The Festival of Lights, Diwali, will be celebrated on Saturday 17th Oct 2009. The Indian holiday of Diwali celebrates light over darkness, good over bad and has numerous stories associated with it. For me it is about meeting friends & family and enjoying good food!

It is indeed a welcome change to see the inclusive nature of this President, Barack Obama. I was surprised to read this morning that Diwali is being celebrated in the White House.  It is nice to have a President respect different people, religions and traditions.

I look forward to lighting my home with “diyas” and eating “mithai”! …

Very proud of my son Rahul for successfully running his first half marathon at the “Rock & Roll Half Marathon” in San Jose today! He completed the run in 2:00:58, which is impressive for a first timer.

Rahul started running seriously over the summer with some of his friends and started to enjoy it. He surprised me one day by telling me that he wanted to run a half marathon and raise funds for “Asha for Education“, a non-profit secular organization focused on basic education for underprivileged children in India. We looked at various possibilities and registered for this race. Rahul …

I was invited by Mala Devlin to participate in a panel discussion titled “Software Soul: Maximizing profitability by unleashing the spirit of software teams”. This topic sounded very interesting to me since I have managed projects and global teams for several years at my jobs in the US and in multinational companies in India.

Mala and I met for tea for the first time in July  and discussed the topic and more. I was impressed that Mala had recently published a book called  The Software Soul. The book is an easy read and had several anecdotes that are very easy to …

It was wonderful to meet with my panelists and be able to put a name to the face. We had been communicating occasionally prior to the conference. Face-to-face contact adds a completely new dimension to an interaction. It was a pleasure meeting all of the panelists!

(L->R): Kristin Rozier (NASA); Sumitha Prashanth (Sun Microsystems-India); Radha Ratnaparkhi (IBM); Claudia Galvan (Microsoft); Bev Crair (Quantum); Meenakshi Kaul-Basu (Sun Microsystems); Lydia Ash (Google)

The discussion went very well.  I had prepped the panelists on some questions that I  would ask to seed the discussion. Otherwise, I preferred to keep …

Today 02 October is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. It was nice to see the Google home page honouring Gandhi ji.

It was otherwise a normal day at GHC 09 with a very enthusiastic and energetic crowd of computer engineers. There was a fantastic keynote presentation by Fran Berman, Vice President for Research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, called “Creating Technology for Social Good, A Prologue”.

Dr. Berman focused on the future of the information age and how we are going to keep and archive current information. We need to archive the information because “access tomorrow starts with preservation today.” Along with what …