What the......

If the guys who set the syllabus for the Kerala University are to be believed, taking a seminar about a topic totally Greek to you is essential for awarding you a degree. Every year, thousands of hapless student scour through IEEE papers for a topic, a paper they can relate to.

You know us. With a syllabus that is at least five years behind the current technological trends, how can you expect anyone to read and understand the latest in technology? And make a presentation on it. Microsoft PowerPoint won't even have half the special characters used in a paper. You can't do a presentation in Latex, as far as I know.

You have to complete this presentation in fifteen minutes. If you believe that it can be done, you will believe in anything. It is funny. My paper, which was a discussion on three quantum cryptographic protocols, had to be presented in ten minutes. The remaining five minutes were for the QA session. You must understand that I was speaking to my classmates, who are engineering students and so think of quantum mechanics as only a branch of Physics. It is just not 'engineering'.

I exceeded the time limit by two minutes. I don't consider it a sin. I only regret not having spent enough time on the B92 and the EPR protocols. Spent too much time on BB84. I should have avoided that. Anyway, my seminar would never have ended in fifteen minutes, even if I were to just read my notes.

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Just heard that Obama's lead has diminished. I hope it is not a sign of things to come.

Pakistan is on the brink of defaulting its loans due to the problem of an abysmally small foreign exchange reserve. I was reminded of something. I guess it was last year when an article was published in a newspaper that the RBI is having huge foreign exchange reserves and that we should employ it in setting up a Sovereign Wealth Fund to invest them abroad, especially in the U.S and European markets, as China was doing. At that time I thought it was a good idea. Others were making oodles of money; why shouldn't we.? The guys at the RBI had no imagination, I thought.

Now I shudder when I think of that. (A rare candid moment for me.)Right now, what I want to find out is whether the people at the helm in RBI are that startlingly brilliant or whether they were just lazy fellows who wanted to avoid the paperwork. If the former condition is true, thankfully, we are having some really wise fellows at top and we can snore peacefully at night. If the latter is true, we have luck, a great deal of it, on our side. I mean, you are having a country running like a well-oiled machine in spite of the government. You may consider this an insult to the machines, but I can live with that.

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Another thing I cannot understand is why share prices go down even if an organization is reporting a 40% rise in its profits, beating all market expectations? I really need an answer for this one. It doesn't sound right!

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An advice to all the kids who are scheduled to come to the planet Earth. If you can help it, don't ever choose parents belonging to the same organization. If you do that, your parents will never have time to talk to you on any other matter. Greater danger if they are workaholics. I am telling this from my years of experience.