Journalism in the age of twitter

I don't think any comment is needed.

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More absurd abuse of English

The faster people get 'smart' without an adequate education, the stupider their discourse becomes - and nowhere is this degeneration more noticeable than in the way they mangle a great language. I have remarked on this again and again on this blog and the other one: see, for instance, this post. 

Some of the latest abuses are as follows. I just read on a newfangled news website that it is the 'ask' of many shareholders whether the errant CEO will be punished or not. The ask, not the question or query. Likewise, people send one another 'invites' these days,  not invitations, and football teams have great 'wins', not victories: far too many people have forgotten, or have never been taught, that 'win'  and 'invite' and 'ask' are verbs, not nouns. When morons serve as schoolteachers, this is the type of 'educated' adults you get...

The government of India, in its zeal to create a lot of jobs, has helped to create (or at least popularize) another such wretched new pseudo-word: skilling. They are setting up institutions galore to 'skill' young Indians and make them job- (or business-) worthy. Not teach them skills, mind you, but 'skill' them. Say it aloud - 'I am going to skill you'. If it doesn't sound weird and sick, you are part of the stupid smart set.

Pujo idea

Pujo is around the corner. This time our chief minister has been personally going around inaugurating the 'festival season' more than a week in advance - and I am sure that the vast majority of the residents of the state, as voters, are perfectly happy about it.

How I feel about this season I wrote in detail ten years ago. There has been no reason to change a line in that blogpost. But this year I had a thought: since much about the pujo 'fun' is about monstrous crowds thronging all the pandals around town, and every pujo committee has to worry about squeezing local residents for funds - their budgets ballooning with every passing year - what about charging an entry fee at every public pujo venue? They boast of vast numbers of visitors, don't they, three lakhs, five lakhs at the really big and famous pujos? Well, then, charging the very modest sum of ten rupees per visitor should solve the problem of funds once and for all! As a bonus, the crowds might thin down ever so little, and make pandal-hopping very slightly less of a nightmare for those who do it for the sake of having fun?

In your face policemen

I wish our cops could wear that sort of shirt in public, especially before their political bosses.

Thanks for the picture, Lavona.

Supercars, RIP

A tycoon whose family got rich selling bathroom fittings (and by other means, certainly - I refuse to believe that faucets, showers and wc-s are that profitable!) has died in Kolkata while racing his Rs. 3 crore-plus Ferrari. Well, his family says, he was actually always a very careful driver though mad about cars, and he wasn't racing - I am sure people like that normally drive luxury sports cars below 60 kmph. See the report here.

I have become such a callous man that I cannot feel the slightest twinge of pity or sorrow. I am merely glad he didn't kill some innocent pedestrian or his son who was beside him. And I wish the media would pause for a moment to think whether they would have been half as excited if the dead man had been driving a common Maruti. Also, whether they might write as stridently about careless driving and poorly-enforced traffic rules as they do about the evils of smoking and misbehaviour with women on the roads.

If you are wondering why I am so unsympathetic towards people like this, read this and this and this.

And here's an obituary for supercars. Once upon a time Prince Philip and James Bond drove cars like that; now potty-sellers do. If I ever had the slightest fascination for such machines, it's long dead. Even if I had a billion dollars, I wouldn't be caught dead in a Ferrari now. I know what sort of people would be 'impressed', and I wouldn't like the thought.

Cricket bizarre

I found this satire on IPL in today's edition of my newspaper so hilarious that I had to put up the link, here.

Besides, it feels wonderful to see that there are still a few people around who can write Bengali of this vintage with such effortless elan.

CM angry with red tape!

This news item in the newspaper today made me guffaw, and I couldn't help putting it up. Much irritated by the tardiness of bureaucrats pushing files around, which are badly slowing down her favourite schemes designed to make voters happy, our Chief Minister herself took to task some babus at a public meeting, asking (and that is how the headline reads in Bangla) 'How long are you going to keep things tied up in red tape?'

