A health city Bangalore can do without

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.

Dhoni goes for a haircut; and the media goes ga-ga

Some cricketers, it seems, can’t even go out for a haircut without causing a law and order problem. The Ranchi police chief, Mr Akhilesh Kumar Jha, is reported to have made a plea to the city’s celebrity cricketer - “I’d request Dhoniji to please inform the police before he goes to any public place, so that it would be slightly easier for us to deal with such situation”. The situation the police chief refers to was a drive Mahendra Singh Dhoni tookthe other day to a neighbourhood shopping mall for a haircut.

A news agency report had it that some 2000 fans mobbed the mall, locking in Dhoni at Kaya Beauty Parlour, Ranchi, for well over four hours. The police were summoned to rescue and escort him home. Wow! What a story. The Hindu even carried a picture of the crush of Dhoni fans at the Ranchi mall. It became a media event because of Dhoni’s propensity to pull a crowd at the drop of his hair. It shows we have people who are prepared to drop everything to be wherever a test player is sighted.

Such is our craze for cricket, which, as Lord Mancroft put it, is ‘a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented to give themselves some conception of Eternity’. My aged aunt’s take on cricket is plainly polemical. She says life would be a lot less miserable, if only they didn’t have the blessed live telecast. Her aversion to the game at any given time is directly proportionate to the level of her addiction to the daytime soap she is obliged to miss on the days of a live telecast of a cricket match. Her son and his son are cricket addicts, like millions of others who get glued to their TV sets, unmindful of the phenomenal national waste of man-days caused by cricket telecasts.

Every nation is entitled to its obsession. It is soccer in Brazil, baseball in US. Our consuming obsession is cricket. Unlike soccer or baseball, which has a season and relatively short duration of play, cricket is a day-long affair and played, nowadays, all the year round. Almost every match is telecast live and re-telecast during the ever shortening non-playing season. And there is a social dimension to the cricket telecast. It tends to interfere with your routine. You can't take the family out on days when a big match is on, nor would anyone visit you. And drawing room conversations, even within families, centre round finer points of something that someone did or didn't do at gully, slip or silly mid-on. You are made to look silly if you don't keep up with the live telecast. You can ignore the ball game at your social peril.

Remembering Rajaji

During my recent Bangalore visit I spent an evening with Mr N Nageswaran, former resident editor of Economic Times. He lives alone, with his 2-year-old Dachshund, Randy, a much mis-spelt breed. In stark contrast to his working life, when Mr Nageswaran routinely invented reasons to turn down party invitations, not many call him or drop in for chat, after retirement. This includes his professional colleagues. Friends dropped out of his life after he lost his wife a few years back.

Our association dates back to the late eighties when we used to have adjacent cabins at the Times Group office on Nungambakkam Road, Chennai. Mr Nageswaran was in a reminiscent mood, talking about his early days as a newspaper reporter in the Madras edition of Indian Express, then under the control of the one and only Ramnath Goenka. Stuck inside his head were loads of stories, anecdotes and eminently bloggable material that could be melted down into words over a couple whiskies. He wasn’t interested, not in whiskey, but blogging.

I referred to our own media veteran in Mysore, Mr Krishna Vattam, who has taken to blogging lately (with much prodding from his daughter and with help from his school-going grandson who ran a computer crash course for grandpa). When I mentioned a blog post by Mr Vattam on an incident relating to Rajaji and Mr Nageswaran’s face lit up and he promptly related a C R quote. “Consistancy is a donkey’s virtue,” Rajaji told his critics, “why should I, an intelligent human being, be expected to be consistent”. This was CR’s response to those who took him on for joining the anti-Hindi agitation, after having introduced Hindi in schools when he was in power.

Rajaji did not tolerate the media mis-reporting him. He used to send a post card to the editor the next morning. Mr Nageswaran was among the few reporters the old man trusted - ‘so I used to be assigned to all Rajaji functions’. As a reporter he was occasionally summoned to his residence where Rajaji dictated a statement, laid out on an easy-chair and sipping steaming hot coffee. The reporter had to sit on the floor to take down dictation - ‘he always asked me to read back to him what I had taken down’.

Mr Nageswaran recalled that when Sir C P Ramaswami Ayyar joined the Swatantra Party founded by Rajaji, Nehru had called it a party of old men. In a rebuttal CR observed, “Pandit Jawaharlal Neru has called us a party of old men; I would like to tell you that Jawaharlal Nehru is not a spring chicken”. Mr Nageswaran was among the newspapermen who was present at the Madras Music Academy function (in 1956?) at which Nehru paid his much-quoted tribute to M S Subbulakshmi. “Who am I, a mere prime minister, to say anything about the queen of music”, Nehru told the gathering.

