A typical situation: An all-India entrance examination is conducted sloppily, loading the results in favour of some. The rest write to the institute about the faulty invigilation and mismanagement of time by the exam centre but receive no response. Frustrated, they decide to approach the Media.
The Times of India is the obvious first choice. The logic being: since it is read the most, it will cause maximum embarrassment and hence result in corrective action.
My experience tells me something else.
There are two kinds of newspapers:
1- those that are read the most by people-at-large (Times of India, Hindustan Times)
2- those that are read the most by bureaucrats but hardly by anybody else (Free Press Journal, Indian Express, The Statesman, Asian Age)
In my opinion, it is a better idea to approach the second variety for help. If one can impact the right IAS officer in-charge of education, there is a higher chance of corrective action happening.
I recall the IIPM story here. Soon after Rashmi Bansal and Gaurav Sabnis were hounded by IIPM, there were hectic attempts across the spectrum to push the story into the 'MSM' (Main Stream Media). A week of PR by the people involved got the story published in a few top dailies, even if as only opinion columns.
That IIPM is still enjoying the ride on inaccurate claims in full-page ads is there for all to see. As a bigger indicator of the failure of the bloggers' campaign, absolutely NONE of the senior IAS officers in the Union Education Ministry know about the IIPM matter even today. Moreover, none in the Union IT Ministry have a whiff of who/what bloggers are. That is how weak the blogger campaign was.
The catch here is, it was always going to be futile trying to push a story into commercially successfuls newspaper that place advertisements on a sacred high pedestal.
Though JAM magazine did commendable work in the investigative piece on IIPM, it can hardly expect a difference, just like MAD magazine cannot expect to influence world opinion on Iran's nukes.
I think, had a lesser known paper like Free Press Journal or Indian Express in New Delhi been provided with this story first, they would have badgered IIPM more successfully than others because of two reasons:
1- since they don't get any ads anyway, there is no risk in taking on IIPM
2- they are religiously read and taken seriously by IAS officers
The media that is read most is not necessarily a vehicle of change.
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Monday, December 19, 2005
Matheran Diary
My curiosity about Matheran, a resort 80 km east of Mumbai increased several times when I came to know it was India's only automobile-free hill station. Cars can come at most 3 kms of the town and are prohibited thereafter. A toy mountain train runs from Neral right into main Matheran town but has been out of business since July 2005's rain devastation. Taxis charge Rs 50 per seat to ferry the 6 kms steep climb from Neral to the last automobile point, whereafter one treks amidst a beautiful wooded path to the main market, the town center of Matheran.About 800 ponies and 90 hand-pulled rickshaws operate atop the hill station. Matheran mein aa ke ghode pe nahi baitha to kya kiya. The place is overflowing with people, mostly from Mumbai and Pune on weekends. From the bustling market, hills paths lead to Echo Point, Charlotte Lake, Lord Point and a dozen other Points, or hill edges jutting out to face a sheer drop into deep valleys. Miniscule streets in this tiny town are named 'Ambedkar Marg', 'MG Road', 'Patel Marg' and other heavy tags. The weather is cool all year round and the entire hill is green and thickly wooded.
Suicide is the Point
A single traveller is officially banned in Matheran hotels. You don't get a room unless you are at least a group of two. Why? The official version goes that Matheran is a popular suicide destination, and depressed people
frustrated with urbanese come to Matheran to jump to death from one of its several Points. So a solitary tourist is automatically adjudged a Suicidee and refused accomodation. Khali peeli police ka chakkar nahi magta hai.
I check with the local police station and the figures are appalling. There is one suicide reported per fortnight in Matheran!
My own hotel owner describes the last case involving a rich Mumbaikar, who arrived one day in a Skoda (special emphasis on the automobile brand) and hired a hotel room near one of the cliff edges. In the morning, nobody answered his door when a bellboy knocked. Panicked, the hotel and the police launched a search operation and the rich Mumbaikar's body was found at the bottom of a Point.
Car o Bar
The last hill-station to experiment with vehicular ban was Mussourie.The ban was lifted around 2000 and the thing has become a mess now. The entire place bears the look of an endless parking lot and the market on The Mall is a replica of Karol Bagh during Diwali.
The vehicular ban at Matheran has preserved the town and its air really well. But after the train service stopped, the ban has turned into a bane. The train was a cheap method to transport essential goods like foodgrains, milk, vegetables and LPG cylinders to the top. Post-train, ferrying costs have gone up by 30 percent, largely because of the manual labour costs incurred in carrying cargo from the last vehicle point to the town centre.
A gas cylinder is 10 rupees dearer at Matheran and a shaving razor is 2 rupees more inflated. A band-aid, however, costs the same.
Jignesh goes to Matheran
Every other tourist in Matheran is a Gujju. He comes loaded with entire family, lock stock and barrel, and immediately books three rooms in the Shiv Ganesh Gujarati Lodge, or some such. While walking from Taxi stand to Hotel, the younger members of the troupe are instructed to keep a watch for restaurants offering the ubiquitous Gujarati Thali. Nothing else would do.
The Gujarati tourists are an animated lot. Time after time, Jignesh, the nephew of the family head (who is also called Jignesh) makes a fuss and is disciplined by Shantiben, his mother.
These specimens also have an unending appetite to talk about money. At the slightest provocation, two Gujaratis (both being most probably called Jignesh) enjoying the nature at Matheran will erupt into a heated discussion on Business. Abuses would fly abound for some common acquintance (also called Jignesh) who is reputed unprofessional and does not deliver the maal on time. The deep discussion will carry on over lunch, dinner and late into night even as other family members give up on them. Only a cricket match viewing Live on TV can end their raconteurships.
Echo Point
When you shout out loud from this place, the voice is supposed to echo back from the rocky cliffs on the opposite side of the valley. In reality, it is quite a dampener. The echo is overrated - all that comes back is but a whimper of your howls.
A more effective way to make Echo Point work for redeeming the 2 kms trek is to locate a soul atop the hills on the opposite side of the valley. Most likely, that sould will be equally disappointed with the echos, or the lack of it. You then make a pact. Whatever you shout, that person shouts back and an echo is created. You then shout out loud and hear the same thing being shouted back from across the valley. Voila, you have an echo!
But then, that's cheating no?
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Write the writing off!
We print journalists have a strange habit of enumerating 'a flair for writing' as the prerequisite skill for journalism. 'If you have a flair for writing, journalism is the career for you' is a much milked line in our respective publications' weekly education supplements. I don't know why we do this.
The truth is, that unless you are the table journalist type, you realise two years into the profession that writing skills are only the third or fourth most essential in journalism. At best, it is only an added asset.
Out there on the field, especially on the cherished crime/court beats or panchayat beat, writing skills amount to zilch. What matters is street-smartness, awareness, alertness, persistence and ruthlessness. You can be a reporter, a good one at that, without writing skills. But you cannot be a reporter for nuts if you cannot extract a story out using this whole cocktail of people skills. If your story is good, the newsdesk will take care of mediocre writing.
The overrating of the flair for writing is why we have so many journalism dropouts. Kids with perfect backgrounds join the profession assuming that they would get to write beautiful pathbreaking pieces and become famous overnight. I see so many leaving within months because they could not take the shock of dealing with a foul-mouthed policemen, politicians and goons. The basis of journalism is not good writing, it is News. Good writing can only build on top of interesting facts.
If you don't have enough facts worthy of News, what really is the use of beautiful writing skills? If you want to earn money out of good writing skills, why not instead become an author of books?
The truth is, that unless you are the table journalist type, you realise two years into the profession that writing skills are only the third or fourth most essential in journalism. At best, it is only an added asset.
Out there on the field, especially on the cherished crime/court beats or panchayat beat, writing skills amount to zilch. What matters is street-smartness, awareness, alertness, persistence and ruthlessness. You can be a reporter, a good one at that, without writing skills. But you cannot be a reporter for nuts if you cannot extract a story out using this whole cocktail of people skills. If your story is good, the newsdesk will take care of mediocre writing.
The overrating of the flair for writing is why we have so many journalism dropouts. Kids with perfect backgrounds join the profession assuming that they would get to write beautiful pathbreaking pieces and become famous overnight. I see so many leaving within months because they could not take the shock of dealing with a foul-mouthed policemen, politicians and goons. The basis of journalism is not good writing, it is News. Good writing can only build on top of interesting facts.
