Two Escapes

In this article I will describe two daring escapes by two remarkable leaders of India. These stories are so fascinating and their impact so profound that there are no parallels like them in human history. They fought against odds that are so overwhelming that the David versus Goliath story becomes pale in comparison. An ant against an elephant is a more apt comparison.

First Escape:

Shivaji Bhonsale escaped from his Agra prison, where he was imprisoned by Emperor Aurangzeb on 19 August 1666. The escape itself from one of the strongholds of the empire is miraculous. But his subsequent journey back to his kingdom through thousands of kilometres of hostile territory is just incredible. He started with just a few men and little money. He deceived the imperial guards and search parties by travelling through a much longer route of Mathura, Allahabad, Varanasi, Puri, Golkonda and then back to his country. On the way he had to abandon all his followers in fear of getting detected, he lost all his money, he begged for provision and eventually against all odds reached home safely.

After reaching home, he crowned himself king. He challenged the richest and mightiest empire of his time and eventually brought about its downfall in less than 50 years of his death.

The odds that he fought against are incredible. He fought the combined forces of the Mughal Empire and its two sultanates Bijapur and Golconda at the height of their power. Their combined strength included a million strong army, hundred thousand cavalry, over two thousand pieces of artillery manned by the finest European gunners. They had a combined revenue of five billion rupees, one third of the global GDP.

Against this Shivaji had less than fifty villagers and two hundred rupees a year revenue from his land. But he fought with steadfast determination and insatiable quest for liberty and eventually overpowered all three adversaries and established a kingdom based on justice and equality. He faced religious persecution under the Mughal rulers. So he ensured that all citizens get equal rights and no one is persecuted in his realm. Finally when he died after establishing a strong, peaceful and prosperous kingdom, he was so loved by his people, that he entered the pantheon of the great rulers like Ashok and Akbar.

Second Escape:

On 16 January 1941 Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose escaped from his home in Calcutta, where he was kept in house arrest by the British rulers of India. He travelled through Dhanbad, Delhi, Peshawar, Jalalabad, Kabul, Central Asia, Moscow and finally reached Germany. There he raised an army to fight against the British Colonial rulers of India. Then he travelled to Japan via submarines evading all the allied blockades and reached Japan, again raised an army, went to Singapore, then Burma and fought against the British army. He lost the battle. But due to his determined push, the British Empire, the mightiest Empire in human history crumbled to dust in less than 10 years.

When he started his journey, Netaji did not have any followers. He had just been ousted from his own Congress party, of which he was the elected president. He was arrested and kept interned in his house by the British police. He did not have any alliance with any foreign power. What he had was a burning desire to free his countrymen from the tyranny and oppression of an alien power. And with that inspiration he achieved what no one could ever dream of, decolonization of half the world. It is sad that he did not live to see this new world.

Sources:

Mahaniskraman

Shivaji: The Grand Rebel

I recently read the book Mahaniskraman by Sisir Kumar Basu, a thrilling account of Netaji’s escape from house arrest. Sisir Basu, Netaji’s nephew, drove him during the first leg of his journey to Gomo.

Last November I went to Kolkata. There I visited the museum dedicated to his life in Victoria Memorial. Although I hated the idea that a colonial monument is used as the site for a museum after him, I liked the exhibits. Particularly one depicting his escape graphically. I stood in front of it for a long time thinking how passionately he must have hated subjugation by an alien power that he undertook this journey to free up his country from bondage. I have a desire to translate Sisir Basu’s book to English to make it available for all Indians to read.

Last month I read the book Shivaji: The Grand Rebel. Very nice book on Shivaji’s life and time. Then the idea struck me that these two escapes had such a profound impact on human history that I felt like sharing with you all.

Thanks for reading.

What If...

What if a genie appears to me from somewhere and gives me boons.

• Your exile is over, you go home now.
• Your slavery is over, you are master of your time now.
• Your loneliness is over, you live among friends from now.
• Your struggle to acquire foreign tongues is over, you will speak in Bangla from now.
• Your hardship is over, you will eat fish and rice now.
• Your nights of fear are over, your maa will sleep next to you now.

What if...

Sunnyvale

It has been three and half years since I last went to Sunnyvale. I was there last time in January 2018. I was at Infinera at the time. I used to go on business trips to Sunnyvale a few times every year. I left Infinera in 2019 and since then I stopped going there.

Do I miss Sunnyvale? Sure I do. I miss the sun. Sunnyvale is true to its name. It is indeed a sunnyvale. I have not seen such bright sun anywhere, except maybe in Calgary. I miss the wonderful people there, Rajan, Mahidhar, Iftekhar, Biao, who are warm, friendly, and welcoming. I miss the drive along Route 101 at 80 mph in a nice big car that does not wobble at high speed. I miss the clean, organized first world living where everything is predictable and affordable.

What I do not miss. The horrible never ending flights to get there. In the plane I could not sleep, could not stay up, my knees used to hurt, my stomach was bloated up and my ears used to hurt. The trouble did not end even after the plane landed. Then I had to wait in a queue for immigration that seemed to stretch all the way to the bay! I do not miss the jet lag, staying up all night in my hotel room fearing what will come out of the bathroom (remember The Shining room 237). I do not miss the phony greetings of the hotel girls “Bye. Have a nice day.” I do not miss the horrid smell in the breakfast place. It was so disgusting that even though it was complementary, many mornings I gave it a miss and ate elsewhere.

I surely do not miss America. I spent about 5 years there. I do not have a single fond memory of that country.

Memories

I got this photo frame on my bike ride this morning. It was lying down on a heap of garbage by the side of the road. It was so touching, I could not leave it there. It is disturbing to think that someone could let go of such a precious memory.

