Wish I were an alumnus of La Martiniere School, Kolkata

Last week, I happened to read the article (refer full text and link below) in a column by Mr. Jug Suraiya in Times of India newspaper. I could not help laughing at the shade of satire in it. Very good read and here I add it to my blog for all future references :)
Link - http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/entry/take-a-tip
Title of the article, details of publishing - Take a tip by Jug Suraiya, 12 August 2010, Times of India, Bangalore
Full text - (refer below)

Take a tip

Without referring the matter to me, the porter in the New York City hotel picked up my bag six inches and put it on a trolley. He wheeled the trolley five feet to the elevator, and pressed the button for the 5th floor. He wheeled the trolley 10 feet to my room, opened the door and pushed the trolley in. He held out his hand. Bowing to the inevitable, I put $5 — which i could ill afford — into it. My bag had travelled 10,000 miles with me free of cost, its conveyance covered by the price of my air ticket. However, its journey of less than 100 feet in a NYC hotel was not covered by the price of the hotel room and cost me an extra five bucks by way of a characteristically American institution known as the tip.

Though not unique to US culture, giving a tip for services rendered is the bedrock on which American capitalism is based. According to folklore, the word tip, as in gratuity or baksheesh, is said to be derived from the initial letters of the phrase 'to insure privilege'. To insure privilege, or good service, from a waiter in a restaurant, say, you gave the chap a tip over and above the price of the meal consumed. This custom was soon extended to other areas of daily commerce so that everyone, from taxi drivers to tour guides, hotel porters to Wall Street multinational bankers, expects a tip for services rendered — though in the case of the Wall Street bankers it's not called a tip but an incentive bonus, which is often in excess of a million dollars a year and which might well have helped to nudge the world into the global economic crisis.

Crisis or no crisis, almost everyone I encountered on a professional basis in America — cabbies, bartenders, the folks who served you fast food and the people who pointed out to you the local sights of interest on a hop-on, hop-off tourist bus — not just expected, but often demanded, a tip for doing whatever it was that they were supposed to be doing anyway, and for which presumably they were already being paid. And just in case you missed the point, sometimes they'd even do the arithmetic for you and tell you on a restaurant bill, for instance, exactly how much the tip worked out to if you left a 15 per cent tip, a 20 per cent tip or a 25 per cent tip. But 15 per cent was the absolute bottom line. If you tried to get away with anything less than that it was likely to be interpreted as an overt act of hostility liable to provoke an appropriately warlike response.

It got so much that whenever I found that once again I had lost my way — which I have a great knack of doing, in America or anywhere else; why is it that the place I'm looking for is never in the place that I'm looking for it but in a totally different place altogether? — I wouldn't ask passers-by for directions. What if the person I stopped turned out to be a professional, unionised directions-giver and demanded a tip for the benefit of telling me that where I wanted to be wasn't where I was, and where I was wasn't was where I wanted to be? Fifteen per cent, minimum, just to hear that? Get lost. Which is exactly what I did.

Going around in circles in America, I realised that we in India also have a long tradition of giving tips. Except we don't call them tips. We call them guru dakshina, or tatkal, or speed money, or ghoos. Or just plain bribes. Which we perforce pay to service providers like cops, and babus, and politicians, and the guy who replaces our empty LPG cylinders, to make sure that they do indeed provide the service that they are meant to provide to begin with. And because we think of these things as bribes, we beat up on ourselves, and the world beats up on us, for being corrupt. No one beats up on Americans for being corrupt, not even those Americans who happen to be Wall Street bankers. It's a question of vocabulary. Change the word 'bribe' into 'tip' and 'corruption' becomes 'capitalism'.

So next time you have to make a hand-out to the LPG delivery man, or to your friendly, neighbourhood CWG contractor, don't think of it as a bribe. Think of it as a tip. As in a 'totally innocent practice'.

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Jug Suraiya is an eminent journalist, a great satirist who features in the opinion editorial in Times of India newspaper. His column carries creative names like - jugular vein and juggle bandhi.

In the habit of reading Times of India for over 4 years now, watching Times now channel news debates; I have grown fond of Jug Suraiya and Swapan Dasgupta. While the former uses very simple, funny thought with many a pun at places, the latter is spotless clean on facts, facts on history and politics, highly verbose in nailing down the point. The fondness for both seems to only increase with time. They both are very noted journalists and are alumni of La Martiniere, Kolkata. Wish I were an alumnus of the same school, guess it is never late ... can learn so much from their blogs/posts/columns, would love to write like them someday.

We are (virtually) never alone

I would'nt want to miss this article.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Solitude/3708/
William Deresiewicz writes essays and reviews for a variety of publications. He taught at Yale University from 1998 to 2008. He has written the article below -

