Diss Regards

The other day I received an email from a person who had signed off with ‘Cheers!!’ Now, I’ve seen enough people sign off with ‘Cheers’ – but without the two exclamation marks. While nowhere near as common as ‘Regards’, it’s the informal, buddy way of signing off for people who don’t want to come across as being too stiff. It’s a bit like saying “Hey, just because I’m sending you an official email with words like ‘peruse’ and ‘do the needful’ doesn’t mean that I’m some boring corporate chap who’s sold his soul for a lifetime of great riches and eternal boredom. There’s a fun side to me – I sign off with Cheers, as if we’re in a bar enjoying a drink together.”

In the case of this Cheers, though, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I suppose it was the exclamation marks that threw me off. I grew up in simpler times - before the onset of text messages that ushered in an era of rampant abbreviations. Spare the rod and spoil the child was not just a literary expression but a guiding principle for most teachers, who ensured that not just the rod but also the cane, the duster and the knuckles were never spared in a suspiciously eager attempt to prevent said child from spoiling. An exclamation mark, then, could not be tossed about casually or sprinkled liberally without a care in the world. Like a good wine, it had to be rolled around, savoured gradually, lingered over and finally used very judiciously and with utmost discretion, only if a sentence contained something truly worthy of emphasis.

This isn’t how it is now – every second sentence on social media ends with something like this - !!!$$@!!!. While I'm no grammar nazi, a lifetime of conditioning has meant that I could never bring myself to it. My mind would grapple with technicalities like “Do I really need two dollar signs when one may convey the message just as effectively?” or with larger, more philosophical questions like “Would the person who reads this think that I’m a hysterical teenager?” Even a single exclamation mark would leave me agonizing over whether it actually needed to be there at all. “Does it emphasize the point too strongly? Is it making the sentence come off as too aggressive or desperate? Would a full stop be a more subtle way of conveying the point? Should I save it for a more critical or dramatic sentence that is more deserving of an exclamation mark?”

But coming back to the email signature, I’ve also seen many people use ‘Cheers!’ – but with one exclamation mark. At that level, it still feels like something that I can deal with. The feeling is approximately the same as ‘Cheers’, except that the person is trying to emphasize the Cheers in a more earnest way, like he truly means it. As if he’s announcing to the world “No, don’t mistake me for the guy who uses ‘Cheers’ just to convince everyone that he isn’t a boring corporate guy. I’m actually a very fun guy and just to emphasize that point, here’s an exclamation mark”.

However, two exclamation marks? It just seems excessively happy. Or jumpy. Or hysterical. Like the person has just won the lottery and is sending out the email. Or he’s just met his childhood idol and is sending out the email. It’s the sort of signature that makes you forget that the rest of the mail is a stinker and instead creates a picture of the guy being extremely thrilled each time he sends an email, jumping up and down all over the office, delirious with joy and frothing over in a frisson of excitement. At the very least, such a person would have to change his signature to ‘Gloom!!’ to be taken seriously if he wanted to convey genuine anger or disappointment.

All this got me thinking about official email signatures, and the one I use. 

Regards. 

That is without a shred of doubt the most boring, ineffectual way to sign off on an email. It says absolutely nothing at all. It’s a blank wall, a poker face. Whether it’s there or not makes absolutely no difference to the recipient of the email. I’m sure it didn’t start out that way. The person who first used ‘Regards’ in an email probably had noble enough intentions “Hey, I can’t just sign off with my name, that would look too curt. I must convey some sense of warmth/sincerity/respect without looking too friendly or casual.” Now, though, it’s absolutely generic – perhaps that’s the reason I end up using it. It gives nothing away.

The problem is every other variation on Regards tends to convey something more, and you may not always want to do that. There’s Warm Regards/Best Regards/Kind Regards/Thanks & Regards, which make you sound like a friendlier version of the person who simply says Regards. There’s ‘rgds’, which makes you sound like a busier version of the person who says Regards and therefore has no time for punctuation or typing the word out fully. Then there’s ‘BR’, which makes you sound like a cooler, more ‘with-it’ version of the busier person who has no time to type out Regards. The sort who would wish someone ‘HBD’ on his or her birthday and not think twice about it.

