See Change @ The Alternative

A couple of months ago I was invited, by a couple of intrepid ex-engineer, present-social development types , to write a regular blog on design and sustainability for their forthcoming e-mag called The Alternative. I said yes, yes, of course, smartypants that I am.

The actual site, as you can see from the tantalizing splash page, is still being tested and tweaked and recoded, but I thought I'd cheat a little and link you to my first post for them, which is up on The Alternative's pre-alpha nukular test site, before the context of it loses steam. Time and tide and all that. I call the blog 'See Change', and this here's my first entry in it, huzzah huzzah: Big Innings.

And while you're sending my new blog some love, do take a moment to flip through the rest of the test site and pass on any valuable feedback and suggestions you may have, with regard to content, design and whatever else, to contact at thealternative dot in. You will be rewarded with a full recharge of good karma.

Update (as on December 2010):

What with this, that and the other, the 'See Change' blog never really materialised. The Alternative and my new magazine, Brainwave, are now engaged in a mutually-beneficial content-sharing partnership, so all's well in Toyland. In case you're a history buff, though, reproduced below is the first entry to 'See Change' that I'd presumptuously linked to above. For a bit of drama, think of it as the only existing recording of a dying baby's first wild cry. Who knows what it might've grown up into.


Big Innings


Just so we're clear on this from the very outset: design is not the slickness of packaging, the visual appeal of an expensive product or, for that matter, a pursuit of the wealthy. Design is, simply, the understanding and application of efficiency.

Good design leads to the elimination of clutter, the smoothness of operation and the ease of usability.

Good design isn't some esoteric technical thing that only designers are clued into: rather, it's a life principle that applies to all people, products, processes and interactions.

I'm going to come back to this wheezy theorizing in just a short while, but first let me regale you with a silly little anecdote. I promise to entertain.

--

My neighbourhood department store is my debit card's favourite exercise spot. Each time I visit it, my card sniffs the air, begins wagging its tail and joyously sprints out of my wallet with all the exuberance and vaguely idiotic innocence of an unleashed retriever. The fault is my own. I am a distracted shopper, and my debit card is only too eager to take advantage of my spaciness. The usual pattern is that I set out with the intention of buying a specific item, like a bag of sugar or a packet of milk or whatever. But intentions are like punctured prophylactics. They can lead to an embarrassment of undesired offspring. Take the other day, for example, when I set out to Thom's bakery and department store in Frazertown for a can of pesticide, for to deal with a minor cockroach crisis in my kitchen. Smarmy retail designers who possess no conscience had me wandering the aisles in a hypnotic daze for the next half hour.

You know how it is. To get at an item of your choice, you have to first pass by a stream of other shiny happy products that all scream at you from the shelves, pleading to be picked up and folded into your bosom like a mob of hungry babies. By the time I emerged from Thom's into the light of cold day, my head was spinning, my bank manager had suffered a myocardial infarction, and my arms were creaking with two large bags packed with aromatic phenyl, dish-rags, marshmallows, green tea, deodorant, flavoured yoghurt, orange juice, a couple of magazines, beer, honey-roasted peanuts, shaving razors, shampoo and a packet of MTR pongal. It was only when I reached home that I realized that I'd forgotten to buy the pesticide. (“The look on his face when he unpacks his bags and finds out he's a f***wit – priceless.”) A field day for Mastercard, cockroaches for me.

What we may infer from this, aside from the shuddersome image of me being chewed up by thousands of indestructible arthropods, is this: the more choice we have and the more information that's thrown at us, the more effort and time we are forced to consume in evaluating our options, and thereby the more likely we are to be dissatisfied with the outcome. People who study such things call the phenomenon 'choice fatigue'. They say that the leading cause of unhappiness in successful market economies, such as that of the USA and increasingly our own as well, is an over-abundance of choice. We adapt to this proliferating choice by picking things haphazardly and acquiring far more than we need. And the more we own, the more we get used to all the stuff surrounding us, and the less special our lifestyles feel to us. Is it any surprise, then, that highly consumerist, advanced societies feature at a remarkably low rank in world happiness indices?

