Author: JP

Musing about being a Calcuttan

A quote from Simon and Rupert Winchester’s Calcutta: A Brief History

The burgeoning wealth and importance of Calcutta during the nineteenth century meant that gradually it began to move beyond its colonial roots for the first time, and started to become a city that blended the influences of both East and West. The Bengal Renaissance, as it is known, is central to the pride Bengalis feel about their city, and a litany of names, most unfamiliar in the West, are known to everyone in Calcutta. Social reformers, educationalists, poets and nationalists became, and remain, household names in Calcutta, in a manner unknown in most other major cities of the world, but which seems entirely natural in Calcutta, high-minded as it is.

One of the drivers of the new attention to matters social and spiritual was the growth of printing. Bengalis have long been addicted to the adda, a group gossip and discussion session that can last for hours, and the printing press and periodicals allowed more Bengalis to participate in virtual addas. Around the bookshops that sprang around Dwarkanath Tagore’s  Hindu College a culture began to grow that, not content with having addas, began to talk to greater numbers of people, through pamphlets and periodicals. All of the great names of the Bengal Renaissance used periodicals for both polemical and creative writing. Between 1818 and 1867 there were some 220 different periodicals published in Calcutta, mainly in Bengali, freely discussing politics, culture and spirituality.

Markets. Conversations. Interest in education and social matters. Using technology to scale up into virtual conversations. In and around bookshops. Based on journalism and pamplets. You can see why I got interested in blogs.

Blogs are addas. On a digital scale. Without the caffeine and nicotine.

Of librarians, preachers and 911 operators….

If I wanted to know the most common human FAQs, I’d ask librarians, preachers and 911 operators.

So said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, to the assembled masses of the Reference User and Services Association, American Library Association. You can find a copy of his full speech here. [Strangely enough, I quoted from his speech last year as well.]

His talk was entitled Public Policy and the Future of the Internet; in it, fairly early on, he asserts the importance of the Three Is (Internet, Intellectual Property and Identity) more eloquently than I’ve been able to manage, which only goes to show. He says:

I want to highlight three major areas of policy ferment that will play out in the coming decade.

The first policy debate involves what kind of internet we have – from an architectural and deployment standpoint.

The second involves what kind of information policies we have – basically I am treferring to the kind of rules we develop about information property such as copyright, patents and trademarks.

And the third involves what kind of policies and norms we develop about our online identities – that is, the policies we construct about online privacy, anonymity and surveillance.

Read the whole thing, it’s worth it. While not expressly taking an extreme “side” on much of the debate, he lays out the issues dispassionately and accurately, and places it all in a framework that will help us conclude the debates and arguments. IMHO anyway.

I also liked the way he ended the session, providing 10 reasons why the future can belong to librarians. While I’m not a librarian, my interest in information and its management, distribution and access is such that I feel like I can vicariously belong.

I will comment in more detail later.

Yeah Yeah We Speak Perfect English, Just Serve

….is the title of a bizarre short film from the Wholphin stable. Take a look at the clip sometime. It’s people playing cross-border volleyball across an international boundary fence. A different perspective, it lets you see just how ugly fences are.

More on rich veins: Not fooled by randomness

Have you really thought about how you listen to music on any given day? Do you tend to choose an artist, an album, a period? Or do you just press the shuffle button or its equivalent?

I’m currently using one of my favourite techniques:

  1. Sort out my iTunes library into Time order
  2. Scan through the library very quickly and choose an “opening” song
  3. Go with the flow and listen to whatever songs happen to have the same duration as the opening song
  4. Stop whenever I feel like

I’ve written about this before, but this time I thought I’d share the songs that popped out as a result:

I’m sharing them for a number of reasons, listed and annotated below:

One, an observation on our “social media” culture and the implied transparency

When I scanned the list I was very tempted to take out the Boney M song, but I didn’t. It felt like cheating. It felt like the equivalent of quietly kicking your golf ball out of the rough when no one’s watching. You don’t do that. It felt all wrong even though nobody was watching. So anyway I didn’t do it. And it made me ponder about the cultural and social implications of the renaissance of transparency that we’re all experiencing.

