Mine is worth almost USD 50,000. Maybe it is time I sold out and moved to the hills
The valuation is based on Tristan Louis’s research that was triggered off by the aquisition of Weblogs Inc by AOL.

Not bad for a blog that is part of a:

a bitchy, self-indulgent and an almost incestuous network comprising journalists, wannabe-writers and a massive army of geeks who give vent to their creative ambitions on the internet. Given that the average blogger-age is 25 years, it’s clear bloggers love to indulge in hearty name-calling and taking college-style potshots at others. This is probably why some of them get into trouble.

That surely sounds like a frustrated blogger whom no one links to, or even worse a bitchy self indulgent journalist who either doesn’t know about the topic that he is writing about, or couldn’t care

Tags: Blogging, Social Software

In the last couple of weeks there has been construction work happening outside our office. A sidewalk is being built. And there is a whole bunch of people working on it. This particular young man wheels in gravel.

Adarsh Nagar, where the office is situated is also a MAHDA colony -with houses (they are called huts, but don’t look like any hut that I have seen), as opposed to apartments.
And there is huge ground smack in between the colony.

I have seen more kids out playing here than anywhere else in Mumbai. It is vacations now, and the kids are out full strength to play. And playing cricked under the sun with everyone jamming in seems to give them great pleasure.

This particular girl seems to be fascinated with the dynamics of building a road. I really liked the interplay of shadows and light. and the absolute rapt curioiusity on her face.

I would have loved a closer shot - but that would have meant sacrificing the spontaneity.

Despite the fact that half the television industry is in Adarsh Nagar, there is a certain old world charm about the area. Innocence here is still not lost.

Tags: Mumbai

When 6 million Jewish people perish in concentration camps, it is called a Holocaust.
When 20 million people died in Stalin’s Soviet Union it was called ruthless Communist murder.
When PolPot murdered 1.8 million in Cambodia he was a madman.
When a million plus died in the fatricidal civil war between the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s in Rwanda and Burundi - we were horrified.
When close to a million died in rioting during partition, it was a human tragedy.

when 60 million girls go missing what do you call it?

The UNFPA report of 2005 makes for scary reading. It states that 60 million girls are missing in Asia.

Discrimination against girls may begin in the womb. In some countries, a strong preference for sons has led to the elimination of millions of girls through prenatal sex selection. Baby girls also die through deliberate neglect and starvation. In Asia, at least 60 million girls are “missing”.

In Chapter 7 dealing with Geneder Based Violence the report also states:

Worldwide, an estimated one in five women will be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.One in three will have been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused, usually by a family member or an acquaintance. More often than not, the perpetrators go unpunished. Each year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are trafficked and enslaved, millions more are subjected to harmful practices. Violence kills and disables as many women between the ages of 15 and 44 as cancer. And its toll on women’s health surpasses that of traffic accidents and malaria combined.

If 60 million Tamils, or Muslims, or Slavs or Jews or Yadavs or Todas or Bedu’s or Kurds disappeared it would be front page news. But, when 60 million girls disappear, it seems to be par for the course.

Tags: Culture, Gender Issues, Society

Currently re reading an old favourite. Tranlated by Sir Richard F Burton(the explorer not the actor), and with an introduction by A.S.Byatt

Scheherazade’s attempt to save her life and the lives of all the eligible women in the kingdom by weaving a story that would divert her husband’s rage against all women for having been cuckolded. It almost seems an allegory for the lot of women in modern days. Cajole for your rights rather than fight for it. Somethings never change.

It has all the old favourites - Ali BAba, Alladin, Sindabad, the Potter’s story etal. The kind of stuff that you used to get in Chandamama, Champak and a half a dozen hindi films.

Somehow, the versions that I read that i was a kid were more sanitised than the one I am reading now. And, I am sure that the original tales were even more bawdy and earthy and that the English translation by Sir Richard Burton was keeping in mind the sensibilities at that time - Victorian England.

The one irritating thing about this particular Modern Library edition is the complete lack of paragraph breaks.

