Admit to Complexity

Complexity. Nuance. More grays, less black and white. Please! The popular media, the public conscious, zeitgeist - whatever you call it is so obsessed with reducing things to anecdotes and representative summaries/ cliches that aren't that representative at all.

I know, I know... what's the point in blogging for the first time in six months and wailing on a point that is essentially a corollary of the previous post?

Well... I watched Avatar, that's why. Yes, patient reader, I shall explain. In a longish rant (I feel your chagrin).

To dismiss it as eye candy (or a play on "Dances with Wolves") would only prove the point I'm trying to make and add me to the count of the unwashed masses I decry. It is a phenomenon of computer imagery and sound design and whatnot. But at its core, it is yet another big-ass rip off of Joseph Campbell's mono-myth, with a dash of Gaia-ism, anti-Bush/ war/ Blackwater rhetoric and a big dose of "John Carter of Mars" and "Midnight Tides".

To the uninitiated, John Carter of Mars is a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (he of Tarzan fame) about an American on deathbed who finds himself transported to Mars in the blink of an eye, discovers he has superpowers while there, joins a clan of Martian warriors (Martians come in green or red or yellow skin if memory serves, and call their planet Barsoom), marries a princess, defends against fanatics, tames a six-legged steed (no dragon here) and so on... until one day he is the "warlord of Mars"; sound familiar? Well, these books got written somewhere in the last century.

Midnight Tides is the fifth book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen saga by Steven Erikson. It tells the story of how a capitalist empire (Lether) which has already subsumed many indigenous civilizations by trade-craft and war finally meets it match at the hands of a very war-like if fallen (grey skinned) civilization known as the Tiste Edur. One of the primary characters of the book is a Letherii man responsible for studying/ helping destroy several civilizations in the past who this time around intends to betray Lether and make it eat crow...

Fanboy tangents apart, here's the thing: both Burroughs' Barsoom and Erikson's writing feature a beautiful world with imaginative flora and fauna, and the authors (more so for the latter) in broad strokes paint a narrative that is far more complex and real than Avatar. In other words, they do everything on a page that Avatar does on screen, and then they do a lot more.

Someone said to me, this movie is more of an experience than a story; and I agree completely... it is a superlative experience (as I tweeted the morning after I saw it). But did it also have to be so f**king dumb and derivative?

In the translation from page to screen these days (and hardly anyone would argue that the zeitgeist is now ruled by the screen more than the page) we lose all manner of nuance that would otherwise make things much more worthwhile. For that matter, if you read the scriptment that Cameron had written for Avatar years ago, in its 70 odd pages it had a lot more meat on the bone than what's in the final movie. Where did it go?

Cameron hardly had Hollywood suits breathing down his back asking him to make the movie merchandise or lowest common denominator friendly (one assumes)! He calls himself an auteur (and he is, technically) but seriously - this is an Eragon-esque story that a teenager could belt out in a year or so of effort. This took him a decade and a half?

Movies - science fiction movies - like the Matrix and Blade Runner and The Fountain (and many more) have come out over the last three decades that frankly don't allow people like Cameron the excuse of having to make their work "accessible". Can anyone honestly say Cameron shouldn't have spent another - oh, 5 million - and come up with a better story?

Now all this said, the truth is Avatar and movies like it will remain the gateways, nay the gatekeepers for a vast majority of people to the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature and imagination. That is not a bad thing. If I'd been twelve years old and had never seen a science fiction flick in my life, Avatar would be enough of an excuse to become a fanboy, buy every toy that comes out, devour all spin-off comics and books, and dive deep into SF&F. Hopefully I would still end up discovering the joys of Erikson and Dan Simmons (whose Hyperion Cantos featured the concept of uploading your consciousness to a cosmic network by the way) and others that are devastatingly good.

But guess what? I'm not twelve any more, and I prefer my Oz to be closer to Kansas!

