Journeyman journo

For everything there is a season, And a time for every matter under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to love, and a time to hate, A time for war, and a time for peace. --Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Natwar is an embarrassment

I wonder what fig-leaf of defence Natwar Singh would offer after the Volcker report. I would agree with Swapan Dasgupta that the former Federal Reserve chairman did not have an axe to grind in Natwar Singh when he named the foreign minister in the beneficiary list of Saddam's oil-for-food scandal. What's really interesting is that senior Congress leaders have rubbished the charges against the party, but not those against Natwar. Is it an indirect admission of guilt that Natwar is indeed the rotten one? The foreign minister has surely a lot to answer. Writing in Pioneer, Swapan Dasgupta convincingly argues that the Gandhi family loyalist is indeed a spot of bother.



Swapan Dasgupta


First there was The Mitrokhin Archive, a quasi-official publication of the British Government which revealed the alarming extent of KGB penetration of the Left-liberal political establishment and India's intelligence agencies.


The UPA Government, no doubt concerned with the reputation of the Congress party and its Communist allies, decided to brazen out the controversy. A junior Minister of State was deputed to inform the country that the charges were "devoid of merit" and smacked of unsubstantiated sensationalism. A lazy media decided this was the last word on the subject and relegated Mitrokhin to the archives.


Now there is another damning report that suggests that a senior member of the Congress party was bribed by Saddam Hussein to influence the country's foreign policy. The UN-backed, independent report by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker on the Oil for Food scandal, which was released in New York on Friday, is only tangentially about India. Indeed, India finds only perfunctory mention in the main report. It is a report on how the Saddam regime received colossal kickbacks and bribed its way through the political establishments around the world.


Perhaps it wouldn't have mattered if the Indian extras in this web of deceit were figures from the past. However, the Congress establishment has to face up to the fact that an international report by a man, who has absolutely no axe to grind in India, has listed External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh as a beneficiary of $748,450 (amounting to Rs 3.37 crore at today's exchange rate) from Iraqi oil sales. The money was routed through Switzerland by a company called Masefield AG and listed the beneficiary as a "member of the Congress party."


The political tag attached to the payment makes it quite apparent that the External Affairs Minister was paid in his then capacity as head of the Congress' foreign affairs cell. According to the Volcker Report, such payments were made to "empower Iraq with economic and political leverage to advance its broader interest in overturning the sanctions regime." In other words, Saddam's payments were qualitatively no different from the suitcases disbursed by the KGB to further the interests of the Soviet Union. Saddam was buying influence and the Congress allowed itself to be bought.


This, however, is not an ordinary allegation of sleaze. The amount involved is relatively small compared to whispered kickbacks in commercial deals. The Volcker Report acquires importance on two counts. First, there is the role of Natwar Singh in pushing the unanimous resolution condemning the US-led military intervention in Iraq in 2003. And, second, Natwar Singh now happens to be the External Affairs Minister of India.


For the moment, it is not necessary to go over Natwar Singh's successful lobbying for Saddam in India. Nor should the controversy be confined to the repeated visits made to Saddam's Iraq by a Congress MLA who is part of Natwar Singh's family. What is important today is the issue of the Minister continuing in office for even a single day. A man who has been indicted by an international report for being a lobbyist for a criminal regime has absolutely no right to determine the foreign policy of India. His immediate resignation is a must.


Of course, the Minister has every right to answer the charges. However, the indictment by the Volcker Report means that it has to be resignation first, and a post-mortem subsequently. National honour and national security must be upheld. Both Mitrokhin and Volcker have conclusively demonstrated that "anti-imperialism" is not an ideology; it is a position of profit.


For the Congress too there are important questions to answer. Natwar Singh is not an ordinary functionary of the party. He has for long been a trusted adviser of Sonia Gandhi and has also served as the custodian for various trusts of the first family. He is in the inside track of decision-making in the Congress. Consequently, it is pertinent to ask the question: Were the payoffs merely to an individual?

Breakout moment for bloggers

Mark Glaser has written the best-ever piece on the IIPM vs Bloggers issue calling it as a 'breakout moment' for Indian blogosphere in Online Journalism Review.
By Mark Glaser
Posted: 2005-10-26

In India, you might think that if you buy enough newspaper ads, those same newspapers won't bother to check the claims you make in those ads. The papers wouldn't want to lose ad money, right? But that old equation is changing, thanks to one scrappy youth magazine called JAM and the collective investigative strength of the Indian blogosphere.

It all started June 15, when JAM ran an in-depth report debunking the advertised claims of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), a private business school that had spent more than $1 million in ads for its MBA program in May 2005. JAM found that IIPM had inflated claims about placing all of its students in jobs; having teachers from Harvard, Columbia and Yale; and luxurious extras such as swimming pools, mini golf and Wi-Fi towers.

