CNN-IBN had an article a few weeks ago about how 10 million tons of wheat and rice are at risk of rotting in India, as they are stored in the open under tarpaulins.

This isn’t new, as we know. Every few years, some newspaper publishes a picture or a news article about rotting foodgrains, and the story dies down a few days later.   There is rarely much outrage over the wasted foodgrains.

Suman Sahia writes in Tehelka that “The government acknowledges that food worth nearly Rs 60,000 crore is destroyed every year due to poor and insufficient storage facilities. This lost food is keeping millions of Indians hungry. To add insult to injury, the government spends about Rs 2.6 crore of the tax payers’ money to get rid of food grain that has rotted during storage.”

Rotting grains (Pic courtesy: IBNlive.in.com)

On this note, I love what the Minister of State for Agriculture K V Thomas said in his interview to Tehelka :  “There were 11,708 tonnes of damaged and non-issuable food grain in Food Corporation of India (FCI) depots. However, the whole lot hasn’t become spoilt. This quantity has become non-issuable to beneficiaries of the public distribution system because of various reasons.”

Ah, so they weren’t spoilt, they were just wasted.  I’m sure that is an important distinction.

FCI, for its part, has been in the business of storing foodgrains in the open for years.  The IBN article says “The amount of food grain wasted was 9.4 million tonnes in 2008, 16 million tonnes in 2009 and 17.8 million tonnes in 2010.“

But how many tons of foodgrains were spoiled due to improper storage in 2000 or 1990? What about the years when we imported wheat when we could have used stored foodgrains if only they hadn’t rotted?

-  Here is a report from the Hindu, dated March 19,2002, about FCI floating tenders for building 70 godowns across 13 states to store foodgrains.  What happened to those godowns – were they ever built, or were they inadequate?

-  There was also the case of 17,000 tons of rice that were taken from FCI godowns in Karnataka over a 15 day period in 2004 and were found at Mangalore port awaiting export to Kenya by a private company.  This was happening at the same time that Karnataka was reeling under a drought.

My question is – why has so little attention been paid to this issue by our esteemed Members of Parliament/ ministers/ politicians all these years?

Why have our NGOs not protested?  Why do newspapers not make a bigger issue of this?

Is it that people believe that this issue doesn’t affect them, since FCI foodgrains are only going to be distributed through the PDS?  Do the rich and the middle class not care because they don’t buy PDS rice, and the poor don’t have a voice anyway?

I’m not going to preach about how we need to be more sensitive to issues of the poor. (We do). But this issue is not a poor man’s issue.  FCI’s incompetence does not just affect those dependent on PDS food grains.  It affects all of us, and here are two examples how:

1.  What happens when the PDS cannot supply enough rice or wheat and those dependent on the PDS are forced to buy foodgrains in the open market? Does it not impact the middle class when food grain prices increase as a result?

2.  What happens in years of drought when the Government, without a surplus of stored foodgrains, is forced to import foodgrains? Again the market price goes up and yes, the middle class is impacted.

The Supreme Court order asking the Government to distribute free food grains to the poor is a great idea, but is only a stopgap measure.  We will have the same problem of spoiled food grains next year, and (going by history) the year after that.

Unless the middle class, the media and the NGOs realize that this is not a poor man’s issue alone, and unless they start protesting more.

1.   There is the casual, drive-by racism:

One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to “go home to India.”  In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if “dot heads” was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.

While Stein’s lame attempt at humor falls flat here, I wonder whether he would even dare to make fun of Jesus or Mohammed in this manner. What’s even more curious is the way he implies that the New Jersey residents who called Indians “dot heads” were somehow not going far enough. Does he not remember the gang of “dotbusters” who prowled the streets and killed Indians in hate crimes in  Jersey City and Hoboken?   What’s his point – that the “dotbusters” should have changed their name?

There are Indians in NJ who can still remember those terrible times, and no, they will not find the “dotbusters” any funnier if they had a different name.

2. There is the casual ignorance of history:

Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.

Of course, by “people in Arizona”, he means the people who displaced the original inhabitants – the Hispanics.  Surely Stein knows that what is now Arizona was once part of Mexico ?  So the new people of Arizona feel a sense of loss of what, exactly?

Besides, (as others have noted) what’s his point in bringing up Arizona in the time of SB 1070?