Mega-family household, dates back to Shivaji

Two is company; three, a crowd. When the number goes up to 180, it becomes a TV story. Deccan Herald correspondent Shyam Sundar Vattam wrote about a 180-member family in rural Dharwad that was featured in a BBC documentary. As Mr Vattam put it, the telecast has led to a steady flow of visitors to Lokur, a village 15 km from Dharwad. Lokur (which means people’s place) is home to the Narsinganavar family that has 180 members living under the same roof.
At an age when an increasing number of young couple are constrained by circumstances or contrive to live away from parents the Lokur family represents social anachronism. The mega-family phenomenon, I presume, is something peculiar to remote rural locations that are remote in more than a geographical sense. The BBC crew that went to film the Lokur family found they didn’t even have television. The crew donated a TV set so that the family could watch the BBC documentary on them.
I know of a mega-family at Avlegaon, Maharashtra, that is not accessible by road. An unmade cart-path stops a mile short of the Fauzdar household that had some 150 members when I visited them during Ganesh festival some 10 years back. It was a mansion-like house in the middle of a paddy field. It belonged to a fauzdar, who was the village land-record keeper and he registered births and deaths in the village, in Sindudurg district of Maharashtra.
I went to Avlegaon with Mr R S Sawant, a Chennai-based company CEO whose wife belonged to this village. Mrs Sawant traced back the Avlegaon settlement to the days of Shivaji. The villagers shared their surname with the Maratha ruler - Bhonsle. The fauzdar’s forefathers were in Shivaji’s army. When their menfolk went out to fight battles the women and children of the basti came to stay in the fauzdar’s house, which was built 300 years ago. The fauzdar family owns half the village land. According to Mr Sawant, they are self-sufficient in terms of their needs of rice, cereal, fruits, vegetables and milk.
The core strength of the household is around 80, mostly middle-aged people and young children of those employed in towns. Those of the employable age in the family have gone out of the village, to towns and cities such as Mumbai for employment. They make it back to Avlegaon for holidays and festivals. The house strength was 150 when Mr Sawant and I visited the village. We were there on a Ganesh chaturthi day.

Infosys: Paying its social dues in China

As many as 50 of the 100 Chinese undergrads who went through a three-month course at Infosys training centre, Mysore, went back to work for other companies. They were not obliged to join Infosys, according to Infosys china CEO, Mr James Lin. The students who spent three months in Mysore represented the first batch of an Infosys sponsored internship programme.

The company website said China Scholarship Council together with Infosys selected 100 undergraduate students in their fourth year from leading universities in the software engineering field. The program involves a three-month intensive training course on interpersonal and technical skills at the Global Education Centre at Mysore, and a four-month internship at Infosys’ development center in Bangalore.

In return for the favour China is reported to have exempted Infosys China unit from the provisions of the labour law pertaining to trade unions. The Infosys unit in China has 700 employees, of whom 95 percent are Chinese. And they have no union. Mr Lin is reported in The Hindu as saying, “we will never let a trade union be formed here”. The Hindu’s Sandeep Dikshit, in an op-ed page piece says China needs a workforce that is talented and familiar with international practices and business environment. The Infosys sponsored internship programme partly takes care China’s HR needs. To quote Mr Lin (this time, from his company website), “We believe that a truly global company has a global view of not only markets, but people and culture. Through this initiative, along with our investments in China, we hope to provide Chinese software professionals with an opportunity to train on cutting edge technologies.”

Our students can also do with some company sponsored internship. As The Hindu report put it, Infosys paid its ‘social dues’ to China through the internship scheme. I don’t know if the company feels it owes anything to Mysore by way of ‘social dues’. Wouldn’t it be a good idea, if they were to sponsor a few seats in every training batch at the Mysore centre to the bright but socially disadvantaged students from Mysore ? Like China, we could also do with multinationals sponsoring internships to our students who lack employability skills. According to a Nasscom study, three out of every four engineers our educational institutions turn out are found to be deficient in tech. skills, fluency in English, ability to work in a team, and to deliver basic oral presentations.

At campus recruitment big companies skim off the best and the brightest. A company sponsored internship programme for some of those who are left out might be one way the corporate sector could pay its social dues to educational institutions.

