sunstruck

The farmer’s plight

2011-09-15T08:55:00.004+05:30

The Indian farmer’s life is in danger. Not just now, but it has been so for a couple of hundred years.

Though we would like to believe that the widespread use of industrial fertilisers and pesticides, the introduction of genetically-modified (GM) seeds, the inefficient public distribution system of farm produce, the land-grabbing by the rich and the industrialised, the corrupt government officials, etc are all responsible for ruining the Indian farmer’s life – and, believe me, they all are – there is, perhaps, something of greater concern.

You see, there’s a history – a legacy you could say – to the farmer’s plight. It has been, and still is, a sort of built-in or inherent risk to the farmer’s profession and life... and future.

This risk has everything to do with human progress and our civilisation, and therefore difficult to resist or reverse. The reality, and the tragedy of it, is that the farmer is caught in a time trap. Neither can the farmer stop the accelerating force of industrial and post-industrial life that is squeezing the life-force out of him; nor can he go back to tribal living where life for the hunter-gatherer was, and still is, poor, brutal, dangerous and (ah yes) downright uncivilised.

There was a time when farming was a noble profession. Farmers grew the food we ate, hired workers for their fields and generated employment for many, were primarily responsible for our sustenance for generations to come, and helped build our modern societies. They were the creators of wealth of our nations. They shaped our social values. They were esteemed members of our communities, along with skilled artisans, builders and teachers, while merchants where actually viewed with doubt. After all, what did the merchant do but make money for himself!

Two forces changed all that for the Indian farmer. First, the invasion and colonisation of our country by the Europeans. Second, the advent of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, and then, rather slowly, in India.

As a result, the control of forests and farm land were taken over by those in power (the government and the rich) and deployed for building towns, roads, railroads and factories. And, the mass production of goods – along with the extraction of ores and their conversion to metals which enabled the mass production of goods – took precedence over agriculture. Progress became the buzzword; building great societies became a noble profession. Those who built industries became the new leaders. Merchants and businessmen began wielding power and became the new esteemed members of our communities.

For us, in the industrial and post-industrial era, there has been no looking back since then. For the Indian farmer, however, life has taken a sad turn. Now, with his much-devalued-and-redistributed land, his continuing dependence on mass-produced seeds, fertilisers and pesticides from large industrial companies, and his price-controlled produce marketed through a corrupt and inefficient public distribution system, he is no longer considered a creator of wealth of our nation. On the contrary, he is lucky if he can create any wealth at all for himself and his family.

Once a noble ‘professional’ and an esteemed member of our community, the Indian farmer is now left stranded in his fields. And, if he doesn’t watch out, soon, that too may not be his.

The Consulting Conundrum

2011-08-26T01:35:00.001+05:30

In a meeting yesterday, this is what a prospective client of mine told me: “We’ve hired consultants before. They are full of babble. They don’t deliver.”

I was affronted. And hurt. You see, I’m a consultant. The meeting was obviously starting on the wrong foot and I had to quickly come up with a defence – for myself, and the consulting fraternity. It got me thinking about my own profession. What if she was right! That, consultants were full of babble and they didn’t deliver.

Various images sprung up in my head and I was reminded of Robert Townsend’s comment in his book, Up The Organization, which I had read some twenty years ago. Although I don’t remember it verbatim, it went something like this: “Consultants are people who borrow your watch and tell you what time it is, and then walk off with the watch.”

As you can see, this was not flattery. If this was a fitting description of what I did for a living, then I was in the wrong profession. But, perceptions are perceptions, no matter how much truth there is in them.

Leaving aside my client’s idiosyncrasies – and Robert Townsend’s wisdom – there does seem to be a controversy over how a consultant really should work with a client. There seems to be a mismatch between what a client expects from a consultant and what a consultant delivers in the end. This can not only lead to bad feelings between the two, it can actually damage each other’s reputation. Perhaps, there was a way out.

Let’s face it: We can’t do everything alone. Once in a while, we need someone to help us out. This dictum holds good not only for the individual or the individual team manager, even the best organisations depend on external help from time to time. And, its commonplace to hire a few consultants on their teams. The question is: If there’s already an external consultant on their team, how is an organisation supposed to get the best out of him?

Set your goals in the beginning

As you know, consultants come in different shapes and sizes – from individual experts to multinational consulting firms – and with different core competencies. Although the consultant’s individual area of expertise is critical in selecting the right consultant for your organisation, your success with a consultant depends a great deal more on the goals you set for the consultant and the role you expect the consultant to play.

If these are not determined early in the process of selecting and working with the consultant, chances are, you will find your consultant underutilised, your organisation out-of-pocket by a large sum of money, and yourself unhappy. Soon, this will lead to a breakdown in your relationship with the consultant, forcing you or the consultant to walk off in a huff – sometimes with a trail of unfinished tasks – which really doesn’t do anyone any good. When this happens, you and your organisation have as much to lose as the consultant.

Once I had to end a relationship with a client because she refused to set the goals in the beginning. I entered the relationship offering marketing strategies, but ended up setting organisation goals and sales budgets, taking calls on HR issues, recruitment and training, and deciding on IT purchases. I even selected the books for the office library. Before long, I became an extra pair of hands in the client’s office – a sort of an odd-job manager who was involved in almost every activity.

Although the importance showered on me was gratifying, and my client got more than her money’s worth for hiring my services, it took the client-consultant relationship to a virtual dead end.

If you’re a CEO with an external consultant on your team, don’t ever let this happen. Remind yourself that a consultant is an expert in a specific field. Not everything. Consult him only for his expertise. Express and explain what is expected from him as he sets out to help you solve the problem for which he is hired. In other words, set your goals right in the beginning of the client-consultant relationship.

Be honest, be open

A consultant offers guidance based on your description of the problem. If you are frank about your organisation’s problems, the consultant gets a better picture of the issues involved and makes a better recommendation. That means putting aside your embarrassment and telling your consultant the whole story. It means coming clean with the consultant. It means honesty.

One way of looking at it is to consider that, together, the consultant and you own the problem – and later, the diagnosis and even the solution. This gives your consultant a lot more confidence to work with and actually results in a team effort. The ownership is shared. The idea is to apply the consultant’s knowledge, skills and insights to arrive at a solution that has the best chance of working for you and your organisation.

It also means keeping an open mind – not only in terms of viewing the problem at hand, but also in accepting the consultant’s recommendations.

Sometimes, as a CEO or a line manager, you’re so neck-deep in day-to-day operations that it’s difficult for you to see the problem as it is. It’s easy to mix up the symptoms with the cause, thereby arriving at an incorrect definition of the problem. Just stop for a second and imagine how difficult it is for the consultant to work on an incorrect brief from you. The entire foundation of his solution is likely to be shaky.

Sometimes, a consultant will prescribe a course of action totally contrary to what you may expect from him. It may even mean a serious change in the way your organisation thinks or behaves. It may mean letting go of old habits – habits, which may have been your strengths at one time but are incompatible with the changing market scene today. And, believe it or not, the best of us suffer from such temperaments. Here’s a case in point:

On an assignment with a large well-know business house, I found them to be so full of themselves that they refused to look the problem in the eye. In their retail venture, which generated inadequate revenues as a result of too few customers, they became hell-bent on starting a customer loyalty programme. With total disregard for the problem at hand. They mixed up a simple branding problem, which advertising would have solved, with a customer loyalty issue. Today, they still don’t have enough footfalls in their stores; and still no great revenues from sales. Now, they have one more problem – they cannot justify the cost of running the customer loyalty programme as it can’t reach substantial economies of scale.

When you hire a consultant, have faith in him. Tell him your whole story. Let the consultant do his homework. Then put your heads together to diagnose the problem. You will arrive at a much better solution thereafter.

Collaborate, become a partner

Here’s the prototype consultancy model:

The consultant is hired for his expertise which your organisation doesn’t posses. He works with you and your team as a collaborator, without exercising direct control on or over your organisation’s resources and systems. He listens patiently to your needs and, after doing his own analysis and homework, suggests a course of action for your organisation (the solution).

Much like a doctor attends to his patient by diagnosing an ailment and prescribing appropriate medication and a diet.

Just as a patient believes that the doctor can cure his ailment and that things will improve if he follows the doctor’s prescription, you have to have faith in the consultant’s advice. Just as the patient has to swallow the medicine himself, you have to resist the urge to maintain status quo and implement the recommended strategies and processes. Sort of, bootstrap yourself to a new level. This requires fundamental shifts in your attitude and in your work style – even at a personal level. If you’re unwilling to change, neither will your organisation.

Once you agree with the consultant’s recommendations, you can internally influence the members of your team – either using the hierarchical authority that the consultant lacks, or simply as an inside man – to ensure a successful and speedy implementation. You know exactly how your organisation adapts to new situations, reacts to new ideas, responds to new types of behaviour, and you are the best person to recognise and leverage the consultant’s skills for your organisation’s benefit.

As a client, you must hold up your end. You should always aim for a partnership.

From what I’ve read and heard, Robert Townsend’s story at Avis is a wonderful example of this kind of partnership – with Bill Bernbach – and is worth a mention here. When Townsend became President of Avis Rent-a-Car in 1962, Avis was an unprofitable company. With Bernbach’s masterful advertising, Avis assumed the “We’re No.2. We try harder.” platform and propelled its sales and market share manifold in just a few years.

Apparently, Bernbach recommended Townsend to overhaul Avis’ customer service and upgrade its product offering before his agency, DDB, creates the advertising. People from DDB, in fact, spent several months learning the Avis business, meeting with and talking to Avis employees about the company. This led them to ask a simple question: “Why does anyone ever rent a car from you?” The reply was: “We try harder because we have to.” The rest is marketing history.

Yes, Bernbach is credited with the “We’re No.2. We try harder.” advertising for Avis. But, don’t forget, Townsend had the wisdom to listen to Bernbach and the courage to run the advertising he recommended.

Indian consumers voice concerns over GM food

2011-03-28T16:57:00.001+05:30

What with cricket, scams and forthcoming state elections ruling the headlines, the debate over introducing genetically-modified (GM) food/crops in India is almost forgotten. Is that a good thing? Depends on which side you’re on.

If you’re in favour of introducing GM food/crops in India, then, perhaps, a quiet entry while no one is looking is the best strategy to adopt. However, if you’re a concerned citizen, worried about your own and your children’s future, then, perhaps, the entry of GM food/crops in India and their proliferation in the Indian consumer market can be a scary proposition.

That’s possibly one reason why, two weeks ago, on World Consumer Rights Day (15 March 2011), a group of concerned citizens met in Mumbai to open up the debate over the possible introduction of GM food/crops in India and the quick and quiet passing of the proposed BRAI (Biotechnology and Regulatory Authority of India) Bill.

[BRAI is expected to act as the sole agency responsible for the regulatory system, including research, transport, import, manufacture and the use of GM crops in India.]

The meeting was organised by the Mumbai Grahak Panchayat, with over 22,000 members, and the Alliance of Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), an alliance of over 300 farmer and consumer organisations from across India. Their proposition: the government must encourage public hearings prior to the passing of the BRAI Bill and the introduction of GM foods in India.

Some important questions were raised at the meeting: Is GM food safe for human and livestock consumption? Will farmer interests be safeguarded once GM seeds are introduced in India? Will consumers have easy access to information on GM foods offered to them and be able to exercise their right to refuse GM food in favour of natural/organic food? Is the Indian government ensuring that Indian citizens are kept informed of the risks of GM food/crops?

And, most importantly, is the Indian government trying to evade consumer concern for, and opposition to, GM food/crops by passing the BRAI Bill quietly?

Surviving the 21st century

2011-02-16T18:53:00.001+05:30

The impact of the internet, the mobilephone and air travel is beyond doubt. Technology has indeed changed our lives: helping us to connect with our family and friends, to conduct business speedily, to have access to education and healthcare which were beyond our reach earlier.

Today, in urban India, we can learn about a socio-political uprising in Egypt, spread the news to our friends on our social networks, post opinions on our blogs, comment on online news sites, and show our support for the cause with thousands of people across the world... from the comfort of our homes.

What this means is that technology has liberated us to an unimaginable degree. Now we can hear what’s going on, and be heard, in all corners of the world.

But, technology also binds us. It locks us into believing that what is provided on our platter is all good. Good for our consumption, as food and as thought. So subtle and yet so powerful is this belief that we seldom question what is offered to us. We take it for granted that what’s offered to us is pure and safe, and will improve our lives and lifestyles.

This is not always so. If we think the global financial crisis of 2008 was a shocker, taking away what’s most sacred to us, then we are aware of only half the story. There is a deadlier crisis at bay; a deadlier conspiracy at play. What I’m talking about is the danger of genetically modified food that is served on our platter every day.

From health hazards to environmental hazards to failure of crops which affect our food supply, technologies that propagate genetically modified food are killing machines. Yet, and in spite of volumes of information available on the internet, worldwide, awareness of the risks of genetically modified food is low.

In India, where genetically modified crop failures and farmer suicides are rampant, educating the farmers and the public at large are uphill tasks. Who could or would provide this education? And, at what cost? How does one reach out to over a billion people, most of whom are illiterate?

Added to this is apathy in the media and among policy makers and the government. With the Food and Agriculture Minister preoccupied with cricket, construction and his other interests, who’s going to chalk out a strategy for us to survive the 21st century?

What's new

2010-04-01T13:27:00.000+05:30

I hear people declare these days, “consumers trust products and brand recommendations from people they know” (or words to this effect), as if it’s some kind of revelation. But, hasn’t this always been the case? Haven’t people always consulted their family, friends, neighbours and colleagues for advice and recommendations on products and services they intended to buy and use? Haven’t people we know influenced our choices and purchase decisions – or, at least, shared their knowledge and experience of products and services they’ve used with us? What’s new about that?!

It’s true that, with the internet, much of this influence has shifted online – at least in the developed world where internet penetration and usage are high. It’s also true that the internet has encouraged online participation, conversations and influence, and even accelerated it, by making it easy to listen in and participate in ongoing conversations, as well as enabling us to take personal or collaborative action. And, of course, it’s true that the internet has increased the reach of these conversations and actions – and their influence.

However, the internet still operates on human needs and desires which drive our purchase decisions as well as our preferences for specific brands.

What’s new today is that the control of product/brand conversations and recommendations is slowly (albeit more rapidly in the developed world) shifting from the product/brand marketers to the consumers. What’s also new is that the wise marketers (and there aren’t too many at the moment) are beginning to give credence to this shift of control and beginning to engage their consumers in their marketing.

My favourite things

2010-01-01T17:47:00.001+05:30

More than anything else, 2009, for me, was the year in which my life was overwhelmed by social media (my own project for children included in it), Jacqueline Novogratz’ book The Blue Sweater, the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, and two films: Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 and James Cameron’s Avatar.

Not only were these my favourite things in 2009, they continue to shower their influence upon me even now. And, as I feel it in my bones, my transition into 2010 is really a journey of understanding of life with a new sense of interconnectedness, interdependence and equilibrium, giving it a whole new meaning.

Does 2010 promise something more? I don’t know. But, for now, I have my favourite things to build my life on.

The greatest evil

2009-11-15T09:22:00.000+05:30

The use of fear as a weapon is nothing new. Not just in war or by totalitarian governments upon their people or by the mafia or by landlords over farmers and peasants in agrarian societies like India, but even in cases as simple as parents disciplining their children or children bullying other children.

What I find interesting (as a study) and, at the same time, horrifying about the use of fear are two things: (a) how this use of fear is endorsed by others, making it legitimate; and (b) how power, and therefore political authority, is exercised by this use of fear to achieve goals.

By the endorsement of use of fear – and violence, which naturally comes with it – I don’t simply mean people in authority supporting and encouraging others to use fear to achieve their goals. No, what I mean is the belief – and the support and encouragement of that belief – that those who use fear and violence as weapons against others are ‘free of all blame’.

In short, the belief that the use of fear and violence is for good. This is where I see the greatest evil.

Evil in their blood

2009-11-07T00:16:00.004+05:30

Although we tend to single out Adolf Hitler and the Nazis for their evil nature and deeds, we all know that they weren’t the only ones in modern history. In fact, a few years before World War 2, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), hundreds of thousands of Spanish people were brutally murdered by General Francisco Franco, the Nationalists and their allies the Falangists.

British author Jason Webster, who lives in and writes about modern-day Spain, in his 2006 book ¡Guerra!, narrates incidents of atrocities committed by General Franco, his Nationalist side and the right-wing Falangists during the Spanish Civil War. Here’s an excerpt:

“In public, Franco used to declare that Republicans with no blood on their hands would be spared. In secret, at Castuera many were murdered simply for having been on the other side. Grouping the prisoners into batches of ten, the Falangists would tie them together around the waist and then drag them to the mine just outside the camp. There they would line them up at the top of the shaft and push them over the edge. Some fell directly to their deaths, others smashed their limbs at the bottom but remained alive. The Falangists finished them off with grenades.”

Most of these deaths were never reported and it is only now that Spanish and world historians are trying to make sense of the killings during the Spanish Civil War. I’ve read accounts by Professor Paul Preston, eminent British historian and an expert on the Spanish Civil War, in which he suggests that the number of deaths – and missing persons – is likely to be tens, perhaps hundreds, of times more than what has been found, reported and documented.

Where does this violence, this cruelty, this evil come from?

Although all is supposed to be fair in love and war, I wonder what goes on in the minds of the people who mastermind these heinous plans and commit these murders in such large numbers. Laurence Rees, in his 2004 book and the BBC TV series Auschwitz: The Nazis & The ‘Final Solution’ (about which I’ve blogged here), gives us an insight into the Nazi mind, describing the coolness with which the Nazis committed mass murders and how inventive they had been in their methods. It seems evil was in their blood.

Perhaps Franco and the Nationalists/Falangists weren’t as inventive as the Nazis in finding ways of killing people, but they did know how to instil terror within their enemies. Both Professor Preston and author Webster cite the example of General Emilio Mola who was Franco’s counterpart during the Spanish Civil War (actually General Mola had masterminded and spearheaded the Nationalist coup against the ruling Republicans before Franco joined him) and led the attack from northern Spain.

Apparently, shortly after instituting martial law in Pamplona in July 1936, General Mola had addressed a group of mayors in the city with these (or similar) words:

“It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do. There can be no cowardice. If we vacillate one moment and fail to proceed with the greatest determination, we will not win. Anyone who helps or hides a communist or a supporter of the Popular Front will be shot.”

Jason Webster in ¡Guerra! narrates the story of another Nationalist General, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, who had mastered the art of radio broadcasts to effectively instil terror in the people of Seville over whom he ruled ‘like a wicked medieval warlord’ in the early years of the Spanish Civil War. Every night he would come on Radio Seville (then under his control) with his announcements and demoralise the town’s people through a series of threats and insults.

But General Queipo de Llano was known for more than his radio announcements. Webster writes:

“Queipo went on to rule his southern territories through a system of fear, terrorizing the people into a state of submission through violence. Mass executions and torture were the norm, soldiers often dragging men out of their homes and shooting them in the street or bayoneting them to death. At night the sound of gunfire ricocheted around Seville as small groups of union leaders, left-wingers or people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time were taken to the outskirts of the city to be shot. Simply having a callus on your hand or a sunburnt face (which suggested you were a manual labourer or farm worker), or had a tattoo or your shirt undone were reasons enough to be imprisoned.”

Mind you, these narrations and descriptions of violence and evil are about Spanish men acting against their own countrymen – not against another race or religion as was the case with the Nazis or the Japanese during World War 2. In the Spanish Civil War, and perhaps for many years after (as General Franco continued to rule Spain until his death in 1975), the Spanish tortured and murdered their own kind in hundreds of thousands.

[Citation: 1. ¡Guerra! by Jason Webster, chapters 6-9. 2. Paul Preston: The Crimes of Franco – The 2005 Len Crome Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Imperial War Museum on 12 March 2005.]

Is man good or evil?

2009-10-25T11:02:00.002+05:30

Danny Archer: So you think because your intentions are good, they'll spare you, huh?
Benjamin Kapanay: My heart always told me that people are inherently good. My experience suggests otherwise. But what about you, Mr. Archer? In your long career as a journalist, would you say that people are mostly good?
Danny Archer: No. I'd say they're just people.
Benjamin Kapanay: Exactly. It is what they do that makes them good or bad. A moment of love, even in a bad man, can give meaning to a life. None of us knows whose path will lead us to God.

