A Time To Reflect

charukesi March 3rd, 2006

The debate on comments in blogs is never-ending. Me personally, commento ergo bloggum (Latin makes me sound so cool - and clueless)… Which roughly means, I keep blogging because you in your nice and naive way keep leaving comments, thereby egging me on. You may or may not have noticed but I need little encouragement to go on and on. Anyway, I am all in agreement with this old jungle saying - “For all sad words of pen, tongue or keyboard, the saddest are these: 0 comments” (very wise words for an anonymous blogger except I am not admitting here I think he is wise).

Comments or no comments, it is never easy. Turn off your comments (it is your blog afer all) and you will have the readers up on their hind legs baying for your blood. And all this advice about what makes a blog a blog from perfect strangers. Trust your fellow men - or women or aliens from outer space - to be normal and polite and leave your comments section open. And you are asking for trouble. The world’s unheard voices pipe up as one voice on your comments section with gems ranging from the mildly rebuking you have no clue what you are talking about, you numb-skulled moron, to the nasty personal, I know your dad used to eat fourteen dodo eggs for breakfast every day, so don’t get all sanctimonious about the bird flu kinds.

And if you are still reading this, you will be familiar with the other kind of commentor. No, not the overwhelmingly nice stranger who says I love your blog. Very interesting site. Please visit my site on teenage acne sex or tries to sell extremely intresting and useful products such as penis enlargement pills to you on your blog. No, not those.

I mean those commentors who leave completely irrelevant and touching comments on your blog based on one quick word they caught in your entire page long post. Much like google ads which say, “reads” my rant against the fairness creams market and promptly puts up ads for fariness products right on top of my blog, thus destroying any little credibility I may have among readers.

Comments which scream out - I am a nutcase, laugh at me. I find myself loaded wth these especially when I write on education or employment (or what can be loosely construed as employment related posts) - then I find that I have suddenly turned into an agony-aunt-meets-financial-shark types blogger and people are writing in asking for advice on finding similar jobs or admission to such courses.

For instance, recently Eien Nunez wrote to me, I am interesting in having a business in Spain Barcelona selling doctorate degrees to people it would be posible to do business with you? if so, how much the degrees will cost me, time of delivery, also any delivery charges?
Could you send me the different degrees you have available a pic of some of them will help to show people what they will get.

And why? Because I had written about this kind stranger from the yonder who had written to me offering genuine degrees for sale.

Alright Eien, I am interesting in having business in Spain too, degree or no degree. Heck, I am interesting anyways, Spain or no Spain. And no, I don’t have pictures of the different degrees I have - they are the shy and retiring types and prefer not to be photographed.

And then the one about outsourcing tuition from India - Hello, I am a post graduate in chemistry. i have excellant communication skill with knowledge of computers.I wish to give on line tuitions for the students. Can you please whom to contact for the assignment.

To be fair, he only said his communication skill was excellant not his English. But I never know what to do with such comments. So I keep them and think about poor Satya who writes regularly about education and receives such notes all the time… Check this out if you don’t believe me…No really, check it out.

Have you been on the receiving end of crank comments (not the nasty ones). Then please share them here.

Let us all be interesting together…

***
update : birth of a coconut : and just for the record, I can’t decide which I enjoyed more - Vik’s post on the abnormal coconuts and goats of tamilnadu. Or this comment “the goat was born like thatt .. and the coconut was also born the same way”. Or Vik’s response to that - “Also, thanks for your insights that the animals were born that way”.

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charukesi November 30th, 2005

I hope some good comes out of this appeal for one rupee a day for Project Why. A few popular blogs had linked to the post as well (thanks Amit, Uma, Abi, desipundit); more people have seen Anouradha’s modest appeal, will they also act on it?

No one has responded with ideas on what we can do further with blogs for fund-raising for such causes. So here is my own idea: the next time there is a blogger’s meet in any city, can each of the bloggers put aside for a good cause the money they have spent on their coffee there. If each of us spends 50 rupees on coffee there and puts aside 50 rupees, at the end of the blogger’s meet, we have not just ten (or twenty or more) happy bloggers who have their next post ready, but a bunch of happy children - who possibly have eaten a meal or receive medical tretment with the money.

I am not personally invovled in Project Why (or any such project) yet - regrets. But as a blogger, I believe in the power of many. I can make a beginning this way… I also know that bloggers in Bangalore have been thinking about doing something together this way.

What do you think?

***

May be very late in pointing out this - but I recently came across the world community grid project. In the debate of leaving computer on v/s switching it off after each use, I side with the former. The project is an effort to use your computer in its idle time. This is from the site - World Community Grid’s mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals - like you - collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.

