Recycled Writings

Bye bye, Bangalore; saying it with saplings

2008-01-15T17:02:00.000+05:30

If everyone who goes abroad the first time – students, IT professionals or baby-sitting NRI parents – were to plant a roadside sapling to mark the occasion, we could have a green corridor all along the way to the airport in three to five years.

So I said in a recent post highlighting the green initiative of Mrs Janet Yegneswaran, who set up the Tree-for-free Trust in memory of her husband . Now that the Bangalore international airport would be ready for operation in six weeks, this is as good a time as any other to plug the message: Say it with Saplings – addressed to Bangalore air-travelers.

When airport-related items are the flavour of the Bangalore media, it is time to drum up the ‘green' corridor idea, in the hope it would be taken up by the Bangalore municipal and the international airport authorities. What triggered the idea was a story in Bangalore Mirror about a California NRI having planted 21 saplings at a city park to mark her three-week vacation in Bangalore. It’s time the media followed up on the idea for a Greener Bangalore.

This is the time for the Tree-for-Free Trust to survey the highway to identify open stretches along the road to Devanahalli; and to seek permission from the authorities and landowners to plant saplings on their space, as a citizen initiative. Janet has been engaged in encouraging residents and neighborhood interest groups to chip in their bit in making a difference to the city’s green cover. Janet’s trust arranges to plant saplings sponsored by individuals to mark special occasions such as birthday, death anniversary, wedding date, college admission, job placement or whatever.

The media report on the California NRI planting saplings as her farewell gesture on leaving Bangalore evoked many enquiries from residents seeking to sponsor saplings. Sunil Khanduja of SiliconIndia set up a online group in support of the initiative of the Tree-for-free trust.

But then the initial spurt in public enthusiasm hasn’t been sustained. We haven’t heard anything further either from Janet or Bangalore Mirror about whatever happened of those sponsorship enquires. Have the sponsors planted their saplings? How many, where and by who? And how are the NRI saplings coming up at the Koramangala eco park? Wouldn’t their non-resident sponsors wish to read about and see photographs of their plants on Janet’s website?

The SiliconIndia support group remains a non-starter. Not a single member, other than yours truly and Sunil who started it, has joined the group. In a recent e-mail Mrs Janet Yegneswaran referred to lack of media or corporate support. Maybe not many know of her efforts; maybe, she hasn't done enough to create public awareness. For a start, I would like to see Janet sharing her thoughts and experiences with the SiliconIndia support group.

Those in the media could do more of the Bangalore Mirror type stories (are you reading,Mr Balanarayan?) Radio jockeys could be persuaded to plug the green message. Company CEOs could talk about it to their staff and in social circuits. SiliconIndia network members with Bangalore connection could take more interest in sustaining the GreenBangalore support group.

Cross-filed in SiliconIndia

Delhi techie blogs to pay for studies aborad

2008-01-11T18:50:00.000+05:30

Blogger Ankur Shankar has a mission - to blog his way to the London School of Economics (LSE). The 25-year-old techie in NOIDA wants to study economics at LSE. He has an admission offer, but no funds. Ankur is hopeful that his blog would raise ad revenue to pay for his studies in London.

It works this way. Google’s Adsense places assorted ads on Ankur’s blog. His earnings are related to the number of hits his blog gets; and the ‘clicks’ for a specified ad. Online advertising in India represents about 10 percent of the companies' overall advertisement budgets, according to Business Standard. Media pundits reckon this form of marketing has huge potential; it has scope for ‘contextual advertising’ that seeks to match buyers with sellers in a meaningful way.

Advertisements appearing on blogs are chosen to flog products and services that would interest the niche readership of a given blog. Ankur posts short stories, on a daily basis; a story a day for 180 days. Ankur’s blog – The Million Dollar Story – is a six-month project that started in December last. He needs to raise $1,10,000, by May-end, so as to enable him to join the two-year M Sc course in Economics, starting at LSE in July, 2008. It is reckoned he would need a million page-views a month, for the next five months.

Whether Ankur’s Million-dollar-story would raise a million page views a month is a mega question. Undoubtedly, his endeavour has evoked much word-of-blog support and several bloggers have put Ankur on their blogroll. What gets him readers, however, would depend on the appeal of Ankur’s posts. The blogger is set to turn out a story a day; and he reportedly spends some three hours every evening on his blog post, apart from holding a day job.

A reader’s comment left on a recent post says it all – “…effort is highly commendable, but you need to take more time and write better stories; your stories haven’t excited me to come back and read another one”. It occurs to me that Ankur, instead of slogging it out on his own, could take on board a bunch of bloggers contributing posts to his blog. This could be a way to boost page-views; and the contributing bloggers would have the satisfaction of furthering Ankur’s cause.

In the last five weeks Ankur’s blog has raised a little more than $300, creditable in itself, but it doesn’t look as if it would take him anywhere close to the target figure. Ankur is, however, hopeful that the buzz his blog generates among bloggers and in the mainstream media would get him noticed by a corporate sponsor. And he promises to work for any company that sponsors his LSE course, for five years after his graduation.

Cross-posted in SiliconIndia, Desicritics

Taslima Nasreen: Where does she go from here ?

2007-12-22T10:56:00.000+05:30

Where does she go from here? I refer not merely to her ‘homeless’ status, but also her literary works in progress, if any. I am not familiar with her writings; Taslima Nasreen is less widely read than written about, not always for the right reason. Leading a life, unsettled and under constant threat of violence takes courage. But can Taslima, or anyone else in her nomadic situation get any writing done at all?

I wonder if she ever regrets having written something, so long back, that was to pose a life-long challenge to her life; to brand her infidel and be banished from Bangladesh. Not that an apology would now alter her life. I am all for freedom of expression. But those who assert their right to write their personal truth on socially sensitive issues ought to realize that such freedom comes with social constraints, and consequences.

Arguably, the city she came to adopt as ‘home’, and the local authorities there have an obligation to protect Taslima. This hasn’t happened, which is why she is ‘on the run’, for her safety, from her beloved Kolkata. Her current situation is fluid, and sticky. And Taslima hasn’t helped matters by talking to the media from her ‘undisclosed location’.

She told The Hindu that the external affairs ministry has conveyed that she wouldn’t be able to return to Kolkata anytime soon; and wherever else she chose to stay in India, she would have to lead a life in captivity.

‘Captivity’ isn’t quite the word I would use to describe ‘security cover’ extended to the high profile writer. “Why do I have to lead a life in captivity?”, Taslima is quoted in her telephonic interview with The Hindu’s Marcus Dam, “all I’m asking for is to be able to lead a normal life”.

Isn’t she asking for a bit too much? Celebrities don’t have the luxury of ‘normal life’, as you and I understand it. Snag is Kolkata isn't the only city that isn’t happy to welcome her back. Authorities in Hyderabad and Jaipur have demonstrated their disinclination. However, Mr Narendra Modi of Gujarat, during his poll campaign, is reported to have invited her to his state. I don’t know if Taslima reacted to Mr Modi’s offer, which could well be public posturing.

Meanwhile, our media tracks Taslima wherever she goes, even in an ‘undisclosed location’. What’s more, she appears more than willing to oblige them, with quotable story. This, at a time when those concerned with her security would want to keep her location a secret. Wouldn’t it help if Taslima were to maintain a low profile, by staying off headlines, till such time the authorities finalize arrangements to settle her somewhere safe and secure?

The Bangladesh writer has, on more then one occasion, expressed her gratitude to the media. Their presence have been a life-saver, at times, for her, when Taslima came under attack from a bunch of intruders at the Hyderabad Press Club not long ago. But media exposure could also work against her; and it doesn’t always win her public sympathy. As she herself put it, “I have become, it appears, an embarrassment to all…”. And media interviews at this time don’t help matters, do they.

Cross-posted in Desicritics

Brand India or business pariah ?

2007-12-13T11:44:00.000+05:30

News: Orient-Express Hotels rebuffs Tatas’ proposal again

The bit in this news that bugs me is the Orient’s statement, saying that aligning with Tata’s ‘predominantly domestic Indian hotels chain’ would adversely impact the brand value of Orient’s premium properties.

I see it, not as just a rebuff to Tata’s, but as a statement that undermines India’s business pride. It may well be the Orient’s considered opinion that aligning with Tata’s hotels (that run the Taj Group) doesn’t add to Orient’s brand value. But to say that dealing with hotels that are Indian would adversely impact the Orient brand value is a bit thick. They make India sound like ‘business pariah’, don't they?

I claim no knowledge of the intricacies of valuation of corporate brands. Correct me if I am wrong in sensing that Tata’s is a reputed global brand, and the Taj Group, rated high in the Indian hospitality sector. To say that aligning with them is bad for one’s brand value doesn’t make business sense. If anything, it smacks of corporate apartheid.

This reminds me of Arcelor’s initial reaction to Lakshmi Mittal’s takeover bid - “we don’t share the same strategic vision, business model and values”. Arcelor, you may recall, was then the second largest steel makers in the world; and Mittal Steel, the world’s largest. India-born Mittal was portrayed “in terms that could be described at best as xenophobic’ and they questioned his company’s “European culture and value”. That Mittal took over Arcelor is now history.

Unlike the Mittal's, Tata’s are not in a hostile takeover mode, not as yet. With a 11.5 percent stake in Orient-Express, all that Tata’s seek is an alliance that would bring its non-Indian hotels under the Orient-Express fold; enable both companies hold minority stake in each other’s equity capital and have representation on each other’s boards.

It’s is difficult for a corporate novice such as yours truly to understand how such an alliance would adversely affect the brand value of Orient’s premium properties. What is clear, however, is that Indian business enterprises, setting their sights on global strategic alliances, may well face rejection, not because their company performance records are not up to the mark, but because they are Indian.

Maybe corporate India needs to take a hard look at our efforts at building Brand India. Maybe, our ‘India Everywhere’ campaign at Davos hasn’t been good enough. What India needs to get herself ‘shining’ is produce more of the likes of ‘Steel’ Mittals and ‘Citigroup’ Pundit.

For all the spin and hype, 'Brand India', to my mind, is a concept that is largely illusory. But it is an illusion that appears to sway some global business minds.

'Hotmail' Bhatia on the idea of 'failure'

2007-12-10T17:16:00.000+05:30

When Sabeer Bhatia, who made his first million early in life, talks about the idea of 'failure' he ought to be taken seriously. It is not in our business culture to embrace failure, he says - 'we have not matured with the idea of failure'. People are surprised when he tells them that the story of Silicon Valley has been that nine out of ten products failed, but the one that made it more than made up for all earlier losses.
A failure is seen in the US as 'a badge of honour', as he put it; as an experience you learn from; something that spurs you to try again; and something that works up your hunger for success. And what does he find in India? You have people (promoters) saying, "Oh God, you've failed; I'm not sure if I would want to come anywhere close to you".
Mr Bhatia told the BBC(view video)the other day that raising funds for new ventures was tough here. India sn't such a hot or happening place for young techies with big business ideas, particularly if their ideas entail risks. And it is not in our business culture to factor in failure. Safe and secure are the attributes that attract funding. A project idea fraught with risks is, simply, no, no. According to Mr Bhatia, any new product that comes out of Silicon Valley takes five to seven years to realize its business potentials.
Google Search, starting in 1999, didn't make a go of it till 2005. Sabeer's 'Live Documents' took four years in developing. Mr Bhatia conceded he was lucky to have made a pile on Hotmail within two years. This was a decade back. As a student in Pilani he never thought he would become a businessman one day. And he did, with a bang, at Silicon Valley. Perhaps, it had something to do with Mr Bhatia's peer group at Stanford - Steve Jobs (who started Apple Computer) and Vinod Khosla of Sun. Though his subsequent business initiatives have not been such big hits, Mr Bhatia's Hotmail story still opens many doors for him.
I wonder if our home-grown first-generation millionaires in business – Infosys' Murthy, HCL's Nadar, Jet's Goyal and Deccan's Gopinath – share Mr Bhatia's perception that desi business culture constricts techno-preneurs, and that institutions in India tend to value experience and seniority, rather than intellect and creativity. His insight into business culture helps us get a sense of the predicament of our middle-class entrepreneurs, with knowledge as the prime asset. Power-point presentation of their bright ideas is, perhaps, the only collateral our knowledge-driven entrepreneurial class, can offer prospective funding agencies. These guys can take their bright ideas elsewhere. Some do.
Which is such a pity. For, in Mr Bhatia's reckoning, "our economy, the way it is going, allows people to take phenomenal risks and become superbly successful in three or four years." He concedes cultural constraints made it tough for many young techies to explore their bright ideas, and take them to entrepreneurial level - "we have so many have-nots that people here are happy differentiating themselves from the have-nots."
Our mindset is not amenable to taking risks; our business mentality finds failure unacceptable. Maybe, when they next hold Bangalore-IT.com or a global business summit, organizers should have a session on the dynamics of failure, inviting speakers who have faced notable failures.Our business leaders are fond of summit-ing only with those who have made it big. It is time they realized there is much to be learnt from the failures.
We needn't celebrate failure, as Mr Bhatia says Americans do, and see it as 'a badge of honour'. But we need to learn not to be scared of failures, if we want to realize the full potentials of our economy, as Mr Sabeer Bhatia sees it.

Cross-posted: Desicritics
Zine5
SiliconIndia

Our celebrity-obsessed media

2007-12-02T19:22:00.000+05:30

Fireworks,the fanfare and the media fuss over Sanjay Dutt's homecoming from Yerwada were in keeping with our Bollywood fan-club culture. The Sanjay admirers who thronged his Pali Hill residence wouldn't have,probably,settled for anything less spectacular.For the celebrity-obsessed electronic media it was the big story of the day. Most channels led their lunchtime news bulletin with Sanjay's home-coming, while around the same time, in neighbouring Pakistan, Gen.Musharaff shed his uniform and took oath of office as his country's civilian president.
NDTV, arguably, one of our more respected elite news channels, went for live coverage,tracking Sanjay Dutt's travel home from the Pune jail to his Mumbai residence.The young and energetic TV reporter, positioning himself across the street from the block of flats where Sanjay lives, gave us details of the scene around him. A huge hoarding put up on a sidewalk read, 'Welcome Sanju Baba'.We heard the TV reporter tell us about how the cops on the scene, present in strength, formed a human-chain to stem the surge of fans onto the street that was cleared for Sanjay's arrival from the airport (he made the trip from Pune in a helicopter).
We learnt a convoy of five media cars followed the Bollywood actor on his drive home from Mumbai airport. As the car carrying him neared the closed gates of his residence hell broke loose and the assembled media'went berserk',as our TV reporter put it.
Wonder what Sanjay Dutt made of such fanfare. A sensitive mind would have felt awkward and acutely embarrased by it all. It wasn't as if he was coming home with an Oscar. Lesser mortals in his circumstances would have preferred to make a quiet entry and slip into their homes unnoticed, even by those in their neighbourhood.

Get Real, Arshad Warsi; This Isn't Reality TV

2007-11-27T06:10:00.000+05:30

I thought you were cool, Mr Arshad Warsi; one of the more sensible guys in Bollywood. And, I reckoned you would give it back to those blighters who racially abused you and Bipasha, while filming in London. What you did, instead, was disappointing; you cribbed about it in the media – “I was shocked; I am not used to this sort of thing”. This isn’t on, not from ‘Circuit’, of Munnabhai fame.

Let’s consider what really happened. Warsi, with co-star Bipasha Basu, was filming outside a pub at Southall in London. A couple of whites in a passing car stopped by, shouted at them something about ‘brown skin and black skin’ and buzzed off. I know this could hurt a sensitive soul, but Warsi, you can’t be too sensitive to stray utterances of berserk minds.

Any Asian resident in Britain would tell you this sort of thing happens to us all the time. Pubs and street-corners, notably in a working class area, are designed for hoot-and-run racial abuses. Most people ignore it as public nuisance. Some hoot back at the racists, if it makes them feel any better.

The incident happened in a predominantly Asian locality. Those familiar with London would tell you Southall is so desi that no white, with racially abusive intentions, would want to be caught making trouble there. It is not an area for anyone to take panga with desis. What Warsi encountered was a couple of cowardly, car-borne cat-callers of the racial kind. They, presumably, were unaware of Arshad Warsi’s celebrity status. Maybe, they didn’t care. Which may well be the sticking point with Bollywood visitors, accustomed to strangers seeking autographs, rather than shouting swear words at them.

“For me it was an alien thing,” Warsi is reported to have told the media. Another actor chipped in, “you come to London, and you’re shooting; this is the last thing you expect”.

Come now, Warsi. You should know better. Skinheads and hoot-and-run scumbags are almost everywhere. You could report to the police. I reckon Britain has a law against racial abuse. But then you can’t legislate against racial mentality, can you ?
Lage Raho, Arshad Warsi.

Cross-posted from Desicitics

Karnataka CM on thanksgiving rounds

2007-11-16T06:00:00.000+05:30

I can’t figure out what our Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa is up to. He has been doing the rounds of temples and mutts, has done homa at his official chamber at Vidhana Soudha. He has paid a visit to his village astrologer near Tumkur. And, between trips to temples, Mr Y has ordered transfers of some key IAS and IPS officials. He has also managed to give sleepless nights to several others in bureaucracy, which is as clueless as you and I are on what he might do next.

A media report spoke of elaborate official bandha during CM’s visit to his village astrologer, near Tumkur. Senior government officials had reached the village the night before Mr Y’s arrival, to be at hand, just in case Mr Y needed to have a word with officials. As it happened, the astrologer reportedly advised CM to maintain silence till he returned to his office in Bangalore from the village visit. Such fuss and official fanfare may not be in the official protocol book. It would have been much simpler to have the astrologer over to the chief minister’s chamber, for consultations.

We have a chief minister who turns his official chamber at the state secretariat into a venue for Vedic rituals, including homa. Mr. Y is entitled to his puja at his official residence. Having it at his office in the state secretariat may be good for Mr Y’s soul, but such things wouldn’t go down well with those of us who believe in the sanctity of the seat of government. Mr Y may not think much of it, but there is a distinction, however subtle, between the CM as a person and his seat of power.

Today’s CM is Mr Y. Tomorrow, the seat may be taken by ‘X’Ali or ‘Z’Anthony. Mr Y, I reckon, isn’t conscious, or he doesn’t care, about such finer distinctions in a secular democratic set-up. If anything, our five-day old CM has been sending distinct signals to the people that, in governance of the state, he may well be guided by the Parivar and the divinity, rather than his cabinet and officials.

The media carried the other day a picture showing our CM prostrating before a spiritual leader. For Mr Y this may be personal. I don’t know what our swamijis and sadhus make of heads of government touching or falling flat at their feet. Surely, there must be more dignified ways of seeking their blessings.

My take is such gesture, by those in power, send out wrong signals to people. They can’t be blamed for thinking that they could have their work with the government done, if they seek a reference or recommendation from this guru, that sadhu, or such and such swami. Such public perception, of a close connect between spiritual leaders and the seat of government, is extra-constitutional, Besides, it doesn’t enhance the prestige of the community of spiritual leaders.

Meanwhile, we have the CM’s word that he wouldn't take any official decisions for the next few days and all decisions his fledging government has taken till date would be put on hold as he spends time visiting temples and offering prayers till Nov.19 when Mr Y is scheduled to prove his majority on the floor of the Karnataka legislative assembly.

Cross-posted from Desicritics

Reinventing Nilgiri’s local media

2007-10-27T12:07:00.001+05:30

A friend in Coonoor, Rev. Philip Mulley, mailed me a couple of recent issues of The Local that carried his article, tracing the beginnings of road building in Nilgiris. It all started in 1819, with the then collector of Coimbatore, John Sullivan, taking up a path-breaking expedition to Kotagiri. It then took over 50 years to build a road connecting Mettupalayam with Ooty.

And in the early years travelers to Coonoor/Ooty took ‘fast tongas’ that changed ponies in relay at every third mile. A retired colonel once told me that there were only seven cars in Coonoor town when he first came to the town in the 50s. A fascinating read, but The Local published Rev. Mulley’s piece in three installments spanning as many months. This isn’t the only aspect of this fledging community paper that doesn’t appeal to me as a reader. It is slim, a 10-pager, tabloid sized, and is priced Rs.7. As a community media initiative The Local is the best thing that has happened to Nilgiris in a long time. But as a publication this undersized, overpriced monthly has much to be modest about.

Glossy paper with bright colour photos add to the cost of production, but they do not necessarily sell the magazine. Pricing and periodicity of publication matter; so do mode of distribution, readership profile, and the mix of content. Publisher Edwin David in his note printed in the August issue would have us believe that his print-run of 3,000 copies is sustained by subscriptions by well-wishers who order The Local not only for themselves, but also for friends, their offices. And there are those who sponsor copies for distribution among a core group of planters, the army brass at Wellington, and professionals such as bankers, accountants and doctors.

The Local has focused mainly on content and quality, says its publisher, adding that it has managed to stay on, stubbornly, with costly glazed paper and color photos, hoping advertisers would come their way before long. The publisher refers to a leading car dealer in Nilgiris and a Coimbatore real estate developer having committed to taking ad. space, and several potential advertisers having “expressed their intent”.

I have heard it all before, from a friend Sasidharan who used to bring out a modest six-page weekly tabloid from Coonoor. He even managed to get a handful of advertisers and had a strategy for developing classifieds columns that attract its own readership, besides adding to the ad. revenue. Sasi’s concept was that of a community weekly with a mix of content generated by informed readers and experts such as Rev. Mulley.

The publication was short lived. Because it was brought out under a franchise arrangement with a Chennai group that published Apollo Times. Under the arrangement Sasidharan was obliged to name his Coonoor publication, Apollo Times, print it at their press in Chennai; and pay for it at the rate of Rs.1.50 per copy. The Chennai media group was interested in promoting its brand name; and in exploiting the Coonoor market to further their plans for opening an edition in Coimbatore.

As Mr David suggests in the publisher’s note, advertisers in Coimbatore have their own agenda and perceive Nilgiris as a small market. The Coonoor publication, being ‘a small paper within a so-called small market’, was seen by major advertisers, not so much as an independent media entity, but a mere add-on to a franchise publication in Coimbatore. The Coonoor edition of Apollo Times came to be exploited towards this end, bleeding Sasidharan’s meager resources.

If the Coonoor media failure established anything, it was that there is space for a local media in the Nilgiris. Within its short span of life the modest community weekly had acquired readership in Ooty and Kotagiri. Unsound business arrangement and cash crunch forced the Coonoor Apollo Times closure, even before it had a chance to develop a network of local advertisers who could not afford to advertise in mainstream newspapers. A local media with a critical mass of readership would serve the interests of small businesses better, and at a cheaper advertising tariff.

The Coonoor community weekly was distributed free. Free publications, as a business model, have worked well for neighborhood weeklies that are published in Chennai’s Mylapore, Adyar, Egmore and, Purasawalkam. What’s more, there are two or more players vying for the free-media space in Chennai. The latest in such Chennai publications is Velacherry Plus.

Pricing The Local, that too, at a stiff Rs.7 a copy, doesn’t appear to make marketing sense. What’s more freesheets brought out elsewhere have more pages, and lots more of reading material. Globally, the Metro group of free newspapers publishes local dailies from 70 cities in 23 countries.

The Local, I reckon, has potentials if only it re-invents itself. Besides a rethink on pricing, and periodicity, publishers of the Nilgiris monthly would do well to start an interactive website of The Local to synergize with the print edition. It would make a lot more business sense, if the readership of The Local extends beyond the geographical confines the Nilgiris and reachs out to non-resident population with Nilgiris connection. Rev.Mulley’s article can be accessed the world over, if The Local were to go online.

Speaking of online community initiative we once had a Coonoor blogsite that made a connect with non-resident Coonoorians in Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Muscat, Singapore, Australia, Madrid, Peru and several other places within three months of its inception. As a Coonoor-connected person staying in Mysore, I wish I could access The Local online; and,maybe, even put in my input occasionally. At the Coonoor blogsite we had an ‘Ideas’ page that had Nilgiris folks from all over posting their thoughts.

Cross-posted in Desicritics and Zine5

Delhi blogger makes waves in Pakistan

2007-10-19T10:37:00.000+05:30

'Who is this bloke?'. I wondered, on reading about his blog - Pakistan Paindabad - making waves. Mayank Austen Soofi. The name didn't mean a thing to me till then. And then there was this mail from fellow Desicritic and friend Tanay, recalling Mayank's post at Desicritics one year back, about his visit to Lahore's Heera Mandi. "I was able to smell/feel the streets of Lahore," wrote Tanay, touched by the narrative. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, they say, plans to make a film based on Mayank's post. I have plea for Mr Bhansali: Do remember to send us all DCs an invite for the film's premiere.

This new-found media interest in Mayank, I presume, started with a PTI news agency feature from Islamabad. My hunch is, in the coming days there may well be a rash of Sunday print media features and news channel interviews on this Delhi blogger who fell in love with our neighbors after a visit to Karachi and Lahore. A leading Pakistan daily - Daily Times - called Soofi's blog 'the website that teaches you neighbourly love'.

But then, it appears, not everybody loves Mayank Austen Soofi and his pro-Pak web initiative. Why would a promising young man from Delhi be blogging Pakistan? The question factors in it suspicion of a hidden agenda - could Soofi be a Paki staying in India, possibly ISI-connected. That Mayank anticipated this, but chose to press on with his blog speaks of courage. If I were in film making, I would probably do a documentary on what makes Mayank tick. Who knows such a movie might prove an inspiration for people to create more cross-border blogs; and for bloggers like Adnan (a Karachi-based blogger) to come out of their 'social closet' and declare without fear or reserve their good neighbourly feelings for people across the border.

In his tribute to the late playback Kishore Kumar the Karachi blogger noted that he had thought twice before posting the piece, declaring unashamedly his liking for Kishoreda , "Many regular readers would consider me hypocrite", wrote Adnan. His readers know him for his writings on politics and religion and "my rant on Music not (being) a part of Islam". Advisedly, Adnan, the blogger, doesn't give away much about himself, other than his first name and e-mail ID. Mayank is more communicative, insofar as he reveals he hosts three other blogs and is the owner of a private library.

Wonder if Mayank subscribes to Shelfari (would he like me to send him an invite?) so that we have the benefit of browsing his 'shelf'. It is said you get an insight into a person by looking at his collection of books. A scroll down his blogs, reading a bit here and a piece there, enabled me to draw an identikit (perhaps, as unreliable as a normal police job). Mayank, I would say, emerges as hyper-active, but regular kind of guy who likes being all over the town - at embassy parties in Chanakyapuri, a by lane in Ballimaran, used-book shop at Pahargunj or on location where a TV news crew at work in Kalkaji. (see Soofi's photo blog)

He is the type that would ask Deepak Chopra loaded questions - 'was Buddha a god?', 'how'd he feel, if he were to land in Delhi today' ('baffled', I would guess, at all that traffic). I didn't know the world's best known high-end seller of spirituality is Delhi-born, was schooled in St..Columbus. So was Shah Rukh Khan, and, I learnt from Mayank interviews, Anupama Chopra.

Blogger Soofi comes out as a skillful interviewer, drawing out well-known people to disclose value-adding trivia about their life-story. Deepak Chopra, Soofi finds out, was a part-time news reader in AIR getting Rs.75; had fun as student in AIIMS (Doctors in his time, presumably, didn't lose their screws inside a patient on the operating table).

Soofi pays attention to details - such as Chopra's Vespa scooter; and Tom Alter's (actor) passion for cycling, notably when he races to meet his girl - "I remember cycling to my girlfriend, from Daryagunj to East Patel Nagar, in 30 minutes flat". Wouldn't we like to know what Mayank Austen Soofi's preferred mode of transport is; and whether he has a girl-friend ?

Tailpiece: When this piece appeared in Desicritic Mayank wrote in response, he communtes in Delhi's deadly 'blueline' buses. And, yes, he has a girl-friend.

This piece reproduced in Mayank's blog - The Delhi Walla

All that hype over Mysore Dasara

2007-10-15T09:16:00.000+05:30

People don’t talk of Dasara without a mention of Mysore. But how many make it their destination when they plan their Dasara holidays? How much of people’s thoughts on Mysore Dasara translates into tourist revenue for the city? Newspapers here are full of statements by otherwise sensible officials, that would have us believe that Dasara is indeed the time when all roads lead to Mysore.

We have it from the Karnataka Tourism Department Secretary that the Mysore Dasara this year (October12-21) would attract over 12 lakh tourists from across the world. Which is, presumably, why they have made the official website - www.mysoredasara.com - multilingual. Those hosting the site claim you can get information pertaining to the ten-day festival in ten foreign languages, not counting English.

I tried Korean the other day, and nothing showed up on my laptop. Moved to Chinese, Japanese and Russian, with equally disappointing results. And then, to French, followed by German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, before I gave up. The site did not offer any more language options. Anyway, with the festival organisers setting their eyes and hype on global tourism, I would not be surprised if the Dasara website takes in a bunch of other languages next year, including Swahili, or whatever they speak in Timbuktoo.

A call to the Dasara site software person explaining my experience with their Korean edition evoked swift reaction: “Is that so? But it appeared fine when I checked last.” Anyway, the bloke was polite enough to thank me for the call, and offered to look into my complaint. I was hoping he would call back, with the latest status report on the much-hyped multilingual Dasara website. No call; no turn in my luck with the Korean site. So much for the tourist-friendly touch of our festival organisers. When I blogged about this, an observant reader wrote back saying he got the Korean site fine, and other language editions as well. What’s more the site even has a window showing “automated robot-type woman saying stuff” on Dasara.

Maybe my laptop isn’t Dasara-friendly. I tried one last time before sending this article for Zine5. And there is improvement. I now get the audio-video window, but no text still. And here is a question for the site managers: Couldn’t they find a desi robot that can pronounce the word ‘Dasara’ unfractured and doesn’t speak in a heavily affected accent?

The authorities have hired admen and event managers to strategise Dasara for tourism. They speak the language of the marketing people – product promotion, image-building, a publicity blitz and Brand Mysore. Hype is the name of the game. A newspaper report, in a curtain-raiser story, said: For a city that is emerging as a national brand vying with the best among tier II cities as a popular investment destination, the Dasara celebrations have emerged as the fulcrum to promote tourism and highlight Mysore as a perennial destination.

Reading this, I couldn’t help wonder, as a resident of Mysore, if the newspaper and I have in mind the same city. As for Dasara celebrations “emerging as the fulcrum”, the reality, gleaned from recent media reports, doesn’t warrant such optimism. Bookings in many city hotels were far less than anticipated; not many of the 22 house-owners registered last year for the much-publicised home-stay programme for tourists are said to be in business this year. And the Rs. 6,000 gold card that provides VIP access to three persons to all Dasara events are not such a sought-after item among foreign tourists, judging by the online sales. To start with, they printed fewer cards this year (750) and a majority of them still remain unsold.

