Fundamatics

Category: Current Issue

  • You Think You Know Them, But You Don’t – Part 3

    You Think You Know Them, But You Don’t – Part 3

    Photograph by Dariusz Sankowski

    In most large companies, we barely know most of our colleagues – we see only the professional side of their personality (if we’re lucky) during the typical work-day. We may learn more about them during office parties and off-sites, sometimes with assistance from ethanol. The process of forming deep friendships (or enmities) usually takes a long time, sometimes many months or even years. Travelling with them is one way to accelerate this process, to its bitter end perhaps? As I’ve mentioned earlier, Mark Twain was no doubt prescient when he noted, “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” (more…)

  • Lighting Up Lives

    Lighting Up Lives

    Global Himalayan Expedition (GHE) teamed up with IEEE Smart Villages to electrify the centuries old Linghsed Monastery and the Lingshed School. The entire project was documented by National Geographic as part of its Breakthrough Series, featuring top innovations of this century that will change the world we live in. The DC (direct current) Solar Micro Grid concept engineered by GHE was showcased as the breakthrough innovation that GHE has implemented to bring access to energy to more than 38 villages in the remote mountain communities of Himalayas, impacting the lives of over 15, 000 people. (more…)

  • Managing Volunteer Expectations

    Managing Volunteer Expectations

    Photograph by Tim Marshall

    Why do volunteers quit? Is it the lack of enthusiasm and commitment? Sometimes it is a poorly managed volunteering experience that leads to volunteers falling out.

    I have been a volunteer for as long as I can remember. Starting at nearly 5 years of age, when my parents used to take me to medical camps, to until recently, when I just finished a 2-year volunteering project with a Foundation in Angola, Africa working with street children. (more…)

  • Examination Without Invigilation – An experiment in trust

    Examination Without Invigilation – An experiment in trust

    Photograph by Aaron Burden

    It is generally acknowledged that there are many things seriously wrong with our system of education. Otherwise we could not have become so corrupt or so incompetent. Of course it is possible to argue quite convincingly that because we are so corrupt and incompetent, we have produced the present system of education. But then it is the usual question about the precedence of the egg or the chicken. Whatever that may be, and we will leave it to the sociologists to argue, and analyse it interminably, surely there is little doubt that the education we get these days is far from satisfactory. Particularly deplorable is the situation is what we call as higher education which may be defined as any programme of education which follows the 10th class. (more…)

  • Bringing Change

    Bringing Change

    Photograh by Aman Bhargava

    When I was in IIT, some of us had been interviewed for a documentary– “I am 20”[1]– in 1967.  I had then said, “Freedom in India means freedom to starve, go naked, be uneducated and die of hunger.”   I was  critical about the conditions in India and felt we had failed to achieve our goals. After graduation I set up an industry in plastic packaging. To me providing livelihoods was one of the key priorities, and at the end of the last century we employed 500 people.

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  • Jamming to Innovate

    Jamming to Innovate

    (Image Source: Link )

    It is estimated that less than a hundredth of the world’s built space is designed by architects. As members of the community, this limited contribution has been the cause of some discontent to us. So, in 2013, when HSMI, the R&D cell of the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO) accepted our proposal for a project aimed at exploring the affordable housing space, we were excited at what we saw as a precious opportunity to push the boundaries of our profession, to design for ‘the other 90 percent’ and to truly innovate. (more…)

  • My Tryst with Open Wells

    My Tryst with Open Wells

    Over the past 10 years I have been working with BIOME Environmental, an organization that looks at ways to promote sustainable living in a city – not only in theory but also in practice. The practice comes from the solutions that the group of BIOME engineers and architects offer – homes designed to keep energy requirements low, homes made of sun-dried mud blocks, homes which store and reuse rainwater, homes that treat wastewater and allow it to be reused within the site itself, etc.. I am a part of the Water team within BIOME, and this allows me the opportunity to travel and look at various aspects of water – the issues and solutions – around Bangalore and across the country. The water sources that capture my imagination and that of my team– for their beauty, human ingenuity, history, adventure and poetry – are not the springs, rivers, dams and lakes, but simple manmade structures that provide access to water – shallow open wells. (more…)

  • From the Beehive

    From the Beehive

    September – October, 2017

    The road of life is full of important choices which lead you to where you are right now. All of us, over the course of our lives, will feel the call to deviate from the more common path. Something inside of us will be called upon to go left, when it seems that everyone else is going right. The pressure to conform, to behave and do as others do can be an overwhelming force indeed. But, this issue is about people from our own campus community who showed courage to deviate from the common path. Without their willingness to explore the road “less traveled by”, our lives may not have been quite so rich at all.

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  • Teaching to Play

    Teaching to Play

    Our vision is to get children to play! As simple as that. But it took us 14 years and multiple business models to finally develop an idea that worked. The journey has not been easy. And it started in 2003. We were evaluating many start-up ideas. Nothing clicked. Until a friend shared the story of his son not playing enough and wished that there were more playgrounds. This thought sparked an idea; a business was conceived and a company named SportzVillage was formed in August 2003. (more…)

  • The Future is Here: Connect The Dots To See It

    The Future is Here: Connect The Dots To See It

    Photograph by Alex Wong

    [The article below was originally an Institute lecture given by the author on August 3, 2017. Here’s the link to the video recording.]

    Thank you for giving me the opportunity to deliver this prestigious Institute Lecture. I will not indulge in speculative technology forecasting but all the same, transport you into the future, because the kind of research projects or non-academic careers that you could choose may change if you knew some aspects of the future with a degree of certainty. I will demonstrate that you can even today see many of the things that will, probably, happen in a few years. You just need to identify important technological developments that have already happened and then study their impact, when adopted in specific fields, and then, study the impact of those things on things that lie further downstream. My interest in these things started one summer night in Aberdeen in 2007 when I heard on TV that a British Bank, Northern Rock had collapsed suddenly due to investments in CDS (Collateral Default Swaps), an instrument that most people had not heard of till then. I wondered how things could have been different for hapless investors, if this collapse could have been anticipated. Research led me to understand that Banks were speculating in that instrument and that it was being used by Bankers in the US to create multiple layers of pseudo assets built on poor quality loans given to people with doubtful credit history. After understanding the chain of events backwards from Northern Rock’s collapse to the root cause, I found that if one had worked forward from when reckless trading in naked CDSs had started, it would have been possible to predict the Northern Rock collapse. This thought enthused me to use the same process in the forward direction starting with the then situation, and that led me to believe that the entire global economy will collapse in the next year. I gave talks on this at various public forums from November 2007 until March 2008 by which time the fault-lines became self-evident and the collapse happened in July 2008. Then onwards, for the past decade, I have been using this very simple process of deductive logic for predicting the future after identifying things that can trigger change- social trends, politics and technology amongst many others. That is the secret behind predicting that oil price would collapse in 2008 whilst the general opinion, including that of Goldman Sachs, was that it would rise from $140 per barrel to $180. (more…)