If you don’t have an issue with online text and want to sample before you purchase - then you can get the stories here.

Tags: Reviews

The last few weeks have been spent trying to cast kids for a show that we might be doing. The show is centred around 10 year olds - doing what ever 10 year olds are supposed to be doing.

The entire process has made me glad that I have no kids - children in Mumbai are scary. They behave like petulant & irritating 18 year olds. the girls try and act sexy, the boys macho. I asked a question, what games do you play. Pat comes the answer - nintendo, games on my playstation, or playing is for babies. No chor police, no lagori, not even the modern equivalent of out door games.

It is positively scary. I hope it is a function of the kind of kids who want to act (or whose parents want them to act) rather than symbolic of the entire lot of Mumbai/metro kids. After looking for almost 15 days - we still haven’t found the kids. Because the kind of naughty innocence that we are looking for doesn’t seem to be available.

Tags: Society

She strangled her first two babies to death because they were girls, terminated two other pregnancies because the foetuses were female and lost two baby boys to infections acquired in infancy. Married at 18, Ranu, from Rajasthan, is now fiercely protective of her only remaining offspring, a baby boy.

Yet she and her husband Muktar have no remorse about the fate of their “missing” daughters. “I will kill other children if they are girls,” Ranu said, explaining that she is too poor to pay for their weddings.

Read more of the article here.

Tags: Gender Issues, Poverty

Society and Culture has always fascinated me. Why do certain people behave in a particular manner? Why do Tamilians do somethings and Punjabis do something else. And this is more from a macro sociological/anthropological/ethnographic perspective than a micro (psychological) viewpoint.

I always used to have words with the sales teams (when I headed channels) on this concept of a “Hindi Speaking Market” or the concept of “South India” or indeed the “North East”. I am not really sure whether you can lump all Punjab, Haryana, UP, MP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttaranchal, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, etal together as one homogenous Hindi Speaking Market. My funda was geographical clusters do not necessarily mean socio cultural clusters. Yes, in the extremely broad view we all eat, sleep, drink, procreate etal. but so do dogs and cats. Yes, also in the extremely close up view, I am very different from the next person in my community. But, i guess technology has not reached a stage where we can accurately target the individual with all her inbuilt peculiarities. So a via media is found. In today’s usage it is Socio Economic Classification (SEC’s). But i honestly believe that the time has come to take it beyond SEC’s and look the impact of ethnicity, language, culture and society on our decision making process.

We know that there is a world of behavioural differnce between people from UP and people from Punjab. We attribute it to socio-cultural differences. Yet, we expect them to view and purchase the same things. And our communication to them - inciting them to do so - is identical. I think, that at a certain level, importing too many management, marketing & research fundaes from the west - which is relatively homogenous - has led to a certain kind of laziness in India. We (those who have something to sell) think in English, and translate that English thought into various Indian languages. I am not really sure that such an approach works anymore. The market has expanded beyond those who exclusively think in English and has gone on to encompass people who think in the vernacular.
But, it is not just about the language - though that does play an important role. Putting out a hoarding that says This ya That may appeal to someone who thinks in English because we are a talking about a fairly binary language which has its roots in a fairly binary culture where good and bad or God and Devil are very clearly defined. If you think in Hindi the translation may make sense but not the essence. Because we are talking about a fairly ambigious culture. The concepts of yes and no may exist, but it is very rarely used. Instead the concept is that of shayaad (maybe). We are talking about a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. And it is not just a peculiarity of the language. It is probably also the mind set.

At the same time it is also about cultural symbolism. “pan indian” culture is a figment of the marketeers imagination. A hope that their life will be made easier in communicating to the diversity that is the Indian Market place. Just because someone in the Chennai or Mumbai adopts Sangeet as part of their marriage ritual, doesn’t mean that it is the norm. It is most likely the exception.