Cross-posted in Praja-Mysore, Desicritic and Zine5

Mysore writers museum

2007-10-05T09:20:00.000+05:30

Swift, Shaw, Beckett and Woolf. “As we peeked into their letters and manuscripts on display, we’d suddenly stop dead on our tracks, as the familiar beginnings of stories and poems, or the title of a well-loved play enacted in college days, years ago, caught our eye”. So writes Indu Balachandran on a visit to Dublin’s Writers’ Museum. Reading these lines I wished, if only we could have a museum dedicated to R K Narayan, Kuvempu, Tejasvi and other writers with Mysore connection.

My friend and Star of Mysore columnist Dr Javeed Nayeem even suggested a splendid location - Oriental Research Institute – in a note a couple of Dasara’s back when he shared his thoughts with us on an idea for, what he called, the R K Narayan Walk. The idea was to take interested tourists and visitors round the writer’s favourite haunts.

Maharaja’s College Centenary Hall could be the starting point. Next stop – Ramaswamy Circle, where the Hardwicke High School student was martyred as he took a bullet fired by the then deputy commissioner during a demonstration. Then, a walk through the twin campus of the Maharaja’s and Yuvaraja’s, where many luminaries were students or teachers, before visiting the Oriental Research Institute, where a writers’ museum could be located, said Dr Nayeem, a story-teller in his own rights, and a Mysorean well-versed in local history.

The RKN Walk could then proceed, after a look-in at the un-ignorable Crawford Hall to Kukkarahalli, the lake that has many stories to tell on the time spent there by Mysore’s literary legends – Kuvempu, T P Kailasam and several others.

I gather that a group of Praja-Mysore activists led by Mr Arun Padaki, are putting together a power-point proposal for a network of heritage trails in Mysore. Whether or not they make the Walks happen, they are setting a worthy precedent for citizens-official partnership in the city’s development.

Cross-posted from Praja-Mysore

Bring Gandhi down from the pedestal

2007-10-03T06:08:00.000+05:30

Tamil poet Vairamuthu at a televised Gandhi Jayanti Kaviarangam read out a poem that says the hand watch Gandhi had, like his other wordly possessions, is a prized timepiece that would go for crores at Sothebys and people would line up to acquire it.

"If Gandhi were to be up for sale" asks the poet in the next stanza, "would there be takers?" Kavi Vairamuthu exercised his poetic licence to convey a reality. The things Gandhi owned are collectors' items; the thoughts he held have no takers.

A recent media report said the Bangalore University centre for Gandhian studies has had no students since they set it up. That Gandhi has no takers among today's generation shouldn't surprise us. And the fault need not totally be with the youth. It's probably because old-time Gandhians have failed; worse still, they pooh-poohed attempts to redefine Gandhi. Lage Raho Munnabhai may be dismissed by Gandhians as much too simplistic and masala-driven. But the Bollywood attempt does reflect the need for teachers to relate Gandhi to the nation's current concerns.

The Gandhian Studies Centre at Bangalore University has provision for annual intake of 40 students, is endowed with a Rs.15-lakh annual budget; has built over the years an infrastructure, including a 200-seat auditorium and an open-air theatre. Media report says that the few who applied for the PG diploma course offered by the centre did so to take advantage of free hostel facilities. The authorities who got wise withdrew the facility. The applications for Gandhian Studies dried out. No free hostel, no students.

One has to be naive not to ask why the university authorities would still want to continue with the studentless Gandhian studies centre (now a campus within the univeristy campus). And even if the decision-makers at the university view closure of the studies centre as an option, they couldn't be expected to voice it without risking stiff resistance from flag-waving Gandhians. I mean the type that comes out of woodworks, once a year to garland statues, and pose for media pictures.

The name 'Gandhi' brings to my mind a pedestal bearing a life-size statue, soiled with clotted droppings of a thousand pigeons that use as rest-room the statue's head & shoulders. Once in a long while you see municipal workers putting the statue to a beauty-parlour treatment. Which is when we realise that Oct.2 must be around.

We can’t think of a town in our country without a Gandhi statue. If only a statue can speak, we would probably hear from Gandhi Square in every town a cry of anguish, ‘Hey Ram, what have I done to deserve this?’. When people want to forget someone special, they set him up on a pedestal. And Gandhi is the best-known among the forgotten figures in our recent history, sentenced to a 'pedestal' that is frequented by passing pigeons.

Even during his lifetime, Gandhi proved inconvenient to many of our leaders. Subsequent generations found his socal prescriptions, such as caste equality, communal harmony and corruption-free society, tough to put in practice. Those who put Gandhi on a pedestal are happy keeping him there, for ever. If the statue on our neighbourhood Gandhi Square is allowed to make just one wish, it would be, ‘Bring me down from the pedestal’.

My thought on this Gandhi Jayanti Day is that the father of our nation, who had led a simple life amid ordinary folk, would probably like, more than anything else, a 'parole' from life on the pedestal, so that he could step out on the street and join the never ending public morcha of social activists against the powers that be.

Cross-posted from Desicritic.

Whispers in New Delhi's corridors of power

2007-09-29T06:58:00.000+05:30

Presumably, the most read media in New Delhi bureaucratic circles is not The Times of India or Hindustan Times, but a little known Bhopal-based website with a pedestrian title – Whispers in the Corridors -it keeps you posted on impending postings & transfers of IAS/IPS officials; it carries rumors on who’s under suspension, who are tipped to go on deputation to the Centre, from where; and whose name is up for reversion to the parent state.

Whispers publishes political tidbits, corporate changes and other water-cooler gossip. A recent post in Whispers claimed that intelligence agencies have put together a list of top 50 movers & shakers in politics, the men who call the shots in corridors of power in various state capitals. The website calls them ‘big brothers of political masters’; and it claims the PM has the list, along with information on the degree of their proximity to PMO and 10 Janpath.

Whispers doesn’t name names, but throws up clues for the benefit of those familiar with the dynamics of power. A certain Mumbai-based businessman is said to have the remote-control on Rajasthan; he can get done anything in the state. If you can’t guess who, here is a clue - he takes active interest in cricket; holds a diplomatic passport. Another businessman, again from Mumbai, can move matters in Bihar; clue – deals with auto industry. ‘A shipping and trading magnet’ can do things in Gujarat; a Mumbai builder is the man for Maharashtra. A Delhi-based real-estate developer is said to be calling the shots in Haryana; A promotee police officer is believed to be doing it in UP.

How about Madhya Pradesh? The site has nothing on this. But my guess is Suresh Mehrothra, the man behind Whispers in the Corridors.

Anyway, reading Whispers is fun. Much of it is, admittedly, hogwash, but many of its hunches, they say, approximate facts. Snag is in figuring out facts from the hogwash.Which is why Whispers, they say, has become required reading for the bureaucrats in the reckoning, besides liaison men and the lobbyists who do the rounds of the Secretariat corridors and the central hall of the Parliament House.

Whispers reminds me of Claud Cockburn’s cyclostyled gossip-sheet that kept London’s Whitehall on the buzz in the 30s. Called, simply, The Week, the gossip-sheet was read by bureaucrats, by leading politicians, bankers and journalists. Philip Toynbee said, “this cyclostyled sheet, which made public all the news and rumours of news which the official press fought shy of, was a squib which exploded effectively in many strange places”.

Claud Cockburn, in an introduction to a book by his wife, Patricia – The Years of The Week – wrote: “Friends and enemies are in agreement at least on one fact. It is that The Week exercised an influence and commanded an attention grossly, almost absurdly, out of proportion to its own resources”.

Perhaps, one could say the same about the Whispers of Bhopal. The Week of London was produced with the help of a few part-timers, in a dusty, one-room office in Victoria Street. The Bhopal website is brought out from a modest government quarter (allotted to journalists) at T T Nagar. The Whispers publisher, Dr Suresh Mehrotra, has a degree in medicine, but he has been a journalist as long as I have known him.

The media incarnation of Suresh, I believe, had its beginning as a Hindi journalist reporting for a news agency from Ujjain. Most high-flyers have had humble beginnings. Suresh and I came to be posted as newspaper correspondents in Bhopal around the same time, in early eighties. I worked for The Times of India, and he, for the Free Press Journal that had opened an edition from Indore.

For someone new to the print media (he had till then been a UNI wire service reporter), that too, in a paper that had yet to make its presence felt in Bhopal, Suresh kept up a steady flow of ‘exclusive’ news stories, much to the surprise and envy of his colleagues in the media. He was quick to earn a grudging recognition from media peers; he developed a network of contacts in official and political circles. I found him unfailingly helpful whenever I needed a contact or information on a story I was working on.

Contacts are the life blood of a newsman; and Suresh had it in abundance. Whispers thrives on official shop-talk; and it has sustained for six year now, on the strength of Suresh Mehrotra’s extensive contacts. Soft-spoken Suresh has a way with people that makes you swap cell number and e-mail addresse with him on your first meeting. I lost touch with him long before they invented e-mail;before the cell phone tsunami hit us.I learnt of his Whispers during a recent Delhi visit.

Cross-filed from Desicritic and in Zine5.

Accident victim care court ruling

2007-09-27T07:32:00.000+05:30

My public-spirited friend ERR passed on a mail he got from a friend, with a note that if we spread the word widely and long enough, lives could be saved. The message in the mail, doing the rounds as chain-mail and among bloggers, pertains to a ‘Supreme Court ruling’ that enables a by-stander to rush victims of hit-and-run accidents/assaults to hospital, without anxiety over hassles with the police or court-kachheri chakkar.

A stranger who brings an accident victim to hospital can walk out after leaving the victim in ER and it is the hospital’s responsibility to inform the police. First-aid /medical care come first. Question of payment and police formalities would arise only after the victim had been given immediate medical attention at ER.

My thoughts on reading this was, how come the mainstream media and TV channels missed such critical public interest court ruling. What was the case in reference to which the Supreme Court gave the ruling? In fact, did the apex court give such a ruling at all?

Googling for answers I ran into this observation from an Ahmedabad-based law firm. Its prime spokesman Mr Homi Maratha, in response to a post in Lawguru.com, is quoted as saying that hospitals have their own policies and as part of the procedure they adopt the responsibility of the person who brings in the injured does not end at leaving the accident victim at a hospital. You can always refer the SCC or Constitution Law of India, ‘you can find certain relevant authorities’.

Another advocate, Mr Sidharth in New Dehi says an answer could be found in the Commentary on the Constitution.

This was where I left my Google search. Maybe, someone legally knowledgeable could take this from here. Wonder if a query under RTI Act would be admissible in this case; in ascertaining the authenticity of what is being widely circulated as a Supreme Court ruling.

The Dosa of San Francisco

2007-09-25T18:45:00.000+05:30

At Sunnyvale Saravanaa Bhavan, we had to wait for 30 minutes for a table of four, that too, after a 40 minute drive on a freeway at 60 mph. Which goes to show the lengths to which NRIs can go for ‘desi’ food.

My visit to Sunnyvale Saravanaa was two years ago. There has since been a proliferation of Indian eateries in the San Francisco Bay Area. What’s more, desi food has come to figure in ‘Food & Wine’ section of the mainstream US media. A hefty Sunday paper gave big play recently to a restaurant called The Dosa in San Francisco. The newspaper write-up apparently worked up a prominent Indian resident, B S Prakash – ‘I read it, first with amusement, then with irritation and ending with burning indignation’.

Mr Prakash, reviewing the newspaper review on the web, says he was amused at the description of dosa as ‘a large thin crispy crepe - sour and not sweet’ filled with buttery potato, onions and cilantro, to be eaten with a dip of chutney’. He made a mental note that he ought to repay this with a review for Rediff of a snooty French restaurant serving crepe – ‘a crisp, smallish dosa-sweet and not sour, and with a topping, not of masala but of maple syrup’.

Mr Prakash, who does a monthly column for Rediff, holds a day job. He is India’s Consul General in San Francisco. What irritated our columnist was the firangi’s description of dosa, embellishing her narration with references to mutton and egg-fillings, the things not palatable to a traditionalist. His ‘burning indignation’ was, however, reserved for the foreign restaurant reviewer’s perception of desi service.

First, the food writer didn’t relish that The Dosa doesn’t take reservations. This can’t be an issue with most NRI restaurant-goers. If anything, they factor in the waiting time while planning to eat out. My experience at Saravana Bhavan wasn’t uncommon. It was the same story at Milpitas Bhima’s, where they have a pager system to facilitate the throng waiting for a table.

While registering your name at the reception counter they allot a number and and give you a pager. The idea is that you don’t need to crowd around the restaurant door, waiting for the reception desk to call out your name and number. With a pager you can stroll out or wait in the parking lot; and pager-buzz alerts whenever a table is made available.

In fact, there are quite a few classy restaurants in the California Bay Area that don’t take reservations as a matter of policy. I know of an Italian joint in Pleasanton (or is it Dublin?) that doesn’t accept reservations. The wait-time is 20 to 40 minutes. The restaurant has, helpfully, a liquor-dispensing counter that enables you to linger over a glass of wine or beer while waiting for a table or delivery of your take-out order.

Apart from no reservations facility, Marianne, the media food columnist, finds other aspects of the service in the Indian restaurant unacceptable. Having found a seat at The Dosa, she was made to order straightaway. Presumably, she is used to the fuss made by the bloke in a bow-tie with a writing-pad who hands out an oversize menu card and a wine list, and waits on you to order. Instead, she got a tattered menu card, only after she asked for it (normally, desi customers have their minds made up on what to order even before settling in). She started with idli ($4.95 a plate), moved to masala dosa ($8.95), and, presumably, wound up with carrot halwa. Marianne’s complaint was that they brought her a bill (instead of a ‘check’ placed in between a leather padded folder) even before she sent for it. And then there was this ‘water boy’ who kept filling her glass with water even when it was not fully empty; and refilling her sambar bowl, unasked for.

Marianne found the service appalling. I wonder how she would rate Mysore’s GTR Tiffin Room or Indira Bhavan; and the Bangalore Udupi, close to the central bus stand, on a narrow one-way street, with no parking;it is always crowded. The place has an age-old reputation for vannai dosa

As for The Dosa of San Francisco, Marriane has better credentials to comment on its service. Because neither I nor Mr Prakash have been there. He admits he cannot as yet vouch for The Dosa’s authenticity - “it is not easy for me to shell out $8.95 plus taxes for a dosa”. In my case, it would work out to another $1,200 or more, by way of airfare from Bangalore.

Tribute to film critic and friend M Shamim

2007-09-24T08:34:00.000+05:30

Retired journalist Atul Cowsish doesn’t visit the Delhi Press Club often; and whenever he does, he doesn’t stay beyond eight or half-past. When Atul went there a couple of Sundays back, for a condolence meeting, he stayed on for an hour after the meet, hoping that I might drop in at the club. I was visiting Delhi then, after a 11-year gap. The condolence meet was for a senior club member and common friend M Shamim. The three of us, Shamim, Atul and I, had been part of the local media scene in Delhi of the 60s and the seventies, when newspaper reporters were a close-knit group; and everyone knew everyone else.

I didn’t go to the club that day because I didn’t know about the condolence meet. In fact, I learned about Shamim’s demise only at a subsequent visit to the club to meet Atul, by appointment. Cowsish and I used to cover the Delhi Administration (or was it the municipal corporation beat?); he, for The Statesman, and I, for The National Herald. We met that evening at the club after three decades. To celebrate the occasion Atul stayed beyond 9 p m, lingering over his customary two smalls.

Shamim and I were on a different beat together. We did the round of cinema houses on Fridays to review, for our papers, the latest releases. We saw two, and, on occasions, three films, back-to-back as they say, and also took in a late-evening booze party hosted by a visiting director or Bollywood star.

There was camaraderie among film critics of English dailies and the bunch of us taxied together from one cinema house to another, to catch up on the latest releases. The core group comprised K M Amladi of Hindustan Times, Debu Mazumdar of Indian Express, Habib Tanveer of The Patriot, Amita Malik of The Statesman, and yours truly, then representing National Herald. Shamim of The Times of India was our group lead, a dada in fact.

At the press club condolence meet a former Times colleague Yogendra Bali said in his tribute, “I remember the whole of Bollywood used to be scared of him (Shamim), for he never spared anyone in his (film) reviews”.

Bali often used to tag along with Shamim on his Friday rounds of cinema houses, and, occasionally, stand in for him whenever Shamim couldn’t make it to a show. I wouldn’t say, as Bali does, that Bollywood was scared of Shamim. He was pampered by most Bollywood busybodies; and many held him in high regard. But no one who was anyone in Bollywood those days could afford to ignore Shamim.

As someone from a lesser paper(National Herald) I basked in the reflected clout Shamim had with Bollywood folks. He wouldn’t let them take any of us for granted in the matter of invites to a special screening or a Bollywood party. Shamim rarely accepted an exclusive invitation from any film world biggie. It was all or none , he used to tell them.

He was on first-name terms with all big actors of his days. Amitabh Bachchan was then a ‘bachcha’. If I remember right, Saat Hindustani was his first notable film; and its maker, K A Abbas, a good friend of Shamim, held a special screening for us at the Mahadev Rd. Films Division auditorium. I can’t recall what we wrote about the film, and if we mentioned Amitabh's role in it, at all.

Yusuf bhai (Dilip Kumar) who rarely interacted with Delhi film journalists used to phone Shamim whenever he was in town. And Shamim, true to his all-or-none principle, had him call us over as well for an afternoon drink at Oberai. I also remember us spending a long afternoon with Kamal Amrohi when he shared with us the factors responsible for the long delay in the making of Pakheeza. Matters no one would discuss with gossip-driven film media. Such was the relationship Shamim had with Bollywood folks and the trust they reposed on his film critic friends. Amrohi was married to the leading lady Meena Kumari when Pakheeza first went on the studio floor.

And then there was Aradhana, for the release of which the producer had flown the lead players to New Delhi. The Shamim gang was invited to meet Sharmila Tagore at Hotel Imperial. Rajesh Khanna, making a debut in the film, was staying in the adjacent suite. Yogendra Bali might remember this incident, for, I believe, he was also with us then. As we left Sharmila’s suite Mr Khanna’s PR man, met us on the hallway to plead with Shamim to spare a few minutes for Aradhana’s leading man. Shamim turned him down, but politely in his Lucknowi andaz, as we headed to a Connaught Circus cinema house to attend a film premiere.

This was the Shamim I knew. Such was his clout in Bollywood.

Cross-posted in Desicritic and zine5

Human Rights course for Karnataka cops

2007-09-20T20:48:00.000+05:30

We have it from the officer in charge of Karnataka police recruitment and training that constables and sub-inspectors study human rights as a subject during their basic training and that they undergo refresher course at various stages in their career. I read this in The Hindu open page where the officer, Mr D V Guruprasad, gives his take on the Bhagalpur brutality. It is refreshing to note a top cop, in the rank of additional director-general of police, taking a stance on the issue in an open forum.

What I read in his article, however, wasn't so heartening. He says he wasn’t shocked by the TV pictures of a Bhagalpur cop on a motorbike towing a battered chain-snatcher tethered to his vehicle. He attributed the continuing incidents of police in various parts of the country to public apathy. What shocked him about the motorbike incident was that onlookers who watched the brutality either cheered the police or preferred to be mute spectators.

In reference to the public attitude Mr Guruprasad write, “ I have come across many educated and well-placed citizens telling me that if the police do not use the third degree, a criminal cannot be taught a lesson”. This tends to shut out further debate on police excesses. Maybe Mr Guruprasad has a point – the public gets the police it deserves.

In an environment where people passively approve police excesses on crime suspects, Mr Guruprasad says, the police brutality would stop only when policemen are made to realize that there is suitable punishment in store for those who take the law into their own hands. That reminds me; does anyone know or care to find out the current status of the case against the cop on the bike? Has anyone seen a follow-up story in a newspaper or TV channel?

One would have thought the department would, in the interest of discipline of the force, want to see the policemen guilty of excesses (recorded on live TV with no scope for doctoring) meted out a severe punishment in expeditious manner. The irony is those who take the law into their own hands are dealt with in accordance with due process of law, which is not always sufficient or swift enough to be exemplary.

Mr Guruprasad, in his article, refers to the 1980 Bhagalpur blinding of 31 under-trials. A Google search on the progress of the case revealed that three policemen – station in-charge, an ASI and a havildar – were convicted and sentenced to two years in jail plus a fine of Rs.2,000 by trial court in 1987. The main accused got bail and appealed against the sentence. The apex court cancelled the bail and dismissed his appeal in March 2004. And it wasn’t till a month later a special magistrate realized the Rs.2,000 fine and sent the accused to serve out his two-year sentence.

The law, sure, takes its course, though this may take some 24 years after the incident. I don’t know if the court included the interest on the Rs.2,000 fine, realized 17 years after it was imposed

Manivannan, Mysore's man of the hour

2007-09-18T07:43:00.000+05:30

With Mysore municipal commissioner Manivannan P joining Praja-Mysore, we can count on a spurt in the ‘hits’, and hopefully, action-oriented input on the fledging community site. I have had the benefit of a look-in on the communication between Mr Shastri, representing the Praja admin, and Mr Manivannan. Was struck by his observation that a ‘city grows as much as its citizens are ready for it; and it can grow only when it takes its citizens along with it’.

Found it so apt, in the context of what I experienced during a recent visit to New Delhi. Going there after 11 years proved to be a trip of re-discovery, not just of the place but also its people, even those I thought I knew. What with its flyovers and the Metro it is evident that Delhi aspires to become world class city. The question Mr manivannan’s growth mantra raises is: Are Delhi people ready for it? Aspiration needs to be backed up with a change in people’s mindset as world class citizens. A mindset-aspiration gap is an issue that needs to be addressed in Mysore as well. And the hope is Praja input/interaction would create necessary awareness conducive to the much needed change in the public mindset.

The second part of M-mantra – a city grows when it takes its citizens along – calls for an enlightened leadership. In Delhi I noticed the one thing people are uniformly proud of is the Metro rail; and the much talked about man in this context is Mr E Sreedharan.

Needless to add, the name that springs to mind when we talk of Mysore administration is Mr Manivannan P. Googling Manivannan I found the Hubli-Dharwad municipal corporation under Mr. M’s regime as commissioner had the distinction of being the only civic body in Karnataka to have secured ISO certification. A California blogger Nagesh Tavarageri, reproducing Shyam Sundar Vattam’s article in Deccan Herald. posts:

"It took nearly two years to overhaul ‘junk administration’ and make it numero uno in the State. Hard work, dedication and commitment among all sections of the administrative agency has paid rich dividends in the form of ISO-9001;2000 certification from TUV, a German agency."

To quote Mr Manivannan’s mail to Mr Shastri,

"a city government that isn’t responsive loses relevance. But in a democracy public institutions can’t be overlooked, and hence they become fetters in the path of development."

Expressing personal views on the basis of his administrative experience, Mr M says,

"an intelligent citizen is one who understands that the chains can’t be removed, but the need is to increase the speed of the government machinery."

As I see it, Manivannan is the best thing that has happened to Mysore in a long time. Whether it was by design or administrative convenience we now have an administrator with a proven track record. And he is open to ideas, public views and opinion. ‘Informed’ and ‘concerned’ citizens, on their part, would do well to give Mr M a chance. Confrontational activism that defined the NGO-administration relations so far won’t go.

Cross-posted from Praja-Mysore

Delhi roads are not for driving

2007-09-17T11:32:00.000+05:30

To zip on M-G Rd., you must dodge trees - News headline

I used to think roads were for driving till I read The Times of India during my recent visit to New Delhi. People there apparently ‘zip on roads’, and the newspaper I used to work for has become more imaginative in giving headlines than in my time (I left Delhi in 1982). I have a problem, though, figuring out why people have to zip, while driving can take them to places. Revisiting Delhi was a trip of rediscovery, of not just the place but its people as well. The changes there made me feel lost, baffled and initmidated. The two verbs in TOI headline - 'zip' and 'dodge' - appeared to sum up the composite mindset of folks in Delhi today.

Anyway, the newspaper story pertained to the traffic hazard posed by trees on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road. It appeared that 50 odd trees were left untouched when they widened a five-km stretch on this road. Such tree-considerate acts, I thought, made Delhi a role model for environment-friendly governance. In my town (Mysore) they have no qualms about felling even vintage trees to widen roads or have an additional building on a college campus. Growth with conservation is an alien concept to Mysore's city managers.

Delhi, I believed, was different. This was before I read the TOI story. Initially, M-G road was widened (leaving the roadside trees untouched). Now they find the trees are a traffic hazard. Unarguably, Delhi roads get clogged with cars for much of the day, despite the flyovers and the Metro. The question is: would road-widening and felling intrusive trees solve the problem of rising traffic without serious efforts to curb the number of vehicles on Delhi roads?

Maruti, they say, turns out a new car every 15 minutes, and half the vehicles produced in Gurgaon is marketed in the national capital region. The tree story in TOI was not just about the worsening traffic on M.G Road; I thought it had to do with people’s mindset. A car owner is quoted as saying, “It gets tough to swerve the car in time (to evade trees on M.G Road) if one is driving fast, more so with call centre cabs pushing you around.”

The traffic police share this view; their grouse is that the government is sitting on their plea to have the trees uprooted. The Metro rail people extending the line to Gurgaon would like to see those trees gone, to get more road space to work on. The mindset is thus in favour of flattening M-G Road of trees. But then, when the traffic on Gurgoan Road becomes unmanageable again two years from now, they would have no trees to make a scapegoat of.

The status quo is not alarming enough to warrant a tree slaughter. Everyone admits there has been no fatal car-tree collisions on this stretch so far. As a traffic police officer put it, “It is a miracle that nothing has happened so far.” Maybe the cops are counting on something happening, given people’s penchant for fast driving and the menace of call centre cabs. Are these guys reckless beyond redemption? As a small-town resident, I have a problem understanding why fast driving can’t be curbed by the police enforcing lane discipline and speed limits, as they do in world class cities. Doesn't New Delhi aspire to become a world class city?

A prerequisite, presumably, is that people in Delhi need to have a world class mindset. They could make a start by picking up proper driving sense. Take the M-G Road situation. It's my considered opinion that if only road users could be persuaded to ‘drive’ rather than ‘zip’ on the roads, there would be less scope for bang-on collisions with the trees on the road. After all, each tree has a tree guard, which is painted with red reflector stripes. The stretch is well-lit, with blinking light barricades to guide motorists around trees at night.

A car-tree collision, when such precautionary features are in place, is a remote possibility, if car owners in Delhi can learn to drive and not ‘zip’ on the road.

Cross-filed in Zine5 and Desicritic

World’s eldest YouTuber?

2007-09-05T06:17:00.000+05:30

In response to my post in Desicritic – You’re never too old to blog – Eric Shackle, 88, writes about the oldest YouTuber, Olive Riley, 107, who lives in Woy Woy, 50 miles from Sydney. Olive blogs as well. But then she calls it ‘blob’. Which makes her, not just the oldest, but, presumably, the world’s first and the only blober.

I mention this for the record, in view of ambiguity, raised during this 10th anniversary year of blogs, about who the world’s first blogger really was. A decade from now, when the world celebrates a decade of ‘blob-ing’, the world’s first blober issue could be settled by referring to Eric’s comment and this post. Incidentally, would anyone have a clue to when the first e-mail was sent, by who, to whom.

Eric (don’t feel comfortable addressing him as Mr Shackle), who liberated so many senior citizens from ‘computer-phobia’ and encouraged them to browse, blog and otherwise explore the Internet, writes that Sydney was the British colonial capital of the New South Wales when Ms Riley was born (1899). Describing her as physically frail but mentally alert, Eric informs us that the grand old lady of blogosphere who survived two World Wars, the Great Depression (1930), had seen life as a barmaid, egg-sorter and a station cook.

What’s refreshing is Ms Riley can recall her early out-of-this-world days. Reading her you realize that there are things that don’t change with time – such as one’s school day escapades. Olive YouTubed how she was teased at school because of her surname (Dangerfield) and how, in frustration, she landed a low that laid her tormentor flat. Doesn’t this prompt us to reach for Olive’s blob?

Must mention here a paragraph on Mr Eric Shackle. A retired Sydney journalist (do they ever do?) this 88-year-old lists as hobby, Internet searches and writing on them. Does a column for senior citizens in webzines and copy-edits A-Word-a-Day newsletter for India-born Seattle-based word-lover Anu Garg.

Reinventing Mysore Dasara

2007-08-30T16:44:00.000+05:30

I had mixed thoughts for Mysore as I read a blog post by my Chennai-based journalist friend Vincent D’Souza. A part of me wondered why some of our creative minds couldn’t think of designing a T-shirt for Mysore. The other part of my mind doubted if such fancy ideas would be acceptable to conservative Mysoreans or go down well with their thoughts on the pig menace, garbage pile-up in street corners and other mundane concerns.

Chennai too has pig menace; is known for its Coovum, a repository of all imaginable germs. Rail passengers to the city can’t miss the unwelcome sight of discarded plastic water bottles, paper plates, polythene bags, and other non-bio-degradable wastes littered for miles on either side of the track as they approach Chennai Central. And yet the city boasts of its December music festival; and has a critical mass of city-lovers that organizes neighborhood heritage walks, celebrates Madras Day and brings out city T-shirts. My friend who sees no contradiction in this would be the first to admit that pigs and Cuuvam can’t be wished away from the Chennai scene. They are as much a factor in the city as its heritage buildings and glass-fronted high-rise structures.

Namma Chennai T-shirt that Vincent blogged about fits in with the Madras Day celebrations (Aug.22), a community initiative with corporate support. They make a song and dance of it by holding an annual T-shirt design contest. The prize-winning design of last year, by Shreyas, a design student, is on this year’s T-shirt. Made in Thiruppur, event organisers order in limited numbers so as to make the T-shirt a collector’s item. Any die-hard Chennaiwasi who develops a chaska for collecting Namma Chennai items can be counted on buying the T-shirt every year.

Founded by a Chennai community newsweekly, Mylapore Times, along with the Nalli Silks and L&T, the Madras Day celebrations are supported by nearly 40 organisations that include not just business houses, but NGOs, select schools and colleges, public trusts, and private foundations, heritage societies and PR firms. Event management and marketing skills go into the design, release and sale of T-shirts and organizing other events.

We boast of much older, better-known and big-time celebrations – Mysore Dasara. But after every year’s celebrations all we get to read in the media is how mismanaged the events were; and about the need for re-inventing Mysore Dasara. There is talk about corporate sponsorship. It is not as if major companies don’t see mileage in Mysore Dasara. Snag is that Dasara ,in the manner in which it is now run, does not leave scope for corporate participation. Over the years it has come to acquire a reputation as a sarkari event that is staged with government grants, by a plethora of officially sponsored committees, mainly for the benefit of pass-holders.

Cross-filed from Praja-Mysore

Laloopadesa

2007-08-20T11:53:00.000+05:30

Indian Railways Minister Laloo Prasad who doubles up as a management guru has been invited to address the country's top hoteliers at a hospitality summit in New Delhi. Topic: 'Lessons from a Moving Train'. The news item, though buried on Page 12, caught my eye because I had recently blogged about a lesson I learnt from a moving train - lessons from railway catering management.

