Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from February, 2013

Arbit - the spiritual side

Arbit Choudhury For the uninitiated, Arbit Choudhury is a web-comic run by 4 friends (including me) focusing on Management jargon related humour and features 'Arpit Choudhury' - a B-school student in India who is famous for his wisecracks among his friends. We release regular comics - you can subscribe to them on Facebook , Twitter or email . Way back in 2004 when we started Arbit , we had initially chosen a different name for it - it was part parody of a then famous Management Guru, part a play on words (something which Arbit is famous for!).  We for some reason did not like the name and asked our friends to suggest other names - of the several names which were proposed, "Arbit" was one. While I and Shubham were convinced of the name 'Arbit', Hemant wasn't quite so. So we ended up going back to our friends, conducted a poll on the NITIE LAN, and "Arbit" won! But it was not until recently that the spiritual relevance of this name we g

Space - the final frontier!

About 8 years ago, I blogged about how our generation has disappointed the science fiction writers by not making much progress in the area of Space Travel - something considered achievable by them by the 21st century. Space however is an area where we may not have matched fictional expectations in any form. We have an international space station in place but that I believe is a far cry from a space city and the days of Star Trek do not seem close enough. Time has come, when we will redeem our honour soon.  Space hasn't progressed much in the past few decades because it has remained, until now, a high expense, high government (funded and) controlled industry; much like Telecom sector in India until 2000s and Banking until 90s. Also, entry barriers in terms of cost and regulation made experimentation difficult, which in turn made risk taking difficult. Less risk taking meant less chance of disproportionate reward, lesser private sector involvement resulting ultimately into les