It was a pleasant surprise when my friend from school days Richard invited my family and myself to ‘The Grand Hockey Dinner Dance’ at the St. Bede’s School Grounds on Saturday, the 9th January 2010. This dance was the culmination of a 2-day long hockey tournament of Anglo-Indian teams from all over the country.

I was not surprised that a dance would signal the end of the tournament because in all Anglo-Indian social occasions, dance plays a very crucial role. Whether it is a wedding or a community event or a party, great importance is given to the ball-dance, to the presence of an orchestra and the ambience of the dance floor. This expression of community spirit through dance is but a small fraction of the larger sense of gaiety, camaraderie and joyfulness that the Anglo-Indian community stands for – they are a colorful and proud people who trace their traditions to hundreds of years of the interaction between European and Indian civilizations.

My first interaction with Anglo-Indians was through my primary school teachers most of whom were Anglo-Indian women: the images of Mrs. Grant, Ms. Tina, Mrs. Johnston and Mrs. Devotta can never be forgotten for their dedication to the children whom they had under their care. One of the myths that is propagated about Anglo-Indians is that they are more European than Indian. Many have missed out the hyphenated identity “Anglo(-)Indian.” As a result of a lack of acceptance in mainstream Indian society and appropriate employment opportunities, there has been a mass migration of Anglo-Indians to places as far as Australia, Canada, England and the USA.

The history of the Anglo-Indian community is a testimony to the struggle of a sub-minority within India’s evolution as a post-colonial nation-state [Article 366(2) : Constitution of India]. While it is true that the earliest Anglo-Indian families were the by product of relationships between Europeans and Indians, the community has come a long way since. It is characteristically Indian in several ways while retaining some cultural traditions of yore. Most Anglo-Indian communities, it is famously known, lived near railway cantonments where many of them worked as engine drivers.

Again, sports like hockey, football etc had good Anglo-Indian representation. In many ways, Anglo-Indians were the backbone of the Indian educational system in the form of committed and strong educationists and teachers.

The Indian Constitution guarantees their right to retain English as their medium of instruction. Further, both the Lok Sabha and the State assemblies have place for nominated seats for the Anglos [Article 334]. With a dwindling population (almost like the Parsis), the Anglo-Indians struggle to retain their firmament in Indian society and not get completely marginalized or non-existent. A remarkable feature about the Anglo-Indians is their open-mindedness as a people, one dimension being several inter-marriages with other castes and communities in Indian society. Among the most famous Anglo-Indians of post-independent India was Frank Anthony, a Supreme Court lawyer (also a member of the Constituent Assembly) who represented Mrs. Indira Gandhi during most of her trials and tribulations. Other prominent Anglos on the national scene were/are A.E.T. Barrow (educationist and brain behind the ICSE board of education), Lt. Gen Henderson-Brook (who prepared a classified report on the Oct-Nov 1962 debacle), Roger Binny (cricketer), Diana Hayden (former Miss India), Leslie Claudius (hockey legend) and Ruskin Bond(writer).

Anglos in the wind is the name of a magazine edited by Harry MacLure whoalso led the organizational effort of the Hockey event. Being in the midst of the Anglos at The Grand Hockey Dinner Dance was a poignant experience.

Not only were there representatives of the community from places overseas mentioned above, there were Anglo-Indians from all over India at the dance, as it was an extension of the tournament. Many would have heard of the ‘Bow Barracks’ of Kolkata, an Anglo-Indian synonym for a place. Nowhere else have I seen the aged 50/60 and above take to the dance floor with such an enthusiasm and sustain it over long hours. Young and old were at it into the wee hours of the night.

Wishing that the moments with the Anglos on a Chennai Saturday night would last longer, not to miss their love of dance, I was reminded of the album Saturday Night Fever by the Bee Gees (1977). The following lines from that album were evocative:
“Here I am
Prayin’ for this moment to last
Livin’ on the music so fine
Born on the Wind
Making it mine “

What I was grateful to Richard for inviting me to the Grand Dance was that it gave me an opportunity to join one segment of India in its celebration of the nation. This is a beautiful community and that came across at The Grand Hockey Dinner Dance.

Chak De, Anglos !
- – - – -
References:

1. Frank Anthony, Britain’s Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo-Indian Community (Paperback, 2007);
2. Hostages to India: or The Life Story of the Anglo Indian Race : by Herbert Alick Stark
3. These are the Anglo-Indians: James Reginald Maher
4. Bow Barracks Forever is a 2004 Indian film directed by Anjan Dutt (the real life story of a tiny but resolute Anglo Indian community right in the heart of bustling north Kolkata)

Updated 23 Aug 2009 2:50PM – added the Indus signs from Bryan Wells’ paper.

