Beep beep! went my cell-phone, informing me that my SMS has been delivered to 2525. "Yess, now Rahul Vaidya will surely win Indian Idol" thought me, thanks to my dil-se voting for one of the cutest and talented candidate. I was just another victim of the crazy bug called Reality Shows which had bitten the whole of the world.
2 things happened at the end of the same month, Rahul Vaidya got voted out and my Mobile phone bill showed an SMS charge of Rs. 6 for an SMS sent to a Special Number! Isn't that a shocker! Actually not...
Reality shows based on singing and dancing would of course be a wild-fire in India rather than other parts of the world, with a never ending list of shows permutating among professionals and non-professionals in that particular field. And it compels the bug-smitten viewers to always follow it and try their level best to be a part of it, be involved in deciding the future of all those entertainers on the silver screen. Little do they know that those entertainers have already been paid huge sums to strut their stuff on the stage and little does it matter to them if you spend those 6 rupees with all your good intentions of saving the dude/ dudette from being "Voted out". And the event organiser, producer, broadcaster all earn crores of INRs from advertisers trying to draw our attention to their superstar-endorsed products.
If you are still wondering what difference would those 6 rupees make, you are wrong. About 50% or 3 rupees go to the telecom service provider who facilitates you to send the stupid SMS and the remaining goes to the owner of the four digit number "2525". Yeah, now i understand why none of these numbers are in the format of a normal 10-digit mobile phone number. And with crores of votes every week, each multiplied by 3 gives you the chillar that goes into the kitty of the channel broadcasting the show.
This is an answer to another mystery boggling in my mind. Newspapers, cable TV channels, fortnightly magazines, etc. come up with so many GK quizzes where you get a simple question like "Who played the lead role in the super hit movie Ghajini?". Your options would be (A) Queen Elisabeth II (B) Jadoo from outer space (C) Aamir Khan. And guess what !! You need to send an SMS quickly to another stupid 4 digit number and win bumper prizes of 1000 maruti cars and 5 million gold coins. We feel so amazed at the General Knowledge we possess when we are able to answer this question, and try our luck by spending a paltry 6 rupees. But again, the only prize winners are the ones putting up the "Kya aap paanchvi paas se tez hai" question. Just think of how many people would think like us from the population of 1.5 billion!
There you go, just my thoughts on the crazy SMS voting culture. I hope you enjoyed reading this post. If you like it, please SMS "YES" to #*&^ :-)
About Me
- The-GentleGiant
- I never want to grow up, just love the carelessness and innocence of childhood
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Not mine, but a good one
Kid Corrupted
Tom Chiarella, 01.22.09, 06:00 PM EST
Bribing my way through childhood
When I was a kid, I thrived on bribery--cash offers for in direct exchange for behavioral compliance. My dad once offered me $50 if I could hold onto one pair of gloves for a month. My grandmother, who lit her next Parliament from the embers of her last Parliament during her bridge games at the Tides Club, once offered my cousin John $500 payment if he didn't smoke until he was 18. I paid too. My brother routinely demanded money to keep my secrets. My aunt hated listening to the clunky narrative of my dreams, but offered to suffer silently if I paid her 50 cents a dream.
Some people would call this stuff a primitive cycle of bribery and extortion. I'm certain that any number of experts would make the case that children should not be bribed. You could even get me to sign off on that. But understand that my thrill in the bribe grew out of the fact that I really did know how to walk the straight and narrow.
By the time I was 14, I was a boy scout, I played team sports and I had a paper route. And I had persisted a bit in each. None of it really interested me. I had no hunger for merit badges, I hated practice and I despised collecting weekly subscriptions from my customers, who often dodged me and rarely tipped. In all of this, the return was too incremental, the progress too subtle, especially when set against the stunning gamesmanship of a good bribe.
Propositions, as my father called them, quickly lifted me from the bottom of the earning scale, made me aware that my behavior, my actions, had negotiable value. I always liked it when my dad, stretched thin by a dilemma, would push back his dinner plate and say, "I tell you what ..." And that would soon be followed by a description of the problem from his perspective, its cost to him and what he was willing to pay to see things righted. This was my first experience with expected value. My dad was willing to put his money ahead of the payoff.
In eighth grade, the kids at my school started smoking pot, inviting me to join them. When my dad got wind, I was terrified. But he put it in terms of his cost to him, which cooled me down and allowed me to listen. "I don't want you smoking pot. It worries me. It just hurts my chest," he said. "I tell you what, every month you stay away from that, I will throw you a $20. That way, I can think about what I want to think about." I lasted nine months too. Even then, with the proposition at its end, my dad had what he was after, knowledge about what was happening in my life.
I'm pretty sure we weren't violating any written ethics, except the cookbook advice you get from childcare books. To hell with that. Value must be churned, examined and discovered by the young. And maybe my family life sounds a little sordid. But we weren't all that bad at the basic obligations of a family; we loved one another, took care of each other, did chores, lived up to the mutual social compact of a home as well or better than almost anyone I knew. I was dead loyal to my parents, I protected my brothers and I (slowly) learned to tell better stories, to the delight of my aunt. If all the money changing hands sounds a little cold-blooded or corrupt, then know that we lived in a free-flowing economy of pocket change, and we understood one another better than most, and we made each other laugh.
