yantrajaal : the personal portal of Prithwis Mukerjee

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2009-07-04T14:27:00.003+05:30

Yantrajaal is a personal portal. A portal is defined as a gateway to something or somewhere and many large and excellent portals exist that can lead a visitor through the magic maze of the world wide web. But Yantrajaal is unique because it will lead you into a private web — very unique to me, and me alone — that defines my Digital Identity.
Yantrajaal is a work-in-progress, or as they say in world of Web 2.0, it is in perpetual beta. Yantrajaal began as an eZine in the much-maligned, much derided, dotcom era and has been a testbed for technologies and ideas that have subsequently entered — and even exited from — the mainstream. It is a labour of love — some call it love for labour — that at the moment is trying to crystallise the concept of a digital identity of its creator.
Yantrajaal was born in 1999, when the world wide web was in its infancy. To see what we felt about the web in those days please visit the Nostalgia section.

Prithwis Mukerjee, Calcutta

Nostalgia

2009-07-04T12:43:00.004+05:30

image from Sulekha Rajkumar, Typophile

Yantrajaal completed ten years of existence in June 2009.

This is what I wrote on the home page in June 1999.

The World Wide Web has outgrown its initial concept of a mere network of computers and is being seen today more as a way of life. As it thrives and grows, this web is encompassing and pulling into itself a greater and greater diversity of devices – set top boxes, smart television sets, terrestrial and cellular phones, palmtops, network computers and very soon common household gadgets like refrigerators and microwave ovens. And along with these gadgets, our entire lifestyle is being dragged into this great web or Jaal.
YantraJaal – is an eZine that reflects this new reality. In Sanskrit, “Yantra” is an artifice or a device and “Jaal” is the net or the web. YantraJaal thus, represents the web of connected devices.
YantraJaal is a forum where we explore all that is of interest to the connected community. Here we look at art and literature, science and technology, philosophy and religion – a very ambitious canvas, but one that is necessarily circumscribed by the perspective of the editor who is computer professional based at Calcutta, India. Hence there is a definite bias towards the India-centric view of the world.
Thank you for stopping by this website, we are that sure you would enjoy the articles that we have assembled here. Happy reading.

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and this is where I spent the ludicrous sum of US$ 70 to get my domain name

Bio

2009-07-04T12:37:00.006+05:30

Prithwis Mukerjee is an engineer from IIT, Kharagpur and has done his Masters and PhD in Associative Information Systems from the University of Texas at Dallas, USA.

He has been a footnote in the Great Indian Software Story and was worked in Tata Steel, Tata IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM doing – and in the process learning – all that can be done with and around the software business in India and the world. From in-house software development, through experimenting with new technology, management consulting and global delivery of software services to corporate training there is little that he has not done in career spanning 18 years.

As an extension of his intense involvement with in-house training programs he switched careers, entered academia and is currently a Professor at the Vinod Gupta School of Management at IIT, Kharagpur, India.

Prithwis is a founder member of the ACM India Council and is the current Secretary of the organisation.

For a detailed and updated bio data please visit

Prithwis won the Financial Express Big Idea contest with his unique idea of creating a National School Authority of India and expressing it in exactly 50 words !His professional motto is “Resources are Limited, Creativity is Unlimited”

Focus

2009-07-04T12:36:00.009+05:30

What is Web 2.0 ?

My student Aditya Pauniker has explained it rather well in this book, Web 2.0 - Concepts and Business Models.

The Kollaborative Klassroom is my on going experiment to understand the dynamics of Web 2.0.

Cloud Computing with Zoho

Learn about Zoho, the amazing web based application development tool. Read more about the continuing saga.
I spoke about Cloud Computing to the and this was converted into a slide show.

Second Life

I believe that the current 2D web will eventually evolve into a 3D virtual world and wrote about this in the Economic Times in 2007

I have a Mahamaya Kali temple in Second Life — the amazing 3D virtual world

Parashar21 is tool that uses relational database technology to store horoscopes as sparse matrices. The key idea is that once storage and smart retrieval can be mechanised, then astrological hypotheses can be validated by statistical techniques. To know more about the philosophy and the usage of this unique tool, visit the Parashar21 website by clicking on the logo at the left.

Books

2009-07-04T12:32:00.006+05:30

Business Information Systems ….

Published by Jaico in May 2009
Business Information Systems is short, crisp book that introduces business managers to the key elements of software systems engineering in a manner that is radically different from that found in any contemporary text book. Structured as a dialogue between an expert and a novice – in the Upanishadic traditions of India, this book leads the reader through the technology issues and management processes that are crucial for the successful deployment of information systems. Cutting out abstract, theoretical topics, the book focusses on what is minimally sufficient for a practising manager and yet goes deep enough to take the reader to the point where he or she can actually create and deploy web based applications without the help of professional programmers.
For the cross-over community young line managers and would-be managers studying in B-Schools, this book will provide a robust answer to the perennial question : “I am not a programmer – and have no intention of being one, so why do I need to learn all this technology ?”

The Road to pSingularity

An image of the cosmos as reflected in the still waters of a dispassionate computational analysis. Five different strands of thought – namely, Advaita Vedanta, the plausibility of illusions in a digital ecosystem, the mathematics of the Universal Turing Machine, the persistent and evolving nature of the Genome and Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness – are brought together to create a modern perspective of a world view that was first articulated by Sankaracharya. This vision is delivered, not as a discourse, but instead through a dialogue between a Seeker and Sceptic. Finally, the ubiquity of causality and the existence of free will are challenged and the cosmos is sought to be explained in terms of patterns – the Contours of the Eternal – to which all sentient consciousness finally converge in the ecstasy of pSingularity : the primordial Singularity.
Hardcopy available at my bookshop

The following video is a humorous take-off on the subject this otherwise esoteric book !

Calendar

2009-07-03T16:53:00.003+05:30

This website is currently inoperative

2008-12-17T14:39:00.001+05:30

please go to Yantrajaal at http://www.yantrajaal.com

2007-07-02T10:47:00.000+05:30

Welcome to Yantrajaal

The World Wide Web has outgrown its initial concept of a mere network of computers and is being seen today more as a way of life. As it thrives and grows, this web is encompassing and pulling into itself a greater and greater diversity of devices - set top boxes, smart television sets, terrestrial and cellular phones, palmtops, network computers and very soon common household gadgets like refrigerators and microwave ovens. And along with these gadgets, our entire lifestyle is being dragged into this great web or Jaal.

YantraJaal - is an eZine that reflects this new reality. In Sanskrit, "Yantra" is an artifice or a device and "Jaal" is the net or the web. YantraJaal thus, represents the web of connected devices.

YantraJaal is a forum where we explore all that is of interest to the connected community. Here we look at art and literature, science and technology, philosophy and religion - a very ambitious canvas, but one that is necessarily circumscribed by the perspective of the editor who is computer professional based at Calcutta, India. Hence there is a definite bias towards the India-centric view of the world.

Thank you for stopping by this website, we are that sure you would enjoy the articles that we have assembled here. Happy reading.

Prithwis Mukerjee, Calcutta

Residence @ Renu Villa

2007-06-01T13:40:00.000+05:30

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