3.  There is the casual attitude to offense and racism:  (from his response on twitter)

Didn’t meant to insult Indians with my column this week. Also stupidly assumed their emails would follow that Gandhi non-violence thing

Now, if I had written an article that was unintentionally racist, demeaning, malicious and offensive to a lot of people, I would be horrified, and I would apologize.  The words “I am sorry” would be part of what I would say.  What I would certainly not do is turn around and ask readers why they weren’t following Gandhi and turning the other cheek.   That’s a classic blame-the-victim strategy.  Besides, of all the wrong things to say, playing on one more stereotype (Gandhi = all Indians)  should rank  among the worst.

Is that why he targeted Indians in his article, though – because he believed they would turn the other cheek and not object?

(If he is actually receiving any threats, that would be different, but doesn’t seem to be the case here).

I also wonder if he would have dared to write a similar article about any other demographic – like say, Jews, Muslims, or WASPs ?

When I first read Stein’s article, I thought it was a very lame attempt at humor, and only served to showcase his ignorance and prejudices.  I was willing to believe, though, that Stein himself wasn’t racist, even if his article did sound rather racist.

But after reading his unapologetic tweet, I wonder if Joel Stein is really racist.  Either that, or he is completely clueless, insensitive, will write anything to stir up controversy, and is unapologetic about his rudeness.  Not someone whose column I will read anymore.

Either way, I can see why Joel Stein will never apologize for this article.  He is obviously incapable of seeing how offensive and racist his words are, whether or not he intended the insults/ racism.

Even more surprisingly, TIME magazine has chosen to take the same unapologetic attitude – as the Wall Street Journal notes:

On the scale of apologies, “We’re sorry” is the strongest, “mistakes were made” is the wishy-washy version preferred by politicians, and “we regret you are offended” is the not-so-apologetic apology. That last option appears to be the route the magazine took with its official response Wednesday: “TIME sincerely regrets that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column ‘My Own Private India.’ It was in no way intended to cause offense.”

I hear though, that the article is not part of TIME’s International edition which gets sold in India. I wonder why?

How many of us have found our bags torn, broken or opened in Indian airports? How many of us have found items missing from checked bags?

I think everyone knows someone to whom such things have happened (if they haven’t happened to us, that is).

Indian airports have a practice I haven’t seen in any US or European airport.  By the time the bags reach the carousel from the plane, they have already been X-rayed and their contents “noted”. A fellow passenger once pointed out to me a “X” mark made in chalk on a bag in the carousel.  “That bag has some valuable stuff”, he said. “They have marked it so the customs guys can ask for extra money from whoever holds that bag.  If this passenger is clever, he will simply wipe the mark with a wet tissue and move on”.

But most people don’t know about this chalk mark trick.  I certainly hadn’t.   As I watched, more bags circled around with “X” marks.  My bag wasn’t one of  them.  My bag, it turned out, was winging its way to another city, but that’s another story.

Baggage Carousel (Pic: Robert S. Donovan/ Flickr)

I don’t see why checked bags need to pass through an X-ray after arriving in India.  After all, these bags have passed through an X-ray in the originating airport, after which no one apart from airline employees have had access to them.  So it certainly cannot be for reasons of security.  But as this column in the Financial Express indicates, the bags do get X-rayed.

The article asks the same question that’s on my mind:

Why do we have this business of X-raying baggage at the time of entry? In some airports, the checked-in baggage will be X-rayed before you can walk through customs. In all airports, hand baggage will be X-rayed. If there is a security issue, surely that is pertinent before you board an aircraft. What is the security issue after you have left the aircraft?

I can understand customs officials passing bags through the X-ray after you have retrieved them, to check for food etc.  when you are with the bag. Isn’t that the best way to do it anyway?  If you think a bag has a quarantined item (like food or plants) or say drugs or weapons, is it wise to merely mark it with an easily erasable (and very visible)  chalk mark and let it go?

The chalk mark trick appears to be well-known in flyer forums and so is the wet tissue wipe-off trick. The popular view in these forums seems to be that the chalk marks are the work of corrupt Customs officials who want to pocket a bribe.  My fellow passenger thought the same way too – why else would they put an easily removable chalk mark, he asked, instead of  say, a sticker or some kind of hard-to-remove tape?

What is clear, though, is that the X-raying does help unscrupulous baggage handlers to filch valuables from bags (now that the X-rays tell them what to look for). And yes, there are lots of unscrupulous baggage handlers out there, as many of us who have found items missing from checked bags know.  But has anyone ever been caught so far?

Well, perhaps because no baggage handler before has managed to steal Rahul Gandhi’s cellphone from his checked bag?

Here is my question – if any of us ordinary souls had reported an item missing from our bags, what are the chances the authorities  would have found the item, or  admitted it was a baggage handler who stole it?

