E-governance

There is a good reason why the rich and the important don’t vote.

Today, I went to a nearby centre, powered by a certain company which is helping the Government in its e-governance drive, to get my election card made. My name was on the voters’ list and my parents’ have an election card. Now, their election cards look like they belong to someone else. They have got the spellings of the names wrong, the address incorrect, so much so that we could actually be living in a different area of the city.

In all fairness to the system, they are short-staffed. I would think that’s why they would try to make things easier for themselves and the ‘teeming masses’. The centre I went to, had a small queue outside and some people sitting inside, armed with computers. I say ‘armed’ because the elderly people who had come there, were curious and frightened at the same time of the contraption that claimed to take photographs, albeit distorted.

People had to get their details verified first and then got the go-ahead for the photograph. Since my name was on the voters’ list, the person at the desk nearly persuaded me to get my picture taken, regardless of the different sounding name and address. My name was spelt wrong and so was my address! He claimed they were minor mistakes and it would take me 3 more months to get my card made if I insisted on the corrections.

I figured that while I could do nothing about the photograph (which would not look like me anyway), I could do something about my name and address. So I told him that I would come back tomorrow and left.

Time taken for the exercise: 45 minutes. So much for e-governance.

Which side of the fence is greener?

I am not sure if a newspaper should have a stand or should remain stand neutral. It is a newspaper after all and some scribes even fancy that they make market-moving statements.

The difference between ideologies today is wafer thin unless you happen to be a leftist (in which case the difference would be substantial, regardless of the opposition). I wonder and wonder if a newspaper that will not publish anti-corporate world, anti-regulator stories is spineless. I am not sure if it is better to completely bow down to commercial interests. In the latter case, there is some sort of a stand rather than merely drifting in the direction of the wind.

Understand that I am not judging nor am I propagating that it is a happy state of affairs to bow down or resist commercial interests. I am merely saying that a newspaper (of all things) should not be value neutral or perhaps I am asking that question and not stating it.

What do you do when anything that is written against the regulator is watered down, sterilised even, before passed on to the reader? Are newspapers filters or purveyors?

I am unable to make up my mind. At some level, newspapers are the intermediaries and at another, they are the sources. But does that give journalists the right to sieve through the news, juice it up or water it down? Everything that journalists ever write–the placement of news stories, the display, the charts, the information–closets them into categories. There are planted stories, provoked stories, but never neutral stories. Even the agency stories-if one thinks why a particular story has been done–whether it needs to be told, –yes, indeed, why should a story be told? Is silence, as in most cases, a sign of complicity or duplicity?

Newspaper offices are heavily political places–loaded in fact with subtle messages, statements, symbols that will not escape you unless you are a public relations person.

Tricks of the trade

G is a phenomenon, as I was telling someone.

He can smell a scam from a distance and then he can whip up enough proof to substantiate his allegations. Despite everything, I have grown to appreciate the market like never before. There will always be people who try to outplay the market and sometimes they succeed to. But in the absence of the market (or a free one, at that), they always succeed.

The purpose of this post is not to sing paens to the market but to some people who want to make a difference whatever they may do. G does. G thinks that what we do is PR journalism. Perhaps he is right. What difference are we making and to whom? Why do we even begin to think that way? We think that we can move the market by what we write. You wish.

The market sniffs a merger, much before the blood thirsty scribes can. i have heard scribes boast about their ability to write market shattering stories. The beauty of the market is that it discounts the present. Yet, if you look at what happens, despite everything, you would be amazed by the belief that people have, in their ability to outwit the markets.

Equally amazing and ruthless are the brokers who survive on wafer thin margins, sometimes eating into each others profits. If you travel from Borivli to Churchgate in the morning, you will hear (or overhear) thousands of stock tips being exchanged or deals being struck. Put, call,put, cash. By the time, the train pulls into the anachronistic Churchgate station, deals many times over the margin amount are struck.

Sometimes I wonder why they should talk to us. We are eating into their precious time. Yet, they have an axe to grind too. They want to outwit the market, leverage on the knowledge of the market and yet march ahead.

Then, there are the cartels–the bulls and the bears. Groups of brokers who benefit from bringing the markets down and some who profit from pushing it up. The market is strangely the god and the devil, rolled into one.

Email passwords

A piece in the Wall Street Journal by Katherine Rosman set me thinking about what happens to a person’s email, ATM passwords, social networking website memberships once he dies. You don’t die in the virtual world till six months after your actual death (and that, too in the case of websites like Yahoo! that require you to log in every month. I am not aware of any such thing on gmail. But, well, I am not dead, yet.)

So you leave your passwords behind. Rosman’s mother was an avid glass collector and in the piece , she re-visits memories of her mother and of her glass collection. Her mother asks her sister and her to guard her ‘Ebay reputation’ even as she is about to die. Such are the times that we live in.

We have virtual friends, virtual shopping, virtual reputations even. Rosman writes beautifully and reminds me of a certain someone who could not stress enough on ’specifics are the heart of journalism’.

What connects the real and the virtual? For instance: people could keep sending you emails, spam or otherwise, offering you viagra, lingerie, free flight tickets, perfumes, apologies, stories, newsletters. All the time, you are dead and gone. Of no use to the world or the world to you.