Every once in a while a new word or phrase is coined, usually by a researcher or by the media, that has all the ease-of-use and shorthand built into it to quickly become a word that will get widely used and end up in a dictionary. This morning, from Agence France-Presse comes this story and headline, and the Romantic Realist suspects “tech sex“, atleast its straightforward, non-kinky meaning, will soon end up in our every day lexicon.

One in five US teens has had ’tech sex’: study

“One-in-five US teens has sent nude or partially-clothed images of themselves to someone by email or mobile phone and twice as many have sent sexually suggestive electronic messages, a survey shows.

American youngsters aged 13 to 19 are having tech-sex despite a majority of them saying it can have “serious negative consequences” on them, the survey commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (NCTUP) revealed on Wednesday. (READ FULL SURVEY HERE)

More than half of the 1280 teens and young adults up to age 26 who took part in the online poll, conducted in September and October, said they had received a sexually suggestive message from someone else – and one in five said they had shared the racy message with a third person.Eight in 10 teens said they would be concerned about sending a sexy image of themselves or racy message because they “might regret it later,” while nearly 70 per cent said they were worried it could “disappoint family.”Where teen tech-sex gives real rise to concern among adults, said NCTUP, is that more than a third of teens (38 per cent) say exchanging sexy content makes dating or physical sex with others more likely, and three in 10 say those who exchange sexually suggestive content are “expected to hook up.”“That so many young people say technology is encouraging an even more casual, hook-up culture is reason for concern, given the high rates of teen and unplanned pregnancy in the United States,” said Marisa Nightingale, senior advisor to NCTUP.Although teen pregnancy and birth rates in the United States have dropped by one-third since the 1990s, they remain high compared to other developed countries and carry high costs to the teens involved, their children and society, NCPTUP said in a report published last year.“The US birth rate of 41 per 1,000 in 2004 was much higher than Canada’s 14 (in 2003), England and Wales’ 27 (the highest rate in Western Europe), Japan’s six and the Netherlands’ five (the lowest rate in Western Europe),” said NCTUP’s “Emerging Answers” report, published in November 2007.More than 30% of girls in the United States become pregnant before they reach age 20, and many become pregnant a second time before their 20th birthday, according to NCTUP.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of all 15- to 19-year-olds in the United States have had sex at least once.” AFP

A good pop culture measure of what might happen to “tech sex” will be to measure Google search results for the term. As of 11 December 2008, “tech sex” throws up about 73,800 results including many variations. So, watch that space.

I Want Media, an online media resource, recently named Arianna Huffington co-founder of the online news and opinion site, The Huffington Post, as the 2008 Media Person of the Year in a poll that saw her easily trump the likes of Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, Tina Fey, the dead-on US television impersonator of Sarah Palin, the Twitter trio of Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, and Sam Zell, who has driven the Tribune Co. into seeking bankruptcy protection.

Huffington, whose website capitalized on the US elections, to record traffic, is a well deserved winner for pretty much reinventing the business model for journalism (as Craig Newmark of Craigs List says in nominating her) and is the vanguard of what will likely reshape the American media industry in coming years.

What was interesting to me was that the finalists also included “The Laid-Off Journalist” a clear sign of what else is happening in the Western media world. The sharp job cuts and shrinking of the newspaper industry, especially in America, this year is unprecedented and, come to think of it, has just begun. At last count, some 15,157 job cuts have been documented by one account and, as I predict, it is only beginning.

The juxtaposition of Huffington’s rise and the demise of print (and television) newsroom jobs is quite interesting to this Romantic Realist in the sense that they are, in some ways, the yin and yang of the state of western journalism. Rapidly falling but still large advertising revenues for print coupled with significant news gathering infrastructure (read costs) on one side, and rising but nowhere as profitable (in terms of revenue per reader/subscriber) revenues for digital news dissemination on the other. Speaking of layoffs and the future, do read Tina Brown’s angry piece on how media organizations are actually not using layoffs to “kill the media zombies” on her new web media site, The Daily Beast.

