Ripples on the brain

I just happened to visit this blog : http://www.adityamohan.com/. The father of the child is a contributor to the Corporate blog of Infosys. The baby, 4.5 months old, lost its life in a Jet Airways flight from Toronto to Delhi. I cannot think of what the parents will be going through. Is there a way legally, through consumer court or something, to force Jet Airways answer his questions and actually identify the reason behind this mishap? I don’t know if this incident was covered well in the media.

During these international flights, especially the India-US ones, my heart really goes out for the infants, their parents and the aged people who go through the ordeal. More terrible would be to see mothers travelling alone with infants, or worse, with an infant and another kid. In my opinion, if a husband cannot accompany his wife and kids in an international travel, he should have either not gone abroad or not married.

If the above incident affected you, you can sign the online petition here. I’m not sure how it will help though.

A couple of years ago, I used to routinely attend Lecture sessions on Carnatic music. Musicians and musicologists, while explaining the raaga concept, used to demonstrate the right and wrong ways of singing a raaga. After attempting to sing the raaga the wrong way (for e.g. just touching the swara notes and not bringing out the raaga bhavam or not singing the traditional swara phrases a raaga is famous for), they would claim (sometimes genuinely) that it was difficult for them to sing them in the wrong way even if they tried. The crowd will then laugh and applaud.

I was reminded of those incidents when I read this article of Hasan Suroor in the Hindu today. Writing about an article of a British academic (which is the second piece in that link) where he wants pundits to agree on a set of variant spellings, Hasan Suroor provides some examples which are funny:

if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Ken Smith of Buckinghamshire New University wants pundits to agree on a set of “variant spellings” of some of the more commonly misspelt words such as “their” for “their,” “argument” for “argument,” “twelth” for “twelfth,”, “truly” for truly and — horror of horrors — “speech” for speech!

I read and re-read this sentence umpteen times, but couldn’t differentiate between the wrong spellings and correct spellings for all the example words, except “twelfth”. Is it the case of Hasan Suroor or the British academic unable to spell the words the wrong way even if they tried to like our musicologists in the first example?

I think the reason for the wrong wrong spellings is because the reporter typed his article in MS Word or some such editor that automatically corrected his wrong spellings without alerting him. Or some editor diligently ran the article through a spell check utility and corrected his wrong spellings . That reminds me (again) of a proposal we did for the US retail chain Lowe’s. MS Powerpoint automatically “corrected” all Lowe’s into Lower without alerting the author. Normally spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are not very uncommon in these presentations, but this was one in which we even got the client name wrong! Thanks to Microsoft products’ assumption that they are smarter than the user.

Coming to think of it, MS editors may be a major culprit for people fogetting (or not learning) their spellings. They don’t even allow them to realize they are entering the wrong spelling.

It has been 3 years since I started blogging. It all started when I was studying at the ISB. I had attempted writing a couple of times and abandoned them as I was highly irregular. I tried just one more time as there was an urge to vent out a lot of things in my mind. It has come along well for 3 years now.

I honestly don’t know why I blog these days. There has been a period in 2007 when all I wanted was more readership for this blog. It worked for sometime, but I lost interest again and then the readership fell. Atleast more than once I’ve thought of hitting that “Delete the entire blog” link. Twice I have thought of moving out of blogsome. Some how this is still alive. Let us see how long this continues this way.

I somehow found this dinner conversation I had with an American colleague very funny.

We were talking about some restaurant chains when he mentioned about some restaurant that he had been to during his “wedding rehearsal”. I wanted to know what a wedding rehearsal was. He told me that it was something that happened on the night before the wedding with close family members practising their part for the next day. I mischeviously asked him if the rehearsal was limited to the wedding ceremony alone. He cut short my question and replied, “Wait wait wait! In America we test the quality of the product before we buy”.

Oh! this was funny. It was in 9th or 10th standard that we read about “The Policy of Appeasement” in our history books. Appeasement was a very amusing term for many of us and we spent quite sometime understanding what it was.

After that, this is the first time I think I’m hearing the term “appeasement”, thanks to Bush’s remark in Israel. As if that was not interesting enough, we have this funny interview that I’ve watched atleast half a dozen times now. The interviewee, Kevin James, is asked a simple question, “What did Chamberlain do?”. Not that I knew the answer to that question before watching that video, but a guy who spews as much as rhetoric as Kevin James does, he should have known atleast some background on appeasement.

