Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Making money
An experimental "democratic" revenue model for news publications new to the internet (that are reluctant to change their delivery styles)
Thursday, 21 June 2012
The post-reporter era
One of the foundation stones of journalism is the process of reporting. That there is a messenger working the gap between an event and a story provides for news to exist and exist with myriad nuances attached to it. There are ethical and moral issues, technical considerations, writing styles, and presentation formats to perfect. The entire news-publishing industry is centered on the activities of reporters and streamlining them.
What the reporter requires the most is... well, a few things. The first is a domain of events, from which he picks issues to talk about. The second is a domain of stories, into which he publishes his reports. The third is a platform using which he may incentivize this process for himself, and acquire the tools with which he may publish his stories efficiently and effectively. The last entity is more commonly understood in the form of a publishing house.
The reason I've broken the working of a reporter into these categories is to understand what makes a reporter at all. Today, a reporter is most commonly understood in terms of an individual who is employed with a publishing house and publishes stories for them. Ideally, however, everyone is a reporter: simply the creation of knowledge by people based on experiences around them should be qualification enough. This calls into question the role of a publishing house: is it a platform working with which reporters may function efficiently, or is it an employer of reporters?
If it's an employer of reporters, then any publishing house wouldn't have to worry about where the course of journalism is going to take the organization itself. Reporters will have to change the way they work - how they spot issues, evolving writing styles to suit their audiences, so forth - but the publishing house will retain ownership of the reporters themselves. As long as it's not a platform which individuals use to function as reporters, things are going to be fine.
Now, let's move to the post-reporter era, where everyone is a reporter (of course, that's an idealized image, but even so). In this world, a reporter is not someone who works for a publishing house - that aspect of the word's meaning is left behind in the age of the publishing house. In this world, a reporter is someone who works simply as a messenger between the domains of events and stories, where the role of the publishing house as the owner of reportage is absent.
The nature of such a world throws light on the valuation of information. When multiple reporters cover different events and return to HQ to file their stories, the house decides which stories make the cut and which don't on the basis of a set of parameters. In other words, the house creates and assigns a particular value to each story, and then compares the values of different stories to determine their destiny.
In the post-reporter era, which is likely to be occupied by channels of individual presentation - ranging from word-of-mouth to full-scale websites - houses that thrive today on the valuation of information and the importance the houses' readers place on it will steadily fade out. What exists will be an all-encompassing form of what is known as citizen journalism (CJ) today. Houses take to CJ because of the mutually beneficial relationship available therein: the CJ gets the coverage and the advantage of the issue pursued no longer being under wraps; the reporter gets a story that has both civic/criminal and human-interest angles to it.
However, when the CJ voids the relationship by refusing the intervention of a publishing/broadcasting house, and chooses to take his story straight to the people through a channel he finds effective enough, the house-level valuation of stories is replaced by a democratic institution that may or may not be guided by a paternalistic attitude.
Therefore, if a particular house has to survive into the post-reporter era, it must discard issue-valuation as an engine and instead rely on some other entity, such as one represented by a parameter whose efficiency is a maximizable quantity. This can be conceived as a fourth domain which, upon maximization, becomes the superset of which the three domains are subsets.
A counter-productive entity in this situation is that of property, which is accrued in great quantities by a high-achieving house in the present but which delays the onset of change in the future. Even when the house starts to experience slightly rougher weather, its first move will be to pump in more money, thereby offsetting change by some time. Only when the amount of property invested in delaying change is considerable will the house start to consider other alternatives, by which time other competing organizations will have moved into the future.
What the reporter requires the most is... well, a few things. The first is a domain of events, from which he picks issues to talk about. The second is a domain of stories, into which he publishes his reports. The third is a platform using which he may incentivize this process for himself, and acquire the tools with which he may publish his stories efficiently and effectively. The last entity is more commonly understood in the form of a publishing house.The reason I've broken the working of a reporter into these categories is to understand what makes a reporter at all. Today, a reporter is most commonly understood in terms of an individual who is employed with a publishing house and publishes stories for them. Ideally, however, everyone is a reporter: simply the creation of knowledge by people based on experiences around them should be qualification enough. This calls into question the role of a publishing house: is it a platform working with which reporters may function efficiently, or is it an employer of reporters?
If it's an employer of reporters, then any publishing house wouldn't have to worry about where the course of journalism is going to take the organization itself. Reporters will have to change the way they work - how they spot issues, evolving writing styles to suit their audiences, so forth - but the publishing house will retain ownership of the reporters themselves. As long as it's not a platform which individuals use to function as reporters, things are going to be fine.
Now, let's move to the post-reporter era, where everyone is a reporter (of course, that's an idealized image, but even so). In this world, a reporter is not someone who works for a publishing house - that aspect of the word's meaning is left behind in the age of the publishing house. In this world, a reporter is someone who works simply as a messenger between the domains of events and stories, where the role of the publishing house as the owner of reportage is absent.
