Vimoh.in

Bollywood as the international bimbo

2012-05-30T23:07:00.000+05:30

Why Hollywood Loves A Certain Kind of Bollywood:

"Well, “respect” may be the wrong word. Bollywood is now the official bimbo of the international film scene. No one cares what our movies say as long as they look good and offer mindless fun. In fact, that’s our designated job according the kitsch-is-cool pose adopted by American critics. Cartoonish characters, absurd plotlines and bad dialogue? Thank you, that’s exactly what we ordered, with a giant serving of exotic locales, dance numbers, and costumes, please!"

The obvious exotification aside, I also have a problem with the word Bollywood being equated with Indian cinema in general. Bollywood is only Hindi movies, which are a part of the Indian cinema spectrum. India has many states where the people speak many languages and many of these states have thriving film industries of their own. In the south, the Tamil and Kannada language movies have a following that rivals that of Bollywood.

Sentenced to death for dancing

2012-05-30T22:27:00.000+05:30

Four men and two women sentenced to death for dancing at Pakistan wedding:

"A traditional jirga, or tribal council, condemned the six to death for “staining the honour” of their families after they defied local customs that require men and women to remain separate at weddings. They were sentenced after mobile phone footage of the event surfaced, infuriating residents of a remote village in the mountainous district of Kohistan, 100 miles north of the capital Islamabad."

I don't mean to play down the ridiculousness of the sentencing above, but perhaps you should also read this Quora answer on the "logic" behind Afghan tribal customs.

The real Miss India

2012-05-30T22:05:00.000+05:30

Raise a toast to the real Miss India:

Amul ads, the ones you and I know as well as we know R K Laxman's 'Common Man', receive a fitting tribute as a book compiling them is released. That an ad campaign has managed to consistently remain embedded in a nation's social and cultural fabric for so long, is nothing short of amazing.

McDonald's insults Muhammad (apparently)

2012-05-30T19:42:00.001+05:30

Saudis Demand Punishment for McDonald's Toy that 'Insults Muhammad':

"The toy consists of a blue superhero figurine (apparently a Power Ranger Samurai). It stands on one leg, and, when the lever is pressed, it pounds on the base with the other leg. According to the Saudis, the designs that appear all around the base, where the figurine stomps its foot, is really the name "Muhammad" written several times in circles."

I have a feeling that if I blindfold myself and randomly doodle on a wall, I will end up accidentally insulting the prophet. So I will refrain from doing so.

Re-branding the idea of a brand

2012-05-29T22:19:00.000+05:30

Traditional media companies cling to their brands at their peril: Rory O'Connor on how the very definition of brands is undergoing a change in this age of friends and followers.

“People like Eric Schmidt, they’re clinging to brand power as the solution,” O’Connor told me. “That the Internet is a cesspool of information is so wrongheaded as to be laughable. To say the Internet is a cesspool of information is like saying you can’t trust the telephone system because people tell lies over it. It’s just the medium. The people who are legacy media who are clinging to this idea that brands are how you sort out this cesspool, as Eric Schmidt put it, are exhibiting all of the foresight of an ostrich.”

Schmidt’s not alone. O’Connor says he got a similarly brand-oriented response when he interviewed Paul Slavin, former senior vice president of the digital operation at ABC News. “Paul Slavin, I asked him, I thought, a very point-blank question: ‘Why should people trust ABC News?’” O’Connor said. “He was flabbergasted. He was almost speechless. He took it as some pejorative attack. After he stopped sputtering he said, ‘Because we’re ABC News.’”

On Firefly and free speech

2012-05-29T21:47:00.000+05:30

What Windows Phone can do for you

2012-05-29T20:24:00.001+05:30

Windows Phone Got Me Laid: What the duck!

"A beautiful girl with long blond hair and sparkling blue eyes entered a bus, since it was crowded, she sat next to me. A sweet smell of her fragrance spread through the bus as I caught her looking at my new Lumia phone… Moments later she asked me, “What kind of phone is this?” This? It’s a Windows Phone. She looked intrigued as I explained her idea behind the Metro UI."

Retro-futuristic aliens

2012-05-29T18:33:00.001+05:30

“Men in Black,” “Prometheus,” and Fictional Aliens : The New Yorker: Don't you just love nutjobs? The world's literary history would be so much duller without the occasional off-his-rocker dreamer.

"It was only after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s and Charles Darwin’s theories of adaptation and natural selection gained wider acceptance, in the nineteenth century, that writers began to speculate in earnest about the sorts of creatures that might flourish in environments beyond Earth. According to Brian Stableford, writing in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the definitive reference on the genre, Camille Flammarion was the first author to present a popular fictional portrait of truly alien life-forms. Flammarion was a French astronomer whose metaphysical interests, if he were pursuing them today, would be labelled New Age. (These beliefs damaged his scientific reputation, but they did lead to a friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle, who shared a fascination with spiritualism.) In 1864, Flammarion wrote a nonfiction book, “Real and Imaginary Worlds,” expressing his conviction that there was life on other planets, and eight years later he produced “Lumen,” a peculiar fictional work in which the title character, a scholar, relates the myriad wonders of the universe to a disciple."