If you don't have enough facts worthy of News, what really is the use of beautiful writing skills? If you want to earn money out of good writing skills, why not instead become an author of books?
Monday, November 28, 2005
Stubborn Man on a Stubborn Balloon
There are so many interesting anecdotes about Vijaypat Singhania's record breaking hot air ballooning feat that media space has fallen short to report all of them.
Singhania did not refrain from adding his personal touch to parts of the flight. For instance during the descent, Singhania's flight technician Colin Prescot had announced in Mumbai that weather conditions and misbehaving burners would make landing an ardous task spread over several hours. Minutes after the prediction, Singhania took matters in his own hands and landed anyway. Brute force works best in times of crises. That he landed in the same area in Sinnar near Nasik where he had performed practice flights earlier must have helped.
Soon after he hit the ground, Singhania cut the balloon off from the capsule. The balloon after detachment dragged away some of the burners with it, charring the grass for some distance. Funnily enough, the balloon then took off on its own again, and was still floating in the sky when Singhania boarded a chopper back to Mumbai. The balloon continued floating all over the place till late evening, giving some really nasty moments to the Singhania's ground team. Imagine their plight, as they had to keep chasing the balloon around in their SUVs all day in order to catch it the moment it touched down again!
It would be wholly amusing to find out where the balloon finally ended its love affair with the air... if it fell on top of some unsuspecting villager having a bidi or on farmland, damaging lakhs worth of produce. In the olden days, hot air ballooners carried a bottle of champagne along with them in the flight. Because you cannot predict where your balloon will land, the champagne came handy as a gift for cooling down tempers of the people whose property you landed on. Over time, property owners realized that a balloon carrying people in a basket dropping all of a sudden from the sky is not really God's curse. So the champagne was instead shared by the ballooners in a party after returning to the launch site. The ritual champagne party was thrown by the Singhanias after the flight too.
Anyhow, reporting the hot air balloon record was a wholly exciting experience. I watched the takeoff in-the-flesh, and then later followed the balloon all through its flight in a chopper. We veered above Mumbai, Trombay, Alibagh and the highway to Nasik for hours, catching both beautiful and ugly overhead glimpses of India's most complicated city before taking an exclusive return flight with the Man of the Day himself. These are the experiences that make me feel very convinced about having made the right decision about my career!
Singhania did not refrain from adding his personal touch to parts of the flight. For instance during the descent, Singhania's flight technician Colin Prescot had announced in Mumbai that weather conditions and misbehaving burners would make landing an ardous task spread over several hours. Minutes after the prediction, Singhania took matters in his own hands and landed anyway. Brute force works best in times of crises. That he landed in the same area in Sinnar near Nasik where he had performed practice flights earlier must have helped.
Soon after he hit the ground, Singhania cut the balloon off from the capsule. The balloon after detachment dragged away some of the burners with it, charring the grass for some distance. Funnily enough, the balloon then took off on its own again, and was still floating in the sky when Singhania boarded a chopper back to Mumbai. The balloon continued floating all over the place till late evening, giving some really nasty moments to the Singhania's ground team. Imagine their plight, as they had to keep chasing the balloon around in their SUVs all day in order to catch it the moment it touched down again!
It would be wholly amusing to find out where the balloon finally ended its love affair with the air... if it fell on top of some unsuspecting villager having a bidi or on farmland, damaging lakhs worth of produce. In the olden days, hot air ballooners carried a bottle of champagne along with them in the flight. Because you cannot predict where your balloon will land, the champagne came handy as a gift for cooling down tempers of the people whose property you landed on. Over time, property owners realized that a balloon carrying people in a basket dropping all of a sudden from the sky is not really God's curse. So the champagne was instead shared by the ballooners in a party after returning to the launch site. The ritual champagne party was thrown by the Singhanias after the flight too.
Anyhow, reporting the hot air balloon record was a wholly exciting experience. I watched the takeoff in-the-flesh, and then later followed the balloon all through its flight in a chopper. We veered above Mumbai, Trombay, Alibagh and the highway to Nasik for hours, catching both beautiful and ugly overhead glimpses of India's most complicated city before taking an exclusive return flight with the Man of the Day himself. These are the experiences that make me feel very convinced about having made the right decision about my career!
Friday, November 25, 2005
Dilemma
The coaster sticks to the bottom of the cup when I pick it up to sip tea. I don't know what to do about it.
Monday, November 14, 2005
BS-chools!
Education in Indian bschools seems to be about a lot of pointless BS which attracts a section of people who after joining it only gravitate more towards that kind of BS.
At a certain top b-school that I visited recently, I had the chance to interview a few profs from whom I was expecting a good mature conversation about the general management education scenario in the country. I was appalled to hear them talk utter nonsense disguised under jargon. Being the impatient one, I cut the interview short bluntly with a couple of them after they gave me horrifying goobledoock like "augmenting competencies which seem profound at the conceptual level but are immensely essential variables in terms of personal value addition."
All I had asked them was, "Why does a b-school need a festival?"
Hello!! Why couldn't they state their thoughts in simple words? Are the profs in our best b-school such pathetic communicators? To make things worse, this disease is contracted by perfectly normal students. It renders them into brainless duds who begin to talk like one of those text-to-speech conversion software programs. Do these guys even listen to themselves talk? Who will have the time to talk to such people in the corporate world?
There was this extempore competition happening during the visit with participants from top b-schools contesting. It was so depressing to see that none of them was having fun. With grim faces, they were talking total nonsense like "Lord Buddha said this, Vivekanand said that, Gandhi said so-and-so" for commonplace topics like 'Some people are alive because it is illegal to kill them.' It is okay if you deliver such a speech in class VIII in school. But at 23?? Excuse me! Doesn't anybody in the system realise how pretentious it all is?
Whatever happened to common sense?
At a certain top b-school that I visited recently, I had the chance to interview a few profs from whom I was expecting a good mature conversation about the general management education scenario in the country. I was appalled to hear them talk utter nonsense disguised under jargon. Being the impatient one, I cut the interview short bluntly with a couple of them after they gave me horrifying goobledoock like "augmenting competencies which seem profound at the conceptual level but are immensely essential variables in terms of personal value addition."
All I had asked them was, "Why does a b-school need a festival?"
Hello!! Why couldn't they state their thoughts in simple words? Are the profs in our best b-school such pathetic communicators? To make things worse, this disease is contracted by perfectly normal students. It renders them into brainless duds who begin to talk like one of those text-to-speech conversion software programs. Do these guys even listen to themselves talk? Who will have the time to talk to such people in the corporate world?
There was this extempore competition happening during the visit with participants from top b-schools contesting. It was so depressing to see that none of them was having fun. With grim faces, they were talking total nonsense like "Lord Buddha said this, Vivekanand said that, Gandhi said so-and-so" for commonplace topics like 'Some people are alive because it is illegal to kill them.' It is okay if you deliver such a speech in class VIII in school. But at 23?? Excuse me! Doesn't anybody in the system realise how pretentious it all is?
Whatever happened to common sense?
Sunday, November 13, 2005
20 random rants
Zarine has nothing better to do in life :p so she has tagged me. Since I have nothing better to do in life either, I pick up the tag to write 20 random things about me :D
1- Music is the epicentre of my existence. I wish I had more time and money to invest in all the music I haven't heard.
2- Although I have been born and brought up in big cities, my sensibilities and beliefs are more small-town and semi-urban than cosmopolitan. I identify more with Bhopal or Dehradun than Delhi and Mumbai.
3- I love running and do it every morning. 2-3 days without it and I feel dizzy.
4- I don't like people or being too close to them much, but over the years I have worked hard towards becoming less shy and maybe developing an exterior that helps me get along with people.
5- I am a stickler for privacy and don't like it when people pry too much.
6- My best friendships have been with the unlikeliest of people. They have never said in as many words nor have I ever said to them that they and I were friends. I'd like to keep it that way.
7- I love riding in double-decker buses.
8- I enjoy having an orange bar especially when a little stub of it remains on the stick.
9- I can sleep standing on one leg for exactly two seconds. On both legs, it's 8 hours :D.
10- I like passionate people and doers not talkers. There is no point living a life where you do not follow your dreams.
