Comment by Riaz Haq on November 30, 2021 at 10:19am

Umar Saif
@umarsaif
Some reality check …

Twitter- Parag Agarwal
Google - Sundar Pichai
Microsoft - Satya Nadella
IBM - Arvind Krishna
Adobe- Shantanu Narayen
VMWare - Raghu Raghuram
Vimeo - Anjali Sud
Google Cloud - Thomas Kurian
NetApp - George Kurian
Palo Alto Networks - Nikesh Arora

https://twitter.com/umarsaif/status/1465622837641859077?s=20

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 4, 2021 at 10:59am

45. A few weeks before the first draft of this manuscript was completed, the Census Bureau released the PUMS

2013 data set with some new fields of information that allowed us to calculate the distribution of college degrees by field and country of birth. The following fields had the highest shares of the India-born in the United States: electrical engineering technology—24 percent; computer engineering—19 percent; botany—11 percent; computer science—11 percent; metallurgical engineering—10 percent; electrical engineering—10 percent. Note that these shares of India-born were relative to the entire population in the United States. That is, 24 percent of all electrical engineering technology graduates and 19 percent of all computer engineering graduates in the United States were born in India.

Chakravorty, Sanjoy. The Other One Percent (Modern South Asia) (p. 311). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 

In 1990, about 22 percent of the India-born had bachelor’s degrees and 26 percent had advanced degrees. By 2000, these proportions had grown to 29 and 32 percent, respectively. And by 2010, these proportions had grown to 32 and 37 percent, respectively. The figures for 2000 and 2010 were derived from the Census Bureau’s site DataFerret. The 1990 figures were calculated from the Census Bureau’s report. See “1990 Census of Population: The Foreign-Born Population in the United States,” www.census.gov/prod/cen1990/

Chakravorty, Sanjoy. The Other One Percent (Modern South Asia) (p. 312). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 

47. In 1990, about 22 percent of the India-born had bachelor’s degrees and 26 percent had advanced degrees. By 2000, these proportions had grown to 29 and 32 percent, respectively. And by 2010, these proportions had grown to 32 and 37 percent, respectively. The figures for 2000 and 2010 were derived from the Census Bureau’s site DataFerret. The 1990 figures were calculated from the Census Bureau’s report. See “1990 Census of Population: The Foreign-Born Population in the United States,” www.census.gov/prod/cen1990/

Chakravorty, Sanjoy. The Other One Percent (Modern South Asia) (p. 312). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 12, 2021 at 10:58am

New Twitter CEO (Parag Agarwal) highlights struggle to halt India's brain drain - Nikkei Asia

Rupa Subramanya is a researcher and commentator. She is a distinguished fellow of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and the co-author of "Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India."

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/New-Twitter-CEO-highlights-struggle...

I identified the fact that most of these success stories typically involve people with graduate degrees, training and work experience all acquired in the U.S. Well trained in mathematics, fluent in English and at ease in the American business culture, Indians are able to transition into leadership roles much more comfortably than many other Asian-born corporate executives in the U.S., including those born in China.


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But the success of Indians on Wall Street, Silicon Valley and in Ivy League colleges is both a glass-half-full and a glass-half-empty story.

On the one hand, Indians excel in the meritocratic American work culture, but on the other, they are escaping a stiflingly bureaucratic, crony-driven, inefficient work culture back home where innovation and creativity are often punished rather than encouraged and rewarded. With the notable exception of several prominent recent startups, mostly in the tech sector, the biggest Indian conglomerates are typically headed by their founders or their descendants.

These push and pull factors driving talented Indians to the U.S. are revealed dramatically in official statistics. Using data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a reply to a question in the Indian Parliament, my analysis shows that from January 2014 to September 2021, a little under 1 million Indians have given up their passports to acquire foreign citizenship. Indian law does not allow multiple nationalities, so those giving up their passports are doing so because they have acquired citizenship elsewhere.

Of those giving up their Indian passports from 2014 to 2019, the years for which we have comparable data, more than 30% on average were giving up their Indian citizenship to become naturalized Americans. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, that was a whopping 45%. In other words, almost half of those giving up their Indian passports were acquiring American ones.

China, which also requires those citizens who obtain citizenship of another country to relinquish their Chinese passport, has seen no such exodus. Data from the DHS from 2003 to 2019, the last year for which data is available, shows a consistently higher number of Indians becoming naturalized every year compared to Chinese-born immigrants.

