Our deepest fear

Came across this amazing little piece in a movie tonight (Coach Carter, starring Samuel L. Jackson). It's by Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond imagination. It is our light more than our darkness which scares us. We ask ourselves – who are we to be brilliant, beautiful, talented, and fabulous. But honestly, who are you to not be so?

You are a child of God, small games do not work in this world. For those around us to feel peace, it is not example to make ourselves small. We were born to express the glory of god that lives in us. It is not in some of us, it is in all of us. While we allow our light to shine, we unconsciously give permission for others to do the same. When we liberate ourselves from our own fears, simply our presence may liberate others.

No comments on this one. I have nothing to say that can add to it.

The Art of the Matter: Part I

This particular rant is about art. Of the abstract variety. And I mean the intentionally abstract stuff. Not like my paintings, which are intended to be straightforward but end up as expressionist nightmares.

Anyway, the reason why it came up is, a friend of mine proposed an idea for a piece of software that could, given a particular painting, automatically identify the artist.

Aside: The friend I was talking to is Angshuman Saha. The only man I know who can tell the difference between Monet and Manet. He can actually distinguish between impressionist and post-impressionist stuff like they were chalk and cheese. (To me, they're both just splotchy stuff on canvas. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure I can tell the difference between chalk and cheese.)

Angshu's own artistic ventures are somewhat minimalist bordering on wierd. His most famous work to date is Black straight line on ruled paper No. 32. Then there's Fish in a napthalene ring, and Default risk model, and... you get the idea. I've been thinking about writing a piece on him called Portrait of an Artist as a Middle-Aged Statistician but haven't gotten around to it yet. Someday...

Now, back to automatic artist identification. Seriously, this can be a fairly difficult task. For one thing, great artists may take a while to evolve their own signature style - their early work may have elements of other artists' styles that they tried to emulate back then. For another, it may be easier, sometimes, to try and identify a certain school of art (impressionism, surrealism and whatever else) than a particular artist. Maybe you could look at some very specific things relating to certain artists. For instance, if you see a soft watch, it's either Dali or someone trying to imitate him. If you see a badly drawn anorexic horse, it's M. F. Hussain. And so on and so forth.

Then there's the case where the whole damn canvas makes no sense. If there was only one school of art that did this, then you could use it as a default option if you found no pattern whatsoever. The problem is, there's more than one school. Different forms of chaos, if you will. Then what do you do?

The conversation segued from there to the arbitrariness of art in general.

Consider Marcel Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase, for instance. Yeah, the picture on top. Do you see the nude? Do you see the staircase, for that matter? Heck, do you even know if the painting is hung right side up?

Sometimes, even the experts can't tell. Take Henri Matisse's Le Bateau (see left). Apparently, it was hung upside down for 47 days in the New York Museum of Modern Art and no one noticed. Frankly, what shocks me is that the phrase "no one noticed" is often followed by an exclamation mark when this painting is mentioned.

There's a damn good reason why artists like these don't rule the world. Imagine what it would be like if Duchamp and his band of dadaists took over Playboy magazine. That painting by Marcel Duchamp could be Miss January. Hell, the Matisse painting could be Miss January - what difference does it make?

Or if Dali and assorted surrealists made Superman:

Bystander 1: It's a flying tiger with an elephant coming out of its mouth!
Bystander 2: It's a violin playing goat!
Bystander 1: And don't forget the giraffe with brightly colored machine tools in the bathtub on the side.
Bystander 3: No, it's Gala posing as both Superman and Josef Stalin at the same time, depending on which way you look at it!

This rant about art has been long pending, so I'll probably continue in my next post. Watch this space. (If anyone's actually watching, that is.)

How do you write a thank you note to music?

A few weeks ago, I caught a viral infection that was going around (so far as I can see, it's always going around, and every time it comes within catching distance, I seem to dive at it), and when it went away, it left behind a sort of racking cough. I'd have these long coughing fits, and each one simply worsened the state of my throat so that the next attack was even longer and more painful. The end result, after a few days of this, was that I could barely speak without hurting. Pretty irritating, I tell you.

So I was sitting in front of the TV, desultorily clicking on the remote, when I saw some new Indipop group on one of the channels. I'd normally keep clicking on, but what they were singing made me pause. It was a cover of "Aasmaan ke paar shaayad" from the soundtrack of the movie "Rockford".

It's one of those songs that I'd sung along with a couple of friends at IIMC. Ratul would take the lead, and Shantanu and I would do the backing vocals. For some reason, we'd end up doing it towards the end of an all-night jam session, so the song is forever associated with sunrise in my mind.

