On the Maintenance of Law and Order 31 Jan 2013 9:59 PM (12 years ago)

In her press conference today, Jayalalithaa used the phrase "law and order" at least twenty times, and insisted that it was maintenance of this mythical entity that was the prime motivation behind banning Vishwaroopam, and not any number of political, personal or business conflicts she may have had with Kamal Hassan. What struck me as odd was that the outcome was only half-successful, and that too in a very convoluted reading.

Allow me to first explain my understanding of "law" and "order". The former is the governing set of rules and principles that dictate what is acceptable behaviour in a number of scenarios applicable to life within a nation's borders. The latter is the enforcement of these rules and principles by designated authorities, also in accordance with applicable rules and principles.

If one were to observe the Vishwaroopam ban ruling and the justification offered by the Chief Minister (and by a High Court bench), one is led to conclude that our governance machinery is altogether too willing to countermand the law in favour of maintaining a vestige of order. By throwing up her hands and saying that the Tamil Nadu Police is understaffed and ill-equipped to protect the citizens against violence, Jayalalithaa has also declared her failure at applying the law to those parties who would cause the violence. This would be the Muslim groups who had announced demonstrations against the films outside the 524 cinema halls scheduled to screen the film, and had abdicated responsibility towards any violent activity that may occur. In other words, they may cause damage to property and injury to innocent bystanders, but it wouldn't be their fault. Of course, the law says that violent acts such as these are unacceptable and punishable, so what law is Jayalalithaa upholding by allowing these threats to not just go unchallenged, but to be supported by the government? And what sort of order would you maintain, when it is these goons who lay down the law and not the elected government? Is it really "law and order" that the TN government are enforcing, or the tacit yet public surrender to extra-legal and mob-fuelled fear and survival at any cost?

And what about Kamal Hassan's right to make the film of his choosing? Jayalalithaa is happy to not curb his freedom of expression; she only wants to stop him from freely expressing himself. The refusal of our "leaders" to acknowledge the role of a national Censor Board and "reasonable restrictions" on freedom of expression as a muzzle would be laughable if it weren't such a prevalent thought among the citizens that free speech should have its limits. And in the end, a democracy will get the government it deserves.

Blogger's Bile, Or What STFU Really Means 30 Oct 2012 9:15 AM (12 years ago)

Consider this sequence of events:

Barkha Dutt provides the shrillest, most over-the-top, inconsiderate and insensitive coverage of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai known in the popular vernacular as 26/11.
Several bloggers call her out for this terrible show of journalism. Amongst them, Chyetanya Kunte, who is particularly harsh on Dutt's shoddy journalism.
On 26 Jan, 2009, Kunte's post entitled Shoddy Journalism disappears (above link from the Google cache), and a withdrawal statement appears. The Indian blog community and Twitterverse explodes into a flurry of censorship-related condemnation of NDTV and Barkha Dutt.

This brings us to the exercise of trying to fill in the gaps. Let's begin by asking the logical first question: did NDTV force Kunte into publishing the withdrawal by threatening to sue? The language and structure of the repudiation certainly looks like it was drafted by a legal professional, which means some sort of legal proceeding was imminent if the withdrawal was not published.

The next obvious question is: what did NDTV find objectionable in Kunte's original blogpost? Besides the obvious anger and venom that Kunte directs at Dutt and NDTV, there are two claims which raise red flags. The first is the implication that Dutt's behaviour was unethical, and resulted in the exacerbation of the hostage situation at the Taj. The second is a quote from Wikipedia, which alleges that Dutt's coverage of the Kargil episodes resulted in the death of Indian soldiers by giving away their locations. Both these allegations are enough for NDTV's lawyers to get into the act and invite Kunte to the legal equivalent of a staring contest, which they duly did, and won.

The furore amongst the bloggers comes mostly in the form of outrage against the perceived censorship of Kunte's commentary by Barkha Dutt and NDTV. I don't know how much of it is considered opinion versus knee-jerk responses to us-versus-them impulses. It staggers me to find that very few have actually addressed the question of NDTV's right to legal redress, but have instead chosen to condemn them for bullying a lone blogger with their legal might. If one stops to consider whether they had a case, maybe a clearer line may be drawn. Freedom of speech is protected only to the extent that one's comments do not damage the reputation or the welfare of the subjects being spoken about. Satire is given a slightly longer leash, but it is by no means infinitely long.

Kunte's statement that Dutt's on-air conversations were responsible for making a bad situation worse is the first of his problems. If he could not substantiate that claim with proof, he had made a libelous claim. It was made infinitely worse by his quote, excerpted from the Wikipedia entry on Barkha Dutt. He quoted:

During the Kargil conflict, Indian Army sources repeatedly complained to her channel that she was giving away locations in her broadcasts, thus causing Indian casualties.

The trouble with quoting Wikipedia, of course, is the dreaded [Citation needed] tag. It breaks all possible links with credibility, and puts the burden of proof on the person quoting the offending text. Kunte might have believed the Wikipedia quote, but when he published it under his name, even with attribution, he put his lot in with that statement. When called upon to substantiate it, he was probably at sea. But this is the difference between journalism and blogging. The more seriously the latter wishes to be, the more it must resemble the former in rigour and choice of language.

Bloggers value their opinions, but do not always feel obliged to back up those opinions with the necessary rigour to support and substantiate them. It is time that this obligation was picked up and applied to blogposts in the same way as columns and news reports do. It is a valid argument that some of our leading publications do not adhere to the prescribed rigour, and it is a valid comment to criticize them for this laxity, but it is not a valid justification of abjuring the same rigour when voicing one's own opinions. The consequences of such oversight can be quite damaging, as Kunte's experience has no doubt shown him.

It is also a prevalent opinion in the blogosphere that Kunte was bullied into submission by NDTV. Perhaps this is true. However, it was his choice to make: whether to stand up to the bully and put his money where his mouth was, or to back down and apologize. Maybe he didn't think it was worth the hassle to fight, and backed off. Or maybe he accepted that he had made a mistake. I cannot tell based on the available evidence. The upshot, however, is that in making some unwise comments on his blog, he invited trouble upon himself, and found himself unable to fend it off altogether.

Meanwhile, what has NDTV achieved? In attempting to silence the libelous post, they have succeeded in proliferating it across several blogs and websites, thus making their problem worse many, many times over. It has resulted in severe damage to the NDTV brand and to Barkha Dutt's own image as a crusader for the freedom of the press. Their attempt to muzzle negative commentary has now portrayed them as hypocrites, in addition to the wholly accurate popular belief that Dutt is shrill, opinionated, excessively aggressive and self-absorbed in her journalistic style. It is one thing to call her incompetent and self-indulgent (opinion), and entirely another to claim that she was responsible for casualties (unsubstantiated fact). The former will get you rolled eyeballs, while the latter will get you a lawsuit. Choose wisely, as they say.

Victim - A Translation 27 Sep 2011 3:42 AM (13 years ago)

A couple of weeks ago, one of the folks who run Gaysi Family (Web, Twitter) tweeted a request for a Tamil-to-English translation of a short story they wanted to post on the Writer's Bloc section of their site. Writer's Bloc is where they showcase LGBT writing from India into English. It's a great project, IMO, because it's a category of literature that has struggled to find outlets in our country, which tends to play the ostrich when it comes to issues that don't exactly fit into its sociocultural identity.

