The World That Week

After about a year or so of telly-abstinence, I have once again begun watching the news on TV, that too at that traditional hour between 9-10 pm. Things really are the same: the conflicts of Afghanistan, global recessionary trends, Indian film awards, and young Sachin Tendulkar's plans for the summer.

Yes, young Sachin.

I have, you see, stumbled upon the fact that at 9 pm each weekday, NDTV Profit airs episodes of "The World This Week", that 90s show. Mercifully, there are still those of you old enough to remember a time when news studios were not like the set of Hollywood Squares and when someone read out the news to you instead of behaving as if they missed those days of quoting prices on the floor of the BSE. Right into your malleus-incus-stapes. 

So yes, I have been watching news from around the world; only that it is from two decades ago (they are currently in 1992 with the Barcelona Olympics around the corner). It is instructive to note illustrations of both "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" as well as "plus ça change, +1 change". Afghanistan stays rocky, Scotland is still looking for independence, the Tories are back in power. But there is no Gabby Sabatini, Narasimha Rao is forgotten, and terrorism is prime-time news every week. 

"The World This Week" was anchored calmly and patiently by the psephologist-turned-mediaman Prannoy Roy, whom history will now only recall as having unleashed upon the us the likes of Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, and He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named-BUT-SHOUTED-OUT-WITH-EXTREME-OUTRAGE-NOT-TO-MENTION-PREJUDICE. There was the bearded special correspondent Appan Menon, whose preferred style of letting his interviewees say everything would soon be rejected by every media school's syllabus in the last decade. TWTW was an example of how news could be interesting, even if it was about the elections in France or South Africa, and relevant, with reports on the then emerging AIDS epidemic or rap music from the US. Where breadth of coverage didn't mean sacrificing depth, and listening to the news just once a week meant a chance to let the substantive events surface above the knee-jerk flavour of the day.

This may be the nostalgic rumblings of a Doordarshan-era apologist who forgets that then, news could often be staid and unimaginative, or worse, dangerously status quoist and propagandist. But programmes such as TWTW and production houses such as NDTV showed us the light at the end of the TV camera and laid the foundations for TV news media as we know it today. If they turned me on TV, their successors have sadly turned me and the telly off at 9.

But not any more. Tune in to TWTW: the good thing is you know how most things are going to turn out, so there are no worries. You can see a somewhat random collection of sports clips from alpine skiing and Italian Serie A action, and the occasional entertainment hilarity such as the inaugural "Natraj Awards", billed as India's answer to the Oscars. You can live in the past with the assurance that you made it to the future despite the news.

And for once, the nation should demand to know how.

Be there, be square

Each Saturday, when I receive my copy of the Indian Express, I turn, not to the sports pages or the Page 3 party news (this being the IE, there is none of course), but to read Mihir Sharma rip into the Indian TV news media. I derive a nasty form of pleasure from it, and I'm sure I'm not alone in it. In recent times, spurred by what we saw, heard, and winced during and after L'events D'Anna, his tone has become as militant and mocking as that of some Kejriwal-Bedi offspring. And this is one campaign I wholly support.

Take for instance Sharma's take on the ever increasing panel sizes of 'experts' on Times Now. There were days when the 9'O Clock show looked more like a set from Hollywood Squares: there were many boxes on screen and each box had someone answering questions, sometimes simultaneously. But unlike that TV show, the responses were not funny and the viewers never got any answers at the end.

Indeed, I call upon Mihir Sharma to go on an undeclared, unwarranted, infinite fast against such news programmes. For that is what the Nation Demands.

Incidentally, I have been on a zero-TV diet for the last 2 weeks. And realised it's very easy to achieve an immediate improvement in one's life.

Babies, Babas, Bappis, and Bas Karo

Outgoing Kerala CM V.S.Achutanandan called Rahul Gandhi an "Amul Baby" a few days ago, in a desperate attempt to remind us that much of the country is in the midst of assembly elections. Predictably, the Congress and its minions have seen red (ha!) , and dismissed this as being uncivilised and disrespectful.

