I was rushing to the airport when the courier chap caught me and handed over a couple of attractive red boxes from Vodafone. The box was fairly large and had a nice heft to it and the bunch of us in the car played a guessing game about its contents. I briefly fantasised that Vodafone, having mysteriously found out that I had dropped my cell phone so many times that deep cellular damage had occurred, had understandingly sent me a couple of free phones as a freebie. My colleagues snorted at my naïveté and prophesied it would be a clock. Or a torch. Or some other quasi-useful gizmo.
Anyway, to cut the suspense short, I tore open the box with all the weary boredom of a jaded kid getting yetanotherone birthday present – and we all gazed in to see who was right. Let me put it this way — we were all gobsmacked. Nestled inside was a pig. Yup. A pig. About five inches long and three inches wide, if my spatial memory serves me right. A pig with a blackened mouth, pretty heavy at that, made of some sort of resin. And if an ugly pig wasn’t mystery enough, the pig had, on its back, a small hole and impaled in that was something that looked like a grenade pin. The pig was relayed around the car in a quick pass-the-parcel game and the conversation segued into what this thing could possibly be.
“A keychain for a giant key,” someone suggested. But even if you had been able to lug this around in your handbag, that surmise was shot to pieces by the fact that the pin fell out. With no damage or shrapnel, I hasten to add … it merely looked like a grenade pin. Someone picked up the strange pin with this circular end and peered through it. “Hmm, this is a clue,” she said, “If we can figure out what this is, we will figure out the pig-thingy. Maybe you can use it to keep notes – if you ran out of Post-its, you could pierce a note and pin it onto the pig.” Someone else thought it was some sort of stress-buster – slide your finger in and twirl the pig and gave this a try. The pin shot out and the pig flew, almost braining the driver. “See, you have two of them,” I was told, “Maybe they will send you another one and then you will have the full cast for a fairy tale enactment.”
It was all most intriguing but I wasn’t happy at the thought of lugging this hefty animal around with me so I was about to jettison the mysterious pig in the taxi. But the guessing game wasn’t over and I was exhorted by my bunch of mystified friends that I simply had to take it along for the flight. Alas, the security chaps were a bit startled when the pig showed up in all its porcine glory, the odd pin outlined nicely in the scan. The bag was unzipped and the security guy took it out gingerly and nervously pulled the grenade pin, all the while giving me gimlet glances which quite unnerved me. “What is this?,” he asked, suspiciously. I searched wildly for an answer and came up with “A toy”, stopping myself at the last minute from saying, “Du-uh, I don’t know”. It would too tragicomic, I thought, if I was arrested or shot on suspicion for a pig-thing, the identity of which I have no clue. Luckily the grenade-pin came out smoothly and he relaxed. Not to the extent of letting me take it on the flight, however. He weighed it in his hand and did a couple of reflective bicep-curls and then pronounced that it was a danger and I had to either check it in or junk it. Maybe he thought I would threaten to fling it at the pilot or maybe he thought I would use the grenade pin as a dangerously sharp instrument … whatever, I didn’t pause to find out. I abandoned the pig with a strange sense of relief and loss.
The mystery continued to seize us, however, and grew into an outsized mental itch that refused to go away. I caved in to peer pressure and called a knowledgeable friend. The minute I mentioned pig-grenade she burst into loud cackles and said, “Silly, that is not a pig, it is a pug”.
Oh.
“And that’s not a grenade pin, it is a card-holder.
Oh.
“Hmm, so why are they sending me one of the worst-looking-pig-pugs I have had the misfortune to set my eyes on and why do I need a cardholder?” I asked belligerently?
“To put your visiting card in,” said my friend, patiently, when she had mopped her eyes dry. “And what do I do with that?” I asked, still foxed. “Keep it on your desk,” she said, helpfully. I relayed this information to my eagerly waiting group and after stunned silence, the burst of mirth that erupted earned us some more suspicious glances.
Now here’s a newsflash – I know who I am – I don’t need a pig-pug on my desk, carrying my card on its back like a paper howdah to remind me of my identity. So the mystery continued. Who would need a thing like this? Maybe if you were a frontline staff at a hotel or a bank? Then a customer would figure out who you were and could read out your name, assuming the customer was not discombobulated into speechless horror at the sight of the pig-pug. That is a possibility, I suppose. But why Vodafone should assume that most of its customers are frontline staff is another mystery, which I have no energy to delve into.
