Its been 758 days since I published a blog. I have since drafted 40 blogs but never finished even one of them. Now I completely understand the concept of ‘Writer’s block’. There were a lot of reasons such as 2 international relocations and busy work schedule, but above all, it was just the lack of enough interest and motivation to rant (write) about something. I always peeved about George R.R. Martin not completing Winds of winter or not even giving a tentative release date for it. Now I get it. If you are stuck, you are stuck. If I cannot drag myself to write a couple of hundred words on a generic topic, who am I to judge someone who has the grueling task of completing an epic series of books. But looking at Mr. Martin shifting his focus to making some easy money for HBO by helping them make shitty spin offs of his work, my worst fear is that ‘Game of Thrones’ will end up being the Sagrada Familia of books.
May be the ending of the TV Series was the actual ending he planned. The last 2 seasons were bad. In fact, calling them bad is an understatement. Especially compared the rest of his work. I totally agree that that was the only logical ending possible. I am a little proud that I predicted the fate of most of the characters. Its was just the pace and screenplay that ruined everything. The outcry and disappointment of fans may have caused him to reconsider another/alternate course to the story line and may be he is stuck.
Now that I have beat around the bush infront of my house and also all the bushes around the neighborhood, lets get back to the point. Elephants and Goldfish are on the opposite ends of a very particular spectrum – ‘Memory retention’. At least that’s what people have you believe it. Researching for this blog led me to a fact that it is actually ‘Bees’ that have the shortest memory and Goldfish have been unfairly maligned about their mental abilities. Renaming this blog to ‘An elephant and a bee’ would have been easy enough but I did not want to burn the few remaining credits on DALL·E to create another image for this blog. It also reinforces the point I am trying to make here.
What we now about the world is driven by the narrative set around it and there are only a few but very influential ‘entities’ in the world that do this. For every Rupert Murdoch there is a George Soros. For every Fox News, there is a CNN. For every BBC there is a Al jazeera. All these ‘entities’ want you to see the world in Black and White. The world we live is too complicated to be put into 2 buckets. If you read between the lines, you will see that everyone has an agenda.
What’s the first headline you see in any major publication since the last one month? Its the Israel and Palestine conflict. Who created the problem in the first place? Yes, the Jews were driven out of the middle east but it was centuries before the colonization by the British. The jews were allowed to migrate back to the region by the British and then after the 2nd world war, United nations passed a resolution to carve Israel out of Palestine. If you care about Jews so much and wanted a safe place for them, why not carve our the just now defeated Germany or some other part of Europe? If the US, who had so much influence in the UN was so moved my the Zionist persecution, why didn’t they make a 51st state for them? California or Texas would be climatically Ideal. US already has so many places names after European towns and cities. Who stopped from creating a new Jerusalem? Wouldn’t creating a Jewish state in the middle of Arab world be the most dangerous thing to do given the history of hate between the Abrahamic religions and track record of the would be neighbours?
You may say that it was to correct the historical wrongs and the . But some things are beyond salvage. If they did want to truly correct the wrongs of the past, most of Europe should have given back all the wealth looted from its colonies. The self proclaimed ideal nation – the United states should have vacated America and given it back to the Natives. None of them happened. It will never happen too.
If the reason was to give Jews back Jerusalem and their ‘Holy’ land, they should have set the example, they should have destroyed Mount Rushmore and given back the natives their holy lands. The British in India should have given back Ayodhya and Mathura back to Hindus. The Australians should have given back the occupied sacred spaces to the Aborigines. The Spanish and Portuguese should have given back the Incan gold and don’t even get me started on Africa.
Pardon my french but Who the fuck divides a country that way? Let alone a country, who the fuck does divide anything this way?
If you think about it, it doesn’t surprise me at all. It looks to have been done on purpose. It was the perfect way to permanently destabilize a region and ensure that there can never be peace. It was after all a model that worked perfectly well only a few months before November 1947. India was partitioned. It ended up with East Pakistan and West Pakistan bordering India on both sides. What about the Hongkong situation? There is a clear pattern. The United states politicians still do this till date to their own country. Its called Gerrymandering. Its done to ensure that the black and hispanic voters do not have a majority in any district or county. Its not even subtle.
You can live life as a Goldfish – Forget what happened in the past and live life as it come or an Elephant – Never forget anything that happened to you. But the problem is that they want you to be an Elephant about all the wrongs done by you and a Goldfish about all the wrongs done by them. They want you to be a Goldfish and tell you that Goldfish has a very short memory even if that’s absolute bullshit.
Its a pattern that has been and is being repeated across the world. They will keep doing it. They do not want anyone else to prosper or live in peace. They do not care about any faith other than theirs. The do not care about any race other than theirs. It happened to middle east, it happened to Americas, it happened to Africa, it happened to Oceania. It happened in parts of Europe.
Americans and rest of Europe were greedy but the British have always been petulant. If they cannot have it, no-one can.
Anybody familiar with the periodic table of elements would be familiar with the concept of exceptions. Despite our human brains exceptional desperation to classify and group things into buckets, the world we live in is full of exceptions. The list of things also includes people. History has often shown that the people who are different and do not fall into this buckets are often the ones who contribute most to the world. These are the ones who defy the status quo and the normal notions of the society. These are the ones who can bring change. Some times bad, more than often good. These are called odd balls in simple language, data science calls them outliers. Do you know what data engineers do to outliers? They discard them.
Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning seem to be the latest and hottest trends in technology according to many. Its not only the latest ‘fad’ for CEOs and CTOs but has also become a very integral part of our lives (even if you don’t want it to – more on that later). But that is this? Machine learning algorithms are just simple programs that are instructed to look into a data set and come up with a model that gives the most accurate prediction for future data. Might sound simple, but there is a lot more to it. All it does is split the data into a training set and a testing set. It trains itself with training set is one of they predefined ways and then tests itself against the testing set to see if its logic was correct. if not, it tries another predefined way. There are about 10 commonly used predefined ways. If you don’t fit into any category, then you are screwed.
