Category: Society & Culture

  • Creature Comforts

    By sheer coincidence, the only two Stephen King books I’ve read are “Under the Dome” and Needful Things. They’re separated by a decade and a half (publication) and so, I was surprised to see a massive similarity in the themes – strange things happening in a town and then the focus shifts to human transactions, motivations and the good/evil within us. In the earlier book, it was a new shop and its proprietor  that played havoc, in the later one, it’s an indestructible dome.

    When I discussed this with a few friends, I was told that this was not surprising and there were more books with that broad theme, and many authors repeated their themes regularly. These authors and their books are bestsellers too, which means a lot of people like this arrangement?

    I have vaguely sensed this in music too – from MLTR to Bon Jovi to Bryan Adams to (even sometimes) Rahman, there seems to be a basic tune which is rendered differently at different times and released as a new track, and it sells. Which does make me wonder if even in these so-called hobbies, many of us have become creatures of habit, just like most other spheres of life – including food, people and so on. Comforts are easy that way, keeps the mind away from thinking. Of course, it could be subjective, and you could be on autopilot on some things, and not on others.

    Meanwhile, all this is not to say that others, who are always pushing themselves out of the zone, can get all judgmental about it, but I do wonder whether its a conscious decision to stick to a comfort zone, an inability to break out of it, or not even realising you’re in one. Etymologically, ‘comfort’ means ‘make someone stronger’, but by building that fort around the self, do we become stronger or weaker in the face of life?

    until next time, comfort knocks

  • Playing God

    So, a few days back I had this rather scary thought. What if ‘God’ or ‘collective consciousness’, was a variable?  Depending on the notions and mores of living beings, it would change, continuously. That would probably explain how everything went downhill from whatever is believed to have existed as utopia or paradise, and how it works in cycles. Like a game that adapts to you and your moves.

    Meanwhile, I came across a link that I am yet to fully explore. Maybe you can, and write about your experience in the comments/ your blog. It is titled ‘Ten games that make you think about life‘, and the synopses do make it seem promising. Coincidentally, the first one in the list is ‘Immortall’!

    And while I was writing this, and scanning Google Reader, I came across this link, which talked about a game where Augmented Reality, a new technology that offers a “direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics”, was mashed up with “Conway’s game of life“. Though I’m familiar with AR, I’m still reading up on Conway’s Game of Life and it’s fascinating!!

    From the wiki entry “The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that ‘design’ and ‘organization’ can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analogue of Conway’s Life ‘universe’ extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws governing our own universe.” Essentially, the game of life could’ve been played out without the designer – God.

    Meanwhile, the new game lets users create their own artificial life and then, through augmented reality, see it ‘live out’ in the real world. We have become creators. Does it go from here to a point where in the far away future, a new strange species looks back and wonders who created them, and gets no answer? Is that how the game is played out?

    until next time, a level playing field?

  • Roleplay

    Jagathy Sreekumar, in my opinion, is one of the finest comedians actors to grace the screen. Probably THE finest. Since he’s acted only in Malayalam movies (over 1000 of them), he’s relatively lesser known to non Keralites. But you don’t have to go away, this is not about him or even Malayalam movies or even movies.

    Contrary to his usual on-screen characters, he’s a very serious person in his media interviews. He was once asked why he accepted all the roles that came to him, and why he wasn’t more choosy, especially since he could afford to. Pat came the reply “I’m a professional. Do you think a doctor should be allowed to choose which patients to accept?”The interviewer predictably moved on to easier pastures.

    This was sometime back, but I was reminded of it during the debate on Tendulkar ‘walking’.  (he walked away despite the umpire signaling ‘not out’) Both Jayawardene and Ponting were clear that they’d walk only after they were declared out. Though I have not always been a Tendulkar fan, I have been an ardent admirer for quite a while now, of the player on the field and the person off it.

    So it was quite a difficult question – the morality of a professional (?) ‘walking’ without considering his responsibilities to the team. (forget the expectations of a nation for now) Was he being selfish – keeping his ‘fair play’ image intact? (though Ganguly claimed Sachin hasn’t always ‘walked’)

    While the moral question lingers, I thought I got an insight into Sachin’s behaviour from this amazing article I read thanks to Roshni. It says that Sachin is a bridge, between two eras of cricket, and he realises the responsibility. As a sport, today’s cricket, both on and off the field, is vastly different from what it used to be, and yes, it is no longer just a sport. As the author quotes “The team’s rabid popularity, is a reflection of rising national ambition, of pride in national achievement.” Maybe Sachin realises a bit beyond this too, and is doing his bit to ensure that in the pursuit of success, a right set of ethos is also kept in mind. Playing the game to win, and playing it fair.

    Jagathy, legendary though he is, perhaps has it easier. There are bigger stars around him who are expected to be role models. He can get away with moral absolutism.  Tendulkar probably has the tougher job – as he charts new territories in terms of matches played, runs scored, centuries made, he also has to navigate new grounds in moral integrity, balancing his own stance with the expectations of a team, a nation and still ensuring that he’s a worthy icon in all respects.

    until next time, Godlike

  • Running for eternity

    I must confess that I didn’t like Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays with Morrie” as much as his other book “The Five People you meet in heaven“, but writing anything negative about a non-fiction book such as this is not in good taste, so I refrained from doing a review. I also think that it is not so much a bad book and this takeout is more to do with my evolution than the writing or the concept itself.

    The good thing though is that it does have quite a few nuggets that you can chew on for quite some time. 🙂 This is my attempt to thread together a few. To be precise, three of my favourites.

    At least a couple of times in the second half, Morrie talks about how people run after the next house, vacation, car, job etc because they think that this will grant them the elusive ‘meaning, and how our culture has ‘forced’ people to feel threatened when they stand to lose their materialistic gains. This is what makes money God, and them mean. This is, of course, completely debatable, but I brought this up only for context. It led me to think that how, in infancy and in old age (from several instances I have seen, read about) and perhaps sickness, we are more concerned with needs, and at all times in between, it moves towards wants.

    On a tangent, I remembered the ‘proof of good times’ thought that I’d shared earlier, more than a year back, in ‘Progress Report‘, and how we capture images and notes, sometimes for ourselves, and sometimes for others. Ourselves, for memories, and perhaps posterity, and others, because, I thought ubiquitous social connectivity is perhaps making us inadvertently live a life we want to portray to others. I discovered a nice usage in the book that connected to this thought of eternity attempts “And tapes, like photographs and videos are a desperate attempt to steal something from death’s suitcase“.

    And while on posterity and eternity, the last one, a quote from Henry Adams “A teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops”. I think, in that sense, every being is a teacher, and thus lives on.

    until next time, wednesdays with manuscrypts, okay? 😉

  • 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.