charukesi June 10th, 2005
More than a million children work in mines, says a report from the Science Blog…
“Because the money they earn is crucial to ensuring that they and their families survive, many are unable to attend school at all. These children are digging for survival,” the UN International Labour Organization (ILO) says.
charukesi June 8th, 2005
A couple of random thoughts - in my mind, they are loosely filed under ‘culture’ and the kind of social discourse and attitudes it can foster..
One is on the rape-marriage incident that Uma has written about. There is a thought-provoking discussion going on around this topic on her blog - one observer has asked, then what is the ‘way out’ for the woman and her child? And I had responded to this comment saying that seeing marriage as a way ‘out’ for this woman or her child is naively believing in the lived-happily-ever-after story… just look at this picture and try to imagine their future together as husband and wife. To protect and cherish. And rape till we die?
My point was about the association of the word ‘honour‘ in relation to rape. First you ‘destroy’ her honour and then ‘redeem’ her honour - does any other culture have this connotation? Movie after hindi movie has had the hero’s sister who’s izzat has been looted by the villian. (There is an even stranger word in Tamil - karpu - roughly meaning chastity - this nebulous but ultra essential ingredient for a ‘good’ woman - but rape is karpazhippu - destruction of chastity)
The only izzat / honour I can associate in my mind with rape is self-respect - that to me is the only real ‘honour’ to get shattered in a rape victim…
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And the second thought occured to me while watching FRIENDS (come on, admit it, how many of you ever have profound ideas while watching FRIENDS) - Monica tells her brother Ross, but they (their parents) don’t love me as much as they love you. And Ross takes off on how he was a medical miracle - since he was born years after his parents were married, when they had given up all hope for a child… And then Monica followed… Simple explanation…
In India, what different connotations would this have? A daughter feeling unloved, or not loved or cherished as much as the son… Why do we let this happen?
charukesi June 8th, 2005
Are we stifling our children with too much care, asks Bageshree S in The Hindu. Are parents stifling creativity snd independent thinking in their child(ren)?
Is this the fall-out of the smaller-families-fewer- children system? Large families = more heads and mouths to worry about? Fewer children + absence of other family members (grandparents, aunts and cousins) + possibly guilt about not being able to spend time (”quality” or “quantity”) with children = OOPs, short for Obsessive Oppressive Parents?
As Tim Gill, in his article in The Guardian says, if there’s one thing today’s children desperately need, it’s some “benign neglect”.
I remember reading in ToI a while ago that in an attempt to give their kids a headstart in life, parents are putting them through personality development programmes……
A headstart to what ? Heck ! Till I was 18 or so, I did not even know I had to have a personality and so on….
charukesi June 7th, 2005
Sunil’s post the scavenger’s son and the comments on the post relating to the role of education in ’social upliftment’ triggered memories of a few young people I have met… I had written about them earlier - here it is…
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I recently met a few young girls during the course of some research in South India. It was a small town, two hours by bus from Madurai, a temple town deep South.
One of them came up to me after the group discussion and asked if I had an MBA degree. Her story amazed me….. From a family of six members, she had nurtured ambitions of doing an MBA one day. Her role model was a distant relative working in Madurai in a local company, highly respected for his wisdom and social work.
She was then in the final year of her BBA (Bachelor in Business Administration) degree. She spoke to me about the struggle she had to undergo to convince her conservative and uneducated parents to allow her to study further after finishing school. That was not the only issue; she had to travel to Madurai for this since the town did not have a college with this kind of facility. Of course, the option of staying in a hostel was unthinkable, the girl says, I did not even dare to suggest it…. Letting me study in Madurai and with boys is itself a big step for them….
So she takes a bus and travels two hours each way for this degree…. And she aims to study for an MBA.
To look at her, one would not have thought this girl had any fight in her. She was dressed in a simple salwar-kameez, with plaited hair and a round bindi. And her English was far from perfect. I know my English is not good, but I am learning, she says. It is very important because people think I am not good enough because my English is not good….. What kind of people are these, I wondered , who judged this girl on her English language skills and refused to see the sharp mind and the fire within ?
She was a bit self conscious but not at all diffident or apologetic about it. On the contrary, she was very articulate and confident. And she saw a bright future for herself…..
I wish her all the luck she needs to fulfill her dreams…..
Yet another girl I met was doing her M.A. in Tamil. I visited her home to interview her and was struck by tininess of the room which she and her parents and a sister and a brother occupied. This room and a kitchen even smaller, was home to them. Her father was a carpenter and her mother stitched blouses and other small things for neighbours in order to supplement the family income.
I was curious to understand her choice of Tamil as a subject for her M.A. and asked her if that would be of any help to her in securing a job. Much to my amazement and embarrassment, she reeled off a list of professions open to her on finishing her degree.
And not only conventional ones like teaching but areas like tourism and library management, which I, in my superior ignorance, had not imagined she would even know of. She had researched her prospects thoroughly and was very lucid about the life she saw for herself five years later….
They were clearer and surer about their future than I was at that time….
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And another post following this - Their future looks bright
But if as Dilip says in his comment on Sunil’s blog, Societal attitudes are resistant to the best efforts at education, what is the solution? What is the process for educating a whole society that believes that each individual has a place (based on his birth?) and is ‘destined’ to stay there…
charukesi June 7th, 2005
Update : please send in your nominations by 6 p.m. this evening.
