I wonder who it was that first made the diabolical switch for the meaning versus the origins. The sirens were originally seductive creatures calling lonely sailors to an imminent death by wrecking over the rocks. While their intent was nefarious, the songs themselves and the creatures themselves had to have been alluring. Cut to the modern age, when sirens sound anything but attractive. The ambulance's whine, the fire-engine's high pitched croak, the air raid's insistent warning - are all sounds which cannot be ignored but definitely not something that draws the listener towards them. In borrowing words from Greek mythology, this particular one suffered a cruel modification. Even if preparing for doom, why can't the music and/or sounds be kept happy?
The first is the original Indian powerbike. Well thought-through product marketing by Bajaj targeting an attention hungry new India launched its sales into orbit in the early 2000s. Thanks to the Pulsar, motorcycles were not about getting from point A to point B but more about how you felt on the way. That it was not a 1950s design bolted onto a 1970s leaky engine helped. An 18-year old Bajaj Pulsar is still a Bajaj Pulsar.
The second is an orange dream vetted across the deserts of Dakar and its cousins in different continents. The full form of KTM may be beyond the linguistic capabilities of most of its customers but Kronreif & Trunkenpolz Mattighofen sure did know how to make a motorcycle. The growl putter of the KTM Duke's engine divides opinion viciously as does its behaviour in traffic. Nobody likes being overtaken by an orange blur but some do take pleasure in the existence of such manoeuvrability.
Possessing both in a single stable might seem unnecessary but practicality wasn't the first concern of any motorcyclist's life anyway. For that, there will always be the public bus.
Everyone loves pirates. That much is clear. That excludes those they may have looted and/or killed. Maybe. Because the outlaw is default cool and forever story worthy. And for a while, rich and influential too. Compared to those killjoy enforcers, grim men with the grim task of compliance, pirates are forever tagged as the fun ones.
A-Frame houses more suitable for the Swiss Alps find themselves far from home. There is of course the cursory connection of mountain cultures binding high living folks from Europe to those of Asia. To me, it is just a photogenic photo opportunitybut the urge to design a barrage-side tourist lodge on the lines of Swiss chalets is beyond my understanding. Along the edges of the Asan Barrage where thousands of winged European tourists congregate, I have always found this tourist lodge devoid of tourists of any sort. While the chai and pakoda continue to be good each year, I can see the disuse creep in slowly but surely. In the lap of the Himalayas, an attempt to become a tourist magnet seems to have gone wrong. One suspects that originality of solution was not the priority here but it was blind replication.
Much of the past year has been spent in experimentation with AI. As an early adopter of publicly available AI, I have seen it go from powerful to muted and to powerful again. As many YouTube videos also insist calling it Intelligence only because it produces seemingly intelligent output is misplaced. Predicting is not the same as creating and as of now the code is doing the former, albeit very well.
In many ways, AI does with content what I do when I am cooking. I know the ingredients and the order they should go in. I know the time splits for each of those components to be heated, fried or boiled. What I produce looks a reasonable approximation of what the final output should look like. But since I am doing the task mechanically, you can always taste the difference - that final quality of the end product from a real person invested in the process as opposed to me.
This happens to be a rant about something so commonplace that it firmly establishes me amongst the minority of minorities. But I have never been able to integrate myself with the idea of taking selfies. Yes, that ubiquitous posing into a camera that you yourself are holding. That, to me, borders on the farthest spectrum of narcissism and yet it is a viral infection of a scale that even cinematic zombie infestations can't hold a candle to.
How important is it really to be documented at a place you are visiting, an occasion that you are attending or to establish that you brush your teeth by posing with your toothbrush? And aside from the last occasion, how difficult is it to ask someone else in attendance to take that picture of you? I agree with Sudha Murty when she says that she had long stopped travelling with a camera as it interfered with her experience of a place. Serial selfie-takers take up that disconnection one level higher by filling their digital and mental galleries with infinite photos of themselves.
Be present in the moment. Appreciate what you have. An attitude of gratitude. Truisms with a history of overuse and abuse are a dime or anna a dozen and if anything, their usage seems to be only rising. There is comfort in the familiar and to criticize cliché is to risk facing reverse snobbery. We must be mindful of the hurt sentiments of those who feel excluded by any subversion of what is expected. In an age of public performance, pandering to the watching crowds is not selling out, it is the only path to engagement.
