The Porn Library of Chromepet

(This is not meant to be an adult post - it simply analyzes a model of working together as a community. Nothing offensive in here)
I went to engineering college in a suburb of Chennai called Chromepet. My first lesson in civics was in that college, from unlikely sources.
The college had several hostels, with different batches of students. There were also dayscholars (although most of us were far from scholars), who resided in Chennai and did not need the hostel services. Still, most of us spent lots of time in the hostel.
Within a few months of starting college, the hostel rooms had a good supply of porn books. Some of these books were supplied by our seniors (in the sense they were left over). Some were actually bought by our batch mates. With the frugal money supply we had, we still managed to allocate some "charity" money for buying porn. A few of us were more avid hobbyists - they got the weekly and monthly Tamil and English magazines with religious regularity.

Side Note on Porn Books
You would expect that English magazines rule; but actually the regional industry is more innovative in porn. The writers in the English magazines want to get into movies or something - so they write very high quality English with obscure vocabulary. They also take a long time getting to the point - most of the time the "incident" has happened without any warning. The Tamil porn books excel - the writers are not going anywhere, so they have more motivation to make the magazine succeed. So usually the way it works is this - you read the tamil books and then take a look at the photos in the English magazines. Repeat.


The Community Forms

Soon it became apparent that there was a problem with our collection of porn. The books were not available in one central location. Since they were distributed, someone in a hurry (don't go there) had to go room after room. Since many of these books had similar looks you may pick up an already covered book by mistake. Our premium and newer books were not well-managed - nobody knew where they were.


At this point I want to point out that the porn book collection follows a model very similar to the Web 2.0 model (as described by Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo! VP-product strategy in his blog here). 1% of the community contribute the money and the books (contributors); 10% are more active users and volunteer administrators (synthesizers). The remaining use the books (consumers).
It seems that this model will never work for anything other than porn books in the non-web world. The contributors gained nothing by spending money, getting the books and then handing them over to the consumers. But the porn books were kind of "hot property". You could NOT take them home. Plus once you had gone through them a couple of times, they are done (so are you). There is no point in scrawling your name in them or anything stupid like that. Thus, the contributors were motivated to share the books with their batch mates.

Back in Chromepet, thus, there was a strong case for some community activism that would better the situation for everyone. The first thing a couple of synthesizors did was to find a permanent location for the library. There were pros and cons in hosting it in a room - our first choice of location was disrupted because the "scholar" had his dad visit him the next week. We finally chose a classmate's room which was easily accessible and whose family did not care about him. The idea was that the library should be accessible all the time - so we put the collection next to a window which was always open.
We also had a volunteer librarian who would sort the books and put new books on top and did some housekeeping.

Issues with Community Sharing

Now, this is, of course, a trust based model. There are different reasons for it to fail:

1. It is possible for a guy to not buy a single porn book; and still manage to get the best and latest on time.
This is a classic problem and relates in a way to the "Prisoner's Dilemma". If enough people became convinced that they could get a free ride without buying a single book ever, and the contributors sensed this; then there exists a strong disincentive for the contributors to keep buying. The whole community would stop working - which would be a personal catastrophe.
Please keep in mind that, in the web world, a contributor to YouTube atleast gets to see people visiting his video, commenting and thus has a sense of fulfillment. This never does exist in the non-web-porn-book-library-community-in-Chromepet. If exposed, actually the contributor faces ridicule and ostracism (I should be writing English porn).
But, this never happened in our case. The community came together and even the poorest of us contributed atleast a couple of times to the growing library. Dare I say it, there was a sense of shared purpose.

2. If people took the books, there was no punishment for not returning a book. Actually no one kept track of loaned books and returned books. We were trying to become scholars. If this system was misused, people could just stop returning books to the library. Eventually the library would shrink and may cease to exist as a community endeavor.
Again, this never happened in our case. Our batchmates always returned the books - very rarely were pages torn and eaten. There was a commitment to keep the porn stash in its allotted place.

Thus, our model of community work survived in spite of many challenges. In a pre-web world, it is a miracle that it worked. Now, of course, with the internet, there are several porn boards and groups were people share videos, and stories. But there are several incentives for a user to gain "credits" in such a community. And of course, in a virtual environment, the user need not be afraid of his video getting "lost".


The Community Thrives

When I left the college, the library had thrived through the years. We left it to our juniors to manage. There may still be books marked with our names being circulated among younger scholars (unless they have all shifted to YouTube).
We left fulfilled that we had built an institution. I am reminded of Subrata Bagchi (MindTree) in his famous speech, Go, Kiss The World:

That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success

The danger of melancholy

I was hearing this song in youtube:


After a long time, I felt tears in my eyes. After a long time because I have been avoiding the experience of melancholy for some time now, consciously.

Here is the tragedy of human expression - in music, in literature and in movies, the best experience is the saddest.
When I was in 6th Std, I read "Sivagamiyin Sabatham", Kalki's historic novel about the tragic romance between a Pallava Prince and a dancer woman. When I finished I vowed that I would never read that book again in my life. Since then that novel has been published multiple times in Kalki magazine - and I have sneaked around and read a few lines; but I cannot bring myself to read it through, particularly the last chapter. There is this song that she dances to in the end "Munnam Avanudaya Naamam Kettaal" - I can still picture that song in my mind.

Aftre I had finished college, I had a brief break before I joined work. I was supposed to join August 1st, 1995. A week before that I had a nasty viral fever. While recovering, I borrowed the novel "Gone With The Wind" from a neighbor and finished it in three days. I would wake up every morning and start reading; continued till the night. On the fourth day, I was to go to work. I started for work, went upto the train station and then came back home. My mother was shocked. (She complained that I would retire without ever working). I sat in my room and brooded about Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler for two days.
If "Gone with the Wind" had a different ending, with Scarlett and Rhett walking off into the sunset, my response would have been very different. But, again, I vowed that I would never read that book again - after 13 years, the effect of that book still stays with me.

After marriage, and a career shaping up, I have been consciously avoiding reading books in which tragedy lurks - no Thomas Hardy style books. I seek P.G.Wodehouse or Dave Barry. I watch Vadivel comedies every night. I do not ever watch movies to completion at home - I prefer Sarath Kumar or Arjun beating a hundred people. I watch and read movies and books that I KNOW cannot cause me to experience melancholy again.
The problem is this - I do want to read better literature. I can understand subtlety. An year back I bought Jeyamohan's Tamil novel "Vishnupuram". The writing delighted me and I zipped through it, until half way through, a child passes away. I closed the book and never read it again.
Thus, I am prevented - purely from the point of self-preservation - to enjoy the best out there. If I ever went through "Gone with the Wind" or "The Mayor of Castorbridge" again, I know that it is bye-bye to work. I would be sitting and crying in a room.

The same effect happened to me while listening to Ali Abbas or Amanat Ali's singing in the music talent shows. There is a different kind of Pakistani infiltration happening now into India - those damn good singers with their Sufi style rendering. Listen to the video below and tell me how you can go face stupid programming bugs next day:


So, I keep running away from the music talent shows on TV; turn my face away from the literature section in book stores. I have stored Vishnupuram and other such books in the house in a store room so I do not have to look at them and be reminded of fictional people's tragedies. I watch Spiderman and Shrek and Arasu and Marudamalai, thinking that I can wipe away an yearning for something of substance.

A few days ago my wife successfully got me to watch an Iranian movie called "Children of the Heaven". It is about two kids who have a problem with getting a new shoe. That is it - sounded harmless. I watched the whole movie riveted. Guess what - it seemed full of lurking tragedies (although nothing happened) and I was shaking with concern for the children by the end of it.
I will never watch that movie again. In fact, Iraninan movies - you are dead to me. You are too realistic. If you can make buying a shoe so tragic, I don't care to think of your war movies.
I am planning to compensate by watching back to back shows of "Arasaangam" and "Walter Vetrivel".

