I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again

Won’t Get Fooled Again (Pete Townshend) The Who, 1971

I was born in 1957. Which meant that most of my growing up happened in the Sixties and Seventies: my taste in music, as some of you no doubt have figured out, is deeply influenced by the musicians of the time. As I grow older, my appreciation for that privilege grows.

Childhood is a time for heroes, and I drew on the pantheon of the time for my choices. Some are no more: I never got the chance to see John Lennon in person, nor Janis Joplin, nor Jim Morrison, nor Jimi Hendrix, nor Jim Croce, amongst others. But that didn’t stop me eating at Threadgill’s, and meeting Ingrid Croce and having a meal at Croce’s, or visiting Père Lachaise and Strawberry Fields to pay my respects. [I haven't yet made it to Greenwood].

I’ve stayed true to the music I grew up with, and over the years I’ve been able to see Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, John Mayall, the Who (but without Keith Moon), Led Zeppelin (but without John Bonham), Steve Winwood, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Cream, Queen, Eric Clapton, Simon and Garfunkel, John Martyn, Joe Cocker, Leonard Cohen, Jethro Tull, Crosby Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Don McLean, Donovan, Stevie Wonder, Cat Stevens, Van Morrison, the Moody Blues, and a few more besides. This year alone, I hope to see Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Ian Anderson/Jethro Tull and Crosby Stills and Nash.

I knew I was deeply into Sixties and Seventies music. I never thought it would mean I’d become a regular at concerts given by musicians in their sixties and seventies. It’s been an incredible privilege to hear and watch so many of my boyhood heroes, even more so because I’ve even been able to meet, and converse with, a few of them. Which brings me to the point of this post.

Pete Townshend.

I had the pleasure of meeting Pete a few days ago, as I travelled back from Toronto. He’s a quiet, charming man, someone who is careful and measured in what he says. Our paths crossed serendipitously a few times over the trip and in Heathrow, and a few things stood out for me. While he wasn’t really into Twitter or Facebook as yet, he spoke about how music was changing as a result of empowered people connected through networks, how the performance and the audience were becoming more intertwined, less separable. While he concentrated on the meaning of what he was trying to say through his music (his writing has often been based on, and reflective of, his experiences), he was acutely aware of the technology underpinning the music, and how it was changing. He spoke about how primitive the recording equipment was for Live At Leeds, which to this day remains one of the best live albums ever produced; how today’s DJs produced quite elaborate sets, unthinkable a few decades ago, and earned money comparable to today’s top artists as a result; and he spoke about how performances were themselves becoming more holistic, more encompassing of diverse talents and disciplines, richer in the context of the instruments and media used. All of which means we can look forward to a real masterpiece when he unveils Floss.

I’d read his autobiography, but meeting the man did something for me and to me. I felt I understood something more about who he was, his humility, his humanity.

The words he used to describe Won’t Get Fooled Again, as quoted in Pete’s Diaries in May 2006, took on a fuller meaning for me as a result.

Of course the song has no party-allied political message at all. It is not precisely a song that decries revolution — it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets — but that revolution, like all action, can have results we cannot predict. Don’t expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.

The way he ends the post is also important:

Spike Lee told my manager that he…. “deeply understood Who music”… what he understood was what he himself — like so many others — had made it. He saw an outrage and a frustration, even a judgment or empty indictment in the song that wasn’t there. What is there is a prayer.

After meeting Pete, I understood a little more about that prayer.

We live in times of tremendous change, of real turbulence in society globally. Some of those changes reflect economic challenges, some are environmental in nature, some are driven by political turmoil. Some of the new technologies may seem to exacerbate those tensions; and there’s a new generation out there, a generation that contains my children, our children, and those that will follow them.

And when I think about the world we have prepared for them, I realise the need for prayer is even greater.

Won’t Get Fooled Again. A song that marked and influenced a generation, with each of us making of it what we will.

A song. And a prayer.

Ground Control to Major Tom
Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on
(Ten) Ground Control (Nine) to Major Tom (Eight)
(Seven, six) Commencing countdown (Five), engines on (Four)
(Three, two) Check ignition (One) and may God’s (Blastoff) love be with you

This is Ground Control to Major Tom, you’ve really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare

This is Major Tom to Ground Control, I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today
Here am I sitting in a tin can far above the world
Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do

Space Oddity, David Bowie, 1969

Amazing.

Just watch this.

Commander Chris Hadfield, as you hand over command of the ISS, I thank you. I thank you for making me realise once again what joy there is in doing what your heart calls you to do. I thank you for reminding me how diverse and incredibly interesting human beings are.

