Category: Thoughts uncut

Brunch and the Buck

Black Buck
No. Not this one.

It was Sunday and I was brunching with a few foreigner friends. And with us were an Indian couple who loved talking about their exotic trips to various parts of the world.

Everything was fine. Sushi is deceptive, I learnt. They packed my unsuspecting mouth with so much of rice and flavour that three rolls stuffed me. Though it could’ve been because I had also eaten some risotto, bread and brie, and noodles, washing it all down with a tall glass of Mocktail.

By the time the storytellers began their cruise somewhere in central Europe, I had almost dozed off. But it was a party, and I had to play my part. I smiled and nodded as if it was the most interesting thing I had ever heard. It was, too, to an extent. I even felt a tinge of jealousy that they could lounge in a jacuzzi for thirty minutes while on a ship that in itself was a large jacuzzi.

And then the man of the couple began narrating the incredible story of his iPhone meeting water. Since they were in the middle of the sea, mobile network was out of the picture. Great. But he had taken his phone over to a water tub — a jacuzzi if you prefer the fancy term — to take pictures. Pictures of what, he didn’t say, and I didn’t know him well enough to ask. Anyway, he had become engrossed in the water to remember the phone in his pocket.

To summarise, he had spent a fortune on the cruise and had gone into the jacuzzi with his phone still in his pants. Awesome. Thirty minutes he relaxed before kicking himself for losing his iPhone to the perilous chemicals of h2o.

Social convention seemed to dictate we laugh at this point. So we did.

He went on. His heart had broken and his phone’s soul had shattered, but he had given it a royal goodbye. At this point, I didn’t know whether I should laugh or put on a sad face. I decided to plaster a smile, showing I was politely interested. Not too much, not too little I thought to myself.

While I had been busy thinking, he had been talking. When I turned my attention to him again, he began telling us tough it was to replace the phone he had just finished mourning. It’s hard, I heard, to get an iPhone replaced. They ask a lot of questions. And a lot of money. Not too surprising, since we were talking Apple and a drenched iPhone that they never claimed was water-proof. “It cost me a bloody 20,000 bucks!”

Hold it right there, buddy.

I was wide awake now. “20,000 bucks”?

A lot of Indians used “Rupee” and “buck” to mean the same thing, but our North American friends — from the looks on the faces — didn’t. The storyteller seemed too invested in his story to notice, but for a moment, there was silence. And “buck” was the culprit.

Plenty of my close colleagues say “buck” when they mean “Rupee” and it always left me with a knot in my stomach. I’d ache to give them a stern look over my glasses and correct their distinct sense of senselessness. They are two different things; a buck in America is 65 rupees in India, which is the approximate cost of a cup of coffee in a semi-fancy restaurant.

Twenty thousand Indian rupees is about $300. And I could imagine our company’s horror when they heard a figure that meant $20,000 to them. Sure, they were all too nice to blurt it out to my Indian friend, but he did sound silly.

We might spend weekends watching Hollywood movies or pretend to read modern American literature, or even chat on Tinder with people from the other side of the world. But some things don’t change. The “Rupee” couldn’t ever become the “buck.” And I wish my iPhone-losing friend hadn’t interwoven our economies like that, given how unstable they are. (But that’s for another time.)

I’m No Goldfish

Yesterday, I read an article about goldfish. The author claimed that the human attention span has equalled a goldfish’s.

goldfish3

So now my attention span is just about 9 seconds. That’s one piece of trivia I can relate to. I forget to finish a lot of my tasks, and I don’t read past the headlines in most of the pieces I see online. And thanks to Buzzfeed’s listicle culture, most articles nowadays follow the same format. So I don’t need to read past the heading of each paragraph. As someone who writes for a living, I can sympathize with the writer’s hard work, but I still I don’t read that huge chunk of content myself.

It’s obvious. People take articles for granted now. No one expects a random online surfer to read through an entire piece about how the economic bubble is bubbling. And so, most writers, too, focus only on the headlines and a paragraph or two in between. (Just in case.)

And the article I read yesterday also said people don’t read longer posts because they’re mobile most of the time, looking for instant answers. And the author also says we jump from one tab to another.

Sure, I do that. If I can’t find what I’m looking for in a website, I close the tab and move on. Any writer beating about the bush would drive readers away. After all, there are plenty of sites out there littered with information.

Why do we do that, though? I wouldn’t go to another site if I get what I want from the site I’m looking at. That’s more of a case of what’s in the article than a case of my attention span.

So I disagree with the author. Our attention span isn’t that limited. Plenty of people read a thousand-word article and still stay on in the same page. I’ve done it and I can attest that even impatient readers will sit through an article if it’s gripping enough.

