Tag: Mo

  • MeMo

    It’s been a while, but that’s the way it always has been with us. I am posting this on a day when I know I’d have heard from you. Some years you’d call, some years you’d WhatsApp, and the last couple of years, you took to Twitter just so you could needle me.

    Twitter was our playground. We had our own language, I remember people getting irritated by it! I was always in awe of you, and your sublime words and ideas. It didn’t begin on Twitter though, it began with a comment on a blog. But it did end on Twitter, and it speaks about how out of touch I was, that I got to know when someone added me to a conversation.

    On that day, many people reached out to me, asking me if I was ok. I was, but I wasn’t, and ironically, I felt you’d be the only person who could understand what I was going through.  But I went through the motions – I tweeted about you, retweeted those posts about you, and signalled normalcy. (more…)

  • Gulp fiction

    I’m quite a huge fan of Heroes and was quite sad to see Season 4 end, more so than normal season finales, because after quite a while, there was a villain that I could really empathise with.  Robert Knepper as Samuel Sullivan just rocked. Though the villainy is manifested in his selfish desire to become more powerful, there was something in his arguments that made me forget it at regular intervals. To give you some context, the entire series revolves around people with special abilities (think X-Men). This season, mostly through Knepper’s character- Samuel, emphasised a lot on how society treats such people. Samuel’s desperation to belong (and later make normal people respect his kind) is expressed very well in his conversation with another character with abilities, Claire.

    “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you”, says Claire, quoting Sartre.

    “I always thought freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose”, counters Samuel, without acknowledging “Me and Bobby McGee” 🙂

    The urge to belong and the pain of being different. Mo wrote a post recently on being chided for missing a reference in a conversation. A reference to Pulp Fiction.  At a broader level its also a small commentary about our consumption of popular culture, and second had experiences. Its a sentiment I share – that somehow the consumption of popular and even off beat culture and getting the respective references is the benchmark for judging a person. So, to get bombarded with “haven’t you seen/read/eaten.. don’t you know..” is now a common thing. Like I told her, thanks to everyone becoming media, C+ is actually a great grade, considering the noise.

    In some ways, I felt it also throws up our need for validation. The consumption and the opinions we have on that decide the kind of role we land in our immediate crowd, and now, the larger world. From “Govinda movies??!!” and “MLTR is why I go away from you” to “Eww, you’re still on Orkut?! .. Omigod, how can you play Farmville??”,  this judgment happens all the time  🙂

    At times, the validation is for others and their expectations, and at times for the self. In many ways, I think its like some gladiator fight where a person is just fighting himself, and the expectations he has set. The audience could be the self, or others. If its the latter, its all okay so long as the person conforms to a broadly accepted set of norms within the crowd.Even if one wants to get out of it, its difficult. Its difficult to sever the connection between a validation that is given to one without asking and the ties that one would want with other humans. 🙂

    In Heroes, Claire’s character’s ability is instant regeneration. Break a bone, receive a bullet wound, and she heals instantly. In the last scene of season 4, she throws herself from the top of a Ferris wheel, lands on the ground all broken up, and immediately heals, all in front of a waiting media crew. An open challenge to society to accept her the way she is. And another character says “Its a brave new world”. To me, it was a statement of hope, one that will get out of a TV show that’s part of popular culture, and enter the real world.

    But meanwhile, for now, until the pill happens, the moment one goes beyond what can be immediately understood, and what provides a point of reference, one has to be ready for “And I will strike upon thee… “:D

    until next time, reverence to reference 🙂

  • Social Obligations

    Sometime back, I had this conversation with Surekha. Let me give you the context. I subscribe to a lot of sites on Google Reader, and therefore find a lot of links that I want to share. I end up sharing them – on Reader itself, where i can also ‘Like’ it, on Twitter, rarely on FB, many times on delicious. I also use many of these links for the posts on my other blog. Surekha’s  observation was that I was stingy with praise. I, as is my wont, proceeded to defend myself. I said that since my sharing had multiple layers and filters, the very fact that I shared it on Twitter was a praise in itself. She called me elitist (which, after a recent post, is almost as insulting to me as being called a vegetarian :p) 😀 From where she’s looking, she’s right, and its a valid perspective, though I wouldn’t admit it then. 😀

    It made me think about how I share links. Now, I’m not sure if this is retrofit rationalisation or an inbuilt mechanism. In my chat with Surekha I had mentioned that my varied interests meant that what I considered a ‘Good Read’ might be a lousy read for someone not interested in the subject. I wonder now, if my binary kind of approach to things (0 or 1, extremes) coupled with my objectivity fixation makes me just share something without an opinion, so that the person who reads is without the baggage of my bias, good or bad.

    Sometime back, after watching the stream for a while, and reading opinions on a subject, I asked Mo, “post this generation,do you think anyone will know there is a ‘don’t like it,don’t use it’ option? wouldn’t they feel obliged to comment? :|”.  I felt that, what blogging started, microblogging has accelerated. From books and places and events to personal traits – not just of celebrities, but of other users’, everything finds its way into the stream, the digital version of the collective consciousness. To corrupt the current Videocon line “We is the new me”. Our ‘stream world’ and all its inhabitants seem extensions of ourselves, a huge canvas of vicarious living. Do many of us feel obliged to share our opinion in real time, some kind of pressure to constantly contribute, and so we comment on everything we can lay hands on?

    In this sharing blitz, do we spare a thought for the object of our comment? Specifically people. With real time, opinions are being formed in minutes. Yes, everyone is entitled to one, but does it also mean we become trigger-happy? When we stick labels, when we judge, do we think of the effort/thought/perspective of the person at the other end? (those on Twitter, think #mpartha, #princesssheeba…I must say, i confess to some silly work on the latter) As we have more listeners, do we feel obliged to pass judgment and evolve into what others would be impressed with/like? Is that why people change when they become popular on say, twitter? It happens in real life too – this modeling of self based on the audience, but in real life, its difficult to enter the streams of thousands of people. With each of us getting a microphone, I wonder if we have entered ourselves unwittingly into a new form of rat race, in which the casualty is compassion and consideration for others?

    until next time, this is an opinion too 🙂