There aren’t too many editors and publishers left in the US who don’t think that the print-only newspaper model is broken. The problem is that costs of news gathering, be it for a web site or for a newspaper, still remain very expensive and will be, until there is some rethinking of what constitutes journalism and who is solely incharge of creating content. The mainstream media company’s dilemma was well articulated in a National Public Radio interview by Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, who said:

“Good journalism does not come cheap. And, therefore, you’re not going to find a lot of blogs or nonprofit Web sites that are going to build a Baghdad bureau,” adding that at the same time “there’s a real shortage of the kind of information that I would call quality journalism.” (Read transcript or listen to the interview here)

In India, the newsroom layoffs have started to come in bits and pieces, with the likes of Saakal Times cutting dozens of jobs (Read more here) and some magazines shutting shop. And I predict more will come (should come?) if the current advertising downturn lasts, as it looks it will even if there is some overall growth. The much more interesting question for me is when and how fast will India’s own Arianna Huffington and The Huffington Post take root?

PostScript: A colleague sent me this interesting link after he read this post: “You may find this interesting. a son on the death of the newspaper his dad works for…(read post here)

It is not unusual in New Delhi to get marketing pitches for why The Times of India or Hindustan Times are the essential morning reads. I don’t know what the overlap of readership is between both papers but each one does try to say they are the must read and not the other.

What is interesting to me is how journalists and editors at both papers seem to be doing their best to convince Delhi’s readers that they actually can’t do without both papers. Both newspapers of 9 December are a good example of what I mean. Both are full of stories on Indian state assembly results where the Congress party won three states while the Bharatiya Janata Party retained Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Let’s look at how both papers wrote about what actually happened in Madhya Pradesh in terms of the Congress party losing:

The Hindustan Times story by NK Singh is headlined Development plank, Cong did it for BJP. The Times of India story, by Team TOI, is headlined Infighting to blame for Cong debacle. So far, so good. But it quickly gets rather interesting for the reader.

Here is HT’s Singh on what happened, laying the blame squarely on Suresh Pachouri of the Congress:

“Another factor behind the BJP victory was the Congress party itself. It looked as if the party was determined to lose. And the person most responsible for it was probably the state unit chief himself, Suresh Pachouri, a former union minister, who was sent to Madhya Pradesh last February. He proved to be a disastrous choice. Pachouri has never won a single general election in his life; in fact, he lost the only election he ever contested. He runs his politics, Rajya Sabha style, whose member he has been for the last quarter century.Till February the general atmosphere in MP was that the Congress was coming back to power. That started changing almost immediately. The Congress remained a divided house till the time it went to polls. In fact it could never put its act together. Probably for the first time in Madhya Pradesh, only one leader, Pachouri, got a larger than life projection in the official campaign of the State Congress. This was, of course, done at the cost of other charismatic regional leaders such as Jyotriditya Scindia, Kamal Nath, Digvijay Singh and Arjun Singh. Many Congressmen, used to working under a collective leadership at election time, found it hard to swallow. The acute groupism resulted in complaints of favouritism in ticket distribution, leading to large-scale revolt, including that of regional satraps like Mukesh Nayak, Mahavir Prasad Vashishth and Balendu Shukla. It cost the party a number of seats.” (Read full story here)

Here is Team TOI on what happened, seemingly blaming everyone but Suresh Pachouri for the debacle:

“To begin with, it doesn’t need an exhaustive analysis that Pachauri is promising to figure out why Congress lost MP; the party was routed because of factional fights between at least four “serious” chief ministerial candidates. Thus, hurt and angry, Pachauri sat alone in the party headquarters, flanked by a handful of loyalists. Ever since he was sent by Congress president Sonia Gandhi as MPCC chief, Pachauri had been waging a lonely battle.

A week before the state went to polls, Congress released its election manifesto pledging wheat at Rs 1 per kg and sops for farmers, free salt to tribals and free dhotis and sarees. When the manifesto was released by Union defence minister Pranab Mukherjee, none of Pachauri’s four rivals were on stage. In fact, soon after the release function, Kamal Nath told reporters that “another manifesto” would be announced with more sops! Digvijay campaigned for his supporters, Kamal Nath for his, Scindia for his ‘durbaris’. And though all stalwarts squabbled bitterly over the CM’s chair, none contested the assembly elections himself — not even Pachauri. With top leaders refusing to contest, the second rung was left rudderless.” (Read full story here)

So was Pachauri a lonely, tragic victim undone by Congress rivals (Times of India) or was he the cause of the disaster by keeping his Congress rivals out of the limelight (Hindustan Times)? Or are the facts somewhere inbetween? Incidentally, for two rather opinionated stories, neither one of them is labeled as opinion or analysis.