Heed the Ent

In my first year as an I.T. professional, I took pride in being a perfectionist. I was - and in a more conciliatory way, still am - anal-retentive about grammar. Good vocabulary was something I commanded and demanded from those that wrote to me - use the perfect word, or shut up. I was a formatting freak - font sizes, margins, table widths, spreadsheet colours - everything had to meet a standard at once sober and functional. Every document of the many I wrote had footnotes, explications, counter-points, whatnot. If a point was not precisely and accurately made, I thought it better not to make it.

I would pore over the finished draft of each email, each document, each presentation and spreadsheet (you can tell I never wrote a line of code to save my life!) for several minutes; read them over twice/ thrice before sending them out. I would often re-word/ refine/ explicate something in that last minute review leading to much self-congratulation.

And of course after all this, the stuff I sent out always had glaring mistakes I would only notice the next day, week, or month. This is the best cautionary tale I can tell for the point I make below.

This was all before we truly entered the age of Facebook feeds, single paragraph blogs updated with posts every hour, Twitter feeds where 'no post over 130 characters' is supposedly a good thing(!), and 24x7 news where everyone has news and analysis, but where you have to dig through piles upon piles of absolute horseshit to get one long-term, panoramic perspective!

It is fitting that in this "fast-paced" world we are working on constantly increasing the volume and "instantaneousness" of information available for consumption. It certainly fits in with the fast food, fast car, private space, romance by email and Facebook culture we live in. It is also fitting that just as I am working on turning thirty, I should publish this post complaining not that I can't keep up with technology, but that in some instances such as the ones cited, technology and the ways in which the media - both organized and 'web 2.0' - is using it, are a complete disservice to mankind. That I'm doing it online I think shows that I am not a crusty old technophobe - that I'm doing it at all shows I'm not 'with the times'!

Folks, think about this piece of Entish wisdom spouted by Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: "You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say."

It is perilous to constantly reduce the distance between (if not to short circuit) thought and broadcast, emotion and reaction, event and news report; it is prudent to be a little long form, a little elaborate, a little considerate, deliberate, and less prolific in what we say, and do.

I don't fear the 'oops' email where you end a friendship at 3 a.m. with an ill thought jibe; I fear that in this day and age, whether you are a private citizen or (worse) a media person, or (even worse) a public figure, once it's out there, it's out there. And if it is ill-thought out, it will do damage. So my friends:

Fear the tweet, heed the Ent! Out!

On Democracy

Mr Churchill, erstwhile PM of the UK said on the floor of the House of Commons on the 11th of November, 1947 that "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Said quote having been beaten to death from time to time by many a commenter to justify everything from fascism to electronic voting to pornography. The key to (ab)using the quote lies of course in paraphrasing it, emphasizing a word or two to change it's meaning (emphasize "tried" for instance in the last bit and the meaning changes completely, opening the field for the user to propose an entirely new form of government for trying!) or simply going full anon with ; 'Someone once said' and then proceed to cast aspersions on their intellect and/ or intent. That can be done with any good quote, whether actually uttered by a dignitary or made up on the spot (full disclosure: I've often made up quotes for school/ college essays, and mostly attribute them to Bertrand Russell - a man hardly anyone has read and who could plausibly have had an opinion on anything).

But I digress. This here is supposed to be a meditation on Democracy. More specifically Representative Democracy.

The infamous "they" say democracy in general started with ancient Greece of course, and conjure up images of potbellied, half-robed, and flaxen-bearded sophists gathering in yonder agora for a good spot of drunk verbal jousting. They also say the tradition spilled over into Rome where unfortunately some bloke called Julius had other ideas.

This is hogwash, of course... for one thing Greek democracy (particularly in fabled Athens) was participatory, not representative, and although Aristotle did say (and condemn many of us, myself included)" "To take no part in the running of the community's affairs is to be either a beast or a god!", what us modern people fail to acknowledge is that Graeco-Roman citizenship was exclusive! Women, 'barbarians', and slaves had no vote, no say. Citizenship was for the privileged few.

