Mar&Apr

 Ok so i missed the Mar updates :) and here i try to combine both Mar and Apr. But honestly, time flies and much more happens when you are into the thick of things. March and April have both been super hot this season, and while i did travel to a few places they were equally hot if not more, both Chennai and Trichy. I got to know some fun names of the different dishes there - like perpusli, vethakolzubu, moorkozumbu, kootu and all (ok I know i got all those spellings wrong!). So yea, looking forward for the summer to go and rains to come by — today it started to rain super heavy suddenly so there is hope. In fact it rained so hard that the tree branch fell on our house gate and wrecked it! Just got those fixed and blah. This city also needs a big re development project, everything seems to be falling apart..!

Book readings have slowed down noticeably last few weeks- maybe it’s the heat and everything-but haven’t been able to finish any book last two months, super slow progress. But now i am reading a new book - Orhan Pamuk’s Other Colors. The other book of his was My name is Red, which was a long read but very interesting literature. This is more auto biographical and short stories in a way - it’s also a book that has won the Nobel Prize. So looking forward. 

Things have picked up in office with more projects added into the fray. Taking stock, one by one! The office visits are a good things still - I find the interactions more positive, quick and in some ways more meaningful - like humane., Anyway i guess that’s here to stay so that helps. 

May seems like another busy month. I may take a few days off for a few hospital checks and visits for parents - but that’s about it. Too hot still to plan anything more. Looking forward to June already :)

- NB

Right First Time

So its a book, and quite an old publication too, somewhere in the 80s! I heard about this from Dad who read this book on quality control, several many years ago, I remember seeing it with him when i was in school i think! He had borrowed it from the library. He had told me that it was an excellent introduction to quality control and how it gets applied in the manufacturing world (his line of work too). 

Several years passed and i was in college and we did have subjects on statistics and probability and application of the normal distribution in many areas of work. And i was into these quality books too by then, inspired by dad again, and had read works of Edwards Deming (Out of the Crisis), Scherkenbach (The Deming Route to Quality), Phil Crosby (Quality is Free), Frank Price (Right Every Time) and a few others. The one by Frank Price was actually a sequel to the first book, Right First Time, which i was never able to get. The ones available for sale online were priced 4k and 5k (international editions, and way too pricey) and i could not find it in the British Library or other places too. 

Until now! I got the copy from the IIM-B library recently and of course I borrowed it! Its been a month (or more i think!) since i have it and just completed it now! The book, the style of writing and the concepts were very easily presented in such an entertaining way too, a testament to the expertise of the author to make an otherwise drab subject, as interesting as a novel! 

The book starts with the ill's that plague the companies in the industrial sector, faced with tons of quality issues, and rejections. It goes on to explain about how to measure process capability, measure it against tolerance limits (after much negotiations on the specifications based on the ultimate function), and find answers to the question "Can we make it ok?" in this stage. Subsequently, moving on to answer the question "Are we making it ok?", where it gets into sampling and measurements, and understanding drifts of averages and range, and setting control limits to the process. And finally trying to answer, "Can we make it better?",  a question towards continuous improvement and action. Here the concepts of t-tests and f-tests were introduced, as a way to compare between capabilities of different machines and to enable us to make a distinction of which one is better (using statistical significance). 

While the above made part-1 of the book (where there was a fair bit of math), part-2 dealt more with people and quality, as after all, the outcomes are indeed due to a large measure upto the people incorporating the practices of quality control. To this extent, it explained several concepts from behavioral science, especially covering the fallacies of Fred Taylor, and McGregor's theory X & Y. And moving into more recent studies of Heizberg and Maslow (Theory Z) and Lawler, towards breaking down the activities of work and the motivations (will) to make a good deal of it. 

Overall, the book is a managerial treatise on quality control, explained in a language that is ironic, and witty, and towards the end, dealing a lot with psychology and human behavior. It was a good read, and almost felt like a literary work towards the end, due to the inimitable language and the ease with which difficult concepts were introduced fairly simply. 

