Book Tag

June 9, 2005

Yazad tagged me with this book meme that's actually hopped from LiveJournal to the "other" blog world. Sorry, my response has been late. But getting the flu has at least one upside, and that is that you find some time to write stuff like this. You can't work even if you want to because your taste buds are shot, and without being able to taste food properly, a chef is pretty useless.

Here we go then...

Total Number of Books I Own: Like Yazad, I never counted. I estimate several hundred (at least 700 or so). I got them insured for Rs. 50000 which is much lower than what they're worth. The collection also grows faster than I can read them, so I have about 20 books still to be read. 

Last Book I Bought: I spent many hours at bookshops in Singapore during my last trip a couple of months back (when I wasn't eating, that is), and the last book I bought was a double volume of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour.

Last Book I Read: Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps: How We're Different and What to Do About It. I borrowed this from a friend because the title got me curious. (I'm always curious about books on human behaviour.) It turned out to be mostly crap and I read only 3/4 of it. Does that count? If not, the last book I read completely was Frederick Forsyth's Avenger. It was entertaining but set off my "bullshit meter" far too often.

Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me: I can't possibly restrict it to five, but those are the rules, so let's give it a shot.

On Writing Well by William Zinsser: This book is invaluable to people who want to be better writers. When you read it, you will realise how much more you could be. I owe much of my penchant for simplicity and clarity to this man. It's affordable, so you should buy a copy too.

The Design of Everyday Things: If you think I bitch too much, you can partly blame this book. It opened my eyes to the world of design, and showed how poor design is responsible for product screw-ups. If you've wondered why people push a door when it's clearly marked "Pull", this book will tell you. (And it's a design problem, not a user problem.)

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams: Every person who manages a team of professionals in the IT business should have a copy of this book, and even if you're not in IT, a large part of the management advice in this book will still be useful to you. Stuff like how overtime doesn't help in the long run, or how motivational posters actually have the opposite effect... here, read the sample chapter online. 

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion: Robert Cialdini has written a wonderful book on how we are manipulated by other people all the time. He describes these "weapons of influence", why they work, and how to protect yourself from them.

It Rains Fishes: Legends, Traditions and the Joys of Thai Cooking: Believe it or not, this book has only 30 recipes, but its value lies in the detailed way the author explains the principles of cooking and combining flavours. I'm a strong believer in teaching people how to cook rather than teaching them just recipes, and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Read her pieces on balancing flavours, making curry pastes, and cooking to taste rather than blindly following recipes. This book closely competed with the far more formidable tome on Chinese cooking, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking by Barbara Tropp. So why did It Rains Fishes win? Because Tropp's book is not in the least for the casual cook. It can be intimidating reading it if you're a novice, but a great learning experience if you're not (and I wasn't.)

 

Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs

Is there anyone out there who hasn't been tagged yet? People like Yazad have tossed their nets out to catch everyone. After much cross-checking, here are my picks:

The Raving Atheist

Shanti Mangala

Sandeep

Jace

Anita Bora

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Bharteeya Blog Mela - 21 April

April 22, 2005

Greetings, amigos. Please set some time aside for an eclectic selection of posts from the Indian blogosphere. This week we have 22 posts for you to sample, and as usual, I've taken some time to go beyond the nominated posts and find other noteworthy pieces of prose. I've even broken them into topics. So for instance, if you couldn't care less about cricket (like me), you can skip the sports section completely. Apologies for the minor delay in posting. There was a power problem at home. You'd think a UPS mated to a spike-buster would do the trick, but noooo...

On with the show, shall we? 

Society, politics, and culture

Satya argues for liberalisation of tertiary education (yet oddly enough not primary and secondary education) and thinks the government should stop trying to regulate everything. In another post, he points out that the Punjab government is opting for a school voucher system after seeing a big drop in education standards. A model for the rest of the country to follow? This is an interesting blog that the Cartel will watch closely. 

Patrix, in a post that rules him out as a libertarian, opines that individual rights can and should be subverted in a time of national crisis. Shocking! Somebody tell him about Indira Gandhi and her Emergency. ;)

In another post, Patrix ruminates about making safe career choices or leaving it all to do something one loves. 

Harini talks about how Indians will marry anything and everything in as much style as possible. That includes marrying trees too.

