Lenin and the Indian press

Today a reader posted this comment on my most recent posting about hygiene:

Hi Sunil,

I hope you don't mind if I raise a point unrelated to this blog post. Perhaps you are aware of the fact that Times of India is one of the biggest culprits in the paid news scandal. Here are two links that you may find interesting.

www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/feb/20/press-freedom-india

www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/sainath/article2523649.ece

I have seen you referring to ToI articles in multiple blog posts, and this comment was prompted by such an observation. (However, I don't mean to say that we should be boycotting ToI.)

Regards.
Sayan 

By its own admission this comment is unrelated to hygiene (except quite distantly) but relates to concerns I've raised on this blog in the past and to some thoughts that have been forming in my mind of late. So I thought it's a good idea to quote it here to open the discussion.

The Guardian link above dates from February 2011 and recounts a "sting" operation on the Times of India group. The stinger, posing as the PR person for a private company, asked a company called Medianet owned by Bennett Coleman (who are also the owners of the Times of India) to help him buy coverage of his company's party in the Delhi Times. Medianet agreed to do so for a fee and said it could be dressed up as a news story if celebrities were present. It also offered help with purchasing celebrities.

The other link, from The Hindu, is an article by the respected journalist P. Sainath (about whom I've briefly blogged here in the past). It concerns a different paid news scandal, involving the former Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Ashok Chavan, and Marathi newspapers Maharastra Times and Lokmat (the former being the Marathi version of Times of India and therefore belonging again to our friends Bennett Coleman). These worthy journals, among others, carried full pages of articles purporting to be news items that lavished praise on the CM ahead of elections.  Sometimes identical articles appeared in different newspapers. Often the page was entirely free of explicit advertisements, contrary to usual practice.

Now the CM's own financial declarations show no payment having been made to these papers. So either  the press was being generous to the politician from the goodness of its heart (and rival papers were somehow producing identical articles), or else a cozy deal had been reached between the press and politicians. To investigate this question the Press Council of India formed a sub-committee that produced a report from whose preamble I quote:

The reader of the publication ... is deceived into believing that what is essentially an advertisement is in fact, independently produced news content. By not officially declaring the expenditure incurred on planting "paid news" items, the candidate standing for election violates the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 ... Finally, by not accounting for the money received from candidates, the concerned media company or its representatives are violating the provisions of the Companies Act, 1956 as well as the Income Tax Act, 1961.

The Election Commission of India tried to probe this case but Mr Chavan fought back with a court case seeking to prevent them. This case was dismissed recently by the Delhi High Court. The Press Council sub-committee's report, by its own admission based on a lot of circumstantial evidence, was sought to be buried by the Council which replaced it with a censored summary of its own. But recently the Central Information Commission has ordered the PCI to publish the full 71-page report of the Sub-Committee and you can find this (along with the shorter censored Council report) on this page. Besides describing the cases I've referred to above, the long report also names certain private companies (Videocon, Kinetic Motors and Gillette among others) that are suspected to have paid newspapers/TV channels to have their products favourably described in a "news" segment. The full report is worth reading though the reliance on circumstantial evidence is something of a disappointment, as they themselves admit:

Though the phenomenon of widespread practice of "paid news" has been verbally confirmed and vindicated by politicians and campaign managers of political parties, there is no recorded documentation that would firmly establish that there has been exchange of money between media houses/advertisement agents/journalists and politicians/political parties. The problem in establishing the practice of "paid news" is simply one of obtaining hard proof or conclusive evidence.

If you take the above story together with past incidents such as the Niira Radia scandal (about which I blogged a year ago) in which the unethical behaviour of major mediapersons Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi was umasked in their own voice in wiretapped telephone recordings, then a rather ugly picture emerges of the Indian press. However clearly it's a very divided house. I'm proud to note that the PCI report mentions the late journalist Ajit Bhattacharjea, who was married to my Masi these last many years, as an example of someone who has consistently pushed for better press ethics.

Today Ms Dutt and Mr Sanghvi have received no punishment and are totally rehabilitated, unlike some of the business people and politicians they seem to have facilitated. Companies like Medianet will perhaps continue to sell news pages and celebrities to private companies. At some level I wonder if the readership even cares. Lenin would have been pleased, for he once said: The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses. 

