New look, new feel.

I've been writing on this blog for over 10 months now and it has gone through quite a few iterations since it started out. However, many of the templates I have used have not been very reader-friendly. They've been a bit sparse or too complicated or very low-contrast.
Today, I had a little bit of time to play around, and not being completely tech-illiterate like many of my peers, I decided to check out some new templates to do up the blog. I didn't want to use another Blogger template, so I went scouting online for something new, fresh and different. I found some nice templates here and decided to implement one. Anyway, because these things seem to have a habit of inspiring me, I changed the look and feel of the other blog as well.
There are still a couple of bugs, like resizing the image which I will need to do and the font size might be a slight problem. Anyway, please let me know how the blog looks now.

Are us Brownies racist pigs?

But first, tom-ta-tom-ta-tom many thanks to Mister Saket Vaidya, but where is the trophy?
Yet, I must say that there are a lot of very good blogs by Indians out there and I do make an attempt to read as many as possible. Anyway, I doubt I am hardly mysterious anymore, yet I kinda like 'K' so I'll stick with my rather unimaginative nom de plume for the time being. Anyway, Saket you got yourself a beer. And I still want a trophy.
Anyway, now that my long, rambling and pointless first para has been dispensed with, lets get to the crux of the matter shall we (I should really try and be more concise). I was reading an article in the ToI which made me think. (Note : This does not mean that I am an intellectually challenged person who starts thinking when he reads the Times, but rather means that in the morass that is the ToI there is occasionally a good article alongside the idiotic 'sting' operations they mount on bloggers - the reaction to which I think has been needlessly over the top - but for a more balanced counter-argument read this by Saket)
The article in the Times was Rashmee Roshan Lall, their UK correspondent and points out a question facing the South Asian community after the recent Birmingham riots - Is the Brown Man a racist?
I met noted UK advocate and 'eminent' (so to speak) UK-Indian Sarosh Zaiwalla earlier today and during the course of my interview with him (The Bachchan libel case, the corruption allegations surrounding him and Keith Vaz, blah, blah, blah) I asked him this question. And he told me something rather pertinent, "Haven't we been racist for ages?"
As anyone who has met me would testify, I'm not Mister Fair-Boy. In fact, I'm rather dark, OK so people might say a lot of that is because of the fact that I haven't had a bath in three years (I'm really not THAT unhygenic), I really don't give a flying eff about my skin colour. I will never use any Fairness cream, and find the concept rather funny - though I must appauld the person (from a totally capitalistic point of view) who dreamt up the idea of marketing fairness creams in India. In fact, the recent launch of a fairness cream for men my Emami is just taking advantage of the demographic skew in the usage of 'Fair and Lovely' (more men use it than women).
However, it is true that Indians treat darker skinned people with a degree of contempt. I know for a fact that my certain family members of mine are extremely happy that Friendgirl is extremely fair, and I wouldn't hesitate to label my family (despite its occasional escapades in the realm of dysfunctionality) as 'progressive'.
Of course, jokes about skin colour are rather common in North Indian schools, less now than before though - I never got picked on for being dark, oh no siree, I was worse - I was a Bengali (but that is another story altogether). And while fairer Indians might diss out their darker brethren for nothing apart from the fact of being 'fair', there is still a rather weird bonding between Aryan and Dravidian stock desis.
But this is not about the way Indians treat Indians, or to be more precise the way Aryan/Dravidian Indians treat Indians, it is about the way we treat other communities. For example, while the average fat-horny-old-desi man would want to bed a Mongoloid girl from the North-East, there is an extremely high chance that he would consider that person beneath his community. Just ask yourself, how many North-Easterners do you see in managerial jobs or senior positions? Even though there has been a relative improvement lately, Indians are treating other Indians as second-class citizens for no fault other than their ethnicity. Little wonder that half those states want to secede.
Indians would treat East Asian people equally badly too, if it weren't for the fact that those chaps are equally racist too. A very senior Indian manager working in a large East Asian company firm once told me that all three Chinese, Japanese and Korean managers are equally racist, "They come here to screw the women and talk down the men. They treat workers like shit. The ones that do well are the ones who barely manage to look Indians in the eye. The ones that fail can't even do that." I was once told a very interesting story by a Delhi-based adman which went on the lines of the fact that some these companies have a formal 'whoring allowance' for their managers. Tip to people from the North-eas+t : Start acting like East-Asians and give people back the same shit they give you!
But we aren't talking about the East Asians here, but the way we act with the White Man and Black Man. Are we racist with White people? Damn, we are. We insult them at every oppurtunity, have secret desires of bedding them and think of them as big bags of money. But the way most Indians act around Black people sometimes startles me. By most Indians I mean average middle-class Indians. Take a Black person to a middle class neighbourhood and not only will the kids make fun of him, inside the daughter will be hidden and people will not look him in the face. Most people will think that either he is a criminal, rapist or a drug dealer (something that is not helped by the fact that almost every single cocaine runner in Bombay does happen to be from West Africa). I don't think I am over-generalising things here, because (and I must clarify this again and again and again) us bloggers are not a regular demographic, we would fit into what statisticians would call SEC A++ or SEC A+++. Even many Indians who have moved to the West (UK and the US in particular) have more misgiving about the Black community than most White people (save Neo-Nazi outfits) - this may not be the guy working at an i-Bank in Manhattan or London or the coder in Palo Alto, but the Middle-Class Indian drives a cab or runs a store.
I am writing from observations that I have made. I might be totally off the mark, I would like it if some of you wrote in with your own observations on the issue.
EDIT : Trying out a new look and feel, please let me know how it looks.
India

