Classic

An Analysis of South Indian Brahmin Wedding Feasts

Growing up, life was full of mysteries waiting to be unraveled. The wedding feasts I used to attend represented one such enduring mystery. The dictionary meaning of “feast” had led me to expect a lavish spread of dishes, while actual experience was utterly at odds with that expectation. There were quite a few dishes, but the course that was served first and which overwhelmed everything else was rice and saaru (rasam). Everything else served later was in small quantities. A young boy with a small tummy, a habit of eating slowly and an ill-developed strategic approach would easily get overwhelmed by the feast. He would find, as I did, that the meal he had at the feast was less rich than the what he consumed on an average day.

Let me illustrate this point for my North Indian readers. How would you like it if you were lured to a feast and served copious amounts of dal with rotis, and when you were almost sated, minuscule amounts of paneer butter masala and malai kofta were plonked on your plate? The wedding feasts I attended were like that.

I grew to adulthood without the puzzle being solved. I learnt to cope by consuming less saaru, eating faster and by developing a better appetite. In time, as the cares of the world began to weigh down on me, mysteries that challenged me during my boyhood receded from my consciousness till the debates over Sainath’s and Utsa Patnaik’s assertions that the poor are consuming less food brought back the memories.

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The Amazing Dilip D’Souza

I understand that one faction of my readership wants me to stop baiting Dilip D’Souza. I have never understood their point of view. Dilip’s views are invariably interesting, not because of their content, but for the insight into the mind of the holders of these views.  As an example, let us take this sentence:

All right, let’s see. Iceland, Singapore, Korea, Norway, Taiwan, Japan and Germany after being devastated in WW2, arguably even Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Botswana until it was hit by AIDS a decade ago: all these countries managed to “improve the lot” of their citizens, all somehow created the “conditions for human development.” (More than three seconds)

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Dear Sainath

You say

The region’s farmers could be trading one volatility for another. (via)

In your world, does having a Plan B increase risk?

Update: OK, so my point was not clear, but the article is. The farmers are not getting married to soya bean. They are planting it this year and they can return to cotton next year – the article itself predicts that they will, when the price of cotton moves back up. The two crops could be individually as volatile as they want. But unless their volatilities are perfectly correlated -the evidence of the article indicates that they are not-  when the two are combined,  their effect on the farmer’s fortune will be to reduce volatility.

The Bhaskar Ghose Glasnost

Swami, arguing against my point that deregulation makes things better, claims that Tamil TV hasn’t got better at all after the entry of private channels – the positive changes have been balanced out by the negative ones. My only experience with TV in Tamil Nadu involved watching midnight masala on Sun TV when I was in Chennai, so I am not very qualified to comment about that. But about National TV, I partly agree. Indian TV was at its best during the Bhaskar Ghose era. The quality of serials that were on air at that time has not been equalled since.

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The Nominee for the Most Brainless Website Registration Page is…

Airtel. If you want to register with Airtel to pay their bills, these are the steps you need to follow:

  1. Go to www.airtel.in
  2. Find the small box that says “My account” and the smaller link that says “register”.
  3. It will show you a page that asks for a user id, Airtel number, account number and a captcha. You can enter any valid looking phone number there and any junk you want into the account number. These are not validated. Only the captcha is validated.
  4. Once you successfully go past the captcha… a PDF form is displayed. You are supposed to take a printout of that form, fill in all the details by hand, sign it (with signature proof, address proof etc.) and drop it off at an Airtel relationship centre. No, none of the details that you entered in step 3 gets pre-filled into the form.

Why step 3 exists is a mystery to me. Just another example of the phenomenon I talked of here.

Taboos Are Funny Things-II

My wife loves wearing sleeveless dresses. In fact, it would be accurate to say that she has a fetish for them.  If she ever gets  salwar kameez with a long sleeve, she won’t wear it till it has been altered so that the sleeve is short enough for her comfort. I once gifted her a nice full-sleeved shirt and to my horror she wanted to mutilate it to sleevelessness. it took all my powers at emotional blackmail to dissuade her.

There is one exception, however. Once while discussing how she wanted a saree’s blouse to be stitched, I suggested a sleeveless blouse. She looked at me with disgust and said: “That is what whores wear!”.

My guess is that this is what happened. A generation back, the saree was the only dress for most people. In North India, fashionable women took to wearing sleeveless blouses. In  South India, they did not, and  wearing a sleeveless blouse was considered daring and mildly disreputable. Over a generation, young women over most of India have made the transition from sarees to other forms of dress. So, a woman in South India who wants to look fashionable will wear  a sleeveless kameez. This means that if you have grown up in a town in Karnataka, it is entirely possible that you have never seen a woman wearing a sleeveless blouse with a saree. The only exception would be whores. Of course, all this will change with the introduction of the Tata Nano.

Not Stupid, Just Inattentive

Nicholas Carr’s article on the cognitive style of the Internet has been linked and discussed quite a bit. Ironically, I found that his article was an ostensive refutation of his own point. I liked the article the first time when I skimmed it. But when I read it in detail and thought through it, I think that he was incorrect on most details. I think that the low attention span that he is talking of is actually a manifestation of three factors:

  1. It is difficult to read on screen. People’s eyes hurt.
  2. It is easy to get distracted when you are on the net. This may be related to point one. If you get physically tired when you read an article, it is easy for your mind to wander and look up something else.
  3. People read more actively on the net. Reading paper books is enjoyable. But just because you enjoy something it doesn’t mean that you are thinking. Carr’s article is nicely written and it flows well. If I were reading it on paper, I would be lulled into complacency by the flow. But because I was reading it online, I was also actively thinking about which parts I agree with and which parts I don’t. For example, I was thinking “Hmmm… Jakob Nielsen has written about writing for the web. I should head over to http://www.useit.com to compare.”  It was all I could do to stop myself from giving in to the temptation immediately, thereby proving Carr’s point. (Coincidentally, his current article is on the same topic.)

On the whole, I think that 1 and 2 are bad, while 3 is good – though I suppose that actively thinking without actually reading an article and understanding something is counterproductive.

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What the Government Says and What it Means

Ritwik says:

Your argument is essentially that regulations will ensure that only those who see a profit motive in education and are able to lobby with regulators will survive and the true educationists/ philanthropists will move out due to overburdening and ever increasing regulations. Isn’t this in contradiction to the usual lament that one of reasons why education lags in India is the fact that one can’t open schools for the profit motive? In such a case, a law that disallows the provisioning of education for the profit motive should keep these people out, right?

Ritwik is obviously not married and has never attended the Art of Living course.  If he had done either, he would have learnt that the words of your wife or of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar are never to be understood at the superficial level. There are always deeper levels of meaning to it. So it is with the words of the government.

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