Cricket is (as) a Religion!

 

I was on a writing hiatus for long, not because I had a writer’s block, but because I was worried if I would be able to compete with the new kids on the block like the Geminis, Co-Pilots, Chat GPT’s and finally I was perplexed to see something named Perplexity was a proponent of clarity in writing. So, I was a challenged writer since the advent of AI. In a sense I also behave like the generative AI. I get prompted and triggered only when an event or a news tug at my grey matter & my aorta and they in turn trigger my fingertips to type / write, an algorithm that I was trained on since I started writing.

They say Cricket is a Religion in India, its oft used by commentators and Cricket writers from across the world when they write about Cricket & India, it is a metaphor that depicts the passion the fans show for the game akin to the passion they show for their religion. But is that passion for religion or spirituality of any kind on the wane these days? And is it right to associate that passion for winning in a performance-based sport like a team game to a passion for something that is as personal as a religion.

I write because, one such event happened less than 24 hours back in which a 23-year-old young girl played an innings in a place rightly called Navi Mumbai (New Mumbai) at the ICC ODI World Cup Semi Finals, the old Mumbai (Bombay) maidans produced a bunch of male cricketing Gods. It was an innings that eclipsed the best knocks ever played by the so called Gods of Indian cricket like Sachin, Dhoni, and Kohli and will be the more talked about innings in the years to come than the legendary efforts of two other Gods of Cricket called Dravid & Laxman whose godliness was quiet appropriately christened at the Eden Gardens, a good quarter century back.

The 23-year-old was called Jemimah Rodrigues!!!

The name Jemimah also means “beautiful day" apart from dove. The dove is a biblical symbol of peace and purity, while "day" signifies the end of a long period of darkness and the dawn of a new, joyful era for Job (Biblical Character). True to her name she did end a long period of darkness and dawned-in the new with her innings and her attitude to the game and life.

What caught my attention and what has gone viral since, is her post match presentation speech https://www.icc-cricket.com/tournaments/womens-cricket-worldcup-2025/videos/emotional-jemimah-speaks-up-after-india-s-stellar-win-cwc25 wherein she has glorified the God she worships in and gave all credit to him. She endorsed her belief system and platform, when the so-called Gods of men’s cricketing fraternity went on to make millions endorsing products that the youth of India gobbled up without a second thought, here was a young maiden endorsing her own source of strength and belief, a much-needed antidote for the mess the present-day generation find themselves in. Trolls are already up in arms and she, being an influencer of sorts, would be subjected to lot of negativities in the coming days.

What’s new? one might ask. We have seen many a sportsmen and women do it. But the passion in which she expressed it stood out. In a world so polarized, this could even mean the end of the career for this brilliant sportswoman, but she braved it all and it was testimony of sorts. A testimony from deep down her heart and spirit. One might ask why should a sportsperson rely on spiritual strength and proclaim it in a way she did, Even an accomplished sports person needs to invoke that inner strength by calling out to their spiritual / belief system whoever or whatever it maybe, even if the sportsperson is an atheist he needs to turn to his inbuilt belief system in those moments of desperation.

She has etched her place in the history of Indian sports annals not only for having played one of the best innings in any format or gender categories but also for having played on the front foot to acknowledge that her faith complemented her efforts to win the game and that her faith played a part in countering her anxiety in life. She mentioned her strength to endure came from the spiritual text that she follows that says ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning’ the presence of mind of a 23-year-old to quote this after 3 grueling hours on the pitch is commendable and shows that she is as passionate about her spirituality as she is about cricket. She has just endorsed the fact that spirituality and religion can play a part in the success of any sportsperson. An endorsement that might fetch her more brickbats than bouquets but every sportsperson can apply that into their training and performance irrespective of their religious affiliations and beliefs.

I hope her 2 million plus followers on Instagram who belong to a generation who believe in instant gratification will be willing to waste / endure time weeping at night for the joys of tomorrow. (again please read it metaphorically!!!)

RUCA to Gabba – The not so Kutty Story!

My blogs on cricket are reserved for tributes when someone close to my heart bids adieu to the game, it was reserved for the contemporaries of mine and more specifically when Ganguly, Dravid & Sachin slid gracefully into the twilight of their careers. Cricket is always called a Gentleman’s game, however the ‘gentlemanship’ in cricket is waning over the years, as the mantle is being passed on from one generation to the other, much akin to the societal deterioration in values we see around. Further Cricket has always produced two sets of cricketers, street smart & cerebral. In the Indian context, while Dravid can be categorized as a cerebral cricketer, Dada (Ganguly) falls under the street-smart category and if you ask me, Dhoni also falls into this category. This is not only true in India; the below table gives you quick run through on my take from the cricketing world I grew up watching. Introspect on the personalities listed below, and you will get the drift.

Country	Street-smart	Cerebral
Pakistan	Javed Miandad	Imran Khan
West Indies	Vivian Richards	Clive Lloyd
Sri Lanka	Sanath Jayasuriya	Kumara Sangakara
Australia	Shane Warne	Steve Waugh
England	Ian Botham	Mike Brearly
South Africa	De Villiers	Shaun Pollock
New Zealand	Brenden McCullum	Kane Williamson

 

However, these qualities get rubbed on to a chosen few from the previous crop of cricketers.  Though a gentleman’s game in the colonial era, in the subcontinent the gentlemen were groomed in the narrow streets or gullies of overcrowded cities. This blog is about A particular gentleman who once ruled the streets of Madras (or rather one street) and went on to be, not only a Street-smart cricketer, but also a cerebral one, a perfect recipe for tasting success in International cricket. And, boy he did!!!

In Indian cricket the street-smart ones get to play ceremonial farewell matches with all the pomp & splendor thrown in with a guard of honor et al, while the cerebral ones just fade away into oblivion, Dravid, Kumble, Dinesh Karthik…The recent one to join that illustrious company is my very own Madarasi (Chennaite) Ravichandran Ashwin.

Ashwin epitomizes the tribe of no nonsense Cerebral South Indian cricketers, I’m happy he carried the baton of this tribe with poise & grace, as you read the following names you will get an idea, Chandra, Prasanna, Vishy, Kirmani, Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad, Kumble & Dravid from Karnataka, Venkatraghavan, Srikanth, L Siva, W V Raman, Dinesh Karthik from Tamil Nadu, Abid Ali, M L Jaysimha, Azhar, VVS from the undivided Andhra Pradesh. Most of them exhibited humility, while humility was a virtue and won the hearts of puritans like me, the flamboyance the street-smart cricketers displayed was a crowd puller and contributed to the all-important revenue when the economic landscape of cricket went through a major transformation.

Ashwin was the latest addition to the cerebral list above, but what separated him from the rest was the street smartness that complemented his cerebral approach, He would display his cerebral side when he  thought about the ‘Revs’ RPS (Revolutions Per Spin) when pushing a quicker one through the air and following it up with a slower one, and then go on to display his street smartness when being alert on an overenthusiastic non-striker backing up too far and ‘mankading’ him. Off spinners are unsung heroes in cricket. The leggies are often up there along with the speedsters in the bowler’s hall of fame.

