Enter Return to Office, Exit WFH

 

Remote work that kept companies afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic has now fallen out of favour of corporate czars. HR managers of various big corporations have issued return-to-office mandates and are exerting pressure on employees to be present in offices. In the post-pandemic world, companies are eager to return to the pre-2020 working norms as they brace for an economic downturn.  

The latest to do so is e-commerce giant Amazon which has mandated managers to sack employees if they don’t attend office three times a week. Earlier, banking majors JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs had issued directives to do away with hybrid mode and want employees to attend office on all five working days of a week. 

Closer home, Tata Consultancy Services in June scrapped work from home and wants its employees to be present in the office five days a week.

Infosys CEO Narayana Murthy also has a dim view of letting employees work from home and feels it leads to the waning of institutional culture. Regarding the Indian context, Murthy said the WFH system does not work as people live in ‘multi-generational households’, ‘have poor Internet bandwidth’, and ‘do not have a separate room to convert into a home office’.

However, Infosys has not totally scrapped work from home option, though it claims that the number of employees attending office was steadily increasing. It claimed as many as 70% of its employees are on campus at any given point in the week. 

Boost to Collaboration

The reasons being cited by various companies for bringing people back to the office include productivity, collaboration, training, and networking. Managers feel that face-to-face interactions improve camaraderie among employees and boost collaborative efforts. On the other hand, remote work runs the risk of employees working in silos.

The other reasons include lack of supervision and training, especially for younger employees. This could seriously affect their learning curve.

Lastly, there is the overhead expenses like real estate. Many of these companies have continued paying rents and leases for the office space even during lockdowns.

Interestingly, Tesla and X chairman Elon Musk has even added a dimension of morality to this issue. He observed that working from home was possible only for a certain set of white-collar employees, while others had no choice but to attend office. Hence he felt that remote work was ‘morally wrong’.

WFH as a Saviour

When the dreaded Covid-19 pandemic made us hunker down in our homes to duck the invisible virus, and the governments imposed lockdowns to contain its spread; employers and managers saw remote work as the go-to option to keep their businesses running.

While industries like software have used this option on a limited scale in the past, for others such as banking, insurance, and publishing it was a headlong plunge into unchartered waters with too many imponderables. 

This unplanned experiment, thrust upon them by the virus, forced them to shift work from office premises to the 1 and 2 BHKs of employees, with dining or study tables doubling up as a home office. Webinars, Zoom meetings, and Slack messenger provided the tenuous link in the socially distanced world to keep the offices ticking.

Once the teething troubles such as lack of enough laptops, ensuring data safety and patchy internet connections at the homes of employees were sorted, the companies found the going smooth with not much dent in productivity. While the pandemic was raging, TCS even announced its 25 by 25 vision - under which only 25% of the workforce would work out of office by the year 2025. However, this year the plan was given a quiet burial.

This eagerness to call back employees triggered an exodus among the women staff at TCS. For the first time, women employees leaving the company outnumbered their male counterparts. The company, however, decided to stick to its return-to-office policy. 

Survey Narratives

Before the pandemic, remote work was looked down upon by most managers. They saw it as the first refuge of slackers and used to sanction it with much reluctance, and most companies had a monthly cap on WFH.

However, the pandemic ensured that WFH was the only way out and skeptics were forced to list out its virtues. Many research organizations came out with surveys stating that remote work had not affected productivity and the work-life balance of the employees had improved. Though some of them claimed that employees were complaining of longer working hours. 

Once the virus was gone for good, the surveys began to sing a different tune. They began to list out the ills, including low productivity, longer turnaround time, employee tendency to procrastinate, and lack of supervision and mentoring of new employees.

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Israel, Palestine and Indian Social Media

Image: X (formerly Twitter)

The 75-year-old Israel-Palestine dispute is once again on the boil, but this time the war hysteria is being felt almost across the globe, thanks to social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.

In India, in the 1970’s this conflict used to be confined to the ‘World’ pages of the English newspapers and was non-existent in most vernacular dailies. Later with the advent of satellite television in 1990s, we got to see footage of buildings getting reduced to rubbles on BBC World News, accompanied by a fast-paced narration by Lyse Doucet - each word going off like a bullet from a machine gun.

Those days the Indian government used to throw its weight behind the Palestinians in tune with its policy of non-alignment, while Israel was considered a pariah state. Gradually around 1980s, a section of intelligentsia and political class began to feel that it was high time we explored ties with the Jewish nation, as they argued we shared many common interests. India then formally established diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992, but after ensuring that ties with the Palestine Liberation Organisation were not upset. 

For the general public, discussing politics in drawing rooms, tea shops, and paan shops – the brick-and-mortar predecessors of social media platforms, the Israel-Palestine conflict only evoked yawns and the initiator of the topic used to be dubbed as a ‘big showoff’. Many had no idea where this region was on the world map and used to dismiss this ignorance with a ‘kya-farak-padta-hai’ shrug.

Even when social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook became household names in the first decade of this millennium, the Israel-Palestine wars didn’t evoke much traction among Indian users. 

However, Israel was fondly remembered by a section of the Indian commentariat whenever Delhi, Mumbai, or Kashmir used to get rocked by terror attacks. Israel's success in freeing passengers and crew from a hijacked Air France aircraft at Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976 had won them legendary status. These analysts looked upon the Jewish nation as a role model and wanted India to show the same ruthlessness while dealing with Pakistan-trained terrorists. The worldwide rise in Islamophobia after the 9/11 terror attacks in the US also added heft to this school of thought.

