There is lots of buzz on the Internet regarding the recent announcement by Twitter that it would be blocking certain tweets in certain countries, although the same tweets will be available in the countries outside of the jurisdiction of those countries wanting to block that particular content.

In the beginning, as soon as I came across this news my first reaction was, “Whattha…” but then I did some reading on the issue and found myself agreeing to many commentators who, although cautiously, understand Twitter’s point of view and deem the development not as bad as it sounds.

The thing is, we don’t live in a Utopian world where freedom of expression and speech is available unshackled. It is not. While tapping on your keyboard, writing for your blog or for Twitter (or Facebook, or for that matter any publishing platform on the Internet) you may take your right to express yourself for granted, but your freedom ends where another’s discomfort begins, and this discomfort can be anything – political, social, ideological or religious.

In the current scenario the governments can block Twitter completely and this doesn’t work good for anybody. Countries like China can block Twitter for just a single tweet. There are many media companies that remove the content from their servers and it is available nowhere in the world. This is the worst case scenario.

Although it is a cyber platform, it works and operates in the real world. Also, it is not a non-profit entity. Somewhere down the line Twitter needs to earn money and it will be earning money via its presence in various countries, and when it plans to have presence in various countries it needs to comply with local jurisdictions whether one likes it or not.

While trying to comply with the local laws Twitter has very carefully drafted its censorship policy and has made censoring content a bit difficult. Particular tweets, while blocked in a country whose government wants them blocked, will be available to the rest of the world and you will also be notified when those tweets are blocked. At Twitter help Center they say:

Many countries, including the United States, have laws that may apply to Tweets and/or Twitter account content. In our continuing effort to make our services available to users everywhere, if we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity, it may be necessary to reactively withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time.

We have found that transparency is vital to freedom of expression. Upon receipt of requests to withhold content we will promptly notify affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so, and clearly indicate to viewers when content has been withheld. We have also expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to include the publication of requests to withhold content in addition to the DMCA notifications that we already transmit.

I think this is a clever thing to do. The governments will have to follow procedures in order to block particular tweets. The same governments will not have an excuse to block entire Twitter at the drop of a hat. Twitter can always say, look, we’re complying with your local laws so you cannot block us.

The good thing is the transparency factor and also a clever way of keeping the content visible in the regions where the local laws are not applicable. Transparency in the sense that the content that is blocked will be marked as blocked content and as mentioned in the above quoted text from Twitter, all the requests to withhold content by particular governments will be listed at the Chilling Effects website.

Since all the Internet companies have to operate in the real world, they have to follow the real jurisdictions. Perhaps one day we will have utopia and the cyber world will be totally different from the real world, but right now everything boils down to the real world, where we all have to operate. Twitter is trying to comply with local laws as well as allowing free flow of information wherever it is possible. So far, it sounds fair.

Phew! Scam after scam and now journalists-businesspersons-politicians wheeling dealing: we have a roller coaster society going on here. There is “outrage” and this is really stupid, I mean, who are we fooling? We have always been in the list of the most corrupt developing countries in the world (and this is what keeps us “developing” and not developed).

The problem is not with our businesspersons, politicians and journalists: they have always been the way they are, and the nexus has always existed.  It’s just that due to the Internet and social networking websites the news spread like wildfire and people no longer have to depend on newspapers and electronic media to get news and exchange opinions.

The 2G scam (4G is already out, by the way) is one of the biggest scams the country has ever endured, and so is the Commonwealth Games scam (1,70000 crores – approximately $ 37570000000 — and more than 35000 crores, respectively). There has been a litany of scams under the present government and even the most tolerant are forced to point fingers at the Prime Minister who quite undeservedly enjoys a clean image.

What is clean?  Cleanliness can be of many types:

• You just wear clean clothes but underneath you never wash your body
• You wash your body but wear dirty clothes
• You neither wash your body nor wear clean clothes
• You appear very clean but from the inside, spiritually and mentally, you are unclean
• You are totally clean, from the outside as well is inside but you operate in an environment that is totally unclean

Manmohan Singh probably falls under the last two categories. He has the saintly image and he draws a very miniscule amount of salary. But what is the reality?