They're doing a good job.

The hygiene challenge

During a recent vacation, which offered time to muse and ponder, I found myself becoming more and more fascinated by the subject of good hygiene and its opposite, public filth. It started in Agra where I had to wait over an hour in a queue to enter the grounds of the Taj Mahal, in a narrow lane surrounded by choked sewers, cow dung and flies. A huge goat in a blue sweater (I'm not making this up, see below) stood at the entrance of a jewellery shop the whole time, decorating it with a shower of turd pellets which seemed to bother no one but myself.

By the time I was admitted to the relatively spotless grounds of the Taj, I was in no mood to appreciate the symmetry and tranquillity of Shah Jahan's monument to love. So I started to ponder over root causes. What are the reasons why India is so hygienically challenged? Government or people? Urban or rural? Modern or ancient? Is religion a cause of the problem or does it help? Poverty must be relevant, but exactly to what extent? How do we compare with other countries (or regions of other countries) where the economic situation is comparable?

I recalled that on my return to India about 28 years ago, I was assured by a few eminent members of the chattering classes that India was a "slovenly country" and I was making a mistake coming back to it. From then until today I've heard that type of distanced criticism about India a number of times and it is frustrating, since lots of tongue-clicking is not an answer to any problem. Nor is the standard explanation of the chatterati for every problem in India: that it's somehow down to corrupt or apathetic politicians. I've started to think, more and more, that the most interesting answers lie in other directions, and that the chatterers about whom I'm being so uncharitable are an important part of the problem. But more about that later.

Over the last couple of days I've spent some time surfing the net on the topic of India's hygiene problem. But there seems to be very little available in the nature of information or analysis. The standard search results tend to consist of "reports" making content-free statements like "India is the filthiest country in the world". A good example of what I mean is found in this article. It breathlessly announces that "According to the latest Global Hygiene Home Truths Study 2010, conducted across eight countries, India has topped most of the categories that reveal high contamination levels." It continues with this gem: "Dirt levels of refrigerators for world stood at 46 per cent, while India registered 70 per cent. Kitchen table dirt levels for world were 36 per cent compared to 75 per cent for India".

This seems to be a shining example of bad science. Most Indians don't have refrigerators or kitchen tables, so the "India" here really means middle-class India. Even if you suspend that particular objection, the concepts used and numbers presented are pathetically ill-defined (are they really making the comical claim that Indian kitchen tables are three-quarters dirt, whatever that is, and only one-quarter granite or wood??). So then I tried to head for the website of the Global Hygiene Council, the originators of this weird survey. It turns out that the Council is sponsored by Reckitt Benckiser, better known as the folks who make Dettol and a bunch of household cleaning products. At once it becomes clear why this survey focuses on kitchen tables and has all the makings of a "scare the middle-class" article. The good old profit motive.

A somewhat more informative recent report from the Times of India quotes India's rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on the subject of hygiene. A couple of years ago Mr Ramesh, then the environment minister, had famously said "if there was a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would win it hands down". In the recent report, referring to the figures that 58% of India' s population, as against 4% of China's, practices open defecation, he remarked: "I consider these numbers a matter of great anguish and shame. We must make sanitation a political campaign like Gandhiji did. Kerala, Sikkim, Maharashtra, Haryana and Himachal are doing well but other states have to pick up significantly." He then promises to focus on "nirmal gram abhiyan" (which translates as "clean village campaign") and informs us that it has already worked well in 25,000 villages in India but needs to be extended to the remaining 600,000 villages.

Googling "nirmal gram abhiyan" leads to this page of Guidelines which is quite informative. For the first time I am seeing some analysis and some offered solutions. One of the observations in these Guidelines is that:

"The practice of open defecation is reinforced by traditional behaviour patterns and lack of awareness about the health threats posed by it. At the same time, there is little awareness about the potential health and consequent economic benefits of sanitation facilities... The safe disposal of solid and liquid waste is not accorded priority at either the family or community level. There is no planned effort in rural schools to inculcate good hygienic habits in children."