On the other hand, in New India secularism has become a dirty word and the Indian Muslim is increasingly being seen as the other. Frequent lynching, hate speeches, and other hate crimes against Muslims for nearly a decade have helped bolster this narrative. Using this corollary, anyone attacking Muslims across the globe gets instant support from Hindutva zealots. Hence, the current Israel-Palestinian war is evoking a very strident reaction, and the world is getting a taste of the toxic polarization India is currently afflicted with.

On October 7, the moment the Palestinian extremist group Hamas breached the heavily guarded Israeli border to carry out attacks on residences and military installations, and rained missiles on some Israeli towns, #IStandWithIsrael began trending on Indian Twitter. Soon there was a rash of similar-sounding hashtags and in some cases, even Israel was misspelled as ‘Isreal’. 

A number of resident welfare uncles, who bombard us with ‘good morning’ messages, turned into ‘military experts’ overnight. They expressed their choicest outrage against Hamas but were salivating over the prospects of massive air raids Israelis were planning to carry out on Gaza in retaliation. Borrowing a cricket analogy, a Twitter user said Hamas had done with its batting and now see what Israel does. Memes showing Hamas in poor light were widely circulated.

As the frenzy spread, we had random guys from Rajkot to Rae Bareli offering themselves to fight for Israel. This reached such a feverish pitch that the Israeli ambassador in India, Naor Gilon, had to issue a statement, “Israel never asked anyone to come and fight for us. We fight our own fights.”

All the prominent influencers of the right-wing social media ecosystem in India began rooting for Israel and wanted the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to wipe out Hamas by flattening Gaza. All this vociferous posturing was emanating from the bedrock of rabid hatred towards fellow Muslims.

There is an old adage (though who actually said it is disputed), “The first casualty of war is the truth.” This war too helped rumour mills work overtime with social media proving to be a force multiplier. 

One of them was that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies in a hospital after entering Israel. The report was based on hearsay and travelled across the globe. It gained so much credence that US President Joe Biden issued a statement condemning the act. Later it turned out that the report had no basis, and the White House had to ‘walk back’ on its earlier statement.

The trouble is that by the time these lies and half-baked reports get exposed, they have already travelled too far. It gets shared by thousands of social media users, and many don’t even get to know about the clarification that comes much later. 

Hamas has been attacking Israeli positions in the past but never attained a success of this scale. For the dominant Western media, Hamas action became the casus belli, as if this was the first stone cast in this dispute, while they conveniently overlooked Israel’s atrocities on Palestinians that date back many decades. Every anchor in prominent TV channels across the Western world wanted the panelists to first condemn the October 7 Hamas attack and then get on with Israeli atrocities.

No Western leader issues a statement on this issue without including the line, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Hence, the oppressor gets a blank cheque, while the oppressed need to be the epitome of poise and grace or be dubbed as a terrorist.

Coming to Indian mainstream media, a major chunk of which has been reduced to government mouthpieces over the last decade, the Hamas attack provided a golden opportunity to divert attention from a civil war-like situation prevailing in Manipur state. 

For Indian TV news channels, many of whom fit Arundhati Roy’s description of ‘Fox News on steroids’, this war provided fresh ammunition for its daily edition of notoriously toxic debates. Talking heads with very extreme views were invited and they all still continue to call for the annihilation of Gaza to teach Hamas a lesson. 

Interestingly, some of these channels have flown in their top correspondents to Tel Aviv, and they are reporting from the relatively safe confines of Israeli towns with none venturing into Gaza. They are also unable to see the widespread protests on Israeli streets calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ouster. Amid all this turmoil, ANI even managed to find an Indian woman residing in Israel, who was willing to sing paeans of Narendra Modi!

It may be recalled that none of these channels ever bothered to send even a single reporter to Manipur where the ethnic conflict rages on even to this day.

While most of the Israeli media is pulling no punches and asking the Netanyahu government tough questions regarding Israeli security failure on October 7, for Indian reporters and Twitter users he continues to be a hero. The same template is expected to continue as Israeli forces get ready for ground assaults on Gaza.

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Gigabyte Skeletons

Lucky is the man who does not have skeletons in his closet, so goes the saying. But in this digital era, the closet or cupboard has been replaced by our smartphones and laptops. These gadgets now hold so many vital and crucial records of our lives that if they land in the wrong hands, our future could be in jeopardy.

In the last decade or two, mobile phone usage has become so pervasive that it has scaled all class, gender, and age barriers. Our lives have become so dependent on our phones that they have now become an extension of ourselves. 

With each upgrade and new features, these devices have progressively entwined themselves with our private and official lives.

In the early 2000s, we had the feature phones that could carry our contact lists, call logs, text messages, and maybe a few games. They could not access the internet, or download apps, photos, or videos. As for images, it could only provide a few limited emoticons that could be used along with text messages. 

Those were the early days and mobile phones were a prized possession with even incoming calls and messages getting charged. People saw this as a new mode of communication that helped them stay in touch while on the move but used it very sparingly and followed some cheat codes to beat high prices. 

The traditional landline phones continued to hold sway as they offered cheaper calls and the only threat mobile phones posed then was to wristwatches and timepieces as they displayed time with greater accuracy and offered a more versatile alarm facility.

Once the charges for incoming calls and messages were abolished, mobile phone sales and usage grew by leaps and bounds. Many one-handset households turned into multi-handset ones and soon families began pondering whether a landline was needed at all. 

