Pl read

If you are visiting these writings for the first time, or have not read the entry "Why o Why",

may I suggest you read that first and then read the rest in numerical order?



Sunday 3 December 2017

How could one person touch so many lives?

Just before 7 pm on Saturday, Dec 2nd, 2018, Saraswathi took the stage towards the end of a function arranged to release the third collection of  short Tamil stories penned by her dear father Shri S.V. Ramani. Before her, many  celebrated Tamil writers — who were sitting on the stage — had spoken in praise of the stories, and the story teller.  In fact, a few months earlier, at the release of the second collection, the literary world had acknowledged his prowess by calling him “The Sculptor of Great Stories”.

Until he showed us a typed version of some of his stories more than a year ago, I had no clue that story writing was a talent my father-in-law possessed among a myriad of others.

He was an avid painter, an impatient one at that. His paintings were created in spurts, often after  a trip to some exotic locale. He also painted portraits, ones that attracted the most attention were his paintings of Kanchi Paramacharya, and Shri Ramana Maharshi. The latest was a photograph-like depiction of the “Junior” Acharya of Kanchi. His paintings adorn the walls of the house he built in Nanganallur, Chennai. In the very first room that visitors see as they enter the house one can’t but notice paintings that surprise  many by the fact that they came from the same person they had high regards for, but for other reasons.

Most of us, if we are lucky, have an effectiveness quotient of one — we do reasonably well what an average person is expected to do. But my father-in-law was a true  ashtavadhani. To me, that came about because he enabled, nurtured and empowered people around him and made sure whatever resources and connections were at his disposal  were harnessed to help someone handle with finesse the problem they were facing. Many have vouched that but for him their lives would have languished. 

He was as generous with his time as he was with his financial support for worthy causes.  And, he did all this silently and diligently. To top it off, many of the good deeds he engineered were done in the name of the Rotary Club, with him being the primary, sometimes sole,  financier of the activity. He did not do things for  the glory that  usually attracts people to perform such actions. 

Innumerable are the  schools — in rural as well as urban areas, hospitals — especially those catering to the not so well endowed, and, in general, public causes, that owe their very existence to his bottomless generosity.

Arguably, his passion for music surpassed everything else. Come music season, he could only be found in his favorite sabhas that dot the city of Chennai. He thoroughly enjoyed Carnatic music — it was clear to those who were near him when he was listening to music — that,  to him, it was a spiritual experience. The meticulous manner in which he maintained his vast music collection bears witness to not only his love for the divine sounds, but also his vision of  making the young singers become familiar with long forgotten kritis. Music Sabhas as well as musicians — the established as well as the fledgling ones — were keen to have  his presence at their concerts. To enable the music lovers in Nanganallur get  their music delivered  literally  in their backyards, he built Ranjani Hall — a functional auditorium along with a self-contained two story place for visitors to stay.

It was in this auditorium that the release of the book containing the third collection of stories took place on 2nd Dec. Just as his daughter Saraswathi finished thanking the speakers for their kind words about  her father and his creations, her brother Murali stood at the entrance of Ranjani Hall, while people saw an ambulance pass by behind him, Saraswathi tearfully informed the audience  that earlier that afternoon their father had breathed his last. 


What a tribute to a glorious life which defined in one go what a can-do attitude and  a big heart can bring to this world!


Thursday 17 August 2017

Women Perform their Duties, Therefore Deserve their Dues!

Inequities galore!


Even a cursory look around us reveals palpable gaps between
-   what a woman is capable of doing and
   what she is assumed to be capable of,
-   what she gets as dues for some work done, compared to
    what a man gets for the same work, and
-    what a man does casually to go up the career ladder and is praised, and
    what a woman has to struggle to achieve but is frowned  upon.


In almost all cultures, and especially in India, women are given, and often perform, the role of caregivers.


During their early years, their children take the care givers for granted.
During their middle years their husbands take them for granted.
During their late years, their children have left their nests, husbands need physical assistance  themselves and the women are expected to behave as they did all these years, taking care of them.


Since all such care is usually given at home, they are nonrenumerative. They are the care givers but few care to openly acknowledge the critical role the care givers  play. (See my care givers) .


I am of course talking about what used to be the norm, but my contention is that things have not changed that much, even with more women entering the workforce. With women forced to prove her capabilities outside the home to remain employed, they are have to juggle multiple conflicting demands on their time. Many compromises are made.