One way that Netflix or YouTube or other video streaming service would suggest a video to a user would be using Naive Bayes algorithm. Its a simple calculation of probability of you liking A because you liked B. For this they use your Likes, Age and location etc together with genres or key words they associate certain programs with. Lets say, you watched Daredevil, then you must like super-heros and Marvel cinematic universe. You watched a standup comedy show? More from same comic or other comics who do similar kinds of material must be a good guess.
Now lets go step further, A mall or an e-commerce sites wants to target ads to users and want to link your age, gender to your spending patterns. The ones marked below are outliers, that means the k-means algorithm used for customer segmentation cannot place you into a cluster/group because you do not fit the purchasing patterns of the data they have. Here the words “Data they have” is very important. More on that later. So, since you do not fit, the data engineer discards these outliers as faulty data or insignificant data. It means you get generic suggestions/ads or irrelevant ads. Annoying but still not dangerous.
But the problem comes when these standard data mining algorithms are used to take decisions that may make or break lives. For example, approval of a loan or admission into a college or a job. May be someone had a personal tragedy and had bad scores for a couple of years? May be someone went broke because they spent all their income on medical bills of a family member. Then you seem as an unusual data point to the Machine learning algorithm. It cannot handle you because it never looks for a cause. For it, you are just a row in a spreadsheet that doesn’t fit its idea of the world. The data it has is its world view.
If you wanted to develop a program that screened resumes and shortlisted potential candidates for interviews. Old school way was to write a lengthy list of skills you are looking for and match the resumes with them or a sub set of skills. In the modern way, you just feed the resumes of all your employees to it and ask the Machine learning algorithm to figure out what your company needs. You may think that the program will deduce the skills required. But it can also come to a conclusion not to select female candidates if only 20% of your workforce is woman. As per the data you prefer Men 80% or 4 times over the other gender. If majority of the work force is in 30’s, it can also conclude that the company doesn’t want to hire other age groups. You may think this is too hypothetical, but this actually happened.
Being ignored for a job because of your gender is…. BAD, but not a catastrophe. How about being denied a loan because of your race? How about being arrested for a crime you did not commit because the data engineers used the facial data related to only a specific ethnic group to a facial recognition algorithm?
A lot of the technology news is filled with success stories of Machine learning and how it can help businesses earn more. But the other-side of the story is often suppressed. Did you know that a twitter bot by Microsoft was suspended mere 16 hours after it went live after it started to tweet stuff like this.
Training a machine learning algorithm is like teaching a child. Like a child trusting their parents to give them all the accurate,true information, the algorithms assumes that the information given to it is the only information. But unlike children who may change their opinion when they see a new point of view or set of information, computers do not have the autonomy to seek additional data. They always think that the data given to them is full and final, no other type of data can exist. For a company with 20% female work force, the algorithm truly believes that this is the way things should be, the percentage cannot increase. Thus AI kind of works to ensure that the status-quo is maintained. Thus killing progress. For computers, once a loser is always a loser.
If a bias is conscious then it means that you are dealing with an Asshole, if a bias is unconscious then you are dealing with someone ignorant. A computer program is only as smart as the people who build it. If the people who build it are ignorant, then it is going to be ignorant. But unlike humans, computers do not look for reason, that makes them dangerous. Like all human beings, the programmers or data scientists or data engineers are also biased. They may fail to acknowledge it because most of us don’t know our own biases. If you don’t believe me, Harvard has a simple online test to prove this. Don’t worry, they don’t ask for your personal information to take the test.
If majority of the venture capitalists and investors were using Machine learning to decide their choices, What would be the AI calculated value of success for a college drop out, a lumber-mill worker and a guy selling books from a garage? I am pretty sure it would be in single digits if not zero. If that had happened, we would be in a world without Facebook, Tesla and Amazon. The same algorithms that these guys are creating now, would prevent similar success stories. May be that’s the plan. May be they do not want competition.
Imagine If they decided sporting results, same teams would always win. A winner will always be a winner and a loser will always be a loser.
Imagine if machine learning algorithms decided elections, politicians will become de-facto dictators. Wait! Hasn’t Facebook already almost ensured this?
I will let Will Smith summarize why I detest these algorithms.
“Don’t attach locations or ethnicity to the disease, this is not a ‘Wuhan Virus,’ ‘Chinese Virus’ or ‘Asian Virus,” the World Health Organization wrote in a February 2020 bulletin. This was funny in a way because the last pandemic of this scale was called ‘Spanish Flu’ ( the disease did not even originate there) and more recently there was MERS or Middle eastern respiratory syndrome. Not to forget the fact that Ebola was named after a river in Congo. Lyme in Lyme disease is a geographic location.
If calling COVID 19 a China Virus is Racist and unfair. So was the case with other diseases. But one significant difference between them and COVID 19 is that China has been very secretive of the virus and has been reluctant in carrying out transparent investigations into the origins of the virus. China did exactly what the world expected it to do. Hide any useful information. Arrested the guy who tried to warn others about the disease and left him to die. So, irrespective of the argument on weather associating the virus with Wuhan is bigotry or not, Chinese government is responsible for all the deaths that happened in the first wave of infections. Let’s call it for what it is. There of no need to mince any words here.
But since then, for every wave of infections and every variant of COVID 19 going around, we and we alone are responsible. By we I mean the great citizens of the world. Most people blame the governments for not doing enough. But this is not an earthquake or a tsunami for the government to send in a disaster recovery team and quickly fix it. It’s a disease that transmits trough proximity and can be contained by self restraint. To put in simple words, if everyone in the world stays where ever they are and puts in an effort to live with the minimal interactions required to survive, everything would have gone back to normal long time ago.
But we are a species that isn’t able to eradicate AIDS. A virus far more easy to avoid. Why is it so? We call ourselves the only cognitive living organism in the world. Why can’t we restrain ourselves for a few days/weeks/months? I have hardly moved my ass in more than a year. It’s not easy. I too crave a vacation outside the 4 walls of my house. But I’m just trying to fulfill my share of social responsibility.
