Many years back while walking the Royal Mile in Edinburgh I spotted a quaint museum called the People's Museum. In spite of the strong tradition of socialism in Scotland, Royal Mile isn't exactly the place where you would expect a People's Museum. Suffice it to say, the museum reconstructs the life of an ordinary working class scot in the 18-19 century. It captures the technological developments due to the Industrial Revolution and how that changed people's lives and lifestyles. The reconstruction is so well done that you would have to see it to believe it. In fact it is one of the best museums I have seen.
I was reminded of the museum the other day when I tried to explain to my six year old daughter about certain gadgets that I and even my much younger brothers in law have grown up with. Soon I realised that making my daughter understand the technology we grew up with would be a difficult task. Many of the things I grew up with have disappeared from use but have not yet found their way to museums... so where do we find them?
The first one was a rotary phone: where do I find one? The ones in the museum are still from the time of Mr Bell. My first phone was a serious looking black rotary phone
The second one was the steam engine: The ones in the railway museum are 19th century not the powerful ones of 1970s
The third one was the Handwound watch: where do I get one? Museums have fancy repetors and pockets watches from 19th century but not a handwound watch. I am sure HMT still makes some, but..... My first watch was handwound.
The fourth one was a black and white TV with wooden stands and shutters, where have they disappeared? The first TV I watched was a Keltron with four legs and sunmica laminated wooden shutters. Not yet found in any museum
The fifth item would definitely be the Video Casette and Video player. I grew up on a healthy dose of hindi movies on this fantastic gadget
The sixth would have to be the music cassette: I wonder where have those lovely cassettes of Kishore Kumar I collected over the years gone?
There are at least 15 more such items that can be added to the list. And I have just stuck to changes that have been brought about by pure technology and not mentioned anything which is connected to better availability of goods and better purchasing power. That list I guess would be much longer
So after this rather long conversation with my daughter, I realised I need to be happy about the "old things" that she is still sticking to and not be too unhappy and sentimental about "old things" she is discarding. And... one of the biggest piece of good news is that she still likes books and she is just getting into the habit of reading them by herself. Perhaps better still is the fact that printed children's books are still available and doing very well. Although most of the popular heros in the books and indeed the topics have changed, I was happy to discover shared loved between us for some eternal characters such as Mickey Mouse and Jataka Tales.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
First Love
Food is my first love.
I can say this with a lot of commitment and conviction knowing full well that my wife, my daughter, my mother, my sister and three people who I call friends and who have stuck with me through thick and thin for the last 5 years to the last two decades do not read blogs:) [That is what I call freedom of expression].
I am agnostic about food.
I use the word not in the recent sense of technology but in the original sense of religion [techies are using a lot of serious words without understanding them nowadays]
I love food irrespective of where they origin and who cooks them. That is agnosticism for me.
I am religious and dogmatic about food.
Food should be good to taste and made of good ingredients. That is what I mean by I am religious and dogmatic about food.
Armed with the above parameters [again a word which is pythagorean but currently being used by IT project managers], for the last one year I have been hunting for good eating places in Mumbai.
Again, I must mention that my search for good food in Mumbai is not dependent on a) Times Good food guide or Vir Sanghvi's Rude Food or any such tome [I think they are fake]. My tongue and pockets are the best judge. b) secondly, I have my biases: However good a dal is it cannot be sweet, for example, you cannot make a sphageti bolognaise with chicken mice, for example, and there are not diet sweets.....
With such huge biases I have drawn up a list of places where I would like to visit again and again. The list is random:
1. Mondy: Value for money for so called continental food and reasonably priced booze. [Leopold is horrible but the cylinders they serve their pitchers are interesting]
2. Copper Chimney [Good Indian veg and non-veg food, they make their rotis with atta not with maida] Please avoid Delhi Durbar in Colaba if you know your food.
3. JafferBhai: best Mughlai takeaway if you know what to order and if you do not compromise with your mughlai dishes [no salt no chilly types keep out]
4. Taj Mahal lunch buffet [if you like cold cuts and salads for lunch there is no better place than this. They also have a wide selection of "Indian" dishes from Kolkata to Goa]
5. Ivy Bistro best value for money, preparation and excellent wine. Must try the red and white port here. The costs are a real steal here and the bakery stuff is the best
6. Gordon House: The best Indian Chinese in the Chinese restaurant in the ground floor.
7. Sports bar buffet lunch on a late Friday afternoon with beer: Good value for money and you can just gorge on the salads and soups.
