Happenstance

Old Guy: It's a lovely day, a day to be remembered.

Young Guy: I'm glad.

Old Guy: We've altered the course of fate, like a grain of sand that jams the works.

Old Guy: You must take me for an old nut who talks a lot of rot.

Young Guy: Maybe so.

Old Guy: You're partly right, but only partly. Listen to me, there's not a gesture, even the most insignificant, that can't change the world. You see, every detail, every gesture, as slight as it may be, reveals an infinity of truths and thus has an endless repercussion and grandiose effects.

Old Guy: You only have to piss in the sea to make the ocean rise. Don't they say the beating of a butterfly's wings over the Atlantic can cause a hurricane in the Pacific?

Old Guy: So feel free sometimes to do something stupid,random and ludicrous.

Old Guy: That stupid, random and ludicrous act can upset the order of the world.


The dialog is from a really brilliant French film, by writer-director Laurent Firode, called "Happenstance". The movie revolves around the life or to say lives of a few individuals whose paths cross every now and then due to a set of random events. Allow me to emphasize on the word, random, in the last sentence. Since I have emphasized enough, these random events aren't just small changes in the lives of these people, they are in fact a series of inputs to the system we call life. these inputs are so small, so insignificant, that we dont really see their existence, but they make a change in the way we live our life, they make us alter the course of our actions, as you will see in this film.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, recommends to watch this movie, in the Black Swan, so I did & after watching it, I was thinking to myself, was this movie about the lives of these people, or something else? The answer came to me almost instantly, it was not about these people, it was about insignificant, mutually exclusive random events that just made these people behave the way they did. It was really about chaos theory, or to be precise, the butterfly effect.

How many random events can just pass by us throughout the day. Do we really notice them, is it because they are random we dont notice them or is it because we are not capable to notice random events at all. Even if we notice them, would we actually, against our best judgement, acknowledge that these were random events?

A crow craps on you on your way out to some important appointment, you rush back to your home, to change your spoilt white shirt into a graceful black one. You move out of the house wary of any snipers on the roof tops or tree branches again willing to give you a taste of their bowel movements. You reach on time for your appointment & what you realize that person you wanted to meet is also wearing black. The person confessess that, black is the most preferred colour for her & that she was glad that I wore black. Isnt that a weird coincidence, or is it just a natural order of things, I could have so easily avoided the crow crap by taking a auto rickshaw instead of walking, but I forgot my change in my drawer the first time I left home. I forgot the change in my drawer because thats not where I usually keep my change, I keep them in a bowl just besides my table, which fell off the table & smashed into small pieces the other night.

This is a classic series of random events happening in our day to day lives & even if we want to connect & we can connect them, we would find a pattern of activities emerging, where one activity's output becomes an input to some other activity & so on. A random event occuring two days back has the ability to change the course of events happening two days hence. This is the classic case of Chaos Theory, 'Idea that seemingly minor events accumulate to have complex and massive effects on dynamic natural systems.'

Why is this relevent? I have always been a fan of this concept, I accidentally saw this movie called 'the butterfly effect' (another popular title for chaos theory) & realized how deceptively simple the concept was yet so inherenetly mind boggling to understand. I tried to connect many events in my life (in my free time ofcourse) to see if I can really derive causal links to past events & I could. Some of them were readily visible while others which were governed by forces unknown to me (donot read GOD) were blurred or impossible to decipher sometimes.

Thus chaos theory makes you take a bird's eye view of the entire series of events to trace which event was fed to which other event in an endless series of cause & effect. Imagine the plight of people who work in the fields involving complex adaptive systems, like stock markets, economics, governtments & nations & so on. The sheer impact of chaos theory is unprecendented. We can't even begin to imagine at how many causal connections can be attached to just one decision & how many times and how high would we have to go to get that coveted bird's eye view of the system(s)?