Along came camera phones. Many wondered why a camera was needed on a phone, which is meant to communicate. But all naysayers were proved wrong, and what these camera phones spawned was something no one had foreseen – selfie culture.

Now no age group, social strata, or ethnicity is free from this narcissistic affliction; and hardly any occasion or place is considered not kosher for a selfie. Whether this narcissism was inherent among the people or fanned by camera phones and social media is open to debate. Now we have reached such a stage where prominent handset brands are offering ‘selfie-camera’ as their unique selling proposition!

The advent of smartphones was a game changer. They made people unlearn the usage of keypads and master the art of tapping, sliding, and typing words on flat screens. Smartphones offered a seamless link to the internet and the facility to download apps completely changed our personal and work lives.

The features they offered were a direct hit on personal computers and laptops and boosted the use of mobile internet. It has changed the way we socialize, handle finances, shop, travel, and access news and entertainment. Smartphones are the first thing we look at after waking up and the last thing before crashing at night.

Hence they have now become a rich repository of your personal photos and videos, data concerning your health parameters, banking and digital payments apps, and authenticator gateways to access your office’s protected networks. 

Losing a smartphone is nothing short of a calamity, irrespective of the passcodes and other safety nets you may have activated to safeguard your personal and official data. Even moving data from an old smartphone to a new one is as challenging as moving houses!

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Caste, Racism and the Common Threads

Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste (The Lies That Divide Us) has been on my reading list for long. Though I bought it a couple of months ago, only recently I decided to take the plunge into this voluminous book. It delves deep into the race problem in the United States and draws parallels with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and the long-standing caste system in India. 

Wilkerson, a New York Times veteran turned academic, feels the term racism is insufficient to encapsulate the systemic oppression of African American people in the US and prefers to use the term ‘caste’, which in Indian society is used to describe a person’s social standing in the well-demarcated hierarchy. 

The term Caste originated from the Portuguese word Casta, meaning race or breed, and it was coined by Portuguese traders. While doing business with their Indian counterparts, these traders observed some well demarcated divisions within Indian society.

Caste has been present in the Indian subcontinent for over a millennium, while the first batch of slaves from Africa came to America around 400 years ago.

The first time I heard the term slavery was when I had to study a small portion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in school. The chapter described some of the sub-human living conditions of slaves in the US in the 18th century. 

Ever since I have been hearing intermittently about the friction between the African Americans and the whites in the US. They become a talking point when there is a Rodney King or George Floyd-type incident of police high-handedness towards African American youths, resulting in widespread protests. Even the term ‘African American’ is a refined and politically correct avatar of Negro or black that was freely used in the 1970s and 80s. 

Caste in India

In India, your status in society gets decided by the accident of birth with Brahmins figuring at the top of the pecking order, followed by Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, and a vast underclass - collectively called Dalits or Bahujans or outcastes. The widespread practice of marrying only within one’s own caste has kept this water-tight segregation alive for centuries. 

This hierarchical order, also known as Brahminical order, is well entrenched with each caste showing deference to those above them and riding roughshod over the less fortunate. The father of the Indian constitution and a Dalit himself, B R Ambedkar, had succinctly termed it as ‘graded inequality’.

Even religions like Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism that profess to be opposed to casteism tend to acknowledge this Brahminical order as a fait accompli of Indian society. In fact, some sects like Syrian Christians in Kerala take pride in their professed Brahmin ancestry before they embraced Christianity.

Racism in the US

In the US, when the founding fathers drafted the Constitution, the welfare of the blacks was not there in their minds. Slavery was considered an accepted practice and a vital element in keeping the US farm sector running on near-zero wage bills.

Even the White House had a slave quarter. The third president Thomas Jefferson, who had authored the epoch-making Declaration of Independence, had fathered six children from one of his slaves.

Though Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in 1865, after a four-year-long civil war, the subsequent rulers did precious little to help the newly freed slaves join the mainstream.

On the contrary, the southern states that had fought against the abolition of slavery during the Civil War introduced the Jim Crow laws (Jim Crow being a pejorative term for an African American). These laws supported racial segregation in public places and proposed a host of other discriminatory measures aimed at keeping the African American community on the fringes of society. 

‘Negroes and dogs not allowed’ boards were proudly flaunted in front of shops and restaurants. Even where they were allowed, blacks were served only after all the white customers had been attended to. Public buildings and movie halls in some towns had separate entrances for blacks and whites, and hospitals had separate wards for black patients. In the armed forces, they had separate barracks for white and black soldiers.

It is said that when World War II was drawing to a close, a school in Columbus, Ohio, held an essay contest with the topic “What to do with Hitler after the war.” An African American girl wrote just one sentence: “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of life in America.” The Jim Crow laws remained for around a hundred years in the southern states and were repealed during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. 

Pat from the Nazis

While studying ways and means to prosecute the Jewish community and other minorities, the Nazis were quite impressed by the way the United States had sustained its white supremacy by treating African Americans and other minorities as second-class citizens. 

They were particularly impressed by American eugenicist Madison Grant who firmly believed in Aryan supremacy and was considered close to US Presidents Herbert Hoover and Theodore Roosevelt. Grant had persuaded the US administration in the 1920s to tighten laws related to immigration and interracial marriages. He believed that ‘inferior stocks’ should be sterilized and quarantined in order to get them eliminated. His book ‘The Passage of a Great Race’ advocated ‘cleansing’ the gene pool and had a special place in Adolf Hitler’s library.

The common thread among the ruling class and elites of the US, India, and Germany was the zeal to maintain the purity of the bloodline. In the three countries, there were legal and societal curbs on interracial marriages. 