Dasaavatharam

First of all, I like the movie; and this is one movie on which everyone has a different opinion. Everyone has their favorite character. A few liked the graphics. A few hate it. A few liked the "butterfly effect". A few thought it had no relevance. The 12th century scenes made sense to some; no sense to others. Kamal Hassan successfully got everyone talking.
There are so many subtleties and sub-texts that people have noticed - one person mentioned that the Lorry on which Kamal jumps in Chengelpet road had "Siva-Siva" written on it. Kamal got people watching the movie multiple times. Good job.
A few items of discussion:
1. Kamal has a problem with religions but not with all of them, as people could see. That is fine. An artist belongs to his day and age and Kamal is still a product of the sixties, with DK ruling the roost. Plus, I think the majority religion here can afford to take a few hits and not be so touchy about it.

2. It is incredible that people actually tried banning this movie - whatever happened to freedom of expression? The argument everytime in India goes, "Freedom of expression is fine..but you cannot go overboard". But who decides what is overboard? Even if a majority is hurt by a movie, an individual's freedom of expression trumps that majority. It is a fundamental right. More on this in another blog post.

3. Kamal's final conversation with Asin on God brought back memories.
Me and my friends Tayo and Lucy were having a conversation 3 or 4 years back. Tayo is a Nigerian who had finished college in Odessa, the Ukrainian port city. He was out of money and wanted to go to London and try getting a job. He caught a train in Odessa and went all the way to London (yes, that is possible). He had all his earthly belongings, and a friend's phone number in London. He lands in London and finds that he has misplaced the phone number. And cannot afford a hotel or anything in London. He cannot go back either. He is standing in the London train station, cursing himself.
At that moment, a miracle happened, according to Tayo. A classmate of his from Nigeria, a country he had left seven years earlier, walked past him in the London train station. And he had the phone number of their mutual friend.
Think of the odds of that.
Tayo finished this story and said, "That is why I believe in God".
I said, "But if God was there, he wouldn't have caused you to miss that phone number".
Lucy interjected and said, "Yes, but then Tayo would never know the presence of God".
It is hard arguing with that. I have noticed that many atheists act with lots of contempt towards religious people.I myself do not believe in God or any supreme power, but I can understand the power of that idea. Kamal Hassan, in this movie and in others, shows that contempt of the ill-informed. Religious people are not idiots.

4. One part that disappointed me was the run-up to the tsunami. Fletcher and the Japanese guy are fighting on the quayside. The helicopter is overboard. Govind and Asin are watching a little way off. How nice would it be if the camera had shown the receding of water during the tsunami? Everyone would have been oblivious except for the viewers, who had already been excited by the birds fleeing the coming doom. I though they would show that effect, but they seem to focus more on the martial skills of Kamal.

5. What was Kamal thinking about the finale of the movie? How could they show that ridiculous stadium meeting with Bush and Manmohan Singh and then K.S Ravikumar (for god's sake) dancing WITHOUT showing the titles? That ruined the whole fantasy of the movie and made it look like a circus. That must be one of the reasons people felt a vague discomfort about the movie - because the director ruined the fantasy in the end.

Overall, good movie but far from perfect.

What is the purpose of IT corridor?

(Updated Below)
When the Chennai IT Corridor (Rajiv Gandhi Road or OMR) was originally planned and laid out, I thought of it as an office district. It was supposed to be a 4 lane road with medians, trees on either side, sidewalks and so on. The part that got my attention was the side walks because Chennai as I have noted before is a very pedestrian unfriendly city. The planners have taken lots of trouble to make sure pedestrians get hurt walking in the city streets.

Now that most of the IT corridor is laid out, I am bewildered about the path it has taken. My office is in the middle of it and the government is coming up with a Toll Plaza right at the beginning of Perungudi.
The side walks are not being built and not just that - it is impossible to walk in that road because of all the building construction stuff that is laid out on both sides of the road. You walk at your own risk while IT cab guys threaten you with maddening speeds.
I am not talking about walking the whole length of the IT corridor - people have to get down from buses and walk somewhere, don't they?

Then, they are now laying the medians in such a manner that there are only gaps every one kilometer or so. That means a pedestrian has to walk one kilometer to cross over and double back to a place that is just opposite to them - or, they have to jump over the median. So you always find a bunch of people hanging on for dear life at the edge of the 4 foot tall median.

That makes me angry - the planners are obviously considering the IT corridor as a free way - there are no signals; there is a toll plaza after which you can speed your way to..to where? Where is the IT corridor free way going? This is not the high way people will choose for going to Pondicherry or Mahabalipuram. Was that the original intention? That this is a highway for going somewhere? How moronic is that?

The IT corridor, for all purposes, is being built with IT companies and other technology companies (and supporting services such as restaurants) on either side. It is an office district. It is NOT a freeway. It SHOULD have been laid out with pedestrian crossings. The government is not only giving pedestrians a bad deal - it is actually making sure that services such as restaurants or other shops on either side NEED A CAR or other vehicles to get to. In this age of global warming and all round environmental concern, the planners are laying out a road in an office district that will require a car to cross over.

In the bus stands across the corridor, people are hanging on to the edge of the road as cabs and buses speed past them over taking each other and wildly honking. People have to land exactly at their office door (and never should come out) if they want to live a long life with all limbs intact. Or they should have a car.

This is what our government has become - this was a much talked about seriously planned road and this is what they have come up with. As a utility road to fulfill a base purpose, the planners have completely failed. What they have laid out is a needless freeway going nowhere.

What should actually happen is this:
Ban private cars and IT company buses from going into the corridor at the Velachery link road and Madhya Kailash. These two places are well connected through train (MRTS) and bus.
Have the companies in the corridor pay a sum to the public transport corporation according to their employee strength. Have buses that operate all day long shuttling from Madhya Kailash to Sholinganallur.
This way private IT company buses will be eliminated (many of them travel empty). And the pollution will come down substantially because people are forced to share the road space.

Update I: Two comments are promoted to the front page. I will answer them below:
First, from subbu:

Even though the banning of private vehicles on the corridor seems to be the ideal thing to do,it is impractical to follow, as people have to come till Madhya Kailash on their own. And Chennai doesn't have an effective Mass Rapid Transit System.Think about some one coming from Thiruvottiyur to Navalur. For him sitting in the company bus and sleeping is the better thing to do than catch a bus,train,bus and the shuttle from Madhya Kailash.

The otherway is to have companies operate their buses only till the starting of the corridor but that doesn't solve any problem.The traffic and pollution level inside the city will still be the same.

Secondly from Maheswari:

I think it is premature to comment on the new OMR since lot of things are still under development. I also second Subbu remark of streamlining the private vehicles. BTW the toll plaza is not going to be hard on all sections, if i am right.

To answer subbu - what gave us the impression that there is lots of choice when it comes to controlling pollution? We HAVE to reduce fuel burning at some point - it is not about a person getting on a company bus and sleeping. That is not an acceptable or sustainable "requirement" any longer. If we started from the assumption that there are infinite resources to consume and then proceed to deduce models of transportation, of course, comfort is what you aim for. That is not the case any longer. I think it is clear to most people that we do not have infinite resources and the cost of private vehicles burning fuel at this rate is never going to work out. If you start from that, a person getting into a bus and sleeping without a change-over is the least preferable alternative.
If private vehicles were banned in the OMR, it would lead to people choosing public transportation from home. I agree that public transportation is not perfect, but then the goal would be to make it better - the pressure would be on the government to solve that problem. Now the pressure is to widen, widen, and widen roads so that enough private cars can go through. It is never going to work out.

My answer to Uma is this: How many years should we go before we CAN comment on the OMR? It has been built for the last 3 years.
Let me ask you a simple question - it is obvious that the government is building this road without pedestrian crossings and without signals. Everybody who goes in the road in a car is comfortable, while if you go walking or cross the road, you are in trouble. Did anyone ask the question about the reverse happening? Did anyone wonder why the road was not built with concern for pedestrians actually SHOWING? You think that concern for pedestrians is there and that the government actually is waiting to unveil some magic solution after 3 years. Ok, meanwhile, why are pedetsrians forced to jump over medians while cars streak along? Why do pedestrians get a raw deal every time? Why can't car drivers be forced to wait at a signal? What is the big problem here?