A Fatwa on you.....

While I respect the right of a community to have a law of their own, which they are more than welcome to practice in a country dominated by their community, I find some of the recent pronouncements of fatwa's by some illiterate and obnoxious celrics in India to be downright strange. My reaction on reading some of them vacillate between anger (Imrana) and laughter (Sania). Of course, I continue to believe that India should quickly adopt an Uniform Civil Code (a fact on which I will always support the BJP) but with Mrs G Redux in power and the crazy commies (Prakash Karat's latest is saying the Volker probe is a bunch of lies - inspired by what N.Ram wrote no doubt) this will never happen in the near future (Until in a highly optimistic scenario, Lalu loses in Bihar and this leads to a total breakdown at the Centre, snap polls are called and the NDA comes back to power, until then we'll have to wait till 2007). But, if you think some of the ones propounded in India are bad, I came across this article in The Guardian which reproduces a fatwa issued by some cleric in Saudi Arabia.
It is a fatwa on football/soccerr, and some of the suggestions made me go 'Whaddafaaak?'
Do not call "foul" and stop the game if someone falls and sprains a hand or foot or the ball touches his hand, and do not give a yellow or red card to whoever was responsible for the injury or tackle. Instead, it should be adjudicated according to Sharia rulings concerning broken bones and injuries.

Pink?!?

