I read on Spaceweather.com today morning about an intercontinental network of space weather balloon released by the website in collaboration with Earth to Sky. The data is released on the website.
It would be lovely to get a few balloons from India as well besides the ones being launched from TIFR’s National Balloon Facility in Hyderabad. It would be a fun lear
September 25th was the centennial birth anniversary of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya. I had heard the name mentioned and was curious to know who he was. A cursory reading of the Wikipedia article on him pointed out that it was his philosophy that the Bharatiya Jan Sangh and later the Bharatiya Janata Party followed. His philosophy was called Integral Humanism.
The text that forms the basis of the philosophy is a 1965 text of the same name and can be found on the BJP’s website here. I read the text on Sunday and quite agree with the analysis provided on The Wire.
On the day prior to PSLV’s launch, FactorDaily has a near 2 minute video on the man who succeeded Vikram Sarabhai, laid the foundations for India’s rocketry programme including the PSLV, started the Earth observation and communications satellite programme and after whom India’s space port, Sriharikota is named – Satish Dhawan.
C Gopinath writes in The Hindu Business Line on the lack of attention on mid-level management in relation to the news related to Wells Fargo. I found this paragraph to be instructive and applicable to many organisations in India today:
The problem lies in a managerial culture that has eviscerated the role of the middle manager. Mid-level managers are key to an organisation, translating the policies of the top to operational systems and procedures, and in reverse, interpreting and communicating issues and market intelligence from the bottom. Thanks to new ERP systems and misplaced process re-engineering, the role of the middle manager has been castrated. ‘Yes managers’ have come to occupy those positions. They tell their bosses only what the top wants to hear.
There are many resources for people in their 30s online. Sandeep Maheshwari has this video of the ultimate goal of one’s life and is addressed to an audience in their 30s.
When we mention digital banking today, what comes to mind are mobile apps and internet banking facility provided by our bankers. DBS, a bank from Singapore, changed that by launching Digibank. It applies the term to banking from end to end.
I read about digibank first on Twitter via ads while a tweet from @sengupta made me want to try it out:
Finally 1 bank that’s nailed the entire app only banking experience- Digibank by DBS. An MVP that makes sense with an experience that works.
— Aditya Sengupta (@Sengupta) May 10, 2016
It kept the whole concept vague when it launched. When you download their app, you realise the badassity of the idea. When you first download their app, you get to use it as a wallet, like you would use Paytm’s offering. It then offers you a steep incentive to upgrade this into an account by paying a steep 7% interest when you convert the wallet into an account. Then you can walk in to any Café Coffee Day coffee shop and confirm your identity via a biometric authentication process through the Aadhar database.
The first hindrance it removes is the tedious task of visiting a bank with a form filled up 
online and KYC documents. Here you just walk in to a Café Coffee Day outlet that is open from 11 AM to 11 PM with your mobile phone that has a code on it! The bank also saves tremendously on manpower costs. For the customer, visiting a less formal atmosphere like a coffee shop is less of a hassle than visiting a bank branch during business hours. He/she also probably saves a holiday.
The second hindrance it removes is all the paperwork. eAadhar enables authentication of a customer without him having to take any documents at all. With the data that the customer fed into the app and by taking required permissions, the bank can probably just download the information from the eAadhar platform and the Income Tax website. Imagine the paper that can be saved by saving the paper used for the accounting opening form and the photocopies you had to get for a traditional bank.
The third hindrance it removes is the use of a smart assistance to remove waiting for banks to open to get your problems resolved. If the inbuilt smart assistant does not resolve your problem, it gets transferred to a real person. Technology and AI can actually handle most issues that customers approach a bank with.
That said, being a new thing, there will be teething issues and problems that need to be resolved. My authentication did not work. I don’t know what was the problem. But I was happy that when I wanted to close my account, they did it quite quickly and then sent me an email once that was done.
However, this is how I hope banking will be done in the future. From your device and from your homes.
Towards the end of 2015, I slowly began to loose interest in reading religious texts. They seemed repetitive to the extent I began to wonder that if the texts were so similar, what was there to fight about. D introduced me to Sandeep Maheshwari, an entrepreneur from Delhi who gave talks inspiring students. The first video of Sandeep that I watched was “Last Life-Changing Seminar” on YouTube.
Till then the only things I used to watch on YouTube are TED talks and Talks at Google. The Life-Changing Seminar was the first Hindi video that I heard from start to end. The full hour or so.
Slowly, Sandeep’s videos started to move towards the spiritual. This started, in my opinion with a how-to video on basic meditation. He understood that not everyone was interested in the spiritual and hence started a separate channel on YouTube for his spiritual stuff. This is the channel that interests me. His inspirational video and videos related to personal excellence continue. The first few times I watched the spiritual videos, I spent them trying to pin down what teaching he followed. I wanted to categorise them so that I could then read the books myself.
While I am still getting the hang of the basic meditation video through daily practice, I have continued watching his videos on his spirituality channel. Slowly, I concentrated more on what he was saying than trying to classify his talk. His spiritual talk, also in Hindi, seek to clarify and are linked to examples befitting the twenty first century.
These talks helped revive my own spiritual interest, helped clear my understanding and understand some things much better in Hindi than while reading some texts in English.
Prabhat Patnaik writes a useful critique of the Left in this thoughtful piece in The Hindu.
What is true, however, is that even the Indian communists, despite being opposed to globalisation and associated neo-liberal policies, have not charted a concrete alternative development strategy. Their opposition has taken the form of identifying particular parties as neo-liberal and having no truck with them, which has hampered united struggles for the defence of secularism and democracy. But uniting with others in struggles, on platforms, and even in government, against the Hindutva and semi-fascist forces and on the basis of a concrete alternative agenda to neo-liberalism, will serve the people better.
