Deccan Chronicle And The Naked Art of Selling News

In the age where our most inner and intimate matters have been commoditized by corporations, it’s no surprise that sex is being used as a tool to sell products. Many critics of popular culture use the adage “sex sells” to justify the means. Well, though there may be some truth in it, it’s disgusting if a product that comes with an element of the proverbial “social responsibility” resorts to a juvenile representation of its target market for the sake the one thing all business needs – sell more.

If the advertising guys at Deccan Chronicle think this is what young minds are – one heck of perverts ogling at hoardings of naked woman embossed in newspaper prints all over her body, metaphorically meaning to read the newspaper giving particular attention to detail, or whatever crap that was meant to mean – then there has just been a little mistake. Just that we youngsters have a little more sense than to get swayed by pictures of naked women to buy a newspaper.

What’s more intimidating is that their ad doesn’t even talk about the quality of news – the least you would expect of a newspaper – and whenever they remotely do, it’s again a skin-deep expose. Chennai Metblogs carried a post on similar lines with more pictures. Probably the in-house talent pool of Deccan Chronicle Marketing ran out of concrete ideas to increase youngsters’ readership and resorted to the only supposedly sure-to-work strategy – sex appeal.

An independent survey conducted by research firm MediaAnalyzer states that,

While almost half of men (48 percent) said they like sexual ads, few women did (8 percent). Most men (63 percent) said sexual ads have a high stopping power for them; fewer women thought so (28 percent).

If only 8 percent of women give a damn to such an ad, then was it all about increasing Male leadership? Am I hallucinating or does it really sound awkward? If you still think this would make Deccan Chronicle the-ultimate-choice-of-the-young-minds then take a bite at this MediaAnalyzer finding,

Men tend to focus on an ad’s sexual imagery (breasts, legs, skin, etc.), which draws their attention away from other elements of the ad (logo, product shot, headline). This may be why men’s brand recall was worse for the sexual ads than for the nonsexual ones.

So there goes the sex sells theory. Trying to fit an ad suited enough to market a lingerie brand into marketing a newspaper looks as awful as it sounds. They would do a lot of good to themselves, if the nice folks at Deccan Chronicle could stuff their ad-women with some clothes and talk more about how good their news reporting is, so we know exactly what they sell. We youngsters like to see naked truth in newspapers, not naked women.

This Day, That Year…

The year was 2002. The day was November 18. And I had just woken up into a warm Monday morning cooled by the humming Air Conditioners within the confines of my room at Hotel Poonja International in Mangalore. I lay motionless in the bed listening to my watch ticking the seconds off counting down to the biggest moment of my then life – the first day of work. Hours later, I would start nervously, clad in my new shirt, new trouser, new tie, new shoes and new socks, almost spill a drop of sambhar on my trouser, and take the elevator down to catch the bus to work. To Work! How awfully strange it sounded on that day to say I was going to ‘Work’!

It felt so much like a newborn baby, with nary an idea what to expect out of a career – except that, it should be ‘great’. The nervous pride of beginning a career in a dream company overshadowed the nostalgic memories that were being created in those very minutes. It was still like good ol’ college days, and the first few weeks of training meant I would continue to pour over notes and write exams and wait for results. The 90-member class room – where I always sat in the last row – seemed just another extension of the college-day classes.

And when one such session was in progress we were told not to call the instructors ‘sir’ like we were so used to calling the college professors, but to call them by name; it was the corporate culture, after all. “Welcome to the corporate world”, one of the instructors had told us with an ironic smirk on his face. Life was never going to be the same again.

Well, it never was. Five years later, today, there is just the sepia tinted pictures of those days etched in memory. I do continue to work for the same company where my career was born on this day and brought up this far; where I grew from an anxious kid into the stuff that adulthood is made of. Today, I know why it’s hard to write software, why they call customer the king, and why they taught stress management in college. I know age and energy are inversely proportional, and, needs and responsibilities increase with income. And I also know that choosing the seat next to the emergency exit gives you the maximum leg room in flights.