Another commonality was the ‘sanctity’ in the usage of water. In the US, offices had separate water fountains for white and black employees, and many beaches were out of bounds for African Americans. In India, the Dalits and other lower castes too faced similar restrictions and the Nazi Germany also barred Jews from using many beaches. 

Race Purity

Among the whites, anyone not having Anglo-Saxon blood was considered ‘polluted’. People from other European countries such as Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, and others fell into this category. In fact, Benjamin Franklin, another luminary of the American War of Independence, was concerned about the rising influx of German immigrants to Pennsylvania State and feared that they may ‘Germanize’ the state by imposing their language and culture. 

However despite all these intra-continental prejudices, the European immigrants always enjoyed a privileged status in the US as regardless of their country of origin or vocation, they were slotted in the ‘white’ category once they entered America. Whereas people migrating from Asia, Africa or South America were classified as ‘coloured’ or ‘blacks’. And however successful they are in their careers or businesses they are seen through the lens of their race.

By the 1880s the US policymakers started getting worried that the increased immigration might upset the white supremacy and began imposing curbs, especially those from the non-European countries. The axe first fell on the Chinese in 1882 and this tightening of curbs continued until the 1960s.

Trump Legacy

Donald Trump came to power by tapping the insecurities of white voters. He capitalized on their fears that whites would turn into a minority sometime in the 2040s. His presidency polarized the US society and opened the old wounds of the Civil War era. 

The neo-Confederates, who drew inspiration from the Confederacy movement that fought against the abolition of slavery, started gaining prominence in some of the southern states. Though the Confederacy movement was defeated and slavery was abolished, they remained a force in southern states and subsequent governments did little to keep them in check. The neo-Confederates saw the advent of Trump in the White House as an act of reclaiming their 'glorious past' and this further strained the tenuous racial equation in many cities, leading to violent clashes.

Personal Anecdotes

Wilkerson recounts a few personal anecdotes to highlight the subtle racism in the present-day US. As she lives in a predominantly white neighbourhood, salesmen coming to her house assume she is the housemaid and ask her to call the ‘madam’! She also recalls an unsavoury incident at a restaurant along with her white host. 

She also narrates an interesting nugget regarding Ambedkar. She happened to attend a seminar on casteism organized by a US-based Indian group. The organizers presented her with a small bronze bust of Ambedkar.

When she was in the airport undergoing a security check, the African American security officer spotted it and grew suspicious. He got it closely checked and asked, “Who is this?” Wilkerson thought telling him about Ambedkar would be a laborious process. So she told him: “This is Martin Luther King of India.” 

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Oppenheimer Omnibus

There is now a ‘mushroom cloud’ of opinions about Christopher Nolan’s latest movie Oppenheimer. While the overall opinions are positive, some do pick Nolan for certain historical omissions. The most glaring miss was his soft pedalling of the devastation Japan faced after the dropping of nuclear bombs, and the US administration’s heavy-handedness in evicting the Hispanic residents at the nuclear bomb test site at Los Alamos.

Before the promos were out, I had vaguely heard of Robert J Oppenheimer as the nuclear scientist who led Project Manhattan – the United States' plan to build a nuclear bomb during the Second World War. In India, he was also remembered for quoting a line from Bhagavad Gita, “Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds,” after the bomb was successfully tested.

Thanks to a friend’s prodding, I landed at a city multiplex on the first day of the movie’s screening. The hall was packed and we managed to get tickets only in one of the front rows - third from the screen. The hall was milling with young college-going and 20-something crowd, probably Nolan fans mesmerized by his Dark Knight and Inception. 

It made me wonder how they are going to take their favourite director’s attempt at a three-hour-long biopic about a scientist - which totally eliminates any scope for high-voltage action or special effects. Moreover, I wondered how many of these students and young professionals, with their brains hardwired to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), will feel excited about a period drama steeped in politics and history. 

I had come for the movie with a near-clean slate. I didn’t closely read any newspaper reviews. The news item of lead actor Cillian Murphy’s interest in Bhagavad Gita had evoked some social media buzz, especially among the bhakt crowd. 

But their euphoria of an Indian scripture being validated by a Hollywood star soon turned into anger after the movie was released. To their chagrin, the famous scientist is shown reading the holy book during a sex scene. This is now snowballing into a major controversy with the latest reports of Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur wading into it. He has censured the censor board for letting this objectionable scene past their scissors. 

There are even calls that Nolan should drop this scene worldwide. This controversy is likely to linger on for some time as the hyper-nationalist Indian diaspora is expected to keep it on the boil. I recall how Time magazine columnist Joel Stein was forced to apologise in 2010 after he wrote a humour piece on how the town of Edison in New Jersey state changed after being swamped by Indian immigrants. 

As I said earlier, my knowledge of Oppenheimer was sketchy. So I had no idea that this ‘father of the nuclear bomb’ too was caught up in the maelstrom of McCarthy's witch hunt for communists and socialists in the 1950s. So far, I had thought that only politicians, film artistes and writers were hauled up. One of the most notable ones was Charlie Chaplin.

During the early days of the cold war, the US policymakers thought that socialism was more dangerous than fascism. They made all-out efforts to weed out or blacklist people they thought were sympathetic to these causes from the federal administration, universities, and the film industry.

Unlike the stereotype of ‘apolitical’ scientists steeped in lab research, Oppenheimer was active politically, though in a prudent manner - he baulked from becoming a card-carrying Communist. But he made contributions to socialists and Communists fighting General Franco during the Spanish civil war, wanted scientists and academics to form unions, and was in love with a card-carrying Communist woman academic. 

