Artless and honest article - Should we really feel embarrassed of our parents?

Over the past few months, I have felt some honest emotional core missing from all the articles that I have read. There have been excellent articles to be sure – Suhel Seth’s roast, the expose on Kahani– and I do not even expect all articles to take me on an emotional hyperdrive. The famous letter to a Punju Boy is at best a rant, and not the best that has been written on the same theme, and its follow-up seems to be more a desperate bid to cash on an unexpected windfall as it rather incorrectly makes it a boys-vs.-single-girl crusade and works on a rather incurious logic that while bloggers are free to rant as viciously and stereotypically as they want, it being their blog, the commentators have to follow some norms defined by the very intemperate blogger.

Certain people on facebook have to end everything, everything, on a punchline. Seriously.

Then there are some favorite bloggers once who now have to have an armchair-side opinion on all themes they ever broached. So much so that when something happens, a cricketer retires, something else becomes topical, I can turn to their blogs in a couple of days and know there will be a post waiting for me there. Topical, vehement, but hollow.

In that respect, this article touched me with its honesty. It is what it is – what the author feels about, she has not been pushed to it by something that came in the news and is going to invite a lot of eyeballs if cashed on immediately, but something that touched her – simply. It is sentimental, because it is truly heartfelt and she does not have to cover with cleverness and punchlines.

A new low, yet again: Rahul Vatsa in CNN IBN

What's with CNN-IBN and their contempt for movies?
First, you have to bear the bloated mustachioed Masand offering his cliches for every movie, making you wonder at the ways of the world which pays this man to do what he does. Now this is the level of class II-level humour that you have to now read through by some Rahul Vatsa . It reads me like an idiot  sitting beside you and insisting on regaling you with his wit and you just wanting to shut him up to focus on the dirt under your fingernails. For me, this article definitely heralds a new low of such worthless unprintable inanities appearing in other-wise (still) respectable prints.


And what's with the utterly Zero-Percentilish language?

Let's drive to Goa!

Ec lair or ek tum

The funny thing is that I actually thought about Mona Kapoor today while driving down from Nainital. The context was that i had passed a hair salon board bordered by a rather anachronistic Divya Bharti with Katrina Kaif. And I started thinking about Feroze Nadiadwala, and the way producers have with hereoines, and then Boney Kapoor, and finally how Mona Kapoor once attacked Sridevi. And I thought how I must be the only person in the world at the moment who does not know Ms. Mona personally but is thinking about her.
After landing in Lko at one, and checking the net after five days, I find that Ms. Mona Kapoor is dead.

Of all the desperate-for-soundbyte attempts, I recommend this one by TOI, its obit built entirely around tweets, giving us eclairy tidbits from the deceased Ms. Kapoor's life.


I hope when I am dead, my life is not summarized on what toffees I kept on my tables.

When Goliaths collide

In 1997, a letter from John Le Carre in the Guradian, defending against himself against allegations of being anti-Semite, brought in the ring Salman Rushdie and Hitchens, invoking LeCarre's soft rationalization of the fatwa against Rushdie in 1989.
Oh what a delicious  battle this. And note how LeCarre's arguments already preempt the recent line taken by Chetan Bhagat.
Read Hitchen's opening metaphor! I was grinning imagining Chetan, cleaned out by the legendary Hitchens, trashed like poo in a soiled diaper.
Read here.

(All said and done,I still respect Chetan for sticking out for what he imagines freedom of speech as, even though i heartily disagree with him, and taking a stance. I believe that the Rushdie fatwa has been misused by certain rightwing elements for their own agenda, people who are as much enemies of "freedom of speech" as the ayatollah. Freedom is a rather tricky concept to understand because, many  times, the restraints lie not within the society but within us. Freedom is a dizzying plunge into a never-ending abyss of possibilities, negations, and regenerations, and not many of us want to walk to the edge of that cliff.  But it does strike me funny how he believes he sometimes "provokes" in his writings - illustrative how, like that frog in the well, our worldview seems so secure in its definitions, even in its accepted "provocations, when we choose not to imagine it beyond what we inherit.

From Satanic Verses:
“Question: What is the opposite of faith? 
Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. 
Doubt.