This was probably for the best because a) it cut down the number of participants in the debate in yon fabled agora and b) it probably cut out the 'salt of the earth, unwashed masses' types who wouldn't be 'wise' in the Socratic sense anyway.

Of course, beyond early Rome, there were few instances of even semi-democratic republics (unless there were some in Africa that got wiped out by slavers before the historians knew it). In India for instance, the authority and dharma of kings were institutionalized by many means, not least through religion, but also through the works of Chanakya and his ilk.

So let us then fly past the monarchies and the feudalism and imperialism and fascism and communism with scarce concern and arrive at a seminal epoch - Earth circa 1947, post World War II, when Imperialism was in its death throes and the cognoscenti were mostly nodding their heads in acquiescence when Mr. Churchill said what he did. The consensus was, 'Democracy Rocks'.

The consensus also was that we needed a more... acceptable way to keep the unwashed masses in check than slavery or the denial of suffrage to women, both of which the western cognoscenti now considered despicable, although their own Bibles silently (for the former) or actively (for the latter) encouraged the practices. Fear not, for the Brits and Yanks had in the time past come up with practical representative democracy, which they proceeded to prescribe to a world in flux.

Representative democracy is convenient to the cognoscenti. It is power in the hands of a representative who, by definition, will be elected from among 'the best of us'. S/he will be more qualified, better educated, wiser etc. than the people s/he represents. "More qualified" is the new "Powerful"; "Wiser" the new "Manly"; and "Politically connected" the new "Royal". Which is sort of predictable when one frames the descriptions in a post-industrial, faux-egaletarian, more crowded, and income-gap ridden world.

It would be tedious now to walk you through the dense history of the past sixty-two odd years, so instead take a moment to view the rushes: democracy fails (for the most part) in Africa, flounders (for the most part) in Asia and South America, takes on a local, somewhat corrupt but vibrant flavor in India, and finds zealot levels of belief in North America and western Europe. (we will conveniently forget the Middle East and anything west of India for the length of our discussion, where the black gold seems adequate reason for the prescribers to withold prescription from time to time e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan).

Of course, the prescribers do get an anomalous zealot elected to high office in the last 9 years of this period who foolishly starts, well, prescribing zealously... but then his work will (one assumes) be undone in a few years to come.

More pertinently in the here and now, the world's largest democracy is currently in high gear, electing officials to various levels of office. We vote in millions, for reasons as varied as from a bottle of free booze to a high falutin philosophy. Every one of my closet elitist friends is afraid Mayawati will be PM (perhaps not recognizing that maybe Mayawati being PM is the logical next step in the emancipation of the under-privileged). The dance of democracy, that imperfect goddess, is in full flow.

So here's my question: Why hasn't anyone pointed out the obvious? That democracy, in the cosmic scheme of things, is only a recent invention with an at best spotty track record?

Why isn't anyone concerned that in most democracies (India, the US, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan for about ten years of its sixty year lifetime) seems to give the world as many (albeit less potent or long lived) dynasties as any other form of government?

Why isn't anyone concerned, (this is most puzzling for me) that the cognoscenti everywhere seem to be alternately at war with or engaged in manipulating and hoodwinking the very masses they want to serve?

Why aren't we concerned in this age of information and the world wide web that although participatory democracy is actually almost feasible in this day and age, we ('wisely') still stick to the representative variant? Why aren't we concerned about the obvious focussing (and consequent abuse) of power this allows?

Think about it - a voting machine on every street corner, that uses biometrics to establish identity, and on a timebound basis allows you to vote yea or nay on not representatives, but issues, bills, and propositions before local, state, and national governments.

Does that really sound so impractical or unreasonable? Why have elections where we exercise our right every few years? Let the 'unwashed masses' of yore rule, continously. Remove this creamy layer of elected officials. Let the bureaucrats get their instruction directly from the public they serve! Sure, we'll probably see a guillotine or three, and almost certainly have a couple of wars and a disastrous foreign policy for a while... but hey, it will be the people's rule.

