Techfest happenings!

Right now, Techfest 2007 is going on at IIT, Bombay. It has been fairly good fun, overall, though there have been some disappointments.

On the quizzing front, I managed a second-place with Ajay, a friend of mine also from KReSIT, in the Questioning Philosophers quiz. This quiz was on Computers and IT trivia. Was rather good fun with nice questions, having been organized by Ramanand. Sadly, we missed his science trivia quiz, Spectral Scatter, due to an organizing commitee goof-up. Basically, they mixed up the elims timings of the science quiz and an astronomy quiz, so we wound up missing the science quiz elims, as we'd gone to the CC-India launch, thinking we were missing the astronomy quiz.

I managed to attend the launch of Creative Commons in India. Was a rather nice series of talks, and didn't feel too long at all. After this I attended the Robowars contest. This wasn't a great experience at all. After waiting an hour and a half for the event to start, there were a series of deafening explosions that were apparently supposed to add to the spectacle. Next, the first couple of battles were rather insipid, so I gave up and left as I'd been on my feet for most of the day, and was rather tired out. Frankly, I felt the event had been over-hyped.

I also attended the talk by John Nash. The problem was that it wasn't really a broad topic, being based on game theory, so a lot of people who weren't able to understand it, left. Also, it was conducted using video-conferencing, so the audio wasn't too good. I think many of the people there had only heard of him due to the movie, which was why they were there. I think that the marketing types are taking over!

All in all, it has been relatively good fun, but I've not had a chance to see all the exhibitions yet!

Most famous NRI?

A short post as I'm starved for time. I just had a thought - Who is the most famous NRI/PIO/etc.?

Note: Meant to be taken with some sense of humour.

Is it Lakshmi Mittal? No, he only became famous after his daughter's wedding! Amartya Sen? No, who likes economists anyway? Kalpana Chawla? Well, yeah, somewhat famous, but not really in most famous category.

My vote for THE most famous NRI goes to, the one and only, Madhuri Dixit!!

Happy New Year!

Here's wishing all of you a happy and prosperous 2007!