Nitin Pai ridicules a foreign policy expert's suggestion to negotiate with terrorists in Kashmir. (Get proper permalinks, Nitin. :)

On Sepia Mutiny, Anna is miffed that a list of the best 50 restaurants in the world doesn't have anything Asian in it. (I want to make that list one day with my restaurant, but given how poorly Indians receive gourmet multi-course meals, it may not happen if it's in this country.) 

Saket Vaidya, in a long post, details his concern for the poor and how he has fed many a poor person on the street.

Suhail Kazi has a meandering post on his journey and the trials and tribulations on his way to getting a Social Security Number in USA.

Anand reminisces about witnessing large rallies in Kerala, God's own country (how I hate that term!) 

Fellow atheist Sybil, who lives in Melbourne, finds that most of her colleagues have tried some drug or the other.

Akshay goes on a train ride in Mumbai and tries to explain some of the local history.

Economics

Naveen, on the CCS blog, has suggestions for books that explain how markets work around the world.

Marketing and Management

Neelakantan takes pleasure in trying food from different vendors, grateful that he doesn't have to endure the standardised mediocrity served at McDonald's. He also thinks that ready-to-eat packaged food has more potential in India than ready-to-cook food.

Sports

Swaroop forgets to use the spell-check while writing that Saurav Ganguly's six-match suspension will help him get the break that he needs. To ignite a flame war, he even mentions the support for Saurav from some cricket-loving Cartel members. Could he possibly be talking about posts like this?

And Nandan thinks Sehwag is more like Don Bradman than even the legendary Sachin.

Science and Technology

Selva is upset at Microsoft being granted a patent on a method to access emergency data.

Rajesh Jain believes that affordable bandwidth will lead the way in encouraging development of ASP-modelled software solutions for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises)

Humour

Gaurav has an excellent plan for eliminating all crime from Mumbai. It involves a strategic identification of all the hotspots of criminal activity, and then shutting them down one by one. Bravo!

Lastly, please don't miss this hilarious post on The Examined Life where a couple of Cartel members take on the mysterious Sudhakar Nair who appears unable to detect sarcasm, sardonicism, and irony. Well, maybe he's not so mysterious after all. His writing style and IP address bear more than a passing resemblance to a certain left-leaning socialist writer whom we all know and love. (Seriously, "Sudhakar", you're dealing with a bunch of very smart people who are even smarter when working together. Did you think we wouldn't find out? You need to do a better job of concealing your Clark Kent identity.)

Thank you for visiting folks, and I hope I've given you a decent selection to read. Posts with just a couple of lines and a hyperlink were left out, just for the record.

The next mela will be hosted at Selective Amnesia.

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Blog Mela Announcement

April 15, 2005

Yes, folks, yet another Blog Mela is being hosted at MadMan's Web. This one will be on 21 April. If you missed the last one, catch it at AnarCapLib.

I'm sure you know how it all works, but here you go again:

The Rules

• Posts must either be made by Indians or must focus on India or Indians.
• Please send permalinks to the blog entries only, not just the blog URL. If the permalink is not working, send me the title and date of the blog entry. Whole blogs are not accepted as nominations.
• You can nominate your own posts or someone else's.
• You can submit any type of posts except personal journal entries. By "personal journal entries", we mean the navel-gazing posts of the kind that would be of interest only to your friends and family.
• The entries have to be dated between April 14 and 20.
• Not all entries nominated may be accepted. Editorial discretion will be used.
• New rule: If your site has those annoying pop-up, pop-under, or floating ads, forget about it!

Please post your nominations as comments to this post. Don't post too many links at once or you'll trigger my spam-buster.

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NASA says there ain't no life on Mars

February 19, 2005

Remember that story about evidence of life being found on Mars? Yes, the same one that made front page news on our beloved Slimes of India. Well, it wasn't quite true.
NASA just said so. But guess who broke the news before NASA put out its official release? It was the excellent astronomy-related site, BadAstronomy.com.

To be fair, the Slimes of India was not the only one to pick up the news. News sources like MSNBC and Boston Herald carried it too. What really gets egg on the face of ToI is that they didn't bother crediting the original source, Space.com, for the story. In their usual style, they dispensed with the attribution, making it look as if it was their own story. If they had credited Space.com, they could at least have saved face and passed the blame on to them.

Will ToI print a retraction or follow-up? I'm betting they'll keep quiet about it.

