Art and Prejudice

Last weekend I watched Tom Ford's A Single Man. The movie is a masterpiece and even more fascinating when you consider the fact that it comes from a first-time Director who is already a big name in the world of fashion design and therefore presumably expends a lot of his creative energy in that profession.

Based on a Christopher Isherwood book, A Single Man to me was about how loneliness and fulfillment are two sides of that essential coin of existence: love.

Beyond the theme, what bowled me speechless was how A Single Man handles it's context. The central situation is a 20 year old live-in relationship between two men broken by the sudden death of one of them
in a road accident. The movie gazes at the gay context unflinchingly and still performs a miracle.

Let me expalin. I am, I must confess, essentially uncomfortable around gays and any gay context. I am, of course, as adept as the next 'liberal', in disguising this discomfort in my social stance. But in my private moments, and movie watching is a private act, I flinch away from gays and gay contexts. The miracle of A Single Man was that for those 90 odd minutes it freed me of my prejudice!

The art of Tom Ford and Colin Firth, the leading man, enabled and uplifted me to go beyond the cage of my "learned matrix" to participate in the essential and single consciousness that runs through all of us. That
is the function of high art. To free us for some exhilarating moments from learning and prejudices into the wide open spaces of pure consciousness.

In fact to many a practioner of art there is no meaning to life other han the pursuit of these moments of freedom. Like my friend Salim Ghouse, the theatre personality and movie actor, says in reaction to some of my frequent and contorted searching for meaning in science, philosophy and spirituality, "the rest
is a meaningless void'. An extreme view perhaps but then to produce art one must start with prejudice.

“You have all the watches but we have all the time”

“You have all the watches but we have all the time”.
The quote is attributed to the Afghan Taliban with reference to the NATO forces “occupying” their country.

Ignore the essential cowardice of terrorism that harasses and murders innocents wantonly and concentrate on just the phrase. What comes shining through is the “audacity of hope”. The pluck that propelled Obama from the shadows of a broken family and a missing father to the pinnacle of power is the same pluck that drives every human endeavor against the twin irresistible forces of Fate and Nature

In the long run Fate and Nature will outlast all human endeavor and therefore in the literal it is Fate and Nature who have “all the time”. The audacity of hope and with it the essential and defining spirit of humanity lies in ignoring obvious and overwhelming advantage.

Out of these dynamics of the audacity of hope I believe could spring a ‘positioning” strategy that could propel worthy but losing causes like the fight against climate change from the margins to the mainstream. The then mayor of London in a conversation in 2008 put it in stark perspective for me. “ All this talk about saving the Earth from coming environmental disaster is bunkum. The Earth will continue fine, it will be us who will be extinct”. Frame the green fight as a fight for our rights and our life rather than a fight for Nature, in fact a fight against the implacable forces of Nature and it will have all of us intensely involved.

So is NATO human endeavor and the Taliban a force of Nature or is it the other way round? Like in all things political the argument can be made both ways.

The Power of Design

Design defined as the set of organizing principles that result in purposive systems as distinct from random noise, is to my mind the mysterious creative force behind the universe.

Someday when someone cracks the theory of everything, it is possible that at it's ticking heart will be an entity that crystallizes the difference between 'undesign' and design. Simply put design is why anything forms out of the great nothingness of 'undesign'.

The truth of the assertion can come from surprising quarters. You would think that poltical dynasties are accidents of history but dig a little deep and one can hypothesize a startlingly simple design that makes the success of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty inevitable.

In a society caught in a complex net of caste and regional identities, the creation of a famiily that arising from a displaced community shorns itself of all regional and caste identities through two generations of extramural marriage is a masterstroke in the design of enduring dynasty,

At a deeper level add generic traits that promote an easy perception of grace and you have multi-layered design reinforcing resonance, dampening dissonance.

Issac Assimov in his seminal science fiction work - The Foundation Series - invented a science called Psychohistory. Using Psychohistory the founding fathers of an uber advanced civilization called the Foundation predicted moments of civilizational crisis thousands of years into the future and even left recordings of advice on how to tackle each crisis.!

Those guys cracked the design of their universe.

For ordinary folks like us even a peripheral awareness of the importance of design can, I believe, increase the frequency of those terribly satisfying aha moments of intuition.

“Events are in the saddle and ride mankind”

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line have a classically portentous ring to it. One can almost, in the background, hear the award-winning “Return of the King” soundtrack and in the foreground  visions rise that both threaten extinction and promise renewal.

Can you see a perfect storm developing? The euro totters. The time-bomb hidden in America’s credit card debt and borrowings on commercial real estate across the world is ticking its final riff. China’s hundreds of millions of dispossessed are beginning to do the unthinkable- they struck work at a large Honda factory this week. The Naxalite issue in India boils over. Deepwater Horizon leaks into the Gulf of Mexico with no end in sight. In Guatemala an erupting volcano combines forces with a grade 1 storm threatening to bury cities under a blanket of black cement.