I'm not queer, as the community refers to itself, but I am friends with many who are, and I'm very happy to stand up and support any effort that helps make our country a less challenging place for them to live in. I'm also proudly Tamil, or தமிழ், if one must be accurate, and I've found that my familiarity with the language has slipped somewhat. I have the disadvantage of lacking a formal education in Tamil, but I'm very happy for the time I spent with my grandmother when she taught me to form and read the letters, the words, the sentences, and finally, the stories. And this was a great opportunity to not just revive my own flagging Tamil, but also a way to contribute to a great effort by the folks at Gaysi Family.

The Gaysi Family post is here.

It has been a very long time since I have tried a translation, and this is my first one ever in Tamil. Shridhar Sadasivan's பலி (Bali) is a simple story, and one that is probably familiar to many who have known similar characters in their social circles. My challenge was to bring along the Tamil idiom, not so much the words themselves, into the translation, to try and present the characters as they are, and not sanitize the emotional positions they occupy by merely moving the words across languages. I hope I have done what I set out to do, at least to some extent.

Shridhar Sadasivan's பலி, originally published in the Tamil magazine, Thinnai (திண்ணை).

My translation, titled Victim. I think a better title is Sacrifice, and I hope my reasons will be obvious on reading the story. And anyway, isn't it rather condescending to call someone a victim?

After The Storm - Thoughts on Section 377 27 Sep 2011 3:42 AM (13 years ago)

It's been a month since the Delhi High Court read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, and the euphoria has died down. Now is probably the right time to take a more rational look at the ruling and its implications for India's LGBTS community, and Indian society in general.

First, it's about damn time the law got a shooting down. It's one of Lord Macaulay's unheralded evils, secreted away in the Indian judicial system in an era when even holding hands in public was considered indecent behaviour. The British version of this law was only repealed in the 60s, so we should probably be thankful that we stepped onto that path so quickly.

It's a strong step forward from the judiciary, and it is in our interest as a nation for other High Courts to similarly read down the law, so that it can be rewritten as soon as possible. The timing of the ruling was also fortuitous, coming as it did while the Home Minister was dithering on the issue of LGBTS rights after first promising a comprehensive review of the law.

It is important to note that all elements of Sec. 377 have not been ruled unconstitutional. The Delhi HC only ruled that it is a violation of the fundamental right to equality and freedom of expression to declare homosexuality a crime. In essence, two consenting adults may now engage in same-sex intercourse without having to worry about the cops hunting them down. Not that they ever had to worry about being arrested; no homosexual has been charged with criminal conduct under Sec. 377 in forty years. It's always been harassment, entrapment and blackmail, as Amit Varma describes in his column on the Matunga Mafia. With this ruling, there's hope that the gay community can live its life free of persecution from those charged with protecting them.

Despite the reading down of this one segment, there is no indication that Sec. 377 will be eliminated from the IPC. The HC ruling states that it will be used to govern laws pertaining to non-consensual unnatural sexual activity involving both adults and minors. This is the first major stumbling block on the road to a truly progressive assessment of gay rights. In order to achieve a truly level playing field, it is critical that sexual partnerships and behaviours involving same-sex couples be treated identically to those between heterosexual couples. In other words, if a man rapes another man, the law governing the act should be no different from the one that applies when a man rapes a woman. In the same token, there should be no difference in statutory rape law based on the victim's gender. To use a different IPC section to address same-sex rape is to continue to condone the belief that homosexual and heterosexual relationships are different in the eyes of the law. In this scenario, the GoI's earlier promise of a comprehensive legal review of Sec. 377 becomes even more critical.

Regardless of the law, gay men and women and transexuals will still need to live in a society that regards them with emotions ranging from disdain to disgust. It is a commonly held belief even among the highly educated classes that homosexuality is either a communicable disease, a psychological illness, or an extreme form of perversion, and that their families and friends must be protected from this evil at any cost. One colleague insisted that he fears that his teenage son might be tempted to try sex with a man, which is apparently worse than the boy trying cocaine. Or what if his gay roommate suddenly decides to foist himself upon the boy at night? Another former colleague insisted that all gay men and women must be forced into therapy to cure them. Insurance coverage should be provided for this treatment, he says. A concession to the pre-existing condition clause, I think. Maybe these people are creating a new class of untouchability, happily dragging our society back a hundred years in the process.

In a society where it is natural for a man and woman to be assaulted by the moral police for merely holding hands in public, it is a giant leap forward merely to accept the possibility that humans are sexual beings. To understand the nuance of one's sexual constitution and to allow its expression is a glimmer at the end of a very long tunnel. As with most dark roads, those with a little vision must guide those with little vision, at least until everyone can see a little more clearly. And then we go back and get the next lot.

The Guitar Is The Man Is The Guitar 6 Sep 2010 10:29 PM (14 years ago)

2009 has not been a good year for the legends of entertainment. Since June, the Reaper has been working overtime, reeling in some rather large fish. Most likely, the latest is probably not going to be missed nearly as much as those who preceded him, because they probably just think he's a guitar.

Long before the Gibson Guitar Corporation put his name on a solid-body electric guitar, Les Paul was a legendary innovator in music, beating Bob Dylan to the neck-worn harmonica and designing and recording on a prototype multi-track recording system. But a block of wood known as 'The Log' is what made him so much more than an excellent jazz/country guitarist.

The Log was a 4x4 block of wood on which Paul strung strings and embedded a magnetic-coil pickup, building one of the first Spanish-style electric guitars. Ted McCarty at Gibson had to be convinced to build a solid-body guitar, and only consented when Leo Fender's Telecasters hit the shelves, almost a decade after The Log had been in use. It was McCarty, then, who got the patent for a guitar that is known as the Les Paul Standard. Paul, according to Gibson, only contributed the tailpiece design and the colour preferences to the guitar. And yet, only the most ardent fan would even remember Ted McCarty.

So, after the brief history lesson, we get to the important business - that of paying tribute. It's not surprising that some of the legendary licks in guitar music have come by way of various Gibson Les Paul models. Here are three of my favourites:

Random Trivia: Eric Clapton recorded the lead part on a Les Paul, the only guest to ever play on a recording by The Beatles.

And one of the most recognized songs ever, by the man himself:

Test-driving The Amazon Kindle 20 Jul 2010 12:32 PM (14 years ago)

Like any self-respecting reader, I have a healthy collection of books, and consequently, an overflowing bookcase. I also live in Bombay, where every enemy of books - heat, humidity, dust, shortage of space - exists in abundance. As a result, half my library rests in a quiet corner in my mother's apartment in Madras, waiting for the day when they can finally claim a place of their own in my home. I try to keep my books well, without tears, creases, folds, dog-ears or any form of marking. Given that much of my reading takes place on the trains and stations of Bombay's local train system, this is far from easy to do, especially when one hand is occupied in desperately holding on to an available support for the duration of the commute. My success rate at book maintenance stands at about 40 per cent.

I have been reading on my computer screen for several years now, thanks to Project Gutenberg, which provides free downloadable digital copies of works that have entered the public domain, and the PDF file format is a staple for a lot of academic and professional publications. But my extremely poor eyesight has proved to be a serious limitation in reading long articles, short stories and novels on a computer screen. The strain is simply too much, except when it comes to scanned comics, but that is a matter for a different time. The development of e-ink and electronic paper technologies has therefore been of great interest to me, and by corollary, the growth of the e-book reader market.

