Most Chennaites will not be coming to work today; the rains preceding this tropical storm have made travel within the city virtually impossible. That would mean today would be the first time (since I moved to Chennai in June 2000) that the city has lost a day of work for any reason. In a country known for frequent strikes — Bangalore was shut down for a day in 2000 when the actor Rajkumar was kidnapped, Hyderabad had its day when police fired on a mob, Calcutta shuts down because of strikes so often it isn’t even funny — this says something about the work ethic of the city.

Here’s hoping the storm misses, and they get back on their feet soon!

1 Comment

Outlook magazine has a rather astonishing aside in a story covering IIPM: TR Vivek writes (screenshot)

The Indian blogging community (or blogosphere, as it likes to call itself) is essentially a bitchy, self-indulgent and an almost incestuous network comprising journalists, wannabe-writers and a massive army of geeks who give vent to their creative ambitions on the internet. Given that the average blogger-age is 25 years, it’s clear bloggers love to indulge in hearty name-calling and taking college-style potshots at others. This is probably why some of them get into trouble.

Of course, Outlook would never indulge in self-indulgent cheap potshots. Oh no.

Thankfully for Outlook, the average Indian is still far too deferential to authority and India far too unwired for it to really get hit where it hurts — on the bottom line — the way the US media is. However the gratuitous name calling is likely to do Outlook little good because ultimately the vocal, articulate, well-to-do urbanites who comprise India’s blogosphere are ultimately its best customers, and instead of working with them it is clear some writers within the magazine have chosen to take an adversarial, condescending stance.

The outcome of that — a battle between a weekly magazine versus an always-on network increasingly reaching the most well-heeled of that magazine’s customers in an increasingly wired country — is foregone; it is a question of when not if. And given Mr Vivek’s snarkiness, I am not sure many would shed tears for him and the magazine he writes for.

4 Comments

JK over at varnam.org has a great post asking ‘What Argumentative Indian?’ to Amartya Sen’s new book. I wasn’t very happy with the book either because it seemed to me while it did a good job of supporting his thesis that many ‘Western’ notions were in fact not so Western after all, it did not do a good job of explaining why despite these ideals much of the West ended up with secular democracies while India ended up first a rag-tag bunch of kingdoms that was easy pickings for the British (who then through their education system created a new generation of educated Indians who re-introduced concepts of civic democracy and nationalism back to the country).

It seems to me that the prodigious intellectual output of India during the Vedic period had given way to near-intellectual bankruptcy around 10BC. The chief culprit that destroyed India’s intellectual depth, I would say, was an increasingly rigid and unforgiving caste system, which had a side-effect of compartmentalizing knowledge and denying a first-class education to all (incidentally making Sanskrit effectively a court language and sealing its fate by making it incomprehensible to the masses, and as a third-order effect creating India’s modern tower of Babel). A rise in superstition and ritual mirrored the decline in education, as cows became ‘holy,’ temples became richer and rituals more elaborate. Brave and occasionally successful attempts to present alternatives to this dysfunctional society would abound in the next 500 years (starting with the Siddhartha Gautama and leading up to the Bhakti Movement and the Sikh gurus) but they had little impact on the majority of India’s Hindus who returned to worshipping rats and snakes, believing in Karma and generally accepting their lot in life.

And in a few hundred years much of India would come under Mughal rule, and (Akbar’s catholicism in religious matters notwithstanding) her history would roughly mirror those of other Islamic empires: people-rich empires (rich enough in people and uncaring enough of talent, it is said, that Shah Jahan had the hands of the creators of the Taj Mahal cut off that they may never recreate its wonder again) turning out intricate works of art, craft and clothing; but ignorant of the European renaissance and the rumblings of scientific enquiry emanating from the West, blissfully unaware that their ignorance of these would soon prove their downfall.

Yes, as the good Professor argues, Indian had achieved a high level of intellectual achievement at a time when most Europeans were in bearskins. What to me matters more is that Europe came out of her dark ages and saw a continent-wide Renaissance that it followed up with a scientific and industrial revolution. Whereas India never thought of herself as being in one and as a result various renaissance movements (Mahatma Phule, the Brahmo Samaj, Periyar) had extremely limited effect, even socially.

It is no wonder the Vedic period is unfailingly eulogised by traditionalists who then blithely ignore the rot that set into India in subsequent years. Perhaps the most telling fact about this loss is that it became necessary for Amartya Sen to write his essays to help his countrymen ‘rediscover’ these ideals in the first place.

4 Comments

It’s the cover-up that gets you, not the screw-up. IIPM are about to find that out first-hand. Overselling (or tooting one’s horn for that matter) isn’t a crime, but the fine b-school academics over at the sue-happy institute should perhaps have been new-age enough to read The Cluetrain Manifesto and realize that rubbish threats (like these fine bits of public discourse involving toilets and molotov cocktails, archived here) do more harm than good.

I’m sorry I didn’t find out about this sooner, because I really have little to add to the sea of posts this has already generated. All I’ll say is IIPM’s antics were excellent entertainment (and fodder for many jokes) up to the point that people started quitting their jobs because of threats of portable computer immolation (!). I’m still waiting to see how this’ll pan out — and when someone at IIPM will realize that a high-profile court case involving a ridiculous sum of money will give them far more of the spotlight than they really wanted.

Updated 15 Oct: The Indian media continues to maintain radio silence on this, barring NDTV and a city edition of the Indian Express. Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that IIPM is one of its largest advertisers. No sirree.

Comments Off

After getting excited (against my better judgement) about today’s Google+Sun announcement, it’s turned out that the all the noise was primarily about a marketing junket — the most notable software announcement was an earthshaking Google Toolbar bundling deal.

I was expecting some noise about Google and OO — perhaps a Save to Google Storage in OO’s Save As dialog, or beefed up OO document search powered by Google. In retrospect, of course, both of those were silly — Google’s ’standards’ approach would mean the only way they’d ever offer file storage would be WebDAV and Google Desktop already searches OO files just fine.

Of course, the Web 2.0 types who got excited about a ‘webified’ OpenOffice (like many of Scoble’s commenters) had better not hold their breath. Current browser technology, even with AJAX, is very fragile (Gmail’s autosave, for example, is very flaky and I’d be very interested to see if Yahoo’s new mail handles drag/drop well — Oddpost had frequent problems) and definitely not the platform you’d want to build a solid productivity app on. And OO.o’s desktop heritage pretty much precludes it from being an effective browser-based cross-platform app… Google would have better luck with Mozilla’s XULRunner (and given Google’s wooing of the Mozilla foundation and Eric Schmidt’s refusal to get into discussing Open Office today I believe they have come to the same conclusion).

Consequences for Google: What is interesting is that with today’s announcement it’s the second time Google fans have expected red meat but come away disappointed. As a Google user since google.stanford.edu, I associate Google with simplicity and simplification — i.e., Google’s products reduce noise, not add to it. Google Search obviously reduced search noise, Gmail (either by itself or by scaring the bejeezus out of its competitors) reduced noise by removing the tedium of constantly having to delete email. Google Talk added to the noise by adding Yet Another Client to an already crowded market, and today’s announcement did not help matters. Google’s upcoming Calendar product had better be orders-of-magnitude stunning for the company to recover some of its mojo.

Comments Off