The nature of such a world throws light on the valuation of information. When multiple reporters cover different events and return to HQ to file their stories, the house decides which stories make the cut and which don't on the basis of a set of parameters. In other words, the house creates and assigns a particular value to each story, and then compares the values of different stories to determine their destiny.
In the post-reporter era, which is likely to be occupied by channels of individual presentation - ranging from word-of-mouth to full-scale websites - houses that thrive today on the valuation of information and the importance the houses' readers place on it will steadily fade out. What exists will be an all-encompassing form of what is known as citizen journalism (CJ) today. Houses take to CJ because of the mutually beneficial relationship available therein: the CJ gets the coverage and the advantage of the issue pursued no longer being under wraps; the reporter gets a story that has both civic/criminal and human-interest angles to it.However, when the CJ voids the relationship by refusing the intervention of a publishing/broadcasting house, and chooses to take his story straight to the people through a channel he finds effective enough, the house-level valuation of stories is replaced by a democratic institution that may or may not be guided by a paternalistic attitude.
Therefore, if a particular house has to survive into the post-reporter era, it must discard issue-valuation as an engine and instead rely on some other entity, such as one represented by a parameter whose efficiency is a maximizable quantity. This can be conceived as a fourth domain which, upon maximization, becomes the superset of which the three domains are subsets.
A counter-productive entity in this situation is that of property, which is accrued in great quantities by a high-achieving house in the present but which delays the onset of change in the future. Even when the house starts to experience slightly rougher weather, its first move will be to pump in more money, thereby offsetting change by some time. Only when the amount of property invested in delaying change is considerable will the house start to consider other alternatives, by which time other competing organizations will have moved into the future.
Monday, 7 May 2012
The online as offline
The print medium is not the same as the web-based medium, but we still have a tendency to approach the two as if they were the same when it comes to information communication. More specifically, in many newspaper offices in India, the internet and print editions are managed similarly to the point of expecting to reap equal profits from both (at least, that's how the management is modeled). In fact, because the internet does not have space restrictions as stringent as those imposed by a newspaper, and because stories can be uploaded as and when they happen as opposed to having to wait for a day, editors actually believe that such freedoms could only work to the publication's advantage.
Eventually, when the results come in reflecting the newspaper's poor performance on the web, the editors' first reaction is to question the editorial team responsible for managing the internet-desk. If that doesn't work, money is seen to be the problem: the page is redesigned, more funds are pumped in to spruce up the looks and navigation, and the amount of interactive content is increased. All these are fine initiatives, but unfortunately they aren't solutions. They do to the newspaper what taking longevity pills will do to a patient of cancer: he might live longer, but the blight will continue to spread until its death-grip is complete. At this juncture, many people also think that if they took a few steps back, reanalysed the problem, decided to just drop the unlimited space and instant-post assumptions, and rolled out the web edition thereon, things would be fine.
They wouldn't. We forget the effects of mismanagement in the interim period. Misguided decisions introduce their own set of problems into the machine, problems that are more systematic and resilient than the problems caused by assuming there's a lot of space and a lot of time. This mismanagement could manifest in the attitude toward web-based journalism, in the fashion of structuring the editorial team, or in thinking the way the internet-desk communicates with other departments in the newspaper is the way the print-desk does it, too.
Looking at it broadly, the attitude toward web-based journalism and the way the organization is structured become coincidental when those calling the shots are the misguided ones. The web-based medium serves an audience quite different from the one served by the written medium. Knowing that that is so, what sense does it make to have an editor for the internet edition who works as though he's working with the print edition? Because of the limitation on space being absent, for instance, the consequence has been the overloading of web-pages with content - as if it's an online newspaper with a hundred pages.
Very few editors in India decide to leave the sub-standard stories that didn't make the cut to the newspaper alone and instead turn their attention toward enhancing the impression of existing stories. Very few editors use the extra space available to serve every newspaper's original goal: to get the news across. And if ever they fail to do that effectively, it won't matter what else they get right. It's like reducing expenditures by eliminating needs only to buy something that will never be used simply because it comes at a heavily discounted price. If you want to continue to help your cause, use extra space to maximise the benefits arising from good journalism. Don't try to maximise the channels of revenue by exposing readers to the products of sub-standard work.
This matter of benefit-maximisation - while situated in the print framework - matters more on content than on anything else. This is because the most that can be done to a newspaper in terms of its design is to remove it from the way of easy reading as much as is possible. On the web, however, benefits can be maximised by more than just making the reading area less cluttered. There's not only more space but there are also other forms of data-expression. Now, journalists don't just have to choose between using an image or writing some 200 words to convey an idea: they have to pick between interactive infographics, videos, images, and audio clips to convey the message most effectively.
