Forging PAN Indian identity thru soft power

Another run of Indian Idols comes to an end with a victor crowned. While many lamented the rather limited talent of singers coming to the fore, this particular series will be known for another reason.
For a change the 2 finalists were not from main stream India and seen by most - which is essentially the North/West and South of India. Rather both of them were from East - One from Darjeeling which a part of Bengal still has its own identity and the other from very East Meghalaya. TV news channels were reporting a lot on how it has fired up the people of North east to finally see one of their own occupying national centre stage. There were reports that the usually very estranged Garo and Khasi tribes of Meghalaya for once united in supporting a guy from the state. This is a very healthy sign.
I personally watched Indian Idols rather very infrequently. From what I heard from most was that the candidate from Meghalaya was the most talented of the lot though I personally preferred the voice of the Darjeeling hero (and mind you I say the voice not the singing talent). Well one show is not fair to pronounce judgement on someone but most of friends were holding the Meghalaya guy as the winner for many weeks now.
What might have happened is that the usual bane of such shows strike and maybe people voted on ethnic lines and Bengal is a very large state. On the other hand, winning a show is also about preparation and lets face it, when its just two finalists, both of them will have great talents. So a song selection and that one day can make fortunes. Lets hope that indeed that was the case in which case Meghalaya will not be disappointed.
It was good to see politicians for one realizing something. The final had clips showing the prime minister and the chairperson of the ruling coalition meeting the two finalists to wish them well. This is something I saw for the first time and I think it was significant. For both the finalists to come from North East (and lets face it the favorite was the Meghalaya guy) it was as much an endorsement of the fact that india is slowing coming into its own.
Many say that the unifying factor in India are cricket and Bollywood. Its a thought I can readily agree with. There might be a lot of hostility between ethnic groups within India but Hindi movies and Cricket does fire imagination across India. It is this soft power that is often neglected by most Indian policy makers. Thus it was heartening to see the top policitos realizing this importance and were seem to wish the two. I only hope this will encourage other NE Indians to come forward for such. If we look at it, i remember no cricketer from Northeast. There is Bhaichung Bhootia who is quite a superstar but in football, a game not that main stream in India. The only noteworthy actor from NE India has been Danny Denzopa and he too is old now.
By encouraging more people to come, especially into mass media from NE (cricket takes too many facilities to begin showing results) we can ensure that not only NE guys start seeing them as a part of a PAN Indian identity, it will also make them more familiar to the rest of India. Ignorance of our own brethren from East is a blot on the rest and it can only augur well for the future of India if the same is rectified early.

Surreal Moments in Life

A friend answering a buzz on his mobile
F:Hello
Stranger on the other end: Who are you?
F: Whom have you called?
S: My daughter gave me this as her number a week or so ago
F: Well she gave you a wrong number, I've had it for ages.
S: Can you hunt for her in Pune?

Another that happened to me once.
* Phone buzzing *
Me: Hello
S: Sir are you looking for a job change
M:Only if its good.
S: Thank you.
- end of call-

Some Laws of nature

1. The moment you get to a song you really like, either the phone will ring or some urgent work land up.
2. Finish the work and replay the song and 1. will happen again
3. The most diligence demanding mail clarifications always land up on Friday around 5.
4. The only time in the day you'll open comic.com is the time the boss's boss decides to pay you a visit.
5. Come out of the door in undies to drop the trash and the auto lock on the door will mysteriously engage behind your bare back.
6. The moment that hot babe in the hangout joint look at you with a smile, it will turn to laughter as you slip on spilled coffee and then get up to realize the trouser seams are off.
7. Give a girl a fish and u feed her for a day.Teach her how to fish and she forms a worker's union
8. Traditional dress day is only celebrated in firms which have no employee hailing from some primitive tribe. (I wouldn't mind attending one in some Brazilian firm )
9. Hit delete by accident and it NEVER fails to execute successfully.
   

