Can online exams eliminate corruption from public service recruitment ?

Recently, Indian Railways is conducting the world's largest online test where 9m+ candidates are expected to appear.

This has the potential to effectively wipe out corruption that has been plaguing public services recruitment ever since the inception of this country.

Ideally an online exam must have a large bank of questions grouped by complexity. Each candidate is randomly served equal number of questions belonging to such group.

1. Even if the question bank leaks, it is impossible to carry a printout of the answers to the exam hall.
(can be dumped in a mobile phone. those are banned even in the Indian cricketers' dressing rooms)

2. Cheating (copying verbatim) is difficult, because a carefully designed system can ask different questions to candidates even if they might be sitting side-by-side in the hall.

However, the format adopted by online examinations is objective question with single or multiple correct answers. It is impossible for a machine to verify the answer to a subjective question. The machine can probably assess the correctness of a subjective answer but it is hard for it to assess it qualitatively.

The question - do we really need subjective question to judge the merit of a candidate. The examiners perspective plays a vital role in this assessment. The movie that I like may not be the one that you also do.

Hence, in my opinion this seems to be the way forward. Any research aimed at machine driven assessment of subjective questions is unlikely to bear any fruitful result.

The only argument against online exams seems to be the lack of a level playing ground as everyone is not asked the same questions.

All Our Gold

For long enough, the money made by an honest Indian and dishonest one has found its way to gold. 
Our religious rituals have also enhanced our affinity towards gold. And gold jewelry is an insurance for most women. 

But what we did not care is that all these gold bars, biscuits, coins and ornaments add up to "worthless" asset. Gold has very less industrial use because of its nature. 

Can we mobilize it ?

Maybe we can we add gold to items of everyday use like a spoon with a gold handle, rims of glasses and edges of smartphones and flood the Indian and Chinese market. 
However, the item price must not increase by 5% of its current value, else people will not buy. The market will decide whether this 5% premium will come down or not. 

Nationalized banks can be an ally in this effort. 

Would love to be the IT Head of this company :-))

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Correction: The idea may not work. The mobile phone or watch will reach their end
of life but the gold added to it will remain as it was. It may again make gold costly.

women's education in India has actually helped men

 If you have found yourself, no need to proceed further

Else

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Women's education in India has actually helped men

The claim of this article is - woman's education in India has actually helped men. In technical terms, it has led to a better social atmosphere rather than raise industrial productivity. Lets examine. 

Jump back to our grandparent's era. Women were generally married off at a younger age than at present. Mostly she wasn't allowed to choose her life partner; and many of our grandparents got off with beautiful and caring wives without having ever qualified the basic threshold of education. 

The social planners identified several problems in that state of affairs. 

a. Men never had the need to go for higher education.

b. A mother being the first ever teacher of her child was ill equipped to deliver basic education.

c. Since the choice of life partner was skewed towards men, it lead to domestic violence.

d. Female foeticide thus threatening the continuity of the society.

Such problems still exist in our society but has eased off gradually. 

Another generation ahead (our fathers' one) we find women graduating from colleges. At least this happened in major urbanized places. Hence our fathers couldn't get away with a matriculation degree but had to aim for higher qualifications in order to get that beautiful and caring wife. We also witness a rise in number of marriages where women choose their own life partners. 

In my generation, a man cannot get away just with a higher degree. The society had seen a rise in women employment levels aided by liberalization of the economy, thus more job opportunities. Here an important parameter kicks in - the earning potential of a man. 

As a testimony to this hypothesis one can crawl major matrimonial websites and count the cases of a working woman. Mostly one will find that one of the expectations she looks in her partner is equal or more income compared to her.

In a way, we can clearly see that women's education has led to raising the standards of men's education. 

Now, lets turn to the industrial productivity part. 

Well, India never had any industrial revolution for anyone to participate. 

And this is where we differ from our Western counterparts. 

In that part of the world women's education stemmed from a pressing industrial demand. When the world was torn apart by two world wars, most men were at battlefields. A war of that magnitude required a lot of fighter jets, tanks, vehicles, tonnes of ammunition and a lot other stuff like canned food, medicines, lots of paperwork etc. It was during these times the Western industries heavily relied on women to deliver. 

Hence the conclusion that women's education in India was driven by the goal of a better society rather than the demands of the industry. 

Way to go ladies !!

(the last line definitely means brickbats for the author :-)

Free Will

This free will is not about dying. But life.

Hence, My agreement with God.

ǝƃɐıɹɹɐɯ oʇ spɐǝן ʎןuo ʇɥƃıɐɹʇs ƃuıʞuıɥʇ

Three decades and one year of solitary existence demands a good explanation.


I have a descent job, descent looks, can talk sweet and reasonably committed to a cause. Still I am unmarried. So, I thought this needs an explanation.

Several ancient European cultures had fancy punishments for people who opted to remain unmarried, though, this didn't extend to priests. They couldn't leave a will (reasonable), or hold a public office (Atal Behari would never be PM) or appear as a witness at a trial. (hmm ..) Ancient Rome levied more tax on the unmarried. So, does modern night clubs in my city. Less if you have a partner, more if alone. May be civilizations were driven by the zeal to increase superiority via headcount.

Women of my city have a different explanation for the love marks of my celibacy. Sometime back I was accused by couple of my female colleagues that I ignored them at a public place. And that, I was accompanied by another man at that time. Hence, they seemed to conclude that I am different ! A few decades back, they would have labeled me arrogant. Courtesy modern openness, that is not fashionable anymore.

