Falling standards in articles

I read for content.And perspective.

Blogging is a amazing confluence of both; the only caveat being the veracity of the facts stated is not set in gold standard.

Call me old fashioned, but I expect more from syndicated columns. A little beyond facts. If possible, insights that can make me pause beyond a second.

This article on how credit cards cheat customers is an OK blog post but a column in Rediff Money section?

The authoress has not delved into any of the processes working behind the twin issues she had. No dissection at where it is going wrong and some fix-its.
It's a rambling - the sort you hear around your cubicle all day from people who can't actually be bothered to open the bonnet and see how the goddamn thing works.

This article should have been slotted in Blogs. It is only "You know what happened one day to me..." It has no value add in a Money section.

The few understanding I have of the publishing industry, I am distressed at the falling standards in quality and depth. Apparently, one of my friends is supposed to turn in an article within a week on a topic that prev. she had little clue on. And she does this in her free time since she is freelancing along with balancing a job. And the magazines in question are supposedly reputed.

Previously, you could tell a well-read man by the perspectives and insights he had had the advantage to go through and introduce in his thinking - beyond the everyday drawing-room discussions. Now these discussions, rather narrations, pass for insights.

Why Tibet Matters

Article in IE

Duvall on Godfather III and Brando

Mickey Rooney: Who wants to be tall?!?

Karan 2

I know my post regarding Karan was excessive. Without actually reading a single page of his book and knowing the guy, I made broad sweeping statements - some of which have already been proven wrong.
More than malafide intentions, it comes from a stream of radical comedy i believe in - mastered by Carlin and Pryor - of politically-incorrect, over-the-top, tasteless generalizations just to make a point heard. I think it's much more needed in our country, where the mainstream corruption and mediocrity have entered the national psyche so deeply that we have even stopped realizing that.
An example is the intellectuals highlighting the list of achievements of NorthIndians in Bombay. Just by doing that they are acknowledging the right of a beat-up politician, propped by his dynasty and little else, to launch a violent ethnic attack on unsuspecting people struggling to make a living.
Who the fuck is Raj Thackrey to question anyone? A hair on the asshole of his patron that got shat away in the last elections. How can anyone question the rights of any citizen to his own country? It reminds me on the dialogue from Hey Ram where Kamala tells Shahrukh to go back to where he has come from and Shahrukh replies tersely – “Mere mulk se mujhe nikaalne waale tum kaun hote ho?”
Butcher this guy - lampoon him - and make jests about how he's really pissed coz he was buggered by a Bihari kid in a sulabh sauchalya. Make claims as outrageous as his, it can never be worse than the violence he manufactured. Take him seriously and you're giving him power.In fact, the scene of an unsuspecting LT passenger is reason enough for twenty years of incarceration for RT - and I am not going overthetop here. Our everyday inviolable rights are like the lady on a DTC bus – no one has the right to touch them. Period.

Unfortunately, we’ve forgotten that. We’re loud, cock-sure coz we know we’re standing over a pile of shit and we don’t want to look down. It’s time we start asking us some tough questions.

And I believe that the best weapon is humor – tasteless, irreverent and loud – questioning the limits we have set for ourselves on what can be said and what cannot; exposing the everyday hypocrisies of our lives.
Sometimes, you need to keep slapping a person to bring it to senses. Likewise for nations.

What vexed me was that KB was not a RT. I was doing the broad generalization against a guy who was nothing like RT and whose only sin was the employment of a shamelessly deceitful mean to promote his book; though only a subtle one.
Amit tells me that he is a "placecommer, top 10, P&G PPO kinda crap". For the non-IIM guys, that means a BigSwingingDick (BSD), at least in IIM jargon (a jargon some of us don't give much credit to). But all said and done, KB is an achiever, who also managed to get a book published. Laudable - not many of us have the patience and application to do that - at least, the person in this room hasn't.

But if this is so, my frustration is aggravated.All the more reason that Karan didn't really have to do this. He should have the guts, the confidence to be willing to be judged on merit alone. He has the privileges of talent and achievement to show the way; instead he’s resorting to shameless and deceitful self-promotions. I would believe that his need to write a book emanates from a need to find a bigger truth in himself, just for the sake of himself. Money would not be the issue – he is not starving. His book might still be a good read but if I, a chef at a restaurant you’ve walked into, come out of the kitchen holding the dish you ordered under wraps, telling you to just have it since I went to IIM once and got an Aditya Birla school, what’s your first take on my cooking skills?
There is an artist – temperamental and pure; and there is a bhaand.
Of course, it is KB’s call where he wants to stand.The reclusive, eclectic PankajKapoor vs. the dancing at the wedding, anything for an extra soundbyte Shahrukh Khan – the king of self-promotion.
But Shahrukh is in an industry known to favour only star-sons – he’s clawed his way up.
What’s your story, KB? Why do you feel the need to spam like those mails promising me an extra 4”? Why do you want to taint the purity of your writing aspirations with a lie? You never did see what my friend’s reading list was, right? So, you lied. Period.