I still can’t get over it!

For those who want to know more, these tweets are self-explanatory:

Here, making each day of the year
Changing my life with a wave of her hand
Nobody can deny that there’s something there

There, running my hands through her hair
Both of us thinking how good it can be
Someone is speaking but she doesn’t know he’s there

I want her everywhere and if she’s beside me
I know I need never care
But to love her is to need her everywhere
Knowing that love is to share

Here, there and everywhere (Lennon/McCartney) The Beatles, Revolver, 1966

What a wonderful song. Music from a time when bands were made up of musicians, most of whom knew how to play at least one instrument. When melodies meandered. When the ability to sing was considered useful.

Don’t worry, this is not going to be a Those Were The Days rant. In fact I want to celebrate today.

I want to celebrate a time when great things happen because people build platforms and then open them up for others to use and enhance, giving creativity a chance.

Take GeoGuessr as an example. What a lovely idea. A service built on top of Google Street View and Google Maps.

It takes you here, there and everywhere.

It then asks you to guess where you are. You can look around, take a walk (or a ride, depends on how good you are at navigating the view).

Once you’re ready to guess, you place a marker on a map. And the service scores you on accuracy. There may be other factors in the score, such as time elapsed, but that is not evident so far.

So you get to take a random walk around the earth, indulge your curiosity, develop your observation skills, trigger book-memory or experience. And, if you are so inclined, you can make a game out of it.

As developer Anton Wallen says, it was “built as an experiment to investigate the possibilities that the Google Maps API v3 offers, and to create a simple immersive game.” Details to be found in Chrome Experiments.

How simple. How beautiful. Thank you Anton. Thank you Google.

I may not think much of modern music, but I’m entranced by how the artists of today use the instruments of today, how they make platforms and APIs sing. Not just in the world of music, not necessarily in the world of music. Here there and everywhere. Helping improve our lives in many different ways, in healthcare, in welfare, in being informed and responsible citizens.

 

A circumstance beyond our control

The phone, the TV, the News of the World

Got in the house like a pigeon from hell

Threw sand in your eyes and descended like flies

The Pretenders, Back on the Chain Gang, 1982

 

As with many of the songs from the ’60s and ’70s, debates rage about what this song actually means or refers to. That’s not what this post is about. When it comes to meanings of songs, I take heart from the story of the Doors fans who wrote deep and searching treatises about how the band, and more particularly Jim Morrison, used the imagery of Mojo in dark and satanic ways, especially in the repeated incantations of Mr Mojo Risin’. And everyone accepted that. Until a little old lady wrote in and pointed out that it was nothing of the sort. She and her husband lived next door to the Morrisons when James was a young lad; it was her husband who came up with the name “Mr Mojo Risin” for the lad. Why? Because it was a perfect anagram of Jim Morrison.

Back to the song. The phone…. Got in the house like a pigeon from hell.

It was around twenty years ago that the “business” mobile phone invaded the house, and to some families it felt like that pigeon from hell. And then , for them, things went from bad to worse, as push e-mail and Blackberry became pervasive. Objections and uproar followed, debates about work-life balance ensued afresh, but that was about it. I didn’t see anyone send back their OBEs in protest.

Work-life balance. Now there’s something I’ve never quite been able to understand. What a strange dichotomy. Is work not part of life? Early on I decided that I mustn’t be pedantic about it, and so every time I heard the phrase I interpreted it as “office-home balance” or something similar.

That still left me with a problem. I think about “work” all the time. I think about my family all the time too. And come to think of it, I think about my friends and music and food and books and my faith all the time as well. [Okay, okay, no one ever quite multitasks, so when I'm thinking about my family I'm not actually thinking about work, except in those cases where the two touch.]

I’d never heard the phrase all the time I’d lived in India, but that may have been for a multitude of reasons. I was 23 when I left India for the UK, six months after my father’s untimely death at 49. Except for two three-month stints (with Martin Burn and with Capital Magazine) I’d only ever worked for my father, while still at school, at university and after I’d graduated. I couldn’t really understand what people meant when they used the phrase. I had neither the experience nor any other way to conceive of the meaning.

I tried. I tried hard, by looking at my own life, how my father lived and worked, how his friends lived and worked, how they conducted business and pleasure.

