Whether the government, the private sector or NGOs should deliver development is a question which will not have much relevance unless India's wealth continues to grow to pay for that development.
English is one of the advantages India has which are said to be propelling it to economic superpower status.
There are all those Indians who speak excellent English. It's the mother tongue of the elite and effectively the official language of the central government. Then there is the growing number of parents who now aspire to give their children an education through the medium of that language. But is the craze for English an unmixed blessing?
Back in the sixties the British regarded Indian English as something of a joke. The comic actor Peter Sellers had mocked it so comprehensively that I found it well nigh impossible to get the BBC to allow anyone with even the faintest Indian accent on the air.
In India, we native English speakers laughed at quaint phrases like "please do the necessary and oblige", or more simply "please do the needful", and "it is suggested that the meeting be preponed", which appeared regularly in Indian official correspondence.
Feted writers
A senior British diplomat once suggested that his PA should find some less geographically specific way of answering the telephone when he couldn't take the call than saying, "Sahib is not on his seat". Much to the diplomat's dismay a colleague told him that his PA had misunderstood the instruction and been even more specific. He'd told the colleague, "Sahib is in the lavatory."
Now with Indian writers carrying off the major literary awards, and Westerners in the IT and BPO industries talking of being "bangalored" when they are replaced by English-speaking Indians, Indian English is anything but a joke.
But could the very success of English in India "bangalore" India's own languages?
The linguist Professor David Crystal speaking in Delhi said: "A language is dying every two weeks somewhere in the world today. Half the world's languages will no longer be spoken in another century. This is an extremely serious concern, and English has to share the blame." Others put it less politely, describing English as a killer language.
But should India worry if English kills off some of its 22 officially recognised and hundreds of its not-so-official languages?
Perhaps the answer is no.
In his book comparing the future of India, China, and Japan, the former editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, said India fell short of China in almost every measure except the ability to speak English.
So why shouldn't India build on its one advantage? One practical reason is because, looking back over the history of India since it became independent in 1947, it is clear that any threat to Indian languages has the potential to provoke a violent backlash.
Mark Tully is a writer and former BBC India correspondent. This is an edited extract from his new book, Non Stop India, published by Penguin Books, India
TOI NEW DELHI: For the first time in many years, fewer Indian students are going to the US for higher study, while the number of Chinese students has jumped. But, also for the first time, the number of US students in India has jumped by over 44%.
According to theOpen Doors annual surveyby the US'International Institute of Education(IIE), students from India decreased by 1% to a total of 104,000. "Yet, India, as a destination for US students study abroad, increased 44.4%," said the survey. Despite the decline though, Indian students represent 14% of all international students in UShigher educationand the nation is by far the favourite destination forIndian students overseas.
The spike in Chinese students in the US, the survey said, is largely responsible for the country registering a 5% growth in international students in its colleges and universities during the 2010-11 academic session. China has increased its student population in the US to about 158,000 by 23%, pushing it to the top of foreign sources of students in the US.
Interestingly, India has jumped to 14th place as a destination for US students going overseas. At 3,884, US students in India have climbed by 44%, moving India up from the 21st spot the year before. China remains a greater favourite, with 13,910 US students in China, or a rise of 2% from last year. The beeline for India and China is explained by the global interest in these two rising nations.
According to the study, the college campuses that reported increases in the international student intake also recorded more foreign government sponsorships. This applies for a large number of students from China, said others familiar with the flow of international students to the US. Indian students are overwhelmingly private citizens and depend on funding from scholarships and teaching assistantships. After the recession, many of these have dried up, and this may have had an effect on the student flow, they believe. The Open Doors survey said almost 70% of the funding for international students comes from outside sources.
Usually, the number of international students at colleges and universities in the US increased by 5% to 723,277 during the 2010-11 academic session. It said, this was a record high number of international students in the country, the fifth straight year of student increases - fast emerging as a major service sector earner for the US. "Higher education is among the United States' top service sector exports, as international students provide significant revenue not just to the host campuses but also to local economies of the host states for living expenses, including room and board, books and supplies, transportation, health insurance, and support for accompanying family members," the survey said.
The top 10 most popular fields of study for international students in the US continue to be business and management (22%), engineering (19%), mathematics and computer science (9%), physical and life sciences (9%), social sciences (9%), fine & applied arts (5%), health professions (5%), intensive English language (5%), education (2%), humanities (2%) and agriculture (1%).
Justice Markandey Katju, Chairman, Press Council of India, argues that the media has a very important role to play in helping the country make the transition from an old feudal society to a modern industrial one quickly, and without much pain.
The Role the Media should be playing in India
by Justice Markandey Katju, (former Judge, Supreme Court of India), Chairman, Press Council of India
To understand the role which the media should be playing in India we have to first understand the historical context.
India is presently passing through a transitional period in its history, transition from feudal agricultural society to modern industrial society.