I still have no idea where this pig-pug promo fits into the marketing strategy. I could call and ask my friend more details into this mystery. But guess what, ever since I moved into this high-rise in Bangalore, my cell signal is … shall we say … a tad erratic. I find that if I lean out of the window at a particular spot, and hold my head in a spondylosis-inducing angle, then the signal works. If I move my head ever so slightly, or do this teeny-weeny shift in my stance, the call drops. For a while, most of my conversations had long patches of silence from my end which earned me huge undeserved compliments of being an excellent listener, till everyone caught on. The loss of signal makes the whole “wherever you go” tagline rather ironic, I suppose, but that’s another story.
Maybe the parcel should’ve come with an instruction manual explaining what it was supposed to be. On the other hand, we might not have had so much fun. Maybe, even as I write, there are Vodafone customers all over the city (the ones who know who they are and who are not frontline staff) playing “guess what the pig is” games, whiling away the time as they wait for a signal to materialise. Or maybe it really is a stress-busting device –I could drop it and stomp on it each time the call drops and that would make me feel so much better that I might not even complain, thus taking the load off the call centres – oh, but I can’t get through anyway, because of the no-signal issue, remember? Sadly, I am now bereft of my pig-pug – by the end of the saga I had become almost fond of its ugly face. I suspect I might have enjoyed having it around to remind me of the unintended hilarity caused by an incredibly weird promo, but that’s life. Somewhere in the garbage heap of the airport sleeps a forlorn pig-pug with (or without) a pin in its back. Goodbye pig-pug.
(Radhika Chadha is a consultant in strategy and innovation and the co-author of Innovative India: Insights for the Thinking Manager. Karate-gy is the proprietary name of the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow Ltd. )Unorganised and organised retail must coexist and flourish in India…
After almost scaring the Tata Motors away from West Bengal, Mamata Bannerjee has now trained her guns on Reliance Retail. Well, Reliance Retail should be used to being targeted by feisty women politicians. Immediately after coming to power in Lucknow, Ms. Mayawati had earlier undertaken a similar exercise in UP.
All this is taking place when behemoths of international retail are trying to enter the Indian market. Tesco has chosen to come with Tatas, while Reliance has tied up with Wincanton. The big daddy of them all, Wal-Mart is coming to India courtesy the Bharti group.
In the September edition of Pragati-The Indian National Interest Review, Prashant Kumar Singh makes significant observations about the confusion surrounding retail industry in India. He rightly notices that-
The debate over retail in India has been fixated on the growth of organised retail, entry of international retailers and concomitant demise of the traditional retailer. The spectre of ogres like Wal-Mart gobbling small retailers has completely paralysed the government on the policy formulation front; not because of any real concern for small retailers but more out of their perceived political clout. This lack of policy initiatives for boosting and regulating organised retail is unfortunately based on the fallacy that modern retail and unorganised retail are necessarily antagonistic.
…Available data provides sufficient evidence that traditional retail is under no immediate threat from organised retail. With the present rate of growth of organised retail of 45 percent per annum, any structural changes brought about by gradual policy shifts will take at least a decade before unorganised retail feels the heat. This assessment is not to condone continued government stupor towards the unorganised sector on the issues of credit availability, access to distribution channels, and realisation of fair price for the produce. It is, instead, meant to spur the government to initiate concrete measures to support the traditional retailers.
…Given the benefits of organised retail, the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) needs to be analysed. It is fallacious to prescribe FDI as the panacea for all the ills plaguing organised retail. The eagerness of international giants to enter Indian markets can be attributed to saturation of the developed markets and low penetration of formal retail in India. The entry of FDI in retail will tilt the balance between suppliers and retailers, force smaller players to adapt and differentiate, and bring consolidation in the sector. The accompanying direct benefits are substantial: increase in exports due to high level of sourcing from India, incorporation of global best practices, investments in the complete supply chain–especially in technologies relating to cold chain, food processing and IT, increase in product variety and categories, increase in employment, and secondary benefits of modern agriculture and shopping tourism. Moreover, this FDI in retail will arrive without any sops and tax breaks from the government, unlike IT and auto-manufacturing sectors, where state governments have been bending backwards to attract investments.
Prashant Kumar Singh makes a strong case that with the right government policies in place, “the ecosystem of the retail industry in India will then adapt itself to accommodate the two seemingly divergent strands of retailing, evolving into an indigenous Indian retail model”. To read the complete piece titled “Retail in Doldrums“, download the community edition(pdf) of the latest issue of Pragati-The Indian National Interest Review.
