Ripples on the brain

First of all, Happy Navarathiri to all the readers of this blog. It starts today and continues through the Saraswati Pooja day on October 1st until the Vijayadasami day on October 2nd which the 10th and the last day of the festival. Unfortunately, this year the Saraswati Pooja day and Vijayadasami fall on national holidays, so an extra holiday is lost.

The entire period between August and January is one I look forward to. The festivals seem to just queue up one after the other. The Avani avittam marks the beginning of the festival calendar. Krishna Jayanthi, Vinayaga Chathurthi, Navarathiri/Dussera (Saraswati Poojai and Vijayadasami), Deepavali, Karthigai, festivities associated with the month of Margazhi (the music festival, thiruppavai, thiruvamppavai), Christmas, New Year and Pongal follow. Other festivals like Raksha bandan, Onam, Ramzan etc. also fall in this period. Republic day indicates the conclusion of nearly 6 months of festivals, celebrations and holidays. It is for this reason that I liked the odd semester a lot when I was doing my engineering . I was home every second week end and for festivals like Deepavali and Pongal, I stayed at home for almost a week at a stretch.

If the amount of celebration is plotted against the festivals listed in a chronological order, then you almost get a bell curve with the celebrations peaking during the Navarathiri and Deepavali period. As a festival, Navarathiri gives me the maximum satisfaction because of the preparations that go into the festivities and the duration of the festival itself. The joy starts from the time the kolu dolls are unpacked from their storage boxes and arranged in their pedestal so that they get a life of their own for the next 9 days. Once the dolls are arranged and space is allocated for the additional stuff, it always becomes a challenge to manage with the limited space in the living room. After a lull in the initial couple of days, guests start pouring in and you also visit a lot of houses. Music and sundal add to the excitement. The Saraswati poojai is the most enjoyable day for school going kids as they get break from their books. Vijayadasami marks the beginning of a lot of new things and is always exciting. The dolls are then carefully put to sleep on the night of Vijayadasami day only to be put to their places of storage again the next day to make the living room spacious all over again.

Chennai adds its own flavour to many of the existing festivals. The Ayutha Poojai, for example, falls on the day of the Saraswati Poojai. All the vehicles, equipments (at work place) are cleaned, decorated and worshipped. Most of the offices have pooja in their premises at the end of which they distribute a mixture of pori, vellam and pottu kadalai. Even on other occasions like the Kaanum Pongal, 2 days after the Pongal festival, the Vinayagar idol immersion after the chathurthi and of course the margazhi/December music season, the Chennai way of celebrating these festivals is always unique.

I read somewhere last year that a survey found January 27th to be the most depressing day in a year to the Europeans (or the British alone? I forget which) as Christmas day celebrations are almost forgotten and people look ahead to a full year of work. I don’t think it will be any different for the Indians. After January 26th, the only festivals before the annual vacation are holi which falls in March and New Year in the lunar calendars followed in each state which falls sometime in April.

Yesterday, as I tried to find the 3 idols that form the base of the kolu in my house – the ganesha, saraswati and lakshmi – I pulled out the other ones – Krishna-Radha, Vivekanda, Chettiyar-Achchi, characters of the dasavatharam etc., wrapped in all sorts of things like old mosquito nets, newspapers, appa’s veshtis, amma’s sarees, akka’s churidhars and my t-shirts, that won’t form a part of our kolu this year as my parents are abroad with my sister. The white ganesha, which was purchased during the vinayaga chathurthi festival some 10-15 years ago, impressed my father and continued to stay on (though normally they are immersed in a water body at the end of Ganesh Chathurthi) to decorate our kolu every year. Even in the years when it became logistically impossible to arrange a full-blown kolu, like this year, we make sure those 3 idols come out during Navarathiri. I look forward to visits to friends’ houses, sundal and a lot of good concerts this Navarathiri…

Tamil Nadu health minister states that the number of Chikungunya cases in the state (not in Chennai city, mind you) is down to 1302 persons this month. That is very hard to believe. I don’t know from where the minister got this genuine-looking figure.

