Sigh

There’s a strange thread on the Bangalore Bikers Club forum. An otherwise sane and thinking human being has asked for pictures of “Bangalore Biking Cuties” to add to a presentation about cycling in Bangalore. (In his defense, he did not invent the… well, cute phrase, but just ill-advisedly used something that was said elsewhere.) Naturally, it has led to some of the said cuties protesting the term. Yet others have defended it saying, among other things, that “the men in this group have always been respectful towards women”. What one has to do with the other is hard to work out.

A friend of mine has responded with well-worded reasoning, so I should just provide the link to it and shut up, but in my self-appointed role of Last Word of/in Wisdom, it’s really hard to keep quiet.

My first reaction was blank horror on behalf of Joshine Anthony who cycled all 919 km of the Tour of Nilgiris in 2008, including a 7000-foot climb. I’ve talked elsewhere on this blog about gender condescension in a sports context. No matter how good the intention, referring to women cyclists like this just implies that it’s a secondary wing, introduced at best as a concession, and at worst to add a bit of colour to the proceedings. It’s an injustice to serious cyclists.

Purely from a communications point of view, how much more effective would that message have been if it was something like: “Need representation from the women cyclists”? Well, you may only be asking for photographs, but you probably would have also got involvement – perhaps new ideas, women willing to participate more actively, to go with you to make that presentation to corporates, to use their networks too for the common good. Now you’ll have enough photographs, sure, from the cuties and from those who will be big enough to rise above the pettiness, but that seems so meagre compared to what it could have been. There will be women who will get involved anyway, some because insensitivity is not a solely male prerogative and some because of, again, rising above. But it will not start the transformation that it could have.

And surely concepts like respect need to be approached with circumspection, not bandied about carelessly? In my experience, those who feel it tend not to feel the need to state it. Not one of the 20-odd men that completed the same distance in TFN ’08 gave the slightest indication that they thought of Joshine in any terms other than, simply, a fellow cyclist. This is very different from telling her, for example, “I respect you Joshine for being a woman cyclist who completed the tour”.

If the male cyclists were referred to as Bangalore Biking Hotties, then calling the other half cuties would have probably been okay. If it was used ironically, that would have been fine too. But I think this is another of those things that you either get or don’t. It cannot be taught, be we never so strident.

Just checked the thread again, and saw that several women are now pointedly supporting the cause, and drawing their skirts away from the protesters. Perhaps one person's sensitivity is another's needless political correctness. I still stick to my point, though.

Facebook: The glue of small things

Elizabeth Bernstein is the latest among several columnists worrying that her online social network might destroy her real-life one, with complete disregard for the illogic of that.

I think blaming Facebook for the fact that you or your friends may not take the time to actually meet is a particularly grand abdication of personal responsibility, even for a time that has made that into a fine art. And about the people who don't have time to keep in touch but have the time to update their pages - well, if they didn't want to call you, they would have found other things to do anyway.

The example in the article of someone being upset at being de-friended by his ex is just bizarre – isn’t that the natural thing to do when you’ve just ended a relationship? I’ve hit the “remove friend” button to celebrate far smaller endings! A jiltee keeping too close an eye on the activities of the jilter and other kinds of stalkers are not new. Going online is just another way of doing it. As for intrusion, you can choose not to see people’s quiz results or photo albums and who gets to see what on your page. You’re not really at the mercy of anything, so all the angst is a little overdone.

One of the points in the article is that people can get more aggressive and indiscriminate when they’re typing than they would face-to-face. This is true in some cases, but it’s also worth noting that someone whose social abilities break down before a keyboard probably didn’t have too many of those to begin with. The couple who bickers on an FB wall are likely to do so in your living room too. The person who updates his status with flossing details would probably also share this information to your face, as would the one who wants to talk about last night’s dream. These people were always in your life – you were forced to listen to them at work, in the supermarket, at the bus stop, on the train, in the gym, lift or lobby. Now you also hear them online. The difference is that you’re free to ignore the status updates. In fact, if you didn’t log on every thirty seconds, you wouldn’t even have to know they’re there.

FB probably doesn’t bother me because I have a stunted social conscience and tend to turn off social contact like a tap when I’ve had enough of it. But apart from that, I frankly enjoy it! When your siblings are scattered around the world and your closest friends are far away, Facebook is a magic window. I’m at a point in my life where most of my preferred phone numbers have area codes and time zones. I can’t make an international call just to tell someone what someone else said this morning, nor is sharing everyday trivialities over email a good idea. It’s the worst thing about long-distance relationships, a hollowness that comes of never having enough small things to fill it. To me, this is what the status update, wall post or photo comment is about.

Perhaps the reason Facebook inspires so much love-hate press is because - ironically - it's a pretty accurate representation of our "real" social world, and it makes us uncomfortable to see it in all its ugliness.

