The Caged Phoenix

Questioning traditional thought, Dipankar Gupta critically examines:

• how the elite is reluctant to acknowledge that structural impediments, and not cultural factors, deny growth benefits to the majority of one billion plus Indians.
• how the wealth of a few is intimately tied to the poverty of many.
• the close link between growth in high technological sectors of the Indian economy on the one side, and sweat shops and rural stagnation on the other.
• how affluence came to the developed West only when general standards arose across all social classes.

http://swblogs.blogspot.com/2009/08/interpreting-present.html

Confessions of a Prejudiced Mind

http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/99270/08_2009/rewind47_1a/back-to-1947-reliving-the-year-of-independence.html

"Buniyaad was one serial which brought back all those memories that we did not speak of, in the hope of forgetting the pain..."

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Are there topics which are better, if avoided? Some topics that just shouldn't be brought up, for the sake of "pleasant conversation"?

Sometimes, the very purpose of conversation is circumspect. Sure, it depends on who the conversation is between and what context it is in. Yet, there are some presumptions that one inadvertently ends up making. And one cannot help but feel perturbed, to say the least, when the very basis of these presumptions is questioned. Suffice it to say that the reason why one would not want to question these "presumptions" is because of one basic fact: the questioning of something so deeply ingrained in his psyche would be to question everything that he believes in and stands for.

So is this a classic case of close-mindedness, and of not being open to views that do not conform with your own? Does this mean that the basis behind everything that this person stands for (or so he thinks) is so fragile, that all it takes to shake these beliefs are a couple of questions?

Let's look at some of questions:

1. Is incest immoral?
2. What makes a person a Brahmin? Why must a Brahmin not eat beef? Isn't the answer to these the questions a prerequisite for actually being called Brahmin?
3. Is it wrong for an Indian to say that the Partition of India was a good thing for the Muslims (of Pakistan)?
4. Is the common man ready for movies/television series to be made on communally sensitive issues (Partition for eg.)? Isn't it better for these issues to be avoided on account of the fact that they might incite communal violence (for isn't it obvious that documenting a communal issue would mean attributing blame to a particular community)?

There are, in my opinion, times when a line has to be drawn. This is not out of fear of being considered flippant. The reason behind this drawing-of-the-line, this taking-of-a-call is simplistic, which is also why it can so easily be criticised. The reason is this:

There are some questions to which there are no answers not because you do not know them, but because they cannot be expressed. You do know the answers. And you can say that you know the answers because it is that gut feeling you get when faced with these questions; the gut feeling is the answer. All that needs to be done is for you to have the guts to stand behind these convictions irrespective of whether you have logic validating them or not.

Because what is logical is not always what is right...

Art

(from http://www.whatay.com/)

Newspapers should be news carriers not newsmakers

(Social Science Essay Competition 2004, winner; recently retrieved)

Newspapers should be news carriers, not newsmakers; there is truth and information enough to print, without fiction of falsehood, and to publish the latter is to betray the former.

“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later two reporters form the Washington post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon, and the status of print journalism soared. The two reporters were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their report on the Watergate Scandal was investigative journalism at its best. It was an epitome to high quality journalism. Sadly, today this kind of journalism is an endangered species and is on the brink of extinction.

At their best newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. Yet, today we see that the quality of journalism has gone down. The fact is that newspapers are losing readership to other forms of media such as television, and more recently, the internet. Thus, in order to cut costs, newspapers are now spending less on journalism and more on the presentation. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international politics and world affairs are.

But the question that concerns us the most right now is not the fact that the media is focusing on lifestyle issues to attract readership. The question is that the print media spearheaded by the newspaper industry has started sensationalizing news. It is one matter to write about entertainment but it is another one to actually create news and thereby mislead the public.

In India, the newspaper industry is rife with yellow journalism. The job of a newspaper is to report the news which concerns that people at large. Yet we have seen some leading national newspapers making non-issues ‘front-page news’. For example, the Shahid Kapur and Kareena Kapoor lip-lock was front-page news and the whole issue was thrown completely out of proportion by the national newspapers.

As mentioned before, newspapers can be called the voice of a nation which is talking to itself. The role newspapers play in nation-building can not be overlooked.

In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle their opponent’s offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think tanks all over the world are worried about the effects of a crumbling fourth estate. Are today’s news organizations “up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends?” asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.

The fact that sensationalist and fictionalized news is being sold in the name of hard core journalism is not restricted to India alone but is spread all over the world. The same issues are plaguing even the leading newspapers of the world such as the Guardian, New York times, wall street journal etc. in fact, the question of lowering standards of journalism has risen only because of falling revenues for newspaper companies. As written in a recent issue of ‘the economist’, the share price of New York Times fell by more than half within the last 5 years as a result of falling readership. This is not an isolated case and has had cascading effects all over the newspaper industry.

The reason newspapers are losing readership is because of the rise of new sources of media, which are more convenient such as the Internet. Even on the Internet blogs have risen over the pat few years to challenge the leading newspapers of the world and have lured away a major chunk of their readership. With the rise of these new sources of media the newspaper industry has felt the twinge.

