More importantly, the article tells us that Leslie McFarlane hated the Hardy Boys, hated writing the books, and only did it because this was the only work he could get as a writer.

Leslie McFarlane, the author of the article tells us, was a fine writer, and could write really well.  The syndicate who paid him to write the Hardy Boys novels, though, wanted formulaic stories and poor Leslie felt completely demeaned writing the stuff they wanted.  He knew he was above this garbage, he could write much better, he admired F. Scott Fitzgerald and he was as fine a writer as Fitzgerald was.   In his diaries he complains about writing the Hardy Boys books – “the ghastly job appalls me” and refers to the first book as “accursed”.  Clearly, he hated the books.

He also wrote other short stories on the side, works where he was free to write as he chose. Unfortunately, though, no one else seemed to appreciate his better works, and poor Leslie, in order to put food on the table during the great Depression, had to continue writing the Hardy Boys books.

If this was really Leslie McFarlane’s attitude (and his diaries do seem to indicate that it was), I have three problems with it :

First, what about the legions of teenagers (and precocious pre-teens) who read the Hardy Boys books?  They hadn’t read F. Scott Fitzgerald, and they didn’t know what “good writing” was supposed to be.  The Hardy Boys, pedestrian writing and all, were among the first books these kids read, and what led them to a lifetime of reading.   As the author himself mentions, it wasn’t until he went back and read the Hardy Boys books as an adult that he realized how bad they were – as a teenager, he was oblivious.

Second, while I can see that the syndicate must have had rigid strictures on story lines and what characters can and cannot do, I am not sure how they can actually make anyone write badly.  As the WaPo article author himself mentions, there are portions of text where McFarlane really comes alive (like when he describes Aunt Gertrude).  So what prevented Leslie from showing his writing skills in the rest of the book ?

Third, the Hardy Boys’ books’ storylines may have been intellectually undemanding, and none of the works will ever be compared to  Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby.  But if it is being remembered as a good writer that one cares about, writing serious, intellectually demanding fiction is not essential.   There will always be two kinds of authors – those whose books sell in the mass market, and those who achieve critical acclaim but sell much fewer books.  To say that critical acclaim is more important than mass appeal does indicate a certain level of snobbery.  I love my P.G. Wodehouse and Terry Pratchett as much as I love those Nobel winning authors, and sometimes the Nobel winning authors turn out to be sad disappointments.  Critical acclaim is not everything.

The sad fact is, Leslie McFarlane as Franklin W. Dixon made more of an impact of millions of lives than F. Scott Fitzgerald did, but he never realized the true worth of what he was writing.

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?

I have gone on record in the past saying that I am glad Wimbledon has a “no 5th set tie-break” policy.  After watching the match between Frenchman Nicolas Mahut and American John Isner,  I wonder whether it is time to rewrite the rule.

My objection to deciding the fifth set with a tie-break was that it would mean that both players could hold their own serves, all through the tie-break, and one player could win the set and match by virtue of winning just a couple extra tie-break points.  In other words, each player could hold their serve, no one breaks the other’s serve and just a couple of tie-break points decide who wins the match.  Imagine a championship being decided like that.

But consider the drama that has been happening in Wimbledon for the last three days.  Mahut and Isner have been engaging in a epic battle in a first-round match (the kind that sometimes get decided as 6-4,6-3,6-1).  At the end of the second day of play, the score read 4-6,6-3,7-6,6-7, 59-59 (or 6-4,3-6,6-7,7-6, 59-59).   Wimbledon’s scoreboard gave up after 47-47, the website reset to 0-0 after 50-50.   The match has lasted 10 hours so far, and it’s still not over.   At over 7 hours, the 5th set alone is longer than any match in history.  When the players come on court today, they will have been playing for 3 days.

No physios were called, no one suffered a cramp,  no curses were uttered, nobody argued with the umpires.  You could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a match from decades ago.

John Isner during the Mahut-Isner epic battle. Look at the scoreboard! Pic courtesy: AELTC/Wimbledon.org

I am going to be very sorry when this match ends today.  It is certainly not fair to whoever loses this match.  Not that the winner is going to be much better off – having played the equivalent of three games in three days, he is going to be at a disadvantage to whoever he meets next.

But here is the clincher – in that mammoth 5th set, where each has won 59 games, they have still won those games by holding their serve.  They have not traded breaks.  So in the end, when this match does come to a close, it will be decided by the result of  a single game, which seems a small thing when you consider that 120+ games would have been played in the 5th set alone.

When I think about it, that’s not very different from winning a set after winning a couple of tie break points.  Rather, given how these two have battled, it seems a rather unfortunate end.

So maybe we do need to have a 5th set tie break in Wimbledon, like we have in every other Grand Slam the US Open (as an alert reader has pointed out, only the US Open has a 5th set tie-break rule).  But I still don’t think it should come into effect at 6-6.  The players should be given a chance to battle it out, otherwise would be ever have games like this, which truly show the spirit of human persistence/ endurance and determination?

