Pretty Pimpin

Since coming back from the US, I was always intrigued at what Indians thought of the concept of privilege. I had thought a lot about the kind of privileges I had inherited in India and what privileges I was afforded in the US. It made me realize how lucky I am; I have always felt guilty about my privileges since then.

After I came back to India, I had a conversation with a coworker (also a good friend) at my last company. I specifically talked about how we both were privileged by Indian standards simply by being born biologically male. I explained how families treat sons and daughters differently. In India, they usually do.

Friend said he did not have privilege just for being male; his sister was treated equally. Perhaps it’s a strategy I should have thought out beforehand. If he had talked to other women about the problems they face, he would have understood that he was looking at his privilege through rose-tinted glasses.

Gender Privilege

Male privilege is very real.

In India, some women are never allowed to go out with friends, have a social life, have any kind of experiences beyond what is considered training for marital life; it depends on families. Male children have different curfews compared to female children. Women aren’t allowed to take part in religious and (sometimes) cultural occasions if they’re menstruating. They aren’t allowed to enter temples when they are on their period.

Even if your family treats kids equally, society sure as hell doesn’t. You are forgiven a lot of things as a man. I live in Mumbai and all our house helps have had a history of their husbands being drunk, unemployed, and violent. The wives slave away while most men contribute nothing to their households.

Female feticide and infanticide is remarkably common in India, though it’s definitely reduced. Did you know there are 200 million fewer women in India?

You are harassed much less as man. I remember reading a report about a large percentage of women being groped, catcalled, touched inappropriately when asked about it in a survey. Don’t forget the numerous reported rapes in India. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, literally. Most rapes in India go unreported.

Forget harassment, I was inspired to write this article by our house help who remarked “You do quite a bit of housework”. Knowing how much my Mom does compared to whatever little I do around the house, is the expectation from men to do housework THAT low? I’ve seen a lot of Indian men I know do exceptionally little to help around the house (other than earn for the family. My Mom earned for the family AND did a lot of the housework). And all this is unpaid labor that women are just expected to do.

Financial/Social Privilege

Pivoting to other kinds of privilege. Recently, my Mom could not get out of bed due to a disc prolapse (she’s fine now but I’ve never seen her in this much pain). Since my Dad and I are handy around the house, we did most chores except cooking full meals. We had multiple choices: asking our house help to cook for us, ordering in, or kind friends and family giving us food. We could afford eating out every day if we wanted. We got a lot of food from family and friends. Essentially, our social and financial privilege could help us out.

Compare that to our house help’s brother. He’s going through a similar back problem as my Mom but he has lesser access to the privilege we have. Because he cannot work, they have a financial crunch that our house help has to resolve. I could also talk about healthcare privilege here but that would be moot.

Our house help has issues of her own. When she married her husband, her mother-in-law did not disclose that her husband was prone to seizures. Because of this, he’s never worked in a job for too long and has had drinking problems. She works at at least 10 houses, trying to give her son a better life. She alone has to manage feeding a house of 4 people. She takes a few days off in a month but she doesn’t have assured holidays, almost no long holidays.

Compare that to my Mom. She had to privilege to take sabbaticals twice when she was working: once when I was ill and when she underwent treatment for breast cancer. Yes, I am comparing the organized sector versus the unorganized sector. I’ll come to that in my educational privilege section.

What family you are born in can dictate the kind of privilege you have. Yes, your grandfather/father/whatever-ancestor worked hard to give you the social/financial privilege you have. You inherited it. And from inheritance, I pivot to a very unfortunate (but perpetuated) privilege in India – caste privilege.

Caste Privilege

Privilege is a heady, addictive drug. Anyone who says the caste system doesn’t exist now or society is against “upper castes” is literally showing their privilege. You aren’t affected by the caste system because you have been benefiting from the caste system for generations. Yes, you missed out on a dream college seat because of the quota system. Guess what? People from so-called “lower castes” have been missing out on stuff for centuries.

A lot of people bitch about the quota system (for Americans, this is Affirmative Action in India). Just a thought for those who bitch about the quotas: how many centuries have upper caste people benefited from the system that kept taking away from the very castes you say are now benefiting? Unless your upper-caste ancestors actively worked to bring down the caste system, you have no say in this. You speak from a position of privilege.

You say the caste system doesn’t exist? Here’s an eye-opener, a Bloomberg article about people keeping the caste system alive in Silicon Valley, of all places. My ex-roommate, a guy from Kanpur, talks about how insidious the caste system is in Uttar Pradesh. He mentioned a caste called Musahars, a name that literally means “rat-eater”.

