South Asia Daily

A flamboyant despot’s gory street death

On April 1, 2010, I published on this blog fake sketches (done by me) of what was purported to be Muammar Gaddafi’s early work.This line is being retired now.

 

When a flamboyant despot dies a gory street death, the world approves with barely concealed glee. People see poetic justice in the raw brutality of such death.

Some even regret that he could not be killed more than once as if, somehow a single mortal event does not measure up to all the violence and pain and destruction he inflicted on others. They want him killed and revived, killed and revived until such time as their bloodlust settles.

The mobile phone video of a severely wounded Muammar Gaddafi, in tattered blood-soaked clothes, largely incapacitated and visibly disoriented being mounted on the hood of a car and reportedly paraded has been viewed millions of times around the world. There is also a video of a freshly lifeless and shirtless Gaddafi being flipped around on the street asphalt. People have watched these again and again, perhaps hoping that every viewing might reveal some new dehumanization of a delusional tyrant who lived his own life at the expense of the world.

I find it hard to understand when people say a brutal end of the kind Gaddafi had proves that a life lived by brutalizing and tyrannizing others never works. The argument is that because he was lynched alive without any mercy more than balances his lifetime of violence towards others. I disagree and do so purely in statistical terms. Gaddafi was 69-years-old. He overthrew King Idris in 1969 as a 27-year-old colonel. What this means for at least 41 years he lived his life on his own terms and did pretty much everything that he desired and more. That includes creating and wearing his own quirky fashion line.

If you add a decade or so of a reasonably content childhood to the four decades in power, we are talking more than 50 years out of 69. Even after accounting for the normal human struggle of the remaining 19 years, over 95 percent of which were spent in adolescence, one can reasonably argue that the period when he could not do precisely what tickled his fancy was rather short and was largely confined to the last months of his life since the uprising.

From Gaddafi’s standpoint more than 90 percent of his life was lived the way it pleased him personally. If that is not a damn good deal, what is?  In comparison with the enormous suffering and misery he caused to others and for so long, his own suffering and misery in the end was miniscule and shortlived (not to mention fully deserved). Contrary to what a lot of people think, the comeuppance for a despot invariably falls short of his despotic deeds in real terms. In short, life does not necessarily balance things out. It was as true for Gaddafi as it was for Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and many other barbarians.

On a separate note, I have found at least four different versions of his last name including Khaddafy, Qaddafi, Gadhafi and Gaddafi. As Shakespeare might have said he smells dead by any other name.

No memorial service for them

The Bengal tiger

There is unlikely to be any special memorial service in the Sundarbans in honor of the 18 Bengal tigers which were shot dead in Zanesville, Ohio. Tigers are not emotional that way, certainly not the Bengal tigers. Ditto lions, bears,monkeys, wolves and mountain lions.

This story has so many primal emotions at play but two in particular stand out—human weakness to possess and control other species and ensuring our own survival at any cost. “I gave the order on my way here. If animals looked like they were going out, they went down,” said the no non-sense Sheriff Matt Lutz.

And go down they did, almost all of the 56 that were let out of their cages by Terry Thompson, the owner of the Muskingum County Animal Farm, before he himself committed suicide.

Animal rights activists are understandably angry at the wholesale killings of the animals instead of sedating them. One obvious explanation is that because it is easier to kill a 300 pound cat on the loose than sedate. Experts, who support the killings, argue that excited animals are hard to sedate because tranquilizers take much longer to take effect in that state of excitement. And time was not on the side of the police and other wildlife experts who had to contain the animals before they began attacking people.

In the end this story is quite simply about who lives—the animals or the people near the farm. In this particular case it appears saving the animals was not a priority at all. The authorities did try to shoot a dart at one of the tigers which only made him more out of control.

On a side note, I found it incongruous when TV anchors cautioned the viewers that the images of the carcasses they were about to show were “disturbing.” We do stuff out plates with chicken breasts, thighs, wings, dead shrimp, sliced fish, ground beef, dismembered crabs—don’t we? Just a thought.

P.S.: On a separate note, it was amusing to be corrected when I pronounced Bengal tiger as Bengol tiger and not Bengul tiger the way Americans do. It should actually be Bongla tiger.

Lift manhole cover and take the plunge

The other day, in keeping with the glib and often flippant nature of Facebook updates, I wrote: “Surprise!! Anna Hazare and company are political in a country where even the manhole covers are political.”