The truth is obvious - the government does not care about pedestrians for the same reason that it pays more attention to airports than busstands - the IT corridor is really meant for "foreigners" who can streak through in their taxis and land at office doorstep. It is not meant for you and me.

Worthy conversations

I remembered this conversation I had in Boston last year in a buffet. It stands out for the deep insights it offers into the human condition.

I step around and see an office colleague at the buffet.

"Hi"
"Hi..How ARE you?"
"Good..Good. How are you doing?"
"Very good. How is everything?
"Going fine."
(Sneezes)
"Excuse me."
"Bless you"
"Thank you"
"Well..see you around"
"See you too"
"Nice running into you"
"Same here"

And then we walked apart.

When you come back from the States..

Beware of the false prophets.
In this "global age" and the "information world", they say, you do not really have to be "There". "There" is now, it is "here". You do not have to be in India - just stay connected. That is what they tell you atleast.

But then the people who say this are clueless.

I called one of my friends in the USA, an NRI, sometime back. He is Telugu. He was talking about coming back. He said that he would return in 3 years, when Coastal Andhra becomes a separate state, with Vishakapattinam as the capital. Why? Because he loves Vizag and thinks IT companies will open shop in Vizag only if it is made state capital.
I heard this and I thought the creation of the separate state was a done deal. I mean, my friend pretty much "knew" when he was coming back.
Well, I talked to a couple of Telugu friends and here is the deal - they have been having this fight in Andhra for the last 40 years. No luck.
But my friend was pretty much convinced. I am sure he would not be so convinced if he was actually in Andhra, if he was "here" instead of "there".

People tell you distance means nothing in these times, but it does. You are more distant from realities "on the ground". No amount of browsing and discussing over the phone seems to help.

When I was in the US planning to come back, I would call up and ask people how things were. I learn that getting a phone takes one day, getting a ration card may take a couple of days and getting a gas connection - well, they will be waiting with the cylinder when I land.
After landing, I learnt that to get a PREPAID phone, you need address proof! And, get this, you need a separate ID proof and address proof. So, your passport won't help. You need your passport (which anyway has the wrong address) and then either a ration card, or PAN card or voter's id.
So then started my long struggle to "prove" that I exist and that I am me.
Gas connection - they need a ration card or something that says you do not have a ration card. How will you get that something? With a ration card, of course!
I made multiple trips to the ration office in Mylapore. People told me I had to bribe the guys there. I was worried that they would arrest me for trying to bribe a public official. Everytime I went there a guy would come up, stand real close to me and whisper how I should fill up the forms or what I should get the next time. I automatically assumed that this guy would ask me for the bribe, so I also took to whispering. Both of us would stand in the center of the room and whisper perfectly legal things to each other. Our romance continued every time I visited that place. He never asked me for money and I never offered.
It took me a year and a half to get my ration card.


When I came back I had a bunch of stories written in Tamil. I was sure that I would just have to walk up to Mani Rathnam and then say, "Mani, listen, here is a script. You need not cast me; but I would need all the royalties and merchandising profits". I was so convinced that is all I had to do - I did not plan to work when I came back. I thought I would make so much more writing for Mani Rathnam. Well, guess what, I started the daily grind within a month of coming back and I have not "walked upto" Mani Rathnam.


Lastly, the people that piss me off are the ones who said, "Go back. Stay at home and we will give you dollar business." I was busily calculating the money (in dollars) I would get working from home, maybe even working from Coffee Day. Ofcourse, nothing materialised.

That is what distance does to you. Information is not everything. Context matters.

My poor Vizag friend is worse off - he is waiting for a new Indian state to be created for his purpose.

My post in DailyKos.com - Would you relinquish power?

Below article was written by me in Dailykos.com, here. I post very occasionally in dailykos about American politics:

Political reconciliation hasn't happened, and violence has leveled off and may be creeping back up," said Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., chairman of the House committee. "So how can we encourage, if not force, the intransigent political leaders of Iraq to forge a real nation out of their base sectarian instincts?

That above is from AP article here on the Petraeus testimony.
That is a Democrat there, talking as if the Iraqis actually invited the USA to invade them.

American liberals and progressives complain all the time that Democrats in the Congress and Senate are not opposing Imperialism enough. I have seen many imply that the Democrats really do oppose imperialism, but are afraid of being attacked on national security platform.
Read that quote above - it looks almost as if Congressman Skelton admits no culpability for the United States in the current mess - oh no, the States went in with noble intentions and is still acting nobly; but curse those nasty Iraqis for being so sectarian!
The presidential candidates, of course, have to be more careful about this. They never, ever blame the policies that took America here.
Yet we are all scrounging through campaign speeches and debates to find out evidence that Obama or Hillary will indeed make a difference in foreign policy.

We can stop looking forward to that.

If YOU were the most powerful person in the world, and your "base" is asking you to relenquish that power and position, so that "America's image" improves abroad, will you do it?
If YOU were sitting in the Capitol Hill, being solicited by the lobbyists of a hundred countries around the world, knowing that you could use your military at your bidding, at your convenience, would you relenquish that power and seek "multilateralism"?

I think, by definition, it is impossible - for the men and women who are at power's doorsteps in the United States Senate, Congress and White House - to voluntarily give up power. Saying "No" to aggressive war CANNOT be done by the men and women who are at the power center. It is futile to expect that.

Of course, I accept, that if you took long term interests into consideration, it probably makes sense to curtail that power - probably. But they do not know that for sure. All that they know is that it is going to take a long time and the results are iffy, in their mind, to take the noble route of NOT using America's power.
So, what do they do?
They ignore their base.

Why complain about that? Aren't the expectations of us, the leftists, incompatible with human nature itself? How can we expect this from America's leaders?

This is what they mean when they blame "the angry left". Because these leaders know that you do NOT hold the power of America's military (I know, you think you do) - so it is easy for you to ask for moderation of that power.
The leaders are sitting with that power at their finger tips. Why would they get down from there?

There are two assumptions that mess up our politics:

1. That America is the democracy that others should aspire for. Partly true. But then you think America has already reached the zenith of the democratic system. No, you have not. You think that senators and congressmen SHOULD exercise power with caution because you think YOU are in charge. But you are not. It is no different from any other system around the world - the powerful like power. They think they deserve power. No surprise there.

2. That the right leader will tone down American imperialism. That will never happen, because it is against the nature of powerful men to take down the source of their power by several notches.
What, then, is the solution for American Imperialism?

I think we have a lesson from history - the same solution that solved British Imperialism. Imperialism can only be ultimately confronted, exposed and eliminated by the victims.

Are SEZs a good thing?

You have heard the slogans about the Indian Dream and India Shining. Most Disney movies talk about how you can become anything you want to be and how you can always realize your dreams. News media covers the stock market extensively, even though only 2% of the Indian population invest in stocks. We are told that our airports need to be privatized and maintained sleek - even though 98% of Indians do not use airports; nobody talks about the busstands and train stations that they do use. The Indian middle class welcomes Special Economic Zones (SEZs). It welcomes so called labor reform with hire and fire policies. It opposes trade unions actively.

There is a connecting thread between all of this - and it is a phenomenon that happens in the USA also. Thomas Frank covered this in his 2004 book "What is the Matter with Kansas?".

The United States state of Kansas was at one point (during the last century) a hot bed of left wing activism. Some of the earliest war protests and populism originated there. Yet,

worsening economic conditions on the Midwestern plains have only driven voters further to the right, into grass-roots antiabortion activism, campaigns against the teaching of evolution, obsessions with cultural indecency and other largely symbolic crusades

(http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2004/06/28/tomfranks/)

Michael Moore talks about this phenomenon in his book "Dude, Where's My Country?". Middle and poor voters should normally vote for increased taxes, improved labor standards, support trade unions and so on because these measures align with their class interests. For example, it is obvious for some time now that the IT and BPO industry employees need "collective bargaining" - that is, the right to organize as a union. Yet the normal industry employee opposes unions. So does their family.
That is, the middle class in India is acting against its own class interests - the question is why?

That ties in with the book I mentioned above about Kansas and the Disney movies.