This oft-quoted dialogue from Edward Zwick’s 2006 film Blood Diamond (starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Danny Archer and Basil Wallace as Benjamin Kapanay) is rather poignant. Poignant because, though the dialogue reveals to us the dichotomy of human nature, good and evil, it doesn’t leave us with any answers as to what is man’s inherent nature. Perhaps because there is no simple single answer to the question: Is man good or evil?

This question, I’m sure, has given many of us sleepless nights – especially if we’ve recently experienced unexpected behaviour of goodness or evil from people close to us whom we’ve judged to be of contrary disposition. That was exactly my experience in watching Neill Blomkamp’s film District 9 a couple of months ago. However, in Blood Diamond and District 9, our predisposition to good and evil – or, rather, who is good and who is evil – is made clear by the films’ stories and the films’ directors.

But, what if life was not so clear to us? How would we respond to good and evil then?

These questions made me think about a book I had read in my childhood (I, later, saw the older version of the film made on the book as well). The book was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, first published in 1954. Lord of the Flies narrates the story of a group of marooned British schoolboys when their plane crashes on a deserted island – and the consequences thereafter when the boys fight for their survival in the jungle, making up their own rules as they go along, guided by their instincts.

What unfolds in Lord of the Flies is a sort of morality play, with different characters in the story assuming different roles of good or evil, or somewhere in between, defining a conflict between civilisation and savagery, reason and impulse, good and evil. However, unlike Blood Diamond or District 9, Lord of the Flies and its author Golding do not offer a simple answer or explanation or outcome of good winning over evil. On the contrary, Lord of the Flies suggests that evil comes easily to man. And that, the instinct for evil is far more basic and far stronger than the instinct to do or be good.

Evil against the ‘other’

2009-10-16T15:36:00.001+05:30

One aspect of Neill Blomkamp’s film District 9 (see my previous blog) that intrigued me was the question of man’s willingness and capacity to do evil. Not just evil against the ‘other’ (depicted, in the film, as the aliens or the ‘prawns’), but also evil against a member of one’s own tribe – that is, another human being (the film’s protagonist, Wikus van de Merwe).

Of course, in District 9, at the moment of evil, the human in question was, perhaps, not entirely human. For, Wikus van de Merwe, after exposure to an alien fluid, was biologically (that is, genetically) transforming into a ‘prawn’. So, perhaps, at the moment of evil, Wikus van de Merwe had become the ‘other’... and the treatment meted out to him by the humans was justified.

But, was it? Was that how it worked?

When I look at the recent spate of bombings and killings (and even beheadings) that are taking place in my own country, India, as well as in neighbouring Pakistan, I am, once again, troubled by the question of man’s willingness and capacity to do evil... to his fellow men. Because, it’s here, in our daily lives, that I see no ‘real’ difference between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’.

But, that’s not how it seems. In defence of their actions, I suppose, the men of evil in question here can justify themselves: in India, the Maoists defending the rights of the farmers and the peasants against a (still active) feudal system and oppression; and, in Pakistan, the Taliban and its allies protesting against the government’s inability to run its own country peacefully, without foreign intervention.

Is this justification enough to destroy innocent human lives? In the minds and the hearts of the Maoists in India and the Taliban and its allies in Pakistan, apparently, it is. For, to the Maoists, the Taliban and their like, those who are not with them in their struggle are considered the ‘other’. And, any evil against the ‘other’ is a logical end in itself.

District 9 busts the myth of good and evil

2009-09-22T19:33:00.001+05:30

This year, from an unexpected quarter of the world, comes a film that takes head-on, and then shatters, the myth of good and evil. That film is District 9 and it comes from South Africa. What’s more surprising is that District 9 is a sci-fi thriller that deals with aliens on Earth; but, interestingly, steers clear away from the United States (the favourite invasion ground among aliens) to take its roots in, and over, Johannesburg.

District 9’s director, Neill Blomkamp, adopts an ingenious news broadcast-like technique to tell us the story, jumping cuts and cameras and viewpoints here and there to give his film-viewers the feeling that everything is happening in real-time. If that isn’t enough, Blomkamp keeps the adrenalin flowing with suspense, action and an incredible skill in storytelling.

Early on, in the mid-eighties, we learn that a huge alien spaceship arrives over Johannesburg and becomes immobile, perhaps due to a technical fault. A mission, when sent up to the spaceship, finds a huge population of weak and undernourished aliens, and rescues them by bringing them back on Earth. These aliens, which look like large prawns on land and are given that nomenclature by humans, are quarantined in a colony of their own just outside Johannesburg. This colony is District 9.

Twenty years later, with a total failure in integration between the humans and the prawns, matters come to a head between the two populations, and the South African government decides to relocate the prawns farther away from Johannesburg. It enlists the services of a large multinational company, MNU, which is also the second-largest weapons manufacturer in the world. When MNU forces, led by a mild-mannered Wikus van de Merwe (played by South African actor Sharlto Copely), enter District 9 to inform the prawns about their forced relocation and serve them eviction notices, things get out of hand.

During the operation, Wikus becomes accidentally infected by a mysterious alien fluid from a canister which he confiscates from a prawn. A genetic metamorphosis sets in in Wikus, and he slowly, and then rapidly, begins to turn into a prawn. When his metamorphosis comes to the MNU’s notice, MNU jumps at the unexpected opportunity of using a part-human-part-prawn to learn how to use prawn weaponry which they were, so far, unable to do as the weapons are genetically coded to prawn bio-technology.

As MNU scientists and doctors prepare to cut him open for medical experiments, Wikus escapes from MNU’s grasp and is then on the run as a fugitive. Rejected by his own people (including his wife) as a freak, Wikus hides in District 9 and ends up befriending a prawn leader when the prawn leader suggests that it can reverse Wikus’ metamorphosis if it could go back up to the spaceship hovering above Johannesburg. To make this possible, says the prawn, it requires the mysterious fluid in the canister which is in MNU possession. So, the two of them attempt to get that mysterious fluid back from MNU headquarters.

Scorched by Wikus’ daring mission to attack MNU headquarters and escape again, MNU soldiers step up their chase. Wanted alive for his unique bio-technological importance, Wikus is now hunted not only by the MNU, but also by the Nigerian mafia ruling District 9. The Nigerians believe that if they eat Wikus’ flesh, his alien powers will be transferred onto them. So begins a hunt for Wikus… right until the gruesome end of the film.

Although disturbing to watch and, in places, heart-wrenchingly emotional, this is where District 9 excels. Director Blomkamp turns the concept of good and evil on its head, showing us the predatory nature of humans and the greed that resides within us. The viewers of District 9 end up believing that being human is, perhaps, not such a good thing after all.

Good and evil

2009-09-15T15:00:00.000+05:30

In war, if there is no geography, no physical ground or territory to conquer and to bring under one’s control, it’s difficult to claim victory.

In war, if there is no individual enemy – i.e. an individual person or a group of persons acting collectively as an entity (such as a party, a movement or a nation) which can be called enemy – to conquer and to bring under one’s control, or perhaps to eliminate altogether, it’s difficult to claim victory.

For, in war, victory comes when the enemy, in its tangible and finite form, is identified, located, engaged in combat and defeated.

In a cosmic war, where the forces fighting each other believe that they are both acting in God’s name and are freeing the world of and from evil – in other words, when the war is declared as a war between good and evil – the situation and the enemy become difficult to comprehend, and the strategy and solution even more difficult to conceive and execute.

Perhaps, the only way to win a cosmic war, as Reza Aslan suggests in his book How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, is to win over the hearts and minds of the people.

A new geography

2009-09-11T02:17:00.000+05:30

What fascinates me about a Cosmic War is that it defines the battleground at a new spatial level. And no, I’m not talking about the mystical ‘war in the heavens’ I mentioned in my previous post. I’m here on Earth… or so I think… talking about something far more dangerous.

The thing is, in a Cosmic War, geography is no longer mapped on land and sea – and defined by latitudes and longitudes as we know them. A Cosmic War leaves all such mundane matters behind… to enter the human mind. And, it is here that a Cosmic War creates its battleground.

For, a Cosmic War is really about controlling the human mind. It is not about geography or politics or religion or the military. Since it is in the human mind that thoughts, desires and actions originate – and are determined – whoever conquers and controls the human mind controls the Cosmos.

Cosmic War

2009-09-06T08:46:00.003+05:30

Recently, on Fora.tv, I watched an interview of Iranian-American author Reza Aslan by Phil Bronstein, Editor-at-Large Hearst Newspapers and the San Francisco Chronicle. In the interview, Aslan discusses his latest book How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.

Through subjects such as Islam, jihadists, the al-Qaeda, medieval zealots, the Crusades, and evangelism in modern America, Aslan explains that the Cosmic War, in essence, is a conflict over identity... a conflict between good and evil, where the battles are fought on Earth as much as in the heavens.

Aslan suggests that, in a Cosmic War, there is no compromise, no negotiation, no settlement, no neutral ground... and, therefore, the war can be neither won, nor lost. He proposes that the only way to win the Cosmic War is by not engaging in it... by refusing to fight in it.

How feasible is this idea? You be the judge. Watch the Reza Aslan interview here.

[Citation: How to Win a Cosmic War, Reza Aslan interviewed by Phil Bronstein on Fora.tv]

Critical perspectives on global power

2009-05-21T23:32:00.006+05:30

Nermeen Shaikh’s scholarly work of non-fiction The Present As History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power is probably not intended for non-scholars like me. The book is a selection of interviews with 13 leading contemporary thinkers from the social sciences... discussing how the social sciences affect global power. The interviews are erudite and require much concentrated reading. Moreover, the reader is expected to be (already) well-versed in subjects as varied as Islam, Economics, International Affairs, Anthropology, Human Rights, Feminism and Post-Colonial History. As you can guess, I’m struggling with it.

Meanwhile, on YouTube, I came upon a short interview of Nermeen Shaikh on News Weakly - a TV programme from Pakistan hosted by Sami Shah. The interview, while introducing Ms Shaikh’s book The Present As History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power, presents a perspective on how the United States and the West view a concept like ‘war on terror’... and how foolish and dangerous that view can be for the rest of the world.

An end to war?

2009-05-19T20:15:00.001+05:30

“State television showed hundreds of corpses scattered around the battlefield and floating in a nearby lagoon as the armed forces combed the ruins where the Tigers made their last stand.”
[Quote reproduced from an article in the Economist, 18 May 2009, titled An end to the war?]

As I read reports on the recent ‘end to conventional war’ in Sri Lanka between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government in which God knows how many millions of Sinhalese and Tamil people have died over the past 25 years, I wonder… and I wonder… and I give up.

I give up because I cannot make sense of this ‘war’ we humans wage against one another. I give up because I feel ashamed of what I’ve become: a cold and callous observer of meaningless death and the politics that rules this world in the name of freedom and national security.

Suspicion

2009-05-13T20:40:00.000+05:30

There has been, and still is, so much talk and literature on the 9/11 WTC incident from the American perspective that one often forgets how that incident has affected others around the world.

To start with, there is a continuing American suspicion of Arabs and virtually anybody with a Muslim name or anyone who may look like an Arab – including, foolishly, Hindus and Sikhs from India – and the fear it generates both in the West and in Muslims. Then, there is America’s ‘War on Terror’ – an idea which is equally abstract and absurd, shifting strategies from Afghanistan to Iraq and back to Afghanistan, with no specific result in sight.

On the other hand, there is Islamic fundamentalism – a metaphor, at least according to the West, for old-world regressive thinking and practice, made acutely prominent by the deeds of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Mutawas in Saudi Arabia. To these and many other Muslims around the world, there is a suspicion that America and the white Europeans are really the oppressors, while they are the persecuted lot.

This point and counterpoint of suspicion plays in the hearts of people from both sides of the ‘war’: the aggressors and the victims. Each living in their ‘reality’ of what the ‘truth’ is… while terrorism continues to take centre-stage.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

2009-05-12T20:14:00.003+05:30

At a café in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man corners an American with a beseeching question, “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance?”; and so begins Mohsin Hamid’s tale of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Then, in the next 180-odd pages, we live through the Pakistani’s life as he pours out his heart, chapter by chapter, to the unknown American.

We learn that the Pakistani’s name is Changez; that, not too long ago, he was in America, studying in Princeton and then working in one of the most reputed management consulting firms there; that, he was in love with a beautiful white American woman; that, due to a series of events not in his control, and in spite of the loving support of his family and friends, his life comes crashing down to a bitter end… bringing him back to Lahore and to this meeting with an American stranger.

Does this sound real? You bet it does! And Mohsin Hamid weaves the tale of The Reluctant Fundamentalist admirably. The tale of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a confession, written in first person in such polite, beseeching and convincing language that I can understand why the unknown American couldn’t walk out of this conversation with Changez. I certainly hung on to every word of his until I finished reading the book. I’ve seldom read a book that is so engrossing.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is really a tale of an immigrant’s loss of love, hope and innocence. But, what’s also interesting about The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that author Hamid presents a unique perspective of a normal Pakistani’s response to the world’s response to global terrorism and how this ‘whole enchilada’ of global terrorism and retribution, and the fear that it envelopes us with, changes the lives of even those who are non-participants… forever.

Shaken, not blurred

2009-04-29T15:54:00.000+05:30

Not only can terrorism lead to economic uncertainty, in a roundabout way, political, social and economic uncertainties – and, therefore, discontent – can give rise to terrorism. Some of this notion can brew and grow as movements of national liberation as well. The French and Russian revolutions are a case in point; not to mention the continuing insurgency in rural India by Maoist Naxalites.

There are ideological differences too, closely linked to this uncertainty and discontent, and perhaps as a result of it. These differences often motivate sections of people into challenging existing/ruling regimes, holding them responsible for racial/religious/ethnic discrimination, inequality in distribution of wealth and therefore polarisation of lifestyles, political exclusion, and obstructing civil rights.

In India, we have seen and experienced a variety of terrorist acts due to ideological differences. These include planned acts of terror by Islamic radicals who believe that their Allah is the only God and whose goal is to create an Islamic State not just in Kashmir, but across the globe. And, let’s not forget violence from Hindu extremists who wish to save our country from this Islamic challenge.

Like many others, we, too, have believed in national liberation and have freed our country from British Rule. And, on achieving Independence, we have declared our country as a secular State, where we believe that several points of view can coexist harmoniously and that no single view or dogma is likely to be entirely right for the welfare of our people.

Yes, it’s true that, specifically in the last ten years, we have been a target of terrorist attacks and have suffered at length. Still, I hope that, though our confidence may have been shaken, our sense of values and good judgement have not been blurred. As we go to exercise our constitutional rights on Election Day 2009, I hope we shall all continue to believe in the foundation of a secular State and not let our prejudices cloud our judgement.

Uncertainty

2009-04-25T09:48:00.002+05:30

Does terrorism have a negative impact on our economy?

I simply don’t have the wherewithal to provide a quantitative response to that question. But I know, in most terror-hit places, economists and city planners have tried to assess the economic damage caused by terror attacks. For instance, the economic impact of the 9/11disaster in the United States is a case study among many scholars and governments. However, in India, research in this area is sadly neglected.

As a resident of Mumbai, I have been a silent witness to several terrorist attacks over the years. By ‘a silent witness’ I mean that, though I have not been ‘on the spot’, I have experienced the shock waves that have rocked the city immediately after the attacks, and those that have continued ever later. Moreover, my childhood memories of Marxist and Maoist insurgency in Calcutta still remain with me.

Apart from loss of life and injury to people (which is tragic enough), terror attacks leave a trail of fear, confusion and panic. Almost like a domino effect, people stop work, schools and colleges are closed, shops and offices shut down operations, factories and workshops stop production, and stock markets behave unpredictably, bringing down stock prices.

But, most important of all, terrorism creates uncertainty... uncertainty in the minds of people, and in the economy.

Specific industries are hit adversely: e.g. tourism and, therefore, travel and hospitality services. Foreign investment is reduced. Investments into, and plans to grow, local projects and industries are halted or delayed. There is loss of revenue due to drops in productivity in various sectors... and even in consumption.

How significant is this impact on the economy is difficult to tell. But there is no denying the fact that acts of terrorism have negative influences on a country’s economy.

India is no stranger to terror attacks

2009-04-21T01:32:00.000+05:30

India is no stranger to terror attacks. Our history is replete with instances of invaders and marauders attacking our country and terrorising our people: from the (controversial) Aryan Invasion to the Greeks, the Sakas, the Huns, the Pathans, the Moghuls, the Portuguese, the British... and now the Pakistanis.

Regrettably, not all terror attacks have been from foreign invaders. Some of it has been internal. I remember growing up in Calcutta during the late sixties and early seventies when anti-establishment Marxists and Maoists killed many policemen, government officials, teachers and innocent people over ideological differences with the government.

Then there were terrors of the separatist movements – the Sikhs, the ULFA, the GNLF, the Bodos, the Mizos – and retribution by the Indian government thereafter.

Since Independence, we’ve lost three national leaders to assassinations by fellow countrymen – Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi – and thousands of others from terror attacks by insurgents like the recent Maoist attacks to disrupt elections, or violent civil riots under State supervision like the infamous Gujarat riots in 2002.

Election terror

2009-04-17T19:17:00.000+05:30

It’s one thing to blame Pakistan for striking terror into India’s heart from across the border. It’s another to resolve terror within the country’s borders – much of which, at least recently, is not from Islamic dissidents or due to Islamic influence. For, if we are to go by yesterday’s Naxalite attacks at polling stations, India has a lot to worry about managing terror from within.

Here’s the scene:

As India goes to polls in certain parts of the country, Naxalites or Maoist insurgent groups are coming out of their hideouts to strike terror on unsuspecting Indians. No one seems to be spared: from election officials to security personnel to ordinary citizens. Their methods are simple: bombs, landmines and guns to kill and injure people… setting polling booths on fire, blocking roads by felling trees and with boulders. Even electronic voting machines are reported to have been looted.

Since these insurgents are nestled within a few states/territories in India, one hopes that their terror strikes will be contained within these territories. If not, we have a lot to worry about in the next two weeks.

The question of terrorism

2009-04-13T23:54:00.000+05:30

From an economic perspective, India surviving the global economic recession in the coming years seems plausible. In fact, as I’ve tried to explain in my previous post, it seems almost assured. However, there is the question of terrorism.

Everyday there is some report or the other on terrorist activities disrupting – or threatening to disrupt – life in India. Terrorism has become so commonplace that I worry that the people of my country may accept it as they accept the beleaguered traffic on the roads, the power cuts in their homes and offices, or the coming of the monsoons every year. Soon, I fear, terrorism may become a part of the fabric of normal Indian life.

What’s dangerous about terrorism in India is that it is not just an ideological or a political viewpoint, but one that combines the worst of these two with strong religious and ethnic lineage and feelings. Indeed, we have a history to prove it. Since Independence, and much earlier, these feelings and differences have been hard-wired into us – and into Pakistanis – and it’s unlikely that they will be expunged soon.

How much economic disruption and damage can this terrorism cause? I have no answer to that.

Can India live through the recession?

2009-04-10T22:23:00.001+05:30

“What is the truth behind the fitful hints which reach us intimating that there exists in India an old wisdom that promises the most extraordinary development of mental powers to those who practise it.”
– Paul Brunton, spiritual seeker, in his book A Search In Secret India (Chapter 1)

With job cuts in certain sectors, a drop in demand and in production, no doubt the global recession has hit India. Interest rates have fallen, the stock market is idling, and the government is reconsidering its estimate for the country’s growth in GDP. Most likely it’s going to be far below last year’s projection of 9%. Indeed, the figure will be half as attractive as that. Still, in all probability, India will be one of the very few countries around the globe to end the year with a positive growth in her GDP.

Current market reports indicate that FMCG, retail, automotive and pharma sectors will do well... not just in the usual urban areas, perhaps less so, but by exploring markets in smaller towns and in rural India. For instance, the FMCG industry, estimated at $40 billion, is expected to have huge wins in rural markets with large populations from India’s over-600,000 villages asking for and buying branded consumer goods. Most other industries are likely to follow suit in order to grow their businesses or sustain them.

Of course, there will be some set-backs. Industries dependent on foreign markets for their customers and foreign investments will suffer. But, thanks to local demand from a large population (over a billion people with varied needs), a conservative banking system (no toxic debts to worry about), adequate resources of her own to channelise towards growth (only 20% of India’s GDP is dependent on external trade), management prowess of her industry leaders (competing with the world’s best), and an educated and skilled workforce, India is likely to live through the global recession without a great scare.

