Narayana Murthy is nothing more than a glorified Program Manager who was at the right place at the right time. Low cost, high volume deliverables kept them afloat for decades. Even the minimum wage in the US two decades ago is significantly higher than what an engineer gets paid at Infosys to this day.
The fact that Infosys has remained a sweat shop since its inception with zero softwares brought to the market and transforming into a retirement home of IT coolies whose only aspiration in life is a work trip to the US, speaks about how socialist the Infosys philosophy is, and how low agency and mediocre India’s software developers were for 30 years.
How a genius like Sikka ended up at Infosys is quite astounding.
Albeit, the early employees gained from hitting the jackpot with the shares enabling thousands of them to become millionaires.
And today, we have brilliant minds with high agency, willing to take the risk of innovating and going global with their ideas, while Infosys continues to swim in the cesspool of mediocrity, paying shit salaries, while Murthy and his boomer stock of co founders and executives continue to accumulate insane wealth, while projecting modesty on the outside.
Classic champagne socialist behaviour. Modesty is just the facade because they always knew, they never deserved the wealth they accumulated and they wilfully prevented people from taking high stakes risks, because they feared their profit margins would reduce if the company innovated and created the need for investing in talent who wouldn’t settle for the salaries of a fuel station employee.
Granted, they employed lakhs of people and lakhs of families went from lower middle class to upper middle class or upper class even.
That way even Indian Railways can claim credit for the same reasons.
In between all this, we have somehow bred a generation of people who only care about increasing their networth by hook or crook, and not willing to put in the effort and intellectual rigour in building world class products.
And we expect to compete with Silicon Valley with a handful of genius entrepreneurs who shunned mediocrity.
With the capital Infosys had, they could have easily setup their own Y-Combinator and used the ideas coming out of it to become force multipliers creating an organic ecosystem of innovation labs across the likes of TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro et al, and by now, India would have been on par with the US for technological innovation. But we had Narayana Murthy who thought AI was hyped and rejected the idea to be an early investor in Open AI.
And this guy is supposed to be a technology leader. 😂
If you speak Kannada, Telugu, or Sanskrit, you’ve likely noticed that Hindi sounds "clipped."
Rama becomes Ram. Shiva becomes Shiv.
Even in English, "Chocolate" feels like it’s missing a syllable. Ever wondered why?
I went down this rabbit hole yesterday and was fascinated with what I learnt.
Welcome to the world of 'Schwa Deletion' in linguistics. 🧵👇
SUPREME COMEDY
In 2005, the Chief Information Commissioner asked the Supreme Court to declare the assets of its judges.
The Supreme Court got angry. "We don't listen to orders. We give orders."
The Supreme Court appealed to the Delhi High Court against the order of the Chief Information Commissioner.
But the Delhi High Court said, "You have to release the information."
So the Supreme Court appealed the decision of the Delhi High Court to a 2-judge bench of the Delhi High Court.
The 2-judge bench of the Delhi High Court referred the matter back to the Supreme Court, saying this is your matter, you decide.
Now the Supreme Court became the judge, jury and executioner in its own case. Cricket bookies would kill to have such a fixed match.
A single-judge bench of the Supreme Court took up the matter and said a 3-judge bench should decide the case.
The 3-judge bench of the Supreme Court sat on the case for 8 long years and arrived at a verdict - the matter should be looked at by a 5-judge bench of the Supreme Court.
Finally in 2019, the 5-judge bench of the Supreme Court gave its verdict. It did not say that Supreme Court judges should declare their assets. It merely said the Supreme Court should release any information it had. So basically if a judge does not declare his assets, then there is nothing to declare.
Comedy, yes. Funny, no.
Indian Tourism Isn't Dying. It's Already Dead. Here's Why.
Thailand: 35 million tourists in 2024.
India: 9.66 million tourists in 2024.
A small nation, Thailand received 3.6 times more tourists than India.
India has everything: beaches, mountains, deserts, backwaters, and all the seasons.
Yet, we are behind.
Do you know Singapore, a city-state, gets more tourists than India?
Shocking, Isn't it?
Our bad reputation is costing us too much.
- Frauds and cheating.
- Taxi mafia in tourist places.
- No proper city infrastructure.
And the biggest reason is the Lack of Civic sense.
India is infamous for being one of the most unhygienic countries all across the world.
Is it going to change or not?
I don't see a much clearer picture.
I will reach Guwahati, Assam tomorrow, 20th December. In the afternoon, the new terminal building of the Lokapriya Gopinath Bardoloi International Airport will be inaugurated. This is a major boost to Assam’s infrastructure. Increased capacity means better ‘Ease of Living’ and a boost for commerce as well as tourism.
Airlines fleece customers for last min changes.
This cancellation from airline, without compensation for alternate arrangements is criminal. @DGCAIndia should mandate adequate compensation mandatory to protect flyers!
I decided to build a Transformer from Scratch...but on a GPU.
No PyTorch or TensorFlow.
Just CUDA, Python and Numba.
Just finished building the full Encoder Block - here's a thread on my progress so far:
From the news it seems like the only problem in New Delhi is the CM’s residence. Otherwise it’s a model city with perfect infra, social welfare, etc. 🤦♂️
The Hampi of North India
"Bayana, were it not for its shortage of water, might have been the capital of India."
So begins Mehrdad Shokoohy's book on Bayana, one of the great forgotten cities of India, just half an hour from Bharatpur. 🧵
Do you all remember when Backstage Capital raised like $5m on Republic from retail investors a few years back and in return essentially agreed to getting $.12 for every dollar in profit the fund returned?
I wonder what happens to them now 🤔