I am not sure but maybe it’s somewhere in 1990s. We used to live in a place called Boleng in Arunachal Pradesh. There were many times when our days began with music of Sharda Sinha. Imagine a morning, sun shining through the lush green hills, bright blue sky and rays coming in through the windows. In the morning sun you could see the dust in the air and it was a Philips Tape Recorder (my mother still has it) and…
Sahib, Sindh and Sultan: Steam Engines of the First Passenger Train Its 3:35PM on April 16th, 1853 and Sahib, Sindh and Sultan, three steam engines of India’s first passenger train were ready, all spick and span new, between then Bombay now Mumbai, then Victoria Terminus now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus to cover 21 miles in 57 minutes to Thane. The train was filled with more than 400 invited dignitaries including the Amelia Cary, Viscountess Falkland, wife of Governor of Mumbai Lucius…
A brief Intro Jagadish Chandra Bose was an Indian scientist whom I knew more about his research on plant physiology but it never came to my notice that he was a pioneer in wireless technology. Before he changed his attention to botany he was into physics and electromagnetics. What we know today as the latest 5G technology (millimeter waves) in mobile communication, he was working on such stuff in in the last decade of 19th Century. It was common for…
Panchatantra – A project It was sometime during the Covid a thought came to my mind about starting a Podcast. I have been a listener to Podcast for a while. It was probably a lost love that I rediscovered again. As a kid, I remember listening to BBC Hindi News under the night sky. Also I remember listening to Hello Farmaish ( हेलो फर्माइश) with my mother in the afternoons after the school. I still remember a road trip where…
Entangled Life Recently I started reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake and one thing that stuck with me is the Carpenter Ants and their relation with a family of fungi Ophiocordyceps. Now the world of fungi and how they affect our lives is amazing. As a kid I remember there was a sensational story of few ladies dying after eating some wild mushrooms that turned out to be poisonous. The more you read about the world around that is not…
8:00 AM Anand realizes that he has a meeting in another half an hour. Today he also needs to drop his daughter Anu to the school bus. “Anu, Anu!! Wake up its time for the school.” Anand hurriedly calls out. Anu reluctantly gets out of the bed and starts with “I don’t want to go school” as usual. Anand picks her up and goes through the morning chores quickly enough and gets Anu dressed up. A quick breakfast for her…
QWERTY For the story of Qwerty keyboards, we will have to go back 150 years to late 1880 when one Mr. Christopher Latham Sholes was tinkering in his lab in Milwaukee to develop the prototype for typewriters. Now the legend has that the Sholes was trying to develop a layout such the expensive typewriting machines won’t get jammed. There is no conclusive evidence to suggest that this was the case and some research has debunked this theory. But whatever may…
100th Post I started to write on a blog 10 years back and registered shabdh.com about 8 years back. Its my humble attempt to share something useful or interesting. Since this is somewhat like a milestone for me I thought I will just do some giveaway to mark the occasion. Here is a book that I am planning to giveaway to a randomly chosen person who has liked the post. Since I can ship only in India, this is limited…
Mother Tongue There must be a reason why we call the language that one speaks as a kid as mother tongue. In ancient times women folks were generally no that mobile and were not migrating as much as men. So when a bunch of men migrated and displaced local population, they took the local women as their wives and the young kids learnt first the language of their mother and hence the mother tongue. India and its languages कोस-कोस पर…
Calculus – A little Personal Background Calculus was introduced to us in India in Plus 1 is the CBSE curriculum (we have a 10 +2 system, where one spends 12 years in School + 3 years in Nursery, KG1/2 before getting to school). I am an engineer and have taken many courses in mathematics but unfortunately my interest started waning down quite a bit and I missed the fun in doing mathematics and it became a very dry subject for…
Tail Event? Talk about a tail event and disruption, Covid has been a tail event that nobody wanted and hair cutting salons in India are hard hit. While doing my own hair cut today myslef I was thinking if someone would have asked me pre Covid “Would you cut you own hair at home ever in your life by yourself?” My answer would have been straight no. Almost everyone has a favorite barber shop and also a chosen barber to…
Last Mile Businesses that directly deal with customers probably want them to have best customer experience but that is generally not delivered in a way that most businesses and customers would like to. Businesses normally spend a lot of time hiring and training people who are in the backend and but not their frontline workers. The frontline workers who directly interact the customers are many times contractors, outsourced or temporary. The call centers that service customer calls are one thing…
Qatar and its population breakup The most remarkable thing about Qatar is that it’s Qatari population is only 313,000 whereas the expatriate population is about 2.3 million. Of this 2.6 million population about half of population lives in the capital city of Doha. There are about 7 expatriate for every Qatari native. There are about 300 males for every 100 females in the country overall and the most probable reason is the expatriate population. For Qatari population the sex ratio…
The Battle Battle of Buxar fought in October 1764 that set out, a greedy private enterprise East India Company headquartered in London, on a path that changed the South Asia forever and the after shocks are even felt today including what we see today in Afghanistan in 2021. As a kid I have been to the place and unfortunately there wasn’t much there except agricultural fields and few graves for British Officers reminiscent of the bloody battle. Lets look at…
Dehypothecation What? So whenever you take a vehicle loan for 4 wheeler or 2 wheeler, basically debtor (one who takes loan) pledges a collateral to secure a debt. Once the debtor closes the loan the Registration Certificate (normally called RC Book, it is mostly a Smart card now like a Chip Credit Card) needs to be updated and the process is called Dehypothecation and recently I closed loan for my two wheeler and had to go through this. Now why…