What is in the address?...A lot

Pune and a few other parts of Maharashtra, where Marathi is still spoken to conduct daily business, have some weird practices. One of them is address a person you are speaking to as a relation who would normally be very senior to you in age.

For example, a woman younger than me by say five years would address me as “Kaka” (father’s brother/male cousin) or worse “Ajoba” (grand-father)! My current neighbour- who is almost my father’s age- calls me “Kaka”! At Nashik, where my mother moved to in late 1980’s, a vegetable vendor (of age 30-35) would routinely address her as “Aajji” (grand mother) when she was only 50 years old and none of her children was even married! My wife gets very irritated when a woman not much younger calls her “Kaku” (wife of Kaka). It is not just because of implied age difference but also because “Kakubai” in Marathi means slovenly woman.

I think this practice is typical Puneite’s way of snubbing people or just a sloppy habit that needs correction. If indeed you want to make the other person happy, which is likely the case in services dominated world, you should address her such that she feels younger and not older!

In South India (Karnataka, Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh) this is not so. At most places, they address you as “Sir” or “Madam” (or Uncle/Aunty). That causes no irritation and all parties involved can concentrate on business on hand.


The Artist: Peter Arno The New Yorker Jan 30 1960

How to solve any problem…American way?

Elite (or is it just nouveau rich?) Indians looked towards UK for approval until about 1970’s and since then US has replaced UK.

Many (if not most) children of our top civil servants, judges, industry captains, media moguls, established artists, military top brass, doctors, lawyers, thought-leaders and builders are now settled in US or plan to do so.

No wonder US rules over minds of India’s effective policy makers or indirect rulers.

Indian society’s acceptance of personal wealth as the only criterion of success is a further proof of how American way has prevailed.

And what else is the American way?

While I was working at a major IT transnational company, on seeing a presentation foil titled “Operating System Wars”, my South Korean colleague exclaimed that war was the only way Americans knew how to conceptualise or solve a problem!

No surprises therefore to read a survey in Newsweek June 4, 2007 that says world trusts China (46%) to act more responsibly than US (43%).

Global warming? Bomb the damn thing with water! (Haven't seen funnier and sadder picture than this for a long time)

Artist: R K Laxman Times of India June 8 2007

For Just Kicking Dust or the Sheer Joy of it?

For all the wrong reasons, Indian cricket seems to be in the news (this week- "Graham Ford on Monday announced that he has declined an offer to coach the Indian cricket team"). I wonder if we have long forgot the joy of cricket. Times of India covers the game on front page and sports page. I wonder if they realize cricket should also make it to “The Speaking Tree” –its column on spiritual matters.

Sample this:

“……It said a great deal for Smith that he did not allow the misfortune to throw him off balance. Bowling more carefully, he delivered the rest of the over to the order. Five balls went down, each of them swinging into the batsman. Three of them Troughton was able to leave alone, as they swung across his body and down the leg side, making Deacon leap and stretch to stop them from going for byes. True, Troughton played carefully, once going right up on his toes to bring the ball down on to the pitch in front of him with the straightest of the bats, dropping his wrists and slackening the fingers round the bat handle. The seventh, aimed straight at the middle stump had Troughton driving across the line trying to work it away to mid-wicket. It moved off the pitch again, but this time in the other direction, touching the outside edge of the bat as it went and winging its way chest high to Gauvinier at first slip- a straightforward, finger-tingling slip catch. He flung the ball high in delight- for himself, for Norman, for the ball, for the catch, for the score and for the sheer joy of cricket”
(John Parker “The Village Cricket Match”(1977) from cricket anthology “The Joy of Cricket” Selected and Edited by John Bright-Holmes)

During world cup 2007, Ian Chappell was asked why cricketers throw up the ball when they catch it (because few mess it up by dropping it in the process!). Person as erudite as Chappell could not quite answer it. He should have just said – “for the sheer joy of cricket!”.

Or read this Browning-ian envoi

“…Time stood still in a distillation of delight. People and place and circumstances gave visual representation of a meaning, a conception, an ideal. Cricket was itself again and all was well with my world” (From “Thanks to Cricket” (1972) by J M Kilburn)

Are we still capable of enjoying these subtle almost spiritual features of cricket or we just enjoy “kicking dust”?