Ashwin is not done yet, I expect him to be contributing to this great game by being the next Harsha Bhogle wielding the microphone, or a Gary Kirsten coaching international teams, or the next Kumble churning out Cricket data analytics software, or even a Paddy Upton getting into the realm of mental strength training of sportspersons. You never know, he might shun all of the above and become a life time patron of RUCA (Ramakrishnapuram Underarm Cricket Association) and will end up contributing his clones of grounded Street Smart + Cerebral cricketers to the Indian cricket pool.

The Ratna that Ratan was!

October 9th 2024, will go down in Indian Industry as not a day of mourning but one of immortalizing a legend who was an embodiment of humility, business acumen, philanthropy and integrity. As soon as the news was broken at around midnight there was a huge out pouring of emotions on the social media leaving many Indians with welled up eyes and lump throats across generations from boomers to Gen Alpha! Such emotions are normally reserved for celluloid heroes and politicians in India.

This is not a requiem to the great Mr. Ratan Naval Tata, as the Social media is flooded with tributes by people who have worked for / with / along him and also people who have met him in an elevator, hotels, airports, events, exhibitions etc. I don’t fall under any of the above categories. I felt I should write this from a common man’s perspective growing up hearing this household name the last 50 odd years. Salt to Steel conglomerate they call the empire, that’s how a Gen X would remember and also, for Titan that replaced the boring HMT’s on the wrists of the bride and bridegrooms of the 90’s, the Gen Z would remember them for the jewelry and sarees from Tanishq and Taniera, while Gen Alpha would remember them for Starbucks and Jaguar.

The story of Ratan Tata is not one of rags to riches, but one of humility in entitlement. He was handed over the baton of a thriving century old empire and one in which the surname was a household brand, what more could one ask for, taking over a business. Many a brands and great business surnames have fallen by the wayside while Tata remained and continued to make an impact on the common man’s lives across generations. That is not just due to the brand recognition / recall value the name carried but solely due to the bearer of the baton who carried that brand name, in this case, the man, Ratan Naval Tata. The timing was also right for him as he took over the reins of the Tata group in 1991, a significant year in Indian corporate history as that was the year the seeds of liberalization was sown by the Dr. Manmohan Singh and Mr. P V Narasimha Rao and yours truly was in the sophomore year in Engineering hoping for a better future is a few years. TELCO / TISCO / TCS / TCE where the names that did rounds in any aspiring Mechanical Engineer’s minds in the 90’s.

India is a country where sycophancy rules the roost and paid mourners and crowds are mobilized for the final journey of a politician or a celluloid celebrity, and the journey to the final resting place takes multiple detours and is delayed by several hours and even days to gain maximum public empathy. However, this was not the case with Mr. Ratan Tata’s final journey.  He was laid to rest within 18 hours of his breathing his last breath. But the crowd that lined his final journey route and the millions watching it on television or on social media sites with moist eyes were a testimony to the man he was, and the culture he had created in an organization.

Tatas were an epitome of corporate culture and the words that are used these days more as fad or simply for ticking the governance boxes were the bywords at the Tatas. The emphasis on Compliance, Ethics, Integrity, Equality etc. look good on governance posters in canteens and board rooms in corporates these days, but that was the way of life and business that Ratan Tata preached and practiced.

Many stories on Ratan Tata’s benevolence to the society has been written about in the last couple of days, I would like to highlight one from my side too. Tata Chemicals dropped a 500 Mio USD (in 2008) Soda Ash Plant close to a potentially large soda ash reserve in Lake Natron in Tanzania which was a popular breeding ground for Flamingos, on the instructions of Ratan Tata, yes, there were a few objections raised by environmental activists, but Ratan Tata was willing to give an ear and react.  I cannot imagine any of the present-day industrial power houses willing to lend a ear or compromise on a 750 Mio USD deal today to save a breeding ground for flamingos.

The political parties were up in arms even before he was laid to rest on who will be the first to recommend a Bharat Ratna (the highest Indian Civilian award) for him. The same award was given to a cricketer who is just as old as Mr. Ratan Tata’s contribution to the Indian society at large and yet politicians are debating on if and when one should bestow him with this honor. He definitely would not be turning in his graves thinking of this, as his very name embodies the most precious gem and for his work, 1.3 Billion people of Bharath have already adopted him as their RATNA.

Ratan was well and truly the Ratna that Bharath had or will ever have and for optimism sake, wish more Ratans come up in corporate India following his legacy of humility in governance which is lacking in the new age valuation driven business leaders

Veni!, Vidi!, Vici! without any Ad ostentationem!

Yusuf Dikec is a household name today, thanks to social media that made him viral. The ‘virality’ on social media eclipses the essence of the coveted silver medal at the Olympics 'he' won, that every sports person aspires for in life.

But wait a minute… Did he win this medal alone? No! He was a part of the mixed team 10-meter air pistol shooting event. This was a Team sport and only his image & name went this viral, I wish to present before you the name of his team mate no one knows, or rather the less 'virtually' popular,  Sevval Ilayda Tarhan who is nonexistent in the entire narrative. Had Sevval performed badly would he have been on the Silver podium? NO! is my emphatic answer, and had he not been part of the silver winning team, would his image have gone viral with messages of motivation like ‘Success doesn’t come with your hands in your pockets’ tagged along with it? That’s another emphatic NO!!! Incidentally, Sevval also shot with her hand in her pocket!!!!

This image for me gives multiple messages of relevance to each and every one of us, be it in our personal or professional lives. Social Media takes bits and pieces of the life around us that we project and amplifies to an extent that people around get mesmerized by the ‘now’ image and do not look into the so called behind the scenes or do a fact check on those events or images. This is a rather dangerous trend irrespective of the context we apply it in.

In the professional context this is akin to a Manager over shadowing his best performing employee from being part of the success story, also from the now all-important inclusivity angle, was that not a sidelining of the contribution of a woman in the success that got them the silver? Her only fault was, Unlike Dikec, she was competing with large ear defenders, a visor, as well as braids in the red and white colors of the Turkish flag. She was shooting with one hand in her pocket, too.

His one hand in pocket image portrayed nonchalance and confidence and inspired people the world over to be like him, while her show of patriotism towards the country with braided hair in Turkeye’s national flag colours and her large ear defenders (Dikec was wearing ear plugs) and a protective visor (Dikec was wearing a glass, the power of which we know not) cost her the moment of glory in the virtual world of virality even though she was an equal contributor to the first ever silver medal in Shooting for Turkiye. Sadly, Sevval Ilayda Tarhan’s hand in pocket image did not gain the same traction, the male shooter got? Wasn’t that nonchalance? Was that not Confidence? Dikec has been competing in the Olympics since 2008 and has never won a medal, so where was his nonchalance then? Where was his confidence then?

In the Corporate world too, akin to a team sport, the main contributor / player, Manager or even the team / company is only as good as his / her / its team.  In the personal world the so-called influencers send a multitude of naïve children, youth and even grown-ups to pursue the path of attaining virality on social media without really understanding the real not reel story behind the scene. The story is always longer than a scene or the reel and unfortunately given the pandemic like attention deficit all possess today it is very difficult to inculcate the virtues of patience in people to understand the essence or the real story behind the events happening around us.

