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Friday, December 30, 2011

Jaipur Literature Festival

Will you be there?

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Thursday, September 08, 2011

The history of Star Trek

The entire history of Star Trek is in this SPACE.com timeline infographic.

Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

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Monday, August 22, 2011

A third view on the Lok Pal bill (and may there be more!)

This letter is reproduced here with Ms Roy's permission, and with the request to forward to friends. We need more debate, not just blind following.

Please also visit this page on the NCPRI site, which has a lot of related reading and additional matter.

Letter from Aruna Roy:

As a preface and a possible apology, let me say that this is a combination between a letter and a note. Please bear with the length of it. We write to you on a matter of mutual and common concern, the Lokpal bill, now in Parliament. The context of this letter is explained below.

When the Joint Drafting Committee of the Lokpal was working on the Jan Lokpal , the NCPRI had written to the Chair, Shri Pranab Mukherjee, and the co-chair Shri Shanti Bhushan, enquiring about the TORs and the process of and participation, in public consultation. Both assured us that there would be formal public consultation. It did not happen.

When the government bill went to cabinet with the intention of placing it in the monsoon session of parliament, the NCPRI decided to make its position known. The NCPRI is continuing with its deliberations and consultations and has prepared an approach paper and a set of principles for circulation. This is a work in progress.

The belief in consultations and discussion is the reason why we write to you.

The NCPRI’s (National Campaign for People’s Right to Information) involvement with legislation to deal with corruption and arbitrary use of power, began with the demand for an RTI law in 1996. The Lokpal was flagged as a law that needed to be taken up along with the Whistle Blowers Bill to address the killing of RTI activists and establish accountability. A committee was set up in the September 2010 for that purpose. The issue of the Lokpal was however taken up by some members of the NCPRI Working Committee, who formed the IAC and the NCPRI discussions remained suspended.

The Lokpal discussion has had an interesting trajectory. It began as the stated logical end of a large middle class mobilization on corruption. The stated end of that campaign was the demand for the setting up of a Joint Drafting Committee for a Lokpal bill. In common usage and understanding of corruption, the term casually refers to a range of corrupt practices. The political/governance spectrum is indeed more culpable than others. For it is mandated to maintain integrity in public life, to keep the country on keel with constitutional and other guarantees. This includes preventing the arbitrary use of power and corrupt practices. The Lokpal was too simplistically ordained by the campaign as a solution to all varieties of corrupt practices in our lives.

However the assurance that all solutions to the entire gamut of corrupt practices could be worked out through a strong Lokpal has left us with a great sense of disquiet. Not only because it does not address the arbitrary use of power. But because it is an unrealistic promise to rising expectations that it is an alleviation of all ills through one bill. It is also a question of the contents of the Jan Lokpal draft itself.

There have been public meetings but few consultations on the content of the Act in detail . While gestures and symbolic assent - like sms and referendums - may approve the intent, drafting of an Act needs more informed debate. The Lokpal debate has had its share of general platitudes, we need now to go beyond that. We also have to place the role of dissent squarely in the fulcrum of the debate. The discussions after all, flow from the acceptance that a strong Lokpal bill is needed. Also that the earlier and even the current government draft is faulty, even on principles.

The NCPRI however did make efforts before the 5th of April to arrive at a consensus with the IAC in a meeting held on 3rd April in the NMML. The NAC took up the matter independent of the NCPRI on the 4th April. The NCPRI had expressed reservations about the over arching and overwhelming structure of a law, which included grievances and corruption within its ambit. It was argued that though both are equally important, they require different mechanisms for implementation.

Subsequently events took over, and in the polarised discourse, it became impossible to make suggestions and or suggest changes. Every critique was attributed to wrong intent and viewed with suspicion and mistrust by the civil society members of the Joint Committee. Critique of the Bill has evoked sharp reactions, and statements have been made that no amendments or change to the principles or the framework is possible, and that disagreement with the draft was tantamount to promoting corruption. We were baffled by such statements. The NCPRI however continued with the consultations to evolve an approach, a set of principles and measures to unpack the huge unwieldy and much too powerful structure proposed by the IAC.

We are attaching a set of documents defining our approach to the Lokpal, different both from the Jan Lokpal and the Government bills. The NCPRI would like to share a set of principles and a framework for deliberation. The summary of our basic arguments is detailed below. This was placed in the public domain by the NCPRI and the Inclusive Media 4 Change ( CSDS) on the 5th and 6th of June 2011.

The consensus that emerged was that in place of a single institution there should be multiple institutions and that a basket of collective and concurrent Lokpal anti corruption and grievance redress measures should be evolved.

