Musical Sunday morning... Gulaabi aankhein...

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.

Brexit and Trump

Like all minds, mine also keeps working and thinking all kinds of crap, which most of the time is worthy of being posted on this blog - given the kind of standards I have set for it - but typing those down in a way that I also sound smart and literate requires a lot of mental preparedness which we call mood, which I get very rarely, although even when it comes, it is debatable whether I really sound all that.

That was a really long British kind of a sentence, which reminds me of the hottest gossip of the world at the moment - Brexit. What a funny term it is - I can launch a biscuit with this name that is also a bread, the brown one, and also has some x - my secret ingredient - to make a delicious yummy and tasty Brexit. I don't know what I need to do to copyright this idea... but like those idiots do on facebook to protect their privacy - I hereby declare the above mentioned idea as mine, and anybody who copies will have to pay me money of the order negotiable based on my mood during negotiation.

They say Brexit will lead to the next recession. And it will be real bad, I hear. And looking at David Cameron's face these days, I can tell he's sitting in an exam he hasn't studied for. The vibes are all negative if you hear world news. I don't know how big a dent one bunch of countries - a 'kingdom' it is called - ruled by a queen who also doesn't seem to have a clue on what's going on - can have on the whole world. But history tells us they are really capable of screwing everyone for their own survival. Anyhow, if I lose my job because of all this shit, I will start calling myself an entrepreneur to sound cool. And tag myself a CEO for some time, so that whoever hires me (after the Brexit is poop) considers me in higher league and makes me top management - a VP or something.

There's another mess waiting to spread all over. It's called Trump. Now although Trump sounds to me like an underwear brand - for males - this is really a guy, whose face resembles those fat dogs who look like they are smiling like humans do, but they are really just trying to spit out all the shit inside coz their ass is so choked and constipated.

This guy - Trump - talks nonsense like it makes sense, and sometimes it does. I am not the one to worry too much about sense, though, as long as I am getting entertained...  I bear Bhalla parivar in ye hain mohabbatein, for example, and never complain. But please don't judge me... I have a right to get entertained by any crap. For your information I did stop watching Sasural Simar ka when it became too meaningless. So I too have some limits you see.

A lot of people say Trump will screw the world. And like Brexit, he will also be chosen by people. How ironic! But if he indeed makes it to the white house, and if the world really gets more messy, especially for Indians in IT like me, I will have some more time as the CEO I plan to become if laid off. I may make it big too if I persist enough. My pani-puri thhela will be my office and assembling plant. And the product shipped right into customers mouths through steel carriers - with onions and sev - in customers' hands. And customer takes over the product logistics after it's shipped to the plate. FOB price of Rs.20 for 6 units. Again - I hereby declare this idea as mine, and anybody who copies will have to pay me money of the order negotiable based on my mood during negotiation.

this moment... is gone

Imagination - an interesting ability that we humans have, that enables a beautiful world to reside within us and also outside. So much so that it is hard to tell which is real. Dreams are another way of enjoying a presence beyond the waking reality. If you never wake up, then in your mind, is the dream all there is? I don't have a strong enough recollection of my dreams to say whether in one sleeping session I have one dream end to end, or a set of smaller independent ones. I think it's the latter, but don't feel confident in telling for sure. Why don't I? Am I lying somewhere with a deeper-than-natural sleep induced somehow, dreaming all this I call my life, like they show in the Matrix movies? While it doesn't seem like we have control over our dreams, we certainly have a handle on our imagination, although it can be argued that at some end of the chain of causality, we don't really know where thoughts and ideas come from. Without going that far, if we choose - like we do - to picture our thoughts in more video-like fashion rather than snapshots, we can take them to an end where scenarios plays in our minds in their finer details. That requires us to have enormous control on our minds, given all the disturbance they're subjected to. An awareness that the situation is imagined, yet living it in the mind like its happening for real - it's closer in nature to virtual reality of the technology world - and dreams in our sleep. And like in a dream, it is sometimes possible to forget the unrealness of it and get so immersed in it that one forgets his/her real identity which is outside the dream or the imagined state. Is someone's illusion someone else's reality? Within layers and layers of imagery, am I just an image? Am I dreaming? Am I imagining? Am I being dreamed? Am I being imagined? - this person that is me at the moment. But wait, the moment's gone...

Digital

Every IT company is talking about focusing on "Digital" these days. I've seen lots of these 50-60 year old leaders in large IT companies saying in one breath that they'll focus on Digital, IoT, AI and Cloud. Even the younger ones talk all this shit but I won't accuse them of stupidity as they are closer to my own generation. Even the older guys are not stupid for sure - I must say - as I am an Indian, and I should respect old people and Gods. I figured that sometimes when they say Digital, they mean and include IoT and AI as well. May be something else also. I am not sure whether Cloud is also implicitly meant. Perhaps it is. Perhaps when they say 'Digital, IoT, AI and Cloud', they actually mean 'Digital - IoT, AI and Cloud'. The hyphen is lost in all Indian English accents.

