Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

FoU Camp, Foss.in and Barcamp Bangalore in a row.

Tomorrow is FoU Camp, the sorta-annual gathering of members of Silk-list. Silk is now nine years old and easily among the more interesting lists I’m on. With attendees coming in from across the country, and some from around the world, this will be one event well worth attending.

Last year, six of us went to Coonoor for an extended weekend, discussed topics ranging from burnout to what it means to be a hacker, and took lots of pictures of the camp, and tea estates. This time the location is Bangalore, and a lot more people are attending. If you’re interested, join the list.

Barcamp Bangalore 2 is next weekend. You may recall the previous iteration in April, when we gathered 150 people into Yahoo!’s reception area for a day of unstructured discussions. Jess and I made plans then for what the next iteration would be like, partly resulting in FoU. Having not the bandwidth to organise another Barcamp however, we announced the list’s closing, when a new team sprang into action. They’ve done a great job putting it together.

The focus this time is on startups. Over 90 have been invited to participate. The list of registered attendees is already longer than April’s. This Barcamp will be on Dec 2 & 3 in the conference rooms of Thoughtworks, on Airport road. Register if you haven’t already.

The unacknowledged elephant in the room is, of course, Foss.in (I wish they had an appropriately sized image that I could use here). Now in its sixth year, this event has grown to be a significant gravity centre. It’s largely responsible for the date and attendee list of FoU Camp. I’ve been off the FOSS circuit lately, having wandered into open standards and other realms of intellectual property, but it’s hard to miss this event given its far-reaching impact.

FoU Camp has no event charges. Everyone covers their own. Barcamp is free thanks to sponsor support. Foss.in has a minimal cover charge, intended to ensure entry is limited to those who really want to be there. Pre-registrations close today. Hurry up!

Subramanian Vincent writes in India Together:

Community radio gets its day

After years of meetings, letters, discussions, workshops, petitions, and even some international pressure, New Delhi has decided to move forward and open up radio broadcasting in a way it never was until now.

The good news is that India is moving towards opening up community radio. The unfortunate part is that it’s not quite open yet.

For one, you have to be a registered non-profit. I’ve seen friends try to run community-friendly businesses registered as non-profits, only to find themselves compelled to turn for-profit to keep the business growing. The modalities of a non-profit registration are not conducive to a business that wants to generate its own revenue rather than run on charity. While the decision to limit it to non-profits is in line with policies around the world, with the community expected to finance the operation, it also hinges on what it means to be a non-profit in each of these regions.

Next, the radio has to be low power, giving it an approximate radius of five kilometres in an urban area, and broadcasting of news is not allowed. The limit on reach is understandable, for it helps reinforce the community aspect, but debarring news is not. We currently suffer from gaping holes in media reach. Television channels reach nationwide or specific linguistic regions (ie, states). Newspapers cover entire cities. But what of news only relevant to specific neighbourhoods? Where is the medium to carry such news? For connected communities, web-based media can fill the gap, but we’re a long way from significant access density.

Community radio is a viable option. That it’s opening up is great news, but it could do with being more open.

In her paper ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’: Language and Its Identities in Contemporary Karnataka (Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 12-19, 1996, pp 2809-2816), Janaki Nair attempts to trace the origins and evolution of Kannada nationalism, seeking to show how its growth has been hampered on various fronts and how it may be increasingly aligning with “strident communal or anti-minority forces,” resulting in “undemocratic resolution of its identity crisis.” This paper may help cast some light on justifications for the recent announcement of Bangalore being renamed to Bengalooru.

While Nair does not provide a general introduction to the larger nationalist movement across the country, that may be gained from “The Thematic and the Problematic”, chapter 2 of Partha Chatterjee’s “Nationalistic Thought in a Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?”. Chatterjee explains therein that the nationalist movement, which sought independence from colonial power, claimed to speak on behalf of the populations whose support it needed, even while seeking goals that may not have immediate appeal to those populations. The nationalist movement was thus necessarily a bundle of compromises.