Joe

In my fairly long but strangely unchequered career, I've been lucky to have had mostly mentors rather than bosses. But even in a line of giants, Joe stands out.

Recently, I stood up in front of about 70 people and made a presentation. It's not the first one I've made, so it was not a big deal, and that was exactly what was special about it. It's a long distance from the person I was at Joe's first appraisal of me seven years ago. He looked calmly at a defensive writer and said "I agree you don't really need it when you're a writer. But if you want to grow into something more, you have to be able to talk." Then he told me the crucial thing I needed to know: "Making a presentation is not about showmanship. It's just about telling a group of people what you know or believe in." And changed my view of my job, what I could do and how far I could go. He introduced me to ambition.

He grew up in Africa, went to graduate school in San Francisco and is Lebanese at heart. He had a parrot in his office that adored him like a dog and brought a happy German Shepherd named Pablo to work occasionally. His opinion is brutally frank and his compassion, disarming. He's eccentric and moody, but his scrupulous sense of fairness is only matched by his self awareness. I have co-worker friends who for some reason were not considered "my people", so I know that life with Joe was not all joy. But I was very squarely under the mantle and so felt no growing pains for six years, though I was making gigantic leaps as a person.

His annual appraisal of me consistently included the emphatic words "too nice", which graduated to "stupidly nice". My essential nature and first responses have not changed. I still find it hard to correct someone I like but because of Joe I do it anyway. I still shy away from confrontation but I will speak up against injustice. I still want people to like me but when I have to I will nevertheless go ahead and do things that will get me disliked. I was taught well.

Most of all, Joe gave me a role model, a template and manual that I refer to a million times in my working day. He only asked that we did the best we could and enjoyed ourselves doing it. He inspired absolute trust, which for a creative team, translates into having the confidence to take risks. He knew that his team's loyalty was the index of his success, their triumphs, his own.

That seems clear and logical, but when you're in the fray and surrounded by the loud and the hasty, it is easy to forget. Away from Joe's guidance, work is a particularly nerve-wracking episode of Survivor, but I brought with me four magic words that work without fail in any situation: "What would Joe do?"

The best thing I've read this week

Approach people w/
happy curiosity, it will
disarm them.

This was written on two Post-it notes left inside a book. On "Forgotten Bookmarks".

Favourite random things of the week

Favourite Quote
“The more colourful you are, more the possibility of you being respected as a living animal on Kerala roads,” says a cyclist friend who did a trip in full cycling regalia from Kochi to Athirapally Falls (approx 165 km) along Kerala’s homicidal highways.

Favourite Eavesdropping Situation
The table next to me seems to be engaged in either a chemistry-free date or chemistry-ridden interview. It’s been 30 minutes and it’s still unclear. Aha, it’s neither – it’s a “proposal” meeting and he may have just blown it by not responding to a joke she made, and then paraphrasing it back to her as his own. Then again, you never know: maybe she finds it endearing.

Favourite Bit of News
A call-centre taxi driver was returning home on his motorbike after work – and got run over by a call-centre taxi.

Favourite Find on the Net
“With the Backing of the USDA, One Lady Seeks to Remove One Man's Elephant that he's Loved and Owned for Over 25 Years.” Read all about it.

Favourite Bit of Unease
Listening to Obama’s election night speech again today, the lustre seemed to have dimmed a little. At the time it seemed a sincere speech – well-written, yes, but not too much so for a good orator – and more importantly, it seemed humble and understated, two traits alien to US politics. But listening to it now, it seems too crafted, too much a product of the ultra-evolved communications industry for comfort. Words are powerful in the hands of someone who knows how to use them. Godmen and other confidence tricksters have known this since the first caveman managed to get a group of other cavemen to hunt his mammoth for him.

It’s the illusions I recall

I heard a rumour that my old school is soon to be shut down. That’s my only school – I entered it for kindergarten at two and a half and left it with high honours at 15, class monitor, house captain, school prefect, prizewinner, teachers’ pet but nevertheless a very popular know-it-all, who did not yet know that that would be the last time she would enjoy certainty of victory.

It was a rural school, many students were the first ones in their families to be literate. There was a strong teaching ethic that had nothing to do with the syllabus, and a deep influence on the small community that Whitefield was at the time.

Around the time I entered high-school, the small private concern had entered a disproportionate stretch of glory. We became a centre where other schools came to write their school-leaving exams. We shone in state-level sports and cultural meets. Our name was heard in high places and our school band went to greet visiting government luminaries. Our chief guests grew more distinguished every year. Our teachers were volunteered as polling officers and advisors on textbook committees. We were the preferred guinea pigs for Education Board types, so new perspectives entered our classrooms now and then, usually in the English classes (or these are the only ones I remember). In later years, I studied with some formidable teachers of English literature but it was those visiting academics who really shaped the way I read and write, opening windows where none had existed.

