This is where I work/post from

Is it arrogance or simply a complex?

Yesterday I was doing some keyword research for my website and I came across a discussion board. Someone had posted a requirement for a “cheap” content writer for his website. Many (seemingly Americans) had replied that no matter how cheap the requirement was, one should never hire writers from countries like India, who mostly plagiarize or write shitty English. Most of the time you end up re-writing the pathetic English and that too has been plagiarized from some other similarly pathetic writer, some of the repliers had written. They again and again stressed that if one wants good English, the American writers should be the natural choice because English is their native language and they know the pulse of the readers.

Well, if you want something like This ain’t no English! probably you do need an American writer who knows the pulse of his or her readers :-).

I don’t mean any disrespect, most of my clients who ask for my content writing services are from the US — and they cannot write a single paragraph without making grammatical or typographical mistakes. Some are ready to pay well, some don’t. Those who pay well are obviously aware of the criticality of what appears on their websites; they mean business. It doesn’t matter to them who I am and where I live. They know that I can give them good content, and that’s all that matters. Are they doing me a favor? The hell not! I’m giving them something that they cannot find in their own country: good, affordable (but not necessarily cheap) content. Are they doing me a favor? No; since I cannot find well-paying clients here in India, I advertise my website in other countries. It’s simply a business thing.

Some people in America think that they are doing a favor by allowing Indians to work with them, and from such attitude stem such thoughts:

I don’t know what kind of content you need though. Perhaps stuff like “See my sentence. See my sentence here.” works. In that case, you could outsource to a non-English speaking country or visit your local Junior Highschool.

Don’t be shocked when you hire someone from say India and you get served for copyright infringement.

More and more native Americans, Europeans and Australians have begun to have grudges against the immigrants or the people who do their outsourced work. But why do they forget a few things: all the economic advances they have made they have practically looted from other people. Europe became rich by colonizing Asia and Africa; the Americans availed of ample land by mercilessly killing the native Indians; the Australians became what they are by virtually eliminating the aborigines.

Whether they like it or not, the fact is that people in India are smarter, and I’m not boasting because there is nothing to boast about. Our civilization is old — it goes back to 6-7 thousand years. Vedas and mathematical doctrines were being written when people in Europe were still living as savages. Our education, although lousy currently (thanks to the babu legacy the British left behind), was of the highest order. The only problem is, like the Ancient Romans that fell to the Hun invasion, we became pacifists. We got so much wrapped in cultural and spiritual pursuits that it became easier for first the Islamic, and then the European to invade us and plunder the land. Oh! I didn’t mean this post to be so serious.

Anyway, what do you expect if you want to pay pittance for such an important service (I’m just talking about content writing because I do this, other services too have similar biases)? If you go to www.rentacoder.com, an average bid request is like: I want a 700-word article and I’m ready to pay $2-$4 per article.. What do you expect? Hemingway or Samual Beckett?

I love my lifestyle

Compared to other people I feel I live quite a relaxed, quite a privileged life, and I like it (gosh! so many I’s in a single sentence!). Today in the evening when I was sitting in the McDonald’s (facing Janpath) with my nephew, I saw how people kept getting business or office calls on their mobiles. A couple of them had their palm PCs adroitly settled on the tables to continuously check messages. A seemingly newly-married guy left his bejewelled wife thrice and went out to attend phone calls while she patiently browsed through the newspaper. Addendum: my nephew just told me that she was staring at other men while her husband was busy on the phone.

I didn’t receive a single call while we sat there for about an hour. I made just two calls to Alka to ask her if she wanted us to bring something home from there. And this is not a remote instance. I never remember myself being busy with a phone call from somewhere while Alka and I are out (although she would hastily add that it’s so rare when we in fact go out). On the other hand, I often see men clung to their cell phones while their wives are buying things or doing some other stuff. I pity people who spend busy lives. People take pride in living busy lives. So albeit I love the idea of fiddling with a palmtop or a smart-phone, I hardly fancy myself having one because I’ll never have so many complicated schedules that I’ll need processors to track them.

I wonder if people are really that busy or they just make a pomp and show of being busy. I had a relative who was expert in that. Once we had the misfortune of sharing a dinner in the same company, and 50% of the time he was running out of the dining hall to listen to his calls. It was as if the entire office couldn’t breathe without calling him. Do people really like being that busy? I think some do. It instils in them a sense of importance. They feel wanted, they feel indispensable. Yes, I think this is the right word — indispensable. They are so indispensable that they have to be within reach even when they are not in the office.

I’d hate to be indispensable. I like to be left in peace. When I’m with my wife, I hate to be disturbed, I HATE it. But then she reciprocates with the same zeal when I’m working.

