Then it found itself in the path of the transport network which carried saltpetre from Bihar to the Bengal coast and from there to Europe; demand for saltpetre had shot up in Europe as an essential ingredient in ammunition in the wars being fought there. Francois Bernier, the French physician and author of Travels in the Mughal Empire, an account of life in Aurangzeb’s court, notes that he was given a bill of exchange to be cashed in Kasimbazar which he visited, testifying to its role as a financial centre and where merchants from Gujarat, Lahore, Multan, Delhi, Agra and the Deccan settled there.

When the Maratha invasion of Bengal in the 1740’s disrupted some of these networks the Kasimbazar merchants enrolled themselves into another social network, that of the Dutch, English, French, Danish and Belgian merchants who had by then appeared on the horizon. This new network was global and spanned Europe, Africa and Asia. Kasimbazar became the hub through which saltpetre, sugar, rice, poppy and cotton cloth flowed.

Thus, the ‘small world’ of the Kasimbazar merchant was embedded within many different social networks: an Information Network that carried news about the impending arrival of ships and convoys and information about the reputation and credit worthiness of merchants, a Prestige Goods Network that dealt with luxury or prestige goods which could be transported over long distances because of their  high value to weight ratio, a more local  Bulk Goods Network which dealt with low value necessities like food  and a Political Military Network which dealt with the business of making and breaking of alliances.

The story of Kasimbazar’s networks is one of many networks described in a remarkable book, Networks in the First Global Age 1400- 1800, edited by Rila Mukherjee and published by the Indian Council of Historical Research. It contains contributions from Indian, French, Iberian and American scholars and studies networks such as the one centred in the Portuguese city of Porto which linked the Asian and Atlantic networks, the one in Ladakh which linked South and Central Asian markets, the social networks of Milanese merchants in Castile and many others.  Its central assumption is that to understand the flow of events of history you need to study the networks in operation and the nature of the connectivity in these networks. This is a dramatic departure from earlier historical methods which would have viewed, for example, events in in the ‘small world’ Kasimbazar, as deriving from its role as a small town in a larger empire, the Mughal or to view it as a participant in events in a period of history, the 17th and 18th centuries.

This use of the Network perspective is part of a larger movement that started out in France with the work of people such as Bruno Latour and Michael Callon and is now sweeping across many disciplines.  Actor Network Theory, as it is called, holds that human beings are not to be given a privileged status in the world being analysed but are seen to be one of the actors along with other objects. In the Kasimbazar case, the commodities being traded there, its location on the Ganges, the artefacts in use such as Bills of Exchange, the transportation systems such as oxen and river boats all pushed and pulled against each other in shaping the Small World of Kasimbazar and its role in the larger networks that it was embedded in.

Thus, a plan to improve a mathematics textbook, for example, looked at from the perspective of the Actor Network theory would be different from conventional efforts. A maths textbook can be viewed as an object that is embedded in a Curriculum Development Network, made up of policy makers, teachers, maths experts; a Publishing Network made up of writers, editors, printing machines, ink; and a Distribution Network made up of schools, textbook committees and so on. Attempting to produce better math textbooks would necessarily involve tracing the way a maths textbook comes together by the incentives and priorities of each of these networks.

Our cup of joy is overflowing in this, the 50the year of our founding!
First, we show up as Number 1 in the All India Management Association survey of management schools for 2011. We have all through our 50 year history been in the Top 3 but it is especially sweet to be in the top spot in our 50th year. This reaffirmed our belief  that concentrating on better pedagogy and better curriculum matter more than anything else for an educational and research institution like us.