Spreading the green message, Somnath style

It's the kind of story, I wish, the media would do more often. It is about a young man's effort to convey a green message in a down-to-details way that appeals to those with an accountant's mind. Whenever someone comes up with an idea or message, we tend to ask, 'what's in it for me'. Cost-benefit ratio is the key to sell anything. Which is what T N Somnath, a PUC student, has tried to figure out, to promote his case for saving trees from axemen.

A hundred year old tree, he says, is worth Rs.11.2 lakhs. How ?
Oxygen it produces is worth Rs. 2.5 lakhs
The soil erosion it stems saves Rs.2.5 lakhs
Impact on humidity - Rs.3 lakhs
Ecological benefits of a tree sheltering birds/insects - Rs.2.5 lakhs
Air pollution control - Rs.70,000

Put in such neatly calculated and tabulated format, it raises the question: How did Somnath come up with the numbers ? But I would let that pass.

The pertinent point is Somnath has come up with an imaginative way to create public awareness about the importance of trees. The next time you see full-grown tree being felled, you'd say, 'there goes Rs.11 lakh worth of our wealth'. Somnath is reported to have nailed printed notice boards, carrying his tabulated figures, on the trunks of a hundred old trees in Bangalore city. The credit for bringing the story of Somnath's crusade to save trees to public notice goes to The Hindu reporter Govind D Belgaumkar.

Great work, Somnath ; good show, Govind.

And then, S G Neginhal, retired forest service officer, says in Deccan Herald, a tree does the function of five air-conditioners in bringing down urban temperature. What's more, it harbours nocturnal birds such as owl that feed on rodents and mosquitoes, thereby keeping a check on the spread of rat fever, chikungunya, dengue and malaria.

A plate of fruits, stuffed and knitted

The latest Wonderweb mail, from Vibhuti Jain, has 10 photos captioned 'Knitted Food'. To know how these fruits are 'grown' and what it takes I Googled and found a knitting site - Jimmy Beans Wool. Besides Size 7 and darning needles you need dyed organic cotton yarn and polyester batting as stuffing material.

Take his tea, but vote for me

Shashi Tharoor, jeetega zaroor. That was the slogan on which he contested the St. Stephen's College Union election, 1974. In his column - The Hindu - Mr Tharoor writes the slogan turned out to be prophetic. His 'most memorable achievement', as college union president, was improving the quality of vegetarian food at the mess. Mr Tharoor had also kept his union out of the JP moment, a stance, he said, he later regretted during the Emergency.

I had won a campus election too. This was at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE), a few minutes walk across the road from the St. Stephen's. Unlike Mr Tharoor, I can't say I achieved anything . At DSE those days we didn't even have a canteen ,for me to improve the quality of its offerings. We used to stroll across to Ramjas College for snacks and smoke. Like Mr Tharoor, I had a regret. I could not keep DSE from joining the Delhi University Students Union.

Till my term DSE students had kept themselves away from the university union affairs. Our college didn't even call its students body as a union. At DSE we were part of, what they called, a 'fraternity', of which the president was DSE director. And the students elected the vice-president. It was during my term as VP the student body adopted a resolution, affiliating itself to the Delhi University Students Union. For the record, I cast my vote against the resolution.

The DSE Students 'Fraternity', presumably, hasn't since been the same again. Politics came to characterise student body election. Mine was the last term - 1959-60 - when election was won through a fraternal contest. My slogan against my only rival was : 'Take his tea, but vote for me'.

Medical ethics. Where's it ?

A surgeon who won't take kickbacks from the lab or radiology facility to which he/she sends patients; and won't give a cut to the physician who sent him the patient might lose referrals from other physicians.

Is he naive? Or is he just being ethical ?

Dr Abraham Verghese: I think in the US, and perhaps in India, we've drifted so far away from the ideal that we are not even aware that there is a standard that we're supposed to adhere to.
Dr Verghese, Director, Centre for medical humanities and ethics, University of Texas, addresses this and many other ethics issues in an interview with C K Meena that appears in The Hindu.

Author of My Own Country: a doctor's story, a best-selling memoirs about treating AIDS in smalltown USA, Dr Abraham Verghese was in India to attend a Clinical Ethics Conference at Christian Medical College, Vellore.

Manipulated media

A 22 year old Oxford graduate and aspiring journalist, Willem Marx, had a stint in Baghdad as an intern in a US PR firm. Which resulted in a lengthy, but engaging, account of how the US forces make/fake news for media consumption. Willem interned with a PR-firm that processed military-fed material into news reports and features and flogged them, as reports sourced from ‘independent’ agencies, to Iraqi media - print, TV and radio.