I am no marketing guru or profess to be anything of the like, but when a brand which I admire and one I actually have a pleasant user experience with dramatically changes its brand image, it seems to affect me. So when my telecom operator decides to drastically change its colour scheme, I do feel that something has changed. But when my telecom operator (or as is the case in Bombay, my to-be telecom operator) decides to brand itself Pink, I am a bit flabbergasted. I know that ToI had done a story on the future colours of Hutch two days ago, but the story still gave me some hope - they said Pink and Blue.
But Hutch has gone Pink! All Pink! Of colours in the world, they had to choose Pink! OK, so its a Dark Pink, but its freaking Pink none the less. And the citizens of India are soon going to be inundated with a pink campaign.
And by the way, in case you didn't know - the Orange brand's days are numbered in Bombay, because Hutch will return the rights to the brand to France Telecom in a couple of months. So from Orange, Bombay will go Pink. In even better news, because Essar bought over BPL Mobile and Essar are important stakeholders in Hutch and I assume Hutch would like to consolidate all its companies under one roof before they go for an IPO, plus I don't think Essar would like to pay the BPL money to use their brand, expect BPL Mobile also to go Pink soon.
Hutch might well roll out this new branding and colour across the world, with India just being the tip of the iceberg. After all, India is going to become Hutchison Telecom's largest market - if it isn't already with over 10 million Hutch (and Orange Mumbai) users. Vodafone is Ferrari Red, Orange is well, Orange and now Hutch is Pink. But ah, here we have a problem, because Duetsche Telecom is also Pink! But these are different pinks and the branding is also wildly different.
Anyway, I am rather sure that Hutch and O&M will come out with a killer advertising campaign soon and sell me the idea of Pink (Have you seen the brilliant Irfan Khan adverts for Hutch ka Chhota Recharge?). Well, their website hasn't changed as yet, but I guess by tomorrow morning, we'll be singing a different (Pink?) tune.
PS : One quick automobile brochure type disclaimer : The colour of the logo as seen on your screen may be nothing like the colour that Hutch actually uses, but let me assure you its pink all right!
EDIT : Why has Hutch gone Pink? and other similar questions are the most popular keywords for this blog, so as a service to everyone, I'll explain things a bit more. In 1995, Max Industries controlled by Analjit Singh acquired one of the two cellular licenses for the Bombay circle. Actually, Max Industries had acquired the license for Delhi but they swapped licenses with Bharti - which is an interesting bit of cellular telephony history in India. Now, when Hutchison Max was established they had acquired the rights to the 'Orange' brand for the period of ten years (if I'm correct) from Mannesmann, the German publisher which operated 'Orange' in Europe. However, Mannesmann, being a publisher obviously saw the telecom business as a non-core business and wanted to get out of it (plus the fact that they lost a lot of money). They tried to sell to Vodaphone in 1999, and Vodaphone AirTouch acquired the company but wanted out.
In 2000, the complication began. Orange got sold to France Telecom for a whopping $37 billion. This was the era of highly overpriced telecom acquisitions, and this wildly optimistic acquisition loaded France Telecoms books with a lot of debt. Now ironically, France Telecom at that point of time held 26% in BPL Mobile, but because of the deal that Orange had struck, the brand had been licensed for a certain period of time (10 years would be a good guess) and since HutchisonMax had spent a bomb promoting the brand they weren't keen to kill it. So you ended up with the strange situation that the brand of one of the partners in one of Mumbai's cellular networks was being used by the other network. Make sense of that if you will. On top of that, as both Hutchison and Orange have 3G operations in competing countries, this co-opetition thing was rather weird. So much so that Hutch executives who went to global Orange brand summits were locked out of certain meetings.
France Telecom exited BPL Mobile a long time ago, and today BPL Mobile is owned by Hutchison's main partner in India - the Essar Group. Some people (including me) feel that the BPL Mobile brand will be killed in favour of Hutch sometime around the IPO. After 10 years, France Telecom obviously decided not to renew their license agreement with Hutch and the Orange brand had to be killed. According to some stories I'm hearing, Orange didn't want the colour Orange to be used in the Hutch logo. Hutch had to be different - Red was out since Red is Airtel, Blue was BPL Mobile and Yellow was Idea. Hutch needed a high impact colour and sadly Pink seemed to be the only one available it now seems or what Hutch's brand managers thought that Pink was the only colour available.
Which is still unacceptable - even Green would have been better - maybe Lilac. The Hutch store's all over the place look godawful.

Between a rock and a hard place.