The Amazon Kindle, now available in India and many other countries around the world, allows users to browse Amazon.com and directly download e-books directly onto their device either over WiFi or over WhisperNet, which connects to Amazon over wireless telephone networks such as GPRS/EDGE or 3G. One can also download e-books onto a computer and sync them with their Kindle, and there's no need for iTunes-esque bloatware. The current edition of the Kindle offers 2 GB of storage, which is approximately 1,500 unillustrated books. Now that's a library I can accommodate in my shoebox Bombay apartment.

My Kindle experience is about a week old^[1], and so far, I must admit that I'm quite enjoying it. The viewing screen is a comfortable 6" and the display is almost exactly like ink on paper. This makes my easily fatigued eyes very happy. I am also able to use the Kindle with one hand, a lifesaver compared to the traditional paperback when commuting on the train, especially during rush hour. Based on the publisher's whims, the Kindle supports an experimental text-to-speech feature which reads out the text of an e-book through an onboard speaker or a standard pair of earphones. Another experimental feature is the built-in MP3 player, but there are far superior devices for that purpose, and this isn't meant to play music anyway.

Amazon's Kindle-friendly e-books use a proprietary AZW file format that supports many readability enhancements on the Kindle, such as page orientation, text size adjustment and the aforementioned text-to-speech service. The Kindle also supports unprotected PDF documents, but does not offer zoom or rotation options. However, if users send the PDF files to Amazon by email, they will convert them to AZW for free. A quick Google search offers a number of DIY solutions for this as well. My experience with unconverted PDF files on the Kindle has been unpleasant, to say the least. The entire page is crammed into the display that is about the size of a pocketbook, making the text too small to read comfortably, and without the zoom function, this can be quite difficult. I promptly dispatched the PDFs to Amazon for conversion, and all is now well in my world.

Despite the reading comfort and ease of use, the Kindle is not an automatic option for most readers. Its user interface is a work in progress, and in the absence of a catalogue and search function, managing a library on the Kindle is a major problem. The Kindle will also struggle to make a significant impact in international markets in the short run, mainly for cost-related reasons. The Kindle's global edition is priced at USD 259, or approximately INR 12,000. The device does not include any content other than a user guide, and all e-books must be purchased separately. One of the significant selling points for the Kindle in the US and Europe has been that the price of an e-book is a fraction of that of a paperback copy. This comparison does not hold true across international markets, due to a substantial markup on e-books sold outside the USA. In India, this difference can be as high as USD 3, or close to INR 150. In India, this represents an increase of 30-50% over the average paperback cost.

The Amazon Kindle store catalogue stores over 300,000 titles in Kindle format, and the India store has access to most of the titles. However, the price is a significant barrier, and it is only to be expected that a number of pseudo-legal alternatives and home-brewed solutions will pop up, as has been the case with most technological advances in recent history. The more significant development has been Amazon's Kindle application for iPhone and iPod Touch devices, which is free, and has all the functionality that the Kindle supports. Amazon has also released a free desktop application for PCs. These apps will serve as a driver for digital books in India far more than the Kindle itself, due to a significantly lower entry barrier. This transition could take years, and the only real catalyst is increased availability at much lower prices.

While many traditionalists would make a strong emotional case for the smell and feel of a new book, I harbour no such bonds. For me, the pleasure of a book is in the reading of what the pages contain, though I will admit to frequently admiring a well-designed cover or an elegant typeface. Maybe I belong to a generation whose exposure to technology in all aspects of life has created an ambivalence to traditional forms of consuming information and entertainment, but I believe that just like painted scrolls became printed books, the next step in publishing is upon us, and it has a digital avatar. I have a Kindle, and I don't think I'm going to let go of it anytime soon.

This article was published in the February issue of JetLite's in-flight magazine, FlyLite.

[1] It's two months now, and I'm enjoying my Kindle experience even more.

With A Little Help From My Friends 22 Feb 2010 9:38 PM (15 years ago)

On September 9, 2009 (or 9-9-9 for those so inclined), Apple Corps released fourteen remastered albums by these four chaps from Liverpool who called themselves The Beatles. It was a big deal because it was the first time any of their music was being digitally remastered for an audience who had no idea about what The Beatles sound was all about. They sold it in a fancy USB storage device that looked like a green apple (see picture), and cost an absurdly expensive $279.99. Like many others, I shook my head in disappointment; that truly was one pretty apple.

In November, I was visiting my friend Udhay in Bangalore, and during the course of a conversation that lasted a few hours and covered subjects from the legendary traffic of his hometown to his daughter's language skills, we meandered through the art of digitizing music from the 70s. Neither of us is an expert, but he did mention that he had managed to collect the entire Beatles catalogue in FLAC format. This is super-awesome, because it's lossless compression that actually lets you listen to the music without turning all the nuances into noise.

So now, thanks to Udhay, I have everything this pretty green apple had to offer, except the possibility of several gigabytes of free storage once the music had been safely migrated to a more reliable storage device. O-bla-di, o-bla-da, life goes on.

Simultaneously, strange things were afoot in videogame-land. On the same day that the pretty green apple dropped, MTV Games and Electronic Arts put out The Beatles: Rock Band. Now, I don't know anyone who wails away at air guitar while listening to The Beatles (my normal reaction is more karaoke-esque, and involves butchering all the multifarious high notes in the process), but fellow-Beatle-phile and game guru Anand Ramachandran procured a copy of the game. Many, many hours of gameplay have occurred, but the best outcome imaginable: Anand's wife, Abitha was introduced to this song, and has been hooked ever since.

So, it's not too hard to see where this is heading. We were at a party hosted by the most awesome Prem Panicker because he's moving to Bangalore, and while we're sad to see him move away, it was the perfect excuse for some mayhem. What I had not bargained for was a small pile of box-shaped gift-wrapped objects at the base of a small Christmas tree. I found, with my name on it, a copy of The Lost Beatles Interviews, by Geoffrey Giuliano and Vrnda Devi (aka Brenda Giuliano), featuring an afterword by Dr. Timothy Leary. Not a whole lot of new material, despite the title, but enough stuff to keep an old fan happy for a few nights before the lights are turned out.

And, for something just a little different:

What Do You Call Picture Books For Adults? 16 Oct 2009 3:37 AM (15 years ago)

I was talking to a friend recently about my fascination with comics, specifically Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, and she interrupted me to correct me. "Not comics," she said. "Graphic novels." It was all I could do to keep from foaming at the mouth. I then patiently explained to her the excellent marketing gimmick that is the 'graphic novel', and how it was originally used to describe comic-book adaptations of short stories and novellas, and how Will Eisner co-opted the term to market his A Contract With God, and Other Tenement Stories to adults, instead of the children who traditionally read comic books. I then directed her to a YouTube video of Neil Gaiman explaining how he wrote comics, and couldn't, for the world of him, understand what a 'graphic novel' was.

This is not unique to Gaiman. Most of the legends of the medium - Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, to name just a few - have insisted that they worked with comics, and that 'graphic novels' was just something the marketing department put on the books to make the grown-ups feel better about buying them. This includes Moore's Watchmen, probably the modern era's quintessential 'graphic novel', which was originally serialized in 12 comic-book-sized issues. It's probably worth adding that what commonly passes for a 'graphic novel' in bookstores today are known as trade paperbacks, a collection of multiple issues containing a single story arc. Unlike Watchmen, Art Spiegelman's masterful Maus and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis would qualify as true graphic novels, published as single volume without serialization.

