The Examined Life

Most of my readers should have already downloaded and read the July 2008 edition of Pragati. If you are have been remiss, please do so now. It is focused on India’s foreign policy and contains many high-quality articles, as Pragati always does.

Here are some thoughts on writing and editing, based on the few months of poring over submissions and editing that I have done as an editor of Pragati:

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You say

The region’s farmers could be trading one volatility for another. (via)

In your world, does having a Plan B increase risk?

Update: OK, so my point was not clear, but the article is. The farmers are not getting married to soya bean. They are planting it this year and they can return to cotton next year - the article itself predicts that they will, when the price of cotton moves back up. The two crops could be individually as volatile as they want. But unless their volatilities are perfectly correlated -the evidence of the article indicates that they are not-  when the two are combined,  their effect on the farmer’s fortune will be to reduce volatility.

The government of Madhya Pradesh has banned the sale of alcohol in the vicinity of temples in designated “holy towns”.  It turns out that there is a temple to Kal Bhairav where you offer booze to Shiva and get it as prasad. Now what?

When it comes to the NREGA or reservations, resistance from the existing order is a sign of why the measure is needed. When it comes to market forces, resistance from the existing order elicits the question “What market forces?”

Swami, arguing against my point that deregulation makes things better, claims that  Tamil TV hasn’t got better at all after the entry of private channels - the positive changes have been balanced out by the negative ones. My only experience with TV in Tamil Nadu involved watching midnight masala on Sun TV when I was in Chennai, so I am not very qualified to comment about that. But about National TV, I partly agree. Indian TV was at its best during the Bhaskar Ghose era. The quality of serials that were on air at that time has not been equalled since.

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Airtel. If you want to register with Airtel to pay their bills, these are the steps you need to follow:

1. Go to www.airtel.in
2. Find the small box that says “My account” and the smaller link that says “register”.
3. It will show you a page that asks for a user id, Airtel number, account number and a captcha. You can enter any valid looking phone number there and any junk you want into the account number. These are not validated. Only the captcha is validated.
4. Once you successfully go past the captcha… a PDF form is displayed. You are supposed to take a printout of that form, fill in all the details by hand, sign it (with signature proof, address proof etc.) and drop it off at an Airtel relationship centre. No, none of the details that you entered in step 3 gets pre-filled into the form.

Why step 3 exists is a mystery to me. Just another example of the phenomenon I talked of here.

Two links:

1

2

My wife loves wearing sleeveless dresses. In fact, it would be accurate to say that she has a fetish for them.  If she ever gets  salwar kameez with a long sleeve, she won’t wear it till it has been altered so that the sleeve is short enough for her comfort. I once gifted her a nice full-sleeved shirt and to my horror she wanted to mutilate it to sleevelessness. it took all my powers at emotional blackmail to dissuade her.

There is one exception, however. Once while discussing how she wanted a saree’s blouse to be stitched, I suggested a sleeveless blouse. She looked at me with disgust and said: “That is what whores wear!”.

My guess is that this is what happened. A generation back, the saree was the only dress for most people. In North India, fashionable women took to wearing sleeveless blouses. In  South India, they did not, and  wearing a sleeveless blouse was considered daring and mildly disreputable. Over a generation, young women over most of India have made the transition from sarees to other forms of dress. So, a woman in South India who wants to look fashionable will wear  a sleeveless kameez. This means that if you have grown up in a town in Karnataka, it is entirely possible that you have never seen a woman wearing a sleeveless blouse with a saree. The only exception would be whores. Of course, all this will change with the introduction of the Tata Nano.

Nicholas Carr’s article on the cognitive style of the Internet has been linked and discussed quite a bit. Ironically, I found that his article was an ostensive refutation of his own point. I liked the article the first time when I skimmed it. But when I read it in detail and thought through it, I think that he was incorrect on most details. I think that the low attention span that he is talking of is actually a manifestation of three factors:

1. It is difficult to read on screen. People’s eyes hurt.
2. It is easy to get distracted when you are on the net. This may be related to point one. If you get physically tired when you read an article, it is easy for your mind to wander and look up something else.
3. People read more actively on the net. Reading paper books is enjoyable. But just because you enjoy something it doesn’t mean that you are thinking. Carr’s article is nicely written and it flows well. If I were reading it on paper, I would be lulled into complacency by the flow. But because I was reading it online, I was also actively thinking about which parts I agree with and which parts I don’t. For example, I was thinking “Hmmm… Jakob Nielsen has written about writing for the web. I should head over to http://www.useit.com to compare.”  It was all I could do to stop myself from giving in to the temptation immediately, thereby proving Carr’s point. (Coincidentally, his current article is on the same topic.)

On the whole, I think that 1 and 2 are bad, while 3 is good - though I suppose that actively thinking without actually reading an article and understanding something is counterproductive.

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Ritwik says:

Your argument is essentially that regulations will ensure that only those who see a profit motive in education and are able to lobby with regulators will survive and the true educationists/ philanthropists will move out due to overburdening and ever increasing regulations. Isn’t this in contradiction to the usual lament that one of reasons why education lags in India is the fact that one can’t open schools for the profit motive? In such a case, a law that disallows the provisioning of education for the profit motive should keep these people out, right?

Ritwik is obviously not married and has never attended the Art of Living course.  If he had done either, he would have learnt that the words of your wife or of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar are never to be understood at the superficial level. There are always deeper levels of meaning to it. So it is with the words of the government.

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