Other shutters were removed too, quietly and forever. There was (still is) a school for the blind across the road and some students from there were sent to study in ours, a lesson in self-sufficiency long before it was fashionable to think of the disabled as differently abled. My mother was one of the group of teachers in my school that crossed the road and learnt Braille to make this happen. Most alumni my age will remember at least one blind child in class. One of these children is now a very senior official in a bank, another is a translator in the UN. It still bothers me when someone hurries to assist a blind person with what they believe is compassion but is really presumption, and am gleeful when the helper is shaken off impatiently. Then there was “moral science”, which was a secular teaching of principles of the “honesty is the best policy” variety. Religion only entered intellectually in the language text books through poems or stories from the major religious groups.

But I went to last year’s School Day celebration and found a mere facsimile of the place I remember. “Moral” overwhelmingly means Hindu now. Eid is a day off. Christmas is a foreigner. The Guru Granth Sahib is a mystery. Even the Buddha gets no air time. The strange parochialism that is being celebrated across the country has permeated into the staff room where teachers have long been required to wear saris, leaving no room for diversity in the form of a skirt-wearing kindergarten teacher named Lillian or a music mistress called Miss Dunn swathed in awe-inspiring frocks. No blind children play football with the sighted ones. Professors do not take poetry classes for 14-year-olds on teach-the-teacher visits.

It seems the school I knew is long gone anyway, I’m just glad it existed for a while. I have to admit though that the tartan band uniforms are much better than ours used to be, as is the band itself.

The rumour turned out to have got it wrong - it wasn't the school that was ending but the tenure of the head mistress. She used to be my maths teacher, one of the strong influences of my school days, and with her goes the last of the old guard. I guess I have no more reason to visit the school, for school days or anything else.

Dubye?

There is much ghoulish anticipation of Dubai’s total collapse; an unmistakable note of glee runs through every report. The imploding of impossible dreams is always good value, the bigger, the better. And nothing is more orgasmic than being able to say “I told you so”. There is, in fact, an orgy of this in progress, forgetting conveniently that Dubai is not all, or even largely, crystal-studded water bottles and “My other car is also a Porsche”.

What happens when all the waiting staff, gas station attendants, valet drivers, office boys, grocery store workers, nannies, busboys, bellboys, groundskeepers, grooms and security guards return, needing jobs, to Manila, Jakarta, Dhaka, Colombo, Kochi, Lahore, Banjul and Bratislava?

What becomes of the taxi driver who was in Dubai so that his son in Pakistan could go to college and “become a gentleman”, and another one from the other side of the Waga border who had “five daughters to marry off”? The maids who are saving to pay for the first brick and mortar house their families have known, the elderly van driver who spent his whole life in the Middle East, brought up an extended family and still had five years to go “to make money for me now"? Most people in Dubai have heard at least one similar story.

Zooming out a little, what will Kerala do, since its prosperity owes more to “Gulf money” than policy? What about Bangladesh where the amount of migrant money put into community development is apparently higher than the government can afford to allocate?

And what of the others, the ones who may have nowhere to return to? The emotional refugees from Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the people who built real lives in Dubai, permanent lives, and only talked of "home" in requiem for a life that was gone. I took a lot of taxis so I heard many moving variations on this theme, but the wistful tales of snow in Peshawar, rain in Gambia, recipes for Koshari and the abominable Molokhia, even one poignant rendition of Amar Sonar Bangla, are nothing to the single line from a taciturn Palestinian: “My country is imaginary.”

A more expansive compatriot of his driving a taxi in Chicago told me: “But you always have India.” I replied hospitably that there’s room in India for everybody, if it should come to it.

Railroad crossing?

A friend forwarded a video of a train-related thing, which led, as YouTube videos do to an hour of watching others in the category. All that has led to one burning question - how can you be accidentally hit by a train?

They are loud: hundreds of metal wheels scrape on metal rails. They're heavy: you can feel the earth shake before you see them. Apart from that, there are bells, lights and a horn that you can literally hear for miles. (I can hear one right now, sitting in my room. The railway line is one and a half miles away). So, how?

In one video, a truck was halfway across the tracks and you could hear the brakes of the train screeching for ages before it hit it anyway. Another one is a hushed report of a guy driving across the tracks right in front of an oncoming train. This time the bad train was especially culpable, as far as I can tell, because he was "a father on his way to his son's birthday party." It doesn't matter if he was a drug dealer on his way to kill an old lady - the fact is he didn't look both ways. When I stopped watching, the newscaster was talking of an investigation into how many times the horn was sounded. Maybe they'll also check if the headlight was in fact on. And if the insects in the shrubs were breathing too loudly and drowning out the sound of a 10,000 ton diesel engine.