Summary of the NCPRI approach towards a series of concurrent and collective Anti-corruption and Grievance Redress measures:

Rationale: Vesting jurisdiction over the length and breadth of the government machinery in one institution will concentrate too much power in the institution, while the volume of work will make it difficult to carry out its tasks.

1. Unanimous endorsement of the need for accountability of all public servants, including the contentious issue of inclusion of the PM, with a few caveats. ( No one is above the law, enforcing the rule of law).

2. An independent system for judicial scrutiny and standards.

3. An independent and strong institution to scrutinize corruption of public servants and issues, which require different administrative processes and organizational set-up.

4. A mechanism to redress grievances of the common citizen.

5. Whistle Blowers protection.

The five measures proposed by NCPRI are:

1. Rashtriya Bhrashtachar Nivaran Lokpal (National Anti-corruption Lokpal): An institution to tackle corruption of all elected representatives, including the Prime Minister (with some safeguards), Ministers and Members of Parliament and senior bureaucrats (Group ‘A’officers) and all other co-accused including those in the private and social sector. The Lokpal will be financially and administratively independent from the government and will have both investigative and prosecution powers.

2. Kendriya Satarkta Lokpal (Central Vigilance Commission): Amending the Central Vigilance Commission Act to remove the single directive and empower the CVC to investigate corruption and take appropriate action against mid-level bureaucracy.

3. Nyayapalika Lokpal (Judicial Standards and Accountability Lokpal): To strengthen the existing Judicial Accountability and Standards Bill, that is currently before the Parliament, to ensure that the judiciary is also made effectively and appropriately accountable, without compromising its independence from the executive or the integrity of its functions.

4. Shikayat Nivaran Lokpal (Public Grievances Lokpal): To set up an effective time-bound system for grievance redress for common citizens to make the government answerable in terms of its functions, duties, commitments and obligations towards citizens. The grievance redress structure would have decentralized institutional mechanisms going right down to each ward/block level, and would ensure a bottom-up, people centric approach so that complaints and grievances can be dealt with speedily and in a decentralized, participatory and transparent manner. It will integrate public vigilance processes like vigilance committees and social audits, and provide for facilitation for the filing of all grievances/complaints through the setting up of block information and facilitation centres in every Block (rural) and ward(urban) in the country.The grievance redress mechanism will be a three-tier structure consisting of grievance redress officers at the local level within the department, independent district level grievance redressal authorities and central/State level grievance redress commission. It will include and rationalize existing
structures.

5. Lokrakshak Kanoon (Whistleblower Protection Lokpal): To strengthen the existing Public interest Disclosure and Protection to Persons Making the Disclosure Bill, that is currently before the Parliament, to ensure appropriate protection of whistleblowers.

These institutions, where relevant, will also be established at the State level. In addition there will be a common selection process to staff these institutions. We feel that all these measures need to be brought in simultaneously to effectively tackle corruption at all levels and provide a mechanism to redress grievances of citizens.

We write to you, to present this alternative, to elicit your responses, and to invite you to be part of the discourse. Please do let us know whether you are interested in being part of the discourse and in receiving periodic updates.

Please forward this on to friends and other interested people.

We look forward to your reply.

Warm regards,

Aruna Roy
MKSS (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan)
Village Devdungri, Post Barar
District Rajsamand 313341
Rajasthan

(email us at views.lokpal@gmail.com)

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Recommended reading on the Lok Pal bill(s)

A number of posts I found interesting and informative. Please also read Amit Varma's post, Anna's Song, where he has put together a similar selection (warning: links to this blog) and Prajnya's page dedicated the Lok Pal debate, which has a large number of links from different perspectives.

In no particular order:

India needs reforms, not a super babu - Kanchan Gupta - Daily Pioneer

Is there a teaching moment we're missing today? - Swarna Rajagopalan (personal blog)

I'd rather not be Anna - Arundhati Roy - The Hindu

Rupees, Annas And Vice - Gautam Patel (personal blog, but a piece that has appeared in the TOI's Mirror set of city newspapers)

Why Anna Hazare is wrong and Lok Pal a bad idea - Nitin Pai - (personal blog, The Acorn, part of The National Interest)

Of the few, by the few and Time to step back (both by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, in Indian Express)

A thinktank brings Anna the eyeballs - Rahul Kanwal - India Today

The Making of an Authority: Anna Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi - Mukul Sharma - Kafila (a collective blog)

The dangers of a movement - Ranjit Hoskote - Tehelka

The Insurgent - Mehboob Jeelani - Caravan

Jan Lok Pal: unconstitutional, unnecessary - Amba Salelkar - Pragati (part of The National Interest)

