Category: Yesterday

  • Of fame and purpose

    I completely missed Bigg Boss 6. Except for knowing that the arrested-for-sedition cartoonist and Sapna Bhavnani were participants, my exposure to it was limited to lunch conversations at office, where two of my friends seemed to be avid followers. 🙂 I thought my ignorance was only fair, since they are usually clueless when I mention the names of micro-celebrities on Twitter.

    Increasingly, I am realising that popular culture is going through massive fragmentation. The above was an example. I think this generation is connected with more people than any before it. It has always been so, with better means of communication, but this time, it has been an explosion. We’re still coping with the overload, or filter-failure, as Clay Shirky calls it. Despite social networks, or probably because of them and their algorithms, we miss out on many things.

    I was thinking of all this in the context of fame. Fame, to me, has some connection with my favourite subject these days – purpose. Fame can serve as a means, or end, or a by product of purpose. The thing is, with the fragmentation I mentioned earlier, fame probably has to be redefined, also because its shelf life has been drastically reduced. Once upon a time, a name/photo appearing in a newspaper was an achievement. (let’s ignore the notoriety piece 🙂 ) Later, before channels mushroomed, it was television. But now….

    One of the things that might happen because of all this is the gradual de-linking of fame and purpose, if it does exist. I’m still trying to figure out how that will shift our perspectives on purpose.

    until next time, being famous ain’t what it used to be…

  • Oh, my 90s

    A couple of years back, I had written this post about the golden years of Bollywood music in my life – the 90s. The search for a restaurant within JP Nagar before we watched Talaash (at Gopalan) took us to Kakori Kababs & Curries. The restaurant review is for later, but what really made the day for me was their instrumental music collection of 90s Bollywood music. I listened to songs from Sainik, Imtihaan, Damini and it was amazing how I could remember most of the lyrics despite not having heard these in years! Just goes to show the power of those imprints.

    Later, Talaash also took me on a sidetrack – memories, and I thought about how our reality changes massively over time. Many things that seemed to be the crux of our existence at one point in time slowly fade away into memories and then into archives of insignificance in the larger chapters of our lives. We can’t even mourn or be happy about them because we don’t remember them in the first place.

    So the next day, I started working on this playlist, just so that every time I go through my YouTube channel, I would remember, and could help myself to a blast from the past. Music has always been time travel for me. Probably, many years later, when the memories surrounding these songs and the times they existed in slowly begin to fade, and they seem like a dream from years back, (what they say when they come across the lamp post at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia Part 1) this would be my crutch to go hobbling on that path. 🙂

    until next time, the soul of music

  • From the Kerala diary..

    An overcast sky met us at the Alwaye railway station on June 1st. As I sat inside the bus to Kothamangalam, I wondered where the rains would meet us. I saw school kids waiting for their bus, but not as many as I had expected. It has been a tradition in Kerala – on June 1st, when the kids begin their academic year, the rains are the first to welcome them. I remembered umbrellas, raincoats, pants hitched up, new wet notebooks…. But it seemed that things weren’t so anymore. I wasn’t the only one surprised – the Gandhi in Perumbavoor stood open jawed.  We reached our destination, dry. I learned later that most schools were opening on Jun 4th and the rains were scheduled on Jun 5th. On the way back to Cochin that night, starting from a near empty bus stand, I was able to relive the window seat. But I realised that just as the seer had changed, so had the scene.

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    There’s a wonderful quote that’s attributed to Bryan White – “We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.” So when one goes back to places which only hold childhood memories, maybe there’s a natural pull to rewind to a time without that learning, and just let loose. And just like in that age and time, many impulsive, harmless things then become capable of delivering an incredible amount of joy.

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    For a long time now, Nedumbassery had been my exit point from Kerala. And so I sat, after a wedding feast, on a journey from there to Palghat and beyond, watching a series of places I hadn’t seen in more than a decade. Familiar landmarks and new sights, and the Western Ghats that stood solidly in the background. Hello, Kuthiran. Dad was surprised I could remember the name of the towns. How many ever roads a man walks down, his first roads remain etched….

