Planet Manipal

People have to stop behaving like Twitter “owes” them their service.

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One fine day at a news channel in Mumbai, an intern was sitting and sipping her coffee, quietly amused about how a producer was complaining. “Aarushi ne phir se hamara show kha liya!” (Aarushi ate up our show again.) There were some new developments in the case, and love it or hate it, you just couldn’t ignore it. The crime reporters in Mumbai were discussing what might have happened at the Talwar residence that night – they were so sure, sitting in far away Mumbai, that this definitely could not have happened in this particular way, and it must have happened in that way. Speculations, speculations, speculations…

“Raga!”
Ouch! I burnt my tongue! “Yes sir?”
“Take this number; this is Tanu. Go to her house.”
“Oh ok. But…”
“Yes?”
“Um, what is the story?”
“You don’t know Kahani Tanu? Get her byte. She’s going to play Aarushi. You know about the twist in Kahani right?”
“Oh… but…”
“Go fast! There’s no time to waste!”

She’s gonna play Aarushi? Isn’t Kahani one of the longest running serials? What does he mean she’s playing Aarushi? Did they create a new character who’ll die??? The intern had a lot of questions in her mind. Obviously the boss wasn’t gonna answer them… Oh well, she decided to find out once she met the girl…
“My character resembles Aarushi a lot; she, the character, is a battameez girl, who parties a lot and never listens to her family. Because of her behaviour, the family is very angry and very unhappy. This is also honour killing.”
What?!! The entire country is still speculating as to what happened, and a production house has concluded that it was honour killing, and that Aarushi was a battameez girl whose family was angry with her??? What do they know about Aarushi?
“Well, my clothes have been designed along the lines of what Aarushi was wearing in those photos, and my new hairstyle is also exactly like hers. Research? No… Everyone knows… The news channels have been telling us what she was like…”
The intern came back to office that day, half-disgusted at what she had heard. But the girl speaking it was only a little older than Aarushi herself, and was excited to be on her ‘first time on news!’
You can’t blame the kid – neither kid. One was dead and the other was a dummy. Who do you blame? Definitely NOT our responsible police force and our respectable media!
The Police did such a great job – they declared the murdered within days of the crime without proper evidence. Speaking of evidence, they were so careful to let the entire world trample all over it, especially the media. They were so careful to not block off the scene of crime, the neighbour saw great scenes of the relatives performing puja and the media celebrating Diwali. How can anyone blame the police? They did a great job of messing up everything!
They messed it up so well infact that the CBI had to step in. Our Investigators decided to go against the police’s decision of letting kids play hop-scotch on the Talwar terrace and warded off the scene of crime for some reason the police couldn’t comprehend. They caught some more people and made the media-diwali even grander. Aarushi had become so famous that our intern was a little anxious. Her seniors in the office weren’t very happy with Aarushi. Oh no. If Aarushi hadn’t died, it would be us going around all over Mumbai for Neeraj Grover!
And then one fine day in Chennai, a college student who had just returned from a month’s internship in Mumbai, was sipping a cup of coffee and watching TV when CBI gave a press conference and told the media that they had ‘narcotically’ found the murderers. The case would be solved as soon as they found tangible evidence, as the narco tests were not going to be accepted in a court of law.
She was half-disgusted to see the reporters pound the father who was not even allowed to grieve for his only daughter; they announced that he had murdered her; they tarnished his image – from being called a man who had an illicit relationship with his colleague, to a man who had killed his daughter who possibly had an affair with her 42 year old household help… The Talwars, Father, Mother, Daughter all, became ‘famous’ quite suddenly, thanks to the media…
At least the Daughter is dead. May the Father and Mother rest in peace!

I haven’t seen the new design yet, but it does look a little unfamiliar. It however does offer more integration points for search, which is always a good thing.

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The announcement of iPhone 3G caused the uproar in the cult of the Mac that was expected. I find myself defending the cheaper, better and much more attractive phone from Apple more and more often now from people who say it’s just a marketing ploy and Jobs’ reality distortion field makes us think that the phone is superior when it’s actually not.

I had almost but given up debating Apple vs. the World about a year back, choosing to take the high road and just sit back and watch people argue their hearts out on a topic that will not put a scar on the bigger picture — that it doesn’t matter.