This Romantic Realist thinks that perhaps instead of going at each other with massive marketing campaigns, a smarter strategy might be to convince readers to buy both papers–if nothing else to get to the bottom of stories?

ps: by way of full disclosure, Mint is published by HT Media Ltd, which also publishes Hindustan Times.

There has been a lot of renewed debate in India this past week about Muslims, Hindus, Pakistanis, “true” Muslims, Jews, Americans and Islamists, as India and Indians come to terms with the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. It is only natural that issues of race, religion, ethnicity and skin-color, all of which are deeply rooted in the Indian psyche, bubble up to the surface at difficult and emotional times like this.

But two disparate “conversations” this past week also brought home to the Romantic Realist how even the most well meaning–and often highly educated–people speak and act, out of maybe ignorance or sheer hubris, in ways that are troubling, to say the least.

Specimen 1: Just days after the terrorists struck and fingers started pointing to Pakistan’s involvement, a childhood friend from Chennai, prone to sending group emails about jokes or very weighty issues such as national security, sent a missive that was essentially a thought provoking article written by Mohsin Hamid, the Pakistani British author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which had appeared in the UK’s Guardian and carried by several other papers including the Dawn. Hamid’s piece was an eloquent appeal to not look at each other in “divisive anger” but realize that India and Pakistan are actually united in a “shared sorrow” and their efforts to fight extremism will “founder if fought alone.” (Read Hamid’s essay here)

There was just one problem with the email. This friend, an IIM Bangalore alumna who is in the people business, having run a very successful Chennai-based recruiting firm, and has among the sweetest dispositions of any of my small circle of friends, titled the email: “India and Pakistan are bound by sorrows – A Paki view” And she lost me. Rather than ruminate over Hamid’s intelligent essay, my troubled mind went off on a tangent, pondering issues that have now culminated in this blog post. For those of you—like my friend, I suspect there will be a few if not a lot of you—wondering what the fuss is all about, here is what the style book of SAJA (the New York-based South Asian Journalists Association) says about “Paki” in what is an attempt by the largely Indian group to educate the West about what not to call the people of Pakistan: “Paki– A derogatory slang word for people of Pakistani origin. Is the South Asian equivalent of “Jap” or the “N word.” Do not use under any circumstances. If you are quoting someone saying this, be sure to treat the word with the same caution you would treat “Jap.” Used often in England as a racial epithet against South Asians in general (especially by skinheads). From LondonSlang.com: “paki – a derogatory term used to describe anyone who looks vaguely Asian even though it is an abbreviation for Pakistani.” Some people mistakenly use it as a shorthand way of saying “Pakistani.” Egregious Examples: A headline in the New York Post (June 17, 1999): “India: Pakis Killed POWs.” President George W. Bush at a press conference (Jan. 7, 2002): “And we are working hard to convince both the Indians and the Pakis there’s a way to deal with their problems without going to war.” The official White House reaction within hours: “The president has great respect for Pakistan, the Pakistani people, and the Pakistani culture. Pakistan has been a strong member of the international coalition in the war against terrorism and that he meant no disrespect with the word.”

You can also read the Wiki entry on “Paki” here.

Specimen 2: A senior executive of Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, the large Indian drug company that is now majority owned by Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo Co, is introduced to me at the Clinton Global Initiative’s Asia meeting this past week. He is someone I have exchanged emails with in my nearly three years in India but had never met. As we exchange business cards, I make small talk noting that I am surprised even the card hasn’t changed since the November completion of the $4.3 billion acquisition by Daiichi. His response: “Raju, you know the Japs. The Japs don’t do anything quickly.” Then he went on to explain it is mostly business as usual at Ranbaxy anyway under the new owners.

The rest of the conversation, him nursing a whisky and soda, and me sipping a glass of bubbly, is a bit of a blur because I kept thinking that while Daiichi may own Ranbaxy, it has a long, long, long way to go to before changing hearts, and thoughts and stereotypes at its Indian entity. By the way, “practice dignity” is still one of Ranbaxy’s 7 core corporate Values.