Desi Pundit is not alone.  Last week, Ultrabrown decided to close shop too.  At this rate, I wonder which other group blog’s turn it will be next week.  It’s not just group blogs even. Dozens of bloggers I follow have either decided to stop blogging, take a break from blogging, or are posting very infrequently.  (Yes, I know, I am also guilty of mysteriously absenting myself from my blog every now and then).

Part of this perhaps has to do with the demographics of the early bloggers – many bloggers I read started blogging when they were in school and had some measure of free time.  As they became older, the pressures on their time have increased – whether it’s because of work, longer commutes, marriage, children or a combination of all of this – and inevitably, blogging has taken a back seat.

Other bloggers have graduated from blogs to writing books and so update their blogs less frequently.  Still others are perhaps disenchanted with the drop (in recent times) in blog readers and commenters.  After all,  although every blogger starts off with a need to voice his/ her opinion, comments from readers are the oxygen that keeps one going.

There is also the issue of having competing avenues to express yourself.  Once upon a time, there were only blogs. Now you have Twitter and Facebook updates and any number of other means to comment about articles you’ve read or comment about news events.  Too often, it isn’t necessary to write a long blog post because you’ve already said your piece in 140 characters or less.

As I see it, the desi / Indian blogosphere is at the crossroads.  The old guard is now giving way to a new generation of bloggers.  At DP, we have linked up posts in the past that were written by bloggers in their teens (and some who are barely older). Perhaps some of them will start a group blog (and perhaps they already have).  These are the bloggers who are going to blog enthusiastically for the next few years. These are the blogs I should start reading now. If you know of any such blogs, please send me a link and I will add them to my feed reader.

Of course, there is the question on whether the nature of blogging itself will change over the next few years.  I hope that doesn’t happen.  While Twitter and Facebook are great for immediate responses, there is nothing like a thoughtful and well-analyzed blog post.

As for Desi Pundit, Patrix said it best:

Over at DesiPundit, people have moved on to other things and time & resources haven’t been as plentiful for those who have remained. The Indian blogosphere and presence on other social media networks has expanded greatly and in our experience, it is no longer possible for human-powered aggregators to keep up; at least on a part-time volunteer basis.

He’s right, of course.  Still, my fondest memories are those of my early days as a blogger and a DP Contributor, when I used to trawl through hundreds of blogs, trying to discover a new blogger or an interesting post.  What I discovered then was that the Indian blogosphere is still very much in its infancy – the number of high-quality blogs that can appeal to a general audience (i.e. not just family) is rather low considering the millions of Internet users in our cities.  And yet, its amazing how much this small group of people have been able to achieve and the attention they have received from the mainstream media.

So while I am really sad to see group blogs die (and especially Desi Pundit, given my association as a Desi Pundit Contributor and Community Member), I wonder if it is just one more event in the growing up process of the Indian blogosphere.

Anamika Veeramani (Pic courtesy AP)

Actually, most of the kids I saw at the competition were quiet and reserved.  That’s because they were focused on spelling words, not on showing off for the TV coverage. That’s not what the TV presenters want.  Erin Andrews was determined to squeeze out every last drop of feel-good human interest; she was desperately hunting for good sound bytes.  There’s only so much you can show viewers about finalists’ interests and favorite heroes.  If you can’t get people to faint every time, you at least need them to dance or jump or sing.

When the Spelling Bee gets covered on TV, it becomes just another form of entertainment, and the competition itself becomes secondary.

The TV coverage on the Spelling Bee has many advantages – it will inspire a much larger audience to start participating in Spelling Bees and learning to spell words correctly (a much-needed change in a country where most people don’t know the difference between “you’re” and “your”).  It will help dispel the dorky image that participants in these contests face. TV coverage brings with it a bigger pot of money, which hopefully will result in more participants getting prizes.   And finally,  people like me who are really interested in the competition get to watch at least a part of it.

But how much TV is good?  It is bad enough when they keep cutting to commercial breaks (as Anamika mentioned) but what happens when TV coverage begins to infringe on the competition itself?  Consider what happened today at the Bee :

Concerned that there wouldn’t be enough spellers left to fill the two-hour slot on ABC, organizers stopped the semifinals in the middle of a round Friday afternoon — and declared that the 10 spellers onstage would advance to the prime-time broadcast, including six who didn’t have to spell a word in the interrupted round. Essentially, the alphabetical order of the U.S. states helped determine which spellers got to move on the marquee event.

