Is Manish Tewari’s media diktat a sign of Cong returning to 1970s?

sanjay gandhi

Vivek Kaul

Manish Tewari, the minister of information and broadcasting, who probably spends more time in television studios defending the Congress party, than in his office, recently issued what his ministry called an ‘advisory’ on the way television channels have been covering the protests against the gang rape of a 23 year old women in a moving bus in Delhi.
A part of the advisory had this to say “It has been observed that some private satellite news TV channels in their 24X7 coverage have not been showing due responsibility and maturity in telecasting the events relating the said demonstration and such a telecast is likely to cause deterioration in the law & order situation, hindering the efforts of the law enforcing authorities
.
Whereas Rule 6(1)(e) of the Cable Television Networks Rules, 1994, which contains the Programme Code to be strictly adhered to by all private satellite television channels, provides that no programme should be carried in the cable service which is likely to encourage or incite violence or contains anything against maintenance of law and order or which promotes anti-national attitude.
After Tewari’s senior in the party as well as the government Sushil Kumar Shinde equated the protesters in Delhi to Maoisits, Tewari wants the nation to believe that the coverage of the protests in the heart of the capital could promote an anti-national attitude. What has the world come to?
I can’t help but compare this situation to the scenario in the mid 1970s when Indira Gandhi, as the Prime Minister had declared a state of internal emergency and the politicians of the day directed the newspapers to fall in line. (There were no television channels back then other than the state owned Doordarshan).
As Vinod Mehta writes in 
The Sanjay Story “The Chief Censor of India issued a dictat to the press…: ‘No criticism of the family planning programme. This includes letters to the editor.’”
Indira Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay had unleashed an ambitious male sterilization programme to control India’s burgeoning population. “The problem, of course, was that Sanjay did not have the time for gentle act and sustained persuasion. He wanted results, latest by day after tomorrow. A young man in a hurry he disastrously miscalculated the quantum of ‘motivation’ necessary to get people to the operating table,” writes Mehta.
Given this, Sanjay’s ambitious programme came in for a lot of criticism and one of the impacts of that was that the press was asked not to criticise it. The same thing albeit in a milder way is happening right now. Tewari’s veiled threat against covering the Delhi rape protests comes after his predecessor Ambika Soni ( a known Sanjay Gandhi crony) stopped government advertisements to the 
Daily News and Analysis (Read about it here) for a while late last year.
The state of internal emergency was declared in India with effect from the midnight of June 25, 1975. That morning most Delhi newspapers did not come out because the Congress government had ordered power supply to be cut in Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg where most newspaper offices are based in Delhi. As Tavleen Singh writes in 
Durbar “But with typical Indian ineptitude, the officials had forgotten that the Stateman and the Hindustan Times had their offices in Connaught Place.”
Soon Inder Kumar Gujral who was the information and broadcasting minister was dismissed given that he wasn’t deemed to be effective enough. “Sweet, mild Inder Gujral was replaced by Vidya Charan Shukla. The story of the minister’s sacking that drifted around newspaper offices was that Mr Gujral, an old friend of Mrs Gandhi, had objected to Sanjay ordering him around and Sanjay had responded by ordering his immediate dismissal. The unsmiling brutish Shukla warned us at the first press conference he held that any defiance of press censorship would be dealt with harshly. He was soon dictating which stories we should give ‘prominence’ to and these were usually related to an event attended by Sanjay Gandhi or an idea that had come from him,” writes Singh in 
Durbar. While it is difficult to see Manish Tewari morphing into another Vidya Charan Shukla, his recent dictat to television channels is a milder form of what Shukla did with the newspapers in the mid 1970s when emergency was in operation.