India’s selflessness

2009-04-09T19:23:00.001+05:30

At the G20 Summit’s trillion dollar global recovery plan announced in London last week, although Eastern Europe had been singled out as the region in dire need of financial aid and assistance, no help has reached it yet. Mexico alone seems to have secured a $47 billion credit line by the IMF.

Perhaps it’s because the IMF has already pledged $60 billion in loans to Hungary, Latvia, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine ahead of (and in spite of) the G20 Summit, and are a little skeptical of making further investments in the region without due diligence. However, the IMF has other requests to worry about. Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and South Korea have already queued up behind Mexico.

But, what about India? Wouldn’t India benefit from a little IMF funding?

According to various media sources, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been quoted as: “India does not need IMF funding but we have been in favour of expanding IMF resources as this will help developing countries that need assistance. It will restore confidence about emerging markets.”

Adding that, “We have agreed in favour of greater resources for the world’s developing countries, because developing countries who are not responsible for this crisis are yet major victims of the crisis.”

What explains India’s selflessness is difficult to tell. One hopes India will prosper on her own inner strength.

[Citation: India for 3-Fold Increase in IMF Equity, Outlook magazine, 7 April 2009; India helps secure G20 deal for developing countries, Thaindian News, 3 April 2009]

No quick fixes

2009-04-07T10:57:00.000+05:30

UK’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown has put it succinctly at the G20 Summit in London recently: there are no quick fixes to resolving the world economic meltdown. So, will the $1.1 trillion dollar deal help?

If anything, the financial markets around the world have responded marginally positively to the G20 trillion dollar news. But the greatest gain, certainly, has accrued to the IMF – which, I thought, had fallen out of the world economic radar in the recent past – bringing it back into prominence after years of anonymity.

It looks like, at the moment, the IMF funding and the credit lines are to be extended to smaller/poorer/fiscally-immobile/developing countries. Eastern Europe has been mentioned often, but there’s no news of Africa. Mexico’s got lucky with a $47 billion credit line; so, perhaps, names of other countries will be announced soon.

The trillion dollar deal is expected to improve trade flows, raise world output, increase demand, save people’s jobs, save several ‘poorer’ economies, and shorten the recession. To me, this certainly doesn’t sound like a quick fix; but rather, a grand plan. The question is: can all this be achieved?

The good news is, if the G20 leaders can rustle up a trillion dollars in a single day, there’s probably more money available for funding, should there be a need for another rescue operation. The bad news is, the plan doesn’t seem to account for key Western economies which are still weighed down by the debts of their banks, businesses and individual consumers. After all, that’s where the trouble started!

Fend for yourself

2009-04-04T00:16:00.001+05:30

President Barack Obama’s declaration, at the G20 Summit in London on 2 April 2009, that the United States (or rather, the American consumer) can no longer be viewed nor accepted as the role model for driving global growth is a fascinating submission.

Fascinating from two perspectives: one, that, perhaps, the age-old (American) belief of hardworking risk-takers being rewarded meritoriously now stands under scrutiny; and two, after years of following the American economic model, most countries are now left to fend for themselves.

For many developing countries, like India, this is rather sudden. For, these countries had been emulating the American capitalist model for many years and had become heavily dependent on exports to the US and other developed nations, reaping the benefits of trade, investment and currency exchange. Now, that very foundation is shaken.

What should these countries do to face this new reality? Well, no doubt, fending for oneself should be high on their agenda… looking inward, protecting jobs and businesses, increasing demand and consumer spending, and reducing overall debt. Locally, within the countries’ boundaries.

With a little blessing, things should look up in a couple of years.

These are uncertain times

2009-04-01T22:38:00.001+05:30

“The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.”
– Professor Albus Dumbledore, speaking to Harry Potter about the Time-Turner at the end of J K Rowling’s book Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

While President Obama has been busy trying to revive the failing US economy, I’ve been busy dodging in and out of various corporate ‘measures’ which my company is taking in order to meet the needs of the future. Restructuring, reorganising and rationalising have been in full swing for the past few months, and some results are already in view: my CEO loses his job, my head of digital strategy is appropriated by my corporate office, and my restructured pay comes into effect today.

As I stepped into a new financial year this morning, a friend in a senior position in a leading telecom company in India called to reiterate the fact that the economic downturn has come down hard on his company and the telecom industry in general. Apparently, in his business, existing clients have delayed their renewals or renewed their contracts at substantially lower fees; prospects have either walked away or are delaying their decisions to purchase; and a few projects have been abandoned under a credit squeeze.

These scenarios are probably true for most businesses and countries around the world. But, the heartbreak for most people is the fact that nobody seems to be able to predict an accurate picture of what lies ahead.

Globally, it seems, the demand for, and hence the value of, every type of asset (including intellectual property) is falling and it is uncertain if this trend will be reversed soon. This fall in demand is creating a downward pressure on incomes from those assets, leading to losses in businesses, jobs and demand for talent (an artist I met recently is selling his paintings at one-third of what similar paintings have fetched him last year)… which, in turn, are steering economies towards a world of unhappy minds and empty stomachs.

For the world has changed

2009-02-09T18:37:00.002+05:30

“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

These words could well have been uttered by India’s Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, describing the state of things in our country. Or, by Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, lamenting over his Party’s failure to show the people of the UK a light at the end of the tunnel. However, these words were spoken by President Barack Obama of the United States in his Inaugural Address at the White House three weeks ago.

Could the situation be any worse? Well, in President Obama’s words: “Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many – and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”

Not exactly the kind of situation to inspire an incumbent President! The risks are great… especially, when the whole world is waiting to see if he can do some magical thinking to save his country and the planet, without tramping over and destroying others in his eagerness to fulfil his responsibilities. For, without doubt, such has been the style of his predecessor.

But, President Obama seems to know this well; and he preempts us all, saying (and I quote from his Inaugural Address):

“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy the relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.

For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

Wonderful words. The question is: will President Obama be able to keep his promises?

[Citation: President Barack Hussein Obama’s Inaugural Address, 21 January 2009.]

The year of magical thinking

2009-01-28T14:09:00.002+05:30

“It is my opinion that the earth is very noble and admirable by reason of so many and so different alterations and generations which are incessantly made therein.”
– Quote from Bertolt Brecht’s play ‘Galileo’, translated by Charles Laughton

No, I wasn’t at the Taj Hotel, nor at the Oberoi Trident, in Mumbai on 26 November last year when (Pakistani) terrorists attacked and shot dead innocent people at their dinner tables. Nor did I lose a close friend in those terror attacks of ‘26/11’ as they spread across South Mumbai, killing close to 200 persons. But, when I try to imagine the events of that night, I cannot help but recall American author Joan Didion’s opening words in her book, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’:

“Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as we know it ends.”

If you find these words ominous (particularly since this is my first post in 2009 after an absence of close to three months), I apologise. I’m no soothsayer. I don’t wish to spoil your mood by forecasting anything darker than what you would have heard already from your neighbourhood economist. The truth is, the way things are globally and in India, terrorists notwithstanding, we’ll all need some magical thinking to help us through 2009.

But, why magical thinking?

Joan Didion’s book, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ (forgive me, for I have stolen the title of the book to name this post), published in 2005, is an account of her grief in losing her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, quite suddenly from a heart attack on the night of 30 December 2003… while their daughter, Quintana, was in an ICU in a hospital downtown suffering from septic pneumonia.

Ms Didion had trouble accepting this reality. For an entire year, she hoped her husband would come back. She believed if she hoped enough, if she held onto her husband’s memories and possessions long enough and strongly enough, if she re-lived her earlier experiences with her husband vividly enough, if she performed the right actions timely enough, her husband’s death could be averted and her life would be normal again.

Alas, hope may be a strength in times of human weakness, but it cannot turn back time. And so, regretfully, Ms Didion confesses at the end of her book:

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
Let them become the photograph on the table.
Let them become the name on the trust accounts.
Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.”

By magical thinking, perhaps, Joan Didion means hope. Perhaps she means acceptance. Perhaps she means the transition from grief to hope to acceptance as a natural progression of events and human experience. I’m not quite sure how to interpret this. Perhaps, I need to find the answer to this question in my own personal way… as I journey through 2009.

[Citation: Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Charles Laughton, Grove Press; The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Harper Perennial.]

Bertolt Brecht Collected Short Stories

2008-11-06T19:35:00.000+05:30

Bertolt Brecht has also written short fiction. Not much is written about this (after all Brecht is mostly known as a playwright and a poet), but this facet of Brecht’s talent came to my attention when, a week ago, I picked up a copy of his Collected Short Stories. Brecht’s collection contains 37 short stories in the main section of the book, plus a ‘fragment’ of a novel in the Appendix. The short stories are grouped in three sections, in a linear fashion, pertaining to critical literary periods in Brecht’s life.

The first group, called The Bavarian stories (1920-24), contains 11 stories and represents his early writings. The second group, called The Berlin stories (1924-33), contains 14 stories and probably represents Brecht’s most productive years in Germany before WW2 – thanks mainly to Elisabeth Hauptmann, whom Brecht’s publishers had sent to help him complete a book of poems. The third group, called Stories Written in Exile, contains 12 stories and mainly represents the period of his fight against Fascism (which dominated Germany at the time) from the outside.

I loved the stories for their purity and non-political nature. For, it seems to me that, while Brecht was establishing himself as a playwright and a poet, he used his short stories to experiment with the plots and the parables he used so effectively later in his plays. Brecht’s stories, particularly those from his years spent in exile (when he fled Germany during Nazi rule and moved from one country to another before returning to East Germany after the War), some of them with their remote historical settings, are perhaps his most accomplished.

What is common in all these stories, and what makes them good reads, is Brecht’s story-telling ability. He uses a straight-forward narrative prose, telling the story as it is, without adding any undue artifice to stimulate the reader’s attention. It’s as if Brecht is trying to say, “this is what happened and that is exactly what I’ve reported here.” Hence, the stories are crisp and to the point. There are no overt political messages as there are in his plays. Yet, the stories are engaging, and a few, quite entertaining.

[Citation: Bertolt Brecht Collected Short Stories, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, translated by Yvonne Kapp, Hugh Rorrison and Antony Tatlow; Methuen 1999 paperback edition.]

The politics of the auditorium

2008-11-04T12:40:00.000+05:30

Bertolt Brecht’s theatre was intellectual. He believed that, to induce social and political change, the audience needed to be incited and aroused intellectually. In other words, theatre had to appeal to the audience’s powers of reason rather than to its emotions – which is what the earlier schools of theatre (for instance, Shakespearean theatre) depended on.

Whereas, in a Shakespearean play, people in the audience would feel for the fortunes or misfortunes of the characters because they identified themselves with the characters on stage, Brecht would find ways to alienate the actors from the characters they played, stirring up audience consciousness through techniques and practices such as songs, talking to the audience through the actors, projecting messages on screens, or actors carrying placards with messages.

Brecht laid bare a situation – usually a social ill – on stage, inciting the audience into thinking about the problem, unemotionally (i.e. by developing a critical attitude), and formulating their own solutions in their minds. He believed that people, essentially, were capable of thinking their way out of problems and improving their lives – which is what, he believed, was needed to induce social change and fight capitalism.

“Brecht thus sought to alter not only theatre’s representation of reality but also the politics of the auditorium, encouraging in the spectator an active, interrogative attitude to what is presented.”

[Citation: Quote from The Politics of Performance, Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook, edited by Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf, Routledge, 2001.]

Keeping the audience tuned in

2008-11-01T16:28:00.001+05:30

Bertolt Brecht is considered to be one of the greatest playwrights and dramatists of the 20th century. So highly is he rated in the literary world that some intellectuals and scholars have described him as “a literary-theatrical equivalent to Picasso.”

Brecht’s dramatic style was somewhat unique. He relied more on the actors and their performance, switching their roles from time to time, testing the audience, forcing them to stay alert, almost as if he was asking the audience to participate in his plays along with the actors.

I remember several such trying moments while watching Brecht’s plays. If I were to take my mind off the stage, I missed a lot. And, if I hadn’t read the play earlier (which was usually the case) and, therefore, weren’t privy to Brecht’s treatment notes and scene descriptions, I really needed to stay alert.

That’s probably why, in order to keep the audience tuned in, Brecht’s plays have a lot of action on stage. With actors moving about, singing, choreography and text messages like newspaper headlines projected on screens as backdrops (there are very few stage-props), the audience just can’t take its mind off the stage.

Fortunately, directors of Brecht’s plays still follow his dramatic style today, keeping their audiences conscious of – and committed to – what is happening and what is being said on stage. Considering the fact that Brecht’s plays also force its audience into thinking during the play, the mind does wander, thereby requiring considerable effort on the audience’s part to stay tuned.

Bertolt Brecht: still socially relevant

2008-10-30T19:04:00.001+05:30

If not anywhere else, you can be certain that German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s plays have a place in Kolkata, the capital of the Marxist-ruled state of West Bengal in eastern India. There, I remember my college days spent watching Brecht’s plays staged (usually) at the Max Muller Bhavan, as well as in other theatres, both in English and in the Bengali vernacular, with various contemporary interpretations.

Of all of Brecht’s plays, his The Threepenny Opera was the most popular, with Galileo coming in a reasonably-sound second place, both of which had us thinking in our seats during the play and on our feet while walking back home. For, such were – and still are – typical responses to Brecht’s plays. Brecht didn’t just entertain you, he set you thinking about what’s happening around you.

Even his greatest detractors couldn’t deny the fact that Bertolt Brecht delivered a balance of entertainment and instruction. Because, at the heart of every Brecht play and/or production was the belief that the audience had to be entertained (using ‘devices’ such as songs and humour), as well as moved to thinking about the theatre on one hand and, on the other, the society people were living in there and then – making his plays socially relevant with the times.

Commenting on European drama in the first quarter of the twentieth century, in an essay titled On Experimental Theatre, Brecht (1898-1956) wrote:

“For at least two generations the serious European drama has been passing through a period of experiment. So far the various experiments conducted have not led to any definite and clearly established result, nor is the period itself over. In my view these experiments were pursued along two lines which occasionally intersected but can none the less be followed separately. They are defined by the two functions of entertainment and instruction: that is to say that the theatre organized experiments to increase its ability to amuse, and others which were intended to raise its value as education.”

Bertolt Brecht believed these two functions of entertainment and instruction can – and need to – be married to produce the perfect play. But even more, Brecht believed that theatre had to make sense to people – to be relevant and contemporary to its audience.

To achieve this, Brecht wrote copious notes on his plays, giving directions to himself, the actors and directors, and even rewriting his plays, introducing his thinking, his responses to and his beliefs about the social and political happenings of the time. For instance, although he had written Galileo (one of his most famous plays) prior to the Second World War, he changed the ending and several other sections of the play after the United States dropped the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

So, in reality, there is a Galileo I (Galileo Galilei written in 1937-38) and a Galileo II (Galileo re-written in 1945-46); although, today, what is accepted and staged as Galileo is actually Galileo II, Brecht’s later version. The effort Brecht put in to make his plays socially and politically relevant to the present times is a practice that is still followed by producers and directors who stage his plays today.

[Citation: 1. On Experimental Theatre by Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willett, quoted from The Theory of the Modern Stage, edited by Eric Bentley, Penguin Modern Classics, 2008. 2. The Science Fiction of Bertolt Brecht by Eric Bentley in the Introduction to Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, English version by Charles Laughton, Grove Press, 1966.]

The Great Dictator, Arturo Ui

2008-10-23T19:02:00.002+05:30

Adolf Hitler has fascinated many people – not only during his rise to leadership in Nazi Germany, but over the years. He has been, and still is, at the centre of much research and talk… and even filmmaking. Everyone from people who suffered during WW2 in Europe to historians, sociologists, psychologists, military strategists, management gurus to school children have heard of and discussed Hitler sometime or the other.

A niece of mine who had worked at a bookstore in Mumbai once told me that Hitler’s Mein Kampf was one of the highest-selling books at the store. What explains this? No idea. Except that, perhaps, in spite of his delusion, autocracy and cruelty, Adolf Hitler is a fascinating subject for many people. Some may revere him even today.

From all of this, and keeping aside my recent foray into Laurence Rees’ work (see my previous posts), two works of creativity stand out in my mind. First, The Great Dictator, a film by Charlie Chaplin released in 1940. And the other, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a play by Bertholt Brecht written in 1941. While Chaplin’s film is an all-time great work of art and acting, winning favour from adults and children all over the world, Brecht’s play is less well-known, particularly among Indian audiences.

It’s a coincidence that both Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin were born in April 1889 (a few days of each other); Hitler in what was then Austria-Hungary and Chaplin in London, UK. The two men did not meet each other. A story suggests that Chaplin decided to work on The Great Dictator when a friend of his, Alexander Korda, remarked on the physical similarities between the two men and, upon doing some research, Chaplin found that both Hitler and he had both struggled to achieve what they had attained in their respective fields.

The Great Dictator is a parody of Adolf Hitler. The film’s hero, played by Chaplin, is a dictator called Adenoid Hynkel; but the resemblance to the real Hitler is indeed fantastic. In fact, many of the other characters in the film bear resemblance to actual men in Hitler’s coterie. Although Chaplin deals with many of the issues from Hitler’s life and the history around that time, the focus in The Great Dictator is on the delusional mind of Adenoid Hynkel.

When The Great Dictator was released in 1940, or when Chaplin had started work on the film two years earlier, Hitler’s atrocities were not so well known. Apparently, Chaplin had later said that, had he known about the real atrocities of the Nazis, he may not have introduced so much comedy in the film. Needless to say, Hitler had banned The Great Dictator from being screened in all German-occupied territories. But, a rumour exists that Hitler had seen a screening of The Great Dictator once.

Unlike Chaplin, who had the freedom of making films in Hollywood, German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, born nine years after Hitler and Chaplin, and a Marxist to boot, lived in fear of Nazi persecution. In 1933, when Hitler came into power, Brecht fled Germany, first to Denmark and then to Sweden, Finland and finally to the United States. It was in Finland in 1941 that Brecht wrote the play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. However, the play was not staged in English for another 20 years.

My introduction to The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was 20-odd years ago in Kolkata, when the play was staged simply as Arturo Ui. Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is about a small-time gangster in Chicago, called Arturo Ui, who takes control of the cauliflower business in Chicago by getting rid of his opponents one by one. The play, and the characters within it, all have a strong resemblance to Hitler and his cronies, and the setting describes Germany just prior to Nazi rule.

Like The Great Dictator, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a parody of Hitler and the Nazis, staged in a larger-than-life style, highlighting not just the evil ways that Hitler/Ui adopted in his rise to power, banning all opposition, but also the sense of the dramatic that he (both Hitler and Ui) seemed to possess and use to win his audience over. Of course, unlike Chaplin’s film, Brecht’s play has strong Marxist or anti-Fascist undertones, drawing parallels between actual German history and the scenes in his fictional play.

The Mind of Adolf Hitler

2008-10-20T18:58:00.001+05:30

“The Nazi regime was one that practised what one historian [most likely Martin Broszat] famously called ‘cumulative radicalism’, whereby each decision often led to a crisis that led to a still more radical decision… All the leading Nazis knew their Führer prized one quality in policy-making above all others: radicalism. Hitler once said that he wanted his generals to be like ‘dogs straining on a leash’ (and in this they most often failed him). His love of radicalism, plus his technique of encouraging massive competition within the Nazi leadership often by appointing two people to do more or less the same job, meant that there was intense dynamism in the political and administrative system – plus intense inherent instability.”

[Quoted from Auschwitz: The Nazis & The ‘Final Solution’ by Laurence Rees, BBC Books, 2005.]

“[Hitler] does not think things out in a logical and consistent fashion, gathering all available information pertinent to the problem, mapping out alternative courses of action, and then weighing the evidence pro and con for each of them before reaching a decision. His mental processes operate in reverse. Instead of studying the problem as an intellectual would do, he avoids it and occupies himself with other things until unconscious processes furnish him with a solution. Having the solution, he then begins to look for facts that will prove it is correct. In this procedure he is very clever, and by the time he presents it to his associates, it has the appearance of a rational judgment… His orientation is that of an artist and not that of a statesman.”

[Quoted from The Mind of Adolf Hitler by Walter C Langer, as stated in Michael S Wade’s management book Leadership’s Adversary: Winning the War between Leadership and Management, Nova Publishers, 2002.]