The thing about railway caterers is that they manage to maintain uniform standards of tastelessness and yet sustain a growing demand for their meals on moving trains. Our rail minister's choice of topic for the hospitality summit had me wonder if someone had drawn his attention to my earlier blog piece. The Hindu news item said the rail minister would articulate "his now famous management tips on how turnaround of the Indian Railways was achieved." I would say Bihar could have done with his 'turnaround mantra' when Mr Laloo Prasad was at the helm in that state.

I recall a tip the minister shared with IIM-A students on his achieving the railway 'turnaround.' The minister noted that the railways were like a Jersey cow. The cow fell sick if it wasn't milked fully; so would the railways, if their full potentials were not tapped.

I can understand students from Wharton and Stanford taking in an audience with Laloo during their study tour of India; and then telling CNBC how "wow-ed" they were with our minister's management insights. What I can't figure out is how our b-schools, business chambers and hoteliers association, who know well enough how our railways work, can fall for the minister's Laloopadesa, as if it was a management Gitapodesa.

At the coming hospitality summit, Mr Laloo Prasad, as a seminar speaker, figures in the same league as managing director of Switzerland's international hotel management institute. The next thing that we might hear is that one of our premier universities such as JNU is to confer a doctorate on him. My sense is Mr Lalu Prasad has been such a hit for so long, with so many, because he knows not to take seriously much of whatever he says to the academics and the media.

Cross-posted from Desicritic

An update on the Mysore commune initiative

2007-08-16T19:01:00.000+05:30

An earlier post in Jan. on Prem Subramaniam’s ongoing efforts to develop a river bank commune near Mysore evoked following enquiries:

“…yearning for a settlement as described by you. Please count us in it and any updates on this would be highly appreciated”, wrote a Bangalore-based couple.

“…a great move. can you keep us updated on the legal transaction nuances.”

Prem, “still waiting to live my dream”, is hopeful of relocating himself in his dream setting, near Srirangapatnam, by the end of next year. Here is an update he e-mailed:

The current status on my plans to relocate to a non-urban environment in the vicinity of Mysore is that the final step in the alienation of the land is still awaited. The site comes under Mandya. Agricultural Land in Karnataka cannot be bought by anyone who does not already own agricultural land elsewhere and whose gross family income from non-agricultural sources exceeds Rs 2 lakhs a year.

People circumvent this rule. I did not want to take this risk. So an application has to be made to convert the land for residential use. This process was supposed to take about 4 months. It takes longer, as inevitably all the documents required take time to collate. The documents have to be forwarded in a lengthy process and final sanction wrests with the DC. The earlier DC fell ill and his replacement has not looked at documents relating to alienation of our site for over 2 months.So there has been no progress for over 4 months now.

Meanwhile I have finalised designs for built-up space with help from Bangalore based Chitra Vishwanath, a staunch advocate of environment-friendly buildings. There are many practitioners in Karnataka, Kerala,Pondicherry,Delhi and Mysore too, but the challenge is to have a seamless extension with the contractor chosen to execute the work. Through the offices of Chitra Vishwanath I have identified someone in Mysore.

I also have had an engineering company from Bangalore to do a report on the feasibility of setting up a micro-hydel, but since we are on the River Kaveri , I am not sure if it will be easy to obtain permissions, even though this exercise could create an alternate source of power for the village community.

I have used the time that has lapsed to visit organic farms in Karnataka, tourist attractions and do background work to establish contact with people with the kind of skill sets that I feel I will need to rely on. I have travelled by train,car,local buses and this has helped overcome the frustration of not being able to move on my project.

I have looked at an interesting model of a retirement community in Gujerat where some NRIs have taken 12 acres of land about 80 km from Ahmedabad,40 km from Baroda, and 4 km from Anand.They are in the process of building 100 one-bedroom cottages supported by about 20000 sq ft of common facilities.They accept only those over 60 and are offering the cottages on lease for 10 years with a reasonable deposit and a monthly outflow towards meals,maintnenance,electricity etc.

I am told that a similar variation is on offer by Classic who have the Kudumbam project near Chennai. There are variations to the theme in Coimbatore too. In Uttaranchal Anil Nayyar,formerly of Airtel, is setting up a residential Knowledge centre.

My own sentiment is not to relegate older people to a commune. It is meant to be a place for those who do not need to be on a 9 to 5 regime. So could include those in part-time jobs, those who can work out of home, those who may need to go to an office once in while and not on a daily basis. It should be an place which can provide a nourishing environment to at least three generations of people.Where grandchildren could come and spend time with their grandparents if the parents do not have time.Where the skills of the elders is available for a variety of purposes. I see value in offering an alternate tourism experience.

In the ideal world I would like to see about 4 to 5 sites of the kind I have envisaged within a 100 km radius and perhaps have these replicated in other regions of Karnataka.

The learning experience from attempting to convert agricultural land is that it maybe simpler to buy plantation land in Coorg, Chikmagalur or similar or look for similar terrain in Tamil Nadu. However these will be a little remoter and may not suit all.

There has been expressions of interest on what I am attempting to do and I have therefore initiated dialogue with someone in Coorg to acquire a 3 acre site about 8 km from kushalnagar.It is just 0.5 km from the Kaveri and amidst coffee plantations. Close to Bylakuppe,Dubare Elelphant Camp. If this works out I can include those interested in the development of this site for creating a commune.

Alternatively, if there are individuals with sites which are suitable, we can think of collaborating. I have to emphasize that I am not driven by commercial interests as much as making my concept work and share the knowledge so that an alternate quality of life is available for those seeking it. Underlying the work is the 4 cardinal principles of consumer satisfaction, commercial viability, benefit to local economy and engagement of local communities ,and long term sustainability.

Still waiting to live my dream!

Related posts: Dreams of a commune on the Cauvery bank
More on the Mysore commune initiative

No-taker Gandhian studies

2007-08-15T10:00:00.000+05:30

Bangalore University centre for Gandhian studies has no students. Hasn't had one since they set it up, says The Hindu. Lack of interest among today's generation shouldn't come as a surprise to many. The fault need not totally be with the youth. It's probably because old-time Gandhians have failed; worse still, pooh-poohed attempts to redefine Gandhi. Lage Raho Munnabhai may be dismissed by Gandhians as much too simplistic and masala-driven. But the Bollywood attempt does reflect the need for teachers to relate Gandhi to the nation's current concerns.

The Gandhian Studies Centre at Bangalore University has provision for annual intake of 40 students, is endowed with a Rs.15-lakh annual budget; has built over the years an infrastructure, including a 200-seat auditorium and an open-air theatre. Media report says that the few who applied for the PG diploma course offered by the centre did so to take advantage of free hostel facilities. The authorities who got wise withdrew the facility. No go. No free hostel, no studients for Gandhian Studies.

One has to be naive not to ask why the university authorities would still want to continue with the studies centre (now a campus within the univeristy campus). The determination of education administrators to press on with the course may have to do with their devotion to Gandhi and his thoughts; their belief in Gandhi's continued relevance. Wonder if the authorities ever viewed closure of the studies centre as an option. Even if they did, they couldn't be expected to voice it without risking sharp resistance from staunch Gandhiwadhis.

Also read Talking Gandhi over brandy

Cross-filed in Praja-Mysore

Karachi blogger's tribute to Kishore Kumar

2007-08-12T10:27:00.000+05:30

Those of us who take our freedom of expression for granted don’t give a thought to what it is like to be living under socio-cultural environment in which listening to film music; or even of writing about the singer is taboo. Adnan, a blogger in Karachi writes that he thought twice about posting his tribute to late Kishore Kumar on 78 birth anniversary day (Aug.4).

Adnan says he usually blogs on religion and politics and many of his readers who believed music to be not Islamic probably “consider me a hypocrite”. The Karachi-based blogger rationalises his Kishore Kumar post saying that he blogs not for others – “I write for myself”; and that he couldn’t wish away a past in which Kishore da was his favorite singer.

Adnan’s mamoo and dad were Kishore fans; they rarely missed the Akashvani programme playing old film songs. Adnan recalled he got initiated to Kishore songs when he heard Kumar Sanu on cassette singing Kishore songs. Adnan went for the original singer, and liked what he heard even better.

It wasn’t just Sanu who copied, says Adnan, several Pakistani singers copied Kishore. He mentions Alamgir, Sheikhi, and Sajjad. Among his all-time Kishore favorites Adnan lists – Zindagi ke safar in Safar and the Aandhi numbers that are best heard in your darkened room, late in the night.

Casablanca in Malayalam

2007-08-09T18:07:00.000+05:30

My friend S P Dutt, whose way of staying in touch is by sharing with e-pals interesting items he reads on the web, sent me a Guardian story on the making of a Malayalam movie, Ezham Mudra. The movie, inspired by Casablanca, would have in the lead Suresh Gopi and Mandira Bedi in the roles immortalized by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

Director Rajeev Nath, who is scheduled to start shooting in Kerala in September, is reported to have said his film would be a tribute to the original (he has watched it 20 times). Most film goers of today are unlikely to have watched the original to compare Mandira’s performance with Bergman’s.

A notable aspect is that this sad love story, set on a beachfront café in southern India, would play out in the background of Tamil Tigers’ fight against the Sri Lankan authorities. There was an earlier film in Tamil with the militancy in Sri Lanka as its backdrop – Mani Ratnam’s Kannathil Muthamittal.

Copy or inspired, Ezham Mudra raises viewer expectations. For those familiar with the old classic I’ve a question: Which desi name comes to mind at the mention of Ingrid Bergman?
Multiple choice - Mandira/ Monica/Pooja/ none of the foregoing.

You're never too old to blog

2007-08-08T10:30:00.000+05:30

Elderly folk generally stay away from the computer, saying they can't get a hang of it and that it is too late to try. And lack of awareness of potentials of the web, even among younger middle-class parents, accounts for a low PC density. In Mysore, they say, there are no more than 5,000 broadband connections. People who ought to know better associate a computer and the Internet with video games and porn.

Most people over 65 have faith in the printed word. They don't care for what appears on the web, according a survey done by Hariharan Balakrishnan. In The Hindu write-up he says respondents to the survey included professors, padma bhushans and even Jnanpith awardees. It is not that they don't have computer at home. Nor do they lack computer-savvy children and grand-children. Balakrishnan says 95 percent of those who responded said they were 'computer-illiterate'. Apparently, they chose not to do anything about it. How many of the uninformed elders have taken initiative to seek guidance from their youngsters, asks Balakrishnan, adding that not many computer-savvy youngsters have been enthusiastic enough to educate their parents.

Wider computer usage, notably by senior citizens who have perceptible presence among NGOs, could change the way we address public issues. Those in Mysore Grahakara Parishat (MGP) believe in morchas, and in old-fashioned petitions , signed and secured through written official acknowledgment by the departmental dispatch clerk; and they then complain that officials rarely give them a hearing or read their petitions. Tell them about putting their case online, and skeptical elders in MGP would retort, "but who reads your web?". A fair question; and an effective way of saying 'no' to change. Maybe, the word on the web may go unread by officials; but it is there online for anyone to see, anytime.

An MGP convener Dr Bhamy V Shenoy says their NGO is 18 years old with over "700 members on paper". It takes up civic issues, and in Dr Shenoy's words, "has served Mysore over the years often silently and sometimes through the press". Didn't I say they have faith in the printed word? Anyway, Dr Shenoy reckons MGP has failed to develop the way it should have because "of lethargy and indifference of the people". Ironically, Dr Shenoy made these observations in an online discussion forum.

A bunch of web enthusiasts in Bangalore have announced a citizens civic network site for Mysore that seeks to synergize with, not supplant, the work of MGP, other NGOs and also public spirited individuals who wish to be heard. Skeptics, of whom there are many to be found in any city, ask if we need yet another NGO. Efficacy of PrajaMysore would depend on the strength of its online members. Success of any online network calls for wider public awareness of computer usage.

Balakrishnan refers to the initiative of an 88-year old Sydey-based web enthusiast Eric Shackle to persuade senior citizens the world over to overcome their fears of computer. There is a world of information out there; life's experiences of a multitude waiting to be discovered through a computer. Eric calls it 'the magic carpet of the Internet' that anyone can hop on, without giving up the comforts of one's study room at home.

Eric has put down his thoughts in a web-book aptly titled, Life Begins at 80. As an Australian radio interviewer put it, Eric who led a busy life as journalist and PR man found it all coming to a dead stop on his retirement - "to go cold turkey after retiring can cause psychological problems; and Eric dealt with them by discovering a new world - the world of the web". Eric, now 88, was 79 when he got his first computer; 81, when he set up a website with a friend in South Africa.

Which reminds of a blog-to-blog chat(B2B) with my friend T R Kini. We are both 65 plus (I'm 69). We lost touch in the late sixties, and the web helped us re-discovered each other, after four decades, when we chose to trade nostalgia about our time together in London in the sixties. The B2B morphed into an eminently readable travelogue in which Kini recalls his hitch-hike from Delhi to London.

First published in Desicritic

PRAJA bangalore, a citizen’s network

2007-08-03T13:02:00.000+05:30

It seeks to be a networking platform for concerned Bangaloreans;it's an attempt to bridge those who serve the city (municipalities and development boards) and those who care, and wish to participate (residents).

The other day I heard a spirited Mysorean, who has signed public petitions and joined deputations complaining that their petitions go unread by officials(who say,“we have no time”); and that MLAs don't find enough time to pursue their own priorities and agenda. Praja Bangalore works on the premise that this can’t be said about all officials and MLAs; and that there are still enough of them, MLAs and officials, who care; and can do with public feedback. Their task can be made easier with more people participation.

Of course, there are NGOs that carry public grievances to the civic authorities. But a citizen networking on the lines of Praja Bangalore would in no way minimize their role or compete with NGOs;it would complement the work of NGOs. Besides, it gives officials a wider perspective on issues and concerns of the people. Praja’s agenda, articulated in its ‘About Us’ page speaks of the scope and structure of the online initiative at citizens networking.

It is an initiative worthy of emulation. My thoughts are that it may not be worthwhile reinventing such website for Mysore; not now, at any rate. Because, Mysore has relatively low broadband density (5000 connections, according to some estimates) and lower web browsing public. But those of us who are familiar with the potential of the web would benefit, if only Praja Bangalore could be persuaded to open a Mysore page on their site. This way, we can count on networking the small, but significant, section of the Internet-connected Mysoreans, but also on the input and networking support of a sizeable number of Bangalore-based folk with strong Mysore connection.

Free public transit

2007-07-30T17:13:00.000+05:30

The Tyee, an independent alternative newspaper from British Columbia, Canada, in a recent investigative series made out a case that it was time people in cities got a free ride in public transit system. Free public transport, they say, would help reduce traffic congestion, carbon emission, and, save the authorities the establishment costs involved in collecting fares, which, in some places may be more than the collection made through tickets sales.

San Francisco mayor is reported to have ordered a serious study be made of the cost of charging people to ride public transit. In New York the mayor would dream of a mass transit given away for nothing, while an awful lot is charged for bringing an automobile to the city.

Fare-free public transit is an interesting thought; might even work somewhere (Portland, Seattle). It has been tried and given up in New Jersey and Texas; and attracted the homeless (using a running train or bus as shelter) and the hooligans on board in Florida, driving away the core passengers.

For those of us in India free public transport is no one's dream. It's an academic concept that we read about in blogs or the Tyee kind of publications that investigate issues and carry viewpoints widely ignored by the big media.

Guru Dutt’s cameraman

2007-07-20T11:55:00.000+05:30

Cinematographer V K Murthy has in him a book or two; and it is time an enterprising publisher talked to him into writing them. In a recent visit to his native Mysore (Mr Murthy is now settled in Bangalore) the man who shot Guru Dutt’s classics such as Pyaasa, Kagaz ke Phool, and Sahib, Bibi aur Gulam spoke of his life and times with famed director in Bombay.

Mr Murthy who gave up his schooling in Mysore and violin lessons to go to Bombay in search of work in visual media was with Guru Dutt for much of his career. Following the death of the latter Mr Murthy worked with directors such as Pramod Chakraborthy, Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani. But Mr Murthy is best known in the film industry for his association with Guru Dutt.

Perhaps, no one else has better credentials to do a definitive biography on the late director. So close to him was Mr Murthy, it is said that every time Guru Dutt had attempted suicide the first call from the director’s household went to Mr Murthy. As he put it, “whenever the call came…I would run to his house and rush him to the hospital”. When it happened the third time Mr Murthy’s efforts failed. Guru Dutt died.

In response to a query whether Kaagaz Ka Phool was autobiogrphical Mr Murthy is reported to have observed, “It looks like that….It almost seems like he rehearsed before actually committing suicide”.

Why this fuss over Mysore Utsav?

2007-07-18T17:43:00.000+05:30

Thought we’re in a free country where anyone is free to organize a utsav; and anyone else is free to oppose it.Which, in a democracy, is the prerogative of opposition netas. Shouldn’t we, the freedom-loving citizens, recognise the right of a bunch of political has-beens to protest the upcoming Mysore Utsav (July 26-29)? I only wish they raise objections that are credible.

The opponents of proposed utsav say 1)it is an attempt to dim the glory of Mysore Dasara; and 2) it is not proper to hold the utsav at a time when farmers are facing financial hardship. No, these objections are not my invention. They are credited to a former minister Mr H Vishwanath. Equally inventive is the justification the utsav organizers trot out for holding the four-day festival – “to foster a great tradition, culture and heritage of the royal city”.

And what have they lined up to uphold this heritage? Free screening of Rajkumar films, a fashion show to promote Mysore silk, a kite-flying event and filmy music by Shaan and Udit Narayan. Sure, they would be fun. But I’m not sure if these cinema-based events help “foster a great tradition and culture”. And there is no mention of involvement of the person who has a very personal stake in sustaining the city’s royal image. Mr Wadyar and the palace appears nowhere in the organisers' scheme of things.

Instead, someone who anchors TV programmes, Mr Deepak Thimmaiah, held forth at a Hotel Metropole press meet in the run-up to the Mysore Utsav. Insisting that it is a purely private affair, Mr Thimmaiah spoke of the initiative being taken by the minister in charge of Mysore district, Mr G T Deve Gowda. Presumably, there is no contradiction or clash of interests here; and presumably,there is nothing in the ministerial code of conduct precluding Mr Gowde from proactive participation in a privately sponsored mega mela.

Considering that the utsav is likely to cost at least Rs.2.5 crores it makes business sense to involve someone with official clout to attract sponsors. According to Mr Thimmaiah, the four-day utsav will be managed and marketed by TV House (rather naïve of me not to have heard of such corporate entity) If better known companies are sponsoring the event, the spokesman didn’t mention them at the Metropole press conference.

The Hindu reports that the mega event is being opposed by many political parties because they reckon it would “affect the prospects of Dasara”. I have a theory on the prospects of Dasara 2007. Prevailing uncertainty over Janata Dal (Secular) intentions regarding its commitment to hand over the government to BJP this October is bound to impact the plans for the state-sponsored Dasara. For the city corporation and some departments such as public works, tourism, horticulture Dasara is all about grants. Last year these departments had put in demands for nearly Rs. 25 crores. They have reason to be concerned about allocations this year. Lower grants; not much of Dasara.

Roping in Bollywood for Hillary campaign?

2007-06-29T06:44:00.000+05:30

Read in the media that some US resident Indians are planning to rope in Bollywood stars for the Clinton campaign. Thought our biradari in the US had more sense. I can understand their enthusiasm for the US presidential race. But getting Bollywood stars to campaign for Hillary appears a corny idea. Does anyone really believe Amitabh Bacchan or Rani Mukherjee can sway the electorate? Indian-Americans account for less than one percent of the US population.

I can understand Bollywood stars doing a door-to-door in Mumbai to collect old clothes and cash for flood or quake relief. Involving them in a poll campaign, even in India, has been little more than a media hype. In the recent UP elections the Samajwadi Party featured Amitabh Bacchan in TV promos. The super-star probably was more effective flogging Dabur Chyawanprash on TV.

I can’t see Shahrukh Khan or that Zinta girl campaigning for Hillary at community centres in the US suburbs and the gurudwara Sunday congregations. Whoever has thought of drafting Bollywood star may be having in mind a song-and-dance programme as fund-raiser . Which is old hat. Besides, live shows of filimy item numbers may no longer be the money-spinners they once were. Someone mentioned a recent Asha Bhonsle concert bombed, insofar as there were hardly a thousand people in a venue that could hold ten times that number. One reason is that they are too many of them, held much too often, featuring the same old faces.

A report in NRIPulse.com speaks of plans by Indian Americans to raise at least $5 million for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. For her senate bid the New York Indian community had chipped in $50,000. Accepting the gift, at a fund-raiser held by a Maryland dentist, Rajwant Singh, Hillary had reportedly joked, “I can certainly run for a senate seat in Punjab and win easily”. At a more recent fund-raiser in San Jose, a participant identified as director of a Mumbai-based tech firm is reported as saying, “If Bill Clinton ran for president or prime minister in India, he’d win”.

Hillary Clinton spoke at the Maryland fund-raiser what her Indian audience wanted to hear. But her folksy talk hasn’t evidently gone down well with the Americans, for whom India has come to be identified with one word – ‘outsourcing’. The point is, in her bid for Indian-Americans' support, Hillary may stand to lose more votes than she might gain. Her opponents are making an issue of the Clintons’ apparent closeness to India and Indians.

A recent newspaper headline said, ‘Clintons’ support to Indian companies deserves attention’. The media article, by Newsday columnist James P Pinkerton, reasons that America under Hillary wouldn’t be such a good idea. As he put it, if Hillary could cruise to the Democratic nomination, and perhaps, the presidency, ‘American jobs will continue to cruise to India’.

In Pinkerton’s reckoning the Clintons seem to have, what he terms, ‘unnaturally close connections’ with foreign companies interested in draining American jobs. “Shouldn’t this be of interest to Americans”, asks the columnists, and answers his own question, “but the mainstream media seem to say no”.

To further his point Pinkerton says Bill Clinton has invested $50,000 in an India-based electronic-transactions company. He has accepted $300,000 in speaking fees from Cisco Systems, which, among other enterprises, helps American companies outsource jobs to India.

The flaw in Pinkerton’s piece is in its statistics. The columnist cites an economist’s projection that “40 million American jobs could be lost to outsourcing in coming decades”. How many decades? That is not made clear in Pinkerton’s commentary.

Cross-posted in Desicritics and Zine5

NRI Parents ’kick-off’ meet: A non-starter?

2007-06-23T06:50:00.000+05:30

I was half-hour late for the meet and Sandeep Chauhan, convenor of the Bay Area Indian Parents Association (IPA), was waiting at the parking lot, presumably, wondering if I would make it at all. He had reasons to be concerned because only one other member in our 38-strong Yahoo Group had turned up. The occasion was IPA’s kick-off meet at Santa Clara, California. From the turnout it appeared a non-starter.

Sandeep wasn’t going to admit failure. The three of us pretended as if it was business as usual and went ahead with the meeting, while a less determined lot would have called it off for want of a quorum. However, we had one thing going for us - a family cheer group of two males, three females and the eight-month old Yash, grandson of a founder member, Mr Y K Gupta.

His family and mine sat through the meet, and even participated in the hour-long proceedings. It was a meeting that set a record of sorts. No association or group can claim to have held its constituent meeting with an observer so young as Yash, who endearingly stretched himself out on the table to reach out for the papers, on which Sandeep was recording the minutes. The meet convenor coped with the intervention by bribing the child with a cardboard box for Yash to play with.

Our e-group, no more than three weeks old, comprises a few visiting NRI parents and many concerned NRIs who want to make their parents’ stay in the US an engaging and sociable experience. Mr Gupta echoed the sentiments of many NRI parents when he said that the only reason that brought him and his wife to America was their son and daughter. The Guptas have been here five times, and their stay follows a predictable pattern – excitement of being with their loved young ones for the first few weeks, followed by several weeks, punctuated by yawning activity-gaps when ‘time-pass’ becomes an issue.

The IPA is a social initiative to evolve a support-group approach to the ‘time-pass’ issue. Sandeep suggested periodical weekday neighborhood community lunch at someone’s place or the local park, for visiting NRI parents, at which stay-at-home moms could pool in their home-cooked dishes.

The idea of creating a databank of members was discussed. Someone suggested county-wise directory of NRIs, like the one they once had in Phoenix, Ariz. (no one was sure if it is still being maintained). On our part, it was agreed we should start with a databank of our Yahoo Group. Sandeep raised privacy concerns, involved in online disclosure of postal address and phone numbers of the group members. We settled for collection of bare minimum data such as county of residence, age, areas of interest so that folk living within one another’s easy reach could arrange to have their own ‘do’s’.

As a visiting NRI parent I suggested we mention the city we come from (Mysore). This could give an additional focus of contact among visiting NRI parents; and also help some of them sustain their contacts even after they return to India. On the privacy issue I am among those who believe that transparency is a key pre-requisite for social networking among visiting NRI parents. Of the 38 Yahoo group members I find no more than 11 have chosen to declare online their name, age, and location. I don’t find it encouraging, or even worthwhile, to interact with a bunch of unnamed persons, about whom I know nothing other than ‘encrypted’ e-mail ID.

When I raised this point one of our young friends mentioned spammers, privacy concerns, risk of revealing online one’s name, location and other contact details. I can understand such concerns of a few who may be vulnerable to a threat of harassment. Having been a blogger for some years now I get exposed to spamming, online cranks and hate-mailers. Yet, I haven’t felt the need to adopt a phony online identity.

I can't speak for young working NRIs, but I wonder what privacy concerns visiting NRI parents can have; particularly, in a place where they are unknown and go unsung. The whole point of IPA, I reckon, is to help NRI parents emerge out their social self-exile and engage themselves in meaningful group activities.

Cross-filed in Zine5 and Desicritics

US jail food, not quite the Hilton standard

2007-06-14T21:04:00.000+05:30

I didn’t know, or care, what they serve for lunch to inmates in California jails till San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on it. Frankly, I wasn’t thinking about jail food till Paris Hilton got locked up in a Los Angeles county jail for drunk-driving. The way the US media fussed over the custody saga creates an impression that the food they serve Ms. Hilton in jail is a matter of national concern.

Where this celebrity kid is interned they serve inmates cold cereal, hard-boiled eggs and a beverage for breakfast; it is ham or cheese sandwich, fruit, Jell-O and cookies for lunch. Dinner has to be a hot meal – steak or macaroni and cheese, vegetables and dessert. And Paris doesn’t touch anything other than cereal and bread. So says SF Chronicle.

In the San Francisco jail, the food is reportedly prepared under supervision by Aramark, a food services provider whose clients include schools, professional clubs and ball-barks. Besides overseeing the jail kitchen, Aramark is said to train prisoners in cookery. Michael Buffington, a catering company founder who has been chef in some famous hotel kitchens, had graduated from the San Francisco jail, where he served time in 1992 for cocaine possession and driving under influence.

An ode to RG

2007-06-06T19:51:00.000+05:30

Heard about RG’s death in Bangalore from fellow journalist M R Venkatesh. Chennai-based Telegraph correspondent, MRV, is a rare species in the media that retains relationship with me even years after my retirement. R Gopalakrishnan of The Hindu was a common friend and colleague, known for accurate notes-taking at press conferences and getting the 'quotes' right. I know this, for I have relied on RG’s notes when I had doubts about my own speed-writing at press conferences we have attended together.

Reproduced here is the e-mail MRV sent me on RG:
Could Karma’s Taal
And ‘Rebirth’s dance
Turn a little comical
When similar mortal frames
Are seen on a Contemporary screen?
That’s how Language
Drew a picture
On the mind’s slate,
When years back
I first met ‘RG’,
As the self-effacing soul
R.Gopalakrishnan was fondly known
To friends even outside ‘The Hindu’,
Oh! He seems
Bengal’s great genial actor
Utpal Dutt
Reborn on a same Time scale!
Almost Everything about ‘RG’,
The gait and the cigarette,
Spectacle drooping and studied,
Deep Intellectual anger
Soaring like summer-time mercury,
To the rollicking laughter
That blazoned a Child-like innocence,
Looked an Utpal Dutt reprint!
But soon I discovered,
All these were only the
Bodily chariot
Reined in by a deeper Soul
That ‘RG’ came to signify,
Economics, Marxism
Sociology et all,
Were the rims of a
Rollercoaster ride
With a journalistic leg
On Each side,
His voice of Peace
That climaxed against
Pokhran-Two,
His abiding faith
That the down and under
See Secularism as Naturalism
Came as enduring light
Before his Soul flew away!

- M R Venkatesh/Chennai/ June 5, 2007 (After Hearing
of RG’s Death at Bangalore)

Cross-filed in Desicritics
- and Zine5

Remembering Chittaranjan

2007-05-25T21:00:00.000+05:30

It wasn’t his anniversary day. Nor was it a day of remembrance for media veterans. Yet his daughter and I had him on our minds; spent a few tear-filled moments, remembering the late C N Chittaranjan, when we met at a concert hall in Sunnyvale, C A, last Saturday.

The occasion was a carnatic vocal music concert by Chittaranjan’s grand-daughter, Kavita. It was my first social outing during my current US visit. “I get a feeling that my own father has graced this occasion,” said Girija Radhakrishnan, tears welling up in her eyes. I was rendered speechless. Girija, who has everything going for her had one regret in life - that her father Chittaranjan didn’t visit her in the US.

CNC (as he was known in the media and among friends) was a kind of journalist who rarely took time off from work. He lived for journalism. He once told me that after he had his three daughters married, and well settled in life, he felt he ccould no longer be accused of neglecting his family for his profession; he felt a sense of legitimacy in devoting his undivided attention to work. He had provided for a modest income from savings and a small house in Chennai for his wife after he would be gone.

He died in New Delhi. In his later years CNC’s prime concern in life was to be able to bring out Mainstream on time, every week. Apart from writing editorial CNC commissioned articles (for which no payment was usually made); and spent at least two late evenings a week at a smelly, noisy printing press at Jhandewalan, going through page proofs. The man had a heart condition.

Mr Chittaranjan was a rare newspaper editor who didn’t own a vehicle, and used to travel by bus. This was in the 80s, when travelling in a Delhi Transport Corporation bus was no Sunday picnic. He remained a man with a common touch, though he rose to senior editorial positions in Hindustan Times and Patriot, and to be editor of National Herald. CNC had always the welfare of journalists at heart. His involvement with the interests of journalists did not always endear him with newspaper managements. In The Indian Express, Madras, he took on the then mighty media baron Ramnath Goenka, who had at one time threatened to shut down the Madras edition.

CNC led the workers’ agitation, for which he had to spend time in jail. Later he moved to New Delhi to join Hindustan Times. When Patriot and Link was started in the sixties (by Dr. A V Baliga, Aruna Asaf Ali, V K Krishna Menon and Edatatta Narayanan), as an alternate media to counter monopoly houses, CNC was invited to join the editorial staff.

