The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

It was 6:30 PM IST, which was 9 AM EST.

Kalam: Good morning Your Excellency.

Musharraf: Good morning President (Musharraf forgot the time difference). Kashmir…..(cut short by Kalam)

Kalam: Yes, Kashmir. Few minutes back I was in the herbal garden of Rashtrapati Bhawan, where we have some of the herbs especially brought from Kashmir. The ancient science of Ayurveda, emphasized a lot on the importance of herbs in our life. They give you vitality(pauses and sips something, which he emphasizes is Kashmiri drink Kehwa, organically grown). Infact, you must take a pledge that you would only consume herbal products. I have a pledge for you(picks up a card next to him but is cut short by Musharraf)

Musharraf: Mr. President, my entire country right upto every single child wants….

Kalam: Ah, children. In my last five years, I have met two lakh children every year and conveyed the value of science, human values and hard work. Infact, hard work can shape up your destiny. A girl from Meghalaya asked me recently…

Musharraf: Your Excellency it would be better if we…

Kalam: Yes, agreed. Telemedicine is better. In my country, there are 250 districts and 4679 blocks and 8374529 villages. Not every village has a primary health centre. So, we have positioned telemedicine vans which travel the interiors and through remote telemetry via low orbit satellites connects the patients to the best of the specialists operating out of any part of the world. This way mankind can tremendously leverage science and….

Musharraf: Your Excellency, small request.

Kalam: I was coming to all things small. Infact, in the times to come, Nanotechnology would play such a vital role in what we do, even the ordinary cars would have lot of nanoscale parts. The applications of nanoscale are diverse. In my country, we have set up four advanced centers to research on nanoscale applications. Not just nanotechnology, but biotechnology….

Musharraf: For strategic reasons, I…

Kalam: Infact strategy, vision & core competence and have to be interlinked. I have visited all the states of India. Few days back, talking to students at an IIM I came across a physically challenged student who had topped the class. Can you tell me why he succeeded?(Pauses and resumes) He succeeded because he had a vision from his childhood, had a strategy to get there using his core competence, which was quantitative techniques. Infact, in India, we have been blessed with a lot of ancient time mathematicians such as Aryabhatta, and in modern times such as Ramanujam who under the guidance of …..

(Musharraf forgets his agenda and realizes the knowledge overflow. He starts seeing lot of value in what Kalam is speaking and asks his ADC, “Have you taken notes properly?”)
Abdul Kalam gets up from his seat and bids goodbye to Musharraf. And adds, “No need for any notes. The entire conversation would be up on Rashtrapati Bhawan website in about 15 minutes. Infact, an MPEG file would be emailed to you in the next thirty minutes. Or would you prefer to have it on YouTube, Your Excellency?”

I heard CKP at an academic event couple of years back and was stuck by a mesmerizing presentation he gave on what appeared in the bookstore later as “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”. As a logical sequel, this book appeared on the shelves of a colleague a months back, and I have helpfully borrowed it, without giving my colleague the chance to say no. So next few days, I will have this highly talked about book for bedtime reading. Shall certainly write when I finish, which I am hoping will be by end of next week.

Updated: Here is the post.

My friend Rajeev Singh sent me this beautiful parable from Durban.Cannot resist posting this, since this shows the true contrast between good communication and better communication. The beauty in the message is its sheer simplicity.Here it goes.

A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: “I am blind, please help.” There were only a few coins in the hat.
A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, “Were u the one who changed my sign this morning? What did u write?”

The man said, “I only wrote the truth. I said what u said but in a different way.”What he had written was: “Today is a beautiful day & I cannot see it.”

Do u think the first sign & the second sign were saying the same thing? Of course both signs told people the boy was blind. But the first sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people they were so lucky that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?
Moral of the Story:

Be thankful for what you have.

Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively.

Wikipedia defines Open Source as follows:

“Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice.”

So, when I read about a car being made ‘Open Source‘, I halted to read about it. At the Dutch auto-fair Auto RAI 2007, The Netherlands Society for Nature and Environment and the three technical universities of Delft, Eindhoven and Twente launched what was termed as their stimulating vision on mobility. In plain language, three universities have come together to design a car on the collaborative movement called Open Source. The car of the future is called c,mm,n (pronounced ‘Common‘). Essentially, that would mean, collaborative, shared designing of a car(‘a car‘ -isn’t that an oxymoron in the context of Open Source?!) by car design enthusiasts. The blueprints are available for anyone to download, improve and productionize if you wish, provided, you plough back your improvements to the common knowledge pool.

Hang on, the cars aren’t rolling off the assembly line anytime soon(and certainly you would never download the car from Sourceforge), we are just talking about the initial phase of this new idea. If you would like to see a visual of c,mm,n, Core 77 has a picture of the concept car showcased at Auto RAI 2007.

Car design is a complex and very expensive affair. Maybe, like Linux avatars, a bunch of talented car designers form a ‘kernel’, from which many derivative models can be made. Maybe the frame, the engine, the powertrain designs would evolve in public domain. That is the idea behind this Open Source Car movement.

Another related point. As cars become more complex, they carry more an more of embedded software for control, in a field called infotronics. Not sure how far how much Open Source movement really fits into that, since most of the infotronics (some estimates put it over 10-15% of overall cost of some categories of cars) is believed to be proprietary, and in a very competitive space.

Overall,c,mm,n brings the concept of Open Source to the physical domain. A very interesting idea indeed. Move over Ford, GM, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Tata. The kids are on the drawing board and they know what they are doing.