The doors of managing perception

You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a feku
If I was to say to you
I know exactly what to do

Come on baby, light my pyre
Come on baby, light my pyre
Try to get the light on hire

It's time to isolate it's true
The situation's really dire
You clapped and yet we're in the goo
Wait a minute, gotta sue The Wire

Come on baby, light my pyre
Come on baby, light my pyre
Try to get the light on hire, haanh?

We could take care of the poor
We could push testing rates higher
Help the farmers, okay, yes, sure
Wait a minute, gotta sue The Wire

Come on baby, light my pyre
Come on baby, light my pyre
Try to get the light on hire, haanh?

You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a feku
If I was to say to you
I know exactly what to do

Come on baby, light my pyre
Come on baby, light my pyre
Try to get the light on hire
Try to get the light on hire
Try to get the light on hire
Try to get the light on hire

Covid-19 in India: donation drives you can support

You're not enjoying lockdown, but you know you are comparatively better off than many others. And you want to help people who do not have your privilege.

Here are a few suggestions.

• Of course, there's the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund

These are campaigns on fund-raising sites that aim to:
1. Help medical professionals with equipment (masks, etc.)
2. Assist daily wagers with basic sustainance, food grains, etc.
3. Support sanitation workers and others
4. Donate to provide soap, sanitizers, etc. to people
With most of these, the platforms are waiving their charges, so all money goes to the fundraisers.
One request: pay via net banking; a credit card means the platform pays credit card charges.

• Give India's fundraiser to feed Covid-19-hit families and also this page.

• Give India's fundraiser for hygiene kits

• Ketto's dedicated Covid-19 page, where you can find multiple campaigns:

• Milaap's dedicated Covid-19 page, where you can find multiple campaigns:

• Buy masks for medical workers. PharmEasy will match your donations. (It's 200 rupees a mask.)

Some more

• Want to volunteer in your neighbourhood, please see this Facebook group set up to 'help people help people', Caremongers India

• Campaign for daily-wage workers in Delhi on OurDemocracy

• Uday Foundation's campaign on Ketto

• Campaign to buy Ventilators & Medical Supplies For COVID-19 Ward At St. John's NAHS, Bangalore on Ketto

• Support for Wastepickers in a time of COVID 19

• Habitat for Humanity India: Hygiene Kits to the underprivileged to fight against COVID-19

A few more I've found

• Sumanasa Foundation is seeking contributions to buy provisions for community kitchens run by the Greater Chennai Corporation. Indian rupee contributions to Axis Bank account 91101001257036, IFSC UTIB0000006. Source, this tweet by the musician TM Krishna, one of the trustees.

• RotiGhar is distributing freshly-cooked meals to security guards, labourers, rag-pickers and others in and around Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai, Bhiwandi. Contributions via Paytm / Gpay to +91-97691-81218 or UPI chinukwatra@okaxis. WhatsApp these numbers for details: +91-96993-96544, +91-96190-89050, +91-99877-30605, +91-75063-84025, +91-95946-09229, +91-72087-73650. Follow (on Twitter): RotiGharIndia and founder chinukofficial

• Goonj's campaign (foreign passport holders can also contribute)

• Zomato's Feeding India campaign (tax deductions available: (more info)

• SAFA Society's campaign collecting funds for relief packages in Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru (tax exemptions available)

• Covid-19 Relief Fund for Daily Wage Workers of Chandigarh/Tricity on OurDemocracy

• Sangama, which works with working class, non-English speaking gender/sexual minorities, sex workers and people living with HIV, is raising funds for family units of sex workers, and transpeople


• Apnalaya is reaching out to vulnerable households in M Ward. Follow their Twitter (@ApnalayaTweets) or support at apnalaya.org/donation/

• Coro India, which works on equality and justice in gender-related issues, is raising funds for food packages, masks, sanitisers and soap for daily-wage workers.

• Fit Brigade: Independent volunteers from Mumbai to help senior citizens who are living alone with delivery of essential items (groceries, medicines, fruits and vegetables) and cooked meals. Contacts: South Mumbai: 9821887707/ 9820391911; Central Railway suburbs: 9004670600/ 9833170665/9773706712; Western Railway suburbs: 9819236951/9821159710/9022420360

• AngelXpress Foundation, which enables volunteerism, primarily with teaching is now working on bringing relief to their student's families. Contact them or support via instamojo

• Sparsha Charitable Trust which works in the Wadala area, is seeking support for getting supplies to vulnerable families there. Email info.sparshatrust at gmail dot com

• YUVA (Youth for Unity And Voluntary Action) is raising funds for the urban poor.

