Yayy, the flight appears to be on time, that's a first! :-)
For my daughter, that is. Her school has been functioning on Saturdays too, for the last 3 weeks and will do so for the next three, to make up for the days lost last month due to the Swine Flu scare. I can understand it if the higher classes were asked to catch up on lost tutoring because they may have external / Board exams in a few months' time. But what is the urgency for kindergarten and primary students to "make up" 6-8 lost days! Making them go to school 6 days in the week is quite painful, both for the kids (and the parents!). Many of us who are used to a 5-day week find it very difficult and tiring when we have to sometimes work the weekends. Imagine, six-year olds having to do 6 consecutive 6-day weeks: not just school but also homework during all the days! Are we and our schools pushing our children too much, even before the know it, into a never-ending race to achieve more? Just to get closer and closer to nervous break-downs and cardiac ailments, perhaps at a record-breaking under-thirty age... My daughter is not yet complaining, but she doesn't yet know what it will be like in twenty-odd years, if this were to continue!
I spent a couple of hours this morning at a Registrar's office in Navi Mumbai getting a document registered. During those two hours, there was no electricity in the area: part of the scheduled 3-4 hour load-shedding that is prevalent across all of urban Maharashtra excl. Mumbai (rural areas have longer power-cuts). Many homes and most businesses "beat" the power-cut by using inverters (a crude way of load-balancing, perhaps!), so they don't really bear the brunt of the heat and humidity.
What shocked me today was the observation that Government offices don't seem to have that benefit. Indeed, there was an inverter in the Registrar's office but only to run the PC and printer that was required for the registration activity. Not a single fan was working on this extremely hot and uncomfortable morning. Yet, the officials were all working, without too much of a complaint about the situation - for it must be a regular thing for them. The small office was crowded with people awaiting their turn, multiple parties signing documents and getting them stamped and so on. The sub-registrar, the boss of the place, sat in the centre of all this activity, with a soft smile on his face as he scrutinized agreements worth millions of rupees or marriages (worth much more!), and signed wherever he needed to. Not once during the two hours did I see him lose his temper or get irritated at anyone/anything. There was no way I could have kept my peace or lasted even a day in such an environment.
However, our public servants work in such an environment. Daily.
There is a lot that is wrong with the Government and the bureaucracy. Productivity is low, and there's corruption everywhere. But, the next time we sit in our air-conditioned offices (or lounges) and pass remarks about how all these babus are lazy and corrupt, spare a thought for those officers sweating it out in dingy, claustrophobic offices, without some of the basic amenities that we take for granted.
A lot needs to change...
My 6-yr old daughter is facing the biggest challenge of her life (so far...): trying to figure out how English words are spelt! English might be the default, global language and all that, but it faces a major disadvantage: it's got the funniest spelling system that can fox the most diligent of learners. Since most of the English words are actually derived from various other languages, Latin, Greek, etc., we end up with almost crazy spellings, replete with silent vowels and consonants!
My daughter just doesn't like learning spellings by rote... she tries to derive the spelling based on how it sounds. Which is how any logical brain must work. So she wrote "beautiful" as "butiful"... unfortunately, English is not a phonetic language, unlike, say, the Indian languages. Words don't spell as they sound. So, you need to "learn" the spellings of words... (this has of course spawned an industry in itself and a national pastime in the US called Spelling Bee)...
Most of us older people who have the excuse of character limit of an SMS or a Twitter message (or actually, sheer laziness!) have created our own version of English that is largely phonetic. All of us have turned on SpellCheck in our word processors and mail programs and don't have a real need to remember spellings. Voice to text conversion software is taking away the need for us to even type or write.
But, our kids have to learn, by heart, in an unnatural manner, spellings of words that sound very different from how they are taught to pronounce them.
As we heard in Namak Halaal, English is a very funny language!
If you are an avid quizzer and are in Pune today, don't waste your holiday idling in front of the TV (or the computer!)... the Pune regional round of the Tata Crucible Quiz for Corporates is being held today at the Taj Blue Diamond. The preliminaries begin at 3pm and the Final Rounds an hour later. Registrations have closed now, so if you just woke up, get over to the Taj and participate from the audience.
