iPhone, My Way
If don't have the spare cash to buy the latest cool toy on the market at least you will be able to enjoy David Pogue showing off. He takes on the iPhone in his way.
Quote
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
- Kurt Vonnegut
e-Leash
Some people are under the impression that if you have a cell phone then you SHOULD always be available all the time, be it night or day. One of the unfortunate consequences of the electronic leash is having to explain yourself all the time.
Don't piss people off. Give them an excuse. Here are some of mine:
'Hey, are you busy?'
'Actually, no! I am talking to my parents in India.'
'Where were you? I called you a million times.'
Umm... I was thirty stories underground. I don't get any signal there.
'Why did you cut the phone?'
'I did not cut the phone... my phone ran out of charge.'
'Why do I always get your voice mail when I call?'
'Why do you ALWAYS call at the wrong times?'
Link to my Photo Album
Hi,
How are you? I assume you are doing great and are enjoying the summer. I have just returned from my summer vacation and I would like to share my digital pictures with you. You know right? that I bought a digital camera a few weeks ago and I went completely berserk taking pictures. Who knows? One of them could even make it to the National Geographic!!!
Instead of my usual practice of sending you the pictures as a large .zip file, I am sending you a link to my online album (I know you don't like attachments). Don't worry! you don't miss out on anything as I have downloaded EVERY SINGLE picture. Boy! It did take a long time to upload.
A lot of them look like repeats, but you will appreciate the subtle differences. I like to be honest and I have not deleted the completely out-of-focus and badly exposed shots. By the way, since you like puzzles - all the pictures are titled IMG_(some number).jpg and have ABSOLUTELY NO comments or descriptions. I guess it would be a nice exercise for you to figure out what the heck they are all about (you already know where I went). Going through the slideshow may take a while, but you won't lose track of the fact that it's my vacation album - at least one of us is present in 90% of all the shots. I can't wait to order the prints.
Enjoy!!
- Your friend
P.S. Hope to see your online album soon.
Pankaj Mishra on The Clash Within
Pankaj Mishra reviews The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future by Martha C. Nussbaum in The New York Review of Books. Mishra not only reviews the book, but also provides an interpretation of the events in a short history capsule on Indian politics, economy, and media since Independence.
Unlike the West, Nussbaum's thesis is that India faces a clash and danger from within. There have been major changes in the Indian political and economic landscape in last decade and a half. The most salient being: the rise of religious and regional nationalism in form of the BJP and others, and the bewildering rate of growth, initially fueled by software.
His and Nussbaum's explanations for the rise of the BJP and changes wrought by their six years in power seem rather simplistic:
... after a string of successes throughout the Nineties in provincial elections, to gain power within a coalition government in New Delhi in 1998. Six years of the BJP's rule brought about deep shifts in Indian politics and the economy.
While it is true that the BJP did provide a vent to decades of simmering discontent and the urban middle-class and elite provided them support, most of the sweeping changes were more a result of adroit maneuvering in the face of mostly uncontrollable external global changes than implementation of agenda.
Apart from that quick explanation, Mishra and Nussbaum are right on many other counts. Mishra rightly states that India is a rather complicated exercise in democracy. A democracy in which, " ... India's leaders faced the problem of instituting a secular and democratic state before the conditions for it — an adequately large secular and egalitarian-minded citizenry, and impartial legal institutions — had been met."
While there is a lot of freedom in the Indian media, most papers rarely exercise that right and are have been reduced to a mere echo chamber. A fact that I as a blogger am familiar with since much of the blog world is mostly an echo chamber. Yet, the 'sensible' blog world is largely free from much of the idiotic fascinations of the Indian press. Cases in point: the overblown idea of 'global Indian takeovers' and co-option of anything that has the most vague connection to India (like Sanjay Malakar or Norah Jones).
One of the big accusations that Nussbaum via Mishra throws at us is that the new privileged generation of Indians lacks any 'identification with the poor'. The phrase is quite telling. For most us: the poor exist, something should be done about it, but for now, let's get rich and sustain the growth. The Maoist militancy in the hinterland and farmer suicides are reported but have not, for most of us, become a 'critical issue'. It can be safely said that most people of my generation, including myself, are well-meaning but we lack the necessary background and education to identify adequately with the poor. No one denies the starkness of contrast and the disastrous side-effects of the explosive nature of growth. But, mere acknowledgment of a problem does not equate to identification with it.
