Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!
Hello world!
November 6, 2009the gaana bajaana on Pune’s radiowaves..
August 27, 2009
Not going frequency wise but rather by the order of dislike – next comes ‘[self-proclaimed] Pune’s number one radio station – Radio City 91.1 FM!’ Radio City, actually is not so bad but at the same time, ends up having nothing interesting or fun about it either! Some time back, as and when I used return late from office and flip to this station; they would have this deep baritone voice – who would more often than not be taking a call from one his fans [read: friends he pleads to or folks he gives prizes/incentive to!] and discussing why he is so good [!!!] – [and yes he would make the very-obvious-sounding attempts to play the praise down and act modest
And finally, a station which is probably the ‘best amongst the worst’. Radio One – 94.3 FM. Radio One has some plusses to it:- Good RJ’s – Sangram is absolute fun to listen to when he is at his witty-best – as also when he is concerned about the stock markets
; Gya is smart, energetic, wacky and once-in-a-while-the-shayaar; Subhav has started English music late in the evenings [though of course his mix or choice is something not to be commented on as yet!]; Meenal seems to be the chatterbox – and with that I think I know this station really well! - The music generally is decent – they keep it simple by playing the popular songs only – though that’s exactly the reason why everyone flips stations – listening to the same songs repeatedly gets very boring – Radio ONE if you ever read this – please change this aspect!
- Ghanta Singh – he used to be really good… after the initial buzz, more or less he has been quite uncool – way below the SUD level
- And I think they play the most hated ads with lesser frequency – like the ‘khao vimal re, khao vimal re… vimal pan masala, isme hain asli Kashmiri kesar ka dum or something-on-those-lines’
Anyway this post came more from my [and am assuming every Puneite's] wish that there was more of both – quality and quantity – on the Pune radio scene…

The world’s best CHAOS
August 15, 2009But in all this, there exists a small area where
–> you could occasionally find litter on the pavement or
–> shops/businesses [Mustafa! - Frankly I don't understand why so many
–> and you would encounter the occasional traffic chaos around the parking lots
and this place could only be called “
Little India”While these
arguably are the negatives about Little India, the good points are those that are common to everything that has “India” in it:- Very buzzing and active – meaning lot of people, lot of noise and a lot of work happening all the time!
- Business, trade and commerce thrives successfully here, setting new benchmarks all the time.
- The food is brilliant!
- And of course, it is very colorful here!
Again while these are true of India [or Little India in Singapore] – there’s of course a lot more that goes on to define my super country.
Being the largest, oldest and continuous civilization in the world – we have given [and very passionately continue to give] more people to this world than anyone else. If there ever was a debate globally as to who gets the credit for the progress of human race – India should win hands-down – had we not procreated – there would be no people and hence no progress! [This silly argument apart, we should anyway be responsible for most progress purely on the basis of the quality of our people]. India and her people have had admirable qualities, some of which are:
- Tolerant and peace-loving – we haven’t invaded other countries or enforced our beliefs on other people [at least not forcefully!]
- No word is rich enough to describe the heritage and culture – earliest school of medicine known to man [Ayurveda], the mother of all European languages [debatable but I am convinced it is Sanskrit], religions, scriptures, epics, vedas and it goes on
- Hard-working and progressive – this is quite evident even in the current times where our junta is often blamed for taking the jobs away from some of the lazier folks
- Hospitable and welcoming to all – Unfortunately could also be the reason why we had so many foreign rulers!
However, like everyone else, I too have opinions on what we should do and what we shouldn’t do in our country
What we should do
- Focus on the basics – land, water, resources and above all people –> While it’s probably good to have enough people to take over the world without having to fight a single battle – what we don’t realize is that all these people don’t go to settle in other countries and that we all are trying to use the same set of resources that half of us were using some decades ago. These resources unfortunately don’t share our quality of exponential growth! And knowing this, there still isn’t a single man [or woman], in the house that matters, who would talk about implementation of population control! The mindset is “It’s something that the masses don’t like and let’s not raise it – we might just get a negative impact and lose the elections!”