Jog back the memory lane - Teen Deviyan in JLTA couple of year

s back, Faiz and I landed at JLT and had a blast. One of the sessions we attended for laughs was called "Teen Deviyan" featuring three young female authoresses - Ira Trivedi, Anjum Hassan and Meenaxi Madhavan Reddy. Ira owned the session with a whisker-licking easy and Anjum was, really, in the wrong panel altogether and Meenaxi seemed to have a glossophobic attack as she read from her book.
This scouring article appeared on The DNA the next page and ever since I have always kept an eye open for anything by G Sampath. 
I do believe, given that I was a witness, this is brilliant writing. It is brief, simply written, and offers a delicious glimpse of what transpired without turning vicious.
Sometimes, as writers, we tend to overload the text with metaphors and twisted convoluted qualifiers. this article is an exercise how the same can be achieved, even bettered, if the message is intact. 

Time was when writers were scruffy-looking, unkempt individuals, who dressed strangely, smoked endlessly and suffered from alcoholism (or looked like they did). Their glamour most certainly did not - with some exceptions — stem from their looks.

You were attracted to their books before you engaged with their looks. At the Jaipur Literature festival, it’s been the reverse — you run into a wildly pretty woman and then scurry to find out what book she has written. This year, it is strikinghow extraordinarily pretty and well-toned the writer community has become.

Perhaps there is a secret cult of fitness fanatics for whom writing is part of a wholistic ‘wellness’ routine, like pilates and meditation.

How else does one account for the fact that the younger women writers all look like — and have the proportions of — models? As for some of the men strutting about like prize bulls, one gets the distinct impression that they put in more energy into their workouts than into their works.

You can’t help but wonder if there is some kind of inverse correlation between a writer’s looks and the quality of her prose — the worser the book, the more glamorous and attractive an author has to be.

To test this hypothesis out here at the Festival, I decided to rank all the female authors around in terms of their looks (I’m neither qualified nor interested in doing this exercise for male authors).

Right at the top, is former Miss India contestant Ira Trivedi. If a photographer can achieve an orgasm by sheer clicking, many surely attained it this evening at the Diggi palace, as she simpered and flirted with Chetan Bhagat in the session titled ‘Teen Deviyan’.

Her lush dark hair hung exactly as they had been trained to. If only she could have just sat there, like that, forever. No, she had to open her beautiful little mouth.

Anyways (to use a favourite word of Trivedi’s), if you really want to test out my hypothesis for yourself, I invite you to buy her brilliant book, The Great Indian Love Story, and read it — read it right till the end no matter what.

Softening the face of evil

I get really uncomfortable when a piece of history, represented by an imagery or a quote, gets appropriated and included in a work of art without the work attempting to understand the context of that piece. Like this new Hitler chic fad. Or, Che Guevera T-shirts being sold for 1500 in an American owned-brand store in a centre-city mall.

I believe greatly in the power of irreverent humour, of taking something sacred, and smashing it to pieces to exposes the hollow inside. As I read somewhere, we laugh loudest at things that most concern us. All institutions become stupider and stupider since their very nature is to self-preserve, and deny the dismantling of dialectical change. The older they are and the more obdurate they remain in their “faith”, the stupider they become, and the more the need to challenge them with irreverence. Humour, as a device, measures these institutions against the ever-changing conditions and values of our existence and leads to a constant cycle of creative destruction. However, before we lift the crowbar, it is our responsibility to first understand what exactly we are dismantling.

There have been many genocides through history. Many have been responsible for more deaths than Hitler. The great religions (the Inquisitions are estimated to have killed 60 million people), Genghis Khan, the prolonged massacre of the American Indians, and many others we will never know because no witness, no evidence was left. However, we can now view and appraise them from a cold distance because we live in a largely different world than the worlds these men lived in. Genghis Khan was not a war-criminal in his time, merely a rather vehement conqueror. The tortures and massacres in the name of religions were justified in those societies whose foundation stone remained the very religion, and not the principles of universal and fundamental rights that most modern societies are built on. The massacre of the Indians has sunk into a large collective unconsciousness. When America talks about the foundation “this country was built on”, they ignore the blood and bones crushed beneath those very stones. But even John Wayne now cannot get away with justifying that brutal beginning of American history (“I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”)

Hitler however still remains relevant to us because he engineered the biggest genocide of our own modern age. His legacy was not merely the murder of European Jew, gypsies, political dissidents, but a cold precise, even impersonal, system to achieve the same. Legacy of those concentration camps, as John Updike describes in Towards the End of Time as “those orderly death camps in the middle of the last century which ended forever Europe’s concept of itself as civilized and of the Western world as proceeding under a benign special Providence”.

