Books, Movies and Music

I can’t take it anymore! The constant yammering of lectures, formulaic books, romantic comedies and all that is called mundane has driven me to the point of desperation. I reached a point in time when you feel you have to speak out or forever hold your breath. Why? You may ask. Well, the best the reason I can conjure up is ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ and my threshold to tolerate bullshit has gone down a lot.

People would attribute it to my apparent smugness, well, I pride myself for having an opinion of my own and so I don’t give a damn. Let me explain myself why I snapped.

I read ‘The Lost Symbol’ by Dan Brown.

My verdict- a waste of 7 hours of my life! It follows the same formula, Langdon wakes up the morning having no idea what shit is going down that evening, some superhuman crazy guy who is borderline gay, likes playing dress-up and is trying to get ‘atonement’, of course, the damsel in distress, a sceptical Langdon (on the premise which crazy rituals thought up by show-off scientists are explained), symbols and architecture explained by half truths, a near death experience for Langdon… yada yada yada… Sounds familiar? It’s the formula that revived the sheen ridden ‘thriller literature’. It’s as if though, the writer did not even try to conjure up something original. It’s a disgrace.

It’s the same for movies and music, all formulaic and even copied; we then nurture it by consuming them without criticism. The whole point of creativity is to be fresh and inspiring. If you are a serious follower of art, please don’t encourage such mediocrity and give fresh ideas and fresh minds a chance.

The Business of being Politically Correct

After the scare of the cold war, the fear-mongers of the world found something else- “Global Warming”. It was a perfect cause for the resurgent hippie community and also kept the intellectual community occupied. Pressure groups went all out on this, convinced us that we were really, really bad people and created terms such as carbon footprint to add more guilt to our already depressing lives.

Lets us bear in mind that pressure groups like Greenpeace and Environment Defence Fund are now part of a multi-billion dollar industry. The top officials draw handsome salaries and run these well-oiled organisations to amass huge fortunes as donations. They made it fashionable to donate; they got celebrity darlings to pose for them, they even made it heroic by an ad-campaign that exalted people who went to jail for these causes.

The biggest criticism I have against them was the anti-DDT campaign. The National Academy of Sciences once reported, "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria." During the 60’s an uproar shunning DDT, as it was ending up in our bodies led to litigations against it and eventually was banned  in the US, even though it was ruled that DDT was not a hazard to man. The cause was taken up by the pressure groups and it led to the complete ban of DDT.

Since the ban in 1972, over 50 million people have died from this once nearly vanquished disease and India is particularly notorious in Malaria-related deaths. Instead of the DDT that didn’t harm human beings we now use Prallethrin, which is like the Anton LaVey of being nice.

There are lots of other examples of them effing things up, so given their track record; Is Global Warming a hoax? If it’s true, are the measures done by them productive or counter-productive?

My qualms arise out of the unsubstantiated and skewed reports circulated by activists, they show drastic pictures of ice-caps melting while we know for a fact that some ice-caps are actually growing, surface temperatures have indeed gone up in some places but its not true for all over the world, in fact many cities in the US have grown colder after adjusting the increases due to concrete density (number of buildings) and so on.

Climate is something that we have not even begun to understand properly because of the very fact that there are far too many variables involved, even the best models of climatic prediction should be taken with a pinch of salt.

I cannot say it’s all been bad, companies have made conscious efforts to reduce their impact on the environment. Research for clean fuels and to increase efficiency of existing systems has been funded because of this. It’s just that when we make opinions we should see all sides of an issue rather than blatantly accepting public sentiment.

Fun Fact:  A recent report by the UN revealed that the total livestock produces more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world. So I am offsetting the greenhouse gases produced by my 3-litre car by eating as much as beef as possible. Wink!

                                                                                                        

Memes

I am truly fascinated by memes and the power of ideas. Ideas can be infectious, empires were built on it, coups were initiated by it, religions are propagated by it, and wars were fought for it. So, what is a meme? It’s a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. In basic terms, it is the ideas or practices we inherit from our upbringing and also from our environment.