--

While it's obvious that we often consume far more than we require, it's also worth assessing some of the wider-reaching – and subtler – effects of our fervid consumption. The first step to sustainable living is to understand the patterns in which people and societies interact, in figuring out the simple logic behind complex mechanisms. The objects we use and the objects that use us have their origins in a mind-boggling array of locations, and they are transported to us daily at a massive cost to the earth's resources.

Regard your morning cup of tea, for instance. Let's zoom in a little further, onto that nice Earl Grey teabag. That bag that consists of flavoured tea leaves wrapped in a special paper composed of fibres that are engineered to facilitate superior osmosis, while making sure that the paper doesn't tear from exposure to hot water. That bag that is held together by a staple pin and suspended from a little piece of printed cardboard by a string. Each of these components was likely sourced from a different part of the world. The tea leaves inside the bag are probably a blend of Darjeeling tea, Ceylon tea and a hint of Lapsang Souchong that was sourced from a mountain in the Fujian Province of China and processed in a Xingjian Province sweatshop. These tea-leaves are flavoured, in turn, with a citric oil extracted from the Bergamot orange that's produced in the south of Italy. The paper in the teabag is made of bleached, pulped abaca hemp from the Philippines or Columbia, and the staple pin that secures it is from the USA. The cotton string, it is possible, was bought by British traders from a corporation in Mozambique that in turn purchased heavily subsidized American cotton through a dubious middleman with links to organized crime. The card flap in your bag of tea was probably made in Ludhiana and printed in Hyderabad using French inks in a Japanese offset printer.

But that's not all.

The teabags were most likely shipped to India from England in standard-sized 8ft tall by 40ft long metal boxes on 350m long Panamax cargo vessels that can each carry 6,600 such metal boxes and are major contributors to air and water pollution, oil-spills and toxic ship-breaking.

Of course, all that comes only with your monthly supply of Her Majesty's favourite Earl Grey tea. Maybe there are other teas from other brands that aren't quite as catastrophic in their environmental impact. The lesson here is not that you should now become paranoid and freak out over the slightest detail of your existence. The idea is to be aware of the fact that the world is far more integrated than you might've earlier thought possible (god knows, the recession taught us that little lesson resoundingly enough). Going Swadeshi isn't about knee-jerk xenophobia. Going Swadeshi is about global thinking. It's an easily ignored fact that Gandhi was first a lawyer, then a wily politician, and only then a nationalist symbol. The stuff he said isn't merely the byproduce of fortune cookies.

--

Speaking of good old MKG. Every October, as always, the media and the government's lumbering PR department waggle their collective index fingers at you with that blithe Gandhian admonishment that you must “be the change that you want to see.” That sounds like a right pile of biscuits, but how does this cliché quotation translate in terms of practical, everyday application?

John Thackera, the Founder and Director of Doors of Perception, a company that interfaces between designers and grassroots innovators internationally, expands on the Mahatma's deceptively simple aphorism thus: “The imaginary, an alternative cultural vision, is vital in shaping expectations and driving transformational change. Shared visions act as forces of innovation, and what designers can do – what we all can do – is imagine some situation or condition that does not yet exist but describe it in sufficient detail that it appears to be a desirable new version of the real world.” Shared visions act as forces of innovation. Now there's a winning ticket. Thackera's point, I'm sure you'll sympathize, is summat shy of the kind of wide-eyed Lennon-ish poetry essential to sufficiently inspirational messages, but what it lacks in vague-ass preachiness, it makes up for with insight and pragmatism. Thackera advocates idealism with a backbone, a sort of structured pottiness, the very engine of creation.

We all have the ability to mentally conjure up ideal alternate worlds – the very fact that we complain so much about the one we currently inhabit ably demonstrates the vitality of our imaginations – but do we have the right tools to describe these worlds with the detail required to effect a lasting and efficient transition to them? Are these other worlds truly going to be fitter, happier and more productive than this one? You're not too sure? Well, I'm not either. So let's you and I use this space to discuss the possibilities.

