Slavery in the internet age.

It was legal to own your slave in the USA, just around the time
Mahatma Gandhi got freedom for India with his monumental methods of
non violence.

One would think after sixty odd years India would be the truly free
country. But one look at our educational system, and we'll realize we
have enshrined slavery, celebrated obedience over pursuit of
knowledge, and concluded that our "system" is more important than the
results it brings us.

The results our system has brought us are as follows:

- The education we consider most important for our children are those
mandated by foreign needs. If the Silicon Valley hires software
engineers, we rush our kids into computer science. If their stock
market dives without a clue, we dive with it!

- Virtually none of our "educated" masses are able to solve any
problems we face. We routinely turn to foreign "experts" even for
very national issues like cleaning the Ganges.

- Our educational system doesn't inspire any of our young minds to
turn innovators. Since the invention of the aeroplane, 90% of the
world's patents have gone to Americans.

Our construction and civil works standards have not been updated since
the 1940s. In other words, we still follow standards set by the
British Raj, while in the USA, these standards are updated every six
months. With the amount of innovation and technology and new
methodology that has evolved in this period, we in India have not made
a single attempt to come up with our own new standards.

Our government machinery and the bureaucrats it has spawned talk
regularly of e-governance, like it is some sort of revolution. Go to
the www.bsnl.co.in website and try e mailing any one of the forty odd
senior officers whose e mails are there in full public view. NONE of
them work! Ditto for most of the government websites, including the
Tamilnadu Police Department HQ. And there is a message from the TN
Chief of police about e-governance!

It was suddenly a hot idea to get on the internet, and so we did,
without a thought on how it would or wouldn't work. We are slaves in
our mind, and looking for a slave driver to force us to do something.
We were forced into the internet age because the rest of the world was
going there and not because we have genuinely embraced it for what it
can do for us.

- Why in heaven's name should the Indian Railways website "shut down"
every night?

- Why doesn't the Tamilnadu Directorate of Technical Education website
have a single means of contacting them?

- Why aren't we still able to vote online?

Out of sheer pride, we built something called a Light Combat Aircraft,
which was by no means the most advanced aircraft in the world, but we
called it "indigenous". The indigenous Kaveri engine produced less
than 70% of the thrust needed to propel our indigenous aircraft, and
we're still pouring our indigeous tax money to buy a foreign engine,
and to somehow convince the Air Force to buy this plane. Why?

Because we're slaves, and we would like to pretend like we love our freedom.

Hindustan Motors and Toyota started functioning the same year. HM had
the protection of the Indian government, while Toyota had to survive
in the world market. We nurtured slaves to our own laziness, while
Japan chose to compete with pride against the best in the world.
Result - today Toyota is the world's #1 auto maker, and HM needs one
stroke of pity from someone's pen to shut it down.

Why do we have to buy a certain brand of gingely oil because the
American Heart Association somehow endorses its goodness? Why isn't
there an Indian Heart Association? Maybe we are heartless?

Why are there white people in suits on most of our corporate websites?
Why is it always a white man telling me what underwear to buy and
what shirt to wear? And yet, why is it okay in the same industries
for white people to wear shorts to their jobs while we follow dress
codes like we're going to jail?

What DO we really care about and do well? Everything that foreigners
tell us how to do. Aviation, for example! How we maintain our
aircraft, the standards we set for selecting pilots - all foreign,
since we don't make planes, and we don't trust the ones we do end up
making once in a while. The big fear guiding us here is not even that
people will die if standards are not adhered to, but because planes
are expensive and aren't worth much when they fall from the sky, even
once.

How much of a price are we paying for keeping our faces in the mud?

Once upon a company...

There is an animal in the business world that is hard as nails, sharp as a knife, and as unforgiving as a fall from a cliff.

From a clearer perspective, however, it is hard as a brick, sharp as a broken shard of glass, and inflexible as a frozen fish.

It is the ambitious but clueless corporate leader - blind as a bat and driven like a wild boar.

The ideal candidate to fill this animal's spot would be highly educated but unconnected, limited in life experience but unlimited in giving opinions, full of theories and information, very short of knowledge and a blank in wisdom.

This candidate pays attention to one thing and one thing only - the target. He drives everyone to the target, talks about results, categorizes every other person into one of the few pigeonholes he has been theoretically taught about in management school, and cannot handle anyone who doesn't "fit".

