The Mad Hatter's Take

Silence of the Flutes

2011-12-12T13:44:00.000+05:30

The village used to be called Phoolpur, once upon a very long time. Or so the old colonial records in the District Collector's office said. It was 'discovered', in a manner of speaking, by a Civil Servant of the Raj trekking in the foothills. When he returned to District Headquarters after spending a few days in Phoolpur, he had with him the most exquisite bamboo flute that he'd ever come across. "The Stradivarius of Flutes", he had written in his diary, perhaps unconscious of his exaggeration being counter to the stereotype of the Englishman prone to understatement. Most of India, with no tendency to understatement in the least, agreed with him, and the village was renamed Flute-pur. It's flutes were now the most coveted instruments in all of India, and something that music aficionados had to possess.

It must come as no surprise to us then, that when an urgent message, delivered by hand, came to the office of the District Collector, the gentleman who held that title promptly ordered his brightest young deputy to travel to Flute-pur to investigate. That village was the district's prize possession and only claim to fame even in the 21st century. And the young man, an IAS man on his first posting, jumped at the opportunity to do something out of the rather humdrum routine at work.

By the time he got off the jeep a couple of days later and felt the soil of Flute-pur under his feet, he had mastered all information about the village in the possession of the proud Indian bureaucracy. And that was a lot of information, even for those accustomed to maintaining monthly records of the weights of all buffaloes in the district that were being paid for by the government under various schemes.

Flutepur was a rather unremarkable village, and made few demands of the district administration. The majority of its rather small population were in the flute trade, so to speak. A small patch of bamboo outside the village was cultivated with effort and at non-trivial cost to generate raw material for their flutes. Hushed whispers were heard about techniques of cultivation learned from travellers from distant parts in times long lost to history. Tens of flutes were made each year, and tested by a small group of musicians in the village, and one flute was picked each year - the best of Flutepur. Selling that flute usually raised enough for everyone connected with the trade to live comfortably for a year.

The problem, as "Sahib" was informed by the headman, was that there would be no Flutepur flute that year. And that meant the village was in dire straits. What caused this unusual turn of events, not heard of in centuries? Could it be that global warming had finally claimed a victim in the remote districts?

"Sahib", who had grown resigned to that title by then and had actually begun to like it more than his college nickname, sat down with the village elders, and had them tell him as much of the process of flute-manufacture as they could. From the process of replanting the bamboo patch once in a decade, to the process of harvesting, cutting, shaping, finishing, and testing, he had more information about the craft of flute-making than he expected would be shared with him. And what had happened this year that was out of the ordinary? Did the village musicians reject all of the flutes made that year as being of less-than-perfect sound instead of picking one?

"No Sahib, we did not need to even take it to the musicians. The craftsmen rejected this years lot themselves. None of the flutes this year made any sound".

"No sound at all? Nothing at all?"

"No, nothing at all. See for yourself".

And he was handed a flute, which he blew into, and heard total silence. Total. Silence.

And then began the detailed investigation, and interviews of everyone involved in the process. From the craftsmen polishing the final pieces, to the ones involved in cutting, drilling holes and the like, to the harvesters, the sowers and the supervisors who managed the entire process, keepers of knowledge passed on through generations. What they were all united in was the assertion that the sacred flute making process had been followed in the greatest detail, and not even a minor deviation from the art of the ancients had happened.

"You see, Sahib, it isn't merely craft to us. It's as close to religion as we can get outside of our normal worship. And we wouldn't make a change, even a minor one"

Dusk came with no solution, and "Sahib" began to wonder if he had encountered something beyond what his IAS training had prepared him for. The life of an officer in the districts was tough, he'd been warned, and could throw up challenges more intricate than could be anticipated.

After a simple, but hearty dinner with the headman, he settled into casual conversation on other aspects of the village, mostly to project an air of casual confidence. The village hadn't really heard of, or cared about, any of the myriad government programmes being successfully run throughout the state. No, they didn't particularly care for loans for buffaloes. They didn't want a school, since they taught themselves the art of flute-making, basic literacy and numeracy, and didn't need much else. They grew their own simple food, and didn't have much need for modern seeds, or fertilizer, thank you very much. Traditional cattle served their needs, and they did not want government aid to replace them with higher yielding varieties. The only one program they had contact with was the one where a contractor paid them to plant bamboo the previous year. They replanted bamboo every ten years in any case, and liked being paid for it this time. Of course, they didn't change anything in the process, but if they were being paid for doing something that they'd do anyway ...

