My Take by GVK

MY TAKE, at a new address

2007-08-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

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A cash-for-appointment hoax

2007-08-15T21:14:00.000-07:00

We’re not in America where they say that the resourceful can ‘pay’ their way to spending a night at the White House Lincoln’s bed-room. But then our desi mind works in weird ways. A couple of ‘enterprising’ Mumbai guys are reported to have claimed that they could arrange a meeting with the President at Rashtrapati Bhavan for anyone paying Rs.22,000. Their claim was reportedly telecast in a private channel.

I first learnt of something so preposterous from an R Bhavan denial: “This is to clarify that no such person by the name Sanjay Bhide and Niranjan Ganjawala as reportedly mentioned in the message or any other person has been authorised to bring people to meet the President." Dismissing the claim as mischievous, the R Bhavan spokesman reiterated that anyone could meet the President after taking an appointment.

Wonder how Bhide & Ganjawala came up with the idea that anyone would want to pay, in thousands, for an appointment with the President? It is not as if you tip the peon or office clerk to slip you into the office of a thanedar or tehsildar to get a file moving.

That the nation’s highest office is constrained to take note of such claim speaks of the influence of the electronic media. That a TV channel chose to telecast the cash-for-R-Bhavan-appointment claim smacks of irresponsible reporting and poor editorial judgement. Wouldn’t you say any responsible news media ought to have cross-checked such claim with R Bhavan before rushing to telecast ?

Taslima and the media

2007-08-11T23:19:00.000-07:00

Far from condemning their attack on Taslima Nasrin a section of the Urdu media in Hyderabad is reported to have found fault with the three accused MLAs for their alleged failure to cause injury to the Bangladesh writer. An Urdu daily reportedly expressed disappointment that the assailants went into action “with nothing more lethal than bouquets”.

Frankly, I found it hard to take that anyone, notably from the media, could express such sentiments in cold print. A Deccan Herald report cited the Urdu media hitting out at the MLAs for making a hash of it, considering that the police reportedly arrived on the scene some 30 minutes after the event. For the unfamiliar the event refers to the widely televised physical assault aimed at the Bangladesh writer by an unruly group led by three MLAs at a Hyderabad Press Club function to mark the release of Telugu translarion of Taslima’s novel Shodh.

The writer who had to leave Hyderabad in haste under security escort later told Deccan Herald in Kolkata that she had been attacked elsewhere on earlier occasions, but “it was never like that Thursday (assault in Hyderabad)”. Expressing her gratitude to the press Taslima said that if it were not for the media persons at the venue, “I wouldn’t have returned here alive”.

I stand corrected. In an earlier post, based on my viewing of live telecast of the assault, I suggested that the media on the scene was perhaps less enthusiastic about rushing to the rescue of the helpless victim than capturing the attack, blow by blow, on camera. Here is what Taslima told DH interviewer Prasanta Paul: “The photographers could have just clicked on and on as they (assailants) would kill me, but see, they chose to save me”.

Attack on Taslima: Some questions

2007-08-09T23:24:00.000-07:00

The attack on Bangladesh writer Taslima Nasrin by an unruly bunch led by three MLAs at a Hyderabad Press Club raises some questions.Extensive visual coverage of the incident was possible because of the media presence in strength at the scene of violence.

A couple of TV channels went ‘live’, with reporters in the thick of it all giving us a running commentary. The camera focused on vandals hurling books, bouquets (used as brickbats), furniture and things at a baffled Taslima. She was being shielded from taking direct hits by a grey-haired middle-aged gent who chivalrously stepped into the line of the missles-throw.

What intrigued me was that the foul-mouthed protestors made no attempt to block the photographers. They went about their vandalism in the full media glare; in utter disregard of the TV presence. This was unusual.It seemed as if they played to the camera. And the crew wouldn’t stop shooting as long as action continued. You may ask why the TV crew couldn’t put aside their camera and go to curb the attackers, instead of capturing their attack on film in graphic details. It’s a question that is easier asked by us than answered by the media persons.

The Taslima book release function was planned to be low key affair, in the presence of a group of invited media persons. Some of them were heard saying that there was no advance announcement of Taslima’s appearance. But trouble-makers apparently knew enough to mobilize a strike force. The police, on the other hand, appeared blissfully unaware, till after the attack started. Question is, how come the intelligence people didn’t know or didn’t alert the police.

Read in the papers the next morning that the assailants were charged, arrested, produced in court and freed on bail. And the visiting Bangladesh writer was whisked away by the police under security escort to the airport and put on the first available flight to Kolkata, where Taslima is living in exile.

Made-in-China toys

2007-08-01T22:44:00.000-07:00

News is the US toy company Fisher Price is pulling out of stores in US and Canada nearly a million plastic toys, many of which are ‘Elmo’, because they contain potentially unsafe amount of lead. And those who have bought them in the last four months can exchange them for a safer toy. The toys for pre-school children were made in China.

I wonder where the recalled toys go. Shouldn’t be surprised, if they find their way to the Third World, notably ours. In recent times we have been flooded with consumer items that are sold at half the price at which our own products are made available. China-made toys look slicker than those turned out by many Indian toy makers; they are much cheaper.

In smaller towns (I know about Coonoor) itinerant traders organize full fledged exhibition/sales of China made items every other month. In Mysore a couple of dollar-shop type of outlets have sprung up to flog made-in-China products.

Factory seconds and third-country rejects appear to have a huge market in middle-class India.

MIT’s Intellectual philanthropy

2007-07-31T04:21:00.000-07:00

Must thank The Hindu and Vijaysree Venkatraman for a lucid write-up on the OpenCourseWare (OCW), a website that provides free and unstinted access to material on some 1600 courses taught at MIT, Cambridge. Those who created OCW believe knowledge should be free and open to all; and that innovation and discovery are possible only if resources are shared. Highlights of the article:

NGOs have translated OCW content into many languages, widening its reach.

Some 150 like-minded universities, including those in China, Japan and Spain, have formed s consortium to publish their educational material online.

A Chennai user, 35-year-old businessman, is quoted as saying, “Some of the first courses I looked up were from the Sloan’s School of Management" (was then an MBA student at Madras University)”. He visits the site to learn about relativity, robotics or any topic he fancies.

The MIT initiative helps self-learners and the intellectually curious to acquire knowledge that would otherwise be possible only by joining a regular university course that every one, everywhere, cannot afford. . .Read The Hindu article . .

India of his dreams

2007-07-28T21:44:00.000-07:00

It is not as if Indians aren’t dreamers; it’s just that parental, peer and social pressures wouldn’t let our brilliant minds deviate, in pursuit of their dream, from a straight-jacket education system.Writing in The Hindu Open Page E C Thomas poses the question: Have you come across any young person who is prepared to drop out of an IIT or IIM to throw himself into unknown waters to follow a dream?

These institutions produce excellent managers, to execute other people’s dreams, elsewhere in the world. Mr Thomas would like to know if India in recent times has invented any product that can be said to have revolutionized the world scene ? We are emerging as the biggest market for cell phone, a product that we haven’t created. Nor have we created digital camera, plasma TV, iPod or DVD. In engineering India makes products engineered by others. Our IT majors, says Thomas, are in effect sub-contractors to elite corporations. We haven’t created an innovative company such as Google, Apple or Microsoft. But Indians are prized for their execution of designs of foreign innovators. The Hindu article cites the instance of Google chief scientist Krishna Bharat who joined the company in 1999.

Mr Thomas would like to see, what he terms, a holly alliance of parents, universities, private enterprise and the state, with a hidden agenda to keep the fire of innovative spirit burning in our brilliant young minds. We must ensure that the best of us do not become available to the highest bidder... More on thes lines in Open Page.. . .

My take on Mira Nair’s Namesake

2007-07-25T23:14:00.000-07:00

Gogol Ganguly. It takes half the run of the film for the character to come to terms with his name. Gogol. The guy who so named his son is dead and gone mid-way through the movie; and the son, so named, grown up and married, lives on to face ridicule from the partying American friends of his wife, an ABCD (America born confused desi).

Gogol, initially frustrated and, even angry, at his father, comes to accept his name, particularly after his father’s death. He gives up on his wife, who opted to retain her pre-wedding name. Presumably, she doesn’t feel comfortable with being addressed as Mrs Gogol.

What’s there in a name? Nobody seems to ask Gogol this, in the movie. His father, Ashoke had to come up with a name for his new-born on the spur of the moment and Gogol was the first name that came to his mind. He couldn’t think of any other, quickly enough; and mom Ashima, who had ‘Nikhil’ in mind, wouldn’t however name her kid without the sanction of elders in the family in India.

She tries to explain to the doctor at a New York hospital that she had written to her parents and a reply was awaited from Calcutta. Presumably, there was no e-mail then. The doctor cites the hospital rule – no name, no discharge. And that is how Gogol came to be so named by his father. Ashima accepts it in the belief that the family could always give him a better and proper name at the namakaran. .

How was Ashima to know that, unlike in her native Calcutta, a name-change wasn’t that simple a proposition in America? So the lad was stuck with Gogol, much to the amusement of his classmates at school. Years later when his son asks, “why did you do this to me, dad?” Ashoke explains the rationale for naming his son after his favorite Russian author, Nikolay Gogol.

I couldn’t catch what transpires here between father and son. I have problem with accented English, spoken at high speed. Besides, some characters in the movie mumble their lines or speak in whispers on occasions. I don’t know if many others have this problem with the Namesake soundtrack. English-speaking desis such as yours truly, who are not quite with-it with the English spoken in the US, could do with English sub-titles.

Mira Nair’s Namesake is a film with which NRIs can relate. Namesake storyline shuttles between Kolkota and New York. What happens to Ashoke and Ashima could happen to any NRI who sets up family in the U S. The film brings out the critical little concerns of desi parents with growing teenagers who have closer affinity with their American peers than their tradition-bound parents.

Mira Nair’s treatment is nuanced. How does a desi nari living in New York react to her college-going son phoning in to say he has a girl friend and that he would like to bring her home? How do parents cope when Gogol and his American girl turn up for dinner? The director brings out the discernable discomfort of Ashima at seeing her son’s gentle resistance to his girl-friend’s advances to place her hand on his lap or to give him a peck in the cheek in excitement.

It has his mother worried when Gogol’s home visits from the college hostel become less regular and his phone calls get briefer, fewer and far between. Her fears for her son were,presumably, unfounded. On learning of his father’s death Gogol has his head shaved off, as a mark of respect to the departed. When his otherwise orthodox mother tells him, “You need not have done this, son” Gogol responds, “I wanted to do it, mother”. One may read in this a social statement that the NRI youths in the US are all not totally lost to our sanskrithi.

Devi Shetty’s heart tips

2007-07-15T00:33:00.000-07:00

Didn’t know Mother Teresa was Dr. Devi Shetty’s patient. What’s more, she inspired him to reach out to the poor and the needy. This was, presumably, why the renowned cardiac surgeon gave up his job at a corporate hospital to set up a notably patient-friendly Narayana Hrudayalaya, Bangalore. Where, it is said, no needy patient is turned away because he/she can’t afford the expensive surgery. Dr Shetty subsidises the deserving. An uncle of mine was a beneficiary of Dr Shetty’s benovelance.

According to him, Indians are three times more vulnerable than Americans to this expensive disease. Women needn’t worry till they are 45, because they enjoy till then nature’s protection. So said Dr Shetty in a Q & A with a group of Wipro employees at a meeting arranged by the company. IT professionals among them, who worked to the US time zone, found it reassuring to have it from the guru that those who work night shift were in no way more vulnerable to heart attack than those who do more earthly hours.

I had the transcript of Dr Shetty’s Q & A chain-mailed to me. A subsequent Google search revealed it has been doing the rounds in blogs for a while. I counted 30 and gave it up. Like all other bloggers, I found that the Shetty transcript made such a compelling read that I chose to blog it yet again here. After all, yeh dil ka mamla hai.

Dr Shetty responds to a spate of questions such as whether the incidence of heart disease is hereditary (yes); why walking is preferable to jogging; how irregular food habit impacts heart; how tricky it is to differentiate between an attack and common gastric trouble; and what the heart’s worst enemy is (oil). You know what, Dr Shetty’s junk food list includes samosa and masala dosa. Read the full transcript.

Rail travel notes

2007-07-12T07:35:00.000-07:00

Do you know of anyone who might know of someone who has said he/she liked rail food? I have yet to come across one who relished – I mean, yummy-yummied – a meal in the train. That the train food is no good isn’t worth writing about. What intrigues me is capability of caterers to serve meals in trains that are so uniformly tasteless.

I had occasion to try out rail meal during my recent travel to Vizag from Bangalore and back by Prashanti Express. The menu varied, from brijal in the day to beatroot at night for curry. There was variety, such as sambar, morkozahbu, bhaji, puri and rice. But they all tasted the same, every time.

Sambar, rasam are the kind of items amenable to fluctuating taste, even if cooked by the same hands. It has to do with the masala mix; making it a bit too hot one day, a little less salted on the next, and, occasionally, even tasty, through sheer human error. But railway cooks, it appears, are trained never to err on the side of taste. And this is an aspect of catering management, I thought, the country’s best known rail management guru ought to highlight in his talks at IIM-A and management lectures to visiting students from Harvard, Stanford or wherever.

Prof. Lalu P Yadav can tell his Ivy League undergrad disciples how caterers in India’s vast rail network manage to maintain standards of tastelessness and still sustain the demand for their meals. The server in my compartment (AS1, July 6, Bubaneswar-bound Prasanthi) turned up with dinner at 10 p m because there were 500 meals to be served that night and there was no one other than him to serve them.

Another distinct feature of our rail system that might interest students of communication management is the working of public address system at Bangalore railway station. Our railways have public announcers who tend to betray supreme indifference to aspects of oral communication such as diction, phonetics and pronunciation. And then, from where I found myself on Platform-6, one heard a clash of voices emanating from two different P A systems.

As one announcer belted out scripted messages about delayed arrival of the Brindavan Express, there was a counter voice, from another system informing us about the status of the Mysore-bound train from Jaipur. The blare of announcements, delivered in Kannada, Hindi and English, not always in a conducive tone and accent, made less sense than noise.

Yet another feature of customer service communication pertains to availability of wheel-chairs at the Bangalore railway station. My source of information on it was through word-of-mouth. And licensed porters were willing to produce a wheel-chair for you, at a price that is directly proportionate to the level of your helplessness. I paid Rs.60, beating down the initial asking price of Rs.150, to move my handicapped mother from platform 7 to 5.

Later I learnt you could get a wheel-chair from the station manager’s office by producing an ID card. There is also provision for requisition of wheel-chair by incoming passengers who can ring up a designated number. One would have thought information on customer services such as availability of wheel-chairs and the contact phone number ought to be displayed on closed-circuit TV or electronic message boards and also announced through the public address system.

Cross-filed in Desicritics

Karnataka legislators for China ?

2007-07-03T22:41:00.000-07:00

I wonder whose idea it was to plan a China trip for the entire lot of Karnataka legislators. They add up 300 members – 225 MLAs and 75 MLCs. Their mission: a study of economic development models adopted in China. No wonder the external affairs ministry has yet to clear the trip,proposed to be made in batches this September. The Karnataka assembly speaker is quoted as saying that the China trip would help our legislators “change their mindset” towards development models to be adopted in Karnataka.

Even if our foreign office buys this story, you and I may have problem figuring out why so many of our legislators need to go abroad for a change-of-mindset. Understandably, China appears to have made remarkable progress, development-wise. So can we, if we have the political will and can effectively implement projects. More importantly, unity of purpose among legislators, divided by their party or caste loyalties, can work wonders. If only they learn to put economic interest of Karnataka above the interests of their caste, community or political party, we can be in a position to tell China a thing or two about fast-track development.

I share the speaker’s contention that legislators need a change of mindset. But do they have to go to China for this? Can’t we accomplish this change at lesser than the Rs.6 crores the foreign trip would cost the Karnataka tax-payers? Mercifully, the CM and the deputy CM are reported to have opted out of the proposed trip. Their entourage of officials and security squad may have to forego an opportunity to visit the Great Wall.

Father’s Day at the St. Francis

2007-06-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

I don’t know about other parents, but my response to any suggestion involving spending money is to ask my son, ‘can’t we do without it’? This was how I reacted when our son and daughter-in-law came up with this plan of our spending the weekend in San Francisco to do the sights. Couldn’t this be done without spending money on hotel? After all, we live in San Ramon, less than a hour’s drive to San Francisco.

I was evidently missing out on something. June15-17 was a weekend for celebration – of Ravi-Meera’s wedding anniversary. It was Father’s Day weekend. And then our son’s son Siddarth, who completed 18 months this weekend, had to visit the aquarium and take a ride in a San Francisco tramcar.

It turned out to be our weekend to remember. It is not every day you get to stay at Westin St. Francis, overlooking the Union Square; a hotel that has been witness to history for the last 100 years. Putting us up there was Meera’s (daughter-in-law) idea. And Siddarth enjoyed the rides in the bubble-top elevator, in which we went up and down, often, between the lobby and our rooms on the 17th floor; and, at times, to the top floor at Level 32.

St. Francis is a heritage hotel. It played host to delegates at the 1945 UN founding conference. Greta Garbo had stayed there. So had Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. The hotel has a MacArthur suite, so named to celebrate Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s stay at the St. Francis. A TV travel channel documentary recalled how St. Francis came to host Queen Elizabeth II. The queen who usually stayed in the royal yacht Britannia on her overseas tours had to be accommodated on shore because of rough weather conditions during her visit to San Francisco.

The Clintons dined there when in town. Actor Robin Williams, a San Francisco resident, could be spotted dining at Michael Mina, the hotel’s signature restaurant. So they said. I couldn’t bring myself to walk in there to check this out. Dining there could set you back by $100 plus per person. The four of us took to our rooms sandwiches and salad from Cheese Factory at nearby Macy’s; and parceled pizza from a Powell St. eating joint for lunch to be eaten at the Union Square.

I don’t know how much it cost us for the two-day stay. But room rent at the St. Francis couldn’t come cheap by any standard. I got a sense of the price level at the place when I discovered that a bottle of plain water cost $ 7. A six-minute overseas call made from the room would run up your bill by over $60. I ordered some roses from the hotel florist. The bill: $84 and 32 cents. I have the precise figure because the sales girl handed me back 68 cents when I paid out $85, in tens and five-dollar bills. If the florist found me weird, she didn’t show it. I must have been the only hotel guest who got away without tipping.

Cross-posted in Desicritics

Why Mysore?

2007-06-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

Because it has a million residents with nothing much to do.Other than Infosys training centre a few small software companies there is nothing in the city. Its educated population need to go out of town to work.

Commute time for those locally employed is rarely more than 10 minutes.

Low cost of living.

Office space in Mysore is five times cheaper than in Mumbai; 43 times less expensive than Manhattan.

These are said to be the reasons for a US legal process outsourcing firm – Smith Dornan Dehn (SDD) Global Solutions – to set up shop in Mysore. But then the same factors apply to hundreds of other town. The company chairman Russell Smith is quoted in The Economic Times as saying his familiarity with Mysore had to do with yoga training.

Mr Smith, who learned yoga from Pattabhi Jois, said he decided to set up his LPO company after three yoga-learning visits to Mysore.The Mysore office located at Saraswathipuram handles legal work relating to leading entertainment companies in the US. The clients include Sony, HBO, a couple of British TV companies, the Clinton Foundation; and the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute. The yoga institute is founded by Pattabhi Jois, whose yoga students include several celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Sting, Madonna, William Dafoe, Donna Karan. SDD is a Manhattan-based law firm.

NRI parents in the US: A life in slow motion

2007-06-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

I have books to read, 24x7 Internet access at home, a collection of movie DVDs, cable subscription to desi TV channels, and 17-month old grandson Siddarth to clown around with. And yet, life in San Ramon, California, isn’t quite like back home in Mysore. It is not that I miss Mysore; it is more that I had expected much more from life in San Ramon. Creature comforts are okay. But there is only so much you can read during the day; only so long you can spend in front of a laptop. You get bored. You lack the stamina to keep pace with a grandson, making you go round and round to the chime of ‘Ring around Rosie’.

I may not lead any more active a life in Mysore. But I rarely find myself on loose ends in India, as I do in the US. Weekdays here can be bit of a drag;feel as if my life is being played out in slow motion. I feel like Siddarth’s toy train running out of battery. Apparently, many other NRI parents face this slow motion syndrome, which is not the same as life led at a leisurely pace.

This is evident from a post I read the other day on the Craigslist by someone from Sunnyvale, who is planning to engage NRI parents in the San Francisco Bay Area in group activities. After an e-mail exchange I learnt that the initiative comes from a public spirited NRI, Sundeep Chauhan, who says he has come across very many NRI parents in their 50s and 60s going through life in the US in relative isolation. Their working sons/daughters are not able to devote much time for them, except in the evenings and weekends. Weekdays of many NRI parents are marked by empty hours of waiting for their kith and kin to come home.

Sundeep attributes the slow-motion syndrome in NRI parents to ‘culture shock’ and the fast-paced working life of others in the family. He reckons that a support group to address the community needs of NRI parents would help them spend their US visit in a more fulfilling manner. Sundeep believes that group activities such as meetings to share ideas and interests with like-minded people and group outings to places of interest during weekdays could help.

This is our sixth visit, of my wife’s and mine, to the US, in as many years. We have seen it all and done all things touristy. At my age (68) doing the sights no longer interest me, though I have fun lazing about, with family on a sunny Sunday afternoon at San Francisco Union Square, over a glass of white wine, trying to keep pace with Siddarth running amok chasing pigeons.

The key is in grabbing as much family time together as possible. As I see it, the only reference point to my US visits is my son and his family. And if I don’t get to spend much time with them, I feel dissatisfied, disappointed, and, at times, defeated. That my son and daughter-in-law are not at hand whenever I feel like a gupshup puts me off-key. What makes it all the more frustrating is that I need to rely on them even for mundane things, such as visiting the local library or a used-books fair.

It took me a few visits to accept the fact that my grown up kith and kin have their own lives to lead. And that I am not the centre of their universe. Realizing this simple but tough-to-accept reality has made life a lot easier for me and, hopefully, for them. For visiting NRI parents, the point is not whether life is more conducive back in India than in the US. It is not an issue of Mysore versus San Ramon. I would like to have it both ways – live in India and also be able to visit often kith and kin in the US. San Ramon, for me, is a strange town where my only reference point is my son and his family.

Another aspect of life in the US for NRI parents has to do with their self-image. They might have been somebody big and important back home - a chief engineer, senior journalist, a chief secretary or a renowned businessmen. When in the US they are having to lead a life of relative isolation and social obscurity. They don’t get the kind of recognition to which they were accustomed back home, even from friends and colleagues of their US-based sons and daughters.

A 70-year-old NRI parent in Palo Alto who was a psychiatrist in a leading Mumbai hospital is quoted in San Jose Mercury News as saying, “In India I was in charge. Now, I don’t do anything; have to ask my daughter for money to go to the barbershop. It’s awkward”.

Reference: Indian Parents Association Yahoo Group.

Cross-filed in Zine5 and Desicritics

Watergate, the unreported story

2007-06-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

June 17 marks the 35th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. And America isn’t planning anything to mark the occasion. This may be because Americans do not know much about Watergate. A survey by a US TV channel some years back reported that a third of the respondents said they were not familiar with the scandal that drove President Nixon out of office.

Watergate brings to mind in most of us in the media the names of Woodward and Bernstein. It was the story that turned the two Washington Post reporters into media celebrities, though scores of other Washington-based journalists from several other publications contributed to the uncovering of the Watergate scandal. Lesley Stahl of CBS, in her memoirs – Reporting Live, writes that Watergate had glamorized journalism as a profession.