Talking about inclusivity when you google up Yusuf’s name most of the searches return questions like Did “he” win a medal?  And the results that throw up are “He” won a medal when the actual reply should have been “They” won a medal, as it was mixed sport and he won it because of her! In this era of pronoun sensitive prose this is an unpardonable and glaring error.

Dekic might have Veni! Vidi! Vici! the virtual world!

Sevval not only Veni! Vidi! Vici! but also helped her country in walking away with the silver medal without any Ad ostentationem!

FOMO on a Silver Jubilee!

Finally, yours truly now has something more silver to look forward too than just the silverware at home or a scanty silver haired cranium.

We touched our Silver Jubilee as wedded husband and wife. 25 years back, falls under the prehistoric era in the evolution timeline of the so-called Big fat Indian weddings. Those days the weddings were neither fat nor were the bride and the groom, they looked famished by the end of the wedding ceremony, and with no Toni or Guy around to make us look like a Bollywood hero or heroine and we also did not have the right lighting to make us look fairer than we claimed in our matrimonial ads.

To reminisce the day, I had a glance at our Wedding Album after ages... Was shocked to see, I had been devoured from the cover page of the album by other inmates who co inhabited with us the last 25 Years. Wondered why only I was taken apart while my wife was still smiling, consoled myself saying I must have been the sweeter of the two! When I saw a copy of the same picture, I realized I was all sweaty, famished and glaring without any emotions and the photographer then did not have the tools nor the skills to make me look otherwise... The insect inmates must have mistaken me to be glaring at them and devoured me to glory.

The entire ceremonial affair was done and over with in less than 72 hours, and I’m talking about the engagement, marriage and in some cases even meeting the girl / boy for the first time. The closest I got to the Sangeeth ceremony of today was when the cab driver of the car I was travelling in for my engagement churned out a creaky version of Congratulations and Celebrations from his archaic car stereo!!!!

Less talked about the photo shoots of the days the better. It was more like a shoot at sight for me. May 18^th in Madras is like being barbecued and here comes the photographer with super bright lights at my face, the heat from which literally tanned me and took the sheen out of the efforts I had put in to look fairer the previous evening.

The staple menu in almost all weddings was, a Biriyani followed by a scoop of vanilla ice cream and if you are lucky they would throw in a few pieces of fruits of the season and viola you had a fruit salad too.

Fast forward to today, The Indian wedding industry is a 159 Billion Dollar industry, starting from hiring the likes of a globe-trotting Seema Taparia for your match making which technically was a freelance activity for your neighborhood aunties then, to date nights that cost a bomb now which were limited to samosa cut in two and a cutting chai then. Not to forget the tribe of Wedding Planners who would go any length to ensure you were shot from tree tops or underwater, bedeck your venue with Tulips from Keukenhof, Michelin Star Chefs would be dishing out the choicest Foie gras and Sushi and finally not to forget the designer wear that might look good at Met Gala events but not quite designed for Madras Kathri in May.  Ah and not to antagonize the senior citizens of the household, add a dash of tradition too into this cacophony with the likes of Mehendi and a Haldi ceremony which is a fixture, irrespective of the cast or creed you belong too, they would justify it saying after all turmeric is just an anti-oxidant. Mind you, this trend is not just confined to the ultra-high net worth strata but has trickled down to the middle and lower middle-class India too, albeit in a marginally scaled down fashion.

The latest addition to destination wedding is in a space capsule and to add salt to the wound it was announced on 18^th May 2023 exactly 25 years after I got married. You can have up to 8 guests in the capsule that will take you 100,000ft above poor Earth and will also feature a play list, my guess is that Stairway to Heaven would feature in them and how much more literally closer can you to get to the old adage “Marriages are made in Heaven”, but the Indian version says for it to last, it should be written in the stars. So, all you folks who are going up there please read the script on the stars as well and pray that it lasts on humble earth too.

As we celebrate our Silver Jubilee, I am going through a sense of FOMO (Frustration Of having Missed Out) on all of the above. I want to shake a leg, but cannot, as the knees are creaking, had hair then but no stylist or a head spa, designer wear these days come only in slim & super slim sizes and on the best days I can fit just about an arm into these shirts, the closest I get to haldi is in our kitchen while cooking and no drone photo shoots from tree tops for me, else they will capture a barren head. Wish I was born 25 years later!!! Having said that, I still cherish going through those moth-eaten photographs in my wedding album and vividly remember every guest who came on stage (and the gift he / she gave me). I can vouch, this joy, no wedding planner or a big fat wedding can give.  

Here’s Wishing my wife of 25 years all patience and strength with help from all Gods & Stars to endure another 25 with this annoying man!!! 

BOT (Bought) me not!

The buzz around the new BOT on the Tech block was making me go crazy, and I decided I will join the bandwagon too. Google will be out of business someone mentioned, while another said education is going to become redundant, well the thing about education becoming redundant had little effect on me as I had already used and misused what was taught at school and work and hardly had another decade of effective working life ahead of me and realized education cannot get me far anymore. Then someone said writers are going to be extinct as the new kid can write Prose and poetry with poise. Now, that hit me and I had to take a quick call and write a Requiem for my Blog. RIP Writers and bloggers, I told myself.

The doubting Thomas in me still refused to believe and buy into the idea that a couple of chips, wires, waves and cryptic codes could invade and hijack my thought process and creativity. After all we are “The Creation” isn’t it? And the new kid is just our creation.

So, armed with a user name and password I decided to confront the new Frankenstein in the room out to destroy the creativity of mankind. The gladiator in me walked into the coliseum to take on the massless but artificially intelligent rival!

Will a writer become redundant now that AI can write poetry and prose with ease? I asked

The speed at which it/he/she/they replied amazed me. I heaved a sigh of relief as I read the contents with bated breath...Relieved I was!

The new kid ChatGPT surrendered saying it can only generate text and acknowledged the fact that it does not have the same level of creativity, nuance and emotional depth as human writers and will not be able to bring the cultural context that a human writer can bring to text.

I have posted the complete transcript at the end of this blog. But what impressed me was the humility with which ChatGPT acknowledged its limitations. I totally admire the quality and speed at which technology surprises us every day. However, we humans are gifted with a power unique to us when compared to other living species that inhabits the universe. It is the power of discernment, which is also considered a virtue, decision making with discernment involves both the heart and the mind. Discernment is an important tool in Management, Personal life, and even Technological decision making.

ChatGPT might have an edge over us in the head part of decision making as our brains are wired in a complex way which can, to a certain extent be replicated outside the boundaries of the skull. But, the way of the heart is out of bounds to tech yet, except for the fact that tech can keep it oiled and working for just a while and not more.

Chat GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer and as the name suggests it is Pre-trained and it needs a trainer, that is us, to transform our queries/prompts. I’m not a naysayer of Tech and hope that it goes on to add value to human existence, but with the same humility that ChatGPT exhibited to my query I should admit that 'THE CREATION', that we are, happen to be far ahead of anything we create.

So, our 1000+grams of grey matter, any day will outclass the creation of latest chips, waves, codes and wires

Now for the fun part!!! Please find below the transcript of my interaction with ChatGPT

My Prompt: Will a writer become redundant now that AI can write poetry and prose with ease?