"Sahib" made them say that again to ensure that he'd heard right. There was no government program to pay for planting bamboo, he would've known if there were. A contractor had apparently turned up in the village, asking the headman for signatures of those involved in planting bamboo, and handed them a small amount of money in return - and pocketed the majority of what he got from the government, most likely.

A quick mobile phone call to headquarters gave him the information he needed. Someone had managed to get the Flutepur bamboo planting exercise approved under the Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, and had turned in the required documentation stating that money had been paid and pocketed a good amount. It being Flutepur, the headman's signature had been checked by the clerks at Headquarters and judged genuine. Which it was.

And that, "Sahib" told them the next morning, solved the mystery of the flutes. They were mystified, and repeated - "nothing changed, Sahib, it's the same bamboo we planted, with the same method".

Ah, he said, but haven't you heard?

"NREGA baans, to na bajegi baansuri!"

Daddy! Can I have some seed money for my investment fund?

2011-10-28T13:32:00.001+05:30

Daddy! Can I have some seed money for my investment fund?

Gulp. I cast my mind back to when I was his age, a desperate attempt to recollect anything of similar audacity that I'd pulled. Nothing. This one keeps beating me hollow.

"Do you know what seed money is? Or an Investment Fund?"

Seed money is money you use to start a company.

"Good, and an Investment Fund?"

I dunno. I guess I'll use the money to buy stuff I like.

"Ah. That's kinda what they do, but it's slightly more complicated than that. See, an Investment Fund takes money from various people, and buys portions of companies, called shares, on their behalf."

With other people's money?

Was that surprise in his face, or glee? Perhaps it's the innocent mixture of both that works only for the young.

"Yes, and the Fund charges people for investing their money. Is that what you want to do?"

Hmmm. That sounds easier than a real job ...

And off he went. Was that the moment my wannabe-game-programmer turned into a wannabe-Wall-Street-type? One hopes not. One fervently hopes not.

I must buy him that book on programming that he's been asking for.

Rashtriya Hindi Diwas Ki Shubhkamnayen

2011-09-15T15:46:00.003+05:30

September 14th is National Hindi Day, the day we celebrate the language that is one of the two official languages of the Union Government, and one of the several official languages of the Union, but not *the* official national language.

Junior Hatter would like to add the following

If I find the person who invented Hindi, I will thrash him, cut him to pieces, and pulverize his remains.

Needless to say, the kind of Hindi "teaching" that our schools offer results in this kind of undiluted love for the language among non-native-speaker children and makes it safe to bet that Hindi isn't going to become a de-facto national language any time soon.

Aap sabhi ko mere taraf se hindi divas ki hardik shubhkamnayen.

A Thought Experiment In History

2011-09-04T19:39:00.000+05:30

All this trade and capitalism is bad.

Ignoring the loudly ringing alarm bells in my head, I decided to take issue with the remark.

"Why do you say that?"

It's that East India Company that colonized us.

Indeed.

And it's trade that helped them do that.

and?

All this talk about globalization is just pretext for more trade, and hence more colonization. Globalization is just East India Company 2.0

Actually, you have a point, but not the point you think you have.

What?

We didn't get colonized because of trade. We got colonized because we didn't have a Indian West Europe Company driving our trade instead of a British East India Company.

Really?

Indeed. Suppose we had woken up to the potential of trade with Europe, and formed our own trading companies to compete with the East India Companies, we'd have fared better. With trade being competitive, profits would've accrued to the producer and consumer, rather than the monopolist trader. That'd have meant the British East India Company wouldn't have managed to accumulate the capital that enabled them to become a military powerhouse.

Trading wasn't our mistake. Not grabbing a share of the trading channel when it became big was. Distrusting the process, and leaving it to the Europeans was. Not rising above feudal disputes to create trading alliances within the country was, and so on ...

Hmmm ...

And, by extension, that means what we need to do today is to not deny globalization, but ensure we don't end up a passive factor in it again.

So you're saying we should embrace and participate in the process.

Yes, we need to own a fair share of the trade channels.

