The big match on Twitter!!

The frenzy which swept the nation on Wednesday was also on display on Twitter. Here is a compilation of some of the most interesting tweets in case you missed them.

Poonam Pandey’s announcement (in the news here and here) that she would shed her clothes if India wins the match and Dhoni’s controversial selection of Ashish Nehra was the fodder for some of the most funny tweets.

The celebrities attending the match were also at the receiving end of many taunts. The best was J&K CM Abdullah Omar (who was at Jammu) chiding famous reporter Barkha Dutt for being at Mohali and paying attention to politics instead of cricket.

As the match began, the onfield events became the focus:

Seems like J&K CM also realised that the voters wont be too happy if they miss out on the big match, so when the J&K grid started tripping he made an appeal to conserve energy so that more TVs work!

When India won, apart from the expected cries of joy and tears on the other side, Afridi was showered with much appreciation and praise from both sides of the border.

Even the “Faking News” which generally talks rubbish, got serious about this…

I wholeheartedly agree with the final sentiment on twitter. Pakistan really played exceptionally well during this world cup and Afridi’s leadership in making men out of his young boys must be praised. Though they lost yesterday, they played rather well and Riaz was exceptional. I hope that at least the cricketing ties will get back to normal after this and I’d like to see an Ind-Pak series soon, atleast at a neutral venue if not India or Pakistan.

Do comment and let me know if you found this tweet collection interesting and also if you are or planning to get active on twitter! Last, but not the least, remember to cheer your heart out during the World Cup final on Saturday.

INDIAAAA!! INDIAAAA!!!!!

NOTE: All the pictures in this post are screenshots taken from the website http://www.twitter.com. All the posts are the intellectual property of the people who posted them on twitter.

Internal Party Elections should be made mandatory!

Here are the stats that author Patrick French unearthed while researching his book India: A Portrait – published in January 2011 by Penguin -

• All MPs whose age is less than 30 years have other family members in politics.
• More than two-thirds of MPs aged under 40 have other family members in politics.
• An alarming 69.5% of women MPs have other family members in politics.

Browser Wars! Is Chrome winning?

Just as the launch of iPhone suddenly heated up the smartphone sector, the launch of Google Chrome greatly heated up the browser war which till then was simply a competition between IE and Firefox with IE having a massive lead.

I was one of the first ones to download Google Chrome when it was released on 2nd September 2008. It was love at first sight. I never went back to IE after using Chrome for just one day. What pleased me the most back then was the ultra minimal interface. I simply loved the fact that there were no space wasting toolbars and that there was a single box for both search and address bar.

While stats from http://j.mp/usageshare indicate that IE still leads with 45% and is followed by Firefox 36% and Google Chrome 16%, I am pleased to know that most of my friends prefer Chrome like me. Here are the browser stats of my blog:

English is an Indian Language!

New York Times recently published a letter titled  “India Faces a Linguistic Truth: English Spoken Here” which succinctly makes the case for how English is the de-facto national language of India. I couldn’t agree more. All around India you can see signs of how English is omnipresent in every walk of life and only politicians and extremist activists portray English as an undesirable colonial imposition on the people of India.

The much lauded 9% growth rate of India is driven mostly by growth in knowledge intensive sectors like IT and the services sector in which knowledge of English is the most basic prerequisite. Even in small towns and villages, there is much demand for English language education and English medium schools as well as private English tuition centres are raking in huge amounts of money.  English is the route to every aspiration that the common man of India.

English is as Indian as Mehendi, Cricket or Tea

The most common and often the only argument against usage of English is that it is a “foreign” language. But how do you define what is ‘Indian’? The tradition of applying mehendi or heena, seen at almost every Indian wedding (both Hindu & Muslim) was brought to India by Persian invaders. Cricket, also a British import, is now an integral part of contemporary Indian culture. It is played, watched and discussed in the smallest of the Indian villages. Any suggestion of Cricket being an undesirable foreign import would sound absurd to any average Indian who has grown up watching and playing it. Tea, the afternoon drink of choice for most office workers in India is always served the British way, with milk and sugar but hardly any one on protests this British influence in Indian lifestyle.