Updated 22 Aug 2009 11:55PM – found the image of the single/double bangle.

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FTOTW [Fine Tastings of the Week]

Why we must focus on women for development – a brilliant/heart rending/uplifting article in NYT (Via Ganesh). Programmable Web – a great post on Google’s Pubsubhubub (via @raganesh ).

Prolog

As many of you know i started working on researching the IVC (Indus Valley Civilization), formally, a month or so back.  Since most researchers are concentrating on the script, i am focusing on the Symbology.

I am writing this post to collect the wisdom of the community  to make the hypothesis into a scientific proof which can pass muster with the research community.   In the Epilog,  I will explain, how you can all help me.

IVC Bangle Hypothesis

Here is my  hypothesis – unmarried women wore bangles only in one arm, whereas married women wore bangles in both arms. The iconography from the IVC is quite sparse but still there seems to be enough evidence for this hypothesis. The famous Dancing Girl of Mohenja Daro. You can see that the statuette has bangles only on one arm.

There is another piece of iconography where 2 men are having a fight ostensibly over the hand of a woman (wears bangles only on one arm).  In this piece, we have another woman, possibly mother goddess, wearing bangles on both arms.  Given that in the same piece of iconography both  bangles on one arm  and  bangles  on two arms are present, it is highly unlikey to be a scribal error [I am trying to find this image on the web for you all to review. Meanwhile Found the image below. Also take a look at the Fig Deity Seal at the bottom of this post - it has women wearing bangles in both arms].

There are some burials of women with shell  bangles on only the left arm [The authors of the book also seem to think that one-arm bangles signifies marital status (Via Priya Raju)  ].

I found another instance of this type of burial where the woman had bangles only on the left arm. Don’t know if they are both the same instance. I hope not.

Why does this bangle hypothesis matter?

In the inscriptions , there are several  which have a symbol of a man, having an implement in one arm or in both arms.  Sometimes the implement is seen on  one leg or both legs. For example, see page 71 [reproduced below, click on the pic to expand] of the Bryan Wells’ Indus Script Thesis [Caution: 12MB PDF]. My guess based on the bangle symbology, that having an instrument on one arm/leg signifies someone with less skills/expertise than the one who has it in both arms/legs.

How do we prove this hypothesis?

Even in modern day  India, bangles are an important part of a married women’s attire. The Shankha Pola tradition still continues in Bengal or the Valai Kappu ceremony which is still observed  in South India. However, given the distance in time and space from the IVC, we cannot use practices from modern India as proof. Additionally, we don’t have written records prior to 6th Century BCE, which leaves a gap of 1,000-1,200 years after the downfall of the IVC.

Assuming that tribals have been following their traditions for millennia, we need to find tribals in North Western India who have a similar bangle symbology.  That would be a good enough proof.

I found some tribals – Ekbahia and Ikbainha whose women wear bangles only in one arm. However, it does not seem to indicate marital status.

Thanks to Priya Raju, I found this practice amongst the Ahir Tribes:

These people belong to the Gujarati and Rajasthani families – Cherry thinks the woman pictured above is from the Ahir tribe. The bangles would have been gifted to her during the girl’s wedding – they do marry very young. The pastoral tribes cover their entire hand with broad plain bangles made of bone. The unmarried wear them only from the wrist to the elbow whereas the married wear them from the elbow upwards as far up as the underarm. Since these tribes are nomadic and they cannot keep their assets under safe keeping, they wear their saving in the form of jewellery on their person.

Epilog

From the above, it is quite evident that there is some symbology associated with bangles and marital status. But we still need to find the exact match for the hypothesis to stick.

Can you all help me uncover this? Please pass this to people that are familiar with folk/tribal customs in North Western India. Thanks in advance. Whoever helps me, i will acknowledge them in the paper formally. 

As someone who has grown up amongst a wide variety of friends, I was taken aback when a friend told me recently that it is increasingly becoming rare when you can have a conversation for conversation’s sake with someone even for a full hour. The implication in that moanful statement was that people have lost interest in relating to one another. That people don’t know or are no longer comfortable in handling relationships! Gone are the days when people enjoyed companionship purely for the sake of it. Now the new mantra was having fun however defined but having fun did not necessarily mean that people were building relationships. I wondered if this is a kind of cynical position or are truly healthy human relations becoming rarefied.