Hullo, then, and welcome to 'See Change', a blog on design and sustainability for the real worl... no, no, three times no, strike that. Wayyy boring. I can already hear the hollow crannies of the internet exploding with the thunder of a million browser tabs being hastily closed all at once. Okay, here goes once again. Welcome to 'See Change', a blog on pattern recognition and identifying nodes of... er... ah, screw it. Too pseudo. Not happening. Right, let's start over, one last time.

Hey hey hey howdy ho! – you intelligent, beautiful, sexy potential-commenter, you! – and welcome to 'See Change': a blog about figuring out what we really need, and about cutting loose all the shit that we can bloody well do without. Amen.

Joy in the morning

After nearly thirty years of literary incarceration, Woody Allen staged a prison break last year with a new collection of short stories titled, appropriately, Mere Anarchy. The book hit our local shelves only recently, and it offers a textbook example of 20th century humour writing. 20th, and not 21st, because the references, sense of humour and world view, given the author's vintage, are somewhat dated.

What makes the writing relevant is Allen's very modern and exceedingly strange set of choices in subject matter, culled mostly from an eccentric jumble of news items and clippings that he cites at the beginning of each story. In the stories, he writes about futuristic fabrics, prayers sold on eBay, spiritual gurus and even a short misadventure featuring our favourite moustache-rack, Veerappan. What makes the book humourous, however? To answer that, one must examine what makes any writing humourous. And as this article is not really a review of Allen's book, as Allen's book is merely a McGuffin for our sordid purposes, we may now move onto the crux of the matter: the joke. Do you know how jellyfish commute? No? Wait for it.


The Cult of Laughter

The test of a seriously funny bit of prose (which phrase, given the context, is not so much an oxymoron as a guideline) is in how well it responds to the public transport's bilious eye. If your light reading for the morning's commute gets you guffawing like a nitrous oxide salesman – heedless of the many stares, affronted whispers and elbows lodged in your ribs – what you have in your hands, unless you are some manner of idiot, is a piece of A-grade clownery. It is often a misconception that the labels on library racks are efficient signifiers of their contents – the Commuter Guffaw Test is perhaps the only true indicator of a well-timed ticklebomb; indeed, the most reliable 'humour section' is that bus seat you just fell off laughing. Speaking of which. The one about the jellyfish? They travel via octobus. Hahaha. Octobus! Get it? Oh hahaha... Yeah.

So it turns out that Humour, as per leading encyclopedia-makers, is not classified under genre fiction, presumably because good writers of all dispositions must necessarily employ some element of wit in their works. Having said that, there are some among these writers who are funnier by far than others, and a comic elite among even that minority who are so explosively funny as to seduce you into disregarding your surroundings and startling your fellow passengers. Who are these lords and ladies of LOL, you ask? Here is a brief, severely non-comprehensive humour-fiction overview:

Early Days

It all began, roughly 0.25% of a millennium back in 1759, with Tristram Shandy, one of the greatest comic characters ever to... Ah, no, confound it. Let us begin at the beginning. It all began, Eeyore's years ago in 1605, with Don Quixote, a nutty geriatric given to impassioned daytime hallucinations. If the strength of a work of art is in its premise, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha is a tricep-flexing mural-painting windmill among a goggle of illiterate giants. Miguel Cervantes' picaresque novel, chronicling the misadventures of a childish imagination trapped in an old man's body, birthed several generations of pretenders and a few worthy heirs.

Chief among the latter was Lawrence Sterne's hilariously overtechnical masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – considered by many to be the greatest comedy novel written in the English language, and also perhaps the first instance of a postmodern literary technique. One of the central conceits of the novel is that it never really seems to begin, owing to the narrator's propensity to wander off into various tangents at the slightest whimsy. By the end of the book Shandy has, at considerable length, said everything about everything without really saying anything about anything. It is not hard to imagine an 18^th century Londoner, having just read an embarrassing anecdote involving Shandy's emasculated uncle Toby, falling mirthfully off her horse-drawn carriage.

