Be careful if the CSI President invites you to a lunch,
particularly if it is early in his term of office!
It was sometime in 1974; I was working as a researcher
at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. The telephone rang, and a voice
said that Mr F C Kohli from TCS would like to speak to me. It was an invitation
to lunch. Kohli had either taken over or was soon to take over as President,
CSI. We agreed on a date and time. The lunch would be at the
Oberoi, within walking distance of Kohli’s office.
It was a good lunch – and to cut a long story short – Kohli
knew how to recruit people! I accepted his invitation to serve as Chairman, CSI
Publications Committee, before the lunch was over. Dr Mathai Joseph, as Editor,
was bringing out the CSI Journal. Prof DVR Vithal was visiting TIFR at that
time, and was very much involved with CSI. Among other things, he was handling
the budget and accounts of CSI publications. I somehow got the feeling that
Mathai and Vithal were in the know Of Kohli’s plans! It was a pleasure to work
with the two of them and learnt how to run CSI publications on peanuts!
Mr Raizada, who lived in Delhi, was the Editor of the
CSI Newsletter at that time. I noticed something special about him the first
time I met him – a rare zest for life. Relaxed and smiling, he enjoyed meeting
with friends and colleagues. He took pleasure in every job well-done. I would
visit him on CSI business whenever I went to Delhi. He was always an excellent
host. Mr Parthasarathy was the Co-Editor of the Newsletter. The three of us decided
to rename the Newsletter. What better name than “Communications of the CSI”?
That name has lasted to this day. Raizada passed away a few years later.
Looking back, I feel he had known that he did not have long to live.
Years rolled by, and terms of office came to an end. I
took the responsibility of Editorship of the Journal from Mathai. What I
enjoyed most in this work was learning about printing technology of that time,
and learning those mysterious notations editors used to correct and mark up the
proof pages that the press would give us. Promoting submissions, writing polite
regret-messages to authors who sent in papers that referees did not approve of,
and coaxing advertisers were other parts of the work. The best part was in
recognizing budding talent and encouraging Ph D students or young professionals
to write the first papers in their careers.
Let me get back to my fascination with typesetting. The
pages were manually typeset by a letter-press operator. The letters, cast in
lead, lay in trays on the type-setting machine. We would go to the press near
Sassoon docks to give the matter to be typeset and to collect the proof pages.
I proudly recall these memories of that bygone era. The pen would jump out of my pocket when
anything looked like a manuscript or proof came in sight. I was not very
popular with the typesetters, as I usually wanted them to go to a second or
third round of corrections and “improvement” of layout. It would have been
different if there had been a PC and a WYSIWIG editor on my table, but this was
in the seventies! Anyway the cup of tea that was available round the clock in
the nearby Indian Express canteen was pretty good compensation for the absence
of WYSIWIG and all that. Even today, if you write me a letter, my pen jumps out and I would be editing your letter as I read it! The real victims of
my proof-editing zeal were my poor colleagues and students whose Ph D work was
supervised by me! How much they wished that CSI had not made me such a zealous editor!
A couple of them started helping me in carrying my editorial responsibilities
with CSI publications and are now as dangerous with their corrections and
mark-ups as I have ever been. Chandrasekar and Anjaneyulu! Let me get even with
you guys for the editing you did on my occasional writings!
Technology changed rapidly – photo-typesetting machines
took over the work of typesetting very soon. In a decade I saw the number of
magazines in the market grow up tenfold or more. Then came the PC-like machines
from Apple – it was a complete rout of the old technology. It is a pity that
CSI publications have not carried an article describing this revolution and its
impact on the life of thousands of typesetters who were displaced by the new
technology. Experience and skill in a respected occupation were suddenly
devalued. Kids in jeans replaced a generation of respected craftsmen. I wish
someone had made a movie of the change that all this brought in – a Naya Daur
of information technology, if you are old enough to remember the film that
Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala had featured in!
I never did guess at that time what price I was going
to pay for that lunch at the Chambers. It involved over twenty five years of
work for CSI on and off in various capacities. I was “recruited” again by an
incoming President, Dr P P Gupta, who followed Kohli as CSI President. That was 1976 I think. Some of
us at TIFR[1]
had been working on part-time courses for professionals in computing who did
not have a formal qualification in this area. We were inspired by the ideals of
the (British) Open University: affordable, continuing education, flexibility, and
emphasis on quality. Mr P Sadanandan, Dr S P Mudur and I, working with a number
of other NCSDCT colleagues were active in running part-time courses. Other
colleagues at TIFR contributed, by sharing the load of teaching and
administration. This was at a time when opportunities were very limited for doing
a full time university degree programme in India in the field of computing. So,
when Gupta asked me to suggest new activities CSI could start, I had the
pleasure of working with Sadanandan and Mudur to create a proposal for a scheme
to be called National Standard Tests in Programming Competence (NSTPC). This
was sometime during 77-78. The three of us took turns at serving as
Coordinators over the first few years as the NSTPC took off as a significant
CSI activity. This program earned CSI credibility in the education area; the
tests were taken by tens of thousands over the years. For instance, by 1977-78,
the number of test takers per year had climbed to 2589, though only 819
qualified that year. Members enjoyed going through serious learning even years
after they had left college. Many of them proudly continue to list those
certificates in their CV’s on the Web even today. Dept. of Electronics of the
Government of India had by that time started giving significant grants to the
NSTPC activity and its scale of operations went up rapidly[2].