Cricket resembles more and more to Hindi cinema: a lot of "kicking dust" about its personalities and very little about its quality of music, acting, story, direction, dialogues, songs etc.


“Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Watterson printed Asian Age June 13, 2007

Patenting Some Obvious Thing will Raise Inequity in the World

Bill Gates at Harvard on June 7 2007 told graduating students:
”……I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world—the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries—but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity—reducing inequity is the highest human achievement....
I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities… on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity. “

Very moving words, reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi.

TIMOTHY B. LEE in his column “A Patent Lie” in NYT on June 7, 2007 says:
” WHAT a difference 16 years makes. Last month, the technology world was abuzz over an interview in Fortune magazine in which Bradford Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, accused users and developers of various free software products of patent infringement and demanded royalties. Indeed, in recent years, Mr. Smith has argued that patents are essential to technological breakthroughs in software.

Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Mr. Gates worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want.”
Mr. Gates wrote his 1991 memo shortly after the courts began allowing patents on software in the 1980s. At the time Microsoft was a growing company challenging entrenched incumbents like I.B.M. and Novell. It had only eight patents to its name. Recognizing the threat to his company, Mr. Gates initiated an aggressive patenting program. Today Microsoft holds more than 6,000 patents.

It’s not surprising that Microsoft — now an entrenched incumbent — has had a change of heart. But Mr. Gates was right in 1991: patents are bad for the software industry…..

The Gates memo predicted that a large company would “patent some obvious thing,” and that’s exactly what Verizon has done. Two of its patents cover the concept of translating phone numbers into Internet addresses. It is virtually impossible to create a consumer-friendly Internet telephone product without doing that. So if Verizon prevails on appeal, it will probably be able to drive Vonage out of business. Consumers will suffer from fewer choices and higher prices, and future competitors will be reluctant to enter markets dominated by patents.

But don’t software companies need patent protection? In fact, companies, especially those that are focused on innovation, don’t: software is already protected by copyright law, and there’s no reason any industry needs both types of protection. The rules of copyright are simpler and protection is available to everyone at very low cost. In contrast, the patent system is cumbersome and expensive. Applying for patents and conducting patent searches can cost tens of thousands of dollars. That is not a huge burden for large companies like Microsoft, but it can be a serious burden for the small start-up firms that produce some of the most important software innovations.

Independent invention is not a defense to patent infringement, and large software companies now hold so many patents that it is almost impossible to create useful software without infringing some of them……

Only patent lawyers benefit from this kind of arms race. And Microsoft’s own history contradicts Mr. Smith’s claim that patents are essential for technological breakthroughs: Microsoft produced lots of innovative software before it received its first software patent in 1988. As more and more lawsuits rock the industry, we should ask if software patents are stifling innovation. Bill Gates certainly thought so in 1991, even if he won’t admit it today.
”
Therefore, as we remain grateful to Mr. Gates for philanthropy, world would be more equitable place if he became equally generous towards small start-up firms.

Imagine Wright Brothers could not invent the Aerial Age because of a patent……….


Artist: Chon Day The New Yorker 28 Sept 1940

Are women at the mercy of biology?

Since Victorian era began in England, in India- let alone sex-mentioning women’s monthly periods became taboo. It was not so in medieval times. Indian historians (e.g. T S Shejwalkar, D G Godse द ग गोडसे) have quoted instances when women’s monthly period was mentioned without any hesitation.

During my childhood in sixties and seventies, monthly period was a subject that could not be avoided (how do you turn down an invitation to participate in religious activities?) yet could not be discussed directly. Many euphemisms were invented. I remember one – ‘Dog touched’. My mother used it and we interrogated her mercilessly- how the hell it did! She always came up with a story. Not very convincing most times.

Although my mother never practiced it, we saw most women of Brahmin households “sitting Out/Aside/Away” during those "dog-touched” days. They were not allowed to ‘touch’ most things and people. They almost became 'untouchables'. They used separate set of utensils for eating, wore separate set of clothes and so on. The whole day, they sat in a shadowy corner of the house.

I felt great mystery every time I came across a “sitting OAA” woman. Now, how the hell did a dog touch her?!

These days in cities I don’t come across women “sitting OAA” but the subject is still treated with some hesitation. We have dozens of sanitary napkin brands on the market today, but their advertisements continue to be shrouded in mystery.