    The occasion for which we had made the trip saw 3 generations – one that had been born and had spent all their childhood in that village, another (mine) in which the majority of the members had cities that they considered home but had spent many a wonderful vacation there, and a third which was probably making a few memories. There’s that favourite Garden State quote of mine – Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place. In this version, ‘imaginary place’ is not a place that no longer exists physically, but one that exists in a certain state in  the memories of many people. I wondered when a place would cease to exist at all – is it when it disappears physically, is it when all the people who have memories of the place cease to exist, or is it when the place changes so much that even memories cannot bring it back. You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. When the seer and the scene let go of each other. And that was why this trip was special – memories had been added, and the disappearing had been delayed.

    until next time, seen there, done that 🙂

  • No kidding

    The debate on twitter, some time back, on the subject of kids on Junior MasterChef Australia was an interesting one to watch. I have no definitive opinion on it, and I understand that it can be debated both ways. So, just a few perspectives.

    I watched the show for a few days, and was amazed by the skill displayed by the kids. I also found the judges being very careful with their words. (they can be scathing as the ‘regular’ MasterChef show would prove) The kids seemed to be having fun. I don’t know if the elimination grind got to them. I don’t know how the entire experience would affect them – irrespective of them being winners or losers.

    What I do think is that in many ways, the show is preparing these kids for the world – for making choices, (I’m reasonably sure none of them have been forced to come here) chasing a passion, the consequences – winning and losing, fame and despair, public scrutiny and the loss of privacy, dealing with judgments passed by others and so on. And that goes for all sorts of reality shows – dance shows with scantily clad kids included. Any opinion I have against dance shows is a judgment based on my baggage, and objectively, I can’t be sure that dancing (of any kind in any attire) < cooking. I could be flawed in my rationale, but that’s like saying Vidya Balan’s performance in The Dirty Picture is somehow lesser than Sanjeev Kapoor’s erm, Dal Makhani.

    I am not a parent, so I can only talk from the perspective of a child that I once was. 🙂 We didn’t have reality television then, but we had non televised competitions, and I have been a participant. Music, debate, hockey, quizzing, cricket, dumb charades – I’ve represented  my school/college in all of these. I was lucky enough to be encouraged in most of these (very few got the point of Dumb C 🙂 ) by my parents and teachers. I can only dimly imagine the sacrifices my parents might have made for letting me pursue these and my other indulgences – voracious reading, for example. 🙂

    I do believe that most parents want the best for their children, though the way they show it could be seen and judged in different ways. Parents have no inkling of what the world will become, though they pretend to. They make choices based on their experiences, their perspectives of the future, and their desires for their children. I have a choice to make now too – I could blame my parents for not making me focus completely on studies. (for example) Who knows, I might have gotten in and out of an IIT/M and might have finally written a book. 😉 Or I could be thankful for the choices they made for me, and for the experiences that gave me. I, for one,  am indeed thankful, and think that these paths gave me valuable perspectives – with regards to all the ‘preparation for the world’ points I had listed earlier. There can be no A/B testing for all this, you realise. 🙂

    The fun part is that somewhere along the way, I started writing a bit. This blog has been around for more than 9 years, I write 2 newspaper columns. I haven’t been trained for any of this. Whether the story has a fairy tale ending is completely subjective and dependent on many factors that are beyond the parents’ or the child’s control, or imagination. The parents and the children are living some great moments. Perhaps that’s all there is to it.

    until next time, show stopper

  • Mythistory

    Centuries apart, but both in The Wonder Eras and Irascible, I had written about the documentation of incidents that we now call mythology and history. (respectively) In the former, I had mentioned the feeling when I saw the place where Sita had been temporarily imprisoned in Lanka, and in the latter, a fictionalised version of an event that happened in 1919. Both a bit intangible – the first only because of the centuries that have passed and it was still difficult to believe that myth was just history but more ancient, and the second because I am not sure if it actually happened.

    Sometime back, I read William Dalrymple’s ‘The Last Mughal’, that uses Bahadur Shah Zafar as a ‘device’ to write about the events of 1857. The book is based on actual documents. As I wrote in my review (will share soon) what remains with me long after I have read the book, and something I went back to, almost every time I picked up the book to continue, is the photo of Zafar, lying with his face to the camera – the face of a broken old man who through his life saw the dominion of his ancestors taken away from him until all he had was his city and an empty title, who had just been made to undergo a trial and many humiliations before it, eyes expressing melancholy, and resigned to his destiny.

    Suddenly, the images that I remember from history textbooks were transformed into a real person, and history was somehow tangible, as was his plight. It was almost as though that if I could take a few steps more, I could somehow feel the same about our myths.  Have you ever felt that when reading/seeing anything?

    Perhaps it is that way in every age, when some things that were history move into legend and then on to a myth status. I am still debating in my mind whether the layering that happens, adds or subtracts.

    until next time, history repeats?