The world's best CHAOS

To go on to visualize a successful chaos, lets begin with Singapore of all places!! Singapore, as most of us are aware, is amongst the most disciplined, organized and well-governed city-states in the world. You can't get away with littering or breaking rules. Shops and businesses strictly adhere to the time guidelines [and not tweak these on the basis of their business realities or maybe even by bribing cops/authorities]. There is no unruly traffic - since no one really breaks the rules!

But in all this, there exists a small area where
--> you could occasionally find litter on the pavement or
--> shops/businesses [Mustafa! - Frankly I don't understand why so many desis shop there of all places in Singapore!] have successfully tweaked the rules - Mustafa is the ONLY 24-hour shopping center in Singapore!
--> and you would encounter the occasional traffic chaos around the parking lots

and this place could only be called "Little India" :)

While these arguably are the negatives about Little India, the good points are those that are common to everything that has "India" in it:

1. Very buzzing and active - meaning lot of people, lot of noise and a lot of work happening all the time!
2. Business, trade and commerce thrives successfully here, setting new benchmarks all the time.
3. The food is brilliant!
4. And of course, it is very colorful here!

Again while these are true of India [or Little India in Singapore] - there's of course a lot more that goes on to define my super country.

Being the largest, oldest and continuous civilization in the world - we have given [and very passionately continue to give] more people to this world than anyone else. If there ever was a debate globally as to who gets the credit for the progress of human race - India should win hands-down - had we not procreated - there would be no people and hence no progress! [This silly argument apart, we should anyway be responsible for most progress purely on the basis of the quality of our people]. India and her people have had admirable qualities, some of which are:

1. Tolerant and peace-loving - we haven't invaded other countries or enforced our beliefs on other people [at least not forcefully!]
   
2. No word is rich enough to describe the heritage and culture - earliest school of medicine known to man [Ayurveda], the mother of all European languages [debatable but I am convinced it is Sanskrit], religions, scriptures, epics, vedas and it goes on
3. Hard-working and progressive - this is quite evident even in the current times where our junta is often blamed for taking the jobs away from some of the lazier folks :)
4. Hospitable and welcoming to all - Unfortunately could also be the reason why we had so many foreign rulers!

However, like everyone else, I too have opinions on what we should do and what we shouldn't do in our country :)

What we should do
- Focus on the basics - land, water, resources and above all people --> While it's probably good to have enough people to take over the world without having to fight a single battle - what we don't realize is that all these people don't go to settle in other countries and that we all are trying to use the same set of resources that half of us were using some decades ago. These resources unfortunately don't share our quality of exponential growth! And knowing this, there still isn't a single man [or woman], in the house that matters, who would talk about implementation of population control! The mindset is "It's something that the masses don't like and let's not raise it - we might just get a negative impact and lose the elections!"
- Stronger judiciary --> not the one Sunny Deol refers to in Damini
- Remove ANY political influence from the armed forces, police system, national educational institutions

What we shouldn't do
- Take decisions on basis of religion/caste --> be it hanging criminals or creating reservations in education/jobs or giving/not-giving benefits to a group of people
- Educated/well-meaning citizens, social activists and political outfits fighting the battles alone --> There are so many amazing people, who have willingly given up their comfortable and successful lives/careers and decided to make a difference - these folks would really make a difference if they were together - if they were one force

The list as such can go on..

What, however is interesting, is that with all the good and bad, we still click as a country - we are growing and succeeding at whatever we do. India and Indians have this innate quality of making things work - even if the best of resources may not be available, we make do with what we have and get the best out of it. Everyday the commuters in Mumbai's local trains complain of the extreme crowd and the mess - but they still continue to make it the most relied upon, fastest and most convenient mode of transport in Mumbai! India's biggest industrial house sets up one of the most ambitious car projects in a state which has historically not been too warm to industry - only to suffer later thanks to political reasons - but the project doesn't get shelved - it ends up in the leading pro-industry state of India and gets perfectly on track! The Tirupati Temple in Andhra Pradesh has 50,000-100,000 visitors everyday and without using any advanced logistic mechanisms or equipments, the authorities have designed quite a unique system where the time spent by devotees has gone down steeply over the years [although the number of devotees has been going up]. These are just some examples that go on to illustrate the "make things work" quality of Indians.