I obviously do not know who these people are. I do not want to know. To me they just represent a story, a story of a man and woman in love. Such an eternal story.

From the black and white photo it seems that they must be old now. I wonder how their love story blossomed. I hope it bore beautiful fruits with many children. I hope life treated them kindly. I hope they are still alive and happy, surrounded by many, many grandchildren.

These two particular individuals will soon recede to oblivion. But the concept they embody will live forever.

A woman and a man, in love with each other.

Leaving Kolkata

It has been almost 25 years since I left Kolkata, halfway through my life. A kid born by the time I left would be the same age as me when I left.

And what a life I left behind! Friends, fun, frolic. For what? To save my family from poverty? Or for the glamour of going abroad. For the lure of the unknown world out there. For sheer peer pressure. Everyone was going abroad. So I had to. I guess a little bit of all.

But whatever it was, it was unnecessary to accept that hardship for the little gain I got in return. Yes I saved some money, yes I saw the world, yes I learned to speak good English. But I could achieve all of these without leaving Kolkata permanently. Seven years I spent abroad was a waste. I do not have a single fond moment of those seven years. Only good thing that happened was I got a good education during my MSc and that experience really enriched my life. I would not be the same person had I not studied abroad.

I remember the Kolkata I left behind so vividly. The exciting years of pagers and cell phones and the first personal computers. Telephone booths everywhere. We had some disposable income to spend on us, a beautiful city that we could call home, a few devoted friends that were madly in love with each other. It was just the life to look for. The job was fun, the leisure even more fun. Weekdays passed by quickly absorbed in fun work. Weekends flew by even faster with food, drinks, movies and long walks with friends.

There were book fairs in Maidan and office tours to Maithon and weekend getaways in Bardhaman. There was love from Anjan, rebellion from Nachiketa and sadness from Suman. There were big eyed, baby faced, compliant girls like Shilpa Shetty and Urmila Matondkar. There were movies like Bombay, Raja and Rangeela. And we had our whole life ahead of us.

Did I live it well? I guess I tried.

No fear.

No guilt.

No remorse.

Diya's Diary Entry on CoronaVirus

I was browsing through my old photos last night and I came across this diary entry from my daughter’s scrap book, written last March at the beginning of the lockdown.

What an uplifting message from a seven year old.

Of course it is endearing to me because it was written by my daughter. But even disregarding that, it is very inspiring.

But it is also heart wrenching to think what these kids must have gone through in the last one year, cooped up in our two bedroom flat, not being able to go anywhere, not being able to play freely, constantly being on alert. The pandemic has robbed them of their childhood.

And this is nothing compared to what many others have gone through, people lost their loved one, not been able to be with them at their last moment, people lost their jobs, business, livelihood. So many successful businesses closed up, so many innovative startups died at infancy. It was just a litany of endless misery.

Some people tried to find a silver lining in all of these. “It was good for the environment, pollution has gone down, traffic has gone down, people are spending more time with themselves and their families”. I applaud their optimism. But I myself cannot find any solace in any of these. To me this pandemic is just unadulterated suffering, the worst calamity of my lifetime. There is nothing good that can be found in this endless misery.

I really, really hope that Diya will not have to endure anything like this again in her lifetime.

Weight Loss

In the above photo I am holding a 10 kg dumbbell. For my physique, it is heavy. I cannot hold it for more than a minute. What if I tell you that I was carrying this 24X7 for the last fifteen years. I used to walk with it, sit with it, go to bed with it, and go to the bathroom with it. I never kept it down even once. You are thinking where do I buy my pot from. But it is true. Since the age of 35 my weight hovered in the range of 71-72 kg. I am almost 62 kg now. I was carrying this 10 extra kilos for the last 15 years. I know people who carry two, three even four of these dumbbells. Imagine what this does to our back, joints, knees. How much does it reduce our mobility?

Let us look at it slightly differently. If I continue my lifestyle, I hope to attain a stable body weight of 60 kilos. That means that I was carrying 12 kilos of extra fat with me. This amount of fat would sustain me for two months without food. Essentially I was carrying two months of ration with me all the time! How absurd is this? Now there is a reason why our body stores extra food. When we humans lived in the wild as hunter gatherers, every meal was a chancy affair. It could be days even weeks between meals. So to survive, our body adapted to store extra food. But we do not live in the wild anymore. We can “Swiggy” our next meal in 15 minutes. Then why store two month’s provision in our body? I have heard that some of it is stored inside our blood vessels. Think about it. These arteries that carry essential nutrients and oxygen supplies to our vital organs like the heart or the brain, we are blocking them to store provision! I remember when the Total Mall opened on Outer Ring Road 10 years ago, we went there. It was jam packed. It is my habit that when I go to a crowded place, I first look for the fire exit. When I checked, I discovered that they have blocked the fire exit to store merchandise. I was horrified, I went to the store manager and started yelling, I called the fire department. In the end nothing happened and people just laughed at me, so I left. I was thinking these people have no idea what a fire accident looks like. But we are doing the same thing. We are blocking our arteries to store fat. We have no idea what a heart attack looks like. Now I don’t want to scare you. Our body is an amazingly resilient machine. It can take a tremendous amount of abuse and still keep going. If you are young, there is nothing to worry. But as we approach 50 and these organs pass their expiry date, we should not take risk, rather give our body a helping hand. If we block our arteries and increase cholesterol in our blood, one small clot and we lose one vital organ. Why take that chance? Who knew even Saurav Ganguly could get a heart attack.

