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CA shows the way – hiring can become fair
California is the latest and largest jurisdiction to ban employers from asking job applicants about their salary history, a move designed to combat wage gaps based on sex and race. As an entrepreneur for two decades, I have been guilty of this – asking for salary history of applicants before making an offer. As for me, the reason was never about discrimination. It was to save money for the company, which was always short for a small business. The other reasons, as generally believed in India, was that a large percentage increase in salary from an earlier job will set an expectation on future (annual) hikes, and, this process will…
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Decision Roulette as a Gift
I don’t normally get gifts, so I was pleasantly surprised to get one today from a colleague of mine at my firm – Vishwak Solutions. Phani Kumar who works in our SharePoint team had been to USA for few weeks and returned early this week. He was the one who gifted me this – a corporate decision maker gadget. May be he felt I make poor decisions & needed help in future :-). Thoughtful of him. The way it works is, you ask a question in your mind that needs a decision then spin the top, once the top stops spinning you will see the small red dot in the…
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A cricket game for fun
I am not lazy and I am not a fitness freak. I do Yoga practice twice a week, walk to places that are near-by, take the stairs daily in my office; at the same time I do enjoy eating (especially multi-cuisine). Right from my school days I was not into any sports regularly, other than a year when I took Tennis classes. So I was surprised myself when I joined in to play a brief innings of cricket during my company’s annual offsite today at Mamallapuram. My batting and bowling (one over each) was just about acceptable I think; my colleagues I suppose kept quite, out of prudence of not…
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Dr Kalam advocating for Work from Home a decade before the pandemic
The first time I had the privilege to meet the former President of India Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was in May 2010 at his official residence in New Delhi. At that time I never thought I will get the opportunity to invite him to our office function or share the dais with him, both of which happened yesterday. So much for the saying, you can’t get lucky twice! The venue was Le Royal Méridien, Chennai, the time was 3:30 PM, and the date was 8th December 2014 (yesterday). Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam graced us with his presence by being the Chief Guest for the 14th Year celebration at our group…
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Tamil keyboard app for Windows Phone 8
I have written earlier about Windows Phone 8 (~Nokia Lumia phones) supporting display of “Tamil” language texts. The support is not 100%, though you could read Tamil texts, you couldn’t type in Tamil (Tamil IME/Keyboard was missing). I am expecting Microsoft to release an IME for Tamil in their future updates (I am not privy to any release plans or dates). In the meanwhile I was finding it difficult to correspond in Tamil with friends using my Nokia Lumia 925. Tired of waiting, I had our mobile team at Vishwak Solutions write a basic app that allows Tamil text typing. The app is live and available for free download from…
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Project Spiftcar
Project Spiftcar was one of the challenging projects that I am proud to have directly worked on, which set the stage for my next 15 years (ongoing) partnership with MSN India & other media clients in India. The engagement was with Microsoft India to develop and deliver the NDTV.COM Election Website for the Parliament elections in 1999. This was challenging for many reasons including having Streaming Video (which was bleeding edge in those days), live integration with real-time election results from backend systems and the duration which was in total just 10 days from groundbreaking (blank Visual Studio Project/Zero Infra) to go live! Incredible and probably a world record of…
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Surprise Gift I got
Today afternoon I was suddenly called to come out of my room and I saw the entire team at Vishwak standing out. Then two (GV, SaraP) of them came forward and gave me a nice large “Thank You” greeting card with all their pictures and signatures. Then came another gift, a beautiful painting. In my 15 years of experience this is probably the first “Thank You” card/gift. I was touched. Yesterday we had a big dinner to celebrate an achievement in Vishwak. Overall, I am in cloud nine now.
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Kani Thamizh Sangam Meeting– August 2011
இன்று கணித்தமிழ் சங்கம் தனது மாதக்கூட்டத்தை எங்கள் அலுவலகத்தில் (விஷ்வக் ஸொல்யுஷண்ஸில்) நடத்தியது. கூட்டத்தில் தே.மு.தி.க சட்டமன்ற உறுப்பினரும், மாஃபாய் நிறுவனருமான திரு.கே.பாண்டியராஜன் சிறப்புரையாற்றினார். தமிழக மாணவர்களிடம் கணினி தேர்ச்சியின் அவசியத்தை சிறப்பாக எடுத்துரைத்தார். உறுப்பினரின் பலப்பல கேள்விகளுக்கு அழகாகவும் பொறுமையோடும் பதிலளித்தார். அவருக்கு நன்றிகள்.