So five years, it has been. Enough time for a newborn to go to school. And that’s how long it has been since my professional life was born. A stutter here and a stumble there, but it has kept moving nevertheless.

We, The Bloggers

“We take your fun seriously”. The caption of BrewHaha was apt to describe the meeting of Bangalore Bloggers. Over forty bloggers from varied professional backgrounds, some with a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (one of them actually queued at Blossoms even before the sun rose for the day) tucked under their arms and a jubilant smirk on their face, made themselves comfortable over bean bags, low-rise chairs, carpets and designer pillows that flanked across the floor at BrewHaHa on a bright Saturday afternoon.

Bangalore Mirror covered the meet in its July 23 edition

It was exciting to see a number of faces hitherto known only by the words in their blogs, including a number of fellow Desicritics. Some of them had suggestions for the Biz/Tech section (me being the section editor) on how we could cover more technological tit-bits and further enrich the section.

The enthusiasm was apparent and before any time lapsed we got into business with a quick round of introductions. Suddenly we began speaking another common language - the language of corporate India - where Mocha Frappes and Cappuccinos meant ‘Have a good afternoon’. The coffee cups began making their rounds as the bloggers – now christened Blogaloreans – went about our stuff.

Blogging is not just a phenomenon. From the days of daily rants, blogging has evolved into a major medium of communication and information exchange that is determined to harness its power to make a difference in whatever ways it can. A few of the bloggers shared their ideas of a Web NGO, Wings – an initiative to help differently enabled individuals take up adventure sports, and a number of other ideas most of which would be formally discussed in the upcoming BarCamp.

The primary aim of the meet was to nail down a list of topics to be discussed in the Bloggers Collective at the BarCamp at IIM-B campus, scheduled for the coming weekend (28th, 29th July). The following are some of the topics.

1. Technical tips for non-technical bloggers
2. What do you Blog about?
3. Social responsibility of a blogger
4. Copyrights and Censorship in blogging
5. IT Laws
6. Mainstream Media versus Blogging
7. Corporate Blogging

These topics are indicative and as is the spirit of BarCamps there would be more of it. I will be co-moderating a proposed debate on Mainstream Media versus Blogging.

This is also the first formal attempt to form a professional community of bloggers in Bangalore. Arun, one of the organizers of the BarCamp conveyed to us that they have formalized certain points with IIM-B for conducting the Bangalore BarCamp every four months in its campus.

This support from the academia and the enthusiasm of the bloggers is sure to take us a long way making this a socially responsible global phenomenon that would not hesitate to raise its voice through this powerful medium and make a difference whenever it matters. And BarCamps are important events to make it happen.

L’affaire Life, Fiction and the Monsoon

The monsoon rain is dashing outside in this late night hour, as I sit beside a thick volume of The Shadow of the Wind turned to page 143 and gazing at the line I just finished reading.

Everything on that page spoke of another time: the strokes that depended on the ink-pot, the words scratched on the thick paper by the tip of the nib, the rugged feel of the paper.

Much like what the lines of fiction do to me – speak of another time and another space, forming such mental imageries as if you were being transported through time into that world – the world that fiction is made of. And every time I raise my head from the tinted pages of a book, I feel suddenly ejected from the hallucination of those imageries into the blinding pace of the real world.

Fiction tends to touch you, at times in strange ways. There are times when I’m surprised how much a character resembles me in his thoughts, as if I were actually him. Like Yambo (the protagonist in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana) did.

It was one such monsoon morning, many years back. I was staring out at the lashing rain and the chill wind seeping in with a whooshing sound between the edges of the window, until I began rummaging the non-existent bookshelves in my then home, dusting worm-eaten editions of what appeared to be Tinkle, Gokulam, Champak, Chandamama and Misha torn beyond recognition. A quick trip down memory lane reading the words from the books which bore no interest for my then grownup mind, made me go through the erstwhile thought processes of my preceding years; the times when Suppandi and Shikari Shambu held my rapt attention, and the talking animals of Champakvan gave an unfailing smirk.