Somewhere in the interlude, there's this section that goes "Hey hey hey, ho ho ho" - I know, it doesn't tell you anything about how it sounds. Three people are required to sing it - the harmony sounds quite good if it's done right.

So anyway, when this section came on, for a moment, I didn't remember that I had a sore throat, or that it hurt to talk, or that the next coughing fit was probably 15 seconds away. I just sang the harmony part I used to do when we did this song. Hey hey hey, ho ho ho...

Sure, it hurt like hell, and I couldn't stop coughing for a while. But for a moment there, somewhere in my head, it didn't matter. It was like, there was a guy who could sing, and he woke up when he heard this song, and to my surprise, he was the same as he used to be, even though he hadn't sung in a while and it wasn't the practical thing to try right then.

Yeah, I know I'm babbling. I don't know if you, whoever you are that's reading this, can see what I'm getting at. Frankly, it doesn't really matter. Anyway, what I wanted to say was:

Thank you, music. Thank you, Ratul and Shantanu. Thank you, JBS-12C. Thank you, India. Thank you, providence. Thank you, disillusionment. No wait...

In praise of Roger Federer

Was out of action at work for a few days due to a bad head cold and fever. The advantage of such a thing, if you can actually see one beyond the continual sneezing and sniffling, is that you're asleep most of the day due to sheer exhaustion. Consequently, you're wide awake at odd hours of the night. Which, if you're living in India while the US Open is going on, is a really good thing.

Managed to watch a good bit of Roger Federer's game recently. I'd heard so much about him and seen so little that I wanted to get an idea of why the best tennis players alive are all uniformly rhapsodizing about him. Sure, what I'd seen of him, I'd liked, but why this much hyperbole?

So I watched. The guy seemed mostly half-asleep on court - he'd seemed that way for most of his matches in the tournament, from whatever I'd seen. Sure, he kept racking up the points, but I couldn't yet see what was extraordinary. Although at some level, I could sense that a guy who could win a set without seeming to do much was probably playing at a level where he was too good to be obvious about it, I didn't yet see the full extent of it.

Then Lleyton Hewitt nearly broke him to win the second set but failed and it went to a tie-breaker. For the next seven points in a row, Hewitt didn't seem to be able to do anything at all. Federer took the set 7-0 in the tie-break. He did go on to lose the next set before winning the fourth one and the match, but by the end of the tie-break, I had seen what I wanted to see.

I don't think I know enough tennis to compare him with any other player I've seen, or to comment on his all-time greatness, or potential thereof. But for about five minutes there, in the middle of a mostly sleepy match, it was like peering through a keyhole into the infinite. It makes you wonder what it must be like to be him, to be able to produce something like that on the court.

From whatever I've seen/read of him, he seems to be a quiet, self-effacing kind of guy. Which essentially means that, unless he works on his image, nobody who doesn't follow tennis will know who he is. Sad but true.

Yeh andar ki baat hona chaahiye

Open question cum random rant:

I was at Bangalore Central recently. For the uninitiated, it is one of the 32767 malls that have sprung up in B'lore city in the past few years - I guess the idea is that, if you're not creating Enterprise Java Beans, the only acceptable alternative is to be shopping.

Which brings me to my specific rant: I saw this brand of men's underwear called Chromozome, or something like that. The tagline was, if I remember correctly, "Fashion innerwear for men".

Here's what I don't get: If you're not Superman, why should this interest you at all?

A friend of mine attempted to provide some illumination on the subject: Underwear is a very popular gift item from the opposite sex. Or from the same sex - let it not be said that I'm not an equal opportunity blogger. Hence the idea of creating a premium segment.

I kinda get it. Although, frankly, it still seems like an odd way of marketing underwear. Maybe the problem is word associations: when someone says fashion innerwear, my instinct is of some guy walking down the ramp in the nearly-altogether.

So, what's this about anyway?

A few words about the proposed content in this blog. My guess is that, most of what I want to blog about would fall into one of three categories:

1. Rants on various topics. eg: when I turn on MTV and find that it's essentially just a heartbeat away from becoming a 24 hr Bollywood movie trailer channel.

2. Open questions of an utterly useless nature. eg: If you eat a dish made of Venus flytrap, assuming this particular flytrap has been fairly successful in its chosen profession, so to speak, are you eating a vegetarian dish or a non-veg one?

3. Minor pieces of writing that I could use some feedback on. Maybe even a few story ideas. If you find an idea here that you like, feel free to use it. I'd appreciate it if you added an author's note to acknowledge the source, but that's up to you. As far as I'm concerned, I designed Corlandt.

Read on...