The comment was in response to Hazare’s professedly non-partisan anti-corruption movement engaging in undisguised partisan politics in a recently concluded parliamentary by-election. Arvind Kejriwal, the leading light of the Hazare protest movement, campaigned against the candidate of the Congress Party in Hissar, Haryana. The candidate, Jay Prakash, who was in any case expected to lose the election, did indeed do so. The calculation on Kejriwal’s part seemed to be at the right place at the right time to reinforce his movement’s political power, something which he has publicly denied courting.

Upset at Kejriwal’s partisan campaigning two prominent members of the Hazare protest team, Magsaysay award winning water activist Rajendra Singh and  P V Rajagopal, vice-chairman of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi, have quit the movement. My question is why did the two gentlemen think that the movement was anything but political to begin with? As an astute political commentator said so glibly in his recent Facebook update, ““Surprise!! Anna Hazare and company are political in a country where even the manhole covers are political.” (The astute political commentator requested anonymity).

There is nothing particularly galling about the Hazare movement taking political sides because all movements do eventually become political. If you believed in the spiel about the movement’s inherent loftiness, it is your problem. Perhaps to prove their political neutrality, they should say that they would oppose corrupt candidates irrespective of their party affiliations. That is also political but it at least offers the movement’s strategists some flexibility.

Another way for the movement is to formally become a political party and seek to contest elections at all levels. But people with moral certitudes, the way Hazare and company display, cannot reconcile entering politics with their public posturing from moral high ground. Those who claim to be above the political fray discover soon enough that in a country like India the above-the-fray approach works only so far. Beyond a point those seeking generational change have to get down and dirty; and by dirty I do not mean morally compromised.

Those who have come to wield moral force in India, or for that matter anywhere in the world, get addicted to it because it is often without responsibility. Few callings in life are easier than being a saint. The dust and grime of fixing India’s harrowing problems require much more than saintliness. They also require much more than observing the vow of silence that Hazare is doing these days. 

Of course, the primary purpose of the vow of silence is to retreat from mundane preoccupations and ruminate over deeper philosophical questions. It is not merely mumbling annoyingly in response and feverishly writing long protest notes. If it is only a question of not speaking for days, I do it more frequently than him, operate as I do from my basement.

In the midst of his ‘Maun Vrat’ as the vow of silence is called in India, Hazare thought it appropriate to appear on NDTV’s Indian of the Year award celebrations. My image of a person observing this vow is that of someone with a calm visage immersed in the sheer serenity of having disengaged from the worldly machinations. Instead one saw Hazare struggling not to speak out even as he wrote down his replies to questions from NDTV’s Group Editor Barkha Dutt. 

My unsolicited advice to the Hazare team would be to lift the manhole cover and take the plunge into the sewer of politics.

Why ‘Occupy Dalal Street’ may not work

Here is why ‘Occupy Dalal Street’ may not work.

Before I tell you why, a clarification. There is no plan underway for an ‘Occupy Wall Street’ style protest in Mumbai’s stock trading heartland. But in case there was, here is why it would not carry the same powerful symbolism. There is no slick-haired, suspender-wearing, master of the universe, foul-mouthed, wealth flaunting Gordon Gekko figure on Dalal Street who can become a target against which popular ire can be concentrated.

A majority of stock traders on Dalal Street is made up of undistinguished Gujarati men, dressed up in ill-stitched synthetic shirts and trousers, chewing gutkha, slurping tea off unwashed cups from street vendors and occasionally spitting on the sidewalk. There is a greater reason to protest their dressing and eating habits than their profiteering. I exaggerate of course, but you get my drift. Even when they ask “Ajey ketla banavya (How much did you make today?), it sounds more reassuring than greedy.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was Harshad Mehta, whose rise eerily paralleled Gekko in the 1987 movie ‘Wall Street’ by Oliver Stone which captured the culture of greed. By the time the movie came to India, Mehta had already firmly established himself as that figure in real life. He once posed for a magazine cover with his latest Lexus which in those days reputedly cost him 4.7 million rupees. And yes, he did wear suspenders once in a while and live in a 15,000 square feet apartment. Of course, his floppy suits looked as if they were tailored on a street in Kalbadevi but that is irrelevant here. Mehta was an exception in the otherwise studiedly low-key world of Gujarati stockbrokers who do not like to rub their wealth on poor people’s lifeless cheeks.