Hollywood immortalized the Woodward-Bernstein story in All the President’s Men, featuring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the lead. Lost in all the myth-making was the fact that it was the US courts and the Congress that had played the crucial role, not the press. Yet an impression was left that the press had single-handedly driven President Nixon from office, giving media an aura of invincible power, writes Lesley Stahl, who was in on the Watergate story right from the start. Those in the media know enough to realize the limitation of its power. Newspaper and TV coverage do not alter the course of history. Reporters and columnists can nudge the pace of pendulum in its swing, but cannot reverse the swing of the pendulum.

Watergate, however, changed the way the media reported people in power. According to the CBS reporter, it ushered in a swarm-around-'em mentality where reporters and cameramen hounded people related to a developing story. Considerations of public dignity and decorum are thrown to the wind in the pursuit of a story.As Lesley put it, Franklin D Roosevelt’s wheelchair and John Kennedy’s women had gone unreported because newsmen in their times respected and protected the President’s privacy. Watergate brought an end to the protections.

Writing of her experiences Lesley Stahl noted that she got assigned to Watergate because there was no one else her junior available in the newsroom.The story then was seen as a third-rate burglary at the Watergate office complex. Incidentally, CBS was the only channel and Lesley Stahl, the only television reporter that covered the early court appearances of those arrested for the burglary. As a result Lesley's first 'scoop' in her reporting career came when she and her cameramen bet the competition by telecasting the first picutres of the Watergate burglars.

Lesley’s complaint was that finer points in her reports and exclusive findings about the accused often went unreported on the CBS radio. Her superiors in the CBS newsroom, who relied more on the print media,didn’t think much of the Watergate story that was, at that stage, not even being covered by The New York Times. Lesley was the first to report that the burglars were from Cuba, with phony passports; and they had in possession wads of hundred-dollar bills, consecutively numbered. But her reports rarely went on the air.

As Watergate story got bigger CBS weighed in with a senior correspondent, relegating Lesley Stahl to be his number two. Her input was used by the prime Watergate correspondent who, at times, neglected to give credit for Lesley's contribution.

Cross-filed in Zine5 and Desicritics.

When my deo spray posed a threat to America

2007-05-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

I don’t know which colour-coded alert (orange, yellow, blue or black) is now on in America. But with my every visit to this country, I learn about new threats to its homeland security. I was careful this time not to keep my nail-cutter in the shaving-kit as part of my hand baggage during air travel. The last time I did, the officer at the security check (Hong Kong airport) took the nail-cutter away before I could board the flight to San Francisco.

They were after my shaving kit this time as well; at the security check-point in Seoul (during transit) the man picked out my deo-spray and said, “No, not allowed”, before tossing it into a thoughtfully placed trash-bin. Toiletries so collected at airport check-points can keep the shelves always filled at Chennai’s Burma Bazaar. The US federal security bans carrying gel (more than three oz) in any form in the hand-baggage.

It is on such occasions I miss my wife. She has a way with the airport security officials. During our last visit to the US together we had our baggage scanned on arrival at San Francisco and I watched helplessly a customs official rummage my hand baggage and pull out a plastic container with betel nuts. As he was about to toss it into the bin my wife spoke up on my behalf. “It is supari,” she said, “we take it after meals for easy digestion”. The man saw sense in it, and asked my wife if there was anything else we were carrying. “No”, she said with a straight face, while I knew she was carrying rasam powder, milk sweets and banana chips.

This time my wife and I traveled on different dates. While I lost my can of deo-spray my wife had breezed through the airport formalities with her Mahalakshmi sweets and assortment of other eatables for her pregnant daughter-in-law and beloved son.

My son Ravi, who travels frequently within the US, says they were more considerate at domestic airports. Once at San Jose when he told the security officials he didn’t want to lose his after-shave gel. They offered to courier his can of gel to his residence at San Ramon. He wound up paying the courier charges ($ 10), which was more than what the gel had cost him.

My wife’s complaint is that I am anxiety-prone. My anxiety is that, unknown to me, my wife packs in sweets, eatables and curry power in supreme indifference to the restrictions at the US airports. My telling her about such baggage violations, sniffer dogs and the trash cans at the airport security checks has little impact. I get silenced by her saying, “I will take that chance, so long as you don’t blurt it out to them”. So I let my wife do the talking. I can’t bring myself to telling people at airports, ‘we’ve nothing to declare’, particularly when I know not what my wife'a baggage had that didn't show up on the electronic scanner.

Cross-posted in Desicritics and Zine5

SOFTEN: Infosys staffers' initiative

2007-05-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

IT professional S L Manjunath e-mailed the other day asking if I could help him identify some localities of the poor who might need the used clothes his friends on the Mysore Infosys campus had collected. First, I thought it was rather naïve of my young friend to have come up such request. Because, the poor are found everywhere in our country. I thought all that Mr Manjunath and his friends needed to do was step out of their swanky campus to look out for them.

On reflection I sensed their problem. Not all poor people need be needy for the kind of clothes Mr Manjunath and friends wish to distribute – old jeans, branded shirts, skirt and tops, and salwaar-kameez. Handing them out at random to alms-seekers in front of temples may not be a good idea. I have seen well-to-do devotees doling out their used clothes to the poor lined up in front of Raghavendra temple on Thursdays. In most cases the takers are not the end-users. And the discarded clothes find their way to the neighborhood flea market.

Mysore Infosys is an exclusive township, housing some 4,500 company trainees, who come from all over India and abroad for a 16-week training course. Many of them, given to an upscale lifestyle, often discard clothes and things they sparsely use. Manjunath and a group of his campus residents hit upon the idea of reaching out to the needy with clothes they collect on the campus.

They formed a Social Forum to Enable the Needy (SOFTEN), initially to help the economically disadvantaged children in Mysore’s corporation schools to acquire soft-skills such as proper communicating and analytical abilities and improvement of language skills, notably, English. During the current school vacation SOFTEN plans to run a ‘soft-skills’ course for the benefit of deserving Class X students from some local corporation schools.

Presumably, the idea for collection and distribution of used clothes is a SOFTEN spin-off. In advanced countries they have Salvation Army and thrift shops through which the collected clothes are distributed. Collection of clothes and other useful items from those on Infosys campus would be easy, given the initiative of spirited township residents such as Munjunath. The problem is in evolving an effective distribution system.

If an operating system with a clothes collection centre on the campus, and distribution outlets in the city, can be put in place in Mysore, it could serve as a working model for Infosys and other IT corporate townships elsewhere in the country. Orphanages and old age people homes would be natural outlets for consumer useables. Public-spirited individuals and institutions that can spare show-room space and a couple of volunteers could come forward to set up used-clothes outlets, run by volunteers.

NGOs such as Mysore Grahakara Parishat (MGP), Rotary and Lions Clubs, Institution of Engineers (which routinely rents out space for sales of books, garments, handicraft and other consumer items) can designate space for SOFTEN’s distribution outlet, where the poor and the needy could go to pick up the clothes they need.

It has been my observation that NRIs, notably young professionals, are given to discarding clothes, shoes and other serviceable consumer items as they go out of fashion, or when new styles and models are in the market. It would help if each NRI were to set aside five kg (out of their total baggage allowance of 60 plus kg) for bringing their used clothes on their every trip to India. The parcels of clothes they bring in could be deposited in drop-boxes set up at airports, to be picked up by the NGO coordinating distribution among the needy.

Crossfiled in zine5 and Desicritics.

Karnataka ban on lotteries

2007-05-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

Those opposing the ban appear to have no credible case. The best Arunachal Pradesh (which petitioned against the official notification) could come up with in the Karnataka High Court was 1) It was a small state, with the state-run lotteries being its main source of revenue; 2) The state has made infrastructure investment in Bangalore for a lotteries distribution network; and 3) Lakhs of people, including the physically challenged, were dependent on lotteries trade.

The stress on the physically challenged wouldn't be lost on the handicapped,who are unlikely to be pleased with such crude attempts to plead their cause. Anyway, for most sellers commission from sale of lottery tickets can’t be their main source of income. Haven’t we seen children hawking lottery tickets in street corners?

A state, however small, that has to rely on lottery trade to run its affairs can hardly be considered a viable administrative unit..

Remembering Krishna Menon

2007-04-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

The handful of people who still care will mark his 110th birthday on May 3, writes Shashi Tharoor in his latest column devoted to V K Krishna Menon. The man who was seen as Nehru’s blindspot didn’t endear himself with very many other politicians, presumably, because of his reluctance to suffer fools gladly. As Mr Tharoor put it, Krishna Menon’s approach was not calculated to win friends.He died a forgotten backbencher, without even a political party to call his own.

The only visual that comes to mind of his funeral (I was then a newspaper reporter in New Delhi) is that of his body laid out on a truck being surrounded by Madhavan Kutty of Malayala Manorama, Blitz Raghavan (I believe) and a few others.Known for his carping comments the man had a delightful way with words. He was fond of telling his British friends, “You know why the sun didn’t set on their empire? Because God didn’t trust the British in the dark”.

Shashi Tharoor wrote that his father had helped Krishna Menon set up the India Club at The Strand, right across the street from the Indian high commission in London. It was a place where one had masala dosa and tea at prices affordable to young Indian newsmen. The club was also known for serving Southie meal, notably rasam. The cook there, as the story goes, was specially brought by Krishna Menon from Tanjore. Have you heard this one, Mr Tharoor?

Can we visualise a self-governing Bangalore?

2007-04-24T04:17:00.000-07:00

Union finance minister, Mr P Chidambaram, has come up with a radical idea to make Mumbai a truly global city. It needs greater autonomy and better governance, if it has to deliver on good housing, roads, schools, water, and all the rest of the items that give a place a global city status. An experts committee on Mumbai as international financial capital has said Mumbai needs to be seen across the world as a welcoming cosmopolitan and cultured metropolis capable of accommodating a large number of expatriates.

Isn’t this the kind of vision many have for Bangalore? Mere location of a number of IT companies and BPOs do not make a Silicon Valley, as our consul general in San Francisco, Mr B S Prakash would tell us – ‘Silicon Valley is not a point in the map but a state of mind’. A defining feature of Silicon Valley, according to him, is ‘affluence in the air but with no signs of stress or striving’. We can’t say this about Bangalore, can we?

If we set up an experts committee on Bangalore as a global IT capital, it wouldn’t come up with anything very different from the findings of the Mumbai committee. Mr Chidambaram’s observation on greater autonomy and better governance was made at a conference organized by the Finance ministry and the Confederation of Indian Industry to discuss the experts committee report.

It wasn’t a kiss, says The Times of India

2007-04-18T23:00:00.000-07:00

What Richard Gere did to Shilpa Shetty on stage in New Delhi the other day wasn’t a kiss. It was a peck, says The Times of India, making a finer point. And here we were, the uninformed, getting hot and bothered, protesting, burning effigies and shouting hai, hai slogans without as much as knowing a peck from a kiss. Now we have it from TOI, quite unambiguously, and I quote, “About the latest case of Shilpa Shetty and Richard Gere, it must be clarified that it wasn’t a kiss, which is meant to be planted on the partner’s lips”.

“It was a peck,” adds TOI, “which in many countries is a normal way to greet each other, and not a sexual act”. It wasn't an S-act, agreed,; but it wasn’t a normal greeting either. Shilpa herself admits it – ‘Richard went slightly overboard’. People elsewhere in the world who peck each other by way of normal greeting are not usually seen bending over their partner in close embrace, while working on her cheeks, both sides, more than once.

The Times(Mysore edition)story – Curb national pecking disorder - carries a picture showing Richard, bending over Shilpa, in a ‘pecking’ position. Says the photo caption,‘The kiss that has nation up in arms’. Nit-picking apart, the newspaper story, played up on Page One, has it, “in a situation where the law is vague and the general public apathetic, the moral brigade seems to be usurping the space’. Shouldn’t that be read as ‘morality brigade’?

Anyway, the thing about TOI is that it gets down to the basics, just in case its readers are clueless even four days after the event, which has been played out in newspapers, TV channels and by bloggers (including this one). I can’t think of many other newspapers that would have given thought to the possibility that the millions who read the Gere-Shetty story and viewed visuals on TV and the Internet, wouldn’t have applied their mind to draw a line between a peck and a kiss.

Where TOI lays it on the line is in this sentence – ‘even the slightest of pecks can raise a furore in the land of the Kamasutra and Khajuraho. Correction, my reporter friend, we’re now known as the land of call centres and the Bollywood that gave the world the song number – Choli ke peeche kya hai. And I have a problem with the TOI report that says bizarre public reaction (to ’a slight peck or a mere brush of the lips’) is not something peculiar to India – ‘it seems to be a sub-continental malady’.

Such needless comparison, that in no way furthers the story, may not go down well with our neighbours. I doubt if the story would have played out in this manner, had a comparable incident happened in Pakistan or Bangladesh. I don’t know if TV channels there would have shown the tell-tale video clip, which fueled widespread public protest. One can’t imagine such incident happening there, in the first place. And in some parts of the world, the pair involved would not have got away with it, and survived to tell their tale to the media.

Cross-posted in Desicitics .

Some questions for our media

2007-04-17T05:43:00.000-07:00

Fixing an emergency water pump at K R Sagar calls for celebration on two counts: -
1)That they managed to install the pump, at last; and
2)that the pump will ensure regular water supply in Mysore even during the peak of summer, when KRS water level dips below the 72-ft mark.

The scheme for installation of an emergency pump was sanctioned in Sept.2003; and the work was promptly handed over to a private contractor, who was to complete it by April 2004. A media report refers to the three-year delay, without any explanation. The delay is attributed to ‘various reasons’.

Well, what are these reasons? Wouldn’t anyone want to know? Did the authorities take action against the contractor, who remains unnamed in the newspaper I get. Should such person's identity be protected by our media?

The scheme, when sanctioned, was estimated to cost Rs.1.5 crores. What has it cost eventually? One would have thought the media would raise these questions with the authorities. If officials stonewalled reporters,it is understandable. What is not understandable is media’s apparent indifference. Now there is the Right to Information Act for the media to tap. Maybe, it is a hassle. The answers we get at the end of it all may not be satisfactory. Never mind if they don’t all answers. Media should try.They can do a story on how legislation works.

Civic 'shramdhan'

2007-04-16T04:36:00.000-07:00

I wonder how Suryadevra Ramchandra Rao would have handled the situation caused by contamination of central water storage tank that supplies water to Mysore. That it has been in a state of neglect for years became public knowledge following recent media exposure through a citizens’ initiative led by ex-MLA Ramdas. The city corporation has since hired 150 men to clean up the tank and as a result water supply from the tank has remained suspended for the last three days and stay that way at least for the next three days.

With a more responsive civic administration the task could have been completed by now. The thought crossed my mind on reading about the Surat civic body chief in Sunday Herald. The way Surat under S R Rao coped with citywide garbage pile-up in the wake of the 1994 floods speaks of a responsive civic administration that inspired people to cooperate with the civic body. Mr Rao’s operating principle is “step out from AC to DC” (that is, from air-conditioned offices to daily chores at the street level).

The mantra motivated the staff and inspired citizens’ groups that mobilized residents into, what they called, ‘Rao sena’, to help in civic efforts. In Mysore our neighborhood netas can mobilize crowd in a jiffy for dharna, gherao or thod-phod of public property. If only they could use their crowd-forming potential for a civic shramdhan, our cash-strapped municipal corporation could have saved money on hiring labour, and accomplished the tank clean-up sooner.

The ex-MLA deserves our thanks for exposing this monumental official neglect. Had he followed up his good work by moving in his supporters for helping out with the clean-up of the water tank, the ex-MLA would have earned his credentials to become my MLA once again.

Talking (Kannada) Movies

2007-04-12T23:59:00.000-07:00

Cine Maatu, a Bangalore forum of film enthusiasts, plans on screening a series of award-winning Kannada movies that are hard to find in the theatres/TV. As the forum convenor, Mr B R Gopinath, told The Hindu reporter Bageshree, the best of our films are less accessible to viewers than the works of international masters.

Among the movies the forum has lined up for showing, on the second weekend of every month, are Beru, Phaniyamma, Kanneshwara Rama, and a host of others accessed from Girish Kasaravalli’s personal library. His own movie, Nayi Neralu, is expected to be shown at the inaugural of Cine Maatu. The film maker has thrown open his vast collection for the benefit of film enthusiasts. It is an idea worth emulating by others with a personal video library.

Apart from bringing in quality movies for interested viewers, the Bangalore film enthusiast forum would arrange interaction of film makers with audience following every screening. Such interaction would be of interest to a far wider audience, if only the forum convenor could arrange to put out typescript of the proceedings on the web. The forum members could create an e-group or a website, to archive interaction with makers of award-winning films.

Films such as Beru, themed on degradation of values in the bureaucratic system and corruption in the administration, have relevance. One would like to hear from its director P Sheshadri about how he came to choose the theme and the hassles he had, if any, filming/distributing it. Sadly enough, the film has not got the kind of exposure it deserves. I recall journalist Krishna Prasad once wrote in his Deccan Herald column that at a special screening in Shimoga the award-winner Beru drew an audience of two. Yes, there was a turnout of just two persons for the show.

This must be an all-time record. Can’t wait to see how many Beru draws at the Cine Maatu screening (due April 15). Convenor’s contact number – 9242523523.

Title of this post has been copied from BBC World, with my apologies to programme producer Tom Brook.

Our man in San Francisco

2007-04-11T19:49:00.000-07:00

Heads of Indian missions abroad are seen as remote figures, working at reports to South Block from behind closed doors in posh offices. They are usually seen showing up at public 'do's' – R Day flag-hoisting at NRI gatherings, tape-cutting to open an exhibition of works by a visiting artist – and heard holding forth at Indo-So-and-so Friendship Society meeting or a chamber-of-commerce seminar inaugural.

So, it wasn't with much expectation of a response I e-mailed our Consul General in San Francisco Mr B S Prakash on the need for an NRI/consulate initiative to donate desi books/CDs to public libraries in the US. This was a year ago. To my pleasant surprise he promptly mailed back thanking me for my interest, adding that he felt nice hearing from someone from Mysore. Mr Prakash did M A (Philosophy) from Manasa Gangotri and taught at Maharaja's College for a year before joining Indian Foreign Service. In his college days Mr Prakash was a keen debater in Kannada; recalls that among his partners in debating was Shubhachandra, now a professor in Jainology dept., Mysore University (Professor, are you reading this?)Ambassador Prakash(so ranked,in diplomatic hierarchy) admits to being nostalgic about his Mysore connection;his Gangotri days.

More recently, when I drew his attention to a particularly touching tribute to Poornachandra Tejaswi by a 16-year old Bangalore girl, Mr Prakash reminisced – "For me, in the seventies, totally caught up with the magic of navya, Tejeswi's writings were a welcome relief . . . that he was Kuvempu's son, and yet so different was another cause for marvel". I reckon we haven't heard the last word on Tejaswi from Mr Prakash, who runs a column in Rediff.com where he writes on literature, arts and lifestyle.

More articulate among those in our diplomatic corps write on lofty issues pertaining to international relations, global terrorism. Mr Prakash does it as well, for The Hindu edit page. He is equally proficient in writing about his experience in California. Mr Prakash's Rediff.Column gives one an insight into the man, his flair for writing and his mundane interests. He watches "a fair amount of TV, all kinds, movies, series, news, views, sports and scandals".

His recent piece – Get up and get rich – was triggered by a TV show featuring Donald Trump talking money. He can write knowledgeably about Barry Bonds, Bollywood stars. And about A R Rahman – didn't know that he was born in one faith, and a family crisis made him turn to another, making a Dileep kumar, an Allah Rakha Rahman.

Invited to preside over a Stanford University music festival evening when the music maestro was honoured, our envoy did his home work on Rahman. Which gave him material for a Rediff.column, with references about our reigning movie Khans and Rais and popular songs – Chaiya, Chaiya, Taal Se Taal Mila.

Mr Prakash takes in his stride someone using his web-space to take a swipe at the consulate, because no one picked up the phone when he called or many of the consulate e-mail responses are automated. My experience on this has been refreshingly different. Anyway, what has it all to do with Mr Prakash's writings?

Someone else asks, 'As CG, does Mr Prakash have nothing better to do?' He appears to have in mind a stereotype image of a diplomat. I would say the likes of Prakash have an edge over other less well endowed career diplomats. His reputation as a lifestyle writer can only help him widen contacts and give a human face to CG's office that is generally associated with issuing visa, stamping passport extension, and taking care of visiting dignitaries from India.

We have had writers, journalists and poets posted as heads of mission. Poet and essayist Octavio Paz was Maxican ambassador to India, John Freeman (ex-New Statesman) served as the UK high commissioner in New Delhi. Our journalists and columnists have represented India. I can think of three – Prem Bhatia (Kenya), Dr K S Shelvanker (Sweden), Kuldip Nayar (UK).

Cross-posted in Desicritics

CM and government officials

2007-04-10T06:04:00.000-07:00

Mr H D Kumaraswamy heads a government in which, it appears, he cannot rely on his own officials. His complaint is that bureaucrats, far from addressing people’s problems, do not even deem it necessary to bring them to his notice.

CM says, if only the officials were responsive to public issues, he wouldn’t need to hold janatha darshan and go on night-stay in villages to get an idea of the extent of the problems such as housing, sanitation, water supply education and healthcare. Addressing a meeting of about 100 officials – DCs, zilla parishat CEOs, dept. secretaries – CM observed our officials could do with some compassion, a mother’s heart, as he put it.

This is in sharp contrast to the tough talking the CM did on earlier occasions. Whether or not his change-of-heart call works with officials the chief minister appears to have had a change of mind in coping with non-performing officials – threat has given way to an appeal.

Bringing Montessori into mainstream education

2007-04-10T00:33:00.000-07:00

It’s good, it is holistic, and is child-friendly. And yet Montessori is widely seen as experimental, with parents and education policy makers not quite willing to accept it as mainstream school education. A report in The Hindu says the system has been adopted in just 10 schools in Bangalore, Chennai, till the fifth std.

I didn’t know Bangalore has an institute of Montessori studies, which has trained nearly 100 teachers in the past decade. A couple of teachers from the institute spoke to the media about the positives of the Montessori system. Every child works to his/her own time-table. The focus is on hands-on method of learning; on laying the ‘right foundation for blooming to happen’.

That’s fine, but does it get children the kind of grades they do, with the rote-based system? This is what concerns most parents. And this is why they prefer to put their children in conventional schools, where they are encouraged to rely on coaching classes and guidebooks to get through their exams. Does the Montessori Institute have an answer to such parental concerns?

The answer lies with the government. It needs to take a policy decision to have all primary schools in Karnataka adopt the Montessori method. The government school teachers could be suitably retrained.

Meanwhile at the Bangalore institute they are reportedly conducting seminars on ‘Understanding Montessori’ for the benefit of anyone who cares to attend – teachers, parents, social workers, child psychologists. Check out their website. Contact – iims.blr@gmail.com .

Is this media ‘silly season’?

2007-04-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

Those in the media know of, what is called, ‘silly season’ when hard news is hard to come by and reporters contrive news stories to keep themselves in print. When I set up a media blog with young friend Anand Balaji we would remember to sponsor an award for the silliest story of the season, comprising a citation plus a basket of Ooty carrots.

Among nominees for this category would be this Page One story in The Hindu (Bangalore) with the headline – ‘How safe are IT professionals working in booming Silicon City?’ Isn’t that a mouthful for a newspaper headline? The recent murder of software engineer Manoj Kumar has thrown up this all-important question, says the story, and cites statistics to substantiate the reporter’s statement. Readers are told there have been three such murders (software guys) in the last two years.

