The Rise of Slime

The vast ecosystem of our seas and oceans is being altered fundamentally by overfishing, industrial pollution and the waste of the human race run amuck. While many a species of sea creatures head towards extinction one thrives - the jellyfish. The jellyfish species thrives because it feeds on the pollutants and waste we dump into the sea. Compounding this is the fact that jellyfish also feed on the eggs and the young of the predator species that feed on them. And so as the population of jellyfish multiplies the population of species that could have kept a check on it dwindles. Setting up a vicious cycle that ocean scientists have termed as 'the rise of slime'. Think of jellyfish as the corrupt. Think of the pollutants and the waste as acute materialism. Think of the species that hunt jellyfish as the honest and the upright in society. And think of the attack of the jellyfish on the young of these species as the insidious corruption-fuelled attack on the values of our children and our young. To use another metaphor, humanity's race to extinction is not just being fueled through the inexorable running down of the hardware - global warming et al- but an insidious attack on the software- the corruption of the human spirit. Bad as the diagnosis is, the eternal optimist in me believes that the prognosis is not all doom and gloom. Because even slime wants to evolve. All of life arose from a primordial slime. Unfathomable are the ways of this universe- an endless cycle of destruction and creation.

(reclamation)

Hard day's night waits/ For the last flight out/ Free beer fails/ To stir the soul/  (as it used to)/ Bemused I look around for/  Amusement/ (the soul's drug of easy resort)/ I spy! I spy!/ Sparrows! A troika no less!!/ In this anodyne plastic wasteland!!/ Could it be a fey designer's/ Half-wit touch?/ Or possibly/ (oh stirring thought!)/ Nature reclaiming,/ Inch by slow inch,/ Her own

Dial S for Shellphone

The Next Big Web Thing?

David Gelernter did not invent the Web. But he might be the guy who re-invents it. This professor at Yale thinks the Internet is a mess and needs some radical restructuring. In 1991 he published "Mirror Worlds" which envisaged a future where all our activities will be mirrored on the Web. Over the past ten years he has spent in to restructure the Web to mirror this emerging reality. David had nothing to do with either Facebook or Twitter. However social media did give rise to a concept central to his mission -the timeline. David however is not very complimentary about Twitter or Facebook. He believes that both while being important to the evolution of the Web are essentially inelegant and will not exist in a decade. Wall Street better rethink the $100 billion dollar valuations (the moot point, some would say, is that whether Wall Street itself may not exist in 10 years). The news is now that David is now ready to launch his product among students at Yale just as Facebook was first launched among students at Harvard. The product is, as you would expect, shrouded in mystery as of now but David does talk about the Internet of the future becoming a instead of a network of static assets and each person having a Lifestream that feeds the Worldstream and is visible to others in part based on permission settings. Imagining David's product based on the above concepts could be an interesting exercise. Who knows, you might land yourself a complementary product that positions you downstream from David's putative game changer. One more point. David was a victim of the Unabomber. A letter bomb blew up in his face, leaving him severely handicapped. Give a Genius a handicap and the odds are he will flower. Wanna bet on David's idea? You know where to find me.

Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!

Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!
Those, according to Steve Jobs's sister, were his dying words.
And he said them as he stared beyond those gathered around his deathbed.
What was Jobs seeing?
My guess is that what this unmatched curator of great design saw was design perfection, some sort of design heaven.
It is my theory that if one has lived life passionately, on death one passes to that passion.
For those of us, and that would probably be the vast majority, death only leads to one more go at life, one more opportunity to find passion.
An interesting variation of this theme is the concept of the Half-Way House - a concept that I came across a Japanese book or movie, the details of which I do not remember.
The Half-Way House concept is that when we die we all go to a Half-Way House. At the Half-Way House we are asked to recall that moment in our life when we were the happiest. And as soon as an individual in a Half-Way House recalls that moment correctly, he/ she is transported away from the Half-Way House to Heaven.
Passionate Involvement = Intense Happiness = Heaven?
Oh Wow! Of Wow! Of Wow!
Go figure "Hey Ram".

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.