I am still working on the list and will update whenever possible. Also, I forget the names of some places which I liked: E.g.; the small place in Malad where they served exquisite chilly meat balls [beef]; or the numerous takeways which are great value for money Or even my local bar ani restaurant where they can prepare a chilly chicken to order.
Please do not take my views lightly if you care either for your stomachs or for your wallets, since my opinion is based on spending my hard earned money and experimenting on my rather mature stomach.
Last but not the least: If you love bengali sweets please not got to sweet bengal try visiting Brijwasi instead.
Bon Apetit
I can say this with a lot of commitment and conviction knowing full well that my wife, my daughter, my mother, my sister and three people who I call friends and who have stuck with me through thick and thin for the last 5 years to the last two decades do not read blogs:) [That is what I call freedom of expression].
I am agnostic about food.
I use the word not in the recent sense of technology but in the original sense of religion [techies are using a lot of serious words without understanding them nowadays]
I love food irrespective of where they origin and who cooks them. That is agnosticism for me.
I am religious and dogmatic about food.
Food should be good to taste and made of good ingredients. That is what I mean by I am religious and dogmatic about food.
Armed with the above parameters [again a word which is pythagorean but currently being used by IT project managers], for the last one year I have been hunting for good eating places in Mumbai.
Again, I must mention that my search for good food in Mumbai is not dependent on a) Times Good food guide or Vir Sanghvi's Rude Food or any such tome [I think they are fake]. My tongue and pockets are the best judge. b) secondly, I have my biases: However good a dal is it cannot be sweet, for example, you cannot make a sphageti bolognaise with chicken mice, for example, and there are not diet sweets.....
With such huge biases I have drawn up a list of places where I would like to visit again and again. The list is random:
1. Mondy: Value for money for so called continental food and reasonably priced booze. [Leopold is horrible but the cylinders they serve their pitchers are interesting]
2. Copper Chimney [Good Indian veg and non-veg food, they make their rotis with atta not with maida] Please avoid Delhi Durbar in Colaba if you know your food.
3. JafferBhai: best Mughlai takeaway if you know what to order and if you do not compromise with your mughlai dishes [no salt no chilly types keep out]
4. Taj Mahal lunch buffet [if you like cold cuts and salads for lunch there is no better place than this. They also have a wide selection of "Indian" dishes from Kolkata to Goa]
5. Ivy Bistro best value for money, preparation and excellent wine. Must try the red and white port here. The costs are a real steal here and the bakery stuff is the best
6. Gordon House: The best Indian Chinese in the Chinese restaurant in the ground floor.
7. Sports bar buffet lunch on a late Friday afternoon with beer: Good value for money and you can just gorge on the salads and soups.
I am still working on the list and will update whenever possible. Also, I forget the names of some places which I liked: E.g.; the small place in Malad where they served exquisite chilly meat balls [beef]; or the numerous takeways which are great value for money Or even my local bar ani restaurant where they can prepare a chilly chicken to order.
Please do not take my views lightly if you care either for your stomachs or for your wallets, since my opinion is based on spending my hard earned money and experimenting on my rather mature stomach.
Last but not the least: If you love bengali sweets please not got to sweet bengal try visiting Brijwasi instead.
Bon Apetit
Friday, June 01, 2007
CEOs Salary and Generational Vision
The Prime Minister in his inimitable style seemed to have set the media on fire. Just one match stick was enough... At the annual general meeting of a large employers' body Dr Singh, among other things, mentioned that CEOs should check their own salaries and generally refrain from conspicuous consumption.
Since then I have read at least three CEOs from three generations all connected directly or indirectly with the employers' association mentioned, come up with typically generational answers: CEO in mid fifties India Chairman of a top consulting firm: 70 per cent agrees with PM 30 per cent disagrees in a national daily. CEO/promoter of a telecom giant just enterning his 50s; 55 per cent disagree and 45 per cent agree with the PM's views again on a national daily. CEO/Promoter of a tech company in his early 40s, competely disagrees with the PM and calls it a demand and supply situation. if there are better schools and colleges training better CEOs and ensuring their steady supply the cost of hiring them will go down, this was in a blog.
