Peaceful Troublemaker

Technology is steroids for art

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 19:04:00 +0530

This piece originally appeared in the New Indian Express on 18th September

Over this weekend, a combination of Old Monk Rum and good friends made for some interesting conversation that I thought was worth sharing. They say that alcohol (and Neurosurgeons) open the mind, and after some Paapdi chat and Pani Puri accompany said spirit, the universe suddenly seems a lot more clearer. One of the chaps, a semi-professional photographer pointed out that anybody with a low-end SLR camera considers himself a photographer nowadays. The art of composing a scene and capturing a rare moment has given way to the probabilistic approach involving taking 20000 photos in a couple of hours and hoping that some of them turn out to be masterpieces. This is a photographic approach clearly modeled on the parable about the monkeys hitting keys on typewriters for long enough that they manage to produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Another chap, a talented music director, pointed out that music production was no different. While the likes of Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd had to bake the bricks they used to build their magnificent musical mansions, a contemporary musician copy pastes pre-recorded loops to create rich soundscapes with no more effort than the click of a mouse.

It raised an interesting point about creativity and art and its intersection with technology over the years. On the one hand, technology cynics point out that the current generation of creative people are the equivalent of athletes who use performance enhancing drugs. It’s not their own talent, but technology that enables creative expression, they claim. Lost is the art of photographic and musical composition, they bemoan. But if we rewind to the time when Gutenberg invented the printing press, we will notice that there was fair bit of bemoaning about the art of calligraphy and the destruction of the profession of scribes as the printing press made them obsolete. Technology cynics of that era waxed nostalgic about the handwritten and painstakingly illustrated scrolls that master scribes and brilliant illustrators used to create and how this soulless machine made it possible for every Thomas, Richard and Harold to publish anything they wanted.

If we fast forward to the 1960s, a similar debate erupted over the use of the electric guitar and how it made guitar playing “too easy”. The synthesizer arrived in the 70s and when the personal computer arrived, the rate of use of technology in art exploded. Is this a good or bad thing? Hard to say, but as long as we remember that Pink Floyd used technology that was not available to Jimi Hendrix a decade before them and no one today considers one “better” than the other. The progression from Ilayaraja to AR Rahman follows a similar arc. Both are brilliant music directors that made the best of the technology available in their era.

I think there’s something deeper here. The general trend in cultural expression has been that technology continuously pushes the envelope. And since we live in exponential times, the envelope is being pushed like Speed Post. If simply getting some sound onto an LP (or a hazy image onto a photographic plate) represented the pinnacle of creativity in the early part of the century, the bar has simply kept moving higher, as more and more people are able to do the easy stuff , like point & shoot photography and copy-paste music.

The Story of the Potato

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 11:40:01 +0530

This piece originally appeared in the New Indian Express on 17th July

Did you know that potatoes were responsible for the dawn of Human exploration of our planet? Yes, it wasn’t bigger ships, better maps and navigational aids or the realization that the shortage of Vitamin C caused scurvy. It was potatoes. I didn’t know this till I met a good friend in Pune recently and he gave me the mental equivalent of goosebumps when he told me how the vegetable equivalent of Inzamam-ul-Haq changed the course of history.

You see, it turns out that Europeans, who were, in general, itching to traipse about the globe, colonize every acre in sight, spread the word of Christ by crucifying everyone else who had a different theological opinion and loot, plunder and enslave every part of Terra, had one small problem. When Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães in Portuguese) set out in 1519 with 237 people, his expedition returned with 18 in 1522. They did circumnavigate the globe, but at a huge cost in human lives. His trip wasn’t an exception. It was the rule for one simple reason - food. Before the humble potato was discovered in Peru by the marauding Spaniards who were busy eradicating all manner of things Inca, and introduced to Europe in 1536, brave European explorers had no form of food that could stay unspoiled on long voyages. Every other vegetable and meat product succumbed to fungus and bacteria. Once the Europeans stocked their ships with potatoes, they were able to, as Jared Diamond puts it in his famous book, take their guns, germs and steel all over the world.

