A letter to Nirpal Dhaliwal

Nirpal Dhaliwal writes in DailyMail that Britain need not apologize to India for ruling it for 300 years. Only a moron can write this kind of article. At one point he even states "without the British, Indians would not even know what it is to be Indian." The worst part is the writer is a Sikh and I have to take great pains to remind him of JalianWala Bagh massacre. During the Bengal famine, millions of Indians died due to the inaction of the British.

I always opined that British Queen deserves same place in history as of Hitler because she was directly or indirectly responsible for millions of deaths in India. And you may discard my opinion as mere rant by some unknown blogger but Nirpal, I would suggest to read this article by Johann Hari.

He also writes:
"should not obscure the fact that British rule in India was a joint effort, impossible without the widespread co- operation of Indians themselves.
Despite the country's vast population, there were never more than 70,000 British troops in India; the running of the country required an enormous infrastructure of native troops, police and bureaucrats."


Dude seriously, I wonder how with your minimal brains, you manage to write for Guardian. Why don't you just leave the history aside and stick to writing tourist guides. The widespread co-operation of Indians was tactically achieved by adopting the policies of Lord Macaulay. A wiki entry on Lord Macaulay shows:


"The term Macaulay's Children is used to refer to people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonisers^[4]. It is used as a pejorative term, and the connotation is one of disloyalty to one's country and one's heritage. This frame of mind or attitude is also referred to as Macaulayism"

Nirpal, doesn't even mention about the partition of India because of which today both Indians and Pakistanis are paying the price and also which took hundreds of thousands of lives. Half the problems the world is facing today is because of the rule of The British. The LTTE problem in Sri Lanka, Israel-Palestine problem, Indo-Pak, Sino-India, and also countless ongoing wars in Africa. The British employed divide and conquer in India  because of which Hindu-Muslim relations are always on the boil. They have employed these strategies in Africa as well with disastrous consequences for Africa.

I can go on and on and show how misguided Nirpal's article is but I would suggest him to read atleast Wikipedia articles on British Raj. Atleast then he might figure out that Britain not only needs to apologize for India but to the rest of the world as well.

Links:
http://johannhari.com/2009/07/31/the-dark-side-of-andrew-roberts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay,_1st_Baron_Macaulay#India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famines,_epidemics,_and_public_health_in_the_British_Raj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Economic_impact

ps: This blog has been written in a hurry while I am waiting for the flight. I did not proof read it and if I have given any wrong links or data, will later be corrected.

Rosetta Java developer interview

I had interview for Technology Associate with Rosetta, a Cleveland based interactive brand marketing company. The position was for Java developer and I had three rounds of interviews. The first round was with the Team Manager and it was mostly HR based with few technical questions sprinkled mainly about the projects in my resume.

The second round was technical and all the questions were on Java. He gave me code on synchronization and asked me to find if anything is wrong with the code. There was another coding based question on Java Reflections. I never used reflections and I just before the interview coincidentally I read about reflection. I just glanced through the concept since I had lot of other things to go through. I think I did well on that question. And then he gave me a recursion based problem and asked to code it iteratively.

Finally he asked all the OOPs concepts final, finally, finalize, static, abstract, inheritance, interfaces, garbage collection, collections(hashmap, sets). I concentrated a lot on generics and luckily they are still using JDK 1.4 so I did not get any questions on newly added Java concepts.

Overall the interview was positive experience except for the greyhound bus ride from Columbus to Cleveland. This is the second time it happened to me that my co-passenger was drunk although this guy was much better than the other co-passenger I had from Columbus to Chicago. Why would Greyhound let in the passengers who are drunk onto its buses is beyond my comprehension

.NET interview

Today I had an interview for an internship position at a reputed company in Columbus, OH. They were looking for .NET developers and since I had lots of experience in Microsoft technologies, I got a call from them.

I was pretty confident that I would do well in interview since I am quite comfortable with .NET. I was asked questions like ASP.NET page lifecycle, viewstate, Session variables, LINQ, dynamic web controls and pretty much standard stuff.

I had another interview with another Columbus based company and it was on phone. They sent me few pieces code and I don't think I can post that code here. They told me that code is from their software. So not taking risk. I was asked to go through the code and explain what is happening with the code. They sent an aspx page, a code behind file and another cs file. Questions were on LINQ, javascript, to explain CommandName and CommandArgument...



There are few things I could not answer, like one question on Javascript. He asked me about variable naming conventions in js file and asked why variables are named like that. I did not have any concrete answer apart from saying that its following standard procedures on how to name variables. I don't know what he was expecting though.