Perhaps government will break down and political parties will transmogrify into lobbying groups - people wont vote on issues unless they have their skin in the game somehow. Certainly people like me who wax eloquent about their apathy and agnosticism will not bother to vote every hour or day or week when we don't vote every few years! Perhaps the litany of boredom that is governance will actually put most voters to sleep...

But doesn't all this happen anyway? Wouldn't true technology-enabled participatory democracy be democracy in all her glory?

More to come... out!

Politics and Me

Let me start out with a confession that will shock no one (it should) and concern even fewer people (which is tragic). In my life of just over 28 years, having lived in India from birth for the most part, except a four year spell in the US, I probably know more about the constitution and politics of that land than I do of my own. Head hanging appropriately shamed, the only mitigation that comes to mind is the fact that I really did not know/ care about politics until a few years ago, so in some sense I 'awoke' while in the US. I must also say my taste for politics was defined and honed by a spectacular TV show - "The West Wing", which in itself is, over its seven seasons a course in liberal American politics.

Growing up in India, politics was always something you tapped your nose about and sighed knowingly (although you knew nothing). The thing to do for those my age was to say we thought politics was dirty. Of course, if you pressed us for detail, we could respond with scant little other than a few movie references; or perhaps with some headlines that had pierced the indulgent media cloud that was forming around us. We laughed at Laloo, tut-tutted the Thackerays (and turned up our noses at those who wouldn't), and stared slack-jawed at Jayalalitha without bothering to understand.

I never got that these politicians who obsessed about things we cared nothing about (suitcases filled with cash, endangered ethnic identities, and buffalo care) were in fact representing us, our ideas and ideals, our hopes, dreams, nightmares, and philosophies. Until far too recently, I couldn't tell a leftist from a right-wing nationalist or a centrist if my life depended on it... curious, because I had spent hours obsessing about the very philosophies that they espoused.

My otherwise trivia-obsessed mind never drew lines to connect Lenin and Trotsky with a Naxalite or a Jyoti Basu, or Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan with Montek Singh Ahluwalia and P Chidambaram. Laughable as it sounds, I was obsessed with understanding some philosophies of economics and governance without recognizing they local variants!

Fast forward to 2009... and we are in the thick of an election season. Another confession - I haven't voted this time (registration and location issues were a convenient excuse) but before you cite all the damn Tata Tea Jaago re commercials let me explain why.

If there is a sin I am guilty of, it is apathy. I don't glory in the fact that I have the wherewithal to admit it where a lot of others don't. I also don't want to propose any solutions or remedies to my condition because, well, I am apathetic to it. Anyway, this blog isn't about what I propose to do about it. This is, (to borrow a wonderful phrase from R Scott Bakker, whose mind-blowing book "The Judging Eye" I am currently reading) an attempt to analyze 'the darkness that comes before'.

Why is it that I am apathetic?

First of all, I don't have too many problems with the way India is run. I am rich enough, escapist enough, and 'travel-enabled' enough to have all these problems seem distant. I live in a gated community that charges premiums on everything to make sure only the 'elite' live here. The beggars on the street are a dull buzz outside my air-conditioned car. I have a good job, eat well, drink expensive, and am allowed to live in a cocoon of my own design.

In fact, if there were one difference between me and the pre-ascetism Prince Siddartha (beside the fact that no banyan tree is going to see me get turned into a Buddha any time soon), it would be that I've had more than the fabled four moments of 'realization' - I've seen poverty, and death, and hunger, and pain, et al - and I walked on past them. Maybe ascetism (or a realization that my comforts are holding me back) is needed before one is truly enlightened, but I am selfish and blase enough to deny myself denial.

The fact is that in a complex reality like India, I am in the minority in the class sense. I don't have tales to tell of a childhood of poverty that I had to pull myself out of by my bootstraps. I was well-provided for - coddled, actually - as a child, and the only difference between me as an adult is now I know where the money comes from!

But then apathy isn't all that keeps me from being political. There is perhaps a deeper reason - my agnosticism.