The news report speaks of “a notion that professionals from (IT) companies are increasingly becoming soft targets for criminals”. This is bit of a stretch because the suspects in all the three murders are said to be first-time offenders, not hardcore criminals.

The Hindu story is bylined. I don’t wish to name the reporter, as the focus here is on the story, not the reporter. It is not the reporter alone who can be held responsible for this silly story. The sub-editor (do newspapers still have one) who is accountable to the published text has evidently not exercised his news judgment The guy who gave the headline must have been particularly blank-headed to have come with something so bland as the ‘how-safe-is-it’ headline. And then the late-night editor, or whoever decides on page one stories, must have been hard put to it to find anything better for the page one bottom-spread slot.

Arguing India

2007-04-06T01:17:00.000-07:00

Argumentative Indians are everywhere. Four of them - from New Delhi, New York, Toronto and Reading, UK – have clubbed up to set up a blog to argue it out. They are drawn from varied fields – college teacher (Debjani), chartered accountant (Kaiser), university professor (Ananya) and newspaper woman (Ishani). A four-line statement of purpose that goes with their group blog – Arguing India – says the idea is to understand India, appreciate her myriad contradictions through arguments and contestations.

My contact in this argumentative group is Ananya Mukherjee Reed, Associate Professor (political science) and Director, International Secretariat for Human Development, York University, Toronto. I have been in touch with her, in the sense I keep sending her alert mail on posts I wish to share with others, and Ananya has been unfailingly prompt in appreciation of my gesture. I haven’t got to argue with her, yet. The professor is said to be ‘passionate about arguing’.

Her group blog, in its statement of purpose, raises provocative questions:Is India a democracy (at all)? Is she booming (in real terms)? Does the caste system still exist? Come on, Ananya; the real argument is over the quota system, which, some would argue, represents a radical role reversal of castes in political terms. Brahmins are now the quiet ones, with so-called lesser castes making all the noise.

And then, the arguing bloggers ask, ‘Is ‘Water’ an accurate representation of India’s reality? If it were so, why wouldn’t India have adopted the movie as the country’s official Oscar nominee? I have flogged my prejudices in my blog, and in Desicritics. Perhaps,Ananya could make a reference to my take on ‘Water’, to only put a bit of polemics in Arguing India.

The ‘flat world’ effect

2007-04-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

The Hindu carries a revealing story on Bangalore fruit marts where California grapes, Chinese pears and Washington apples compete for shelf space with desi varieties. This, presumably, is the ‘Flat World’ phenomenon to which Thomas Friedman and Nandan Nilekani refer when they talk of leveling the playing field. I get a few other messages from The Hindu story that deserved a byline of the reporter who did it.

1)Bangaloreans, by and large, prefer desi fruits because of the price advantage.
2)There is no appreciable price difference between apples from Shimla (Rs.90) and the ones imported from the US (Rs.100). Which, I reckon, means that transportation costs of sending apple from Shimla is nearly as much as the expenses in air-freighting it from Washington. The message here is that the produce from Shimla can do better, sales-wise, in Bangalore with a streamlined transport, and better packaging and cold storage facilities.
3)I wonder if the ‘playing field’ has been 'leveled' enough, for apples from Shimla and organges from Coorg to find their way to the fruit marts in Boston, Brisbane and Bejing.
4)There is a sting in the tail of the media story. It refers to a Basvanagudi fruit stall owner who flogs desi apples with stickers saying, ‘From USA’. A 'flat world' side-effect?

Our media news priorities

2007-04-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

Karnataka government has suspended 157 doctors for staying away from work, health minister R Ashok told the legislative council during question hour the other day. That most of them were disinclined to work in rural areas is no less significant. The minister also informed the House that 14,770 posts remained unfilled in the departments of health & family welfare; the dept. of ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy; of unani, siddha and homoeopathy; and the dept. of drugs control. Didn’t know our government had so many departments.

An acute staff shortage in government hospitals doesn’t make headlines. Deccan Herald carried this info under ‘At a Glance’ column, clubbing it with two other items on a Town Hall dharana by a group of Hindu activists in Bangalore against alleged religious conversions; and a road accident claiming three lives in Arsikere. The Hindu published it under Karnataka news-briefs.

So much for development journalism. To quote blogger Viju, giving her reason for taking to blogging, “It (mainstream media) has no room for what I love; development journalism”

Coping with copying in exams

2007-04-03T01:03:00.000-07:00

Karnataka education minister Basavaraj Horatti has decreed that SSLC candidates found copying would now be debarred for three years, instead of a year or two as was done earlier. This is a deterrent insofar as the students planning on copying in exams would now think thrice (not just twice) before taking the plunge, besides upgrading their anti-detection skills. It has been established that copiers are usually smarter than exam invigilators.

The (mal)practice has now become a joint enterprise involving students and unscrupulous teachers. Recently it was reported that 52 Bangalore SSLC candidates had their answer papers replaced with ghost-written ones, in as many as five subjects - Kannada, English, Hindi, Math and science. That they managed to get this far before detection speaks of lapses in the system. We’re dealing here with a candidate-examiner collaboration on an organized scale. Three school headmasters are reported to be in custody and six others face criminal charges.

Debarring candidates – whether for two or three years – makes sense only for those who are found out. But then candidates who are determined to copy and the teachers willing to accommodate them abide by the 11th Commandment – ‘Thou Shall Not Be Caught’. So long as we press on with the current exams system, copying wouldn’t go away. The only way to fight the menace is, perhaps, by reinventing an exam system in which copying would be pointless. Open-book exams may well hold the key. Would it work in all exams?

Educators and policy-makers ought to think of devising a system in which students are tested, not so much for what they know on a given issue or subject, but for their knowledge on where they could find relevant information. In the age of information overload propensity to identify right sources, presenting relevent information in context, and doing it all within a specified time assume importance. Info is free; packaging it in answer papers takes intelligence and gets the grades.

Here is a thought, how about an Internet-driven exam system? In which candidates (with laptops in ‘hotspot’ exam centres) could browse the Net to get answers.On test would be their presentation skills and propensity to identify sources tap-able for answers. Candidates would be required to list their sources for the benefit of examiners. I know this system would not be compatible with all SSLC subjects. Math is one I can think of, where an open-book approach wouldn’t work.

Chamarajanagar’s Illinois connection

2007-04-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

He was in Shanghai Monday last, Singapore on Wednesday; has a business meeting in Frankfurt Tuesday next. And he is at Chamrarajanagar for the weekend. If asked which one of these places sticks out like a sore thumb, I guess there would be near unanimity on Chamarajanagar, a town that strikes me as dry, dusty, and in a perpectual state of neglect.

I said near-unanimity, because Chamarajanagar is a ‘charm-nagar’ for our man on the move - Dr. Krishna Venkataswamy, Director of Research and Development of GLS Corporation, McHenry, Illinois. He heads, among much else, the company’s R&D facility in China: and he is on the Global Leadership Team for the company’s business operations in Europe and Asia. His responsibilities entail much traveling. And wherever his travels take him – Mumbai, Tokyo, Hong Kong – and, whenever feasible, Dr. Venkataswamy (Venkatesh, to friends) heads home, to Illinois, via his Charm-Nagar.

“I still feel like a boy from a small town who happened to be fortunate in life,” said Venkateh when we met in Mysore during his current whistle-stop chakkar half-way round the world. Venkatesh doesn’t fit in with the swanky pigeon-holed image of a frequent-flyer company executive. With a red bindi on his forehead, and a vintage hairdo that seems to make a fashion statement against the current trend in sporting long, tapering, sideburns, Venkatesh would pass for a Sanskrit scholar or music vidhwan from Agrahara.

It is not just the look, Venkatesh is refreshingly different in his outlook in life as well. He says his passion for science, notably, physics, got him high grades right through to his Ph.D (completed within a record two years and two months). He is a Director of the Distinguished Alumni Board at the University of Florida, and on the Executive Advisory Board for Howe School of Technology Management at Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey.
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And it is the same passion for science, not the money, that drives him in his work. Venkatesh is a reputed expert in his specialty - thermoplastic elastomers. He has nearly fifty patents to his credit; has chaired many American and international conferences on Thermoplastic Elastomers. But then this small-town boy still finds time to stay in touch with his school – JSS High School – and his friends from the Chamarajanagar days. He referred to Mallesh, now a professor at Gangotri (Mysore), and Prakash (I believe), a company VP in Bangalore.

By way of a pay-back to his native town, and, as an endearing pretext, if I might add, to keep himself in touch with his humble beginnings, Venkatesh funds a local orphanage and pays for the upkeep of a few needy matriculation students of his school. In life, says Venkatesh, he would have never made it to where he had, if it was not for his late mother, periyappa Ramaswamy Iyer, who stepped in to save his family house from being auctioned when Venkatesh was a schoolboy; his grandpa N S Sundaresa Iyer who funded his education through National College, Bangalore, and IIT Madras (1979 batch); and Dr Krishnamurthy who guided him to take up higher studies in Florida and “showed me the ropes in my early years in the US”. ( Isn’t he the Nanjangud municipal school boy who went to IIT Bombay, and made it big in the US with 100 research papers to his credit ?)

Rainwater harvest in Mysore

2007-03-22T23:47:00.000-07:00

The city corporation commissioner, Mr K N Chandrashekar, has announced that no new building would be given completion report (CR) until it has a rainwater harvest system in place. I remember they brought a regulation in Tamilnadu some years back, making it mandatory for all houses, not just the new ones, to set up rainwater harvest system.

Had this been implemented in letter and spirit cities and municipal towns in Tamilnadu today would have no reason to crib about water shortage. Snag was in implementation. The regulation on rainwater harvest system in Tamilnadu was not backed up with guidelines in respect of design and space specifications for compliance.

This often meant shoddy enforcement by technically uninformed municipal staff that carried out a cursory inspection of houses, in a half-hearted manner. Many houses got through the staff inspection by installing, if at all, a make-shift rainwater collection arrangement for the sake of official records. They all complied with the municipal regulation, but without appreciable exploitation of rainwater resources.

Question is: does our civic body have the clout and determination to secure compliance of municipal rules and regulations? If builders and house-owners fail to comply within a specified period the municipal corporation should have the resources and be empowered to install appropriate rainwater system at the house-owners’ cost. The civic body could seek technical guidance and co-operation in this regard from CART at the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore, and private sector service providers in evolving an operating system for compliance of rainwater harvest requirements.

The municipal commissioner should also consider factoring in following requirements, other than rainwater harvest, right from the stage when builders seek building plan approval from the town planning and civic authorities. It should be made mandatory for builders to have:
1) roof-top solar panels
2) Energy-saving electrical wiring and lighting and other fittings in the common area.
3) Tree-planting in open space
4) Provision for collecting and disposal of recyclable waste.

Read: FAQ on rainwater harvest
Urban model projects

A question of signature

2007-03-21T22:31:00.000-07:00

How did Sir Mirza sign his name? Dr Javeed Nayeem who knows more than most of us about Mysore’s local history could put us wise on the finer points. But we don’t need a Dr Nayeem tell us that the former Dewan of Mysore didn’t definitely sign his name as ‘Sir Mirza Ismail’.

An amateur piece of forgery came to light during a Lokayukta probe into land scam in Bangalore. That the document bearing a forged signature was on official records undetected for years does not speak much for the procedure they adopt for scrutiny of records at the registration office.

Those involved in the scam had apparently faked a document, gifting away 500 acres of forest land belonging to the erstwhile Mysore state. The ‘document’ dated Jan.25, 1941 reportedly carried the then Dewan’s signature as ‘Sir Mirza Ismail’. Those with a touch of class won’t ‘sir’ themselves. And the scammers lacked common sense to know this.

Suing a spammer, a Gordon path

2007-03-21T21:53:00.000-07:00

Have you read about the man who took a spammer to court, and, what’s more, won damages of 750 pounds? Telegraph, London, carries the story about a civil case won by 30-year-old Gordon Dick at Scotland’s Edinburgh sheriff court against an Internet company that sent him an unwanted mail.

It is a kind of thing most us wouldn’t do (for fear of being ridiculed by others), but wish someone else did. Spam, they say, accounts for three-quarters all e-mails sent in Britian.

Mr Dick would like to see very many others take spammers to court. He has set up a website to guide us how. The website refers to one other case settled out of court in Colchester county, UK. Gordon's prescription is addressed mainly to folks in the EU. One can’t see this resulting in a spate of court cases against spammers, even in the EU countries.

Spamming wouldn’t go away, because far too many of us rely on ‘delete’ button to cope with spam. What, if they get rid of the d-tab from the keyboard? That is when we would all hit the Gordon path.

Time-Newsweek tussle

2007-03-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

"I don't want to sound mindlessly Darwinian about this," (the Newsweek-Time rivalry). "We had a Cold War mentality; now we're competing with everyone [online]."
Without mentioning Time by name, he added: "I don't think we have to make philosophical pronouncements. The readers don't care about broad statements of mission. They care about what they get on every page of the magazine and every day online."
- Jon Meacham, Editor, Newsweek. From MarketWatch

Our poor MLAs

2007-03-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

Following my previous post – An MLC’s privilege – I did a Google search to see if I can get anything on the pay and perks of our elected representatives.Reproduced here are excerpts from NDTV Message Board (Jan.13, 2007)

The salaries and allowances of MLAs/MLCs were revised on August 24, 2005, with the basic pay raised to Rs.8,000 – a 100% hike. However, not all are happy. Says a legislator, “These salaries are a mockery. In private companies, the decision-makers draw huge packets. We are policy-makers and the salaries should be commensurate to that.’’

MLA/MLC pay & perks:
Basic: Rs 8,000 per month
Allowances: Rs 14,000 per month (includes telephone allowance for a landline, salary to a personal assistant and driver)
Constituency allowance (moving in the constituency): Rs 5,000 per month
Train fare of Rs 50,000 per year. No travel documents are required
Free KSRTC bus pass which entitles the member and one attendant to travel across the country, any number of times, where KSRTC service is there
TA: Rs.10 per km, when they travel to Bangalore for the session or legislature committee meetings.
Sitting allowance during the legislature session: Rs 600 per day
When the legislature committee meetings are there DA of Rs 600 per day for five days — two days before, after and on the meeting day. Rs 750 per day outside Karnataka.
Two LPG connections on priority basis.
Car Advance of Rs 5 lakh at interest rate 7% per annum. This is waived off in the event of a member’s death.
Entitled to purchase 2 discarded army Jeeps and 1 motor cycle allotted by ministry of defence.

An MLC’s privilege

2007-03-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

I didn’t know, did you, that a member of the Karnataka legislative council could use official vehicle for private purposes on payment of ‘user charges’. A privilege conscious MLC chose to make an issue of his failure to get official vehicle for private use. On his complaint the council chairman reportedly recommended suspension of two officials on the charge of dereliction of duty. See The Hindu story.

The complaint:the MLC was denied the privilege of using sarkari vehicle for a family pilgrimage to Tamilnadu, though the requisition was made 20 days in advance. The official explanation said the designated vehicle had been under repair. If we go by the media report, the MLC concerned was informed about this.

Question is: Shouldn’t the officials have made alternate transport arrangement to meet the MLC’s vehicle requisition? The answer would depend on whether an MLC can claim private use of official vehicle as his right, rather than a facility subject to availability of the vehicle.

I have a few more questions:
1)Is the rule on government vehicles unambiguous about their private use beyond Karnataka?
2)Should a people’s representative be so assertive in his claim to such privilege, merely because it is there in the book?
3)Wouldn’t we, the lesser mortals, like to know if there are other such privileges our representatives in the state legislature enjoy in the service of democracy ?

A media story on MLCs’ privileges would be timely, and educative. Meanwhile would anyone know what ‘user charges’ add up to, and the year when the rates were fixed?

Unquestioning media report

2007-03-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

Software exports from Mysore-based IT units is expected to cross Rs.600 crores in 2006-07, according to a STPI (software technology parks in India) official quoted in The Hindu. The same newspaper, citing another official, had put the figure at Rs.1000 crores three months earlier.

Going by today’s (March 15) report in The Hindu, STPI, Bangalore, director, Mr Parthasarathy pegs the figure at Rs.650 crores,(give or take away Rs.50 crores) when the final tally is announced in mid-April. He reckons Mysore’s future in the software sector to be “very bright”; and would have us believe that in terms of IT growth path the city was “on track”.

But there seems to have been some official back-tracking in their projection of exports figure for the current fiscal year. In December last we had the same newspaper publish a report that the software exports from the city was expected to touch Rs.1000 crores in 2006-07 (that is, by March 31, 2007). The earlier Hindu report, quoting STPI director, Bangalore-Hyderabad, Mr B V Naidu, had said Mysore was poised to maintain a 100 percent growth rate for the next few years.

So the projection made in December got scaled down by as much as 40 percent in a matter of three months, and still it is maintained by our officials that Mysore’s future is ‘very bright’ and its IT sector growth is right ‘on track’. Maybe officials are entitled to make statements; and the media, obliged to report them faithfully.

B2B with Kini: Purely Personal

2007-03-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

A touch of mutual back-scratching may have crept in, in my B2B with Kini. Readers who don’t get put off by the first few lines of Kini’s latest – Manna from Heaven – would get to read,in his transit through mountainous Turkey, a stranger-than-fiction experience.

This B2B has, among other things, enabled me to discover a Kini that is different from the bloke I knew and moved with in London – soft-spoken, a little edgy, scholarly spectacled, in blue velvet corduroy, and always dressed for Carnaby St. People who know me think I give credit where it is due, but often grudgingly.

I am not immune to a touch of flattery. But kini and I are not given to flattering each other. We both know we are not the easiest guys to get along with. And, I am sure Kini would agree with me, we were not the best of friends while we moved together in mid-sixties.

We didn't know nor cared about each other's background. Our interests were different. So were our social circles. We were at work, together but on different beats. Which, I guess, accounts for a certain diversity in the narrative content of our B2B. My end of this blog nostalgia recounts episodes and events with no coherance or chronology. His blog runs like a TV serial, as exciting as Lonely Planet for a travel addict. Both of us were then more immature, unwise, and outlandish – I, in my dreams, and Kini, in experience.

Memo to my columnist friends

2007-03-13T06:58:00.000-07:00

I would like my friends in the media to read Steve Outing’s Stop the Presses column in E&P. Writing about newspapering in an unbundled world he says those writing in the print media would do well to get their stories and columns published by others – in their websites and blogs – and thereby reach a wider audience.

I have been trying to persuade my Mysore friends Mr Krishna Vattam and Dr Javeed Nayeem to cross-file their newspaper columns in their blogs, from which they could be picked up by some others. Both deserve to be read beyond the area of circulation of their respective papers. Dr Nayeem’s Friday column does appear in Star of Mysore website. Snag is contents in this site are archived only for a week, after which they are irretrievably lost. What Dr Nayeem writes in Star of Mysore does not even have the shelf-life of carrot or potato.

The Kannada daily in which Mr Vattam’s weekly column appears doesn’t have a website. Anyway, he could file a shortened version of his column in English for the benefit of those who can't read Kannada or get his newspaper in their town.

Media and Mr Ashwath’s illness

2007-03-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

We get to read in the papers about Mr K S Ashwath’s ill health whenever a visiting film artiste or Kannada cinema notable calls on the 270-film veteran at his Saraswathipuram residence. As someone who has worked in the media I can understand that the fact of Mr Ashwath’s ailment, which has been reported many times earlier, no longer makes news. And we shouldn’t grudge our film folk getting a few lines in the media by calling on an ailing actor with an envelope and a photographer in tow.

What I don’t understand, however, is a three-column story – Help pours in for Ashwath – in The Hindu that is mostly a puff job for a visiting film artist. We have a quote from this cine artist saying, “He (Mr Ashwath) is an exclusive chapter in the history of Kannada cinema and his contribution to the industry cannot be undermined”. That should be read ‘underestimated’, I guess.

As a reader wouldn’t you want the newspaper to tell you what Vertebro Basilar Insufficency (VBI) is ? That is what ails Mr Ashwath. Readers would have been better served, I reckon, if The Hindu story had given a two-para background on its possible symptoms, and the required line of treatment. The reporter need not have gone any farther than making a quick Google search for the relevant info.

The newspaper, which says Mr Ashwath is undergoing treatment in Mysore, doesn’t put us any wiser on the hospital where the relevant treatment is offered. A quote from his doctor would have more relevance to the story.

Mysore: A commuters' terminal for Bangalore

2007-03-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

Uncritical acceptance of the drumbeat that Mysore is poised to becoming a hotspot for industrial investment could lead to some serious miscalculations. Mysore has witnessed sharp rise in land prices and hyper building activity in anticipation of a ‘feel-good’ growth projection. The latest to flog such perception is the so-called Vision Document by the local Institution of Engineers (IE). See The Hindu story.

A recent PowerPoint presentation by experts told district officials pretty much what they wanted to hear. I wonder if IEVD (Institution of Engineers’ Vision Document), while talking of the city’s potential for rapid growth, notably in the IT and BT sectors, has made any reference to our knack for losing out projects to Hyderabad, Pune and Tier-2 towns elsewhere in the country.

Could anyone cite an instance where our elected reps./district admn./chamber of commerce have persuaded any specific investor to come to Mysore in recent times? It is time we stopped making much of the Infosys presence to make a point of Mysore’s IT development potential. Expression of intent by some other IT biggies makes us all feel good, but does little else.

No vision document drafted by anyone has failed to stress the obvious benefits of upgrading airport and having a double-track rail link between Mysore and Bangalore. These projects have been talked about for long and the tardy pace of their progress does not speak much for our official/political credibility when it comes to executing projects.I don’t know if IEVD refers to once-hyped, now officially disfavoured six-lane Expressway project. Its non-progress and hassles faced by the company executing the project doesn't inspire investors confidence, but gives us a sense of the politics of infrastructure development.

A very visible aspect of Mysore’s growth is mushrooming construction activity, mainly apartment buildings. Is it an indication of a step-up in industrial investment, or could the buildings spurt be the upshot of large scale speculative investment in real-estate development. Shouldn't the town-planners be wanting to get a picture of the extent of encroachment of government land ?

I do reckon Mysore has a future; as a commuters terminals for Bangalore. With rail travel time getting shortened to 90 minutes or less,one could expect influx people working in Bangalore moving their residence to Mysore.

How Krishna Vattam took to blogging

2007-03-07T06:27:00.000-08:00

Veteran journalist Krishna Vattam thought he had a time management problem. As Mysore’s senior-most working journalist (pushing 75, I reckon) Mr Vattam attends to the daily grind of running an understaffed, cash-strapped Mysore Mail; spends time catching up with developing news to do his regular column for a Kannada daily. And as a local celebrity he gets invited to preside over school functions, university journalism workshops, seminars, meetings of local heritage committee. As a very visible senior citizen Mr Vattam is occasionally asked to join civic deputations to press for clean water supply, cleaner environment or protest against unauthorized street-side hoardings that ruin the city’s heritage look.

Home at usually late in the evening he takes in a TV serial, of which Mr Vattam is a self-confessed addict. How could he do all this, and still find time for blogging? This was his contention when I first talked to him about it an year ago. I felt he had much to blog about his long innings as Deccan Herald correspondent and the subsequent public life he has been leading.

But then Mr Vattam, till the time I talked to him, didn’t know what a blog was and how it worked; nor did he seem to care. Presumably, he shared the preconception of middle-aged Mysoreans, who thought of blogging as a teenage thing. Senior citizens in my city see a computer as an in-house post office, where they could check/send mail. The more informed among computer users Skyped their children living abroad.

Mr Vattam wouldn’t have probably gone in for a computer had his daughter not presented him with a PC. And then, his school-going grandson, spending summer vacation at grandpa’s place, put Mr Vattam through a crash course on how to work the mouse, cursor, and the keyboard. That was when I started exchanging e-mail with Mr Vattam and sending him links to my blog posts and web articles on issues of mutual interests.