Subsequently, a collateral advantage of publishing on the web is that it gives the publishers an option to capitalise on multi-form content: the more elaborate the news delivery is, the costlier it could become to access it. All such aspects of online publishing have to be managed using a single voice of authority at the helm because their mismanagement is tied in closely with the failure of news-delivery. If the writing, editing, accounts, and web design departments operate autonomously with sizeable communication gaps between them, the reading-the-newspaper-online experience is going to be fragmented and as scatter-brained an affair as the logic behind the divided support driving the initiative.
The internet comes with a host of opportunities and that remains the biggest reason yet for publishers to move to the web to push their content. However, it seems shortsighted and in poor judgment that the people who decide to move online forget that so many opportunities can only come with so many chances for making mistakes. And they make those mistakes frequently and, more worrying, increasingly systematically. The important thing is to not let mismanagement off the hook all that easily - they leave a Yeti-sized footprint behind that must be erased completely before beginning to make way for a new working model.
[caption id="attachment_23041" align="aligncenter" width="529"]
The Times of India is one Indian newspaper that seems to have taken to online publishing well. Their internet publishing mechanism seems well-oiled, and their articles, well-chosen (albeit from the pool of articles they have to choose from). Most importantly, auxiliary systems such as a self-administered payment gateway, smart pagination and a proliferation of their online services that moved at a pace more to their comfort than of the offline edition ensured that users received a an all-round sense of satisfaction when they logged on and off the ToI website.[/caption]
Eventually, when the results come in reflecting the newspaper's poor performance on the web, the editors' first reaction is to question the editorial team responsible for managing the internet-desk. If that doesn't work, money is seen to be the problem: the page is redesigned, more funds are pumped in to spruce up the looks and navigation, and the amount of interactive content is increased. All these are fine initiatives, but unfortunately they aren't solutions. They do to the newspaper what taking longevity pills will do to a patient of cancer: he might live longer, but the blight will continue to spread until its death-grip is complete. At this juncture, many people also think that if they took a few steps back, reanalysed the problem, decided to just drop the unlimited space and instant-post assumptions, and rolled out the web edition thereon, things would be fine.They wouldn't. We forget the effects of mismanagement in the interim period. Misguided decisions introduce their own set of problems into the machine, problems that are more systematic and resilient than the problems caused by assuming there's a lot of space and a lot of time. This mismanagement could manifest in the attitude toward web-based journalism, in the fashion of structuring the editorial team, or in thinking the way the internet-desk communicates with other departments in the newspaper is the way the print-desk does it, too.
Looking at it broadly, the attitude toward web-based journalism and the way the organization is structured become coincidental when those calling the shots are the misguided ones. The web-based medium serves an audience quite different from the one served by the written medium. Knowing that that is so, what sense does it make to have an editor for the internet edition who works as though he's working with the print edition? Because of the limitation on space being absent, for instance, the consequence has been the overloading of web-pages with content - as if it's an online newspaper with a hundred pages.Very few editors in India decide to leave the sub-standard stories that didn't make the cut to the newspaper alone and instead turn their attention toward enhancing the impression of existing stories. Very few editors use the extra space available to serve every newspaper's original goal: to get the news across. And if ever they fail to do that effectively, it won't matter what else they get right. It's like reducing expenditures by eliminating needs only to buy something that will never be used simply because it comes at a heavily discounted price. If you want to continue to help your cause, use extra space to maximise the benefits arising from good journalism. Don't try to maximise the channels of revenue by exposing readers to the products of sub-standard work.
This matter of benefit-maximisation - while situated in the print framework - matters more on content than on anything else. This is because the most that can be done to a newspaper in terms of its design is to remove it from the way of easy reading as much as is possible. On the web, however, benefits can be maximised by more than just making the reading area less cluttered. There's not only more space but there are also other forms of data-expression. Now, journalists don't just have to choose between using an image or writing some 200 words to convey an idea: they have to pick between interactive infographics, videos, images, and audio clips to convey the message most effectively.
Subsequently, a collateral advantage of publishing on the web is that it gives the publishers an option to capitalise on multi-form content: the more elaborate the news delivery is, the costlier it could become to access it. All such aspects of online publishing have to be managed using a single voice of authority at the helm because their mismanagement is tied in closely with the failure of news-delivery. If the writing, editing, accounts, and web design departments operate autonomously with sizeable communication gaps between them, the reading-the-newspaper-online experience is going to be fragmented and as scatter-brained an affair as the logic behind the divided support driving the initiative.
The internet comes with a host of opportunities and that remains the biggest reason yet for publishers to move to the web to push their content. However, it seems shortsighted and in poor judgment that the people who decide to move online forget that so many opportunities can only come with so many chances for making mistakes. And they make those mistakes frequently and, more worrying, increasingly systematically. The important thing is to not let mismanagement off the hook all that easily - they leave a Yeti-sized footprint behind that must be erased completely before beginning to make way for a new working model.