The period of emergency also saw the power in the Congress party pass onto the next generation i.e. from Indira Gandhi to Sanjay Gandhi. As Mehta writes “Around November ’76 Mrs Gandhi was finally sold on dynastic succession not only on the ground of filial devotion but because she thought that the country’s destiny safe in her son’s hands…No coincidence then that in December ’76 the Censors issued a written directive to the press asking it to refrain from using the prefix ‘youth leader’ in connection with Mr Sanjay Gandhi.” Sanjay Gandhi became the real leader ‘overnight’ and gradually took over the running of the government of the day from his mother Indira, despite never being a part of it.
Along similar lines Rahul Gandhi, the proverbial prince in waiting, will lead the Congress party in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it was recently revealed. What remains to be seen is whether Rahul gradually takes over the running of the government from his mother Sonia as well, like his uncle did from his mother nearly 36 years back. Sonia Gandhi despite never being a part of the government wields tremendous control on it.
The emergency was a blot on the Indian democracy. But it didn’t really impact the man on the street, the average Indian, the man who actually goes out and votes, and who we now know as the 
aam aadmi, in any major way. “In February ’76 a Bombay monthly, now undeservedly extinct, sent a reporter to the interior of Maharashtra to determine what impact the Emergency had had at the grassroots level. The reporter returned with the not unexpected news that most villagers didn’t even know there was an emergency in the country,” writes Mehta.
Until of course Sanjay Gandhi caught onto the idea of male sterilization to control the Indian population. But he was a man in a hurry and soon forced sterilizations were being carried out through out North India and states like Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Quotas were set for different chief ministers. Navin Chawla, another known Sanjay crony, who rose to become the Chief Election Commissioner of India, and who was one of the bureaucrats helping Sanjay Gandhi implement his hair-brained scheme, said “One had to prevent poor people living like animals and breeding more poor people.”(As Vinod Mehta quotes him in The Sanjay Story).
Soon forced sterilizations were happening all over the place. Even the beggars around the Taj Mahal in Agra were rounded up and forced to undergo 
nasbandi. And this finally made people realise that an emergency was on in the country. As Mehta writes “Before June ’76 the Emergency was a peripheral phenomenon in rural India. The constitutional changes, detention of opposition leaders, curtailment of fundamental freedoms, censorship of the press, were hardly likely to affect life of the Indian peasant….This ignorance was rudely shattered with the launching of the sterilization programme. And it was this which took Emergency to the heart of India, to its hamlets and small towns.”
When elections finally happened in 1977 this turned out to be a major issue and the Congress party was booted out of power the first time since independence. The entire frustration of the emergency came to be consolidated largely around one issue and that was 
nasbandi. Mehta quotes author Sasti Brata as saying “The elections have not proved that democracy flourishes in India, the elections have only proved that men don’t like to lay on tables and have their things cut off.”
Is something similar happening in an India, which is clearly more urban now than it was in the 1970s, right now? Has the frustration of being under nearly eight and a half years of misrule of the Congress party led UPA, all getting consolidated under the issue of a 23 year old women being raped in Delhi? The nation has forgotten the 2G scam. The commonwealth games scam. The nexus between Robert Vadra and DLF. The coalgate scam. We have adjusted to the price of almost everything going up at a very fast pace and the fact that our salaries are not going anywhere. We don’t seem to mind the high EMIs.
But will we forget the fact that a 23 year old women who had her whole life in front of her and who was getting back home from watching a movie on a late cold Delhi evening, happened to board the wrong bus, only to be raped and almost killed by a set of goons?
That time will tell!