Can the most basic ethical system of truth and lies be subverted in the name of marketing?
Am I old-fashioned if I call KB’s mail and the email telling me that I have been chosen from 1lakh people to receive a personal loan – lies?
Isn't a lie anything contrary to facts stated despite the knowledge of facts?
Or have the marketing gurus found another jargon for that too?

Excerpt from Shashi Tharoor's Article

In engineering, a lot of my friends debated whether Humanities as a subject should be included in the curriculum.
My aces in Humanity sort of put my argument for the inclusion biased, coz of the jack my GPA got courtsey these courses. In fact, I tried to squeeze in some more Humanities courses in my electives but the institute, for some reason, did not allow Humanities to be included even in the non-departmental open electives.

Shashi Tharoor talks about the need for Humanities in Engineering course here. I personally buy his argument tho' the context - to stop engineers from becoming terrorists is still ridiculous to me.
Just by statistics, the best brains go to engineering( read: most not all!) since it is usually at the frontier of the future - CivilEngg in the 20s, Chemical in 50s-60s, Electronics since the 60s, Computers since 80s, AI, Genetic Algorithm, Nanotechnology, etc.). The reason some of the best brains flock here is the challenge (again, some not most). Genius comes with its own burden - the burden of knowing that impact, wide and influential, is within reach in the future. The article ignores the social impact that many of these brains go to make - NGOs, social initiatives, awareness forums. Tho' I know that the author is aware of it.
It is also a presumption that Humanity per se is a sure-shot vaccination against the infection of terrorism. Some of the most violent men have been the most well-read - the Communist leaders, Pol Pot. The inherent violence (open to interpretation) of the superman ideology of Nietzsche is essentially a Humanities subject.

How do you fight violent states in today's age through any means but terrorism?
Big men, who believe they are big and destined to change the world, have the end in mind and not the means - the end being a better future: as they interpret it).
There has always been violence - it started with tribes, evolved into civilizational, national and ultimately ethnic clashes. The leaders were some of the best men of their times. Every collective violence is a reflection of the violence of the individual - be it a nation against a nation, or a race against another, or a group of mountain guerrillas swooping for a kill in the valley.
I do not offer glib solutions to terrorism as it is as complex as any pan-human phenomenon.
I agree with the author's broad views on the advantages of Humanities studies.
But his broad generalization and simplistic solutions mimic my feelings regarding Tharoor's most books and writings: good, heartening, promising - but not deep enough.

"...the argument in favour of studying the humanities. I have always believed that the well-formed mind is preferable to the well-filled one, and it takes a knowledge of history and an appreciation of literature to form a mind that is capable of grappling with the diversity of human experience in a world devoid of certitudes.
If terrorism is to be tackled and ended, we will have to deal with fear, rage and incomprehension that animates it. We will have to know each other better, learn to see ourselves as others see us, learn to recognise hatred and deal with its causes, learn to dispel fear, and above all just learn about each other. It is not the engineering mindset that facilitates such learning, but the vision of the humanities student. The mind is like a parachute — it functions best when it is open. It takes reading and learning about other peoples and cultures to open (and broaden) minds.
Ignorance and lack of imagination remain the handmaidens of violence. Without extending our imagination, we cannot understand how peoples of other races, religions or languages share the same dreams, the same hopes. Without reading widely and broadening our minds, we cannot understand the myriad manifestations of the human condition, nor fully appreciate the universality of human aims and aspirations. Without the humanities, we cannot recognise that there is more than one side to a story, and more than one answer to a question."

Minister for Youth Affairs

MS Gill - ex Election Commision

Dalai Hitler

Two of my abiding interests through the years have been the rise of Nazism and Tibet. The former arose from class VIII when I chanced on a coffee-book at a teacher's room where my young eyes stood paralyzed at the sight of bones coarsely draped with the semblance of white skin piled in a heap like a Holika (I still remember that picture).

Through the years I swallowed books and articles to understand the mass psyche that can invoke this cold, grotesque reality.

Tibet fascinated me from my trips to the Garhwals where I chanced on is depleted yet fascinating civilization. After meeting Tarun, I read more on Tibet and have always anguished at the gradual deculturization of this great body of knowledge, art and philosophy in the blood-red hands of an expansionist and anachronistically totalitarian machinery.