Source - http://www.businessweek.com//technology/content/sep2008/tc2008093_489920.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
Some are calling Google's (GOOG) new browser Chrome an "Internet Explorer killer." Others venture further and call it a "Windows killer." Whether Google's newly launched browser has Microsoft (MSFT) quaking is unclear, but there's no doubt that Google is serious about "organizing the world's information"—and is prepared to shake up the status quo in the process.
It should come as little surprise that Google is entering the Web browser market. The search heavyweight already has a substantial stake in our online activities. Search, check! E-mail, check! Office documents, check! The list of Web applications offered by Google is both long and varied. With its goal of providing all of our online needs, it makes perfect sense that Google would step up and provide a Web browser built to accommodate its applications. With Chrome, Google is betting that more of us will move more of our computing from desktops to online, relying on the vast data centers known as "the cloud." But can Google's Web browser singlehandedly entice us to dump a favorite Web browser and our computer's operating system?
Let's start with the operating system. What's your favorite flavor? Windows, OS X, Linux? Whichever your allegiance, for at least the next several years, you'll need an operating system to boot your computer and store the applications that are still too large and unwieldy to run from inside the cloud. Take iTunes, Photoshop, or PowerPoint. While online equivalents exist, they just can't match the processing power and functionality that come from the applications you run from your computer's operating system.
And, while Google Chrome's strength comes in its ability to segment online activities—an open tab playing a live video stream won't slow down the remainder of your Web browsing—it still needs an operating system at its foundation. For evidence that Google Chrome is not yet ready to replace an operating system, consider the browser's limitations at launch. Despite two years of hard work, Chrome can't run without Windows and it won't run at all on Apple's OS X or Linux.
Then comes the question of Chrome's potential for wresting market share from Google's rivals. Can Google really launch a new browser and expect to grab some of Internet Explorer's 72% Web browser market share and Firefox's 20%? Chrome certainly started off strong. On its opening days, according to analysts at Lehman Brothers, free downloads reached an astounding 2% of the market. Lehman predicts that the new browser could reach 15%-20% market share in just two years. In other words, it's likely to be big, but not dominant.
What's more, Google Chrome is not yet proven as a revolutionary Web browser. Google technicians emphasize that its architecture is different, and predict that it will handle computing intensive software applications better than its rivals. But most of the Web surfers who downloaded it on its first day came to face to face with a bare-bones browser with few of the add-ons and plug-ins available on the others.
What Chrome can boast is the Google brand. While not everything Google touches turns to shareholder gold, its brand works wonders. The company could launch a new brand of laundry detergent, and we'd likely clear grocery store shelves of the stuff. You can bet that Google's fans will jump at the chance to download a Google-branded browser, so they can check their Gmail, look-up their Google Maps, and search for laundry detergent on Google.com.
It's our infatuation with the Google brand, more than the technology inside, that will boost Chrome's market share and further extend Google in our daily Web activities. As for being a Windows or Internet Explorer killer, don't count on it.
From http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/aug/05house.htm
"Even God will not be able to save this country," a fuming Supreme Court on Tuesday said while slamming the government for its refusal to amend the law for launching criminal prosecution against those who illegally occupy official houses.
"We are fed up with this government," the apex court said, adding, "They don't have the guts to differ with the opinion of the clerks."
"Even God will not be able to save this country. In India even if God comes down, he cannot change our country. Our country's character has gone. We are helpless," a bench of Justices B N Aggrawal and G S Singhvi said.
The apex court said PILs are being filed before it by people who are vexed with the approach of the government on various issues.
"You complain about judicial activism when you are in power. When you are not in power you come to us for remedy," the bench said.
The bench gave vent to its anger as Additional Solicitor General Amarender Saran bluntly told the court that the Centre had decided not to amend Section 441 IPC (criminal trespass) for prosecuting squatters of Government accommodation in the country.
The government took the stance that the existing provisions provided under the Public Premises Act was sufficient to evict those unlawfully occupying government accommodation.
Moreover, it claimed that out of 99,100 government houses only 300-odd dwellings were under unauthorised occupation for which had been made to evict them. But this did not satisfy the apex court which said the Government does not have the guts to take on the offenders
This is copied from http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-stranger-heath-ledgers-joker/
Dear readers, this is about the film The Dark Knight and will, of necessity, be crammed absolutely full of spoilers.
