Murakami and Ishiguro

I have never been to Japan. In fact I never have had a proper conversation with a Japanese, just the occasional professional meeting with Japanese expat managers.

However that does not prevent me from having two Japanese at the very top of my list of favorite writers: Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Murakami and Ishiguro in many ways are poles apart while embodying the same quintessential quality which I presume reflects being Japanese in spirit.

Both belong to my generation: the baby boom generation.

Murakami born in Japan in 1949 has lived in Japan all his life. He writes in Japanese.

Ishiguro, born in Japan in 1954, left it at age 5, didn’t visit it again until thirty years later, is a British citizen and writes in Queen’s English.

Murakami’s books (he has had 12 published during te period 1979 to 2009 all except the last available in English translations: the 2009 book, IQ84 will be available in English in 2011) gives play to a society’s pain and gain through a cast of characters who live on its margins.

His 2007 book ‘Kafka on The Shore” has a 15 year old who runs away from home, has a split personality and is obsessed by a prediction made by his father that he will be responsible for his (the father’s) murder and then will sleep with his mother and his only sister.

And a 50 year old who loses most mental faculties in a mysterious incident at the age of 6 and now lives on a government subsidy, completely ignored by his well-to-do brothers and spending his time using his one special ability: the ability to converse with cats.

“Kafka on The Shore” can be read as a meditation on the loss of Japanese family values but coming from an angle that simply refuses to make any value judgments while being written with a verve that would keep even a hard-boiled reader of pulp fiction engaged if only he (the reader that is) is ready to give up any preconceived notions about high-brow writing.

Ishiguro’s books (he has published 6 in the period 1982 to 2005) are always in the first person. The first-person point-of-view take on the air of an unfolding mystery as the protagonist gradually reveals fundamental character flaws that both hinder and define his life. The resultant pathos draws the reader into an intimate sympathetic relationship with the protagonist.

His 1995 book, "The Unconsoled", is written from the point-of-view of a famous pianist who is visiting an unfamiliar European city and is quickly loosing large chunks of his memory as he struggles to prepare and give the concert he has come for.

The sense of menace in this book, in my experience is matched only in the book “The Turn of The Screw” and the movie “Vertigo”.

Ishiguro and Murakami are very different. However every book of theirs is a labyrinth in which you are lost in while building it, turn by twisted turn, yourself.

Read them if you are inclined to invest in books. The ROI is high.

Two closing thoughts:

- Mumbai these days has a hoarding campaign running all over town. It read: “Help! MCGM to keep Mumbai clean!”!. This subtle transformation of a run-of-the-mill civic message to an appeal and a warning of impending doom is a rare gem. Here is a standing invitation for a drink to the copywriter who got this copy past some hapless English-challenged bureaucrat.

- In some corner of my conscience I do feel that I should not be doing this but here is an idea for the next MNS campaign. How dare the Mumbai IPL franchise be named Mumbai Indians! It should be immediately shift to being called the Mumbai Marathas. And while at it lets get that inveterate Indian- Sachin- out of the captain’s seat and get amchi Sunil out of retirement and in the saddle ( One more thought: Will the creation of Mumbai Marathas be the explosive issue that will give impetus to the rise of a new political force- the Konkan Nirman Sena?)

I/O Time, Core Time, Plug-Out Time

For many years I felt information/stimulus swamped and world-weary. Over the past few months I have discovered a solution.

I have learnt to parcel my waking hours into three kinds of time.

I/O Time is when I consume media or communicate with others.

Core Time is when I switch of all input and output channels and put myself in a ring-fenced processing mode.

Plug-Out Time is when not just all input-output channels but all processing is sought to be shut or at least minimized.

The reason why I used to feel swamped and weary, I now realize, was that by and large all my waking time used to be I/O Time. Watching, Reading, Listening, Browsing, Talking, Meeting, Presenting, Writing and so on.

Now I make sure 30% or so of my time is Core Time. And I find that not only do I now have a better angle of repose but the productivity and effectiveness of my I/O Time has measurably increased.

Plug-Out time is a state of being when you are ‘just hanging out with yourself”.

Many of us take classes to learn to meditate and then practice it hard and long. I now realize that trying is not meditating.

Trying nothing, being nothing, in other words being plugged-out is meditating. Mantras, breathing techniques, solitude etc. help but are not necessary. I know now that one can be plugged out, eyes wide open, waiting in a crowded airport lounge.

And sleep. What kind of time is that? Sleep time I cannot categorize. All I know is that I now sleep better with the three-way balance back in my waking time.

The Prison of Our Perceptions

In that rare film noir product from Bollywood, Kaminey, the protagonist Charlie cannot pronounce the Hindi consonant “sa” and substitutes it with “pha”. In a tense moment he tells a boss man “Main pha ko pha bolta hoon”. The boss man replies “ Abe ga…, pha ko pha nahin bolega to kya bolega!”.

That is a good example of the prison all of us live in. The prison of our perceptions.

