Would you believe that a seeemingly endless list of names of strangers could tell a poignant tale ?
This long list is a snapshot of "Booming" India's Agrarian crisis. What it doesn't talk about is the plight of the families of these deceased men. Each person on this list may have had at least 3 or 4 lives dependent on him - lives that may have withered off by now !


Sainath's book titled "Everybody loves a good drought", is a collection of stories from India's poorest and unheard-of districts.I read it about a year ago. It paints the true picture of my land - The land of contradictions, The land of abundance and paucity !!

More here.

Currently


Reading..





Watching..

Books for January

In the Market: The Illustrated History of the Financial Markets




The Rational Unified Process Made Easy: A Practitioner's Guide to the RUP (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

WELCOME 2008

As 2007 retreats....

As the winter lumbers along...
This year, the snow arrived on the first of December and it has been fairly cold all through the month. Here are a few snaps that I took today,

Search engine trends and stock performance

This is the kind of stuff that I usually write in my other blog.

Can Google Zeitgeist help you predict the stock market trends ? I heard about this today on Fast Money !




Given above are the following charts,
1) Google Trend chart for XBOX and Playstation searches
2) Stock Price chart for Microsoft (Left)
3) Stock Price chart for Sony Corp(Right)

The question here is whether the spikes on the trend chart have immediately preceded (at least often) spikes on the stock price chart. If yes, Is it possible to closely follow such trends in every market and make the right stock picks ?
I need to take a look at several more jagged peaks before I make up my mind on this. Anyway, the idea that search trends can be tracked to predict stock swings had never crossed my mind before. Well, long way to go :-).

Of Nukes and Mutually Assured Destruction
Yesterday, I was watching an interview with General (Retd) Shanker Roy Choudhary who was India's Army chief from 1994 to 1997. The General spoke about India's nuclear policy which was one of second strike as opposed to Pakistan's first strike and with an India focus. Well, that may sound like an effective strategy for deterrence. The General's comments were well balanced and he made no malapropos statements. But words, no matter how civilized or ominous they sound cannot substitute for proper planning.
I pass in front of the Schenectady Masonic Temple every day on my way to office. The building houses a fall out shelter, one of the several hundreds in this country. Built during the days of the cold war, such shelters would act as asylums for ordinary folks to escape from nukes and the ensuing radiation. National Geographic channel once ran a documentary on how adults and kids were taught to duck and cover in offices and schools during the cold war days when the threat of a nuclear war loomed large. The military spent millions of dollars building nuclear bunkers and also made plans to save the leadership in case of any such eventualities.
Now coming back to my earlier point - If India truly wishes to abandon the ability to strike first, it should prepare to survive the enemy's first strike. If they attack the metros and other large cities, the casualties could easily run into several millions and then comes the deaths due to radiation. Attacking major cities and vital installations has the potential to break the country's communication backbone. So the General's answers made me think..

1) Why have I never heard of any shelters being built in the major cities in India ?

2) Why is the population not taught survival strategies (At least in the major cities) ?

3 ) What if the attack is massive and it destroys our nuclear assets there by hampering our ability to launch a retaliatory attack from India ?

4) Shouldn't India have bought/built nuclear submarines capable of launching ICBMs (wonder where we are on the much vaunted "Surya") and have them scattered across the globe ? All I have heard about is a protracted tug of war for leasing the "Akula" from Russia. During the cold war, the Russians and the Americans built nuclear submarines which guaranteed them the ability to strike back.

5) Shouldn't we think of building some kind of missile defence system ? President Bush's invitation was readily shot down by our mandarins .

Well, I hope that the Indian leadership who ought to be far more intelligent, knowledgable and smarter than me, has answers to all these questions.

And above all, I hope and pray that a nuclear war always confines itself to literature and imagination. May it never happen in real life. Peace to All ! :-)

Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) Examination
I have cleared the CBAP examination conducted by the International Institute of Business Analysis. I have received some mails asking me about the examination / certification after my comment on the IIBA community in orkut. So it may be worthwhile posting what I know, if it helps at least one person out there.

The CBAP examination is a test of your knowledge of common Business Analysis processes and practices. This is no rocket science and IMHO all you need to crack the exam is a week of dedicated effort ( ~ 30 hours of study ) - well, that is for a person of average retention like me. If you are smarter, the lesser hours you need to invest.

The CBAP questions are from 6 main topics,

1. Enterprise Analysis,
2. Requirements Planning and Management,
3. Requirements Elicitation,
4. Requirements Analysis and Documentation,
5. Requirements Communication,
6. Solution Assessment and Validation

A quick glance at the BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge ), would convince anyone who has spent a couple of years doing Requirements Analysis that these chapters contain processes that they follow in their day to day work. The CBAP certification is aimed at intermediate and senior Business Analysts ( you need 7500 hours of BA experience + a few other things..check the IIBA website for details. )

A couple of mails were about how I prepared for the exam. Well, this is what I did,

1. I read the BABOK cover to cover twice (300 pages of processes and practises. I had to read it twice for the ideas to percolate deep enough). As I said earlier, If you are smarter than me, you may have to read it only once.

2. CBAP exam questions/question papers are not available online and hence I bought the CBAP exam guide from B2T Training. Here is the link. It contains about 450 multiple choice questions that you can attempt after you read the BABOK.

3. A few questions ( I recall about 4 or 5) are from outside the BABOK. They may be from the PMBOK ( the one used for the PMP certification) or any of the reference books mentioned in the BABOK. I didn't spend any time reading these books - most of these just need common sense to answer. Example :
In which level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs does Problem Solving belong ?
a) Self-actualization b)Esteem c)Belonging d) Safety

I had no idea about the 5 levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs when I first saw this question ( It is also not mentioned in the BABOK ). But there is a no reason to think that it would belong to Esteem, Belonging or Safety. Problem Solving and Creativity should be associated with Self- Actualization.

To cut a long story short - Read the BABOK cover to cover, take some practise tests and you should sail through. Good Luck !

This is interesting. It tells you how to charge your iPod ( or for that matter any small USB powered electronic gadget ) using,
1. An Onion
2. A Cup of Gatorade
3. A screw driver.

Boy, Renewable energy sources are certainly catching on in this country ;-).