January 30, 2009
The End of Solitude

What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That's 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she's never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she's never alone.
I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she'll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?
To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few. Through the solitude of rare spirits, the collective renews its relationship with divinity. The prophet and the hermit, the sadhu and the yogi, pursue their vision quests, invite their trances, in desert or forest or cave. For the still, small voice speaks only in silence. Social life is a bustle of petty concerns, a jostle of quotidian interests, and religious institutions are no exception. You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you, and the divine word, their pretensions notwithstanding, demurs at descending on the monarch and the priest. Communal experience is the human norm, but the solitary encounter with God is the egregious act that refreshes that norm. (Egregious, for no man is a prophet in his own land. Tiresias was reviled before he was vindicated, Teresa interrogated before she was canonized.) Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism, a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom. The seer returns with new tablets or new dances, his face bright with the old truth.
Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism. In Marilynne Robinson's interpretation, Calvinism created the modern self by focusing the soul inward, leaving it to encounter God, like a prophet of old, in "profound isolation." To her enumeration of Calvin, Marguerite de Navarre, and Milton as pioneering early-modern selves we can add Montaigne, Hamlet, and even Don Quixote. The last figure alerts us to reading's essential role in this transformation, the printing press serving an analogous function in the 16th and subsequent centuries to that of television and the Internet in our own. Reading, as Robinson puts it, "is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity." "The soul encountered itself in response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass." With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice became available to, even incumbent upon, everyone.
But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. Protestant solitude is still only figurative. Rousseau and Wordsworth made it physical. The self was now encountered not in God but in Nature, and to encounter Nature one had to go to it. And go to it with a special sensibility: The poet displaced the saint as social seer and cultural model. But because Romanticism also inherited the 18th-century idea of social sympathy, Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with sociability — if less for Rousseau and still less for Thoreau, the most famous solitary of all, then certainly for Wordsworth, Melville, Whitman, and many others. For Emerson, "the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society." The Romantic practice of solitude is neatly captured by Trilling's "sincerity": the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others. Especially, as Emerson suggests, one beloved other. Hence the famous Romantic friendship pairs: Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Melville.
Modernism decoupled this dialectic. Its notion of solitude was harsher, more adversarial, more isolating. As a model of the self and its interactions, Hume's social sympathy gave way to Pater's thick wall of personality and Freud's narcissism — the sense that the soul, self-enclosed and inaccessible to others, can't choose but be alone. With exceptions, like Woolf, the modernists fought shy of friendship. Joyce and Proust disparaged it; D.H. Lawrence was wary of it; the modernist friendship pairs — Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, Hemingway and Fitzgerald — were altogether cooler than their Romantic counterparts. The world was now understood as an assault on the self, and with good reason.
The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city. In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth: Eliot's London, Joyce's Dublin. The mob, the human mass, presses in. Hell is other people. The soul is forced back into itself — hence the development of a more austere, more embattled form of self-validation, Trilling's "authenticity," where the essential relationship is only with oneself. (Just as there are few good friendships in modernism, so are there few good marriages.) Solitude becomes, more than ever, the arena of heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast and terrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights. To achieve authenticity is to look upon these visions without flinching; Trilling's exemplar here is Kurtz. Protestant self-examination becomes Freudian analysis, and the culture hero, once a prophet of God and then a poet of Nature, is now a novelist of self — a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, a Proust.
But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined. The first of these technologies, the first simulacrum of proximity, was the telephone. "Reach out and touch someone." But through the 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.
Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone.
As a result, we are losing both sides of the Romantic dialectic. What does friendship mean when you have 532 "friends"? How does it enhance my sense of closeness when my Facebook News Feed tells me that Sally Smith (whom I haven't seen since high school, and wasn't all that friendly with even then) "is making coffee and staring off into space"? My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude.
But at least friendship, if not intimacy, is still something they want. As jarring as the new dispensation may be for people in their 30s and 40s, the real problem is that it has become completely natural for people in their teens and 20s. Young people today seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can't imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others. As long ago as 1952, Trilling wrote about "the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment." Now we have equipped ourselves with the means to prevent that fear from ever being realized. Which does not mean that we have put it to rest. Quite the contrary. Remember my student, who couldn't even write a paper by herself. The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.
There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation's experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century. Suburbanization, by eliminating the stimulation as well as the sociability of urban or traditional village life, exacerbated the tendency to both. But the great age of boredom, I believe, came in with television, precisely because television was designed to palliate that feeling. Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one's lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.
I speak from experience. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.) It took me years to discover — and my nervous system will never fully adjust to this idea; I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect — that having nothing to do doesn't have to be a bad thing. The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.
So it is with the current generation's experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn't call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn't always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn't always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.
And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.
But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that "our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context"; neuroscientists, that we have "permeable minds" that function in part through a process of "deep imitation"; psychologists, that "we are organized by our attachments"; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by "the power of social networks." The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."
The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self. The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.
If they didn't, they would understand that solitude enables us to secure the integrity of the self as well as to explore it. Few have shown this more beautifully than Woolf. In the middle of Mrs. Dalloway, between her navigation of the streets and her orchestration of the party, between the urban jostle and the social bustle, Clarissa goes up, "like a nun withdrawing," to her attic room. Like a nun: She returns to a state that she herself thinks of as a kind of virginity. This does not mean she's a prude. Virginity is classically the outward sign of spiritual inviolability, of a self untouched by the world, a soul that has preserved its integrity by refusing to descend into the chaos and self-division of sexual and social relations. It is the mark of the saint and the monk, of Hippolytus and Antigone and Joan of Arc. Solitude is both the social image of that state and the means by which we can approximate it. And the supreme image in Mrs. Dalloway of the dignity of solitude itself is the old woman whom Clarissa catches sight of through her window. "Here was one room," she thinks, "there another." We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.
To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one's way beyond it. Solitude, Emerson said, "is to genius the stern friend." "He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions." One must protect oneself from the momentum of intellectual and moral consensus — especially, Emerson added, during youth. "God is alone," Thoreau said, "but the Devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion." The university was to be praised, Emerson believed, if only because it provided its charges with "a separate chamber and fire" — the physical space of solitude. Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts. But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. "The saint and poet seek privacy," Emerson said, "to ends the most public and universal." We are back to the seer, seeking signposts for the future in splendid isolation.
Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone. It has undoubtedly never been the province of more than a few. "I believe," Thoreau said, "that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark." Teresa and Tiresias will always be the exceptions, or to speak in more relevant terms, the young people — and they still exist — who prefer to loaf and invite their soul, who step to the beat of a different drummer. But if solitude disappears as a social value and social idea, will even the exceptions remain possible? Still, one is powerless to reverse the drift of the culture. One can only save oneself — and whatever else happens, one can still always do that. But it takes a willingness to be unpopular.
The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn't very polite. Thoreau knew that the "doubleness" that solitude cultivates, the ability to stand back and observe life dispassionately, is apt to make us a little unpleasant to our fellows, to say nothing of the offense implicit in avoiding their company. But then, he didn't worry overmuch about being genial. He didn't even like having to talk to people three times a day, at meals; one can only imagine what he would have made of text-messaging. We, however, have made of geniality — the weak smile, the polite interest, the fake invitation — a cardinal virtue. Friendship may be slipping from our grasp, but our friendliness is universal. Not for nothing does "gregarious" mean "part of the herd." But Thoreau understood that securing one's self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.