I leave you with this. For pure wholesome entertainment you can't beat provincial American news:

August 15, 2008: 61 years of freedom

To really feel Independence Day, you have to be in school. Or have school-going kids or be with people who have such. Nobody else seems to pay much attention to it. My mother was chief guest at a school today for their Independence Day celebration. Her description made me as sharply nostalgic for my days of marching in my house in the parade, as I suspect it made her for her days of organising these events. This is the only chief guest I know of whose speech was actually addressed to the students assembled before her rather than into the middle distance. In a nutshell, she told them what it meant to be born into an independent country and that what they got out of it depended on themselves, not anyone else.

I went to register myself at the local election office a few days ago and found:
- Government officials have turned polite, efficient and punctual.
- Government information is no longer guarded by malevolent spirits and three-headed beasts – it's freely available on detailed websites.
- Government procedures are still shrouded in mystery, myth and legend, but less bad-naturedly so.
- Someone I studied with earns 4% of my salary. She has the same degree I have, the same general socio-economic background. But she was handicapped briefly by a traumatic marriage, which would explain some of it.
- The economic surge seems to have sharpened and widened the gap between the haves and have-nots rather than otherwise.

If it's just me noticing it more now, it's not because I'm freshly repatriated but because I have a car. It's the first time that I'm not dependent on public transport in India but I know the deadness of waiting for the bus, the tiredness that comes from constantly adjusting to circumstance, accepting the certainty of uncertainty, the large swathes of time swallowed by the mere mechanisms of life.

This train of thought was taken up again during the run up to the elections and the recent budget session in the parliament. There were so many candidates or spokespeople this time who held the right kind of education, spoke English in familiar accents, and felt as they ought, but the more reassuringly familiar they got, the uneasier they made me. We complain on our blogs and editorials but we are the urban elite, we already have the tools to function. We don’t need representation as much as the crowds in the suburban bus stops at the mercy of public transport, the small farmers at the mercy of the monsoon.

India is still largely a country of people who cannot read the expiry dates on bottles of medicine and bleed to death in the corridors of badly run government hospitals. Of millions of lives as unaffected by the recession as the boom. Of travesties, divisions and farces of all the more dangerous kinds. Our banks have one mode of customer service for my father and another for the labourer building the house next door, as does every other institution. Government warehouses overflow with subsidized rations that do not reach the poor they are meant for. Government schools have single-digit pass rates since political parties prefer to invest in wasteful religious and parochial sentiments rather than education. Kids sleep on the verges of highways and old people huddle in doorways in the rain. And, ominously, very little of the technology flowing into the country reaches the real core of India’s economy – agriculture.

There are a lot of wonderful things about this country that I appreciate even more now that I’m freshly repatriated. It angers me when people demand western standards of this, that and the other, and consider that the only yardstick. It makes me furious when someone's capabilities are judged by the quality of their English. Making India better is not about being like anybody else but about being the best we can be. Unfortunately, we warrant a lot of the criticism, court it, even.

We've come a long way in 61 years, there’s no doubt. And once India’s lower middle class and poor have uncorrupt representation and real attention, we can start to call it progress. Giving IT employees a new flyover to decongest the roads is important, but on its own, it’s just icing on a barely baked cake sitting in a faulty oven in a place without electricity.

My driver is surprised when I apologize for keeping him later than usual, and I feel like apologizing again for a much bigger thing that I cannot even define, but guilt without action becomes merely another luxury.

World’s greatest entertainer gets world’s most boring funeral

I just finished watching what should have been the ultimate celebration of the phenomenon called Michael Jackson, but turned out to be a paint-by-numbers, made-for-TV funeral service for somebody. Except for the words of a few friends and the tears of his daughter, it was so devoid of soul that not even the expected “We are the world” at the end could drum up any magic. A slick choir, a predictable preacher and safe hymns. Windows-wallpaper lighting effects, some automated slides and a few sound bites. There was no connection between the man in the pictures and what was being acted out in front of the screen.

He cut across practically every culture in the world but his epitaph was spoken from an insular soapbox. He revolutionized the music video but his last one was an AV that any trainee editor could have put together in a day. It surprises me that it makes me so furious, but I feel as if a final, irrevocable injustice was done. He never got to make his come-back tour - this was it, his last concert, and they kept him off the stage. The King of Pop should have been moonwalked off it.

They should have probably called the Brits in for this one – the Diana memorials were (are still being) done impeccably. No matter what you think of the reason for it, the event itself is always moving and eloquent and all those other words that the TV channels are already brazenly, shamelessly using for this one.