  1. Some prefer to stay home even if they are employable.


  1. Some take a break from work whenever a non-trivial need for their services arises. In many cases - due to insensitive workplace rules - some are forced to quit their jobs and, when the need for their services subsides, they start all over again and in many cases, without due credit being given to their prior work experience.


  1. Some use the time between two care-giving episodes to upgrade their skill sets, and even to get the next diploma or degree. Many find this rewarding due to the thrill or self-satisfaction of learning something new. But there is a distinct likelihood of such women feeling even more frustrated after the degree is earned because of competition from younger men and women with credentials similar to or better than theirs.


The situation for women especially those who get back to jobs or any career path after a break due to, for example, child rearing, is dismal.


The Result:  women end up in jobs that are not as rewarding or stable as they deserve.


The sad part in all this is that, perhaps because the space given to women is disproportionately small and opportunities at the top being few and far between, there is sometimes an unhealthy competition between women and (in some sense) not surprisingly, some women are perceived as playing playing hard,  to get to the top. And, in this male dominated world where women are supposed to be soft hearted, such behavior is not viewed positively. Here again, we see a double standard, in that when a man does it, it is considered to be a sign of assertiveness but when a woman does it, she is considered “pushy”. Nevertheless, to many males and females in decision making roles, such pushiness is something they can do without and so decisions are made, not based on one’s real capabilities, but on perceptions.


This has several consequences.


1.  The right people not being where they ought to be, the society does not get the benefits of what is achievable through their participation;


2. They feel the world is not fair to them and this leads to frustration that affects performance, giving reasons the decision makers badly need to justify their decisions, thus forming a vicious cycle;


3.  As a result, some  capable women, who do not want to fight the fight, settle for less than what they deserve.


This also contributes to women feeling that they are dealt with in an unfair manner.


The powers that be, in government and elsewhere, have not woken up to the loss that society incurs as a result.

In fact, the current policies and practices contribute to the continuation of the status quo.


These include
  1. Irrational age limit for jobs and to apply for government schemes/funds for entrepreneurship or self-employment.
  2. Need for prior experience of a specific kind.
  3. Need for the job to be “permanent” in order to be able to  get funds.
Consider academics, the temple of rational thinking.

Advertisements from Government funded research institutes state that they prefer candidates who are below 35 years of age  for entry level faculty positions. If a woman is beyond that age and wants to do research in academia, her only choice in India is to work as a low-paid researcher with absolutely no benefits such as pension or a health plan unless she is married to a spouse with similar benefits.   These research positions are temporary, on-contract basis and there is no job guarantee and it forces her to work in an atmosphere of fear of  losing her job due to loss in funding,  making her unnecessarily dependent on a mentor.  There are very few programs like Department of Science and Technology’s Women Scientists program, but then again, it does not lead to any permanent position. She cannot apply for Associate professorship since she lacks experience post PhD and Assistant professor position is beyond reach due to age!


Currently,  in spite of working hard and even helping Professors to  write proposals, a researcher’s name can never appear in the proposal as a Co-PI because  the non-permanence of  her job prevents government  agencies from funding her project in spite of the  PI being  a permanent employee.  Despite mentoring PhD students in her group, her name can never appear on their theses as Co-guide since she does not have a permanent position. There are many highly qualified women with a  passion for research toiling in research laboratories in temporary positions, reconciled to a stunted career.


An irony in all this is that there are no temporary research positions for PhDs with more than five years of experience because it is  assumed that they would have become assistant professors!


So, only those women who follow the  sequence of Bachelors, Masters, PhD, faculty position, marriage, child birth, etc. -- and do not attempt to do  things in a different order   -- have some hope.


The following recommendations emanate from the above observations:

a) The more informed and enlightened institutions like the IITs  should  have research track  positions. It will benefit everyone if people who want to be on this track, male or female, are empowered to write proposals (which will provide funding, among other things,  for their salary). They can, in addition, help regular faculty to carry out their research and  mentor research students.

b) As long as someone has the qualifications associated with a position, age-related bars  should be eliminated, so that the demoralizing and debilitating impact of such bars on one half of society can become history. This also makes sense in light of the fact that women live longer on average than men.