The reason why the middle class is vocal for improving airports, is against trade unions and why the news media covers the stock market so much is this: our middle class believe that they are going to become rich business owners at any point soon. This is the myth that has been created by our government and media even though unemployment is now standing at 8%.
Let us take the case of Special Economic Zones - every state capital is vying to create these as a silver bullet for "creating wealth". Whenever someone protests the SEZs they are dubbed anti-development. Suddenly the intelligentsia are all about GDP-based development. But there is hardly any analysis of what the SEZs actually mean? Who do they benefit?

Special Economic Zones
A special economic zone is created out of apparently barren land and handed over to developers at a cheap cost. Companies that open there do not get any tax on their dollar exports. To be part of an SEZ you have to be a new entity - you cannot move older contracts into the SEZ.
Sounds like a good deal for business owners. We have all been hearing about how business has to be simulated by tax cuts.

But there is a hidden cost to SEZs. There is a reason that taxes exist. Just to maintain transport infrastructure along the SEZs, governments pay considerable amount of money. The company does not pay taxes - so where does the money come from?
Correct - it comes from OTHER tax payers. That is, people like you and me. Where do the benefits go to? To a set of business owners.
Thus SEZs transfer money from average people to business owners.

The idea is that business owners then can competitively succeed and that they will bring more jobs in. Thus the community - kind of - benefits by giving the business owner a break.
The truth is that nobody has really measured this and determined that the tax sacrificed and the hidden cost to the community is worth bearing for later benefits from the business. It is just assumed. And that is the problem.

For the last 15 years we are set upon a development model about which there is very little debate atleast in policy making circles. Let us consider what our development model is.

The Indian Development Model

1. Provide tax benefits to business owners
2. Encourage foreign investment by dismantling certain environmental and labor standards.
3. This will result in more jobs.
4. More money to spend for consumers.
5. Trickles down to poor people and lower middle class.
6. Wealth has been created!!

This is the model and most people reading this will probably have no problems with it. It is likely we consider this the only possible model to attain Western standards. This model depends on tax cuts and making rich people richer - the exact policies that Bush has been following in the United States for the last 8 years amid much revulsion and a 25% approval rating. Those policies have been denounced repeatedly in the USA - yet there is hardly any debate in India.
The reason why there is very little debate about SEZs and the principle they are founded upon (other than debate on land grabbing) - is because that is how the media and policy makers would prefer it to be. Those who challenge this model are not simply against the chosen model - they are against development itself!
Thus a policy that actually takes money from tax payers and transfers it to business owners is never debated in India! We blame the government all the time for misusing tax funds - yet no voice is raised against the SEZs.
My point is that there is no substantive debate - the same "meritocrats" who rail against reservation do NOT seem to be interested in proving how the development model that is even challenged in the West has any chance of working in a country where 25% are below the poverty line and 35% are illiterate.


The Indian Dream

The Indian dream does not exist - for 80% of us, survival is the dream. Instead of acknowledging that, our middle class is sufficiently brain washed as to actually support policies and practices that are against its own class interests. Let me repeat this - most of us have little chance of becoming the next Narayana Murthi. There is nothing wrong in supporting policies that will actually help our class, instead of "labor reform".

IT layoffs and corporations - Continued

Since I wrote this post, a few people have come to me and said that I have not written the corporation's point of view. I would like to respond to that.
The fact is that post was written because I do not see ANYTHING BUT the corporations' point of view in news media. There is really no criticism or inquiry into whether the corporation is fudging the facts.
We have to note a key fact here - corporations have to be regulated and challenged to be truthful and not to abuse their powers. The truth is that corporations wield enormous power and therefore that comes with big responsibilities and regulation. That is how it works in all developed countries.
Again, these corporations are pretty well behaved in the United States or the UK - only in India do you see them attempt to manipulate the system.
Let me give you a further example - has anybody noticed that the notice period that an employee has to give before leaving keeps creeping up and up? In late 90s it was one month. In some small companies, it now stands at 3 months. In Cognizant it is 2 months, I think. These same companies stick to the 2 weeks notice for employees in the United States. Has anyone wondered why that is? From a corporation's point of view, this is of course, their perfect plan for combating attrition. I would love to see it from their point of view, but their point of view violates all labor regulations.
If left unquestioned, corporations of course would LOVE if employees were bonded labor. There is nothing really like that to combat attrition, is there? What keeps that from happening? Definitely not sudden goodwill. It is labor regulations and the courts that prevent that from happening. Yet, we ignore that it is government regulations that have to force companies to behave. You see postings in online forums all the time about how government should get "out of the way" - but this is precisely why government has to be "in the way".
I know of companies that refuse to give the relieving letter to employees after serving their correct notice periods. Companies that do "creative" salary packages to make sure a part of their employees salaries stays with them if they leave. Let us not pretend that corporations are somehow benign creators of jobs and wealth - it is much more complicated than that.
They have a proper role and that role requires questioning and regulation.

IT Layoffs - Stop blaming the staff

In the recent days TCS and IBM have cut jobs in sight of a looming US recession. This has been widely reported in the media and much analysis has gone through.
I have been reading these news items and analysis, and there is a common thread running through them. A recent Ananda Vikatan article I read prompted me to write this post.
The industry "analysts" and the company's own people are at pains to point out that the employees were fired because of lacklustre performance. It is a regular "weeding", they say and has nothing to do with the company's own performance.
In the case of IBM, the people who were laid off were mostly trainees. These companies recruited these people after different rounds of interviews. Suddenly, when the US market was going down, these guys realized that they had "non-performers" among them?
This is corporate India for you - in the last few years we have become a country that shamelessly celebrates corporations. News media calls them "India Inc" as if they represent India herself. The media have been brainwashing us into thinking that nothing "India Inc" does can go wrong - and that these are men of steely will working towards a common purpose. Most corporate advertisments try to align themselves with patriotic fervor.

The middle class has gotten to think that its interests are closely aligned with those of these corporate masters.
That is why, TCS and IBM can get away with this, without criticism for their spin.
Mind you, I am not saying they cannot lay off - my point is that there is a difference between layoffs and firings. By calling mass layoffs as firings (for performance) the companies are trying to keep their reputation clean. These companies want to keep their sharholders happy - so for naked advantage, they are saying that nothing is wrong with themselves. They are laying the blame on the poor employees laid off. The truth is that TCS and IBM anticipate revenue problems. They are shedding people BECAUSE of the company's problems - not merely because of performance. By shifting the blame on the victims, TCS and IBM are trying to shield themselves.

This is cruel, because our society has no social security net for people fired or laid off. These employees are victims of capitalism and they should be called as such, instead of blaming them. The companies should be honest about this.

The point is also that in modern India, these employees have no constituency. An employer just has to say "This guy did not perform" and everybody accepts it without questioning. Performance is a general word and no one can really cross check.

This reminds me of the 2001 recession when H1B workers started returning to India. The same kind of jeering response rose from our media at that time. The writer Sujatha said that "non-performers were sent back" - as if the American companies were the ultimate arbiter of performance. I was in the United States at that time and I know for a fact that people who were laid off just happened to be in the wrong departments. Entire divisions were cut down.
You cannot call yourselves a capitalist society and then keep jeering at people laid off.

Running into celebrities

I have been living in Chennai for almost 12 years (with gaps). When I was in Madurai I frequently heard that Chennai people get to see MGR or Jayalalitha or Karunanidhi just walking around in local markets. So you could be shopping for a clothes and boom! you could run into Rajinikanth. (It was a simpler time then).
I also heard that the people of Chennai were so used to celebrities that even if they ran into Rajinikanth looking for leather pants, they do not react like "country fruits" - that is, they will not rush towards him and bother him. They will act as if they shop with Rajini all the time.
So, that was the myth about Chennai - it was hot, sweaty and rude - but then you could run into superstars anytime.
This appealed to me a lot. When we were moving to Chennai, I expected that I would be running into Mani Ratnam or SPB pretty soon. I even imagined how "cool" I would behave when I saw them. I used to debate whether I should smile at them or give them a frosty look.
It was all a matter of time.

I moved to Chennai in 1989 - and from then to just an year back, I did not see a SINGLE celebrity. I hung around all the cool places in Mylapore and Adyar and Nungambakkam. Yet, I saw no one - and I never got to practice my slow "acknowledgment" smile.

