Nirmal Babaji is becoming more popular by the minute. According to Google Trends, he has been far more popular than Ramdev Babaji in 2012. Yesterday he got his own Wikipedia page, and it is already being vandalized. There are allegations of fraud on Babaji, but never mind that because his Youtube videos aren’t as funny as I hoped. He has been a trending topic (in India) on Twitter for a few days now. That is where I came to know about him, and so I thought I could cash on his popularity a wee bit.

I am working on a small project for which I need to familiarize myself with the Twitter API. In all my astonishing smarts, I converted this boring requirement into a little fun. Using Python Twitter and PycURL, I wrote a dirty Python script that collects publicly available data about followers of a Twitter user. The challenge is that Babaji has about 46000 followers on Twitter, and the Twitter API has stringent rate limits. With my limited knowledge I couldn’t afford to collect data about all his followers. So I randomized the list of followers hoping to improve the sample set, and (so far) collected data for nearly 3500 followers.

Below are a few interesting results about the followers:

(Sample size: 4415)

Before extrapolating these “results” one should bear in mind that though the sample size is large as an absolute number, it is only 10% of the total set of Babaji’s followers. Inferences can be highly inconclusive, not that I make any.

• 40% never tweeted.
• 41% created their accounts in 2012.
• 49% aren’t followed by anybody.
• 20% are following only Babaji.
• 58% are following less than 10 people (one of them being Babaji).

One thing I can tell. Babaji is drawing thousands of his followers to Twitter. Those 885 users are his true followers, following him and only him. I hope they all get free tickets to Babaji’s Samagam.

Question to the Third Eye of Nirmal Babaji: How to overcome Twitter API rate limits? Is creating a bunch of EC2 instances and splitting the task into sub-tasks (crude map-reduce) a good solution? Which is the easiest solution? Do authenticated calls get higher limits? (I dare not get banned from Twitter while the project is still pending.)

Pune was the first place where I had a fracture, stayed in a hospital, felt like an alien. There was a time when I was, to put it mildly, peeved with living there. But it was also the place where I started my life as an independent adult. There are a thousand little possibilities that follow from that one thing. First job, first film festival, first bar, first car, first sale as a writer, first full keyboard, to cite a few firsts.

It always had a pleasant weather, few hundred options to eat out, few film festivals round the year, few places to drive around, few traffic jams, and a perpetual road construction in Baner. It isn’t as much about the city itself as it is about where and how I lived. Where I live today, I have already tried more than 25 different restaurants in just over two months. But none of them have yet to water my mouth like the thought of eating at Delhi Kitchen or Cad-B (now Chocolade) or Sayaji Portico or Fx. I don’t yet look forward to a film festival here the way I miss PIFF. I guess it wasn’t as much the quality of those as it was the experience.

Though each apartment that I called home in Pune has its list, my last home was the most memorable. Nikash Lawns is a few metres away from Sus Road (near Sai Chowk), with wide open space across the road and no traffic. I lived in an old apartment there, more spacious and with more furniture than a man needs. The walls had pencil markings calibrating the rapid growth of two children who once lived there, and later visited me. The bedroom had a rack where I could exhibit all my books. Each morning the chirping birds woke me, a few times with a scare of seeing them flying inside the bedroom. It is those birds that I miss the most. There were so many of them, of different colors and sounds and sizes. One day as I tried to record myself playing Fur Elise on the keyboard, I accidentally caught the birds on tape. I never tried to tape them; that accidental mp3 is enough.

In the first week of my stay in that apartment I was welcomed with a notice about the society’s policies against renting out apartments to “students, bachelors and foreigners”. The society secretary, my neighbor, asked me now and then when I was getting married. Another neighbor once called me in the office to ask whether I was the one who parked the vehicle wrongly; I had my vehicle in the office parking lot, but if somebody screwed up the bachelor must be the first suspect. The day before I vacated, the secretary saw me from the next building, waved to me, walked to me, shook my hand with both of his, and emotionally wished me the best. He wasn’t entirely glad that I was leaving. Neither was I.