On average, 40% more Indians became naturalized in a given year than Chinese, bearing in mind that China has a larger population than India. In 2019, a whopping 64% more Indians were naturalized than Chinese. Given the large number of Indians giving up their passports in the last couple of years, that percentage may even tick up a few more points when the latest U.S. numbers become available.

This reality of a mass exodus of talent from India is not new, a phenomenon that goes back to the 1960s. However, it is a far cry from the optimistic free-market rhetoric of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his early days in office, when his main slogan was "minimum government, maximum governance."

Modi convinced many at the time that India would once again be a land of opportunity, as it had been in the mid to late 2000s under the previous Congress-led government when the economy was growing at nearly double digits, prompting many Indians to return home with some even giving up the coveted American green cards. That hope soon faded against the backdrop of corruption scandals that helped usher Modi to power in 2014.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 26, 2021 at 7:58am

What’s the secret behind India’s IIT, which produced Twitter chief Parag Agrawal and other tech titans?
The Indian Institute of Technology is an elite network of 23 engineering schools which boasts the ‘the most difficult admission exam on the planet’
‘IITians’ include Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Micron Technology’s Nikesh Arora and Sun Microsystems’ Vinod Khosla


https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3160906/whats-secr...

Above the imposing main entrance of the first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which opened back in 1951, is the motto “Service to the Nation”. For years, as many graduates of the country’s elite network of engineering schools headed off for greener pastures in the US, the joke among Indians was “which nation?”.
Twitter’s new chief Parag Agrawal recently joined a long list of talented IIT graduates who have become tech titans in Silicon Valley, including Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Micron Technology’s Nikesh Arora and Sun Microsystems’ Vinod Khosla to name just a few.

By global standards, IIT – which has grown to 23 campuses around India – is way down the academic league tables, according to the widely used QS World University rankings. IIT Bombay fared best of all Indian educational institutions in 2021, coming 177 out of the leading 200 universities in the QS global rankings. By contrast, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was in top position. While IIT scores well on employer reputation, with 70 out of 100 points, it loses heavily on its lack of international students and faculty.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 1, 2022 at 8:10am

Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones

https://www.economist.com/asia/2022/01/01/why-brahmins-lead-western...


what do the chief executives of Adobe, Alphabet, ibm, Match Group (which owns Tinder), Microsoft, OnlyFans (a subscription service featuring content creators in various stages of undress) and Twitter have in common? All seven happen to be of Indian origin. That is not surprising considering the abundance of subcontinental talent drifting into Western companies: in recent years Indians have been granted well over two-thirds of America’s h-1b visas for highly skilled workers.

But these particular bosses share something else, too. They are all top-caste Hindus. Four are Brahmins. Traditionally associated with the priesthood and learning, this pinnacle of the caste pyramid’s 25,000-plus sub-groups makes up just 50m or so of India’s 1.4bn people. The other three ceos come from castes traditionally associated with commerce or “scribal” professions such as book-keeping. These groups account for a similarly slim section of the pyramid’s capstone: the 30% of Hindus that the government classes as “forward” castes, as opposed to the 70% who fall among such categories as “backward” or “scheduled” castes (Dalits, formerly known as untouchables) and “scheduled tribes”

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 1, 2022 at 4:57pm

Dalit Diva
@dalitdiva
(Thenmozhi Soundarajan)

In the grand silicon valley tradition of white cismen passing the torch to Brahmin cismen Jack Dorsey is stepping down and Parag Agarwal is the new CEO of Twitter. Will he also remain silent about Caste? #casteintech

https://twitter.com/dalitdiva/status/1465358123640655875?s=20

Remember Microsoft went from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella & Alphabet from Larry Page to Sundar Pinchai. These companies still have caste discrimination while having leadership that is racially diverse but caste priviliged. DEI is the need of the hour. #Casteintech

https://twitter.com/dalitdiva/status/1465358125616152581?s=20

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 3, 2022 at 4:37pm

#Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of 4 counts of fraud, acquitted on 4. Her #Indian-#American partner & ex boyfriend Ramesh Balwani is facing his own charges and a separate trial. #SiliconValley #technology
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/elizabeth-holmes-ver... via @nbcnews

The government's case included text messages between Holmes' former business partner and ex-boyfriend, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, discussing Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou. The couple expressed concerns over Carreyrou writing a negative article, with Balwani promising to "nail" the reporter.

