"smashana vairagyam"

this is deep thought. its also rubbish and fragmented. its been written over atleast 2 months of one sentence a week, so if it makes little or no sense, it is most likely that you are not losing your mind... but then again... may be you are....

recently, i saw death. fairly up-close. not in the kinds that motorcyclists describe as the last few seconds before their heads get smashed in the pavement. but like the kinds where an aged relative who was slowly fading just ceased to exist. the post departure motions and the talks that ensue always makes one wonder what would people talk about when i am gone.

my mother taught us a phrase very early on. "smashana vairagyam" which badly/loosely translated means the divine selflessness attained at the cremation grounds. its the end result of the introspection that happens once you see the futility of living in the eyes of a dead close relative. you feel that all they did, is summarized, as good by the close ones. mundane by the ones that aren't so close, and as stern silence by the ones who watch cynically. you suddenly start looking at life from an obituary perspective. what would people say after i died. how would dad react, or mom feel or my aunt who never liked me talk of when she's consoled. what would my cousins who now look at me as an anomaly say. what anecdotes would be brought up? would it be the ones where i rebelled. or the ones where i obeyed. the ones where i was idiotic or the ones where i was brave? and after all these questions it suddenly starts to dawn... you need to live better. you need to do more for people. you need to be a better son, brother, friend, support to those so related. your desire to hoard money suddenly becomes a thing of great guilt and you wish you had done more for society in general.

the thing with SV is that it only lasts as long as the fires burn. the minute you are back home, the minute you interface reality, you start to slide back into your ways, you worry about the insufficiency of funds provided at work. the futility of asking for a raise, the promotion politics. the new car, the unpaid credit card bill that you got your tv with. all come back as if they never left, and all that is left of that moment of absolute renouncement is a shred of determination that you will one day rise above it all. i would like my V to last longer than that. i would like it to translate into everything i do. i wish to live life with complete abandon of someone connected with things but only to experience them. i wish to be rid of all things lineage driven. my investments will be in people and the things they do, not tangible assets that will give me dividends and returns when i turn 70... i want me experientially abused today... i dont want to wait until i am old and over ripe to experience life... i want to travel, move, be uncomfortable and learning everyday. i dont want tomorrow to be like today and like yesterday... a brand new tomorrow in all sense of the word. coming back to my obituary, i want it to simply read... karthik natarajan lived. fully. and i dont want people to remember me for the things i did, i want them to remember me for the fun we had together. at my funeral i want everyone all drunk and disorderly and mildly riotous. i want it attended in clothing of your determination, and i want it celebrated with the gladness of having being transferred to an exotic location for work.


funeral day playlist:
(guns and roses) november rain
(iron maiden) number of the beast
(metallica) turn the page
(pink floyd) the entire discography
(doors) ghost song
(doors) truckers song
(U2) even better than the real thing
(U2) even better than the real thing
(coheed and cambria) welcome home
(nadaka) pick any and other songs that will be determined over the course of the remainder of my life.

my digital is too analog.

look at the things you use today. your phones, computers, the softwares on the computers, the things those softwares do, the internet, blogs, social media everything digital. now think of a time before these, the time before you had any of your digital realities. think of how people used analog things to do what you do with your digital. the watches, the word processors, the drawing tools. even the things you use the internet for. like communication, publishing, photo sharing, ideation, collaboration, everything that you do today, was being done then. slowly, none the less, but surely. now you have blogs, then you had news letters, now you have websites for designers, then you had bulky portfolios, now you have a mobile phone, then you had telephones, the text messaging of today, is the direct lineage of the telegram. and i can go on. but what am i rambling about here?

what i really mean to say is... we havent changed anything. we made the digital do analog things are satisfied with them. architects use autocad for 2d drawings, and are happy with it, only a few push things to their full potential. how many architectural firms think of computers and digital techniques as more than tools that replaced the drawing board? we call them design drawing. not designing. Word replaced the word processor or the typewriter. books written on the type are like books written on a computer, no change there. just the convenience of a select few. i am not one of those shun your computer, nature is the right way to go preaching hippie. i love my macbook. more than the people around me, but its just a sad realization that since the time someone invented the printing press, we havent moved much, and since the time of the telephone we have moved even lesser.
the mouse simulates a pen, the screen supposed to be paper, digital watches with needles, mp3 players that look like cassette tape players, bluetooth headsets made to look like Bakelite phones. we even had mobile phones with jog dialers,
all new technology at some point simulates and if we are lucky just about replaces old technology.

now forget what you know. think of something that has never been done before. like the multi touch track pad in the macbooks, and the new apple mouse since the beginning of the mouse/trackpad usage, no one thought of more than two fingers and 3 buttons. or google wave, first time ever, we got a system that is built on the internet, not on the postal service! social networking broke the mould to some extent, orkut, facebook, linkedin all these did move out of the general already existing since adam and eve.

now lets look at what work we do. day in and day out. time and time again, do we do the same things that people have been doing since for ever? or are we doing something new? is your digital too analog?

food for thought. and action. :)

(i know i got preachy on this one... but i was sick of the autocad interface when this one came about :) too bad you got the wrong end of this stick)

many to many cities.

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

this lecture primarily demonstrates as the shift in public media from a one-to-one (telephone) and one-to-many (newspapers, televisions, radio... ) to a many-to-many medium. and demonstrates this through the recent chinese earthquake, and the way news propogated. he says "in order for any media to become widespread, the technology needs to get boring" people using twitter, facebook, chatrooms etc have become so much the norm that we can easily put up our views on a public forum.

if we replaced media with planning. the principles are the same. ancestrally, planning has been a 'one-to-many' operation. it has come from the 'planner' to the 'people' never have we really had a dialogue. surveys and interventions are the tools we use today for feedback, but what if we had a system in place that would give us a 'feed-front' (for lack of a better term) what if we could use the open platform to get users (in this case residents of the area) to plan their own locality. essentially assuming that planning is organization of a finite number of resources within a finite area. which means it is a matter of distribution and not creation. the intangibles like the socio-cultural flavors, are better catered to by the 'non-experts' as they live and breathe the area.

in visual terms it would be like mapping a wiki over a finite area, non experts come in and edit pages, collectively they can then map the desires, fears, aspirations of the region under consideration.

thereby instead of an outsider coming/observing the region for a definite length of time and then planning for it, we could now get residents, who have been soaked
in the social fabric, to plan their own regions.

there by making the planner a medium of interpreting this directory of social desires such received, instead of the modernist version of 'god'.