The country witnessed a deluge of scams when he was the Finance Minister and now when he is the Prime Minister.  Of course the sudden gush of liberalization could have fuelled the corruption engine of the country, but what is the use of you being clean if everything and everybody around you is dirty? Are you really clean if people around you are unclean and you mingle with them and allow them to run the country knowing all the time what harm they are causing to your country?

In today’s The Pioneer column Swapnadas Gupta has written about how Nehru and Indira Gandhi tolerated, if not encouraged, corruption as a necessary evil bi-product of socialism. Is Manmohan Singh perpetuating this string of misguided philosophy? It sure looks so. But at what cost?

This mentality has cost the country billions of dollars. According to an international report discussed by Kanchan Gupta in the past 60 odd years the country has lost more than 20.85 lakh crores, and that’s a conservative estimate as most of the data is unavailable. Some excerpts:

The outpouring of moral outrage over Raja’s crime may have served the purpose of forcing one of the most corrupt Ministers (by no means was he the lone wolf in the Cabinet) in the present regime to quit office in disgrace although he remains defiant as ever. But it has also swamped a revealing report on Global Financial Integrity that was released last week. The details of the report indicate the extent of corruption in India and confirm what we refuse to accept: We are a corrupt society with a corrupt system; a nation that silently indulges in corruption while raucously protesting against it, as is being witnessed at the moment.

The GFI report says, “From 1948 through 2008, India lost a total of $213 billion in illicit financial flows (or illegal capital flight). These illicit financial flows were generally the product of corruption, bribery and kickbacks, and criminal activities.” Illicit financial flows pertain to the “cross-border movement (or transfer) of money earned through illegal activities such as corruption, transactions involving contraband goods, criminal activities, and efforts to shelter wealth from a country’s tax authorities”. The total of $213 billion is a misleading figure because “the present value of India’s illicit financial flows is at least $462 billion,” the GFI report explains, adding, “This is based on the short-term US Treasury bill rate as a proxy for the rate of return on assets.”

The GFI report provides some other interesting insights. For instance, contrary to the claims of successive Governments, more vociferously by the UPA regime, India’s underground economy, which is “closely tied to illicit financial outflows”, continues to expand with each passing day. The present value of illicit assets held abroad ($462 billion) “accounts for approximately 72 per cent of India’s underground economy — which has been estimated to account for 50 per cent of India’s GDP ($640 billion at the end of 2008)”. Just above a quarter of illicit assets are held domestically.

Go to his link for more juicy data.

Corruption has seeped into our very psyche. In fact people who are not corrupt are looked down upon. “Ooper ki kamayi” is a given. You’re termed as silly if you don’t pay a bribe and get your job done faster. Breaking rules and then getting away by bribing corrupt policemen has become an act of bravado. corruption has become a part of our daily lives and people have given up on the ideas of an upright society ruled by a principled government.  The common citizens have started following the philosophy of “if you can’t beat them join them”.

Well, that’s the problem, but what is the solution?

The solution against corruption is not a mystery, we all know what needs to be done.  As of now our politicians, businesspersons and bureaucrats will never let the rampaging dinosaurs of corruption go extinct. Too much money is involved.  Just imagine having 170000 crores stashed away somewhere in your account.  It will be mad to think that they will deal with the putrefaction when almost everybody is involved. People like Raja and Kalmadi are not so powerful that they could orchestrate scams of such proportions.  Some bigger people are involved and somehow our media and intellectual commentators are avoiding taking their names (understandable, actually). Even we know their names, but I’m not going to name them here for obvious reasons.

If ever we are going to see a resistance against corruption it is going to be as monumental as the independence struggle. Or by a miracle we may get a person at the helm  who follows a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to dealing with corrupt individuals whether they are in politics, bureaucracy or business.

It all started with this innocuous exchange between Kanchan Gupta, a prominent columnist who writes for the Pioneer, and Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State for External Affairs, an avid Twitter user and the current media blue-eyed boy (my wife’s expression).

One tweet and from a media darling he has become a pariah, and this was bound to happen, and I wonder why he, or anybody else for that matter, never saw it coming (I’ll explain later). And the most appalling aspect of all this is, "cattle class" wasn’t even his expression, he was simply replying to Kanchan Gupta’s tweet: it was a simple exchange between two individuals that was blown out of proportion by the media as well as politicians. Go through various online links of newspapers and TV channels and nobody mentions even once that the expression did not originate from him.

