I don't like to think of myself as a ranter, but when I make two consecutive blog posts ranting, I'm forced to rethink that opinion. derherr and me just had a minor twitter argument about smallchange.in, Vishal Dadlani's attempt at enforcing his version of standards on the Indian broadcast media. Since twitter is just not the place for longer opinion pieces, I thought it was time for me to write what I thought out on my blog instead.

I do not live in India right now, and I did not watch the TV coverage of the Mumbai attacks on private Indian news channels. Perhaps my opinion would have been different had I had to face the horror of watching their reputedly unforgivable coverage. (On the other hand, perhaps not. I do not offer this as an excuse for my opinion.)

I did follow it closely on American television; the Thursday following the attacks was a public holiday here in the United States, and like all expatriate Indians here, I spent my Thanksgiving glued to the US news channels CNN, Fox and MSNBC whilst they covered the second night live all day. A predominant theme during their coverage was an expression of wonder that they were allowed to be so close to the action, and an expression of constant astonishment that the authorities were continuously feeding them uncoordinated, insufficient and often untrue information.

derherr argued with me that what smallchange.in is proposing is to rein in much of the shockingly inappropriate behaviour the TV channels exhibited during certain specific situations, and nothing more. I worry, though, that what it is proposing can and will snowball into restrictive control of the media by the state or the judiciary.

smallchange.in is a tale told in two parts: the first part is a heartfelt account of what Vishal saw and felt during the telecast of the Mumbai attacks; I sympathize completely with this section, but disagree with his unsubstantiated opinions about the moral, legal or newsworthy nature of many of the incidents.

The second part, the core, is terrifyingly ambiguous and is the metaphorical Pandora's Box, but without the hope. Let me quote Vishal, and dissect:


You want the court to subpoena all the TV channels for their (very probably non-existent) tapes of the event to see for themselves all the horrific events that you have already listed out in great detail in the first section. Maybe they will discover some more shocking incidents that passed you by.

I don't believe TV channels keep spools of their telecasts in a storage room somewhere, and I wonder if, after reading your petition, they haven't destroyed these spools already.
Why do you think there exists this single, inarguable definition of the phrase "inflammatory propaganda"? What fit and proper Writ Order do you want the court to pass - maybe an official admonishment to the channels? A Nivellian order saying do this no more? Cease live news broadcasts entirely? Or only when the channel deviously plans to telecast Inflammatory Propaganda?

What about Twitter's live BS? Do you know how terrifying the rubbish twits were to people like me who were so far away? Shall we jail the twitterers too, or maybe get the court to officially admonish them? Block twitter, maybe?

Tell me exactly what you want this second "writ order or direction" to contain, before I sign your petition.

The closest US TV channels have come to a moral code of conduct is to insert a 7 second delay on live TV broadcasts so that they can bleep the f-word out before the FCC gets to fine them. This is such a trivial and hateful comparison to make in the face of the Mumbai attacks, but it's unfortunately a relevant analogy. Your Authority will be the new Indian FCC, and their code of conduct will, at best, be something as toothless.

What you are complaining about is how the authorities handled the press, not how the authorities handled the Mumbai attacks. This can be tackled by either changing the way the press works, or by changing the way the authorities themselves work. I prefer the latter to your former.

In hindsight, I want the Maharashtra police, the Mumbai ATS, the SPG commandos and the union Home Ministry to have had a centralized incident management and press liaison team to have directed the press to a safe, proximate location and to have kept them constantly updated with non-sensitive information on the event. To have established prior personal relationships with the Arnab Goswamis, Rajdeep Sardesais and Prannoy Roys so that when these degenerates first telecast hotel room numbers out as public broadcast, to have called them and told them to first inform the press officer before informing their viewers. To have adapted to the situation, rather than have gone by your pre-written regulations book governing "such and similar eventualities".

Tell me exactly what you want this third "writ, order and direction" to contain, before I sign your petition.
What is this blanket statement doing in your mission statement? Are you now asking the court to randomly make up stuff that places restrictions on the television media? What are the consequences of leaving such loose questions open to the court to decide? What exactly are you asking for with this bulletin point, Vishal?

Tell me exactly what you want this fourth "other writ or direction" to contain, before I sign your petition.

--
umang pointed out this blog post to me:, aptly titled "Knee Jerk Response":

Harmanjit said it as well as it can be said. Freedom is absolute; impulsively forced state control will only come back to bite us in a year or a decade in the future. The same heads, the same cooler heads will then be forced to ask themselves whether they were right in the first place.