The article was originally published on www.firstpost.com on December 27, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]

Top 10 in Indian non-fiction books: More reasons to skip Chetan Bhagat

chetan bhagat
Vivek Kaul
It is that time of the year when newspapers, magazines and websites get around to making top 10 lists on various things in the year that was. So here is my list for the top 10 books in the Indian non fiction category (The books appear in a random order).
Breakout Nations – In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles – Ruchir Sharma (Penguin/Allen Lane -Rs 599)
The book is based around the notion that sustained economic growth cannot be taken for granted.
Only six countries which are classified as emerging markets by the western world have grown at the rate of 5 percent or more over the last 40 years. Only two of these countries, i.e. Taiwan and South Korea, have managed to grow at 5 percent or more for the last 50 years.
The basic point being that the economic growth of countries falters more often than not. “India is already showing some of the warning signs of failed growth stories, including early-onset of confidence,” Sharma writes in the book.
When Sharma said this in what was the first discussion based around the book on an Indian television channel, Montek Singh Ahulwalia, the deputy chairman of the planning commission, did not agree. Ahulwalia, who was a part of the discussion, insisted that a 7 percent economic growth rate was a given. Turned out it wasn’t. The economic growth in India has now slowed down to around 5.5 percent.
Sharma got his timing on the India economic growth story fizzling out absolutely right.
The last I met him in November he told me that the book had sold around 45,000 copies in India. For a non fiction book which doesn’t tell readers how to lose weight those are very good numbers. (You can read Sharma’s core argument here).
In the Company of a Poet – Gulzar In Conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir(Rainlight/Rupa -Rs 495)
There is very little quality writing available on the Hindi film industry. Other than biographies on a few top stars nothing much gets written. Gulzar is one exception to this rule. There are several biographies on him, including one by his daughter Meghna. But all these books barely look on the creative side of him. What made Sampooran Singh Kalra, Gulzar? How did he become the multifaceted personality that he did?
There are very few individuals who have the kind of bandwidth that Gulzar does. Other than directing Hindi films, he has written lyrics, stories, screenplays as well as dialogues for them. He has been a documentary film maker as well, having made documentaries on Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and Ustad Amjad Ali Khan. He is also a poet and a successful short story writer. On top of all this he has translated works from Bangla and Marathi into Urdu/Hindi.
In this book, Nasreen Munni Kabir talks to Gulzar and the conversations bring out how Sampooran Singh Kalra became Gulzar. Gulzar talks with great passion about his various creative pursuits in life. From writing the superhit kajrare to what he thinks about Tagore’s English translations. If I had a choice of reading only one book all through this year, this would have to be it.
Durbar – Tavleen Singh (Hachette – Rs 599)
Some of the best writing on the Hindi film industry that I have ever read was by Sadat Hasan Manto. Manto other than being the greatest short writer of his era also wrote Hindi film scripts and hence had access to all the juicy gossip. The point I am trying to make is that only an insider of a system can know how it fully works. But of course he may not be able to write about it, till he is a part of the system. Manto’s writings on Hindi films and its stars in the 1940s only happened once he had moved to Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947. When he became an outsider he chose to reveal all that he had learnt as an insider.
Tavleen Singh’s Durbar is along similar lines. As a good friend of Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi, during the days when both of them had got nothing to do with politics, she had access to them like probably no other journalist did. Over the years she fell out first with Sonia and then probably with Rajiv as well.
Durbar does have some juicy gossip about the Gandhi family in the seventies. My favourite is the bit where Sonia and Maneka Gandhi had a fight over dog biscuits. But it would be unfair to call it just a book of gossip as some Delhi based reviewers have.
Tavleen Singh offers us some fascinating stuff on Operation Bluestar and the chamchas surrounding the Gandhi family and how they operated. The part that takes the cake though is the fact that Ottavio Quattrocchi and his wife were very close to Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi, despite Sonia’s claims now that she barely knew them. If there is one book you should be reading to understand how the political city of Delhi operates and why that has landed India in the shape that it has, this has to be it.
The Sanjay Story – Vinod Mehta (Harper Collins – Rs 499).Technically this book shouldn’t be a part of the list given that it was first published in 1978 and has just been re-issued this year. But this book is as important now as it was probably in the late 1970s, when it first came out.
Mehta does a fascinating job of unravelling the myth around Sanjay Gandhi and concludes that he was the school boy who never grew up.
“Intellectually Sanjay had never encountered complexity. He was an I.S.C and at that educational level you are not likely to learn (through your educational training) the art of resolving involved problems… He himself confessed in 1976 that possibly his strongest intellectual stimulation came from comics,” writes Mehta.
The book goes into great detail about the excesses of the emergency era. From nasbandi to the censors taking over the media, it says it all. Sanjay was not a part of the government in anyway but ruled the country. And things are similar right now!
Patriots and Partisans – Ramachandra Guha (Penguin/Allen Lane – Rs 699)
The trouble with most Delhi based Indian intellectuals is that they have very strong ideologies. There sensitivities are either to the extreme left or the extreme right, and those in the middle are essentially stooges of the Congress party. Given that, India has very few intellectuals who are liberal in the strictest of the terms. Ramachandra Guha is one of them, his respect for Nehru and his slight left leanings notwithstanding. And what of course helps is the fact that he lives in Bangalore and not in Delhi.
His new book Patriots and Partisans is a collection of fifteen essays which largely deal with all that has and is going wrong in India. One of the finest essays in the book is titled A Short History of Congress Chamchagiri. This essay on its own is worth the price of the book. Another fantastic essay is titled Hindutva Hate Mail where Guha writes about the emails he regularly receives from Hindutva fundoos from all over the world.
