Digging for Meaning

Said A word , said, is like the air that carries it... there, but ever changing. You know it is there, but 'which' air? May be it was made of something else the moment it was said. But now the memory has mutated the word with memories and assumption. It dissolves into maybes and blank spaces. What were you saying? Sorry the word didn't reach my cognition. Maybe it crashed against my ear and fell down. Let me look for it, while you go on with utterly temporary utterances that die right after they are born. Without a keen ear, a spoken word is a still born child. Keen ears and intelligence are the oxygen for meaning making with words. Unless one writes them down.  A spoken word is seldom alone. It carries with it movements, loudness, intonation. They are made of worldviews and emotions... exceptionally unique worldviews and emotions. exceptionally untranslatable unique worldviews and emotions. The rational word is but a small actor in the grand theater of emotions an...

The security guards at the entrance of your typical mall is the new brahmin. Both flay around their hands in ritualistic nuisances. The older ritual-peddler would throw in flowers and water creatively, the new one runs a beep-beep metal detector in the air around us. Both are pretenses to comfort the incessantly worrying minds. Our  minds often wander in search of answers to questions that have no answers. and we just can't fathom the fact that some questions are plain wrong - that chasing them would never give you answers, only anxieties. As our world gets more and more critically complex, we would see emergence of newer and newer rituals: Unique identity cards, police with guns (even if they might not know how to operate them), walls, courts, child locks, the education system based on silly exams, audit firms, research firms and most of all advertising. Even if a rational mind realises all these institutions & acts as pretenses, one can't stop seeking consolation ...

Chomsky apparently is a 'Contrarian'. Amartya Sen is 'anti growth'.  Labels come easy, comprehension not so. Chomsky is 84 and Amartya Sen is 79 - Both have spent major part of their lives in bringing to light facts and ideas that the mainstream and the powerful want to dust under the carpet. They are not attention seekers and side show freaks. They are heroes, the few brave ones who are fighting for well being of people through justice and truth.  and these heroes get branded as 'Contrarian' and 'anti growth'. The question to be asked is - by whom? Often these are people who don't read enough or don't read what should be read. They do not (or don't want to) comprehend the effect of ideas.(who benefits? how so? at what cost?). The ones whose source of perspective is Arnab Goswami and such other sensationalist prime time TV trash. For them, ideas are like fashionable clothes or a recent movie - useful as social conversations and nothing be...

Note: This is from a series of posts that I would be writing about Marketing's assault on our language. (AOL) ______ Sometimes, weird vowel-less sounds (?) stumble out of busyfolks' mouth. When they utter these sounds among themselves, there is an implicit expectation that the meaning is understood. Its amazing really, a fence made of sounds. Recently, I was confronted with this particular sound -"FMOT". It took me  a while to hear sideways and decipher the words hiding behind the capital letters. "First moment of Truth". Most marketing students, including me, would know this as legacy of the store shelf Gladiator - P&G .Its an elegant concept really from a marketer's perspective - it is that decisive time frame when a customer first sees a product in the store shelf and gets sufficiently curious about it to buy it or not. It's a crucial time for the product - 'it's showtime!'  But is it a "moment of truth"? err.. i w...

Something peculiar in today's ET caught my attention. Pg 4. 'It is patently absurd victory' - TK Arun. The reporter has this to say about Samsung - 'The company is likely to gloat a bit - as a result of the lawsuit, this one-time maker of cheap synthetic garments is now squarely in the same bracket as the bluest of haloed Silicon Valley blue-chips.' Hmm.. I smell a Brahminical bias here.. The author suggests that the cheap synthetic garment maker should feel good about the loss because its more than it could have ever hoped for. After all, it came from the low cast profession of  making 'cheap synthetic garments'. The fact that it stretched itself out of its impoverished roots is laudable, feels the Brahmin inside Mr. Arun. His spirit still lives in the 20th century India where there were 'low cast professions' and 'high cast professions'; where they myth of who deserved what was continuously spun by the few in the 'upper circles...

I caught myself singing along to an English song. again. *stop* I can't go on. Once I realize that I am singing, i must stop. Well, its not that I am a terrible singer (not to my own ears anyways) or that i have any social qualms (quite on the contrary, I might sing loudly in crowded places just because I can) but its simply the fact that it sounds weird coming out of my mouth. You see, my English and the American/British English is wildly different from each other. Inadvertently I find myself trying to ape an accent that's not mine and I feel ridiculous. *stop* So while Indian English is almost my first language, i don't have a single art/ cultural reference to it apart from some stand up comedy. (and none of them unconscious of the accent. instead, more often than not, they are conscious jokes on the accent) I have no songs to sing in my natural English accent and language. I can sing truly to Hindi or Marathi songs. but half the lyrics would be lost on me due to my ...

I was reading Art India’s review about chintan upadyay’s oeuvre, where it says that his conception of an artist is ‘Warholian’. Wtf is warholian. Warhol was a great artist. He had a certain distinct vision, a distinct style. But when Chintan Upadyay can be ‘warhol like’ why should he be a ‘warholian’? Well, my trouble is not with chintan or Warhol but with this tendency by writers, reporters to turn everything ‘ian’ to give undue depth to an argument, especially when people’s styles don’t remain styles but apparently a discipline due to the suffix ‘ian’. So we get warholian, lovecraftian, well why not pawarian? I have certain distinct traits, well none expressed to the world with any beauty or originality but in my world I am quite pawarian and this pawarian-ness is quite important to me. So to sum up my request, stop turning famous people’s traits into disciplines.

This blog is already 7 posts and exactly 7 days old, and we haven't really set the ground yet. My bad! (another of the DN manifestation - usage of global lingo. check out urbandictionary ) Before going any further lets get to know who we are talking about when we refer 'digital natives' (DN). Is this a matter of age, as some sources define it by the generation born after 1985? Damn! According to this definition, i missed the bus by a year. Would Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons not be Digital Natives? Also, this would be widely variable across geographies, class etc depending upon the nature of digital ecosystem evolution and penetration. So, who are these digital natives? Like a native of a city/state, digital native shares the language, the culture, the habits/mores to a certain degree with fellow technology users. They have distinctive ways of working, learning and socializing. As Marc Prensky would describe it - they share ' the a...

Eating up vowels, remixing and mashing up differet names, chopping to convenient length, in quest of originality creating a langauge of our own. wlcm t th lngg f 21st cntry. (welcome to the language of 21st century. well, i did go overboard with this one, but sometimes i wonder, what if vowels do go extinct. how would globalization and fight for identity throughout the world shape the language in this scenario?) In '1984', George Orwell envisioned a new language invented by the establishment - 'newspeak'. It also had shortforms, mashups, and similar traits to the one we are seeing in the web 2.0 era. however, the context is polar opposite. In the novel, the language is a product of an authoritarian regime, whereas the the new language we are helping to shape is a ramification of demographic nature of the new media and new digital technologies. Even here, the demographic that is at the forefront of this change is the DNs - the young and technologically savvy. A look at t...