How good is caste for affirmative action?

Well, caste may be the simplest indicator of socio-economic status in the Indian society, atleast in much of rural and semi-urban Indian society. And so in a country where any kind of false certification (including false proofs-of-annual-income) may be produced in a dirt-cheap budget, caste may be an effective indicator for affirmative action. But the problem with it is.....as an individual of a higher caste one feels terribly penalized for having born in a higher caste. Its one of those things where interests of an individual are in exact conflict with the interests of society in general.

The solution? I can think of one: Better Information Systems that keeps track of beneficiaries of the action and thus making sure that their progeny are treated normal.

The terrorism of Mumbai's Infrastructure

Mumbai says, "Bomb blasts are just a minor part of the problem". That gives you some idea about the anger thats building up with in the city. The city reportedly contributes to 1/3rd of the total national tax revenue and yet has to grapple with the most basics of infrastructural problems like the rest of the country. The problems are so acute that people think that bomb blasts are just a minor part of it! Bomb blasts happen may be once every two years (I am ashamed to give a periodicity to the acts of terror, but thats the periodicity history indicates), but the infrastructural problems are to be fought with every minute. And yet red tape, bureaucracy, corrupt politicians, inefficient systems get nothing done. Naturally, its residents are angry but dont know where to direct it.

Its important that all this building anger is let out before pseudo outlets (like 'Maoists', balkanization of communities based on religion etc) become more popular.

Stone's WTC

Its unfortunate that we are in a time where we make movies like "World Trade Center" based on real-life incidents. I am not saying that such movies shouldn't be made, but what I am trying to say is its unfortunate that we are in a time to witness an event of such epic horrific magnitudes, both on and outside the silver screen. And when such a movie is made, it carries all the baggage that every other movie carries. IMBD entry, x/10, reviews, star rating system etc...and all of these parameters have to basically strive to distance the artistic merits of the movie from the actual human misery that's part of the real-life incident. But an incident like 9/11 makes it only more difficult.

With a title like WTC, one might expect something nothing short of a whirlwind tour of world history for the past 4-5 years OR at the least a political context to the crash and basic ground level rescue operations, given that its an Oliver Stone movie. But Stone chose a much narrower focus.

He tells the story of two remarkable cops who watch out for each other after they are trapped under tonnes of rubble. He tells the story of their families interspersing it with the rescue operations. One might ask why the title WTC for such a narrow focus. Isn't Stone using the powerful WTC brand name to pull more audience?

WTC stands for many things in our decade. We basically have a pre-9/11 world and a post-9/11 world in matters of world economy, politics, trade, immigration and religion. Such is its significance. So what is it you want WTC to stand for? Of all the things, Stone thought that the fundamental human instinct to help each other and watch out for each other, mostly because that's the right thing to do...is what WTC most stood for. I would love to agree with him. But unfortunately, incidents like London Underground bombings, Madrid bombings, Bombay bombings, Transatlantic aircraft plots make it only harder to believe it.

Nevertheless, except for a single pro Iraq-war comment, I thought that the movie had been well crafted and makes you imagine what is it actually like to hang around the accident site. After being pulled out from the rubble, one of the guys asks where the two towers have disappeared! I kept thinking about how helpless-a-creatures we turn into, when we loose that simple big picture/orientation. And how big a blow was the 9/11 event to the political/economical/blah-blah orientation of all us including countries and governments.

How to make money out of YouTube?

Or Who should buy YouTube?

theoretically, a consortium of companies.

One of them could be Netflix. Why?

Because, I never got a chance to see Monty Python on TV. And I saw bits and pieces of Monty Python, first on YouTube. Chances are that:

• I've disliked them. End of the Story.
• I've liked them to an extent that I want to buy a DVD of it. This one happens rarely. Even it happens, there is no harm in renting it before you buy it. One would feel less disheartened by renting it, if the whole thing didnt meet their expectations.
  
• I've liked them to an extent that I want to try more of it. In that case renting from Netflix would be a good option. (This tells me that Netflix should probably add a "I'll Keep it" button after items-that-are currently-at-home.)
  

In a way, it is not very different from contextual ads but with one difference. I am talking about ad-companies where you can 'try' things before you buy. I think I am trying to use the fact that a certain amount of piracy is healthy as it is capable of bringing in more business.

1981

Average year of birth of suspected arrests in the 2006 Transatlantic aircraft plot is 1981. And there is a guy who was born in 1989! I am curious to know if the average age is increasing or decreasing or just staying at 25.

30+ south-asian britons, feel happy that you are a lesser match to the stereotype.

But sadly Indian Police are not polite enough even though you dont fit the stereotype. NY Times writes here about police hunts in the muslim dense suburbs of Mumbai and the people's grunts about it. Being an immigrant and fitting a stereotype is one story, but being a match in your country is a totally different one. Sadly, that is part of growing global reality.