- Stronger judiciary –> not the one Sunny Deol refers to in Damini
- Remove ANY political influence from the armed forces, police system, national educational institutions
What we shouldn’t do
- Take decisions on basis of religion/caste –> be it hanging criminals or creating reservations in education/jobs or giving/not-giving benefits to a group of people
- Educated/well-meaning citizens, social activists and political outfits fighting the battles alone –> There are so many amazing people, who have willingly given up their comfortable and successful lives/careers and decided to make a difference – these folks would really make a difference if they were together – if they were one force
The list as such can go on..
What, however is interesting, is that with all the good and bad, we still click as a country – we are growing and succeeding at whatever we do. India and Indians have this innate quality of making things work – even if the best of resources may not be available, we make do with what we have and get the best out of it. Everyday the commuters in Mumbai’s local trains complain of the extreme crowd and the mess – but they still continue to make it the most relied upon, fastest and most convenient mode of transport in Mumbai! India’s biggest industrial house sets up one of the most ambitious car projects in a state which has historically not been too warm to industry – only to suffer later thanks to political reasons – but the project doesn’t get shelved – it ends up in the leading pro-industry state of India and gets perfectly on track! The Tirupati Temple in Andhra Pradesh has 50,000-100,000 visitors everyday and without using any advanced logistic mechanisms or equipments, the authorities have designed quite a unique system where the time spent by devotees has gone down steeply over the years [although the number of devotees has been going up]. These are just some examples that go on to illustrate the “make things work” quality of Indians.
To come to think of it, it is our unique mix – of the experienced and the youth – of the conservative and the modern – of the right and wrong – that make us work – that make US the world’s best chaos..
And lets leave it that thought for now.
How I got lost @ Dalal Street…
August 11, 2009Fortunately, quite a few of us have that all important ‘decision-check’ person in our lives – Dad – who in his time would have gone through this “stocks market main bahut interest hain” phase.
One fine day, I began on this note and ambitiously started reading the hitherto-never-touched ‘Finance’ section in the newspapers. Not having the most impressive reading speed, I preferred the short precise summaries of stocks / markets / funds in general. Off-time between work went in reading moneycontrol.com articles and then going on to having these very-intelligent-discussions in the coffee area with anyone and everyone who was interested in listening as to why I thought the market would go up or collapse that week [the predictions were fairly true in the beginning but went really awry later on! must be beginner's luck!]
So after monitoring some scripts [which I called "my picks!"] for some weeks [by when your patience really starts running out], I decided to take the plunge. This was just before the gloomy crisis began!
Things then were golden everywhere and any drop in the market was “a minor profit booking by foolish short term investors”.
Fortunately I took baby steps [more out of the fact that I did not have big money or big heart to jump in]. Unfortunately though, the first script [lets call it chapraasi life sciences ltd.] that I invested in was a company that was not doing the best then. My logic behind this one was based on what a lot of big smart guys say – invest in a “good” company when it’s *not* doing good!
And well before I could do the Math for my loss [I used to put all the numbers together - the STT's, brokerage, tax, interest %, etc. - when calculating my profit or loss] and take the decision to exit – the loss went up exponentially!
The period after buying this first script to until some months back had these trends where I came to learn about the various axioms of equities and investments!
- Seeing two different markets was a confusing factor in the beginning. However, later on I started seeing the occasional disparity in the price of the same stock on NSE and BSE. I then thought-out-of-the-box [in my personal opinion ONLY] of buying from one exchange and selling on the other and making a neat profit intra-day! Of course with my first such transaction, I quickly came to realize that Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parikh were way too intelligent than me!
- This lesson was followed by a pair of new “terminologies”. “Bonus” and “Split”. The former sounded so simple in it’s possible implication. However, since I had burnt my fingers with my previous creative-thinking, I decided to find more about how bonus/splits work. So I got in touch with some “informed” friends, who, well, misguided me. Since then I have gone back to basics and asked only my well-read and really-concerned-about-my-money Dad.
- The previous two experiences were nothing as compared to this one!