While Hindi nationalism has its origins in the 1870s, Kannada nationalism failed to take root until about 1920, when Alur Venkat Rao specifically took on the agenda. Nair notes that this delay was because an administrative identity on which nationalist politics could develop was unavailable. The nationalist movement justified its existence by seeking to embrace modernity and industralisation, but in Mysore state, this agenda was taken up by the state itself, thus severely hampering the conditions in which a public sphere could develop.

The resultant muted political identity, source of the legendary ‘tolerance’ of the Kannadigas to external cultures and languages, is often cited as a distinct advantage over other states, especially with Bangalore becoming an attractive location for integration into the new world economic order.

However, this displacement of cultural nationalism with economic and legal modernisation is “fraught with unexpected anxieties that have violently manifested themselves in the past two decades”. Kannada nationalism is today a beleaguered nationalism since it possesses neither the will nor the resources to combat the hegemonic presence of English as the language of science and global capitalism. Instead, it displaces its demands on the politico-cultural sphere via the state, taking refuge via the linguistic orientation of states, which grants Kannada status of official language of Karnataka.

This is not straightforward either, since Karnataka is unusually rich in the number of languages spoken by its inhabitants, which include Tulu, Konkani and Kodagu as native languages, apart from significant populations of Telugu, Urdu, Tamil and Marathi speakers. Kannada speakers account for only 65% of the state. Nair also quotes figures from other studies, which note that Bangalore has 14% of the state’s population (second ranked Belgaum being a poor 8%), and within Bangalore, Kannada speakers account for only 34%.

Perhaps as a result of this lack of dominance, or perhaps the inability to take on the economic hegemony of English, Kannada nationalism pits itself against other dominated languages, particularly Tamil and Urdu.

Nair here notes the three significant moments of language-related agitations in the last two decades, the Gokak agitation of 1982, the Cauvery agitation of 1991, and the agitation against the telecast of news in Urdu in 1994. From the manner of these agitations, she points out that acts of securing the identity of Kannada by attacks on other linguistic minorities are restricted to regions of high economic growth where minorities are visibly thriving, particularly urban areas like Bangalore and Mysore.

The development of Bangalore as city and its place in the global order make it a site of bitter contention on the plight of Kannada and Kannadigas throughout Karnataka. This may be correlated with contemporary developments, wherein Bangalore is claimed to rightfully belong to the Kannadigas and renamed to make the point, even while the legitimacy and appropriateness of the Kannada version of the name is in question.

Nair divides her examination into four sections, looking at Kannada as the language of Work, Culture, Governance and Religion.

For the first, she points out that the legendary ‘tolerance’ of Kannadigas is a case of reinterpretation of the existence of substantial linguistic minorities, who owe their presence to migration caused by droughts in the farmlands, the availability of jobs in an industrialised Mysore state, and general migration from rural areas to urban centres, all of which have essentially little to do with the Kannadigas themselves. For their part, Tamil workers attribute their presence in the state to their propensity for ‘hard work’. These assumptions about either people continue to persist today.

In the realm of culture, Kannada has never had much hope against an internationally hegemonic language like English, which found traction in India in the absence of a common language across the incipient nation-state. Despite this, Nair notes more than a century of struggle at keeping Kannada as the medium of instruction in schools, lately with the support of bodies such as the Kannada and Culture Department.

Nair also notes the discomfort the Kannada movement has had with Hindi, the language of the larger nationalist movement, including instances of protest at Hindi television programmes and movies being dubbed in Kannada instead of being remade, even as others consider remakes as the death knell for original work in Kannada.

In recent times, these tensions have manifested as the Kannada film industry’s demand for a delay of several weeks on all other language films being released in the state. Nair says such moves may be seen as the coercive rather than persuasive quality of Kannada’s limited reign over the culture of Karnataka.

Nair notes that given the sheer hopelessness of attempting to prop Kannada against other language media, the movement went after an easier target, the official channels of the state.

Given the economic order of the day, with the public sector slowly but surely transitioning into a private sector, the state not just handles administrative functions but is an active interventionist force in this transition, and thus ideally positioned to secure the interests of the Kannada movement. In over 30 years of intervention however, it has failed to do this, resulting in some considering the only viable route being to make Kannada the sole official language, with the school system as a crucial site for that intervention. The Gokak agitation concerned itself with this need. The 1994 agitation against telecast of news in Urdu may be seen as another act of consecration of Kannada as the language of the state.