Reminder call to send in your nominations for this week’s Bharateeya Blog Mela.
To read more on the BBM and to drop your comments, click here
(Yippee, this post is sticky - thanks Harini)
charukesi June 7th, 2005
More Nursery School Children Going Online .
Before they can even read, almost one in four children in nursery school is learning a skill that even some adults have yet to master: using the Internet. Some 23 percent of children in nursery school — kids age 3, 4 or 5 — have gone online, according to the Education Department. By kindergarten, 32 percent have used the Internet, typically under adult supervision.
On the one hand, children are curious - about the world, about everything… and on the other, surfing the internet is largely intuitive… especially for this generation of children born into technology… A world moving towards a constructivist approach to learning - 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.
In India, infothelas and NIIT’s hole in the wall experiment…
charukesi June 7th, 2005
From Mumbai Dope on Mid Day - Mumbai’s literacy rate is 85.6% (female: 82.7%, male: 90%) compared with India’s overall literacy of 65.4%. - I wonder how many of these men (and women too) in Mumbai learnt to read and write on the job and not formally… practical literacy…?
charukesi June 7th, 2005
New Words to Know for 2005 - link through wordlab - about “new words added to the English language in or before 2005, and reflect evolving workplace vocabulary”
I tried to pick out a few favourites from this list but that just didn’t work - so do read the entire list…
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BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps all over everything, and then leaves.
SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.
CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.
PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.
MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.
SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.
SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The Anna Nichole show or the Bachelor is a prime example.
PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the heck out of an electronic device to get it to work again.
ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.
404: Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error message “404 Not Found” (meaning that the requested document, like the person’s brain, could not be located).
GENERICA: Features of the North American landscape that is exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, subdivisions.
OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time after you hit the “send” button during which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake.
WOOFYS: Well Off Older Folks.
Have any of your own?
charukesi June 7th, 2005
This report from The Week says Xenitis Computers’ PC (AAmar PC in the east, AApna PC in the north, AAmchi PC in the west and NaMMa PC in the south) sells for Rs.10,000 - while the high end model is priced at Rs.25,000.
Apart from the current pricing, two more things are striking : the company’s aim to be the first Indian MNC in computer hardware manufacturing - the chairman, Mr. Ghosh is confident that Xenitis’s low-cost computer will help it emerge as the first Indian MNC in computer hardware manufacturing. “The Indian computer market is growing at an annual rate of 35 per cent,” he said. “Every third year, the market doubles in size. I am sure that, by 2010, Xenitis’s turnover will cross Rs 5,000 crore. Already, we have captured a sizeable chunk of the market in Bangladesh. In June, we will start shipping our products to Dubai and in September, we will sell AApna PC in Russia.”
And price control in the market - He said MNCs, which monopolised the Indian hardware market for long, were feeling the pinch. “Our brand has compelled most of them to reduce the price of their products by at least 25 per cent,” said Ghosh. “When our products from the new factory hit the market, the artificial price structure maintained by them for so long will collapse. My aim is to sell a PC at a price which is at least 10 per cent less than our existing cheapest set. In this regard, my idols are Henry Ford and Ratan Tata.”
From Business Line - Xenitis Group launches sub-10k PC, to set up manufacturing unit
Then what is all the fuss about the Mobilis please? (I now sit back and wait for Dheepak / Abi to answer this one - am genuinely puzzled - and I have always said I was tech-handicapped - am fascinated more by the economics aspects of this)
Also The Rs 10,000 solution? Low-cost PCs are the rage. While the price barrier has been broken, what about functionality? My understanding of this is that while such low priced computers may not provide the most sophisticated programs, they are adequate for basic computer functions like word processing and internet browsing - these computers are targeted at low end users in any case…
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And as I was surfing, I came across this - If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside - Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine
charukesi June 6th, 2005
I had blogged about my dropped jaw last week on seeing a full page ad for HT in the ToI. And Suhail wrote in pointing to this link from exchange4media - Warring rivals join hands. HT, TOI agree to co-operate. And today, Rediff reports Times, HT join hands in Mumbai
Cross ownership of media vehicles is one thing (ToI, India Times, Radio Mirchi blah blah) - it makes cross promotion across media vehicles easy - but advertising for a competing brand screams all lines drawn - in the battle against DNA…
Says Ravi Dhariwal, executive director and member of the board, Bennett, Coleman: “It’s not a change in strategy for either of the players. We compete for readers and advertising but that does not mean that we will not collaborate. In Mumbai, it will be a win-win situation for both of us.”
Clearly not for the readers though. Unless you are rooting for sheer entertainment value…
It will be interesting to see how long this bhaichara lasts… what will happen once HT actually hits the market?
As for DNA, the proposed June launch has been postponed for a few months - and in the current market scenario, this only spells trouble… despite this bit of imaginative and optimistic spin from DNA’s marketing head Suresh Balakrishnan The signal is clear. It only suggests that Times considers HT a lesser rival than us - and apparently this is a point that insiders at ToI agree with - Rediff also says that DNA is going to launch a new ad campaign around this theme soon.
DNA, Speak to us. We are waiting to listen to you…
I have already developed this affection for the underdoggish DNA (here you must picture my amused yet tolertant smile at Subhash Chandra’s dreams of world domination) - if that newspaper delivers even a bit of what it promises - stories that are relevant and interesting to the readers (and not the publishing group’s other media / events interests) , I am looking forward to it…
———– cross posted on Media Musings
