Saturday, March 03, 2007

Where the Mind is without Fear (Rabindranath Tagore)

Human Size Abodes

World renowned Applied Mathematics department in Brown University was housed in an old house with a spiral staircase. It had a single bathroom for men and women. World authorities on Control system would write manuscripts on an old thick circular table, that seemed like it had served as a dining table in a previous avatar.


A souvenir from any college in India, on the other hand is a glossy affair. Cover of the magazine is usually a building with all students and faculty standing in front totally overwhelmed by the building's size. If one feels helpless to modify situations around him/her in India, it is because of such straight jackets, be it an imposing building, an inflexible system or the weight of any elder's advice. Advice becomes an edict from an authority and not a direction.

Manipal has several colleges and banking institutes. Staff of these institutions built homes for their use during retirement. Since students from Malaysia used to come to Manipal for part of their studies, a tradition of renting these houses to them had become established. Usually, but not always, these were two bed room houses, with an European style bathroom attached to main bedroom and another Indian style used by guests and children in the other bedroom. In addition, there were government built MIG houses, as opposed to LIG and HIG houses. The Medium Income Group houses were two small bedroom and a single bathroom houses.

KarMic Training centres consisted of finding a two bedroom two bathroom place and walking in with the whole gang to determine which room would be a good classroom, where we should have the library, remaining a bedroom and a kitchen usually serving as laboratories. Using Vivek Pawar's suggestion, we purposely had only three computers for four engineers, so the engineers were forced to talk to each other. In addition, we emphasized that you did not always have to be in front of the computer feeding it information.

In the classroom eight chairs would be organized in a horseshoe manner in a single row and classes would be held with only a blackboard. The other eight engineers would be in the two labs in groups of four. The engineers who would be students had a major say in the decisions. They could modify the arrangement anytime they felt necessary.

Initially, two engineers were placed in one of the MIG houses. First three months, the company took care of paying the rent, electricity and other bills. Later the responsibility was transferred to the engineers though the amount continued to be paid by the company. Last quarter, the engineers got trained in driving, applying for telephones and gas cylinders, big issues those years. During the initial phases, when the engineer understood the loan from the eventual design group, in a manner similar to what a bank usually does, an insurance was taken on him/her. In case the engineer died, the loan would be recovered from the insurance coverage. However, we enhanced this concept and paid half the premium for insurance that would pay the engineer in case of a mishap and also paid half the premium for payment to the engineer's parents. Slowly we ensured the engineer was now responsible for more than himself/herself. In initial years, the 11 weeks of class followed by two weeks of time off were followed strictly. Classes were held Wednesday till Sunday to allow outsiders to come and teach during the weekend. So no holidays were allowed during the eleven weeks - None. Classes were to start daily at 9:00 AM and at 2:00 p.m. First few days, engineers came late, we started making a histogram on how many joined at 8:57, 58, 59, 9:00, 9:01 etc and the classed started on time after that.

Food and living expenses were covered in the fess. We also covered all laundry to ensure engineers learnt to spend the day in clean laundered clothes. Monthly, Rs 250 was paid so that engineers could call home. Connection with home was important.

Engineers were paid Rs. 1500 per month for working for the company for one hour per day. Usually it is typical to pay a stipend. That decouples the idea of work and money. Each evening, we would all troop to the western edge of Manipal from where the Arabian Sea is visible and discuss this work. The work could be recruitment, accounts, computer set up or local administration or library maintenance.

Quite a few of our engineers came from poor families. There were engineers that sent money orders home from this monthly income. I think the number of engineers that were poor, or had lost family members etc makes up a good 70% of the population. We requested our engineers to use local small shops for phone calls even though the training centre had STD, we wanted to make sure the shops thrived.

We had our own electrician, plumber, gardeners and people to clean the houses. All houses would be swept daily and mopped every other day. Home owners were happy to entrust their houses. Sathish, who owned a STD booth joined us to organize all the help, he still works with us. He still operates the STD booth.

Detoxification

One of our engineers moved his household items. With rains being torrential in Manipal, it took the moving company a few days extra to deliver the items. Though our engineer was extremely upset and would not tip the people who delivered, feeling sorry I was trying to pay a small amount to the people who delivered. I got caught and one engineer asked 'if I was being naive'. I mumbled something that day.

A year later the answer was much clearer. We were trying to be naive. Our society has become so polluted that we have become extremely cynical. We expect everyone is trying to cheat, we also take this mode of operation to be natural. In US, the case is different. Strangers will greet you and normal assumption between two people is that each is honest. In our closed environment, we have become such people. It removes layers of distrust and allows us to live a fuller life. Friendships are deeper. When men and women work together late in the night, men will accompany women and see them safe to their homes. Library door is open and I do not expect our engineers to cheat. The trust has been returned. When new women engineers join the company, parents come to check how the environment. Once the morning is over, they are ready to return home, satisfied with the environment.