To understand the power of memes, consider the Muslim movement of Jihad or if it’s too clichéd let’s take the Nazis, they created anti-Semitism in the minds of the millions of Germans, the holocaust that followed is considered to be the very low point of human civilization. Closer to home, the idea of regionalism seems to be catching on with the help of opportunistic politicians like the Shiv Sena. Memes are also quite notorious in the markets, it’s commonly known as market-sentiments, and millions are lost because the idea of poor performance or the reverse catches on faster than wild fire.

So, why understand memes? As educated individuals, understanding the power of memes and their implications would help us to use our intellect and rationality to use them for our own means and obviously, in positive ways.

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry"-Richard Dawkins

Differences

People are different. It’s these differences that make us so interesting or we would be just bland as British cuisine. These differences dictate our beliefs, our tastes, our partners, our opinions and even our fights. The fights have been quite prominent enough that the masons of society tried to use universals to segregate us or rather restrict our differences. This led to basic segregation based on gender, religion, race, colour and so on. These segregates then developed rules and practices. Crude segregation like this was done to rein in the chaos that arose out of these differences. Simply put, rules keep us alive or we would just kill each other at the drop of a hat.

This worked well for some time because these rules have evolved with society and now as we believe it, constitutes the civilized society. The evolution was not without its hiccups, some really bad practices and rules led to unnecessary stifling of individualism, like casteism and subjugation of women. However, as society evolves, it corrects its mistakes and such practices would eventually come to an end. That’s the beauty of evolution.

Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist, on his quest to find the perfect Diet Pepsi (he was consulting for them to find the perfect blend for their new product ‘Diet Pepsi’) stumbled on the fact, that there can never be the perfect PEPSI only Perfect PEPSIS. He realized that people have different preferences so the perfect Pepsi is a delusion. The best way is to get people into clusters of preferences and develop products to satisfy that particular clusters. Even though, Pepsi just went with only one diet Pepsi, his later clients took his advice and bought out different choices for their products. This unwittingly started the revolution of choices.

Today, the ruling dogma of all western industrial societies is that “if we are interested in maximising the welfare of citizens, then the way to do that would be to maximise individual freedom. The way to maximise freedom is to maximise choice.” This was explained by Barry Schwartz the writer of “The Paradox of Choice”. This contradicts our accepted segregation.

This was ground breaking; the advent of choices and cheap customised servicing with the help of technology has changed the way we live. We are spoilt with choices today. Individualism rules over collectivism. It’s our very own differences that are being harnessed by marketers to sell products. Product lines are being horizontally expanded to service everybody’s needs. Life can’t get any better.

The downside for all this is something called as ‘opportunity cost’. We are so spoilt with choices that we can’t make up our minds on anything and is always bothered by the missed opportunity. For example, when we order something at a restaurant, we always wonder what it would have been to have the other dish, it’s the same with men choosing partners, and why else do you think men cheat? ‘It’s all because of choices’. So inadvertently, we end up with regret or anticipated regret, its opportunity costs, an escalation of expectations and self-blame which all spiral into being miserable.

Everything seems to be a good idea the night before.

Halo ed Cars

I usually hate marketers, they always twist facts and if you are at the receiving end of it, you are sure to be screwed (e.g. how they made me join ABS) but I am very grateful to them because of creating a term called Halo cars. Halo cars are those models that are developed to create positive associations to a brand. Companies tell their pot-smoking engineers to go nuts and develop something so berserk and impractical that car nuts like me would drool over it and have wet dreams.

And look what it created, the Sergio Scaglietti-designed 250GTO! That’s one beauty(the red car) that just oozes passion. There are several others too, like the 250LM, 288GTO, F40, F50, the Mercedes 300SL gull-wing, Ford GT40, Aston Martin db5, Jaguar XJ220, Lamborghini Miura, Diablo. More money was made from selling merchandise of these cars than the cars themselves.

