The moaning of life #2 Childhood Trauma

The entire shark family is out for a hunt, and the little fish are running for their life. We get to cheer as the Baby Shark does Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo with his family, calling on the family - extended family and sometimes robots on the 'hunt' because your offspring decides that that is the one song they want you to play or a tantrum follows.

Many of you will say it's not the content but the catchy tune that draws the babies towards the nonsequential song, but it's more than that. It's the sheer repeatedness that draws your angst towards the piece. And YouTube provides the music based on how much time you want your baby to be engaged to it. You have a 60+ minute version and a 120+ minute version. The same shark family going out on the same hunt.

And it's not just the Shark family. Weirdly, baby JJ and his family sing random songs, go on a holiday and even increase the family. I am talking about Cocomelon, which has arrived in your child's life as he murmurs the word 'co-co' in broken language, asking you to play his songs. And these multiverses interact. The shark family comes out to play with the melon family capturing the baby's imagination.

Go out in the market, and in some corners, some parents are desperately holding out their phone screens on their screens, and you hear the bee entering the watermelon, and you know they are desperate. When did these things come into existence? 

The vaguest memory I had of a cartoon that I had watched at this age was that of some weird thing that aired on DD metro. Some Civil Servants perhaps had this idea of copying tom and jerry and used stop-motion animation using puppets. 

You have this cat chasing after a fish, a mouse who looks at the fish as if he is in love. The fish, in turn, dresses up as a princess and a chase ensues. While all this fun is going on, the cat catches the fish, fries it, and eats it. The bones are then dressed as the queen in the mouse's imagination. That was the most traumatic experience of my childhood. 

So shocking it was that for many years I did not eat fish for a long time. 

The second childhood trauma came from the show Richie Rich, but later years in my life. I used to travel to school with this slightly more privileged kid. They had cable TV with remote control when we still used the button TV. One day on a casual walk to school, the kid happened to mention the Richie Rich cartoon, a show where the boy is so rich he has a robot as a butler.

For the little me, the boy is a bit more privileged than me. It was hard to distinguish between him and the Richie Rich kid. And the petty conversation followed, with me chiding the boy for watching unrealistic shows.

How can a robot change its appearance, I argued?

But you can program it to change its appearance, he argued back. So lost we were debating the abstract concept about a fictitious character that we never realised that the whole argument was moot. The entire premise was inconsequential and yet had grasped our imagination.

One who had seen the show. The other could just imagine it.

But like it or hate it, the shows do have an effect on your personality. That argument early in the morning while walking for the bus stuck with me. That evening I rushed home, opened the oxford dictionary in my room and ran my little fingers on the listing page for 'p'. 

For until that argument, I had never heard of the word programming. 

And perhaps in the little mind of the baby, the word 'Doo doo doo do do' has some significance. Maybe we will come to know in the future?

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The moaning of life #1 Nerdgasm

Nerd culture has always been with us since the dawn of time. Those days when young boys and girls dreamt of walking into Mordor or chasing flying dragons, and this was necessary before the boon of modern computer design. Nerd culture hit its peak in the nineties when shows like He-man, swat cats, and G.I. Joe took a ripe audience for a ride. 

Moving away from Red Riding Hood and her impaired vision (I mean, who mistakes a wolf for her grandmother), we had cats who built plans in a junkyard. And the little me used the building blocks to assemble different items in my Mechanix box.

Nerd culture spun geographies, and I have a friend in London who grew up in Hong Kong and emigrated to England. Our upbringing has nothing in common, yet we spend hours discussing He-Man!

People have a passion for the pop culture and do not judge others. We do not fight if someone loves comics, board games, or even those who enjoy sewing. We appreciate all forms of nerdism and passion for different things.

The nerd culture hit me when I first saw the first spider-man movie in theatres. Here is a guy dressed in spandex, spinning webs from his hands, doing acrobats in the air. It was impossible to understand. And yet it made sense. It made so much sense that I watched that movie in the theatre three times. The Junior college (High School) student in me had saved enough money to do that. So what I go hungry for a week at college.

My girlfriend, now my wife, forgave me for taking her to the avengers' premiere for a date night and screaming in a theatre when I spotted Thanos on screen. 

Or when I promised her, I would walk into Mordor with her, when giving her a ring, not THE ring. She was the one, however, as she gifted me my first edition of Lord of the rings and the complete Sherlock Holmes as a gift.

Did we know back then that the nerd culture would hit us badly? It will decimate the entire movie-going experience. It will change the world during a pandemic. 

It was not a wave, and it was a big bang. 

And the Big bang theory had a big hand in it.

See, until the point when the show Big Bang Theory came aboard, we all went to comic cons, but we never celebrated the fact. So when I entered the entertainment store in Bangalore, I saw but didn't buy because until then, there was a premium on being different.

