Month: August 2018

An Onam minus the Sadya!

Yesterday was Onam – the biggest festival for Malayalis in Kerala and all over the world which is usually celebrated with much fun, flowers, food and festivities. This year though, the absence of all these was palpable. Kerala is just recovering from one of the worst floods it has seen in the state’s history. It will take many weeks if not months for the state to fully get back on its feet. Roads and highways need quick mending and probably re-laying in many parts. Agriculture is almost finished in the near term. Power infrastructure needs a quick fix. And above all, personal and individual properties and assets in affected areas need to be refreshed.

Understandably, not just in Kerala, but even all over, the festivities around Onam in the back of such a huge natural calamity were muted. Usually on Onam day, one’s social media time line is flooded with greetings with pictures of colourful Pookalam (Artistic arrangement of flowers), Ona Sadya (the traditional feast) and stuff like that. The Ona Sadya is an inherent part of the festival. Strictly vegetarian, even pictures of the Sadya are enough to incite one’s taste buds. So much so, one could easily mistake Onam for being just a festival of food!

However, yesterday, it was pictures of different kinds. Pookalam was mainly of the map of Kerala with a message to rebuild the state! Greetings were with the King Mahabali making aerial surveys of the flood ravaged state or moving around in boats and shedding copious tears for Kerala to spring back to normalcy soon. And almost no picture of Sadya in sight!

In Mumbai where I Iive, the Kerala Bhavan at Vashi in Navi Mumbai hosts the typical Ona Sadya on the day of Onam. Last year, I remember the waiting for a place before the banana leaf was minimum an hour! There are few other places in the city which also have the Ona Sadya! This year though all these organisations gave the festival and its Sadya a miss, understandably. There is no doubt that it was the saddest Onam in a long time!

Even as Kerala was reeling under the impact of the floods, the many fault lines that exist in the society surfaced with impeccable alacrity.

Centre Vs. State: Even as the relief work was underway, with co-ordination from multi-level agencies, the squabble between State and the Centre over funds allocation in public left a bad taste. It is understandable that in India, politics is in the centre of everything. In a federal structure, it is not always that the same party rules the Centre and the state. But as citizens what we expect in times of calamities like this is for parties to raise above their political identities, put a united face and commit to relief and rehabilitation efforts in unison. Instead of having their own channels of communication with the Centre regarding need of funds, was there a need for the CM and the state finance minister to routinely communicate through the media regarding shortage in allocation of funds? Added to this was the unnecessary confusion over the US$100mn financial aid from UAE. Was there a bickering needed in public between 2 governments (centre and state) regarding the stance to be taken? Didn’t we at the end of the day showcase ourselves as being churlish in the eyes of the world?

Ruling party Vs. Opposition: For the initial few days, it was heartening to see the leaders of the ruling left and the opposition Congress visiting affecting areas together and expressing their solidarity to the public. As we saw later, this unity was short-lived.  The opposition leader of the Congress Ramesh Chennithala couldn’t resist himself from hitting out on the Chief Minister and the government for mis-handling the flood situation and for not being pro-active enough! So much for the solidarity!

One State Vs. Another State: In times like these, social media does a great job in mobilising support from people far and wide. Help poured by way of money and material from states like Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and others to Kerala. Even as this was happening, Kerala filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court that the sudden release of excess water from Mullaperiyar dam by Tamil Nadu was one of the cause for the floods. We now hear that Tamil Nadu is preparing to file a counter affidavit refuting Kerala’s claim and putting the blame on Kerala’s non-readiness to handle torrential rains of this year’s magnitude. This tu tu-main main I am sure, will continue till the cows come home!

Right Vs. Left: We all know that in India, the hegemony of the Left is being questioned left, right and centre these days (pun unintended)! The Right is trying desperately and aggressively to catch up on the lost time to dismantle established narratives. Even admitting this as par for the course in a diverse country like India, one felt that the spinning by certain quarters of the Right that the floods were caused because of the recent attempts to allow entry of women to Sabarimala was stretching a bit too far! The argument was in bad taste and not surprising that it was taken out of circulation quickly.

And there were more – North Vs. South, Kerala Vs. Others and so on.

I am not for once suggesting that these fault lines didn’t exist before and are a recent phenomenon. I do believe however that the proliferation of media in general and social media in particular has emboldened these fault lines like never before.