Stalin is dead and so is, largely, that ugly face of communism. Unfortunately, Hitler, the ugly ideas of Nationalism Socialism he stood for, are still alive. Read Umberto Eco’s great essay that defines fascism, and you realize that the ideas which oppose minority rights, diversity, dissent, intellectuals and propound the violent imposition of a syncretistic faith, are still very much in our midst. And I am not talking about only the skinheads.  

If we choose to make a simulacrum of Hitler’s face, casting aside his hideously inhuman legacy of ideas - of a politics that methodically kills all dissent and difference, that glorifies a mythical past and molds every face and mind to that hideous ideal - what stops us then to extend this to using the swastika or a photographic print of the concentration-camp inmates as a Tshirt logo? Or a battered rape victim or a killed female fetus? Because they’re visually disturbing? Exactly. In the same manner, while Hitler’s face might not be, arguably, disturbing enough, the ideas he stood for and which still remain very relevant to us are many times more disturbing than the ones I mentioned. 

To paraphrase Eco: "We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again." And images, if I might add. Chaplin used his own likeness of Hitler to juxtapose the littleness of the man against the impact he was having on the lives of millions. And that’s why he would remain a bigger artist than Matisse who secluded himself from this greatly inconvenient war to paint his beautiful, voluptuous but lifeless paintings.

I am not a fascist. I believe in creative license and if somebody does decide to print a Nazi T-shirt all I can do is shake my head and still support their right to print that T-shirt. It’s only the cycle of ignorance it perpetuates that worries me, because in the bedrock of this doesn’t-concern-me ignorance is found these very evil ideas.

Take a hike

If you enter the boss' cabin demanding a raise, and he tells you to 'Go, take a hike', do you get that hike, or no?

Book Review - Zero Percentile 2.0

Where do you begin to review a book like Zero Percentile 2.0?

Belonging to that inspired genre of fiction where language is but a quickly-assembled vehicle for ideas, it would be unfair to burden the novel with any expectations there. The most that one can complain about is the inconsistency there. The language remains flat and insipid through most portions (sample this bullet-pointed description:  “The principal was tall and fat.”) and mooches along time-worn cliches. Courage is mustered (and never buttered), smiles flit across faces (as opposed to other unmentionable parts), couples “love each other like crazy” and when “thunderstorms, rains and the (sic) blinding streaks of light” accompany star-crossed births, one can sigh and comfortably snuggle to the fact that one is looking inside an imagination and sensibility which has remained underfed. And yet it insists on singeing you now and then with sparks of cringe-worthy inspirations like “a cocktail of different emotions in his heart”, “most aesthetically done lingerie” and possibly the worst metaphor for eyes, ever: “those two communication channels”. Information does not simply get lost in workplaces: it gets “extinct under silos of everyday work”. Moments like these where one wishes that the author would have restricted himself to the “tall” and “fat” adjectives he had displayed such uncanny mastery over.

But one wonders at the quality of editorship when one finds phrases like “most deep”, “thousands of passerby”, “his looked helpless” (unless “his” happened to be hanging out of the trousers at the moment) and when one has to frantically refer and reaffirm that “loathe” still remains a verb despite its repetitive usage as a noun.

But language, as many of these new-breed writers insist, is incidental, if not inessential. In the context of English in India, even an elitist conspiracy against the masses.

So if it’s not about how you say it, but what you have to say, let us examine the plot. ZP 2.0 begins where ZP 1.0 ends and that does not speak much for either of them. The setting is the takeover drama of PureConsultants, a Gurgaon-based software company which has dreams of becoming the biggest software company in the world, an ambition only slightly more exaggerated than Rohit Shetty’s dream of becoming the next Scorcese. An ambition as bloated as that needs a man needs a man with a vision at the helm, and Motu, the bloated protagonist, is just the man for it. A man brimming with business insights, all of which he had realized long before the story starts. Sample a few:

·         “Motu had realized a long time back that if he wanted to attract the best people in the industry he had to build a brand.” (Gaat it? Hire mediocre talent first, let them build the brand, then chuck them all out and hire the best people.)

·         “Companies needed to innovate to stay competitive.”