If Mr Vattam has anything going for him, it is keenness to learn and a willingness to learn it from younger generation, particularly, grand-children, of whose caliber he is justifiably proud. The idea that a blog would enable him to network with the likeminded and facilitate sharing of ideas and life’s experiences with others appealed to him. That was how Mr Vattam set up a blog. For some reason, probably the time-management issue, the blog remained blank for a while, with his friends leaving comments asking how long do they have to endure an empty blog. This prompted Mr Vattam to file a few posts.

He then lapsed into silence (couldn’t, presumably, come to grips with the time-management issue) till the other day when he sought my help in reviving his blog, of which he had forgotten even the URL. We fixed the problem through a Google search. But I couldn’t help wondering why his sudden interest in revival of the blog. During a recent Bangalore visit to his daughter’s place Mr Vattam learned that his 15-year old grand-daughter, with flair for writing, maintained a personal journal that made interesting reading. That was when he decided to revive his blog-in-coma. “I wish I had kept a journal in my younger days,” said Mr Vattam.

The crazy book prices

2007-03-06T03:49:00.000-08:00

I don’t understand publishers’ economics. A coffee-table book on Bollywood is priced Rs.1995. Sounds like Bata shoes price tab, doesn’t it, – A pair there is marked Rs.999, never a thousand? I know the coffee-table genre are bought for drawing-room furnishing, rather than for reading pleasure.

The book is titled – Lights, Camera, Masala: Making Movies in Mumbai – text by Naman Ramachandran with photos, by Sheena Sippy. It is unputdownable for a good half hour, says The Hindu Literary Review columnist Pradeep Sebastian. He sounds a note of caution for those who may think of buying it. You look at the marked price, which makes you think again. So, what do you do? “Settle in more comfortably to browse through the book for another half hour before you put it down and leave the store”, writes Mr Sebastian. Lights, Camera, Masala…...is published by India Book House (IBH)

Its poor publishing cousin, National Book Trust (NBT), offers K S Duggal’s autobiography – Whom To Tell My Tale – for Rs.65 (yes, I have checked the price list). Reviewer Anita Joshua says the book may get ignored for its shoddy editing. I can think of another reason – its price. We are so conditioned to seeing a three-figure price tag even on pedestrian stuff that we instinctively reject, thinking that a book priced so low as Rs.65 can’t be good. Whatever the reason, ignoring Duggal’s book, says the reviewer, would be ‘akin to sending an innocent man to the gallows’. It would not take long for even a reader unfamiliar with Duggal’s writings to realize the power of his word.

Cost of a book is in no way related to the quality of its content. Maybe I shouldn’t be comparing NBT books with those of IBH or other private publishers. Their economics are different. National Book Trust, being a state-run outfit, can afford to ignore economics. But then we credit many in the publishing business with motives that are not primarily profit-driven. Ask publishers, and they say they lose money on most of their titles. I suppose it is the economy of cross-subsidy that keeps them afloat – pricing high-selling books high enough to ‘carry’ other titles. At the same time they don’t mark the price of a book any lower simply because it doesn’t sell.

B2B with K: Where we were the day Nehru died

2007-03-01T00:03:00.000-08:00

In Tehran, homeless, penniless and hungry, says Kini. He wound up his latest post - End of an era... - with these words: this was the 27th of May, 1964 –“a tryst with destiny”, a significant day in Indian history as an era was coming to a close and the breaking news of this event made us the centre of attention for the rest of our journey...

On that day in May I was on a ship, crossing the Suez. The ships moved in a convoy led by a pilot boat through a narrow strip of sea wide enough for single-lane traffic. Ours was a one-class tourist vessel – m v Asia – a Lloyd Triestino boat on the Hong Kong – Trieste run.

it was mid-morning (May 27, 1964); most passengers were out on the promenade deck when news of Nehru’s death was announced through the ship public address system. Suddenly I found myself focus of attention. Wherever I went, on the deck, the library, or the dining hall,co-passengers sought me out convey their composite sympathy, and to say how sorry they were to hear the news. Ours was a small one-class tourists liner, in which almost everyone was a familiar face. Never realized Nehru was so known, and endeared.

They wanted to know what the man was like; whether I had met him. Nehru was, in fact, a tourist attraction in New Delhi. He set aside some 15 minutes daily to meet and pose for photos with common people who came to his residence, Teen Murti House. An official photographer from the Press Information Bureau (PIB) was deputed to take pictures that were catalogued and kept for public browsing in the PIB photo library. I knew this because I had worked there for a while.

Visitors to Teen Murti House who wanted to order copies of their photographs with Nehru were directed to PIB photo library, Parliament Street. They came from all countries, cultures, and walks of life. A former Ms Australia dropped in once at the photo library, to get copies of her pictures with Nehru taken at Teen Murti House that morning. My boss was so taken in that he took her out to lunch (while the photos were being developed and printed) at the Chelmsford Club.

It was during his Teen Murti House darshan time I met Nehru a few months before his death. I had escorted a freelance journalist from the US, Jackie Hudgins, who was on a world trip. Jackie had worked half-way round the world, from Richmond, Virginia (US), freelancing for foreign magazines. In New Delhi she had done a couple of talks on her India experience for Australian radio.

It was a journalistic assignment that brought her to the PIB photo library. It was well stocked with news and feature pictures taken by a platoon of official photographers. And journalists in New Delhi, paricularly the foreign print media, relied on the PIB library for their photographic needs. Jackie Hudgins came there looking for pictures of horse-drawn carriages, to go with her magazine story of a tongawallah in Jumma Mazjid. When she chanced on an album of Teen Murti House photos, of visitors with Nehru, the globe-trotting freelancer expressed interest in meeting the man and having her pictures taken with Nehru. I arranged for her visit to Teen Murti House, and also agreed to accompany her.

We joined other visitors waiting in small companionable groups in a spacious hall in Teen Murti House. It was customary for the PM to meet visitors after breakfast, before he left for office at the South Block or Parliament House. Nehru stepped down from his first-floor living quarters to the waiting hall, and worked his way through the visitors standing in knots of two or three. He spent a few minutes with each group, with the photographer in tow taking pictures.

Nehru walked up to us for a chat with Jackie. He evinced interest in her globe-trotting, as Jackie told him how she had worked her way, freelancing, through Japan, the far-east, Indonesia and Singapore. Her next stop, she said, was Pakistan. “Do write about it,” said Nehru before moving on to the next group.I wasn’t sure how he meant it. Maybe he wanted Jackie to do a book on her travels. Surely, he would not have meant that she wrote to him. I don’t know if she did. But I got a letter from Taxila,in Pakistan, on her travel in a caboose (with the guard of a freight train).

So much our meeting with Nehru. Must admit I felt utterly ignored in the proceedings. Would conclude this post, Kini, with my disembarkation at Genoa, after a ten-day boat trip from Bombay. Immigration and customs officials at the port were particularly kind, as they examined my Indian passport. The immigration official uttered the word 'Nehru' noddingly, and stamped me through.I was waved through the customs formalities, with no baggage checks. Which was helpful. Because I had in my baggage an item that did not belong to me. I was taking ashore an ivory chess board on behalf of a crew member.

Shortly before the ship docked at Genoa a crew member came with a request to our cabin, which I shared with three other Indians. None of us thought much of carrying a small parcel for him, to be collect after we cleared the customs. The plea was addressed to us as a group. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to any of us to turn down his request. We knew it was not quite the right thing. But then the crew member working in the dining hall had become a friend during the voyage.Unknown to us, the chap was, presumably, cultivating us. Smuggling small items through the customs was not seen as a crime then. Most people would have done it, without a thought, even for total stangers. Would not be seen as a smart thing to do nowadays.

Ab Kahan, asks Lalu

2007-02-26T19:26:00.000-08:00

As TV studio lights dimmed, but before the mike got switched off, following a live interveiw rail minister Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav was heard by viewers, asking, Ab kahan jana hai. I presumed that question was addressed to the TV guys who interviewed him soon after he had presented the rail budget in parliament.

Reading the papers the next morning I realised it was Lalu who was on the move, not the TV-wallahs who set up shop at the channel studio, interviewing people who came their way. As The Hindu reported, "Walking from one TV studio to another and taking up lively discussions through the electronic media, the railway minister handled all the queries with aplomb..."

On the rail budget afternoon I watched Lalu, back to back, on Zee News and NDTV, and then lost interest, as show hosts of varied genders, at different studios, tended to ask the same set of questions. In one of the shows Rabri Devi, thoughtfully positioned in front of a TV channel camera at Patna, had a question for hubby. Wanted to know how the rail minister worked the magic of giving additional passenger facilities without raising fares, and yet showed increased profit with every budget.

"You ought to know," said Lalu, and told the Bihar ex-CM that the (passenger)benefits-(rail)profit ratio worked to the advantage railways and its users alike. The minister then went on to explain it to his wife through a Lalu-Rabri household analogy. They are used to raising cows in their backyard in Patna. As Lalu put it, they give you more milk, if you give them proper care and better nourishment.

Pratham: some thoughts

2007-02-24T06:04:00.000-08:00

Pratham, Mysore, organized a meeting the other day in a borrowed venue (The Hive school, Yadavagiri) to create awareness and to raise funds. The pretext was the release of the NGOs house magazine – State of Education in Mysore. Managing trustee Mr Ashvini Ranjan was pleased with the turnout, and, possibly, the day’s collection.

“I am overwhelmed by the response,” said Mr Ranjan. He admitted that those at the Pratham, in the last five years of its existence, had been accustomed to seeing empty halls and vacant chairs. As it turned out, Mr Ranjan, was unwittingly responsible for creating awareness of the wrong kind. Something he said on the Cauvery verdict didn’t please some people. They stormed Pratham office, smashed furniture and windows, shouting slogans.

Pratham, for the unfamiliar, is an NGO involved in educating children from weaker sections through non-formal home intervention and in training those volunteering to teach slum children. Mr Ranjan and his team would like to see wider public involvement in the work Pratham is doing.

Convening meetings like the one held at The Hive is okay. Besides, the core group at Pratham would need to do some homework, to reach out to specific interest groups with concrete proposals on how they can help the Pratham cause. My reference is to teachers and student volunteers, young professionals, clubs of all kinds, NGOs involved related spheres, and, notably, the local builders association. Mr Ranjan and his team of resource persons would need to take time to hold meetings with various interest groups to secure their involvement.

I thought of the builders association after hearing Dr T Padmini about her interaction with families of watchmen employed on building sites. Construction workers move from one site to another, with no fixed address or ration card or any other documentary proof that would enable their children to get admission in regular schools. Dr Padmini could discuss with the builders association and explore ways of helping the workers and their children to get primary education. The education department could be persuaded to accept an undertaking by the builders (endorsed by their association) in lieu of proof of residence or other requirements. Dr Padmini would have heard of Mrs Mahadevan’s initiative in opening mobile crèche for nursing mothers among construction workers in New Delhi some decades back. Local builders could be talked into extending facilities for a Pratham type initiative in building sites, if they are not already there.

Findings of Dr Padmini’s survey on the dismal state of primary education among slum children need to be taken to various schools. Those involved in the survey could hold seminars with teachers and senior students at selected schools. The idea is to educate them on the plight of the less advantaged children; and to involve public spirited teachers and students in educating their neighbourhood children.

Pratham could think in terms of networking with orphanages and child welfare institutions. I know of a well-run children’s orphanage – Chamundi Children’s Home – that could benefit from Pratham initiative, to supplement education of the boys and girls of the home who attend regular school. This apart, periodical interaction among children from the home and those who have benefited from Pratham would help in personality development. Pratham could take their children, in manageable groups to visit old people’s homes to spend a day with people there. Such interaction can only be mutually beneficial for the children and the aged alike.

With its website in place Pratham could develop online networking with like-minded individuals and agencies. Speaking of involvement of others, Pratham could look out for online contact with young professionals with volunteer spirit. I know of Mr S L Manjunath and his Infosys team involved in SOFTEN initiative. Others can come up with lots of other contacts worth making.

English for pre-school kids

2007-02-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

Happened to read an article on ‘do’s’ and ‘don’t’s’ of teaching English that appears in Pratham publication, State of Education in Mysore. Though the write-up is addressed to teachers of Kannada medium primary classes, it could be instructive for young mothers keen on interactive baby talk, in English, with their two or three-year olds.

Excerpts, reproduced without permission from the teachers’ English teacher, Dr Durai Krishnan:

DO encourage the child to use English household words – table, tube-light, bus, book (without literal translation in mother tongue) so long as they understand what these words stand for.

Common household vocabulary of English words vary with families – mom, dad, breakfast, dining table may not be commonly used in all households.

DO proceed teaching from the known to unknown in respect of words, sentence formation and conveying ideas.

When it comes to teaching, spoken words precede writing – No slates or notebooks until a ‘child’s mouth is full of English’, says Dr Krishnan, and at the primary level teaching of writing should be limited to the alphabet, and the child’s own name.

DO keep talking to your child – acting, laughing, story-telling; reading is no substitute to talking.

DO NOT alter the child’s learning sequence – listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Speaking to children and story-telling are best done outdoors, outside a class-room setting.

Books are not for reading – use them for showing pictures, talking about them; and also use charts, flashcards, photos, 3-D toys etc.

Teach a child one word at a time – speaking it out clearly, loudly, with lip movements.

For further details contact duraikris@gmail.com. Dr Durai Krishnan, a retired BARC scientist, is founder trustee of Sethu Bandhana Trust, Mysore.

The Mysore labour crunch

2007-02-20T22:57:00.000-08:00

After reading the story in The Hindu any passing motorcyclist in dark glasses sets me thinking if he has been responsible for holding up building work somewhere in the city. For Mr A Ravindra, a builder with many ongoing projects, is quoted as saying that many of his workers, in recent weeks and months, had stopped work, only to show up a couple of weeks later “on a motorbike, wearing dark glasses and flaunt their new-found prosperity”.

Local construction workers, they say, come from families that own farmland on the city outskirts. With a phenomenal rise in the price of agriculture land (an acre can fetch anything from Rs.30 to 90 lakhs) quite a few construction workers have made a minor fortune by disposing of their land. Another factor citied by employers facing a ‘high rate’ of attrition in the last couple of months is that many of those working on construction sites have found better paid work with local IT companies, as gardeners, sweepers and caretakers.

The labour scenario in the building projects reflects vertical mobility of unskilled labour. It is an upshot of the very economic factors that have enriched builders and land speculators. Have these beneficiaries passed on the benefits of the building boom to their labour force by giving their workers a fair hike in wages and improving their working conditions?

Big builders have resorted to ‘import’ of workers from other parts of the state and the country. Maybe a time would come when they would think of making labour a stakeholder, entitled to dividend, in the projects the builders take up.

B2B with K: A saturation limit?

2007-02-20T18:25:00.000-08:00

Change the name of this blog to ‘ramblers park’. The account of 1960s nostalgic journey through NW frontier has reached the saturation limit, says a commenter in my previous post. Far from it, my friend.. I thought we had just begun. One person’s ‘saturation limit’ can be seen as a ‘starting point’ by someone else, as the following mail I got suggests.

“ Your exchanges with Mr. Kini and the blogs that you put up almost like letters to each other (made public) has been fascinating”, writes another friend. “…these stories (through an exchange of letters) has kept me so interested that despite time constraints, I never fail to open the blog park website frequently, to see what’s posted on your adventures.”

To go back to the initial comment, it goes on to say, “could we expect you to come down to earth and post things about Mysore – something closer to home?” It’s a thought. But then I thought you could get personal in blogging. Incidentally, are we talking of the same blog here?

For those who care to read more nostalgia , Kini has posted his latest - Facing No Man's Land....

B2B: Kini hits a speed-breaker

2007-02-18T18:15:00.000-08:00

Word from Herne Bay, UK, is that our friend Kini isn’t doing well,again.Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) has a way of draining body and mind - "barely being able to get up in the morning as if my head is filled with cotton wool, choking for breath, no strength in my burning legs and chest wall in a clamp. Then as the day progresses with more oxygen in the system, life becomes possible. My head is full of half completed sentences for my next blog of my trip across Pakistan".

Getting through daily routine takes some doing. What most of us take for granted is an ordeal for Kini – ‘I find it hard to stay in front of the PC and string words together’. In an earlier e-mail, referring to our B2B Kini said he hoped to resume his account of his overland trip to London. In his earlier piece Kini gave us an idea of how he got bitten by this overland travel bug.

I look forward to reading his accout of transiting Pakistan, in the 60s, when the country was perceived the least India-friendly. Kini had a refreshingly differnt experience - 'We took a 2 days 2 nights train from Quetta to Zahedan in Iran . The tickets were bought for us by a stranger, the station master of Lahore mainline station who put us up, fed us, took us around and gave us a surprise by putting us on this train'.

B2B with K: Clueless in Germany, a tale of two visits

2007-02-17T19:36:00.000-08:00

Leaving London on that May morning (in 1967) in a 12-seater van we motored down to Dover, from where we took a car-ferry to Ostend. Brian, our tour manager and driver, was into endurance driving; wanted to try out how far, and long he could drive in one stretch. The mad bloke drove through the day, and night, through the subsequent day, halting just long enough for a wash, meals and for petrol.

Out of the car ferry at Ostend, we drove through Belgium, halting briefly in Brussels to ensure we were headed to Germany. I got to see the Black Forest by night; drove right through that renowned spa town on the forest edge, Baden Baden. But then we spent an hour or two in an unknown town, went into a crowded bar hoping to find someone who could speak English. No luck. Whoever Brian tried to speak to just shrugged his shoulder and carried on with whatever he was doing.

A few minutes later, someone tapped my shoulder from behind, asking in perfect English what our problem was. He ignored Brian, in, what I would call, the characteristic German disregard for men and matters British. Anyway, we needed German currency to be fed into the automatic petrol vending machine, and direction to some place we could hope for a hot meal. The gentleman at the bar was helpful, and acknowledged my ‘nameste’ with folded hands.

Brian had learnt his first lesson in organising overland tours; that you can’t count on a German in Germany to speak English with an Englishman. I felt somewhat indispensable, and flattered by Germany’s preferential treatment towards a desi. But then I had a German experience of another kind on my subsequent visit to the country 27 years later, in 1994.

This time I was in a group of foreign journalists on a jaunt at the German government expense. I represented the Times of India. The others in the group were from Australia, S Korea, Brunei, Indonesia, Lebanon, and an India-born woman representing Vatican Radio. Apart from the Australian woman reporter and our German escort, our group was coloured. You can’t fault the official hospitality. We travelled business class, were put up at posh hotels in Bonn, Berlin, Dresden and Hamburg.

On escort duty was a kindly middle-aged lady (can’t remember her name) from Hanover. The state information department, drafted her, wife of a businessman, because she spoke English and expressed her interest in interacting with people from other countries and cultures.

Much to her embarrassment, we were greeted with cat-calls from some young things hanging out at the Dresden railway station. At Bonn, on a stroll on my own at a market square, where some leather-jackets on motorbikes ganged up to hold an impromptu rock concert, a middle-aged shopper helpfully advised me to stay out of their sight. At a Cologne pub,where we stopped by for snacks, and local German beer, I was given a dirty stare by a stranger in the wash-room. I swiftly made my way back to our group to find safety in numbers.

It was at a German bar, some 27 years earlier, that I met a helpful stranger who made me feel so welcome in Germany. I was then an anonymous tourist. But here I was now, a guest of the German government being ‘carried ‘ in business class comfort, but given a menacing stare by a stranger for ‘trespassing’. Mine might have been an isolated experience and this sort of thing may well be happening elsewhere in the world.

I still recall the swinging sixties when young Germans, notably, female and single, used to come to Britain as au-pair, ostensibly, to learn English, but, in reality, to find a husband. They seemed to have a preference for desi grooms. My experienced friends, three of them to be precise, have it that German girls with working knowledge of English made good wives. I know Kini would say, French are better in this department.

Millie runs a blog, at 81

2007-02-16T05:37:00.000-08:00

Ran into this interesting blog run by Millie who has many gripes in her life to write about. At 81, she is billed the Internet's oldest blogger. This is what her blog is about:

Millie Garfield is one of the Internet's oldest bloggers, according to The Ageless Project. With an authentic and humorous voice, a knack for story telling and frequent updates, Millie's blog, My Mom's Blog, shows that people want to hear from someone with a story to tell

Let’s do a Juhu in Mysore, says Dr Shenoy

2007-02-15T18:31:00.000-08:00

That Mysore residents/voters ought to organize themselves to put up their own candidates in the next city corporation election is a thought-provoking proposal. And,if I may add (with due apology to Dr Bhamy Shenoy), it should not go unconsidered merely because the idea comes from a convener of Mysore Grahakara Parishat (MGP). Dr Shenoy cites the Juhu citizens initiative at the recent Mumbai city corporation elections.

Alfred D’Souza, Independent, sponsored by the Juhu residents, polled 4,582 votes, defeating his Congress (3,900 votes) and BJP (3,200) rivals. Polling percentage was 43.These figures reflect:1) Citizens initiative works, if the target we set is modest, and tangible with a definite time-frame; 2) campaign power of the political biggies can be countered with effect; and 3) there is still a log way to go in persuading people to cast their vote, even if it is the fate of their own candidate that is at stake. Political pundits may have other interpretation for the low polling percentage at Juhu.

The Juhu people’s campaign story started six months back (a realistic timeline) when a Juhu corporation area sabha was formed on the Janaagraha concept developed in Bangalore, says Dr Shenoy in a Star of Mysore article (Feb.15, 2007).

A polling booth (Juhu municipal ward had 37) was taken as the primary unit, and about 100 residents from each booth met to choose their area sabha representative (ASR). The grass-roots level meeting had folks from various walks of life in varied age-groups (17-70). Names of persons with candidate potential were sent by various booths. Eventually, a short-list of four was considered at a meeting of area sabha representatives. Mr D’Souza was their choice. Citizens, notably, the prominent ones, canvassed for the people’s candidate. And campaign expenses (Rs.60,000) came from ad. Revenue of a Juhu citizen welfare magazine.

Dr Shenoy, seeing lessons here for Mysorean, suggests a start be made in Mysore. Let’s mobilize citizens from five of the 65 municipal wards, says Dr Shenoy.My first thought is that MGP could make a start in such citizens initiative from its home ground, Yadavagiri, and Dr Shenoy should announce right away that he is not a candidate. Maybe, he is not interested. Besides, elections do not favour ex-IITans, as Dr.Shenoy is well aware. But a public declaration by him, and a few other NGO spokespersons with high media visibility (need I name them?), would help create much needed public trust in citizen’s initiative.

One other thought. A person's political affiliation shouldn't be a factor going against his/her choice as people's candidate.Political parties too often ignore the claims their own workers, which could leave party persons, with good credentials, neither here nor there.

That (aircrash) photo is a fake

2007-02-12T23:28:00.000-08:00

Read my earlier item A photo worth a millon words. and, then, what follows:

This photo is a fake. An airplane can never remain stable even for a second with the loss of the horizontal and vertical stabilizer. Not even a second. It should be in an uncontrolled spin vertically downward. In a vertical downward spiral, there's no
time for anyone to have taken the photo and the position of the airplane with respect to the horizon and clouds in the background (any aviator can spot this)suggests aircraft flying straight and level. This is impossible. Clearly, one of the clever fakes that I have seen recently but nevertheless a complete fake.

Capt. Anup Murthy

(Dr. Anand got this e-mail, a copy of which was marked to me.)