I am glad i could finally read this work, and appreciate what my dad must have appreciated so many years ago! And i told him i read it...you should have seen the glint in his eye :) 

Ciao!

Of painted caves and evolution...!

Thinking back upon civilization, man and evolution, the entire gamut of human and other life, leaves a sense of awe and at some level, even a suspension of belief in the grandeur of creation. For it all begets the question of time and its beginning. It begets questions on how we came to be, what we came to be and at some level, why we came to be! If we give that a skip, it still stares at you and forces you to step back, pause and wonder. For the questions are all around, in every little thing out there in nature, and possibly in every act of ours.

So, what is making me write about this? Well, I have been reading this book called "Secrets of the Past". Its a seriously old publication (somewhere from the 50's) from the Reader's Digest editors. It takes you through a tour from the beginning of time, at the creation of the earth and the stars, the awesome forces that makes up the universe including white-dwarfs and black holes and many such others. The sheer numbers, when it describes distances, temperatures and forces, is fathomless.

It then starts the journey of creation on earth, the tectonic plate’s shifts, the different eras, the first signs of life, the first great wild animals and life. It goes on to the beginning of the appearance of many, many millennia ago, of prehistoric man (prehistoric, because that’s the time when history was not written/recorded, but we are beginning to understand it from facts gathered through research and study of fossils and archaeology and whatever remains of our own earliest forms, from what they left in their wake) It takes you through this roller-coaster ride, where man, the hunter-gatherer, the fellow who lived in trees, finally, with the passing of aeons and aeons of years, begins to climb down those trees, begins to scan the vastness of the lands, learns, understands and survives, ever so slowly, through many more millennia's. It seizes your imagination, thinking of the enormity of our evolution!

It also talks of our far off ancestors, leaving a trail of their occupations, embedded in the ages long gone by, and in many different places too, scattered all over the world. The way they lived, what they ate, how they survived, what kept them going are the very many things, that makes the book extremely interesting to read. Oh, and so far, it’s just a quarter of the book!

Or of course, if you choose not to let your mind do the imagining, you can tune into National Geographic on tv :) but hey, it doesn’t even come close!

In any case, it probably isn’t just this book, but others too which might be equally interesting, if you like that kind of stuff...now let’s see, where was I, ah..the painted caves of the Tassili in the Sahara.. :)

Chao!

I am 'listening' a Book !

I was not a great fan of audio books and always thought people who listened to them were either the ones who were completely unread, or that they were too busy doing other important things in life (and I wondered what exactly!) and had no time on hand to sit with a book to, duh, read them. Because it takes me long to commute to office and back, and though I have lots of reading material with me always, sometimes it gets a lil boring. So I thought of checking out on audio books anyway (ewww...). While browsing, I came across the website Librivox. Here there were tons of audio books all in the public domain and available for download. It was real eye-opener to find so many classics which were just lying there! Gee, it was like I had found some treasure trove :) I went ahead and downloaded the "Sign of Four" (Arthur Conan Doyle) which I thought would be easy listening. A sample chapter from the book confirmed it. There are other websites too where you can get public domain books. Here is another.

For the next one month, I listened up chapter upon chapter of the book. To be frank, it was a real treat to the mind and ears too! The lady reading the book had a wonderful voice and I could see the story unfolding in front of my eyes as I listened to it. I could see Sherlock sitting in his chair and Watson by the side as they solved another great mystery! It was fun! From then on my take on audio books has changed. Though I personally do prefer reading from a real book whenever possible, because I like to get a feel of the book, read it word by word and also have the convenience of flipping back to read up some craftily written piece, you might enjoy listening to an audio version of the book too. I would probably reserve it to light literature and not serious literary work. And anyway, there are not as many audio books either.

In the meantime, I have just downloaded 'The Man who would be King' and 'Siddhartha'! Happy reading...er..listening!