The Third Slip: Issue 193 - The Last Straw
By Chuck & Tony
Hello, Slippers! Welcome to The Third Slip - the weekly newsletter that’s like your name written on a cup of Starbucks coffee - it’s close to being correct but there are often typos in it, its contents are dark and bitter but you like it, and you can use it as fodder for your Insta feed, or hold it close to you for some temporary warmth.
This is issue 193. 193, of course, is C1 in base 16. A testament to the news sea one has to swim in to summarise it into a cell of information in an Excel sheet. Or, about 1740 words. Let’s get started...
Brand x or Brandy?
A brand new section on TTS. If you thought A/B testing was hip and all, we present to you these people who were offered the choice between Brand x and Brandy and emptied the full bottle of the latter.
It’s not Fucking funny: Fucking, a village of about 100 people in Austria, has had it up to here with your juvenile jokes and stealing of signposts. From Jan 1, 2021, they shall be known as... Fugging. Ei! Stop laughing. Is this fish market?
It’s Totally fine: Adani Gas is apparently changing its name to… Adani Total Gas. As B-School alumni, we have to assume this is some prank played by their consummate trolls of brand consultants. Let’s not forget that this is the same stable that rebranded its Australian group “Bravus” which they thought means brave, but actually means crooked. Please go stand in the corner with Penny from The Big Bang Theory who has the Chinese character for Soup tattooed on her right buttcheek.
BTW, they got some great brand placement in the ongoing Australia rout of India India tour of Australia too (sigh)
At Home
Armers vs Farmers
Look, we’re no agriculture experts. So we can’t tell if the new farm laws are good or bad. On one hand, the sector badly needs reform. On the other hand, this move is brought to you by the makers of Demonetization: The Queue and GST: The Botched Implementation. Anyway, many farmers from Punjab descended to the capital to protest as is their constitutional right. They were met with water cannons and tear gas, as well as a pit quickly dug on a national highway to prevent them from crossing (the government clearly doing a clever interpretation of ‘in the trenches’). The boycott-happy IT Cell who this week took Netflix to task for a kissing scene was silent, while everyone else trended #boycottfood on their behalf (it’s amazing to see how BJP mocking is becoming mainstream). And here’s a good read on how the party got Punjab really, really wrong, where the usual politics of division won’t work.
The government has crossed the line from being a waiter in a restaurant who makes recommendations while ultimately placing an order as per your suggestion to an overbearing boyfriend who places an order for you because “Babe, I know best okay?” In the process, they’ve screwed over the security forces and farmers with their unwillingness to listen.
Illustration by Harini Kannan
Lawed have mercy: Kerala government felt that the best way to protect cyber trolling (against women) is to bring in a libel law. It was not fully thought through, and rightly backlash followed. Kerala put said libel law on pause and is taking steps to withdraw it completely. Wait, a government that actually listens to criticism?!
When life gives you sermons:
<rant>
We hate putting forth op-ed like views in TTS because we’re unqualified to do so. But when the obvious becomes the insightful, we lose the will to hold back. So, much like an ill-advised second plate of banana fritters, here’s something… There is no credit in bringing about an ill-conceived law and then pulling it back - it shouldn’t have come to be in the first place. However, the contrast between the protest against the farm law and the pulling back of 118 by the Kerala government should give us pause to think.
The withdrawal happened only because the media, the public at large, and most importantly the supporters of the party pushed back and asked the powers that be to reconsider. And they did, gracefully. But when the national media (HAHAHAHAHA sorry) and your average bhakt has found new labels to put on newer sets of anti-nationals, what do we do? We push back, gently but firmly with conviction and appeal to rational thought, in WhatsApp groups with our friends and family. And when all that fails, we start a newsletter or make art or post links on our Facebook walls. We like to believe every little action counts. If not to anyone else, to ourselves. And we like to think that the aggregation of marginal gains will eventually result in something magnificent.
</rant>
We Stan by you: After Stan Swamy, an 83-year-old activist with Parkinson’s disease, was jailed and denied a straw, folks on social media are buying and sending sippers to Taloja Jail.
Sun lo: One place where this government has done a good job, apart from keeping TTS authors busy on Sunday mornings, is renewable energy. We’re on course to exceed our Paris agreement targets and even Coal India is going solar.
