Take a Plunge...

Are you one among those who believe that India's hopes reside in its youth? Juz have a glance at the events of the recent week and you might want to take off your rose- tinted glasses. In Madhav College in Ujjain, students beat up and killed a defenseless unarmed professor of Political Science because they believed he was responsible for the cancellation of student elections.

The furious hysterical faces of ABVP activists threatening to wipe the floor with their teachers, wagging fingers and spewing abuse was captured in full close up by television cameras. A policeman standing next to the students shockingly failed to realize that criminal intimidation is a punishable offence and simply looked on.

In Chandigarh, furious young women demanded an apology from and suspension of a teacher who punished a girl for speaking on her mobile phone in class. And in Meerut, girls from a local college vandalised the vice chancellor's home and damaged his vehicle simply because he failed to give them an appointment.

Our great hope is that 65% of our population is under the age of 35, but has India's youth inherited the worst traits of their elders and tossed out the best like yesterday's hawai chappals? Is the mantra "the system sucks" leading to total normlessness? In the '60s and '70s youth movements were generally ideological, based on attacking ideas rather than individuals. Today, youth protests have dramatically changed.

The anti-reservation stir this year was no doubt an example of a powerful youth movement where concerns about the future were certainly legitimate and many sincere young people participated in the debates. Yet alas, here too there seemed to be a sort of tunnel vision on the part of the protestors, a refusal to engage with the realities of social justice, to understand what caste discrimination really means.

Instead there was an almost hysterical obsession about "oh god-whats-going-to-happen-to-me-I'm-going-to-America." "The system sucks" syndrome," is a little dangerous. Why will I abuse my teacher? Because "the system sucks." Why will I ram my car into sleeping human beings? Because "the system sucks." Why will I applaud a film that makes heroes out of criminals? Because "the system sucks."

In fact the system does not suck. Many many things in our system work: the courts, the new economic processes, social structures and citizens' initiatives. To wash all this away in the blanket mantra, "the system sucks" is the worst form of self-absorption. Rang De Basanti is a cult film for today's youth. A film that preaches disrespect, hedonism, and historical forgetfulness and valourises murder is seen as the great protest film of our time. Glance at any workplace today and you'll find the majority of the workforce made up of feverishly ambitious mercenary young people myopically focused on upward mobility, with empty minds that are also as narrow as their trousers.

Scan the blogosphere and you'll find several vicious armchair twentysomethings vomiting out defamatory and bloodthirsty sentiments about strangers who they would, it would appear from their blogs, like to murder. Take a survey of the individuals spooning up milk to the idol of Lord Ganesh and you'll find many are sharply dressed young trendies who when not leafing through horoscopes, sun signs and escapist ghost stories are spending the rest of their waking hours drinking or drugging themselves in order that they can experience the "deeper" moments of existence.

India's youth may be our greatest resource, but parts of the youth are, alas, sunk in such awful decadence and aggressive normlessness that they make the Naxalites of the sixties look like nawabi intellectuals. Youth politics has degenerated to such an extent that a specially appointed committee headed by former CEC JM Lyngdoh was set up to frame guidelines for campus elections. But notwithstanding these guidelines, in large parts of India, college politics is rarely marked by the ideological stances of the sixties.

In the 1970s for example, youth activists took an active role in the Nav Nirman movement in Gujarat or in the anti-Emergency protests and many future politicians - be they Sitaram Yechury or Arun Jaitley cut their political teeth in these protests. Now organisations like the Youth Congress, NSUI or the ABVP are in decline and comprise mainly of lumpen elements jostling for petty local fiefdoms. Lumpen and rogue elements are taking over campuses and turning youth politics into factories creating even larger numbers of villains.

The intriguing fact about this money-conscious success-oriented generation is the disappointing conservatism of their ideals. Where is the risk-taking, the personal gambles, the adventurous spirit of youthful recklessness, of questioning and rebellion? Not there. This is a generation that outwardly looks more modern than their parents but whose thinking is much more backward. In short they believe in caste, patriarchal family values, do not support women's rights and are overwhelmingly concerned with money and success. When the desire to hit the arc lights outstrips all sense of morality, decency and values then our future is not really in very safe hands.