The other important point in the book and Mishra's essay is that mere transplantation of what has worked in America and Europe, and even China won't do. Chiefly, what I find missing from current debates on Indian economic and political policy is the lack of environmental considerations. As Mishra writes:
But it may be imperative for Indians, who, arriving late in the modern world, are confronted with the possibility that economic growth on the model of Western consumer capitalism is no longer environmentally sustainable.
For Mishra the 'trickle-down' theory of economic growth might be too slow to stem the grim outlook:
There are no easy ways out of the impasse — the danger of intensified violence and environmental destruction — to which globalization has brought the biggest democracy in the world.
Whatever your personal inclinations and prejudices may be, it is quite clear that Pankaj Mishra's voice rises above the current babble of the rabble.
A Mirror perhaps?
Sometimes we all feel that reviewers need a reviewer. (That is supposed to be the editor's job) One reviewer to my paper sent in this comment:
- TABLE 1 : (minor corretion): title and description ...
I laughed. Then sat down to work on the comment.
A Note to Bathroom Singers
Since none of you ever illegally downloaded an .mp3 or a video, or read a pirated book, this one is for you. I would like to warn you chaps that even bathroom singing could become an illegal activity, along with whistling, if things continue in this fashion as Slashdot reports: In a rather bizarre move, the National Music Publishers Association and The Music Publishers Association of America have decided to take on guitar tabs. They have served notices to a number of tab websites for infringment of copyright and IP. As a result many guitar tab websites are twiddling their thumbs and have restricted access till they figure out what to do.
Guitar tabs as opposed to sheet music are diagrams of notes and chords for people too lazy to read music and are usually transcribed by ear by some 'talented' musician. They aren't direct copies, but interpretations of the melody, chords, etc. which the publishers claim are an infringement of the artists's creative copyright over the melody. I have tried to write tabs and it does take a few hours of effort to get all the notes and chords right. It's not a simple case of running a copier, or dragging and dropping songs from one folder to another.
The publishers' claim that these 'illegal' sites make money off banner ads without permission. The publishers now want to make money from their own 'official' sites. This seems fair enough. Often Tom is making money off Dick's unpaid labour of love of creating tabs from Harry's song?
What seems fuzzy is the definition of the song IP. A large number of these tabs are often wrong, is that a copyright violation? That gives our first workaround - a silly one, one that the lawyers will have for breakfast. Assume I make a change in the key of the song, or I make a tiny, obvious error in the tab; is it still a copy? Then can I then sue anyone who uses that tab for copying? If a song sounds like Stairway to Heaven then it is obviously stolen even if it an annoying MIDI file or cell phone tone. Fine.
But where do you draw the line? At the melody? The song arrangement? Section of music? Individual riffs? Combinations of notes? Chord changes? Aren't all songs mutated copies of other songs? What is really original? Who is that guy who wrote the first I-IV-V change? He should make billions.
A simpler definition is: as long as you don't profit from it, anything goes. The next time you are in the bathroom and whistling or humming away be aware that you are infringing on song IP. While that currently qualifies as fair, personal use it is still use of IP without permission. Who's to say that in the future you might need the artist's/publisher's explicit permission everytime you play that song at house party? On a brighter note, if you do happen to be a musical genius and your neighbour is whistling a tune you composed. Sue his ass off!
A good idea would be to write a program to write a song that has every musical note, in every major and minor key, with all possible combinations of rhythm and chord changes. Yeah! Heck it will be ten miles long, but then I will have created every song in the universe.
Spaced Out
Zachary Kanin takes Sunita 'Suni' Williams's Boston Marathon in space a few steps further in this hilarious piece.
From One Small Step:
April 16—Suni Williams competed in the Boston Marathon on our treadmill. Although she did not win, she said that she enjoyed the “fresh air” and “being outside.” NASA is very pleased with us for finally doing something that people on Earth aren’t horrified by.
April 19—Today, Suni used the StairMaster to begin climbing Mt. Everest. She predicts that it will take several months to complete her ascent, but she is refusing food and water. Our colleague Oleg Kotov tried to explain that mountain climbers on Earth do not deprive themselves of sustenance, but she insisted that she would “hunt for food, like a human."
City of Djinns
There is something odd about rusticating in the Georgia countryside under a hammock and to be reading a book written by a Brit on an Indian city. William Dalrymple is one the finest scholars of the late Mughal era and one can understand his fascination and love affair with Delhi, which he calls The City of Djinns. The book, an account of a year in Delhi, is a fascinating portrait of India's capital city. He writes, "Delhi is a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic, a city of djinns".