Artificial intelligence (AI) can generate text, such as poetry and prose, using a variety of techniques, but it does not mean that human writers will become redundant. While AI can generate text that may be grammatically correct and coherent, it does not have the same level of creativity, nuance, and emotional depth as human writers.

AI-generated text is based on patterns and trends found in existing text data, and it can produce results that are impressive in terms of its technical capabilities, but it lacks the ability to understand the human experience, emotions, and the cultural context that a human writer can bring to the text.

Additionally, the creative process of writing is not just about producing text, but also about exploring and understanding the world, expressing oneself and connecting with others. For many writers, the act of writing is a form of self-expression and personal exploration, which is not something that can be replicated by AI.

Moreover, as technology advances, so too do the expectations of readers. They are becoming more sophisticated and discerning, and they expect to be engaged in a way that is hard for AI-generated texts to match.

In conclusion, while AI can generate text, it does not replace the role of human writers. Human writers bring creativity, emotional depth, and cultural context to their writing that AI cannot replicate. The role of human writers will continue to be important in literature, journalism, and all forms of written communication.

The Happiness Paradigm

I have just rung in the New Year... But, given all the new age hype about living in the ‘now’ and not worrying on the morrow or not dwelling on one’s past, I was wondering if dwelling on the past is as bad as it is made out to be. Dreaming / planning about the future, may be yes. The past teaches you lessons and shows you the path not to take, while dreaming of the future only helps in aspiring and planning for the future, a future that can be offset by events we have no control over. So, my two cents would be to embrace the past, use the experience, tend the bruises from the falls and learnings and learn to live in the now.  

As one rings in the new year we are being flooded with Happy New Year messages digitally every other minute. Images, GIFs, videos, memes and what not... ‘Happy’ in the Happy New year seems to be an abused adjective. Circa 2022 was a year of mixed emotions for me, more biased on the side of sorrow than the joys. Lost a dear cousin at an age I shouldn’t be losing him. The gurus of happiness say cliched stuff like happiness is a choice and one choose to be happy and all. I totally disagree with that.  Did his family or me have a choice to be happy when he left us on a Friday evening? No, Not all. Happiness is not an individual perception, Happiness cannot be a choice, Happiness is a state of mind heavily influenced by the past and present events. One can be unhappy or happy thinking about the past, one can be happy or unhappy thinking about the present, but one can never be happy or unhappy thinking about the future.

So, wishing someone a Happy New Year is just a cliché and means nothing. New Year greetings should be changed to Wishing one a New Year with whatever it has to offer you! Offended? Call me a pessimist or whatever, why should I be an Optimist when it comes to happiness? How can I decide on the unknown as defined by the Latin root of Optimist, Optimus which means it is not only good or better but the best, that is utter rubbish, it might soothe my senses but rationally I do not know if the future holds the best or worst for me? 

We live in a world today that says data is king. Can someone confidently tell me with the assistance of AI and all the data over the last 2022 years that you can confidently predict a Happy New Year to the 8 Billion plus people around the globe.

So, Here’s Wishing you all a Year filled with 365 ‘Nows’, How the ‘Now’ will turn out to be, neither You nor I know. Take the experience from the past in your stride, buckle up and ride the roller coaster of life in the present!  Unbuckle as you reach the destination and be ready to buckle up after another365 nows.

Future can only be understood when the Future becomes the Now!!!

...and the final whistle is here!

 The final whistle of the FIFA 2022 is just less than 8 hours and with the end of another year in 12 days, I thought It would be best to end my rather inconsistent blogging year with my views on the World cup and the bon-homie around it, as I had the fortune of living in the host country and be part of the festivities first hand.

From the time, the State of Qatar won the rights to win the World Cup on 2^nd December 2010, I have been fortunate to have played a small part in the related infrastructure works starting from the City that is hosting the finals, the Stadiums and the Drainage networks around the country, it gives me a sense of joy and pride to have been part of this history.

Though not an ardent football fan, I tend to follow only the World cups and the earliest in memory is the 1986 World Cup in Mexico which was famous for the wrong reasons with Diego Maradona’s Hand of God becoming more famous than God gifted feet of his. I was 14 when that happened and here I am 36 years later watching it with my daughter all of 14, as World Cup unfolds in front of her. I followed a world cup on paper while she was fortunate to actually watch it live. Football or for that matter any sport has evolved greatly over this period of 3.5 decades and had there been a VAR then, Argentina might not have qualified and gone on to win the world cup. That was a period when God played a hand and technology was not around, but in my opinion, technology brought in that unwanted perfection to sports.

My knowledge of football continues to be pathetic so much so that if they call an offside now, I am immediately reminded of how brilliant Vishwanath & Ganguly were on their offsides while it is scorned upon in Football. Its not that I love football less but I love cricket more.

As someone who witnessed this from close quarters I can say this was a seamlessly organized World Cup with close to 25K volunteers of diverse nationalities putting in their heart and soul with a smile to welcome the world to Qatar. I am no FIFA guru to compare it with the rest of the World Cups but from a resident, and an unbiased spectator point of view I can say the organizers did not leave a stone unturned.

As in any GCC country the Indian population which is a predominant one, found itself in the thick of things and this was the first time a World Cup happened closest to the Indian Subcontinent, the time difference being a mere 2.5 hours.  The majority of the Indian diaspora come from Kerala which unlike the rest of India love their football. Can’t blame them as the state’s only notable contribution to Indian cricket has been the fiery Sreesanth and the constantly fired but always fired up Sanju Samson. Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar and even some of the un-pronounceable Croatian & Polish players were worshipped as Gods in Kerala, some went under water with a hoarding of Messi, some prayed for him in institutions cutting across the sensitive religious divisions. The Keralite fans sporting the favourite team jerseys outnumbered and out voiced the native Brazilians and Argentinians and luckily their jerseys were not the ‘Besharam Rang’ (thankfully Netherlands were ousted in the Semis!). Though there was an entourage of Bollywood and Mollywood Celebrities including Deepika Padukone who will unveil the World Cup later today, I am hopeful someday a country of 1.3 billion people produce 11 Mbappés to pose an Indian challenge in the World of Football, and graduate from being just super fans to players to watch out for. Waiting for the 1983 moment in Indian Football!

As the curtains come down on the month long festivities in my adopted city, I can vouch that this has been a truly inclusive and the most diverse world cup, but at the same time one which glaringly highlighted a deepening East-West divide.

No country or region can claim the right to a sport. Cricket is a testimony to that. A sport has no boundaries, only rules. Anyone who is skillful enough and can play by the rules can claim the sport to be his/her/their own too. As the FIFA Qatar 2022 tagline goes Now is all...I certainly believe Now is just the beginning to all. Mexico / America / Canada are all set to host the next World Cup in 2026, from the diversity point of view I believe you will see Tacos, McDonalds and I don’t know much about Canada, just like the visitors knowledge was limited to Shawarmas in Qatar. No offense to any one from those three countries, my excuse is that I am as ignorant as you folks there in the west when it comes to the knowledge of Geography and culture on the other side of the world.

