indians – Pertinent Observations

Name mutilation

Like Bangalore supposedly became Bengaluru a few years back (when HDK was cheap minister), West Bengal is going to change its name to “Poschim Bongo” or some such thing. Now, unlike Bombay-Mumbai or Madras-Chennai, the thing with these name changes is that they are merely globalization of local names. Let me explain.

Bombay (bom bahia or good port in Portuguese) and Mumbai (of Mumba Devi) are fundamentally different. Madras (mad race? ) and Chennai (beautiful) are again fundamentally different. While I disagree with those name changes and still prefer to call those cities by their former names, I see that the change in those names at least has some merit. They wanted to get rid of their colonial British-given names (and i’m sure Tams wanted to prove they aren’t a mad race, though they might have achieved the opposite through this action) and chose local names in the local language.

When Bangalore’s name was supposedly changed to “Bengaluru” a few years back, Kannada newspapers (I used to subscribe to Vijaya Karnataka back then) had a tough time explaining the name change. Because Bangalore has forever been known as “Bengaluru” in Kannada. Even now, when I speak in Kannada I say “Bengaluru” but I say “Bangalore” when speaking in any other language. While it might have been a noble intention by HDK and UR Ananthamurthy and others behind the name change to get the non-Kannadigas to use the Kannada name, the effect has been completely counterproductive.

Till date, I’m yet to meet someone who is not conversant in Kannada to pronounce “BengaLuru” correctly. First of all, most people can’t say the “L” sound and instead pronounce it as “l” (in Kannada that can make a profound difference. for example “hELu” is “tell” while “hElu” is “shit” ). Next (this is the problem with most North Indians), people have trouble pronouncing the short ‘e’ sound. Finally, it’s hard for people to figure out that the first U in Bengaluru is to be pronounced long and the terminal u should be pronounced short. The combination of all these means horribly messed up pronunciation, which makes one wonder why they bothered to “change” the name at all.

West Bengal doesn’t seem to have learnt from this experience of Bangalore. They want to call themselves “Poschim Bongo” it seems. Not being a bong, I’m going to have major difficulty in pronouncing that name, and I might end up pronouncing it in a way that makes most bongs cringe. I really hope they see sense before they make this name change official and opt for a saner name, if they want to change their name at all that is.

One thing they could try would be to knock that “west” off their name (I believe the Times of India has been campaigning for this). West Bengal was the primary reason that I got my directions and geography horribly wrong till I was some eight years old. I used to assume that “West Bengal” was at the western edge of India! Especially since Bangladesh is no more called “East Bengal”.

Given that they are mostly commie, one thing they could try is probably to go the East Germany or North Korea way, and name themselves “Democratic State of Bengal” or some such thing.

Remembering Names and Pattern Recognition

I spent the first half of this week attending a Pan-Asia training program in Hong Kong. Most of the people attending this program were from the Tokyo and Hong Kong offices of our firm, and most of them happened to be natives of China, Japan and Korea. It was a wonderful training program and gave much scope for networking. The biggest surprise to me, however, was about how bad I was during the two days at remembering names – something I consider myself good at.

We Indians constantly crib that westerners are usually bad at catching our names while on the other hand that we don’t have much trouble remembering their names. Thinking about it, I think name recognition is basically an exercise in pattern recognition and the ease of rememberance of a certain class of names depends on how easily we can recognize those patterns.

If you are familiar with the broad class of names of a particular ethnicity (let’s say Indian Hindu for example), you don’t really need to remember the name as a collection of syllables. You only need to know say the first letter, or an abstract concept which is what the name means, or a combination of this and it is likely that you can remember the full name.

The thing wiht western names, however, is that due to Hollywood, or sport, or colonial rule, or the fact that Indian Christians have names similar to mostly christian Westerners, most Western names are familiar to us. And because of this familiarity, it is not hard at all for us to remember the name of the average Westerner. On the contrary, due to lack of exposure, Westerners can’t recognize patterns in Indian names because of which it is hard for them to remember our names.

It is due to lack of general familiarty with Chinese and Japanese names that I found it so hard to remember names during the recent trip. There was no way I could break down names into easy combination of syllables (yeah for example Hi-ro-hi-to consists of all easy syllables, but how many people called hirohito would you know for you to remember the whole name by just remembering part of the name) and so I had the additional responsibility of remembering all the syllables in the names and the combination in which they occurred.