Ball bounces off a wall

2012-05-29T14:54:00.001+05:30

Indian boy solves 350-year old math puzzle set by Newton - Times Of India:

"His solutions mean that scientists can now calculate the flight path of a thrown ball and then predict how it will hit and bounce off a wall."

The primal urge to take naked pictures of yourself

2012-05-29T13:28:00.002+05:30

The Urge to Sext Naked Self-Portraits Is Primal: Who knew? Apparently the reason all these celebrity types (and wannabes) post naked pics of themselves on Twitter is because they want to be desired.

"The desire of the man is for the woman,” Madame de Stael famously penned, “The desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.” Being the center of sexual attention is a fundamental female turn-on dramatized in women’s fantasies, female-authored erotica, and in the cross-cultural gush of sultry self-portraits. Studies have found that more than half of women’s sexual fantasies reflect the desire to be sexually irresistible. In one academic survey, 47 percent of women reported the fantasy of seeing themselves as a striptease dancer, harem girl, or other performer. Fifty percent fantasized about delighting many men."

Ursula Le Guin on messages

2012-05-28T23:36:00.002+05:30

Ursula K. Le Guin: A Message About Messages:

"I am grieved and affronted when reviewers treat my novels and other serious books for kids as candy-coated sermons. Of course there’s a lot of moralistic and didactic stuff written for young people, which can be discussed as such without loss. But with genuine works of literature for children, with The Elephant’s Child or The Hobbit, it is a grave error to teach or review them as mere vehicles for ideas, not seeing them as works of art. Art frees us; and the art of words can take us beyond anything we can say in words."

The liberal arts are useless (kidding)

2012-05-28T21:01:00.001+05:30

The Aryan theory dies, again

2012-05-28T17:06:00.000+05:30

Recent genetic studies have placed the age of the separate north Indian and south Indian communities at roughly 12,500 years. That's a whole lot older than the 1500 BC date assigned to the arrival of the imaginary Aryans till now by various eminent scholars (politically motivated, or otherwise).

Though the theory changed, two factors remained constant: the existence of two separate groups (Dravidians and Aryans) and their identification as natives and foreigners. The scholarly consensus is that the Indo-Aryan speakers arrived in North-East India following the decline of the Harappan civilisation. These horse riding migrants introduced Vedic religion and Sanskrit language and culturally transformed a region bigger than ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt combined, non-violently.

Now a new paper published in the American Journal of Human Genetics states that current Indian population is derived from two ancestral populations—the Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI)—both of which are older than 3500 Years Before Present (YBP). Though this seems to confirm the Aryan-Dravidian divide and the migration which happened after 1900 BCE, the paper actually does the opposite; it refutes the large scale migration version of the Aryan theory.

Neil Gaiman's advice for the young writer

2012-05-28T16:50:00.002+05:30

On the accuracy of religious myth

2012-05-25T21:35:00.000+05:30

I came across this refreshing defence of myths as stories in an article on mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik’s site. Even an immortal story can use a good defence every now and then.

I have often been asked if the war at Kurukshetra actually took place a few thousand years ago. History is real. Is the Mahabharata a document of facts? Historical? Real? I say: no. No, it is not real. It is not historical.

To call Mahabharata a story based on historical war is to strip it of its magic, its power, its sheer magnificence. To make Mahabharata historical is to confine it to one period of history. If one does that, it holds little relevance in modern times. To be relevant, it cannot be confined to one period in history. It must be a-historical, timeless, free of geographical and historical moorings, independent of space and time. To me, that is what Mahabharata is.

To me Mahabharata is a symbolic narration that reflects the thoughts and feelings, concerns and commentaries of the Indian people over centuries. That is why it is an epic. That is why it is sacred. It continues to enchant and enthrall us just as it enchanted and enthralled audiences a hundred years go. Through the story of the Pandavas and the Kauravas, it discusses the nature of human society.

via The Clothes of Draupadi | Devdutt.

To see people debating over the accuracy of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat is not a problem in itself — it is good sport and keeps us on our toes. But it becomes worrisome when it is assumed that the validity of an entire epic depends on its historical accuracy.

Hinduism, to use a machine phrase, is a religion with plenty of redundancy built in. That is to say that its value as a way of life will not suffer even one bit even if all events in the Ramayan and the Mahabharat are proved to be fantasies. India has survived as a civilisation by focusing on the reality behind these stories, not just the events that demonstrate them.

Your brain on God

2012-05-25T21:29:00.002+05:30

The NPR has a yummy summary of current research on the relation between brain activity and various instances of spiritual experience. There is a bunch of podcasts thrown in as well.

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual — from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered in this controversial field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.

via Is This Your Brain On God? : NPR.

I believe much of what passes for religious experience can be traced back to the brain. But to say that it originated there doesn’t seem convincing to me. That is like opening up a radio, pointing at the speaker and saying this is where the sound comes from. Of course the sound comes from the radio. But that isn’t the source, is it?