One frequent thought that people drop in response to friendships is that there is just no time. The pace of life, commuting, demands of work and family all have added to a situation where there is no time remaining for keeping in touch with friends. Hence, some relationships get dropped by the wayside. This is often the story of several women who when asked how many school or college friends they kept in touch with, many would not be able to count even one among them. The reason given is once they leave the educational system they get married and all attention, time and energies gets focused on the newer unit that they are part of after marriage. This is obviously no one’s fault but the social structures that men and women are part of, say marriage, elicit such responses from them.

But I am still left with a nagging feeling. It is not all about time is it? One of the factors that I have often heard is that friends whose social status or economic strata changes over a period of time lose touch faster than anything else. A newer unsaid dimension even if they don’t speak about it has entered the picture. The relative difference that has emerged in the material existence of the two friends who have grown together causes some tension. This perceived difference in status tends to diminish the frequency of contact between those who were earlier friends if not root out the relationship completely. Interestingly, factors like caste or race or language or religion or ethnicity tend to be overridden in the early days of the friendship and remain overwhelmed in relationships but class can be an intruder.

What next? We have noted time, gender and class as variables that affect friendships. Workplace/collegiate relations sometimes metamorphose into healthy friendships. This is a larger debate by itself but like class there is a need for caution if the levels of hierarchy of the friends are different. Whether we like it not, hierarchy in organizational contexts does play a role. Likewise can men and women be just friends as epitomized in the classic film ‘When Harry met Sally’? Again, there are ground rules for such relationships and they are very much possible.

Why is friendship important? What is hot about people being just friends? Clearly, these are the only ties that are not bound by blood or primordial sentiments like caste or race or ethnicity or religion or nationality, kinds of compartments within which we work in for most part of our lives. A friend is family indeed but just that s/he is not connected to you through blood ties. Our children are taught in their proverb/phrase books ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed.’ Whenever we are stuck with some issue or problem that we are unable to resolve by ourselves, we immediately think of a friend who can address this for us. Such is the supporting function of friends. But as stated at the very outset, it neither begins nor stops there.

Friendship is about another human presence. It is about the no-holds barred space which we long for in life but find it is all divided up in silos. One can speak one’s heart and mind to a friend and be accepted for who you are as you are. It is commonplace to hear people say in a marital context, “Ah, at last, you have found your SOUL-MATE.” Why the connectivity between ‘souls’ gets confined to marriage or they are only a prerogative of marriage is anyone’s guess? This could possibly be because of a social anxiety that marriage should be accorded the highest form of friendship. This is true but yet presents an incomplete picture because individuals define social spaces as they deem fit. In the process of evolving as a person, the insight of our friends about us are a source of nurture and criticism.

One pre-condition to friendship is that there are synergies between the two people or mutuality of perception and association. Several efforts are wasted when there is a complete difference between the perceptions of the two people regarding what constitutes their friendship and people are then forced to move on in life. Regardless of the type of friendship, trust is a critical factor which affects whether the friendship would last a lifetime or just one of those passing episodes of life.

Among the most important concerns is the deployment or claims or use of the term ‘friend’ in conversations. Numerous are the cross-cultural examples of pub-mates where one of them does not get invited to say the other’s wedding and is shocked, “ I thought that I was his friend.” Sure but did the latter take the trouble to decipher in what sense the term ‘friend’ was used? Don’t we all work with at least three gradations of social interaction? These are acquaintances, colleagues and friends. Acquaintences are those whom you meet on the street or in the corridor at work place; colleagues whom you spend the most part of 8 to 10 hours every week day and friends are those whom we have been talking about.

Popular media and history are replete with examples and references to friendships. Who can forget the mid-1970s classic Hindi film Sholay that celebrated friendship with the famous song ‘Yeh dosti !’ However, in the final analysis, friendship is an aesthetic almost spiritual principle. It is about the divine, sacred and beautiful in earthen human relationships. It is about the lived experience of bonding between people on the principle of common humanity. It is an idea that challenges the narrow-minded spaces that caste or race or religion or ethnicity or even class breed often in society.

May friendships win!