Simple and Effective Writing

Swaminathan S. Ankalesaria Aiyar, a leading economic journalist, inspires me to grab the Sunday Times newspaper. His column - Swaminomics has been my favorite for quite some time. Varied topics are discussed in his column in very simple and effective English. The ideas are not complicated, intent is clear and crisp - truly reader friendly.

I liked his entry in his column dated - 09/05/2010 and below is the link and complete text of the article.
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Swaminomics/entry/raman-effect-fingerprinting-the-universe#

The sentences in Brown Bold have been highlighted because these brought an instant smile on my face. Even, I have heard my teacher utter them. That's precisely how Mr.Swami writes and the reader gets an instant sense of recognition with the topic discussed - be it politics, economics or science.

Raman Effect: fingerprinting the universe

At school, we were taught that Sir CV Raman won the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering the "Raman effect". But when we asked what exactly the Raman Effect was, our science teacher fobbed us off, saying "it's very complicated." Clearly, even he didn't know. Cynical students wondered why a complicated discovery without any obvious use had won the Nobel Prize.

But today, Raman's discovery has finally become a breakthrough technology. Hand-held scanners called Raman scanners, weighing just one-third of a kilo, are being used by US narcotics squads and airports to detect drugs. Security experts think that Raman scanners may be the best devices to detect explosives carried by terrorists. Safety inspectors are using Raman scanners to detect hazardous chemicals and gases. Police forces are using Raman scanners for forensic work.

The scanners work by detecting the molecular structure of the object they are scanning. If you shoot a beam of light on an object, a very small part of it interacts with the atoms of the object and scatters light in a pattern or spectrum unique to that particular molecule. This is the Raman Effect. It is difficult to detect, and typically needs lasers to amplify the signal. Every molecule has a different Raman pattern. This is why Raman scanning has been called the fingerprinting of the universe: it can identify substances as surely as fingerprints can identify humans.
Identifying the chemical composition of a substance typically requires chemical and physical tests that take time, maybe days. They typically require a sample to be extracted and destroyed while testing. But Raman scanning can take just 20 seconds. It does not require cutting, extracting or destroying a substance. Scanners have a laser, spectroscope and an electronic heart that can recognize Raman patterns. This yields almost instant recognition of target substances.

For instance, narcotics squads in the US are using Raman scanners programmed to detect up to 100 drugs. At the scene of a crime, or during airport security checks, the scanner can tell whether a substance is heroin, crack cocaine, amphetamine, or plain chalk. Security experts can programme scanners to detect different sorts of explosives such as RDX or nitroglycerine.
For decades, Raman's discovery could not be converted into easily usable or affordable tools. In his time, equipment for lasers and spectrum separation and scanning were primitive, bulky and costly. Only in the 1980s did laser technology progress to the point where it was compact and economic. This new technology was most popularly established in the CD player: a laser could scan a disc to play music.

Scientists in many fields, including space and telecom, began to research applications for the Raman Effect. Some found ways to enhance the Raman Effect by adding surface metals, making the effect easier to detect. This led ultimately to the invention of scanners that could detect trace elements of less than one part per billion. Such scanners can identify minute quantities of bacteria, chemical pollutants, or explosive elements.

A recent article in The Atlantic, a US monthly, says that Raman scanners are gradually becoming big business. It cites officials at Delta Nu, a manufacturer of Raman scanners, as saying that scanners are already a $150 million business, and growing fast. The company's scanners currently cost $15,000 each, but it hopes to cut the cost to just $5,000 in the next five to ten years.
Researchers at UCLA and Intel have incorporated the Raman Effect on silicon. Because of its crystalline structure, the Raman Effect is 10,000 times stronger in silicon than glass. Researchers at JPL and Caltech have found other ways to increase laser efficiency. This has driven down size and costs.

Researchers at Stanford University are experimenting with Raman scanners to diagnose cancers in various organs. River Diagnostics in Rotterdam is marketing a bacteria analyzer that hospitals can use to instantly detect deadly pathogens. One day, Raman scanners may make blood tests obsolete: a scan may suffice to tell you the content of glucose, cholesterol, uric acid and other elements in your blood.

Scientists aim ultimately to create a database of Raman patterns of every substance for easy identification. This is similar to Nandan Nilekani creating a national database for fingerprints and irises to identify every Indian. Databases have already been created for narcotics, pollutants and explosives, which is why scanners have already become practical tools. Every time they are used to catch a drug smuggler or terrorist, or to detect a cancer or pollutant, we can give thanks to CV Raman. School teachers can now teach students why exactly the Raman Effect is so important: it fingerprints the universe.

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Another post from Swaminomics - a beautiful article that states the differences between Rights and Entitlements.

Link: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Swaminomics/entry/let-s-not-confuse-entitlements

Date: 29/08/2010 - Sunday Times (Swaminomics blog entry in Sunday Times of India, Bangalore edition)

Title: Let's not confuse entitlements with rights

In a pensive mood

After a long time, a good article, quite thought provoking, appeared in Sunday Times newspaper dated 09/05/2010, by Swapan Dasgupta, very famous Indian journalist and political commentator.