Then blogger Gaurav Sabnis, an IBM salesman based in Mumbai, linked to the JAM article on Aug. 5 with a post titled, "The fraud that is IIPM." Perhaps the story would have died right there, but then IIPM made a tactical error by sending Sabnis a legal notice by e-mail on Oct. 4.
"The articles have caused unfathomable damage to the reputation of IIPM and to its various operational areas," the e-mail read. "The articles further have affected innumerable future operations of IIPM. We have legally notarized and logged all the releases and are sending you this e-mail to you as the first notice of proposed legal, judicial and criminal action against you that has already been approved & cleared by the Post Graduate Fellow Programme committee at IIPM."

While Sabnis at first found the whole legal threat funny, he wasn't laughing when his boss at IBM told him that IIPM was putting pressure on IBM (which sells laptops to IIPM) to get Sabnis to delete the blog posts. Plus, IIPM told IBM that its students were planning to burn their IBM laptops in protest. Sabnis quickly decided to quit his job at IBM to spare the company the PR nightmare.

Meanwhile, IIPM served similar legal notices to JAM magazine and another blogger who had written about the school, Varna Sriraman. The furor in the Indian blogosphere -- where bloggers refused to delete any posts -- finally caught the attention of the mainstream Indian media, which then covered IIPM's inflated claims.

"It looks like a breakout moment [for Indian bloggers] to me," said Peter Griffin, a communications consultant and blogger in Mumbai. "With this case, the ingredients were just right. Popular bloggers being targeted using some very heavy-handed methods by an institution that's not exactly highly regarded, a person at the head of that institution who doesn't command any respect, the popular bloggers being respected by their peers ... and, most important, the issue of freedom of expression at the center of it all -- a cause that blogs, by definition, will support."

Blogs make a differenceIn fact, the Indian blogosphere, cheered on by American counterparts such as InstaPundit, rallied to the defense of JAM magazine, Sabnis and Sriraman -- while also putting IIPM further under the microscope. With some ad hoc investigative work by bloggers such as Curious Gawker and Transmogrifier, the authenticity of IIPM's MBA degrees were called into question.

Blogger Thalassa Mikra found that IIPM founder Dr. Malay Chaudhuri had lied on the educational backgrounder he filed when he ran for public office. Mikra discovered that Chaudhuri claimed in the file that he went to the Berlin School of Economics in the 1960s, even though that school was only founded in 1971.

The updates were coming fast and furious at that point. Bloggers such as Amit Varma and DesiPundit ran massive posts with links to all the new information.

"This entire matter has driven home the point that bloggers can help enforce accountability in public life, and that no one -- whether they be the government, companies or even bloggers themselves -- can get away with deception," Varma told me via e-mail. "That is a fantastic thing. It has also made Indian bloggers more aware of the power they wield, and the ability they have to disseminate information quickly. We've seen this at different times in different ways, like during the tsunami, for example."

In December 2004, Indian bloggers such as Varma and Griffin covered the effects of the Southeast Asian tsunami, and they used the lauded Tsunami Help group blog as a template for the more recent South Asia Quake Help blog focused on the Oct. 8 earthquake in Pakistan. Today, Oct. 26, happens to be Blog Quake Day, with DesiPundit calling on bloggers around the world to mention the Pakistan quake and link to charities that support relief efforts.

While Indian bloggers also rallied to support Mediaah blogger and journalist Pradyuman Maheshwari last March against a legal threat from the Times of India, Maheshwari decided it wasn't worth fighting for and pulled the plug on his popular blog.

IIPM's overreactionBut the legal threats from IIPM did nothing to cow bloggers or JAM Magazine. Rashmi Bansal, the editor and publisher of JAM and a blogger as well, told me via e-mail that IIPM's Chaudhuri and the school's dean A. Sandeep showed up at JAM's offices to accuse them of yellow journalism. After the visit, JAM received a 17-page legal notice threatening to sue JAM for defamation unless IIPM received a retraction and apology.

Amit Saxena, head of corporate communications for IIPM, sent me a statement that tried to deflect the criticism of JAM and bloggers, and accused the latter of a slant toward the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), a more respected and established system of business schools.
"We are stunned as to how the most pampered students of India (i.e. from the IIM) suffer from so much inferiority complex from us that given the first opportunity to pen something (be it [former] IIM students like Rashmi Bansal or Gaurav Sabnis, and all other IIM students on the Net and other media), they stoop down so low as to write relentless lies and spread baseless rumors about IIPM," the statement read, in part. "But beyond a point IIPM can't allow these kinds of shallow rumors mongering to go on and had to take an action."

But Saxena would not discuss the details of the JAM expose, and IIPM has never explained discrepancies with its ads and the information unearthed by journalists and bloggers. Instead, IIPM has served legal notices, and a plethora of nameless blogs, allegedly by IIPM alumni, have sprouted up overnight defending IIPM and smearing the bloggers.