Attention span and content are two different things. If I’m boring, I’ve lost my reader. If my title doesn’t resonate with the reader, they won’t read more. If my writing is too convoluted, I’ve lost my reader. If I make the reader refer a dictionary for every second word, I should know they’re not coming back.

goldfish2

It’s got nothing to do with the goldfish and its attention span. I don’t often credit people enough, but humans are cleverer than fish. We have the capacity to assess before we process, and process before we prosecute. Goldfish can’t do that.

The Twentieth Century

Here in India, we love the West. And by West, I mean the Western culture — or what we think we know about it. As technology crossed the seas and landed the television in an otherwise untelevised society, we became adept at making Friends our weeknight companions. We went from staring at stars in the sky to staring at stars on the screen.

While we indulged in “Seinfeld” and “The 70s Show,” and laughed at Homer’s jokes, the British came over telling us to “Mind Your Language.”

And we thought that was funny. Every time a funny episode aired, we’d huddle around and gape at white women sporting little black dresses and short shiny skirts. And as time went by, it didn’t feel awkward anymore. The white men in the sitcoms didn’t think it weird, so perhaps it isn’t.

Our women tried fancy clothes and our men tried perfumed sprays. Oiled hair became gelled hair, and the once turmeric-clad skin now looked “up to ten years younger.”
Thirteen-year-old girls went to school instead of their mother-in-law’s house. They learned to do their homework rather than their home work.

India — or a part — of it, saw a whole new world blooming under the influence of the West. There was a time when we got goosebumps as the hero and heroine made eye contact, but now, not even public display of affection (or PDA!) makes us flinch.

And we have fewer 19-year-old mothers cradling 2-year-old children. The system of the woman in the kitchen and the man on the porch reading a newspaper made less sense to a breed of youngsters born in a new era.

We’re now in a world of promise and freedom of thought. From being a suppressed generation of youth, we’ve embraced the wisdom that came with booze and books. We learned, and we craved for more. We adopted new ways and gave way to newfangled emotions.

We fell in love with the modernity that the West showed us. And we shunned the peculiarity that home instilled in us.

From being a society that had its eyes cast down, we began looking up at others. We started talking to the others, dating, falling in love, and did everything else we hadn’t heard of before. Arranged marriages are no longer the norm. We’ve dabbled in life and experienced things we’ve seen only in sitcoms before, like nuclear families, sex before marriage, pregnancy before you’re ready, miscarriage, abortion, divorce, and — distortion of reality.

We thought we had become forward. We thought we had it all figured out. We thought we’d become trendy folks, that we’re revolutionary, that we’d gained the right to free speech and opinionated blog posts.

We love the West because we think it changed our thinking.

It didn’t. The West changed our thinking about thinking. We think we’re more open-minded and free . We live in fallacy. Because, every day, at least one person undergoes harassment and abuse because of our “modern thinking.”

It’s not the fancy skirt, and it’s not the drinking. It’s the thinking.

We’ve adopted many important practices from the West, but we missed the vital ones. Sex is fine but talking about it isn’t. We don’t have sex education in school but encourage aborting unwanted pregnancies. We say love is universal but *gulp* men holding hands? We talk about the wage gap in careers and ignore the chore gap at home. We think like the West, and we stop at thinking. Thinking is no good unless we do something.

It’s the twenty-first century. But for most of India, it’s still the twentieth. We’ve moved on from vintage to montage, but most people live under taboos and traditions. We’re nowhere close to the West of twenty years ago. We are not modern. We just live in a fake version of reality that we created to feel good about ourselves.

Even though we haven’t moved on since Friends, the world has. Sure, technology will bring us closer to the West, but we need more than ideal ideas and tall talks.

Otherwise, we’re just a powerful society clueless about the power they hold.

Why You Shouldn’t Study Shakespeare

will

Some of us, more than others, have taken those Shakespeare lessons in school a little too close to heart. So much so that we decided to delve deeper into the man’s mastery with words, words, and more words.

Shakespeare was the father — or one of the fathers (with the utmost respect to Homer and Johnson and Marlowe) — of English literature. And that’s one of the reasons people study Shakespeare; he’s done most of the heavy lifting already. When you study Shakespeare as a subject, you don’t have to create anything from scratch. There are no eureka moments. (As the ignorant people would say, but that’s for another time.)

As a student, you’d have to memorise the structure, the poetry and find the prose that’s hidden within. It’s not medical science, it’s not astronomy, and it sure as hell ain’t math.