I guess the practice of "sitting OAA" had a lot of merit. It made sure a woman was freed of physical labour (sample these killers- fetching water, cooking, washing clothes) and sex during menstruation. It gave her much needed rest.

I never heard menopause being discussed at all. So following headline would sound from planet Venus.

ELIZABETH HAYT (NYT June 7,2007)“Listen Up, Everybody: I’m in Menopause”


Artist: Barbara Smaller The New Yorker 1 Nov 1999

Putting the Skinned Knees Back Into Playtime

During my school days (1965-1975) at Miraj, I wore shoes or chappals only reluctantly because they were a hindrance to free movement. There also was an added danger of forgetting them (costly items then and now) if taken off. Our pastimes did not particularly need them either.

The biggest pastime of them all was playing marbles. Two games called Benda (which since then I have realized had strong sexual undertones) and Yanhee-Ganda (literally means female and male in Kannada). Followed by Kabaddi, Aatya-Patya, Gilli-Danda, road-side barefoot Cricket and few other games which are hard to describe but thoroughly enjoyable. All under blue sky. Most times on the roadside. Occasionally on playgrounds or courtyard of a big house such as Arvind Bedekar's (where his sister Alka too would join)/ Srinivas Thanedar's Vada. Only extreme hot summer day would force us to play indoors.

We did not mind dirt (I did not think twice fetching a ball from big, open sewer), injuries (I carried skinned knees with little pus most times), heat (30+ Celsius), hunger pangs (forever hungry) and occasional mouthful by someone who felt pestered by our games (e.g a gentleman called Khare who ran a small handloom mill and hated our cricket ball hitting his tin shade). Note I have not mentioned vehicular traffic because there was not much.

Although my wife and I encourage our son to play outdoors, surely he is having less fun than what I had. When I won at marbles really good, I felt like Livermore in picture below. We did not talk to girls out in the open back then so she would be missing from my picture!

ALEX WILLIAMS has written an excellent essay on this “Putting the Skinned Knees Back Into Playtime” (NYT May 20, 2007).

“………Back then, children didn’t need to take seminars to learn to play a no-tech, simple game. In the era of micromanaged play dates, overstuffed after-school schedules, cuts to recess and parents terrified of injuries, lawsuits and predators, many traditional childhood games have become lost arts, as antique as the concept of idle time itself.

But lately, a number of educators like Mr. Cohill, as well as parents and child-development specialists are trying to spur a revival of traditional outdoor pastimes, including marbles, hopscotch, red rover and kickball. They are attending play conferences, teaching courses on how to play, and starting leagues for the kinds of activities that didn’t used to need leagues — just, say, a stick and a ball. They are spurred by concerns that a decline in traditional play robs the imagination and inhibits social interaction, by personal nostalgia, and by a desire to create a new bridge to connect generations — a bridge across both sides of the Nintendo gap.

Although their efforts have mostly yielded modest results, a hint that they may be on to something comes with the success of an unlikely best seller, “The Dangerous Book for Boys” (Collins), a sepia-toned celebration of the lost arts of childhood, complete with information on how to make a tree house, fold paper airplanes and skip stones. Within days of its publication earlier this month, the book had soared to No. 2 on Amazon’s sales ranking, right behind the latest Harry Potter installment. The book, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, sells for $24.95 in hardcover and may be appealing as much to fathers who are nostalgic for a youth they never quite had as to children.

Conn Iggulden said in an e-mail message that he routinely received correspondence from parents who yearn for a “return to simple pleasures,” which seems to stem from “potent forces, like the realisation that keeping your kids locked up in the house on PlayStations isn’t actually that good for them; or the appalled reaction of many parents to a health-and-safety culture that prevents half the activities they took for granted as kids — and that they know were important to their growth and confidence.”
“

Artist: Alan Dunn The New Yorker 24 June 1933

How six-day war “victory” metamorphosed into forty-year (and counting) war…. India are you listening?

This month six-day war is seeing its 40th anniversary. It was a huge event in 1967. I was only seven years old but I still remember some of its coverage in Marathi newspapers. Israel’s victory looked comprehensive. Don’t forget, in Indian Hindu middle-class homes there has been a tendency to celebrate Israel’s victories over Muslims.

But looking at the Middle East today, should we call it a victory at all let alone celebrate it?