In the profession he was several years my senior; in life, he became a family friend, helping me along to get a break during my down-and-out years. CNC re-hired me in The National Herald, New Delhi, ignoring the management policy not to take back anyone who had quit the paper, that too, barely an year earlier. Later, when CNC fell out with the National Herald management he put in a word for me at The Times of India, where I had the longest stint in any single newspaper (20 years) during my four decades in journalism.

Irony was that CNC, who had helped several others to make it big in their careers, was himself happy to be working for lesser dailies on relatively modest pay and no perks. After he left the editorship of The National Herald CNC went back to Mainstream, whose founder-editor Nikhil Chakravarti relied entirely on CNC to run the journal.

It was during these days we met every other evening at his place or the Chopra tea stall near our residences in Karolbagh; and talked mainly of his current editorial concerns at Mainstream, or discussed the topic for his next magazine article. After my transfer to Bhopal as TOI correspondent in the early 80s, I never got to meet him. Several years later, when I was posted in Chennai, I got a call one morning that CNC was no more.

I couldn't attend the funeral; nor could I make a subsequent trip to New Delhi to convey my condolences to his family. Those were eventful days for journalists covering Tamilnadu, and I couldn’t find myself getting away from the daily grind of newspaper reporting, even for a week. I knew CNC would have understood my situation. As a die-hard media person, CNC wouldn’t have had me miss my assignments, even if it was for his own funeral.

Cross-filed in Zine5 and Desicritics.

Felicitations to my online friend

2007-05-07T12:50:00.000+05:30

We live in the same town, Mysore; about three km apart. We have known each other for some two years. We belong to a vanished species of journalists of the typing and shorthand era. We have a lot in common and much to share about our media days in the 60s and the 70s. And yet we hadn't met each other, till Sunday last.

Such is the marvel of the Net. The technology that brings together people spread across the geographical divide can also obviate the need for even neighbors to meet, face-to-face, to be able to stay in touch. Who needs to meet when e-mail, v-mail and Skype could speak. And my friendship with Mr Krishna Vattam is strengthened with every e-mail we exchange, with every chat on the old–fashioned telephone.

My friend has turned 75; and felicitation would be in order. In fact, there was a public felicitation function, about which I learnt, true to form, through the web, after the event. Presumably, the man was much too modest to inform me, as yet an unmet friend, about a public 'do' in his honour. But then the morning after the event, to my surprise, Mr Vattam called to ask if we could meet. We did, and talked about, of all things, Krishna Menon, as if we were picking up the thread from where we had left it in our ongoing online communication.

He referred to D R Mankakar's 'Guilty Men of 1962' and his clumsiness in using the web software, to post a comment on my recent blog post. Here we were, meeting for the first time, and all that we could find to talk about was Menon, Nehru, Rajaj, and about the Emergency. If we were excited about our first ever face-to-face, neither he nor I wanted to betray our child-like excitement, particularly in the presence of his teenage grand-daughter Mr Vattam had brought along with him.

We talked about the blissful unfamiliarity of even some of our today's media folk with India's recent history. Mr Vattam spoke of L K Advani's Mysore visit, at which he told the local media about his imprisonment in Bangalore during the Emergency years (1975-77). After the press meet, said Mr Vattam, he was asked by a young reporter, in all innocence, why Mr Advani was jailed. If at all our youth know of what went on during the emergency, their knowledge is limited to what they saw in Sudhir Mishra's movie, Hazaaron Kwaishen Aisi.

Mr Vattam left a copy of the felicitation volume brought out on the occasion of his 75 th birthday; his completion of 56 years in journalism. His father was a journalist. So is his son. Presumably, media is in the Vattams' DNA. Reading through felicitation volume I learnt Mr Vattam had watched the Telugu movie, 'Malleshwari', 54 times. Wonder who kept the count, and why he stopped short of 55.

He is the founder of a local support group called 'Ex-cancer Patients' Association', to build-up self-confidence and dispel that lingering fear of relapse among the recovered patients. Mr Vattam is a cancer survivor. The next time I meet him, I must remember to loan him my copy of Stewart Alsop's Stay of Execution, in which the Newsweek columnist describes, without sentimentality, what it meant to live with lethal cancer and survive to tell the tale.

Cross-filed in zine5 and Desicritics.

The way we are

2007-05-04T12:31:00.000+05:30

(Sourced from news reports in The Hindu dated May 4)

The not-so-fresh fruits and vegetables sold at the Horticulture Produce Marketing and Processing Cooperative Society (HOPCOMS) retail outlets and the apparent ‘unfriendly’ behavior of salespersons have been driving away customers.

A legal team representing, two Karnataka ministers, appearing before the Lokayukta said the ministers could not file the details (regarding assets for 2004-05) in time because of the fault of their personal staff.

A Bangalore city corporation official, referring to their programme to seal open manholes, observed that metal lids worth Rs.750 each were often found missing.

A 60-year-old maid in Bangalore, claiming back wages for 11 months from her employer filed a complaint with the Labour Dept. one year back. She has yet to get her dues.

Chief minister H D Kumaraswamy (at a public function in Tumkur district) said officials seemed to believe that his government was about to fall and (therefore) were neglecting their duties.

Rasheed, Hyderabad travel agent alleged to have got fake travel documents for several politicians maintained he was innocent – “I have done what people asked me to do; I have not done anything on my own…”.

Has our media gone celebrity-berserk ?

2007-05-02T19:44:00.000+05:30

The Abhi-Ash wedding coverage in our media has driven the Tirupathi temple management board to review its treatment of visiting Bollywood celebrities and businessmen. They can no longer count on a walk-in darshan, special puja and extra laddu - the privileges extended to the PM, the CMs, Governors and visiting state dignitaries.

NDTV, in a prime-time news bulletin the other day, showed a video-clip of the celebrity couple, along with Amitabh Bachhan, being escorted to the sannadhi of Lord Balaji, as thousands of pilgrims in queue waited it out for their turn. Local paper in my town, Star of Mysore, ran an editorial critical of such discriminatory treatment in a place of worship. "Nobody would have grudged if distinguished persons are given preference over 'aam janata' at venues of public functions, a festival or felicitation or a lecture" wrote my friend and editorial writer Srihari, "but it was uncalled for at a place of worship, that too, at a temple that attracts devotees in unmanageable numbers every day".

A snailing queue of 30,000 devotees was brought to a standstill for some 25 minutes, as the Bollywood celebrities took their time to do puja. Lesser mortals, after hours spent in queue, don't get as much as 25 seconds with Lord Balaji before they are hustled out to the chant of 'jhargindi, jhargindi' (move on), kept up by temple security staff.

That the temple management has chosen to 'level the playing field' in the House of God must be attributed to the media coverage that otherwise evoked sharp blog comments and TV talk-show discussions. They went into the why, the why-not and the how-much of the Abhi-Ash wedding coverage; argued if the media had gone celebrity berserk or was merely being reader-responsive. All this, over a Bollywood wedding, kept firmly out-of-bounds for much of Bollywood people, party gate-crashers and the entire media. Who got invited, and which Bollywood notables were snubbed, and why, came under tabloid scrutiny. Banning the media from their social do's has been a familiar ploy with some celebrities to generate hype.

The Bachhans, however, had us all believe that they kept out the media because they wanted the wedding to be a private affair. But then was Amitabh so naïve as not to know that media perceives news as anything that someone wants to suppress? Had the Bachhans sent out invites, even if it is only to their favourite newspapers and TV channels, chances are the media would not have made such a big deal of the wedding.

Shutting them out altogether made it a challenge for the media. Hordes of reporters converged on the barred entrance of the Bachhan bungalow, hoping to pick up crumbs and to peep through cracks in the closed gate. Pathetic, it may seem to others. But in media parlance this goes under the genre of 'peep-hole' journalism. Some celebrities resort to a media ban to be able to sell exclusive rights of coverage to the highest bidder, which is termed 'cheque-book journalism'. A recent example of this was the Liz Hurley-Arun Nayar wedding in Jodhpur. The rights, it was rumored, went for $2 million. Bollywood weddings are not quite in this league yet.

"Do readers and TV viewers really care whether or not Aishwariya and Abhishek got married?", asked a blogger. I would say media doesn't care either. TV and print media were in it, to be in the reckoning in a competing environment, to promote newspaper sales, and generate ad revenue. Blogger Balaji, who reckons our media has gone bonkers, would like to see not just development journalism, but also development of journalism.

But development journalism wouldn't fetch the kind of sponsors a cricket match or celebrity wedding does. As for development of journalism, it is a matter of perspective. Journalism could be said to have developed insofar as major newspapers are now run by MBAs, who draw up marketing strategy for the media, as they would for a brand of toothpaste, soap, chips or any other product.

We live in an age where newspapers have their news columns sponsored. What we get to read is the stuff for which media can find sponsors; we see more of golf than khabadi in our sports pages. Abhi-Ash wedding was eminently 'sponsor-able'.

TV talk-shows justified celebrity coverage. We heard 'entertainment editor' of a publication billed the wedding of a major media event. In the run up to the wedding Vijay Times ran a story on Page One the thoughts of some fashion designers on how they would dress the couple. Can't get more corny than that, can you? Editor of a newspaper from Mumbai was heard saying on TV that the wedding was news that simply, couldn't be ignored.

Such has been the development of journalism. Time there was when The Times, London, ignored Marilyn Monroe's first ever visit to Britain. And its readers had no complaints. The newspaper that didn't have space for Marilyn devoted 20 inches to a feature on bulb growers. Admittedly, The Times of today wouldn't have the temerity to act this way.

At the other extreme there was Cecil King's Daily Mirror, which, at the height of the Suez crisis, published prominently on Page One a celebrity picture, with a headline screaming, 'Diana Dors Sensation'. Suez figured as token front-page item. That was an instance of media going celebrity berserk. We may not be quite there, yet. But our mainstream media is increasingly tabloid.

Where does it leave the old-fashioned reader/viewer? Someone who wanted to escape the Abhi-Ash wedding on TV said he tried switching channels, only to find the same visuals telecast everywhere. He opted for Sanskar channel and even started seeing sense in a commercial break. But then there is no escape from Amitabh, Abhi or Ash Bachhan, even during the C-break. They appear in every other advertisement.

Cross-filed in zine5 and Desicritic

Feeling sad and freaked out

2007-04-25T16:12:00.000+05:30

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, 73, killed in a car crash in California was being driven by a UC Berkeley journalism graduate student, Kevin Jones. He suffered a punctured lung. Halberstam, who had come to Berkeley to deliver a speech to journalism students, wanted a volunteer to drive him to interview a former star footballer in Mountain View, in return for an opportunity to spend time with the famous journalist.

The journalism school had e-mailed Halberstam’s offer to its students, saying “he’ll give you a private seminar on the way back. Details are vague, but this could be a really cool opportunity”. Kevin took up the opportunity as “he wanted to talk to someone that he thought was interesting”. Besides, Kevin didn’t have classes on Monday.

The crash that left his journalistic icon dead made Kevin feel ‘really sad and freaked out’, said his wife from the Stanford Hospital, where he was admitted with lung injury, “It’s just a very traumatizing thing to have gone through”.

When Rs.12 was a princely salary

2007-04-24T10:48:00.000+05:30

Descendants of the Mughal emperors, in early 1800s, were paid their upkeep by a magnanimous British East India Company. A Mughal prince got a monthy allowance of Rs.12 a month, which wasn’t more than the wages a head servant in any sahib’s household those days. William Dalrymple’s ‘The Last Mughal’ gives a fascinating account of the life and times during the Raj.

A sampler from excerpt of the book published in California Literary Review

Delhi College, a madarsa under the Mughals, was remodeled by the Company in 1828 “to uplift the uneducated and half-barbarous people of India”. The man behind this good work was Charles Trevelyan, brother-in-law of Thomas Babingdon Macaulay, whose minute declared that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”… The historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England . . . The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

In striking contrast to his three notably dressy younger brothers, Mirzas Jahangir, Salim and Babur, Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775-1838) was a man of spare figure and stature, plainly apparelled, almost approaching to meanness, reported Major Archer in 1828, when Zafar was fifty-three, and still a decade away from succeeding to the throne. “His appearance was that of an indigent munshi, or teacher of languages.”
When one of his followers was bitten by a snake, Zafar attempted to cure him by sending “a Seal of Bezoar [a stone antidote to poison] and some water on which he had breathed,” and giving it to the man to drink.. .The Emperor also had a great belief in charms, or ta’wiz, especially as a palliative for his perennial complaint of piles, or to ward off evil spells.
To read more of the excerpt access California Literary Review.

Are women in media over-empowered ?

2007-04-15T18:32:00.000+05:30

I know this is a loaded question, prompted by a statement in S R Madhu's talk to the Joint Action Council for Women that met in Chennai last month. He believes there is a strong connection between women's media and their empowerment. Full text of his engaging talk appears in a blog by Madhu's young journalist friend Alaphia Zoyab. Bloggers like Ms Zoyab, to my mind, can work at securing equal empowerment of non-media women.

Their target group ought to be middle-class urban career women, who, seen as liberated in economic terms may not be so empowered in their domestic situation. Empowerment of rural women may well take a generation or two to be realised. Media women are a class apart.

They are perhaps the most empowered of the lot. So much, in fact, that if the likes of Ms Kakaria have their way, women's empowerment in the media may well become a threat to many men hoping to get into the media. Mr Madhu in his talk on 'Women and the Media' gives profiles-in-brief of the empowered such as Anita Pratap (ex-CNN), Madhu Kishwar (editor, Manushi), Barkha Dutt (needs no intro), Mrinal Pande (editor, Hindustan), Sucheta Dalal (finance columnist, and more), and Bachi Kakaria (Times of India)

As Sunday Times of India feature writer, Ms Kakaria used to send me memos (then, a TOI outstation correspondent) asking for 300-word input for articles she was working on. She was in an empowered position of aggregating, editing, clubbing-with, and, at times, ignoring, inputs received from various correspondents. The resultant feature articles got a full-page play with Bachi's byline. Of course, they acknowledged our input, at the bottom of the story, in italics; almost as an after-thought. I suspect such inputs-driven Sunday features were invented by editors to promote their blue-eyed ones in the organization; and to hassle outstation reporters such as yours truly.

I am not blaming Ms Kakaria, merely making a point about how empowered women can get. Mr Madhu's talk cites Ms Kakaria as saying, "the women we interview for jobs are so much better than men, that sometimes we take a man just as a token gesture for men". Her message for women in the media: Stop thinking gender; think only professional.

They have evidently come a long, log way, women in media. There was a time when newspaper editors would not think of having a woman on their staff. Speaking of the status of women on the media scene in the 60s Madhu cites the case of Rami Chhabra, who, seeking a job on The Statesman, Calcutta, was told by editor Prem Bhatia, "Young lady, if you want to work in a daily, wipe off that lipstick and remove those ear-rings. Pretty girls shouldn't be in newspaper offices. They distract the men."

Pran Chopra reportedly turned down Razia Ismail for a job saying, "I'm sure you would refuse to do night shifts". This was a legitimate concern of editors those days. In the initial days when a few women got into newspapers, usually because of high connections (being daughters of high government officials or editors in other newspapers) editors didn't give women the night shift. Which caused resentment among men, because their turn for late-night week came quicker on the duty roster. Unable to take flak from male peers, some women in newspapers, feeling uncomfortable with favoured treatment, have in fact insisted on they being given night shifts, just as their male colleagues. Razia, I knew, joined Indian Express, New Delhi.

Madhu's address on women in our media refers to Barkha Dutt, a hotshot TV reporter from 24x7. I can't help feeling that her go-getter reputation has something to do with her genes. Barkha's mother was a reporter with Hindustan Times, New Delhi. Those familiar with Prabha Behl (before her marriage with S P Dutt) knew her to be combative in chasing stories, fairly vocal at press conferences, and friendly with other reporters. She had a wavelength with those of us in other papers; and usually addressed us, male or female, as 'yaar'. Prabha rose to be the chief reporter, Hindustan Times. She died young

This piece also appears in Desicritic

Gaping holes on water tank; who pays for the damage ?

2007-04-07T17:46:00.000+05:30

It is all very well for Karnataka Chief Minister H D Krishnaswamy to talk tough to non-performing officers, warning them of stern action. Our media works into the story well-worn clichés - 'taking officials to task', not tolerating 'lackadaisical attitude', and action against officials who don't 'pull up their socks'- to make CM appear a no-nonsense guy.

The media knows, as well as anyone else, that politicians play to the gallery. And Mr Krishnaswamy, or anyone else in his position, ought to know that government officials are relatively immune to such threats. Their service rules and self-serving official procedure ensure government employees are insulated from ruling party threats that are, at times, held out by political leaders for public consumption.

If anything, the political executive has limited powers in comparison to the bureaucracy and the police. As they say, a chief minister does not even enjoy the powers that a police inspector does. A chief minister can't order anyone's arrest; something a police officer does in as a routine.

The snag is, in any government, there are a few officials willing to do the biddings of political bosses. A minister, ruling party district secretary or MLA often gets done things that are not within their ambit of power, with the help of obliging officials. Immediate provocation for Indira Gandhi to declare Emergency in 1975 was Jai Prakash Narayan's call to the police force not to obey illegal orders of those in power; and to insist on getting all their orders in writing from their higher-ups.

On the flipside is the apparent inability of CM and other ministers to hold officials accountable for their lapses. Take the case of contaminated central water storage tank that supplies drinking water to Mysore city. The storage tank has been in a state of neglect for the last six years, according to media reports. The water storage tank would have continued to remain uncared for, if it were not for a civic initiative that exposed this monumental neglect by officials.

According to Mr A Ramdas, a former MLA who led the civic initiative, concrete roofing of this massive underground tank has gaping holes, exposing the stored water to contamination through fallen debris, floating remains of dead birds and an outgrowth of weeds.

The city corporation commissioner, who has moved in the wake of media exposure, to do damage control and clean up the tank, ought to explain how such blatant lapse by the maintenance staff had gone unnoticed for so many years. Would the tough-talking CM or the minister concerned take steps to identify officials responsible for having neglected the upkeep of the water storage tank for so long?

Departmental action apart, a CM concerned about streamlining the administration ought to address the issue of material damge. Is there a provision (or shouldn't there be?) in the service rules of government officials for fixing individual liability for the material damage caused to the water storage tank? Shouldn't such damage be quantified and the computed amount collected from non-performing officials concerned ?

Cricket: There’s life after World Cup for Team India

2007-03-27T19:42:00.000+05:30

Let’s look at the positives. We beat Bermuda, didn’t we? Why not build on this win. Let’s now try out Outer Mongolia (trust they have a cricket team), and thus, strike a winning streak. I don’t see the great idea in India playing the same teams – Sri Lanka, Australia, Pakistan etc. – year after year. If Indian cricket has to survive (for the benefit of sponsors and live telecast right-holders) we need to look at fresh pastures beyond our sub-continent.

We under-rated Bangladesh, which has been one of our unfailing failures. It is time India started playing sure winnables. I already mentioned Outer Mongolia. We could tour Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and Brunei. That would be a morale booster, and give our boys the feel of victory, so that our team members can come home to a grand airport reception. This time I visualise our team flying home from Jamaica, on a late night flight, and be whisked away from the airport by the personnel on bandobast duty.

Speaking of airport receptions, newspapers carry a photo of Pak team transiting London’s Heathrow under police escort, presumably, to guard them from being ambushed by enraged fans. Heathrow has a sizeable staff strength of Asians, including Pakistanis. I guess, there is scope for bilateral exchanges with Pakistan on ways to improve cricketing fortunes to the mutual benefit of both countries. I don’t mean we play a World Cup losers’ Cup tie. In fact, an India-Pakistan series at this time would not be a good idea. If only because, we can’t ensure that neither India nor Pakistan lost any match. We could resort to match-fixing by which every tie is made to end in a draw.

I have an out-of-the-box idea. Let us hold a joint selection camp of cricket players from both India and Pakistan; split the top 22 into two opposing teams, comprising players chosen irrespective of their national colours. In fact, the ‘blues’ and ‘greens’ on the field would be replaced with plain old white, the only colour our old-fashioned cricketers knew.

Speaking of old-fashioned cricketers, the opposing teams should be led by legends such as Zaheer Abbas and Sunil Gavaskar, as non-playing captains. We could call it the Sadbhavana Cup. Legend has it that during an India-Pak tie when Abbas got into a seemingly unending run-spree, the then India captain, Sunil Gavaskar walked up to him to say, “Zaheer bhai, Ab-bas karo”.

Zaheer Abbas, interviewed on an Indian sports TV channel, didn’t confirm this story, but said that Sunil was his good friend. So was Bishen Singh Bedi. During their tours overseas both team members socialized. Zaheer recalled the match in which he completed 100 centuries. That evening Zaheer hosted a party – “every member of the Indian team I invited turned up at the party”.

Former Pak captain, referring to an India tour of Pakistan, said he didn’t sleep during the entire five weeks of the tour. Indian bowling trio, said Zaheer Abbas, was so much on his mind that he spent sleepless nights thinking of ways to cope with Bedi, Prasanna and Chandrasekhar.

Catalyst on Water

2007-03-24T08:49:00.000+05:30

Dr Bhamy Shenoy has mailed the following note on Catalyst magazine, an NRI initiative, that devotes its current issue to Water.

Four years ago, some residents of Chennai were leaving town due to water shortage. The Hindu, in an article 4 months ago, said Chennai had too much water now. If you open the city corporation tap, water actually comes out, instead of plain hot air four years ago.

A contributing factor in Chennai’s transformation is Rain Water Harvesting. We still (in Chennai) have a long way to go in order to ‘mainstream’ rainwater harvesting in our daily life. Other southern states have followed the lead taken by Tamil Nadu.

Water for life and water for livelihoods’ is the maxim expressed in the 2006 United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report (HDR). Water insecurity violates the basic principles of social justice. Access to water is a basic human need and fundamental human right, yet more than one billion people worldwide are denied the right to clean water. Water pervades all aspects of human development; when people do not have access to clean water their choices and freedoms are constrained by ill health, poverty and vulnerability. Thus, water gives life to everything, including human development.(“Jal hai, to kal hai” in Hindi means “If you have water, you have a tomorrow”)

Catalyst for Human Development’s latest Water issue has articles ranging from sustainable rural water management to rainwater harvesting. You can DOWNLOAD the full PDF file (5.9 Meg) at www.afhd.org . If you need printed copies, details are given in the magazine. You may contact editor at editor@afhd.org with any questions or comments

Scrapbook Jottings–4

2007-03-20T19:48:00.000+05:30

JFK killing wire copy: Associated Press story sent to newspapers through teleprinter sold at a New York auction in March 1997. Seven-foot paper roll of AP story, giving a moment-to-moment account of the first 90 minutes after the JFK killing (Nov.22, 1963, at Dalles) fetched $10,000, for a disabled Vietnam veteran Donald Zammit, who had found the wire copy in an envelope after his father’s death.

Newspapermen: Most of what they do is superficial, out of balance, prejudicial when they claim impartiality, and riddled with inaccuracies. They blame inaccuracies on an obsession with speed, which is used the way a cripple uses a crutch. Being slower, checking facts before they storm into print might be better public service. They are critics, self-appointed judges of everybody’s failings except their own. (Do not know who said this, where, when and in which context.)

Peru, India and the punctuality drive

2007-03-02T21:48:00.000+05:30

It was Ecuador in 2003. and it is Peru today that is poised to combat chronic lateness. The Latin American late-running nation has launched a punctuality drive. After hearing the news on the BBC, I wondered when, if at all, we in India would look at chronic lateness as a serious issue.

I have been flogging this message on the web ever since I read in 2004 a New Yorker piece on the campaign in Ecuador. The magazine feature - Punctuality Pays - said, "At high noon last October 1, the citizens of Ecuador did something they'd never dreamed possible, they synchronized their watches". They did four other things:

1) Ran a nationwide poster campaign to convey the message that punctuality pays

2)Public and private institutions - from local councils to major industries - took a pledge to keep time

3) Late-comers were turned away from offices and factories, with placards reading 'Don't Enter; Work Started on Time'

4) And newspapers published everyday a list of dignitaries and public officials who turned up late at public events.

Peru, emulating Ecuador, has clocked in its drive - 'Peru on Time'. At noon on March 1, President Alan Garcia sounded a bell signaling the nation's 28 million people to synchronize their watches. Peru and punctuality have been incompatible; and chronic lateness was often overlooked by Peruvians who considered it an endearing cultural trait.

How Indian, I thought. It's in fact also a very Mysorean trait.

Another similarity between the two countries: nothing in Peru - wedding reception, funeral, social dinner or a business meeting - ever starts on time. Travel guides for western tourists observe that Peruvians expect friends to be late for an appointment.

So tourist brochures advise foreign visitors, rather thoughtfully, not to arrange to meet a Peruvian on a street corner - make it a café or bar. If, for some obscure reason, you want someone in Lima to turn up on time, you will be well advised to stipulate that the meeting is a la hora inglesa (by the English time).

Peru has now officially declared that to be late would no longer be fashionable. The Forum of National Consensus, a government-led council of business and citizens' groups, which is steering the campaign has directed schools, businesses and government offices to stop tolerating 'Peruvian Time", which usually means an hour's lateness. We have such close commonality in our bad habits, Peru and India.

Peru has chosen to do something about it. When will we in India do the same? For a start, wouldn't you like to see our media and corporates sponsor a public interest message recognizing punctuality as a civic virtue that represents respect for the other person's time?
--------------------

This piece is cross-filed in Desicritics; and evoked following comments:

Karthik
I understand your concern for this cultural level change. Unfortunately going from A to B involves lot of challenges! Bus, traffic, political rallies. People get used to this and becomes a habit. Make no mistake. I am not justifying this. I am all for coming on time. But it is upto the individual to correct himself in a country like India. Nationwide changes require the concerned people to lead by example which they are never going to do. I myself am guilty of being a little late for some unimportant events. But things like interviews, meetings i am always ahead of time.

Ashish
Oh, to be late is an institutional thing in India. If you are invited for a wedding and the time says 8 PM, and you reach there at 8, you could literally help in setting the place up.
In fact, at my marriage, the whole procession reached around 30 minutes after the written time, and my bride also was not ready since no one expects the groom's party to arrive anywhere near time :-)

bharath
why is punctuality a human virtue? Its likely to help machines when they synchronize activities, communication, etc.
all those poems written about waiting, a waste? :)

BUG - The Brotherhood of Unwelcome Guests

2007-03-02T08:58:00.000+05:30

Desicritic Uma Ranganathan's much-commented piece on an unwelcome guest, inspired me to recycle this piece that was written four years back. But I reckon it will stay valid for the next 400 years. My piece was written in a spirit that if anyone were to be shown in an unflattering light, it better be yours truly in the interest of maintaining domestic harmony. So, here it goes:

Athtiti Devo Bhava. I don't know if such a thing is really in our scriptures or it is just something made up by an inventive mind advocating the cause of the Brotherhood of Uninvited Guests (BUG). Whoever thought of it knew how our middle-class mind works. The three-word sloka is so embedded in our belief system that few of us can bring ourselves to turn away an unwelcome guest who appears unannounced at our doorsteps. You wouldn't want to drive away the Lord, would you?

Someone did just that, to me, in the US. They called the bluff on that devo bhava nonsense. Suffice it to say that those involved was a desi family well known to us. Giving away much more would not be in the interest of my domestic harmony.

It so happened that my wife and I were at loose ends on a Sunday afternoon and so our son took us for a drive. Some 40 minutes out of our home I was told we were close to where this desi family was staying. I suggested we drop in on them.

"Unannounced?" asked my son, "Without as much as a call?"

"Why not?" I thought my son, having stayed in the US for some time now, had forgotten the three words in Sanskrit that would open Indian doors even to strangers. After all, this desi family was so well known to us that they should be happy to see us any time.

My son tried to reason with me. I was firm. My wife didn't say anything, maintaining an enlightened neutrality in a disagreement between father and son.

I prevailed. And as we neared the driveway of our friend's suburban house we noticed the family of four was leaving for some place and the lady of the house was closing their front door. We stepped out of our car and met them on their driveway. They were nice and syrupy, but made no move to ask us in.

"What a surprise," said the lady of the house, "I wish you had called before coming."

I mumbled something to the effect that we had not planned this visit, but decided to drop in, on the spur of the moment. After a few more minutes of small-talk, still on the driveway, we exited as gracefully as we could.

"You must come again," said our host, "we must have a meal together." She was polite, but firm in slamming the door on us.

At our place I let my wife handle a sticky situation by letting her answer the door-bell. I do not intervene in her door-step inquiry into such unwelcome intrusion. I pretend not to hear my wife when she calls me to the door to greet an unannounced visitor. Of course, I sulk and usually take it out on her whenever we are lumbered with a visitor we could very well do without.

An unwelcome guest often gives cause for domestic discord in our otherwise peaceful married life. The snag is, my wife relishes her reputation as a gracious hostess, particularly among fair weather friends and relatives. Such is her hospitality that those who come to our place once would want to come again. I keep reminding my wife, "We are running a household, not a 'Welcomgroup' outfit."

The last 'guest' we had stayed only for a night, mercifully. We have had people coming in groups, including unmanageable children, without as much as a phone call announcing their arrival, and staying for days. Our overnight 'guest' dropped in around 8 pm, and promptly settled into the only rosewood armchair in our living room that doubles as my study. It was not yet our dinner time; it was the time my wife and I spend reading a book or magazine in companionable silence. With our evening so rudely interrupted, my wife went to the kitchen to get dinner ready, leaving me to cope with the lady in the rosewood chair.

I don't remember the details of the small talk we indulged in for the next 15 minutes. But my wife rescued us from what seemed an interminable 15 minutes by announcing dinner. To be fair to the lady, an out-of-towner, she didn't drop in on us unannounced. She gave my wife a few hours notice when they met at a common friend's place earlier in the day. The lady had told my wife she was inviting herself to our place for the night. When my wife sought to explain that things at home were in a mess the lady said, "Don't worry, I will adjust." I thought it was the host who would have adjustment problem in the circumstances.

When it was time for her to leave my wife sent her off with the traditional offering of the kumkum and an invitation to visit us again. My hunch is that the lady took my wife for her words. I don't suppose our guest had any inkling of my smoldering resentment at her for having taken us for granted. .

Cross-filed in Desicritics

Media self-censorship

2007-02-28T16:53:00.000+05:30

A Deccan Herald article speaks of an unnamed company CEO’s disenchantment with IIT graduates. In reference to their poor caliber he is quoted as saying, “we are not likely to recruit them any longer”. Who are ‘we’ and who is this person speaking on their behalf? He is Mr Muthuraman, MD, Tata Steel.