Is it the instant gratification that humans are now habituated to? Is it the over compartmentalization, politicization and polarization of news feeds? Is it utter disregard and lack of value to others lives? May it is one, may be it is everything. Except for a handful of countries that actively against vaccinations or use of masks, most have been at least trying to inoculate citizens and are advising caution. But this is all they can do. Ironically, this is not a new problem. Part of it is ignorance, part of it is apathy and part of it is desperation.
Funny enough each of these parts are associated with a different set of people. But it all boils down to greed. Lets imagine a world without equity. A world where every organization is not at the gun point called Share Value and is forced to show quarter on quarter, year on year improvement in revenues and profit. Lets imagine a world where everyone doesn’t need to get a pay hike every year. Imagine, even its hypothetical, a world without loans and credit cards. Wouldn’t it reduce the number of desperate people and desperate companies?
We have slowly been brainwashed into valuing non-essentials more than essentials. In Nature, there are lots of experiments. Some work and others don’t. The natural selection process had previously helped weed out everything that did not work or would not work. But the Homosapians have changed the rules. We do not contribute anything to Earth, we only consume and we are not that smart about out future as well. The issue of melting polar ice caps and global warming always divided people when there was no room for argument at all. Its just the Oil companies want to stay rich, that is why they find new stupid, dumb reasons against renewable energy. Sometimes they are do it through phony research funding, some times they do it through lobbying. This is best explained in the dystopian comedy Idiocracy.
Look at the logical way to price something. Its the cost of manufacturing + cost of logistics + Profit Margin. This is how most of the essentials are priced. But what about Non essentials? Coke is cheaper than Water in many countries. You take water, add a bunch of things to it and a shit load of sugar, then market it like crazy and still end up selling it for less than the cheapest ingredient involved in Manufacturing? How can these numbers ad up?
They have build a very powerful maze for common people where no matter which route you take, you will always end up where you started. Most people do not have enough savings to sit out of their job. So, not sure if and when we will get out of this cycle. Until we do that, we may not even get out of this pandemic.
When I watched The Trueman Show for the first time, as a kid, it completely went over my head. I couldn’t understand it. Why would someone pay to watch another person’s life. That too 24×7. The idea seemed absurd and idiotic. I watched it again recently after almost 2 decades. My wife didn’t know that it existed. It started with us watching the Netflix special ‘The Social Dilemma’. At the end of the day the entire concept of social media is to let other people know what they are doing in their lives. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are like an audit trail of people’s lives. Or at least the events that they deemed to be important. So I was reminded of the movie which now I feel was well ahead of time.
Side-bar: May be I should sell this idea to these IT giants. Most of the celebrities are avid consumers of social media. So why not automate writing of Biographies?
When ever google photos a notification on my phone saying ‘5 Years ago today’ or ‘2 Years so today’ it scares the hell out of me. I feel like I just received a note like 👇
Anyways, my wife doesn’t like spoilers, so I did not tell her what it was about. Though we still don’t understand the joy people derive from watching/knowing about others lives, we understood that it was possible. The times we live in are where every Tom Dick and Harry television network is full of so called reality shows. So it now made sense.
May be it always did. May be having parents who did not gossip (bitch) about others made me ignorant of the trait most of us have. Curiosity. Not in Science, not in spirituality, not in seeking the purpose of life but in what our neighbors are doing. May be if everyone lived in houses made out of transparent glass, we wouldn’t need televisions anymore.
It’s not just adults, take a bunch of kids who receive presents. Everyone would be more curious about what others got. They would be restless until they know that they got something better than others or may be until they are sure no one got something better than them. Next comes education. Whenever grades are announced first we look at our grades and then ask everyone around about theirs. Strangely the only ones we retain are the ones who did better than us. I’m sure that the sadness of a low grade was always washed away on learning that our friends didn’t do any better either.
But before the Orkuts and Facebooks came along, this was it. We just frown for a day or two and you were done. But any like and comment on the posts by anyone you know will keep rubbing salt into the wounds of your failures. We forget about your life and get fixated on others.
As a kid I used to watch tons of Discovery channel. It was informational and it was educational. Well theoretically it still is. But lately its focus has been on teaching survival skills in the wild and fishing techniques. That’s reality TV too. Feels like attempts to make non fictional versions of Cast away. This is the PG rated version of reality TV if you believe eating animal shit and insects wouldn’t scar kids for life. The more popular versions of this reality based television programming are borderline voyeurism.
Truman show was truly a movie made ahead of its time. But looking at the world around me I think we are way past the concept of the show. People are volunteering to be on reality shows. A side effect of people starting valuing themselves based on the number of followers they have online or the number of likes they get. I always thought that the word Celebrity meant that a person celebrated for something they have achieved. But now it just means popular. All you have to do is let people watch you. For every video on the internet, there are 10s of videos of people filming themselves watching them.
But I still don’t understand why one would want people to follow them and watch them all day long. If Voyeurism is watching people in intimate moments, whats the word for wanting to be watched?
In early 2015, Russel Peters did a show in the city I lived in. I immediately booked tickets and because I knew what to expect, I got the tickets for the last row. I was not sure if I could laugh at myself if a stranger made fun off me and if I couldn’t, I did not want the camera to put my wry smile or an upset face on permanent record of the video recording. I guess that would be the same for a lot of people. We are often comfortable when our friends make fun of us but not when others do. But this is a little different for public personalities. Their lives are an open for everyone. Not just the media or comedians, people form every walk of life have the liberty to make fun of them. Well that’s more or less accurate. More in a few countries with a real freedom of speech and less in countries with restrictions on what you can say in public.
For example, India has a something called a Right to freedom which includes freedom of speech but it comes with a big asterisk. The State can impose reasonable restrictions in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offense. Which more or less means shut your trap. This indirectly kills the art of Satire and Parody. Unlike America where it is routine for comedians, talk show hosts to mock public figures, India can be a dangerous place to exercise such freedoms, especially against politicians in power. Even the Russel Peters was a heavily toned down version of his usual self when he toured India.
