On Race and racism!

I have been hearing a lot about race and racism these days (more about the second). Discussing race and racism has become some sort of taboo, so most of what I have been hearing is everything about race that it is not... i.e., people pretend to shut their eyes to differences. This trend has also entered management research these days (see for example Harrison, Price, & Bell, 1998). What people probably ignore is that differences do exist and it manifests itself in different ways. It is these differences that makes life interesting. So, why ignore it to just sound politically right? Why not celebrate our differences?

Here is my take on race. I think, when it comes to race, there are four kinds of people, 1) "I like my race, I like the other races too", 2) "I like my race, I hate every other race", 3) "I hate my race, I like some another race" and 4) "I hate racism". The first and forth category are noharmers, the second harm others, and the third harm themselves. The race challenge could be handled in two ways, 1) Teach people to shut their racist eyes and say all humans are alike. Which is what most recent attempts do. 2) Teach people to understand that there are difference, acknowledge the differences and live amicably with one another... The first is more of an utopian task, the second is reasonable... As we say in India "Unity in Diversity"... Lets learn to acknowledge our differences and live amicably...

Google is not the 'BEST' search engine!

I had been a devout preacher of google from as early as the summer of 2000 when I was first exposed to it. It was, in my opinion, a largely democratic and efficient search engine. However, my opinion about google’s democratic nature has failed. It is more of a commercial web crawler that takes money to index web sites and to list sites in the first page of a search. I thought that it was still ok as long as I could get what I wanted. These days even that doesn’t happen. For someone to have google search his or her webpage, it is not just enough that a valid webpage exist, but it is now imperative that his or her webpage is designed to google's specifications. Which is, google requires that, for a webpage to be searchable, links to that webpage should exist in other "AUTHENTIC' webpages. This is very undemocratic. How could some one who is new to the internet have links to his or her webpage in another "AUTHENTIC" webpage (by the way, the word "AUTHENTIC" is poorly defined too!%^#%*!~* ). However, search engines like yahoo are not as bad as google is. For example, I had created a new webpage from my university's server - http://ihome.ust.hk/~rajiv - however, I tried searching my name "Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode" using a number of combinations, but I would get every website with my name in it other than the one that is my own. I then searched for the url http://ihome.ust.hk/~rajiv. To my surprise, I got this message "Your search - http://ihome.ust.hk/~rajiv - did not match any documents.” I then tried searching my name in yahoo, just to see if there is anything wrong with my meta data. I was thrilled to see that my search for "Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode" returned my webpage http://ihome.ust.hk/~rajiv as the first in the search list.However, this is not to say that google is a bad search engine. It only means that it is not the BEST. If you are searching for something that you think ought to exist in the net and if you do not find it though google, do not get disappointed. Your belief about the site's existence need not be wrong; rather google is not CAPABLE of searching it for you. Try yahoo or some other search engine instead and you might end up finding what you want without much difficulty. That said, I am still a fan of google, but for other reasons. It is good at searching scholarly work and it is good at searching data. Of course, I haven’t tried other search engines for these purposes, but I sure haven’t had the need yet.