Then it starts to get a little polemical, and I sort of enjoy that when it comes from the GOI even if I don't agree with all that they say. Here is how it continues:

"One of the principal, though unstated, reasons why people have not come forward to join any sanitation-related movement is because it lacks social prestige (this may be due to caste, age-old beliefs, taboos and practices). The upper strata of society have not concerned themselves with this issue at all. They have preferred involvement in the national-literacy programme; the immunization programme; the family welfare programme; the girl child; the non-conventional energy programme; the welfare of the disabled; afforestation; environmental pollution (not related to sanitation) such as air and river water pollution; and now, the latest craze is to join the awareness campaign on AIDS.

An equally important reason is that the construction of latrines involves a monetary expense. People would prefer to utilize their money to satisfy other felt needs, such as consumer goods.

In the circumstances, there is an urgent need for awareness-creation for felt-need and demand generation for sanitary latrines- the link between sanitation, health and safe drinking water needs to be emphasized, and community participation ensured for the sustainability of the behaviour-change in the community."

Now all this is at one level quite irritating, the sarkar attempting to malign everyone except itself: Rich people want to work for celebrity-rich issues like AIDS while the poor spend all their money on mobile phones instead of toilets. And so on. But this is no different from the way the "upper strata of society" spends all its time trying to malign the government. And at least unlike the chatterers, the government has a fairly detailed action plan, including a list of target areas in the first phase, that you can read about by following the link above.

Once you get over the irritation, there is some content in the criticisms. While India's very poorest clearly can afford nothing except some occasional food, there is an enormous section of our society that is still quite poor but has a little spending money, who do not consider sanitation worth spending on - for example giving far higher priority to clothes, rituals and marriage celebrations. It is this class and their attitudes that one would like to see compared with, say, comparably poor people in Vietnam or Thailand. I strongly suspect people in the latter two countries perform better than us on hygiene indicators (and spend less on rituals and weddings) and I'm not speaking of capital cities but the hinterland where people are still genuinely poor.

Likewise the Indian urban middle class has tended to shun the hygiene issue as a problem of "other people". While criticising the proliferation of slums in cities as due to "politicians and their vote banks", we have tended to ignore that the people living in slums are after all fellow Indians seeking honest work and deserve a clean place to live. Not to mention the obvious fact that they are indispensable as labour in our homes, where they wash dishes for example. So even if middle-class people had no altruistic feelings, they could have shown some enlightened self-interest in ensuring that the people who work in their homes live in a hygienic environment.

Finally there is the elephant in the room, tangentially alluded to in the Guidelines I quoted above: the role of religion. The caste system has made us, forgive my bluntness, incapable of taking responsibility for our own shit. Or our garbage. Places of worship should convey to their followers a sense of responsibility for personal and social cleanliness, and I suspect that in India they fail miserably in this, particularly the social aspect. The notion of ritual cleanliness, fundamental in our country, makes things worse: people are deluded into believing they are keeping themselves clean when they are not.

If our temples (and schools) taught hygiene and nothing else, they would make a valuable contribution to society and we would not have so many sporadic garbage dumps comfortably sitting in backyards. Unfortunately this photograph, which I took in Jodhpur a few days ago, is not encouraging.

Ode to the Delhi Metro

(with apologies to P.B. Shelley etc)

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert
That from Delhi airport, or near it
Makest a rapid start
Amidst profuse strains of beeping alarms.

Faster still and soon,
From the earth thou springest,
Into the smog of Dhaula Kuan;
Through grey surroundings thou wingest,
And gleaming still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the silvery lightning
Of the sunken tunnel,
Over which the crowds are frightening,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

Keen as are the blue dots
Above the doors front and rear,
Whose intense lamp tells us
How far on our way we are,
Until we hardly see, we feel that we are there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
Declaiming in Hindi and English
From an unseen cloud
"Watch the gap 'tween train and tracks", indeed we should.

Who thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
Not the squalid subway trains
Of Paris, New York, London
Narrow, decrepit and, on warm days, smelly.

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Is the bilingual pleasure
That in your final announcement's found,
Ham is samay New Delhi station pahunch rahe hain!