That home also carries with it its share of guilt of my privilegedness. While walking along the six-lane Sus Road to buy a Cad-B or a kulfi (Maharashtra ki masoor kulfi), I would pass huts without doors adjacent to closed societies. Huts whose children ate below the street lights and wives waited on the entrance for their drunk husbands. To one side of the wide open space across my apartment was a slum without sewage or toilets. From far away I could see people, young and old, male and female, relieve themselves in the bushes. I remember staring towards their darkness on the night my apartment was flooded with water. There were no public toilets in the Pune I know. It tormented me to see people crossing the roads with a paint can in their hands while I drove to my office. I don’t care if that road-less patch on Baner-Pashan Link Road never gets repaired. I just hope they build a few public toilets for the people constructing all those tall buildings that will have restrooms fitted with Kohler urinals. Surely they will.

Well, we all have our problems.

Today Pune mostly conjures in my mind an image of good times. When nostalgia hits it is very likely that even the bitter memories will make me smile.

During my IIMI interview some years ago one interviewer asked me whether I had read War and Peace. I told him that I had not and that I was unlikely to ever read it because it is such a fat book. It was hard to admit, because I feel an inexplicable admiration for Leo Tolstoy, but my prejudice against fat books remains to this day.

I heroically picked up James Joyce’ Ulysses last year because I couldn’t resist after reading Dubliners (and some letters to Nora Joyce), and I had the advantage of relying upon the audio book. I completed the book, by mostly listening to it and only occasionally reading along (especially Molly’s Soliloquy). It is a deliciously juicy fat one.

Having done that I reluctantly picked Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind last month. Several people in my friends circle have been quoting “GOTW” as a favorite since the times of Orkut. I always secretly doubted their claims because to my knowledge most of them couldn’t be bothered with even watching its four-hour-long movie adaptation in fast forward. (For the record, Vivien Leigh rocked as Scarlett O’Hara and she is the biggest reason why I am giving the book a try.)

Now I am struggling with GOTW. While trying to listen to it, I am mostly distracted by an imaginary commentary written by Mark Twain about this very book, on how excessively ornate and adjective-ridden each paragraph being narrated is. I will not disappoint you with the commentary, but here is the second paragraph of GOTW, taken without permission from the preview on Google Books:

Scarlet O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin–that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.

I understand it. Today describing the protagonist’s appearance is an amateur writer’s folly. A century ago even the most famous writers felt compelled to describe the protagonists during their introductions, even if it meant having them stand in front of a mirror and describe themselves. Imagine the pathetic vanity of such a protagonist.

Here is a random paragraph from page 39:

There was indignation in his hoarse bass voice but also a wheedling note, and Scarlett teasingly clicked her tongue against her teeth as she reached out to pull his cravat into place. His breath in her face was strong with Bourbon whisky mingled with a faint fragrance of mint. Accompanying him also were the smells of chewing tobacco, well-oiled leather and horses–a combination of odors that she always associated with her father and instinctively liked in other men.

This thoughtful prose follows a question that “he” asks Scarlett. The sharp-witted quick-on-feet Scarlett instead of responding to the question, or thinking of an answer, is drawn to his mouth, its sounds and smells and textures and what not. Take my word for it, or browse the preview, and you will see that this level of description is a norm. Show, don’t tell. Imagine a camera that follows such narration along every bristle of an eyebrow and every thorn of a thistle. Imagine a movie which is almost entirely made up of close-up shots, be they of the fly on a villain’s cheek (that wonderful scene in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West) or of a paan-colored mouth during a monologue from a movie in East Man Color.