[caption id="attachment_23041" align="aligncenter" width="529"]
The Times of India is one Indian newspaper that seems to have taken to online publishing well. Their internet publishing mechanism seems well-oiled, and their articles, well-chosen (albeit from the pool of articles they have to choose from). Most importantly, auxiliary systems such as a self-administered payment gateway, smart pagination and a proliferation of their online services that moved at a pace more to their comfort than of the offline edition ensured that users received a an all-round sense of satisfaction when they logged on and off the ToI website.[/caption]
Sunday, 12 February 2012
Stay away from each other!
For being India’s largest English daily, the Times of India doesn’t sell as much as it is bought. And in all probability, those inflated numbers could’ve provided the newspaper the motivation and confidence to take on one of India most reputed dailies: The Hindu. Being only a regular-sized newbie in Chennai, it awakened the city one fine morning to its first salvo, “Stuck with the news that puts you to sleep?” Mildly-amused media historians would later testify that the Times brought the ensuing advertisement pogrom upon itself.
[caption id="attachment_21598" align="aligncenter" width="365" caption="Image courtesy Sandheep Adhwaryu"]
[/caption]
At a time when finger-pointing was absolutely unnecessary, Times pointed an entire arm at a newspaper that catered to a significantly different audience. Perhaps someone should have told it right then that if one messes with bulls, one only gets horns. Because when The Hindu struck, it transgressed the borders of Chennai that the Times had limited itself to: the YouTube videos parading the former’s ‘Stay ahead of the times!’ line went viral, advertisement banners sprung up all around Tamil Nadu, and the Times ship was all but sunk.
Unfortunately for Chennai, this jejune tussle was news for a week. Retired station-masters used to waking up every morning to a tumbler of filter coffee and The Hindu were now being alerted to the existence of Page 3 parties and wardrobe malfunctions. Large sections of important pages were given up to poking fun at the Times with thinly veiled smugness while readers tried to understand where the logic was in advertising about The Hindu in The Hindu to people who were already buying The Hindu. Masquerading media muscle under the pretext of snubbing the Times? Maybe.
Thinking it had thrown the kitchen sink into it its attack against The Hindu, the Times blanched when it got the bathtub back. Its first response was to acknowledge the “waking” of The Hindu to its competition. This led many to believe that the competition concerned the invention of catchphrases, prompting Dhanush to go back in time and record Kolaveri.
[caption id="attachment_21602" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Meteoric comeback!"]
[/caption]
To the Times, it is plausible that any publicity is good publicity, but The Hindu, in the opinion of many of its readers, overstated its strengths and wasted important space and time retaliating to a competitor’s notably specious claims. As the dust begins to settle now, residents of Chennai are finally waking up to a world where nothing has changed… except for a grim parting shot from the Times that makes too much sense.
[caption id="attachment_21603" align="alignleft" width="640" caption="The Hindu could take a leaf out of Einstein's book and (apart from running a daily science page) hold back from becoming a condescending news-giver."]
[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_21598" align="aligncenter" width="365" caption="Image courtesy Sandheep Adhwaryu"]
[/caption]At a time when finger-pointing was absolutely unnecessary, Times pointed an entire arm at a newspaper that catered to a significantly different audience. Perhaps someone should have told it right then that if one messes with bulls, one only gets horns. Because when The Hindu struck, it transgressed the borders of Chennai that the Times had limited itself to: the YouTube videos parading the former’s ‘Stay ahead of the times!’ line went viral, advertisement banners sprung up all around Tamil Nadu, and the Times ship was all but sunk.
Unfortunately for Chennai, this jejune tussle was news for a week. Retired station-masters used to waking up every morning to a tumbler of filter coffee and The Hindu were now being alerted to the existence of Page 3 parties and wardrobe malfunctions. Large sections of important pages were given up to poking fun at the Times with thinly veiled smugness while readers tried to understand where the logic was in advertising about The Hindu in The Hindu to people who were already buying The Hindu. Masquerading media muscle under the pretext of snubbing the Times? Maybe.
Thinking it had thrown the kitchen sink into it its attack against The Hindu, the Times blanched when it got the bathtub back. Its first response was to acknowledge the “waking” of The Hindu to its competition. This led many to believe that the competition concerned the invention of catchphrases, prompting Dhanush to go back in time and record Kolaveri.[caption id="attachment_21602" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Meteoric comeback!"]
[/caption]To the Times, it is plausible that any publicity is good publicity, but The Hindu, in the opinion of many of its readers, overstated its strengths and wasted important space and time retaliating to a competitor’s notably specious claims. As the dust begins to settle now, residents of Chennai are finally waking up to a world where nothing has changed… except for a grim parting shot from the Times that makes too much sense.
[caption id="attachment_21603" align="alignleft" width="640" caption="The Hindu could take a leaf out of Einstein's book and (apart from running a daily science page) hold back from becoming a condescending news-giver."]