I ask them to focus on the title of this post now. The text is written upside down without using any images. How ? English characters have been substituted by Latin ones, wherever needed. For e.g. 'ƃ' replacing 'g'. Might have been the digit 6 as well. So, please stretch your imagination. At that moment, after a few drinks and junk food, I was searching for a washroom. And it was a pretty serious search. Thats why I didn't have the luxury of breaking into an elaborate conversation. A little bit of spiritual explanation here wouldn't do bad. I do not search truth in beauty but beauty in truth. Which is even a more serious search.

However, I do not hold that futile search guilty of not returning any results. Life's certain circumstances have forced me to focus my time, energy and money on things other than marriage. Like my mother's treatment, a long standing property dispute and an unexpected turn of events when I had almost converged on the search result. It is this simple. The script of my life has already been composed by the almighty and this is what he (or she) had designed.

This was not an advertisement of my bachelor life, neither a mating call for the eligible spinster. Only a word of wisdom, that has been passed to me by my teachers. Please, please, please. Do not jump to a conclusion, arrive at them.

The search result will always be sweet.

The Class Struggle

No, comrade. This ain't for you, though you can continue to read.

Since boyhood, I heard my parents say, we belong to the "Middle Class". (Its still that way !) Time and again, the same categorization has also been emphasized by my extended family and friends. Why were we called so ? Is it because we didn't have a car or because we travelled in side-upper berths in a non-AC train compartment. Gradually, I deciphered that all the reasons why we weren't called the "Upper Class" requires money. Henceforth it was etched in my mind, that class and money are interchangeable.

A teacher of mine said, if you have doubt about an established thought, figure out the etymology of the words that describe it. I resorted to the age old general classification of our Hindu society - Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya & Sudra. The established thought said it was by birth. Could our ancient wisdom be so over-simplified ? The Rig Veda describes the primordial man - "The Brahmin is the head, his arms were Kshyatriya, his lower abdomen became the Vaishya and feet is the Sudra". Nowhere is it mentioned that a person is born to any class. On further investigation, it can be found that the social status depends on someone's deeds and actions. In fact, each of these is a state of life. The Sudra is the person seeking mundane pleasure, someone running without The reason; the Kshyatriya realizes the fallacy and symbolizes the conflict within. The Vaishya is knowledgeable (currently Subject Matter Expert) whereas Brahmin is the enlightened. Ideally a person starts as a Sudra and elevates to a Brahmin. If Brahmins were by birth, why are they also called 'Dwij' or Twice Born.

In ancient times, maybe the Kshatriya really fought those who resisted free thinking and the Vaishya made money owning to his/her working knowledge, the Brahmin relinquished everything to live in the temple and the Sudra kept running around for opportunity. Probably the existing form is an aberration or the Rig Veda was rigged in favor of the the privileged, and from his debris was born the Middle Class.

Not even McKinsey can "status-ify" India more accurately than the Indian Railway express train compartment does, unknowingly - too many people cramped into the General Compartment like you see in slums & MHADA complex, some chair cars for the middle class in waiting, a lot of sleeper class for the gigantic middle class, few air-conditioned cabins for the upper middle class and a large compartment with butlers for the few belonging to the upper class. In fact Indian Railways have been polite to drop the word 'class' which was a British leftover and changed to only General, Sleeper, 2AC, 1AC, etc. like the Americans calling us 'Third World'. Would you have liked if they said 'Third Class' country instead ?

And yes, without a doubt I belong to the large middle class. Because neither am I a genius nor too good a person. But there is a slight caveat if you are either genius or good. There is no guarantee where you will land up - low or high classincome. But definitely not middle classincome.

This will be the class struggle of my life.

Mens sana in corpore sano

This Latin phrase translates to "healthy mind in a healthy body" - Roman poet Juvenal (10.356)

A comparison among the greatest two exponents of this quote - Michelangelo & da Vinci

Leonardo said, "Nature is the source of all true knowledge; she has her own logic, her own laws; she has no effect without cause; no invention without necessity." He had no formal education, hence couldn't write well, instead, drew his ideas. He wanted to know everything & his life has been the quest of unraveling the mysteries of nature. Michelangelo was a perfectionist & couldn't withstand criticism. Once a co-painter, Torrigiano, broke his nose; a damage that never healed, which made him look even uglier. So he remained obsessed with beauty throughout his life. People still debate who among these Italians is the ultimate "The Renaissance Man".

Both of them grew up alone, without a mother.

Leonardo dwelled in the future tense. His notebook is a testimony of the grand ideas he had conceived, 500 years before those were actually realized. It included design for the flying machine, battle tanks, under-water diving suits, study of human anatomy and maps, even the design of spectacles. Michelangelo lived in the present tense. He was an ferocious executioner, completing most of the works he had commenced - the Pita, statue of David, Sistine chapel fresco and even engineered the revamped architecture of Medici chapel and St. Peter's Basilica. Once Michelangelo scoffed Leonardo because Leonardo never completed the magnum bronze status of a warhorse he had promised to his patron, Ludovico Sforza.

Both of them loved symmetry and dissected human corpse.

Leonardo was the Class. According to folklore, he was courteous, sober and affable. He kept a good company and participated regularly in discussion circles. Michelangelo was the Mass. He was known to be unkempt, rude and braggish. Its also said that he rarely bathed and slept with his shoes on; to the extent that it peeled off his skin when he took those off.

Both of them never married.

Leonardo was the brain of God & Michelangelo, the hand of God. Leonardo thought what no one had ever thought, Michelangelo did which no ever had ever done. Leonardo's highly accurate studies of anatomy match the modern medical textbooks and Michelangelo's amazing layout and perception of Sistine chapel fresco can undermine the advanced designing software. According to Vasari, Leonardo and Michelangelo were pitted against one another by the shrewd Machiavelli, to draw side by side, the walls of Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The competition never completed. Instead he could have asked Leonardo to "think" and Michelangelo to "do".

Leonardo is the mind, Michelangelo is the body. Following is my humble tribute to these amazing men.