Fortunately, it is not difficult to lose weight. You do not have to make any sacrifice. In fact your life will only improve. But you have to do it right. First you need to set the expectation right. So remember the two things.

• You cannot starve your way out of fat. It does not work. At least for most people. You cannot function normally when you are hungry and hence you cannot go hungry for a prolonged period of time. So as soon as you start eating again, you will go back to your original weight.
• Exercise does not have a significant impact on weight loss. Exercises are great. They make you happy, fit and motivated. But they don’t have much impact on body weight. To lose weight, you must change your diet.

So what to do? I will tell you one secret that will enable you to do this without giving away your pleasure of eating good food. Are you ready? Here it is, to lose weight, you do not have to stop eating anything (Almost. Some fine prints below). Instead you need to eat more. What you need to do is to eat 1000 grams of fruits and vegetables along with other stuff. You can even throw in 100 grams of dry roasted nuts with it if you like. Do this and I guarantee you will lose 10 kilos in six months. Surprised. Don’t be. There is no magic here. When you eat this amount of low calorie food, your desire for eating other high calorie food goes down. So instead of eating four slices of pizza, you will eat one slice. That’s the trick. Of course you should avoid some types of foods like the ones below.

• Processed food - Avoid anything that comes out of a colorful plastic bag, Maggies, chips, oreos. They are not food. They are worse than cigarettes or pan masala. Make sure your shopping cart does not have any of these items.
• Sugar and sugar based drinks like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. These are raw calories without any nutrients. Instead use jaggery. Jaggery is colorful, that means it has some minerals.
• Maida - Avoid that bun in a burger, or the dough in the pizza. Again this is just raw calorie.

The best part about doing this is that this is not a crash diet program, but it is a lifestyle change. Once you adapt to it, your body will achieve its natural healthy weight. You do not have to panic if you go on a vacation to Kerala and eat a lot of seafood for a week and gain a couple of kilos. No worries, your body will lose them in a few weeks.

If you add exercise to your lifestyle, particularly the kind you enjoy doing like cycling or swimming or playing football, you will stay motivated and fit. This will change your life.

So stay healthy and have fun.

Journey of a Royal Painter

ln 336 BC, Alexander the great ascended the Throne of Macedonia after the demise of his father Philipe. The inheritance has followed by insatiable angst against the Persians and he vowed to finish them in their own land. He kept his promise in the battle of lssus. He won the battle but lost the fight to Abdul Rahman Zami, the most celebrated persian poet of fifteenth century. He immortalized Alexander‘s tale in Persian manuscript Khirodnama-i-Sikandari. The manuscript had its journey from generation generation when it passed on to the Mughal emperors Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir and Shahjahan and eventually reached to the Indian Museum.

How Indian Museum came into the possession of this manuscript, is also a story of great interest. The Museum authority received a registered letter from Mr. Debabrata Ghosh of Calcutta on 24th July 1976.The letter suggests that Mr. Ghosh is in possession of this manuscript. It was handed over to his family by his grandfather Haruchandra Ghosh who happened to be a great scholar of Persian language. Further research finds a statue of Haruchandra Ghost at the Old house of Small Causes Court on Bankshal Street. He was the ‘Dewan‘ of Naldanga. The manuscript was finally acquired by the Curator of Islamic Antiquities on 26‘” August, 1976. Mr. Ghosh has passed the legacy for the generation to come. Khirodnama-i~Siakandari (31cmx200m) is important for its historical value.

First two folios of this manuscript bear illustration of the Durbar hall. It is dated 963 Hijri or 1555 CE. Renowned Calligrapher and artist Mir Ali penned Khirodnama-l-Sikandari. Another copy of Usufwa Zuleikha was selected by Jahangir for his private library. According to ’ Tuzuk-l-Jahangiri, the official biography of Jahangir, Jahangir paid a thousand gold coins to acquire a copy of the manuscript for his library. Abul Fazal mentioned about Mir Ali in Ain-I-Akbari. it is described at the end of the manuscript Mir Ali copied this manuscript in 945 Hijri or 1538 CE at Bukhara.

If the Persian style painting delights us in hrst two folios, the illumination in the next page astonishes us. Two Badshahi stamps and handwriting of Jahangir and Shahjahan are depicted on it. Badshah Jahangir wrote: “Allahho-Akbar! The book is enlisted in the library of the person who is enthroned in the name of God in his coronation year. The writing in the first and third page of the manuscript was by Nuruddin Jahangir, son of badshah Akbar.” Next, Shahjahan wrote: in the name of a compassionate and kind God. The manuscript bears the evidence of beautiful writing of Mollah Mir Ali, and is enlisted in the library on 25‘“ day of the Bahman month of Akbari year in l307 Hijri when l ascended the throne. The writing is of Shihabuddin Muhammad Badshah, who is son of Jahangir and Jahangir is son of Akbar badshah Gazi." Beautiful decorations and illustrations found in every page of this Farsi nuscript. The manuscript tantalizes with its bright usage golden, peacock blue, and bright red colour. The elaborate capturing of the life of Sikandar now has been carefully kept for its further museum preservation.

Source: https://indianmuseumkolkata.org/

BJP

Unlike previous elections, this election provides voters with a clear choice. One side there is BJP (all the other corrupt NDA allies are gone. It is only BJP now. Much clearer that way). The other side there is the Mahamilawat of effectively the corrupt brigade. I try to summarize the choice below.

