Prem Panicker on Anniversary Blues:
"Those two signposts — CRPF jawans crapping, peeing and bathing in the shadow of the Gateway and those divine smoked salmon sandwiches – perfectly bookend our response, as a government and as a society, to one of the worst terrorist attacks, worldwide, in recent memory.
The least we could do is avoid noise pollution, no?"

For weeks we followed the production of a low-budget film inspired by the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Here it is, the insanely comic making of a tragic film…
Not long after the night of 26 November, several filmmakers had a wholly original thought. Why not make a disaster movie out of this? And so, as the filming of Total Ten commenced at Film City in Goregaon, there was a certain hesitation over the sensitivity of the subject, which roughly translated to: “Will somebody kill me for doing this?” One actor asked another if the script had an anti-Muslim or anti-Pakistan stance, and got a shrug in response. Neither had seen the script.

So, what works?
Earn a reputation. Have a conversation. Ask questions. Describe possible outcomes of a point of view. Make connections. Give the other person the benefit of the doubt. Align objectives then describe a better outcome. Show up. Smile.

चेक बुक हो पीली या लाल,
दाम सिक्के हों या शोहरत -
कह दो उनसे
जो ख़रीदने आये हों तुम्हें
हर भूखा आदमी बिकाऊ नहीं होगा है !

जाने क्यों कोई मुझसे कहता
मन में कुछ ऐसा भी रहता
जिसको छू लेने वाली हर पीड़ा
जीवन में फिर जाती व्यर्थ नहीं

अर्पित है पूजा के फूलों-सा जिसका मन
अनजाने दुख कर जाता उसका परिमार्जन
अपने से बाहर की व्यापक सच्चाई को
नत-मस्तक होकर वह कर लेता सहज ग्रहण

वे सब बन जाते पूजा गीतों की कड़ियां
यह पीड़ा, यह कुण्ठा, ये शामें, ये घड़ियां

इनमें से क्या है
जिनका कोई अर्थ नहीं !

कुछ भी तो व्यर्थ नहीं !

सौ ग्राम हल्दी,
पचास ग्राम जीरा
छींट जाने से तबाह नहीं होती ज़िंदगी,
पर क्या करूँ
छोटे-छोटे नुकसानों को गाता रहता हूँ
हर अपने बेगाने को सुनाता रहता हूँ
अपने छोटे-छोटे दुख ।…

मैं बहुत कम तेल वाला दीया हूँ
हल्की हवा भी बहुत है
मुझे बुझाने के लिए।

छोटा हूँ,
पर रहने दो,
छोटी-छोटी बातें कहता हूँ- कहने दो ।

उन्होंने मुझसे पूछा -
क्या करेंगे जानकर कि
अयोध्या में बसकर भी क्यों उदास रहते थे पागलदास।

उन्होंने कहा-
क्यों उदास हैं आप बनारस में
बुद्ध कपिलवस्तु में
कालिदास उज्जयिनी में
फसलें खेतों में
पत्तियाँ वृक्षों पर, लोग दिल्ली में, पटना में
दुनिया जहान में क्यों उदास हैं
आप सिर्फ यही क्यों पूछ रहे हैं
कि अयोध्या में बसकर भी क्यों उदास थे पागलदास।

मैंने कहा -
मुझे उनकी उदासी से कुछ काम नहीं
मुझे बुद्ध, कालिदास या लोगों की उदासी से
कुछ लेना-देना नहीं
मैं तो सिर्फ बताना चाहता था लोगों को
कि इस वजह से अयोध्या में बसकर भी
उदास रहते थे पागलदास।

आज हमारा न चाहना
हमारी चुप्पी में
चाहने की स्वीकृति ही तो है

तालियों से झर रही है शर्म
उतर रहे हैं कपड़े
और देख रहे हैं हम
आश्चर्य की शृंखला में
जुड़ते हुए अपने नाम।

There's two issues here – our tax collections which grew at a 20-30% clip in the last few years, from greater reporting and solid growth, have come down to negative or flat levels. This has two bearings:
* The deficit, at 6% of GDP (or Rs. 3 trillion) isn't going to come down much until tax revenues pick up. Our other sources of income are the fees from licensing like NELP and 3G allocations, and from divestment – won't quite add up to bridge the divide. And public expenditure (check the link) is going up at 33% or so.
* Where's the 6% GDP growth that we're talking about? How come people aren't paying a lot more in income and other taxes? (In times of 8% GDP growth, taxes grew 40-50% yoy) Maybe it's just the first few months and things will get better in the last six months of the year. But with bank credit stalling at 9.7% (yoy growth) I hardly see the signs that there's a big recovery happening.