Another reality is that I just can't tell the difference between political parties and philosophies in India. They are peopled with semi-senile geriatrics or dynastic mediocres who think power is their birthright, for the most part. I do see once firebrand revolutionaries and activists reduced to the role of ignorant yet arrogant pimps in the horse-trading games that repeat at each level of government. Quid pro quo is not only the way in India, it seems to the guiding philosophy!

To vote, to be politically active, is to make a choice and to be convinced of a direction and a philosophy/ vision. I am, first and foremost, a disgusted agnostic.

If I were to have political opinion, I suspect I would be labeled a conservative in India; against unchecked free markets, against invasive government, against affirmative action, for aggressive and engaged foreign policy (particularly projection of regional power), for devolution of power to the states, for uniform civil codes and several key constitutional amendments (beginning with the removal of 'socialist' from the pre-amble, which to my mind is an anachronism now), etc.

To be sure even these opinions sit in my mind with a hundred caveat emptors and while I lean in those directions, I haven't made up my mind.

It is perhaps that hesitation, that recognition that today's just cause could well be tomorrow's grave error (or genocide without the need for brute force) is what keeps me in my stall while all the other horses are running around. I am genuinely afraid of political/ activist passion.

Given that believing/ doing something might not work out for the best, I resign myself to believing/ doing nothing with any force. (I'm not a nihilist - just an armchair commentator with mild preferences).

This is made further strange that my parents are activists, and always have been. They have stated preferences and they do what they say they should. From my earliest days I have seen them fight for some social cause or other (although, it must be said they too for the most part shun the regular channels of elective politics and believe more in people's movements).

I think I am beginning to understand now why I didn't ever feel like jumping in and helping them... first of all, the family dynamic never behooved me to do it just to please them, and secondly, somewhere in my subconscious sits an agnostic sage with the advice:

"Believe nothing, and be wary of passion; passion leads to unreason"

I know that sounds smug and convenient... but not to me. I can't say I've lived by that statement all of the time, but I can confidently say I have most of the time.

Anyway... I just realized I've gone past the point where this post could've had a good punchy finish, and into ramble territory.

So let me conclude by saying... I am a political work in progress... and might - just might - vote the next time. Assuming all things don't remain equal...

Indian Premier Lame

Yes dang it, I know. Tis the big show, the holy TV pilgrimage for most Indians these days. The most cash-rich sports league in the nation. A breath of fresh air in the cricketing world. A way to build bench strength in Indian cricket more effective than any before it. A marketer's dream come true (even with the move to rain-plagued South Africa). A celebrity making device for Lalit Modi and an ego-stroking device for Shah Rukh Khan. Another way for Indians to waste their time listening to Shilpa Shetty wax eloquent about things she doesn't know. And an opportunity for that host guy who sits with Arun Lal in what the wife tells me are the most atrociously put together clothing ensembles beyond what's in my closet.

But, with apologies, it is an exercise in Lame. Fail. Cannot haz cheezburgr.

First of all: Bangalore Royal Challengers, Kolkata Knight Riders, Chennai Super Kings? Are you kidding me? A nation of over one billion and we can't come up with names not inspired by booze, a dumb but fun David Hasselhoff show that was badly remade last year, or whatever it is Super Kings is based on (cigarettes maybe)?

Secondly: there is a singular lack of differentiation between the teams. Watching , I just can't pick favorites. One problem is, there's nothing particularly Mumbai about the Mumbai Indians. You could call them the Bhatinda Brawlers, make Bhajji captain, and be the same team (of course, you'd need an international venue in Bhatinda)! Why aren't the teams regionalized? Well, I understand why, and they are good reasons, but at least do *some* zoning to make sure the teams can capitalize on the regional identities they have embedded on their names, and pick players from, you know, the city they claim to be from? If they were truly regional, we'd get some nice fanbases delineated... at this point, I just can't cheer for a favorite because I'm having a tough time telling them apart. (the garish uniforms do help in this regard and have ensured that I will never cheer for Mohali with their hint of pink, or the wife for the garish red Mallya team, whatever it's called).

