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?
Any typical school kid from India must have learnt about Ashoka – The Great. He once ruled the entire Indian subcontinent. What we were thought in school was that he was a great king, he got trees planted along the side of the road to make travel easy. It may not be the most important thing he did in his life but again I did not write my text books. The symbol of a 24 spoke wheel on Indian flag is his legacy being celebrated. But he wasn’t always great, in fact he started out a terrible ruler and only changed after the battle of Kalinga. He self reflected and had a realization after massacring thousands of people. He did not completely cut out violence after that but he became a far better person. If he were living in this day and age, #AskohaTheTerrible would have been trending after his first war. I am actually waiting for some descendant of the people he killed to start an online petition to remove the Chakra from the Indian flag.
In the movie Munnabhai MBBS, there is a scene where a pick pocket tries to pinch the wallet of an elderly person. Get gets caught in the act and immediately the people in the vicinity transform into a lync mob and start trashing the wanna be thief. The elderly man intervenes and asks the thief if he wishes to be left at the mercy of the angry mob. He goes on “These are the citizens of our country. See the anger in their eyes? One just had a fight with his wife, someone’s son isn’t heeding his words, another is jealous of their neighbor and someone got a scolding from their landlord in the morning. They never speak up there, because they lack the courage. They will show all their anger on you.” Even though the move came out in 2003, it was right on point about the general outrage not just in India but around the world. In a way that scene was written well ahead of its time.
“There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”
Victor Hugo, in Les Miserables, says that there are no worthless people, they are like that because of their upbringing. I do not agree completely to the statement. I understand the premise, but I feel that there is a point in every ones life when they are a weed. But most people in normal circumstances, get out of this phase and do make something better of themselves. At least they try. The ones that do not try, even if the conditions are favorable are really worthless. There is a difference between a person who sends you an email that he is a Nigerian Price who can send you his fortune if you pay the customs fee and Lehman brothers. There is a difference between a guy who ogles women in a bus stop and someone like Harvey Weinstein. The former are either victims of circumstance or still in that stupid phase. The latter are the worthless people. If Hugo was alive, he would definitely call them the result of bad farmers.
But, just like the people who tried to trash the pickpocket in the movie, the people now a days are finding it difficult, in fact even more difficult to distinguish between the two. The social media, especially twitter is full of people who, like a pack of wolves waiting to pounce on any and every mistake made. I have been hearing about the numerous lives destroyed for something someone did or said decades ago. Last year, a top executive in Boeing had to leave the company for an article he wrote 29 years earlier that argued women shouldn’t be in the defense forces. There is a separate pack on stand by to attack people on separate issues, ideologies. When the liberals do it, the conservatives call it Cancel culture, but when they do it they refer it to as protecting the moral standard of the society.
Be honest and name an Ideal person. A person who never did any mistake in their life? Aren’t you yourself embarrassed if not ashamed by things you did or said? I am. I have many instances of things that I did that I was not particularly proud of . I am sure many of the poor souls who got kicked out of their jobs because of the cancel culture are too. Most Indians would name Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation as an example of an Ideal person. But he too did not stand against racial injustice as soon as he saw it. He did not change until things got personal and he was kicked out of a 1st class carriage on a train in South Africa. Speaking of South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s first wife accused him of beating and being threatened with an axe.
The public shaming has now gone on to such ridiculous lengths that one mistake in judgement can end your life as you know it. It doesn’t matter if its a simple joke between friends, or even if the so called victim the twitterati imagined was not even offended by the action. It doesn’t matter if the matter is stupid and personal or even purely accidental. The world is a complex and messed up place. You cannot apply the same medicine to every disease, each and every one of the have to be looked objectively. If one feels outraged or angry at someone, take a moment pause and think about if what they did was just stupid or unintentional. Check if you are really looking at a weed or if its a plant that needs to be forgiven for one mistake. May be sometimes they were speakeing the truth and you just didn’t like it.
It is necessary to take out the weeds but it is also important not to take an axe to every tree with a crooked branch. If we do that, we may end up in a world with no trees. Our society as a whole is becoming too politically correct for its own well being. There is a saying in India that a person with Jaundice sees the entire world as green, which is equivalent to seeing the world with ‘Tinted’ glasses. They also say a picture is worth a 1000 words, not sure how much a video is worth (24 frames*number of seconds*1000?)