Recently, a major GW advocacy center, the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit was hacked into, and about 62 MB worth of email communication and other data was "made available" on a public FTP server in Russia…
it turns out that the emails reveal a sinister plot – that scientists were "fudging" or deleting or hiding data in order to prove their point, which is that Global Warming exists. One email talks about a scientist applying "tricks" to make sure the data would "hide the decline", referring to temperatures – you can't have declining temperatures in a global warming paper, can you? Others talked about how it was a "travesty" that they can't account for the lack of warming – so instead of questioning if there is global warming, they question the data.
If these guys were in the stock market, they would start by saying the market is wrong, so let's assume that prices are much higher than they are today, because they should be.

कई साल बीत गये हैं
टूट गया है इलाहाबाद से नाता
छूट गया है अल्लापुर….
दूर संचार के हजारों इंतजाम हैं पर
नहीं मिलती ममता की कोई खबर,
उसकी शादी हुई या बैठी है घर,
अब तो किसी से पूछते भी लगता है डर।

कैसा समाज है, कैसा समय है,
जहाँ मुहल्ले की लड़कियों का
हाल-चाल जानना गुनाह है,
व्यभिचार है,
पर क्या ममता के हाल-चाल की
मुझे सचमुच दरकार है ?

The British have a lovely expression for retirement; they call it "going plural". Retirement is a time for pursuing multiple interests, now that work is behind you. Work which robbed you of the best hours of each day, the best years of your life. Because work takes such a handsome chunk of your life, it makes sense to learn to enjoy it, otherwise your working life will be a living misery, a terrible waste. The problem comes when it takes over your life, and all you learn to enjoy is work – live to work rather than work to live. You are then the Marcusian ‘One Dimensional Man’. AJ Cronin said: "Men's hands are too coarsened by hard work to able to appreciate the finer things of life." That is true of all of us to some degree. Work partly deadens our ‘hands’, unless we constantly flex them, constantly seek to keep our leisure interests alive.

Almost everyone you know seems to have a sure fire theory about how to have a big night out and still avoid the dreaded hangover. Some just don’t add up while others can leave you feeling even worse. Here are 10 hangover myths debunked and some facts which will leave you feeling a little better the morning after!

Thanks to Facebook, mobile devices and impaired judgment, we're only a few seconds (and clicks) away from staining our entire extended social network! That's peace of mind in your pocket. To make sure you never appear on Facebook Fails, follow our how-not-to guide of the five most common Facebook faux pas.

How is it that companies are willing to trust employees with their customers, their expensive equipment, and their cash, but are unwilling to trust them when it comes to using the Web at work or loading their own programs onto their workplace PC? Do IT staffers really believe that conscientious, committed employees turn into crazed, malicious, hackers when given a bit of freedom over their IT environment? Or are they all secret control freaks—the sort of folks who alphabetize their DVD collections and have separate drawers for different colored socks? Either way, if they had the budget, they’d probably hire hall monitors.

Part 2 of the 3-part series

There’s probably no organizational attribute that’s more important today than adaptability. In our topsy turvy world, every organization is teetering on the brink of irrelevance, and unless it can change as fast as change itself, it will soon tumble off the ledge.
In contrast to market share or product differentiation, adaptability is an abstract concept. So let me take a moment to explain why it matters.

“Perspective tellings” of this complex, multi-layered epic are not, of course, new things. Many notable books and plays in this vein have been written in all the major Indian languages…but…hardly any of these are available in high-quality translation…Panicker’s Bhimsen…isn’t a straight translation…he expanded on the frequent tensions between the Pandava brothers, for Randaamoozham, as he points out, is at its heart the story of a family struggling to survive.
As a reader, if you come to Bhimsen having previously encountered only mainstream translations of the Mahabharata, there are two important things you have to deal with. First, this is not an omniscient-narrator telling: everything we read is filtered through the prism of Bhima’s personal experiences, his very particular biases and prejudices…
The other thing to understand about Bhimsen is that there is no room in it for the supernatural or the divine; everything is explained in strictly realist terms.

If the cost of a Kindle book is mentioned as $0.00 on the Amazon Store, it will still show up as $2.00 for you if the country associated with your Kindle is something other than United States. This is because Amazon charges a $2 roaming fee for “international downloads”.

You can either temporarily change your Kindle country to US or use the “Transfer via Computer” option when buying a book and you won’t be charged that extra $2 fees. Thanks Dhamini Ratnam.

The phrase "time is money" doesn't hit home until you're sitting at your desk, goofing off, and realize that you're wasting your own money by doing so. A freelancer has his or her hourly rate top-of-mind at all times…A freelancer is less likely to waste time on things that don't matter because they can't afford to. As an employee, do you know what your hourly rate of pay is?…
there are two common kinds of freelance work: the well-paying tedium, and the underpaying interesting jobs. The first funds the second…Freelancers choose what contracts to work on based on several factors, not just monetary compensation…
Freelancers…strive for a higher level of excellence because they own every single thing they do, and every job is a stepping stone toward the next. If your name appeared on every single thing you produced…would you feel differently than you do now?

Puru Pratap Singh, a class IV student from Gurgaon in India, has won the Doodle 4 Google contest and you can see his artwork live on the Google India homepage.
The theme of this year’s Google Doodle contest was "My India".