All this did not affect him when he got down to setting up a nuclear testing facility in a remote desert land in Los Alamos and wooing top scientists in the country to work on the project. Once the weapon got successfully tested he became a national hero. 

But his ties with the Communists came back to bite after the world came to be divided into two camps – the US-led Western bloc (comprising capitalist countries) and the then USSR-led Eastern bloc (communist countries) after World War II. His opposition to the hydrogen bomb and fear of an arms race also landed him in the bad books of the US administration. 

As for characterization, Murphy with his probing eyes gets into the skin of Oppenheimer, who graduates from being a precocious science student fiddling at a lab in Cambridge, to a more confident theoretical physicist. During Project Manhattan, he acquires the swagger of a confident entrepreneur trying to sell the idea of the atomic bomb to fellow scientists. After the devastation caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the unravelling begins. He is shattered and vulnerable for the rest of his life.

I just could not make out Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. Nolan showed them in an entirely different light. Damon has traded his boyish looks to be a Lieutenant General who was the military face of Project Manhattan. Downey Jr, famous for his Iron Man roles, plays a more complex role as a government official who tries to pin down Oppenheimer with his previous links with socialism and communism after World War II when McCarthyism took over.

It is to the credit of Nolan that he keeps viewers engaged for three long hours. It is no mean feat to keep the Instagram Reels generation, with low attention spans, engaged for such a long time. 

Tailpiece: Almost throughout the movie Oppenheimer has a cigarette dangling on his lips, or someone else is smoking. Hence we had the ‘smoking kills’ sign as a permanent fixture on the right corner of the screen. Sounded a bit rich as the movie itself is about the atomic bomb and killing people in thousands!

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Close Shave with Bank Hackers

Terms like phishing, and hacking have been swirling around in TV channel discussions and in newspapers, with cyber experts listing out the precautionary steps to be taken. Banks also bombard us with text messages, often to the point of clogging our phone storage space, urging us to never share the one-time password (OTP) with anyone, and no bank official would ever ask for it.

But cybercriminals continue to thrive and find newer methods to fool bank customers, and every second day there are reports of people losing their hard-earned savings to phishing attacks. The other day a hacker came dangerously close to wiping out my bank balance.

I was trying to make an online payment for the monthly apartment maintenance fee. But for some inexplicable reason, I was not getting the OTP on my registered mobile number and hence could not clear the final step of the money transfer. After a couple of attempts, I gave up and decided to pay some other day.

However, later on, I decided to tweet about it, wondering whether mine was an isolated case or any glitch in the bank’s bulk mail mechanism. Minutes later I noticed that there was a reply from a Twitter handle displaying the bank logo and apologizing for the inconvenience caused, along with a helpline number.  

A couple of hours later I thought of giving the number a try. The number looked a bit odd as most banks have a 12-digit helpline number starting with 1800… while this was a straight 10-digit mobile number. But I let it pass.

When I rang up the number, the usual paraphernalia associated with banks’ helpline numbers was missing - no answering machines welcoming me and directing me to press this or that number. Instead, there was a guy at the other end and he was conversant only in Hindi. 

I told him about the issue and after a brief pause, he said that for identification purposes I need to tell my permanent account number (PAN), issued by the Income Tax Department. In hindsight, I realized this was the first stage of the trap and I fell for it. Soon after I shared my PAN number, I heard a message beep on my phone.

He asked if I got a message. When I checked my phone’s message folder, I found a fresh one had landed on the bank’s message thread. He then told me to share the OTP mentioned in the message. 

The moment he said that I smelled a rat. I was reminded of the numerous warning messages banks had sent against sharing OTP. I immediately disconnected the call. This was followed by a flurry of incoming calls, and my phone’s Truecaller app traced them to disparate locations such as Lucknow, Patna, and Kolkata. I refused to take any of these calls.

I then took a closer look at their Twitter handle. I noticed that it was riddled with typos and grammatical errors and did not have a blue tick. Even in the title ‘cares’ was spelled as ‘caress’. After the calls stopped, I got a text message, ‘sar coll me’ [sic]. 

I immediately left for the bank and told the executive about not receiving OTP. I also narrated to him about this shady helpline and my refusal to comply with their dubious demand. The executive remarked, "Sir you have been saved."

He explained that they were actually hackers and had I given the OTP I would have lost all the money in the account. He claimed the bank keeps receiving such complaints and recently even one of their employees got conned in a similar fashion!

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Afwaah: Rumours in New India

After getting eclipsed by the propaganda movie Kerala Story in theatres, Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah is now making its OTT debut and will be screened on Netflix from June 30. Interestingly, despite being a top draw and hogging most shows at multiplexes, Kerala Story is now struggling to find an OTT release.

Set in a town in Rajasthan, Afwaah captures the burning issues of ‘new India’ such as communalism, misuse of social media to circulate and amplify fake news, beef politics, and the toll it takes on different strata of society. All of this is narrated by Mishra in his trademark riveting fashion, reminiscent of his suspense thriller Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin. 

The opening scene sets the tone. A political rally passes through a communally sensitive area and a local politician (Sumeet Vyas) makes inflammatory speeches. This leads to communal violence, resulting in the killing of a meat seller by the politician’s henchman (Sharib Hashmi). 

Mishra then weaves in many strands – the politician’s fiancé (Bhumi Pednekar), who is also the daughter of a veteran politician, is upset with the goings on and decides to cut asunder ties with family. 