"None of this does IIPM the slightest bit of credit, nor does it enhance its reputation," wrote Kanika Datta in Business Standard, India's leading business daily. "If it wants to defend itself with dignity and credibility, the institution would do well to set up a blog of its own rebutting the facts in the JAM piece and publicly dissociating itself from the more injudicious comments of its enthusiastic alumni. The Net is increasingly becoming a pain point for corporations, especially large multinationals in controversial businesses. If there is a larger lesson for them in this incident, it is how not to deal with negative stories."

Instead, the scrutiny of bloggers helped get the notice of mainstream media, who then piled on with their own reporting. CNBC-TV18 -- a joint venture of CNBC and Indian TV18 -- ran a story on Oct. 24 stating that IIPM did not have approval from the Indian government's University Grants Commission (UGC) to offer an MBA.

"There is no private institution which is not recognized by UGC or which is not a part of a university, [that] can offer an MBA program," V N Rajshekharan Pillai, acting director of the UGC, told CNBC-TV18. "That is the rule of the land. I do not know how exactly they call it an MBA program. This institution has not approached the UGC, it is not a university. It is not an affiliated institute of any university from their advertisement."

Sabnis, the blogger who quit his IBM job, told me he is weighing various new job offers. He said that IIPM has made a few changes to their ads since the JAM story.

"I expect them to keep making changes because now there is literally an army of bloggers exposing lies of IIPM," Sabnis said. "Just today, I got an e-mail from a blogger who mailed Philip Koetler, the father of modern marketing. IIPM uses his name in their ads. The blogger made Koetler aware of this and asked if he endorsed IIPM. Koetler replied saying that the institute shouldn't be using his name in the ads. As such facts are unearthed and blogged about, IIPM will be forced to alter its ads."

Bloggers + MSM = better media?The story of IIPM and its battle with JAM and Indian bloggers follows a familiar trajectory here in the U.S.: There's a story in a smallish magazine, picked up and magnified by bloggers, then picked up and magnified by the mainstream media (MSM). This snowball effect has bloggers exulting, and the MSM taking bloggers much more seriously.

S. Karat is a freelance journalist in New Delhi who writes the ContentSutra blog, a spinoff from PaidContent.org that covers digital media in India. Karat told me IIPM made a big mistake taking on bloggers.


"The bottom line is Indian bloggers have arrived," Karat said via e-mail. "They have become strong opinion makers. Indian mainstream media has failed to take up the issue -- one reason is that IIPM is a big advertiser and the mainline media is an interested party there. But they forget that readers are their first priority and not advertisers."

While mainstream publications like The Hindustan Times and Businessworld have given bloggers credit in shining the light on IIPM, not everyone is happy with the bloggers' methods.
Sajan Venniyoor wrote on the media watchdog site The Hoot that Sabnis went over the line in his blog post -- and should use the same journalistic standards as the MSM.

"If blogs are to be taken seriously as an alternative medium, they should measure up to the standards of accountability and reliability of the mainstream media that the bloggers so deplore," Venniyoor wrote. "Just because you are the underdog does not mean that you are always right."

And though some in the Indian MSM are taking bloggers more seriously now, at least one mainstream journalist is not convinced. T.R. Vivek wrote an in-depth story for Outlook India on the IIPM flap, even finding that the bloggers were on the right side of the law. But when describing Indian bloggers, Vivek struck a low blow.

"The Indian blogging community (or blogosphere, as it likes to call itself) is essentially a bitchy, self-indulgent and an almost incestuous network comprising journalists, wannabe-writers and a massive army of geeks who give vent to their creative ambitions on the Internet," Vivek wrote. "Given that the average blogger-age is 25 years, it's clear bloggers love to indulge in hearty name-calling and taking college-style potshots at others. This is probably why some of them get into trouble."
Perhaps, but Vivek could be accused of taking the same type of potshot just within that paragraph. And in the final analysis, bloggers were the ones -- along with JAM magazine -- to stand up to a big institution without backing down.
"There are several issues that mainstream media doesn't go after with as much enthusiasm as it should," Sabnis told me. "Reasons can be manifold -- business interests, the 'sexiness' of the story, effort involved, potential audience, etc. Bloggers, however, are not bound by any such constraints. They have no editors and no marketing team to answer to. Thus bloggers can pursue such issues with a lot more conviction. They can bring such issues to the notice of the mainstream media much more effectively."

Friday, October 28, 2005

10 Greatest Desi mysteries of all time

Writing in Outlook's 10th anniversary issue, creative whiz Freddy Birdy list 10 Greatest Desi mysteries of all time.