BJP	Mahamilawat
Impeccable leaders	Corrupt Brigade
Democracy	Dynasty
Decisive Government	Total chaos
Meritocracy	Sycophancy
Wealth creation	Poverty redistribution
Secularism	Jihadi appeasement
Make strong allies	Get beaten by every neighbor
Safety for our children	Bomb explosion every week
Hope	Despair
Performance	Pedigree
Sushma	Priyanka
Modi	Rahul

The voter registration is on. Please enroll and vote.

https://www.nvsp.in/Forms/Forms/form6

About Hiring

I have been taking interviews since 2003. By now I have taken hundreds of interviews and also given a few. I also conducted campus hiring events and walk in interviews, too. I am not good at taking interviews. No I am not being humble here. I genuinely think I am not good at it. I have seen really good interviewers. I am not one of them. One of the reasons I am not good at it is that I do not enjoy taking interviews. Measuring someone’s potential, intelligence and skills in one hour is daunting. Coupled with that the high stakes for making a mistake makes it one of the hardest task at my work. But still I have been made to do this over the years! That is probably because I speak a lot and give the impression that I am always available. So hiring managers used to find an easy “bakra” in me. Ever since I became a hiring manager, I take this task very seriously and end up doing it myself.

Having taken so many interviews I have gathered some working knowledge about it. I am going to share my experience in this article. There is no new wisdom here. This is just a collection of common practices in one place that hiring managers may find useful. So feel free to skip if you are already a very good interviewer.

Let me start by giving a sketch of how typical interviews go.

Say you are a project manager and you need to deliver two important features on IP multicast and MPLS multicast in your next release R10. You have one staff engineer in your team Akash, who knows IP multicast but he is busy with R9 issues and will not be free for next few months. So you got a requisition for a position approved and you want to hire an engineer who can help you with these features. You give a JD to your TA (Talent Acquisition Manager) and he searches with key word “multicast”. He sends a bunch of resumes to you to shortlist. Since you are up to your neck with R9 issues and R10 planning, you delegate this to a senior team member. Then one fine Wednesday afternoon at 2:40 PM you get a call from your TA.

“Subhendu, what’s up? You had a phone screen at 2:30 PM and the candidate called me that he did not receive your call.

“Shit!” You say. “Sorry, I forgot. I will call him right away.”

So you hurry to a conference room. Pull up the resume. Glance through it. Then call the candidate at 2:45 PM. You tell to yourself. “Oh. It’s just a phone screen. I am good at it. I can manage in 15 mins.”

And you are right. It is no big deal. It is a phone screen. It can be and should be done in 15 min. You should avoid doing a phone interview, and only do phone screening. The purpose of telephone screen is to introduce to the candidate you and your company as well as the job so that he gets interest to apply for the position. From your side you verify that the candidate is good enough to call him for a face to face interview. Invest one full day on him. Most of the time it should be discernible from his resume and his references. You should just validate those info over telephone.

So you like the candidate and ask your TA to schedule a face to face interview.

Come Friday morning as you are fighting the traffic to get to work, you get a call from your TA.

“Subhendu, where are you? The candidate is waiting for 30 min in Bombay conference room! First panelist Akash is not here yet.”

You remembered Akash was chasing a release blocker till early morning and he will not come so early and it will take you another 30 min to reach office.

“Is anyone else available?” you ask your TA.

“I see Bhumika there.” Bhumika is from the Java team and she does not know C++ or embedded programming. “I have no choice.” You think.

“Please ask her if she can take the interview.”

So she goes and does a good job interviewing the candidate on his programming skills.

Then goes Anand. He is a very good C++ programmer. But he is from the L2 team. He does not know much L3 stuff and he does not know multicast.

Finally to your relief Akash walks in and jumps straight into his R9 issue. You pull him out and request him to finish the interview first. He goes in and finished in hurry in 30 min.

You meet Akash at the cafeteria during lunch.

“How is the candidate?” You ask.

“He is awesome. He knows more multicast than me. He contributed to RFC.”

You feel very lucky that you got a good candidate.

Post lunch as you are preparing your weekly status report, you again get a call from your TA.

“The candidate is waiting.”

You feel irritated to be interrupted on your work. But hurry to the conference room. By that time you already made up your mind based on Akash’s feedback.

You start speaking to the candidate casually. Somewhat apprehensive to ask tough questions fearing he might flunk. You find him very confident. Also found that he ranked 16 in his JEE exam? He worked for good companies in the past.

“24 karat gold.” You think and jump straight to salary discussion. You are pleasantly surprised to find out that is getting only 36 lakh with 14 years. The market rate is 50. Even if I offer him a 30% raise it is still very cheap.

“What a deal?” You thought.

As a good manager, you gather feedback from two other panelists. By this time you do not want to lose the candidate. So want them to say “yes”. But to your disappointment, you find that they are not OK with the candidate.

Bhumika said that the candidate has an attitude and does not test his code. He hardly even codes. Mostly give opinions to others.

Anand said the candidate is very poor with programming. He does not know C++ at all and is not willing to learn. He thinks we should change to C instead!

Bhumika is being too sensitive. You thought.

Anand is not from my team. He does not know how we work. Besides he does not know multicast!

You ignore their advice and decided to go ahead with the candidate. You walk to your boss’s cabin and ask him.

“Boss, I got this great candidate. Can you please speak to him for a few minutes?”

“I am leaving for the US tonight. I have not even packed. I have to leave now. I do not have time. You should have told me before. Let’s do this next week when I come back.” Says your boss.

“He has other offers. He will not wait that long.”

Your boss has great confidence in you and trusts your judgment.

“If you like him then go ahead and hire him. I will approve. No need to wait for me.” Says your boss and leaves. You lost your last safeguard.

You make an offer. After much haggling, the candidate joins after two months.