• If you own a 3-D printer and would like to help doctors expand their ventilator capacity via 3D printing valves and splitters, see this page

• Gurgaon Nagrik Ekta Manch is collecting for Gurgaon's stranded daily wage labourers

• Ahmedabad based youth organisations (Elixir, Ahmedabad Global Shapers, Hearty Mart, Communicate Karo, Amdavad Rockets and HeyHi Foundation) have an #AhmedabadFightsCorona campaign

• Project Mumbai has a free counselling facility for people in Mumbai, 8 am to 8 pm, across multiple languages, including Marathi Hindi English Gujarati Malayalam Punjabi and Kannada. More here on Twitter

• Project Mumbai is also helping the Maharashtra govt provide N-95 masks to healthcare workers.

• kashtakaripanchayat.org is raising funds for sanitation workers in Pune, and Pimpri-Chinchwad

• Mercy Mission in Bangalore is a federation of NGOs coming together to #FightCoronaTogether. See their (work in progress) page on Facebook.


I'll be updating this post as often as I get new information, and also this Twitter thread and this Facebook post.

We, the People of India

I think the preamble to the constitution is one of the most beautiful texts India has produced, putting in words what our best selves can be.

I asked a large number of friends if they would like to join in on a virtual group reading. Sveral jumped in. Here it is.

Video, Audio and Text


Audio-only


Voices
Arundhati Ghosh, arts professional, Bangalore
Dilip D'Souza, writer and journalist, Bombay
Jasmeen Patheja, Bangalore
Karen Donoghue, academic, Shillong
Kirtana Kumar, actor and director, Bangalore
Lalnunsanga Ralte, academic, Shillong
Mitali Saran, independent writer, Delhi
Peter Griffin, writer and journalist, New Bombay
Pervin Varma, development professional and musician, Bangalore
Rahul Ram, musician, Delhi
Rimi N, researcher, Bombay
Sampurna Chattarji, writer, Thane


The quality is rough and I will probably do another version. But I wanted to get this out in time for our seventieth Republic Day.

---

If you want to do this with your friends (I'd really like to see more versions, especially in other Indian languages) here's a how-to.

1. Record a 'pacing' track yourself.
Be clear, make word endings clean, don't do too much voice acting (because others may not be able to replicate your impressive interpretation; but don't be too robot-voice either). It may take several tries. You should wind up with a recording that's around 50 seconds long in English.

2. Send the audio to your friends. Ask them to listen to it a few times, then record their version.
Best way: listen on earphones on one device, and record on another. Getting the synch really, really close is critical. It can take hours to clean up otherwise.
You may also want to try a karaoke-ish style. That is, text on screen at the right pace. If you, like me, are an amateur at video editing, it can take a while. (I used GIMP to make the text, subtracting one word at a time and naming the files in reverse order, so the full text is 85.png, minus one word is 84.png and so on, until 00.png, which is a blank screen.) Then used GIMP to make an animated Gif. Then an online converter to turn the Gif into a video. There is probably an easier way to do this, but I don't have the skills. Ask a film-maker friend.
I have one version which is just my voice and the text, which I will post in the comments.

3. Mix the audio.
If your friends have been faithful to your pacing track, this is easy. But even the best intentions will produce lost of stuff you have to mess with. FOR EACH TRACK. THIS TAKES TIME!
I used Audacity for the audio editing.

4. You can release the track as an audio file, but you may want to also of a video version. This opens up lots more possibilities if you're proficient with a camera and a video editor.

I repeat, please, please do this in other Indian languages!

I saw it in the papers

The Telegraph is read by people who think they should be ruling India, but they really can't be bothered.

The Hindu is read by people who want to rule India but don't want to stand for elections.

Times of India is read by people who don't care who's ruling India as long as they get their celebrity gossip attached.

Hindustan Times is read by Delhi people who want to know whose fathers rule India.

The people who rule India don't read.

An homage to:

Prime Minister Jim Hacker on British press and readers. from tolep on Vimeo.

Violent night

Violent night, holy shyt
Fires are lit, flames are bright
Round yon Muslims the bigots go wild
Pretty sure no case will be filed
Weep in Muzaffarnagar
Weep in Muzaffarnagar

Violent night, holy shyt
People quake at the sight
Mobs are coming — is that a cop car?
Saintly voic's saying 'Kill the mullah'
Bro, a pogrom is on
Bro, a pogrom is on

Violent night, holy shyt
Kutta ka bachcha in the headlights
This will go down well with the base
Together they'll de-Muslim the place
Hindu rashtra on earth
Hindu rashtra on earth

I am an island

A winter's day
In a dweep I bought from
Ecuador
I am alone
Gazing at my phone at news reports from desh
And a freshly powdered silent pile of hash
I am a prick
Who owns an island

