Another bag - and a very strange look

In keeping with the usual Indian habit of not practicing what we preach, I almost stepped out yesterday to buy my breakfast items without a bag. Thankfully I was reminded of my preaching by my very alert roommate and I succesfully stepped out with what has now become my shopping cover (a plastic bag admittedly, but it is reuse!)

Note, this shop is different from the one in my previous post. It's smaller, family-run and less crowded than the retail chain. So with all required items purchased, I stepped up to the counter again. Again, just as the items were about to be bagged, I pulled out my own bag and presented it to the man. The look that I got from him at that moment was somewhere between what E.T got when it first landed on earth and the look that George.W.Bush has got throughout the time he has been on earth. In fact, if I weren't a regular customer, it seemed pretty sure he was going to label me crazy and chase me out of the shop.

If you're the logical type, it is an irrational act on many levels. I am saving them one bag, irrespective of how miniscule that cos saving is. This shop did not have any branding on its bag anyway, and neither did the bag that I took. Hence there is no marketing loss. And yet, from an anthropological perspective, it was a perfectly natural thing to do. It is called inertia. Or 'status quo' bias. I ticked him off so much simply by breaking his process of grabbing a fresh plastic bag from his stack, blowing it open, dumping the things inside... the whole line. I broke the process, with an 'unnatural' act, and hence it became extra effort for the person.

Any object at rest or motion will continue to remain in rest or motion unless acted upon by an external force...

I saved one plastic bag today

Every time I go to a retailer, I get the mandatory plastic bag in which to put the items I have purchased. This happens repetitively, the bag is in use for barely 20 minutes (walking back home for a maximum of 1km) and they all pile up in one shelf in my cupboard one after another. Hence, they are also annoying.

Today, when I had to buy a bunch of household essentials from the friendly neighbourhood retailer, this time I took my own bag. Or rather, a bag I'd got from the same friendly neighbourhood retailer just three days ago. When I reached the head of the counter and the cashier reached for the bag, I whipped out my white used bag from my pocket in my best Clint Eastwood impression. The man at the till looked at me quizzically, but there's of course no reason for him to reject my wish to use my own bag. And he duly filled 'er up and sent me on my way. The bag held for the 20 minute walk, got emptied in my house and went back into the shelf.

It isn't exactly an earth-saving act. It's one plastic bag less and that too for a very selfish reason of reducing the clutter in my cupboard. But if it has served the purpose it was meant to serve just as well as a new bag, and if I can use the same bag over at least 10 purchases, that's 9 less plastic bags in landfills like these:


Of course, I am now naturally inclined to get holier-then-thou and ask you to think about how much lesser bags there would be if each of us reduced 9 plastic bags from being used. Or use fancy terms like BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag) and expound upon the merits of doing that as well. Or tell you how we can even put that 1 bag out of use if we use a jute bag. However, I'll resist all those inclinations now. All that's for later. This post is only about what I did. And what I did was save one plastic bag today.

So what did you do today?

The UID Project

Dear Mr. Nilekani,

Firstly, let me congratulate you for stepping back from the corporate world and consenting to take upon yourself the onerous task of accounting for every single one of our 1.3 Billion and growing population. As a 'giving back' step to society, it is very commendable and it also helps that you've picked what is definitely an area of expertise to give back in. Hopefully you can bring all of your expertise and know-how gained in the corporate world and see this project to completion successfully.

I remember when the UID project was announced and you were given special cabinet rank to execute it. I remember your interview over phone with Shereen Bahn on CNBC, not one on my regular-channels list admittedly. After that of course the project has been going on, as always happens with projects of this size and magnitude, at its own pace and time. And cost. So why am I suddenly reminded about this now?

The reason is because today, I got Uniquely IDed. A census officer came over to our place today as part of the National 2010 census, and also to collect details for the UID. And the whole experience left me with a lot of headaches about the management of the project, which I'm sure have crossed your mind as well and you are looking to solve. Still, as a concerned citizen, just my two penny worth of thoughts in what will finally give the Social Security number equivalent to all of us in this country.

Firstly, there are three of us living in a shared apartment - an undeniable feature of almost every house in a radius of 5kms from where I live. I'm sure the same is the case with houses in Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai and every other city in this country. Most of us are temporary residents there with permanent addresses all given differently. In such a situation, is there going to be an effort to cross-reference people scattered over the country to the actual households they belong to? By permanent address or something would be the way to go I'd think?

The second issue is with the language. The officer who came around took down our names in the regional language. I'm sure there is going to be a lot of Lost in Translation occurring when these names are transliterated back into English for the UID. And I don't want any issues when the spelling on my UID does not match the spelling on my passport because someone made a typo at the data entry point.

Also I would apparently receive my UID from the local Corporation, 6 months down the line. What if I'm not in this Corporation 6 months down the line? And have surrendered my local phone number? It is the only means of contact that the Census officer has for all three of us in this house, since he took my name as 'head of the family' - another concept which cannot apply to shared residences like ours. Anyway yes. I'm now tied down to this city's Corporation for the Identity Proof which is supposedly trans-national and should be provided to ALL citizens of this country.