“I would rather have five finalists, than five who didn’t deserve it,” said Elizabeth, the finalist from Missouri and one of the four spellers who spelled a word correctly before the round was stopped. “I think it was unfair.”

More here.

We are talking about kids who have worked really hard for years to be where they are. For some of them, it’s the last shot they have at the prize (or the last time they get to participate in the Bee).  It’s almost become a way of life for some of them – starting each year aiming for the National finals.  Do we really need to play games with these kids in the name of  filling TV time slots?

I am all for more TV coverage, but I think we need to set limits on what organizers can do.  If this is the kind of thing that is going to happen every year, I’d rather not have the competition on ABC, or any other channel that has no issues disrupting the competition.  I would be just as happy to watch it on ESPN2 or cable or some other channel with less viewership. Or even online (on say ESPN360.com).

Please, ABC, if you think the format of this competition doesn’t fit your prime-time needs, don’t bother airing it next year. I’m sure someone else will do a better job.

Apparently, the bigger secret is that desi kids have their own national-level Spelling Bee preparatory network. Slate has an interesting article on the North South Foundation, a nonprofit byRatnam Chitturi which runs (among other things) a Spelling Bee league.   This is what Slate says about NSF:

The NSF circuit consists of 75 chapters run by close to 1,000 volunteers. The competitions, which began in 1993, function as a nerd Olympiad for Indian-Americans—there are separate divisions for math, science, vocab, geography, essay writing, and even public speaking—and a way to raise money for college scholarships for underprivileged students in India.

Kavya Shivashankar (Pic. courtesy Washington Post)

The NSF Spelling Bee competitions (Slate describes one in Kansas held at the local temple) are also at a national level and have some prize money, though nothing on the scale of Scripps. Slate estimates that about 30 desi kids from the NSF ranks will be among the 273 kids who participate in the Scripps National Spelling Bee which starts tomorrow.  The finals air on ABC on Friday, June 4th. Hopefully, at least a few of those 30 kids will make it all the way to the finals and perhaps even win.

Of course I will be watching – longtime readers know how much of a Spelling Bee fan – in 2007, I wondered about all the desi kids on the Bee and what their parents must be telling each other ,  in 2008, I hypothesised about why Indians do so well in the Bee (CBSE system? ancient gurukul tradition?) and about Sameer Mishra’s “numb nuts”.   It’s a fascinating phenomenon,  this abundance of desi participation, and I have never figured out why this is so.

But I will be puzzling over it some more over the next few days as I watch gawky kids in braces and pigtails mouth words I’ve never heard before.

I’m not sure why I watch.  I really don’t know why I find this such a fascinating competition.  Perhaps when I understand that, I will also understand what drives so many Indian-American parents to spend so many years teaching their kids, or so many kids to spend years learning words they’ll probably never use again.  The prize money is good – the winner got $40,000 last year, but desis have been competing in the Bee long before the prize money was anything great.

So why do you think desis like the Spelling Bee so much?  What could explain this phenomenon?

They are all spam comments (of course, what else can I expect?).  Akismet correctly recognizes them nearly all the time, but occasionally, it lets a few slip by.  Maybe it knows how much I like readers’ comments (and how few of them I get).  Here’s a sample of the spam love I get, and note the .in web addresses of the authors.

Sample of Spam Love

So I wasn’t too surprised to read this article in the Hindu about how India is the second top spam generating country in the world.  This is based on a study by Sophos, and you can see the list on their website here.

Over at SpamHaus, they have a list of the top 10 worst spammers, and who do you think makes it all the way to #3?  Someone called Herbal King from India.

Pic: Spamhaus

You cannot imagine how happy it makes me to see Indians succeeding in one more IT related area.

Has any of you also noticed a sudden increase in spam-comment love on your blogs from .in websites?

At least one Professor at the University of Houston has taken the lead on this.   The Chronicle for Higher Education has an article on Ms. Lori Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at the University of Houston.  She teaches about 1000 students and has 7 Teaching Assistants (TAs) and outsources assignment grading to India (and other countries) through an outsourcer called EduMetry which is run, not surprisingly, by a PIO – Chandru Rajam.

The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too.

The idea behind this is that it frees Professors and TAs to do more research and teaching.  From a student’s perspective, though, this means very little feedback on his/ her assignment and the grade received.

Here’s an (imagined) conversation which is possibly happening right now at Houston :

“Why did you give me a C+ ?” asked the student to the TA.  “I thought, I did, like, quite well, you know. “

“I don’t know,” shrugs the TA. “I didn’t give you a C+”.

” ‘Course you did”, says the student. “Says here – see?  C+.”