Teach me half the gladness
That thou, o train, must know;
Such harmonious madness
From my journey shall flow,
The world should travel then, as I am traveling now.

Sporting chance?

Sports and religion are two fields of human activity where absurd statements seem to pass unchallenged a lot. Actually there are a few prominent people who challenge statements made on behalf of religion: Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are prime examples, quite different from each other too. But when it comes to sports I don't know of any prominent critics, so I'll just have to try my own hand.

The present posting is inspired by this article wherein Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton says he accepts the risks of racing. Commenting on the recent deaths of Dan Wheldon and Marco Simoncelli in racing accidents, he admits this is on the minds of the fraternity as the Grand Prix starts in Delhi and then comes out with the following gem:

"But you have got to do what you do because you love it. It is a sacrifice and a risk that we all take. No one wants to be in those situations but, for me, if I was to pass away, I cannot imagine a better way, personally. I have always said if I was going to go, then in a racing car would be the way to do it. It is what I love."

This statement may not appear absurd to people and it certainly doesn't appear to have invoked a chorus of condemnation. But imagine the same thing said by a modern-day version of Timothy Leary who liked experimenting with mind-altering drugs: "If I was going to go, then high on LSD would be the way to do it. It is what I love". What an outcry there would be!

In fact you don't have to imagine it - music legends Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse died prematurely because of their excessive dependence on drugs (and alcohol in the latter case) and in the popular view their deaths are far from glorified.But if Mr Hamilton's comment is appropriate then we must reconsider. Presumably MJ and AW were doing what they loved. There is plenty of evidence that the success of their art was correlated with their wild abuse of chemicals. Without heroin there would have been no Amy Winehouse album "Back to Black", recently judged the biggest selling album in the UK in the 21st century. I've listened to it a lot and it's a truly brilliant work: depressing and deranged but original, powerful and intelligent. Comparison with a Van Gogh painting would not be out of place.

It's obviously not my point that musicians or other artists are right to fry their brains and die at 27 like Amy or 50 like MJ. But why is it OK, even noble somehow, to get in a machine and spin round a racetrack like a maniac and occasionally collide, spin out of control and die? Wheldon was 33 and Simoncelli a mere 24. Compare their short lives to that of drug guru Timothy Leary who not only experimented with drugs during the heady 1960's but urged others to take them. He was imprisoned and even called "the most dangerous man in America" (by the most dangerous man in America at the time, Richard Nixon). Yet he lived until the ripe age of 76 and even inspired a nice song, "Legend of a Mind", by the Moody Blues. It makes you wonder.

They are like that only

Readers of my blog will know that "profiling" (racial, ethnic and other) is a form of injustice that disturbs me considerably. I blogged about a recent incident here.

Over the years I realised that my strong distaste for profiling was not universally shared. A decade ago I spent a year at Princeton, starting a couple of weeks after the 9/11 attacks, and read with dismay as numerous incidents of profiling unfolded, some leading to deaths and others merely to absurd situations like this one (on balance though, I have to say that the number of such incidents was extremely modest in post 9/11 USA compared to say the anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim pogroms in India). But when I sought to raise the issue at the lunch table in Princeton, a very respected physicist shocked me by saying that a few people being wrongly profiled was quite natural and acceptable in the prevailing situation.

Since then I've encountered this sort of "tolerance" of injustice on a surprising number of occasions. What disturbs me is not that it exists but that it can be found among people who are (or believe they are) well-meaning liberals. These people may themselves bear no ill-will toward the community being profiled, but for some reason are willing to express opinions that end up encouraging the biases of others far less liberal than themselves.

Which brings me to the topic. Recently the Vice-Chancellor of Hyderabad Central University ended up in a confrontation with students at his university who hail from the North-East of India. According to the reports, it started with a couple of incidents of alcohol-fueled violence on campus, in which some students from the North-East were implicated. Thereupon the VC is said to have convened a meeting of faculty members from the same region and "informed them that the university administration would carry out a series of reform measures to curb consumption of alcohol and drugs on campus and that he would "start" with the northeastern community." (the quote is from this Times of India article). This led to considerable resentment from the students, and accusations of racial profiling. In particular an association of students from the North-East pointed out during their protest that other non-North-Eastern students had been involved in the drinking incidents that provoked the row. They also complained that they themselves were constantly being profiled by students around them ("are you cooking dog meat?" etc) and the VC's action would only make things worse.