Abducted kids
Have a rape case pending too
That they can't litigate
I have no need of justice, justice is a pain
Punishment and jail time I disdain
I am a prick
Who owns an island

Don't talk of love
But sex tapes I've made before
I was sleeping with an actor
I won't disclose the number of offshore crores I have
Tax-free dollars paid for Kailaasa
I am a prick
Who owns an island

I have my kooks
And my bhakts are there to protect me
I am shielded in my exile
Safe within my room, eating magic shrooms
I can touch everyone and no one can touch me
I am a prick
Who owns an island

And my prick feels no shame
And no one hears my victim's cries

Real life, as often happens these days, outran satire. Ecuador said it hadn't agreed to sell the 'swami' anything and he had left, presumably for Haiti.

Work and disability

Persons with disabilities are 2.21% of India’s population according to the 2011 census. It’s not a figure that seems realistic; for one, global averages place the number at between 10% to 15%, and since a number of disabilities can be a result of sub-optimal nutrition or lack of timely medical care, a developing nation is likely to have a figure at the higher end of that range, if not higher.

But even if you take the census data as fact, a recent Business Standard study said that among some of India’s top listed companies, the percentage of employees with disabilities is 0.46%. If you assume, reasonably, that these companies are a little ahead of the curve on inclusive hiring practices, that indicates that less than 25% of persons with disabilities find employment. It is rather likely that as you move away from the cities and the big companies, the figures will be pretty low. The government and public sector undertakings do reserve jobs for candidates with disabilities, but in my limited knowledge, these are low level or relatively unskilled positions. (This is anecdotal and ancient, but in college, I had friends who acquired BA and BSc degrees and the only jobs they got were as telephone operators.) The 2011 Census figures are more optimistic: they say 36% of persons with disabilities are employed. If you take that as fact too, it still leaves 64% of disabled people wholly dependent on others.

Granted, some of these people will have severe disabilities; some will also have learning or intellectual disabilities. These can get in the way of getting a standard education, of learning employable skills. And we’re a a country where even able-bodied people often don’t have access to these things. There is a whole lot to fix here, at very basic levels, and that’s beyond the scope of what I want to say with this.

So I'll just ask these questions.

How welcoming is your workplace to persons with disabilities? Is your office wheelchair accessible? Are the approaches and the layouts navigable for persons with limited or no vision? Are there disability-friendly toilets? Is there software that makes work systems accessible for various disabilities? (I don’t ask this rhetorically; please do share answers.)

If your office doesn’t stack up too well on these criteria, is there anything you can do about it?

p.s. This is from my friend Balaji Bondili:

Living in SF, I always think about the “smart” products that are created to support the so called ‘busy’ lives of tech bros with very little of this ‘intellect’ spent on solving problems of the disabled that actually need some of the analytics and sensors and all that cool tech but not no, let’s figure out how the deliver cappuccino with a drone…

To which I’d like to add:

And there's this. Products that are designed to assist persons with disabilities very often do have wider applications. Things like screen readers, voice assistants, navigation aids are mainstream now, and commercially viable.

The room in the elephant

Mastodon — or to be precise, mastodon.social, which is the only part of the 'Fediverse' I've explored at all — feels a lot like early Web.

Before 'social networks' were named thus. Before Ryze or Orkut, which for many Indians were their first steps into the ocean. Before even blogs. When there were communities, and it felt… right. When "assume goodwill," to steal friend Udhay Shankar's advice to members of a certain list, seemed perfectly natural. (To be clear, I only met Udhay comparatively recently. When I did see that succinct phrase, those words leapt out at me; they described what I had been looking for then — and often I found it — and continue to search for today.)

These communities of choice formed in ad hoc ways. Lists (which of course were pre-Web, and to which I came late), chat rooms (which I jumped into enthusiastically, over-enthusiastically), even comment sections when they came up. And, as someone pointed out to me, guest books and the like. It took some time and effort to find your peeps and keep track of them.

Geocities was the first, if I recall right, to create infra of a sort for this. (Raise hands if you had a homestead.) Then came LiveJournal, which I totally missed out on, and then other early purpose-built networks and the "blogosphere," which I put in quotes because it already feels like a bygone era. And now, of course, social media seems ubiquitous, inescapable.

In this deluge of information, Mastodon.social feels calmer. Like starting over. The rules of engagement, formal or informal, are sane, and moderation is firm and decisive. I see 'influencers' fumbling around, some adding 'verified' symbols to their handles because Mastodon doesn't have them. I also see folks who are confident in their worth, being helpful, reaching out, not standing on their celebrity dignity. I see names from long ago, people who sort of withdrew from the hurly-burly (or maybe just from my ken, as I morphed).