When you first start learning how to drive any decent instructor would have explained how to set your rear-view mirrors and explained the concept of the blind spot. The area that is invisible to you if you just look at your mirrors. The instructor I had was a little over the top in his ways, so when ever I changed lanes without checking the blind spots, he used to yell you just killed a kid driving a bicycle or you just killed a person on a bike. In a way, it did help to hammer home the point he was trying to make. Though hypothetical, he was just explaining the consequences of my actions in the real world. Just like in a car, the driving seat of the journey called life also has blind spots. How often do you check for them?
In your opinion, what’s wrong with the world? I’m not concerned about everything that is wrong in this world. What is one thing that in your opinion, the biggest problem in the world? Well! The answers would differ. Based on your nationality, financial status, Age, gender etc, the answers might vary. What if I told you there is a more prominent thing that influenced your answer?
As the old English saying (correctly) goes, Birds of a feather flock together. That’s the way of the nature. But in the era of globalization, different birds are having to flock together. The street you live in, the bus you take, the super market you use, the place your work… all of them have people from various cultures, races and backgrounds. I am not going to be a saint an say everyone is same. We are different… well that sounds a little negative.. let me try it this way. We are all unique in our own ways. Even the twins may only look same. In terms of ideas and ideologies they can be polar opposites.
When it comes to inconsequential things like favorite color/food/actor, there is never any harm. They may argue a little and may have trouble ordering food as a group in a restaurant. But when it comes to matters that are more serious and uncompromising in our petty minds, we tend to seek birds of same feather. This is because these so called uncompromising things are mostly beliefs and its never fun to be challenged to defend something that cannot be logically defended. Things such as political or religious affiliation, where there is no flawless/perfect choice, people get offended easily because they will not be able to make a clear logical argument for their choice.
So, naturally we tend to interact with people with similar political/religious affiliations be it physical or as it is becoming more and more common – virtual. Those Twitter/Facebook/Instagram feeds filled with memes, jokes and news that consciously and sub-consciously create echo chambers where you keep hearing the same thing again and again. You know what… if you hear something long enough, even if it is horrible you will start to find it tolerating. I owned a house near a highway for 4 years. All the long distance buses used to queue there and from 8 pm to 11 pm and the drivers used to honk like hell. First week was horrible, but after a couple of months, they did not bother me. I got used to it. Okay… you may say that I started ignoring those sounds. But another case in point, again me. I spent about an year driving 260 kms for work every day. That meant I spent 4 hours on road. For the fear of dozing off, I used to play music at full volume. Some of that music was horrible, the only criteria for the songs that I used was good bass and a fast beat. After an year of hearing to them, these horrible songs with stupid lyrics became some of my favorites. They still are my guilty pleasures of music.
This is what happens over time, you tend to develop selective blindness and selective deafness to things that normal people would cringe at. This is exactly what has happened since 2017 when an anonymous used started a theory and that ended up in the attack on the US capitol building 3 years layer. The Q Anon movement is a big thing in America. In reality, it might be a playful guy putting a wild theory on a message board and that in-turn being used by some politically motivated groups to further their self interests. Last week I was going through some applications of machine learning in word processing and I came across someone who actually did an analysis of the posts from this so called Q and came to a conclusion that they were 2 different people. A lot of people who had were aligned with the ideas or just wished the things said by Q were true. So they took a cue from what every he said and converted a small dumpster fire into a wild fire that has started to engulf an entire nation.
So, it is very important to discover if you are living in an echo chamber. Technology provides some options such as Ground news. But it is ultimately up-to you. How diverse is your network? How many people do you know are different from you? Try to be more open in your choice of people you hang out with, you have a better chance of not being sucked into an echo chamber.
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.
Today, I came across an article by Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic. She writes about how the new corona-virus has blown America’s false notions of superiority out of water. America has traditionally believed itself to be superior to every one else. They believe themselves not just to be better than the rest of the world but the best. So, when the information about Covid-19 epidemic broke out, the entire far-west (if China, Japan and South east Asia are far-east to the US, then they are far-west to us. Right?) was first very critical about the food habits of the Chinese, then far more critical about the way the communist regime failed in controlling the spread of the virus. The initial denial of a contagion, threatening doctors who tried to speak out and finally the lock down of an entire province. Each and every move by China was criticized by the western media. The New York times used the title ‘Made in China’ for an article on this new disease.