This is a very painful and agonizing period in history. The old feudal society is being uprooted and torn apart, but the new, modern, industrial society has not yet been entirely established. Old values are crumbling, everything is in turmoil. We may recollect the line in Shakespeare's play Macbeth: "Fair is foul and foul is fair". What was regarded good earlier e.g. the caste system is regarded bad today (at least by the enlightened section of society), and what was regarded bad earlier, e.g. love marriage, is acceptable today (at least to the modern minded persons).
One is reminded of Firaq Gorakhpuri's Urdu couplet:
"Har zarre par ek qaifiyat-e-neemshabi hai
Ai saaqi-e- dauraan yeh gunahon ki ghadi hai"
In a marvel of condensation this sher (couplet) reflects the transitional age. Zarra means particle, qaifiyat means condition, e means of, neem means half, and shab means night. So the first line in the couplet literally means
"Every particle is in a condition of half night".
Urdu poetry is often to be understood figuratively, not literally. So this line really means that (in the transitional age) everything is in flux, neither night nor day, neither the old order nor the new. Also, in the middle of the night if we get up we are dazed, in a state of mental confusion, and so are people in a transitional age.
In the second line, saaqi is the girl who fills the wine cup, but she is also the person to whom one can confide the innermost thoughts in one's mind. The poet is imagining a girl, to whom he is describing the features of the transitional era. 'Yeh gunahon ki ghadi hai', i.e. it is the time of sin. In this transitional age it is a 'gunahon ki ghadi' from both points of view. From the point of view of people of the old, feudal order it is a sin to marry according to your choice, and particularly outside one's caste or religion, it is a sin to give education to women, it is a sin to treat everyone as equal. At the same time, from the point of view of modern minded people the caste system is a sin, denying education to girls is a sin, and love marriage is quite acceptable. Thus old and new ideas are battling with each other in the transitional age.
It is the duty of all patriotic people, including the media, to help our society get over this transition period quickly and with less pain. The media has a very important role to play in this transition period, as it deals with ideas, not commodities. So by its very nature the media cannot be like an ordinary business.
If we study the history of Europe when it was passing through its transition period, i.e. from the 16th to the 19th Centuries, we find that this was a terrible period in Europe, full of turbulence, turmoil, revolutions, wars, chaos, social churning and intellectual ferment. It was only after passing through this fire that modern society emerged in Europe. India is presently going through this fire. We are passing through a very painful period in our history.
Historically, the print media emerged in Europe as an organ of the people against feudal oppression. At that time the established organs were all in the hands of the feudal despotic authorities (the king, aristocrats, etc). Hence the people had to create new organs which could represent them. That is why the print media became known as the fourth estate. In Europe and America it represented the voice of the future, as contrasted to the established feudal organs which wanted to preserve the status quo. The media thus played an important role in transforming feudal Europe to modern Europe.
In the Age of Enlightenment in Europe the print media represented the voice of reason. Voltaire attacked religious bigotry and superstitions, and Rousseau attacked feudal despotism. Diderot said that "Man will be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest". Thomas Paine proclaimed the Rights of Man, and Junius (whose real name we still do not know) attacked the despotic George III and his ministers (see Will Durant's 'The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution'). Louis XVI, while in the Temple prison saw books by Voltaire and Rousseau in the prison library and said that these two persons have destroyed France. In fact what they had destroyed was not France but the feudal order. In the 19th Century the famous writer Emile Zola in his article 'J' Accuse' accused the French Government of falsely imprisoning Captain Dreyfus in Devil's Island only because he was a Jew.
In my opinion the Indian media should be playing a role similar to the progressive role played by the media in Europe during the transitional period in Europe. In other words, the Indian media should help our country get over the transition period and became a modern industrial state. This it can do by attacking backward, feudal ideas and practices e.g. casteism, communalism and superstitions, and promoting modern scientific and rational ideas. But is it doing so?
In my opinion a large section of the Indian media (particularly the electronic media) does not serve the interest of the people, in fact some of it is positively anti-people.
There are three major defects in the Indian media which I would like to highlight.
1. The media often diverts the attention of the people from the real issues to non issues. The real issues in India are socio-economic, the terrible poverty in which 80% of our people are living, the massive unemployment, the price rise, lack of medical care, education, and backward social practices like honour killing and caste oppression and religious fundamentalism etc. Instead of devoting most of its coverage to these issues the media focuses on non issues like film stars and their lives, fashion parades, pop music, disco dancing, astrology, cricket, reality shows, etc.
There can be no objection to the media providing entertainment to the people, provided this is not overdone. But if 90% of its coverage is related to entertainment, and only 10% to the real issues facing the nation (mentioned above) then there is something seriously wrong with the media. The whole question is of proportion. In the Indian media the sense of proportion has gone crazy. Entertainment got 9 times the coverage that health, education , labour, agriculture and environment together got. Does a hungry or unemployed man want entertainment or food and a job?
To give an example, I switched on the T.V. yesterday and what did I see? Lady Gaga has come to India, Kareena Kapoor standing next to her statue in Madame Tussand's, tourism award being given to a business house, Formula one car race etc. etc. What has all this to do with the problems of the people?
