The Chetan Bhagat Generation

Have you read a Chetan Bhagat book? I haven't.
The sales figures of his books are, I am told, through the roof.
Somewhat mystified I decided to talk to my friend the erudite Musty Bookwala, a third generation bookseller.
"Chetan Bhagat! That man is a genius I tell you"
Then spying the blank on my face.
." Are dikra, tame  khuch khabar nathu. His books are in what I call Fraille. Nathi samjhu?
Let me explain like Braille is for the blind, Fraille is for today's young"
" Musty are you saying the reading habits of today's young are kind of kinky?" 
"Oye Aggie what reading habit? Unless of course you mean Nike or somebody is going to market clothes to read in. Boss they buy Chetan Bhagat because they find they can read them, one SMS at a time. Also when you no longer buy a newspaper what do you think you can carry with you to the bogs?"
Next time I spied Chetan on a current affairs programme on TV I stopped surfing and paid attention. I saw the man in a new light. Was I beholding, I wondered, India's Steve.
Steve started with the iBook and went on to the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Having single handedly reviving the Indian publishing industry with iPulp, Chetan can perhaps re-invent the fashion industry in India with iKitsch and then perhaps take the film industry out of the hands of Idiots like Aamir Khan and Hirani with iMasala. 
Carry on Chetan. Keep reaping India's wonderful demographic dividend. Regardless.

Dennis Ritchie and the Dynamics of Fame

Dennis Ritchie died on the 12th of October, a week after Steve Jobs did.
While Steve Jobs's got about 210 million effusive eulogies across the world Dennis Ritchie passed away mostly unheralded.
Should it be any different, you may ask. After all Jobs is Jobs. Who by the way is Deniss Ritchie?
Ah! the self-referential circulairty of Fame.
Dennis Ritchie is the guy who created the C programming language and along with Ken Thompson created the UNIX operating system. As anyone who knows something about computing will tell you, C is at the heart of all computer programming.Even if a program today is written in some other language, that language itself is written in C.
But C apparently does not hold a candle to shiny little things with the prefix i when it comes to Fame. Is Fame fickle? Is it a lottery who gets to be Famous? Somebody someday will define the dynamics of Fame. Till then here are two photographs - one is of Dennis Ritchie and the other Steve Jobs. See if you can tell which one is which.

Writing Poetry at A Hundred and One

Read a review today about Dorthea Tanning’s second book of poems – “Coming to That”.
Among the many things that are extraordinary about Tanning is the fact that she is a hundred and one and still writing poetry.
One other extraordinary thing is that she is also a painter and sculptor of considerable repute. This while being as the reviewer points out “a woman of extraordinary personal power and seductiveness (everyone who meets her seems to agree)”.
Tanning’s self-effacing wit is evident in her description of herself as the “oldest living emerging poet”
Much of Tanning’s poetry in ‘Coming to That’ is retrospective; she has a lot of past to cover while living in “the long looked forward to, endlessly delayed future”.
Sample this excerpt from the poem titled “Never Mind”:

Never mind the pins/ And needles I am on./ Let all other instruments/ Of torture have their way./ While air-conditioners/ Freeze my coffee/ I watch the toaster/ Eating my toast./ Did I press the right/ Buttons on all these/ Buttonless surfaces/ Daring me to press them.

The reviewer finds this a happy mix of flustered sexuality (pressing the buttons of buttonless surfaces to turn them on!?) and technological cluelessness of the elderly. Some combination that. There is more. Sample this from the same poem:

Will the fellow I saw pedalling/ Across the bridge live long/ After losing his left leg, / His penis, and his bike/ To fearlessness? / Will his sad wife find/ Consolation with the/ Computer wizard called in/ Last year to deal with the glitches?

The reviewer asserts that this is the first poem he has read that “imagines a rent-a-geek as a potential Don Juan’. The modern day equivalent of the “Postman Rings Twice” imagined by someone from a generation which waited, sometimes eagerly, for the postman’s knocks?
Let me give this final extract that captures Tanning acute awareness of being burdened with too long a past:

Surely this everywhere present is real/ enough and eager, yet unable, to tell me/ what I am waiting for now.

Raymond Kurzweil, the author, inventor and futurist predicts that in the next decade the average life span of the affluent individual, because she could afford all the advances in medical science, would be close to one hundred and fifty years; most people with whom I have discussed this balk at the thought of living that long. Well if you are anything like Tanning that would not be so bad a deal.
However even Tanning knows the joys of mortality. In the late sixties she did a series of soft sculptures, reminding many of the female form, made mostly of tweeds and other fabrics. She said then that she wanted them, unlike sculptors in marble or plaster, to not outlast their makers. Well Tanning certainly seems to be made of sterner stuff than tweeds.
Can’t wait to download “Coming to That”.

(Sketch above is of Tanning as she is today, picture below is of a self-portrait painted when she was young)

Discontinuing Diseducation

Both the words 'continuing' and 'education' have become boring cliches. 'Continuing' has come to imply 'more of the same' instead of a dynamic flow. 'Education' has come to mean a gradual closing of the mind through an accretion of self-importance and dead knowledge rather the gradual illumination empowered by a seeker's humility. Put the two words together and they serve up a double whammy. Continuing Education has come to imply the communal gathering of professionals around yet another stagnant pool of knowledge, there more to meet. greet and preen rather than drink from the waters and you wouldn't blame them because truth be told they aren't thirsty. In a better world (round the corner as they tell me that 2012 will signal the end of things as they are - good bye human greed, stupidity and apathy) we will perhaps subscribe to Discontinuing Diseducation to undo the harm that a century of mass-market education has done to a couple of generation of practicing professionals. Get them to regularly attend sessions that take them faraway from their areas of domain expertise to lands of learning where they can be children again, curiosity multiplying discovery multiplying curiosity which is the natural attitude of children to learning until rote education overcomes it. And as the mind slowly opens again the trapped and stagnant pools of domain knowledge will begin to flow again cleansing themselves of detritus and gathering force and powering a world of good. Auden in a poem titled "Under Which Lyre" wrote these lines about the GI bill that enabled World War II veterans to attend college that capture the spirit of Discontinuing Diseducation: Encamped upon the college plain/Raw veterans already train/ As freshman forces...../ And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter/ Are shot to pieces by the shorter/ Poems of Donne