When I visit India, I usually end up visiting a bunch of friends, uncles, aunties and cousins. Some of them live in modern apartment complexes, towers, as they call them. Taking the elevator and, on occasion, the stairs, I can’t help but think “Where is the fucking fire escape?”. Chided, I am, for such thoughts. “You have become American”, “If there is a fire, we will just run downstairs”, “Lord Ayyappa will not let anything happen to us” are among the myriad responses I’ve gotten. And then something like this happens. [NYT]

But early on Friday the hospital, known as Amri, confronted an emergency for which it seemed to have no plan: an inferno in its basement that transformed the entire hermetically sealed and air-conditioned building into a giant chimney for a searing, smoky fire.

When the smoke cleared, 94 people were dead, scores more were injured and a nation was left asking: Is nowhere, even an expensive, privately run hospital designed for the country’s upwardly mobile classes, safe from the disaster that seems to lurk on every railway line, highway on-ramp and festival ground?

The most revealing comment, at least one by a famous person, on this topic:

Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, summed up the mood when he sent this message on Twitter: “Every time I see incidents like #AMRI I’m convinced we really are a 3rd world nation with delusions of greatness.”

Indian cities, over the last 20 years in particular, have sought to model themselves after the West; swanky malls, ritzy apartment complexes and state-of-the-art hospitals and medical care; for all this prosperity and opulence, safety and concern for human lives is still a “phoren” concept.

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This is not intended to be a review.

*spoiler alert* Some points give away the story line of the movie.

Peepli Live is a slap fest. It’s a slap across the face, for today’s politicians, the government, it’s babus, their yojanas, and above all, the MEDIA and us, it’s viewers.

Live television has long crossed the boundaries of absurdity. An year ago, the CM of Andhra Pradesh (YS Rajashekar Reddy) passed away in a chopper crash, and the media created a mass hysteria among people and portrayed several hundred ‘shock deaths’ – death of many average souls, who died of shock when they heard the news. For a major part of the week, including the night of the disappearance of the chopper, the news channels went wild, especially the one owned by the CM’s son (and apparently the heir to the CM post in the next few years), broadcast images of people weeping inconsolably for a CM they most probably never saw in flesh and blood ever in their life. His popularity exaggerated and magnified a million fold, and gaining maximum political mileage out of a personal tragedy.

That is a tiny example of our mis-information age, and Peepli Live makes a satire of it. Farmer deaths is something we hear about everyday, (right after cricket, dynasty politics, Pakistan, world, Chinese made gadgets and 10 tips to improve our sex lives). The characters in the movie are in abject poverty, and their cuss words may make you laugh, or cringe, but they are pretty unfiltered.

In the first few minutes you hear a pair of newsreaders relaying the news about Shilpa Shetty, denying the rumor of an affair with Prince William. You thought that was exaggeration? Over an hour into the movie, a TV presenter is shown examining the poop of a person they are unable to get hold of, for a millionth interview.

Budhia, a simpleton who is talked into giving a statement about committing suicide, as he is about to lose his ancestral piece of land, is now on the run because the media had made a circus out of his life, and his tiny little home in an unknown rural town of Peepli. His half hearted suicide talk has become a national sensation, and everybody in an official position in the country, and the media, have a vested interest in his death.

The stress of this turn of events has given him a diarrhea, but the media won’t allow him to attend his ablutions in peace. If this doesn’t tell you something, then good. The real world media has done its job well. We have been desensitized, the level at which we can be shocked is so high up, that nothing trivial like suicides because of poverty, bother us anymore. We couldn’t do much about it anyway.

While the suspense of Budhia’s life or death is gripping the nation, Mahato is out digging a ditch to make money by selling the soil, and ironically, his weak body gives away and he dies in the very ditch he is digging. Nobody give’s a sh*t because they are busy analyzing Budhia’s sh*t.

