A Time To Reflect

charukesi June 30th, 2005

My blog has been changing homes - and now will hopefully stop misbehaving and disappearing at will… It is now hosted by Madman.

While on blogs, take the short MIT survey on blogs - their attempt is to understand the way blogs are affecting interpersonal and social communication… Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.

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And this cartoon on Saket’s blog reminded me of this…

• The World of Indsight
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charukesi June 30th, 2005

Another view on India - Jack Yan writes in the beyond branding blog that the next revolution in motoring is likely to come from this part of the world… (I am quoting the entire post here since it is not very long…)

Ford is going to launch a replacement for the Excursion, which by my reckoning is over 19 ft long, that’s even bigger. Somehow I think this is foolish given that oil has just hit $60 a barrel. Last time the Japanese walked all over the Americans when the Arab–Israeli War took place. This time, I’m betting it’s Tata’s $2,000 car that the Indian company is planning.

Oh, I’m betting the world’s next revolution in software, operating systems and computing could well come from there, too.

Update : Sambharmafia links to this article in newsweek on how Tata is a ‘uniquely Indian kind of multinational’…
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Talking about the lessons of the 1970s, I just had to show you this ad for Volkswagen - created by Bill Bernbach for Volkswagen showing an America reeling under the rising price of gas… This entire campaign for Volkswagen has been called the greatest ad campaign of the century - and very rightly so…

Bernbach built the Volkswagen, and particularly the Beetle story at a time when anti-German sentiments were very strong in America. Couple this with the fact that the car he was selling was ugly - no getting away from that. And with these, he built not just an advertising campaign bordering on genius, but a lovable brand too… the Volkswagen Beetle…

• Advertising , Indiawatch
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charukesi June 30th, 2005

Here is a lovely post by anthropologist Alexandra Mack Kids Day and India - her experience with children on ‘bring your kid to work’ day, where I was a tour stop, “Let’s Travel to India.”

She took them through pictures of India - and they noticed things that were similar to what they have seen in the US - familiar stuff like shopping malls and Subway outlets - and also the not-so-familiar stuf, like the village well and monkeys on the road… Her post is about how open minded kids are - They were into seeing pictures of another country, could see the similarities and differences, but at the same time were somewhat unconcerned about the differences. I mean, they thought it was cool and interesting, but not weird or “why do I care.”

I don’t know… hit them with anthropology and other cultures at an early age and maybe we’ll have less problems in the world?

True - kids are much less concerned with the (mostly insignificant) differences that adults care so much about - and they have less stereotypical baggage with which they see the world… Do read the whole post…

Update: Also read related post by curiousgawker - Multiculturalism : Mankind’s only hope

• Indiawatch , Children and youth
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charukesi June 28th, 2005

I was outraged by what I read on concentriccircle about child traffickers preying upon children orphaned in the tsunami in Sri Lanka… I happened to mention this to my husband yesterday, and he said after a moment’s thought - but isn’t this what happens all the time -innocent children are either weaned away with guile or kidnapped and forced into these?

My initial reaction was that of dismay, how can you say this? Isn’t this - trafficking in the tsunami orphans - the depths of evil? Unimaginable…? But then I thought about it - what about the millions of children who get forced into the flesh trade every year?

Why have I never felt outraged about them - or to be utterly honest, even thought much about them…? Their plight is no worse than those of the Srilankan children… Read Sunil Laxman’s post on the documentary the day my god died… The UN estimates that one MILLION girls/women are forced into the sex-trade EVERY YEAR. Even the United States is not free of this menace, with an estimated 50-60,000 girls (minors) trafficked annually.

When it is about one million lives everyday, it becomes mundane, an everyday occurence - not newsworthy…

I remember this wonderful article Atanu Dey had written - An Entirely Avoidable Great Tragedy - about the silent everyday disasters which never make the news - We are a strange lot. We get on with our lives as if nothing is the matter with the world, when 10 million children die needlessly every year. Then a stupid large wave hits and a few thousand die and we run around like headless chickens…

In his superb book, Everybody loves a good drought, P.Sainath says abut the hoopla made about the plague of 1994 - … which in turn, gave the world an apocalyptic vision of the Black Death mowing down millions in India. Actually, the plague, or anything else you want to call it (to each his own bacilli) took fifty four lives. Tuberculosis claims over 450,000 Indian lives each year, nearly eighty thousand times as many. It would be lucky to get a couple of columns in the newspapers yearly….

Diarrhhoea claims close to 1.5 million infants each year in this country - one every three minutes. That is thrity thousand times the number of lives lost in the plague.

And so on… Plague makes for beter copy anyway

So what does this mean?

Have we become so hardened and insensitive that everyday tragedies and horrors do not affect us any longer?