Many channels show cricket day in and day out. Cricket is really the opium of the Indian masses. The Roman Emperors used to say "If you cannot give the people bread give them circuses". This is precisely the approach of the Indian establishment, duly supported by our media. Keep the people involved in cricket so that they forget their social and economic plight. What is important is not poverty or unemployment or price rise or farmers suicides or lack of housing or healthcare or education, what is important is whether India has beaten New Zealand (or better still Pakistan) in a cricket match, or whether Tendulkar or Yuvraj Singh have scored a century. The Indian media so much hyped up the cricket match at Mohali between India and Pakistan that it became a veritable Mahabharat War!
Enormous space is given by our media to business, and very little to social sectors like health and education. Most media correspondents attend the film stars, fashion parades, pop music, etc. and very few attend to the lives and problems of workers, farmers, students, sex workers, etc.
Recently 'The Hindu' published that a quarter million farmers committed suicide in the last fifteen years. A Lakme Fashion week was covered by 512 accredited journalists. In that fashion week women were displaying cotton garments, while the men and women who grew that cotton were killing themselves an hour's flight from Nagpur in the Vidarbha region. Nobody told that story except one or two journalists locally.
The media coverage of the education field concentrates (if at all) on the elite colleges like the I.I.Ts, but there is very little coverage of the plight of the tens of thousands of primary schools, particularly in rural areas where education begins.
In Europe the displaced peasants got jobs in the factories which were coming up because of the Industrial Revolution. In India, an the other hand industrial jobs are now hard to come by. Many mills have closed down and have become real estate. The job trend in manufacturing has seen a sharp decline over the last 15 years. For instance, TISCO employed 85,000 workers in 1991 in its steel plant which then manufactured 1 million tons of steel. In 2005 it manufactured 5 million tons of steel but with only 44,000 workers. In mid 90s Bajaj was producing 1 million two wheelers with 24,000 workers. By 2004 it was producing 2.4 million units with 10,500 workers.
Where then do these millions of displaced peasants go? They go to cities where they became domestic servants, street hawkers, or even criminals. It is estimated that there are 1 to 2 lac adolescent girls from Jharkhand working as maids in Delhi. Prostitution is rampant in all cities, due to abject poverty.
In the field of health care, it may be pointed out that the number of quacks in every city in India is several times the number of regular doctors. This is because the poor people cannot afford going to a regular doctor. In rural areas the condition is worse. The government doctors posted to primary health centres usually come for a day or two each month, and run their private nursing homes in the cities the rest of the time.
In 'Shining' India, the child malnutrition figures are the worst in the world. According to U.N. data, the percentage of under weight children below the age of 5 years in the poorest countries in the world is 25 per cent in Guinea Bissau, 27 per cent in Sierra Leone, 38 per cent in Ethiopia, and 47 per cent in India. The average family in India is consuming 100 kilograms of food grains less than it did 10 years ago (see P. Sainath's article 'Slumdogs and Millionaires').
All this is largely ignored by our media which turns a Nelson's eye to the harsh economic realities facing upto 80 per cent of our people, and instead concentrates on some Potempkin villages where all is glamour and show biz. Our media is largely like Queen Marie Autoinette, who when told that the people have no bread, said that they could eat cake.
2. The media often divides the people: Whenever a bomb blast takes place anywhere in India (whether in Bombay or Bangalore or Delhi or anywhere) within a few hours most T.V. channels starts showing that an e-mail or SMS has been received from Indian Mujahideen or Jaish-e-Muhammad or Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islam claiming responsibility. The name will always be a Muslim name. Now an e-mail or SMS can be sent by any mischievous person who wants communal hatred. Why should they be shown on T.V. screens, and next day in print (the T.V. news at night often sets the agenda for the print media news next morning)? The subtle message being sent by showing this is that all Muslims are terrorists or bomb throwers. In this way the entire Muslim community in India is demonized, when the truth is that 99 per cent people of all communities are good, whether they are Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or Christians, and of whatever caste, region or language.
India is broadly a country of immigrants. About 92 to 93 per cent people living in India today are descendants of immigrants, and not the original inhabitants (who are the pre-Dravidian tribals or adivasis, comprising of only 7 to 8 per cent of our population). Because we are broadly a country of immigrants there is tremendous diversity in India – so many religions, castes, languages, ethnic groups, etc. Hence it is absolutely essential if we wish to keep united and prosper that there must be tolerance and equal respect to all communities living in India. Those who sow seeds of discord among our people, whether on religious or caste or lingual or regional lines, are really enemies of our people.
The senders of such e-mails and SMS messages are therefore enemies of India, who wish to sow the seeds of discord among us on religious lines. Why should the media, wittingly or unwittingly, become abettors of this national crime?
3. The media promotes superstitions
As I have already mentioned, in this transitional age, the media should help our people to move forward into the modern, scientific age. For this purpose the media should propagate rational and scientific ideas, but instead of doing so a large section of our media propagates superstitions of various kinds.
It is true that the intellectual level of the vast majority of Indians is very low, they are steeped in casteism, communalism, and superstitions. The question, however, is whether the media should try to lift up the intellectual level of our people by propagating rational and scientific ideas, or whether it should go down to that low level and seek to perpetuate it?
