Tagging Along

I've been tagged.

So here goes.

Eight things about myself:

1. Am a mom.

2. Am sleep deprived, but that's my normal state of being.

3. Am doing at least two things at once at any given time.

4. Am an extrovert, very talkitive.

5. Don't like talking to people about personal issues.

6. Love to cook once in a while for a lot of people, tolerate everyday cooking as a necessary evil.

7. Get grumpy if I have to tell people what to do.

8. Love to see new places.

I'm not going to tag anyone else, but if you do decide to follow this tag trail, please do and let me know when you do.

Girl Escapes From Captor 8 Years After She Was Kidnapped

What a story!

Yesterday Natascha's father, Ludwig Koch, said he recognised his lost daughter immediately. In an interview with Austria's Kurier newspaper, he said she looked in bad shape physically and had wasted away. "She has very, very white skin and marks all over her entire body. I don't want to think about where they came from," he said. After being reunited on Wednesday they had both wept. "She told me: Papa, I love you. And her next question was, Papa, do you still have my toy car?'

"I told her I did, and we had never given it away. We still have all her dolls as well."

Career Women's Houses Are Dirty, and Other Male Delusions

There's a bit of a brouhaha on the Internet over an article published on Forbes. The article was originally published on August 22. The following day, Forbes took the article down. A few hours later, the article was back up on the site, but this time right alongside an article with a counterview.

What was all the fuss about? Well, the article in question, written by a Forbes.com news editor Michael Noer, is titled "Don't Marry Career Women". That should explain it all. Right? But wait, there's more. The title is merely the tip of the iceberg. The article itself - in which rocky marriages, husbands' ill-health, dirty houses, dysfunctional kids, divorces, extra-marital affairs and lower rates of childbirth are all blamed on working women - is priceless.

In support of his assertion that men should not marry working women, Noer quotes many "studies". However, in many instances, the author's paraphrasing of the studies, or the quotes he uses, talk about "individuals", "spouse", "people" and not about women specifically. Here are a few examples that Noer ropes in to argue that career women are more likely to cheat and run away with someone:

• When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you.
  


• According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.
  


• "I also find that the incidence in divorce is far higher in couples where both spouses are working than in couples where only one spouse is employed," Johnson [who "examined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation"] says.
  

It is baffling that the author relies on these statements to conclude that only working women cheat, run off, have extra-marital sex and are responsible for the rise in divorce rates. In a similar vein, Noer makes an argument about "labor specialization" - if both spouses work, the household suffers. Again, the argument should not and does not translate to mean that women should stay home.

Furthermore, people - men and women - will cheat if they are so inclined and if the opportunity presents itself, whether they stay home or go out. What about spouses who stay home and are exposed to the mailman (or mailwoman), the fedex man (or woman), the pool boy, the baby sitter?

The essay is chockfull of other "insights" into marital relationships.

• Households in which the women work are dirty, he says. Really? Is it any surprise? This is a reason why men should not marry career women? And is this really a problem? Where are the men in the equation? Do they really expect the house to be spic and span? If they really do (which I doubt - someone should go check out some bachelor pads and see how they stack up on the cleanliness scale), why not pick up after themselves, take the trash out, mop and dust a little, eh?
  


• Husbands in households in which the women work are more likely to fall ill, he says. Are men really such babies? Did anyone check to see if the women in households in which the men work are more likely to fall ill? No? Why not? Because women are expected to take care of themselves, but the men need handholding and need to be taken care of or else they fall ill?
  


• Husbands will be unhappy if their wives make more money than they do, he says. Well, all the men need to do is to tweak their attitudes a little bit. How about feeling happy that the family is earning more money? How about feeling proud that your wife is earning more than you?
  


• Wives will be unhappy if they earn more money than their husbands, he says. Well, don't worry Noer. This character flaw won't last long. I suspect this feeling stems from having a crabby husband around and women will stop caring what their husbands think or feel if their illogical behavior lasts long enough.
  