His personal essays on the Oxford University Press, the closure of the Premier Book Shop in Bangalore and the Economic and Political Weekly are a pleasure to read. If I was allowed only to read two non fiction books this year, this would definitely be the second book. (Read my interview with Ramachandra Guha here).
Indianomix – Making Sense of Modern India – Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya (Vintage Books Random House India – Rs 399)
This little book running into 185 pages was to me the surprise package of this year. The book is along the lines of international bestsellers like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist. It uses economic theory and borrows heavily from the emerging field of behavioural economics to explain why India and Indians are the way they are.
Other than trying to explain things like why are Indians perpetually late or why do Indian politicians prefer wearing khadi in public and jeans in their private lives, the book also delves into fairly serious issues.
Right from explaining why so many people in Mumbai die while crossing railway lines to explaining why Nehru just could not see the obvious before the 1962 war with China, the book tries to explain a broad gamut of issues.
But the portion of the book that is most relevant right now given the current protests against the rape of a twenty year old woman in Delhi, is the one on the ‘missing women’ of India. Women in India are killed at birth, after birth and as they grow up is the point that the book makes.
My only complain with the book is that I wish it could have been a little longer. Just as I was starting to really enjoy it, the book ended. (Read my interview with Vivek Dehejia here)
Taj Mahal Foxtrot – The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age – Naresh Fernandes (Roli Books – Rs 1295)
Bombay (Mumbai as it is now known as) really inspires people who lives here and even those who come from the outside to write about it. Only that should explain the absolutely fantastic books that keep coming out on the city (No one till date has been able to write a book as grand as Shantaram set in Delhi or a book with so many narratives like Maximum City set in Bangalore).
This year’s Bombay book written by a Mumbaikar has to be Naresh Fernades’s Taj Mahal Foxtrot.
The book goes into the fascinating story of how jazz came to Bombay. It talks about how the migrant musicians from Goa came to Bombay to make a living and became its most famous jazz artists. And they had delightful names like Chic Chocolate and Johnny Baptist. The book also goes into great detail about how many black American jazz artists landed up in Bombay to play and take the city by storm. The grand era that came and went.
While growing up I used to always wonder why did Hindi film music of the 1950s and 1960s sound so Goan. And turns out the best music directors of the era had music arrangers who came belonged to Goa. The book helped me set this doubt to rest.
The Indian Constitution – Madhav Khosla (Oxford University Press – Rs 195)
I picked up this book with great trepidation. I knew that the author Madhav Khosla was a 27 year old. And I did some back calculation to come to the conclusion that he must have been probably 25 years old when he started writing the book. And that made me wonder, how could a 25 year old be writing on a document as voluminous as the Indian constitution is?
But reading the book set my doubts to rest, proving once again, that age is not always related to good scholarship. What makes this book even more remarkable is the fact that in 165 pages of fairly well spaced text, Khosla gives us the history, the present and to some extent the future of the Indian constitution.
His discussion on caste being one of the criteria on the basis of which backwardness is determined in India makes for a fascinating read. Same is true for the section on the anti defection law that India has and how it has evolved over the years.
Lucknow Boy – Vinod Mehta (Penguin – Rs 499)
One of my favourite jokes on Lucknow goes like this. An itinerant traveller gets down from the train on the Lucknow Railway station and lands into a beggar. The beggar asks for Rs 5 to have a cup of tea. The traveller knows that a cup of tea costs Rs 2.50. He points out the same to the beggar.
“Aap nahi peejiyega kya? (Won’t you it be having it as well?),” the beggar replies. The joke reveals the famous tehzeeb of Lucknow.
Vinod Mehta’s Lucknow Boy starts with his childhood days in Lucknow and the tehzeeb it had and it lost over the years. The first eighty pages the book are a beautiful account of Mehta’s growing up years in the city and how he and his friends did things with not a care in the world. Childhood back then was about being children, unlike now.
The second part of the book has Mehta talking about his years as being editor of various newspapers and magazines. This part is very well written and has numerous anecdotes like any good autobiography should, but I liked the book more for Mehta’s description of his carefree childhood than his years dealing with politicians, celebrities and other journalists.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers – Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity – Katherine Boo (Penguin – Rs 499)
As I said a little earlier Mumbai inspires books like no other city in India does. A fascinating read this year has been Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Indians are typical apprehensive about foreigners writing on their cities. But some of the best Mumbai books have been written by outsiders. Gregory David Roberts who wrote Shantaram arrived in Mumbai having escaped from an Australian prison. There is no better book on Mumbai than Shantaram. The same is true about Suketu Mehta and Maximum City. Mehta was a Bombay boy who went to live in America and came back to write the book that he did.
Boo’s book on Mumbai is set around a slum called Annawadi. She spent nearly three years getting to know the people well enough to write about them. Hence stories of individuals like Kalu, Manju, Abdul, Asha and Sunil, who live in the slum come out very authentic. The book more than anything else I have read on Mumbai ( with the possible exception of Shantaram) brings out the sheer grit that it takes to survive in a city like Mumbai.
So that was my list for what I think were the top 10 Indian non fiction books for the year. One book that you should definitely avoid reading is Chetan Bhagat’s What Young India Wants. Why would you want to read a book which says something like this?
Money spent on bullets doesn’t give returns, money spent on better infrastructure does… In this technology-driven age, do you really think America doesn’t have the information or capability to launch an attack against India? But they don’t want to attack us. They have much to gain from our potential market for American products and cheap outsourcing. Well let’s outsource some of our defence to them, make them feel secure and save money for us. Having a rich, strong friend rarely hurt anyone.
And if that is not enough let me share what Bhagat thinks would happen if women weren’t around. “There would be body odour, socks on the floor and nothing in the fridge to eat.” Need I say anything else?
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 26, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])