Which brings me to how there just isn't enough of a team image/ reputation yet, and the owners/ players are just too damn polite (of course with Shah Rukh Khan, its hard to get the maniac to comment on anything or anyone other than himself, so...). Some marketing guy needs to tell them to sling mud at each other, get some rivalries going, and make this interesting. They can't do that right now because its like the Buddy League where losing captains go pat the back of the winning one over a beer at the end of the day. Where's the venom? I thought the whole reason why cricket got boring and T20 had to be invented was that it was, you know, sedate. Lose a little more of 'gentlemanliness'... the Aussies will teach you!

Third: They really need to move back to India. Or don't call it what it is called now. That move made me angry, and just added more dollops of lame to the lame sundae.

And finally, either get the cheerleaders less clothes, teach them to dance, or get them a damn half-time show so they do more than just randomly flail around on the sidelines.

Anyway, I feel slightly sullied by the fact that I've actually blogged about sports now - me, with my history of playing no Cricket other than EA Sports' excellent Cricket '97 on the PC, or golf on Wii Sports. So I'm off to take a bath. Out.

The World in General

So I've been ruminating all day today about complexity, progress, perception, and reality. Or you could say I've been thinking about the parts of the blind folks' elephant that they are for quite some time now.

I know you feel a rant coming on, so in the interests of brevity, let me attempt to summarize in a few brief sentences:

1. The world is incredibly, inexplicably complex.
2. We perceive but a part thereof, and jump to wild conclusions and hypotheses based on observed phenomenon or (let's face it) bombast and hot air.
3. We then set out to affect the reality we scarce understand based on what will, in time, be proven naive and flawed plans.
4. Thankfully, one surprising facet of this reality we don't understand is also that in the short term and the long, we do make what seems to be progress most of the time...
5. And in a world where the laws of thermodynamics seem to be holding in both the short and long terms, we spend a finite amount of energy to achieve a predictable result, and leave the reality we seeked to impact forever changed (hence increasing its entropy).
6. So I've been ruminating about what it is that keeps us from, you know, falling flat on our faces...

If you didn't get some or all of that, let me stop using pseudo-geekspeak and give you an illustrative example.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... humanity itself.

I think it is fair to say that no scientists or politicians or philosophers or men of industry - or anyone else in history has ever had a blooming clue what's what with the world. A milder version of said statement would be that none of us has ever completely understood the world and planned or acted based on anything other than a limited or flawed understanding of the world.

So we have thoughts, ideas, policies, religions and wars being designed and executed basically by people who have some miniscule part of the puzzle solved. They are all of ephemeral half-life and for good or bad end up changing the world in their own way.

And from their cues and miscues we have this emergent behemoth made up of billions of living, breathing, eating, shitting, humping, and sometimes thinking organisms that is human society and it is (arguably) better off than it was when this mess started a geological second ago. There are even macro-trends that can be deduced and macro-projections of our trajectory that we can make... so long as we forgive ourselves the fact of not seeing the occasional hundred year economic depression or thousand year dark age in this corner of that continent or some such.

So I'm wondering what is the secret... the guiding force... the fountainhead of all this "forward" motion?

(Here I will ask you to imagine I inserted a diatribe on whether it really is forward motion or simply chaotic helter skelter that our limited minds with their limited senses perceive as forward motion)

Of course, when I think this, I have no blooming idea what the answer is. I'm just saying I'm pretty sure no one else does either.

Also, I realize that the so called "illustrative example" I set out to give has in itself become a vague diatribe in need of an illustrative example or simplification of its own.

Ah well... enough said for now I think.

PS: What? You feel like tearing your hair out because I just blathered on for a few minutes without actually going anywhere but I did actually (maybe) manage to engage if not entertain you for a while? Well... there's your illustrative example then.

I'll save some more crap for later. Toodles!

Reader Stream

How does one use the internet?

