The word ‘millionaire’ is said to have been coined in the early 1700s when many Frenchmen turned nouveaux riches with the ‘Mississippi bubble’. A period of economic boom saw the shares of Mississippi company rising, making many Frenchmen rich and Paris attracting investments, much to the envy of John Blunt, the Director of South Sea Company in London.
When Bharathan’s Kathodu Kathoram was released in 1985, I was in high school. It was a time of movies with great stories and music. A time when directors, script writers, music directors, and even lyricists were all considered superstars. In discussions in school and college campuses, it was not just the actors that got attention, but the makers as well. Thankfully, directors and writers are still heroes in Malayalam film industry and the story is still the king.
Recently a former colleague and a popular podcast host asked me in a conversation that how much of what we do are really impactful and how much of that is playing to the gallery. And my response to that was most of the things done in the pretext of impact is all playing to the gallery.
A few days back, in an attempt to reduce the number of times I reach out to the mobile phone involuntarily, I set up a timer for the screen time of WhatsApp. For now, it is working. Most of us have enough anecdotal stories of our attempts to reduce the infinite scrolling and browsing, with spectacular failures, moderate successes and everything in between.
Getting lost in a rabbit hole is easier these days. We get introduced to a new concept or subject. And if there is a desire to get to know more about it, there are enough pathways, thanks to the internet. From tweets to short reads, long reads, videos, podcasts, and books itself, it’s all out there.
This is triggered by @manuscrypt’s interesting piece on Efficient Existence.
I have never been a religious person, barring the first 15 years or so, though I grew up in a deeply religious and ritualistic family. Since high school, I have moved in the spectrum of agnosticism to atheism, finally settling for the latter. No compulsions or pressures from home also helped my cause. During my early career, while working in an unconventional and radical organisation, I came across the definition of God as ‘collective goodness of humankind,’ which appealed to me and stayed with me forever.
This is that time of the year, when many of us like me are under pressure to be ‘thought leaders’, predict and write about trends for the coming year. And we all attempt it in all earnestness.But truth be told, most of these are hollow to say the least. For instance, a few years back, for over six years one prediction evolved every year in various forms and this is how it happened. Starting on the first year with ‘This is the year of mobile’ to a final version ‘Really, God promise, this year is the real year of real mobile’ on the sixth year with all variations in between. Not to mention about times when middle-east countries really panicked hearing that all oil will now be replaced with data, every complicated excel sheet got labelled as Big Data, and every mobile camera and face creams became AI enabled. This year the word is that we will have AI enabled masks.
Debates are now raging over a new controversial law that allows the State to interfere in a deeply individual choice like marriage (notwithstanding that in India, it is not such a deeply personal choice).
Science, especially with the understanding in evolutionary biology and neurosciences tell us that as a species we have evolved over millions of years and our brains have evolved over time. And our actions are controlled by reactions/changes in any of the three parts of the brain.
(First published in Impact Weekly, August 2020)
When the famous author Nassim Taleb coined the phrase ‘antilibrary,’ so many of us, across the world, felt a sigh of relief. Felt validated. Legitimised. Liberated from the guilt of buying more books than one could read. Antilibrary refers to the number of books in your personal collection that you have not read.
(Originally published in Thriveglobal.in in 2019)
(Originally published in 2019)
(Originally published in 2018)
(Originally published in the IMPACT 12th Anniversary Issue on Inspirations, a collection of notes from over 200 people in the Indian Marketing, Media & Advertisement industry on what inspires them)