At the point when folk join organizations to be part of teams, they are reminded that they have left all their cultural biases, if any, of colleagues from diverse backgrounds, behind them and are now part of a cosmopolitan workforce. With globalization, we have also reached a stage of cross-cultural sensitivity or so we like to think not just within nations but also across nationalities and continents. So, whatever may be one’s assumptions about another’s cultural background we just don’t exhibit them in the work space. This is ingrained and is possible by and large, the corporate sector especially in multinational organizations (which are all part of the globalization process) where any communal sentiments could damage the interests of the organization which is controlled through several methods and checks and balances. The moot question is whether cosmopolitan values need to be learnt at all or can we assume that families, schools and universities take care of them?
However, if we took a glance at India and the world, how much has the opposite of cosmopolitanism (i.e.) hate speeches or prejudices or stereotyping really come down? How much do we judge our neighbors and colleagues less by their caste, communal and racial backgrounds? Obama’s  leadership and that of several others on these issues has been welcomed by all those positive thinking and well-meaning among global citizens.  The purpose of this post is however to consider the sources at which the child, the teenager and the adult picks up assumptions and notions of the ‘cultural other.’ Socialization by parents and teachers plays an important part in this process.

If and when the parent warns the child in the following terms: “I told you not to play with this those dark-skinned fellows (sic)” can go in for a lifetime of a sense of clear-cut difference, if not bias against those who look black. This point is globally valid. Apart from parents and teachers, the next source of learning could be the peer group. Being teased by a peer-group for belonging to a particular community or hearing the peer group extolling the strengths of a community or perhaps downplaying them could also be a contributory factor.

While all of the above are manageable factors because people unlearn or relearn what they have picked up in their early years so long as the weightage of these values or biases is not too strong. Among the most dangerous form of socialization is that which is performed on  innocent young minds by a socio-political organization or movements.  A brilliant imagery of how mindsets can be modified by groups is demonstrated by the 1997 film . Another major source of prejudice, to state the point briefly, is of course. repeated media coverage of social groups with certain slants/steretypes  which engenders stereotypes of its own.

About a decade or two back it was not uncommon to hear the unselected candidates who emerge out of public service commission interviews complaining that people of certain castes/communities alone were selected. The private sector was largely held free from such problems as it rewarded merit and talent alone, regardless of the cultural background. A large part of the grouse regarding these issues or the hurt felt used to be swept under the carpet. At the highest levels of governance, citizens of various countries are reminded that they ought to think of their nations first rather than the regions or other parochial units among them.

It is here that commonsense understanding militates against social science perspectives of the issue. First and foremost, the primary unit of existence or what is considered as the parochial or the region or even case or community for that matter cannot be denied at all. It is a reality and people very much relate to it on a day to day basis. In social science language we call this the relationship between the UNIVERSAL and the PARTICULAR. There are several particulars and one cannot deny them. There are several primordial sympathies if not affiliations such as caste, community, religion, region, race and so on. So, what then is the UNIVERSAL. The managers of a large country such as ours would consider the NATION as the universal. We then have to draft the equation between the Universal and the Particular within the nation. The moment the individual moves into the globalization process as a member of an MNC, then even the nation becomes a particular in the economic sense and the globe itself becomes the universal with national economies becoming interlocking units into the globalization experience. So, when what unit becomes a ‘universal’ and a ‘particular’ remains a question mark?

It is therefore important that we respect all the so-called ‘parochial’ units or ‘particulars’ as I have redesignated them. It is not the rejection of the particular that is the solution at any level but the transcendence of the particular for a higher goal. The idea of denying the specific or parochial is a polemical method or dominant discourse that seeks to mandatorily define the universal as a certain set category as for example either the region or the nation. In a globalised word, identities are always in a state of flux and so to typecast and straitjacket various levels is a really loss for understanding social, political and economic relations in the globe.

A very old and classic tension is related among Gen-X several of whom opted to learn western pop music. Immediately, among their elders was a hue and cry about how Indian classical music was being abandoned. While there have been real interventions in the form of movements from the 1980s which have taken this perception seriously and tried to popularize Indian classical music, what is important is to notice that right afterwards western music too or its local strains like Indi-pop became very popular. Why is it necessary to think one in exclusion or opposition to the other?

Jawaharlal Nehru spoke about Indian culture or heritage being a palimpsest in which the older strains don’t get wiped away. Rabindranath Tagore whom both Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru hailed as ‘Gurudev’ was among the most cosmopolitan personalities that India nay the world had at the beginning of this century. He had the passion for art and literature both European and Indian, the cultural travels and synthesis both Indian, European and East Asian. Most Indians associate Tagore with barely the national anthem but I would consider his name as synonymous with cosmopolitanism. So was Mahatma Gandhi who argued that if we were all “true believers” of our respective faiths, we would never even speak ill of other religions. Nehru with his agnosticism and mighty international statesmanship directed us to look for oneness beyond the immediate boundaries.

We don’t need to look further than these three heroes for the relationship between the universal and particular and transcending all of them to build that sense of togetherness which is what cosmopolitanism is all about.