Rahman at Hollywood Bowl

• A multi-ethinic, multi-racial chorus group (from Miami) called "Global Rhythms" that sings ethnic music from non-western cultures using western instruments.
  
• Another group from Stanford University called "Raagpella" that specializes in a style of vocal singing that's not accompanied by musical instruments called 'A cappella'.
• A gypsy music troupe from Rajasthan called "Musafir".
• Hariharan, Sukhwinder Singh, Sadhana Sargam, Madhushree, Anisha Nagarajan
• Sivamani and a bunch of other percussionists

• A legendary open-air modern amphitheatr called Hollywood Bowl with a capacity just shy of 18,000 which has been the stage for some significant to notable performances by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Frank Sinatra and The Monty Python.
• Make 70% of that 18,000 white/Caucasian and only the remaining 30%, desi.
  
• Bring in Tom Schnabel, the director of World Music Programming for KCRW, a popular NPR flagship station in West Coast, to host the show.
• And yeah, bring in the center piece of this Jigsaw puzzle "The Mozart of Madras", AR RAHMAN.
  

That should give you some flavor of the whole evening.

Tom Schnabel started out with an introduction saying that Rahman composed in a wide variety of genres including Classical, Rock, Pop, New Age all done in Indian style. The performance of the evening, "Bombay Theme", seemed to have been Rahman's standing-up to the introduction. Subsequent performances included pieces from Dil Se, Taal, Bombay Dreams, Rang De Basanti, Roja, Bombay and Yuva. Some of those grandiloquent pieces like "Ramta Jogi" employed "Global Rhythms" and "Raagapella". And in the tradition of carnatic concerts, Rahman gives away a slice of the evening to the percussionist Sivamani. And this guy tries out variety of beat cycles culminating in the three beat clapping cycle of the audience, yeah, the appeal of percussionists is more instant and universal. This rapper guy called "Blaaze" spiced up the evening with his occasional rapping of some Rahman numbers like "Humma Humma".

Rahman concluded the evening with "Vande Mataram" with the Indian tri-color fluttering on the giant TV screens.

Many of these numbers set people to swaying and hip-shaking often in Bollywood style. A guy called Richard Corliss summarizes the concert in TIME well before it even took place. :)

I thought some of the numbers performed that evening would be better appreciated in headphones than in a concert setting, for a couple of reasons: one. many of those Rahman's minute improvisations are simply not possible in a concert setting. two. Multitude of those instruments can amount to noise in a concert setting. I've to say that its more an observation than a compliant.

Karl Marx is a substitution on German side

While Germans, Argentines and Brazilians cruise thru the 2006 FIFA cup, check this classic philosophy football match by Monty Python.

Protest over hike in fuel prices?

Leftist parties in India protest over hike in fuel prices. They oppose the anti-people increase in price and demand a complete rollback of prices.

Its so disappointing to read news like that. Why should state-owned oil companies pay the market price and sell the general public at a subsidized price? How is rolling back prices a pro-people measure, when it is going to bite back in the ass, when staterun oil companies go bankrupt after a period of time owing to the dead-weight of subsidizing market prices?

Accept the fact: Oil is scarce and scarce is always costly. State-run oil companies are not brewing oil in their kitchens. Its imported and every darn country in the world is paying a price and fighting for reserves and resources.

Subsidizing market prices has disastarous effects not just on oil companies, but on society in general. Consumers do not know the real market price, so the usual price check on consumption doesnt work. The incentive to develop fuel-efficient technologies is taken-off from the automobile industry. The incentive to develop efficient public transportation systems, alternate fuel sources and bunch of related stuff...is just off the hook! Its a golden opportunity to be a leader in such technologies in the developing world and the left parties want to throw it away!

Whats even more depressing is the fact that, none of the Indian Media seem to question the protest. All they seem to do is an as-is reporting saying 'so and so party protests in such and such state'.

"Why so?", "So What?", "How sensible is your protest?".......no such questions attached.

1961 TV Commercial

Here is a 1961 TV commercial, an introductory-tour+operation-manual, rather. Contrast it with today's iPod. We have sure come long way in matters of user experience. Haven't we?

I am the 'Keshava' guy in this podcast

TOI's unbelievable arrogance

I cannot believe the arrogance of Times of India. They spin the 10-billion-INR-aid-to-Nepal as " Koirala thrown Rs 1,000-cr aid lifeline". Times is proving all worthy for a Razzie or something.

movie:Gandhi

Amidst all the events of epic proportion that permanently changed the course of world history, there is a little boy that climbs up the tree and starts breathing fresh air of freedom after looking at hoards of people marching along with Mahatma 'Walker' Gandhi towards Dandi on the western coast of India. Similarly, among those BBC-Breaking-News events, Gandhi goes in circles along with his wife, re-enacting their marriage for a journalistic friend. Gandhi leaves for mudpacks, while Nehru, Jinnah and Patel discuss about the possibility of country's partition. Such are the intricate details, director Sir Richard Attenborough paints on this mammoth canvas of one of the last real epic movies ever made. In a pre-digital era, the movie employs about 300,000-400,000 extras in some scenes!