Of course this could be because of the fact that unless you use some extra Twitter tools or a JavaScript addon you cannot see the tweet he had replied to. But before jumping the gun, at least the media dudes should have checked the entire chain of the tweet exchange.

About cattle class, 60 years of Congress governance has made sure that a majority of Indian citizens live like cattle. May be the expression touches a sore spot. May be the party has a ghost of a conscience by a freak chance.

Anyway, back to why they should have seen it coming. The days of individual politicians have gone. Most political parties in India thrive on the halos created around particular families and individuals, and all other members have to operate from under their shadow. Just look what happened to Jaswant Singh. After writing the book, he became an individual and moved outside of the shadow.

Similarly, the Congress party workers have to work within the shadow boundary of the Gandhi family. By using Twitter, by articulating his thoughts, by directly interacting with the common folks Tharoor is building his own mass base — people have begun to adore him and perhaps in the process, have begun to neglect the other blue-eyed boy, Rahul G. Now how can this be tolerated in a party where sycophancy is religion and the 3 Gandhis at the helm are no less than gods?

So in the guise of austerity and an abstract tweet, he is being targeted by his own party men and women, and soon they will be competing with each other just to show how loyal they are to the real blue-eyed trinity.

According to his latest tweets Shashi Tharoor has apologized, and in a country where words and rhetoric matter more than reality, he has done the right thing. Ours is a strange country. Speak truth and people will lunge at your throat; feed them with pleasant lies and they will fall on your feet.

The world of social media is agog with the way the Iranian protestors are using Twitter to send streams of updates from various locations. Some have even gone to an extent of calling it a revolution. On the other hand, social media experts like Gaurav Mishra say that more than a tool to trigger a revolution, Twitter is acting as a medium to organize meets and disseminate related information all over the world. But the importance of Twitter can be gauged from the fact that many from Iran protested when Twitter had to shut down its services due to scheduled maintenance, and there was so much pressure from Iranian Twitter users that the company decided to postpone the maintenance schedule. Twitter users like @StopAhmadi have been featured in Washing Post and New York Times. In fact, according to another buzz, it was the US government that requested Twitter to postpone the scheduled shutdown so that the Iranians could keep on interacting with the international audience at this critical juncture. This NYTimes.com article says:

The request, made to a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is yet another new-media milestone: the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.

“This was just a call to say: ‘It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?’ ” said P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs.

I feel Twitter is a great empowerer. In just a few words, less than 140 characters to be precise, your message can reach thousands, and even millions of people, and for that you don’t even need thousands of followers. You just need some people who will be eager to retweet your message to their followers. Remember that American student who was arrested in Egypt and he sent a tweet about his arrest from his mobile phone and the news spread like wildfire? There was so much diplomatic pressure that the Egyptian government had to release him. No news agency or media house could have achieved that so fast.

The use of social media tools seems disorganized sometimes, but I think this is the beauty of it. I would love to see NGO’s and activists in India using Twitter to gather and spread information and awareness. Even the normal public. Not just to update your friends on what you have for breakfast or what film you just watched, but also updates on what government officer is demanding bribe, what police person is misbehaving, who is eve teasing a girl at the bus stop, etc. The greatest power, of course, will come from people transmitting Twitter streams from their mobile phones, from rural and far flung areas.

The world of social media is agog with the way the Iranian protestors are using Twitter to send streams of updates from various locations. Some have even gone to an extent of calling it a revolution. On the other hand, social media experts like Gaurav Mishra say that more than a tool to trigger a revolution, Twitter is acting as a medium to organize meets and disseminate related information all over the world. But the importance of Twitter can be gauged from the fact that many from Iran protested when Twitter had to shut down its services due to scheduled maintenance, and there was so much pressure from Iranian Twitter users that the company decided to postpone the maintenance schedule. Twitter users like @StopAhmadi have been featured in Washing Post and New York Times.

I feel Twitter is a great empowerer. In just a few words, less than 140 characters to be precise, your message can reach thousands, and even millions of people, and for that you don’t even need thousands of followers. You just need some people who will be eager to retweet your message to their followers. Remember that American student who was arrested in Egypt and he sent a tweet about his arrest from his mobile phone and the news spread like wildfire? There was so much diplomatic pressure that the Egyptian government had to release him. No news agency or media house could have achieved that so fast.