We need a good Left and a Right in politics to have a more balanced world. Also, waiting to see such a useful critique of the Right.
Kammattipaadam is a Malayalam movie starring Dulquer Salman that looks at the story of urban development and the communities it marginalises. The story runs through the life of the lead character, Krishnan, played by Dulquer Salman and how Kammattipaadam where he grew up also grows or is developed.
Kammattipaadam is a place outside the Kochi-Ernakulam twin cities. Krishnan’s childhood is spent in village surroundings with his parents and the generation engaged in farming. As Krishnan grows farming sees a decline and they become part of the outskirts of Ernakulam. Here, in his teenage years, Krishnan takes on criminal activities like others from his community and income group as farming is no longer seen as a viable means to make a livelihood. He stabs a police officer and is sent to jail. When he returns as an adult, he sees that his Kammattipaadam has changed.
Kammattipaadam is now a suburb with small houses replacing farm land. Builders buying old hutments in bulk and building buildings to house the burgeoning population now coming to Ernakulam and Kochi. The crime moves up from petty crimes and spirit business to extortion in communities who stand up to builder lobby that seek to clear people without adequate compensation for the land. The same criminals seem to learn the folly of their ways too late and lose their own land are themselves displaced. The compensation makes up for the price of land but does not make up for the loss of livelihoods.
Moving from farming, many of the people displaced take up plying vehicles, running small businesses and somehow surviving while others take to even more serious crimes like murder. Some who learn the folly of their ways are also not allowed to move out as the past comes back to haunt them.
The movie itself is a rare crime-drama film in Malayalam with realistic portrayals from various actors. The film does not seek to answer how to fix the issues that it raises but rather holds up a mirror to the urban community to show that this is probably how the buildings that you live in was built up – on the blood and toil of communities and people who were extorted and murdered to fulfil the whims of early developers who were driven by the greed of money.
It could be that this was not the case, but the movie makes you curious about how your urban sprawl grew, what was there before and the people who once called that land home.
A company in the US, Planetary Resources has started making efforts to mine asteroids or large meteorites in space. I believe Indian companies, especially mining companies which are having a hard time getting government clearances must look at space mining quite seriously. This would be a chance to save the environments in the locations that these mines are located on Earth without moving people out and also will push mineral exploration into space. Also, by the time that they get clearances to mine in India, they could probably build, launch, mine and return back to Earth with minerals and possibly sell them on Earth. This is a good possible study for the MBA types to find out which is cheaper – waiting and getting clearances or launching two spacecrafts into orbit for the purpose of asteroid/meteorite mining.
Wikipedia’s article on Asteroid mining has this to say on the possibilites of minerals present on asteroids and meteorites:
These include gold, iridium, silver, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium,ruthenium and tungsten for transport back to Earth; iron, cobalt, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, aluminium, and titanium for construction; water and oxygen to sustain astronauts; as well as hydrogen, ammonia, and oxygen for use as rocket propellant.
Given this range of options, I thought I should also design a bare bones, un-researched article on one asteroid mining scenario.
My concept works on two spacecraft scenario. One is a longer lasting Tug-craft. The second is a frequent Earth returning Mine-craft.
Earth based asteroid monitoring systems will be used for the twin purposes of keeping an eye on incoming asteroids that could hit Earth called Near Earth Objects as well as potential targets for a tug-craft in orbit. Looking at timelines of spacecraft that cater to the International Space Station or that go to the Moon, we currently can get a spacecraft into Low Earth Orbit and then from there to a specified target (between the ISS to the Moon) in 1 to 5 days. We can also decently estimate their trajectories and velocities to get a handle on where we should send our tug-craft to intercept the asteroids/meteorites and also whether we can send them to intercept points in the time available to us.
For the purposes of this idea, let’s consider that an asteroid passes near the Moon. A tug-craft could either be launched from Earth or a spacecraft already in orbit can be redirected to the target. Let’s say that the tug-craft reaches the intercept point in 5 days. As the asteroid approaches, the tug-craft makes adjustments to it’s orbit, makes more precise calculation of the incoming asteroid’s velocity with respect to itself and begins mapping the mineralogical possibilities that the asteroid/meteorite offers. The tug-craft then uses tugs (metallic or composite rope like structures) to drill and latch onto and slowdown the speeding asteroid using its on-board thruster. It also uses on-board remote sensing instruments and spectrometers to estimated the mineralogical content and location on the asteroid. In my example, I provide for three tugs to pull the asteroid into a mining-parking orbit with the tug-craft dictating the orbit.
This itself would require a minimum of two test flights and a few more flights to improve and perfect asteroid catching techniques. It would be something akin to catching a bullet. It would require continuous improvements or kaizen method to get better and more cost effective in the longer run. But there will be millions of objects to test it on even in the Near Earth space.
The mine-craft’s work is a bit more straight forward, given that the target’s location is known. It only uses data from the tug-craft to understand location of the deposits and begins to mine the asteroid. The raw minerals are collected and returned to Earth. Earth-based mining techniques may not work in space and may require re-working the mining design. The recent launch of expandable spacecrafts would come in handy to increase the amount of material the spacecrafts can bring back to Earth.
The only part of this that we have not worked out fully with is tugging the asteroid and mining the asteroid. Test flights would be needed to test out both systems in parts of space where it keeps away from Earth during such tests. I think these systems could be ready to for deployment after research in the next 5-10 years.
Parallel Spirals 