1. How does Bappi Lahiri get through an airport metal detector?

2. Why would anyone want to learn the "Art of Living" from Rhea Pillai?

3. Why use the term "bad hair day" when you can say Abdul Kalam?

4. Who finances a Dev Anand film?

5. Who watches it?

6. Why are there 50 ways to leave your lover but only five ways out of an aircraft?

7. How many Suhel Seths are there exactly?

8. What will happen to the acting repertoire of Rajni Kant when smoking ban comes into effect?

9. Why are the gyms still packed while it is all Adnan Sami gets all the girls?

10. Navjot Sidhu.

11. How does Sourav Ganguly digest all the nails?

I made up the last one.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Bushwhacked!

George who? I think his name is Dubya. :) Dada, thanks for sending the images.





Wednesday, October 26, 2005

My epitaph!



Just made this up....:)

Monday, October 24, 2005

Bombay Times plagiarism

Talking about plagiarism in media I came across this gem from Unsorted. Looks like proliferation of media has led to increasing incidences of plagiarism. But I guess BT are plain unlucky to have been caught. This is the standard practice in the media community - from simple cut and paste job to tweaking a story and then publishing it elsewhere. No wonder, mainstream media today is in an unholy mess. Good work Sunil. Keep posting such media piracies.

FDI in print media

Vir Sanghvi in his well-articulated essay on Indian media makes a case for entry of allowing FDI in print media. It's an idea whose time has come and some day the Commies would surely give in and allow the foreign media to have a stake in Indian media. As Vir Sanghvi in his Counterpoint argues how competition would help infuse much-needed discipline and accountability in the sector.


Perhaps because there has been so little real news to report – before the earthquake, of course – over the last several weeks, the media themselves have become the story. Nearly everywhere I go people are discussing the media, arguing about our ethics and lamenting the trend towards sensationalising news.

The most influential of the critics, of course, has been the Prime Minister. Angered by reports that the PMO had called a meeting to discuss the rise in the Sensex (no such meeting took place), he used the anniversary celebrations of The Tribune to complain about the lack of accountability in the media.

But there have also been other attempts to analyse media issues. At Outlook magazine’s tenth anniversary celebration, Vinod Mehta made an excellent speech on the role of the press and the Chief Guest, Sonia Gandhi, expressed concern at the move towards “tabloid journalism”. The anniversary issue of Outlook also contained Shefalee Vasudev’s comprehensive look at the issues facing the media. On Wednesday, AK Bhattacharya, the journalist’s journalist, wrote a thoughtful piece in Business Standard about the media and responsibility.
I have written about the media before – and I was quoted in Shefalee’s piece – but I think it is probably worth restating some basic positions now that we have embarked on a phase of introspection.

Accountability: The general view among politicians is that the media are accountable to nobody. This is plain wrong. Individual journalists are constantly being held accountable by editors and most newspapers are far more concerned about accuracy in reporting than they were, say, ten years ago.
The reason for this is simple enough: competition.

If people stop believing you, then any media outlet (print, radio, TV, internet etc) is dead. Take our own paper. Ten years ago, the HT’s position in Delhi was unassailable. But today, with newspaper price wars and the competition with TV and the internet, we have to consciously strive to hang on to our readers. The latest readership surveys may say that we have 3.4 lakh more readers than The Times of India (that’s the IRS result; according to NRS we are 3.98 lakh ahead) but we know that it is a damn close run thing. A few months of sloppy reporting and readers will switch papers.

In Bombay, The Times is still number one by a long, long way but the entry of the HT and DNA has forced it to become a much better paper than it ever was: it has even re-introduced such features as the books page, which they used to tell us were outdated concepts.

In TV, the situation is even more competitive. Take the Bombay floods. Of the many TV channels, only Uday Shankar at Star News had the insight to realise that citizens were mad as hell (and in all fairness, I have to add that, among newspapers editors, our very own Avirook Sen was the first to reach the same conclusion). Uday seized the moment and turned his channel’s fortunes around with his angry flood coverage. Last week, Star News was the number one news channel in the country, ahead even of the mighty Aaj Tak.

To argue that the media have no accountability is to miss the point. We are accountable to increasingly demanding viewers and readers all of whom have more choices than ever before. If we stop doing our jobs, people stop reading or watching us.
To say that this does not amount to accountability is to insult the intelligence of readers and viewers.

To all the politicians who take this line, I have only one thing to say: the reader is not a fool. He (or she) is the person who elected you.

Defamation: I am always told that newspapers can write what they like because libel laws in our country are so weak. This is simply not true: the libel laws are very strict.


The problem is with the courts: a defamation case may take years. But this is a problem with all cases, not just with defamation. A murder case can take ten years. If somebody cheats you in a commercial transaction, then the courts will take over a decade to provide justice. So, why single out libel cases?


And if politicians are serious about media accountability then they should do something about the delays in the legal system. It is no good blaming the media for the mess in our judicial process – we didn’t cause the delay. And as citizens, we are also denied justice because of the unwillingness of all governments to spend the sums of money required to overhaul the system.