The larger the numbers, the better the story…

The greater the tragedy, the better copy it makes… throw in a few photographs from the scene - or even gory ones from archives will do…. and greater the glee with which we read it… It is the same ghoulish instinct that draws people towards the scene of say, a gruesome road accident… and tut tut before we get back to whatever we were doing…

Update : Selective Amnesia has just put up these two fantastic ads - I will post them here and let them do the talking for this post above…

(A 200 km/hr wind can blow away a whole State. What’s it going to take to move a nation?)

(It’s amazing the effect a cyclone can have. The people of Orissa are dying in hundreds. The rest of the country has gone blind)

• Society & Development
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charukesi June 28th, 2005

SK has blogged about Googlinglish, Google’s on-line translator tool - wherein you can translate chunks of texts or the whole contents of a web page into different languages. The translation can be done between English and French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Additionally, it can translate between German and French too..

He tried - The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak

Spanish - El alcohol está dispuesto pero la carne es débil

Back to English - The alcohol is arranged but the meat is weak

No problemo, so long as the booze keeps flowing

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And having read this, I spent a pleasant and constructively useful (for me, ok) morning at the google translator site… Thanks SK, I don’t remember when I last had so much fun without moving from my chair…

I started with - laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone

And followed a slightly circuitous English - German - French - English route…

Lachen Sie und das Weltlachen mit Ihnen, Schrei und Ihnen Schrei alleine

Et flaques mondiales avec vous, un cri et vous le cri riez seulement

And world puddle pools with you, a cry and you it cry only laugh

Sure, the way it is raining here, the world can only puddle pools with you…

And the English - Portugese - English version goes
ria e os risos do mundo com você, grito e você grito sozinho
it laughs and the laughs of the world with you, shout and you alone shout

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I was so enchanted that I went on…

Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you
French - Faites à d’autres car vous voudriez que d’autres fassent à vous
And back in English it was - Make with others because you would like that others make with you

Make with me, baby!

And the best was yet to come…. English - German - French - German - English went as follows (ok, I was jobless, I admit)

German - Tun Sie an andere, da Sie möchten, daß andere an Sie tun
French - faites à d’autres, puisque vous voudriez que d’autres font à vous
German - Gemacht an einem anderen Reisebus möchten Sie, daß andere an Ihnen machen
Finally English again - Made at another touring bus you would like that others make at you

Go figure that out… As for me, I am off to find my touring bus…

Update : Srikanth has pointed out this urban legend around “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. Do read it. Also did you know “out of sight, out of mind” English - Russian - English is “blind and insane”?

• - New media , Language & writing
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charukesi June 28th, 2005

One minute they were all walking in line…. listlessly but in a disciplined manner nevertheless…

The next minute, as my friend and I pulled out our cameras, all hell broke loose….

And this is the result…

Bare feet and happy faces, originally uploaded by Road Blog.

Photographing children, old people and rural folks is a particularly rewarding experience - there is an innocence in their eyes as they stare into the camera, that reaches out straight to you and touches you…

What is this fascination with being a “part of the picture”? Even in cases where the person with the camera is a stranger and the subject knows that s/he is never going to see the photograph…

I remember the ad for Kodak KB10 camera which had captured this insight in a wonderful storyline…

A wedding procession… the groom asks every passerby to tke a picture for him… and every passerby in turn, wants to be included in the photograph… and finally the bridegroom is left holding the camera… taking pitcures of a bunch of strangers cramming themselves into the frame… (I have googled furiously for this ad and could not find it anywhere - if anyone remembers more about this ad or can find any link to it, please let me know…)

• Advertising , Children and youth
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charukesi June 27th, 2005

Ogilvy rules, ok?

Apologies David Ogilvy - (in advertising) when you have nothing to say, sing it. More Ogilvy rules here…

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Today’s Times of India carries another article about that terrible “sport” so popular in the middle east camel racing - with children as jockeys -
Over 5,000 Pakistani children still racing camels, says Pakistan’s Daily Times. The ToI report says sometimes a child who falls off the camel gets crushed to death under the feet of other racing camels… but the race is not stopped…

And here, ConcentricCircle writes about something that is horrifying and disturbing - child trafficking in tsunami-hit SriLanka. Imagine a little girl, who has a mother and father and a nice home to play in. She is given food whenever she is hungry, probably even before she asks for it. She has a nice warm bed to sleep in and a comfortable cushy pillow to lay her head on. And the only worry in her little head as she rests on that pillow, is whether she can skip school the next day and play with her favorite doll. And the next day, there is this Tsunami and she sees water everywhere. She cries and cries and there is no mother or father to answer her, leave alone console her. Instead, there is this man who comes to her and speaks kind words, and she naively follows him. And the next thing she knows, she is shoved into a van with 20 other girls like her! She probably doesn’t even realise what her fate is! . As I commented on her blog, just the thought of these innocent trusting faces makes me want to do serious violence to these men preying upon their vulnerability…

What kind of human beings are these…?