Here is the link to his blog/article - http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/right-and-wrong/entry/face-it-india-is-all and below is the complete text of the article -

Face it, India is all about caste

In recent times the world has witnessed a lot of crying over spilt milk. Germany has apologized to the Jews for the Holocaust; Japan has said sorry to the US for Pearl Harbour; the Pope has publicly taken the burden of his errant clergy on himself and bowed his head in shame; the federal government of Australia has apologized to its aborigines for wilfully killing so many of them; Russia has apologized to Poland for Stalin's massacre of its non-Communist leadership in 1939; and 13 years ago, the Queen apologized for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Compared to these grave wrongs of history, the abuse showered on long-forgotten British civil servants by the cheerleaders of Indian nationalism seems a case of petty theft. For six decades, generations of Indians have been taught to believe that the colonial rulers saw India through the lens of ignorance and prejudice. Sir Valentine Chirol, a distinguished journalist who was prolific on 'Indian problems' epitomized the type of Englishman Indians loved to despise. Writing in 1926, Chirol observed that "Hinduism could not build up a nation because the one vital structure which it did build up was the negation of everything that constitutes a nation."
The "vital structure" that Chirol alluded to was caste. National allegiance, he felt, "was secondary to the loyalty each (Hindu) owed to his caste since his caste was his karma, determining much more than his present life, namely, all his lives still to come."
Chirol mirrored the colonial perception of India as a land obsessed by caste and unable to rise above it. Since the foreign rulers never aimed at being social reformers, they attempted to accommodate this caste obsession in public policy. They documented caste in all its bewildering complexities in the Gazetteers and, most important, attempted to quantify caste allegiances in the Census operations from 1881. As Census Commissioner for the 1911 Census, Sir Herbert Risley went one better. It wasn't enough merely to record the caste preferences of individuals. To make life easier for policy makers, the Census had also to identify "social precedence as recognized by native public opinion." In other words, the administration had to locate a caste in the ritual and social hierarchy and determine which caste was high, intermediate or low.
Risley's attempt to define caste precedence triggered an upsurge in civil society. Caste groups mobilized to redefine their varna status, undertake changes in ritual practices and even press for changes in caste names. India experienced a bizarre ferment with caste leaders pressing for vegetarianism, restrictions on widow remarriage and changes in the rituals governing marriage and mourning. The Census led to a government-induced process of what MN Srinivas was later to call 'Sanskritization' — social changes premised on the belief that Brahmins were role models.
For nationalist historians, Risley was a villain promoting 'false consciousness' and furthering a divide-and-rule approach to undermine national unity. The Census was perceived, not merely as a quantitative exercise, but a divisive game which, in the process, reduced Indian society to a hideous caricature. Even though Mahatma Gandhi felt compelled to accommodate the 'depressed classes' through the Poona Pact, the conventional Congress view was that caste, like religion, was purely a social institution that had no place in public life and political decision-making. There would be some compensatory discrimination in favour of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes but that's where the encroachment of caste would end. In line with this thinking, the first post-Independence Census in 1951 dropped the enumeration of caste altogether.
So strong was this nationalist consensus that when the first Backward Classes Commission was appointed in 1954, reputed Gandhian and anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose proclaimed "the desire and will of the Indian nation to do away with the hierarchy of caste…and prepare the ground for full social equality." Indeed, when the Backward Classes Commission identified 2,399 non-SC and non-ST communities as 'backward', the report was fiercely contested by Congress.
In five decades, politics has come full circle. Last week, the Cabinet deliberated on the wisdom of reviving the enumeration of caste in the Census. There was no unanimity but the government finally conceded that was little point persisting with the old nationalist consensus. Already politicized by democracy, caste has become the basis of the government's elaborate redistributive programmes. Sixty years of experiments with modernity have proved to be mere ripples on the surface; the depths of India's 'vital structure' have been unmoved.
India owes an unqualified apology to the British Raj for suggesting that its officials didn't understand India and, indeed, vilified it. It's our nationalist modernizers who have been defeated by the 'real' India. The future appears to belong to the khap panchayats. Chirol was right and we may as well acknowledge it.

Eulogy

A speech or a writing in praise of the dead is very common in India, may be world over, not to forget the case of the king of pop, Michael Jackson.

Starting from home where according to Hindu rituals, a laudatory speech is read out by a priest on the 10th day after demise of a person, to the state or country in which we live, bouts of emotions are displayed on event of demise of a political leader, an actor or any person of considerable social prominence.

The person’s age or the cause of death being natural does not mitigate this display of  emotions. We all know how Bangalore came to a standstill for two days with widespread cases of looting and arson when actor Rajkumar died of ill health. This recurred with actor Vishnuvaradhan’s death when South Bangalore faced brief and sporadic violence by mobs.

Even borders of nations, the activities in which the person is actually engaged when alive does not deter one from singing poems of praise in the event of death, remember how Tamil Nadu CM Karunanidhi lauded the slain LTTE political leader SP Tamilselvan through carefully crafted poems that invited ire from the Indian government. May be the CM was clouded by personal grief, he forgot the quantum of terror unleashed by LTTE for decades in Sri Lanka.

Emotional speeches, visits of prominent leaders from across the border, impeccable state honor have all come to Jyoti Basu, the 95 year old CPM veteran, who succumbed to old age and deteriorating health, to a leader par excellence who managed to reign over West Bengal for 23 years, to a true colossus/legend/patriarch and many more names that the press has bestowed upon him posthumously.

However, an astoundingly different and a crisply true notion is expressed by the article below, published on Times of India, 20th Jan 2010 named “A place time forgot”, written by Ashok Malik
Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/A-Place-Time-Forgot/articleshow/5477570.cms

A Place Time Forgot

Only a hard heart would not have been moved by the idea of a proud, imperious man on a hospital bed, valiantly fighting all that nature threw at him. Jyoti Basu was chief minister of West Bengal for 23 years. In 1996, he almost made it to 7 Racecourse Road. In the eyes of his devotees, he remains the finest prime minister India never had.

In the past few weeks, these devotees were very visible. Some wrote maudlin articles. Others, such as H D Deve Gowda - who got the job Basu's party forced him to turn down in 1996 - made the pilgrimage to Kolkata. Ironically, the most fervent praise came from outsiders. Those who experienced Basu's Bengal, as opposed to those who idealised it from afar, would prefer a more cold-blooded assessment.

