Anniversary Galore

The month of November and the Year 2009 are unusual in many ways as they are anniversary months for many important events and mark significant milestones.

This is the month when the Foundation Stone of IIIT was laid. IIIT is going to to be 3 years old. We are very young Institute indeed. How will we celebrate our Foundation day? I have asked Prof. Tanitrishna to organize a foundation day debate among the students. This will the topic of my next blog.

This is the year when we have started our B.Tech. programme. We hope to start our Ph.D. programme this year too. We walked on the long corridors of the newly constructed building this year.

Every one is talking about Sachin's 20 years in cricket. Sunil Gavaskar was there for about 17 years. What is Sachin's secret for such long tenure in cricket? To my mind, it is his raw talent, simple life style and staying away form captaincy. The last one is the most important. Most good players after assuming captaincy have lost their touch. Sachin is smart enough to avoid the trappings of captaincy and stick to his core competency: just play cricket.

This month twenty years ago, the Berlin wall came down marking the end of communism. I still remember the debate: will West Germany pull up East Germany or will the East Germany bring down West Germany, Will the combined Germanies lead to another world war. Fortunately, the German nation has not led to another war. The Berlin wall signifies the artificial walls we create to foster our own interest.

This is the fortieth year of Internet. Internet has been a game changing technology. Countries like India have benefited immensely. The penetration of Internet is still slow. We need to hasten this process and the break the digital divide. I watched a Bob Metcalfe (inventor of ethernet) interview on Youtube. He talks about how in 40 years we have got clean and abundant Internet Bandwidth. For him the next challenge is the give the world clean and abundant energy in next 40 years.

This month we celebrate Jawaharlal Nehru's Birth day as the Children's day. My wife who is the president of Innerwheel club, celebrated children's day with the students in Malipada M.E. school near IIIT campus. The condition of the school is bad and there are hardly 25 students in the school. While we extol our achievements in higher education, our primary education is in shambles. We need to ask ourselves what needs to be done to bolster out primary education system.