Mosaic 13

Mumbai, August 8, 2010 CNN recently fired senior journalist Octavia Nasr for lamenting the death of a Hezbollah leader on Twitter

When companies are

But that’s not necessarily a good thing, says
Anil P, blogger and IT professional. “The
idea that internal forums are very active is
usually a PR gimmick. If it does happen,
like in the case of Infosys currently, it’s

allergic
only because attrition rates are rising and
there is a strong anti-policy vibe.” In fact,
Santosh, an ex-Infosys employee reveals,
“There were instances where the blogs
have been shut down because of the in-
tense anti-Infosys sentiments.”
Consequently, for a majority of dis-
gruntled employees, social networking
sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Orkut
are a safe refuge from the prying eyes of
their employers, many of whom place a
high price on confidential client informa-
tion. This is especially the case with MNCs

to status updates
who have clients in the banking, financial
services and insurance (BFSI) sector.
So how does Infosys intend to enact the
policy given that it’s impossible to trace
employee online behaviour outside of the
company intranet? Denying the possibili-
ternal platforms of communication that with millions of jokes and jibes directed

O
n July 16, 2010, the same day it ty of monitoring social networking web-
When companies announced its social media pol- necessitated the creation of a social media
policy. “This policy is to make them aware
at the Satyam founder. And while Satyam
employees contemplated their fate on so-
sites through online surveillance tools,
icy, the first of its kind for a ma- Gurjar says, “It’ll be through employees
frame a ‘social media jor IT company in India, Infos- that even if you’re talking to someone who cial networking websites, the absence of a themselves that such cases will be report-
works in the same project as you, you can’t centrally located online discussion forum, ed. But once you create awareness, it will
policy’ for their ys was already on the back foot.
“This is not meant to be a gag on employ- discuss client or company confidential in- insiders feel, only contributed to the sub- be very unlikely that it will happen.”
formation,” she adds. sequent confusion and hasty resignations. Vikram Thakar, IT Head, Hutchison 3
employees, is it really ees. It’s about protecting IP [intellectual
property] and client confidentiality,” it Infosys employee Rajat Jhaveri believes As former marketing and communica- Global Services Pvt. Ltd, offers a clearer
that if such an instance had actually tak- tions manager in Satyam, Prasanna Ku-
to protect confidential tweeted in vain, as a volley of negative
press from both within and outside the en place, the ruckus created wouldn’t have mar reveals, just before the scandal broke
guess, “Lots of companies are on social
networking sites today through Facebook
client information, as organisation spread across the social net-
working world.
gone unnoticed. Instead, he feels ex-
changes between Infosys employees in re-
out, the IT company was actually planning
to launch a brand new internal social me-
groups and such. I’m thinking people from
HR or the audits department who’re al-
they claim? Or is it The company’s recent career restruc- cent times belie a far more discernable
trend since the recession. “If you go
dia platform. “We were developing a social
networking tool that combined Facebook
ready members on such websites, will use
it as a means to monitor status updates
turing policy, iRace (Infosys Role and Ca-
driven by a desire to reer Enhancement), which was initially through both the internal forum and on-
line discussion boards on Facebook and
and Twitter, along with other elements, to
enhance employee interactivity.” After the
and comments.” But for now at least, this
may not deter most employees from con-
conceived to avoid layoffs during reces-
prevent negative press sion, had subjected thousands of employ- other websites where Infosys employees
have vented their anger, you’ll see it’s frus-
Mahindra Group took over, the tool was fi-
nally introduced but internal uncertain-
tinuing to enjoy the greatest privileges
that the Internet offers — freedom of
about management ees to demotions and pay-cuts instead. The
growing resentment was publicly aired on tration with policy which is the predomi- ties and severe attrition rates meant that choice and anonymity.
nant emotion, and it has nothing to do with the platform never took off in a big way. Social media experts, on the whole, be-
decisions from the company’s internal online forums and
external social networking platforms. the disclosure of client data.”
My space vs office space lieve a bit of respect and trust on the em-
Clearly, controversy regarding senior
popping up on An internal affair management creates the most fertile At the other end of the spectrum, Infosys
ployer’s part can help corporates reap the
benefits of social media without having to
officially has an employee redressal sys-
Facebook and Twitter? Another IT behemoth Google Inc., has also
had its own social media demons to con-
ground for a full frontal social media back-
lash, as another Indian IT company, tem, an extremely active internal blog, and
constantly combat its negative effects.
Some names have been
Uttarika Kumaran tend with. Rumours about Google’s ruth-
less laying off of employees who’ve leaked
Satyam, discovered in recent times. After
Ramalinga Raju admitted to corporate
a policy discussion forum Myvoice, which
purportedly sees 3,000 to 4,000 hits a day.
changed on request
k_uttarika@dnaindia.net
finds out information about upcoming products fraud in January 2009, in the weeks fol-
lowing, Facebook, Twitter and Orkut ac-
keep circulating, but are substantiated nei-
ther by Google (the company refused to counts across the world were inundated
comment when contacted by DNA), nor its
tightlipped staff.
Last year, when the company gifted all
its employees the much hyped G-phone, it
encouraged them to blog and tweet about
the soon to be launched product. But one
employee in an overseas office took it too
far. “The company hadn’t yet communi-
cated the launch date to the media. But she
tweeted about it, and next thing you know,
she got fired,” says Rohit Parikh, a for-
mer Google employee.
Parikh, however, also mentions the pres-
ence of a vibrant internal discussion fo-
rum at Google. “Internally, there’s no cen-
sorship — you can say whatever you want,
but not so externally. And most employees
understand the difference.”
Ironically enough, Infosys, which has
enthusiastically spearheaded the use of so-
For disgruntled employees, social cial media in creating a free and fair at-
mosphere for employee interaction, has
networking websites such as Facebook, quickly had to face its unflattering conse-
Twitter and Orkut were a safe refuge, quences in the Indian context.
While declining to refer to a specific
away from the prying eyes of their case, Nandita Gurjar, senior vice-president
and group head, HR, Infosys, says it’s more
employers, many of whom place a high the possibility of employees not perceiv-
price on confidential client information ing the difference between internal and ex-
Illustration by Ravi Jadhav

