Category: Society & Culture

  • A converging life

    The year was 1993, and at least for the next 4-5 years during which I actively played the game, I was hard at work trying to replicate it every time I bowled. Such was the magic of The Ball of the Century. I don’t even watch cricket now, and yet, I could sense my own excitement when I showed the clip to D.

    No wonder it came up in an evening with friends soon after. 40-something year olds who are still at war with the phrase ‘middle age’. We talked about Warne and how everyone was shocked – after all he was only 52. In the context of cardiovascular diseases, I think 40s are the new 60s, mostly courtesy a drastic shift in lifestyles. And that’s when it also struck me that all our celebrity crushes and role models are entering the second half, if not already well into it. In them, we see our own epochs. They are a part of us, and their age or agelessness have started defining us by holding up a now uncomfortable mirror for us. When health events happen to them, or when they pass on, or they retire (like Shahid Afridi at 18), we feel the spectre of old age. And along with that, the grip of our own mortality tightening. We’re watching the clock and conscious of time.* Or maybe it’s just me.

    But let’s not get morbid. While Simone de Beauvoir called ‘elderhood’ the ‘crusher’ of humankind – with our own biology and expectations of ourselves, and society’s different manifestations of ageism, she also believed that it is an opportunity to turn to ourselves, to be more responsive to our own needs, and less obliged to other people.** And hey, we still have mid-life crises, and the thrashing around for relevance and meaning. Also, apparently, in a happiness vs age graph, the 50s are when the curve begins its upward journey towards making a smile.

    But yes, the series of undulating hills that I wrote about in a post a while ago are certainly coming up. And while The Lincoln Highway is not my favourite Amor Towles book, two pages in it, when Abacus Abernathy weighs his life, were magic to me. I see no way to top that, so I’ll just leave you with it.

    What an extraordinary passage were those first years in Manhattan! When Abacus experienced firsthand the omnivalent, omnipresent, omnifarious widening that is life.

    Or rather, that is the first half of life.

    When did the change come? When did the outer limits of his world turn their corner and begin moving inexorably toward their terminal convergence?

    Abacus had no idea.

    Not long after his children had grown and moved on, perhaps. Certainly, before Polly died. Yes, it was likely at some point during those years when, without their knowing it, her time had begun to run out while he, in the so-called prime of life, went blithely on about his business.

    The manner in which the convergence takes you by surprise, that is the cruelest part. And yet it’s almost unavoidable. For at the moment when the turning begins, the two opposing rays of your life are so far from each other you could never discern the change in their trajectory. And in those first years, as the rays begin to angle inward, the world still seems so open, you have no reason to suspect its diminishment.

    But one day, one day years after the convergence has begun, you cannot only sense the inward trajectory of the walls, you can begin to see the terminal point in the offing even as the terrain that remains ​before you​ begins to shrink at an accelerating pace.

    In those golden years of his late twenties, shortly after arriving in New York, Abacus had made three great friends. Two men and a woman, they were the hardiest of companions, fellow adventurers of the mind and spirit. Side by side, they had navigated the waters of life​ ​with a reasonable diligence and their fair share of aplomb. But in just these last five years, the first had been stricken with blindness, the second with emphysema, and the third with dementia. How varied their lot, you might be tempted to observe: the loss of sight, of lung capacity, of cognition.

    When in reality, the three infirmities amount to the same sentence: the narrowing of life at the far tip of the diamond. Step by step, the stomping grounds of these friends had shrunk from the world itself, to their country, to their county, to their home, and finally to a single room where, blinded, breathless, forgetful, they are destined to end their days.Though Abacus had no infirmities to speak of yet, his world too was shrinking. He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb. 

    *Trivia: It has been a decade since Gangnam Style became a phenomenon, two decades since Sourav briefly became Salman at Lord’s, 25 years since Diana died, Arundhati Roy got a Booker, the release of Hanson’s mmBop, Aqua’s Barbie Girl, and Titanic, and 30 years since Basic Instinct released, and Babri Masjid was demolished.

    ** Simone de Beauvoir recommends we fight for ourselves as we age

  • An IG Story*

    *Cheap thrills: Instant Gratification Story sounded less cool

    More than half a dozen years ago, in a Guardian article with bullet points fired against Powerpoint, Andrew Smith astutely noted that ‘In this century, it seems to me, our greatest enemy will not be drones or Isis or perhaps even climate change: it will be convenience.‘ We are now so deep into the convenience era that this would be met with ‘What’s wrong with convenience?’ Dennis Perkins, in a Vox article on video stores, had provided the answer – ‘The victim of convenience is conscious choice.‘

    I was reminded of this by the venture capital funded ‘who can deliver grocery fastest?’ pi**ing contest happening on Indian roads. I don’t know about the rules of venture capital, but road rules are definitely being rewritten by the delivery boys. Wrong-side riding, simultaneous road-screen navigation and so on. But that’s a whole different story.