“Yes, but I didn’t grade you”, says the TA.  “And none of the other TAs did, either.  Someone in India gave you the C+. And no, you can’t ask him why, because I don’t know  who that was.”

“What does someone in India know about my paper? “

“A lot, according to him.  He says you use too many apostrophes in the wrong places. He said your paper was “backwas”.  What’s backwas, do you know?”

Jokes apart, you’d think that the seven TAs should be adequate.  But as someone I know who has been a RA/ TA says:

If it were to take 5 mins to grade each student (and this is definitely on the low side, I would think), each
TA woud spend about 13 hours a week grading 150 students. Plus, say 3 class hours, so 16 hours right there. Plus hold office hours for 150 students: 20 mins each for the 10% of the students who actually come asking questions, and that’s another 5 hours. And undergrads can be insanely dense: I’ve spent an entire hour just repeating stuff for a couple of students …

The remaining 20 hours go towards taking classes (10 hours a week), doing homework (another 10 hours), so when does the thesis get done!

The key issue here of course is that a single Professor is teaching 1000 students.  That seems an unusually high class size.

But I wonder if, going forward, really large class sizes are going to become the norm.

Almost every US university has a funding shortfall.  They can only cut so many costs; they need to increase revenue too.  What do you think they will do?  Would it surprise you if they decided to admit more students (and even better, full-fee paying international students?)

But at the same time, they wouldn’t want to hire too many more permanent, tenured faculty, so perhaps they would resort to more adjunct faculty.  But you cannot have Adjunct Faculty teaching Econ 1o1, so what do you do?

Increase class size.

I suspect this will probably happen a lot more at second and third rung universities.  There used to be a time when any US university was a good university, and any US degree was better than an Indian degree – in people’s minds, that is.  But from an international student’s perspective in these financial-aid starved times,  one wonders if it still makes sense to apply to any but the top US universities.

Think about it, not only are you less likely to get a job after graduating from Tier 2 and Tier 3 US universities, you are now going to face the ultimate insult – the people grading your assignments graduated from the same Indian universities you rejected.

It is a fascinating acknowledgment of the continuous evolution of Indian emigrants.  The acronyms may be recent, but we have had PIOs  for centuries.

A few months back, I read “Sea of Poppies”.  It’s a great book at many levels.  I love the amount of research and historical detail that has gone into it, like the description of the Opium Factory, the setting itself – in a time and place that I wish we knew more about, and Amitav Ghosh’s writing style.   If I have one regret, it’s that the sequel would be published sooner; I cannot imagine waiting years for a sequel.

But the book shows how little we know about emigrant Indians.  Thinking about the subject also makes me realize that I am just the latest link in a chain of emigration that goes back at least to the 9th or 10th century, and possibly much earlier.  But who were all these people whose footsteps we are now following?

Which states did people emigrate from?  We know the story in patches – about Tamils  settling in Indonesia and Malaysia as early as the 9th and 10th century , about people from U.P. and Bihar and Bengal ending up in the Caribbean islands and Fiji, but it’s astonishing how much we don’t know.

What drove these people to emigrate?  Were the reasons always economic – like fleeing famine and poverty , or were they social – trying to get out of the caste system, say, or political – like fleeing an unjust king?

Was there a pecking order of preference in these destinations?  Was Mauritius preferred to Jamaica, or Kenya to South Africa? What kind of ships did they use, and what hardships did they face along the way ?

I am particularly interested in the earlier emigrants (i.e. before British times, like those Chola and Pandya era Tamils) about whom we know virtually nothing.  What did they find so compelling about the new lands that they decided to stay back?

There are books that describe the experiences of more recent emigrants, although these too are few and far between.  The history of emigration during British times is itself fascinating – you have the stories of how Sikhs went to Canada and the Komagata Maru incident, or how Indians ended up in Mauritius and the West Indies/ Caribbean as Amitav Ghosh draws on.  How much more fascinating would it be to look at the stories of Indian emigrants down the ages?

It would be great if someone could write a book describing the various sea routes Indians took over the ages, where they spread from their initial destinations, how they fared and if any returned.  Is some historian out there listening?  Can we have someone research the history of Indian emigrants, please?

I know of  one family who returned, though – mine.  Reading “The Glass Palace” reminded me of my own family history -  my great grandfather was a famous doctor in Rangoon.  The family returned to India during World War II, in a story that rivals any thriller you’ll ever read.

I’m sure many of us have more such fascinating stories tucked away in our family trees, of people who left, generations back and also much more recently.

All the more reason why we need an emigrant history edition.