'One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter' What bullshit!!

The very mention of courts and lawyers send a shiver down the average man’s spine. If there is one bit of advise that is handed down the ages from fathers to sons it is this – ‘avoid lawyers like the plague’.  However the truth is that dispute resolution can only be achieved by adhering to rules and the interpretations of that is what Courts and lawyers do. It may come as a surprise to many that the study of law now includes new areas like governance, taxation, human rights and now even terrorism.

When it comes to terrorism most of us would like to lock these terrorists and throw the keys away but we also need to keep in mind that sometimes these ‘criminals’ have been wrongly punished. It is to safe guard these innocents that laws are made and why courts take extreme care to see that no man is wrongly punished. But when we see the delays in sentencing people like the Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab who killed innocent Indian citizens at the Victoria Terminus at Mumbai it creates confusion in our minds.

Most of us had felt that the Indian judicial system was nit picking when there was so much evidence that he indeed killed so many innocent people. Some felt they should have marched him to the nearest gallows and hanged him. However, the fact that the trial dragged on for years is now recognized as a tribute to the fairness of the Indian judicial system.

In this conversation with Geetha Madhavan, a leading lawyer specializing in matters of International terrorism she says hanging Ajmal Kasab should have been an open and shut case. She prefers to call a spade a spade and feels that mollycoddling terrorists or pandering to terrorist organizations is a complete ‘No No’. She is particularly incensed when she hears the oft repeated defense that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. She has a simple yardstick to judge this. If the accused has killed innocents who have played no part in the dispute then he has no right to call himself a ‘freedom fighter’.

According to Geetha Madhavan such a person is just a plain and simple ‘murderer’ and ought to be judged as one.

The expert says sharing knowledge is more profitable than hoarding it.

Is the Internet going to be the only means of communication that will exist in the future? It looks like the experts are convinced about that. According to them almost everything except physical objects will travel through the ether. Decades ago the American Television serial ‘Star Trek’ showed people and material beamed from the command ship ‘The Enterprise’ on to the surface of planets with boring regularity. But even if do not reach those levels in the short term we are going to see more and more users accessing the net for work and leisure.

The maximum usage worldwide according to surveys is for watching pornography. The citizens of Pakistan and India are the unchallenged leaders. It is not because others are not inclined to watch sex videos but because the citizens of India and Pakistan outnumber the rest. The Chinese don’t get to see stuff that their Govt doesn’t deem appropriate.

But on a serious note it is in the dissemination of information that the Internet has caused a revolution. No more stories like Ekalavya and Dronacharya. The old guru sishya parampara has gone for a toss given that anybody can access any information with or without a teacher. Nobody can be kept away from anything for very long. Even if you secure the information with security barriers, passwords and encryption it is only a matter of time before someone cracks them. The Internet has also made it possible for an individual to be gainfully employed in half a dozen ventures at the same time. You could buy and sell almost anything over the net. You could deliver the latest technological information and tips to the farmer in the remotest part of the world. It gives us hope that we could reverse what looks like the unstoppable march of rural folk like lemmings into urban areas.

The Internet could also cut out the middlemen in a vast number of trades who no longer serve any purpose. It could keep farmers in the loop whether it is for information about the weather, air temperatures, wholesale and retail prices of their produce and a hundred other bits of information. It may help reverse global warning, reduce air pollution, crime, corruption and many other modern day problems.

Earlier where could a villager or the resident of a small town go to get information on stuff like this? Could he get it from the schoolmaster or the postmaster in his village? Not likely, but now you can get all that through the mobile phone with which you can log on to the world-wide-web. This has led to a new set of entrepreneurs mushrooming all over the country. Even philanthropy has been made simple. It may not be long before a person can contribute even one rupee for a good cause while on the move.

Listen to Kiruba Shankar, a passionate votary of the Internet. He confesses that some of his earlier enthusiasm is now tempered by reality. The infrastructure needed like improved Internet speed and spread is still poor in our country but he gives you a brief glimpse into the enormous potential of the Internet.

Fat people need designer wear too.

People choose their careers in the strangest manner and for the strangest reasons. If you think that students make career choices after carefully weighing all the options you could not be more wrong. Take Tina Vincent for instance. She chose to major in History while in college because she felt that was the best way to cock a snook at her parents. If you wonder what is the logic behind that, she explains it this way. “My mother wanted me to take up a science so I chose History.” That’s how children irritate the hell out of parents.

To her surprise she fell in love with History and the rest as they say is history. She quickly realized that History was no good for careers so she started looking around. She soon went into dress designing because she could not find clothes that fitted her (she is generously proportioned). She does not like being called ‘fat’. So she felt she ought to do something to help other plump sisters who have been traumatized looking for clothes that will look good on large people. She moved from being a person making large sized outfits to making designer wear for fatties. She is now a designer owning her own couture label in Chennai.  