Then disaster happens. He took three more months to learn C++ and be productive. Then you find out that the guy does not want to do any work. He has an opinion about everything but does not produce anything himself. Finally you need to pull Akash to deliver the release with more than a month delay. Akash is so stressed out that he may leave. Your boss’s confidence in you takes a dent. And you find out the next three releases are on SDN and NFV. The new candidate has no desire to learn these new things and is useless. You basically have a passenger in your team, who is causing more harm than help and you need to hire more people to deliver the next releases.

Of course I am exaggerating. Most hirings do not go this way. But surprisingly, quite a few do.

So what went wrong here? Everything. Let me try to list a few.

• Preparation: No one plans for interviews. Interview is some invisible task that somehow fits into our schedule. Hiring is the most crucial part of team building. Take it very seriously. Add it to your plan, make time in your schedule as well as the team member’s schedule and your boss’s. Divide the work, who will ask what. One person should cover programming, another networking knowledge, another system building. Train your panelist on what to ask, as well as what not to ask. If the candidate is married, if he owns his flat or rents, where is he from. These are information that you do not need to know. There are other ways to do small talk and break the ice. Most importantly, make preparation in advance on how to receive and evaluate panel’s feedback. Stay objective and do not get clouded by prejudice.
• Hire on potential not on skills: Skills requirements change, potential does not. You are hiring the candidate for what he can do for you, not what he has done before. While past is a good indicator of the future, it is not an insurance. The guy may have ranked 28 in JEE, may have been a star performer 10 years ago. But that is past. You must evaluate what he can do next. And this is not easy. Some tips on how to do is to see how he extends a solution when given additional requirements, how easily he gives up when asked a tough question. How inquisitive he is. Has he learned anything new recently? When a very tough question is thrown at him, does he accept the challenge or recoils with resignation? Ask him something totally new, not at all related to what he is doing currently and see how he proceeds. Introduce a new and interesting concept and see if he shows interest and asks more questions to broaden his knowledge.
• Do not look for a deal:  Look for a deal when you buy a computer, not when you hire a team member. People have emotion and self-worth. When you pay them less than what they are worth, you hurt their self-worth and that impairs their confidence and ability and reduce their engagement. So once you decide to hire someone, pay her market rate and not try to get her at the cheapest. By doing so you are not helping your company much but you are hurting your team big time. You will add a disgruntled team member who will not perform well and will stay dejected and spread negativity. She will become a constant source of worry for you for the next few years. Not worth a few lakh. And once you hire someone at a certain rate, it will be difficult then to correct her pay to market. Rather consider low pay as a red flag. Why is this candidate  paid so less? It may as well be that she was genuinely deprived. But probe that and make sure that this is not an issue. Ask her about her past appraisal ratings, how she fared compared to her teammates. Only when you are satisfied that she is OK you make a hiring decision. On the other hand if you surprise the candidate by paying more than what she expects, you now have an enthusiastic member who is eager to perform and surprise you in return.
• Do not ignore attitude and temperament: Cultures matter. Sometime they matter more than skills and ability. If you have a very competitive team and you hire a soft, introvert member, you are asking for trouble and vice versa. There is a thin line between confidence and arrogance. “I have done this” is confidence. “Only I have done this” is arrogance. You should be careful about spotting that line. For example allow the candidate to brag about some past achievement then observe if she also gives credit to her partners, does she also mentions her shortcomings. Be on the lookout if she persistently cribs about her peers, boss, and company. See if she is very opinionative. Does she focus more on ‘who’ than on ‘what’? Take HR feedback seriously. You do not need to make a hiring decision on a feedback like ‘the guy has attitude’. But make a point to probe her if you get any such feedback.

Here is how I approach this. Again this is not the best practice and I am sure people have better ideas. But I have not made many hiring mistakes so this can be used as a working hypotheses that can be improved.  

I break a 60 min interview into four main parts.

1. I spend first 10 minutes introducing my company, the job and then myself. Thereafter I ask the candidate to speak about him. This has two purposes. One is to know about his past which gives strong indication about his future. More importantly it allows the candidate to calm down and gain confidence. What I observe is attitude and temperament along with skills he picked up.
2. In the second part, I spend 10 min as an elimination round. For most candidates I give a moderate program to write. Like run length encoding or shifting bits in an array. This is an elimination test. If the guy flunks it, I give him another chance with a different problem. If he still flunks, he is out. This again has two purpose. One is the elimination test. It weeds out the bad candidates and saves me 30 min. But for the guys who passes this it gives a morale boost for the next question. It works like a tonic and the candidate gets charged up.
3. The third part is the main interview. This is where I try to gauge the candidate’s potential. What I do is ask the candidate to design something big and complex, like design Facebook or Uber for senior candidate. For junior candidate I ask for example to design a software bridge. First I observe his reaction and his approach. Then I give him lots of hints to make good progress then again I leave him alone to extend. I spend about 30 min in this part. Sometime I give the guy a NP-hard problem without telling him. Like I ask to give a shortest path algorithm. Once he does that I ask him to come up with a longest path algorithm. In the exited state he does not realize that it is hard. Then I observe how easily he gives up or does he try his best to solve it.
4. I spend the last ten minutes on checking cultural fit. I ask questions about her past achievements and failures. Ask her to describe how she received help from peers and boss to overcome shortcoming or gain competencies. Ask her to describe career transforming experience, how she coped with them, who helped her during the process. The objective here is to allow the candidate to talk a lot about her and then look for clues on temperament and attitude. There is no secret sauce for this. This is all about practice and discipline.

Finally I close thanking the candidate and answering any questions she may have. Once again I briefly summarize the job and clearly explain the next steps in the selection process.

