Name of Source: Blogspot

A storm in a v-cup — v for vocabulary — is how the latest controversy over Shashi Tharoor’s remarks ought to be described. For only someone with a very modest collection of words at his disposal, or a very large hatchet, or both, could possibly interpret the junior minister’s reference to Saudi Arabia being a “valuable interlocutor for [India]” as assigning Riyadh a mediatory role between New Delhi and Islamabad.

‘Interlocutor’ means a person or entity or country involved in a conversation. And the Minister of State for External Affairs was clearly talking about the value of Saudi Arabia as a dialogue partner for India on the subject of Pakistan. He wasn’t even suggesting the Saudis use their good offices to counsel the Pakistani authorities to get serious about terrorism. Over the past decade, that is something every Indian leader has been asking of pretty much any country with clout over Islamabad. On Monday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told reporters he had made a similar request to King Abdullah during his just-concluded visit to the Kingdom.

According to the Cambridge dictionary, the word interlocutor could also be used for “someone who is involved in a conversation and who is representing someone else.” Thus, by way of illustration, R.S. Pandey is the Government of India’s interlocutor for talks with the National Socialist Council of Nagalim. But that makes him a designated representative of the Centre rather than a mediator between the Centre and the NSCN. Thus, even if someone were to claim they had this second dictionary meaning in mind in questioning Mr. Tharoor, the correct accusation would be not that the Minister was advocating Saudi mediation but that he wanted the dialogue with Pakistan to be outsourced to the Saudis, an even bigger absurdity.

A simple reading of Mr. Tharoor’s quote would make it obvious that both constructions are completely unwarranted. In response to a question about Saudi Arabia’s close relations with Pakistan, this is what the Minister actually said: “We feel that Saudi Arabia, of course, has a long and close relationship with Pakistan, but that makes Saudi Arabia all the more valuable an interlocutor for us. When we tell them about our experience, Saudi Arabia listens as somebody who is not in anyway an enemy of Pakistan but a friend of Pakistan and, therefore, I am sure will listen with sympathy and concern to a matter of this nature.”

There is no way these words can be taken as suggesting mediation. If, nevertheless, Mr. Tharoor felt compelled to issue a clarification, this was not for lack of clarity in what he said but for the media’s inability to understand.

That the roots of this controversy lie in poor vocabulary becomes obvious when one traces the development of the story as it unfolded on Sunday. The first media outlets to claim that Mr. Tharoor had asked for Saudi mediation were Urdu language news channels in Pakistan.

Indian channels, which monitor Pakistani channels like hawks, started flashing this claim as ‘breaking news’ by the afternoon. Opposition politicians were then trotted out to give Pavlovian responses and the whole story was padded with references to earlier controversies Mr. Tharoor had been caught up in.

What is surprising is that well after the Minister clarified what he meant and reporters and editors had the chance of consulting their dictionaries, at least three national dailies unfairly accused Mr. Tharoor of seeking Saudi mediation.

Some TV channels also ran breaking news on Monday citing the supposed failure of the Congress party to defend the Minister as proof that the “high command” was indeed very angry with his “interlocutor” reference.

Of course, no actual evidence of such anger was produced.

Mr. Tharoor, who spent his entire working life in the United Nations, is learning the hard way just how vicious and irrational politics can be.

While he must share part of the blame for some earlier controversies, his only fault this time was to use a word many journalists and politicians simply didn’t understand.

Name of Source: The Hindu

Incidentally the above description of Indian news television has been drawn from the blogposts [here and here] by two TV reporters themselves. And we are not even venturing into that apperceptive — and accusatory — piece by P Sainath in the Hindu, which has gone unanswered by otherwise so-prone-to-feign-indignation star editors and editor-cum-owners of the Indian news television houses.
Just a quick recap of what happened earlier today. In response to a question on whether India will seek Saudi Arabia’s support to influence Pakistan to address India’s concerns over terrorism emanating from Pakistani territory, Minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor, as part of the Indian PM’s delegation to Saudi Arabia said:

We feel Saudi Arabia has a long and close relationship with Pakistan and that makes Saudi a more valuable interlocutor to us.[TOI]

The statement was unequivocal, on-the-record, captured by the TV cameras and accurately tweeted by ANI News editor Ms. Smita Prakash. A little discussion on the subject took place on twitter between Smita, Acorn, Offstumped, Filter Coffee, and this blogger, which resulted in a blogpost on the subject by The Acorn. Attempts to search the above quote and related news item on the web met with no success for a couple of hours after that.