Poor customer service? INDIAN INK

KALPISH RATNA

Travels with a brinjal

Don’t call, just tweet
Savvy consumers are ble-checked the tickets himself. The ic-
ing on the cake happened when the
discovering that couple was upgraded to business class
on their return flight.
raising a stink on Almost a year after the incident,
Hrush Bhatt, founder and director
Twitter works better (product and strategy), Cleartrip, rec-
ollects, “In terms of customer care,
and quicker than that episode was challenging, not be-
cause we could not fix it, but because
dialling a call centre of the number of people to whom the
and being put on hold incident was exposed.”
Bhatt is probably right. Shankar’s
forever, reports tweets are read by about 56,171 follow-
ers, and every tweet could be influen-
Arcopol Chaudhuri tial in shaping or damaging reputa-
tions.
Brand manager’s nightmare
Twitter in particular, is allowing cus-
tomers to cut through the bureaucra-
cy at big organisations and inject a
sense of urgency into the customer
support process. An irate tweet is like-
ly to become more of a nuisance than
an irate complaint letter, and organi-
sations are struggling to respond to
complaints in real time, in public.”
Manoj Damodaran who works with
an online media agency, shares a
dilemma he faced with a telecom com-
pany once, when he wanted his credit
limit on his cellphone connection to be
extended. “Repeated calls to the cus-
tomer care helpline went in vain. It
was annoying because the customer
care executive did not understand the
the onus of responding to Twitter-
based complaints.”
Shankar says there are lessons in
all this. “It’s natural to screw up. But
it takes courage for a company to ad-
mit its mistake,” He adds, “A prompt
response and phone calls help. I
haven’t stopped booking tickets on
that website.”
c_arcopol@dnaindia.net
J
ust how Indian is English? In this
headline from a leading national
daily, it sounds very nearly Greek.
gourmands who glut on bhajiya and
bharta. Haute cuisine demands nothing
less than aubergine, a word easily asso-
‘House collapse kills 4:
Owner built three floors after marrying
ciated with a quaint little village in
Provence or our villa in Tuscany.
her three sons.’
That’s almost Homeric. Maybe Oedi-
Aubergine oozes olive oil, fabulous stuff,
not to be confused with the crisp bain-
pus was one of triplets, the Greek ver-
sion of Amar Akbar Anthony. The truth
gan bhajiya of the nukkad fry-out. If
street cred is what you crave, nothing
is a little more prosaic. A Hindi translit- works like eggplant. Only somebody
eration explains all. It’s just Apni An- with a severely restricted acquaintance
grezi. with this vegetable could have named it
Only, Angrezi isn’t apni. It is French. after an egg. There are egg-shaped white
Europe’s first appearance in Indian brinjals, or I would have diagnosed
memory is as Farangistan, the land of
those marauding Franks who sustained
colour-blindness too.
Brinjal is a purple tribute to those
the bloody crusades next door for two
centuries. We knew the word Firangi
vagile botanists, the Portuguese, who
got it from the badinjan of the Arabs
long before Vasco da Gama made land-
fall at Kappakadavu on 20 May 1498. The
who got it from the local Indian words
vartaki, bhantaki, vaingana, baingan.
many Europeans pampered in the lav- Badinjan became Spanish la berenjena,

