Category: Social Commentary

  • Farm Vile?

    While two movies, despite not being remotely connected in terms of geography or genre, are perhaps not a trend, it did remind me of a conversation from more than a year back – something I blogged about too. An excellent conversation with S, that started with the dystopian scenario of 1984 and human farms and moved on to time travel, all in the context of advancement of society and the species.

    The movies in question are Gamer and Peepli Live, and the one thing that links them – the value of the human life. While the former is set in a word of the future, in which a new technology allows replacement of brain cells to allow full control of a body by a third party and finds application in gaming (one game in which gamers control a real person in a proxy community, a far more ‘real’ version of Second Life, and its more violent avatar, a multiplayer third person shooter game in which death row inmates fight for freedom), the latter is seemingly less complex – a farmer is ‘encouraged’ to commit suicide for the betterment of his family – more specifically, for the money they’ll get as compensation.

    And the question they make me ask – at what point in the future does mankind stop treating human life as sacrosanct? One could argue that it never has been, with the amount of killing that happens around regularly, but what I mean here is as a species. So, when someone says ‘human farms’, there won’t be gasps or expressions of horror/disgust. With population figures soaring, virtual lives competing with real ones, rise of machines, increasing gaps between the haves and have-nots, do you think it will happen? Just in case you think I’ve completely lost it, we’ve already started experiments with living beings – microorganisms in games.

    until next time, knotty question.

  • Armchair travel plans

    If I discount Pico Iyer, the travelogues of Pankaj Mishra, and Mishi Saran’s Chasing the Monk’s Shadow, I hardly read travel books. But I picked up Rahul Jacob’s ‘Right of Passage’ on a whim (influenced by Pico Iyer’s comment on the jacket) and quite liked it, mostly because its really not just a travelogue. Shall publish a more detailed post on that later.

    I was hooked on early enough thanks to the last lines of the preface

    Still, there is this final paradox of travel: time and again, these memories come back unbidden with the clarity of something that happened yesterday, long after we have returned to the rhythm of our lives

    Later in the book, he compares flight travels with train journeys – that he can remember his first flight journey but the rest are a blur. In contrast, however, he remembers most of his train journeys. Though I’m not really the most frequent of fliers, I can relate to that.

    I wonder if its to do with memories of childhood, in which train journeys played a very important part (for me), and that affinity meant that later journeys would also be cataloged better by the brain. Or is it the entire set of experiences – from ‘uniform’ airports to passengers consciously avoiding each other even if it means staring resolutely at the seat in front compared to colorful railway stations that seem to be oozing character to seats facing each other and almost forcing conversations?

    I juxtaposed this with cities and their culture too. Recently, when I went to Cochin, and dropped in at its most ‘happening’ mall, I wondered how much of homogeneity was being created by malls. The same brands, almost the same store experiences, familiar multiplex chains that somehow give you an air of familiarity even in an unknown town (not Cochin for me, but otherwise). How much of a city’s original hangouts and culture will survive this  onslaught? In fact, I even told D that I could already see landmarks of my days in Cochin  (local shops famous for some particular item) disappearing and the new ones (like a Nilgiris store) being unfamiliar to me. Would most people prefer familiarity over serendipity? Or would a middle ground be found – carefully packaged serendipity?

    Going beyond the things to be seen in a place, every travel experience is also about the  discovery of the character of the place you visit. Will we end up creating a homogeneous world, in our constant quest for convenience, and change travel from the train journeys they should be (opinion) to controlled fancy flights?

    Fortunately for this generation, this is perhaps not a reality we’ll live to see, and even in the sunset years we will have our memories and photographs and be thankful that not all journeys need travel.

    until next time, planed travel

  • A small matter of life and death

    There’s this wonderful scene in ‘The Hurt Locker’ in which James talks to his baby son who is fully engrossed in playing with his toys

    You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don’t ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older… some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.

    Its probably a generalisation, but I’m sure many people can identify with that. Figuring out at some point, that all the things and people they cherished, or they themselves, have moved on. In fact, there are many who might be even more unfortunate and realise that have nothing to love, going through the motions of life, as a job to be finished. But it could be even worse.

    Quite a morbid line of thought, but one that I felt compelled to share, because it made me think about so many things we take for granted. Sometime back, I had written about the ‘alone’ people I see in many places. Well, there’s another kind of people I have seen – sometimes during daily commute, at other times, when I travel.