This is indeed unfortunate and in the times to come one hopes fervently that the same proliferation of media and social media will help to unite us a society and make us more mature in responding to situations like this.  We are in a democracy and it is within our right to question and criticize our governments and for opposition to pillory the Government. However there is a time and place to do so. It could well be after the rehabilitation process is complete. And not squabbling on the full glare of media when people are struggling in relief camps with big question marks about their tomorrow. Even if governments and parties do so, the least as public we can do is to not give such squabbles traction in our day-today social media conversations (read as forwarding on WhatsApp/Facebook/Twitter)

As Onam passed by minus the traditional Sadya this time, that is some food for thought for us as a society!

Pic courtesy: Mathrubhumi English

Life without Google!!!

On the 27th of July this year, which was observed as Guru Purnima day – a day where we remember our gurus/teachers in life, a meme which was going viral on WhatsApp showed a student prostrating before “Google” and paying his respects on Guru Purnima day to the search engine! As much as it’s a joke to laugh about, one cannot miss the irony looking at the reality of the search engine’s clutch on our lives today!

Google today, is a gargantuan Eco system. But here, we are referring to its earliest avatar –the search engine.  For this generation, their first and probably only chosen resort for discovering answers to any question is “Google”! School is just for parents’ reassurance! Our generation which studied and survived without Google in those days seem so dated now! In conversations among our peers, this dialogue is often said and heard – “In our times there was no Google. We all worked so hard. And look at kids these days! They just Google and get all information what they want without moving their a**s!” That the lines are often pregnant with envy which is never missed by the kids is another matter!

Well, forget this generation. What will happen to “us”, the “Doordarshan” generation of the 70’s and 80’s if the search engine stops working one fine morning???

  • Where will we get those “thought for the day” messages for circulating every morning in the WhatsApp groups??
  • How do we take important decisions like whether to dry clothes inside or outside? Go back to the old fashioned way of searching the Newspaper for weather forecast! And use the thumb rule of drying clothes outside if IMD says heavy rain is in store for the day!
  • Travelling and reaching a new place means calling up and asking for proper directions and landmarks and religiously noting them in a piece of paper and not forgetting to put that in your pocket before leaving and leaving sufficiently early to be there on time and,… and,…
  • Did you just get used to the Uber or Ola App after repeated pestering by your kids? Then time to get back to the old ways of hailing the cab on the road and haggling about the faulty meter or the amount “above” the meter!
  • One may have to think many times before taking up the challenge of trying out some new exotic recipes at home! And have to go back to the time-tested way of calling the mother for any recipe! And have to start maintaining that cooking book!
  • And imagine what will happen to the parents when faced with school assignments and projects without Google!!! And get used to taunts like – “Dad, the answer you taught yesterday for the problem is totally wrong!!”
  • And as parents, forget about becoming heroes in the eyes of children by answering some weird, tough questions on general knowledge or some such thing by   surreptitiously checking on Google!
  • Tieing that saree the very traditional way for the puja is going to be nerve-wracking!
  • Where will you get the jokes for the all-important seminar the next day?
  • And where will one find answers to all those silly and not so silly “How to…” questions?
  • So and so forth

I am just listing the obvious.

It’s clear that not this just generation or the Gen Next, even the older ones today, cannot pass a single day without Google.

Google spent or is still spending tonnes of dollars on traditional media like TV for popularising the idea of “googling” with older generation as their main target audience! When you have the most popular online platform trying to spread awareness about itself through TV commercials, Billboards, Newspaper ads, irony just “googled” for the best way to commit suicide!!!

Look at these TVCs here! These are certainly endearing but I wonder if today is there a real need for anyone to advertise virtues of “Google”???  Well, probably this will fall under CSR for Google for helping the economy of the country with its huge ad spend!

Jokes apart, Google is participating in real CSR for example with projects like providing Free Wi-Fi at Railway stations. But the larger game plan must be to make people get used to the Google Ecosystem which is today omnipresent! From Search to Mails to Video sharing to Smart phone OS to Cloud sharing to Photo sharing to so many things! While there are options and semblance of competition in others, for internet search, competition is non-existent or is far off.

Any product with no competition is worrisome. We can see today how SEO techniques are being used by most to influence search results and increasingly are either not reliable or dis-honest! Time to have a challenger to Google!

Postscript: Did I say competition for Google search is non-existent? Well I take back. I am married. Don’t you remember this??? I just googled and found this 😀