Leaders

I suppose most of us have a visceral mistrust of politicians, but the method of dealing with them proposed by the mighty K. Malik, author of that most glorious collection of correspondence brought to us by dint of the earnest labour of New Light Publishers of New Delhi, 1111 Letters for Every Occasion, is quite singular. Write letters of advice to the leaders of all parties, giving them the benefit of direct contact with the electorate they seek to win over to their views. Tell ‘em how it is! And then get stuck into the current government, sharing a new way forward for the country!

In fact, K. Malik’s letters to various Ministers spell out an interesting alternative national agenda. Perhaps India would have been improved had he actually sent these letters rather than selling them to New Light Publishers? We may never know...

A footnote, perhaps interesting or perhaps not: the exhortation to the Sikh Akali party claims that Guru Nanak Dev founded Sikhism to bring together India and Pakistan. That’s interesting, as he died in 1539, a little over four hundred years before Pakistan’s sanguinary foundation. Further proof, should it be needed, that K. Malik does, indeed, exist in a parallel universe that is fundamentally different to our own.

Next week: Love letters.

Letters to the Leaders
People must keep a vigilant eye on the doings and misdoings of the political leaders. We must praise their good works. Also, we should point out their faults and the faults of their policies.

To the Congress Party
Please redeem your pledges of Price rise immediately.
If you do not, your days are numbered.
You can fool some people for all time and all people for some time but you cannot fool all people for all the time.

To the B.J.P.
You have failed to challenge the might of the Congress (I).
Why continue to have nuisance value?

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
Stop insulting Northern India, Hindu and Hinduism. Don’t cut your nose to spite your face.

To the Akali Party
Sikhism and politics do not go together. We must help bring together Hindus and Muslims, India and Pakistan. Guru Nanak made Sikhism for that purpose.

To the Minister for Foreign Affairs
In line with the great ideals of Mahatma Ghandi, we should abolish passports and visas. Let us have open doors to the world. That is the true mission of India.

To the Finance Minister
The word ‘Income-Tax’ should go. It smells of feudalism. It does not suit democracy. Income-Tax should be known as “Public Charity Fund”. And taxpayers should be induced to pay the maximum without coercion. If the government does not trust the people, why should people trust the Government?

To the Minister for Information
Television spells a great danger to the psychological health of the people. Children are wasting too much time seeing TV rather than studying their books. TV should be restricted to Sundays and holidays. It is a great national nuisance.

To the Minister of Agriculture
You must encourage people to become agriculture minded. Agriculture should be made a compulsory subject in schools. Children must grow something in schools or their houses, even on house-tops, to qualify for Board Examination.

Taxi

Right. Here comes a question I've been meaning to ask everyone I know for a while now...

What is WRONG with ‘illegal taxis’? The Dubai Road and Transport Authority (RTA) has been insisting on car poolers jumping through hoops of fire whilst visibly chewing on photocopies of their grandparents buttocks so that they can stop the societal evil of illegal taxis. But the very reason for a market developing in illegal taxis is that there is a clear and unfulfilled market need. Whatever happened to ‘laissez-faire’ – the attitude that built Dubai?

Nobody sensible would take an illegal taxi in a market where there were well-regulated legal taxis that offered a prompt, clean, efficient and pleasant service at a reasonable price. But if someone wants money for a ride and I'm willing to pay it and be outside the regulated environment, then that's my lookout – my risk and my choice to make. The better the ‘regulated’ taxis, the less likely I am to go ‘unregulated’.

If the regulated taxis were a bunch of irresponsible, rude, self-serving bahoos that won't pick up fares, won't travel to a range of places, won't abide by the regulations, don't know their way around and generally try and fleece all and sundry, then I'd be very tempted to do the unregulated thing. Particularly when trying to travel in difficult traffic in what must be growing into one of the world’s most hellish rush hours – an experience unrelieved by the existence of any viable public transport. Particularly cross-Emirate public transport. Because if there were a cost effective viable public transport option, punters would surely be taking that rather than an unofficial taxi! No?

So the very market for unregulated (‘illegal’) taxis is created by the inefficiencies of the regulated (‘legal’) market. If there’s a market in illegal taxis, it’s surely a clear sign of failure on the part of the RTA, isn’t it? Or have I got this all wrong because I’m not a ‘traffic expert’?

Informal markets exist when formal markets fail. And most formal markets start as informal ones. It’s called innovation!

Using regulation to stifle market innovation is something that we've seen before (Skype), but it don't make it any the less ugly...

Toot

I will never fail to lose my sense of marvel and astonishment at the Arab World. It's been a 22-year love affair for me so far (with the occasional unexpected pot hole) - and yet I'm still finding new things around every corner. If I've learned one thing, it's that I've so much yet to learn.

