Posts filed under ‘Arts’
Invent Meaning of Own Life – Happier for Trouble
Am not the first to decipher that this is not a comic done by the honorary artist behind ‘Calvin and Hobbes’, monsieur Bill Watterson, as many people have beat me to it in this comments page at Reddit (here be dragons; you’ve been warned) but the hypertext led me to the source at ZenPencils and the root of the quote which is from a speech given to the graduating class at Kenyon College by Watterson on May 20, 1990 which has been beatifully illustrated by Gavin.
For those grappling to transcribe or frantically search for the exact text in the comic, look no further for it has been captured as well –
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake.
A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
Hat-tip to my friend Nandita Ravindran for the rabbit hole who said that I was the first one she thought of sharing this with when she stumbled upon ImgUR.
Rain and Umbrella – Vaana Vallappa, Law Challappa
Taj Mahal, Pyramids are Empire Sponsored Tombs
Looking deeper, I questioned why would the guy in the picture be sick and pale and green? Could it be that idiot sod thinks this was not an advertisement but death caused/sponsored by some cola company? I could not put a finger on it but it made me wonder about tombs and sponsorship. This is hardly a futuristic phenomenon for there are instances all around us if we really looked. What is the Taj Mahal really but a tomb sponsored by erstwhile Mughal empire as a proxy display of power and wealth? It is high time before people saw it for what it is than some crazy idea of eternal love. Even so, there is documented evidence of slave labour, severed hands and whip deaths. Ditto with pyramids of Egypt which have traditionally been an icon of engineering prowess and cultural superiority but they are nothing but tombs of power-mad god-complex kings who even in death wanted to cross the river Styx first-class and craved for a premium deluxe specical place in heaven. No sirree, heaven was not enough to these buggers. They wanted box seats to watch the play as it unfolds down below. It makes me look at all these so-called wonders of the world with new eyes unveiling the monstrosity behind the farce and the ignoble intentions/cruelty behind these structures. To jest, all this started with a ponderance with why a cartoon character was puzzled in some random image of some booklet.
Locked Out of Dreams – Strange Disturbing Visual
There is a poem lurking in somewhere but that is for wimps, er romantics. I intend to express myself using imagery being a self-confessed visual person. Hard too.
USA Pig-Eat Binge Gorge Earth – Simpsons T-Shirt
This is a screen-grab from an episode where Homer Simpson wears this t-shirt in Brazil. It is a very graphic image of evil gluttony with a challenging “Try and Stop US” bumper sticker caption. Sometimes, even Simpsons crew draw realistic depictions.
Beggars Can Be Readers – Breakfast Newspaper
Mistakes in Causal Direction – GDP and Education
When you find a correlation between two phenomena, you’re tempted to conclude there’s a causal relation as well. The problem is that this causal relation – if it exists at all – can go either way. It’s a common mistake – or fraud – to choose one direction of causation and forget that the real causal link can go the other way, or both ways at the same time and space. Or not.We often think that people who like violent video games are more likely to show violent behavior because they are incited by the games to copy the violence that’s featured in these games. But can it not be that people who are more prone to violence are more fond of violent video games? We choose a direction of causation that fits with our pre-existing beliefs. Another widely shared belief is that uninformed and illiterate voters will destroy democracy, or at least diminish its value. No one seems to ask the question whether it’s not a diminished form of democracy that renders citizens apathetic and uninformed. Maybe a full or deep democracy can encourage citizens to participate and become more knowledgeable through participation. A classic example is the correlation between education levels and GDP. Do countries with higher education levels experience more economic growth because of the education levels of their citizens? Or is it that richer countries can afford to spend more on education and hence have better educated citizens? Maybe both. Or perhaps it is just old boy Pareto Law. Or simply, random twist of fate.
Bakes your noodles, no? These are chicken-egg problems and hence, solvable.
Joy of Giving – Ample Supply of Goodness – Banyan
Though there is a lot of suffering, there are also a large number of people and institutes and corporates doing their best to alleviate it. Goodness is not in short supply. Buddha said this in his sermon on charity, “Hard it is to understand: by giving away our food, we get more strength; by bestowing clothing on others, we gain more beauty; by donating abodes of purity and truth, we gain greate treasures; give till it hurts.” Most other religions and prophets have preached the same. In a country such as India where more than half of the population lives on less than 20-rupees daily (or 50c, hey, it is far less than international yardstick of poverty at 2$/day, interesting), it is the responsibility of the privileged fellow citizens to change the skewed balance between the haves and have-nots. Basic needs like food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, water, electricity that several of us take for granted are even today a struggle for several. Fortunately, the conscience of the common man is awake and alive. So are corporate hearts and dedication of NGOs.