Since trade is as much in services, we need our own services companies to compete with multinationals, and to hold their own. We need our own brands to market and sell Chinese manufactured goods under their own brand names. We need our own oil and natural resources companies to invest in fields outside the country to extract and bring home the coal and oil we need. You get the drift ...

Yes, but I'm not sure I'm convinced. I need to think more about this....

Sure. Come back when you've thought more about this. That'll also give me some peace and quiet in the meantime.

(Of course, I didn't say that last sentence. But I did think it.)

What's the Middlegame for Anna Hazare & Co.?

2011-08-17T20:54:00.005+05:30

Watching the Anna Hazare story unfold, the Mad Hatter is reminded of an old chess dictum - "sometimes the point of an opening is unclear till the middlegame commences".

Mad though he is, he doesn't believe that it's all really about the Jan Lokpal. Neither does Firstpost, apparently. They have an interesting backstory to the current Janlokpal agitation.

So where do we go from here if Jan Lokpal doesn't happen? What good could come of all this?

Well, what if it does happen, you ask? may I request a drag from what you're smoking before I answer that?

What IAC has managed to do is to get a whole bunch of middle-class Indians to actually get their backsides off their ergonomic office chairs and on to the streets. If this movement peters out, what good will that do?

Here's a possible scenario: Let's say the Jan Lokpal movement dies down as the government expects, are quiet for a while, but anger simmers. Let's also say IAC is able to awaken that anger to mobilize the same middle-class to extract electoral revenge in 2014 (or whenever the next substantial election is). That will not be easy, but is just about within the realm of possibility. Especially since 2014 is expected to be a close election, any new vote bank could actually matter well in excess of their numbers.

Perhaps, just perhaps, if this can spark the first organized middle-class vote bank in independent India, some long-term good will come of it. Because if someone proves that the middle class can be made to vote en bloc, the game of Indian democracy changes for ever.

Perhaps the middle class is Kejriwal and Bedi's middlegame. Anna is just the gambit pawn. And the Mad Hatter, a compulsive player of gambits, approves.

Happy Independence Day

2011-08-15T12:25:00.001+05:30

India will never be truly free until she learns to celebrate the individuals that make her what she is rather than the bumbling incompetent State with the anti-Midas touch. Sadly, she isn't showing any signs of doing so.

Replug of an old blogpost on the same idea, since I can't think of much else to say.

Happy Independence Day, etc.

Guest Post: The Battle of the Mascots

2011-08-14T10:12:00.004+05:30

Courtesy Junior. Click on the pic for full size cartoon

I'd have liked a little more nuance and a little more development of the protagonist characters, but the ending meets with my approval. :P

Guest Post: The Story of Harold

2011-06-22T16:50:00.001+05:30

Junior's new cartoon series

National Testing Scheme

2011-06-20T14:53:00.001+05:30

The powers that be, we hear, have set up a committee to "fix" entrance examinations for tertiary (read, college) education in science and engineering in India. It claims to be motivated by "the principle of inclusion for a collaborative excellence rather than exclusion through competitive excellence".

How one can avoid exclusion in an entrance examination is unclear. Isn't that, you know, the point of the whole thing? The Hatter put aside his initial misgivings, and read the proposal in detail. It does seem that a good amount of thought has gone into it, but not nearly enough.

It is all very well to reduce the number of redundant entrance examinations, but it's interesting to note that board exams (class 12) are being considered as replacements for entrance exams.

No amount of "statistical analysis" and "multi-parametric grading" can change a basic fact - when you have a college with such low accept ratios as IIT, you must have tests with extremely good discrimination between the 99th and the 99.1st percentile of ability. Yes, that good, even if that means making it impossibly tough for someone in the 90th percentile of ability. Any exam that can distinguish adequately between the 20th and the 30th percentile of ability will find it difficult to distinguish between 99th and 99.1st. Using board exams as an indicator is practically ruled out, since board exams are taken by everyone in the educational system, and cannot be targetted at the top few percentiles of ability. One way to avoid this issue is to increase the accept rates to much higher levels. That means setting up tens of IITs and a couple of hundred NITs, not just in name but in quality, overnight. That's not very likely, is it? Well, if that isn't going to happen, we have to live with needing high levels of discriminatory power in tests.

One can talk about two levels of examinations, but one can never use the same test that decides whether you pass or fail your qualifying grade to select candidates for IIT. In engineering parlance, the signal-to-noise-ratio at the high end of scores in board exams is insufficient. There's no way out other than having a tough examination, stressful as it is.