We had the best placement record of all IIMs last year as judged by the starting salaries our students commanded. We don’t spend a lot of time aiming for this but nevertheless it is gratifying to get such an acknowledgement from important stakeholders like recruiters
Then, our faculty published more articles this year in international peer-reviewed management journals than all other management school in India. This proves to us that the  decision we made three years ago to fund our own research has paid off.
Then we have commissioned a quarter-of-a-million square feet of new classroom and hostel space in our campus this year to ease the pressure of having nearly doubled our student intake in the last four years. You can see all these beautiful new building around you outside.
Finally, this past year, 10% of our revenue came from online education, a percentage higher than the Harvard or Stanford business schools. In the coming battle to deliver high quality higher education at an affordable cost, this is a very big step forward.
A second reason why our cup of joy is full: our state Chief Minister is with us today- welcome Madam. You have proved yet again that what Bengal thinks today, the rest of India thinks tomorrow. By focusing the national attention on the need to sensitively and justly deal with the great and millennial transition from agriculture to industry that our country is going through, you have helped refine our country’s approach to this issue. Madam, your predecessor, Bidhan Roy was the man who energized the Sarkar Committee which recommended the setting up of the IITs and IIMs in India. So, welcome to IIM Calcutta, Madam.
A warm welcome to our Governor, Mr Narayanan. You have dedicated your life to making our country a more secure place to live in. You have our heartfelt appreciation for this life work of yours , sir. Welcome to IIM Calcutta, Mr Narayanan.
Topping up our cup of joy is the visit today to IIM Calcutta of our beloved scholar-Prime Minister. Sir, we watch with admiration as you tackle the many complex issues that face our nation. We particularly admire your exhortation that we grow our GDP fast, and your insistence that we do it in a way that the benefits of growth include all Indians. We want you to know sir that at IIM Calcutta we have a large group of scholars from diverse fields such as Economics, Statistics, Sociology and Operations dedicated to research in just this: how to mathematically model the welfare impact of public policies.
We only wish we had a little more time with you today to show you some of that work. In any event, we want you to know sir that our appreciation of the dilemmas of inclusive growth is not merely emotional but intellectual as well.
Welcome to you sir, our scholar-Prime Minister!
END

The Jet Airways flight from Bombay to Delhi had hardly started taxiing for take-off when the attractive 40-something woman seated next to me, glancing at the stack of IIM reports on my lap, flashed a friendly smile at me and said,

“What do you feel about Jairam Ramesh’s statement that reputation of IIMs and IITs are not because of their faculty and research but because of their excellent students?”

I turned around to take a closer look at my co-passenger. She was trim and fresh-faced even at this unearthly hour and wearing what looked me like a Ritu Beri outfit.

“Isn’t such a public debate healthy?” I countered as I tried to figure out what kind of answer would make sense to her.

“I think such statements by Ministers bring down the image of institutions that we Indians are proud of,” she declared.

                            *                           *                            *

Reputations of higher educational institutions are a complicated thing to unravel. What makes these reputations, whether it is the research output of the faculty or whether it is the latter life success of its graduates or even the iconic style of its campus is something which truly deserves a debate. It is as esoteric a subject as figuring out what sets a company’s stock price: over the long run it has something to do with that company’s past profits and future prospects but it also seems to matter whether that industry is in fashion right then. Some academic researchers have even concluded that picking stocks to invest in by throwing darts at a board listing all the companies trading on the stock market and picking those that the dart sticks on is as good a way as doing rigorous analysis. That is to say, random chance, does as well as analytical rigor.

Something similar could be said about the rankings and reputations of Business Schools. The rankings that Indian and international magazines put out from time to time usually ascribe a weightage of about 20% to the ‘quality’ of research output. By far, the highest weightage across all such rankings, and often adding up to as much as 40% is for the salaries awarded to its graduating students. And since, in recent years, international Investment Banks and Management Consulting companies have offered the best salaries, those institutions that place their students in these sectors tend to get the best starting salaries and hence the best rankings in surveys.

Judging the research output of an IIM is an art form. The current method is to count the number of research papers published in international peer-reviewed journals which is somewhat like judging a person’s health by looking at his weight-to-height ratio. Too high a weight-to-height ratio probably means you need to exercise more or eat less, too low a ratio probably means you are neglecting your food. But for the vast majority of us who fall in the middle range, the ratio may not reveal much.