Let’s start with physical separation. My father worked from home. There was a partition of sorts, a wooden structure maybe six feet tall, with a door stuck somewhere in it, painted a gaily yellow on one side, and, on the other side, stocked with volume upon volume of bound magazines (our family livelihood enshrined in leather). When he was this side of the yellow, he was at home. And when he was not, he was at work. That was the theory. In practice it was closer to “whatever was the most important thing to get done got done”. Sometimes home things took precedence, sometimes not. That was his work-life balance.

Although there was a physical separation between work and home, they were adjacent, and the partition in between was somewhat flimsy. So, even as a 12-year-old, I wouldn’t have been able to understand this work-life thing. And it wasn’t as if it was something new and modern and free-thinking, this integration of work and home. The house I was born in was the place where my extended family lived, the place where we ran the family business from, the place we printed and published the magazine from.

No real physical separation.Work and home were both in the same place.

So I looked at time. Did my father separate out his day into a “work” half and then a “home” half, with sometimes a “golf” half or a “club” half instead of one of the other halves? Not really. One night he’d be home with us, the next night he’d be over at the printing press putting the week’s issue to bed, and the night after he may have been out with friends playing poker. He’d come to school some afternoons, to watch us play an inter-school match, and then go back to work. He often worked Friday nights …. the magazine needed to be at the Post Office, franked and bound and ready to post, before 430am on Saturday. That was our “slot”, take it or leave it. I’d seen him work on a Sunday. I’d seen him relax with the family on a Tuesday. I’d seen him stay sleeping at 7am, and stay working at midnight.

I couldn’t use time as a distinguisher between work and home.

I moved on to activity. Could I use the nature of what he did to figure out some way out of my confusion? He spent a lot of time talking to people. And listening to them. Never taking notes, but listening intently. Sometimes he would do this at home, sometimes in restaurants, sometimes at the “office”. If he wasn’t in conversation, he’d be writing. Sometimes a stenographer came in and took dictation. Sometimes he typed it all out from scratch, in one seamless “take”, no edits (my preferred style, ostensibly influenced by him). And if he wasn’t in conversation or writing, he’d be reading. Food would enter the equation here and there, though latterly he was known to prefer what they loosely termed a “liquid diet”. Talking to people. Writing. Reading. Sometimes with food, sometimes with drink, sometimes neither. That’s what he did when he was with family, with friends, or at work.

Nope, I couldn’t tell the difference.

I tried everything else I could think of. Whom he spent time with. What he was passionate about. It didn’t matter. The answer was the same. If I looked at what my father did, then work and home and everything else was hopelessly intermingled. The principal way of separating one from the other was “priority”, in terms of both importance as well as urgency. If I cut open my eyelid in a fight at playschool, he would come home to see me; if there was a problem at the printer’s that’s where he’d be. Priorities. Getting what needed to be done done.

That was how I used to think about “work-life” balance. So when I started work myself, I came with a view that my working life and my home life didn’t need to be kept separate. I came with the view that I would keep doing the things I enjoyed doing, that I would keep spending time with people I enjoyed spending time with. The origins of my relationships could be labelled and analysed, and there words like “family” and “work” and “church” and “school” and “pub” and “club” all meant something.

Initially I kept all these groups separate. And that had an unintended consequence, I became a different person in each group. That was a nightmare: I landed up in a situation where I had real conflict as a result : a part of me wanted all these groups to merge (why have separate non-overlapping groups of friends?) and another part of me blenched at the thought of the merger (everyone would see all the different “me”s in one place). I had to work very hard to become one consistent person independent of environment, something I would not wish upon anyone else. So after a while I began to merge the groups.

Initially I kept my activities and locations separate as well. Work was work and home was home. But what happened when your work mates came over to play contract bridge at home in the evening? What happened when you went on vacation with a work mate, to spend a week playing golf? Was it wrong to spend time “socialising” with the people you worked with? Soon I was back where I started.

When the mobile phone entered my life, I didn’t find it a problem. Child has an accident at school, my wife calls me, I drop everything and go home to help. It’s early Saturday morning, there’s a problem at work, Slammer’s spreading like wildfire and we have to get everything back up in time for the Tokyo open? Hey-ho, it’s off to work I go.

Priorities. Getting the job done. Outcomes. Timely outcomes. Sometimes the job to be done is connected to your “employers”, sometimes it’s to do with your family, sometimes it’s about your friends, your community. All of it. At the same time.

It’s a bit like Maslow’s Hierarchy versus Nohria and Lawrence 4-Drivers. There was a time when people thought that needs were hierarchical. So we had Maslow and sequential thinking. Now it appears to be that we have multiple parallel drivers: a drive to acquire, to bond, to learn and to defend. All operating at the same time. But not with the same intensity at the same time.