Her path crosses with a US-returned Indian Muslim advertising professional and TedX speaker (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). She tags on to him to escape from her family members and professed well-wishers. Meanwhile, after the riots, Hashmi is told by his boss to lie low. But he soon discovers that there is a danger to his life and decides to flee.

Both Siddiqui and Pednekar keep the high-voltage drama going and they are joined by Hashmi who too is on the run. Amid all this Mishra brings in love jihad, beef politics, and the rise in communal temperature. It climaxes with the dance drama of a high-brow literature festival coming face-to-face with the anarchy outside the fortified venue. 

The movie’s theatre release coincided with that of Kerala Story, a film about some girls from Kerala joining ISIS. The film was economical on facts and high on propaganda. 

But it had the blessing of the ruling establishment at the Centre. In fact, during his whistle-stop election tour in Karnataka, the prime minister had praised the film and taking cue many BJP-ruled states made Kerala Story tax-free. Many ministers made a beeline to theatres, with cameras in tow, to watch the film.

All this hype paid rich dividends for the movie’s producers at the box office. On the other hand, Afwaah had a modest opening in most cities. It opened to just single shows in some theatres (with many having screenings after 9 pm). Such a limited opening was a disaster foretold, as people were reluctant to go to theatres located far away and at odd times.

Hope the OTT release will provide the movie a new lease of life. 

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Gitanjali Aiyar: An Icon of Bygone Era

 

In this era of screaming TV anchors and high-decibel debates that resemble a bout in a wrestling ring, the passing away of Gitanjali Aiyar reminded us of far more dignified, though somewhat staid, times of television news in India. Those were the early days of television news in the country and unlike a newspaper reporter or a radio newsreader, a TV newsreader has a face, and viewers were getting used to this novelty of seeing them regularly in their living rooms.

Gitanjali Aiyar, along with Neethi Raveendran, Minu, Komal G.B. Singh, Rini Simon, Preet K.S. Bedi, Suneet Tandon, Tejeshwar Singh and others became household names in the 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi government went on an overdrive to spread the footprint of the country's lone television network Doordarshan across the country. TV towers were getting inaugurated on a daily basis in every other district, and it was seen as part of Rajiv Gandhi’s vision to take India to the 21st century.

For the viewers, this sudden burst of visual treat was very alluring. So far he/she had to go to the nearest cinema hall for visual entertainment. Moreover, the TV offered much more: global sporting events like Olympics, Asian Games and live telecasts of cricket matches, all of which could be enjoyed from the comfort of your homes. It was also a great boon for the invalid and the aged who could not go to cinema halls.

Though the government succeeded in making the television hardware ubiquitous across the country, the programming part remained very Delhi-centric, and heavily skewed in favour of the Hindi language. Since the state-owned Doordarshan enjoyed a monopoly over the airwaves, viewers were actually a captive audience with no other alternative. Satellite television and dish antennas were yet to make an entry.

Amid all these limited offerings, there was a 20-minute English news bulletin at 9 pm, which many of those residing in the non-Hindi belt looked forward to. Those were pre-teleprompter days and news readers had the unenviable task of reading through the paper and maintaining occasional eye contact with the viewers.

With her crystal clear accent, lean build, and immaculate sartorial sense, Gitanjali Aiyar soon endeared her viewers. Women used to gawk at the saree she used to wear and compare them with that of fellow women newsreaders.

However, many people did not know that Gitanjali Aiyar was actually a Maharashtrian and her maiden name was Gitanjali Ambegaonkar. Hence, she sometimes used to trip while pronouncing some tongue-twister names of South Indian cities and their people. This used to roil those residing in the south of Vindhyas – how could an Aiyar pronounce Kozhikode or Thenmozhi wrongly? Some even used to shoot off angry letters to the editor in English dailies.

Being a government-run institution, Doordarshan news was a bland fare as it had to go by the sarkari rule book. What passed off as a news bulletin was actually a caravan of speeches, book releases, and planting of trees (all mainly in Delhi) by telegenic Rajiv Gandhi. Things like 'breaking news' or 'flash' were unheard of and there was a yawning gap between what we saw on television and what we read in newspapers and magazines. The latter appeared to be closer to capturing the rough and tumble of Indian politics.

Towards the latter part of Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure, the country was rocked by Bofors, Shah Banu case, Ram Janambhoomi, and other controversies, but Doordarshan managed to remain hermetically sealed from all the heat and dust it generated.

The entry of satellite television in the late 1980s began stirring things up. It provided a glimpse of what BBC or CNN television news looked like. The launch of homegrown news channels like Star TV News and vernacular offerings in the mid-nineties raised the bar. Soon Doordarshan news had fewer takers and it got relegated to an also-ran status amid a gaggle of newly-started TV channels.

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Hammer Over Heritage

 

I recently came across this picture on Twitter of Mumbai’s Eros movie theatre covered with tarpaulins as it gets ready to be torn down to make way for yet another ritzy shopping mall. Built in 1938, Eros is one of the prime example of art deco style of architecture in the city, which was very popular in the 1920s and 30s across the world.

Art Deco combined modern styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials, while symmetry was its hallmark. However, its dominance ended with the beginning of World War II and the rise of the strictly functional styles of modern architecture.

South Mumbai became a Mecca of art deco in the 1930s with apartments on the newly reclaimed Marine Drive built in this fashion. The trend later spread to suburbs such as Matunga and Chembur. In fact, even today Mumbai houses the second highest number of art deco buildings in the world after Miami.