Most of the IIMs, at least the older and settled ones, neither publish too little nor do they dominate the international sweepstakes with their output.  Most published papers in the world seem to be the result of the mandatory doctoral work of Ph.D. students. So, a sure way to increase the research output of the IIMs is to substantially increase the number of Ph.D.’s we produce across the IIM system. That should increase the research output dramatically.

But then, there is a raging debate in international academic research circles whether publishing in reputed international journals really amounts to anything.

Two academics, Julian Birkinshaw and Michael Mol, took a look at the fifty most influential ideas in management of the last 150 years, things like Just-in-Time inventory management, the Six Sigma quality system, and the Balanced Scorecard method and point out that all of these breakthrough ideas originated within real-life business settings not from within academia. The role of management academics in these innovations appear to be to merely document them and spread the word about them.

                *                           *                            *

“Well, what do you think?” asked my attractive traveling companion, bringing me back to earth from my reverie.

“I think that the IIM faculty do a great job of picking the right students for the IIMs, they run the entrance exams and interview process strictly on merit and in a country where most things can be bought, an IIM seat cannot be bought, so the credit for even the student quality should go to the faculty. And do you know that 75% of the students come from families with family income less than Rs 70,000 a month.”

‘But still, should ministers say such things in public?” she asked

“I think such public debates are good”, I said, realizing immediately that I was repeating myself. “Are you worried about these issues because you are an alumnus of an IIM or perhaps a faculty member?’ I asked.

“No!” she said, drawing herself up in her seat. “My husband owns a business.”

“See!” I said triumphantly, “Jairam Ramesh’s statement has drawn even you into the debate about research at the IIMs and IITs. Is that not a good thing?”

She gave me a side-long look, checking whether I was pulling her leg, then opened the copy of Bombay Times and buried her head into it.

END

When Johannes Guttenberg, in 1439, thought up moveable types and oil-based inks and fixed them on an agricultural screw press no-one watch all this could have thought of this as a revolution. But a revolution it was, by making ideas and learning available to an audience larger than ever before.

END

As we pick up the action, Bukhara was an independent Emirate but had a Czarist Russian Agent overseeing matters much like the British Residents in Princely States in pre-independent India.

Khodjaev was the son of a well-to-do merchant in Bukhara and like scions of many wealthy families in the Bukhara of that time was sent to the Soviet Union and then Turkey for higher studies. In Turkey he came under the influence of the Young Turks movement, that restive group impatient with the old ways of the Emir-ruled states and wanting to bring them into the modern world.

On his return to Bukhara in 1912 he founded a newspaper, ‘The Holy Bukhara’ which preached the need for democracy, secular education and such other modern ideas that were sweeping the world of that time. It is said that the ulema whispered into the Bukhara Emir’s ears asking whether the Emir had now embraced Christian ideas such as these and the emir panicked and ordered the newspaper shut after just 13 issues. The political movement he had co-founded, the Jadid, which among other things wanted a separation of the State and Religion, split into a conservative faction ready for a long and patient attempt to persuade the Emir to modernize and a radical faction, of course led by Khodjaev which wanted immediate action.

By then it was 1917 and Russian revolution shook the world, so Khodjaev and his radicals presented a plan to the Bolsheviks proposing radical modernization. With Russia’s support the plans were again presented to the Emir who had no choice but to accept it.. It is said that the Emir , after accepting the plan, encouraged the ulema to use their  reach to the masses through Friday prayers and the madrasas to oppose it. This set up clashes in the streets of Bokharo between the Ulema and the radical faction of the Jadid. The Emir used this excuse to arrest the radical faction leaders.

This made Khodjaev and his team decide that they had no choice but to ask the Emir to go if Bokharo was to modernize. This coincided with Lenin’s announcement that all former Russian colonies were free to go their own way and could even ask for the help of the Red Army to unseat the traditional emirs who ruled all over Central Asia.