Nair contends that Urdu speakers solidarity springs in part from the solidarity made available by Islam and is able to exist without the patronage of a state. Kannada envies and fears Urdu’s religious affiliation. Kannada’s own association with Hinduism is naturalised and hence beyond interrogation.

The final section of the paper seeks to explain this naturalisation. This section is the least convincing, for it pegs its explanation around the work of one man, Alur Venkat Rao’s 1917 conception of ‘Karnatakatva’ in his Karnataka Gatha Vaibhava. Alur’s history of Karnataka ends in 1565, when the forces of Hinduism were defeated by the forces of Islam. Despite that the Bahmani and Adil Shahi court cultures in North Karnataka paralleled the court of the Wodeyars, Alur holds them responsible for the decline of Karnatakatva.

While Alur’s work no doubt was meant to rally specific groups to the cause of Kannada, he achieved his cause much in the same way that Shahid Amin has noted elsewhere with Hindi nationalist writers such as Bankimchandra, who had to separate Hindi from Urdu and thereby alienated Islam while attempting to define a Hindi nation. In this manner, the identification of Kannada with Hinduism has become naturalised without an explicit call for their association.

In conclusion, Nair notes that the Kannada movement resembles the Shiv Sena movement quite closely in the kinds of elements it assembles in its self-definition (Hindu, anti-minority and patriarchal) as well as in its aspirations (control of the political machine), while other details vary. Kannada nationalism, like all nationalisms, attempts to produce a solidarity between all Kannada speakers in order to efface the specificities of caste and class, but pits itself against other dominated minorities rather than addressing the causes for its own domination.

There are some concerns with this paper that must be noted:

First, Nair presents the case of Kannada nationalism as a series of causes and effects, a domino effect with only two visible roots: of Mysore state absorbing the nationalist agenda, thereby stunting its growth, and of Alur Venkat Rao’s version of Karnataka’s history having created an other that the weakened movement could pit itself against. The result is compelling but not entirely convincing. Perhaps Nair’s other work throws more light on how the parts fit together (see a review here).

Second, while Nair does not claim it, the paper suggests that North and South Karnataka have independent identities and are largely united only by common language. This becomes clear when she distinguishes between Mysore’s Wodeyars and North Karnataka’s Bahmani and Adil Shahi courts. Yet, the Bahmani kingdom occupied a different (if overlapping) period from the Wodeyars, and the Wodeyars’ Mysore state did not cover all of present day Karnataka. Hence, when she finds cause with the actions of the Mysore state, what of the (then) rest of the Kannada speaking people? How did they develop? Or did their sense of identity tend to align with Maharashtra, perhaps thus providing the backdrop for recent agitations regarding state affiliation in Belgaum?

Third, the linguistic conflicts described in the paper pit Kannada against Tamil, Hindi and Urdu, but what about Kodagu, Tulu and Konkani, languages that are almost entirely contained within the boundaries of the state but aren’t official languages, and therefore have even greater cause for insecurity? If this greater insecurity may be considered reason for the movement to feel secure against them, does this reinforce that the movement has indeed only picked on languages that pose a comparable threat, ignoring the minor and the hegemonic alike?

(This text was written for an assignment at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.)

Global Voices is having their annual summit in Delhi this December. Having been curious about GV for a while, I’m attending.

If I am, say, based in Bangalore and tasked with blogging to bridge my neighbourhood with the rest of the world, then I would find it far easier to comment on the world in a manner accessible to folks around me, than to comment on my immediate surroundings in a manner accessible to the world. The first reflects my curiosity. It comes naturally. The second, however, requires some engagement with the perceived audience. It requires me to imagine who the reader is and what level of explanation is needed to convey the message.

That GV not only manages this, but does it with such gusto, suggests then that GV isn’t merely an index of conversations, but also the perceived audience for everyone who contributes to GV. The folks on GV talk to each other, and the world benefits in the process. It is a machine that generates the energy to keep itself going.

I expect the annual summit will have the atmosphere of an old friends gathering. If some of that energy rubs off on me, that alone will make it worthwhile. I’m taking my camera along.

