Paris2Barack

Back in 2007 the mainstream news media in the US was obsessed with entertainment news. So much so that gossip mags in supermarkets were feeling the heat. I mean, if the mainstream media poaches on their ’safe-bet’ of celebrity gossip, what is left for them to report? Of course, this being the land of innovators, these guys started filling their front-pages with gossip about the Dubya-Laura-Condi triangle. Sick but hilarious. You go to the nearest grocery-store/supermarket, buy some stuff for the kitchen, stand in the queue at the counter and end up trying to make sense of the headlines speculating whether Condi can ever do a Monica… Definitely sick, occasionally hilarious.

In the middle of this hysteria discerning people (like me) started raising their eyebrows by more than the mandatory one-eighth of an inch. In short doses, such stuff is amusing. Large doses of such speculations suggest proximity of the end of the world. And I am not ready for that yet.

The entire phenomenon of page-1-ification of page-3 had created a positive feedback loop where the media was obsessing over those whose main job was to be in the headlines. It works for both, except that the ensuing loss of credibility would kill the news industry before these publicity-hounds grow old. The only way out in such cases, when all else fails, is Divine intervention. Intervene or not, Comedy there definitely was. The US was in the middle of two wars,  but these wars lost the ‘battle of the front-pages’ to the grand-daughter of a hotelier. The last time a heiress created a sensation, at least she was kicking some serious rear-end, this time it was all for nothing. We now know that things did eventually change for good, so much so that we can’t imagine that news was so silly back then. We now obsess over the Obamas.

Anyway, I was reminded of all this by this video clip of a news anchor trying to make a point about the sad state of affairs in those days:

(link-source: The Editrix)

Miniluv Redux

Some time back I had posted on the post-election protests in Iran. I did not realize how naive I was about Iran until a comment by Tazeen.  Looks like even my hopelessness was naive:

(source: Sam Roggeveen)

On hindsight, this should have been obvious. There are too many distractions on the internet. It is most compatible with arm-chair activism. Type a rant, and be done with your anger! It is that easy. It is equally fickle. You read one article and get all fired-up, but you can get equally fired-up for the opposite cause by reading another article. The medium is built for propaganda. And from the well known example of Google in China,we know that the medium is tightly controlled by the Big Brother. Fat chance we have, of beating the casino in this gamble!

MohAtma!

“We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces.”

So said Lady Bracknell. Atleast that was what Oscar Wilde made her say. And she was right. Right for her times. Wilde, I regret to say, needs to be revised! Conditions have deteriorated quite a lot since the days that Lady Bracknell was imagined in. We don’t even bother with the surfaces these days. We live, I regret to say, in an age of edges. I am only reducing the no:of dimensions by one as I need to account for the literary licenses of the next generation. The one after theirs, I am glad to say, is not my problem.

While the past generations judged a book by its cover, we do not bother to even glance the cover. Our judgement is solely a function of whether the author is in fashion, or not. Predictably enough, where the generations before us had Hemingway, we have the likes of Roy. Where they had Wilde, we have… NONE. No writer who can point out the inherent silliness of it all without sounding like a whiner. Even when some one makes an attempt, we condemn him for being politically incorrect, or brand them as publicity seekers. Most often we just ignore them. We have so many who make a living out of creating sensation that when some one actually rattles us with aim of making us question our beliefs, we are caught off-guard. Occasionally though, we get angry just because we can’t stand the person.

This whole thread, Bracknell, Wilde and Hemingway aside, is no where truer than it is in India. We don’t give an airborne-pollination about either history or historical figures. And we remain apathetic until an outsider pulls a smart-one on the figures that we would rather not care about. Just like those truck-loads of cows whose remains regularly head to the tanneries. We do not care about it, so long as it stays at the periphery of our thought.

The sad part of this pheonomena is that the only people who are truly hurt when an outsider intrudes on our beliefs are those who pride themselves of their knowledge. These are the only people who feel hurt at the apparent silliness/15-minute-mode of the outsiders. This, inspite of the fact that these very people know that they are not the target audience for these rattlers. Is it because of their condescending attitude towards their ignorant brethren? That the sheep might follow the wrong shepherd? The people that the writers want to rattle never get the hint. They look up to their indignant brothers and, predictably enough, take to the streets. When Rushdie wrote about the issues that he had with the religion that he grew up with, he was rewarded with fatwas. When he questioned the myths about the Father of the nation, a principle figure on whose legacy his entire career was based on, his target audience did not give a damn. And he ends up hurting a few people who feel that the greatest man in the near past be sacrosanct!

