Truth behind 26/11

See this at MOB...The truth behind 26/11, a beautifully crafted documentary of the terror attacks whose first anniversary we will be marking by creating more dossiers. The video is a little less than an hour long, but worth every minute of your time...

Don't watch it, it could make your blood boil.
Don't watch it, because it will remind you of things that we are all supposed to have forgotten.
Don't watch it because everybody hoped that nobody will produce something like this, so that, you the miserable will forget that 26/11 ever happened, but thanks to the effort of the Dan Reed and the folks who helped put this all together.
Don't watch this, because it isnt good enough for Bollywood to make a (hard hitting?) movie on this - they have better things to cover...

But do watch it if you want to see how 26/11 happened with some dots nobody ever joined for most of us...

Thanks Dan Reed and folks! For all the shouting anchors and the saturation point media coverage, if there was just this one thing that we could have that gave you an insight into how dastardly the terrorist show was, it is this...

Update: On a related note, heres Tunku Varadarajan on the same documentary. Note his last para...(via Acorn on Twitter)

YAOLC

YAOLC is going to be launchedin 3 years...YAOLC? Yet Another One Lakh Car. Get it?

Once upon a time, Ratan Tata visualized the 1 lakh car - now known as the Nano. Many laughed at him, some behind him and many derided it. But then, he and his team went ahead and delivered it anyway.

And now you have the spectacle of yet another 1 lakh car YAOLC. Now, first point is that anything that aims to be YAOLC will be a me-too product. Once Maggi 2 minute noodles was launched, no other 2 (or 1.5 or 3) minute noodle could be Maggi (and many tried that and continue to do so). Unless there is a game changer.

So, Bajaj two things, please don't burn up the wires for YAOLC which will see the light in 3 years or call it something else. By then the Nano will be available in the second hand market for the price of a bike (or less). And god forbid for your project, in an electric avatar. Car sales may have zoomed in October, but petrol aint gonna last us forever...

An idiot bloggers humble suggestion - go for something more radical than the YAOLC, something BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal as Tom Peters would say) perhaps for a 1l akh electric car or something that you promise you will replace all your rickshaws with. Now that will make people sit up and take notice and maybe your marketing will get done for free too...

Digital age

This is a digital age in photography. Scanner technology and digital photography have come of age. Yet, ever so often, we apprehend spies with photographs and documents - hard copies or with maps in an age of wikimapia. I cannot believe that in this digital age, a person who is smart enough to spy is not smart enough to send the whole damn thing via cyberspace.

One plausible explanation (apart from the one obvious explanation) is that they were carrying digital images that were recovered. The other one is that the really important stuff has to be "delivered in person" to "prove their worth".

Now that begets another obvious question. How well protected and guarded is cyberspace? Any idea?

Marathi, Hindi and all that

A nice column on the Marathi Hindi issue. As a non Maharashtrian, who can read, write, understand and converse in Marathi, I could be someone Raj could extol as a Mumbai citizen. (Apart from that to add to my Maharashtrian credentials - I like Maharashtrian food, am an unabashed admirer of Shivaji). But then, I am also someone who someone has learnt to speak Kannada recently, who can vouch for Mohanlal in Mallu movies and can understand Gujarati as well. Point being, force will not work.

Soft power does.

While on this, it might not be out of context to say that AR Rehman popularized Tamil in Mumbai (perhaps all over the country). During the late nineties, his songs were the rage in college festivals all over in Mumbai. The songs were so good, people forgot "Madrasi" and danced to his tunes. Perhaps they were in other parts of the country as well, but that's for others to comment. And I personally know of Maharashtrians (and other Indians) who have bought his Tamil collection and gone on to love it!

I learnt Kannada here not because of the KRV or somebody like that. I learnt it so that I can get my work done better here than stand up as an "outsider". But I still don't like Kannada movies - I have tried to see a couple and not liked them - sorry folks, lot of work needs to happen there! But give me a good movie in any language and I will see it and that's the only it can happen - by making quality stuff and making people interested.

Hindi films helped spread the language more than "Hindi days" in government organizations ever did. The same holds for other languages...

Mobile phone call drops

Its frustrating isn't it to get call drops every few minutes or seconds...and here is a reason why. And the reason, as the author says is not as complicated as we think it is. It is a very simple reason.

While that is one part, remember that call drops happen only when you are connected - the general availability of networks itself is an issue. I have found it extremely frustrating to get a stable network connectivity. Surely the largest (or thereabouts) market in the world deserves better?

We are a nation of...

We are a nation of shoplifters, eh? Asks this article. I don't know and cannot comment. What I do know is that headlines are sometimes catacylsmic...So, I searched about our wretched life for some doomsday predictions and heres what I found...

But what I do know is that previously studies of this nature have told us that India is a country plagued with AIDS. Also heart disease (40% of Indians are at risk). Also diabetes (50.8 million here). Smoking risk is catastrophic. Cancer (one of the highest cancer rates in the world ) Obesity is also an epidemic.

At this point, I gave up.

