My Christmas gift ...to myself

Christmas is one more occasion when we give gifts to our near and dear ones. The other being Durga Puja, bengali as I am. So, after much ado and a lot of encouragement from my friend, I decided to buy myself a domain and host a website.

Since I didn't get an opportunity to create custom web pages as yet, I relied upon google, as always. I had created a few useful web pages a few days back on http://site.google.com. For the time being, I am redirecting my site to my google pages.

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Visit me at www.prijitdebnath.com
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Another one from experience....

The more one runs after ones goal, the easily it deludes him. To realize something, just work for it and leave it alone.

SaaS / No-SaaS (What all apps moves to the cloud?)

We had a talk delivered by Dr. Anand Deshpande, the MD of Persistent, a software company based in Pune. Mr. Deshpande, a acclaimed figure in the industry, spoke at length on the future of the IT industry, on Clouds (private and public) and so on. He also came up with a 2X2 matrix on what all apps would move to the cloud? With due respect to him, I came up with my own 2X2 matrix on SaaS/No SaaS. The example I have taken is for a banking industry.



I shared this with Dr. Deshpande for his comments but perhaps he is too busy to reply. Understandably :)

Random thoughts

While the Sensex fell close to 500 points the day before yesterday, I thought -
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Since the market (say stock market) is inefficient and imperfect, it corrects itself to reflect the true value of the stocks, can't we human beings, imperfect as we all are, also correct ourselves from the misconceptions we hold.
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One more thought crossed my mind while I was watching the CBS serial, Numb3rs:
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Since the Universe is expanding at such as breakneck speed of 1.8 times the speed of light, we all eventually move away from one another one day. Knowing this reality, should we not try our best to get as close to one another as possible.
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Finance wisdom from Thirukkural

Thirukkural, a non finance Tamil literary work written more than 2000 years back by Saint Thiruvalluvar, also speaks of finance sense, much of which, or rather the lack of which, is the cause of our financial troubles. Some of the gems are -

1. Kural No: 113; 'nandre tharinum naduvigandhuaam aakathai andre ozhiya vidal'

It says: 'Even when apparently giving gains, ways which are not truthful are to be abandoned.'

2. Kural No: 112 : 'seppam udayavan aakam sidhaivindri Echathirkum yemmaapu udaithu'

It means: 'Wealth (children, financial wealth, friends, charity and fame) earned by a person using fair means will protect not only the person but also his future generations.'


3. Kural No: 385 says: 'eyatralum eettalum kaathalum katha Vazhuguthalum valladhu arasu.'

It means: 'Producing, saving, protecting, regulating and equitably sharing is the way to powerful governance.'

I hope we pay heed from these basic thoughts as we plod up the road to recovery.

Source: Financial Lessons from Thirukkural, Rediff.com

To my dear motherland....

Time to pause...think

Think, I thought, was simple word. But when I tried to look for the meaning of the same in Merriam Webster, I was nothing but surprised. This word is a noun, a verb both transitive and intransitive as well as an adjective. So while I was expecting a small couple-of-line definition I pretty got a whole web page. Hence I decided to do more justice to it.

It is weekend here at San Jose and am coming to this country after a long year, yet I decided to stay back in my hotel room and contemplate. By the way, contemplate itself means to "think intently and at length". Most visitor would rather go out in the weekend for shopping, sight seeing and the likes but I decided to stay put in my comfortable hotel room. I realize that in the course of my fast life, I haven't thought enough. In other words, I have not given myself the time to think. In office, I am busy with my work like everyone else and in my non office hours, I am spending time mechanically. I have been kind of flowing in the stream of life without knowing, very likely, where am I heading to.

Am I wasting my time "thinking"? I reckon not. This is my chance to do some thinking. Who knows when will again get another golden chance to think?

Self Service

The days of self service is back. Even since coming to Pune, I had parked myself in a rented accommodation with a couple of other guys. We had a cook, more of a family member so to speak, who used to take care of all the household chores, from cooking to doing dishes to washing clothes. But the Swine Flu scare in the city had terrified him so much that he decided to calls it quits for the time being and return back to his native.

Now since life don't appreciate such excuses, we were left all alone to fend for ourselves, and that includes cooking, doing the dishes and even ironing the clothes. Perhaps it is a small reminder from above that one is all for himself. I am slightly lesser hit since I am leaving for the USA tomorrow for a small training and a few all day meetings. That will take care of nine good days. Once I come back, I have decided to stay in a hotel for a couple of days, a kind of way to quarantine myself after the overseas visit, so that I know that I have not contacted any of the viruses out there.

Back to Reading...again

Am back to reading...again. After a hiatus, have again decided to go back to the good old source of knowledge and entertainment. This will surely keep me away from the internet and will be a welcome change, and a positive one too.

Remember what Mark Twain had said about reading:
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A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
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It was a lazy Saturday afternoon and having no great thing to do, I decided to head to the British Library here in F.C. Road, Pune. After spending a couple of quick hours, I realized that the library is small and doesn't have a great collection. But then if I read a good book a month, that should suffice my need. They had a good collection of biographies and autobiographies of sports persons though. Without further ado, I filled up a membership form and submitted it to the gentleman at the desk. And within five minutes, I was a member. I issued two books and an audio CD. The books are -

• Moral Intelligence - A book on enhancing Business Performance and Leadership Success


• The Beautiful Game - A book on the game of Football


• Appointment with Death - An Agatha Christie (BBC Radio Collection)

So let me start from the very start and revive the good ol' habit of reading.

Things have changed

Things have changed a lot in the last two months. Before leaving XLRI and in most of my pre MBA days, my surfing used to include time spent on websites like Business Week, CNBC.com, Economictimes.com and so on. In short, I was mostly interested in financial news. But now, when I surf I visit tech websites and blogs such as Techcrunch.com, Neowin.net, Linux Insider. The development on the tech side (from software perspective) is my bread and butter. I am more interested in when will Microsoft RTM Windows 7 than what the Fed says about the economic slowdown.