Among the various ways that language preserves bits of our past is through turns of phrase that jump centuries and classes. That art has long been supported by the privileged is no secret and without the largesse of the nobility, many a poet, painter and the occasional philosopher would not have had the time to produce what they did. Naturally, much of their art acknowledged the greatness of their patrons often overlooking their sordid realities. Songs composed in their honour therefore were the norm, not anomalies. Carried through in that spirit, 'unsung' continues to be used for overlooked contributors whose efforts were never appreciated in a manner or time period which could have helped them find success or acclaim.
In that league of extraordinary people fall the group of people locally called 'tihadi' in Uttarakhand. Daily wage earners ready to be recruited on a daily basis for whatever odd jobs that a neighbourhood required. Here in the outskirts of Dehradun too, you would see milling around in the dozens near a designated location at 08:00 AM looking for employment in this rapidly urbanizing part of town. In a quest to clean up invasive vegetation from our campus lake, it is this pool of readily available handymen that we drew from to eventually accomplish the herculean task of ridding ourselves of our Central American overstaying guests. The so-called water lettuce or Pistia had gorged itself on the nutrients of our lake and taken up residence covering every patch of water available. Our office softened backs were more than ready to give up after the first few buckets of removal. It was due to and only due to the engagement of these relentless extractors that the tons of green goblins could be dumped out of the water.
11th December 2022, Dehradun
Wintering ducks and itinerant birdwatchers have them to thank for getting their favourite haunt back. They, on the other hand, are back again at the designated location at 08:00 AM hoping that the next day or days will put some money in their hands, some to feed themselves and the remainder to send on to their families back home in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar or Bengal. Problems get fixed, buildings go up and gates get hinged by these very hands but the luxury of choosing to not do anything may never be in their fate.
There was a time when shouting out to the universe was not compulsory. After painstakingly liking and disliking songs for years on Amazon Prime, I have decided to go the other way. This brings back the randomness in the algorithm and opens paths to unknown destinations. A classical cover, purely instrumental, of Linkin Park's "Numb" has my Like finger itching again, partly a responsibility to fulfill, partly a boast of my eclectic tastes in music. I resist but I am not sure if the world cares. I chose to Air Like, keeping the algorithm at bay.
देहरादून में आए हुए मुझे भी अब 8 साल हो गए और मैं उस मुकाम पे पहुंच चुका हूं कि मेरे आने के बाद कितने बदलाव आए हैं, उन पर अपने विचार रख सकूं। यहां के जंगल, पास के पहाड़ और लुभावना मौसम इसे खास बनाते हैं और मेरे रहते-रहते ही इनमें मैंने काफी बदलाव देखे हैं। जो पहले से ही देहरादून में हैं, उन्होंने तो और भी ज्यादा फर्क देखा होगा। बाकी स्थानीय लोगों के बातचीत में अक्सर इस अनचाहे परिवर्तन की सारा जिम्मेदारी "बाहरवालों" पे ठोप दी जाती है और इस पर कुछ हद तक सहमति भी की जा सकती है। लेकिन जरा और सोचूं तो ख्याल आता है कि मैं भी तो बाहरवाला ही हूं। पर्यावरण से जुड़ा काम जरूर करता हूं पर इस दोषारोपण के खेल में मैं भी दोषियों के कटघरे में ही खड़ा हूं।
Perspective is a powerful thing. It can turn the dire into desire and hopelessness into certainty. When heading out to watch a documentary like the Nilgiris in the company of fellow idealists who curse and dream in the same breath, it is not difficult to spot the dissonance. On one hand will be the spectacular footage of wildlife projected onto the magnificence of a full size movie hall, on the other will be the knowledge that even as we watch in the AC-cooled dark confines of a decidedly environmentally harmful supermall, the actual subjects of the film would be that much further on the path to obsolescence through a combination of greed and antipathy. We want to enjoy the sights and sounds of the wild in the comfort of our urban forts but how many of us would be there on the ground when it is required to take a stand against the JCBs?
Of course, there is the faint flickering hope that amongst the thousands who pay their way to this recorded spectacle of nature’s bounty, a handful of these observers may be impelled to do more than that. This tiny minority of a minority will always be in short supply as bringing change requires mad devotion to the cause, otherwise often left at the mercy of important sounding words urging actions that never materialize. Changemakers will always account for only a minuscule proportion of the population, but the pretty on-screen story might just inspire them to take on the bad and confront the ugly truth yet.