By late in the afternoon, the Indian TV news stations woke up from their Sunday slumber and flashing tickers on TV screens said that Tharoor had asked for Saudi mediation with Pakistan. More amazingly, TV news stations played the video clip of Tharoor making the statement and followed up the clip with newsreaders interchangeably using the words like interlocution, mediation and intervention in their commentary. English news channel editors are supposed to possess a decent knowledge of the language to not make such basic errors. Even if they don’t, a quick glance through a good dictionary or a Wiki search on the internet would have explained the meaning of interlocutor to the editors. Perhaps, as someone suggested, this being a Holi weekend, editors were on leave, leaving this to rookie interns. More on that weekend thing later.
If one reads it carefully, this is not really a path-breaking statement. Even if one were to read signs of a tactical shift in India’s position on bilateral nature of disputes with Pakistan, it nowhere — by any stretch of imagination — calls for a mediation or intervention. It merely suggests that India is asking Saudi Arabia to use its influence over Pakistan so that India and its citizens are better protected from the jehadi terror emanating from Pakistan. They say it is a dramatic shift without looking back at the active interest displayed by the US [interlocution, mediation, intervention, interference... take your pick here] to bring the Kargil conflict to an end in 1999 and then to stall the military stand-off between India and Pakistan in the wake of the attack on the Indian Parliament. The Acorn explains the geo-political context in which this is a realistic option for India today; although other analysts and media houses are free to disagree with the proposition and criticise it vehemently. What they are not free to do though is twist the statement to suit their argument and create a controversy that harms the national interest.

That bring us to the real issue under the scanner. It is not about Shashi Tharoor or the choice of English words. It is about the nature of some media houses in this country to feed off manufactured controversies to sustain their TRPs. National interest be damned.

The callous and disdainful attitude of the electronic media is best exemplified by this twitter conversation between Suhasini Haidar, Deputy Foreign Affairs Editor of CNN-IBN and The Acorn. First, the tweets from Suhasini.
suhasinih Methinks the articulation of interlocution may have been particularly badly timed….on a long news-free holi weekend.
suhasinih Or maybe we say it like it is….that India wd love for US, China and Saudi to intervene on OUR behalf with Pak. But nt the other way around
suhasinih Anyway Tharoor has now clarified….

Here is Nitin Pai’s reply.
acorn @suhasinih It is shameful that media decided to misrepresent a nuanced point @shashitharoor made, because it was a news-free holi weekend
acorn Good people of India beware, the TV media has a long news-free weekend!
And here comes the killer patronising line, with a smiley in tow, from Suhasini against the other media [i.e. bloggers and twitter users]
suhasinih @acorn also beware of media that blames media rather than gov
And finally, Nitin again.
acorn @suhasinih We do need media to keep media on the ball. Government is checked by opposition, media & punished by public. Not so for media

It was more surprising because Suhasini, in her media pieces and social media interactions, comes out as one of the more sensible and down-to-earth journalists on Indian television. One can then well imagine the attitude of those starry TV news editors that populate and shine on the Indian news channels.
It is difficult to digest the patronising and dismissive tone which reeks of unbridled power — We make the rules, we decide how it is done, we know best, how dare these petty bloggers correct us or point out the facts to us? And finally, we give a damn.

There were even more cynical responses from the media fraternity. Mr Tharoor has again created a controversy to stay in the news. Well, one may disagree with Mr Tharoor and his conduct or views but to bring it down to the level of a personal vendetta campaign is rather disagreeable. Personal attacks are just not done, whether on a politician or on a journalist.

A related argument is that why can’t Mr. Tharoor be like other politicians and keep quiet. This actually seems to be the whole agenda of this campaign to create controversies around Mr. Tharoor and diss him in the public domain. Certain sections of the electronic media are so rooted in their old ways that they don’t want our ministers to directly talk to the people, and talk a lot more at that. Rather than report that accurately, they want to continue with the old-style nexus between certain journalists and ministers. These ministers will either provide leaks attributable to sources within the government or interviews to favoured news channels, resulting in exclusives. Once the government becomes more transparent and accessible to all in its direct communications, these journalists and media houses will lose this exclusivity and the business their channels derive from that nexus, and consequent exclusivity.