How does the writer and then the editor get away with it? And how do all the readers — 30 million copies sold — put up with it? Not in a wild racy Mills & Boon that is a couple of hundred pages long, but in a door-stopper that is over a thousand pages long. I came across one contemporary review mentioning this nugget:

But any kind of first novel of over 1,000 pages is an achievement, and for the research that was involved, and for the writing Itself, the author of Gone With the Wind deserves due recognition. I happen to feel that the book would have been infinitely better had it been edited down to, say, 500 pages–but there speaks the harassed daily reviewer an well as the would-be judicious critic. Very nearly every reader will agree, no doubt, that a more disciplined and less prodigal piece of work would have more nearly done justice to the subject-matter.

Two things. One, that “any kind of first novel over 1,000 pages is an achievement,” is a revelation about those times. Two, that there is/was another person on the planet who felt “that the book would have been infinitely better had it been edited down to, say, 500 pages,” is a consolation. About how many “great books” does one dare to say that! GOTW isn’t a juicy fat book like Ulysses, but a book that turned obese by gluttonously gobbling junk food.

Returning to the contemporary lies. We live in times when we need slow movements amidst fast-paced fast-food-packed attention-deprived lifestyles. In one survey back in 2009, about two-thirds were found to lie about reading a book, and even though it isn’t to me sufficient for sweeping generalizations, I understand if most of us want to believe and have others believe that we are capable of doing very long and boring things like reading a book, not just any book but a fat one. I suggest giving that honor to a book other than GOTW. Ulysses is a safe choice, because many people who have read the book actually have no clue about what it is except that they had a good time reading it.

DISCLAIMER: I am not an expert on any of the subjects discussed in this post.
NOTE: Many hyperlinks in this post refer PDF documents.

I am impressed by the amount of information the National Crime Records Bureau is sharing online. It recently released the annual report Crime in India 2010. Main documents Compendium2010 and Statistics2010 together contain about 650 pages. In the future I hope NCRB becomes more user-friendly, in formatting its report and more importantly in giving granular access to drill down every other way. I also hope we will have our own National Crime Victimization Survey (if we don’t already), with at least this level of information sharing. It is useful.

When the latest report was released, various news media outlets dutifully poured outrage and spread FUD. One such attempt that was most circulated among my circles was TOI’s take that rapes are rising fastest among major crimes. My fact-finding showed a different picture, so I wanted to clarify a few things that I wish the reporter (Subodh Varma, TNN) had.

Incidents of rape in the country have increased by a staggering 792% over the past nearly 40 years.

This nugget came from the 2nd page of Snapshots-5310. It is an absolute increase in the number of cases reported.

…compared to all cognizable crimes…

What do you think are cognizable crimes? Definition in Compendium2010 (p15): “A cognizable offence or case is defined as the one which an officer in-charge of a police station may investigate without the order of a magistrate and affect arrest without warrant. The police has a direct responsibility to take immediate action on the receipt of a complaint or of credible information in such crimes, visit the scene of the crime, investigate the facts, apprehend the offender and arraign him before a court of law having jurisdiction over the matter.”

Experts believe that while some of this jaw-dropping rise could be explained by increased reporting as awareness has grown among victims and families, the scale of increase undoubtedly reflects increasing violence against women in society.

The age-old classic trick of inferring an undoubted reflection by referring to non-existent people and data. The experts weren’t specified, so I failed to get any information from them. NCRB statistics don’t throw light on all factors. To be fair that is probably not their job. A few factors that matter:

• Gender: Increasingly there are studies on the genders of rape victims. But the current definition as per IPC probably does not have that complexity, so let me ignore this for a moment. However I request knowledgeable people to clarify the latest definition, outraged ones to make noise about the obsolete definition, and lawmakers to take note.
• Population: India has seen a notable growth in population since 1971. It also has been dealing with serious problems and significant plans related to a balanced sex ratio. So considering women population makes more sense to me (for the moment), even though crime incidence rates are usually calculated as number of reported cases per 100,000 population even for rape cases.
• Records: As mentioned in its Message, NCRB prepares the annual report based on the data sent by “State Governments and UT Administrations and Heads of various law enforcement agencies” within a deadline. I don’t know how the data submitted after this deadline is adjusted for in the next report, and what incentives the local police stations have in prompt submissions. I am guessing that records keeping and submissions are not “automatic”. If these two aspects have improved since 1971, which is a good thing and not an unreasonable possibility, they will have resulted in larger numbers with time. I request knowledgeable people to clarify about records keeping and submissions over the years, outraged ones to make noise about their quality, and bureaucrats to take note.
• Victims per Case: Table-5.3 in Statistics2010 (p395) implies that it is possible that a case can have more than one victim. Considering the number of victims instead of cases makes more sense to me, especially after reading about the infamous Vachathi case.
• Reporting Rates: Think about the last accident you witnessed and the last time you lost some cash, and you will have a basic idea why not all crimes get reported. Crimes of rape and sexual assault are infinitely more complex, and many studies across countries claim that they are one of the most under reported (unreported) crimes. Various sources online suggest that reporting rates have increased over the decades, but I couldn’t find reliable data showing trends over a period in any countries. I request knowledgeable people to point me to any studies, outraged ones to make noise about the need for greater awareness and better victimization studies, and sponsors to take note.

To make indubitable references on how much more or less dangerous a society has become for women, we need actual data along with expert opinions. (That is not to say we should stop asking for the situation to improve.) Taking only population and sex ratio into consideration, I have the below table*:

* The population and sex ratio figures are from respective documents shared by Census India and its 2011 dashboard. Reported Rapes are from NCRB’s 1953-2010.

This eight-fold increase is

no longer an eight-fold increase. To show how sensitive ratios can be, let me illustrate with an example using one more factor. Suppose that the reporting rate was x% in 1971 and y% in 2010-11. Then the adjusted incidence rates would become 942/x in 1971 and 3791/y in 2010-11. Now that’s an (4.02x/y)–fold increase. If the reporting rate increased from 10% in 1971 to 30% in 2010-11, that would be a 1.34-fold increase. If the reporting rate increased from 5% in 1971 to 20% in 2010-11, that would be negligible increase. Mind you, this is hypothetical and I am considering just one additional factor.

Moving on.

Maintaining a trend which has existed for several years, almost 97% of the rapes were committed by persons known to the victim with about 7% committed by family members and 35% by neighbours.

I could find no data or even a passing inference to such a trend in the NCRB report. The TOI reporter or his experts may have. The figures about “committing” and the definition of “family members” are imaginative. One paragraph in Compendium2010 (p83), however, contains the following two sentences: “Offenders were known to the victims in as many as 21,566 (97.3%) cases. Parents/close family members were involved in 1.3% (288 out of 21,566) of these cases, neighbours were involved in 36.2% cases (7,816 out of 21,566) and relatives were involved in 6.2% (1,344 out of 21,566) cases.”

Back to how dangerous our society is to women.

Rape is not the one danger to women and India is not one society. There are other violent crimes, including deaths from dowry and sati; other crimes against women, including harassment and importation. Their incidences vary across states, cities, villages, demographic categories. We need more awareness in all aspects of these issues among everybody, including men.

For actions and activism to be effective, we need as clear and complete a picture as possible. Not hyperbole. We are not using all available data, and we don’t have as much data as needed. We should. This is as good a time as any other to make noise about these things.

A RAINN would be good too.

P.S. People might be interested in this UNODC document related to sexual violence. Remember that the incidence rates there are calculated per 100,000 population and not 100,000 females.

I am drawn to themes of crime, especially law and order and justice. Almost half of what I read is crime fiction. I like books and movies with police procedurals at least as much as suspense and detective fiction. I occasionally spend hours reading about true crime cases and investigations. I realized that I even prefer games with these themes (especially in a noir setting) far more than, say, war games.

The charm of the Police is easy to fall for. Whereas a soldier may be a national hero to one country and a national enemy to another, and therefore his or her roles and acts inherently ambiguous, a policeman on the other hand is a social character with clear goals. The Police face a problem that can be attempted to be controlled but not eliminated from a non-dystopian society. (I subscribe to the views I found resonant in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.)