To come to think of it, it is our unique mix - of the experienced and the youth - of the conservative and the modern - of the right and wrong - that make us work - that make US the world's best chaos..

And lets leave it that thought for now.

Happy Independence Day!

Some pictures from India's first independence day - August 15th, 1947

the last part...

Summit day #2 had more lined up and had more than just eclipse to talk about. Also, deciding on sessions/workshops in advance allowed us to space out that little time in between to meet/talk/catch-hold-of.

Once again, the day began with the compère extraordinaire [:)]. However, she ended up repeating precisely what she said the previous day [:(]. The first "sponsored" session was by Oracle - by Dhiraj Bhandari who was going to speak about the eclipse plug-in to rapid deployment on weblogic. And this is what I recollect / found interesting:

1. Starting off with Oracle strategy for Eclipse and other development tools [a key question was asked towards the end. Now that Netbeans is in the kitty, how does the priority for Eclipse change - and Dhiraj stressed that JDeveloper and Eclipse are the order in which their priorities remain - big point?]
2. Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse [OEPE] and it's component structure
   
3. All the features of the above mentioned plug-in and relevant tools
4. A very interesting new feature 'Fast Swap' - which aims to cut the Edit>Build>Deploy>Test to Edit>Test!! This was illustrated with an example
5. With a concluding demo + some good Q&A - Oracle finished well

Unfortunately for the next "sponsored" session, the previous session had overshot it's time. This did not deflate Bharath K from IBM who spoke on Enhancing the productivity of RAD using Websphere. I, however, spent most of the next 20 minutes filling the feedback form.

Once done [!!] with the sponsored sessions, we were back to the 3 parallel tracks. While Ilya's workshop on Design Patterns Used in Eclipse garnered much interest, there was one track which had 3 sessions.

The first was Google AppEngine for Java and Eclipse Developers and the speaker for this was a Google AND Microsoft evangelist [how? just how??] - Janakiram MSV! Lot of pluses for this one - very good topic, exceptional presentation and even better presentation/visualization skills! He concluded with a great demo - showing the hands-on role of Eclipse while jumping on the Google AppEngine / Cloud Platform. It was fairly certain that his audience would return for his next session later in that track.

I skipped the next session and went about to mingle with the Eclipse junta and visit the stalls. Thanks to our "sponsored" sessions overshooting the time given to them, everything was running pretty late. It was time for Janakiram's second session - Lighting up Java Web Apps with Silverlight. Now Janakiram brought a Mac with a dual boot for Windows and well, as per the unwritten rule, Windows crashed :) It was a two-pronged attack really - M$ being M$ would always crash and Apple being Apple [when it comes to going against M$] would ensure that there was no recovery!

To add to his woes, there were some Adobe flex supporters who posed some interesting questions to Janakiram. All-in-all his session was fairly interesting!

By-the-way, all this trouble allowed for the early delay to be covered up and saltmarch were back again to their punctual best. In the last part of the summit, I went for the track with a short session on OSGi packaging and Eclipse as a framework of frameworks. No bias against Progress Software but both their sessions [previous day's case study and today's OSGi packaging were VERY boring!]. The speaker, who was originally listed on the schedule, missed out and someone else filled in for him. Unfortunately though the compère was not aware/informed and she went on to thank the missing speaker! [:D]

The final session I attended at the summit was Anshu Jain's Eclipse as a Framework of Frameworks. Anshu came in a breezy manner and had a large audience [with no offense to his topic/knowledge, this large audience was partly because the test automation tools workshop in the second track had failed big time!]. He encountered more technical issues while simultaneously doing both - troubleshooting + interacting with the audience. His premise was simple but the way he took us to that was very powerful. His session was not as much about getting to know new things but more about realizing the power of what you already knew!

I skipped the last BIRT session and went to get my all-black-tee. With the last few business cards getting exchanged, we bid adieu to two-days-of-really-well-organized-knowledge-sessions!

Considering that the eclipse community is pretty niche in India as yet and there is comparatively lesser buzz around the same; Saltmarch & Ancit did a pretty neat job of making things interesting and insightful.

With that and an early flight, the terribly short trip to Bengaluru also came to an end.. and we returned to base camp.