In Europe during the Age of Enlightenment the media (which was only the print medium at that time) sought to uplift the mental level of the people and change their mindset by propagating ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity and rational thinking. Voltaire attacked superstitions, and Dickens criticized the horrible conditions in jails, schools, orphanages, courts, etc. Should not our media be doing the same?
At one time courageous people like Raja Ram Mohan Roy wrote against sati, child marriage, purdah system etc. (in his newspaper 'Miratul Akhbar' and 'Sambad Kaumudi'). Nikhil Chakraborty wrote about the horrors of the Bengal Famine of 1943. Munshi Premchand an d Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyaya wrote against feudal practices and women's oppression. Manto wrote about the horrors of Partition.
But what do we see in the media today?
Many T.V. channels show astrology. Astrology is not to be confused with astronomy. While astronomy is a science, astrology is pure superstition and humbug. Even a little common sense can tell us that there is no rational connection between the movements of the stars and planets, and whether a person will die at the age of 50 years or 80 years, or whether he will be a doctor or engineer or lawyer. No doubt most people in our country believe in astrology, but that is because their mental level is very low. The media should try to bring up that level, rather than to descend to it and perpetuate it.
Many channels mention and show the place where a Hindu god was born, where he lived, etc. Is this is not spreading superstitions.
I am not saying that there are no good journalists at all in the media. There are many excellent journalists. P. Sainath is one of them, whose name should be written in letters of gold in the history of Indian journalism. Had it not been for his highlighting of the farmers suicides in certain states the story (which was suppressed for several years) may never have been told. But such good journalists are the exceptions. The majority consists of people who do not seem to have the desire to serve the public interest.
To remedy this defect in the media I have done two things (1) I propose to have regular meetings with the media (including electronic media) every two months or so. These will not be regular meetings of the entire Press Council, but informal get-togethers where we will discuss issues relating to the media and try to resolve them in the democratic way, that is, by discussion, consultation and dialogue. I believe 90% problems can be resolved in this way (2) In extreme cases, where a section of the media proves incorrigible despite trying the democratic method mentioned above, harsher measures may be required. In this connection I have written to the Prime Minister requesting him to amend the Press Council Act by bringing the electronic media also under the purview of the Press Council (which may be renamed the Media Council) and by giving it more teeth e.g. power to suspend government advertisements, or in extreme cases even the licence of the media houses for some time. As Goswami Tulsidas said 'Bin bhaya hot na preet'. This, however, will be resorted to only in extreme cases and after the democratic method has failed.
It may be objected that this is interfering with the freedom of the media. There is no freedom which is absolute. All freedoms are subject to reasonable restrictions, and are also coupled with responsibilities. In a democracy everyone is accountable to the people, and so is the media.
To sum up: The Indian media must now introspect and develop a sense of responsibility and maturity.That does not mean that it cannot be reformed. My belief is that 80 per cent people who are doing wrong things can be made good people by patient persuasion, pointing out their errors, and gently leading them to the honourable path which the print media in Europe in the Age of Enlightenment was following.
Adrianne Yamaki, a 32-year-old management consultant in New York, travels constantly and logs 80-hour workweeks. So to eke out more time for herself, she routinely farms out the administrative chores of her life — making travel arrangements, hair appointments and restaurant reservations and buying theater tickets — to a personal assistant service, in India.
Kenneth Tham, a high school sophomore in Arcadia, Calif., strives to improve his grades and scores on standardized tests. Most afternoons, he is tutored remotely by an instructor speaking to him on a voice-over-Internet headset while he sits at his personal computer going over lessons on the screen. The tutor is in India.
The Bangalore butler is the latest development in offshore outsourcing.
The first wave of slicing up services work and sending it abroad has been all about business operations. Computer programming, call centers, product design and back-office jobs like accounting and billing have to some degree migrated abroad, mainly to India. The Internet, of course, makes it possible, while lower wages in developing nations make outsourcing attractive to corporate America.
The second wave, according to some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and offshoring veterans, will be the globalization of consumer services. People like Ms. Yamaki and Mr. Tham, they predict, are the early customers in a market that will one day include millions of households in the United States and other nations.
They foresee an array of potential services beyond tutoring and personal assistance like health and nutrition coaching, personal tax and legal advice, help with hobbies and cooking, learning new languages and skills and more. Such services, they say, will be offered for affordable monthly fees or piecework rates.
"Consumer services delivered globally should be a huge market," observed K. P. Balaraj, a managing director of the Indian arm of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.
But globalization of consumer services faces daunting challenges, both economic and cultural. Offshore outsourcing for big business thrived partly because the jobs were often multimillion-dollar contracts and the work was repetitive. In economic terms, there were economies of scale so that the most efficient Indian offshore specialists could become multibillion-dollar companies like Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Technologies.
It is not all clear that similar economies of scale can be achieved in the consumer market, where the customers are individual households and services must be priced in tens or hundreds of dollars.
Then there are the matters of language, accent and cultural nuance that promise to hamper the communication and understanding needed to deliver personal services. Already, some American consumers voice frustrations in dealing with customer-service call centers in India. At the least, the spread of remotely delivered personal services will be a real test of globalization at the grass-roots level.
