Small Pleasures

There’s a tendency to want every media experience to be extra-ordinary. Every album should be Sgt. Pepper’s, every film should be a Sholay and every TV series should be a Battlestar Galactica.

However, in the timeline between Chris Nolan, Radiohead and Joss Whedon, there lurk lovely little gems. They aren’t masterpieces or classics, but they have their own special place. They light up your life in small ways at unexpected corners. They never change your life, but they definitely make it less burdensome to live on a day-to-day basis.

I remember making this remark about Kaminey on Twitter (on why it was unfair to burden the maker of Omkara and Maqbool with so many expectations) . “It’s a small film with smaller pleasures.” And I’d definitely apply that to these films/TV series.

As I’ve shifted my TV viewing away from ‘live’ TV to more and more shows on DVD and streaming via Netflix, I’m encountering a lot of these. It’s been a lot of fun and a million times better than watching another rerun on TV.

Inside my comfort zone

In It Might Get Loud, Jack White makes a remark that stuck. To paraphrase, he states that great art comes from emotional conflict. He talks about how he has to stop himself from getting comfortable and take himself to a hard place emotionally, because that’s the only place from where his creativity flows.

As I look at the frequency of posts on this blog go down, I wonder about that more and more. This blog isn’t high art, and I’m not Jack White. However, writing here requires a level of ardor that I don’t feel that often anymore. I’ve been in a number of situations this year that would have me mad, or angry or happy and pages of (bad) musings would’ve come out of it. But not anymore. So this blog sits, forlorn.

This emotional settling down isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I was too excitable for my own good in the past. But I worry about crossing over and becoming blasé. The world is a beautiful place and there’s lots to love and be excited about here. It’s just that a lot of things don’t seem  as blog-worthy anymore. In addition, tidbits, random insights and link-love have passed over to Twitter. 

As the zeros draw to a close, I don’t fret about the future of this blog. It has its place and its pleasures. It’s just that I (or you, dear reader) will partake of it less frequently than before.

Punching at the Sun

I particularly enjoyed reading Jim Collins’ two management classics Good to Great and Built to Last. One of my favorite parts in Good to Great is the window vs. mirror paradigm used by successful CEOs to describe success and failure.

Put simply, when successful, CEOs of great companies tended to use the ‘window’ paradigm – they say things like “I got lucky, the economy turned around at the right time” or “I have a great management team” – statements that deflected credit for the success away from them as individuals to external factors beyond their control i.e. outside their ‘window’.

In contrast, they used the ‘mirror’ unsparingly in times of failure. Every failure of the company finally rested at their feet. It was their fault that they didn’t judge the economy slowdown, or that they let costs get out of hand. They held the mirror, where every problem was because of a failure on their part.

By these standards, there isn’t much hope for Wall Street. This President on the other hand, generally comes through as being quite the ‘Great’ CEO.

However, where I find this analogy most interesting overall was in terms of how you look back at life. I was having a conversation with SK about an incident a couple of years back, and it was interesting how I saw it differently from him. As a third-party bystander, he didn’t see it as being my fault.

However, in my head I could see a million different places where I could’ve done things differently, and exhibited better judgment. May I have those decision points back and do the right thing this time around please? But then, real life offers you no do-overs.

Every day, you face small and big hassles and crises. I could be the ‘window’, blaming the world for my problems and existential angst that crops up occasionally. But the ‘mirror’ seems like a better thing to hang on the walls of your life-abode.

I’m normally not given to this much navel-gazing, but this seems to be all that’s flowing from my keyboard, so that’s the way it goes.

Right-ward pacing

I play softball at work with my co-workers. Our in-field is really really good. We have great people at first base, third base and shortstop positions.

I haven’t really learnt softball/baseball as properly as some of these guys did, so I observe their technique with great interest. Our shortstop (let’s call him T) throws the ball in a very specific manner. He picks up the ball or catches it off the bounce, gets into position and then pauses for maybe half a second. Then he lets the ball go to first/third base depending on what’s necessary.

That stop is key. He could, like a lot of people I’ve seen, release the ball as soon as it hits his hands. But he stops, makes sure his body and arm are in perfect position and then positively rockets the ball to the right player (I did say our in-field is good). The half-second margin he gives himself adds a lot of things: it ensures his body and arm are in position, he has a clear assessment of where he has to throw the ball to be most effective, guarantees the accuracy of his throw and prevents injuries. In all likelihood, he more than regains the time lost during the pause through the speed of his eventual throw, since he’s never in a suboptimal position while throwing.

As we navigate our way through this wired, ever-connected, faster! faster! world, this is a parallel I think about a lot. I see people all around me with the dial set to 11, furiously multitasking. Updating Facebook status at concert? Check. Tweeting while watching a movie? Check. Email while hanging out with friends (in lieu of real conversation)? Check. Doing more! All the time! With less time!? Check.

