I just realised that my employment contract prevents me from working two jobs, especially with a competitor. This draconian provision reminds me of the worst excesses of Nehruvian Socialism. And I presume you know what that unfortunate event led to? Continue reading
Year: 2008
Indian IT Clients Are Victims of the Bangalore Bug
Why do Indian websites suck so badly compared to American websites? Not just websites – it is rare to find a software targeted at Indian users that do not suck.
When a country is famous for its exports of “X”, you’d expect that the place to visit to pick up the best and cheapest samples of X is that country. Unfortunately, whether or not you are right in your expectation depends on the nature of X. If X is an agricultural commodity, you may be wrong, because the best examples of X might get exported, leaving behind export-reject stuff. If X is a manufactured product, you’d probably be right, because there is generally less variation in manufactured products than in products from the farm. Any improvement in quality can be quicky applied across the board, resulting in benefits for all users, including domestic ones.
IT is of course a service. Services vary quite a bit in quality. In this regard, it is more like an agricultural commodity than like a manufactured product. It is interesting to dig a bit into why IT products targeted at India turn out to be of poor quality.
My New Favourite Writer
…aren’t we fortunate that financial markets have not been permitted to fail in India, through the elegant expedient of not permitting them to work in the first place?” (Percy Mistry)
In Defence of Gandhigiri
Nitin Pai quotes Dr. Ambedkar to rebut Raj Thackeray’s argument that there is nothing wrong with breaking the law while running political movements.
I’m afraid I have to disagree with Nitin, and also with Dr. Ambedkar. Indira Gandhi tried to use the same argument against Jayaprakash Narayan during the emergency. She claimed that because India had adopted a legitimate and democratic constitution, there was no longer space or need for civil disobedience, the satyagraha or any of the various instruments that got us our independence. Narayan disagreed, and which is more, he had Gandhiji on his side. Gandhiji himself had stated that satyagraha was a weapon against oppressive governments everywhere, not just against foreign ones.
Did You Know?
A virgin can be up to 19 days pregnant, but she will not know about it till a few weeks later?
Ayyo!
A TV commercial for a life insurance company currently on the airwaves is an example of how a skewed conception of gender roles endures even when we are supposedly becoming a more modern and liberal society.
The commercial in question has been around for a bit but no one seemed to take offence. Until the education secretary of the Delhi government, Rina Ray, took it upon herself to point out that it was objectionable. She has lodged a complaint with the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and the Delhi Commission for Women and insists that the commercial be withdrawn and an apology issued by the company.
The objectionable commercial features a father saving up to fund his daughter’s education and ends with the tag line: Hai toh pyaari lekin bojh hai bhaari (though she’s loveable, she’s a burden). It spells out the mindset prevalent in this country: a girl, or woman, is a liability. One that changes hands, from one set of guardians, to another. Any investment made in the girl’s well-being, therefore, is often with an eye on making her more eligible in the marriage market. This might sound crude, but reality is often not palatable. This is not to suggest that there are no exceptions but they are too few in a nation of India’s size. (Times of India)
I think that Hindi speakers ought to protest against the gross distortion of their language by this officious Bengali. In the first place, the jingle says: Khushiyan to hai pyaari, magar thodi bhaari hai. The “bhaari” term refers, quite clearly, to the happiness and not to the girl. Second, the ad referred to is one in a series. In a different version of the ad, a man who is getting married finds the earth giving way below him when he thinks of the expenses involved. In another, a man is handed his baby (of unspecified gender) by the nurse, and goes through the same experience. In all versions, the same jingle plays.
If we had ads like the ones we used to have ten years back, the man would have been worrying about his daughter’s marriage and his son’s education, and the wedding ad would have had the bride’s father worrying about the wedding expenses. Quite clearly, our ads have progressed quite a bit now. But there is no pleasing some people.
Arresting Raj Thackeray
I have not been able to make up my mind on whether we should have laws against the kind of things Raj Thackeray says. Quite clearly, conspiring to commit violence should be punished. If I were to pick up a phone and ask a hitman to kill someone, I cannot claim free speech protection. I don’t see how anyone can claim free speech protection if he asked a crowd of people to do the same. The problem is that when people “incite violence” they do not use very precise words. A judge has to consider hidden meanings and effects of those words on “reasonable people”, and a person who listens to Raj Thackeray and then goes out to beat up North Indians is, by definition, unreasonable.
Jawaharlal Nehru Professorship of Indian Business and Enterprise
Jawaharlal Nehru Professorship of Indian Business and Enterprise!
The Dravidian Movement
When the Dravidian movement was conceived, was it ever intended that the whole of South India would come under its ambit? Did anyone take any ideological or political steps towards that goal?
The Fallacy of the Fallacy of Division
Lekhni wants to know what was wrong with Falstaff referring to the the Fallacy of Division in his post. Thinking through the Boeing 747 example in the Wikipedia article should make the problem clear. Yes, the fact that a jet plane can fly across the Atlantic does not mean that its individual parts can fly independently across the Atlantic. That is because while a jet plane is composed of its individual parts, a part of a plane is not the plane. While we can have interesting philosophical debates about how many parts one has to remove from a plane for it to cease being a plane, the point is that an engine of an aeroplane is not an aeroplane.
NREGA Propaganda
For the past month or so, the Central Government has been spamming NDTV with ads targeted at landless villagers, explaining to them, sometimes in Hindi, sometimes in English, the benefits of the NREGS, how the scheme means that they no longer have to migrate to cities, how it also means that women and men get the same pay for the same work, and how they should guard themselves against muster roll fraud.
The ads are as good as we expect government ads to be, but NDTV?
Unclear on the Concept
None of this is to suggest, of course, that women are as a group, more likely to be concerned about women’s rights than men (or, in other words, the probability that a given individual will be sympathetic towards gender issues is higher if that individual is a woman). That, sadly, is still true. But one must guard against the fallacy of division that ascribes this property to every woman. That’s why the notion of the ‘first woman president’ is a largely meaningless one [1]. We have little or no reason to expect that a woman who is president will be, simply by the fact of being a woman, more responsive to gender issues than a man would be in her place [2]. (2x3x7)
One must also guard against the tendency to post Wikipedia links without actually reading them.