Whine and cheese

My social life these days is shot.
Not that it was very hectic at anytime.
That said, I used to socially meet many more people than I do now.
There is one type I remember fondly, mostly because I don’t meet any these days.
The type who wore their commitment to liberal causes on the sleeves of their Fab India kurtas and kurtis.
It was fun listening to them for about fifteen minutes. After which the first signs of gastric trouble would cloud my horizon. Perhaps because my constitution could take only that much whine and cheese. Though, I must admit, some of them served indubitably fine whine.
May I apologize, through this somewhat widely read blog, to all those whose whine, over the years, I have not done justice to. My constitution is sturdier now and they perhaps will give me another chance. After all whines get better with age don’t they? As long as methinks, it is not new whine in old bottle. So please feel free to write or call.
Shall we then move on to Waisty and Soda? Then perhaps I should abstain. Because a pun stretched is no fun at all.

“The least important most important thing there is”

I have worked in advertising for many, many years. However it has been a year or more now since I last worked on a campaign. I do other stuff now, stuff which is deeper, more rounded you could say but I do miss advertising.
I make up by watching Mad Men (for those of you who don’t know, Mad Men is a TV show in the US centered on a Creative Director- Don Draper- on Madison Avenue in the 60’s. Mad Men is among the most acclaimed TV serials of the past few decades. It has won Emmys for consecutive years and is currently running in its fourth season- the 12th episode was telecast last week).
In the latest episode, Don is rattled watching the agency in which he is a partner fall apart. Ruing the fact that he seems to be able not do much his rant to his second in command in creative is: “We are supposed to just sit writing on our typewriters as the walls around us fall down We are after all creative- the least important most important thing there is”
A brilliant piece of self-awareness don't you think? And then Don Draper does a startling thing. His agency is going down because American Tobacco took away Lucky Strike, an account that accounts for more than half on his agency’s billing. Don takes a full page ad in the New York Times headlined “Why I Quit Tobacco” pithily decrying cigarettes as a product, swearing of ever working on a tobacco account again. The cat is now among the pigeons. Don believes this ad will attract new clients to his agency and save it. His partners think he is wrong and are furious at him. Will the agency be rescued? Will Don be proven right? Hold your breath for the next episode (to be telecast in the US on Monday and to be in my hands by Wednesday).
The fictional Don Draper’s fictional full page ad is brilliantly written. The kind of copy that one doesn’t see any more in real life as all the real talent in advertising is now creating television commercials. Advertising in it’s hey days of creative work in the press has seen some of the most effective writing in the world. Forced to be brief, forced to work to a brief, brilliant writers after brilliant writers have produced work that I know will not be celebrated or remembered but, in my belief, should, in all fairness, find a niche in the annals of creative work that lasts. But it was all done by hired hands working as handmaidens to crass commerce, so put it in that trash bin with yesterday’s newspaper. Now let’s move on to the important important things, shall we?

The Morris Theorem, Hard Ceilings and the Dead Cat Bounce

Ian Morris, a Stanford University professor of classics and history, in his path breaking book “Why the West Rules- For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future”, postulates what he, rather immodestly calls the Morris Theorem: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer way of doing things. And they rarely know what they are doing”
Morris also postulates that every civilization climbs the ladder of progress until it hits a “hard ceiling” of social development. The units of time that underpin Morris’s analysis of the relative rise and fall of the East and the West are in hundreds and thousands of years. Morris’s analysis is in the same league as that put forward by Arnold Toynbee in his “A Study of History” and Paul Kennedy in his more recent book “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers”.
When I think about what Morris is saying I find myself mulling over a couple of points.
The first point is in the context of what regular readers of this blog would have noticed: my disgust at the current state of the Indian establishment and my avid, if armchair bound, search for means to change it.
Does the Morris Theorem provide insights in this regard? Does the establishment continue to flourish because us the “greedy and lazy” people find it easier, more profitable and safer to not just overlook the faults of the establishment but, in most cases, strive to be accepted as a part of it? Are violent revolutions successful when they create conditions when it is no longer safe to be part of the establishment? Is there any other way?
The second point is where in the cycle of ascent and descent is the Indian civilization. Did we hit the hard ceiling around the times the Vedas were created? Is the past century showing signs of an upturn?
Or are we just experiencing a “Dead Cat Bounce”? The “Dead Cat Bounce” is a stock market term. When a share falls precipitously it experiences a tiny resurgence at the bottom of its fall, a resurgence that is known as a “Dead Cat Bounce”. Many a clever stock market operator has profited from a Dead Cat Bounce by recognizing it for what it is. However disaster awaits those who, out of Irrational Exuberance, mistake a Dead Cat Bounce for something else. Irrational Exuberance? That is another story.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Go together,
You precious winners all; your exultation
Partake to everyone. I, an old turtle,
Will wing to some withered bough, and there
My mate, that’s never to be found again,
Lament till I am lost.
- Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
A civilization as old as India ought to measure achievement differently from shiny new ones.
Instead we want to strut on the world stage to the rhythm of other people’s drums.
The result can only be the kind of farce that Delhi has been witnessing over the past two months (some would say the past sixty three years). It would be hilarious if it was not so tragic.
What about China you would say. An old civilization that stuns the Western world in most things it does including Beijing 2008.
But China discovered itself again when it started walking, about three decades ago, to its own drums. Going beyond the labels of communism and democracy, it discovered a system and an engine of prosperity that is entirely of its own making.
India’s Westminster style of democracy is a borrowed idea. In sixty three years we have not innovated one bit in the way we govern ourselves. Indian business and the Indian people in the meantime have, with no help from the State, reinvented themselves. Today, I believe, there are extant, Indian business and cultural ethos that are original and rooted in quintessentially Indian values. And this is the principle reason why India has finally found its voice.
It is urgent that we the Indian people, use this new found voice and vigour, to find ways and means to reinvent the Indian State. Otherwise this behemoth, cannibalizing the hard-won prosperity of the Indian people, will continue to strut on the world stage, in garbs that can only disgust. And more menacingly threaten ours and the well being of our children.
The alternative is the escapism of the old, so wonderful captured in the Shakespearean verse reproduced above.