Of course, caste comes in when you’re talking about Hindus. But what about if you are any other religion in India?

Religious Privilege

There has been a rising intolerance to other religions in India since… you know when. I won’t get into a political battle because it’s honestly not worth it.

Being Hindu in India is an easy benefit. Hell, even being an atheist in India is easier than being a Muslim, I’d say.

Muslims in India find it harder to rent flats because they are considered “antisocial” elements. Christians are called “rice-bags” as an insult.

I could go on and on but this is just scratching the surface. I’d be doing my non-Hindu citizens a disservice by talking about issues I have absolutely no idea about. So if you want to tell me all the shit you’ve gone through, I’m here for you.

I know I’m expounding privilege on a blog, so my words might not reach a huge percentage of India’s population. That’s where educational privilege comes in.

Educational Privilege

The fact that you can read this and make sense of it means you are luckier than a huge chunk of India’s population. India says 77.7% of its population is able to read what I’m writing right now.

Would they want to? I’m sitting in the comfort of my parents’ home, educated but working freelance jobs right now because I can afford to. Educational privilege doesn’t just mean the ability to read and write; it means the ability to have a comfortable life for yourself, even if it’s through inheritance.

Educated people tend to get better jobs and thus enable privilege for themselves. And that’s another argument for the quota system, it gives people who have forever been downtrodden, a level footing.

Anyone who is lucky enough to read this has educational privilege. The fact that you can also speak and understand English means you are luckier than a lot of Indians.

I finally get to two more privileges, both apply to the US as well as India: Location privileges and skin color privileges.

Skin Color Privileges (Racial Privilege in the US)

The fairer your skin tone is, the easier life is. Do I need to elaborate on this?

White privilege is a real thing in the US (as much as conservatives refuse to admit it). If you are white, you automatically benefit in jobs, education, dating, almost everything.

Being fair-skinned in India gives you advantages in the job market when you interview, people are just nicer to you in general? Almost every single marriage ad in Indian newspapers mentions skin tone, as if you’re marrying someone’s skin.

Oh, have I mentioned white people are LOVED in India. But maybe that’s just because they are a good source of money when they travel? Not sure.

Anyone have any more examples?

Location Privileges

Born in a developed country? Welcome to every other country as a tourist without the need to go through a tedious visa process.

Born in an underdeveloped/developing country? Go through an expensive and tedious visa process to go literally anywhere.

Even within countries, being born in a city gives you a lot of benefits (pollution can be an issue though). Like if you’re born to a family in a city like Mumbai/New York who own real estate, you can benefit from saving on rent, essentially pocketing most of what you make from your job.

---

Finally, I am adding what I call Indian Privilege Bingo here. Evaluate how privileged you are and understand that privilege. Make sure you help people who don’t have that privilege; the world is a happier place if everyone is happy.

Male	Hindu	Upper caste	Educated	Can speak English
Came from middle class family	Has a home	Can wear clothes you choose	Heterosexual	Healthy
Lives in a city	Has friends	Human (Free Space)	Did not skip meal involuntarily	Fair skin tone (compared to standard)
Didn’t have to work till graduation	Able-bodied	Not disabled	Lives in a peaceful country	No criminal record
You can afford to be “apolitical”	Can legally marry the person you love	Can afford to say “everything should be privatized”	Doesn’t depend on public healthcare	Can afford to buy a car

Got to Let Go

Well, that’s another shambles again, isn’t it? The US Presidential Elections in 2020.

Flashback to 2016. I was grading assignments at my office in the UNT GAB, oblivious to what was happening in the US Presidential Elections. Or maybe I was hiding? I don’t remember anything clearly except that I remember feeling crushed walking back home after seeing that America had voted for Donald Trump.

All the months leading up to the 2016 elections, I had read about how Hillary Clinton was absolutely going to be the next US president. I had accepted that without question. For international students in the US, life is always hard, regardless of who’s in power. There’s a struggle to get jobs, there’s a struggle for very limited H1B visas after you get a job; it is definitely not easy.

So, the hope is that the US gets a president who understands that immigrants do not threaten the livelihood of US citizens; they can exist and benefit together.

Leading up to this Presidential Election, I was promised Joe Biden was a certain winner. He was so far ahead in the opinion polls that his lead was unassailable, apparently. I avoided reading these because I knew how 2016 had turned out. My girlfriend, my best friend, everyone I love (most tend to skew blue) assured me that Trump was not getting a second term in power. I told them I would believe them only after the results were out.