Incidentally, I’m just freewheeling here. It’s Saturday night and something triggered a desire in me to write this, and to learn from your comments. If you want to read more serious stuff on the same subject, try danah boyd’s recent post on similar lines. She’s good. Really good.

And comment. Please comment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m pickin’ up good vibrations

(Good good good good vibrations)

Listen to a sample here: The Beach Boys, Good Vibrations

Picking up good vibrations. Hmmm. Love the song, but I suspect the phrase is a bit dated. If I used it in front of my kids, I’m convinced I’ll get their special “Can-we-pretend-he’s-not-with-us?” look. So I won’t use the phrase in front of them.

Children.

You know something? Apparently chillies have no such reservations. They’ve been happily picking up good vibrations from neighbouring plants for millennia. Or so some scientists think. I quote:

In the new study, Gagliano and her colleague Michael Renton showed that chili plants sprouted faster and were healthier, compared with those grown in isolation, when they were grown next to “good neighbors,” such as basil, that help inhibit weed growth and pests.

Remarkably, the scientists got the same result even when the plants were separated by black plastic so that they could not exchange light or chemical signals.

Somehow, the chili seedlings could tell what kinds of plants their neighbors were and respond accordingly. Gagliano speculates that the answer involves acoustic vibrations generated—either intentionally or not—inside plant cells.

Good vibrations indeed.

So “seedlings could tell what kinds of plants their neighbours were and respond accordingly”. Reading that, I wandered into a quiet daze thinking about human beings and how we listen (or not). That wandering led to this post. Now you know.

I started, lazily, with comparing myself to a chilli plant.  “Can I tell what kinds of plants my neighbours are, and respond accordingly?” And that started me down the track of examining the hows and whats of my own listening habits.

I listen to protect against danger. Even today, 55 years+ on from birth, I react to strange or unfamiliar sounds, particularly when they’re loud as well. I’m told that it’s common amongst humans, and can be traced back all the way to Savannah Man. The crash of glass falling and breaking, dropped plates smashing, cars throttling, dogs growling, someone screaming; rarely (since I live in the UK) the sound of a gunshot. But for sure I’m sensitive to certain sounds; I will turn, look, sometimes flinch, respond if needed.

I listen for pleasure. I feel very privileged in that I’m a night person and a morning person. I stay up late, and often spend time in bed listening to the local neighbourhood tawny, a sound I adore. It lets me drift away all gentle and smiling. I can sleep easily anyway, but there’s something special about being lullabied by your own tawny. If you get the chance, try it. I also tend to wake up early, and allow myself the joy of immersing myself in the dawn chorus. I’ve slowly learnt to tell the sound of one bird from another, but I’m still pretty useless at it, there is so much more I want to know. I can just about tell the to-ing and fro-ing that goes on between pairs of birds, and have learnt how to isolate particular conversations within the general orchestral sound. But I have no idea which is the male and which is the female, and sometimes I don’t even know what kind of bird is doing the talking. Most regular readers of this blog will know I love my music, stuck in a wondrous rut of my own making and choice. I listen primarily to Western folk/rock/folk-rock music made between 1965 and 1974, and make occasional forays into other genres, cultures and timezones. So much to listen to, so little time.

I listen to learn. More than reading, more than watching, I can concentrate the most when I’m just listening. I have no idea why this is the case. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a home where there was no television, and in a city where electricity was something you experienced occasionally. The phone was often on the blink; battery-powered portable radios only began to show up in India when I was in my mid-teens. Most of the time, we spent time talking to each other, playing, and, when and where possible, we listened to the radio. School was also more about listening and learning than watching and learning; obviously there were exceptions, in the chemistry and biology labs, in carpentry class and in the gym. But by and large I grew up in a listen-and-learn culture. When I emigrated to the UK in 1980, it was the first time I’d ever left India; in fact it was the first time I’d ever lived in a city other than Calcutta; the previous 23 years of my life had been lived in just three houses, 1957-59, 1959-69 and 1969-80. I had no choice but to listen, to understand what people were saying (their accents were strange to me), to understand what they meant (the words, idioms and usages I’d never come across). It pays to be quiet in such circumstances.