Crisis is a Terrible thing to Waste

"a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. It makes unthinkable changes suddenly possible." from “For the Soul of Mankind” by "Melvyn Leffler" as reviewed in the Economist. What a beautiful way to sum it up.
Indeed all this current fracas about the nuclear deal, the Adam's bridge (Ram Setu in popular lingo), the globalization issues, the mess in education sector. All these are an excellent opening to debate our thinking, break free from the shackles of mindset evolved over 1000 years of war fare and conquest by foreign invaders.
The current resurgence of national confidence has a lot to do with liberalization ushered in, in response to balance of Payment crises of 90s. A crises that changed the course of modern India. We had an erudite philosopher Prime Minister than. Not always the most clean of our politician, Mr Rao must be given credited for putting right people on job and shielding them from interference. Always a mark of a great manager. I personally appreciate what he did for our economy.
Where he failed in the same vein was in handling the Ayodhya Babari masjid crises. The events of 93 were a crises, they were also a great opportunity to solve the issue once and for all. And he failed miserably.
I think the same crises -opportunity stares in the face of the current government. Will Rao's protege - the current prime minister and more importantly the real power behind the ruling party seize the issue and act in real national interest is any body's guess. Thinking long term I'd say even lose the next election but if you act in India's real interest ( and the government knows it better than I, being privy to much more facts and opinions than I a mere private citizen), the people will elect them in the next round or so.
The growth momentum is there and as more and more people are lifted out of poverty and ignorance they will realize the consequences of actions sooner than later. So in long term, an informed practical approach should pay well.
There are real risks though. While most Indians proudly proclaim that Indians are the most philosophical, most liberal thinkers in reality we are rarely so. Look at the modern times where the protests are almost always violent involving forced 'bandhs' or actual violence. So the opportunity will not be seized without making hard choices. But then we need to overcome adversary by force of will.

small things all

Some string, a cardboard box, a ball, a puppy
endless joy

Making Government Footprint more Welcome

Continuing from the last blog post idea, I feel one way to citizens feeling more empowered is to reduce the government arms to people contact. Remember its the attitudes which set the tone of the interaction and we are a nation have severe attitude problems.
Recently I paid by municipal taxes thru an online bill pay facility of a bank. I never received the tax demand but thankfully Pune municipal corporation has a website that allows you to search and view taxes to be paid by you. Assuming that was not the case I would have had to go to the municipal office. Find out where to go (interaction 1), find out my outstanding taxes (interaction 2), go and pay the taxes (interaction 3). Any of these 3 places could have exasperated me. However the online governance ensured that I do not have to waste a leave and saved a lot of time for me. That makes me feel better about Pune Municipal corporation.
Now many people - especially in government employee unions will complaint that if we make everything online where will the employees go. An argument that makes me as a tax payer angry. Does the government feed me if i get unemployed? As for municipal facilities? well half the city doesn't get municipal water (tho it pays local taxes), my housing society has its own security, if I get ill chances are I'll go to a private hospital because i do not 'trust' the government hospital to always treat me well and yes I can afford to pay for private hospital so maybe its good cause the 'sarkari doctor' has 1 less patient to see so (s)he can see another poor patient. But lets take the union's argument and assume that it is every tax payer's duty to sustain living for those who cleared a government employee recruitment exam. Can we than reduce government and still not unemploy them?
I think we can. The problem is that the government is missing from areas it should be in and is too much into areas it should not be in. Do we need a thousand tax collectors when by automating system we can do with hundred? While Pune traffic police complaints that the traffic is a mess because they have too few people? Why not take those 900 tax collectors and make them traffic policemen?
Villages don't have medical facilities because medical graduates don't want to live in a village which has no worthy school, no electricity and what not. Government still posts them and most of them go to villages only on paper. Why not take the biology graduates in government and below 25 years of age and give them an offer. Government will train them on its own expense to be a medical practitioner (RMP) provided they spend 10 years living in a village. After 10 years they are free to do private practice. Now the question is 1) what will keep them in villages and 2) do we have enough colleges to train them?
My answer to 2) is, do we really want to make them an MBBS doctor? Really how much treatment can a village dispensary do? Better idea is to open maybe 20 colleges across India that trains them to give medicine for common stuff like malaria, dysentery, family planning, taking blood samples and all, preserving them well and sending them to district laboratories for tests. Also to identify when things are beyond their competence and send them to city hospitals.
For 1) Make the village panchayats responsible for ensuring the RMP is actually in the village. If not they must report it to the district. And make Panchayats answerable for any issues arising out of non-reporting.
This is a short term solution. In longer term, a real issue is that village kids can't compete with most city kids and become doctors or engineers because the village schools are terrible. Instead of trying to get them into medical/engineering colleges through quota when they do not have the skills to compete with fellow classmates during course and bring the overall interaction quality down, why not have special schools. Do we really need MBBS in every village? Have colleges that take them for 3 years and train them to handle normal medical/engineering needs. Have PG courses that can make some of the more promising ones MBBS should they care to after doing maybe 10 years in villages. Since these are not MBBS they are not allowed to practise in private merely in dispensaries. Some will argue this is a class distinction. My answer is that given a choice between being unemployed and becoming a looked up to member of a village many village kids will jump at this opportunity. And it will raise standard of living in villages.
Similarly involve private sector. Have electricity bills/municipal bills available online. Whats stopping a bank from sending an officer to a village once a month with a laptop and a mobile net connection, collecting money and paying the bills online given the payer a receipt then and there. The villagers don't have to come over to some place, stand in line to pay and there is no additional charge. The bank can charge 2 % to the tax authorities for this service. The man power reduction in tax collection will be more than 2% in costs so net collection goes up. Meanwhile the tax collector becomes a teacher/police/doctor or some such more skilled guy.
True some will crib at having to leave a cushy job in a city with a lot of potential to harass and earn illegal money. But government jobs are not about that right? They are so that people can serve people.
Its a win win.