He uses the word "manage" as a substitute to "evade" and "lie".

Everything he presents looks beautiful to him, and everything he presents looks like the last thing he presented!

He wants wonderful things but doesn't know anything about the license to make big mistakes.

If something fails, it is always somebody else's fault, because he "delegated" something he would never have been able to handle in the first place anyway!

He is intimidated by people who have very strong domain knowledge in areas where he is lacking.

He loves repetition because he has been taught to repeat things to keep the pressure on, while not realizing that some people react in the opposite way to something that is mentioned too often, like "drive carefully" signs.

Structure is more important to him than development.

When he ends up irritating someone, he switches to "managing" that person by choosing from a list of things he has been taught are "nice" things to do to people. (This list is pretty short and tends not to evolve)

Order is more important to him than improvement.

Every other person he meets is potentially useful to him in some way to get ahead with his ambition.

He prides himself on how well he can neglect his personal life while pushing his business ahead, but uses such words to describe this talent, you'd think he's doing a good thing.

He doesn't know how to have a good time, and doesn't get into that unless that good time is used to get closer to someone he needs to know better in order to get ahead with his agenda.

He can't understand why other people don't pick up the phone when he calls them on a Sunday!

He is distinctly uncreative and a really boring conversationalist.

He cannot catch a joke in the middle of a conference call.

To him, being bull headed is being professional.

He works hard but has not played in a long time.

He uses his values to judge other people.

His idols are those that have reached the "top" and are obviously powerful and successful, not the ones who have done something unique or special.

He loves micromanagement. He doesn't flinch when he says "I really need you to say these exact words to the client", even when the "exact words" sound like a B movie dialogue from the 70s!

He can't tell the difference between standard of living and quality of life.

He could just as easily be a she.

Once in a while, in the study of human beings, we are presented with a clarity that baffles, a vision that stands before us as if there is nothing else left to reveal, and we wonder what part of that we never saw before.

God bless you if you are working for this type of person.

Terrified into Stupidity!

Through the last 40 hours, the drama of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai have occupied Indian media focus, but have also served to highlight a dangerous trend - pandering to America's way of doing things, starting with a full subscription to thoughtlessness.

According to Ravi Shankar Prasad, National Spokesperson, BJP, "As you (Barkha Dutt) rightly pointed out this is a replica of Nine Eleven in India". http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/video/video.aspx?id=45516. According to this fool, "It is time that India responded in the same way as America responded"! America responded by attacking the wrong country, pissing away its economic well being, and stands empty handed seven years later, with Osama Bin Laden roaming free and Americans mad about phone tapping and torture that led nowhere. America's image took a beating worldwide and is now on the precipice of a massive economic downturn. Is this the example we want to follow, you bloody jerk? Why can't you set higher standards, and why can't these standards be our own?

Barkha Dutt started this nonsense, despite being a Padma Shri, asking if this is India's Nine Eleven! What a mockery she is making of this prestigious award by being so cluelessly glued to the way America does things! I had enough of this looney bin when she was brimming with emotion for Barack Obama and never got beyond the dumbed down versions of everything she saw and reported on from the east cost of the USA. Now, she is here, canvassing the emotion of the situation instead of presenting the facts in a clear light and causing a mature debate.

Just this afternoon, she asked a gentleman who was tensely waiting for news about a relative stuck inside one of the hotels under siege, "How are you feeling? You probably have no words to describe it"! and immediately stuck a microphone to his face! What a tinhead!

I have been hearing the word "hostages" over and over again on all the news channels, and frankly, how can so many people be hostages if most of them didn't even see the attackers? They were just trapped guests who floundered out somehow. The word "hostage" is defined in the dictionary as "a person seized or held as security for the fulfillment of a condition". Clearly this was never a hostage crisis anymore than a snake dance. But what does it do to the image of India, when we take pride in rescuing 100 or more "hostages" but build this picture in people's minds that security is so lax that 100 or more hostages can be taken in one sweeping move over public exposed areas!? The FACT is that none of the people who came out were hostages but our media loves the sexiness of that term. Multiples of morons.