W
hen noted blogger Kiruba
Shankar had a harrowing
experience booking an air
ticket on a travel website,
it threatened to spoil his wedding an-
niversary — a short vacation to
Malaysia with his wife. While the tick-
et got booked, it was yet to be a ‘con-
firmed ticket’. When he and his wife
landed at the airport, officials contin-
ued to pass the buck, and eventually,
after running from pillar to post, when
he did get the tickets, the couple was
the last to enter the flight, five minutes
before take-off.
“I was panting and awash with
sweat. My wife was really hassled.
This is NOT the kind of experience I
wanted to give her on her vacation,”
he wrote later on his blog, livid with
the travel website.
He eventually posted a tweet vent-
ing his frustration. “That’s when I re-
alised the importance of Twitter. You
get to say what you want in quick
time.”
Soon after, the co-founder of the
company in question, Cleartrip, not
only sent him an apology email, but
also confirmed his return tickets, call-
ing him up to tell him that he had dou-
The episode probably sparked off the
first amongst many such customer
care exercises on Twitter, when com-
panies took note of what a single tweet
could do. Today, brands like Kingfish-
er, Cafe Coffee Day, Parle Agro’s Hip-
po, Vodafone, Bajaj Allianz, Flipkart
amongst several others in India have
warmed up to answering customer
queries on Twitter.
The time taken to solve each query
might be different, but with India
showing the second highest number of
Twitter users in the world — approxi-
mately 3 million out of an active in-
ternet population of 52 million — it is
acknowledged that a consumer’s frus-
tration about a certain brand is only
140 characters away from becoming
public.
Gaurav Mishra, CEO, 2020 Social,
reasons, “Social media in general, and
Frustration with a brand
is only 140 characters
away from becoming
public
urgency of my situation. I tweeted to
the company’s Twitter handle ex-
plaining my situation. They took
about five days to respond, but when
they did, I got a call from their head-
quarters and they solved my problem
immediately.”
Twitter is too open
But not many
companies will
warm up to dedi-
cated customer
care on Twitter. Ex-
perts say that Twitter
is too open and brands
are insecure of cus-
tomers washing dirty
linen in public.
Sanjay Mehta, who
heads social media agency,
Social Wavelength, says, “The
only companies who’ll handle com-
plaints better are the one who choose
to do so. Most brands fear that their re-
sponse to a complaint on Twitter may
end up creating a storm which they
may not be able to cope with. So esti-
mating the resource demands, creat-
ing a protocol, all these have to be in
place. Only then can a brand take on
Hrush Bhatt, founder of Cleartrip
checking the company’s Twitter
account on an iPad —Vipin Pawar.DNA
ish courts of sultans and rajas were all
firangis. Whether their postcards home
were in Italian, Portuguese, Russian or
Slavic, we, with our inherent xenopho-
bia, only knew them as firangi.
But the Englishman was subtly dif-
ferent. The first to admit this were the in-
dignant firangis whose ships were am-
bushed by British pirates. They labelled
the pirate as Anglaise or Inglese. And
when he made land here, in far more gen-
tle guise, he was quickly naturalised as
Angrez.
Historians have overlooked the irony
of Angrez. In the metaphor of Indian
Ink, it is onomatopoeia. Ang in Hindi
is limb, rez in Urdu is to erase or destroy.
That’s four centuries packed into one
word. Angrez — a self-descriptive his-
tory of British India.
If A is for Angrezi, then B has to be
backpacker, a neat description, as every
word carries its very own knapsack of
story.
I began this column while eating brin-
jal. Now that’s a word distinctly dated.
The purple emperor hitching a ride in
your biodegradable shopping bag can-
not possibly be a brinjal. Your weekend
fix of food porn should set that right tout
de suite. Brinjal is strictly for the proles,
and from there it was a short step to
aubergine. Our brinjal, like most things
extensively Europeanised, is a Bongob-
ashi, a fruit of Vanga, Bengal.
The travels of the baingan can be
matched only by one other backpacker.
Haji Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Ab-
dullah Al-Lawati Al-Tanji Ibn Battuta.
Reading his Rihla, I’ve pondered his
name time and again. Name and origin
are simple enough, but what of the
patronymic? What could Battuta mean?
In Italian, battuta is line or stroke,
and our traveller’s father was a scholar
in Islamic law, and perhaps the only
writer in the Malilki ‘hood of Tinji —
sardonically nicknamed ‘Lines.’ You
think that’s far-fetched? In Tangier, cir-
ca 1304, the with-it language was Lingua
Franca, a mixture of Italian, Turkish,
French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic.
Clearly not Babel enough for young Abu
Abdullah, who set out on a quest for di-
versity that would last 24 years.
Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena imagined
the moment:
Ibn e Battuta, pehenke joota,
chal pada toofan mein…
Kalpana Swaminathan and
Ishrat Syed write as
‘Kalpish Ratna’