The Benz Experience

Just been through the Mercedes Benz A-class-to-S-class experience, and I can only say I have seen nothing even remotely like it. Now that could be because I haven't seen much (which, incidentally is not completely untrue!) or simply because the thing really rocks. The link really deserves a separate line. So:

http://www.a-to-s.co.uk/home.php

What blows my mind is the amount of thought that has gone into the work on each letter. Every single presentation is a perfect marketing pitch. Precise content focused on what the customer needs, and how the feature concerned offers the best in its line. The animation in the fore (assuming animation is a part of the "text") / back (assuming it isn't: work it your way!)ground contextualizes and enhances the message. And the best thing of all ... no technical stuff! My only crib ... I ain't no Sheikh. Or I'd have bought myself a fleet or two.

Another thing I find interesting is the element of surprise. Each presentation behaves differently, and I was like ... what's gonna happen now. And when it did happen, it was like Wow!!

On a slightly different note, the entire experience makes a very telling statement on how the nature of communication has changed for us. Text, design, animation and sound intermingle to create an experience that is as edifying as it is entertaining. The back-end: technology. Multidisciplinarity really getting into the groove now, ladies and gentlemen, look sharp now! Mark C Taylor had this book called Imagologies published a few years ago. When I read that book, it was more like yeah, that way lies the future. But the past few years have so revolutionized communication, I have very serious doubts. We live in an age of rapid evolution, and euphoria and wonder need to give way to innovative improvisation. What are we going to do with what we got?

How about novels that tell the story with the background animated and sound effects bolstering the tale. That could do wonders for Wuthering Heights, don't you think? But how would you sell them? This opens another pandora's box of copyright issues, illegal copying, etc. If we are to offer our new Wuthering Heights as an online thing, web access, software requirements, etc. open up another plethora of issues. Writers will no longer need to go for reading sessions; writers will no longer write their novels. They will need to have an extremely well-qualified team reading the manuscript, figuring out what each nuance means, deciding which nuance they want to go with, and the writer needs to sit in with the gang and watch his book explode in size, scope, and format; while his message shrinks to a movie that can only be told one way ... or can it? One could go on ... but there.

'Wonder what they paid the team that built that Merc thing though!!!!

Excuse of a Post

I haven't posted anything here for very long now, and I had promised myself that I shall put in something at least once a week! This is simply not done. Ratting on promises made to others is what drives civilization; I am all for that. But ratting on one's promises own to oneself is something I frown on, like all civilized citizens of august mettle. Ergo, this excuse for a blog.

I hereby write in this blog that I haven't anything to write about, and have neither the wit, nor the patience to think up something new and churn out something even remotely palatable.

I wonder what people do when they want to write (or have to write), but can't for nuts think of anything worth writing about. What do you do then?

You lemme know!

Culinary Lament

The more I taste of curd and cheese,
And others of that ilk,
The more it grieves my heart to think
What man has made of milk.

languorous

sleepy silky smooth and slow
turning slowly with the flow
winded intertwined and yet
long unwinded softly spread
under shadesun interplaying
wakasleep in spring noondaying
loning lie somnullent glow
waving breezes touch and go.

crystal blue the sparkle sky
cotton clouds and you and I
bumblebees that land or drone
while the peepuls creak and moan
crickets somewhere close at hand
birds a pecking on the land
rustling grasses leaves that fly
in the breeze that gentles by.

My First Blog

'Thought I'd begin by saying why I call my blog Digressions. I believe that language offers the human mind the tools and the space to create, or rather, to re-create himself. In the mill of the world, we do what we get to do. However, one is elsewhere. The heart longs for that space of ideas and glow that is uniquely its own. And thus, in a world dominated by practical whys and wherefores, one needs at times to veer off the line carved in stone, as it were, to claim that MomentSpot in TimeSpace as ones own.

This is just a moment, and, unless a miracle happens, shall not balloon into a new world; and yet, it exists. A digression for all its mite, yet more the digresser than the usual work of a lifetime!

This, then, is the drive behind this blog: to virtually register as a digresser and to say, "What I do is what I do, but this is what I am!"

I think of Robert Frost speaking of getting away from the matter-of-factness of existence, using a birch tree as a combined vehicle for "both going and coming back."

"May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again."

In my land, there are no birches; virtual digressions of verbal diarrhoea need to suffice for the moment. Fortunately, it appears to work for me.

So this is the promise: There shall be digressions posted as regularly as they occur. Read them not as bits of gyaan spilled over by some over-aggressive bossy wiseguy, but as rambling bits of stuff that quintessentialize the need of the human mind to go swinging off to someplace he has no practical reason going... and yet must!

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches!

Why Does Man Need Literature?

Left to itself, our species is one that believes in survival at the cost of everything else. And this characteristic is not unique to us. Survival of the fittest is the rule of nature. Only the strongest, the fleetest, the smartest have survived. The rest have dwindled into oblivion, “by chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d.” The ecological circle demands it be so, and we comply.

The same drive for self-preservation, however, has led to the decimation of the jungle within which the entire exercise of violent defense was perpetrated, for lack of a better method of survival. Concrete jungles of soaring sky-scrapers have evolved, and in these impregnable dens, man sits and lives in redolent luxury. All the animals that ever posed a threat to the species have either been decimated or imprisoned in zoos and “wildlife parks”. But man still needs to reckon with other powerful animals around him: Others of his species.

Prizes have changed; the fight continues unabated. Better lives, prettier wives, more money, more property, higher designations…. man fights man more fiercely, more violently than ever before. The world has already witnessed two world wars… more are on the anvil. Stay with us… the worst is yet to come. Hell shall freeze over.