11- I lack the extreme pessimism that is said to be essential to a journalist. It makes me a complete misfit in the profession and I have begun to hate it. Still, it has been working well for me and I don't know why it is so.
12- I hate Maggi noodles and its mere smell makes me uneasy.
13- I love jazz and would like to form my own jazz band someday.
14- My parents have never for once approved of my eccentric career choices yet they have stood by me all along.
15- I always believed that one could not make new friends after 21 but still made one of my closest ones at 24.
16- I have no time for people who lie because of personal insecurity and find it surprisingly easy to move on without getting affected by them.
17- I think cricket is overrated.
18- I think the idea that guys and girls can be just good friends is a load of BS.
19- I love Delhi for its trees, wide roads and eating places, Mumbai for its workaholic pace and Bhopal for its innocence. Also, I refuse to believe that there can be a city filthier than Mumbai.
20- Finding 20 things to write about me was easier than I thought :D
I tag... everybody in blogdom! In particular, I tag:
Rajat
Neeta (more so because she hates being tagged :D)
Bharathi
Siddharth
Aastha
Good Luck! :)
1- Music is the epicentre of my existence. I wish I had more time and money to invest in all the music I haven't heard.
2- Although I have been born and brought up in big cities, my sensibilities and beliefs are more small-town and semi-urban than cosmopolitan. I identify more with Bhopal or Dehradun than Delhi and Mumbai.
3- I love running and do it every morning. 2-3 days without it and I feel dizzy.
4- I don't like people or being too close to them much, but over the years I have worked hard towards becoming less shy and maybe developing an exterior that helps me get along with people.
5- I am a stickler for privacy and don't like it when people pry too much.
6- My best friendships have been with the unlikeliest of people. They have never said in as many words nor have I ever said to them that they and I were friends. I'd like to keep it that way.
7- I love riding in double-decker buses.
8- I enjoy having an orange bar especially when a little stub of it remains on the stick.
9- I can sleep standing on one leg for exactly two seconds. On both legs, it's 8 hours :D.
10- I like passionate people and doers not talkers. There is no point living a life where you do not follow your dreams.
11- I lack the extreme pessimism that is said to be essential to a journalist. It makes me a complete misfit in the profession and I have begun to hate it. Still, it has been working well for me and I don't know why it is so.
12- I hate Maggi noodles and its mere smell makes me uneasy.
13- I love jazz and would like to form my own jazz band someday.
14- My parents have never for once approved of my eccentric career choices yet they have stood by me all along.
15- I always believed that one could not make new friends after 21 but still made one of my closest ones at 24.
16- I have no time for people who lie because of personal insecurity and find it surprisingly easy to move on without getting affected by them.
17- I think cricket is overrated.
18- I think the idea that guys and girls can be just good friends is a load of BS.
19- I love Delhi for its trees, wide roads and eating places, Mumbai for its workaholic pace and Bhopal for its innocence. Also, I refuse to believe that there can be a city filthier than Mumbai.
20- Finding 20 things to write about me was easier than I thought :D
I tag... everybody in blogdom! In particular, I tag:
Rajat
Neeta (more so because she hates being tagged :D)
Bharathi
Siddharth
Aastha
Good Luck! :)
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
And then the children slept in peace...
Perhaps the most exciting development of this week is dacoit Nirbhay Singh Gujjar’s encounter yesterday in Etawah, UP. It means the end to 25 unrelenting years of fear in more than four districts of UP and MP.
The word ‘Fear’ has become too commonplace these days, especially in the contemporary context of terrorism, increasing rape cases in cities and old couples being looted and hacked in residential areas.
But none of us city dwellers have been anywhere near to living in true fear, of the kind evoked by Nirbhay among the villages of Etawah, Uraiya, Kanpur in UP and Bhind in MP. For over two decades, these people have spent every moment of their lives with the knowledge that there’s very a high likelihood they’ll be killed by Gujjar the next minute. Imagine the kind of fear which made thousands of people bolt their doors fast not even a second later after sundown and not come out until daybreak for each day of over 20 years.
Nirbhay’s reign of terror had made him a consummate folk anti-hero whose name was invoked by mothers in the state to put recalcitrant children to sleep.
To realise what fear means, one just has to take a walk in the town of Bhind. Every fourth shop in the town is a fully legal arms and ammunitions shop. There are more than 80 shops within an area of two sq kms that sell all kinds of rifles and country made revolvers. People need that kind of personal security in that region.
In many ways, Nirbhay’s end was coming. In the classic good-cop-bad-cop manner, for two years the MP police had been talking of getting him a graceful surrender while the UP police spoke of nothing but death in an encounter for Gujjar. In February 2005, Nirbhay’s relative Arvind Singh Gujjar surrendered respectably with his gang in Bhind to MP police. The same day, the UP police had seriously wounded several members of another gang headed by Rajjan Gujjar during an encounter in Etawah. Such totally opposite policies by the two states must have caused some serious confusion among dacoitydom. Somewhere, Gujjar’s tactical mistakes leading to his death must have roots in this confusion.
Mind you, the good-cop-bad-cop routine was only a coincidence, for the UP and MP police never cooperated with each other for ending their common menace of dacoity.
Only a month ago when MP CM Babulal Gaur visited UP’s Mulayam that talks of coordinated anti-dacoity operations first happened on a serious level. Yesterday’s encounter might be a result of only that.
The word ‘Fear’ has become too commonplace these days, especially in the contemporary context of terrorism, increasing rape cases in cities and old couples being looted and hacked in residential areas.
But none of us city dwellers have been anywhere near to living in true fear, of the kind evoked by Nirbhay among the villages of Etawah, Uraiya, Kanpur in UP and Bhind in MP. For over two decades, these people have spent every moment of their lives with the knowledge that there’s very a high likelihood they’ll be killed by Gujjar the next minute. Imagine the kind of fear which made thousands of people bolt their doors fast not even a second later after sundown and not come out until daybreak for each day of over 20 years.
Nirbhay’s reign of terror had made him a consummate folk anti-hero whose name was invoked by mothers in the state to put recalcitrant children to sleep.
To realise what fear means, one just has to take a walk in the town of Bhind. Every fourth shop in the town is a fully legal arms and ammunitions shop. There are more than 80 shops within an area of two sq kms that sell all kinds of rifles and country made revolvers. People need that kind of personal security in that region.
In many ways, Nirbhay’s end was coming. In the classic good-cop-bad-cop manner, for two years the MP police had been talking of getting him a graceful surrender while the UP police spoke of nothing but death in an encounter for Gujjar. In February 2005, Nirbhay’s relative Arvind Singh Gujjar surrendered respectably with his gang in Bhind to MP police. The same day, the UP police had seriously wounded several members of another gang headed by Rajjan Gujjar during an encounter in Etawah. Such totally opposite policies by the two states must have caused some serious confusion among dacoitydom. Somewhere, Gujjar’s tactical mistakes leading to his death must have roots in this confusion.
Mind you, the good-cop-bad-cop routine was only a coincidence, for the UP and MP police never cooperated with each other for ending their common menace of dacoity.
Only a month ago when MP CM Babulal Gaur visited UP’s Mulayam that talks of coordinated anti-dacoity operations first happened on a serious level. Yesterday’s encounter might be a result of only that.
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Furious to Sleepy in 24 hours
Two of the greatest Himalayan rivers Alaknanda and Bhagirathi meet at Devprayag (pic) in Uttaranchal to form the holiest Indian river Ganga. If one stands at the confluence facing downstream, the Alaknanda on the left flows in calm and serene while the Bhagirathi on the right is a study in fury, a huge noisy angry mountain river. You may take a leisurely dip in the Alaknanda, but two metres away towards the right the Bhagirathi might consume you if you put both legs knee deep into the water.Only till yesterday.
After the third diversion tunnel of the 2,400 MW Tehri Dam project was closed down earlier this week, the water flow on Bhagirathi upstream stopped, putting the furious river to sleep.
Devprayag now has the Alaknanda flowing ever as calmly on the left while on the right there’s only a small stream, the remnant of Bhagirathi. When the Bhagirathi water level began climbing down yesterday, there was however a backflow from the Alaknanda into the Bhagirathi first, where the Alaknanda water ran in to fill in the void in Bhagirathi. Things began to neutralize soon. It would have been an interesting spectacle to witness.
