Sunday Musings 02/02/2014: What after the Information Age?

It is interesting to examine the clichés and pet phrases from past decades. Just about a decade ago "The Information Age" was the favourite tool in every pontificator's tool box. With the projections of Moore's law more than coming true, with the third generation of the Internet already in the geriatric ward, isn’t it surprising that the phrase has kind of been laid to rest. But do a little bit of digging and you realize that this is just a minor manifestation of a much deeper cycle at work. The phrase “The Industrial Age” was currency in the intellectual discourse of the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s and disappeared with the coming of the flower children of the 60’s. And then in the 70’s the first mutterings of the phrase “The Information Age” were heard in the 80s and the 90s one could get sick of hearing it. And faded out in the Oughts. Which gives rise to an interesting question? What’s next? I have a dog in the fight. Many years ago on a mellow evening with a friend I had expounded a theory. And felt warm satisfaction when the cover story on the future of jobs in The Economist dated January 18 sort of confirmed it. A paradigm shift in a society’s technology creates a new class of jobs that in time change the very structure of the society. The Industrial Age created blue and white collar jobs that in turn created the middle classes which lead to the creation of modern society with social, economic, cultural and political structures that the world had not seen before. The Information Age on the other hand while democratizing information has paradoxically created a global elite and a weakening of the middle classes. The next epoch will have network of computers, smart fabs and things take over functions that while hastening the demise of the middle classes will also destroy the power structures that today feed the global elite, especially the vast and global manipulation of money. So with the networks doing most things that today we do as work what will be the future of work? The Economist’s article stops short of saying what that will be but does express optimism that the world will find a way to have all our children and children’s children productively engaged. But where The Economist does not tread I shall venture further. The currency of the Industrial Age was material goods, the currency of the Information Age is information and it is my prediction that the currency of the next age is going to be emotion. Fifty years of now the principal economic activity will be that of decoding, generating, storing, buying and selling of emotions. We can see the crude, early prototypes of these key economic activities of the future in the music, art, cinema, TV and gaming products and services of today (they are like the abacus was to the computers of the Information Age). What will this coming age be called? If humanity is fortunate enough to take the right route than perhaps we will have the Spiritual Age. If not we will have the Entertainment Century before humanity discovers the secret at the core.

Sunday Musings 26/01/2014: A State of Mind Called Bangalore

An important part of my psyche is a state of mind called Bangalore. A quiet inward gathering that stimulates both deep rest and deep thought. An alertness that mixes cool repose with the edge of anticipation. A decade ago the city now known as Bengaluru held the promise of triggering in me this much-loved state of mind. No longer. Somewhere between the breakneck growth of the city and my own personal growth the connection between the state of mind and the city is lost. Now I look for and sometimes find the state of mind in quiet conversations with certain friends and the music of CSNY, Dylan, Blind Faith, Jethro Tull and Pink Flyod. There is also the sub-conscious triggering by a particular kind of touch, smell, sight and taste - a triggering that John Fowles - according to many the best writer of contemporary English- called the objective correlative. Apparently the world of the sub-conscious endures much longer than mere places in the world out there. Another Republic Day, another parade. Hopefully by this time next year the promise of an incipient paradigm shift in India's politics would have taken root and with it the clouds that threaten to rain on our parade would have disappeared.

Sunday Musings 19/01/14: The Empire Strikes Back!