I subscribe to two newspapers just so that I can stay off social media trends and focus on meatier issues but as it happens, those very newspapers often report about aforementioned trends. This time though, those trends have a fascinating intersection with history, so couldn't resist writing about it.
The reporter tells me of a trend of not-so-cute dolls by a Hong Kong designer which go by the name Labubu whose designs seem to be now inspired by a 1st millennium BCE Mesopotamian demonic figure Pazuzu. Besides the rather memorable names of both those trends, it is a good reflection of the fact that bored humans over the rather brief history of our species have always liked a good scare. Even as social media algorithms press all sorts of buttons on rage, fear, love and lust, it is good to see social media talk about stuff from a few thousand years ago as opposed to, say, only-a-90s-kid-would-know sort of non-historic nonsensical nostalgia.
I, on the other hand, when I read of Pazuzu's historical role - a defender against demons being the mean demon that he is - I am forced to think of all the painted "Buri Nazar Waalein Teraa Muuh Kaalaa" [Sort of translating to - Envious people, may infamy pursue you] demons I have grown seeing on the backs of trucks in India. Not that I grew up on the highways of India, mind you, but the route to my school required us traverse a stretch of the same for a good decade or so. In houses in Uttarakhand, the same envy-busting demon's face now in clay molded form glares off newly built houses in my neighbourhood. Between the Middle Eastern Pazuzu and the far-eastern Labubu, I guess we should be happy to have our own version of what seems to be a trend that will never go out of fashion.
Old is slow. Old is stagnant. Markers of growth are shiny and cold. Air-conditioned spaces fuelling the furnace outside. That doesn't quite matter because if we all make enough money, we can always shift to another planet. Thoughts on the past are productive time lost. New ideas, new visions. Onwards and upwards. Let the rust and the vines find somewhere else to live. Preferably on pages of diaries and in dystopian TV series. While selling dreams of an imaginary perfect past, let's paint over all the real imperfections - those wandering steps that brought us here that could yet give us pause to wonder what exactly is the rush?
Expectations are how the devil gets his dues. If you set about fulfilling other people's expectations of you, your own expectations of yourself are likely to take a backseat. On the flip side, meeting your own expectations of yourself is not enough either. They leave you vulnerable to failing the expectations of what others think you should be.
This Sunday's Indian Express article makes a pitch for not seeking perfection and the ability to revel in the scruffiness of being. A noble cause and saver of anxiety pill bills that is. In seeking to hide flaws, we often raise greater suspicion on the lines of "Tum itnaa jo muskura rahein ho, kyaa gumm hai jisko chhipaa rahein ho [With a smile so broad, what sorrow do you seek to conceal?]"
Scruffy Way of Life, Sun, 03-Nov-2024, IE
But I cannot seem to separate the word from the image of a furry mountain mongrel, unkempt and untrained, slightly stinky but completely free. The article is structured around the obsession (of many of us) around presenting a idealized home when folks come calling. While I can honestly claim to have no such passion, the guilt that comes with having someone visit my house and just glance around is proof enough that I am not as immune to societal norms as I would like to be. Not that the next time a guest comes around they find my residence sparkling clean and maniacally organized but a temporary fever does at least induce me to organize a shelf or two to soothe my social conscience.
Sunday, 19th May, 2024, 16:00 hrs. Indian Standard Time
I am firmly on the spectator side of sports. The physical co-ordination required to direct a bat/ball/racquet like entity while simultaneously twisting/running/jumping has always eluded me. Never particularly angry/frustrated at the player(s) when my chosen player/team fails to win, I know that however poorly they played, they were better than I would have been in the same situation.
Good thing then that I support Arsenal. A North London football club in the Premier League, they seem to float among the elite names of the footballing world without quite making it. In a few hours time, 10 months of an amazing football season by the club is (probably) going to end without a trophy. Much to the joy of fellow armchair fans of more 'winning-est' clubs, not for the first time.
Isn't sport, playing or watching, all about winning? A mostly controlled experience of sharpening that competitive edge without slashing around wildly? Looking around, the evidence seems to point in that direction. Unlike me, there are many for whom the primary return from the investment of watching 'their team' on TV is the second-hand joy of their victory or the venting of unfiltered frustrations at their loss.