    The kind of people who make me wonder what it is that makes them hold on to their life. The easiest example I could give are the beggars – no, not the ‘professional’ ones who haunt our traffic signals, but the ones that frequent obscure places, where there’s hardly a chance of them getting anything, the ones who don’t even ask. They sometimes look too old or invalid to move out of there. There are other examples too, ones that need not be at such levels of despair, but you probably get the drift.

    So what makes them plod on? A hope that things will become better? A dogged belief in the sanctity of life? A dull notion that life has to be lived on unto its natural conclusion? Or maybe they are in a state where they’re okay with what they’ve to live with or what life will dish out next? Or maybe they’re afraid that the experience after death will be worse.

    I’ll end where I started from – ‘The Hurt Locker’. To quote James again ‘Everyone’s a coward about something.‘ Sometimes it’s life, and sometimes it’s death.

    until next time, alive and clicking 🙂

  • Versus all the world…

    (written a few moons ago)

    Season finales have a way of dispiriting me, by showing me the transience of things. Things that we like, things that we get used to, things that teach us lessons, sometimes not even by design.

    Like this one, which took me to Queens, a borough of New York City, week after week, and also gave me a peek into the world of fashion magazines, however contrived a view it may have been.  More than the sometimes convoluted plots and the character profiling that ensured certain audiences, I was a fan because in its own way, it gave insights into the innate goodness that exists in all humans..characters, especially in the final season of a dramedy 🙂

    But more than anything else, the show was all about the journey of its title character, an unlikely success story. It sold the hope that a person could make her (in this case) own world, despite her unconventional ways, because she believed in herself. And it sold it well, because many a viewer cheered for her, and egged her on.

    Say that I’m changed, say I’m different
    Maybe I’ll finally understand

    It has succeeded to some extent, in teaching me, that its not really the choices I make, but how much of myself I am willing to put in them, that really decides the outcome, and the way I deal with that outcome.

    I’m ready, I’m ready
    I’m ready to believe

    And if I zip through the entire journey of the character, I can also see the transience of these outcomes, despite their seeming finality.

    Say I’ll let go, say it’s obvious
    Oh, I tell myself over, over and over again

    So yes, thank you, for taking me on a very interesting journey, and giving me several LOL moments, thanks to nasty one liners from Marc/Wilhelmina/Amanda. And now, when I am asked, usually with much incredulity, followed by amusement, about why I watch Ugly Betty, I’ll perhaps hum..

    And all the world can watch the choices you make
    All the world can watch each tiny mistake
    Let the world watch….let the world wait for you

    until next time, couchsurfing of a different kind

    Lyrics: All the World (I Tell Myself) by Correatown, played during the season 4 finale

  • Decision Faker

    Of all the books I’ve recently  read, one I liked immensely was Thrity Umrigar’s “First Darling of the Morning”. Some of it had to do with her wonderful articulation of the pop culture phenomena close to my generation, some of it had to do with her personal traits, which I could identify with (“The more silent and introspective I grew from the inside, the more smart-alecky and verbal I felt compelled to be“), and a lot of it had to do with her honest portrayal of human relationships – their gray areas, their changing nature with time, and many such nuances. Will put up a review here soon.

    One of the things that made me think was this

    And finally, I know that the world still belongs to the adults, and although, in their kindness and mercy they may pretend to share it with us, ultimately it is still their world. It is they who decide when we are old enough to stop playing with dolls, when we should give away toys that they’ve decided we’ve outgrown……”

    I tried to think back to the first decision I had ever gotten to make by myself, but I couldn’t think that far back.  I remembered the days in engineering college – love, politics, future plans, all of which were perhaps my decisions. I also remember getting back from GIM and feeling exactly the way the author describes her last days in college.

    I am nowhere close to being ready to be anything but a college student. The world suddenly feels too big a place for me to navigate.

    And then it dawned on me, that however much I’d like to think that decisions are my own, they perhaps aren’t. There’s always a set of people who play a role in the decisions, directly or indirectly, influencing the outcome. But the decisions are made, for better, or worse. In her acknowledgment, the author uses a phrase “Thank God we don’t get what we deserve in life”.

    When i see ‘kids’ these days, this one for example, or N, and the seeming ease with which they take decisions and handle themselves, I wonder if its a generation thing or a personality thing. Even at this age, there are days when, just before I sleep, I wish I could go back to those times, when by the time I got up, my parents/ grandmother would have fixed the mammoth problem that had seemed so future-threatening to me the night before. These days, I wonder if they ever felt all grown up and in control, or were they just pretending, like I do  many a time now.

    until next time, deservedly so.