Blindness

2008-10-14T09:57:00.001+05:30

Why did no one fight back?

If over six million Jews were killed by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 – over a million of them in Auschwitz concentration camp itself – surely some of these Jews could have formed resistance groups and risen up against the Nazis? But, why didn’t they? Why did they meekly surrender to the Nazis when the Nazis came marching into their towns and went knocking on their doors?

Was the might of the Nazis so overpowering that the Jews were paralysed by fear? Were the Jews so religious in principle and practice that they decided not to pick up arms against the Nazis, even to protect themselves and their loved ones? Were the Jews so widespread in Europe that they couldn’t come together in time to form a line of defence, or even sabotage Nazi initiatives against them?

What could explain the inconceivable passivity with which the Jews across Europe surrendered to the Nazis? Is this some giant mystery of the twentieth century?

In his autobiographical writing, Night, Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, gives an example of the ‘blindness’ with which the people from his small town of Sighet, in Transylvania, responded to the Nazi aggression during WW2. He suggests that it was a sort of blindness – the inability of the people of Sighet to take cognisance of Nazi aggression and atrocities against the Jews around them – that drove the Jews to their horrible fate.

Here’s an excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s Night:

“Spring 1944. Splendid news from the Russian Front. There could no longer be any doubt: Germany would be defeated. It was only a matter of time, months or weeks, perhaps.

The trees were in bloom. It was a year like so many others, with its spring, its engagements, its weddings, and its births.

The people were saying, ‘The Red Army is advancing with giant strides… Hitler will not be able to harm us, even if he wants to…’

Yes, we even doubted his resolve to exterminate us.

Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? In the middle of twentieth century!

And thus my elders concerned themselves with all manner of things – strategy, diplomacy, politics, and Zionism – but not with their own fate.”

[Citation: Night by Elie Wiesel, translated from the French by Marion Wiesel, Hill and Wang publishers, 2006.]

To forget would…

2008-10-10T14:16:00.001+05:30

“Why did I write it?

Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories, to help prevent history from repeating itself?

Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one’s knowledge of death and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature?”

***

“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would not only be dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

[Quoted from Night by Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, author, winner of The Nobel Peace Prize (1986); from the Preface to the new 2006 translation (from the French) by his wife Marion Wiesel.]

Auschwitz

2008-10-08T19:59:00.004+05:30

I’m reading Laurence Rees’ book Auschwitz: The Nazis & The ‘Final Solution’ and watching his BBC TV series at the same time. Of course, the book provides details the TV series cannot, keeping in mind the time-frame in which the video format had to be packaged. Still, the colour ‘enactments’ in the TV series are well-directed. Some of the old and hazy B&W video footages of Auschwitz (and elsewhere) in the TV series are heart-wrenching.

A December 2004 BBC press release has this to say about the TV series:

“The name Auschwitz is quite rightly a byword for horror,” says series producer Laurence Rees. “But the problem with thinking about horror is that we naturally turn away from it. Our series is not only about the shocking, almost unimaginable pain of those who died, or survived, Auschwitz. It’s about how the Nazis came to do what they did. I feel passionately that being horrified is not enough. We need to make an attempt to understand how and why such horrors happened if we are ever to be able to stop them occurring again.”

[Citation: BBC TWO press release – BBC Two unravels the secrets of Auschwitz, 3 December 2004. Auschwitz plaque photo courtesy Sunil Bahl.]

War against the weak

2008-10-07T19:21:00.002+05:30

The belief that human stock could be improved by careful breeding is not something devised by the Nazis alone. Much before the Nazis got onto it, eugenics, or the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding, was practiced in the United States of America.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, frustrated by the influx of immigrants from various parts of the world (particularly from Asia and southern and eastern Europe), America had become quite concerned with the racial composition of the immigrants, and, in turn, its own population.

In response to this growing problem, a group of eugenics practitioners in America had decided to take serious measures in limiting immigration. What is of greater importance is that some of these measures actually led to a sort of ethnic cleansing of the American population.

In his 2003 book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, American investigative author Edwin Black states that “eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in ‘colonies’, and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning.”

According to Black’s November 2003 article in the History News Network titled The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics, from which I’ve quoted above,

“Elitists, utopians, and so-called ‘progressives’ fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented [Sir Francis] Galton’s eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind – and less or none of everyone else.

The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the earth.”

[Citation: The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics by Edwin Black, History News Network, 24 November 2003.]

You can also read a previous post of mine Eugenics, an American point of view.

A collective enterprise

2008-09-30T14:24:00.000+05:30

Hitler’s hatred for Jews was hinted at and later communicated freely in his speeches. He blamed them for Germany losing WW1 and for draining his country economically, which he believed led to the suffering of the German people. For these reasons, in 1939, Hitler had been contemplating expulsion of Jews from Germany. Then, why did he, by mid-1941, change his mind to order the extermination of Jews? Wouldn’t a simple expulsion of the Jews from Germany have been enough? Why death?

Some people suggest, and some even insist that there is proof to show, that Hitler and the Nazis were greatly influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. That, Darwin’s theories of ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ were behind the Nazi ideal of a master race – a pure(r) ‘Aryan’ race. That, Hitler and the Nazis had used Darwin’s theory to brainwash millions of Germans into believing that they were radically superior to other human beings in the world.

Apparently, though speaking against slavery, Darwin himself believed that some races like the blacks from Africa were genetically inferior to the white Caucasians. Hitler had built upon this theory to attack the Jews as a genetically inferior race. And, the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews during WW2 was a direct derivative of the German ideal of a superior race based upon Darwin’s theory. But the interesting thing is that, this belief was so widespread and so deep in the minds of the German people, the Jews simply had no chance.

And, that’s what’s so shocking about the extermination of the Jews!

British TV producer and author Laurence Rees brings this fact out in the open in his book and his BBC TV series, Auschwitz: The Nazis & ‘The Final Solution’. Rees’ book and films reinforce the fact that, although it’s true Hitler had given the order to exterminate the Jews, the actual killings were carried out by ordinary men (and women) collectively, without any remorse.

Here’s an excerpt from the ‘Introduction’ of Laurence Rees’ book:

“Tracing how Hitler, [his Chief of SS, Heinrich] Himmler, [Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard] Heydrich and other leading Nazis created both their ‘Final Solution’ and Auschwitz offers us the chance to see in action a dynamic and radical decision-making process of great complexity. There was no blueprint for the crime imposed from above, nor one devised from below and simply acknowledged from the top. Individual Nazis were not coerced by crude threats to commit murders themselves. No, this was a collective enterprise owned by thousands of people, who made the decision themselves not just to take part but to contribute initiatives in order to solve the problem of how to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies on a scale never attempted before.”

[Citation: Auschwitz: The Nazis & ‘The Final Solution’ by Laurence Rees, a BBC Book, 2005.]

The Jewish Problem

2008-09-25T10:41:00.002+05:30

The Holocaust or mass slaughter of Jewish people by the Nazis is a subject that cannot be ignored when we think of WW2 and its aftermath. At least from the European experience – i.e. keeping Asia and the Pacific aside. Although no one seems to know the facts exactly, historical records suggest that Adolf Hitler had given the order to annihilate the Jews himself, sometime towards the end of 1941. Perhaps a few months earlier.

Historical records also suggest that Hitler was working on an ideology of a pure race – a Nordic race, a master race of Scandanavians and Germans who were believed to be the fittest and most capable of leadership. Hence, it is believed, he ‘had it in’ for the Jews, the Gypsies, the Slavs, the homosexuals and a few other minor ethnic groups. The reason stated for the Holocaust was ethnic cleansing. In other words, it was a racial issue.

However, when we read about Germany during Hitler’s time, we learn that the country – and most of Europe – was in an economic recession. The context of films such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (see my previous post) or more recent ones from Hollywood such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Steven Soderberg’s The Good German are, by no means, untrue. And worth noting, if we wish to understand what may (also) have led to the Holocaust.

During the recession, when much of Europe was recovering after WW1, a polarisation had taken place dividing the rich and the poor, and the German people ‘believed’ that the Jews had cornered all the money in their country. The entire commerce of Germany was in the hands of the Jews and, therefore, the Jews were responsible for their poor economic state and well-being. These sentiments were so strong that, when Hitler and the Nazis had proposed getting rid of the Jews, very few Germans had protested.

While surfing the internet recently, I found a document titled The Jewish Problem from Calvin College in Michigan, USA, which gives a pretty clear picture of the Jewish Problem in pre-Nazi Germany through the words of one Max Eichler from the German Propaganda Archive. Here are some excerpts:

“Background: The book from which this section is taken was intended to provide a citizen's handbook to the Third Reich, with many pictures illustrating the way Nazi Germany worked. This section presents the "Jewish Question" from a Nazi viewpoint. Citizens are told that Nazis measures against the Jews are reasonable and defensive — but there are also hints of what was to come.

The source: Max Eichler, Du bist sofort im Bilde (Erfurt: J. G. Cramer's Verlag, 1939) pp. 139-142…

…Yet after six years of a National Socialist government, the 700,000 Jews in Germany were worth 8 billion marks, while the nearly 80 million German citizens were worth only 200 billion marks. Each Jew on average had 4.57, or four-and-a-half times, as much as the average German. Jewish net worth, which had been 4 billion marks in 1918, had doubled, at the expense of the German people. Jews also owned substantial property (for example, more than half — about 60% — of Berlin belonged to the Jews, although they were only 3.8% of the population). That proves the extent to which Jewish parasites had exploited the German people.”

These facts could be true. For, not too long ago, I had heard similar sentiments expressed by an elderly Parsi lady I had met in Mumbai who (passed away several years ago but) had grown up in Germany prior to WW2. She was categorical in stating that the Jews had controlled all the businesses, had made huge sums of money charging astronomical amounts for the products and services they delivered (even the basic necessities), and had made the lives of ordinary German people (including her) miserable.

In her view – and, so it seems, in the views of millions of Germans ‘suffering’ at that time – Adolf Hitler may have come as their saviour.

[Citation: The Jewish Problem, a document from the German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College, Michigan, USA. And, in remembrance of TS – may her soul rest in peace.]

Reconstruction

2008-09-20T14:37:00.002+05:30

Rachel Seiffert and Bernhard Schlink (see my previous post) aren’t the only ones to embed their sentiments of post-WW2 Germany in my mind. Long before I read Seiffert and Schlink, I remember seeing an outstanding film on the same subject by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder called The Marriage of Maria Braun.

The Marriage of Maria Braun centres on a woman in Germany in the final years of WW2 and during its reconstruction. It’s about a young woman, Maria, who finds her country and her life in ruins, but still tries to make something of it single-handedly, using her brains and her charm (sexuality). Through various turns of fate and determination, she succeeds and prospers, only to lose everything in the end.

The film begins in a bleak winter Germany during WW2 where men are stealing planks of wood to build fires to stay warm, and women are selling themselves to earn a few marks to provide food for the family. In this desperation, Maria marries the love of her life, a soldier, Hermann Braun, only to lose him to the Russian Front.

Not long after, while she’s working in a bar for American soldiers to earn her keep, Maria receives word that Hermann is reported missing in action. Lonely and out of her mind, she takes up a kind Black American soldier as her lover. One night, while they are together, Hermann lands up unexpectedly and, in a heated struggle between them, the American soldier is killed. Hermann takes the blame and is jailed.

Finding her true love again, Maria vows to create a life for both of them when Hermann returns from jail. With the English she has learnt from the American soldier, Maria takes up a job as the secretary to the owner of a textile mill. Using her intelligence, hard work, perseverance and her sexuality to charm the owner, she rises from the rank of a secretary to become a prosperous businesswoman, accumulating wealth and power.

Just when she feels she has succeeded in reconstructing her life from its ruins and is ready to start a new life with Hermann, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who had drawn out the story for screenplay) brings in a twist in the tale. And, in classic Fassbinder style, everything comes crashing down.

The Marriage of Maria Braun is Fassbinder’s parable of reconstruction… of life, love and the soul of not just Maria Braun in the film, but also of his beloved country Germany after WW2. What Fassbinder tries to say in the film is that, in life and love, as it is in war and economics, reconstruction and prosperity come at a huge price.

Trials of the ordinary

2008-09-17T16:35:00.001+05:30

I feel ashamed that I know so little about the aftermath of the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. No other nation has experienced such tragedy. No other people have experienced the agonies of living with their dead, their injured and their sick for so many years until reconstruction.

Yet, I’ve read so little about it – even in fiction. Tales of post-WW2 Japan, at least in English, seem hard to come by. Most of what I’ve read about WW2 and its after-effects has been British or American – narrating, decidedly, a victor’s point of view of war, suffering and reconstruction. This has made me wonder about the vanquished! Surely, they have tales of their own!

Fortunately, two books of fiction had caught my eye. Both were about Germany and, unquestionably, enlightening to read! Specifically, because they presented a perspective I’ve often overlooked: that the trials of the ordinary people, caught in war, are, inescapably, an integral part of the killings, the invasions, the espionage, the heroism, the sorrows and the romances.

The first book was Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room, and the second was Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.

Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room was not really a novel, but three novellas distinct in their narratives. The first narrated the life of a handicapped boy who felt isolated as he was unable to take part in the action due to a physical deformity and, therefore, turned to photography and chronicled the war until his disillusionment when the Allies attacked Berlin.

The second narrated a journey by an adolescent girl who, stoically, took responsibility of travelling through war-torn Germany to reach her younger brothers and sister safely to her grandmother’s place. The third novella narrated the story of a schoolteacher in present-day Germany trying to absolve himself from the guilt of his grandfather’s war crimes.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader was different from Seiffert’s novellas. It was a unique story of a teenager’s relationship with an older woman who disappeared from his life one day, and then, many years later, when he was a law student, turned out to be a war criminal on trial. The story presented the young man’s confusion and, then, his slow understanding of the older woman’s need to keep secret a personal disability – even at the cost of punishment and personal grief, leading to a tragic end.

The Dark Room and The Reader were both sensitive and disturbing; and yet, two of the best books I’ve read on war.

Evil for the sake of good

2008-09-12T16:18:00.002+05:30

“The decision to use evil for the sake of good requires that the decision-maker be willing to bear the brunt of evil.”
[Quote from Bernhard Schlink’s novel Homecoming.]

Should the United States have dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was it morally right to kill and injure hundreds of thousands of people with a single command? Was this wanton murder any different from Hitler’s Nazi Germany? After dropping the first one on Hiroshima to prove the point, was the second bomb on Nagasaki necessary?

These questions have been debated since August 1945 to no conclusive end. If we are to go by the fact that the United States has, till date, refused to apologise to the people of Japan for dropping the atom bombs, then we can be sure that the United States feels that they were justified in their action. It was, after all, to shorten the war and save thousands of lives!

It’s interesting to note that the atom bomb was actually intended for Hitler’s Germany. Hitler was evil and had to be stopped. Hitler’s own atomic programme had to be stopped. Even Albert Einstein – an advocate of peace – had urged the United States in their atomic-bomb research by writing to President Franklin D Roosevelt himself.

But Germany lost the war in Europe and surrendered to the Allied Forces in May 1945 – three months before the atom bomb was ready for use. So, Japan became the obvious target.

The United States still claims – as they did back in 1945 – that the dropping of the two atom bombs compelled Japan to surrender and bring World War 2 to its end. And so it did. On 15 August 1945, in his acceptance of surrender speech, Emperor Hirohito of Japan said, “The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage.”

On a clear day…

2008-09-09T19:15:00.002+05:30

63 years ago, on a clear day, history was created. On that day, 6 August 1945, at 7:42 a.m., an atom bomb was dropped on a city called Hiroshima in Japan, killing more than 150,000 people – half of them on that day itself. All civilians. Thousands more died from injuries and radiation illnesses over the years.

The next day, US military officials had confirmed publicly that Hiroshima was devastated: at least 60% of the city was wiped off the map. An eyewitness account on Tokyo Radio had described the victim’s bodies as bloated and scorched, burned with huge blisters.

At least four Japanese cities were targeted by the United States: Kokura, Niigata, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The one chosen as target – ‘bomb primary’ – depended on weather conditions, as the pilot on the plane carrying the bomb needed clear visibility to drop its load. As Hiroshima was experiencing clear sunshine that morning, the luck of the draw went against its people. And, history was created.

On hearing the news of the attack on Hiroshima, US President Harry S Truman, returning home from Europe on board USS Augusta, had apparently announced that, “The experiment was an overwhelming success.” It is rumoured that President Truman had also said, “It is the greatest thing in history!” But this comment seems to have been deleted from most US records.

Japan had challenged that the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima was inhuman, an atrocity, a crime against God and man, a violation of international law, specifically Article 22 of the Hague Convention which outlawed attacks on defenseless civilians. President Truman, of course, defended himself, announcing on national radio that the bomb had been dropped on a “military base, not a large city.”

And then, on 9 August 1945, at 11:02 a.m., the United States dropped the second atom bomb on Nagasaki, killing another 80,000 people – with, possibly, an equal number succumbing to injuries from “blistering blast winds, heat rays and radiation” over the years. On 9 August 1945, Nagasaki, too, was experiencing a clear day with sunshine and, therefore, became ‘bomb primary’ (apparently, Kokura was primary target, but a moderate cloud had covered and obscured the city).

[Citation: The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History by Erik Durschmied; 63 Years Ago: Media Distortions Set Tone for Nuclear Age by Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher, 6 August 2008; and various sources from the internet.]

NOTE: On further research I find that the bomb on Hiroshima was dropped at 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima time (not at 7:42 a.m. as indicated in Erik Durschmied's book The Hinge Factor. There is photographic evidence to show that several clocks in Hiroshima had stopped at 8:15 a.m. - presumably when the bomb was activated on ground.

The Hinge Factor

2008-09-06T13:35:00.000+05:30

We’ve grown up reading about wars in history books, with narratives of how great kings and great generals have been responsible for victories against all odds. We’ve read tales about their conquests, their courage and their heroism. We’ve accepted their courage, their commitment, their skill, their strategic decision-making capabilities and their leadership as the realities of battles they’ve fought and won. We’ve taken these factors for granted.

But, what really decides the outcome of a battle? What decides the fate and lives of thousands – sometimes millions – of people in a battle, during war, or even after?

In his book, The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History, Erik Durschmied presents an antithesis to the factors we often take for granted: that men with brilliance and courage and determination and leadership win battles. He suggests that, often, it is the unexpected and the unpredictable and the absurd in a battle that swings victory in favour of the opposition – changing the outcome of events and the course of history.

Durschmied suggests that the outcome of a battle and the fate of millions of people are not always determined by great men and their heroic qualities (as we tend to read in history books and believe), but more often, by improbable and unexpected happenings. In the prologue of The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History, he writes:

“Some chroniclers wish us to believe that battles are won by valor and the brilliance of war lords, on whom they bestow the accolade of ‘genius’ when they are triumphant. They record the victor as being brilliant and the loser as not. And yet, there is no secret formula to the victorious outcome of a battle – except that much depends on who commits the bigger blunder. Or, to put no finger point on it, many battles have been decided by the caprice of weather, bad (or good) intelligence, unexpected heroism or individual incompetence – in other words, the unpredictable. In military terms, this phenomenon is known as: The Hinge Factor.”

Changing the course of history – by chance

2008-09-03T20:12:00.002+05:30

In a film as recent and as mediocre as Wanted, directed by Timur Bekmambetov, actor Morgan Freeman’s character ‘Sloan’ talks of taking control and changing the course of history forever. For, the ability to do so is the ultimate show, and possession, of power.

If nothing else, history has been, and still is, about change. However, not all changes in history have been brought on by people – from their desires and their deeds. Much of it has happened by ‘existence’. Some of it has been accidental. Some of it has happened due to a combination of factors which were outside human control.

In his book Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, semiotics professor and author Umberto Eco mentions an instance in history when history has not been entirely in human control – that of Christopher Columbus ‘discovering’ the Americas – in the chapter ‘The Force of Falsity’ from which I’ve quoted in another blog:

“And so you see how complicated life is, and how fragile are the boundaries between truth and error, right and wrong. Though they were right, the sages of Salamanca were wrong; and Columbus, while he was wrong, pursued faithfully his error and proved to be right – thanks to serendipity.”

This fact, that Columbus discovered the Americas by chance, is not an isolated example but seems to be a common occurrence in history.