I like and think about these themes more than I intend to discuss about right here and right now. Instead I will get verbose about various ways in which the Police are difficult to like in the Indian society.

పొలీసాడు గడప తొక్కాడు. A policeman entered the house.

That is how my mom described the worst damage from a major fire accident in our house some months ago. It is a sentence that occasionally rings in my mind with deep sadness. I am not sure if my parents got some శాంతి done to counter that evil, though I won’t be surprised.

On 15^th August, 2011, when I and my dad were in a shop that made and fit frames, a policeman entered the shop. The setting was fraught with tension because on national holidays, according to some labor law, owners of all non-emergency enterprises should disallow workers from working. The shop owner knew it, and was conducting business with the shutters half pulled down. The policeman knew it, I guess because it’s a big day for him in terms of wages as well as catching law-breakers. But the policeman came with a portrait to get it framed. His opening remarks were about some senior policeman who never pays for anything, and how he himself was not like that and thus deserved a decent discount. The shop owner spoke his mind, including not so subtle hints that the Police are always fleecing small businessmen even on Independence Day, and the policeman got more aggressive and started cursing.

There are a few other memories as an adult. Like when a friend’s house was burgled (twice), the investigating policeman suggested that an FIR would be useless because burglaries get little priority compared to cases involving violence. Of course, cases without FIRs get no priority. Or like when the investigating policeman of a murder case I was acquainted with gave a press statement in which he said that the victim was a vegetarian and the accused/suspect was a non-vegetarian. That apparently was a crucial psychological profiling in the case. Or like when a policeman once visited me in a hospital to take an FIR about the accident where no second party was involved, and collect some mandatory payment, without a receipt, of course. Every time I got pulled over by a traffic cop – at least 4 times – my only instinct was to pay the fine and flee as quickly as possible, trying not to look him in the eye. It was as if even their presence could reduce my lifespan, apart from the ignominy of standing a few feet away from them.

It is a norm for the Police to charge some fees during verification as part of a passport application, just like the postmen do. In college days, most moms used to warn us never to go to the police station all alone for this verification and to never haggle with them (unlike while buying vegetables and groceries). I know many people who consider visiting a police station to be unfortunate and dangerous.

In one of the schools that I studied in, about half the students in my class were children of policemen. We were very young, so I never heard any police stories (except that one fellow’s father worked in some intelligence department), but there were stories about one father belting a child and another father kicking a child from behind and another father locking up a child in the bathroom. These were very few and spread over five years, but they still created an impression that police parents are in general stricter, almost cruel. Unlike doctors’ children becoming doctors, CAs’ children becoming CAs, everybody else becoming engineers, nobody became a policeman. Nobody does.

Probably my first memory about the Police was from when I was seven years old. I and my brother were sitting at the entrance of a jewelry shop while my parents were shopping inside. A police jeep stopped outside the shop, and from it a man and an old woman got down. The jeep went ahead to park somewhere on the roadside. The man, wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers, sat beside me while the woman went inside the shop. The man started small talk, with questions about our names, classes, and then my dad’s job (మీ నాయనేం చేస్తాడు?). My dad wasn’t a policeman. The man talked about how the Police are the most respected, pointing how even their mothers got attention from total strangers. Even at such a small age I could see that what he said was totally not right.

These are a sample from nearly twenty years of memories. But in all my life there isn’t a single instance where the Police could be seen in a positive light. If there was any, my mind successfully suppressed it. The only applicable adjectives are cheap, corrupt, cruel, fearsome. The Police are the boogeymen for children and adults alike.

Indian Police have a major image management issue. This is also true about politicians, bureaucrats, increasingly people in judiciary, and probably all public sector fields. But I think the contrast is clearer when the Police are considered. Such an image will create problems in their recruitment and day-to-day operations.