All complicated arguments to drive home a simple point to the Prime Minister who is a very 1960s honest man, like many of our fathers. Just to digress a bit and profile such a man. No income outside salary. if you were in government, low salary and low tax, in private sector high salary and 90 per cent tax [if you do not believe me ask any CEO of private sector company in the 1960s]. Only people who made money were doctors and lawyers [but their income too was limited by the poor paying capacity of their clients and a doctor's fee was anything between 2 and 10 Rs and they played the volumes game those days]. What was the mindset of such men. They were brought up in the nehruvian tradition of nation building, sacrifice before consumption. The biggest social achievement then was to show others how much you have sacrificed. Cars were not needed, air conditioners were almost a sin, eating out was waste of money etc.
Great men these were, but at the end of their generation they left behnd a divided and inequitable society and to be fair to them some of them like the Prime Minister himself realised that this model had failed to deliver and consciously chose to move on to another direction that of economic freedom and liberalisation... creating a generation of people like us who now look like frankenstiens eating into the nation's entrails by those who created us.
In this debate neither side is wrong. These are two different ways of looking at things: While the PM looks at the 2000s with his prism of 1960s [not sure how to handle it] the generation of 1980s and 1990s looks at it through their own prism [agains not too sure how to handle it].
To get back to the point. What were the CEOs in their own generational way trying to tell the Prime Minister. I think two things: a) there is a generational gap in thinking and perceiving reality. Please let our generation run the show. You have handed over businesses to us, now handover the politics and economics of the country so that we get a chance to show how it is run in the new regime. b) Economic prosperity is not percolating not because of excessive freedom of privileged classes, but because of lack of freedom of non-privileged classes and non-privileged sectors like agriculture. c) please do not behave like Indian crabs by pulling down those that are going up in life.
I was was in positive awe of my father, his honesty, hardwork for a PSU, commitment, sacrifice, simple lifestyle. But never really bought into his philisophy. Like millions others of my generation. And as I grew older and had a stronger voice did not fail to mention to him at times that a) if he had taken care of himself he would have ensured a much better life for his family [I really do not know how much better since I and my sibling and my mother are doing pretty well in life:)] b) my generation has no human heros: self success is the only hero always looking for a new heroine: money.
Jai Hind
Since then I have read at least three CEOs from three generations all connected directly or indirectly with the employers' association mentioned, come up with typically generational answers: CEO in mid fifties India Chairman of a top consulting firm: 70 per cent agrees with PM 30 per cent disagrees in a national daily. CEO/promoter of a telecom giant just enterning his 50s; 55 per cent disagree and 45 per cent agree with the PM's views again on a national daily. CEO/Promoter of a tech company in his early 40s, competely disagrees with the PM and calls it a demand and supply situation. if there are better schools and colleges training better CEOs and ensuring their steady supply the cost of hiring them will go down, this was in a blog.
All complicated arguments to drive home a simple point to the Prime Minister who is a very 1960s honest man, like many of our fathers. Just to digress a bit and profile such a man. No income outside salary. if you were in government, low salary and low tax, in private sector high salary and 90 per cent tax [if you do not believe me ask any CEO of private sector company in the 1960s]. Only people who made money were doctors and lawyers [but their income too was limited by the poor paying capacity of their clients and a doctor's fee was anything between 2 and 10 Rs and they played the volumes game those days]. What was the mindset of such men. They were brought up in the nehruvian tradition of nation building, sacrifice before consumption. The biggest social achievement then was to show others how much you have sacrificed. Cars were not needed, air conditioners were almost a sin, eating out was waste of money etc.
Great men these were, but at the end of their generation they left behnd a divided and inequitable society and to be fair to them some of them like the Prime Minister himself realised that this model had failed to deliver and consciously chose to move on to another direction that of economic freedom and liberalisation... creating a generation of people like us who now look like frankenstiens eating into the nation's entrails by those who created us.
In this debate neither side is wrong. These are two different ways of looking at things: While the PM looks at the 2000s with his prism of 1960s [not sure how to handle it] the generation of 1980s and 1990s looks at it through their own prism [agains not too sure how to handle it].
To get back to the point. What were the CEOs in their own generational way trying to tell the Prime Minister. I think two things: a) there is a generational gap in thinking and perceiving reality. Please let our generation run the show. You have handed over businesses to us, now handover the politics and economics of the country so that we get a chance to show how it is run in the new regime. b) Economic prosperity is not percolating not because of excessive freedom of privileged classes, but because of lack of freedom of non-privileged classes and non-privileged sectors like agriculture. c) please do not behave like Indian crabs by pulling down those that are going up in life.