Now, onto the dance of the diplomats - "We stand strongly behind the people of India" - clearly means we are the ones taking the bullets, while everybody else hides behind us. Can we really see Bush running into the building shooting at terrorists? Can we hear any nation offering to offset the compensation being paid to the victims' families? This has reached a point where the same stupid, meaningless noises are made by leaders of every nation exactly like the noises others made when their assets were attacked. Only the Israelis had the sense to say something truthful like "We have full faith in India's security operations".

"We strongly condemn..." is another one that has done its rounds for a long time and obviously the stupidity tank never runs dry. Where is the condemnation? I wonder if I would have listened to my parents if they had said, "We strongly scold you for your mischief" instead of "Come here you little rascal. You're grounded for a week! Now, apologize!" Oh, this one's richer than a single criticism. If a condemnation wasn't a strong one, wouldn't it automatically be downgraded to a criticism? So, what's up with a strong condemnation? Can we hear something like "These f@#$ing terrorist motherf@#$ers should be roasted on a slow fire!"? Please, so the terrorists may actually get the message their minds can comprehend?

Clearly, terrorism unleashes a lot of people's stupidity. It is amazing how there is still a player who can set a higher standard. BBC. The BBC report has all about going deeper, unemotionally, and finding information that nobody else has paid attention to, like talking about a person who was arrested in London with a connection to an earlier attack in Mumbai and how he is being held by the authorities in London to question about this one. None of the heavy breathing emotional nonsense here. How do they do it? By actually doing it, I would say. Can we stoop a little less and copy them instead of stupid Americans? That might be really hard, yes? Maybe one of these days I will take Barkha Dutt hostage to teach her the ropes or whip her with one.

Stupid ads and outright lies!

"Thousands of pixels being chased by festive looking dancers. When they are about to catch up, the marauding pixels fly into a giant screen and arrange themselves to make the colourful face of a Kathakali dancer who makes facial gestures on the giant screen" - the brief for the Sony Bravia commercial couldn't have been very different from this yawn inducing, uninspiring idea meltdown. I hardly have a question about the uncreative nonsense that Indian ad. agencies almost always come up with. But if the brilliant colour of the Bravia TV is clearly visible on my existing TV, why would I want to buy the Bravia?

The latest ad for Timesjobs.com on television tells you you will find a better paying job on their site, and then goes on to explain in great detail, on the same site, how they are not responsible for anything in an "as is" presentation of information! http://www.timesjobs.com/popuphtml/Terms.htm#link14 In other words, there is absolutely no effort put forward by Timesjobs.com to ensure the jobs there are indeed the better paying jobs. Stretch that a little, and you will easily infer you could get the lowest paying job and Timesjobs.com will still not be responsible for their own advertisement in any way. How can a service that shouts - "Because you are worth more" completely absolve itself of that claim, after "better paying job" is the the only reason for you to consider their service? Absolutely nefarious.

This advertisement sells you an alternative to an employment agency, without any of the responsibilities you would come to expect. It is just a cheap reference, where the attempt is to cut out the percentage commissions of the employment agency and nothing more. Therefore it is an outright lie that you will find "better paying jobs" there. With subjective claims like "The tastiest Sambar in the world", you can let it go, but when there is something measurable like a person's salary, how can the media planners of Timesjobs.com be so stupid and assuming of people who end up visiting their site? Clearly they can, and I hope the recession causes some of these fools to be kicked out.

By now, even if you are a fairly occasional TV watcher, you must have seen the enormous disclaimers at the end of some ads. that flash for about a second, which nobody in the world can read, for two reasons - the print is too small, and there is just too much to read in one second. So, what is the point of showing the disclaimer at all, especially when everyone in their right mind should know the disclaimer is for dissing all claims made so far by the advertisement that a normal person can understand and trust.

Communication, the very point of advertising, is sometimes lost on me. Especially with car advertisements where the car flies through the air, skids all over the road, spins, and just about manages to find a grip of safety before vanishing into the horizon. I would think a car that throws itself about so easily would be the most unsafe thing to buy and the most unsound investment. Especially if the car is tiny like a Swift, I'd go all out singing its praise on how roomy it is and how solid on the road it can be. If it is all over the place, I kind of begin to feel it is flimsy and untrustworthy. Am I the only one who has this problem?

