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One

He caught the metro as always from Kalighat. The one at 8:40, which meant he would be well in time for the first class at 9:30. It was all still new to him, done with school now, finding his feet in a big city (well it was only Calcutta, but then he had never really lived alone and away from his parents). He liked his classmates, though he worried sometimes that he really wasn’t that smart and someday he’d be called into the HOD’s office and be informed that they had made an error with his test results and actually he’d need to leave. He’d get off at Central, like all days, with his favourite jhola, and walk the 15 minutes to the college back gates, opposite the hostel. He was glad that having that bag helped him fit in, giving him something familiar to cling to while also allowing him to melt into the “Bengali intellectual” crowd that populated the campus.

It was more crowded than usual on the train today and he shuffled to the corner at the end of the seats. People didn’t really like standing there, near the passageway connecting the bogies. He didn’t mind, there was musty breeze that kept heat at bay and he’d spend the 25 minutes looking at the list of stations and counting down the 7 stops in between.

The train stopped at Jatin Das Park and he saw her get on the train. She still had that head of curls, untameable as always. They had studied at school together, she always beating him in maths and now she was studying statistics in the same college. They had always been friends, she had the boyfriend-girlfriend thing going with his best friend and he had an unrequited crush on her best friend. But after the boards, they hadn’t been in touch really and he had accepted that they would really not meet again. Then they ran into each other at the college and now they nodded to each other as they passed, and she usually had a smile to spare. They were both busy finding their feet and figuring out this new world they had stepped into.

She had her head down, having garnered the corner seat near the doors. He moved across, she felt something and looked up and then she gave the brilliant smile that she sometimes did. He couldn’t help grinning.

Two

It was a Friday night in Bombay. His second year in the city. They were out in the new bar that had opened last month in the mall that had opened 2 years ago. It was all very polished and chrome-y, the bar smelled of varnish and they still had their opening stock of good beer (it wouldn’t last and they’d only stock Fosters and KF soon enough, and Tuborg (but who drinks Tuborg)).  Both he and his flatmate had acquired a taste for Erdinger (dunkel obviously), almost caramel-y with a dark chocolate smell and the bartender usually served it in these tall ice cold glasses. They ended up hitting the place at least once during the weekend, mostly with the usual gang of batchmates. This time around it was just him and the flatmate, shooting the breeze and moaning about work.

He had noticed the three women sitting together on the next table as soon as they had come in. He was fascinated by the women in Bombay. It was the way they spoke and the way they walked. A casual and yet deeply considered nonchalance which he imagined came from money and worldliness and privilege. To not know a moment of doubt while passing through life. No wonder they have flawless skin. He kind of felt that way about the city itself sometimes, glamorous and cold and un-knowable somehow. And he guessed that the women fit the city and he wouldn’t.

They were on their second bottle when he saw the girl who sat facing him get up. He had been watching her, helpless and fascinated in a way. She walked slowly over to them, studied action and indifference together, her friends whispering furiously to each other. PS, with his track record with girls (he’d even had a French girlfriend), just looked up with casual bemusement as she reached their table. She leaned in and asked him (and not PS).

‘Can I join?’

‘Sure.’ (he was surprised his voice didn’t crack)

Later, much later (on another day and then it was just them), he did ask her why she came over that day. She just smiled and said it was a silly bet. Sometimes, Bombay girls are maddening.

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Couple of quick (but not easy) pieces then. I have been reading a bit and am currently working through a book called, How to See the World by Nicholas Mirzoeff. It talks about how the great explosion of visual media is shaping our understanding of the modern world. A wide-ranging book, it references the Arab Spring and the World Wars and provides a sort of connective bedrock that connects modern world affairs from a visual perspective (this is a wonky sentence). Fascinating stuff (really) – in the age of Instagram and Pinterest and Tumblr (it still exists, right?) and front page photographs of suit clad assassins – trying to make sense of things requires us to interpret the medium in a more critical manner. Often it is the only source of information available to us and we are still somewhat open to accepting pictures as being honest when most news is mostly fake.

Another thing I read recently was a piece in the New Yorker – it’s a humorous piece yes, but it poses a simple but arresting argument (not original certainly, but quite well written nonetheless) that we might be actually living in some sort of computer simulation. Think about it, we all have kind of accepted that artificial intelligence is very much a reality and I think that superintelligence is inevitable (I don’t know about timelines) – how much of a stretch is it to think that we are all artificial intelligences and virtual reality in a simulated world created by some sort of superintelligence. In a probabilistic sense, the possibility that we are artificial constructs is much more likely than not – all we have to do is accept that artificial intelligence can exist (and you know it does).
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I watched Moana – liked it, it’s okay (and better than Zootopia, sorry). Regarding songs, I haven’t got much. Magnetic Fields (well Stephen Merritt) is releasing an album, 50 Song Memoir, and I am quite prepared to love it.