The media was paid for their publication. A newspaper charges anything from $50 to $1.500 a piece. TV and radio commanded a much higher fee.

The PR company made millions. Its total earnings during the two months of Willem's internship was $19 mill. The company got $ 20,000 for every news story it placed in the Iraqi media. Placement of 32-op-ed articles and 80 half-page advertisement fetched $400,000. Plastering Baghdad with 140,000 posters meant another $400,000. The company also designed nine Internet news sites (for $2,500 each) and produced five DVDs ($ 580,000).

Willem Marx article, a must-read for reporters and other media-related folk, appears in AlterNet

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Celebration of dancers

My friend Vibuti Jain of Wonderweb sends me loads of photos on a wide range of subjects. the one on the left is from the set of 12 pictures he sent me under the heading - Celebration of dancers.

Coping with your in-laws situation

I don’t watch saas-bahu serials on TV. Presumably, they typecast saas as the devil-in-residence; and a bahu as the tormented underdog. Pa-in-law (sasur) is usually painted as a well-intentioned, but good-for-nothing, guy, and the prime ‘yes-man’ in the household.

Richa Pant in a rediff.com feature articulates here thoughts on how a woman could handle in-laws, for maxing domestic harmony. Maybe there is nothing in the piece that you don’t know about already. But then it is the kind of theme that you would want to read about, if only to self-rate yourself in Richa’s 9-pont scale. The article is mainly for women who can’t ‘escape’ in-laws trouble, by staying away from saas.

Part II of Richa’s article deals with the husband’s perspective on marriage and in-laws.

How about a piece on the in-laws perspective, Ms Pant ?

Lalu at IIM-A

My thought on seeing the newspaper headline was: ‘What was he doing in a place like that?’. I could not quite place our top entertainer-politician in a sober setting of a management class-room . Besides, my perception (I stand corrected) of our rail minister was that he probably knew about cows, rather than issues of high management of railways.

I was mistaken. In his interaction with management students at Ahmedabad Mr Lalu Prasad impressed the gathering with his plans for the railways. What’s more, the rail minister told the IIM students a thing or two about cows as well. A Jersey cow, he says, falls sick, if she is not milked fully. So would the railways, if their full potential for development is not tapped.

The minister spoke of his dreams of developing our railway stations to global standards - with shopping malls, large parking lot, transit hotel and all. He makes sense with his suggestion that access to platforms should be restricted only to passengers. Apart form security concerns, the ban on visitor entry to platforms would make them far less congested.

As a security measure, the move for passengers-only platform would have merit, only if the ban on visitors is backed by proper arrangement, at the platform entry, for security check of both passengers and their baggage (x-ray screening). However, provision can be made for allowing in visitors who come to see off elderly passengers, needing help in boarding a train.
Railway stations in future would look more like airports. Hopefully, with no entry fee, for access of visitors. to the lobby, the mall and areas other than the security-cordoned railway platforms. Airports would also so well to scrap entry fee to arrival/departure lounges. Aviation minister, Mr Praful Patel, should take a leaf from the rail minister.

Damned by Debt Relief

In June 2005 the finance ministers of the G8 industrialised nations struck a deal worth a seemingly whopping US$72billion that cancelled the debt of 18 of the poorest countries in the world, 14 of them in Africa.

So how’s that working out for those on the receiving end, for those who live in the poor African countries that have been liberated from debt? ‘It is rubbish. It stinks. This debt relief is making things worse.’ says DeRoy Kwesi Andrew, a science teacher and BA student in his twenties who lives in Accra, Over the past year he has been working on the film Damned by Debt Relief, a scathing critique of the economic and political straitjacket imposed on the poor countries that signed up for debt relief.

‘Debt relief has taken away very much: our independence, our ability to develop, our self-respect

it has meant the country being forced to submit to more stringent international regulation of its spending habits and priorities, Says Andrew. ‘It does not deliver development and it also denies us the freedom to pursue development.

The post-G8 debt relief programme ties poor countries into a relationship of child-like dependency with international institutions.

They tell Third World countries how to run their affairs, prioritise their investments and they insist on regular check-ups to make sure these countries are adhering to ‘good policy performance’
.
In order to win debt repayment or relief Third World countries must agree to mould their political and economic life – the very lifeblood of sovereign states – around the diktats of Western governments and banks.

From Spiked interview with Ghanaian teacher and film maker.

