Paradise Lost and Regained: The Common Man Only Lost

In a recent incident of Saturday, May 4, 2013, a woman street hawker outside the restaurant was beaten by a ‘bouncer’ employed at the  popular Paradise Biryani. A few customers got outraged and one brave woman, wrote a blog that went viral. Meanwhile, some called the city police. Hyderabad newspapers couldn’t ignore a story that had already caught the fancy of their English speaking reader base, so they reported the incident. The  ’bouncer’ is being reported arrested. Many may think that’s a happy ending. I beg to differ.

First, consider the two eventual victims in the story. The flower hawker woman. Poor and Female. Thrashed. Scared away from her only livelihood? Need I say more. The ‘bouncer’ Prakash Yadav. Male, Lower middle class.Probably lives away from his family and works as a security man to make ends meet for many. Most likely will loose his job.

Now, consider who is really responsible. One, the Paradise management and two, many of its customers. Why did the bouncer behave in the way he did? Probably because it is the diktat of the restaurant management to keep the area around “clean”. Clean of irritants who the well heeled customers of Paradise potentially would find a nuisance. Such instructions to ward off such “troublemakers” (as this woman). are unarguably motivated by the need to provide a delightful customer experience.  An incident such as this dents their image for sure. But perhaps the news of the bouncer’s arrest, that too reported in newspapers within hours of the incident, is perhaps the best PR redemption exercise.

Of course the bouncer should be punished for inappropriate behavior. But what about the manager who instructed the bouncer to behave in this way? What about the owner who asked the manager to tell the bouncer to behave this way? What about the customers who probably scoff at the  sight of beggars and street hawkers outside the restaurant?

Another bunch of “people like them”  have been further sidelined. As for “people like us”, the blogger, the newspapers and Paradise Restaurant management and the customers, we have all reaped our share of gains.

In sum, the blog and the  resulting action is job well begun, but only half done!

I request share this one widely, so that people also appreciate the harder implications of such stories

Paradise no more

Reblogged from Reporting Live :

For all those living in Hyderabad, India, Paradise hotel is synonymous to biryani and is one of the most visited restaurants in the city. Located in Secunderabad, the hotel was so iconic that it lent its name to the place where it is. I say 'was iconic' because it no longer is, for me anyways.

Last night, I was there with my family celebrating my mother's birthday.

Read more… 1,182 more words

To summarize, 'bouncers' at the famous Paradise Restaurant in Hyderabad behaved in an inhuman manner with a street hawker. And the management encouraged it. Yes all of them are to blame. But the bigger blame is that "people like us" are indifferent to what goes on in the daily lives of "people like them". Paradise only keeps the area "clean" for its own customers, I presume. I can live without these Biryanis if such is the collective conscience of the restaurant and the majority of its customers.

India’s Public Health System Fails Yet Again: The case of Runa Begum with Hydrocephalus

You have already seen the news about Runa Begum, a 17 month old baby girl from Agartala, Tripuara who suffers from Hydrocephalus, medical condition in which fluid accumulates in the brain leading to an abnormally large head circumference. It is reportedly a serious but largely correctable medical condition.  The short story is that Runa, was born with this condition and only after recently her story along with pictures, circulated globally via media and online social networks, now she is being treated at an elite private hospital in  Delhi, some 2000 kms from her hometown. This has been made possible only by private charity. However, cases such as these raise several questions on the state of our public health system.

Given that her head has swelled to 3 times the normal size, presumably the condition manifested at birth or even before. So why did it take 17 months of worsening complications and media reports for the family to receive medical attention? And that too by the private sector and/or charity.

News reports say that the family was denied treatment at the Government Medical College at Tripura as they could not produce documentation that they were ultra poor and such a surgery costs a lot of money. Moreover a ‘rare’ condition such as this required advanced medical care that was perhaps beyond the expertise of  the Agartala hospital.

First, hydrocephalus although uncommon, is not really a rare disease as it affects 1 in 500 children born. Second, Agartala is not a village but the largest city in one of  India’s 28 states. The Government medical college at Agartala there has a multi specialty hospital with clinics in Pediatrics  Surgery and Neurology, all three specialties required for such a case. Moreover they are linked to many other hospitals through telemedicine, precisely to seek consultation on cases they are unable to handle.  Despite all this neither were they able to treat a child with a potentially fatal condition for 17 months nor arrange treatment elsewhere? They merely let fluid accumulate in her head, which has now swelled to 90 cm, much larger than what is usually documented for this condition ( Images revealed by web search show much smaller heads)

Thankfully for Ranu, the visually stunning nature of hydrocephalus , caught the media’s eye and subsequent support poured in. However there may be thousands other less fortunate poor kids whose parents may not have documents to claim abject poverty, yet may be poor enough to not be able to afford any private hospital.

