I live a secret life.
A normal person’s life is lived as a web of relationships with real people. I live a normal life of that sort. But in addition and almost as important to me is my secret life. A secret life lived with an ever-changing cast of fascinating minds and people. A Russian mafia don planning to spill the beans in exchange for a promise of protection and asylum by Britain. ( John Le Carre). Einstein explaining his theory of relativity. A neurotic genius revealing his inner life, no holds barred (Henry Miller ). A Yankee from the nineteenth century transported to King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain). Amartya Sen gently expounding an idea of justice. And so on.
At any given point in time I am at various stages of reading five or six books. I read them at varied pace. Some take me as much as a fortnight to complete. Some spend themselves on me in a one-night stand. And the characters that inhabit these books I am reading and the writers who write them become, for that period of time, an integral part of my life. I have relationships with them and emotions engendered by them which are as real as anything else in my life.
My secret life however had an in-built governor preventing it from overwhelming me. The books and hence the characters and the writers were scattered around various places in my home and office and at any time and place only a couple vied from my attention. Beyond my library of a thousand books or so, if I had to acquaint myself with a new one meant making a trip to the bookshop that could happen about once a week.
Over the past month there has been an upheaval in my secret life. I resisted the Kindle for many months because I sensed in some corner of my mind the danger. But the latest generation Kindle got so many rave reviews that I gave in to the temptation.
It arrived a month ago. Bound in an authentic leather jacket it sat in the palm like an incredibly light well-produced hardbound book. Open the book and a small screen etched with a tasteful picture nods at you. Put it on and the screen changes to the very page you last were reading. It looks 100% like a well printed page using a magical technology called e-ink (it can only handle black-and-white but then who needs color- we shall leave such frills to that darling of the infantile and the philistine- iPad). But that’s where the likeness of the Kindle to the book ends. As you read a book, on hand literally at the flick of a switch are a hundred thousand or more of them. The result is a permanent invitation to promiscuity, a promiscuity of the mind and the soul, immeasurably more inveigling then that of the body. On the positive side I have one more reason to thank the Almighty for not making me filthy rich. Just imagine my troubles if I had an unlimited book budget!
So here I am joining the ranks of those laid low with technology. I empathize now with the couch potatoes, the mobile fries and the Facebook rats.
So why don’t I, you might say just put away my Kindle, give it away and get back to my previous well-ordered existence?
Are you mad!?
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
“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?
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?
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, October 11, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
An Artist’s Impression of Garden-Variety Politicians
Many Indians do not like VS Naipaul.
In a country where we are quick to embrace anyone successful with the slightest connection to India, this Nobel Prize winner of Indian descent is by and large ignored. Could be something to do with his field of endeavor- literature does not excite the popular imagination, his nature- acerbic and distant and the fact that he had written a book, An Area of Darkness, that was a brutal portrait of the India of the 70s (no matter that in the nineties he was among the first to catch the flowering of modern day India in his brilliant follow-up book on India – A Million Mutinies Now)
No matter whether you like him or dislike him, VS Naipaul is, I believe, among the two or three most prescient and powerful writers of his generation.
This week I have been reading his The Mimic Men, a novel first published in the mid-sixties. As an exposition and rumination of the psyche of those who grow up in small towns under a colonial yoke it is unmatched. As literature it is outstanding enough to get a special mention in his Nobel citation. Read it if you have the inclination and time for such things.
In this post however I want to offer you a passage from this book. The politician is a mystery to most ordinary people. The passage below, I think, offers the kind of insight on the subject that only great literature can provide. Enjoy.
(Note: The protagonist in first person is describing newly-minted politicians who have come to power in a small Caribbean island on the shoulders of the success of a political party started by his friend. The protagonist himself though a part of the movement is an intellectual and does not see himself as a politician)
“The others we could observe. We could see them in new suits even on the hottest days. We could see the foolish stern faces they prepared for the public to hide their pleasure at their new eminence. We could see them coming out of restaurants with their ‘secretaries”. We could see them shirtsleeved – their coats prominent on hangers- as they were driven in government cars marked with the letter M, on which they had insisted, to proclaim their status as Ministers. The car, the shirtsleeves, the coat on the hangar: the fashion spread rapidly down the motorized section of our civil service and might be considered the sartorial fashion of our revolution. At sports meetings they went to the very front row of the stands and over the months we could see the flesh swelling on the back of their necks, from the good living and the lack of exercise. And always about them, policemen in growing numbers.
They were easily frightened men, these colleagues of ours, they feared the countryside, they feared the dark, they grew to fear the very people on whose suffrage they depended. People who have achieved the trappings of power for no reason they can see are afraid of losing those trappings. They are insecure because they see too many like themselves….”
“…in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside…”
“.. They felt the awe of the ungifted who thought they had, simply through enduring, suddenly discovered, in this response of the ungifted among their people, the source of the power and regeneration they had waited for without hoping to find”
(Emphasis mine)
In a country where we are quick to embrace anyone successful with the slightest connection to India, this Nobel Prize winner of Indian descent is by and large ignored. Could be something to do with his field of endeavor- literature does not excite the popular imagination, his nature- acerbic and distant and the fact that he had written a book, An Area of Darkness, that was a brutal portrait of the India of the 70s (no matter that in the nineties he was among the first to catch the flowering of modern day India in his brilliant follow-up book on India – A Million Mutinies Now)
No matter whether you like him or dislike him, VS Naipaul is, I believe, among the two or three most prescient and powerful writers of his generation.
This week I have been reading his The Mimic Men, a novel first published in the mid-sixties. As an exposition and rumination of the psyche of those who grow up in small towns under a colonial yoke it is unmatched. As literature it is outstanding enough to get a special mention in his Nobel citation. Read it if you have the inclination and time for such things.