It led to the establishment of her store called Tina Vincent, which is located in a fashionable part of Chennai.  She says she would love to do more ramp shows featuring her clothes but since she only caters to large sizes she says that it is difficult to find suitable models in India. Apparently it is not enough to just find big built women but they need to be able to carry off the clothes they wear. So it is mostly models from abroad that can do that but they charge a bomb to walk the ramp in India. She says she has had a good run thus far, but admits that she still has a long way to go.  

Did a single Indian submarine bottle up the Pakistani navy?

I have always been keen on defense matters but living in Chennai I had been unable to meet any defense analysts. One day I decided to ask Google chacha if there were any defense analysts in Chennai and to my surprise I was told that there was quite a large number of them in Chennai and it even gave the number of one of them. I promptly dialed the number and a guarded voice came on line to tell me that he was in the middle of a memorial service and that I was to call him a couple of hours later. That’s how I came to speak to Commodore Shekhar  about defense matters with particular regard to the Navy and when I asked him if he would be ready to discuss it on camera he readily agreed. He made it clear to me that since he had left the Navy over twenty years ago he was not privy to sensitive information but being a keen observer and as one who continued to take an interest on matters Naval he had an opinion which he was ready to share. 

On he appointed day and at the appointed time Commodore Shekar walked into our studio. I mentioned to him that years ago when I was an apprentice officer in the Shipping Corporation of India I had met a naval officer named Lt Franklin at Vizag (Later on I came to know that Franklin’s parents and mine had known each other). Anyway Lt Franklin had invited me into his sub that was undergoing some maintenance work. I can still remember the cramped quarters within the steel tube. I remember being amazed to see that the crew of the submarine slept in bunks (or were they hammocks?) rigged up between the torpedoes. My ship the M. T. Desh Bandhu was a tanker of about 26,000 tons engaged in carrying crude oil from Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf and Vizag.

That was my only experience of submarines other than seeing movies like ‘The hunt for Red October’. Now here I had a submariner with vast experience to talk to and I was impatient to start. Commodore Shekhar had served as the Electrical Officer in the Indian submarine Kursura that had bottled up the Pakistani Navy inside Karachi harbour in the 1971 war with Pakistan.

Watch the other talks with Commodore Shekhar here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDpz-jpTRo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alwbJdKxZJM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uuhd4q2PncE

Birth of a blog

2^nd September 2013, Chennai,

Birth of a talk show - Rumble

I’ve had a friend from my school days complain that everything about Chennai on TV was only in Tamil. “Sure I know that the city is located in Tamil Nadu and all that, but everything in Tamil, that’s a bit much!” he said. Another reminded me that I had a reputation of being a severe gas pot in school and asked me why I did not do programs in English myself. Obviously he has no idea that TV is driven by TRP’s but I thought I would give his suggestion a shot. When I did approach a few channels they politely showed me the door. Even The Hindu told me that there was no market for English programming. They had just dumped their own English language TV channel called Hindu Metro.

But then an acquaintance of mine Ravi Menon, pointed out that I could do it over the Internet for free. Ravi felt I could interview people from Chennai and post it on the net and see if it gets a response from netizens. However I did not know how to find a production house that would take care of the shooting and editing, so I forgot all about it.

Fast forward to August 2013.

Ravi the enthusiastic friend of mine (the type people call an ‘enthu cutlet’), has no concept of when to make phone calls to people. He calls whenever the mood gets him. So one night when the phone rang around one thirty in the morning I knew it was him. Much against my instincts I took the call and it was indeed him. He was all excited but then again he gets excited about almost anything. I resigned myself to listening to him blather all night about something that may have caught his fancy. As soon there was a break in his monologue I told him to call me again in the morning, cut the call, put the mobile on ‘silent mode’, placed it in another bedroom then came back to bed. That I thought would be the end of that, but I was obviously wrong. As soon as I reactivated the mobile in the morning it started ringing. It was Ravi again.

I could still sense the alcohol in his voice but he said that he called to tell me that he would speak to me later and cut the call. That is so typically Ravi. In the evening he introduced me to Suresh Menon, owner of a design shop called Sushma Multimedia that is engaged in creating works for just about anybody. He does corporate films, documentaries, designed brochures and had even directed a full-length feature film.