Human beings are animals, but that is not all they are. I think spiritual experiences are a sign of something much larger (God, for lack of a better word) channeling itself through the human animal. Our interpretations of it are feeble and weak of course, but that is why research like this makes me happy. We are getting there.

How to get ideas

2012-05-23T10:46:00.001+05:30

Some people think creativity is something innate. Others believe it can be honed and sharpened. I believe it is a matter of willingness. One gets ideas when one is open to them.

Towards the end of my time in college, I began working on a story about an alien orphan on a backward and under-developed planet. My hero discovers that he is the last of a race of super-psychics who ruled the galaxy long ago. The story stayed with me for a month or so. I spared little effort in capturing it in its awesome brilliance, blaming my tight college schedule and my general inability to write long stories due to impatience. To my relief, it eventually left me.

A few months after that, I found elements of my story in an extremely cool Indian fantasy novel. The levels of similarity in some details to my idea blew me away. And the novel had actually been written (in a much better way than I could even hope to) before my idea ever came to me. I have learnt since that the only thing that makes me creative is my willingness to be so.

Ideas don’t care a fig about my talents. They are choosy, but they don’t make a show of choosing a worthy vessel as far as capacity is concerned. It is up to the person who gets an idea to prove himself/herself worthy of the honour. One’s chances of getting an idea go up phenomenally if one is willing.

Some time ago, someone told me I was fortunate to be creative and that he never gets any ideas. I told him he was complaining about bad reception without even trying to get a cable connection.

How then, does one go about getting ideas?

Start by letting the universe know you are ready to become creative. Although it is more a state-of-mind thing than anything else, you can actively help by reading up, listening and generally exposing yourself to emotions and states that are conducive to the kind of ideas you are seeking. Think of it as furnishing your mind-space so that ideas are comfortable there.

Secondly, be prepared to indulge ideas. They require a lot of loving. You may be fortunate to get a nagging idea – the sort that won’t leave you, no matter what. But for the most part, ideas are fickle and moody. They can take you to wonderful places and open your eyes to beautiful worlds, but if you ask them to wait five minutes so you can finish up your business at the bank, they will walk out of your head and won’t come back. This is why carrying a notepad is so important. You can take notes while on the trip and jot them down later. You will notice however, that if you write as and when an idea strikes you, you will always be happy with your work.

Ideas require space. Make sure your worries and problems don’t crowd into the room you have so graciously provided your ideas. This will piss them off and they will leave. If at all you let your worries into the presence of ideas, teach them to be civil. Tell them to communicate. With luck, you will see something new arising out of the friendship.

More often than not, your idea-room will play host to more than one idea. It may even have a well-behaved worry or two in it. Sooner or later, they will mingle and reproduce. Let them. There have been times when I have stepped into such intercourses and declared that sci-fi must not have any feelings for poetry, or that my nightmares must never meet my brand new trophy character. My policing has invariably always caused them to rise in indignation and walk out.

When I play cool, they let me watch their orgies. It is highly entertaining. Sometimes, I end up an uncle to a brand new baby idea. It is the best feeling ever. Try and encourage such interaction. After ideas leave, they will tell others about how cool a host you are and you will get more of them. Don’t forget to be nice to them as well.

I can not overemphasise the point about ideas being finicky. You may feel the occasional urge to dress up an idea in something else. These suggestions will mostly come from your worldly-wise self. I think it is safe to say that such attempts don’t work very well. An idea has all the clothes it needs. That which it needs, it finds by itself inside the room. Forcing your idea into a suit even when you know it is more of a t-shirt person, will kill your end product.

When it is finally time to part ways with your ideas (regardless of whether your association bore any fruit or not), do it on nice terms. Don’t shove them out of your life. Take notes and keep a record of the details. Most good ideas will return.

Philosopher J Krishnamurti said it is the thought that is primary, not the thinker. So no matter what, through all this, remember always to feel fortunate.

On the roots of racism

2012-05-14T15:02:00.000+05:30

Our world has a dark past. There was once a time when groups of people declared themselves superior to others based on the colour of their skin, or the place of their birth, or the religion they followed. They trampled on the rights and lives of those they considered inferior and sub-human.

Much time has passed since then. Such people remain in our midst, but by and large the civilised world scoffs at any sign of discrimination. We are horrified at any sign of discrimination and proceed to stamp it out as soon as we see it.

This is where we go wrong. We are too preoccupied with the signs.

I believe the act of offending and the act of taking offence are both voluntary. I can’t offend people without intending to offend them, just like I can’t be offended if I refuse to be offended.

Discrimination happens when one intends to discriminate. Minus the intent, discrimination doesn’t exist.
My Muslim friends calling me kaafir isn’t discrimination. Russell Peters’ comedy is not racist. Miley Cyrus’ doing the “slant-eye” gesture does not make her racist. These signs don’t mean anything without malicious intent.