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Stealing content for your web site - The [name deleted] way

January 22, 2005

Update - 16 March, 2007: I have decided to remove the name of the person involved because I think that enough has been written about him, and it's been a couple of years since the original incident. Since I'm ranked high on Google for his name, I don't see the need to let it stay that way. The hyperlinks to his site have also been changed to example.com

I know we all have writer's block from time to time. It's not easy to keep writing on your blog regularly. Some people wait a while, take a break, and come back when they have something worth writing about.

But not [name deleted].

Because Mr. [name deleted] thought that rather than write something original of his own, it would be oh so much easier to simply steal articles from others (Shanti has more) and reproduce them on his site. No, this wasn't with anyone's permission of course. He simply copied it word for word and posted it on his blog. To give it an air of originality, he even copied the comments from the original sites and posted it on his site. Hey, you gotta give him marks for thinking this through.

What was Mr. [name deleted] trying to do? We don't know. But after Amit Varma brought it to the attention of some of us, we decided to send an email asking him to remove the posts and give him 24 hours to comply. Well, we didn't get a response from [name deleted] so he's about to feel some blogger wrath from us. Next time somebody does a Google search for his name, he may get a little bit about [name deleted]'s blatant plagiarism.

Amit's article on plagiarism also talks about writers in major publications stealing large chunks from others. Having worked in the IT media in India, I know from first hand experience that this is common in the IT publications too. I have seen plenty of people do it, and I've worked with some of them. Some at least tried to paraphrase it. Many didn't bother. It was amusing to watch someone with no clue about SQL Server, for example, write a full article on the full-text search feature. It was clear they didn't exactly learn it all in two days. Plagiarism was so easy that it came naturally.

As a writer, I absolutely hate it when others rip off my work, and it's something I can never imagine doing. But hey, when the Slimes of India takes its page 4 Hollywood gossip directly from the Internet every day without any editing, and nobody bats an eyelid, you know that the problem is serious. It's not a crime if you don't get caught, right?

Well, Mr. [name deleted], you have been caught, and the Indian bloggers have something to say about it. Here's your 15 minutes of fame notoriety, mate!

Update: Ravages has sent an email pointing out further theft on [name deleted]'s site. But don't believe him; compare for yourselves:

http://www.example.com/2003/10/web-process-design.html
http://blogs.mit.edu/chsakda/posts/388.aspx

http://www.example.com/2003/10/query-against-uddi.html
http://blogs.mit.edu/chsakda/posts/389.aspx

http://www.example.com/2003/11/bad-art-night.html
http://crossimpact.net/archives/2003/11/17/bad-art-night-ex-votos/

http://www.example.com/2004/03/sun-ldap-provider.html
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/chrismay/entry/sun_ldap_provider_sucks/

http://www.example.com/2004/05/accessing-utk-ldap-server.html
http://blog.maisnam.com/archives/000062.php

http://www.example.com/2004/11/tomcat-in-high-volume-sites.html
http://www.jroller.com/page/carlossg/?anchor=tomcat_in_high_volume_sites

http://www.example.com/2004/12/open-source-identity-management.html
http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/single-sign-on-in-java/view

http://www.example.com/2005/01/collaboration-technologies-and-portals.html
http://jroller.com/page/portlets/20050202#collaboration_technologies_and_portals

Update (26 January): [name deleted] has apologised for his actions.

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Bharteeya Blog Mela: The Tsunami Memorial

January 4, 2005

(Welcome, Instapundit readers. Get yourself a cup of coffee, and set aside some time for reading all these posts.)

It's Blog Mela time again, as we present the best posts from Indians and about India/Indians. This is also the first Blog Mela of the new year, which is of course a meaningless statistic.

As you would expect, this week's reading is heavy on Japanese 101, as the word "tsunami" is introduced to thousands of people who had never heard it before.

This past week, bloggers have supplemented the regular and mostly repetitive news coverage with their own account of the disaster, and some of these have been more revealing than what the newspapers dished out.

Sameer has an overview of what a tsunami is.

While we don't typically accept whole blogs as nominations, Amit Varma's India Uncut has tons of reading, written while visiting the tsunami-affected areas.

(Update: Amit is churning out reports faster than I can read them. Some outstanding writing there.)

Amit's travelling companion, Dilip D'Souza, too has plenty to report. I recommend you set aside a big chunk of time to read everything they've written.