I waited several days before blogging about this, hoping that it would all somehow turn out to be a mistake and that the VC, someone I know well and who moreover blogs at this site, had never actually said what he was accused of saying: that he wanted to "start with the northeastern community". But though there has been a creditably profuse apology, which seems to have been accepted by the students concerned, there has in fact been no denial of the original accusation, neither in the press nor on the VC's blog. So I assume that he did decide to address this problem by "starting" with the NE students.

Which leads to a lot of possibilities, all very unsavoury and all taking place anyway. When riots take place or there are bomb attacks, the tendency is to "start with the Muslims". This demonises a whole community, some believe rightfully. The questions that rarely gets prominence are: (i) when placing human beings into categories, are we exercising objective choices or indulging in knee-jerk reactions? (ii) when singling out a category of human beings for reform, what message do we send to those members already completely innocent of the charge?, (iii) what is gained by focusing on entire communities rather than individuals?

To illustrate my points: about (i), one could well argue that terrorist attacks today are motivated by religious fundamentalism, so instead of drawing a bracket around Muslims, one could more appropriately draw it around religious fundamentalists of all hues. This is not to say one should actually do this -- even among religious fundamentalists, only very few are motivated to actually commit violence. The question should in fact be turned around: by bracketing very general categories ("North-Easterners", "Muslims" etc) one includes so many irrelevant people in the net that the real culprits can easily slip out of it. On point (ii), we have for years been seeing the effect of profiling on Kashmiri youth, who find they are all considered "suspected terrorists" and, not at all surprisingly, have reacted with a profound hatred for the Indian state.

There are other forms of profiling not based on ethnicity or religion. Some years ago I had a heated argument with a close friend (and reader of this blog). The issue at hand was an accusation of gender-based discrimination by a female faculty member against the Director of her institution. I had asked my friend if she knew the facts of the case, and my friend responded that though she did not have any hard evidence, she was inclined to believe the accusations because gender-based discrimination in academia was extremely common.

Now on the latter point, I heartily agree with my friend. The problem of gender-based discrimination in Indian academia is huge and its existence is almost totally denied even today (ironically a lot of it is based on profiling, e.g. "why admit girl students for an advanced degree when they'll just get married and stay home in the end"). Nevertheless, using this as "evidence" against the Director in a gender discrimination case amounts to profiling. While it may be good fun to profile Directors, it's not right.

Nor is it right when Directors - and VC's - resort to profiling. Moreover it's not constructive or helpful in any situation. So my advice to VC's is, when you feel the urge to place a community within brackets, Just Say No.

Fine and dreary

There's a BBC weather report that still sticks in my mind though I viewed it at least a decade ago. That year the monsoon was showing signs of failing in and around Bombay. July had been largely sunny with very little precipitation and if it didn't rain soon, the city's water supply would be in a lot of trouble. During that stressful period I turned on my TV to see a cheerful BBC weather-person wave her hands airily (why do they always wave their hands airily?) in the direction of Bombay on the map, and say "the weather in the West of India is fine". I felt like screaming: "it's not fine you dummy!!!".

She was using a word that, in Britain, is synonymous with "sunny". The Oxford English Dictionary offers "bright and clear" as one of the meanings of "fine", but the word originates from Latin via Old French and its original meaning is "of very high quality". It's only British weather that establishes a connection between the two meanings.

What I wonder is, why don't weather-people stick to words that have a well-defined scientific meaning (e.g. "sunny") rather than those which include a value judgement, like "fine" (and while they're taking my advice, could they please stop waving their hands as if they're swatting gigantic Finnish mosquitoes!!).

My memory of the incident above was revived by a new and highly loaded adjective that's started appearing on my Android smartphone of late. Accuweather.com, from where it loads its weather report, describes Bombay's weather today as "dreary". This offended me instantly. Bombay can be hot and humid, and today it's rather hot and quite humid. That's typical October weather and it comes as a slight relief after all the rain we've been having.