Naming name in this context would have added credibility. Without the name, the story carries no thrust. And is unlikely to be taken with the seriousness the issue deserves. What’s worse, the writer of the newspaper article, Bhamy V Shenoy, exposes himself to the charge of dressing up his prejudice (against IITs) by inventing a quote by conveniently unnamed sources.

Dr Shenoy says he named the company and its MD; it was the newspaper that withheld the names. And he was not informed about it. A newspaper has the prerogative to edit any article it receives to make more sense of it or for reasons of space, editorial policy norms,or to address judicial or libel implications. And our media is also known to have exercised their prerogative to play favorites or not hurt their advertising interests.

Whatever the reason, the newspaper succeeded in watering down the story that speaks of the needlessly tough CET, the role of mushrooming coaching shops, and a corporate tendency to go to institutions other than IITs for recruits. The article was based on Dr Shenoy’s interaction with Mr Muthuraman (both graduates of IIT Madras) and some others at the recent alumni meet in Chennai.

Tata Steel MD’s observations were based on his recent interaction with a group of final-year students of IIT-Madras. Dr Shenoy quotes him as saying that the students could not even name the authors of the course books IIT students were supposed to have studied. Worse still, even some faculty members were no more knowledgeable about the subjects they taught.

Dr Shenoy, quoting his fellow IITans, attributes such sorry state to flaws in the admission process that encourage IIT aspirants to resort to coaching classes to clear a patently tough common entrance test. Once they are in IITs, students pay little attention to the rigors involved in higher education. The newspaper article, citing IIT admission figures in a recent year, says that out of the 979 successful candidates from the South Zone, as many as 769 were from Andhra Pradesh. In the Northern zone, says Dr Shenoy, Rajasthan is “an unlikely state that is reported to have been doing well by sending a high proportion of students to IITs”. This reflects the success of, what Dr Shenoy calls, ‘pressure-cooker coaching shops’ that have mushroomed in recent years in Hyderabad and Kota.

Dr Shenoy, who has worked in oil industry in the US for 20 years, is now settled in Mysore and intensely involved in social welfare NGOs and consumer activism. He writes newspaper articles in the fond belief that he could effectively put across a social message. He wrote the Herald piece – Brand IIT takes a knock – to be able to highlight correctable flaws in the IIT admission system.

This, indeed, was the point Mr Muthuraman had in mind in making his observations at the IIT alumni meet. Dr Shenoy said Mr Muthuraman and many of the IIT alumni that came to Chennai from all over the world were all in it together to ensure that IITs regained their past reputation. Mr Muthuraman, who was sent a draft of the article, is reported to have said that it deserved extensive publication in the media.

This piece has been cross-filed in Desicritics.

Scrapbook Jottings-3

2007-02-20T12:49:00.000+05:30

September, 1979

Political Imperatives: Dr Rajni Kothari of the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research, addressing a seminar on India’s imperatives : “All our great achievements have so far been in the field of aesthetics, poetry and culture; our biggest failings have possibly been in politics”.

Women’s Movement: An angry young woman wrote to The Statesman that women’s movement should be encouraged, instead of being ridiculed. The paper’s reporter had described a women’s (New Delhi) Boat Club rally as a picnic for women in their Sunday best.

The reporter should have known better. Women everywhere give much thought to dress wherever they show up, a picnic or a protest rally. I read about the predicament of this girl in Paris who had been invited by students planning to burn down the Palais de Justice. She couldn’t decide what to wear for the occasion. So she didn’t go.

Indira Gandhi on poll campaign: Kaithal in Haryana greeted Mrs Indira Gandhi the other day with ‘murdabad’ slogans, but gave her a Rs.1 lakh purse for the party campaign fund. The Statesman called it a ‘mixed reception’. A lucrative ‘mix’, I would say. A hostile reception with a fat purse thrown in is better than empty zindabad slogans.

At the end of her electioneering day in Haryana, protesters wound-up with sore throat caused by slogan shouting. Mrs Gandhi’s party was reportedly richer by Rs.4,66,000, not counting the 65kg of coins she received at a poll rally in Jind where the organizers weighed Mrs Gandhi with one-rupee coins.

Piloo Mody: speaking to a drawing-room group at Friends Colony (New Delhi’s abode of posh people), observed Mr Charan Singh was a prime minister on ‘daily wages’; and Mrs Gandhi, leader of a party of ‘bonded labour’.

T A Pai, rail minister, told a Congress workers meeting in Panaji that politicians were changing parties more often than their shirts.

H N Bahuguna, union finance minister, conceded 'inability’ of the government to deal with the menace of black money. It would not be in a position to take hard decisions to curb black money circulation in view of the coming Lok Sabha Poll. The minister was addressing a conference of chief ministers of the Congress ruled states.

Scrapbook jottings- 2

2007-02-14T12:26:00.000+05:30

Like most journalists I used to maintain a scrapbook, of mostly book excerpts, news trivia, and drafts of features/ book reviews I did for magazines. Sixteen single-ruled school exercise books of jottings, scribbled in my shabby hand-writings that are at times illegible even to me. I drew extensively (wouldn’t use the word ‘plagiarise’) from scrapbook jottings for my magazine writings.

Streaking across women’ college : Sept. 1979: Page One bottom-spread in Delhi edition of Indian Express spoke of a group of college students, with their pants down, dancing in front of a women’s college on Delhi University campus on a moonlit night. The boys said they indulged in ‘a little friendly ragging’.

Streaking, as they called it, was first reported in the US on April 1, 1974, when students who stripped themselves marched outside the White House to “lay bare the facts about Watergate and get at the naked truth”. Since then the craze spread out among students all over. They have done it on bicycles, motorbikes, ski-slopes and parachute jumps. A 67-year-old arrested for nude strolling in Ohio reportedly told the police, “I’m too old for streaking, I was snailing.

Godse Vs Gandhi: A news item based on a Hindu Mahasabha press release (Sept.1979) said Mrs Sindhu Godse, wife of Nathuram, would oppose Mrs Indira Gandhi in the poll; and Mr Gopal Godse would context against Raj Narain. (UNI, Bareilly).

RSS denial:RSS chief Balasaheb Deoras denied (in the media at Ujjain) that he had said RSS could form a government at the centre in 10 years. As he put it, some people were out to malign RSS at all cost.

Fake shooting: Jacques Mesrine, 42, bank-robber, kidnapper, con artist, and French, lured a newspaperman to an interview, riddled him with bullets, and shot the proceedings in Polaroid. The pictures were sent to newspapers that promptly published them. The journalist involved,Jacques Tillier, suffered superficial wounds. . .

From my scrapbook-1

2007-02-13T16:55:00.000+05:30

Like most journalists I used to maintain a scrapbook, of mostly book excerpts, news trivia, and first drafts of features/ book reviews I did for magazines. Sixteen single-ruled school exercise books of jottings, scribbled in my shabby hand-writings that are at times illegible even to me. I drew extensively (wouldn’t use the word ‘plagiarise’) from scrapbook jottings for my magazine writings.

Excerpt from The Press Inside Out by Bill Grundy

Newspapers are very odd things. Unlike sausages or shoes, production lost through strikes cannot be made up by overtime when a strike is over. An edition lost is lost for ever.

The problem every newspaper faces is to be able to influence the influential, who are few, and yet attract the mass; to push a political line, and yet have some claim to fair reporting.. . .Reporting in depth is often confused with reporting at length. Many long stories tell readers more than they wish or care to know.. . .News is not what they buy newspapers for. . .As for newspapers, it is not the number of readers, but their spending power that makes a newspaper viable.

News and the BBC: In its early days news played very little part in BBC’s thinking. As the story goes, one night an announcer said: ”This is the BBC. There is no news tonight”. BBC was regarded as merely a miracle where a gentleman with an impeccable accent and manners would read aloud, in as non-committal a voice as he could manage, stirring things about fat-stock prices and hoggets and shearlings; exciting to farmers, perhaps; less so to others.

Page One of Daily Mirror, London (of May 17, 1960), in reproduced here in its entirety.

Mr. K !
(If you will pardon
an olde English phrase)
DON’T BE
SO BLOODY
RUDE !
PS
Who do you think you are ?
Stalin ?

Blogging Davos

2007-01-27T11:49:00.000+05:30

I reckon the World Economic Forum (WEF) meets at Davos make more business sense than the UN, though both are equally ineffective when it comes to re-ordering the world. At Davos no one hears of a cash-crunch for running the show. The UN is plagued by shortfall in funding by some member states. I don't suppose, at Davos, they adopt resolutions that get routinely flouted by members.

Presumably, there is a lot more fun and booze at Davos, going by the blogs. The 800 company CEOs attending the show are encouraged to blog at the WEF online journal of its participants. A Davos delegate blogs of the night he went into his hotel bar to find something to eat, and ended up meeting some Amazon-based Brazilian social entrepreneurs - 'we ended up drinking beers and swapping stories well into the night.' Speaking of meeting people the blogger writes of the immense opportunities Davos provides. He reckons the best place to meet people are in the minivans (seating six) that shuttle delegates around various happenings spots in Davos.

The International Herald Tribune/NYT blog is my favourite. Last year they ran a post about people flocking the Google party to gawk at its co-founders - Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Besides gawkers there were, at the party, connoisseurs whose focus was on the passing drinks tray, at which 1959 Pauillac Bordeaux and 1990 Krug champagne were on offer.

The no-celebrity policy adopted by the WEF for this year was a mistake, according to an unnamed invitee cited in the NYT blog. Stars such as Angelina Jolie and Sheron Stone, who made a splash in the proceedings in previous years, were not invited this time. WEF founder director Klaus Schwab, 67, is reported to have held that the conference "committed to improving the state of the world" lost its sense of seriousness and purpose, if the invited celebs cornered much of the attention.

Prof. Schwab, in a reference to the media/delegate attention drawn by Stone in 2005 was reported to have told WSJ that she had a "bit of her own show going and that's not what we really appreciate." But then Prof. Schwab, who has been running the show since 1971, knows as well as anyone does that people go to Davos not just to discuss the global economy or the status of poverty in Africa.

A business leader, they say, could wind up spending $10,000 dollars a day on a Davos trip. Surely, he can't be doing this to lament the fate of Africans who live on a dollar a day. For the 2,400-odd delegates from 90 countries, it presumably makes business sense to be in Davos. It saves many of them half a dozen trips to China, US, India, Australia or Brazil. Global networking is what this is all about. I remember reading this refreshing take on Davos in the Deutsche Welle blog. It referred to the Davos forum as an excuse for many to gossip about designer clothes and dine on lobster - 'one must always look one's best while discussing the poor.'

Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic, in a blog last year, was reported to have spoken of pushing a space shuttle service for public travel. Virgin's CEO said he would be on the inaugural flight with family after Enterprise completed 50 test flights. The Google guy Sergei who also evinced interest in getting into space tourism quipped he would wait till Branson had sent 1000 flights - 'we have to offer our passengers return tickets.'

WEF, experimenting last year with opening up blogs for delegates, invited participants to post on Forumblog.org what they reckoned accounted for success. Richard Branson listed his 10 points, the first of which was, 'you've got to challenge the big ones.'

Point 10: 'Be a common, regular person'.
Point 3: 'Haggle, everything is negotiable';
Point 7: 'Don't lead 'sheep', herd 'cats';
Point 6: 'Smile for the cameras'.

A young entrepreneur from Finland posting her take wrote: "I would regard myself as successful, if I am able to raise two balanced adults from my two-year old, and the younger one, aged 4 months."

Columnist Buchwald: Dead, on his own terms

2007-01-19T18:40:00.000+05:30

Art Buchwald is dead. And his only concern, as he slipped into unconsciousness was, “I just don’t want to die the same day Castro dies”. So says the satirist’s long-time friend at Washington Post, Ben Bradlee. Buchwald died of kidney failure, Jan.20, at his son’s place in Washington D C. He was 81.

I thought the old man was gone well over a year back when his syndicated column stopped appearing in The Hindu. Buchwald was then very much alive and kicking , though with only his left leg. The right one had been amputated below the knee. His kidneys were failing. Refusing dialysis the 80-year-old celebrity satirist opted, instead, to enter a Washington hospice, to 'go gently into the night when all else fails'. This was in February last.

He didn’t go. What’s more, he lived long enough to write a book – Too Soon to Say Goodbye. Those entering a hospice do not usually last longer than two or three weeks. But Art Buchwald stayed on, and on, for so many weeks that he came to be known around the Washington hospice as The Man Who Wouldn’t Die. He left the place in July last to spend summer at Martha’s Vineyard..

Buchwald had his reasons for quitting the hospice. "It didn't work out the way I had expected," he said, "besides, I've gotten so well that Medicare won't pay for me any more". I had my suspicion as to why Buchwald went to the hospice in the first place. So that he could do a book on his near-death experience. Hospices don't usually get written about, because they are associated with death. Buchwald says he spent time at the hospice discussing his funeral with family - details such as where to hold it, how elaborate it should be; and who would speak on the occasion. The columnist reportedly convinced his long-time friend Carly Simon to sing at his funeral.

Another reason, befitting Buchwald's 'unmatched sense of the absurd', could have been the proximity of the hospice to McDonalds, from where he had a steady supply of burger 'n' fries. Besides junk food, said daughter Jennifer, her dad's other enduring loves were, being at the center-stage, spending time with friends, and writing. Buchwald's decision to discontinue dialysis, after he had it a dozen times, put him right there at the center-stage, turning him into a story.

As for spending time with friends Buchwald had so many visitors during his stay at the hospice that on some days it was standing room only. He was believed to have toyed with the idea of putting a tariff on it, $ 25 a visit. His only worry at leaving the hospice, they said, was whether people would still want to see him when he was no longer in the 'death-house'.

Art Buchwald’s only regret, presumably, was that death claimed him before he got around to complete his ultimate work - a pornographic one. In a foreword to one of his books Art Buchwald had observed, "It is absolutely essential that anyone today who claims to be a writer must produce a pornographic book". It was, he reckoned, a status symbol, comparable with that of the Hemingway era, when, in order to be a writer, you had to bag a lion.

"If I ever hope to be taken seriously as a writer, I must get down to work on my book" So he wrote in 1968. But then Art Buchwald could not proceeded beyond the first paragraph. His problem was , "every time I start a paragraph: - ‘Harry looked at the two girls in his bed and shook his head. How could he ever satisfy both of them and still make the seven ten for Scarsdale’ - I say to myself, Is this something the Supreme Court would want to read?"

A blog-to-flook story

2007-01-17T18:22:00.000+05:30

The Hollywood movie, The Devil Wears Prada, that won for Meryl Streep a Golden Globe Award (2007, for best actress) started life as a blog by Lauren Weisberger. She had blogged about her days as an assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. It made such sensational reading that a publisher chose to make a book of it. The book became a best-seller and morphed into a movie. Ms. Weisberger has since written another book, described by Kimberly Llewellyn as a novel about the glammed-out New York city life entitled Everyone Worth Knowing. Kimberly, a four-book novelist, blogging on Lauren says, "I'd never seen anything like it. The I-Love-Lauren websites. The I-hate-Lauren sites. Incredible. I don't recall a time when a writer has evoked such emotion in readers."

Lauren Weisberger's case may be exceptional, but it does make the point that every other blogger may have a book in him/her. The genre is called 'blook'. But the urge to make a blook of their blogs remains for ever bottled up within most bloggers. Mercifully so, one might add. For, in this age of e-book and self-publishing, if the blooker genie were to get out of every blogger's bottle, there would be a literary tsunami in the publishing scene. It is guesstimated that there are some 50 million blogs out there in blogosphere, and 75,000 more created every day. It is an ego trip for a whole lot of them, blogging. Someone called it e-casting ('e' for ego).

A blook, if you haven't heard, is a hybrid literary form. It is a book that started life as a blog. This new literary genre holds out enticing possibilities. Bloggers, particularly failed authors, need not look for a publisher; nor worry about rejection slips. The age of self-publishing is with us. And the blook is here to stay. The founder of a self-publishing site, Bob Young, has even instituted the Lulu Blooker Award, on the lines of the reputed Man Booker Prize. The inaugural year blooker prize, announced in April last year, attracted 89 entries from 12 countries.

And the winner was blogger Julie Powell, 33, till then an unpuiblished author holding a dead-end office job in New York. She told The Guardian that blogging had kick-started her writing career. And she had no idea what a blog was until her husband initiated her into it. The jury described her blook, "a heartfelt, funny and occasionally obscene tell-all about her journey of self-discovery and cholesterol."

It all started when Julie Powell, frustrated with publishers' rejection slips, and bored with her day job, sought to engage herself by trying out all 524 recipes given in a book of French cookery. Her understanding husband not only tasted what she dished out but also suggested that Julie chronicle her cookery efforts in an online journal. The blog attracted a publisher's attention, and the rest, as they say, is history. Julie's blook is reported to have sold 100,000 copies. Among short-listed entries was by another foodie, Russell Davies who blook-ed a blog on his visits to London's 'greasy spoon' cafes. Title of the blook: Egg, Bacon, Chips and Beans.

The cookery blook-ing reminds me of a friend, Vidya Nagaraj, who has blogged about her online search to get the right recipe for 'masale-puri', a Mysore street-food specialty. Vidya lives in a small Japanese town where her family of four are the only Indians. Her perseverance to take on a Japanese town with her culinary might, her masale-puri recipe hunt, the response of Mysoreans to uphold the culinary reputation of Vidya, nay, of India, in remote Japan, and the hassles of being a vegetarian in a town of non-veggies has in them the spark of a blook.

As she put it in her blog, A Mysorean's Japan Diary, "Vegetable choices are very limited in this small town. For the first time in my life, I saw beans and ladies-finger sold in packets of 6 and 10... Now what is a south Indian vegetarian supposed to do with just 8 or 10 beans?"

Aviator Capt. Anup Murthy was minding his own business (of doing consultancy work and flying airplanes) till he took to blogging some months back. A few weeks into his incarnation as blogger Anup realized he was developing an audience beyond his family and friends. His blog now has a cult following and Anup's air travelogue has given rise to a plea that he publish his blog journal in Kannada.

A Mysore cardiologist, Dr Javeed Nayeem, who has taken to blogging writes about Tabebuia blossoming in his town as knowledgeably as charting a network of heritage walks through Mysore, a town steeped in history. And then we have in Mysore a potential blooker in Mr. Krishna Vattam, an old-time journalist, who recently underwent a crash course in the use of computer conducted by his school-going grandson, so that he could get into blogging to "kick-start his literary writing career". Mr. Vattam's recollection of anecdotal stories on life and past times of Mysore and his propensity to view current events in the context of Mysore's recent history could make engaging blog material. And a potential blook.

The blog-to-movie progression of The Devil Wears Prada makes another point. That there is something beyond blook, for a hit blog - a 'flook'. A flick made out of blook.

CEO Arun Sarin's a 'dignity' clause in his contract

2007-01-12T18:30:00.000+05:30

I read ( can't recall where) sometime back, that Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin had it written into his contract that if and when his time came, he could not be asked to go by sending him an unceremonious "electronic mail or any other electronic messaging service." I read this in the context of a report that a UK-based insurance company had sacked 2,400 of its employees via terse e-mail.

By insisting that hiring and firing be done with some dignity, Mr. Sarin can be said to have set a precedent for HRDs. But then, do many of those who get fired really care? The shock could be the same whether you learn of it through a decently drafted e-mail or a three-word SMS, saying 'u r out'.

I once got sacked, but it happened decades before our graceless Internet era. I was then a proof-reader at a London printers. You got paid weekly, on Friday afternoons. And got sacked as well on Fridays. An hour before clock-out on Fridays, the cashier used to go round the printing works carrying a tray of sealed envelopes, and handing out pay packets to shop-floor employees. Like others, I awaited the cashier's arrival with the usual eagerness on that fateful Friday afternoon. He came, delivered, and left. He had left in my packet more money, twice my weekly pay.

Could it have been an accounting error? When I went to him, the cashier assured me there had been no mistake and that all the money was mine for keeps. He also let it be known that the company no longer needed my services. That extra cash was in lieu of the one-week notice period. Can you think of a nastier way of getting sacked? Gracelessness was the standard operating procedure for some companies.

There were exceptions. In Life magazine, it was said they didn't believe in sacking their staff. Instead, the chosen ones were made to feel so unwanted that they left on their own, sooner than later. Writing about her experiences in a book, Such Is Life, a former staffer described how those who fell out of favour were put through, what the author termed, the 'Treatment' by the Life management. A senior writer under 'Treatment' found, on his return from a vacation, that his desk on the editorial floor occupied by someone else. He found his personal effects shifted, in his absence, to an office on the floor above.

At his new office the staff writer was given a room to himself, with larger carpet space. However he was no longer asked to attend editorial conferences. No assignment came his way. He was left to his own devices. The management believed their dignified indifference would drive most people to resignation. But they misjudged the staff writer who used his time in the 'cooler' to write a novel. It got rave reviews. When the management realised he was building up a successful writing career at Life's expense, the man was relocated to his earlier desk on the editorial floor.

Such was Life then.
Now we need the 'dignity' clause.

(Unabridged version at Dateline Mysore, zine5.com)

Being positive under provocation

2007-01-10T07:52:00.000+05:30

This New Year I resolved to stay unruffled about nasty things people might say. "Don't be provoked, think positive," I said to myself. I soon realised that this was easier resolved than done.

Let me explain. In response to something I wrote, I got a mail, saying, "What the f--- r u",without as much as a question mark by way of punctuation. I didn't mind the f-word, a graphic speech form some people adopt to drive home their point. But his use of 'u' and 'r' was inexcusable. I sent a reply, saying I wish my anonymous friend showed a semblance of e-mail etiquette the next time he sent an abusive mail.

Now, how does one give a positive spin to such mail? Columnist Art Buchwald, they say, hung on his office wall framed copies of selected mail he received. Nastier ones merited the pride of wall space. Some stinkers on display at his office read:
"You are a nasty, ugly old man."
"Get the hell out of the US. Try Siberia."
"We girls think you most contemptible."
"Are you a writer or an idiot?"

Art's point is that you cannot be said to have arrived till you begin getting hate mail. I only wish my anonymous ill-wisher had spelt out his 'u' and 'r' and abbreviated the f-word.

Speaking of English, the language spoken by today's youth doesn't quite conform to grammar and the ground rules of English usage as laid down in Wren & Martin. During my last US trip to visit our son and daughter-in-law, some of their friends addressed my wife and me as "Hi, guys," without making a gender distinction. My wife, who is forgiving by nature, didn't think much of this. I, being a stickler for form, found this 'Hi, guy' thing disagreeable.

Typical snatches of conversation we had to cope with ran like this:
What's up, guys!
You smile, not quite knowing what to say to this 25-year-old who asked the question.
So, what did you, guys, see in LA ?
You list places - Universal Studios, Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Museum of Tolerance and so on.
"What, you guys were in LA and came away without seeing Disneyland?"

I got so worked up over this 'guy' talk by 'desi' friends that I posted a message on an NRI web site, giving vent to my smouldering indignation. My message evoked an e-mail response: "Tumhe aur kaam nahin hai kya? Are you unemployed, or something?"

This was deflating. This happened a while before my New Year resolve . Now, with my new-found positive mindset, I reckon, I shouldn’t have dripped over this 'Hi, guy' thing, in the first place. I can see this as a generation leveller. Viewed in this light I would rather have a young thing address me, 'Hi, guy,' than 'Uncleji.'

Recycled from Dateline Mysore, zine5.com

Would anyone know God's e-mail ID ?

2007-01-06T17:54:00.000+05:30

If marriages are indeed made in heaven, it is time God looked into the affairs of His department of matrimony. It has given too much licence to too many to enter into matrimony on the flimsiest of grounds - love. Whoever says a marriage works merely because the boy and girl involved are emotionally involved. We see the same old tiresome story being played out everywhere. The boy and the girl fall in love, become man and wife, fall out of love and live miserably ever after. Or have their personal lives exposed in divorce proceedings.

I want to send God a memo on the marriages He makes in heaven. Would someone let me have His e-mail ID? "I'm not even sure I believe in marriages anymore," said Gloria Swanson, a movie star of the silent era, after three unsuccessful marriages. I have just finished reading her engrossing memoirs, Swanson on Swanson. It is a 550-pager and Gloria needed every page to recount her life story spanning five marriages.

Murphy's law of wedding states that everything that can go wrong with a marriage usually does. I read somewhere that 45 percent marriages in the US end up in divorce. Can God afford such high rejection rate of marriages made in heaven? In India we have other ways of putting an end to marriages. Such as bride burning. This happens in 'wed-now-pay-later' cases. Trouble arises when the bride's parents don't pay dowry. You see, marriages, even if made in heaven, can be about money.

The Heavens have been much too liberal in sanctioning so-called 'love marriages'. If you ask me, it is a contradiction in terms, love marriage. For love, as we knew it during courtship, rarely survives marriage. People in love have no idea of what they are getting into. Nor are they in a mood to listen to voice of experience What they don't realise is that unlike courtship during which lovers spend quality time together, marriage means spending time with your partner on a 24-hour basis.

When love fades out and you come down from cloud 9 you might well be lumbered with a spouse who snores, blabbers in sleep, watches too much sports on TV, takes too much time at the bath and carries magazines to the loo. It is adjustment, accommodation, understanding, a flair for argument usually over trivia and a spirit of endurance that sustain a marriage.

I have nothing against love marriage. My son Ravi has married the girl of his choice. To be candid, I can't say I jumped with joy when Ravi first mentioned Meera, the girl he had in mind, in a long-distance call from the US, I was relieved, though, to learn that the person my son had in mind for matrimony was not Mexican, Spanish or Chinese, but an ABCD (America Born Confused 'Desi'). Meera must have been a confused girl. How else could one explain her choice? Normally, I am not among those who would quarrel with the notion that love knows no nationality. But this case wasn't normal. I was the father of the groom.

As father of the groom, I had certain responsiblities, such as breaking the news to my aged parents, their conservative clan of relations at Pollachi, not to speak of my wife's not-so-progressive sisters. My son choosing his own life-partner was, in itself, enough to raise their conservative eye-brows. And a girl born and brought up in the US was clearly an unknown entity. No one in our family circles was familiar with such species.

Meera helped matters by making a pre-wedding familiarisation visit to India. She spared me the unenviable task of having to reassure our relations that not all America-born girls need be 'memsab' in temperament. With her unassuming ways and pleasing manners Meera managed to dispel apprehensions and inspire confidence and affection in my clan. The only snag was that many of my relations couldn't get the hang of Meera's accent.

Parental concerns are not always in the reckoning of some of our determined youths. Defiance of parents by those in love is a running theme of many of our movies.If God wants to protect his made-in-heaven brand image, he ought to rein in love-struck youths from rushing in where sensible people would pause to contemplate the consequences of matrimony. Today's youth watch too much soap, too many movies such as Dil to Pagal Hai, Kuch Kuch Hotha Hai, Salam Namaste, and, of course, that mother of all mismatched couple movies - Kabhi Alvida Na Kehana.

If such films have to be made at all because of box-office compulsions, they should be given 'PG' certificate i.e. vulnerable youths could be allowed to watch such films only in the company of sensible parents.It is a matter of perspective. Take Devdas. I view it as a promotional film for liquor; and also a film about the virtues of arranged marriage. Paru's parents in Devdas ensure that their daughter has an enduring married life. Just imagine her plight, if Paru had married Devdas.

Tailpiece: The last time I sent a communication to God was in 1971. The letter (no Internet then) I sent was returned undelivered. I had not given the proper PIN code for heaven. 1971 was the year I got married.

For the unabridged version of this piece look up Dateline Mysore in zine5.

Saraswati, an Unschooled Middle-class Mother

2007-01-02T12:16:00.000+05:30

(Republished to mark the death anniversary of a woman of substance. The piece was initially published in Jan.2003)

My neighbor in Coonoor, G.V. Raman, lost his mother, Saraswati, when she was nearly 90; an age when she believed it was better to be gone than be alive any longer, overstaying your welcome. A month before her death she had made out a will, listing among other items a bank deposit of Rs. 50,000 to be set aside for funeral rites. She also made a trip to Coonoor that was to be her farewell visit.For someone named after the goddess of learning, Saraswati didn't do much schooling - a third standard dropout. Saraswati belonged to the vanishing species of unschooled middle-class mothers. They don't make mothers like Saraswati nowadays.

Today's middle-class mothers come with an academic degree. Which doesn't necessarily make them more educated. The purpose of education, one would think, is to enable you to cope with the world you come to confront in life. Saraswati's world centred around her husband and children and she learnt to cope with the rigors of domestic life at an age when today's girls are at school and full of dreams fed on Barbara Cartland. Saraswati became a near child-bride, kept house and bore children before she turned 20. She was married at 13 to someone eight years older than her. On the final count she produced 11 children - eight male and three female - of whom seven (four and three) survive her. No school or university can offer a course to cope with this situation.

If anything, among the Western educated women there is a libbers' school of thought that would like to wish away motherhood. I read about this writer, Ellen Peck, whose book The Baby Trap extolled the virtues and joys of not having children. She composed an obituary to motherhood, which was published in The New York Times on Mother's Day. Saraswati's generation was brought up in a tradition where women didn't have rights. She only had duties. A woman was expected to be a dutiful daughter, dutiful wife and mother. It takes some education in tolerance for one to conform to such tradition.

"My mother was solely devoted to the comforts and well-being of my father," says Raman. Always at her husband's beck and call, Saraswati's purpose in life was to please him.Her husband's position at the Aruvankadu cordite factory in the pre-Independence days entailed occasional entertaining of his British colleagues at home. Saraswati picked up enough social etiquette to make inane small talk with Mrs Norris, Flannegan or McCantyre.

At Pune, where her husband was posted , Saraswati had the occasion to accompany her husband to a VIP reception at which the visiting governor sought her out to exchange a few words. Saraswati was the only woman wearing diamond nose-rings and sari in the 'madisar' style adopted by orthodox Brahmins. "Mother didn't betray any communication problem," says Raman. That she didn't know a word of English didn't pose difficulty. She had mastered Ananda Bodhini, a guidebook that listed core English words and their meaning in readable Tamil.

She wouldn't address her husband by name, not only out of reverence but also because of a belief that a woman who addressed her husband by his proper or nick name tended to shorten his life. He died some 25 years earlier than she did, even though Saraswati was scrupulous enough not to address him as Gopalan even once in his presence. According to Raman, his mother's only regret was that her husband did not live to share with her the fruits of his government service. His last drawn pension was less than Rs. 500 while Saraswati drew a family pension that was ten times the amount.

And she spent much of it on gifts, tips, autorickshaw rides to the bank and, occasionally, movies. Rajnikant was her favorite. She listed in a diary all the films she had seen her entire life. Raman described his mother as sociable. She relished spending evenings at the sit-out in front of her house watching the world pass by and trading gossip with the milkman, vegetable vendor and the flower woman who relied on her for their daily news fix. The old lady's favorite reading was Dina Thanti , a Tamil daily noted for its coverage of crime and social gossip .