The first thing that irritates me about Digital of today is that the word 'Digital' is used as a noun, while it is actually an adjective. Remember Digital Watch, Digital Washing Machine? But what the hell does it mean to say - XY% of our revenue will come from Digital; or - we are very upbeat about Digital; or - We will invest in Digital. Digital what?

Here's a definition of digital (adjective) from dictionary.com
...pertaining to, noting, or making use of computers and computerized technologies, including the Internet: 'We are living in an increasingly digital world.' 'Digital activism uses social media to achieve political reform.' 'His blog is a great example of digital journalism.' 'Digital technology has revolutionized the music industry.'

This brings me to the second thing that irritates me - what the hell is this stuff that is newly tagged Digital now? Doesn't everything done through interconnected (is that even necessary?) computers come under Digital technology? What the hell is new here?

Probably newer applications are emerging due to internet becoming more ubiquitous and accessible through means never imagined before, and that has opened a whole new world of applications and possibilities in doing things. That can be seen as an expansion of the whole Digital arena. Why this separate fuckin' term called digital - the way it's used - which doesn't even talk about all things digital and is not even grammatically correctly used?

Or may be it's just me... I need to do some googling to understand if I'm missing something but am feeling too lazy... you can use that to your advantage and call me stupid, I don't mind :)

Note: The image in this post is copied from the internet without noting the source.

Meaninglessness of all we do...

This astounds me. The meaninglessness of it all. So much of crap that we do all the time pretending it's all a big deal, yet none of it is of much consequence. In jobs it does earn us our salaries, so at an individual level official crap still has some monetary value. Even that is all a huge waste at organizational level; created coz someone higher up had to show he was doing something and simply didn't understand what's really to be done. Crap trigger is always top-down. And crap flow is both top-down and bottom-up. Is that personifiably true as well?

But money does not really assign meaning to what we do. For an individual, meaning has to be something beyond money. It's something that justifies the act by leading to an outcome that makes the world a better place in some manner, however small. And that outcome has to be visible enough to be really motivating. Otherwise, it's again no real meaning. It's like those hundreds of slides created every week by millions of managers worldwide to send to their bosses every Friday - stupid status reports - knowing most of them won't be read or understood. But they have to be made, coz someone more powerful wants them, and that's his way of making sure the progress of work is on track. It does meet the purpose for some bosses to some extent.

There is an interesting issue with us which makes the whole concept of meaning look upright and upside-down at the same time. We want meaning yet we want to get crazy and excited. Challenges motivate us, but challenging work is frustrating. We prepare the most rational strategies, yet we don't follow them, coz we are only good at making them. We like to sleep. We like to eat. We also want to be slim. We like privacy, yet we want a social life. We want mobile devices, yet we want work-life balance. We like to drive but we don't like traffic. When on bike we hate cars on the road, when on cars we hate bikes on the road. And everyone hates those walking in between. And walkers hate everyone in return. We like going to expensive places, yet we want them cheap with discounts. We go to malls and not buy anything. We buy things coz everyone does. We wear ties, which serve no purpose at all. We hit humans and love God. We take credit for good job but dump work on others. We take work that can give us recognition. We bully the weak and complain getting bullied by the stronger. We watch TV serials which show routine life, but find our own routine lives boring. We are obsessed about nudity, although we're all the same bodies. We don't like the smell of our own shit. We can kill plants and eat them, but killing certain animals becomes sin. We are okay with killing mice and mosquitoes, though. We enjoy alcohol and drugs that dumb down our minds, yet we take pride at our intelligence. We make strange drawings on our bodies and feel proud about it. White ones want tan. Black ones want to be white. The middle ones want to be white too, and then seem tanned. A woman saying she needs a man only for making babies is awesome. A man saying he needs a woman only for making babies is sick. Well there's a background to it - men have a long legacy of sickness of lot of kinds over ages. Let's pass that. We kill in the name of God, yet we don't have a clue who that is. The winners write histories to show them as good and losers as evil. Everybody dies, history remains. For whom? We can die any moment. Reality is that we will die some day, yet we live like we have forever. We are lazy, yet we want to achieve so much in life, be on top of the world. We push tasks on Friday to Monday as if it would never come. We want promotions in jobs, yet we don't want to be accountable for anything. We get inspired by what rich people say while they are at a place much different from where we are. We admire global Maxima more than local Maxima, yet we talk about setting milestones. We hate our bosses and what they do, yet we want to be promoted while it will only lead us to our bosses' position. We are masters of contradictions, yet we talk about consistency. We admire children, yet we aspire maturity. Do we become nuts when we are screwed?

Such fucked up minds we are, and yet we talk of meaning!