[/caption]
Thursday, 26 January 2012
The glorified recycle bin
One of the better dailies in south India, The Hindu, brings out a science and technology section once a week (every Thursday). When you read the page, it becomes immediately evident that their science staff is either non-existent - which I hope is the case - or utterly incompetent.
For starters, none of the pieces they run on this page is original. All of them are picked from either science journalism organizations, like Discovery Magazine, PhysOrg, io9 or LiveScience, or from the blogs of prolific science journalists, like Ed Yong, Tom Levenson or Jennifer Ouellette. I'd have appreciated it had an effort been taken to contextualize those stories to an Indian audience, but all that's done is a textbook copy-paste manoeuvre.
[caption id="attachment_21377" align="aligncenter" width="254" caption="N. Ram, The Hindu's (now former) editor-in-chief"]
[/caption]
Further, the stories that the editor chooses to print on that day on that page are stories that have no time-value, i.e. the stories won't get stale even if they're read after a week. Things like muscles we thought we never had, weird animals, and some new images snapped by NASA's space telescopes make it there, and when I read them, I learn nothing knew that could be relevant except in a quiz.
News that never gets old will always be more of information than knowledge because the need of the hour keeps changing. And it keeps changing because our needs change the moment we read the paper and learn something new. Our needs change because we're constantly using knowledge of the world around us in different ways to move ahead, learn more and do more.
In such an environment, I'd like to know more about what's going on - particularly in science because science has been tipping the power scales in Asia's favour for the past few years. We could use such a shift away from the West to give ourselves an increasingly valuable competitive advantage. But no - it is India after all, and we, the newspapers, must feed only what the hungry want, not what the hungry deserve. And that's politics, dance, music and cricket.
I don't understand why only one page out of 20, or effectively only one page out of some 140 accounting for the entire week, is devoted to science and technology. For all that the nation touts to be its future and one of its major exports to the world, science news in the Indian publishing industry is as good as not represented. They can possibly have no excuse for this: there's enough going on just at the city-level to fill an entire page every day.
All I'm asking is, get science stories from the web - no issues - edit them a little, give credit to the original authors, and publish them on that day itself. There are new technologies being born and culled everyday, new inventors and innovators coming into the scene, new products, processes and techniques finding their way into our lives. There's news-value in all of those stories, so make use of it. (I myself read more than 150 articles per day, and that's after filtering out an equal number from my feeds.)
To conclude: dear The Hindu, don't ditch science because you think no one's eating it. No one's eating it because you're ditching it.
For starters, none of the pieces they run on this page is original. All of them are picked from either science journalism organizations, like Discovery Magazine, PhysOrg, io9 or LiveScience, or from the blogs of prolific science journalists, like Ed Yong, Tom Levenson or Jennifer Ouellette. I'd have appreciated it had an effort been taken to contextualize those stories to an Indian audience, but all that's done is a textbook copy-paste manoeuvre.
[caption id="attachment_21377" align="aligncenter" width="254" caption="N. Ram, The Hindu's (now former) editor-in-chief"]
[/caption]Further, the stories that the editor chooses to print on that day on that page are stories that have no time-value, i.e. the stories won't get stale even if they're read after a week. Things like muscles we thought we never had, weird animals, and some new images snapped by NASA's space telescopes make it there, and when I read them, I learn nothing knew that could be relevant except in a quiz.
News that never gets old will always be more of information than knowledge because the need of the hour keeps changing. And it keeps changing because our needs change the moment we read the paper and learn something new. Our needs change because we're constantly using knowledge of the world around us in different ways to move ahead, learn more and do more.
In such an environment, I'd like to know more about what's going on - particularly in science because science has been tipping the power scales in Asia's favour for the past few years. We could use such a shift away from the West to give ourselves an increasingly valuable competitive advantage. But no - it is India after all, and we, the newspapers, must feed only what the hungry want, not what the hungry deserve. And that's politics, dance, music and cricket.
I don't understand why only one page out of 20, or effectively only one page out of some 140 accounting for the entire week, is devoted to science and technology. For all that the nation touts to be its future and one of its major exports to the world, science news in the Indian publishing industry is as good as not represented. They can possibly have no excuse for this: there's enough going on just at the city-level to fill an entire page every day.
All I'm asking is, get science stories from the web - no issues - edit them a little, give credit to the original authors, and publish them on that day itself. There are new technologies being born and culled everyday, new inventors and innovators coming into the scene, new products, processes and techniques finding their way into our lives. There's news-value in all of those stories, so make use of it. (I myself read more than 150 articles per day, and that's after filtering out an equal number from my feeds.)
To conclude: dear The Hindu, don't ditch science because you think no one's eating it. No one's eating it because you're ditching it.
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
I'm Indian. That means I'm stuck in the 1960s.