This of course was my grand grand decision of investing heavy in the market the night the bailout package was almost approved by US Congress – the next day the markets tanked – and Ramalinga Raju hadn’t even hit the markets yet!!! I didn’t realize the logic for days and kept arguing with people who explained it to me that it was because of the long drawn process of the bailout package, the uncertainties of how/where the money would be spent and that it was lesser than what our dear Bernanke bhai had asked for. Anyway, who cared about the reasons after the money was out, the stocks were in and my portfolio was RED. - I became very conservative after the above experience and came to realize the large-scale significance of US markets on global economy. During this phase, I came up with this scientific identification of the relation between US and Indian markets . This relation held true only till Diwali or so after which often the Indian markets would behave differently than the others!
- As a result of all these bad experiences with stocks, there came a small period of time when I was absolutely convinced that Mutual funds are the ONLY way to go. I developed this active interest in all available and performing funds then. I sounded more like an ICICIDirect.com salesman making a pitch rather than discussing why we should plan our tax investments in advance – and all this was to an audience that didn’t really care about either [my team members!
] - I also had these sincere attempts at making plans to read/learn up on Futures, commodities and the works which resulted in my sincere failures at doing any of the same.
Gradually, in a lot of ways, I have come back to where I started
- having that list of “my picks” stocks [which is much refined and in general been good for me consistently]
- I ring up my father before any buy/sell
- I do all the math related to profit/loss
- but I more or less keep it simple, i.e. I buy for a period greater than a year and track once in few weeks
In between all these tragic and terrible experiences at the stock market, there were also a lot of moments of brilliance that helped me make some money
Fortunately the book overall has been green and healthy!
So in this entire process, I have come to learn a lot – and not just about the markets – but about
- companies and enterprises [and their well-planned frauds]
- rich performing public sector that becomes poor and poor performing public sector that becomes lazier or non-existent
- the jazzy economic words and terms
- the mass-philosophy of buying/selling
- the importance of rumors and working principles that make rumors work!
- and I still have the chapraasi life sciences ltd.
But after all this, if given a choice then it is still confusing as to what was better – pocket money with no concerns to invest/plan or salary and all the right-things-to-do that come with it!
the last part…
August 1, 2009Once again, the day began with the compère extraordinaire [:)]. However, she ended up repeating precisely what she said the previous day [:(]. The first “sponsored” session was by Oracle – by Dhiraj Bhandari who was going to speak about the eclipse plug-in to rapid deployment on weblogic. And this is what I recollect / found interesting:
- Starting off with Oracle strategy for Eclipse and other development tools [a key question was asked towards the end. Now that Netbeans is in the kitty, how does the priority for Eclipse change - and Dhiraj stressed that JDeveloper and Eclipse are the order in which their priorities remain - big point?]
- Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse [OEPE] and it’s component structure
- All the features of the above mentioned plug-in and relevant tools
- A very interesting new feature ‘Fast Swap’ – which aims to cut the Edit>Build>Deploy>Test to Edit>Test!! This was illustrated with an example
- With a concluding demo + some good Q&A – Oracle finished well
Once done [!!] with the sponsored sessions, we were back to the 3 parallel tracks. While Ilya’s workshop on Design Patterns Used in Eclipse garnered much interest, there was one track which had 3 sessions.
I skipped the next session and went about to mingle with the Eclipse junta and visit the stalls. Thanks to our “sponsored” sessions overshooting the time given to them, everything was running pretty late. It was time for Janakiram’s second session – Lighting up Java Web Apps with Silverlight. Now Janakiram brought a Mac with a dual boot for Windows and well, as per the unwritten rule, Windows crashed
It was a two-pronged attack really – M$ being M$ would always crash and Apple being Apple [when it comes to going against M$] would ensure that there was no recovery!
To add to his woes, there were some Adobe flex supporters who posed some interesting questions to Janakiram. All-in-all his session was fairly interesting!