Raja Ram Mohan Roy died a good 20 years before Wilde was even born. Inspite of being virulently hostile towards the Hinduism as practised in those days, no record exists that tells us that he had to go underground to save his life. We generally tend to imagine that we are better than our ancestors. So one can not help but wonder, what if he lived in our times? Would he have been forced to go underground like Rushdie and Nasreen?

PS1: While I often complain that Wilde resorts to literary licence a bit too often, he is never far off the mark. More importantly, he seems to be of the “Shut up, and do your work” school.

PS2: My stance on idol worship & conversions is diammetrically opposite to that of Raja Ram Mohan Roy. But that does not take away any respect that he deserves for the reforms that he fought for.

Abort, Retry, Ignore?

I was reading this old post by GreatBong lamenting about the lack of traffic to his posts that can be judged as sensible by any objective standard, while seemingly crappy blogs keep getting heavy traffic. It is a testament to his skill that, even in such a moment of frustration, he had managed to come up with a post that conveys the pain that is caused when one is rejected by a subjective standard that one finds unreasonable. May be the mythical ‘frustration of poverty’ that forces great works of art is at play here. I don’t know. But this post is not about what is behind works that touch our hearts. This post is about the frustration that is a consequence of being rejected by seemingly subjective standards. This post is not about whether its ubiquity is restricted to nerds. This post is about the role of chance behind these frustrations. It is about an instance that demonstrated how much a casual act by a stranger can change the fate of an enterprise from a soul-crushing humiliation to something that warms the hearts even years later.

Back in the fall of 2003, PJ and I were given the ambitious task of selling T-shirts to IIScians. Ambitious, because we had to convince the students, particularly the new entrants, to buy T-shirts from the non-entities that we were. It looked like there existed a T-shirt design, and we just had to do the front-end work. Blissfully unaware of the absence of any such design for the shirts, we made posters promising the moon (“babes for the guys, and dudes for the girls”) in a language that was meant to convince the readers that we were qualified to make such promises. A week before we hit the mess’ with prototype T-shirts, the truth of the non-existence of the design was revealed to us, and we had to come up with designs that were ‘cool’ and ‘acceptable’. Not surprisingly the designs that we came up with were, we were convinced, particularly unremarkable. And we went with these unremarkable designs to a students’ mess to begin the sale. And then began the long wait where we kept trying, unsuccessfully, to catch the eye of any student in the hall, in the hope of getting someone to wander by our table.

It was a good half-hour before the first set of students finished their dinner, and it was a good ten minutes after that before anyone even bothered to stare in our direction for more than a few seconds. You put a bunch of smart-sounding posters, notice that the reaction to the posters is good, and then occupy a few tables of the dinner hall with your T-shirts… You should have students dropping by your table, right? Wrong, apparently. We were being ignored by the same students who were frustrated about being ignored by the people that they were interested in all their lives. Being ignored appears to be something that we humans are incapable of empathizing with, in spite of being at the receiving end of the same treatment forever. Coming back to the mess that we were in, another few minutes, and we would have given up on any hopes of succeeding, and left with our stuff. At least that was what PJ and I had resigned ourselves to. What else can one do, when one has just become invisible to one’s acquaintances? And then, as Tolkien might have put it, something happened that we had ceased to expect. One non-descript student who we had not noticed till then (ignored by the ‘ignored by the ignored’) wandered towards our table while sipping on his tumbler of Boost. After a few, insanely long, seconds of looking at the shirts, he smiled, and asked, “How are you doing?” The rest was just a blur of people and numbers and cash. That smile of his was the difference between public humiliation and a memorable adventure. To this date, I don’t dare think about what the scene might have been had he not decided to walk towards our table. I don’t even dare to think whether the decision was about whether to walk towards our table, or whether to ignore us! I don’t know if PJ dares to think of it either. Occasionally we talk of him, but never do we try imagining the alternate scenario.

But then, as Tolkien said, somethings that should not have been forgotten were lost. The ungrateful bastard that I am, I don’t even remember this man’s name.

Hanging on to the towel

You believe that you are entitled to possess/experience ‘X’. As with any belief, this may not necessarily logically (colloquially referred to as ethically) valid. You are offered ‘X’.