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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of four federal fraud charges Monday and acquitted on four others while a jury deadlocked on the three remaining charges after months of trial.

Holmes, 37, was the force behind a modernized blood test —advertising a cheap finger prick that could offer comprehensive results for a number of medical issues. But The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 that Theranos devices were inaccurate, beginning the company's eventual downfall.

She was initially facing 12 fraud counts, but one was dismissed earlier in her trial, the result of an earlier error by prosecutors. Holmes potentially faced 20 years in prison, fines and potential restitution to defrauded investors.

The jury spent seven days going over the evidence and charges. On the third day of deliberations, jurors asked the judge to listen to audio clips of a 2013 call Holmes had with investors.

A week into deliberations, the jury sent a note that said it was deadlocked on three charges. Judge Edward J. Davila, at the prosecutor’s request, read the jury instructions known as an “Allen charge” — telling them to resume deliberations and attempt to reach a verdict on the outstanding charges.

The jury remained unable to reach a unanimous verdict, they said in another note Monday.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 15, 2022 at 10:27am

#India's #IIT professor says 'ghosts exist', claims to have driven out 'evil spirits' via chants. Behera teaches Electrical Engineering. He has a PhD from IIT #Delhi. His specialities include #robotics and Artificial Intelligence (#AI) #Hindutva #BJP #Modi https://www.timesnownews.com/the-buzz/article/iit-mandi-director-pr...

KEY HIGHLIGHTSProfessor Laxmidhar Behera, Director of IIT Mandi, said that "ghosts exists"In a video, he claimed that he went to Chennai in 1993 to drive out "evil spirits" from his friend's house and familyHe said that he chanted holy mantras in his apparent act of exorcism

A video of the newly appointed Director of IIT Mandi, Professor Laxmidhar Behera, talking about his apparent act of exorcism to get rid of "evil spirits" from his friend's house by chanting holy mantras has surfaced online.

In the five-minute video, Behera recalled the 1993 incident when he travelled to Chennai to help a friend who was in distress as his "family was affected by ghosts".

The professor said that he had started "practising the thoughts and wisdom in the Bhagavad Gita" along with chanting the 'Hare Rama Hare Krishna' mantra. He said that he had decided to help his friend to "demonstrate the potency of the holy name", The Indian Express reported.

"So I took two of my friends and reached at 7 pm. He was in a research scholar apartment. After 10-15 minutes of loud chanting, we suddenly saw his father, who was a very short... person, absolutely old, barely able to walk, and suddenly his hand and leg was... he was creating such a ghastly dance and his head is almost touching the roof. You could feel that he is being completely devoured by the evil spirit," Behera said in the video.

He added that the mother and wife of the friend were later "possessed by the evil spirit'. It took them around "45 minutes to an hour" of loud chanting to ward off the "evil spirit", he said.

The video was posted seven months ago on a YouTube channel named "Learn Gita Live Gita". The tagline of the channel is "Project by IITIANS who live Gita."

Behera told IE, "I narrated what I said. Ghosts exist, yes."

Behera is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He has done PhD from IIT Delhi and his areas of speciality are robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 15, 2022 at 11:58am

The catastrophic cost of junk science, bogus information and the Hindutva inferiority complex
Pseudo-science will be the death of us.
Rohit Chopra
May 01, 2021 · 07:30 am

https://scroll.in/article/993255/the-catastrophic-cost-of-junk-scie...

In part, the packaging of junk science as genuine Hindu scientific knowledge represents a deep-seated complex about the significance and worth of Hindu identity in a global world. In the Hindutva schematic, Hindu identity is, of course, conflated with Indian identity. In part, this phenomenon is a product of a very specific battle that Modi has been fighting forever with the legacy of Nehru, who is his intimate enemy, the figure he wants to surpass and displace from institutional, collective, and public memory in India.

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As India collectively gasps for breath, confronted by a catastrophic surge of Covid-19 infections and deaths, the control and content of information related to all aspects of the pandemic have become highly politicised, even more so than has usually been the case for a good while now.

Having masterfully managed, threatened and eventually dominated most of the legacy media over the last seven years, the Bharatiya Janata Party government suddenly finds itself haplessly trying to contain not just the virus but the narrative about the extent of the carnage, the breakdown of the healthcare system, and the reasons for the clearly visible failures of Modi’s leadership.