Saraswati was fastidious. Till death she wouldn't give up on the nine-yard sari, wearing which was increasingly becoming an ordeal. She never sat down to eat without a napkin; and always rounded off her meals with sugared curd in a silver cup and spoon.As Raman put it, "My mother might not have been born with a silver spoon, but she left behind one." He treasures it

FAQ: What do I do the whole day?

2006-12-30T07:13:00.000+05:30

I remember an envious colleague telling me on the day I retired, "I wish I too could say, a Monday is just another day."

Ogden Nash articulated the thought in a verse:
Monday is the day that everything starts all over again;
It's the day when life becomes grotesque again,
Because it is the day when you have to face your desk again;

The bliss of retirement, of not having to go to work, is short-lived. Before long you discover there is another side to a life free from Monday-morning work hassle. Now I have people asking how I manage to spend time in retirement. I tell them about my collection of unread books, the TV remote, that handy device for channel-surfing. I tell them about my blog. They nod agreeably. And just about when I feel that the issue has been settled, they pop the question: "Yes, but what is it that you do the entire day?"

Even while in service, friends and relatives, whose perception of a journalist is based on what they see in movies, had difficulty believing that I was capable of an honest day's work. A journalist is seen generally fooling around in coffeehouses or the press club much of the day, dropping in at the office for a while to work the phone and tap a few hundred words on his PC before rushing out for cocktails in the evening. If this is called work, they wonder what idling would be all about.

I mean, they can clearly see the slogging involved in the job done by a ledger-pushing bank clerk or a bricklayer. Even some government babus manage to look busy and purposeful. But when it comes to the media, people are a bit dense on what, precisely, a newspaper correspondent does. I suppose one could raise the same question about the Pope or the President of India.

Our TV and print media photos usually show the President taking a leisurely ride on the horse-drawn Victoria down Rajpath on R Day, hosting lavish parties for visiting dignitaries or pinning medals on people. My boss at the Times of India News Service desk was seen doing not much other than signing sub-editors’ duty charts, leave-sanction forms and lighting up his Guntur cheroot that got put out every now and then. He made seem time-consuming. The boss always managed to look important, purposeful, and in his loosened up tie and rolled up sleeves, fully occupied.

As I said, since retirement the most persistent FAQ I have had, even from well-meaning folk: What do I do the whole day? Spending time on the Net, or with a book, isn’t seen as ‘activity’. I don’t go to the bank or post-office; or stir out my house to pay the phone or power bill. I had a neighbour in Coonoor who had a flair for fixing things - electric iron boxes, mixie, torches, vintage HMV sets that play gramophone records and virtually any other thing that would otherwise have been consigned to the kabariwalah.

Watches and wall clocks that don't run fascinated my busybody neighbour . Occasionally, when he found himself on loose ends, he checked out his neighbours, asking if they needed anything he could fetch from the market or if they had a dripping tap that needed a fresh washer. In contrast, there I was, doing none of this. Must confess I haven’t even mastered the art of wiring a blown fuse. What’s worse, I often get caught ‘book-handed’.

If there is anything a wife usually gets bugged about in a man milling around the house 24x7, it is his obsession with books. Her refrain, ‘don't sit there hiding your face behind a book, do something.’ In retirement, count yourself lucky if you get to read a book, without being interrupted, by having to answer phone calls that are usually for others in the house; distracted by someone ringing the door bell – dobhi or subzi-lady. This is when you miss the office. I used to take a book to work; averaged two titles a week.

Retirement is not all about a running argument with your wife. It makes you more reflective; ponder philosophical questions such as, "How did I age so quickly?" It seemed not so long ago, when I was a care-free bachelor, then, a not-so-caring husband in newspaper, and job-driven absentee father for my son; and now, a grandpa. After retirement, notably, after a grandson happens, you find more relevance to life. Snag is you realize that there isn't much life ahead for you to benefit from the enlightment.

And then the changed lifestyle leaves you with time to think, particularly during those insomnic spells. Few people really do think, although most believe they do. Thinking is demanding and tiring. It is an exercise for the mind. Thinking is hard work. Need I say anything else about how I spend most of my day?

(See earlier version of this piece in zine5.com)

Of Punch & Shadow, and a street dog named Brownie

2006-12-27T12:02:00.000+05:30

When our Bitsy died my wife and I resolved never to keep a dog ever again. Bitsy was irreplaceable. But my wife's madness for dogs hasn't gone away, even decades after Bitsy's death. It is in her DNA. Whenever she phones any of her many sisters the conversation eventually turns to dogs. She talks about Prince with Gowri in Mysore; about Joey, with Chitra, the dead old Tuffy, with Rajesh (both in Chennai). At a recent family get-together in Bangalore, hosted by Gita, the bunch of sisters ran a seminar on dogs. Besides their own Punch and Shadow Gita's daughter, Bubly, is friends with Rocky, Tommy, Blackie and a couple of other street dogs of Kammanhalli, Bangalore.

Speaking of street dogs we had one at Coonoor that fed on leftovers offered by neighbourhood residents. Piloo Nazir, who isn't a rice eater, bought rice from the fair-price shop, only to feed our friendly neighbourhood dog. She boiled leafy vegetable with a fistful of rice, and served it without salt or sugar,but with spoonsful of sympathy. The dog had it all without complaining.

But then he was not finicky, like Prince in Mysore, who would wait till late in the evening, on an empty stomach, for his master Raghottam to come home from the club with the customary packet of chicken bones. Our neighbourhood dog was not as fussy as Shadow in Bangalore who would want his fresh milk and rice served in stainless steel bowl, preferably hand-fed by my niece Bubly. Our dog was not as pampered as Tuffy or sheltered in a Velacherry delux apartment as Joey.

When my nephew Kartik had to leave Joey in the care of the SPCA at Vepery, Chennai, for a few days, the handler was instructed to serve him curd and rice, which wasn't on the kennel menu. The dog handler told him that he would have to order it from a nearby restaurant. Kartik left with him a hefty advance to cover the food plus a little something for the curd-and-rice care.

Yes, we are a dog-mad clan. I must say I married into one. Before our wedding, my wife had a dog named Bhutto. Whether or not Bhutto is remembered in Pakistan, the name is part of our family folklore. I am not sure what prompted my wife's family to name their dog after a signatory to the Simla Agreement. But then there need not always be a reason for in one's doings.

Unlike pet dogs that are taken out for daily walk by pet owners, our dog in Coonoor used to walk people in the neighbourhood. He escorted school kids to the bus stand. He took our neighbours, the Ramans, to the temple, and escorted my wife and me on our morning walks. Which was why we named him Walker - Brownie V Walker, to call him by his full name. That 'V' in the middle sorted him out from other Brownies in town. One should not confuse our dog with Brownie A Walker ( of Aruvankadu) or 'B' (for Bedford) Walker. I don't know why, but most street dogs we found in Coonoor were brown.

Walker had many friends, who joined him on our walks. And before we made it to the St.Anthony School kerb, we had a gang of brownies, all friends of Walker, walking us along. At times Walker followed a jogger for a few yards to sniff him out. A few of the morning walkers he didn't particularly fancy. There is this lady with a boy's hairdo. Whenever she happened to overtake us on the street, Walker barked. She was not amused; we looked elsewhere in embarrassment. The lady once shouted out across the street, asking us why we didn't have him on a leash. She, probably, didn't see Walker was a street dog who happened to walk along with us.

We could not get rid of him, even if we wanted to. There is no way Walker would disown us. He has no ego. Shoo him away and he would be back, wagging his tail with added vigour before you could say Brownie Vannarpet Walker. At times I got put off by his prancing, pouncing and licking at my forearm as soon as I step out of the house in the morning. Walker, who spent the night out in the cold, was always at our door-step in the morning. We humans we are so full of ourselves that we fail to to appreciate Walker's selfless cheerfulness after a night out in the cold and the exuberance with which he greeted us in the morning.

But then I couldn't bring myself to admit Walker into the family fold. You see, we once had a dog, Bitsy, who was picked up from the streets in Bhopal. We took Bitsy along when I was transferred to Chandigarh and then on to Chennai. He died at the age of 13, of kidney failure. Bitsy was an adorable rogue and undisciplined to the core. The only person he ever listened to was Dinkar, our office assistant. But then Dinkar could not come with us to Chennai. Fortunately, we had a spare bedroom in our Pantheon Road residence and we locked Bitsy in there whenever we had visitors.

Those who know dogs know that most of them are allergic to khaki. Walker didn't fancy our postman. We could have asked him not to wear khaki, if only to appease Walker. But that would have been against regulations. But then Walker was freaky. He didn't like my newspaper delivery boy either. And he didn't wear khaki.

We really don't understand dogs, do we? My junk mail the other day had this to say about dogs:
They follow you around with their tongues out; only respond to simple commands; their needs are basic and predictable; they whine when such needs are not met; they scratch a lot, and sometimes drool; make loud noises and sometimes smell bad; they are rude and rowdy, especially when they are with others like them.

What does it all add up to? Dogs are men that wag their tails. In some respects, they are more sensible than humans. I have not seen a dog throwing stones at stray men. Have you ?

Talking Gandhi over brandy

2006-10-02T06:27:00.000+05:30

(Published in Nov. 2003, the theme of this piece is ever-relevant, and eminently recycleable every other Oct. 2. Wonder if Dr M S Rao has found a publisher for his irreverent book on Gandhi.)

It takes courage for someone to attempt a book on Gandhi. He is so over-written about that a Google web search for books on the Mahatma throws up 324,000 references. There is so much information overload that anyone who entertains thoughts of publishing yet another book ought to be either Gandhi's grandson or mentally challenged. Dr. M.S. Rao is neither. And he has a book in the works; and is in search of a publisher.

Dr. Rao, a medical practitioner disenchanted with his profession, is settled in Coonoor and runs a guest-house - www.trystindia.com - with his English wife. Apparently, he has better credentials to write about the ills of medical profession than about Gandhi. Dr. Rao has written about it in 'Look After Yourself. No One Else Will - How to bypass the medical profession and stay healthy'.

I didn't know Dr. Rao well enough to dissuade him from doing the Gandhi book when he called me the other day for a get-together. I didn't know what I was in for when I suggested the Velan Ritz bar. Discussing Gandhi over rum and lukewarm water wasn't quite my idea of spending the evening. Besides, care-takers of his legacy would rather prescribe a glass of goat milk to go with Gandhi. Speaking of legacy, it is said a London restaurant owner named his enterprise Gandhi Steak House. In a magazine article Gopalkrishna Gandhi said, 'Gandhi (the name) sells, so does his steak; and together the two work magic for the restaurant owner'. Speaking for himself, Gandhi's grandson says it works for him eminently - 'paths open, pot holes close to let the person bearing the name pass'. At airports he gets waved through by customs officials when they look at Mr Gandhi's passport.

Dr. Rao is no goat-milk Gandhian. Indeed he believes that Gandhi needs to be saved from such elements. He claims his book is an attempt to 'liberate' Gandhi. The thing that is going for him is this incurable obsession with the subject and Dr. Rao's belief that no book has succeeded in explaining fully the phenomenon of Gandhi, who, he says, is impossible to pigeonhole. As he put it, the man was a politician, philosopher, doctor, dietician, sex-therapist, ascetic, veterinarian, social reformer, woolly-headed anarchist, mystic, rabble-rouser and a compulsive cleaner of latrines.It is about time someone presented Gandhi in a manner that was not only acceptable to the present times, but interesting to an entire spectrum of readers, says Dr. Rao in a prologue to his book, which is nearly done. The prologue gives us the author's sense of Gandhi in today's world.

Dr. Rao poses the question: What, for instance, would Gandhi do, if a bunch of thugs rough him up, as they do in Mafia movies? After the deed is done the thugs leave Gandhi, with a bleeding nose, and a warning: "It will be worse next time, old man, unless you give up making salt."And then Gandhi gets a call from another thug informing that one of his sons was being held for ransom and he would be killed, if Gandhi didn't pay up. To which Gandhi reacts, "You've got the wrong number, mate. I have no dough, so go ahead and do what you think is best. By the way, which son of mine are you holding? I have millions of them." So spoke the father of the nation, in an alien accent. Having spent 17 years in Liverpool Dr. Rao can't be faulted for embellishing Gandhi's lingo.

Dr. Rao says one can find much that is self-incriminating in Gandhi's own writings. And anyone diligent enough to go through them could interpret Gandhi in any light. If one wanted to dismiss Gandhi as manic depressive, one could do so in Gandhi's own words. "If we were to conclude he was an egotist, he says so himself; a sexual faddist, he tells us this quite plainly; and a nut case, he joyfully agrees," says Dr. Rao.The author says he has peppered his book with remarks on Gandhi by non-Indians, because "citations from others are, by far, the surest way to impress Indians, whose peculiar psyche does not lend them to believe their own kind." A book gets noticed, if it informs, interprets, irritates or exhilarates the reader. Whether or not he delivers on the other three attributes it appears Dr. Rao would have no problem irritating readers with some of his self-opinionated remarks.

A social nobody, with no-good address

2006-09-19T10:29:00.000+05:30

(Published in Sept.2002 when I used to live in Coonoor. Now based in Mysore, I stay on the classy end of Dewan’s Road, where real-estate value of flats has nearly doubled in the last two years, says my friend and property developer Mr M B Nagakumar.)

At out-of-town parties and social gatherings when people learn I belong to Coonoor, I tend to draw more attention than other out-of-town guests, say, from Cuddalore or Namakkal. "Oh, you're from Coonoor?" they ask with envious interest, taking you, perhaps, for a planter, a retired company vice-president or Maneckshaw's neighbour. The moment they learn that I live in Vannarpet, Coonoor, the "interested" guests lose interest and move along to find someone else to say "hi" to.

Some socially self-conscious folk in my locality feel that I misrepresent our address. Balaji, a youth in our neighbourhood, can't see why I keep mentioning Vannarpet, while our housing board flats are located at Srinagar Colony. I tell him that even the beat postman and auto-men are not quite familiar with this name. In fact, our locality has yet another name - Thanthai Periyar Nagar. I whip out my voter identity card to prove this.

Balaji has a point. By flaunting my unenviable address I might be making a social statement.Vannarpet, I concede, doesn't sound quite classy. The address could prove fatal for social-climbers. You could lose a contact, as I did with an old schoolmate of mine. After we finished schooling in New Delhi in the late fifties, we went our different ways, till our paths crossed three years back. That was when I heard that my schoolmate had become the top brass in the Coonoor military establishment. His address: Flagstaff House, Wellington.

I phoned and he was happy to hear from an old schoolmate. A few days later he asked my wife and me to dinner at the Flagstaff House. We spent a pleasant evening, at the end of which we resolved that we would stay in touch. But we never got round to meeting again and my friend eventually retired from the army and left Coonoor. I can't figure out why we didn't meet again, but the thought crossed my mind that my address might have had something to do with it. But to be fair to him, I must say we had not been pals at school, though we have had some common friends.

In my younger days when I spent three years in London my friends and I were particular about finding digs at a "decent address." We would not have anything to do with Southall, which had the reputation of being blue-collar and infested with our compatriots. A joke that did the rounds had it that when someone asked a policeman for directions in Southall, he was told, "Turn right at the traffic lights, take the third left and follow the curry-smell and you can't miss it, mate." The stranger followed the directions faithfully, but got confused by a profusion of curry-smells. The friendly London bobby had not said which curry - mutton, fish or plain chicken.

Those days you could get a reasonably big and fully furnished room, all to yourself, for three guineas a week in Brixton, Camden Town or Shepherds Bush. But we were willing to pay as much and a few bob more for an attic or even basement digs, so long as it carried an address in Chelsea, South Kensington or Hampstead.

The London telephone numbers in the sixties carried a three-letter area code followed by a four-digit number. I used to share a bed-sitter with a friend at Bayswater, a middle-class locality, but we managed to get an 'MAR' phone number that belonged to the Marble Arch exchange, an upscale commercial district. My crummy basement room at Swiss Cottage had a phone connected to the exchange at Hampstead, an affluent residential area. It helped to have a classy area-code, particularly if you needed to work the phone in your line of business. Area codes such as 'HAM' (for Hampstead), 'BEL' (Belgravia) or 'KEN' (Kensington) had an element of social magic that persuaded unsuspecting strangers to return your calls.

Of course, you can't underrate the importance of acquiring a London Westend address. It made business sense for commercial establishments based in the suburbs to rent a Westend postal address. I worked for a few months in a shoestring community news weekly, India Weekly. that was brought out by a voluntary group of journalists. But we had an impressive address that we shared with the London Bureau of the Ananda Bazar group of newspapers. India Weekly was located next door to the London Daily Mail on Carmelite Street. I could claim that I have worked in the famed Fleet Street.

Subsequently, I edited The Afro-Asian Echo, a journal run by a Nigerian who had fled to London with his loot in the wake of the civil war in his country. He paid through the nose for locating the Echo's business office in the upscale Oxford Street area. And the journal folded up in six months. Maintaining a classy business address proved fatally expensive. The Nigerian still owes me a month's pay.

In the US the very well-to-do live in gated communities where you can't acquire real estate merely because you have the lolly. You've got to be socially acceptable. This rules out most ethnic minorities and African-Americans unless, of course, you happen to be Oprah Winfrey or Denzel Washington. Social exclusivity is zealously guarded by residents. Their point is acquisition of houses by any Tom, Dick or Harry who can pay the asking price tends to bring down the property value in the area.

Nearer home, I can't think of a city better planned for perpetrating social snobbery than New Delhi - the largest babuland in the country. You can judge the status and class of a government official by the locality he comes from. Sarojini Nagar is Class III and II. Kaka Nagar is decidedly Class I. R K Puram and Rabindra Nagar are both government residential colonies, but they are a class apart. Residents of Moti Nagar are not in the same league as those living in Maharani Bagh.

A socially upscale address does not necessarily mean decent living conditions. I spent over 10 years in Chennai in a flat infested with mosquitoes all the year round. Coovum flowed, nay, remained stagnant with syrupy effluent, barely a block away from our apartments complex. Whenever the wind blew our way the stench would waft into our second-floor drawing room. When it rained one had to wade through ankle-deep water to reach the parking lot. The residents shared the apartment complex with lizards, cockroach, bandicoots and an assortment of other janthus. My address: Parsn Towers, Pantheon Road. It was classy

VIPs: Some are, Simply, Simple

2006-09-04T09:25:00.000+05:30

(Sonia Lunches with 'Commoner' - Newspaper headline.

Karnataka Chief Minister, Mr H D Kumaraswamy, has taken to overnight halts at villagers' residence while he is out on tour. This way, says CM, I get to understand people's grassroots problem better.
We have a President with the common touch. The very name A P J Kalam has become synonimous with simplicity. Following piece appeared in July 2002; was written on the eve of Dr. Kalam's shift in residence from the residential quarters of Anna University, Chennai, to Rashtrapati Bhavan.)

So, our 'missiles man' Kalam put himself through the security routine at Chennai airport the other day. Kalam Insists On Going Through Security Process said a page four box-item in The Hindu. His 'insistence' on opening up his own hand baggage for inspection is understandable. For A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, after moving to Rashtrapati Bhavan, would no longer be allowed to get away with such a thing. Surely, we can't have our President queuing up at the Indian Airlines check-in counter.

Dr. Kalam being frisked by a CISF chap before walking through a metal-detector would have made a great picture. It could have been turned into a media event. His airport security act might be seen by critics as a PR exercise. But then the MIT (Madras Institute of Technology) diploma-holder in aeronautical engineering who scaled such heights in the world of academics and scientists doesn't have to resort to such stunts. The humility and simplicity of the man is writ large on his face, attire and demeanour. In fact, if Dr. Kalam were to travel abroad without the Presidential 'bandha,' some uninformed 'immigration' bloke at a European airport might pull him in for questioning, as happened to Dr. Amartya Sen at Zurich airport some time back.

At Coonoor, where I live, I have seen Field Marshal Maneckshaw awaiting his turn at the cash counter in a bank. My bank employee neighbour Jayakumar made acquaintance with the Field Marshal during his periodical visits to the Bedford branch of Union Bank. An ex-serviceman himself, Jayakumar is overwhelmed by Maneckshaw's refreshing accessibility - "When I was in the army I couldn't dream of going anywhere near the general, let alone having a word with him."

Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma, as union communications minister, used to visit the Hanuman temple in New Delhi's Irwin Road on Thursday evenings without 'bandobast.' The message Kalam and Maneckshaw send out through personal example is generally lost on most others in public life, for whom rules and regulations are meant for lesser mortals, and flouting them is the norm for a VIP. Haven't we heard of 'chota-mota' political busybodies throwing their weight about at airports and, at times, holding up commercial flights to await the late arrival of some VIP? Black cats in attendance, escort vehicles and advance patrol cars constitute the ultimate status symbol.

We now have a President who delights in browsing at airport bookstalls and chatting with the sales staff. The question is: would Dr. Kalam be able to, nay, would he be allowed to, do his thing, now that he has tenanted Rashtrapati Bhavan? Presidential office is protocol-driven and an element of pomp and ceremony goes with the turf. Initial reaction to Kalam's choice as the NDA presidential nominee was one of surprise in many quarters. Besides, one doesn't associate the likes of Dr. Kalam with the political polemics the presidential race evoked.

And then, it was not as if he got elected to the highest office in the land on the strength of personal credentials. Dr. Kalam wasn't even the first choice of NDA, which was shopping for an expedient 'minority' candidate. Cynics would have us believe that there was a toss-up between Muslim and 'Isai' in which the former had an edge. The outcome of the presidential race would have been different had Dr. Kalam been adopted by the left parties instead of the NDA.

Viewed in this light, the presidential race smacked of political match-fixing. Everyone knew the score even before the game started. What mattered was the numbers, not the relative merits of the opposing candidates. There is no such thing as 'conscience' vote in political contests. The last time they resorted to the ploy was when Indira Gandhi backed V.V. Giri in the name of 'conscience' vote against the official presidential nominee of the Congress. In politics, you follow your 'conscience' only if you want to split the party.

I admire Capt. Lakshmi Sahgal for her courage in taking on a fight she very well knew she couldn't win. She called it a 'symbolic' contest; willingly submitted herself to becoming the 'symbol' for the side that didn't have the numbers, but wanted to make a political point. The left parties sought to demonstrate their 'ideological' divide with the BJP-led ruling alliance.
NDA, in its choice of Dr. Kalam, sought to play the 'minority' card. We didn't see him as a Muslim till the BJP-driven ruling coalition opted for Dr. Kalam's candidature.

We have had Muslims as Presidents before, but the circumstances were not the same. The Gujarat riots and BJP's party political compulsions in the state accounted for an unwarranted focus on Dr. Kalam's minority status. Likewise, few saw Capt. Sahgal as a Tamilian. That she was a Tamil by birth was made out to be a factor in the contest against the Ramanathapuram-born A.P.J. Kalam. We have had a contest between two illustrious persons who belonged to the same and the smallest of the minority groups - 'Hindustani.'

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Importance of being Aarthi Prabhu

2006-08-27T11:00:00.000+05:30

(During every Ganesh Puja my mind goes back to the Ganesh festival I celebrated some 15 years back at Kudal, a modest Maharashtra village. This piece, published in 2002, is about a legend Kudal gave to Marathi literature. About Aarthi Prabhu, who continues to live in the hearts and minds of the people of Kudal decades after the poet's demise.)

I had not heard of Aarthi Prabhu till I visited his native village, Kudal, in Maharashtra. This was some 15 years ago, over two decades after Aarthi Prabhu's death. But people still talked about him as if he had been with them till the other day. They spoke of him in endearing terms, but with an acute sense of sadness. Aarthi Prabhu died young, at the age of 46, in 1976.

My Kudal visit was sponsored by a generous friend, R.S. Sawant, settled in Chennai, and made annual visits to his native Kudal during the Ganesh festival. When I expressed a desire to visit his part of the country during Ganesh puja, a major social event for Marathis, Sawant readily offered to take me along, but on one condition. "You shall not open your purse during the entire trip," ruled Sawant, "better still, forget your wallet at home." It was a ten-day trip. Such was his Maratha hospitality.

As I said, everyone in Kudal knew someone who had known Aarthi Prabhu, Kudal's native man of letters. He is still so much a household name that you have got to be bit of a dud not to be familiar with the name - if you ask, "Aarthi, who?" folks in Kudal could give you that funny look. Mrs Sawant, wife of my host, had been to the same school as Aarthi Prabhu. Their headmaster, K.A. Wardekar, was the first to identify Aarthi's literary potentials. Wardekar was a Maths teacher, and Aarthi had particular distaste for the subject. But then he used to show his early writings to Wardekar, who felt inadequate to judge their literary merit - "I referred the boy to P.S. Nerlurkar."

My hosts took me to Wardekar's house at Vengurla. Every other person you are introduced to makes it a point to mention that Sunil Gavaskar belongs here and they have named a local sports stadium at Vengurla after the cricket legend. Mr Wardekar talked about 'madcap' Chandu, as Aarthi Prabhu was known among friends and schoolmates. Chintamani Triambak Khanolkar was his name. "Magazines would not accept his initial poems," said Wardekar, "perhaps, because his name didn't sound literary." The pseudonym - Aarthi Prabhu - helped sell his works. After he had gained literary fame Aarthi Prabhu had novels and treatise published under his own name.

Aarthi wasn't particularly well-read. He was not familiar enough with Marathi literature to be influenced by anyone's works. At school he was poor in studies; at home he wasn't endeared by his parents. Wardekar had kept in touch with Aarthi Prabhu even after he gave up studies to help his father at the eating house run by the family - "Aarthi was a victim of child abuse, often beaten up by his father." Wardekar was a regular customer at the eating house - "They served mid-day meals at Rs.50 a month."

After his father's death Aarthi wound up the family eating house and moved to Bombay, in 1959, with his wife, three children, widowed mother and an uncle. The first and the only job he held was that of an attendant in All India Radio. He used to commute to work from Karjat, which is closer to Pune than Mumbai. Aarthi Prabhu could not hold the AIR job for long. He was turned out on suspicion that he had Communist leanings.

It turned out to be a blessing, as Mrs Sawant put it. The Tata Centre for Promotion of Arts and Literature discovered Aarthi's potential and offered him a monthly scholarship of Rs.1,000. The two-year term was extended for a further period of two years. It was during this time that Aarthi's oversized family saw some happy days. It was also a period during which Aarthi was prolific in his writings. His plays became popular.

For someone who had problems getting through high school, Aarthi Prabhu's works came to be prescribed for Marathi literature students at the post-graduate level. Seven scholars have done PhDs on various aspects of Aarthi Prabhu's literary work. His literary reputation brought Aarthi Prabhu close to the Mangeshkar family. Lata and her sister Asha Bhosle set to music and sang some of his poems. As Wardekar put it, Aathi's regret was that his literary worth went unrecognised in native Kudal during his lifetime. Kudal boasts of a 125-year-old public library with a collection of 20,000 titles, but it did not have a set of the complete works of Aarthi Prabhu.

His personal misery and poverty did not cramp Aarthi's literary output, which was prolific till the end. They say that even in his deathbed at K E M Hospital he didn't give up on his writing; he handed in to the attending doctor a scrap of paper in which he had scribbled these lines shortly before the end came:

"At the last turn of my life's journey,
There should be a blossom of flowers;
And if possible, I should get up and walk,
To complete my journey of life."

The leading character in American Beauty, that masterpiece on decadence of life in the suburbia, says, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life; and this is true of every day, except the day you die." Aarthi Prabhu, even on the verge of death, sought to live even his final hours as if it were his first day.

The unsung sub-editors in print media

2006-08-21T18:39:00.000+05:30

( This piece appeared in July 2002, and relates to the print media in New Delhi during the Sixties. Most newspaper readers may not be familiar with the species called 'sub-editors'. They put in shape raw copy written by correspondents. Sub-editors process the story submitted by a correspondent, and give headlines to what appears on the printed page. Reporters/correspondents corner all the glory; get invited to booze parties, the press tours. Behind every correspondent's byline in newspapers, there is usually an unsung sub-editor. )

Every office has its sacred cow. Ours at the Times of India (TOI) came in the guise of a Special Correspondent (with capital 'S' and 'C,' in grudging recognition of his sacred cow status). He was an unmitigated pain in the butt for us on the TOI news service desk. This piece, however, is not just about an 'SC' (who was, in fact, a brahmin in the office hierarchy); it is more about that downtrodden backroom species in a newspaper office, called sub-editor.

Inspiration for this piece came from a paragraph in which writer Brendan Gill sums up his spell as an editor on The New Yorker magazine. In his book, Here at The New Yorker, Gill wrote, and I quote: "For a time, I served as an editor as well as a writer, but the experiment proved uncongenial to my vanity. We had writers so inept that one had to rewrite them almost word for word, and when, at a cocktail or dinner party, I would hear a writer praised for a profile that was, in fact, almost entirely my handiwork, I would grind my teeth with ill-conceived rage."

Gill can be said to have spoken for the universal brotherhood of sub-editors in the print media. Speaking for myself, I have occasionally had an odd reporter thanking me for, what Gill calls "the usual tidying up of grammatical loose ends." But, as a class, reporters are not given to acknowledging the value-addition done to their work by rewrite persons. If anything, reporters are quick to blame the editorial desk for "butchering" their copy.

During my early days with TOI as sub-editor on the news service desk in New Delhi, we had a Lucknow-based special correspondent, who enjoyed a sacred-cow status with the editor. We shall call him Shastri. He had a know-all air about him and, what's worse, he believed that sub-editors were part of the editorial furniture in a newspaper office.

Shastri had a penchant for Victorian flourish in his writing. Which was okay in a Sunday magazine piece. But news reports on something as mundane as question hour proceedings in the legislative assembly or the CPI state council meeting called for straight-forward journalese, to describe who hit out at what and when pandemonium prevailed in the house. But then Shastri had in him the genes of Shakespeare, who probably was born Seshappaiyer in a Telugu Brahmin family before the literary world reinvented him.

Ignorant of Shastri's special status, in my early days with TOI news desk, I took liberty with his copy, cutting out the literary foreplay from a news story on zero hour hungama at the UP assembly. Shastri was not amused. Besides, he was a pal of my chief at the news service desk. The next morning our shift in-charge, K T R Menon, gave me a piece of helpful advice - "We don't edit Shastri's copy; we just mark paragraphs and bung it in." Menon, an accomplished rewrite man, knew better than investing his professional skills on Shastri's work. The TOI editor, Girilal Jain, used to ask 'KTR' to "run through" editorials and his edit-page articles before they were sent down for printing. Such has been his professional reputation that Menon, after retirement from New Delhi TOI news desk, was recalled by the management to help launch a daily in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Girilal, like most editors, had his favorites. Reporters generally had free access to the editor, particularly those with extensive contacts in political and bureaucratic circles. And Girilal, like all editors, believed that his editorials and political punditry made waves. Political correspondents and those who covered the PMO gave the editor feedback, filling him in on the impact his writings made in South Block. And the correspondents contrived an impact-report, even if Girilal's editorial words of wisdom went unread on any given day by those at the government decision-making level.