My woes continued in the United States - I visited New York City pretty often. No celebrities there either.

After I came back to India, around an year back, my luck changed. I went to the Subway restaurant to get some food. And I saw Krishnamachari Srikanth sitting and munching a sandwich with his family.
Remember this was my first time - so I abandoned all caution and stared at Srikanth so hard that his family seemed to be alarmed. They all started pointing at me and whispering and I left the restaurant very embarassed.
But I was excited - surely my luck was turning. I could figure out why I was missing all the celebrities: celebrities are like the tigers in Discovery Channel shows. You catch them at the watering hole - they still needed to eat! The reason I had not seen ANY of them all these years was because I was stone broke in college and initially at work. I ate in local tea shops. The celebrities will not be caught dead in those shops.
Now that I could afford Subway, a new world opened up before me. I visited that subway a couple of more times to see if anyone else would turn up.

Then I realized there was someone else blocking my access to celebrities - my wife. Let me explain:
By the East Coast Road in Chennai, there are sevaral resorts. One of the more famous ones is Fisherman's Cove. Me, my wife and my brother-in-law went to the Cove one day for lunch.
We were sitting in the restaurant - and I was keeping an alert eye on the other guests to see if anyone turned up. I was concentrating so much inside that I did not immediately notice that my brother-in-law and my wife went silent.
When I noticed, they were staring intently out the open french window.
I asked them what happened.
My wife initially shook her head, then relented and said, "Vikram walked by".
From the nonchalant way in which she said that, it seemed like one of her friends or something. Then I turned and saw a well built man walking further off, walking away from us and everyone in the balcony of the restaurant were waving to him. Some even had their cameras out.
I said quietly, "So you mean actor Vikram just walked by?"
"Yes."
"You, of course, mean the guy who won the national award for
acting, who kicked so much ass in Dhool, Dhil, Saamy and all those movies?"
"Exactly"
I was apalled. They apparently saw him walking in our direction, and wanted to appear SO cool that they did not even tell me that this world-famous (ok, among Tamils) actor just strolled past us.
All that I got to see was his behind.

This level of ultra-coolness hurt me again, once in the beach. We were sitting and chatting in the Besant Nagar beach. My wife said singer Chinmayi walked past. Again I was too late; Chinmayi is the singer of Kannathil Muthamittaal and Ennuyir Thozhiye.

All these celebrities sneak around my back and I am utterly clueless about how to spot them.

Then a couple of days back I hit jackpot.
I was going to work, at peak traffic time. We were waiting for the signal at one of the busiest intersections in Chennai. Suddenly police stopped all traffic. A bunch of guys walked to the center of the intersection and started exploding firecrackers. I was late for work and along with my colleagues I was cursing the person causing the delay.
A bunch of white SUVs went flashing by. And then there was a slow moving van with a open sunroof. Actor Sarath Kumar was waving to everyone in the intersection.
He did not seem to understand that we were not gathered there to watch him pass by. We all had to get to work - and in the heat and the smoke, here was Sarath kumar, mighty pleased with himself, waving at us.
Nobody waved back.
So, here was the first movie celebrity I ever saw - after so many years in Chennai - and I was already praying for him to be gone so we could move on.
Such is life.

Oh, by the way, I saw one of the guys who acted in "Chennai - 600028" in Cofffee Day yesterday. I am going to hang out more there. I am sure Kamal Hasan will come along any day.

Women's Hostels and Police Attitudes

I have seen lots of postings in online forums about how women are so free now and how they get preferential treatment everywhere and how men are suffering. The assumption is that social problems with respect to treatment of women in society, in public and private spaces is solved.

One of my friends stays in a women's hostel. I narrate here a list of problems they go through.

1. Near that hostel the women have been hit 3 or 4 times by guys in bikes. In a couple of cases the victim had to be treated for injuries.

2. When the hostelites complained to the Police, they were "advised" by the Police to behave. The policeman in charge told them the victims were to blame because he had seen some of the women talking over the mobile phone while walking. So he told them if they stopped talking over mobiles, the guys will stop hitting them.
(Remember that the policeman had no idea if the people who were actually hit were talking or not. He was "improvising" - he had seen too many Vijay movies with "advising").

3. The police apparently want to be sure that the women are not prostitutes. So they have asked for 3 photographs of each tenant to be given to the police station and their parents' phone numbers.

4. One of the women was dropped off by a male colleague because it was late at night. The hostel owner saw this and has asked to talk to the woman's parents to "warn" them.

Everytime someone is a victim our brave police steps in and blames the victim. They have no ability to stop wrong doing.

Secondly, can we even imagine ANY of this happening to a guy in a men's dorm or mansion (equivalent to a hostel)? When women stay alone our society gets all kinds of ideas and loves to harass the hell out of them for daring, simply daring to work. They always will be threatened by "reporting" to their parents.

I was talking to an inspector in a police station some time back. He said he found a couple of girls in the beach at 10 PM and decided they were not dressed appropriately. He called their dad and explained to him that the girls were "out of line".
The dad said he did not think they were out of line and police should not regulate how women should behave (as long as there was no violation of the law). The inspector told me that he yelled at the dad. He told the dad not to come to the police if "anything" happened to his daughters.

The inspector sounded very self-righteous. Apparently he thought he was within rights to warn women; he will not dare any such warning to the screaming, threatening bunch of thugs roaming the beach side.

Our society has pretty much accepted that women HAVE to be "controlled" or else all hell will break lose. That whatever is wrong with us today is mostly because of the way women dress. That women do not have the same rights as men.
In the above hostel incidents, the women are not even "bold" or "forward" or anything. They are just living their normal lives - while trying to escape being hit by bikes, while trying to stay in the good books of their hostel owner and while trying to stay in the good books of the police.

In the recent movie "Vel", in a completely disconnected scene, Surya sermonizes to Asin about the way women dress, and says "a woman should not expose the body meant for her husband" or some such bull. Leave alone the fact that his own former girl friend and current wife went dancing half naked in her movies. That this guy who dances for money actually "educates" our females about how to behave is the height of hypocrisy. It is not "acting" - that scene had nothing to do with the movie really.

I hope everyone who laments about how good the women have now shut the hell up after reading this.

Random Blogging - Telugu Movie

I was flipping through television channels when I saw the final scenes in a Telugu movie. I do not know Telugu but could follow what happened. Recording it for posterity:


Scene is in a mine shaft - Chiranjeevi appears talking lots of dialogue abusing the villain, Appa Naidu. Appa Naidu looks like a rich gentleman - why is Chiru yelling at him? Because Appa Naidu has Chiru's Mom tied up in a pit. Chiru's Dad is tied up near the roof somewhere, ready to hang. Chiru is mighty pissed at this and nears the villain saying nasty things in Telugu (which still sounded sweet to my ears).
Villain laughs, takes a step back and from top of mine shaft a steel cage falls and entraps Chiru. This further enrages Chiru. Villain is still laughing. Mean-looking guys with Naidu are also laughing. One guy brings what look like fiery tongs. They all poke at Chiru and laugh at him. Chiru's shirt torn off. Chiru seems comfortable in the mine shaft without shirt.
Suddenly, the Mom who is tied up starts speaking to Chiru - she is urging him to beat the hell out of Appa Naidu. Chiru looks at her and seems to ask "Can you see that I am in a freaking cage in a mine shaft?". Appa Naidu now turns attention to Mom (She should have kept her mouth shut in my opinion). Anyway, tap turns on and water starts pouring into pit where Mom is currently situated. Yes, she should definitely have shut up.
Chiru gets all crazy at this and starts mightily pulling at the bars of his cage. Villain and all his employees are laughing. But, wait - the bars seem to be bending. Yes, Chiru is out. Chiru picks up the huge steel cage which he was imprisoned in a minute back - picks it up with one hand and throws at Appa Naidu's staff. Staff exit stage left.
Chiru throws something at Dad who, (let me remind you), was tied up in the roof in very awkward position watching the whole show. Dad freed immediately, jumps down and starts fighting.
Things are beginning to look rosy for Chiru and bad for Appa Naidu.

