Amazon.com launches Kindle at $399. End of an era ?

Online retailer Amazon.com has launched an e-book reading device, called Kindle, at US$399, according to this report.

The Kindle has received a number of advance reviews as it uses technology that brings the reader experience as close as possible to reading a print book.

That Amazon.com has decided to throw its weight behind the e-book reader indicates that the company is seeing a significant shift from print books to e-books, at least in developing markets like the US.

A lot of people are however going to hate this transition, including readers. Whatever happened to tucking into bed with a nice book to read, and the familiar rustle of paper, and the smell of ink and paper ? Will print books go the way of the vinyl record, wooden toys, natural Christmas trees ?

Don't know if I will be able to make the transition. Perhaps our children will as they did with MP3 music. It would also be worthwhile investigating the impact of digital books on our informal culture of sharing books. It is not physically possible for me to let a neighbor read an interesting digital book in my catalog, unless he has a digital reader. In case he has a reader, it is also not quite clear whether it is lawful under copyright laws for me to beam my download to his reader.

On the flip side, e-books will push down the cost of publishing, as the cost of printing, paper, and physical distribution will go. Books will become more easily accessible, because they can be easily downloaded. Amazon is offering 90,000 e-books in its catalog, with most priced at US$9.99 each. Not yet basements prices, but e-books are bound to get cheaper as more vendors start getting into this market.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s American love fest could backfire

“But my generation did not love America only because she had defended freedom. We also loved her because for us, she embodied what was most audacious about the human adventure; for us, she embodied the spirit of conquest. We loved America because for us, America was a new frontier that was continuously pushed back--a constantly renewed challenge to the inventiveness of the human spirit.”

That was Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s President buttering up to the United States during a speech to Congress on Wednesday.

Sarkozy, who incidentally comes from a country with a rich tradition in art, literature, and music, says the imaginations of his generation “were fueled by the winning of the West and Hollywood. By Elvis Presley, Duke Ellington, Hemingway. By John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth. And by Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, fulfilling mankind's oldest dream”.

Goodbye Jean Paul Satre, Albert Camus, Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Bizet, Emile Zola and others that have long made France a center, nay a beacon of culture, politics, and ideology. Farewell to France’s own perception of how politics and the economy should be run.

Enter the new France, a pastiche of all things American, of George Bush and Donald Duck, of Britney Spears and Madonna.

To this sad pass has come such a proud nation that once tenaciously clung to its culture, language, and heritage.

Sarkozy seems to have done a perfect job wheedling his way into replacing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as America’s poodle.

In his speech, he agreed with the US that Iran with nuclear weapons was unacceptable, he reiterated his commitment to French continued engagement in Afghanistan. He gave the US a bonus: he did not refer to the country’s embarrassing debacle in Iraq. That was one issue at least on which Sarkozy could have held his pride, and told America, “we told you so, but you didn’t listen”. He could have used that opportunity to outline a broader view of how the world should move, rather than toeing George Bush’s now jaded and US-centric perception of the world

The members of the US Congress gave him a standing ovation, not once but many times. At a media briefing US President George Bush was seen escorting Sarkozy away with his arm patronizingly around his shoulders.

But Sarkozy carried nothing substantive home, except memories of a transcontinental love affair.

French reaction was fast and bitter. "You cannot be content with looking into each other's eyes and declaring you love one another. You must transform that into a vision and action for the world," former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, a Sarkozy rival, told RTL radio, according to this report by Reuters.

The smitten President also returns home to meet continuing opposition to his bid to Americanize the French economy. Two powerful Paris public transport unions said on Thursday they would join a wider rail strike from the evening of November 13, after rejecting a government offer on reforming their pensions, according to Reuters.

Whoever said the world loves a lover was evidently not French.

The religious right should target the capitalist system rather than gays

America’s religious right is emotionally and culturally lost. As it sees it traditional mores and culture giving way to a new liberal culture that pays little attention to religious issues, it is trying to reverse the change, for example, by influencing the country’s choice for President.

