Tag: objectivity

  • 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….

  • Brands – Maturity, Transparency, Objectivity

    On the day that gay sex was made legal in India, I had wondered aloud on Twitter, whether condom brands like KS, Moods or even a deo brand like Axe – whose communication is all about attracting people (the female gender so far, since its a deo for men) – would use the occasion to provide a bit of a twist in their standard advertisements. As expected, none of them did. Which led me to wonder on the maturity of audiences and those of brands. (‘maturity’ for the lack of a better word, a more elaborate description follows)

    From an experience in an earlier place of work, when we had played on the visuals of Sai Baba and Jimi Hendrix and talked about music and religion, I have seen the fear that marketers have about how the consumer will react to a communication that could be taken as offbeat. In the case above, one could argue about hurting sentiments of followers (Sai Baba’s, according to the client, Hendrix’, worried the copywriter 😀 ), but there really wasn’t anything derogatory. Now that may be a subjective reaction, so let’s go back to the initial example. I’m reasonably sure that even if KS/Moods/Axe had thought of this, they might have decided not to pursue it.

    Is that because of a simple positioning mismatch that they perceive, or is it a fear to push the boundaries, of what they perceive as acceptable to their audience? Something that goes against the image they have created. But, as we keep discussing here, consumers are moving on. They talk to each other, and share their experiences about the brand, which may or may not work in advantage of the brand.

    Meanwhile, I recently read an article in the New York magazine, which got me thinking quite a bit on this subject. The article was titled ‘Say Everything‘, and talked about what the author perceived to be the largest generation gap since the hippie generation. While the extreme scenarios outlined in the article- of the kind of photos and complete transparency, of thinking of themselves as having an audience, of archiving their adolescence, of having a thicker skin than earlier generations- may not be what the average youth indulges in in his community, it does point to a generation which is growing increasingly uninhibited with sharing more and more of themselves with others on the net. The author points out that with surveillance cameras, transaction tracking etc becoming the norm, this complete transparency approach might be a saner route.

    In fact aren’t FB/Twitter status updates, and even online journals that many in my generation indulge in, also cases of living for an audience? The details of what they share might vary when compared to a younger user set, but this seems to be a trend that may not be scaled back, and in all possibilities, would increase. With the social tools that keep improving the ways to communicate, and share, can brands afford to cling to the kind of communication that they are used to delivering to the audience?

    In another article I read, YouTube blogger Kristina Horner, who was criticised for working with Ford Fiesta, makes a wonderfully simple, yet passionate argument that for “both bloggers and brands to be successful they need to accept that traditional advertising is not-effective (and even rejected) and that publishers like Kristina can find a win-win situation where a brand supports their work without compromise.”

    Would being completely transparent (yes, that is a bit of a redundancy, i guess) ensure that brands get a fair deal from the people they communicate to? Like I read in another context, would transparency fulfill the function that objectivity is supposed to?  But as always, transparency is not something that can operate only in communication, it moves to product, and many other functions within the organisation. So, as more and more consumers realise what Kristina has articulated so well, shouldn’t brands also take some initiative in changing themselves, and collaborating with their consumers?  That would take some maturity, i guess. 🙂

    until next time, audible audiences

    PS. For those missing the Tool Aid that is the blog’s staple diet, here are a few interesting reads

    The Sysomos in depth Twitter study that places India in the top 10 countries in which Twitter has been growing.

    The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing report.

    The Wetpaint/ Altimeter list of the world’s most engaging brands, and how there might be a link between engagement and financial performance

  • Imago

    That I worship Bill Watterson and simply adore Calvin & Hobbes is not a secret. In fact, it mostly irritates people when i quote from that unique mix of humour/sarcasm/wit and profundity. But no, this is not a gushing post. A few days back, when a friend was talking about her kids, I told her to be thankful that they weren’t like Calvin. She said one of them does have imaginary friends. I am not sure about kids these days, but I simply cannot remember any imaginary friends I might have had in my childhood. To be very fair to everyone concerned, I am quite befuddled even when it comes to recognising real friends of that era and erm, a few eras later too.

    But I wonder about the character of these childhood imaginary friends, and why they exist. Is it loneliness? Considering the minimal baggage that we have at that young age, are they confidants of doubts and thoughts that we think we can’t share with others, even if they are of the same age? Calvin has his club, theories about society and education, ‘scientific experiments’ etc which he shared with Hobbes. Is it because he felt that he would be laughed at, if he shared them with others?  Hobbes usually attempts to give him a more mature perspective on all the stuff he discusses. I’d like to ask the kids with imaginary friends about the conversations. 🙂

    Maybe, as we grow up, our baggage grows and as we conform to the norms around us, we figure out that imaginary friends have to go? Or it is perhaps a need that gets filled or forgotten about amongst other priorities, as we acquire new real people – friends, relatives or any other relationships along the way, and maybe figure out that we can share different things with different people, and not have to reveal ourselves totally to everyone? And that takes away the reason for having an imaginary friend to whom we confide all?

    Real people bring their own baggage, they perhaps shield us a bit, and tell us things that we want to hear. They perhaps validate our beliefs and thoughts and inferences, either because they don’t want to be the people who deliver the bad news or they don’t care enough. Of course, I am not taking away anything from the good friends that we manage to get, if we are lucky enough – the conscience keepers. But they’re human too, and their objectivity would waver, they’d have their biases. Perhaps, we should build an imaginary friend all over again, our own objective self, one which can show our own prejudices without fear of retribution.

    until next time, object of my imaginary attention 🙂

  • Views

    …and we lament, ‘Oh, he has changed’, without pausing to consider the objectivity of the statement. We like people to stay whoever they have been so long, because it then means we don’t have to alter the patterns we have set for them, and when, in our view, they alter themselves even a wee bit, we frown, and even that small changes causes a butterfly effect on the set of patterns, however irrelevant they might be to the particular change.

    And that was what i discovered the last time I checked – ‘our view’. In many cases, it may not be the person that changes, but only our view of him. Our views, which change constantly as a result of all the experiences we keep having. Our views, which keep adding layer after layer, filter after filter,so that the tint that we see once may never be seen again.That perhaps is why the youth are not able to have a child like innocence in their perspectives, and the middle aged can never find their youthful exuberance in their views, and so on…

    And so, the next time, i say ‘You have changed’, I shall perhaps do a quick review of what really has changed.


    until next time, next change