So do I lose something if I’m dispensable? First of all, I couldn’t care less because being indispensable is not one of my priorities in life. Second, being self-employed has its own pluses. Nobody is breathing down my neck. I’m not answerable to anybody (this doesn’t mean I don’t do my work on time, or under perform). I’m not in the rat race. Financially, I’m not “the arrived one” but I’m reaching a comfort level that my friends working in various companies have taken years to attain. I work hard and I work smart, but I don’t put in long hours — I think only those people put in long hours who don’t have a life. Work should be done to support life, it should not become life.

I think on an average whenever I decide to work hard I work for 6-7 hours a day maximum, unlike most people who end up spending 11-14 hours (it might include commuting and unscheduled meetings). Once when I worked in GE, I got the first-hand experience of how incompetent most of high-flying project managers are. They actually take pride in spending long hours in the office, and some of them were dumb enough to declare how they missed various family occasions because they had important office work to attend to. The tragedy was, the poor guys actually didn’t have anything concrete to do other than creating hurdles for those who really wanted to do something meaningful. I couldn’t stay in that pool of uselessness for more than three months. They got fed up of my incessant nagging for newer assignments. And they were annoyed that I made it a point to leave office on time.

Almost the same amount I’m earning working on my own. There, I used to spend 8 hours in the office, 4 hours in commuting — a total of 12 hours. Add a few hours getting ready, coming home tired and spending some time of inactivity. So all in all I was spending 15 hours on my job. I can be a millionaire in a few years if I put in the equal amount in my own work, which of course I don’t aspire to do. These days I work for 6 hours and if I really need some more cash I’ll work for around 8 hours, but not more than that.

Once I was sitting outside, staring at the Gulmohar tree. It was a lazy, October afternoon, and it was perhaps a Wednesday. Silently, I kept admiring the beauty of the tree. Then I thought, how many people have the good fortune of appreciating such moments? I can do it everyday. Everyday I can go out, whenever I want to, and look at the Gulmohar tree. In fact at any part of the day I can do anything, and if I want to work, I can get up at 3 in the morning and switch on my laptop. I’m so lucky to be self-employed. And I value the fact that, work wise, if the vicissitudes of life permit, I’ll never be busy.

Body and soul

Where does the soul go when the body is dead? Or it is the other way round — the body is dead when the soul goes away. If body and soul are two different entities, I wonder when the soul decides that now it’s time to call it a day. And if the soul doesn’t have to depend on the body, why does it leave the body when the body no longer is what it has to be to stay alive — for instance after decapitation?

Bhishma in Mahabharata didn’t want to die before certain issues were resolved. He remained alive. He kept his soul from leaving the body even when the body had been damaged beyond repair. There was a general in Guru Gobind Singh’s army (I cannot recall his name) who kept fighting even when his head had separated from his body. He wanted to keep alive until he had reached Amritsar. In one hand he held his severed head and with the other he fought with his sword. Of course this is far-fetched because you need eyes to travel and fight and since there was no connection between the head and the body, there could have been no bodily coordination. Perhaps the soul led the body?

People come back from the dead sometimes, which means their souls decide to return to the host body. We often relate our relatives with their bodies, not with their souls and perhaps souls understand this. That’s why the come to finish the unfinished tasks through the bodies, and not straightaway. The souls that come straightaway are considered spirits. I’ll write more on this.

Beauty of language

In the evening while having dinner I watched Gadar - A Love Story. It’s an entertaining movie. My favorite portion of the movie was this song, that was perhaps the theme song of the movie:

Ud jaa kale kawa
Tere muh wich khand pawa
Leja tu sandesa mera
Mai sadke jawa

This song carries such a beautiful meaning in it. The song is composed in part Punjabi and part Hindi. It oozes with romance of the soil. Interestingly, such lines are difficult to translate but here it goes:

O’ black crow
If you decide to fly I’ll feed you sugar
I’ll pour upon you my good wishes
If you take my message to my lover

Languages are so intrinsic. I’ve heard and read lots of Punjabi text that can never be translated into other languages because the language itself is at the heart of the message. Like, some things can only be said in Punjabi. I’m sure this is true for other languages too.

Hindi literature

There is an interesting post at Known Turf on the status of Hindi literature and I’d love to add my own thoughts. There was a time I was an avid reader of Hindi literature, the trashy type. I mostly read detective pocket books and railway station type sensational magazines. The only writer of repute that I ever read during those days was perhaps Munshi Premchand. That day I was telling Alka that he can easily be compared with the likes of Tolstoy and Chekhov. A long time back I had written this post on the bad state of Hindi literature and its writers and there I had observed in what total ruin Premchand’s house remains and no particular effort is being made to turn it into a national monument. Another Hindi writer that I can recall is Gulshan Nanda of the Kati Patang fame.