That guy tries to beat around the bush for sometime (count how many times he says “energize, legitimize”; very funny, not very different from how I used to attempt answering 12 mark questions I had no clue about during my engineering college days ) before finally admitting he doesn’t know the answer. But that doesn’t give him any respite as he’s totally flayed by the host. Poor guy decides to scream continuously to avoid further embarrasment, but doesn’t succeed.

For MSNBC, this create an “alwaa sapdara mathiri” effect. They have already shown this episode twice this evening.

Courtesy: Gaurav Sabnis

In April 2006, five people from a University in the US were involved in a road accident. One girl survived the deadly head-on collision. Someone from the University identified the girl that was alive, but unconscious and also the other dead victims. The girl who survived was Laura Van Ryn and one of the people who were dead was identified as Whitney Cerak, another student from the University. The authorities passed on the sad news to all the families.

The Cerak family was asked to collect their daughter’s remains and the Van Ryn family was told that though their daughter was alive, they should be prepared to expect the worst, as it normally happens in such tragedies. Even then, when the reached the ICU, they were shocked to see their daughter in coma and bandaged almost from head to toe. They prepared themselves for a lengthy road to recovery and recuperation for their daughter (if she were to ever come out of coma).

While the Cerak family, as the families of other victims of the accident, held funeral service for their daughter, the Van Ryn family wondered if their daughter would have been well-off had she not survived the accident. They spoke to her, sang to her when she lay in coma. A small movement of the eye brows or lips would be greeted with joyous celebrations. After a fortnight, the hospital asked the family to take her to a rehabilitation centre. Though she was in partial coma, her condition had improved over the fortnight. She was in the rehabilitation for 3 weeks or so. In this period, her parents and sister would wheel Laura to her sessions, and again try to engage her in conversations and so on.

In this weeks after the accident the Van Ryn family noticed a lot of changes in Laura. But they were prepared to take her in whatever state she was in, as the doctors had already warned them about the same. They weren’t even sure if Laura would ever completely regain her memory as there had been a severe brain damage. They noticed that teeth arrangement had changed, she had a pretty disfigured forehead, she had lost her eye color and so on. But they also noticed that she had pierced her navel and called her boy friend Tiger, when she gained partial consciousness. Laura’s sister reasoned that she would have secretly pierced her navel during the spring break and the doctors had also warned the family that she would not be able to recognize even people very close to her. Once when her father was with Laura, he was upset to hear the words “false parents” from her. Again, when Laura’s sister was with her during one of the sessions where she was asked to write down her name, she wrote “Whitney”. When she took this to the specialists, they hypothesized that she would have picked the name just before the accident and would have stuck on to it.

Only after the last incident, did Laura’s sister really began doubting the identity of the girl her family considered their daughter. She went back and checked the names of the victims who died in the accident and identified that Whitney Cerak was indeed one of them. Unable to hold herself any further, she went back to Laura and asked her directly what her name was. “Whitney Cerak”, she said, again. That was it for Laura’s sister. She had confirmed her fears. She told Whitney, “Thank you. You will be alright pretty soon”.

The Cerak family that was trying hard to come to terms with the death of their daughter received a call late one night 5 and a half weeks after the crash from the same person that broke the news about their daughter’s death. But this time he said their daughter was alive. They couldn’t believe it. Whitney’s sister disconnected the call abruptly. However, she and her mother decided to drive late in the night for around 5 hours to check out in the rehabilitation center where the caller said Whitney was. Though both of them didn’t believe it could be Whitney, they were gripped by a strange, uncomfortable feeling of what if it were true!

When they walked into the rehabilitation center, the Van Ryn family took them to the girl they had been taking care of for the last 5 weeks. It was indeed Whitney Cerak! The Cerak family didn’t know how to react. While there were screams of joy from the mother and the sister, their confirmation also left the Van Ryn family devastated. They hadn’t realized that their daughter had died and was buried 5 weeks ago under a stone with a different name on it! Laura’s funeral was held and the Cerak family helped their daughter through her long road to recovery.

This mistaken identity episode happened because after the accident, the identification was done by a University authority. There was no scientific technique adopted to confirm the identities of the victims. The survivor was identified as Laura based on the hand bag that was found near her which had Laura’s id. The Cerak family buried the disfigured remains of what they assumed was their daughter, without looking at it as they wanted to have pleasant images of their daughter.

