6 AM Pacific

Indians and Unpredictability

A notice at a neighbourhood Postal Annex. Truly, a picture is worth a thousand words. The proprietor is, you guessed it, Desi.

The notice is a microcosm of Indianness. If you get past the English (hey, its a foreign tongue, so stop being so fussy) it really is a reflection of our relationship with predictability.

There are three kinds of Indians:

- Those that are unpredictable and don’t care.
- Those that are unpredictable, but would like you to expect, and perhaps accept, their unpredictability. The store owner who put this notice up belongs to this set.
- The predictable kind. Within India, this is a very small set.

Indians are not brought up to be predictable in their behavior. The environment (Bangalore traffic for instance) doesn’t allow us to be. But this is certainly a phenotype issue not a genotype one. Because somehow, when Indians leave India they leave their unpredictability behind.

The great achievement of the IT Services industry has been to extract predictable outcomes for clients out of this morass of unpredictability. They erect these boundary walls around the company. Within these figurative walls there are no power cuts and meetings start on time. Defects are measured and deadlines are met. Because that’s what clients in the developed world expect. It’s gotten easier and easier over time, but in the early days the pioneers did the equivalent of moulding square pegs to fit into round holes.

Hinduism and Evolution

Today the Texas Board of Education voted on how American history will be taught in Texas schools. It is a version of history that fits the conservative world view. From the New York Times

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

Texas textbooks are important not just because Texas is a big state, but also because many small states just go with the Texas version of the textbooks because it costs less than commissioning their own versions.

Around this time last year the Texas Board voted to change science text books. Evolution, which is always in the spotlight when such matters are discussed, was saved by the skin of its teeth from being relegated to “one of many alternate theories”. However,

Failing to overhaul the curriculum broadly, conservatives instead attached a series of measures specific to subjects like biology, where teachers would be newly required to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of natural selection to explain the complexity of the cell.”

More »

An Indian Passport and Indianness

M. F. Husain surrenders his Indian passport and takes up Qatari citizenship. As the drama plays out and now peters out in the media an interesting question to ask is what is it that makes one an India.

Now one could write a book on this subject (not me, I’ve already got a gig going but someone, I’m sure) but here’s a short blog post.

Whether you have an Indian passport or not is a terrible way to look at it. From the Husain media circus, it appears that surrendering the passport was really the event that made him unIndian. In spite of his protestations to the contrary, Barkha Dutt (link to NDTV above) seemed to think that was the case. It so happens that India does not permit dual citizenship. The OCI is not the same as citizenship. If like many other countries like the US, India did permit dual citizenship then Husain could have added the Qatari passport and no one would have cared.

I have many friends who live in India but hold a US passport. I think they would consider themselves Indian.

What about residency? Is that a good criterion? But then there are all kinds of Non Resident Indians. Short stays, long stays, those that are waiting for the kids to go to college to return. And then there are those who don’t intend to go back but still feel very connected to India.

I think that its just silly to try to draw these boundaries, and affix labels. Let’s just celebrate a shared culture with great diversity within it and fuzzy boundaries at the edges.

And it is downright hypocritical to celebrate Sunita Williams as one of our own, but decry M F Husain surrendering his passport as abandoning his country.

Europe is Getting Less Secular

The latest flap over halal meat served in a restaurant in France

A French fast food chain’s decision to serve only halal meat in eight restaurants with a strong Muslim clientele has sparked a wave of criticism from politicians decrying the step as unacceptable.

Quick, the restaurant chain, is also not serving any pork products in these restaurants.

Right wing politicians are making hay out of the incident. But to anybody not blinkered by religious prejudice, there is absolutely no logical argument that you can make against Quick’s decision. Quick is free to tailor their product to suit individual or group preferences. Customers who don’t like halal meat, even though it tastes identical, are free to go elsewhere for their meals. Customers who would like pork in their meals could also follow suit.

I would spend a little more time on searching for a grain of logic in the arguments of the critics, but that would be a waste of time. What is clearly happening is that Europe is seeing growing pressure against its secular principles. Switzerland’s minaret ban vote is another case in point. France itself is pretty close to banning the burqa, which I have to admit is not as illogical as the tirade against halal only restaurants, but is fueled largely by political calculations and an anti-minority sentiment.