An year from now, I will be working in a similar complex adaptive system, would I be ready for facing the chaos? .........well, I would say lets see. :)

The Responsibility of Education

Why do we find so many people in our country not satisfied with the state of education? In fact 5 mins ago, I was one of them, I too believed that education is something that should be pristine, unadulterated & of extremely high quality which would actually add some value to our lives. But what is this quality of education & how do we measure it? Is it that the premier institutes are the benchmark for the quality? Can't there be quality of education in terms of degrees of quality?

In a video my Malcolm Gladwell, from TED 2004, he cites an example of Howard Moskowitz, who single handedly changed the way we perceive the customer satisfaction levels from a given product. He said that not all people like the same flavour of products, people have different preferences & companies should cater to these differences of opinions. For instance, sweetness of a cola drink. I like my cola to be less sweeter than the average cola available in the market, some people like it extremely sweet & I am sure there are some people lying in the middle of both these preferences. But does the cola company, who's product we prefer to consume, cater to these differences of preference? I doubt, but they must be, since I dont drink colas, i wouldnt know. But the point is, do all the people/students who choose an institute for educating themselves or even have to attend an institute to educate themselves, really know what quality of education they actually want? In fact if they know what quality of education they want, they will constantly compare the current quality with their previous experience of education at the last institute they had attended. This choice of quality becomes even worse when parents have to choose an institute for their kids. How do they know that the school they want to put their kids into is of a particular quality that they seek, infact what quality threshold
do they actually have & how does it affect their choice?

Do they compare the institute of choice with the really pathetic institutes out there? How do they decide that the institute they have compared is pathetic or excellent? I think it is a really skewed decision, in terms of naivety of the people, when it comes to choosing the right kind of educational institute. They almost always go by the opportunities that the institute might make them available with. An MBA from the IIM's will give them the assurance that they will be in the company of some of the intellectual elite of the nation, or it might open up placement / partnership opportunities for them in the future & so on. So compared to that, a lesser known B-School in some suburb of some town, whose name people wont remember if you told them you are from that place, is this b-school any less better or worse? The problem with this comparison is that the result is always going to be skewed towards the IIM's since they have a consistency in the quality of their output, unlike this B-school. So ultimately, the questions of choice boils down to the quality of people you are going to learn amongst. Again, you visit this institute & you have a dialog with one of their existing students, depending on the responses of that student about his own institute & his personal opinion, you might pull the trigger. So isnt the choice skewed again to the direction of someone else's quality opinion?

Then there are always those articles in the newspapers & leading publications about how the industry is not satisfied with they way the institutes are churning out people with no knowledge & no expertise whatsoever. The real talent crunch that they feel is not because of the institute or the high (supposedly) expectations of the corporates. I think, it is purely because of the way each individual student perceives what education is all about & defines the quality threshold for itself.

What I mean is, it is the student's responsibility that he can make the most of what it gets. If the student would always rely on external factors like, professors, company of classmates, popularity of the institute, location of the institute & so on, the degree of satisfaction from the education received will always vary. But if the student thinks that it its personal responsibility to educate itself, to learn from whichever resources available & to cope with whichever people it meets, I think the whole point of educational institutes being pathetic goes out the window.

I sulked a lot during my graduation for not being at a good institute, not being able to learn to my full potential. In fact sulking had become a way of life for those three years. But along with that I engaged in really nice discussions with my friends, classmates & also learned many things on my own, by reading what my peers at the college werent reading from my field of study. I subconsciously, had decided to educate myself. I did not readily realize it, but I had inherently set a pattern of self education & had taken up the responsibility to learn on my own. Surely whatever doubts that had surfaced, I had visited countless forums on the internet to sort them out, since I was sure, i wasn't the only one who had that doubt. I had taken charge, but I still sulked, since I was fixated on the concept of someone teaching to me, someone had the responsibility to make sure that I get somewhere in my life. I felt it wasnt just a monetary obligation for them to teach me well, but a moral one since it's a teachers duty to teach.

Morality shorality goes out the window, I now realize that every student should think practically towards his own education, surely if the external factors are good, it can benefit the student in more ways than we can think of, but just waiting on things to fall into their places is a sure way to fall back in the race.

Like Tom Cruise's lawyer, Thomas Tipp, in the movie Vanilla Sky tells him at Tom's bday party, "learn to be an asshole, claim your life", obviously the context differs, but thats what you need to be, a little bit of an asshole to accept the fact that its not people who will mold you, ITS YOU.

Visual Poetry

There is some intense power in music, not the divine one, but one that appeals to the brain at a raw, physical level. The place in the brain, processing sound to electrical signals traveling bit by bit to that part of the brain, which tells me if what I am listening to, is really good.

Its funny how Mozart's work was said to have the tunes which would enhance brain power, whatever that meant? But there is some sensory appeal, that music makes us feel, eventhough its just a whistle, or a guitar piece, or even your favorite band.

Four years back, when I first experienced the film, Vanilla Sky, I fell in love with the concept of using music in the movies at the right place at the right time, to create a super impact of the scene in front of you. Frankly the only film which made me feel like I should learn spanish so that I can watch the original spanish version, Obre Los Ojos. The film has been interwoven with an out-of-this-world soundtrack. It just makes each and every scene come to life, appeals to you even more, makes the characters feel more real than they already are, makes you believe in the immense power of the visual poetry.

I experienced such an appeal just an hour ago, with Heima. Heima is a documentary film made around and about the Icelandic Post Rock band, Sigur Ros (pronounced See your Rose), which means Victory Rose (i think). My discovery of this band & its subsequent addition to my mental playlist, was also a direct effect of Vanilla Sky. Their ever so popular an spectacularly magical track 'Njosnavelin' (pronounced Navelin, i believe) was featured at that scene in the film where we have come to know it all & the movie is just about to end. With stunning visuals & Tom Cruise falling to the ground from a sky scraper, his floating body enunciates the whole impact of the song & song enunciates the whole impact of the scene. I was perplexed & wanted to desperately find this song, which I eventually did & realized that I struck platinum.

It began as a love story & is now a quasi obsession for this band, whose name I learned to pronounce just 2 years ago. But its whole appeal is not just the music they play, but its the mental imagery they generate. You need to listen to their music in the middle of night or early in the morning, when there is no noise from the outside & its just you and the music. Then you have to close your eyes & allow them to take you on a journey of the aurora's, to the poles & deep across the mysterious dark of the space. This is, what I believe, is visual poetry, the sensory appeal I was talking about.

About the documentary; this documentary is a direct outcome of the wish of the band to play for their own country-folk, a sort of gesture to give something back to their beloved nation. After their world concert tour, they decided to go unannounced into the Icelandic country side, look for places to setup their equipment & start a concert, free, just for the local folks. Then moving around the whole nation to visit many villages in the icelandic country side, which btw is a beautiful, beautiful place (more about that later).

People, from the local towns, join them, everything is impromptu, no promotion, just go there, setup & play. The places where even the population was not enough to fill a small chappel, people from even the neighboring towns joined the townsmen for the concerts. Its not the concert or just he music I loved in Heima, it is the representation of the music. Using violin sticks to play the electric guitar & making a xylophone out of naturally available stones, is just the beginning. Their music not only explores the surreal Icelandic country side, but it also runs along with great concert visuals & stage lighting. The breath-taking videos of the shores, kids playing on the beach (presumably the band's & the crew's families), it all gives a gush of fulfillment. You suddenly get teleported to the place, the shore, the high mountain, you can almost feel the chilly Icelandic wind blowing on your face. The music is just the stimulus. Even the concert itself is visually stunning. Constructing sets on the spot in a matter of hours, or using local abandoned buildings or sometimes even setting up a concert bang in the middle of a field, just out there under the sky. The raw simplicity of their music, their inspiration & the visual collage it creates, it almost became meditative. It lasted for an hour and thirty minutes, but in the end I felt it had just begun. It can be simply called as the calmest experience of my life, what a way to end the exam!!!