I don't think there's anything wrong in being called an "Amul Baby". Assuming the usually bombastic VS was referring to the chubby "Amul Girl" and kids who've been reared on butter, Rahul Gandhi (who has previously been described as heading the "babalog") is being compared to an iconic figure says more clever things in a week than many of our politicians manage in years.

Of course, Kerala has lots of Babys of its own - none more prominent than the current Kerala Minister of Education M.A.Baby.

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Apparently, Bappi Lahiri is some sort of an official cheerleader for the Pune Warriors IPL team. That team has the least amount of golden colour on its uniforms, so perhaps Bappi-da has been roped (though no lasso is big enough to...) into lending his auric presence to the proceedings.

Speaking of the Sonar Fella, here's an extract from a recent book about the making and impact of "Disco Dancer". Writer Anuvab Pal goes to Bappi Lahiri's house, where:

Now, during the walk, on either side of me, what I saw could be best described as gnomes. [...] It was a garden gnome, a little sculpture in ceramic.

But not of a random old white man but of Bappi Lahiri himself, wearing tuxedoes of different colours, almost as if fourteen midget marble versions of him, or a series of oversized tiled Bappi Lahiri action figures, we[r]e welcoming you into a room whose central decoration you were manipulated into observing -- a wall with two roman columns on either side. The wall had a huge framed photograph. In the photo were three people -- Mr Lahiri, Sonia Gandhi and Jay Z.

The article is here.

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Speaking of gold and IPL, we're into the fourth year of the annual parade of extreme colour clashing combinations. The addition of the Kochi Tuskers and a revamped Bangalore outfit has taken the discolorations to stratospheric heights. Watching an overhead shot of the players during their match reminded me of some of the worst Powerpoint slides I've seen. And this supreme example of this website of a Japanese children's hospital (who must be undoubtedly, just to spite me, doing great humanitarian service during the current crisis).

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(It has become exceedingly difficult to make pithy observations such as the above at home. As soon as they are made, the reluctant smile on people's faces gives way to grave concern. "You are going to tweet about this, aren't you?")

Fast and Future

"Civil Society"
A tendency to wince each time this phrase is heard has now turned into a full-blown case of shuddering unease, with the events of the last week. Does this universally mean what it represents in India today? A cursory web search is evasive on the answer, but it appears to principally (and ironically) serve as a label for anyone excluded out of formal social or political dialogue.

So what makes this particular collection 'civil society'? Can it only be defined by what one is not? For instance, anyone in the military is not 'civil society' (and serve us indisciplined civilians right). Anyone in politics (i.e. not in a position to rule today or tomorrow) is not 'civil society', perhaps because it is hard to be 'civil' in that society.

I don't know what it is about 'civil society' that riles me. Perhaps 'civic society' might work for me. Given the strength of this class of people is in their ordinariness, perhaps "ordinary people" is good enough. Or "Rest of India".

The God of News Channels
There is a God of News Channels, who looks and protects them. Realizing the inevitable hollowness of soul that would succeed the euphoria of an Indian World Cup win, He provides with an event that would allow them to remain on the side of the masses. Something you could cover all day, and whose result was going to take more than a few days to emerge. There were clear heroes and villains too. Essentially, something like a gripping Test match between India and Australia. This makes a good change from the usual battles, once in a while.

It also meant that reporters could continue to interview the ordinary citizen, while keeping the experts talking. Words like "Victory" and "standoff" could still remain relevant to headlines. And there were scenes of street celebrations to round it all off.

Less ironically
I actually heard some interesting and thoughtful comments by ordinary people. The politicians sound so out of touch, and so unwilling to engage in meaningful debate. Any young politician could easily have seized the day by simply talking to and with ordinary people, in many of the hundreds of gatherings around the country. There were no reports of any major 'young' political leader doing that. It was both an opportunity lost for the established lot and the briefest of sparks for the Rest of India.

