While you're at it Sibalji

Our path-breaking Minister of Human Resource Development has taken same 'bold' steps in fixing India's completely out-of-fashion education system. If you haven't already heard, Sibal saab is proposing to do away with the 10th boards and have the 12th board examinations only. Boy, when I look back, 10th was the only period in time of my life that I struggled the Most! Anyway, so if a kid can now have the most grueling 12th year of his or her education instead of the 10th, so be it. Right now, I'm on a different case altogether.

Reservations - a brilliant concept introduced by Dr. Ambedkar that made sure that the upper caste of India gave a better chance to the lower to get even with them. He however forgot to add a footnote that should have read.

"PS: Check back on this rule 25 years later with a committee or whatever you please that will determine how this system has faired. Scarp it once you think it has served its purpose. Basically, folks! plan an exit strategy for the reservation system."

Of course the addition of this footnote was overlooked and consequntially proved fatal and made a lot of Indians angry. For good reasons, may I add. You can tell its a sort of a screwed up system when two students can afford to have the same over-priced education but only one of them gets to go first because of his/her caste. We have got to understand that backward caste is NOT synonymous with poverty, not anymore.


Sibalji, don't you think its high time we took one long hard look at our reservation system and fixed it up. While the concept of reservations is actually pretty darn intelligent it needs its own set of checks that will keep the system healthy. So, I propose that (I'd like you to put your "idealist" hats right about now)


a) Reservation based on the caste system needs to plan its exit strategy. That is to say, the government will announce that in say five years time, reservations in education and government jobs will not be based on caste. 
b) Reservations in education: Will be provided to students who can only afford to study in government schools. Someone who can not afford education at a private institution is the only deserving candidate for a reservation. This ratio should vary for students from rural/tribal government schools and urban. 
First of all, this is not to say that our government schools suck. Have you seen government schools? They usually come with decent campuses and on rare occasions even decent teachers. The reasoning here is that they provide cheap education. Logic being, I'd prefer cheaper/free education if my family is below the poverty line. So most probably, I can't afford a costly education and therefore will be a good candidate for the state to give a  nudge.
c) Reservations in job: is a pretty lame concept. Expecting the state to support you throughout your life time (remember that reservations play up for preference to backward castes during the time of promotions too) is a little too twisted. Enough reason to pronounce it not only useless but malignant. 


The above is my opinion limited to reservations based on caste system and I won't go anywhere close to examining the rest of the reservations. Although, I would like to add that reservation for anyone should be an optional privilege. Try asking 'If you are eligible, would you like to be considered for a reservation?' in government application forms.


I hope the idealistic caps you put on before these points, helped you reach this point without raising an eyebrow or dismissing the idea with a pfff. In case you haven't... lets have a conversation! :)

If you thought Mac made the best ads

think again :D

hindi version

tickle your curiosity?

If you've read Pygmalion and remember its subtitle - 'a romance in 5 acts' the above will probably make you curious.

This play has an interesting history. Shaw's fifth act has him closing the play with Eliza saying that she doesnt need Mr. Higgins and Higgins laughing at Eliza. As one can guess, Shaw left it to the imagination of the audience to interpret the ending they liked. Eliza could marry Freddy, Eliza could marry Higgins, Eliza could go back to Convent Garden... there are so many possibilities. However, this was not agreeable with the audience back then. They wanted Eliza to marry Mr. Higgins so badly that they pushed Shaw to write a sequel. Of course, Shaw gave them an ending they were better off not hearing.

So, I decided to write a sequel for three reasons:

1) While the play made sense to me, the prequel (for me) didn't fit. It was funny nonetheless :)

2) I didn't like the play ending with Higgins having the last laugh

3) I had to do a project for my class.

The poster you see above is one of my unsuccesful attempts :) As soon as I'm done with the poster and have it all ina presentable format, I'll put it on my site in pdf format for you all to be able to download and read it.

Trends in music

I wrote about how creativity should be for free in this post  a while ago. I know it sounds preposterous (and selfish) to ask artists to distribute their work for free but just hear me out.
Over the last few weeks I've been exposed to some very interesting, heart-touching and goosebumpy music experiences over the internet. They are all connected by two things: copyright and creative commons and they brought me back to that short little post I made a while ago. Let me explain to you what these were.