Many of these people don't live in Kolkata, or West Bengal, anymore. A contraction of opportunities, educational and economic, and a closing of the Bengali mind have long forced them to relocate. From Bangalore to Boston, about every buzzing city has its share of refugees from Bengal. Perhaps posterity will call them "Basu's children", a once-great state's lost generation(s).

West Bengal is not a location of contemporary relevance; it is the place time forgot. Kolkata is a museum piece; somebody cruel once called it "the world's largest old people's home". You go there if you're a heritage tourist, a nostalgia junkie or have a particularly beloved patriarch to visit one final time. As Basu's health deteriorated, this harsh verity made itself apparent. In his twilight hours, he began to resemble his terrifying legacy.

Sympathetic fellow travellers tend to dismiss criticism of Basu as limited to a small Kolkata elite he disempowered. He is worshipped by millions in Bengal's rural heartland, they argue. How true is this?

Certainly, the worst of the CPM's 'cadre-cracy' was reserved for the city. In the 1970s and 1980s, the world gradually began to turn. The Asian tigers began to embrace technology and trade and move out of misery. They gave a slumbering continent a new economic model. This was precisely the time Basu chose to finally bury the Bengal renaissance. Business was hounded out, computers were resisted. English was abolished in government primary schools, depriving young Bengalis of a massive comparative advantage.

What was the result? As an early industrial state, West Bengal should have led the march into post-industrialisation. With its educational institutions and its middle class, it should have been a services sector natural. The first IT companies and the IT-enabled services boom should have started in Kolkata. Basu didn't allow this. History will never forgive him.

The point is Basu should have known better. Even before he became chief minister in 1977, he was a well-travelled man. He knew the global currents. He understood the implications of driving out technology and English, all in the name of anti-elitism. In contrast, his successor had a provincial background. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had to learn a lot of lessons the hard way, lessons that came easily to Basu. Yet, to be fair to Bhattacharjee, he tried. Basu didn't bother.

How successful was Basu in village Bengal? The state has 18 districts; 14 of these are among India's 100 poorest. Inequality - the gap between supposedly pampered Kolkata and the hungry hinterland - was the Left's war cry. As economists Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari emphasised in their paper 'A Story of Falling Behind'(2009), "Uttar Dinajpur, which is West Bengal's poorest district, has a per capita SDP that is only 33.6 per cent that of Kolkata [the richest district]. For all its talk about equity and removal of inequalities, the West Bengal government hasn't been able to improve the lot of the people in the worst-off and backward districts."

Basu's biggest failing was lack of conviction. He mocked those he opposed as well as those he led. In the late 1960s, the CPM entered government in alliance with Congress rebels. Basu was deputy chief minister and in-house saboteur. Almost every day, his party would lampoon the governor, Dharma Vira, as a reactionary agent of Delhi. Almost every evening, after the slogans were done, Basu would reportedly turn up at Raj Bhavan for a drink with Dharma Vira and their common friend Ranjit Gupta, former chief secretary and the brother of CPI leader Indrajit Gupta. Was this a careful separation of the personal from the political - or was it plain hypocrisy? How would you describe Basu's visits every summer to London, ostensibly to "seek investment", visits so important that he often missed August 15 in India?

The most illuminating story comes from the day of the funeral of Pramod Dasgupta, CPM strongman, in 1982. According to an eyewitness account, immediately afterwards a tired Basu went to a certain relative's house and, there, he sat down with a book: George Mikes' How to be an Alien. Considering how he looked at Bengal, and what he had reduced it to, that's rather telling.

Quotable Quotes

• Harsha Bhogle, the veteran cricket commentator in his book - "Out of the Box" said,
  "Since T20 is the next big thing, the one thing I would go for is longer boundaries. The quicker the boundaries come in, the shorter it will become and the quicker it will die out because at the heart of cricket is a contest between bat and ball. The day you make one of them irrelevant, it's not cricket any more. So for T20 cricket make the boundaries distant."
  
  
  SRK on being detained at Newark airport, US for 2 hours, said it was not a drama and he needed no publicity stunt. In his interview to TOI, he was quoted saying the lines below. Quoting German pastor Martin Niemoller, Khan said, ‘‘They came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.’’

• From May 10th 2010, we get a new term, better said, an alternate expression for a very common idiom. Foot in mouth - is an idiom, all of us are familiar with, we might have done it/witnessed others doing it many a times. To put foot in mouth means - to say something that you regret, something embarrassing, something hurtful/silly/stupid. Well, from now on, we can even say - I did a "Tharoor". When one says something ridiculous, makes a preposterous remark, even a sensible remark at a wrong time to a wrong audience in a wrong forum/venue , we claim the person has done a "Tharoor". The derivation is from record of many such foot in mouth events by Mr.Shashi Tharoor, ex Union Minister of UPA cabinet who was forced to resign after the brouhaha surrounding sweat equity, office of profit and his more than mentor like involvement with the Kochi IPL franchise. Jairam Ramesh, another Union Minister of the UPA government, follows Tharoor as an ardent disciple in this context. Feel free to use this new term :)

All Truth, No Lies!

We all have heard the famous quotes – “Honesty is the best policy”, “Truth is bitter” and many of us have even read “The story of my Experiments with Truth”, an autobiography by the father of our nation.

However, truth has received a completely new and unparalleled dimension on television right now. One gets monetary rewards for speaking the truth, for disclosing the most sacrosanct secrets of his/her private life, for unveiling them in front of loved ones whom we would never want to hurt or betray. Money for ripping apart one’s respect and self esteem, the most heavily regarded and thereby guarded elements in full public view.

The questions are all prepared in such a way that the answers are meant to expose only negative traits. The person in question is seated in an apparently uncomfortable position, in one of the perfect executive-like cushioned chair to face a volley of questions, all of which induce stress in the contestant & his/her near and dear ones. When the current era talks so much on stress management, skilful techniques of handling stress at work/school/home and every place on earth, why does this TV show aim at creating bouts of it?