• If women quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy, he says. Sure, there will be some sadness. There's bound to be unhappiness over lost friendships, over the loss of professional connections. But that's life. Priorities change when kids arrive. But is this a valid reason not to marry a working woman? That's a myopic view if I ever saw one. And what about the unhappiness a non-working woman may feel that she doesn't work? Does this not count?
  

Just in case the men reading his essay are horrified and are thinking they will never ever marry, Noer exhorts men to marry. Do marry, he says, because marriage is positively correlated to higher incomes for adult men. How wonderful! If you want to make more money, you want to be happy, have children and children who are well-adjusted, stay healthy and have a clean home, marry. Please do. Just follow Noer's advice and make sure the woman of your dreams doesn't have a college degree and makes less than $30,000 a year.

The puerile and inane ideas expressed in this essay are trumped only by Forbes first pulling the essay from the web and then republishing it with a counterview written by Elizabeth Corcoran, also with Forbes. If Forbes did not think that the essay would not stand on its own merit, why did they publish it in the first place?

And oh, before we go, please do read Forbes? You Suck. Lively and quite on point.

Comments

Comments are back on! Thank you for your e-mails and feedback on this topic. They all made a lot of sense. While I may not be able to reply to all comments, I do look forward to reading them. Thank you for reading and commenting.

"Punny" Headlines Driving You to Pull Your Hair Out?

Puns have no place in headlines. That's what you are taught in Journalism class in that chapter on newswriting. The thought behind this edict is that puns can harm a story in several ways - they tend to distract the reader from the story; they make light of what may be a serious news item; headlines with puns may be clever, but they may not reflect the actual content of the story.

Two Gannett editors, Meg Downey and Frank Sutherland, exhort headline writers to avoid puns, which "elicit groans rather than draw readers in or they make light of a serious issue." They point to this headline to illustrate their point: "Levi Strauss to button up six plants" on, they say, "a serious story about the clothing manufacturer laying off 36,000 workers."

"The disease of pun-ism seems to be spreading," says Jim Barger, sports editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Used in moderation, like bourbon, they can leave the reader with a pleasant glow. But too many groaners can lead to glassy eyes and and readers wondering what's on television."

The San Antonio Express-News (via Poynter) went so far so as ban puns in its headlines after one particularly productive day in which copy editors produced nine pun headlines. According to Editor Robert Rivard, the decision to ban puns came on the heels of "predictable e-mails from readers dismissing us as a serious newspaper."

That, in my opinion, was a rather drastic step. I enjoy puns in headlines. If I don't go on to read the story following it, it's probably because the subject matter did not interest me in the first place any way. While there are terrible puns (such as the Levi Strauss one, for example), I have come across some mighty clever ones too that actually add to the story.

I was therefore happy to find that in spite of the prevailing wisdom in the newspaper industry, there were a number of "punny" headlines in the newspapers over the past couple of days - all relating to the one story of the forfeited cricket test match between England and Pakistan at the Oval and each one a play on the umpire's name Hair. (I haven't seen a photograph of Hair with his umpire's hat off. I wonder if he has any.)

'Pakistan demand Hair cut' read an August 21 headline in the Guardian (a clever headline, and I did go on the read the story). "A hair-raising past" says this Cricinfo headline. "Series with fraught histroy sitting on a Hair trigger" opines a Telegraph headline. "Pakistan lay blame on Hair for parting of ways". Now, is that a pun? The headline seems contrived. You can almost feel the effort that must have gone into the drafting of that headline. Moreover, "parting of ways" is not exactly how I would describe the Hair-Pakistan relationship.

Here's another "Hair cut" word play though not as good as the Guardian headline: "Hair cuts an over-officious figure in the game". "Pakistan no stranger to bad Hair day" according to The Times. "Hair's some more bad news for Pak" reads a not so good pun on the CNN-IBN website.

Before we go further, let me confess to my own attempt at punning in my post titled "Umpire Alleges Ball Tampering: Hair Today Gone Tomorrow?" Here's another in Desicritics writer Desh's post, "Darrell Caught in Pakistan's Hair."

Some of them - OK, may be a couple - are good, the rest rather insipid. So what makes a headline with a pun a good headline? A Capital Idea quotes a book called Headlines and Deadlines:

Two tests can be propounded for puns, whether in a headline or elsewhere. The first is whether each of the two meanings of the word forming the pun is appropriate. ...