Shinde-speak shows all that is wrong with the government

13-sushil-kumar-shinde-300Vivek Kaul
A few things that home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said today tell us very clearly what is wrong with the approach of the Indian government to the recent public protests in Delhi against the rape of a 23 year old woman. 
If we meet students today, tomorrow we may have to meet Maoists
First and foremost how can the home minister of the world’s largest democracy say something as casual as this. At one go he has associated the students and the general public protesting in Delhi to Maoists who kill people day in and day out. The liberal historian and writer Ramachandra Guha told me in a recent interview that Naxalism is one of the biggest threats facing the country right now. Mr Shinde wants us to believe that the protests in Delhi are as big a threat as a Naxalism? How crazy can that be?
The second point that comes out here is that if the government does not come out and meet the Maoists (or Naxals as they are more popularly called) who else will? But Mr Shinde seems to be so comfortable in his bungalow in Lutyens Delhi that for him Naxalism might even be something that exists in a foreign country that is not India.
Or how else do you explain his statement “when 100 adivasis are killed in Gadchiroli, should the government go there?” Yes minister, the government should go there. If people of this country are being killed the government has to make every effort to stop it.

They are throwing stones at the police
This was Shinde’s explanation on why the police started lathi-charging and tear gassing the citizens of this nation who had gathered to protest. As a Delhi police commissioner put it “hooligans have taken over this protest.”
But as usual there are two sides to the story. As Shuddhabrata Sengupta writes in a column “The violence began, not when protesters threw stones, but when the police started attacking people. Stones were thrown in retaliation. The television cameras that recorded what happened show us the exact chronology. The police were clearly under orders not to let people up Raisina Hill. Why? What is so sacred about Raisina Hill? Why can a group of unarmed, peaceful young people not walk to the gates of the president’s palace?”
Shinde wants us to believe that the force was used to protect the Rashtrapati Bhavan which is built on top Raisina Hill.
Let me just deviate a little here. A few years back George Bush visited London. This was the time when War on Terror was at its peak. Bush had to meet Tony Blair at his 10 Downing Street residence cum office. While the meeting of Bush and Blair was on, Britishers protesting against the War on Terror and the indiscriminate bombing of Iraq, were allowed to pass through 10 Downing Street, shouting their version of “
Bush-Blair hai hai!”.
Why can’t that happen in India? Is Pranab Mukherjee’s security risk greater than that of the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain put together?
Assuming even if the protesters threw the first stone did that mean that male policemen should have been allowed to go around mercilessly beating up women and senior citizens? The police behaved along expected lines having long been a hand maiden of the government. As Gurucharan Das told me in an interview earlier this year “after Indira Gandhi the police became a handmaiden of the executive. The police lost its independence.”
Also why was there no effort made to engage with the protesters while they were there? Other than some statements being made by the junior home minister, whom no one had heard about till a few days back, almost nothing credible came from the Union Government.
In his address to the nation today Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is heard saying 
theek hai at the end of his speech. Did the Prime Minister really believe in what he was saying or was it just an act that he was putting on? A scene from a movie at the end of which the director says cut, and the actor asks “theek hai? ya ek bar aur karte hain? (was it good enough? or shall we do it once more?)”
When Sonia ji herself had met protesters, they should have been happy
This statement of Shinde is the world view of a member of the Congress party whose be all and end all in life is to get a darshan from the lady herself. The allegiance of a Congressman like Shinde is to the Gandhi family and not the nation and public which elects them to seats of power.
As Tavleen Singh writes in her new book Durbar “Years later, the ultimate subscriber to the idea of democratic feudalism, Mani Shankar Aiyar, admitted in a television interview with Karan Thapar that the party was just not proud of its dynasty but knew that it was the ‘adhesive’ that held things together.” As a Facebook/Twitter joke going around puts it “What Sachin Tendulkar’s retirement from ODIs tells us is that everything comes to an end, except the Gandhi dynasty.”
Getting back to the point, what does meeting of the protesters with Sonia Gandhi have to do with the issue at all? And if protesters feel like continuing their protest even after meeting Mrs Gandhi what does it tell us? It tells us that the assurances even from the lady who runs this country by ‘remote control’ weren’t convincing enough for the protesters to stop protesting.
When political parties protest, call bands, damage public property, burn buses and try to shut down the country, the police conveniently look the other way, but when some people in Delhi want to protest it becomes a security threat to the President? And they police respond by lathi charging, pushing the media out of the scene and shutting down metro stations. The politicians of this country keep reminding us time and again that we are the world’s largest democracy. If we are the world’s largest democracy then why are we shutting down metro stations?
Varchasva” a word in Hindi which best describes the situation at hand. The closest English translation of the word is “absolute power”. And absolute power makes people behave in the way the government of India led by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh is currently behaving.