A photo worth a million words

2007-02-12T18:31:00.000-08:00

Worth a million words in praise of one man’s audacity in the face of death; his out-of-the-box thinking and split-second reflexes. My reference is to the passenger who took this picture (if you can see its copy pasted on this blog) moments before he went down with a crashing plane involved in a mid-air collision over South America.

The photo was recovered from the memory stick in a digital camera found in the wreckage. It’s owner, identified with the help of camera serial number (presumably, under warranty), was Paulo G Muller, actor in a children’s theatre at Porto Alegre, Brazil.

I got this picture in e-mail forwarded by my friend Dr (Lt.Col.) Y N I Anand, who had got it through a link chain (which carry mostly junk, but an occasional gem such as this one). Thank you, doctor sahib.But I must admit,seeing the picture my first thought was, could this be really real?

Mundane story behind a media scoop

2007-02-11T22:36:00.000-08:00

If it was not for the old fashioned beat reporting by Orlando Sentinel editorial staff the NASA astronauts love-triangle story would have perhaps been missed by the media. The Sentinel editor credited his paper’s scoop to the shoe-leather work by beat reporters. Referring to this my friend and retired resident editor of The Economic Times, Bangalore, Mr N Nageswaran recalled his experience as police reporter in the Madras edition of The Indian Express in the late 50s.

As reporter on late night duty (also called the mortuary beat) it was Mr Nageswaran’s job to make late-night calls to all city police stations, followed by a visit to the General Hospital mortuary. It was on one such routine visit the reporter learnt that the police had brought in a short while earlier a body identified as Arumugam, a rickshaw-puller. It made little more than a news-in-brief. Cases of drunk and dead rickshawmen picked up from street by the police were not uncommon.

As Mr Nageswaran was leaving the hospital mortuary its caretaker in need of a smoke told the obliging reporter that the body had marks of injury, probably caused by beating. On the basis of further information he gathered from a police contact Mr Nageswaran pieced together a story that made Page One.

The story was that a sub-inspector in the Flower Bazar area had an eye on flower-seller Rukmani. Her inconvenient husband was taken to the police station on the pretext of investigation. That was the last Rukmani saw of her rickshaw-puller husband. His name: Arumugam..

It was a story the police wanted to bury. On the morning it appeared in The Express the Madras police commissioner, S Parthasarathy Iyengar, sent Inspector Senthamari to Indian Express to get a retraction and an apology from the reporter. The inspector met the Express supremo Ramnath Goenka to register a complaint of false and misleading reporting by the Indian Express. Goenka directed chief reporter Ganapathy Sharma to sort out the issue. “We used to call him ‘Gunboat Jack’”, said Mr Nageswaran, “the chief reporter wanted me to meet Goenka and apologise to the inspector”. He did neither, saying his (Mr Nageswaran’s) job was to report to the chief reporter, and, that he stood by his story. Meanwhile the story of Arumugam’s death in police custody was picked up by other papers. The police sub-inspector who started it all was eventually convicted on the strength of Rukmani’s testimony.

B2B with K: Leaving London, home-bound

2007-02-11T05:43:00.000-08:00

‘Right ho, then,’ was all that my friend Sushil Nangia said as he saw me off outside Waterloo Station on that May morning in 1967. I was leaving London for good, and had chosen to do it overland in a 12-seater van, with six others – two men, three women and a girl child. Compared to the turnout Kini had at New Delhi station when he set off on a hitch-hike to London, my send-off from London, heading home to New Delhi, was a quiet affair.

In fact, I wasn’t expecting anyone to show up, as I had taken leave of my friends the previous evening. Sushil surprised me, by turning up at the Waterloo station parking lot,our designated departure point. To be there that early, to meet me for a few minutes, Nangia had sacrificed his Sunday morning that one usually spent breakfasting in bed and poring over the bulky Sunday papers. But then Nangia is a peculiar guy in the Bertie Wooster kind of way. And he was among the more unpredictable of the friends I had in London those days.

For all you know, Nangia might have turned up to make sure that I wasn’t bluffing about undertaking this crazy overland exercise. Kini is intrigued, not by my mode of transport, but by my decision to return to India, at a time when thousands were prepared to sell their assets back home, even risk their lives to come and live in the UK. More on that, a little later.

Nangia was among my contemporaries who settled for permanent residency in England. He was then a clerical officer at a London county council office, a secure and pensionable civil service job. And with a felt on his head and rolled-up umbrella, and sporting a wire-frame pair of spectacles, he looked a brown sahib down to the tip of his polished black shoes. With such a start ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’ Nangia must have retired as a Whitehall busybody. I lost touch with him. Wonder if he wears braces, like Larry King.

Nangia and I have known each other from college days. And we usually found ourselves at the same coffee-house table, presided over by ‘Speedy’ (S P Dutt), who was to be known, years later, as Barkha Dutt’s dad. Nangia and I had come to Britain around the same time, along with a group of other coffee-house regulars. During ‘Speedy’s’ occasional trips (he then worked for Air-India in New Delhi) we used to gather at India Tea House (Oxford St.?). Like at the Delhi coffee house, we spent hours at London Tea House whenever Speedy came on his visits.

At the Waterloo parking lot Nangia made small talk with Brian, and asked how we discovered each other. Well, I met Brian through the New Statesman personal column, advertising an India trip overland, by the shortest sensible route. The trip, Brian cautioned, was not for those who expected to be ‘carried’ by others in the group; who were not prepared to accept some heat and discomfort; and definitely not for those who couldn’t ‘get along’ with strangers.

Brian promised to transport us in a brand new 12-seater van, which I learnt later was funded mainly through our contributions, as down-payment on a vehicle loan. I don’t remember how much he charged, but it was less than a hundred pounds per head, excluding visa fees for Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. I couldn’t get Pakistan visa. Flew from Kabul to Amritsar, to rejoin the rest who drove through Pakistan.

We paid for our food and accommodation, wherever Brian chose to make a night halt. In Tehran, Istanbul and Kabul we spent a couple of days or more. We split into companionable sub-groups for dining and doing the town. Brian, Carol (a student nurse on way to catch up with her boyfriend in Sydney) and I happened to club-up.

Kini wants to know why I returned to India, at a time when every thing started going for me. A two-word answer to that would be, ‘home sickness’. It was true I had not planned on getting back. Like Kini with his wishful thinking, of marrying Francoise Sagan, my dream was to move on, from England, to places before settling down at Sao Paulo. Though Kini didn’t get Sagan, he did marry someone suitably French, I was wider off the mark in my dreaming. I have settled down in Mysore(my Sao Paulo).

One’s dreams have a way of getting blurred with changing realities. My reality, after three years in England, was an intensified pull of my folks back home, coupled with a certain new-found fondness for India, and all things Indian. I don't know why our Bharat began to look mahan when I viewed it from London or Darlington. The other factor that bothered me was that I was beginning to get accustomed to a cushy lifestyle and creature comforts. And felt the longer I got used to them in the UK the tougher it would have been for me to get back. That, on my return,I discovered an India that wasn't that mahan was quite another matter.

A question I would like to ask Satish, Subash, Sushil, and Kini, who have made the UK their home is this. Has the thought of getting back ever crossed your mind ?

B2B with K: My take on the names you dropped...

2007-02-08T21:02:00.000-08:00

Kini, a quickie on my recollection of the names you dropped in your last post. Mentioned here in order of their appearance in your account:

Irshad Panchatan: Knew him less as a mime artist than as a friend of my friend O P Kohli (is no more), who was the elder brother of Satish, who had sustained me during my cashless days in London. Are you still with me, Kini? Anyway, whenever Irshad was in Delhi he spent time with O P, with whom I used to hang around in the Janpath, and later Thambu Coffee house.

Irshad and O P were associated with the Hindustani Theatre, patronized by, among others a local architect Anand, and Shama Zaidi. Wonder if you ever ran into Vidya Sagar, a painter who used to hang around when the theatre group rehearsed at Shankar Market. Vidya Sagar later followed us to London, where he found a job at India House (as lift operator, I believe). My recall of Vidya Sagar was that of romantic dreamer, who was intensely in love with someone. I credit him with this self-serving quote, “Being in love is a 24-hour job; it’s impossible to be in love and do much else at the same time”.

Years later when I was posted as the Times of India correspondent in Bhopal I had a call from Sagar saying he was in town as a guest of Bharat Bhavan that invited noted artists and performers to conduct workshops. Sagar was still in London doing well as an artist, and, presumably, out of love.

O V Vijayan: You know, Kini, a website set up to celebrate our cartoonists and their work, doesn’t have any mention of Vijayan in its homage to a few greats in cartooning. The website, CartoonistsIndia.com, has been set up at the initiative of a CEO whose last name rhymes with yours, Ashok Kheny, Incidentally, they pay tribute to Abu, who was a cartoonist at the London Sunday Observer. He used to frequent India Club, at Strand, for lunch, usually a Southie thali. Soft-spoken, pipe-smoking Abu Abraham had a pleasing personality. As someone in the higher editorial echelon of a mainstream Fleet St. paper Abu was my career role model.I was introduced to him by Iqbal Singh of Patriot, as a misguided youngman who had given up a govt. job (at the Press Information Bureau) to come to London. That was a pretty factual, if unflattering introduction,I thought.

Najmul Hasan: An old friend and colleague, first at The National Herald and, years later, at TOI, with a flair things artistic. For a reporter Najmul had connection with officials, politicians and others who usually had media dealings with special correspondents (a higher reporter breed). In later years Najmul (I heard he is no more) and I fell out, never to patch up, over misunderstanding on something I now find silly.

Kini writes that 50 odd friends and well-wishers gathered at New Delhi railway station as he set out on his hitch-hike to London in 1964. In contrast, three years later, I had this lone friend, Sushil Nangia who turned up in front of Waterloo station on that sunny morning when I left London for good in a 12-seater van, at the start of our overland trip to India. It was May 3, 1967. Have you met my friend Nangia, Kini ?

I’m a sakku-moottai, aren’t we all, at times ?

2007-02-07T22:14:00.000-08:00

I read with a certain guilt-feeling Lakshmi Ramanan’s latest in Mangayar Malar (Tamil mag.) – Nee Oru Sakku-mootaiya? (Are you a bluff artist?). That hyphenated s-word is a Tamil term for someone adept at making excuses to cover-up a lapse or cope with an embarrassing omission. I have been guilty of resorting to it with Shyamala (which is how we call her), particularly, whenever my wife and I neglected to meet her ailing mother (she is no more) during our occasional Chennai visits.

Lakshmi Ramanan, a prolific Tamil short story and feature writer, is my wife’s cousin. Her parents – Ramasami Iyer and ‘Thirukkural’ Kalyani Mami – had been a great help when we were setting up house in New Delhi in early 70s. At a time when we had no elder relations in Delhi to look up to for advice and guidance Shyamala’s parents were there for us.

I don’t recall the specific excuses I made up, but Shyamala or her IAS husband Mr Ramanan ( who retired as Chief Secretary in Rajasthan) have been decent enough not to challenge me. If anything, they acted as if they believed my cock ‘n’ bull that I invented on the spur of the moment. The pair of them are delightful conversationalists. Shyamala speaks as breezily as she writes.

I don’t get to read much of what she writes (can’t keep pace with her turnover in varied magazines - Mangayar Malar, Kalki, Kalaimagal, Ananda Vikatan, Kumudam Bhakti Spl.). However I recall a piece she did on her grand-father, Venkatsamy Iyer of Chamarajanagar. The reputation he had with all his grandkids (including my wife) was that of a stern person who had firm beliefs about the status of women, and their place in our households. In his reckoning a woman’s place was firmly in the kitchen.

Shyamala happens to be the first female graduate in the family (she passed out from Delhi’s Indraprasth College)in her days. She couldn’t have even thought of becoming a graduate, if her grand-father had lived longer. He died before she joined college. Shyamala recalled that when she once showed him a medal she got in school her granddad asked, “what would you do with a medal?” Education was not for girls, who should focus on marriage and on their work in the kitchen.

Irony was, as Shyamla put it, “I couldn’t have got married to Mr. Ramanan, had my grandfather not died at the time he did”. Mr Ramanan wanted a graduate bride..

Autobiography of an ordinary Indian

2007-02-06T21:50:00.000-08:00

Blogger Narendra Shenoy prescribes three ways to make it to Medikeri. My favourite would be, what Mr Shenoy would call, “an inexpensive and characterful way”. Bussing it there from Mysore. Here, a note of caution from Mr Shenoy: Be prepared to share it with livestock. To put it in the blogger’s own words, “I traveled once this way for a lark and had to share my seat with a goat and a rooster. (When I told this to Sheela, all that she asked me was, ‘were they MBAs too?’ – talk about empathy ).

I happened by Mr Shenoy's blog through a Google Blogs Alert. His blog is named – Autobiography of an ordinary Indian – We have had one from an ‘unknown’ Indian, this was quite a while ago.The book had put Nirad Chaudhuri on the short list of the great Indian English writers of his time.

Mr Shenoy who styles himself ‘an ordinary Indian’ says a question that has bothered him is: “why should only the rich and famous be allowed to write autobiographies?” He reckons he is unlikely to be rich or famous anytime soon, anyways, and, by inference, he could not write his bio. So Mr Shenoy chose to blog it, his autobiography.

May I suggest something, Mr Shenoy? Don’t jazz it up to the point where you don’t get to recognize your own life. Besides, a common Indian’s life story told as it plays out during these trying times, would anytime be more salesworthy than fiction from an ordinary Indian. With your style, and with Sheela to help you along with the narrative, you might even make a 'blook' of it - blog morphed to a book.

B2B with K: Kabul in the hippy, happier days

2007-02-05T23:46:00.000-08:00

Kini, Wonder if you have seen Kabir Khan’s Kabul Express. It’s a film about two TV journalists on assignment in Afghanistan following the fall of Taliban. Our Kabul visits, yours and mine (in May 1967) made three years apart,predates that of John Abraham and Arshad Warsi by four decades. In the 2006 movie the two actors were featured as media men exposed to life-threatening situation while driving through Afghan countryside.

We did Kabul during the good old, carefree days when travel was safer and even regular guys took to back-packing. We had with us a middle-aged wife of a businessman from Norfolk who was bored with golf and country life. She traveled overland with us to get a feel of the world, and send picture postcards home from exotic-sounding places.

There was this Indian couple with a school-going girl. They were going to Bombay for a long vacation. A British student nurse planning to join her boyfriend in Sydney joined in for ‘some fun and a bumpy ride’ to Bombay, from where she was to take a boat to Australia. And then we had Brian who had bought 12-seater with our contribution for the trip and set himself in business as an overland tour operator. He was our driver, and it was his first trip, which made us all equally inexperienced.

Pak refusal to grant visa held me back in Kabul, while the British in the group, made it through Khyber Pass into Pakistan, and then on to India via Wagha border. Had to hang around four days in Kabul for a plane connection to Amritsar. Ariana Afghan Airlines flew to India only twice weekly.

Kabul in the 60s was a staging post for hippies, hitch-hikers and flower children looking for poppy-sourced bliss. ‘Make Love, Not War’ was their mantra. They sustained a host of Afghan youth as tour guides, an euphemism for drug peddlers and pimps. Lodges, cheap and smelly, were full. Cafes in town were packed with those who stayed in cheap lodges, but spent their days at a cafe lingering over coffee for rest & recreation, and to use the rest-rooms (toilets).

Outside were parked vehicles, mostly vans and land-rovers carrying number plates of almost every European country. Some of the vehicles displayed placard advertising seats to London for 50 pounds. I visualized Brian putting up a seat-for-sale signboard on our van, on his way back after offloading us in Bombay.

Kabul those days had a thriving Indian community. They owned petty businesses and shops dealing in all conceivable items – dry fruit, saris, hardware. Many of them had a back office for unlicensed trade such as money-changing and bootleg liquor. I didn’t know if it was illegal to deal in currency, for we paid for most the stuff we bought with dollars. But when I wanted to en-cash a traveler’s cheque a shop-keeper, adopting a hush-hush tone, sent me with a middleman to a house some distance away to receive cash in dollars.

But then money changing on the sly was a standard operating procedure shopkeepers adopted in many places. I had similar experience on reaching Bombay. Everyone I knew usually went to a shopkeeper rather than a bank to have our dollar or traveler cheque encashed. Shopkeepers paid a higher exchange rate. Those were days of severe forex restrictions. Those who emigrated to the UK, as I did, were given a foreign exchange allowance of three pounds.

Meanwhile in Kabul I had a spot of bother when I reached the airport to catch the Amritsar flight. I wasn’t aware you needed an exit visa to leave the country. An immigration official directed me to a designated police station in the city to get he visa. When I mentioned my anxiety about missing the plane the official assured me that the plane would not take off that soon and that I had time enough to make the round trip to the city police station. Irony was my tourist visa was to expire before the next scheduled flight to India, three days later.

I needn’t have worried. For the plane was still there on my return to the airport with exit visa. How was I to know that the published schedule for flights out of Kabul were notional and they were routinely delayed. I would like to presume, this time they held up the flight for me on the say-so of the immigration officer. Even after boarding I found my plane, a Dakota, wouldn’t leave Kabul so easily. The plane on runway made two false starts before take-off .Maybe the pilot was being put through flying training at our expense.

Over to you Kini, for your take at Gateway to India.

India will overcome, says who?

2007-02-04T18:17:00.000-08:00

Says Edward Luce, who has been India correspondent of The Financial Times, London. He writes about “the strange rise of modern India” in his book, titled, In Spite of the Gods. It won’t be enjoyed, reckons The New York Times review, by Indian diplomats, academics, Hindu nationalists and makers of cow-dung anti-dandruff shampoo. “Most others, I suspect, will relish”, says the reviewer Ben Macintyre.

Nicely put, Ben. My suspicion is that many of the academics and diplomats who read this sentence would want to read the book, if only to repudiate it; and the others would be inclined to buy it to see what is there in it that would not please Hindu nationalists. And I would want to figure out why Ben, the book reviewer, has excluded the shampoo makers.

The author of this book cautions that the expectation of success has infected India’s privileged classes with “a premature spirit of triumphalism” that could prove self-defeating, a case of counting chickens before they are eggs. “India is not on an autopilot to greatness”, says NYT review quoting the author, “it would take an incompetent pilot to crash the plane”.

The Edward Luce prescription:Improve education, strengthen liberal democracy, develop a coherent energy strategy and radically revise the transport system before the country’s car population swells from 40 million today to an expected 200 million by 2030 and brings the entire country to a chocking standstill.

My question: Can we accomplish all this? Sure, all it takes would be a miracle mindset-change in our people and policy-makers alike.

B2B with K : Of crossover book and a cross-country trip

2007-02-03T21:45:00.000-08:00

Reference: Kini's B2B

Kini, The Hindu review of Inglistan, a Rajesh Talwar novel, says the book is about cultural comparisons, with the leading character holding forth on Indian culture and the crossover - how Gujaratis are the European equivalent of the Jews and how Indian restaurants in London are really Bangaladeshi.

How true.I have found that owners of most of our eating joints in London came from Sylhat district of the then East Pakistan. And they usually named their restaurants after Agra, the Taj or some other renowned Indian landmark or town. There used to be an Agra restaurant in every otherlocality in London of the sixties.

Another piece in The Hindu Sunday magazine, this one on a cross-country rickshaw run, Kini, reminds me of your Delhi-London hitch-hike (1964, was it?). The magazine piece by Antara Das is about a Kochi-Darjeeling three-wheeler ride undertaken by some 30 odd teams, many from Britain. It took them two weeks to finish the 3,500-km course. Compared to what you and our friend Subash Chopra did, thumbing lifts across West Asia and Europe, the auto-rickshaw ride would have been a cakewalk.

I don’t know if Subash and you were thoughtful enough to maintain a diary. Rickshaw-runners, we are told, ran blogs. In the words of a blogger, unfamiliar with the coomon mode of transport in Asian roads, an autorickshaw was no more than ‘ a bench-seat bolted over a two-stroke engine’. As one of them put it in a sum-up post, “…3219 km on the clock, seven spark blugs burnt out, one full service, a total of Rs 200 paid in bribes; and Rs.70, in toll charges”.

Maybe, you would like to check out www.rickshawrun.com; might even be driven to put down your thoughts on the 1964 hitch-hike. You don’t hear of people doing this sort of thing nowadays. It is perhaps because thumbing lifts no longer works in most countries. Car owners and truck drivers do not trust strangers with backpacks. Cross-country roads are no longer safe for hitch-hikers; and more countries would refuse Indians transit visa today than they did in the sixties.

In 1967, when a group of us did London-Bombay overland in a 12-seater, Pakistan was the only country (of the eight-nation crossover) that refused me a visa. My British companions had to leave me in Kabul, to fly over and rejoin them in Amritsar, while they drove through the famed Khyber Pass into Pakistan and exited via Lahore and Wagha border to enter India. From Amritsar we took the road again to Bombay.

I guess it took us about 12 or more days, of steady driving , with halts at Grass in Austria, Maribar (Yugoslavia), Istanbul, Tehran, Mehshad, Kandahar, Kabul, and a few other places I can’t recall.

What makes Shiva tick

2007-02-02T05:40:00.000-08:00

It can now be disclosed that I have a film-making nephew, Shivakumar Ramanathan; and his 40-minute audio-visual creation – The Portent – was screened at a recent festival for niche films in Mumbai. This must come as a revelation for many of those who claim to know Shiva, and this includes his extended family of aunts and uncles and a platoon of cousins. All that they knew till now was that Shiva holds a day job, as a regular guy in a regular company, in Los Angeles.

What was unknown and appreciated even less was his romance with film-making.. Shiva slogs during weekends on things films and filming. He has been doing this double-take in life ever since he moved to LA (was it a decade back, Shiva, or more?). So far as I can gather Shiva Keeps himself in touch with few friends outside his film school circle. He has no family (by which I mean wife and kids). And his mother’s constant concern is that her only son is pushing 34, and still unmarried, maintains a punishing pace of work; and he brushes aside suggestions that it was time he set up family. Shiva puts films first.

Putting films before family is not an idea that a middle-class Iyer mother from a Chennai’s conservative locality (Kotturpuram) can accept. But I reckon my young nephew can’t be faulted for thinking that a wedding could wait till he made his first marriage (with films) work. Now that The Portent has happened, would Shiva reorder his priorities in life? A delegation of his well-wishers – sister, two aunts and a nephew – that returned from the Mumbai film-fest (Shiva couldn’t make it) was pleased with his accomplishment, but had on its mind just one question: ‘What next, Shiva? They didn’t mean his film-making – ‘life’s about other things as well, such as shaadi ‘.

I guess I am getting preachy. Surely,Shiva didn’t send me his DVD to have me psychoanalyze him on the pretext of writing about his film. Speaking of which, Shiva’s 44-minute offering -The Portent – is on paranormal phenomenon, with some blood and bullets thrown in. Violence is not explicit, but is menacingly suggestive. Which heightens effect. My wife, on learning about the theme, didn’t want us to watch the DVD at night.

Visuals are pretty sharp, though I felt the soundtrack of dialogues could do with more clarity. Or was it only me who couldn’t catch the words because of wax in my ear? Speaking of soundtrack I thought slipping in a bit of tabla as background music to some action shots was cool.

The Portent could leave an involved viewer with questions. The film is on Ben Fisher, a medical man troubled by his innate power to see other people’s future, not just of his patients but total strangers He knew what was coming for them in the near future,but couldn’t explain how. Forewarning those facing impending death or violence wasn't always a good idea. He could be implicated. Anyway he was rarely believed by anyone. And he could not do anything to avert the tragedy he knew was waiting to happen.