I have spent countless solitary days and nights in Devprayag in a one-room tenement that I visit every year. It's my yearly pilgrimage to nature. During these annual trips, I get up early at 6am, take walk down to the confluence, past the suspension bridge over Bhagirathi. That early in the morning, there’s daybreak on Alaknanda while a few yards on the right the Bhagirathi valley just kisses goodbye to the morning twilight.
After a breakfast of bread and goat-butter with very sweet tea I walk up along the Alaknanda to the higher part of Devprayag town and meet up with some locals that I have made friends there over the years. They tell me proudly that their sons travel 80 kms to and fro everyday ‘to learn computer course at NIIT Haridwar centre’.
When the sun is out and over above, I cross over the confluence from the bridge over Alaknanda to the little island with the abandoned clocktower. Nobody visits this clocktower yet it is always spotlessly clean and you don’t even have to brush the dust off the benches around it to sit. I don’t know how this happens.
After lunch at the bus stand, watching buses from Haridwar and Rishikesh travel diligently up the highway to their destinations at Gangotri, Kedarnath or Badrinath, it is back to my room for a quick nap or some reading.
At the first hint of sundown I trek up one of the many hills around the confluence. From the top of one of the hill, drinking very sweet tea made by a villager, the confluence looks like two small lines of termites coming together to join a single file.
At night, I have dinner with the 75-year-old owner of my tenement. As usual, I have thousand questions to ask about him about Uttaranchal, its culture, people, potential and development. I get my answers spoken in the hill dialect, interspersed with much lore, stories of ghosts and banshees, tigers and leopards, the woman who turned into a tree, et al.
All this will still be possible, but the deafening roar of the Bhagirathi’s fury in the background will be missing.
It is a small price to pay, for Tehri Dam brings with it electricity and economic benefits that will help this backward state greatly.
There has been much propaganda by the media and so-called-environmentalists against this dam, accompanied by claims of earthquake danger by ‘conservationists’ who know zilch about seismology or rock mechanics and everything about impassioned speeches and James Joyce type writing. The truth is that if you travel upstream along the Bhagirathi valley, the locals will tell you how eagerly they have been waiting for Tehri Dam.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Why Natwar Singh's resignation might mean General Elections
If the Paul Volcker Committee report names the Foreign Minister Natwar Singh as recipient of kickbacks from Saddam Hussein, the routine face saving measure is that the ruling party Congress gets the minister to resign.
But what if the ruling party too received kickbacks from Saddam? By the same logic, should the Congress also ‘resign’?
Surely, the BJP already has this gameplan in mind: if Natwar is somehow sent packing, the Union Government automatically follows suit.
Which is exactly why the Left has come out in support of Natwar Singh.
Brilliant game of Chess, this!
But what if the ruling party too received kickbacks from Saddam? By the same logic, should the Congress also ‘resign’?
Surely, the BJP already has this gameplan in mind: if Natwar is somehow sent packing, the Union Government automatically follows suit.
Which is exactly why the Left has come out in support of Natwar Singh.
Brilliant game of Chess, this!
Sunday, October 30, 2005
To begin with... gibberish gibberish gibberish
Writing a good and catchy intro (opening lines) for a story has assumed so much significance in journalism that for many reporters, often the intro is the story. Understandably so, because competition between broadsheets has become so cutthroat, that newsroom bosses remain under pressure to churn out content which will attract the reader first and maybe inform him later. Fresh recruits ‘on the beat’ sent to some press conference carry that distinguishable expression of worry over their faces that voices the concern, ‘Where do I pick up the story from?’
The question is not illegitimate, but its interpretation has changed of late. ‘Where do I pick up the story from’ earlier used to mean which of the so many things talked about at the conference holds the highest importance – thereby deserving place in the opening lines. Now it means what smartass and wittily constructed sentence (even if vaguely relevant to the story and its facts) can I come up with to get the reader read my news item. It is like using Aishwarya Rai to advertise a new electric drill or a bulldozer. Viewer spots a beautiful face staring out of a newspaper ad, and once the attention is captured, we can leverage it to sell whatever… fairness crème, television, cooking oil or Patton tanks.
No real harm is done in writing a catchy intro to attract a reader toward a news item, as long as the item performs due diligence in delivering all the facts in the later paragraphs.
How are fresh recruits reacting to the newsroom pressure for good intros? Quite funnily. I have seen a huge number of fresh recruits set their browser homepages to one of the many websites on the Internet that contain famous quotes by famous people from where they cull out intros for their stories. If the story has a sociological flavour, begin with a Chomsky quote. For political, it is Abraham Lincoln of JFK. If the story is on personalities or celebrities, Freud has blurted out enough dope on people and behaviour to work as coherent intros. And George Bernard Shaw is the all-seasons man, he has said something witty about everything before dying. PG Wodehouse is the resort of the humorously inclined.
Is it doing the reader any harm? Mostly no. Because stories allotted to a fresh recruit are usually not important enough to affect the reader’s life in a big way. Is it doing the young reporter any harm? Maybe yes. Excessive pressure on intros does channelize all energy towards those first four sentences of the story. The remaining 300 words end up being mishmash and a vague representation of the facts. Over time, will this generation of reporters become as good writers as the newsroom bosses they work under?
One look at the Metro pages of any of the half-dozen broadsheets in Mumbai proves this. Beyond the intro, most stories are a mess. They begin with something and conclude with something completely unrelated.
As a classic example, I copy-paste the intro and the final paragraph below of one such story I read and leave it to you to guess what subject the story was about.
Intro: Men are four: He who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a fool – shun him; He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is simple – teach him; He who knows and knows not he knows, he is asleep – wake him; He who knows and knows he knows, he is wise – follow him!
Ending paragraph: “Some of the challenges involved in KPO will be maintaining higher quality standards, investment in KPO infrastructure, the lack of talent pool, requirement of higher level of control, confidentiality and enhanced risk management." Mr Walia adds.
The question is not illegitimate, but its interpretation has changed of late. ‘Where do I pick up the story from’ earlier used to mean which of the so many things talked about at the conference holds the highest importance – thereby deserving place in the opening lines. Now it means what smartass and wittily constructed sentence (even if vaguely relevant to the story and its facts) can I come up with to get the reader read my news item. It is like using Aishwarya Rai to advertise a new electric drill or a bulldozer. Viewer spots a beautiful face staring out of a newspaper ad, and once the attention is captured, we can leverage it to sell whatever… fairness crème, television, cooking oil or Patton tanks.
No real harm is done in writing a catchy intro to attract a reader toward a news item, as long as the item performs due diligence in delivering all the facts in the later paragraphs.
How are fresh recruits reacting to the newsroom pressure for good intros? Quite funnily. I have seen a huge number of fresh recruits set their browser homepages to one of the many websites on the Internet that contain famous quotes by famous people from where they cull out intros for their stories. If the story has a sociological flavour, begin with a Chomsky quote. For political, it is Abraham Lincoln of JFK. If the story is on personalities or celebrities, Freud has blurted out enough dope on people and behaviour to work as coherent intros. And George Bernard Shaw is the all-seasons man, he has said something witty about everything before dying. PG Wodehouse is the resort of the humorously inclined.
Is it doing the reader any harm? Mostly no. Because stories allotted to a fresh recruit are usually not important enough to affect the reader’s life in a big way. Is it doing the young reporter any harm? Maybe yes. Excessive pressure on intros does channelize all energy towards those first four sentences of the story. The remaining 300 words end up being mishmash and a vague representation of the facts. Over time, will this generation of reporters become as good writers as the newsroom bosses they work under?
One look at the Metro pages of any of the half-dozen broadsheets in Mumbai proves this. Beyond the intro, most stories are a mess. They begin with something and conclude with something completely unrelated.
As a classic example, I copy-paste the intro and the final paragraph below of one such story I read and leave it to you to guess what subject the story was about.
Intro: Men are four: He who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a fool – shun him; He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is simple – teach him; He who knows and knows not he knows, he is asleep – wake him; He who knows and knows he knows, he is wise – follow him!