So that is a long discussion about hiring. Thanks for reading this far and hope this will be of some help in the upcoming hiring season.  

Quitting an Addiction

Kicking a habit is not easy. If you rely solely on your willpower, you are probably going to lose. Willpower is absolutely necessary, but there are tricks that can help. The key thing in giving up any addiction is staying positive about your life and making a villain of your addiction. If you constantly think that your life with addiction is a great one and you are giving up something precious to prove a point or for long term health benefits, then chances are that you will soon lose steam and get back to your old dear life with addiction. So what you need to vilify the addiction, gather evidence how miserable it made your life. Let’s face it, no matter how you glorify, an addiction never makes life better it only makes it worse. So it is not hard to come up with facts about the short-term negative impacts of an addiction.
So why in the fight between willpower and addiction, it is the addiction which wins most of the time? The answer is simple, cravings are short term, gratification instantaneous while the benefits of quitting are long term and imperceptible. So how do we win this battle? By relying on the short benefits of quitting, while recognizing that while cravings are powerful, they go down very quickly. They are pretty much gone in about a month. So if you can hold on for a month, your chances of winning increases dramatically.
So how do we focus on the short term gain? This is mostly on the healthy living. Whether you are quitting smoking or drinking, it immediately leads to very healthy improvements in your lifestyle. You sleep better, you get more energy. Convert that into activities, cycling, swimming and you will feel a lot more cheerful. You can fight negative thought more effectively. If you are quitting drinking, then you are getting back your wit. Use it to something cerebral and you get an immediate return. Read a book, play chess.
For myself, quitting drinking brings enormous benefits. My wit is all I have. I do not have a great physique, I have no social skill, I do not enjoy the company of others that much, I do not watch TV or sports. I live my life through my brain. I have a house full of books and a computer full of movies. I can enjoy them much better if I keep my wit and use my brain, instead of losing it every free evening I get. Then why it is still so hard to give up! Why indeed :)

Stay Healthy

Folks stay healthy. You cannot enjoy life if you are not healthy. No matter what you have, a private island, Sunny Leone and Katrina Kaif (Hrithik Roshan and Irfan Khan for ladies) as company, a few million dollars in the bank, a yacht of your own, no matter what. Even a small boil is enough to kill your happiness, forget big disease like diabetes or heart problem.
So what should be your priority in life? The following.

1. Have a good night’s sleep. I try to get 10 hours. But everyone should at least get eight.
2. Eat a proper breakfast. Not two toasts and a glass of milk. Proper meal, rice or roti or muri.
3. Do not smoke, chew gutka, pan masala.
4. Avoid drinking. At least minimize to no more than twice a month.
5. Be active for at least half an hour every day. Walk, cycle, play with your daughter, anything. Try to break a sweat.
6. Try not to eat a heavy meal at night, especially after 8 PM.
7. Avoid sugar, packaged food and drink. Most packaged food contains only maida, oil and sugar, sometimes harmful chemicals and no nutrients whatsoever.
8. Remember purpose of eating is to get stuffs that sustains our body, namely vitamin, protein and minerals. Calorie comes with them automatically. The amount of work we do, we need very little calorie. You don’t need to eat extra calories.

We are a pretty healthy family. We rarely fall sick and when we do, they are pretty minor. My guess is that we are plain lucky so far. But there is a little possibility that it is because we follow pretty much all of the above. What we do wrong:

1. We do not drink milk at all.
2. We hardly eat any fruits or vegetables.

I am trying to correct them slowly.

Religion

The power of religion has hardly diminished in last 10000 years. The assumption that with progress of knowledge about creation and the natural world, our faith on an unknown God will diminish does not seem to be correct. Even well educated scientists believe in God. I think our insecurity and inadequacy is too strong to be dispelled by reason and data alone. At least in it's present form. I think instead of trying to explain away the Cosmos and the creation, study of our brain will yield better result in dispelling religion. Draft post. I will work on it later.

Varkala

Spent four days in paradise. Sun, sea and sand. Total bliss. Papanasam beach and Janardanswamy temple absolved me of all sins. Believe me, I sinned. Seashore beach resort was a beauty. The staff were like angels. Had a real good time.

Happiness

I woke up with this idea this morning. I think this is worth noting down. I am unhappy most of the time because I want to change the world the way I want. They key to happiness is to accept the world the way it is. Of course this is morally reprehensible idea, because if everybody thinks this way the world will stay a shitty place it is. But nonetheless it is very comforting.

I am somewhat an extreme case. I worry about things that does not affect me directly and about things I have absolutely no control over. And because I am such a lazy person, I never do anything to change anything. That makes things worse.

Again I am a lazy man. So I cannot finish this post now :) I will elaborate over this idea when I get a chance.

Israel is a colony

I wrote this in response to a blog by Sam Harris. The mail bounced. So I posted this to my blog.

Dear Mr. Harris,

I am a huge fan of Bill Maher and you. I believe everything that you say about the rise of militant Islam and the threat it poses to the rest of the world, especially to atheists like me.

Few days back I wrote a paragraph about how Bill Maher, such a prominent and funny atheist, conveniently forgets that he is being religious when he supports Israel. I also wrote, any Jew no matter how rational, secular she might be, has to support Israel, including Einstein. Jews are the most intelligent people in this world. But when it comes to Israel, they simply suspend all their judgment and support every single atrocity that Israel commits. Then I saw you being so irrational as to support Israel against Palestine and I started thing he must be a Jew, otherwise no rational human being can support Israel in this conflict. I was again bang right.