·         “Motu had realized a long time back that there were no real rules in business except that it needed to succeed.”

Insights which would make a Times-Ascent columnist weep.

To take Motu’s PC to its rightful place under the global sun, is the team. Arjun, the CTO, his protégé, with a broken marriage and a daughter, Diyaa, brought by “the lady who gave birth to her” a little prematurely in the world and suffering from many handicaps -- speech, slumping heads, braces on the legs – (it would be perhaps too much to expect any actual medical condition named) all of which she spectacularly, and predictably, overcomes over the course of the story to win back the affections of the perfectionist mother who abandoned father and daughter. Till then, Arjun and little Diyaa take on the world. As Diya tells her papa:

“You told me yesterday that to have the courage to do something is bigger than the actual achievement. I will definitely try. Don’t be nervous… we will win.” Diyaa smiled at him.

Incidentally, this is a speech given by a five-year old.

Given his challenges, Motu has spared Arjun the challenge of managing his next-big-thing in the hands of San, short for Sanjeev, the quintessential cliché for maverick:

“San was a maverick, liked to live king-size (as opposed to queen-sized), and importantly, always on his own terms. He was a dropout from IIT Delhi. (That ISI stamp of mediocre fiction: IIT!) He did not complete his degree as ennui forced him to discontinue in the middle of III year.” And you thought no one could force him to do anything.

 San arrives “tall” and “disheveled” “wearing jeans, crumpled T-shirt and something that came closest to slippers that usually men wear at night” for an interview, and through the book variously refers to money as “greens” (The only greens I have seen in Indian paper-notes have been the five-rupee ones) , “dough”, anything but money.

 It is a posturing that pervades the novel backed by nothing but air as warm as a fart trapped in an electric blanket. San christens Motu BD, Big Daddy, (rather than the more appropriate Biggus Dickus) and together the product they build is called “Babe”. What this product actually does for their big,big pharma client is never made clear. Alex, the CEO aspirant, dreaming of a merger of nothing less than 200 BN dollars, explains the role of the Babe as “it will give the USFDA what it wants, keep it satisfied, and will take care of one of the most painful parts of the merger” and later to his board as “this product is very important to us strategically. It will lead to a substantial amount of saving on the current expenditure of the company, to his board”. This is as detailed it gets.

Even though Babe remains a pivotal element of the plot all through the novel, its purpose is to only serve as the arena for the most cringing metaphors when San complains about funding breaks, crying how they are not letting his bade turn into a beautiful woman. And, of course, unabashed and unrestrained posturing. Sample this conversation about the Babe between the CEO and CFO:

“What is your opinion on the babe?”

“How do you want it”, she asked.

“Raw and naked.”

When the Babe runs into some issues (Explained away with the same fidgety-eyed vagueness: “older, unusable code”, some unmentioned changes of rules from USFDA), Motu realizes no amount of money and effort can put back together the Babe again. Since no details about the product and the issue are ever revealed, because none exist, one can only watch the drama unfold and wonder that leave aside board-room drama, has the author ever witnessed a module being developed. It is indeed difficult to classify ZP2.0 as a business fiction or, more specifically, an IT fiction, since it is equally clueless on both. When PC, in its earlier avatar of NumeroSoft, gets its first shot, shortlisted for another of those vague projects by the pharma major,  Pankaj, still at the helm of affairs, makes a pitch on why this unknown startup serving Delhi lalas should be favoured over its Infosys-numa and Accenture-numa rivals, with what the author knows best. IIT-IIT-IIT. “Two of the people are here from IIT and getting into IIT is tougher than securing admission in the famous MIT or Stanford.” And then it gets deliberately vague again. “They took turns to explain their parts of the presentation. Each of them spoke very well and came across as thought leaders on their topics.”

The question still haunts us: which genre do you classify such a book in? Language a casualty on the very first page, only a few pages need to be turned to realize that the book packs not even that modicum of details that, one would assume, make a fiction business fiction. The insidious insider account it poses to spill is at best a badly-overexposed , clumsily composed, photograph of a preening half-wit standing akimbo with the Infosys building as a backdrop.

Earlier, a delivery manager apprises Arjun, the CTO, thus: “There were multiple components that had to be plugged together to make it function. One of the most important components is not working well.” These are the vague mutterings which go for cutting-edge tech industry talk.

