(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.

Writing Poetry at A Hundred and One

Read a review today about Dorthea Tanning’s second book of poems – “Coming to That”.
Among the many things that are extraordinary about Tanning is the fact that she is a hundred and one and still writing poetry.
One other extraordinary thing is that she is also a painter and sculptor of considerable repute. This while being as the reviewer points out “a woman of extraordinary personal power and seductiveness (everyone who meets her seems to agree)”.
Tanning’s self-effacing wit is evident in her description of herself as the “oldest living emerging poet”
Much of Tanning’s poetry in ‘Coming to That’ is retrospective; she has a lot of past to cover while living in “the long looked forward to, endlessly delayed future”.
Sample this excerpt from the poem titled “Never Mind”:

Never mind the pins/ And needles I am on./ Let all other instruments/ Of torture have their way./ While air-conditioners/ Freeze my coffee/ I watch the toaster/ Eating my toast./ Did I press the right/ Buttons on all these/ Buttonless surfaces/ Daring me to press them.

The reviewer finds this a happy mix of flustered sexuality (pressing the buttons of buttonless surfaces to turn them on!?) and technological cluelessness of the elderly. Some combination that. There is more. Sample this from the same poem:

Will the fellow I saw pedalling/ Across the bridge live long/ After losing his left leg, / His penis, and his bike/ To fearlessness? / Will his sad wife find/ Consolation with the/ Computer wizard called in/ Last year to deal with the glitches?

The reviewer asserts that this is the first poem he has read that “imagines a rent-a-geek as a potential Don Juan’. The modern day equivalent of the “Postman Rings Twice” imagined by someone from a generation which waited, sometimes eagerly, for the postman’s knocks?
Let me give this final extract that captures Tanning acute awareness of being burdened with too long a past:

Surely this everywhere present is real/ enough and eager, yet unable, to tell me/ what I am waiting for now.

Raymond Kurzweil, the author, inventor and futurist predicts that in the next decade the average life span of the affluent individual, because she could afford all the advances in medical science, would be close to one hundred and fifty years; most people with whom I have discussed this balk at the thought of living that long. Well if you are anything like Tanning that would not be so bad a deal.
However even Tanning knows the joys of mortality. In the late sixties she did a series of soft sculptures, reminding many of the female form, made mostly of tweeds and other fabrics. She said then that she wanted them, unlike sculptors in marble or plaster, to not outlast their makers. Well Tanning certainly seems to be made of sterner stuff than tweeds.
Can’t wait to download “Coming to That”.

(Sketch above is of Tanning as she is today, picture below is of a self-portrait painted when she was young)