The malli-puu revolution was here

Further proof that Tamil Nadu seceded a long while back and we didn't really know.

this is a screen grab from a News X TV Channel news ticker that said 'Karunanidhi on a 3-day visit to India' - on Sunday, 30th Jan. He was in Delhi on coalition business. 'malli-puu' is 'jasmine' in Tamil.

7 Khoon Maaf - Vishal Bhardwaj's latest

Read about it on George's blog or see the trailer at the VB blog.

Facebook's new messages system

I've always wondered why, in the age of online handles and content-based routing and web identities, do we still need to have 8+ digit numbers for phones. Since it's painful to remember more than a handful of these numbers, we end up giving them useful aliases on our mobile devices or address books. Instead, why can't we simply have something like a "name telecom provider" interface?

Which is why I was intrigued to see that very same point being made in Facebook's announcement of its Facebook Messages revamp. It's very clever, it's very social, and it is likely to take Facebook to people who didn't care to be part of that ecosystem. When GMail brought in a fresh look at e-mail, it was typically Google: fast, usable, but geeky (tags instead of folders, email classification, attachment reminders). This, in comparison, is social-like-hell (for us not-so-social types) - separate inboxes for friends vs others (v. simple - why didn't others implement this?), the promise of replaying your interactions with a person over a lifetime, and convergence of email/IM/sms.

The announcement also suggests that they spoke to high-schoolers to understand what they thought about messaging, which is interesting. So Twitter is for the 30+ crowd and the hare-brained-celebs, GMail for those who discovered Google in their twenties, but FB will evolve with teens.

I don't use FB very much, but it looks like it's just arrived on my online doorstep. Especially if this is the vision:

Relatively soon, we'll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren't there yet, but the changes today are a small first step.

Zuckerberg's Social Network keeps getting wider.

(just a bunch of thoughts that struck me when I read the announcement)

The software has nothing to do with it

It's an old ploy - newspapers put out headlines or take angles in a story just to grab our attention, but without considering the facts. And who does it better than The Times of India? Today's newspaper reports the unfortunate murder of Darshana Tongare, a recent COEP grad and IBM trainee, who was stabbed by an unknown figure. Apparently she wasn't robbed, so the motives aren't entirely clear yet.

The Times of India takes the view that "The safety of women techies in Pune has come into sharp focus once again". So far, nothing suggests that the profession of the victim had anything to do with the incident. The safety of every woman in the city, professional or not, traveling at night could be called into question. In fact, the general safety of the populace at large. What's more shocking was the lack of response from the police control rooms, when passer-bys tried to report the incident. The ToI buries that deep into the report.

Many newspaper articles, particularly in headlines, report incidents of crime with the profession of the victim embedded. In most cases, this is incidental. "Techie" is now a cliched and obnoxious word - and not everyone working in a software company is a technologist. Cases of suicide caused by overwork may qualify. But to papers, just 'man robbed' isn't sufficiently eye-catching, I suppose.

In fact, the same ToI report lists 7 other cases from the last 2.5 years where Pune women associated with the world of IT-BPO have been assaulted. In four of these cases, the suspects/assailants were known to the victims, and were crimes involving personal disputes. Nothing to do with being in the software profession. But yes, at least two of the remaining three could be said to be directly related to the nature of the industry, involving late working hours and being situated in poorly connected/lit/policed areas of Pune.

Such a lack of perspective affects the city and the industry as a whole, and dilutes the focus away from such issues such as better policing and systems that could both prevent and solve such issues. Incidentally, the ToI's sister publication (to my mind, the more reliable and less hypocritical of the two) Pune Mirror takes the angle of the emergency number "100" being unmanned. The Indian Express report is expectedly sober. From a non-Pune-paper view, The Hindu largely report the facts, editorialising only in the end (which is their prerogative), quoting the appropriate earlier cases.

One hopes the case is swiftly solved and that the right lessons are learnt by the police. Might we dare to hope for the same for India's most selling newspaper?