I can say it beyond any doubt that both Hindi authors and Hindi readers are to be blamed for the current languishment. Most Hindi authors (there are exceptions of course) are anti-progress while reaping full benefits of this progress. They hate change. Their themes still revolve around the oppressive jamindars (evil landlords prone to keeping bonded laborers) plaguing rural India. I’m not saying these jamindars don’t exist, but there are other subjects too. These authors cannot be funny without making fun of other lifestyles and ideas. They cannot be serious without highlighting the dark sides of cultures they pretend not to agree with. They glorify wretchedness but crave for riches and rewards.

This portion in the post sums up their general attitude:

These are narcissists and megalomaniacs and they are full of personal hypocrisy. that is the crisis…They want media coverage, but they claim to hate mainstream media. They want to sit in the middle of the bazaar (the market-based economy) and lick up the cream of globalization, but claim to be against the ‘bazaar’ , because they want to be known as ‘radical’. They send their kids to study in the USA, but claim to be against the USA.

Hindi readers too can be squarely blamed. They don’t read enough, they don’t buy enough books, and they don’t encourage their kids to buy and read Hindi books. In fact many people are ashamed of being seen reading a Hindi novel; they’d rather be seen reading an English novel (whether they can understand it or not). Again, the ball comes back in the court of authors. Hindi literature is not known as quality, as elite literature, as it should be.

I think publishers (Panguin India has made some right moves in this regard I guess) are losing big money by not encouraging quality Hindi literature. There is a big market waiting if good books can be written and the right readers can be reached. In the land of Kalidasa, you can surely find great authors if you try hard; and there are people waiting to read them. I’d love to read a good Hindi book, and in fact, I get an English magazine called The First City just to read a Hindi column that appears in it regularly.

About advertising in novels

A few days ago someone asked me how would it seem if advertisements appeared in novels. A novelist recently sold a page of his book for ad space. My first most reaction was of course a definite NO. I mean, how pathetic.

But then I thought more about it. There is big money involved in writing, publishing, promoting, and eventually selling novels. Many authors churn out book after book just to earn big bucks, and surely some authors earn millions. Some writers buy their own books in thousands just to turn them into best sellers. Big promotional tours are organized round the globe. So what’s wrong if a single advertisement appears in a book of say, 300-400 pages?

It does no harm if it stops there. But advertising is like this virus (we have all seen it in the form of SPAM) that spreads at an alarming rate. First it’ll be one page, then two, then three, and soon there will be an advertisement on every second page of the novel. A 300-page novel would turn out to be a 600-page one. It’ll be good for those who are used to skipping pages, but to serious novel readers it’ll be a major nuisance. Just imagine…in the thick of the plot when a character is going through a life altering, blood curdling experience, when you are partaking a delicious dish of melodrama and intrigue, there you are at a page that exhorts you to buy L’Oreal lipstick or VIP underwear.

A Very Kind Communist Party of China

Dilip D’Souza here recounts how horribly a group of Tibetan nuns were treated by the Communist Party of China in order to “reform” them.

Bestial encounters II

In another incident concerning animal attacks once when I was about 10 we used to live in a decrepit locality in Lajpat Nagar, New Delhi. There were square blocks containing four contiguous rows. These rows further contained 16 houses each, 8 on the ground floor and 8 on the first floor. The houses (they mostly consisted of one room, one store, and a rectangular construction of kitchen and bath-place combined together) on the first floor were conjoined by a common gallery. Bitumen roads divided one block from another. Most living in Delhi must have seen these localities called “double-stories”.

Back then I used to use a rollator to walk about. A rollator is a walking apparatus with wheels at the bottom. It looks like this, but mine was a local one made by a neighborhood carpenter. I was quite active amongst my friends and used to gallivant here and there with the group.

One day we were playing on the road when we saw an elephant coming at a distance. In India sadhus visit backward or old localities riding their elephants and people give them alms and donate money in obeisance. They are mostly conmen who cheat the unsuspecting public and maltreat the majestic animals.

All the children ran towards the elephant. I couldn’t run but in no time I too joined my friends and stood in the middle of the road to catch a clear glimpse of the giant beast gradually moving towards us while getting gifts from the religious minded with his trunk and turning them over to the sadhu straddled at the top. Another small crowd of kids was following the elephant from behind and they were making all sorts of noises to get the attention of the elephant. Some were even throwing small pebbles and the sadhu was casting angry glances at them repeatedly.