The graphic novel syndrome affects most Indian writer-artists working with the comic-book idiom to tell their stories. The term has been injected with a sense of gravitas by its purveyors, and as such, has resulted in a number of extremely self-conscious and contrived storytelling. Amruta Patil's Kari, a drone of an illustrated short story (or is it captioned paintings?) about a whiny lesbian advertising professional does not even use the format of a comic book. Sarnath Banerjee does better with his Corridor and The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers, but offers little more than an honest effort. The latter is particularly disappointing in its storytelling; in adapting to the comic-book idiom, Banerjee compromises the integrity of his story, and it meanders like a severed kite. If ever there was a case to be made for an editor's guiding hand, this is it. But where does one find an editor who understands the medium well enough to mentor young writers?

The comic-book industry in the West has always straddled multiple worlds. Writers such as Moore, Miller, Gaiman and Warren Ellis, who have all written a number of path-breaking adult comics cut their teeth writing for DC and Marvel Comics' pantheon of super-heroes. To paraphrase Gaiman, there's nothing like writing about grown men swinging around in brightly-coloured spandex to stop you from taking yourself too seriously. In addition, one might add, the editors at these publishing houses, such as Julius Schwartz at Marvel and Archie Goodwin and Karen Berger at DC, set very high standards for their properties, allowing young, upcoming artists and writers to get used to the rigour of producing high-quality work on a regular basis, and under a tight deadline. Indeed, Miller's Daredevil and Moore's Swamp Thing are considered to be some of the best work in the history of super-hero comics.

The situation in the Indian comics industry is rather different. Amar Chitra Katha and its basket of properties focus exclusively on children, and are only now beginning to publish new titles in addition to their decades-old catalogue of over 400 titles. Indrajal Comics, home to the first indigenous Indian comic character, Abid Surti's Bahadur, has disappeared. Raj Comics and Diamond Comics, with their hugely popular super-hero titles, cater to a Hindi-speaking audience, peddling shoddily produced comics to audiences who simply don't know to expect better. It is here that the true opportunity exists for young writers to tell engaging and intelligent stories that expand the reach of these characters beyond their current audience. Raj Comics, currently going through a rejuvenation phase, should seize this opportunity in their own right to take their properties to the next level.

One reads comics for the same reason that one might read a short story or a novel: the story. The visual medium is merely a device that enables the story to be told using certain techniques, providing a unique experience to the reader, but it is the story that will bring him back for more. A good story with mediocre artwork will attract far more readers than superbly-drawn comics with poor story-lines. Virgin Comics learnt this the hard way, watching their brilliantly-drawn but horribly written titles circle the drains with no end in sight. And good writers can only become great writers if they are pushed to deliver a higher standard by the publishing mechanism, through mentorship, editorial input and collaboration. Ditto for the artists, whose responsibility it is to make the story come alive on the page.

Yet, this system is not necessary to produce superstars. Harvey Pekar, Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman did not have to go through the grind before delivering comic-book masterpieces. Osamu Tezuka, that legend of Japanese manga, produced amazing work as an amateur before abandoning his medical practice to produce manga. But India is yet to produce a Spiegelman or Tezuka, and we should not hold our breath. All we can do is appreciate them when they do arrive. Meanwhile, it is best to hope that the system can deliver a strong pipeline. Of course, a thriving ecosystem with mentorship and apprenticeship is no guarantee of high quality professionals. Just look at Bollywood.

This piece was published in the Oct 17 issue of OPEN Magazine.

A Global ICANN 7 Oct 2009 5:51 AM (15 years ago)

This past weekend, the Financial Express carried a column I wrote about the decoupling of ICANN from the US Department of Commerce's purview. In an act of shameless self-promotion, I shall now highlight the points I made in that article:

If the Internet is an international entity, then it should be administered by an equally international body. The Obama administration's move to accept this truth is a marked deviation from the Bush era, and a move in the right direction.
It is important to note that this move can create serious issues of both internationalization and localization of the Internet, particularly from the perspectives of scale and security. Many of these issues have already been raised by ICANN, but moving forward, a global perspective will certainly help to ensure that they will be addressed.
It is not in anybody's interest to make the Internet an auction site for top level domains, and the rest of the world is perfectly capable of ensuring that frivolous domains are not turned into a money-making machine for ICANN and domain registrars. In other words, don't expect .sport or .cola to come into existence anytime soon.
Unicode URLs are the route to making the Internet truly global, but aforementioned security issues need to be addressed and loopholes preempted. Once again, it's a grown-up world, and they can handle the pressure.
Finally, the Internet gets to be truly international in almost all aspects. This means the European and Asian representatives on ICANN's Governmental Advisory Council now have to show that they can step up and shoulder the burden of shaping the Internet's future.

Thanks to Anand for passing on the contact, and Nikhil for going on vacation.

Cricket These Days: Some Thoughts 16 Jul 2009 12:16 PM (15 years ago)

The West Indies Players' Boycott

By all accounts, the West Indies Cricket Board has completely mishandled the situation, and over-estimated the need for cricketers to represent the West Indies in international cricket. The basic fact of the matter is that professionals need to be paid in accordance with a contract that is acceptable to both parties. In the absence of such an agreement, it is not practical for the employer (in this case, the WIBC) to expect its employees (the players) to actually serve the contract's terms. Especially when alternatives such as English county cricket and the IPL exist as far more lucrative and less demanding options. The WIBC has managed to delay the inevitable by fielding a second-string lineup against Bangladesh, and threatens to use the same players for the ICC Champions Trophy. Jimmy Adams thinks this is placebo, and eventually, even these youngsters will realize that not all is well with their employment situation, bringing all involved back to square one. He's right. The WIBC has to step up and get their act together, and the sooner, the better.

Saurav Ganguly In Cricket Administration

On the face of it, Dada looking to enter the CAB is a good move for the game. As a proven leader of men with an understanding of the game and the people who play it, he brings a unique perspective to administration, which has been mired in ennui thanks to self-serving politicians and businessmen treating it as a personal fiefdom. And yet, cricket administration is a political game, an arena where one must constantly jockey for power and watch one's back lest a rival steal your leverage. Ganguly is no stranger to this game; as captain, he has had to play it to ensure that his team was cast in the mould he desired. In the office, though, his play will have to be different. The straight bat will rarely lead to runs, and the balls will always be short and aimed at the ribs. Once he learns to play that game, he will have to discard the straight bat in order to survive. And that will mean that he will be little different than those who came before. Power corrupts, as they say, and Ganguly is a man who has already walked that slippery slope for a long, long time.

The Ashes Are Here; Can We Burn Them Again?

It is a series that has little going for it except nostalgia. The ECB dispensed with tradition and chased the money, so that excuse is gone. England hasn't been a relevant Test side for over a decade, with 2005 being a blip in that sorry record. Australia has conquered everything there is, except for the same 2005 blot. And yet, in Cardiff, these two teams drew a Test match. Australia, the masters of the kill, failed to administer the coup de grace after dominating an English side that didn't seem too interested in playing five full days. This begs the question: why does anybody care about this series? When it isn't hopelessly one-sided, it is irredeemably mediocre. The English sports media, God bless them, are a bunch of slavering dogs after a washed-up bone. They're welcome to it - just leave the rest of us alone.

Is It Really Good To Have Pakistan Playing Cricket Again?