Yet if the journalistic qualities of newspapers were to be compared with those of the Internet it can be said that newspapers clearly come out on the top. The reason is that newspapers are prevalent on a national level whereas blogs are more localized and focused on limited issues.

The need of the hour today is to have responsible journalism. One which can shape the opinion of people and nations in turn in a positive way, and not delude them with unnecessary and false bits of news such as how a soccer star had interludes with an adult- movie star during the soccer world cup, or how 2 famous Bollywood stars kissed each other during a party.

An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired up bloggers and well informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Millers’ national conversation will be louder than ever.

In conclusion, we can argue that there are many reasons behind the falling standards of journalism but the fact is that there is enough truth and entertainment to print without fiction or falsehood and to publish the latter is to betray the former. As the title suggests, lets hope in the future newspapers become news carriers and not newsmakers.

What the South Block blokes are up to.

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/govt-bars-bureaucrats-from-facebooking-in-office/84781-3.html

Indian diplomats now cannot open a Facebook account, use external e-mail services, or write blogs. Thanks to the new rules and much stricter firewalls aimed at preventing cyber attacks and leakage of classified information.

Over the past eight months, the Ministry of External Affairs has been overhauling its computer network security, putting up layers of barriers against intrusions into the network, said officials associated with cyber security.

There are almost 600 computers at its headquarters at South Block, about half of which are connected to the Internet. Classified work is typically done on stand-alone computers, usually with the external drives removed.

"We have set up a unified threat management system for the ministry. This simultaneously uses eight levels of protection like firewalls and spam mail filtering," said a senior official.

"We are also requesting and encouraging more responsible behaviour from our staff when working online," the official told IANS.

A circular issued last week asked officials not to log on to social networking sites, specifically citing Facebook, Orkut and Ibibo as examples.

The other prohibited practices include download of peer-to-peer music using sites like Kazaa and sharing of photos through Flickr and Picasa.

The circular also discourages using services like G-mail, Yahoo! or Hotmail for official communication. A similar circular, officials said, had been issued in the Prime Minister's Office in December.

But the matter is even more critical for the foreign office as officials posted in Indian missions abroad or on foreign tours tend to use web-based mail rather than the ministry's own mail system.

"We have had cases of senior officers using G-mail or other similar accounts abroad for official work, only to find some form of tampering when they return," the official said, adding people have been told to change their web-mail passwords if they had opened the account during foreign tours.

The missions have been told to use their official mail ID issued by the National Informatics Centre for communication. But several missions have complained that the mail home page was inaccessible due to port blocks by local Internet service providers.

They have been asked to contact their service providers to unblock the site.

"We want to secure communications with Indian missions through private networks. This may be implemented in the next few months," said an official working with the technical team in the ministry.

Apart from their offices within the country, cyber security officials are also fortifying Indian embassies abroad with the first such team visiting the Indian embassy in Beijing late last year.

In 2008, nearly 100 Internet addresses were blocked, several of them at Chengdu in China, after these were found to be the source of a swarm of attacks on the network.

"An attack could be just a simple mail, which activates a programme to leak data from that computer to another address on the net," the ministry official said, adding new intrusions were more geographically dispersed.

"We had some intrusions which were traced to Houston, but we know that Chinese hackers were behind it," the official said. "It's a daily defensive war that we are engaged in."

Not all online behaviour guidelines are the result of potential security threats - some are merely to caution officials. Like late last year, some officials got a circular advising them to stop writing blogs.

The order came after a Saudi Arabia-based official's personal website created a controversy for carrying an advertisement on writer Salman Rushdie, which was posted automatically as the site was hosted on a free server.

"Now we have mailing communities to keep in touch with each other - no blogs."

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Meet my alterego- Mr. Sitcom

"Chandler: I'm not so good with the advice... Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?"

Friends. Seinfeld. Scrubs. Another-random-sitcom.

Its a thought, but it might actually be interesting to see how humour among teenagers has evolved with the advent of sitcoms. The pop-culture references every now and then, the randomness and the obscurity- these are some byproducts of the role sitcoms have come to play in our lives. So the next time you laugh at your friend's funny, consider this- which sitcom has he been watching lately?

''The Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2, by Ludwig van Beethoven, is popularly known as the "Moonlight" Sonata (Mondscheinsonate in German). The work was completed in 1801[1] and rumored to be dedicated to his pupil, 17-year-old Countess Giulietta Guicciardi,[2] with whom Beethoven was, or had been, in love.[3] The name "Moonlight" Sonata derives from an 1832 description of the first movement by music critic Ludwig Rellstab, who compared it to moonlight shining upon Lake Lucerne.[4][1] (See also below.)

Beethoven included the phrase "Quasi una fantasia" (Italian: Almost a fantasy)[5] in the title partly because the sonata does not follow the traditional sonata pattern where the first movement is in regular sonata form, and where the three or four movements are arranged in a fast-slow-[fast]-fast sequence.''

“ According to a popular anecdote that circulated in the 19th century, Beethoven wrote his Moonlight sonata ... when playing the piano for a blind girl at night. Thus the sonata was called Moonlight sonata. This anecdote was particularly popular at the end of the 19th century and was a frequent topic for painters and graphic artists."

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