The second test is based on the theory that the basis of humor is incongruity and unexpectedness. This means that the pun should not be obvious; it should not be just lying around waiting to be picked up ... The best advice that can be given to the headline writer is to avoid the pun unless he is convinced that it is exceptionally good. If there is one thing that most newspapers need, it is more sophistication. The bad pun, like the childish rhyme, is the mortal enemy of this quality.

Almost all of the Hair puns were just lying around waiting to be picked up.

Book Review: Hitchhiker, Vinod George Joseph

Most people cherish three things in their lives - family, friends and career. Ebenezer, the protagonist in Vinod George Joseph's debut novel, Hitchhiker, is no different. He loves his family the way most of us do - he grumbles at them, he complains about them, but he wouldn't know what to do without them. He prepares himself meticulously for a career in engineering, doing all the things one must to in India to get into a good college, and looks forward to the day he can become and engineer and lift his parents and sister out of the financial dire straits they are in. He falls in love with a smart, educated, independent young woman, the kind he had always dreamed of marrying. He and his friends plot and plan their way through high school, teasing each other about their dreams for their future lives, wives and careers.

In other words, Ebenezer is a normal kid with normal dreams.

There is also a crucial fact, however, that rules over Ebenezer's fate with a ruthless hand - he is born a Verumar, an untouchable. There is nothing he or his family can do to escape this unfortunate happenstance. Moving away from their ancestral village does no good because the necessary visits back to the village bring home to Ebenezer exactly who he is and what his place is in society; converting to Christianity proves to be a double-edged sword - on the one hand there is the suspicious eye with which society looks upon them (did they convert for money?), and on the other hand, Ebenezer loses the advantage of the quotas for scheduled castes in colleges because he is now a Christian and therefore no longer eligible for reservations.

This one fact, the fact that he was born the son of scheduled caste parents, lifts Ebenerzer out of the world he is so desperately trying to create for himself, spins him around and hurls him back to the ground, shattering in the process every single dream he has for himself and his family.

Ebenezer's mother and sister are hacked to death by the "higher" caste Edayars on a visit to his village; his family finds out that his aunt had been raped when she was a young girl by the son of her Edayar landlord, and subsequently drives her to commit suicide; his father loses his job because he joins a union demanding reservations for backward classes in the Christian institution run by his employer; his girlfriend's parents refuse to accept him because he's a Verumar although he converted to Christianity; a chain of events starting with the murders of his mother and sister ensures that he fails in the crucial exams leading up to admissions into engineering college, and culminates in Ebenezer never finding the engineering career he dreamt of.

Hitchhiker is a gut-wrenching story. As you read about young Ebenezer, you are hopeful for him and his sister Gwendolyn, two smart kids who seem to have spurned all that their history holds for them; two kids successful in their school, hardworking, extremely capable of achieving their dreams. You feel affection for Esther and Peterraj, Ebenezer's parents, who did what they thought they had to do to give their children the best possible start in life - they converted to Christianity, sought jobs and financial help from their church, obtained education for their children in the church's school and lived life quietly in their corner of the school compound. You secretly applaud when Ebenezer and Gayathri, his girlfriend, decide to marry.

It is almost too much to bear when the threads of Ebenezer's life start unraveling in such rapid succession as to leave you breathless.

Hitchhiker has all the ingredients that make for a great read.

The plot is very well thought out, researched and executed. The events leading up to Ebenezer's aunt, Karuppamma's suicide are set up brilliantly and the section ends chillingly,

Bhadrakaali [Ebenezer's grandmother, Karupamma's mother-in-law, who goads Karupamma into committing suicide] hugged Karuppamma by her feet and burst into loud sobbing. The tears were for real. Bhadrakaali had really liked Karuppamma. She knew that if she were in Karuppamma's position she would have acted exactly as Karuppamma had done. But, she had no choice. Her duty to Alagiri [her son and Karuppamma's husband] and his children came first. Matters had taken the only course they could and the world was now a better place.