Since Mehta’s death in 1992 the wealth of many trading families has grown exponentially but for some reason Dalal Street traders do not quite have the same revoltingly greedy and subversive reputation that the Wall Street executives have acquired. I can tell you from having spent years on and near Dalal Street as a young reporter that the traders there are every bit as crafty and money obsessed. For decades leading Dalal Street traders operated without the shiny glass and steel corporate frontage that one sees on Wall Street. That deliberate lack of slickness and corporate polish acted as a protective layer against the prying eyes.

I am aware that in the last decade that traditional culture has had to make way for the more Wall Street type corporate cut-throat atmosphere inside Indian trading firms. However, by and large their bonuses and wealth have remained far less ostentatious and in your face than what one sees on Wall Street. Even in the India of 2011 stock trading still feels like an individual pursuit by someone wanting to make a fast buck rather than institutionalized corporate greed central. It is a question of perception.

More than the image issue, the reason why Occupy Dalal Street may not resonate that much is because, unlike in America, inequities of life in India are found in so many more places than just on Dalal Street. The stock broker is not yet as emblematic of society’s ills in India as he is on Wall Street. That has to do a great deal with the fact that India’s economy is on a rapid growth trajectory unlike in America where the economy is struggling. The 14 plus percent of real employment and nine plus percent of official unemployment is now being increasingly blamed on corporations not doing enough to create domestic employment. Since Wall Street is the most identifiable symbol of predatory capitalism for the disaffected Americans, Occupy Wall Street has gained traction.

So, so like that.

P.S.: The post today is a bit of a stretch but then life is a bit of a stretch.

Amazon shakes up publishing world

It was not hard to predict that Amazon.com would eventually become a publisher itself, although, admittedly, I never predicted it. The New York Times reports today about how Amazon is rapidly emerging as a publisher by directly signing up authors. The web giant will publish 122 titles this fall.

Amazon has had in place many of the key elements required to position itself as a publisher. Since its 1995 founding as an online bookstore the company has become a massive global retailer of lot of other goods as well. However, books and spin-offs have remained its core competency.

With its global reach, distribution of content has not been an issue for Amazon. Distribution supported by warehousing facilities give Amazon two major elements needed for the publishing business.

Then in 2007, it came out with its first e-book reader, Kindle which allowed the company to distribute its content directly to the reader’s palms. Kindle with its wireless connectivity freed its customers from being tied down to a particular spot.

With storefront, distribution, warehousing and mobility all in place the logical next step had to be content. That’s where authors and editors come in. The Times story talks about Amazon bringing in publishing veteran Laurence Kirshbaum to take care of that crucial part of the equation. There is already an aggressive outreach by Amazon to grab topline authors from traditional publishers.

What publishing giants should have done themselves ten years ago by sensing the trends emerging in the digital world is being done by Amazon.

The Amazon push into a world that has steadfastly remained traditional is shaking up established names. My own sources in the book publishing world tell me that many of them do not know how to counter the onslaught. In many ways they should blame themselves because they refused to change. One of the big daddies of the publishing world, for instance, should have commissioned its own e-book reader before either Barnes and Noble (Nook) or Amazon (Kindle and Kindle Fire) came out. Somewhere along the lines, the culture of intellectual arrogance bred by decades of supremacy over publishing books also played a significant role in creating their own nemesis.

As the Times story notes, Amazon may end up making publishers and agents redundant by doing both themselves. For instance, it has signed up actress and filmmaker Penny Marshall for $800,000 for her memoirs, according to the Times.

With some luck and a lot of business savvy I could have trumped Amazon by a decade. Here is how. In 2000, after raising capital with uncomfortable ease from a very well known Silicon Valley venture capitalist called Raj Singh, I set up a publishing and media company christened Literate World. The web front of that operation was literateworld.com, which was designed to emerge as the world’s first multilingual literary portal.

The overarching objective of the multilingual literary portal was to use the worldwide web to create interest in global literature and leverage that interest by publishing books. The portal began with news, features, interviews and trends in literature in the three most widely spoken languages—Hindi, Spanish and English. In less than six months the portal was receiving close to two million hits a month without any publicity whatsoever. I had plans to add 12 more languages to the portal.  I am sure we could have built up a huge global readership which we could have leveraged for our own titles.