Isn't that what millions of long-suffering common citizens ask, looking up only to God for succour?

But think, do you imagine that it is only the bureaucracy's bad habits that are to blame? Isn't it a fact that lots and lots of people make a living (or at least a better living than their official salaries allow) only because the files move so slowly unless greased with speed money? Try getting something as humble as a driving licence renewed without engaging a tout! Now all those tens of thousands of touts are citizens as much as you and me, and they have aspirations just as we do, with no more honest and straightforward way to fulfill the same. So isn't it a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black?

Patriotism, well understood

Translated, that reads Getting shot at on the border is not the only kind of service to the nation. Stop spitting everywhere while you are chewing tobacco: that will be a big enough favour to her. 

Notice pasted on a roadside wall on the way to the Ramjhula bridge from the Geeta Ashram. 

Indian values coming, beware!

There is a news item in my paper today that says the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has drawn up a new model curriculum for engineering and management courses that makes it compulsory to learn a smattering of Indian/Vedic values. That set me thinking, and several rather disquieting thoughts came into my mind.

First, teach ‘values’ to people in college, when, as any psychologist will tell you, their values have already set hard for life? Don’t you teach values in very early life, and that too more by example than by precept, if they are to be any use at all?

Second, anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows what kind of values children who grow up fixated on engineering and/or management school later in life are being taught at home, isn’t it? That one gets an education only, repeat only, to get a job; that engineering and management is the quickest and safest way to at least a moderately paying job, that to get into those colleges all you need to learn is a bit of physics, chemistry and math (not much of that either, if daddy is ready to shell out a goodly sum of money!) – everything else is useless, language, literature, history, geography, economics, civics, leave alone something so esoteric and impractical as ‘values’? Don’t they also learn among values that it is fine to cheat through exams all one’s educational life, just as long as one doesn’t get caught, and naturally carry on living by those values for the rest of their lives? Don’t they learn that it is fine to forget everything one has crammed before exams afterwards, because knowledge is useless, only the exam scores matter? Don’t most of them condone, or at least quietly go along with the disgusting practice of ‘ragging’? Don’t they habitually use dirty language? Such kids will suddenly start learning values like honesty, hard work, thrift, cooperation, courtesy, punctuality, cleanliness, kindness etc etc in college? Why on earth should they? How can they be made to? What sort of fools expect them to?

And what exactly are Indian/vedic values? If values are worth the name, aren’t they supposed to be universal? Are Indian values all very healthy and worth teaching – extreme forms of patriarchy and casteism, for instance, open defecation, blind worship of the old, deliberate confusion of myth and history, mindless cruelty to animals, the tradition of kowtowing to people in power to their faces and constantly plotting to stab them when their backs are turned, arranging big fat weddings to show off one’s ‘success’…? (the ‘authorities’ quoted have said that our epics are great sources of good values. Look up my essay on the Mahabharata in this context. The Ramayana I won’t even deign to discuss, and the Arthashastra, another of these people’s supposed gold mines, recommends that the king spy on everybody all the time, including his own family members. How’s that for a good ‘value’?) And what kind of rubbish is a sentence like this – ‘Indian culture is largely focusing (sic) on collectivism where family and work group goals dominate over individualistic needs and desires’, and that, feel the authorities, is not only missing in conventional management literature but sorely needed by our budding engineers and managers. Well, as any semi-conscious Indian could tell you, as countless writers from Saratchandra Chatterjee to Arvind Adiga (who in The White Tiger has famously called the traditional Indian family an asphyxiating, soul-destroying chicken coop) have shown, the above assertion is pure bunkum: Indians typically neglect and treat the weak in their families, children, women, the old and the handicapped, with monstrous cruelty while paying lip service to family love and mutual obligations, and westerners, who mouth far fewer pious platitudes far less often, actually show far more collectivism and concern for the common weal: witness everything from how they keep their surroundings clean, insist on stern laws to prevent abuse of the weak, and provide social security to those who cannot fend for themselves. Whom are we trying to fool?