We had a Pandey, Special Correspondent, whose proficiency in palm-reading rather than his professional merit opened the editor's door for him and put him on the fast track. But the snag with being such "special asset" reporter was that his sacred cow status did not survive Girilal Jain. When Arun Shourie took over as executive editor, Pandey, who had everything going for him till then, suddenly found himself as lost as a stray cow squatting on a Daryagunj road divider during rush hour. Shourie didn't care for Pandey's proficiency in astrology. Which was too bad, because Pandey could have read into his stars and warned Arun Shourie that he wouldn't last more than six months in The Times of India. (As it turned out Shhourie didn't last for more than six months on The Times.)

Some reporters might be lousy writers, but they knew how to keep their bosses in good humor. We had an Assam correspondent who made regular shipments of quality tea and honey to the news editor. That he made money running a benami taxi service went unreported. There was this Bhopal correspondent of another national daily who got a car allotted on CM's discretionary quota (during the permit raj) and was running it as a taxi. This was brought to the CM's notice. During one of his visits to New Delhi, the CM, when he had occasion to meet the newspaper owner, asked him in all innocence, "But don't you pay your reporters well?" When the press baron wanted to know why the CM seemed concerned about salary levels at his newspaper, the latter remarked, "Well, your man in Bhopal presumably runs a taxi to make both ends meet." The correspondent was promptly transferred out of Bhopal. So much for taxi-operators who doubled as newspaper correspondents.

In contrast to the stepmotherly treatment meted out to sub-editors in Indian newspapers, a deskman on a British daily was a valued person. Reporters found it worthwhile cultivating him rather than complain against desk. At The Northern Echo, a British daily published from Darlington, UK, I did a stint as sub-editor in the mid-Sixties. Those days in Britain one was not considered for a desk job until one had put in at least five years as a reporter. Newspapers in Britain faced a perennial shortage of capable deskmen. At the Echo they thought well of sub-editors from India, "Do you know Sunny Rao?" the chief sub asked me on my first day at work. "He was a damn good sub." Sunny Rao had worked on the TOI desk in Bombay. He had left the Echo before I joined them. I realised that as an Indian I had a reputation to maintain. On the Echo editorial desk I took the slot that was vacated by another Indian and former Indian Express sub, Subash Chopra, who moved over to The Times, London.

The editor rarely, if ever, questioned a sub-editor's action. The music critic of the Echo once took up with my editor Don Evans the treatment his music review had received at the editorial desk. I happened to have reworded the first paragraph of the music concert review. A couple of days after the publication of the review, Don sent word that he wished to meet me at his office. After the pleasantries Don politely broached the subject, saying that our music critic was unhappy about the handling of his copy by the editorial desk. I told Don that I was constrained to rewrite the first paragraph in the interest of clarity - "When I could not understand the jargon the critic had used, I didn't expect our readers would."

I'll end this piece with the last word on sacred cow Shastri. Some days after I had been advised not to touch his copy, the editorial desk noticed a glaring literal error in a story (I believe it was about the Kumbhmela at Allahabad) and, we, the lowly sub-editors, conspired to let Shastri's article pass through the editorial desk untouched. The reporter's reference to a public place came to be printed as 'pubic' place. The report carried Shastri's byline, and thus, our sacred cow got nailed in print. We didn't hear Shastri cribbing against sub-editors.

Women in my life

2006-08-13T11:40:00.000+05:30

(Published in Aug.2002, this piece relates to the late Sixties, when women in print media were a rare species.)

I am not pretentious enough to believe that intimate aspects of my life would interest anyone other than my wife. The mischief in the heading is calculated to get the attention of friends and family to my Zine5 ramblings My adorable platoon of nieces - Uma, Ranjini, Savitha, Kavitha, Swetha and Babli - wouldn't be drawn to reading this feature had I headlined it, blandly, Women in My Life in Journalism.

With no further ado I'll introduce Usha Rao ( later, Rai) and Prabha Behl - the only women I knew of among local reporters when I joined the profession in New Delhi in the sixties. That female journalists were a rare species those days had much to do with the perception of newspaper management. They could not, then, bring themselves to ask women to work long hours or do night shifts; nor count on women makeing a career in journalism. And the few who did, became prone to absenteeism after marriage. What was worse, some of them got married to someone within the profession.

Usha Rao of The Times of India became a 'Rai' after her marriage to Raghu Rai, famed photographer who was then with The Statesman. She used to do the Delhi University beat. I was then on the staff of The National Herald. Though a senior reporter, I was assigned the campus beat as a 'punishment' for having fallen out with my editorial boss. After having covered the Delhi administration and done political reporting at the local level I was unceremoniously assigned to reporting college functions, student union elections, convocation ceremonies, ragging incidents and the like. Usha, my senior on the campus beat, realised the situation and helped me out with news contacts and, occasionally, with carbon copy of her stories, at a time when my performance was being closely monitored by my tormentor. My missing even a minor story attracted a sternly worded memo from the editor.

Female Viewpoint
High-powered political reporting was then generally a male prerogative. Women reporters, even after years in the profession, were rarely assigned anything other than health, education or social welfare departments. But then some women have a way of carving out a niche for themselves. Usha Rai in her later years as journalist developed an expertise in ecology and does extensive writing on wildlife and environmental issues.

Even in general assignments such as a plane crash or political campaigns, news editors usually managed to find a woman's angle for female journalists. My former TOI colleague Kalpana Sharma is now doing very well at The Hindu, with her expertise in taking a "female viewpoint" on virtually any issue - the 9/11 attack, Afghanistan under Taliban, or the Gujarat riots.
Prabha Behl, the other female reporter from my early newspaper days was a go-getter; rose up to be chief reporter of The Hindustan Times. She had the potential to break out of fluff reporting. She died young. Her daughter Barkha Dutt is making waves as a livewire in TV reporting.
Among the few women journalists of my Delhi days, Neena Vyas has risen to the level of a political correspondent of The Hindu. During my dog days at The National Herald Neena was doing the campus beat for The Statesman. I had first met Neena in London, where, in the sixties, her husband and my college friend Ravi Vyas worked for Longman's Green, the publishers. I recall Neena having done a stint as apprentice with the Associated Press, London Bureau.

My editor at The National Herald, M Chalapati Rau, had been credited with the view that a woman on the staff would be a needless distraction on the editorial desk and at the reporters' room. Perhaps, he had a point. For when our news editor Kripalani eventually managed to persuade 'M C' to approve the recruitment of a female art critic, Priya Karunakaran, it was a matter of celebration for some of us on the staff. 'Pikky' showed up on Friday evenings to submit her review for publication and hung around for coffee and a chat with some of us in the reporters' room. This was, perhaps, what 'M C' had in mind when he referred to "a needless distraction."

Gender Bias
The Indian Express of those days was a "progressive" employer. If I remember right, Tavleen Singh got a break in journalism with IE Delhi. Another Express staffer in those days, Razia Ismail, gave up journalism to join the UNICEF.

The Times of India, where I spent two decades, proved to be a stamping ground for women journalists. Some of us who belong to the old school suspected a reversal in the management's gender bias. The pendulum swung in favour of women, not just in the matter of recruitment. Much to our envy, some of our women colleagues were even favoured with plum assignments. It was during my stint as the TOI Bhopal correspondent (in the eighties) "bandit queen" Phoolan Devi surrendered before the then Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, Arjun Singh, and was lodged in the Gwalior jail. And my editor sent Ayesha Kagal, an editorial colleague from Mumbai, to interview Phoolan in jail. As the TOI man in Madhya Pradesh, I ought to have handled the assignment. Instead, I was asked to meet Ayesha on her arrival from Mumbai and tag along with her to Gwalior to facilitate the interview. I was familiar with the town and had contacts with local officials.

I doubted whether Ayesha was even familiar with the language spoken in the Hindi heartland. As it turned out, Phoolan Devi wasn't familiar with it either. She spoke a Chattisgarhi dialect and we could communicate with her only through an interpreter. Which was just as well. For I gathered later that the "bandit queen" was given to foul-mouthing males and that in response to my questions had used the kind of language that would have embarrassed us. But then the bandit queen developed a liking for Ayesha and invited her back the next day without me. I realised then that my woman colleague from Mumbai would get a better story. But I beat her to it by telexing a story based on our first meeting. My interview with Phoolan Devi appeared the next day. And Ayesha, being the good sport that she was, appreciated it. But then Ms Kagal had the last word. Her story on Phoolan Devi appeared as a full-page spread on the TOI Sunday Review!

It was Nancy Reagan who likened a woman to a teabag - only in hot water do you realise how strong she is. Pushpa Iyengar, my TOI colleague, proved the point with her coverage of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination. Rajiv was blown to smithereens in a bomb attack at an election meeting in Sriperumpudur, Tamil Nadu. It was an assignment no journalist would have missed. If only they had anticipated the bomb blast, TOI would have flown in a senior correspondent from Bombay or Delhi. In journalistic parlance we call it "parachute reporting" - cornering of plum assignments by seniors from the headquarters, ignoring the claim of the TOI Chennai news bureau.

Suicide Bomber
Pushpa had set out from Chennai to do a routine election meeting coverage at Sriperumpudur. Rajiv Gandhi drove down there on arrival at the Chennai airport from some place in Andhra Pradesh. Shortly after he reached the venue of the public meeting, Rajiv Gandhi worked his way to the dais accepting garlands from the local notables who had lined up to greet him. In the receiving line was a female suicide bomber who had activated a trigger for the RDX explosives strapped to her body as Rajiv approached her to accept her greetings.

Pushpa, recovering from the initial shock of the deafening blast, waded through the shattered remains amid the rush of those fleeing the scene in panic. She was joined by two other women journalists - Nina Gopal of The Gulf News and another woman representing The New York Times. The two of them had travelled with Rajiv and Nina had interviewed him on their way from the airport to Sriperumpudur.

Meanwhile hell broke loose at TOI. At my Chennai residence, I was woken up from sleep by a call from Bombay. They wanted a story within the next 30 minutes. I had no idea when Pushpa would be able to make it back to office and how. Soon after the blast the police had cordoned off the exit points from Sriperumpudur. A sketchy report phoned in from there would not do for TOI.

The police and the state information department officials were no wiser on the blast. Anyway they were not generally known to have been of much help with information on such crisis assignments. As I twiddled my thumb and wondered what to do, Pushpa called from our Nungambakkam Road office. She had made it back from the blast scene well ahead of most others - "I got a lift in Rajiv Gandhi's car," she told me.

"As I got talking to this girl from Gulf News a driver came up and asked us to leave the place quickly and get into his car," Pushpa said. "He said, 'Rajiv sir has instructed me to make sure the madams reach their hotels safely'." And the loyal driver was there to follow Rajiv's directive, even though his boss was no more. Pushpa joined the other two on their trip back to Chennai. And filed the story of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination for The Times of India. Pushpa Iyengar later became deputy editor with The Deccan Chronicle, Hyderabad.

Women have come a long way, from my early days in journalism.

A Misfit in Today’s Media World

2006-08-01T19:27:00.000+05:30

(This story relates to journalism in the 70s, when reporting was about working your calf muscles and your phone; about tapping reticent news sources, and missing stories. Those were the days before the Internet, 24/7 news channels, and blogs, to which print media reporters today can now outsource their news-gathering work. Today’s newspaper correspondents don’t report news; they package it. My generation of reporters may find ourselves a misfit on today’s media scene - Are you reading me, Mr Krishna Vattam, Mr Gouri Satya ?
This piece was titled ‘The Punjab Beat’ when it first appeared in May, 2002)

Every other journalist, they say, has an unfinished book in his drawer. I started work on my unfinished book in late Seventies. I was then a sub-editor with The Times of India in New Delhi, and envious of reporters, who appeared to have everything going for them - byline, high visibility, influence and cocktail invitations on most evenings. I became wiser later, when they posted me the Punjab correspondent, at a time when militant groups held sway in many parts of the then troubled state.

Admittedly, a Chandigarh dateline gave one visibility in high places those days. Not evident, however, was that behind those bylined stories was usually a much-harassed reporter who spent long and, at times, futile hours working the phone and tapping reticent news sources to put together a story. And, at the end of the day, you might not have accessed all facts or even got them all right. But this reality hits you too late to make amends, that is, when you see the other newspapers the morning after or get a memo from the editor, saying, "We have been beaten by the competition." On such occasions you feel you could have done without a byline on your story. Editors have a way of unsettling you with unceremonious memos and late night phone calls, wanting to know why you didn't file anything on a killing in Kapurthala or gas-cylinder blast at Batinda.

The correspondent of an outstation newspaper, based in a state capital, is held accountable for whatever happens elsewhere in the state. He can't beat the news agencies - PTI and UNI - which appeared to have their men everywhere. But you don't tell this to an agitated news editor who doesn't let you have a word in edgeways when he is on the blower. You can't argue with an avalanche, can you ?

PTI and UNI could have been a major menace for me and Chandigarh-based correspondents of other outstation papers, if we had not cultivated the agency reporters so that we stayed alerted on news breaks. I knew of a colleague based in Patna who dreaded late-night phone calls from his office in New Delhi. He was dedicated and hard-working, which wasn't enough. He failed to develop a rapport with the news agency guys.

The worst thing that can happen to a reporter is finding that the news report he just finished filing has already been overtaken by subsequent developments, that too close to his deadline (the time by which he is required to submit his report for publication). Soon after my posting at Chandigarh I attended a press conference, addressed jointly by three Sikh leaders - H S Longowal, P S Badal and G S Tohra. Longowal had then signed an agreement with Rajiv Gandhi. The other two Sikh leaders entertained misgivings about the Centre's intentions. However, it was mainly due to Longowal's initiative the three Sikh leaders had come to share a common platform for the first time in their political career. Their joint press conference had the making of a sure-fire front-page story.

By the time I telexed the story (we didn't have computers then) it was 5 p m. I decided to call it a day and go home early. After having delivered a major front-page story I did not expect the New Delhi office of The Times of India to bother me with any phone call about a stray blast at Batala or a shooting incident at Gurdaspur. They were common occurances in Punjab those days.

But then minutes after I reached home that evening there was a call from New Delhi, asking for a story on a shooting incident at a gurudwara in Sangrur. The victim, this time, was Longowal. The Akali leader, on way to his village after addressing the Chandigarh press conference, was shot dead by militants when he stopped by at a gurudwara to address a congregation. This was not just a front-pager. It was the lead story, on which I had to get cracking under mounting deadline pressure. Such was a reporter's life in Punjab those days. So much for dateline Chandigarh.

As for my book in the making, it still remains unfinished, with nearly 200 pages of typed manuscript done. As I said earlier, I started work on the book when I was a sub-editor. I used to work six-hour shifts, which left me with enough time for book-writing. But then I gave up creative writing when I became a reporter

Soapbox speakers

2006-07-26T06:17:00.000+05:30

(Published in June 2002. I haven't been to London since the late Sixties. Hyde Park Speakers' Corner was then an exclusive British institution devoted to freedom of expression, of cranks, windbags and other unemployables. I read that some years back, they tried it out in Singapore. Wonder what its current status is; if the Singapore's soapbox orators still have their corner. Would any of our Singapore familiar folks - Capt. Anup Murthy, Mrs. Vidya Nagaraj - know ?)

My friend and Zine5 writer Padmini Natarajan says that her Wednesday feature 'This and That' is her 'soap-box in the corner of Hyde Park'. By making such declaration she has licensed herself 'to wax and wane, grumble and groan, cheer and cry', blah blah blah. This, despite some 'skillful arm-twisting' by her editor. At the real place they are known to have done much else, unedited at that.

At the Marble Arch end of London's Hyde Park there is a corner meant for soap-box orators. I was a regular there, initially as a passive listener , and eventually, a back-row heckler, on Saturday afternoons in the Swinging Sixties. The Speakers' Corner attracted all sorts, from the world over - petty politicians on dole, dissidents in exile, extremists, evangelists in search of a congregation, cranks and other windbags. The thing about the speakers' corner was that it gave commoners (in terms of freedom of speech) the type of immunity MPs enjoy in the House of Commons. What made the place a prime source of Saturday afternoon entertainment for Londoners and visitors alike was that the speakers represented all creeds, colours of skin, shades of opinion and degrees of madness.

Michael Foot in his book Debts of Honour - a collection of essays on the personalities to whom the author felt indebted - refers to Bonar Thompson, a Hyde Park orator who valued his freedom so much that he refused to earn a living and lived on what others gave him in the name of freedom. N'Khrumah, several other leaders of newly independent African countries and our own Krishna Menon had graduated from the Hyde Park Speakers' Corner.

It took lung-power, wit and guts and a fairly thick skin to survive as a soap-box speaker. Those with king-size egos were cut to size by the sharp and highly interactive audience. Your voice should be loud enough to drown the noise coming from hecklers at the back row; and it helped if you had something sensible to say.

Some senior soap-boxers, however, were exempt from this criteria. There was this pathetic, but delightful, basket case who had collected, over the years, a band of faithful listeners who were so accustomed to his senseless and repetitive speech that they would not accept anything fresh or sensible from him. This crowd knew his script by heart and checked the speaker if he departed from the text and prompted him if the speaker skipped a phrase or fumbled for a word.

Then there was Sam, who said he could have been Billy Graham, if only he had taken to golf. It was golf, said Sam, that had brought Billy Graham close to LBJ and Nixon. It was at a game of golf Cecil B Demille invited Billy Graham to go into the movies. He declined the offer because, as Sam put it, "Billy boy was already making a fortune as special envoy to the president of the universe." But then Sam didn't approve of those who became disgustingly rich - "I am proud to be on dole in Britain."

Sam then went on to caution the audience of the wrath to come, despite, nay, because of the likes of Billy boy. "I warn you," said Sam, "there will be much weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth." An old woman in the audience yelled, "But Sam, I have no teeth!" to which Sam responded, "Don't worry, madam. We will get you dentures under the National Health Service scheme."

At the adjacent soap-box George held forth on how his lousy set of teeth had kept him away from serving his queen and country. He claimed that he would have been in the royal navy during the War, had it not been for his rotten teeth. "In London those days bombs fell all over the place," said George, "and I had planned on getting away from it all by joining the navy."
But the doctor at the naval recruitment board held that George didn't have a chance.

"Why, doc?"

"Your teeth are bad, George, that is why."

George got furious. "What have my teeth got to do with this, doc? Can't you see, I am going to fight the enemy, not eat them."

An African soap-boxer who claimed to have been on dole ever since he came to England took delight in deriding the British - "Britain is a nation of inventive geniuses; they make 40 different types of electrical plugs, none of which work satisfactorily." Britain, he said, was a nation of chips-eaters - "They have fish with chips, beef curry with chips, baked beans and chips, pie, pudding... you name it, they have it with chips. Why, presumably, they even have sex with chips."

Heckler : "Tell me, do you still eat people who visit your country?"

Speaker: "Oh yes, we do. But don't worry, we no longer eat Englishmen. Because the last one we put in the pot ate all the potato.

To London, with 12 shillings in pocket

2006-07-12T18:21:00.000+05:30

(Appeared in Zine5, June 2002)

In 1964 I gave up a secure government job in New Delhi, for an uncertain future in London. I was then 26, an age at which you think you know all the answers. Now, at 62, (in 2002 when this piece was done) I know that I don't even know all the questions.

I went to England on a labour voucher. Those days, citizens of the Commonwealth countries could migrate in search of job to England on a voucher issued by the British ministry of labour. It didn't promise a job, but guaranteed a dole for a work-permit holder till he found employment. Getting a labour voucher posed no hassles for those with an university degree. And it was convenient for many educated unemployables from India and former African colonies to find their way to England.

Some of them, with a political agenda at home and flair for public speaking, went on dole for as long as they could and spent time promoting their pet cause at the Hyde Park Speakers' Corner. It is the only place that guaranteed unfettered freedom of speech. You could even abuse the royalty. But then you could be taken for a crank. There was this middle-aged Irishman, who blamed his permanent unemployment status to the Royal Navy recruitment board. George brought his own soapbox to the Hyde Park corner on Saturday afternoons and held forth on his pet grouse against the armed forces.

"I volunteered for military service," said George, "when bombs were falling all over London." He was rejected on medical grounds. A naval doctor who examined him said, "George, your teeth are bad." To which George responded, "Doc, I am going to fight the enemy, not eat them." The recruitment authorities remained unpersuaded. And George has been telling this story ever since at the Hyde Park Speakers' Corner.

The work permit listed my occupation as 'journalist'. It took me over two years to get a job on a British newspaper. Till then I did an assortment of odd jobs. Which included a two-week stint as a packer in a clothes wearhouse; and a clerical officer ( a civil service job) in a post office savings bank.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) allowed a work-permit holder three pounds sterling as foreign exchange for travel. This was my pocket money during the 10-day boat trip from Bombay to Genova in Italy and an overnight train journey from there to London. That I was left with 12 shillings when I reached the London Victoria station, at the end of the 12-day journey, spoke for my scrupulous money management. In violation of the currency regulations I carried some Indian rupees, but the only place en route where I could convert it was Karachi.

M.V. Asia, a Lloyd Triestino boat, sailed into Karachi a day after it left Bombay. I went ashore with a group of passengers to get a feel of the Pakistani city. The moneychanger at the port exchanged our rupee for an equal amount of Pakistani rupee. However, a paanwalah in Karachi city was eager to give two Pakistani rupees for every Indian rupee we offered. Indian paan that he imported/smuggled was considered a delicacy there.

My friend Satish Kohli (we used to live in the same neighbourhood in New Delhi) who was to meet my train at Victoria that afternoon wasn't there. Finding myself friendless in unfamiliar London, without an address to go to and with no more than 12 shillings in my pocket didn't do much good for my spirits. Satish did turn up eventually (he had been held up at work) and took me home to his bed-sitter at Golders Green.

London tended to grow on me. And even when I found work at a newspaper in North-east England I used to travel to spend a weekend in London every other week. I was in England during the 'swinging' sixties, when the Beatles were a rage, and the Twiggy look was in vogue; when girls, in mini-skirts, went for a boyish cut and boys wore long hair. But there were things where change was inordinately slow in coming. Sound of Music was on at a Tottenhamcourt Road cinema house (the year was 1964). The movie was still running when I left London three years later! Agatha Christie's Moustrap was playing for the 13th year at a London theatre.

The first job I got through the employment exchange was that of a proof-reader at a North London printing press. They don't keep you on dole for more than six weeks at a time. If you don't find anything worthwhile within this period, you have to take up whatever job they offer you at the labour exchange. And journalists were not recruited through labour exchange.

I didn't last for more than three weeks as a proof-reader. On the third pay-day (they pay weekly, on Fridays) I felt that my envelope was heavier than usual and on counting the cash I found there was twice the amount I got as weekly wages. This was their way of showing you the door. My supervisor, a Pakistani, later explained to me over a drink that the manager who had bungled on a job work chose to make a scapegoat of me.

My next job was with India Weekly, brought out by a group of London-based Indian journalists and supported by the Indian High Commission. P N Haksar was deputy high commissioner and Salman Hyder, who retired as foreign secretary a few years back, was in the mid-sixties a first-secretary (information) at the High Commission. India Weekly was the brainchild of the then London bureau chief of the Calcutta daily Hindustan Standard, Dr. Tarapada Basu. He managed the weekly, with voluntary contributions from S K Shelvankar of The Hindu, Iqbal Singh of the Patriot and Shisantu Das of the Indian Express.

My position at India Weekly remained unspecified. So was my job description. I wasn't given an appointment letter. I was paid through office voucher an amount that was not much higher than what I would have got as dole, if I had registered myself as unemployed. You could call my stint at India Weekly sweat labour. But I cheerfully endured it. It kept me away from the humiliating dole queue.

Journalism: The last reort of a flunky

2006-07-07T06:10:00.000+05:30

(The Zine5 piece appeared in June 2002; it relates to early 1960s when journalism wasn't a well paying job. Nor was it one's first career choice. The headline says it all.)

I suppose a poor academic track record - low second division in BA (Hons.) and a high third in MA - had something to do with my becoming a journalist, if only because it effectively ruled out most other job avenues. In the early sixties there weren't many options for the likes of me. My grades were too low for a teaching job. Many of my batchmates took up teaching while they studied for the IAS entrance exam. Some, who had influential parents, got covenanted jobs with Metalbox, ICI and other foreign companies or became assistant managers in the tea estates.

My father, a government babu, wanted me to appear for the IAS exam. I did. And spent hours daily 'group-studying' with friends at the Janpath (New Delhi) Coffee House. Not surprisingly, I flunked the exam. I couldn't blame the coffee house. For all others in the study group got through the exam and eventually rose up to the level of a joint secretary and above.
In fact, it was through a coffee house contact I learnt of a job opening at The Press Information Bureau (PIB) in the Union I & B Ministry. The basic qualification was a graduate degree and a diploma in journalism. A senior PIB official, K.K. Nair (better known for his writings on art and culture under the pen-name 'Chaitanya'), recommended my appointment on a temporary basis, on condition that I pursued the diploma course through evening classes conducted by the Punjab University department of journalism. I had carried to the job interview clippings of the features I had done for a youth magazine during my Delhi University days. Besides, my having done post-graduation from the Delhi School of Economics probably weighed in my favour.

I was appointed 'Assistant Journalist' at a princely salary of Rs.450 a month. This was in 1961. Newspapers paid much less those days. Fresh graduates recruited as probationary sub-editors at the Press Trust of India (PTI) got a monthly stipend of Rs.150. Entry level salary at the Times of India didn't exceed Rs.300. It was less at The Indian Express. Many of my seniors at the PIB had switched over from newspapers to the then better paying government jobs.

H.Y. Sharda Prasad, who made a mark as press advisor to Indira Gandhi, was once on the editorial desk of the Indian Express. My boss Pratap Kapur, had given up a job on The Times of India to become Information Officer in PIB.. The then head of the PIB photo publicity unit P.N. Khosla had come to the government from the News Chronicle. It was during my stint at the photo publicity unit (1961-64) I had occasion to come in contact with well known photographers, T. Kasinath, who headed the Photo Division of the I & B ministry and T.S. Satyan, who worked for Life magazine. Now settled in Mysore, Mr. Satyan is working on a book recalling his days as news photographer in New Delhi. Not many photographers of those days had familiarity with English of the grammatical kind, let alone a flair for writing. During my recent Mysore visit I re-established contact with Mr. Satyan after a lapse of 38 years.

Though I was lucky to have landed a government job I was not happy there. I wasn't among those who fancied a secure 10-to-5 job Not when you were in your early twenties. I cheerfully endured the irregular hours kept by working journalists. While in the PIB I used to envy news reporters whiling away the afternoons at the coffee house; late-shift sub-editors at The Hindustan Times (then located on the first floor at the Connaught Circus) dropping in at the Scindia House Milk Bar around 10 p.m. for a quick bite.

Before long I started looking around for an opening in a newspaper. At The Statesman, which then had the last of its British news editors, they wanted me to go out and get a story before they would interview me. As the news editor put it, "when I joined this paper in Calcutta the editor sent me out on a monsoon story before I was offered job." Monsoon was ruled out for me. It was then mid-summer in New Delhi. I settled for a piece on the thrills of gliding because I could persuade a friend at the gliding club to take me up for a spin. The next day I reported to the news editor, who tossed at me a noterpad made out of waste newsprint.. And I had to turn out 750 words right there, in his presence. Some 45 minutes later I handed in my copy. The news editor went through the first few paragraphs and pronounced, "No, this is not up to the Statesman standard."

My next target was The Times of India, which had advertised for trainee journalists. You were required to submit a 1500-word essay on a topic of current interest. I wrote something about Indian agriculture having been a gamble in the monsoon. This was the pet theme of my economics professor, Dr. B.M. Bhatia, at The Hindu College (Delhi). Anyway, I got called for an interview, where they quizzed me about some recent TOI edit-page pieces. Though aspiring to become a journalist I wasn't a scrupulous newspaper reader. As some of the less prepared contestants do on the BBC Mastermind programme I said, 'pass' to too many questions (for which I didn't know the answers) . In fact, I wasn't even well up on the editorial leading lights at TOI those days.

A couple of years after this interview, when I went to England to take my chances there, I used to see every morning, on a London red-bus, a middle-aged person poring over the Times of India. He used to board at St. John's Wood and alight at The Strand. After observing him for a few days I went up to him to ask, "Excuse me Sir, are you Mr. Girilal Jain?" He took his time to size me up before saying, "No, I am Kumud Khanna."

How was I to know that Girilal had by then left for India to become the TOI resident editor in New Delhi and that Khanna had taken over as the paper's London correspondent? After his London assignment Kumud Khanna became editor of The Illustrated Weekly for a brief spell before Pritish Nandy came along to jazz it up so much that the Weekly lost its credibility as a serious journal and eventually went out of circulation.

To return to the theme of my job-hunting in New Delhi, I made another unsuccessful attempt to join a newspaper, this time at The Patriot, by which time I became so bored with the government job that I quit the PIB and left for England to take my chances there. For someone rejected by the Patriot - as its news editor put it eloquently, "Krishnan, your English is poor and your grammar is weak" - I got a break in mainstream journalism aborad, in a British provincial daily, The Northern Echo published from Darlington in North-east England.

Plea to Rahul Dravid: Please Endorse 'Maddur Vada'

2006-06-14T08:30:00.000+05:30

(Appeared in zine5.com in May, 2005)

The idea occurred to me during one of those commercial breaks when you simply can't escape ads by switching channels. They synchronise their breaks, these TV channels. With some skilful channel-surfing you can dodge some disagreeable ads for some time. Having to put up with a silly commercial once in a while can be trying enough, but some channels are at their annoying worst when they repeat selected ads during the same commercial break. This happens usually during the telecast of a blockbuster. That is when a 'maha movie' gets to be a 'maha bore.'

Anyway, while watching a pizza commercial, I got the idea that our maddur vada could do with a celebrity endorsement. Paresh Ravel, my favourite actor, is seen taking a big bite of pizza and then muttering through a mouthful, 'Hungry, kya'. It was a class act.I shared my idea with a friend, who visualised Mandya Ramesh endorsing the maddur vada. The snag was that the product was already more widely known than the celebrity. Ambrish was another name that popped up. He is a popular Kannada cinema figure who has turned a politician. But admen prefer a sportsman, preferably a cricketer. The idea is to promote maddur vada globally. Rahul Dravid could be our best bet!

As an endorser, Rahul would be a perfect fit for the product we want to flog. Maddur vada, like cricket, is a great leveller. Few of us who have travelled on the Bangalore-Mysore train have failed to taste it. It's a classless food item, the maddur vada. It's in demand right through the length of the train, in the second class coaches as well as the AC chair car. It's relished by peasants and company presidents alike. Maddur vada and Rahul Dravid will be a creative director's dream match. All that someone needs to do is cash in on this creative kink.