On a related note, a disproportionate proportion of people of Chinese origin at the training had a christian (western) first name and a chinese last name (eg. Michael Chang). But then I suppose this is because a lot of Chinese people adopt a “Western name” to make matters simple when they migrate or something (so for example, someone called Chang Sun-Wang will convert his name to Stephen Chang).

Bangalore Book Festival

So today I made my way to Gayatri Vihar in the Palace Grounds to visit the Bangalore Book Festival, on its last day. It was interesting, though a bit crowded (what would you expect on the last day of an exhibition? and that too, when it’s a Sunday?). I didn’t buy much (just picked up two books) given the massive unread pile that lies at home. However, there was much scope for pertinent observations. Like I always do when I have a large number of unrelated pertinent observations, I’ll write this in bullet point form.

There were some 200 stalls. Actually, there might have been more. I didn’t keep count, despite the stalls having been numbered. Yeah, you can say that I wasn’t very observant.
All the major bookshops in Bangalore barring the multicity ones had set up shop there. I don’t really know what they were doing there. Or were they just trying to capture the market that only buys in fairs? Or did they set up stall there just to advertise themselves?
It seems like a lot of shops were trying to use the fair to get rid of inventory they wanted to discard. All they had to do was to stack all of this on one table and put a common price tag (say Rs. 50) on every book in that collection, and it was enough to draw insane crowds
One interesting stall at the fair had been set up by pothi.com an online self-publishing company. I’ll probably check them out sometime next year when I might want to publish a blook. Seems like an interesting business model they’ve got. Print on demand!
I also met the flipkart.com guys at the fair. Once again, they were there for advertising themselves. Need to check them out sometime. Given the kind of books I buy, I think online is the best place to get long tail stuff.
There was an incredibly large number of islamic publishing houses at the fair! And have you guys seen the “want qur an? call 98xxxxxxxx for free copy” hoardings all over the city? Wonder why the Bajrang Dal doesn’t target those
There was large vernacular presence at the fair. I remember reading in the papers that there was a quota for Kannada publishers, but there was reasonable presence for other languages also, like Gult, Tam, Mellu, Hindi
A large number of stalls were ideology driven. Publishing houses attached to cults had set up stalls, probably to further the cause of their own cult. So there was an ISKCON stall, a Ramakrishna Mutt stall, a Ramana Maharshi stall, etc.
Attendance at most of these niche stalls was quite thin, as people mostly crowded the stalls being run by bookstores in order to hunt for bargains. Attendance was also mostly thin at publisher-run stalls, making me wonder why most of these people had bothered to come to the fair at all.
I saw one awesomely funny banner at the place. It was by “Dr Partha Bagchi, the world leader in stammering for last 20 years” or some such thing. Was too lazy to pull out my phone and click pic. But it was a masterpiece of a banner
Another interesting ideological publisher there was “Leftword books”. Their two sales reps were in kurtas and carrying jholas (ok I made the latter part up). And they were sellling all sorts of left-wing books. Wonder who funds them! And they were also selling posters of Che for 10 bucks each
I wonder what impact this fair will have on bookstores in Bangalore in the next few days. Or probably it was mostly the non-regular book buyers who did business at the fair and so the regulars will be back at their favourite shops tomorrow.

I bought two books. Vedam Jaishankar’s Casting A Spell: A history of Karnataka cricket (I got it at Rs. 200, as opposed to a list price of Rs 500) and Ravi Vasudevan’s “Making Meaning in Indian Cinema”.

Cooking

I’m in the process of my weekly cooking. I’m making onion and potato sambar which should last me for about four meals – one tonight, and for three meals during the course of this week. I have been on and off the phone to my mother, as she has been giving out expert instructions from the other end of the other side (yes, this is a fighter sambar that i’m making). It’s almost done, and I’m waiting for the pressure cooker to cool down. There is a small 5 minute process to be done after that happens, and I’m good for the week.