So breakfast today in Amman with pal and colleague Ammouni brought a new discovery, one so basic that it left me breathless with the weight of my ignorance.

Toot.

Now I always thought Toot was a Jordanian blog aggregator, or perhaps even Columbian Marching Powder, but I failed to spot the fruit behind the name. Toot is a pale, slightly greenish fruit, something like an anaemic gooseberry colour that has the shape of a slightly elongated, and smaller, raspberry.

And it's delicious. And I'd never heard of it before. And it's unique. And now I'm going to look out for it wherever I can.

So I am, as the barrister once admonished the judge, none the wiser, but better informed.

I feel slightly better to learn that I got to it before Wikipedia did. But only slightly.

Shill

It's not often I shill for clients on da blog, but I liked this thingette from IBM employee Sacha Chua so I've put it here. Later on today, if I'm lucky, a few of the delegates from this year's Arab Advisors Fifth Annual Media and Convergence Conference will swing by to take a look at it, because I'll have pointed them here.

They'll also be able to read the thought provoking article here, which my mate Gianni turned me onto.

Sacha is a self-confessed member of what we old people like to call Generation Y. It's not a term with which I'm particularly comfortable, but then I've heard even worse epithets. I happen to hate, with a passion, 'digital tribe' and even worse is 'digital native'. The idea that someone grew up in a digital world is interesting, but I don't think that labelling and boxing them is desirable or even funny, clever or mature.

As it happens, I grew up in a digital world myself, but a strange and fast-moving digital world where I was filled with round-eyed astonishment at the things happening around me. I grew up in a world where my school didn't know what number base would be the number base of computing, so I was forced into calculating in binary, octal and duodecimal. Crap - hex won out. I learned to use a computer with a card reader, then a teletype. Later on came coding punch tape for CNC turret presses, eight inch disk drives, 20lb portable computers, memory chips the size of aeroplanes and all the rest of it.

It might not have been Facebook, but it wasn't exactly an 'analogue upbringing' either.

Which might be part of the reason why I find it so intensely irritating to have to watch telcos and telecom vendors trying to 'get to grips with the kids'. They'd be well served to just try a little wide-eyed curiosity themselves and start exploring this brave new world we've all been building, rather than just trying to shoe-horn it into old fashioned revenue models from their heady circuit-switched days.

Here endeth the geek session. Back to being silly tomorrow... promise...

Bumps

It’s a remarkable study in human geography: throughout the Emirates there are to be seen various stages in the development of communities around speed bumps. I do find that interesting: as an inattentive and impossibly inky-fingered schoolkid, I vaguely remember being told about how communities will establish around natural land formations such as the confluence of rivers or trade routes. And, in fact, there is evidence of communities built around trade routes in the Emirates from 3,000 years ago: specifically in the megalithic burial site to be found in Bitnah, which is a village on the wadi system from Masafi to Fujeirah which has, incidentally, been scandalously neglected by the government of Fujeirah. That wadi was the lower, and probably would have been the easiest and therefore principal, crossing of the Emirates from the coast, across the Hajar mountains and over the desert plains, the higher being Wadi Bih from Dibba to RAK.

Today’s trade routes are black-top and almost every set of speed bumps on a busy road will see chaps selling baby-doll pink candy-floss, fruit and vegetables or black mountain honey from rickety carts or packing-case stalls to the cars as they slow down. More established markets, such as those on the RAK road through Umm Al Qawain, put up scaffolding frames and tack corrugated iron roofs on to make more permanent shops. And then you have examples that have turned into semi-settlements, such as the Masafi Friday Market, a speed-bump community on the Dhaid/Masafi road. This now sports some concrete and block buildings, including a mosque and has turned into quite a large on-road retail park.

More established communities are to be found on the Abu Dhabi highway: again these started as speed-bump communities in the days when the highway was a two-lane affair with no camel fencing and some famously wicked speed-bumps that would regularly be adorned with lorries on their side that had come in too fast and lurched off the road. Today, these are small villages that have outlasted the speed-bumps that prompted their foundation. There’s another one of these on the Dhaid highway from Sharjah: a roadside truck-halt kind of community.

I do find it amusing that the UAE has two types of developing communities built on selling people candy-floss...

Sober

Here's a sobering read for anyone that thinks media freedom is a good thing: the World Association of Newspapers represents over 18,000 newspapers and its report into media freedom in the world today cites abuses of freedom of expression on a truly global basis.

"In the Middle East and North Africa, the past six months have been marked by a number of setbacks in the area of press freedom, mainly due to autocratic regimes that do not hesitate to take drastic measures to prevent independent voices from making themselves heard. Bloggers throughout the region continue their relentless battle to spread news and information ignored or censored by the mainstream media."