A test used by investigating agencies after serious contemplation on criminal subjects is the central instrument of the show - polygraph test. Did one know that the polygraph test measures physiological responses of the sympathetic nervous system like changes in blood pressure, pulse rate, respiration/breathing patterns, skin temperature etc in human? These patterns are believed to be different for deceptive responses. Is one prepared to go through this test for sake of some lakhs and crores ? Instead, it would save a million lives if people volunteered for an early diagnosis of many fatal diseases and silent killers like hypertension, cardiac problems, diabetes, cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.

If one was seriously interested in coming out clean, then why not do it in front of loved ones in confinement? That one is prepared to face the whole world while confessing on dark, inner secrets of life, sweating out and breathing faster as the process happens, goes out to show how mercenary people have become.

The show airs the truth about lives of many biggies and celebrities. So the next time India lost a cricket match, why not the captain be subjected to a polygraph on the actual reasons, why not politicians involved in many scandals get free of guilt through this instrument? Wish this show had started earlier, we could have got Ramalinga Raju of Satyam participate and check the veracity of his company’s revenue/profit reports and thereby averted the worst ever tech debacle.

Below is the link to a very well written article on what this TV show offers to the society apart from big bucks – by Santosh Desai in Times of India, dated July 26, 2009. http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Citycitybangbang/entry/the-very-naked-truth

Below is the complete text of the article -

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The Very Naked Truth

It has happened. The parliament is seized of the Sach Ka Samna question and the clouds of outrage are darkening visibly. Charges of vulgarity and fears about potential damage to the Indian way of life are rife. On the face of it, it is easy to see why this show should cause such offense. A participant performs the ultimate act of pornography as he disrobes himself in full public view of all that he considers most intimate, stripping himself of not only dignity and self-respect but dismantling in the process, the trust he evokes from those he loves most. We watch in voyeuristic disbelief, with a combination of fascination, horror, guilt and smug superiority at someone's else's misery. That a channel should produce a show like this makes us cringe, for what could be more exploitative and destructive than a spectacle like this?

And yet, the issue is not that simple. We keep talking about the virtues of honesty in our life and personal relationships. And all that this show does is to deal in the truth. Participants know not just the kind of questions they will be asked but have been exposed to the specific questions that come their way. They know their family will be at hand. The format produces a forced kind of honesty, but at least it deals with the truth and isn't that supposed to set us free?

Maybe not. This is where the motivations that surround this show become important. The show is not interested in the truth but specifically seeks that truth which will cause damage to the individual's self esteem and poison relationships. It is a spectacle only when participants disclose something scandalous. The reason why the family is such an important part of the show is because in some ways it is the show. We have in effect created a market for preying on someone else's personal misery. Once we accept a show like this, what stops us tomorrow us tomorrow from going further down road- for instance why not do an organ donation show tomorrow where a donor chooses from among a long list of critically ill patients vying for the life saving donation? The word 'elimination' will have an altogether realistic meaning then. Or why not make siblings fight for their parents attention and have a panel of esteemed judges give them points?

The commoditization of truth is part of an overall movement towards taking all that constitutes the personal and private and giving it exchange value in order to make it marketable. We can make money on the basis of our looks, education, ability, luck, our willingness to do stupid things and our openness to making our private life public. Everything has exchange value; we can monetize all parts of our life as evidenced by people marrying, dying and selling their virginity on screen for a price. Reality shows in general and Sach Ka Samna in particular serve to turn society's instruments against themselves. The individual is extracted from the folds of her inner world as all that constitutes ones private inner world is laid bare with the seductive aid of money and fame. We become consumers of ourselves as we turn our insides out for the consumption of the outside world. In effect society turns cannibalistic as it feeds on itself and its most cherished institutions. Of course, these institutions themselves are not built on any absolute truths and are riddled with contradictions. Even in this case, we can see how the professed ideal of honesty in relationships comes with clear limits. Relationships are not based on absolute honesty. Given the way society has been constructed, they cannot be. In fact they are based on the opposite- they need others to be insulated from all of an individual's real feelings. It is revealing that almost all viewers who recoil at the show and vow never to take part do so not because they have nothing to hide but because they do and are smart enough not to hurt their loved ones with the truth. This is not limited to a few of us, but is close to being a universal truth.

The trouble with Sach Ka Samna is not that India is not ready for it- at a certain level no society in the world is, given the way it challenges the fundamental assumptions on which we build societies. It is also almost certainly not illegal- nothing that is said or shown in the show is particularly shocking or new. That husbands stray, wives fantasise and siblings betray is hardly anything we have not around us in our lives. It is also unlikely to specifically lead to permanently damaging the fabric of Indian society. The trouble with Sach Ka Samna is that it crosses an invisible line we had drawn for ourselves. It tells us that we are comfortable consuming all that we value in our own lives in the name of entertainment. In the guise of modernity it takes us back to the primitive, as we take pleasure in a new and refined form of an ancient bloodsport.

The most striking thing about this show is that the channel thought it was alright to produce it, that so many participants took part and most importantly so many millions watch it for now. Sach Ka Samna is not a sign of the changes to come; it is a symptom of the changes that have already happened.

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Nothing Endures but Change!

When Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher (535-475 BC) remarked – “Nothing endures but change”, he left behind a highly important notion that finds place in every walk of our life, in a person’s development from infancy to adulthood, in industry – be it marketing, electronics, finance, agriculture, medicine, in global environment and climate. Rephrase it as “Change is the only constant”; “The only constant is change”; ‘Change alone is unchanging”, we sure would have heard the phrase in most meetings in our workplace, if not explicitly, earlier in our life.

Though change is inevitable and typically a regular feature, we try to resist it with immense effort, only to embrace it half-heartedly later, until it becomes a watertight compartment of our life. In my four and half years stay at Bangalore, mostly restricted to its south east cosmopolitan part, changes I have observed have been minimal, well pronounced of them being- hotter summers, lesser rainfall in May-Aug, more glass buildings/brand stores with aluminium glass composite panels, more tech parks, more bore wells, greater felling of trees, increased traffic with years. Whilst, my myopic exposure to changing urban life leaves me pondering on what the city will be like in 5 to 10 years, for those who are natives of Bangalore, the change over last decade would truly be overwhelming, exponential and nettlesome.

