Net Neutrality

Of late the newsfeed in facebook is full of petitions and posts supporting net neutrality. It was less than a fortnight back that I saw an episode on net neutrality by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight show in HBO. I was just amazed by the way he connects such serious issues with humour while he also successfully creates an empathy amongst his viewers for the issues he brings to limelight. For those of you who missed the show or have been lazy till now to read and grasp what exactly 'net neutrality' means, let me give a synopsis.

Till now, we have been using the internet by paying for the amount used, say 1gb, 2gb, etc at flat rates. That is the net rates are neutral to all domains. If it were to be abolished as many data carriers like airtel and vodafone seek, your data pack will change the same way your erstwhile TV cable connections gave way for DTH services.

Remember the days when you used to pay a minimum of 100 bucks or so and you could watch the boring soap-opera channels as well as the world cup finals? Slowly, the DTH operators entered the fray, started by offering good quality streaming at competitive prices and lured the market their way. Just the predatory pricing strategies are adopted by e-commerce players to acquire customers, the DTH acquired customers and eliminated the small cable operators from the game. Once they got rid of them, they started milking the cash by increasing the prices. That was just the tip of the iceberg until someone came up with the idea of DTH channel packs. You pay a minimum of 200 odd bucks to get a handful of channels and then subscribe to additional packs by shelling out more coins.

If the data carriers had their way, you would pay base price for one gb data and pay extra to use different domains. For instance, 120 for 1gb + 50 for facebook + 30 for watsapp + free for hike. Before you rejoice over the free service for 'hike' it might not be applicable to you if you are an unfortunate vodafone customer since hike has its links with airtel only.

The case that these carriers set forth is that if you pay extra,you will be able to use these websites at ultra-high speeds whereas without these also you can use them at the existing speeds. Sorry airtel, we are not stupid enough buy this bullshit!

For all of you who were over the moon when supreme court repealed section 66, anti-net neutrality is a fix at this by those in power. The next time you post something against the autocrats, the website will not be accessible at normal speeds, thanks to the back channel links between the government that ends net neutrality and the corporates that reap the billions.

Although you might be happy to not to come across my writing if net neutrality ends, let me also tell you that you probably won't be able to access any website at your private time either. If you know what I mean, you better sign the petition.

https://www.change.org/p/trai-take-an-action-to-preserve-net-neutrality-in-india

It might not be all that the fight needs, but am sure as hell that it is not nothing.!

Happy b'day Anna.!

Hi ra,

Wish you a many more happy returns of the day and a great year ahead. Let me start by apologising for not finishing this piece before today but lets face the truth, both you and I know how good I am with timelines :P. So let that go, especially since its still not too late over there in the Fundy city. It would be an understatement if I said I have known you most of your life for I am the only one who knows you as a brother, a friend, an opponent and a guide.

We had the squabbling phase in the '90s before you were packed off to a boarding school. Luckily it didn't last forever and you returned in a year with much exposure and maturity. But that didn't help a lot in our fights for the remote because come what may, we have the 'right to fight' with each other on every silly stuff that we could. Then it was my turn to try my luck outside the comfort of home and fortunately it turned out to be better and I started seeing you as a big brother, for you were the one who considered me mature enough to tell stuff that Amma and Appa would never do. The five long years at sainik changed our equation altogether. Our thoughts evolved and somehow we started agreeing on most of the stuff. That meant a great deal especially when we needed to convince mom and pops.

The college years were the best, both yours and mine. A day doesn't pass by when I wouldn't miss the days we spent in coimbatore. Those were the days we had on our own without any chaperone. By the time I moved in to college we were adults and started the long conversations on career choices, business prospectives, and stuff I wouldn't publish on a blog :P.

We have come a long way, both you and me but I still long for the days when we used to play at our locality with the cousins as nothing could come close to the carefree days that we shared together. I know that I would never have to worry about falling down, for I have you for a safety net to confide in. So, let me toast to another great year we shared and for the best of your health.

Cheers,
Brother.

Stereotype

Stereotype- this is one word I have been trying to explaining a major part of my life since I come from a State, the culture and customs of which are entirely different and new to people from rest of the country. That added to a recent chat I had with one of my colleagues from North who happens to be in Tamil Nadu currently, gave the push I needed to let it out on the blog.