We had a case when some of our engineers were working in Bangalore. We had only one house, so one room occupied by women and others by men. One parent was concerned, came to Bangalore to make sure everything was OK, stayed in the house and on the way out said the daughter is safer there than in any other arrangement.

Our engineers go out and sometime lose things having gotten to this level of freedom. Question is why is it not like this in other organizations and places. Even big organizations are worried about theft of cellphones, laptops leave alone purses.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Dum Poyee

Original plan called for overlapping one year courses for eight candidates with a July batch for bachelors and January batch for eight Master's candidates. Ground reality turned out that there were very few suitable master's candidates available. Our engineers came up names of their friends and we filled up the second batch with six of their classmates. This time, it was a candidate from MIT, two from Bagalkot, one from Nitte, and two from BVB, Hubli. Training for the second batch started in Jan . One more confusion existed, candidates would come from Mangalore University and Karnataka University and they would graduate at different times.

By July, first batch would complete training, second batch would be in the middle of training. Taking stock of the master's candidate situation, we decided the system needed to be changed. We choose all 16 candidates to start in July, with class for eight in the morning and eight and the afternoon and somehow squeeze a third class for the second batch. We had to juggle the labs. We ended up with 9 hours of teaching five days a week, a punishing teaching schedule. This would last for six months and then onwards it would a leisurely six hours a day, .
five days a week

Now, we started more detailed plans for hiring for the third and fourth batches. This time there was more time on hand and we had KarMic engineers to conduct the interviews. We made preparations for interviewing from the three colleges. We had friends in Nitte, BVB Hubli and now in Bagalkot. Sharmila from first batch was in charge of hiring. This made it easy to convince women to join KarMic as well. We had application forms and presentation foils. We organized trips to the colleges for pre-placement talks. We collected the application forms with all marks cards and analysed them and shortlisted candidates for interview.

Interview Process

When my father's party came to select my mother - an old man accompanied them. Those days there were no hotels in Sirsi so the party stayed in my mother's house. Early the next morning, the old man was trying hard to open an almond. Automatically, my mother offered to help open the almond, running around to get a kitchen pestle. Almonds were extremely rare those days, I remember a few placed for a Pooja and when the Pooja was over, each of the kids would get one. Almonds were much tastier then compared to now, you can now buy a pound of almond seeds for $5, no need to open them and no need to go after the last bit of almond meat in the broken shell. I am told the help in almond opening ensured the marriage.

KarMic interview process consisted of selecting the students and bringing them to Manipal for a full weekend. They would reach early morning and stay with our engineers. They would stay for Saturday and Sunday and undergo three to four interviews of three hours each, play volleyball with our engineers, have an entertainment session on Saturday evening and provide feedback. Two to three of our engineers would interview three or four of the candidates. We would have looked at all there marks cards and gotten the professor's references. After each session, we would do a triage and concentrate more on intermediate candidates. Each triage was independent of others, this gave a chance to student to show their best side.

Usually we would have one of our engineers to go to the place students were from and accompanied the interview candidates in a bus or car arranged by us for the interview. After the conclusion of the interviews, the bus would take them back to their home and drop each of them to their homes, individually. Interviewees were treated with care. Results would be announced in due time. Hiring for long term is different from hiring in bulk.

Dum Poyee

A very large number of engineers graduate in India every year. Even then we knew that it would be an uphill battle to get the type of engineers that we wanted. We recognized it early. We built a thank you program. We did not have a lot of money on hand either.

In Udupi area, besides Kannada, two other languages are spoken. Both are dialects and do not have their own script. Konkani is spoken almost the length of western coast, from Mangalore to Goa. Tulu is more localized.

Konkan region was difficult to travel earlier, with wide mouths of rivers breaking roads. Only recourse was to either go inland where rivers were narrower and easier to cross or cross the wide river mouth with a boat. Synchronization of buses became inevitable, so the region enjoys very good private transportation. Travel situation is now much improved. The conductors of the buses in order to fill them to capacity urge the passengers to enter the bus and tell earlier to passengers "Dum Poyee" : move forward.

Tongue in cheek, we used "Dum Poyee" to work with the colleges that we were working with. If the big colleges did not want to work with us, we will make the colleges that work with us big. We invited professors from the colleges to spend a few months and learn along with the students. We got junior students to spend time in KarMic doing projects and on occasion included their projects along with ours on silicon. One mistake we did was not charging any money for it. Professors did not pay any thing. Students paid only their room and board. Unfortunately since there was no fee, some participants spent their time looking for hidden strings. Some students were sent to look for hidden charges in the room and board. Why do we do it to ourselves!

After all these years, the idea has taken root only in Bagalkot with Prof.Kambalimath. He routinely has students in earlier years do a more thorough project compared to any other institution in the state, may be the country in my estimation. In other colleges, the trained professors stopped imparting their knowledge and moved on to other things. The state of VLSI training is still dismal, now you can get a master's degree for the same amount of ignorance, compared to bachelor's earlier. Expensive tools have been installed, however very little training occurs.