Both these steps, I believe, will lead to a win-win situation all around.  In academic campuses, where the spouses can also be expected to  be qualified, by giving opportunities for the spouses to shine, a tangible -- and much needed -- increase in  the overall  productivity of the campus is highly likely.

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The author,  Krithi Ramamritham, an eternal optimist, is Rekhi Chair Professor in the Computer Science Department at  IIT Bombay. He retired from IIT Bombay in Feb 2020.

He is thankful to Saraswathi for being a wonderful caregiver, sooner in life than usual.  Also, along with Sumana,  she sensitized him to the sad plight of passionate researchers due to age discrimination and insensitivity of decision makers to the constraints faced by women. Thanks also for their inputs and comments on this blogpost.

As always, he requests the readers of this blogpost to bring it to the attention of others (male of female)  who may be interested.

Monday 19 June 2017

My Father


My dad was a self-made person, and most such people are simple in their approach to life, but have big hearts. His wants were few and given his origins and his exposure, he had both his feet on the ground.

Come to think of it, in many ways, he was a trailblazer:

o   By the time he was 25, he had seen and experienced more of the world than most people of his generation had or could at that age.
o   By the time he retired, he had served in almost a dozen cities as an
employee of the Civil Aviation Department, Government of India.
o   He gave us the best education possible, in places far away from where he served, sometimes fending for himself, because my mother was taking care of us.
But he never forgot his roots and also impressed upon us to do the same.

Today I wanted to write about him.
But, I wanted to write about him, as my father.
This, I now realize,  is harder than I thought.

Of course, I remember many nuggets...

-- The many holiday trips, in First class "coupe"s, we took, from wherever he was stationed to Madras (now Chennai). Since it was just our family in the coupe and it often took 36 hours even by "Express trains", the experience was out of this world. After Madras we would go to visit our villages, where many of my cousins also came for the summer holidays.

-- On rare occasions we were able to visit his "communications office", where he and his colleagues would be directing several aircrafts at a time,  and  observe the radar screens with blips, representing aircrafts in the sky,  playing  hide and seek, disappearing from the screen as it swept the sky, and reappearing in a another spot on the the next screen.

-- On Deepavali day, we would all wake up bright and early and wait for my father to have his "Ganga Snanam" and give us all new clothes. The latter happened only on such special occasions, so we all looked forward to these special days.

-- More recently, when I went home for the first time following my stem cell transplant, his first remark was, "what happened to all the hair on your head", to which I simply responded, "at least my head is still there", and that seemed to satisfy him.

-- A year later,  when our daughter got married to Tim, my father was there at all the wedding related events, blessing the couple, and acknowledging the relatives and friends who had come. Roopa was delighted that all her grandparents were there to celebrate.

There are many many more and I am thankful for the memories.

Still, I wish I had taken the time to know him better; I was too preoccupied with one thing or another when he was around, to really talk to him, to really get to know him, more than I do.

Fortunately, perhaps realizing that such a day will come, he had started writing “his story”. And, I am so glad he did. Reading it now, after many years, I can see the many dimensions of his life and his attitudes towards life, his love for us, and more. He was a proud father, delighted with our accomplishments and that of our families.

As it happened, his writing stops in the 1980s. So, I have to reconstruct the following 30+ years of his life, but I believe we have better documentation about his activities then than the preceding period. I have set a task to myself -- to complete the story before another year passes by.


The story that he wrote does not have to wait until I get my act together. 
You will it find it at “MY RANDOM THOUGHTS by S.Ramamritham”.
I am sure you will find it fascinating.

Thursday 8 June 2017

It ain’t over until it is over (and one will never know if it is over)



In my last entry on taking tests seriously, I had mentioned that one may have LA  hits the patient when the hematologist orders a test, BCR-ABL,   following a complete blood count (CBC) "blood test" in which  the numbers related to blood parameters  don't fall within the expected range. 

Starting from this moment, the prefix 
hemo- or hemato-  (as in hemophilia, a disorder in which blood fails to clot) the highly frequent blood related test

- take the periodic tests seriously. Listen to your body when it demands  rest.

Sunday 28 May 2017

21. Enlightened Energy Management

Enlightened Energy Management is not just about turning off unnecessary lights
-- it is about lightening the load on the electric grid using all your smartness.