Now, I don’t know if learning this interesting bit of historical trivia gave you mental goosebumps or not, but I have a theory (Scientists, right-wing lunatics and wannabe humourists tend to be full of theories, and that’s one of my theories). There is a point in every Indian kid’s schooling life, when a rather intriguing transition happens. It’s the transition from a “curiosity to understand the world” to “crack exams and move ahead in school”. This happens at different times for different kids and it’s not a sudden transition, it’s more like caterpillars turning into butterflies (well, in reverse, i.e).

It might start with a parent scolding you about the 13/20 you scored in a Mathematics test or them asking the names of the kids who ranked above you in the final exams, but slowly but surely, our system turns butterflies into caterpillars, highly focussed eating machines that nibble on information, not knowledge, because that’s what helps in cracking tests.

I was fortunate to have studied in a school where the teachers of that era brought History and Geography to life with enthralling stories that left me a butterfly for life in those subjects. It left me with a curiosity to go buy big fat books on history the moment I got a job and could afford to buy books for myself. So ask your kids about Magellan. If they tell you that he was some Portuguese chap who sailed around the world in 1519, tell them about the historical significance of the potato and remind them that being a butterfly is much more fun. For an entire lifetime.

Ears glued to the cricket

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:15:00 +0530

This piece originally appeared in Cricinfo:The Long Room on Feb 14, 2010

The generation of Indian cricket fans whose lives straddled the British Raj and the Indian one are a unique lot. One would think that, when it came to picking a cricket team to support, the independence movement would have impelled them to wear the tricolour on their sleeves with pride, but that wasn’t the case. Down south, from where my parents come, the 1950s and 60s bred a distinctive bunch of cricket loyalists.

GS Sundaram was my grand uncle (one of many), and having served the British Raj as a privileged and educated member of an Indian society that was largely illiterate, he managed to achieve a neat bit of mental trickery that allowed him to claim: “I support India but I like English cricket.”

Of course, back then Indian cricket was the equivalent of the Wright brothers’ 1901 glider, while England was more an Airbus A380, so that helped. Everyone knew it was futile supporting India in a match against England, so by the 1950s it was politically correct to admire English cricket while admitting that India had some distance to cover before they could compete as equals.

It also helped that he lived in a hamlet near the southern tip of India, far away from politics and jingoism of Delhi, and was the only man in the village with a radio. That confers a certain kind of power.

His Philips valve radio, the crystal ball that gave him his powers, could barely pick up the BBC, but static or not, GS was Moses. He held court when Ken Barrington unleashed crisp cover-drives and Colin Cowdrey leaned into an on-drive. He translated crackling bits of commentary into expressions like “splendid shot” and “wonderful flick o’ the wrists”, as young kids - my father among them - sat enthralled by the vivid (and often entirely made-up) cricket imagery he painted.

Like most from the radio era, he would often let ears become eyes, reprimanding Ted Dexter for needlessly chasing one wide outside the off stump, and demonstrating to his willing wards the right way to defend off the back foot. Barrington was, as far as he was concerned, the greatest batsman in the world. Ken was poetry, and GS would imagine his favourite poet, Keats, writing an ode to the square-drive, while he daydreamed about daffodils growing in Xanadu and Kubla Khan singing the rhyme of the ancient mariner.

He could afford to mix things up a bit. English literature was both mandatory and mostly inaccessible in India back then. Just being able to speak English put one on a pedestal so high that people rarely cared for the content of your speech. When his wife scolded him for spending his time fantasizing about Sir Colin’s majestic straight drives at times he ought to have been at work, he would respond with Shakespeare and ask if Mrs GS could hold a candle to the ethereal beauty of Desdemona. GS was an Anglophile but a harmless one.

Things became more difficult when Mr Sobers et al started to showcase to the world glimpses of what would eventually become the Caribbean juggernaut of the 80s. GS had to make some choices then. Would Peter May and Dexter still rule his cricketing heart, or would he have to start supporting West Indies? The colour of his skin eventually prevailed and he made an exception. When Rohan Kanhai faced Fred Trueman, he prayed for half-volleys. He also expounded on the evils of slavery to the kids gathered around his radio.