Dumbing down: When I joined the HT in 1999, I treated it as a sacred mission to resist the trend towards dumbing down of newspapers. These days I am less passionate about the issue for several reasons. First of all, I think the danger has largely passed. Dumbing down was a 1990’s phenomenon, spearheaded by The Times of India. But in this decade, The Times has changed track and has actually smartened up. Nor do I see other papers rushing to follow the 1990’s Times of India model.

Secondly, much of the nostalgia for the papers of the 1960s and the 1970s is misplaced. If you go back to the files and look at them, you will find that most papers were very dumb – even in those days. They were shoddily produced, poorly written, full of government handouts and obsessed with politics, crime and municipal issues. I yield to nobody in my respect for the great editors of yesteryear but let’s face the truth: most of them only cared about the editorial page –which the vast majority of their readers did not even look at. The rest of the paper was produced by poorly-paid, badly trained news-editors and reporters, many of whom could not write English and some of whom would happily carry plants and accept the odd envelope.

This situation only began to improve in the late 1970s when such magazines as Sunday and especially, India Today rewrote the rules of journalism. It was not till the Sunday Observer in 1981 and The Telegraph in 1982 that we had any professionally produced papers that would meet today’s standards.

In 1979, when I came down from Oxford I was offered a job as an Assistant Editor at The Times of India. Other people of my age – many of them much brighter than me – were told they would have to start as trainee reporters. So why did I get to be an Assistant Editor? Simple: I had been to Oxford while the others had been to Indian universities.

How can anyone not be glad that this journalistic caste system is dead and that so many of our best editors – TN Ninan, Shekhar Gupta, Shekhar Bhatia, Tarun Tejpal, Jaideep Bose and so many others – are people who went to Indian universities and worked their way up to their present jobs?

Sensationalism: This criticism is usually directed at TV channels (though sometimes we get it in the neck as well, viz HT’s Salman Tapes) and reflects an annoyance with the number of crime programmes – many hosted by guys who look like criminals themselves – on TV. Viewers are also angered by the Breaking News slug which is used all too frequently.

I have two broad responses to this criticism. The first is that if sensational TV programming offends you, don’t watch it. I don’t watch Sansani or Hello Control Room or Red Alert or whatever and frankly, my life is not any poorer for it. The great thing about satellite TV is that – unlike the bad old days of Doordarshan’s monopoly – we all have choices. Nobody forces us to watch anything and there’s always another channel that has different programming. For instance, if you stick to the three NDTV channels, Headlines Today or the two CNBC channels, then you need never encounter anything grotesquely sensationalistic.

Secondly, I suspect that tabloid TV is a phase. TV channels are eschewing the traditional journalistic methods to reach out to viewers. And because all of this is so new, there are no rules or guidelines and they tend to go overboard. But if viewers are tiring of too much crime and too many bogus Breaking News slugs, then the channels will be forced to rework their programming. That is how the market – a far better guide than any politically-appointed regulator – operates.

And finally: Unlike the doomsayers, I am hugely optimistic about the future of Indian media. There was, I concede, a danger in the 1990s, but I think that moment has passed. Our problem is that we are too used to a judgemental culture of limited choice: one or two newspapers or one Doordarshan. We need to accept that today we have virtually unlimited choice. And in this diverse marketplace, there will be something for everybody.

Equally, not everybody will like everything that is on offer. But that’s fine. The whole point of a diverse media culture is that as long as you have a choice, you don’t need to approve of other people’s preferences.
And as the media grow, we will have more and more choices.

The Amisha soap opera


Did anyone watch the Amisha Patel show on NDTV Indya(The Hindi logs) and the homilies by the actor's friends and acquaintances this morning. The sweet nothings by Amisha's friends about her traits, smile, cutness, bravery(give me a break), fortitude and sweetness almost made me diabetic. Starting from choreographer Farah Khan(who reminded the viewers how the actress brought food for her during the shooting of Kaho Na Pyar hai) to her neighbour going overboard on Amish'a smile, the whole show was straight out of a Balaji soap opera. A teary Amisha also aded to the whole drama. It made a very depressive Sunday morning viewing. Just beats me why NDTV is giving free publicity to out-of-work actors? What's wrong with people at NDTV Indya? Have they run out of ideas? Next time get ready to see some obscure album actress getting all misty and cry buckets in NDTV.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

New women

Gurumurthy makes some interesting observation about the New women.
http://news.indiainfo.com/columns/guru/033005sudarshan.html


S Gurumurthy

Brinda Karat, a Left feminist, has criticised RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) chief K S Sudarshan for his views on the role of women. In Sudarshan's view, a woman who puts the family above her career is the role model for others. Brinda chided him for being anti-women. For her, a family woman is subordinated. Conversely, a career woman is liberated. Sudharsan's view and Brinda's are not just a conflict of the 'traditional' India with the 'modern'. Today, it involves the 'modern' West as well and a debate is on out there. Look at the facts and the thoughts on the role of women in the West, which our intellectuals of the Left and also of the rest generally benchmark.