Suddenly I noticed a vehement agitation in the elephant’s body. It raised its trunk high up in the air and threw out a shrill trumpet that caused an unanticipated stampede amidst the crowd. It veered to both the sides again and again, almost flinging down his sadhu. I could see its big dilated eyes and the froth coming out of its pout. Nobody had an idea what had agitated the elephant. Before I could make sense of what was happening, I saw the crowd around me had dispersed and the elephant was coming in my direction with great speed despite the sadhu desperately trying to stop it or at least change its direction.

The whole world disappeared in front of my eyes. It was just the elephant, with its trunk raised high up in the air, its head moving up and down with great frequency, and its body rapidly growing in its size as it approached nearer. I could also hear screams such as yeh ladke ko marega! (it is going to kill the boy), arre hatao usse koi waha se! (move him from there quickly), etc. Most of the vociferations, wrapped in panic, were incoherent, or may be I couldn’t understand them. Not knowing what to do, I did the only thing that came to my mind — I tried to run, which, of course, I couldn’t.

After a few hurried steps I lost control and I fell on the road. Amidst the din, the pain caused by the fall, and the approaching death, I lay there looking at the sky. All of this must have happened in a span of ten seconds, a few seconds more or less. Although I was a kid, I had a fair idea of distance and time. The elephant by now should have done with me whatever it had in its mind, but I was still lying there, injured by the fall. Overcoming the pain in my head where I had hit the road, I turned over and looked in the direction from where the elephant was coming. The elephant had stopped just a few meters away. In fact it was standing there as if nothing had happened.

Someone came running and picked me up, and soon I was sitting in a room surrounded by concerned neighbors. A few were yelling at me for taking unnecessary risks like this, and some were awed at the way the elephant had stopped short of trampling me and were profusely praising God for it. Ice was quickly applied on the bump on my head. After a short fussing around they all went outside to see the elephant again and I was left there alone, totally shaken, still trying to figure out what had happened. A friend had brought inside the rollator and had placed it beside me. I tried to stand up but couldn’t, my legs were shaking. I could hear the bells of the elephant gradually ebbing away.

Decency and education

A few days ago Alka had to visit her doctor for the routine check-up. I usually accompany her but due to my knee pain I decided to wait for her in the car itself.

These days our hot topic of discussion is the depleting value system in the current generation. Most kids today are growing up like zombies…vying to reach at the top without the stairs or the climbing rope. No matter how hard you try to motivate them, their spirits refuse to budge even an inch away from their set patterns. They don’t read, they don’t think, heck, they don’t even listen to good music. She went through a distressing experience while teaching the kids of our locality.

So when in front of the doctor’s room nobody offered her a seat (she’s almost 8-months pregnant), her analytical thoughts went working again and on our way back we had an engaging discussion. Does being cultured depend on education and social background? We both agreed that it definitely does not.

She said they were mostly young men occupying the seats. One looked like a sales person waiting for a meeting. The rest were perhaps soon-to-be young fathers. She stood there for more than ten minutes. Although she was not greatly inconvenienced, the way we’ve been brought up, it’s almost unthinkable that a pregnant lady stands while a few young men sit conveniently upon their chairs. I’m on crutches; still I’d offer my seat to a female in similar position. Even goons are known to be more decent than that.

Education these days is not evolution; it is just a tool for material gains. People get educated to get good jobs and earn good money (earning good money is not bad in itself). Education is not used to attain a higher level of wisdom, as it should have been. It is used to furbish life, not to enrich it. That’s why we often see highly “educated” people wallowing in base attitudes.

On the other hand, I’ve seen the so-called illiterate people having more refined manners and a higher degree of dignity — our maid, Meera for instance. She not only respects others, she also respects herself. We good-humouredly comment sometimes that she walks like a queen. She performs her tasks with supreme diligence and takes pride in it. She cannot read a single word, but she knows how to treat life, in her own “unrefined” way.

Our neighborhood presswala bows with respect without a single hint of obsequiousness. That day when we were to go to the hospital, our car cleaner hadn’t been coming for a few days. We’ve been regularly having dust storms, so there was a thick pal of dust covering the car. Seeing that we were about to leave with the dirty vehicle, he came running from somewhere and dusted the car with his own angochcha) (a thin cloth used by men in warmer climates to wipe off sweat etc.).

I don’t mean to imply that people who are nice to us, or are seemingly servile, are well mannered. No, they might not be. Neither it is that all illiterate and poor people are good and all educated and rich people are bad. The point that I’m trying to make is that it’s not necessary that education makes you a decent, a cultured person. Decency is inherent (with genuine intentions it can be cultivated too). Education and money surely makes it easier to feign virtuosity but it’s the inner self that ultimately shows up when it really counts.