The arranged Lavalife

Lavalife, eHarmony, entrenous, ........, shaadi, bharatmatrimony

The spectrum above is distilled below:

Lavalife.com introduces arranged marriages to the west

shaadi.com introduces an online dating service to the east

How have newspapers survived?

For the wired crowd, newspapers are a bit of a novelty. Unmanageable sheafs of paper delivering news that's a day old at best. Like tv, the news too is sometimes just a break between advertisements. So when pitted against the instantaneousness of the net, how has the daily goliath survived?

Against

• News is almost always a day old, if not more, save some of the stop-press items
• You don't get to choose the news in the paper. You can choose the sections you want to read though
• With its 40 odd pages, each the length of a dinner jacket, the paper's unwieldy at best
• Environment hazard

For

• There's an editor
• You don't get to choose the news in the paper. For some of us, if we did, the breadth of our awareness would be narrow
• Tradition and routine. We're comfortable with news being a day old. It's the optimum amount of time that we're okay with, knowing that reporters aren't relaying hearsay and that they've had a chance to confirm stuff they're reporting on. Editors have given it the thumbs up after a careful review
• To pack tiffin

To me, it seems like 'For' wins the day. At this time.

The bigger question is how much longer can the tradition of newspapers hold fort against all the other forces? In an article in the New Yorker, Eric Alterman says "newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago."

The reasons are many, and chiefly to do with competition from the net. Editors on the net are savvy about the audience they want, and with a decent editor at the helm, loyal readership is easy to build. Content-specific blogs, where the writer is often the editor, do quite well for themselves. The new information junkie sets up rss feeds from her favourite blogs and is wired for the day.

There is a semi-bright spot though. Online newspapers, i.e. the websites of the major newspapers that carry a cross-section of articles from the days' papers, are a compromise. That a newspaper runs a corresponding website gives the paper a way to connect with the crowd that's drawing away. Sadly though, the revenue a site like this generates through ads and the like probably isn't enough to sustain the site, given the reduced profits from decreasing circulation and falling rates for the print ads. Coupled with the fact that the online newspaper still needs the same machinery (journalists, editorial staff, reuters contracts, etc) to back it up as the printed paper, it's a lose-lose situation.

From my younger days

"Thought for the day"

We used to have these back in school. Sometimes, I'd choose to take it literally, to let it be the sole thing that occupied my mindspace all day. I'd often be tempted to actually learn stuff that day, or to, yknow, talk to folks, but I'm sure wiser minds than mine had deemed the 'thought for the day' truly encompassing enough to sustain.

So, on the day, my credo could be: 'It is terrible to speak well and be wrong.' - Sophocles or 'Not failure, but low aim, is crime.' -J.R. Lowell

or some other such. And call it a genetic virasat, but I could always blank my slate save the thought for the day. Got into much trouble.

A one-line tragedy

There have been others, but this here stood out -

"For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn."

- Ernest Hemingway.

Dawn's best

I get my brightest ideas before it's bright out. That's right, every morning, just before sunrise, these epiphanous little movies play in my head. And they're actually really funny! Thing is though, that when you're asleep, the part of your brain that's responsible for storing minutiae, and storing them long enough that you can flip through them like notes later, is switched off.

I realised that I was letting many a riveting blog post slip by only because I'm always too sleepy to transcribe the stuff I see during those early hours. Last night though, I'd kept pen-paper handy, by a bedside table to beat the machine. And did I ever :) It's three in the afternoon now, and I have a whole page of notes here, albeit scrawled illegibly, but then, this is the stuff dreams are made of...wait back that up...my hyperbole just melded with reality..I'm feeling special now :-)

This post is written in real-time. I was pretty sure I had gold, so didn't bother constructing this post in my head first. Had I, I realise now it would've been a good idea.

Having made sense of my notes, I find I've written crap. I've learnt a little about myself today though. During the pre-sunrise hours, it isn't that I produce gold every morning, rather my threshold for what causes the chuckles drops like a blessed christian on GOD tv.

Maybe some other day.

The areas of my ineptitude

These are many, but the ones I chose for this top 5-er are those that frustrate me the most.

5. Sewing - At various points in time, my wardrobe's had perfectly nice shirts and trousers that've been rendered unwearable by a missing button or a come-undone hem. So I see the button lying there, the shirt pleading to be worn, and the thread/needle combination lying by the potpourri. Yet, I'm going to do nothing about it until I get to go home and have my mommy do the dirty.

4. Multitasking - I cannot talk to my significant other while trying to pretty up a presentation, nor can I pick out work clothes while listening to Anindo Chatterjee do an intricate rela.

The point is, these things need all the attention I can give them, with little (ability to pay attention) left over. In fact, when I chance upon somebody else multitasking their way through similarly involved activities, I'm left in awe. Can't do much else but admire.

3. Drawing - You'd be amazed at some of the replicas I can produce. Back in the day, my biology teacher gave me star*star*star when he saw my detailing of the cell structure. Without a dang picture or photo in front of me though, when what was needed was a little girl lost in thought, I've been known to produce a slug.

2. Dancing - I sprout appendages at the very thought. I'll have to forever say never.

1. Singing - I have my good days. The problem is that I have too many bad ones.

Married to the movies

When I get off a taxi, I like to stand there, back to the cab, luggage on the pavement beside me. The luggage and I remain absolutely still (me by choice, the luggage, not so much) contemplating whatever lies ahead and the life we've left behind, while the taxi pulls away.

I do this because it would make a nice cinematic moment. It's definitely a moment you've seen before in some movie. In that moment, it'd appear as though this person (here, me) was about to begin life anew.

And when I write, I like to sometimes chew on a pencil using the corner of my mouth. I don't remember though, the last time I used anything other than a keyboard to write. As you might suspect, I do this because it makes a movie moment, were someone to catch a glimpse.

Finally, I'm given to planting trees in my driveway, in the hope that they'll one day grow tall and cast a sweet shadow where they stand. This way, my neighbour's children, when on their way back from taekwondo class can run around them while I blare Pehla Nasha from my den. This would make for a terrible cinematic moment, but one I'd fondly marry.

Media bashing

You get to see these clips of Rumsfeld - "I never said we know for sure where Iraq's WMDs were" and thanks to some really great archiving, the folks over at Jon Stewart's Daily show are able to pull up another, older clip of Donny boy saying "Yes, well they're north of xyz, south of abc, etc, Yeah, we've got good intelligence".

But what I'd REALLY like to see is taking this up another notch, so that the likes of Tony Snow, and heck, even Bush, when lying at Press conferences, can immediately be told off for their two-faced, no-good, double-dealing ways.

This doesn't need magic. If you're a half decent journalist, and you've got your questions mapped out right, you already know the line that Snow, Bush and their ilk are going to toe.What that means is if you make an accusation, they're going to deny it. If you ask them about how something they'd said earlier turned out to be untrue, they're going to deny having ever said such a thing. If you tell them you love their hair, they're going to say it wasn't their fault, they had to wear a helmet on the way over.

The point is, many of these press soundbytes are given at events/press conferences that are telecast live. All that the journalist needs to do is to dig up a video of the guy when he was asked the same question a few months earlier. The difference between this and Stewart's daily show is that the video needs to be ready PRIOR to the journalist's question being asked.

Journalist then asks question. Snow goes "Ermm..No, no, I never said anything of the sort. The media always distorts facts". BAM - Journalist whips out her new iVideoplayathingy in front of the TV cameras! Yeah, I'd like to see THAT.