I directly commissioned 15 books in different languages with a minimum advance of $5000 paid to the first three authors. The first three of those were published in English, Hindi and Marathi to very strong critical acclaim. Unfortunately, we folded up for reasons unrelated to the publishing venture. I remember having reached out to business executives in all major publishing houses in New York with a proposal to collaborate on digital publishing. Not one of them even had the courtesy to return my phone calls or respond to email messages.

Soccer dad sees daughter’s first goal

My daughter Hayaa (Pic: Dr Prakash Desai)

After shouting from the sidelines for several weeks,including such motivational chants as “Kick the ball as if it is me”, my nine-year-old daughter Hayaa scored her first soccer goal yesterday.

Incidentally, when I say soccer, I mean European football, the kind that is played with feet, and not American football which is mostly played with hands.

She nearly missed the game because she forgot her shin guards at home. Had I not had to rush to the field with them, I would not have seen her score because I had decided to skip this time. Hayaa’s team was down 3-1 until the last quarter when the coach positioned her as one of the three centre forwards.

Less than 40 seconds after the referee whistled the start Hayaa and her teammate Kate had successfully dribbled past the rivals and were face to face with the goalpost. Hayaa had a clean hit in front of her which I was sure she would mess up. Instead, she kicked the ball straight past the goalie and into the goal.

My thumb and index finger reflexively came together and went straight to the edge of my mouth as I let out an ear-shattering whistle. With that I completed my transformation into a soccer dad, the kind who not just ferries his child to these games but stands on the sidelines and cheers with near demonic vehemence. I now have the full measure of what Sarah Palin has been saying about the ferocity of soccer moms. For those of you who may not quite get the American cultural reference, soccer moms are suburban middleclass moms who transport their school-going children to their various soccer games with gusto and watch them play with unbridled passion.

On a side note, I am happy to report that I am perhaps the only parent at these games who can not only whistle but whistle with many combinations of fingers and even without them. I am willing go to the extent of claiming without any basis whatsoever that I am perhaps the only one in my city Naperville’s population of 141,853 who can whistle with all fingers and without.

For weeks, I have been telling Hayaa that in football the ball is meant to be kicked and kicked hard when required. It requires no TLC because they are now mostly made of synthetic leather and not real animal hide. Of course, many of them are still made of cowhide which has been made waterproof.

With her first goal scored, my advice to her is that she should retire. It is always good to leave on a high note.

P.S.: Our team lost 3-2.

Is insider trading an outdated, victimless crime?

The sentencing of Raj Rajaratnam to 11 years begs the question whether insider trading is an outdated, victimless crime. The question is particularly relevant in the information age where the lines between insider trading and legal trading have been indistinguishably blurred.

When you consider that the whole business of stock trading is based on a sordid mixture of verifiable and unverifiable tips and intelligence, I am not entirely sure how egregious insider trading is. Let me qualify my view by saying I have never traded in life because I have never had the money to trade and, more importantly, I regard the business of trading to be a generally useless pursuit.

Whether insider trading is a victimless crime is a question that has occupied a lot of serious academic minds for quite sometime. Whether it is an outdated crime is something that I have added. There is so much information floating around in cyberspace that one can make a reasonable case that a fairly smart trader can distil it into highly lucrative intelligence even while unconsciously violating the provisions of the law against insider trading. This glut of information is a direct consequence of the information technology revolution which is now in its very advanced stages.

Of course, in Rajaratnam’s case the prosecutors have argued that he squeezed every ounce of insider intelligence out of his rolodex in order to make huge profits. They have also argued that since he had inside information he had a clearly established unfair advantage over ordinary investors with no such access. One result of this was that ordinary investors would have most likely paid much more on the stocks than Rajaratnam, who had the ability to buy low and sell high because he got in early on the strength of his inside information.

That’s a fair point but at the same time it is debatable how many ordinary investors who had a similar opportunity of cashing in on inside information the way Rajaratnam did would have actually shunned it on moral and legal grounds. I understand that in the end Rajaratnam case is about enforcing the law as it exists on the statute books. Prosecutors have a constitutional obligation, not to mention a moral one, to prosecute to the fullest extent of that law. However, my contention is whether such a law makes sense any longer when the ways in which it can wittingly and unwittingly be violated or circumvented have grown manifold because of the IT revolution.

In the strictest legal and moral sense stock markets and stock traders the world over do occasionally operate outside those tight definitions. If it is only a question of not being found out ever or for the longest period possible, then I am afraid the whole edifice of the rule of law collapses.

