Lost in the illusion - It's a wonderful world

We are often told that our planet is rapidly loosing languages. As the world becomes flatter and more global  and smaller communities seek to integrate into the larger warp and weft of this planet, an unfortunate consequence is the loss of smaller languages in the world. Of the 7000 odd languages that exist today it is said that by AD 2100, 90 % of them would be lost. I think it is very sad.. It's not just the loss of the language per se but the loss in cultural and intellectual diversity that one feeds sadder about. It's the loss of a way of thinking, expressing thoughts, of a world view that defined a community. Visually it's akin to the 'loss of clothing styles' in the world. From the vibrant, colorful clothes, vibrant patterns that many of our ancestors wore, we move on to the greys and blacks and monotones that are the output of an industrial age where the speed of the mechanical looms killed the patterns and designs and standardized things. A few random w...

Do we really know the people that are around us? Apart from the (narrow) prism of the role in which we interact with them - Do we really know them? Perhaps it is not really practical to know, Do you really care about the life story of the Barista at the coffee shop that you buy your coffee from everyday? Or the person you 'meet' in the subway everyday? Sometimes I cannot but wonder at the miracles of the stories that each of us have and the coincidences, chances in time and space that get us to be or get us together ... First, about a Japanese man i sat next to at an office dinner. We struck a conversation, and i was telling him about how much i loved the movie "Jiro dreams of Sushi' and we started talking about Japan. I told him that I  always wanted to visit Tokyo and Kyoto. He told me about how beautiful Kyoto is and how the Allied forces spared Kyoto during the second world war. It turned out I knew the reason why the Allied forces had spared Kyoto that surprise...

Sunrise, On the Great Wall - June 2009  Drum Tower, Glowing in the dusk light, Xian, May 2010 

Objects not in their natural environment stand out. In the natural environment, things that stand out get eaten. That's why chameleons change colours and monarch butterflies have striations that help them blend against the tree trunks. Last couple of weeks i have encountered unusual objects in a corporate environment. The classic Moleskine notebook. I work in a regular corporate environment - not a design house, not a creative agency .. and I did a double take when a VP for a business whipped out a Moleskine and started quoting market factoids from it. I thought the cachet of the book was all about the creative types that use the book and the creative nuggets that the book allows you to capture to be used later. Not market and business factoids. It was almost like Hitler being decorated with the 'Star of David' by Israel to honor his contributions to the Jewish community. Still these things tend to happen, (Obama got a Nobel, right?) so i let it pass. Today i saw someone el...

"There is heaven in the sky and Hangzhou on earth" - Chinese Saying It is a magical city around the older part of the city - the ancient West lake. A renowned city in China for centuries, an ancient capital, Inhabitants famed for their refined tastes in culture and food. Marco Polo supposedly visited Hangzhou in the late 13th century and was very impressed with it. His book refers to the city as "beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world." Although he exaggerated that the city was over one hundred miles in diameter and had 12,000 stone bridges, he still presented elegant prose about the country: "The number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of goods that passed through their hands, was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof." (Src. wikipedia reference for Hangzhou) Apparently right after Marco Polo's visit and the good PR and WOM that followed - the population grew to 3.5 mio making it one of the biggest urban...

A consistent thread in my life is the pleasure of books. Buying them in bookstores from Chennai, Mannheim, Mumbai, Kathmandu, Mumbai, Bangkok, Shanghai and Amazon. Reading them in places from the bathroom to those interminable airline check-in queues. But – often, in a quiet moment, examining the conscience i.e. bookshelves, I note several books left unread. Or some carefully flirted with for a single dinner date for a few pages. A few probably bedded with for a few nights for a couple of chapters. A book that always was quiet in its sombriety, yet compelling was Steven Pinker's “How the mind works". Bought on a whim due to it's name and author, it lay ignored for a long time. Yet, it continued to wrestle with my attention until I finally decided to curl up with it a couple of weeks ago. It has been a glued obsession. I love it. I understand it. I feel it. A cloud has parted. So, this it. You can't come to a book. It must come to you. At a time fertile in its myriad ...

Colonialism and humanity perhaps cannot exist in the same sentence. As an Indian when i read colonial accounts of the how the Europeans brought civlisation to the uncivilized masses of India or when i read about how Indian economy, one of the richest in the world in the 16th century with positive balance of payments was plundered systematically by the British, my blood boils. Descendants of a civilisation that contemplated the true nature of reality in glorious hymns of the vedas atleast a couple of thousand years before the mighty Roman empire came to exist did not necessarily need the brand of civlisation that the whiteman brought. The colonisation of India was one of the earliest proactive attempts to set right a trade balance that was heavily tilted in favour of India. In the pre-colonial era balance of trade was very often positive in favour of the Asians especially the large empires of India and China. (The Europeans rammed at the walls of the middle kingdom for over 150 years t...