Yesterday, the office of a movie director was attacked because of his political parody on a actor turned politician. These are the same bunch of people who were giggling at the the two movies that the same director made but were about other politicians. So, laughing at others is good but you cannot laugh at yourself? Not just this instance, this taking an offense thing has gone so far that the judicial courts have asked the film makers to add disclaimers to their movies to protect their artistic freedom.
The very first instance of such an incident (that I can recollect) was when the release of Da Vinci Code was postponed in 2003 due to a protest by some Christian missions in India. It was a weird thing that a movie made in a predominantly Christian country and I don’t remember any protests or law suits in US about this movie. There has been a gradual increase in the frequency of such incidents and that indicates that people have grown more sensitive. Right? But here lies the paradox that the same people have grown highly insensitive to the other things such as anything that might offend others. So, what do we call someone who thinks everything is about them? Egocentric? Conceited?, Self-centered? Self-absorbed? Self-obsessed? Self-serving? Self-interested?
You can call them any of these or all of these. India is a country of 1.3 billion people. Whatever you say or do, there is a very high probability of more than a few people getting offended. Is the only way to keep everyone happy is for everyone to remain silent? Like in the movie A quiet place. Or may be silence will also offend some people.
I don’t mean that everyone has to be think skinned or that every opinion is valid. There is a time for everything and now a days, everyone seems to get outraged for every petty little thing. May be forgot that it is okay Laugh at your self once in a while. The idiosyncrasies are a big part of what we are and it is okay to be made fun of and if someone makes fun of someone you adore or idiolize, that’s OK too. Nobody is perfect.
More often than not, the anger comes from a fact that the satirist is at least partially correct and you don’t like the fact that it is being pointed out or in some cases being exaggerated. It is the embarrassment you feel that triggers these reactions.
A picture is worth a 1000 words. So, let me put it to you this way. If you laugh at any one of these pictures, you should be able to laugh at all of these.
Coco is a 2017 Pixar animation film about a boy who accidentally enters the world of the dead. An interesting premise, right? The movie is his race to get back to the living world by dawn, so that he doesn’t remain there permanently or in other words – DIE. In this movie, there is a very profound scene where the boy witnesses a dead man die. The confused boy asks his companion, Hector what just happened and Hector responds saying that when a person is forgotten, that’s when the ‘Real death’ happens. These forgotten souls don’t have a place, even in the land of the dead. That made a lot of sense. Once no one knows you ever existed, you never existed (at least philosophically).
This got me thinking. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that there is a land of dead and there are lots of souls there living just like we do in the living world. They exist as long as someone remembers them. Because being remembered is the most important thing in that world, lets assume the power and stature in that world is directly proportional to the the number of people who remember you. But there is a catch here, this isn’t a fair logic. I am pretty sure that Chengiz khan and Hitler will stay longer in the memory of the World when compared to Nelson Mandela or MK Gandhi. I say this because, our brains are hard wired to remember threats. Its a means of survival. So, its not fair that bad guys get better stature in this world, so lets assume good memories are a credit and bad ones are a debit. That evens it out to a pretty fair world. Its a fictional one, so it can be fair.
I haven’t invented this concept, it’s the same concept of a good vs bad ledger that most religions of the world preach. The more good credit you accumulate, the better is your after life or next life. I guess, our ancestors believed that this was the only way to keep the us in check.
One thing common between Chengiz khan, Hitler, Mandela and Gandhi? There are all historical figures. These are the guys who fill the pages of history text books of children across the world. No one else would be remembered for more than 4 generations. My history text books mentioned a lot of important events that occurred in the past. So good, mostly bad. If my memory serves me correctly, we are living in the first ever event that effected the entire world since the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event. That’s 65 million years ago. I am not counting the last ice age which ended about 11,700 years ago because it did not effect the southern hemisphere.
Model of the last ice age.
The corona-virus pandemic has hit the world hard. It was in a way Nature putting us in our place, but most of us don’t seem seem to realize this. We are so very eager to get back to out ‘Normal’ or sometimes simply stupid that we are continuously throwing caution to wind and add fuel to the fire of this epidemic. It has reached every nook and corner of the earth. From the tribes in the Andaman to the indigenous people of the Amazon, no one is being spared. This is what it must have felt for people in eastern Europe when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. The country that was responsible for alerting the world did every thing possible to cover up until there was no where to hide and by the time the world know what was going on, it was too late. Covid-19 makes the incident Chernobyl look like a fire in a dumpster
Chernobyl radiation spread
Covid-19 outbreak world map
I know I haven’t done anything worthwhile in my life to be inducted in to the history books hall of fame or ‘infame’. But I do believe our entire generation will be held responsible for what we are doing now and will have a special place in the history, may be even a separate chapter for us. The worst part is that we don’t know if and when this will end. If it does end, how far is the next Zoo-tonic virus pandemic? According the National Geographic, 16% of all humans can be attributed to Zoo-tonic diseases and they also make up 75% of the emerging infectious diseases. AIDS, Mad cow, SARS, Ebola, MERS, Swine flu and now a new strain of SARS. If we continue going against the laws of nature and keep exploiting it in every possible way, the next deadly disease will be right around the corner waiting to pounce on us.
There is still time, Our actions over the period of coming months will determine how our future generations will remember us or if there will be a future. History is always written by the victors, at this moment of time I am not sure if there will be any.
Mississippi Burning is a 1988 movie based on a true incident. In June 1964, 3 civil rights workers disappeared and the vehicle they were traveling was found burnt. After 2 months of federal investigation their bodies were found buried. They were all shot. Their crime? Trying to get voting rights to black people. 9 were arrested including a cop and a pastor. The maximum sentence given out was for 10 years and no-one served for more than 6 years. Oh yeah, and the jury said pastor was not guilty because they couldn’t convict a… ‘Pastor’. The all white jury was later found to have some former KKK members.
56 years later, May 2020, Minneapolis – the capitol of Minnesota was burning. Reason, a black man died (technically murdered) in police custody, in broad day light, on the street. So, has anything changed? Did it get worse? What’s wrong with America? What’s wrong with Americans? What’s wrong with white people of America?