The ridiculous advertisement also has its place somewhere, except when you begin to wonder why a motorcyclist would hire a helicopter to throw him from several hundred feet high onto the top of a building. Motorcycles are not aircraft, and if you landed on the top of a building in one, and survived the fall, you'd pretty much have nowhere to go. Now if the building itself was your destination, what do you need the motorcycle for? Stupidity at its bleeding worst.

Then comes the sexuality crutch. Why would you think of sex when you are drinking a bottle of Slice, for heavens' sake? Aamsutra, my flaming arse! When I am thirsty I might reach for some Slice, and if I love mangoes, great! But sex is not something I associate with a fruit drink, no matter how much Katrina Kaif seems to be turned on by the thought of humping a mango or a Slice drinker. Jittu Krishnamurthy was right when he said, "In lieu of creativity there is sexuality". Most of the time, sexuality is what seems to be easily on tap for most of our ad. makers, and they don't even bat an eyelid about what the product is! If the fools working in advertising agencies are so bereft of ideas, why don't they just quit? Maybe we should make a Kaam Sutra ad. for them to get the hint? "Make way, not ads."

The attempt at the abstract - this is the genre that gets me really laughing. Like the ad. for the Tata Safari Dicor, that starts of about "lines", and how you can make your own "lines" with the ugly beast called the Tata Safari! What an idea, Sirji! How many customers actually think about buying a car as the same as buying a paintbrush to make lines with?! If I wanted to make lines, I'd find a thousand different ways without having to buy an SUV. Give me a f$#@%ing break. The abstract should be left to geniuses who can present some weird connection in a sane way, not to half drunk dopey eyed wanna be rebels turned washout creatives.

There aren't that many professions in which anything goes! Most of our India centric ads. are all about filling up the airwaves with noise. Speaking of noise, why does the volume jump up as soon as it is time for an advertisement? Right in the middle of a cricket match, which itself is fairly well controlled in terms of noise during a broadcast, the ad. will just blare its way into your life. My hand is invariably on the Mute button as soon as it is time for a commercial. So, I get to watch most ads. without sound anyway. No TRP machine will report this fact, and some advertiser somewhere is losing money and not getting value!

"See what happens when a CD begins to dream"??? Since when did inanimate objects start dreaming and we found out what they dreamt about? This offering is from Moser Baer, with ugly black wires morphing out of nowhere and hitting the roof, the floor, the model's hands, and what not, before becoming all kinds of electronic goods - simply unimaginative, uncommunicative rubbish presented with the finesse of a snake devouring a rat. I wonder how this gets past the brainstorming stage - assuming there are actually coherent stages to the process of unleashing a commercial on unsuspecting masses. Scarily, this commercial is a computer graphics lift from a science fiction movie. Maybe that is why we are asked to imagine what happens when a CD begin to dream? I'd like to see what miracles happen when our ad executives begin to think.

The Axe deodorant commercials seemed to be rather well put together until they came up with the latest one with the chocolate flavoured temptations. Apparently, only women fall for the smell of chocolate and will stick themselves to glass in pure longing, even when they cannot smell the spray! How retarded can things get? If a deodorant smelt anything like chocolate or reminded me of something to eat, I'd be completely turned off. Watch this product vanish off the shelves for being absolutely idiotic in conception, ad or no ad.

The stupid, stressed out woman who thinks her husband is dead when she finds him snoozing and is shocked when he wakes up, leads me to think she was hoping he was dead! After all, presumably, she would be the beneficiary of her husband's life insurance policy! Knowing fully well that "Life Insurance" is actually "Death Insurance", they don't really have to tell us how happy we can be just because we bought insurance, do they? I mean seriously, what the heck do we care once we are dead? Sure it must be the hardest thing to sell, but in all seriousness, if you needed Kal Par Control (whatever the crap this means, especially to those of us who cannot read English and end up understanding in Hindi), you'd work to make more money today, not spend a little more on an insurance plan! Moreover, if there is another company selling the same thing, telling you to let tomorrow lie and just enjoy today, what are you supposed to do? Very confusing, and might be better if someone would just tell us, "Look, someone is going to need this money if you croak". After all, how many of us are fooled by insurance ads anyway?