But, suddenly, camera turns to show the brave Mom; Mom under water.
When camera tuens back to Chiru, Chiru is caught by Appa Naidu's reserve staff. Dad also caught. Mom gone.

(Now, a Malayalam film would have ended right there.)

But, this was, thankfully, not Malayalam; as the Mom was soon to find out. Chiru yells, "Rajaaaaaaa....". I am looking for this entirely new character.

Raja is the friendly neighborhood...elephant standing right there in the mine shaft, watching proceedings with interest. I don't know how he got in, but he did nothing when Mom went submarine. On Chiru's call, Raja comes to senses; picks up water from Mom's water tub and blows it on Villain's people.
Mom is now out of water and is smiling and happy.

She has reason to be happy - the police are here. They have been brought by Radha. The police announce their entry by shooting in the air in an abandoned mine shaft. Clever.

For those of you getting up and leaving the theater, hold on, movie has not ended.

Villain Appa Naidu and his son get Radha and jump into a mine vehicle and race along a track. Sharp Chiru jumps in another mine vehicle and goes after them at top speed. Fights with them, gets Radha transferred to his vehicle and stops vehicle before it goes over hill.
Appa Naidu and son hanging from mountain top. Chiru above, police below. Appa Naidu finally says the magic words - "Chiranjeevilu Niraparadhilu" - which I understood as Chiru is innocent.

Everybody breathes a sigh of relief and Chiru and Radha get married.

PS:
I am not making fun or any judgement call of Telugu movies - I have seen some of them and I do not really think that Tamil movies are that different. I thought it was interesting that I could understand the movie without knowing the language and even get some back story (that Chiru had been charged by the police wrongly).
I later found that the movie name is Adavi Donga - which again I could understand - Adavi means Forest in old Tamil and Donga means thief. So it was some kind of native Tarzan movie.

Does Web 2.0 exist or is it a buzzword?

Whenever I discuss Web 2.0 with a group of developers they are confused about what it means. I have referred to O’Reilly’s definition, but it is way too generic. I have pointed out that there is a Web 2.0 style in Graphic Design and that does not interest them. Every service vendor out there is talking about Web 2.0 and job portals have Web 2.0 specialists.
In spite of all this hype, it is still hard to explain what web 2.0 really means. One friend suggested content sharing between users; another mentioned Ajax based websites. There are still lots of technical people who are skeptical that there IS a "Web 2.0".

I have realized that the core fault is in asking if there is a web 2.0 to the wrong group of people – it is pointless asking developers or service providers whether they can code web 2.0 or they offer web 2.0. The true set of people to ask about web 2.0 are web users – not the builders.

Internet users have been using the web since 95. Many more begin to use it every year. These are the best people to ask – do you see a way in which your usage of the web has become different? Do you see a better web to call it web 2.0? We should be asking the political blog writer who writes commentary. We should ask the student who uses the web to research and collect information. We should even ask developers whether they USE the web differently.

Forget about Semantic Markup, W3C compliance or cross browser – what do the millions of web users see different?
As such an user myself, avid follower of political blogs and blog writer, I see such a change myself. (That change has nothing to do with Ajax).

The primary way in which the web has changed for me is in simple services that I am able to avail of and then link with other people around the world very easily. The ability to form a kind of community fast is the primary reason I feel the the web has changed.

One example is del.icio.us. By storing links in del.icio.us, I can actually observe that other people stored the same links and so take a jump in to see if they have more interesting information and so on in a rapidly complex linking mechanism. These links that del.icio.us forms sits one layer above the hyper text linking at the core of web 1.0 itself.
Reddit.com offers similar services – the ability to discuss within a community about an article.
Then of course RSS – that I can subscribe to feeds and pull information from the internet for my own content construction is amazing to me.
If I am a content author, if I want to take my content around to a community (flickr, youtube, blogger), , if I want to establish a community of like-minded people (Facebook, Orkut, MySpace), if I want to have the ability to combine this content with others effectively (Mashups and RSS), then the current web is way different from the original web.
Do not tell me that these facilities existed in some form in the original web - I don't care. These are much more available, visible and usable now and that is what I care about.

These features have nothing to do with the way the websites are built technically. They have to do with adding personal and social value.

I think Wikipedia and similar ideas are the greatest achievements in human collaboration – because they fulfill the original goal of the internet. The original goal was that all human knowledge, historical and otherwise should be available in an easily accessible, hyper-linked form. Web 2.0 adds the ability to form communities on top of this massive data and analyze it and parse it and add additional information.

Just for that, Web 2.0 does exist – it is not a phantom buzz word. It is a real phenomenon and we have to be proud of it.

Deepavali and Dogs

I live in a lively neighborhood with lots of dogs, cats, goats and hens around. My wife thinks cats are evil (or more accurately that they can "manage" life without outside help). But, according to her, dogs are innocent angels that just need to be protected.
Since I had been attacked by a dog when I was myself innocent and angelic, I had much less sympathy for dogs - and thus promoted cat welfare.
We saw some evidence for the cat tendency to "evil" the other day - near a grocery shop we found two kitten playing around. One of them was trying to attack a brinjal. The other kitty was picked up by a kid. The kid held the kitty in his hands and started petting it. The cat closed his eyes and seemed to be enjoying the whole episode.
After a couple of minutes, the kid let the cat go.
The cat sauntered off out of sight and then, started licking and cleaning wherever the kid touched. He thoroughly cleaned himself and then seemed curse the dirty human and walked away.
So, that is where cats stand with humans.
Now, Deepavali came around. The night of Deepavali I was returning back from work in an auto. Firecrackers were exploding all around.
The neighborhood dogs were getting scared as hell. I think the dogs have a short memory - they had forgotten last year's Deepavali. They thought the humans had gone crazy and started destroying the world with Lakshmi vedi. So as I entered our area, I saw that the dogs were barking their heads off. They obviously thought this would dissuade the humans from destroying the world. But none of the humans seemed to be listening.
A particulaly nasty firecracker went off - and a dog started fleeing the scene. He ran like he thought the end of the world was near - ears flattened, tail between legs.
After running for some time, he noticed that nobody else was running. The humans were just shopping as usual.
The dog seemed to realize that he was the only coward fleeing the scene. Or he began to think the crackers were exploding in his head. So he began to act brave. He slowed down. Took a casual look around - and tried to convince everyone that he was just running for the daily exercise.
Then a Oosi vedi went off next to him and then he started the crazy run again.
I reached home and the dog near my home had the same look - he was not running but he was resigned to his fate. I could see him praying for the end to be painless.
Now that Deepavali is over, the dogs are celebrating - I can hear them all night.

Sidewalks and Pedestrian rights

(Updated below)
I am posting here a few pictures of the "sidewalk" between Ramco Systems in Sardar Patel Road and the Adyar Cancer Institute in Chennai. Someone higher up made the decision that in the interests of road users, pedestrians need to suffer. Take a look at the impossible to navigate sidewalk - it has lamp posts in the middle;the government uses the sidewalk to put junk material. Vehicles speed up on the wide road horns blaring and threatening anyone who steps out of this ridiculous sidewalk.
My question is this - who made the decision that this space is enough for pedestrians and thus consigned them to this position? Who decided that the roads are "owned" by private car owners?

Pedestrians navigating past each other



Meanwhile here is a busstop sharing the space for the walkers


This is the width of the sidewalk - one person can stand


The corporation also helpfully adds useless junk



There are lampposts that are part of the sidewalk


Update I
I thought Maheswari's comment below and my answer significant - so promoted here:
Maheswari said:

Guys you are right that pavement is narrow but is there any other better alternative than this???. Being commuting the chennai traffic for past 15 years i am really frustrated and tired. Candidly,after these flyovers i feel commuting better then before even as a pedestrain also.