At the beginning of the novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Yambo loses his episodic memory due to a stroke and can remember everything he has ever read, but does not remember his family, his past, or even his own name. Yambo goes to his childhood home, and searches through old newspapers, books, magazines and comic books to see if he can rediscover his lost past.

I noticed Gokulam’s cartoons of classroom satire that did to me then, what Dilbert cartoon does to me today. Perhaps that’s how I developed a liking for corporate satire, and the cartoon adorned walls of my work cubicle. Misha was my favorite, that I carried with me to school, reading during the long commutation. Not much has changed even now; from carrying a book with me to work to the hour-long commute, the patterns of childhood still stick on.

Somewhere between the lines of fiction lie the roots of what has become of you today. Yambo is unsuccessful in regaining past memories, though he relives the story of his generation from the books in his childhood home. But remembering is only a process and not the destination. As Umberto Eco deliciously puts it,

Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering.

Fiction has a liberating effect. I seek refuge in fiction, when reality becomes a bit difficult to handle. Like an umbrella lets you enjoy the monsoon, even as it shelters you all the while.

Blogging: Mainstream Media Develops Cold Feet

“The show tries to see the other India - the corporate circle, and what it thinks of politics and the upcoming elections,” Barkha Dutt told me when I stumbled on her, while she was waiting in our office cafeteria to interview the then chairman of our company. That was three years back, when opinions of the ‘other’ India - that had nothing to do with the upcoming elections - still mattered. Not that those opinions were going to revolutionize Indian politics or anything, but they just seemed to matter - as an opinion.

But things seem different these days. The country’s celebrated journalists are developing cold feet at the very decibels of noise created by the ever-increasing number of bloggers, and they have been equally vocal about it. Barkha Dutt writes in Hindustan Times:

Log on to the Internet, and you will be stunned to discover how many bloggers - anonymous, or otherwise — have worn their obvious bias on their computer screens. Some even write about wanting to “leave India if Mayawati ever became Prime Minister” - all this without a trace of irony or shame. Their delusion is not just offensive; it’s positively frightening.

So opinions are called delusions today, huh? Sagarika Ghose (from CNN-IBN) wrote sometime back:

Scan the blogosphere and you’ll find several vicious armchair 20-somethings vomiting out defamatory and bloodthirsty sentiments about strangers who they would, it would appear from their blogs, like to murder.

What’s the big fuss about an educated Indian voicing his personal opinions in his personal space, reaching out to his community of readers? If you are worried about misrepresentation of information, do bear in mind the readers are equally educated to understand what’s sensible and what’s not. Blogs don’t push information down your throat. People read a blog if the writing interests them, otherwise they keep away.

While, at one side, the Mainstream Media talks of free expression, on the other side it shudders at the opinions expressed by bloggers, and how vocal we get about it. Edit India quoted Barkha Dutt a few months back on how

bloggers can write anything including gossip (even about honourable people and their private lives!) and the blogosphere functions without any watchdog.

An opinion is an opinion is an opinion. And it is highly unfair to say I shouldn’t call someone a jerk in my blog, because the MSM doesn’t have the freedom to call him a jerk on television. All the more reason why so many journalists take to blogging - they have their own opinions which can only be expressed in a space personal to them. Bloggers are not over-opinionated irrational cribbers, but many bloggers also give an utterly mature and completely rational explanation on their stand. Opinions are like assholes and everybody’s got one, but it doesn’t necessarily mean everybody has to be one. (OK, I’m defamatory. Sue me.)