These cars were downright bonkers. The gull-wing Merc had the dubious status of frying your balls, literally, it was that hot inside. The Miura for instance, asks in its manual to actually open the door and sit sideways to look outside to reverse it. All of these cars always put up tantrums. If it was out in the rain it won’t start, if you haven’t driven it for a week, it won’t start, if it’s not the right fuel it won’t start, if someone else drove it with a heavy foot, he would have probably messed up the timing and that’s a visit to the mechanic. It would also kill you, if you did not treat it properly. But, I would have loved every moment of it.

The Japanese then came along with their halo cars, like the very iconic ‘Nismo-Nissan Skyline GT-R’. These things were crazy, they had tons of power and handling ability all this with Japanese reliability. That meant you can burn rubber at the track and on the way back pick up the kids from school. Sure, they weren’t anywhere as pretty as the Italians but the GT-Rs started filling kid’s and dorm room walls.

The Italians then embraced the ‘vulgar’ electronic aids and developed some pretty interesting cars. The latest of the crazies are the Ferrari FXXs (the black car; the glow in the front wheel arch is the semi molten disc brake due to immense braking friction) and the Merc 722s, both cars push the boundaries so much that it creates new ways for you to die. It has so much grip, that if you get over zealous at a turn, the g-forces could snap your neck like a twig.

Oh! God bless the marketers!

Breakpoint

What’s eating China and Pakistan? Why do they hate us Indians? Did we, by chance, make fun of their really small wieners or is it that they aren’t getting any. It’s a bloody mystery.

Last week, when we inked a deal to promote free trading to ASEAN countries, the bloody Chinese acted like a bunch of third graders. A Chinese ‘scholar’ from a state-run ‘university’ declared in his infinite wisdom that India was a “Hindu Religious State” and that Hinduism is a “decadent religion” and that apart from annexing Arunachal Pradesh and working with countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan to secure the separation of Assam and Bengal from the Indian Union, should encourage Tamil separation and divide the country into 20-30 nation states. That’s not all; they have been spreading such ‘insights’ to countries which we trade with thereby trying to erode our ties with them. The cheeky bastards

During the dreadful 26/11 acts on Mumbai, Jiabao picked up his cheap Chinese-made phone to called his frat buddy (in the small wieners club) Giliani, to extend his support. While the world sympathised with us, these bastards were thinking of breaking us up. No points in guessing who was against extending sanctions on Jammat-ud-Dawa, the Chinese again. They have also been constantly upping their naval presence in the Indian Ocean and also been very cooperative to enhance the Pakistani fleet.

You know what, fuck them; I challenge the yellow bellied assholes to do as they please. We won’t take this lying down. I know one thing for sure; they are shit scared of us, otherwise they wouldn’t go for such underhanded tactics. I know, we Indians have our differences and can’t stand each other, but when it comes down to the shits we are a bloody force to reckon with.

Identity Crisis

My previous post sucked. Yes, sucked per se. After some painful reviews, I realised what I have done. I went out of character.

On the trepidation of losing my readers, I decided to understand my blog. I reread all my posts and my first thoughts were that it was a manifestation of an angry young man lashing out at the savageness of this world.

No, it was too clichéd! This ain’t the freaking 80’s! Nobody likes a freaking one-man-against-the-world plot. These are the years of the sweet-talking metro-sexual and I know for the fact that I’m not one. I still think mousse is something you eat and not for your hair. I still believe in treating women with respect and not slapping them around (strangely they seem to like it).

Maybe that’s it. The blog has an old-worldliness character to it strewn with a newfangled attitude toward issues. Its like ‘The Hindu’ and ‘DNA’ (the newspaper) coming together with soft porn and economics on the same page. Maybe that’s what my readers like.

I hope this self-diagnosis hit the sweet spot and I promise that I’ll never lose sight of the character again.