Mine may be a cynical view of the world of finance in general and stock trading in particular but those who inhabit that world have not done a stellar job disabusing doubters of their doubts about the fundamental integrity of the profession.

Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011

Co-creator of Unix and C programming language Dennis Ritchie

I know as little about the world of computers and coding as possible and as is appropriate to admit publicly. But even I understand that what Dennis Ritchie did was seminal and way more fundamental to the dawn of the digital age than anything that another geek superstar who died recently did.

Ritchie’s death yesterday did not cause the feeling of virulent global bereavement that Steve Jobs passing did some days ago. However, those who keep track of the largely unsung and unheralded pioneers of the digital world that we so instinctively live in now would tell you that we owe a great deal more to this co-creator of Unix and the C programming language.

I am very uncertain when I say this but my limited understanding says that before Ritchie created the C programming language, early computers were sort of standalone curiosities that could not be interconnected. The human parallel would be that if all seven billion of us could not communicate (which may not be such a bad thing but about that another time). If we have individually portable apps for everything, it is in large measure because of what Ritchie did.

My techie friends tell me that almost everything that we do in the digital world is directly because of C or its enhanced version of C++. Think of Ritchie as someone who breathed life into this world way back between 1969 and 1973. Those who know C also vouch for its sheer minimalist elegance as a language. It is both spare and telling simultaneously.

If I am able to produce this drivel every morning unmindful of people’s moods and conditions, it is also because of Dennis Ritchie. Now that is a problem.

Ashok Kumar: The undervalued legacy of a renaissance actor

Ashok Kumar (Pic credit: Unknown)

(October 13, 2011, marks the 100th birth anniversary of Ashok Kumar. Friend and fellow journalist Ashok Easwaran, who is about to complete the actor’s biography, takes a quick look back)

By Ashok Easwaran

Hindi cinema has perhaps rarely seen another actor with the refined, understated craftsmanship of Kumudlal Kunjilal Ganguly, better known by his screen name, Ashok Kumar. Here was an actor who straddled Hindi cinema from the mid-1930 to the 1990s, who pioneered the concept of 'natural acting' at a time when theatrical acting was the norm.

As Hindi cinema's first superstar, he, nevertheless, took box office risks. "Kismet", in which he played a negative role, ran for three years in Kolkata's Roxy Theater. The film's record was broken by "Sholay" 32 years later.
It was Ashok Kumar who introduced the suave, Westernized hero to Hindi films, puffing at his trademark cigarette, a habit he acquired to keep his hands occupied on camera. Years later he won the National Award for his role as an aging prisoner in Hrishkesh Mukherjee's "Aashirwad", the film in which he also sang Hindi cinema's first rap song, "Rail Gadi, Rail Gadi".

He earned the title of the "grand old man of Hindi cinema", and for good reason. Ashok Kumar's career spanned an entire era in Hindi films beginning shortly after the advent of talking films.

Yet, barely 10 years after his death, even as Ashok Kumar's birth centenary is celebrated Oct 13, he remains an undervalued - some may even say forgotten - actor. In fact, one of his daughters laments that she is better known today as Kishore Kumar's niece.

Celluloid fame is notoriously fickle, with superstars of a previous era quickly consigned into the dustbin of history. But when I was doing research for my biography of Ashok Kumar, I was somewhat surprised at the enduring respect and affection for him. To the many directors and actors he had worked with, he remained Dadamoni, an affectionate elder brother.

Producer and director Yash Chopra, probably the biggest name in Hindi cinema today, spoke of the diffidence with which he approached Ashok Kumar for a small role in his first film. The actor not only agreed readily but did not charge him any fees for doing the role.

Waheeda Rehman is celebrated as the epitome of Indian beauty and when I met her, she was graciousness personified. Her eyes lit up when speaking of Ashok Kumar, as she reminisced about his pranks on and off the sets.

"With great respect and affection, I must say he was a 'kaam chor'," she said. While shooting in Chennai, he feigned an asthmatic attack because the director had given him his lines too late for him to memorise. She said that Ashok Kumar had insisted that Rehman tie a 'rakhi' on him every year, but when she took him up on his word, he led her on a chase through two studios to his home. I asked her if he had ever expressed regret for the inconvenience he had caused her.. Apparently not. "Woh bade jo the (he was the elder one)," she laughed.