Peter Griffin wrote in about an organisation that helps visually impaired kids raise money by giving them work braille-embossing visiting cards. I visited the Wikipedia page on Braille last night and was fascinated to learn that Braille is a six digit (2x3) binary-encoding scheme that originates from military use. The system is designed around how fingers feel rather than being merely embossed versions of latin characters.

I’d like my cards braille-enabled, but have some questions. Peter, can you pass these on? Posting these in public because others may be curious too.

• Do the kids do the embossing themselves, or are they just the beneficiaries? The Outlook article doesn’t say.
• How do they mark the braille dots? By hand, one card at a time? If so, I do think these kids could benefit from a technology upgrade that lets them be more productive. Such an upgrade may not make sense when there isn’t much work, but I hope it’s in the plan.
• What kind of paper should the cards be printed on, to make braille impressions that last? Since I’ll be carrying stacks of cards around, it would be nice to not have them smother the dots off each other.
• The logistics. How do we do this? Do I get my cards done the regular way and then send them for braille-embossing? To what address do I mail them? Can I instead email a design and expect to receive printed and embossed cards in my mail a week later?

(Note: In the braille version of the title above, I’ve used regular spaces instead of the braille space, Unicode character 2800 “⠀”, because my browser treats the braille space as non-breaking and messes up the page’s formatting.)

Over on Silk-list, Kragen Sitaker forwarded an article by Kevin Barnes titled Finding coders on the subcontinent, about the shortage of tech talent in India. It’s a well written piece that describes a real problem without being condescending about it. It sparked an interesting discussion. However, at some point I couldn’t help but feel that it was rather one-sided, finding fault with the people seeking jobs without saying anything about the companies that seek to hire them.

Here is my rant:

Sure, demand outstrips supply, and there’s a vast pool of unqualified people trying their best to get their foot in the door, but surely this doesn’t mean there are no qualified people?

If you’re a company seeking to hire and retain talent, you’ve got to know how to hire and retain talent. You can’t blame the supply for your shortcomings. You can’t just turn up in a new place, setup camp, and expect the best to gather in your tent, because, after all, you’re cool and they want jobs. In my experience, well qualified people are not hard to find if the job deserves a well qualified person. The myth of talent shortage needs reversal.

First, the startups.

Sturgeon’s law applies here. 95% of all startups will fail. There’s no escaping it. If you’re seeking to work with a startup because you’ve heard the stories of valiant struggle before success, of glorious riches, of the freedom and responsibility and growth such a job affords... you’re likely totally unqualified to tell if the company you’re associating with will be one of those stories.

In other words, your company will fail. Cut and run before it takes you down.

Before you join, demand to be explained the business plan. If it doesn’t make sense, leave. They don’t know what they’re doing.

If the company declares it confidential, leave. They don’t have a plan.

If you tell them it doesn’t make sense and they tell you that you don’t understand and they know what they’re doing, leave. They’re pompous assholes.

If they try to impress you by making you feel small and promising great heights if you associate with them, leave. They’re condescending assholes.

If they tell you that your expected take is more than you deserve, leave. They have no respect for your abilities.

If they offer you stock without giving you decision making responsibility, leave. The stock is worthless and you’ll be signing away the rights to your career.

If they’re offering a decision making responsibility but no stock, leave. They’re control freaks and you’ll get shafted when they realise how dependent they are on you.

If you send them a referral and they pitch to that person singing paeans to the wonderful things they’ve heard about them, raise the alarm. They’re desperate and think nothing of lying in their pitch.

If they say anything about how they’re in your part of the world because the costs work out better here, run like hell. They only want you because you’re cheap. There are few things worse than a job where your most attractive feature is your price tag. Do not ever work for a company that is in your area while the market is elsewhere because it’s cheaper here. Globalisation wasn’t meant to be to your advantage. You’ll get walloped by the glass ceiling before you know it, and then they’ll toss your burnt out body on the road.

In summary, working for a startup is generally a very bad idea. It’s no wonder most startups only find the most desperate candidates, or the brilliant but naive ones who will inevitably burn out. Stop whining that people have no risk taking appetite. They’re being sensible, you’re not.