Hazare is no Gandhi - Salil Tripathi - The Daily Star

Reign of the Tin Men - Shoma Chaudhury with Revati Laul, The third flight path - Shoma Chaudhury, with an interview with Aruna Roy and Lokpal: An option without a fast or fuss - Revati Laul (all Tehelka)

Answering Anna’s critics: 10 posers and rebuttals - R Jagannathan - Firstpost

Protesters We Like: Anna, Arundhati and the doublespeak of dissent - Lakshmi Chaudhry - Firstpost

Hazare's solution is no solution at all - Aakar Patel Friday Times

Dreams at the barricades - Mihir Sharma - Indian Express

Hazare, Khwahishein Aisi: Desiring a new politics, after Anna Hazare and beyond corruption - Shuddhabrata Sengupta - Kafila

Are we missing anything? Please leave links in the comments. Thank you.

Added later

A patriarch for the nation? - The nation’s problems cannot be solved by a supercop - Ramachandara Guha - The Telegraph

Annationalism - Shekhar Gupta - Indian Express

A tale of two movements - Amita Baviskar - The Times of India

The long shadow of the Ramlila stage - Ashutosh Varshney - Indian Express

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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Rs 0.02

1. I'm anti-corruption.
2. I'm anti-Anna Hazare.
3. Hazare is a sanctimonious right-wing tyrant so cloaked in his own virtue that he believes he is above the law.
4. The law is frequently an ass.
5. Nevertheless, the law is frequently our only hope.
6. Better the elected asses than the dictatorial unelected.
7. The government is playing into Hazare's hands with its idiocy.
8. Yes, these views can be held simultaneously.

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Monday, August 08, 2011

Great-Grandson of Godawful Poetry Fortnight

We launched the first Godawful Poetry Fortnight in 2008, and followed up in in 2009 and 2010. All our posts are here, and there's a brief article in the TOI about the Fortnight here.

Now, time to gear up for 2011. You have been warned!

The essentials:

• Godawful Poetry Fortnight runs from the 19th to the 31st August.

• Our Patron Saint is William Wordsworth.

And he gets this signal honour for saying that poetry "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Way too many aspiring poets have rallied behind that banner, too few going so far as recollecting those emotions in tranquillity, let alone reading the rest of the preface to Lyrical Ballads (which can be found on Bartleby, for those interested).

• To join in, all you have to do is post on your blog*, Facebook or Google+ a godawful poem you have written, with—all totally optional—a brief note about GPF, a bit about what godawful poetry means to you, and a link to this post.

• Post godawful poems as often as you like during the Fortnight. (The True Believers Challenge: post thirteen godawful poems, one on each day of the Fortnight.) Squeeze your muse like a boil. Get it all out. Pester your friends to post too. Once GPF is done, you will write good poetry for the rest of the year, yes?

• Technorati is pretty much dead now. So just use a Godawful Poetry Fortnight tag or label on your post, and maybe a #GodawfulPoetryFortnight Twitter hashtag as well.

• To those who feel the need to point out this Fortnight lasts only thirteen days, we draw our cape around us, and say, in a marked manner, "Poetic license."

* I'd be happy to link to you if you tell me where your poem is.
If you don't have a blog, you're welcome to use the comment space here or, if you know me and have my address, email me your poems and I'll post them as guest posts.

Labels: Godawful Poetry Fortnight

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Saturday, May 07, 2011

Jhunjhunwala was too busy to go to the Situation(al Comedy) Room

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Bappi Goes To The Situation Room

For Samit.

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Sunday, April 10, 2011

Chennai Reporters' Beat

Yo, Madrasis (it's okay to say 'Madrasis' for just people from the city, no?),

The noble Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan (have always loved the regal way his name rolls off the tongue) has an experiment to propose, one that we're eager to see the results of. It's happening in a few hours.

Excerpts from his post:

On Sunday, the 10th of April, we will all meet at the Luz Signal (near the Sangeetha restaurant), and proceed in a stochastic and haphazard manner towards TT K Road/Sivaswami Road. Along the way you, and I, will meet people, talk to those we meet and keep a keen eye out for all kinds of things. At the end of the walk, we will talk for a few minutes about the things we saw, and coffee/breakfast/brunch later, disperse.
...
you will sit down and write about whatever you think is worth writing about from the walk.
...
I (and perhaps one other person) will then collate these stories, edit them (minimally, and brutally honestly) and structure them into a paper we’d love to spend a Sunday with. A month of Sundays with.
All of this, then, will be published as an entirely online newspaper; due credit given, of course.

Details here.

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Sunday, March 27, 2011

Change a letter, change the story

These, reformatted and with typos (hopefully) corrected, are from a Twitter hashtag we started in the wee hours, #changealetterchangethestory, which in turn was ripped off from a couple of old posts on this blog (1, 2 and you'll see that my first few were from my own contributions there), which in turn were inspired by an email thread. Please add more!

