Category: Society & Culture

  • 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 🙂

  • But what do I know?

    Unlike in my other blog, Seth Godin is rarely referenced here. But when I read this post (rant, he says) from him titled “Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so“, I sensed some vague connection with something I’d written a while back.

    Unlike other posts of Godin, whose blog I religiously follow for its ‘food for thought’, I found a smugness to this post – perhaps the rant provides the liberty. But as always, he manages to make a point. However, for a second, I wondered about the irony of this post coming from someone who does not allow comments on his blog. And thus this post.

    It is to be noted that he did not switch off comments just like that, he has valid reasons. Even if one just looks at the scale (1858 people retweeted and 2373 ‘Like’s) and considers  only a certain % commenting, it would tend towards chaotic. But whatever the reasons, he has chosen not to use comments as a channel.

    Ok, lets move on to me now. 🙂 I don’t read business books, however I follow several blogs in my line of work and otherwise. I rely on my Twitter, Reader and (occasionally) Facebook connections to point me to interesting reads. I also use Wikipedia extensively, despite the accusation that crowdsourced content can only be so trustworthy. From all this consumption, I have ‘superficial’ information on a lot of subjects, which make good conversation. This is also because I have way too many interests, and I’m forever in awe of things I don’t easily understand. My interest sometimes wears off after I’m able to bring a subject to my horizons of understanding. Sometimes, a more knowledgeable person corrects me/points me to things he/she thinks might interest me further and whenever I need/want to know more about a subject, I try and use the web’s sources to the fullest.

    But here’s the thing. Once upon a time, I could remember websites in context and add to discussions (offline), but increasingly I rely on delicious, among other things. I’m forced to prioritise my memory thanks to the ton of information out there that I process daily. Ok, that, and age.  🙂 And this is not a problem that will end soon, and its something I keep bringing up here. (Read)

    Time is the new currency, and I increasingly feel that people now react mercilessly to an “I don’t know”. Is that an excuse for people to claim knowledge of things they know nothing about? Maybe not, but perhaps like many other things, it is one of the ways for them to feel accepted and have a sense of belonging. So yes, it might be easy to label it as being deliberately uninformed, but in judging people so, without context and more understanding, we might be falling into the same trap ourselves – about people this time, as opposed to subjects.

    until next time, judge mental capabilities?

  • The wonder eras

    The Lanka trip earlier this year, and specifically the Day 2 visit to Sita Kotuwa was quite an experience. Like I said in the post, its difficult to describe the feeling when one sees evidence that points to the actual existence of characters who were  considered a part of stories and mythology. Its one thing to theorise about what our gods really were, or read  historical perspectives, and another to come face to face with the reality of it. Of course, we could debate that Rama was human, and only considered an incarnation, but if the events in the Ramayana did happen, there is enough ‘godness’ in it for us to still wonder.

    I read ‘The Rozabal Line’ by Ashwin Sanghi recently, which is a fictional story based on the Jesus in Kashmir theory. The author has done considerable research on this, as evidenced by the notes, acknowledgments and references section of the book that spans more than a dozen pages. The domain the book operates in meant that these trails were fascinating, and I plan to follow them online soon.

    Meanwhile, in the book, the author draws parallels to the various messengers of gods who shared a lot of commonalities with Jesus, mostly in terms of events in their lives. They belonged to various cultures and eras before Jesus, thus ‘a great deal of material available to create a story around the historical Jesus Christ’. The existence of Jesus has probably never been in question, as opposed to say Rama/Krishna, but the above, and other things I read in the book, does make him much more human.

    Cut to the present. I read an actress’ comment recently – that she wasn’t on social networking sites because it took away the mystique surrounding her. Fair point, and I had to agree, considering how most actors and ‘celebrities’ in general use the sites to showcase feet of clay. I’m not comparing celebrities to gods, not yet, but in the eras before hyper communication tools, and further back, before ubiquitous magazines and television, there was probably more fiction than fact built around celebrities. The persona overshadowed the person. But now, they seem to be just regular people. Not that they aren’t that, but its more in-your-face.

    And thus I wonder, about the gods of yore. In those times, news got around much slower, and it was perhaps easier for legends to be born and for facts to be coated liberally with fiction. It was also perhaps easier to believe. So when I see images and statues of Jesus these days, I wonder what the real story and who the real person was.

    Ashwin Sanghi took 2 years of reading and 18 months of writing to complete this book. You see, the other thrill of ‘The Rozabal Line’ was having a conversation with its author, while I was reading it. Wonders never cease. 🙂

    until next time, acts of faith

  • 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.

  • Crowded Out

    At restaurants, in movie halls, in malls, I sometimes come across people who’re there all by themselves. Not the corporate warrior catching a quick lunch, or the guy catching a movie in a multiplex to kill time, or the husband who got lost while his wife concentrated on the shopping, but the people who look like they wished they had someone to share the moments with.

    I see them furtively glance at the other tables and people, as though trying to steal a vicarious experience. I sometimes wonder how they came to be that way – are they introverts who never managed to get out of their own company, or people who found their partners or soulmates, and lost them midway to life, or did they make a choice of being alone, only to regret it much later in life.

    And then there’s the flip side too. Happened to see Robin Williams’ “World’s Greatest Dad” recently, and was reminded of that. While I agree that ‘lonely’ and ‘alone’ are not the same, I quite liked this line from the movie

    “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.”

    In a hyper connected world, with its own sets of cliques and norms and validations and more often than not, a lack of compassion, that is a thought I can relate to. Thankfully, the movie’s soundtrack offers a solution 🙂

    I’ll say who cares
    When people stare
    I will make myself invisible
    Yes I will

    Invisible – Bruce Hornsby

    until next time, virtual immaterialism 🙂