And then we still have malnourishment, malnutrition, Tubercolosis, Leprosy, High Blood Pressure, Depression and a host of other known and unknown ailments to go. Almost every half big shot who gets arrested, falls sick - this is anecdotal, but if you read the papers, you know it right? Man, we are a sick nation arent we and we shoplift too!

Offered without comment. Perhaps it is someone seeking funding or creating a market - god knows what. Perhaps we are really unhealthy or getting there real fast. Or all this is creating a new health consciousness...Something...

The pit...

These LeT chaps have to be given an award for creativity - even if they get the death sentence for everything else..

Using this Headley guy (aka Daaud Gilani) and others like him is a damn smart idea. You know why! I am sure this guy must have managed to achieve quite a bit during his stay here.

And it appears that he also something to do with 26/11 and left a few days before etc. - there were a lot of rumours about "internal support" for and during 26/11 and I hope we get to the bottom of it, but knowing India, it may never happen. He also ran a visa facilitation agency - now god knows what his contacts here helped him achieve...

More as we get to the bottom of this pit...

A history of social networks...

Humans have always craved attention from other human beings (or their profiles these days). But to think that this is a new phenomenon would be making a big mistake. Social networks and networking are not a new thing at all...

When the phone was invented and launched in India (a difference of a few centuries till the time we did not have to shout), it was used for - you guessed, social networking - remember those wrong numbers were people chatted for hours? The same thing.

Twitter with 140 characters is difficult? Try the phone. Three minutes were the norm for a local call and everything that you wanted to say had to be completed by then. Timers (or beeps) allowed maamis to exchange s(t)weet 3 minute conversations. (And if you think 3 minute conversations is a joke, talk to anybody at a wedding. By the time they reach "today", it will be an hour.)

Once they got used to the phone, maamis called each up other and asked each other the recipe for Molakootal simultaneously sizing up the culinary knowledge of the maami and getting to know 'whats cooking' in the house. (For a long time, this was the only thing people exchanged on phones apart from festival dates). If this were on facebook, Janaki maami would have updated it with a recipe for today and then Chandrika maami would have helpfully suggested frying the jeera before burning it. And then of course her kids would have disliked "molakootal" while the Gujju kids would have died for it...Yes, yes, the maamas were there somewhere, social networking on buses and trains and on platforms while they waited...

But even before that, entire recipes were exchanged on the 15 paise postcard - which is perhaps singularly responsible for many people learning to read (imagine you could read private messages written on something that had no envelope duffer and hence causing atleast a 15 percent jump in Indias literacy levels). Nobody will admit that's how they learnt to read real fast, phonetics or no phonetics, but apart from giving bored sorters on mail trains something to do, this is what the postal network did for us. It made us more social. And then, somebody had to invent the envelope and make those status messages private...(And then literacy went down again, since there was no motivation to read addresses...)

And prior to that for local area gossip, there were temples. The best saris were worn to temples, as was the newest jewellery. Often it made it easy to communicate to god. "Oh god please give me the fancy jewellery that Saraswathy maami is wearing - it is right here in front of you". It was also the then modern equivalent of a watering hole where people gathered and exchanged juicy bits of information in the guise of spirituality. There was a Tuesday group or a Shani group for people who shared a common interest.And now theres Sai baba on Facebook. There were also schools, marriages and many a social function, but we leave them for now...

Prior to that, we social networked across walls and hedges, occasionally throwing something that really poked someone - todays pokes are harmless. Even prior to that, we strutted about in fancy headgear or clothes often borrowed from the latest hunting victim...And that's what we are doing these days. From showing off a trinket we found or a bone we found to updating our status on Facebook, we always were a social animal, now we are a social networking animal.

This was something that kept running in my brain for the last few days and this article had a sentence "Back even further, in the hunting and gathering days - the 60s - there were no computers of any kind. At all. The primary method of social networking was drawing pictures on cave walls."

And this piece begged to be written.

Of sports and sportspersons

I read this from Prem Panickers blog and it set me thinking...The link is about Agassis new book etc., but it is also about Agassi and how he was pushed by his dad (pushed being an understatement - you might want to read either the link or the book) in the formative years.

This will probably be a multi part post as I try to wrestle with my thought process. But one of the first questions that comes to my mind - can anyone reach the pinnacle of sport without being super focussed? Think Abhinav Bindra who trains at his own private range for hours. Think Saina Nehwal who trains so hard she has no friends. And the Abhinavs and the Agassis are the survival bias candidates - the guys who made it big. Many others dont...

Here are some of the questions, I am wrestling with...

Can someone become a top class sportsperson without spending all those hours and sacrifices? (clearly no).
How much of this becoming a top class sportsperson is about self motivation and how much of it is about being pushed (by someone - coach, parent)
At what point does the pushing become self motivation and vice versa?
How self motivated can you be at age 7 or 10 or 13? Is that self motivation? Really? Or is it something else being explained as self motivation?

I remember my better half saying, how in her school days, the poor guys always ran the best. They, in many cases, were running away from their "hard life". This was their potential passport to success or to put it in a different way, training helped them get their mind away from their daily hardships.

(I recall reading something similar about Rajyavardhan Rathores army background in an interview where somebody asked him about stress or something. Does someone have a link to that?)

Initial thoughts I hope to sort better over the next few days...