Viswanathan K's Thoughts

This blog is based on two interesting titbits from Harish Mehta’s The Maverick Effect . ~~   A surprising cameo in the NASSCOM story is the actor, Shammi Kapoor. Even though he was in his 70’s, he was connecting to the Internet (long before the Internet took off in India) to access world news. “He was an Internet enthusiast with an incredibly curious mind. He took to new technologies like a fish to water.” NASSCOM tried to enlist him to pitch the benefits of the Internet in India to bureaucrats and policy makers in government. He agreed to do it. For free. His celebrity status was a big attraction. He spoke passionately of the world it could open up, how he connected to his kids abroad via the Internet. “His personality and presentation skills helped us communicate the potential of the Internet to even bureaucrats.” ~~   In the 80’s and 90’s, there was the huge problem of terribly slow data links from the West to India. Even the laughably slow 64 kbps link co...

NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) is a trade association. It started by serving the needs of the still-in-infancy software companies, but has expanded to include BPO’s, R&D centers, and startups. “(NASSCOM is) India Inc brand builder, a think tank, a lobbyist group, an interventionist or more.”   This may sound like a reviled lobbying and backroom dealing entity, but as Harish Mehta writes in The Maverick Effect , back in 1988 (when NASSCOM was founded), it was a necessity. “NASSCOM was incubated at a time when it was an uphill battle to even get software recognized as a tangible product or a service, and something different from computer hardware.” Hard to even imagine such a confusion today…   Back then, the Indian body representing software companies was really a body for computer hardware companies, MAIT. MAIT treated software as the poor cousin. Mehta and a few others wondered if the only way was to form a dedicated body to...

Flashback to the 70’s. IBM didn’t dominate the mainframe market yet. A company called Burroughs was also a contender. Burroughs had a joint venture with the Tatas to sell and maintain Burroughs in India. It gave the fledgling TCS a toehold to the world of computers and international projects, writes Shashank Shah in The Tata Group . Until the partnership ended in 1978.   Suddenly TCS, a company of engineers only, had to find customers and clients. Faqir Kohli was pulled in from Tata Power. Though reluctant to move to what seemed like a career dead end company, he was persuaded by JRD Tata.   Kohli persuaded Burroughs to sign the first outsourcing contract in Indian IT history. At a time when TCS didn’t even have a single Burroughs machine! Importing one was impossible in those days. So TCS acquired an ICL computer from LIC (whose trade unions wouldn’t allow LIC to use it since they feared computers would wipe out jobs): “TCS built an ingenious filter to transfer the ...

I overheard this fresh-out-of-college girl at office telling her friend that her everyone in her team was “so old”. Of how nobody seemed to kid around, of how nobody ever “pranked” each other. Of how she could talk to these people, but couldn’t relate to them at all. That made me think of the time when I started working. Back then, almost everyone in IT was in the 0-3 years experience band. The only vehicle people had was a bike. For celebrations, everyone wanted to go out for dinner, not lunch (it could be a longer affair that way, and you could have drinks too). People looked forward to foreign trips: the longer, the better. Most of us came to office on weekends not necessarily to work but what else was there to do? Besides, in the pre-cell phone era, the office was the only place one could get together and then make plans for the evening/night. Even managers used to be unmarried back then: that was how young a team was. And now? The IT industry has undergone a population inversio...

Means v/s Ends. When people say the means are more important than the ends, they are (usually) talking about ethics and morality. But when it comes to problem solving in the real world, shouldn’t the emphasis be on finding a solution? On finding ‘x’? Shouldn’t how one figures out the solution be irrelevant? Taken to an extreme, rules and processes often blind us to what is the intended purpose of the whole exercise. Just look at a bureaucracy to see what I mean. Unfortunately, our education system focuses on the “how”, not the “what”. That is almost always a bad thing, except maybe in one case. Computers blindly execute instructions without having a clue as to what was intended. Maybe our wavelengths match with computers when it comes to following instructions without a care about the ultimate intention, and perhaps that’s why we Indians are so good at IT?!