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In February 2021, at an event which was attended by the health minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan, Ramdev claimed that Coronil had received certification from the World Health Organisation, an assertion that was shortly thereafter denied by the WHO and condemned by the Indian Medical Association.

In April 2020, Jaggi Vasudev, who has built a fortune by peddling senseless jargon like “inner engineering” to gullible and stressed Indian techies in Silicon Valley, stated with his characteristic confidence that “the virus does not want to kill you. This virus is living in our body because we are a wonderful habitat for it.”

As a defence strategy, Vasudev advocated not treatment, but mental strength, calm, and a positive attitude. Good virtues all, no doubt, but unproven as a remedy for illnesses. As Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher, and author of the Pulitzer-prize winning book on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, states, “A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.”

Cow urine party
In March 2020, a Hindutva group, the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, held a cow urine drinking party as a means of providing protection against the virus. Given the reach of Ramdev and Vasudev and the incessant promotion of gaumutra by the Hindu Right since 2014, these grand pronouncements beg one big question: if there is any significant measure of truth to any of these claims, why was the virus not effectively vanquished or contained in India within a few months of these remedies being trotted out?

As with celebrity affirmations of dubious science, though, the more alarming issues here are, one, the complicity of the BJP government in actively promoting snake oil cures and, two, the moral and ethical responsibility for the harm arising from the propagation of such inaccurate and misleading information among the Indian populace.

To be clear, these kinds of arguments are not an invention of the Modi era nor exclusively believed by Hindu nationalists. They have a long history, dating back to at least the nineteenth century. The historian Gyan Prakash’s fine study, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999), describes how such claims are rooted in colonial-era anxieties about the universalist nature of neglected Hindu knowledge, which, Hindu intellectuals argued, had the potential to hold its own against Western science and technology though it first needed to be resuscitated from the depths of time.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 28, 2022 at 10:33am

#UkraineWar has exposed #inequity in #India's #medical school admissions. #Indian medical entrance exam favors students from elite backgrounds (upper caste) who can afford specialized coaching or those who can attend expensive private colleges ($100,000) https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2022/0328/How-th...

Every year, roughly 1.5 million students take the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, to compete for some 90,000 seats in medical schools across India. About half of those are at private universities where tuition and other fees easily exceed $100,000. As a result, tens of thousands of Indian students opt to study medicine in countries like China, Russia, and Ukraine, where education is cheaper.

Opposition to NEET has been brewing since the government introduced the exam in 2013. Critics say that NEET favors students from elite backgrounds who can afford specialized coaching – echoing arguments against the SAT and ACT in the United States – or who can attend expensive private colleges where the bar for admission is lower. “The system is not fair; there cannot be any doubt on that,” says Dr. Anand Krishnan, a professor of community medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. “Medical profession is not just pure knowledge. You have to be more humane. There are a lot of other characteristics which are important to look for.”

When Mr. Gahlot was in 11th grade, he left his hometown of Siryawali in northwest Uttar Pradesh to go to Kota, Rajasthan, the academic coaching capital of India. There, he says, he followed a grueling regimen of studying six to seven hours a day, but fell about 50 points short of what was required to get into a government-run college.

“It was totally depressing. I would think I’m not smart enough to be a doctor, I can’t do this,” he says. Several of his friends in similar situations chose different career paths. But Mr. Gahlot had made up his mind to become a doctor in eighth grade, and turned to his last resort – going abroad. He says he was too ashamed to tell his peers he was leaving India, because many see foreign medical students as “quitters” who weren’t able to crack NEET.

The fierce competition for Indian medical school seats cost another student his life. Naveen Gyanagoudar had gone outside to buy food when he was killed by Russian shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Speaking to local reporters, his distraught father lamented that despite scoring 97% on high school exams, his son couldn’t get admission to a medical school in his own country.

The double blow of high competition and high cost means India’s new generation of doctors lacks diversity. “They are predominantly urban-centric kids, from well-entrenched, reasonably well-off middle-class families,” says Dr. Sita Naik, a former member of the Medical Council of India, which used to oversee medical education. Dr. Naik says these graduates are unlikely to move to rural areas, where the demand for doctors is the greatest. Rural India is home to two-thirds of the country’s population but only 20% of its doctors, according to a 2016 report.

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