On the road, cars cut into cars; drivers curse loudly, buses refuse to give way and hog the entire road. Disease? No. Symptoms. There is violence in the air, and man is trapped in a gyre of increasing hatred, violence and sadistic pleasure. A simple accident leads to abnormally flared tempers and fist cuffs blossom into full-fledged blood baths. The heart itches for a fight; pines for it, and the soul craves the freedom it’s lost.And yet we survive. Man has not decimated his own species yet. Something holds him back; saves him from shooting like a comet into the sun of extinction that lures him constantly using the same drive that got him going. In thy beginning is thy end, Adam!

What preserves us? What mollifies our desire, our almost undeniable need – so strong it pains in the lungs – for self-annihilation that threatens to send us whirling into an abyss of contented death? It is a corpus of dicta, axioms that tell us what is on and what isn’t. “thou shalt not!” said the ‘Lord’. Palliatives of a wider variety than confronts a wide-eyed child at the candy store lie displayed around us, and we pick and choose. Syrupy messages in dulcet media to lull the senses, sweet savories and spice to make us want to persist in our folly of breathing… the world is charged with the wool that is pulled over our eyes. The biggest industry in the world? Enter-tainment! Sports, cinema, television, theatre, radio, computers with multimedia drivers, thousands of mp3s and online games, and the biggest abomination of them all: cell phones that offer all sorts of absurdities: cameras and games and variety of alerts and what not! We wrap ourselves in luxury to dull the grinding gnashing violence boiling over all around us.

Of all the palaver that traps us in our bodies, the root lies in what passes for literature. The day the first man thought “Now that my food is cooked, let me stretch my hand to the fire and garner some heat I don’t really need,” literature was born. Literature is the voice of leisure, the voice of the celebration of man’s victories over his opponents. Literature is the repository of what has happened. Literature is gyaan palatably packaged. “The right word in the right place,” quoth Robert Frost, one of its more celebrated perpetrators. To smite hardest when it is most necessary, methinks. Literature packages the wisdom of the ages, the insight of our forefathers and that of other’s forefathers, who still make us all want to live on despite hating each other by turning our minds towards abstractions and ideals and that killer concept: beauty!

Why write at all? Why create these masterpieces of deception? Milton, one of the most fluent liars of this class responds: To justify the ways of God to man. God needs justification? To Man? God wants him out of the way, so he can get on with the task of sending the planet another deluge. Long time no sea! God does not need justification. We do. Why have we not killed each other yet? Because my love needs to live, say the romantics. Because life is hell, howl the existentialists. Because that is all we’ve got, moan the realists. Because momma’s in purgatory, and until she’s able to find her way into the inferno that ought to be her inevitable telos, I cannot digest my soup. Bosh! I need to live because if I die, a better shall come to roost over the Earth. A better? On my Earth?! On your life, may be… not on mine! So fine… I shan’t kill you if you don’t kill me… come… we’ll both sit and read Shakespeare!

“The opium of the masses,” said Nietszche, referring to the pathetic concatenation of sauce and soup; shady: Hot like summer; cold like winter! What we need is not literature. We need Superman; we need Alladin’s gjinn; we need “a two fisted humdinger… a bona fide supraman!” Who needs that shady Swinburne crap anyways!!! Damn Swinburne; damn literature… and damn… errr… ummmm… Shall we read some Shakespeare? :D

Achilles and the Scooterist: A Tableau

Consider, gentle reader, the little weevil of a distracted scooterist you see at the forefront of the line of slaves, waiting for the light to turn green. Notice the spotlessly clean, creased and cuffed gear resplendent on his person. Take in, too, the well-groomed right hand revving restlessly at the accelerator, eagerly awaiting the signal like a horse at the races. He’ll slam through the traffic in a moment now, young, powerful, impetuous and throbbing, like his 150-cc minion. Two like-minded bodies, brothers-at-war against the rest of the pretenders on the road; rulers, both: warriors of the road, princes of their clans, unbeatable, indefatigable, completely, well and truly intrepid… or are we missing something? Where’s that not too well shod heel in this Achilles of a warrior that knows no fear, this intrepid Zeus of the gleaming tarmac, this slick, quick, fearless seeker of the bubble reputation even in the mouth of the redoubtable crossroads?

Glance at your watch, indulgent peruser, and you shall see that heel glaring and gleaming in all its but-of-course-ness. The sun’s begun peeping already from behind the tall building looming cheerfully in the background, full of glass windows and displays and offices crammed to the full with gentlefolk switching on their systems for the day. Isn’t it time Achilles got to his workstation too? We all think so, and so does Achilles. Shoot straight, shoot hard and shoot low, Paris, and suddenly, the Zeus of the road shows up from behind the glare of the godly for what he is: a mortal, alas, revving to meet the electronic doors before they slide shut with the boss man tapping his foot behind it.

Gently engirdling his impeccably ironed collar, pray find a gleaming chain, golden in the sun, golden, actually under every species of light, and not gold still. The chain disappears inside his pocket, where a laminated card proclaims his identity to the electronically-secured security locks that jam with surprising uniformity the fragile glass doors in software firms all over the solar system. But you already know this, of course! Mortal chafes at the chain, utilizing its eminently handy location to scratch at that precise point where the shirt collar, in connivance with the pinstripe tie, grazes the neck real bad and causes an itch that no Achilles could ignore.

What polished heels are these that reduce Achilles to mortality! What gleaming leashes that make willing – and yet chafing -- pets of men “who once strode with gods”! The “prince of pets” hoots, mindless of these ponderous questions, shifts gear, and tears down the taunting tarmac, with the entire pack hurtling right behind him in panting pursuit.

Let us leave the race to its fate for the moment. He shall make it anyway. Signals or none, that slab of glass shall not close without Achilles sipping coffee behind it while his system boots up. Courtesy the company, of course.