Why? As far as I know, 4 people suffered from the disease in my office this month alone. A close pal recovered from the disease in the beginning of September. Currently, my aunt, two other relatives, and one colleague are still suffering. When I know of so many people myself, how can that number be so low? He should disclose his source.

First of all I’m neither against reservation, not against women, nor am I against any particular caste. For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to understand this whole concept of reservation against the backdrop of the widely reported events in the country and my experiences. Obviously, I haven’t done a lot of analysis on the subject, so the post might be very amateurish.

The OBC reservation issue

My Social Studies teacher in school presented the best reason I’ve heard thus far for reservation based on community/caste. A handicapped child should not compete with a normal child in similar terms. A perfect reasoning that I hold on to even today. There have been some people who have not been given the opportunity to educate themselves because of their caste for generations. Hence, it is completely possible that their offspring in the current generation will find it that much more difficult to perform due to several factors – hereditary, lack of parental help at home etc., other than of course the financial reasons.

Sometime early this year, when AIIMS was involved in violent agitation against reservation, the Prime Minister assured them that their demands will be looked into and the Supreme Court, citing PM’s assurance stated that since the PM has agreed to come up with a committee to review the proposed policy, they must return to work. The Hindu, in its editorial argued that the striking doctors were no longer justified in continuing their strike in the light of these assurances.

After the issue cooled down, the government did appoint a committee under Mr. Veerappa Moily. However, instead of reviewing the reservation policy, the committee came up with plans to implement the reservation policy. Till date, as a common man, I haven’t seen any empirical evidence from the government for the need for reservation for the OBC’s (like they being completely under-represented), any evidence on the success of the reservation policies currently in place (like the positive changes in the number of students of particular castes graduating) or any logic that justifies the number 27% (the need could even be more than 27%). The useless HRD minister Arjun Singh’s appeared completely clueless in this interview when Karan Thapar provided him with facts and figures. After initially trying to be a lone crusader for OBC reservation and drawing flak from all and sundry, he tried to completely shift the blame to the Parliament in the interview.

Now why is an empirical, numerical data important to arrive at a proper reservation policy? I’ll answer this question with an example. For a few days, I had an opportunity to commute by the local trains in Chennai. I noticed that both during the busy office hours in the morning and in the evening, there were many coaches that were marked as “Ladies Compartments”. I believe that this is a perfect solution to enable ladies to travel comfortably in a train. But, what is the right number of compartments to be reserved? In fact, I noticed that during the peak hours, the normal coaches (sometimes even the first class ones) were overflowing with people literally having enough space to just plant one foot. At the same time, each ladies compartment had 4-5 women (full capacity should be greater than 72)! Now with so much space to themselves, the ladies exhibited a peculiar behavior. They no longer sat in any of the seats (when they had the luxury to spread their arms and legs), but stood near the entrances of the compartments. Try to calculate the wastage of resources (here, seats) assuming around 25 ladies occupied the 4 ladies compartments, when they could have occupied just one instead and left the rest as general compartments.

This is the kind of resource wastage we are looking at if reservations are done without proper analysis and figures (In the above case, the solution could range from having ladies bays/coupes instead of compartments or changing the number of reserved compartments depending on the timing). Though, the government plans to increase the number of seats in institutions of higher learning, it is common knowledge that the capacity can never be more than the demand. With limited capacity when compared to the demand, reservation should be an optimization formula that takes care of the interests of the downtrodden while minimizing resource wastage/quality reduction/rejection of the deserving. While everybody understands that implementation of a reservation policy accurately is very difficult, the reservation policy itself cannot be inaccurate/deliberately approximate.