Khodjaev and friends, in a move that he was to judge to be a tragic mistake later on, took this offer at face value and invited the Red Army’s help in unseating the Emir. This of course took no time since the Russian army was not only overwhelmingly powerful compared to the Emir’s one  but also because many basic utilities in Bokharo at that time including the railway system was run by Russia.

Khodjaev and his Russian allies quickly despatched the Emir, renamed his party the Communist Party of Bokhara and in 1920, as the First Secretary was effectively the head of the People’s Republic of Bokaro.Khodjaev promptly got down to modernize his state, opening schools to impart secular education, side-lining the Ulema, separating the State’s functions from religion.

The first sign of trouble for Khodjaev was when he tried to alter Bokaro’s role as the cotton plantation of the Soviet system. He pushed for a larger allocation of land and resources to food crops, famously telling Stalin that people cant eat cotton. It is said that Stalin viewed this as an expression of nationalism which ran counter to the views of the Communists at that time.

Ominously, in the 1937 election to the Party posts, Khodjaev’s name was not proposed. The next year, he was summoned to Moscow and after a brief trial was condemned to death for his anti-people attitude. He was promptly executed and his mother, wife and two daughters were packed off to Siberia to do hard labour from which only one daughter survived.

Khodjaev’s struggle to modernize his country makes a poignant tale. He was swimming against the many strong tides of his day: the rise of Communism, the social structure of the Central Asian emirates of that time with a tightly coupled relationship between the ulema and the Emir, a country which was a single-crop ( cotton) commodity producer vulnerable to fluctuating prices, the Great Depression of 1929, the formation of the Soviet Union in 1924 and the consequent isolation from world markets.

After Uzbekistan was set free from the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, Khodjaev has been posthumously rehabilitated. There is a university now named after him and his ancestral home is a museum.

Yesterday we stopped by to see the museum and found that we were the only visitors there. Later in the day we visited the Emir’s ( yes, the same Emir who foiled Khodjaev’s modernization plan) summer palace , a scaled down version of the Czar’s in St Petersburg, which was flooded with peasants from Fargana, newly-weds on their first picnic etc.

This is why I was astonished when on a morning stroll in Kiva on a recent holiday in Uzbekistan, I turned a random corner and what should I see but a giant statue of an old acquaintance, Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

For those of you who did not pay much attention to your high school history teacher, he is the man from whose name the mathematical term ‘algorithm’ is derived from. And again for those of you who have not been paying too much attention to what’s been going in the world of late, the algorithm is what drives, among other things, Search Engines, Social Networking sites and other marvels of our age.
The term ‘algorithm’ is the latinization of his name. ‘Al-Kwarizmi’ in Latin became ‘algorismi’ and from there ‘algorithm’. He worked in Baghad’s House of Wisdom at a time when wild beasts roamed the areas where Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne now stand. His book, ‘On Calculation with Hindu Numerals’ (‘Kitab al-Gam? wa-al-tafriq bi-?isab al-Hind’), written in 825 was translated into Latin in the 12th century as ‘Algoritme de Numero Indorum’, literally, ‘Al-Khwarizmi on the Hindu Art of Reckoning’. This book introduced a decimal system of numbers composed of the numbers 1 to 9 and a 0 to the western world. His other book, ‘al-Kitab al-mukhta?ar fi ?isab al-jabr wa-l-muqabala’, is considered to be the foundational text on algebra, the word ‘algebra’ itself being a latinization of ‘al-jabr’

Al-Kwarizmi, means ‘from Kwarizm’ and Kwarizm is another way of spelling Korezm, the modern name of the Uzbekh province in which Kiva now stands.

‘Whenever financial experts gather nowadays the talk inevitable veers to the financial industry meltdown of 2009 in the US and Europe. Was it greed on part of the market participants, was it a failure of the regulatory system, was it the compensation system for financial industry executives that lay at the bottom of this crisis which has created immense suffering for tens of thousands of ordinary people in the United States and Europe?

