Of making things

There is something in the weather these days. The dog days of summer are a bit far away and it’s never a proper winter in Bombay anyway. It is not quite spring here either, not that I have ever seen it in the seven years here.

I remember the springs (the season and not a band) from when I was young. Perfectly golden sunshine in the afternoons sandwiched between the slightest tinges of cool breezes in the morning and in the night. They last for a month, maybe two. Starting a little after Saraswati pujo and continuing till the final exams – glorious days in which to cycle around the township and to stack up a pile of books in the balcony and read them till the sun went down. You could try growing a small garden inside medicine bottles and watch an ecosystem of ants and insects develop around them. You could gather the fertile clay from the river banks which have fed probably the oldest continuous civilization in the world and make little figurines with no feet and large heads and bake them inside the kiln of an old school kitchen heater. You could make a garrison of them and they would defend the garden against the threats that a child’s mind dreams up.

The world is generally a different and a more difficult place these days. That’s what I think anyway. There is more pressure to make your presence felt. To achieve, even if it is to achieve a sort of dull mediocrity measured on parameters of shallow success, meaningless pedigree and financial gains. People seem entitled to have opinions without really being qualified to have them; there is a lot less forgiveness and mercy (not a religious sentiment, though I believe that the one thing that recommends religion is it’s espousal of a quality of mercy in its followers) in their interactions and a shortsightedness and cruelty that comes from a casual disregard for the feelings of others. There is noise, so much of it. Updates and queries come at you from all directions, a restless urge to know the most banal and the most trivial forcing you towards wasting precious time on them. There is consequently less time for considering the worthy, what should be worthy.

We don’t spend time building things, developing them, learning to work with nature and materials. A nation of software developers and coders exists side by side with poor farmers eking out a livelihood from dirt, each ignorant and unmindful the other. And I understand that it must be so, an economic system that requires specialization and a world that’s grown so far away from the simple self-contained village economy. Doesn't really stop me from wishing for a simpler time while typing all this on a laptop made by a Japanese company in its manufacturing facilities in China using a platform that is spread the world over (its ownership by a corporation out of California is just another piece of redundant information). I find technology fascinating; it is endlessly wonderful how a physical world and its physical forces are finding new applications and new uses. It is just that with industrial manufacturing and miniaturization, so much of technology is just inaccessible now. It saddens me a bit, in a way humans being made redundant by this march of science, a redundancy of the human dexterity and individual innovation that was a hallmark of ours as a species. At the same time, I still think it’s just a matter of scale that makes the modern world a bit incomprehensible. You break it down to its basic bits and it is still understandable for the most part. You have to kind of accept that the world is too complicated in its totality and that there is a size beyond which it’s not really your world. It has an existence separate from you and you exist as a small, nay miniscule cog inside this giant machine which doesn't really need you to function.

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Onto the things I have been reading and listening and watching. I have been busy, that's a caveat. So most of what I have been reading have been things on the fly, articles and such, which you save to the trusty app and then get around to reading only later. But there have been some interesting things, so I will mention them here. Books first.

1. Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud (http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Comics-Invisible-Scott-McCloud/dp/006097625X)

Since I belong to the Nerdus eternus sub-genre of human beings, reading comics was de riguer and though I am a way bit older now, I continue to be fascinated by them as an art form and as a literary medium. They do ensure a jolly good time in most cases at least and you will never really convince me that Maus or Daytripper have lesser value than most Booker winners. So this book, in which McCloud explains the form of them and a bit of the history of them and the thought behind them and the art and what makes a gutter special (you gotta read the book to find out), is important. It's not florid or self-important. It is simple and thought provoking and endlessly interesting, at least to me.

2. The Periodic Table - Primo Levi (http://www.amazon.com/Periodic-Table-Primo-Levi/dp/0805210415)

A book that effortlessly blends chemistry and history. That's not a book I thought I would ever get to read. Short autobiographical stories that use science as a metaphor. Can't really recommend it enough. The language is concise (the original language of the book is Italian) and somehow in between the stories you come to realize the beauty of science and how it is really everything that is around us and how meanings can subtly extend from one part of life to another.

Songs next. Except that I can't really think of many songs. So I will give you a couple of my favorite Neil Young songs and a Sigur Rós song for variety.

1. Cortez the Killer - Neil Young

This is one of those songs I can listen to on loop for almost forever. The story, the sadness, the nostalgia. Pretty much perfect. Don't point out the historical inaccuracies. They don't matter and you would be an idiot to point them out.

2. Heart of Gold - Neil Young

Beautiful song. And because it is a live performance that demonstrates his charisma and talent quite perfectly. And again, it's a damn good song.

3. Njosnavelin (Untitled #4) - Sigur Rós

Don't ask me why I like this song. Not because I understand it.

So that's pretty much it. I watched a movie,71 (directed by debutant Yann Demange), about a British soldier stranded overnight in Belfast in 1971 (that where the title comes from). That period of history is called the Troubles and the movie is gripping and good. In case the history interests you, definitely suggested movies are In the name of the Father (1993) and also Bloody Sunday (2002, like the U2 song).

That is pretty much it.

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Three-oh