I'm a fan of Bangalore. I've lived there most of my life. I knew it when it was a Garden City, and I know that it's now a garden city as much as New Jersey is a garden state.

After Bangalore, I moved to New York City and am seeing the true benefits of a great public transportation system. There are 20 million people in the NYC metropolitan area - think the population of Mumbai or Lagos - and 90% of them don't need a car to survive. A car is a liability for the privileged 10% like me; a car is also a liability for the bottom quartile because they can't afford it. The middle half have cars, but choose not to live their lives by their car because there is no need to.

NYC is incidentally the greatest and most inclusive city in the world. That is the power of cheap and easy public transportation.

Let me clarify my premise. I suspect the recent protests about road-widening in Bangalore are partly about the Good Old Days and how clean and green Bangalore was; there's probably a bit of xenophobia as well, perhaps? (Shhh.) On the flip side, there is genuine love for the environment - look at these guys - they're the real deal. But unfortunately, people like me and people like the politicians will only take the cynical view, and nothing will come of these protests.

Here's what's needed: defined alternatives. Urban policy and planning is a heavily studied international academic concept.The great Kalki Barack Obama Himself emphasized the importance of the city to the culture of a country. Urban planning is not a new idea. Cities have tried and failed; roads have been widened; tunnels have been dug, new subways have been built; congestion pricing has been tried out. Everything has been tried.

My uncle-in-law was an IIMB professor who specialized in traffic management - ask him for some suggestions. Do a little research on your own and walk up to the government with a plan.

Off the top of my head, I have a four suggestions I have (incidentally, that makes it four more suggestions than the Hasiru Usiru website seems to offer):
- For every square piece of tree-lined road cut down, ask for an area twice the size to be reforested in a central location. For that purpose, identify vacant and barren land in central locations (maybe your neighbouring unclaimed plot?) and point out their availability.
- Emphasize public transportation systems over road-building. Every dollar built on the 'Namma Metro' is worth a million spent on widening a road. Namma Metro is bloody important.
- Ask for dedicated bus lanes and bus stops. Since there are not enough policemen to enforce logical bus lanes, the alternative is cordoned-off stretches of roadways... and I mean literally, physically separated, stretches of roads.
- Get numbers on the expected increase in traffic. (So what if you're wrong? At least you tried, and they gave you a new airport as the award.) Figure out how many of these may flip over to the Metro when it's designed, and whether it's worth improving infrastructure in case of a potential fall in traffic.

I'm curious about this Hasiru Usiru organization, by the way - what is their plan? Their blog seems to have "let's come up with a good name" as their main agenda. Their side agenda seems to be "let's have some meetings - lots of them." Statements like "a multi-pronged approach is necessary in the short term to stop the road widening project" do not exactly inspire confidence.

I'll try to be kind here, but websites like that really make my blood boil. There are suggestions on getting together and raising signboards. The person who registered that website is getting famous as a social activist and is busy buying his Fabindia kurtas already. But you know what? They'll end up in exactly the same place the "Save Cubbon Park from the MLAs" movement.

What movement again? This one: I remember the time when I was a kid and the Karnataka state government decided to build a 'hostel' for MLAs within Cubbon Park. Cubbon Park has the misfortune of surrounding the High Court and the Vidhan Soudha state legislative headquarters, and the legislators obviously decided to treat it like their own backyard - literally. They decided to build a big residence for themselves there.

There were protests. The protests were loud and strong. The protests died out. The MLAs waited two weeks and they got their wish. A decade later, that building has been built on Cubbon Park land, and a neighbouring portion of the Vidhan Soudha has also been successfully encroached on to build a mini-Vidhan Soudha. (The latter didn't even have any protests worth remembering.)

The failure of that movement hurt me as much as I hurt when I found out the park by Nanda Talkies road was to be cut down to build Namma Metro.

Telling the government "don't widen the roads" will not work because the larger majority will never understand why you are protesting when the traffic situation is so obviously so bad... "I mean, seriously, look at this traffic jam right in front of those protesters!". These voices - not yours - are the ones the politicians will listen to.

Unless the voice is reasonable. Take your ideas, meet up and thrash them out. Figure out five alternatives. Give them the exit clause; the leaders are human and after they take their 90% cut, they will do good with the other 10% if given that alternative.

I'm an atheist, but I pray.

Last night, Wolf Blitzer starting reading out the names of some US states off the map's legend. He continued to do so for about fifteen seconds, which was when the audience realized he had every intention of reciting every single state name. Yes, he actually did that last night. He just read out names of states. It was magical.

CNN then brought out the hologram interviews. That did it for me. It was right then that we switched to Comedy Central and listened to Jon Stewart declare Obama the next President of the United States.