Sounds too much of an advertisment but well, thank goodness that there is some good still left although I opine that poor are poor because they are suggestable and keep electing criminals time after time after time who are responsible for this mess which is a serious problem than is acknowledged. Maybe they deserve to suffer.
Do You Drink Milk – Kid Home Theatre
Story goes that my nephew absolutely hated milk and any of its sidekicks like yogurt, buttermilk and horrors, even ice-cream. As any parents would do, they would tell him that drinking milk would make him strong and excel in sports and studies. But this was of no avail because both parents were not smart nor athletic at all. The kid just could not make the connection. One day, an LPG cylinder guy came to the house and he was quite simply the strongest guy the kid has ever seen because he was moving the cylinders like toys. Visibly impressed, the kid hounded the worker and finally mustered the courage to ask him, “Uncle, do you drink milk?”. The guy was bemused and not knowing what to say, looked around only to find us as surprised as him, if not more so. Finally, he answered in the affirmative. The kid immediately ran to the mother and asked for milk and has never complained of it in the many years since. Mothers can be great inventors of necessitating milk but most of the times, I suppose, kids are greater discoverers of positive effects of milk.
Authorized Graffiti Paintings on Bangalore Walls
I can only imagine what the future directions to lost tourists would be. “Go left on the painting that is about grief and suffering inviting the viewer to contemplate the evanescence of life speaking to the horror of ones own mortality and from there, take first right to the rather safe, predigested, bucolic genre scenes depicting the crass shallow values of the human condition”. While the former could be a banian advertisement and latter, a cinema poster, a tourist will be able to find the address in question and empty his bladder on the avant garde piece of a hole in the ground.
Muslim Women in Hijab/Burqa – Where is Choice?
While the media has no dearth of stories of women suffering under the Islamic tyranny, there is not much hue and cry over France, Germany, Netherlands, Canada trying to ban any form of head covering in public institutions for years. But this is only for Muslim women because Christian nuns and orthodox Church masses (which again force women to cover their hair) are excluded. What hypocrisy and double standards. No? When one says this is a heated discussion in Europe, where is the buzz/kill? The best reasons they can give is people having a sense of discomfort on seeing a vieled woman and revoking memories of 9/11 which is a load of bull-shit. How many burqa-clad women were involved in that relatively trivial incident? It is plain Islamophobia and religious stereotyping at play here and not a clash between religion and progressive secular culture as it is made out to be because if it is about feminism then, no one should be dictating what (not) to wear. At the heart of all of this should be the the right of women to wear what they want. Plain and simple. Maybe it just needs some PR spin. Wear the burqa to be protected from sun and stay fair thereby empowering women because beauty triumphs all. How about an environmental spin saying that wearing hair-covering gear makes men less excitable leading to less sex, less rapes/population. Or perhaps, an economics spin based on less lewd thoughts… Well, you get the drift.
You Dont Mess With Nataraja – Kick Ass
Better be careful when gyrating before the lord of the dances…
Love Can Do Anything – Music Heals
Advertising Agency: Ade, Bogota, Colombia; Creative Director: Nacho Martinez
Art Directors: Leonardo Silva, Cristian Borrero, Tomas Casallas
Copywriter: Eduardo Vargas; Illustrator: Miguel Ang; Published: October 2009
Sea Port of Kakinada – Tourism Disappoints
I have been to the place in question but it never lived up to the billing of the article. In fact, I did not even know that the dusty hot hamlet had a history going for it till I read this piece. I guess it is the same with everyone. We read all these pamphlets and brochures in tourism shops and books and when we land in the promised place, it is just the same as your place – only more confusing and boring. No one is feeding exotic food, dancing in crowded dance clubs, giving away freebies et al. No Sirree!
Rejoice Ye Poor! Prosperity Beckons – Rosling – TED
Enough of sunshine optimism which does not suit a dark and broody conflicted scientist/artist like me. Really, Rosling. Really? To paraphrase some words from my comic friend, Mike Slacknerney, these TED talks are like donuts. Sure, its all fluff, have no intrinsic value and there are big gaping holes in the middle… BUT, if you make it sweet enough with mass media hype, intellectual tripe, chequered academic accomplishments, conjectured reality and market forces, sugar-glaze it and importantly, add little coloured sprinklers and graphs to it, people will lap it up – while cheering in dunce hats. Humans are suckers that way.
