Random Musings on India

Ya ya, its been a long time since the glorious start but, you know, I have a real life too. So.

Anyway, this piece is inspired by televised scenes of India's cities. In this piece, I'll start off with my favorite folks - the police in India.

Has anyone thought about how every televised visual shows the inefficiency that is rampant in India's Government institutions? The most emphatic example of this has got to be scenes that show policement. In Indian cities, whenever there is an "incident" the lathi-wielding police are out in numbers. But that, of course, is no different from anywhere else in the world. What is different is what they seem to be doing. First, not one of you, I assert, wil be able to recollect any scene where the police personnel seem to be arranged in some kind of professional scheme. They are all usually clustered together, slouching, their shoulders in the eternal droop of the physically indolent, paunchy, and with a body language that practically screams "lackadaisical". Why? Why do we silently countenance the expenditure of crores of public monies in the maintenance of such a force, if we can call it that. I would say spent if I felt that they had ever exerted themselves.

The uniformed ones never ever seem to be doing stuff alone; they hunt in packs. Usually of tens. They are usually shown crossing the street towards no particular goal. And all together of course.

Another place you meet the police are at traffic stops. We must be one of the few countries in the world where we have traffic police and electric stop lights in the same place. Always. If we are going to spend money on policemen, then cant' we at least dispense with the electric lights and save some money.

And of course - reflecting our colonial past, our bureaucratic mindset, and the uniquely Indian conflation of responsibilities across insitutional boundaries, we have the police deployed at airports to check the passports and visas of those coming in. Not once, not once has any of these worthies said anything remotely like "welcome back", "hope you had a pleasant travel"; never. There is the surly, wordless extension of the hand into which you are supposed to divine the request for your passport and some other paperwork. There is some officious and noisy stamping of multiple pages. And then there is the surly turning away from you, supposedly dismissive in the worthies' mind.

A digression - The socialists and communists in India have robbed us of our soul. Anti-god by principle and anti-human in their practice, these worthies have reduced India's once splendorous architectural history to a soulless, uninspiring industry today. Government buildings are all uniquely drab, Orwellian nightmares. The buildings are solid blocks of badly built rectangular concrete blocks whose sides are punctuated with narrow slits creatively labeled as windows. The buildings are either unpainted or are painted in yellow or green with streaks of rust running down the sides.

The Fake Scientist

After initially falling over each other to heap praise and undeserved prizes on Saurabh Singh of Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, the Indian media is now on its next mission of "exposing" Saurabh. Sad thing is that this entire episode really captures, in a stunning, brilliant, snapshot the current state of the Indian media. For years I have read reports of how our journos simply take press releases from organizations and file them as news reports. The Saurabh Singh episode shows that in its current state, the media has no self-correcting mechanism. Self-referential and circularly referential writing has been a hallmark of Indian scholarship. One simply has to look at the Irfan Habib-Satish Chandra scandal where clear evidence of plagiarism was presented by Arun Shourie. This by a person who was the chariman (or wanted to be, I forget now) of the Indian Council for Historical Research. The current Saurabh Singh episode is simply a continuation of the same mindset. One paper reports it. Another journo reads the article and arbitrages it from the vernacular to the English media as a "news report". It is revealing that there is no editorial review of such breathtaking news. In a marketplace where credibility has no value, who will spend time or money protecting it?

Now before you start wondering whether I am simply taking one incident (however big) and using it in a disproportionate way think about this: Ganapati drinking milk, Ramar pillai and petroleum from leaves, Saurabh Singh ... all these huge huge "news reports" within the space of a few years! I have long felt that Indian media is in a tailspin - just take any newspaper and read through the frontpage looking for typos, syntax errors, bad English, etc. etc. Within the space of a few column inches you will run out of red ink in your correction marker.

That said, there are a few quality operations that still exist. But the market is flooded with purveyors of bad news. Unless India as a society can filter out the incredible from the genuine, debate on any topic will continue to be marked by false claims, unattributable quotes, non-existent numbers, plagiarized opinion pieces, etc. etc. etc.

How it all started

So this is how it starts. My first blog. Well .. actually my second blog but I forgot the username and password for my first one. A long time back. If I don't remember it .. did I do it? So perhaps this is my first blog.