Category: Flawsophy

  • Life…streamers

    Sometime back, I read an extremely interesting post by Chris Messina – how we’re now hit by a plethora of data and information on the real time web, which our brains have not adapted to, and how, in order to process this, we’d require an augmentation of our existing abilities.

    The information overload has been happening for a little while now. Between reading blogs, writing them, microblogging, Facebook and all the shiny little tools that keep coming up, it’s a constant juggling act. I’ve been on Twitter for over a couple of years now. I can see a drastic change in the relationships there already, as compared to the banter of the initial days. New people, new thoughts, old people who’re changing with time, old thoughts recycled.  A simple @ tag connects lives. Meanwhile, its not just relationships and thoughts that change, but also behaviour – the need to share an experience, attention deficit, and so on. These would obviously vary with an individual’s usage of Twitter, facebook etc, but I’m sure there are more like me.

    While I’ve been dimly conscious of the vastness of the Twitterverse, I had a more tangible realisation only after i came across a tool (from an article shared by Shefaly). As I sat watching the pictures streaming across the screen on Twitcaps, I felt I was somehow connected to all of them across the world sharing images – from parties to churches to landscapes to death to raunchy stuff to coffee mugs and so many many other things. There are multiple images being shared every second, and I had an acute realisation of the magnitude of change happening, in terms of connectedness and sharing. The population of the world, the population of your own city, the number of people working in your office/living in the apartment complex- as the numbers come down, the people slowly change from a blurred intangibility to a focused person. But as we get more and more networked, the number of persons who become tangible are increasing, the arguments about their relative importance to self notwithstanding. As Chris says in the article, can human beings cope after a point?

    Sometime earlier this year, I remember writing a post about speciation – the evolution of the human species, and how replacement of body parts and advancement might finally end up in a being that may not match our current concept of human, or even living, like the Cybermen in Dr.Who. In that post, I had also mentioned Homo Evolutis, one of whose characteristics was networked intelligence.

    As the information deluge gathers momentum, there may be those who choose not to be part of it, who are comfortable not being part of this vast stream of consciousness, while there may be others who use their abilities and the augmentation to embrace this. These are obviously two extremes, and its quite possible that humans would figure out a middle path. But I already see this divide happening – some leaving it by choice, some left out by circumstances. The learning curve is becoming so steep that after a few years, it might be difficult or even impossible to catch up. And that’s how I begin to wonder whether we’re rapidly approaching the point when the species will diverge. Maybe not in my lifetime, but within a couple of generations?

    There’s another aspect of all this that I wondered about. With the increasing amount of information and the speed at which we’re forced to process it, will we have time to acquire more perspectives, or continuing that cycle, accumulate more baggage? Will that change the way we behave with people, and the way we live life? Will we become more objective? Or will we become more biased, relying on notions we don’t have time to change, and behaving accordingly?

    As I write this there is a stream of thoughts running in my head – of times, friends and relationships. Poignant moment as I realise the vast yet connected nature of the universe and its inhabitants. In the miniscule amount of my lifetime that I have spent on Twitter, I realise that people and relationships have changed, perhaps irrevocably. The lifestream will be an interesting read for me later, if I do manage it. Meanwhile life flows, faster, faster, until each second and beyond is accounted for, with streamers in between, so that we might remember…just..

    until next time, you’re here..now..reading post #700..thank you 🙂

  • A flaky post

    Paperweights. The ones with either a dancing girl/couple or a snowman at the centre. Turn it upside down, and the ‘snow flakes’ come floating down. Long trips away from routine make me feel like those flakes. I float for as long as I can, but i can’t defy the gravitational pull, there’s no way but down. All my floating is restricted to the confines of the paper weight, I can only wistfully look outside. When the upside down movement happens, I know that I’m in for a ride. I know it will be wonderful while it lasts, I also know the inevitability of the descent. In the initial moments of the floating, I am able to forget the ending, and enjoy myself, but towards the end, I end up counting the moments left. It is time to land, the journey is over.

    Remember Forrest Gump? Through the movie, there’s a white feather that floats around. A while back, I read somewhere that it represents destiny and luck, which is why it is shown to appear at opportune moments. Its free, unconfined and goes where the breeze takes it. Sometimes it gets stuck on to things, and then a gust of wind helps it resume its journey. Does it keep track of its journey, or does it just enjoy the ride?