And check out the thread, scrolling back to the beginning, before it became a sort of minor viral. We particularly recommend contributions by @tinytoots, @ravages, @leftarmspinster and @rajasen (who are cordially invited to repost their selections here or on Facebook, where this will eventually cross-post).

The basic rules: (a) add a letter, subtract a letter, or change a letter, (b) provide a blurb and (c) if (b) is funny enough, you may be permitted to bend (a) slightly.

Jurassic Pork
Stars Miss Piggy. Kermit guests as amphibian with a taste for the Other White Meat.

Bone With The Wind
Rhett decides he doesn’t give a damn and follows his libido.

The Princess Ride
Another set of Princess Di revelations. The butler did it, apparently.

A Suitable Toy
The search for the perfect self-gratification aid

Vernon Dog Little
Dyslexic boy framed for incident in the city pound.

A Stud in Scarlet
Holmes helps a metrosexual accused of a crime of fashion.

The Complete Woks of Shakespeare
The man who introduced Chinese cooking to Elizabethan England.

The Dairy of Samuel Pepys
How one man milked success for all it was worth

Of Human Bandage
Florence Nightingale's rip-roaring autobiography

Finnegan's Cake
Buttery, over-cooked

Beautiful Thong
@soniafaleiro's lyrical real-life story of Fashion Week

Sin Fish
@chakraview's coming of age story, set in an aquarium

Heaver Lake
Vikram Seth's beautiful collection of poetry on throwing up

Nine Hives
William Dalrymple's ode to bee-keeping

Known Smurf
@anniezaidi 's debut novel about her childhood's favourite toy (yeah, okay, that was 2 letters)

Homage to Catatonia
The pro-LSD manifesto

Popcore Essayists
@jaiarjun edits set of learned essays on incestuous pornography

The Grill
@soniafaleiro on the art of barbecuing

My Fiend Sancho
@amitvarma's experiments with devil worship

My Experiments With The Troth
MKG's story of his marriage

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Umpire
@prempanicker's argument for neutral match officials

Mound of the Baskervilles
A pictorial study of the gravestones of Yorkshire

Of Rice and Men
How to ensnare a Tamizh groom

To Fill a Mockingbird
A guide to the bird-feeders of Alabama

The World According to Carp
Scientific study of the migration habits of this popular fish

Fear and Loafing in Las Vegas
The flaneur's guide to sin city

Match 22
Elizabeth Taylor's marriages

Midflight's Children
The progeny of the Mile-High Club (one more cheat - 2 letters changed)

The Unbearable Lightness of Peeing
Blessed relief

Sods and Lovers
The Hemingway you never knew

The Girl With The Dragon Tatti
Creative defecation

The Girl Who Flayed With Fire
S&M, pyromania; it's all there

The Grate Indian Novel
Slightly irritating IWE work

The Sly Company Of People Who Caress
Love for sale, surreptitiously

India Balling
An NYT reporter takes a gap year in India

Trainspitting
Why the railway tracks turned red

Shtupping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Frost's raunchier side

Love and Ponging in Bombay
How a deodarant salesman found romance in the city's trains

Malgudi Pays
RKN's guide to budding IWE writers

Sacred Dames
The BJP's sadhvis - an insiders account

Groom on the Roof
Finding love in the hills

In An Antique Band
Life on the road with The Rolling Stones

Maxiumum Pity
When Mother Teresa opened a branch office in Bombay

2 Statues
Best-selling Indian novel with wooden characters

Lunatic in my mead
The mad bootlegger of Bangalore

The Hungry Diet
Amitav Ghosh's patented, guaranteed weight loss manual

The Mother Side of Midnight
Oedipus revisited

Supperman
The sad story of an overweight superhero

The Kite Punner
Who strangled him with the manja?

A Hose for Mr Biswas
Naipaul's epic work on suburban gardening

What Ho, Jeeves
Bertie can;t remember who he was with last night (well, okay, no letters changed)

The 3 Mistakes of My Wife
How his spouse said 'I do, I do, I do'

The Singh And I
@bhogleharsha on how to keep smiling in the commentary box

Spittle Women
The first compartment of the 8.20 Churchgate fast

Withering Heights
Collected criticism

Sex and the Pity
How the losers get laid

The Twin Showers
The Ashleigh and Mary-Kate voyeur tapes

Park Night
Bruce Wayne cruises the Oval, looking for a little Robin

Lady Chatterly's Lever
Give me a place to stand and I'll make the earth move for you, baby

It Takes A Pillage
The USA's war on Countries Which Won't Give Them Oil

Who Filled Roger Rabbit?
A taxidermist's tale of woe

The Audacity of Grope
Another president's memoir

The Audacity of Dope
How an idiot became President

The Wind in the Pillows
Why she had to change the bedclothes

The Call of the Mild
Indian engineers move to the USA

Caturday Night Fever
The LOLCATS collection

Pilates of the Caribbean
Weight Loss in the West Indies

Dork Knight
@sidin's secret fantasies

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Monday, February 07, 2011

Caferati's Fifth Annual Poetry Slam at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (formerly Prince of Wales) museum garden
Sunday, 13th February, 2011
7.00 pm.