There have also been cries of blogging taking over journalism, but nothing can be farther than truth. Bloggers do enjoy the freedom that journalists - bound by so many other threads - do not, but there is no way blogging can be a competition to journalism. They are as different as mammals and reptiles; and as important for the evolution to sustain. If anything, blogging is complementary to mainstream media; and these are standing instances - CloudBurst Mumbai, WorldWide Help, Tsunami Help, Mumbai Help and many such!

Journalism and MSM have a far bigger role to play. Bloggers are their window into what goes on in the minds of the Indian next door - those thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain confined within the walls of his middle class home. Rather than fearing bloggers, MSM should understand the importance of embracing and complementing them. And the country’s foremost journalists like Barkha Dutt should be the first to understand this, rather than passing nervous comments making stereotypes of bloggers.

Dude, Where’s My Blog?

It was Wednesday night. The summer rains accompanied by lightning and thunder were playing their music outside, while I tried to login into desicritics. I called up Aaman when I realized I couldn’t login. “Some server issue, Phillip’s on it”, he told me. Twelve hours later – a chill running down our spine – we realized, the site is being subjected to a Denial of Service attack thereby bringing it to a screeching halt.

In the technology parlance, a Denial of Service (DoS) attack is,

…an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to, motives for and targets of a DoS attack varies, it generally comprises the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. (Source: Wikipedia)

Desicritics was shelled. The server was pounded by over 300 attacks per second, over the period of a day, effectively blocking out any legitimate attempt to open the site or any of its pages. Even as the servers began suffocating by the intensity of the shelling, the people behind the scenes worked overnight to keep the site from being grounded altogether.

The origins of the attacks seemed to be spread across the globe and that made it even more difficult to wade them off. After a day long struggle, the nice people finally held their nerve. The baby is alive and kicking, and raring to go. The thought that there was every chance we could have actually lost everything is scary. Even scarier is the thought that this may not have been a random, but a targeted attack. I hope to be wrong.

It’s hard to fathom how anyone would have compromised the security and gained access to the server. That is, unless someone had a bunch of notoriously sophisticated techies spread across the globe, who could spend some strenuous hours exercising a few million neurons of their brain and work in a disciplined unison to attack their unsuspecting victim. But even if they do, what could have been the motive?

Desicritics is a site of public opinions. And whatever news and opinions are being spoken about is just another opinion of a section of the public – and the public has every right to speak its mind – and not different from what might have been told in various other forms of mainstream and alternate media. There are heated, but constructive discussions. And I’m unable to imagine any rational reason why we should be a victim of such a frustrated frenzy.

Was it just an extreme random instance of the ever increasing cyber nuisances (like how our inboxes get flooded with tons of spam everyday), or was it a premeditated, highly organized instance of cyber terrorism? It’s impossible to tell.

Price of public opinions, huh? Then I guess it’s time to raise our voices even louder.

Demystifying Feminism

The tag thing is up again, and this time on a rather serious note. After Am started it, DG tagged me in her Feminism in a desi setting post, and here I go with my take.

From email forwards to movies, there has been a pattern of trivializing the opposite gender in the name of fun. But between all the fun, what is not apparent is an inherent attitude of dominance that gradually gets established in men, and that of submission in women. Blame it on the generations of conditioning. A girl, as soon as she is born, is being conditioned to be ‘womanish’. It seems the most natural thing to train the girl in what people have laid down the generations as duties of a ‘woman’ – cook, wash, manage home, while her brother is groomed to play the Man of the house.

A simple excuse in some circles being – women are biologically inclined only for such chores. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, gives a brilliant insight into the biological and psychoanalytical aspects of understanding feminism.

The first — that of the passivity of the female — is disproved by the fact that new life springs from the union of the two gametes; the living spark is not the exclusive property of either.

There is nothing in the DNA that defines the duties of a woman. It’s just a result of the relative superiority that men have ‘forced’ upon women – a superiority which has no rational or biological basis!