I make no claims to be completely above such feelings. I cannot recommend losing or mediocrity. At this point, if my total time sunk into watching and cheering for Arsenal were a person, he would be above the legal drinking age of 21 - with only one major season-end occasion for cheer in all that while. I WANT them to win and their success IS my success in that magic mix of marketing, circumstance and choice which professional sport leagues around the world thrive on.
But somewhere tied in with my inability to stitch a series of good passes together is a philosophical acceptance that such is the nature of sport. I feel that sport is a wonderful stand-in for life, where bravery, rising to the occasion and comebacks from the edge of disaster feature frequently but it is important to acknowledge that it is still only a stand-in. While the sportsperson has the additional responsibility of making fans happy or face their judgement in a public arena while in pursuit of personal dreams, being seen and cheered is part of the draw in today's age.
In a near perfect season from August 2023, this young Arsenal team has solidly glided and gritted its way through only to be bettered by the finest of margins by an even better Manchester City team. Arsenal's current manager Mikel Arteta is upbeat and cheerful even now because he knows that in a game where 22 well-trained professionals duel with a sphere, space and gravity, certainties and miracles co-exist. As a distant observer whose only effort is in watching, if the guy in the midst of it all can take it in his stride, so can I.
In real life, the race targets and prizes may vary but we must all run. Sports competitions offer a low(er) consequence re-run of the same. There are rules and limitations aplenty - heroes, villains, fate and redemption. The smoothness of Arsenal's play in the Arsene Wenger years had drawn me in and though the glimpses of genius have been few and far between since, they have been enough for me. As my life and career ran along in parallel streams and eddies, the constant grace of this footballing team gave me a useful alter-ego.
I watch and cheer for this team, drawing on memories of Bergkamp and Henry, sympathizing with Fabregas and Ozil and wishing the best for Saka and Rice with the smile of the art professor Wenger floating all through. In the end, sports offers an infinite sea of stories with their own trajectories. There is no right story or wrong story, only a highly subjective 'your story' where the personal maps with the unscripted nature of the playing arena, projecting meaning and inspiration. In picking Arsenal's story, through all its glorious uncertainties and glimmers of hope, I have picked mine.
Countdowns are a useful way to build up tension. Even if it is not a space rocket preparing for launch after years of mathematics and physics nerds adding up numbers. After every Timeout in the Indian Premier League twice every innings, the entire stadium shouts along to the dwindling numbers in expectation of something extraordinary to happen. Usually it is the fall of a wicket with the batsman’s flow, whatever little of it was accomplished in the 6-8 overs before the commercial needs of the sport stepped in, completely destroyed. Ordinary lives need some sprinkling of hope and the reset offered by the beginning or end of a countdown is just that. The anticipation towards the New Year, the official worldwide one, beginning at 12:01 on 1st January is another such event - created more out of denial of boredom than dreams of drastic change.
Getting AI James Joyce to rewrite the same:
Countdowns, my dear reader, those ephemeral markers in the grand tapestry of existence, weave their silent magic. Not merely for the celestial behemoths—those rockets, their fiery trajectories etched by the ink of equations and the fervor of physicists. No, no! Even within the amphitheater of cricket, where the crowd’s roar mingles with the dwindling numerals, a drama unfolds. The batsman, that fleeting maestro of willow and leather, dances upon the precipice. His rhythm, painstakingly spun over six to eight overs, shatters like glass against the commercial tide. Ordinary lives, oh how they yearn! They crave the sprinkle of hope, the reset button pressed at the cusp of beginnings or the brink of endings. And behold, the global New Year, its arrival marked at 12:01 on the first day of January, emerges not from grandiose dreams but from the quiet rebellion against monotony.
French-Algerian writer Albert Camus' "The Stranger" first featured in my world in a conversation with Ma a long time ago where she mentioned of a novella where the protagonist's refusal to grieve for his mother's passing lends to extrapolated assumptions from the same. I started reading it only in the aftermath of her passing away and its bleak logical outlook of the world failed to strike a chord with me, especially at a time when I was feeling emotions most keenly. Halfway through the book, at the point where the protagonist is arrested after shooting a man dead (for no particular reason, it must be added), I gave the book a pause.
The second half of the 77-page book I resumed yesterday and ran through it in an evening's worth of effort. The courtroom process and our guilty narrator's passionate disinterest in the same are exquisitely captured as are the visual details narrated that only a person least bothered with all the human chatter around him can observe. In a way, "The Stranger" forms the antithesis of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" where the main character of Rodion Raskolnikov is wracked by guilt and slowly disintegrates mentally.