After watching them play Sri Lanka, I'm not so sure. The T20 World Cup win should have been a sign of resurgence, but all the Pakistanis have done is fritter away any modicum of respect it might have won them. The team has gone about this Test series against a very accomplished Sri Lankan team with all the discipline of a schizophrenic who has lost his medication. By showing up under-prepared both mentally and technically, they have made a mockery of the game, and Younis Khan's excuses about a young team are eyewash. This is a middle order in which all the batsmen from three to seven have close to ten years of Test experience. It's about time they started to play like it. If we wanted a club side, we'd rather have the Lahore Badshahs playing Test cricket.

What You Need To Know About What You Read 7 Jul 2009 12:36 PM (15 years ago)

In the alternate stream of reality known as Twitter, I chanced upon this blog entry by Penelope Trunk (via @thinkmaya), in which she explains why she thinks conflict of interest is irrelevant in the blogosphere (a word that I hate, but will employ in the interest of brevity). To wit, bloggers get readership because they produce quality content, not because they expect objectivity.

(. . .) I’ve made a lot of money selling posts. For example, when I wrote a post about PayScale, I was getting paid $5000 a month to talk about them. (I considered not revealing the true value of the contract, but then I thought: Well, PayScale is the poster child for transparent salaries, so how can they complain?)

But readers don’t need to know that I was paid to write the post. Readers should just want the post to be useful and interesting and all the other things you want from any post. Who cares how I get paid as long as I write well? The post got about 100 comments, and it got picked up on 20/20 and in the New York Times. That means it’s a good post. In fact, it probably means that PayScale has good ideas and that’s why I chose to work with them. You should just trust me to take money from smart companies—if I take money from stupid companies then I’ll write stupid posts. [Links removed, italics mine]

It appears that Ms. Trunk is saying, "Trust me, I won't take money from companies who suck and write good things about them, because I know you'll catch me out when you use their products." She also says that disclosures are 'boring', because fewer people read her disclosure about LinkedIn sponsoring her blog. The questionable conclusions aside, this trivialises the creator-consumer relationship in the content domain. The blogger now claims a position of influence in the online world that rivals newspapers and television. It is therefore asinine to not expect them to observe the same standards of disclosure and objectivity in their content creation. Especially those who have large readership and are aware of their influence. To brazenly defend the compromise of the content with a statement like "I'm not lying, trust me" is to belittle the readers' intelligence and disrespects them greatly.

All content creators are held to the same standards: if you write about a company's services or products, you need to be unbiased, because people will take decisions based on your opinion. It is immensely naive to imagine that this is not true, or to believe that readers will trust your integrity blindly. If you are known to conceal information in one regard, there is no reason for your readers to believe that you have concealed information elsewhere as well. If it has hurt traditional media houses to not disclose commercially motivated opinions, then it will surely impact bloggers as well. The impact may be more visible amongst higher-profile bloggers, but it will be visible. Most conspicuously by a drop in readership. Whether Ms. Trunk will suffer this fate remains to be seen, but many a tech blog has suffered for its overt bias in reporting.

Shefaly responds to the Penelope Trunk post with much disgust:

What I can’t quite stomach is unsubstantiated ‘opinions’, prejudices and bigotry and biases – wrapped up fancily as “expertise”.(. . .)

Yet something bothers me deeply about the tawdry combination of amorality and hubris in Miss Trunk’s post. And the presumption that somehow the readership just “wants good content” not necessarily the assurance that the opinion is not coloured in any way. [Emphasis in original]

Much fury also vented on Twitter by @nixxin, @neo_Indian and @vboykis. Thanks for inputs, folks!

[Meme Alert] Kreativ Blogger Award 23 May 2009 12:14 PM (15 years ago)

I got this from Aditi, and because I like her very much, I shall do this. I shall now list seven things I love.

I love walking in the rain. I don't mean the crazy downpours that come with the monsoons, but the steady shower that lasts an hour or so, with winds that don't blow you off your feet. I miss that these days. It was easier to do in college than it is now.
One of the greatest things in the world is to watch the sun rise over anything that's not man-made. Mountains, lakes, oceans, whatever. As long as there's no building obstructing the view.
Violins.A well-played violin is the best sound in the world. Me playing the violin isn't quite there, despite close to a decade of training, but I love the sound of violin music.
Finishing a good book in one sitting is the most satisfying feeling I can imagine.
A good discussion on any old topic. The ones I have with Anand top my list these days.
Single-malt whisky. There's something enchanting about cracking open a new bottle of Scotch and inhaling the smells. Almost mystical.
An idea perfectly executed is a thing of beauty, and in turn, a joy for ever. Sadly, there are precious few of these going around these days. Compromise is the death of creativity.

I'm supposed to pick seven people to share this with, but I can't ruin my reputation by propagating a meme, now, can I?

Homeward Bound 22 May 2009 3:35 PM (15 years ago)

I have lived nearly half my life outside Madras, my hometown, if one included a year of elementary school and a year of college in Bombay. Of course, they call it Chennai now, though us old-timers still find it somewhat awkward to use that name. I'm not really an old-timer, either, but I grew up in Madras, and I haven't lived in Chennai very much.

College was the beginning. Living away from home for nine months a year gives one the opportunity to detach oneself from the moorings of one's upbringing, followed by a crash course in reclaiming them once again. And yet, one abandons those moorings in search of entries in one's curriculum vitae. It is, of course, unknown to the young student that there is delicious irony in the abandonment of one's life in the development of a CV. This is a lesson to be learnt only when it is too late to use it.

There is not much to be said for life in a college hostel. And yet, one successfully navigates through it using a potent combination of routine, academic diligence, personal relationships with the faculty and their families - especially one particular daughter - and a healthy disregard for what people think of you. For a bonus, I recommend taking on the most thankless of all administrative roles in the Institute. It is good for one's thick skin to help a peer and be known as a bastard for it. I did not miss my college once I turned my back on it, degree in one hand and a scholarship for higher education in the other. I do not believe I had friends there, and if I did, I do not have them now.

In Columbus OH, I ended up in familiar company - a classmate from college for a roommate, and a small group of Indian friends who kept each other from drifting into the white-bread world that is Central Ohio. And yet, we explored our new surroundings with vigour. The more layers I peeled back, the more interesting the onion became. First, we observed the tapestry that was Columbus's cultural mix - African, Irish, German, Italian, Hispanic, Middle-Eastern - and then we participated. We watched and we learnt and we went out and tried it out, whatever it could have been. While I found myself immersing myself into the city's fabric, my roommate was almost Zen-like in his clarity of vision. At the end of his Ph.D., he would head back to India, get married, have a family and career, and live happily ever after. As for me, I wasn't quite as sure.

I guess there were only two things that I really missed about India at the time, and both cravings were easily addressed by visiting Madras every other December. First, there's the beach. American beaches are almost sterile compared to the manic energy of Marina Beach. And then there's the Carnatic music season, a whole month of pretty much non-stop live Carnatic music. Easy enough, then, to get a fix for both urges, and get on with the business of spending every possible minute with friends, doing things that we've done since we were kids, and a few things we picked up along the way to adulthood. And then it was Christmas, and the New Year, and another flight back to the freezing winter of Central Ohio. Squeezing a year's worth of living into a month is rather draining, physically and emotionally, and you're always left feeling like you've left out most things.

I broke free of my moorings when it became apparent that circumstances would force me to move right back to where I came from. My last two months in Columbus were spent without any significant contact with Indians. I bunked with a Jewish classmate and her roommate, another classmate's boyfriend. The townhouse was right in the middle of the Short North, Columbus's art district and home to its vast gay population. It was a unique opportunity to interact with a subculture to which I'd had no previous exposure. And I watched, talked, and learnt about gay America. They became friends. And in a matter of weeks, I was gone, another transient memory in their lives. And they in mine.