Now let us see how the US responded when the disease breached their borders. Was the government transparent about the situation? Did the government take the situation seriously? Did the government make sure that people have enough testing and treatment facilities? Did the US government allow private non-profit laboratories who volunteered for free testing? Why use the past tense? Lets ask, Is the US government doing enough today? The true and ironic answer for all the above questions would be an big NO. They stand 8th in the world with 5213 cases, with the case count rising rapidly everyday, they might be ‘the best’ here too. But how did a country like the US end up in such a situation? As Ms Applebaum reasons, just like the Japan in 1853, the US has been in a state of deep slumber of false pride for a long time now. Its failure to update its ways with a illogical argument of them being ‘American ways’ is now coming back to bite them. Do you know the number of countries in the world that officially use a non-metric system? 3 (Liberia, Myanmar and the US).
My mind has this incurable condition called the Butterfly effect condition. Don’t try to google it, I coined the name for it. The butterfly effect in lay-mans terms equates to saying a butterfly fluttering its wings can cause a cyclone. It may not make sense when put this way. In another way, if you have enough data, you can connect a large event to a in-obvious trigger. My brain is like that, anything I see or read can trigger a topic that is not very obvious. So, it you talk about butterflies, I may end up thinking about cyclones. This article in Atlantic was one such trigger. If you notice, most of my blogs start with a point and end up in a very different zone. Now back to the topic or in other words, back to all the stuff that came up to my mind when I read the article on the United states and Coronavirus.
The failure to adapt or update has caused many kingdoms and countries to fall/fail. A very good example of this is India. Just like Japan, India has always been a different place. The culture, the languages, the religion were all unique. So was the war fare. Indian kings used elephants in war for centuries, battles were also fought only from dawn to dusk. This meant that Moguls has repeatedly tried and failed to invade India for an extended period of time. So, when Moguls updated their war tactics and changed the rules, by using trumets & drums to scare the elephants and then attacked in the night, India fell into the hands of Moguls and remained there for 800 years. Then came the British with their muskets and cannons. Moguls lost because they literally took knives to a gun fight. So, not updating to the latest techniques in warfare has ultimately led to the demise of moguls and eventually the downfall of India as an economic power.
Economic history of the world
We have see the falling giant and the fallen giants, what about the tiny? What about people with humble beginnings in lower or middle class families? From wealth to personal preferences to habits, people need to keep updating themselves. The successful need it to sustain and others need it to be successful. Going back to America for a moment, when the country was formed using pounds for weight and Fahrenheit was OK. But when there were better alternatives, they chose not to adopt them. When you are born in a remote village and do not know any thing about the world, it was acceptable a decade ago. But when you have a smart phone with a 4G connection and still choosing to remain in your well, then you will quickly become stale and irrelevant. Updating doesn’t mean moving from Orkut to Facebook to Instagram to tiktok. It means upgrading your intellectual coefficient and expanding your knowledge.
An Italian building stating that it was constructed in A.D. MDCCCLXXXVIII (1888 A.D). Imagine modern Italy still using their old numerals.
Now a days, everyone is familiar with updates and upgrades. Either your phone or computer would prompt for an update at least once a month. This is because the threats keep on updating themselves, so these devices need to continuously improve to stay safe. Similarly, the challenges and demands of life are changing everyday. You have you adopt and adapt, else you perish.
Sharks can sense a single drop of blood in an Olympic sized pool. Hyenas by the virtue of the lion king and their unfortunate appearance are one of the most hated animals. Leeches are worms that survive by sucking the blood of animals. They are different species, they live in different habitats. But, Guess what’s common between them? Yes they are all carnivores. What else? Something less obvious. All three of them do not kill their prey. They feed on them when their prey is still alive.
Why God did made the snake before lawyers? To exercise.
A popular but illogical joke. I’ll tell you why.
When it comes to comparing professions with a animals, lawyers are compared to snakes. But snakes bite and kill their prey or at least paralyze them before eating them. But an attorney doesn’t do that. Attorneys are leeches, they have to keep their food alive in order to sustain. What more, just like a leech sucking on a buffalo, they have the ability to numb the prey, so that the client doesn’t realize the blood sucking part. Now a days some other professionals are also taking a cue from leeches. For example, doctors in India have been employing different scare mongering tactics to squeeze as much as possible from every patient. So is education industry.
