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 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.