My return to India was not by choice, but by force of circumstances I could not control. Bitterness and frustration abounded, but I was going back home. At least I could afford to take a little time off before getting on with the process of getting on with life. I was in a city I knew intimately, among friends I've grown up with, and a family I'd grown increasingly estranged from. Within a year, I was gone again, a splinter in a fragmented family split across three cities in two continents. I live in Bombay now, another city with a new name fabricated from local sensibilities. It is not a city I feel at peace in, or even remotely comfortable. It hangs about me like a suit that is too tight at the shoulders and too wide at the hips. I would much rather be elsewhere, but I must be here now. When I no longer feel that need, I will leave.

I live in a large apartment surrounded by minimal furniture. I live in anticipation of abandoning this place and finding another. When I do find it, wherever it may be, I should like to be able to call it my home.

[This post was inspired by Dsplaced (Web, Twitter), a wonderful project started by Jinal Shah (Web, Twitter) and Mansi Trivedi (Web, Twitter). Do check them out.]

Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones... 15 May 2009 2:10 AM (15 years ago)

...but bullets can't pierce my breasts. At least, that's what our genius Bollywood actresses seem to think.

Consider, for a moment, the following scenario - it's not too far-fetched. After all, that's why these ladies want the jackets. So, the scenario:

Hot starlet meets dashing gangster in some sort of social do. Dashing gangster sweeps her off her Blahniked feet and starts a furious clandestine romance, for which she is compensated by means of several leading roles in B-movies. All is well in Bollywood, until some nasty competitor in the gangster business decides that our leading man must pay. Preferred mode of payment - hot starlet shall lie in an awkward pose in a pool of her own blood. So, enter super-successful hitman with his high-powered rifle, with which he can shoot the wings off a fly from a few miles away. Hitman spots starlet in tight-fitting dark jacket, which on closer inspection, turns out to be an original Rahul More design from Magnaera.com. Maybe his bullet could pierce it, who knows? But why bother, he thinks, when he can simply shoot through that ample, exposed bosom?

He lines up his shot, which is easy enough, since there's plenty of exposed cleavage. And he shoots, which is easy enough as well, just like flicking a switch. And then, the twist in the tale! The hitman is dead, with a hole in his head the size of a bullet from a high-powered rifle. Forensic experts are called in, and they quickly determine that the hitman has shot himself, thanks to the incredible flexibility of the hot starlet's implants. "Who needs to cover up these things? I'd rather protect parts of my body that aren't nearly as invulnerable," says the hot starlet as she totters off with her gangster boyfriend. Lots of media reporters scribble these words down as the new mantra in fashion design.

P.S.: Yes, I got that bit about the fly from Wanted. So? This is India, we don't believe in intellectual property. Oh, and I got the link from Prem Panicker on Twitter.

On The Throwing Of Shoes 21 Apr 2009 1:24 AM (16 years ago)

When Jarnail Singh threw his sneaker at P. Chidambaram, I'm sure he had no idea that it would turn into some kind of national pastime for India. Since then, Naveen Jindal and a couple of others have been targets of footwear projectiles. The sad part, all these guys did little more than float the damned shoe in the general direction of their targets. It's almost insulting to see a Sikh, a well-constructed specimen of the warrior race, toss his shoe underhand at a static target barely a few feet away, and miss! As someone said somewhere on the Internet (I'd link it if I had any idea who said it), if they can't hit a politician with a shoe from point blank range, how do we expect our cricketers to score direct-hit run-outs?

So, I sit at home, beset by insomnia and the white noise of television's talking heads in the background, wondering: what is the most effective way to throw footwear towards a static target and inflict maximum damage? Is it necessary to have appropriate equipment? Is one form of shoe more suited to throwing than another? Is it easier to throw underarm or overarm? Questions flew thick and fast, like arrows in Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan. Or maybe it was B. R. Chopra's Mahabharat. I forget.

My testing materials were limited to my four pairs of footwear - leather dress shoes, tennis shoes, sandals and the trusty old hawai chappal. For a target, I used a chair. It works for a static target ten feet away. So, with all necessary implements at hand, the testing began.

I summarize my results below. Limited initiative in the middle of the night prevented me from recording all data accurately, so these results are merely indicative (though they have been verified through repetition).

I tested three styles - the overarm javelin, the underarm frisbee, and the underarm slow-pitch. The underarm throws immediately threw up a problem: in the presence of obstacles between the thrower and the target, it is impossible to use the frisbee, as the shoe would definitely hit the obstacles. The slow-pitch can avoid obstacles, but does not deliver sufficient momentum to the shoe, and the toss would be mostly harmless (to borrow a phrase from a famous dead writer). Besides, the dress shoe and sneaker are extremely difficult to throw using these techniques, though the underarm frisbee works like a charm for the chappal and sandal, both in terms of force and distance. Accuracy is always questionable with the frisbee, as is speed to the slow-pitch.

That leaves us with the javelin, which is intuitively the ideal way to throw a shoe at a target located at approximately shoulder-height, so that we can skip people standing around us and send the shoe towards the politician of our choice. Because it utilizes a good unhindered swing of the shoulder and forearm, coupled with aerodynamic orientation of the shoe, it delivers a strong throw and minimum deviation from its path or decelaration in its trajectory. The dress shoe is easiest to throw in this fashion, as it provides for a comfortable grip and has a natural taper at the toe, which minimizes air resistance. The chappal is particularly hard to throw as it isn't easy to hold, and the same holds for the sandal as well. The sneaker is not much harder to throw than the dress shoe, but doesn't go as far as the latter.

Other untested styles of shoes include moccasins, boots, Kolhapuri chappals, mojris, jootis, and all forms of women's shoes. I'll bet that the dress shoe still wins. ~~Muqtada al-Sadr~~ Muntazer-al-Zaidi (as Rohan points out in the comments) had it right when he threw his shoe at Dubya, as the video will show. Jarnail and the rest would do well to watch and learn.
(Videos linked until I bother to expand the column width of this blog, after which I might embed them. But do click on through.)

Lessons For Mallika Sarabhai - Twitter Edition 10 Apr 2009 12:22 AM (16 years ago)

This morning, I learnt that Mallika Sarabhai, who is contesting for the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha seat against L. K. Advani, was following me on Twitter. So, intrigued and cynical, I ventured over to the account's page and discovered that it was basically a long list of links to her comments on television and in the newspapers. As any self-respecting user of interactive social media will tell you, this is a terrible way to go about things. So I tweeted the following four 'lessons' for Mallika Sarabhai:

Lesson No. 1: Followers on Twitter are not going to help if you don't talk to them.
Lesson No. 2: It's good to get the word out, but putting every single video/article about you in my timeline = spam.
Lesson No. 3: It would help if someone who's not a campaign PR hack used this account. It's called authenticity.
Lesson No. 4: Answer questions, preferably starting with the same ones you asked LK Advani. Then the ones people ask.

This has been blogged at the request of my friend Hemant (blog, Twitter). There is room for more elaboration on how Ms. Sarabhai and others in her place can use the medium more effectively, but it will require more time, thought and energy than I can spare at the moment.

Slumdog Millionaire - Review 9 Jan 2009 9:06 AM (16 years ago)

Let's get a few things about Slumdog Millionaire out of the way: it's got an impossibly convenient story, it makes poverty look like the most beautiful thing on earth, and these illiterate Indian slum-dwellers speak English better than they possibly could.