Now we have the very stylish PSAs, like "Save the girl child" that comes to us in the middle of a cricket match on Ten Sports. Hello? It isn't as if we are all about killing the girl child, and it certainly isn't those of us who understands English and can see the point of a poignant message that needs the message. So, what is the point of this PSA as opposed to the crude ones made by the same ministries? The direct ones in Hindi, that treat the viewer like a stupid villager are actually much more effective in communicating the point. Check out the one where the girl child in the womb talks to her father through a stethescope! Then there is the really thought provoking one that asks us to imagine a world without women. I thought about it, honestly and deeply, and really came to this - I'd definitely hate seeing fewer women around, but... Wow, wouldn't that be a good way to control human population?

Remember the Intex commercial, extolling the virtues of their speakers, especially the drop of the pin you can hear clearly while the older gentleman is clearing his ears? Well, if I can hear it on my existing set of speakers, I sure don't have any reason to buy Intex, do I? Am I the only one thinking out loud on this really base level of stupidity exhibited by fools who are paid to precisely not do this kind of work?

The heady smell of failure

Most good stories come full circle. The adventurers who return to their village, the hero who comes back to his roots, richer for the ride and wiser for the experience, but essentially coming back to starting point after victory to share it with his tribe. The sense of belonging is one we can all identify with, and is used in no small measure by good story tellers. But for that, we must identify with the characters, the journey they chose to go on, and the ordeals on the way that made them better. In the very least, we must care.

Of late, Americans have shown up to be the drunks who went to the party, trashed the palace, and puked on the lawn and let it flow down the street called Wall Street. That's no hero's journey - it is a fool's parade and isn't funny when it takes 700 billion dollars to begin to fix, and most of the people who paid this in taxes weren't even invited to the party. But some people have such a hangover that they still don't realize the palace stinks to high heaven, and the neighbourhood is sick of the scene.

There was a segment today on NDTV called "A view from Wharton", which had a bunch of Indian clowns studying at Wharton Business School, offering their views on the financial crisis. The puppies all had rather optimistic views about them finding jobs and I wondered how and why any of us would give a rat's arse if any of them got jobs or not! When none of them was talking about getting jobs in India, how could this possibly be relevant to us here, apart from paying bored attention to some specimens from a well known tribe of Indians wanting to study and work abroad. Who cares if some Indian guy graduating from some school in the USA gets a job or not?

More than anything, I'd be worried if we're celebrating those who have chosen to learn from a failed system! I really don't want to hear from the losers on how it is done! I have always believed that you get expert opinions from people who are reasonably successful at what they do. If you want to talk about a formula one racing, you try and get Michael Schumacher, or if you have to settle for someone less, maybe Narain Karthikeyan has some insights. You most certainly do not ask the village idiot who crashed his bullock cart into the train you can hear two miles away.

But the amusement value, priceless! One of these puppies thought they had the best ringside view of this crisis, and it helped them learn first hand from their faculty how exactly these things came about and they were interested in seeing how this kind of crisis could be prevented from spilling over to the rest of the world, and affect countries like India that might be more vulnerable to this kind of situation! I can usually smell stupidity coming round the corner at full speed, and even the geniuses at Wharton did not disappoint!

What exactly are these idiots learning at Wharton? This financial crisis isn't a nuclear bomb that somehow spills over the border with the wind carrying deadly radiation to other countries. It simply isn't going to be felt in areas that are not vested and dependent on the American economy. It most certainly isn't going to affect countries that have long since insulated themselves from this kind of fly and crash cycle by keeping their economies slow and steady. We in India certainly know what slow is even if we may forget steady once in a while, so who exactly has been affected in our "vulnerable" country? We don't know yet, but we are not the country pissing off billions in a war with no end in sight, and we certainly aren't going ga-ga lending to people who can never pay back.

The professor at Wharton had a better view of Indian economic experts - he said they had a mindset quite different from those of their American counterparts and while they thought about building their companies, they also thought about building their countries. Quite a fascinating viewpoint, and timely. When America was trying its best to bully us to open our markets some more in the 90s, nobody quite thought about India as being correctly cautious. Our own "financial experts" were busy comparing us to the rapid growth of the Far East and wanted more and more deregulation right away. Are we in the same planet today?

So, why are we supposed to take Wharton seriously? Apparently, there is a Wharton business school alumnus who is in charge of Bush's $700 billion bailout package, which he must dispense with in the next two months. All right genius. What about the thousands of idiots schools like Wharton must have unleashed over the years to cause this mess in the first place?