Updated Aug 15, 2009 10 PM – Here is a recent techmemed post that contemplates some similar ideas about Twitter.

Updated May 16, 2009 6:15PM – Mark Cuban says most of his traffic is now coming from Twitter/Facebook and less and less from Google!

FTOTW

We restarted this series in my previous post.  First, Nancy Dixon, a top expert in Organizational Learning has a brilliant post on the history of KM.  Hal Sperlich will be proud of this – 619,284.5 Miles on a 1971 Mustang and still going strong. Sean Platt has a great post on Creative Inspiration. SP Rajeshwaran has a great post on being a Code Monkey .  Brilliant article on what goes on inside a baby’s brain by Jonah Lehrer in the Boston Globe.

Prolog

I have been on Twitter for the past 1.5 years and I have been smitten. Given my interest in social technologies, i have been thinking about why Twitter is an important development. There have been several rah rah posts about Twitter recently, but i am not satisfied with the inferences.  Like all series starter posts i have done in the past, this post has some thoughts from me to get the community started. I promise to analyze and publish the wisdom of the community, as always.

History

To really understand the power of something, i believe that we should delve into the history a bit. There have been several perspectives of the Web including the highly popular 1.0/2.0 view.  In my view, that classification does not help us understand the Twitter phenomenon adequately.

Therefore, i decided to categorize the web into 3 eras as captured by the diagram below:

In the first Algorithmic Era, most of the focus was on using algorithms to tame the web, Google’s brilliant citations-based (or incoming links-based) algorithm being the chief amongst them.

Then came the Crowd Era, which saw the launch of several crowd platforms like Digg, Flickr, Youtube etc. which allowed us to use the crowds to make sense of the web content as well as to add fresh content.  I included Blogs also in this era because it is very difficult to tame the massive base of 40+ million blogs.  Though bloggers do have an identity, the massive size of the blogosphere reduced bloggers to a crowd [Inside the firewall, we have managed to create a powerful community using blogs  which is difficult to do on the internet due to the crowd effect].  Even the highly popular Wikipedia is a crowd phenomenon – you still don’t have an easy means to understand who the top contributors are, their reputation etc.

In the next era, which i decided to call the Community Era, we have 2 major categories – Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut  etc in what i would term a closed category and Twitter in an entirely new open category. The open category i think models the real world better and that is why it is very powerful.

Three Real World Parallels

1. Asynchronous Friending

If you look at Facebook or Orkut (i use both of them), you need to friend someone first and only then can you exchange anything.  In fact, Facebook won’t even allow you to look at someone’s profile before friending them.  Whereas on Twitter, you can follow anyone and if they like they can follow you back  and if they don’t like you at all, they can block you.  The twitter model is more akin to what we do in the real world.

2. Fine-grained Relationships Dominate

In the real world, all of us participate in many communities  – our neighborhood, our relatives, our coworkers etc.  We have relationships in these communities of varying degrees of strength.  Most relationships are built over time based on a number of fine-grained interactions (low amount of time per interaction) over time – meetings, get-togethers, parties, games, religious/social gatherings etc.  We also have coarse-grained (high amount of time per interaction)  interactions with a few people like our immediate coworkers, supervisors, immediate family/close friends  & close relatives. But most of our network growth comes from the fine-grained relationships. You can analogize a tweet to a fine-grained interaction with your followers.  Additionally, a tweet is very simple and consumes little effort. This is why using blogs or youtube or flickr to build networks is harder because to produce a good blog post or a good photo or a good video takes significantly more effort.  Additionally, the followers also need more effort to appreciate a blog post or a photo or a video.  The problem with Facebook or Orkut or Linkedin is the lack of a tweet-like simple fine-grained interaction mode (although lately Facebook has been copying twitter heavily).

2. Asymmetric relationships

In the real world also, we have asymmetric relationships – the strength of the relationship with someone that we perceive maybe different from the strength of the relationship perceived by that someone.

To make some sense of a large number of relationships – Orkut allows you to grade the relationships. But that is not how we do it in the real world -  our perception of the strength of the relationship is subconscious and is based on perceived quality of  interactions and the frequency of interactions we have.

In Twitter, you can do the same thing, the Twitterers you interact with subconsciously grow on you over time, which could lead to a mutually rewarding relationship. In most

Are there other ways in which Twitter resembles real world community-building?

Epilog

Do you agree that Twitter marks a fundamental tectonic shift? If  so, what impact is it going to have on the web?  That is what i am trying to contemplate. I have some thoughts. Look forward to yours. I would also like your views on Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut etc.