Right, so let's take a deep breath and move on. So, there's Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), who's just won 10 crore (100 million) rupees in Kaun Banega Crorepati (conveniently, it's still Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in the film), and he's just been rewarded with a night in jail, subjected to all kinds of interrogation techniques that Guantanamo Bay would balk at, because the rather condescending host (Anil Kapoor, playing a professional asshole) of the show thinks he's a bloody cheat. After much useless torture, the cops (Irrfan Khan and Saurabh Shukla) decide that it's better to be nice to him, and have him explain how he knew the answer to every single question.

It appears as though every significant event has occurred purely to help young Jamal answer questions on a television quiz show. Except for Latika, a girl orphaned by the same riots as Jamal and Salim. Jamal's hunt for Latika after she's captured by a local Fagin culminates in his appearance on the show, which in turn culminates in, well, expected fashion. Jamal's answers are the result of rather harrowing experiences, some of which are shot with almost poetic elegance by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, including little Jamal's rush through some rather fresh bodily waste, and the extraction of a child's eyeball with a spoon. Everyone knows a blind singer earns double, Jamal tells the cops, explaining how he answered a question correctly.

Every single cliché about India that exists in the West is represented: stifling poverty, organised begging, sleazy tour guides, child abuse and prostitution, the underworld. In attempting to catch them all, Boyle manages to do nothing more than merely stroke their surfaces, and the short-story style does not help at all. It also hurts the characters - they turn out hollow, with none of the three actors assigned to play Jamal, Salim and Latika actually getting into their roles with any conviction. Dev Patel struggles with the role; he comes across as far too polished for the 'slumdog' he's playing, all smoothness and no rough or jagged edges. Anil Kapoor lays on the condescension towards the chaiwallah so thick that you're annoyed with him before his first scene ends. He does get to swear, though, and does so quite naturally. He must have been thrilled with that one.

To be perfectly honest, it took me two days to actually realize all of this. For the two hours that the film runs, it is an exhilarating ride, aided with a percussive, powerful hip-hop soundtrack by A. R. Rahman, an effort far superior to the tripe he has churned out for Bollywood in 2008. Each mini-story is a little puzzle, with a prize at the end: the answer to the quiz question. And the prize, more than the characters or the storylines, is what keeps you hooked, again and again, until the final denouement, a most cheesy Bollywood-type dance sequence set in ~~Victoria~~ Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. A question appears at the end, one that is anticipated from the very beginning, and it is answered. As with the rest of the film, you always knew it would be. Because it was written.

If I Saw You In Heaven 9 Dec 2008 4:44 AM (16 years ago)

Via Salil Tripathi again, a poignant and undeniably controversial cartoon by Hemant Morparia, long-time contributor to Mid-Day:

Mid-Day did not publish this image, believing it to trivialise the deaths of employees at the Taj Mahal Palace and Towers hotel in Mumbai in November. Salil shared this image with an email list of some extremely smart people (and me), and after 50+ exchanges on the topic, opinion is still divided on whether this is an acceptable tribute to the fallen, or whether it is demeaning to them. Some of the key concerns:

This cartoon isn't funny.
Is it too soon to publish a cartoon like this, when people are still hurting from the attacks?
Does it trivialise the deaths of the Taj staff, making light of their demise?
Does it insult the Taj staff, and imply that they will continue to serve in their current roles even in the afterlife?

My comments, along with Morparia's own thoughts on the matter:

This cartoon isn't funny.
This is little more than a common misconception. Not all cartoons are meant to be funny. I saw this cartoon as a gentle pat on the back for a group who were exemplary in the way they behaved in extremely testing times. That made me smile.

Morparia says:

[T]he cartoon follows the tradition of giving tribute to the departed. a recent one was after vijay tendulkar died.another one was after pu la deshpande . . . [U]nfortunately, any cartoon is naturally associated with being humorous. All cartoons are not, either by intent or default, funny. Here I am not trying to be funny at all - just pointing out how the Taj staff's valour and going much, much beyond the call of duty, gets them to heaven. Even the hypothetical facilities of heaven are improved on their arrival. [Edited for punctuation]

Is it too soon to publish a cartoon like this?
Probably. There's really no good time to publish a sensitive piece, because those affected will always react adversely towards it, even if in varying degrees. That should not reflect on the cartoon or article in question, or the intentions and sentiments it carries. As a publisher, a newspaper must take into account the reactions of its readers, as they would directly impact its future business. However, a publisher is also a voice, and must balance that responsibility with the business implications. Scales do tilt, and it is often the voice that is silenced.

Morparia says:

I realize that this may be misconstrued, and seen as insensitive. Perhaps could do with more time between event and publishing. We are all raw now and hurt easily at anything at all. I dont mind it being posted on other blogs. But if you could add "unpublished cartoon", and add some of my qualifiers, that would perhaps help people see this as not anything more than a simple tribute to their extraordinary sense of duty, rather than something made to generate a laugh.

Does it trivialise the deaths of the Taj staff, making light of their demise?
I don't think so. I can see why people would think it does so, though. As I said, my first (and consistent) reaction was that it was a congratulatory comment on the quality of the Taj staff. Morparia also addresses the potential for misunderstanding (see above). There's not much to say, but in an atmosphere of emotional discomfort and public distrust, it's as easy to sympathise with those who find this drawing in poor taste as it is to criticise them for being hypersensitive.

Morparia says:

It is possible that those who find this offensive or tasteless, may actually be subconsciously letting us on to what they really think of this kind of work. Would such a view then not be offensive? Of course, no one will admit to this, really.

Does it insult the Taj staff, and imply that they will continue to serve in their current roles even in the afterlife?
This is the tricky one, IMO. It is quite possible to pick this meaning up and run with it, but to do so would require a keen eye for the offensive. Or just an extremely thin skin. Both of these can be found in large numbers, not just in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, but as a social attitude throughout this decade. Maybe it is a mass exodus towards political correctness, or mindless aping of Western cultures (who have already migrated). Or maybe it's just us losing the ability to look at ourselves with a sense of humour (which is infinitely more saddening).

My reading of this cartoon is that if the Taj workers were to serve in Heaven, it would enhance the already lofty standards of life beyond the Pearly Gates.

Morparia says:

Is the cartoon possibly offensive/insensitive to some because it posits that the staff is continuing to do in heaven what they did on earth? In that case, is this an unwitting comment on how we really perceive their roles here?

As a corollary, had I shown NSG commandos in heaven and some people commenting that they feel safer here, would that be offensive too?

There is an important sociological comment here; Indians tend to lower the value of the service industry to the level of servitude. This can be extended to the way we perceive certain kinds of labour as well, and our need to employ other (lesser) people to do our menial chores for us, without ever learning the skills to do them ourselves. In specific response to the NSG commandos in heaven, one of the members on the email group responded (correctly, IMO) that their presence would have sufficed, rather than for them to have been in service. But I ask in response, shouldn't all those military martyrs suffice already?

Over to you.

Star Wars, A Long Time Ago... 9 Dec 2008 3:12 AM (16 years ago)

What if Star Wars had been made at the time it purportedly occurred, i.e., a long time ago? YouTube user neonstz gives us an idea.

Meanwhile, one of the best ever pieces of Star Wars humour:

A View From Across The Seas 27 Nov 2008 10:59 AM (16 years ago)

Via Salil Tripathi, a piece by his son, Udayan Tripathi, a freshman (Class of 2012) in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Udayan was born in Mumbai, and grew up in Singapore and London, but has visited Mumbai several times. This piece was written for his campus newspaper.