Even optimists acknowledge the obstacles. In a report this year, Evalueserve, a research firm, predicted that "person-to-person offshoring," both consumer services and services for small businesses, would grow rapidly, to more than $2 billion by 2015. Yet consumer services, in particular, are in a "nascent phase," said Alok Aggarwal, chairman of Evalueserve and a former I.B.M. researcher. "It's promising, but it's not clear yet that you can build sizable companies in this market."
Veterans of the business offshoring boom predict an emerging market, but most are not investing. Nandan M. Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys, said there is "definitely an opportunity in the globalization of consumer services," and he listed several possibilities, even psychological counseling and religious confessionals. But, he added in an e-mail message, "This is just 'blue sky' thinking! We have no business interest at this point in this direction."
What the offshore consumer services industry needs, it seems, is a solid success story in some promising market.
A leading candidate to watch, according to analysts, is TutorVista, a tutoring service founded two years ago by Krishnan Ganesh, a 45-year-old Indian entrepreneur and a pioneer of offshore call centers.
Concerns about the quality of K-12 education in America and the increased emphasis on standardized tests is driving the tutoring business in general. Traditional classroom tutoring services like Kaplan and Sylvan are doing well and offer online features. And there are other remote services like Growing Stars, Tutor.com and SmarThinking.
Yet TutorVista, analysts say, is different in a number of ways. Other remote tutoring services generally offer hourly rates of $20 to $30 instead of the $40 to $60 hourly charges typical of on-site tutoring. By contrast, TutorVista takes an all-you-can-eat approach to instruction. Its standard offering is $99 a month for as many 45-minute tutoring sessions as a student arranges.
TutorVista also stands out for its well-known venture backers, its scale and its ambition. The two-year-old company has raised more than $15 million from investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Silicon Valley Bank. TutorVista employs 760 people, including 600 tutors in India, a teaching staff it plans to double by year-end. Its 52-person technical staff has spent countless hours building the software system to schedule, monitor and connect potentially tens of thousands of tutors with students oceans away.
"Our vision is to be part of the monthly budget of one million families," Mr. Ganesh said.
It is a long-term goal. To date, TutorVista has signed up 10,000 subscribers in the United States, and its British service, rolled out in September, has 1,000.
Further gains will depend on winning over more customers like the Tham family in California. Since he was in elementary school, Kenneth has had stints of conventional tutoring, often in classroom settings with up to 10 other students. At times, this cost the family up to $500 a month. Last year, Ernest Tham, a truck driver, noticed a reference to TutorVista on a Web site and suggested his son give it a try.
"Kenneth was apprehensive at first, and I wasn't sure how it would work," Mr. Tham said. "But, shocking to say, it's gone very well."
Kenneth said he initially found it "very unusual, not seeing another person. You get used to it, though. It's not a problem." He schedules one or two sessions nearly every day, mainly for English and chemistry. With a digital pen and palette, he writes sentences and grammar exercises, for example, and his work appears on his computer screen and on the screen of his tutor. They discuss the lessons using Internet-telephone headsets.
"You can also get help with homework problems," Kenneth said, "but they're not supposed to do all your homework for you."
In a year with the TutorVista service, Kenneth has improved both his grades and standardized test scores, his father said.
Ramya Tadikonda has tutored Kenneth Tham, among many others, from her home in Chennai, India. To achieve its ambitions, TutorVista must recruit, train and retain thousands of tutors like her.
Ms. Tadikonda, 26, is a college graduate who had previously worked as a software and curriculum developer for a math Web site for students, but left to raise her children. Earlier this year, she joined TutorVista, took the company's 60-hour training course, followed by tests and practice sessions for two months. She now works about 24 hours a week as a math and English tutor and makes about $200 a month.
Ms. Tadikonda says she enjoys tutoring and the flexible hours. "You can have a career and still spend time with your family," she said. "I never thought I could do that."
The timing is right for global tutoring, according to John J. Stuppy, TutorVista's president and a former executive at Sylvan Learning, the Educational Testing Service and The Princeton Review. Improved Internet technology and the ability to tap of vast pool of educated instructors at low cost are crucial ingredients. "It becomes possible to make high-quality, one-on-one tutoring affordable and accessible to the masses," said Mr. Stuppy, who joined TutorVista last year.
Steve Ludmer, 28, and his partner Avinash G. Samudrala, 27, are betting the time is right for another kind of global consumer service. They left lucrative jobs in management consulting and private equity to start a remote personal assistant service, called Ask Sunday, which began in July.
The company is based in New York, but its work force is mostly in India. It is one of a handful of startups trying to create a business in offshore personal assistant service. Some, like GetFriday, charge hourly rates of $15 or so, but Ask Sunday has a per-request model, $29 a month for 30 requests a month or $49 for 50.
The requests can be unusual. A few subscribers had Ask Sunday search online dating services for short lists of people who meet their criteria. But the requests are mainly to help busy people like Ms. Yamaki, the New York management consultant, free up time and outsource hassles.