I defend the iPhone from sceptics because I believe that Apple is doing an excellent job of promoting a device that has true potential to change the way we work with phones today. Sure, the iPhone has spawned many clones, and pushed the competition to add whatever they saw in the device to their own devices (like every Apple competitor does at some point). But Apple has a knack of getting things “mostly” right the first time out. I really don’t care what people say about Apple’s prices or limitations. If the product is good enough, who cares if you can break it open and fiddle around with the internals. Or if the features and usability are high enough, how does it matter if the service provider lock down charges you a little more money. Apple has always been higher on the cost, but they’ve more than balanced it out with excellent support and performance of their products and software. If you’re not willing to pay a premium for superiority, maybe you’re better off not owning a superior device.

The debate isn’t for or against Apple. The debate is for what the particular device in question brings to the table. It’s not co-incidence that many award winning and people popular devices come out of the one company most people love to hate. And people love to hate Apple on the case that they don’t have the freedom to do what they want with it once they own it. They believe that if they’ve paid for it, it is theirs to do whatever they want. They hate the fanboy-ism that follows Apple around everywhere, and some have even admitted to not making the switch to avoid being stereotyped as a fanboy just because they use an Apple. They would be right, but that’s not how Apple works, is it?

Apple’s lock down is to protect their work, their intellectual property, and the secrets that keep them ahead of the game. Apple is a small company, that has to squeeze out revenue from every little corner that they can muster. It is not a luxury, it is a survival tactic. If Apple opened itself up, their maintenance and development costs would shoot up. Not to mention customer support. Being closed has worked for Apple all these years, and probably will way into the future.

As SwitchingToMac clearly puts it:

It’s mostly about control, Apple has control of the entire computing experience, Hardware, Operating System and much of the core Software. Windows PCs are a conglomeration of a bunch of companies working independently all competing against each other but trying to make product that are harmonious at the same time.

Does Apple use its loyalists?

Apple thrives off the loyalists, the ‘cult of the Mac’ as they’re called. They depend on this small but extremely loyal group for their revenue. While the market leaders like Microsoft bank on the long tail to get their money, Apple does the exact opposite. In fact, you could say that Apple actually uses this “cult”, fuelling their emotions and egging them on by doing things like presenting the Mac vs. PC ads that have become so notoriously popular. Tom Krazit at One More Thing traces this back to an active strategy by Apple and Guy Kawasaki:

Kawasaki recalled signing up 44,000 hardcore Mac users in 1995 on a listserv named, quite appropriately, “EvangeList.” “All I would do is disseminate good news,” Kawasaki said. He wanted his listserv to be a counterpoint to the torrents of bad news about the Mac, exemplified by a 1996 BusinessWeek cover story about Apple titled, “The Fall of an American Icon.” For its cover art, the magazine placed an Apple icon in front of a black, funereal background.

If you’ve read any book on Steve Jobs or watched any of the documentaries, you would have seen how he treats the entire company as one big family¹. The same feeling resonates among the Apple enthusiasts. If any blogger/journalist makes the slightest mistake of saying anything remotely bad about an Apple product, or Apple in general, you can almost foresee the impending reaction. The wrath of the cult is ruthless. It’s almost like every Apple enthusiast takes it as a personal attack whenever the company is spoken ill of.

And that is what Apple wants. That is what they need. Because these are the people who will buy the next product to come out their doors without question. These are the people that through repeated persuasion and coaxing, “convert” others and make them switch. I myself have converted about 7 to 8 people over to Macs ever since I began to take interest in this sort of thing, and I’m proud of that. It is my little contribution to the company I’ve come to appreciate and respect. And I know, that the people who’ve switched, are happy they did so. So happy, that soon they will be showing their Macs to their friends, asking them to give it a shot. And that’s how Apple has grown, and will continue to grow.

So argue and debate all you want. If you’re not a part of the “cult”, you don’t have anything to win. Apple-ers will never listen to your attempts to sway them away, but they’ve gotten better and more efficient at turning people from your side to theirs. It’s like getting soldiers to defect by promising them more vacations. What will you pick?

I decided to write this post as I saw the text plate on CNN IBN read “Spanish Jallikattu” when the channel was running a story on Spain’s bullfight. For those who don’t know what Jallikattu is, it is the Tamilian (Madurai-based, to be specific) version of bullfight, and for sure, a much better version when compared to its Spanish version.