The outcome of Budhia’s life doesn’t really matter anymore, there’s a wonderful 3 min scene about what ‘yojanas’ can help him. There’s one for widows, disabled and the destitute. But the only one Budhia qualifies for is either ‘Lal Bahadur’(a hand pump) or the 1 lakh compensation that his wife gets if he dies.
Again, a wonderful satire on how our national leaders have been idolized under different schemes (mostly for political purposes). There’s wonderful characterization of IAS level/Block development officers, who say nothing but, ‘yes sir’ to the minister. The educated secretary of Agriculture, who won’t do anything except wait for a court order, and the high rung politicians, for who, everything is just a political game. To get into power, and remain in power. Absolutely no other objective.

Peepli live is uncomfortably funny, has no songs, has exceptionally talented actors, is produced by Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao, and is a very simple and straight story that was born out of frustration with things that are wrong in India today including the media, which has long lost its original purpose of information, and fast moved into the world of entertainment. LIVE entertainment. And Peepli Live is a wonderful window that captures this in less than 2 hrs.

How Santosh Ostwal quit his job, did some jugaad and bettered over 10,000 lives. [Economist blog]

Couple of year back I had a post on “Indian farmers texting their way to prosperity” in which I discussed the likelihood of wireless technological innovations happening in rural Indian with almost zero Internet and computer involvement.

People complain about the folks in rural and backward areas of India getting left out of the information gold rush. That is a pretty myopic view because you don’t have to sit in front of a computer with keyboard and mouse for “information”. That is so 90s. Pretty much anyone in India, who earns some amount of money, can afford a mobile phone these days, and that is not hyperbole. And guess what the easiest and most convenient way to access information is? An entire set of people numbering greater than the population of the USA are bypassing computers altogether, but still getting information. Hope some entrepreneur minded person is listening.

This thought process stems from the concept of jugaad a.k.a the ability to make the most of existing resources and improvise and innovate. The timing of that post was right around the big crash and most of the world had not yet started feeling the complete effect of the recession engulfing the globe. Fast forward two years, frugal is in. Entrepreneurs are embracing lean practices is kick start their business ventures. Jugaad has arrived on the main stage. But what would one do jugaad for? To save the world or build the next Facebook app?

If it were up to Santosh Ostwal, his answer would be to save the world. The [Economist blog] has an incredible story of how one man applied his engineering ingenuity to help farmers in rural India at great personal cost.

Ostwal first stumbled on this problem when he visited his grandfather.

In 1981 Mr Ostwal, then an adolescent, visited his family’s village near Pune during his summer vacation. Every midnight, his 82-year-old grandfather (who had lost a leg to gangrene and walked with a stick) would walk a mile to switch on the water-pump to ensure that his oranges were ready to ship the next morning.

His first solution a.k.a jugaad was simple but effective.

He started with a $2 alarm clock. The farmer set a time, and the sound of the alarm fed into an interface that signaled the coil of the pump’s starter. It was a user-friendly technique, but the alarm could be set only once; the farmer still had to walk to his fields to switch the pump off. Mr Ostwal would scooter to the fields himself at midnight and take out his multi-meter and oscilloscope, and he began to win the farmers over.

His second jugaad ran into some hilariously suspicious babudom.

In 1998, he abandoned the alarm clock and considered a remote control that would use a radio frequency allocated to him by the ministry of communications. He first had to convince the ministry that his remote control was not capable of deploying a bomb and that he could be trusted with it.

By 2001, he had quit his job, lost his apartment and was literally leading a hand-to-mouth existence. However, the desire for a solution spurred him on.

For about 9 months, I was not having any bread and butter at all. Me, my wife and my two kids… I was driven out of the house by the house owner and really came on the road in 2002. I was unable to fuel my innovations anymore. Sustainability was totally finished. But (at the time) thanks to mobile phone technology, one fine morning of Ganesh Chaturthi in 2003, I thought to myself, ‘why do I have to go for these licenses? Why can’t I try the same technology by using wireless connectivity of the mobile phone? I immediately tried the same technology with wireless connectivity of the mobile and surprisingly, I can tell you within 15 minutes, I got the result using the bulky Motorolla T 180 mobile ha ha ha! So instead of investing in a license, I piggy-backed on the wireless connectivity of the mobile phone.

Per Ostwal, the biggest impediment he faced besides lack of funds and resources, was resistance from the very farmers he was trying to help.