My dad always preferred to bring a box of inarguably dry Italian cookies to his dry cleaner, or a book from his nightstand to the shoe repair guy, or a framed photograph to a contractor before any work was done. Often, he was their landlord or their employer. He accepted their little favors too. To him it didn't matter. He always thought it was tediously WASP-y to see these as bribes. He didn't care about an ethics code that sought to control every human exchange. He wanted to place that code on its ear. Put value ahead of return, he always said. If no one else does it, that just sets you apart.
Comment On This Story
Not surprisingly, this led my father to be a fairly conservative tipper. He taught me to calculate dinner tips to the dime, excluding sales tax from the total bill. He was scornful of the tipping process, not the tip itself. "That's just money you leave behind," he told me once, as we walked away from a large tip I left for a dinner in the Adirondacks. "What does that get you?" I told him the waiter had done a good job. He deserved it. "Then you got lucky is all, " my dad said. "If that was really going to work, I don't know why you didn't tip when you walked in the door?"
So I made it a proposition to myself. Every time I walk into a bar, I slap down a $20 at the front end of a transaction and look the bartender in the eye. "I tell you what," I always say, "that's for you. It's not even your tip. It's just so you can afford to keep an eye out for me."
Occasionally a friend of mine will say, "Why do you bribe them like that?" It seems to offend their sense of the ethics of a bar room that I get more service, faster service and better service than anyone else. But I don't explain. I've learned to shrug off people's misunderstanding about expected value. Sometimes I tell them it's in my blood. Sometimes, I say I was a boy scout once.
Tom Chiarella is a visiting professor of creative writing at DePauw University and writer-at-large for Esquire magazine
Tom Chiarella, 01.22.09, 06:00 PM EST
Bribing my way through childhood
When I was a kid, I thrived on bribery--cash offers for in direct exchange for behavioral compliance. My dad once offered me $50 if I could hold onto one pair of gloves for a month. My grandmother, who lit her next Parliament from the embers of her last Parliament during her bridge games at the Tides Club, once offered my cousin John $500 payment if he didn't smoke until he was 18. I paid too. My brother routinely demanded money to keep my secrets. My aunt hated listening to the clunky narrative of my dreams, but offered to suffer silently if I paid her 50 cents a dream.
Some people would call this stuff a primitive cycle of bribery and extortion. I'm certain that any number of experts would make the case that children should not be bribed. You could even get me to sign off on that. But understand that my thrill in the bribe grew out of the fact that I really did know how to walk the straight and narrow.
By the time I was 14, I was a boy scout, I played team sports and I had a paper route. And I had persisted a bit in each. None of it really interested me. I had no hunger for merit badges, I hated practice and I despised collecting weekly subscriptions from my customers, who often dodged me and rarely tipped. In all of this, the return was too incremental, the progress too subtle, especially when set against the stunning gamesmanship of a good bribe.
Propositions, as my father called them, quickly lifted me from the bottom of the earning scale, made me aware that my behavior, my actions, had negotiable value. I always liked it when my dad, stretched thin by a dilemma, would push back his dinner plate and say, "I tell you what ..." And that would soon be followed by a description of the problem from his perspective, its cost to him and what he was willing to pay to see things righted. This was my first experience with expected value. My dad was willing to put his money ahead of the payoff.
In eighth grade, the kids at my school started smoking pot, inviting me to join them. When my dad got wind, I was terrified. But he put it in terms of his cost to him, which cooled me down and allowed me to listen. "I don't want you smoking pot. It worries me. It just hurts my chest," he said. "I tell you what, every month you stay away from that, I will throw you a $20. That way, I can think about what I want to think about." I lasted nine months too. Even then, with the proposition at its end, my dad had what he was after, knowledge about what was happening in my life.
I'm pretty sure we weren't violating any written ethics, except the cookbook advice you get from childcare books. To hell with that. Value must be churned, examined and discovered by the young. And maybe my family life sounds a little sordid. But we weren't all that bad at the basic obligations of a family; we loved one another, took care of each other, did chores, lived up to the mutual social compact of a home as well or better than almost anyone I knew. I was dead loyal to my parents, I protected my brothers and I (slowly) learned to tell better stories, to the delight of my aunt. If all the money changing hands sounds a little cold-blooded or corrupt, then know that we lived in a free-flowing economy of pocket change, and we understood one another better than most, and we made each other laugh.
My dad always preferred to bring a box of inarguably dry Italian cookies to his dry cleaner, or a book from his nightstand to the shoe repair guy, or a framed photograph to a contractor before any work was done. Often, he was their landlord or their employer. He accepted their little favors too. To him it didn't matter. He always thought it was tediously WASP-y to see these as bribes. He didn't care about an ethics code that sought to control every human exchange. He wanted to place that code on its ear. Put value ahead of return, he always said. If no one else does it, that just sets you apart.