This is not a rant against a particular journalist or a media house or in favour of one smart politician. This is not even about bloggers versus mainstream media. That’s an old story played many times over. This is about the role and responsibility, or lack of it, amidst sections of the Indian mainstream media, especially those broadcasting in the English language on television. If they claim to hold a mirror to all the other sections of the society, they must learn to hold a mirror to themselves. Else it will hurt them badly when active sections of the society, or even the government, are forced to hold a mirror to them and their ugly reflection is out in the open. They won’t certainly want that to happen. Nor does the nation.

Name of Source: Pragmatic National Interest

The gospel of self-improvement has taken varied forms throughout history and is perhaps America’s most successful export. But in the digital age, the idea of improving yourself is under siege by a similar-seeming but utterly different gospel: that of self-branding.

The Internet-connected class worldwide faces growing pressure to cultivate a personal brand. Ordinary people are now told to acquire what once only companies and celebrities required: online “findability,” thousands of Google hits and Twitter followers, a niche of their own, a virtual network of patrons, a personal Wikipedia page and dot-com domain.

“The Internet has forced everyone in the world to become a marketer,” said Dan Schawbel, a personal-branding guru and the author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success.” (Mr. Schawbel, 26, has more than 100,000 Google listings for his name, 70,000 Twitter followers and a self-styled niche as the “personal branding expert for Gen-Y.”)

The rise of the personal brand reflects changing economic structures, as secure lifetime employment gives way to a churning market in tasks. It suggests a new unscriptedness in institutions as we evolve from the broadcast age to the age of retweets. It augurs a future in which we all function like one-person conglomerates, calculating how every action affects our positioning.

The personal-branding field traces its origins to the 1997 essay “The Brand Called You,” by the management expert Tom Peters. But only with the rise of easy-to-use social-media tools has one-person brand management become practical. Columbia University and other institutions now teach it; training firms peddle it in India and China; Microsoft has sought to bring its precepts to the poor; PricewaterhouseCoopers this week announced a Personal Brand Week, providing free online tips for college students.

What distinguishes personal branding from other self-cultivation is its emphasis on reputation over talent, on “explicit self-packaging,” as the scholars Daniel Lair, Katie Sullivan and George Cheney have observed: “Here, success is not determined by individuals’ internal sets of skills, motivations, and interests but, rather, by how effectively they are arranged, crystallized, and labeled.”

As personal-branding experts see it, they are merely responding to new economic realities. It is no longer enough, they say, to join an organization and ride its brand for decades. Companies are outsourcing aggressively; globalization is creating and destroying industries more rapidly than before; the Web is fostering job-hopping; the recession is throwing millions on the street.

In this new world, personal branders argue, self-packaging rules.

Employees are told to run permanent marketing campaigns to build an audience that follows their tweets and maintains ambient Facebook-level awareness of what they are doing. This audience belongs to you, not your organization, branders say; it will follow you and attract employers to you.

Strenuous personal branding is now seen among unelected politicians who speak daily (often via assistants who do the typing) to massive audiences through social media. Corporate employees build reputations online without spokespeople supervising them. Journalists, too, blog, tweet and Facebook about their reporting, instead of simply reporting.

But among the more remarkable places to watch the spread of off-message personal branding is in the very message-conscious world of diplomacy.

In the United States, for example, the State Department has allowed tech-savvy senior officials like Jared Cohen, Alec Ross and Katie Stanton to maintain robust personal brands. On Twitter, they report on affairs of state and encourage giving to Haiti, while also offering lighter fare, from daily minutiae (“best diplomacy training is coaching my 7 y/o’s basketball team”) to film reviews (“Soderbergh’s ‘The Informant’ was pretty mediocre”).

Mr. Ross and Mr. Cohen have Twitter fan bases of around 300,000 each, while the State Department’s official channel has about 14,000.

Recognizing this disparity, the State Department sent an unconventional delegation to Moscow last week with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the actor (and feverish tweeter) Ashton Kutcher and the tech-savvy Mr. Cohen as models of what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls “21st-century statecraft.” Some at the State Department worry about security risks and misstatements by diplomat-tweeters. But Ms. Stanton, who once worked at Google, said that personal brands — her Twitter biography is “Mom. Public Servant. Cupcake Connoisseur” — might convince skeptical foreigners to give the United States another look.

“It’s easier to trust individuals than institutions,” she said.

For those who bemoan the scriptedness of public officials or the brainwashing of corporate advertising, personal brands can be deliverance. If broadcast television over decades encouraged institutions to funnel their message into one voice, the rise of social media is restoring multiplicity. Institutions are going off-message again.