My answer:

Maheswari,
Let me explain the problem here:
When roads are being laid, it is a part of city planning. Now, there is a certain width of the road available. Of which you partition for traffic and pedestrians.
When you partition for traffic, you should remember that there are private vehicles as well as public transports. There is a measure called road space taken per person. That measure determines how much priority you allocate to vehicles and also how much space the road has to take.
The road space per person taken by a public bus is small - thus public buses, by carrying more citizens are performing an essential service.
On the other hand, a single person who takes a Scorpio or Bolero consumes LOTS of roadspace per person. There are estimates that they take 10 times the road space of a public bus.
So, when you lay a road, that does not discriminate between public buses and private vehicles, you end up penalizing pedestrians over PRIVATE VEHICLE owners. Because, your road's width is anticipated to accomodate all vehicles.
This is a major issue and ties up with the concept of PUBLIC COMMONS. The road is a public common and people who take up inordinate space in it have to be penalized. This is why in the USA, some cities have a separate carpool lane - because carpooling reduces the roadspace per person.
Now, imagine that Chennai has separate bus lanes. Then the question really is a tradeoff between multiple lanes for private car owners OR pedestrian safety. And the government SHOULD consider this.
What I have shown in the photographs is that the government has not even considered this.
Cities such as Shanghai which are similar to Chennai in terms of evolution, have very wide pedetrian space and considered safe for them. That is because pedestrian safety should be the concern of any city planner. The only reason it is not so in Chennai is because rich private car owners dominate the consciousness of the city and the government.

Gym Gyan

In Chennai, most neighborhoods have a public gym - there is one in Chetpet, Nungambakkam, Besant Nagar beach and so on. They have a set of parallel bars and then some weights and dumbbells. The local students hang out there in the mornings or evenings discussing body building and so on.
In such places, there are always some people who offer wierd advice - advice that apparently shows their expertise. These are well-meaning people, but some of the bits you hear are pretty unusual.
When I was in college and used to hang out at the local gym, there was one guy who was always doing parallel bars. He told me one day that if you did parallel bars, muscles in your legs MOVE to your chest, thereby making your chest look big, while your legs are very thin.
That is, according to him there was a single muscle that went back and forth between the chest and legs - depending on if you were doing Squats or doing parallel bars.
It seems pretty stupid now, but I completely believed him. One of his suggestions to keep the muscle from moving was to keep the legs bent at knee level while doing bars. With the effect that you look like you are going to the toilet while doing the bars.

One of the people who used to hang out was a state baskettball player. He made knowledgeable comments on working out so we asked for his advice on how best to workout. He became enthusiastic and suggested that all of us gather early morning at 6 AM for a visit to the Chetpet gym.
We did. He got us to run towards Chetpet from Nungambakkam. While running he kept going back and forth, trying to make us run in formation. Unfortunately, most of us were not even fit for NCC; we kept talking to each other. I rememebr that one of us actually held hands with another WHILE RUNNING. And we ran too slow - we were basically walking.
The basketball player was getting increasingly annoyed - he yelled at us. We did not care. Suddenly he screamed at us and went running back. Left us, in the middle of the road.
We just walked down to a tea shop and then returned.

One other guy traded stories of his days of working out. He said they had a "Guru". He said the Guru's legs looked like Hanuman's. Now this Guru firmly believed that a good workout meant you have to sweat a lot. He accomplished that by having the workout in an asbestos shed and then CLOSING THE DOOR AND WINDOWS! I would sweat if I was in such a room, WITHOUT working out - but these guys believed their Guru was the greatest because he made them sweat.

Are NRIs buying up all the houses?

In my house search I frequently come across realtors who claim that NRIs are willing to pay much more; and that is the reason why prices are going up.
There are several urban myths about the current rises in real estate prices in Chennai - you have all heard of them. Someone says that a friend of theirs went to book an apartment on the FIRST day of booking. The apartment was in Siruseri or somewhere in a 18 floor building. And by the time they reached the booking office all the apartments were sold out except for one in the 18th floor.
This kind of story is so common - 6 months back I was told that an apartment in Santhome costs 1.1 crores!
My wife called up a builder's office and she made the mistake of opening the conversation in Tamil. The immediate response from the builder - "You cannot afford it". No price quote, nothing - just you cannot afford it.
In my investigations to see if ANYONE is paying 1.2 crores for an apartment in Adyar, one group was always blamed - the NRIs. The realtors will talk to me with mournful faces and describe how the NRIs are able to pay any kind of money and thus us idiots in India can never buy these.
Unfortunately, I was an NRI till last year - to me it is obvious these people are bluffing. In the latest Tamil movie Shivaji, Rajni returns after 10 years in the USA with 250 crores! Is this really possible? Is it true that NRIs in the USA are so extremely rich, ready to blow their money on apartments?
(In this article I am analyzing NRIs in the USA alone - because they form one of the richest groups and thus I am safe analyzing them).
Let us look at the US census for 2000 and the American Community Survey. In 2005, there were around 2,319,000 Asian Indians in the USA. They form the richest minority in terms of median income. On an average, the monthly salary of an Asian Indian is $60000.
If you are in IT, your pay depends on your years of experience and the number of years you have been in the United States. Many MS students get around $60000 - $70000 when they start. If you are consulting your rates can vary from $35 (when you are starting up) to $70. Your rates also depend on the region you are in - if you are in New York City or in Bay Area, California, you are likely to charge much more. But your living expenses and the tax you pay are also very high in that case.

After taxes, you are likely to be saving around 6-7 lakhs per year - if you are living a normal life style. If you have kids, that savings rate will go down.

The emphasis here is that an Indian in IT in the USA is not super rich. Whether you are consulting or you are a permanent employee does not make a huge difference.
Of course, if you are an MBA from Wharton, the story is entirely different - you can earn a lot. But then you are stuck for 5 yeears or more paying off the student loans.
That is why the rate of savings I mentioned above is pretty much the standard for an IT employee - 5 lakhs if you are normal to 9 lakhs if you live shoestring and are a bachelor.

Now let us say I have spent 5 to 8 years in the USA. I have saving of around 25 lakhs to 60 lakhs. I plan to buy a house in Chennai. Would I buy the 1.2 crore one in Adyar or even the apartment in Siruseri?

Unlikely. The reason is that NRIs are as conscious about their investments as a resident of Chennai. For 1.2 crores, I can buy a good condominium in downtown Boston or Philadelphia. To imagine that Chennai as a city with no public infrastructure and no standardized property rates and even less security can command such a price is absurd. If I am an NRI and I see that I could be paying the same price for an apartment in Chennai as I am in Philadelphia, I would buy the one in Philadelphia.

I have always suspected that the NRI rationale given by realtors is a smokescreen to keep hiking their prices. None of my friends in the USA have bought property in India. If I was still there, I would not either. The problem is the realtors know that nobody is going to actually fact check their stories. Do people really believe that NRIs are ready to blow their money on crappy houses in Chennai?

The issue is also that as a very intrusive culture, Indians make it a matter of habit to be familiar with other people's pay. But, because of the prestige associated with being an NRI, nobody really reveals what their pay is in the USA. Even if your pay is high, you got to live there - and you got to spend money there. Thus people are completely unaware of the true savings. NRIs are not living in the USA JUST for the savings. There is also a quality of living that you pay for and enjoy.

This is ofcourse not true for everybody - there are a few who strike it rich. But if they do, they prefer to stay there.

One related issue is that people see a reason for this insane rise in real estate costs - they say, "Oh, this is India Shining, of course! When the economy grows, this is what happens!". That is, they say that we should all be happy about this because what is happening is a natural consequence of our economic growth. Is this true?
There is no direct correlation between a growth in economy and real estate prices - in the USA, during the recession from 2001 - 2004, real estate prices were actually going up! That is, even though the economy was down, property values were increasing. The reverse is happening now - even though the US economy is doing well, real estate is going down.
Even in India, the total growth in economy over the last two years is around 15% -meanwhile real estate prices have doubled - that is a 100% increase in costs for a 15% rise in GDP. What sense does this make?

The truth is that realtors are completely speculating and randomly pushing up the costs - while blaming the economy or NRIs. A speculation driven cost rise is nothing to be cheerful about. We need to understand that Markets require regulation - and the Indian state is really weak in regulation.

