Current Events

I can't think of any one subject to write about in this post. Therefore, I will ramble on about a few current events.

First of all, there's the death of Steve Jobs. On my Facebook feed alone, I have had at least four friends provide a link to the speech he gave at Stanford, five who shared the famous Apple advertisement featuring Einstein and Gandhi, six different versions of the Apple logo altered in some way to pictorially commemorate Jobs, nine friends who posted variations of the "Jobs/Cash/Hope" joke, and about a dozen who came up with iSomething status updates - iSad, iMourn, etc. I'm not kidding. iSwear.

There have also been innumerable articles, TV programs, blog posts and speeches eulogizing Jobs. Most of them have only restated information that was already known to most people. That's why it was refreshing to come across this piece, by John Gruber, where he provides a personal touch to a lesser known detail:

Those grass stains [on his shoes] filled my mind with questions. How did he get them? When? They looked fresh, two, three days old, at the most. Apple keynote preparation is notoriously and unsurprisingly intense. But not so intense, those stains suggested, as to consume the entirety of Jobs’s days. There is no grass in Moscone West.

Surely, my mind raced, surely he has more than one pair of those shoes. He could afford to buy the factory that made them. Why wear this grass-stained pair for the keynote, a rare and immeasurably high-profile public appearance? My guess: he didn’t notice, didn’t care. One of Jobs’s many gifts was that he knew what to give a shit about. He knew how to focus and prioritize his time and attention. Grass stains on his sneakers didn’t make the cut.

Late last night, long hours after the news broke that he was gone, my thoughts returned to those grass stains on his shoes back in June. I realize only now why they caught my eye. Those grass stained sneakers were the product of limited time, well spent. And so the story I’ve told myself is this:

I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.

Then, the Nobel prizes were announced. As usual, the prize for literature went to someone I hadn't even heard of, leave alone someone whose works I have read. And, as always, that did not trigger in me even the slightest inclination to want to read some of that writer's works. Off the top of my head, I can't think of even one winner of the Nobel prize for literature whose writing I have enjoyed reading. The reason has been best articulated by R. K. Narayan who, in reaction to the fact that he did not get the prize in 1986 even though he was one of the leading contenders, speculated on what the committee responsible for making the decision must have felt about him:

…His writing is too simple, and too readable, requiring no effort on the part of the reader. …He has created a new map called Malgudi in which his characters live and die. Story after story is set in the same place, which is not progressive, a rather stagnant background….. We hope some day Narayan will develop into a full-fledged writer deserving our serious consideration.

The day the Nobel prize goes to someone whose writing is simple, readable and requires no effort on the part of the reader, I promise I will read the works of that author.

I have not watched even a single match of the Champions' League T20 (CLT20) cricket tournament. I am delighted to note that my Facebook feed has been amazingly silent on this too. I have many cricket-crazy friends but not one of them came up with any post or status update related to CLT20 until yesterday, when I saw just one post that read "RCB in CLT20 final - yay!" If the Facebook barometer is anything to go by, interest in this is waning. It may be too early to make a definitive prediction, but the trend is heart-warming.

I hardly watch any TV these days. The only program I make an effort to catch is "Kaun Banega Crorepati" (KBC). Amitabh Bachchan makes it truly worthwhile. To me, the most admirable thing about the show is the compassion, empathy, grace and gentle humor with which Bachchan relates to the common man. He is good enough as an actor to fake those emotions but I would like to think that he is being genuine. I am a little concerned, though, that the Left-Liberal "intellectuals" of India might brand him as a "fundamentalist".

After all, he did the Gujarat tourism commercials for free.

Then, in one episode of KBC, there was a question, "Which Indian Chief Minister's middle name is 'Damodardas'?" The participant did not know the answer and took the "Expert Opinion" lifeline. The expert said, "It's Narendra Modi, and I am a great fan of his work." Ooooooh, it may not have been the Big B who actually said that, but it did happen on his show, right?

In another episode, there was a contestant whose husband was a farmer who had committed suicide. She too sought the expert's opinion on a question and Bachchan then asked the expert, who was an economist, for his view on why those suicides happened. The expert said that such incidents were not at all unavoidable and the only thing that was required was good and efficient administration and that, while the condition of farmers in Maharashtra may be deplorable, just 200 km away, in Gujarat, the farmers were thriving and happy. Tut tut, Big B, how can you allow such brazen propaganda to be aired?

I will leave you with this clip, which was one of my favorite moments from the previous edition of KBC (KBC 4):