For instance, the Stone Age cave paintings in Altamira, Northern Spain – one of the greatest historical discoveries – were found accidentally when, in 1879, a 9-year-old girl crawled into a cave while exploring her father’s estate. The Stone Age cave paintings in Lascaux, Southern France, were found in 1940 by a teenager (and his friends) when he followed his dog into the cave.

Similar examples of chance discoveries are quoted by war journalist and author Erik Durschmied in his 1999 book The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Has Changed History, and by British mathematics professor Jacob Bronowski in his famous 1973 BBC TV series The Ascent of Man, which was later published as a book in 1974. They make interesting reading (or viewing), for both academics and laymen, about how history is shaped through the years.

If we are to believe great scholars like Eco, Durschmied and Bronowski, be it exploring the new world or war upon nations or man’s scientific and technological achievements, much of the course of history may have changed simply by chance, and not because of great strategies by powerful and ambitious men.

10 ideas that changed the course of history

2008-08-29T19:05:00.001+05:30

What we see, and act upon, is more a product of what is inside our heads rather than what’s out there. We think we see the real world but, actually, we see what we want to see. Often, we tune out big chunks of the environment; either because we are not comfortable with it, or because we are too fixated on something else.

All through history, we have shown a reluctance to accept new ideas or adopt new lifestyles. We have tended to stay with what we are comfortable with… even if it has caused us problems, limited our growth, or invited danger. Because, we believe, changing our view of the world opens us up to uncertainty and risk.

However, all has not been lost. There have been enlightening moments – even movements – in history which have ensured that we have evolved, and progressed, as the human race.

A couple of months ago, The Observer in the UK (now part of Guardian) published a series of interviews announcing what they felt were ideas that changed the course of history. The ideas were listed as
1. Plato’s Philosophy
2. Sun-centred (Copernican) Theory of the Universe
3. Cartesian Cogito
4. Theory of Universal Gravitation
5. Adam Smith’s Laissez-Faire Economics
6. Women’s Liberation
7. Marxist Analysis of Capitalism
8. Theory of the Unconscious
9. Theory of Relativity
10. World Wide Web.

An article on these ideas titled, Blue sky thinking: 10 ideas that changed the course of history, is available online on the Guardian website and makes interesting reading.

[Citation: Blue sky thinking: 10 ideas that changed the course of history – interviews by Ally Carnwath, Lucy Halfhead and Katie Toms, The Observer, 22 June 2008, article from the Guardian website.]

Minority status

2008-08-27T17:08:00.000+05:30

The issue of ‘background books’ that Umberto Eco raises in his book Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (see my earlier post ‘Travellers’) is not confined only to those who travel outside their countries. It is, rather, a notion – a concept, a view – that governs our attitudes and behaviour towards others, other situations and other things.

It is a notion that shapes, and is shaped by, convention. It is a notion that dictates what is thought to be true – in spite of emerging evidence to the contrary. It is a notion that hinders our ability, as perfectly normal human beings, to act rationally.

History is replete with examples of such notions impeding human progress: from Galileo being condemned for championing the Copernican model of the universe (which puts the Sun at the centre and the Earth in orbit around it), to Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’ being interpreted as anti-Christian, to modern-day feminists being ridiculed for challenging the subordinated role of women in our societies.

In each case, our background books have been overbearing, reducing new ideas and discoveries, which spring forth every now and then, to minority status.

Melbourne is UNESCO City of Literature

2008-08-26T18:28:00.003+05:30

Well, I’ll be damned! Last week – on 20 August 2008 – Melbourne (Australia) was declared UNESCO City of Literature.

The happy news was reported in an article, Melbourne hooks the books by Jason Steger, in Australian newspaper The Age, flaunting Melbourne’s rightful place as the second UNESCO City of Literature – the first being Edinburgh (Scotland) in 2004. [UNESCO’s website hasn’t been updated with the information on Melbourne yet.]

According to The Age, “The timing could hardly have been better had it appeared in the final chapters of a best-selling thriller. Three days before the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival, UNESCO has named Melbourne as its second City of Literature.”

The newspaper went on to state that, “[Victoria’s] Arts Minister Lynne Kosky said the decision was confirmation of the value of a lot of people who have been working in the literature industry – writers and publishers and those who support writing and publishing.”

Furthermore, reported The Age, “Ms Kosky said there were not many places internationally, and nowhere in Australia, that had a comparable space for literature and ideas. Melbourne’s status as a City of Literature would have cultural and economic benefits for Melbourne and Victoria.”

Couldn’t India’s New Delhi or Kolkata or Chennai qualify just as easily as Melbourne or Edinburgh? What qualifies a city as a UNESCO City of Literature anyway?

According to UNESCO (as indicated on its website),

“The following list of criteria and characteristics serves as a guide for cities interested in joining the network as a City of Literature:
• Quality, quantity and diversity of editorial initiatives and publishing houses;
• Quality and quantity of educational programmes focusing on domestic or foreign literature in primary and secondary schools as well as universities;
• Urban environment in which literature, drama and/or poetry play an integral role;
• Experience in hosting literary events and festivals aiming at promoting domestic and foreign literature;
• Libraries, bookstores and public or private cultural centres dedicated to the preservation, promotion and dissemination of domestic and foreign literature;
• Active effort by the publishing sector to translate literary works from diverse national languages and foreign literature;
• Active involvement of media, including new media, in promoting literature and strengthening the market for literary products.”

Read The Age article on Melbourne, the second UNESCO City of Literature here.

Visit the UNESCO Culture Literature page here.

[Citation: Melbourne hooks the books by Jason Steger, The Age; UNESCO City of Literature webpage.]

Travellers

2008-08-25T10:13:00.000+05:30

“We (in the sense of human beings) travel and explore the world, carrying with us some ‘background books’. These need not accompany us physically; the point is that we travel with preconceived notions of the world, derived from our cultural tradition. In a curious sense we travel knowing in advance what we are on the verge of discovery, because past reading has told us what we are supposed to discover. In other words, the influence of these background books is such that, irrespective of what travellers discover and see, they will interpret and explain everything in terms of these books.”

– Umberto Eco in Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (translated by William Weaver)

Recognising Indian authors

2008-07-26T21:35:00.002+05:30

“The Man Booker Prize promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year. The prize is the world’s most important literary award and has the power to transform the fortunes of authors and even publishers.”

Authors of Indian origin who have won the Man Booker Prize are Salman Rushdie (1981 – Midnight’s Children), Arundhati Roy (1997 – The God of Small Thins), and Kiran Desai (2006 – The Inheritance of Loss). There is also V S Naipaul (1971 – In A Free State) – for those of you who consider V S Naipaul to be an author of Indian origin. Salman Rushdie, of course, won the 'Best of the Booker' this year.

Would any of these authors have won the Man Booker Prize if they had written their books in an Indian vernacular language? I think not.

What encouragement can we provide Indian writers to write in their own vernacular languages? How can we transform their fortunes (as The Man Booker Prize promises) by recognising and rewarding their talent?

[Citation: Quote from The Man Booker Prize website.]

A nation and its literature are closely tied

2008-07-24T17:18:00.000+05:30

A new book award has been announced in India. It’s the Golden Quill Book Award from www.indiaplaza.in. I learnt about it a couple of days ago when a blogger, named Stephen, wrote a comment on my blog and provided some relevant information about the award. On inquiring about the Golden Quill Book Award, I found that this year’s shortlist contains five books, all written in English, by writers who are domiciled in India.

This made me wonder about another recently-held award ceremony… about Salman Rushdie winning the ‘Best of the Booker’ prize. I wondered what this may mean to us in India. Would we feel elated because Rushdie and his ‘Midnight’s Children’ have championed the Indian nation? Would we feel it’s a great achievement for the Indian people and Indian literature? After all, though born in India, Rushdie is a British author, writing in English.

To quote from a quote in my previous post (with a little modification), does “It thus ably represent the excellence and diversity of narrative traditions and literary approaches in a multilingual, multiconfessional country” that India truly is? Or, does Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ reflect a globalised India where everyone speaks English?

I raise this point for two reasons: One, people across the world have begun to view Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ as the quintessential Indian novel, ignoring many more-suitable examples from Indian literature (such as the earlier Bengali novels of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay or the more-recent novels of R K Narayan). And two, Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ seems to have drowned out the rich, as well as complex, heritage and repertoire of Indian literature in her 20-odd regional languages.

Don’t you think, to appreciate Indian literature, one has to understand her people – a great many of whom aren’t Midnight’s children – and her culture – which is steeped in thousands of years of traditions, superstitions, myths, philosophy, logic and social structures? Perhaps, as a nation, we need to impress upon the world what Indian literature truly is. After all, a nation and its literature are closely tied.

The shortlist of books and authors in the Golden Quill Book Awards 2008 can be found here.

English language, Indian literature

2008-07-22T16:14:00.000+05:30

The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947-1997, was published in 1997, (possibly) to celebrate Indian literature produced during the first 50 years of India’s Independence. This seemed to be true as the collection featured ‘contemporary’ Indian writers – the oldest, I think, was Jawaharlal Nehru – most of whom you would have heard of and, perhaps, read in the last 20 years.

The collection was edited by Salman Rushdie and Elisabeth West, and contained both fiction and non-fiction from 32 Indian authors, some of whom are no longer alive, but all, except one, writing in English. The exception was Saadat Hasan Manto, whose narrative was the only inclusion of a translated work of an Indian vernacular language (in this case, Urdu).

Rushdie, in his enthusiasm no doubt, or perhaps to justify his own inclusion in the collection, had stated that the reason for focusing on Indian writing in English and not including translations of Indian vernacular writing was because (a) Indian writing in English had proven itself to be a force to reckon with globally, and (b) no great work of Indian vernacular writing had appeared during this period.

Like many readers and writers of Indian literature, author Amit Chaudhuri, though included in the Vintage 1947-1997 collection, may have felt that Indian vernacular writing needed greater appreciation and recognition. He, therefore, ended up editing The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature in 2004, putting together a collection of Indian writing which included a fairly even representation of Indian vernacular writing.

Much to the delight of many readers, and going back 150 years into Indian literature, this ‘modern’ collection included 20 (out of 38) writers who wrote in Indian vernacular languages, including Rabindranath Tagore and Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay. Alas, Amit Chaudhuri, being Bengali, may have favoured Bengali literature a little more than other Indian vernacular literatures.

Whatever be the editor’s bias, a review of this collection in Amazon.com states, “It thus ably represents the excellence and diversity of narrative traditions and literary approaches in a multilingual, multiconfessional country.” [Ali Houissa, Library Journal, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY – reproduced from Amazon.com.]

From this perspective, The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, seems to be a perfect marriage of English language and Indian literature. Its success made possible by the use of one language, English. And so, I’m reminded of Pascale Casanova’s words again: some languages carry more weight than others.

Disappearance of languages and literature

2008-07-21T12:46:00.000+05:30

With more and more globalisation and with English language’s dominance the world over, specifically in terms of markets for published literature, would Indian regional-language writers be tempted to adopt English as their language to achieve prominence? I mean, what really is the future of, say, Bengali (my mother tongue) writers and literature twenty years from now?

After all, if you look around you, you’ll see more and more publishing companies are becoming globalised, and a few large global publishing houses are beginning to dominate the industry. In fact, some publishers are being bought over by entertainment companies and a phenomenal media consolidation is taking place globally.

What does this mean to language, to literature and to writers? As larger publishers – or media houses – start dominating the publishing industry, would some regional and smaller languages and literatures disappear? Would conforming to globalisation through writing, or translations, in one or a few dominating languages be their only hope of survival?

If writers are forced to write, or translate their writing, in another language because (a) they are dominated by another language, and/or (b) another language offers a much wider readership for their writing (than their own), what would it mean to a specific country’s or region’s language and literature? What would it mean to that country’s or that region’s or that people’s culture?

Exile

2008-07-19T16:23:00.000+05:30

It is reported that Irish author James Joyce had taken exile in France because he didn’t want to fight between choosing English or Gaelic as his language of expression in his motherland. Czech writer Milan Kundera, on the other hand, moved to France for political reasons – when Czechoslovakia came under Russian communist rule – and, later, chose to write in French rather than in his mother tongue Czech.

I find Kundera’s case interesting. Perhaps Kundera wrote in French to save himself the trouble of translating his Czech into French before publishing in France for a ready French audience. Or, perhaps, he wrote in French because the French literary ethos, and the French audience, did not welcome literature in a language other than French.

French literary scholar Pascale Casanova, citing the Man Booker Prize and its many non-British recipients, had stated in an interview with Charles Ruas in 2005 that, unlike the English who welcome writers from their ‘colonies’, the French are rather arrogant and practically despise writers from their ‘colonies’ (typically countries in West and North Africa, Algeria being an ideal example – besides Canada).

This makes me wonder how closely literature is connected to politics. If we look at history, we find that many writers were forced to write in, as well as translate their works into, another language simply because they were dominated by another culture and its language at that time. To some writers, this can mean another form of exile – an exile in one’s own land.

Paris’ literary superiority

2008-07-16T17:07:00.000+05:30

French scholar and critic Pascale Casanova believes there’s no such thing as ‘global literature’. However, in her groundbreaking book The World Republic of Letters, published originally in French in 1999 but which became famous in 2005 when it was published in English by Harvard University Press, Casanova puts forth a model for a literary world system which is indeed intriguing – and rather flattering of Casanova’s own country.

In an interview with Charles Ruas on WPS1, going back to 2005, Casanova states that, just like the political and economic world before us, there is a parallel literary world. This literary world is dominated by two literary languages: French and English. In fact, this has been so thanks to the history of European language and literature, and specifically since the 19th century when Paris and London were fighting for dominance as the world’s capital.

Paris, naturally, won; with the greatest writers from across the world – Edgar Allen Poe, Mark twain, William Faulkner, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and many more – flocking to Paris to establish themselves. There was a belief that Paris recognised genius. To be a writer and to be published in Paris was to be canonised.

Paris was the literary capital of the world. It was the place that all great writers visited. It was the place where writers were declared ‘real’ writers. Interestingly, more than the French, Paris was made into this legend by foreign writers like Poe and Faulkner and Joyce. Many writers – such as Edward Gibbons (memoirs), Oscar Wilde (Salomé) and August Strindberg (plays) – even wrote in French just for this recognition.

The ‘Paris’ myth grew and offered prestige to many writers. More and more writers congregated in Paris, further reinforcing Paris’ dominance in world literature. Apart from English which became its greatest rival from across the shores, other languages like Greek, Latin, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian… all bowed down to Paris’ literary superiority.

[Citation: Pascale Casanova interview with Charles Ruas on WPS1, 28 February 2005.]

The literary world system

2008-07-14T11:30:00.001+05:30

In my previous post, I had suggested that, perhaps, there is a large international market for translations of Indian regional-language writing. If such a market really exists, it opens up opportunities not only for Indian-language writers, but also for Indian-language translators. This proposal, of course, makes sense if there really is an international literary space where Indian-language writing translated into English (or other languages) can snugly fit in.

While dwelling on this possibility of an international literary space for Indian-language writing, I came upon William Deresiewicz’ 2005 review of French scholar and critic Pascale Casanova’s book La République mondiale des lettres (The World Republic of Letters). Here’s an excerpt from that review which appeared in The Nation:

…it helps to know how the international literary sphere is usually thought about – or rather, not thought about. Academic departments, literary academies, histories and reference works, honors and prizes: The institutions of literary life almost invariably partition the world of literature into discrete, autonomous national traditions – English over here, American over there; Italian in this classroom, Spanish in that; German Romanticism, French Symbolism, the Russian novel. Even the Nobel Prize, our one global literary honor, makes a point of emphasizing the national provenance of its laureates, so that it is understood that it is often a country as much as an author that is being recognized, and that the consecration of, say, a Saramago, shuts the door on all other Portuguese writers for the foreseeable future. As for the books that enter our national literary space from the outside (especially from outside the English-speaking world), do we ever think about why some reach us and not others? Where do translated writers ‘come from’? Are they simply the most celebrated authors in their own countries? (In fact, they often aren’t.) If we think about these questions at all, we probably assume that the writers we become aware of are just better than the ones we don’t. (But ‘better’ according to what criteria, enforced by whom?) In other words, we’ve bought into the myth of an international literary meritocracy, or, in Casanova’s words, “the fable of an enchanted world...where universality reigns through liberty and equality...the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal.”

[Citation: The literary world system, by William Deresiewicz, The Nation, 3 January 2005.]

Indian writing for the global market

2008-07-10T10:54:00.000+05:30

[No, I’m not talking about the Kama Sutra]

If Indian translators aren’t recognised and rewarded for their contribution by the industry (readers and publishers included), perhaps, relying on India as their only literary marketplace is a dead end. In that case, could Indian translators not look upon the world as a larger market for their services?

When I think of some of my favourites, such as Michael Hoffman (famous for translations of Joseph Roth, Patrick Suskind, Wolfgang Koeppen) or Gregory Rabassa (famous for translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar), and the recognition and awards they have received, I’m inclined to think that the global market may provide a much-needed break for Indian translators.

Of course, Indian authors and their publishers – both Indian and international – have to accept the idea and make headway. I understand that Penguin, Picador and Harper Collins have already initiated programmes to put Indian authors (i.e. those who reside and write in India) on the global literary map, but their efforts have largely focused on Indian authors writing in English.

When it comes to translations, my kudos goes to a little-known publisher from Kolkata called Seagull Books – started in the early 1980s by Naveen Kishore – which has taken the initiative to publish English translations of Indian regional language books (mainly Bengali, but there’s more) and market them internationally. My collection of Mahasweta Devi’s writing couldn’t have been possible without Seagull Books.

The translator’s dilemma

2008-07-08T16:48:00.000+05:30

Translators aren’t rewarded as well as they ought to be. Apparently, the economics of translated titles is not promising. The logic is something like this:

A higher fee for translation increases the cost of production and, in turn, the price at which the title is sold at the bookstore. A high price deters readers from buying the title and reduces its demand, adversely affecting its sale. With low sales, publishers can’t recover their investment and lose interest in publishing translated titles.

Moreover, in India, with her 20-odd regional languages, the universe of readers for translated titles is fragmented. Publishers can’t take the risk of printing a large number of copies for a single title. A small print run, once again, increases the unit cost of the title and its price, deterring readers from buying the book.

With fewer readers buying translated titles, fewer translated titles are published… further reducing the translator’s opportunities.

Book translations are disappearing on the open market

2008-07-05T14:34:00.001+05:30

“The success of a few internationally acclaimed titles, however, masks the wider paradox of how free interchange between markets, cultures and languages is drying up. With the decline of translations of books, a centrepiece of book culture, namely their universality and diversity, is at risk. A turf war between publishers and translators can’t resolve the fundamental riddle of the current implosion of the translation market. We probably need to acknowledge that for a growing number of books, we may have a potentially interested reading audience, but no viable business model in a purely market-driven book economy. Thus, the traditional rights markets alone are not enough to organize a universal network of books and ideas through translation. And the public funding offered by many countries for translations is not enough either to bridge the widening gap between cultural expectations and the economic obstacles.”

[Quoted from an article, titled Cultural diversity? A pipe dream, by Rüdiger Wischenbart, in www.sightandsound.com, 22 March 2007.]

Indian writing in English translation

2008-07-02T18:35:00.000+05:30

There is a market within India for Indian regional language books translated into English. That’s because there is a rich treasury of literature in every Indian regional language. Yet, a person of, say, Bengali origin is unable to read and appreciate Hindi or Tamil or Marathi literature since he or she is unlikely to be proficient in other Indian regional languages.

Given the fact that only a small portion of Indians are proficient in more than one Indian language, proficiency in English, apart from Hindi, is a resource we can rely on. Moreover, as the market for books in English language is growing rapidly (see my previous blogs on the Indian publishing industry), translating regional language works into English is an option we can consider.

Of course, it’s easily said than done. Several issues need to be resolved. The first of which is arranging quality translation services through qualified translators. Some of this is available already, usually centred at universities as literary translation is considered an academic endeavour. Publishers need to find ways to engage the academia in this enterprise and make translation into English worthy and remunerative.

Second, universities, councils and boards of education need to prescribe such translated texts in their syllabus/curriculum, as well as reading material for research projects. This will increase readership and ensure these books are available in their libraries.