Update: Salil's look at Bombay Burning in Far Eatern Economic Review.

(My own take is somewhat different, and I'll post that later.)

* * *

It isn't that the Taj Mahal Hotel looks like Healy Hall. If you squint, crinkle, and squish you might find a passing resemblance but to do so is to miss a much larger point. Diversity. We all celebrate it at some point. It might be at Pluralism in Action during NSO, or just in meeting the international students on your residence hall floor. Mine include men and women from Jordan, Spain, the UK, the UAE, and the Phillipines. Diversity enrichens everyday life. From it we learn that while Rangila is beautiful, just wait for that summer abroad to India, to see Nariel Purnima on Chowpatty beach in Bombay.

Before I leap into a proclamation about Georgetown, Bombay, and diversity, a note on why I won't call it Mumbai. In 1996 Bal Thackeray, a fan of Germany's most infamous leader, as the head of the then-ruling Shiv Sena party renamed the city. He cast off its colonial name, one bestowed upon it by the Portugese, to tell fellow Hindu fundamentalists that this would be a Hindu city, in the state of Maharashtra. That diversity was not exactly welcome here. He chose Mumbai after Parvati, a Hindu goddess. We in Bombay won't spit in the
face of those who are different to us, and Thackeray renaming the city after a Hindu goddess was spitting in the faces of the city's Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Sikhs.

So what of Bombay today? How is that riotious, raucous, tantalising, and turbulent city faring these days. As we saw over the course of this afternoon, not so well.

I was born in Bombay 19 years ago. The neighbourhood you see on CNN, blood splattered across its dark deserted streets is mine. The glass shards from Padminis, Ambassadors, and Mercedes Benzes lie strewn across paving stones on which I have walked. The rumble of army trucks has shaken the foundations of century-old buildings minutes away from my birthplace.

And my birthplace is Bombay Hospital, tonight just one of the locations beseiged by AK-47 wielding youths. Alan Jones, quoted all over the BBC World Service talks of them in their jeans and t-shirts as they sprayed bullets across the magnificent lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel. A lobby which I can picture, right now, from memory. I know which ornaments are probably lying across the ground. Across bodies. And the leather sofas and the granite desk with its Hussain mural and the LVMH store and the rug too. Blood-stained? Bullet-ridden?

I was last in Bombay in June. That trip changed my life, and the city played no small part in doing so. Victoria Terminus, the Taj, the Oberoi, Bombay Hospital, and Chowpatty beach all made that week incredibly special for me. It hurts emotionally and physically to know what happened in those beautiful buildings tonight.

We at Georgetown are familiar with the ominous shroud of potentiality that looms over campus. Minutes from the White House, Capitol, and the Pentagon, we perch over a city right in the crosshairs of terrorists. Just like Bombay.

We marvelled at the fortitude with which our city leapt up from that smoke stenched Langley morning seven years ago. Between now and then, bits of Bombay have been blown apart thrice. The city will rise again, it always does.

We celebrate diversity at Georgetown because cosmopolitan places like our campus, like Washington, and like Bombay are the greatest places on earth. When we arrive as ambassadors from faraway lands - be it
Baltimore or Mirpur, the land of the Balti (a type of Pakistani cuisine) - we bring the exotic to one another. We enrich each others' experiences with sounds, sights, spices, and scenes from home.

Bombay just blew up, so I'll take a moment to look back at the city in which I first spoke, stepped, and stumbled and give my thanks this Thanksgiving for diversity. Because diversity: strength in variety, strength in commonality, and strength in sharing experiences is what will pick this city up from tonight's blood-stained memory.

While We Were Out 3 Nov 2008 3:14 AM (16 years ago)

Things have been happening around the world. Some good things, some sad things, some downright disgusting things. Let's give them a quick look.

Anil Kumble Retired From Test Cricket
I don't have a definitive Anil Kumble memory. I don't even remember much beyond the much-referenced 10-wicket innings and the broken-jaw bowl. In retrospect, I think it is exactly that which makes him so important to my experience of Indian cricket throughout his career. Like the time I went to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City - I don't ever remember looking down at the foundation; it was just there. And now it's not. Thanks for everything, big fella.

P.S.: Rub the 100 in Warnie's face. Thanks.

Raj Thackeray's Goons Beat Up North Indians
The official stand is that the MNS is fighting for the rights of Mumbai locals, who are apparently being marginalised by parasitic North Indians. So, what rights are they talking about, exactly? Let's consider the auto-rickshaws and taxis being operated in Mumbai. My experience, anecdotally corroborated by friends, has been that local drivers tend to be far more focused on where they want to go, rather than where the commuter wants to go. Try a bhaiyya or Bihari, and chances are, you'll get where you want to go. You may get cheated, sure, but if you know your way about town, you'll be okay. Now, as a consumer, I'd much rather use a 'Northie' cabbie/auto-wallah, because I don't really care where the driver would rather go. For me, the local guy is a problem. I'd much rather have an outsider take me where I want to go than not go at all. Dear Raj Thackeray, your boys don't deserve rights unless they actually do their jobs.

Disclosure: I'm a Tamil from Chennai, who were the original Shiv Sena case study that the MNS is ripping off.

V. Anand Retained The World Chess Championship.
While everyone in India was jumping up and down about India's win over Australia in the Mohali Test, Anand defeated Vladimir Kramnik in the championship match in Bonn. A friend was unhappy that not enough Indians follow chess, but in a sense, maybe that's for the better - a game of chess is an intensely personal exercise, and it is fitting that any celebration of success in the game should be just as intimate. Just like a party to which only 50 people are invited.

Twitter = Life 17 Sep 2008 11:38 PM (16 years ago)

For those who came in late:
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Google v. Bloodsuckers 17 Sep 2008 1:43 AM (16 years ago)

Now, we've received news that Google is taking a bunch of students to the northern-most inhabited part of the USA. This is a town known as Barrow, in the lovely, yet frigid, state of Alaska. Here's a map:

View Larger Map
They hope to show how Google Earth and Google Maps can be used to enhance education.

A noble intention, of course, but what will happen if they run into this?

Your Free Murakami Fix For The Day 3 Sep 2008 10:49 PM (16 years ago)

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On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! 21 Aug 2008 3:47 AM (16 years ago)

It was a good day to take a trek through io9, as evidenced by two consecutive posts on a generally underactive blog.

Hot on the heels of the script for The Dark Knight comes the truly non-Euclidean revelation that the true home of dread Cthulhu has been discovered. We can now prepare ourselves for the eons of unimaginable and undescribable horror that will come when the residents of galaxy NGC 1275 look back in our direction. What foolishness you have wrought, Hubble Telescope!

In a weak attempt to justify its blasphemous investigations, the HubbleSite tells us:

One of the closest giant elliptical galaxies, NGC 1275 hosts a supermassive black hole. Energetic activity of gas swirling near the black hole blows bubbles of material into the surrounding galaxy cluster. Long gaseous filaments stretch out beyond the galaxy, into the multimillion-degree, X-ray–emitting gas that fills the cluster.

These filaments are the only visible-light manifestation of the intricate relationship between the central black hole and the surrounding cluster gas. They provide important clues about how giant black holes affect their surrounding environment.

Filaments? Filaments? Such blatant disregard for the infernal tentacles of the Elder Gods! These astronomers will be consigned to the R'lyeh Starbucks. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!
[Image from HubbleSite]

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