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Bangalore: Imagine your kid or nephew or niece or a friend’s kid stranded outside the school on a stormy afternoon because he or she missed the school bus. All the roads in the city are choc-a-bloc filled. The streets are flooded with water. There are live wires hanging from uprooted electric poles, on the roads. Your kid needs your assistance, but can’t communicate the same to you. Why? The government has banned them from using mobile phones.
Last month Karnataka government banned the use of mobile phones by anybody under the age of 16. Now, the Tamil Nadu government has banned the use of mobile phones in schools. It seems that it is not enough to keep the phone switched off in the class; the students’ bags will be checked to see if they carry a mobile phone – they can’t carry the device on them, period. What prompted the to come in to action here? I concede that children probably text message each other in the class, which is a distraction and obviously impermissible. Of course, there could be other menaces also like the kids playing games, listening to music etc while the class is on. The mobile phones could also posse a problem of more sinister nature, as we witnessed in a Delhi school in the multimedia messages (MMS) case, not so long ago. I accept that there are distractions and other detrimental aspects when we hand mobile phones to kids. But aren’t we pushing ourselves into an old era? To me this knee jerk reaction looks more akin to the ostrich burying its head in the ground and wishing away the problem. While our Nation harps on the big strides we have made in mass communication; while we pat ourselves on keeping the traditions of democracy alive; and while we pride in our constitution and judiciary – is it right to curtail the right of a child to the communicate via mobile phones? The pity is that there are parents & teachers vouching for this action. Like I said, this at best is a knee jerk reaction. There is a problem – acknowledged. But, is the current solution optimum? No. Other avenues haven’t been explored at all. Can we put in a control at the point of sale? – Kids can have only phones without camera. Can we put in a control at the place of contention, the classroom? – All children to place their phones at the front of the classroom, in a designated stand or compartment, while the class is in progress. There could be hundred other things that could be done instead of banning kids from using mobile phones. We should explore them prior to imposing this kind of a retrograde diktat.

There is only one word that comes to mind instantly when I hear this action – Ridiculous!

(c) Suresh Damodaran,2007

Global companies are waking up fast to the fact that public opinion is being shaped by forums of various kinds on the internet, like social networks, e-groups, wiki and of course blogs. Microsoft is recently touted to have paid an independent reviewer to counter and correct supposed inaccuracies in a wikipedia article drawing out the coding standards issue in open source. This only goes to show the growing influence of blogs and interactive sites. Have a look at this article in

this out, yesterday Divey sent me this link about the epaper edition of ‘The Hindu’! This is refreshingly close to the real newspaper. Digitisation of books, magazines and newspapers is gaining prominence on the net. This latest move by the Hindu brings the ‘actual’ newspaper into your computer. Currently, the service is available free of cost for a period of three months. The Hindu seems to be building another revenue stream with this service. The logical question that comes to mind is – who will pay for this, when a free edition is available in the web page format? I would, if I can get to read the paper like it is physically then I wouldn’t mind paying for it; besides, we don’t know for how long the free edition will be available.

(c) Suresh Damodaran,2007