The recent rhetoric by China against the Dalai Lama calling him "wolf in monk's robes" and talking about suicide bombing squads reminded me of Hitlers' own tactics of attacking nations by claiming unfettered violence from . Ah! His genius! Of rhetoric, playing the aggrieved party while being the aggressor, of the wolf calling the lamb the predator.

Totalitarianism - both left and right -has always thrived on rhetoric and repression of thought within.

As a result, I searched on Google if anyone else had commented on this obvious parallel - besides the timing of this Olympics and the 1936 Berlin.

So far, I haven't come across any such articles. The closest I came was this article - written in 2006 whose logical flow still evades me.

But more interestingly - here it is China which is comparing the once-free Tibet to the Nazis!

I think China's hypocrisy is fast rivaling that of Hitler and Stalin's own.

It is, in my opinion, a great tragedy that we have empowered China economically(by allowing it to trade in the world economy by exploiting its totalitarian "advantages" - of slave labor, unfair financial practices and enforcement of mass migration and resource deployment) so highly, that it can mock us with its barefaced lies and genocides. Instead of denouncing its corrupt and inhuman governance over a fifth of the humanity with embargoes, we have succumbed to the lure of cheap goods manufactured against the laws of comparative advantage (simply because they do not come from the law of free markets) and allowed this festering red dragon to hold in terror a significant part of the world. From its own people who refuse to hear the world Tiannamen even in the cubicles of US, to the Maoists in Nepal, to the Naxalites in Telanagana forests, to the evil junta in Burma and to that grand old man in Dharamshala who weeps at the thought of how a great culture like his breathes the last, unheard gasps on the deathbed of Tibet - and human dignity.

Sneaky Pricing strategies

I normally don't discuss my work here. But I found these tips to be very common-sensical. Which is what I like about my industry - retail: it touches our everyday life immenself.

Sneaky Pricing strategies

1. Irrational pricing is putting the price of items at say $4.95 instead of $5. The reason is based on memory processing time. Rounding upward involves an additional decision compared with storing the first digits. Furthermore, due to the vast quantity of information available for consumers to process, the information on price must be stored in a very short interval. The cheapest way to do so, in memory and attention terms, is by storing the first digits. Customers think they are getting a better deal than they in fact are. (Besides, by pricing like this, you force the cashier to make change, reducing opportunities for fraud.)
2. The purpose of the discount vouchers is not to save customers money, but to get them to buy products they don’t normally buy, or to buy more of it. Look again at the terms/ offers associated with your loyalty card.
3. Eye level is buy level: Products positioned at eye height sell twice as well, so place your highest margin (not most expensive nor most popular) items there.
4. Known Value Items (KVIs) can be sold below cost to try to beat the competition: these are loss leaders. Margins must be increased by raising prices on other items that are not KVIs, and then upsold with the loss leaders. Consumers exaggerate the perceived value of the savings and tend to spend (more than) they thought they saved. NEVER run a loss leader on an item that os not a KVI.)
5. Buy one Get one free ('BOGOF') has been shown to increase purchases by up to 150%. Unlike 50% off, which actually does save money, 'BOGOF’ deals accustom consumers to buying more of a product than they normally do, so when the offer ends they are likely to carry on buying more.
6. Value add or bundling. Bundle a few complementary products in one package and charge marginally less. Or, add value by slicing/ opening/ cleaning/preparing a product. Anything that spells convenience is worth extra dough – and well beyond the cost of adding the value.

To comment or not to comment

I have started on 3 blogs and got really hooked on to them.
One is a photoblog with an entry for each day since 2005.
The other are witty and evocative commentaries on everyday India - one of them a hugely popular blog.

Many a times the posts are so complete in style and substance, that they leave little to be said other than the vapid "Wow!" and "Me too"s.

I have succumbed to the temptations of leaving some comments here and there just to show that I was there. But they are inane and redundant - and I know that.
But I have stopped doing that now - I just go and check them regulalry without commenting.

That's one issue with me - if I am seeing something that moves me, I have to tell it that I am there.
Sabby, the sleeping giant, had the quality that he could walk up behind you every day, hear you singing, smile and go back. And never let you know he was there. Or leave a flower at your doorstep in the morning, and never mention it. And when I went wild over - Why don't you tell her it was you! - he would just laugh heartily at my impatience.

Where does my impatience take me - disturbing the serenity of that which I see,
Where does his languid patience take him - silent and unknown to most, but himself.