Along with a ton of those intricate moments, Attenborough has some of the greatest cinematic moments as well. Judge Broomfield (played by Trevor Howard) standing up when the 'extra-ordinary' prisoner whom he is going to try enters the court hall, those mesmerizing talks between Gandhi and NYTimes' journalist Vince Walker (played by Martin Sheen) as Gandhi tries to explain that all he found out after years of thinking and travelling is the 14th century song "Vaishnava Jan tho...", Nehru jumping into the crowd asking the traitor to kill him before touching Gandhi, talks between Lord Irwin (played by Sir John Gielgud) and his cabinet and later with Gandhi, Gandhi ascending the steps of the majestic Viceroy palace (which becomes Rashtrapathi Bhawan later) as the camera pans up and zooms out, all those conversations with Life's photographer Margaret White (played by Candice Bergen)...and the list of moments seem endless.

Couple these with Ravi Shankar's music while Gandhi discovers India and you start to get an idea of how much of an accomplishment is getting the movie made.

Yeah, I saw Gandhi yesterday for the nth-time and the movie has been extremely inspiring every time I see it.

Immigrants and Geography Bee ?

NY Times has a great article on the usefulness of Geography Bee over the more popular Spelling Bee. NY Times articles raises an important point that most of American kids do not look beyond the coasts. This year's winner of the contest is an eighth grader from Illinois, from an immigrant family (Indian in this case). The guys who came in 2nd and 3rd places also happen to be from Immigrant families (Indian again). So just wondering how edgy can, being a child of an Immigrant family, who naturally look beyond the american borders, be? Looking at the winners of the contest, I am tempted to conclude that its pretty big an edge!

Amartya Sen and Tag cloud

Clearly, tag cloud and folksonomy are in vogue. Amartya Sen in his new book, "Violence and Identity" talks about multiple identities of an individual:

The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).

Wow! Thats a whole bunch of tags. Aren't they? Shashi Tharoor adds an interesting twist in this sunday magazine review of the book. He says that people who realize that they have multiple identities are a minority and not a whole lot of people are going to read this enlightening book. I am not 100% sure about that. But it sounds so true when the word 'context' is thrown in. Most people fail to realize their multiple identities when taken in by a momentary raze of a given context.

Are people using enough of tagging in the online world to use it as an evidence for or against Tharoor's twist? Thats an interesting question to think about. I should log my thoughts on that.

Democratizing or Inventing?

In an article titled 'Inventing Creativity', Ajit Daura thinks that Kaavya Viswanathan is more a victim of a remix culture than the perpetrator of a literary crime. Thats probably true because, at both conscious and subconcsious levels, younger generations at large do not hold any prejudices against remixing. For them it is pretty much 'okay' to remix and its definitely part of the creativity spectrum. This decade may even be called 'the dawn of the remixing age.'

Ajit concludes the essay with this...

...but in the market economy in which we live, Mozartian self-expression seems to be the least important value in a work of art. Is it any wonder that it is cut, copied, remixed and pasted to suit a common denominator of taste and sales?

There, I beg to differ. While it takes a Mozart to bring out a 'Marriage of Figaro', the remixing age and the new digital technologies that facilitate remixing allow many many more 'ordinary folks' to express freely and creatively (though its not authentic always). Remixing is more about democraziting creativity, not just serving to a common denominator.

Proposing using Apple

Apple is posting a time lapsed video of the visitor lines before its new fifth avenue store: http://www.apple.com/retail/fifthavenue/

Somebody used this delayed web cast to propose to his girl friend, Uschi Lang : http://images.apple.com/movies/us/apple/fifthavenue/timelapse0500.mov
Now, does that count as graffiti or vandalism? Will apple edit the video, if somebody shows a placard against Bush?

Land for Land?

"Drowned Out" is a documentary about Sardar Sarovar Project on River Narmada of India. It talks about some of the pros of dam which include bringing water to drought stricken villages of Western Gujarat and Rajasthan and one of the largest canal irrigation systems in the world. The cons are the submergence of large number of villages and unfair settlement for displaced people. (Environmental effects of the dam have not been discussed.). Unfair settlement seem to be the heart of the issue. Resettlers were offered good land on paper, but when it came to the efficiency of governments in executing, all the resettlers got were poor weeded lands that had abyssmal returns of crops.

