Pissing on their Pearls of Wisdom

I am convinced that 60% of the people who are relatively good at their job know only 60% of what they are expected to know. They compensate the rest with their ability to package and re-package the 60% into something that makes it sound as if they know it all.

Subtle Advertising

Those useful little yellow things!

Surveillance Society

(One of the many inconspicuous corners at... ok, this will get me into trouble!)

I leave my home and there are 'Neighbourhood Watch' cameras watching me. I walk down my street, and there are traffic cameras. I get on to the bus, and there are tennis ball sized CCTV cameras concealed in the cieling of the bus. I step into the tube station and there are cameras at the entrance, in the ticket machine, on the escalators, in the stairways, on the platforms, and surprise surprise (!), cameras on the tube.

I walk down the lobby at my workplace; I notice the security screens at the reception through the corner of my eye and guess what -- in the pixellated image, I spot a figure with an uncanny resemblance and the same clothes as me. On the trading floor, the eye doesn't seem to blink, it only swivels stealthily. Taylorism in top gear.

Before I sip my morning tea, an average of 500 to 600 cameras in London have put me in their frames. Fact!

Identity cards, bio-metric data, and abstracted profiles in databases for every citizen, satellite surveillance, and the omni present roving eye.

Welcome to the show -- smile -- the real Big Brother is watching.

Stop

Walking down Bishopsgate at lunchtime today, I happened to look up and curse the sky for how grey the weather was. Little did I know that in my exasperated gaze, I would catch a glimpse of one of the most beautiful buildings in London. It made me wonder... the programmed lives that we live from home to work to home, how often do we stop for a minute to observe and cherish?

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

-- W. H. Davies

*Thanks for the poem Rish!

In Distinguished Company

Manet's Music in the Tuileries Gardens, Monet's Waterlily Pond, Seurat's Bathers at Asrieres, Van Gogh's Sunflowers...
Spent a lazy Saturday at the National Gallery in the distinguished company of art's modern masters.

Each painting tells its own story, but together they trace major changes in art between 1860 and about 1914. The display of Impressionist art offers different vistas and surprising connections between canvases. The juxtapositions emphasise both continuity and flux in artistic practise; the boundaries between generations - 19th and 20th century art - become blurred.

What was interesting to see was how painters responded to one another, how movements were born, how styles & techniques were adopted and adapted across the European continent. But most of all, one sees how the European painting tradition that began centuries before, remained in the 20th century.

Looking forward to Rodin's exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts this weekend.
I'm beginning to realize that art opens up a part of my mind that lies dormant through the week...

If only we...

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." -- Mark Twain

Faith

I was schooled in a Catholic Jesuit institution for 7 years. I have read the Bible (the old and the new testament). I go to church more often than I go to the temple.
When it comes to faith in the Lord, I consider myself as much a devout Catholic as how my family would like me to be a Hindu Brahmin.

Yet, I can't help but doubt Christian groups worldwide when they raise a hue and cry about the release of a motion picture.

Is a 2000-year old faith so feeble that we fear it will crumble under the influence of a 3-hour motion picture? Are people's beliefs so fragile that when questioned would shatter the very foundations of their convictions?

What I only see is unfounded fears of religious institutionalists.
And these weren't the teachings of God...