Each character (and there are many, many, characters) is fleshed out and the attention to detail is welcome and refreshing in many places. In this passage, for instance, the author takes the time to paint a picture of Esther's workplace, the nursery section in the school run by her church,

There were three-year-olds all around her and most of them were crying out aloud. Deserted by their parents, they were making their fear and anger known in the only way they could. Many of the parents liked to hang out in the school after leaving their children in the nursery. But, Victoria Miss who had been handling the LKG class for the last twenty-five years, insisted that all parents clear off after depositing their children. A few parents, however, could just not be chased away.

The language is simple, and there is ample background information to round out the situations and events in the book. The life of each character is examined under the microscope of religion and its various aspects such as caste, conversion, reconversion, the politics behind reservations for scheduled castes in educational and governmental institutions and untouchability.

And therein lies one of a couple of minor drawbacks - every character in the book is somehow affected by some issue related to religion to the point where the reader feels the message is being pounded home relentlessly. The other is the sheer number of characters which the author spends considerable space fleshing out in such detail that the reader is left wondering where the story is going.

These drawbacks, however, are mitigated to a large extent by the author's simple and evocative writing style and the plot's ability to draw the reader into the lives of the characters.

At the bottom of it all, Hitchhiker is a simple story of unrequited love, of carefully laid plans going haywire, of circumstances beyond your control taking over your life, and it is well told. Reason enough to want to read the book.

Hitchhiker, Books for Change, 395 pp, Rs. 350 (India), USD 19.00 (outside India).

How sick is this

Did anyone, one man asked, know of girls’ camps willing to hire adult males as counselors? Meanwhile, elsewhere in cyberspace, the second group celebrated the news that one of their own had been offered a job leading a boys’ cabin at a sleep-away camp.

[...]

In this online community, pedophiles view themselves as the vanguard of a nascent movement seeking legalization of child pornography and the loosening of age-of-consent laws. They portray themselves as battling for children’s rights to engage in sex with adults, a fight they liken to the civil rights movement. And while their effort has brought little success, they celebrated online in May when a small group of men in the Netherlands formed a pedophile political party, and they rejoiced again last month when a Dutch court upheld the party’s right to exist.

How sick is this.

Of Furry Eyebrows and Hairy Upperlips

“On both coasts, everybody wants a thicker brow that reminds you of Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner,” said Robyn Cosio, an eyebrow stylist who works at the Salon by Maxime in Beverly Hills and Eiji salon in Manhattan. “People love that I leave the two bottom layers of undergrowth and don’t take out so much in between the brows so that they can stick up and look feathered.”

Ladies, lay down your tweezers. Facial hair hasn’t been this much in demand since the advent in 1978 of Brooke Shields. Indeed, this month French Vogue devotes an entire page to the tinted, brushed and glossed eyebrow, recommending a “dense and proud” brow as the best way to structure a face.

There's one fashion trend (NY Times link; requires free registration) I've been way ahead of. Now if they would only catch up to hairy upper lips and sideburns...

Meredith Vieira Moves On

There's a lovely story about Meredith Vieira in last weekend's New York Times Magazine. Here is a snippet.

Her repeated insistence that there was no paycheck big enough, no title prestigious enough, to give up her home life has made her a heroine to viewers who pay attention to such things.

[...]

Vieira is careful to say she does not think less of women who were more willing to leave home than she was and even allows that maybe she is "a little extreme" in her desire to be with her children. "The juggling act just never worked for me," she says now. "Maybe it was the three miscarriages, so all I was thinking about was a healthy baby, or maybe it’s just who I am, but I never wanted to prove I could be macho. And I was quite successful not proving that, wasn’t I?"

There are no universal solutions that fit all families when it comes to managing two careers and children. Some want to juggle both career and children, some don't, some need to juggle both career and children, some don't. Each family has to decide for itself what is best. One is not better than the other, one is not morally superior than the other. What is important is that we recongnize what works for us and we do it, as Vieira seems to have done and is doing.

The only show I remember seeing her on is "The View" which I enjoyed watching. I liked what I saw of her on the show. She was irreverent, seemed comfortable in her skin.

Please do read the whole thing (I think it requires free registration).