The panjandrum of the national press and the talking heads on TV have the cudgels out for AAP. And after the initial shock, the major political formations have got their dirty tricks departments’ working day and night targeting it. But the biggest strike that threatens the AAP phenomenon is from within. Not just within the party in the shape of sundry moles like Binny but from within the consciousness of AAP’s best people. The ministers in Delhi’s state cabinet need to dig deeper to find the right response to a state of being that is ipso facto alien to them: that of being in power. Are they doing so? One would think not. Except for Kejriwal who seems to have found an angle of repose, the others seem to be floundering. History tells us that successful rebellions carry the seeds of failure within their very success that they fought so hard for. In fact this is the most potent weapon of the empire of power in its effort to crush all newcomers. The empire not only strikes back it strikes within. Whether or not AAP survives the assault, there is no doubt that AAP has already done what all successful rebellions do that is change the frame of reference. Those in power are now uneasy. They must learn this new frame of reference and those who enjoy power and pelf find learning the hardest thing to do. It is the wedding season and I have attended my fair share already. Over the past couple of years I have noticed a trend at Indian weddings that has the amateur anthropologist in me thinking. Traditionally it is the groom that comes to the wedding venue with much sound and fury accompanied by loud music, firecrackers and raucous dance by accompanying friends and relatives. Traditionally the bride waits demurely for all this circus to reach its conclusion so that she can garland the cock-a-hoop groom. This seems to be changing. Now at quite a few weddings, the bride gets her moment of glory too. After the groom’s arrival at the wedding venue he is made to cool his heels as the bride is carried to him in a colorful and somewhat noisy parade. I am told that the longer the procession, the longer the groom waits, the greater the glory of the bride. Is this a sign of the rising power of the woman even in the strata of Indian society that likes to celebrate and conduct weddings lavishly (that is 98% of the rich, the poor and everybody in between)? Or is the wedding procession of the bride just another facet of the rising macho competitiveness in Indian society – the bride’s father asserting his masculinity in the face of the increasingly boorish dance of the groom’s arrival?

Sunday Musing 13/01/14

I am waiting expectantly for the next AAP feat. And I don't mean another breathtaking electoral performance in the coming general elections. Much before that AAP needs to govern Delhi for the next three months if not brilliantly than at least credibly. if that happens I believe that the paradigm shift to take root in Indian politics. Talking about paradigm shifts, do you notice paradigm shifts in the people you love, admire or just know well? I have begun to notice quite a few. Probably because I accumulated a lot more data as I grow older - lot more people observed over a lot more years. In one individual case the paradigm shift in character has been both subtle and startling. I have admired him for more than two decades for being a 'big small man'. Diminutive in stature and modest in term of intellectual pitch, he was a true leader and friend - fearless, insightful and generous. And then success waylaid him. The paradigm shifted and from a "big small man' he transformed into a "small big man". The spirit of generousness that so defined him earlier is now polluted by a pompous preening that only highlights an incipient sense of insecurity. Have you noticed how insecurity is almost always a by product of success? You would think success would nurture security but quite to the contrary. The only state that predicates security seems to be the state of 'nothing to lose but our chains'. That's why perhaps the greatest and most difficult yoga to practice is the yoga of non-attachment. 'Looking for Sugarman' is an award-winning documentary on a songwriter singer named Rodrigues who lived in obscurity and genteel poverty in Detroit while his music, unknown to him, found almost anthem like success among two generations in South Africa. Later in life Rodrigues got to savor his success in South Africa with successive sold-out concert tours. "Looking for Sugarman" in a meditation on the nature of success and fame as it brilliantly captures Rodrigues poise as he contently sinks back into his life of obscurity in the US after tours of screaming celebrity in South Africa. The rise of the Australian team from the ashes of last year is a happy development for those of us who love Test Match Cricket as it promises the excitement of five more-or-less evenly matched teams - South Africa, India, Australia, England and Pakistan. Among my fellow followers of Test Match Cricket the above assertion will be a subject of much debate but I am ready with a vigorous defense! The Oscar season is upon us and there is a surfeit of potential Oscar winners on my hard drive. "Dallas Buyers Club" starts from the left-field with a destructive drug-abusing oversexed AIDS-infected protagonist who then in a pleasantly surprising turn half-way through the movie finds redemption and a measure of happiness springing from the depths of his gathering despair. Worth a watch. My iBooks shelf is overflowing as my reading took a backseat to an intense learning engagement with a field completely new to me. I have just begun to dip into 'Humboldt's Gift' by Saul Bellow. Waiting in the wings are Kate Atkinson's Life After a Life, Tenth of December by George Saunders and Americanah by Ngozi ( a Nigerian American). Let me conclude this Sunday musing with a word about the joys of continuous learning. I spent the last week engaged in learning the basics of a craft entirely new to me and way out of my professional field and I am glad to report that it is a most invigorating experience. Something to do with, I guess, getting long dormant neural connectionfiring again. Highly recommended. Signing off with a piece of poetry that can give some cold comfort on the days one despairs about the human condition (and may they be increasingly few). <i>Hollow Men We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!/ Our dried voices, when/ We whisper together/ Are quiet and meaningless/ As wind in dry grass/ Or rats' feet over broken glass/ In our dry cellar/ Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion;/ Those who have crossed/ With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom/ Remember us—if at all—not as lost/ Violent souls, but only/ As the hollow men/ The stuffed men./ - excerpted from 'The Hollow Men' by TS Eliot