Oh, and finally there’s ‘br’, which makes you sound like the busier version of the already busy person who uses ‘BR’, someone so busy that there isn’t even the time to bother with punctuation while typing ‘BR’. Beyond that point, you’ve just attained a sort of email signature nirvana – you’ve risen above all these petty considerations and simply sign off with your name. Or better still, just your initial.

A.

Missileaneous Excitement

For a country whose entire foreign policy can be distilled into the question “Should we launch another missile and piss everyone off?” it wasn’t surprising that North Korea recently launched another one of its missiles. As always, the reactions to it were along predicted lines, given that this has happened so many times before – South Korea was alarmed, the Western European powers condemned it, China looked the other way while the US imposed a fresh set of sanctions on North Korea. That last point made me wonder – wasn’t North Korea already isolated and reeling under the weight of international sanctions? Yet each time they launched a missile, a fresh set of sanctions were promptly announced – is there some sort of bottomless pit of sanctions that the US has in place? Or do they think up new things to sanction each time a missile is launched?

The guys at the State Department must be pretty bored trying to come up with new sanctions each time. They probably walked in to the next day’s meeting with a sense of overwhelming dread and despair.

Head of Sanctions Department (addressing the Sanctions team): You know the drill, boys – that’s the tenth time those North Koreans have fired a missile. We’ve already placed sanctions on defence equipment, uranium and radioactive elements, electronics, medical equipment, industrial goods, heavy machinery, vehicles, specialized services, general services, recreational firearms and home décor items – so think of something new.

After countless late nights spent poring over the possibilities, the end result would be a sanction on some fairly innocuous item, like citrus fruits. With all the big-ticket items already placed under sanctions, the Sanctions team plumped for citrus fruits after a vigorous and heated debate over the merits of imposing sanctions on other similarly insignificant items like lawn ornaments, embroidery kits and cushion covers.

A State Department announcement to that effect will follow:

“The United States shall not tolerate this impudent display of missile launching by North Korea. We take such matters seriously, and to show you how seriously we take it we shall impose a sanction that forbids the entry or exit of citrus fruits to North Korea. Citrus fruits are a rich source of Vitamin C and highly tasty – a state deprived of Vitamin C can only survive so long. This is just the beginning, and if the North Koreans do not dismantle their weapons program we shall extend the sanction to other fruits and maybe even vegetables, if push comes to shove.”

The North Korean state, while being disappointed at the prospect of breakfast without orange juice, would engage its propaganda machine to convince people that they never really loved citrus fruits that much in the first place anyway.

“Citrus fruits are the ultimate symbol of Western imperialist and hegemonic forces. Its zesty flavour and quenching allure mirrors the decadent and hedonistic lifestyle of Western consumerist ways. The dastardly but admittedly tasty citrus fruits are headed down the same path of destruction as the rest of Western society. The Supreme leader has always been more of a watermelon person anyway. Apples, bananas and grapes are also fruits he’s really quite fond of.”

Soon, though, the rest of the world moved on as stock markets began to crash amid fears of another recession, and North Korea was forgotten again. It wasn’t always this way for North Korea. Until the Islamic terrorists came along and truly made a nuisance of themselves, North Korea was in the spotlight with far greater regularity.

It all started in 2002, with George W Bush declaring North Korea as one of the members of the Axis of Evil, along with Iran & Libya. I know what you’re thinking “Axis of Evil! Wow, that sounds like a great name for a heavy metal band!” But unlike Iran & Libya, who weren’t exactly jumping for joy over their new moniker, North Korea seemed to revel in its bad boy status, firing off a slew of missiles, embarking enthusiastically upon uranium enrichment programs and indulging in all the clandestine and covert stuff that doesn’t go down well with the US unless it’s the CIA that does it.

The excitement peaked in 2005, with the Axis of Evil being discarded for the more colourful-sounding “Outposts of Tyranny”, comprising six countries with North Korea once again leading the way. I know – “Outposts of Tyranny” sounds like an even better name for a heavy metal band, doesn’t it? Perhaps the US State Department should consider creating names for metal bands as an alternate line of work.

Apart from North Korea, though, most of the outposts of tyranny have simply lost their tyrannical edge and can now be more accurately termed as “Outposts of Milder Levels of Oppression and Totalitarianism”. Gaddafi is not around anymore, Iran has agreed to dismantle its nuclear program, Myanmar is inching closer to democracy, Belarus no one even remembers had originally made it to the list and Obama is considering making a trip to Cuba – leaving North Korea as the one outright evil, unrepentantly tyrannical country from that original list. The time seemed ripe to truly take centre stage, as opposed to being part of an Axis or one among the Outposts.