***
It seems we are still too close to The Dark Knight; we are reeling. The critics have generally rated the film very high, which is useful but not explanatory, and Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker has already become legendary despite the fact that we don’t really know what is legendary about it. An attempted discussion at The Valve died out amidst cries that comic books are kids’ stuff (or maybe FASCIST!), and our friend Scott at Acephalous showed wonderful enthusiasm tinged with unmistakable vertigo. Some critics have compared the Joker to a wounded child who turned out bad (instead of turning out bat), which is wrong, and others have compared him to the Sex Pistols, which is pleasanter but still not quite right. There’s as much of the bum — the homeless, unemployed and mentally ill man for whom beatings have lost their meaning — in the Joker as there is the punk.
I’m going to start from the premise that Batman’s acting and psychology in this film aren’t very interesting. Christian Bale doesn’t get a chance to act, because neither playboys nor avengers get to feel much emotion, and he doesn’t develop because he did all that in the first movie. Instead, it’s the idea of Batman, the sum total of the things he represents, says, and does, that start the engine of the film — he is the fixed quantity, the “immovable object,” with which the Joker dances. Furthermore, the secondary plot of the film, involving Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face, falls way short of Batman’s chemistry with the Joker. (This is partly due to Aaron Eckhart’s limitations as an actor, which are considerable. He appears to get his ideas for characters from their summaries on Wikipedia.) Thus everything revolves around the Joker. The film forces us to return to him obsessively.
In an interview with Fear.com, Ledger announced that he and Christopher Nolan had “the same idea” about the Joker, but refused to elaborate.
What is the meaning of what Ledger has left us?
***
I advise you to hire a poet.
-Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust
First, it must be said that the Joker is much, much smarter than Batman. Not only does he guess every move that Batman will make throughout the film, adjusting his own actions accordingly, but he shatters the fundamental assumption of any superhero film, which is that superheroes don’t kill supervillains because they (the heroes) are finally so dominant that they have the luxury of mercy. In The Dark Knight, Batman doesn’t kill The Joker because the nature of the separation between the Joker and himself is just too tenuous, and he has to enforce that separation by refusing to kill. The Joker happily calls his bluff, leading to three scenes where The Joker wins by showing no concern for his own life (four if you count the grenades in his jacket).
The reverse is also true, though — The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other — I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people — Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.
That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.
Insofar as we can untangle the Joker, the story goes something like this: It is the nature of the self to be melancholic, and thus to long for a return to a critical point of origin, which, if lost, would leave a void threatened by madness. As a result, the individual tries to go back to a point of origin that he has (for all practical purposes) invented, lacerating himself in the process, and so actually becoming the scarred, exiled creature. At the same time, the individual, despite his scars, gradually is able to come closer to the illusion of being identical with his fantasy. Of course, ceasing to distinguish between oneself and the fantasy is also madness: when Batman takes off his mask, he is Bruce Wayne, whereas when the Joker takes off his clown mask at the end of the bank robbery, he is still a clown. The main thing enabling Batman to remain both people without a psychotic breakdown is the Janus figure of the gatekeeper, Alfred, whose two-facedness in this film (part butler, part CIA scorched-earth man) earns him the name in all its fullness.
The role of time in this psychological process is pretty confusing, but there are lots of examples that can help us see our way forward. For example, in the film Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character Jack is trying to recover the manhood that he’s lost to consumerism and the working week. This desire splits off into a persona of its own, named Tyler Durden, who Jack imagines to be Brad Pitt. In order to be Tyler Durden, and thus to recover his own primordial self, Jack has to put himself through physical ordeals (mostly savage fistfights) that smash him (and his life) to pieces but make the Durden aspect of his personality, still represented as an unharmed Adonis, more and more totalizing. In The Dark Knight, the Joker shows up at a meeting of crime bosses from whom he has just stolen $68 million. One of them asks “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have [my henchman] tear your head off,” to which the Joker replies, “How about a magic trick? I will make this pencil disappear.” The Joker makes the pencil disappear when the henchman moves towards him — the Joker slams the man’s head against a table, killing him instantly when the pencil slices through his head. In other words, the conversation about why the Joker shouldn’t be assaulted happens as the assault is actually being attempted and then foiled: the two things are one and the same, except for the split between the logic of insanity (the Joker as Adrian Brody’s pianist, performing at gunpoint) and practical thinking (the Joker defends himself against an immanent threat). The fantasy of innocent “magic tricks” is realized at the precise moment when it has utterly failed and been replaced by calculating violence. It is a version of what characters experience in Jean Genet’s novels: when the drag queen gains enough aesthetic sense to become, at last, an elegant jeune fille, he is a middle-aged man. When Harvey Dent truly becomes Gotham’s patron saint, he is a dead murderer.