The one factor I really wish could be addressed is the effect of coaching shops on entrance exams. Even a couple of decades ago (when the ancient Mr. Hatter took his JEE), access to a good coaching center was considered important, and so was being in a "good" school in a metro. It was estimated that being a "small-town" kid with only access to "postal coaching" lost him a couple of hundred ranks at the minimum. These days, things have gotten even worse. Changing the examination pattern doesn't help this problem in the least.

The ideal selection test would be a tough exam that no-one prepares for. That, unfortunately is an impossibility.

Happy Fathers' Day

2011-06-20T12:24:00.003+05:30

Happy Fathers' Day, Daddy!

"Thanks Junior, what are you getting me?"

I couldn't have, and didn't expect much. Junior Hatter has a career in the Greek finance ministry waiting given the way he spends his pocket money.

A big hug. It's the thought that counts, isn't it?

"Awww. Remind me to return the gift for your birthday."

Not my birthday, feel free to return it on Children's Day.

You teach children logic, and they use it against you. Happy Fathers' Day!

He Ram(dev)!

2011-06-03T16:40:00.047+05:30

Baba Ramdev, of "Yog" fame has the whole country's knickers in a knot over his threat to fast against corruption. A wholly commendable aim, one would think.

Except, this are his list of demands. Some of his lesser known demands are:

— Replacing the British-inherited system of governance, administration, taxation, education, law and order with a swadeshi alternative
— Increasing substantially the Minimum Support Price of grains
— Making wages of different categories of labourers uniform across the country
— Promoting Hindi at the expense of English.

If you remove the stuff about the Lokpal and bringing back unaccounted money, it does bear more than a vague resemblance to an election manifesto from a loony bin somewhere in the cow-belt.

Sometimes, I'm amazed at how little things have changed over the centuries. Adi Shankaracharya - or his disciple Totakacharya, take your pick - once said (Bhajagovindam, Verse 14):

जटिलो मुण्डी लुञ्छितकेशः

काषायाम्बरबहुकृतवेषः

पश्यन्नपि चन पश्यति मूढः

उदरनिमित्तं बहुकृतवेषः

Loosely translated as:

Watch out for Sadhu Baba types who're just out to fill their bellies.

Touche.

What Is Common To ...

2011-06-01T18:10:00.005+05:30

What is common to coffee, pickled vegetables, perineal use of talcum powder (seriously, I kid you not), gasoline exhaust, diesel fuel, and ..... mobile phone use?

Yes, you guessed right, the WHO considers all of them "possibly" carcinogenic.

Hmm ....

Book Review: The Ascent of Money

2011-03-20T12:53:00.006+05:30

This one was quite an accidental read, something I stumbled upon at my neighbourhood bookshop. This was something I hadn't seen before, an attempt at placing the standard tools of the global financial system in historical context, so I picked it up on a lark. Given that, I'd say it wasn't a disappointment at all, but rather good. Niall Ferguson does succeed in creating an engaging and interesting read.