Developing world is developing for the better and faster than the West of yore? Puhleeze. I will not even go into the epistemology of “development” (air quotes) but here is what I see all around me in no particular order – poverty, traffic, pollution, unemployment, disease, violence, indecency, scarcity, waste, dust, starvation, illiteracy, death, oppression, conflict, malnutrition, famine, cheating, stupidity, abuse, cheapness, exploitation, debt, slavery, greed, corruption, sleaze, vulgarity and just about every conceivable ill that has been documented and jogging for the worst at an alarming rate. I tend to think am a cynic extraordinaire but could factor that maybe, I have been looking in the wrong places. Or taking the wrong samples. Or accessing the wrong data. But I doubt it for 5.5 billion people who have to face such putrid facts of life by direct in-your-face observation and the 4.5 billion who actually have to experience it on a daily basis are hard to miss.
I do miss and dont see a lot though. Free roads like Sweden. Summer houses for all like Norway. Free health like France. Luxury SUVs for all like USA. Free education like UK. Public-art architecture like Spain. Freedoms like Netherlands. Sports facilities like Australia. Green energy like Germany. Cleanliness like New Zealand. Water security like Denmark. Oil independence like Canada. Milk surplus like Switzerland. Robot gadgetry like Japan. Intellectual culture like Italy… yada yada yada. Believe me, I have been to a lot of places and there is no parallel or progression from ‘survival’ to ‘drudgery’ to ‘life’ for the 90% of the world. Hence, such statistics and talks anger me.
The theme is that most developing countries today have similar development metrics (child mortality rate, life expectancy etc.) to western countries in the early part of the century – a world ravaged by war, rampant apartheid, legalized slavery, fuelled by imperialism and in general a shitty era to be a human unless you are not an aristrocrat. But poor people should rejoice. They are comparable and statistically better off to the poor in the West 150 years back. Ah, the thrills of schadenfreude. Yes, the West developed to where poor countries want to be but we all know they had a headstart with occupied wealth and zero competition of planetary resources. They were environmentally superior and had a clean slate to rape the Earth but now the poor countries inhabit an impoverished planet. And yes, the West back then did not have the West to strangle any indigenous development and shove complicated models. In the duration of the talks (36 minutes), I can dole out numbers of how many people must have died out of sheer helplessness and hopelessness due to a combinatorial lack/scarcity of food, water, clothing, shelter and health. But enough of my words. Let us see what Alan Kay has to say in one of his writings now taken out of context and yet made a bit more contextual to this discussion.
Shakespeare had Puck say, “What fools these mortals be!” He meant not so much the modern meaning (that we are idiots and simpletons), but that we are all too easily fooled about almost everything. Anthropologists tell us that modern human types have been around for 40,000 years (perhaps as long as 80,000 years). But the “real science” that has revealed so many surprising and powerful things about the world is only a few hundred years old. We have been fooling ourselves about most things for tens of thousands of years. Now theater, TED talks and other forms of fiction work because we not only are easily fooled, but we *like* to be fooled.
For example, a TED talk is a dark place with lots of rich people watching clever looking people on stage say good sounding words embellished by entertainment so that we are able to pretend that the scenery is not cardboard and that they are really immersed in somewhere great and worldchanging. Another good metaphor is Marshall McLuhan’s: “I don’t know who discovered water but it wasn’t a fish!”. He meant we are the fish and the water is our beliefs/assumptions, most of which have been with us so pervasively as to have disappeared from view. The only way for a fish to keep doing what it is doing is to continue living in water – even in an acquarium with things like TED the fake rocks and external food to keep the myth that all is great with the artificial world. For those who want to come outside (like me), there are slim pickings of survival unless a random mutation kicks in to develop lungs and ultimately, become an ape. It is all up to chance.
[edit] This post and accompanying cartoon have been commented by none another than the uber-analyst Hans Rosling. So, all references to 50-years/half-century have been replaced by 150-years/century – even in the cartoon. This makes my argument all the more striking. The poor world is where the West was 150 years ago but yet, there must be much rejoicing with the state of affairs and the impending progress. It is just a matter of time and would take only about the next 50+ years or so to get Mozambique and their ilk to be a Sweden of 2009. Good times ahead. It also reminds me of concepts of entropy, Zeno’s paradox and I wish I could do a Rip van Winkle but let us not digress…
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Tribute to A R Rahman by M F Husain
Naked Man Manouver to Seduce a Woman – HIMYM
I say the time has come to give these Neanderthals (are they people? I’m not sure) their due. After all, they gave us the wheel. They gave us fire. And based on cave paintings found in Bulgaria over the weekend, they gave us: The Naked Man.
Step 1:
You and the woman you clubbed, enjoy rotting deer carcass by torch light.
