NDA admissions, or at times suddenly discovering that after romantic incidents I could be disqualified for being overage by just six months, I decided to settle for the higher of the two values whenever I had to tell my age to somebody. Advantage of being a guy: you don't need to fudge figures to prove that you still are in the 'desirable' age range ;) So I had always stuck to this convention of using the ceiling value whenever someone asked. Yet it also entailed a feeling of the biological clock ticking more rapidly than I would like it to -- one fine morning when I was going over something I suddenly realised that by my convention I am 26 already!! So when surveys came out that a...