Word Junkie

Computers have started writing stories. Not literature yet, just news stories. Now why should I be amazed? If computers can play chess, writing a news story should be a piece of cake.

Computers are already churning out copy faster than people. The Financial Times reports:

“Now a US news service has found a way to replace human beings in the newsroom and is instead using computers to write some of its stories.

“Thomson Financial, the business information group, has been using computers to generate some stories since March and is so pleased with the results that it plans to expand the practice.

“The computers work so fast that an earnings story can be released within 0.3 seconds of the company making results public.

“By using previous results in Thomson’s database, the computer stories say whether a company has done better or worse than expected.”

The company is using computers not to cut costs but to “deliver information to our customers at a speed at which they can make an almost immediate trading decision,” said one of the executives.

People are still needed to write other kinds of stories, he added.  “This means we can free up reporters so they have more time to think.”

Computers should be able to think as well if they can play chess. But I guess what the executive meant was out-of-the-box thinking, something that can’t be programmed into a computer yet.

And the executive had another complaint. The computerised reports are very standardised, he said, adding: “We might try and write a few more adjectives into the program.”

I never imagined computers would one day be able to write too. But some oldtimers are unfazed. Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com in an article in the Guardian refers to the Financial Times story. And he welcomes these “roboreporters”. But a man who went from print to digital media, he’s an early adopter, isn’t he?

I wonder what Indian communists will say to China now. They are claiming the nuclear deal with the US will compromise national security. China would prefer India to have no nuclear security at all. I am not making this up. The Straits Times in Singapore yesterday reported:

“As a signatory country, China hopes non-signatory countries will join it as soon as possible as non-nuclear weapon states, thereby contributing to strengthening the international non-proliferation regime,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in Beijing.

One American newspaper translated the statement into plain English: China wants India to give up nuclear weapons. There is not a word, of course, about China giving up nuclear arms. China can have such weapons under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. So can America, Russia, Britain and France, but while America and Russia negotiated partial disarmament, I cannot recall any such steps by China. But it wants India to disarm.

China is technically right. India is not one of the five countries allowed to have such weapons under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. But even the International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed El Baradei has welcomed the Indo-US deal, accepting India is a nuclear power. Still, China continues to insist India should disarm.

China does not want India to grow stronger. After all, we are neighbours. Traditionally, the Middle Kingdom has always expected to be kow-towed to. Why should it be any different now?

But have the Indian communists protested against the Chinese statement? Not that I know of. For all I know, they may not even mind that China wants India to disarm. After all, it is the People’s Republic of China.

I am not saying the Indian communists are close to Beijing. But consider the nuclear deal. Bush wants a strategic partnership with India to counterbalance China. No reason for Beijing to like that. The Indian communists certainly don’t.

I am glad India and America have reached a nuclear agreement. I am no nuclear expert and know the agreement could be rejected by the US Congress. But those who say President Bush was wrong to strike a deal because India never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and this could encourage other nations to develop nuclear weapons are making a mistake. They are speculating about the possible consequences of the deal without looking at the ground realities.

I am not saying other nations will not develop nuclear weapons. But if Iran or North Korea wants to become a nuclear power, it will do so no matter whether the US Congress approves the Indian deal or not. India went ahead with nuclear experiments despite international sanctions because it thought that was in the national interest.

The best deterrence against nuclear proliferation is peace and stability. India is assured of neither. It is in a volatile region and has been to war with its neighbours. China was already a nuclear power long before India carried out its first test in 1974. And Pakistan carried out nuclear tests within days of the second Indian explosion in 1998. The Europeans and the Japanese and the South Koreans are protected by American security commitments. India has no such safeguards. One could say India chose to be in the Soviet camp, but the Soviets are gone: India has to protect itself.

And India poses no threat to anyone. It did not grab Pakistani territory when it won the 1971 Bangladesh war. Unlike China or Pakistan, India has never been accused of covert arms sales or illegal transfer of nuclear technology. Nor has it ever been hostile to America like Iran or North Korea.

