The dark side of an Emirate - Johann Hari

For those who have worked in the Persian Gulf, or, for those who have been there, Johann Hari writes candidly about what goes on behind the glitter of malls and office complexes The dark side of Dubai - Johann Hari in The Independent.

Yes, I have been through it all. I lived in a camp in the desert, I have seen the exploitation of labour, I have seen the taking away of passports, I have seen the cruelty meted out to my compatriots. Ours was a British Multinational, so we were comparatively better off. However, I could see the workers of the contractors struggling under the harsh sun for 12 hours or more without proper wages or over time.

It's indeed sad to see how development has gone horribly wrong for these immigrants who make these countries rich. It says in the article that the Indian Embassy counted around 900 suicides/deaths, but then it stopped counting, or, forgot to give away the true figures. For a parent in Kerala sending a son to the Gulf is a big risk because he may not come back. He will either be killed, murdered, or, commit suicide.

Rivalries between Asian nationals are very high. There's an unacknowledged war between: Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangla Deshis, and Philippinos. People get beaten up if they aren't careful. That means that it is very easy to accomplish a murder on a construction site. Just push the fellow down from a tall under-construction building and say he fell down. Who will know?

True, when we enjoy the hard work of an immigrant, also think about what he/she is going through in the desert country. It's callous how Indian embassy officials do not investigate conditions their citizens are living in those countries. I think India which has more expatriates than other nations should make it mandatory to investigate all the labour camps before sending its citizens there and ensure that they are paid legitimate wages.

External affairs ministry, are you listening?

This Talk of Censoring Internet Content: A Solution

I am a bit nauseated by this whole thing of censoring the Internet. I have written about it here before and I am writing again. I don't know why India wants to join the repressive regimes in doing this. Obviously there is a lot of content on the net which is risque, provocative, unsubstantiated. But why take away the last bastion of human freedom (freedom of expression) as we know it. Asking web portals and service providers to delete objectionable content is like asking an ant to bathe an elephant (sorry, bad simile *grin*).

I have a better idea. Some portals and sites are already implementing it. Let the users decide which is unacceptable and inappropriate instead of the big arm of the government interfering with the small feeble fingers of online expressionists. Phew! When the big media houses are run like production houses of pig iron, it's natural that people will express their opinions through blogs and comments and fora. We have seen abundant examples of such pig-iron manufacturing enterprises in our morning broadsheets.

Blogs, facebook and twitter have created a welter of voices on the net through which information flows on a regular basis. I check Twitter to find out what has been happening. And, unerringly, unambiguously, rather, most occurrences are on Twitter before it is on the tube or the newspapers. And you get a diversity of views from people you know and trust unlike in the print and electronic media.

Aside: Ever since a program named "Sansani" came into the media consciousness, every newscaster has been shouting himself/herself in the throaty stentorian of the pony-tailed Sansani reporter. Ugh! He strutted around, he pointed a finger at the camera, sometimes he provoked. It was assumed that to achieve TRPs you had to be like the Sansani reporter.

But do we need such pyrotechnics to achieve Television Rating Points (TRPs)? I don't know.

Okay, coming back. Just a minute, have patience. As I said let the user decide on user-generated content. Most sites have a link "Click to report inappropriate content" on their pages. Make this mandatory for all portals and sites. Thus you are putting the onus on the user to decide on what is appropriate. Wikipaedia does this, many portals and service providers are already doing this.

The service provider can then remove the content if there are more than an agreed number of clicks. I think therein lies my solution. Anyone listening? Viral this please!

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

Steve Jobs and His Times (A Re-post of an Old Article, with Changes)

Steve Jobs - A Life in Reflection

Dear Son,

Since the last week I have been wading through Steve Jobs' biography by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon and enjoying the flow of events and the rich details contained therein. So, here's my take on his life and his days, as we were contemporaries, well, sort of. The book provides a ringside view of the most momentous developments in computer history. I am much more involved because I was there to witness most of the events mentioned in the book: the transformation from Microsoft's operating systems (OS) to Windows and the evolution of computers from clunky boxes to the sleek ones you see today. So here's a gleaning of a few thought for you son and your contemporaries.