Anyways, let’s compare the Tamilian and Spanish danger-spirits later and get to my observation here. How many times have you noticed a famous English news channel give a south Indian vernacular headline to their story, and use a word like Jallikattu? Think. I am sure you would not remember any instance. Not that this proves anything, but it does indicate one thing, English news channel are moving southward. You think the observation is senseless and out of the blue? Well, not really.

Sometimes, you come to conclusions due to a thought process which has been induced into you. You hear someone more authoritative say something else, and based on their opinion you develop one. This conclusive observation might be one like that. However, I have quite few reasons to think that the English news channels have started giving more value to the South.

For one, I realized that it is a known thing among news channel marketers that English news has more takers down south than the North. All the people up there, surprised? You should be. While you always thought that the average Madrasi has a funny English accent, he seemed to have moved closer to English news channels than you are. And this is a statistical observation, TRPs prove this. It is not the Bangalore effect alone. Hyderabad and Chennai are not far behind either. The average south-Indian, being more educated than an average north-Indian, has more affinity to English news channels.

It is not very difficult to notice the shift. IBN ran Dasavataram for weeks together before it was released. Special hour-long shows, special interviews, covering the music launch, interviewing make-up artists and choreographers... the list goes on. KS Ravikumar is probably the first director to have got such unprecedented coverage from the English medium, both for himself and his film. So much so, that even Hindi news channels wanted to be safe and covered south-Indian event even if they didn’t run it later. I met one very senior entertainment reporter from Star News (Hindi news), and he told me he had been to Chennai for the music launch of Dasavataram. Now, that is not something that happens all the time.

There were two episodes of ‘Being SP Balasubramanyam” on IBN. Not that he deserves less, he is a blessed prodigy. But it does come at a time when everyone seems to be running south. And as I write this, Times Now is running a special show on the South-Filmfare awards, and surprisingly, Times Now is a highly visible media partner for the event. Even if the fact that a special show for a completely south-based event can be called as business because Times Now is a media partner, it is worth noticing that an English news channel like Times actually took special interest in partnering with the organizers of the show.

Moreover, I have also heard a lot of Mumbai entertainment-reporters rant about too much of South news being covered on their news channels. But then the rule is clear, isn’t it? Go where you get the maximum money. People down south watch you more, then you have to give more importance to them.

It is not entertainment alone that seems to be bringing more stuff from down south, but also lifestyle. Times Now has always covered more of the south compared to others, but NDTV and IBN too have started running human-interest feature stories based in cities like Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad. More of citizen journalism, sports, business news and even politics have been seen in TV now. I guess TV9 is starting an English news channel based on the south alone. They clearly seem to have discovered a new highly potential market to sell news. It is quite clear, the Indian English media is southward bound!

Finally after waiting for a long time my Dell XPS 1530 arrived yesterday and it really rockss, i was supposed to get it on 3rd July but continuous delay were caused by curfew in Indore and some other factors.

The Config is
Processor : Intel C2D T8100 - 2.1GHz
RAM : 3GB 667MHz Dual Channel
Graphics Card : GeForce 8600GT 256 MB
Screen : 15.4" WXGA+ ( 1440x900 )
WiFI card : Intel 4965 802.11n
OS : Windows Vista Home Preminum ( removed after an hour )


It looks gr8 far better then what i previously owned, HP 6515b which was given by my college MIT, Manipal.
As soon as i received my Dell first think i did was to run Windows Performance Index and the score came out to be 5.0 with 5.0 being the lowest score because of my 3GB RAM!!!

I tried some Windows Media Centre and then it was time to say vista good bye and say hello to Fedora 9, the install went without a hitch but when i booted i that my mouse was not working, a quick search on forums and i had the solution add i8042.nomux=1 as a kernel parameter and every thing was working, WiFi, LAN all worked out of the box, some yum install and my new notebook was ready to rock and roll

so here they are x144 and x121

PS - i will be heading back to manipal on 16th, waiting for a really rocking sem……….

If this is all it took to dethrone Twitter from whatever place it holds in our lives, we would have passed on the service a very long time ago.

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[Free Software Foundation] just seem a little too rabid, their methods too extreme (insulting the Gates foundation’s work is equivalent to tossing paint at people wearing fur coats, except not hilarious) and their overall goals too ambitious and unrealistic.

