I Read Technology and I Muse

I think, as I read this:

“One billion people around the globe now have access to the Internet

Mobile devices outnumber desktop computers by a factor of two to one

Nearly 50 percent of all U.S. Internet access is now via always-on broadband
Connections

In the first quarter of 2006, MySpace.com signed up 280,000 new users each day and had the second most Internet traffic

By the second quarter of 2006, 50 million blogs were created—new ones were added at a rate of two per second

In 2005, eBay conducted 8 billion API-based web services transactions.”

The above document is from the messiah of Web 2.0 - Tim O’Reilly - who is pioneering the next big thing in online technology. It, I mean technology, changes so fast that one has to run to stay in place. Technology pessimist as I am, my grouse about technology is that it has alienated man and become a devouring monster of the Godzilla kind.

So what? I am comfortable with things technical. What you see on this page are examples of the technology of the future. The “John’s shared items” are widgets imported from other sites and blogs with a single click. The ones above it are RSS syndication buttons. The links below are the latest in tagging technology. Now, what? Perpetual beta? He, he. For more, as they say, watch this space.

web2.0 | perpetual beta

How Do You See Bombay?

The results of a survey I carried out on "How Do You See Bombay" is out. Fourteen people responded (thank you people!) and here are the results for you to judge.

In spite of being a dirty and badly managed city (as they say) people would still like to come back to Bombay. Is there irony there? Do you think?

Bombay | Indian City

Seats, Red Spit, and Being Steve Smith

My latest Short story (Seats, Red Spit, and Being Steve Smith) appears here. Do take a look.

call center | BPO | outsourcing

The Kritya International Poetry Festival, Thiruvananthapuram - Pictures

An Old Nostalgic Picture!

I fished out this picture of mine from some old albums nestling inside a cupboard which I was cleaning. I am sitting inside my editorial den in Army and Navy Building at Kala Ghoda, Bombay. At that time (Before I started gawking into a computer screen 12 hours of the day!) I was editor of the monthly journal of the Bombay Management Association. The magazine published management- related articles and had a circulation of 3000 copies and I did all I could to make it popular. (Yes, I had the sad duty of sending rejection slips, too!)

Those were pre-computer, pre-laptop, pre-internet, pre-cellphone days (see the clunky phone on my desk) and all I had was the Remington portable you can see beside me (misty eyed!). I used to type my editorial and articles on this beat up portable which I had to sell for scrap recently, as it had rusted from disuse. I enjoyed my work of editorship and got to learn a lot about publishing as it was done then, of which more hereunder.

Manuscripts were typeset and sent back by the press in long galleys. These were proofread and sent back to be manually pasted into page layouts. These layouts were again corrected and sent to press for a final proof. This proof was again corrected, made into positives, and then into plates and printed on offset machines. All this had to be done in one month and I had a hell of a crazy schedule back then. But, I loved the work, and those halcyon days still linger in a special place in my memory.

How Much Do You Love Bombay?

Yes, how much do you love your city? Or do you hate it? Test the depth, length and width of your love or hatred by answering this simple survey I created on CreateSurvey.

Off to Kerala for the Kritya International Poetry Festival

I am off to Kerala next weekend for the Kritya International Poetry Festival to be conducted at Trivandrum in the Vylopilli Bhavan Center. I have been given a slot under Indian languages. (Guess Rati Saxena the spirit behind Kritya is right in classifying English as an Indian language, of course, it is!)