The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 24, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]

Why women will continue to be raped in India (Part 2)

rape 
Vivek Kaul
Yesterday’s post on the Delhi rape case generated a lot of heat among the readers and I got a lot of response for it. The responses make my belief even stronger that women will continue to be raped in India. In this piece I will address some of the responses that I got and make a case for what I said yesterday and what I am reiterating today.
Why do you have to be so negative?
This was by far the most common response from the emails I got and the comments that I read on the first piece. Well, how can I be positive? A 23 year old girl who had her whole life before her has been raped. Doctors who are treating her have said that they haven’t seen a worse case of sexual assault in all their lives. And one of the rapists has said they did what they did to her because she was resisting rape and biting them. Her intestines have been taken out and if she lives she won’t be able to eat again.
As the poet Sahir Ludhianvi wrote in 
Pyasa “Hum gamzada hai, laaye kahan se khushi ke geet. denge wahi, jo paayenge iss zindagi se hum.” Loosely translated this means that “I am unhappy, where do I get songs of happiness from? I can only give what I get from this life.” For those looking for more positivity can go and watch Salman Khan’s Dabanng 2 which releases today.
And as they watch and enjoy 
Bhai (as his fans like to call Salman) bashing up the baddies one more time, they should remember that this reel life superstar is accused of ramming his Toyota Land Cruiser into a bakery in Bandra on September 28,2002, killing one person and injuring four others. Salman has been summoned by the court 82 times till now. And he has not been present there even once. People like him are a symbol of the rich and famous in this country who systematically abuse the system of justice, take it for a ride and ensure that it does not work.
Girls get raped because they wear sexy clothes
This is by far the most appalling thing that I have ever heard. One gentleman who wrote to me had this to say. “Don’t you think girls are misusing their freedom…our education doesn’t teaches culture it teaches only history and tradition. When the freedom is given to women…they should use it n the fruitful way. Wearing jeans below belly proves they wants(sic) some attraction from opposite genders(sic) of society.”
Another man wrote in saying “
The simple reason is foreign influence. we have forgotten our tradational (sic) wearings (sic) and jumping to foreign culture particularly ladies and young girls of different ages working or studying wearing very very less cloths(sic) and showing their figure in a very nasty way. We used to see this type of body showing in the movies but now a days in every gulli or street you can see a live show. If this type of life style previles (sic) no one can prevent or control rape cases.
So these men want us to believe that women are getting raped because they want to get raped. If this is the attitude prevails even among some men, then god help us! Let me try and flip this argument around and explain why this is nonsense of the highest order.
I see all around me, bare chested men in just their striped shorts, bermudas and pyjamas with long 
naadas dangling, and no woman that I know has actually ever expressed the desire to mob these barely clad men and publicly pull their naadas down. So much for sexually arousing exposure!
Delhi is a very safe place
Another gentleman who claimed to be a CEO of a company wrote to me to say that he had been living in Delhi for the last seven years and he found it to be a very safe place. His 21 year old son whenever he came to India for his holidays from the US where he is studying partied till very late in the night and came back home only at around 4am in the morning and hence that proved that Delhi is a safe place. When I asked him what about the girl friends of his son? Did they party till 4am as well? Pat came the reply. No, they had 11pm deadlines. Sons can party till 4am because sons don’t get raped.
Another gentleman wrote to me that Delhi is safe for 99.994% of females and backed up with some statistical mumbo jumbo. “
The media needs stories to carry on with their TRP’s & viewership so that they can make more mullah. And we are happy reading the craps which they serve changing the flavors every now and then so that we don’t get bored. Killing the girl child is not something new, its there for centuries in India. Kings wanted their heirs again a male & so had multiple queens.And so had a male sooner or later, the same is followed for generation’s. That’s why a Rahul Gandhi leads Congress & not a Priyanka,” he added.
Delhi (572) has more rapes than Mumbai (221), Kolkata (46), Chennai (76), Bangalore (97) and Hyderabad (59), the next five biggest cities in India, put together. Guess that makes Delhi a very safe city! There is this small cottage industry that seems to have sprung up almost overnight trying to defend Delhi as being safe, as not being the rape capital of India and so on. If we are not even ready to acknowledge that Delhi is an unsafe city (and frankly it gives me the creeps) how can we even start addressing its fascination for raping its women.