Caferati's Annual Poetry Slam made its debut at Kala Ghoda in 2007 (the first in India, actually) and has returned every year since then, to much enjoyment from its faithful audience and participants. This is its fifth edition.

Themes

There are no required themes. (Since it's the eve of St Valentine's Day, we suggest you bring at least one love poem.)

We’re proponents of free speech, but please understand (1) that we must abide by the laws of the land, and (2) that there may be children present in the audience. Please don’t bring poems that could get the Festival in trouble with the law.

Deadlines

For initial submission via email:
11.49 p.m., 11th February, 2011. (We may extend this deadline, but don’t count on it.)
To respond to the invitation to the Slam:
10 a.m., 13 February, 2011.
On the day of the Slam, 13th February 2011:
Report to the sound console at the venue by 6.00 p.m, and ask to speak to one of the Literature volunteers. Please show all five of your poems to the volunteers.

How our Poetry Slam works
Even if you know how a conventional Slam works, please read this section. There are more than a few tweaks.

Before the Slam:

Each poet must have ready at least five poems.

To be invited to compete in the Slam, you must submit one poem via email. (See address at the bottom of this post.)

The organisers/judges will short-list poets from the entries. Selection criteria will be the quality of the writing and how well, in the judges’ opinion, those poems lend themselves to performance.

The selected poets will be informed of their selection only via email. Their participation will be confirmed only once they reply to that email and confirm that that will be able to perform at the Slam and that they will come prepared to perform five of their poems.

At the event:

Participants in each round will perform in random order.

After each round, the judges will vote, and the competitors with the lowest points in that round will be eliminated, until we have a winner. The exact number that will be eliminated in each round will be decided depending on the number of participants selected to compete in the Slam, and will be announced before the performances start.

Scoring will be cumulative. Those who survive each round will carry their points with them. Elimination in each round will be based on total scores up to that point. In case of a tie, the totals from that specific round will be used as a tie-breaker.

Rules and Conditions

Submit only one poem via email.

The contest is open to anyone over the age of 16, except families of the organisers and the judges. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been published or not, whether you’ve performed before or not.

Since the main event is live on stage, selected participants must be prepared to travel to the venue (at their own expense), from wherever they are, to perform their work.

Entries must be your own, original work.

Entries can be in Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and English

Each poem must take no longer than two minutes to perform. Time on stage will be kept strictly, and you will be cut off if you exceed the limit.

Participants selected for the Slam can, on stage, read from a written version, recite from memory, declaim, shout, or sing their words. They can stand still, gesture, pace, jump and up and down, stand on their heads, whatever. They will be judged on both the quality of the words they perform and the performance itself.

No costumes, musical accompaniment, or audio visual aids allowed. It's just you and your voice

There is no entry fee.

Submissions remain the intellectual property of the entrants, but by submitting an entry, you give the the Kala Ghoda Association, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival and its Sponsors, and Caferati permission to use your entry, with acknowledgement, but with no payment to you, in their websites, as part of Press Releases (where they may be reproduced by media organisations), and in a possible special booklet or CD featuring the best of the Festival.

The decisions of the jury are final and binding, and no correspondence will be entertained regarding the jury’s decisions.

Judges

Caferati’s editors will evaluate initial submissions.

On the event day, there will be a panel of 6 judges.

The expert panel:

(to be announced)

The Audience Panel:

Three randomly chosen members of the audience will join the experts to help judge each round.

Prizes

Prizes worth approximately Rs 3000 (first place), Rs 2000 (second place, and Rs 1000 (third place).

Winners will be announced at the end of the contest.

How to enter

Email editors AT caferati DOT com with the subject line Kala Ghoda Poetry Slam 2011.

Please include:
Your name
Your age
Your telephone number (preferably a cellphone you carry at all times)

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Sunday, February 06, 2011

The Essential Indian Books survey / the Readership survey

Would much appreciate it if you could post links to these on your blog. I'm trying to get at least a few thousand responses, and a link from you would help big time.

