The Rewards of Bad Behaviour

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"A Well Behaved Child". Remember your primary school report card with those remarks by the teacher? Did your parents' faces beam on seeing the card? Probably not. They were more likely fixated on the B in English Literature to be bothered about recognition for good behaviour (their concern shifting to who the best tutor could be to turn that B into an A+ in the next term). On the other hand, the really naughty classmate who had not wreaked as much havoc over the term as he was expected to ended up with a large bar of Cadbury Fruit & Nut from the teacher and relieved expressions on his parents' faces. When you returned home, it was your demanding, misbehaved sibling who got all the attention, who had to be coaxed and bribed into silence. If you were the content, quiet one, you maybe got a smile and a....

Nobel Peace before the War ?

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President Obama must have gone to bed last night with various wearying thoughts - choosing the best strategy for the Afghan conflict, finding common ground between the Israelis and Palestinians, the economy and its mysterious ways, resolving the healthcare stalemate - and hoping that the phone doesn't actually ring at 3 a.m. Yet, this morning greeted him with unprecedented shock when he learnt that he was the Nobel Peace prize winner, just nine months into his job, and with possibly seven more years to go, provided he doesn't get swung out of office by the swing states at the end of his first term. The Nobel Committee has long established a reputation for being somewhat cuckoo. They didn't consider Gandhi a worthy recipient, to give an example. I faintly recall Mohd Yunus, telling an interviewer shortly after his prize was announced something like - that while....

A Letter To The Prime Minister... From a Well Wisher

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Dear Dr Singh, Firstly, congratulations on your resounding victory in General Elections 2009. You may have fallen a few seats short of the 272 seat mark, yet your party and your alliance's win has exceeded the expectations of even your most optimistic well wisher. Your party comes with a mandate that the Indian electorate has not given to any other in the preceding four elections. The unprecedented rise in the stock markets is ample proof of how even the prescient markets had misestimated your victory and the scale of it. Which brings us to our road ahead. You are more in control of our nation's destiny than anyone has been in a long time. The first few years of your last government marked a period of rapid expansion across several visible parts of India's economy. In many ways, this was self propelled and globally driven.....

Breaking Zoos! The Truth About ZooVision

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The truth about Television is finally out. You've heard it before, mostly in conspiracy theory discussions, that television programming is nothing but a mind control tool devised by corporations to keep audiences glued to channels and fill the gaps between commercial breaks. You never believed it when that know-it-all neighbour told you that TV programmes, whether soaps, reality shows, the news or even made-for-TV sports, were designed in a special way - a particular coding of colours, a sequence of images, specific notes and pitches of sounds - to enslave the viewing population in a state of mass hypnotism. Well, he was right. Ever wonder why people couldn't give up watching the fluctuating familial fortunes of the bahu in her in-laws' house, year after year? It was not the twists in the storyline but rather the subliminal mind alteration brought on by the variously coloured sarees. Advertisers grumbled....

A Nano Step for Indians, A Mega Opportunity for India

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As I write this, the Tata Nano is being commercially launched. Another milestone in the eventful path of the 'Rs 1 lakh - People's Car'. Along its illustrious journey, it has generated a fair amount of controversy - including concerns about increased pollution and higher traffic congestion in already gridlocked cities. Such reservations aside, the launch of the Nano comes at a critical moment for India -with the beginning of a period of economic slowdown, and no clear solutions on how to turn things around. Yet, the 'Nano Moment' presents unique opportunities that could not only revive the economy, but also transform India for long decades of prosperity. Among other comments, the manufacturers stated that they expect the car to be popular in India's rural markets. While India has one of the world's longest road networks, most roads in rural India would not allow a car like the....

Rebirth of Faith - In Yana & The Other Girls

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Every once in a while, something happens somewhere, that puts faith back in your cynical self. And for the truest believers, it is a moment of divine intervention - a sign to the non-believing masses - that faith in the priests' words and the scriptures can one day save your life. Such a moment occurred to me a few weeks back, on the morning of January 16, 2009, India time, to be precise, as I was wiping sleep away in the first waking moments of that day. (For those of you thinking that I am about to launch a new religion with these lines, or that these are excerpts from a discourse that may have a title like 'Philosophical Underpinnings at the End of the First Decade of the Third Millennium', I confess it's neither. In fact, I want to talk about Yana Gupta, and why it is....

Shoe-Away

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In Japan, and a number or other Oriental cultures, opening your shoe outside the entrance of people's homes is a part of everyday practice. Similar are the customs in many Islamic cultures. Barring some urban pockets of western tolerance, changing from shoes you wear outside the house to slippers and chappals are the norm across India as well. Besides homes, shoes are also strictly barred in religious places like temples and mosques. I don't know the exact philosophies behind such footwear etiquette, but they seem to stem from the fact that shoes are things that tread in the world's dirt, which you would not like to bring into places that you hold sacred, such as your home or your place of worship. Now, such things probably sound too exotic to the Western world, where shoes are just another part of your clothing. They go all over the city,....

Champions of Race

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In less than 100 hours, we have witnessed some firsts that would have seemed unimaginable just 100 weeks back. It is the story of two individuals born of African origin fathers and Caucasian mothers, and generically classified as 'Black'. Two individuals born not into wealth and affluence but into families of modest means. Two individuals who in less than 100 hours became firsts of their race to win their respective 'races'. While you may have guessed Barack Obama right, I am also talking about Lewis Hamilton. US President-elect Obama was born of a Kenyan father and a white American mother. The Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton was born to an African origin father and a white British mother. In both their cases, when they were two years old, their parents separated. Both spent the next few years with their birth mothers, but moved to a....

Fuelling your Food

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Global warming is definitely on the global agenda like never before. If the Kyoto Protocol, a hot button topic at the turn of this decade, initiated partial global action against this beast, Al Gore's more animated 'An Inconvenient Truth' made it pop! (Especially in an era of Bush-hate, where Gore unwittingly represented all that could have gone right with this world since his 2000 election defeat) The Bush Government, which denied the whole world-heating-up phenomenon during its first term, woke up to the sweaty armpits in the Rose Garden lawns during even short presidential handshakes, and accepted that something indeed was strange about these unrelenting summers. (It would be highly partial, though, to single out the heat and call it Global WARMING. So they settled on the more politically correct Climate Change phenomenon.) Once again, Oil (the cause of many a modern war), found itself right in the....