During a late meeting at the office recently, Ms. Yamaki said, she sent a one-line e-mail message from her laptop that told Ask Sunday to order her usual meals from her favorite Manhattan restaurant, for delivery at 9:30 p.m. When the meeting ended, her take-out food was waiting.
To handle such personal chores, Ms. Yamaki has handed Ask Sunday a wealth of personal information, including credit card numbers, birth dates of family and friends and phone numbers for doctors, car services, favorite restaurants and others. She finds the convenience well worth it.
"The service is great in a pinch to make your life a little smoother," Ms. Yamaki said. "And it's available 24 hours a day, which is more than you can expect from a personal assistant at work."
'I should have started my writing career much earlier'
Nov 2, 2011, 12.00AM IST
He's famously controversial and extraordinarily prolific. Born in 1915 and close to 97 years now, author, humorist and political commentatorKhushwant Singh could be the oldest journalist in the world - but this hasn't sweetened his bite too much. Speaking with Humra Quraishi, Singh discussed childhood memories, contemporary politics and facing death - with a spirit of celebration:
How are you spending your days currently?
By not meeting anyone. In fact, i'm happiest when left alone. I have never ever felt lonely. There are books to give me company. I keep readingall through the day and before going to beda¦my hands have begun to shake but i still somehow manage to write longhanda¦
I wake up even earlier than before now and sit and think about what all has to be written and done during the day. I watch news on the television. Often i brood about my childhood - our ancestral village, Hadali, was in undivided Punjab, now Pakistan. Before Partition, my village had a majority of Muslims - almost 95%. There were only some Hindu and Sikh families and only one gurdwara, but just no communal tension... much after the Partition, on the two occasions i visited my village, they were so emotional. How they welcomed me, putting up banners and what not! It was touching. These days, these memories keep coming back.
Yet, your penchant for contemporary political commentary hasn't gone - broad comments on what's happening in the country today?
We have an honest and able prime minister but there is rampant corruptiona¦I don't believe the likes of Anna Hazare can do a thing about this corruption. Only Mahatma Gandhi would have been able to arouse mass consciousness to halt this corruption spreading all around. Meanwhile, on the other side, it's so obvious that chief minister Narendra Modi is targeting officers in Gujarat who dared to bare the truth.
But going by your long journalistic experience, is such disorder unique to India?
Well, the recent rioting in the UK pained me. The student days i spent there were my happiest. I defend the English today. I blame immigrants for that unrest, for they don't want to integrate. Why go abroad if you don't want to mix? If you don't want to integrate, stay put!
Your age is always a matter of public comment; do you privately think about death?
Yes. I think of death very often. I think of all my friends gone and wonder where they area¦I wonder why we don't discuss death in our homes. It's one of those realities no one can escapea¦I also believe in the Jain philosophy that death ought to be celebrated. Years ago, i'd sit at the cremation grounds. That had a certain effect on me, worked as therapy. And years ago, i'd written my own epitaph: 'Here lies one who spared neither man or God/ Waste not your tears on him, he was a sod/ Writing nasty things he regarded as great fun/ Thank the Lord he is dead, this son of a gun.'
Clearly, you have few regrets; is there anything you wish you could have done differently?
I should have started my writing career much earlier - i wasted several years pursuing the legal profession. The other regret is not to have written more against religious fundamentalists hell-bent on causing divides between communities of this land. They have to be dealt with severely. My worry is over the rise of right-wing fascist parties in the country. We have to save our country from these destructive forces.
New Delhi: Heres a compelling argument for education reforms in the country: student suicides increased by 26% from 2006 to 2010,with metros Bangalore,Delhi and Mumbai having most victims,in that order.And this is just the official data. While 5,857 student suicides were reported in 2006,the figure jumped to 7,379 in 2010,according to data released by the National Crime Records Bureau.In other words,20 students killed themselves every day in 2010,something both academicians and mental health professionals blame on a flawed education system where performance pressure ranks above all else.
The governments intention to restrict the applicability of the Right to Information (RTI) legislation in certain areas such as sport and nuclear safety is puzzling.If anything,these two areas require greater transparency in light of corruption in last years Commonwealth Games as well as the protests against nuclear power plants in Jaitapur and Kudankulam.Ever since its enactment in 2005,the RTI Act has faced pressure from various government quarters to allow for greater discretion the call for removing file notings from RTI purview has been around for sometime.However,such moves go against the very principle of open governance.Trying to circumvent the RTI law or bring in amendments to increase the scope of exceptions only betrays reluctance on the part of the government to move towards transparent functioning.
There is no denying that RTI has empowered people in a way previously unknown.That RTI activists have used the legislation to shed light on a plethora of scams in recent times bears testimony to the efficacy of the transparency law.In this respect,the increasing number of attacks on RTI activists is a cause for concern.Making disclosure of information automatic in such cases will act as a deterrent.Nonetheless,there is merit in the criticism that the burgeoning number of RTI applications is hampering government functioning.This can be tackled by making declassification of government records a matter of routine.Transparent governance would receive a big boost if non-sensitive government records could simply be published on the Web India can follow international best practices in this regard.In case of more sensitive information,it could be published after a predefined lapse of time.