My parents didn't understand why a grown man would want to buy comics. However, I may try to explain about a man dressed as a dog wielding an MP5 gun firing through riots in Delhi (for an unversed, that's Doga, an Indian punisher who dresses like a Dog). A manager at a famous IT firm told me it didn't look professional that I had comics in my drawer, even though I spent more money on them than he ever did for an aftershave. A karmic balance was maintained when another manager exchanged Hush Hush with me for my Sandman overture. My mother questioned my collection of board games and wondered if they were for the kid.

And here is the thing, people told us to hide the fact that we enjoyed nerd culture. And yet, here was a show that celebrated the culture and showed the world it was as normal as people screaming for their favourite sports team. Sheldon Cooper, as a character, told us that it was okay to wear your justice league t-shirts out in public, and we did just that. And it said to the nerds that if you try hard, you can find your Penny, the girl of your dreams, and she will adjust with your nerdvana.

The nerds realised we were being lied to our whole life. That we were told to hide our passions for the greater good was a lie. Did I know I'll have a room full of board games professionally preserved in a bespoke made cupboard? I didn't. It was not hard to convince my wife, who had been along for the ride, to have the ONE Ring keyholder on the console table. She just gave up.

But, and here is the kicker, most of us nerds were more prosperous than other muggles (even though we spend our money on things many considered useless), and the world was watching.

So a movie producer could proudly announce, listen, we are going to make seventeen films in ten years, and I know this bunch who will watch them. When the world entered the pandemic, the nerds knew what they were going to do. We studied every zombie, alien invasion and apocalypse film. The world now caters for nerds and celebrates pop culture.

The nerdgasm hit.

And it will be hard for the world to reset. The clubs are failing, and going out is taking a hit, but today the sales of board games, comics and e-readers are through the roof. Unfortunately, PS5 are unavailable in the market; this is humanity's golden age. 

Since the dawn of time, humans revered the hunters and the gatherers, but the squeaky little guy who sat around the bonfire, telling heartwarming stories so that you do not fear throughout the night, had his only time now.

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The tale of two biryani

Before we begin, let us address the elephant in the room - what is a Biryani? Those who have not yet faced globalisation at the scale the world is moving on. Biryani is a dish in which succulent pieces of meat are cooked to perfection sandwiched between multiple layers of rice that is lightly spiced with thirty-six different spices. Those who have had the pleasure of meeting me (before March 2020) know that I have this persistent dream of having all types of biryanis in the world.

But this is not a food post. This is a post about observation and the value of change management in business. I had a favourite biryani shop on my way home from work. I had to ration my travel to make sure I do not eat there every day. The chef had a knack for making Biryani. However, he had no business acumen. He decided to keep his shop low-key, he offered no credit/debit card facility.

He only offered Biryani, and he was good at it. There were queues outside his shop that blocked the entire pavement, to the annoyance of the travellers. Needless to say, he was popular.

His sous chef started a completing Biryani shop in 2019 in the same area. He was a good chef but he was not the best. His entire marketing strategy was to jump on the tailwind of the original Biryani restaurant. He upgraded the infrastructure, offered credit/debit card payments. He negotiated with food delivery agents. Still, there was no business, nothing compared to the original biryani shop.

And then everything changes. Someone tried to eat a bat or a pangolin or there was a freak accident in a lab somewhere. But Covid hit the world, faster than Sterling runs with the ball towards the goal post. And as lockdown shut the places and people crawled back into enclosed spaces, the original biryani shop started feeling the brunt.

The new Biryani shop already had the habit of deliveries, his revenue model changed, it was a very short trip for him to prep for the pandemic. I could now order biryani from the comfort of my house. No need to stay in the queue, no need to carry loose change to give in the shop. And by the time the original biryani shop caught up, it was already too late.

Few of the regular customers had changed their palette and moved to the new biryani shop. And as I gobbled on the succulent meat, I could not help but wonder. Having one good thing about your business is not enough in modern times. The one thing that you are good at is the icing on top. The cake is a robust infrastructure that is hazards and pandemic proof.

Now, a pandemic is a once-in-a-life event, and you cannot prepare for such a calamity. But using the tools that support your business process will open your business to better avenues. Falling behind the technical curve because you are unfamiliar is not an excuse. We live in an exceeding post-pandemic world.

If the pandemic has been hard on your business, you have fallen behind on the technology curve. Like it or not technology is now penetrating our life deeper than the needle of COVID vaccines enter. People are wearing devices on their bodies, we have come a long way from that lone telephone kept in the corner of our houses. Sixty years ago we used to carry a cheque book in our pocket, now we carry the entire bank in them.

It is time to reinvent your business for the modern world. Because in this world, doing one thing is not enough. You need the technological backbone behind your talent, else like the first biryani shop, you end up losing to the next big thing!

What do you think?

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