Friday, May 19, 2017

Everything I ever needed to know, I learned in Kindergarten . . . .

No, not me saying but my daughter’s class sang in their end of year graduation party. Yes it was a sweet and sour moment, sweet for the 22 kids spent almost 10 months of their lives, 5 days a week and 7 hours of their day together as part of a class with the very wonderful Ms. Andrea Bredl (Ms. Bredl for short) and they are ready to move on to next level. 

I am amazed at the transformation Avni has gone through the school year, besides academics (reading, writing and math), she made lots of new friends, performed science experiments, attended field trips and plays, performed in a play, played in Kinder Rodeo and so much more. Oh did I tell you, she pulled off a very successful surprise mothers day party in 2017? and more importantly it was meticulously planned over a 3 week period.

I am thankful to Ms. Bredl for making my daughter a science enthusiast and more importantly a gardener. Evidence, here is the crystal she grew using borax powder and the lima bean plant she grew from seed at school and now thriving in our backyard.



Congratulations Avni on your graduation.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

School uniforms . . . .

Back in India during my school years, we always wore uniforms to schools and there were special occasions when we were allowed clothes other than uniforms. As much as the uniforms were a great idea for it showed "equality" among students (not mine, some teacher in my high school days had portrayed it) . On the contrary, parents had their ways of showing their affordability even in the plain bland uniforms and of course it didn't bother us kids at all.

Looking back the school uniforms had both strengths and weaknesses
  • It always was a night mare right before the end of summer and a mad rush to the special stores selling school uniforms or rush to our favorite tailors to get them stitched right before the school started.
  • If by any chance you made a mess of that uniform, you essentially had nothing to wear to the school next day (who would keep multiple school uniforms)
  • It made discrimination much easier than you can imagine. For ex: between 2 kids one with a random school uniform and another with "good" school uniform any misbehavior the "good" school uniform attracted harsher criticisms and if needed punishment or viceversa
  • When we have multiple schools within walking distances of each other, for teachers they served the purpose of identifying our kids and other kids
  • It did serve as an economy booster and kept the tailors and cloth merchants/makers in business
  • The school density at some point became so high in Bangalore that the schools were finding it hard to differentiate their uniforms from others and were playing all sort of tricks to keep it that way (like adding a tie, changing shoe color, making the shirt to a tad different shade)
One can argue, the economics of the day demanded school uniforms for it was easier on parents pockets. I argue differently it wasn't the economics but the ability to differentiate between schools is what drove the school uniforms existence and the reason they are still thriving in urban India.

Now the question what prompted this post? Today was second round of  Lemonade play at school and for that all kids from kindergarten were dressed up in blue and white while the teachers were in blue and black. So, Kiker elementary had some uniform for kindergartners today :) . 

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Kejriwal and EVM tampering

For the elections in UP among other states, AAP claims the polls were rigged with the EVM (electronic voting machines) and they even had one of their nerdy MLA to build up a mock EVM and demonstrate in the Delhi assembly as to how it can be hacked. I was very keen to understand the modus operandi and did watch the video on NDTV. For starters media got it wrong, he never said swap the motherboard. His contention is “there is a code that can be programmed to any EVM that will make sure all votes balloted will be counted in favor of one party only and no others”, he further goes to say “depending on where in the ballot list the party to be favored is listed the code will be different” and to quote his own words “tampering happens on election day after 10:00am and code will be entered by one of the party workers and not 2 days before when the EVM’s are mock tested in front of all contesting parties” .

I appreciate the MLA taking his time to build a mock EVM (sad, he didn’t get a loaner from election commission) and his effort and eloquence with which he explained the whole process. I am sure this is just a hoax and here is my data to prove it.

Assuming all above said is true, let’s take UP elections there were 403 seats and close to 2095 candidates from 20 odd parties contesting. For the whole of UP, there were 306 polling HQ’s and each had an average 400 or so polling booths and if I assume 5 EVM per polling booth it would be a total of 612,000 EVM to be tampered with.

So, I would need at a minimum 500000 (assuming some will vote multiple times) men/women (registered to vote) who are extremely disciplined, trusted and can be handed the code to enter to each EVM to be tampered. Again from the MLA’s own words the code is different depending on the serial order of your party on the ballot box and hence I cannot blanket distribute a code for all of them. So, we would need a minimum of 100-200 different numbers to be circulated among these folks.

For sake of argument, any party needs to win half the seats to be in majority. That could cut down the requirement to 310,000 add to that the collusion with the election officers in each polling booths and the hierarchy needed to maintain this many people in line and to expect not a single one of them come out to the media or threaten to come out on media. 

Are we kidding ourselves, even the Indian army cannot handle this kind of massive effort stealthily. One can argue the election happened in phases even then the number of people required to pull off a scam like this is truly mind boggling, I don’t understand why no one in the media is raising this question?