The music also put some thoughts in my head, while listening to sigur ros, it almost felt like there has to be that one special lady sitting right besides you who gets the music just the same way you do, whose presence is like that visual collage that you cant wipe out even if you want to, the calm & the ease of living almost making you feel high. The question of what is life all about, becomes so irrelevant after this experience, that it seems as, whatever this life is it should never end, should always have this Icelandic tune playing somewhere in the background, at those special moments we come across.

Before today, I never really thought that a few songs or a post rock band could move me to such an extent, but like they say, "harr cheez ka first time hota hai".

Song for the moment: Hoppipola - Sigur Ros

Technorati Tags: Sigur Ros, Iceland, Heima

Parallel Encounters

Are we made to believe that what we see is what it is or are we used to believe what we see is what it is?

Throughout almost 23 years of my journey till the point I sit here in front of this 17’ screen writing this, is it what it is or is it just what I choose to see? The daring concept of the matrix does linger around somewhere, but I won’t aim at it.

I think, I would love to spend the rest of my life through what I call, parallel encounters. It is the ability to construct the world around you, the reality around you from your experiences from whichever source you can find. This is a very primitive process I believe which must have helped us survive till now, also primitive enough to know that that’s how babies might construct the world around them. Audio – visual perception is such a powerful concept that even the slightest disturbance in the reception can make your thoughts go on a drunken tread.

Richard Dawkins in his book “The god delusion” speaks about the burkhaa that the human race wears through whose slit we look at the world. How the world of the ultra-violets & the infrareds has been cleverly masked away from us. So what we perceive, what we experience thus becomes a benchmark to our perception of our life. Life, a loose word that we throw around, bound by the confines of a system we call the body & trapped in the undecipherable concept of the mind, is I think an omnibus of experiences that we conjure up throughout our living days. The gross thought of trying to figure out what everything is made of, might be the human arrogance that has led to our exponentially successful survival.

I refer to parallel encounter again within my own domain, through my very own burkhaa slit, the world being exposed to, people, books, movies, music, and nature. These media provide such a vast pool of information about the capacity of life, its sheer proliferation through our thoughts and the singular will of man to relate everything to some ultimate conclusion, as if that is where it all came from and that is where it’s going to end. A search for singularity starting from the singularity itself, like a circle.

I am one among the many of us who really want to know what things are made of, and am really sick of my own thought when I come no where close to relate it to some final answer. I fail to realize why do I need to do that. I may read, I may watch, I may learn, I may listen, I may imagine a lot of causal connections to this final answer, but it will always be skewed & limited to my helplessly myopic view towards it.

Through parallel encounters, we can weave concepts, understand the fabric of life through multiple alternatives, multiple visions of people who have tried to represent their own interpretation towards their final answer. A movie as bold as “into the wild” makes you think why is the social class structure so important to us that we constantly try and live for fitting in it? It speaks of how humans are consumed by the passion of career (including me), who are willing to let go of these parallel media to chase an imagined future. Why do we want to cling so dearly to the thought of being accepted by all? Why do we always have to listen to ourselves speaking endlessly about ‘what if’?

Isn’t what we have already, enough? What is enough? Is there anything like enough? The abyss of experience gets even deeper as we grow up. I have noticed radical changes in my thoughts ever since I began reading, which is totally beyond the reach of some people who have been very close to me ever since I was born. The sheer inaccessibility is all due to the singular difference of not having shared my parallel experiences in the exact same order that I have.

The concept is that if every experience is capable of making an infinitesimally small dent into the way we think and perceive reality, then is it possible that if someone shares the exact experiences in the exact order with someone else, will be molded in the same way? Will the two experiencers ever wonder that the thoughts or interpretations that they believe to have spontaneously arrived at are shared by someone else too?

Parallel encounter is a concept in its embryonic stage, I want to read more, watch more, listen to more until I can safely presume that I have been created by my experiences.