Delhi the Piracy Capital

Yesterday a national news channel in the absence of anything better to do carried out a long story on book piracy. Two things were highlighted in the story a) Delhi is the piracy capital of India b) students, especially medical students, were the worst pirates so far as books were conerned. Coming close on the heels of the recent judgement against a swiss pharma MNC, the story opened up the issue of IPR violation and piracy once again. My views on piracy are simple:
No one has yet come up with a detailed sociological report on piracy. My personal view, having, read pirated books, got my degrees by reading illegally photocopied articles, bought pirated softwares, music and a host of other things, is that any one trying to resolve the issue of piracy should answer the first question, why would otherwise law abiding citizens willingly violate the law?
The simple answer is high need, high cost and low affordability. I need something real bad, I do not have the full money to pay for it, because in my view it costs more than what it should. That is the simple reason for piracy. I have never realised why a trash paperback by John Grisham should cost 500 Rs, I am going to read it once in the plane and throw it in the dustbin; why a medical course book which has been through 100 editions should still costs $100 when the author, publisher and their daddies have recovered the cost of the book several times over, or why for that matter pharma companies keep extending the patents of an old drug through various non-transparent means often in perpetuity, or for that matter why should a CD with five songs cost Rs 300?
The main reason for piracy I feel is the failure of the companies to understand the market and the paying capability of the consumer and every market goes through this process before piracy is well within the acceptable levels. On the other hand consumers also go through their own education and realise some goods and services will continue to carry a price premium because they are better for the rest of it, pirated or genuinine does not really matter.
Take the case of PCs with prices coming down, grey market has almost disappeared. Yet brands like Sony still command a premium. Take the issue of DVD where moser baer is making the consumers aware of the "real" price of a high quality movie on a DVD.
I think more than anything else, piracy is a signal to the marketers to reconfigure their prices or products and they should learn important lessons from a market where piracy is rampant. That's the real consumer feeback and should be taken seriously - we love you but not that much, is the consumer response.

Disclaimer: This blog entry was make with the aid of a genuine IBM laptop running on genuine Microsoft softwares by a genuinine person with a twisted by genuinine brain.

The Train to Pakistan

To many of us Khushwant Singh looks and writes like a sordid and perverted sardar. To me though he is the greatest living "Indian Writer In English". Not because he is a very powerful man, not because his father was one of the richest men in Delhi, not because he is the most erudite Indian alive, not because he is so alive and acive till this day, not because he is well off enough to have great friends in Delhi and a house in Kasauli for his summer retreats. Not because of none of these. But for these reasons:
1. He writes the best english in all five continents, even though he is a humble Indian and a sardar to boot. All of us thought good Indian english was the prerogative of Bongs and Southies.
2. His one book "A Train to Pakistan: should have won him a nobel in English literature, just that he never knew ho to lobby
3.He is the most fearless anti establishment thinker for four generations now
4. He still thinks and has not gone senile and we should congratulate his mild drinking for this.
5. His children are by our standards better than him intellectually and in terms of achivements, but they will never admit to this. That is like a great father: when you children feel humbled by you.

What can I say to that great man, but may you have may lives and live forever:)

A Woman President

Unlike most civilisations, we have really complicated kinship terms. For example we do not have simple uncles but complicated mamas, chachas, mausas and buas [all by the way first uncles from mother's and fatehr's side. Likewise for aunts we have mami, chachi, mausi and so on. Kinship terms run so deep in our society that we still sometimes follow the ancient system and call all our father's male siblings "father" in order that they were born relative to the biological father. Thus "bade Papa", "Majhley Papa" and "Chote Papa", Papa and Chacha. if you do not belong to this cultural milieu you would get perplexed trying to figure out who the biological father is, but not so a discerning Indias.
In fact, kinship terms are the first things we teach our chidren after they have learnt to say papa and mamma. It is long process of training and takes upto 10 years for the child to understand and then correctly apply these terms. After all it would be darn insensitive to get this wrong - in fact to address your mami as mausi would make the entire family incestuous.
With so much of training and such finely tuned kinship terms, I was damned surprised when the entire nation started tearing their hair on the latest issue of what would be a female president of India be called. The Presidents have always been men and we have called him Rashtra-Pati [husband to the nation, literally. Though is slightly more complicated that just husband].
Some suggested the obvious, she be called Rashtra-Patni [wife to the nation]. This would make the plight of the Madam President worse than Draupadi, we are a nation of 1.2 billion half of which is our male population. Others, although realising the need to come up with the correct term, kept quiet since Rashtra-Patni was too embarrassing a term to be attached to the first Woman President.
I think, all of us got it wrong and I think I am the first one to crack this. Hear me out on this one and you will soon realise that I am right.
Rashtrapati is so called not just because he is male, but because our rashtra - bharat - is a female. We call it the motherland. Hence the Head of the Sate is called Rashtrapati - Pati [husband] of the state. Now if the nationstate is a female [mother] then isn't it so easy to find a kinship term for a female president?
I think if you are true to our tradition of kinship names a woman president should be called Rashtra-Sautan [sautan again is much more complicated than the simple anthropological term co-wife], but it is the correct term.
Rashtra-patni should correctly be reserved for a woman president in a country which styles ifself as a fatherland - by that standard the only true Rashtra-Patni is Angela MERKEL of Germany.

I hope you will agree with me.

Mahabalipuram

I had seen the images since I was a kid and also remembered that they were really reall old. Later of course, I ead much more about them and finally yesterday I was able to visit Mahabalipuram and was able to see with my own eyes the work of Pallava sculptors 600-700 AD. The village of Mahabalipuram is a World Heritage Site because of these ancient monuments. It also helps that the beach extends to as far as the eye can see on both sides and the sea is really blue. It was a great day's outing rounded up with a lunch at GRT resort. For the first time in my life I felt jelous about Chennaites. Pity I could not enjoy the beach, which seemed to me to be exgtending from the outskirts of Chennai to probably the southernmost tip of India without a break. Incredible India!