Third, publishers and distributors need to make certain that such books are available in bookshops across the country, in towns big and small. Furthermore, the books must be available at affordable prices to attract a larger audience. These issues together are a big challenge as English literacy levels are very low across India. Publishers and distributors are unlikely to find this a profitable marketplace for their books.

Fourth, although prices of books need to be affordable, publishers need to find economies of scale in order to publish books in good print quality. Normally, it is expected that cheaper books mean poor presentation in terms of paper, printing, binding, etc. Publishers need to explore paper quality, and printing and binding technologies that allow production and distribution of a ‘value for money’ product to the consumer.

Fifth, copyrights and deterring piracy.

However, there is an upside. Since the Western world has an interest in getting to know India, specifically in/with Indian points of view, there is a chance that several Western markets will open up for Indian writing in English translation. Since, thanks to award-winning authors of Indian origin like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Jhumpa Lahiri, Indian writing in English has captured a high-ground in the international literary market as well as in India, English translations of writing in Indian regional languages can now make a break-through internationally and in India.

The art of the translator

2008-06-28T18:01:00.001+05:30

“As a translator I know that there is a fascination in living at such close quarters with a writer, engaging with every word they wrote, trying to make another text which is worthy of the original. But there is also a melancholy of translation. Compared with other writers, translators feel undervalued. It is not so much that they are badly paid (this is a problem they often share with those they translate) as that they are downgraded, damned with faint praise, criticized in passing and, unkindest of all, ignored. All are aware, and if they weren’t critics would remind them, of the inadequacy of their efforts – ‘the translator is a betrayer’ goes the old refrain, unthinkingly.”

– Peter France, The Art of the Translator

[Citation: Peter France on the Art of the Translator, Oxford University Press website, about Peter France’s The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation.]

Ignored

2008-06-25T19:18:00.000+05:30

“Left to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

For a boy growing up in a Bengali family (from West Bengal, India), the literary works of Rabindrath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and other eminent Bengali writers were prescribed reading. Furthermore, on my parent’s insistence, I was introduced to Bengali translations of English, French and Russian fiction – both novels and short stories – as well as universally-known works such as Aesop’s Fables, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

As a teenager, ready to make my own choices in literature, writers like Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, O Henry, Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky became obvious names on my reading list. Added to that list were hundreds of others; far too many to name here. But, there was one common fact about my reading habit: I had switched entirely to English. I no longer read Bengali translations of any foreign literary work.

This made me wonder: who were those translators from my childhood who had so painstakingly and faithfully translated Homer and Hugo, Dickens and Dostoyevsky for Bengali readers like me? Why did I not remember them? And, even now, why do I not remember who translated into English Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels from Spanish or Milan Kundera’s novels from Czech, and later from French … all of which I read so avidly?

It was with much humiliation that I realised a brutal fact: that, although translators play a critical role in bringing authors and poets and playwrights to prominence in various languages, and in the minds of millions of readers across the world, their talent and enterprise are ignored by the best of us in the most supreme of moments when literature gives us pleasure.

Some latest info from NBTI

2008-06-18T12:28:00.002+05:30

Obtaining data on the Indian book publishing industry is not only difficult, it can also be misleading… with various publishers quoting various figures. However, I’m guessing, data published by the National Book Trust, India can be trusted. So, I’m sharing something I found on their website, released in February this year during the 18th New Delhi World Book Fair 2008.

Here’s a quote from National Book Trust, India’s website:

“Publishing scenario in contemporary India is a conceptually exciting, linguistically rich and quantitatively diverse phenomenon. India is perhaps the only country in the world, which publishes books in more than 24 languages. There are nearly 16,000 publishers producing not less than 80,000 titles in all major Indian languages including English with an annual turnover of Rs.100,000 million. Of these, almost forty per cent titles are published in English language alone. As a result, India ranks third in the publication of English books immediately after the USA and the UK.”

This should put a lot of questions to rest.

Please note that the NBTI figure of Rs.100,000 million (i.e. Rs.10,000 crores) as annual turnover of the book publishing industry is far higher – and more promising – than the ‘Rs.3,500 crores to Rs.7,000 crores’ figure I had presented in my previous post. I stand corrected. However, I wonder if more titles are published in English than in Hindi, as NBTI claims.

[Citation: National Book Trust, India website.]

Bound and gagged

2008-06-14T13:22:00.003+05:30

Searching for information on the book publishing industry in India is a frustrating experience. Internet searches generate miscellaneous and dated information. Publishing industry people never volunteer anything; nor do they come forth with anything specific upon probing. It seems, not only are books bound in India, when it comes to sharing information, their publishers – and their staff – are proverbially gagged.

No one seems to know what the size of the book publishing industry in India really is. Figures vary between Rs.3,500 crores to Rs.7,000 crores – a pretty wide margin. Of this, Hindi books seem to have the biggest share in the number of titles published (followed by English, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi). But, English books seem to have the biggest share of sales in value – i.e. in rupee terms. That’s because English books are more expensive than regional-language books in India.

Even here, the share of English books vary between 22% and 45% of the market – another wide margin – considering a great many English books are imported. However, there is a general belief that the book publishing market in India is growing – and growing fast, considering the improvements in literacy. Here again, the English-language book market is growing the fastest – thanks to India’s globalisation. If we were to consider 2% of India’s population as English-language book readers, that’s a huge potential of 24 million consumers for English books.

This fact has changed the dynamics of the Indian publishing industry. More and more retail brands like Crossword, Landmark and Oxford are opening up bookstores in major cities. More and more Indian publishers are realising the importance of reach and setting up their own distribution channels. More and more foreign English-language publishers are eyeing the Indian market for their books and publications. More and more Indian writers are beginning to write and publish their works in English.

Although these changes are bound to rub off on regional-language publishers sooner or later, at the moment, they’re feeling a little gagged.

[The figures quoted in this post are entirely my own speculation and should not be interpreted as industry figures. The Indian market for books includes school books, academic books, general interest books (fiction, non-fiction), and trade books.]

In India, print still rules

2008-06-13T15:59:00.002+05:30

Western media may be replacing the printed word with the digital, but, in India, print still rules. Contrary to Western media trends, the print media is growing phenomenally in India. In the last five years, the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry in India has given approvals for publication of 284 new magazines.

Earlier this month, the Indian I&B Minister, Mr Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, addressed a meeting in New Delhi on the ‘Growth of Print Media in Liberalised Economy’. According to a Press Trust of India (PTI) report on that meeting, titled Print media records dynamic growth: I&B ministry, dated 2 June 2008, and reported in www.outlookindia.com, India’s “print media industry stood at Rs.149 billion in year 2007 and recorded a growth of 16 per cent over previous year.”

What’s more, Mr Dasmunsi had added, “in view of increasing literacy, there is a possibility of more growth and expansion of the print media in future.”

Mr Dasmunsi’s confidence is based on a survey of ‘India Media & Entertainment Scenario’ conducted jointly by the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The survey had further pointed out that the “magazine industry size was estimated at Rs.19 billion and registered a growth of 15 per cent during the year 2007.”

“According to the same study,” reported PTI, “Indian Print Media is projected to grow by 14 per cent over the next five years and magazine publishing to grow at a higher rate of 15 per cent. During the same period, newspaper-publishing market would reach Rs.243 billion.”

[Citation: Print media records dynamic growth: I&B ministry, PTI report, 2 June 2008, New Delhi.]

Unbound

2008-06-09T12:03:00.003+05:30

“Reading in America, as in many rich countries, is down. A study by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency, says leisure reading is declining, especially among the young. Since 1985, books’ share of entertainment spending has fallen by seven percentage points… Books have changed very little in half a millennium, but they may now be on the verge of going digital.”
[Quote from Unbound, the Economist, 5 June 2008.]

The latest issue of the Economist has a story on Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos shaking up the entire publishing industry with ‘Kindle’, his e-book reader, and his decision to insist that all POD (‘Publish On Demand’) books sold through Amazon.com be printed by the company at its warehouses.

The Economist story, which really highlights the advent of new technology in the publishing industry and, with it, changes in book buying and book reading, clearly vindicates the fact that less and less people are reading, and even less are going to be reading in the future, the printed word – not just newspapers (see my previous post), but also books.

There are good reasons for this change: “An economic slowdown may play to the new technologies’ strengths. The costs of printing and shipping paper and cardboard are rising… And if consumers become more price-sensitive, e-books may become more appealing.”

But, for the moment, there is some good news for the traditional book publisher. According to the Economist story, “Though they are an improvement on a computer screen, e-book readers remain crude simulacra of books. A poll released by John Zogby at BEA (i.e. Book Expo America) found that 82% of Americans strongly prefer paper to pixels.”

The end note? Says the Economist, “Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music (I had blogged about this too), any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient — but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.”

[Citation: Unbound, the Economist, 5 June 2008.]

Switching to digital media for the news

2008-05-29T11:57:00.002+05:30

“There are those of us who no longer read a newspaper’s print edition, and we’re not coming back. It’s now time to consider some options to keep Web readers on the hook – and to even turn them into profits.”
– Steve Outing, journalist

I gave up reading newspapers in the early 1990s and switched to TV. My morning ritual was to switch on my TV and watch the news on BBC World and CNN. A mug of steaming coffee in hand, I would switch channels between BBC World and CNN, and compare the news and its treatment by the two news delivery agencies. Much later in the day would I look at the newspapers – mainly to catch up on national and local news.

Today, even this ritual has changed. I, now, rely on the Internet for most of my news: international, national and local. Not to mention gathering news from email alerts I receive every day. Of course, I understand that, in India, with her growing print publications and TV channels attracting more and more readers and viewers every year, I’m in an insignificant minority. But internationally, I seem to belong to a new segment of media consumers.

According to Steve Outing, in his article Serving Those Who Don't Read the Print Edition in Editor & Publisher, “the growing number of people like me – those who used to read print editions of newspapers but have switched to digital media for their news – as well as people who have never read newspapers but still have needs for local news and information” need to be served news differently – most certainly digitally – by news organisations.

“And it’s not only because new technology provides an excellent – many would say better – alternative to the old printed form,” says Outing in his article. “There are environmental concerns about supporting a product that consumes precious resources: trees for the product and oil for delivery. Continuing to receive printed newspapers delivered by pollution-spewing delivery vehicles when an environmentally friendly digital alternative is available is also a moral choice that a growing number of people will make in the years ahead, as the Green movement continues to gain momentum.”

Although important, still leaving environmental concerns aside, Outing points out that, “Those of us who’ve given up the newspaper print edition haven’t changed all that much. We still want news – just in a format that’s more relevant to our lives in the age of the broadband Internet and mobile connectivity. We haven’t given up on newspapers; we’ve given up on the traditional platform. Former print-edition readers still want the news delivered to them, so newspaper publishers need to put more effort into developing useful digital delivery services.”

Steve Outing has a great deal more to say on this topic, recommending possible solutions to today’s media companies. If you’re keen on reading Outing’s entire article in Editor & Publisher online, you can find it here.

[Citation: Serving Those Who Don't Read the Print Edition by Steve Outing, Editor & Publisher, Stop The Presses By Steve Outing, 28 May 2008.]

Books aren’t going to be enough

2008-05-27T16:13:00.002+05:30

“But most cultural practices stop at the scale of human collectives: cities, economies, networks. You need to understand how communities now share information online in order to understand the complexity of today’s video games.”

– Steven Johnson in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You

The fact that books aren’t going to be enough to keep today’s youngsters occupied, excited and honed on their skills is an argument Steven Johnson has been proposing for a while. In his 2005 book (with a bright pink cover - paperback issue), Everything Bad Is Good For You, Johnson questions the popular notion that video games, TV and the Internet are responsible for dumbing down our intelligence.

On the contrary, he proposes that popular culture – with video games, TV and the Internet in its forefront – has actually helped increase the IQ levels of Americans in recent years. Johnson’s contention is that today’s video games, TV serials, films and the Internet are so complex that they actually engage our problem-solving faculties. He says that the complexity of these media force us to apply our minds and develop critical thinking skills, which a book never does.

No, Johnson doesn’t throw books by the wayside (in fact, he has written several), but argues that though books have – and add – value, video games force players to make choices, solve problems, keep track of complex situations and, in some cases, cooperate with other players to achieve a personal win. To an extent, suggests Johnson, even TV and films encourage our participation and use of intelligence. But the leader, by far, in the category is the Internet as it also encourages social interaction.

I’m not sure if I can agree with Steven Johnson when he proposes that video games, TV, films and the Internet actually help increase IQ levels. As far as I know, there is no such supporting data available in India. But I do agree with him on the point that non-literary media like video games, TV, films and, definitely, the Internet are important in our lives today. Today’s youngsters, and on occasions we too, thrive on such media and are likely to build their/our futures on them, rather than on books.

[Citation: Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson.]

A telling story

2008-05-26T12:28:00.000+05:30

The way youngsters consume media today may be a telling story. It may give us a few pointers on the way news, entertainment and even education ought to be designed, packaged and distributed in the future.

In an interview to The Editor’s Weblog recently, Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of the Associated Press, suggested that, “It no longer is an assumption that text is the default and only way to tell a story.”

Ms Carroll felt, “It’s the best way to get the fast word out.” “Only now,” quotes The Editor’s Weblog from that interview, “AP reporters also think about the most appropriate media to tell a story, which will be of most use to customers.” This thought certainly turns print journalism upside down, eroding its dominant role in the distribution of news.

The point made by the Economist.com article, From literacy to digiracy (see my previous post), on whether “our pedagogical tools are inconsistent with the skills needed” is also worth considering.

Youngsters today are not only consuming huge amounts of electronic/digital media outside their school/college curriculum, they are actually enjoying the experience far more than they do reading textbooks or attending lectures. In doing so, their skills in handling and experimenting with electronic/digital media are developing more rapidly than what our traditional means of education can impart.

And yet, and especially in India, there’s been very little improvement in the way education is designed, packaged and distributed for consumption by these youngsters. No wonder youngsters are moving away from textbooks and lectures, and getting hooked onto the Internet, video games, mobilephones and the TV. Can we blame them?

[Citation: Associated Press 2.0: 1-2-3 filing for all stories, The Editor’s Weblog, posted by Jean Yves Chainon, 21 May 2008.]

Young media consumers redefine literacy

2008-05-22T16:39:00.002+05:30

The Economist.com article I had quoted from in my previous post, From literacy to digiracy, ends with:

“So, no surprise that when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest and flunk their literacy tests. They are skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.

Teachers must recognise that our pedagogical tools are inconsistent with the skills needed to survive in a world where people are always connected to everyone and everything. In such a world, learning to think for oneself could well be more important than simply learning to read and write.”

These words are important to us not only as social commentary, but also because of their prophetic value.

When I look at the digital world around me and, particularly, the consumption of digital/electronic media by today’s youngsters, I am certain that the traditional definitions and associations of the term ‘literacy’ need to be reviewed. And, along with it, more appropriate learning/teaching methods – or, what the Economist.com article calls ‘pedagogical tools’ – need to be invented.

In the West, this need is already critically apparent in the world of news consumption. More and more youngsters in the 18-34 years age group are consuming their news digitally, and not from their morning papers. Newspaper readership is on a downward slide as youngsters are choosing Internet news channels and portals, e-newsletters and even emailed news from friends, to source their daily news from.

A recent study by Associated Press, aimed to better understand the behaviours of young readers in the 18-34 years age group, has found that not only is consumption of printed news by this group declining, youngsters today are actually sourcing and sharing news with each other through text messages, emails and social networks… which are popular and powerful media channels today, but discounted by traditional media.

According to a report in The Editor’s Weblog, Jim Kennedy, VP and Director of Strategic Planning at Associated Press, suggests: “These young consumers are looking up to news as a form of social currency.”

[Citation: AP study of young media consumers: “they want the back story”, The Editor’s Weblog, posted by Jean Yves Chainon, 21 May 2008.]

Technology is changing our perception of literacy

2008-05-20T12:45:00.002+05:30

“For anyone under the age of 20, the world being experienced is one where the internet has always existed, and where everyone who matters is only a click, speed dial or text message away. “Tomorrow’s adults,” says Mr [Mark] Federman [of the McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto], “live in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity.” Their direct experience of the world is wholly different from yours or mine.”

– quote from a recent article From literacy to digiracy on Economist.com

When a friend proposed that, with the advent of computers and the Internet, reading has become a thing of the past, I argued back. I felt that, on the contrary, reading has become popular again – thanks to the Internet. The only difference is that, today, the reading page has become digital – and decidedly vertical. To put it in an old-fashioned way, today, people are sitting up and reading. (My school teachers would have been happy to see this.)

That’s because computers and the Internet bring with them their own charm. To start with, computers and the Internet provide access to volumes and volumes of reading material we never knew existed. And, we are delighted to read them now, as they open our minds and increase our knowledge manifold.

Second, computers and the Internet bring with them still images, audio, animation and video – which means photos, music, movies and video games on our fingertips. It means colour and action. It means participation and interactivity. It means a whole new world of entertainment.

And finally, computers and the Internet bring with them connectivity and openness, encouraging us to create and contribute to the larger communication and socio-cultural processes… and touch each other’s lives.

But, it hasn’t always been this easy. Perhaps, it still isn’t. When I see the detractors of technology come charging at me on their high horses, the best I can do is blog about my thoughts and feelings. Once again, thanks to computers and the Internet. So, I was delighted to read an article on Economist.com, titled From literacy to digiracy, which discusses these same issues.

Here are some excerpts:

“Literacy may be under attack from electronic media, but that’s actually nothing new. In fact, the assault on the written word began not with the Macintosh computer in 1984, but with Samuel Morse’s demonstration of the telegraph in 1844 — an innovation a colleague on The Economist insists, quite correctly, on calling the “Victorian internet”.

In an essay on why Johnny and Janey can’t read (and why Mr and Ms Smith can’t teach), Mark Federman of the McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, argued that the telegraph was the first to “undo” the effects of the written word.

Where the phonetic alphabet separated the sound of a word from its meaning; and encoded that sound in symbols we call letters; and combined those symbols into hierarchical groupings called words, sentences, paragraphs and, ultimately, books; the telegraph recombined those symbols with sound — enabling the instantaneous transmission of information from person to person across vast distances.

If the telegraph was the starting point, Mr Federman reckons we are probably half way through a 300-year transition out of the world of mass literacy. That world began when Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press in 1455, and gave birth along the way to the Reformation, the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Method, and finally the Industrial Revolution — not to mention the modern era of newspapers, universal education and, yes, mass literacy.

Why 300 years? Because that’s how long it takes to reform social institutions. It’s the period needed for a generation to cease hearing about the way things used to be done from great-grandparents, who had heard about such things from their own great-grandparents.”

[Citation: From literacy to digiracy, Economist.com, 16 May 2008.]

Technology today has its beginnings in our past

2008-05-17T12:11:00.000+05:30

Several ‘generation now’ friends of mine responded with dismay to my previous posts. They said that their generation (typically 15-24 years) was indeed unique: more adventurous, passionate and technologically savvy than any others they knew of. They felt (a) my previous posts glorified older people unnecessarily, (b) using the ‘generation now’ tag for anybody over 25 years of age was incorrect, and (c) the Internet was truly theirs.

Well, I told them about Steve Jobs. Born in 1955 (that makes him 53 years of age –old enough to be a father-figure to the ‘generation now’), Steve Jobs is not only the co-founder of Apple, but also a man greatly admired for his contribution to today’s technology: computers, design, user interfaces, graphics, animation, the iPod and the iPhone.

Like Steve Jobs, there are others who would fail the 15-24 years age group test for ‘generation now’, but could still call the Internet truly theirs. Here’s a small list:

Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail, born 1968. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, born 1964. Jerry Yang (born 1968) and David Filo (born 1966) of Yahoo!. Tom Anderson (born 1975) and Chris DeWolfe (born 1966) of MySpace. Sergey Brin (born 1973) and Larry Page (born 1973) of Google. Steve Chen (born 1978) and Chad Hurley (born 1977) of YouTube. The youngest person from this eminent list (and there are many others I haven’t included) is 30 years of age.

In my opinion, these gentlemen are just as adventurous, passionate and technologically savvy as today’s ‘generation now’.

Anyway, the idea is not to argue over who is the real ‘generation now’. After all, ‘generation now’ is a socio-cultural classification identifying the habits, behaviour and psychographic profile of today’s youngsters. The idea is to acknowledge the fact that everything evolves over time. Technology today, as much as our socio-cultural habits and behaviour, and our psychographic profile, all have their beginnings in our past.