Witgenstein a linguist and philosopher of the highest order illuminated this prison in another way. A woman walked up to him and said “ Sir though they say the earth moves around the sun, it sure looks like the sun moves around the earth” Witgenstein replied, “Tell me Madam what should the earth moving around the sun look like?”

The prison of our perception is different from other prisons in that there is just one person in it and the jailors are all missing! Get me? Sometimes I think words are the strong steel bars of this prison.

Just learnt from CNN that a frontrunner for the post of the President of EU is the current Belgian PM who writes haiku like poems. An example from his collection:

Wind blows through my hair
After years the wind still blows
Sadly the hair no longer does

I look forward to hearing more from this guy.

Got any of your own haiku to share with me?

Beyond the Brand: The Meme?

Meme: (me~m) n biology an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means esp. imitation (The New Oxford American Dictionary)
What does a brand that has done that, been there, go next?
In these days of viral communication it seems that becoming an “element of culture or system of behavior…passed on by one individual to another.. by non-genetic means” is well within the grasp of even relatively modest marketing budgets.
The question is why would a brand want to become a meme?
Well, simply because a meme is more powerful than a brand by many orders of magnitude. USA is a meme that still drives pop culture across the world. Milk is a meme, just ask any mom. India used to be a meme in the Middle Ages- fueling dreams of exotic mysteries and fabulous riches in many a buccaneer. Today the increasing soft power of India if husbanded well could give back to India the power of being a meme.
So will brand marketing now move on to aiming for the power of the meme? Well while the use of viral media is on the increase and the marketing chaterrati is talking about changing paradigms etcetera, I don’t think anybody knows how to make a meme happen through marketing. Maybe we need a new to discipline to be invented. Will a new Kotler soon arise?

The Poetry of Ted Hughes

I discovered Ted Hughes when I was trying to cope with difficult times. I loved Ted Hughes then because the poetry of Ted Hughes takes on grief and transforms it into a healer’s vision.
Ted Hughes was England’s Poet Laureate until he passed away in 1998.
Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 called Ted Hughes a voice that was simply “longer and deeper and rougher” than those of his contemporaries.
Today I find in Hughes’s poetry a universal vision transformed by a startling yet rooted perspective. In his poem, reproduced below, titled “The River” from the 1983 collection of poems titled “River”, every Indian will recognize the mythos of the holy river so much a part of Indian culture transformed by an empathy that sunders aside metaphors to grasp the cruel truth of Nature.

The River

Fallen from heaven, lies across
The lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go on
Issuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightness
Through its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buried
Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils,
It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pit
It will return stainless

For the delivery of this world.
So the river is a god.

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.

Monday Notes

What if Noah had charged the biggest moneybags of his day the BC equivalent of a billion euro a seat on the Ark? And planned to use the money to build the Ark and then leave the moneybags behind anyway. After all who needs moneybags after the Flood? To get the full story watch 2012, the latest catastrophe potboiler from Hollywood. And for a deeper understanding of the perils of being a moneybag read an earlier posting- The Value for Money- on this blog.
I had lunch at the Mysore Café in Matunga today and I recommend that you put savoring their Mysore Masala Dosa on your Bucket List.
Plan to settle down after I post this to watching the highlights of India get out of a hole on a day of good Test cricket. Those of you smirk at Test cricket can go take a walk. Or write me a mail on why you hate it so and I promise to respond.

Musings on a Saturday

This week’s November rains fell like happiness on a sunny day. Once again CNN got the weather forecast right and our weather guys managed, once again, an almost perfect negative correlation with reality. Why do we export some of the best engineering and science talent in the world and still have a woeful level of quality of engineering and science in our public life? At the surface the answers are easy and glib. Our public jobs pay poorly and therefore attract only the incompetent. Corruption is endemic and it kills all desire to perform a job well. However could it be that the nub lies deeper? Is it that the Indian genius is in the abstract and the ephemeral and not in the material world? That is why we can be the world’s best mathematicians and coders? That is why we craft best when we craft in homage to an idea? That is why we do shoddy work when it comes to planning and executing infrastructural projects or running daily humdrum services? Could it be that we can push up the quality of our public infrastructure and services by approaching them from a design context that is different from the way the Western world does? Worth some serious thought I think.
Last night I wrote a short story in my dreams. I dream two kinds of dreams. One kind is where situations and relationships that I have been through are twisted and represented in a manner that emphasizes and ratchets up an emotion that I did not consciously ascribe to them. The result is I wake up refreshed and with a fresh perspective of that situation or relationship. In the other kind of dreams I work. My mind writes furiously and somewhere I watch astounded. Pages of stuff- essays, stories, memoirs, poetry- spill out into the dream state! When I wake up from such dreams I wake up tired. I know my dream wrote something good and worthwhile but there is no way the waking me has access to.
Meanwhile my blog, as regular readers would have noticed, languishes. The novel I started awaits the third chapter as the protagonist, the lewd adept, stews and regularly castigates me. And as Aqumena gathers steam, my professional energies are deeply engaged in paid work and the tap runs dry on downtime professional essays for the blog.
Perhaps one way to populate the blog better is to turn to weekly column type postings like this one.