The Hindu Business Line : From India to America

Catch up with the Suburban Sahibs this weekend - a story about the passage to the US of three immigrant families; their flair for programming languages; their quirks; and their sense of displaced identities.

FOR those working with Extensible Markup Language, a good reference is XML 1.1 Programming Bible by Biran Benz and John R. Durant, published by Wiley Dreamtech India P Ltd (www.wileydreamtech.com) . The very first point on the cover could attract accountants too: "Harness new XML 1.1 power to structure data for spreadsheets, configuration parameters and financial transactions." Let's say you know HTML, but have you heard about "the granddaddy of all markup languages, Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML)"? If you have seen XML documents, you would have noticed that they are tough on the eyes. Let that not put you off because XML is "not designed for us to read" but by XML parsers.

Okay, I thumb straight to chapter 13, on `creating an Excel spreadsheet from an XML data source'; this is something relevant if we are trying to consolidate data from different formats. "XML Flattener contains processing logic so that data in an XML file can be converted into a two-dimensional spreadsheet."

Excel 2002 can do wonders, because it "figures out what should be represented as rows and what, as columns"; it even applies default formatting to bold and colour column headings. "Another way of importing XML into Excel is by using a special feature known as Web queries."

The authors explain how, with a Web query, "you can import data from any page that is served up and parsed by the Web browser." At the end of your work, you can make your Excel data portable by saving the same as XML spreadsheet. Let me try out a few X abbreviations on you: XACML is XML Access Control Markup Language; XI is XML integrator; and XDK is XML Developer's Kit. If they are too boring, try X-KISS, XKMS, X-KRSSS, XML4J and XSL. You may like to retort with XSU for making me shut up the X stuff, but that means XML-SQL Utility. Essential read, because XML may be the ultimate link that holds our civilisation together, when things become too specialised and diverse.

Don't trip over IP law

A heavy-duty book on law is what Avinash Shivade provides in Intellectual Property Manual, published by LexisNexis Butterworths India (www.lexisnexis.co.in) . Relevant, because if you are in any knowledge industry, such as software, IP should mean not only Internet Protocol, but also the subject matter of the book. "The intangibility of these rights leads to their own peculiar difficulties in creation and enforcement," notes the author in his preface. "Not only in India, but all over the world, the legislatures are trying to grapple with the more and more complex fields of intellectual property rights like biotechnology, information technology, plant varieties, geographical indications and so on."

Laws that we have are those that have evolved "in fits and starts, more in response to the onslaught of technology". Contrary to popular misconception that IP rights can restrict use, Shivade points out how, in intellectual property rights, "the owner does not retain possession of any intellectual work". How? "The very object is to make the work in which an intellectual property right subsists, available to as many users as possible." Thus, the developer of computer software has to licence the software to users; a trademark has to be applied to goods, advertised and used.

"The four major intellectual property rights are copyrights, designs, patents and trademarks." However, as a result of international conventions and agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), there are new complex rights such as: "Geological indications, semiconductor integrated circuit layout-designs or `chips', rights of plant breeders and protection of undisclosed information."

The book devotes great attention to each of the four major IP laws: The Copyright Act, 1957; the Designs Act, 2000; the Trade Marks Act, 1999; and the Patents Act, 1970. In the Copyright Act, you would find the definition of `computer' after `composer'; and, `computer programme', as Sec 2 (ffc) defines, "means a set of instructions expressed in words, codes, schemes or in any other form, including a machine readable medium, capable of causing a computer to perform a particular task or achieve a particular result."

Also, in what can make your English professor angry, `literary work' includes computer programmes, table and compilations including computer databases, putting software on the same pedestal as Kalidas or Shakespeare. Accommodate Avinash's Manual in your rack, pushing out outdated software manuals.

A to Z of desi in America

Who is an NRI? Answer: "The one carrying nostalgia in a suitcase." This definition is from Amitava Kumar's foreword to Suburban Sahibs, written by S. Mitra Kalita, and published by Penguin (www.penguinbooksindia.com) . He talks of `duty-free Indians', `long-distance nationalism', and how `roots have given way to routes.'

The book is about three immigrant families and their passage from India to America. Meet the H-1Bs of Kalita: "These were the newly arrived, highly skilled Indians who earned dollar salaries close to six figures, who were greeted by limousines at airports, who knew what Guess and Gap were, whose knowledge of programming languages from Java to COBOL to C++ had paved their entry to the US."

ABCD is not new: American-Born Confused Desi; but can you stretch it to Z? "American-Born Confused Desi, Emigrated From Gujarat, Housed In Jersey, Keeping Lotsa Motels, Named Omkarnath Patel... " And why did the CEO of Tata Consultancy change his memo headings from `Office Orders' to `From the CEO's desk'? Why is Mumbai having a rising DINK class: double income, no kids?

You may work across software platforms, but "ads tend to be caste-specific." Also, "even flaws can be explained away." For example: "37/5'7½" look much younger, good-looking Hindu Gujarati professional. Issueless innocent divorcee.

Working as Sr. Software Consultant, MS Computer Science. Easy going, down to earth, cosmopolitan outlook, good sense of humour, seeking attractive girl... " Reserve the Sahibs for the weekend.

Tailpiece

"Suppose the short hand is in 4 and the long hand near 12. Means what?"

"Means you don't have a digital watch on hand."

mail to:Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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