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.