Kiruba, who normally sticks to very "bloggy" stuff on his site, changes gear to write long accounts of the relief efforts. He also takes photos, which is helpful.

Suman Kumar, who has suffered a bandwidth tsunami on his site due to being mentioned in the New York Times (with a little help from yours truly), is trying to do his bit with the relief. He has a tsunami site of his own.

Alpha is upset over the loss of life, but is more upset at the lack of news coverage in the USA.

Patrix disagrees with Alpha. He thinks the media is being particularly insensitive in its relentless display of dead bodies and suffering people.

Sandeep blames the government's apathy for the deaths in India. As did I earlier.

Gaurav disagrees.

Rhyncus has a strange rationalisation of why God is needed because two tectonic plates causing the earthquake is not satisfying enough as an explanation. In part 2 of his article, he says he's got a rock which he calls God, and it's an extension of his parents.

Yazad has some thoughts on depression caused by the tsunami.

Ramanand thinks the media is being unfair in its criticism of cricketers for supposedly not doing enough towards the relief effort because they make an easy target.

And now, on to the non-tsunami stuff...

After the silly MMS "scandal" where Avneesh Bajaj was arrested by police for no fault of his, Sandeep lashes out.

Anand Vivek draws some parallels between Don Quixote and the Nasruddin Hodja legends in the middle-east.

Manu Sharma says "A human edited product news feature is never going to happen at Google" because he thinks Google is primarily a technology company.

A lady known only as "Medium Latte" says that she prefers not to accept help given just because she is a woman, although it's tempting.

That's it for this week, folks. I know some Hindi blog entries were nominated, but I've left them out of this mela, not because I'm a snobbish bastard, but because:

1) I studied Hindi for 10 years at school, and speak the language fluently, but haven't read any big chunks of Hindi since 1990. So my reading speed has reduced to a crawl.

2) The thin strokes of the text coupled with the low resolution of a PC monitor made it even harder to read the entries.

3) Some of the spelling mistakes (mostly misplaced matras) didn't help either.

My apologies to you all. Perhaps we should start a Hindi version of the Mela soon. Shanti, what do you think?

I'd like to remind you that my web links blog, in addition to being on this page, also has a separate page of its own. Even if I don't write longer entries, the links blog is still updated almost daily. Check back often.

The next Mela will be on Nilesh.org

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Blog Mela: Call for entries #2

December 27, 2004

Ladies and gentlemen, our beloved Yazad Jal, who blames the viruses for his inability to post his Blog Mela on time, has now created a cascading wave of schedule changes to the darn Mela (I think I won't use the word "tsunami" at the moment.) Since his mela was a week late, my Christmas edition shall now be the New Year edition Blog Mela (apologies to Nilesh.)

I'm sure you're familiar with the rules, but here we go anyway:

1. Posts must either be made by Indians or must focus on India or Indians.
2. Post permalinks to the individual blog entries, not the blog URL. If the permalink is not working, post the title and date of the blog entry.
3. You can nominate your own posts or someone else's
4. You can submit any type of posts except personal journal entries. I am serious about this.
5. The entries have to be dated between December 26-31.
6. Last date for submission of entries is 01 January 2005.
7. My own little rule: Entries written in SMS-lingo will not be considered, no matter how insightful.

C'mon folks, shake off that holiday lethargy and write something interesting.

The last mela was held at AnarCapLib and the next one will be at Nilesh's weblog.

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Bharteeya Blog Mela

October 16, 2004

Hello there. How are you? Take a seat, won't you? The show will begin in a minute. How about a cup of virtual coffee? No? You're sure? OK then.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages... MadMan's Web is proud to present you with yet another weekly edition of the Bharteeya Blog Mela, our virtual showcase of insightful writing by Indians without any of the "I changed my toothbrush today" fluff.

The entries below have been chosen both from reader submissions and from my own travels around the Indian blogosphere. I have used editorial discretion when picking the posts and if yours hasn't made it, I'm sorry. 

(This is the paragraph that's supposed to start with the "without further ado" cliché but I will not use it.)

Let's jump right into it, eh?

Vichaar.org has some suggestions for online promotion of Shwaas - India's nominee to the Oscars. (Editor's note: Have you noticed the media attention paid to Shwaas compared to Lagaan?)