Farmers were not accepting this as a problem of theirs. They would tell me that this is routine work for us and our sons. Why do you worry so much? Walking a couple of miles daily is no big deal. What other work do we and our sons have? Let them work hard and appreciate the food that they get at the end of each day!

However, he did not let any of this disrupt his pursuit for a solution to the problem that plagued him from childhood. There is a happy ending to this story.

Today his solution – a mobile-phone adaptation that triggers irrigation pumps remotely – is saving water in India and helping more than 10,000 farmers avoid several taxing, dangerous long walks a day.

Do you know of any other inspiring entrepreneurial stories like these? Please share them with us in the space below.

Miscellaneous links:
NanoGanesh

60 years ago, when the constitution of India was adopted, our freedom fighters hardly expected the unity to remain fragile 60 years later. We stand united in our love for ‘miley sur mera tumara’ for it’s star value and…wait! Before I can finish my latest news on our unity, there were a few interruptions, mostly controversies this video generated. But, watch the video first…

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Now back to the latest news, (only 10 or 20 min old) depending on whether you watched the second part of the video or not.

Raj Thackeray condemned the video and proclaimed that every character in the video should sing in Marathi only, pointed by a reporter that it was a about the integration of multi-cultures, he chucked the reporter out of his castle (built of chamchas stacked upon each other), for using an English word in the question, while this was on TRS leecher leader K Chandrashekar Rao, demanded that Telugu actor Mahesh Babu’s part in the video be cut out or he would fast unto death because Mahesh Babu (born and schooled in Chennai and married to Hindi actress Namrata Shirodkar), was an Andhrite. Ignored by public, he threw a few pebbles, hurt his own little finger and ran on the roads of Hyderabad with screams of ‘Jai Telangana’, and promising freedom to all Telangana people from the dreaded Andhra dictators, who were apparently Caucasian like the Britishers and demanded that all Andhrites cross over beyond the imaginary line in his head.

Tamil Nadu politicians expecting the impending trouble, translated all Hindi lyrics to Tamil long before the video was made or imagined in a director’s head.

Imamullah hakimullah Pasha, in the meanwhile threatened to burn the channels broadcasting the video, because Salman Khan was not wearing a burkha. The saffron wing parties like the Ram sena, came there to join the chorus because little kids both boys and girls were in close proximity that was clearly western influence and inducing low morals in their fragile minds, so they tried to beat up the kids gathered there, but ended up fighting Imamullah hakimullah’s henchmen.

The terrorists who had come from across the border, got confused in the melee and blew themselves up prematurely, but nobody noticed them, until each political party tried to show the deaths as self immolation by their party workers.

Mayawati, who recently made Taj Mahal her official residence complained randomly about castes and cultures, while demanding that three videos come out of UP each signifying a future state, like that of her mind dealing with multiple personality disorder.

Mallika Sherawat and Sherlyn chopra gave interviews, calling the video bland and tasteless because it didn’t have any sensuality in it, and the only way would have been to include both of them strutting and singing in American-accented imaginary languages. Rakhi Sawant proclaimed that in the next season of her reality show, she would invite a guy from each state for her swayamvar, apparently she included the state of ‘Cannada’ with capital Ottawa in her list.

While this was happening, the media was seen camping outside actor Rekha’s residence demanding that she make a comment about Big B’s appearance in the video, or they  would make up random stuff about she watching the video a hundred million times in her house, though they were not even sure if she had a TV or watched it.

This could also be the reason why you may not have heard of this news elsewhere, but trust me, this is all true, at least in my own head.

Happy Republic Day India. Happy Republic day.

It is a truth universally acknowledged in India that a politician bereft of an issue to express his indignation over, would concoct one out of thin air. The moment such a concoction is introduced to the mango citizens (aam janta if you are wondering), the Indian news-media congregates to take a swig out of the barrel and proceeds to get high.

This familiar scene is playing out currently in India. In what has to be the most WTF evoking “It happens only in India” type occurrences that I have seen since moving back home, an innocuous exchange on Twitter (see image below) between a journalist and the most famous Indian recipient of the Colbert Bump in dominating newsprint and airwaves. It has politicians jostling among themselves to express their displeasure and the media, not one to be left behind, has been fanning the flames mentioning twits and twats every minute of the day for the past 24 hours and counting.