The average person will probably check his/ her email (obsessively), use social networks like LinkedIn/ Facebook/ Orkut, perhaps Twitter or blog a bit, and when that's done go to a combination of websites that keep them up to date on matters of interest. For me that would be a smattering of blogs, news, movie reviews, and op-eds.

Now of course, I was spending ridiculous amounts of time going to multiple websites, poring over hundreds of articles and posts, trying to (and failing at) separating the good stuff from the chaff, and often ended up missing stuff I would've liked if I'd only noticed it.

My problem was partially solved a while ago, when K got me hooked on to Google Reader - a fantastic feed reader and aggregator. In a nutshell, it takes the RSS feeds for all your favorite websites and displays them to you in a single stream. You can save yourself multiple bookmarks/ trips to multiple sites however many times you do in a day. I heavily recommend checking it out if you haven't already.

That said though, now I have a new problem. I am over-informed. My 'trends' page on Reader tells me I sort through an average of ~100 posts in a single day. It doesn't (thankfully) tell me how many minutes/ hours a day I spend doing that. It is quite an addiction.

I also have this weird compulsive thing going on - much as with my email inbox I cannot bear to see unread items in the Reader queue. Each item must be read. Good items must be starred or shared... and finally I am over-informed and don't have a peer group of people who are reading what I'm reading (although poor wifey does get subjected to a continuous stream of updates). 

Anyway I figured since Reader lets me share items I think are interesting, I'd put the shared items feed on my blog (in the right hand column). Just another stream of information for those not yet overloaded :D Just so more people know what's on my mind...

Christians All

Something I've been thinking about for a while now...  

Here's the thing: we're all Christians without realizing it.

First up, the idea of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient god is in itself a Judaeo-Christian-Islamic construct. Yes, I know both the Vaishnav and the Shaiva sects of hinduism have their own 'flavor' of monotheism, but come on - that's about a 22% slice of hindu philosophy. That Christians chose to steal from the Greeks and make Jehovah looks like Zeus (with the buff body and white hair and Gandalf beard as seen in Michaelangelo's work) is beside the point... heck, even Morgan Freeman (and Amitabh Bachchan in the misbegotten ripoff using said ripoff) have to dress up like a post-modern chic avatar of Zeus when playing the character.

Secondly, let's talk about swearing... I'm sure you knew that a lot of substitution swear words we use are "minced oaths"; meaning they are Christian oaths that have been... phonetically sterilized. Kind of like a poor doggie that got snip-snipped.

"Egad" says Mr Lodge of Riverdale... which stands for "By God".
"Zounds!" yells Jughead... which stands for  's wounds... God's Wounds... referring to that poor Hesoos guy and what he went through three days before Easter on a little hill...
"ods bodikins" goes the stiff upper lipped British refrain... meaning "by God's little body
Besides all these, you probably already knew that "Gosh", "Darn", "Gee" and "Heck" stand for God, Damn, Jesus, and Hell respectively?

Which brings me to hell... and heaven, and purgatory.

First of all, the Christian conception of the three is not in the Bible. No, credit for this wondrous creation goes to a Mr Dante Alighieri, who wrote the "Divine Comedy" and to a lesser degree, to a Mr John Milton, author of "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained". You see before then, no one really associated Hell with fire (or even punishment necessarily). For Judaism, it was sufficient punishment for bad deeds to be sent to Purgatory after death and being denied the presence of God.

But I digress... my point is this: the very common Indian expostulating a vehement "go to hell" is using a Christian concept. The Hindu concept is that you get recycled, and the form you take in your next life depends on your karma quotient in the current life. A judge does do a balancing of good deeds and bad, but you get the result right away, not on Judgment Day. If you're lucky, you get moksha or mukti from this tiresome cycle... and few variants of Hinduism that I know of believe you join Zeus in heaven as a prize for good deeds (I may simply be under-informed).