Since I finally started taking a newspaper at home because I finally ran out of Archie Comics to read on the pot, I am getting news seconds after I wake up. And since I am deprived of the joys of 50 channels of news on TV (Because I haven't bought a TV, yet) this early morning contact with news feels good. And, I did eventually subscribe to the Times of India, because for four bucks you get one hell of a lot of newspaper - it might even be thicker than a regular edition of the New York Times, and the NYT does sell for ten times price (Here, one should refrain from making the quip that the NYT is a hundred times better than the ToI, so actually the ToI should cost only 40p). Anyway, back to the point. While I like DNA and even once in a while read HT, I do find Mumbai Mirror to be the best new newspaper to have been launched. Why? Because its is so completely vapid and it makes no bones about it. And heck, I love the Subhash K Jha columns on Mondays, yesterday's one had something about how Aishwariya Rai was singing Happy Birthday to him from Slovakia. But, today, the Mirror carried something really interesting. An interview with Shashi Tharoor (this link won't work beyond a day because of the awful way the Mirror archives its site, go to the archives of 8th November 2005 and search for the piece). Now Mr Tharoor is an UN Under-Secretary General and has attempted to write several novels (I say attempts because, they are exactly that). Now Tharoor, unlike many of his other influential batchmates from the St Stephen's Class of 1975 is a Congress apologist and he has hardly vieled his intention to join that den of corruption (of course, that depends if his ambition to become Secretary General get squashed). So when his potential future employer and his current employer have a spat over a man who believes the Berlin Wall was a good thing, it makes for interesting reading.
By the way, I finally worked out why the Lefties supported Natwar. Its because that man also had Dinosaur-era opinions of global politics. And talking about our commies, the ToI had an interesting piece today about how the party leaders had a tough time controlling the crowd protesting at the Indo-US air exercises in Bengal. Because the crowd seemed to be more interested in watching the F-16's and the E-3 AWACS rather than listening to doddery old Bengali men. And Indiatimes in all their glory doesn't have a link to the story as yet.

Don't people learn?

You have to hand it to Ponytail. Today hoping that the blog fires have died down he reverted back to his old advertising. Just check out Page 3 of today's HT in Mumbai. Same old promises, same old shit, amybe taking advantage of the fact that many people are 'blogged out', maybe even the fact that some people took advantage of the situation and tried to make matyrs of themselves over the entire issue. Sigh!
Anyway, the man is also a plagarist - the latest issue of his magazine has listed data and information from another publication and passed it off as their own. Many of the articles printed by his magazine are talks or seminars delivered by the people whose pictures are used, but anyway. I happened to read Ponytail's letter in his magazine, and it contains some brilliant gems of hilarity.
Ah, well, at least Ponytail isn't a two-faced hipocritical bastard like the leaders of the Indian Communist movement. In their desperation to save Iran from international reprimand they want our (discredited) Foreign Minister to tell the US to bugger off. They also want the government to tear up the (fairly decent) Nuclear deal that we have signed with the Yanks (judging by the way the Chinese have reacted to it, it must be a good deal). They also don't want our Air Force to practice against F-16 fighters and of course, then there is retail, let alone how their steadfast refusal to change labour laws has probably kept more people unemployed than it has saved. IT and Services might be outperforming the economy, but no country has made the big-league without manufacturing led growth and no labour reform and no FDI in retail will keep India back. Something that suits the Communists and Lalu, because they feed off the poor and illiterate. Don't blame Capitalism, blame the Commies.
Anyway, back to the point. Ponytail is back to his old tricks - "Dare to Think Beyond the IIM's" - Yeah, right. I wonder if the advert is carrying a modified disclaimer?
IIPM

Pharmaceuticals.