1.      Magnetic Fields – All my little words – unashamedly sentimental and quirky. This is not my favourite song by them, but this is very sweet (we are using sweet as an adjective, I am a little ashamed but it suits somehow).

2.     Beastie Boys – Sabotage – white Jewish guys singing rap-metal-rock (is it called nu-metal? I am hopeless with the categorizations). It’s pretty awesome with wicked guitar licks – one of those songs which makes you appreciate a decent set of headphones. RATM is very much in the same vein – you can easily see the influences.

      

3.     Verve – Man called Sun. A criminally underrated band. I think each of their albums (they just have 4) is pretty great. Again, not putting my favourite song here, because everyone knows (who knows me) that I love it. So, here’s something different – more psychedelic, more mellow. The 90s had some damn good Brit bands and I guess that topic will keep for another day.

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I was more aware of International Women’s Day this year.

The Future Is Now

Take a look around. No, seriously, put your head up and take a look around you. If the sun is shining or the lights aren’t out yet, there must be a fair bit to see. You might not be seeing what I am, which is mounds of books, a couple of old laptops, water bottles and other associated detritus as befits a modern vagrant, but you’d definitely have a lot to see. Maybe a nice hand-crafted cushion cover (from fabIndia obviously) or a favourite photograph of that trip to Goa from well, gosh, nearly 10 years ago, or maybe there is that ratty t-shirt you know should be thrown away but you just can’t bring yourself to do. There’s more evidence of obviously of a human life lived, things you cannot see, such as nail clippings and itinerant strands of hair, symbols of your mortality and uniqueness, physical states in a flux with DNA signatures silent and eternal.

To identify as human is an interesting experience (choice is not the correct word, is it?). To have emotions and to know happiness and pain, to be bored and excited, to have impulses and longings. To have your eyes water up stupidly when manipulated by the soaring strings at the close of a Pixar movie, to giggle at the routine rant of a middle-aged comic who rages at a PC crowd which titters subversively and guiltily at the non-PC jokes, deadpan humour and cynical irony understood and enjoyed. The patience to practice and become better at certain activities (like hitting a ball across a net with a racquet (that’s all it is, howsoever exhilarating it may be) or like identifying how colours interact and how light and shade can be faithfully reproduced or deconstructed to evoke emotions) or how Nature’s patterns follow rules, some known and some unknown, and yet radiate a beauty that defy rule-making. To take joy in companionship and to seek out the warmth of fellowship and family and to cherish certain relationships over all others. To be proud of loving and be humbled by receiving love, knowing that neither really matters and yet seeking to be worthy nonetheless. To strive for success and for dignity in work, to do the best we can, limited as we are by our neural idiosyncrasies and physical foibles. We aren’t perfect (we only need to take a look at the papers for that) but we kind of like that imperfection, that little un-knowability, that makes us human (and also perfection is over-rated and bland). We still push ourselves though, knowing that we will always fall short of the mythical ideal makes it easier to strive to be better. Pushing it to the limits and not knowing what the limits are, makes it all worthwhile ultimately (an Eagles reference here).

We have always wanted to believe in a greater power. It’s not as cut and dry as a belief in God or Gods (feel free to choose your own poison or not drink from the well at all), but there is either some fatalism or some belief that hard work and/or intelligence and/or luck begets success and happiness. Is that true anymore? I wonder sometimes. Let’s look at the situation dispassionately. We live in a world of limited resources. Yes. We consume more and more each year. Yes. The global climate change is well underway and we have entered Anthropocene. Yes. Automation is inevitable as capital seeks ever more efficient allocations. Yes. Disaffection will spread as more and more work will be done, better, by automated machines. Machine learning is at an inflection point where I believe most decision making can be driven by data and semiotics. And it’s all kinds of decision making really (go, poker and chess all require very different mental capacities) where automatons parsing data are better than us and they are getting better all the time. I think most jobs, if not all of them, which are presently the remit of typical lower and middle management, and in most sectors, can be done better and in a cheaper manner using software and logic. Blue collar jobs are disappearing anyway – a country can’t compete on a cheap labour arbitrage when there are machines for most things. I don’t think we, as a country, are at the cutting edge of software technology, what we do, to my impression is, take on the tedious bits and do them diligently and then sell them on the cheap. We are looking to innovate and move up the value chain no doubt, but we then don’t invest in real research and STEM education. We have millions of engineers, no doubt, but I don’t believe that they have been trained to innovate and design and be creative. Any creative spark is indeed stamped out by our education system and our tendency to copy and imitate (on the cheap, no doubt) rather than create and develop. And I don’t see much change happening for the better anytime soon. Similarly, the financial sector plays on a cost arbitrage and by charging for making capital accessible – as we develop risk matrices and develop better behavioural models for markets and then leave the decision making to these systems, I don’t see much need for decision makers (the so-called management) anymore. It’s funny how as we advance technologically, we take out the need for human interaction and human input more and more. What is the solution really? Do we go further down the rabbit hole till we make superintelligent machines? I feel in a way that the answer lies in something we considered while looking at our choices. We can’t really look at the situation dispassionately - that premise simply won't provide us with an acceptable solution.