Yes we are all brothers and sisters under the skin. All united by this thingee called “Indianess”. But under the skin does not really determine either purchase or viewing. Other things do. Do i buy more insurance because I want to save tax or I am a Tamil? Does she buy more fair and lovely because she is young or is it because she is Rajasthani? (just examples)Maybe one day the industry will grow up and target specific custom for products and services in a specific manner. Until it does this trend of fairly inefficient communication is going to continue.

Tags: Society

… right up there with the other great mysteries that include why God(dess) decided to create the universe (she was having a bad day :); to what happens to the other sock (the one that never came back from the washing machine); to why does your sambhar never taste like the one your mother makes (or his mother makes); is the mystery that almost caused a war between Italy and China. The mystery was on who invented noodles - China or Italy. Obviously both sides claime primacy in noodlegiri.

Finally, the matter can be closed. Along with gunpowder and paper, it was the Chinese who invented noodles.

…50cm-long, yellow strands were found in a pot that had probably been buried during a catastrophic flood.Radiocarbon dating of the material taken from the Lajia archaeological site on the Yellow River indicates the food was about 4,000 years old.
Scientists tell the journal Nature that the noodles were made using grains from millet grass - unlike modern noodles, which are made with wheat flour.

Tags: Science

.. just as another blogger Varna received a legal notice and a threat to be sued for 175 crores, in the ongoing saga of IIPM v/s freedom of speech, MSM seems to have woken up and printed its first story.

But Varna’s story first. She blogged about a debate she participated in - where she was told she is too aggressive for a woman. The funniest part is that today is Vijaydashami and in the south we celebrate it because the Mother Goddess killed Mahishasur. Aggression, my left toe nail :). And as in the case of Rashmi, hoardes seeminglyloyal to the corporation descended on her blogsite and began sexually slandering her.

I know many of your dirty secrets. Especially about how you cheat on your many boyfreinds for money. I am glad you have not let your shadow in on IIPM.

This is one of the comments left on her blog by someone claiming to be IIPM #1. One of the things that can reassure blogdom is if Iipm puts out a statement disassociating itself, and unambiguously condemning, comments of this nature.

This is sexual slander. And i guess any women’s cell will take it up and fight on the victim’s behalf. I hope that all concerned who are resorting to this sort of defence of the corporation realise what they are upto.

Back to the MSM. HT today has an article on this, here.

FOR THE first time in the history of Indian cyberia, it appears that a blogger has had to quit his job for expressing his personal opinion on a particular educational institute, and on the claims that it makes through its advertisements.

Blogger and Mumbai resident Gaurav Sabnis, who till recently worked with IBM Mumbai’s server department had, in his personal blog gauravsabnis.blogspot.com, linked to an article in JAM magazine that questioned the veracity of IIPM’s advertising. He had added a comment of his own, raising questions about the educational qualifications of IIPM’s founder, author and management guru Arindam Chaudhuri.

IIPM reacted by issuing Sabnis with an e-notice that threatened him with a lawsuit if he did not withdraw his post. According to Sabnis, IIPM also got in touch with his employers, IBM, and attempted to pressurise them to have him remove the blog posts.

Failing that, IIPM reportedly told IBM, their students would burn the ThinkPads that IBM had supplied to IIPM.

The story goes on to quote A Sandip, dean of IIPM

“We are not concerned about the blog, and in no way has the written matter on the blog affected us,” says A. Sandip, IIPM’s all-India dean.
“But we are going to take legal action against the blogger for defamation. The person is identifiable. It is a legal notice against the person and not the blog.”

Read rest of the story here.

I am personally flabbergasted. ‘In no way has the written matter on the blog affected us” but we are all so incredibly bored of planning and management that ” we are going to take legal action against the blogger for defamation”. thereby allowing something that didn’t affect to come into public purview, create a ruckus amongst influencers in blogland, and drag our institutes own name through mud, just because we can. Makes perfectly logical sense
Note: the bits in quotes are Prof. Sandip’s. The italics are my remarks. My legal firm has a bunch of very fine litigators. Thank you.

Update:
Express has this piece here.

Tags: Blogging, Social Software