Long before, the West had caught on to what the likes of Brinda now advocate for Indian women. The West, ideologically close to Brinda, moved even faster. In the Russian Federation, 65 percent of the marriages end in divorce. The divorce-to-marriage rate in the Ukraine is 63 percent, Czech 61 percent, the UK 51 percent, the US 49 percent, and Germany 41 percent. Swedish women are the most 'liberated' and 'empowered' with half and more of Swedish Parliamentarians and civil servants being women. Is it just a coincidence - or consequence - that 65 percent or more of Swedish women and men live together without marriage, any one with anyone for any length of time? In the end, over two-thirds of Swedish elders are bereft of family support. This has forced the Swedish Government to pass a law to provide caretakers, at its cost, for assisting the aged who are orphaned.

Look at the USA, which many look towards. The traditional arrangement where men go to work and women look after the house has fallen from 53 percent of married couples in 1972 to 21 percent in 1998. The divorce rate in the US has doubled between 1960 and 1998. Don't dismiss it as merely a cultural fall. It is economic as well. The state had to step in to fill the void in families. So the social security cost, that is the cost of caring for the aged and the infirm, unemployed and others, has skyrocketed. Many in the West are frightened of this time bomb ticking under their economies. Some of the best minds in the US fear that the emerging 'Fatherless America', as one writer put it, will bankrupt the country.

In contrast, the entire social security cost is privatised in India through the traditional family mechanism. But for such traditional families the Indian state would have gone broke long ago. Now the West is realising the criticality of women who put home above career. A study made in 2003, covering over 1,00,000 families in the UK and the US, found all this: wherever men and women have competed and claimed arithmetical equality, families broke up; the happiness of families and their overall economic status stood eroded; wherever women had the full support of husbands and had been mothers taking care of the family, happiness in the family was complete; separation forcing women to remarry or remain single caused a drastic reduction in their overall happiness.

Look at the relatively more traditional Germany. An article in The Christian Science Monitor (March 25, 2005) reads: "In Germany, the idea that it's possible to combine family life and a career is rejected by society as a whole," argues Barbara Vinken, author of "The German Mother." German society, she says, is increasingly split into two camps: those who have children, and those who don't. "It's a society in which a growing segment isn't reproducing anymore." The article goes on: "Sending your child (to day-care in order) to work is seen as something that weakens the family rather than strengthens it," says Giscela Ehler, head of Familenservice, a childcare consultant based in Berlin. "Women," she says, "feel that they have to choose between family and career." Yet, only 16 percent of German women with children less than six go for work.

Now see the stunning decay in women's status in the relatively traditional Germany. Like in all West the German Government provides doles till employment is offered to the unemployed. An unemployed German girl receiving the dole was stunned when told by the employment office to either join a brothel that had jobs to offer her or, if she declined to, become disentitled to her dole! Why? As Germany had legalised prostitution as an industry, a job in a brothel was as good any other employment for women in market economics!

So the West is now debating what the ideal role of a woman should be. In the West, one abuses Barbara Vinken as anti-women or dismisses her as Biblical. Nor does anyone trivialise Giscela as medieval. What Sudarshan says in India is precisely what Barbaras and Giscelas say in Germany. So let us look at the debate in the West, developed and more than that, decaying - lest even as we replicate their development, we don't bring in their decay. Sudarshan has a valid point. He never said women should not opt for a career. He only cautioned against idolising career women and trivialising the family-bound. In an intellectually spineless atmosphere, he has had the guts to raise a point, a profound one. Let us discuss it without being dismissive or abusive.

Software Dodos?

A great rant by Katie Lucas over redundancy in software sector.

"Why would you want a great developer to become a manager in the first place?"
Well, this particular developer is becoming a manager for the following reason:

Job requirements for engineers have an alphabet soup attached to them. I've been rejected for jobs because the version of Sybase I last used is too old, and this is for a role where SQL isn't even the core requirement. The SQL standard hasn't changed, but agents can't figure that out - they just want people who've used the latest version of Sybase.

I get turned down for UNIX dev roles because the version of VB I've used isn't the latest -- because they add a VB background to all the dev position requirements, and it's got the be the latest version of VB.

I've just got bored of having my technical skills outdated every six months. If I take my eye off the ball and Microsoft announces a technology and I don't immediately ram it into my CV or pick the wrong job, a year later I'm near unemployable.

I'm fed up of my career being this bizarre stamp collecting exercise where I get judged on how many of the acronyms I've been near lately and not whether I've gained any deep experience in anything.