If you prefer to Tweet, you can use http://bit.ly/EssentialIndianBooks and http://bit.ly/readershipsurvey

Click here to go to the surveys.

Essential Indian Books

Informal Readership Survey

Or you can take them on this page, below.

Do please pass the URLs on to friends as well. The more people we get to fill this out the better the results will be.

Many thanks!

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Sunday, January 30, 2011

ForbesLife India - an e-sampler

Open publication - Free publishing

Please also read a short introduction by Indrajit Gupta, editor, Forbes India, and the introduction to ForbesLife India by Charles Assisi, editor.

If you'd like to subscribe, please see this page for details.

We hope you'll pick up your copy soon, and we look forward to your feedback. You can write to us at ForbesLifeIndia AT network18online.com, follow us on Twitter or 'Like' us on Facebook.

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Friday, December 31, 2010

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a..

..plagiarism accusation!

(Note: please see the update at the end of this post.)(Update 2)

Background and disclosure: I work for Forbes India, where I handle a section of the magazine. Also in my portfolio is the fancy-pants new-age designation, "Editor, Social Media." Which means that I handle the magazine's social media presence: our LinkedIn group, our page on Facebook, and our Twitter handle. And I'm part of the team that creates our covers.

But.

Everything I say below this is my own opinion, and should not be construed as being official communication from Forbes India or it editors and stakeholders. My own personal opinion. Not official. Clear? Thank you.

Today, I got a few alerts from friends that someone called @acorn had said, on Twitter, that the latest Forbes India cover was ripped off from another magazine. Here's the tweet: Forbes India Dec 2010 cover http://j.mp/i7dqXs plagiarises from Pragati Oct 2010 cover http://j.mp/e6BL09.

This made me grumpy. Make that more grumpy. We're handling regular issues of the magazine, plus a new project that we launch in a bit, and it already looked like I'd have no time to do more than raise a glass with friends to bring in the new year before getting back to work. Now I'd have to go find out who this acorn is and what they were wittering on about.

So, acorn is the Twitter ID of Nitin Pai, who identifies himself as the editor of Pragati, The Indian National Interest Review, from The Takshashila Institution. Now that 'national interest' bit rang a bell. It sounded like a name I'd heard and dismissed from my mind a long time ago. (Dismissed on the admittedly arbitrary grounds that it sounded to me like a rip-off of The National Interest, a US-based foreign policy magazine, and people who can't even think up an original name aren't worth paying too much attention to.) Later, smart pals like Amit Varma linking to The National Interest from time to time persuaded me to check it out a few times. But then I found nothing of particular interest to me in what they had to say, so the blog vanished from my mind. Until now, when I learn that it also has a magazine.

And so, to the plagiarism bit. Mr Pai is saying that we stole their original creative idea. That is a very serious accusation, the kind that lawyers make lots of money on. And one that I, as someone who has made a living out of creating original work, take very seriously.

Let's see now. This 'magazine' did a cover in October, in which a muscular man clad in a kurta, waistcoat and Gandhi cap is shown opening up the buttons of the first two items of clothing, to reveal that he is wearing a blue undershirt on which, within a diamond shape, you see the Ashoka Chakra. The headline says, "Time for change."

(Quick aside. Ye learned ones: Doesn't this flout the Flag Code of India, 2002? It says, among other things, "the Flag shall not be used as a portion of costume or uniform of any description nor shall it be embroidered or printed upon cushions, handkerchiefs, napkins or any dress material." Or are parts of the flag exempt?)

Forbes India's year-end issue cover has a muscular man opening up his sherwani to show that he is wearing a blue undershirt on which is emblazoned a red and yellow diamond shape, within which you see the words "Person of the year 2010." The copy says, "Smarter, bolder, stronger, braver, tougher, bigger, wiser. Better. The Best of the Year."

So, if Forbes India is guilty of plagiarism, it must mean that this person that Pragati portrays is an original creation of their...think tank. Let's see now. Have we seen a similar visual somewhere? No, that can't be true. They wouldn't put a fictional American comic book character on their cover in a pose that large numbers of people around the world would recognise instantly , make a few cosmetic changes, and then claim that it is an original concept. So that must mean this is a totally original thought. (But then, one doesn't get the symbolism of this gentleman taking off his traditional Indian clothing to show us his underwear. Maybe they meant Time to Change. You know, "change your underwear, kiddies," that kind of thing. Good lad. Not sure what the point, but I'm all for hygiene.)

We, in the Forbes India team, are pretty clear where we got our inspiration from. None of us had heard of Pragati before today (and, between us, we do read pretty widely). We were paying homage to a hero of our misspent youths. Who was faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Who would zip into phone booths and rip off his street clothes and spectacles to reveal his superhero costume underneath.