The question here is not about whether you would accept the offer. The question is, “Do you consider this to be an issue of just two choices, or is it more of a grayscale issue?” And, how much of an effect would this answer have on how far you go with the offer?

Words of wisdom:
Marvin

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Zaphod Beeblebrox

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer.

Miniluv

2006: Burma

2007: Tibet

2008: Iran

Can’t help noticing that Orwellian/Bulgakovian touch! Unlike in the past two cases, the modicum of freedom in Iran gives us an idea of the desperation that drives such protests. And the hopelessness behind it all.

Winamp, Galadriel…

Archana: Obama is this dude, you know

Me: Yeah right! He is to politics what Aishwarya Rai was to acting… I prefer Sarah Palin. And, by the way, that line sounds familiar, and not in a good way at that!

Furious Archana goes for the kill: What do you mean? Ok why did ever our Winamp ji not consider politics?

Me in the ‘You can’t handle the truth‘ mode: Elementary… That was answered by Tolkein long time back. Take this

Lord of War

Plain and simple

random African kids getting stray bullets from morons who don’t deserve to handle Kalashnikovs…

According to Atanu Dey, we don’t fare any better!

hogwash?

What are the odds that the whole swine-flu hysteria has been set-off by some nerd at some univ because some girl rejected him using the golden words, “Only when pigs fly…”?

Sutra

3 months back:

Here I was, locked up in my room, trying to motivate myself to get started on the dreaded WENO-schemes, and what do I hear: a girl screaming from the TV in the living room. My illustrious room-mate has been making his mom watch some Tam movie, while finishing-off some argument with some friend over the phone. Anyway the screams had been going on so long that I giveup on suppressing the curiosity on how many girls must’ve been killed off by then. On the TV, of course. Sticking to the Wilde-dictum, I yield– and guess what, no blood! That incompetent goon on screen was only demanding some girl to answer him about some inconsequential thing while he had grabbed her hand!!!!!!!!!!!

If anything, girls on TV make girls outside look sober! Sanity followed once I went back to the lines of a wise man:

The Female of the Species

WHEN the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
‘Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other’s tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations—worm and savage otherwise,—
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger—Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue—to the scandal of The Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!—
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

Unprovoked and awful charges—even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons—even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish—like the Jesuit with the squaw!

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice—which no woman understands.

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern—shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

by Rudyard Kipling

Now:

WENO be damned, the whole idea was a wrong thread that consumed 3 months of work with nothing to show. A plot of GIGO is not exactly the sort of thing that the DoE is interested in funding! So, in the process of writing an outline for my thesis, I ended up navigating deep in to a comment thread debating stuff at best tangential to yet another post on yet another blog about the same old depressing depravity of us humans and, unlike with that thread with WENO, have come out with a link from Bhetti. It is a poem by Chinua Achebe, the author of a particularly depressing short story, back from my school reading material, titled “Dead Men’s Path“, that I can’t seem to  forget till date. Here’s the poem:

Vultures

In the greyness
and drizzle of one despondent
dawn unstirred by harbingers
of sunbreak a vulture
perching high on broken
bone of a dead tree
nestled close to his
mate his smooth
bashed-in head, a pebble
on a stem rooted in
a dump of gross
feathers, inclined affectionately
to hers. Yesterday they picked
the eyes of a swollen
corpse in a water-logged
trench and ate the things in its bowel. Full
gorged they chose their roost
keeping the hollowed remnant
in easy range of cold
telescopic eyes …
Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house^
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep – her face
turned to the wall!
… Thus the Commandant at Belsen^
Camp going home for
the day with fumes of
human roast clinging
rebelliously to his hairy
nostrils will stop
at the wayside sweet-shop
and pick up a chocolate
for his tender offspring
waiting at home for Daddy’s return …
Praise bounteous
providence if you will
that grants even an ogre
a tiny glow-worm
tenderness encapsulated
in icy caverns of a cruel
heart or else despair
for in every germ
of that kindred love is
lodged the perpetuity
of evil.

Dostoevsky would have approved.

——-

^ From the BBC page on this poem:

charnel-house	A vault where dead bodies or bones are piled.
Belsen Camp	Bergen-Belsen was one of the most notorious concentration camps of the Second World War. It became a camp for those who were too weak or sick to work and many people died because of the terrible conditions. Anne Frank was interned there and died of typhus in 1945. The camp was liberated in 1945.