But Barrington continued to be his hero. If somebody was silly enough to make a careless remark about how Neil Harvey was really the better batsman, the radio would be switched off and the offending party removed from the premises. If Ken edged one to first slip, the radio would be switched off and the kids sent out so he could recover from his disappointment privately. Given the rarity of Test matches in those times, every garbled, static-filled “splendid shot” from the willow of Barrington was a rare thing, a treasure to be cherished.

Cricket was (and mostly still is) for most Indians a prohibitively expensive game to play. The village my father hailed from had a cricket association that would scrounge around to be able to afford their quota of two cricket balls (which cost Rs. 3 each, in the 50s) each month. Batsmen would be requested to avoid hitting the ball into the nearby river, as that tended to cause unplanned budgetary overdrafts. The leather balls themselves arrived all the way from England, and lasted about 10 days worth of cricket each. When a few over-enthusiastic improvisers indulged in a few too many agricultural heaves into the river, it was benefactors like Sundaram who coughed up the rupees and annas to buy more equipment.

It was common for batsmen to wear a pad on just the front leg, so that overall wear and tear on gear was kept down to a minimum. Indians from that era were well versed in the art of jugaad, of making do, but for some reason no one wanted to skimp when it came to the gentleman’s game. Scorebooks would be procured from afar, and a good one-rupee coin used for the toss (not just any four- or eight-anna coin), and whites were mandatory.

Cricket was a ritual. Its arcane rules, the paraphernalia and the sheer minutiae involved in every game, all amounted to practically a religious experience for my father’s generation. For conservative, religious and finicky gentlemen like my grand uncle, the rules of the game bore a similarity to the Vedas.

GS Sundaram, Bachelor of Arts, Gopalasamudram, Tamil Nadu, India, passed away well before innovations like limited-overs cricket reared their heads. I suspect he might not have enjoyed them. He lived his life in a more leisurely era, one that never considered time worth saving. He never ever watched a game of Test cricket in his life, and yet he managed to instill an intense passion for cricket in my father’s generation. They, on the other hand, had an easier time getting us excited about cricket. They just had to switch on the TV.

The Great Indian Irate Crowd

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:07:00 +0530

This piece originally appeared in the New Indian Express on 20th Feb 2009

This is a scene that, like the proverbial policemen arriving on the scene well after the Indian hero has done his um..heroic deeds, repeats itself daily in several airports around the world. An Indian airline runs into a problem - engine trouble, tire puncture, wing falls off et al, a flight gets cancelled, and the perennially financially challenged airline’s pared down staff have to deal with the Great Indian Irate Crowd.

A small bunch of unempowered and underpaid employees of the airline first have to deal with a mob of people, all of whom believe that their need for alternate flying arrangements is the most pressing. They form a line, not perpendicular to the counter, but parallel to the counter and soon several arms are waving all manner of documents in the face of the harried airline reps.

As the shouting match intensifies, the harried airline employees build defensive fortifications around themselves. Whatever little hope they had of even marginally addressing some of the crowd’s concerns has by now vanished and emergency shutdown procedures are initiated for their collective auditory apparatus.

Once people are done with trying to (and failing to) prioritize their need to immediately travel from point A to point B, the digressions start. One or two elderly, and eloquent gentlemen will bemoan this state of affairs and paint the entire airline company as a bunch of child molesters. More folk will chime in and provide more anecdotal evidence to strengthen this accusation. “This happened to me last time also. These people, na, will never change.”

After a few more ad hominem accusations are thrown around, one chap will now, almost on cue, raise his voice a few notches and start doing the whole rage routine. “My son is getting married tomorrow, and because of you, his life is going to be ruined”, he will scream. The moment that happens, a few more will realize that articulating a potentially traumatic and life-threatening need to fly right now is a good strategy to pursue and soon, someone will add “My daughter has an entrance exam tomorrow” or “I have a heart-bypass surgery in a few hours”.

