(Above): A child enjoying Holi, the festival of colors in Fremont, Calif., March 31. Look for full coverage in the May issue of Siliconeer.

However, in India, firms are increasingly offering work-from-home option to enable employees achieve greater work-life balance. The enthusiasm of the firms lay in the fact that the concept contributed to a general reduction in office and travel expenditure, higher efficiency and productivity, retention of invaluable talent due to lesser layoffs, shortening of timelines of projects, lower medical leaves, besides other advantages.

The yeas and nays over ‘Work from Home’ have a clear parallel drawn when it comes to advantages and disadvantages of the practice. Work-from-home can only be successful when the professional strictly adheres to the critical, vital ingredients of discipline, obtains proper training, and has a home-office environment geared towards building concentration, and adopts clear work-time and home-time divisions, writes Priyanka Bhardwaj.

The evolution of Sunnyvale Hindu Temple is a story of unconditional dedication or samarpan by those who had a dream, twenty-one years ago. Just as Rome was not built in a day, an institution like this cannot be built in a day either. When the goal is to build a community project with the contribution of the community and not with a bulk donation of the select few, it takes time and dedication, writes Ashok K. Gupta.

Innovation, from improving robot navigation to advancing treatment for breast cancer, was thriving at the nation’s capital. Honoring high school seniors with exceptional promise in math and science, Intel Corporation and Society for Science & the Public recognized the winners of what is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition.

The competition recognized high school seniors who are leaders in innovation and seeking to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. This year’s winners included two Indian Americans who won the ninth and tenth place in the competition. Siliconeer presents a report.

Looking back at the recent turn of events, Karunanidhi is the Sachin Tendulkar of Indian politics if one goes strictly by age criteria and not record or statistics. Contemporaries like Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani have faded. Manmohan Singh is headed for retirement. The country is facing an even bigger fiasco as the political players draw cards at their game of poker, writes Siddharth Srivastava.

They led the conception, design, and implementation of much of Google’s revolutionary software infrastructure, which underlies the company’s web search and indexing, as well as numerous applications across the industry.

This technology has been emulated by virtually every major Internet company in the world. Siliconeer looks at Dean and Ghemawat’s research describing the scalable infrastructure they created was pivotal to the burgeoning field of cloud computing.

Taking on the Conrad challenge, Tinnovate, a team of three young students and future entrepreneurs, Vinitra Swamy, Michael Li and Ashley Liu have created “inVision” which will benefit humanity in their day to day lives by suggesting safer alternate routes for their commute, writes Bhuvana Ramachandran.

After leaving medical school and heading to India to pursue her passion in music, she was able to complete and release two music albums and start her own music label in India. She then went to France to do her MBA. She has started an events company and music label in the United States to propagate world music and young artists. Rimi Basu hopes her story will inspire youth to choose non-traditional paths and follow their passions.

Every once in a while, a story comes along which needs to be told from another perspective. Writer Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist was one such post 9/11 tale. His fictional story is being made into a film directed by Mira Nair. Ras H. Siddiqui talks to the writer and reviews the movie.

Siliconeer wishes a happy Pohela Boishakh, Baisakhi and Ugadi to all our readers!