I can’t help but think that our normal process of meal preparation (talking of india in general here) is plain inefficient. Cooking happens at least once a day, in each and every household. You have women balancing jobs, kids and at the same time tryign to find time to cook. Every day. Some people hire professional cooks, who again come once or twice a day in order to cook, and get paid a decent amount (I’m told the going rate for a Brahmin cook (yes, this market is segmented by caste) in Bangalore is Rs. 4000 a month). But then again, you need to be around when the cook arrives, occasionally supervise the cooking, and the quality of food churned out by most of these small-quantity cooks is not much higher than abysmal.

There is tremendous opportunity for economies of scale when it comes to cooking. For example, it takes exactly the same amount of effort to make 1 kilo of rice as it does to make 10 kilos of rice. It is a similar case with sambar, and rasam, and with most curries (even north indian curies) – apart from the effort involved in cutting vegetables which varies linearly with the amount of stuff to be cooked. Yet we choose to do it every day, in every house hold, sometimes up to three times a day. There is something wrong right?

There are two ways in which demand can be aggregated in order to exploit economies of scale – across days and across households. Indians in general prefer fresh food. Even after the introduction of the refrigerator a few decades back, a number of families didn’t buy one because they thought that would encourage consumption of stale food (I don’t have any such fundaes so I cook once a week). There are a number of people who insist that each meal be cooked fresh – I remember that my late father used to insist that at least rice be cooked just prior to each meal (he was ok with not-so fresh sambar, etc.).

Caste fundaes mean that eating out hasn’t traditionally been popular in India. Even nowadays, when you have a lot of people living alone, or with friends, there are very few people who eat out every meal. One look at the timings of the traditional eateries in Bangalore (MTR, Brahmin’s coffee bar, the various SLVs, Vidyarthi Bhavan) tells you a story – they are primarily breakfast and tea restaurants. MTR has recently (12 yrs back) introduced lunch nad dinner but had always been a breakfast and tea place. Most of these places would open from 7 to 11 in the morning and again from 3 to 8 in the evening.

Then there are more religious fundaes which encourage the cooking of each meal fresh – if you observe traditional people with sacred threads eat, you might observe that they do one small pooja with the rice and ghee before starting off. Would anyone want to do that with stale food? Again – similar religious fundaes have traditionally stopped people from eating out. Which is why we have the prevailing model of each meal being prepared in each household.

The problem with most restaurants in India is that they don’t serve home food. After all, they have never been the staple (i.e. every meal) source of food for people, so they have always tried to differentiate themselves from home food. The only restaurants that serve stuff that is made in a similar manner as in households are the small “messes” that operate in areas with a large concentration of single people living without family.

Going forward, I wonder if there is a market for restaurants which make food that is similar to what is made in households (of course it differs by genre, but within a genre it will be made similar to the way stuff is made in households), and which are not too expensive. They might operate on take-away or delivery model (i know that right now there are lots of tiffin-carrier providers, but they need to scale up significantly). They can exploit the economies of scale (both in terms of cost as well as effort) and provide home-like food for people who would otherwise want to keep a cook.

A good place to start this model would be areas with large concentratioon of single people, or double-income couples – something like Gurgaon. Would there be a market for someone who would provide hygienically made and tasty home-style north indian thalis at around Rs. 30 per plate? Economies of scale mean that this food is likely to be produced at a very cheap cost to the restaurant which will enable it to be priced cheap. The price point will also mean that people will eat there rather than hiring a cook to cook at home. Of course, there needs to be reasonable variety at every meal – which again means that hte restaurant should be reasonably big.

The problem with this model is it might not be feasible as a very small business. It needs to start off in a big way, serving some 1000 people every session – this is the only way enough economies of scale can be harnessed to make things cheap and also provide variety.

Assuming a couple of these start in Gurgaon and are successful, and the model spreads around the country. There is a good chance that a large section of the population will get out of the make every meal every day at every household model.

Lazy post: Search Phrases: March 2009

I think I’ll make this a monthly feature: collecting the whackiest search terms that people use to land up on my blog, and posting them here. I had published one such list for February. Here goes the list for March:

describe my job
apprentics for carpenter in gurgaon
can north indians survive in the south
carnatic music pakistan
dry fish market in orisa & madrass contact numbers
examples of bastardization in a sentence
how can death be postponed by chanting mantras?
kodhi is a cheap guy
savitabhabhi.com competition
verb phrases of the behavior of atticus
what are some other versions of dashavatar -film -songs -jobs -dvd -movie