What keeps discrimination alive is the victim mentality. Both on the part of the so-called victims and those out to protect them from discrimination.

In 2006, a section of the Jewish community in Mumbai protested the opening of a restaurant called Hitler’s Cross in the city. They said they were insulted by the use of Hitler’s name. Slum-dwellers in Mumbai’s Dharavi protested against the movie Slumdog Millionaire when it came out, saying they found the word “dog” derogatory.

A few days ago, America protested the publishing of a newspaper cartoon it saw as racist and offensive. A section of the Muslims in Kolkata protested an article published in The Statesman making a point about criticising religions.

The Hindi word for ghost is ‘bhoot’. It also means ‘past’. As long as we insist on the ghosts of our past ruling our present, we will never reach a future that is free of it.

The purpose of a ritual

2012-05-12T16:41:00.000+05:30

If you remember the last scene of The Da Vinci Code movie, you will remember that the hero Dr Robert Langdon finds himself running with barely-concealed hurry towards the place where Mary of Magdalene, he deduces, must be buried. He is a non-believer, but he is also a historian. He is someone who pursues secrets of the past with great passion.

Langdon finds the spot finally, looks around to confirm his calculations, lines up the stars in the sky, and is finally satisfied that he is standing right over what countless others have died looking for — something that has moved the minds of men since the days of Jesus Christ. He is standing over real, tangible history.

He however, doesn’t know how to react to the moment. What he does know is that he can’t not react. The presence of history is too great for him to ignore. His passion for history and the invisible past is as great (if not more) as someone else’s might be for God and religion.

Perhaps because Langdon feels nothing else would aptly express what he feels, he kneels.

Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik said at TED India this year, “Culture is a reaction to nature. And this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation to generation in the form of stories, symbols and rituals.”

Kneeling or bowing down to a higher power is a ritual meant to express the feeling of humbleness. It happens more often than many of us would admit to, but we are humbled numberless times in our lives. What one man feels in front of a deity, another may feel standing in front of grand canyon, while yet another might feel the same when his life has taken a bad turn and nothing seems to be going right.

Rituals are man’s different symbolic reactions to the different aspects of the world around him. They are man-made constructs designed to express that which cannot (should not?) remain unexpressed.

The idea is not something exclusive to religion either. If you were moved by the movie 3 Idiots, you may find yourself saying, “Aal Iz well” in remembrance of the feeling that the movie evoked in you. That’s a ritual too. Same goes for gestures like “Live long and prosper” and “May the Force be with you”.

Rituals are a part of life and therefore, inevitable, just like superstition or facial hair. It does not do to declare them evil or old-fashioned. Try and see if you can understand where they came from.

Why do we suffer?

2012-05-12T10:54:00.000+05:30

One point about the world that is often brought into the debate about whether God exists or not is suffering. What sort of God would watch as his creation rips itself apart with violence? What kind of God would let his followers die of pain?

The people who ask this question are often the ones that take the metaphorical version of religion – mythology – to be all there is. They imagine God to be some kind of “guy” (a big huge, all-pervading guy, but a guy nevertheless) sitting somewhere up in heaven passing judgment on all that exists in this world. They ask what he could be thinking when he unleashes terrible trauma upon them. Some imagine him taking joy in it all. As someone recently said to me on Twitter, “God, if he exists, is a sadist bastard.”

The error in this is obvious. Human beings have a bloated idea of their own importance. And our imagination assigns human characteristics to everything. So a storm becomes cruel, an earthquake becomes murderous, a wild animal is seen as a devious monster. This is mythology — a subjective way of looking at the universe. So God, according to this view, becomes something with human proportions, human attitudes, human tendencies, and even a human appearance.

More importantly though, I think what makes people complain about suffering is the belief that they are somehow the centre of the universe. It is the same belief that people had back when they thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe and everything revolved around them. It is the same belief that caused Socrates to drink poison and the findings of Galileo to be challenged. They chose to look at the big picture. But people simply refuse to come to terms with the fact that they are only a small piece of a puzzle that is far greater than them.

Look around and you will find that everything suffers. The breakfast you had this morning caused some life form – either vegetable or animal – to die. Millions of germs die every time you sneeze. You hurt grass every time you walk on it. Animals either kill and eat each other, or they die of starvation. It is suffering both ways. Life progresses by feeding on itself — science calls it the food chain. That is the way the world works. You are not only suffering, you are also causing an equal amount of “suffering” to the world around you.

In fact, if you pay it even a little thought, you may conclude that this is the only way the world can work. If we use a machine metaphor for the world, we find that suffering is merely our subjective view of friction. No machine can work without friction. Things need to rub against each other, corrode each other, in order for any machine to work. Without friction, there would be no machine.

People who ask, “Why can’t all the suffering just go away? Why can’t we all just live in peace?” are wishful thinkers. They don’t realise that in order for the world to even exist, someone or the other must suffer. What we call suffering is subjective. We only get sentimental about it because it happens to us, or to creatures we include in our idea of “us”.