I didn’t make up any of this list. They’re from actual experiences I’ve had.

For a far simpler but 100% effective test, ask to see the founder’s working space (if the founder has a fancy title like “CEO” or “CTO”, laugh at them before you run, for a fancy title invariably means they have no key staff). If it bears any sign of being superior to the spaces of ordinary employees, any sign at all, whether glass cabin, better furniture, even view from the window, say thanks and walk away. You won’t regret it. The only admissible difference is that they have vacant space around them to accommodate people for meetings. Startups are expected to be disorganised, but not to have visible hierarchies. (The successful startups I’ve worked with invariably had egalitarian working spaces even after having grown several hundred strong.)

Not that established companies are generally any better. When you treat your employees as replaceable unit labour, what better can you expect but to fill your vacancies with replaceable unit labour?

Look at the HR policies most companies have. The big shops all treat their “fresher” recruits as bonded labour. (The contracts are worded to pass the bond off as training fees.) These aren’t mere formalities. I once had a person come running out of a BigCo, three months into the training period, to work with me at a startup. About the most brilliant person I’ve had the pleasure of working with, and a good friend since. He couldn’t stand the place for the way it treated folks, by policy. He told his HR manager as such before leaving. She said she would have to file him as absconding, because otherwise it would be a hassle for her to explain. BigCo sent a lawyergram, threatening a civil suit for violating the bond unless he paid up. (They didn’t follow up, suggesting it made no economic sense.) In the same period, that same company was all over the press as among the best performing companies and one of the best places to work. The press detailed what was most repulsive about the place (“deskilling labour”, aka “leave your brain at the door”) and celebrated it as its unique strength, the engine of its growth. It was disgusting.

As for the startup? The team did some brilliant work that’s caused lasting ripples around the world (as measured by a Google Alert on the name of the product, which continues to turn up new results every few weeks), but the place didn’t escape Sturgeon’s law. Their HR policies were so insane, the best ran for cover at first opportunity, while the brave fought until they burnt out. How bad could it be? Consider this: they had a single phone in the premises, which the “director” personally answered to screen all calls. He’d refuse to pass the call if he thought someone was getting too much phone time. When he left for the day, he locked the instrument in his drawer. This was at a time before cell phones were ubiquitous. The startup had this very expensive, large, open space for an office, one whole side of which was a glass wall with a glorious view. Two thirds of the floor was unoccupied, reserved for future expansion, while everyone got packed into the other third with approximately two and a half feet of personal space, without even cubicle walls. The only place to keep a backpack was to hang it off the back of the chair, or on a designated shelf at the other end of the floor. All this, despite that they paid excellent salaries. Management didn’t think better conditions were needed given the kind of work they did.

(I won’t bother to describe the power politics, aka mutual backstabbing, that characterised the place. This startup wasn’t even the worst disaster I’ve seen.)

I’ve been expelled from an organisation for incompetence on more than one occasion. In moments of self examination, I’ve wondered: was I really that incompetent, or was there something about the place that was so inhibiting? It’s been painful acknowledging one over the other, but with the passing years, I’m increasingly convinced that most companies are really lousy places to work at. They make glorious statements about what their people mean to them, but they usually don’t know what those statements mean.

In the last half decade, not one company has managed to convince me to become a full time employee. I’ve remained a consultant even when heading their tech departments, choosing to work with no job security, no perks, all-work-related-expenses-are-my-own,-please-just-pay-me-this-lump-sum,-thank-you-very-much, because, guess what? It actually works out better than to be an employee, given their policies. Have you seen the employee contracts most companies have?

What’s that? You have an entrepreneurial streak and would like to make the most of it? Well, screw you. You’re the company’s property and you do what you’re told. Don’t you dare be good at anything else. (Don’t believe me? Read the fine print on your contract.)

What’s that? You’ve some errands this morning and will be in late? But you said the same thing yesterday. Well, yes, we have flexitime, but we’d like it if you were in office 9.30 to 6 each day. Please don’t compel us to review our policies.