The use of social media tools seems disorganized sometimes, but I think this is the beauty of it. I would love to see NGO’s and activists in India using Twitter to gather and spread information and awareness. Even the normal public. Not just to update your friends on what you have for breakfast or what film you just watched, but also updates on what government officer is demanding bribe, what police person is misbehaving, who is eve teasing a girl at the bus stop, etc. The greatest power, of course, will come from people transmitting Twitter streams from their mobile phones, from rural and far flung areas.

A. R. Rehman

Finally, the Indian movie and music talent gets recognized by the International audience, screamed almost all TV news channels and people are falling over each other to get sound bytes from various artists. Aside from all this cacophony, I’m not sure about A.R. Rehman, but Slumdog Millionaire did deserve the Oscar. A.R. Rehman is good, in fact the best among the current lot of Indian music directors but as some commentators rightly said, we have had exceptional music directors and singers, it’s just that, previously there was no international exposure for them.

Here’s the apology published by Chyetanya Kunte, and here is how different bloggers have responded.

I’m reproducing here a part of his unconditional apology:

Consequently, I hereby repudiate and withdraw my post dated November 27, 2008 titled "Shoddy Journalism" and, more specifically, the following allegations / statements made in the post titled "Shoddy Journalism" namely:

• a lack of ethics, responsibility and professionalism by Ms. Dutt and NDTV Limited;
• that Ms. Dutt and NDTV’s reporting at the scene of the Mumbai attacks during November 2008, resulted in jeopardizing the safety and lives of civilians and / or security personnel caught up in and / or involved in defending against the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008;
• that Ms. Dutt was responsible for the death of Indian Servicemen during the Kargil Conflict.

See how cleverly he has repeated everything in the apology .

Here’s the image of the original post that’s present in Google cache (click to enlarge):

I think he has taken the right decision to take down the blog post because he wanted to make a point and he made it and now he is getting ample coverage. Had he been sued by Barkha Dutt and company he would have had to bear the cost unnecessarily, unless of course there were people to help him out or if he himself had enough resources. “Big-shot journalists” like M/s Barkha Dutt wouldn’t have to spend from her own pocket because the TV channel would take care of the entire hassle while she carried on with her routine job. In fact they must be having a separate legal department for such things.

About the freedom of speech thing: I think many bloggers take this too far. Freedom comes with responsibility and like any other medium, when you say something that sort of accuses another person you have to back it up with enough data and evidence and shouldn’t base your blog post on unsubstantiated facts. But of course you can refer to other reports claiming the same things and this shouldn’t be illegal. I am not writing this in support of Barkha Dutt, I’m writing this so that bloggers don’t get in such kind of tight spots. Blogging being free or cheap doesn’t mean that you can publish anything. You have to be responsible if you are publishing something and your message is being read by many people and is publicly available. Whenever you are publishing insinuations on your blog always link to the source that you are basing your insinuation upon. This way you can always say, “I didn’t say that, I simply said what he said, how would I know it is not true?”

Regarding people like Barkha Dutt trying to throttle freedom of speech, I think by attributing such expressions to journalists like her is plain stupid. Even a kid would know that she and the news channel she works for don’t care a hoot about freedom of speech. They are simply mouth pieces of the pseudo-intellectual mafia that has been screwing the country ever since…forever.

Anyway, Gaurav at his blog is compiling a comprehensive list of reactions. If you want, you can join the FaceBook groups Facebook group to protest Barkha Dutt’s bullying of Chyetanya Kunte, Facebook group that advocates taking Barkha Dutt off the air and Facebook group which nominates Barkha Dutt as the worst journalist on the planet (source Gauravonomics).

I accident saw her in a YouTube video and was struck by her beauty. When I showed the video to Alka she told me that she’s Leela Naidu. I generally don’t like the profiles of Indian film actresses (except for Madhubala) but Leela Naidu was/is a stunner. Once she was declared one of the top 10 most beautiful women in the world, and I’m not sure about the others, she could easily be among the top beauties. It was nice to know that she didn’t die young, like many other extraordinarily beautiful people.