It’s been just more than 3 years since I have started writing this blog. My first ever blog (in my opinion) was my best work. That’s because I had pondered over those thoughts for years before I started typing them down. In hindsight I was kind of prophetic. Watching these protests unfold across the United states and later across the world, I wanted answers. I was 13,022 km away, but had a unique vantage point. Unlike popular opinion, I don’t think the white supremacists hate colored people, I think they are shit scared of them and they are paranoid. For that matter, Not just I think a lot of people are scared of black people. Not just black people, in a lot of countries, the race which is majority is paranoid about a race that is minority. Except in India I don’t understand the rationale behind it.
India which has always been predominantly Hindu, was ruled by Islamic invaders for 600 years and then was handed over to the Christian invaders who ruled it for a neat 190 years. It was under the rule of a minority that never pandered to the needs of their citizens. So, I do understand that the Majority of India doesn’t trust their minorities. Well, not all minorities, the Christians do not directly represent the British. Indians are not paranoid about Buddhists or Jains, not even Parsis who are as their name suggests Persians who sought refuge in India when their country was invaded. But Muslims have long reminded Indian people of atrocities that the Mughals committed and I do understand the psyche behind the distrust.
But in Europe and Americas, where black people were enslaved and forcefully brought in and exploited for generations. Even today, most of them do not have the social or economic means to displace the Majority. So, what do they fear? Are they afraid of revenge?
Side note: Why are only black people called African Americans in the US? Why are people from countries north of Sahara desert like Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt or Algeria called Middle east people? If doesn’t make any sense.
– A random thought
I have theory of relativity (not as complex as Einstein’s). The amount of fear or paranoia between 2 races is directly proportional to the relative difference of skin color. Fairer races believe that they are superior to darker races. I believe this is the subtle conditioning of brains using a tool called language.
Language plays a large part in how we perceive the world and we multiple languages have repeatedly hammered the idea that White is good and Black is bad. Which list would you prefer to be on? Black list or a White list? Would you be happy being the black sheep of the family? Don’t you think that such phrases cause a Unconscious bias in your head?
Now coming back to America, though banning gun ownership can drastically reduce the race related murders to just verbal or physical assaults and save lives, lobbying of fire arm manufacturers and the 2nd amendment of their constitution make it impossible to stop Americans from owning Guns. Argument of pro-gun folk in America is that it is necessary for their safety. Any civilian saying that they need a gun to protect themselves reeks of cowardice. This adding to the paranoid nature of Americans is what is causing so many problems. Why else would someone chase and hunt down a person jogging/running through a neighborhood?
So, the logical choice would be to educate people that being darker doesn’t infer character. We can get rid of this cowardice in future generations by having more diverse schools and exposing children to more cultures. As for the adults, I think they need to develop a new vantage point to see the world. Unless this happens now and happens fast, some 60 years from now another city/state will be burning and a some other confused soul will be writing a blog (or what ever this thing will be called then) about how nothing has changed since June 2020.
In my native tongue, there is a saying that translates to there will be 7 people in the world who have striking resemblance. Though it doesn’t say what this resemblance is in, this urban myth has left me pondering over last few weeks. There are tons of theories doing rounds on the internet about weird coincidences. Once example of such physical resemblance is Enzo Ferrari – the founder of Ferrari and Mesut Ozil a German footballer with Turkish origins. Well unrelated people from different generations having striking resemblance is intriguing but having had about 108,760,543,791 humans born till date, the probability of 2 people looking alike can still be explained mathematically, if not with just paranormal reasons.
I have known these fun facts for years now, but what compelled me to write about it is that I have started pondering this with another concept called Parallel life. There is a book on this subject comparing how some famous people share a parallel life with another famous person and there was even a Korean movie made on this subject almost a decade ago. Now why can’t we apply similar logic to people in news now?
According to most main stream western media, sees India’s prime minister Narendr Modi as an equivalent of Trump. Since Modi has become the prime minister of India, the self proclaimed liberal media such as BBC and CNN always refer to him as a ‘Nationalist’, ‘Conservative’ and a ‘far’ Right person. Both have used the same slogan “India/America first”, both have been pro-majority. Trump has even used Modi’s catch-phrase for his campaign to entice Indian Americans. I do understand their misunderstanding. I dont want to dive deep into it as it needs a lot of explanation and deserves a separate post. Lets just say India is like an exception here and the fact that Modi panders to other world leaders despite them being authoritarian is just business. He just wants more foreign investment. So, According to me they are not at all similar. In fact, if you compare their lives, both are polar opposites in each and every criteria.
Since March 2020, all that anyone can talk or think about is the CoronaVirus and if you follow the News you will also wonder how the Government of the United States has managed to hit a new low in the management of this epidemic. If you had compare the life of the current American President to an Indian politician, I would choose the current chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. Both Have had zero experience in governance before taking up their current jobs, they are what they are now only because of their fathers, both have a strong support base in bible wielding folk and the only achievements on their resume are either failed businesses or white collar crime law suits. As a matter of fact, they both down played the dangers of Covid=19 early on(one of them still continues to). One could even argue that they sort of had Parallel lives. But the resemblance ends there.
When if comes to handling the epidemic once they got past the phase of just denying it, the was passed on to the Chief Minister of Telangana. The more I think about it, the more I feel that the Indian Politician who first came to my mind when thinking of the American President was in fact not the correct match. Their circumstances of their rise to power might be similar but both are vastly different people. Now lets see how the POTUS went about his work of saving people.
First he said it was just a normal flu just like the Indian counter part who said that it would go away with one dose of Paracetamol. Then he and his administration kept heaping self-praise on how well they have been handling the situation and how everything is under control (they are doing it till date). Then they have said that the hospitals have enough beds, the doctors have more than enough medical supplies to deal with any number of patients while the ground reality was completely opposite. They tried to not to test dead bodies for Coronovirus just to keep the numbers low. Their explanation for increase in cases was that the testing has increased. Last but not least, they both blamed the spread of pandemic on others.