It is also spawning a whole lot of groups on the lunatic fringe, people like the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas who picketed the funerals of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Church claims God is punishing the U.S. because of its tolerance for gays, according to this report in CNN.

America and a lot of other cultures and countries have promoted unbridled capitalism and consumerism, often at the expense of traditional value systems. The breakdown of traditional culture and value systems is in a sense part of the grand design of capitalism to stress on integrated and homogenous markets for which it is more efficient to produce and more efficient to distribute. McDonald’s and its attempts at global homogenization has been the symbol of this attempt to neutralize cultural and yes religious differences in the interests of the markets.

This neutralization of local culture is being resisted in many countries, and often takes the form of anti-American sentiment. In America too, the religious right is now reacting to attempts of capitalist society to homogenize and control tastes, values and lifestyles. You may ask what do lifestyles and culture have to do with religion ? In the past, they have all moved together with religion, culture, and lifestyles influencing one another. You can’t neutralize or modify one, without pulling down the entire superstructure.

The religious right have made homosexuality and abortion rights their key issues. But they have conveniently avoided taking on the real cause of their problems – the breakdown of culture, religion, and values by mass consumerism, and the consequent anomie.

The fringes of the religious right are the real problem, as they are lunatic attempts to cope with the social and cultural anomie beget by modern consumerist society.

The religious right, which has typically voted Republican and in favor of the glorification of the current capitalist value system, has in a sense contributed to the social and cultural anomie in American society. They cannot blame homosexuals and abortionists for America’s problems. The devil is in the system – the capitalist system, and the value system it promotes to perpetuate its existence.

The religious right will probably look at these issues through their traditional demonology. They will probably say, “Hey, here is another self-serving homosexual”. I am not a homosexual. I believe that the religious right should put aside its witch-hunting of homosexuals and go after the big Satan – the system itself of which they are both the supporters and the victims.

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In India, lots of spending on poor quality

Over the weekend in Bangalore, I had promised my daughter I would take her to an up market store that sold a variety of breads with exotic names and ingredients ranging from olives to sunflower seeds.

On Saturday morning, we braved the maniacal traffic and went to this place, only to find that the breads were two or three days old. The cheese-and-garlic loaf, a favorite in our household, was three days old, according to the label. An employee graciously recommended the wheat bread that was only a day old.

Close by is a Chinese restaurant that serves Indo-Chinese food, a mix of Chinese flavors and a pungent Indian idiom. The “ drums of heaven” there are usually soggy, while their noodles can be very sticky.

But the bakery and the Chinese restaurant continue to attract customers by the droves. They stand in queues outside, something unthinkable say a decade ago when most of Bangalore eat home-cooked food. A number of restaurants, with claims to offer Thai, Spanish, Italian, Provencal, Egyptian and other varieties of cuisine have also sprouted across the city. The fare is in most cases indifferent, but that does not deter customers from queuing up and paying exorbitant prices.

That had me surprised until I recalled an old, but no less relevant it seems, concept in sociology. An eminent Indian sociologist, M.N. Srinivas, observed in his field studies among one some of the communities in India, that the castes positioned lower in the hierarchy tend to imitate and modify their culture to resemble that of the dominant caste in the locality. Srinivas called the phenomenon Sanskritization, as the values and culture that tend to get imitated by the new social upstarts were the Sanskrit, Brahmanical ones.

What does this have to do with the large number of crowded restaurants and malls in Bangalore ? A lot, I think. Unlike previous upstarts, who believed that assimilating Brahmin and Sanskrit culture, rituals, and customs was key to their social climbing, the new upstarts have in a strange twist decided on American culture as the dominant culture to be imitated and assimilated.

These days Indians have wine tasting parties, to refine their taste for something they never consumed earlier. You have chefs of five-start hotels and other, usually self styled gourmands, writing in the society pages of newspapers on the finer points of rare delicacies like caviar and truffles.