I was was in positive awe of my father, his honesty, hardwork for a PSU, commitment, sacrifice, simple lifestyle. But never really bought into his philisophy. Like millions others of my generation. And as I grew older and had a stronger voice did not fail to mention to him at times that a) if he had taken care of himself he would have ensured a much better life for his family [I really do not know how much better since I and my sibling and my mother are doing pretty well in life:)] b) my generation has no human heros: self success is the only hero always looking for a new heroine: money.
Jai Hind
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Know thy History
In India history as a discipline has been a much maligned subject. Just need to look at the controversy each version of the NCERT history texts generate. This does not happen with any other discipline. But as a normal interest area of a student, the importance of history is declining. it is even losing favour with potential Civil Services candidates. I think it would be a sad day for us when our civil servants are not well read and not well read into our history. Among the civil servants especially those who rise high to determine local policies and are responsible for security some books which are quite immortal much be read and updated. I was for example told by a senior civil servant of kerala cadre that William Logan's Malabar Manual written in the 19th century was the most helpful book he ever read as a non Malayali officer of Kerala cadre. He in fact has committed the book to memory. it helped that he was interested in reading as a Engligh literature student and as a polyglot. another important sets of books were the District Gazette series. I have read most of them pertaining to Bihar and Bengal and though written in the 19th century and some of them shoddily updated in the 1970s, they are a wealth of information for the educated district officer. As are the Final Report on Survey and Settlement operations of each district [there would be one for each british district]. As opposed to Col Todd's romaticised Annals of Rajasthan or numberous British translations of Persian and Sanskrit texts, the works that i mention are based on field surveys and meeting with real people and what they thought of themselves and others in thier locality. Also, a must read are the decennial census reports starting in Bengal from 1872 and appearing regularly for each province from 1891 up to today. They are literally invaluable in understanding local language, customs etc. I wonder how many of our civil servants would have read any of these. It does not really help especially since most of our civil servants have little or no training in social sciences [they are mainly engineers and management students or worse still doctors].
To the senior policy makers given the political situation in the country I take the liberty of suggesting an essential reading: William Hunter's "Indian Mussalmans". Published in 1882, less than 30 years after the first "Indian War of Independence " this book is a masterpiece. Hunter was probably the first one to envision that from the Northwest frontier provice [starting in what is now Afghanistan] to the gangetic delta in what is now Bangladesh, there was a continuous tract running through punjab, united provinces {UP}, Bihar and Bengal dominated by the Muslims whose social needs, needs to address their grievances were different as were there responses to the reforming influences of the British rule. Juxtapose this area on a current map of India and you would begin to realise the importance of this book.
Another set of books came out from the mid 20th century till recently. These set of books spoke about civil disturbances, popular movements, millennium movements etc. in a geographical congruous area forming a necklace from southern bengal bihar, chattisgarh, madhya pradesh, andhra pradesh, maharashtra and western parts of Gujarat. Plot this area on the map of India. You will not miss to note two things: a) the area is mostly dominated by "adivasis" b) this is a the now dreaded naxalite belt".
Who says you dont learn from history? it all depends on whether you want to learn anything from it.
Cheers,
To the senior policy makers given the political situation in the country I take the liberty of suggesting an essential reading: William Hunter's "Indian Mussalmans". Published in 1882, less than 30 years after the first "Indian War of Independence " this book is a masterpiece. Hunter was probably the first one to envision that from the Northwest frontier provice [starting in what is now Afghanistan] to the gangetic delta in what is now Bangladesh, there was a continuous tract running through punjab, united provinces {UP}, Bihar and Bengal dominated by the Muslims whose social needs, needs to address their grievances were different as were there responses to the reforming influences of the British rule. Juxtapose this area on a current map of India and you would begin to realise the importance of this book.
Another set of books came out from the mid 20th century till recently. These set of books spoke about civil disturbances, popular movements, millennium movements etc. in a geographical congruous area forming a necklace from southern bengal bihar, chattisgarh, madhya pradesh, andhra pradesh, maharashtra and western parts of Gujarat. Plot this area on the map of India. You will not miss to note two things: a) the area is mostly dominated by "adivasis" b) this is a the now dreaded naxalite belt".
Who says you dont learn from history? it all depends on whether you want to learn anything from it.
Cheers,
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