Ravi introduced me to Suresh at his studio located at the foot of the Kodambakkam Bridge. Ravi straightaway launched into his plan of making a talk show with Suresh’s help. On his part, Suresh told me that he had what it takes to produce small shows and that he was willing to try it out. From there things moved at lightning speed. Within the hour things were set up along with the lights, microphones and cameras.  I called my friend Rana Bubber and asked him to come over to the studio. I didn't tell him what it was all about, not that he would have cared anyway. He being an old friend of mine willingly came over after he cleaned up anothert bunch of punters at the Race Course. By now you must have inferred; Rana was a bookie at the Guindy Race Course.

He is a passionate votary of low cost housing and can talk for hours on the subject so we decided to start with that. I had never been in front of a camera except once when I played a five second part in a music video during my Magnasound days. The budget was so small that the director Ken Ghosh asked me to play the part. The song was  ‘Alone now’ by Jasmine Bharucha.

We picked a word from among the lines in the 1976 song by Johnny Wakelin titled ‘In Zaire’. The camera’s rolled and thus was born the program titled ‘Rumble’. You can see them on this link https://www.youtube.com/user/sureshmen

Racing drivers have no time for groupies!!?

Do we need to see youngsters driving their cars at breakneck speeds on city streets? I think the answer to that would be a resounding ‘No’. But for youngsters to get their need for speed out of their system we will have to let them do it somewhere else. Automobile enthusiasts claim that they drive at high speed as part of their research efforts to make a stronger and safer car. Most of the drivers point to the excellent safety records of racing car driving and say that only a very small percentage of drivers get hurt while racing on the track. But then whey they do get hurt they stay seriously hurt and end up being dead. But how can you legislate against those who are determined to take their chances.

There is a certain thrill in watching cars careening around a bend at over 300 kmph and we might as well acknowledge it. Therefore allowing people to drive their cars under controlled conditions may be better than allowing them to do so through city streets. Part of the attraction that motor sports has for the enthusiast is the presence of long legged young girls hanging around in the team dugouts. Are they part of the support team or are they there just to lend colour? Parthiva says racing is serious business and that drivers have no time for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G303DC3OaUU

In Chennai I have often witnessed youngsters on motor pikes pound past startled and frightened pedestrians. One day as I was idling at a signal on Sardar Patel Road on a busy Saturday over a dozen motorbikes went past me. Even though there were cars crossing the intersection from the left these crazies shot through the red light. Before I could react or even the lone constable could wave his lathi at them the entire lot went through. Each bike had a pillion rider too. The next day I read that the traffic police managed to stop and arrest a few of them but there were no follow up reports in the newspapers. I wondered whether they managed to stop such stupid and dangerous exploits by deranged riders? I doubt it. I think those guys must still be doing it on some other stretch of road.

I understand an enormous amount of money is spent on professional automobile and motorcycle racing. Even the prize money runs into millions of dollars but to get an opportunity to get behind the wheel of a racing car the drivers have to bring in their own funds!! Young Parthiva Sureshwaren is one among those drivers who have managed to take part in such races. You can hear more from him about this dangerous but exciting sport and also whether there are racing groupies in India.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G303DC3OaUU 

Music companies want more profits.

While the Internet has made money for many it has also destroyed all sorts of businesses. The list of companies that have gone under is long and promises to get longer in the days to come. Ghanshyam Hemdev was one of the earliest to see the potential in the music business in South India and he proved it by setting up an immensely popular label called Pyramid Audio. They were one among the earliest in South India to set up a label catering exclusively to Tamil music.

He had virtually stumbled into the music business by releasing the songs of the film ‘Gentlemen’ on Pyramid Audio when other labels had rejected it because of the price. The film had music by the then musical sensation A.R. Rahman. The film was a hit and he was irreversibly sucked into the music business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHh1XFHiwpk

From the days when film music was available on CDs and cassettes at every street corner, the situation is now quite different. The arrival of the Internet made the hard copy like a cassette or a CD unnecessary. Music became digitally encoded and could be easily transmitted over the Internet to anybody anywhere at no cost. File sharing services like Napster made it impossible for the owner of Copyrights to restrict the sale geographically. In short it spelt the death of Music labels and forever changed the mechanics of the music business.

Earlier the ownership and consequently the possibility of earning were restricted to copyrights owners but with the arrival of the Internet it became impossible for anyone to track the transmission of music files. Singers started to ask for a share of the revenues. Music labels who had acquired the Copyrights exclusively through the payment of hefty sums now found themselves forced to share their revenues to singers.

Music labels argued that they have already paid the singers and did not see any justification in the demands of the singers when the singers do not agree to share when losses are made. All in all it set the stage for protracted arguments from singers and copyright owners.

Ghanshyam Hemdev explains things from a Music Company’s perspective. 

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHh1XFHiwpk