Is India relevant for Indians

I have often wondered what makes us so full or road rage, so ready to slash and burn at the slightest opportunity when in a mob. The key thing is that we do so when we are in a group. While I have no answers I will make a guess!
I think its the 'system'. It makes people feel so impotent in normal life that given an vent, they all erupt. Look at our government offices. A visit to any is a soul wrenching experience. Pan stains on walls, rude staff. It does not matter to the clerk (or the corner constable of police - the lowest rung) that the person he is talking as if the other is some lowly life form is probably talented enough to be his boss' boss' boss had he or she wanted.
It does not matter that the staff gets his salary from what the visitor pay as taxes. In short, the 'babudom' makes citizens feel 2nd class. We are a flawed democracy. so given an oppurtunity we descent into mobocracy. Common man knows that he can't really fight against the system and win. For the simple fact that given everything else, it will take 15 years for the court process to end. Who wants to spent 15 best years of life in courts? This leads to apathy and that in itself is a root of many ills.
Now I understand that any solution short of a revolution will be tough to get. After all in order to reform babudom and politics, the initiative will have to come from the top as well. But the top has lot more to loose in reforms than the bottom. Power is the most powerful aphrodisiac.
Courts in India are perceived to be free. But then even if free, in order to fight the system in courts you need a powerful prosecution arm. But the police have probably the worst public image among all government arms. And the reason are not hard to see. Just observe how a policeman (any policeman) talks to a common man - alone on a street. It will give you an impression of a ruler to a serf. But thats only the tip. Its a reflection merely of an institutional behaviour. What is our conviction rate? How many perpetrator of high visibility terrorist acts have been punished. When they have been - the top rung is almost entirely never caught, the middle and lower run get convicted in like 15 years. And as a recent columnist in Outlook pointed out, that too happens only when a Hindu- Muslim thing happens!
Take the well publicized case of a son of an IAS officer in Central government being killed. The accused are some family members of a sitting Member of Parliament. The case is dragging on for so many years. This when the person killed has a family who is a member of the power elite. If the accused are guilty the family of the dead has been denied justice as yet. If the accused are not, they have been denied justice for so long, living under shadow.
If such a high profile, under the media glare, case takes over 10 years to come to a logical conclusion just image what happens when a common man is involved. Assuming the police investigate with talent and impartiality ( both of which at least in public perception are extremely rare) it will still be longer than a decade wait! So the common man looses faith.
This is probably why terrorism is spreading roots. Why Naxalites are gaining control over such a large portion of India. Because for so many people the state has ceased to exist. When that happens what stops a person from defying the state? While I hate civilians being harmed (that is after all the definition of terrorism) for those which no help from state in defending life and liberty, it will cease to matter. And that is what seems to be happening.
An attack on police will cease to awaken people because for them its merely an armed wing of a state that just extorts taxes from them and does nothing in return except oppression.
Its a danger sign and we stop to look at it thinking that the problem will go away. The only way to fight this menace is by making state relevant. Improve the police, improve the governance. Make people proud of being an Indian. I once read that when US celebrates its 4th of July- the citizens celebrate not the state. In India, its the state that celebrates and not the citizens. If we are to stay as a nation, we have to correct this.