Oddly enough, on the human level suffering serves to enhance the imagination. It makes man aware of his smallness and helplessness. It teaches him that he doesn’t matter as much as he thought he did. It makes him humble. It seems to say, “You are no different from that baby deer in the forest who was mauled to death by ravenous lions yesterday on National Geographic. It happens to everyone and everything. Get used to it!”

A child that hates school but is made to go anyway suffers. A guy who has to put up with a sour boss in office suffers. Someone on a deathbed waiting to die of a painful cancer suffers. It is all the same thing. Some suffer more, some less. The difference is of degree, not of kind.

Interestingly, man is the only animal that can work through suffering. While a crippling disease will truly “cripple” an animal, history is full of examples of human beings who made the world a better place in spite of their own personal suffering.

The scientist Stephen Hawking is paralysed from head to toe. The great Helen Keller was deaf, mute AND blind (my imagination fails when I try to put myself in her shoes). Beethoven was deaf (and he was a musician). These people not only did things, they actually did them better than others.

Reason? They didn’t allow their suffering to drag them into selfishness. They didn’t fall into the trap of thinking that someone up there is exclusively targeting them with misfortunes. They looked beyond themselves, into the world around them and decided to contribute to the betterment of the people around them.

On language, culture and technology

2012-05-11T10:11:00.000+05:30

I was wondering why some languages contain words that have no suitable equivalent in another language. For example, the Sanskrit word Dharma (धर्मं) has no English parallel. The most we can do is use insufficient replacements like ‘religion’, ‘responsibility’ etc. Not only are these words insufficient, they are also very misleading in some political contexts.

A culture gathers words into its collective vocabulary on the basis of many criteria. People learn words that imply ideas and define objects that matter to them in their lives. It is said that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow (do they really?). Seeing how snow is such a major presence in the lives of the Inuit people, it is no wonder that they have many ways of referring to it in many different contexts. In much the same way, the nature of a culture’s vocabulary depends on its priorities — things they like to do, matters they consider important, customs and traditions they value, and so forth.

The word Dharma being such a solid part of Indian civilisational vocabulary simply points to the fact that the ideal has always been important to Indians. Dharma, in all its versions (social responsibility, individual choice, religiosity), is a concept that has had a lasting presence and a widespread influence on Indian society and thought.

Cultures find words for things that are important to them. Because Dharmic concepts are such an important part of Hindu thought, there is a whole range of words for them in Sanskrit and its child-languages — words that often do not have equivalents in languages spoken by people from other traditions.

Take the world wide web for example — it is the language I am using to communicate with you right now. But the vocabulary of this language is mostly based on commerce. Commercial values dictate the form our communication takes. The web services we use need to make money if they are to continue their existence as tools of communication. This reliance of the web on commerce is only because commerce dictates intercultural interactions in the real world as well. Things on the web are a mere echo of human society as it exists outside the digital world.

Perhaps, in the future, when human society adopts a more mature set of values, the web will start reflecting this maturity and gather a new set of words around itself. Already, words like ‘share’ and ‘social’ have become a big part of the internet’s vocabulary. But the impetus behind this seemingly generous new wave of information technology remains commercial — big corporations herding large numbers of people into walled gardens and using their creativity to make money off them. This may be another bubble that will soon explode, and if it does, I hope a more distributed model of commerce will take its place. One where I can talk, trade, and transact with you without having to abide by commercial third-party rules.

Personal messages do not need subjects

2012-05-10T22:26:00.000+05:30

I remember when I first started using email. I had no one to send email to, so I was delighted whenever I found out someone, usually at college, who had an email address. Being an obsessive evangelist of cool things, I got a lot of my friends to open email accounts also. But only a few of them showed any kind of enthusiasm regarding this weird new thing I was singing about. It was understandable though — I couldn’t expect them to realise the value of a tool for which they had no use. Internet penetration in small-town India back then was practically zero. Even mobile phones were something of a rarity.

But eventually, when my newbie friends did start emailing me, I noticed something that was only going to make sense in retrospect. A lot of their messages to me had no subject line. Before I got used to seeing (no subject) next to a sender’s name, I used to shake my head at how bad people were at learning new things. I mean, how difficult was it to type something relevant into the subject field? The few who did enter a subject wrote dumb things like “Hello!” or “Yayyy!”

It was only much later that I became of the view that it was not their fault. People should not have to learn to use software. Software should be designed to work the way people behave. And entering subjects for messages is something very weird.

Think about it. Back in the days when we wrote notes and letters to each other, did you ever write anything resembling a title or subject? I never did. A message was just a message. Its importance depended on who the sender was. So a note from a pretty girl was more important than a note from the boy wanted to know what was in my tiffin. It didn’t matter what the notes were about. Personal communication was about persons, not topics.