And as for the author’s knowledge of how Indian businesses works, let this end the discussion here and now: “New age Indians had for long stopped inducting undeserving family members and relatives into the mainstream of their businesses.” Right.

Maybe, it’s about the characters and their stories after all. So let us continue with the introductions.

Then there are the ladies, the love interests, Priya and Jaanvee. Priya forms the love-triangle with Motu and Pankaj, and their story continues, and mercifully, ends here. Janvee described in the same clichéd strokes as San, “eco grad from St. Stephen, MBA finance from IIMA” is the genius CFO who cannot figure out the mysterious company taking away PC’s Fortune 100 clients and poaching their employees, raising its shareholding from .5% to 51% over a period of many months, than do the obvious – ask the clients and the exiting employees. It takes the genius of Motu to make the first crack, even with the mysterious competitor’s ownership of PC now poised within kissing distance of 51%, as he traces the ownership to Pankaj by some judicious keywords on Google search (the details of the keywords left again conveniently vague). Later, even as the countdown to the finale begins, the AGM where control of PC will in all possibility be wrenched from their hands, he finally has the blazing epiphany only to be rebuffed by the CFO:

“What if we make a counter offer at a higher price to buy back the shares?”

“They will raise the price too. Moreover we don’t have the hardcash to pull it off. We will go bankrupt.”

LBO, anyone?

Another thing that the author keeps insisting about the girls is that while their beaus might be obese (Motu) and hygienically-challenged (San), the girls are the perfect realization of that ever-elusive beauty with brains.

She [Priya] was a rare combination of mind and matter which enhanced her appeal” -- leaving one wonder where that appeal had rested before the mind and matter elements.

A beauty with brains [Janvee], she could easily qualify among the top five in the “thinking man’s most wanted women’s list”. None of the men, all of course national icons, are quite mentioned as any figuring in any “thinking” or even unthinking woman’s desire list.

The sexist undertone continues where spinster Janvee’s passion for PC is explained thus. “PureConsultants was her surrogate child, replacing the physical, in-flesh one.” Got it? Same passion, but for the men it is a dream, a vision…. for San, the dough, the fame… but for Janvee it is the repressed mother bursting out.

To be fair to the author, it might be guessed here that the poor being might not have had much of first-, or even second-, hand experience of how females really feel: “[Janvee] never felt a tingling in her loins on seeing a man.” Perhaps shemales.

 And, of course, even as the drama reaches a climax, where PC, for all its Alexandrian ambitions, finds itself besieged by a mysterious competitor and a stalled watershed product, lacking the wits and balls to do anything, the posturing never stops. The finale is set when Motu crashes into the AGM in a helicopter, and hailed by the pilot, an ex-IAF wing-commander, and nothing less, as “one of the best things to have happened to the Indian business”. Arjun, who reunites with his wife conveniently on a chat, uses the moniker – superhero007. A failed marriage, a disabled child struggling against prejudices, PC nose-diving: nothing punctures our preening superheroes’ bloated egos.

The last of the jokers completing the pack is Nitin, for whom Lady luck seems to have reserved the worst of her plans. Infected with HIV in the previous novel, the sky falls on his head when he fires a cheating employee who hereon always stalks him with “loathe” in his eyes. His condition now revealed to everyone by the newly-acquired malefactor, Nitin hits rock-bottom when ostracized by his own colleagues and hounded by the press, PC apparently being new-age India’s beau ideal. “Opinion polls were conducted on him with an overwhelming (and uninformed) majority declaring he was on the wrong side.” Then, Tanya enters his life with a knock, a knock quite not like the pounds of the incessant media always at his doorstep, because “this knock was uncanny, soft and intriguing”.  (I have tried knocking on my door for minutes and never quite managed anything like this.) Tanya is a lawyer out on a purpose, to reclaim Nitin’s lost right to suffer with dignity, because “her father had caught the virus [HIV] on his only (How unlucky can you get?) visit to a brothel on the East Coast in the US.” It is notable how the novelist remains silent on the more significant details like what does Babe do and what ails it, and abundant in detail where none is really acquired.