Memes and the Coming General Elections

Brand gurus, mostly, do not make good election strategists as simply as a good man. mostly, does not make for a great politician. Building brands and winning elections work on two entirely different communication paradigms. Elections are won when the evoked memes favor one party more than the other and not because one brand is stronger than the other (I had written a post last year that contrast brands and memes: Beyond the Brand: The Meme?. It is reproduced at the end of this post). When voters vote they are going much beyond making a brand choice. They are acting on the deepest and complex set of human needs and instincts. Election campaigns work when they are based, overtly and covertly, on "shorthand" that crystallizes these deep and complex needs. This "shorthand" is both pervasive and simple as it is magical. Magical because it manages to invoke and infer to a rich structure of perceptions and self-image within an individual.For many decades now the memes that have have distinguished the winners from the losers in Indian politics have come from the area of identity. Muslim and Hindu. Lower Caste and Upper Caste. Rich and Poor. Over the past two decades another powerful meme has been added to Indian politics: Local and National. The Local and National meme has added a whole new set of winners in Indian politics and ushered in the era of coalition politics. In the past few years another powerful identity based meme has made it's appearance: the Youth meme. This meme is the most powerful dimension of the demographic dividend that promises to change Indian politics and Indian society. Election strategists that deeply understand and invoke the Youth meme could tap into a winning vein that, given India's demographics, could hold them in good stead for the next 2 to 3 decades. On the other hand strategies based on a superficial understanding of the Youth meme can dump one into the loser's bin for a long time. The Youth meme is not necessarily evoked by "babalog" politicians. In fact fronting entitled members of the "lucky sperm" club might be a way to evoke the Youth meme not for your party's campaign but for the opposition. The election strategist needs to go deeper in his examination of the Youth meme. How does it interact with the still powerful memes from past elections - Religion,Caste, Class and Ethnicity. Is the best way to invoke the Youth meme not by direct appeal but to invoke a set of powerful ancillary memes? What are they? Jobs? Freedom? Quality of Life? Education? Health?. These are the questions that the election strategists who will win in 2014 are pondering over and getting answers to right now. And if no one is, well it could then well be that there is no winner in 2014. It will then be time to prepare for some more years of the doldrums of the limbo my friends. 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 social media and 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?

PS: To the normal consumer brands are a significant but small part of her existence. On the other hand to marketers and advertising people like me brands are the core of our discipline. So if you are one of my many readers who are from outside the marketing and advertising fraternity pleas bear with me when I, once in a while, indulge in shop talk.