The book takes off with the story of the Medicis and their banking system. Unlike prior banks, the Medici banks were of larger scale and diversified across various assets including currencies and merchant debt. The Italian banking system spread to the financial centres of Northern Europe, and thus was born the modern fractional reserve banking and currency issuing central banks.
We are then shown the evolution of public debt in Italian city states, where governments borrowed from rich citizens as an alternative to taxation, and how that model was adopted by other European powers. This led to the bond market, and consequently the birth of the rentier - someone who could live off he interest on purchased debt. This market of trading in public debt (bonds) produced the Rothschild mega-fortune - quite by accident, if you believe Ferguson. The Rothschild dynasty lives on, and is the subject of much gossip of a financial nature. The US Confederacy, Ferguson would have you believe, was defeated as much due to the Rothschilds not buying their bonds as anything else. We are led through World War I, German Hyperinflation, South American debt defaults, and other bond market tragedies, but left on a relatively optimistic note thanks to moderation of inflation and fewer defaults in recent times.
The Stock Market bubble is considered to have a history as old as Stock Markets, illustrated through the tale of John Law. Law was a Scotsman, who became, in quite an unlikely fashion, financial czar of recession-plagued France. Through a combination of loose monetary policy and a bubble in the stock price of the Mississippi company, he took the French economy from bad to better to horribly worse than where he started from. Parallels with Alan Greenspan's attempt to bring the US out of the recession of the early 2000s are not explicitly made, but are probably intended.
An interesting connection between the evolution of the insurance market, and the later evolution of the welfare state is made. Those of a lefty economic bent would do well to avoid the temptation to utter words of an unprintable nature while Ferguson presents his case, mildly though, that the welfare state is economically untenable in its 20th century form. If you believe the welfare state is a good thing, this would have been a good starting point to craft an argument about how it may be funded in a tenable fashion. One gets the feeling, to borrow a phrase from Ravi Shastri, that Ferguson wouldn't be in the vanguard of those wanting to try.
When discussing the housing market, Ferguson sticks to script, not-so-gently hinting that the governmental tendency to incentivize home ownership contributed a good bit to the rise and then crash in home prices, and the following recession. We aren't likely to see a conclusion to that particular debate - whether it was governmental incentives that created an environment where Wall Street trickery thrived, or whether the tricksters would've thrived regardless.
To his credit, he does make the point that it is the evolution of governments and exigencies of historical governance - war, colonialism, slavery and such - that created most of the institutions of modern finance, which is a valuable insight not easily obtained without perspective.
Ferguson does seem to have a reputation of being a bit simplistic. The book could possibly have done with some broader geographical perspectives, and pre and post-colonial looks at money in great non-western civilizations, but that would perhaps have distracted from the simplicity of the narrative.
In summary: this is definitely worth a read and a ponder.

The Apple Does Not Fall Far From The Tree

2011-03-09T13:38:00.003+05:30

"Your hair looks extremely messy today!"
Thanks, I hope it looks like Ronaldo tomorrow.

El Cheapo

2011-03-05T15:23:00.001+05:30

Let's face it. Or rather, let me face it. I'm a sucker for cheapo stuff when it comes to the not-so-important things in life. Like UPSes. And eBook readers. This is a note-to-self to not do that too often.

Quality is free in the long term, cheapo stuff costs money.

G'bye Nokia, It Was Nice While it Lasted

2011-02-11T21:11:00.004+05:30

The Mad Hatter has been a long-time fan of Nokia. Today, he is a former fan. Nokia has jumped from a Burning Platform (TM) and plunged into Ice Cold Water (TM), thus quenching the mild flame that still burnt in his heart.

Starting from an old non-smart-phone that's still in my house somewhere, unused but still functional, to the remarkable 6600, to the still beloved N95, and the 5800 XpressMusic, it's been a long and happy relationship. Thus far. What I thought was a brief Android phase while I ran out of patience waiting for MeeGo has turned into an indefinite disenchantment.

I guess we'll never know if MeeGo's native-Linux-like architecture was technically superior to Android, as they claimed. Or we could say Android won by default. As they say, time-to-market always wins.

But yet, if only you had more patience, Nokia. If only.

The Prime of Life

2011-02-07T21:22:00.002+05:30

"Middle age is hard"

It was unexpected sympathy. Especially coming from Jr. Hatter.

Indeed, I said.

"You know, it's very tough. You have to deal with school, and a whole lot of other stuff. Including parents telling you what to do"

Eh? In middle age?

"Yes. 10-13. It must be the hardest part of life."

Flight of the Bumblebee

2011-02-05T11:41:00.000+05:30

Not to make too much of a fuss about it, but it is getting a wee bit disconcerting to keep hearing the "bumblebees are not supposed to be able to fly according to science" myth being parroted.

Would it be too much to ask to go to the Wikipedia page for bumblebees, and read the references there about how this myth began, and what reality is?

So, let's all agree that bumblebees do fly, and are indeed supposed to be able to.

A Tale of Two Telcos

2011-02-04T21:08:00.003+05:30

Setting up 3G on Tata Docomo with my HTC Desire Z

Insert SIM in phone
Switch on Phone
Ta - Da ...