I feel incredibly fortunate that I'm able to sustain a career writing about things that interest me personally. I can't have the expectation that, if something is interesting to me, it isn't universally compelling. Any time I have ever tried to write something and anticipate what people might be interested in, it always fails. You can't fabricate intellectual enthusiasm for a subject. I write about things that are interesting to me and hope that they are interesting to other people, but I don't expect them to be.

Here is our perception of you: You are a lazy writer. And a lazy columnist. You do not respect your readers enough to try making sense; resorting to cliches of the worst kind, all the time. You compensate for your poor standards by talking down to your readers—you do this most often by talking about US trends in general and Hollywood in particular, and positing yourself as some kind of insider and perceptive “spectator”. But you see nothing except what your own media feeds the masses. You augur a terrible age, in which people who are raised on meaningless mediated values, grow up to spout those same values, louder and lower, in that very media.
In short, you are a writer of no substance. Most of your readers know a great deal more than you.
This is not a new discovery for us, or a new anger at the sudden realization that trees are cut to distribute your column. This is the summation of a strong opinion formed over the course of years.

ome books and authors change how we think.
I was catching up with an old friend and I was distilling some of my favorite books into one-liners to show the contributions of various authors. He suggested I share them as a post, so here it is

51. If there is a service charge, alert your guests when you present the bill. It’s not a secret or a trick.
74. Let the guests know the restaurant is out of something before the guests read the menu and order the missing dish.
75. Do not ask if someone is finished when others are still eating that course.
76. Do not ask if a guest is finished the very second the guest is finished. Let guests digest, savor, reflect.
77. Do not disappear.
80. Never insist that a guest settle up at the bar before sitting down; transfer the tab.
82. If you drip or spill something, clean it up, replace it, offer to pay for whatever damage you may have caused. Refrain from touching the wet spots on the guest.
85. Never bring a check until someone asks for it. Then give it to the person who asked for it.
91. If someone complains about the music, do something about it, without upsetting the ambiance. (The music is not for the staff — it’s for the customers.)

48. Do not ask what someone is eating or drinking when they ask for more; remember or consult the order.
49. Never mention the tip, unless asked.
50. Do not turn on the charm when it’s tip time. Be consistent throughout.

The negatives sound harsh, but whenever you curate something, whether it’s a conference or an art show or a magazine (an editor is basically a curator), you never get everything right. My friend Sambit Bal…once told me that when he put together an issue of Gentleman, he would be satisfied if at the end he had a product in which any reader could find three or four pieces they thoroughly enjoyed. No one’s ever going to enjoy everything; and no one piece can satisfy everyone.
By that reckoning, TED India was a success. I’m sure that many TED India attendees will have loved the Talks I hated and not liked the ones I loved. That’s the nature of a conference like this, and on the whole, I’d say the folks at TED did an amazing job. Also, my criticism is all about the Talks. The conference itself was immaculately organised, and the kind of people I got to meet awed and humbled me. It was, if I may lapse into cliche, the experience of a lifetime.

Here's what occurred to me: if you want to find a great manager, hire a successful parent. It's the same job. Think about it:
- Expressing care.
- Practicing patience.
- Leveraging uniqueness.
- Developing independent capability.
- Setting appropriate expectations and boundaries.

You are afraid. You're afraid of leaving what you know, you're afraid of seeking what you want, you're afraid of taking the wrong path, or you're afraid of failing at the right one…
It is fear that always tamps down our authentic selves, that turns us into some patchwork collection of affectations and expectations, mores and mannerisms, some treadmill set to the prevailing speed of universal acceptability that causes a tyranny of homogeny…
The voices of conformity speak so loudly out there. Don't listen…
Only a principled refusion to be terrorized by these stingy standards will save you from a Frankenstein life that's made up of others' outside expectations grafted together into a poor semblance of existence…
Samuel Butler once said, "Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on." That sounds terrifying, doesn’t it, and difficult too, but that way lies music.

How will this new audacious and authentic world work? I don’t know. Helpful, right? Except that “I don’t know” is one of the most exciting sentences in the English language because in the right hands it suggests, not ignorance, but discovery. It’s the beginning of news reporting, of medical research, of stage preparation, of business creation, of legislations. I don’t know…
I don’t know, but you do. Or you will…Samuel Beckett once said, “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” The mess, the mess. That’s, finally, what we’re leaving you today. We leave you a mess. And I won’t apologize for that. Instead I want you to see it for what it is: an engraved invitation to transformation. Certainty is dead. Long live the flying leap. Take it. Use it. Bring it. Congratulations!

# Know your bigger picture
# Put the hours in. Consistently. Regularly.
# Remember those who are telling you not to do it 'for your own good' are wishing they had the ooomph to so something similar.
# It'll take longer than you think.
# The path will be different to the one you planned.
# It'll involve a lot of heartache, sleepless nights and simple fear.
# It'll make you the person you must become.