    This is not just an India phenomenon. In its 2022 Media trends report, Dentsu has at least two points covering it – Omnichannel Everything (p9) and the Bring-it-to-me economy (p11). From Netflix to grocery and every consumption in between, these two trends rule.

    As Kavi notes in It’s too soon to say, our priorities are increasingly immediate over long-term. In everything from company results (QoQ) to bulking up with steroids to climate change. In a subsequent post, he continues this line of thought of us over indexing speed and time, and notes that this comes at a cost (and provides a useful framework to evaluate this for self). Intentionality is key, and this aligns well with my thoughts in the context of freedom.

    In a previous post – Default in our stars – I had written on the journey from Netflix’s Shuffle Play to the surveillance capitalist creation and exploitation of our behaviours. On the way, there are effects at an individual and societal level, including the loss of learning and the faculty to create and debate shared understandings.

    Increasingly, the convenience-based thinking and decision-making wiring that powers instant grocery delivery has started manifesting everywhere else. Politics was something I had pointed out around 4 years ago – In Other Fake news. As nuance does a speed-walk towards extinction, everything from the side you choose on Kim vs Kanye to pro-vax or no-vax is an us-vs-them all-out war. This is the meta level play of what Farnam Street calls The Small Steps of Giant leaps. Small choices on small things gradually removing the ability to think independently, form a point of view, debate it out with those who offer a counter-opinion, and replacing it with easy heuristics on which side to choose. When I think about how our species has advanced because of planning, sharing ideas, and finding ways to work towards them, I wonder if these are in some way the Chesterton fences of the mind that we are systematically removing.

    A related effect is the increasing inability to even conceptually think in years and decades. This has a disproportionate impact on two of the most important areas in life – health and wealth, or rather Insta-slim and Insta-rich. The unfair advantage of being able to think in decades on both is unfortunately lost to vast swathes of people once the instant gratification wiring takes hold. To quote from Farnam Street again, we win the moment at the cost of the decade. What’s more, one of the main ways to get this perspective – acquiring knowledge if not wisdom from those who have spent the time and effort isn’t spared either – we have 15 minute book summaries too. Zooming out, I wonder how much of narrative control we have already ceded.* How will one ever know!

    While cause and effect are still hazy, in my mind there is indeed a correlation between this instant gratification and being on stage and under scrutiny all the while. The mirror has been replaced by a selfie camera, and you can imagine what that would do to reflections!

    *Related Read: Because your algorithm says so

  • The constraints on freedom

    The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow was in my long list of favourite reads in 2021. It would have been in the top 10 if it weren’t for my Arundhati Roy bias, because it gave me at least a couple of fundamental perspective shifts.

    The first is at an information level. The book is primarily a rebuttal of what now looks like a simplistic and linear way of looking at human history. The two Davids go up against the Goliath of the contemporary civilisation narrative that comes out in practically every book that even briefly touches upon the evolution of our species. This popular narrative can be (simplistically) summarised by three of my favourite books – Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and the two-part Political Order series by Francis Fukuyama. We were foragers until wheat domesticated us (as Harari would say), which led to societal hierarchies as we now see it. To massively paraphrase Fukuyama’s books, from various kinds of states (governance styles), we then evolved into preferring liberal democracy through the interplay of the state, rule of law, accountable government and social mobilisation, idea legitimacy, and economic development. Both Harari and Fukuyama have been instrumental in helping me understand what we could call ‘the system of the world’. (borrowed from a Neal Stephenson trilogy).

    But in this book, Graeber and Wengrow use archaeological evidence to show how these broad strokes don’t do justice to the experiments and trade-offs that many societies played with in farming, property, democracy and thus civilisation as we know it. It is far more nuanced, and in doing that, bring up the freedom that our ancestors had.

    Which brings me to the second shift. This insight, while was stated in a broad human context, also hit close to home. Has civilisation, they ask, caused us to lose what they see as our three basic freedoms – the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? It’s something to ponder over at a personal level. Liberal democracies might tom-tom freedom as a non-negotiable and enshrine it in their constitution, but ‘civil society’ and its economics would probably crumble if we actually had these freedoms. As I tweeted, The book made me realise even more that the freedom the individual needs and the structure that society wants will always be at odds. The differences are of degree not of kind.