Sick Lit

Not to be confused with Chick Lit which was a genre in writing in the late 90’s early 2000’s and was popular fiction targeting Young women and hence it took a Sexist turn and I do not want to even tread that path within 72 Hours of celebrating the International Women’s day.

Sick Lit can be more interpreted as Sick Literary sense exhibited by a tribe, but then again, I would be branded a stereo typist if I call them a tribe. Stereo typist is not related to listening to the Stereo and Typing.... a bad Dad Joke is what they will call it, Wish I could understand the Gen Z language to call it good or bad.

This is an effort to compile a ready reckoner to all parents of Gen Z to understand their language and effectively communicate with them. This language sounds like a hybrid born out of the collaboration of the escapees of the Tower of Babel and illiterate native English Speakers.

So, brace yourself for the crash course and I will be around to pick you up from the crash.

Sick: Sick is no longer the sick you and I knew about, it is so good that its sick. Got it? No? Don’t Worry Neither have I, but simply follow the tribe.

Vibes: Every experience these days is prefixed or suffixed with vibes. So much so, that a humble Vegetarian joint with such a spiritual name like Kailash Parbhat have suffixed their name with Vibes to christen one of their outlets. Wonder what Vibes Kailash would give one? Vibe is a short for Vibration which is a huge topic on its own delving into resonance and natural frequency etc. I’m yet to tune into their frequency and resonate with the vibes.

Bae: Before Anyone Else is what it stands for...Unfortunately a friend who eats my daughters’ lunch at school comes before her parents who manage to pay her fees BLD (Before the Last Date). I made it up, If they can so can I. You will see many more of mine at the end.

Drip: Being in the Pump industry for over 2 decades the first thing that comes to my mind is Drip Irrigation, sadly if I wear a dapper jacket they say Drip, Drip and I end up looking down to check if I’m suffering from some bladder incontinence. I later came to know Drip meant I was looking cool in my jacket.

Dope: Hahaha...I know what you thought, that’s not what it is. Dope is a close cousin of Drip, they mean you are way too cool. Those days it used to mean cool and high...Now the altitude is gone only attitude remains.

IYKYK: This is brilliant, it’s an abbreviation for If You Know, You Know. Wish I knew what you know anyway what You and I know is no great know how. I’m happy that they did not abbreviate it as IUNUN, they sure know how to spell You & Know, Else It would have been an I followed by 2 UN’s...Sadly even 1 UN is powerless today.

Fam: They hardly need their Family these days but address their friends as Fam. The fam stays with them while the Family is too long and boring to stay close.

No Cap: Honestly all what I wrote above was true...No Cap, I wasn’t lying. With or without a cap one can lie. Wonder, how this came about.

Lit: We belong to a Christian Denomination called the Mar Thoma Church. The motto of the Church is Lighted to Lighten. Today the Gen Z uses Lit to express anything and everything that is amazing or brilliant. Wish, I get to see a day when our Gen Z kids would say the Church is Lit!!!

And finally, my favourite

YOLO: You Only Live Once, they live like there is no tomorrow. My worry is that if they see through the once and are still around to see the morrow they might not have enough to live YCLTT....You Can Live Twice too!!! So, in order to prepare them I coined, SYBAO (Slog Your Bloody Ass Off) If you want to YOLO

So, people be kind to me and post your comment below and please don't forget to say how Sick this blog was!

Meta, Delta, Crypto, Deivam!

 Oh, My Cron...Sorry! meant to type Oh My God and auto correct prompted it to Oh My Cron. The title of the blog and the blog itself is inspired by the hierarchical people to be revered in life, which is imbibed in Indian traditional values which goes thus, Maatha (Mother), Pitha (Father), Guru (Teacher), Deivam (God)

The title kind of sums up the journey each one of the inhabitants of planet Earth went through the last year. I will try and present my perspectives from the New Normal Point of view here. Not necessarily in the same order as the traditional one.

Delta: I slowed down on my blogs after I wrote two on the Covid19 virus and then felt that this was becoming monotonous and there was nothing else interesting going around to write about. Since then Covid 19 has moved on to 20, 21 and 22 versions eclipsing the likes of Windows, iPhone and Samsung launches and, in the process, taking along with it half a dozen Greek alphabets too, at least the names of the virus took us back to some elementary high school algebra. Waiting for versions named after Fourier and Laplace, guess they have reserved that for more severe mutants. As the virus continues to hold us at where it matters the most, humankind (to be gender neutral) has been brought to its knees praying to God.

Meta: As Delta was raging and reigning over the world there came along another Greek alphabet to establish absolute supremacy over humankind. This time it was man made, and there was no ambiguity on the origins of this unlike the Delta. Meta promised unparalleled joy and experience. An avatar we could take and express and enjoy ourselves and yet do not be ourselves at the same time. As it is, I’m yet to understand the difference between a Story and a STORY and Reel and REAL, for me story was all about emotions, the truth and real flesh blood experiences and even if it was a fictitious one it was well within my realm of imagination. Unfortunately, the stories of today are so ephemeral and make believe and false smiles and laughs and those that ‘influence’ you and others around. The meters and meters of reels were rolled around several spools to create magic that captured emotions. Today a 30 Second snapshots of 100’s of images whizz past you that you almost go blind or a twirl or even a laugh is a reel and they garner more attention than the real-life stories around. Stories of people, passion, poverty, purpose, they all go unnoticed. What I realized was that they wanted the aesthetics of the yesteryears to narrate the stories in 30 seconds...A filter that is most popular is the old grainy VCR filter with the date and time covering half the screen.

Crypto:

a combining form meaning “hidden,” “not perceived immediately or with certainty” 

As the definition of the term goes it is not perceived immediately or with certainty. I am no authority on this. But people say it’s the next big thing in the Digital Financial world. Move over equities, bonds, derivative and the likes, the big boys of the town are here. The real reels to rake in money are through cryptos. To know less about it and how confused I am, you can read a blog I wrote a while back here about a close cousin of Crypto called NFT. Rightly so, the Greek root to it means Hidden.

So, after we have revered the Meta, that means transcending (to what, we are yet to figure) and Delta that is simply shaped like a triangle and denotes a difference mathematically and to Crypto that means hidden, life has been all Greek and less of Latin which means we have understood it partially. Sadly, Crypto takes the place of the ‘Guru’ in the traditional hierarchy, Unlike the Crypto, a Guru knows all and shares all and does not hide anything.

Now finally it’s only the ‘Deivam’ part of the traditional Indian value Hierarchy that has not found a replacement yet. It might / cannot be replaced by the antecedents in the original version but in the new normal version each of them is trying to be the ‘Deivam’ or the God. Meta plays God that promises happiness and joy in a Virtual world. The Delta happened because someone tried playing God the creator and Crypto is the hidden God of wealth. Irrespective of the caste, creed, religion or region one is from, there is one power above us all that make us what we are collectively, Human.

As a wise man once said....” We might not know what the future holds for us, but we sure know WHO holds the future!”

Wishing Your Families & You a Blessed Year filled with Good Health (sans the influencing ‘STORIES’) and Happiness in real life (without the help of Meta)V

The Star who saw Stars!