That I still relate strongly to Dostoevsky's projection of the world, as bleak as Camus' if not more, is possibly an indicator where I fall on the socialist-individualist spectrum. Dostoevsky's protagonist is (eventually) very concerned with the repercussions of his crime within a larger moral universe while Camus makes his narrator fume (in an intellectual manner) only about society's glee in punishing him for his differentness, for his casual battle against conformance. While Raskolnikov comes to terms with the fact that he is not above the rules at all, the Stranger waits for the guillotine confident that the due proceedings are only simply prosecuting his refusal to comply.
The longest day is already upon us and with it the arrival of the monsoon. A morning person like me has hardly any reason to complain in that regard. Extended hours of sunlight shielded by clouds loaded with relief is a win-win in my book. June is almost over, with it the half-way mark of the year, causing the well-organized to recap what was achieved thus far. Unlikely to be accused of such good qualities, I take the time to savour the change of air after summer’s long sultry goodbye. There’s a thrill in having survived another sun-fest season in a top floor room.
What do I do with the extra 2-3 hours that I get by waking up early? I use it to breathe a little easier and enjoy the luxury of not having to plunge into the day’s frothing pool of activities in a barely awake state. This is not to say that I approach the dreaded work hour with a confident calm. It is more about having some free time before rushing into the due-yesterday channel of professional commitments. In its favour, besides the long daylight hours, summer offers the chance to be less drawn into the infinite charms of sleep as its co-conspirator, the blanket, has been put away for the season.
My dogs are happy campers with regard to the hours I keep. Dawn is their golden hour too. At the slightest movement showing my emergence from slumber, they pop up at my bed-side eager to wage battles or pursue alliances in the as-yet unplanted fields behind my house. The seriousness with which they survey their home turf and the protocols with which they deal with friends or foes makes me wonder if inefficiency and error susceptibility are the best markers of being human?
There's something inherently violent about the word. Looking at what it meant to the people at the other end of the sword makes it twice as problematic. Yet without any hint of irony, virtual runners are awarded Conqueror medals for iconic (conquered) places like Machu Pichu and Kilimanjaro.
When it is about nature, the conquering word is even more misplaced. Reading a recent New York Times article on reaching the true summit of the highest peaks in the world, it was hard not to laugh at such a flimsy definition of victory. You make it up to the top or near-about on the very edge of your life, rush down after a couple of minutes - call that conquering? Did you really conquer K2, or did you barely survive it? A strange sort of vanity and many light-years from the truth.
"Its lead researcher, Makoto Tsubokura, said that opening windows on commuter trains can increase the ventilation by two to three times, lowering the concentration of ambient microbes." Thus spake a scientist and got me thinking.
It has been my contention that despite the heat and the dust and the stench (cruising urban slums at a slow roll) to be tackled when travelling in a Indian railway sleeper compartment, there is nothing quite like it.
For one, the awareness that you are travelling in a thundering metallic mechanical snake and that speed is fun can only reach completeness in an express train's sleeper coach. In a scrunched general compartment, you are too uncomfortably close to someone's else's armpit and in the outer space like isolation of an AC coach, you become more understanding of why some rich people commit suicide just to break of their boredom. The sleeper class is where it is at.
There's also the demonstrably extra-social vibe that the fresh air brings in making a sleeper coach a much chattier and occasionally argumentative space. Either way, it is much better than mentally wrestling the "Are we there yet?" monsters. If the weather outside gives you a chance demonstration of a thunderstorm after a hot day in the plains, you don't even need someone to talk to. A window seat and unidentified sources of ecstatic happiness are more than enough company.
There is a lot that could be said against the sleeper coach experience - the gnawing and only partially irrational fear that you might reach your destination but your under-seat luggage might not; the office route pass-carriers whose rights to 99% of your paid-for berth you cannot dare deny; the unmentionable status of toilets within 10 minutes of the start of the journey. But that would be nit-picking.
Lonely trees, temples on distant hills, galloping bridges over nameless streams - the landscape passes you by but at a pace that you can process from a height that does not require entrusting a deep belief in God (otherwise known as a pilot). Sprinkle on some imagination and you could be riding along the train on a very fast infallible motorcycle. Turn it up a notch more and you could live entire lifetimes in those little habitations that you rumble through, never to be visited in real life but sampled, oh so beautifully, in a few seconds of track based dreaming.
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