Coming back to Eros, during my stay in Bombay (as it was known back then in the early 1990s), it was a landmark theatre located right opposite to the Churchgate station. It was dull yellow structure with a light maroon façade and had two art deco blocks joining in the middle to cylindrical structure.

Eros along with Regal and Sterling used to screen only English movies, and I remember that Steve Martin starrer Father of the Bride was the first movie I saw at Eros, and the first in Mumbai. The movie was a hit and the producers tried to milk it further with sequels.

After that these three movie theatres – Eros, Regal and Sterling became permanent fixtures during off days and holidays.

Those were pre-internet days and movie watching was an altogether different experience. Online booking was not even thought of, and hence, one had to reach the theatre a couple of hours in advance to avoid facing a ‘house full’ board at the ticket counter. Making an advance booking meant going to the theatre in the morning to book for a night show. 

After the culture of people going to malls and watching movies in multiplexes became well entrenched, the single-screen legacy theatres came under threat. Sterling reinvented itself into a multiplex, Regal diluted its Hollywood only norm and Eros stopped screening movies in 2016.

Now this piece of priceless heritage is soon going to be history.

Dumb and Dumber

 

While reading late journalist/editor Vinod Mehta’s memoir Editor Unplugged, published in 2014 and a sequel to his earlier memoir Lucknow Boy,  one is astonished to see the cockiness of TV news channels in the pre-Modi days. Mehta, whose entire four-decade-old career spanned through the print medium starting from the ancient linotype era, had a love-hate relationship with the TV news channels. 

He used to be a reluctant guest at some of the panel discussions on TV, but savoured the ‘face recognition’ it offered among the general public. He, however, claims that he will never trade his position as a print publication editor for that of a TV anchor.

Mehta chides Indian TV news anchors for lacking nuance while dealing with the complexities of politics, unlike their British and American counterparts, but grudgingly acknowledges that TV new channels have changed the citizen-politician relationship and made the latter more accessible to the aam aadmi. He also lauds TV channels for throwing light on the day-to-day hassles and cruelty experienced by the unempowered class.

A case in point was the brutal gangrape of a Delhi woman in 2012, now known as the Nirbhaya case. The saturation coverage by TV news channels ensured that the issue never got relegated to a statistic and the perpetrators got punished. The victim’s family hailed from a lower middle-class background. Various TV news channels, especially the vernacular ones, have also highlighted the woes faced by the urban poor in metro cities and the pathetic conditions of slums.

TV news reporters back then were very aggressive and never hesitated from shoving the mic in front of those in power and posing tough questions. During the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai and the numerous corruption allegations that the then UPA government faced, the TV journalists raised pertinent questions that had put the Manmohan Singh government on the mat and it had to pay a heavy price during the 2014 general elections.

But after the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance government came to power in 2014, the mindset of TV news reporters and media houses has undergone a sea change. There has been a total meltdown of the combativeness among the TV anchors with most of them toeing the government line. 

They can be now broadly classified into two categories – lap dogs and guard dogs. The former see no wrong in the government and sing praises day in and day out, and totally blank out any criticism or dissent. They willingly and unabashedly work as the propaganda arm of the government.

The second types also carry out the above functions, but in addition, they strain every nerve to discredit and nip in the bud whatever little dissent is left in the country. Former NDTV India anchor Ravish Kumar, one of those honourable exceptions who chose not to join the lap-dog-guard-dog herd, had coined the term Godi Media (media sitting in the lap of establishment) and it soon gained wide credence.

The conduct of mainstream leading television stations during the recent farmers’ agitation and earlier unrests will surely make Mehta turn in his grave. They were busy looking for a sliver of opportunity to discredit the protestors, look for a foreign conspiracy angle, and dub the protesters as anti-national. They never dared shove the mic in front of any ruling party neta to ask some hard questions.

This slavish docility is not confined to TV news channels. Many newspaper columnists have become circumspect and resort to wishy-washy stands on various issues. The same guys had no fear of taking on the Prime Minister and the government during Manmohan Singh’s tenure and before. 

Self-censorship is now a byword for most publications and it is there at all levels - right from the reporter to editor to proprietor. Hence spinning the narrative in the favour of the ruling party is the new credo. Otherwise, government ads stop coming or, even worse, they enter the bad books of state-run investigative agencies. 

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Plane Tales From India

 

As air travellers, Indians’ reputation has been zilch class and their eccentricities have provided enough fodder for stand-up comedians. The most notable ones include stuffing up the overhead cabin baggage holder with their unwieldy bags and air hostesses struggling to shut the holders before a takeoff, and the mad scramble to the door as soon as the aircraft comes to halt after landing. 

But of late they have, quite literally, touched a new low with the leaky bladders of male passengers on international flights, where free liquor is served. India’s flagship carrier Air India, which was recently taken over by the Tata Group, has been rocked by two ‘peegate’ scandals on their international flights. 

Interestingly both flights were bound for New Delhi. The first incident happened on board a New York-Delhi flight on November 26 and the second one happened on a Paris-Delhi flight on December 6. The media got the stinky whiff of the first incident only a little before the second one came to light. 

In the first incident, a 34-year-old Shankar Mishra, working with an American bank Wells Fargo, and travelling business class had got drunk and urinated on a 70-plus woman co-passenger.

While the passenger’s conduct was unpardonable, the airline crew’s reaction too fell woefully short. The air hostesses cleaned the victim’s seat and offered her pyjamas to change over, but the crew decided against offering her a fresh seat.

She was told to make do with the same damp and smelly seat with some extra blankets thrown in. When she refused, they permitted her to sit in the “jump” seat normally occupied by flight attendants during take-offs and landings.

