The Living and the Dead

The recent death of a friend brought home to me the great and perhaps symbiotic relationship between the living and the dead.

Our dead crystallize our lives for us. An immediate and obvious effect is that the life and character of the departed comes into sharp focus. All the trivialities, the irrelevances and the prejudice fall away and the essence is revealed. And inevitably the essence of every human life is pure. The details are juts miasma, the universality of life is that every life, every single one has meaning, the same quintessential meaning, the same search for identity that in itself is the goal.

And then it strikes you. The essential purity that you now perceive in the friend or the loved one who has passed is the same purity that is you. And your life would be much easier and more joyful if you could, every single moment, hold that perception about yourself. Live in the moment present as if you just died in the moment past. Ah that man J. Krishnamurthy, such simple truths he told. Truths that suddenly drench you with meaning like that surprise summer shower.                   

     

From “Coming Home” to “Leaving Home”

I have come a long way.

Or so I realized as I watched “Leaving Home” this weekend.

A two hour plus documentary on the rock group Indian Ocean, “ Leaving Home” gave me the kind of high that happens when you listen to good music for an extended period along with a rich emotional sub-text.

Indian Ocean’s music is ‘sufi rock’ that does not seek that label. Earthy, very Indian and at the same time suffused with the uniquely modern humanitarian spirit of rock.

The music, the emotional connect I felt with the very middle class, the very rooted guys who make up the band Indian Ocean and my admiration for the brilliantly simple and very Indian idiom of its film-making had “Leaving Home” create an impact on me that remided me of a film that left a similar impact on me back in 1980.

“Coming Home” is a Hollywood film that tells the story of a triangle. A women, her fiancé who has come back home from the Vietnam war and a stranger who comes back from the same war, an invalid. “Coming Home” according to me uses classical American rock music from the 60s and the 70s better than any other movie that I know of.

The impact of “Coming Home” on me resulted from the same factors as in the case of “Leaving Home”. Good filmmaking, emotional connect and music that I identified with.

However there are, to my mind, crucial differences too.

The emotional connect I felt with “Coming Home” derived from that shallowest set of human emotions: the self-fancy and self-pity that results from romantic love and my musical appreciation of classical American rock is somewhat derivative to peer groupthink back in my school and undergraduate days.

On the other hand my emotional connect with Leaving Home results not from my personal confusions and miseries but a deeper corner of my being that admires the indomitable nature of the human spirit. On the same note, my connect with Indian Ocean’s music is, on first listening and with no one telling me of its virtues, almost atavistic. The rhythms and melodies of the desert where I was born and the sounds of the sea along which I have spent all of my adult life set to the yearning that is at the core of spirituality.

Am I still capable of responding to Coming Home today? Perhaps yes but on vastly different grounds. Was my 1980s self capable of enjoying and responding to Leaving Home? I don’t know.

What I know is that I have changed and despite the reflexive panegyrics all of us (especially those of us in the business of advertising or marketing) pay to youth, the older me is deeper, more anchored and capable of getting a lot more out of every moment.

Is it just me? As a youth was I exceptionally callow. Is it just a natural evolution that most of us experience? Or is it a change in the larger Indian gestalt that is giving back to us, the chattering classes, our roots.

Probably a bit of all three.

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.