Sadly, along came the Islamic terrorists and blew it all to bits, in more ways than one. Apart from the obligatory week in the spotlight fetched by a missile launch, it's back to the scrapheap of geopolitical obscurity for America’s favourite villainous state.

We're Digging It!

Most people assume that the government is excellent at corruption, very good at digging up roads and terrible at everything else – but this is only part of the picture. We may curse the government each time we pass by a road that has been dug up for the last 6 months, but the reality is that a dug up road is like a new year’s resolution gone wrong. It’s like the gym that you’ve stopped going to a month into the new year, the cakes that you’ve started eating after a fortnight of conscientious abstinence and the pair of jogging shoes that you used precisely twice and that’s now making you avoid the shoe rack in fear of being consumed by an overwhelming sense of guilt.

You know how it is. Each New Year begins with a significant proportion of the population making a resolution to make their neighborhood gyms richer. Well, alright…the resolution is to lose weight and get fit in the New Year, but the reality is it’s the gyms that get richer. To their credit, though, the people at least tried. It’s the same with the government – a dug up road is like the government ebulliently committing to a new infrastructure project, beginning work with fresh-faced enthusiasm and promptly losing interest midway through. Which is why the road remains dug up until the next time an election is round the corner.

So while most people were cheering the government’s announcement that it’ll allocate several thousands of crores for infrastructure investment in Bangalore at the Global Investors’ Meet last week, I wasn’t quite so enthusiastic. It just meant that there would be many more roads dug up all over the city before promptly being forgotten in the eager rush to do some fresh digging up.

For those of you wondering, the Global Investors’ Meet is one of those annual shindigs that are increasingly popular in India these days. It’s the sort of event that gets the newspapers frothing in excitement because it includes high ranking politicians as well as corporate leaders who are so senior that they cannot afford to be seen doing any actual work and hence spend all their time networking. It’s one of those events that most governments can fall back on to bail them out of a crisis situation and buy them a few weeks of goodwill. “Rising racial intolerance? Collapsing infrastructure? Power crisis looming? Let’s have a Global Investors’ Meet before this gets out of hand!”

A big sign of the success of any of these Global Investors’ Meets is the value of the MoU’s signed at the meet. And you know it’s always a spectacular success because every year it’s a new record number that ushers in a sense of unmitigated optimism for the state in question. The newspapers eagerly lap this up with reports stating that “Investors signed MoU’s worth Rs 60,000 crores with the Karnataka Government which could lead to the creation of up to 6 lakh jobs in the state. To address industry concerns about excessive paperwork that scuppers most investments, the state government has promised that it would hire origami enthusiasts to make all that paperwork a lot more interesting. Ratan Tata has also praised Karnataka claiming that it’s one of the few states that he actually enjoys investing in, while Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, who had twice threatened to leave Karnataka, has once again changed her mind and decided to stick around and invest some more.”

Each year, everyone goes back thinking that the state is well and truly on the way to being an oasis of development and prosperity, only to come back for the next Global Investors’ Meet with everything still being the same. Any reasonable person would be well within his rights to wonder why this is so. The chief culprit for this is the MoU. In essence, an MoU is like a non-committal, no-strings-attached version of the IoU. While it officially stands for Memorandum of Understanding, it's meaning is closer to “Might Owe You”. According to its definition, MoUs are “not legally binding but they carry a degree of seriousness and mutual respect, stronger than a gentlemen's agreement”. I’m no Sherlock, but that does sound very suspicious, doesn’t it? Even if an MoU carries the highest degree of seriousness and respect, it still means that a company may invest a certain amount in a state, but it just as well might not do so if it doesn’t feel like it. So you’ll have legal teams as well as government and corporate big shots spend months and months agonising over the fine print and meticulously poring over the details of a document that finally looks something like this:

In short, major investment decisions that could impact the future of a state are made on documents that hold less legal water than your average rental agreement. Which means that you’re more likely to get your rental deposit back than the Global Investors’ meet resulting in any actual investment – now that’s a headline worth reading!

