Dedication

I am living in the present house for more than a year. I had not seen the design of the gate of my next door neighbour at all. Rather, I had not observed it at all.

Here is the picture of that gate.

“What is special?”, you might say. Look closely. What does the white line represent? If you have had any brush with statistics, you will recognise it as the Normal Distribution curve or in the more general parlance the Bell Curve.

The owner’s profession? An expert on Statistical Quality Control. This is the gate of the house of (now late) Mr. Srinivasan. He had a Master's degree in Statistics. He once told me that he had trained some top people in the company I worked for – for nearly 20 years – Kirloskar Electric. When I left that company, I was the head of Quality Assurance for one of its units, Unit IV, Mysore, hence my interest in Statistics.

When I told Mr. Srinivasan about myself, he presented me some books written by him, one of them on Quality Control. You could take a look at his book here: Managing Quality: Concepts and Tasks By N S Sreenivasan, V Narayana. After retirement, he wrote some more books - on self development and he gave me copies of those too. One of them is "vyaktitva sudhaaraNe" published by saahitya sindhu prakashana.

Alas, he is no more.