It was not your sister/mother/wife who was raped
One women wrote in saying this: “Just read your article and I am speechless reading that. Not in a good sense mind you. Though the facts that you have mentioned are correct. But as you have said that stoning these scums is not a solution. Would you have said this if this had happened to your sister, mother or wife? Would you? try and understand the pain that girl has gone through. The accused is saying that they inserted metal rod inside her and when removed that rod some rope was sticking to it.. that was her intestine man… can you even barley imagine what she had gone through those 40 mins. keep your loved one in her shoe and then tell us killing them will not stop this. What will ? I find you sick who is taking this issue to some other extent.
A few other people wrote in along similar lines talking about a rape in Tamil Nadu and the rapists being killed in an encounter after that. “
This may be ruthless but these kind of punishment will tell others to be cautious…i would like to recall the Coimbatore incident were a 10 year old girl was raped by two of the car drivers in 2010. The next day there was a huge cry out in the state , understanding the pulse of people police immediately swing in to action and he was encountered, the whole tamil nadu know that this was planned execution by law enforcement agencies but all people of tamil nadu welcomed it.”
If we as a society want to stone people to death, kill them in encounters etc, how does that make us any different from the Taliban? And as I said in my piece yesterday any solution is as good as the system that will execute it. In a country like India if anything like chemical castration and encounter killings for committing rapes becomes the order of the day and the police are pushed to solve rape cases faster, what are they likely to do? More often than not they will get hold of some random guy (the homeless, the slum dweller or probably just about the first person they can get their eyes on) beat the shit out of him and get him to confess to it. How do we ensure something like that does not happen? There is absolutely no way to do that.
Why can’t we make karate compulsory for women
This was another major thought that came across that women should learn karate/martial arts/boxing for their security against men. Great idea! But what will a woman do when four men pounce upon her! Another idea along similar lines was that buses shouldn’t have filmed window panes. As one gentleman wrote in “Mr.Harish salve in NDTV, insisted that the busses (sic) should not be allowed to have filmed window panes.” Yes, but women are raped in auto-rickshaws, cars, go-downs, homes, everywhere. What do we do about that?
But, like all the other writers, you are also just addressing the problem, without any solution.
I got loads of emails asking me for a solution. One woman wrote in saying “You are the ambassador of media and you should educate the Janta, by writing about the Laws as to what a layman can ask from the Government as a form of justice for such miseries.
What solution are we talking about? It isn’t rocket science here. We are not talking about how to get an Indian man on the moon. The solution is better policing. But the police in this country have sold themselves out lock, stock and barrel for money. And other than that their attitude towards rape leads me to believe that women will continue to be raped.
As an earlier piece on this website reported “Satbir Singh, Additional SHO of Sector 31 Police Station, Faridabad, puts it: “
Ladkiya jo hai unko yahan tak yahan tak (he gestures to mean that women should cover their entire body, then carries on speaking)…Skirt pehenti haiBlouse dalti hai; poora nahi dalti hai. Dupatta nahi dalti. Apne aapko dikhawa karti hai. Baccha uske taraf akarshit hota hai.” (Girls should be covered from here to here… They wear skirts, blouses, that don’t cover them fully. Don’t wear a dupatta. They display themselves. A kid will naturally be attracted to her.)”
“Sub-Inspector Arjun Singh, SHO of Surajpur Police Station, Greater Noida, clarifies the position further: “
She is dressed in a manner that people get attracted to her. In fact, she wants them to do something to her.””
And why blame the lowly Sub-Inspectors when even the first citizen of this country does not take rape seriously. As an earlier piece on this website pointed out “
It is also worth recalling that before demitting office as President, Pratibha Patil commuted the death sentences of several rapists. A record 30 pardons were granted in double-quick time. Among them was Santosh Yadav, who was already serving a jail sentence for rape. In jail, as gardener of the jailer, he and a fellow convict raped the jailer’s own daughter. He was pardoned by Patil. Dharmender Singh and Narendra Yadav killed a family of five when their minor daughter resisted rape. They, too, were pardoned.”
A woman President pardoning rapists. Do I need to say anything more on why I remain pessimistic!