I sent this particular letter to a few newspaper editors in Chennai. One of them asked me to "start speaking like a 22-year old".
Dear Mr. Editor,
I am now a holder of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from an esteemed institute in India. I joined it in 2006 after mounting pressure at home; there are many things that contribute to this particular phenomenon — that of persisting in believing that engineering is the ONLY way to go — but a very significant one is that of the obsession with scores.
I'm no longer a student, and whatsoever I say now is not as a result of harassment at home. I say it because it is strange, severely unproductive (if not counter-productive) and, more importantly, it is reinforced year after year by the same establishment that also professes any capacity to put an end to it: the information broadcasting industry.
I don't mean to point fingers at anyone at this point; news is news. However, objectively speaking, I don't see any valid reason for high-scoring students in the state-instituted class XII examinations to merit any prominent mention right on (any of) the first few pages of a newspaper that sells 5+ lakh copies each day. This sort of coverage may have been justified if the examination in question was the UPSC entrance test, which is perhaps more consequential by orders of magnitude.
The Kothari Commission report submitted to the Indian government in 1966 established that India's needs were better met by engineering or medical science degree holders rather than those who had studied the liberal arts and/or the social sciences. However, times have changed significantly. In fact, India has been acknowledged for its scientific output repeatedly in international academic and political circles alike. What more do we want? Is it not quite palpably perceived that we lack the understanding required to bridge the gap between a country struggling under ancestral burdens and a country the greatest resource of which is its burgeoning numbers of youngsters? Is that not a need better met by studying the social sciences?
Why is it not sufficient to only declare the announcement of the results? Why does it seem pertinent to photograph each of the many toppers? Through this process of aggrandizement, scoring high becomes an incentive. I concede the threat presented by over six lakh competitors in each of the examinations, but that fact alone does not validate the celebration of these high-scorers. They have my heartiest of regards, but I think you will agree when I say that their accomplishments are monumentally insignificant when compared to so much as the discovery of an indigenous method to manufacture high-efficiency batteries — something that any engineering graduate will put his mind to if he or she knows any celebration is in the offing.
There is one last question I wish to ask: if there is any celebration at all, why must it stop with the class XII exams? It is popular opinion, and not quite wrong still, that given the voluminous syllabi, most of the students have not learnt anything as much as they have managed to remember it till the D-day. If there is to be any celebration, why not celebrate those exams that have an assuredly formidable practical component? Why not celebrate those achievements the incentivization of which promises tractable good for the nation?
*
Dear Mr. Editor,
I am now a holder of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from an esteemed institute in India. I joined it in 2006 after mounting pressure at home; there are many things that contribute to this particular phenomenon — that of persisting in believing that engineering is the ONLY way to go — but a very significant one is that of the obsession with scores.
I'm no longer a student, and whatsoever I say now is not as a result of harassment at home. I say it because it is strange, severely unproductive (if not counter-productive) and, more importantly, it is reinforced year after year by the same establishment that also professes any capacity to put an end to it: the information broadcasting industry.
I don't mean to point fingers at anyone at this point; news is news. However, objectively speaking, I don't see any valid reason for high-scoring students in the state-instituted class XII examinations to merit any prominent mention right on (any of) the first few pages of a newspaper that sells 5+ lakh copies each day. This sort of coverage may have been justified if the examination in question was the UPSC entrance test, which is perhaps more consequential by orders of magnitude.
The Kothari Commission report submitted to the Indian government in 1966 established that India's needs were better met by engineering or medical science degree holders rather than those who had studied the liberal arts and/or the social sciences. However, times have changed significantly. In fact, India has been acknowledged for its scientific output repeatedly in international academic and political circles alike. What more do we want? Is it not quite palpably perceived that we lack the understanding required to bridge the gap between a country struggling under ancestral burdens and a country the greatest resource of which is its burgeoning numbers of youngsters? Is that not a need better met by studying the social sciences?
Why is it not sufficient to only declare the announcement of the results? Why does it seem pertinent to photograph each of the many toppers? Through this process of aggrandizement, scoring high becomes an incentive. I concede the threat presented by over six lakh competitors in each of the examinations, but that fact alone does not validate the celebration of these high-scorers. They have my heartiest of regards, but I think you will agree when I say that their accomplishments are monumentally insignificant when compared to so much as the discovery of an indigenous method to manufacture high-efficiency batteries — something that any engineering graduate will put his mind to if he or she knows any celebration is in the offing.
There is one last question I wish to ask: if there is any celebration at all, why must it stop with the class XII exams? It is popular opinion, and not quite wrong still, that given the voluminous syllabi, most of the students have not learnt anything as much as they have managed to remember it till the D-day. If there is to be any celebration, why not celebrate those exams that have an assuredly formidable practical component? Why not celebrate those achievements the incentivization of which promises tractable good for the nation?
I'm Indian. That means I'm stuck in the 1960s.