It is not just personal to me but I am tired of people judging every possible guy based on their region, language, and so on. The judgement is hardly driven by understanding and majorly swung by the perceived notions about stereotypes with the same background. The funny part is, in most cases the assumed stereotype is itself a myth and the stereotypes are mixed up. Again, it is not personal but just so it is easy to understand for the many Indians who have heard it a zillion times by now, Tamil and Telugu are not the same. First, you judge a person without even trying to know him. Next, most of your perceptions are made up or illogical. Finally you mix up the notions too and expect the other person to fit the bill. That doesn't appear to be personal at all.!

Well, this thinking is not regional. For a stereotypical Tamilian, everyone from India except the four peninsular states is a North Indian (my bad, it is actually five now, and it is not long when Telangana also might become northern), who eat nothing but rotis and speak only Hindi.

Enough about pointing fingers, when I actually tried to understand the cause behind such preconceived notions, my thoughts on idioms were instigated. Stereotyping is similar to the usage of idioms. One uses it with the conviction that he/she has in its usage rather than the true meaning of the phrase or the actual genesis of the idiom. That is indeed why they are called idioms and similarly that is exactly why the baseless concepts are called stereotypes. It is in the usage and thoughts passed around instead of an actual understanding.

For instance, the idiom ‘black sheep’ gives a negative colour to someone in a group whose views and actions are different if not opposite to that of the collective viewpoint of the group. When you trace the origins of the phrase, it was given a negative colour because the black wool couldn’t be dyed and was useless. I don’t know about the rest of you but sure as hell I didn’t know that actual black sheep existed. So, the people who were negatively impacted by the birth of a black sheep laid the seeds for this idiom. Likewise, people who don’t understand and find it difficult to accept a different view or thought try to stereotype it amongst a group of thoughts they can’t digest.

The next time you have time to read upon Russian idioms, please do check out the phrase ‘white crow’. :P

Discount Generation

I guess, the title says it all. The festival and holiday season just got over. The shopping fever has gone down and so has the rainfall of discounts. So for the Gen Y folks who have become far too dependent on discounts and deals, it is a bad time to go shopping, even online. Coming from this lot, I do experience the same hardships as any other young man who wants to buy the latest gizmo in the market during off-season. The discounts have been for better and worse. Although they have increased the number of purchases an individual makes turning us into shopaholics, they have also definitely made us price conscious. Today's youth is ready to wait it out for a month to get a product on an e-commerce portal rather than buy it from the 'new arrivals' section in a retail store. 

I remember, as a kid I used to wonder how can the big shopping centres offer discounts upto 60 percent and more in the time preceding the festive seasons and my dad used to tell me that the stores try to clear out the old stock from their inventory and its not always better to but at that time. Fast forward a decade and now I am telling my dad about the working of the e-commerce, at least what I have a grasp on. Adapting to online shopping is not easy and may be it is for the best because once you do, you kinda become addicted. The websites don't make it easy for you to decide by sending a humungous number of promotions and you end up shopping what you might not use more than once or some stupid stuff you thought looks great in the image. As I mentioned earlier, the preconceived notions about purchasing below the listed retail price is one hurdle before the portals and it is actually ironical too. Should you offer discounts to get customers or should you not offer much to ensure they don't perceive of you as selling faulty goods? 

While this is the case of online shopping, in the last couple of years even the restaurants, hotels, taxis and other service offerings have jumped on to this bandwagon doling out steep discounts and fighting it out to capture a bigger pie of the market. There are indeed apprehensions about the future of e-commerce too, since it is reasonable to believe that the discounts will run out once they capture that bigger pie. But again, how bigger? for instance amazon has been around for quite a while and still it is extending discounts in the established western markets. Yes, the kind of offers have changed over time. One clear indication is the scrapping of loyalty program on Myntra post the acquisition by Flipkart. 

Compared to this scenario, the old brick and mortar stores of the '90s were better. Then, if you purchase from the same shop the experience changes for the better every other time and the discounts keep increasing as your bargaining capacity increases due to the rapport build over time. But it is vice-versa in the case of online purchases. One thing is clear, no matter how much the portals scale, the stores are here to stay forever as has been observed in the western countries albeit a doubt, will the individual stores stay or will they be beaten to the line by the corporate chains?

As an end customer, seldom do we think of such business and economic (if not socio-political) impacts behind our day-to-day purchases and activities. We are in our own race to scout for the best discounts and deals that can be availed at each and every transaction possible. With no worries about the future, just living the present. Carpe Diem!

