Aadhar: no support yet

Aadhar (meaning "support" or "base" in Hindi) is India's rather ambitious Unique Identification project (UID), where it is envisaged that every Indian will have a unique id system, which will then link up all the kinds of IDs in a single system. The other day, I went to get myself registered for this. I had read that there were several people who were against it because of privacy concerns.

Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try. After getting the forms and filling it up, I went to a registration center. I had to stand in a queue with about 25 people ahead of me. The service time require per person is anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes, more so if the forms have not been filled up correctly.

When my turn arrived, I was quite impressed by the entire setup used for the registration. There were fingerprint scanners, retina scans, and the information was filled up in both English and Devnagiri. After verification by me, the person at the counter prints out a receipt in duplicate, and hands us one of the copies.

What really pissed me off is that at the bottom of the form on the screen is a checkbox called "Make information public" or something to that effect. The person did not even bother asking me, and simply went ahead and clicked it. Now, imagine all these personal details floating around on the Internet, and its a very good material for getting a fake user id or for misuse in changing personal details on important accounts.

No matter how secure they say the system is, this is one thing that Aadhar will not get my support for.

A lesson in mathematics for a rickshaw driver

I had earlier written about how to compute the regular fare for the Mumbai autorickshaws. At the end of a rickshaw trip, I try to pronounce the fare computed from the meter reading. This usually impresses the rickshaw drivers. On a couple of occasions, I even tried explaining the mathematics to some of them.

Very recently, I found a rickshaw driver who was keenly interested in knowing this computation. When I explained the simple mathematics behind it, he was quite amazed. In fact, he was so grateful that he waived off a couple of rupees of the fare. I did not accept the reduction in fare, however, and paid the fare in full to the exact rupee.

Unfortunately, unlike for the regular fare, I was unable to come up with a curve fitting simple equation for the late-night (post-midnight) fare. Maybe I should've tried using a more advanced software such as MATLAB or Scilab or some other curve fitting tools.

Time Management and the mobile phone

Many years ago when I had just gotten out of an individual role to a role of leading teams, I struggled to keep track of my activities on account of poor time management. I guess this is a common phase for most people as they rise in the hierarchy. You would have heard of managers telling about the importance of multitasking and thrusting loads of parallel work on you. Even if you are fortunate to not having faced this at work, it is inevitable to face multitasking on the personal / home front. Several things need your attention, and some things must be finished before a deadline.

Years ago I attended a "Time Management" talk (a small session that talked about the basics). As is the case with most such trainings, the learnings were quite common sense - such as planning out a day's work at the start of the day, prioritizing activities, and things like that. One thing that struck me was the use of a PDA (those were the days when mobiles had not yet caught on) for maintaining TODO lists.

Some years later I did buy a Linux PDA (Sharp Zaurus), but never got around  to using it on a daily basis. Some years after I bought my first mobile phone, I started using it for reminders. Every TODO activity (personal and work related) was maintained as a reminder. I continue using this approach even today. I find it to be extremely beneficial. Along with the convenient "Snooze" for the reminders, I feel I have never missed an important deadline.

I know that there are apps that allow one to synchronize one's desktop calendar (Outlook, etc.) with the cell phone calendar, but I haven't gotten around to that point yet. Looking back at these years, I find this simple solution has worked wonders for my problem.

On an ending note, for some time management tips (targeted for grad school, but can be of use to others as well), there's the Time Management talk by Randy Pausch. There's one equation in the presentation that sums it up:

Bad Time Management = Stress