Is it dreary? Look at the photo, taken from my window a few minutes ago, and then at the OED's account of the origin of "dreary":

Old English drēorig ‘gory, cruel’, also ‘melancholy’, from drēor ‘gore’, of Germanic origin; related to German traurig 'sorrowful'

The photo certainly doesn't look melancholy to me, in fact it never gets melancholy around here. As for sorrowful... I can think of sorrowful German and English cities (Potsdam and Durham come to mind right away), but I'm sure their weather reports never say "dreary", even when it is.

Anyhow I expect this problem will go away in the next few decades once India becomes a dominant global power and wrests control of the weather reports. If I'm still alive, I'll be composing this report for Vancouver in mid-summer: "damp and chilly, major risk of depression, travel advisory in effect"...

My trip to the dark side

Like many others of my generation, my computer life first started with DOS. Dave Barry's article about it, which you can read here, still brings back memories and is funny enough to reduce me to tears. I imported an IBM PC for my brother in 1984 and managed to get out of the customs hall at Bombay airport without paying a penny in bribes. Not only that, several customs officers slapped me cordially on the back as I left, saying "it's good that scientists like you are returning to the country". Those really were the days!

It was on another IBM PC running DOS, which Ashoke Sen had imported from the US, that we typed out this humongous paper, processed it in TeX - which took more than an hour (at roughly one minute per page) - and then printed the final version on a dot-matrix printer, which took an entire night. I still have a guilty conscience about the last part, since after the first twenty pages or so I went to bed, around 4 AM, and when I returned at 10 AM my co-authors were still cheerfully watching the printer make noises like a diseased crow and spit out a page every ten minutes.

Thankfully the DOS phase didn't last very long and pretty soon Linux came along (printers got better, too). I was among the first Linux users in India (you can read about this here) and it's shaped my world-view for a couple of decades now. Initially there was all this tension about whether a new installation would work at all and if so, how one could set the screen resolution and colours, get TeX and LaTeX running and install a printer. Ubuntu rendered all that trivial, so for the last few years things have been quite pleasant. I keep a dual-boot laptop with Ubuntu/Windows, the latter primarily so I can make Powerpoint files for popular talks (ppt is by far the best thing Micros**t have ever made).

Talking of laptops, three years ago I bought a Dell XPS 1330, which is a wonderful machine if you can get over its principal shortcoming - it gets hot enough to fry an omelette, and could even burn the little rivulets of melted cheese that usually leak out from my omelettes.That I'm using it even at this moment is due to my wise decision of purchasing a three-year service contract with Dell at the outset. To date, they have replaced the motherboard four times and the screen twice, each time because of overheating and all for free and without complaint. In fact, whenever I'm bored I just phone Dell and they instantly ship me a motherboard and screen (only joking). I think I'll suggest a small fridge instead, it would be cheaper for them.

Before this vaporises, I'd like a new laptop, and it's not going to be a Dell. So what's it going to be then? My requirements are that it should be fairly small (ideally a 13" screen), lightweight, reasonably powerful and have excellent battery life. Price is not a major issue. I expected there would be loads of such machines these days and I could pick and choose, but that isn't the case. Netbooks are light but of course don't do very much. The non-netbook laptops that you see in stores in Bombay are all inexpensive 15 to 17-inchers that weigh a ton. I learned on the net that my preferred category is called "business ultraportables" and visited many dozen websites over the last week. The Sony Vaio S-series, Samsung's new 900 Series and the Lenovo Thinkpad X220 all seemed like interesting possibilities, with Intel i3-i5-i7 processors and 2-4 GB of RAM. All would allow me my favourite Ubuntu/Windows dual-boot configuration. Then there was the Macbook Air, though some years ago it had given me the distinct impression of merely looking pretty and doing nothing much. Anyway I wanted my beloved Ubuntu and have never been attracted to Apple products or Mac OS.

Now as you'll see below, it's one thing to ask how these machines mutually compare, and another to ask how their sales people compare, and yet another to ask how their sales people in India compare! For the machine comparison, some reviews I located on the net said the Samsung 900 series laptops are serious MacBook Air competitors (both 11" and 13" varieties). Other reviews praise the Lenovo Thinkpad X220 to the skies. Yet others believe Sony Vaio's are the best because unlike the other ultraportables they have optical drives. I tried to buy each of these in turn.