Common Enemy

This is more of a follow up to my previous piece. I had an informative conversation with one of my friends who had to read it as I kept nagging him. He is into political sciences and he started off with asking me about the Dravidian movement. In a while, we landed on the best topic - Secularity. Although the politicians of today have altered its definition to 'being pro-minority', the origins can be traced back to a few centuries when the Church influenced the rule of law. It meant the separation of parish from the throne. Before you start wondering about the origins of the word in Hindi or Tamil, let's not forget that even before Christianity, Islam and other beliefs found place in our country, our ancestors had squabbles over the sects of Hinduism too.

Similar to the Shia-Sunni conflicts in modern day Iraq that has given room for the growth of outfits like ISIS; and the many European wars motivated and aggravated by the disagreements between the Catholics and Protestants, the dissent between the various sects of Hinduism was prevalent in the last millennium. Although differences exist between the followers of other beliefs too, probably the low population following them has kept them from fighting against each other.

Although there exist many a divisions within the followers of the same religion, majority of the dissension is between the two big brothers. Partially because being bigger among the lot, they have a huge following, deep pockets and high political stakes. Ya, that's right - POLITICS. As much as I would like to not come up with a conspiracy theory that religious turbulence was spurred by the underlying political equation even centuries back, history says otherwise. My understanding of the entente between religion and politics in England during the time of the Tudors influenced me in penning this piece. Tudors in particular because my interest in the British history was kindled by the tv series in that name, if not by the 'Bloody Mary' drink.

Gradually, over the centuries the differences between the sects of Hinduism has disappeared owing to the arrival of new beliefs in the country, that helped in realising the similitudes rather than the dissimilarity. Even a friend of a friend may not be a friend, but in this pragmatic world, enemy of an enemy is surely a friend. As Kevin Spacey from House of Cards would put it "three cheers to 'ruthless pragmatism'!". That show is one hell of a depiction of cutthroat politics. This trend in Hinduism hasn't been observed in Islam yet or for that matter in humankind yet. As the number of lives lost due to riots is still significant in our country,most of them provoked on religious grounds.

Political masters have used the concept of religion for the good and bad, right from overthrowing tyrants to instigating a pogrom. Sadly, they have been more successful in their attempts to achieve the latter objective. Any play of politics is incomplete in today's world without the media playing its voodoo.   Of late, even once-credible news organisations are turning into TRP craving gossip channels that exaggerate every miniscule incident into a gargantuan clash. We cannot single out the media houses to take the blame for concentrating on delicate issues since as much as they would like to toe the line of their corporate daddies, their survival is based on the audience and their preferences, after all we are the TRP drivers.

With a government at the centre, that is making the citizens responsible and accountable for governance to cleanliness at every chance it gets, the onus is on us to educate ourselves of the art of 'think before you act' or even better 'think before you opine' since silence kills many a conflicts.

Let us unite again against the common enemy - the politics of religion.

The Irony.

As usual, I was trying to zero in on a topic that would be my next piece in this blog. The choices ranged from a simple documentary of one of my experiences to an emotional retort upon the peshawar attack. My flatmate laughed off at my latter choice. So I chose the happening topic-resolutions on new year's eve, to begin with.

We are at the beginning of another year and it is time for those long list of resolutions that are forgotten in less than a fortnight. One of the common ironical resolutions is pledging to quit drinking while taking a shot on New year's eve. The reason is logical too, "its my last shot, before I quit" except that it is not as one can't be expected to pledge other resolutions without a shot each :P.

I am no exception but on this day, I would like to ponder upon a thought that has been growing within since the last few days, the politics on social divisions.

The recently concluded elections in Jharkhand resulted in a non-tribal chief minister for a tribal majority state and the winning party is the one accused of being communal. Many adversaries of the same accused it of playing divisive and communal politics by placing a non-tribal at top and many more learned folks have shared their opinion through various media. This is just my interpretation and understanding of the same with the preconceived notions that I have developed throughout my life.

Not just because I used to admire the leadership of the winning party but I can't digest the irony in opponents claiming it to be communal for placing a non-tribal as the head of a state. As for as I know, there is no say in the constitution that states the head of a region should be from the majority caste, then how is it communal or against the minority in a person from minority wielding power. This is another irony in this entire political game of our country. Many an organisations that claim to support the minorities actually raise their voice in places where the 'minorities' are actually the majority in that region and are economically weak as well, for that is the demographic that exercises the fundamental right of casting their votes, probably because that is their only right that hasn't been exploited, well atleast not denied.

