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I’ve been lucky, at least officially. Right from the start of my career, I’ve worked with some of the best minded managers. Each of them have inspired me to be a ‘little’ better person.

Dr MR Girinath

Not many software professionals get an opportunity to work for a national award winner. I had the privilege of shaping my career under Dr Girinath‘s wings. Even though he had achieved more than most other cardiac surgeons, he still worked hard. He couldn’t rest on past laurels. Every day brought a new challenge for him. And he loved it. Not only I learnt importance of hard work, but also of time – seconds determined life and death.

Dr PV Rao

Dr Rao belongs to an elite team of surgeons who have done successful heart transplants. If Dr Girinath instilled the importance of hard work, Dr Rao instilled a sense of confidence. He believed in me long before I believed in myself. I would attribute my success to him, though he wouldn’t accept it.

Sas3

With a bit of luck, I came into the radar of Sas3. Though I worked with him for a very short duration he made the highest impact in terms of management. His impact is so high that whenever I find myself in a tight-corner, in terms of project or people management, I question myself, “what would sas3 do?” and the answer has never failed me.

Steven Tilley

Oh! those were magical times. I’m referring to those days in Belgium. My stay in Belgium would have been shorter than it was, if not for Steven. He ensured that I never felt as an outsider. Whenever I was around he will request everyone to converse in English. Now that I work in a multi-lingual group, I understand how difficult it is – jokes and funny quips loose their essence when translated from mother-tongue. Yet he did it most of the time.

But his contribution to my career was not ‘making-me-feel-comfortable-around-the-group’. It is in those countless hours of technical, and sometimes not so technical, discussions that we had, often sitting in bars. When mobile computing was still in its baby steps, we discussed on technicalities of brining CRM and ERP systems into mobiles. He encouraged to think beyond ‘out-of-the-box’.

Kurt Van de Moortele

Kurt taught me what trust can bring about in a person. Unlike most others that I worked with, he treated me, a contractor, equal to other team members. He followed a policy of ‘trust someone unless it is broken’. He would tell me, “Keep the users away from me; I’ll stay away from you”. I still try my best to keep the users (from complaining) away from my bosses. Whenever I succeed in that, my bosses keep away from me!

Mahendra

The strongest point of Mahen is his decision making. I’ve not seen him indecisive. He might be gathering facts; but he is never indecisive. During his tenure in our department, there were few decisions that went awry. That didn’t bother him. He didn’t take decisions that made him popular; rather that served the purpose at hand. It is hard to emulate that unless one is confident.

Guru Murty

Success and gentleness don’t go well together. Not for Guru. I’d the opportunity to observe him closely during tough times, and I should say he stayed ‘a gentleman’. It is easier said; but extremely difficult to follow.

One could quickly jump into conclusion that it has all been only nice managers that I worked with. Not quite true. I’ve worked with some terrible ones too. They’ve taught me ‘how-not-to-be’.

I wish to be privileged with such best managers.

On this lovely morning of August 15th, every Indian should feel proud to be an Indian.

We are establishing our footprints everywhere – sports, space, art, literature – and we are successful too.

Everyday there is a news to be proud of being an Indian – some Indian company is buying a British or an American company; someone is winning a gold medal in Olympics; armies of super-powers want to practice with Indian armies; and so on and so forth.

We hit big and we win big.

Or are we?

From the glories of achievement, let us come down to the every day life of common man.

As a proud Indian, I would like to live anywhere in India – safely. Isn’t it my right as an Indian? A Tamil in Karnataka or may be in Maharastra. While this is true on paper (constitutionally), how much it is true on reality?

If a Kanada actor is kidnapped, Tamils are targeted; if he dies, Tamil shows are banned. Thousands flee Maharastra in a day because they are not natives.

Within the same country there is a feeling of ‘four squares of my native land’. We are not British occupying your land; we are fellow Indians coming for living.

As much as we identify as Malayali Nair or as Tamil Nadar, we fail to identify as an Indian. Being Indian is not in our blood – being a thevar is; being a Tamilian is; being a Christian is. There is an identity crisis for Indians.

Let us talk about succeeding in India. Do you think, despite paying the hefty taxes, there is an encouraging climate for success – in sports, in business, in art? None could’ve said it better than the coach of Bindra, the golden boy of India – ‘do you know why he won? He bypassed the system; that is why he could win’. He hit the bulls eye!

What about politics?

Politicians moan that they don’t have enough authority to reform the country. I don’t think authority is an issue – Hypocrisy and dishonesty is.

You might counter me with a question, "Come on, it is in politics of every country; they take bribes too". I might agree with you on them taking bribes. But there is a difference. As Kamal says in one of his movies,  "In other countries, they bribe in order to stop the official from doing their job; only in India you have to bribe to do their job".

Bribe, as a cancer, has gone deep into our system.

I’ll tell you a true incident. I know it is true because it happened to my father. When my father retired, he went to district office to collect his dues. The amount was what was due for having worked for years as a teacher. The peon told him, "You are getting so much; give me 500 rupees; only then I’ll dispatch the cheque"

All that the peon had to do was to give that cheque to my dad. He was demanding "something" for doing his job. (My dad being a patient and principled man, he refused. So he was forced to go back again and again. He went until he got his cheque. You could argue that he could’ve lodged a complaint. Tell me honestly, will that work?)

Bribery is now part of Indian government system, every damn system, including defense ministry. I was so ashamed reading that it was there even in ordering coffins for those who died in Kargil war! That is the extent of bribery.

These are not all. There are many.

But I’ll hide my frustrations, insecurity, shame and salute ‘Mother India’ on this great day, as a proud Indian.

Jai Hind.

In an earlier post, I mentioned about developing a photo-blog in Django. I’m happy to announce that over the last week, I hosted in WebFaction and it is online now.

I realized that hosting Django applications are not that easy – WordPress installation is easy – transfer files; setup some parameters and in about 5 minutes you are up and ready to go. That is the case even for a newbie. However it took me about a week to get this first installation up and running. I was even close to giving up out of frustration.

Good news is that I didn’t give up.

Surely WebFaction, has made Django hosting easier. They have a single-click install of Django – be it with mod_python or with mod_wsgi. You can even choose the trunk version or the official release. Without these it would’ve been a nightmare for newbie like me to host Django applications.

My learning on Django hosting will be another post. This one is about the photo-blog.

As the images are hosted in Flickr, first step is to add Flickr API Key.

Then you start to add photos by providing the Flickr Photo id:

I’m using Beej’s Flickr Python API to connect to Flickr and get information. With the photo id, it will get the EXIF information, photo title, description and tags and store it locally. Once the information is obtained, if needed, it can be changed as well. If the information has to be obtained from Flickr again, just delete the title and it will fire the query again.

That’s all to be done to add a photo!

Coming to the homepage, I’ve designed a very simple homepage. (It shows up messed up in IE; it is ok in Firefox). Most of the part works – browse via tags, comments, about page etc. In the days to come, I want to incorporate the below features:

• Tags as a drop down in browse page
• Email notification of comments
• Comments moderation
• Caching
• Contact form

At this moment, I’m not interested in voting or favorites. But might consider these as add-on features at a later time.

As always the code is hosted in Google hosting. Feel free to browse, comment, code review.