Fabulously original? No. We were paying homage to an iconic image, the mild-mannered reporter turning into the Man of Steel. The cover sought simply to convey that our person of the year was, in a way, a super human. Simple enough.

(I'll admit that I don't think it's as good as some of our previous covers. But we have, more than once, played with old tropes to deliver a thought. This recent cover, for instance, paid homage to a classic VW campaign. Inside joke: VW is now the world's largest car-maker; we took delight in twisting VW's original approach, created by the famous Mr Bernbach and his team, to show what we thought Toyota was trying to do. And this cover was a take on a concept that has had many avatars on the Web, but was originally done by The New Yorker (see this image for a reference) back in 1976. More recently, The Economist did a similar cover, about China's world view.)

Still, Mr Pai says we're plagiarists. And Mr Pai is, undoubtedly, an honourable man. So I guess I'll see their lawyers, or communication from them, in the office soon.

Or, perhaps, *gasp* Mr Pai is trying to get some much-needed visibility for his little magazine by making accusation about Forbes India.

Could it be, could it be, could it be?

Naah. Perish the uncharitable thought. Not from a high-minded organisation that aims to be "credible." That unambiguously pursues the national interest "through consistent high-quality policy advisories." They wouldn't do that.

So, perhaps, I should ask my bosses to get the company's lawyers to speak to Mr Pai about slander. What say ye, Gentle Reader?

*Update

This evening, I wrote to Nitin Pai. I'm extracting a part of my first email to him.

My relating Pragati's size to the matter was immature, and what is worse, ungentlemanly and irrelevant. I apologise for that, without conditions and without reservations.

(This apology is in my personal capacity, as was my blog post. Like my blog post, it does not have the sanction or approval of my bosses and Forbes India.)

This still stands: Your accusation of plagiarism is completely unjustified. I am, to put it mildly, upset about that, and do not apologise for my conclusions on why you made that accusation

Nitin replied to my email promptly and courteously. We have since exchanged a number of very civil emails and while we haven't agreed on everything, we are finding common ground. Nitin's emails to me are personal, and therefore privileged, and it's up to him to decide what he wants to share of their content.

8Update 2

Nitin Pai had told me why he jumped to the conclusion that Forbes India had ripped off his cover: he knew that a Pragati designer had shown work (but not the cover in question) to someone at Forbes India. I agreed with him that I would very likely have come to the same conclusion under the circumstances. (While I disagree with his tweeting his outraged conclusion rather than contacting us, I have to admit that I might well have done the same.) He asked me to check with our design team. I did, and wrote back to him thus:

I checked with the three people involved with the cover, and all three assured me that they had no knowledge of Pragati. The only Pragati they'd heard of as an entity is the very famous printing press in Hyderabad. I did an extra check with the remainder of the team, just to make sure, and got similar answers.
My design chief says he has seen over 50 portfolios in the last two months (we've been looking rather intensively for a couple of designers), and yes, it is possible that he may have seen the name Pragati in portfolios that he has seen, but has no recollection of it.
I can do no more than offer you our collective word on this. I hope it is enough?

I know that in a situation like this, with hurt professional pride and anger welling up — like this post of mine, for example — it would be easy to dismiss this assurance. Mr Pai has been a gentleman and has taken my word for it. He has since tweeted an apology and an explanation — 1, 2, 3 — and updated his post.

I'm glad we were able to resolve this despite the acrimonious start.

Thank you, Nitin, and good luck to Pragati. Here's to more and better from all of us.

Amen.

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Monday, December 20, 2010

In Madras

We were in Madras for a few days (as part of the Poetry With Prakriti festival). Though we've visited the city a few times as an adult, this was the the first time since we were twelve or thereabouts that we saw a bit of the place. We lived there between ages six and nine, and a lot of what we remember had had changed, of course.

These are brief notes on the trip.

• No road seems to meet another at right angles: they merge, curving into each other at acute angles, undulating, flowing around obstructions, never seeming to come to a full stop.

• On the streets, near-misses that would have resulted in fist-fights in Bombay or Delhi are dismissed with a shrug, or in the case of the driver of the vehicle that ferried us around, a giggle.

• Vehicles obey signals at 2 a.m. but ignore them during rush hour.
The right side of the road on a two-way street is merely a suggestion, not to be taken seriously.

• Driving in Madras is as distinct a genre of the art as driving in Bombay, or Delhi. Practitioners of each would look down on the others.

• Did we say Madras has no straight roads? Madras has no straight roads. What it does have is a profusion of one-way streets.

• The city wakes up earlier and goes to be earlier than other metros; things like late breakfasts and dinners are regarded with some suspicion.