Source

[tags]leela naidu[/tags]

I generally don’t use such expressions on my blog but this is a clear case of mutual ass-licking. First NDTV declares Manmohan Singh the leader of the year and then sycophant journalists like Rajdeep Sardesia, Barkha Dutt and Vinod Dua are conferred Padma Sri, one of the highest civilian awards in India. It is anybody’s guess why these three journalists got the award.

At home we were discussing if such biased people keep on getting such awards then what credibility do such awards carry? Actually these kinds of awards fetch many privileges to the awardees, for instance getting their books published, obtaining lucrative government contracts, getting highly sought-after assignments abroad, and of course, in this twisted case, lots of publicity to the news channels they belong to.

Last year I read Arun Shourie’s “Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud” in which very laboriously he has explained, taking examples from various texts and other sources, how these “respected” journalists, historians and scholars keep promoting each other’s works and causes and keep getting rewarded in shady manners and then keep getting cushy jobs and assignments and this cycle goes on and on and on. The only difference now is that common people can articulate their thoughts using blogs and other communication means. So at least there is a certain section that can see the truth and talk about it and I think this is an extremely positive development, and this is a reason why conventional journalists dislike new-age media, especially the kind of media that empowers practically everybody to communicate and exchange ideas.

In another diabolical development our Prime Minister declared that the families of jihadis who are killed by the Indian armed forces will receive compensation from the government. Read this satire recently published in The Pioneer. This is like telling them: kill our army men and if they kill you back we will compensate your families. In another right-thinking society such a Prime Minister would have been arrested for abetting terrorism and his or her party would have never been able to form another government. But alas! This is India, the land of million tragedies. And then they wonder why the Indian Army is short of 12,000 officers. Who would like to fight for the government that compensates people who are out to kill them? This is so bizarre.

Andher nagri by the way means a completely chaotic state of affairs where nothing logical happens.

[tags]barkha dutt, rajdeep sardesai, vinod dua, padam sri[/tags]

Being musically inclined, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa is the only TV show that I watch with random regularity and I can follow how individual participants are performing. Oh, and yes I started my music lessons again . Remember once I mentioned my old recalcitrant guruji who is over 70? After taking his classes it was not possible for me to go to another teacher. Although he sometimes irritates me but I think he’s the best teacher I have ever come across. Coming back to the TV program.

The final event turned out to be a real damp squib. Nobody was expecting Aneek Dhar to win. Of course no doubt be deserved to be among the top three but he was no way the first runners up stuff. Either Amanat or Raja Hasan should have come first; they are far superior than Aneek as far as voice quality and style are considered. He has a very shrill noise although technically he has no flaws.

Did a Bengali factor play in? The Bengalis are prone to send excessive SMS messages to help Bengali contestants win and even when the SMSs are not involved through networking tactics they try to ensure victory for a Bengali contestant. I’m not saying that he is a Bengali so his victory should be questioned; it’s just that the other contestants were far better and this is the only logic that can be drawn — that he undeservedly got more votes. Of course Rashamya too used cheap psychological tricks to fetch more votes for his student.

The win actually doesn’t matter much because many contestants have won and then faded into oblivion. Only the talented can survive. This is why there are many contestants who got singing contracts even before reaching the finals — including Amanat and Raja — but I doubt if Aneek got a singing contract during the competition.

And it is heartening to see that true talent is still appreciated in other parts of the country and that is the main reason that Amanat, despite being a Pakistani, was among the top three, and despite Poonam being the least glamorous among the female contestants, was the top female performer and eventually won the spark of the day award. Hers is the face that should inspire you. Read her story if you can find it somewhere. Listen to her singing Der na ho jaye, I mean, of course she is not Lata Mangeshkar but I think after Lata and Asha Poonam’s voice is the best I’ve heard so far.

All in all, Sa Re Ga Ma P is the best talent hunt program on Indian television and the new singers discovered through it are really going to give sleepless nights to the established but mediocre singers of the Hindi cinema. These singers, barring Aneek’s final fiasco, are really brilliant and truly deserve the attention being showered upon them. Hopefully we’ll get to listen to some good melodies in the near future. And if that doesn’t happen well I’m always there to sing to myself and to people who care to listen, for instance my greatest fan I think, no I’m sure, is my 27-month-old daughter .

[tags]saregamapa, sa re ga ma pa[/tags]