Sometime back in a Zine5 column I suggested to our 'swadeshi' activists an agenda : 'globalise maddur vada'. That was the time when the 'Swadeshi Jagran Manch' (SJM) was hot and bothered over the opening of a KFC outlet in Bangalore. My point was that, instead of fighting foreign chicken-peddlers here in India, SJM ought to take the battle to the KFC home ground. Open a maddur vada joint at Louisville, Kentucky, and make Col. Harland Sanders turn in his grave.

Much water has since flown down the canal from the KRS reservoir to the cane fields of Maddur. And the transnational culinary imperialists having stabilised in Bangalore, have even made inroads into the districts. They have opened a Pizza Corner and a US Pizza joint in Mysore. Isn't it time we hit back, with maddur vada? Make a global brand of it? Bipin Patel, a Uganda restaurant owner in the US, could tell us a thing or two about brand building. He was instrumental in creating a brand image for chaat & samosa in Montana.

Patel opened an all-veg restaurant at Missoula and named it Tipu's Tiger. That was an exotic name. Patel so named his eatery, in homage to the 18th century Tiger of Mysore. He perceived Tipu Sultan as an enlightened ruler who backed diversity and religious freedom. Tipu's Tiger has been written about in every Montana travel guide. Patel made Tipu a brand name in Montana for his chaat & samosa.

Meanwhile multinational culinary imperialists have roped in Preity Zinta to endorse noodles. She now has corporate credentials as a 'brand ambassador'. Imagine Preity on a promotional 'tour in a desert island where they haven't heard of Bollywood. She can introduce herself, 'Hi, I'm Preity, the brand ambassador for Maggi-2-minute noodles'. There is good money for celebrities in product endorsement. What is pertinent, however, is whether celeb endorsements necessarily push sales.

I am a Shah Rukh Khan fan, but that doesn't make me fancy Pepsi. I used to enjoy my occasional pizza even before Paresh Ravel started showing up on the idiot-box muttering, Hungry, kya? Some otherwise sensible actors are not always sensible when it comes to choosing products to endorse. We see Amitabh Bachchan promoting a wide/wild assortment of products. You see him in the Pepsi commercial, the Nerolac paints and Parker pen ads. He also endorses Cadbury's, Reid & Taylor, Emami, and endorses Maruthi Versa and Dabur's Chywanprash. Amitabh is all over TV during commercial breaks.

But then the Big B appears to have his compulsions. His entertainment company crashed, leaving him with the kind of debt that he couldn't meet with his film commitments alone. It was reported that the Amitabh Bachchan Corporation owed Doordarshan a lot of money, which left him with no option but to endorse 10 campaigns for the DD channels, in lieu of a settlement of the outstanding dues. Ad agencies would have us believe that celebs help a brand name with, what is called, top-of-mind recall that translates into sales. I recall Sunny Deol's cryptic one-liner Yeh andar ki bath hai, but can't remember the brand name of the under-garment the actor endorsed. To add to my confusion, Salman Khan has joined in the under-garment endorsement act. We see him in a vest as he says, simply, Asli hero. That must have been the most expensive two words Salman has spoken on camera. That it is the consumer who eventually pays for such crap is not a comforting thought.

Globalise Maddur vada

2006-05-29T07:35:00.000+05:30

(The piece dated Dec.2002 was inspired by a protest in vain by swadeshi activists against the opening of a KFC outlet in Bangalore. Did some imaginative thinking on their behalf to suggest causes that could promote their agenda. But then no swadeshi outfit, nor a Maddur culinary tycoon, appears to have taken me seriously.)

Grand Sweets of Adyar has a brand image among NRMs (non-resident Madrasis). MTR of Bangalore has globalised its rava-idli mix. And Krishna Sweets is the Mysore pak market leader in Coimbatore. I believe we have some food for thought here. Why not promote a brand image for idli-dosa in the global food courts? How about globalising gulab jamun mix? Why can't we float a chole-kulche company with market presence in WTO member countries?

I am not talking about the mushrooming of Indian eateries run by NRIs the world over. You can find websites listing desi khana outlets in places such as Miami and Michigan. What I dream about is a maddur vada joint in Manhattan as part of a sambar-vada multinational chain on the McDonalds pattern.

It was in 1948 Richard and Maurice McDonald opened the first fast-burger joint. Within the next four decades McDonald's came to be represented in 103 countries. Its hamburger has been hailed by The Economist as a "symbol of the reassuring predictability, pre-packaged straight forwardness, the sheer lack of pretension of American life." For all this, it wasn't even American in origin. Hamburger, they say, came to the US with immigrants from Hamburg, who had themselves acquired the habit of eating ground beef with onion juice from the nomadic Tartar tribes. As it evolved in the twentieth century a hamburger came with ingredients other than beef, to cater to non-beef eaters and even vegetarians. Around 1920 the burger came to be sheathed in bun.

Maddur vada is known well beyond the geographical confines of Maddur in Karnataka's Cauvery belt. Those who have travelled on the Bangalore-Mysore train could not have failed to taste it. Like Mac-burger, vada lacks any trace of snobbery and is classless insofar as it is consumed with relish by peasants and company presidents. Vada, with all its variants such as sambar-vada, thayir-vada, sada-vada and masal-vada, is a candidate for brand-building on a global scale.When you think of it, vada is just one of the scores of items conducive to standardization, branding and marketing in our globalization efforts of the culinary kind.

If pizza can make it around the world, why can't masala-dosa do the same? It is not as if people in Berlin, Boston and Bristol are not familiar with our tandoori dishes. Some desi stores in Fremont, Sun Valley and Orange County selling condiments and pirated CDs of Indian films have also opened pani-poori counters. I know of a Karnataka gentleman who makes a comfortable living flogging home-made idli-dosa at a desi store in Phoenix during weekends and at NRI social and cultural get-togethers in Arizona.

South Indian thaali meal used to be a speciality at India Club on London's Strand. That was when they had a cook whose rasam was drunk with particular relish by V K Krishna Menon. It is said Menon, our first high commissioner in London, had brought the cook from native Tanjore. Krishna Menon survived on tea. He had a kettle on the burner all the time. The only other liquid he relished was the rasam made by the Tanjore cook.

In London during the sixties we could live on Indian food, if one could afford it. For Indian food cost more than burgers at Wimpy's or fish and chips. There were more of our kind of eating houses in the suburbs than in central London. My personal favourite was Agra Restaurant at Golders Green. Oddly enough one found quite a few other restaurants by the same name in many other parts of London. If there were more than one such eating place in the same locality, the other one was most likely to be named Taj restaurant. The other odd thing was that many of these places were not run by Indians. They were owned by Pakistanis, mostly from Sylhat district (now in Bangladesh). The place was known for its cooks, like Udipi in Karnataka.

Perhaps, the most serious snag with Indian food joints abroad is their varied taste and quality of items. The eats in all Udipi places in the US are not uniformly good and don't taste the same. Besides, some Indian restaurants do not adhere to the high standards of hygiene prescribed by local authorities.Uniformly good quality and taste, and value for money are the key features of the US burger and pizza multinationals.

To make maddur vada or masal dosa truly global, its promoters should address issues of HACCP (hazard analysis critical control point) and ISO 9002 quality certification. They should standardize the process system to control hygiene with bacteria-free environment at production facility and sales outlets.

I recall that Swadesh Jan Manch or some such outfit launched a stir against the opening of a KFC outlet in Bangalore some time back. It is, perhaps, time they switched strategy and took their battle to KFC's home ground, instead of fighting their presence in India. 'Be Indian; Buy Indian' has become old hat. Our new slogan ought to be, 'Be Indian; Go global'. Maddur vada in Manhattan should be on the swadeshi agenda. Vajpayee, Advani and Gurumurthy of Swadesh Manch could work on this. Togadia could help, if he stays off it. For no swadeshi cause can be truly lost till it has his support.

And then there is a foreign policy implication. We have the opinion of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who declared some five years back that countries with McDonalds did not go to war against each other. As Tom put it, "with the hamburger comes an established middle-class which makes a country too sensible to cause trouble." Yashwant or Jaswant or whoever holds the external affairs portfolio when we get to set up a transnational food company would do well to ensure that maddur vada joints are opened in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad.

Coonoorian couch potatoes

2006-05-18T08:53:00.000+05:30

(Wrote this piece, Nov.2002, when I was based Coonoor and hosting a weblog – The Coonoor Connection’. Which is now in a state of total disconnect. It died of neglect, when I shifted base to Mysore)

Ideas move the world, they say. This might be the case elsewhere, but not in Coonoor. I can claim to speak from experience. Take this 'couch potato' idea I floated in my homepage, 'The Coonoor Connection.' I thought Coonoor could do with an outfit like the Long Beach (California) Society of Couch Potatoes.I promptly posted a message on the web site about the Long Beach society and its ten-point exercise programme for members - 1) skating on thin ice, 2) casting aspersions, 3) throwing caution to the wind, 4) bending the truth; 5) digging up dirt; 6) flogging a dead horse; 7) going the extra mile; 8) jumping to conclusions; 9) lashing out, and 10) marching to a different drummer.

It has been a year since this message was posted . And I have yet to hear a word from anyone by way of response. Not because of our inadequacy. It is my firm belief that Coonoorians are in no way less accomplished than Californians on any of the ten counts. My own favorite is flogging a dead horse.Coonoorians, with their web silence, convey a message. That they are one better than Californians. Our couch potatoes are much too lazy even to organise themselves on the lines of the lazy ones of Long Beach.

Our plus point is the Nilgiris weather. As Kalyani, my friend from Ooty, put it, weather here for much of the year is just conducive to laziness, warm blankets, hot tea and pakoras, and, of course, good books.Speaking of Coonoorians' propensity to stonewall ideas, the very idea of my starting a homepage was to try and put our heads together to break this stone wall and promote online interaction on life in Coonoor, the feel and flavour of the place, its people, their lifestyle, its flora and fauna.

I opened an 'Ideas' page to which those who believed in bettering our quality of life could send their input. I made it a point to mention that we prefer ideas that are weird and wild. Never mind if they think you're crazy. I can't think of anyone crazier than that Newton bloke who played ball with an apple, instead of eating it. And we all know what he came up with.

Some people see sausages and think of Picasso. We could do with those who think on such lines in Coonoor. Who knows, some such crazies might even think of starting an art gallery in town. In 'The Coonoor Connection' I have had people posting even some sensible ideas. But till date none of the ideas or the issues raised in the web site has made a difference to Coonoor. My homepage remains firmly stuck at home.

"We live in our own cozy world," says Thomman Kuruvilla, a public-spirited youngster, "if change is the rule of life, Coonoor has been an exception". According to Sangeetha Shinde, a Coonoor girl doing MBA in London, Coonoorians are status-quo-happy - "I can't see the peers in Coonoor allowing a Mcdonald's or Pizza Hut to set up shop anytime soon." On a more serious note Sangeetha says it was time we decided whether we need to produce more of our tea that has lost its market or shift focus to tourism, cottage crafts and other sectors with exports earning potential.

It is input from the likes of Thomman and Sangeetha that makes our day in the Coonoor Connection team - myself, son, daughter-in-law and my wife, without whose tolerance and tendency to ignore mounting dial-up internet bills, this site would have folded up a long while ago. I would like to share with you samplings of the mail we get at the Coonoor web site.Marshall Gass who left Coonoor over three decades back to settle in New Zealand has this to say: "So many mates from the old school days have made contact since my e-mail went on your web site - Hindley, ramamurthi, natarajan, Francis Mathews, Eates. Amazing. It was the best fun in the world catching up with those guys I played marbles with 35 years ago."

Of his old school, Lawrence, Edwin Good from Melbourne said: "Lovedale was tough, but there is little doubt in my mind that I would not have achieved what I did, only on a junior Cambridge certificate, without the grounding and character-building that went with it in Lovedale. The motto 'Never Give In' has always stood me in good stead in times of adversity." Edwin was a student in 1943-48, of what was then the Lawrence Memorial Royal Military School, Lovedale.

Son of a locomotive driver, Edwin, on finishing school, moved to Nairobi and spent the next 40 years as an oil company executive in Dar-es-Salam, Kampala, Lagos and, finally, Melbourne. Happily retired now, Edwin has a wish to fulfil - "God willing, I intend to take Margaret to India on a sentimental journey."

A Londoner, Agnes L'hostis, wrote that Coonoor by night resembled a Swiss Alpine resort. However, daytime Coonoor was a picture of, what he called "Indian urbanity of jostling market-place, throw-it-anywhere (usually in the river) untidiness and a predictably chaotic bus station." The picture doesn't deter Warren Ezekiel, who lives in Melborune and "is still not tired of travelling to Nilgiris once every 18 months."

From Delaware, US, a non-resident Coonoorian, Susan Grandy posted a message on the web site saying that she was rather distraught after her last Coonoor visit. The Ooty flower show brought back memories of the good old days when the Kuriens of Strathern used to walk away with the prize. She could not accept the fact that they charged an entry fee at Sims Park - "I remember we used to go there in the evenings for a walk." Raiding the Sims Park orchard used to be the favorite pastime of Nina Varghese, a Chennai-based journalist who grew up in Coonoor; even though one ran the risk of getting caught by the mali.

A retired army officer who was once posted at Wellington wrote us to compliment the Nilgiris people for their ban-plastics campaign. Said Colonel (retd) A Sridharan, VSM,: "We were pleasantly surprised in not being handed out any plastic carry-bags wherever we went. Yes, we did see an odd carry-bag here and there on the roadside and these were, presumably, the ones left behind by tourists from the plains." The colonel was being charitable to Nilgiri folk.

And then we have Navin Williams who makes periodical trips to Coonoor from Mumbai to visit grand-parents. They keep telling him about how Coonoor has grown in all the wrong ways - traffic, the noise, dirt and the general downward slide of what was once a quiet and elegant town. What Navin would like to know is: "Since we have such a large populace around the world that is in love with Coonoor, can't we find ways that we can all contribute to improve Coonoor?"

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Comment: You are too unkind to us. Beaches are WARM and you have to get up and do things. We are cool people and believe that life is in being, not doing. Thanks for quoting me. Makes me feel I've written something worthwhile if someone can remember it - Kalyani

No ideas, please, we’re Mysoreans

2006-05-06T08:43:00.000+05:30

As someone who hasn't been in Mysore long enough to take it in our cynical stride, I was envious of Mangalore when I read in The Hindu about the success of their Jana Mana TV serial. The Mangalore city channel programme had completed 250 weekly episodes and we haven't emulated it? Never mind that Mysore hadn't thought of it first. Can't we copy a good idea when we see one? We have a Mysore city channel; we don't lack people with creative resources or talent to produce a TV programme. With some lobbying in the right quarters, we could even find sponsors with a charitable disposition. Why, then, can't we have a Jana Mana in Mysore? Why... WHY?

I gave vent to my feelings in www.mymysore.com. And there wasn't a spate of e-mail by way of reaction. Three persons wrote back, though I alerted 30, seeking feedback to my website message. An excellent idea, wrote Bapu Satyanarayana, an articulate senior citizen who takes active interest in civic issues.I phoned friends and acquaintances. Got a sympathetic hearing and many reasons why they thought the idea wouldn't work. A commonly heard line was: ‘Mysore is no Mangalore’. It was as plain and simple as that. I was being such a ‘tube light’, not to have thought of it.

For those who might be unfamiliar with Jana Mana, it is a community-driven TV programme that is informative, educative, entertaining and interactive. The weekly TV programme, devised by a group of public spirited individuals, addresses everyday concerns of people. They get people with hands-on expertise to answer FAQs phoned-in by viewers. They tell you how old one's neighbourhood church is, or where one can take a course in nanotechnology, the recipe for Kori Sukka, or how to crack CET.

Among the three respondents to my website lament was Anil Thagadur, a spirited Mysorean located in Dulles. He offered to contribute his bit and also his time to mobilise Mysoreans in the US, if only someone at our end took the initiative to put together a TV programme. He spoke of PBS TV and the National Public Radio in the US that are known for exceptional programmes on community development. Anil said, even in the US it was a struggle to find adequate support to start a not-for-profit venture, but once it got going it could really become the voice of the people, for the people. He suggested we collaborate with those running Jana Mana in Mangalore.

Bhamy Shenoy, a social activist, would like to see Jana Mana do more than address civic issues. “We need programmes that debate issues, expose shenanigans in public life, bureaucratic hassles, and expose frauds played on consumers by traders”. Don't we see a touch of Ralph Nadar here? Shenoy's prescription could keep away potential sponsors and prove to be the proverbial red rag to the establishment.

But then Bhamy Shenoy isn't frightfully optimistic about making a go of Jana Mana in Mysore. “I wonder how many Mysoreans would take interest in such things”, he says. He reckons that the main challenge here is motivating people to get involved in civic affairs.The educated and the social elite don't usually get involved, in the belief that they make little impact on civic affairs. The gullible are easily mobilised by political netas for bandhs and street protests.

To protest is our birthright, but it takes a nattering neta to turn it into vandalism. A recent street protest in front of the DC's office turned violent. There was slogan-shouting that went with some window-smashing. The DC's office furniture got thrown about, as in a John Wayne movie. I don't recall who the protesters were or what they were protesting. The thing that has stuck in the public mind is the ransacking of the DC's office.

Trouble is our netas who choreograph political stunt scenes with the vote bank in mind are not usually imaginative. Same old slogans and tiresome attacks on familiar targets. In Mysore, the other day, some so-called Kannada activists went around prime commercial areas blacking out hoardings with messages in English. I believe it was a Sunday morning, when the high streets were deserted and shops closed.

In such unguarded urban settings it wasn't a daring thing to do, going about with a can of paint and a spray gun to disfigure hoardings. It pales in comparison to the ransacking of the DC's office during working hours, in full public glare. The English-baiters with paint cans were led by an MLA. While the protesters with spray paint were at it in Shivrampet, someone drew their attention to vehicle number plates. The MLA is reported to have promptly picked up a can and brush to work on a number plate that carried the registration number in universally understood English format!

Maybe Shenoy has a point. How do you motivate the spray paint brigade to see that a Jana Mana programme, rather than disfiguring vehicle number plates, might have a better chance of promoting the Kannada cause? You have got to have civic sense for this, a certain spirit of inquiry, openness to ideas; in other words, you have to be Mangalorean.

A message posted in the context of some other issue in the Mysore website evoked a cryptic response from Mahadev, another non-resident Mysorean:”We see a lot of ideas on the Net, but the net result is minimal”. Mysore's answer to the Jana Mana idea is: “No ideas, please; we're Mysoreans”.

(When this piece was written in May, 2005, there was response from three persons to the ‘Jana Mana’ idea. There has been no addition to the number in the past year. Post on ‘Jana Mana’ is still there on the web along with several others waiting to be noticed.)

If pigs have a say, they would sue the mayor

2006-04-29T07:53:00.000+05:30

(Written, May 2005, when the pig menace at its peak, rather activists-group generated media noise was loud. The then mayor had made it his crusade to banish pigs from Mysore city limits. Nothing much came of it. I don’t suppose the Mysore pigs have a grouse against the present mayor.)

If pigs in Mysore are allowed to have their say, they would bring a class action suit against the city mayor, for his threat to liquidate them. If, by divine intervention or through Hollywood special-effects, they acquire the power of speech, our city-bred pigs would rush to the media and hold a press conference, lashing out at the Mysore Grahakara Parishat (MGP). Dubbed a consumer 'anarchist' group in some quarters, MGP has been pressing for action against, what they call, the pig menace. Pigs are not amused at such activism.

And then pigs need to counter the scare-mongers who cry ‘encephalitis’. If they can learn to write, the pigs would e-mail a forceful op-ed piece or send a ‘mother-of-all’ letter-to-the-editor to local media to put an end to all letters from health alarmists who drop unpronounceable medical names and drip like a tap with their unending grouse against neighbourhood pigs.

In view of the incessant complaints from anti-pig residents and the MGP's unceasing call for action, the municipal corporation has resolved to combat the menace on a war footing. It is reckoned that Mysore has a pig population exceeding 18,000. And for years they have been accustomed to having the run of the streets, working the garbage dumps, thoughtfully left un-emptied and overflowing by municipal sanitation staff.

We have it from a Siddharthanagar resident that our pigs are accomplished trench diggers as well. With their sharp teeth and strong jaws, pigs work close to people's compound walls to tunnel their way under the wall into residential compounds. They fancy electrical insulation material. Pigs dig holes around electricity poles to be able to chew on the casing and cable insulation.

The city mayor has notified a shoot-at-sight order against pigs found on streets after June 1 (or is it June 15?). If pigs don't seem particularly perturbed, it may be because of our civic body's poor credibility among people. Perhaps even pigs don't take their pronouncements seriously.A few weeks back the mayor had declared that special squads were out on the streets, rounding up pigs and holding them at a specially designated pen outside the city. A pig squad seen at work in the city provided a photo opportunity for local papers.

A week after 'Operation Pig' got under way, some MGP members along with a few media men visited the place to see how the pigs were doing in captivity. But there was not a soul to be found in the pen.The city mayor was quick with an explanation. There had been a glitch in the choice of location and the civic body was looking at another site for the pig rehab centre. The mayor, however, refuted any suggestion that the civic body played out a 'farce' that was billed ‘Operation Pig’.

The mayor's shoot-at-sight order is the latest in the ongoing pig story.But then other municipalities elsewhere in the country had announced such radical measures and invited trouble from animal rights activists. The Mumbai city corporation notified some time back that stray pigs in Mumbai would be killed at the rate of 1000 per week. This was to prevent spread of infection from the Japanese encephalitis virus. It is a mosquito-borne disease that hits animals and humans alike. Mosquitoes that feed on pigs infected with the virus transmit it to humans.

The People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) advanced the argument that the answer to the virus was vaccination, and not annihilation. PETA has it that the encephalitis virus has been contained through vaccine, not pig killings, in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. PETA campaigned among Mumbaikars, with a plea that they flood the city corporation with letters, asking how they could think of killing pigs as an option when vaccine was available.Relocating city pigs raised the issue of animal rights abuse.

Pigs, like most of us, are said to be sensitive to withdrawal of long-enjoyed benefits and privileges, such as unfettered freedom of movement on the city streets. How could the municipal corporation now talk of driving them off their familiar environs? No self-respecting pig can be expected to put up with this. The authorities also expose themselves to the charge of discrimination. They want to drive pigs out of the city streets, while no one is calling for action against cows and other livestock that roam the city streets.Such blatant discrimination by humans would not go well with pigs.

Animal experts would have us believe that pigs are stubborn and headstrong, and, like many of us, they get bored easily. It is unlikely that city-bred pigs would enjoy relocation to a 'halli' setting. We are cautioned by behavioural experts that when pigs get bored they become very destructive.

Pigs may never fly. But Mysorean pigs are modest. They merely seek the power of speech from the miracle maker. So that they can have their say. And the first two words they utter may well be, “Enough’s enough”.

My take on Mysore’s Miseries

2006-04-20T20:14:00.000+05:30

We have it from MGP (Mysore Grahakara Parishat) that there are at least 3,171 residents who believe that Mysore's most pressing problem is garbage disposal. Nearly as many of them give bad roads a higher rating on the city's chart of public miseries. As MGP secretary S.K. Ananda Thirtha put it, "There is a virtual tie between garbage and bad roads for the title of Mysore's most pressing problem." He makes it sound, doesn't he, like a closely contested FA Cup tie between Mohan Bagan and East Bengal in erstwhile Calcutta.
Stray animals are the prime menace, say 2,707 respondents surveyed by the MGP as part of its 'Save Mysore' campaign. And then we have 757 residents who reckon that the worst of Mysore's miseries is mushrooming illegal structures. The image that emerges from the survey findings is that of a haphazardly built town with pot-holed streets, littered with garbage and stray animals that compete for road space with motorists.
Elected caretakers of the city, far from taking note of the findings, pooh-pooh MGP for making "mountains of molehills." It is not for nothing they call MGP a Maha Grahachara Parishat (a mighty nuisance). Maybe you don't need an opinion poll, billed rather grandiosely as 'Save Mysore' campaign, to highlight common civic concerns. Besides, MGP's issue-based priorities chart need not be common to all residents in every locality.
There is the theory of 'hierarchy of needs' that governs people of different classes in different localities. People are motivated by the immediate needs of their locality to be satisfied before they focus on higher needs. And to come up with a list of top five civic issues may not be the most sensible way to assess quality of life in any city. A more meaningful assessment could have been made by seeking public response to the question: "How is the city doing?" Are we doing fine, poorly, or not at all, on waste management, water supply and on an assortment of socio-economic parameters such as upkeep of public parks, heritage sites, road maintenance, cultural activities, transport services, public libraries, shopping facilities, price-levels, hospitals, bus shelters, public toilets, schools, art galleries, museums, eat-outs?
If MGP could think in terms of doing quality-of-life surveys, locality-wise, it would be of help to the civic authorities in addressing the varied needs of specific municipal wards. The survey findings would become valuable reference material to town-planners and social researchers. Such an exercise could help MGP remove its negative image and raise its public profile.
MGP, they say, had hoped to mobilize one lakh respondents in its 'Save Mysore' survey. That they couldn't drum up more than 14,635 residents, even after months of campaigning, doesn't speak highly of MGP's appeal among the people, whose civic concerns it claims to voice.
The city corporation and local bureaucracy appear to have scant regard for MGP, which is dubbed 'a habitual complainant.' I have heard skeptics say that if there is anything we need to 'Save Mysore' from, it is the constant bickering between MGP and the municipal body. There is a school of thought that reckons no civic cause can be said to have been truly lost until it is taken up by MGP.
It is one of Mysore's minor miseries that MGP, which often raises issues of legitimate civic concern, lacks the social clout to shape public opinion and influence action by the civic authorities. The need for MGP can hardly be over-emphasized, in a city where the civic body isn't known for public accountability; and its people are known for their remarkable stoicism. What MGP needs is public credibility. It needs to be taken seriously, by the people who have put up with poor garbage disposal, bad roads, stray pigs, unscheduled power outages, and erratic water supply, for years, with the conviction that not much can be done by anyone to alter the situation

(This piece was done in July 10, 2005, when MGP came out with the findings of its ‘Save Mysore’ survey. The issues highlighted then - pot-holed roads, garbage litter, and stray animals – haven’t gone away. Mysore survives, somehow. And MGP, at this point in time, is focused on ‘Saving Mysore’s Park’, from our politicians.)

MyMysore dot Com

2006-04-16T00:19:00.000+05:30

When he heard I was shifting base to Mysore a friend in Coonoor said, “So, you're moving to that pensioners' paradise.” He meant well. But that isn't how Mysoreans like their town to be thought of. When I put in this bit on our web-page I got a mail from Anil Thagadur, a Mysorean based in Dulles, saying something to the effect that it was just as well I didn’t think the way my friend did. I sensed a veiled threat in his message. When in Mysore, think as the Mysoreans do. Dubbing it a 'pensioners' paradise' gives a fuddy-duddy connotation.

When someone mentions Mysore, my Coonoor friend visualises tree-lined avenues, spacious gardens, and a park bench seating a happy-looking greying couple, like the ones we see in LIC ads. I don’t know where he got his picture from. Maybe he had seen some vintage Kannada films, when Girish Karnad played a college kid.

The parks and gardens of Mysore had been all green and wooded when Karnad used to do the run-around-the-bushes routine for films. As for those greying couples, my random check with friends reveals that many oldies have moved away to the USA, presumably to baby-sit for their sons and daughters. It appears Mysore is losing its pensioners to the US, thanks to their green-card holding children. A pensioners’ paradise - could anyone still say?

I can’t say I’m familiar with paradise. Nor do I know of anyone who has been there. Available reports, gathered from sadhus and TV evangelists, indicate that it can’t be much of a fun place. I doubt if they have Pizza Hut and Planet X in paradise. We have them in Mysore and, what’s more, a throbbing club-life. Everyone I know here either belongs to a club or knows of someone who does.

The dial-a-Domino pizza joint is a five-minute walk from my place. The Cosmopolitan Club is close by. So is The Hutch Shop. Equally close is Devraja Urs Road where the executive types shop for ‘power dressing’. Mysore has the very things today’s youth simply can’t do without - pizza on call, the cell phone and the club-life.

I have been here a month now, and have started feeling at home already. One of the first things they say you do in an unfamiliar town is opt for a crash course in the local lingo. I have already mastered a modest vocabulary of two words - eshtu (how much?) and saaku (that's enough). Trick is to try and muddle through with filmy Hindi. It works with many people on streets and in shops. Where Hindi doesn’t work, you mutter the magic words, namme gotheela, and move on. For those who don’t know what that means, it means ‘I don?t know’.

People who have been here long say this is the kind of town that tends to grow on you. Never mind the open sewage that runs through the old town; the cows that have the right of way on streets; and the pigs let loose to feast on overflowing garbage bins. The city mayor reckons that Mysore has a pig population exceeding 18,000. It is such life’s little touches that lend Mysore its distinct feel and flavour.

It is the most comfortable place to live in, says Vinod Maroli, whose business often takes him away from Mysore .”I get this comfy feeling every time I see Chamundi Hills from afar, as I approach the town”. The feel for the place gets more pronounced among non-resident Mysoreans. Harimohan P, of Manhattan NYC, a civil engineer who emigrated in 1969, would like to see a civic campaign launched to get something done about those open channels of untreated sewage flowing right through the city. Harimohan reckons I couldn’t have made a better choice than Mysore, given the awful state in which most other cities are.

Here is a sampling of other people’s take on Mysore, posted in www.mymysore.com. Dr Ramprasad V, a Mysore-born dentist from Trichy, would like to reconnect with his Sardavilas cronies, and to hear from anyone who has anything latest on his revered gurus - KVN, SR, NSS and Tata Ramaswamy.

A Bangalore-based journalist, K G Vasuki, pines for the city he knows he cannot come back to live – ‘How could I forget GTR, Chamundipuram, and those bicycle rides to Gangotri (University) from the Agrahara’. Ananth Iyer, born and brought up Mysore, would want to settle here. That is a long way ahead for this young man based in Pennsylvania. Iyer misses set-dosa, two idli with scoops of chutney at GTR, Gangotri bread-bonda, the drive-in at Ramya's, and the Nalpak.

And then there is Sandhya, wife of cricket legend ‘Googly’ Chandra. She tells everyone she meets how great Mysore is. “The best city to live in,” she would say, “it is royal, roads are broad, and there is freshness in the air, palace illumination, and, most of all, Goddess Chamundeshwari.” Sandhya ends her e-mail with, ‘Lots of love to Mysore, its people.’

(Wrote this piece – Apl. 2005 – a few weeks after we shifted base to Mysore. I have been here over an year now, and I can’t bring myself to be that exuberant about the town. I feel more at home insofar as I’ve discovered Mysore to be not a ‘show-case’ town as others had made it out, but a place where you can actually live in – can’t live in a show-case, can we. I find here umpteen things to gripe about, as I’ve in any other town that we have lived in till 2005. Must catch up on my Kannada, though.)