Nothing happens in a vacuum

2008-05-12T16:55:00.000+05:30

Nothing happens in a vacuum; specifically when we speak of socio-cultural phenomena. Societies, traditions and culture evolve over time, carrying with them values, lifestyles and practices that people adopt and adapt to according to their needs.

In other words, things that are happening today have antecedents going back many years – some going way back to our days as cavemen, or even earlier.

For those of you who are jumping with joy, claiming the iPhone as a creation of your generation alone, here’s the real story: there would be no iPhone without a mobilephone, and no mobilephone without a telephone before that.

In fact, the need for a telephone is connected to our primal need to communicate with each other. This means, even in the field of technology, what we experience today has been around for several/many years, in some form or the other.

Socio-culturally, what is likely to change quickly is the adoption of a product or service or an idea in new and/or specific applications. For instance, keeping within the field of mobile technology, the use of ‘sms’ for instant polling by media channels or for contests by consumer brands is a clever application.

What I mean to say is that the things that transform our society or culture (or economy, for that matter) are not entirely brand new as we sometimes perceive them to be. They are ideas which have been lying dormant for years before achieving prominence.

The real ‘generation now’

2008-05-08T17:05:00.000+05:30

There is a great deal of talk of India’s ‘generation now’ – not just in blogs like mine, but also by the media at large. As young Indians, they are alluded to as much by media- and market-watchers as retired chief justices in random press/online articles. Even Shobhaa De mentions them prominently in her recently-launched book ‘Superstar India’, unveiled by Amitabh Bachchan.

This brings a smile to my lips. Although everyone believes that the new India belongs to the 21-year-old youth, oldies like Shobhaa De, Amitabh Bachchan and I, all seem to want a piece of their fame and energy. That is, as long as we can enjoy it. After all, oldies like us have helped bring in the ‘generation now’ to where they are at the moment. So, what’s wrong in taking a little credit for it?

This thought makes me wonder if we – the media, the marketing men, and the social scientists – have got the ‘generation now’ definition written down correctly. While we are on the lookout for the 21-year-old mobilephone- and iPod-wired urban youth glued to his/her music, it is really a much older group of people who are responsible for India’s massive social, cultural and economic change.

For instance, wouldn’t someone closer to 30 years of age be a better representative of the new face of India? Wouldn’t 30-year-old urban Indians be the real ‘generation now’ of India? The ones who are aware of their past, who live hand-in-hand with all the technological changes and economic reforms overwhelming the country at present, and who never lose focus of the future because that’s where India is going to be?

India’s ‘generation now’

2008-05-02T22:04:00.000+05:30

The Inma Martinez quote in my previous post is quite interesting. Interesting, at least, on two counts: (a) the ‘generation now’ description she applies to herself, and (b) her use of various media for her music: mobilephone (ringtone), music system (album), computer and online (iTunes), iPod (personal, and on demand). All for the same song! I guess she is watching the video of the song on TV or online as well. If anything, ‘generation now’ is (a) consumed with music, and (b) truly wired.

I wonder if this is true for India as well. Yes, it is, to an extent. In India, ‘generation now’ – as described here – is a very small segment of the country’s population: perhaps only 1% of the growing 1.2 billion (approx.) people. But, nevertheless, it’s a trend-setting segment and all marketing eyes are upon it. For, even this 1% is a huge consumer base for brand marketers of, say, mobilephones, mobile services and music.

Culturally, India’s ‘generation now’ is decidedly urban and somewhat spoilt, comprising of young adults who have been brought up to expect a great deal from life: material possessions, money, praise and even fame. Mind you, this description isn’t very different from the ‘generation now’ of the US or Europe. However, there is one big difference: India’s ‘generation now’ continues to live at home with parents, forfeiting an independent life and the struggles that come with it.

Madonna Mobile Music Makes Me Move

2008-04-28T19:11:00.000+05:30

“I’m on Vodafone, so lucky me, I’m one of the punters that this week can download a new track from her album every day. Yeepee-Hey. ‘Candy Shop’ is the first available jewel, and it’s not bad, so I set it as my ringtone of choice. Tomorrow, we’ll see what we get. Am I not going to buy the album? Oh no. The album will be bought, and downloaded to my iTunes, and then onto my iPod. So why did I pay £1.5 for the priviledge? Because Mobile Music is Marketing Magic Moves these days. I basically paid to sample the music. Of course, I could do that on the Radio, but it’s not the same. I got the track First. I got the ringtone First. It’s all about the NOW.”

[Inma Martinez on her shift6 blog, 21 April 2008.]

The music industry finds its own solutions

2008-04-24T14:13:00.001+05:30

In my previous post, I talked about the new threat of ‘illegal downloading’ (colloquially termed ‘piracy’) which is changing the business of music, globally. For one thing, most music lovers are switching from buying CDs to digital music, downloading them piecemeal (i.e. track by track) from the Net onto their personal computers.

Of greater concern is that most of this downloaded music is not paid for. It is passed on by friends, or downloaded from peer-to-peer music/video sites (known as ‘illegal file sharing’). The music industry is losing sales and, therefore, unhappy. So, how is the music industry responding to this new threat?

Well, most recording companies are worried, being slow to embrace the digital technology as quickly as their consumers have. However, according to the industry representative, the IFPI, the music industry has not been left behind:

“Music sales via online and mobile channels have risen from zero to an estimated US$2.9 billion – 15 per cent of industry sales – over the last five years, making music more digitally advanced than any entertainment sector except games.”

Online retail music stores like Amazon.com or Apple’s iTunes Store have been sampling and selling music in digital formats for a while now. According to the IFPI report I quoted from earlier, “There are more than 500 legitimate digital music services worldwide, offering over 6 million tracks – over four times the stock of a music megastore.” According to an IFPI survey, legal digital music sites (e.g. iTunes Store) offer a wider choice of music/tracks per artist and better quality music than illegal sites.

At the moment, the music industry’s strongest initiative seems to be talking to Internet Service Providers and governments of individual countries for cooperation – to put an end to illegal downloads and copyright infringing services (e.g. Limewire).

This apart – and to answer a query raised in the comments to my previous post – the musicians themselves are innovating ways to reach their fans online – and on mobile. Here are some examples from a recent article on BBC news:

“Bristol band Portishead will release their new album on a music streaming service a week before it goes on sale in the shops. All 11 tracks from the album, Third, will be available from 21 April on Last.fm. It will be free to listen to the tracks online, but users will have to pay to download the tunes to their computer or digital music player. The music industry hopes free streaming will cut illegal downloading.

REM launched their new album, Accelerate, on the music streaming service iLike last month.

Madonna has signed a deal with Vodafone to make her new album, Hard Candy, available on mobile phones from 21 April, a week before its official launch in the shops.”

I’m sure we’ll see more innovations in the future. For the time being, digital technology and mobile communications have come to the musician’s rescue. And, the music industry seems to have entered its second life.

R.E.M. iLike page here.

Portishead ‘Third’ Last.fm page here.

Madonna-Vodafone story here.

[Citation: 1. IFPI Digital Music Report 2008. 2. Portishead launch album online, Jim Reed, BBC news, 14 April 2008.]

Cyber-frantic

2008-04-23T16:57:00.001+05:30

The demand for, and consumption of, digital music is going through frantic change. Digital technology may have made distribution of music easy, through online and mobile channels, but unfortunately for the music industry, most consumers have opted for a free download rather than a paid one. According to a recent IFPI report, “Tens of billions of illegal files were swapped in 2007. The ratio of unlicensed tracks downloaded to legal tracks sold is about 20 to 1.”

In the 15 April 2008 issue of The Moment, Rosecrans Baldwin reports in The Digital Ramble: A Tour of Art and Space, “In an interview in Wired, David Byrne foretells the future for the music business, and perhaps all media, when he says the artists and the audience are now in charge, and everybody’s cyber-frantic.”

There’s wisdom in David Byrne’s words, for the music industry, globally, has indeed turned topsy-turvy. The recording companies and their labels have lost their hold on the market and the consumers. It looks like nobody’s buying CDs/albums anymore, preferring to go digital, downloading music piecemeal in MP3, iTunes, Real Media or other digital formats – mostly without paying for the music.

[I had blogged about this a year ago.]

Illegal downloading is rampant. Just download Limewire or a similar software (available free on the Net) onto your computer, choose your music, and download for free from your peers across the world. Millions of music enthusiasts are doing exactly this every day (or night), helping to bring the legitimate music business crashing down.

Would this mean the end of the music business? Perhaps. Perhaps not. David Byrne explains the situation rather lucidly:

“What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.”

[Citation: 1. IFPI press release, 24 January 2008. 2. The Digital Ramble: A Tour of Art and Space, Rosecrans Baldwin, The Moment, blogs.nytimes.com, 15 April 2008. 3. David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars, Wired, 18 December 2007.]

Personal and private

2008-04-21T18:34:00.000+05:30

I can think of only one reason for this recent surge of personal interaction/communication between youths – both online and on mobilephones. The reason is the personal and private nature of the interaction/communication that today’s technology allows.

When my generation was growing up during the seventies and eighties, the address for any communication – letters, postcards, telegrams (remember those?) – was the home address. It was the only address we had – and it was shared with the whole family. When the postman delivered the mail, everyone in the family came to know what arrived, and for whom.

With telephones, it was the same story. There was only one telephone at home, and when calls came in, whoever was nearest to the phone picked it up and then passed it on to whoever the recipient of the call was. There was no privacy. The home address and telephone number were ‘public’ as far as the family was concerned.

In fact, our parents warned us about giving away the home address and/or telephone number to strangers. So, we were both cautious and reticent in offering it to others. When it came to socialising with friends, particularly with friends of the opposite sex, we preferred to meet them face-to-face, and would find opportunities to do so. For, that was the only way we could have personal and private interactions.

Today, emails and mobilephones have changed all that. We have our own personal and private email addresses and mobilephones through which we interact/communicate with our friends… in a very personal and private manner. And, we certainly don’t need our parents’ permission to share these addresses and numbers with others. Wherever we go, our email addresses and mobilephones travel with us.

If our email addresses and mobilephone numbers were ‘public’ in the sense that our home address and telephone number were ‘public’ thirty or forty years ago, how would we behave today? Would we interact/communicate/socialise as frequently, as heavily or as randomly as the youths do today using the new technology? I think not.

Mobilephone relationships

2008-04-19T17:50:00.002+05:30

The new relationships that we – or, at least, the youth today – are establishing using the latest mobile, telecom and Internet technologies are quite fascinating. My personal knowledge in this field is limited, but I’ve learnt a lot about the impact of technology and social media on today’s youth from reading published papers of Danah Boyd. Although most of her work concerns the American youth, Ms Boyd recently posted a story on her blog on how teen Palestinian girls are maintaining clandestine relationships with their boyfriends through mobilephones.

Ms Boyd’s post is based upon a published paper on this very subject, Playing With Fire (October 2007), by two scholars, Hiyam Hijazi-Omari and Rivka Ribak, from the University of Haifa, Israel. She states that the authors of the paper “examine how the mobile phone alters social dynamics, relationships, and the construction of gender in Palestine. In short, they document how culturally specific gendered practices (not technological features) frame the meaning and value of technology.”

The following quote from her blog tells the story in a nutshell:

“Palestinian boys give their girlfriends phones for the express purpose of being able to communicate with them in a semi-private manner without the physical proximity that would be frowned on. At the same time, girls know that parents do not approve of them having access to such private encounters with boys – they go to great lengths to hide their mobiles and suffer consequences when they are found out. While the boys offered these phones as a tool of freedom, they often came with a price. Girls were expected to only communicate with the boy and never use the phone for any other purpose… These girls develop fascinating practices around using the phone, hiding from people, and acquiring calling cards.”

You can read Danah Boyd’s blog post here. And, if you can spare the time, read the entire published paper, Playing With Fire (PDF version), by Hiyam Hijazi-Omari and Rivka Ribak, from the link provided on Ms Boyd’s blog.

[Citation: Palestinian girls, dating and the mobile phone, Danah Boyd, 14 April 2008.]

Changing the way we live our lives

2008-04-18T18:17:00.000+05:30

Most of my friends have given their children – particularly adolescents and teens – mobilephones to stay connected. For emergencies. The logic behind this gesture is simple: should the child be in difficulty, he or she would be able to contact the parent quickly and easily. Of course, the mobilephone is used more often for casual talk than emergencies. And thank God for that. The fewer emergencies in our lives, the better.

However, the parent is aware that the child is using his/her mobilephone for purposes other than calling the parent. For instance, contacting friends, playing games, listening to music, taking photos/videos (and exchanging them with friends). When it comes to specific use of airwaves for calls, sms-es, downloads, and other paid services, the parent normally puts a cap on the child’s usage amount, limiting his/her usage on a monthly basis. Even then, the child finds ways of bypassing such restrictions – typically, resorting to using landlines and the Internet for communication.

What I find fascinating about this behaviour are three things: (a) the inventiveness of the children, (b) the convergence of technologies to offer better connectivity, and therefore (c) the social implications of the use of (in this case, mobile) technology in our lives. Not only is the technology – its features and advantages per se – important to us. What is also important is the influence it has in the way we communicate, build and maintain relationships. In other words, how the technology is actually changing the way we live our lives.

No longer is this technology only a business tool; it is now embedded in our culture.

Our nomadic future

2008-04-15T21:16:00.001+05:30

Here are some excerpts from another recent article from The Economist, Our nomadic future, which make insightful reading on what may be the future of our digital lives:

“Ancient nomads went from place to place — and they had to take a lot of stuff with them (including their livelihoods and families). The emerging class of digital nomads also wander, but they take virtually nothing with them; wherever they go, they can easily reach people and information.”

“Will it be a better life? In some ways, yes. Digital nomadism will liberate ever more knowledge workers from the cubicle prisons of Dilbert cartoons. But the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are ‘always on’ all too often end up — mentally — anywhere but here (wherever here may be). As for friends and family, permanent mobile connectivity could have the same effect as nomadism: it might bring you much closer to family and friends, but it may make it harder to bring in outsiders. It might isolate cliques. Sociologists fret about constant e-mailers and texters losing the everyday connections to casual acquaintances or strangers who may be sitting next to them in the café or on the bus.”

“As for politics, the tools of nomadism — such as mobile phones that double as cameras — can improve the world. For instance, they turn practically everybody into a potential human-rights activist, ready to take pictures or video of police brutality. But the same tools have a dark side, turning everybody into a fully equipped paparazzo. Some fitness clubs have started banning mobile phones near the treadmills and showers lest patrons find themselves pictured, flabby and sweaty, on some website that future Google searches will happily turn up. As in the desert, so in the city: nomadism promises the heaven of new freedom, but it also threatens the hell of constant surveillance by the tribe.”

[Citation: Our nomadic future, The Economist, 10 April 2008.]

Family ties

2008-04-12T15:41:00.001+05:30

Our recent achievements in technology and the growth in social media have influenced our behaviour, redfining the way we gather information, communicate and interact with each other, and do business. Although this phenomenon has affected a portion of our population, it has attracted criticism from many quarters.

I’m not surprised. After all, since the Industrial Revolution, people have cried foul of the negative effects of our technological achievements. One topic of concern has been the weakening of ties between family and friends, claiming that ‘the new technology culture’ has actually isolated people when it should have connected them.

Family Ties, an article in the latest issue of The Economist discusses this very issue and presents several points of view. Here are some excerpts:

In the 1990s, as the internet came into widespread use, sociologists, never an upbeat bunch to begin with, became decidedly pessimistic. Some observed a “loss of social capital” as people spent their time transfixed by screens rather than other people. Others saw the (real-world, as opposed to online) social networks of Americans shrinking, with ever more people feeling that they were intimate with nobody at all. Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University argued that the internet causes social isolation and depression. Norman Nie at Stanford University believed that “internet use at home has a strong negative impact on time spent with friends and family as well as time spent on social activities.”

But most of these observations, made in a rich country at the height of the PC era, focused on the wired and stationary kind of communications technology rather than the wireless and mobile sort. Now, as mobile communications are becoming the norm, a new generation of sociologists is scrambling to update all these theories. So far, most of them agree that nomadic technology, far from isolating people, brings them closer to their families, friends and lovers — their strong ties. But they still disagree on what that means for weak ties with strangers, and thus society at large.

Nomadic technology deepens family ties because, as another sociologist, Christian Licoppe, puts it, it enables “connected presence”, which is new in history. In the era of stationary communications technology, people used landline phones that belonged to a place rather than a person. In that communication culture people talked infrequently and viewed a conversation as an occasion. Typically, they would plan the call for an appropriate time, such as a Sunday. Both sides would introduce themselves with a greeting — i.e., a ritual — and then take time to catch up.

With mobile phones, on the other hand, people call, text or e-mail one another constantly throughout the day. Since they are always, in effect, contacting a person rather than a place, and since the receiver can see the caller’s name, and probably his picture, they often dispense with greetings altogether. The exchanges now tend to be frequent and short. People expect less content but instead a feeling of permanent connection, as though they were in fact together during the entire time between their physical meetings.

The article, Family Ties, also presents an interesting example of the use of mobile technology in Japan and how the Japanese have embraced it behaviorally and culturally:

Mobile technology also tethers couples, especially young ones, but in a different way. Mimi Ito, an anthropologist who studies the effects of mobile technology on youth culture in Japan and America, has found that Japanese lovers send constant text messages to avoid parental rules and to stay connected emotionally when they are physically separated. Every nomadic culture has its idiosyncrasies, and the Japanese speciality is a rich vocabulary of “emoticons”: “I really want to see you (>_<)”; “I feel like I am going to be sick (;_;)”.

This steady stream of emoticons and photos in between physical “flesh meets” amounts to “tele-nesting”, says Ms Ito. It also spices up and prolongs the flesh meets. Young people in Tokyo, she has observed, will start their date by exchanging text messages all afternoon as they do homework or take the train to the rendezvous. At night, on their journey home after the actual date, they use messages again as “fading embers of conversation”, sometimes continuing for days and turning little memories into the couple’s “lore”.

Often entire cliques do this sort of thing, creating, in effect, their own tribal medium and narrative. Ms Ito has noticed a new genre of photography on the rise as young people use their phones to snap photos of everyday situations — the view from the escalator on the way to school, say — which mean a lot to their friends and nothing to anybody else. They especially love photos that capture “dumb things that their friends do”, such as getting drunk and falling into puddles, which collectively amount to “everyday, casual documentaries” for a circle of friends.

[Citation: Family Ties, The Economist print edition, 10 April 2008.]

Social networking was what our parents did

2008-04-11T11:54:00.000+05:30

The detractors of online social networking are many. Their point of view being, since (a) genuine friendships require face-to-face contact, and (b) it’s easy to be deceptive on the Internet, building genuine online friendships are hard to achieve.

Don’t believe me? Well, here’s an excerpt from an article by James Randerson which appeared in The Guardian’s online edition not too long ago:

“Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks.

Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.”

The article quotes Dr Will Reader of Sheffield Hallam University as saying: “People see face to face contact as being absolutely imperative in forming close relationships.”

If you ask me, the last sentence is a real no-brainer. If close friendships can be defined by, say, the relationships that exist between husbands and wives, or parents and children, it goes to prove that physical proximity and face-to-face interaction are two vital factors in human bonding and building relationships.

In the virtual world of the Internet, such human interaction and bonding do not occur. What occurs online is a sharing of likes, dislikes, feelings and ideas – a presentation of profiles and personalities – in order to find a common ground for a friendship. A distant meeting of minds, so to speak.

A rough equivalent of today’s online friendships would be the concept of pen-friends we used to have when we were children 30-odd years ago. With our pen-friends, we exchanged letters, greeting cards, photographs, gifts… all by snail mail… without meeting each other face-to-face.

Snail mail is not the only difference between then and now. In those days, (a) we would have just one or two pen-friends, not hundreds or thousands as is the practice with online friendships today, and (b) pen-friendship was considered a hobby or recreation, mainly for children (although my father had a Hungarian pen-friend for a while), practised in order to learn about different people and their cultures.

Pen-friendship was not looked upon as social networking then. Social networking was what our parents did: mixing and mingling and communicating and sharing with relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues at work and business associates. Albeit, the numbers were small: their network would comprise of 50-60 persons, if they didn’t count the obligatory relatives, with a dozen or so close friends with whom they enjoyed genuine relationships.