There are some professional scammers out there who are always stalking the group of prey to identify the weakest link. From email to sms to phone calls, these people try to bait people and try to make money of them by offering free treasures to millions in inheritance. Hyenas follow the same rule, identify the weakling and gang up on it.
Recently, i have been seeing a lot of sharks around. Both physical and virtual. The physical ones, set shops in our office building as soon as the salary day comes. The virtual ones have discount sales and offers when ever there is some major/minor calendar event or some times just for the sake of it. These sharks are attracted to our office building by the smell of salary being deposited in our bank accounts.
But there is an another class of predator out there, that I am still struggling to correlate with any thing in the animal kingdom. I guess even Darwin would struggle to classify this species. Perhaps they are a mutation of capitalism. They call themselves Marketing executives. They hound, harass and invade the privacy of everyone. What’s more infuriating is that they do it with a smile on their face.
Just like some types of predators, these people set traps and then they stalk and track their prey. In this digital age this has become a very easy thing to do. It’s now even automated. There are plug and solutions available that can do this for anyone. This is not a new idea, its just an exaggerated implementation of an existing idea. In a street market, have you ever faced a situation where a hawker would leave you alone once you have inquired about his product? For him its expression of interest. Digitization of this concept is the reason why we are in a state where majority of the notifications, emails and SMS we get on our phones are advertisements or other promotions. John Oliver explains to the ridiculous lengths these people go in the name of notifications. The tracking is done through hidden scripts of websites. The website that hosts this blog as 2 such trackers. The company I work for, it’s website has 11 trackers. They do analytics, user data collection and prepare stats for businesses on potential customers and their potential preferences. In the earlier example of the street vendors, the digital equivalent would be that you look at something in a store and the sales guys gets behind you for eternity. I say eternity because unlike the street vendor who leaves when you buy the product or strongly refuse, the internet will never leave you. If you don’t like product A, they have gazillion other things to offer. Also, they share their customers generously with others. I can give you an analogy and its not going to be pretty. Imagine writing your phone number on the photo of a beautiful girl and sticking it in the notice board of your apartment. Almost every guy who sees it will call you. The paper boy, the guy who delivers milk, the security guard, the delivery guy, his friends, friends of his friends.
This is how what every telemarketer imagines when he sees your phone number
Now imagine writing your number on a billboard. This is what you did when you gave your phone number to anyone. Weather it be your email provider asking it for extra security, the guy at a billing counter offering redeemable points or the guy who hands you out free lottery draw for exchange of phone numbers or accept to terms and conditions on a app or a website or sign any document when you take a service. In the pretense of selling you something, they want to sell you to the world.
“I laugh at the irony of people screaming out against privacy invasion by governments on twitter and Facebook. The platforms that offered them a chance to look at some memes, videos and probably what their friends had for dinner in exchange for their private information”
– Me
Today I got a call from a person representing my bank. I have a car loan and they were offering me a “top-up” loan on it for the umpteenth time. This was at 12:25 PM. I was so pissed off that I told them that I don’t have a car or an account with them and this was a wrong number. I was just tired of saying no. The most amazing fact about these telemarketers is that the same person never calls you twice, they tell you that they will update their database that you are not interested and then another one will call an hour later. Then exactly at 12:27 PM, I got a phone call from the credit card department offering me an enhanced credit limit. Then I blew my fuse. It then took me 47 minutes to revoke subscriptions from all promotional calls.
Percentage of total calls that were either spam or for marketing in US
Above is an info graphic on the raise in marketing calls in the United States. So, why have we come to a situation where you cannot even live one day of your life without faceless people bothering you?
For example, India has a great many number of prospective customers for all types of businesses. But what they lack is purchasing power. Now, how does one increase the purchasing power? Ideal way is to improve the quality of life, increased wages, better social security, better insurance etc.. there by increasing disposable income and willingness to spend. But, it takes a long time and effort. More importantly willing and efficient governments. Another way is to let people accumulate wealth and then spend it. Lets say you want to buy a car. You can save money for a few years (depending on the car you would like to buy) and then buy it. But some times these few years may become few more years because things like inflation, or unexpected expenses or emergencies. Well, it is good to have some money for the rainy day. Right? But that would mean you buying a car is still an ‘IF’ for the business. So, the bank will give you the loan to buy the car now and then repay it over the same ‘few’ years. That makes you paying them an obligation, not an option. They don’t care for your emergencies, for all they care, if you are already short of money for buying a non-necessary thing, then you will be forced into another loan when you need money. That’s a double win for them.