Comment On This Story
Not surprisingly, this led my father to be a fairly conservative tipper. He taught me to calculate dinner tips to the dime, excluding sales tax from the total bill. He was scornful of the tipping process, not the tip itself. "That's just money you leave behind," he told me once, as we walked away from a large tip I left for a dinner in the Adirondacks. "What does that get you?" I told him the waiter had done a good job. He deserved it. "Then you got lucky is all, " my dad said. "If that was really going to work, I don't know why you didn't tip when you walked in the door?"
So I made it a proposition to myself. Every time I walk into a bar, I slap down a $20 at the front end of a transaction and look the bartender in the eye. "I tell you what," I always say, "that's for you. It's not even your tip. It's just so you can afford to keep an eye out for me."
Occasionally a friend of mine will say, "Why do you bribe them like that?" It seems to offend their sense of the ethics of a bar room that I get more service, faster service and better service than anyone else. But I don't explain. I've learned to shrug off people's misunderstanding about expected value. Sometimes I tell them it's in my blood. Sometimes, I say I was a boy scout once.
Tom Chiarella is a visiting professor of creative writing at DePauw University and writer-at-large for Esquire magazine
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Ask Youself Before You Ask the Other
Empathise!
When I first heard this term from a friend of mine, I didn't know its meaning (yeah now I realise why he is an MBA from IIM and I am not). It is one of the few terms which I cared to look up in the dictionary, and since then it has become one of my best friends (the word, not the dictionary).
Some definitions that I found on the net:
Princeton - be understanding of
Wikipedia - capacity to recognize or understand another's state of mind or emotion
PublicBookShelf - The ability and capacity to fully understand and experience another's thoughts, circumstances and/or feelings
But what definition I apply to it is - Putting yourself in someone else's shoes
As i mentioned above, its one of the best things that ever happened to me, it has helped me realise that things are not always how they seem to you, there is always another side of the story that you ought to listen to. There are inferences that we all make looking at another person's behaviour, but these are based on what knowledge of the situation we posess and our own views and tendencies for that particular situation. Hardly do we consider what frame of mind is the other person in, what kind of background to the situation has led him to such a behaviour.
Its a completely different world for me as soon as I empathise. And I have always realised one thing, often my first thoughts towards an event's occurance have been wrong. And this I know because I always evaluate why I thought what I thought and what should I have thought after empathising. So before we take any actions based on our thoughts, its very very necessary to empathise.
Human wants are endless, and ends to achieve them are scarce. Our entire species have self-invited themselves to the boxing ring, forever fighting with other species of the same race for a common goal, without realising that it would be much easier to unite against a common enemy and jointly share the rewards. This is easier said than done, but the first step towards harmony is to Empathise.
I am sure that if I start giving practical examples to my claims above, it will use up a lot of webspace, but my theoretical comments upstairs should be enough to drive in my point.
So encourage everyone to Empathise and if it helps to change your attitude and improve your relationships with people you did not understand before, do make every effort to spread the message around.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
S01E01 - The One Which Is First
Have read a lot of such titles while downloading sitcoms from the internet, so thought of giving my first blog a similar title!
Btw, before I continue, s01e01 stands for Season One Episode One, another unique feature of the way Americans like to title their sitcoms.
Friends has been my first stint with US sitcoms. Wasn't really into watching anything else but Cartoon Network till my late school days. Then it slowly moved to the then called Star Plus (must be something around 1995) which had very early morning shows (5:30 am) of Batman & Robin, Spiderman and G.I. Joe. Attended my morning school after this meant I could come home and watch Centurians and Swat Kats on Cartoon Network. Studies followed after this, and again some more TV in the early evening, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Star World, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched and Diff'rent Strokes on other channels (dont really remember the name of the channel, i think it was Sony and Home TV). Then went away for a tiresome (and sometime injurious) play-time sessions of Sankli and Chor-Police. Coming back home for dinner was a very difficult decision for me every night, but then got to watch Dekh Bhai Dekh on Sony and Shreeman Shreemati along with and after dinner, and sometimes late night episodes of Malgudi Days both on DD National.
Just a blurry image of what I remember of my good ol' days back then
:)
Btw, before I continue, s01e01 stands for Season One Episode One, another unique feature of the way Americans like to title their sitcoms.
Friends has been my first stint with US sitcoms. Wasn't really into watching anything else but Cartoon Network till my late school days. Then it slowly moved to the then called Star Plus (must be something around 1995) which had very early morning shows (5:30 am) of Batman & Robin, Spiderman and G.I. Joe. Attended my morning school after this meant I could come home and watch Centurians and Swat Kats on Cartoon Network. Studies followed after this, and again some more TV in the early evening, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Star World, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched and Diff'rent Strokes on other channels (dont really remember the name of the channel, i think it was Sony and Home TV). Then went away for a tiresome (and sometime injurious) play-time sessions of Sankli and Chor-Police. Coming back home for dinner was a very difficult decision for me every night, but then got to watch Dekh Bhai Dekh on Sony and Shreeman Shreemati along with and after dinner, and sometimes late night episodes of Malgudi Days both on DD National.
Just a blurry image of what I remember of my good ol' days back then
:)
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