By-the-way, all this trouble allowed for the early delay to be covered up and saltmarch were back again to their punctual best. In the last part of the summit, I went for the track with a short session on OSGi packaging and Eclipse as a framework of frameworks. No bias against Progress Software but both their sessions [previous day's case study and today's OSGi packaging were VERY boring!]. The speaker, who was originally listed on the schedule, missed out and someone else filled in for him. Unfortunately though the compère was not aware/informed and she went on to thank the missing speaker! [:D]
The final session I attended at the summit was Anshu Jain‘s Eclipse as a Framework of Frameworks. Anshu came in a breezy manner and had a large audience [with no offense to his topic/knowledge, this large audience was partly because the test automation tools workshop in the second track had failed big time!]. He encountered more technical issues while simultaneously doing both – troubleshooting + interacting with the audience. His premise was simple but the way he took us to that was very powerful. His session was not as much about getting to know new things but more about realizing the power of what you already knew!
I skipped the last BIRT session and went to get my all-black-tee. With the last few business cards getting exchanged, we bid adieu to two-days-of-really-well-organized-knowledge-sessions!
Considering that the eclipse community is pretty niche in India as yet and there is comparatively lesser buzz around the same; Saltmarch & Ancit did a pretty neat job of making things interesting and insightful.
With that and an early flight, the terribly short trip to Bengaluru also came to an end.. and we returned to base camp.

the eclipse summit.. din kramaank ek…
July 28, 2009so, wake early – we did and set out. on asking the highly-dignified concierge [with funny gloves!], we were given the suggestion to take a rick or preferably walk down, since the venue was barely a km away. we were not sure of the road/location and hence decided to take the rick. however, thanks to speaking in hindi and thanks to our general misfortune in bangalore, no one was willing to come! so, again, walk – we did and were very kindly led in the wrong direction by this apparently-very-helpful-person, who we later realized was confused between ‘the chancery’ and ‘chancery pavilion’!
anyway, we reached the venue and after a very brief security check, we registered. the folks at the registration desks were very friendly and dealt with a brisk pace – as a result keeping the queue short. we were given the basic welcome kits with material for the event [and some raddi / promotional material from the sponsors
].
scheduled @ 930 was a session by one of the ‘platinum’ sponsors – microsoft (yes, you can gasp @ microsoft coming for an open source event + paying for its presence there!!).. sharp @ 930 the compere took to the mic.. and this i must write about.. i, for one, really admire elocutionary skills and the compere for the summit had an absolutely b-r-i-l-l-i-a-n-t voice!! she started off with a cheeky idea to make people switch off/silent their cell phones and then went on to introduce the event, sponsors, organizers.. she soon finished her speech [:(
] and on came microsoft talking about interoperability and how they are really working in the open source community since 2004. his speech was more of a ‘sachhi-believe-me, we do work for free/others too!’
after this forceful session, we were going to have 3 interesting tracks running in parallel with a large set of workshops/seminars to choose from. so the 5 of us split up and i went to ilya shinkarenko’s – plug-in development. this workshop [??] had 9 labs where he gave basic tips and quick tricks on UI principles, basic OSGi, adapters, data-binding, extension-points and then scrammed through presentation & provisioning APIs. honestly this would have been an *amazing* workshop had it been a bit longer and ilya would have had the time needed to cover it all. but you can’t blame ilya / organizers as well, since they had just as much time to fit it all in! in the other tracks, folks liked the ‘gef & zest workshop’ which had the ever-popular [and erstwhile rockstar] malai giving the session!
for the second part of the day, i decided to jump between the halls and first went to attend the ‘design case study of a complex development tool [soa space] built on gef‘ – which IMHO was very boring
i guess it made sense from the speaker’s point of view to talk about their company requirements, development challenges, general abstract points about gef; but it didn’t tell you anything new really!
i then went for ‘eclipse 3.5 pde – target platform story‘ by ankur sharma. unfortunately for him there were some technical issues on account of which he had initiate a without-mic informal interaction with the crowd to talk about eclipse UI and requirements and complaints and general ranting.. his session was very useful for folks like me who yet weren’t on 3.5 and hence, got to know about the useful cool new features in the galileo release of eclipse [i did not use API tooling earlier but thanks to ankur, this has become an inclusive part of all my work now!]..
and yeah in between all this, we had some greaat food [a *MUST* for any good event] and met a lot of interesting folks from the indian eclipse ecosystem! the organizers were always there if you needed some help or information and all the events were dot-on-time! at the end i also saw the traditional long queue for t-shirts [the signature saltmarch all-black-tee!!!].. and with all of this, came day one to an end [at the summit]!
and ‘explore bangalore‘ began [which by-the-way will go in another post that just doesn't have the word *Eclipse* in it!