This is why people in India get so many calls like personal loan inquiries, real estate offers. Types of sales, where you can be put on a leash for a long long time. A common man would be scared of defaulting any loans. Most defaulters are actually people who are inherently wealthy, for them cost of a law suit is much less than the cost of repaying the loan. It is vice-versa for a middle class person. These ‘marketing folk’ are like a mutation in the natural food chain, they create their own prey rather than hunting them. Also, the hunter you see is not he actual predator, like in the case of Ants where the entire colony works for a queen and even hunts and gathers food for the queen. The people who call you or email you get only a miserly bit of the flesh.
May be Jerry Sienfeld foresaw this in 1992. That is why he made the below joke in his show. With all the greedy people out there, the situation will only become worse. We are not in the age of personalized marketing as shown in the minority report. But we are getting there fast.
Its here, Its there, its every where. There is a new epidemic town and every one is going bat shit crazy. If George Carlin were alive, he would have said ‘I told you so’ and showed you his middle finger.
Words of wisdom
Humans as a species have been on a path of self destruction for over a century now. In the name of technological advances and progress we have been going down the scale of the most important aspect for survival. Immunity.
I am a prime example for this. My parents wrapped me in cotton wool since childhood, making me very fragile physically. They were always scared that something might happen to me and now after taking so many precautionary medicines, my immune system is so weak that even the common cold takes 2 weeks and tons of antibiotics to go away.
The only thing on every ones minds these days is the Corona virus. As of 4th March 2020, the corona virus has infected people in 79 countries. There are 16 people in Iceland who have it. 16 people. A country with a population density of 3.5 people per square kilometer have a disease that is spread through human contact.
I always admire the new ways Nature tries to put us in our place time and again. I also admire the foolishness of our race because we never seem to learn.
When ever we put people in difficult situations, their true nature comes out. All the racists out there have been spewing hatred on the Chinese. Insulting their culture and food habits. Its like pot calling kettle black. As usual the wise ass clowns on social media are spreading all kinds of shit on the social media. Forwarding unverified, false information adding to the mass hysteria. They forward a bunch of messages a day and think they saved the world. But one thing is true, Nature has this time come up with a new plan and its going to take a monumental effort to get out of jail this time.
Lets look at the numbers. Scientists say that if not properly dealt with, the virus will infect about 60% of the world population. The death rate after infection is about 3.5 percent. For the first time in history, lets assume that the governments and politicians do their job efficiently and the percentage remains same. 60% of the world population is about 4,661,186,400 and 3.5 percent of it is 163,141,524. That would be 2% of the total population. That’s peanuts when compared to the black death that killed 30% of the world population. It wont even cause a dent to humanity. Its just a scratch.
So, why are most people behaving like its the end of the fucking world? May be we have become too sensitive? May be we are reading too much into this disease? Or may be we are even underestimating it and it is a purge by planet earth to offload some of the burden it is having to bear because of humans. We will only know this once the dust has settled.
I mean, to be fair, the planet probably sees us as a mild threat; something to be dealt with, and I’m sure the planet will defend itself in the manner of a large organism. Like a beehive or an ant colony can muster a defense, I’m sure the planet will think of something. What would you do if you were the planet trying to defend against this pesky, troublesome species? Let’s see, what might… hmm… viruses! Viruses might be good. They seem vulnerable to viruses. And viruses are tricky; always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed. Perhaps this first virus could be one that-that compromises the immune system of these creatures. Perhaps a human immunodeficiency virus making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along and maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction.Well, that’s a poetic note. And it’s a start and I can dream can I?
George Carlin on Plant earth
But one thing is for sure. Again in the words of George Carlin, “The planet is fine, we are fucked“. May not be immediately but we definitely are eventually.
It is a fact that no two people are alike. I am not talking about appearances, DNA. finger prints, iris scans or all the other bullshit that the governments are using to tag us like some endangered species. I am talking about the nature, qualities, behavior and other things that are almost impossible to quantify or classify. There are words in every language to describe these things but the combinations and scale of intensity of these things is so unique to everyone that we would have to invent a new word for each one of us.
