dead at the funeral.

it happened right there.

after the super heavy post of last week, i thought i should go lighter this time. may be something not involving explosions genocidal idiots and such. but then only time will tell if i can let that happen. (this is like the recap section that so many day time televison series have)

(title track)
(silly adverts of soaps, perfumes, insurance companies and their likes)
(and finally the plot fades in from black)
we were at a funeral this week. a friends father had just passed on. (or as they say 'expired' here) but this incident has nothing to do with the death, or the funeral, or even the friend. its just to tell you that this was the kind of place that almost screams out meaning less discussions to keep the place from going explosively silent.

so there we were, talking about our worldly stories, exchanging stories of holidays, work, and others, the newly weds talking of the recently gone valantines day, and how they had the coziest little dinner, or how work ruined their weekend but they still managed to do something valantiny, and the always evident married ones preaching to us singles as to how awesome married life is and how we should get married the minute we can. (at this point i always imagine that they suddenly turn into these preacher like clothes, the white cassocked, balding bearded men and very nun like clothed women without the bald or the beard, preaching/sermoning us to get god/religion or what ever it is that they are selling). thus wading from meaningless conversations to meaningless conversations we waited for the decent time to leave.

one such topic we walked by was the existence of a digital life, social networking, mafia wars, farmville and such. and people ridiculed the obsession that others had and how when we were kids we had such games we played offline and on LAN. and how even seniors today have gotten on to these trivial pursuits. then like any other conversation between friends fingers were pointed on how that person did things the same way as those described earlier. when it comes to anything remotely on the internet, i am generally the one to be pointed to. not because i am good at anything there, but because of my dependence on all things digital. my phone, ipod, macbook all of these things that i shall shamelessly acknowledge that i cannot do without. what if started to emerge, what if i woke up one day, my laptop wouldnt boot, my phone died, m ipod wont play, my email addresses erased, and everything that i did on the internet just basically vanished. (this blog included, but no one mentioned that because i am sure no one reads it) and so on and like every other time, it would end in if that happened i would kill myself. and they all somehow enjoy that ending. something about, now i know this man is mortal. his life can be in our hands, its not diabolical, its just natural that people dont like to know that there are people whose weakness these people dont know.

(commercial break. bad adverts and such. go grab your popcorn, or change the channels now, cos the tone of this series is about to get preachy)

but then i started wondering, dont we all have such things? for some its their little blinking screens, for some it is their online persona, for some it is their money, they pride, for some it is their loved ones. everyone has a set of things, that enable them to get by without which you would find it difficult to function. if that thing, is your digital persona so be it.

the argument they have against it, is that its not real because i cannot touch it. and because i can go to all those places without leaving my chair, those places dont exist either. i think that is a sad assumption to make. the internet, and therefore all things that happen on it are real. the places, the people the things that these people do in those places . second life is not an extension of you on the internet, it is you online. the mind does things that the body just cannot catch up with. so when you lose something online, when your associations with it are purely that of the mind, you would tend to lose it.

imagine if your house got bombed. would you understand if someone killed themselves over it then? (i know i promised not to talk of bombs and death, but this is just to show you why someone would kill themselves over lost facebook pages)

we are ok with people jumping off buildings over lost jobs. but we are not willing to accept that there are some who would do everything they do, online... and if they lose it they almost lose it all. in this day and age? wake up neandrathal and smell the instant coffee!
(fade to black....)
to be continued...

(meaning less white noise between two badly made series.)

death of a drive.

today i lost something.

something valued. something irreplaceable. it was my years of hard work, collecting, saving, swapping, and creating little bits and pieces to put it all together there. it was my hard drive. 320 gigs of portable entertainment. all gone in one single drop of my bag. one careless/carefree gesture and all is gone.

to the untrained eye, it is like a watch being broken, or a favorite tshirt with moth holes in it, but to me, and i am sure to a lot of others to whom half the fun is in the amount of space it occupied. but to me, is the 1900s equivalent of having a big fire in your workplace. or a california wild fire of the 2000s, or losing your own hut in the haiti earthquake. no matter what you get after this.. your life can never go back to being the same. you may rebuild your fortunes, you may work hard enough to make all of this seem like a bad dream, but that day you change. you become someone you were not before and someone you will be for the rest of your life.

the hard disk was fairly new and it isnt that i lost the drive or that i lost money today that i am sad, its a lot more. it is that today i am reminded of my helplessness against all things that i thought i was using for convenience. i cant go without my phone, my ipod, my laptop, the hard drives i own, none of that. its almost as if i am slave to it. and thus the unbearable loss.

almost reminds me of the matrix reloaded dialogue between the council man and neo about dependencies. and he ends with... 'are we truly free?'

and so shall i.


(alright may be just a little foot note.

i know i know. i am a day late. but in my defence, i was a day early last time so there that and thats that! plus i am a grieving man this week. i am allowed a day off aren't i? i mean 320 gigs of movies, music, may be a few bits of work too all gone. never to be gotten again. i am allowed a day off!


i also have to do this..

happy birthday sister.

she thought this would make up for a good excuse for a post. may be she was right, this does seem more intelligent and mature than crying over a dead drive. but then... i dont want to seem what i am not. )

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)