They have a new fight AIDS @home project for which I am going to start donating my computer time. Please sign up for that right now. (And imagine having this on your CV, ‘helped find cure for AIDS). Thanks!

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charukesi November 28th, 2005

‘A time to reflect’ feels neglected. I have been busy elsewhere.

Read my piece on indibloggies The Great Indian blog bhelpuri (continued here). In this post, I have argued that for a blog to stand out amidst the clutter, it is essential to focus on content. In other words, be a specialist blog. And this is what I am attempting with my other blog(s).

On media musings is Disbelief and defensiveness : the SBI story.

And Mindspace continues to be regularly updated too. Latest post there - ease of googling.

So far so good.

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charukesi November 22nd, 2005

Announcing my new blog Mindspace at wordpress. While regular programming will continue here as usual, Mindspace will have more focus on my work areas - qualitative research, ethnography, design and usability, innovations, new technology and such.

Do head there for a dekko. Suggestions and feedback welcome and if nice, much appreciated.

****

My first real post there was on the growing youth-mobile phone market and instant messaging. As I finished writing that, I saw this on BBC - Literary classics become txt msgs. And how!

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE : 5Sistrs WntngHsbnds. NwMeninTwn-Bingly&Darcy. Fit&Loadd.BigSis Jane Fals 4B,2ndSisLiz H8s D Coz Hes Proud. Slimy Soljr Wikam Sys DHs Shady Past.Trns Out Hes Actuly ARlyNysGuy &RlyFancysLiz. She Decyds She Lyks Him.Evry1 Gts Maryd.

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charukesi November 18th, 2005

Just a quick plug to say that Media Musings is up and running again after a longish break. Head there to read the latest post Television looking beyond Bollywood. For those new here, Media Musings is a blog that Harini and I author together. The blog is devoted to the media scene in India and we cover topics ranging from print to television to advertising and new media there.

Please check it out. And keep checking it out regularly from now - that will also keep us (Harini and me) on our toes

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charukesi November 11th, 2005

I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable about all the “power of blogging” chest thumping going around. Look at our muscles, just look at how we bloggers have set the biggies to their heels. Atleast in India, bloggers are a very small, almost miniscule proprotion of internet users, who are a very small percentage of the population to begin with. Then, where is the question of making an impact. And on whom?

On the other hand, thinking about it, no denying that bloggers are making some difference. Take an uncontroversial situation, book reviews for instance. The Jabberwock’s piece in Business Standard says - Publishers and filmmakers are among those looking at web logs as tools of publicity — which could be the first step towards the mainstreaming of blogs. But limited connectivity is still an obstacle. Recently, publishing biggie Simon and Schuster approached a few Indian bloggers, including me - not the biggie lit bloggers - to have them read and review a couple of new titles on their own blogs.

Taking just the blogging world, such promotion is limited in its reach. Along with being cheap and effective. Then why does it make sense to use blogs for promotion and consider bloggers influential? Pardon me if I am stating the obvious here but bloggers are people too. We all have, well, most of us have lives beyond blogging (a fact that we seem to forget in this whole discussion about we the bloggers). And in that life, we meet other people who value our opinions and judgments, just as we do theirs. And what information I gain from reading other blogs, I pass on to people “offline”.

That is what the Power of Word of Mouth is all about. …that finds that consumers are “50% more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations from their peers than by radio/TV ads. That was the idea behind this earlier post too - Shopping and advertising on blogs.

Taking a slightly more controversial situation, viz. the recent IIPM brouhaha, I see the issue as being larger than just we bloggers versus the rest of the world, specifically big bad IIPM. In the excitement of thinking about the impact that bloggers have made or can make with their blogs, there has been no mention of the power of negative word-of-mouth publicity that such an incident generates. One blogger tells ten other people (not necessarily bloggers) and each of the ten tells ten others… you get the drift.

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charukesi November 2nd, 2005

Neha at desipundit points to this blog which airs the unheard voices of the HIV infected in India. Lives in focus is an excellent concept - Using video, audio and photographs, this website presents the voices of those who are rarely given space or time in traditional news media.

Their latest post has this startling fact : “Every minute of every day, a child dies because of AIDS.”

Also commendable is their effort to document the struggles of families in India struggling to buy anti-retrovial drugs, in order to keep a family member healthy, and maybe even alive. I had linked to a piece on the Science Blog which stated, the survival rate of HIV-infected patients in India has risen in response to a 20-fold drop in the price of antiretroviral therapy (ART). In sheer contrast, ‘lives in focus’ says this about their attempt- The baseline will also establish how they think they will manage as drug prices surge and any stockpiled drugs are depleted. I wonder if the Science Blog report was just too optimistic, or in case the prices have dropped, are the benefits not percolating down to the needy? I have written to Sandeep at ‘lives in focus’ - will post his reply here when he resopnds.