We wake up to a tune played by our smart phones, immediately click on various apps just in case there’s an alert or a message that can’t  wait, use the tap (aka faucet) at full flow, drive to work in a car even when public transport is easily available, enter an office pre-cooled to a low temperature that we are forced to wear a jacket, and so continues  our day -- consuming more energy than we need, with consequences that we have little time to ponder.

But, why should an individual care? Consider a typical home electricity bill. For many, it is a small fraction of all the monthly expenses. The usual perception is that even when we diligently turn OFF unnecessary appliances at home, the electricity bill is unlikely to drop by more than the  cost of a meal in a mid-scale restaurant. But, given its multiplicative effect, such diligence can help  power deficient countries like India,  whose citizens are forced to contend with power of poor quality (occurrences of blackouts, brownouts and load shedding).

Avoiding or reducing energy usage, by turning OFF devices when not needed, is obviously a highly desirable goal. The multiplicative effect of simple automated steps  can go a long way in addressing the energy problem. But, rather than depending on humans to intervene, there is need  for automated means to manage the devices to reduce energy consumption and these must be exploited especially for  Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems  since they are responsible for a large proportion (30-50%) of energy consumed by buildings.  They should be designed to use easily available/ sensed information to control HVACs and other devices, like fans and lights, without compromising on the thermal comfort. Automated approaches are especially needed to ensure energy conservation, when it comes to large scale and distributed operations so as to make a difference not only to the purse but also to the environment.

So, what is needed for this automation? A lot of research has been done on how energy consumption of a building is correlated to occupancy, number of appliances, temperature and other environmental factors. For example, various sensors such as motion, door or pressure sensors, cameras, etc. can be used to detect occupancy. Temperature of the building can be observed using temperature sensors and power consumption can be measured using smart meters and clamp-on meters.  These sensors enable automated central administration to reduce and optimize power consumption, while also remotely keeping a check on the health of the energy consuming  appliances, maintaining quality of the atmosphere, and tracking occupants during different times of the day (useful to drive staffing and air conditioning based on footfall), to name a few.

With connectivity, infrastructure, and hardware platforms becoming easier to manage than before, prototypes and proof of  concept deployments exist in research labs around the world, including ours at IIT Bombay, and scores of companies that have begun to empower electricity consumers with automated systems that help them better govern energy consumption and achieve significant reductions in energy bills. These use  Internet of Things  (IoT)  based products to do inexpensive monitoring combined with simple rule-based automated control of electrical devices resulting in reduced energy wastage - sometimes to the tune of 20% on their energy bills. Solutions have been deployed to
  • reduce the dependence on unsustainable energy sources – by reducing unnecessary consumption, improving energy utilization and flattening peaks in consumption.
  • increase our dependence on sustainable energy sources -- by exploiting renewables and finding ways to store excess energy from the sun or wind during periods of low consumption.
With the already large share of buildings’ energy usage rising further, the replicability of these solutions to institutional buildings, such as schools, IT-intensive offices, government establishments, etc., make these solutions attractive.

Basic rule driven control, for example, specifying when some appliance should be turned ON or OFF, can in itself result in quick Return on Investment (RoI). More complex control logic, such as controlling multiple HVAC units serving a common space or varying the AC load based on footfall in one part of a building, is also possible.  

Data collected during the operation of the energy manager can be analyzed and mined to improve upon the rules, to deliver even better performance.

Figure below shows six different patterns of consumption in one apartment complex,  with 60 households. A peak in the consumption of an apartment  might occur when many energy-consuming appliances are ON at the same time in that apartment. For example, in the 5th graph we notice two distinct peaks,  one around 9 am -- perhaps because people are taking hot water showers before leaving for work, and another around 9 pm -- perhaps because food is being prepared while the TV is ON.)

In addition to the increasing gross demand, peak demand has also been rising, causing concerns over increasing costs, poor quality of power and the depletion of resources; the continued dependency on fossil sources will have a detrimental impact on the environment. Furthermore, peak demands are handled by turning ON stand-by power generators that add to the capital costs,  increasing per-unit generation cost. About 20% of the generating capacity exists in a power grid to meet the peak demand, which occurs less than 5% of the time. The quick-responding oil/gas fired (highly polluting) generating sources exacerbate damage to the environment. The latter can be seen in the form of dramatic climate change and the alarming increase in the number of health problems due to the ever increasing environmental impact of the huge demands for more energy.    Since a smoother load profile improves grid stability and quality of service, flattening of peak demand is an important energy-challenge, requiring  suitable demand-response (D-R) techniques. In general, Demand-Response techniques are designed to:

  • Avoid / reduce consumption (e.g., turning off devices when not needed). Simple motion sensors are often deployed in places like restrooms to turn off lights when they are unoccupied.
  • Optimize/ balance demand and supply (e.g., by setting optimal comfort levels and scheduling appliances).  For example, most offices see increased energy usage between 2pm and 4pm, which can be mitigated by pre-cooling; energy needs of homes can be managed by better scheduling of appliances such as washing machines and dishwashers.   
  • Flatten  peaks in consumption profile (e.g., by shifting time of operation). Research on flattening or reduction in peak demand spans over the gamut of work from minimizing peak demand through buffering of energy from renewable resources to the use of predictive control  in building HVAC systems.
  • Store excess energy (e.g., in batteries, which can also help handle blackouts). Energy Storage Systems (ESS) aid in smoothing out this cyclical and stochastic power flow thus complementing distributed generation systems. Under time-varying pricing schemes, ESSs also reliably allow shifting power consumption to low price periods thus cutting down the electricity bill. The maximization of this economic benefit is achieved by smart scheduling of the ESS under uncertainty.
  • Exploit renewable sources (e.g., rooftop PV, wind)   Rooftop photovoltaic systems allows buildings to reduce grid power dependence by harvesting solar energy. For example, a recent study in Mumbai  concluded that the total rooftop PV installation potential for Greater Mumbai is around 1.72 GWp which if fully harnessed can reduce the dependence on the grid almost by half.
These considerations have led to the proliferation of Building energy Management Systems (BMSs). A smart BMS should also be able to perform tasks like reducing and optimizing power consumption, monitoring the status and health of the `appliances in the building, maintaining expected energy consumption in different parts of the building, profile energy consumption of different areas, identifying zones with anomalous power consumption, to name a few.   A BMS delivers these services by tracking, using sensors, various pieces of information like environmental parameters (temperature, humidity, etc.), occupancy status and count, energy available and cost of control. A  BMS  can also flatten the power consumption peaks seen in buildings. It can employ other techniques, such as use of renewables, use of storage devices for storing excess energy during times of low consumption, etc., which can be brought to bear on the energy problem

With many start-ups in this space, making immediate use of the low-hanging solutions, there is a real excitement in the air. Business models including SaaS (Software as a Service), whereby the hardware cost is borne by the solution provider and monthly fee is charged, benefit users from day one. Other innovative models can also serve as attractive ways to spur wide scale adoption of the many solutions.  

But, conservation of traditional energy sources while diversifying into modern renewable energy sources and integrating them into the grid  offers many challenges including:

  • Stochasticity of renewable sources introduces significant technical problems for their integration into the existing power grid. Vagaries introduced by changes in cloud cover and wind speed imply increased unpredictability in the load imposed on the electric grid, complicating the task of scheduling power generation.
  • Energy has become a commodity, with wholesale markets seeing dynamic real-time prices. Retail markets  typically provide flat rate contracts to end-consumers but even there time-of-use pricing is not far off. So it makes sense to provide incentives to users to shift loads from high-price hours to low-price hours of the wholesale market. The decisions also depend on the availability of different sources of energy.
  • In the presence of a large number of sensors, enormous amount of data is generated. The data may have issues like missing values, corrupted values, and inconsistencies. These can further complicate the process of energy management and also introduce other problems, e.g. privacy.
  • Localized heating and cooling systems (that often use community waste as heat sources), commonly found in EU countries, may be applicable elsewhere as well. But capital costs may deter their adoption.

Fortunately, as evidenced by the recently concluded ACM eEnergy Conference in Hong Kong, researchers from around the world are busy addressing these and other problems, so one can expect an even better set of  energy management tools and techniques to be available in the coming years.

When people become more aware of the energy problem, we can expect them to take the necessary steps to manage energy more effectively in their offices and in their own homes. But, experience suggests that there is a  need for smart energy management systems which can enable people to tackle their energy needs without manual intervention or without changing their behavioural pattern -- with  users’ support needed just to install the automated solutions. That will lead to a millions-fold multiplicative reduction in energy consumption, helping realize energy savings that  will cross the tipping point.

This indeed is the holy grail!