    I read a piece by Fred Wilson recently, which talked about failure, and making mistakes, and learning from them. It led me to thinking about the words and their connotations. Both the words signify an end result that didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. It made me realise that these days I have to figure out destinations before i start. And I’m not talking about trips or vacations, its about daily life. There are expectations set – about how the week should go, how the work should be, how the weekend should be, how the movie should be, what i should write, how it should turn out, and so on. The expectations are about people too. When it doesn’t happen the way I want it, there is a disappointment.  This might sound obvious, but I don’t know how conscious each of us are about our dependency on the plans we make, the expectations from life and what we do, our version of ‘what should be’.

    And as this happens day after day, the habit and the conditioning gets stronger, till we don’t even pause to think where this is all leading to. I realise that the more the conditioning is allowed to settle, the more the pattern for the journeys will be set, and the more it will limit the journeys that can be had. So its not even about work or entertainment or even a way of life, it is about the way the mind has begun to function, the thought processes, the walls and the defense mechanisms that  increasingly seem to have a will of their own. Somewhere along the line, there’s also the concept of ‘hope’. Hoping for a better day, a better way of life, all within the structure that I have brought into being.

    What if I let go? One of Forrest’s lines go “I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floatin’ around accidental-like on a breeze. But I, I think maybe it’s both.”

    Destiny, these days, raises a paradox for me. I could say “That is my destiny”, and work on something and perhaps achieve it. Success gives satisfaction and then I move on to the next objective. So its a bit like the destinations and the traps there. Or I could say “I’ll float and let destiny take its course”. But if I did that, can I be sure where I land and what I will be is my destiny? The best destiny possible for me. Heh? Ah there, control again. In either case, it seems a retrofit. Can i un-expect, not ‘control expectations’, just un-expect? Is that getting closer to objectivity?

    It is written. The post has to end. Did you expect it to end this way? Did I disappoint? 🙂

    until next time, nishkama karma points 🙂

  • Just about fair

    A few days back, on Twitter, Vijay Sankaran shared an article, that led to a brief but heated debate. By the time I joined in, fun time was over and people had moved on, but i still manage to butt heads with Surekha for a while. Since the 140 character format was a constraint, we left the argument in a safe place and I said that I’d share a post soon with my consolidated view on the matter.

    The matter was of course “SRK: Now playing at an airport near you”. No, don’t yawn yet. After evading ‘gyarah mulkon ki police’, this is exciting stuff – the discovery of a continent where the words “Rahul/Raj, naam to suna hoga” don’t mean a damn, and an ordeal which lasted (depending on who you speak to) 2 hours/ just over an hour. That makes me wonder whether SRK started off with ” Sattar minute hain tumhare paas, shayad tumhare zindagi ke khaas sattar minute”. In any case, by the time it ended he must’ve been saying “Babuji ne kaha gaon chhod do, sab ne kaha paro ko chhod do, paro ne kaha sharaab chhod do, please aap mujhe chhod do”. Ok, ok, sorry. I am not really an SRK fan, but I have to admit, I admire the journey from Fauji back in 1988 – a hard fought climb to the very top. An amazing trip. And when the ego was forced to land at Newark, even if it was for a brief period, it must’ve been painful.

    Fingers have been pointed (including mine, initially) about how it was a good promotion for the upcoming movie ‘My Name is Khan‘. But from online sources, the release date for MNIK is 2010. This would be way too premature, and despite his faults, I can’t remember SRK doing publicity stunts like this. (correct me if i have forgotten something) He himself brushed off the incident later and said that they were doing their job, and when compared to an ex-president, (Kalam getting frisked) he was a nobody. I’m inclined to say that maybe he wasn’t guilty of making it a great deal, but the media and us consumers of media were. (Yes, even this post is a case in point, eh? 🙂 )

    But all this was just an introduction. The article i mentioned earlier (and which you didn’t bother to click) is by Govindraj Ethiraj and is titled ‘The Idea of Injustice”. It centers upon whether the detention of SRK was unfair, unjust, both or neither. The writer gives various examples of injustice that we experience/see around us in our daily lives – from the politician’s convoy that disrupts our commute to the people sleeping on the roadside outside Hard Rock Cafe. He goes on to say that “Young India actually lives on with the most amazing amalgam of principals and values. Where justice and injustice have little or no co-relation to our real lives or that of others. Where denial of a right to education, livelihood or food has no bearing on our notion of justice.” The title of the article relates to Prof. Amartya’s Sen’s “The Idea of Justice”, and the article also cites some of his views.