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The second remarkable blog is The Patient’s Doctor by Dr. Aniruddh Malpani. Dr. Malpani says this about himself on the blog - I am an IVF specialist who believes in information therapy. I first heard of Dr.Malpani through this post on Rajesh Jain’s blog - the making of Abhishek - a moving personal story of the Jains’ struggle to have a baby. I discovered his blog very recently but have been hooked ever since; I have been leafing through the archives starting from January this year.

As I wrote to him, I see him as a sane voice from “the other side”, and I say this as a person with a traumatic history of interaction with doctors (including a spine surgery that has left more than just physical scars).

And as a person who has recently heard a close friend describe her experience at a ‘fertility specialist’ in Bangalore as “They treat patients like cattle there. I feel so miserable but I don’t have a choice - I want a baby desperately“.

His first post says it best - I am an infertility specialist, but I prefer to think of myself as being a patient advocate. I believe patients should be at the center of the medical universe ( the “healthcare industry” ) and will write about what can be done - by patients and doctors - to achieve this.

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charukesi October 3rd, 2005

Happy Monday Morning… A week into work, this is what I come across…

(From here)

Working from home - and rather infrequently, my msn messenger handle was ‘Say NO to deadlines’. Time to change that now…? And this is a good reminder to put up the usual disclaimer on my blog - have done so.

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charukesi September 23rd, 2005

‘Why do mind maps work?‘ from George Johnson of Between Seeing
(link via one of my favorite blogs, the innovation weblog)

They work because the brain operates in circles. A simple way to think about this is to think of millions of bits of information in the brain flowing in circles. When two bits of information intersect an idea is formed. Mind maps facilitate the collection of those bits of information, where as creating linear lists forces the brain to work in a way that is not natural for it and consequently you don’t get all of the information available to you.

Makes perfect sense to me - that is indeed the way everything - processes and tools - we use for thought and communication work - the internet (in its right name the world wide web) is a series of loops of one thought or idea (in the form of a link leading to another). And that is what blog conversations are all about too - picking up one thread and building upon it elsewhere.

This is what I feel about mind maps (and have said so in a comment on this post) - we have been conditioned to think linearly - in lists - whereas the natural way that thought flows is in circles. We all make mind maps every day without realizing it… linear thinking makes ideas unidimensional and restricted whereas “circular thinking” (for want of a better term) opens up new ideas and possibilities.

Yet people hesitate to adopt - or even acknowledge - such thought processes as natural and effective. As Johnson has said in his post, most of us are trained to think ’straight’ and with our left brains. Anything veering dangerously towards the right brain is suppressed, and even suspect (until of course one is universally recognized as a creative - if eccentric - genius!)

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charukesi September 15th, 2005

Have you read Thurber’s The day the dam broke. I still laugh when I read James Thurber and this story of how rumors about a broken dam wall created panic in Columbus, Ohio, is one of my particular favorites.

But broken dam walls are not all ha ha ha…

“Look at these pictures,” said Hoster, holding photos of houses turned on their sides and upside down, bowled over by the raging waters of the Scioto River. “There was nothing funny about the flood, just loss of life and loss of property.”

Still, “Thurber wrote brilliantly and humorously about the flood, and that’s how most people now know Columbus, if they know it at all — as that place with the funny flood.”

This is my friend’s Bombay rains story. He had left his secure (and boring?) job and very recently started his own catering business. His kitchen, all set up with borrowed funds (and every penny of his savings) was in Saki Naka - a wall separating it from the Mithi “river”.

(the wall stands on the other side of the river but broke on this side)

Except the wall broke the day it poured in Bombay.

(where the wall used to stand)

He went to inspect the kitchen two days after the rain and found his 2.5 ton deep freeze floating in a room way inside the kitchen. 2.5 tonner - I saw three grown women standing inside it today storing cut vegetables and meat on the shelves lining the freezer - that big.

And the water mark remains on the walls in all the rooms - just a little above my shoulder level…

And I saw the “river” for the first time today. I am still shaking my head at the thought that this piddly stream caused all that destruction that terrible day. To me, it will always be “river”.

(this is the “river”?)

Today, he is back on his feet. He proudly took us around his kitchen; all friendly smiling staff and huge amounts of cheese and brave plans for the future…

***
(I know there have been tragedies in no way comparable to this, people who have lost lives and all their possessions - if that is in your mind as you hit the comments button, please spare me. This is just my friend’s story - let us take it as just that. Photographs through my mobile phone.)

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