 A fleeting glimpse of an elderly couple desperately trying to peep through the cracked open gates of the infamous Arthur Road prison just minutes after Body guards with packs in multiples of six swooped a celebrity kid (kid? No, not anymore, but will refer to him as that throughout this piece due to his naivety) from the very gate into a swanky shiny Range Rover made me write this piece. Fortunately, that image just caught my eye for a fraction of a second as the byte hungry media vultures were packing up and getting ready for their flight to keep pace with the horsepower of the Turbo Charged Range Rover.

Now, let me make it clear, this is not about taking a stand on the case and analyzing the rights and the wrongs, this is just a rant on the two malaises that haunts the Indian society, the Judicial system and the celebrity sycophancy. The rate at which the celebrities are being pulled up for drugs and other related offences, it makes sense to open an Arthur Road Annex in Bandra or Juhu as that would spare the commoners using the Artur Road and the infamous prison the inconvenience of road blockades etc.

Call it vendetta, targeting, framed, stereo typing etc. I believe in the old adage there is no smoke without fire, pun not intended, as these days you don’t need a smoke to create that ecstatic fire. It’s a fact that he was picked up under suspicious circumstances and was in jail for a good 28 days. Given the power and money involved, had it been a framed event it would have been exposed much earlier. But again, if the framing was as good as Plan B of ‘Casa De Papal’ then I have no arguments nor did the former Attorney General for two full days. I’m not sure I can call it a travesty of justice as the matter is Sub-judice. If it was a mistake to call it that, I hereby render my unconditional apology as I cannot afford the former Attorney General to bail me out. It is here, that my heart goes out for the elderly couple at the gate of the Arthur Road Prison. I just hope and pray whoever they were waiting for and whatever their crime was, he or she was out to celebrate the festive season with them today. Hopefully Justitia’s  (Lady Justice) Blind fold has not gone loose nor have the scales tipped due to the winds of change!

Heart goes out to the father, for whom I have huge respects, as someone who made it on his own in an industry flush with nepotism and familial rights. He was truly an embodiment of the great Indian middle-class common man making it big in the glitzy world of Bollywood. His affluence to get his son temporarily out of legal trouble might not compensate for the pain he might go through at the guilt of having been partly responsible for it to happen.  Sadly, the father fell into the trap like many middle-class parents of his generation, and it was very evident from the interview he gave when his son was hardly 3. He did mention a lot of things in jest, that are being attributed to the situation his son has found himself. However, I will definitely not concur to those nor hold that interview against him, as some are doing today. But will certainly hold him responsible for one statement he made in that interview. ‘He should do everything I have not done!’, this is one statement from a parent that spells doom for many a kid of this generation.

If this case can become a case study on parenting irrespective of, if you are a celebrity or not, the one statement you should refrain from when bringing up your children is “He or she have/should do everything I did not have / have not done”.

The celebrity sycophancy is another malaise that needs to be dealt with in this case. We had Bollywood divided right at the middle on this case. Virtually vociferous statements of support from people appearing ‘close’ to the celebrity, followed by a few journalists and media houses who rode on the closeness to the celebrity went all out. The noise was, as deafening as the silence from the other half which included the erstwhile Kandhans of Bollywood (not to be mistaken with the Khan-dhans of Bollywood who came out in full support) who refrained from making a statement / tweet of support of the celebrity.

I just hope and pray as the kid made his way back home, the name of which meant a Solemn Vow or a Pledge, made a vow / pledge himself sitting on the leather upholstered seats propelled by an 8 Cylinder engine to not to let his offspring have or do what he did not.

While the intention of the statement from a parent might be good, the execution of that will is not in their hands, just as it was not in the hands of the Super star father who saw stars before he saw his soon-to-be star son after an entire Lunar Cycle of 28 days.

A celestial disorder of sorts!

The Lost art of Public Speaking

 

Public speaking was one art that had the power to stoke revolutions, create nations and also transform people. Sadly, this art like many other yester year artforms is going through a disruptive phase. Disruption is the buzz word these days and those who refuse to be disrupted will fall by the way side. 

 Today public speaking is taught as a skill in schools, and by Life Coaches, Communication gurus, 100-Year-old Non-Profit Organizations etc.  But has the essence of good public speaking been diluted overtime? Content and Language were the quintessential elements that went on to do all things mentioned in the first line of this blog.

Unfortunately, today content and language has been replaced by histrionics and drama and the speeches have been diluted to glorified mono acts on stage. We were taught the importance of the stage dimensions, gesticulations, modulation of our voices and emotional expressions. But all these acts were done only when absolutely necessary and only when the content, the timing of the content and the language warranted it.  

In a good speech the emotions and the drama came from within the deliverer spontaneously, while today the emotions, voice modulation and drama are being practiced during the run up to a speech. Drama was confined only to declamations in those days where one needed to enact the Protagonist of the speech and not just deliver the passage. Growing up I was fortunate to witness some great declamations, a few gems I still remember for the quality of deliverance was a rendering of Francisco's Money is the Root of all evil from Atlas Shrugged, and Shylock addressing Antonio in the infamous Pound of Flesh court scene in Merchant of Venice by acclaimed speakers of my era. The associated drama was a pleasure to watch. Not when a 12-year-old is delivering a Speech on Gandhi on his Birthday, voice modulation yes but no histrionics please as the subject/topic does not warrant it.

We take pride in our knowledge of English and wore our vocabulary skills up our sleeves. We were taught young to pronounce words correctly and write the cursives neatly. The post Industry 3.0 and Satellite television era with exposure to western sitcoms Indians started to imitate the western accent. Children took on from Pokemon, Spiderman and the likes, Teenagers from romcoms, MTV and VTV, desperate housewives from Desperate Housewives and the working executives from Bloomberg, CNN and BBC.

The emergence of BPO’s and Call centers legalized this new found love for western accents and that rubbed on to the Gen Z and their public speaking adventures. So today if you attend a Speech competition you see histrionics, mono act delivered with a borrowed accent swallowing the Ts’ and R’s in the process, just that the native accents make its appearance frequently like the intruders from across the borders. If the topic is humor throw in some clownery too with the rest.

I am no great orator myself, but my advice to thousands of speaking coaches / gurus out there involved in creating a tribe of good speakers, please train them up as speakers who can research and write well on a topic, deliver it with passion not drama, let them pace the stage in a measured way and not run or jump around the stage and for heaven’s sake they don’t need cardboard boats, swords and other paraphernalia  as props to get their message across. Forgive them if they do not pronounce a word right, as long as they can spell it right they are all good. A well delivered speech should stay in the minds of the listener much after they leave the auditorium and the two declamations I mentioned above were heard 31 years back.

These days I get to hear the great ‘I have a Dream’ speech delivered in multiple styles, and soon after, I have Nightmares!!!

What if Rodin’s The Thinker was just a Thought?

This blog is a requiem to the likes of Michael Angelo, Auguste Rodin, Donatello et al. A day when they would be turning, nah even getting up from their graves, masking themselves and heading to Italy to slap one of their tribe!

I’m not a connoisseur of art, nor a collector. But do love pieces of art and indulge in collecting affordable pieces, but these days love or appreciation of art is bordering between insanity and eccentricity. More than the art itself, the way it is being projected / perceived increases its value than the actual workmanship of the same.