Let's get the scenario right. Here's what used to happen when I switched on a computer in the 1980s when I started working for the first time on computers. Windows hadn't made its advent (which you and others of your age take for granted) and what we got on switching on the computer was this (remember, there were no mouses or mice in those days, so everything was typed):

C:\_

The underscore (_) after the C:\ used to blink and we had to type the following:

*.* (star dot star)

That would display all the directories in the computer. Then I would search for a directory I had created that contained my file. I would press "ENTER" and the directory would open. Then I would select the file and press "ENTER." This would open the file in the accompanying program.

The display wouldn't be the colourful pixellated ones we have these days (as you are wont to see on your computer these days) it was sheer black with the characters in white. Above the text would be a set of short cuts including:

^S - Save
^N - New
^D - Delete

So on and so forth.... Remember, all these happened before you all were born. Hopefully, you were a mere happy thought in your parents' minds.

Remember, if you forgot to save, the data you had typed would vanish leading to panic and frustration. Also when you closed a file it wouldn't ask you to save it before exiting. So, next time you open the file, you cross your fingers, then cross your eyes, and hope the changes were saved.

The mouse or mice came later in the nineties. The windows came also at the same time. Before that there were no windows to look at and move your mouse or mice across.

I and Steve Jobs and people of my generation lived through these times, son. Computer were clunky things, not the sleek laptops with colour screens which we see these days. Whatever his failing Steve Jobs took his companies through the momentous changes in computer technology, animation technology, and a lot more.

Yeah, music technology. Because those days we didn't have computers, ipods, mp3 players, and the like, son. Now that you are a computer scientist who has all these gizmos, let me tell you about those days. All we had were clunky cassette tapes and gramophone records. All I had was a cassette player with a mono speaker that issued Beatles and The Doors songs with a squeak. And when the cassette jammed we had to eject it, put a pencil through the wheel which was causing all the trouble and wind it to the end of the tape and try again on the other side of the tape. Yes, the tape had two sides.

Today what you take for granted, son, seem like great revolutions to us oldies. You take all this as given while we didn't have all these luxuries. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and the lot were the men who plodded through these technical cataclysmic changes and made their companies into some of the behemoths of electronics technology.

Why Brilliant People Die Young. Mario Miranda R.I.P.

In Julian Barnes' novel "Sense of an Ending" which I am reading now, the protagonist Anthony's friend Adrian dies. Adrian is a brilliant man and commits suicide after having dated Anthony's girlfriend. The novel is wonderfully insightful and full of deceptive simplicity behind which the author examines profound meanings of life in an offhand sort of way.

Now the question posed by the protagonist's mother is very valid. Do people who are brilliant reason themselves by their superb logical powers into committing suicide? Valid question. Any answer? Most brilliant people I know (how do I name them?) have either killed themselves or worked towards ending their lives in the most obvious way. I mean their brilliance came in the way of their acceptance of things as they were. Is reasoning and local (the essence of what we call learning) such a bad thing?

Questions. Questions.

The best poets also died in their youth, e.g., Keats (age: 26), Shelly (age: 30), both of them died in the prime of youth. Jim Morrison of The Doors, himself a not mean poet, died at the age of 27 drinking and drugging himself to his death.

Wonder why brilliant people die so young.

By the by, Mario Miranda died recently. When I was editor of Ambit he used to freelance as cartoonist for the magazine. Once he met me while he came to deliver the cartoon himself (usually a boy does this menial task) and when he saw me he said, "So, now you are working here." I said "yes" and we exchanged a few words. What he meant was that he had seen me when I was working for The Week magazine at their office.

Exception proves the rule. Mario was by no means in the prime of his youth. He died at the ripe age of 85 having lived a full life. R.I.P. Mario Miranda.

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

Do You Understand What Your Business Associate Is Saying?

Dan Pallotta writes I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore in Harvard Business Review about a malady omnipresent in modern business communication.

I entirely agree.

Hat tips to Raamesh Gowri Raghavan for the link.

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

The Artist of Disappearance - Three Novellas - By Anita Desai Is Out

Here's a review of The Artist of Disappearance - Three Novellas by Anita Desai in the New York Times.

Opening with a deprecatory sort of line meaning, to effect, a mango is rarely a mango in Indian literary fiction, the review concludes with these rather grudging lines of mitigating prose:

At her finest, Desai is a brilliant anatomist of people like Prema — men and women who seek, gain, but fail to triumph in such moments and are left to play their own kind of solitaire, matching what was to what might have been.

