[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW8e9yQc3uw&hl=en_US&fs=1&&w=425&h=344] A young girl in India longs to be in school. She watches through the window and the gracious teacher calls her in. But when she sits down, the boys shift over to one side to be away from her. This is the premise of The Classroom, the winner of the UNICEF youth video contest marking the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). As the one-minute video progresses, more and more girls join the first girls side, until the classroom is full of both boy and girl students doing their lessons.

This book was marketed as the first graphic novel in India. Written by Sarnath Banerjee, the book was a delight to me. A beautiful amalgamation of text and graphics narrating the urban life of Delhi and Calcutta through varied characters. It can be read in 1/2 hr time . However if you take the time to look at the graphics and the interplay of the minute details with the graphics, you will tend to appreciate a lot many things.

For any e-curious person, some of the basic questions that one might have are Who came up with this constant ? Where did it first appear ? Why is this number so important ? Why should one make a function out of this constant ( exp(x) ) ? What is its relation to complex numbers ? What is its connection with hyperbola , as it appears in coshx , sinhx etc ?

Ever since I switched from economics to probability and statistics in my early student days, this area has continued to absorb my interests. The very idea that the seeming chaos of chance obeys mathematical laws is immensely attractive. It gives me great satisfaction to have made a few contributions to the understanding of this field.The successes I had did not come easy to me. They were the fruits of long hours of work which often led to dead ends.

For my lunch @ work, I get it from VITAL foods, an agency which uses the famous dabbawalla network to deliver. Most of us are aware of the accurate service of dabbawalla’s in Mumbai. I think it is also a case study at HBS. Also, the publicity it gets in the local newspapers makes sure that most of the non-residents of mumbai also know about it. However there was a letter from VITAL foods stating that they would discontinue the services of Dabbawalla as there have been too many complaints in the recent past.