Vettayadu Vilayadu and Shivaji

This is probably a late review; but it is prompted because of a discussion I had at work. I thought Vettayadu Vilayadu was a worse movie than Shivaji and it prompted some criticism. I will explain why I think so here.
I like Kamal Hasan - I think he is a great actor; my respect for him increased after watching Virumaandi. In this essay, I am not criticising Kamal - I am criticising Goutam Menon, the director of Vettayadu Vilayadu released in 2006.
In an interview to Vijay TV after the release of the movie, Goutam claimed that Tamil movies should go international. I had no idea what he meant by that - but it raised a red flag for me. He was obviously proud of his movie and he should not be.
Movie analysts say that a movie viewer gives 15 minutes to a director to make his case - the first 15 minutes of a movie a director has to basically get "buy-in" from the viewer regarding the theme.
Take the movie "Matrix". Extraordinary fights happen within the first 5 minutes. The viewer sees a woman killing 5 police men using unbelievable acrobatics. If the movie went on like that there would have been no difference between it and "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" and hundred other Kung-Fu movies. But in the next 10 minutes the viewer is introduced to "Mr.Anderson" and the white rabbit and it is clear that the movie involves something close to the super natural and that an explanation will be forthcoming. The director now has the viewer intrigued and following his lead.
Now, if you took the fights in "Matrix" and made it a part of a movie such as "Mudhalvan" ("Nayak" in Hindi) you are taking a risk - because there is no explanation for why the hero is able to fly around in a movie in which otherwise everything is normal.
I have seen people watch the "Matrix" and then justify weird fights in Tamil or Hindi movies - including Rajinikanth or Vijaykanth movies. In "Matrix - Reloaded", Keanu Reeves fights with a hundred Smiths. BUT, the Matrix has an explanation.
That is, a movie has to be "internally consistent". The challenge is not to apply some kind of universal logic to a movie story - the challenge is that you create an internal logic that can help the viewer appreciate a movie. This is why "The Lord of the Rings" can be accepted as a good fantasy movie - it has a very good internal logical framework. I could not accept the "Chronicles of Narnia" because the director could not justify the reason why the kids in that movie were special.
This is also why people can accept certain kind of movies from Rajinikanth and not from Kamal Hasan. But more on that later.
The argument about Vettayadu Vilayadu was that Goutam Menon had introduced the genre of serial killing in Tamil movies. Therefore, in spite of its flaws, we should accept it. My friend's point was that we cannot compare it with serial killer movies in English - as a Tamil movie it was good enough.
I rejected this argument. First, there HAD been very good serial killer movies created in Tamil before - "Sigappu Rojakkal", "Nooravadhu Naal" and "Moodu Pani" come to mind. Thus Goutam is definitely not "introducing" a genre to the Tamil audience. Plus, the Tamil audience judges a movie on its own merits - we do not need to extend our thanks to a director just because he decides to "introduce" something to us out of pity.
(As an aside, there is this director Sanjay Gupta who copies Korean movies frame by frame to Hindi. He wants to be known as India's Tarantino, but unfortunately he is just a copy cat. Some of his supporters claim that he does a favor to us by "introducing" Korean movies to us. But of course, he could have done that as easily by buying distributing rights and dubbing them. Instead, he is trying to make money out of somebody else's story. That is thievery, not altruism.)

Internal Logic
The more important reason why I reject "Vettayadu Vilayadu" is because it completely violates any internal logic. Goutam shows his hero to be a completely normal person; shows very realistic shots; prepares us for a good detective story in the first 15 minutes; but then completely destroys it all by showing us the "Raghavan Instinct". This instinct lets Kamal find dead bodies buried anywhere. There is no explanation for his "instinct" - it is just hanging there.
The Raghavan Instinct is used repeatedly along with his sheer luck. In the final chase, Kamal just happens upon the bad guy while driving randomly around Chennai - what the hell?
Also, Goutam heavily depends upon shock value - I have never seen a serial killer movie in which they decsribe their whole childhood and every gory act they did. He overextends the shock value by casting the two bad guys as homosexuals. I could not understand why they were attacking women and raping them if they are homosexuals - Goutam should have had his facts straight. Apart from reinforcing the stereotypes about eunuchs and homosexuals, the movie did not enlighten us about anything.

Shivaji and the lack of logic
This whole thread is completely subjective of course.
Many reviewers have criticised the movie Shivaji for lack of logic. In the online threads there was heavy criticism of the movie and its fans.
Rajini movies are still very popular, I believe, for a good reason. I watched the movie "Anniyan" and hated it for its lack of logic. But, I could watch Shivaji and so could many people around the world. The reason is tied in with the "internal logic" I described above.
The director is trying to get "buy-in" from the viewers for a movie - but he has several resources for getting that buy-in. In the case of a Rajini movie, Tamil audience pretty much accept that Rajini movies show impossible, hard-to-believe fight scenes. They accept this even though they know that they will not accept this from other actors. What is the reason for this latitude given to Rajini? I believe it has been created over the years, mainly in the late nineties. It is also tied in with the several urban legends about Rajini - that he has more power and pull than Jayalaitha or Karunanidhi. he does have a larger-than-life image and people are WILLING to carry that into the movie theater.
I think Rajini himself understands this. He is humble as it is and has not bothered to hide his true self (unlike Vijaykanth).
So you see perfectly educated people walk into a movie hall and are able to buy a Rajini movie's story merely because he is in it. This is the fact and many movie personalities are clear about it. I am not sure that I am comfortable about this level of adulation for a person, but my point is that there is a perfectly rational explanation for the success of Rajini movies - an explanation that is common to every movie audience around the world.
If Kamal acted in a movie in which he moves his finger and a hundred people fly around, nobody will watch it. Does this mean Kamal is a lesser personality? I don't think so - the public image of Kamal as a realistic movie maker and actor carries forward when we watch his movies. He can be proud of that.

A Nation of Perceptions

A few months back, I was in Bangalore. The city had decided to extend the timeline of bars from 11:30 PM to 1:30 AM. Times Of India had invited opinions on the extension. I read a letter supporting the extension thus: Bangalore was becoming a global city. That meant we have to behave like a global city - one of the characteristics is an active night life. So we have to encourage such a night life by keeping the bars open.

Over the course of the last few years I have seen this kind of weird arguments gaining ground. It was as if someone had suddenly given a title "Global City" to Bangalore and so Bangaloreans had to behave in certain ways. It did not matter that let alone Bangalore, NONE of the cities in India are truly developed or "Global" (whatever that means). To be considered devloped you need a measure of security; a good life for the citizens; truly accountable and representative city councils; vibrant community activism and so on. The writer of that letter, instead thought the other way round - if we behaved as citizens of developed cities do and we looked similar to them in costume and we spoke like them and ate like them, then we are automatically "Global".

India has become a nation of perceptions - our policy makers, media and intellectual elite have diverted our attention from true problems and focussed on correcting perceptions. For example, the concern about the state of our airports. The reason people worry about them is because white people land in them; God forbid they get the wrong opinion. So we try to erase slums near airports. Meanwhile, has anyone taken a look at the public busstands? Or train stations? Shouldn't some money be spent on them also? Yet everybody have raised the state of our airports to be a primary concern.
The whole India Shining campaign of the BJP Govt. is another example.
The belief is that we do not have systemic problems; that we need to do little other than rebrand ourselves. When you keep comparing a nation to a corporate structure, this is what happens - you focus on advertising and rebranding and not so much on the real issues facing us.

Bollywood is of course, a classic case study in this respect. Back in 2000 there was a big buzz about Bollywood going corporate and professional. They talked about how everyone now focussed on the "script" and how people expected Powerpoint presentation s on the script! 7 years later, Bollywood is in the worst rut it can be in. It is all style (that too cheesy) and no substance. The reason is that rebranding and marketing are not enough to correct the issues with Bollywood - they need a thorough overhaul. One of the problems (as in our political system) is the rise of the star dynasties. The other is that new talent never makes it in. And of course, they are focussing on the wrong audience (NRIs).

For a country as old and as new as ours, there are plenty of problems that need to be solved. We need to be debating why the educational outlay in our budget is so low (meanwhile our defense budget keeps growing). Instead, here we are discussing how long bars need to be kept open so that we can call ourselves "Global".