PostGlobal: washingtonpost.com's New Feature

PostGlobal is the latest offering on washingtonpost.com and is moderated by David Ignatius and Fareed Zakaria. According to the site,

PostGlobal is an experiment in global, collaborative journalism, a running discussion of important issues among dozens of the world's best-known editors and writers. It aims to create a truly global dialogue, drawing on independent journalists in the countries where news is happening -- from China to Iran, from South Africa to Saudi Arabia, from Mexico to India.

Started slightly over two months ago, PostGlobal is fashioned as a blog on which more than thirty journalists opine on questions posed by the moderators. Readers also have the opportunity to respond to these questions directly or to respond to the opinions of the members of the panel. Questions are posed "at least twice a week" and some recent ones have included, "Who will dominate post-Fidel Cuba and does it matter for the world?", "What two suggestions would you give the U.S. Secretary of State?", "Is the war making the world safer for Israel, America and their allies or more dangerous?".

Although it does not seem to be up and running yet on the PostGlobal page, there are plans for and "Editor's Inbox" area for "... assessments of the latest stories and for links to useful resources for making sense of what's happening." The "Debate" section pits two of the panelists against each other on a topic and allows readers to pitch questions to the debaters.

PostGlobal's layout is easy to navigate with clearly marked sections. Readers' opinions are right alongside the panelists' opinions in two columns on the main page and are given as much prominence in terms of placement and they make full use of it too. The readers appear to be much more vocal when responding to the questions and they stay around to answer other readers that may engage them which cannot be said for the panelists. Of the panelist opinions I've read, not a single panelist has responded to any of the comments on his/her posts. Readers' opinions are also much livelier, more passionate.

The feature is still in its infancy and it'll be interesting to see where it goes. With so many media sources out there, from mainstream media to blogs to online magazines, etc., I wonder whether PostGlobal will be drowned in a sea of voices. PostGlobal seems to be trying to distinguish itself from the rest of the field by offering the opinions of a diverse set of "experts" in one place,

... we'll post a question then solicit responses from members of our diverse network of experts, whose combined views, we believe, will reflect what the world thinks about important issues more quickly and completely than would those of any single commentator.

[...]

Understanding the world is a daily puzzle -- for the prominent journalists who make up the PostGlobal network and for our millions of potential readers around the world. We will try to make sense of where the world is going by putting our heads together.

We'll just have to wait and see.

The Tricolor Flies High

I headed out of the house at 7:25 am and made my way to where the flag hoisting would take place. As I neared the main street leading up the mast strains of Vande Mataram filled the air. More people joined the crowd of people moving toward the mast, little girls in silk skirts, boys in pyjama kurtas, men in Jeans, shorts and the women in chudidhars, sarees, having tried their best to incorporate white green and saffron in their dresses.

People stood around chatting, kids ran off to find their friends and generally run around excitedly. Two women with dogs straining at the leash stood at the fringes. A man placed a handful of flower petals in a folded tricolor and tried to get it up the flag pole.

A huge shamiana sheltered a stage and about a hundred plastic chairs. The sound system screeched as it came on and someone asked everyone to move towards the flag pole. Everyone - there were about one hundred and fifty people - gathered around in a loose semi-circle.

The head of the association untied the rope from the flag pole and slowly pulled it. The bunched up flag made its way up to the top, hesitated for a brief second and fluttered in the breeze.

Salsa: The New "In" Thing in Bangalore

"Four one, cha cha cha, two three cha cha cha," went my instructor. We, twelve of us students, tried to follow her steps as she sashayed her way around the floor. By the third or fourth session, we barely managed to keep up with her feet movements.

She, of course, was moving way more than just her feet. Her hips swayed, her arms moved fluidly in the air, her shoulders and spine were ramrod straight. I, on the other hand, punched my hands in the air, hunched my tense shoulders, took giant strides on my flat feet and tried not to crash into any of the walls or crush anyone's feet.

But I keep at it. Why, you wonder. Because I'm a glutton for punishment. Well, no. Ok, maybe yes.