Jason Mraz
Mr. A-Z, as he is sometimes referred to, is an artist I've been following a long time before he got famous on the mainstream pop scene. I love his music for his brilliant lyrics and of course his guitar. Anyway, a friend of mine passed these virals that Jason Mraz produced on the streets of Paris as a part of promoting his upcoming European tour



Its beautiful to see the two musicians (with two completely different histories) to just sit there and play their respective instruments. So what Jason Mraz did was - a live impromptu show on the street, recorded it, enjoyed it thoroughly and put it online. Equals promotion.
Some more diggin up led me to La Blogotheque production. Their concept  seems pretty interesting to me. Of course not all the videos on their site are giveaways but the fact that some are open to having one of their impromptu jamming sessions be downloaded for free is pretty cool. I mean if you are only jamming on the street and not really "performing" at abig stage or a costly studio, you might as well give it away for free right. The audience will promote you, for you. 
Check out the other artists they have on their site who've done more such "take-away shows."
Sean Fournier and Coldplay

What do these two artists have in common? Well, you might know and even be a huge fan of Coldplay and may not have ever heard of Sean Fournier. Well what they both have in common is awesome music and a free album give away. I found Fournier on thesixtyone.com His track - 'Put the world on stop' was one of the tracks I ended up loving on the site. You can imagine the smile on my face when I found out that he was giving away that album for free. His site here: http://www.sean-fournier.com/ohmy I sent that link to at least 15 of my friends and proudly showed it off on twitter too. Equals Promotion.

After you hear his music and like it which i'm sure you will head over to his twitter handle @seanfournier to tell him about it.

Two days later, I found Coldplay was giving away one of their new live albums for free too - LeftRightLeftRight

"LRLRL has to be free because there's so many backing singers." - Coldplay 

Fair enough, don't you think? Well, I guess there's more to that than why they were giving it away for free. Yes, equals promotion.

Imogen heap
There was once a time when hers was the only music i had on my mp3 player, my laptop and my ringtones too. Yes, I adore her. So, when I found her on twitter(@imogenheap), I had to follow her immediately. Luckily, the very same day she was trying out a trial on webcasting  her performance from her living room.

To listen to one of your favorite artists do an impromtu performance on their piano broadcast live, while you are at your desk, is indescribable.

While Imogen Heap may not have intended this to be a form of promotion, just pure silly pleasure of connecting with her fans, she has convinced me that I should buy myself and a friend tickets to see her show live whenever I have the opportunity to :) Equals promotion

So, as I see it, in case you're not comfortable putting your work under creative commons, giving an album or a free live session of your band jamming once in a while, shouldn't hurt.
Thoughts?

Update: Sean Fournier talks about this post. Thanks for agreeing with me Sean! :)

Dear Customer care industry of India,

You have eons to go before you get it right.

Thanks,
A customer.

Democracy is a fun place.

In the past 8 months I have witnessed two countries going through their election processes. Participated in one and been an observer in the other. Its interesting for me to see how people responded to elections at both these places (US and India)

I was in the US on a business trip in October when the US citizens were going through a historical election. I was in San Francisco and (therefore?) the issue of prop 8 was a popular topic of discussion. I indulged in conversations with my Indian friends as well as US colleagues about prop 8 and who they supported. 'My polls' suggested that Obama was surely going to be the President. McCain, apparently was not doing a lot of things right. Basically, whoever I spoke to had a good grasp of what was going on and they knew exactly why they were going to vote someone their president. II, of course, spoke to a very limited set of people (not making up for a good sample size, that is) my colleagues, cab drivers and an 80 year old lady on a plane but each of these people knew what they were talking about. In fact, on the day of results, I was trying to see the news on my mobile(walmarts somehow don't have TVs) and there were these two girls in the same isle who just got to know the results and one of them said to the other "michelle, we won!" they celebrated a little and moved on. The next day at work a lot of my office folk too were celebrating a success or nursing a failure. That is when I realized that Americans took their elections very personally. Meaning, their choosing one political party over the other was a very conscious choice.