While in and of themselves, I have no problem with any of these, the question I ask is: as we navigate through our lives, faster and faster, doing more and more things, are we still in sight of what matters? I can only speak for myself, but the more overscheduled I get, the more important it becomes for me to unplug and just be. I find something vital about disconnecting and letting my brain float. Long stretches of time, at home or outside where I have no clear agenda are worthwhile. I may read for a while, watch Once for the nth time or just make a cup of chai and stare out my balcony.

I saw an interesting talk at my workplace by Carl Honore, the author of In Praise of Slowness where he talks about doing things not too fast or too slow, but at the right pace. In part, it was a relief to see I wasn’t the only person who felt this way.

What does this mean for me apropos life on a day-to-day basis? Unplugging a bit more, saying ‘no’ occasionally to random stuff that doesn’t really make me happy anyway and less multi-tasking, so I’m engaged with what I am doing. Somehow right now this seems to mean shorter yet more productive workdays, a clearer and less stressed-out brain and a happier me. What’s to not like?

Edit: Fixed typo.

Stories on a trip

Tell me a story
Sing me a song
Of life’s wars lost
And sundry battles won

Tolstoy once wrote “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Traveling groups fall in similar categories. They are similar, yet different in their own ways.

Duomo di Milano, Milan

A precocious pre-teen is skipping up the steps, adult-chic glasses in hand. The father follows the mother. Disaffected teen brings up the rear, clicking away on a phone. She looks like she doesn’t want to be here. I wonder: What happens to children in their teens?

As we climb up to the roof, I see a young girl, presumably with her mother. Late teen, at most early twenties. I think it’s a mother-daughter bonding trip. AG thinks maybe the girl is here studying abroad, and her mother is here to visit her. I like this story better. They seem to be enjoying themselves. The bond they share is visible. I see them repeating this: trips together, new experiences, shared mother-daughter moments.

Passenger Train – Milan to Tirano

A father and young pre-teen boy. The father looks like a young Walter Matthau. His beard already has a salt-and-pepper streak. Again, the father-son bond is apparent. The son holds on to his father’s hands occasionally. They share laughs, secret confidences I half-wish I could eavesdrop on.

It’s a passenger train so I’m guessing this is a day trip. I wonder where the mother is. Is it that the parents are separated, and the child is spending the day with a father sorely missed, a son served up as collateral damage for an unfortunate turn of events?

Maybe it’s just that the mother’s working and father-son managed to take off for a day to bond. I like this story better.

Every story is different in its own way.

This came together in a 15-minute writing burst on the Milan-Tirano train. Thanks to AG “Gullito” for one of the story ideas, for reading an initial draft and his stamp of approval.

Milan, Lombardy, Italy - 11th September 2009

The more you know the less you feel
Some pray for others steal
Blessings not just for the ones who kneel, luckily

- U2, “City of Blinding Lights”

Looking at Renaissance-area churches and cathedrals , B and I were discussing this: “Were these built solely as religious places of worship or was there more at work here?”

Cathedrals/churches were commissioned by the aristocracy of the time. They were designed and built by the artistic aristocracy of the time too. While these soaring steeples and tall spires are definitely meant to inspire awe and evoke the greatness of the Lord Almighty, one cannot but help feel that at some level these are manifestations of the ids of the people behind these – either the aristocrats bankrolling them, or the artists responsible for the architecture and the stunning beauty of these places.

The Duomo in Milan

However, all of that is moot. The sense of grandeur and pure awe that one feels on viewing something like the Duomo in Milan make all this questioning of motivations academic. Evoking hushed reverence, the perfect grace of this place left me speechless.

In the spirit of the beautiful symmetry these places exhibit, I close with the same U2 song I started with.

The more you see, the less you know
The more you find out
as you go
I knew much more than I do now

More posts on the way as I process my diary and unscramble my thoughts.

Be Kind, Rewind

The flight now seems interminable. I’m looking at a row of seats next to me with screens flickering various stages of recent blockbusters. Ben Stiller is still running amok in museums while Arnold rises, buck-naked elsewhere. Staccato gunfire echoes from someone’s headphones that are way too loud. The steady hum of the jet makes you wonder “Don’t they build sound dampers into this damn thing?”

The end of a vacation is a time of ‘epic suckage’ (to use a recent hip expression I picked up from an acquaintance). Security checks, removing shoes and belts, metal detector passes. Things you grinned and bore with a song your lips on the way out here suddenly become onerous.

Every moment is fraught. “This may be the last time I drink coffee here.” (though, at the back of your mind, you know you’re going to come back. Soon.) Wistfulness sets in even before the trip is over. You look at photos in the tiny screen of a camera, trying to hold on to something that is slipping away, fast.

*sigh*. It’s time to stop fretting. Life as you have known it for years now awaits on the other side of the Atlantic. You try to switch off this feeling of dread by tuning in to the bizarre pleasures of The Hangover.

This was written on the flight out from Zurich to JFK after a most enjoyable 10-day vacation. More posts on the vacation itself coming soon. This was unfortunately the most well thought out of the paper posts from my diary, so this goes up first. Last-In-First-Out, stack-style.