The late Shammi Kapoor, who said he considered Ashok Kumar India's best actor, spoke of his deep regret on never having got a chance to sign a film with him, and of the dressing down he got from his brother, Raj Kapoor, when he did the "Pan Paraag" advertisement just so that he could work with Ashok Kumar.

Dharmendra remembered Ashok Kumar's fatherly indulgence when he arrived on the sets on New Year's Day too sozzled to shoot. Parikshit Sahni spoke of how Dadamoni had godfathered him when he returned from Russia, alone in Mumbai and devastated at the death of his father, Balraj Sahni.

Ashok Kumar belonged to an era when stars did not have a public relations apparatus, where even a superstar, as he was in the 1940s and 1950s, did not generate the hysteria lesser stars do today. Ashok Kumar himself did not take either his stardom, or the many accolades he received, seriously. His daughter Bharati Jaffrey recalled his remark when she excitedly congratulated him on being awarded the Padma Bhushan, "Kaunsa bada sher maar liya" (So, which big tiger have I killed). He had even turned a plaque that he was awarded into a doorknob.

Acting was a craft he loved, but he had numerous other interests. He was a connoisseur of music. Broadcaster Ameen Sayani recalled listening to his collection of Rajasthani folk songs. He was an avid reader of books from authors like Voltaire, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant to Rabindranath Tagore, and a linguist. Many stars spoke of how he had cured seemingly intractable afflictions through homoeopathy. He cured Manoj Kumar of recurring warts and Moushumi Chatterjee's daughter of asthma.

Ashok Kumar was introduced to painting by actor Iftikhar and this quickly turned into a passion. He learnt the art of watercolors from G.D. Paulraj and was also influenced by masters like Vincent van Gogh and the Impressionists. He had done a painting of a nude Mona Lisa, and often painted in his bathroom, in the nude.

A law student before he joined Bombay Talkies as a laboratory technician, Ashok Kumar modelled his role as a judge in B.R. Chopra's "Kanoon" on M.C. Chagla (the chief justice of the Bombay High Court 1948-58, who also served as a union minister).

Aneeta Jamal, a US federal judge in Houston, said of her meetings with Ashok Kumar: "His range of interests was so diverse. You could talk to him about everything." He showed a keen interest in the judicial system in the US and arranged for her to visit the Bombay High Court when she visited the city.
Ashok Kumar had two qualities rare in the celluloid world - the ability to take his work, but not himself seriously, and magnanimity towards colleagues. Many of his fellow artists spoke to me on how he goaded them to perform better, completely oblivious to the notion that they could steal the scene from him. Once, he even pretended to forget his lines to relieve his co-star of her nervousness.

Ashok Kumar undoubtedly belonged to a very different era, when form did not overpower cinematic content. But even as we celebrate the global reach of today's hybrid Hindi cinema, it is worth keeping in mind that cinema is meant to be more of an art than commerce, and there are few who symbolized the craft of acting more elegantly than Ashok Kumar.

As director Shyam Benegal said: "They don't make them like Ashok Kumar any more. He belonged to a gentler and more innocent time."

(Ashok Easwaran is a Chicago-based journalist and commentator. He is the author of a forthcoming biography of Ashok Kumar. He can be reached at ashok3185@yahoo.com)

“Ooooh, I am so important, subscribe to me”

Among many existential questions that trouble me, there is this one about the recently introduced “Subscribe” button on Facebook. What’s the point of that? It does not even qualify as a trivial question when you consider that there is no point to the universe generally, but someone has to ask such useless questions. So I might as well bear the burden.

Nothing says “Ooooh, I am so important, subscribe to me” than the “Subscribe” button. It also says you are not good enough to be my friend, although you should be desperate enough to subscribe to me. Everyday Facebook suggests a couple of people they think I should subscribe to. I wonder whether to others Facebook ever suggests that they should subscribe to me too.

The day I saw the “Subscribe” button I was instantly reminded of the above clip from Seinfeld where the landlord Silvio (Jon Polito) confronts Kramer (Michael Richards) about a fur coat. In fact, the button specifically reminds me about the bit where Silvio says, “It’s all about me me me..” Cue the clip at 1.35 to get the full context or to 2 to just get the bit I am talking about. (Man, I have so much time in the morning).

Every time I see someone being suggested to be subscribed, I hear the lines, “It’s al about me me me..Please look at me. I am so pretty.”