N, in Women like us notes rather shockingly, 

I find it disturbing that the representative of a feminist publishing house is not clear about what feminism means, not to the world at large but even just to them… That three other writers with her believe that “women like us” don’t have “such problems” therefore, women like us don’t have to write about them.

It’s a pity to see that some women themselves fail to acknowledge the fact that feminism is not a radical occult movement, but a simple thought process that aims to give womanhood its due position in the society.

A cousin of mine once told me, “It started off like just another calm good day. And suddenly I flare up at him for no reason!”. She went on to say how her husband remained so cool despite all the rubbish she poured over him going through a rather rough phase of PMS. Even religion hasn’t spared a woman, by restricting most of the holy chores to men - because, women menstruate. Neither is she spared at the workplace. As would say this recent report from BBC. 

Women civil servants in India have expressed shock at new appraisal rules which require them to reveal details of their menstrual cycles.

Can anything be more disgusting? (Update: Uma tells me via email that they’ve apparently withdrawn it. The BBC news update here. Sanity prevails, I guess.)

Firstly, it’s vital for men to come out of their haze of masculine superiority. An irrational dominance does nothing useful to the cause of a relationship, other than nurturing a false pride by feeding their own ego. Secondly, it’s vital to understand that feminism is not a revolution; it’s a call for a balanced state of mind. Is that a hard ask?

These days, my cousin tells me, she marks the days in red in her calendar and gears herself up to face the adventure. As for her husband, he knows what all the red markings in the calendar are about and he too gears himself up. And they lived happily ever after.

Oops, We Did It Again…

As the afternoon sun gave way to the evening gray-scale and the mild summer breeze tried to relieve all the sweat of another hot day, there was also a mad rush of vehicles; from rickshaws to cars to overcrowded buses prodding their way through chaotic traffic. From school kids to office goers to homemakers, a billion people were rushing home to get their grab on the Remote Control. After all, Team India was playing their most important match of Cricket’s biggest event.

Hours later they managed to grab their spot in front of their television sets, all set for another absorbing night of exciting cricket. The moment of reckoning. A billion hearts watching. And that moment marked the anticlimax of all anticlimaxes – Zaheer Khan started the proceedings with an enormous wide, that sent a chilling sense of déjà vu reminding them of what happened in the finals of the last World Cup - on this same day, March 23.  A billion hearts skipped a beat. Seven hours later, their worst fears came true. A billion hearts were broken.

The Indian team has one of the best balanced sides in the series. An excellent mix of class and aggression, youth and experience, and many of them have already been through at least one world cup campaign, but has never done complete justice to the talent. Every great team has an off-day once in a while when nothing goes its way and end up losing to one of the worse sides, but Team India seems to have an off-day a bit too often than any other. And it just happened that two of them turned out to be key World Cup matches.

This, in all probability, also happens to be the last occasion we are seeing the great Indian trio of Rahul, Sachin, and Sourav play in a World Cup. With countless number of records and words of such praise from legends like Sir Don Bradman, Sachin Tendulkar would end his career with an untold vacuum deep down in his heart - after over two decades of playing and being termed as the greatest cricketer of the present time, he would still not have The World Cup added to his repertoire of accolades.

So two of the worst sides that ever played the game, Ireland and Bangladesh, would be in the Super Eights. The next round already looks diluted because two great teams, India and Pakistan, had one too many ‘off-days’. There is not going to be any new case of minnows upsetting a grand team in this series. Well, don’t expect Australia and New Zealand to be as generous as India and Pakistan. Add to all of this, the fact that the Cricketing World has lost lost one of its greatest champions in Bob Woolmer, thanks to those senseless retards who knew not what they were up to, and you get a world cup that has already turned out to be a huge heartbreak.

Days into the big event, the game lost a great coach who started out coaching South Africa to become such world beaters and in the process, created a special place for himself in the annals of the game. May be, this game of glorious uncertainties has taken uncertainty a tad too far. May History never repeat itself, again.

You Feeling the Wow?

