Posts

Living the Post-Modernity

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  Living the Post-Modernity: In a recent conversation, the name of Baudrillard came up, followed by a discussion of how in the 1980s and 1990s there was an interest in genuine scholarship, research, debate as compared to the frenzy of the discourse-driven post modern montage of images and sensations that pass by – never sticking – because they are not supposed to stick. If it stuck, and if there was a fixity and authenticity of meaning, then we would still be in the modernity and not graduated to post-modernity. Not too long ago, “post modernity”  was the theoretical future – and people like me who were studying the oncoming phenomenon hypothesized that we would someday live in a World where all things stable will be destabilized, all meanings will become meaningless, reality will be completely constructed, and unscrupulous “thought leaders” will try to create passing fads that the numbed and stunned population will believe to be true; in most parts, this was a fictional futur...
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How to Loose Friends and Disregard People

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How to Lose Friends and Disregard People is an obvious take off from the famous book by one of the most read authors in the World who opined about how to make friends and influence people. Yesterday, walking down Park Street, I saw the book still being sold among the wares of the iconic street bookshops, and I started to wonder if there was a need to, nowadays, write something about how to ensure that people can be disregarded and got rid of. There was much demand for Dale’s book because making friends requires work and dedication while influencing people is much more than what sensation-creating "influencers" do on various digital platforms. Dale Carnegie was motivated to author the book because he saw the hunger and the need in people to find empathy and curiosity to learn about others. That was then, but now, I see the carcasses of slaughtered friendships and people yearning to get “out” because friendships are merely opportunities, and when a new person offers the opportu...
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Home Alone

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Home Alone: There is something charming about the dual life that some of us live, and simultaneously there is something acutely melancholic. The confusion about the place is continuously evocative. A lovely evening with the dog, walking down a street that many would consider a "holiday getaway" with the constant reminder that the other place is alive with the sounds of the evening, the cars driving by, or the imminent arrival of the groom at the marriage hall across the street. The comfort of refusing the tea at 5:30 in the evening at the local market and driving off with people who will never judge you to another market to get the better tea and the samosa fried in front of you while the taste of the succulent Easter ham hangs at the back of your tongue. That is the dual life. Where each moment reminds us of the other, and the joy of the moment is interrupted by the melancholy of what could have been - opportunity cost. The banter over tea about the neighborhood girl who non...
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The Languages

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The two lives I suggested in my last post take on meaning in many different ways as life switches between one and the other. One of the key points of this switch is language, in the way Bernard Shaw once famously said, "England and America are two countries separated by the same language." Many who experience the two lives could relate well to the way the lives are governed by the language that surrounds each life. And that is not just about different languages, but it is the language that I thought I knew, but suddenly I realize, either the language I knew exists no more, or I have completely lost touch with the language, while I was flirting with the two lives. This especially happens when one is caught in two lives and each demand adjusting to two different lives. And at those moments the experience begs the question of authenticity and also perhaps power. Which life is authentic and which takes on privilege? And that moment sometimes happens over mostly banal linguistic m...
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Two lives

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In about 24 hours I witnessed a temperature drop of about 25 Celsius degrees, I saw a radical improvement in air quality and noise pollution disappeared. The cars on the road changed, and they all drove on the "wrong" side of the road. A key driving strategy changed - honking at cars at red lights when they take more than a nano second to move when the red light starts blinking - and life, as I knew it, radically changed. For 50 days. And after that it will flip again. Living one life while finding peace in another is a tough act. Life moves from one boarding pass to another, and the key anxiety is whether the complimentary upgrade to a "lie-flat-seat" will happen or not. Drifting from one business-class lounge to the next, checking out the best single malt available, and scoping out the smoking areas in airports all over the World becomes a way of life. And all this because there are work demands, but more importantly because of a strong belief that "statis is...
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Loyalty - give and receive

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Next week there will be a test of loyalty here. A strange thing - this idea of loyalty; where a person says that "I will never abandon you." No matter what happens, loyalty demands that commitment. It is a promise that says that you can count on me. It is similar to the theme I have developed in other posts, the essential answer to "Where Art Thou?" and being always able to say "Here I Am." Never failing and never wavering in the act of supporting what you claim to be loyal to. Judgment, and even reason, may be suspended in that support. It is the moment where self-interest disappears in the face of being with the person, institution, or the idea. In my life this principle has been particularly important. Few people can claim to be the quintessential "company man” and worked for the same employer for nearly thirty years or lived in the same town for nearly forty years (albeit with a temporary departure for professional development). It makes me wonder...
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Who you gonna call?

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Many years ago, there was a movie made about people being haunted by ghosts, and with no one else left to help them, they called a company called the Ghostbusters (the name of the movie as well) to get rid of the evil that surrounded them. While the film was comedic, it made the phrase, "who you gonna call?" a common parlance. In its humor the movie pointed to a malaise that seems to have become a new pandemic. Since there was no one dependable or trustworthy to deal with an infestation of ghosts, the ghostbusters needed to be brought in. Today, it seems, in the absence of having no one reliable or trustworthy to call to deal with the evil that surrounds us, we have no one to call either. It seems there are no ghostbusters for real life. The progressive erosion of trust is like a new pandemic. And it has permeated every aspect of life. The list is enormous: the woman who has been wronged by the one she loved has no one left to call; a child ignored by the parents is hapless i...
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