Kodos and Kang's World Cup of Horror

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(original Kodos & Kang image from Wikipedia)

Pop goes NYT

If you visit any article page on the New York Times recently, you would have noticed a relatively new navigation 'pop out'. Let's say you were reading this news article. As you get towards the end, this is what you are probably seeing at the bottom of the page: Now, when you get to the end of the article text, a box springs out from the right (quite disconcertingly, I found, since the appearance is quite swift and abrupt). The box points to another related article in the same site category: From a web design point of view, this is interesting - a tiny addition that tries to keep the reader on the site. It attempts to catch your attention by appearing out of nowhere. But it can give you a surprise (a slight spike on the fright-o-meter), which is perhaps why I wonder if they would have been better off with something that fades-in instead of the horizontal jack-in-the-box. Incidentally, Forbes India's Business.in site also has the very same navigation pop out, albeit one that grows diagonally. However, the site gets it very wrong on paginated articles (see this article for example). Even if you are coming to the end of page 1 of an article (and not the end of the article itself), you still get a link suggestion box. Surely they don't want me to leave this article by the wayside? NYT doesn't make this elementary error.

Jaspal Sandhu haazir ho

Lalit Modi may look like Ravi Baswani, but his actions have always smelt of Tarneja. Both Tharoor & Modi are two high-flying, speed-racing individuals whose words and actions are just wonderfully designed to evoke jealousy and annoyance in many, and as can be seen right now, there's no dearth of people queuing up to yank them down.

Meanwhile, some lament the future of cricket as a sport and business, fears which I find unfounded. Like in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, someone will whisk it off saying: न पान्डव द्रौपदी के लायक है, न कौरव| इस लिए द्रौपदी हमारे साथ जाएगी|

हम होंगे कामयाब एक दिन?

Important: Updates to our BCQC August Open Quizzes

If you are planning to participate in Sunday's BCQC open quizzes, please see this update.

Monsoon Mania

This year, the monsoons in Pune have been part of a massive tease. It's not like those old films where the weary peasant looks up to see a sky reflect the barrenness of his unploughed field. Instead, the sky is full of dark clouds with just one catch: they aren't ready to spill the beans yet.

A set of more celibate clouds couldn't be glimpsed - they could easily trounce a bunch of champion-quality austere monks at being masters of their domain. While the Great Indian Monsoon has presumably touched Maharashtra (though in Bombay, it is as muted as Maria Sharapova with laryngitis), there's hardly been a drop in Pune. It is starting to get scary.

With the situation getting desparate, monsoon yagnas have broken out in parts of the country. Here's another idea, so madcap, it might just work. Most TV reality shows are unreal: for them, 'reality' occurs when people cry on screen while cameras zoom into their skin pores. Dunno if India has talent, but it sure has judges in packs-of-three in abundance. Reality is usually much more boring than all this, and TV is roundly criticised for denying its existence. But here's a chance for TV to be both meaningful and real, unlike the 'Rakhi' Picture Horror Show, which is quite the opposite. I refer, of course, to the Great Mian Tansen Manhunt.

The great Tansen, it is told, could bring water down in big coloured plastic buckets full of pet animals if he sung the raag Megh Malhar. If only a modern version could be unearthed? Is it not worth millions to find this person, even if s/he could only promise water every two days? (thus outperforming most municipal corporations.)

That my mind is functioning like an Indian TV executive can be blamed on the skies above. Out, out, damned spots. But it's not going to be hilarious in a couple of weeks. In fact, it'll be downright scary when I'm staring up the barrel, waiting for a drop.

What's in a name? Count for yourself

With the inauguration of yet another Rajiv Gandhi-named thingy, a look at the overall thingy leaderboard:

Rajiv Gandhi: 138
Chhatrapati Shivaji: 137
M.K.Gandhi: 68
Shakespeare: 1

With this, Rajiv Gandhi has taken a slender lead in the standings. With the Congress set to enjoy a full five year term at the Centre, he is likely to further strengthen his lead.

In the interest of keeping the drama in the race alive, certain people request you to vote for the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance in Maharashtra.