Below is an article, published in Times of India, Bangalore edition, dated 23rd July 2009 on the changing face of Bangalore Cantonment. (I have gotten into this habit of collecting/blogging some good articles I read for any future references). The article can be accessed at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4810880.cms and if the link becomes inaccessible one fine day, below is the body of the article written by Anita Rao Kashi.

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Changing face of Bangalore Cantonment
Never, ever, try this: toss the question `Is it a good thing that Cantonment has changed over the last few decades?' into the midst of a gathering of old timers, especially residents of Cantonment area. Or do so if you love living dangerously and or if strolling g through a mine-laden battlefield is your idea of fun! The resultant pain, suffering and hand wringing are almost too much to bear.

And yet, Cantonment, or Cantt as it is affectionately called, was set inexorably on the path of change almost from the day it was born, sometime in the beginning of the 19th century. Historically, Cantt has always been the harbinger of transformation: a colonial settlement in the midst of a conservative native population is bound to have wide-ranging consequences. So all the teeth gnashing might seem paradoxical. But the pace of change then was slow and allowed time for everyone to absorb and internalise. In the last couple of decades though, the momentum has dramatically changed, became a runaway rogue engine with a life of its own.

When it was established, the Cantonment covered a vast area encompassing present day Richards Town, Agaram, Koramangala, Langford Town, Cubbon Park, Raj Bhavan, Vidhana Soudha, Millers and Cunningham Roads, Cantonment Station and Palace Grounds. With military precision, houses were arranged in straight parallel lines with the Parade Grounds as the centre of the station's existence, and clear demarcated areas for officers according to rank and the native soldiers. Over the years though, the Cantonment metamorphosed and shed some of the more far flung areas and is now just a segment of its earlier area. But in the last few decades, the change has been so phenomenal that people who haven't seen it for a 10 or 20 years will wonder if they are in the right place.

Unlike some of the other older parts of Bangalore, Cantt has the distinction of reinventing itself the most. The reasons are too many and too complicated. Yes, Malleswaram and Basavanagudi have changed beyond recognition as well, but there are still pockets of old world charm, providing glimpses of what it was and might have been. Yet, nowhere has it been more dramatic, more pronounced than in the Cantonment, large pockets of military presence notwithstanding.

The most obvious, the most recent, and according to some, the most heart wrenching, is probably how the skyline of MG Road has completely changed with the start of work on the Metro project. The massive pillars and girders, the pushed back compound of the Parade Grounds, the absence of the much-loved boulevard, have all contributed to an irreversible surgery on the road. The pleasure of standing near Kumble circle and being able to see almost till the other end of the road at Trinity circle is now lost forever. But long before the Metro arrived, there were plenty of signs that Bangalore's most happening road was getting ready to be botoxed and take on a Manhattanesque mantle. The Bluemoon-Blue Diamond building gave way to a commercial complex as did the EGK building. Plaza theatre became defunct. Elsewhere, on Brigade Road, homegrown brands gave way to global names and the makeover headed towards completion with the arrival of the twin golden arches. And these are just a handful of the changes that have taken place.

In varying degrees, this is the story of much of the Cantt area from Shivajinagar and beyond to Langford town, from Cubbon Park to beyond Ulsoor. And depending on which side of the line you are standing, the list could be a litany of woes, an inevitable path towards development or an exciting modernistic journey. Elgin Mills came down and a classy apartment block rose up in its place; Lido is now an eponymous sprawling mall and the Cash Pharmacy building on St Mark's Road has been replaced with a spic and span giant structure. All along Cunningham Road, Queens Road, Millers Road and scores of other, shiny, glassy commercial buildings have sprouted. And even residential areas have not remained the same. Proof of this are to be seen in each of the many areas that make up Cantonment, but nowhere is it more pronounced than around Ulsoor Lake, where high rise apartment blocks compete with high rise office blocks.

Despite overarching efforts by language fanatics, much of Cantonment continues with a bit of the colonial flavour, the last vestiges actually. Fraser Town, Cox Town, Cooke Town, Richmond Town, Coles Park - the names bring with them Bangalore's association with the past. And yet, in many places, the names are only things that have remained unchanged. Strangely enough, the Bangalorean has clung to them with a fierce zeal: both Residency and Richmond roads were named after war heroes, but nobody even bothers with the new names. On the other hand, citizens have not been so kind to structures. Like fairy tales, once upon a time, this was the area that was famous for British bungalows with extensive servants' quarters, built in classic British and European style, sometimes interspersing Gothic elements with native Mysore styles, and the trademark 'monkey tops'. Today, they have been replaced by towering residential complexes and smart modern houses.

Tree lined avenues and narrow roads, unable to take the burgeoning traffic, have either become larger, or one-ways. Flyovers, underpasses, grade separators abound..... The ancient 5th century BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said "change is the only constant" but old-time Cantonment residents will hardly appreciate his sentiment when applied to their favorite area, though they know in their hearts that it is inevitable.

Whether it is good, bad or indifferent is a subjective issue and there can never be a last word on it. Yet nostalgia is a funny thing.....all of us, even the most ardent change advocates, have been down that lane sometime or the other.

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Vacuous Promises

How many times have we heard vacuous promises from our politicians? An attempt to count instances exhaustively will be virtually impossible. Particularly, when a politician, currently valorous enough to dream of heading the country, lays claims to an initial downtrodden status and a spate of injustice faced in early years, does nothing for the society he/she hails from, it is very depressing. When it doesn't stop with giving a cold shoulder to the impoverished but expolit and squash them totally to gasconade about one's might - the act is truly repulsive.

That's sheerly the kind of reaction to what Mayawati, the CM of the country's most populous state has done; builiding memorials and statues bragging endlessly about her political status and influence.