I listen to serve. I’ve always been fascinated by one strange thing. Faced by a caterwauling catchment of children, mothers can tell if the crying comes from one of theirs or not. Amazing. Yet natural and innate. And to be expected. Similarly, a week-old baby can tell if the voice she hears is her mother’s, and is calmed. Soon after, she can distinguish her father’s voice from all else. Parents listening, children listening, the foundation for a good relationship. A parent who doesn’t hear her child can’t look out for that child; a child who doesn’t hear her parent can neither protect nor please. As a child I listened because I wanted to please: my parents, my teachers, my heroes and role-models. [That didn't last throughout my childhood, I was a difficult teenager, but I started off an obedient child]. I spent 15 years learning under the Jesuits, so there was no dearth of authority models. And you learnt to listen, to obey. And to question, but only within a secure and respectful relationship. No relationship, no questioning. And then I started working, and came across new authority models. After a while it all became the same thing. It wasn’t about obedience or following orders or authority figures or anything like that. As a child, as a student, as a parent, as a worker, it doesn’t matter what role you’re inhabiting, let’s assume you’re doing something. You’re either doing it for yourself or for someone else. If you’re doing it for yourself, then you need to “listen to yourself”. And if you’re doing it for someone else, it pays to listen to that someone else before you do the something. Unless you’ve become a mindreader.

Sometimes, I listen inadvertently. Over the years, I’ve worked for English, Indian, American, German and French companies. And something strange happened every now and then. The French decided I didn’t speak French. And the Germans decided I didn’t speak German. They were both right. My French dates back to classes between 1973 and 1975; and my German to the hard work of reading some Economics texts in that language between 1976 and 1979. So I didn’t speak French or German. But I listened French and German. I knew enough to be able to translate some of what was being said. Which led to some very interesting inadvertent participations in conversations in lifts and in meetings, as others assumed I couldn’t understand a word. Live and learn.

I listen to test and reflect. I love cooking; a great deal of what I’ve learnt about cooking has come about by my listening to my wife; some of it has come from listening to cooks, often face to face in their restaurants and kitchens, sometimes on TV, occasionally in a cookery class. And it was in a cookery class that I learnt to listen to food, to use the sound of the food to tell whether something is ready or not. This seems particularly true for sauces and stews, but I’ve even heard it applied in other circumstances.

Sometimes I listen to spot patterns and intervene as needed. Many years ago, I worked in sales support; it was my job to build demos, write presentation scripts for salesmen, then hide behind the scenes pressing buttons while someone else spoke about what was happening on the big screen on the big stage. It was a job I enjoyed, so I would do it whenever I could. A couple of times, the unthinkable happened; my monitor died on me during a live presentation, and I could no longer “see” what was happening. On both occasions I had to “listen” to the disk activity to figure out when next to press one or other key. It helped that I’d written the scripts. It helped that I’d done it hundreds of times. It helped that the disk activity soundtrack was embedded deeply in my skull. I’ve never had to do it since, but the principle remains. Many of you would have done something similar. Do you remember the days of dialup modems, when you “knew” whether your connection was up or not solely based on the sounds emanating from the modem? Same thing. A learnt sequence allowing you to understand where you were in a pattern.

Why am I saying all this?
Simple.

We’re at a point in time when it’s become possible for us to listen to our customers.

When we listen to our customers, it’s worth thinking about the hows and whys of listening. To serve. To learn. To enjoy. To protect against danger. To spot patterns. To respond as needed.

Listening.

It’s something we’re all going to do a lot of. And we might as well get good at it.

Birds do it, bees do it, even the blessed chillies do it….

I have often walked Down this street before

But the pavement always stayed Beneath my feet before

All at once am I Several stories high

Knowing I’m On the street Where you live

On The Street Where You Live (Lerner and Loewe, My Fair Lady, 1956)

We had the album of the Moss Hart produced stage version at home, with John Michael King taking the vocals for that song; there was something so positive, so uplifting about his voice and the way he sang it that even now, half a century later, my spirit rises when I hear it. If you haven’t heard it, try this link; take care to click on the icon on the right, not the Bill Shirley version on the left.

Walking is uplifting. I walk as much as I can. Not as much as I could or should, perhaps, but I’m working on it. Right now I walk maybe nine or ten hours a week; usually I manage at least an hour a day. I’ve never driven, so maybe that has something to do with it. Why is that? I’m not entirely sure. As a child I grew up in a family with many cars: for sure I remember we had a Plymouth and a Herald in the early to mid-1960s. Then we had a Studebaker Commander (WBE 5789) for a few years, and finally our first Ambassador (WBJ 3162) in the early 1970s. And then, by the time I was fourteen, nothing. No car.