When jobs are scarce, people turn against immigrants. Most of the Muslims in Europe are immigrants from North Africa or South Asia. Add that to the fact that some people can’t separate terrorists from the religion itself and you have a situation ripe for exploitation by politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen.

This movie still has a few reels left.

Another Ladoo for my Ladla

This trip, for some reason, I have been noticing a lot more obesity in India. From the just overweight to the can’t-get-out-of-their-airline-seat-themselves obese. Sedentary lifestyles have something to do with this, of course, but I sense that there is another major factor at work here – an Indian mother’s love. More »

Open Letter to the Bollywood Music Industry

Dear Mr./Ms. Music Executive,

First of all, let me compliment you on your pricing strategy so far. You have aced the test on how to price information products. Information products like music are tricky – the content is all in digital form, the fixed costs are high and marginal costs approach zero. How do you price such a thing?

Your current strategy seems to be working well. You have segmented the market according to the listeners’ ability to pay. To each segment you offer a different product (or sometimes the same product) at vastly different prices. I checked prices at different places for the same album – Don. Here’s what I found: More »

Water, No Ice

Indians are known to waiters in restaurants as the “Water, No Ice” people. Most Indians that I know don’t like to order a drink at lunch since the water is free. And no one likes their water with ice cubes in it. Call it racial profiling, if you like, but the Indian position on how they like their water makes sense to me. Given that our ancestral state in the African savannah did not involve any water with ice cubes in restaurants, I suspect that our genes did not prepare us for this daily assault from ice and ice cold water.

On March 1, my wife, Vidya Pradhan and her friend Rohini Mohan started an “online magazine” for Bay Area Indians. More »

Review: Never Say Goodbye

So you can’t say you never saw a Bollywood movie reviewed on this blog, here’s one.Last night my wife and I went and saw Kabhi Alvida Na Kahna (Never Say Goodbye). We got a baby-sitter for the kids and went and saw the 7pm show at Naaz8, the local Indian cineplex. This was the first day and the shows were all sold out. I haven’t done this in a while and it was great fun. More »

Salaam Bombay

Last week the dastardly terrorist bombing of Bombay’s suburban trains brought global terrorism another step closer to the largest democracy in the world – India.

Bombay is a city very dear to me and my wife. We started our working life in Bombay and worked there for 5 years. Took the train from Andheri to Churchgate and back everyday. I traveled in the same first class coaches that seem to have been targeted by the terrorists. Life wasn’t all roses – the 3.5 hours total commute didn’t leave us much time to enjoy Bombay. But when we did we fell in love with it. We loved the theatre (Prithvi), restaurants (Samraat, Mahesh lunch home), movie halls (Eros, Regal). The heady mix of high finance and Bollywood. The professionalism at work. They all endeared us to Bombay. But most of all it was the people of Bombay. More »

Namaste America

Last week Al Gore was a guest on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. He was there of course to talk about the Climate Crisis and his new movie the Inconvenient Truth. Since the audience at the Daily Show is fairly liberal, Gore got a very warm welcome from them. But what was strange was that Gore greeted them with folded hands. Damned if it didn’t look exactly like a Namaste. It was very casually done, no theatrics around it. I suspect he had done the very same thing many times before.

I was of course very tickled about it. I have long held the view that Namaste is a superior greeting to the handshake in the age of the Avian Influenza. Handshakes transfer germs and are a surefire way of spreading the virus when there is an outbreak. The WHO realizes this and has come up with the ‘elbow bump‘ which is just too hokey to work. Asian greetings like Namaste and the Japanese bow are, in this respect, superior. Although in Japan the formal greeting in business is still a bow, while Indian business (though not politicians) has completely adopted the handshake. Pity.

The other thing going for Namaste in the US is that it is closely associated with India and India is hot right now. India is of course in the news because of the nuclear deal still winding its way through Congress. As an investment destination for business it has to be number one or pretty close. Bollywood dancing is all the rage. You can find Kurti inspired women’s fashions all over the place. And Indian food in the grocery stores.

The big news is that from next summer, Indian mangos will be available in the US. Being that they are much superior to the Mexican variety I think that will win us a few more fans state side. Some say that the mangos are a fair trade for nuclear technology. Some say that we’re giving away the mangos too cheap! The mango deal was done during President Bush’s visit to India along with the nuclear technology deal.

The affinity between the two countries is good for both countries and for democracy everywhere.