While we hope for Ranu’s recovery. the minimum I demand from the Health Ministry is to conduct an inquiry into why exactly was this case not treated by the hospital, which claims its vision as “To provide best Health Care facilities to the people of North-Eastern Region”!

Delhi Gangrape and Beyond: There is no point separating the ‘system’ and ‘us’

At the risk of oversimplification, I would like to summarize that there are two dominant discourses taking shape in the aftermath of the delhi gangrape incident. The first one is blaming poor governance that includes ineffective police,dated laws, social stigma associated with reporting crimes etc. The second one is saying that the fault lies not with the system but with the people, some who because of their mindsets view women as lesser mortals,and others who are apathetic to atrocities committed on ‘strangers’(a person could belong to either or both of these types).
The first side argues that we need to change laws, create more deterrents and these policy changes will lead to a better future. The second side thinks that unless mindsets change, little else is possible. I argue that these two perspectives are not in opposition as many may think. Instead they are highly interdependent and it is hard to ascertain what came first and which one causes the other. However what is clear is that the two are locked in a vicious circle.
Let me explain by summarizing a brief incident from yesterday.
A 60 year old lady in broad daylight was robbed of her purse, pushed and blinded by chilly powder thrown at her eyes, by a man on a motorcycle in a fairly modern and progressive town in north India. She cried for help, asked for water so that she could wash her eyes, to be able to make her way back home. No passerby stopped for help afterwards ( i.e. provided water when she cried for help), leave alone tried to rescue her from the attacker.

Of course it is easy to conclude that people are apathetic and don’t give a dime unless its someone they know. And hence the mindset needs to change rather than the system.

I don’t believe that any human can see atrocity on a fellow human and breathe easy. We even get disturbed seeing such things in fiction. So why in reality would we ignore them.

The answer my friend lies in the system, that forces us to take apathy as the only safe way out. For instance in this case had someone stopped and tried to counter the victim. Almost certainly, that would involve dealing with the police.The police whose actions are determined by crime rate targets and not by a need to preserve law and order.

Returning to the incident just described, say someone had tried to stop the attacker,but failed. He would have to give a statement to the police. It is quite likely the police may not be able to solve the case (various reasons beyond the scope of this post).In which case they may force/harasse this witness to actually say that he saw nothing, in their desperate bid to keep their target of unsolved crimes low. In which case, the witness has not only risked his life, troubled for time, but forced to lie. All this when he tried to be of help.

Finally, we as individuals have lost complete trust in our institutions that we exhibit extreme apathy. For instance it is a common sight in road accidents (hit and run variety) where we often wonder why no one is ready to take the victim to the hospital. Yet we don’t because we know it involves the police and that is messy at best and dangerous at worst.

Essentially, then the debate, In my opinion,doesn’t need to be about where is the problem but at which level to effect change. As any change in either the systemic or individual level will likely change both.

Fake social media profiles: My own experience with Facebook

Just read this blog in the economist, stating how many social media fans/ followers etc are actually fake machine generated accounts. The Blog mentions that Mitt Romney gained 17% followers in a day and interestingly, a friend tweeted about Mitt Romney losing 11 followers per minute.

ouch. RT @mediabistro Romney Losing 11 Facebook Likes Per Minute mbist.ro/ZEB0NA

—
katie day good (@ktdayg) November 13, 2012

Arguably this machine generation of fake profiles, is of some benefit to the organization ( say Romney), but I bet also helps build up the numbers of social media service.
A few weeks ago Facebook prompted me to friend one Harsh Taneja. It was indeed a fake profile of myself. The picture and the “about me” description among other details were scraped from this blog. Interestingly this clone of mine and I also had 7 or 8 mutual friends already. Curious I decided to send a friend request to myself and magically it was accepted in some hours. I reported the profile and I think in a day it was taken down ( as I am unable to find it on searching).

Made me think, it is indeed to easy to create fairly real looking machine generated profiles, given the amount of self descriptions we leave on the web, that can be viewed publicly or semi-privately. And it is quite easy for these profiles to circulate unchecked, as people can entirely miss seeing them, forget to report. In some other cases, they may be of people not on the service altogether ( say people who use blogger but not twitter, and their About Me pages on blogger provide fodder to generate these fake twitter profiles.) Scary!

Finally, I decided to use this service to check my own twitter followers and found that 5% of the followers were fake and another 13% inactive. Perhaps explains why tweeting some random but generic word such as Forex, or Television instantly adds a few followers.