Reservation for women

I have nothing more to add to the above topic, so let me take up the topic of reservation for women. I still am unable to figure out a reason for reservation for women. It is true that women weren’t presented with the same opportunities as men and in some cases were oppressed. But a reservation policy cannot be atonement for the past misdeeds of the society. Shouldn’t just changing the outlook of the society, creating more awareness, having social incentives/disincentives tackle this problem? The same logic as above cannot be applied to women as women do not constitute a single community. I don’t see them having any specific disadvantage/handicap when competing with men (except in physically strenuous activities). If they have handicaps similar to those listed above viz. lack of parental support in academics etc. that should be taken care by the caste-based reservation itself.

I have been witness to several “informal”, off-the-book (and what I consider unfair) reservation policies followed by the several institutions. One of my alma-maters admitted several undeserving women students just to improve its global image despite the fact that it was obvious to everyone that they didn’t make the cut. This is not limited to educational institutions alone. One of my current colleagues, who did his MBA from one of the top-most (government-aided will be an additional clue) B-schools pointed out that several investment bankers offered jobs to girl students just based on their gender. In my institute, a famous IT company came up with a single criterion for short-lists for the interview – girls. In fact many girls themselves questioned and deplored this act of the company during their interviews.

I think all the cases pointed out above were unfair simply because they definitely reduced the quality and denied the opportunity to at least one deserving candidate.

But by far the most poignant example is the following. When I was in Hyderabad, I had an opportunity to visit a corporation school to profile the girl students for a scholarship that an NGO for women was planning to give them. We needed to collect a lot of information (personal, family etc.) from each of the girl child in that school. Only when we turned up at the school, did we realize that it was co-education school. The NGO also provided us with a box of chocolate bars asking us to give a bar to a girl child after getting information from her. While we embarked on this, the boys in the school obviously were piqued as to why the girls alone were being interviewed. When they learnt that chocolate bars also were distributed (we didn’t distribute it in front of them, they obviously learnt about it from their friends), one of the guys (probably 9-10 years old) approached me with a question to which I had no answer: “Why am I not getting any chocolate?”. Every male child in school today is witness to at least one such situation where his girl class mate is getting a concession/priority over him. His perception of the other gender is being set based on such experiences.

Summary

Stopping discrimination against one community shouldn’t mean discriminating against the other community.
I repeat, reservation can never be a way to atone for the past misdeeds of a society.
Reservation cannot be a subjective decision of a few individuals simply because of the stakes involved.

Thanks to the way the policies are being implemented today and the politics that is involved, reservation will ensure cyclic discrimination of communities and will become a perpetual tool for the politicians.

The songs of Vettaiyadu Vilayadu (in particular two of them - Partha Mudhal Naale between Kamal and Kamalini and Vennilave velli velli nilaave between Kamal and Jyo) have almost colonized all the Tamil channels presently. If you had watched 30 minutes of TV at a stretch atleast once last week and are not of the kind that remains glued to one of the cry-athons (read megaserials), then you could not have missed both of these songs.

The songs look like pretty routine stuff dished out mechanically. The “Vennilave” song especially has interludes (just after Harris Jeyaraj appears in one of the dance sequences) that remind one of “Enakku oru girl friend” from Boys. I think it’s a long time since I have heard some good music released in Tamil. I was not at all impressed with “Sillendru/Jillerndru oru kaathal kathai“. “Munbe va” looked pretty routine and though ARR had sung “Newyork nagaram” very well, the album as such didn’t have anything great.

Let’s see who breaks this ordinary sequence.

I didn’t watch the movie “Swades” till today. That the movie was more than 3 hours long always weighed on me. Last Tuesday, I picked up “Swades” as nothing else could catch my attention. Still I postponed watching it till today (that too because I received reminder SMSes from the DVD library).

Gayathri Joshi is bbbbbeautiful…From the first frame till the last she’s blemishless, not in acting, but in presenting herself. I’m sure people (if any) who watched the movie more than once did it only for her. She just steals the eye-balls whenever she shares the screen-space. Wonder why she’s not acting in more movies!