So maybe a tie-break should come into effect after the players are tied 12-12 in the fifth set?  (or maybe 25-25?)

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.

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.

As I read about the 74 soldiers who were killed by Maoists yesterday, I wonder where all this will lead to.  Why do people persist  in the belief that violence will lead to dispute resolution?  Or that armed struggles result in peace or economic development or prosperity?

There are certainly genuine issues on both sides.  All the economic progress hasn’t percolated to the poorest people like the tribals.  They are ill-equipped to cope with the huge changes involved in modern society, and they are naturally reluctant to give up their traditional way of life.

But will gun-toting, ambush video recording killers really solve their problems?

Picture courtesy Outlook magazine

When Ms Roy talks about sweetly-smiling Comrade Kamala, she doesn’t mention that Kamala probably smiles even as she guns down people.  I wonder how much Kamala understands about the issues involved – it’s not easy to have an objective view when you live in the jungle and your only news comes from guerillas.

The key, of course, is economic development.   That bauxite mine that Ms Roy is so fearful about may actually bring economic development to the area.  Sure, it will also bring deforestation and pollution.  But by blindly opposing progress, the tribals are giving up all leverage.  They run the risk of having the mine come up and having no say or control over it.

Having found that hunger strikes lead nowhere, Ms Roy has probably now decided to sympathize with armed struggle as a means of protest.  But both approaches are ultimately fruitless.  It’s a much better idea to resolve issues through negotiation.  That bauxite mine may come anyway, but by negotiating, the tribals can mitigate the environmental damage, ensure better working conditions for the mine workers and so on.

Sure, the tribals don’t have equal power right now at the negotiating table.  But a gun will not help them much.  What they really need to harness is the power of the national (and international) media to articulate their position and their concerns.  Right now, all we see them as is heartless killers who have no compunction about massacring 74 CRPF soldiers.  Based on just that news, I can muster zero sympathy for them.  How does killing soldiers help their cause?  Can they also resist tanks and missiles?  All they will end up doing is turning the forests into a war zone and destroying their villages.  Is that what they want?

If the Maoists are really looking out for the welfare of the tribals, they need to throw away their guns right now.   The power of the soundbyte is much greater than the power of the submachine gun.

What tribals really need are andas, not jhandas.  Not grenades, but microphones.  But they should do the talking themselves, and talk about real issues.  They should especially not let fiction writers do the talking for them.

The form is simplicity itself – there are just ten questions (repeated for each person) but the questions are interesting for what is asked and what’s unasked.

I’ve noticed that others have commented about the race question which categorizes “Asian Indians” as a separate race, distinct from “Other Asian” (which the form helpfully mentions as including Pakistanis,  and presumably also Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis) .  Yes, I didn’t know that Indians were a separate race, as distinct from Pakistanis, and I also didn’t know that Thai and Cambodian and Laotian were races rather than nationalities.

I didn’t know, either, that all Indians were a homogeneous race – that, say, the Manipuris, the Tamilians and the Punjabis were all racially identical (and completely distinct, mind you, from the Burmese, the Sri Lankans and the Pakistanis they are geographically closer to).

There have also been comments about how to categorize people of mixed racial descent – what if you had both Indian and Chinese origins?  Answer : you mark both boxes – the form allows you to mark as many boxes as you want, and safely leave it to the Census Gods to interpret the results.

But what I don’t understand is this – why are 2 out of the ten questions in the Census about race?  I notice that the Census does not ask you about (a) your marital status, (b) number of children (including any you may only have visitation rights to), (c) education levels, (d) annual income, (e) occupation, (f) religion if any.  In other words, they ask you practically no demographic data.  It is just a basic counting of heads.

I mean, people answer more detailed questions when they are opening a bank account.  And I always thought the Census was the one great opportunity for the Govt. to get as much demographic info as possible.

But the Census Gods  do want to know if you own your home or rent it, and what your race is.

On the race question, the census website says:

Asked since 1790. Race is key to implementing many federal laws and is needed to monitor compliance with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. State governments use the data to determine congressional, state and local voting districts. Race data are also used to assess fairness of employment practices, to monitor racial disparities in characteristics such as health and education and to plan and obtain funds for public services.

Which still doesn’t tell me anything.  I’m not even sure how the Census Gods can monitor “racial disparities in health and education”  when they only ask me about my race, not about either my health or my education.  Besides, how do they know that any disparities in education between say, Indians and Pakistanis or Indians and Chinese are racial?

As I mentioned earlier, there are just 10 questions in the form , and four of those questions are devoted to asking your name, age, sex and telephone number.  But two of the remaining questions ask about your race/ ethnicity.

We live in a post-racial world, right?  Right?