My two question: 1) Does Ben’s power extend to people living beyond a certain geographical radius? Is there a range limit to his psychic-radar? I mean, could Shiva have given his story an added dimension of a political thriller by granting his lead player the power to see what the future holds for those who live in the White House? The Portent was shot in LA; and I can even identify the locale in some scences - Shiva's studio in an Orange County apartments complex

2) Is Ben’s power limited to predicting violence and deaths alone? Why doesn’t he foresee some nice and pleasant things happening in people’s lives?

B2B with K : My indebtedness, to Satish, Subash

2007-01-30T18:42:00.000-08:00

Within hours after I posted the Recover, Soon piece, Kini bounced back with an engaging slice-of-life post on life in London of the sixties. Kini is skeptical if this sort of mutual nostalgia-fest would interest anyone other than the two of us. Maybe, it won’t, if you have in mind those who don't relate to either one of us or to London when the girls wore skirts shorter and the boys sported long hair (wonder if you can post a snapshot of yours of those days); the London of Twiggy and Beatles sensation.

My take is our nostalgia trip might interest others, if it has social context and a flavour of local history. Maybe our B2B could be of wider interest if we talk about today things in the light of our past experience. Take this Channel 4 inspired Goody-Shetty spat. What do folks say in your ‘geriatric land’ in coastal Kent? Do you have a race situation in Herne Bay?

Getting back to the 60s, Kini spending some days in Shepherds Bush gurudwara comes as news to me. I had always associated him with a South Kensington address, frequenting pubs in classy Earls Court or Chelsea with his artist and poet friends. My scene was more like the underground pub at Leister Sq, serving German beer, in litre (not in pegs); a noisy joint frequented by Punjabi paapaes and Pakistanis. My crowd was a group of Delhi coffee-house regulars that had been transposed to London.

It was a coffee-house contact, Satish Kohli, who met me at the railway station when I landed in London with 12 shillings in pocket; put me up with him at his Golders Green bed-sitter; and, even took on the landlady, an Indian widow who worked at our highcom. She didn’t relish my stay without paying anything. Satish didn’t dump me. We moved house, first to a cheap, working-class Holloway (known for it women’s prison), and then to Bayswater. I would always remain indebted to Satish Kohli. Wonder where he is; would you know, Kini?

Satish is not the only chap, to whom I feel indebted, but had neglected to stay in touch with, as I moved on in life. Subash Chopra is another guy. You know, Kini, I got into Northern Echo, Darlington, on his say-so. He had worked there before I joined. Subash put in a word for me with editor Don Evans as he was switching to another daily in Oxford (I reckon). Subash is the only guy in our gang who can rightfully claim he was on the Fleet St. Subash eventually had a stint as sub-editor on The Times, London.

At the Echo, a leading provincial daily that was next only to the Yorkshire Post, in terms of circulation, had good impression about Indian sub-editors because of the track record left by Subash and Sunny Rao who had gone to the Echo from the Times of India, Bombay. I joined the Darlington paper a couple of years after he had left. Yet my colleagues on the newsdesk still used to talk about Sunny's work.

Subash Chopra may have no reason to know this: 1) he was instrumental in my getting a break in mainstream journalism; and 2)The job he helped me get paid me enough to save the 100 pounds that I needed for my passage back to India. A group of us did it overland, in a 12-seater van, across eight countries – Belgium, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan.

B2B archive
A blog-to-blog chat
Confusing chronology
Our Fleet St. Days
Dr.Basu of India Weekly
Shroff Saab of Carmelite St.
Mr Chandra in Fleet St.
Mr Chandra of The Tribune, Chandigarh
A new Renaissance

B2B: Recover soon, Kini

2007-01-30T03:46:00.000-08:00

Heard that Kini is going through a bad phase in his health condition. “So naturally, would be falling back a bit in my responses (to B2B posts)’, he e-mailed me, “hope you don’t mind”.

For those unfamiliar with his condition, Kini suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). He has, in his own words, an undiagnosed chest pain, leg pain and sleep problem; he’s wheel-chair bound, can’t walk much.

As a web account of CFS symptoms has it, this illness is accompanied by fatigue. …not the kind of fatigue one experiences after a particularly busy day or week, after a sleepless night or after a stressful event, but a severe, incapacitating fatigue that isn't improved by bed rest and that may be exacerbated by physical or mental activity. It's an all-encompassing fatigue that results in a dramatic decline in both activity level and stamina.

B2B with K: Irfan Khan re-discovers Kini

2007-01-29T06:23:00.000-08:00

I had this rare phone call from Irfan Khan in Mumbai in the wake of an e-mail he had received from Kini. We, Irfan and I, have been in e-mail touch for some time now. Our exchange was usually about sharing media/web articles of mutual interest. I usually e-mailed friends and contacts about something I had written on the web, in the belief that they would be as enthusiastic reading the stuff as I was writing it. A friend of mine calls it GVK’s brag-mail. Many of them respond with flattering one-liners –‘very interesting’, ‘keep it up’, or some such suitably polite words. But a phone call was rare; and Irfan’s call went on for the better part of an hour.

It all started with my brag-mail alerting Irfan, among others,to a Desicritic piece -Blogging it out with my friend Kini. There was response from a few who suggested informative web links on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), of which Kini is a victim. Irfan sent Kini a one-liner, wishing him well, not knowing that Kini and he had been on the staff of Patriot daily, New Delhi, for a brief period in early sixties They had since moved their separate ways. With no reason or occasion to reconnect, for over four decades, Irfan couldn’t place Kini from my mail, but sent him a get-well message, as he would have done with any friend of his friends.

But Kini caught on, and responded to Irfan, reminding him of their Patriot connection (1963-64). As a low-paid newspaper reporter Irfan Khan used to own a car, which was exceptional for journalists those days, said Kini, adding that Irfan had once driven him to Vice-President Zakir Hussain’s residence for tea. “I was gobsmacked !”, said Kini in an e-mail to Irfan, of which he marked a copy to me. What does the word mean, Kini? I’m afraid, I haven’t heard of ‘gobsmack’.

Irfan told me on phone that the car Kini referred to was a gift from his mother, who wasn’t comfortable with her son driving a mobike,that he occasionally used for a cross-country ride (to places like Shimla). A car, his mother reckoned, was safer. And,Irfan said it came cheaper than his bike. Besides, petrol was 45 paise a litre (or was it a gallon?) those days.

Irfan has a UK-connect. He did a six-month stint on a Cardiff fellowship for journalists; was an intern with The Sunday Times, London; and related to many of those Kini has blogged about – Subash Chopra, Salman Haider, P T Chandra and many others. Happy to have re-discovered Kini through this bug called a blog, Irfan said he had half a mind to set up a blog of his own. I know he has a headful of stuff that he can blog about. He once told me he was working on a book. If he hasn’t done it yet, a blog would synergize material-gathering for his book in the making.

B2B archive
A blog-to-blog chat
Confusing chronology
Our Fleet St. Days
Dr.Basu of India Weekly
Shroff Saab of Carmelite St.
Mr Chandra in Fleet St.
Mr Chandra of The Tribune, Chandigarh

B2B with K: Mr Chandra of The Tribune, Chandigarh.

2007-01-27T21:36:00.000-08:00

My friend wrote about the plight of a London-based Indian journalist in the sixties. Mr P T Chandra, then London Correspondent of The Tribune, Chandigarh, had seen better days when he maintained a large office off Fleet Street. But we, Kini and I, came to meet him at a much later time when he was down on his luck, life-style and his bank balance.

He still filed stories for his newspaper, working from a desk, set up for him at India House. The deputy high commissioner, Mr P N Haksar, was Mr Chandra’s friend.. I used to meet him occasionally when he dropped in at Dr Basu’s office, at Hindustan Standard/India weekly, Carmelite St..As Kini wrote, Mr Chandra, in a dark three-piece suit, looked more a company executive than a journalist in distress. Unlike Kini, with whom he opened out over half a 'bitter' at a pub on Tottanham Court Rd., Mr Chandra was rather formal with me, though friendly. And I, a junior reporter setting out to make a career in journalism, was suitably respectful.

Mr Chandra seemed, what I would call, in a state of constant battle to maintain self-respect in the face of adversity. His peers were understanding and helpful. But with rest of us Mr Chandra was constrained to maintain appearance of well-being. So the man inside that three-piece suit put between us a glass screen of small talk and polite enquiry, presumably, because he had no reason to know that I knew about his plight.

I learned from Dr Basu’s assistant, Mr Asoke Gupte that The Tribune didn’t send Mr Chandra a pay cheque. Instead, they banked a certain amount to his account in India. Of what use was a bank balance in rupees to someone having to pay his bills in London, in pounds sterling? If there was any system of ‘hawala’ in reverse, I didn’t think Mr Chandra resorted to such means, so low and illegal.

The sixties were the days of forex regulations. Indian newspapers had to seek foreign exchange clearance from the government to pay salary and maintain offices overseas. It was the Reserve Bank of India that decided whether or not a newspaper could have a fully-paid correspondent, and,if so, what would be the salary payable in foreign exchange.

Incidentally, those of us who came to Britain on immigration were entitled to a princely travel allowance of 3 pounds sterling (at the then rate of Rs.13 to a pound). It took me 10 days on the boat (from Bombay to Genoa) and another day on train to make it to London. I don’t remember how I stretched out my 3 pounds for so many days, and still managed to have 12 shillings to spare when I reached London. I would be interested to learn how Kini and Subash hitch-hiked from New Delhi to London on a total forex allowance of six pounds.

I have a confession to make here: Before boarding my boat – Lloyd Triestino’s m v Asia , a fully air-conditioned cruise ship – I had thoughtfully slipped in a 100-rupee note inside my sox. But then I found it couldn’t get me anything on the boat or in Europe. Small shopkeepers at Karachi,where the ship halted for a day, readily exchanged my money for eats and things we had on Mahatma Gandhi Rd., Karachi. A shop-keeper told me Indian money came in handy to smuggle in consumer delicacies such as Banarasi or Calcutta paan.

A note on The Tribune: In the mid-eighties, when I was posted TOI correspondent in Chandigarh, I had occasion to visit friends at The Tribune township. I know of no other Indian newspaper that has built a residential colony for its staff. The Tribune, Ambala (and later Chandigarh) is run by a trust. I wondered how a newspaper that is so employer-friendly could have treated Mr Chandra so shabbily. Perhaps, it was not the newspaper’s doing. Maybe Mr Chandra was a victim of our forex policy.
B2B archives:
A blog-to-blog chat
Confusing chronology
Our Fleet St. Days
Dr.Basu of India Weekly
Shroff Saab of Carmelite St.
Mr Chandra in Fleet St.

Goody girl is coming

2007-01-27T00:05:00.000-08:00

The first thing I envisioned, on reading that Jade Goody (you know her, don't you?) has been granted tourist visa to India, was a protest demo, placard waving, and slogan shouting – ‘Goody, go back’. When I shared the thought with a friend, he quipped: “Get real, yaar; she’s no Simon Commission”.

Anyway, the Goody girl’s India visit is not going to go unnoticed by our media and TV. Sight-seeing-wise Jane would, presumably, take in the TaJ Mahal,Jaipur, and Delhi (would someone take her to Rajghat and tell her about a guy called Gandhi and his S Africa days?). Maybe she would do Mumbai, to get a feel of where and how Shetty (Shilpa) lives; and drop in at a Bollywood studio. Wouldn’t be surprised if some producer offers her a film role.

The point is: Jade Goody is in for interesting times. I have a question, though. Was it her own bright idea to visit India? Going by a London sourced report, India tourism office there had invited her “to experience India’s healing nature”. There were ads. to this effect placed in British papers. But then, the report quoting ministry sources in New Delhi had that the ads., placed to take advantage of the media coverage around the Big Brother row, were meant to be ‘satirical’. Goody however was welcome, paying her own passage. Jade wouldn’t be treated as India’s official guest. Nor would a red-carpet be laid out by anyone.

B2B with K: Shroff Saab of Carmelite St.

2007-01-25T18:30:00.000-08:00

Earlier items:
A blog-to-blog chat
Confusing chronology
Our Fleet St. Days
Dr.Basu of India Weekly
No talk about India Weekly can be complete without a reference to Shroff Saab. Shroff Akhtar Ali was the quiet man; always pondering over something that had to do with the headline, the wordage or his re-write of someone else’s story - Kini’s and mine, usually. The man had licence to meddle with anyone’s text. And there was no appeal against his meddling.

I usually found him poring over the page-proof, red-penciling some stuff, making a dummy page or cleaning his pipe. Shroff Saab was a man of few words. He opened his mouth only when he was with the boss, Dr Tarapada Basu, usually to complain about something or someone. And his words carried weight with Dr Basu.

Kini and I were, what I would call, 'fair-weather' employees who used India Weekly as parking lot, that we left whenever we found something more promising, only to return when the thing didn’t work out. Shroff Saab was indispensable. He did things that no one else wanted to do; read the page proof, made up pages, kept nagging the printers on phone; and re-wrote our copy. His extensive use of red-pencil was usually a sticking point between us. My attempts to get friendly with him didn’t take me far. Possibly because he was a believer in the generation gap. And won't encourage my attempt to close that gap over an occasional beer at Coger.

But then I didn’t see Shroff Saab being friends with anyone else in the Weekly. Didn’t know how Dr Basu discovered such a workhorse, slogging it out on not much more than subsistence wage. Which was sad, for man who was over 60. Shroff Saab, like a true brown sahib, was dressed in three-piece suit (the only one he owned) or in a Harris tweed jacket. He smoked pipe, and wore a felt.

I didn’t know where he stayed or when he came to work. Whenever I came in, I found Shroff Saab already at his desk, puffing at his pipe, staring at a typed sheet, and ready with his red pencil. And he usually left office with the rest of us – Dr Basu, Asoke Gupte, Kini and I. Dr Basu liked to have everyone around in office till he chose to call it a day.

Never seen Shroff Saab going out with Dr Basu or Asoke Gupte for an after-office drink. As we all stepped out of the lift and lingered on at the pavement for while to exchange gossip Shroff Saab took leave of the rest of us, and walked away into the evening mist, towards Fleet Street.

Where he went, whether he took a bus or tube home, or if he had anyone to go home to remained a mystery to me. But I once heard Dr Basu telling someone that Shroff Saab longed to get home, to Aligarh. He had spent 18 years in England. His problem was he didn’t earn enough to save for his passage back to India.

I heard about his death from Kini when we last met in 1996 (I believe), Chennai.

Davos magic

2007-01-25T05:30:00.000-08:00

...the magic comes when you let serendipity lead you forward. Almost everyone here does something interesting, and you are more likely than not find a common interest with someone you would never would have a priori guessed would be passionate about human rights, or technology, or the political situation in Bangladesh, or environmental change, or...

And of course, the best place to meet people are in the six person minivans. Last year I jumped into one and sat across from George Soros. People are accessible and interested in knowing more about everybody, and it creates a real opportunity to accelerate three month's of new meetings into three or four days.

(From a blog post in The World Eco Forum blog)

B2B: Dr.Basu of India Weekly

2007-01-24T19:34:00.000-08:00

Kini, in his latest post, says I forgot to mention the media oligarch, Dr Tarapada Basu, who brought out London’s India Weekly in the sixties. A great soul (despite what Kini says).Tarada, as he was fondly addressed among the local Bangla crowd, was undisputed doyen of London-based Indian journalists of his days.

Representing Hindustan Standard, Calcutta, Dr Basu was much bigger than the professional designation he held. He was un-ransferable, unlike his colleagues in Hindustan Times, Indian Express and The Times of India, who came and went away from London once in three years or so.

A generous host, Dr Basu knew how to take care of his Calcutta boss, Mr Ashok Sarkar (if I got his first name right) of Ananda Bazaar Group.Mr Sarkar, along with Mr Tushar Ghosh of Amritha Bazaar Patrika, amd Mr Narasimhan of The Hindu made unfailing annual London visits (or was it twice yearly?) to attend Commonwealth Press Union meetings. Dr Basu set up meetings for them with higher British bureaucracy. He also ensured that the India High Commission hosted a reception for the visiting media barons.

Dr Basu was generous enough to allow India Weekly minions, such as yours truly, to use his office space at Carmellite St. If Kini and I can claim to have worked off the famed Fleet Street, it was due to Dr. Basu’s generosity. Had it not been for his patronage India Weekly would have operated from a garage in Southall or Shepherds Bush. Dr Basu once sent me on a week-long tour of England, sponsored by the Commonwealth Press Office. We were taken to Birmingham, Manchester, and some other towns, put up at five-star hotels, driven around in Austin Princess. Everywhere we went they lined up meetings for us with the mayor, local industrialists and other VIPs.

The press tour was for a group of journalists from Commonwealth countries. We were six of us, representing newspapers from Canada, Australia, Pakistan and India. The invitation was for Hindustan Standard. Dr. Basu made me its ‘representative’ for the purpose of the press tour. Who wouldn’t have nice thoughts for such a man? On another occasion, the Indians Association in Manchester invited Dr Basu to be the chief guest at their Independence Day function. He deputed me. I was required to make a speech, and take questions from the audience. I guess I was able to mask my nervousness from the audience. If my hosts on the dais noticed, they were decent enough not to embarrass me or report it to Dr. Basu.

Kini makes a reference to Goger, the Fleet St. pub we used to frequent. Would like to draw his attention to a zine5 piece I did some time back – My Fleet Street Stint.

Related items on B2B thread:
A blog-to-blog chat…
Confusing chronology
Our Fleet St. Days

Who needs words when you’ve a picture?

2007-01-22T21:27:00.000-08:00

The caption of this Page One photo in The Hindu reads: AMITY: Even as the violence-affected areas in Bangalore Cantonment were returning to normal, these two women walk hand-in-hand to procure their daily needs on Seppings Road, symbolizing communal harmony – Photo – K Gopinathan

After reading this I didn’t bother to go through the story. The caption says it all. The photo, however, appeared to convey a different story. It showed two women, one in head-to-toe burkha, and the other, sari-clad with her eyes to the ground, walking holding hands in the middle of a deserted street. The caption explained they were out to procure their daily needs. The women in photo were carrying no shopping bags. Nor was their evidence of any shops being open.

The women in the picture may well be friends, and good neighbours. But do they have to be shown walking down a street, hand in hand? The woman in sari seems not too comfortable facing the camera. Or could there be any other reason why she is seen with her eyes to the ground ?

A photograph, they say, is worth a thousand words (the wrong ones, perhaps).

Confusing chronology

2007-01-21T22:26:00.000-08:00

London-based lawyer, promising author and a new-found e-contact, Vinod G Joseph, wrote to me, on reading my earlier post, that the chronology of my UK employment had him confused. "I guess you worked for the Northern Echo after your stint with the Afro-Asian Echo",he said, "And how long did you work for India Weekly?"

You are right, Mr Joseph.One could get confused over chronology. The Afro-Asian Echo turned out to be a six-month interlude. India Weekly was a kind of safety net for me. I went back to the Weekly after Afro-Echo. Its Nigerian publisher ran out of funds (read the loot) he had brought as he fled Lagos following a coup and the assassination of the then premier, Tafewa Balewa.

Our Nigerian publisher (can't remember his name now)didn't have money to pay us. India Weekly had its door open for us, if we did not fuss over their payment. I could have got as much as they paid, as unemployment allowance. But then, you don't wish to be seen by your friends and neighbours, going to the employment office, twice weekly, to sign up for the dole. Slaving for the Weekly at subsistance wages was a more dignified option.

Mercifully,within weeks of returning to the Weekly, I got the offer from The Northern Echo, Darlington, as sub-editor on their news desk...Before all this, I had done stints (for a few weeks at a time) on the dole queue(where you run into folks with Jade Goody mentality), as proof reader in a North London printing outfit (from where I got sacked), and as a packer with a garments wholesaler off Oxford Street.

I was the only packer who carried The Guardian to work, to be read in tea, and lunch breaks. The Mirror and The Daily Sketch were more visible at the workers canteen. During this period I did freelancing for a Calcutta film weekly, Cine Advance. This was how I got to meet quite a few visiting Bollywood people - Sunil Dutt, Sadhana, Dev Anand, Ramanand Sagar, Raaj Kumar and numerous other lesser knowns in Bombay film industry.

Cine Advance used to give me an impressive byline as 'Our London Correspondent', but no hard currency. The paltry payment they made on per-piece basis was sent to me in rupees after I returned to India. The film weekly was also generous enough to offer a job at their Calcutta office, on a monthly salary of Rs.600 (which wasn't bad in 1969)

Incidentally, London-based journalists representing some Indian newspapers used to get paid in rupees, deposited in banks back home.It came in handy when they visited India once in a couple of years. A significant chunk of my three year-stay in England was spent at Nrothern Echo (over an year), after which I chose to return to New Delhi (home sick), to join the National Herald, which opened its Delhi edition in 1969. Before leaving India I approached some dailies that didn't have a staffer in New Delhi. Most that didn't have their own correspondent were not interested. The Daily Sketch , London, condescened to have me as their New Delhi stringer. I was paid six pounds sterling for every piece they carried. And they didn't publish many of despatches.

But then the government recognised me as an accredited correspondent, invited to press conferences and media briefings at the external affairs ministry. So, there I was, a junior reporter at National Herald, and, at the same time, a foreign correspondent for The Daily Sketch in New Delhi. The arrangement continued till the Sketch merged into the Daily Mail.

A blog-to-blog chat with my friend Kini

2007-01-20T23:39:00.000-08:00

My UK- based friend Kini,T R, has said some nice things about me in his blog. This is my pay-back piece. This way, he would need to access this blog to find out what I say about him. A b-chat between us, to be of interest to anyone else, ought to be more than an ego-cast. I would like to think this exchange isn't just a mutual back-scratching exercise. By this I don’t mean we adopt a reality TV mode in our b-exchanges.

Kini’s blog piece triggered nostalgia juice in me. He spoke of our co-editing of the Afro-Asian Echo in London of the sixties. Those were the days, when most young men in Delhi with a college degree looked towards the UK, if they failed to get into the IAS or find a covenanted company job, or,if they couldn’t become a college lecturer (as a stop-gap arrangement). Getting a work permit for England was easy those days for folks from Commonwealth countries.

Kini and I landed in London around the same time (May 1964?), though by different means. I took a boat from Bombay to Genova; and from there, a train (later day edition of the famed Orient Express) to London. And Kini, with a friend (Subash Chopra) hitch-hiked it all the way. I wish he blogs about it sometime in Gateway to India.

Afro-Asian Echo, as Kini said, was founded ‘on uncertain financial premises’; and folded within six months. Designed to serve the Afro-Asian community in England and Europe, the fortnightly Echo evoked, while it lasted, considerable interest in the African immigrant community. So much interest, in fact, that we once had a bunch of them Africans barging into my cabin to threaten us for having written an editorial, disaagreeably titled – OAU: Myth of African Unity.

Kini mentions Adil Jussawala and Farukh Dhondy (Is he still associated with Channel 4, Kini ?) who were commissioned to write for us. Would like to drop another famous name here, late Dom Moraes, whom I met, courtesy Kini. Incidentally, he was instrumental in introducing Leela Naidu (remember the old-time movies – Yeh Rasthe Hain Pyar Ke, the Householder?)to Dom Moraes. Leela used to work with Kini and me at India Weekly, brought out by a bunch of London-based journalists.

It was a labour of love for Ms Naidu. India Weekly paid us, Kini and me, subsistence wages that we cheerfully accepted. The other option for me, at that stage, was joining the dole queue. Would you know, Kini, the current whereabouts of Ashoke Gupta, who worked with us at India Weekly ? And, of its promoters such as Mr Iqbal Singh and Mr H S Gourisaria ?

Wouldn’t it be nice, if we could sustain this b-chat? We might even reconnect with some old friends.