Cattlegate

While Tharoor is on a state visit to Liberia and Ghana (sans Internet/Blackberry access for the most part), his own party-men have taken umbrage to his tweets that had the otherwise common phrases, “cattle class,” and “holy cows”. Calling his comment unacceptable “given the sensitivity of all Indians”, Congress spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan (who this blogger once considered articulate) said that her party does not endorse it and “finds his comment unacceptable and totally insensitive.” (Link)

Much WTFness was felt when one heard what Rajasthan Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot had to say. Commenting that Tharoor “occupies a responsible and most dignified post”, Gehlot advised him to apologize to the nation for the comments (which he termed “very unfortunate”) and submit his resignation. (Link). But Tharoor did find an ally in his own Prime Minister. Downplaying Tharoor’s tweets as “no issue”, PM Manmohan Singh called it a joke and said, “the matter has been blown out of proportion”. (Link)

Meanwhile the media was not sitting idle. In the last 24 hours, almost every English news channel has had panel discussions on what has since been termed “cattle gate”. Blogger and author Amit Varma was part of one such panel discussion on the TimesNow channel. In a hilarious exchange that had Twitter-aware viewers going WTF every second of the way, Congress spokesperson Tony Vadakkan had this to say to the host of the show,

Let me tell you something: I did a little research after you phoned me, to find out what is the basic cause for this tweet business. Some of the survey reports that I received was Tweet is a very lonely man, and he needs counseling.

That utterance (do not miss the videos on Amit’s blog post) sums up the hilarity of the whole issue. What “cattlegate” has demonstrated to the millions of educated Netizens in India is that Indian politicians do not appreciate humor in the Queen’s language. What is even more surprising is that, some of the politicians that are considered articulate and educated (Jayanthi Natarajan, for one) have demonstrated their abject lack of knowledge of the nuances of the Queen’s English.

To his defense, Tharoor’s tweet was obviously a humorous quip referring to his own party’s recent austerity drive (In other news, the same party, citing security concerns, flew its MP and king in waiting Rahul Gandhi on a whirlwind tour of the southern state of Tamil Nadu at a cost of more than Rs. 10 million) and would have gone unnoticed elsewhere.

But this is India. As some sections of the tired tweeps of the Indian twitterverse jump to his defense (Link), and as yet others look on amused, while English challenged politicians indulge in old fashioned politics to cut down a charismatic newcomer, Shashi Tharoor himself has sought to defuse the situation. He mentioned that he was actually denigrating the airlines for herding passengers into seating like cattle. He clarified (what a lot of us have known for years) that “holy cows” referred not to humans, but to “sacrosanct issues or principles that no one dares challenge”, he said sorry “to those who were hurt by the belief that (his) repeating the phrase showed contempt”. He says he realizes that he shouldn’t assume people will appreciate humour and wished that critics would look up the means of these terms before reacting.

But if utterances by unnamed Congress politicians are to be believed, Tharoor’s apology will not be enough and his tweets will be the catalyst for his downfall. In spite of the PM Manmohan Singh coming to his defense, Party spokesperson Manish Tewari has said that his “party will take whatever action is appropriate and necessary at an appropriate time.” And according to TV news reports, Congress sources have said that Tharoor will be axed when the customary Union Cabinet expansion happens.

This is the sort of sad thing you get (as one tweet put it) when you have an educated person in a cabinet of half illiterate humorless twits. But this case of a bunch of humorless politicians taking a joke literally is certainly rich (as another tweet put it) coming from a party who adopted the music of “Slum Dog” as its call to arms in the last election earlier this year. Can we see through the reason why they ignored the literal translation of that phrase? Obviously yes. And that is a sad state of affairs.

However at Uberdesi, we are monitoring this situation carefully. There is enormous potential for His Eminence, the leader of all the Hindus in the continental US and elsewhere, Rajan Zed, to make an appearance.  He could be tapped to teach Shashi Tharoor, who has spent the last few years outside India, about what the Hindu scriptures say about holy and sacred bovines. That would put the latch on #cattlegate once for all.