Of course, there is written communication that is topical. I entered, “Request for 2 days leave for health reasons” as a subject into a school application once. That was because a leave application is a document that relies on format. The teacher who goes through leave applications may not have the time to go through all your lies and a one-line subject defining the purpose of your application makes his work easier. This format was and remains common to a lot of workplace communication even today. You are not a person in an office, you are a position. You exist in the service of a greater order and your place in it is defined by what you do in it and for it. In such a scenario, messages can’t help being topical.

Some literary forms also require the presence of a title. A short story, for example, can’t be without a name; the same goes for an article or a book. These are content formats and therefore, need an identifier of one sort or the other. Funny thing is, if you are reading a story without knowing the name of an author, it remains content. But if you choose a story based on your choice of author, it becomes communication — the title doesn’t matter, the person who wrote it is what is important. You don’t pick the story up because the idea is interesting by itself. You pick it up because you want to know what that particular author thinks about the matter. The word Foundation becomes less important than the word ASIMOV.

I have used 2 note-taking applications on the web. One is the popular program Evernote and the other is the aptly-titled Simplenote. I will not compare their feature sets in great detail, but the difference that seems most important to me is their approach towards document names. Evernote makes me type in a title for all notes I create, even though the complete text of all my notes is searchable. Simplenote does not have a title field. It simply picks up the first sentence of my note and uses that as an identifier. Simplenote’s approach strikes me as being particularly intuitive. Why do we need a separate field for a subject or a title? Why can’t our software be smart enough to understand that titles usually go at the start of documents. I mean, this is not something new. Microsoft Word does this. If you don’t give your document a name, it picks up the first few words from the text in the file and makes them the document’s title. Why is it so difficult to implement this in email?

Recently, Shortmail, the brand new email service that limits incoming and outgoing messages to 500 characters, did this very thing. Their compose screen is without a subject field now. It works exactly like Simplenote does — by picking up the first sentence in the message you are writing and turning it into the subject line. If you want a subject, type it in the first line. If not, don’t. On Shortmail the primary identifier for a message is the sender’s name.

Tumblr makes the subject line a thing of the past as well. For post formats like photos and quotes, there is no title field. It is only sensible. The idea of typing Mahatma Gandhi on Non-Violence before a two-line quote from Mahatma Gandhi about non-violence is ridiculous in the extreme. The same goes for posts containing a single photo. Apart from data that belongs in a photo caption, there is really no need for a photo to have a title. This is a blog, not an art gallery. Titles burden a piece of art with context. That’s the last thing a beautiful photograph or painting needs.

The gradual fading away of the subject line happened when communication tools like Twitter emerged. The status message is hardly longer than a title itself. It does not need a title. When short form notes became something of a universal format (Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms that integrated the status message as a prominent element), the title started seeming a burden.

Doing away with the title as an element of content formats is neither doable, nor desirable, but a lot of clutter and cognitive load can be reduced if we at least make it something optional.

Bloggers as media-lovers

2012-05-10T21:14:00.000+05:30

Right from the time when the average Joe sitting in his living room became capable of letting the world know what he thinks of it, a debate has raged about whether he should be allowed to do so or not. This debate keeps raising its head in India from time to time. First it was blogging, then Twitter, and in the middle, for some time I think, even Youtube was under the media’s scornful gaze.

The thing about these tools is that they are just tools. It is the average Indian who is behind them. If a lot of people started calling up the media with criticism of their work, would the media condemn the "telephoning elite"? I don’t think so.

But blogging isn’t telephoning, is it? What hurts the media into making such sweeping condemnation of bloggers and tweeters is the fact that it all happens out in the open. The average blogger or tweeter is opinionated and the thought of pretending otherwise never crosses his mind. He simply sees no reason to do so. The phenomenon of web publishing using easy and affordable tools has spawned an entire generation of commentators free from the constraints of format, policy, codes, and sometimes even propriety. This is the age of the writing mob.

Interestingly, when the writing mob comes into areas that were previously exclusively populated by the writing elite, that is, journalists; the problem simply becomes one of authority. Who decides what the format is? Where do you draw the line between what is proper and acceptable and what is not? Is it even right to make such rules?

The simplest way around this problem is through some obvious questions. Why does the media exist? What is its purpose? And most importantly; how does the media know it is fulfilling its purpose?

The TRP system is a numerical indicator of how popular something on a news channel is. It indicates how many people are tuned into what is currently being shown on a channel. Through TRP ratings, news people reach conclusions about how much people like something and try to do more of it.

This is of course fine and dandy as far as a purely mechanistic way of "measuring" popularity is concerned. But then where do all the ideas about doing what is good for the society go? Even a circus gives people what they want. The media is supposed to be different, right? It’s supposed to show us things we need to watch. People may like what is being shown to them for various reasons. But is what they like always what needs to be on TV?

The media is in the business of answering that question. I know they are supposed to be objective and all, but everyone knows they are not. The media is in the decision-making business. They are the ones that decide what direction society takes. Thay decide what should worry us. They decide what we should get angry about.

I don’t think anybody believes the media is objective. Curiously enough, nobody even seems to care about the media’s objectivity. Most watchers of mainstream TV news have elaborate mental lists of news channels and their respective ideological slants. Everyone knows their bias and everyone has accepted them as they are.