And Now for Something Completely Different

The idea of wit that gave shape to current day literature, a major revision on the earlier situational humour, owes much to the genius of one Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, the undisputed monarch of the descriptive sentence. By the time of his death in 1975, Plum, as he liked being called, had written nearly a hundred books, every one of them a master-class in creative writing, a body of work that includes novels, plays, short-stories and musicals. His influence on modern writing, humour and otherwise, is immeasurable, evidenced by stylistic echoes in the work of Douglas Adams, Woody Allen, Salman Rushdie and countless others.

Wodehouse's novels are usually built around farcical, increasingly complex plots involving a rag-tag bunch of characters with peculiar eccentricities, but the real magic of his writing is in imagery so unpredictable, and yet so appropriate (“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin”), that the effect on one's ulnar nerve is instantaneous. If one were to draw a map of new humour, P.G.Wodehouse could well be the bright focus, with various comic luminaries, from Roald Dahl to Stephen Fry to Nick Hornby, radiating out from the center.

This history of sorts, of course, is by no means extensive, as conveniently disclaimed earlier in this article. There are several great names missing from our panorama: American humourists, ranging from Mark Twain to Robert Benchley to that one-man publishing army of the internet age, Dave Eggers; and Indians like the prolific R.K.Narayan and the forgotten G.V. Desani. Oh, and women humourists like Erica Jong, Mae West and our own Manjula Padmanabhan (may their tribe increase), who are more often than not unjustly relegated to the footnotes of humour writing. But my intention was merely to set up the joke. The punchline is in the reading.

Recommendations

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
If you don't have the patience to sit through the unabridged Don Quixote, here's an equally satisfying alternative. Toole tragically committed suicide before he could see his first and only novel in print, but his lead character – Ignatius J. Reilly, the fat, flatulent philosopher from New Orleans – still freely roams the humour hall of fame with hot dog stand in tow and a certain Myrna Minkoff watering the brain.

Leave it to Psmith - P.G. Wodehouse
Two of Plum's favourite franchises mash up at Blandings Castle – the droopy Lord Emsworth plus family plus the Empress, Emsworth's prize pig, match their collective wits with the prolix Psmith ('p' silent) – and much hilarity ensues. A book that courts many many a re-read.

Nonsense Novels - Stephen Leacock
A series of fun short fiction parodying the classics of literature. If you've had it with pulp detectives or think Russian writing is for tossers, Leacock's absurd comedy will have you unbound and off the page before you can say “Karamazov”. Books by this great Canadian humourist are increasingly difficult to find (except, in this rare instance, on Project Gutenberg).

Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated – James Thurber
A collection of early flash fiction, American fables with punchline substituted for morals, for the morally ambiguous. Seething with Thurber's trademark cartoon humour.

All About H Hatterr – G.V. Desani
Out of print, out of sight, and just about out of mind. But you would have to be out of your mind not to read this book if you can, by some miracle, manage to get hold of it. Salman Rushdie, who compared Desani's book to Tristram Shandy, thusly described it: “Hatterr’s dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language... My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him.”

My Uncle Oswald - Roald Dahl
A host of early 20^th century celebrities, including Picasso, Freud, Einstein and Joyce, among others, get duped into participating in one of the most ingenious scams ever thought up. Instruments of torture: chocolate truffles, sex and the Sudanese Blister Beetle. From the insidious mind that also gave us Henry Sugar and Willy Wonka.

Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
An extreme Jewish sex comedy. 'Nuff said.

The Colour of Magic – Terry Pratchett
If Wodehouse and Tolkein had an evil lovechild, it would bear a remarkable similarity to Terry Pratchett. The Colour of Magic is the first in Pratchett's hugely popular Discworld series, in which the world is not only flat, it comes attached to four ginormous space-elephants and a galactic superturtle named the Great A'Tuin.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams
Take your favourite flatfoot thriller and throw in quantum cats, dodos, time travel and electric monks. Sci-fi comedy at its finest.