Ending paragraph: “Some of the challenges involved in KPO will be maintaining higher quality standards, investment in KPO infrastructure, the lack of talent pool, requirement of higher level of control, confidentiality and enhanced risk management." Mr Walia adds.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Nothing Doing
And then Diwali shopping was taken hostage with our lives being the ransom.
I was in merry mode in the bustling Karol Bagh market with a friend when the Delhi triple blasts occured, and even at 6:45 pm the market did not seem to have any inkling of the mayhem that had happened a couple of kilometers away at Paharganj. Only after I received a couple of frantic calls from outstation friends asking if I was safe did I know that crowded spots in Delhi were the most dangerous places to be on earth at that time.
Our first reaction, naturally, was 'Vacate This Place'. Outside Karol Bagh too, things were pretty calm, even as the rush hour Delhi traffic grappled to remain stable in light of the city's fresh crisis. I must laud the Traffic Police for their management though, for despite the blasts and the accompanying chaos, traffic moved on smoothly on our entire way from Karol Bagh to Bengali Market via CP, all of which are at stone's throw from Paharganj. Before leaving Karol Bagh, we really doubted if my friend would be able to reach her home for the day.
My condolences towards the families left aggrieved by today's blasts. The blasts have occured at prime festive period of both the Hindu and Muslim community. Jaish-e-Mohammed is being said to have committed the ghastly act. I wonder how they justify their jehaad to themselves by ending people of their own community and disrupting a festival that celebrates the same Prophet that they cite to justify the jehaad. No it's not complicated, it's just plain sick.
I was in merry mode in the bustling Karol Bagh market with a friend when the Delhi triple blasts occured, and even at 6:45 pm the market did not seem to have any inkling of the mayhem that had happened a couple of kilometers away at Paharganj. Only after I received a couple of frantic calls from outstation friends asking if I was safe did I know that crowded spots in Delhi were the most dangerous places to be on earth at that time.
Our first reaction, naturally, was 'Vacate This Place'. Outside Karol Bagh too, things were pretty calm, even as the rush hour Delhi traffic grappled to remain stable in light of the city's fresh crisis. I must laud the Traffic Police for their management though, for despite the blasts and the accompanying chaos, traffic moved on smoothly on our entire way from Karol Bagh to Bengali Market via CP, all of which are at stone's throw from Paharganj. Before leaving Karol Bagh, we really doubted if my friend would be able to reach her home for the day.
My condolences towards the families left aggrieved by today's blasts. The blasts have occured at prime festive period of both the Hindu and Muslim community. Jaish-e-Mohammed is being said to have committed the ghastly act. I wonder how they justify their jehaad to themselves by ending people of their own community and disrupting a festival that celebrates the same Prophet that they cite to justify the jehaad. No it's not complicated, it's just plain sick.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Jazz update
I must admit, I had severely underestimated the prowess of a five-string bass until I watched that Flecktones concert video yesterday. Now because Victor Wooten is an unbelievably demented and probably the most brilliant cat ever to hold a five string, he can do to harmonics what Wodehouse can do to the idyllic British life.
There are at least 5 harmonics hidden on each string below the fifth fret, adding up to some 25 on a five-stringer, which can be used to construct a fairly complex piece with a simultaneous bassline no the E and A strings. Who'd have thunk! You have to see Victor do it to believe it. Besides Victor, the only bass player who has experimented so extensively with harmonics is Jaco Pastorius, expecially in the latter half of his career.
Hazaar magajmaari later, I laid my hands on five bootlegs of the Jonas Hellborg-Shawn Lane-Andrea Marchesini India Tour. While the Delhi concert, which I had incidentally attended in 2003, is a tight set featuring a spunky Time is the Enemy. The Someplace Else and Tripura House concerts are quite similar but a little predictable. The two-disc Aizawl concert is probably the most complex and best technically speaking.
Meanwhile, the Sunny Jain Collective is touring India and I hope to catch them while in Delhi.
There are at least 5 harmonics hidden on each string below the fifth fret, adding up to some 25 on a five-stringer, which can be used to construct a fairly complex piece with a simultaneous bassline no the E and A strings. Who'd have thunk! You have to see Victor do it to believe it. Besides Victor, the only bass player who has experimented so extensively with harmonics is Jaco Pastorius, expecially in the latter half of his career.
Hazaar magajmaari later, I laid my hands on five bootlegs of the Jonas Hellborg-Shawn Lane-Andrea Marchesini India Tour. While the Delhi concert, which I had incidentally attended in 2003, is a tight set featuring a spunky Time is the Enemy. The Someplace Else and Tripura House concerts are quite similar but a little predictable. The two-disc Aizawl concert is probably the most complex and best technically speaking.
Meanwhile, the Sunny Jain Collective is touring India and I hope to catch them while in Delhi.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Of Honeymooners and Fitting Replies
It so happened, one member of a Yahoogroup that I am member of married (a girl) and immediately left for France for a long honeymoon-cum-business trip in the first week of this month. Before leaving, he turned on the on-vacation auto-reply feature on his email account. Anybody who sends him an email now gets a "I'm on vacation, but I will reply after returning" message generated automatically by his mailbox.
The problem that has so resulted, is that any email sent to the Yahoogroup reaches the honeymooner's email account and makes it generate the automated vacation reply. Since an email sent to a Yahoogroup comes back to the sender, the automated vacation reply reaches back to the mail account in question and elicits another auto-reply. An infinite loop takes over and there's mayhem! Like testerday, group members exchanged some 25 emails all of which invoked the honeymooner's mailbox to go into an infinite loop and fill the Yahoogroup by over 400 vacation auto-reply mails in the past 24 hours.
The honeymooning couple, meanwhile, are understandably, err.. honeymooning in Paris, completely cut-off from the Internet, oblivious to the whole thing. The Moderator, who can block the honeymooner's emails until his return, is away reporting the earthquake in Kashmir.
Any solutions? :D
The problem that has so resulted, is that any email sent to the Yahoogroup reaches the honeymooner's email account and makes it generate the automated vacation reply. Since an email sent to a Yahoogroup comes back to the sender, the automated vacation reply reaches back to the mail account in question and elicits another auto-reply. An infinite loop takes over and there's mayhem! Like testerday, group members exchanged some 25 emails all of which invoked the honeymooner's mailbox to go into an infinite loop and fill the Yahoogroup by over 400 vacation auto-reply mails in the past 24 hours.
The honeymooning couple, meanwhile, are understandably, err.. honeymooning in Paris, completely cut-off from the Internet, oblivious to the whole thing. The Moderator, who can block the honeymooner's emails until his return, is away reporting the earthquake in Kashmir.
Any solutions? :D
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Dare to disagree with Arindam Chaudhry's IIPM?
As a solution to dalits' and minorities' electricity problems, Malay Chaudhry (the self-proclaimed management guru father of his self-proclaimed management guru ponytailed son Arindam Chaudhry) calls for giving each dalit household a diesel engine dynamo 'which will give light for 4 hours a day during the night' (akin to having an eggs-&-sandwiches breakfast for the afternoon dinner). He also advocates two tube wells in each dalit village to solve the drinking water problem, complete with a business plan (it's not too tough to attach statistics to an argument).
(Source: 'Renewing India: Let Caste/Community Divide Disappear' in the IIPM full-page advertisement in October 10, 2005 edition of Hindustan Times, Mumbai. No newspaper considers Malay Chaudhry a man worthwhile enough to write a column, so he has to pay and get his articles printed via advertisements)
The atrocious english language slips aside, the stupendously rising fuel prices and the sheer incongruity and drying up of the water table make Malay Chaudhry's arguments sound like those coming from a class VIII student. Is THIS the class, understanding and maturity of Malay Chaudhry, a former IIM Bangalore professor and Founder Director of what he claims to be 'India's no 1 B-school'?!!
You might ask me why I am even taking the IIPM propoganda so seriously. It takes only a pea-brain to figure out how dubious the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) is as a place to study from their full-page approval-seeking print advertisements.
I am doing this because if you question or pooh-pooh the claims of IIPM from the POV of a concerned consumer, like Mumbai-based magazine JAM magazine did and blogger Gaurav Sabnis followed up with more questions, IIPM stifles your voice by slapping a Rs 125 crore damages legal notice and threatening police action.
Simultaneously, the IIPM PR machinery spruces up fake blogs all over the Internet to discredit Gaurav Sabnis' name. Now what if more concerned citizens question IIPM's unfair practices... will Arindam Chaudhry stoop to newer lows as sending goondas to each home?