Again, for those of you wondering what the fuss is all about, here is what Wikipedia has to say about the use of Jap(s):

“Jap is an English abbreviation of the word Japanese. Today it is regarded as an ethnic slur, though English-speaking countries differ in the degree they consider the term offensive… In the past, Jap was not considered primarily offensive; however, after the events of World War II, the term became derogatory.”

(Read the fully Wikipedia entry here or the other problematic use of the word, this time involving Jewish-American women here)

In India, it is somewhat fashionable, at least among intellectuals, to quickly agree that Indians are racists and but then go to explain at great length why certain acts that seem overtly racist to non-Indians are really, really not so. Such conversations happen frequently for this Romantic Realist, who can claim some personal experience with matters involving race, about small and big acts of racism in India, often as attempts at explaining away this behavior as anything but racist. One only has to read Vir Sanghvi’s argument along these lines, made in his Pursuits column for Mint’s weekend magazine Lounge, following the Australia-India cricket controversy involving Harbajan Singh and Andrew Symonds about the use of monkey and monkey man, to realize how widespread this view is.(Read that particular column here)

I am not saying India is either more or less racist than many countries, including the two I have lived in for many years. That some Blacks feel free to use nigger for one another or that second or third-generation British Pakistanis have reclaimed Paki doesn’t make such words acceptable for others to use them so blithely.

So, this week’s two “conversations” remind me why those in Indian glass houses ought not to throw stones with the practiced ease with which they often do when it comes to race, ethnicity and religion. And, when it comes to racism and ethnic slurs, ignorance isn’t a convenient back door to this house they choose to live in.

Ps: By way of full disclosure, I am a life member of SAJA.

Usually, it is the opinion page editors of newspapers who are in the habit of telling the government and the people as to what ought to be done. In India, however, it is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s speciality as the man who can get things done and who is supposed to get things done has increasingly turned into an editorial writer (or editorial speech maker), often simply telling the country what ought to be done rather than actually doing it.

The Romantic Realist’s last blog post on the Indian government’s Shameful Silence for some 17 hours after terrorists struck evoked a lot of interesting responses (read the blog and the comments here). But since the Prime Minister and his Congress party are a few months away from asking Indian voters to give them another five years at the helm of India, it seems appropriate to look at when he breaks his silence and his continued wish list of what ought to be done. So, here are some of his prescriptions for India from just his November speeches, all of which are listed on the Prime Minister’s web site. In case you think the prescriptions are only about difficult to deal with subjects such as terrorism, I have listed Dr. Singh’s prescriptions for a variety of problems, ranging from education and toilets to Himalayan glaciers and stimulating the Indian economy.

Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on 21 November 2008

“My greatest ambition for the coming century or the present century is to see a fully educated and empowered India. The light of knowledge must touch every child, male or female and empower every one of our citizens…Our challenges and our tasks present themselves to us everyday. It is up to us to exert pressure on our system to deliver results. We must improve the quality of our processes of governance, we must improve the quality of our educational system. We must improve the public delivery system, especially in health care, sanitation, drinking water, education and public transport. We must build a more efficient and competitive society. We must learn to respect the spirit of adventure and enterprise in our entrepreneurs. We must provide an even better environment for individual enterprise to flower and to flourish.”

((So, Prime Minister, how about actually passing stalled education reforms bills or asking Arjun Singh to get out of the way?))

Third South Asian Conference on Sanitation on 18 November

“First, sanitation issues need to be given priority in our development policy approaches. Its cross cutting implications need deep study and greater understanding. The role of community leadership in changing old habits and ways of thinking will be crucial as our own experience has shown. The capacities of our rural and urban local bodies to address these issue from both social and economic angles will need to be enhanced. Second, sanitation has to be located in an integrated framework of public health policy to ensure that sanitation activities are indeed adequately funded. We know for example that something as simple as washing hands properly can check 50% of the diarrehea cases in our country. Provision of safe drinking water can also greatly help to contain the incidence of many water borne diseases. Similarly, provision of toilets near the habitat can protect our women against many stomach related diseases. Therefore, conscious efforts have to be made to invest in hygiene consciousness and sanitation as part of a holistic public health policy.”