Delhi doesn't boast the glitz or the financial muscle of Mumbai, and isn't anyone's idea of the cultural capital either. Around partition Delhi was a city where even milkmen and prostitutes could quote Dagh, Mir, and Ghalib. The indigenous poets and artists have long departed. What remains of culture is transplanted from elsewhere. Delhi, for most, is a political circus, where the Parliament meets, the location of the annual Republic Day Parade, and incidentally also the home of the Red Fort. Monuments are really empty if the culture around it has vanished. Dalrymple's central thesis is that the Partition all but killed Delhi's cultural richness that resulted from the mixing of the Hindu and Muslim worlds from the Mughal times. The Partition exodus resulted in the city being overrun by the boorish and loud Punjabis who have no love nor understanding of the city's language or culture. Modern Delhi is divided into two halves - the decaying and dying Mughal Old Delhi and vulgar and conspicuously consumptive Punjabi New Delhi. But as he explores Delhi's past, Dalrymple cannot escape the Punjabis who now run the city and grudgingly he gives them their due. He rents an apartment from the iron-fisted Partition-refugee Mrs. Puri and is driven around by the irrepressible Balwinder Singh from the International Backside Taxi (backside denoting its location behind the International Centre).
The world that he writes about is from the late 1980s (the book was published in 1993) where he had many encounter with the famous Indian bureaucracy, but things have not changed much since at least in terms of preserving history, culture, and architecture. He writes about two brothers from a family of nastaliq calligraphers. One brother continues to preserve the dying art and the other, the more pragmatic of the two, has all but shunned it in favour of taking soft-porn photos in the same premises where his ancestors laboured for princes, omrahs, and scholars. The death and decay continue. Monuments are still uncared for, valuable papers are still rotting in basements, and grotesque improvements and changes are being made in places that are of great historical importance.
In middle of this captivating account, the mid-morning Georgia sun made it presence felt and I had to run indoors for cover. I was halfway across the world but this plot of earth is only 10 degrees north of Delhi and in any case the red earth of Georgia does remind me of the Red Fort.
Banker to the Poor
If you want to make money on the stock market all you need to do is to remember to 'buy high and sell low'. Correct advice on what to do, but ultimately useless since it does not tell how. Similar is the concept that 'free market economics and education' is the answer to the problems in developing countries. Pray tell me how?
Muhammad Yunus's book 'Banker to the Poor' is an extraordinary tale of an extraordinary person doing rather ordinary things for the most ordinary of people. It is a story of great courage and determination in the pursuit of an idea that was considered to be doomed from the start.
Muhammad Yunus is a patriot, who gave up a professorship in the U.S. to return to his country in 1971 following independence to help rebuild the new nation of Bangladesh. He got disillusioned with his first job at the Planning Commission and accepted professorship at Chittagong University. All along Yunus was really hunting for a cause. Before he hit upon the idea for Grameen in 1976, Yunus tried a number of things to help the villages around Chittagong university.
If Yunus hadn't been the head of the Department of Economics at Chittagong University, he would have been booted out by the bankers and officials when they first heard his hare-brained scheme to lend money to poorest people, ones who had no credit history or collateral. It was a scheme that was not only against all banking principles, but also against plain logic. The said that the poor would simply use the money for their own needs and not for a business and the project would surely fail.
Yet, he persisted and they lent him some money for a pilot scheme.
Only upon reading the book did I realise that in addition there were also social conditions that Yunus had to fight against. Yunus knew that he needed to target women to really make a difference. In Bangladesh most women observed purdah, left all economic decisions to the male in the household, so even getting them take the credit that was being offered was hard. On one hand were the religious right who claimed that women running businesses and taking loans was against Islamic law. On the other hand were the communists who insisted that this was 'capitalist' plot to rob the poor of their despair and rage.
Yunus is a devout Muslim, but not an Islamist. He tries to shy away from 'isms' and and he writes:
I am not a capitalist in the simplistic left/right sense. Bu I do believe in the power of the global free-market economy and in using capitalist tools... The able-bodied poor don't want charity. The dole only increases their misery, robs them incentive and, more important, of self-respect.
Povery is not created by the poor. It is created by the structures of society and the policies pursued by society. Change the structure as we are doing in Bangladesh, and you will see that the poor change their own lives.
