Friday 30 October 2015

Beef: The New Four Letter Word

Beef just refuses to go away from the country’s political menu. It is the new four letter word that has divided the society as if it were scythed through by a super sharp cleaver.

A few decades ago in the late 1960s and early 70s a bunch of Union Ministers were derided for being part of ‘kitchen cabinet’. Those were the Indian polity’s early days of unabashed sycophancy and that too around a woman leader. In this day and age such a remark would have been considered downright sexist.

Now forget kitchen cabinet, it looks like the whole Indian politics just does not want to get out of the kitchen. It has become a place where patriotism is stirred up and cooked for public consumption. And woe betides anyone not using the ‘right’ ingredients!

The reason for this huddle in kitchen happens to be the humble cow, the inheritor of kamadhenu legacy, which is blissfully ignorant of all this hullabaloo. For this animal is more worried about the next meal as rising urbanization and dwindling grasslands have dealt a body blow to its food sources. Nowadays the daily grind consists of foraging waste bins and garbage yards for anything edible, amid plastic bags and paper packets, which it accidentally chomps in, leading to health disasters.

While it struggles to keep its emaciated body and soul together, its human masters are at each other’s throats to decide how it should die!

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Saturday 17 October 2015

Pinned Down By Passwords: Netizens' Agony


'Your password is old and needs to be reset', for any netizen this message is as hurtful and disruptive as biting the tongue while savouring a mint-laden chewing gum. The immediate reaction is 'oh no not again' or somewhat more combative 'WTF, got it changed other day only'.

In this wired and increasingly wireless world passwords and pin numbers are the digital equivalent of what keys and padlocks were to the brick and mortar world. Losing is just not an option and in case of passwords one cannot even seek others help to carry out a search!

In the ever increasing list of passwords and pin numbers (now even some credit cards need them) it becomes a challenge to remember and update them on a frequent basis.

'Password strength not enough' is the prompt we get when we go for some simple and easy to remember words during those updates. Many sites have further raised the bar by asking users to have alphanumeric passwords, which take a heavy toll on the bytes in brain’s grey matter. Names of spouse, kids, girlfriend/boyfriend, exes, movies, movie stars, cricket stars, books, authors... date of birth, marriage anniversary ... all these usual suspect permutations and many more get used up for alphanumeric passwords, but alas like sea waves the reset prompts keep coming. 

And sadly however strong be the password, it makes you no way immune to a hack attack, because they strike at the servers itself, which the site administrators need to take measures to prevent such attacks. 

Remembering passwords is just half the battle. In many sites, as an additional security measure, they have introduced Captcha. A Google search will reveal that Captcha is a type of 'challenge-response test' to determine whether the user is human or not. However, they often make me wonder whether the people who programme those Captchas are anyway human! They contort English alphabets and numerals to such an extent that they resemble a cross between Chinese alphabets and Hieroglyphics. If you clear it in the first attempt, then be rest assured that you may be human, but not normal!!

Banks have an uncanny knack of sending prompts for resetting passwords when you are frantically trying to book a flight or train ticket online. The delay caused due to resetting often costs dear - either you fail to get reservation, get relegated to RAC or fares shoot up.

As for remembering passwords the best way would be to rely on good old pen and paper and store them at a safe place. I shudder when I see people checking their phone screens while typing pin numbers at ATMs. Wonder what they would do if their phone conks off, gets lost or stolen.

If you fail to note down passwords and your memory plays hooky, then you get locked out of emails, bank accounts and host of other services and messages such as 'invalid password' or 'your account has been locked' mock at you. Getting disenfranchised from virtual world can be equally tough as in real one!

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Thursday 8 October 2015

Dadri Syndrome: Lynch Mob At The Gates

The solemn and heartfelt manner with which the Indian Air Force corporal Mohammad Sartaj conducted himself at a TV programme despite undergoing a grave tragedy of losing his father Mohammad Akhlaq to a lynch mob, left many misty eyed. Probably that was the only take away from the infamous killing in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, where a man was killed based on beef eating rumours, to assure us that all is not lost even in this bleak moment. The India our founding fathers had visualised still lives on in some pockets.

The fact that a lynch mob can enter the kitchen of a house and attack a family for the type of food they were having provides a chilling reminder of the rising tide of hatred and communal polarisation in the society. 

The political class, the chief architects who brought things to such a pass, have once again showed that whatever be the tragedy they cannot see anything beyond electoral arithmetic and political mileage. In a way Union Minister Mahesh Sharma's statement that the incident happened due to 'misunderstanding' was unwittingly true. 

The cow vigilantes picked up a wrong household - one with hardly any blemish. None of the family members faced any criminal charges and one of them had even donned the Air Force uniform to serve the country - hence very high on deshbhakti quotient.

Moreover it later came to be known that the meat in the refrigerator was not beef as alleged. But the supporters of the lynch mob would have none of it, because for them rumour is the fuel and the medium of communication ranges from good old loudspeakers and word of mouth to new age WhatsApp. They are working overtime posting photoshopped pictures of cow remnants and other rabid campaigns in social media, which would make late Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels rest assured that at least in India his credo would last another millennium! 

Just imagine if the meat in the refrigerator was actually beef, then it would have been 'advantage' lynch mob (to use a tennis analogy). They would have gone to town saying 'justice' has been done as the killers of our 'mother' have been avenged and some favourably disposed newspaper columnists would have marshalled extreme forms of sophistry to rationalise the killing as 'spontaneous reaction' to 'hurt sentiments'. The fact that possession of beef or its consumption is not prohibited in Uttar Pradesh and Akhlaq had not broken any law would have been relegated to a footnote for the academia, edit pages or TV studios to chew on.

Or think of an even grimmer scenario of beef being found in a house where some family members have a criminal past, a la Sohrabuddin Sheikh. That would have been godsend and the lynch mob would have easily got away with their savagery. Anyone criticising the legality of the lynching would have been branded as supporters of cow killers and desh drohis fit to be exported to Pakistan. "He was anyway a criminal, then why are you speaking on his behalf" would have been the taunt, and the average IPL-fixated Indian Pappu would have nodded in agreement.

The fact that Sartaj had an air force uniform on his back, helped the family land on the positive side of 'good Muslim, bad Muslim' binary, but others may not be that lucky and hence need to be very afraid.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat