RESEARCH

Medical students in Kolkata, India, walk in a silent rally protesting police atrocities against them during an earlier protest against quota-based programmes for Other Backward Castes __________ Anish Nair __________ T he issue of OBC reservations, which has been lying dormant for a while, has been catapulted to prominence in the public by a recent Supreme Court verdict. NDTV and IBN appear to be racing with each other in hosting talk shows featuring many opinions from either side of the divide. This issue seems to affect everyone, so there have been opinions from almost everywhere: actors, cricketers, politicians, students, bureaucrats, scholars... It seems almost everyone's had his say. When a thousand people speak, there will at least be a hundred opinions. We have heard a variety of arguments ranging from the ones that are bizzare, like "Tamil Nadu, which has 69% reservation, has the best educational standards among backward castes", to the silly ones like "they

Interviewing the Father of the Internet 25 January 2005 O n 4 January, a section of the press made it appear that people would soon interact with ‘Martians’, though no life is known to exist on that planet. Two days later, Vinton Cerf , after his plenary lecture at the recent Indian Science Congress, appeared flustered by such an ornamented report. Excerpts from an interview and subsequent Internet chat with Cerf, who is known as the Father of the Internet, by Surajit Dasgupta When you created the Internet, did you ever think it would take off as it has? Many of us who worked on the early technology of the Internet and its predecessors knew that we were working with extremely powerful concepts. But I could not in all honesty say that we were conscious of the magnitude of the impact it would have. I think that realisation has come with time as the Internet has penetrated more and more deeply. This is truly a telecommunications revolution in the making. Don’t you think that all this tal

Lesson learnt well in The Pioneer I n my new office the other day, after I finished preparing company literature on products like power interface unit, phase change material, nano-cooled green shelters, filter-less air conditioner, compressor-less AC, etc, our department needed a French translation of the product descriptions for the overseas market. As I volunteered to translate the matter, my boss looked amused. Immediately I remembered what a curse my versatility had proven in The Pioneer . I laughed and consciously changed the topic of discussion. Eventually, our company had to pay a translator at the Alliance Française de Delhi an exorbitant Rs 6 per word for more than 30,000 words in the company literature, a task I could have done for free — my job profile does not include translation; therefore, no part of my salary can be considered to be the fee for the task — without compromising on quality. That night I asked my wife to interpret the look on my boss's face when I had of