If that is too depressing (it was for me), Gangadhar has an interesting post on Socratic Electronics - A time-tested way of centering instruction around students is to teach by asking questions. This is generally called the “Socratic method”, made famous by the Greek philosopher Socrates. Another way to center instruction around students is to have them share their new-found knowledge with others. As any teacher knows, “when you teach, you learn twice”….. Pedagogically similar to the constructivist approach to learning that I keep writing about - where the learner constructs knowledge according to his or her own understanding of the concept - construction moves the focus of learning from the teacher to the taught.

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Here I am, back from a wet, refreshing weekend break - a look at my technorati shows lots of new blogs who have linked to me or blogrolled me - thanks all of you… I have been making return visits to these blogs. And I find that I am unable to keep track of the list of new Indian blogs that I want to follow.

My blogroll here needs serious updating.

Also a while ago, I had a bright idea and went and signed up for a new rss aggregator to read only newly discovered Indian blogs - in addition to bloglines where I subscribe to too many blogs already including some on advertising and marketing. Now, I cannot remember where I went and registered… been googling for rss aggregator and newsreader and such - without any success so far… *sheepish and feeling-stupid look*

• The World of Indsight , Children and youth
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charukesi June 26th, 2005

We were driving back from an early morning drive + trek near Pune when I spotted this bunch of happy school goers. Rows of girls followed by rows of boys and then again the girls… All shepherded by a few extremely harassed teachers.

Happy kids in their smart bright blue and khaki school uniforms… straining at the leash to break away from the line…

And then I looked down… A few were wearing shoes, some chappals - while many of them were not wearing anything on their feet…

It had been raining the whole night and the day before - and the roads were muddy and potholey…

Bare feet on dirty roads, originally uploaded by Road Blog.

Oh, the children did not seem to mind it in the least - they were one large boisterous bunch. But here is my question…

Should schools in rural (or obviously poorer) areas insist on a school uniform for their students?
Does it serve any purpose - or is it one more case of blind follow-the-letter but-not-attempt-to-even-understand-the-spirit rules that infest our country?
Is the money that a school uniform takes better spent on footwear, books and bags for the children? Considering that this money is spent by parents who are already struggling to send their children to school, sometimes against all odds…

Update : Patrix has this post today on A Uniform School Code, in which he also links to a column by Raghavendra Rathore on rediff in praise of uniform design

• Children and youth , Society & Development , - Education
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charukesi June 24th, 2005

Can’t find that information on the small business you were looking for? Now there is yellowikis - business information in wiki format.
(Link through ResearchBuzz).

This is what their main page says - We want to be like Yellow Pages (http://www.yellowpages.com), Dun and Bradstreet (http://www.dnb.com/us/) and Hoovers (http://www.hoovers.com) all rolled into one - but open, free to both companies and users, global, multilingual and a lot more ecologically friendly.

ResearchBuzz quotes this from their about page: “Small companies - particularly those in developing countries don’t find it easy to set up their own web pages and get them ranked by Google and the other search engines. We hope that a simple entry in Yellowikis will help level the playing field.”

I think it is a wonderful idea… This is a boon for small businesses - a way to get noticed and connected at two levels - globally (for those ambitious service providers) and at a very micro level, within your city or local area - and for free… Check it out…

• The World of Indsight , Technology
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charukesi June 24th, 2005

Harini writes about the decision of Mumbai University to ban women from wearing mini skirts, tight tops and shorts, saying this will help prevent rape.

Rightly, Harini has taken offence to this cause-effect pronouncement - between rape and attire…

And then halfway across the world, there is this - Sartorial shock as English school bans skirts - English, as in, of England.

Sure, the head teacher Marilyn Warden does not mention the word rape here - she goes a step beyond (or is it backwqrd?) and claims that this move is to help the girls maintain their modesty.

I am sure Queen Victoria approves heartily, Ms. Warden.

Here is where I disagree with Harini - worded any other way, such a rule still sucks. Wording it differently may make the link more subtle or indirect but the link remains… Wear revealing clothes and be prepared to get punished for it…? And this is in junior high school - for girls aged between nine and thirteen…

(Just as a thought, would you condone a burgler who has broken into your house because you left a window open just to enjoy the cool breeze - come on, it is your fault, you should have kept the window shut)

The best part is to come yet - “This move,” she argued, “is meant to enhance all of our pupils’ overall educational experience.”

How exactly? Now that the girls are all fully covered, hundreds of hormonally challenged adolescent boys will turn their minds away from bare female legs and suddenly discover the joys of education (I mean the stuf you can learn from school books)?

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Related to this is a question that I have asked earlier, and been thinking about for a long time now - there has always been a rather simplistic explanation for sexual violence in a country like India - “repression”… but how does one explain such - deviant sexual - behaviour in otherwise ‘open’ countries - where sexual mores are much more ‘progressive’ (for lack of a better word for now) - where there is unlimited opportunity for interaction between the sexes from an early age - where there is no concept of ‘indecent western clothes’ - or equating jeans or a skirt with modernity / vulgarity - as in India?

• Children and youth , - Gender issues
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