There is also a stark similarity in the way these both came to power. They did not have an agenda of sorts, it was fear mongering. The notion that outsiders are coming to steal our jobs. The state with highest Covid-19 infections in India is also a governed by the people with same ideology. They have been for years spreading the idea that every outsider is either a criminal or here to steal jobs. If you don’t have an agenda or intention to govern and only know to be divisive they remain in a bubble that the hatred for others among you base of supporters is sufficient to elect you, no matter what you do or more importantly ‘Not do’.
Crisis is the litmus test for leadership, it separates sheep from goats. Larger the crisis, more bigger and better are the leaders required to tackle them. Most of the actual leaders you must have come across in your life must have been ‘non’ leaders by their designations and positions. Leaders are those who other’s interests and welfare above theirs and are not afraid to take hard decisions. Leaders are those who do not keep their folk in dark and Leaders are those who admit when they make mistakes. The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging its existence and these self centered ideological twins across the world are fighting to the best of their ability to turn a blind eye.
The problem here is either in your office or in your city/state/country, there is no test a person has to go through to become a leader. Though the corporate world wants you to believe that reading books and taking soft skills trainings can make anyone a leader, its absolute bullshit. About 4 years ago, there was a psychological evaluation done on each and every one of our team, which also included an anonymous 360 feedback/ I loved that training as it gave me insights into what people thought liked and disliked. This helped me become a better co-worker. I also later came to know that our management team had the same training before us and the results we pretty shocking to them and in a way very obvious to me. None of the our leadership team had any quality required for their role. I wish they did this analysis before they were given these jobs. I wish there is a psychological evaluation of every Managerial or Lead position. Because most of these people coast through their lives without having to deal with crisis, either because they are lucky or because someone below them saves their hide. But when a full blown epidemic like this hits the shores, there is no where to hide.
I have often used writing as a means to rant about my pet peeves, but the real joy in writing is to do it about something you like. Also, the social distancing and self isolation (due to Covid-19) has insulated me from a lot of frustrations. So, even though there are 8 other blogs in draft, I have decided to pour my heart out on a relatively recently discovered joy of mine.I say relatively because this recent thing first happened in 2014.
My taste of movies and music has been evolving with time (exponentially in the last 5 years) . Would you believe that I hated music as a kid? I would change the channel when ever there was a song on the television. Then, I was introduced to my uncle’s collection of old Hindi songs, the mix tapes that people used to get custom made instead of buying the entire cassette. This was the first music I ever liked. Fast forward to 2020, The analysis of my Apple music library for last 5 years looks like this….
17.5% of my plays come from 7 artists who make up just 0.56% of the total artists I listen to. What is more interesting is that 7 of the top 10 songs that I played the most featured as background scores in movies. Today I am going to try and explain how my taste in music has been shaped by movies. Heck, I took an Apple music subscription just because I was not finding enough sources to download or stream my specific tastes in music. So how did a music hating kid end up becoming obsessed with certain types of songs/genres? How did I evolve from Mukesh and Burman to Led Zeppelin and The Doors?
If you count the most listened music on the basis of total amount of time, the winner would be a song whose length is 10 mins and 29 seconds and was introduced to me by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill Volume 1.
In 2014, I watched the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. It kind of shattered the way I watched movies. Before I dive into what profound realization I had when I watched this movie, let me set the tone with a few examples. First watch the below trailer for the upcoming 3rd installment of the Kingsman franchise.
Now, watch it again – after I break it down for you. The trailer starts with a dialogue describing an upcoming war. Then, right when the the logo of the studio appears, a piano starts playing… Its the tune for the song ‘War pigs’ by Black Sabbath. Once Ralph Fiennes has introduced the logo of Kingsman on the shop front, the actual song kicks in. From then on, each and every cut in the video is synced with the instruments playing in the song. Every punch thrown, every fist thump, every explosion, everything. It doesn’t just stop there. Look at the lyrics of the song..
Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death’s construction
War pigs by Black Sabbath – 1970
The visuals in the trailer are exactly what the lyrics say. It feels like the song was written and composed explicitly for this trailer. Right?
Wrong!
The song was first released in 1970, some 50 years before Matthew Vaughn made this movie. You must be thinking that the film makers are getting too lazy to compose music. Again, Wrong! It is much easier to compose own music than find one existing song that suits all your needs among a gazillion songs available out there. If you look back at the trailers of the first and second installments of the movie, you see that the first one features Five to One by The Doors, a 1968 song that is neither in sync in terms of lyrics nor the tune, then the second one features remixed version of My Generation by The Who. Now the second movie trailer is cut in sync with the music but the lyrics only vaguely match the plot. So, what changed? Why was Mr. Vaughn so specific in choosing music this time? Was it just a coincidence that he found this song? Is there a new phenomenon that is catching up? Is it just me or has anyone else noticed this?
Now watch the trailer of another upcoming movie Wonder Woman 1984. Like Kingsman 3, this is also a prequel and the song that plays in the background is Blue Monday, by ‘New Order’. It establishes the time line (the song was released in 1983), it is in sync with the cuts and…. the trailer talks about a ‘New Era’ which basically is synonymous with New Order. This is becoming more and more common with Mission Impossible Fallout trailer featuring Friction by Imagine Dragons. The entire pace of editing is based on the rhythm of the song. Watch when the beat holds off for a moment to show Henry Cavill flexing his muscles before matching each punch and kick.
Now that you have seen enough examples of how non – diegetic sound enhances the viewing experience, you are ready to hear the amazing things in the movie Guardians of the galaxy. Well, only if you know what diegetic and non diegetic sounds are. To put it simply, each movie scene contains a lot of sounds. Any sounds the characters in the scene can hear are called diegetic sounds (e.g. foot steps, car honking, baby crying etc. ) and all the sounds that only audience can hear (background score) are called non-diegetic sounds.
Now that you got an idea, lets test your knowledge. Watch the below video and classify the kind of sound in the video….
Sorry, that was a trick question. The director makes you believe that the sound is non-diegetic only to reveal at the end that it is in fact diegetic.