I see you, Babu, shaking that stash: Another space this government has excelled: Bribery. Highest in Asia, baby! Don’t hold your breath for another India Against Corruption movement though.
Other things:
Cycle on: Another cyclone, Cyclone Nivar ravaged the East coast with 8 deaths in Andhra Pradesh. Tamil Nadu and Puducherry were also affected. But this time, it seems everyone was better prepared and life resumed as usual.
Don’t bank on it: RBI is considering letting corporate houses set up banks. This would be dangerous (Raguram Rajan & Viral Acharya, two ex-governors, say why)
One party, no parity: Modi sir wants One Nation One Election. Or, to paraphrase The Economist, One Nation, One party state. Indeed, the BJP is operating like a corporation, and not in the good munificent capitalism kinda way.
A pigment of your imagination: Double blow to Saffron lord Adityanath’s love jihad plans - The UP Police says “nope, no rise in love jihad cases” and Allahabad High Court denounced a previous decision that religious conversions only for the sake of marriage are unacceptable. Next, the Madrid court tells Don Quixote that windmills are not giants.
Around the world
He’s almost fired
This week, it finally looked like Trump was about to admit getting ready to thinking of maybe perhaps possibly accepting defeat. Everyone else is moving on - from FOX News hosts to former friends to transition agencies to comedians who bought the Trump 2024 domain (hilarious btw). Fittingly, he left the world stage in a whimper at a virtual G20.
Other things that happened this week
Deep-end-ent: China wants to make the world dependent on it, while it wants to become less dependent on the world. Clever fellows clearly hired some MBA to make a slide.
Facsmiley copy: A Singaporean protested with a smiley face to make a point and got arrested, creating a photocopy of the state of the state. The level to which that country takes itself seriously is hilarious.
King-shaming: Speaking of countries with no sense of humour, some Thai activists were arrested. Many people in that country don’t want the King to have so many powers anymore. Don’t choke me, daddy.
I-ran, you ran, Tehran: A key Iran nuclear scientist was assassinated on the outskirts of Tehran. That’s not a reassuring sentence, that’s how a Robert Ludlum novel starts.
Diego well: Maradona died - genius footballer, flawed human, and a social justice fighter. He left the world on the same day as his friend, Fidel Castro, and another genius footballer George Best.
Tech & Biz
Want to feel less lucky: Google’s taking steps to move away from advertising and towards subscriptions, which is not a bad idea at all.
Content Kings: Snapchat launched a TikTok competitor but the true story here is that they’re going to be paying random folks (not ‘influencers’) who surface on the discovery feed ($1 million total per day), hence paying more attention to content than to follower count or reputation. Interesting.
Chip on the holder: Apple’s new laptops come with a chip they made on their own and apparently it’s quite something and competitors should take note
The Big Blunder: IBM finally pardoned a computer pioneer for being transgender. It only took 52 years though. Lynn Conway would eventually move to Xerox’s famed PARC, where her research helped develop VLSI which is crucial to most hardware today.
That Virus: Positive and negative
The Oxford vaccine is efficacious, cheaper, and doesn’t need cold temperatures, all good things for India which has bet the bank on this particular vaccine. Vaccine tech has jumped leaps and bounds. But in India, the frontline warriors & elderly alone will need 600m doses and even with the vaccine, things won’t go back to normal immediately. Good news: the light you see at the end of the tunnel is proper light only, bad news: it will take us a while to get there.
Meanwhile, the covid count is climbing in countries that were supposed to have contained it - including Japan and South Korea. Those are countries with sense, so one can only wonder what the case will be in the US, as many travel during a Thanksgiving weekend. This week, we finally saw fans back in the stadium during the India v Australia ODIs in Sydney. We’ll tell you in 2 weeks if it’s a great story of human endurance or a foolish decision that was doomed to fail to begin with.
LinkedOut: Some great reads we came across this week
WFH - a boon for Indian women from smaller towns working (or looking to work in) IT.
Far-right in the West looks diminished
Booming diversity industry
AIMIM - emerging as the principal challenger of the BJP in states
And that’s almost all for issue 193!
Say hello to the authors on Instagram (Chuck | Tony), Twitter (Chuck | Tony), or by replying to this email.
Until next week, may you get lost in the warm embrace of an old memory, for a fleeting moment but a lasting smile.
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