Is Lizzie Miller Going to Be the New Trend in Modelling? Bulges Are Okay It Seems!

Is Lizzie Miller going to change the trend of ramp walkers being thin as match sticks? See for yourself. The photograph brought hundreds of approving letters to Glamour magazine which featured Miller's over-size, bulgy body. Who says bulges looks bad? Most of them admired the magazine for putting a real woman on its pages.

What about India though? Here normal is: several love handles, big hanging coconuts and jackfruits in the abdominal and posterior areas. (Not meant to criticise, as yours truly also has a bulge around the waist which seems not to go away.) What say?

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

Safeguard Needed for Telecom and Online Content

In this article in Mediainfoworld Kapil Sibal vehemently states that he is not in favour of censoring internet content in India.

Then what is the hue and cry all about?

The problem is that on the net not even the service provider knows what contents are going online. Can Google monitor all the blogs, the social networking sites, the email groups, etc. Can it monitor the discussion groups where Indians and Pakistanis exchange the worst insults known to man in Hindi and Urdu? How can the service providers monitor these?

Can Facebook monitor the acreage of content that is already online? I do understand Sibal's angst about unwarranted content going online without any restrictions. There should be filters. But none of the biggies have any sort of customer redress system.

Why, even the telecom department that Sibal heads doesn't have a monitoring mechanism for the lack of customer support among service providers. Call any helpline of a telecom service provider and you are connected to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that mechanically recite the company's ads and offers and do not give any proper response. Call any number and what you hear is, "To download this caller tune, dial 5."

This is an open letter I wrote to Murli Deora, Minister for Corporate Affairs, in this regard. Among other things I had suggested that all calls should have the option of "Dial 9 for live operator's assistance." Nothing happened.

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

King of Good Times in Bad Trouble

The self-styled "King of Good Times (KGT)" is in trouble with his finances. His airlines is suffering losses. The only time I travelled his airline, I could say I - hm - enjoyed it very much. Kindness in plenty, good service, smiles. The hostesses (in blood-red colour uniforms) were all very kind and friendly. (Unlike the Air-India hostess who laughed when my son rushed to the toilet when the aircraft had just landed in Cochin. I felt offended and asked her, "Why are you making fun of people?" She said sorry. But she shouldn't have laughed in the first place.) Above all, good food, and blankets in blood red colour. The airline made my travel pleasant.

:)

That's alright, but what about the KGT's request to the government to bail out his airline? He had built the airlines into a huge brand, so, isn't branding and marketing enough? What's with airlines that ail and tycoons that fail? Why should the tax payer's money be used to bail out (literally) a business that's making a loss?

That's something I can't, for the life of me, understand.

:(

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

Pratap Sharma, R.I.P.

A few years ago I wrote the script for the corporate film of the company I was working for. Since I was too supervise the production and the recording also, I went to the studio in Bandra to see the editing of the text and visuals. The agency executive met me at the recording studio and in the darkness of the studio he played the voice he had recorded.

As I listened to the recording I was reminded of "the voice" as the sound I was listening to bore an exact resemblance to him. I said:

"This sounds like 'the voice,' but not quite," to the executive.

"Yes, 'the voice' has become an industry standard." There are many imitators but none can capture his exact talent and style.

He knew 'the voice,' as I did. 'The Voice' was one of the people in advertising whose accent was imitated, inflections and half-tone intonations were copied, whose baritone was what studio executives craved for ad films and corporate audio visuals. I remember in the eighties sitting in darkened theatres and hearing the smooth baritone waft from the stereo speakers, creating an aura of richness and of the good life. Alas, those days are no more! They were ones sweetened by a youth gone waste, nothing done, nothing achieved.

I remember him being active till the very end. A few years ago, he attended the Kala Ghoda Literary Festival, breathing from an oxygen tank as he wasn't keeping well.

But when he died, no newspaper carried an obituary. It's a shame to let the great among us die unsung, ignored. We are a profligate people who heap praise on an actor who does a hamming job, but don't respect the memory of a man who moved the standards up another notch. I hope to compensate.

'The Voice' was Pratap Sharma, writer, broadcaster, playwright, ad man and humanitarian. He wrote a detective story serial called "Dog Detective Ranjha." He is no more. I didn't know him personally, but I will always remember him from his 'voice.'

Here's the Wikipaedia article on him. Pratap Sharma, R.I.P.

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.