• A service apartment is not what you think it is. The one I stayed in had beds, electricity, an AC and a small water heater (more than we expected or needed), but no soap or towel, no heating jug, one plastic chair, no hangers in the closet, no storage one could lock, no room cleaning (all of which we could have used).

• On our previous brief visits, we noticed that coffee house franchises weren't as ubiquitous (except for the now defunct Qwiky's) as in other Indian cities. Figures, we said to ourselves: they take their coffee seriously, Tamil folks. This time, we were surprised to see Baristas and Cafe Coffee Days abound.

• In Madras, you understand what sambhar really should be.
And that dosas are not just for vegetarians. Our first meal was egg dosa with chicken curry in a place called Midnight Masala, which was, apparently, the only non-5-star eating option open at 1.30 a.m., when our flight landed.

• When people say they'd like to meet up, they make the effort to do so.

• And, at an event, if you have a low turn-out, it's no point waiting for late-comers; everyone who wants to be there will be there, on time.

• Low-slung, sprawling, set-back-from-the-road type houses still survive, though newer parts of town have their profusion of ugly concrete boxes And in the business districts, glass-walled skyscrapers are sprouting, which seems like a bad idea in a city that is infernally hot most of the year!

• And on Mount Road, we were delighted to see that Indo-Saracenic frontages still survive. We in Bombay are used to Victoria Terminus being used as the ultimate example of the genre. Chandrachoodan tells us that that isn't correct: for one, the school really first took shape in Madras; and VT has a big helping of Gothic in the mix.

• British-era place-names still survive, not just in everyday conversation; they're also there on street signage.

• No one picks on you if you say 'Madras' instead of 'Chennai.'

• Contrary to popular belief, Madras has a winter. And the winter rain is a wondrous thing: a fine spray that keeps dust and the temperature down.

• The only Hindi you hear is from North Indians in restaurants trying to to talk to waiters.

• In Madras, I have an accent.

• They take their movies stars seriously.

• Life does move slower; and there are more courtesies and rituals. A friend says an Open Mic with a time limit for performers, like the one we run in Prithvi, would not work. People would expect to be able to finish their poems no matter how long they last. Remember, she said, this is a place where the alaap of a performance can take an hour.

• And yes, we fell in live with Amethyst (which, we hear, is moving soon, and the lovely mansion in which it is housed may be demolished). Fab food, great ambience, and of course, a beautiful place.

Wethinks we will write about Poetry With Prakriti separately. Soon.

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Thursday, November 04, 2010

Stet 'Stet'

'Stet' is Latin for 'let it stand.' In publishing, when an editor, writer or proofreader uses it on a copy sheet, it refers to a change already marked, and instructs those reading the copy to disregard or discard that marked change.

It also is the name of the blog (tagline: "life, unedited"), that Mitali Saran uses to archive her popular Business Standard column of the same name. Make that her erstwhile column.

Because, you see, she is no longer writing it. It happened because:

This week, for the first time since its inception in August 2006, Stet was not published in Business Standard's weekend edition (October 30, 2010) . You'll find the likely reason for that in the second-last paragraph of the spiked column, reproduced below.

And a later update:

Business Standard's view that the post below was too dated to run is utterly unpersuasive, and I'm afraid I don't believe it. They also say that since this post was put up on the blog, along with comments about BS, the question of carrying it in the paper does not arise. We shall have to agree to disagree on this whole thing, and I will write a post about that in a few days; but meanwhile, I have terminated my arrangement with them with immediate effect. As of this week, Stet will no longer appear in Business Standard.

The column in question, incidentally, is about the product of Aroon Purie's jet lag, and you can read it in the post on Stet (the blog) where Mitali also posted the extracts above. (You should also read the comments on that post.)

**

And while on the subject of jet lag, here's Mitali's poem on the topic, also from the column (but the link is to her blog.)

**

(Some more links to the tiger-nado incident. Nilanjana, Sridala, and via both of them, Abinandanan, Niranjana Iyer (who says that India Today has ripped her stuff off in the past), Rahul Siddharthan, and NITK Numbskulls Page.)

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Monday, November 01, 2010

O tempora! O mores!

Got this as a tip-off for a writers' listings newsletter I run (Caferati Listings, here and here).

Here's the key bit (the whole thing is here.):

Since the magazines caters to luxury and life style readers, a lot of brands would rather have us create something in the Vogue/GQ/Conde Nast Traveller style for their brand than simply placing an ad, because no one in India understands this set of Audience better than we do. The advertorials follow the editorial style to ensure that the promotional article looks like an editorial point of view and not a paid promotion.

They're actually proudly proclaiming that they will help their advertisers make their ads look like editorial.

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