Americans opposed to the deal should remember it is good not only for India. It will also ease the pressure on oil resources by helping India develop nuclear energy, as President Bush said. India is already producing nuclear energy on its own, but the deal will give it access to the latest technology.

Not all Indians like the deal. There have been noisy demonstrations. Muslims have been protesting against Bush because of Iraq and the war on terror. And so are the communists who, of course, oppose anything American.

Hoary communists

I can understand concern about Iraq. But the communists denouncing American imperialism sound so yesterday. They accuse the Indian government of selling out to the Americans. Really? And from where on earth do they expect to attract foreign investments to keep the economy growing? Who is providing jobs and business to Indian IT professionals? China? Russia?

Sorry, the communists are not interested in yuppies living in booming cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad, they are concerned about the poor and the dispossessed in the vast hinterland. Which is where they will remain under communist rule.

I know, as a Bengali from West Bengal, which has been under communist rule since 1977. The leftists have provided a stable administration, improved life in the villages, but several other states have developed faster and become more prosperous than West Bengal. The two-decade-long reign of the former chief minister Jyoti Basu (1977-2000) was notable for two other reasons. He developed the Salt Lake township near Calcutta (Kolkata) probably for the affluent, because one has to have a car to live there. (He lives there himself.) And his son became an industrialist.

Asian Aerospace 2006 — the world’s third biggest air show after Paris and Farnborough, England –ended in Singapore last weekend with a fourfold jump in business, racking up $15.2 billion worth of deals. And the biggest spender was India, ordering more than $3.8 billion worth of planes. That’s $300 million more than the total business done at the last air show here two years ago. Indian Airlines ordered 43 A320 and A319 Airbuses worth $2.5 billion, another Indian carrier GO ordered 10 A320 Airbuses estimated by Agence France-Presse at $640 million based on the catalogue price while Indian low-fare airline SpiceJet ordered 10 B737 Boeings worth $700 million, according to Forbes.

The Indians were the darlings of the air show, said at least one Singapore news report, and my foolish Indian heart swelled with pride. Never mind that I might have never flown unless I came to work in Singapore, there are always ties that bind one to the motherland. I love Singapore, but of course I am thrilled by the remarkable turnaround in India’s fortunes. There was a time when people here used to say I would be a rich man when I return home. They no longer say so. Everyone is aware of India’s growing economic power.

Of course, there will always be nay-sayers. The International Herald Tribune yesterday ran an article with the headline, India’s War on Poverty: Easy Victory Unlikely. Take care of your own underprivileged, I say.

What the article says is true, but look at how far we have come. There was a time when there were just two Indian carriers — Air India flying overseas and the domestic Indian Airlines. Travelling anywhere in India usually meant taking the train. Ordinary people spent entire lives without flying even once. Planes were for the rich or those on a corporate or a government account. Now the middle class can fly as well.

Yes, there are still beggars on the streets, landless peasants in the villages, slumdwellers in the cities who do not even have a proper roof over their heads, let alone dream of flying.

That is a tragedy not about to end. Globalisation is increasing, not reducing, economic disparity.

But it is also improving some people’s lives marginally. Slumdwellers may lack proper amenities but some of them also have taperecorders and television in their homes. Some of them are also going to work in other cities, other countries. Among the Muslims, for example, there are workers who have worked in the Gulf.

An Indian’s economic status can no longer be deduced from his accent, his manners, his appearance or his lifestyle. And expectations are rising. People who barely speak English are sending their children to English-medium schools. New engineering colleges and management institutes have sprung up offering more students a chance to get a better education. Things are looking up — India needs more planes.

Surfing the Net, I came across a blog by a young woman in Canada who wrote she lived in the present but lived for the future. Don’t we all? And that’s what saddens me as I grow older: my expectations are shrinking.

I can no longer dream of an exciting future. Of happiness, peace, tranquillity, yes. I dream of spending the last years of my life in quiet contentment with my wife, with our son at our side, after working abroad for years.