And yes, Biden might still win. It’s still unclear at the time of writing. But I know for certain is that I will not believe opinion polls until the actual election results are out.

The fact that this is such a closer race seems unbelievable to me. But I have learned one thing from this.

I need to learn to divest my emotions from things that I don’t have a lot of control over. It’s not good for my health to stress about the bad direction the entire world is going in. And it is going in an irredeemably bad direction. I have always been a pessimist to a point where I actively depress people by my opinions. And while I don’t think that will ever change, I try to do my best to keep the people around me happy.

If anyone wants to talk to me about anything, the comments for this blog are open as are my DMs on Instagram or Facebook. I promise I will listen to what you have to say, so pour your heart out.

From the Beginning

I am sorry. I have been gone too long. My last post was in 2016 and that was for a class. I haven’t written for pleasure in ages and I’ll tell you why.

Writing is not fun any more. When you do it to get paid, day in and day out, any task stops being fun.

But I won’t digress too far from what I wanted to write about. Grief.

All of us have been through grief. Usually at the passing of someone close to you. Death is a sort of finality that you cannot reconcile with.

This past year has been difficult in that sense. I rushed to Pondicherry exactly a year back (October 2019) after my oldest uncle was declared brain dead through a bizarre incident and he passed soon after. I think my uncle’s passing was the closest I have come to grieving.

I have had all my grandparents pass; my paternal grandfather passed before I was even born. But I was too young and because my grandparents were so much older than me, I wasn’t especially close to any of them. My uncle, however, was a different story. He was an energetic, jovial, charismatic, loving, and kind person. Just an all-round wonderful human being.

When I sat outside the ICU in Pondicherry, I couldn’t remember the last time I met him but I remembered some of my happiest memories with him. After my illness, as a break from my house which had become my prison, I remember going to Bhatkal to spend time with Neelam Mhau (my aunt). Vishu Maam and Vidya Mami were at Bhatkal at the same time. I spent a few weeks with them, relaxing and enjoying a place that I visited every summer holidays. I remember Vishu Maam playfully teasing me about my air guitar (and virtually every air instrument) and I will always cherish him that way.

Another reason I write about grief is something that happened much more recently. So my parents, being the good Samaritans they are, have taken to feeding some of the stray cats around where we live in Mumbai. One female stray decided we were upstanding grandparents for her kittens and delivered a litter of 4 kittens near the electric meter box of our building. And these births happened right before our eyes, literally.

We grew to love these kittens like our own.

Casually sleeping on the trash can

We named the kittens by color because we weren’t feeling too creative. White kitten is Gori, the black-and-white one is Blackie, the tabby with the darker back fur is Bolt (named after the great Usain Bolt because he used to speed up the staircase), and the last one is Billoo Jr.

They’ve all grown into strong 3 month old kittens who love us. All but Gori. She went missing about a week before they had completed 3 months. And I miss her so dang much. She was such a loving kitten, always wanted to play, and always loved us like she loved her siblings. I once watched her play with a bird feather for 30 minutes straight.

I suspect she fell into an open manhole when someone stole the covers one night. That evening was the last time I saw her. My parents feel someone took her because she was such a wonderful kitten. I hope she is happy wherever she is.

Grief is hard. Losing someone you love is hard. I cannot imagine the grief I will go through when I lose my parents. Because that’s a “when”, not an “if”. Death is the only certainty.

Big Data

Sometimes, I wish that I had done something in my undergraduate or graduate degree that was related to big data. Big data is a big phenomenon at this moment in the world, what with Facebook and Google accumulating data from almost all of the population worldwide.

It is also a sector in which there has been phenomenal progress, as the Lohr article states.

For example, there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air.

I had no idea that automobiles had all these sensors put in. But it makes sense because there has been such a huge change in automobile technology, and this has resulted in more fuel-efficient cars.

Big data has been useful in earning companies like Facebook and Google a lot of money via ad revenue through tracking user preferences. There is, and has been for a little while, a huge demand for data scientists. Data scientists are people who help interpret the trends that statistics that Big Data generates.

Interpretation of Big Data is responsible for the development of artificial intelligence, and machine learning. All of this is helping humanity craft ingenious technologies that will benefit mankind, and increased the chances of developing technology that was previously thought impossible, like driver-less cars.

Siri is an excellent example of artificial intelligence, an offshoot of the interpretation of Big Data. Started off as a Pentagon research project, it is now a self-sufficient AI.

I am a huge fan of English football, and having followed it for well over a decade, I know the importance of statistics in the prediction and betting that takes places in the sport (betting is legal in Britain). The predictions of who will win the Champions League or the Premier League also happens because of an analysis of Big Data, which is all of the data that has been accumulated over the 26 years that the Premier League has existed.