At least in India, studying Shakespeare is transferring the textbook onto your answer sheet. Once you’re done, you’re ready to graduate with a degree in Shakespeare. That’s our education system — it’s all text and nothing more.

That’s why it’s so sexy — because it’s easy. Literature students thrive in repetition, and the concept of repeating book words appeals to housewives who’re busy with kids running around the house. It appeals to their husbands who advocate women education and empowerment. It appeals to the losers who can’t do math and science at school. Because, well, let’s face it, people think it’s easier to count metre and Iambs than it is to count metre per second. And who’d want to fumble with computer programmes when they could just scribble lines of rhyme “as defined in the textbook?”

Plus, in Shakespeare, you’re studying plays with words and words with plays; tone and tenor, method and manner. All that sounds far easier than calculus.

Here’s another reason people study Shakespeare: It sounds exciting in the preface of the textbook, but when you flip the cover and cradle the pages, you’ll stare at opinions. Not prose, not poetry, just random interpretations of Bard’s rhetoric.

Your question paper wants observations of moderators, not your own. You think you’re studying Shakespeare when, in fact, you’re studying summaries of the original piece that — this is called irony in literature — never made it the text.

That’s what they do to you when you want to study Shakespeare. They make you study the ones who’ve studied Shakespeare, and not Shakespeare himself. They divulge the amateur as the master; a blunder if there ever was one.

Alas, a formal study of Shakespeare includes none of his actual works and all of misleading citations and cheap caricatures. And to continue studying Shakespeare would endanger our minds, and force us into thinking like the wannabes desperate for a sliver of Shakespearean glory. We’d limit our thoughts and diminish our ability to differentiate witty wit from winding word choice.

And that’s why you should never study Shakespeare. He wasn’t meant to be studied. He was meant to be experienced.

His works are to laugh at, to cry over, and to pine about with bottles of wine. Shakespeare, the man, stomped on rules. He cut licences from rule books. He had a way of doing things, of seeing things. And you won’t get that by reading what others say he says.

You won’t see it when others tell you. You will see it when you see it for yourself. Shakespeare speaks to the reader, textbooks speak at the reader.

You’d study for the marks, but you experience for the thrill it gives you. Shakespeare visualises life and body and love and beauty — he talks human traits. That’s not something to study, that’s the essence of life you inhale, that’s what pierces you, transcending emotions that translate into words.

Studying Shakespeare sticks words to your head. Experiencing it tugs at your heart.

Converse Impromptu

Hello there! Fancy seeing you at my desk. I thought your workplace was on the other side of the floor?

Oh, you’re chatting with my team, that’s nice. Getting a break from all the sales calls you’re dealing with? Well, you deserve it. After all, how many deals do we have now, five Yes, that’s a big improvement from last year’s four. It’s awesome, and no you’re not wasting our time at all. We’re happy to put our work on hold, this is important stuff, whatever we’re talking about.

Hey, no, that’s ok. Don’t bother getting up from my chair, I’ll just stand around for a while. Besides, I’ve been sitting all day at a horrible meeting. The boss just grabbed my throat about that report we should’ve sent. But that can wait. What were you saying, again? Oh, yes the league.

Huh? Sorry, I’m not bored. I’m just exhausted you see. But don’t let that get in the way of your conversation. It must be important if you must have it at my desk.

Oh, yes, he shouldn’t have shouted at the umpire like that. And I did see how the coach reacted. I would have been offended. But — er — you’re invading my space and I’m not punching you, so what do I know, huh?

That’s great, I mean, it was so cool when he lurched over and caught the ball. I didn’t think he would get it either. No, I didn’t nod off to sleep! I was awake, watching the game. Oh, that final moment, when he kissed the ground? Wow, yes, I agree, pure love for his nation. You’re right, that’s what we need, more sportsmen like him. Such a team player. He’s always focussed on the game, never wavering. You know, I’ve never seen him at after parties or hangouts either. I’ve heard he doesn’t do that stuff. Of course, we work at a tech company, and we’re not the same as him. But I’m saying, what a man!

Sorry, what, a movie tomorrow? But don’t you have a meeting with that foreign client? Oh, you sure someone else can handle it? I thought it was your responsibility. Well, anyway, I wish I could come, but I have plans. Plus, work doesn’t happen on its own, you know. Anything else you want to talk about?

Ah, ha, good places for beer! That’s a never-ending conversation. Except, I have to leave early and you taking over my workplace isn’t that great. But sure, it’s Wednesday. It’s not like it’s the most important day, huh?

You know what? I’m just going to take my laptop to the system admin. It’s been weird all week. I’ll see you around?

Never.