It would be interesting to know if there are any cases pending in the consumer courts against IIPM. It is very likely that there are. The AICTE has already objected to the use of the phrase 'Indian Institute of' in IIPM's name.
Meanwhile, several bloggers have come up to back Gaurav Sabnis.
If IIPM actually goes ahead with a legal recourse against Sabnis, they will end up axing their own foot. A defamation case eventually puts the truth to test. Imagine if this blows up into a court case, and a couple of disgruntled IIPM students are gathered to come forward and testify against the institute's malpractices in a court. I am sure the pony-tailed and mouse-voiced Arindam wouldn't consider that an increase in his happiness quotient.
(Source: 'Renewing India: Let Caste/Community Divide Disappear' in the IIPM full-page advertisement in October 10, 2005 edition of Hindustan Times, Mumbai. No newspaper considers Malay Chaudhry a man worthwhile enough to write a column, so he has to pay and get his articles printed via advertisements)
The atrocious english language slips aside, the stupendously rising fuel prices and the sheer incongruity and drying up of the water table make Malay Chaudhry's arguments sound like those coming from a class VIII student. Is THIS the class, understanding and maturity of Malay Chaudhry, a former IIM Bangalore professor and Founder Director of what he claims to be 'India's no 1 B-school'?!!
You might ask me why I am even taking the IIPM propoganda so seriously. It takes only a pea-brain to figure out how dubious the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) is as a place to study from their full-page approval-seeking print advertisements.
I am doing this because if you question or pooh-pooh the claims of IIPM from the POV of a concerned consumer, like Mumbai-based magazine JAM magazine did and blogger Gaurav Sabnis followed up with more questions, IIPM stifles your voice by slapping a Rs 125 crore damages legal notice and threatening police action.
Simultaneously, the IIPM PR machinery spruces up fake blogs all over the Internet to discredit Gaurav Sabnis' name. Now what if more concerned citizens question IIPM's unfair practices... will Arindam Chaudhry stoop to newer lows as sending goondas to each home?
It would be interesting to know if there are any cases pending in the consumer courts against IIPM. It is very likely that there are. The AICTE has already objected to the use of the phrase 'Indian Institute of' in IIPM's name.
Meanwhile, several bloggers have come up to back Gaurav Sabnis.
If IIPM actually goes ahead with a legal recourse against Sabnis, they will end up axing their own foot. A defamation case eventually puts the truth to test. Imagine if this blows up into a court case, and a couple of disgruntled IIPM students are gathered to come forward and testify against the institute's malpractices in a court. I am sure the pony-tailed and mouse-voiced Arindam wouldn't consider that an increase in his happiness quotient.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
My peon put a fly in my coffee
Business Risk Management elicits visions of a group of dashing necktie wearing smart-alecs working overtime to protect an enterprise from investment, capital and credit risks, godown damages, hackers and such.
The US-based business risk consultant firm Control Risk Group (due to make its formal announcement of India operations tomorrow), however on its website offers solutions to 'bomb threat', 'audio forensics' and 'kidnapping' too for businesses!
Did you know that companies also outsource to Control Risk Group for protection from...
The US-based business risk consultant firm Control Risk Group (due to make its formal announcement of India operations tomorrow), however on its website offers solutions to 'bomb threat', 'audio forensics' and 'kidnapping' too for businesses!
Did you know that companies also outsource to Control Risk Group for protection from...
- Construction Fraud
- Corruption
- Defensive Driving Training (when the CEO is attacked by a biker gang at Worli sea face)
- Extortion (D-company, beware!)
- Product contamination (is there poison in your project leader's masala-chai?)
- Anti-money laundering.
I say, what about the biggest risk of them all: intra-office romance?
Friday, September 30, 2005
Fodder for the green men!
Finally, higher education in Bihar has received its long awaited shot-in-the-arm through the route of foreign-university collaboration. A university in the UK has started a course in Astrobiology. Astrobiology, as the discerning mind would immediately grasp, is man's age-old hunger to search for alien life.
The course, besides studying astronomy, will also examine 'popular culture, including films like ET and students will also study obscure texts' related to extra-terrestrial life.
Aliens according to popular culture and obscure texts (and lately definitive literature like 'Men in Black' and 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'), are strange looking people who disguise themselves as people and clandestinely mix with the Earth public and work from inside to destroy humanity via economic and social misdeeds.
Now we know for sure where to find these Aliens... among the politicians of Bihar! Hence, the students' field trips and live experiments are largely going to be in Bihar. Now the question is, will these students do enough research to help these Aliens find their way back home?
The course, besides studying astronomy, will also examine 'popular culture, including films like ET and students will also study obscure texts' related to extra-terrestrial life.
Aliens according to popular culture and obscure texts (and lately definitive literature like 'Men in Black' and 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'), are strange looking people who disguise themselves as people and clandestinely mix with the Earth public and work from inside to destroy humanity via economic and social misdeeds.
Now we know for sure where to find these Aliens... among the politicians of Bihar! Hence, the students' field trips and live experiments are largely going to be in Bihar. Now the question is, will these students do enough research to help these Aliens find their way back home?
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Our celebrities just don't get it
Former Beach Boy Brian Wilson on his website has made an open offer that if you donate $100 for Katrina victims, he will will give you a call on your phone and answer a question of your choice.
True to his word, people have actually testified to receiving calls from him after they made the donation (courtesy Boing Boing).
I wonder why celebrities in India cannot do something like this in the times of Tsunami or Gujarat Earthquakes. A similar offer by people like SRK, Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Shekhar Suman or Sachin Tendulkar would do magic to calamity donations. What we do see them doing, though, is participating in an all-star show the proceeds of which they claim would go into a relief fund. And we all know how much an educated man trusts such claims.
True to his word, people have actually testified to receiving calls from him after they made the donation (courtesy Boing Boing).
I wonder why celebrities in India cannot do something like this in the times of Tsunami or Gujarat Earthquakes. A similar offer by people like SRK, Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Shekhar Suman or Sachin Tendulkar would do magic to calamity donations. What we do see them doing, though, is participating in an all-star show the proceeds of which they claim would go into a relief fund. And we all know how much an educated man trusts such claims.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Whoa-cabulary!
OK, the week gone by, counting from today, is the one that I wrote most extensively in since moving to Mumbai. A list of Top Words and Phrases I used in my newspaper writing in the past week. They keep ringing in my head.
nagpada, chappell, building collapse, eloquence, beach, delighted, saki naka, reliance, patel, VoIP, a study in stupidity, bluetooth, parochial blasphemy, underrated, indian penal code, commendable, investment per megawatt, susu kare chhe, bourses, sensex, zoomed, climbed, hedge funds, flew, sped, tarannum, bungalow, bookies, dabhol, stem cell, kaun banega marodpati, entwine, lokhandwala, sylvan, 26/7, eviscerate, cellular, fixed, gorgeous, MHADA, MMRDA, BMC, vilasrao, biotech, alternative, sectoral, earnings per share, core banking solution, basel ii standards, capital adequacy ratio, organic network, promoter group, paid-up capital, premium, jungle mein mangal, naxalites, rr patil, ipod, itunes, sex scandal, cocaine, main toh bas naukri kar raha hoon, relief package, bridge, port, low pressure area, subir raha ko gussa kyon aata hai?, broker, value addition, VAT, marginal pricing, nefarious, nepotism, vixen, gandhian, pole dancer, Q1 profits.
In other news, I enjoyed test-riding an iPod Nano today. That installing its supporting software on my office computer nearly crashed it is another issue.
nagpada, chappell, building collapse, eloquence, beach, delighted, saki naka, reliance, patel, VoIP, a study in stupidity, bluetooth, parochial blasphemy, underrated, indian penal code, commendable, investment per megawatt, susu kare chhe, bourses, sensex, zoomed, climbed, hedge funds, flew, sped, tarannum, bungalow, bookies, dabhol, stem cell, kaun banega marodpati, entwine, lokhandwala, sylvan, 26/7, eviscerate, cellular, fixed, gorgeous, MHADA, MMRDA, BMC, vilasrao, biotech, alternative, sectoral, earnings per share, core banking solution, basel ii standards, capital adequacy ratio, organic network, promoter group, paid-up capital, premium, jungle mein mangal, naxalites, rr patil, ipod, itunes, sex scandal, cocaine, main toh bas naukri kar raha hoon, relief package, bridge, port, low pressure area, subir raha ko gussa kyon aata hai?, broker, value addition, VAT, marginal pricing, nefarious, nepotism, vixen, gandhian, pole dancer, Q1 profits.