My brain is some of these at times, many of these at other times but never all of these.
As a person who seldom makes a good first impression, I want to ask you this. How long does it take for you to judge a person? But, more importantly, I would like to ask you. Why do you need to judge another person? What purpose does it serve? The only people in the world who should be concerned about what a person is is a psychiatrist. What is the urge to classify and categorize every person in your life?
We do that right from the moment a person in born into this world. We put them into one of the 12 buckets available based on the day they were born. They are called sun signs or moon signs, depending on the place you are born. I don’t believe in astrology. I am so self-centered that I assume that no-one knows more than me, so I start with a presumption that every one is wrong and accept anything only after fact checking. I am like Sheldon cooper with out a PhD. But I do have a confession to make. In my first week of my first job, I was bored and someone send me a link to a website that has all the content from Linda Goodman’s book – Sun signs. As any one would do I clicked on my sun sign and started reading.
No, I still remember the website and the content so well because I was very surprised it to be so accurate. Its been over 11 and a half years since I read it for the first time. But over the last decade I have been revisiting the site. As they say, age generally brings maturity. What I took in from this website changes over this period. The 21 year old was blown away by the content. The 25 year old started looking into the content for other sun signs. Finally the 30 year old understood why the 21 year old was blown away. The content for all the sun signs is highly positive. Even some of the negative traits shown in a positive way. This makes every one like their own stuff. Though I am still a little spooked about the accuracy content, I have also realized that I am not just what was in that web page. There is much more to me. May be it represents 10-15% of me.
If I were on a mission to make every one like me. I would have to print out those pages and distribute them like visiting cards. Underlining the less desirable traits in me and asking people to bear with me because they were manufacturing defects. On the other side, every one around me will have to make an algorithm out of the content to figure out the probable reaction I give to different situations. Its highly impractical and also illogical. Because I change every day, the content of the page has remained same since 1st December 1984. When I say I change every day, I don’t mean like a chameleon. I mean that I evolve everyday. Based on different circumstances, I keep changing my opinions and thus my responses to same events keep changing.
But we keep trying to stereo type people based on gender, region, religion, blah blah blah. Thereby we miss the point. Its none of your business. Deal with people in a case to case basis. In each case, start with a clean slate. It takes a lot of self control to do this. I do digress sometimes. But eventually try to go back to do the correct thing. React to situation based on the facts and only facts of the case.
Don’t try to be the Judge, Jury and Executioner for everyone around you. Judges are corrupt, Jury are gullible and Executioner don’t get to use their brains. In the current society, if a person with a criminal record is found at the scene of another crime, they assume he did it.
Next time you see a news article with something bad written about somebody, try reading it as – a person did a bad thing rather than a bad person did a thing.Don’t generalize. If you do, you will be a person doing the same bad thing again and again.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That’s how it goes Everybody knows
I first heard the song “Every body knows” in opening credits of the movie Justice League. It was a song filled with pessimism. It made sense, the plot starts where Batman vs Superman ended. Superman is dead. All hope for mankind is dead along with it.
(Side note: I have always found movies from DC comics to be light years ahead of Marvel in their quality. Marvel is a money making machine where as DC is a purists delight)
But the original song doesn’t have the same melancholy in it. It feels like Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson who wrote and composed it were being very pragmatic. Though the song was criticized for being bitterly pessimistic. But I disagree. It is one of the most realistic songs ever.
If you believe that everything in the world is fair, you are naive if I have to be gentle. Stupid if I have to be straightforward. But it may not be your fault. The people who are dealt with a good hand in life always make sure that the others don’t realize it. Just like the game of poker, if you want to win more money, you need others to feel safe at the very least and over confident & cocky at the very best.
There have been many ways to keep you distracted enough not to know your own plight. Mobile phones and social media have taken the baton now. Now a days, people treat their mobile phones like a drug addict treats his stash. They are obsessed and addicted to them. A single person or an organization cannot achieve this. It has to be a conscious nexus of various power centers.
Blackberry messenger, first introduced in 2005 was the pioneer in multi-media messaging and voice telephony over a data connection. They did it efficiently and securely. They respected privacy of their users. Then came the iPhone in 2007 followed by Android phones in 2010. Tons of applications started popping up. But 2G was slow and expensive which limited the use of these devices to serious users. In the next decade, the phones became cheaper along with the internet. 2G was replaced by 3G and 4G.