I just read this very interesting article in The Guardian.
It essentially argues that because Generics companies are always threatening to break patents, Big Pharmaceutical companies haven't bothered to develop new drugs. It uses a quote from one of those bastions of intellectual property protection, Bill Gates.
"When you think about developing world health, the price of drugs is not the key issue. It's the drugs that aren't being invented, and part of the reason they aren't being invented is that [if] the pharmaceutical companies work in these areas, then they're expected to give the drugs away. So they never go into the area, and so what we have to do is create the right incentives for the pharmaceutical companies so there is willingness to do differential pricing. Where government money, philanthropic money comes in and takes some of the risk, then we get the breakthroughs."
The truth is that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is possibly the best thing that has happened to third-world countries in a long time, because there is almost no development in the drugs that are killing people. Instead, pharmaceutical companies find themselves developing drugs that satisfy the sexual urges of old white men. Almost two-thirds of the global drugs market is in North America, in terms of value. Imagine that, 300 million people, five percent of the world population consumes two-thirds of the global volume in non-generic drugs (some $50-odd billion a year), add in Western Europe and Japan and the number crosses nearly 85-90%. Some 750-800 million people that is.
This is not software where five hundred geeky college students can work together to create a tremendous new piece of 'free' software. This is something that requires specialists with years of training working in specialised facilities developing new molecules. Now then these drugs have be tested for years, one in three drugs fails in testing, and after the Vioxx fiasco, there are those who believe that testing norms are too lax. Yet, almost no drugs are created to combat Malaria or for that matter, there has been little work on AIDS of late, because I'm sure Western companies are scared that a Cipla or Sun would want to break their patent in a jiffy, supposedly for the poor of South-Asia and Africa.That is what is happing with Roche and Tamiflu, the problem is that Tamiflu requires the 'Star Anise' flower, and that is rather expensive and rare, so the chest-beating might be just that, because Roche has been buying up almost the entire supply of the product (much to the chargin of Chinese chefs) to ensure that they can make enough of the drug in case of an outbreak.
But, its only one or two Indian generics companies (notably Ranbaxy and Dr Reddy's) that are doing any work with development, and strangely enough, many of the drugs they are developing are for Diabetics and Heart Diseases, two diseases that plague this country. As time moves forward I am sure that companies in India will grow to value the importance of intellectual property protection. Yet, Western pharmaceutical companies have to realise that stupid 'patent-extender' policies that they indulge in is not the way to go forward. I am sure that only when more drugs get developed will prices overall for patented drugs actually go down. Instead of threatening to break patents, governments should help in creating more bio-specialists who can develop more medicines. India produces thousands of Doctors but very few people capable of developing medicines - most of them like my cousin sis, run off to good ol' Amreeka because, heck, they do have better facilities. But, India can become a global leader in bio-development, if only our Government were to do a little bit - like setting up a nodal body or institute.
Anyway, I know this sounds very improper in sphere surrounded by socialists or rather anti-capitalists, who believe that everything is for the common good, but the Soviets never developed anything impressive drug-wise did they? Sadly enough, intellectual property protection is what will save the worlds poor not a lack of it!

Sports.

The other day someone wrote that see what happens when the Indian cricket team starts losing, everybody will forget them and we'll look at Sania and Narain. Um, if anyone has bothered to look at the sports pages of late - its cricket and European soccer. OK, so the ToI today carried a piece on how Nico Rosberg took the second seat at Williams, a seat that Narain Karthikeyan was hoping to buy, but Williams made enough money from Jenson Button and didn't want to buy Narain. Despite what the Indian auto magazines (hah!) say, Narain had been completely out-performed by his non-pay team-mate Tiago Monteiro in the second-half of last season. Narain was a novelty in F1, the first Indian F1 driver, he was never going to become the first Indian F1 champion or F1 podium finisher, heck, he did have a chance of making the podium, but he bungled that up at Indianapolis (and his reaction to that race ruined whatever respect I had for him). Anyway, its rather clear that Narain most probably won't have a drive next season. Experiment over.
Honestly, instead of seeing a driver in F1 I would rather see an unified motorsports body in India - there are two the FMSCI recognised by the FIA and the MAI recognised by the Indian Government, which has crippled the development of motorsports in this country. Heck, other than a couple of race-tracks down south there aren't even good tracks in India. Instead of spending money to send not-so-good drivers to F1, we should spend on developing India's motorsports infrastructure, so that we can also produce a Raikkonen or an Alonso or even a Nico Rosberg, who isn't just a famous name - he also won the FIA GP2 championship this year.
By the way, I find A1 Grand Prix rather boring.
Now back to Cricket. We are winning, something which is driving a stake through thousands of Ganguly acolytes (read : the Bengali community). I heard the rather ridiculously cynical idea that Sri Lanka are throwing the matches so that Ganguly doesn't come back. I might be as much of a cynic as the next person when it comes to cricket match results, but for gods sake. I genuinely like the way this 'new' team is playing. There is a verve to the team and then there is Dhoni, who I believe has buldgeoned his way into the Test team. Bye bye Parthiv Patel.
But, the big sporting news, something which must leave my old guitarist friend Hammar who is currently in Boston close to crying (its strange to see a big bloke cry, but the news is such) is the implosion in Manchester United. The problem is that other EPL club fans (such as an Arsenal supporter like myself) are secretly rather pleased at ManU's apparent fall from grace. First they are bought by a greedy American (instead of upwardly mobile rich Russian) and now this. Pity, because they were a great club. I agree with Kevin McCarra, I think Sir Alex should move on, because somehow Mourinho and Wegner are much better managers, and somehow know the inherent worth of players far more.

