Finally arguably one of the famous magazines on this planet has told the truth ! I get lot of comments and stares for my hairstyle or more precisely for the lack of it ! (Imagine an old bald guy running barefoot in the Agara lake, you get the picture ...). Apart from many reasons why I did this is for the ease of maintenance, I know several of my Friends and family who spend a significant amounts of time and resources trying to prop up a decaying crop of hair. There is a downside : Many people remember me distinctly because of my appearance which puts me in embarrassing situations where I can't recall them :-( There is an upside too : One of my image processing expert classmate told me that image recognition/matching is easier with my face as the edge detection becomes much easier ! Maybe that is why I walk thru the Digi Yatra gates effortlessly.

We have successfully graduated to a stable democracy and have made amazing progress in this millennium. But true independence wrt technology, manufacturing in various fields is sorely lacking. We have the people, systems and the opportunity, lets make a concerted effort for the next two decades and achieve true independence by our 100th Anniversary and make Viksit Bharat a reality. Happy Independence Day.

Shri Deepinder Goyal's jet engine ! It was extremely heartening to Goyal's effort on this front. Jet engines is one of the critical technologies that we need to master ASAP. The tech which is almost a century old is still hard and only 5 countries can do it reliably. As most of my friends and colleagues know, this is one of my pet peeve ! Metallurgy is ridiculously hard and we need a good infra of test beds. As a country, as a society we need to make a concerted effort towards this. It is critical/essential to defend our sovereignty and participate in the huge business opportunity, both domestic and phoren. GoI did make an effort starting in the last century, the now infamous Kaveri project. Good progress was made but we are still unable to have a production ready jet engine, check out the travails of the Tejas program. I have spoken to a couple of startups who are planning to build smaller jet engines, out of sheer personal interest and offered them help. @deepigoyal , you have started on a massive, gargantuan effort much needed for our country, best wishes in our effort. Glad to help in any way we can.

One of my favourite topics : simple, authentic and honest food. Yesterday in my crazy trip to Chennai (2 am to 10.30 pm !) was travelling to a meeting from Cheyyar to Ambattur. Three of us in the car decided to skip lunch. Somewhere on the highway one of our colleague stopped the car to get a bottle of water and a drink. So we stop in front of this restaurant, all the signage was in Tamil ! No water bottle or softdrink for sale ! I got out and saw that they had very traditional stuff. They have sundal (usuli in kannada) of six different lentils, Milk with Nungu (Thati nungu in Kannada) & Karupetti (Palm jaggery) and dry fruit burfi. We enjoyed the food. When the bill came, finally saw the name of the restaurant in English, it is AaladiPattiyan. Apparently, it is a chain with presence in and around Chennai. If you like traditional healthy food, give it a try next time you are in Chennai. Next time, I will try their famous Halwa and a couple of other sweets which I had not seen before. I am sucker for places like this which are very local/traditional. Like the small shop inside Mulbagal town for the mulbagal dosa or the Chiblu idli near Kanakapura. The language, the culture, simple (mostly clean) settings and ofcourse recipes honed over generations. Generally healthy food. The Pongal in Subbanna mess in Melukote is also worth a shot. If you know others which are around Namma Bengaluru, let me know Cheers.

Its always a good time to start #text2train