Dilip D'Souza has just adopted a baby and shares his experience as well as the neighbour's reaction.

Ashish Hanwadikar pores over reams of data and concludes that failed economic policies are the only reason for India's lack of economic progress.

Want another theory? Atanu Dey opines that Indians are getting left behind just because of ignorance and stupidity. Hopefully he will explain how in a future post.

In another post, Atanu posts Part 5 of a detailed proposal to get all of India educated by giving them a Rs. 5000 financial incentive to study. Will it evade the notorious Indian skill for finding loopholes in systems and abusing them? Read it and decide for yourselves.

Amardeep Singh explains how the Bush camp has turned the word "lesbian" from a value-neutral description to a slur.

Sandeep is furious that winners of the Nobel Peace Prize don't seem to be particularly worthy; the latest being a lady who believes AIDS was a virus created by whites to wipe out blacks.

Alka Dwivedi laments the mindset of some men that causes operations like hymenoplasty ("repairing" the female hymen) to be offered.

Lazy Geek tells us about how Chennai is making preparations for the shopping season that is heralded by Deepavali.

The Acorn ridicules an NRI mgazine's view that modern technology deployment should be withheld until intelligence agencies can catch up. 

Brooding Dude has a theory of why the British tolerated Gandhi's non-violent protests for so long. He falls short, however, of explaining how this led to India getting freedom.

Feminine Mystique is a little overwhelmed by all the technology around us and thinks that things are hardly "simpler" as they were supposed to be.

Rajk takes an Indian friend to an Indian restaurant in UK where the conversation is not about the food but mostly about the cooler there.

Please visit these sites and whenever possible, leave a comment for the author with your views.

I hope you enjoy this selection of articles. The next mela will be hosted by young Aadisht Khanna. (A full hosting schedule is available here.)

Adios!

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Blog Mela: Call for entries

October 11, 2004

Come one, come all to the next weekly Blog Mela, showcasing interesting writing from around the Indian blogosphere. This is your chance to nominate your Booker Prize winning, Arundhati Roy busting, golden prose. And even if the Booker is in your dreams, you can still find a place here. :)

Here are the rules:

a) Either you or your blog entry must have something to do with India. The entry must be made between 8 October and 14 October.

b) Don't bother with the personal posts. We won't carry them.

c) Send me a cheque for $10 as a nomination fee.

If I'm in a good mood, I might even waive the $10. Who knows...

The Mela will be posted on 14 October for the world to see. Post your nominations as a comment or send me a mail at madman AT madmanweb dot com.

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Journalism or advertorial?

March 5, 2004

The latest issue of Outlook magazine has a piece titled The Body Electronic that I found... strange.

It masquerades as an article about exposing the Indian sex sites on the Internet and how they're hawking women to willing customers. If I didn't know better, I'd call it an "advertorial" for the sites in question. The writer goes all out to provide every last bit of contact information for the people involved in this business.

Examples:

"Business is good.... Earlier, we had services all over India...but stock was proving to be a problem...we are looking for customers for a lifetime..." —Sameer, who claims to be an MBA with specialisation in marketing, on the Mumbai mobile number 098216-86191.

www.indiasexguide.com, true to its name, is more pan-Indian, giving contact details for most big cities.

In Mumbai, you can contact one Robert or Ashok, reachable at 09819437751, who will do the needful. The duo has offices in Churchgate and Andheri (W).

A registration at the indiatimes.com dating site in Kashyap's name (Is Outlook ready with my bail money?) led me to Arun, available at 098218-44021. "I can sure provide the service in Delhi. Just call me two hours in advance," he said. Based in Mumbai, he needs just an hour's notice there.

 

The author concludes with:

My intention is not to raise awareness about Sameer, Arun, Purnima, Robert, Ashok, or their websites. I wouldn't dream of doing that in a magazine that's read by my mother. My honest intention is to make cyberspace a little more worthy of our kids' eyeballs. So I spoke to the cbi about it, whose spokesperson expressed surprise and wanted the addresses of these websites.

Gee, by publishing it in a magazine read by thousands of people, he's certainly raised awareness. Just what we need - a journo on a moral crusade who writes articles like advertorials. If he wanted only the CBI to investigate, he could've given them the mobile numbers in question. What purpose did printing them in the magazine serve?

Go read the article and tell me if you too find it stinks a bit.

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