Bewitched by Sarah Palin?

I've been watching this woman - Sarah Palin. She's definitely conservative, definitely manipulative, definitely confident, definitely a bit retarded, and definitively the perfect Republican candidate to follow in the rich tradition of GW Bush. She looks better than Bush, but she's by no means as capable of making us laugh. In fact, she gives me the shivers.

Just when I was wondering where I should start about this creature that the Republicans have unearthed and unleashed on the American people as their probable next Vice President, this article came today on Yahoo! news.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080925/ap_on_el_ge/palin_witchcraft_blessing

According to this article, Sarah Palin is receiving some kind of holy protection from witchcraft! I have always believed that religion is a personal thing, but if people are using their religious beliefs to ask for votes, I don't think they can hope to be immune to their faith being questioned in more ways than one. But to believe in the power of witchcraft is simply... priceless!

Can you imagine if you were one of the geniuses on the cutting edge of America's science and technology and you are about to join hands with ten other countries in sending a manned mission to one of the moons of Jupiter and your Vice President comes running in with her witch hunter and wants you to form a ring around the launch pad to pray for the mission to ward off a curse? Now, maybe hanging the head of a moose on the windshield (facing outward of course) of the spacecraft would help scare away some of the evil spirits on the way!?

This is who the Republicans have signed on to represent you, America! I haven't even got to the scary thoughts yet. So, what's the big deal - believing in God, believing in witchcraft, what's all the noise about? True, it all comes down to some things we believe in that scientific reasoning cannot agree with. Like creationism that Sarah Palin wants included in school curriculae. That can be argued against and any rational mind will tell you that you cannot "educate" someone in something that has to be "accepted" at face value. The counter argument will always be that since you cannot conclusively prove that there is no God, you cannot say creationism is invalid. This is not even the cycle of debate I am about to engage in.

The most important characteristics of leadership are the ability to understand information, process it efficiently, and be able to take decisions based on the merits of "knowledge" not "belief". So, when you have a leadership that is more based in belief than in knowledge, you are bound to have an inability to assimilate information, an inability to process it without dogma, and the decisions and actions that result from these inabilities are bound to be ineffective. Sarah Palin is a candidate for precisely those kinds of misjudgements, decisions and actions.

The biggest danger of belief systems is that it provides the framework to shift responsibility on elements beyond human control. If an oil tanker hits a rocky reef and leaks thousands of gallons of oil and causes an awful amount of environmental damage, it would be very hard to assure the insurance company that witchcraft could be one of the reasons for the mishap. Sarah Palin must believe that every oil tanker that makes it safely to port is because of some prayer that warded off "all sorts of witchcraft"!

America, please don't slide to such low levels. The laugh has lasted long enough. When we hear about your private entrepreneurs making it to space on their own, it makes us happy. When we hear of one of you in a San Francisco garage making a plug in hybrid car go 200 miles in one charge - That is the America that we'd like to see more of. If that's what you want, what witchcraft can possibly stand in the way?

The character of a city

The last time I was in Bangalore, on a bus from Hebbal to Yeshwanthpur, all seats were taken and quite a few people were standing. At one of the stops, a few women boarded the bus, and of the several seats reserved for women, only one was vacated immediately by the man who was sitting in one.

He made it a point to ask other gents to vacate their seats to women, but to no avail. It just became awkward for these other men and then, after our gentleman really took up the case and began insulting them, as he should, it became a case of men defending their "territory".

You would never see this happen in Tamilnadu. The moment women board the bus, all men who might be sitting in the seats allocated for women just scamper out of the way, leaving no doubt as to their understanding of what is right and wrong. This is true of Chennai, Coimbatore, Trichy, Palladam, or any other place you happen to be in, as long as it is in Tamilnadu.

What is it with Karnataka, that forces its men to compete with women in this silly way? Is it the intrinsic character of the Kannadiga male?

The character of a people can be judged by how they treat the weaker ones. India as a whole may have a dismal record when it comes to defending the rights of the poor, the weak, and the ignorant. But that should serve as no excuse when it comes to how people in cities behave.

Bangalore, your time is up. It isn't enough if you changed your name to Bengaluru, it is time you changed your behaviouru to something more sensitivu.