"Narka lok" as the Hindu version of "hell" (more appropriately, the Indian version of Hades, which the Christians ripped off to build hell) is not the final destination for evil-doers. It is more appropriately a penitentiary, where one does penance. Yes, it does involve boiling oil and fire and brimstone in some variants, but one wonders if this was a case of the ancient world being a much smaller place than we think.

My point is this... Popular culture around the world is (not surprisingly) infused with elements from the three dominant world religions. I'm not saying that is a bad thing... nor am I recommending a Taliban-esque ban on cursing like a Christian or believing in Christian tenets - in the end when it comes to belief most of us are mongrels.

What I'm saying is I find it extremely interesting how we drink in things subconsciously when otherwise we are vehement about being teetotallers. That's all.

Stewart vs Cramer: Coda

So it is done... Stewart took Cramer and threw him around willy-nilly - only, he didn't do it for laughs but rather for pain. He pointed out the obvious: The 17 live hours a day juggernaut that is CNBC is more about entertainment than information. 

For those that haven't seen it yet, I embeddeth the links right here:

Unedited Interview - Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

But - what I'm blogging to say isn't all the above. Rather I wanted to highlight an earlier instance of Stewarts similar treatment of the news media - back in 2004 he appeared on CNN's "Crossfire", a show dedicated to left vs right brawling, and called the show "theater not debate" and the hosts "partisan hacks" to their face.

This is just so much fun I thought those that liked what he did with CNBC might like this too...

Oh by the way - "Crossfire" got cancelled a few months later.

Tabloid News vs. Intelligent Comedy

You look to a news channel to provide you with interesting information, perspectives, and the like right? And you look to a comedy/ entertainment channel for idiocy?

Well, you're on the wrong planet, man!

Case in point...

I tuned in to "Times NOW" and "India TV" the other day, at prime-time, to see if there was any news coming out of that bubbling pot of trouble called AfPak. To my utter chagrin the idiots were running news stories (and by stories I mean those serious, overly melodramatic pieces that feel like they were directed by a Manmohan Desai wannabe) like - 

a) Whether the world is going to end in 2012 (no doubt some executive producer finally saw the trailer for Roland Emmerich's latest effort at world destruction) and,

b) How the United States uses Area 51 to leverage alien technology in making spy planes and other cool stuff (no, India isn't that far behind when it comes to TV series seasons - we got the X-files back in the 90s and everything)

Needless to say, the presenters of said pieces were amateurish, but utterly earnest. The guy talking about Area 51 looked like he had just come up with the answer to life, the universe, and everything.  

The world is not big enough for the shivering and cringing I wanted to do.

Then in the morning, when I had finally woken from my depressed sleep, having lost all hope, I find the interwebz choked with stories about The Daily Show and John Stewart's takedown of CNBC. Here's a comedian, doing better news than all the jokers in all the news network in all the world.

His two takedowns of CNBC are not so much comedy gold as they are... conscientious reporting! If you haven't seen them yet, crawl out from under that rock and take a gander:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

In Cramer We Trust

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

Now with Jim Kramer melting down in response, and finally booking a showdown with  Stewart on his own turf this is simultaneously must-see entertainment TV and perhaps the most relevant debate in the news media right now about the financial crisis. The question is simple: (and I riff on that movie I so badly want to see that the Indian censors won't ever let me): Who reports on the reporters?

So there you are folks... lesson for the day: for your news, go to Comedy Central. For comedy front and center, go to any darn news channel!

Oh, and don't miss the Kramer vs Stewart showdown (I'll be sure to post the linky here)

Famous Last Words

Yes - I know.

I said I was done blogging. Operative word being 'was'. There was no 'why' to my blogging there, toward the end. And without the 'why' my blogging was, well, pointless.

So there is a reason now...

I am out of touch with people as never before, and drinking down information feeds like they're about to run dry. That makes for a bad combination.

I need to Vent. Express. Ruminate and Pontificate. Puke. Whatever.

Further explanations, groans in response to half-chuckles/ snide remarks/ I-told-you-so's and the like in the comments for those who need them.

Without much further ado and self-referential crap, here... we... Go!