Of Factoids and Figurines

1 - Locked and Overloaded

We live in a time of sensory overload - brain, intuition, instinct, smell, sight, sound - all overwhelming us like an old timey South Indian movie on steroids and hallucinogenics.  So we skim through - songs, news, food, articles, lists.  We skim and save for later, fooling ourselves that we will get back to it later.  Picking one thing and diving deep will trigger FOMO of other things.  So we try to engage everything.  And gain nothing.  We might as well be absorbing Taran Adarsh movie reviews for all the enrichment this skimming gives us.

And we end up with wrong notions of arts or stories or events.  So we fight and debate and argue.  Not even content to let someone hold onto their perceived value to an object/piece.  And then we re-evaluate and notice "hidden depths".  Like easter eggs discovered by chance on repeat viewings.  But subtlety may end up being a dying art.  Loud popping colors and noises are the order du jour.  Like a market place screaming for attention.  Everything out of ordinary, out of place, even out of decorum is thrown at us, all in order to be noticed.  And we do notice.  In an overloaded assault on our senses, only the improper and boorish will stand out.  At least for a while.

So overload breeds excess.  And we keep getting excessive.  And stupid.  Like bad firecrackers, like Donald Trump, like Rohit Shetty movies.  Shallow and devoid of depth, we consume the bare minimum from each so that we can move to the next and we end up becoming the lowest common denominator in all.  The standards and quality keeps getting lower.  But louder.  Always louder.


2 - Graphic Unreality

We live in between the tweets and retweets.  A glance at a feed tells us all the "facts" about our world.  Facts and figures and statistics.  That is what we reduce events, incidences and tragedies too.  Perhaps it is us turning into machines.  Perhaps a coping mechanism.  Or perhaps it is us on the verge of the next step of evolution.

This is perhaps, our way of insulating ourselves from something that could potentially overwhelm us to the point of causing irreparable damage to our brain.  So our brain switches off.  Like watching a Rohit Shetty film.  We look at things in terms of graphs and charts and numbers.  We quantify it into pockets of easily digestible information.  Flour churned into fine fluff to create an airy croissant of infographic.  Convenient that as we try to inject our machines with emotions, we are turning ourselves more and more mechanical - just to be able to function.  Outsourcing our emotionalism.

This feeling of insulation carries over when we experience other things that should feel more personal.  Art, relationships, conversations.  What could be rich evocative and operatic becomes a tinny instrumental background score churned through second grade airline speakers.  As the world keeps rapidly moving around us, we are cocooned and numbed into a lassitude as if in slow motion - like the Scorpio vs protagonist in a Rohit Shetty film.  Ultimately, having glanced at everything, we are unable to comprehend nothing.  Left with a feeling of vague emptiness that we can't quite put a finger on.  Like after having seen a Rohit Shetty film.

This will have long term implications.  We will process the data and run the numbers.  But we can't comprehend the implications.  The dissonance becomes evident as our forecasting abilities get weaker and we keep going off the mark.  Unlike a gunshot, fired by a protagonist, in... yep.  A Rohit Shetty film.


3 - Mercator in Effect

when we live life in terms of facts and figures and numbers and graphics, we tend to imagine connections where there may be none.  And tend to distort others that may exist.  Our grasp on scale and size tends to become tenuous and we make false equations.  We think of millions and billions in terms of transactional and transitional value - often an arbitrary number not very different from the other.  The scale of a thousand to million, of a million to billion is lost on us. Much like the scale of each incremental effort to move from one phase of life to the other.

Distance, cost, opportunity are all distorted.  And we end up chasing things that cost us much more in the long run, for a brief present respite.  Vision is lost in this weird in-between world of numbers and graphics.  We are unable to truly grasp the scope of things, good and bad.  

Numbers and data get tossed around, unchallenged and misunderstood.  And we often, knowingly and unknowingly, transfer our delusions to others.  We create a language around these arbitrary denominations that obfuscate all scope and scale.  And no one stops to challenge any of this.  Like how in a Star Wars galaxy of 1000 planets, all things seem to happen to only Skywalker and friends.  And we fail to realize that the jump from millionaire to billionaire is not a straight road but an exponential leap.  That the mechanics and logistics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe will all go for a toss once someone with a calculator and time sits down to audit.

This so called Mercator Effect of numbers is why we tend to experience a dissonance when reality presents itself.  We seem oddly perplexed when the actual status of affairs don't match the conclusions we arrive at.  And it doesn't help that needless numbers like frame rates, hertz and frequency, refresh rates, upload speeds are thrown into the mix to further confound us.  I guess this is why they keep asking you to shoot for the starts.  They probably have the distance and scale wrong in their head. 

MetaCritical Post on Rotten Perspectives

History, they say, is written by the winners.  When I say written, I mean the original writing.  I am not talking about the bad rewrite/remix/remake of the original.  That is a whole different story (see what I did there?).  Rewritten history is like a lazy cash grab revisionist effort on a classic movie (when you combine the two, it's called pulling a Padmavat).  Anyway, so History.  Winner's perspective.  Or at the very least, the survivor's perspective.

While our history is being revised or messed with though, spare a thought for our present.  Our present is also a narrative that is being chronicled.  And the perspective being given to it matters.  A lot of our most historic and landmark judgments are being made, for better or for worse (usually for worse, but depends, as will be highlighted further, on who you ask), by a small group of homogeneous individuals.  I am of course, referring to movie reviews.  Oh, and I guess it applies to the highest courts of law in all the countries as well.

They bring a certain perspective.  A very specific, certain perspective, common to each or most of them. It's like ordering an assorted platter of steamed plain paneer, and steamed plain paneer, with steamed plain paneer and more steamed plain paneer. It's not just about documentation of the present.  Most times, they also have future implications.  By validating that which is comfortable to them, and often only them, they ensure that more such trends are prevalent.  Whether they be actions, laws, or artistic creations.

And so the marginalized come up with their own art forms.  Which is often great, as it gives them a speaking voice.  But there can often be an exclusion from true inclusion (Yes, I type the way Nolan directs).  Meanwhile, the various avenues of propriety and political correctness keep getting narrower, limiting the already narrow perspective that the evaluators (Auto-correct tells me that is not a word) bring (like wearing screen darkening 3D glasses to a shaky cam, low lit movie).  A lot of this is known.  And so doubts and aspersions are cast on the evaluation itself.  These are quite often justified.  But a lot of mediocre voices take advantage of this crises, pinning their poor reception and fallacy of the evaluation itself (I say evaluate and voices and art forms - But I'm thinking movies, reviews and Rotten Tomatoes).  Mediocrity also creeps into the marginalized art form.  But for those starved of seeing their own reflection, they gobble those up.  So we end up with massive over-hyped and decidedly mediocre efforts capturing the collective zeitgeist.

This post itself proves the point against limited perspective - I am unable to muster viewpoints across different platforms and am filtering everything through a movies and reviews lens.  I guess,the point I am really trying to make is, can we make it so that we have fewer of those horrendous Tyler Perry Madea movies?