I think it was at the 13th Annual Convention of
Computer Society of India, 1978, in what is now Kolkata – there were visiting
IFIP colleagues. We were discussing possible activities of joint interest. I
had been nominated earlier that year the CSI Representative to the IFIP
Technical Committee No 6 dealing with Computer Networking. I suggested an
International Conference on Computer Networking to be held in India. With Gupta’s
support, this became a reality in 1980, in the form of Networks-80[3],
perhaps the first international conference held in India in the computer field.
Why should anyone get involved with conferences? I
would like to share the story of what came out of this conference. Gupta agreed
to be the Organizing Chair, and I was Program Chair. However, everyone involved
realized that Computer Networks was a technology with significant
socio-economic value. Its potential had to be demonstrated – we requested Mr
Hemant Sonawala to be Exhibitions Chair. Ambitious plans were made. In one of
the brainstorming sessions held in this context, the three of us cooked up a
proposal to have a multi-city demo of a futuristic railway passenger ticket
reservation system. This was selected as one example of an application which,
over the years, could make a contribution to the quality of life of millions of
people. Sonawala offered to lend a mini-computer from Digital Equipment
Corporation, and the National Centre for Software Development and Computing
Techniques (NCSDCT) offered to implement the demo. Sadanandan was then Head of
the Database Group at NCSDCT. The team under his leadership took on this
responsibility. Sonawala and I went off to meet the Railway Board Chairman to
request Railway’s cooperation and participation in the conference. He agreed
readily. The Posts and Telegraph Dept. agreed to provide data-connectivity over
leased lines between Ahmedabad, Bombay and Delhi. The project went on well and
we got more or less ready to demo the three-city system. But unfortunately, the
Railway Board Chairman who had been enthusiastic about the project reached his
retirement date, and we got derailed! The new officers we met had a new
priority – movement of something like 400 million tons a year of freight. One
of them made a memorable comment which illustrated the value people placed on
the customers’ convenience as a justification for computerization. “Have you
seen a railway seat go empty?”, he asked. “If A does not go, some B will go; We
have been asked by the Govt to focus on freight capacity utilization”.
While we had one setback, we had several other
successes. Several international experts agreed to present papers. Companies
like British Telecom agreed to set up demos. Prestel, which incorporated ideas
related to real-time information dissemination and online transactions was
their show-piece; it was an early precursor of the Internet. Remember, this was
in 1980[4].
An international link connected a few Prestel terminals at the President Hotel
in Bombay to the London Prestel Network. Their demos showed how you could read
up online on bank loans, apply for one, and select your flights from an airline
site to go to London. An enthusiastic student who manned the demo added you
could also find a date online, so that you won’t be lonely when you got to
London!
The NCSDCT team from the Database Group mentioned above
demonstrated an email system it had developed. Mr V. S. Rao, one of the members
of Sadanandan team, had done the lead work on this system; as far as I know, it
was the first email system that was designed and implemented in India.
There were a number of papers covering a variety of
topics. It created a community of researchers and professionals in this area.
From then on, any conference in computer networks anywhere in the world would
have a set of Indians reporting work being done in India in this field.
This conference cost about Rs 4 lakhs if I remember
right. The revenue was Rs 3.5 Lakhs or so. At the end of the Conference, we had
another meeting – Gupta, Sonawala, myself, and a number of colleagues from the Computer
Maintenance Corporation Ltd[5]
who had participated in the Conference. Gupta briefly mentioned the shortfall
of Rs 50,000 and added that CMC would take care of that. But, he said “we
should focus today on how we can use what we have learnt to earn Rs 150 Crores
for CMC over the next few years”. What is the connection between Rs 50,000 and
Rs 150 Crores I did not understand, but we enthusiastically agreed that what we
had learnt at that conference was worth quite a lot! The first suggestion was
that a proposal should be prepared for submission to the Railways to implement
the passenger reservation system. This suggestion was received well, and CMC
won an order to implement a reservation system for the Northern Railway as a
first step. The good thing about our democracy is if you get to do some good in
one of the four regions, it is enough. The representatives of the people will
ensure that all four corners are soon covered by your system. A CMC team,
working out of their R & D Labs in Hyderabad, did an impressive job of
designing and implementing the system and had covered all four regions of India
within a few years.
