They say there’s a pot of gold at the end of each rainbow. But sometimes, when you’re staring at a pot of gold, you should leave it aside to go look for the rainbow instead. Sometimes, the rainbow is worth a great deal more.
I replaced my camera batteries this morning, looked through the view-finder and found the auto-focus all blurry. It took me several moments of panic to realize I wasn’t wearing glasses or contacts… (202 characters, damn you, Twitter!)
Happiness comes in small doses, like the whiff of perfume that wafts on the breeze for a second, hovers under the tip of your nose, and then dances away merrily in a tantalizing swirl.
Sometimes it appears in the form of books, not the ones that you read, but the ones that you could, as you stand in the library, walk around tall shelves, pick up a book or two and watch its pages flutter through your fingers. A mixture of information, thoughts and ideas that is so potent as to make one dizzy with sheer delight. Crisp pages filled with hours, days and months of somebody’s work, crystalized into little bits of paper.
I walked into the library last weekend, after many many months. It was good to be back.
[Click on the image above to view the full album.]
I remember reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig a while ago and reflecting on the nature of Quality as described by the author. Although the ideas described by Pirsig in his meditative narrative weren’t exactly novel, he did paint a layer of clarity over the things we see in day-to-day life, like a lens that magnifies some parts of a specimen and brings to the fore an aspect that simply wasn’t noticed before, even as it stared us in the face.
But today, I was travelling around the streets of Mumbai, and it got me thinking about what sets nations apart from each other, especially the tenuous distinction between the developing and the developed nations. The distinction most certainly isn’t technological — from consumer products to manufacturing techniques, India has everything it needs to be on par with any other nation. In the cases where it doesn’t, there is a penalty of economic cost — we simply have to pay a little extra to get the same benefits. Alternatively, the distinction could be economic, but that explanation doesn’t fit either. While there are plenty of people in India below the poverty-line, there are plenty of rich people as well. But being rich doesn’t make life any easier in India, unless you are so rich that you can literally pay someone to live your life for you.
To take a simple example, imagine that you need to get a new passport, and it takes several hours and several visits to the passport office to overcome bureaucratic hurdles and get the job done. There are no missing pieces that prevent this system from functioning equally well in developing as well as developed nations. Except that you would expect this system to work better in a developed nation, generally speaking.
Or to consider another example, if it takes forty-five minutes to commute one mile in suburban Mumbai simply because the traffic is terrible (because traffic rules are not spelt out properly and seldom followed), whom do you blame? If that commute is important to you, it doesn’t matter how rich you are, such comforts cannot be easily bought. Again, the traffic is not terrible because of poverty, or lack of education, or limited access to technology.
What is missing is something that can be very accurately, if vaguely, described by the term Quality. Look around and you will see people not willing to make an effort to put in their best work, doing a shoddy job simply because everyone else does. They are surrounded by others who accept this situation and get on with their lives as if it didn’t matter. The acceptance breeds indifference, completing the circle.
In many ways, this idea is scarier than the naïve assumption that generating more industrial and agricultural output will magically transform the country into the ideal we cherish in our dreams. It is the people themselves who need to change in some hitherto undefined fashion; simply demanding more resources, more technology or more money does not help in this regard.
Somewhere along the way, we started writing down numbers in spreadsheets and ledgers, and lost track of what is really important to us.
Picking a movie to watch on an airplane is tricky business. Inexperienced travelers make the mistake of choosing the movie they’ve been waiting to watch for the past month, or the one they think they’ll like the most. Bad idea. The audio is pretty bad on any airplane, and add the engine noise to that, and you’re left trying to lip-read the actors. Or you’ll crank up the volume to a point where you go deaf, and then life isn’t as much fun anymore.
Worse still, the little video screen in front of your seat may get turned off a little early, just before you’re told the name of the villain in a whodunit. And if that’s the movie you’ve been itching to watch for a while, it’s been effectively ruined for you.
That’s why I decided to watch “A Time Traveler’s Wife” on my trip from Seattle to Mumbai. It’s a perfect pick: I never really intended to watch the whole thing, so I couldn’t care less if it got cut off in the middle. The dialog didn’t matter too much, since Rachel McAdams is easy on the eyes and this is such a typical romance (man loves woman, woman loves man, man keep disappearing and popping up in other times, yada, yada…). And of course, I dozed off several times as the movie played on, but that didn’t matter all that much either.
Anyway, with this a priori stance about the movie, you shouldn’t really be expecting an unbiased review, but the truth is, I’m not here to comment on the movie at all. In fact, the only comment I have is on the name of the movie: I strongly believe the movie should have been named The Guy Who Disappears and Steals Clothes because, well, that’s what the lead character does all the time. Yes, he travels through time, sure, but that’s quite irrelevant, especially on mute.
Speaking of traveling through space-time, have you ever noticed how time-travelers appear elsewhere almost instantaneously? In real life, I would expect molecules of air and dust to get shoved aside violently when this happens, causing a tiny explosion. Oh well, I guess you can’t be all that realistic in a movie.…
On the bright side, this time traveler was less annoying than Hiro the Hero.
I waited, waited through the days,
Saw the silver moonlight light up the ghostly clouds,
Through a small glass window -
Watched the gleam of pale orange sunlight
As it reflected off the sharp metal of airplanes -
Slept and woke, woke and slept,
Waited…waited…
…and then I was home.
I think, therefore I am.
I think I thought, therefore I think I was.
I think I thought I thought, therefore I think I thought I was.
Now I’m losing track of my thoughts — where was I?