In other news, I enjoyed test-riding an iPod Nano today. That installing its supporting software on my office computer nearly crashed it is another issue.
Man is a Political Animal!
If politicians have the right to behave like animals, why can't we let dogs vote? They have paws too.
A look into history reveals that politics and animals have consistently been in cahoots.
Last week in Bihar, a group of dissidents of a national party took out a rally featuring a battery of pigs and donkeys, drawing a similarity between their own state and that of the animals.
Devi Lal, our former Jaat Deputy Prime Minister's state residence in New Delhi had two well-bred buffaloes from Rohtak as housemates. The old man refused to evict the bovine beasts from the state property, insisting that he could not run the country properly without two fresh glasses of buffalo milk every morning. Cops on security at the house confessed to have mistaken the beasts for the D-PM and vice versa on many occasions. Why two buffaloes? Nobody knows, but the second one was for backup, one might guess. Even Saddam Hussain kept two lookalikes.
The charkha-weilding Mahatma Gandhi mentored what was probably the world's most traveled goat, which he took with him on all foreign tours. One European country even accorded the goat in the esteemed 'state guest' status.
Of course, every now and then politicians turn into the equine to be traded like silk in greedy government formation attempts. Some actually behave like stampeding horses when put inside an assembly hall and armed with mikes with weak bases fixing them to the tables.
A look into history reveals that politics and animals have consistently been in cahoots.
Last week in Bihar, a group of dissidents of a national party took out a rally featuring a battery of pigs and donkeys, drawing a similarity between their own state and that of the animals.
Devi Lal, our former Jaat Deputy Prime Minister's state residence in New Delhi had two well-bred buffaloes from Rohtak as housemates. The old man refused to evict the bovine beasts from the state property, insisting that he could not run the country properly without two fresh glasses of buffalo milk every morning. Cops on security at the house confessed to have mistaken the beasts for the D-PM and vice versa on many occasions. Why two buffaloes? Nobody knows, but the second one was for backup, one might guess. Even Saddam Hussain kept two lookalikes.
The charkha-weilding Mahatma Gandhi mentored what was probably the world's most traveled goat, which he took with him on all foreign tours. One European country even accorded the goat in the esteemed 'state guest' status.
Of course, every now and then politicians turn into the equine to be traded like silk in greedy government formation attempts. Some actually behave like stampeding horses when put inside an assembly hall and armed with mikes with weak bases fixing them to the tables.
Friday, September 23, 2005
Anti music-swapping tool is ineffective
Infuriated by file sharing programs that supposedly make musicians like Metallica take to begging bowls and encouraged by the ruling against Kazaa in Australia, the IFPI, a British music industry conglomerate akin to the RIAA, has launched an anti music-swapping tool that searches for file sharing programs on your hard drive and then proceeds to delete them. The conglomerate has further called upon all the world's offices and colleges to run this tool on PCs in their premises so as to ' increase efficiency by preventing workers from wasting time downloading music' and protecting copyrighted music at the same time. You can test-drive the program here, its called Digital File Check.
Now don't tell me these people can afford to write bad software, because on my pc, which has both WinMX and Ares P2P clients, it fails to locate any of them!
Now just to be sure the files were not protected and all this was not a surreal abberation, I copied the P2P program files to several locations on my hard drive and ran Digital File Check again in a rather uneducated but rational-sounding attempt to help it trap the P2P devils but to no happiness.
Any takers for this software... whatsay, Pointy Haired Boss?
Now don't tell me these people can afford to write bad software, because on my pc, which has both WinMX and Ares P2P clients, it fails to locate any of them!
Now just to be sure the files were not protected and all this was not a surreal abberation, I copied the P2P program files to several locations on my hard drive and ran Digital File Check again in a rather uneducated but rational-sounding attempt to help it trap the P2P devils but to no happiness.
Any takers for this software... whatsay, Pointy Haired Boss?
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Offshore
Big ideas and projects take too much time to take off in India. Protesting environmentalists, a free media, ballot-happy legislators and the gang are forever finding faults with development. Stay orders in courts, misleading media reports, protests that go beyond the right to freedom of speech are tools that delay power projects, housing schemes, flyovers, highways and industries.
A very dangerous and unpardonable specimen that poses a high risk to development is the uninformed journalist, the media's in-house ignoramus.
In April 2004, several villages near Satara in Maharashtra, the hub of wind energy in India, turned against windmills because they believed that the windmill blades drove away rain clouds, causing a drought.
A local newspaper ran a story 'confirming the villager's concerns': "The large blades of a windmill first attract rain coulds towards them using magnetic power. The blades then slash through the clouds to cut them into pieces, thus affecting rainfall and causing a drought."
Soon, the local MLA sensed that playing the tune of the people and the media is best for future election prospects. The next day he was seen leading a rally demanding the demolition of the thousands of plush windfarms in Satara spread across thousands of acres and worth hundreds of crores of rupees. He even produced rainfall statistical data for the last 4 years, attributing a universally bad monsoon to the windmills' rain-killing tendency.
Not to be left behind in displaying utter stupidity, the country's only Ministry of Renewable Sources of Energy in the Maharashtra government ordered a probe into the issue.
Not one soul of consequence came forward to talk reason for weeks. The controversy died with a big Indian Express story pointing out the stupidity of it all, the only oasis of rationality.
I am a firm supporter of renewable sources of energy, be it big dams and hydro projects, wind, biomass or the lesser prevalent solar and geothermal. With fossil fuel prices going up and the Kyoto Protocol in place, I think they provide a great opportunity for the country to build a cheap and robust power infrastructure from the start and and accumulate carbon credits. So incidents like the one above and the following one evoke a sense of comic frustration in me.
Very respectable publications in their editorials have been creating a lot of hype about offshore wind energy projects. They tout it as the ultimate solution to all power problems in India. One of them even assailed the IPO of Suzlon Wind Energy, world's sixth largest wind ev\nergy equipment manufacturer, because its Red Herring Prospectus did not mention anything about offshore projects. I find this obsession with offshore wind projects preposterous, just as I find rain-water harvesting as a solution to water problems in India plain dumb.
Offshore wind energy projects, incidentally, are windmill farms installed on the sea, a few kms away from the coast, because wind patterns are stronger out there.
India has an on-land wind potential of 45,000 MW, of which a little over 3,000 MW has been installed. The remaining 42,000 begs to be converted to installed capacity. State governments are putting in place laws favourable to renewable energy installation. As much as 875 MW wind capacity was added in 2004 itself, the third largest in the world for that year.
Offshore wind projects are at best a futuristic technology. They are installed mainly due to two reasons, first being the lack of enough landmass in a country for on-land projects (European countries, for example) and the second being opposition from extreme environmentalists who (legitimately) oppose windmills on land because their rotor blades are known to kill migratory birds en masse.
Other than that, offshore projects require nearly five times the investment per MW as on-land wind projects. They cannot be installed in large MW chunks and are still at research stage. The cost of power per unit from offshore projects is insanely astronomical.
Most of all, it is slightly too much to talk vigorously of the expensive offshore wind projects in India when only 7 percent of the on-land potential has been converted.
A very dangerous and unpardonable specimen that poses a high risk to development is the uninformed journalist, the media's in-house ignoramus.
In April 2004, several villages near Satara in Maharashtra, the hub of wind energy in India, turned against windmills because they believed that the windmill blades drove away rain clouds, causing a drought.
A local newspaper ran a story 'confirming the villager's concerns': "The large blades of a windmill first attract rain coulds towards them using magnetic power. The blades then slash through the clouds to cut them into pieces, thus affecting rainfall and causing a drought."
Soon, the local MLA sensed that playing the tune of the people and the media is best for future election prospects. The next day he was seen leading a rally demanding the demolition of the thousands of plush windfarms in Satara spread across thousands of acres and worth hundreds of crores of rupees. He even produced rainfall statistical data for the last 4 years, attributing a universally bad monsoon to the windmills' rain-killing tendency.