But Shashi Tharoor, the deputy foreign minister of India and a diplomat-Twitterer with more than 650,000 followers, told me that off-message communication can, by personalizing officials, “strengthen the acceptability of the official message.”

“Ministers in India are generally seen as unknowable and unapproachable by the average citizen,” he said. “Sharing my thoughts, and details of my work, my life and preoccupations, is partly an effort to show the public that their leaders are people they can relate to.” Old-guard politicians are less enthused about Mr. Tharoor’s tweets, however, and he has attracted criticism for defying protocol.

Companies, too, are wrestling with personal brands. Jonny Bentwood, the head of analyst relations for the public-relations firm Edelman, told me that many clients were torn between the view that multiple voices cheapen a brand and an emergent sense that attracting talent requires tolerating brands-within-a-brand.

In a much-blogged-about episode, Forrester Research, a market-research firm, this month moved to prohibit star analysts from publishing analysis on personal blogs. The move was widely interpreted as a backlash against personal brands.

Personal branding will, of course, change not just big institutions but also the lives of brandable individuals. Will it improve job security or simply increase our anxiety? Will it divert power and influence from the well-educated to the merely well-branded? Will brand-building distract us?

There is great pressure from personal audiences to say hello from Beijing, to speed-review “Avatar,” to broadcast the meeting’s latest insight.

But is the society always better off with the undigested utterance, the instantaneous attempt at positioning? And in marketing ourselves, will we neglect the pursuit of actually improving?

Name of Source: New York Times

Actors Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Oscar Award-winning music composer A R Rahman were chosen as India’s Icon of the Last 21 Years in Entertainment.

Cricket stars Sachin Tendulkar and Mahendra Singh Dhoni got the honour in Sports and Infosys founder-chairman N R Narayana Murthy in Business.

The awards were given to mark NDTV’s 21 years in television broadcasting. NDTV’s annual Indian of the Year awards were also given away at the function, with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar being honoured as the Political Leader of the Year, badminton star Saina Nehwal as the Sportsperson of the Year, actor Ranbir Kapoor as the Male Entertainer of the Year, actress Priyanka Chopera as the Female Entertainer of the Year and industrialist Anand Mahindra as the Businessperson of the Year.

Union Home Minister P Chidambaram was the chief guest at the function, which was also attended by, among others, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Lal Krishna Advani, Mr Nitish Kumar, Union Ministers Praful Patel and Shashi Tharoor, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and industrialist Rahul Bajaj.

Also present were actors Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, film-makers Karan Johar and Anurag Kashyap, actors Rishi and Neetu Kapoor, tennis player Sania Mirza, former cricketer Ajay Jadeja, A R Rahman, lyricist Javed Akhtar and his actress-wife Shabana Azmi, shooter Raghvendra Singh Rathore and actress Kalki Koelchin.

The evening was marked by a special performance of Rahman’s Oscar Award-winning song, “Jai Ho” from the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

Rukhsana Kausar of Jammu & Kashmir, who fought back terrorists, was honoured with a special Bravery Award at the function, while Aradhana Gupta was named Extraordinary Indian for battling against several odds in the Ruchika Girhotra case in Chandigarh. Babar Ali from Murshidabad was also given the Extraordinary Indian award for running an afternoon school for underprivileged children in his village.

The Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sanghathan was honoured with the LIC Unsung Hero award for spearheading the movement for the victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy while Karan Johar was chosen as the Social Networking Icon of the Year for making tweeting popular, especially in Bollywood.

Anurag Kashyap got a special jury mention for making unconventional cinema popular and Dr Shashi Tharoor was honoured as a New Age Politician for using new media to reach out to people.

The winners of the awards were chosen through a multi-layered process guided by a jury that comprised Ms Naina Lal Kidwai, Country Head, HSBC India, Ms Shabana Azmi, social activist Aruna Roy, chess player Vishwanathan Anand, eminent advocate Fali S Nariman, NDTV Chairman Prannoy Roy and NDTV 24X7 Senior Managing Editor Sonia Varma Singh.

Name of Source: Net Indian

Mumbai: Indian banks not buying toxic mortgage-backed securities, a good show on the services export front, robust remittances from abroad and the fact that the GDP does not come from the external sector, has helped India cope well with the global economic crisis, Union Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor said on Tuesday.