A lot of affluent Indians are turning their back to their own rich and ancient traditions in food, dressing, and other aspects of culture, to a new world of mainly American kitsch. They are getting there rudderless and without discernment, creating an opportunity for a new set of consultants and purveyors of culture, most of them parvenu. Add to them snooty restaurateurs and five-star chefs. If you find the pasta sticky, don’t complain to the chef. He is more likely to turn around and tell you, without batting an eyelid, that is how pasta is eaten by the Italians. Probably he is learning too.

Maybe this is a transitional phase, but these days in Bangalore, and most of urban India, good food is a rarity, particularly if the idiom is not Indian.

Bollywood and the “stupid Indian”

A picture is worth a thousands words, goes the old saw. By that reasoning, the corrosive images coming out from Bollywood, India’s prolific cinema production industry, and its TV soaps must have by now done great damage to the image abroad of Indians.

In a movie from Bollywood, the hero’s falling in love is usually incomplete without a song and a dance. The couple never ever jump into bed, because the official censors in India don’t allow screening that.

But there is enough in the dance sequences to titillate a repressed audience. A favorite of directors is a scene of a fully dressed woman standing under a waterfall or a shower, revealing a lot through the wetness of her clothes. The director also throws in well-choreographed dance sequences, with a large number of over-fed and skimpily clad starlets, known locally as “item girls”, dancing in tandem with the hero and heroine.

The story line is also quite simple and repetitive, exploiting ad nauseam the “ love conquers everything” theme. The hero or the heroine usually come from a poor family, and there is opposition to the marriage, and other obstacles thrown up by villains who suddenly surface in the plot, either in search of profit, or hired by a competing girl friend or boy friend. Pain is exaggerated and so is cruelty and sadness. A gunned down actor could take half an hour to die, while a nail-biting audience watches every gory detail.

It is only recently that producers have started experimenting with new themes, but most are quite improbable in the Indian context. One movie "Nishabd" (Silent) released this year had a top actor Amitabh Bachchan, who is in his 60s in real life and in the movie, falling in love with an 18 year-old girl. The film was not a hit at the box offices.

Realism is also given the go by in popular TV soaps. The heroes and heroines grow older, and have children and grand-children, as the soaps proceeds from one episode to another. But they still strut around with jet-black hair and youthful faces and figures. And they are still caught up in romantic entanglements of their glorious past. In one serial, the widowed matriarch is a great-great grandmother !

Most of the popular soaps center around wealthy business households with spacious homes, and expensive cars. Some aim at being westernized or modernized, by introducing, and subtly glorifying, to traditional Indians and the country’s rural masses, themes of infidelity, extra-marital affairs, and crimes of passion.

Other soaps like "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi" (Because a Mother-in-law was once a Daughter-in-law too) attempt, in a contrived way, to convey that despite their wealth, the family is still traditional, adhering to the local “sanskar” or culture.

As for the poor, they don’t exist in the world-view of the soaps. The Indian soap is a celebration of the new upper-class hedonism that has emerged as a result of India’s economic boom.

All this adds up to a potential image problem for Indians. If earlier the country was known as a land of elephants and snake charmers, it will now get portrayed as land of social upstarts living in a world of their own imagination.

If Bollywood portrayed Indian men and women dancing around trees or breaking into song, with little by way of intellect or existential concerns, the soaps have gone a step further. They have brought into focus the new Indian upstart. Unlike the love-smitten, song and dance loving hero and heroine of Bollywood, the heroes and heroines of the soaps do unfortunately exist.

But they do not represent all Indians. They do not represent the large number of Indian engineers and researchers who have made a mark, occupying top positions both in India and abroad. They do not represent India’s scholars and Nobel prize winners.

They do no represent India’s large number of poor.

As Indian producers try to take their fare abroad, they will not be exporting real Indian culture, but a new ersatz culture and a new stereotype – the stereotype of the stupid Indian.