I was there... or thereabouts.

I just ran the New York half marathon this morning. I negative-split the race right through and finished the race with quite a bit left in the tank; that's is a pretty obvious corollary if it's known that my pace was 10:30 a mile.

Distance,Time,Split,Pace
5k,0:33:50,0:33:50,10:53
10k,1:06:48,0:32:58,10:37
15k,1:38:50,0:32:02,10:19
20k,2:10:17,0:31:27,10:07
Full,2:17:29,,10:29

It was quite fun to run right through the heart of Times Square; the map of my route shows my GPS watch getting very confused about where I was, since the skyscrapers were in the way of its satellites. (No sane person runs over buildings, of course.)

A 2 hour long video of the race is available here; I recorded it on my DVR as well (new TV, heheh) and will update this blog again if I actually find myself anywhere in the feed.

I'll get my hands on some photographs as well, soon enough.

--
Update: I finish at 2:32:46 in the downloadable 466MB-sized finish line video. I also spotted myself at 1:38:10 of the produced race coverage, elbowing a live TV presenter out of my way while wondering why she was standing in the middle of the road, blocking everyone. Fun fun fun.

I bought myself a new TV last week and had to get rid of my old one. Since it's a pretty old TV and probably not worth much at all, I decided to use FreeCycle New York City to give it away.

I wrote an email to the group saying "Here is a TV. Who wants the TV? Please pick it up." And these are some of the replies I get. Why, God, why?!

Can I please have your tv I need one for my babes to watch her adore I would pick up monday thanks in advance

I will love to have the TV for my father, he is very sick and his room is his favorite please to be, he doesn't have a tv and I can't afford one right now for him, I will love to have that TV can I pass by tomorrow please, I will appreciate this very much.

My wife and I recently lost everything due to a tragedy and are in a NYC family shelter and the TV would be a tremendous blessing we could pick it up at your convenience

Last Name

First Name

Sex/ Age

Bib

City

State

Overall Place

Gender Place

Age Place

Finish Time

Split Time

Pace/ Mile

AG Time

AG Gender Place

AG %

BHARDWAJ

MANU

M25

5625

NEW YORK

NY

3674

2548

675

56:06

0:28:43

9:02

56:06

2891

47.8 %

Summer's about to start, and it was my first race in shirts and shorts. I wanted to break my last 10k time of 56:38 @ 9:07min/mile, so even though it was way warmer and I was way underprepared, I decided to go for it. I did break it, but NYRR unfortunately categorized me at 9:02 pace even though my watch told me I ran an 8:45. Sucks.

Financial markets in India have always loved that golden phrase "irrational exuberance" to the point that India always bottoms charts about the stability of different emerging markets. The Indian government has traditionally never believed in libertarianism, so it always comes up with exciting and unfathomed ways to regulate it, such as a total shutdown on futures trading. Of course, there is no such thing as an independent Central Bank in India, but what's worse is that nobody has even thought about suggesting such a concept yet.

But things are improving: Reverse mortgages, for example, are actually recognized by elite urban citizens in India today: with a mortgage, you live in the house for a few decades and slowly pay the bank its cost and the interest; with a reverse mortgage, you sell your house back to the bank and continue to live in it while they pay YOU until you die... at which point the bank either takes it over or your children pay the bank and buy back the equity in the house. Fantastic concept, that.

The United States, of course, has an established history of loans and mortgaging: savings; the government always spends more than it earns, peoples' saving rates are often negative; money is lent credit card, car and house and then repackaged (which is OK) but then leveraged (which is not) and then sold. India's getting there: Anil Ambani managed to IPO a shell company for $2.8 billion using not his reputation (he doesn't have one, of course) but his dead father's.

To contrast this with that other big country, 96 percent of Chinese cars bought in 2008 were paid for cash down.

The one thing that's being completely forgotten in the chaos that's the tour of the Olympic flame, is the group of participating athletes that make the games. Four months away from the Olympics, they are in the peak of their training schedules and even if they wanted to say something, they just wouldn't find the time to! Some people do, of course... like Milorad Cavic at the European Swimming Championships last month. I'd love to say that the Olympics is ultimately non-political, but with eternally fresh memories of Berlin 1936 and Munich 1972, nobody can ever say something like that.

Here's another sad and simple truth: Tibet could have been freed from China perhaps one generation ago, but that just isn't possible anymore. With the forced migrations of the Hans to Tibet over the past fifty years and with the infrastructural connections like roads and the famed train line to Beijing, it has been wholly integrated into China and isn't separate from any other part of China... except geographically, of course.