I feel Shah Rukh Khan is becoming a package of expressions. Something like a set of yahoo smileys. Give him a situation, he’ll pick the right expression from his armoury and present it. His acting has become equivalent to reproducing the same expressions again and again to such an extent that you copy his expression from one movie and paste it in the same situation in another movie and effect will not be much different. It might be the same for many other actors, but I think the problem is he’s already been exposed a lot, and his signature expressions aren’t many; so you always get that feeling that you’ve seen it before.

I think that shouldn’t bother the directors/producers as long as he has the brand and can rake in the now-famous “first-week collection”.

If you do not have the time to read the whole post, then here is the message: “If you want to have a good internet browsing experience, do not buy Hathway’s broadband connection“. The travails that I have gone through over the last 4 months or so have not ceased at all and I have no hopes of me having a better experience in the near future.

First of all, I don’t find their 256 kbps fast enough. The download speeds are pretty low most of the time and comparable to that of a dial up connection. I agree that it was not like this always. It was pretty fast in the beginning but has progressively become slower and slower to such an extent that I can no longer watch anything in youtube without waiting for like half an hour for a 1 minute video.

Secondly, their connection goes off every now and then. When I got a 3 month connection for the first time, I didn’t have a problem for a month. Then there was a problem every weekend (exactly on a Saturday morning every time!). Now after I recently extended it for 3 more months (I couldn’t help since I didn’t check the other services when the first package expired) and have been swamped with problems almost everyday from then on. In fact, nowadays I make more calls to their customer service than the calls I made when I used a dial up connection for accessing the internet.

But the thing that Hathway should be most ashamed of is their customer service. Anytime you call them (and get through to them after 15 minutes of busy tone on an average), they ask you for your customer number and take the next 5 minutes trying to locate your name. Then you ask them if there is a problem with their connection. The answer is always a grand “No”. When you mention that you are having a problem, they take their own sweet time and respond that they have identified the problem to be signal/cable/power/connection issues. You wouldn’t believe, but it is always one of these 4, as if they were responding to an illiterate guy! “The engineers are already working on it”, they say (”how”, you might ask as they claimed only sometime ago that there was no problem). For any problem, the resolution time is always 2 hours. You get disgusted after calling them daily and ask them to connect to the person who’s working on the problem. The answer is always, “That is not possible”. The problem invariably takes a longer time to resolve.

Once I called the customer service on a Saturday morning and continued to call them every 2 hours to remind them about the problem. The “network engineer” finally appeared at my door at 5 in the evening, a good 9 hours after I’d made the first call and identified a cable problem which was corrected within seconds. When queried as to why it look such a long time for him to come, he replied that he’d been informed only minutes ago! I’m disgusted because the CSR’s can neither identify the problem, nor can they communicate it either to the customer or to their own colleagues. Moreover, the organization doesn’t have an escalation procedure. If you have a problem with their service, you can only report to them. Their superiors neither have a number, nor a mail id.

In fact, that is the reason I am airing my grievance in my blog. I went through a lot of trouble especially last week trying to get an important presentation to office. I have made up my mind to just wait for this package to end. I might go for a BSNL connection which seemed to be good when I tried last week.

Does this happen only to me or others also? I find that I’m absolutely unable to give attention to all my activities at the same time. Take blogging for example. I suddenly discover that I didn’t blog for quite sometime (not that it is a loss for anyone!) and start posting something everyday for a few days, then notice that there are a lot of concerts going on without my presence and start attending them for a week. While that is on, I remember that my library membership is getting wasted (without any lending activity). I immediately visit the library and take more books than what I can manage to read and the samething happens with my movie watching, visiting places etc.

I seem to work in bursts rather than doing anything regularly. Is it because I don’t plan, or is it because I turn lazy every now and then, I wouldn’t know.