Windows Vista, the successor to our old pal, Windows XP, has been officially released. And Sunidhi Chauhan is going to sing the official song of Windows Vista India Launch – Wow is Now. Apparently, you are supposed to feel the heat and get all excited about it.

But does a launch of this magnitude create any excitement anymore? Ten years ago, Windows 95 was the biggest launch in the history of an operating system. Shops were open at midnight for consumers to buy their first copy of the new revolutionary operating system that would forever change the face of personal computing. And those were the days when the Internet was just beginning to be a phenomenon (actually, a nuisance for Microsoft which believed in shrink-wrapped software until then), with hardly a high speed connection to be found.

Today, although Vista is great for many reasons, I would be surprised if it generated half the excitement as Windows 95. Simply because the world is a much different place today. It’s better connected. Windows is a daily routine. Start, Programs, Accessories, Lock, Login, Shutdown are all household words. You check your mails every morning as regularly as you brush your teeth. This is the days of Mobiles, PDAs, Tablets, Blackberries and iPods. And a brand new Operating System is just another new box nicely piled on the Computer aisle.

Vista was plagued with difficulties right from the moment Microsoft came up with an initial list of planned features, way back in 2001. After a two year delay (it was originally planned for 2005), only half of those features found their way into the final product. And many of those make sense only to the technically inclined people, while for the layman it’s all about the fancy graphics and the many interesting goodies.

Some features were dropped because Microsoft was trying to innovate too much in too little time, and others because of the various lawsuits which forced Microsoft to release a version called Vista N for the European Union, otherwise, and more popularly, known as “the version for EU that nobody will use, pay the same price and get less. And no Media Player!”

But despite its delays and shortcomings, Vista is certainly worth paying attention to. There may not be many reasons to get rocking or punch the air, but we do have something nice and better to work with. And the song, in Sunidhi’s voice, is pretty decent as well.

Let there be Light, not Noise…

Noisy crackers are objected to by crackpot environmentalists who see pollution everywhere and deny that life on this planet is about joy and its pursuit. Varuna tells Bhrigu in the Taittriya Upanishad that the core of being human is not about the fact that we eat or that we breathe or that we think, but that we have the capacity for ananda. Ananda must be noisy, rejecting at least at this time the hushed tones of patronizing kill-joys. Let us learn to celebrate with wholehearted vim and gusto our wonderful traditions of gambling, baksheesh, lights and deafening noise!

- Jaitirth Rao in The New Indian Express (via Uma)

Ah well. Interesting links people draw from religious scripts. Now noise has become a way of deriving ananda (joy). The dictionary defines noise thus,

noise  /nɔɪz/ –noun
- sound, esp. of a loud, harsh, or confused kind 
- Informal. extraneous, irrelevant, or meaningless facts, information, statistics, etc.
- Obsolete. rumor or gossip, esp. slander. 

That’s ananda for you – extraneous, confused kind. Looks like the dictionary knows better about noise.

Noise is bad for animals. If you didn’t notice, dogs and cats tend to scamper through the roads on the sound of loud bursting firecrackers. Little babies are still not grown-up enough to understand that there is this thing called a Diwali where people explode noisy firecrackers to attain the state of ananda. There may be sick people just round the street corner and if you have ever fallen sick in your life, you would know noise doesn’t help them any bit. Why do they have No Horn zones in hospitals?

But then, it’s not possible for people to put themselves in others shoes. After all, its one’s own ananda that matters. Not the babies and sick people, so long as they thrive in the joy enunciated by the Upanishads.

People do find it hard to understand a few things. Probably, a dog understands another dog better than a human understands another human. So let’s just say there aren’t too many fortunate people in this world who can spend a few thousand bucks to create extraneous loud noise that lasts a few minutes and creates unnecessary trouble to certain people that is often so easy to overlook. Let there be light and sound, not noise. Have a bright Diwali, not a noisy one.