Tanya writes a townhall speech for Nitin that makes his colleagues, as fickle as film extras, hang their heads in shame and suddenly Nitin is the darling of the awakened media, the subject for Hope, “one of the most prestigious shows on national television” (the author would brook no small regional ambitions for PC), the programme of course running to the highest TRPs ever, even beating Mahabharata, where Nitin confesses his love for Tanya on his knees (To experience the drama, imagine Phaneesh Murthy doing the same for Seetalwad, who’s proved in court his innocence in the sexual harassment case, on 60 Minutes) because alas, the lady with that uncanny knock has left him now, apparently unable to control here tingling loins for him anymore. Because, she reenters his life, buying “most aesthetically done lingerie” and tearing at his belt to let her give him the “priceless present I am planning to give to you” even through two condoms, as she proposes.

Love is in the air, Janvee, that repressed corporate spinster, is being propositioned incessantly by San in business discussions. Motu, even as the drama reaches the convulsive climax  – hostile takeovers, attempted murders, vendettas – is found “humming the Beatles’ number and I love her with the picture of Priya etched in his mind” when phoned by his hysterical CFO. And Arjun, the superhero Bond, is chatting incognito with his wife on the net with all the smug smirk of a Clark Kent since she does not know his identity yet. Once a virus unites them in the PC HO, a fatal attack on PC’s website and not a love virus, they reunite, delegating baby Diyaa’s care to fellow-employees with suspicious propensities:

·         “Arjun sent her away with a junior technologist who loved children.”

·         “He sent Diyaa to a sleeping room with an enthusiastic (ahem!) and cooperative office help.”

(Earlier, an apparently well-endowed doctor tells Nitin, our HIV victim, “I hope I have been able to drive home the enormity of the situation.”)

The plot peaks to the crescendo. An AGM, held incidentally to the backdrop of Mumbai Taj attacks where a lead character dies (Guess! Guess!); the ownership of PC changes hands and then is handed back to Arjun by a Pankaj, friend turned foe turned friend again over shared grief; San, the Anakin, turns to the dark side; and Nitin, perennially fraught with ill-luck, is stabbed and comatose. When, despite his now Lance-Armstrongic status, the doctors threaten to pull the plug out of his life-support (his CEO friends apparently running out of funds to support him any longer), Tanya stalls his evil plans thus: “She brought him home. She converted Nitin’s room to a hospital ward. Along with oxygen she gave him a daily dose of soul-stirring music from her ipod. She often took off her dress and snuggled up to him for hours with his head resting on her bosom, and gave him a…” (Ellipses left deliberately.) My tear-streaked advice to Tanya here would be to close the windows before that striptease since this is a narration by Pankaj.

Interspersed along these various hilarious plotlines are mind-bending revelations like:

·         “The Indian mindset of equating the doctor to god”

·         “As it happens in most love stories with a good ending, Arjun married early.”

·         “Motu’s mind, as is the case with all young people, had no acceptance for stereotypes.” (This one made me chortle aloud.)

In the end, ZP2.0 reads like a reenactment of a corporate drama by an obscure fund-strapped regional channel, by a director as uninformed as the actors. It packs a lot of fluff over two-dimensional characters and a hollow plot. Big-swinging-dickey cockiness borrowed from Wall-Street non-fictions and plastered on Karol Bagh pretenders (where, incidentally they live “blocks” away from each other) with not enough “dough” to buy buttons for their tattered boxers.

A bad, honest attempt might be forgiven. People learn. But it is that conceited assurance that the author packs, of coming from a world “populated by educated people, many of whom have travelled across the world, thus leading to a more mature outlook towards things” that make the readers wish that either the author’s hands be chopped off for typing this excrement and wasting our time or this travesty be stopped immediately. Perhaps, this review would deter a few readers and there would be no ZP3.0.

 

Reclaimed unsettled days

The biggest dilemma when you step out of the stock corporate career is getting up on most days and not knowing what to do with the rest of the day. We tell ourselves that we work for the work, for the money, and if we are such good bullshitters that we can bullshit ourselves, to make the world safer and happier. Perhaps we do, in measures. But nothing compares to the fact that our work structures our life. It gives it an agenda-fitted calendar, deliverables and timelines. It gives us a set of protocols: what to wear, where to go when you wake up, how long to sit at various spots, the jargon, the workflows, the whole hog. At the most, it would give you back your weekends,   which you’ll spend, in all probability, half-thinking about the next week.

These are still early days. But getting up and knowing that the entire day yawns ahead of you, unanswered, too cramped with possibilities is a greatly unsettling feeling. And yet delightful.