Language as a Weapon

Language as a weapon? of mass subjugation? Language is one of the crowing glory of human kind. A unifying force for communities, it also is one of the more divisive factors in our cultural life. Look at the French - English rivalry. or closer home the hostility to Hindi in south? Why does mere choice of language strike such emotional chords? Maybe it has to do with language being the ultimate symbol of cultural heritage. Where language is not merely the communication tool for cultural ideas, it IS a cultural expression itself.

Language serves to stratify societies. Listen to Prof Higgins expostulate the same in "My Fair Lady". Or more recent times read 1984. An interesting idea there. When we think, we think in a language. So What if certain words (symbolic of ideas) are simply not there in a language? What if state ( or society) prevents us from introducing such ideas in language terms. Will over a period of time we see a gradual withering of such ideas?

Forms of language serve to differentiate people. English court had French as the official language for quite a while. Mughal Durbar in Delhi had Persian as the court language for long. It took an Amir Khusro to evolve Urdu - a mix of Persian and Hindustani (the language of the masses) to bridge the gap. Hindi Channels today strive to maintain the Allahabadi Hindi as the standard bearer. It took an AajTak to popularize a much more eastern Bihari style to Hindi to differentiate itself from the traditional elites and posture itself as a channel for the masses. So its obvious that linguistic abilities can serve to stratify societies even where the language is otherwise common.

Jacques Derrida in his theory of Deconstruction mentions how language is a barrier to communication. When communicating through words we are slowing our thoughts down to the flow of the words. Mind which is so much more capable of faster action is essentially slowing down. Hence language itself is sometimes problematic. If we extend the same to inner thoughts - While we may not be saying anything, is the mind slowing down while thinking because we 'think' in a language. Will thinking in way devoid of language be much faster?

Reasons Reasons

Just heard about this job application where the dude mentions - I wanna search for a girlfriend in ur country as a reason for applying to the job.
Cool. Wonder how many such offbeat reasons can be quoted for applying.
Common ones I can think of it -

1. Commuting to this place is so much easier.
   
2. Ah my favorite eating place is right across the street from you
3. Mmmm the receptionist!

More esoteric ones could be

1. God spoke to me and told me to go forth and make common cause with "your firm"
2. Numerologically my name and yours just match
3. Boy you are an incompetent bunch. My rapid rise to top is assured.
4. My girlfriend is banned from entering your country. Hallelujah
   
5. Doctors have prescribed complete break from work
   

... I'm thinking of more

Help - WMD proliferate

Meetings, it almost enlightened me as to why the typical nerd was also supposed to be perpetually high on some or the other substance. How else could one survive the ordeal unless semi in Nirvana land?
Given the rapid proliferation of these ways of mass discomfort - WMD in corporate culture we the sanity lovers need to come up with ways to hit back. Having been in places where sometimes meetings were scheduled for over 8 hours and no this was not a sales department but the hardcore tech one, and even now where WMDs often demand over 5 hours on many working day per day, I've been thinking-(that too on a Monday. Yeah I know its not something that I have done in many years but frankly this is a crises scenario. As a result of moving those massive brain levers here are some caffeine empowered techniques that a (non PH)-B should implement to reduce the WMD quest of lessor minions.

1. Auction of meeting times. People are given certain amount of 'currency' to buy meeting minutes. A 10 minute meeting of 10 people? Sure that'll be 10*10=100/- currency. You can do without 5 or your original list, thought so too, hand out 5*10=50/-. You can do it in 5 min? sure that'll be 25/- plz.
2. And yeah, your last meeting overshot by 20 min. The attendees have had half the person rate times 20min deducted for spending time in meetings. System is auto-claiming their deduction from you. so you need to hand in that currency too.

Such an approach I'm sure will see a significant reduction in WMD proliferation. Then it may be possible for folks to actually get some time in the day to get the work they were supposed to get done done.