Setting up 3G on Airtel on same phone

Insert SIM in phone
Switch on Phone
Get an SMS from Airtel saying my phone doesn't support automatic settings download (the hell it doesn't)
Look and find some APN settings automatically set and enabled in the phone, but non-functional
Google - find several contradictory posts on how to set up APNs for Airtel Karnataka
Call their "technical helpline", and be kept on hold forever
Call 121, and be treated to lecture on how great my 3G plan is, but no APN settings
Try a few things at random
Finally find a setting that works - just disable the "Airtel Live" APN by changing the APN type to something nonsensical. Keep the "Mobile Office" and "Airtel MMS" settings as is.
Ta-Da (or should that be Ta-Duh?)

Why dont I just switch to Docomo altogether? If they can just sort out my billing issues ...

What is a Science?

2011-02-04T14:54:00.000+05:30

The Hon. Bombary High Court has declared Astrology to be a science, citing a Supreme Court of India decision in 2004. What can one say?

"But it's a science!" has been a refrain I have had to deal with quite often when discussing astrology. Or a whole lot of other things.

The view that astrology is a science seems to spring from a very common misunderstanding of the word "science" in India. I cannot claim that this is unique to India, but since I've seen it mostly here, I cannot be sure if it exists worldwide.

What a lot of people seem to mean by "science" is "systematic body of knowledge" - derived probably from the Sanskrit "shaastra", which means precisely the latter. Astrology does definitely meet that standard, since it comes with a set of premises and a well defined set of rules, using which one can deduce the claimed truth or falsehood of propositions.

Being "scientific" requires a higher standard. Being systematic (a "shaastra") is a necessary condition for being scientific, but not a sufficient condition.

The "method of science" has a long and interesting history, and it rests on a few pillars - systematic organization, empiricism, and mathematical model building. Empiricism is the strongest condition, that facts and rules in the system of knowledge must be verifiable through experiment. Exactly how that verification must be done, and how much verification is necessary has been a matter of continuous refinement as Mankind progressed.

This is precisely the condition that a lot of Indian "shaastras" fail - they are based on "a-priori" or "revealed" premises which are empirically untested. That makes them systematic, but non-empirical, and therefore not "scientific". Note that it is not an issue of degree of empirical verification, but a basic philosophical disagreement about the need for strong empirical verification that is involved.

This holds for Astrology, Vaastu, Homeopathy (all of which have failed empirical verification in recent times). Some, like Ayurveda and Yoga have had partial success, to varying degrees, at empirical verification and can therefore be considered semi-scientific to that extent.

So, where does that leave us? Legally, the factual status of any question is what the courts state. Therefore, the Indian legal system now considers astrology a "science". That doesn't change the facts of the matter, and one hopes a challenge to this decision will be mounted through the legal system.

Interesting footnote: the contributions of Arab scientists Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Ibn Tufail to the development of the scientific method are notable. This makes the later descent of the Arab and Islamic world into dogmatism doubly sad. The blame must lie primarily on one philosopher. But that's another story.

Something from Nothing

2011-02-03T12:28:00.001+05:30

A well-written reminder of how you can get something out of nothing.

Oh, and if you have a free hour, here is a good way to spend it.

How many SIM cards must a man own?

2011-02-02T17:47:00.003+05:30

.... before you can call him a Man?

While we await the angry cease-and-desist letter from Mr. Dylan's lawyers, we must ponder the circumstance that yours truly, The Mad Hatter, is the owner, proud or otherwise, of three functioning mobile SIM cards. Moreover, all of them reside in perfectly functional, and powered mobile phones, resulting in him being a larger than life part of India's great mobile success story.

It all began long ago, in the days when mobile phones actually were rather uncommon, with the Airtel connection that the Hatter's prior employer, one with a large Southern state of the US of A in their name, provided him. Now that would've been it, for most reasonable people. But we are talking of the Hatter, who prides himself on his unreasonableness.

Airtel didn't exactly endear themselves to him, taking far too much time to transfer that connection (proudly bearing the name of his former employer) to his more sonorous name. While he persevered (and still does), manfully trying again and again, and then once more, the minor sin of impatience had him in its grasp.

So, he succumbed to the temptation of a "free" SIM from Reliance (technically, a UIM, since it is a CDMA connection) with free calls to his home phone and lower charges than Airtel. And, as it turned out, a rather interesting number which he is rather fond of. In case such things interest you, said number is the 28th biprime, followed by 14 times 3 (the answer to the fundamental question!), followed by the 14th prime, followed by the 14th biprime, followed by three to the power of itself.

