Homealone :(

Last week, both of my flatmates left as their terms at the university got over. And now I am lonely in my house for the next few days before somebody joins in. This situation has made me do unthinkable things at home like trying to read a French newspaper, experimenting with my cooking, looking at the rainbow for a long time (which is beautiful by the way, pic attached), buying a novel at Swiss prices, etc.

Leaving your accommodation here is not as easy as it sounds. Swiss people have microscopic eyes for cleanliness and they make sure you wipe off that tiny speck on your light switch or the windowpane before you leave. Its both funny and a little embarrassing that it reminds me of my IIT days in Delhi when we used to do exactly the reverse. Spend hours cleaning up our allotted rooms before moving in and leave the place like some hell had broken loose there. But the undergrad life at IIT was definitely a lot of fun and demanding at the same time. Still remember those slogging night-outs and infinite nescafe outings.

I hope this homealoness breaks soon and meanwhile I will keep finding new things to do.

PageRank in Flickr ?

I apologize for breaking the rules and making this post a bit geeky. I noticed the geotagging feature in Flickr and couldn't help writing about it. Ok, so lets quickly get to the point here.

I find the graph generated by geotagging quite similar to the web graph. To illustrate this analogy, lets take an example. Say, a person living in NY has geotagged her vacation photographs for Paris and Sydney. Consider the cities as nodes and draw the weight 1 edges NY->Paris and NY->Sydney. Accumulate these edges across users and construct the final graph that might look like the figure below.

The big circles correspond to big sites like Yahoo! with heavy inter-linkage between its sub-domains and main page. The analogy would be to consider a major tourist city like Paris with other smaller cities around it. Heavy inter-linkage with nodes around you means that people often visit nearby places to chill out for short durations. I guess it should be easy to identify such neighbourhoods based on their coordinates.

Now if a place is a major tourist attraction, it is bound to have a lot of incoming tourists from all over the world just like popular sites have lot of incoming links. The Page Rank algorithm should give us a nice ranking score for tourist destinations. Looking from a random surfer perspective, a person on a random world tour taking random tourist flights would be more likely to spend a large amount of time on highly popular places.

Further, if we know the attributes of a place like is it famous for beaches, mountains, city life, etc., these attributes could correspond to topics and we can generate topic sensitive rankings.

Well, it could be just a random thought of mine or it could be something. May be, its very trivial and/or they already do something like this. I have no idea. Sounds like fun to me. What say ?

Elephants on our roads!

Time and again someone asks me, "Do you have elephants roaming around on roads in New Delhi ?". And I give him/her a 10-15 min explanation on how India has changed over years and how elephants have disappeared from city roads and unfortunately, tigers from jungles. Well, at least elephants don't roam around freely on Delhi roads.

Apparently, this 18th century image of India (or New Delhi) has been created by some news channels here by showing such clips. They might just be showing the Republic Day Parade. I don't know. And if people are asking me, I think I should give them the right notion of a 21st century India. Afterwards, I wonder to myself. Sure, "India is poised" and economy is growing but do our cities even qualify for a world ranking of international cities.

Elephants might not be there anymore but has that made public transport any better now. Although Delhi roads are quite good, practically, except metro every other means of public transport sucks. Reckless driving by Blueline drivers has created hell on roads and their recent strike shows how much we depend on these cranky & unreliable buses. Auto-rickshaws fare no better. I think Government has taken a right step now by inviting private companies to run the buses.

Bangalore is a much touted IT city of India that people know here apart from Delhi. But according to my own observation, the road conditions and other public infrastructure are worse compared to other major Indian cities. The Bangalore shine has attracted brands like Google, MSR, Yahoo!, Amazon, etc. to open up offices there but the city needs a massive overhaul to keep the investment coming.

Infrastructure in Delhi has improved a lot over the last few years and further improvements are taking place thanks to the upcoming commonwealth games. Do we need such events in other cities also before our political leadership wakes up to the needs of an upcoming and modern society.

The "suisse way"

Having spent nearly a month here in Lausanne, I figured may be its time to contribute something to the 2.0 world. So here I am with my first post. Initially it seemed quite strange but I guess I am slowly getting used to the "suisse way" of doing things which dents a hole (read crater) in the pocket but is often quite convenient (and sometimes fun too!). Let me not get too long here and quickly recite a couple of events that have happened here with me.


My definition of "countryside" has changed after making a few excursion trips here. Just travel on an inter-city train here and you will know. People in the countryside here have all the modern "city-like" facilities and guess what, some even have swimming pools in their homes. Smaller one for the children and a bigger one for grown ups! Kudos to you if you are still awake and reading. Please go on to the second one.


This one should be a bit more interesting. Last week, none of my flatmates was in town and our apartment door lock being one way, the inevitable happened. I returned from a morning jog (well, ok it was 11am) to find that I have forgotten my keys inside. It is the Murphy which comes into the picture here as well. The conciergerie was on a week long family holiday. My friendly neighbour suggested that I should call up the security of the residences as they also have duplicate keys to the apartments. I call up and amazingly, the guy comes with a key in less than 10 minutes in a traditional suisse way of being on time! And of course, I give him my apologies and many thanks for turning up on a Saturday morning. But the catch comes later on. Two days later, I receive a bill for 161 Francs (which is huge by the way) for this "service". What do I do? Of course, pay the bill and smile at the same time!


Bonjour.