I sent this particular letter to a few newspaper editors in Chennai. One of them asked me to "start speaking like a 22-year old".
Dear Mr. Editor,
I am now a holder of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from an esteemed institute in India. I joined it in 2006 after mounting pressure at home; there are many things that contribute to this particular phenomenon — that of persisting in believing that engineering is the ONLY way to go — but a very significant one is that of the obsession with scores.
I'm no longer a student, and whatsoever I say now is not as a result of harassment at home. I say it because it is strange, severely unproductive (if not counter-productive) and, more importantly, it is reinforced year after year by the same establishment that also professes any capacity to put an end to it: the information broadcasting industry.
I don't mean to point fingers at anyone at this point; news is news. However, objectively speaking, I don't see any valid reason for high-scoring students in the state-instituted class XII examinations to merit any prominent mention right on (any of) the first few pages of a newspaper that sells 5+ lakh copies each day. This sort of coverage may have been justified if the examination in question was the UPSC entrance test, which is perhaps more consequential by orders of magnitude.
The Kothari Commission report submitted to the Indian government in 1966 established that India's needs were better met by engineering or medical science degree holders rather than those who had studied the liberal arts and/or the social sciences. However, times have changed significantly. In fact, India has been acknowledged for its scientific output repeatedly in international academic and political circles alike. What more do we want? Is it not quite palpably perceived that we lack the understanding required to bridge the gap between a country struggling under ancestral burdens and a country the greatest resource of which is its burgeoning numbers of youngsters? Is that not a need better met by studying the social sciences?
Why is it not sufficient to only declare the announcement of the results? Why does it seem pertinent to photograph each of the many toppers? Through this process of aggrandizement, scoring high becomes an incentive. I concede the threat presented by over six lakh competitors in each of the examinations, but that fact alone does not validate the celebration of these high-scorers. They have my heartiest of regards, but I think you will agree when I say that their accomplishments are monumentally insignificant when compared to so much as the discovery of an indigenous method to manufacture high-efficiency batteries — something that any engineering graduate will put his mind to if he or she knows any celebration is in the offing.
There is one last question I wish to ask: if there is any celebration at all, why must it stop with the class XII exams? It is popular opinion, and not quite wrong still, that given the voluminous syllabi, most of the students have not learnt anything as much as they have managed to remember it till the D-day. If there is to be any celebration, why not celebrate those exams that have an assuredly formidable practical component? Why not celebrate those achievements the incentivization of which promises tractable good for the nation?
*
Dear Mr. Editor,
I am now a holder of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from an esteemed institute in India. I joined it in 2006 after mounting pressure at home; there are many things that contribute to this particular phenomenon — that of persisting in believing that engineering is the ONLY way to go — but a very significant one is that of the obsession with scores.
I'm no longer a student, and whatsoever I say now is not as a result of harassment at home. I say it because it is strange, severely unproductive (if not counter-productive) and, more importantly, it is reinforced year after year by the same establishment that also professes any capacity to put an end to it: the information broadcasting industry.
I don't mean to point fingers at anyone at this point; news is news. However, objectively speaking, I don't see any valid reason for high-scoring students in the state-instituted class XII examinations to merit any prominent mention right on (any of) the first few pages of a newspaper that sells 5+ lakh copies each day. This sort of coverage may have been justified if the examination in question was the UPSC entrance test, which is perhaps more consequential by orders of magnitude.
The Kothari Commission report submitted to the Indian government in 1966 established that India's needs were better met by engineering or medical science degree holders rather than those who had studied the liberal arts and/or the social sciences. However, times have changed significantly. In fact, India has been acknowledged for its scientific output repeatedly in international academic and political circles alike. What more do we want? Is it not quite palpably perceived that we lack the understanding required to bridge the gap between a country struggling under ancestral burdens and a country the greatest resource of which is its burgeoning numbers of youngsters? Is that not a need better met by studying the social sciences?
Why is it not sufficient to only declare the announcement of the results? Why does it seem pertinent to photograph each of the many toppers? Through this process of aggrandizement, scoring high becomes an incentive. I concede the threat presented by over six lakh competitors in each of the examinations, but that fact alone does not validate the celebration of these high-scorers. They have my heartiest of regards, but I think you will agree when I say that their accomplishments are monumentally insignificant when compared to so much as the discovery of an indigenous method to manufacture high-efficiency batteries — something that any engineering graduate will put his mind to if he or she knows any celebration is in the offing.
There is one last question I wish to ask: if there is any celebration at all, why must it stop with the class XII exams? It is popular opinion, and not quite wrong still, that given the voluminous syllabi, most of the students have not learnt anything as much as they have managed to remember it till the D-day. If there is to be any celebration, why not celebrate those exams that have an assuredly formidable practical component? Why not celebrate those achievements the incentivization of which promises tractable good for the nation?