As you are surprised by the innocence of Ben Affleck, we are by yours. It is obvious like daylight that Israel is the biggest mistreatment meted out by one group of people to another since the foundation of America. It is the last colony in this planet and it has the potential of being the cause of the third world war. Israelite are the most cruel, greedy, land hungry, racist people on this planet, even worse than the British, the French, the American colonists. The Germans were far more benign colonists in Africa than Israel in Palestine.

Hamas is not a terrorist organization. They are a reaction to Israeli terror. Unlike the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Chechans, the Pakis, I have never seen any Hamas fighter doing jihad anywhere outside Gazza. In Gaza, they are fighting for their honour with stones and rifles against planes and tanks. They will always have my support, Muslim or atheist does not matter. Because we were once a colony. We know how it feels when someone takes away your land, your home your honour.

You will never understand their pain. For you, they are terrorists who should be eliminated.

Subhendu

Israel

I love Bill Maher. I watch all his shows on YouTube. He is so funny and witty. I just enjoy when he makes fun of religion. One thing I do not like about him is support for Israel. I just watched one of his shows on YouTube. In it he also had a Jewish guest (Some "Stein". All "steins" are Jews, like all "anis" are Sindhis, Ambani, Advani, Sukhwani). Predictably both Bill Maher (he is half Jew) and his guest were supporting Israel. I just so wished that I was there to tell Bill that he is unknowingly being religious here! All Jews support Israel, including Einstein. Why? The reason is not political. It is religious. Had it been political, they would have bought a piece of land somewhere in the world that is more fertile, less contested and less religious than Israel. They had the money to do so back then. They still have the resources today to move to a safer and better place. But they will not do it. Because they believe that land is given to the Jews by God and they have a duty to live on that land. So all Jews, secular even atheists, subscribe to the idea of Israel. I think the only people who can challenge the Jews in their adherence to faith are the Muslims. Now when these two are pitted together in a contest for the very essence of their existence, I think there is a potential for a third world war here.

That begs the question why am I sympathetic to the Palestinians. I supported Palestinians when I was young because I was an idealist. Same reason I was a Communist at one point. I actually cried when Yasser Arafat died. But I grew up and came to reason. Now I consider Arafat a corrupt leader who should have been removed from power long before his death. I obviously don't like Hamas ideology. Every time, in every conflict, the Palestinians always sided with their fellow Muslim brothers against India, be it Kashmir or Pakistan. Whereas Israel is a friendly country. Sells us guns at a cheaper price than America. I tried my best to change my view and support Israel. But I can't. In every conflict between the two, I end up supporting Palestinians, even Hamas. To me Israel is the last colony, that will never go and Palestinians are very symbol of people resisting occupation. The truth could be something different. But that's my perception. In my opinion, if my land is taken away like that, I should fight back, regardless of the cost. The same reason I support the Tamils in Sri Lanka, even LTTE, knowing full well that they are a blood thirsty corrupt organization that terrorize their own people.

One thing is true, I have never seen a Palestinian terrorist fighting anywhere outside Israel, like the Chechens, the Arabs, the Pakis, the Egyptians, the Uyghur's,...

Rahul Gandhi's Interview in the Hindu

I am no fan of Modi and I used to like Rahul Gandhi. But I am getting sick of his lies double speek. Here are my responses to his responses in his interview with the Hindu.
1) Modi calls him "Shehzada" because probably he is angry. Of course he is, so are most aspiring people in India. Here is a man who is being anointed as the Prime Ministerial candidate of the largest party, without showing any achievement whatsoever. Now he is not to be blamed for that. We are the ones prostrating before him for his last name. But at least he should accept this fact and be embarrassed about it.
2) In Modi's India there is no place for the poor. Not sure about that. But I do know that the Congress loves the poor. So much so, it does not let them out of poverty. How many "Garibi Hatao" programs have they launched? We still have the largest number of poor people in the planet. That is true love for poor people. 3) The Congress is all about internal democracy. Imagine someone contesting for the Congress president's post against Sonia. She will be lynched. Last time I think one guy filed his nomination and he was beaten up by supporters. Its current PM is appointed, its PM nominee is anointed. That's true democracy.
4) All Modi does is give away natural resources to a few business houses at throwaway prices. At least he did not take bribe for them Congress gave away 2G, Coal mines, Gas, land to the same business houses and took huge bribes.
I stopped reading after this. He has already become like his father, doublespeak and peddler of false hope.

Stop Modi

In the last five general elections, I wanted BJP to win. While the left side of my head argued that BJP is rightist and communal, the right side of my heart always wanted them to win. Because deep down, I felt the majority Hindus should take pride of their own country (India is after all a Hindu country), while providing full protection and equality to the minority. Up until Modi came to the scene, I never truly believed that BJP is utterly communal. I rather felt that Congress and other parties are pseudo secular. They are just using Muslim vote bank.
But this time it is different. This time it is not a "VAJAPA Sarkar" (I hate that term), but rather a "Modi Sarkar" (A term I hate even more). I cannot accept Modi as my prime minister. He is exactly against all the values I care for and he is s serious threat to the very essence of our polity, which is based on allowing diversity. Without this tolerance of diversity, Indian polity will break apart. At a social and religious level, India is not a tolerant country. Most differences lead to violence here. However at a national political scene, somehow good sense prevail and politicians realize that accepting diversity is the only way to keep the country together. Otherwise this diverse, intolerant and deeply religious country will fall apart. With Modi, that sense might get lost. He is already showing his unilateral attitude towards his own party. I cannot imagine how arrogant he will be if he wins a majority.
Modi lacks the sophistication to lead such a big country as India. He neither have the education or the experience. He is essentially a Gujrati Bania and knows nothing beyond that. He is anti woman, anti Muslim, anti left, anti intellectual, anti Muslim, anti Christian, anti Gay, not because he has developed intellectually opposed to any of these idea, but simply because he is ignorant of any other thoughts because of his lack of education and experience. To put it simply, "He is a thug".
So friends my heartfelt request, please vote for change tomorrow, but please do not vote for Modi. I believe even without your vote he will win the election. But I hope without your vote, we will put enough fetter around him so that he cannot roughshod his regressive ideas on us. Let's stop Modi. Let's save India.
5 May: After listening to Modi for last few days, I have changed my mind. May be he has point. At least he is bold and hard working, two of the qualities very lacking in most Indians. Not sure anymore. May be he will be a good PM.