I do find it interesting that the WAN, a body representing the 'mainstream media', made that comment about bloggers in the Middle East, although I do hasten to point out that this particular blog is involved in a relentless battle to be daft and of no particular value to anyone. There are a number of blogs and websites that are challenging traditional thinking on media ownership and the role of media in the Middle East. Before, back in the good old days, you could just make sure that only trusties could own licenses to publish. Now the very nature of what 'publishing' is has been upended by the Internet. The UAE publishing law is, of course, desperately out of date and we still await new regulations that reflect the world around us - and the UAE isn't alone. Globally, much legislation has fallen behind the rapid transformations and innovations that Internet technologies are driving.

Meanwhile, seven journalists have died in Iraq since November 2007 and Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana, namechecked by the WAN report, was killed by an Israeli tank whose crew couldn't read the word PRESS on his distinctive blue flak jacket. The shell that killed him, shamefully, was an anti-personnel flechette round that launched thousands of tiny, evil little darts buzzing like angry, deadly black steel mosquitoes into the still air around him: a hail of shaped steel shards that cut him down as he stood there with a camera on his shoulder filming his own death.

Editor

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor are the most popular form of giving vent to public grievances; and you should learn how to write them. The letters to the Editor are like any other letters. There is nothing new or special about them. Here are a few samples.

To the Reader

Dear Reader

India is faced with a crisis of character. The dark forces that are creating this crisis should be ruthlessly exposed.

All of you are called upon to give us a helping hand in this crusade of ours to expose injustice, corruption, communalism, casteism, parochialism and all such disruptive ‘isms’ and place the culprits in the dock of public opinion. You should send us news exposing such dark forces operating in your town.

News must be accompanied by your full address and signed pledge that it is true and factual. We assure you that this would be kept confidential and disclosed under no circumstances.

This is your crusade.

Editor


Only Goat Skin

Sir

Please refer to Mr. A. Kumar’s letter (The Hindustan Times, Aug 11). The alleged ‘musk gland of the musk deer’ is nothing but goat skin puffed with coal dust, earth particles and small pebbles sewn and tied with professional tact sprinkled with cheap musk perfume. These are not the ‘testicles’ of male deer as alleged by Mr. Kumar. There is no need to be alarmed about the possibilities of the extinction of deer. This business is in line with other fraudulent business practices in the country.

Yours, etc.

Ram Swarup Goyal

Bus Conductor’s Conduct

Sir,

I was travelling by a Route no 85 bus (1616 express) at about 10am on 3^rd August. The driver was driving the vehicle very rashly and an old woman was about to be crushed to death near the Baird Road bus stop. I requested the conductor to give me the complaint book so that I may write the complaint. He refused to give it to me. He challenged my right to demand the complaint book.

Yours, etc.

Shri Bhagwan Sharma

Art for Art’s Sake

Sir,

Art for art’s sake has been debated by academicians for long. For a breath of change, let’s say – art for people’s sake too. We need not necessarily by committed to socialist realism. Incidentally, what deters us from evolving a cultural policy in tune with national aspirations of the people as Sir Aourobindo visualised long back? As we celebrate the Silver Jubilee of our independence, there could be no fitter tribute to that Yogi.

Yours, etc

A.K. Shukla

Next week: Letters to the Leaders

Evil

I don't know what it is with people and Modhesh. Last year one grumpy blogger even went so far as to refer to our cheery little yellow friend as a relentless tide of infinite-eyed, grinning evil! Some people have no sense of fun!

But the time is upon us again as Modhesh statues start to appear around Dubai. The endearing little chap is the mascot of Dubai's Summer Surprises shopping festival, although his ubiquity appears to annoy certain groups of irritable expatriates. Shame on them for being so grumpy!

Yesterday saw the official press conference to inaugurate this years' festivities and they're sure to include loads of wonderful Modhesh fun. And who could complain at the little chap's cheery ways as the thermometer hits 50C and we sweat our way through a summer of stop start traffic and construction-related mayhem?

Oddly, the press event appears to have generated less than stunning coverage: this government story didn't even make it to Emirates Business 24x7, which is simply amazing. But I'm sure it'll pick up soon enough.

He's got his own website, you know, although all the links appear to be broken...

Whatever, he'll be with us for the next couple of months... everywhere, everyday and in every way... Happy summer, friends!

