India

Hi everyone, or people who found this link by mistake, I’m back – my thesis is finally finished, completed, over. I hope to make South Asia-ish as active a blog as those of my fellow bloggers here at The Mantle, whose dynamism I aspire to emulate. I know the “ish” in South Asia-ish gives me a lot of freedom (as does Shaun Randol, founder of The Mantle), but that probably doesn’t extend to me writing about me – so enough about me. Or, as French playwright Sacha Guitry famously said, “enough about me.

Increasingly, NGOs are drawing on marketing techniques, such as paid advertising, branding, celebrity endorsement programmes, and audience profiling, to project their messages and to attempt to influence policy. Whilst this trend has been widely accepted in countries like the United States and the UK, many Indian NGOs engaged in advocacy work are, on the basis of political ideology, questioning its suitability in India.

This picture above is of the zero currency rupees designed by a anti-corruption organization in India called 5th pillar. The group has invented the rupees in hopes that they will be passed on to wrong doers as a sort of tangible scarlett letter against those searching for a bribe or operating under fraudlent pretences.  

"The zero currency note in your country's currency is a tool to help you achive the goal of zero corruption. The note is a way for any human being to say NO to corruption without the fear of facing an encounter with persons in authority.

Next time someone asks you for a bribe, just take your country's zero currency note and hand it to them. This will let the other person know that you refuse to give or take any money in order to perform services required by law or to give or take money to do something illegal"

Props to Designboom

Apologies for the prolonged silence – I promise this isn’t my idea of a “regular” blogging schedule; I’m in the midst of writing my thesis, and basically living in seclusion until it’s done. However, I couldn’t fully resist the trappings of the Internet; once online, a combination of recent events caught my attention that led to a few brief thoughts on India I wanted to share. (I also wanted to let our dear leader Shaun Randol know I hadn’t disappeared. Anyway, back to South Asia and me).

Hi everyone,

I can’t tell you how excited I am to be joining the talented team of bloggers that Shaun Randol has assembled here at The Mantle. Although I’ll mainly comment on things happening in South Asia, I also intend to make use of the freedom provided by the “-ish” in the title to discuss other issues, generally related somehow to something in South Asia (no, I can’t be more specific – that’s how great the “-ish” is).

It was the blurb on the back of this book that initially attracted me. The synopsis likens this Indian novel to a synthesis of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, with an Indian twist. I see now where the comparisons come from, but I think Chatterjee’s novel—though excellent—falls just short of such a literary pinnacle.