Lets face it. India is a densely populated country. Land is scarce and fair resettlement in land takes extremely efficient and politically willed governments to show any useful results. Keeping the merits and demerits of dam apart for a moment, resettlement of people is a key issue in any mammoth developmental project. It becomes all the more complex, when land is scarce and majority of resettlers are illiterate.

The project's foundation stone was laid in 1961. Planners and builders had two generations of time. Yet, planning seemed to be minimal. Why does resettlement have to be Land for Land? Why not exchange land for vocational skills other than farming? Given a couple of generations of time, people would have smoothly made a transition from agriculture to other occupations. I am sure there would be some such skills that can be learnt in a short time as well. I am wondering if any work has been done in that direction.

Some Interesting Trends

Google Trends lists down the geographical locations where bulk of queries for a particular keyword come from. I tried for to find out the locations for some of these listed below....

• Software - Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai... (San Francisco at #8)
• Design - Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Chicago...
• Usability - Bangalore, Chennai, Dublin, Austin, Seattle...
• User Experience - Helsinki, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Sydney, London...
• Java, J2EE, .Net, Siebel, QA, Oracle, SQL, ASP, VB, Datawarehousing, Biztalk, testing, CMM, Mainframes - Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, Delhi in some order
• Ruby, Python, Ruby on Rails - San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York,
• Firefox - Munich (followed by 8 cities in Germany), San Francisco at #10
• Linux - Czech Republic, India, Russia, Norway, Poland, Hungary...
• Shahrukh - Pakistan, Morocco, India, Peru, Iran, UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany, UK
• Visa - Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Vancouver, Singapore, New York, San Francisco....
• GRE - Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Austin, Washington, New York, Chicago
• MBA - India, Pakistan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, United States...
• Islam - Jakarta, Bandung, Kaula Lumpur, Rabat, Cairo, Ankara.... (none of the so-called Breeding grounds in Top 10. Makes sense, because breeding involves certain amount of closed minded ness)
• Global Warming - Brisbane, Perth, Delhi, Vancouver, Portland, Minneapolis, Washington, New York, San Francisco (DC at #7)
• Prius - Pleasonton, Los Angeles, Irvine, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Portland...

iPod and India

I think iPod and iTunes (for that matter, ID3 tag format) are poorly designed for bollywood music for the following reasons...

1. Songs from Bollywood (and other industries like Tollywood, Kollywood...) have atleast two artists or more aptly atleast two 'playback singers'. ID3v2 and iPod work well when there is a single artist. Multiple artists fragment the song collection into larger number of artist categories. For example, there are numerous songs sung solo by Kishore Kumar as well as with Lata Mageshkar and Asha Bhosle together or separately. iPod classifies these songs under the following categories:

• 'Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar',
• 'Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle',
• 'Kishore Kumar'.
• or even 'Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar'

While the listener may always recall it as a Kishore Kumar number. Needless to say, best sold albums by AR Rahman have atleast four artists a song. One needs further ehtnographic research to determine how bollywood music is classified and thought about in listerners' hearts and minds.

2. Playback singers (artist in iTunes) are different from the composer by rule. More importantly, the name of the movie's superstar is prominent keyword in people's minds more than artist or composer. They are known popularly as Shahrukh's song, Rajnikanth's song, Amitabh's song, Chiranjeevi's song etc. iTunes or iPod doesnt even account for this factor which is inherent to bollywood music.

3. Some of the info fields in ID3v2 like Genre have no relevance for mainstream bollywood music. Its all the same: 'filmi music'.

4. Neither CDDB nor Indian recording companies or any othermajor online Indian music websites have a consistent spelling for the artists. You get to see about six different spellings ...'AR Rahman', 'A.R. Rahman', 'AR. Rahman', 'AR Rehman', 'Rehman AR', 'AR. Rehman'....you get the picture.

5. In India, one gets to buy all the 6 tracks of an album for 99c (INR 44.5).

A bigger question is.....Isnt India a Tier-3-4 market at the bottom the pyramid? Immense commodification of music CDs and abysmally low prices of them at less than a dollar are the very proofs.

Isnt iPod and iTunes a Tier-1 product or one that encourges and thrives on Long Tail ?

35% stolen!

BBC reports that 35% of produced power is being stolen in Delhi resulting in an acute power shortage and long power cuts. So when governments cannot plan for increased installed capacity, cannot do good law enforcement in tackling stealing power....what do they do? They draft 'guidelines' for saving power. What do those guidelines sound like? "Government offices must switch off air-conditioners after 1830 and shopping malls across the city will have to shut at 1730." So people who pay for the power have to voluntarily shutdown at insane timings, so that people who steal can do it the royal way! And when leaders like Naidu reform power sector, whats he rewarded with? A terrible defeat at polls. Way to Go!