Toxic childhood

A letter in London's Daily Telegraph, signed by 100 experts evoked a Spiked reaction, saying that experts, while raising critical questions about how we mollycoddle chldren, are suseptible to childish prejudices.

Spiked essayist Helene Guldberg writes: The best thing experts can do for children is to argue for them to be given more freedom – not to do whatever they want, of course; they need clear boundaries set by parents. But unsupervised play isn’t just some kind of childhood luxury that kids can do without. It is vital for children’s healthy emotional and social development. Study after study has shown that it helps to develop children’s ability to negotiate social rules and to create their own rules. Children need to learn to deal with risks and develop the capacity to assess challenges. They also need to be given the opportunity to develop resilience to life’s inevitable blows. In short, taking risks in childhood goes hand-in-hand with developing new skills. Click here.. to read on.

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If only MS could’ve blogged….

The Hindu photo - MS with T Sadasivam

M S Subbulakshmi had this habit of jotting down minute details about all her performances. So says an article in The Hindu Friday Review. Her jottings contained details of concert organizers, venue, accompanists, the song list, the dignitaries in the audience, and even the colour of the sari MS wore for the occasion.

If only they had invented the blog when she was at her prime MS would have been a great blogger. Sulochana Pattibhiraman’s article is full of tidbits on the daily routine of MS - an early riser (well before 5 a m), she started her day with piping hot coffee before a brisk walk-around in her garden. At times she preferred ‘sukku’ coffee.

MS had always discussed with husband T Sadasivam programme details prior to every concert. He chose the songs and listed them out and she scrupulously followed the list of numbers.

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Anne Frank’s Diary

We all know of the book; many of us may have read it. Translated into 67 languages, The Diary of Anne Frank reportedly sold over 31 million copies. I didn’t know that the book had problem finding a publisher in Britain and the US till I read about it in a letter to the editors in The New York Review of Books. The death of the book’s editor at Doubleday, Barbara Zimmerman Epstein, (in June) occasioned the letter.

The Diary of Anne Frank was published in America in 1952, five years after the book first appeared in the Netherlands. The author of the NYRB letter, Kem Knapp Sawyer, points out that Anne’s father, Otto Rank, received numerous rejections from publishers before Doubleday acquired the manuscript (1951). Following its publication he got over 30,000 letters from readers.

In the introduction to the US edition Eleanor Roosevelt wrote:
Anne Frank's account of the changes wrought upon eight people hiding out from the Nazis for two years during the occupation of Holland, living in constant fear and isolation, imprisoned not only by the terrible outward circumstances of war but inwardly by themselves, made me intimately and shockingly aware of war's greatest evil—the degradation of the human spirit.

Anne Frank died at Bergen Belson concentration camp

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TTK Group’s First Lady

A Tehelka interview with wife of TTK group chairman makes a racy read. Mrs Latha Jagannathan emerges as a plain-talking person with a sharp mind that appears refreshingly free from hang-ups one might associate with corporate social environment.

Her response to some rapid-fire questions:
If you met Bush, what would you ask him to do?
To resign.

What about Mother Teresa, if she were alive?
I’d ask her to do things differently. She gave away freely to people. I’d say give them something that makes them responsible and independent

An issue you feel strongly about?
Corruption. An issue that is dragging down the country badly.

Narayana Murthy or Anna Hazare?
Neither. Azim Premji.

Coping with 'hate' mail

No newspaper, or website, worth its image can claim to be free from hate mail. None can be expected to entertain them in the name of freedom of expression. Spreading hatred towards something or someone can get to be some people's obsession. The Hindu readers editor, Mr K Narayanan makes a reference to this media virus in his latest op-ed column. As he put it,

Newspaper ombudsmen are familiar with what is called "campaign" or "hate" mail. In such instances, there is an organised flow of messages all containing the same idea, only slightly differently worded. From the pattern, it becomes obvious that these motivated missives need no consideration. As a rule, the Readers' Editor of The Guardian does not read them and indeed has them filtered out of his inbox

Film Critics, Endangered Species

No matter what film critics say about his flicks - plot-less, pointless, silly, goofy - Karan Johar seems to be laughing all the way to the bank with his latest, Khabie Alvida Na Kehna’ (Kank). Gone are the days when producers looked upon film critics as mai-baap, who made or mucked up a film’s chances at the box-office. Film-goers those days relied on newspaper reviews to set their minds for them. They now have sneak-previews, studio generated puff-shows on TV, fan sites and entertainment blogs. A film critic can no longer play god- Read more, click on Dateline Mysore.