It wasn't that Yunus simply had faith in the poor, he saw them differently. He did not see the poor as beggars but as potential entrepreneurs. Yunus did not patronize them gave them a thimbleful of help and hope and they responded. But why were the poor so much better at returning the money that Grameen lent them? Because that was their only chance to get out. It wasn't charity that they were seeking, all they wanted were the barest means for self-empowerment.
In hindsight all this seems quite logical, but many such schemes have failed to take off in other places. Why? Understanding a good idea is one thing, but implementing it is another. There is nothing small or simple about microfinance. It requires very specialized skills, lots of energy, and an acute understanding of local conditions. Grameen's success can be credited to the remarkable innovation and adaptability of their schemes. After every project Yunus and his team refined their program. In the early years, new hires were chiefly asked to observe and then criticize current schemes, and then they were asked to give their own ideas and suggestions for improvement.
Yunus isn't much of a believer in the 'trickle-down' theory and for a long time opposed the World Bank. Even schemes to directly help the poor are flawed. According to him, almost 75% of aid money is spent on commodities, technologies, and salaries of experts from the donor country itself. The rest of the money, if not embezzled, is spent on making the locals dependent on donor technology as opposed to harnessing local tools and technology effectively. And in most cases all development benefits and advantages are always captured by the privileged.
He mocks the per capita system of assessing economic growth. In his opinion, a correct measure of a country is assessing the per capita growth of the bottom 50%, more realistically the bottom 25%, of the population.
Microfinance, the hare-brained scheme of 1970s has now attracted the attention of the largest and biggest banks. With 97% of the loans being honored, they see it as another way to make a profit. While they can't realistically be expected to match the evangelical zeal of Yunus and his Grameen Bank, they still need to lend to the poorest. Currently, as the Economist recently reported, these banks are still vary of lending to poorest and are mostly lending to institutions, like Grameen, who have a proven track record. Ironic, huh?
It is easy to dismiss Yunus's aim to eradicate world poverty by 2050. In the 25 years of the Grameen bank's existence, it has not made much of dent in eradicating poverty in Bangladesh and there are no comprehensive studies to show that microfinance really alleviates poverty. But, it did make a difference to 6.6m of its borrowers. It did change the idea of how banking for the poor works. How many of us really are interested in being part of a solution?
Tax Forms
Forms have the weirdest questions to which no sane person would ever write 'Yes'. For example, "Have you ever been a member of the Nazi Party?" What??
If you survived T-Day last Tuesday, did you notice this non sequitur?
On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.
- Tom Lehrer
Kurt Vonnegut is in Heaven Now
I have to break my current work-imposed silence to write about Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Words on the book-jackets read,
Kurt Vonnegut is among the few grandmasters of American letters, one without whom the very term American literature would mean much less than it does.
American letters means a little less today. His books will always mean a lot to me. You can pick up any book and start on any page, you will be amused and entertained, and still have learned something. His books are rambling, often without a real thread. You don't read Vonnegut, it reads you. They will change the way you view the world without bullying you about it. Vonnegut wanted us to be humans and simply do the decent thing. Life is hard, shit happens, people are mean, things don't turn out the way they do. Kurt knew it too, as he battled depression for a number of years. But, he had the grace to understand and tell us not to forget to enjoy drinking lemonade under the shade of a tree. He said, "If this isn't nice, what is?"
It is always interesting to walk in a bookstore and see where they place Kurt Vonnegut's books. I always felt that there should a separate section called "Vonnegut". He gave us a few of the most colorful characters in fiction, famously the best-selling, but unknown sci-fi writer - Kilgore Trout.
Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet. Perhaps now Vonnegut will know if the following statement, one that he often made, is true:
"Life is no way to treat an animal".
Previous posts on Kurt Vonnegut:
Man Without a Country. Hear Kurt talks about his books and life in a recent interview on NPR.
Slaughter House Five
For a humanist the thought of being in heaven after death is a big joke. When asked about Issac Asimov, a past president of the American Humanist Society, he often joked, "Issac is in heaven now." Wish Kurt a good time with Issac up there!
Between the High and Low
The blog world is full of pretentious characters. How must one survive? In his characteristic sardonic way, Sinfully Pinstripe offers advice on
How to be a lower-middle brow reader. A reader defined as:
One who technically should not be having any views on Llosa or Woolf because he appreciates Tom Robbins, but one who has sniggering rights at that hot babe who is turning the pages of 'Angels and Demons' at Coffee Day (And why just sniggering rights, who can even walk up to her and suggest her a book ...
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