The incidents at Ujjain, Chandigarh and Meerut are shocking for various reasons. They illustrate the complete breakdown of relations between teachers and students, an utter lack of discipline and the complete lack of respect for all institutions and individuals that seems to characterise many of today's youth. A young woman who insists on being allowed to take her mobile phone into class deserves to be punished. The fact that instead of her, it is the teacher who has had to apologise for trying to stop her from doing so (agreed he should not have slapped her as the students claim he did) is nothing short of a terrifying imbalance in our priorities. But the most chilling indictment of India's youth has come from Ujjain.

Agreed, the many talented and hardworking young people across India, the studious folk in the BITS, IITs and IIMs, the earnest quiet achievers do also exist and thrive but the brutal side of the younger generation was never more in evidence than in this incident when a quiet, defenceless and unarmed academic was murdered (in full view of policemen) by enraged young people infuriated about their political future.

The guru-shishya parampara in India is overthrown. The Rang De Basanti generation manically reciting the bizarre mantra "the system sucks" repeatedly demonstrates its contempt for the law.

WOUNDED - The Realistic 'Bandit Queen'

Seema Parihar is yet another woman dacoit from the Chambal ravines to lay her arms and turn mainstream. After 18 long years of hunting and being hunted in the jungles and ravines of the Chambal with the Lala RamSri Ram gang, Seema Parihar surrendered before the police last June.

The life of dacoits, shown in films like Sholay or even the 'realistic' Bandit Queen, is bunkum. In reality, these bandits don't go about shooting around on horses or having cabaret shows in the evening. On the contrary, their lives are scary and full of struggle, they keep running from the police all the time.

After Seema's surrender, it was during her incarceration that Krishna Mishra decided to make a film on her life. But before signing on the dotted line, Seema had a set of conditions. She did not want to romanticise her life, the way Phoolan Devi's was done and wanted a realistic portrayal of what she has been through. And replaying her life on the screen was "a heart-rending experience" for the former bandit who was kidnapped from her home at the age of 13. The reason? Her father refused to give her hand in marriage to someone from a lower-caste community. They took their revenge thus and she was married off to Nirbhay Gujjar (a bandit again) who was recently killed in an encounter. And this made an apradhi out of her. The men's atrocities forced her to pick up the gun for survival. Life in the jungle was tough, moving around on foot, sometimes covering 60 to 70 kms in a day with no horses.

Like Phoolan Devi, Seema nurses a hope of joining politics. In 2002, she was given a ticket to fight the polls by Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray. However, she declined to fight at the last moment. Seema also dreams of a bright future for her five-year-old son Sagar.

Crushing Competition

Ever heard of the "embrace and extend" theory of competition... When it works, it's brilliant. And here's a perfect example of that!

I have been a Firefox user for a couple years now and love the browser and its extensions. I almost never use Internet Explorer any more -- although sometimes I "have to", because there are a couple of web applications I use that just don't work well in Firefox, like Outlook Web and online banking. Hopefully some of that will change over time as Firefox gets more mainstream, but in the meantime, there's now a Firefox extension that allows you to open certain web pages in Internet Explorer -- within Firefox. I'm not sure how it works technically, and I'm not sure I care, but basically, the new tab that opens with the designated web sites has the little Microsoft "e" as the icon on the tab, and voila -- the sites work perfectly using the Internet Explorer engine within Firefox. So now I never have to open up Internet Explorer again.

Score one for Firefox on the competition front. Is it possible to apply this kind of competitive framework to your business?

Vanilla Ice Cream that puzzled General motors!!!!

I came across this interesting story the other day while browsing and ended up learning a very important lesson - never underestimate your clients' complaint, no matter how funny it might seem!

This is a real story that happened between the customer of General Motors and its Customer-Care Executive. A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

'This is the second time I have written to you, and I don't blame you for not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of Ice-Cream for dessert after dinner each night, but the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem.....You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice-cream, when I start back from the store my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds "What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?"

The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the letter, but sent an Engineer to check it out anyway. The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well educated man in a fine neighborhood. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came back to the car, it wouldn't start. The Engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start.

Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man's car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end he began to take notes. He jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc. In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than any other flavor. Why? The answer was in the layout of the store. Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. All the other flavors were kept in the back of the store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out the flavor. Now, the question for the Engineer was why the car wouldn't start when it took less time.

Eureka - time was now the problem - not the vanilla ice cream!!!! The engineer quickly came up with the answer: "vapor lock". It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other flavors allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man got vanilla, the engine was still too hot for the vapor lock to dissipate.

Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real and all problems seem to be simple only when we find the solution, with cool thinking.