The screens simply said: Steve Jobs, 1955-2011. The assistant at a Washington suburb Apple store was sure it was not what the screens of displayed devices said when he had last checked. He looked lost fleetingly, and then snapped back. All business, "HoThe company, on Jobs's watch, straddled the widely disparate worlds of business and personal computing. The personal computer was truly personal, topped up with a steady supply of even more personal computing devices.
"He was a perfectionist," said John Sculley, in a television interview, of the man he infamously fired from the company he had founded. Sculley and Jobs never spoke again. Apple's best would follow Jobs's return.
Steven Paul Jobs, Apple founder, inventor, marketer and visionary, died Wednesday evening. He was 56. His family said in a statement Jobs died peacefully, surrounded by his family.
"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives," said the Apple Inc board, announcing the death. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve," it added.
Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO late August saying he was unable to carry on. The announcement didn't give reasons, but he was losing the battle against pancreatic cancer, first diagnosed in 2003.
The top job passed on to his deputy Tim Cook, who made his first product launch on Monday: an upgrade of iPhone 4, the iconic device that, as Jobs had once promised, has changed the way people use the phone.
"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being," Cook said in an email to Apple employees.
Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976, working out of that greatest of American launch venues: a garage. That company became the world's most valued company in 2011, beating oil giant Exxon.
Along the way Apple ceased to be merely a computer company as it had started. It was now a company making an entire range of lifestyle products, each more popular than the previous: Mac, iPod, shuffle, iPhone and iPad.
The company, on Jobs's watch, straddled the widely disparate worlds of business and personal computing. The personal computer was truly personal, topped up with a steady supply of even more personal computing devices.
"He was a perfectionist," said John Sculley, in a television interview, of the man he infamously fired from the company he had founded. Sculley and Jobs never spoke again. Apple's best would follow Jobs's return.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
My deepest sympathies to the family and friends of those who are always `dead' serious
I give you three seconds to recall the last time you laughed out loud. One...two...three, done. All those who remembered the last `LOL' they'd casually typed while chatting on Facebook can take turns to slap each other. And the others, who at least tried to recall their real laughter but could not, listen to me. Kya, problem kya hai? Do people, who have to bear you every day of their lives, not deserve to sometimes see the twinkle in your eyes or the teeth that you claim to religiously brush every morning? Kya aapke toothpaste mein namak hai? Then what is the matter, people?
Yesterday I observed this man at a friend's get-together. He was there to attend a party, but his face bore an expression as if the host had put a gun to his head and dragged him there. Someone told a joke, everyone laughed, even those who had heard it before. But this one's expression got worse. Not wanting to be judgmental about some constipated poor soul who may have indeed had a hard day, I asked my friend if that guy was unwell or needed help. "Oh no, Harsh is like that only. He's the serious, brooding kinds. He always says this hansi mazaak is juvenile and trivial.' My friend went on and on describing the behaviour but my mind's record got stuck at the first sentence itself. His name was Harsh? Isn't that supposed to mean joy? Or maybe his folks spelt his name as the English word `harsh' as that's what he was being, on himself.
If you are reading this, Harsh, please know that I'm not trying to criticise you. In fact contrary to what your friends told me, I genuinely believe that there may have been valid reasons or worries that forced you to adopt a serious attitude in life. But I'm not sure if you're doing yourself a favour by dismissing the power of laughter in life as a triviality. I have a problem with those who try hard to suppress this very basic trait, and in fact a unique gift to human beings, by analysing and judging the source of humour. Some of us have become so intelligent that most causes of laughter seem silly or stupid to us. Movies seem full of slapstick, comedy shows are dismissed as being vulgar (some of them actually are) -we basically start thinking its beneath us to laugh at most things. `Isme hasne ki kya baat hai', is a reply we give to most of the things that make an attempt to tickle our funny bone. What we forget is that in the search of that so-called evolved humour, we are becoming used to being serious all the time.
As I'd written in one of the previous columns, if someone tells a joke, some people get too busy in either trying to beat him to the punchline, or saying I've heard it before, or, if at all, do the teller a favour by forcing a twitch of the lips that vaguely resembles a smile. Internet, God bless, has made things worse. Now abbreviations like `lol' which is supposed to indicate that one is laughing out loud, is thrown away super casually, even though you may be slapping your child with the other hand or cursing your maid while you type it. Henceforth, friends of Harsh, try and adopt these three rules in your life. It may just change your life.
1 Set up a laughter library of your own: Everyone has a different benchmark, trigger and level of humour. You know your own, and try collecting things -DVDs, jokes, books, cartoon clippings, that could be your very own laugh-lib. Feeling low? Just dig into your laugh-lib and it may just take you away from your worries for a while.
2 Set some kind of a codereminder for yourself.
Something that'll remind you to check for how long have you, even unknowingly, sported a frown on your forehead. It could be a ring that you wear, or something on the office wall in front of your desk. Promise yourself that each time you happen to look at it, you'll take a deep breath, remember something funny and smile. Yeah, your colleagues may call for a psychiatrist thinking you've lost it, but deal with it. They don't know you are adding years to your life.