Heck, most companies don’t even know how to make a consultant’s contract. I’ve worked with companies for years without one and it doesn’t bother me anymore. There’s a standard pattern to how this plays out that is comforting. The working relationship survives without a contract on the basis of trust. Or more accurately, on the basis that if I quit, they’re in deep shit, so the pay cheques had better keep flowing. The contract invariably comes out in a hurry when one shows signs of disillusionment.

Last year, a startup tried to convince me to sign one that said if they had a successful sale of their product, I’d refrain from indulging in that line of work for the next two years, in addition to the 18 months I was going to stay off such work should I dare quit. They saw nothing wrong with it. Just protecting their interests. A non-compete clause, you see. Would they agree to a clause specifying that they pay me a stipend for the period I was mandatorily off work? Hell, no. Not in their interests.

A few months later, that startup folded.

As for those who accept the muzzle of the contract, look at how they’re treated. “Spec it till there’s no room for creativity”. Lower level staff are menial labour. Their ability to think is an inconvenience. How do you upgrade their responsibilities? That’s easy. Give them a simple task, one they can’t possibly fail at, then make congratulatory noises about how they’re so valuable to the company and taking on such important work. If the employee isn’t insulted and manages to complete it without panicking over how they’ve utterly failed to understand the task because surely it can’t be as trivial as this, throw another task at them. If they’re failing to cope, take the task away. The task has to be done on time within budget. That is most important. Work is worship and customer is king, you see. Don’t waste time on fiddly thoughts like how demoralising such a demotion can be. On second thoughts, don’t even bother telling them they’re no longer in charge. There’s no time. They’ll figure it out eventually and understand that it’s all good. The explanations can wait for the performance review. Let HR do it. We’ll give the person some responsibility again when they seem ready for it. Can’t risk them screwing things up.

Performance review? What’s that? Not once in all my working life have I had a performance review, except when being reprimanded for failing to deliver on responsibilities flung at me. Performance reviews are these mysterious events that only happen to other people, never yourself.

Take a person who’s been through this cycle enough times, put them in a decent work environment where they’re treated well, give them responsibilities commensurate with their experience, and ... what? You don’t know how to do this because you never actually got to this part of the job before? In all these years?

Well, is it any surprise when you find yourself interviewing such a candidate? That you find yourself strangely lacking what ought to have been standard experience?

Companies think they’re doing employees a favour by giving them work. They think employees have no business questioning the nature of the work when they’re getting paid for it. They don’t understand that employees have resumes to fill, and if you’re making a habit of giving them bit jobs that are hard to explain, they’ll go elsewhere seeking a better job description.

They think nothing of stuffing people into cramped workplaces with standard issue computers (ugh!) and really bad ergonomics. I’m yet to see a workplace anywhere in this country that understands ergonomics. The table is always too high, hurting your shoulders when you reach for the keyboard, leaving your feet dangling, and the chair is never the right size for you. There’s always some kind of supporting structure under the table that smashes into your knee two times a day. Bad back from the posture? Well, you really ought to take better care of your health, you know. The company can’t oversee your personal life.

And then they don’t understand why you prefer to work from home, where you’re in charge of the environment. Shirking duty. Hanging out with your girlfriend while claiming to work. If you pull this stunt again, we’re marking it as your day off.

Or force them to fill a timesheet that takes half an hour each day and demands details that no one can possibly provide, except by fabrication (“how much time did you spend on each task?”). Cut off their distractions. Filter their Internet access. Don’t let them visit sites that are unrelated to their work. Send them a list each week and demand explanations for what they were doing on those sites. Structure their workplace such that they have no privacy. They shouldn’t be able to tell if someone is staring at their screen from across the room. That’ll keep them focused.

(All real experiences.)

You know what? Enough with this bullshit.

We’re in a booming economy now. This is an employee’s market. Don’t be held down by companies that can’t respect you. There’s always someone else out there who will treat you better. Companies that actually treat their people well are few and far between. If a company doesn’t go out of its way to prove it to you, don’t waste your time with them. Move on.

For companies that claim people are their most valuable assets, ask yourselves this: are you willing to treat HR as the most important function of your company, far more important than the actual line of business you indulge in? If not, screw you. You deserve the rabble you whine about. You are the very source of what you despise.