Why then, do bloggers often end up criticising what news channels do?

The answer is obvious. Any blogger who pays any amount of attention to what news channels show, and then takes the time to blog what he thinks about it, is obviously a fan! The blogger is part of the news channel’s target audience. But he is also part of the small minority of the target audience who talks back at the broadcasters. He tells them, like the average Joe he is, what he "loves" and what he thinks "stinks".

The media has this tendency to see itself as "The Media" and to see everyone else as "Them". These classifications are somewhat ancient now, seeing as how every Ram, Rahim, and Harry these days thinks himself capable of doing what the media does — pass judgment. It’s the flavour of the season and is likely to remain so for quite some time. The media keeps getting sour at the idea of being in the same compartment as "them". But I don’t think that is going to help.

I think a better way for the media to look at the matter is to start considering blogging voices a complement to what TRPs tell them. So here is my advice to the Indian media:

On one side you have this numerical indicator to tell you how many people are tuned in to what your channel is showing, and then here comes an actual human voice with opinions on how it was. Don’t push the opinion away because you don’t like it. Don’t let the numbers trap you into thinking you have it all measured out.

You have fans because you do a certain service to society. They pay you attention because they think you are worth it. It is a kind of irreverent respect. There is nothing inherently respectable about you. Your worth is defined by what you do. And the people who decide your worth happen to be the exact same ones you keep blaming for criticising you. Sure there is a lot of vulgar noise out there, I won’t deny it. But you can’t let that blind you to the fact that there are sane voices out there too. Look for them, you guys are supposed to be good at this sort of thing. Don’t push the criticism away. Listen to it.

Unless of course, you want to be in the same league as a circus, in which case, carry on.

Indian comics, Indian mythology, and the Indian image

2012-05-10T20:27:00.001+05:30

Someone asked me recently why Indian comics are stuck with mythology as a core theme. I gave a brief answer as it was only an email, but I think should elaborate. There is more to this than is obvious at a first glance. Complaining aside, I think we should try and focus on ways to make this marriage work.

Comics and mythology gain from each other’s respective specialties. Both have qualities that the other can profit from. While some think Indian comics are doomed to retell tales from Indian mythology forever, I feel that in the long run, the trend will help the cause of comics becoming a popular medium in the country.

Ideas from Indian mythology are deeply ingrained in all of our daily lives. ‘Ram-Ram’ is a greeting in our villages and good brothers are called ‘Ram Lakhan ki jodi’. Family disputes are referred to as Mahabharats and mischievous babies are frequently compared to the image of Krishna when he was a baby. This awareness of mythic themes spreads across lines of region and religion, all over India. Comics are a popular medium. They tell stories to the masses, just like Bollywood does. But comics in India are not as pervasive as movies are. So comics as a medium can ride on the reach of mythology as a language that every Indian understands. Mythology as a core theme can help a lot of people overcome the initial obstacle of getting comfortable with a new medium.

On the other hand, stories and ideas from Indian mythology haven’t really had the ‘pop’ treatment until recently. One of the first things that pop into most people’s minds when the word ‘mythology’ is uttered are memories of TV serials with bad special effects and theatrical dialogue. India’s ancient tales have evolved along with India herself. The Ramayana alone has been retold more than 300 times in at least 300 different ways. Comics as a medium can be a whole new grassy field for our mythic cows to feed on and grow fat. Comics dealing with mythology, both as retellings and as reinventions, can expose people to a whole new way of looking at our thousand-year-old stories.

Comics dealing with Indian mythology in any way can be a great tool for Indian soft power the world over. I have often marveled at the magic that the Bruce Lee worked for the popular perception of Chinese culture. Nowadays, whenever I see a grim looking actor with Chinese features on the screen, I expect him to break into Kung-Fu and destroy everything and everyone around him. Granted, it is a stereotype, but it is an empowering and positive stereotype — way better than the bumbling and clueless chinaman image early Hollywood perpetrated.

Imagine retold mythology doing the same for India. Our stories are the most powerful export we can give to the global market in this age. India has always been a land where fantasies flourished. Mythology can help strengthen that image in modern times.

Did man create God?

2012-05-10T00:38:00.000+05:30

There is a beautiful speech by the late Douglas Adams about the possibility of there being an artificial God — God imagined by man to fill in gaps in his understanding of the world. In one part of the speech, Adams suggests that early man, when he found that the world suited him so much, imagined that it must have been made for him, and that whoever made it must love him a lot therefore.

Let me start out by saying that I am not at all opposed to this idea. I have pondered this angle a lot and have even explored it in a post I wrote a few years ago. It is certainly possible that the idea of God came out of man’s mind and I would be lying if I said that this does not strike me as logical.

Having said that, let me also add that the idea does not negate anything in my belief system. I believe that God exists – either as an entity, or an idea, or a force, or a guy with a thousand arms and forty thousand heads – I don’t know. All I know is that he (or she or it) does exist. My personal definition of existence is very wide and allows for a whole lot of abstractions to share space with elements of the tangible universe. So when I say God exists, I may mean that he is in my head and that is quite enough for me.