The literary greats who would be attending is vast and I feel humbled in their midst. From Malayalam there the following great poets and writers:

1. ONV Kurup
2. Sugath Kumari
3. K. Satchidanandan
4. Kavalam Narayan Paniker
5. Vishnu Narayan Namboodiri
6. Madhusudan Nair
7. T. P. Rajeevan
8. Vinaya Chandran
9. Lalitha Lenin
10. Savitri Rajeevan
11. Jaya Kumar
12. Deshmangalam Ramkrishnan
13. Anita Thambi
14. C.P Aboo Becker

Those from abroad include:

1. Mahnaz Badihian - American-Iranian
2. Massimo Sannelli - Italy
3. Mani Rao - Hong Kong, China
4. Heidi Arnold - New York, USA
5. Lana Derkac - Croatia
6. Patrick Cotter- Cork, Ireland
7. Gerry Murphy - Cork, Ireland
8. Tae Ho Han, - Korea
9. Roberto Piperno – Rome, Italy
10. Peter Waugh – Vienna, Austria

In their midst of these greats I have been given a small slot. I feel both honored and humbled at the same time. Guess, a beginning has to be made and I am proud to read my poems in my home state, the state of Mahakavi Puthenkavu Mathan Tharakan, my great uncle.

Kritya Poetry Festival | Kerala | International Poetry Festival | Mahakavi Puthenkavu Mathan Tharakan

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

This blog is by someone who calls himself the fake Steve Jobs (You know, the one who founded Apple Computers?The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs).

But from the style and substance of his blog, he seems to be the real Steve Jobs himself. He claims to have invented the iPhone. Who else can claim that? His blog has a page rank of 6 and - hold your breath - around 30 comments per post (when I am happy if I have it in ciphers though I have named comments "Rotten eggs and vegetable"), and (it is rumored) silicon valley adores him.

Now, who could this Fake Steve be, huh?

Rant - Why I Love to Hate the Character of Lola Kutty

I have been meaning to write this for some time, but life, among other things, got in the way. I am a true blue hater of the character Lola Kutty (for the uninitiated, she is the loud character that comes on Channel V, the MTV clone parodying all things about Malayalis). Don’t ask me why, the reasons are obvious enough.

Firstly, (this is something that gets my goat, and goatee), her accent isn’t original – though she tries very hard. The character of Lola comes out as fake. The people behind the concept have done a wrong thing by targeting a community, parodying their way of life. I think they even tend to create ill-feelings against Malayalis by their portrayal of the Malayali stereotype. If this is not a slur on a community then what is?

They had a show where a Malayali chorus was organized to sing, of all things, Boney M songs. The singers, poor Malayalis, weren’t told that this is going to be a parody on their community. This means, they were singing in all earnest without knowing that they were being laughed at. Again, if this isn’t a slur, what is?

Alex is another character who is some kind of a sidekick, a dumb one at that. He has an obsequious nature and brings Lola everything from coconut water to don’t know what, and, here again, is an extension of the parody. He is shown always dressed in a lungi and a colorful shirt and has curly hair combed into a bouffant. Do all Malayali men look like him?

Lola seems to have captured celebrities’ fancy too. At a Bollywood function, stars – Amitabh for one – was seen hugging and saying “Lola we love you.” For what, may I ask; for wrongful portrayal of a community?

I have mulled at times about taking this up with the Advertising Standards Council (of which I was some hotshot functionary) but found that it doesn’t fall within its ambit. Or, maybe, the Prasar Bharti, which controls All India Radio and Doordarshan, or, just maybe, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry.

The fact that a community has been wrongly targeted and the show which does this has survived so far is something short of miraculous. Why hasn’t the Malayali community (usually very emotional about their culture and identity) reacted to this slur? I wonder.
Lola Kutty

How Neutral Are We?

The words most bandied about on the net is "culturally neutral" and "neutral point of view" etc. So, um, are we so neutered as to be so "neutralized?" Guess it makes my mind go a bit hazy there.

None other than the online encyclopedia wikipedia wants their articles to have a "neutral point of view" so that people don't post stuff that is self-motivated, and chauvinistic. As a content writer I am instructed to write in a "culturally neutral" language, i.e., no Indian words and phrases like "time-to-time" and "do the needful."

Okay, okay, I say, I have neutered my language, polished my content to avoid all those traces of my Indian-ness, but is that what we want?

culturally neutral | neutrality