Fast forward to India, I see a detachment between emotions and the election process. As a kid, I saw my parents vote. However, they never really celebrated the results. The reason was that they had always found themselves voting for the lesser evil. This seems like an obvious reason for the emotional detachment. The other reason, of late, has been the sly alliances that have left the voters feel powerless. It doesn't really matter who we vote, they are going to chose their friends and enemies and therefore they, as opposed to us, are the king makers. Surprisingly however, even this level of maturity in thought process is hard to find. And its a very varied, this set of forward thinkers (who are at all levels of socio, economic and literate population).

The reasons for the detachment for the rest of the population with the election process could be found in some of the quotes below (heard directly and indirectly):

"I won't vote because I am not interested in politics"
"నా చేతిలో వెయ్యి రూపాయలు, ఒక సార బాటిల్ ఎవరు పెడతారో వాళ్ళకే నా వోటు" - Whoever'll give me 1000 rupees and a bottle of alcohol, they'll get my vote.
"what for. it's not like my one vote is going to make a difference"


Call it learned helplessness or classical conditioning this is a very real problem that India is facing. Only when we can learn to keep our differences of caste, creed, gender and religion aside and see credibility and potential of the candidate we are voting for - meaning, only when we can take our election process personally can we do something about the nation.

I have chosen this man


to be my leader. Not because he was lesser of the evils but because he has an ideology that makes sense.
Its an ideology that the rest of the political parties are afraid of taking up and an ideology that is hard for most Indians to imagine. Their excuse being its "too ideal" #learnedhelplessness.

On the day of election results, I sat in front of the tv waiting patiently for them to announce the results for my constituency. Once they did, I celebrated. I felt the high that democracy gives you. I hope every Indian can feel that someday - that ecstatic feeling of being involved. Take your elections personally, your right to vote seriously. And may be, you will :)

Why so many?

Often, lately, when I am using some of my favorite online tools, i can't help but wonder why so many. I use twitter, reader, posterous, this blog, FB to acquire and disseminate information. These might seem a like a few but there is quite a bit of an overlap and differences in what these can do.

For example, twitter and FB both ask me to update my status (what I'm thinking/doing with an emphasis on right now). But what I choose to post on these two is quite different. No, it's not MPD but its because whatever I say I am doing on twitter is a rather short experience. Fleeting, if you may. An article I am reading through, a thought, a question or an idea. The audience also is a mix of my own friends, acquaintances, people I've never met and random bots. Which means that there is a certain level of privacy that needs to be maintained. On FB on the other hand, my status remains constant for days, sometimes weeks even. I am reluctant to changing it every hour or two simply for the reason that I wouldn't be interested in knowing my friends' status/state of mind every two hours. The audience here is strictly people I know and trust but wouldn't like to bore with mundane details.

Posterous is a really convenient way to post things you find interesting over the net. From articles to videos to pictures to anything found on a webpage. Much similar to services like delicious, digg or tumblr. But how is this different from Reader? Well, while GReader lets me broadcast these interesting things only to my friends, posterous allows me to create a space with all of this info that I find cool, open to everyone. While it might seem like the difference is the audience, a question to ask myself is wouldn't my friends be the first ones to know about my posterous blog. Posterous is also an easy way to keep organize all the interesting stuf I find online in my own space. But then, so is google reader. While posterous raises the the e-junk, eating up the webspace issue, reader doesn't (afaik)

Again, this blog is very similar to posterous and twitter because I end up tweeting about something interesting that I might also choose to post on posterous. The difference however is twitter is a microblogging tool which only needs like 1/10th of my opinion on something.. posterous is an easy way to put things onto a blog when I stumble on something extremely cool at work but I have no time to write down my thoughts on it... and this blog is where I wrote my long winding thoughts without periods and only ellipses...you get the drift.

So, essentially its the same goal, acquiring and distributing information, how we do it may involve more than one tool. However, its important to have a hold on yourself when you find absolutely cool new tool and ask the yourself if you're doing the same thing in a different format.

Other questions to ask ourselves, do I need friendfeed if I have twitter, do I need FB if I have orkut or vice-versa of the above.

when virtual crosses over to real...

....you say :P pppphhhbbbbttttttt when you have no comeback

Brilliance in simplicity

Have you ever had an Aha moment from something as simple?