An edited version of this article appears today in the 'Lifestyle' section of DNA, Mumbai. Embedded below is a pdf of the article as it appeared in print:

The Boy Who Knew Too Little

Book Review: Sam's Story by Elmo Jayawardena

The problem, as well as the advantage, with a first-person narrator who isn't conventionally intelligent is that his vocabulary is essentially limited. He is unable to express complex ideas succinctly -- instead, he is forced to lead you, anecdote by painful anecdote, shorn of chronology or method, toward a decidedly unclinical conclusion. In the process you become part of the narrator's inner journey, and what you discover at the end of it may be far more sincere and open-ended than a cleverer man's considered opinion.

Sam, the naive Sinhalese protagonist of Elmo Jayawardena's gentle bildungsroman, Sam's Story, has a very such tendency to let his thoughts ramble. He reminisces fondly about his life as a factotum at the River House, the residence of a wealthy Burgher family in Colombo and the simple joys that came with it. At a liesurely pace, he describes his employers, their household, their children who visited once a year from their studies abroad, the family pets, his worrisome Tamil colleagues and the many demands of his job. Mixed in with his perambulations of this upmarket setting are older memories of his rustic native village, of his mother and siblings and their desperate struggle with poverty, and his own untroubled existence as the uneducated, jobless, witless eldest son of the family.

Jayawardena's book eschews the traditional method of subdividing his narrative using chapters, choosing to tell the story of Sam instead through a series of short vignettes, as if the narrator were conversing with you rather than writing a memoir. This approach, combined with the simplicity of its prose and a steady stream of Suppandi-ish insights, lends the book an easy charm and accessibility that often borders on the irritating. And it would stop at being a simple tale about a simple boy, if it weren't for the book's volatile setting: Sri Lanka of 2001, a country ripped asunder by the dogs of war.

It goes without saying that the tensions of a conflicted land are bound to spill over into the minds of its subjects, however far removed they may be from the actual physical violence. As Sam realizes over the course of the book, even the blissfully ignorant cannot be spared by calamity. The war provides his otherwise jumbled thoughts an inescapable context. When first acquainted with Sam's philosophies on life, one is shocked, most of all, at the banality of the boy's racism. He "hates" his room-mate, a Tamil named Leandro, because "he is of the other kind". The depth of his understanding doesn't seem to exceed the convenient fiction, initially, that the Tamils are the aggressors and that his own people are merely defending themselves. But then we are introduced to Sam's brothers, who are both forcefully enlisted in the national army, one of whom is killed "guarding some unknown road that went to some unheard-of place." In the end, it is when the war makes its way into the River House itself that Sam grows to fully appreciate the larger picture: that when someone who loves you and provides for you is killed, it ultimately doesn't matter who did the killing. All that matters is the peace that you have forever lost.

To his credit, Jayawardena never lets the frame of war disrupt his primary purpose of animating Sam's character. The threat of violence stays in the far backdrop, rearing its head only now and then, if only to lend colour to the hero's thoughts. He also tries hard not to allow Sam's limited intellect to become an excuse to talk down to the reader. The biggest achievement of Sam's Story, however, is the proof that a complex story needn't be driven by loud metaphors, convoluted plot-lines or the piling on of a million characters -- that good literature can come from the patient and sympathetic handling of even the most artless protagonist.

Appearing today in the Sunday Herald, Deccan Herald

No Soap Radio

Pretend you're filling out an online registration form and answer these: What do you feel about Shashi Tharoor's over-hyped bovine tweet? How did you respond to last year's financial meltdown? Did you panic and buy a bunch of masks when the pigs first took flight? How did you react to the big fuss over those old Danish cartoons? During an election, do you cast your vote based on the analysis of a candidate's personal strengths or with regard to her party affiliation? Are you an early adopter of new technologies? Have you ragged your juniors in college? Do you always have a ready opinion about things or do you wait for a popular consensus to emerge? Do you compulsively update your Facebook status message every half hour? Are you a rising star in Mafia Wars? Do you like the feeling of control it gives you?