So I walked everywhere. It was a time when time did not matter. Sometimes I took the tram, especially in the early mornings or late evenings. Sometimes I took the newcomer to Calcutta’s transport ranks, the maroon-with-yellow-stripe minibus, especially if, for some strange reason, time did matter: say if I was meeting friends for a particular showing of a film. Taxis were unaffordable (unless my father was with us); the public bus was best avoided; and the silver-plated “private” bus a veritable death trap.

It was a good thing that I never had far to walk — I could draw out all the journeys of my first 23 years on this earth in one compact map barely five miles square, roughly contained in the map below. My teenage years could be described in a radius of three miles from Flat Ten, 6/2 Moira St, where I lived with my family from 1969 to 1980.

Where was I? Oh yes, walking. People walk in different ways and for different reasons. Some, like Wordsworth described so beautifully, dwelt among the untrodden ways. No crowded Calcutta pavements for them. Yet others walk with purpose and haste, rushing, like Danny Kaye’s Court Jester, late for a date with Alice. [In another shameless sop to nostalgia, here's the link to his version of I'm Late]. There are Court Jester copycats in every major city nowadays, knocking into people, sometimes even knocking them down. Always in a hurry. Always late for something.

My walks are different. I walk cities, not untrodden ways. I want to hike through humanity and not just nature. Alone in a crowd but still part of the crowd. Most of the time, when I walk on my “own”, I use the time to think. I’m aware of the environment I’m in, but not engrossed in it. Just walking. There’s usually somewhere I’m going, but not in a hurry. I allow myself enough time to take my time. [More often than not, I arrive ten or fifteen minutes early at my destination, and circle it for a while].

Human beings are creatures of habit. We grow accustomed to things, and find comfort in the familiar. Studies in the pattern of usage of mobile telephones have shown that we tend to make the same calls to the same people from the same place at the same time. Not precisely, but close enough for the pattern to be visible. And so it is with walks, when it comes to people like me. My most common walks are common walks, walks I do every time I get the chance. So in London I have walked from St Paul’s to Knightsbridge many times: each road, each crossing, the pubs long gone, the pubs that remain, are familiar friends. [I've never done that walk in the other direction --- it's usually when I leave work for a dinner appointment and have an hour or more to kill]. When I go to New York, whenever I get the chance, I will walk from wherever my last appointment finishes to Strand Books. In the past, I used to then walk to the Time Warner Building to visit the bookstore there, but that’s long gone. In San Francisco, I walk from my hotel to City Lights, and sometimes to Book Passage in the Ferry Building. In Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass, not the one this side of the Pond) I walk to the Coop; it doesn’t matter where I start from. In Paris, I try and make it to Shakespeare and Company, but it’s not always convenient; sometimes my last meeting ends too far away from the shop to make walking possible.

Yes, you’ve probably noticed, most of my gentle walks are to bookstores. And there are fewer of them, so I have to work harder at finding them. I suspect I’ll still walk to where they used to be long after they’re gone, because the walk is part of the reason for the walk.

I love Bologna, because it’s a proper walking city. The porticos don’t just extend the living quarters on the higher floors (which they do). They don’t just help with the integration of work and home (which they do). Besides everything else, they provide sheltered walkways at ground level. Mixed use dwellings, cafes and restaurants everywhere, children playing where parents are working, no downtown in sight, what’s not to like?

28 miles of porticos. Wonderful. What joy. Bologna. Not only did they give us gramigna alla salsiccia, not only did they give us the oldest university in Europe, but to top it all they gifted us miles and miles and miles of portico. Bologna is a real city walker’s paradise.

It’s a Jane Jacobs city. Which brings me to the trigger for this post. A comment by a reader in Calcutta, who wanted me to let you know that they’ve been putting the words of Jane Jacobs into action there.

You’ve got to get out and walk.

So check this out. Calcutta Walks. The first set of walks have been completed, but I am sure more will be planned as long as the demand’s there.

Walking is wonderful when you have the time to walk. And you can walk just where you are. It helps if you aren’t in a hurry. It helps when the reason you walk is the walk.