Sculptures were synonymous with some great workmanship with dedicated hours, if not months of hard work and detailing. Thus, were born some all-time famous sculptures like David by Michael Angelo, or Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker in the West and some great pieces of art of Gods and Goddesses in the Indian peninsula. However, in the subsequent centuries’ sculptures started becoming bizarre and was acclaimed more for the explanation that came along rather than the workmanship or the craftiness of the piece itself.

Rodin made the first version of The Thinker around 1881. The first full-scale model was ready by 1904 and around 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson pursuing another art, the art of writing came up with a masterpiece of a book called Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which continues to grace the prose books of today. A story of a man drinking up a serum and turning invisible.

Well almost 140 plus years later, that thought of R L Stevenson has crossed the mind of a sculptor who has ventured into producing or rather not producing, and displaying or rather not displaying a sculpture or nothing, and going on to sell that nothing, for something really big. All along, projecting that invisible sculpture as a work of art and giving the following explanation.

 “The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that nothing has a weight,” “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”   

He throws in Heisenberg, some might throw in Einstein, others Plato, and sell art that is not art as art. How artful of them! He calls the invisible Sculpture ‘Io Sono’ (which translates to “I am”).  Descarte once said ‘I think, therefore Iam’. Here comes Salvatore Garau, who sells an ‘I am’ even though the ‘I’ doesn’t exist for 18000 US$. It is beyond my reasoning that there were bidders at that auction who pushed the price up for something that they could not see. Salvatore Garau sold an invisible sculpture in a 5 X 5 Foot space. The explanation that followed said “When I decide to ‘exhibit’ an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms,”

Salvatore Garau sold 25 Sqft of space that you could carry home authenticated by nothing else than a certificate and gaze at all day and imagine a sculpture there all the while spending a fortune on it and be happy of your proud invisible possesion. If it were for me, I would have also asked him to accept his remuneration as a figment of his imagination and explain that the value of money also exists in the same vaccum that holds his sculpture, then it would have been a fair transaction. Had Salvatore Garau been born 140 plus years back Rodin’s Thinker would just have been a thought.

For the uninitiated who have not understood a word so far here is the link to the full story

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-off-invisible-sculpture-18300-literally-made-nothing-1976181

Well as I said, unfortunately art appreciation has been abused over the years, a banana strapped to a wall or wall painted blue gets passed off as works of art and humanity has reached that obscene levels of stupidity and end up paying astronomical sums for things they don’t understand / see / feel / touch.

If Salvatore Garau could sell his invisible sculpture for US$ 18K, I would also place on auction at Christies, the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta variants of Covid19 for 18 Million Dollars.  At least it’s also a work of invisible art by the Gods above that brought humanity to its knees!

18 Million dollars should help us buy a lot of vaccines!!! Any bidders???

03c077ebaea33c918456b043a5664ed04db19cc4f3444ae65701421ecc4d4612

 The title reads “This piece is worth a Million Dollars’ Note the upper case ‘M’ and ‘D’. You change that, you get a different code altogether. I don’t blame you at this stage to think that I have lost my marbles due to the unending pandemic. Wish we could start calling it an Endemic, justifiably so, as new strains are emerging in line with the Vocal for Local philosophy.  At least a name like endemic would give us a hope of seeing an ‘end’ somewhere.

Gloom apart, I recently realized not everything around us is as depressing as it is made out to be. The uber rich are indulging in life big time continuing to collect art work and what not. Just that the art they are now collecting is in the form of NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens). So, what is it? I don’t intend taking your precious time trying to explain something I haven’t understood. Given below is a definition from the internet.

 ‘’They are essentially certifications of ownership recorded on a blockchain. Nonfungible tokens put the ownership of a digital product -- be it digital art, a video/audio clip or even just a jpeg or gif -- on that ledger. In the age of NFTs, downloading a picture is like owning a print. Having the NFT is like owning the original painting.’

Any image, gif, pdf, jpeg, tweet and even a blog as important as the one you are reading now can be traded and saved for posterity. Art has well and truly come out of the closet and one need not be a connoisseur anymore to collect one. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey sold his first Tweet for US$ 3Mio and a digital art sold for US$ 69Mio. The insanity has reached such levels that some are even selling the sound bite of someone breaking the wind for as high as US$ 400.

Looks like an idle non-corona mind is a digital workshop these days. An overload of Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, NFT etc has crept into my reading in recent times. From what little I have understood Blockchains are the backbones for all this. A stack of blockchains are made up of what they call a Cryptographic Hash Function to form a ledger which I presume will look like a paragraph of my title which by the way was generated on a platform. The last I remember remotely about Cryptography was while reading the Da Vinci Code. I must admit that even during the high paying heydays of Tech and Coding careers I have shunned this field and stayed away, a decision, that I now deeply regret as I try and put this piece of writing on sale on the NFT platform looking for some bored rich soul to buy it as a recreational activity paying a few millions in any currency. All you naysayers out there, brace yourself and get Crypto and Blockchain savvy as it will touch your daily life sooner than you expect.

This might well be one of the last pieces of comprehensible writing mankind would see as the days of writing with known scripts are nearing its end. From now on it will look like the title of mine, the advent of emojis were already a precursor to the times to come.

My apologies to the experts on Cryptocurrency like Bitcoins, Ethereum, Ripple etc. and the gurus of Blockchain and the ‘art’ and fart collectors on the NFT platform, if I have belittled your efforts, research or investments in any way. My only concern is that mankind should not find its way back to the Tower of Babel to communicate in gibberish and write/sketch using Hieroglyphics as our ancient forefathers did.

The Humble Hawaii

 When I mention the word Chappals or slippers the first image that comes to your mind is that of the humble blue and white soles with an easy to slip into ‘Y’ shaped blue straps. When Bata in the 50’s introduced the brand name Hawaii for slippers, it was a best seller, as the common man had finally found an affordable footwear with a feel good brand name that would give him a feel of walking the pristine beaches of the far away Hawaii, while in reality he was strolling down the shores of the Marina in Madras.

Hawaii went on to become a generic and people simply bought Hawaii and not chappals anymore and the brand name itself was used in many households as a weapon to shape the lives of many a wayward youngsters, both by their parents and the girls next door.

One of the most durable pieces of footwear of the days, as the soles outlived the straps everyone had a spare strap at home. A safety pin is all that was required to ensure that you could reach that last mile home and then replace it with a brand new one.

As the nation and the people grew in economic stature the poor little Hawaii found its place being moved to the insignificant corners of the house and slowly got confined to the wash rooms only.  And what a fall from grace it was for a name like Hawaii, to be called bathroom slippers. The final nail on the coffin was when the Indian PM a few years back commented that he wanted to see people who ‘even’ wear Hawaii chappal in a hawai jahaz. A statement akin to the one made by Shashi Tharoor referring to Economy class passengers as Cattle class, but the former quote courted less controversy for obvious reasons.

With Globalisation and opening up of the economy fashion statements changed and that brought about a change to the semantics of casual foot wear too. Flip Flops appeared from nowhere, slippers and chappals were crass and unsophisticated. Manufacturers of the good old Hawaii imitations also changed the design to remove the stigma associated with the blue and white bathroom slippers! Branding came into our lives and turned to an obsession and we were respected for the brand we adorned.