((So, Mr Prime Minister, what’s stopping this being done in Bharat Nirman or any other large scale program?))

G20 Heads of State on 15 November 2008

“An obvious issue is to consider whether the emergence of recessionary trends calls for some fiscal stimulus. A coordinated fiscal stimulus by countries that are in a position to do so would help to mitigate the severity and duration of the recession. It would also send a strong signal to investors around the world. Resort to fiscal stimulus may be viewed as risky in some situations, but if we are indeed on the brink of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, the risk may be worth taking. We should therefore take all possible measures at the national level to complement any coordinated international stimulus.”

((So, Mr Prime Minister, now that the all-talk, no-action Finance Minister is out of the way and you are incharge of the finance ministry, will we see some concrete and large stimulus package?))

Speaking to the Director Generals of Police on 23 November 2008:

“The virus of communal violence that threatens the secular fabric of our society needs to be checked and checked effectively in time, otherwise our multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-caste society could well unravel. The police need to demonstrate greater resourcefulness, greater strength and strength in term of both their intelligence machinery and their response capacity. This is equally true in some measure in regard to the threat from terrorist outfits. The inability of the Intelligence – Agencies and the police to obtain pinpointed and actionable intelligence and in time – has enabled these outfits to carry out some high-profile attacks. The resources at the disposal of the police are often inadequate. The strength of personnel in police stations clearly needs to be augmented. There are far too many vacancies, and much larger numbers need to be recruited into the police, particularly into the civil police. The intelligence machinery at both the Central and State levels needs to be upgraded and should be more sophisticated. Police training has not kept pace with requirements. A quantum increase in the Police Budget across the country is also called for.”

((Mr Prime Minister, now that Mumbai terrorist attacks have made this inability ever more clear, will be see “quantum” increases in smart upgrades of our police and intelligence forces?))

“In 2005, while addressing this Conference, I had recommended a ‘Police Mission’ approach with a view to achieving focused attention on different police related tasks. The intention was to create an image of the Indian Police as a professionally competent and technologically advanced force, one that would be an agent of socio-economic change endowed with a spirit of humanism. I am told that some steps have been taken in this direction and meetings of the ‘Micro Missions’ that were established have been held. On the ground, however, tangible results are yet to be seen.

((So, Mr Prime Minister, three years later you come back and make a speech about your own Mission’s poor performance. What else will you from now on?))

“The contours of internal security have changed fundamentally over the years, and the basic character of threats has become greatly enlarged and also more complicated. A question that is often posed is whether the police have adequately upgraded their skills, have an indepth understanding of to-day’s security problems, are technologically qualified, and have honed their abilities in every direction.”

((They clearly don’t, Mr Prime Minister. So what do you actually plan to do?))

Addressing Indian Mountaineering Federation 26 November 2008:

“It is a matter of deep concern that the Himalayas are being threatened by climate change…We need to develop more expertise and capabilities in Himalayan glaciology. But even the threat of environmental damage should spur our nation to action. We must take all precautionary measures so that the danger which lurks in the background does not materialize….We must mobilize all our resources to protect the Himalayas.”

((So, Mr Prime Minister, why don’t you mobilize all our resources?))

Address To The Nation 27 November, 17 hours after Mumbai terrorist attacks started:

“(1) Instruments like the National Security Act will be employed to deal with situations of this kind. (2) Existing laws will be tightened to ensure that there are no loopholes available to terrorists to escape the clutches of the law. (3) Most importantly, it is essential to immediately set up a Federal Investigation Agency to go into terrorist crimes of this kind and ensure that the guilty are brought to book. (4) We will take up strongly with our neighbours that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if suitable measures are not taken by them. (5) We will take a number of measures to strengthen the hands of our police and intelligence authorities. We will curb the flow of funds to suspect organizations. (6) We will restrict the entry of suspects into the country. (7) We will go after these individuals and organizations and make sure that every perpetrator, organizer and supporter of terror, whatever his affiliation or religion may be, pays a heavy price for these cowardly and horrific acts against our people.”

((So, what are you waiting for, Mr. Prime Minister?))