The last but most telling sign of English being as much an Indian language as any other is that most Indians liberally use several English words while speaking their own mother tongues even when local alternatives exist. For example while discussing cricket in Hindi, most people (including the ones who have never learnt English) will still use the words ‘batsman’, ‘bowler’ and ‘boundary’ instead of the Hindi words बल्लेबाज़, गेंदबाज़ and चौका. As far as I know, there are no widely used Hindi/Marathi synonyms at all for words like ‘table’, ‘railway’ and ‘camera’. The practise of using English words for modern tools is specific to India because we feel comfortable with using English. Other languages like Chinese and Korean have developed local words for these modern inventions.

Culture evolves

So, I think that the criticism that English is a foreign and alien language is completely unfounded and wrong. Something that has been a part of Indian culture for atleast a hundred and fifty years cannot be called an alien language. Today, English has has assimilated into our culture to become a part of it just the same way that mehendi did over the years. So English belongs to India as much as it does to Britain, America or Australia.

While whether English should be adopted as the only official language and/or the national language is another different debate altogether, I hope politicians accept the reality and instead of promoting regionalist pride, take steps to use to use and enhance India’s advantage of being comfortable with English. While Indian government schools continue to educate only in unmarketable local languages, surprisingly enough, our neighbour has realised the advantage of English and is leading the way!

Article from Pakistani newspaper - http://bit.ly/pakenglish

Image source : Amazon.co.uk - Front Cover of the book, Indian English Language and Culture (Lonely Planet Language Reference)

Let us not steal credit!

Daily News and Analysis has recently started a campaign where it labels the positive news stories as ‘India Positive’. While this is indeed a commendable initiative, I just hope that they dont get carried away as in the past where media has celebrated as ‘Indian’, feats and events of people who are only nominally Indian or related to India. Also we must take care not to create false positives by glossing over facts and taking pride in small things. 

India had a female PM and female President before the United States
In 2008 when Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was making headlines, I often heard some people point out with pride that India already had a woman president (Pratibha Patil became the first woman president of India in 2007). While the above is factually true, it is a gross misrepresentation to then go on to conclude that India is more accepting of women in power.

Pratibha Patil was indirectly elected to a largely ceremonial post and ironically Indira Gandhi is the exact opposite of being an example of how women can easily make to the highest echelons of power. She is the fine example of how family ties and connections are the most important political assets in India. Ours remains a patriarchal society and women still face gross discrimination and lack of opportunities in India. We must not kid ourselves and gloss over these facts by idle boasts about Indira Gandhi.

Sunita Williams & Bobby Jindal
I am always amused to hear the name of Sunita Williams as an Indian who has been to space. Here is a woman who is a US citizen, who was born and brought up in the US and who went to space as a part of the US space programme. Yet the Indian media played up the event with a lot of hype. She is Indian only by race (ethnicity) and has no link to the modern Indian nation. I feel that it is completely inappropriate to hail her as an Indian icon. Same case with Bobby Jindal often mentioned as the first Indian to be a state governor in the US.

India has low divorce rate = Indians are happy people
Another argument that I have heard, mostly from elderly Indians is that since India has a super low divorce rate as compared to Western countries where it is very very high, it is a sign that Indian culture is much better and Indians are a happy lot. One must be rather wary of this argument because while at first look it seems very true, the underlying assumption is not really solid.

A lower divorce rate does not necessarily indicate happy marriages. It could also mean that Indians just tend to avoid divorce and endure with bad marriages, which is not a very heartening thought. NGOs claim that the incidence of domestic violence in India is not very low so. This along with the fact that divorces are harder to get due to the lethargy and complex rules of the Indian judiciary might be evidence that the low divorce rate is not necessarily a cause for celebration. While divorce rates of US and western Europe are extremes which I hope India never reaches, I feel that there is no point being over excited in the current low rates.

Stats from http://www.divorcerate.org/ -
India – 1.1%
United States – 50%

There are a lot of things in Indian culture and Indian heritage to be proud of and we should rightfully take pride in them but let us just make sure that we do not get carried away!

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