The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 21, 2012. 
 
 (Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]

Why Samsung is the new Nokia

samsung
Vivek Kaul

I grew up reading The Indian Express. But a few years back my parents started subscribing to The Times of India after my mother complained once too often that “Express main masala nahi hai!”
The fall of 
The Indian Express along with The Statesman which used to be two very good newspapers (Express still is. And I haven’t read Statesman in a while, though at a point of time it was regarded the best English newspaper in Asia) are nowhere in the reckoning now, as far as the number of readers is concerned.
What happened? To some extent the papers remained stuck to their past glory and did not see the rise of the new Indian middle class, which along with hardcore news also wanted a dash of 
masala every morning. They wanted to know how the Congress party was screwing up the country but they also wanted to know whether Amitabh and Rekha smiled when their eyes met at a film industry party. 
The Times of India 
was the only newspaper which caught on to this trend (or should we say created it), raked in the moolah and got way ahead of almost all its competitors in the race.
So what is the point of I am trying to make? Incumbents who are firmly entrenched in their businesses more often than not fail to see the rise of a new category. The most recent example of the same is Nokia, which after being the top mobile phone brand in the world for a period of nearly 14 years has lost out to Samsung.
And the reason for this is very simple. Nokia did not see the smart phone. There are loads of other examples of existing companies that did not see the rise of a new category.
Sony invented the walkman but allowed Apple to walkway with the MP3 player market. RCA which was big radio manufacturer had earlier allowed Sony to walkaway with the pocket radio market. Southwest Airlines created an entirely new low cost airline market which gradually spread to all other parts of the world. Incumbents like Panam, Delta, Singapore Airlines and British Airways did not spot this opportunity.
In India Hindustan Lever Ltd did not spot the low cost detergent market, Nirma did that. Amabassador and Premier Padmini which were the only two car companies in India did not see the rise of the small car market which Maruti Suzuki captured. More recently Maruti did not spot the growing demand for diesel cars and continued to be primarily a company which manufactured petrol cars. It lost out in the process.
Bharti Beetel, revolutionised the landline phone market in India with the introduction of push button phones. But it got into the mobile phone market very late. And this was a huge business opportunity missed given that Bharti Airtel became the largest mobile phone company in India and could have easily bundled Beetel mobile phones along with Airtel mobile phone connections. An entire first generation of Indian mobile phone users could have ended up using Beetel mobile phones. Kodak a company which invented digital photography went bankrupt recently. And BBC, the most respected news organisation in the world did not see the rise of the concept of 24 hour news and left it to CNN to capture that market.
As marketing consultants Al and Laura Ries,write in 
War In the Boardroom, “The biggest mistake of logical management types is their failure to see the rise of a new category. They seem to believe that categories are firmly fixed and a new one seldom arises.”
And why is that? The answer lies in the fact that incumbent companies are too cued into what they are doing at that point of time. A brilliant example is Kodak. How could a company which invented digital photography go bankrupt because of it? Mark Johnson explains this phenomenon in 
Seizing the White Space – Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal. As he writes “In 1975, Kodak engineer, Steve Sasson invented the first camera, which captured low-resolution black-and-white images and transferred them to a TV. Perhaps fatally, he dubbed it “filmless photography” when he demonstrated the device for various leaders at the company.”
Sasson was asked to keep quiet about his invention. This was because Kodak was the biggest producer of photo films at that point of time. And any invention that did not use photo films would have hit the core business of the company. So Kodak ignored the segment. By the time it realised the importance of the segment other companies like Canon had already jumped in and become big players. Also by then brand Canon had come to be associated very strongly with the digital camera whereas Kodak continued to be associated with the old photo film.
The same would have stood true for Beetel in India. They would have been making good money on selling landline phones and wouldn’t have seen any sense in entering the nascent mobile phone market in India where calls were priced at Rs 16 per minute. And by the time the market took off brands like Nokia would have been firmly entrenched. Amabssador and Premier Padmini fell victim to the same thing.
Another excellent example of this is Xerox. “Just think of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, which famously owned the technologies that helped catapult Apple (the graphical user interface, the mouse), Adobe (post script graphical technology) and 3Com (Ethernet technology) to success,” writes Johnson.
But Xerox executives were busy selling the photocopier. They did not have time for these small tinkerings that seemed to have been happening in their company labs. The photocopiers brought in all the money and their attention was firmly focussed on them.
Sony is a really interesting example in this trend. Sony had created the Walkman and the entire market of listening to music anywhere and everywhere. But they somehow failed to latch onto the MP3 player market which was captured by the likes of Apple iPod. An MP3 player was just an extension of the Walkman.
Other than being an electronics company Sony had also morphed into a music company owning the rights to the music of some of the biggest pop and rockstars. Hence Sony supporting MP3 technology would mean one of the biggest music companies in the world supporting the free copying and distribution of music because that was what MP3 was all about.
And with this logic which might have seemed perfectly fine at that point of time Sony lost out to Apple in the MP3 space. Also, over the years music became free anyway.
Getting back to where we started, Nokia made the same mistake. It did not see the rise of the smart phone category as other players like Samsung and Apple did. And the reason was simple. Even though smart phones have been around for a while only now have they really taken over the market because they are robust enough. Hence, as long as the basic phones of Nokia were selling well, as they were till a couple of years back, it had no real interest in thinking about the smart phone market.
By the time the company caught on with the launch of Lumia other international players like Samsung and Apple already had a major presence in the market. In India the smart phone space has loads of local players like Micromax battling for the market as well.
And so Nokia lost the race!
The interesting thing is that Samsung will also will lose the race when the next evolution in the mobile phone space happens. It will be too focused on the smart phone.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 20, 2012

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]