Her job, and mine, didn’t let us live together. Now our son has gone to college in America, she is still in Calcutta (Kolkata) missing him after seeing him through school, and I am in Singapore.

But we will be together again: that’s the dream that sustains me. A dream of golden years before going gently into the night.

But what will I leave behind? Nothing except my family. I am the unknown citizen of Auden’s poem: I will be gone without a trace. There is no reason why my fate should be different from a million others’. But it would have been nice to have possessed some talent and used it to feel a wee bit special.

That’s what saddens me as I grow older: I did not need to achieve anything to feel special in my younger days; I could live on expectations. Not any more.

But I should be grateful for what God has given me. And for a middle-class Bengali who grew up in Calcutta, in Indira Gandhi’s India, I have seen more places and things than I ever expected. I never dreamed of the Internet. I never expected to see Venice, Switzerland, Salzburg, Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam, England and America. But I have, thanks to my wife who has always loved to travel. My son is in America. My wife teaches English, for God’s sake! I always wanted to marry a beautiful convent girl good in English, and my wife is all that and more — she can quote Shakespeare! Could an ordinary middle-class Bengali ask for more? I couldn’t. Maybe the expectations that I had were not all that great, after all; it was just my youth that made life exciting.

My wife in Calcutta (Kolkata) went without food and water all day yesterday to mark Sivaratri — the Night of Siva – in honour of Lord Siva. Her parents’ guru had told her after our marriage that she should seek permission from me before fasting. But that’s just a formality because she can bend me to her will. Knowing Sivaratri had something to do with husbands, I asked her what exactly was the point of the puja. Unmarried girls pray to Siva for a good husband, she said. Married women also pray, though why she couldn’t — or wouldn’t — say. The unmarried women don’t just pray for a good husband; in Bengali they say, “May I get a husband like Siva.”

Siva is also called Mahadeva, “great God”. But no exclamation marks, please, there’s no question about his greatness: He can both destroy and restore the world. He and his wife — Uma, Parvati, Durga or Kali — are also the parents of other gods: Lord Ganesha, god of wisdom and remover of obstacles; Lord Kartik; Ma Saraswati, goddess of learning, and Ma Laxmi, goddess of wealth. Siva is also worshipped in the form of the phallic-shaped Sivalinga. He is also inseparable from his wife though they may be worshipped separately. So women have reason to ask for a husband like Siva.

But a husband like him could mean problems as well. Siva is also portrayed as a yogi or an ascetic, his hair matted and his body smeared with ashes, and he is said to take mind-altering substances such as ganja and opium. They have been traditionally used to enter trance-like states which some followers of every religion seek for communion with God. But drugs have always been suspect except perhaps among the indigenes of South America. Bengalis never approved of ganja and, though some took opium as a painkiller, addicts were frowned upon. And drugs are absolutely taboo in Singapore and the neighbouring countries.

Siva would not have been welcome in South-east Asia unless he changed his ways. But then he would not be Siva.

I am struck by the liberalism of Hinduism that we worship gods like Siva and Krishna, who is usually portrayed with his lover, Radha. We don’t look for perfection, merely greatness, in our gods.

PS: The picture incidentally is taken from Answers.com. My wife said she also prayed for our son in America. The two of us chatted with him online a short while ago. My wife said her parents also observe Sivaratri. Her father also used to fast on this occasion until a couple of years ago. So it’s not just about wishing for good husbands.

Technorati is getting better and better. Now it’s becoming a personal online news reader/news aggregator too like Bloglines or My Yahoo. That’s what I found trying out its new service called Favorites. Now anyone with a Technorati account can create a list of Favorites which are then automatically converted into a webpage containing excerpts from one’s favourite blogs or websites and a sidebar listing when those sites were last updated.

It’s not as comprehensive as Bloglines, offering only excerpts and not complete entries, and will not link to more than 50 sites unlike Bloglines or My Yahoo. But it shows the times when one’s favourite sites were last updated and links to other useful Technorati pages and features, so it should prove quite popular. Technorati has certainly hit on a good way to make it popular by linking it to well-known bloggers and their favourites. Bloggers will be spending more time on Technorati now, I guess.