Before we look at the more complex diegetic music, lets look at an example of the other form. Hans Zimmer has been the master of non-diegetic music for major part of his carer that spans for 44 years. Everyone is very familiar with the German’s work, but many don’t know him. Are you familiar with the theme music of ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’? What about the songs from ‘The Lion King’ that bring out the child in you , every time you watch it? But for me his best work was in Dunkirk, where he manages to keep the sense of impending doom for about 2 hours continuously closely followed by the final scene of Dark Knight. The music gives me goose bumps every time I watch it.
Though composing great music needs a lot of talent and creativity, finding existing music for reuse also needs imagination. It requires one to be an encyclopedia of music.
Now coming back to Guardians of the galaxy, the male lead carries an old walkman with a mix tape of songs called ‘Awesome mix’ (Hit songs of the 70’s). It is really awesome. The songs here are diegetic sound because the character in the movie always listens to it. I hadn’t paid it much attention when I saw the movie for the first time, but because I liked the songs so much, I went to tunefind.com, searched for each and every song and added them to my library. The words in one song made me think and made me watch the movie again, this time focusing only on the music in each scene. It was just amazing, each song made perfect sense to the visuals. The song that caused this Eureka moment was in fact an ultimate analogy to the male lead’s life.
My father married a pure Cherokee My mother’s people were ashamed of me The Indians said that I was white by law The white man always called me “Indian squaw”
Half-breed, that’s all I ever heard Half-breed, how I learned to hate the word Half-breed, she’s no good, they warned Both sides were against me since the day I was born
Half-breed by Blue swede – 1974
In 1988, following his mother’s death, a young Peter Quill is abducted from Earth by a group of alien thieves and smugglers. The movie starts twenty-six years later on an abandoned planet, where Quill steals a mysterious orb. He is a space pirate now, leading the life of a cast away.
The analogy between the story in the song and Peter Quill is not very obvious. One was an out cast because of being born to a mixed race couple, the other one is an out cast because of being born to once species and then being raised by another species. I would say, it’s a perfect analogy. How many hours of research went into finding the song? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to write a new song?
Side Note: Mad max fury road has an awesome score, but hanging a guitar player from the truck to make the sound diegetic felt a little underwhelming for such an innovative movie
Another example of excellent use of diegetic sound is in the Netflix series Stranger things. The story is set in the 80’s and the series is filled with awesome ways to incorporate music into a scene. Weather it is the scene where a handsome hunk arrives in his muscle car to the high school with music blazing on the car stereo or the song playing on the street when a girl runs away from home after a fight with her father (figure) or material girl playing in the mall when the girls go shopping……. The list is endless.
Such sound is sometimes used to do more than conveying an emotion or complementing a scene. In the opening scene of the Amazon prime series – Jack Ryan, 2 kids in Middle East are dancing to ‘Safety Dance’ when the American planes bomb the area and one of the sibling is killed. The surviving kid grows up to become a terrorist in the present time.
Now, the scene could have started with the text Lebanon, 1982. But the same was conveyed with a song released in that year. Of course you would need the information that the US was taking part in the Lebanon war during that year. It also helps portray an image that the Lebanese were more liberal folk during that time period and embraced the music and culture from the west unlike the general portrayal of them as a conservative bunch. It also gives a sense of justification for a kid to become a terrorist.
Quentin Tarantino is the master of both kinds of music. He is director and not a composer. He hasn’t written any music, he cannot play a single instrument. Yet in 8 of the 9 movies he made, he did not hire a music composer. He just reuses the existing songs. His knowledge of music is amazing, his head is like a library of old and new music and movies. Right from the use of music by a scarcely known (in the west) Japanese artist for one of the most important scenes in his film ( introduction of the villain), to a bad guy dancing to a song ‘Stuck in the middle with you’ before chopping off the ear of a person, when they are literally stuck in a warehouse hiding from cops, he understands the impact of music as a medium of expression. He actually starts writing his screenplay only after he has decided the music that would go with it.
Referring to the audio quality of songs like “The braying mule” in Django Unchained
I have saved best for the last. It is relatively easy to find music to suit a 3-4 minute trailer. May be that is why more and more film makers are doing it. One cannot make a feature length film which just features existing music with only industry or the finances to hire a large team to work for you, It needs passion. Tons of it. For a long time Quentin Tarantino had been my gold standard for music in films, but in 2017, Edgar wright blew the entire concept out of water with his movie ‘Baby Driver’. The 46 year old Englishman had just 5 films under his belt when he made this epic musical master piece. Though he had co-written screenplay for a couple of household movies like Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin and Marvel’s Ant-man, his best work till then has been the cult classic comedy Hot-Fuzz. The trailer and the movie do give you glimpses of Mr Wright’s understanding music ( In simpler words, you know that he knows his shit). But Baby Driver is a movie that changed the definition of background score for me.
It is the story of a young man who is dragged into the life of crime due to a mistake he did in his teens, who suffers from Tinntus, a condition that causes him to hear a continuous buzzing or ringing sound even when there is no external noise. To, drown it out we always listens to music (and we hear it). Such a nice premise to give the freedom to add diegetic music where ever the director wants. Below is the first scene in the movie that in sets the tone for whats to come later… This time focus on how music is used to create a unique visual experience.
I am not sure if you have observed, but every cut in the scene and every character movement is in sync with the music. The guy chewing gum, opening the car trunk, closing the trunk, people walking into the bank, car drifts and the scene length. Then comes the second scene in the movie….
This time the director does a one up. A simple task of getting coffee… shot with the words in the song written on walls with graffiti, the way music volume reduces when the character takes out on ear phone to order coffee, the way the guy scatters across the road when he sees a cop and the song says ‘Hitch, Hitchhike baby, across the floor’. Every time I watch this movie, I notice something new.
Watching movies so intently, has introduced me to tons of music from 70’s and 80’s. It has gradually changed the way I watch movies and also increased my appetite for old music. Listening to these songs makes me relive the wonderful cinematic moments. My driving time gets significantly reduced if my phone shuffle picks The Chase Begins or Brothers in Arms (If you know what I mean) .But Focusing on the lyrics made me distinguish art made with passion from art made for money. So people like Tarantino and Wright have spoilt me with their excellent tastes in music and turned me into a guy who is put off my the latest music trends.
