Business is War!

Not sure why I didn’t put this here before. Business is War! is a comedy I’ve directed for MANCH, the theatre group at Infosys, Hyderabad. This is a play written by Deepak Morris.

Business is War! from Riyaz Usman on Vimeo.

Generation Gap

I normally travel home breaking my journey taking multiple stops. One risk in this is, sometimes you could miss a connection, thanks to the Indian Standard Time followed by Indian Railway. Last week I was travelling home from Hyderabad via Bangalore, and this happened – missed the connection from Bangalore.

So started this interesting journey – A passenger train to Salem, an Air Bus to Coimbatore, and another to Home. The 5 hour from Bangalore to Salem was most interesting, with a jam packed compartment, with people almost everywhere possible – Seats, floor, luggage rack, toilets… On top of that the vendors of various products – Buttermilk, Samosa, Vada, Peanut, Tapioca, Gauava, Jack fruit etc.,

Most interesting was obviously the people. People of all ages.

Arre Bhai, and Other Things

Last Saturday was my chance to don the QM cap once again at K-Circle. I guess folks enjoyed the quiz. Thanks for the generous review, whoever has written it.

Quoting Verbatim:

Riyaz Usman sporting an Infosys “Hyderabad Quiz Forum” t-shirt, exuded the air of an experienced quiz master as he unveiled his June Arre Bhai quiz. His “waiting-for-the-room-to-fill-up” slide was an interesting visual – the word “June” half obscured by a hillside (like a sunrise), and a plug for the June 21st Summer Solstice. This was a “tell”, since questions from that realm of knowledge also made an appearance.

25 Lone Wolves arrayed around Riyaz who held in his clicker two sets of 30Q that were going to be answered in the old fashioned analog way – by putting pen to paper. The first set of 30 seemed to have been designed as an engine primer; they were enjoyable and guessable but remarkable in that they enabled higher scores in the second set.

The QM showed his predilection for First Generation video games with two questions about very early games – one game that a software icon created, and the other game an icon in its own right.

Physics/physicist questions were eagerly lapped up by the science-types; A visual with a 60s style “shaggin wagon” with tell-tale markings and a really leading license plate made us all eagerly mentally tabulate physicist names and strike off the ones that did not gel with the visual clues.

There were some interesting visual connects for us to sprain our eyes on – one collage included a set of animals, a world leader, a lofty peak and a farm implement; another showed us an interesting type of doodle whose style we had to identify, and yet another that showed a selection of movie posters of the patriot/war genre.

Riyaz’ quiz was also an ode to the obviously central position that Wikipedia has in the lives of quizzers, and indeed in the lives of all curious people. “Wikipedia” featured as the answer to two questions – one in each set. That frequency is, if anything, an underestimate of the importance of that online resource to us all.

As the Solstice reference had intimated, there were a few Astronomy related questions that had us seeing stars…(not really, but it was a pun waiting to happen!). One question connected astronomy to a physical manifestation of modern commerce, which I thought was terrific.

Showbiz was a major player in the quiz with cameos by a famous movie making duo, a very successful sci-fi movie of the 80s, an Indian flick from the dawn of the film era, a legendary creator of enchanted stories, and a famous spoof of sc-fi films. If there was an also-ran, it was sports; but what was represented from the world of sports, were probably the most iconic, long-lasting sports images and ideas so they were really enjoyable to work out from the given clues.

All in all, a varied and wonderful quiz. Riyaz: your flair for the dramatic, the visual and the entertaining, all came together to make this a memorable session. Thanks, and come back soon!

For those who missed it, the quiz is available at Google Docs, and a low-res PDF as direct download. For those who were there already, attempt the bonus connect round at the end of quiz.

In other news, Infosys team including the humble me has won the ICICI inter-corporate Quiz contest, the same morning. This came almost within a month after winning the Debate contest by ICICI. My shelf got richer by two more trophies! Meantime my bank account got poorer by a significant amount, thanks to the new digital toy – Canon EOS 550D.

12 Angry Men at Infy Hyd

The next production by MANCH theatre at Infosys Hyd DC. Staging this on 31st March 2011. Planning to stage this outside Infy too. Contact me if you can help.

Dear Linguistic Friend

It makes you feel good when you hear good things about your good friends. And when you keep on hearing good news, nothing like it. Santhosh Thottingal, is one such good friend, who always makes his friends happy with continuous feed of good news. He pings almost every day with some news or the other. It can be about his workshop on Wikimania 2010 in Poland, or about one of his apprentice winning Google SoC scholarship, or one of his project making big news.

Recently, he has been selected to the Language committee of Wikimedia foundation in its recent expansion. Santhosh is the first and only Indian in the 16-member committee. Not a small achievement at all.

Wikimedia Foundation is the organization which operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation language committee is in charge of developing a clear policy and documentation for new language projects and their proposal, processing those requests, and supporting and coordinating new projects to optimize their success.

Santhosh is a major Wiki-contributor from India, and a volunteer in several Indian language projects.  He is known for his contributions to Free and Open source projects particularly in Indic language computing. He is a lead developer of Swathanthra Malayalam computing, a developer collective working for Malayalam language computing. He is also the author of Dhvani Text to speech system for Indic languages which won FOSS India award 2008. He is upstream author for more than 10 packages related to language computing in various GNU/Linux distributions. He is the author of hyphenation algorithms for Indic languages in TeX and Openoffice.org. He designed and developed the biggest Indic language computing initiative named SILPA and authored many Indic language processing algorithms such as Indic soundex, cross language fuzzy string match etc.  He wrote the wiki2cd tool used for creating the offline version of Malayalam Wikipedia. He was invited to conduct a workshop on offline Wikipedia projects in Wikimania 2010, the annual Wikipedia conference at Poland.

His admission to the Wikimedia Language committee has happened taking his years of contribution to the Indian language computing into consideration, along with his numerous contributions to Wiki projects. This sure is a proud moment for all of the FLOSS community in India.

Visit Santhosh’s blog to know more about him and his projects.