Gupta also got deeply interested in creating an
all-India data network, IndoNet. The timing was not right. The telecom monopoly
of that time was not ready to let a company, even a public sector company, deal
with new communication technologies. The regulatory environment was not
conducive for such a move.
However, the Networks-80 conference left an indelible
mark on the Indian scene. A variety of computer and network applications were
thought of in the following years and implemented. The great success of the
Railway Passenger Reservation system made everyone understand the benefits of the
technology. Those who had been sceptical about banking applications changed
their minds. The rest is history!
CSI’s cooperation with IFIP continued to develop under
the leadership of Maj Gen Balasubramanian. I was involved in running a series
of a bi-annual Networks conference. An honour bestowed on me by IFIP and CSI
was my appointment as an IFIP Trustee for a term.
When I handed over the Networks Conference Series, it was
to Prof SV Raghavan, who served over several years, running an excellent series
of Networks Conferences.
One of the results of Networks 80 was that I became a confident
conference organizer, ever willing to take on another big conference. I think
it was the CSI Annual Convention in 1987 in Mumbai. Sonawala was the Organizing
Chair and I was Program Chair. The two biggest hotels in Bombay were not big
enough to hold the Convention. Sonawala suggested that we put up a huge
geodesic dome in the oval maidan! This temporary facility was in addition to
renting space at the two big hotels, because everything could not be fitted
under the dome! Sonawala cheerfully went ahead with his plan and delivered the
goods! The audience was well over 1,000
during several sessions.
The International Conference of Very Large Databases
(VLDB) was held in India for the first time with the cooperation of CSI in 1996
in Mumbai. My colleague Sadanandan took the key responsibility for this.
The South East Asia Regional Computer Confederation
(SEARCC) is a forum of national Information Technology professional societies
in the Asia Pacific region. I had the pleasure of serving as Vice-President and
later as President of the SEARC during 1997 and 1998, as a representative of
CSI. We held the SEARCC Conference in 1997 in Delhi. I had the pleasure of
working with Kohli again in organizing this conference. Mr Vandrewala of TCS
was the conference chair. A special event I remember from this Conference was
the Micro Mouse Competition that encouraged young participants to show off
their competitive skills in robotics.
The International Conference on Visual Computing (ICVC)
was held by CSI and IFIP-TC5 in Goa in 1999. My colleague Mudur played the key
role in this Conference.
Exposure to colleagues worldwide through international
conferences gave me a number of other opportunities such as working with the
International Council for Computer Cooperation (ICCC). This was a link
developed in 1980, the year in which we had held the Networks 80 Conference. I
served as Executive Vice President of ICCC during 1997-2002 and as President,
ICCC during 2002-2004.
Let me start to conclude. Membership of CSI, and working
as a volunteer of the Society were enjoyable and valuable. They created for me life-long
working relationships with great professionals. I learnt as much technically and
administratively from CSI as I did from colleges, institutes, etc. that I had
attended. CSI experience brought me professional recognition in a variety of
ways, making me President CSI during 1996-1998. CSI was bustling with activity
even then; our student activities, conferences and publications were already something
to be proud of. I remember in particular the very well organized Annual
Convention and the excellent Student Convention, both of which were held in
Bangalore in 1998.
I will end on a lighter note. What not to do in CSI?
Don’t agree to run for President without knowing who else could be in the
running! You might end up running against highly deserving colleagues unintentionally.
You could have decades of CSI experience, and still be a political innocent!
--------
[1] In
an autonomous unit named National Centre for Software Development and Computing
Techniques. This was headed by Professor R Narasimhan, who is no stranger to
the Computer Society of India.
[2] In
the late nineties, the Government decided to take over the
operation by setting up a Society named DOEACC. Still later this has morphed
into the National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology
(NIELIT).
[3]
Proceedings of Networks 80 was published by North-Holland in 1981 as "Data
Communication and Computer Networks" edited by S. Ramani
1 comment:
It is heartening to note that such advanced thinking existing even decades ago, when computers didn't exist for the common man, especially not in the way they are now. Thanks to you and Times of India, even a lay man like me is aware.
The Indian Railway reservation is a very important and beneficial step which scores of people would vouch for, especially who have travelled in the pre-computer reservation era and the present where onward and return reservations can be done even using a smartphone. The linking of various PRS was very helpful for people doing cross country journeys. People had to queue for the return reservation as soon as they reached their destination.
But they question is, if such levels of capabilities existed even then, why we do not have a Google or Facebook in India? YouTube, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Motorola, Samsung....
None of them is Indian. Why we cannot come up with our own? Everybody realizes that Indians are everywhere, but they are always working for somebody else. Take any giant, you'll find an Indian there.
I wish we could come up with something. Its time we did something for ourselves, and not for others which is exactly what Infosys, TCS etc. are doing.
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