Step 2:
Your woman steps out to use the little girl’s cave. You take off your loin cloth. 
Step 3:
Delighted by your boldness and unharnessed masculinity, you make the two-humped mastodon.
Note:
This works…2 out of 3 times.
Primitive? Yes. While modern-day man may have more sophisticated means at his disposal to seduce a woman (eg., alcohol, Barry White), let’s not forget these pre-historic innovators were fearless. Not only did they live among saber-tooth tigers and dangerous wooly mammoths, but also lady cavemen who were really, really hairy.
Above are the aforementioned cave paintings and a description by a legendary archaeologist who prefers to remain anonymous. Let’s just say he survived a temple of doom, a last crusade, and some really stupid crystal aliens.
People in Bubbles
There is also something exploring the bombardment of sorrow (an extension of how I think such campaigns are made in the first place) and resulting fatigue. But I wonder that at the core of all has something to do with human nature. It is my belief that from the moment we are born, we wrap ourselves around with a bubble…
As long as we feel alright in the bubble – which is like always – we dont bother much about anything else. Call it survival instincts or selfish behaviour or plain bliss or whatever, we are all in our own bubbles.
Brains in Prisons
I think this is because, after a stage – an early one – the brain gets imprisoned. It is a prisoner in its own cranium as depicted here …
Some of you may argue that prisoners could change but change is constant and there needs to be a certain flexibility for this to happen. Unfortunately, things are more like concretized and whats-that-word? well, wired.
Aaja Ve – Sona
Lost Mail/Male Scuzees
Ann Telnaes – Pulitzer Cartoonist
I like the work of Ann Telnaes. So does, Pulitzer.
TBWA Attitude
Some nice adverts done by TBWALONDON.
Useful for C-Works? Maybe. But their attitude as per their write-up of “disruption” is quite cool.
Cartoonizized – Science ‘n’ Nature
1. Mathematics is the language of nature
2. Everything around us can be represented and understood via numbers
3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge.
Therefore: There are (mathematical) patterns everywhere in nature
More than the verbatim quote, what always fascinated me was that we are actually surrounded by science and technology and use them in making almost every decision. Legend goes that a human today comes in contact with more than 31 microprocessors in a day. And our mating, eating and friendship choices are also very mathematical, chemical, sociological and political.
Anyway, science weaves its magic everywhere which reminded me of something I scribbled ages ago. Of showing how we humans and indeed most animals do implicit calculations of math, physics, chemistry, weigh choices, solve problems etc. More recently, a CBS TV show, Numb3rs builds on the same.
For example, a footballer trying to take a free-kick. Or throwing a dart. Or hitting a snooker ball. Or calculating the hip size of a woman for mating. Or a cheetah timing its bursty run. Or a frog timing its flip of the toungue. Or a hummingbird calculating the refraction angles when going for a fish. Or deciding how much salt to add to get the right taste. Or a lion thinking of demand-supply economics when deciding to hump. You get the hint. We can do a whole series on this too.
University and Student Loans
Sreedhar Cartoons
Sreedhar Eenadu Cartoons
I guess most of you would not be able to put the stuff in context (they are all very Indianized) but I like them for the minimalism in drawing and words.
Dont know how difficult they are to follow (if indeed one would sacrifice style) but they are nice drawings on their own. Me thinks.
Hello to TCJJ!
“The Citizens Journalism Journal” (TCJJ) is an open journal in which, we (the citizens) will contribute cartoons/articles on the topic of “citizen journalism” (CJ) phenomenon from a social, economic, research and worldly viewpoint and/or standpoint.
For starters, we will focus on a commentary of photo-journalism, picture-desks and similar. The journal will also seek to be a nice repository of links and research by/for/to the CJ community.
Specifically, TCJJ will have cartoons/articles on recurring themes including but not limited to –
“CJ Readers Digest”
“The CJ Effect”
“Beware of CJs” etc.
which will all be made clear as per the nature of the material that will be eventually published. We also solicit serious/academic matter.
TCJJ will have everything from subtle tips to blatant propaganda of the power wielded by CJ all done in a fun, delightful but yet thought-provoking way.
As an aside, TCJJ is a space to explore various other things of an artistic kind and display the work/portfolio of C-Works (a cartoonizizing collabarative community open for syndication) and so also to give wheels to Srikant’s (a PhD student and a primary author/editor) personal research on CJ.
To that effect, the support of Kyle (founder of Scoopt), Nick (the collaborating artist) and Ali (the collaborating researcher) who will all be primary authors/editors are dutifully acknowledged and respected. Without them and their help, this blog would never have existed.
Thoughtcrafts Sriks6711 
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