The Economist leader dated May 26, 2007 says: “………the six-day war has come to look like one of history's pyrrhic victories…..in the long run, the war turned into a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbours…..Part of the trouble was the completeness of the triumph. Its speed and scope led many Israelis to see a divine hand in their victory. This changed Israel itself, giving birth to an irredentist religious-nationalist movement intent on permanent colonisation of the occupied lands…..Is there a way out? Yes: but making peace will take courage, and too much of the energy that should have gone into peacemaking has been squandered on the blame game….What self-defeating madness. For peace to come, Israel must give up the West Bank and share Jerusalem; the Palestinians must give up the dream of return and make Israel feel secure as a Jewish state. All the rest is detail.”

TOM SEGEV, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, is more scathing in his analysis : “What if Israel Had Turned Back?” (NYT June5, 2007):
“…..But peace with the Palestinians has not come one inch closer. As a result more and more Israelis realize today that Israel gained absolutely nothing from the conquest of the Palestinian territories. Speculating again in hindsight — Israel may have been better off giving up the West Bank and East Jerusalem without peace than signing the 1994 peace agreement with Jordan while keeping these territories. Forty years of oppression and Palestinian terrorism, both extremely cruel, have undermined Israel’s Jewish and democratic foundations. With about 400,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and with extreme Islamism as a driving force among the Palestinians, the conflict has become infinitely more difficult to solve.

Hence young Israelis have good reason to look at my generation and say, “You blew it.” I suppose we did. In contrast to my generation, these young people no longer presume to know what should be done to solve the conflict; indeed they often no longer believe in peace. Many resort to cynical skepticism and fatalistic pessimism. …”

We in India need to learn a lesson or two from this because many in India describe its victory in 1971 war as “comprehensive”. Recently, in an election rally speech, Rahul Gandhi, a lawmaker, was boasting about his grandmother’s “dismemberment” of Pakistan. Kashmir may not be as big a problem as Palestine but it sure is a bad problem. That is the reason; 36 years after our “comprehensive” victory, we still don’t have peace.

Let us have leaders- young or old, military or political- who talk and mean peace.


Artist: Whitney Darrow,Jr. The New Yorker 14 Oct 1967

DDT- Not a Dirty Dozen but a Godsend

Today is International Environment Day. For many people, on such a day it may be inappropriate to praise DDT, which stood for Dirty Dreaded Term after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”.

I was raised in Miraj, a small town in Maharashtra, and distinctly remember how our locality became almost mosquito-free when DDT was sprayed there regularly. Sight of white powder DDT spray itself was a promise of a good night's sleep and no nightly fever. When DDT’s usage was reduced, swarms of mosquitoes returned to torment us. Swat in Alan Dunn’s picture below was our only resort and that was not very effective while sleeping. Mosquitoes feasted on our bodies like a breakfast buffet.

Michael Crichton’s "State of Fear" states:
"......... I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.".

But for some Crichton is as toxic as DDT!

For all of those, JOHN TIERNEY has written an excellent essay- “Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science “- in NYT June5, 2007. The essay proves it’s possible to fool all the people for considerable amount of time. That’s what Carson’s book did.
Some excerpts from the article: “For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school — and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it……
If students are going to read “Silent Spring” in science classes, I wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962, titled “Chemicals and Pests.” It was a review of “Silent Spring” in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin.He didn’t have Ms. Carson’s literary flair, but his science has held up much better………….
Ms. Carson used dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass……..
Ms. Carson presented DDT as a dangerous human carcinogen, but Dr. Baldwin said the question was open and noted that most scientists “feel that the danger of damage is slight.” He acknowledged that pesticides were sometimes badly misused, but he also quoted an adage: “There are no harmless chemicals, only harmless use of chemicals.”……
She cited scary figures showing a recent rise in deaths from cancer, but she didn’t consider one of the chief causes: fewer people were dying at young ages from other diseases (including the malaria that persisted in the American South until DDT). When that longevity factor as well as the impact of smoking are removed, the cancer death rate was falling in the decade before “Silent Spring,” and it kept falling in the rest of the century. Why weren’t all of the new poisons killing people? An important clue emerged in the 1980s when the biochemist Bruce Ames tested thousands of chemicals and found that natural compounds were as likely to be carcinogenic as synthetic ones. Dr. Ames found that 99.99 percent of the carcinogens in our diet were natural, which doesn’t mean that we are being poisoned by the natural pesticides in spinach and lettuce. We ingest most carcinogens, natural or synthetic, in such small quantities that they don’t hurt us. Dosage matters, not whether a chemical is natural, just as Dr. Baldwin realized.
But scientists like him were no match for Ms. Carson’s rhetoric. DDT became taboo even though there wasn’t evidence that it was carcinogenic (and subsequent studies repeatedly failed to prove harm to humans). It’s often asserted that the severe restrictions on DDT and other pesticides were justified in rich countries like America simply to protect wildlife. But even that is debatable (see http://www.tierneylab.com/), and in any case, the chemophobia inspired by Ms. Carson’s book has been harmful in various ways. The obsession with eliminating minute risks from synthetic chemicals has wasted vast sums of money: environmental experts complain that the billions spent cleaning up Superfund sites would be better spent on more serious dangers.
The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned. Malariologists have made a little headway recently in restoring this weapon against the disease, but they’ve had to fight against Ms. Carson’s disciples who still divide the world into good and bad chemicals, with DDT in their fearsome “dirty dozen.” “