Mishra realised his mistake and offered an apology, and the crew readily considered the matter closed. Upon landing, he was not handed over to security and was allowed to walk off after being served a 30-day flight ban.

In the second incident on the Paris-Delhi flight, a man urinated on the blanket of a female passenger while she was away from her seat. In this case, the crew’s conduct was a shade better. They identified and isolated the offender and reported the incident to authorities. The erring passenger was taken into custody by CISF personnel at the Delhi airport.

However, a police complaint was not filed, as both the accused and the victim had reached an understanding. CISF allowed the accused to leave after he tendered a written apology in deference to the victim’s wishes, the airline later said.

After the stink started spreading in the media, Wells Fargo promptly dismissed Mishra. Now the heat was on the Tata Group and its chief N Chandrasekaran issued a statement that the airline crew ‘fell short’ of its duties and derostered the pilot and the crew of that particular flight.

The Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) too had ticked off Air India and reminded the airline that it should have reported the incident within 12 hours, and referred the matter to an internal committee to decide on a flight ban.

Meanwhile, Shankar Mishra went incommunicado and Delhi Police appeared clueless and many began wondering whether it is going to be a Komal Sharma redux. For the uninitiated, Komal Sharma has been elusive ever since carrying out an attack on Jawaharlal Nehru University students in October 2020. 

However, in this case, the Delhi Police nabbed Mishra from Bengaluru on January 6 from a guest house. Interestingly, his name was not even registered in the guest house logbook.

Amid all this din, everybody seems to have forgotten about the second culprit who had peed during the Paris-Delhi flight. His name and whereabouts continue to remain a mystery.

Mishra’s bail plea was rejected and he was in 14 days of judicial custody. After that, the trial began at a Delhi court, and Mishra is now singing a different tune. He now claims the woman had urinated upon herself due to her medical condition and pleaded not guilty! This was in contradiction to what he earlier said during the bail plea hearing. 

Air India’s lackadaisical handling of the incident is expected to make it all the more difficult to bring Mishra to book. 

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Joshimath Sinking

 

The term ‘land subsidence’ was hitherto known mainly to geology students and geologists, but thanks to the environmental disaster at Joshimath in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand state, it now has a wider currency. 

While the country had barely ushered in the New Year, panic gripped the residents of Joshimath after cracks began to appear in many roads, houses, commercial establishments and temples. Some structures are even tilting, thereby endangering the nearby buildings. All this means that Joshimath, which has a population of around 20,000, is slowly sinking due to land subsidence.

The Uttarakhand authorities have recently declared Joshimath as a landslide and subsidence-hit zone. Many families are now being moved to safer areas after their houses developed cracks and became unsafe. 

The US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has defined subsidence as the “sinking of the ground because of underground material movement”. The reasons can be man-made such as mining or large-scale extraction of water or natural causes like earthquakes and soil erosion.

Joshimath is considered sacred for Hindus as it is the winter seat of Badrinath. Every winter the idol of Lord Vishnu from Badrinath temple is moved to the Joshimath Vasudeva temple after Badrinath becomes snowbound. The town is also a gateway to Hemkund Sahib, a pilgrim centre for the Sikhs. Joshimath also has a significant army presence and has been a transit spot for trekkers bound for the Himalayas. 

Located at a height of 1,875 metres above sea level on the Himalayan foothills, Joshimath is part of an ecologically sensitive zone. However, the increasing influx of tourists for pilgrimage and trekking trips to the Himalayas has led to the proliferation of hotels, and lodges, and an increase in road construction activity. 

Environmentalists have been raising alarm about the strain the region was facing due to increased construction and road-building activity, often with total disregard for the ecology of the region. But commercial gains through tourism and overall prosperity in the region have made the policymakers and the local residents overlook them.

This has been the case with most Indian tourists and pilgrim centres. The way Madhav Gadgil’s report on the Western Ghats has been ignored by various state governments in the peninsular region, irrespective of party affiliations, is a case in point.

However, Joshimath’s ecology is proving to be far more fragile and things have reached a tipping point. Experts point out that Joshimath town rests on a deposit of sand and stone, and not rock. Hence it doesn’t have a high load-bearing capacity to hold the foundations of the buildings. In fact, way back in 1976, the MC Mishra Committee had warned against heavy construction activity in Joshimath. 

But unmindful of these warnings, a number of hydel power plants have been sanctioned around the town. In 2021, the Tapovan-Vishnugad project on the Dhauliganga river witnessed flash floods caused by a glacial burst killing over 200 people. 

The town has also been witnessing heavy road construction activity and rail tunnelling as part of the Char Dham project, which will link Rishikesh with four pilgrim destinations - Kedarnath, Badrinath, Yamunothri and Gangothri.

In short, Joshimath has become an infrastructure-stressed zone and it is too early to pinpoint what exactly has triggered the current ecological crisis. There are also reports of cracks in houses in Karnaprayag, located nearly 82 kilometres away from Joshimath, and Srinagar Garhwal located 140 kilometres away. This shows that the current malaise is far more widespread than earlier thought and is unfolding.

Uttarakhand state was carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000, as it was felt that Lucknow was mismanaging the resources of its northern hill districts. Interestingly, the movement for statehood was an offshoot of two earlier environment protection mass movements — Chipko Andolan and the Anti-Tehri Dam Agitation. However, after the formation of Uttarakhand the corporate-contractor lobby has gained an upper hand over environmentalists, and they have little regard for ecology.

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