Frankly, I'm getting too old to play this stupid game anymore. No-one wants to hire a software engineer with a decade of experience to start work in C#. They'll train 2 year experienced people to use C#, but if you've got more experience than that, you better show up with experience in C# because any other experience you have is irrelevant.

I'm tired of my entire experience being torn up and thrown away every couple of years because agents and HR departments can't figure out that a developer who can write C++ can also write C# and Java with very little training -- but what can you expect? These are guys who think Visual C++ isn't the same language as C++.

I looked at being a tech writer. I quite like writing -- I've got a background in creative writing, it's something I quite like, and I've done tech writing around IT projects before. Unfortunately, although I've written stuff and studied writing and so on, I'm not qualified to be a tech writer because the version of PageMaker I last used is too old... I suddenly have these visions of people saying to a re-incarnated Dickens "Look, you've only used quills. What the hell kind of writer are you? We're only considering people with experience with Biros version 4 or above."

I've noticed that things like "Project manager" experience doesn't get thrown away in the same way. No-one says "Oh, but that was a year ago. We manage projects COMPLETELY differently now. That experience doesn't count", whereas they do with, say, SQL. It's like SQL is a whole new langauge with each version of Oracle.

Apparently, being a successful software engineer currently means that you pick a tech, ram some experience on your CV and then bail after a couple of years before that becomes "old tech". Every couple of years you need to pick a technology (which probably hasn't actually shipped at that stage) and bet on it. And you must bet right every time. You never gain deep experience because that would mean missing an acronym off your CV and who knows when you'd need the acronym.

I've been offered two jobs; one will get me a PM background. One will get me a bundle of technologies. The latter is a good role, but how can I tell if those technologies will leave me employable in two years time? They might be completely outdated by then and useless and irrelevant like my experience with SQL on Oracle 8.
It'll get me a couple of years of Java, for example. But how can I tell if Java will still be an employable skill in 2007? I mean, I've got Java at the moment, but no hope of a job using it, because I don't also have J2EE and anyway the Java I did was 1.1 and everyone's after people with experience in newer versions...

Apparently I have no worthwhile experience to show for 10 years in the business because everything's the wrong version or doesn't have the right condiments or is just a tool no-one uses anymore. Any actual background I've got in things like "being an engineer who gets software written" is irrelevant. It's like assessing a builder on whether they've used Black and Decker tools and not on whether their houses are still standing. Or like assessing Dickens' writing skills by the fact he used quills and not biros.

Soft skills like PM don't get outdated by FUD from Microsoft. They don't come with version numbers which can drift out of date.

Really, they're the only alternative if you're the sort of person who can't assume you'll bet on the "right" technology every two years for the rest of your life. So this developer is becoming a manager just so that I can start building an experience history to remain employable with, because I'm fed up of fighting hard to keep even a couple of years of "relevant" background on my CV.

[As a complete side note, reading the job pages in the paper I came across an advert for a "housing policy officer". Now, bear in mind 'm used to adverts which say "Reqd Skills; C++, UNIX, Windows, VB, MFC, ASP, STL, ATL, Multithreaded, C#, .net, CVS, ClearCase " This one said "You should have a higher-second or first degree and a track record of generating effective housing policies."

Wow. Pay was pretty much a match for being a software engineer.

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Are the Geeks in Google working on this?

Link Amitabh to Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise has an Amitabh Bachchan number of 2.

Tom Cruise was in Minority Report (2002) with Kurt Sinclair.
Kurt Sinclair was in Kaante (2002) with Amitabh Bachchan.

Pierce Brosnan has a Sridevi number of 2.

Pierce Brosnan was in The Deceivers,(1988) with Neena Gupta.
Neena Gupta was in Meri Biwi Ka Jawaab Nahin (2004) with Sridevi.

Salma Hayek has a Shekhar Suman number of 3.

Salma Hayek was in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) with Harvey Keitel.
Harvey Keitel was in Beeper (2002) with Gulshan Grover.
Gulshan Grover was in Ek Se Badhkar Ek (2004) with Shekhar Suman.

Gregory Peck has a Shahrukh Khan number of 2.

Gregory Peck was in The Sea Wolves: The Last Charge of the Calcutta Light Horse(1980) with Mohan Agashe.

Mohan Agashe was in Gaja Gamini(2000) with Shahrukh Khan.

All worked up over Mahatma

It's that familiar chorous. The cacophony of a bunch of busybodies who want to impose their brand of morality on the rest of us.

Everyone in Orissa starting from the clownish former chief minister Giridhar Gomango, the Communists, the Congress and a couple of dowdy writers are frothing in their mouth demanding clampdown on a book depicting Mahatma Gandhi's sexually deviant activities.