Jade Vs Shilpa: The baddie gets the boot

2007-01-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

The latest in British reality TV is that Jade Goody(Baddie) gets the boot; and Shipla Shetty stays in the Celebrity Big Brother house. If India’s Shipa (Beti) is declared a winner, it may well be interpreted as the triumph of British fairness and tolerance over racist pit bulls.

Acres of media space have been devoted to the Jade-Shilpa ‘reality’ spat. But the spate of words and sound byte expended on, what Brendan O’Neill calls, the bizarre invasion of real life by the British reality TV, doesn’t quite explain why the fuss. If it is about race, what is new? Aren’t we familiar with the status of prejudice in Britain? Do we need reality TV to put us wise on it? Many commentators in Britain, however, would have us believe that it is not about racism;it's about class – pedigree Vs pit bull, as Carole Midgley says in The Times.

Brendan O’Neill puts the ‘international handwringing over Jade v Shilpa’ in perspective, in a Spiked commentary. Excerpts:

Everyone wants a piece of the overblown Shilpa v Jade controversy…..Whatever you might think of the saddos who enter the house for a bit of airtime, this year there are even bigger saddos outside of the house using the show as an opportunity to posture and pontificate.

As Carol Midgley wrote in The Times (London), the CBB people knew what they were doing when they stuck Jade Goody’s somewhat uncouth and rowdy family – including her loudmouth mum Jackiey Budden – into a house with sophisticated Shilpa: ‘Endemol has gone for the lowest common denominator: pit bull versus pedigree….And it isn’t the first time C4 producers have tried to ratchet up cultural tensions on the show.
In Big Brother 6 they put mouthy working-class girl Saskia in the house, who said in a pre-recorded video that she has concerns about ‘foreigners’ in Britain. ‘They all want to kill us, bomb us. I don’t want to generalise, but I do’, said the silly woman.

BB producers cynically invent conflict for entertainment purposes, and then have the gall to voice ‘crocodile concern’ (as Carol Midgley described it) when that conflict causes controversy. The current Jade v Shilpa spat is actually a product of reality TV’s cynical treatment of individuals as lab rats to be thrown together to see what happens.

Germaine Greer – one-time feminist author who, since her own appearance on CBB two years ago, is now better known as a commentator on all things reality TV-related – says the treatment of Shilpa Shetty isn’t that surprising because ‘this is a racist country. To the vast majority of couch potatoes out there, Shilpa is a “Paki bird”.’
Jade and Jo and Danielle are like the chubby girls in the class jealous of their tall, beautiful and sophisticated classmate….Shetty still has a proper career. They’re being bitchy rather than racist.

In a piece headlined ‘Beauty and the beastliness: a tale of declining British values’, Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian says ‘The Big Brother house remains one of hate, divided between ugly thick white Britain and one imperturbably dignified Indian woman.

Read the commentary at Celebrity - Big Brother: a Zzzz-list scandal. –

Additional read: Mick Hume – All the world’s a reality TV studio

A touching tale of an untouchable

2007-01-15T21:36:00.000-08:00

Vinod George Joseph’s Hitchhiker is no ordinary Joe’s story. It’s an untouchablity tale told, touchingly, by a lawyer with literary aspirations. As a debut book Hitchhiker has been much reviewed; and foreword-ed by Anita Pratap (remember seeing her on CNN?). A word about her foreword. In her incarnation as book publisher Ms Pratap takes a swipe at her own (media) tribe. She says that among the many manuscripts she gets are some from outstanding journalists who can’t write.

Their offerings are ‘muddled and fuddled, showing neither talent nor promise’. Hitchhiker is not by a journalist. And Ms Pratap found it unputdownable – ‘grips you with its effortless prose; a language that is simple, sparing and unpretentious – almost Hemingway-like in its leanness’ (Ms Pratap lost me there). Such hype pre-sets reader expectations. Mr Joseph is however modest in his expectations from readers. As Hitchhiker author put it in his preface, “my only request to readers is that they keep an open mind until the end of the novel; and, hopefully, even after that”.

A message the author seeks to convey is that untouchability is an issue that we can’t wish away. It is like a jelly. You try to curb or crush it through law, it swells up in a non-cognizable form. Untouchablity is about social attitude; about our mentality. And you can’t legislate against a mentality. The mentality , of not just the perpetrators, but of many victims of untouchability as well. Their plight is brought out in touching details by the author in his account of a rape scene (Page 72). A woman, condemned to witness her daughter being gang-raped, doesn’t complain. She merely stands there, weeping.

Finally, she fell to her feet and started tugging at the legs of the men who were holding and raping her daughter. She didn’t scream; didn’t try to pick up a stone and hit the men on their heads. Just crying and begging softly so that no one else would hear of her daughter’s disgrace…… When Karuppamma’s father arrived, it was all over. He took in the scene and realized what must have happened….As he stood there in shock Solaimani (employer of the victim family) gave the man his wages, added another ten rupees, and told him, ‘the extra ten is for your daughter; take good care of her; we’ll need her again’.

The last ten words represent the last word on sheer temerity, no matter what the statute book might say on untouchablity. Speaking of words, I could not help notice that the forgoing paragraph could have done with some editing. The paragraph of 100 odd words has 15 too many. Having been a newspaper sub-editor I tend to view everything I read with an editorial mind.

The author, with help from the publisher’s editor, could have tightened the text, reduced it by 50 odd pages, without sacrficing style, sense, or substance. As it is, I find the book bulky and oversized. It hasn’t been designed for bedside reading. And I have this bad habit of doing most reading in bed.

Hitchhiker, Vinod George Joseph, 385 pages; Rs.350. Published by Books for Change, Bangalore. E-mail – bfc@actionaidindia.org.in ; shoba.ram@actionaid.org .
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Vivekananda’s Mysore connect

2007-01-12T19:06:00.000-08:00

Elsewhere, folks worship the ground on which he once tread. Here he was, staying with us in Mysore for full fifteen days, and we couldn’t care less. My reference is to Swami Vivekananada, who visited Mysore in 1892 at the invitation of the then Dewan of Mysore, Sir K Sheshadri Iyer. The building he stayed in (close to Maharani NTMS School on Sheshadri Iyer Rd.) is now in a shambles.The place stinks, what with emptied liquor bottles, cigarette butts and mounds of garbage left behind by people who engage in revelry. “One would wonder if the Swamiji ever stayed there”, says a Star of Mysore report by BRS (is that my friend, Mr Srihari?).

You’re right, BRS, going by the state of neglect of the place, the man who had stayed there might have been some plain Vivek A Nanda. Irony is that the story of such criminal neglect is repeated in the media on every anniversary day of the swami. And his 145th birth anniversary fell on Jan.12. To cite the SoM story of that day, the place has been turned into a public toilet and garbage dump. The only mitigating factor is that a part of the premises that is adjacent to a municipal school is kept reasonably clean because the students take turns to sweep the floor.

That the place comes under the jurisdiction of the municipal corporation is hardly a plus point. But then blaming the city corporation alone doesn’t absolve residents of their responsibility. Here was an opportunity for civic initiative by proactive NGOs and other public-spirited individuals. Why, even the very media that keeps recycling the story of monumental neglect every year could launch a fund-raising drive, mobilize interest groups and lobby the government for a plan of action.

To start with, a plaque saying - Vivekananda Stayed Here - 1982 - could be placed (at the Lions’ Club or Rotary initiative) at the much neglected structure. Local tourist operators ought to be encouraged to take visitors to the place as part of their conducted city sight-seeing tours. This way, the city corporation would be shamed into keeping the place clean, even if they don’t do anything else.

More on the Mysore commune initiative

2007-01-09T23:00:00.000-08:00

Prem’s initiative in developing a river bank commune near Mysore evoked critical interest among many who sought additional info.

Prem Subramaniam’ response : I have been wanting to spend an active retiree's life in a non urban setting and towards this end tried to find a place where the weather is kind, water and access are not challenges, and proximity to an urban environment within easy reach. There are very few developers who would consider building just a few units on a large site and cluster them together leaving the open spaces as they are to be enjoyed even if titles maybe in individual names. Hardly any encourage a vernacular idiom of architecture combining native knowledge of conservation with other methods to live with less, seek elegance in simplicity, and to treat life as a celebration rather than renunciation.

What is happening are large gated communities and giving an illusion of an American suburbia. Or a fortress environment. My rough calculation indicated that for what you would now pay for a 1200 sq ft flat in Mysore, you could have a simple home as long as you got a few likeminded people together. Since it is difficult to find compatibility amongst a cluster of more than 10 people, the module I am working with is having a site of about 6 acres and developing only 1 acre on it in a cluster of about 5000 sq ft of common space and 10 units of about 1000 sq ft each leaving the 5 acres open and for mixed use of experimental farming and non obtrusive interventions.

In the course of my work I have been meeting individuals, from Uttaranchal, Himachal, and the North East and also from the Coorg area, who have achieved a measure of success. Their expereinces do not seem to have been adequately shared. I think just bringing about synergy between some of these would be interesting

At the present site I am testing land acquisition and transfer of title for urbanites like myself without any falsification or misrepresentation as well as using vernacular architecture and enhancing the open spaces with vegetation which blends with the natural habitation. Likewise experimenting with having environments suitable for what is already on offer in Mysore such as Yoga classes, small recitals/performances, etc

If we can, through this exercise, get adequate feedback to make the concept more robust and implement one site, and if this encourages others to improve/replicate, it would create the critical mass to consider providing additional facilities such as nursing, ambulance, and other medical help; help with services such as banking insurance e -mail, legal advice, extending a retail environment for local produce etc and make living in a non-urban environment a far more universally acceptable option.

On the outskirts of Pune, Satish Magar has created a township called Magarpatta by consolidating the land of local farmers and aggregating 300 acres with a 20 acre central green surrounded by 12 Commercial high rise buildings with residential, recreational and other facilities moving radially out. The original landowners retain the prime sites with bungalows. It has taken him 10 years to get to his current state but what is laudable is the desire to carry the original stakeholders and ensure that they remain primary beneficiaries.

Dreams of a commune on the banks of Cauvery

2007-01-07T06:51:00.000-08:00

I heard the other day from an e-mail contact (one of the many that have survived MyMysore.com) about his plans to shift base to rural Mysore. Prem Subramaniam, along with two like-minded friends, has located 7.5 acres on the Cauvery bank, some 14 km from Mysore and four, from KRS. Prem belongs to a small, but growing, band of professionals looking for open living space, rather than the confines of luxury villa in a gated community, to retire in.

What's more, Prem and his friends would like to work with local people towards improving the hygiene/sanitation/education of the two village communities close to their site; and also improve natural habitat with the right mix of trees, plants; with help from the forest department in getting indigenous saplings. Organic farming could be taken up on a small scale. He would appreciate help from individuals and organizations that have requisite skill sets and share common values to allow Prem and friends to develop their site suitably.

His e-mail, which reads like a mission statement, speaks of showcasing the living traditions in the area around their proposed commune. Prem has in mind in this regard: 1) Sufi music associated with Srirangapatnam,
2) recitation of Sanskrit Shlokas as done in Melkote,
3) medicinal plants repository and alternate healing,
4) culinary skills,
5) yoga (Prem would like to hear from a teacher who would like to use their site),
6) nature walks and identification of flowers, plants, birds,
7) vernacular architecture and indigenous building skills,
.8) dance, and
9) story telling..

All going well, I may have a place to stay by the end of 2007 and am keenly looking forward to spending a considerable amount of time from then on, says Prem - premsubramaniam@yahoo.com

Mymysore dotcom(e) no more; it's dot gone

2007-01-05T06:48:00.000-08:00

Those who have tried to access mymysore dot com in recent days would have confronted a blank page, with this explanation – ‘this site is under construction until further notice’. That’s pure poppycock. MyMysore site is dead. Our modest civic initiative on the web – MyMysore.com - became a ‘dot-gone’, with the dawn of 2007. I put it to death by instructing the software provider to de-activate the site.

It was case of euthanasia of a website crippled by terminal spamming. The spammers wouldn’t go away; and I didn’t have the staying power. My offer to hand over control of the site evoked no response. MyMysore dot com, though conceived as an all-inclusive forum, came to be perceived as website of, by and for a bunch of retired persons. Such perception defeated the very purpose of this civic initiative.

MyMysore site came to be dubbed as fuddy-duddy. Its critics said, among other things, 1) the Mysore site betrayed a middle-age bias; 2) it was run by a retired person who had nothing better to do; 3) was intolerant of views expressed by those other than his yes-men; 4) that Mysore could do very well without the considered opinion of GVK’s cronies; 5) the sky wouldn’t fall with the closure of Mymysore dot com; and 5) GVK was in the habit of announcing closure (of the site), only to garner support and sympathy.

My take is that our modest initiative on the web didn’t work, not due to a perceived middle-aged bias (I am pushing 68), but because of our failure to build up a critical mass, even of the middle-aged and the old. If only we had more of them who took to the site, raising issues, commenting on those raised by others, more often, we could have made a go of Mymysore dotcom.

At a personal level, the MyMysore experience has sharpened my interest in blogs and blogging. What’s more, the web experiment has indeed initiated a few people in Mysore into the fascinating world of blogging. And they include the oldies, who too believed they had things to say, but didn’t know how, and where they could have their say.

As for the spam and spammers that MyMysore dot com have had to cope with we had this interesting post by a certain Mr Mohan Singh. He had this to say:
I work in the States and a colleague of mine is a Mysorean and he mentioned the arguments and insinuations raging in this (Mysore) site. I read most of the posting here and they are really interesting. As some one whose job is in IT security area, here is a piece of information for those who are interested.
We have studied profiles of spammers. A spammer seldom presents himself ( almost all spammers in our experience are young men) as argumentative, dissenter , negativistic etc.. for the simple reason that focus will be on to him as a suspect.
But we found that it is one's friend for long years, colleague with whom one goes for a cup of coffee, jealous relative, a competitor etc.. who turn out at the end to be the culprits. Our company had had complaints from blog sites and on investigation we discovered that in more than 50% of the cases our suspicion ultimately narrowed down to the the person who ran the blog site or on his instructions his collegues spammed their own site to generate interest and attention. Cyberworld is an interesting world indeed.

Some of those who got initiated into blogging through the Mymysore site have moved to Mysore Blog Park. Also carried over from the demised site is Mysorean Directory that seeks to connect the Mysore-connected the world over.

It’s New Year, but not for everyone

2007-01-01T19:30:00.000-08:00

Jan. One is celebrated the world over as New Year, but the celebrations are held at different times of the calendar year by people of varied faiths and nationalities. A greetings card I got from a couple in Houston, Revathi and Raj Nataraj, highlights the point to convey their greetings of peace and well-being to everyone, be they Muslims or Buddhist, Jews or Jains, Chinese or Moroccan, whenever they celebrate New Year.

While Egyptians celebrate Sekhmet in January, Persian’s Naruz falls in March. The Sikhs and Hindus have it in April – Baisakhi. New year comes in May to the Buddhists. Bolivia’s Machaj Mara is scheduled in June. And July is the month for the Armenian New Year. Zoroastrian Shenshare falls in August, the Jewish Rash Hashamah, in September.

October is when Moroccans have their New year. The Jains celebrate it in November. December is the month for Sikkimese Losoong. The year that starts on January 1 is Gregorian. We can run through the year’s calendar, greeting some people, in some parts of the world a New Year of peace, hope and globalised progress.

Mysore Officers Club

2006-12-31T17:48:00.000-08:00

Listening to Karnataka folksongs may not be everyone’s idea of spending New Year's eve. Members of the Mysore Officers Club celebrated the occasion with folksongs, followed by a traditional feast, including bissi bela bath, vada, ubbhitoo, served on plantain leaves. My wife and I, and our six-year-old house guest from Coonoor, Ashika, attended the club celebrations, courtesy Mr Raghottam Rao, friend, relation and a club committee member.

Mr Rao said the idea was to make the occasion truly family-friendly. The booze-and-buffet NY bash held in most other clubs is not the kind of party to which everyone feels comfortable taking their wife and children. Ashika might not have fancied the folk music at the club. But she enjoyed the dinner, thoroughly.

You know, the officers club does not even have a liquor licence? The deputy commissioner is its ex-officio president. Mr Rao, who has been an active club member since it was founded nearly 25 years ago, recalled that the Mysore officers club was the idea of the then city police chief, Mr K R Srinivasan (who, incidentally, took over as the state DGP on New Year eve) and a few other officers. The founder members used to have their club meets at the police chief’s residence.

Those with a flair for local history would be interested in knowing that the Mysore Officers Club, functioned for 14 years from a rented house, at Lakshmipuram. The house belonged to the R K Narayan family. The monthly rent was Rs. 850, said Mr Rao, adding that they shifted to the current premises, close to the University oval grounds, ten years ago, when the then divisional commissioner, Mr Negi, allotted an acre for the club, for Rs. 3.5 lakhs – ‘we mobilized loan from the Canara Bank’.

There's life after retirement

2006-12-30T23:57:00.000-08:00

In response to e-mail alert to a few friends on my piece – FAQ: What do I do the whole day? – asking if they or their retired friends have had to face this question Dr Bhamy V Shenoy cited examples of several senior citizens who spent a full and fruitful life after retirement in social initiatives. Dr Shenoy, who leads a very public life as convenor of Mysore Grahakara Parishat, has several other facets that are not, perhaps, so widely known – that of an energy consultant to a former Soviet republic, a freelance feature writer, a Pratham activist, promoter of an educational institution in his native village, and social activist with conviction that the educated middle-class should embrace politics, to make it clean, caste-free and socially relevant.

Says Dr Shenoy in response to my alert mail: " How can we change the mindset of people, making them realise that retired people, especially in India, can do far more to fulfill their social responsibilities after retirement? Look at Mysore, supposedly a "heaven" for retired people. There are hundreds of them for whom society has done so much during their working years. Can't they spare some time to give back something to society? I was once surprised to find we had among Mysore residents a retired director of an IIT. He was led a reclusive life. There are many retired vice chancellors among our residents . Can they not take initiative in educating our slum and government school children. Look at this ' young man' Dr. Parpia, his relentless work to improve education for the poor. He may well be as busy now as he was while working for CFTRI.

We have a BARC scientist, Dr. Krishnan, searching for schools that will accept his services (free) to teach children basic science. He is coaching failed SSLC and PUC students, to enable them to reappear in examinations.

We have an 82 year principal of B.Ed school going to a Pratham school to teach first graders.

Mr. Madhavan's late mother-in-law used to coach children till she was 100 years old.

No doubt these are exceptions. But why cannot we make this the rule for our retured folk? When someone enjoys what he or she is doing, it does not become a job. All the examples I gave, are of those who were/are having a nice time doing their stint in society, after retirement."

Putting teachers in under-staffed rural schools

2006-12-28T21:46:00.000-08:00

I am not a government school teacher. Which is, probably, why I see the Karnataka ordinance on teacher transfers as a refreshingly radical move. For those who missed it, the Karnataka State Civil Services (regulation of transfers of teachers) Ordinance, 2006, stipulates a compulsory five-year stint in rural schools for all government school teachers in Karnataka.

Provacation for bringing in the ordinance ought to be obvious to everyone, other than, perhaps, those politicians and officials who thrive on transfers trade. The government move is bound to cause panic among teachers, notably, the city-bred who have so far evaded transfer to rural schools, through political connection, contacts in higher bureaucracy, or, plainly, through currency persuasion.

Transfer-dodgers, below 53, better be ready to be moved to a zone ‘C’ school, which could be anywhere beyond 15 km from their city municipal limits. Luckier ones could get placed in ‘B’ zone, that is in a school within 15 km of the city limits. The ‘B’ zone schools are also categorized as rural, though they may be within commuting distance from an urban centre.

If the ordinance is enforced effectively, and, if the ruling coalition has the political will, our city-bred teachers would do well to get used to rural living.

A day out for Bangalore orphanage kids

2006-12-27T22:16:00.000-08:00

I wish other public and private sector agencies, in other places, emulate the Coffee Board of India, in sponsoring a fun-filled day out for the orphanage and other socially disadvantaged children everywhere. The coffee board is reported to have organized a spin around town on a topless double-decker for some 60 children, all below 10, of Anatha Sishu Nivasa, Basavanagudi, Bangalore.

Thoughtfully, the trip organizers put a Santa Claus on board to hand out balloons, toffee and other Christmas goodies to the children, who rarely, if ever, get a chance to stir out of their institution. Wouldn’t it be nice if such children could find someone to take them out now and then, to the local zoo, to picnic at a park or to a movie?

Finding sponsors, and volunteers to escort the children, may not be difficult. The tough part, I reckon, is convincing the authorities of orphanages and other charity institutions to allow their children to be taken out periodically. They tend to view it as safety and security issue; and they are generally unable or unwilling to take the responsibility. In many cases, it entails permission from the governing board, which has its share of members who are not amenable to fresh ideas.

The governing body of an orphanage or charity institution is a mixed bag. A typical managing committee is precedent-driven. Stock reaction to any fresh idea is, ‘have we done any such thing before ?’ A negativist would think of risks, and little else, of trying out anything new. What if something were to go wrong?And then there are, what I call, ‘can’t-doers’ who can trot out six reasons why what you suggest cannot be done. I have heard someone objecting to children’s outings, for fun and exposure, because they could ‘get used to them’.

Mysore Oriya initiative in temple restoration

2006-12-26T04:52:00.000-08:00

A view of the Cauvery from the time-ravaged temple.

I was skeptical when I first learnt of the Orissa Association Mysore (OAM) temple restoration project. It is a tough task, taking on a 11th century temple that remained neglected for the last 400 years. The initial cost estimate was Rs.12 lakhs. Could the Oriya association mobilize the resources? That an association, with less then a hundred member, could even consider such a venture spoke of their think-big mindset. Or was it naivety? I shared my misgivings with OAM president Mr Dilip Kumar Misra. This was a year ago.

When I met Mr Misra and another committee member Mr Ghanshyam Pradhan recently they said the project cost had risen to Rs.30 lakhs, but added that the pace of progress was encouraging. A Kalakarshana ceremony (a ritual marking the start of inner temple restoration work) was performed at Belagola village, off the Mysore-KRS Road, this October. Mr Misra expected the work to be completed in two years. Details of the project and also the status of progress made so far can be accessed at http://www.mysoreoriya.org/.

To a question about fund-raising Mr Misra had a four-word response - “I believe in miracles”. The progress made till now, from the day when the idea occurred to him and a few others, on the Ganesh idol immersion day in 2003, was in itself the result of a series of minor miracles. “It is as if we are being driven by a divine force,” said Mr Misra, adding that there was no room for pessimism in this scheme of things.

It took the Oriya association well over one year to get official clearance. There was so much of paper work that, after a point, Mr.Misra said he simply signed on, without even looking into the papers. He didn’t want permission to be denied for want of a single signature. Most form-fillings were, anyway, a formality and a bureaucratic requirement. Mr Misra was not complaining. Merely stating what it took to get the government go-ahead for the temple restoration project.

A run on the highway eateries

2006-12-25T21:18:00.000-08:00

I happened to be on the road, from Mysore to Bangalore on the day before Christmas. And I found our favourite breakfast joint run by MTR packed, with a spill-over of customers waiting for table. We moved on to Kamat, further down the highway, only to find a much bigger crowd. Our taxi-driver suggested a self-service eatery that served special idli at Bidadi. Same story there as well. We had to make it to Bangalore without breakfast.

On our return from Bangalore, at lunch time on Christmas Day, the situation was the same at Kamat, though we managed to get a table at the MTR. But then the lunch hour rush proved too much for the catering staff. The waiter took much longer to serve, the puri we ordered came with chutney and plain dal, instead of the customary kurma or masala. And then we had to hang around for 15 minutes at the payment counter, because even the manager-cum-cashier was drafted to serve tables to cope with a run on the restaurant.