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But it was an oral confirmation one month before the stipulated internship was supposed to begin, and I got the scare of my life when they told me later that it wasn’t like fixed fixed. I had to go to Mumbai for an interview and only then…

This was, of course, pretty logical. What was not very was travelling from the west coast of India to the east coast, dump some luggage and carry some, and come all the way back to the west coast, all the time knowing that it was still in the maybe stage. Well, we did it anyway, me and Ram. And no, they didn’t ‘reject’ us. Phew!

This is the part which I call ‘bursting the bubble’. I learnt a lot of things – not all ideal, not all happy-happy. I saw and experienced what I had earlier only heard or read about. It’s not like I didn’t believe people when they told me that it’s like this, but when you actually see it for yourself, it hits you full in the face.

It hits you hard. Imagine a fist with some constrained veins and pointed knuckles, coming at the speed of sound… Imagine it in slow motion, Bollywood style, with some Kollywood style gold rings on those big, big, fingers… and it reaches your face and SMACK!

Ouch! Yea, it hits you that hard.

On a more serious note – everybody was a little surprised that their two new interns were both from Manipal, were classmates, were Tamilians, and were both from Chennai. For some people, this was immensely amusing!

But for two people who are so ‘similar’ (and as Anadi puts it, pun intended.), I don’t think we ‘experienced’ the same things. Every shoot is different, every day in the edit-room is different, every train journey is different, and every chai-outing is different. People are different, and so are their ‘response to stimuli’ ;)

There was a point, somewhere in the middle of the internship, where I seriously thought nothing was right. I was whining, and believe me, I sound ridiculous when I do that. I was behaving differently from how I usually behave – symptoms include talking very very little, drinking too much coffee, and, yes, whining. (To be very very honest, it wasn’t the drinking too much coffee part, or the whining part that worried me :P )

And at the end of one very ridiculous whining session, I realised something. It was my multiple personality disorder. And the only person who chooses which one of the multiple comes up and shows her head is, well, me.

Sounds very filmy no? No? Sounds like serials? Whatever!

I like coffee, and there’s no use whining unless that gives you a brainwave. Use what you have to get what you want, but never over-do it in a very obvious way. Lesson learnt in the latter part of the internship, and voila! It’s time to go home. Of course I learnt a lot about the media too – but I aint gonna list ‘em out here, cos I’m incapable of separating the good, the bad and the ugly; so I’ll just leave that for my other blog, for some other time, eh?

But Mumbai is a crazy, crazy place. My last few hours there, I saw the city truly flooded and I saw the selfish people. But I also saw the good ones coming forward to help the taxi-guy when his front brake went pop. I saw the people on the roads telling him which direction to not go in, without him asking them, for that road is really flooded. And there was the taxi guy who, through all that, somehow got me to Bombay Central and didn’t ask for anything more than what the meter read.

Only, Bombay Central was not the station I was supposed to go to. It was 12:30 in the afternoon when I checked my ticket to see that my train left from CST at 2:00 pm. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!

Thank you, Anadi and Niranjan, for getting me to CST on time. Thank you, Indian Railways, for delaying my train by an hour and not cancelling it. Thank you to the 47 people who cancelled their tickets on that train and my RAC became a berth. Thank you, old lady, for being old and not wanting the upper berth, and trading it for my lower.
And I’m back home

I am not quite sure if they were on a date.

Or if there was even a plate!

They just ate – by some chance of fate.

Did they know that food came in variety then?

Did they know they could fry a hen?

Did they even live out of a den?

Maybe they lived in a fen even!

Did they imagine they would have to diet!

And food they would have to fight?

And that food with carbs and wasn’t right?

Sinful was anything cooked in sauce white!

Fat equaling to ugly was a result of multiplied food?

Did the first-man-to-eat-food know that dude!

Did he know that to binge could depend on one’s mood?

He didn’t know what he had started was to obesity, a prelude!

The first-woman-to-eat-food didn’t know,

That food would make her grow and grow!

And leave her on an eternal low!

Also that she would have to cook some more, and more!

Neither of them knew the trap of the food! Sigh!

What a break in the high!

But, if they didn’t eat then, they would die!

And the Earth would just say Bye-Bye!

So good,

That they ate some food!

Bunch of links to tutorials about extending the excellent Firefox extension.

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