Mumbai Under Siege. More than 24 hours since the first blasts made that ever-returning feeling of terror make its comeback once again on the soil of Mumbai, the echoes of which would be heard for a long time to come (and should remain in suspended reverberation, not drown away in the babble of ‘life goes on’, as it has happened till now), and with a nation brought to a practical standstill with governance literally on its knees, the situation is still not completely under control.
It therefore quite naturally feels ironic for me while I was going through this particular picture which I had taken at a friend’s place on a random evening a couple of days back. Some of you might recognize what the complete card says and from where it was taken; that’s not the point however. What just stood out in that picture for me were (i) the word ERASE - a word which is short and crisp, and very powerful, and (ii) the pair of eyes which were ‘torn’ out from a smiling face. Qualities which could easily make this a powerful image, and of course made this a special one in that collection.
Looking at it now, I can’t but help ask myself the question ‘Would You Erase Me?’. After all, there have been countless incidents over this past year (and I have seriously lost count, which I realized when speaking with colleagues at work today), and many more such in the past years, the intensity and impact varying with each incident. Nothing though comes to my memory which would have achieved anything even close in magnitude to this (yes, we did have the attack on the Parliament, although most people I know wouldn’t really mind a few MPs less, specially now after we have had the cash-for-votes case this year). Each time however, the power of resilience so inherent to the human spirit has kept us moving, with a smile on our faces, even as we turn a ‘somewhat’ blind eye to the past in a bid to embrace the future.
So, would you erase me, is what I have to ask of them, this time around. And would we continue to smile and move on, turning a blind eye is what I have to ask of us.
I think I got a bit carried away by emotion last night. It was after all a feeling reserved for Massa, something which he did mention with an overwhelming sense of candidness at the ensuing press conference at the end of the race.
“We need to be proud of our race and our championship. It’s one more day of our life when I will learn a lot but for sure I’m very emotional.”
Lot to learn for sure:
- For starters, never be sure of the finish till you have the last man in. History is filled with epithets which rattle the same story, and we now have this being ratified in the most modern of settings known to humankind today. The last laugh, anyone? Surely does ring in your ears loud and clear now.
- If its a team you are working with while winning, the team should save the skin on your back. This would definitely sound very outrageous, but consider for a moment if Raikkonen would have slid back from his third position and just blocked Hamilton’s entry into the Top 5. He didn’t stand a chance at the title (although I know I would have been happiest to see him do an encore this year too), but his act in ‘good’ faith could have propelled his team mate to clinch the championship. Yeah yeah, I know I was talking about ethics last night, but like I said I got a bit emotional. And since we do operate in a cut throat world where the result is what matters, I think this should be acceptable. After all, this isn’t exactly ‘unethical’ in the sense of the word. In a team sport, team mates are supposed to watch each other’s back. Might sound preposterous, but yes.
- The final lesson (at least of whatever I could think of till now), is the power of exercising your discretion in the most discreet of matters in the most discreet manner. Till last night, I had been having thoughts rambling through my head about what possible promises would Glock have got from Team McLaren for forgoing his fourth position just inches away from the chequered flag. The most obvious leanings being towards the millions which might have been transferred to some unnamed account in some tax haven. What I forgot in the flow of my emotion was the fact that at times, there are things which are much more subtle and cost you next to nothing, and at the same time guarantee you with the most powerful impact to drive home the desired results. Yes, I was reminded this by a status message while randomly wading through Facebook (‘xxx’ is wondering what Nicole promised Glock?), and though this was probably the wackiest status messages I would have seen in some time, it got me thinking. Marketers could possibly take a cue from this episode. After all, exercising your discretion in discreetness could open tremendous opportunities.
One of the most spellbinding F1 race finishes I would have seen in my lifetime.
Winning a F1 race, and championship on hometurf – this had all the ingredients which would have made the Brazilian F1 GP a memory of lifetime for Felipe Massa, but made itself into a lesson which would remain a memory in the lifetime of F1. It turns out that Sport, like any other form of enterprise which allows for manipulation of results deemed ‘unethical’ in the general parlance, has lost out its meaning once again. As if crashing economies wasn’t good enough, we have an instance which though isn’t a first of its kind in the world of sport, just shatters your faith in the fairness of sport. Massa did everything which could possibly be done, which did result in him winning the race today, and would have won him the F1 championship as well – which is what it seemed like for those fleeting few seconds till the realization dawned on everybody that Lewis Hamilton wasn’t in 6th position like he seemed on the final turn before the chequered flag. Mr. Timothy Glock, in a gesture of magnamity which would possibly put the greatest philanthropists to shame, slowed down from 4th position to allow Hamilton to take the 5th position and the F1 title subsequently.
