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.