What's really at stake here, and what can be changed, is the human rights situation in China. When foreign companies want space in China, the poor are relocated to make way for them. When dams like the ones in the three gorges are built, a million people are forcibly relocated. That's always the story in China: forcible relocations of the poor to make way for "development"; this sort of situation can only implode.

The Narmada Dam Project in India was supposed to have a 6.5 cu. km. capacity and was expected to displace 100,000 people: that war against the project has been fought for 30 years now without getting anywhere. It took 15 years to build the Three Gorges Dam in China: 6 times as much capacity and 10 times as many displaced citizens. India is still thinking about that ambitious plan to link all rivers, while China has managed something far grander with the Yellow River. It cost twice as much to build Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5 in London as it did to build the new Beijing Airport.

Students in Berkeley and San Francisco again don't think about what they are protesting about; what with all the mass hysteria and holier-than-thou attitudes prevalent. An excellent photograph of the San Francisco protests I spotted was of a passive Chinese supporter being shouted at by an angry white protestor. That photograph said so much.

With commodity prices soaring, India's also going gung-ho at Africa while ignoring human rights... but then, India's a democracy and its people have historically protested with their vote. That should be fun to watch.

So these guys walked up to the Jefferson Monument in the middle of the night and started dancing. The cops came and shut them down. A few of them got orgasmic at the thought of being accosted by cops and started to shout out exciting slogans about freedom and liberty . Unfortunately, one (admittedly well-connected) woman got herself arrested, earning herself the arresting martyr nickname "The Jefferson One."

She now has a blog and a fund for her defense, and even a twitter feed with an amazing 25 followers when last checked.

How is this different from shouting fire in a crowded theatre? When you bait the cops in this land of paranoia, you can only expect that sort of response. The participants now really believe they were there to "pay Jefferson respects", and by echoing that same thought to each other enough times, they convince themselves that they actually were there for exactly that... and not for something less prestigious and more run-of-the-mill like a plain ole' flash mob???

This argument is not going to get anywhere because nobody is going to take them seriously. They aren't downtrodden and they were barely harmed. The right response today is to dance again... but by letting the cops know first. It's really difficult to expect the cops to both keep them safe and keep the "terrorists" away.

It is a good library that allows me to borrow Watchmen for a fortnight.

416 matches in, it still astonishes me when Tendulkar wins an ODI for India by scoring a century while batting second. (He's done it 14 times in this career, remaining not out half the time, but last guided a successful chase 7 long years ago.)

What was certainly the stronger achievement of the day was India's loss-free romp to the U-19 cricket World Cup trophy. Clinical!

How succinct. This newspaper even publishes a wonderful and readable Style Guide with writing tips.

I came across this excellent PDF where Pakistan's Telecom Authority decided to block all of youtube because of one offensive video, in the process creating chaos across the Internet. (That video has unfortunately been deleted, but I can bet it was blasphemous in some way or form, just like everything else on the Internet is.)

As usual, they misunderstood the difference between a single page and a whole website. When will these damned Big Brother governments learn the difference?

Due to the unexpected snowstorm, my second scheduled race with the New York Road Runners is now no longer designated a 'race': "Due to unsafe road conditions resulting from inclement weather, the NYRR Al Gordon Snowflake 4-Mile has been designated a fun run. Registered entrants will receive credit for one of the nine races that are part of the eligibility requirements for guaranteed entry to the ING New York City Marathon 2009. ChampionChips will not be used for the fun run."

I guess I'm reasonably happy about it: I was only planning to run it since it would count as one of the 9 qualifiers for the 2009 NYC marathon, since after all, 4 miles is peanuts. On the other hand, I haven't run for two weeks now and was yet planning to sprint it all the way; I might just do that even though it looks like I won't get a registered time. I hope I won't hurt myself. (Update: I ran the 4 miles at an 8:58 pace.)

I still need to lose a lot of weight to get up to speed, though.

( The screening of 'The Spirit of the Marathon' )

I have cousins who've lived for years and years in cities across the United States, but haven't ever lived in a Super Bowl-winning city. In my second year here, the city I live in did; every car is streaming across the roads of Manhattan blaring its horn in celebration. This feels GOOD.

I spent this weekend last year in a freezing Chicago; somebody predict who the Super Bowl teams next year will be, and I'll buy tickets right now!

I ran a real slow 8 miles a few hours ago; given that I ran it at 10:30/mile pace at 27F (-3C), I'm not feeling tired at all. I expect to run a full 10 miles this time next week: I'll try and run it at 9:30 pace.

That will hurt.

( Gruesome questions )