Almost every company is involved in data mining and the collection of data from consumers or through every section of their selling process. All of this data helps in understanding what consumers want or how the company can streamline their process and save or make money.

Big Data and the subsequent creation of artificial intelligence is a scary prospect, but that’s only because I have grown up watching Terminator. SkyNet is an impossible entity to create, but the benefits that AI and Big Data have created supersede anything bad that has come of it, like privacy concerns.

Google Analytics and What They Tell Us

Google Analytics, like most products Google provides, is a useful tool in understanding the influence a person or organization wields on social media. If I had the money or cared too much about my social media presence, I’d sign up on Google Analytics. But even if my social media presence doesn’t worry me, I’m sure there are organizations worldwide for whom this matters. There’s also people who care about their social media presence; if you earn your living off social media, you definitely should.

So, Google Analytics gives us a few useful reports that can be set up quickly and which can be used consistently for a long period of time. I’ll only explain how they are useful and not how to set them up, since that is something that can be easily found on a search engine as powerful as Google. The reports are listed below:

Traffic By Social Channel

Just looking at this, it is easy to say which social media page sent the most number of people to your site. Here, Twitter seems to be the most active in sending visitors to the organization’s page.

Design-wise, the pie chart is helpful in representing the quantifiable data easily and the percentage of visitors from each social media is useful in understanding what you should focus on.

If you click on each of the social networks, it will give you the breakdown of the exact links on the social network and the percentage of people who clicked on them, which is a really useful metric to keep track of your audience.

Social Media Traffic

Google Analytics also gives you a barometer of what part of the internet your audience comes from. From the image above, most of the organization’s audience comes from an organic search (fancy term for people searching on Google), followed by social media , followed by Direct (people typing out the organization’s URL in the URL bar), and so on and so forth.

Social media still contributes to 150,000 views a month, which is great to know.

Landing Pages

This analytic gives you an idea of what pages of your website get shared most often on social media. You can click on the links given on the page to see the specific breakdown of networks where this content was shared.

Multi-channel reports

The Venn diagram that shows up on this Report shows the various paths (social media or otherwise) that people take to come through your website or blog. For this example, a lot of people come through the search engines and actually stay on the site, whereas a slightly smaller number come through social media and stay on the site. The overlap of the diagrams is an indication of the overlapping that might occur if a person comes through an organic search but then converts through social media.

These are a few brilliant ways that you can use Google Analytics to analyze how your website is doing in order to create or refresh your content strategy.

How important is Twitter in the corporate industry?

Twitter is one of the most crucial social media resources available to companies nowadays. A social media presence is required for companies to monitor what is being said about their brands online.

Just having knowledge about what is being said does not help. Acting upon that knowledge, by thanking positive commenters or helping negative commenters with customer service related issues is a very good way of showing customers that you actually care.

There are many other ways in which you can make your brand stand out on Twitter.

Creating a Twitter Presence

Posting on Twitter is a good way of keeping your fans aware of new products or just reminding them of how good your brand really is.

This is a tweet from Taco Bell:

I think Taco Bell talks to its biggest customers, college students, and mixes in the right facts to create this phenomenal tweet.

Creating a Twitter presence is also possible by announcing your latest products on Twitter, a good way of getting more customers to try out your product. This works especially well in the food industry.

Solving Customer Service Issues

When people complain on Twitter about the poor service they might have received from the company, a good way to gain brownie points for your company (from the customers) is to make sure that person gets excellent service.

Such a simple thing to do, and Virgin Trains managed to do it and satisfied a customer, thus maintaining their excellent customer service credentials.

Responding quickly in this case was excellent. However, some problems require a more hands-on approach, which might work by actually sending someone over to the problem area.

Interesting Banter

Interesting banter between two companies without it getting out of hand and descending into incivility is the best way to market both brands. Sometimes, companies talk about other companies on Twitter, and if each company can get in a snappy retort, it works in favor of both companies.

Now, Taco Bell had the advantage here, but it meant that both companies got some publicity through this harmless banter.

These things keep the products alive in the minds of the people and help with customer retention.

They might also help in creating new cocktails that benefit both brands.

Using Twitter in a variety of unique ways helps companies raise their brand value and sell more products. Twitter can be a valuable resource for any company in any way they see fit. I’ve listed some of the ways above but there are a variety of ways companies can improve their Twitter presence.

Hopefully, the list above helps you with improving your Twitter presence!