Whitney Cerak has almost recovered fully from the tragedy and is currently studying in Europe. After she had sufficiently recovered, she had a chance to watch her own funeral and listen to the things her family and well-wishers had to say at her funeral. The Van Ryn family felt miserable when people began asking them as to why they were not able to identify the mistaken identity even after five weeks of the accident. The Van Ryn family and the Cerak family later wrote a book titled “Mistaken Identity” on this episode.

MSCNBC aired a programme that covered this episode on a weekend in a documentary format. This went on for more than two hours I think. All through this period, I was so absorbed into this story. Even a movie screenplay couldn’t have been so incredible. The narration was interspersed with interviews with the families. The mistaken identity itself was brought only midway into the episode and it completely surprised and shocked me. Pretty unbelievable! Daily mail has a very good and long story on the episode.

I couldn’t but feel for the Van Ryn family. The moment when they actually came to know about the mistaken identity would have been very harsh on them. In fact, that was the time when smiles had returned to their faces when they witnessed their daughter slowly getting back to normal. To me, the biggest moment in this whole episode was Laura’s sister’s reaction when she heard the girl say her name “Whitney Cerak” when she wanted to double check. It would have been very difficult to react the way she did.

Yes, Tamil New Year.

I think linguistic bifurcation of states in India has created an issue. People who rule the state (instead of serving the people) think they have an authority over the language and all people who speak the language. They have neither.

Hope other states do not follow this wrong precedent.

I don’t know why i have not been affected by the news of the shutdown of Woodlands Drive-in. I had been a regular to its premises during my earlier employment. My office was bang opposite to the restaurant and my colleagues and I visited it a few times in the evening when we had just enough time to hop across the median before that evening call with a client or an onsite co-ordinator.

I think one can never be loyalist of Drive-in’s food. I remember it was always pretty mediocre. Even the famed Chola Batura wasn’t very good. Though the restaurant was close by, it was never a place for family or team get-togethers. We usually had chat items when we went as a group in the evening. Mostly, there was too much pori in the Bhel puri and dosais sometimes had that raw smell. One of my friends who was sometimes teased for being very particular about food never liked the sambhar vadais they served in the evenings. It was always the case of getting a recently made vadai into the sambhar.

There were many other options for an evening bite in Cathedral Road. There was one shop that made very good sandwiches. That was a better hang out place for us. Bread Omlette was my favourite there. (I liked the mint paste he applied on the bread). There was also a roadside kaiyendhi chat corner where we used to get Bhel and pani puris. Then there was Gangotree, though all the stuff was pretty spicy there. I remember there was a north Indian restaurant, just beside Stella Maris that sold Aloo paranthas. I don’t know if that exists even now, but that was actually a reason we went to work on Saturdays. One of those paranthas served with curd and pickle would fill you for the rest of the evening.

The ambience of Drive-in, however, was amazing. Lots of green space in the heart of the city for parking or for just taking a stroll. Many a times, a stressful meeting was always followed by a coffee in the Drive-in to cool the tempers. I think it was a usual pit stop for all those people who had an appointment in the US Consulate across the road. I have seen singer P.B.Srinivas a lot of times there. I was told he came in the same auto and was served by the same person for a long time.

Hopefully, the Government uses it for the purpose it has promised.

There has been a lot of attention to the announcements about the creation of new IIT’s and IIM’s. As the Centre tries to get maximum mileage out of it, there has also been apprehensions about the “dilution of the brand” of these elite institutes. It is sad that details such as location, names of these institutes get more prominence while other important details relating to the quality of faculty, research, facilities in the institutes are not debated at all.

I wonder why it is really important to set up new institutions that have to be named IIT’s. Why can’t existing institutes / universities be beefed up through government aids so that their quality can be enhanced to the level of IIT’s or more? For example, instead of having another IIT in Tamil Nadu, why not take up a defunct university here and make a grand research and technical institute out of the same? The advantage these universities have is the existing space, infrastructure and set up. The name of the institute is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to make it a great one.

When I was in Singapore recently, I had this great fortune to visit the campus of Nanyang Technological University. I was amazed by the infrastructure of the University. We only visited the Electrical and Electronics Department and I can say, the department itself is bigger than most institutes in India (even the IIT’s and the IISc and definitely all the engineering colleges). The class rooms, lab facilities etc. can never be matched by any institute here. I felt blessed just to be in the campus and visit its facilities.