The content of the Oriya book, Michha Mahatma (The Fake Mahatma), by Dr Bibudharanjan, a banker, has united the so-called Gandhi lovers. The 280-page book published by the novelist himself has showed up Gandhi as a mere mortal who struggled hard to douse the flame of lust at a time when the entire world looked upto him as Mahatma. Bibudhranjan, who has earlier penned controversial books on Nathuram Godse and Subhas Bose, has written that Gandhi's practice of sleeping in the buff with his lady consorts Abha and Manu was not only inappropriate, but abhorable and harmful. "An ideal Brahmachari is a man who by constant attandance upon God is capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited," the novelist has written in the section`Sex and Gandhi' quoting the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

“Gandhi is true but Mahatma is false. He was a man with all human failings but he covered them up all in his autobiography My Experiments with Truth in such a way to project himself a Mahatma. After his death his followers continued to cover up the unpalatable side of Gandhi and even went to the extent of blacking out his son Harilal's write up published in the Hindustan Standard a few days after his murder,” he says.

“In my book I have attempted a total and unbiased evaluation of Gandhiji, basing everything on evidence and documents. If the truth explodes the myth of Gandhiji's Mahatmahood, so be it. Why are the followers of Gandhi, who made a name for himself as a seeker of truth be agitated?" says Bibudharanjan.

In Michha Mahatma Bibudhranjan has described how the 77-year-old Gandhi almost forced Manu, the granddaughter of his own aunt to sleep naked with him during the Noakhali riots. "We both may be killed ny the Muslims at any time. We must both put our purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices and we should now both start sleeping naked."

Though I personally don't agree with what the novelist has written, the war bugles have been blown. Considering that the book hit the bookstands a couple of days ago, I am sure none of those protesting have actually read it. All of them read about the book's contents from newspapers and TV channels. I have a copy of it, but couldn't go beyond the first few pages. While it's difficult to visualise Gamango - busy with his queer brand of tribal music - thumbing through the book, the same can be said about countless others who are just so ready to trash the book. Yesterday a woman leader from CPM came to my office with a press release about the book sullying Gandhi's name or something to that effect. This is a bit too much to swallow. If I am not badly mistaken the Communists have never been enamoured with the Father of Nation. Or is it just a October hangover? Whatever, the book has raised the decibel level in the soporific capital of Orissa.

As if all this was not hilarious, a nondescript journalist has now lodged a station diary in Puri, the hometown of the novelist, demanding the writer’s arrest and a ban on the book.

Though I would not rate the book highly over its literary worth, the brouhaha says a lot about our hypocricy. It's not just Orissa, I presume people in rest of the country would have done the same thing. Whatever happened to the idea of Freedom of Speech?

Update

The Mamus(cops) in Bhubaneswar today seized a few copies of the book and are scanning for objectionable material. I am sure they would find a lot. Just proves that cops do read beyond FIR copies.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Mad girl in a little dress

Locked in a room for 20 years, by father

Bhubaneswar: One war, two nuclear tests, five Prime Ministers, countless cricket matches. That’s just a sample of the India Annapurna Sahu has missed since 1985. What was she doing in this period? Watching the peeling plasters on the walls of her decrepit 5x4 ft room in the Gopabandhu Bazar area of the Indian town of Dhenkanal in Orissa in which nothing ever happened.

Termed insane by her family members, and therefore unfit to live with them, 45-year-old
Annapurna was today freed from her dingy room, in which she was locked away for more than 20 years by her father. Freedom came after police were tipped off about the illegal detention.A very weak Annapurna was taken to hospital and then handed over to local NGO Dayananda Saraswati Mission.

Annapurna was imprisoned by her father Brajabandhu Sahu because she had reportedly become mentally ill. Some 20 years ago, Annapurna reportedly started behaving erratically, following which her father decided that it would be better to keep her confined in a room behind their house, rather than take her to psychiatrists.

Since then, Annapurna has remained in the stuffy room where she ate, slept and even defecated. Annapurna, who studied up to Class VII, is reported to have developed some sort of mental illness. “She kept running away here and there. So I kept her confined,” says her unrepentant father, a prosperous businessman.

Annapurna’s father told the police that she was not given clothes as she tore them. “She would tear them out. For the last four months we didn’t give her any clothes at all,” he told the police. After spending more than 20 years in the ill-lit room, Annapurna looks like a ghost of her self. Her tousled hair has turned grey. She has practically forgotten how to talk. But far from taking action against her father, the police are eager to defend him.

“It’s good that she was locked up by her family members. What other option did her father have other than keeping her in a room? It would have been no good had she run away from home and then got raped,” said Debadutta Pradhan, the officer-in-charge of Dhenkanal town police station.Dhenkanal police superintendent Sanjay Singh also supported Pradhan’s contention saying that no case of illegal confinement can be made out. Pradhan said the police cannot lodge any case against her father as it cannot be termed illegal detention. “After all he is the woman’s father,” Pradhan said. However, the legal fraternity says a case under Section 341 of the Indian Penal Code can be lodged against Annapurna’s father for illegal detention.