I started with the Sony Vaio. My IT team assured me that although these used to have the reputation of being smart but overpriced, their current stuff was cheap and plasticky - and still overpriced, of course. They were able to borrow a brand new S-series model from the School of Mathematics for me to look at, and I have to say that "cheap and plasticky" described its appearance very well. It was also a shade heavy, somewhat over 2 kg. Now, some of the premium S-series laptops are said to be much more elegant (according to international  reviews) but here's the rub - Sony India wouldn't actually show me anything, not even if I travelled to a shop of their choice. I could only get to see a given model if I bought it first.

Next came Samsung. Some reviews claimed it was the best competitor to the MBA in the market, and beautiful too, so I got my IT staff to phone their Bombay office. Turns out they don't visit interested businesses with a demo model - surprising given that their 13-incher carries a stiff price tag of a little over Rs 1,00,000 and is new on the market. Where can we see it then? Their reply was "Croma" - a chain of stores started by the Tatas where you can pay extra-high prices and enjoy rude service. I phoned Croma and was told (rudely! have to admire their predictability!!) that the branch I was asking about didn't carry this model. Where might I find it then? Oops too late, Croma hung up on me. Phoned Samsung. Which Croma branch in Bombay has your machine in stock? They asked for my name and phone number. I asked why this was a pre-condition to getting the desired information. They wouldn't budge. I declined to share my details and we had reached an impasse. So, no Samsung 900-series for me. The reviews did mention a poor battery life of two hours, so I didn't feel very bad.

Now it was Lenovo's turn. Like Sony Vaio, most of the models they market in India are obsolete elsewhere. But they do sell the Thinkpad X220 which is current and rather popular, and has impressive credentials. It has a 12.5" IPS screen (this is a relatively new LCD technology, IPS stands for "In-Plane Switching" and is supposed to be far superior to the TN or Twisted Nematic variety which offers a very narrow viewing angle). The 6-cell battery gives an amazing 8 hours of usage under actual test conditions. With a 9-cell battery and an optional "slice battery" base, this goes up to 23 hours. Clearly this is the laptop to have if you're planning to be shipwrecked! And it weighs just 1.6 kg.

So I called Lenovo's sales number at 1-800-425-3353 and got a recording in Kannada. Not sure what it said, but it definitely wasn't "swalpa adjust maadi", the only Kannada phrase I know. Twenty tries later I gave up and tried their Bombay office number. This answered with a voice menu that would not accept any inputs from me. Finally I called their Bangalore office and got a charming telephone operator who giggled when I recounted my adventures. She gave me the direct number of someone in Sales at their Bombay office, who I called immediately and - of course - he did not answer. For good measure I tried their customer service and it was consistently busy! Not reassuring.

Today came the final nail in the coffin - Lenovo India (contacted through resellers) reveal that they do not supply the highly rated IPS screen but only the NT. Moreover globally the IPS screen on the X220 turns out to have severe problems with image persistence (as 40 pages of complaints on this forum will attest). And the NT screen in a side-by-side comparison video with the IPS looks washed-out.

All this panicked me. In India there would be no replacement if I didn't like it. If I may permit myself a politically incorrect comment, in India a laptop, like a bride, is seen for the first time on the wedding day and thereafter is supposed to be for keeps!!

Having now run out of possibilities, I am going to take my friend Vishwanath's advice and go over to the dark side. The Macbook Air has the following plus points: (i) the same model is sold in India as everywhere else, (ii) it can be seen and handled at lots of shops, and frankly looks gorgeous, (iii) on the 13" version you can get an Intel i7 processor, 4 GB RAM and a 256 GB solid-state drive, (iv) it is slim bordering on anorexic and weighs just 1.3 kg. So all I have to do, really, is to give up Linux. I may be the first person to have moved over to the "fruit company" not just because of their product's dazzling looks, impressive build quality and clever advertising, but in large measure because of the combined crappiness of Sony Vaio, Samsung and Lenovo, particularly their Indian incarnations.