But there are also a few other, perhaps more logical reasons. For one, the music is infectious; you can't help but dance. Two, I have delusions of being able to wiggle my hips a la Shakira, the operative word being delusions. (Did you see her FIFA World Cup Final performance? Aye, Caramba!) Three, once you get one sequence right you feel like you can do all of it. Four, my instructor is good at what she does, both the dancing and the teaching parts. Five, any form of exercise that is fun and enjoyable is gold. Finally, and most importantly, there are no mirrors where we dance. So while I feel ungainly and have a faint idea of how klutzy I might look, I really don't have concrete evidence of the blashphemy I commit twice a week.

Over the past few weeks I've been finding out that some or all of the above reasons are responsible for a whole lot of Bangaloreans to turn to Salsa.

And by whole lot I mean thousands.

Lourd Vijay, a businessman and purveyor of all things Salsa should know. He started the first Salsa school in the city, Lourd Vijay's Dance Studio, in 1997. Now he has three of them up and running in which he, along with four full-time and four part-time instructors, teach a total of six thousand students. Yup, that's right, 6,000. And he has plans to open three more studios in the next three months.

Vijay himself came to dancing and to Salsa like many of us do. He saw the movie Dirty Dancing and he was hooked. His sister, who lived in Australia, sent him books and video tapes of dances so he could get familiar with the art. He then went to Canada, to Vancouver and Toronto, to train in the various dance forms. Now he travels extensively all over the world attending workshops, conferences and congresses.

Although the average age of his students is around twenty-five, the classes are so popular among all age groups and among people from all walks of life that his studios offer exclusive classes for those over 40, those over 50, for homemakers, etc.

The reasons most of his students attend the Salsa lessons, he says, are to have fun (which is crucial to any activity that you intend to pursue for a long time), the studios are a great place to network, to meet like-minded people, especially if you are new to the country or to the city, to get fit, and because going to the gym can get boring pretty fast.

The dance form is so popular in Bangalore that the India International Salsa Congress is all set to kick off in Bangalore on August 16th. The official website has all the details of the Congress including the schedule, details of all the performers who are flying in from all over the world, competitions, workshops, parties, etc.

So if you've vaguely heard of Salsa but don't know squat about it, now's the time to go, watch and learn. Lead with your hips and don't forget your heels.

Looking Ahead...

When someone leaves a comment on my blog, I feel compelled to respond and feel pretty bad if I don't. But personal and work commitments don't permit me to do justice to all the wonderful thoughts and ideas that are expressed in the comments section. (Hats off to Greatbong. I don't know how he does it, but he responds to every single one of the 100s of comments he gets on his posts and he does it patiently and thoughtfully.)

So moving forward, there will be a small change to this blog. I've disabled the comment feature. I do hope that you will continue to read the posts I put up (they may become less frequent as well, but hopefully not). I hope to turn the comments feature back on once things get better, but in the meantime, if you have questions or comments related to the post, please do send an e-mail and I will do my best to respond.

Please note that I shall not respond to e-mails with personal comments or comments or questions that do not relate to the subject matter of the posts.

Thank you for reading.

Radio Interview with Kavita Krishnamurthy Subramaniam and Dr. L. Subramaniam

All India Radio's FM Rainbow (101.3) in Bangalore is broadcasting my exclusive interview with Kavita Krishnamurthy-Subramaniam and Dr. L. Subramianiam tomorrow Saturday, Aug 12, between 8 and 9 p.m. This interview is the first in a series (called Pride of Bangalore) that will air every Saturday for the following few weeks at the same time (8-9 p.m.). I'll put up information about the other people I talked to for this series as and when the schedule is fixed. Please do listen if you can.

I interviewed them at their home one morning a few months back. One thing that struck me about them is how modest, kind and unassuming they are. Absolutely no airs about them. They offered us (myself and the sound engineer that accompanied me) coffee, made sure we were comfortable, gave us the best possible sound environment in their home and most importantly, gave me time which is a miracle given their extremely (and I mean extremely) busy lives. And in the process, did not make me feel like they were doing me a big favor.

It was an honor to have met them and talked to them.

Pesticides in Coke and Pepsi

Vikram takes on the issue pointblank.