Tunes

The Internet has made a huge number of things easier to do. The processes of disintermediation, whereby a supply chain is shortened by ‘cutting out the middle man’ and simplification, whereby complex transactions are reduced to a ‘one click’ action have meant that we can now conduct transactions across a vast range of products, services and geographies. For the past few years, for example, we have bought gifts from friends and family online rather than buying stuff locally, packing it up and posting it. So a customer from Dubai can review, select and buy a product from Latin America from a French website and have it shipped to Scotland – and do it in a few minutes. If you stop to think about that, it’s pretty mad.

But one area where the Internet has actually complicated things is in music. You see, I can’t buy music online, unless I buy and ship a CD to myself. Apple’s iTunes service doesn’t support the Middle East and neither does Amazon.com or Napster – if anyone out there knows of a company that will sell music to the Middle East, please do tell me. In the meantime, I’ve used my UK credit card and a UK address, so now I’m buying music from America using a fake British identity and sending it to Dubai. Which is also mad, albeit a different mad.

And don’t even get me started on the brilliant online music streaming service Pandora. That’s closed to us and I’d have bought a huge amount more music if it wasn’t.

What’s amazing about this is that the music industry is complaining about online piracy and the like – it’s hardly any wonder that people unable to get the legal product will buy the illegal one. And in the Middle East they are doing so in remarkable numbers. In fact, one Lebanese colleague was famously surprised to be told that you could actually buy music online rather than downloading it from a sharing site.

So I was delighted to read in that rather natty newspaper The National that GETMO Arabia has been launched – a download site that offers access to online music, movies and the like. Over 800,000 titles, apparently. It’s nice and easy, you just go to www.getmo.com and sign up. The site looks smart enough, the log-in process is simple and effective. It’s great all the way up to actually buying some music. For a start the selection is extremely limited – you’ll find way more choice at the airport duty free. And when you actually do find something you want to buy (it did take me a while. I’m not your average R&B buying Dubai punter) you discover that you’re expected to subscribe – at a hefty €5 per month if you want unlimited downloads – the next plan down at €2 per month supports a whole three downloads. And that before you even get told what price each download is!

So that’s where I stopped. Because I’m not paying €5 per month for unlimited access to a highly limited choice of music at an unknown price. Nope, I’ll stick with my daft iTunes account – and feel sorry for anyone that doesn’t have a UK address and credit card up their sleeves, because the region’s music fans – and music industry – still doesn’t have a decent download site that can be accessed from here.

And that ensures the online music piracy in the Middle East will go on. You have to admire the music industry – a bunch of yo-yo toting cretins if ever there were one.

Toll

I can see bloggers' keyboards melting down today: the news that two new Salik gates are to be installed is virtually guaranteed to get 'em going. Well, it's certainly done the trick for this one, as you can see!

The news comes on a busy front page for Gulf News, which is more than usually lively. Kylie's 40, Suu Kyi's shameful detention is to continue, a new Bond novel has been written by Sebastian Faulks (and launched with a bonkers, brilliant, publicity stunt), Bahrain has decided to stop issuing work permits to all Bangladeshis following the murder of a Bahraini by a gentleman of that nationality and a Dubai nightclub is to operate a 'you're in if we like the look of you' door policy (and the difference is...).

What larks, Pip!

But it's still Salik that tickles me pinkest. The new gates are part of the second phase of the Salik system, Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) boss and 'traffic expert' Matar Al Tayer told Gulf News and anyone else who happened to be listening. This is the very second phase that Al Tayer dissembled about when asked about future plans by media back in January: a second phase that clearly had always included more toll gates. Why on earth the RTA cannot clearly and simply communicate what it is planning is beyond me.

One of the new gates is an additional gate on the Sheikh Zayed road, while the other one will add a charge for the Al Maktoum Bridge: the bridge that most people use to avoid the Al Garhoud Bridge Salik gate. Having effectively forced traffic onto Maktoum, the RTA now notes that Maktoum is busy. They really are clever little bears.

Part of the announcement appears to be the undertaking that motorists will be charged only once for passing through the two successive gates on the Sheikh Zayed Road. I'll be interested to see how they implement that one. Will you have a time limit to cross the two gates for no additional charge? And what happens if there's a crash and you're held up?

Gulf News reports that the reason for the second gate on the Sheikh Zayed road is that people have been driving around the original gate, another piece of human behaviour that has apparently surprised the RTA. The new gate is, we are told, "the only solution" to the problem. Although an alternative solution would be to resite the Barsha gate, no?

There are more gates on the way, for sure. Except the RTA absolutely refuses to be transparent (let alone consultative) about its plans and our media appear unwilling to get to the facts. One journalist I know who chatted to Al Tayer following an interview some time ago says he was told off the record that it was Al Tayer's goal to increase the cost of car ownership in Dubai to Dhs 10,000 a year. If it's true, that surely needs to go on the record.

I suppose I'd better do a Salik Talking T-Shirt now...