Visited Chokhi Dhani in Pune today with family... wonderful experience. As my daughter, Leela exclaimed, "We seem to have come to a different world this evening". The colour and sounds of Rajasthan are bound to attract everyone; rural life (and food) has a wholesome feeling in its simplicity that urban lifestyle can never match, in spite of the conveniences, technology and pace.
It's been over four months since I moved to Pune, and I have been trying hard to get a fixed phone at home. Only recently, I actually managed to submit an application form for a landline connection. Now the long wait for the connection to be provided begins... I have 5 wireless connections at home, yet I am desperate for a landline. Surprising...? 1. My mobile phones are quite erratic. I can use them for short, informal conversations where interruptions don't matter. But if I have to be on a 3-hour long conference call without having to endure frequent call-drops or poor quality, Hello Hello Can you hear me.., there is no alternative to a fixed line phone. 2. I have a decent quality wireless broadband connection that gets me 1Mbps to my home. But I cannot get more even if I am willing to pay for it. And I cannot get voice on it, although it would just need 64kbps of capacity. Regulation is to blame for both: there isn't enough spectrum available to offer higher (dedicated) speeds on the wireless network. And the broadband connection comes from an ISP licensee that is not permitted to offer voice. 3. Fixed phones are shared connections, meant for the home. My children who don't yet have mobile phones (and won't for the near future, if I can help it) need a phone at home if the parents are away. The home security system needs to be connected to a good quality phone line for it to provide remote monitoring / control features. India, and many other emerging markets, have chosen to go the wireless way for increasing tele-density. It was a good starting point for connecting the millions of unconnected. Now those millions having tasted the benefits of connectivity are bound to demand more... increasingly data and high speed at that. In the absence of adequate spectrum (that is usually fragmented between defence, space and satellite programs) and without any investments in fixed last mile networks, India and other markets in Asia/Africa will soon face a major broadband disadvantage. The digital divide between the developed countries that have been investing in fiber-to-home networks and the emerging markets that have placed their bets only on wireless is bound to increase. What that will do to the "knowledge" and "services" economy positioning of these emerging markets is to be seen.
Today's Pune Mirror carried a story on how an author has got into trouble for using the "G" word .... "Ghati" that is sometimes used to describe people from the Sahyadri Ghats or Maharashtrians. Apparently, some activist has filed a case that this is a serious threat to communal harmony!!!
Fortunately, at least in this case, police sources have said that the case against the first-time author, Murzban Shroff, will likely be dropped. Thank God! We all know what happened to that poor Bangalore techie who spent 50 days in jail in a case of mistaken identity for apparently posting a derogatory image that hurt some communities.
Will we ever learn?!
For years, we have been calling our various communities by their pet names... Sardars and Mallus and Gults and Tams and Bhaiyas and Gujjus and Ghatis and Bongs and Bawas.... our popular culture, including films, are filled with humorous references to the quirks of various states / communities... whether it is the English / Hindi accents of various groups or the miserliness of the Sindhis or the Sardar with the Patiala peg and tandoori chicken or the Bong with a cigarette in one hand and a point of view on every topic on the other..... we have always taken it in good spirit and added a new joke or riposte to the collection.
These terms are not racist, never meant to be derogatory. These are our nick-names for our brothers and sisters. Just like specific individuals become Pappu or Motu or Pinky or Laddoo, groups of people that originate from a particular state or ethnic background become known by a representative name. Does it mean that they are necessarily homogenous... of course, not! Not every Sindhi is miserly nor is every Tam an intellectual/nerd... every Mallu does not use 'gogonut' oil to shine his hair and every Gujju lady does not carry a dabba of thepla in her hand-bag.... but it would be fun to think that they did.
India is what it is because of its diversity and more importantly, willingness to accept and respect this diversity. Let us not give up our unique heritage and strength.
This seems like an interesting idea!!