I saw Xiaxue on the Guardian website yesterday. It ran this picture of her on the Technology Blog in a post on the Technorati Top 100 list of bloggers. Several high-flyers have dropped off the list, it said, adding: “Stunning newcomers include The Huffington Post (now 6th), Blog di Beppe Grillo (11), Lifehacker (14), MSN Space Alliance (20), Joystiq (28), TechCrunch (30), Xiaxue (40) and Paul Graham (49).”Excuse me, Xiaxue has been on the list before and, by the time I checked it, she was down to 43, which is still fantastic in a world of, what, a zillion and a half blogs?

I don’t get Xiaxue. But then I don’t get rap music, reality shows, boybands — put it down to age. But even this old fogey must admit Xiaxue is keeping Singapore high up in the blogosphere.

What else is Singapore known for? Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore Airlines, the chewing gum ban, and perhaps Creative Technologies. And, yes, for clean streets, law and order, and clinical efficiency. That’s quite a lot, but a girl makes a difference. After all, it was her picture they used on the Guardian, not some up-and-coming bearded blogger’s.

Would George Orwell have made a good blogger? That teasing question in the Arts and Letters Daily led me to a Financial Times article, Time for the Last Post, about the “dismal fate of blogging”. Sure, some blogs have been making waves, but by and large blogs are a bore, “a medium of internet medium” which took off in America only because some talented writers got into the act, there was an election in 2004 and the traditional media started fretting about this new kid on the block. That, I think, was the gist of the article, except that the writer used much longer words.

The writer, Trevor Butterworth, did raise one interesting question. Would Orwell and Marx have blogged, he asked some noted bloggers like Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds and Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette. Both seemed to think Orwell would have blogged — and produced a lot of bumf, said the writer. Instead of “bumf”, he used the word “dross” — he was writing for the Financial Times. Any writer needs time and peace to write memorably, said the writer. Journalism is ephemeral, only of passing interest, and blogging even more so — “blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence,'’ said the writer. Blogs are not likely to be compiled into classic anthologies, he said, there will be “nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news”. A nice line lifted from Tennyson. And he was complaining about blogs feeding off newspapers and other media!

In fact, the only thing original about his own article was his question about Marx and Orwell. All the other points he made, from boring blogs to most blogs getting little traffic, had been made before.

But I still found the article useful — and not just for the Orwell angle. It’s also an example of how not to blog. It is fine as a newspaper article, however.

The Financial Times set up a blog based just on that one article, reported Bloggers Blog. But the blog, FTmagblog, has been closed now though it’s still on the Net. It attracted 89 comments and only four links. One would have expected FT to do much better.

Our son has grown thinner, we learnt last night. He was complaining his black suit was too big for him. But how could it be too big, asked his mum. She had it made for him just before he went to college in America last year, and it was a perfect fit then.

She had suspected all along that he was losing weight. I couldn’t tell that from the pictures he emailed us, he looked good in them.

Both of us had been worried about his eating habits, however. He has dinner early in the evening and then goes without food for a long time. He skips breakfast, showers and goes straight to class. His first meal of the day is lunch in the afternoon. He has chips and Coke in his room for a late-night snack, he said, but that’s neither adequate nor healthy, we said. And he should have something in the morning. If he has no time for breakfast, at least he should drink some milk before going to class, said my wife. He always had milk before going to school all those years when he lived with her in Calcutta (Kolkata).

But he brushed aside her suggestion. My wife then said if he didn’t listen to her, we would ask his room mate to take him to a store and buy some milk. That, of course, was too much for the boy. He knows his mum is capable of doing such things. If we did that, he said, he wouldn’t speak to us any more. He would block us from his contact list on the instant messenger: we wouldn’t be able to chat with him online any more.

“I have grown thinner, not weaker,” he assured us. We have to take his word for it, after all, there is little we can do.