We have seen an outpouring of dozens of scholarly papers, many dozens of books and thousands of newspaper editorials trying to make sense of these events. Implicated in all of this are ‘derivatives’,mathematical abstractions. Even a savvy marlet player like Warren Buffet has called them weapons of mass destruction.

But do derivatives deserve this kind of demonization?

I draw your attention to a similar event inthe pharmaceutical industry in the 1950’s in the early days of the synthetic drugs era when a German company came up with a ‘wonder drug’ that supposedly cured coughs, cold, headaches and was also a tranquilizer, a pain killer and could also cure insomnia. It was soon a best seller in many countries. It was then also discovered that this wonder drug could also relieve morning sickness in pregnant women, so tens of thousands of pregnant women took to it.

Then reports started filtering in that pregnant women who took this drug were giving birth to babies with deformities: the feoutus would have fish-like flippers instead of arms and legs. Tens of thousands of children were born by the time alarm bells rang and sales of this wonder drug were halted.

This, of course, was Thalidomide.

There were many calls at that time for the ban of all further synthetic pharmaceutical innovations such as derivatives are now being demonized. Wiser counsel prevailed. An elaborate system of clinical trials was instituted, the scale and expertise of national level drug approval authorities like the US Food and Drug Administration was bolstered. The occasionally confliciting needs of Consumer protection and technical innovation were reconciled. The world has since then benefited enormously from an outpouring of synthetic pharmaceuticals.

The derivatives issue needs to be looked at in a similar light. If properly designed and tested and with the right regulatory system, derivatives could play as big a part in our lives as other financial innovations such as the metal coin or the paper currency note or Bills of Exchange have done.

Instead of demonizing the derivatives innovation, we should put in place testing facilities and regulatory systems which will allow mankind to benfit from this financial innovation.  Central to this new system of regulation of derivatives are expert and neutral bodies who can undertake stres testing of derivatives.

IIM Calcutta’s Financial Research and Trading Lab is one such facility which is ready to undertake such stress testing on behalf of regulatory authorities.

High expertise cancer diagnostic experts are few and are located in the Regional Cancer Center at the state capital, Trivandrum several hundred kilometers away. For a patient to go to Trivandrum from Cannanore costs Rs 4000-8000 per visit including the cost of staying in a hotel for him and a helper. It also takes up 3 days time. A patient needs to visit several times for follow up.

The Cannanore centre folks have  variety of diagnostic equipment like ultrasound scanners, colposcope, etc which are connected by VSAT to the Trivandrum center so that diagnostic data can be instantaneously sent to the experts at the Regional Cancer Centre. TV monitors and screens allow the patient in Cannanore and the doctors in Trivandrum to converse.

The highest cost person in this operation is a radiologist who locally
costs Rs 2.5 lacs a month. I made a mental note to check whether machine
learning could help reduce this cost.

A typical Kerala Panchayat has a population of 25,000 and the Cannanore
survey finds that 50 or so are in pre-cancerous stage and 30 are in the
cancerous stage.

It appears that the incidence of cancer in Cannanore is above average. This is partly because Cannanore is a major centre for beedi manufacturing and at one time employed 350,000 people in beedi factories. This has decline now to about 100,000 because of the declining popularity of beedi and smoking in general. The likelihood of cancer in a beedi factory worker is several times higher than the average person.

The second reason for the above average incidence of cancer according to local doctors is that vegetable and fruits in Cannanore ( and for that matter in all of Kerala) are imported from large scale farms in Tamilnadu and Karnataka where dangerous pesticides like Endosulfan are extensively used. Endosulfan, incidentally, is banned in the West but is still legal in India. The Cannaore municipal food inspection authorities dont have the time or the technical skills to spot and remove such fruits and veetables from the market. And thei charter presently extends onlt inspecting cooked food in restaurants.