Two, an observation on Wikipedia

I had twenty-one terms to search for, and all but four were found. Every artist was found. At least one of the songs may have been listed as well, I just wasn’t sure whether the Bless You reference was the right one. And I was too lazy to check. But it’s not the point. The point is that I could find seventeen of the twenty-one. You know something? Wikipedia is just one big multipurpose adjective-adverb. Lets you describe everything, qualify everything. Maybe not everything, but it keeps getting better. Many people bitch about the lack of “expertise” in Wikipedia, but I think they’re missing the point.

What point? It’s a bit like the story about Churchill and the looks-challenged woman. As the story goes, this person went up to Winston and said “Sir, you’re drunk” and he replied “Lady, you’re ugly. And tomorrow I’ll be sober….”

Traditional encyclopediae are ugly. Wikipedia on the other hand may be drunk today, but tomorrow it will be sober. Because it can and will improve. Improve in a long-tail way that nothing else can. And talking about improving it, Iwas surprised by the hyphen between Spencer and Churchill in the Wikipedia listing for Winston Churchill. Should it really be there?

Three, just some random mutterings about the specific songs that got thrown up:

If you haven’t heard of them, do listen to Fotheringay. As far as I know, (and as far as Wikipedia knows, for that matter) they produced only one album. While critics may feel that the album was nothing more than a showcase for Sandy Denny’s talents, I think they’re wrong. I really like the whole album. Fotheringay’s treatment of Dylan’s Too Much of Nothing is a delight. Incidentally, the Wodehouse fan in me tends to pronounce the band “Fun-gee”. Anyone know any better?

I never realised that Simon and Garfunkel had just three Number 1s: The Sound of Silence, Mrs Robinson and Bridge Over Troubled Water. Similarly I never knew that Melanie’s The Nickel Song was released by her old label explicitly to compete with her newer releases, the net effect of which was to make her the first female artiste to have 3 songs in the Top 40 simultaneously.

Remembering how gaunt he looked, I used to think that Headlong was the last video that Freddie Mercury ever appeared in; listening to it gave me the impetus to check. And I was wrong, it was These Are The Days of My Life, which was played at the recent Concert for Diana.

If you’re high in the anorak stakes, you may be interested in this comment in Wikipedia’s article on Ruby Tuesday: All post-2002 reissues of “Ruby Tuesday” on CD (comprising all versions on the ABKCO remastered CDs) are missing a vocal overdub in the chorus. The reason for this change has never been officially addressed. Anyone know why?

I’d always thought that John Lennon changed his middle name by deed poll from Winston to Ono, just as Elton John did (from Kenneth to Hercules). So I was surprised to see the Wikipedia entry showing John Winston Ono Lennon.

I’d heard before about Boney M’s massive African following, and been bemused by it. Seemed a bit like Norman Wisdom and his Albanian fan club. Now that I know that Ma Baker was based on a Tunisian tune, it all becomes clear.

Though I’ve known that Chevy Chase has musical talent, I didn’t know he’d actually played with Becker and Fagen prior to their forming Steely Dan.

I’ve never been able to understand any of the reasons why The White Album is meant to have been such a dark influence on Charles Manson. I still can’t figure it out.

Hitting a rich vein

It happens every now and then; my ten-books-at-a-time reading habit throws up a really good bunch, driven both by recommendation as well as randomness:

An odd collection, yes. Pure serendipity. And very pleasant indeed. Incidentally, I  tend not to write too many book reviews, on the basis that I read a great deal and therefore would not be providing any real filtering service. Recommendations, on the other had, may be of value to some of  you. If readers would like me to comment or review the books I read, then please let me know by writing to [email protected] or commenting on this post.