Those are just some of the issues that I, solely from my point of view, thought about. Expanding my line of thought to the logistics and data collection of the exercise throws up a lot more questions. For example, will the Database be able to cross-reference me and my father as belonging to the same family, though our census happened in different cities? How would it do this, considering the permanent address cannot be a unique key on which databases can be related. The census officer mentioned that he'd come around 5 times to a house. Even allowing that all visits are on weekends, that's about 5 visits over a month. It's quite likely that families are out on month-long vacations. Especially in the summer. Do they just get missed then?

I'm sure there are some issues among these which have been dismissed as inevitable. But there are some points where one wonders, can this not be done better. For example, there's already a huge database of unique Identifications in the form of the PAN card, especially among the salaried class. That's about 250 Million people that have been covered already, and there must be a way to sync that up with the census exercise. For the migrant issue, or the language issue, there's only so much care that can be taking I guess. But the point is, the painstaking and accurate part of the work has to come at this first point of data collection. And I somehow feel there should be a better way to structure this to avoid inaccuracies or double counts.

I guess that's why you're heading the project then, and not me. Because given enough manpower, I'm sure any educated Indian can get the rest of the process after the data collection right. It's to figure out how to get that part right, while ensuring it's not a mammoth time and cost exercise, that your experience comes in I guess. Well, I sure hope you can pull it off.

Regards.

Karthik Call Waiting

The multiplex-boom in India, with their over-cushioned seats, over-priced popcorn and over-stretched parking lots have led to a genre of made-for-multiplex movies. Movies coming from a distinctly setting, with characters that most people watching the movie recognize immediately as themselves, their cubicle-mate, their next-door neighbour... it's brought Hindi cinema a lot closer to its audience, at least the urban audience. However, it fails to take into account that this audience is also heavily into American/English pop-culture and is not going to appreciate one's recycling of old stories. KCK falls into that category.

A first heads-up for those who haven't watched the movie and haven't read up a synopsis of it anywhere - it's not a sugar-laden love story. Even if that's the impression you got watching Deepika Padukone making the collective male populace go 'Uffff, teri ada' on any of the innumerable music channels. If the friend next to you turns and says 'You didn't tell me you were bringing me to a horror movie', shrug and smile. For those who have read the synopsis and have a vague clue what it is about, it's not a thriller either. It's just confused. Like the protagonist himself.

I will not do a brief synopsis of the movie or anything because it's probably present in a million places. Farhan Akthar is Karthik, doing a role which you immediately think Irrfan Khan with his sleepy Vodafone ad voice would be much better at. Deepika Padukone is hot, and trying her best to justify her presence in the movie. There's a psychiatrist who takes 'stating the obvious' to levels never seen before. And there's a Japanese-made telephone which is quite eerie and is obviously the technological predecessor of later Japanese techno-horrors as seen in The Ring.

Karthik has issues in life (he's going to a psychiatrist, duh). The issues stem from childhood scarring, are made worse by a boss who doesn't have a single polite bone on his body, and the fact that the hottest girl in the office sees right through/over/above him. The last part he can have no complaints about I think, he's lucky there even is a hot girl in his office. But personal feelings aside, that's his life. And the psychiatrist is just no bloody help. Until... drumroll. Or rather, ring tone. It's a voice claiming to be Karthik and he rights everything in Karthik's (the non-phone one) life, within 30 first-half minutes. At this point, you're already thinking 'Ohh, Fight Club. Or Beautiful Mind'.

Obviously, he can't tell people about his phone friend without them calling him Cuckoo. Especially his girlfriend, who has apparently been through too many bad relationships and a cuckoo boyfriend is really the last thing she needs. Confusing, this lassie. She mocks him for being a 'safe guy who would never misbehave with a girl', then she says 'you won't be like all them other guys right?'. Make up your mind darling, do you want safe or sorry? A straight lift of a line from the sitcom Two and a Half Men about how girls:men::dogs:cars doesn't help clarify matters any. So anyway, the lassie says he better get help or else. And eerie phone Karthik simply doesn't like that. So everything he built in the 30-minute first half, he destroys in 30 seconds of the second half.

You'd think all the thoughts in your head about 'already seen this story, already heard this line, already know the ending'would stop at those. But the music director feels the need to make his presence felt as well, and a jarring background score to all of the Karthiks' encounter. Heavily 'inspired' by Clint Mansell, you wonder if that's the best mood you want to set for a poor guy having mental issues. Though again, 'Uff teri ada' is completely worth it all. As a visual experience.

Karthik calling Karthik takes two good 90-minute films and mixes them into a hodgepodge 120-minute one. It could either have been the story of a shy, introverted guy slowly overcoming his fears and all that with an imaginary friend type person. Imaginary friends are ok, they're mostly cute, they're always by the protagonist and they usually disappear when the job's done. Or it could have been the story of a tortured, scarred kid whose scars eventually affect him enough when he grows up to start taking apart his life. The one good thing probably was the conscious effort to leave no loose ends, as the 'summary' scene shows how Karthik actually knew everything that he wasn't supposed to know. Fair play there, well worked, at least they didn't make it descend into the realms of the supernatural. If only that effort had been put into a more organized screenplay.

Keeping with the movie's own theme, subconsciously you want to like KCK, appreciate it, applaud it. But consciously, it just comes across as one of those things for which you say 'Well tried. Maybe next time.'