I’ve just finished reading Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared.

Here’s how the author summarises the book:

On his hundredth birthday, just as the celebrations are about to begin out in the lounge in the old people’s home, Allan Karlsson hastily decides that he wants nothing to do with the party. He climbs through his window and disappears – and soon he has turned the whole nation on its head. He does have some experience in these matters. He has previously done the same thing with the world.

It’s a rare book. Joyous, refreshing, insane. I’m not going to review it here, other than to say it may be the most enjoyable book I’ve read this century.

I’m a sucker for “Road” books: I have over 200 different editions of Don Quixote, distributed across the four centuries of the book’s existence. I even have a “three-way-crossing:” book: Robert M Pirsig’s copy of Baron Munchhausen and On The Road, bound together in one volume. So yes, I’m a Road Book sucker, and Jonasson’s book definitely falls into that category. But that’s not the only reason I loved the book.

 

The book I was reading was a translation.

Not just any old translation.

A labour of love.

Rod Bradbury does an amazing job. It is hard enough to write a good book. It is even harder to write a great translation.

I’ve been enchanted by translations and translators for nigh on 50 years. Goes all the way back to when I first heard Michelle by the Beatles. [How times change. I find it hard to believe I live in an age where I have to provide a hyperlink to “the Beatles”.] Anyway, back to the song. I must have been nine or ten when I heard it, and I was very taken with the appropriateness of the translation: how these/are/words/that/go/to-/geth/-er/well appeared in French as sont/des/mots/qui/vont/très/bien/en-/semble. The use of short words in the original and in the translation, the way those words kept the same meaning yet retained the melody as well, that was the magic I saw and loved.

And that’s probably why I liked the Joan Baez version of Where Have All The Flowers Gone, which I heard for the first time, in German, at Devang Khakhar’s house in 1968. [If any of you readers are or were at IIT Bombay, it’s the same guy. We had some great times together as children, 1967-69.]

Translators do a very hard job, and are often underappreciated. We take them for granted. Yet they perform a very important function, expressing something from one language into another, switching contexts skilfully. If I stay with the original theme of translation in literature, it’s heartening to see that there are many instances of good translations about nowadays. Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X is a classic recent example. A superb book, superbly translated by Alexander Smith. We are privileged to live in a time when books written in one language in one country are so readily available in others, and in relatively short order.

Talking about translation, my father did something strange. He bought himself a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo in the original French, along with a French-to-English dictionary, and proceeded to “reverse-engineer” the book, teaching himself French in the process. He claimed he still had the French book with all his jottings, but we could not find it. I do remember finding a green cloth-bound version in English, with gilt lettering on the spine; I hope one of my siblings still has that book.

We continue to learn about how we learn. Recently, I was intrigued by something Douglas Hofstadter has been saying in a recent talk, describing the brain as an “analogy machine“. A part of me thinks that analogies and metaphors are also translation devices, that people who use analogies well perform a similar role. [I shall stoutly resist the temptation to describe the role as “analogous”]. Incidentally, confession time. At least some of you reading this, and seeing Hofstadter’s name, immediately went Godel, Escher, Bach right?

Translation takes place in many contexts. I spent the last few days in Jordan, at a World Economic Forum meeting. The speakers spoke in many languages. All I had to do was to pick up a headset, turn on, tune in, and thereby not drop out of the conversation. A privilege, made possible by the hard work of live translators. That privilege meant I could witness and appreciate, and to an infinitesimal extent even participate, in a really important initiative emerging under the auspices of the Forum: Breaking The Impasse. More about this later.

When you describe your symptoms to a doctor and she interprets it into something where the root cause can be determined, that’s a form of translation. When you tell a salesman what you want, and he responds, that’s a form of translation.

Most projects are about translation, interpreting what is needed by listening to a variety of sources and inputs. Which, incidentally, gives me the opportunity to highlight an old favourite of mine, Tell Me What You Want (And I’ll Give You What You Need). An underestimated track from a great band, the Doobie Brothers, and a brilliant album, What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits.

Even when it comes to information technology, there’s a lot of translation to be done. And good translation requires many things to happen. You need to be a really good listener. I mean really good. You need to be able to store what’s said and to replay it on demand. You need to be able to do that iteratively: Is this what you said? Did I get it right? That’s why, in disk technology, particularly when there’s a phase change involved,  “RAW checks” are performed, the read-after-write checks that ensure what you recorded is true to the original and intelligible when replayed.

The listening skills have to go beyond record-and-replay, archive-and-restore. You have to be able to interpret what has been said from its original context to one where someone else can do something with it. So there’s a second, more important, iteration going on. “Is this what you meant? Have I understood you correctly?”

Much of what people called agile development is about these two steps, listening intently and then translating from one context to another, repeatedly, until the customer can say “That’s it, that is what I want”.

Change has been a constant for some time now, and agile processes were developed in response.

For the past decade or two, something else has changed. The pace of change. And that pace continues to grow.

Which means that we need to become better listeners, better recorders, better interpreters.

Better translators.

Live-translating from one context to another.

A hard thing to do.

Which is why I salute translators everywhere. You do a hard job and you do it well. We could not learn as much as we do if people like you didn’t exist.

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.