Are events riding mankind to a crossroad or is it just the 24x7 new cycle combining with the angst of modern life? Or are we riding the tiger with our hubris as happy company?

Thinking about these questions I am reminded of the recent “Let’s Build a Smarter Planet” campaign from IBM. One part of the campaign highlights the superior and reassuring knowledge that results from deep supercomputers powered analytics acting on the superwaves of information that modern day societies produce.

Wonder if there is think tank somewhere that can tell us whether events are currently riding humanity to some place specific.

However one can always kick back on a lazy Sunday with the thought that the more things change the more they remain the same.

Here are a few selected laughs to go with the thought.

The Hardware Software Duality

Our age has illuminated the quintessential duality of Mind and Matter in a technology paradigm that is central to modern life.


The modern generation’s experiential grasp of the relationship between Hardware and Software transcends even the most intense philosophical thought on the relationship between Matter and Mind.

Human evolution has up until now coded in the primacy of hardware in our perception. Explore the development of human civilization and you can trace the arc of progress manifested in material progress. The spirit of man, the “software” aspect, if you will, of human evolution has not progressed discernibly. Our faculty for imagination and our capacity for empathy are not any higher than our forefathers. In fact it is argued that the detritus of modern life have put such soft capacities under stress.

However are things changing?

Will the next generation go beyond just realizing that the iTunes and the App Store are way more important determinants of the iPhone experience than the shiny piece of plastic one holds in one’s hand?

Will they extrapolate this realization and explore new paradigms of being based on the premise of the primacy of software?

Just today as I read, fresh off the Amazon Kindle press, Jonathan Alters’ “The Promise”- a scintillating account of Obama’s first fifteen months in office- I realized that perhaps the evolution of man from being a “hardware-oriented” species to a “software-oriented” species is underway. The University of Chicago approached the Obama administration for rights to setting up the Obama Presidential Library and though the administration decided that it was too early to think about such things, Obama did wonder whether there was any need for, as tradition stands, a palatial brick and mortar library. Wouldn’t a site on the Internet do, he averred.

Contrast this with the obsession with campus acreage and square footage of the typical Education Society in India.

Perhaps the evolution of a software-driven species begins with the reaching out of the best of us instead of the tooth-and-claw fight for survival that drives Darwinian evolution.

The Meaning of Meaning

He was twenty three, a medical doctor, conflicted between being an active socialist or a retiring spiritualist.

Last week the choice was made for my nephew. He was killed in a numbing incident of random urban violence.

The way the mind copes with the death of a life in full flight is to retreat into the most ancient of meta-questions: What is the meaning of it all?

Does life in essence have meaning or is it in the ultimate analysis meaningless?

Man's search for meaning underpins the three great human projects:  Philosophy, Religion and Science. Perhaps even the great socio-economic construct that is everyday life is a result of the search for
meaning for those who don't find enough meaning in the life of the mind alone.

But what is Meaning?

To my mind, Meaning is a self-referential frame that morphs at different levels of being.

To a top-order mathematician or a musician, Meaning is  perhaps in the cascading harmony of concepts and notes while to the unrepentant hedonist Meaning might reside in the fight between the fading euphoria of last night's party and an emergent hangover.

When it comes to Death however almost all the frames of reference that supply meaning to everyday life fall away.

To my experience, Vedanta and the doctrine of essential, indestructible oneness of sentience gives us the rare  frame that can withstand the assault of the apparent meaninglessness of death.

Strangely death and mourning serve to re-acquaint us to the liberating wisdom of the Vedanta.
No wonder a Vedantist sect (the Aghoris?) locate their spiritual practice in cremation grounds.

Urgent: Management Needs Its Mojo Back!

In school studying management I believed it was a profession with a societal mission and that was made it worthwhile.


I belonged to the Drucker school which believed that management was about maximizing the good of society and the economy at large while providing reasonable returns to shareholders and investors.

I still believe that management can be a noble calling only if it sticks to the above core viewpoint. Otherwise management becomes the handmaiden of money-making , a secondary and servile profession whose ranks will always be dominated by the greedy, the lazy and the weak.

Why do you need the great new science and art of management if the objective is to help some people make more money. The businessman knows how to make money better than anyone else and sure, if you are willing to subvert your talent to his end, he will throw you some shekels.

For the past decade there has been a great debate raging in the management schools about how to teach the profession better. I think the great debate and soul-searching instead should be not about how to teach but how to “do” the profession better? How to strengthen its backbone and regain its soul? The malaise is not just among those millions-of-dollars-bonus boys. The malaise runs deeper.

The malaise is not about big egos but small and weak egos that are all too ready to kowtow to the capitalists and the capital markets in return for pelf, power and perks.

If management is ever to fulfill the Druckerian potential of becoming one of mankind’s noblest modern professions, management urgently needs to get its mojo back.