But let us not make this about me. My interest in the question how God came to be is perhaps inferior to my interest in the question of why God came into being. The how-why divide may seem facile to some. So hear me out.

Regardless of whether God — a force superior to man — created him, or man imagined a superior force after he “just happened”, we are still faced with the inescapable presence of God in our lives, if not as a tangible reality, then at least as an idea.

My question is this (and try and think it over with an open mind): Why did man create God? Why did he imagine Him? What was the need for it? Why did he feel compelled to find a meaning in the world around him that there was no physical need for?

Animals don’t do this. They get along just fine without bothering with the meaning of things. Why is it only man that has this need to imagine things, to tell stories, to wonder about things higher than himself? Why does man have these fancy philosophical questions? Why does man feel humbled? Why is he always looking up? Why do we personify nature? Why do we imagine the wind to be a god? Why do we imagine the sea to be the thousand-eyed Varuna? Why to we consider the earth our mother?

Some will label it delusion of the mind. But I think that is simplifying it far too much. Imagining things is not an option that we exercise. It is a very deep-rooted human tendency. We indulge in little acts of imagination (acts of faith?) uncountable times everyday, mostly without even knowing it.

Many people cherish objects handed down to them by their parents. These can be a pen, or an item of clothing, or something like that. But to them, these are more than just simple objects. To them, these are something more. They imagine a higher meaning in them. Many people yell at their computer when it hangs. Many people find themselves considering certain places more significant than others – the house they grew up in, their first school, the bridge on which they kissed someone for the first time, etc.

These things, while they may not look related, demonstrate the same function of the human mind. Namely, the tendency to believe that the world is more than it appears to be. Belief in the existence of God is just a larger concept than imagining that the bridge on which you kissed your first girlfriend is somehow special and unique. It is all imagination.

My question (as if I have not asked it enough times already), is WHY. Why do we do all this? I have blogged before about our need for rituals and superstitions. Plus, there is scientific evidence of our brains being hard-wired to be superstitious. But that doesn’t answer the question, it only adds to it. Why is man built this way?

For the purposes of this post, I will ignore the idea of God as creator, because we started off with Adams’ suggestion of God being an artificial construct. Thus, we end up with the theory that man naturally evolved from lower animals and got to be this way. But even so, the god-damned why remains unanswered.

If man evolved from lower animals, and lower animals lack the sort of rich imaginative tendencies that man has, does it not naturally follow that what we have is something superior to what they have? Does it not say that the ability to believe and the ability to imagine meanings and the tendency to see things for more than what they seem to be, is something that we gained through the marvelously complex system of evolution by natural selection? May it not be that we evolved to believe in God? And if we did, the question that follows inevitably is – why. Why did we evolve to believe in forces higher than ourselves? Why can’t we just live our lives like animals without wondering about our place in the universe?

I don’t have an answer. But I will not pretend that the question doesn’t exist. So in order to show respect to the question, I will proceed to make some logical deductions.

Let us consider the human body to be a computer. It is a fascinating machine, capable of amazing feats. It boggles our minds. We grow curious and start exploring it. As time passes, our understanding of the computer grows better and better. We get to its very basics. We discover that it is made of metal and plastic. We go even deeper, down to the circuits. We find what makes the software work. We then sit content in the knowledge that our understanding of the computer is complete.

But what we conveniently ignore is (brace for impact) the why. Why is the computer there in the first place? Why is such amazing software installed on it? For what purpose? Ignore the question about who made the computer if you want to. What we should at least wonder about is why it exists at all.

This is, in fact, the single greatest philosophical question that has obsessed man since the beginning of time. Why does anything exist at all? What is the point of it? The name religion gives that reason, is God. Plain and simple.

And the question is not as hopelessly unanswerable as it may seem. We have the computer and we know what it can do. We know that there is an operating system (the soul?) and a web browser on it (imagination?). Does it not naturally follow that there may be a web out there, waiting to be browsed? I mean, why would we be given an Internet Explorer if there were no Internet to explore?

I think the problem here lies with our temporal way of seeing things. Humans have very definitive ways of defining concepts like “beginning”, “end”, “creation” etc. And as we have learnt more, these definitions have been challenged and, in many cases, demolished. For example, our ideas about “up” and “down” disappeared the moment we ventured into the weightlessness of outer space. Could it not be that the limitations of time (as we understand it) do not apply to the force that created us? Why does God have to be something that came “before” us? After all, there are objects in the known universe that mock “time” all the time (black holes for example).

The other idea is to look at the God concept as something resembling music. Music, as we know it today, didn’t exist till humans came around. But we definitely didn’t create music. It has always been around. What we really did was perceive it in a way that none had done before.

Why can’t this be the way man “created” God? The force that made all things may have always been around. All man did (when he got around to being able to do so) was perceive him with a faculty only he possessed — imagination.