The Cannaore Cancer Society folks have van equipped with high tech diagnostic equipment also linked to the Trivandrum centre specials by VSAT which they take to remote viilages for diagnostic drives.

Apart from the high-tech equipment, they also recruited and trained 25,000 volunteers to do a house to house campaign to educate citizens about easy-to-detect pre-cancerous conditions and to tell them that early detection can increase the chances of cure exponentially. Their recors show that when they started in 1994, only 9% of the patients were detected in Stage 1 whereas nowadays 60% of patients are detected in Stage 1. Patients detected in Stage 3 or 4 used to be 75% but has been brought down to 20% now.

 More information at their website http://www.cancercaremccskannur.org

She titled her talk, ‘Is the Cranfield Paradign Outdated?’ alluded to the seminal work on Search at the School of Aeronautical Engineering at Cranfield in the UK between 1958-60.

The work at Cranfield involved comparison of four indexing schemes on 18,000 papers on aerodynamics were manually indexed under these four types of indexing. The authors of the papers were asked what were the basic problems addressed in the paper. Manual searches were then done. It was discovered that it made no difference what indexing scheme was used. The real issue, it was discovered, was the descriptors that were used.

This work was extended in the 1962- 66 period ( referred to in the literature as Cranfield 2). The goal here was to retrieve all relevant documents from a collection of 1400 papers on aeronautical engineering  based on four indexes of 31,25 and 13 descriptors each all of which were done manually. Again, the authors of the papers were asked about the basic problems addressed in these papers. Five levels of relevance assessments were used: complete, High, Useful, Minimal Value, No Interest. It was in this experiment that crucial breakthroughs in Search were made: Relevance and Precision as metrics for judging the efficacy of a Search and the discovery that words in the documents could be used for indexing.

This,says, Donna Harman, was the Cranfield Paradigm: Real questions were asked, there was a large enough collection of documents, the collection was made before the questions were framed and intuitive metrics were used.

The arena then shifted across the Atlantic when Mike Klein from Cranfield spent time in Cornell in 1967-68. The SMART project, as it was called, used the Cranfield collection of documents plus Medical Abstracts.

But things really got going only after the US Defense Department, through DARPA asked NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology ( something like the Indian Standards Institution that we have here in India)  for help in an intelligence analysis project in 1990. NIST was Donna Harman’s perch and her involvement with Search started here.These were  the so called TREC studies.

As Donna describes it, the ‘user model’ for this project involved intelligence analysts searching through a full-text collection of diverse documents with a goal of high recall, i.e. all possible documents relevant to a query needed to be returned without worrying too much about the precision of the search. The document collection was made up of  the Wall Street Journal ( 1987-89, 1990-92) , the Associated Press ( 1989,88), the Federal Register, Ziff-Davis Computer Abstracts, and DOE Abstracts.

The TREC studies went through several phases and practically all the technology in use in today’s Search industry evolved out of this project.

The Cranfield Paradigm of (a) modeling a real user application (b) having a large enough collection of documents (c) building the collection before the queries were formulated (d) one query to produce one answer, conversely the same query ought to return always the same answer,  still held through these TREC experiments.

…which really brings us to the question that Donna Harman posed at SIGIR 2010, Geneva. Does the Cranfield Paradigm hold in an era where we know that user models have evolved in many new directions. For example, one-query-one-answer is not really the user model that reigns today. Users , today, do a sequence of queries, each query is often based on the answers returned in the earlier query. Or , take the example of a Hotel Search where the search provider has large financial incentives to take you down a path you may not want to go, or a user model such as in Amazon book search where they want to persuade you to buy. Or when we know that users usually look at only the top few results which flies against the Cranfield paradigm of re-usable collections. This latter piece is an important consideration because, says, Donna Harman, much of the benefits of Cranfield ( and TREC) came from the re-usability of their document collections.

So, is the Cranfield Paradigm outdated?  was the question she posed to all of us in the audience at the University of Geneva ( incidentally founded by Calvin, the Protestant Reformer)