Below is an article I read in Times of India newspaper, dated 4th July 2009, on the above issue. The thoughts I share are the same as stated in the article, expressed very powerfully and tersely.
Good Read : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/TOP-ARTICLE-Monumental-Mistake/articleshow/4735258.cms
The writer is a freelance journalist by the name Amrit Dhillon.
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Monumental Mistake

Standing beside the dirty Gomti river in Lucknow, looking at the structures Mayawati has built on its banks in her quest for immortality, is enough
to make you weep. Not over the hubris behind the self-aggrandisement. Nor over the idea of building memorials to honour Dalit leaders such as B R Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram. Nor even the colossal cost or the efforts of an army of poor workers labouring under a pitiless sun.

It is the way she has squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. With acres of land and billions of rupees at her disposal, this was Mayawati's chance to go down in history as the woman who gave birth to a piece of architecture rivalling anything that has come up in the past 60 years. It was a chance to be bold and daring, to create something beautiful and unique. A chance to hold a nationwide competition of architects and order them to let their imaginations soar. The competition would have animated Lucknow residents. A lively debate would have ensued on what they desired for themselves and future generations. What did they want in the city? A stadium, a museum, a university, a hospital, a park or a monument?

For Indian architects, bored with designing shopping malls and farmhouses for the rich, Mayawati's memorials would have been a dream project, a stab at prosperity by creating something as spectacular as the Bird's Nest in Beijing, the Guggenheim Museum, the Sydney Opera House, the Louvre Pyramid or the Pompidou Centre.

Most Indian cities are still symbolised by pre-independence buildings -- Kolkata by Victoria Memorial, New Delhi by Rashtrapati Bhawan and Mumbai by Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and Gateway of India. The reason is not lack of talent but of opportunity and near-total absence of any aesthetic sense among the political class, coupled with lack of a desire to create objects of enduring beauty that can become the new icons of India.

Mayawati has bungled by giving Lucknow a collection of gigantic bronze statues, colossal domed structures housing Lincoln Memorial-style statues, and immense stone plazas and walkways stretching as far as the eye can see. Lifeless and insipid, they fail to move the spectator because they speak of nothing but their creator's lust for grandeur. So many trees have been felled and mountains of stone brought in from Rajasthan that residents in the surrounding neighbourhoods say the temperature has risen a couple of degrees. Instead of a beautiful building that would have put Lucknow on the world map, Mayawati has bequeathed the city a memorial with as much charm as her handbag. Grandiose and massive, pink sandstone structures offer a mishmash of styles -- East European Stalinist gigantism, Pyongyang's ponderousness, columns of Imperial Rome, mausoleums of European kings -- all suffused with the pretentiousness of a provincial housewife trying to emulate the majestic sweep of a pharaoh.

What will families do at these memorials once they have seen the 60 stone elephants, the statues and domed, temple-like structures? The vast expanse of stone, unrelieved by greenery, water or grass, will repel visitors. If India Gate has endured as a popular landmark, it's because families congregate in the evenings to enjoy the lawns, water bodies and trees. Mahatma Gandhi's samadhi at Rajghat is simplicity itself and, with its lawns, refreshing. But Mayawati, it appears, is only interested in exuding power. Delhi"s graceful Lotus Temple would find no favour with her; her intention is not to draw people but to awe and intimidate.

She had a choice: erect something original or create a landmark cohering with Lucknow's rich architectural heritage. She failed on both fronts. Moreover, as the 'Dalit Queen' whose heart bleeds for UP's downtrodden, the conditions in which her memorials are being built are shameful. Admittedly, they are no worse than the conditions at construction sites across India where labourers build the mansions of the rich while living in squalor and filth.

But Mayawati claims to be different. The very least she could have done was to create a new model and show the country the decent way to treat construction workers. Why have her labourers been sleeping under tarpaulin sheets and makeshift tents with no clean drinking water, doctor or ambulance at hand, and relieving themselves in the open? Why did she not issue instructions for massive temporary awnings to protect workers from the sun as they slaved for her greater glory, along with a creche, a canteen turning out three meals a day, tankers of cool drinking water and Portacabin toilets for privacy and dignity?

Instead, she has displayed the same contempt towards these workers as their earlier high caste oppressors, forgetting that both the devil and God lie in the details. Mayawati has built a memorial honouring Dalits and Dalit leaders through the degradation of Dalit workers. She is unlikely to grasp the irony, just as she failed to understand her own limitations and the poverty of her imagination when she started conceiving her imperial city.

My Favorite AD

In the world of advertisements, tons of them talk volumes on serious issues of investments, insurance(health/accident), pension plans. A multitude of them deal with less trivial stuff like fairness creams, zero calorie sweetener and dandruff shampoos. Many more are totally insane. Of all these, Tata Safari DICOR, Reclaim your Life! ad stands out!!!

When the advertisement came on 1 full page of an English daily with lines as stated below, it won many hearts. Many memorised the lines/jotted them down, even preserved the paper cutting in their scrapbook. I am one of them.

Here goes -

If you had a look back on your life what would you remember?

The promotion ? The performance bonus ?

The plaque in the conferance room ?

It does'nt take supreme intelligence to know what really matters.

And yet , you do little besides look in the distance and sigh.

Would'nt it be tragic to realise too late that you did'nt see the trap,

that you did'nt recognise the two words

that are the biggest curse of humanity ...

' May be some day' ?

It takes little to reclaim your life.

No less better are the Airtel Ad - with A R Rahman's music adding charm that lasts till day; World Space satellite radio ad - with meaningful lines on how music can be defined, where it can be found, the definition delivered in a very composed voice by AR Rahman.

Hope to see more such well crafted ads amidst the current monotony of "Na sar jukha hai kabhi , Papa ghumm ho gaye tho bhi papa hi car laake denge, Aapka kal rahe aaj jaise hi, Get fair and (not just beautiful) handsome in 14 days " ... etc.