A coda: I lived fairly close to the centre of the map above, so there wasn’t really anything more than three miles walk from me. So I walked. The edges of my world were known and predictable: starting from the south-west, around a quarter to nine on the map, we had the Kidderpore docks, with its smugglers’ bazaar. That’s where you went to get cheap imports of foreign albums (flimsy paper covers sealed in cellophane, chinese or japanese characters sprayed all over them, poorly photocopied artwork…. but there was no other way to get those albums). Nine o’clock took me to Alipore, where one of my closest friends, Vir, lived. Ten and eleven were devoted to the Maidan, the Strand, Eden Gardens. Places for peace and quiet, serenity amidst the throngs. Places that changed completely when there was an important hockey, football or cricket match, but places of peace most of the time. High noon was the University and College St, India Coffee House and scrounging for second-hand books. Between one and three was where my family had their business: the home I was born in, the journal’s offices, the printing presses; 3 o’clock represented Park Circus, the home of another childhood chum, Shaf, and pretty much the eastern edge to my Calcutta life. My early childhood was well established where 4 o’clock and 5 o’clock were, the heart of what passed for Ballygunge in those days, where Rashbehari Avenue met Gariahat. I spent my first dozen years in Hindustan Park Road there. And between six and nine o’clock lay parts I visited rarely, the golf clubs, the sailing lakes, places where I didn’t belong. For some reason, probably affordability, my father wasn’t part of that world. I still went close by occasionally, to visit friends and relatives by the lake, or to go to science classes run by Dr CS Pai on Saturdays and Sundays at Rabindra Sarobar Stadium.

There was a time when location mattered.

Location, location, location. A phrase attributed to many people, in many contexts, usually to do with restaurants, hotels and property. A phrase that may go back to 1926 or even earlier.

Location mattered because finding places was hard. So anything that made finding a place easier was valued.

Today finding a place isn’t hard any more. GPS. Google Maps. TomTom. Various types of satnav.

Today, what matters is how the establishment treats the customer. What matters is the quality of the product or service offered. What matters is how the customer and her network of friends feel about the restaurant or hotel, which in turn is based on what kind of experience they’ve had, either directly or indirectly. These are hard things to get right. Location’s easy in comparison.

So is customer experience the new “location”? In a way, but not quite. The transaction costs associated with finding places have gone down sharply. But then so have the transaction costs associated with finding out about the customer experience. All you have to do is to look up the appropriate site or service, the Zagats, the TripAdvisors.

There is a problem, though. The rating needs to be entered into the service. By the customer. Which is why we’re seeing things like the Tipping Point I referred to yesterday.

There was a time when celebrity endorsements mattered.

They mattered because finding stuff that was reliable, that worked, that was value for money, was not easy. So anything that made finding out such things simply and quickly was valued.

Today, what matters isn’t just that you’re told that something is reliable, what matters is the person doing the telling. And whether you trust that person. Which is where friends come in. The transaction costs associated with finding out about what your friends think of a product or service have gone down sharply. That’s what social networks have done. It’s no longer enough to find out what “people” think of something, what you need is to get the opinion of someone you trust.

There was a time when “hit-choosing” expertise mattered.

There was a time when it was very expensive to compose, record and sell music; when it was very expensive to conceive, write and publish books; when it was very expensive to visualise, produce, direct and release films. So you needed all kinds of experts. Experts who decided what you should like, choosing-experts. Experts who decided how the choosing-experts did, reviewing-experts, sometimes called critics. Experts who decided everything. What was funded. What was marketed. What was sold. What succeeded. What failed.

These experts mattered because the cost of finding out what you really thought, what you wanted, what you liked, what you’d be prepared to pay for something, these costs were very high. So the experts decided everything for you.

Today, there’s a new person who knows a lot about what you think, what you want, what you like, what you’d be prepared to pay.

That person is you.

There is a time when you matter.

That time is now.

Are you excited by 3D printers? I used to be so-so about it; now they have me building one from kit. Why the change of heart? Simple. I was asked to speak at TED @ SXSW a year ago (where I spoke on Information is Food). While we waited for the event to start, there was an opportunity to speak to the other speakers. Which gave me the chance to spend some time with Ping Fu, who spoke about 3D printing and its effect on humanity.

I was blown away, especially by the example to do with children born with cleft palates. I will do everything in my power to drive the cost of 3D printers down; as Ping Fu reminds us, every child has the right to smile.

So since then I’ve been thinking about them, playing with them, researching them.

One of the use-cases I was keen on trying out was that of “faxing” an LP from a scanner in one place to a remote 3D printer somewhere else. I knew that it would be some time before it could be done to any worthwhile fidelity; but the idea that you could scan an LP in one place, send the STL file over to a remote printer, get it to print out the analog object. The principle was simple, just the same as you would send text via telegraph a hundred years ago, or image via fax thirty years ago. [A part of me was also intrigued by what would happen in the world of copyright when this became possible; after the general troglodyte mess created by that industry over digital music, I guess anything is possible].

