Dear reader,
Hello from London. Where the skies are grey, the rain is cold, the trains are late but the sandwiches are excellent.
There is much to appreciate about life in London, and I would be a hypocrite if I did not say that on most days, living in and around London comes with many benefits. Complaining about things in London is usually an act of drawing up a litany of what the young people call these days “first world” problems.
However, one of the most annoying first-world problems you have to deal with when you live in London is figuring out how to maintain communication with your children’s school. Reader, I do not exaggerate when I say that keeping up with what the schools expect of students and parents is, perhaps, one of the most intellectually challenging things I have ever done in my life.
Dear reader, do keep in mind that I am someone who has previously tried to understand the meaning of the song “Aaluma Doluma“. Intellectual challenge is my middle name. My full name is Sidin Sunny Satoshi Intellectual Challenge Nakamoto Vadukut.
But let us not digress.
“Oh my god,” you are probably thinking. “This guy lives in London and still wants to complain.”
Hear me out.
Perils of Parentmail
First of all, the local school sends emails using an app called Parentmail. I say app. But what I really mean is both App and Website. You can access your school emails on a Parentmail website or the Parentmail app on your phone.
But then, usually the Parentmail app will automatically forward all emails from the school directly to your personal email ID.
Except. Except that, if there are any attachments, forms, or links with these emails then there is no point in checking your personal email. You have to access Parentmail to actually get access to these things.
Good? No.
Because sometimes the school will just directly send you an email without using Parentmail.
But fair enough, I hear you say. You have to login into one app or one website.
Wrong.
You are wrong because matters that specifically deal with your child’s work in class are not sent to you on Parentmail but on Google Classroom. And remember, you get a fresh login and password for every Google Classroom for every academic year. So, assuming you have two or three children who are going through the same school, after two or three years you literally have 700 logins and passwords for Google Classroom.
I am not a sociologist or anything, but I sincerely believe that Google Classroom is single-handedly responsible for the ongoing crisis in fertility rates in the United Kingdom.
However, remember that another subset of the work that the child has to do for class is not communicated via Parentmail or Google Classroom but is sent to you via circulars in the child’s school bag. Great, now you are on top of everything that the child has to do in class?
Once again you are wrong.
Because a certain subset of information is sent to parents on WhatsApp via the class parent representative: things that are neither captured in Parentmail nor Google Classroom nor circulars. I am not sure why anyone volunteers to become the monument to human futility that is class parent representative. It is a little bit like becoming the Minister for Prevention of Fish Consumption in the West Bengal government.
So this should cover everything, right? Once again, reader, you are wrong. Because once you navigate all of this the school will inform you that each child must now use two apps for mathematics, one for reading, and yet another app that is used—and the urge to use bad language is very strong here—solely for the purpose of reporting absence due to illness.
No no. Not all absences. But only absence due to illness.
All of this means that parents spend a substantial part of every school term frantically looking for logins and passwords for dozens of apps, many of which are used no more than once or twice a term.
God forbid you forget the access details for any of these things, and your children will look at you with the same contempt that Sourav Ganguly has for a banian (vest).
British Library’s annus horribilis
Now that I have ground that little axe of mine, let us turn our attention to another, more substantial party here in the UK who has been suffering from the most terrible tech issues.
The British Library (BL) is a London institution. An institution whose appeal extends far beyond what you might consider a library’s typical catchment: students, teachers, writers, journalists, and the like. In addition to extending its world-class archives to almost anyone who wants to use it, the BL is also at the centre of the capital’s cultural life, with permanent and temporary exhibitions that can cover anything from Mughal history to Japanese comics to erotica and the Beatles.
The last 12 months, however, has really been the BL’s annus horribilis.
On October 28, 2023, the information systems that the BL uses to run the bulk of its operations were attacked by a ransomware-as-a-service outfit called Rhysida. The BL had responded to COVID restrictions by opening up their vast digital archives and services to remote access by third-party services and remote users. For reasons of cost and convenience, administrators had decided to go slow on rolling out MFA, or multi-factor authentication, on some critical systems. Hackers from Rhysida broke into these systems and, essentially, blew everything up. They also copied out some 600 gigabytes of information from various databases, including numerous files containing private and confidential information.
When the BL refused to pay a ransom of 20 Bitcoins, this information was released on the internet.
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What followed has been a period of extremely painful rebuilding for the British Library. According to one Financial Times report from January 2024, the costs of recovery might consume as much as 40 per cent of the BL’s financial reserves.
Twelve months later, the BL continues to offer many of its services with severe limitations. In March this year, it published a transparent white paper on the nature of the attack, the effects, and the lessons learnt. It makes for sobering, and scary, reading.
One can only hope that this London landmark will soon find its way to normalcy again.
Sidin Vadukut lives and works in the UK. He is Director, Strategy at Clarisights, and author of several works of fiction and non-fiction. A tree fell on him once.