Why is world full with hatred? At what point does someone start hating someone? We are all born with a clean slate. There is no prejudice passed on to us through genetic memory. Or is it?
There have been tons of movies that are themed around the second world war and Fascism. Particularly, Hitler has been an object of fascination for many film makers. Not just the film makers, Hitler has been a subject for a lot of artists, authors. Many people see him as an incarnation of the devil himself, some people idolize him.
For centuries Jews were persecuted in Europe by Christians. By 19th century, in Europe, religious discrimination has made way to racial discrimination just like else there in the world. The Colonialism, slavery and other forms of racial discrimination have been prevailant for quite some time. Hitler was not the first antisemitic, he was the first one to show his hate on such a scale. In a way he was more passionate about his ideas.
From days of Europeans enslaving most of the non-European world, to then Americanized Europeans enslaving Africans, to the present days of discrimination against various communities such as African Americans in the US, Shia discrimination in Pakistan and Rohingya discrimination in Myanmar. Hatred has been very consistently prevalent. Any one who is different is hated. Any differences in the language spoken, accent, appearance, culture are at least frowned upon or made fun of if not hated outright. But I believe that people who say that its not hate because they are not harming them or hurting them by making jokes of them are just lying to me or lying to themselves. It’s also a class of hatred, but not as passionate as Hitler’s. The problem starts with classifying others as being different and then it worsens when you start feeling your self being superior to others. Not just the person, the false pretenses that ones language or culture or food habits are superior to others.
Jojo Rabbit masterfully captures these origins of hatred. It is the story of a boy in preteens in Nazi occupied Austria during the days of the second world war , who has an imaginary friend (none other that the Führer himself). The boy is hell bent on joining the Hitler youth. A comedy of errors results in him hurting his leg and deforming his face and then having to stay at home while his mother went out for work. He then discovers a Jewish girl hiding in their home in her dead sister’s room and the subsequent events in his life.
This is an adaptation of a fictional novel by Christine Leunens’s book Caging Skies. The most profound scene in the movie for me was a boy who when tasked with killing a rabbit as part of an initiation to the Hitler youth camp plots to kill a person in learning that she is a jew. May be, It boils down to a basic instinct that is embedded in every living thing. Fear of the new? From Humans to Animals, the survival instincts are encoded in our DNA. The fight or flight action that every living thing takes when it feels threatened is essential. Animals are to an extent justified in fearing the unknown, given their relatively less developed cognitive abilities. The alienation of the runt of the litter or an albino is very common in the animal world. Yet, this treating everything different as a threat continues to be one of the biggest problems Humans have. Now is this how every human feels? or is there some outside help? Are some people taking advantage of this? How come a 9 year old boy end up valuing a rabbits life more than a human’s?
His dad is away fighting the war, his mom is very anti-Nazi. Where does he get this animosity towards Jews from? His peers and the society. The society as a whole wrongly stereotypes people. When a significant number of people start repeating lies, then it becomes the truth. This is what the Nazi’s did. This is what the British did to India. This is what a lot of left leaning so called literary icons like Wendy Doniger are still doing. We also do this is a small scale everyday. We may not realize it.
Since it is the Corona virus season, some examples in that context may be more effective.The people who are criticizing the food habits of the Chinese ignore the horros of Mao’s rule, the starvation it caused and the subsequent evolution of their food habits. The Indian’s who are discriminating against people from North east India because of being similar in appearance to Mongoloids. The people who are alienating all Muslims because of the role of few who were part of the Tabligi Jamat congregation in New Delhi which accounts to more than 50% of the active Covid-19 cases in India. Before being branded a ‘Libtard’, let me get to the other-side. I do not plan to spare anyone here. The Tabligi Jamat members who igonred the advice of doctors and their head who broadcasted a message that people should continue visiting mosques and praying as ‘their’ god is powerful than doctors. The pastors who are ignoring social distancing rules in the US to continue holding masts preaching that the blood of Jesus will save them. All of these ignore any information or advice from others, this is because they inherently believe themselves to be superior is every important aspect.
Let’s revisit the facts in the case of the unfortunate events that lead to the outbreak of Covid-19 in the southern states of India. Instead of just looking at what different groups of people did, lets also try to look at the series of historical events that lead to this. Firstly, even-though the entire world was panicking about a new fast spreading deadly virus that doesn’t have a cure, people inside the Tabligi headquarters were together because they have been conditioned to believe that God can cure the disease and they are immune from it because they believed in a certain god. They are not alone in this. The feeling of superiority due to their faith drives them to believe that they are immune to the corona-virus. This is what has lead to at least 2000 people to remain together in dormitories when the world was screaming them to social distance. Finally, once they were evacuated and the information came to light that there were several thousand others who has left to their hometowns days prior to the evacuation, there was a call from the government for the participants to come forward voluntarily. But only a minor percentage of them came forward, once identified and when authorities tried to move them to isolation centers, the health officials were greeted with stone pelting and other attacks. This is a result of the fear that has been planted in their minds decades ago and carefully watered & nurtured by certain political and social groups for their profits. Now when the rest of the country saw these events, they reacted according to their own prejudices by generalizing them as trouble makers and doomsday seekers. Some even quoted that this is another form of Jihaad. The hate here is mutual. The number of terrorist attacks that happened in India, to the general disgust at being forcefully ruled by the Delhi sultanate that resulted in the majority of the country enduring personal, financial and cultural damages. This has been deeply rooted in the psyche of many Indians. The recipe is primed for a toxic, explosive cocktail. It has been been brewing for ages, it just exploded now.
From the guy in your office who makes fun of the accent or culture of another colleague to the Indians who refer to North east Indians as Chinkis. From the proud Marathas who want to drive all migrants out of their state to the separation movement of Telangana. All of them are deeply rooted in a person or a group of persons trying to gain advantage from deeply rooted hatred in people. The only difference between these people and the Nazi’s is that Nazi’s hate was more direct and passionate.
Random thoughts of a confused primate 