Why I am disappointed with the Aam Aadmi Party

What Kejriwal showed us is that it takes a lot of hard work to get things done in a democracy. Just wishful thinking cannot change the country. While there is huge scope of improvement in the mainstream political parties, but they are on the right track. Things are happening in India. We need to make sure they keep happening at a faster pace, there is no need to despair.

We should not always keep comparing ourselves with China. Yes China has improved at a much faster pace, but also at a much higher human cost. An experiment like China will bring disaster in a diverse and deeply religious country like ours. And it is unfair to compare us with the developed countries. We started from an abyss in 1947 and slowly crawling out of the pit.

Our democracy withstood the test of time. No matter how much we complain about dynasty, and disenfranchisement of people, our rulers were more or less accountable to the people. Or they were thrown out, be it mighty Indira Gandhi, or iron man Vajpayee. They were made to bite the dust by the “aam admi” using their vote. Mamtas, Mayawatis, Sushmas do happen in our democracy. If our people were so disenfranchised by the “system” as AAP is trying to portray, Kejriwal could not have become Delhi CM in the first try. With all their failing, our politicians never shown the tendency or ever had the guts to usurp power from the people (except once). We never turned into another Pakistan or Syria or Iraq or North Korea (this one could have been better for us!)

Kejriwal kept on harping about corruption and dynasty. But they are not the main issues facing the common women. Pockets of extreme poverty, inequality of opportunity and lack of basic governance are. These are the things that affect the common people the most. Neither Modi nor Kejriwal is talking about them. I saw one very recent interview of Kejriwal in NDTV where one young "common" man in rugged clothes raised a very interesting point. He asked “To me the biggest issue is the equality education. If my daughter goes to a rundown government school with very poor education, where as a rich man's son goes to the best international school, what chances will she have in from of him. She will always remain disadvantaged. What would you do about it?” The young man spoke with such passion it almost made me cry. I could immediately relate to his concern because I am a father and I am equally worried about my daughter's education. Mr. Kejriwal obviously never thought about this. He breezily said, “We can do two things. Close down all private schools. I do not want to do that. Or make the Government schools so good that no one will send their children to private school. Give us five years and we will make that happen.” He actually said that. I am damn sure he never even thought about this ever. Yet he lied to a bright young man, full of high hopes that AAP will do something for his children. By this time Kejriwal knew that he is going to run away in two days. How better is he than the other peddlers of false hope?

Kejriwal does not represent the interest of the "Aam Aadmi". He represents the aspirations and desires of the urban middle class and the Indian Diaspora. We, the IT people have enough money that we do not need the government, we actually pay the government. Our children go to the best schools. They do not need government education or government jobs. Our main problem is our guilty conscience that we are not doing enough for our country; envy that the illiterate stupid politicians are having it better than us, that Rahul Gandhi, that stupid brat is being propped up as the Shahjada, that the roads that we are driving are full of potholes, that the passport office guy does not speak in English. All these are valid concerns. We have right to demand all these. We pay dearly for all these. But we are a tiny minority. We don’t even vote. For most people of this country it hardly matters Rahul Gandhi was appointed the crown prince, or that A Raja has looted 3000 crores, or Ambanis are bribing the robot to get lucrative oil contracts. For them what matters is that their children’s midday meal is free of poison, their daughter does not get raped on her way back from school, they get the full 100 bucks from NREGA, they get an ADHAR card in time.

With all their failings, Congress did pass the RTI, right to education, food security, NREGA, Jan Lokpal, NPS bills. These are not mean achievements, considering they never had the majority, which Mr. Kejriwal is so complaining about. They did try to pass the Woman’s reservation bill. They did kill several thousand Sikhs in 1984, but their ideology is not based on anti-Sikh or anti Minority. They did “appoint” a Sikh Prime Minister. I do not know what Modi is offering to the people of India other than a vague promise of "Vikash". But what are his plans for education, health care, social investment, eradicating malnutrition, which even the robot accepted to be a shame of the nation. I never even heard him speak about the Maoist problem and what are his plans to tackle extreme poverty. Even the robot rightly understood that extreme poverty and hence Maoists are the biggest threat to the country. No one knows. And Kejriwal never asks. At least Congress is seen to be concerned more about the real issues and not some HiFi "Vikash", and even trying to do something about it. I will not be surprised if they do better than people are expecting in this election.

India is changing, with or without Kejriwal. It is changing for the same reason the whole world is changing, spread of the Internet and the Television, spread of democratic values, spread of education, spread of basic human rights. Political parties in a democracy cannot ignore the demands of the people any more with usual brazenness they were used to. If the AAP wants to be a part of this change, they have to learn how to function in a democracy, how to work with the opposition, no matter how corrupt and compromised they seem. Otherwise they will remain a fringe pressure group, less effective than the Maoists or Baba Ramdev.