    It’s when I think about it that I realise how much we have normalised the loss of these freedoms at a societal and an individual level. Why is anyone obliged to obey anyone else? I realise I’d be ok with an answer that has some emotion as the primary reason, but the most likely answer is power – physical or monetary. Between state and corporations, a duopoly exists on this. But the tyranny is rampant in daily lives too. House help, people being turned away from public parks, expectations of service staff everywhere. The list can go on.

    Why can’t we simply go anywhere else? Beyond money, the lines that we have drawn on paper get translated into checkposts and immigration counters, and crossing them is now a privilege. The lines aren’t natural, but try crossing them without the necessary paperwork. And even if you manage somehow, you will live in constant fear of being thrown out. It’s not that easy to go someplace else.

    Between these two losses, the freedom to change one’s social arrangements is pretty much taken out of play. Who one is (identity) and what one does and where, are very difficult to change. Wake up, go to work, get paid, use the money to add to cart, travel, entertainment. Rinse, repeat. Yes, we all have choices, but society’s choice architecture also bias our decision-making.

    How the hell did basic freedoms become a privilege? How did the ‘civil society’ we traded it for go rogue and become tyrannical? I hope to get a better understanding through the books I read this year. How does this manifest in my own life, and what can I do to help myself and at least a few others become a little more free? That’s a life’s work, and a different post!

  • An incognito good life

    For a particular generation, Wet Wet Wet’s “Love is all around” from the soundtrack of “Four Weddings And A Funeral” is a special song. And thus, catching Andie MacDowell (yes yes, Sex, Lies, and Videotape too) in Maid was a pleasant surprise. She plays Paula, mother to Alex, played by her real-life daughter Margaret Qualley, and grandmother to Maddy, Alex’s daughter.

    Paula is an artist, reasonably disconnected from reality. Probably her way of coping with the unpleasant things that happened earlier in her life. In Episode 3 (Sea Glass), we see her preparing for an art show. (Minor spoiler ahead) When Alex (who did a lot of heavy lifting literally and otherwise) drives her to the gallery, it turns out there is no show. Paula had completely misread some charitable comments made by the curator! She might have been a flavour at some point, but is now middling, at best.

    At dinner on the same day, Paula and Alex squabble, with Paula delivering a low blow. But the next day, when Alex returns to her (temporary) home in the evening, she finds that Paula was there earlier, and had painted a wall mural for Maddy. Maddy gets all giggly and excited.

    And all that was one part of the context. The second part is what I have been reading in ‘Lives of the Stoics‘, around the same time. ‘We naturally care what people think of us; we don’t want to seem too different, so we acquire the same tastes as everyone else. We accept what the crowd does so the crowd will accept us. But in doing this, we weaken ourselves. We compromise, often without knowing it; we allow ourselves to be bought – without even the benefit of getting paid for it.‘ 

    I thought about it in the context of Paula’s exhibition vs mural. Exhibiting one’s expressions (art) to a crowd which is seemingly interested in such things vs delighting her daughter and grand-daughter. I understand it does not always have to be an either-or, but I think we subconsciously optimise for one or the other, and neurons wire together etc.

    As I have written before, when the ‘why’ of creation changes, so does the ‘what’. And there are many slices to this. For instance, doing something because it gives me joy vs doing it for validation from ‘Instafam’ or Tweeps. And not just validation, but validation at scale – ‘We have created a world where we reward the manipulation of quantities more than the appreciation of qualities.’ ~ Roger L. Martin. There is another slice, more on that later.

    For some time now, I have consciously tried to avoid this direction, and instead, focused on a different path. From experience, it is a matter of training one’s mind, and being mindful of the distractions. Easier said than done, especially when a staged presence has a direct implication on things like employability. But possible.

    ‘For me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets.‘ ~ Toni Morrison. For instance, something I am grateful for is the ability to make people laugh. Not a prepared standup act, but something on the spur of the moment, with a bunch of contexts built in. These days, when I am able to make D laugh, I consider the day a success. I also find the opportunity to make friends and colleagues smile rewarding.

    Not that I don’t share random wordplay on Twitter, or don’t find validation pleasing, but I am increasingly becoming ok not getting it either. Just being able to do it makes me happy. ‘To have but not want, to enjoy without needing.’ 

    And then there is the other slice. The work on this continues, but that’s another post.

  • Subjective Objectification

    D and I watched Crime Stories: India Detectives on Netflix a few days after it was released. The episode that saddened both of us was “Dying for Protection”, which was based on the murder of a sex worker. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be the subject of discussion on a Saturday late evening, which these days are spent on the balcony, in the company of spirits, watching the sun and the world part ways. Yes, that is privilege.

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