The inspiration to this story was when I saw the soles of my branded hardly worn ‘flip flops’ open up recently. I realized the relevance of a concept I came across called the Veblen Effect in Psychology which was being used inadvertently in the beginning but deliberately later, in brand promotion. Veblen effect is when consumers perceive higher priced goods to be worth much more simply because they cost more. This is exactly what happened to the good Old Hawaii slippers. They vanished when the chappals / slippers became flip flops, and when someone put a logo on the straps and you ended up paying and buying the brand and not foot wear for its utilitarian value, all the while paying more so that you felt it was worth much more. Incidentally the new global head of Bata is an Indian and this is also a shout out to him to revive the good old Hawaii!!! 

Rajni can’t, or can he?

Back after a hiatus!!! With gloom all over, had little inspiration to blog during lockdowns and with me taking a break from Facebook I was also deprived of the voyeuristic pleasures / inspirations from the world in general. A reduced television time too, hardly provide any inspiration, albeit one, when the father of the entire nation that wanted to know was for a week locked up during lockdown and it was a period of eerie silence all around as though the television sets across the country were at a vipasana session. Having said that, even though I was tempted to write a blog on him I stood my ground and said no way I was giving him wavelength time when he was ‘locked’ down.

But, could not resist this time around when ‘Thalaivar’ announced he would throw his hat into Tamil Nadu’s electoral circus. Coming to think of it, the last 4 years has been the longest period in decades when the state was ruled by a Non filmy personality, the political theatrics are discounted. So here we are all set to welcome another one and a déjà vu moment of two filmy friends entering the fray only to turn foes soon. 

Celluloid and Politics have always been bedfellows in TN politics where we practice what I call a Dreamy Democracy. People exercise their franchises dreaming that the Dharma Durai (master of benevolence) would actually be a Nallavanuku Nallavan (a person who is good to good men) and would extend his hand to people in distress (Kai kodukkum Kai). I should also admit that even though they were voted dreamily into power, actors and a screenplay writer have lived up to those expectations in the past and have brought about development & prosperity to the state compared to the ones ruled by full time politicians up North. 

But these are changing times and I strongly believe this impatient generation will not simply fall for a fire out of thin air lighting a cigarette in flight landing with a perfect projectile between the lips. Yes they might have woken up at 3 AM and even though they were lactose intolerant would have poured buckets of milk down a cut-out but when it comes to political delivery this is going to be a new Act and Scene altogether.

"Honest, transparent, corruption-free, caste-less, secular and spiritual politics" – A statement studded with Oxymorons. He needs to invoke almost all his movie titles to fulfill the so called Vision statement he made, Honest at a time when Andha Kanoon (Blind Justice) rules the roost, You will have to be a Johnny, Muthu and Baasha rolled into one if you want to ever practice secular and spiritual politics. Finally Anbulla Rajnikant, your Dharma Yudham (War for Righteousness) might end up making you a Dharmathin Thalaivan (leader of righteousness) but for the flag to fly (Kodi Parakuthu) you should have a strong mind (Manathil Urudhi Vendum) to become that one good man the state needs (Nattukku Oru Nallavan) that incidentally is the last meaningful title of a Movie you have acted in and that was out in 1991. A generation that will be out to vote born after that would know you as a, Veera, Sivaji, Enthiran Kabali, and finally 2.0. 

What matters in a democracy, is leadership deliverance which actually if we stitch all your titles before the 90’s would itself sound like your manifesto for the same. Finally good luck to be an Uzhaipalli (a labourer) and always remember Naan (yaarum) Mahaan alla (no one is God). If at all you end up being successful please try and deliver a regime that should leave a Ninaithalley Innikum (sweet memories) feeling.

War and Virus

War has been an integral part of humanity ever since its evolution. The greatest enemy of mankind has always been man. We have fought wars to dominate one another and achieving war supremacy has been our prime purpose of our existence.

Until recently, War was the only thing humanity really planned for as a universal calamity and feared would wipe him out of existence and hence our focus has been to develop our defense systems even at the cost of our immune systems. When bunkers were being built, quarantine centers were the last thing on their agenda. The Defense budgets in poorer countries far eclipsed the allocation for alleviation of poverty or even healthcare & nutrition.

This quest for supremacy in warfare and war time requirements has in fact stoked most of the industrial inventions and innovations. Furthermore the concepts of war found its way into corporate management and war analogies was used across functions in the corporate world. We introduced corporate jargon prefixed and suffixed with war, War Rooms, war footing, price war etc. Basic fundamentals of negotiation of even a harmless everyday product were drawn from war time strategies / thinking.

Most of my knowledge of wars has been from the history books and fortunately have not found myself in a war zone yet, the closest I got to ‘see’ a war was the Gulf War in the early nineties, which has the credentials of being the first war to take the media by storm and was beamed live over international and national channels. I learnt all about scud missiles and early warning systems etc. I learnt for every Scud that was launched there was a Patriot anti-missile system well in place.

From the first industrial revolution of the 18^th century to the most acclaimed fourth  revolution more commonly referred to as Industry 4.0, the catalyst for development has always been war time needs. Even the first workable prototype of the Internet in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. No wonder once a virus hits the internet, an anti-virus patch is made available within hours by the Kasperskys and the McAfees of the world.

Man fears War more than anything in this world and this fear is the one that sells the most, that’s the reason why even a small civil war happening in the most insignificant of regions of the world finds its way to the front pages and primetime media and not the news of starvations or an epidemic in some deep corners of an under developed part of the world. That’s the reason why I feared for my life when Gulf War happened thousands of miles away from where I was. This is why, even when we had enough early warnings in the form of SARS / MERS & Ebola we did very little and waited for it to blow over and scorned it as just another flu. The virus did not instill the same sense of fear or urgency a war would into our psyches.

Today, even when the whole of humanity is held to ransom by a virus which has claimed lives equivalent to war time causalities; I still don’t see the same fear that war would bring in the eyes of humanity. They certainly are worried, but not frightened. The dalgona challenge, cooking adventures, fitness histrionics etc that are making the rounds on the internet just show that while we are trying to stay away from the virus we are not as much perturbed by it. Can you imagine indulging in such frivolous pastimes when missiles fly over your skyline and tanks roll down the highways?

In pursuit of our Industrial and War time supremacy we have under invested time and money into basic health care and the wellness of humanity. We have a wrist watch that measures our BMI or the steps we take but cannot detect viruses we touch. Industries were too focused on lifestyle diseases rather than life threatening diseases. When Industry 4.0 was happening we forgot to develop our Life Sciences 4.0 or Values 4.0. The harsh reality is that a Premier League football club and its players earn more than a Bio-Science researcher.

Finally, the irony is that we are now fighting a Virus from War rooms that were set up on a War footing but continue to carry out ‘Surgical’ strikes with ‘clinical’ precision during a war! Sadly humanity is gifted with short term and preferential memory; that’s why, memories of World Wars and other wars outshine the great plague or even the Spanish Flu.  A Corona Virus memorial will not kindle the same emotion in a human as visiting a War memorial.