Which is why, when friend Chris Heuer pointed me towards this article, I was delighted.\

A technique for converting digital audio files into 3D-printable, 33RPM records. Perfect. Go on, read the entire post. It’s worth it. And it’s the shape of things to come.

I love a good vindaloo. A proper vindaloo, as described here.

Not surprisingly, I’ve had years of disappointment in the UK, not being able to find a Goan restaurant that met my expectation. I wasn’t fool enough to try and look for one in the traditional Bangladeshi, often Sylheti, establishment that people call “Indian”. After all, none of them serves pork. And a vindaloo without pork is not a vindaloo. Pork. Garlic. Wine or wine vinegar. Onions. A little ginger. Chillies, cumin, turmeric. Marinated overnight. A Portuguese dish Indianised over centuries, owing much to Vasco da Gama.

So when I heard that there was a place in Putney that served “proper” vindaloo, I wanted to go there. But I needed an excuse.

That excuse came when a friend of mine, Joao Barros of Veniam, planned a trip to London and we were to have lunch; it turned out he had a Goan grandfather, and I needed no further prompting.

Off we went to Ma Goa. A tiny restaurant, nothing to look at, tucked away off the beaten track in Putney.

We weren’t disappointed. The vindaloo was magnificent.

I’ve been trying to find words to describe the taste and texture, and failing. But then serendipity struck. I was looking for a recipe to link to in this post, and in that recipe was the precise descriptor I was looking for.

A pickle. A familiar, much-loved, tangy pickle. That’s what a good vindaloo tastes like. Fiery without making your ears pop. A sauce with subtle bits and bumps and odds and sods, reminding you there’s vinegar, garlic and chillies there, but not making an announcement of the fact. Meat that is chewy yet soft enough to pull apart with your tongue, imbued with the taste of the sauce via the marinade.

A pickle.

Joao and I both loved it. The rest of the food was pretty good as well: fresh mango lassi that went down a treat; an unusual starter, a fusion of masala dosa and pappadom (the pappadom was moistened prior to frying, filled with masala potato, folded like a filo pastry and then quick-fried); a pista kulfi where you could feel the bits of pistachio on your teeth and on your tongue. All in all, a brilliant meal, ridiculously cheap for what it represented.

And then came another surprise. When the bill came, I wasn’t given the opportunity to leave a tip. So I asked.

His answer?

If you liked it, say so on TripAdvisor. That’s the best tip we can have.

It wasn’t the first time this happened to me; earlier this year, when vacationing in Eleuthera, I wanted to thank the staff for the service, which had been superb. And their unanimous answer was to direct me to TripAdvisor. And there’d been a few instances last year, but the feeling I get is that the momentum is growing. People don’t want to be thanked in cash, when you could recommend them to others. That’s what matters to them more than the cash. And the only way they can earn the recommendation is the hard way: by providing something exceptional. Which Ma Goa did.

Now that’s what I call a Tipping Point.

May 4th 1970. 43 years ago.Kent State University, Ohio.

Jeffrey Glenn Miller (March 28 1950-May 4 1970)

Allison Krause (April 4 1951- May 4 1970)

Sandra Lee Scheuer (August 11 1949-May 4 1970)

William Knox Schroeder (July 20 1950-May 4 1970)

Many of us know the words to the Neil Young song, immortalising the tragic events of May 4 1970. Four young students, killed in their prime. At least two of them apparently on their way to class and not actively involved in the antiwar protests taking place on campus.

Today.

43 years ago.

I was not yet 13 when it happened, but I still remember seeing the photographs in LIFE magazine a week later. Yes, in Calcutta. There was life before the internet. We had things called newspapers and magazines. They made it across prodigious distances at remarkable speeds.

I was nearly 16 when I first heard the song. And I remember it affected me, particularly because I could remember the incident but couldn’t recall even one of the names of the students whose lives had been lost. I felt grieved and aggrieved.

I’ve learnt a lot more about the incident since, and about the song as well. About how people were affected by both.

So take a minute today and dedicate that time to the memory of Jeff Miller, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder. May their souls rest in peace.

And when you do, think about what they faced that summer.

And then think about what the youth of today face this summer.

The youth of today. Our children.

….this summer I hear the drumming….

What do our children hear? Who are their Nixons, their National Guards, their Kent State Universities?

….this summer I hear the drumming….

Coda: Reader David Eastman points out that some readers may not know anything about the event I refer to. So here’s a link to what happened, and also as seen through the eyes of a Guardian columnist forty years later.