If you see a pattern to this cross examination, if you're familiar with the problems posed here or even take a strange comfort in responding to them, it's because they all deal with easily identifiable instances of group behaviour, where the collective assumes importance over the individual. Are you a cog in the machine or a spanner in the works? Easy to answer. Very few people would own up to the former, while most would happily claim to be heroes or rebels of some sort. Less easy to relate to, however, is, say, the strange connection between the torture and abuse of prisoners of war under the Bush Administration, and the Internet Movie Database functioning as a scale-free network. Over the past fifty years or so, however, we've learnt to slowly understand and quantify such odd dynamics, from the results of numerous studies conducted by behavioural psychologists. Abu Ghraib and IMDb, for instance, are the descendants of two far-reaching social phenomena studied by the highly regarded American psychologist Dr. Stanley Milgram.


Back in the early '60s, having observed the trial of Adolf Eichmann, intrigued by the process of assignation of responsibility and blame for Nazi atrocities, Milgram began a series of controlled experiments at Yale University that tested the willingness of regular people to bend to a superior will. Milgram's theories were also informed, tellingly, by the thesis of fellow psychologist Solomon Asch's Conformity experiment: that most individuals will unquestioningly side with a majority, even if the majority were obviously wrong in its conclusions. Milgram's 'obedience to authority' experiments consisted of three people – an experimenter, a trained actor complicit with the experiment, and an outside volunteer – and a simulated shock generator. The experimenter presided over the study, giving orders to the volunteer. The volunteer, assigned the role of 'teacher', would be required to read out a series of memory puzzles to the actor, who took on the role of 'learner'. This learner would be placed in an adjacent room, separated by glass, and connected up to a set of wires. Every time the learner answered a puzzle wrong, the experimenter would order the teacher to administer an electric shock to the learner. As the experiment wore on and more questions were answered wrong, the voltage of the electric shocks would be raised incrementally – from mild 15v shocks all the way up to a fatal 450v.

The shock box, unknown to the volunteer 'teacher', was a fake, and the actor merely pretended to receive shocks, but the effect of the deception was real. The actor's reactions ranged from a show of slight discomfort to screams of pain to feigned unconsciousness. Contrary to all optimistic expectations, the results of the experiment proved that a massive 65% of the 'teachers' tested continued to administer shocks all the way up to the 450v mark, especially if assured by the experimenter that they were absolved of responsibility for their actions. Milgram concluded, frighteningly, that “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” So. Have you ragged your juniors in college? Were you in complete control of your actions?

The question – and illusion – of control takes on new meaning in the internet age, where all spaces are linked up seamlessly and all information is digital. In this age, the authority figure becomes the network, and its behaviour becomes less predictable as it is scaled outward. The behaviour of social networks is predicated, once again, on research by Dr. Milgram. He first discovered the Small World phenomenon, which postulates that there are six degrees of separation between any two random persons. This idea, which Milgram studied using chain letters, is now practically evident in internet super-networks like Facebook, Twitter and Orkut. Upcoming products such as Google's Wave will serve to further sever boundaries between communication devices such as email, chat, content-sharing, and social networking.

The phenomenon has dramatically shrunk our world, but it also poses new questions about the merits of collective thinking. There's anonymity behind avatars and in groups, but there's also lack of accountability. Social networks contribute greatly to the wealth of human knowledge, but they also eat up large chunks of your personal information and convert them to market statistics that eventually dehumanize you. Do you compulsively update your Facebook status message every half hour? Think about who profits most from these updates. There are bigger and bigger arenas available for the public expression of one's opinion, not all of which is useful or even benign, a lot of which naively assumes the human social prerogative to be collective intelligence as opposed to herd behaviour. How did you react to those Danish cartoons? Or to Shashi Tharoor's 140-character humour? How and why did you arrive at those specific conclusions?

Taking a larger view of society, looking on it as if it were an anthill, is never an easy proposition. You're constantly forced to deal with the possibility that your thoughts and actions take place at the mercy or behest of strangers. Of course, knowing your restrictions is half the battle won. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

Appearing in the Sunday Herald, Deccan Herald, 4th Oct 2009.