In this post however I want to offer you a passage from this book. The politician is a mystery to most ordinary people. The passage below, I think, offers the kind of insight on the subject that only great literature can provide. Enjoy.
(Note: The protagonist in first person is describing newly-minted politicians who have come to power in a small Caribbean island on the shoulders of the success of a political party started by his friend. The protagonist himself though a part of the movement is an intellectual and does not see himself as a politician)
“The others we could observe. We could see them in new suits even on the hottest days. We could see the foolish stern faces they prepared for the public to hide their pleasure at their new eminence. We could see them coming out of restaurants with their ‘secretaries”. We could see them shirtsleeved – their coats prominent on hangers- as they were driven in government cars marked with the letter M, on which they had insisted, to proclaim their status as Ministers. The car, the shirtsleeves, the coat on the hangar: the fashion spread rapidly down the motorized section of our civil service and might be considered the sartorial fashion of our revolution. At sports meetings they went to the very front row of the stands and over the months we could see the flesh swelling on the back of their necks, from the good living and the lack of exercise. And always about them, policemen in growing numbers.
They were easily frightened men, these colleagues of ours, they feared the countryside, they feared the dark, they grew to fear the very people on whose suffrage they depended. People who have achieved the trappings of power for no reason they can see are afraid of losing those trappings. They are insecure because they see too many like themselves….”
“…in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside…”
“.. They felt the awe of the ungifted who thought they had, simply through enduring, suddenly discovered, in this response of the ungifted among their people, the source of the power and regeneration they had waited for without hoping to find”
(Emphasis mine)
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Unscrambled British Council, Scrambled Rushdie
The past week I went back to two abandoned favorites.
I let my British Council membership lapse years ago as its location in Bombay at Nariman Point became increasingly irrelevant to my life.
I remember having a conversation then with the Librarian about how the centre of gravity of Bombay including the mass of its reading public had shifted northwards to the suburbs.
A couple of months ago they surprised me. The library went the “Netflix” model. Browse the library on the website, queue up the books you want to borrow and they deliver them and pick them up (on request- no deadlines!) from your home (www.mylibrary.britishcouncil.org).
The British Council is back in my life and as I browse the library the presence of a selection of graphic novels assures me that the brand’s relevance-seeking new avatar is more than skin deep.
One of the first books I read through my new membership of the British Council is Salman Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence”. Unlike the rest of Rushdie’s books, I had not bought this book when it came out a couple of years ago.
I was enchanted, like many of my generation, with Midnight’s Children but every subsequent book of his, to my mind, was a milestone on his fall from grace.
With “The Ground beneath Her Feet” I thought the addling of Mr. Rushdie’s talent was complete and thus restrained myself from investing time and money in “The Enchantress of Florence”.
With the resurrection of British Council in my life I thought of giving Mr. Rushdie a go to.
I am sorry to report that I think the addled state continues.
In “Midnight’s Children” Rushdie used the device of magic realism to illuminate reality and multiply relevance. “Midnight’s Children” has a totemic status with the post-independence generation because it managed to in their emotional landscape, light the dry tinder accumulated from recital of the history of the independence struggle and the trauma of partition.
However every subsequent Rushdie novel has moved further and further away from this magic of inciting and exciting emotional relevance. There are passages in “The Enchantress of Florence” of great beauty; there are phrases and metaphors that ignite admiration but alas!, the narrative structure instead of involvement engenders distance.
Mr. Rushdie himself perhaps does not care much for relevance. I am sure he will point out he is an artist of the first order and not a public utility like the British Council. Be that as it may be but I for one will dip into the next Rushdie book with great reluctance.
I let my British Council membership lapse years ago as its location in Bombay at Nariman Point became increasingly irrelevant to my life.
I remember having a conversation then with the Librarian about how the centre of gravity of Bombay including the mass of its reading public had shifted northwards to the suburbs.
A couple of months ago they surprised me. The library went the “Netflix” model. Browse the library on the website, queue up the books you want to borrow and they deliver them and pick them up (on request- no deadlines!) from your home (www.mylibrary.britishcouncil.org).
The British Council is back in my life and as I browse the library the presence of a selection of graphic novels assures me that the brand’s relevance-seeking new avatar is more than skin deep.
One of the first books I read through my new membership of the British Council is Salman Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence”. Unlike the rest of Rushdie’s books, I had not bought this book when it came out a couple of years ago.
I was enchanted, like many of my generation, with Midnight’s Children but every subsequent book of his, to my mind, was a milestone on his fall from grace.
With “The Ground beneath Her Feet” I thought the addling of Mr. Rushdie’s talent was complete and thus restrained myself from investing time and money in “The Enchantress of Florence”.
With the resurrection of British Council in my life I thought of giving Mr. Rushdie a go to.
I am sorry to report that I think the addled state continues.
In “Midnight’s Children” Rushdie used the device of magic realism to illuminate reality and multiply relevance. “Midnight’s Children” has a totemic status with the post-independence generation because it managed to in their emotional landscape, light the dry tinder accumulated from recital of the history of the independence struggle and the trauma of partition.
However every subsequent Rushdie novel has moved further and further away from this magic of inciting and exciting emotional relevance. There are passages in “The Enchantress of Florence” of great beauty; there are phrases and metaphors that ignite admiration but alas!, the narrative structure instead of involvement engenders distance.
Mr. Rushdie himself perhaps does not care much for relevance. I am sure he will point out he is an artist of the first order and not a public utility like the British Council. Be that as it may be but I for one will dip into the next Rushdie book with great reluctance.
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