That visit made me and my father wonder about the engineering institutes in India and the direction we are taking. While doing my graduation, I had a chance to visit some of the engineering college campuses in Tamil Nadu during inter-college events. It was appalling, to put it mildly, to see their infrastucture. Many of them had six or so departments in a single building. Including classrooms, seminar halls, labs, staff rooms etc. And mind you these were some of the more famous private engineering colleges. Most the even government engineering colleges have zilch research activity happening in their campuses. I wonder if it is this lack of academic activity that frees up the college adminstrators time and effort and makes them concentrate on other aspects like discipline and decorum .

As the Anandakrishnan Committee recently pointed out, even a premier university like the Anna University has been relegated to a governing and exam administering body. Universities end up this way because there is almost no other constant source of funds for them. The lesser said about the engineering colleges and deemed universities, the better. When I graduated, many of my classmates ended up as lecturers in one of the self financing colleges in TN. One friend even told me, just 6 months after we graduated, that if only he had a Masters degree, he would have been the Head of the Department; all the other colleagues were less experienced than him!

I wonder how regulating bodies like the AICTE allow such institutes to function when even lay persons like me can spot so many gross violations in these colleges. Instead of cracking whip on the technical institutes, AICTE seems to be hell bent on bringing some better-run non-technical institutes under its fold.

While it is common knowledge that under-graduate level education is so poor in India (apart from very few elite institutes), little is being done to remedy the situation.

I remember using this title more than once for my earlier blog posts, but I guess I cannot come up with a better one to write about what is happening in Maharashtra. Indian Government expresses solidarity with the migrant workers’ rights in Malaysia, our hearts go out to those 1200-odd, mostly Indian, construction workers in Baharain fighting to increase their daily minimum wages, but the nation as a whole is almost ignoring the monstrous human tragedy that is happening in Maharashtra, where under similar conditions, lives of thousands of people are being threatened for no reason.

Thousands of migrant workers, all poor and from North India, are being forced to return to their respective native states (even though they have been in Maharashtra for generations) just because one fine morning a miserable individual decided that he needed some national publicity to end his political obscurity. Trains after trains entering Bihar bring loads and loads of migrant workers, each of whom has a personal tragedy to recount - leaving behind life’s earnings, being forced to give birth in train toilets, family being threatened in the wee hours of the night and so on.

Amidst all these pictures, a rather beaming Police Commissioner of Maharashtra, assures everyone in the state (and then corrects himself to include the country; I’m grateful he didn’t go beyond it to include the globe) that no unlwaful activities will occur and his department is in control. His department then proceeds to arrest the individual(s) helping them get more attention than their own actions can fetch them.

It is so sad that all natural (earth quakes, tsunamis, floods, famines etc.) and all man made disasters strike the poorest of the poor. The original target of the diatribe didn’t lose anything (not that I want him to, but to just point out), nor did the well-off migrants in Maharashtra. It is always the poor who cannot defend themselves and who have no one defend them. If you really think your argument is sound, why go against only poor North Indians? Why not against all non-Maharashtrains including South Indians?

I know I’m restating the most obvious things, but I really don’t know what the solution is. Not so long ago, we believed education is the panacea for all these radicalism. “When the society gets educated, it elects responsible representatives” . I realized that the belief is so hollow when I posed a question to my Mumbai aunt a few years ago on whom she votes for. “Shiv Sena”, she beamed with pride. “We don’t even think of any other party”, she went on to explain. Not that the party in power now is able to do anything better, but her answer revealed just how much irresponsible educated individuals are when it comes to exercising our franchise.

I read a piece by Harish Khare in the Hindu which seems right for the present situation:

…Nor are we free of the “fundamentalist” forces whose presence we find so ominous in Pakistan. For instance, a few months ago, the killers of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi were deified as “martyrs” in the Golden Temple. Yet neither the Punjab government nor the Centre nor the BJP (a coalition partner in Punjab) can dare raise a voice of protest against this extraordinary concession to the extremist. There is no real ground for us to feel superior vis-À-vis Pakistan, a presumed “failing state.”

There is no reason for us to feel superior over any country in this matter. All forms of religious/regional fundamentalism and racism exist in India in the ugliest of forms.