Not to be left behind in displaying utter stupidity, the country's only Ministry of Renewable Sources of Energy in the Maharashtra government ordered a probe into the issue.
Not one soul of consequence came forward to talk reason for weeks. The controversy died with a big Indian Express story pointing out the stupidity of it all, the only oasis of rationality.
I am a firm supporter of renewable sources of energy, be it big dams and hydro projects, wind, biomass or the lesser prevalent solar and geothermal. With fossil fuel prices going up and the Kyoto Protocol in place, I think they provide a great opportunity for the country to build a cheap and robust power infrastructure from the start and and accumulate carbon credits. So incidents like the one above and the following one evoke a sense of comic frustration in me.
Very respectable publications in their editorials have been creating a lot of hype about offshore wind energy projects. They tout it as the ultimate solution to all power problems in India. One of them even assailed the IPO of Suzlon Wind Energy, world's sixth largest wind ev\nergy equipment manufacturer, because its Red Herring Prospectus did not mention anything about offshore projects. I find this obsession with offshore wind projects preposterous, just as I find rain-water harvesting as a solution to water problems in India plain dumb.
Offshore wind energy projects, incidentally, are windmill farms installed on the sea, a few kms away from the coast, because wind patterns are stronger out there.
India has an on-land wind potential of 45,000 MW, of which a little over 3,000 MW has been installed. The remaining 42,000 begs to be converted to installed capacity. State governments are putting in place laws favourable to renewable energy installation. As much as 875 MW wind capacity was added in 2004 itself, the third largest in the world for that year.
Offshore wind projects are at best a futuristic technology. They are installed mainly due to two reasons, first being the lack of enough landmass in a country for on-land projects (European countries, for example) and the second being opposition from extreme environmentalists who (legitimately) oppose windmills on land because their rotor blades are known to kill migratory birds en masse.
Other than that, offshore projects require nearly five times the investment per MW as on-land wind projects. They cannot be installed in large MW chunks and are still at research stage. The cost of power per unit from offshore projects is insanely astronomical.
Most of all, it is slightly too much to talk vigorously of the expensive offshore wind projects in India when only 7 percent of the on-land potential has been converted.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Information, Interrupted
In 1996, I traded three coins (two Irish cents and one South African schilling, to be precise) from my vast collection with a friend for two words that have changed my life, as they have of billions of people across the world.
The two words, if i remember correctly were 'dubey' and 'dubey1234', the username-password couplet to the VSNL shell account that let you reach websites on a text-only interface.
Exactly one month later, a more generous friend offered to give me a 'proper TCP/IP Internet experience with graphics' on another stolen VSNL account. He, however, refused to reveal to me the username-password, choosing to instead come to my home and login whenever I asked of him.
Nine years later, Internet access is one of the cheapest commodities in the Indian urban market. The future costs of Internet access are anybody's guess.
A subject that has been very central to the development of Internet utility since the turn of the millenium is related to the rural areas.
Small to medium sized projects networking villages to cleanse up the traditional mandi system, exchange of agricultural information and forging inter-village marriage alliances have reached some success.
Low literacy, however, remains that biggest bottleneck towards leting Indian villages go online in a big way.
Proponents of removing the so-called 'digital divide' exhert a sense of urgency in planting computers in a mass manner in the villages, at a pace that cannot be matched by the increase in literacy.
In my opinion, the 'digital divide' is a flawed concept that only serves the purpose of those who want to see computers proliferate across Indian villages. It fails to solve the real problem, that of the lack of access to information.
The inflated importance attached to the 'digital divide' and the urgency to plant computers in villages creates unnecessary complications, the least of which makes a whole workforce of software minds engage in redesigning popular software platforms in local Indian languages that can be understood by all.
While this community of computer-planters grapples with these complications and experiments with new ideas, the Indian villager is not getting access to any information.
A viable alternative that has been gaining support is that of community radio.
A small radio station made to cater to a small area costs less than One Lakh Rupees to set up. If given into the hands of the community, the possibilities are immense.
Local panchayats can form content policies, a village-level group can create the content custom made for the local needs and disseminate information in a universal format. Public-private participation with the intervention of NGOs can broadly provide the required censorship.
Community radio, however, remains illegal in India for all the wrong reasons.
One would fear the upper-castes in a village take over the radio and use it for lower-caste oppression, or political parties use it to brainwash votebanks.
The Indian Government, however fears an altogether different problem: that of national security. What if a jehadi group takes over a radio station and converts it into a hate-breeding anti-nationalism tool?
The apprehensions are obviously hypothetical and overinflated. The success of community radio in Latin American countries, with all its cocaine mafia, military-civilian tussles and trigger-happy rebels is there to see.
The government in India, can start off by legalizing radio in the interior and problem-free states like Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, Haryana and Punjab. Small pilot projects to test the waters can be a good beginning. Given the free press and public scrutiny in the country, rest assured that these projects would be fairly guaged for feasibility and viability from all angles.
The government, however, will have to take an initiative first. If it engages the various organs of society into a debate, the effort will not be fruitless.
The hesitation of the government to do even that bit is disheartening.
Ten years after the Internet changed Urban India, we require a similar revolution in the rural spectrum. Given the progress we are making in education with respect to rise in population, community radio is a information empowerment solution that the government must consider with absolute urgency.
The two words, if i remember correctly were 'dubey' and 'dubey1234', the username-password couplet to the VSNL shell account that let you reach websites on a text-only interface.
Exactly one month later, a more generous friend offered to give me a 'proper TCP/IP Internet experience with graphics' on another stolen VSNL account. He, however, refused to reveal to me the username-password, choosing to instead come to my home and login whenever I asked of him.
Nine years later, Internet access is one of the cheapest commodities in the Indian urban market. The future costs of Internet access are anybody's guess.
A subject that has been very central to the development of Internet utility since the turn of the millenium is related to the rural areas.
Small to medium sized projects networking villages to cleanse up the traditional mandi system, exchange of agricultural information and forging inter-village marriage alliances have reached some success.
Low literacy, however, remains that biggest bottleneck towards leting Indian villages go online in a big way.
Proponents of removing the so-called 'digital divide' exhert a sense of urgency in planting computers in a mass manner in the villages, at a pace that cannot be matched by the increase in literacy.
In my opinion, the 'digital divide' is a flawed concept that only serves the purpose of those who want to see computers proliferate across Indian villages. It fails to solve the real problem, that of the lack of access to information.
The inflated importance attached to the 'digital divide' and the urgency to plant computers in villages creates unnecessary complications, the least of which makes a whole workforce of software minds engage in redesigning popular software platforms in local Indian languages that can be understood by all.
While this community of computer-planters grapples with these complications and experiments with new ideas, the Indian villager is not getting access to any information.
A viable alternative that has been gaining support is that of community radio.
A small radio station made to cater to a small area costs less than One Lakh Rupees to set up. If given into the hands of the community, the possibilities are immense.
Local panchayats can form content policies, a village-level group can create the content custom made for the local needs and disseminate information in a universal format. Public-private participation with the intervention of NGOs can broadly provide the required censorship.
Community radio, however, remains illegal in India for all the wrong reasons.
One would fear the upper-castes in a village take over the radio and use it for lower-caste oppression, or political parties use it to brainwash votebanks.
The Indian Government, however fears an altogether different problem: that of national security. What if a jehadi group takes over a radio station and converts it into a hate-breeding anti-nationalism tool?
The apprehensions are obviously hypothetical and overinflated. The success of community radio in Latin American countries, with all its cocaine mafia, military-civilian tussles and trigger-happy rebels is there to see.
The government in India, can start off by legalizing radio in the interior and problem-free states like Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, Haryana and Punjab. Small pilot projects to test the waters can be a good beginning. Given the free press and public scrutiny in the country, rest assured that these projects would be fairly guaged for feasibility and viability from all angles.
The government, however, will have to take an initiative first. If it engages the various organs of society into a debate, the effort will not be fruitless.
The hesitation of the government to do even that bit is disheartening.
Ten years after the Internet changed Urban India, we require a similar revolution in the rural spectrum. Given the progress we are making in education with respect to rise in population, community radio is a information empowerment solution that the government must consider with absolute urgency.
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