Ca-boool!

First, I had a great Diwali, I lost copious amounts of money yesterday after winning a kilogram of tenners on Monday night. But, big deal I had a great time looking at all the fancy fireworks that the people of South Delhi sent up to the moonless skiy. The fireworks might have been imported from China (much to the chargin of the Sivakasi factories) but by god, they were of a higher quality than anything that I've ever seen before and they were quieter and I believe less pollluting as well (as they conform to EU pollution rules, or so some of them claimed).
Anyway, before I lost the money I went to meet Doctor D who came back from his tour of duty (on a film set) to Kabul. Two weeks of Afghanistan and the man looks dazed. Maybe because it was the large amounts of cheap Afghan hash that he smoked (very high quality - for 200 Afghani a tola the stuff is a steal). But also was amazed at the extreme contrast in that land - on one side there are tens of Toyota Landcruisers (which the standard mode of transport over there) on the other there is extreme poverty. And there are Bollywood stars everywhere. The Doctor was working on a film which starred John Ambraham (The Kabuliwala's liked calling him John Imbrahim) and had tales of how the man was mobbed by large numbers of AK-47 toting men at everywhere he went.
But for a land that has endured war for 30 years non-stop, he said that it is a country of amazing natural beauty. I'll get him to scan some of his pictures (The Doc is a die-hard film fan) and post them. Yet, so many cities have seen battles for them for years - I believe Mazar-e-Sharif itself has been fought for 22 times in the last 10 years. Going back a few centuries it is amazing that a dusty mountainous land has been fought for so many times.
What I am scared of is that while Afghanistan is bad, the seed for centuries of warfare has been laid in Africa, and that is going to be far worse than what we saw in Afghanistan.

Happy Diwali and all about freedom.

First, Happy Diwali and my head still hurts from last night. And five hundred rupees in tens can really stuff your wallet. Sidharth organised a great party yesterday and some of us had a very entertaining time playing teen-patti. Small stakes of 10/20, but I still managed to end the night with one hell of a lot of ten rupee notes. A lot of them, and many twenty buck notes as well. A breakfast at Fortune Global wasn't too bad as well.
Anyway, coming back to the Delhi blasts, yesterday's TOI had a front-page edit advocating the imposition of laws that could prevent attacks like what happened on Saturday. Essentially, I believe the newspaper was asking for a reimposition of the rather repressive POTA. An act that the Congress government repealed (rather than modifying it) when they came to power. Strange because Maharashtra (despite a Congress government, though it is the strangest Congress government in the country) still has the even more repressive MCOCA.
India has suffered terrorism for longer for almost any country in the world save Israel/Palestine (Note, I equate both parties in the Middle East). The killing of soldiers and paramilitary forces in attacks might be shocking, but since they are still 'soldiers', I could still at one level understand those attacks. But the killing of women and children who are out with their families is indefensible at any level.
However, will it be correct to impose an authorotarian act upon us because of that? I don't know, because I do not know how authorotarian the act will be. Will it be as invasive as the 'Patriot Act' that the US has? Or will it just add another level of security to Indian streets? Frankly, I still feel no matter how much security you have through metal detectors and guys feeling up my ass-cheeks every time I fly, India by its sheer crowd and inherent open-ness will continue to have the occasional attack - killing even more civilians.
The only way I feel we can tackle this is to be proactive (a la Israel) and just send a few of those Sukhoi's we have parked at Pune across the LoC and attack the militant camps once and for all. But with this government, which breeds corruption (Natwar Singh, Hullloooo?) and then denies it (Mitrochkin is a lying bastard and now Paul Volker is being tarred too, lets just forget Lalu) is not going to be the one to do it.
Somehow, at a karmic level we are being punished for having elected this bunch of jokers into power.