3 Finally, don't ever be judgmental about someone else's sense of humour. Don't go into an overdrive to tell your loved ones they shouldn't have laughed at something that you thought was silly. Don't give angry glares to your boyfriend if he's chuckling loud like a child while watching a movie, that laughter is way more valuable than your uptight attitude about whether it was funny or whether its causing you embarrassment in the movie hall. And laugh your own guts out, people who turn to look at you are not thinking you are foolish, they are actually jealous because they are still looking for good enough reasons to laugh. You are lucky you found yours.
Sonal Kalra has read somewhere that laughing five times a day makes you lose weight. It's not a joke. She's very, very serious.
The Tension-Not calmness trophy this week goes to The girlie gang of Prabhleen Chopra, Gauri Gupta and Ashu Gupta, for bringing their ever so lovable charm to this column's Facebook page; and to Jatin Jamwal for possessing what is perhaps the largest collection of funny jokes and oneliners and sharing it with everyone to spread the joy around.
Why are we guilty about giving in to well-deserved fun? It's time to up the fun quotient in our lives!
Each time someone at office asks me for leave, they look hesitant and guilty. I cannot figure out why, because I have never refused anybody leave. I can see no reason for doing so! Even more surprising, almost always the request is accompanied by, "I will do some extra stories before I go on leave…"
That leaves me amused as well as foxed. Why would anyone wish to work extra hard before they leave for fun? Wouldn't they rather unwind and get into the mood for holiday? But then, when it is time for me to take leave, I find myself doing the same! Working extra hard, trying to smooth overcreases that haven't appeared yet, stayingconnected not just till the last minute but even in the car or plane on my way out, till I am physically pulled away fromthe laptop and Blackberry by my family!
Not only are we guilty about our own holidays, we also grudge others theirs. As soon as a prominent politician or bureaucrat proceeds on a holiday, we start hearing murmurs of how the country is in such a dire strait and all our leaders can do is holiday (that too probably on public exchequer)! No sooner does a Bollywood star travel abroad than we start hearing gossip about who has accompanied him and how hewill certainly announce abreak-up with his current partner soon as he returns!
Fun is somehow just not ingrained into our system, nor is it accorded avalued place in our cultural ethos. Duty and responsibility takeprecedence over everything else. Enjoyment is an excess we are taught to do without. Our epics extol the virtues of duty. All characters go through hardships and are never shown having fun, almost as if greatness must meet vicissitudes! Watch any television serial. Each one has elders frowning upon youngsters who attempt to step out from within the family fold for a meal outside, to watch a film, or to go off on a holiday. "Aisa toh kabhi nahi hota hamare yahan" is the constant refrain. The entire effort seems to be focused on not letting anyone break away from set moulds and the call of duty, not even for a short while,lest they be enticed away forever!
Years ago on a visit to Australia, I visited an international magazine office one Friday afternoon only to find it desertedby all except the editor with whom I had an appointment. Seeing my surprise, she smiled and said, "Friday afternoon!" There seemed to be an explanation as well as a slight reproach in her voice. I was told laterthat I had done the unthinkable by fixing to meet her when I did.
Later, stepping out, I realised that most of Sydney was already in holiday mode, with shirtless menlounging in the sun outside bars, guzzling beer. So, Aussies,beer and Bermudas was no stereotype, I remember thinking and smiling. ComeFriday afternoon and the country breaks into holiday mode! Afriend visiting UK last month, wrote to me with a wistful note, "Everyone here lays down their pens, metaphorically speaking, on Friday afternoons and is out enjoying themselves and celebrating the approaching weekend! Why are we so serious in India?"
Yes, why are we so serious? We smile where other cultures guffaw; we talk softly and hesitantly, while others express theiropinions in loud, confident tones, and we tread carefully where others stride ahead. Back home of course Fridays are always Frydays, when we work extra hard and extra-long hours to make up for the coming weekend. We are all so guilty of claiming our pleasures!
Blame it on genetic coding or the struggles of a developing nation where nobody can take their status for granted withoutworking for it, but we have never been taught to unwind and relax. In developed countries, people are encouraged to follow their hearts. Add to that our belief in the cycle of birth and rebirth, believing our next life depends on the good karma we garner in this one, and most of us don't want to fritter away that chance of a better next life!
I believe the art of balance is all in every sphere of life. If we are able to balance the fun quotient in our lives as against duties and responsibilities, how could we go wrong? Of course, we need to understand that the opposite of 'fun' isn't 'work'; it's monotony or boredom! Work could be fun too for many. And, the situation seems to be changing for today's youngsters. Ageneration that uses peers as role models rather than their elders and epics. Connected as they are through social networks with like-minded people across the world, they are more open about their choices, refusing to be limited by parental pressures and demands. They carve out a time for work and a time for fun, and are clear where the two converge and diverge. A perfect balance between work and fun. Maybe soon we will all start becoming less prissy about our fun quotient?!