Today, the Internet allows a much greater reach... and almost-instant connectivity. So, perhaps, the younger generation has become a lot more social... building their network of friends enthusiastically.

[Citation: Social networking sites don’t deepen friendships, by James Randerson, science correspondent, guardian.co.uk, 10 September 2007.]

Virtual friendships

2008-04-07T17:57:00.001+05:30

A couple of days ago, over email, a software engineer ‘friend’ I had ‘met’ on a social network mentioned that he has included me in a special list he keeps of ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ people. I was delighted and honoured, and emailed him to tell him so.

We’ve been exchanging thoughts, ideas and opinions on literary fiction, films and life in general for over a year now, over emails and chats, and now our ‘friendship’ had reached a certain level of recognition and respect for each other. Since we live in different cities in India, we have not met yet. You see, from day one, our ‘friendship’ has been virtual, made possible by the Internet.

I share similar ‘friendships’ with others I’ve ‘met’ online: a history Ph D student in Australia, a corporate lawyer in Brazil, an HR management consultant, a market researcher, an electrical engineer from India… to name a few. Apart from the HR management consultant whom I met on a blind date in Bangalore last year, and have been in touch ever since, these online ‘friendships’ have remained virtual.

Today, there are many people like me who have embraced the Internet and the revolution it has brought in... in connecting people; in helping people make virtual ‘friends’ through online social and professional networks. Some ‘friendships’ have moved further to phone conversations and face-to-face meetings. A few friendships have even become close. Within my larger circle of friends, I know of two marriages which had begun with introductions on the Internet.

As you can guess, I’m an advocate of online social networks and virtual friendships. I believe online social networks connect people. Or, at least, help connect people. The rest is left to specific individual ‘friendships’... to develop or be destroyed… just as things are with relationships in the real world.

Secret world

2008-04-01T18:41:00.000+05:30

My nephew sms-ed me the URL of his new website yesterday. His website had a wonderful introduction by a friend of his, a girl in her late teens, who provided her full name, email ID, and links to her Blogger and Flickr accounts below the introduction. Her blogs featured her photo and some intimate thoughts.

This made me wonder about the ease, and courage, with which youngsters shared their private information on the Internet (see my previous post). Oblivious of stalkers and Internet-related crimes that we read about almost everyday (perhaps less so in India), youngsters today feel free about making their private information public. Some even display risqué photos of theirs on social networking sites.

It’s universally accepted that young people – particularly women – are prime targets of crime. Numbers vary from country to country, and although in most cases young women do not report the crime, giving away too much personal information online exposes these young women and makes them vulnerable to stalking… and harm. So, what makes them divulge personal information publicly?

It seems to be peer pressure, as I found out after talking to several of them. Most teenagers believe that since everyone is doing it (a) they should too, and (b) it is safe to do so. After all, it’s only their friends who are looking at their photos and reading their stuff. So confident are they in what they are doing that there are competitions among them to make their profiles more and more ‘colourful’ to attract friends.

So engrossed are they in their online preoccupation that these youngsters are oblivious to the fact that the friends they attract online may also include stalkers and sexual predators. To them, these crimes don’t happen often enough – so it’s a risk worth taking. Fearlessly, they pursue their online lives, hiding away in a secret world their low-tech parents and teachers are afraid to enter.

The new image-makers

2008-03-26T18:03:00.001+05:30

One of the points I had raised in my earlier posts on Generation Next was their fearless attitude of sharing personal information publicly on online social networks, forums, chats and databases. They don’t seem to care about who sees their personal profiles, messages, blogs, photos or videos. On the contrary, the more people they connect with online using such personal information and self-expression, the happier they are.

The truth behind this lifestyle is quite interesting. Generation Next actually spends days on end creating their personalities through words, images and music, uploading them and changing them constantly, in order to make themselves attractive to others. One could say they have become their own publicists, creating their own brand identities and flaunting them like marketers do with their brands.

To me, they are the new image-makers of the digital world. A marketer or PR person can learn a lot from them. However, not everyone feels this way.

“But are we seeing real people, or personas?” asks Jennie Yabroff in a recent Newsweek article titled Here’s Looking At You, Kids. Adding later, “Sociologists have begun to question the effect of all this exhibitionism on young people. Can they form durable identities off-camera, or are they so used to producing their images for outside consumption that images have replaced their essences? Will a generation for whom all secrets are fair game and every private moment can become public trust each other and form intimate relationships?”

Now hold on. Aren’t we being too tough on Generation Next? Ms Yabroff’s last question certainly sounds a wee bit judgmental. At least, I feel so. From my experience with them, youngsters today are more open-minded than we are – or were, when we were at their age. For all you know, as Generation Next grows up, they’ll be more skilled – and wise – in handling people and situations than we are today.

Although I, too, believe that self-presentation seems to be a priority for Generation Next, I’m not sure if we can declare that what we see aren’t real people, but only personas. In my generation too, and even earlier, the game between ‘the real’ and ‘the persona’ has always been on. Volumes of psychological theory are based upon it.

What’s the truth of the matter? Well, perhaps what Ms Yabroff mentions towards the end of her article makes sense: “It’s probably too soon to weigh the implication of all this publicization on teens’ abilities to have meaningful experiences off-camera.” But, that’s not the end of it. There are theories on the contrary. So, you might as well read the entire article.

[Citation: Here’s Looking At You, Kids, article by Jennie Yabroff, Newsweek, 15 March 2008.]

Learning from Generation Next

2008-03-25T17:15:00.000+05:30

Maybe there’s something to learn from Generation Next: their easy acceptance/use of technology; their unabashed habit of going public online with personal information; their online social networking skills; their trust for each other’s recommendations.

What’s fascinating about this is that most of it is accomplished from inside their bedrooms. Some of them, like Ashley Qualls of www.whateverlife.com, have even become millionaires living this lifestyle.

If this is a massive socio-cultural and economic movement knocking on our doors (which is what it seems to be), then it is going to have a huge impact on the world of business. Businesses will follow Generation Next practices and adopt or tailor new product/service offerings to consumers who are waiting eagerly to try out new stuff… and tell their friends about it.

The influence that Generation Next already has – and can have in the future – is, and will be, simply phenomenal. Technology-related products and services are likely to be benefited most – particularly those that offer multimedia options (remixes, mashups, graphics), user-friendly customisation, and encourage creativity, collaboration and communication.

Advertisers and marketers need to understand this generation and this movement, and channelise this huge potential in their favour to get ahead in business. Mind you, Generation Next is not a patient lot. Every moment lost is a missed opportunity.

Still untapped

2008-03-21T20:18:00.002+05:30

Generation Next may be heavy users of the Internet, emails, IMs and social networks, but from a business perspective, everything is not cool for companies which provide Internet-based services to this consuming target group.

The fact is, GenNext wants it all for free. And they want more and more of it. Apart from mobilephone and Internet service providers which charge for usage (and, in some cases, for features like downloads and responses to contests or polls), no one has been able to come upon a sensible revenue-generating business model.

Search, email and IM/chat services (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL), social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, Orkut), blogging services (e.g. Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad), as well as services like Flickr and YouTube have all admitted defeat. There just doesn’t seem to be a way to monetise their ventures.

On the contrary, they all have to add new features, increase user archival space and improve their services to remain competitive.

Placing ads on user pages is, of course, being tried out. But so far, revenues have been dismal. No matter how many registered users these service providers claim to own, in GenNext category or otherwise, no one is making pots of money.

Considering the billions of users these companies service 24/7, economically speaking, it’s a huge market, still untapped!

Generation Next loyalty

2008-03-20T14:23:00.001+05:30

“Globally, 18-34 year-olds are more likely to rely on technology not only to communicate and shop, but also to enhance their social lives. One-third agree that their social lives would suffer without technology, and that technology has helped them to overcome their shyness.”

[Quote from It’s A Family Affair: The Media Evolution of the Global Family in a Digital Age research report. Research commissioned by Yahoo! and OMD. Project Directors: Mike Hess (OMD) and Michele Madansky (Yahoo! Inc).]

It’s heartening to read research findings which help me make sense of the digital age. Gives me hope that this digital lure is not just another bubble which will burst any day now, but will show us – marketers and social animals alike – a way to plan our future.

Honestly, I am intrigued by what’s happening around me. Particularly, by the lead the 18-34 year-olds have taken to set the direction for the rest of us as far as day-to-day use of digital technology goes.

I realise that, at 48 years of age, I’ve missed the bus. Being digitally connected means spending hours on end with computers, the Internet, mobilephones or iPods – a habit I’m yet to develop. Sadly, I’m from a generation that prefers reading books, listening to music on a large stereo system and meeting friends in person. And even more sadly, I’m still loyal to this lifestyle.

Sure, I have my share of computers, the Internet, mobilephones and online social networks, but it’s never the same as a Generation Next lifestyle. In fact, I was reading an article on the Internet last week that kind of woke me up. The article, called Is Loyalty At Risk? by John Gaffney, explained why – and how – my life is different from Generation Next’s. You’ll understand when you read this extract:

Kids talk on cell phones while they IM, and do all this while they watch TV with 90 percent of the screen, a crawler at the bottom, and promotional messages flashing in the corners.

“Attention,” says Umair Haque, a strategy consultant with Bubblegeneration, “is becoming the scarcest — and so most strategically vital — resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries.”

The generation that will control the purse strings of the future is being raised to expect even more from companies while hearing less from them. What the Pew Internet project calls Generation Next (ages 18–26) doesn’t seem to be loyal even to some of the Web sites whose success it has been most responsible for. More than 40 percent of customers who have a profile on MySpace have profiles on Friendster, Facebook, and other sites.

According to Terry Dry, cofounder of teen-focused online promotional firm Fanscape, loyalty is an allegiance to the next big thing and the next cool brand. “Kids don’t feel like they owe you anything,” he says. “They want what they want and they want something for their loyalty even if it’s temporary. Keep delivering value and you have a shot.”

[Citation: Is Loyalty At Risk? by John Gaffney, September 2007, 1to1 Magazine.]

Generation Next

2008-03-17T19:58:00.002+05:30

A lot of investment has gone into researching today’s youth – the Generation Next (people in the 16-25 years age group) – the ones who cannot live without mobilephones, iPods and the Internet; the ones who create their own content digitally (since they feel what’s available is dismally out of time) and expand their networks socially from the confines of their rooms and their home computers.

Most such research reports are likely to be protected under private ownership, but there are a few which have been released in the public domain. One such report, released a year ago, and called A Portrait of ‘Generation Next’, is from Pew Research Center for The People and The Press, Washington DC. Although the research was conducted in 2006 in the United States and reflects those sentiments, it is a pretty good indicator of what today’s youth (probably) is.

Here’s an extract from that report:

“A new generation has come of age, shaped by an unprecedented revolution in technology and dramatic events both at home and abroad. They are Generation Next, the cohort of young adults who have grown up with personal computers, cell phones and the internet and are now taking their place in a world where the only constant is rapid change.

In reassuring ways, the generation that came of age in the shadow of Sept. 11 shares the characteristics of other generations of young adults. They are generally happy with their lives and optimistic about their futures. Moreover, Gen Nexters feel that educational and job opportunities are better for them today than for the previous generation. At the same time, many of their attitudes and priorities reflect a limited set of life experiences. Marriage, children and an established career remain in the future for most of those in Generation Next.

More than two-thirds see their generation as unique and distinct, yet not all self-evaluations are positive. A majority says that “getting rich” is the main goal of most people in their age group, and large majorities believe that casual sex, binge drinking, illegal drug use and violence are more prevalent among young people today than was the case 20 years ago.

In their political outlook, they are the most tolerant of any generation on social issues such as immigration, race and homosexuality.”

The report is quite substantial and revealing. You can read a PDF version here.

[Citation: A Portrait of ‘Generation Next’, Pew Research Center for The People and The Press, Washington DC, released January 2007.]

Reduced

2008-03-16T14:37:00.000+05:30

Advertisers and marketers know how to reduce their work. They define consumers into segments of people belonging, say, to age groups such as 16-35 years or 12-24 years, with specific behaviours and disposable incomes to allow them certain buying choices.

Consumers are no longer treated as human beings with individual likes, dislikes, habits and preferences. They are reduced to sets of decision-makers fitting demographic and/or psychographic descriptions that are input into advertising and marketing campaigns.

Entire populations of countries are reduced to such descriptions of stereotypes that have a common thread that binds them. A thread that finally forms the basis of a marketing-communication strategy.

The question is, of course, if masses of people with diverse needs, wants and behaviours can identify with, or conform to, such reduced descriptions.

Not the 16-35 years

2008-03-15T14:04:00.000+05:30

Nokia may be eyeing trend-setting consumers in the 16-35 years age group for ‘circular entertainment’ (see my previous post), but in 5 years, 35-year-olds will be over 40 and their lives may revolve around something more important than creating their own entertainment – ‘creating’ being an essential criterion in the phenomenon Nokia is describing.

That’s because most 40-year-olds will be in the middle of their careers, with growing children, and pressures of upward mobility driving their lifestyles. Creating their own entertainment is unlikely to be top-of-mind for them – though, a digital lifestyle is certainly going to be ubiquitous 5 years from today. Most likely, it’ll be the children in the family who will create their own entertainment.

In fact, this is no big discovery. Today, perhaps not children, but trend-setting teens are finding their own ways to entertain themselves. They are sitting on the Internet, downloading stuff, creating pages about themselves, networking with others, and sharing their creations – self descriptions, stories, photos, images, videos, podcasts, comments on other websites, blogs, etc.

They are also on their mobilephones – talking, messaging text, images and videos, sharing ringtones, listening to music or playing games. Even while studying or commuting, they have their iPods or other MP3 players plugged in for music – music which they have downloaded from the Internet or from their friends to create personal playlists.

You won’t find them watching TV half the day like the generation before them used to. Today’s teens are digitally active – participating and creating content for themselves. If I were Nokia looking at future trends, I would study the trend-setting 12-24 year olds today (and not the 16-35 years age group as they did).

Circular Entertainment

2008-03-12T10:14:00.001+05:30

Late last year, Nokia released an interesting bit of news in the market. That, within the next five years, as much as “25% of entertainment will be created and consumed within peer communities.”

This is no ordinary soothsaying by Nokia, but the result of a global study (by The Future Laboratory, UK) of trend-setting consumers (9,000 consumers aged 16-35 years from 17 countries) and their digital behaviours and lifestyles, investigating the future of (their) entertainment.

According to Mark Selby, Vice President, Multimedia, Nokia, the study, titled A Glimpse of the Next Episode, revealed that “people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups – a form of collaborative social media.”

[I remember Apple’s Steve Jobs say something very similar way back in 2000.]

Mr Selby explained, “The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group’s entertainment.”

Nokia has dubbed this phenomenon ‘circular entertainment’ and is pinning some of its business hopes on it. Having watched Nokia’s N-series advertising all through last year, I’m pretty sure Nokia had wind of this trend much before the study was done.

Perhaps the world is already headed in this direction. Perhaps it’s Nokia’s way of engineering a consumer trend in order to capitalise on future marketing opportunities. Whatever the case may be, ‘circular entertainment’ seems like an inevitability!

You can access the Nokia press release here.

[Citation: Nokia press release, 3 December 2007 – Nokia predicts 25% of entertainment by 2012 will be created and consumed within peer communities.]

Mobilephones will change journalism

2008-02-14T13:04:00.001+05:30

With the recent push for citizen journalism by many media houses (print, TV and online), the mobilephone has become an indispensable device for reporting news. However, the mobilephone – with camera, audio, video and uploading/emailing features – has been viewed as an amateur’s attempt at news reporting, and given less credit than the equipment used by professionals in their line of work.

However, all that may be changing soon – according to an article in The Guardian, Forget shorthand – a camera phone is the new tool of the journalist’s trade, by Jeff Jarvis, who is journalism professor at City University of New York. In the article, Prof Jarvis claims that the mobilephone is “the new tool of the journalist’s trade,” and feels it will be an indispensable unit of the journalist’s gear in the future.

Citing Reuters’ mobile journalist (mojo) initiative – used in the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this month – which equips reporters with the Nokia N82 phone for professional work, Prof Jarvis writes that the N82 mobilephones “are kitted with a wireless keyboard, a miniature tripod, a solar battery and a small microphone – along with all the relevant software to edit and publish multimedia content.”

He suggests, “The portability and discreet look of all-in-one devices, apart from their practicality, also change the relationship between journalists and interviewees…”

To know more about Reuters’ mobile journalist initiative and Jeff Jarvis’ views on using mobilephone technology in journalism, read The Guardian article here.

[Citation: The Guardian, Forget shorthand – a camera phone is the new tool of the journalist’s trade, Jeff Jarvis, 11 February 2008.]

Robert Redford pitches the 4th screen

2008-02-13T16:36:00.001+05:30

“The GSMA continues to take seriously both the business of delivering content and the art of creating content, as they lead the exciting mobile sector into the future.”
– Robert Redford, actor/director/producer

Until recently, I was not aware of Hollywood megastar Robert Redford’s involvement in, and contribution to, the world of mobilephones.

Redford, who, besides his Hollywood role, has been nurturing the independent film and independent filmmakers through his Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Institute since the early 1980s, has now become a key force in the exploration and promotion of content delivery on the mobilephone.

As I write this post, Robert Redford is at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, presenting his argument that “the mobile phone is the ‘fourth screen’ – after theater, television and the iPod – extending the reach of movies to new audiences in the global community.”

According to a recent article in EETimes by R Colin Johnson, Robert Redford pitches mobile phone as '4th screen' at confab, Redford believes

“…independent film makers have a unique opportunity to reach new audiences in the global community via their tiny mobile-phone screens. Last year, the Mobile World Congress showcased independent films on mobile phones from the Sundance Film Festival, which is sponsored by the Sundance Institute, of which Redford is founder and president.

This year the Congress invited Redford to participate by keynoting the Mobile Entertainment track within the Congress, where he will address the opportunities for both artists and independent filmmakers to reach mobile-phone viewers worldwide.”

[Citation: Mobile World Congress press release; EETimes article Robert Redford pitches mobile phone as '4th screen' at confab, R Colin Johnson, 11 Feb 2008.]

Bridging the digital divide

2008-02-12T16:20:00.000+05:30

From what I’ve read in the Indian media, Sri Dhirubhai Ambani (the late don of the Reliance Group) had said that, with mobilephones, the whole world is in your hands. In fact, at the moment, there’s a Reliance Communications mobile blog ad campaign running which is using these very words of Sri Dhirubhai Ambani as its theme.

To tell you the truth, I do believe that, with 2 billion mobilephone users around the world (that’s double the number of Internet users), the mobilephone will most likely put the power in the users’ hands. Mobilephone users will be able to connect to and reach anyone almost anywhere. Which means, the mobile technology will be able to breakthrough all political, economic, social and cultural barriers to bridge the digital divide that exists with telephones (landlines), computers and the Internet.

To this end, the GSM Association (the global association of GSM mobile technology companies and brands, based in London) is doing everything possible to support the bridging of the digital divide. According to the GSM Association (and I quote from their website),

“The GSMA believe that the promotion of open, competitive market conditions is fundamental to extending the benefits of mobile communications to all, from the most developed Western European markets to remote areas in developing countries. Mobile has a critical role to play in improving health, wealth, education and social mobility.

To ensure that the benefits of mobile communications are understood and available to everyone who needs them, the GSM Association has developed an integrated programme aimed at better identifying the value of mobile communications. As part of its wider ‘Bridging the Digital Divide’ initiative, the GSMA is working to tackle the cost barriers to ownership and address the economic and social benefits related to mobile.

Its work in this area falls into two categories:

The Total Cost of Ownership and Economic & Social Benefits. The ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ takes a 360 degree view of the mobile communications environment. This includes examining how regulation and tax affect the take-up of mobile phones. It also includes work on delivering a lower cost handset to consumers; which is part of the Emerging market handset programme.

The second area in which the GSMA seeks to address the digital divide is in the area of the ‘Economic and Social Benefits of Mobile Communications’. This looks at the role of micro-payments, the function that a mobile phone plays in facilitating disaster relief, relevant studies and the GSMA’s Development Fund.”

In fact, the GSMA’s commitment goes as far as instituting a ‘Bridging the Digital Divide’ category in the annual Global Mobile Awards which recognises achievements in the global GSM mobile technology field.

[Citation: GSM Association website, Bridging the Digital Divide. Global Mobile Awards website, Category 5, Bridging the Digital Divide.]