Sad

9 people died by falling from the top (12th floor) of a building under construction near my home. A few others are critically injured. A slab broke off, apparently. It is extremely sad and unfortunate indeed. Just a few days back, a guy died at the same site in a similar accident. This is a reflection of the poor safety norms in most work places in India. The culture of jugaad leads to too many compromises in safety, quality and accountability. We live with that as the rich/powerful get away without being held responsible, the poor risk their lives as they don't have any other option, and the middle class just accepts without knowing enough and becomes a victim when things go down. And probably, contrary to what we generally believe, we are also somewhat reckless folk, and more adventurous than one in his/her right mind should be. We are like that only!

Oratory

Oratory, especially that at the most watched platforms, in the current times, is a skill that is less of what it used to be once upon a time. Good speeches still generate some euphoria, but it's less the skill of the speaker and more a lot of other factors that make public speaking so easy now, especially at the topmost platforms where the speakers have all kinds of tools which help them deliver content; and in the end all they do is just that - deliver, without putting much of a brain to it. And even the content is not written by the speakers... so basically all they do is stand on stage and act like they mean what they say. And then these news channels analyse that bull-shit for hours, as if it really mattered. A lot of time and energy can be saved if the content is directly made public, and we avoid all the unnecessary drama. Unless, of course, the speech is supposed to have an immediate psychological impact on the audience - like creating some sort of ecstasy about something and they go and do something they otherwise won't in their right minds. I guess Gandhi's and Hitler's speeches had such impacts on people. Perhaps Obama's speeches did too to some extent - in making the people vote for him - and he delivered them well in spite of just reading stuff on teleprompters; stuff written by someone else, of course. And one may say that every speaker would like such an impact if he can manage. And therefore, there is a strong argument in favor of live oratory in any case. And if we separate the content - read or rehearsed - from the delivery, the latter still requires the human and personality element so as to be really impactful... so we can't really replace the person with a robot that blurts out the content in the best possible manner as per the intended impact. But for people to be impacted by a read-out piece even by a human will increasingly get difficult as they become more and more aware of the fact that it is just acted out by the speaker and is not coming from deep down his mind, especially with more technology getting used - and technology has a turn-off effect in speeches. Teleprompters, for example, are designed to give an impression to the audience that they speaker is looking at  them, while he actually isn't. And the moment you discover that first time, you do feel cheated somewhere deep down. Given that, if someone can manage conventional oratory, he can sweep the crowds away still and have a competitive advantage too. Perhaps Donald Trump is managing that to a significant degree.