Shenoy a great fan of and a regular columnist disseminating information on the sci-fi genre, recommended this book ' Numbercaste ' to me. His reasoning was simple, I am a data scientist and this science fiction book is based on that. Interesting premise for sure. And was he right, I could connect to the story so easily and got hooked. The author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is a big data researcher himself. Thus, the premise is closer home for him. He knows the technological advances and the research that has been going on. He knows about the next barriers to be broken. As the author so humbly acknowledges he just put together things that are already happening around us and extrapolated them to come up with this beautiful book. *** Possible Spoilers ahead *** Key topics of interest to a technologist in this book are exoskeletons, universal identity management based on blockchain to mitigate migration crises, and social and credit scoring system taken to extreme as pro

Back to this blog after a decade and how? COVID19 causing virus SARS-CoV-2 is neither the first coronavirus nor the last such to affect the human species adversely [i] . However, this grander SARS coronavirus has brought a pandemic of a scale never seen before in the modern world. Pandemics and epidemics, of course, have social, cultural, and economic impacts. Businesses may shift from epicenters to other geographies [ii] . There might be reduced social trust amongst the survivors and their descendants [iii] . In some cases, wages improved because of the shortage of labor [iv] . Let us now try to look at the issues business may face and strategies to mitigate those during the current pandemic. Since COVID19 spreads by human contact, most governments have turned to quarantine as a solution. The practice of social distancing for safety warranted most employers to let their employees work from home if possible. People are avoiding going to any place where they might contract the disea