The High Art of Literary Fiction

Fiction, the pundits tell me, comes in two kinds - literary fiction and commercial fiction. Commercial fiction is the kind that helps you while away a few hours suitably entertained. On the other hand, literary fiction is as Kafka famously stated "an axe to break the frozen sea inside us" In these days of ardent quantifying - page ranks, neurobiological metrics and mining of personal data - the question is asked about what use is the "breaking of the frozen sea inside us". Two recent studies by social psychologists ( http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/i-know-how-youre-feeling-i-read-chekhov/?_r=0, and http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0055341) have proved that the reading of literary fiction, at least in in its immediate penumbra, increases emotional intelligence or empathy. These findings, like all findings of studies in the soft sciences can easily be questioned) but that to, my mind, is besides the point. "Breaking the frozen sea inside us" is in itself an affirmation of life and increases the intensity of all that you feel. If it is private grief that you are battling with, it can find you a resonance that relieves the painful edge of grief suffered alone. If it is failure that is depressing you or success that is blinding you, it can help you laugh at both. The utility of literary fiction is, to my mind in the realm of the personal rather than in the lately-much-to-emphasized realm of the social. I read a lot. At any point of time,I have multiple books on my "being read" list - fiction/non-fiction, prose/poetry, literary/commercial (You can find my reading list and share yours on Goodreads - the "Facebook" for book readers). However my pace of reading goes up and down and recently I find myself returning to the voracious mode. Also,after a couple of years of favoring non-fiction, I find myself returning to fiction. In the past 6 weeks I have finished reading six books - The Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahri, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon, Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil, Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel, Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe and The Flamethowers by Rachel Kushner and 80% through with a seventh - The Goldfinch by Donna Trott. That is way beyond my average pace of reading and in these six weeks the four non-fiction books on my "being read" list have listlessly languished there. Everyone of the seven books have been a joy to read. They are of varying merit. I would put Goldfinch right on top,followed by Bring Up The Bodies, followed by Back to Blood, followed by The Lowlands, followed by the Flamethrowers, followed by Bleeding Edge and trailing last would be Narcopolis (For those of you interested in such things, I plan to write brief reviews of each book on Goodreads). But everyone of them, in it's own way, helped me attain an angle of repose after a period of high emotional and physical discomfort. In fact I believe that this torrent of reading has been my sub-conscious coping mechanism. In fact my top-of-the-list book ,The Goldfinch is a masterpiece that,I believe,will find its place among the best of the decade. However I suspect it is on top of my list not just because it is extremely well written, has masterly character sketches or an unflagging narrative intensity but because it finds great emotional resonance with me. The book is set in circumstances and locales that are foreign to me and nobody would catch a glimpse of me in any of the main characters in the book. So where does the resonance come from? I think it comes from the depths of the sub-conscious where empathy goes beyond the apparent and where our deepest self and therefore Kafka's "frozen self" lurks. I am quite aware that literary fiction is not everybody' cup of tea. There are many of us who find other means of unfreezing our deeper selves. For some its treks into nature. For some others it is hobbies like playing an instrument or singing or acting or dancing or cooking or, writing or, apparently with a large section of humanity, talking/ socializing. For the lucky few among us who have found an vocation it is working. The one difference you will notice is nearly all other means of "unfreezing your self" are when you are in an "active" mode - you are doing something- while the claim of this post is that an apparently passive activity like reading good literary fiction can match the intensity an benefit of doing something active. That, I believe, is because in reading each one of us creates the context and is therefore are in an active "creative" mode. And when you are reading a good work of literary fiction you are creating at the deepest level of emotional intensity s and therein lies it power. “It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” ― Oscar Wilde And now for some lighter moments with and about readers courtesy of the New Yorker's Cartoon Bank:

The Eleventh Man

The game of cricket did not fade away from the world. It went up in flames in a matter of months. It all started on a November evening under lights at Mumbai's Wankhade Stadium. India was playing England in a one day international. Harsha B, a ripe 65 year old on the verge of retirement was holding forth on TV in his patented faux mix of Cardus and Arlott. Suddenly the producer's voice broke in "Hey Harsha count the English team on the field. I think there are only on ten". Jolted out of his reverie Harsha got back to the job of describing the action on the field. As the bowler got ready to deliver the next ball, Harsha started describing the field setting while bringing up the graphic showing the field positions occupied. The producer was right. There will be 10 Englishmen on the field including the wicket-keeper and the bowler. Harsha started ticking of the names in his head to locate the missing eleventh man. That was the start of the worldwide befuddlement that ensued. Try as hard as he may, Harsha just could not figure out who was the missing eleventh man. His mind would identify a player and the next moment, lo and behold, the guy would be there lurking at third man or patrolling long on. Besides the producer and now Harsha nobody else seemed to have yet noticed the missing eleventh man. The match halted for the drinks break and Harsha alerted his fellow commentators to the mystery. Over the next one hour, each one of the team of six tried to identify the missing eleventh man and failed to. As strange to everyone of them was that neither the players on the field, the umpires, the players and officials in the pavilion, or any of the 16,433 spectators or the millions watching on TV had noticed the anomaly! The commentary team decided to keep the mystery to themselves and let the match finish. As the players started trudging back to the pavilion and the spectators started vacating the stands, Harsha ran down to the ground and caught hold of the English manager and asked him whether any of his players were missing. The manager was befuddled by the question but since it came from a man he both liked and respected he went around counting his boys. Since England had lost the match, the counting job was easy as all the players huddled around inside the dressing room. There were sixteen in the squad and the manager could count only 15. He brought out a list started ticking down the names. There it was. There was one person missing. It was James Gray, the stocky spinner. But Gray was in the playing eleven and would have been on the field just moments ago. Where was James Gray? The question haunted everybody left on the ground for the next hour so and then the question started reverberating across the world. Mumbai was being searched with a tooth comb 30 minutes after it was noticed that John Gray was missing with all exits from Mumbai blocked. "John Gray had to be somewhere in Mumbai wouldn't he?" "Where else could he be? He just did not have the time to get to anywhere else, did he?" "And any way why would he run away? So what if he got hammered for 45 in 5 overs, it had been done to him and worse before". However the biggest mystery and befuddlement and mystery of all was unfolding in the TV studio. The footage of the match was being examined in the minutest details. Footage from twelve high-definition cameras focused unblinkingly on that less than 2 acres of turf, examined and re-examined. And what happened to Harsha, happened to a team of 30 highly alter individuals over the next 4 hours. In the last 90 minutes of playing time, there were only 14 people, including the two batsmen and the two umpires on the ground, instead of the 15 that should have been there. And the biggest puzzle was no amount of list checking could identify who was the missing eleventh person. Every time a count was taken, James Gray was lurking somewhere on the field. Every time one of the other 10 was assumed was missing, there he was lurking somewhere on the field. Nobody was missing yet the count added up to one missing. Over the next 3 days the hunt for James Gray was expanded worldwide. John Gray was nowhere to be found. The world media was agog even while the mystery of the TV footage was kept from the world.But that was the least of the questions bothering world governments and intelligence agencies. The rationalist were called in but no fraud or trick in the TV footage was exposed. The scientists and the strategist tried to construct explanatory scenarios but none could be created that did not cross the outer boundaries of humanity knowledge. And then on the sixth day it happened again. This time it was in the West Indies during a West Indies versus Australia Test Match. In broad daylight!. This time the world governments and the intelligence agencies were ready. The incident was kept under wraps. The missing player, a Trinidadian fast bowler, disappeared from the face of the world without a whimper in the media. A tightly controlled 230 people knew about the incident. The others were paid-off or intimated or both to keep quiet. And when it happened the sixth time within nine months of the Wankhade incident, the world governments got together and banned international cricket. In a scenario created by a brilliant strategist from British intelligence, rumours about a worldwide betting syndicate that regularly fixed international matches was started soon after the Wankhade Incident and fanned. The formidable propaganda machinery of the Western powers revved up after the second incident and the decision by cricket boards and governments across the world, soon after the sixth incident,to ban international cricket for the foreseeable future was, with the exception of peaceful protests in cities like Mumbai. Kolkata, Sydney and London, accepted by the people and media of the world. And without the fuel of international cricket, in a few years, all cricket died. The world now had 230 more football stadiums. It was nearly two centuries, before the world officially recognized the Wankhade Incident as the first of several botched attempts by the super-computers of the sixth planet around the distant sun Alpha Nova to contact the human race. By then it was much too late to revive the lovely game of cricket.