The Joker would like to be completely mad, and so feel no cognitive dissonance at all; when he is accused of being mad, and replies “I’m not — no, I’m not,” his voice is heavy with regret. Even the stories that he tells to Gamble and Dawes are lucid in their very ridiculousness. Consider the story he tells to Gamble: while his father is beating up his mother, the mother defends herself with a kitchen knife, which then inexplicably causes the father to take the kitchen knife and begin ritually carving up his son’s face. What is supposed to be a story about torture and abuse turns into a story about the envy of the excluded: the little boy re-writes the story to make himself the center of attention, introducing a twist that has its own horrible fascination but actually doesn’t “fit.” This is precisely what Batman has done — turn the selfless work of upholding the law into a spectator sport with him in the middle. The second story not only features the Joker scarring his own face rather than trying to undo the damage to his wife’s face, but involves the Joker getting what are clearly external scars by sloshing a razor around inside his mouth. The union of the internal and the external is what Batman wants out of fighting crime, at Hancock-like cost to those around him.
***
In the first film, Batman fought human agents of totalitarian order; here, he fights an anarchist in love with the fireworks of chaos and the excesses of image. My sincere hope for the final installment is that Batman will face off against something inhuman, by which I certainly do not mean campy monsters. It seems to me that the inhuman is also the best possible lead-in for Batman’s conflicted relationship with the person who shares his denatured humanity — Catwoman, invoked slyly here by petitpoussin. (Nobody, as petitpoussin correctly observes, has been able to bring any life to Rachel Dawes.)
That said, what we make of Nolan’s trilogy will be greatly affected by whether we continue to overvalue films like Iron Man. Jean Baudrillard once wrote that Disneyland existed to make Americans believe that the rest of America was real; by the same token, risk-free parables like Iron Man and Harry Potter, towards which we feel genial disbelief, disguise from us the fantastic chimeras that dominate our real lives, and which comprise the glistening heart of The Dark Knight. I mean our dreams, our wishes, our nightmares, our faiths. It is because we are having trouble dealing with Ledger’s Mephistopheles, his tongue snaking around his lips, that we hear so many empty words about his “great performance” in a genre where “the movie is only as good as its villain.” Nolan thinks we deserve a better class of superhero movie: not the kind we need to preserve us in our delusions, but the kind we deserve.
A portrait of Dalip Singh Saund, the first Indian-American Congressman, will be unveiled in the US Congress at an official ceremony next month.
The unveiling ceremony honouring Saund, who was also the first Asian in Congress when he won a seat in 1956 by representing California, will be held on November 7.
Born on September 20, 1899, to a Sikh family in Chhajulwadi, Punjab, he came to the US in 1920 to attend the University of California at Berkeley.
In 1924 he graduated having earned MA and PhD degrees in mathematics.
He thereafter remained in the US, becoming a successful farmer.
However, life was not easy for an Indian in the 1920s. Anti-immigrant sentiment was running rampant across the country, as reflected in the passage of laws such as the Quota Immigration Act of 1921, the Cable Act of 1922 and the
National Origins Act of 1924.
In 1923 the Supreme Court had issued an opinion that Indians while designated as Caucasians were ineligible for citizenship because they were not "white".
Subject to prejudice and discrimination, prohibited from owning the land he farmed, his American wife having been stripped of her citizenship for marrying an "alien" man, Saund, however, did not waver in his pursuit of the American dream.
He became a founding member and the first president of the India Association of America.
The primary task of the association was to secure citizenship rights for Indians.
Building a national organisation, establishing an effective lobby on Capitol Hill, the association was able to convince Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce of Connecticut and Congressman Emanual Cellar of New York to introduce legislation granting naturalisation rights to Indians and Filipinos.
The act was signed into law by President Truman in 1946.
In 1956 Saund was elected to the US House of Representatives. He served for three Congresses.
In May 1962, he suffered a severe stroke, which left him unable to speak at all or walk without assistance, thus ending his Congressional career. He returned to California and died on April 22, 1973, in Hollywood.
The portrait unveiling is part of a programme to enhance the fine arts collection of the House and to include important members of the House.
The other US representatives to be honoured under the programme are James Madison of Virginia (1789-1797); John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts (1831 -1848); Abraham Lincoln of Illinois (1847-1849); Jeannette Rankin of Montana (1917-1919; 1941-1943), the first woman elected to the US Congress; Joseph Rainey of South Carolina (1869 -1879), the first African American elected to the US Congress; and Romulado Pacheco of California (1877-1883), the first Hispanic-American elected to the US Congress.
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