The cost of the infrastructure didn’t go down. The profit margins did not increase. The biggest change was the source of income. Till 2010, profit was made by selling mobile phones. Now the profit making starts after the purchase. Mind you most of the people use their phones because they are affordable on top of being addictive.
The society has somehow transformed into one where four of the five senses are mostly used for interaction with a mobile phone. Phones still don’t have an odour (yet). At least it is not mainstream yet. But the day is not far.
We are growing numb to the realities of the world. We are in a way becoming that is why we start seeing pragmatic people as pessimists. Deep down I believe “Every body knows” this, but they are just far too distracted to realize it.
This blog started out as the episode 2 of my new ‘Over analyzed movies’ series. But once I started structuring the thoughts, it became more of a ‘Song’ review rather than a ‘Movie’ review. A few minutes later, it started evolving into the following…. Now, the song in question is the title track from the movie Rangasthalam. It is a movie about the lives of some people in a village by the name ‘Rangasthalam’. But the word literally means ‘the Stage’. The one used for theater kind, Not the Stage 1, Stage 2 kind. Now the lyrics of the song when translated to English (Translation cannot do justice to any piece of poetry, it can only be truly enjoyed in its original form) go something like…..
In Rangasthalam, we are all puppets of an invisible puppeteer. Then it goes on to describe how people in Rangasthalam are gullible and innocent etc.
The first time I heard this song, before watching the movie. I liked the philosophical side of the song as I Interpreted it as a play of words referring to the world as a stage and god as a puppeteer. But, once I completed watching the movie, I realized that it had a far more literal meaning in the context of the movie. As, every aspect of the people of Rangasthalam is actually controlled by the anti-hero of the movie. He is a landlord who casts his shadow over entire village with a pseudo-god like status. Now, that was a clever use of words. Ones that have both metaphorical and actual meanings. In fact all great art does. Please mind that I am not referring to the tons of double-meaning-ed pieces of literature out there that replace obscene and vulgar words with the words that infer those things. I am talking about literature like ‘Animal farm’ which captures the idea of communism and social revolutions thought the story of animals in an actual animal farm. I am talking about the movies like I-Robot, Inception, The true man show. I am talking about smash hits songs like London calling, Like a virgin and Summer of 69. The art which needs a lot of context to understand the true meaning.
If this was to be a movie review, then I have to stop here. But it isn’t. The song in question has always triggered a lot of after thoughts, every time I listened to it. Its is a metaphor that refers to all of us. Aren’t we all puppets? Or do you strongly believe that you are acting on your own free will on all decisions you make?
Depending on the your financial and social/political might, you might just be a puppet or both a puppet and a puppeteer. There is a clear hierarchy in our society, the people who pull the strings also have their own masters. The logo of “The God Father” and the plot of the book is a perfect analogy of how a city is controlled by a single guy. May be the phrase “Pulling strings” also originates from the puppet show.
We are born into this world with the strings of Gender, Family, Religion & Region. To be more specific the cultural and habitual obligations that come with being born into a gender/family/religion/region. These obligations become a norm for us. The society adds more strings. Moral obligations, the expectations of your kin and society in general. The compulsion of education via schools with a predefined syllabus. The obligations of degrees, jobs, marriage, kids. Which major to pick in college, which domain to choose for a job, whom you marry, when you marry. Everything is either decided or influenced by someone else.
Lately, capitalism has added more strings. What you buy, where you buy, when you buy something is not exactly in your hands anymore. It is decided by tech giants running machine learning algorithms to dangle stuff that you don’t need and financial giants allow you to indulge with money you don’t have through credit cards, loans, EMIs and installments. Businesses try to put you on a leash by offering attractive memberships.
Elections campaign slogans and political manifestos are decided by data mining. The hastags that you add to the posts are not to search trends. Its is to judge the pulse of people from silly to serious things. Text processing engines burn millions of watts of electricity every day going through the non-sense called social media counting for and against count on each topic and then sell this information to companies that think that data doesn’t lie and machines can think better than us. then shove the outputs of these algorithms down our throats.
Do you still think that you make your own decisions? Or did you start counting the number of puppet masters you have?
Random thoughts of a confused primate 