]..

eclipse [the non astronomy one]…
July 27, 2009anyway, i am not so fascinated by celestial bodies and i was rather keen to attend another ‘eclipse’ event – ASIA’s first and annual eclipse summit – organized by the all-black-tees saltmarch team. before i go ahead, this event was a symbiosis between
- saltmarch, who are the folks that organized the immensely popular ‘great indian developer summit‘ and
- ancit consulting, the only real eclipse community representation in the indian sub-continent…
this ‘eclipse summit ’09′ was organized in bengaluru [bangalore] at the chancery pavilion [which by-the-way is a pretty neat hotel situated right in the centre of bangalore's business district - or so i was told]! so with 5 of my colleagues from tibco, i trudged along to listen to sessions/seminars for the first time after college…
i was visiting bangalore after a really long time and my last memories of the place were mostly of using “kannada bara tilla” or something-that-sounded-similar whenever someone quickly talks to you there… then bangalore was this moderately paced city which had probably one big shopping mall and my cousins used to take me to mg road [that cliched road in every indian city], which was supposed to be amongst the buzzing places in town… this time around, mg road [and it's cousin brigade road where we stayed] were still the most buzzing places of the city but in general the place had changed a LOT! the airport for example is fairly impressive and more impressive are the roads from the airport to the city… however, it is painfully far and the traffic is well, worse than my home town!
however, the bus service, of whatever little i used, was great! and yes bangalore has this ubiquitous presence of software folks… of the 11 random people i met in those 3 days [in the bus & or at the bus stop / one chai shop / in the hotel] – all of them were software professionals, all of them were programmers and all of them wrote java!!! one can be amazed at probably what are the odds of finding at least 1 normal non-technical person in this city!
so 16th night we made it to our hotel and were supremely hungry… so we set out to find a decent place to eat and our patience was really running short… we found this shisha place called ‘soul’ off mg road that looked just about fine… it had some people when we entered and well as soon as we made the first order, almost all the guests had left [it was almost as if they were waiting for us to take the bait!]… anyway, we had a pretty lacking dinner… mainly because:
- because of lack of other guests at the restaurant
- lack of items served from the menu and
- above all, lack of the manager’s basic maths skills!
Anyway, it was about time we hit the sack… we used to consistently get the friendly reminders from the devmarch/saltmarch guys of the registration timings and prizes and events… i, for one, find any activity before 10 am a challenge and these folks kept hammering the deadline of 9 am!
is being continued…

eventually… ! :)
July 25, 2009some small things about me – i was born and brought up in Pune… i pretty much have been here all my life [and am fairly proud of the city and it's facets]… i did my schooling from symbiosis, primarily because it was 2 lanes away from where i stay… however that reason apart, it has given me some amazing friends and really memorable years! this was followed by fergusson – the nice old college with large classrooms [with huge windows that made for simplified exits after the attendance]… fergusson is known as much for the food outside and the festival/sports inside as for their rich history & academic records… from fergusson i made it to pict [pune institute of computer technology] for computer engineering… the place where the presence of students was like that of the tourists – there are peak seasons [read: submissions] and off seasons [read: remaining year round!] . but of course the institute has had a very impressive academic track record over the years and is one of those rare institutes that have a very strong education-industry bond… anyway, after a short stint with amdocs development centre in cyprus; i came back to the place where i did my internship and final year project - tibco!
and it is here that i dwell for now… and i have a linkedin profile @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulkamdar.. so these are the “some small” things about me!
i plan to use this blog to write about everything possible – opinions [i have loads and loads of them!
], my work [eclipse, technical and the works] and in general experiences!
later then…
DISCLAIMER: Anything said/written/implied here is not meant to offend/hurt anyone. If anyone feels that it does, please let me know and I shall correct the same ASAP!