Once the invading horde realizes that the airline staff’s castle is not easily breached thus, the crowd will bring in the battering rams. “I demand to speak to your supervisor RIGHT NOW”. Yes, now that it looks like this lot is not going to fly, what better to do than insult one’s only hope of a seat by pulling rank and hierarchy and refusing to accept that they might just, given a little chance, address the problem.

The sad thing is that Indian crowds do not do this to non-Indian airlines when they mess up. They will behave like civilized folk, form lines, ask politely for compensation (and use received compensation to do some duty-free shopping) and travel happily on the next flight. Somehow, when dealing with our own kind, we go in with a preconceived notion that it’s all a grand conspiracy by the airline to cheat us and that showing a few clueless employees that the angry Indian can be a force to be reckoned with is the only strategy that is available to us.

50 years of red tape and inefficiencies may have held India back economically, but in my opinion, the more damaging effect it has had on our psyche is the Great Indian Irate Crowd’s inability to believe that improvement is even remotely possible. Yes, our people, na, will never change

Hi-tech schools, low-tech admission process

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:40:00 +0530

This piece originally appeared in the New Indian Express on 20th Dec 2009

It’s a cold day in the Madras winter, well, at least what passes for “cold” and “winter” in these parts, but you get the mood I’m trying to set. The queue snakes its way from a small window on a tastelessly designed cube of a building to a large, foreboding gate and out into the chaotic street where cars and two-wheelers are not “parked” as much as being generally “stacked” like clothes in a teenager’s closet. The middle aged folk in the queue are twitchy and nervous, and could collectively make a year’s worth of housing loan EMI payments for a doctor who specialized in reducing blood pressure. They keep looking anxiously at their watches (and mobile phones) and soon enough, a huge pile of nails liberated from fingers forms a snake like skin around the queue.

To add more drama to this already volatile mix, a watchman hovers around, and taking inspiration from the spiritual calmness of those good folks at Tirumala, suddenly screams the Tamil equivalent of “Jaragandi” at this queue. The crowd is flustered, and some attempt to politely ask the watchman how they are supposed to move when the small window at the mouth of the queue still remains stubbornly closed. The watchman does not seem to pay attention. It is only once a year, on this particular day, that he gets to treat adult humans like children and he is not going to be swayed by some trivial logic about closed windows.

Then all of a sudden, the small window creaks open and the crowd gets agitated. All semblance of a queue disappears as people madly rush to the window to receive their manna from heaven, an admission form to a “prestigious” school in Madras.

The clerk at the window, who has been carefully chosen for his ability to transfer anger arising from domestic troubles at his home to the hapless person currently on the other side of the grilled window, now demands to know the parents’ antecedents. A 10-generation family tree and affidavits from the Shankaracharya (or the Pope) are apparently mandatory. The parent must also produce a letter from their employer to the effect that their jobs are non-transferrable. They must also personally connect with GPS satellites and estimate the distance from the footstep of their home to the gate of the school within a 1 nanometre margin of error.

Some of the more “prestigious” schools will even have TV media stationed outside, to advertise to the rest of the world that, even more so than proving Fermat’s last theorem, which kids graduating from these schools will likely not be able to do, the most difficult thing in the world is getting an application form to admit one’s kid in one of these (Tirumala like) temples of learning. My suggestion - if schools are taking the Tirupathi approach, they might as well learn the art of managing queues from them.

The real irony - schools that now charge for “Computer classes” from L.K.G onwards apparently do not possess the common sense to make admission forms available on a website, you know, on that thing we now call the internet?

Oh hello

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:11:14 +0530

I am the chap who writes here. Occasionally, a few misguided editors in mainstream media get this notion that I can churn out something semi-coherent for them. As and when it catches my fancy, I might choose to post some of them here. A quick analysis of the hate mail I get for my column in the New Indian Express reveals that I have grumpy old readers. It is only fair that I cater to the angry young readers online as well.