There are so many questions to answer here – do the profits arising from the machine-like efficiency of these, well, machines, accrue to the equity holders? The 0.1%ers who already control the majority of the world’s wealth, do they continue to accrue the benefits? There are interesting moral and political questions here to answer. Do we distribute the profits to the deprived and the dis-enfranchised? Who will all these huge automated factories make their products for – how many iPhones does Tim Cook need anyway? You need the 99.9% to ultimately drive the consumption, who need to be able to earn and afford. Fun questions with extremely important answers. We need to decide on these things before the decision-making power of the species itself is brought into question. What is certain is that there will be large scale displacements in the existing workforces, what will make the Greek tragedies seem like sitcoms – and it will be both blue-collared and white-collared workers who will be effected. We are woefully behind in terms of re-educating ourselves and educating our children to be able to survive and adapt to the changed environment. We haven’t even started figuring this thing out. I guess there will be requirements to service these robots and there will be customer service requirements certainly – but that’s a very limited and limiting option, isn’t it? Maybe even we will end up with the almost implausible scenario that the machines will eliminate all need for work as we know it and at the same it shall come to pass that all the benefits arising from these increased efficiencies are magically distributed in a left-wing daydream, but then we have to figure what to do with our time and figure out what gives our lives a sense of self and value, if it’s not work (as we know and understand it now).

Now, onto things a bit simpler. Have watched a few movies this past month or so and with the Oscars around the corner, I wanted to talk about them –

1.     La La Land (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3783958) – I remember watching Damien Chazelle’s previous film and thinking that here is someone who thinks that music and the pursuit of it is important, even if somewhat maddening and frustrating sometimes. I guess what he comes up with this time around is a tribute to the musical, set in a modern world which harks back to the golden age of the Hollywood studios and shows the showbiz LA with pastel colours and choreographed dances and unbearably hip jazz nightclubs. Emma Stone is an amazingly expressive actress and I think she will win the statue for best actress in this role (I loved Arrival and Amy Adams in it, but Ms. Stone is terrific in this movie) and I loved the songs (one of which, City of Stars, should win for best original song). And if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s worth seeing for the ending montage alone. Its emotional yet gimlet eyed and it doesn’t shy away from telling you that you have to make difficult choices sometimes.

2.    Kubo and the 2 Strings (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4302938) – I dislike stop motion movies mostly. They usually look ugly to me (think Chicken Run etc.) and only rarely are they great (Fantastic Mr. Fox – and that’s basically the craft of Wes Anderson). This one was beautiful. A sweeping story of magic and journey and dragons and family. It beggars belief that the movie is actually stop motion – it speaks of the immense work put in by the studio. The shamisen powered cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is amazing. I fell utterly in thrall to the movie and would recommend it over any others that I have watched this year. It should (but it won’t) win the Oscars for best animated feature (Zootopia is good but not great and I haven’t watched Moana). Interesting fact, the movie was directed by Travis Knight, the son of Phil Knight (the co-founder of Nike).

3.     Sing Street (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3544112) – A coming of age story set in Dublin – this movie is about a teenage boy who starts a band to escape from a dysfunctional family life and to woo an unattainable girl (mainly for the girl of course). Set to an irresistible soundtrack of 80s hits (The Cure and Duran Duran feature, amongst others), the movie also has some original numbers which are quite effective. I guess the movie resonated with me because it reminded me of discovering new bands and how I think, we all make up our own playlists that are incredibly precious to us. John Carney, the director, has previous in this kind of movies, having made Once and Begin Again, and the movie has a joyous feel to it that makes it a really happy watch.

So, all the movies above come highly recommended. I also watched Allied (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3640424) which was beautifully shot and had some interesting moments – and the beginning is in Casablanca – it missed something, maybe Brad Pitt’s deadpan acting was somewhat difficult to get into.

The songs now…

1.     Fleetwood Mac – Chains. One of my favourite bands. Rumours is an epochal album – there’s not one bad song in the bunch. My favourite songs are probably Chains (from Rumours) and Black Magic Woman (Santana did a great cover, but it really is Peter Green’s song).

2.     Bread – Guitar Man. The soft rock pioneers. The 70s had some great music. This is probably not their most successful album, but this track is a favourite.

Did you know that the word ‘thing’ (used 7 times in this piece before this) comes from the Old Germanic and Old English word for the governing assembly of a Germanic society, made up of the free people of the community presided over by lawspeakers. QI indeed.