Artist: Alan Dunn The New Yorker 29 Apr 1950

p.s. DDT is not going away. Read A New Home for DDT by DONALD ROBERTS (NYT August 20, 2007) here

Let them eat cake.....Have no power of 220V? Take some lightning of 300 million volts

Maharashtra, India’s richest state, has many problems but this is kind of ironic.

It does not have electricity to support its burgeoning economy. Most of its towns and villages are suffering from planned and unplanned “load-shedding”. When a commodity become so precious you would think the state must be guarding it well.

Far from that. Indian Express dated June 3 2007 reports that even the city of Pune has large-scale theft of power. In some areas it goes as high as 36%.
India’s powerful central minister SharadPawar’s constituency- Baramati (adjacent to Pune)- has as much as 45% theft. (No wonder his voters are so happy with him!)

Now surely such electricity-less (remember both electricity and lightning have a single word in Marathi ‘Veej’) state should not suffer from deaths by lightning.

No such luck. In past one year alone, more than 650 people have lost their lives to lightning. This is as per survey done by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. For past few years, IITM has been studying killer lightning during monsoon.. Are its researchers as dumfounded as below?


Artist: Robert J. Day The New Yorker 28 March 1964

Brahmaputra

When I decided to join a tea plantation company in upper-Assam, leaving a cushy job in Nashik, Maharashtra, most people’s fear about my mental state came true! But I did not care. I had tryst with Assam. At IIT, Madras, I had stayed at the hostel named after India’s mightiest river- Brahmaputra. Since then and even before Brahamaputra had called me and I was determined to meet her in Assam.

The day I landed in Assam was a Sunday in July 1989. I was asked if I wanted to visit any place or any one. I immediately asked to be taken to Brahamaputra. I cannot describe my feelings when I reached her bank in the town of Dibrugarh. There she was. So MIGHTY, I could not see her other bank.

In Maharashtra, one may not even notice a river if there was no water in it-which is the case most times- and here was a river that looked like a sea.

My decision to come to Assam was vindicated.

But the same day, I heard some sad stories about the havoc caused by the river. They said she has swallowed whole of Dibrugarh once and she might do it again.

Asian Age of June 2 2007 reports:
“Assam is losing an average of 8,000 hectares of fertile land every year in erosion caused by stream of Brahamaputra. Assam water resources minister also admitted that a series of measures taken over the last 10 years had also failed to arrest this trend.
Minister said: "The mighty river Brahmaputra, that runs from east to west through Assam, had alone eroded away over 3.88 lakh hectare of land between 1954 and 2002. Loss of vast tracts of fertile land has made thousands of families homeless and landless in the state in the past five decades. The damages caused by flood could be repaired but river-bank erosion is engulfing the land.
If experts are to be believed the problem of erosion caused became a major problem after the great earthquake of 1950, during which the river also changed its course. The Brahmaputra took away the entire town of Sadiya and also a large part of Dibrugarh town while the entire township of Palashbari, hardly 30 km west of Guwahati, also disappeared due to river-bank erosion in the subsequent years.”

When Brahmaputra changes her course........


Artist: Rober J. Day The New Yorker 13 Oct 1934