    Surekha felt that the comparison was harsh and unfair and fans are entitled to their expression, and countering every protest with questions on outrage against poverty, corruption etc won’t get us anywhere. While I agreed that fans could express themselves anyway they wanted, I felt the comparison was valid and the sense of injustice that some felt when SRK was detained was connected to the injustice that the child living in poverty faced. (What he makes out of it later/destiny etc is a different debate) To me, it is not a comparison, but a connection nevertheless. Saying that it is not connected reflects our contextual sense of justice that I kept mentioning. We are affected when the things we hold dear (from family to property to film stars) are affected, the rest is someone else’s problem. We relate to our immediate context, and would like justice in that bubble. We are totally unaffected by the rest of the world’s misery. Yes, we do like the candle marches, and protest groups on Facebook, they are easy ways to placate our conscience. But ‘our’ experience of injustice is more pertinent than anyone else’s, and we turn a blind eye to things that will not affect our bubble.

    Forget the rest of the world, when we have an argument with someone close, how many times do we try to be genuinely conscious of the other person’s point of view/perspective? Aren’t we always right in the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves? Aren’t our actions always warranted, just, fair? Can’t we always justify? Heh, to ask the same us to reflect a bit on the world’s inequities when we aren’t even conscious of our own motivations and sense of right and wrong would be asking for too much, huh? Right, wrong, justice, injustice, fairness, unfairness are all subjective, basis our perspectives. Think about it, shouldn’t unfairness and injustice be absolutes, and not relative to any individual’s perceptions and perspectives? But we’ve built an entire society and its accompanying systems and laws based precisely on this. From communities to joint families to nuclear families to the individual, our concern ‘circle’ has been becoming smaller all the while. And everything from world wars to strife in personal relationships is because of our narrowing concern. But this is not a commentary on society, for after all, if change has to happen, it has to be at the individual level.

    Bura Jo Dekhan Main Chala, Bura Naa Milya Koye
    Jo Munn Khoja Apnaa, To Mujhse Bura Naa Koye

    ~ Kabir

    Objectivity. To see things unhindered and uninfluenced by the baggage we carry around. To go beyond our conditioning – self imposed and otherwise and look at ourselves first, and then the world around us as absolutes. Why? Selfishly- because it can un-complicate us, selflessly- because it makes us more humane. When we can do that, perhaps we’ll understand  the connection and what justice and fairness is all about.

    until next time, ego messages

    PS. The thought continues….

  • Visage.. envisage

    In the first book of the Ramayana series, Ashok Banker uses a line, a statement made by Rishi Adhranga to Lakshmana, as the brothers are about to enter Bhayanak van, where Tataka resides – “Over time, truth becomes fact, fact is rewritten as history, history fades to legend, and eventually, legend remains as myth.” In the myth 🙂 , these words are  spoken in the Treta Yuga (the Age of Reason), which follows Satya Yuga (the Age of Truth). The character also states that by the time its the Kali Yuga (the Age of Darkness, which is last and after the Dvapara Yuga), devas and asuras would be just race-memories and dismissed as fantasy by the rational and the scientific.

    In science fiction, there are many stories of the ravages of time. One, where, man comes across computers and other technological specimens, but does not know how to use them, since the lack of energy had made humans de-evolve. Another, where man discovers that the canals on Mars were made by a race of humans, ten thousands of years back, in an older ‘cycle’ of evolution and de-evolution. Interesting? 🙂

    So the other day, I was thinking about facts, truth, history and stories. It further led me to thinking about these blogs of mine, the lifestreams on Facebook and Twitter and on the blog. The digital snapshots of our lives, the way we are storing our life almost by the second, for many reasons. Our experiences, our thoughts, our desires, our emotions, our fears, our happiness and sorrow, and so many more things. To share, to look back….. to create an image of ourselves for whoever sees it?

    In Cochin, at home, there are these old albums with black & white and sepia photographs. The ones with which we, as children, had fun trying to identify Mom and Dad in their childhood photographs. There are other characters in them – grandparents, uncles, aunts and other relatives, friends of theirs. While many of them are easily identified by the earlier generation, some remain unknown, or rather, ones who aren’t remembered. Either ways, other than direct interactions, these photos are perhaps the only remains of people who lived a few decades back. Ever wonder who they really were, as persons, what were their thoughts, what did they think of their life, and others’, did they question their existence, or were they busy running a life, as we are? Did they think that someone, somewhere in the future would look at their photographs and peer into their lives beyond the confines of the frame? Would they have smiled a bit more if they knew, or would they try to look more serious? Maybe they wouldn’t have cared enough to strike a special look or pose?

    With the advent of the web, there are now more means than ever to store ‘life’. Sound, pictures, videos, enough material to make sure that a life is much more documented than the two dimensional photographs. Though my lifestreaming purpose is limited to my life, when I read posts about what happens to a person’s blog/Facebook account etc after his/her death, I can’t help but wonder about the future of digital lifestreams.