After using that for a while, dissatisfaction struck again. What with all this 3G thing going around. Why wouldn't Airtel actually launch 3G? They didn't seem to have a problem shoving that confusion-inducing 3G ad in everyones' faces did they? So, an attempt was made to upgrade his CDMA phone to one that works with EVDO (aka CDMA-2000's 3G). Then the realization struck - every EVDO handset was about INR 10K costlier than an equivalent 3G (UMTS/HSPA) handset. In spite of what Reliance would have you believe, your choice in CDMA handsets is more of the Hobson variety.

So, after shelling out a goodish sum for a HTC Desire Z (about what he'd have shelled out for a less capable BlackBerry on Reliance), the Hatter paid a reluctant visit to a Tata Docomo store, and emerged with a 3G connection. With good rates on voice calls as well. Thanks to the good ol' 2G scam. But that's another story.

And then came Mobile Number Portability - or possible salvation. And SMSs from each of the providers mentioned thanking him for being part of their network, which, as everyone is aware, happened to be India's best et cetera. Reliance makes it a point of informing him exactly where in Bangalore their new cell towers go online. That does little but remind him of how ignorant he is of Bangalore's topography outside a few areas, and main roads.

And then, Airtel launched 3G. At less than competitive rates, but their stronger network may be worth it. And things finally seem to be moving on getting the connection transferred. (Update: done, Hallelujah!)

Reliance continues to surprise positively on everything, but handset price. Their network actually seems to hold its own against Airtel, even in the rural parts of Kerala that I've had a chance to test it in. Their voice rates are better than Airtel as well.

And Tata Docomo, what shall we say about them? A few weeks into the "Docomo Experience", a message made its way into the Hatter's phone, demanding instant payment of nine hundred rupees and change, or else. What prompted that, I still do not know. Neither could the rather puzzled sounding lady I got on their helpline. Apparently, I must wait for their bill to be generated, to know why they think I owe them much more than I think I do.

So there things stand. Three connections, and not one totally satisfactory one.

So, what must be done? Must the old reliable Airtel connection be relinquished? It of the ubiquitous network, and bearing the number that he gets most of his calls on?

Or must the Reliance connection be dropped?

Surely, the Tata Docomo connection must remain, at least for its reasonable 3G pricing? That is, unless their bill arrives, and informs me that said 3G pricing wasn't exactly as cheap as I thought it was.

BSNL's tariffs look rather interesting, especially the data packs being valid on roaming. Should I get a fourth?

What say you, gentle reader?

Bloggin away

2011-01-21T16:10:00.001+05:30

Test post from Blogaway

Make the Best of 'Eleven

2011-01-20T21:11:00.002+05:30

I suppose it isn't too late to wish everyone a Happy New Year 2011 and all that jazz. Fear not, the Hatter has not abandoned his readership and intends to return to log more blog-hours this year than ever.

The collective sigh of relief from the Hatter's loyal reader population in all corners of the globe on reading this is bound to be remarked upon in newscasts, one hopes. Heh.

It's been a tumultuous but interesting 2010. Junior Hatter v2.0 has made his entrance. The yoke of corporate executivedom has been thrown off, and the Hatter has been sighted with his toe in the cold waters of startup-dom. In the next few weeks, he promises to plunge into said waters in right earnest.

With that must come a lot of adventure, and words describing them. Hopefully, they will be interesting ones.

Ring out the old, ring in the new ....

A one-sided battle of wits

2010-11-28T10:41:00.000+05:30

The Hatter is not very sympathetic to the religious side, but does wish they'd find a better debater for that side to go up against Christopher Hitchens. Tony Blair vs. Hitchens sounds like a pea shooter going up against a Kalashnikov. And that's exactly how the debate reads.

The next debater who goes up against Hitchens could do better than to claim the Church's work on AIDS in Africa as an example of the good that religions do. As is pointed out in the debate, much of the problem is caused by the Catholic Church's rather pig-headed opposition to contraception, even when it has positive side-effects like AIDS prevention. It's good to hear that the Pope has finally changed his position on that, and hopefully the preaching on the ground will follow suit. None of that changes the fact that many of those who've died would not have had they used basic prevention which they were encouraged not to from the pulpit.

One would expect the side arguing against religion to bring up Northern Ireland, but Blair brought it up here in one of the more spectacular rhetorical self-goals in recent times.

I'm sure the video will be immensely entertaining!