When most countries suffered negative growth rates in at least one quarter in the last two years, India’s GDP grew around 6 per cent in every quarter, he said at a function.

Many reasons were attributed for this but first “our (India’s) banks and financial institutions were not tempted to buy the toxic mortgage-supported securities and engage in the fancy derivatives and credit-default swaps that ruined several Western financial institutions,” Tharoor said here.

That the country’s service exports continued to do well also helped, though its merchandise exports declined about 30 per cent, the former UN diplomat said.

“Remittances from overseas Indian community remained robust reaching USD 46.4 billion in 2008-09, the bulk of which came from hard-working, blue-collar Indian expatriate community in the Gulf,” Tharoor said.

And finally, some 80 per cent of the GDP does not come from the external sector but from Indians producing goods and services for other Indians in India, the Minister said.

Besides these developments, the country’s financial authorities have pursued policies providing for lower interest rates, expanded credit and lower excise duties, “all of which have served to boost economic activity,” Tharoor said.

When the financial crisis began in September 2008, foreign investors withdrew USD 12 billion from India’s stock markets. But they have now come back with USD 27.3 billion in spite of the global financial crisis and FDI reached a peak rate of USD 1 billion per week in May 2009, he said.

According to forecasts, India could be the world’s fifth-largest economy by 2020, at least in GDP terms, he said.

However, there was still a long way to go, he said, pointing out that while India has been recognised as a leading nuclear power, 600 million Indians still have no access to electricity and there are daily power cuts even in Delhi.

“We are the world’s leading manufacturers of generic medication for illnesses such as AIDS, but we have 3 million of our own citizens without access to AIDS medication, another 2 million with TB and tens of millions with no health centre or clinic within 10-kilometres of their places of residence.”

Similarly, while India has trained world-class scientists and engineers, nearly 400 million are still illiterate, Tharoor said.

The Minister highlighted the problem of unemployment and said “we just have a lot more to do before it can be anything like paradise for the vast majority of our fellow citizens”.

Name of Source: Zee News

Union Rural Development Minister C.P. Joshi has ensured that people from his home state Rajasthan reap the benefits of his ministry’s welfare schemes. So, every second day he is in the state either to address a workshop or launch a development programme. This prompted an official to remark that the ministry should have one more office in Bhilwara or Udaipur or Jaipur. Is the minister listening?

Tharoor’s zoo story

Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor is not known for his love for elephants. But as an MP from Thiruvananthapuram he has pitched for Maheshwari, an elephant living in a zoo in the Kerala capital since 1946. In a letter addressed to Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh, he said Maheshwari should be kept in the “comforting environs”. The intervention came in the wake of the Centre’s decision to take elephants out of zoo enclosures and keep them in the “facilities” of the forest department. Maheswari needs medical attention, Tharoor wrote.

An unequal music

Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal’s interest in amending the Copyright Act to enable musicians to get a share of the royalty seems to have come from personal experience. Sibal recently admitted to having helped shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan when the latter was undergoing a bad financial phase. He said that while Khan’s work was used widely, the maestro didn’t get any share of the royalty and spent his life in penury.

Say cottage cheese

The Group of Ministers for the Commonwealth Games headed by Union Urban Development Minister S. Jaipal Reddy has been meeting almost every fortnight as the sporting extravaganza draws near. Top bureaucrats who have to attend the meetings regularly have decided to go “healthy.” Following this samosas and pakodas have now been replaced with the healthy paneer tikka at these meetings.

Intelligence of humour

During the debate on whether greater political control was necessary to improve the functioning of intelligence agencies, Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi had the audience in splits with some of his comments on the Intelligence Bureau. Sample these: “If the IB archives were opened, we’re sure to find initial reports which describe the RSS as a peaceful cultural organisation.” “Whenever anyone asks me for a reference to try for a Rajya Sabha ticket, I tell him, make friends with any IB officer, and get him to send a favourable report about you to the Centre… you are sure to get the ticket.”

Didi’s railing and ranting

If there is one individual who can take on the maverick Mamata Banerjee, it’s Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. At a recent cabinet meeting, Mukherjee bluntly told the Railways Minister that if she was unwilling to hike passenger fares to raise revenues internally, he was equally unwilling to open the purse strings for special railways projects. After much raving and ranting Banerjee finally managed to secure clearance for ten of the 24 proposals on her list, out of which 14 concerned West Bengal.

Name of Source: Hindustan Times