    With relationships getting redefined on a  regular basis, will there be anyone later who cares enough to go through another person’s life. After all, with the explosion of user generated content, an individual’s lifestream is just a statistic. (yes, even otherwise, it might just be that, but these are perhaps our efforts to move from being an irrelevant statistic  to a relevant individual). Yes, perhaps truth won’t become facts and so on, though the objectivity of truth itself can be questioned. But meanwhile, I am reminded of the science fiction tales. Maybe no one will be able to access all this content. Or it could be a deviant of this scenario. I have quite a lot of music cassettes. While I can still easily find devices to play it, a few years later, that might not be the case – either that, or the tapes would be in no state to be played. There are many tracks in these which I can’t find online. In the near future, they will be lost to the past. So in essence, technology might advance so much that those data items which have not been updated might be inaccessible anyway.

    A life. A lifetime of experiences, which defined not just what happened to a single person, but also to those around. Multiple lives. A web of existence. Humanity. Statistics and non-stories. All of which would be rendered inaccessible or meaningless in the future, but without which the future would not exist. An endless stream, which may have the larger picture of its origins, but has only hazy notions of the details. Makes me wonder. About the construct of our lives.

    until next time, streaming out loud…

  • ESC

    Could’ve been the subliminal effects of ‘bridge’ – no, not the card game, just the word, which had appeared in the title of two posts in the recent past, or serendipity playing its part during random channel surfing, whatever the reason, I chanced upon the movie ‘Bridge to Terabithia‘ recently. Its about two pre teens – Jess and Leslie, who, despite their different circumstances, become friends and  imagine themselves an entire fantasy kingdom, complete with trolls and monsters and evil forces – Terabithia, where they rule as king and queen.

    Jess, though talented, has to deal with problems at home as well as school, and is a loner. This changes with the arrival of Leslie, who beats him in a running event, something which Jess had been training for. They also happen to be neighbours, and soon, Leslie compliments Jess on his drawing skills, when she comes across his notebook. They become friends and create Terabithia. Terabithia is a reflection of their real life, and the evil forces are usually versions of characters in real life, like the school bully, who appears as a troll.

    What appealed to me was the sensitivity that flows through the movie, in its characters, in situations and the way they react to them. It doesn’t have the mesmerising special effects that usually accompany the fantasy genre, but if you have ever imagined as a child, you would immediately identify with the story. AnnaSophia Robb, as Leslie, and Josh Hutcherson, as Jess have both acted extremely well. They make you believe. Terabithia is a haven for the two children to escape from the strife of their daily existence. Actually, I felt Leslie creates it more for Jess than herself, inspired by his drawings, though she is also a loner, who finds it difficult to make friends.

    [Spoiler ahead, though I’d say its relatively unimportant. If you do watch the movie, the sensitive portrayal is the attraction]

    Jess’ music teacher, who has seen his drawings, invites him on a Saturday to visit the art museum. Jess doesn’t invite Leslie, and returns to find out that Leslie had drowned while trying to swing across the creek. (the way to Terabithia) After a brief period during which he blames himself for the death, Jess decides to rebuild Terabithia as a way to remember Leslie. The film ends with him inviting his sister May Belle, who had been kept away from Jess and Leslie’s fantasy world so far, to be the new queen of Terabithia.

    I wondered about the ending. To me, Jess’ visit to the museum, guided by an adult, was a way of showing his breaking away from childhood fantasy, and entering the ‘real’ world. His drawings were a reflection of his life, and the introduction to art would mean that he has a new way of channelling his talent, and moving beyond the problems of his daily life. Leslie’s death accentuates this since she had taken the initiative to form Terabithia. I’d perhaps have had May Belle discovering the drawing book (again) and this time Jesse allowing her to draw and make her own worlds.

    Havens. Some of us make them from childhood. Each part of our life would be characterised by an escape hatch, which was relevant only for that particular age. As I’d twittered a few days back, weekends become the life support for the drudgery of the working week. It brings with it different escape routes, things that I look forward to. I heard a colleague say recently that his kid counted the days till Saturday. I reminded him that we do that too. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Imaginary friends, fantasy worlds, pub hopping, real friends, reading, gaming, movies, vacations, virtual lifestreams…in some way are these all escape routes? On one level, these are escape routes from our reality, they take us to worlds which are more appealing, they give us a temporary release.  What do my escape routes say about me? At another level, I do wonder what we really want to escape from.

    until next time, Houdini of sorts…