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Suggested supplementary reading:
* A New Indian Express article on Gandhi, Gandhi everywhere,
* Atanu Dey on this practice: 1, 2

Given this, one wonders if Mayawati's double-handed backhand of playing 'statue' is just another variant of this game of iconography. If so, she seems to get greater flak for merely not mastering the nuances of the game.

Totalitarianism rules football

Doubtlessly an exaggeration, but it should make democrats peevish that a totalitarian state like North Korea (which we are told is constantly on the verge of starvation) qualifies for the World Cup (their second-ever qualification), and we are not even in the picture.

With recent T20 cups of sorrow running over, this might be the best time for a sport-minded dictator to throw in his hat and fire a few rounds en route to New Delhi. If he promises to whip into place a couple of World Cup victories & qualifications, he might find a supportive populace behind him.

The remaining 60% don't care any way.

फिर भी कम निकले

A certain mutant form of the world according to Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi seems to be on view. While Shiney Ahuja is in jail after pursuing a woman, while the 'revolution' seems to have arrived.

Nonsense worth millions

The whole "Millionth word in English" nonsense finally came to an end with the rather boring 'choice' of "Web 2.0" as _the_ word. The friendly guys at the Language Log tear into the whole affair with gusto.

One can only shudder at the shrieking hype cycle in the Indian news media had "Jai Ho" been chosen. Joy Ho!

The CAT purrs online

About four-and-some years ago, I had hoped the Common Aptitude Test conducted by the IIMs would become a computer-based test. Finally, this year, the exam will be taken by applicants using a keyboard and mouse over a 10 day period.

This is a step in the right direction, but I would still like it to go all the way, like the GRE: no specific time periods for the exam, only a valid score needed at the time of applying to the IIMs. The reasons outlined in that old post still hold, I think.

Fellow BC quizzer Aniket doesn't believe this is such a good idea. I hope for the sake of participants like him that the organisers get the logistics right and don't end up falling between two stools.

A certain calming order has returned to the tennis world. One might even say some larks have rediscovered the wing, as did the snail the thorn, while God takes up the comfy armchair in heaven, and Browning may even be fooled into thinking the world's not such a bad place after all.

I refer, of course, to Roger Federer nailing his place on top of the mantelpiece with the win at Roland Garros. The win may even set his career carefree, with very little left to prove to himself.

He may even stop uncorking the tap of tears that has become such a feature of post-final presentations. Talk about climate change.

There remains the minor trifle of not having beaten Rafael Nadal at Paris, but I wouldn't be too unhappy if his career ended like that. It could be his 99.94, giving us something to debate for the rest of lives. No one should be that perfect.

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Switching sports for second, I'm very happy that Rohit Sharma has moved to the top of the Indian batting order. He answers my prayer for a modern-day batsman who can oozes grace like an Arab oil pipeline from the 1960s. Batting first means his playing time is more predictable. Who else can you really watch?

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Back to the clay. I had missed Fernando Gonzalez's astonishing backside play, and found a video online. It is simply the most crazy thing I have ever seen on a tennis court (or on its sidelines). Here is the human eraser:

Shakespeare nil, Chennai Corporation one

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi's birthdays certainly have something for everyone. If last year it was the prospect of cheaper idli-vadai-dosai, this year it's free gold rings, courtesy of the Chennai Corporation (at tax-payers' cost, as Amit Varma points out).

However, all that glitters ain't aurum, for, as the Mayor says:

"We have formed a committee comprising of Tamil teachers to verify if the baby's name is really in Tamil and only those names certified by the teachers to be in pure Tamil will be given the gold rings."

Unlike Scrabble, there's no mention of an official dictionary that everyone can uniformly refer to. Perhaps a website to check the Tamil-ness of one's name?

One new mother takes the safe way out:

"I've selected the name Kanimozhi, the Chief Minister's daughter's name because she's a very progressive and educated woman," said Bharathi Rani.

But mothers of bonny boys beware: assuming the committee will abide by letter & spirit of the announcement, then they may well rule out a bunch of familiar names. So steer clear of Karunanidhi, Dayanidhi, and Kalanidhi, the words in whose names are clearly of Sanskrit derivation.