One thing I am happy and proud of being a Tamilian is the fact that the then leaders of the Dravidian movement took steps to eliminate the significance of castes by advocating the exclusion of surnames that reflect the lineage. Wish more was done in that front before they got fixated on political gains and started vote bank politics, another feature left behind by the British ideology of divide and rule.

Although we claim to be a secular nation with no disparity on the basis of caste or creed, it is one of the first things asked in our life right from kindergarten to college and at every scratch with the government proceedings. That's an irony we have grown accustomed to since we are toddlers. Well, I guess even a 100 'PK's on caste (instead of religion) wouldn't help the next lot escape from these questions, if we don't resolute to avoid asking or answering these and doom the political masters who try to pull out this wildcard whenever they require.

I guess, that makes for one solid resolution this year. Happy new year folks.! Have a great year ahead..:)

Looking back

       Less than half a decade back, I thought I had found the genesis of my career with my admission into one of the prestigious institutions in the country to pursue under graduation in mechanical engineering but even now after an exponential learning and exploration curve in the past four years, I feel incomplete in identifying my dream. Before I ponder over the failure of exploring my dream, I am obliged to mention the success of exploring myself which by far is the best learning experience I could ever have dreamed of.

It all began when my studious sister failed to make it into the jee exam and and kept going on about the perks of being an IITian. I had no clue about what an engineer actually does, except that they build things. Even when I was determined to choose nothing but the mechanical stream that took me further away from home, I didn't realise it was very much short of building sports cars and humanoids. But like most stereotypical youths in the country, I assured myself that it is my ambition to get into IIT and become a scientist(only if I had known what it takes to be one..:P) and embarked on a two year strenuous coaching exercise after my secondary education, leaving a well endowed boarding school for a cramped multi-storey building with the soul motto of manufacturing IITians. It was indeed worth the workouts, if I wanted to be an engineer as all said and done IITs are still the best colleges in the country. Unlike popular perception, there is very less or no pressure on academics and it feels like a freedom from slavery after the two year(for a few,it's much longer) exercise. As always, freedom without restrictions could prove detrimental to many and so it happens for most of the brightest minds(at least believed to be so) of the country after enlisting into IIT. We still try to keep ourselves worthwhile by engaging in various extracurricular and club activities but in the process get obsessed with filling our resume, neglecting the topmost column that caters to the academic score. The major fault is listening to the hearsay advices that float around preaching academics is not very much important and it is sufficient to have a threshold cgpa to get a decent job placement, which happens to be a non-core industry for all but the computer science graduates. I wouldn't say it is false but the regret one(I speak for myself) has at the end of the course isn't less either.

During my years at college, I wanted to build my career in many a paths like a trader, a consultant, an entrepreneur and so on like a kid who wants to be a doctor,engineer,artist all at once. I understood that I am another proof to the meme 'In India, people become engineers before they decide what to do in life'. As we realise that it is too late to change tracks now, we try to pick the best option available which incidentally turn out to be management profiles and not engineering ones. This draws the ire of public who accuse the IITians of using the taxpayers' money without returning anything to the nation. Of course, one can't blame the common man for being misguided by the media that tend to blow up the packages and shrink the achievements and contributions of IITians. But the opportunities to payback to the society right from the beginning of career is close to nil. I recollect one of the IIT alumni from the early '60s saying 'brain drain is better than brain in the drain' was the justification during their time(he returned to donate millions to his alma matter). Certainly the situation has altered significantly since then but only the location of work preference has been modified and not the nature of roles sought or the companies preferred. I do believe that citing folks who make up fake documents to claim public funds through different avenues is a justification for us taking care of ourselves but there is nothing wrong in living by the quote 'Charity begins at home' either. Well there is a limit to this charity and most of us realise this sooner than the rest. The many budding entrepreneurs and social activists/entrepreneurs from IITs are the living proof for that.

I guess I have gone off the track from what I set out to write today and it is pretty long already. I wouldn't wanna bore the few readers(friends who don't have a choice) by extending it any further.

I wouldn't do what I have done if I had another run at it but there is no saying whether I would be satiated with a different set of choices/decisions. Nevertheless I am proud of the learnings and friendships I garnered on the way. In short, I went in with great desires of building the gen-next devices and earn millions but came out with the dream of starting up(and earn millions too- well, there are few things that don't change easily). Hoping to realise it sooner than writing my next 'look back'..:P