Perhaps, this won't last.. Perhaps server loads will get too high to keep membership free. Perhaps traffic will be too frenetic for moderators to keep track of. Perhaps.

For now, this is refreshing. And fun.


If you haven't tried the water yet, come on in.

Trunk call

Yeah, so I'm on Mastodon.

If you want to join this 'instance' of Mastodon and follow me, use this link.

Both are invitations to mastodon.social — which is the most popular but also only one of many ways to use Mastodon — but you don't have to do either to use Mastodon. You could, instead, go to Join Mastodon and get an overview and then choose from any of a vast number of instances of Mastodon. Think of it — in a limited way — like email: I could have Gmail, you could have Yahoo Mail (but why would you?), but we can still write to each other. You can even set up your own instance of Mastodon if you have a server and are feeling hospitable. And then later, if you want to, look me up.

Here are links to intros to Mastodon at PC Mag and LifeHacker (the later's a bit dated, referring to a tool that lets you look up your Twitter followers, but Twitter's changed it's API, so the tool no longer exists.)

Typecasting

In my first advertising job, in Lintas, the agency had two Apple Macs. One was an older machine, CPU and monitor in one unit, the other had a much larger colour monitor. Each profit centre had allotted hours in the 'Mac Room,' and all the art directors in what was then India's second-biggest agency took turns using the computers within those slots. Most of them would use only the machine with the larger colour monitor. So I, the trainee copywriter, would frequently sit at the old machine and mess around, asking the seniors for help when I got stuck.

I got reasonably competent with Quark XPress, Aldus Freehand and Adobe Photoshop. Enough for one of my senior art directors to draw scribbles with measurements marked, and instead of passing it on to the studio to make a mock-up, letting me create the layout. He was a grey-haired gentleman who clocked in at 9.30 and picked up his bag at 6 and was having nothing to do with this new-fangled stuff, but was happy to humour me. I would wait for after-hours when the Macs would have less of a queue, and work on the layouts, type in my copy, and leave printouts on his desk which he would see in the morning.

My next job was in Trikaya Grey, where, the Mac Room was in the studio, with full-time operators at the machines. The protocol: visualisers and art directors would take pencil-and-paper layouts to the Mac Room and sit beside the operator, who would make the layout.

The studio worked in a bureaucratic kind of way: stop work at 1 p.m., have lunch and then play cards or relax and chatter, and start work again at 2. (We dismissively called this 'studio mentality,' but I have since reconsidered this opinion. Having acquired respect for work:life balance, I now think of workplaces that valourise long hours and sacrificing personal time as exploitive.)

My art colleagues then were Mangesh Rane, who like me was at the beginning of his career (and, unlike me, he quickly became a star), and Ashok Parab, who was a bit more senior, but with no ego about learning how to work digital. (And slightly later, Yardena and Satish Ambewadikar, but they came in knowing how to handle Macs, and of course Makarand Joshi, who named himself Mac The Man Not The Machine and who came in as a Mac operator and worked his way up to now be a creative director in one of the advertising majors.)

Since I knew the software, we would sneak in extra time at the Macs by going to the studio at 1 p.m,, and I would be Mac operator for Mongoose and Parab. Adjusting leading, tracking, kerning and condensation by fractions of a percentage point, moving pictures or 0.25mm rules 1mm higher or lower, creating white space to let layouts breathe and stand out — and never making the logo bigger — I got a free education in design from them. I'm still grateful for that, and while I never got good enough to win awards, I actually had ads out in which I was art director as well as copywriter (and one which I also illustrated) and being able to do self-defence layouts and have a reasonably informed opinion on design has helped me no end in my work life.

Now the story proper. **

One of Trikaya's top creative people was the legendary Vikas Gaitonde, and among the brands whose work carried his touch was Mauritius Tourism.

It was a weekend and Mangesh and I, who were working that day, had the Mac Room to ourselves, Below us, in the paste-up section, there was a spot of trouble. Vikas was in office, because the client needed something quickly. But the place from which the agency usually ordered typesetting was not available (or maybe they didn't have the particular variant of the typeface that he wanted for the headline; I don't remember this clearly, but I think it was a variant of Bernhard Modern).

Enter Mangesh and I.

We scanned the page with that typeface from a type book. Then Mangesh made the layout. and I cut-and-pasted in the letters of the headline one by one, him instructing me on placement to the fraction of a millimetre. A little tweaking and we got the exact condensation right, and while it took some time, we eventually had a printout ready for the big man, and then for the client. And that is how I once did manual typesetting on a computer.

* Jeeze, I'm a reminiscing old fart already. Shoot me now.

** Argh. A meandering storyteller.