I'm Indian. That means I'm stuck in the 1960s.
I sent this particular letter to a few newspaper editors in Chennai. One of them asked me to "start speaking like a 22-year old".
Dear Mr. Editor,
I am now a holder of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from an esteemed institute in India. I joined it in 2006 after mounting pressure at home; there are many things that contribute to this particular phenomenon — that of persisting in believing that engineering is the ONLY way to go — but a very significant one is that of the obsession with scores.
I'm no longer a student, and whatsoever I say now is not as a result of harassment at home. I say it because it is strange, severely unproductive (if not counter-productive) and, more importantly, it is reinforced year after year by the same establishment that also professes any capacity to put an end to it: the information broadcasting industry.
I don't mean to point fingers at anyone at this point; news is news. However, objectively speaking, I don't see any valid reason for high-scoring students in the state-instituted class XII examinations to merit any prominent mention right on (any of) the first few pages of a newspaper that sells 5+ lakh copies each day. This sort of coverage may have been justified if the examination in question was the UPSC entrance test, which is perhaps more consequential by orders of magnitude.
The Kothari Commission report submitted to the Indian government in 1966 established that India's needs were better met by engineering or medical science degree holders rather than those who had studied the liberal arts and/or the social sciences. However, times have changed significantly. In fact, India has been acknowledged for its scientific output repeatedly in international academic and political circles alike. What more do we want? Is it not quite palpably perceived that we lack the understanding required to bridge the gap between a country struggling under ancestral burdens and a country the greatest resource of which is its burgeoning numbers of youngsters? Is that not a need better met by studying the social sciences?
Why is it not sufficient to only declare the announcement of the results? Why does it seem pertinent to photograph each of the many toppers? Through this process of aggrandizement, scoring high becomes an incentive. I concede the threat presented by over six lakh competitors in each of the examinations, but that fact alone does not validate the celebration of these high-scorers. They have my heartiest of regards, but I think you will agree when I say that their accomplishments are monumentally insignificant when compared to so much as the discovery of an indigenous method to manufacture high-efficiency batteries — something that any engineering graduate will put his mind to if he or she knows any celebration is in the offing.
There is one last question I wish to ask: if there is any celebration at all, why must it stop with the class XII exams? It is popular opinion, and not quite wrong still, that given the voluminous syllabi, most of the students have not learnt anything as much as they have managed to remember it till the D-day. If there is to be any celebration, why not celebrate those exams that have an assuredly formidable practical component? Why not celebrate those achievements the incentivization of which promises tractable good for the nation?
*
Dear Mr. Editor,
I am now a holder of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from an esteemed institute in India. I joined it in 2006 after mounting pressure at home; there are many things that contribute to this particular phenomenon — that of persisting in believing that engineering is the ONLY way to go — but a very significant one is that of the obsession with scores.
I'm no longer a student, and whatsoever I say now is not as a result of harassment at home. I say it because it is strange, severely unproductive (if not counter-productive) and, more importantly, it is reinforced year after year by the same establishment that also professes any capacity to put an end to it: the information broadcasting industry.
I don't mean to point fingers at anyone at this point; news is news. However, objectively speaking, I don't see any valid reason for high-scoring students in the state-instituted class XII examinations to merit any prominent mention right on (any of) the first few pages of a newspaper that sells 5+ lakh copies each day. This sort of coverage may have been justified if the examination in question was the UPSC entrance test, which is perhaps more consequential by orders of magnitude.
The Kothari Commission report submitted to the Indian government in 1966 established that India's needs were better met by engineering or medical science degree holders rather than those who had studied the liberal arts and/or the social sciences. However, times have changed significantly. In fact, India has been acknowledged for its scientific output repeatedly in international academic and political circles alike. What more do we want? Is it not quite palpably perceived that we lack the understanding required to bridge the gap between a country struggling under ancestral burdens and a country the greatest resource of which is its burgeoning numbers of youngsters? Is that not a need better met by studying the social sciences?
Why is it not sufficient to only declare the announcement of the results? Why does it seem pertinent to photograph each of the many toppers? Through this process of aggrandizement, scoring high becomes an incentive. I concede the threat presented by over six lakh competitors in each of the examinations, but that fact alone does not validate the celebration of these high-scorers. They have my heartiest of regards, but I think you will agree when I say that their accomplishments are monumentally insignificant when compared to so much as the discovery of an indigenous method to manufacture high-efficiency batteries — something that any engineering graduate will put his mind to if he or she knows any celebration is in the offing.
There is one last question I wish to ask: if there is any celebration at all, why must it stop with the class XII exams? It is popular opinion, and not quite wrong still, that given the voluminous syllabi, most of the students have not learnt anything as much as they have managed to remember it till the D-day. If there is to be any celebration, why not celebrate those exams that have an assuredly formidable practical component? Why not celebrate those achievements the incentivization of which promises tractable good for the nation?
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