In contrast to the chaos at MTR, the Coffee Day next door was relatively empty. Maybe our middle-class clientele isn’t yet ready (or pretentious enough) for the Starbucks culture. Maybe Coffee Day, unmindful of its scrupulously nurtured image, ought to add to its menu items such as thali meals and idli-vada breakfast.

We could do with one or two more strategically located middle-class eateries on the Bangalore-Mysore highway. The middle-class goes for brand image. Several small eating houses, and so-called dabhas along the highway don't seem to attract the car-borne middle-class that goes for the Kamats and the MTR. Mysore’s own GTR, Ramyas or Maheshprasad, I reckon, would do well, if they set up shop on the highway.

Pranoy (NDTV) Roy hogs talk time

2006-12-22T19:38:00.000-08:00

I have a problem with Pranoy Roy hosting a chat-show. He tends to hog the talk time. In NDTV Q & A (Dec.22), featuring Inforsys Narayanamurthy, a large and very informed studio audience could get no more than two questions. The 30-minute show, of which three or more minutes were lost to commercial break, was dominated by the host, Mr Roy. Who isn’t fond of hearing his own voice? But I wish Mr Roy had let his guest finish his thoughts or have his say without interruption. Before N M finished answering a question P R came up with a fresh one. I am sure TVwalahs have their reason; time constraints. NDTV programme producer could turn around and say, ‘we haven’t the whole day, mate’.

I recall, during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi (so feared at home) was once cut off in mid-sentence by an interviewer of an American news channel, saying, 'Thank you, Madam Prime Minister, that's all we have time for'.

During the NDTV show there were moments when we had Pranoy Roy butting in with his one-liner. As Narayana Murthy articulated his thoughts on giving away much of his vast wealth, by setting up a corpus, the show host came up with a quip, ‘what, if your son were to hear this’, or something to that effect. I wonder if Mr Narayana Murthy would have put up with such impolite intteruption, had it come from a lowly newspaper reporter during a press conference in his native Mysore. But then N M managed to have the last word. When the show host invited questions from the audience - ‘the suited gentleman there, on the third row’ - Mr Murthy put Mr Roy down, saying, he (Narayana Murthy) had set a ground rule on Q & A.

Which was, a woman and a gentleman would take turns in asking him questions, and a lady in the audience would make the start. And the lady asked why N M wouldn’t enter politics - ‘we would like to see you in the cabinet’. When Mr Narayana Murthy reiterated that he had no desire to enter politics, we had Mr Roy saying, rather pointlessly, that Mr Murthy may not want to, but it was the desire of society (that he should be in the cabinet).

To be fair to Mr Roy, the NDTV show managed to bring out the man behind India’s best known IT corporate face. In his young days (in Mysore, presumably) Mr Murthy used to make daily visits to the railway station, and part with some small change by way of alms. For him, making money was less of a priority than seeking respect for his company in the corporate world - ‘coming from the middle-class, respect means a lot more to me’.

Now that he got tons of it, what did he spend his money on? Gadgets, and books. He said (if I heard him right) he bought books worth Rs.20,000 a month.

P R to N M: What is your one big ambition? Having asked him, Mr Roy wouldn’t allow Infosys Murthy time enough to marshal his thoughts. We heard him saying that his son kept nagging Mr Murthy - ‘you still haven’t written it down what you want to do in the next five years’. Viewers were left wondering what it meant. Was he being pushed by his son to do a book? Was a Murthy memoirs in the works? Mr Roy wouldn’t let him finish his thoughts before he sprang the next question, on Mr Murthy’s business ethics.

Mr Narayana Murthy justified the early Infosys policy of giving company stocks to all its employees, which has made very many employees filthy rich. The Infosys founder observed it was the first such move by any Indian company, and the largest experiment in democratization of wealth. This resulted in some employees leaving Infosys to set up their own companies. Mr Murthy referred to an ex-Infosys man getting into developing a golf course.

SSLC through Sunday school

2006-12-19T22:29:00.000-08:00

US based scientist, Mr Krishnamurthy, who passed his SSLC from a Nanjangud municipal school, runs SSLC (Surya Shloka Learning Center) course at his home (Chandlers ?) on Sundays for NRI children. The Krishnamurthy couple are known in the Phoenix, Ariz., Indian social circle; and have been, should I say, widely known Kannada Sangha activists in America's sixth largest city. A Bombay IITan, with over 100 published papers to his credit, Krishnamurthy (who, we declare with pride, is related to my wife) has been running SSLC for the last seven years, along with wife Girija, who, I believe, teaches at a school for tribal Indians in Arizona. An alumnus of Mysore University Girija is the daughter of a well known Mysorean, Vakil Srikantaiah.
Referring to his passion for educating ABCDs (America-born/brought-up-confused-desis) on our culture and values, Krish e-mailed the other day, " Surya Shloka Learning Center meets every Sunday from 11 AM to 12 noon. It is somewhat like a Balvihar with the objective of educating children, growing up in the US, about Hinduism, our culture and traditions. Some 20 kids in a wide-ranged 2-16 age group attend our classes regularly. Many parents (and, sometimes, grandparents) sit in with the kids and they tell me that it has been a learning experience for them as well. Of course, I enjoy explaining the Sanskrit verses and telling stories. It's lot of fun".

It's my turn to change diapers

2006-12-16T16:03:00.000-08:00

I missed the TV soap but its title - Saas bhi kabhi bahu thi - set me working on this piece, of which the theme is - Bahu meri bani beti. To those who find my use of desi words irksome I submit that words such as daughter and daughter-in-law, in plain English, sound mundane, and they do not convey the sense of distinction between a bahu and beti . Both are four-letter words. But beti is an endearing term; bahu , somewhat lower down on saas-sasur's endearment scale.

A bahu usually comes to in-laws place with pre-conceived notions, some social baggage; and she feels stifled by the terms of reverence she is constrained to adopt while staying with her in-laws. This needn't be so. The month my bahu, beta and our potha , Siddarth, spent with us in Mysore recently was a learning experience. For a start, I discovered that there are at least four versions of 'Ring Around Rosie'. This one, said to be mom of all ring-around nursery rhymes, predates Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. I couldn't figure out my bahu's favoured version, for she sing-songs in an accent I have problem grasping. Never mind the words. They all sound the same to our year-old Siddarth, so long as the rest of us are there to dance to his tune.

I can't say my daughter-in-law Meera fits into the traditional mould of a bahu. For one thing, she is America-born. And, as such, she is free from hang-ups of a home-grown daughter-in-law, who is portrayed in movies as some one who, in the presence of elders and strangers, hides her face behind gunghat ; someone who doesn't share dinner table with saas-sasur, but serves them instead, before she takes food. Far from wearing gunghat, Meera prefers to move about the house in T-shirt and slacks, which, I suspect, come from my son's wardrobe. Such informality is a kind of social licence to which only a beti would be entitled in standard Indian households.

But then neither my wife nor I has ever been saas-sasur to Meera. And we don't have a biological daughter. That Meera continues to address us aunty-uncle, as she did before her wedding, is not lost on some of our tradition-bound relations. I wouldn't have her address us any differently. If Meera were to call us Appa-Amma, as our son does, it would sound put on, phony.

Siddarth proved a cementing factor that brought each of us much closer to the other in the family. It was as if we discovered each other all over again and Siddarth-centric family dos gave us all a fresh perspective of life around us. I could not imagine that I, at 68, would ever get to play 'Ring Around the Rosie' with daughter-in-law and grandson. My wife joined us in clowning with our ever-smiling Siddarth. Our living room tuned into a kindergarten for adults, with even my aged mother joining in the fun. Family outings, to the zoo, to watch the dancing fountains at Brindavan Gardens, to picnic on the Karanji lakeside; taking in a round of mini-golf at Planet-X with son Ravi, our visits to Devaraj Urs Rd. Coffee Day, ordering pizza for dinner, or simply lounging on our living room sofa gossiping late into the night, all added value to our relationship, by way of sharing in-family private jokes; evolving our own code words for an incident, episode or an anecdotal reference.

Diaper-change is a code word for us. Whenever Meera mentions diaper-change I connect it to an incident. It happened on a day when Siddarth had tummy trouble, when the other three in the family, my wife, son and daughter-in-law, took turns to wipe Siddarth's behind and change diapers. I was the odd man out. When our little friend did it the fourth time, within hours, I heard Meera observe, disarmingly, 'wonder whose turn is it now'. It triggered all-round laughter in the family. A bahu wouldn't bring herself to so banter over diaper changing. A beti would. If I were to pick a defining moment, this was when, I would say, Meera became our beti. And you know what, she didn't let me get my hands on it,...at changing Siddarth's diapers.

Women: A question on their status

2006-12-15T21:46:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post blog - PostGlobal - posed the question: Are women making real breakthroughs in the 21st century or is it still one-step forward, two steps back for half the world's population? -- Samina Ahmed
Though not an answer to the question that has been raised, I thought I would share with you what the publisher of Washington Post, Mrs Katherine Graham, had to say about women in her generation. from her autobiography, Personal History.
Five years after Mrs Katharine Graham became Washington Post publisher (1969) a magazine article on her observed, "Mrs Graham accepts her responsibilities much more often than she asserts her authority". In her autobiography, Personal History , Mrs Graham conceded that this had to do with her sense of insecurity in job; and her feeling that she was a pretender to the throne. Washpost publisher said her feelings then were in character with the generation to which she belonged.
As Mrs Graham put it, "I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men and that they were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and children. Women, she noted, remained largely silent in a group, unable to participate in conversations and discussions. Such incapacity, she added, produced in her "a diffuse way of talking, an inablility to be concise, a tendency to ramble, to start at the end and work backwards, to over-explain, to go on for too long, to apologise".
For many years into her postion as a newspaper publisher Kathy Graham had this belief that the only reason she had her job was 'the good luck of my birth and the bad luck of my husband's death.

Battling a crippling bone disease

2006-12-15T01:07:00.000-08:00

Sanjay Dalal
My son Ravi sent me link to the blog of a friend, battling metabolic bone disorder. Sanjay Dalal, 38, has Osteoporosis of the lumbar spine, and Ostopenia in couple of other areas. How does one be supportive towards a friend one just discovers to have been suffering from a disabling, painful and not easily curable disorder ? Sanjay, who had till now given no inkling, even to close friends, of his worsening condition, blogs, “I realize that friends may distance themselves because they perhaps don't know how they can support someone during a time such as this. However, just knowing that they are there, and I can even enjoy their company even through the occasional email and phone call, at times, is enough”.

Of his determination to fight the disease of the bone Sanjay says, “If Lance Armstrong can fight cancer, and come out fully recovered and then go on to win Tour De France several times, I can do better in my fight against Osteoporosis. I also have two young kids who are growing and who provide me every incentive every day of the week to become active, get better physically, and play with them”.

Putting a face to e-mail IDs in my address book

2006-12-12T23:47:00.000-08:00

I have been meaning to do this piece for a while, but couldn’t get down to it, presumably, due to the L-factor that seem to afflict many of us Mysoreans. L here stands for lethargy. I plead guilty to name-dropping, in the process of saying, thank-you, to those who turned up in response to my e-mail invite, and also those who wrote to say they wished they could make it, to the Regaalis on November 18 evening. They included veteran journalist Mr Krishna Vattam, who came to the hotel, only to leave a note at the reception desk, saying that he couldn’t join us because he didn’t not wish to pass on his cold & cough to the guests at the party.

I was looking forward to meeting him. We have been in e-mail touch for several months, but could not find time and occasion to meet each other till this date. The thing about our Nov.18 party was that it gave me an opportunity to put a face on many names in my e-mail address book. I also realized that quite a few of our guests had also not met one another earlier. The pretext for our get-together was to celebrate Siddarth who was visiting his grandparents in Mysore for the first time since birth one year ago.

Excited at our first meeting some of us traded promises to keep ourselves in closer touch. Dr.(Lt.Col.) Y N I Anand, a retired military doctor specialized in nuclear medicine, overwhelmed us by dropping in at our place the other day to deliver a CD of the pictures he had taken at Regaalis. I was equally touched by the gift of a book by the Madhavans. Must concede that, at the time of posting this piece, I had read only 55 pages of the 160-page novel, The Silver Pilgrimage by M Ananthanarayanan. Mr A Madhavan, our former envoy whose postings included Berlin and Tokyo, and his wife struck a connection with my son, who shares his first name with theirs. And both are based in California.

Dr Javeed Nayeem, cardiologist by profession, responded to my invite, in letter and spirit, by turning up with his wife, daughter and son. The doctor has, in recent months, blossomed into a widely read Star of Mysore columnist. My grouse is Dr Nayeem doesn’t write more and frequently for his blog, which is part of our new-found site – Mysore Blog Park.

Mrs & Mr T S Satyan (need I say who?) were among the first guests to arrive. A stickler for keeping time, the Satyans were there right on the dot, at 7.30 p m. I can brag that we have known each other since the early 60s, when Mr Satyan was a Life magazine photo-journalist, and I, a minion at the Press Information Bureau, New Delhi. Another Delhi connection of ours who showed up at Regaalis, from Chennai, was Mr Sam Rajappa of The Statesman. Mr Satyan mentioned that he had last met Sam Rajappa some 30 years back.

Another friend who came from Chennai was Mr M R Venkatesh of the Telegraph. Speaking of outstation guests I was pleased to meet my new-found blogger friends Mr C N Ramesh and Mr L Venkata Ranga, who came with wife and two-year old kid from Bangalore. Another out-of-towner who came to Mysore specifically for the party was Mr Vijendra Rao of Bangalore Bias. We count him among the five charter members of the now inactive MyMysore Forum.

My professional affinity with journalists probably accounts for the presence of quite a few of our tribe. Mysore media veteran Mr Gouri Satya and wife, who were not likely to come because of a previously committed engagement, showed up briefly. It was such endearing gestures, particularly by those I didn’t know long or well enough, that made my evening. Mr Srihari, a retired CFTRI scientist who has morphed into a Star of Mysore editorial writer, turned up even though he was nursing a fractured ankle. Another Mysorean who has taken to writing in his ‘second adulthood’, Mr E R Ramachandran, was there and wanted us to invent excuses for such gatherings with reasonable regularity. Of the NRI parents who turned up was Mr N D Bhagavan and his wife. I had got in touch with him after reading a media report on Mr Bhagavan's initiative to form an NRI Parents Association in Mysore. As was the case with most other e-mail contacts of mine, Mr Bhagavan and I were looking forward to meeting each other.

Must mention here the help I have had from two of our guests – Mr T Raghottam Rao, and Mr M B Nagakumar. A former Lions Club president who is into full time social work, Mr Rao, used his membership of the Cosmopolitan Club as well as the Institution of Engineers, to arrange much needed accommodation for rooming some of our outstation guests. Mr Nagakumar, a leading light in the Mysore chapter of the Builders Association of India, put in a word that weighed with the Regaalis management to give an appreciable discount on our food bill.

Notable among those who e-mailed to say they wished they could be there was Mr Shankar Prasad, an IT executive and active member of the Mysore IT Forum. Shanks, as he is generally addressed, said he couldn’t make it as he got caught up in a downpour while visiting a friend on way to the party. Energy consultant, Mr Shankar Sharma, was candid enough to tell me he wasn’t a partying type. Capt. Anup Murthy, an aviator-blogger, called from Goa on the morning of the party to say he had to be away from Mysore that day on a pressing engagement.

Periyar’s Brahmin connection

2006-12-12T06:42:00.000-08:00

The Hindu zealots who vandalized a statue of Periyar at Srirangam, Tamilnadu, the other day wouldn’t have known or cared to know that E V Ramasami Naicker (1879-1973), had once been a trustee of a Ganesha temple at his native Erode. I heard this from a journalist friend, N Nageswaran, whose family were friends and neighours of EVR’s at Court Street, Erode. Dubbed anti-God the Dravidian cult figure sustained the reputation by breaking idols of Hindu daities.

The social reform movement he launched had a pronounced anti-Brahmin edge. But, in his personal life, he had Brahmin friends, of whom the most notable was C Rajagopalachari. Mr Nageswaran refuted the commonly held belief that Periyar was a Brahmin-hater. Far from it, he held his Brahmin friends in high regard. When EVR , in his 70s, chose to marry, for the second time, a much younger woman, much to the resentment of his followers, including the current Tamilnadu CM Karunanidhi, he turned for advice and guidance to Rajaji. That EVR was given to abusing in public his Brahmin friend and then chief minister, Rajaji, was quite another matter, says Mr Nageswaran, who used to cover Periyar’s speeches as a reporter for Indian Express. He subsequently moved to the Economic Times, and retired as its Resident Editor in Bangalore.

Of EVR’s Brahmin connection Mr Nageswaran could claim personal knowledge. His school-teacher grandfather Kavandapadi Ananthanarayana Iyer was a close friend of EVR’s father E Venkata Naicker, And Mr Nageswaran had gone to school with a son of EVR’s brother. When his father was worried about young EVR’s waywardness it was Mr Nageswaran’s grandfather and some friends who helped set up a turmeric wholesale business for E Ramasami Naicker. He prospered in business so much that EVR became socially respectable enough to be a trustee of a Pilliar Temple at Erode. Irony was that Mr Nageswaran, who had known of his temple trustee background, was to witness EVR breaking Ganesh idols, as Indian Express reporter in Madras. The media, he said, used to make fun of him, but EVR couldn’t care less so long as the newspapers helped him stay in the limelight.

Recalling his earlier Erode days my media friend said EVR used to address public meetings at Erode’s Karaivaikkal maidan. Power connection for loudspeakers came from an electricity line drawn from an Iyer lawyer’s place close to the maidan. At one such meeting the Dravidian Kazhagam supremo, in an anti-Brahmin rant, called on his followers to go for Brahmins with scissors and have their sacred-thread snapped. As lawyer Dhandapani Iyer heard EVR holding forth on cutting off Brahmins’ sacred thread he cut off power to the public maidan, leaving the mike system dead .

Realising his tactical mistake EVR swiftly made amends by raising his voice, loudly enough for him to be heard by the advocate Iyer, that his followers must ensure sure that nice Brahmins such as Dhandapani Iyer were spared. Power connection got restored and EVR carried on his speech, avoiding references that could hurt the man who powered his public address system.

Long before he founded the black-shirt brigade, Dravida Kazhagam, Periyar had been a staunch Congressman and, as Mr Nageswaran put it, ardent Gandhian – ‘I have seen EVR hawking Khadi clothes, carried on his head, on the streets of Erode’. Gandhi had once stayed at EVR’s place at Erode. Mr Nageswaran reckoned that, if only EVR had stayed on in the Congress, and had he given his due place in the party hierarchy, the Congress might still be in power in Tamilnadu. EVR had left the Congress because he felt its Brahmin-dominant leadership – Salem Vijayaraghavachariyar and Satyamurthy – ignored the aspirations of non-brahmins. EVR believed he was ignored by party leadership in Tamilnadu for the only reason that he was non-Brahmin. And this one man’s belief gave rise to the Dravidian movement that has held the Congress party back from power in Tamilnadu, for decades now.

A Mysorean who didn't know his worth

2006-12-04T18:29:00.000-08:00

T S Elliot said of Dr V Ramakrishna that he didn't know his own worth, like a flower that is not aware of its own fragrance. Dr S Radhakrishnan was full of admiration and very impressed by his profound modesty, and depth of his learning. Somerset Maugham, who wanted to shape a character in his book after him, couldn't get Dr Ramakrishna to talk about himself - 'in spite of my repeated requests for details about him he has been evading me very cleverly'. As Maugham put it, " it is strange that a person of this type is found these days when everyone clamours for undeserved recognition".

A Mysorean who now leads a retired life with his daughter in the US, Dr Ramakrishna, 82, in the words of his Nobel Laureate friend T S Elliot, ' shirks publicity of any sort and does not talk about himself'. I heard about him from his younger brother, Dr Ramaprasad of Chamarajapuram, a retired BHEL dentist now settled in Trichy. "His work is not recognised in India," Dr Ramaprasad said of his elder brother, "I'm sure very few here know of him".

Dr Ramakrishna, a Mysore University agri. science graduate, pursued higher studies in Paris, London and Edinburgh, and received an honorary LL.D from Berne University. Besides being an agro-scientist who has served the World Bank and the Universities of Bangalore and Jabalpur, Dr Ramakrishna retained an enduring interest in child development issues. A Ph.D in child psychology from Sorbonne, Paris, Dr Ramakrishna's UNESCO prize-winning book of 1952 - 'Freedom from Want in Early Life' - Has been published in 14 languages.

He donated the prize money and also the cash component of many of his 13 international awards to UNICEF. The National Defence Fund (set up in the wake of 1962 Chinese aggression) and the Hiroshima Fund were among the notable charities to which he donated his prize money. Apart from literary awards Dr Ramakrishna is a recipient of the Magsaysay (1984) and the King George V Gold Medal awarded by the Royal Psychological Society.

T S Elliot, in his convocation speech at Sorbonne, spoke of his association with Dr Ramakrishna and recalled their first meeting at Delhi airport in December 1951. the Nobel Laureate got held up in transit for four hours. Dr Ramakrishna accompanied Sir John and Lady Crombie, then on a visit to India, to the airport to spend time with a stranded Elliot. While the other three were busy talking 'shop' the young agricultural graduate just listened for about 25 minutes without uttering a word, "but smiling at some of our silly jokes".

So silent was he that the other three made fun of him in a bid to provoke Ramakrishna. A reluctant talker and a slow starter, but once he got going, Ramakrishna could talk "with ease and clarity" on a variety of subjects - literature, science, religion, philosophy, psychology, music dancing and arts. Entomology was his favourite, observed Elliot. The Crombies told Elliot about Ramakrishna's art criticism published in the 'Illustrated London News'. He was a good sportsman and represented his university in football and athletics and was champion in walking and middle distance running.

The man has a dual personality. As Elliot said, what was visible outside is 'all humble, quiet, unassuming and modest; and what isn't visible is the remarkable versatility, wide knowledge, generous heart and a remarkable strength of will". Elliot concluded his convocation speech with a few lines from Grey's Elegy, which, he said, applied to Dr Ramakrishna down to the last word:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear,
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
Losing its fragrance in the desert air.

A health city Bangalore can do without

2006-11-25T20:08:00.000-08:00

Read in the media that Karnataka government plans to acquire 500 acres to develop a health city near the upcoming Bangalore aireport at Devanahalli. I thought Bangalore would be the last place in the state that needs the government help in promoting such investment. Besides, medical tourism is not an area that is crying out for government promotion. If anything, the city needs to consolidate its growth to be able to serve the best interests of its residents. Infrastructure in Bangalore, such as roads, public transport, sewage disposal and affordable housing, are already stressed out as a result of haphard growth that is unmindful of its impact on quality of life of those who are constrained to live there.

A responsive government would think in terms of addressing the infrastructure situation and in regulating the growth factors contributing to this social malady, instead of aggravating the pressure on the woefully inadequate social infrastructure. The coming up of an international airport is bound to promote investment in varied sectors. And a government with foresight ought to be thinking in terms of developing health and other sector-specific townships, away from the city, within a 100 to 150 km radius, with well served rapid transit facilities.

The six-lane Bangalore-Mysore expressway project holds out opportunity for developing sector-centric, growth-oriented townships along the transitway. The expressway gains significance, not just because it can shorten Mysore-Bangalore travel time (to 90 minutes) but, more importantly, because it opens out prospects for growth oriented townships all along the expresseway. If the government is really concerned about betterment of its capital city and the greater Bangalore region, it ought to 1) facilitate early completion of Bangalore-Mysore expressway, in time to take advantage of investment triggered by the upcoming international airport; and 2) take steps to locate the proposed health city midway along the expressway.