To Sue or Not to Sue

A couple of weeks back, the Supreme Court announced that it would seriously consider the matter of banning Santa-Banta jokes on the grounds that they’re racist and offensive to Sikhs and insensitive to the feelings of that particular community and belittles them in the eyes of the public and other such mumbo-jumbo that is generally the case whenever people are outraged. Something that, surprise surprise, tends to happen with an inordinate degree of frequency in this country.

Take a deep breath and think about this. Santa Banta jokes and the Supreme Court – you never thought you’d hear them mentioned in the same sentence, did you? Imagine being a Supreme Court judge. You’ve been the brightest one in your class back in school and were always earmarked for big things. As you grew up, instead of squandering away that early promise like Vinod Kambli, you put in the hard yards and lived up to the expectations. You got into law school and graduated top of the class. You thrived in the high-pressure environment of a ruthless law firm/government law department and acquired a reputation for being among the best in your profession. You won high profile cases and rose rapidly through the ranks before finally being a judge in the highest court the country had to offer. Not for you making a living doing the usual banal jobs like convincing people why one TV is better than the other or investing another person’s money in dodgy financial instruments while getting paid for it.

No sir, you were a Supreme Court judge and would decide on matters of grave national importance. Like, um, whether to ban Santa Banta jokes. Well, ok, to be fair, those aren’t the only type of cases that come up in the Supreme Court – there are enough landmark judgments made that have changed the face of the justice system in the country. Still, it must be an odd sort of job when you go from deciding on gay rights one day to deciding on whether Santa Banta jokes should be banned another day. You’d probably go into office having no clue what’s coming your way.

Supreme Court Judge: So what matters do I have to preside on this week?
Supreme Court Judge’s Intern: Well, the matter of the 2G scam is up for hearing today.

Supreme Court Judge: That case is still pending? How dreadfully boring.

Supreme Court Judge’s Intern: Cheer up! Tomorrow you have to announce your verdict on the matter of banning Santa Banta jokes.

In some ways, this probably mirrors the bipolar nature of the Indian judicial system. Ordinarily, our judicial system is not the sort to encourage people to sue each other willy-nilly. If anything, it’s quite the opposite. Men of fierce determination and indomitable spirit, who bestride the worlds of their respective fields like a colossus; would sport a resigned, haunted look when it came to taking a matter to court. It mattered little that they had an ironclad, open and shut case to back them up. “What’s the point? It’ll go on for years and it’ll only end up being too much of a hassle – it’s just not worth it”, they’ll say in a tone of abject defeat. That their judgment was unmistakably sound could not be disputed. Even in cases where someone emerges victorious, it would hardly seem worth the trouble when you’d cast your eyes upon such headlines in the Indian papers:

Court Orders Nestle to Pay Rs 10,000 to Consumer

A consumer court has ordered Nestle to pay Rs 9,877 to a consumer who found a dead rat's tail in his packet of Maggi noodles. The consumer, a vegetarian, had not noticed the rat's tail while cooking due to a power cut and was midway through his meal when the power returned. As a result he was ostracized by his family and community and also suffered considerable emotional trauma. The verdict was announced after a protracted legal battle that lasted six and a half years; during which the man lost all his life savings, was deserted by his family, suffered an accident on his way to court one day and was even pecked in the eye by an irate pigeon in a courtroom one day.

This is quite the opposite of the scenario in the US, where you’d routinely come across articles that look like this:

Burglars Sue Home Owners for ‘On-the-Job’ Injuries

Two burglars attempting to rob a home have sued the owners for sustaining injuries over the course of the burglary. The burglars were rummaging through the closet when a bowling ball kept on the top shelf slid down and hit one of them on the head before falling and hitting the other burglar on his foot. The burglars insist that the top shelves should only be used to store lightweight objects and the botched attempt has made them the laughing stock of the criminal community. They say that the only earnings they can expect now are comparisons to Laurel & Hardy, and sought compensation to help them tide over the bleak future prospect in their line of work.

The above might make you think that our courts have at least got something right, even though most cases would take at least half a decade to be resolved. Sadly, though, this no-nonsense spirit of the Indian courts does not extend to matters concerning ‘the greater good’. The Public Interest Litigation may have started as a fanciful socialist whim or may have simply been a hankering for some diversionary frivolity. But it was just that little window of opportunity that has been burst open by misguided altruists, easily offended religious zealots and assorted jobless busybodies.

On the bright side, it has finally brought me back to write something on this blog!