Does Hamilton’s F1 victory actually deserve to call itself a ‘victory’? And should Massa feel ‘defeated’? And why do people who lose under such circumstances deserve to be called winners, with a greater sense of righteousness? I think I do have answers to these somewhere, and even though I might not ariculate them here, most of us would know. What I would want an answer to is why Mr. Glock slowed down before the finish line, and I hope he has a bloody good reason for that!
Traveling on the synthetic beats and riffs of computer generated rhythms on an asphalt tarmac you feel a slight bump (which you usually brush aside as what civic minded folks would like to call ‘speed breakers’), and then once in a while you feel a monster bone breaker making you wish some civic authority had painted alternating stripes of white on it to make it visible and provide a sense of identity to that mound of sound. Break beat electronica was one such speed breaker, and Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim has been one such civic (?) authority who made those zebra markings to make it discernible. For though, he may not exactly be the only one who created this musical genre, he surely holds the distinction of defining the genre and providing it with an identity which spawned recognition for itself in the form of millions of swaying souls swaying across the most varied dance floors this world knows.
Proclaimed as one of the biggest exponents of Big Beat today, Fatboy Slim had his first brushes with success in the form of the appetizing popularity achieved by some of his early associations (The Housemartins, Beats International) before he assumed this moniker and went solo to make his debut album ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’ which achieved modest success. The follow-up album ‘You’ve Come a Long Way Baby’ (this was a tagline for the Virginia Slims campaign, something which carried on from the debut album title, which was related to DuPont) released two years later, however achieved a mindboggling success hitherto unknown to the electronic genre, endowing a veritable epithet of being the Bible of this genre. ‘The Rockafeller Skank’ featuring the ever-so-now-recognizable vocal sample of rapper Lord Finesse (right about now, the funk soul brother / check it out now, the funk soul brother) playing in a loop on some insane beats had already captured the airwaves and charts alike before the album was released, and adding it to the compilation added good reason for anybody wanting to check out the album to buy it. The album cover generated some controversy because of featuring an obese dude with a wry grin holding a cigarette (which does make us think though, sticklers that we are for deciphering cyptic connections; Obese=Fatboy, Cigarette=Slim, Title=Virginia Slims tagline; was there a connection really thought of?), which was enough to change the US cover to stacks of vinyl records. The controversy didn’t end here though, due to the liberal interjunction of profanities and supposed blasphemous connotations (Fucking in Heaven had to be edited clean to Illin in Heaven, man, he did get fucked pretty good by the censors on Mother Earth itself). Notwithstanding all this though, the hook contained within progression of ‘Right Here Right Now’, the bubble mouthed samples of ‘Gangster Trippin’, and the chemical nature of ‘Kalifornia’ paved the way for breakthrough success, though surprising the one which shone through and achieved critical chart-topping success was the piano based, electronica minus, soulful vocal based melody of ‘Praise You’ on this dance heavy track album. Undoubtedly one of the most overexposed album of its genre, this is one road bump which jars you to the bone each time you shake a boogie to it.
It is but fitting that the biggest musical export from Down Under was born on terra firma separated from the rest of the landmasses by a fair degree of distance, else it would have been an absolute spectacle to witness the varying levels of tympanic damage they would have created which would have been attributed solely to the amount of noise they have been creating over the years. And even after 35 years of being together, Black Ice doesn’t seem make it look like the decibel levels are coming down. The Young brothers together with Johnson have probably not sounded as good in years since the time of Back in Black, which absolutely justifies your actions of tripping like a schoolkid in uniform when you first experienced them back then. Classic 4/4 time signature drumbeats, clean trademark Angus guitar riffs and Johnson screaming his lungs out, this is good old school AC/DC with an incredible amount of hook.
Dark Night of the Soul - Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, David Lynch 
Together Through Life - Bob Dylan
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - Brian Eno & David Byrne
