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I asked this to my friends. And now I am asking you, what do you consider as love?

Love as happiness is an abstract noun. And like happiness what love means to each individual changes from person to person. Is it a extra flow of endorphins in the brain? Or is it what people compare with stories they have heard.  Of legends laila and majnu, or the recent bollywood flick. Some of my friends offered me their definition of love, what they feel the four letter word implies. I request the reader to comment too, and if possible before they read what the others think. To read what others think of love, (more…)

Nowadays I sport a full beard. The kind so dense that I could smuggle gold coins in. So I get to hear this, a lot :

Why are you growing a beard?

To which I mostly answer, I am not growing it, it is growing by itself. I will dissect this innocent question and the subversive answer to find out what society thinks of the full beard and why.

There are two causes for a full beard, namely -

1. you like a beard, hence you let it grow
2. you are indifferent to it, and hence you let it grow
3. you hate shaving/trimming, and hence you let it grow

The third reason is much more complex. Why does one not want to shave? Does he hate the act of shaving? Does he get turned off by the slight moral compulsion the society has put upon him to shave?
Does the fact that urban society has come to be dominated by white collar corporates, who have been disciplined into the riqours of grooming, make you feel enslaved?

First let us see if there are instances where society or institutions actually encourage a beard. First among them would off course be the sikh religion where beard comes under one of the five “ka’s”. I don’t want discuss this topic, one, because it is a religious issue, and second others have done it way better than I can. Another institution is the defence. At least some commando units, like the black cat commandoes, are encouraged to wear full beards. They even get a beard maintenance allowance if they sport one. Why does the highly disciplined and strict on grooming military, allow beards? in fact encourage it? We will come to this point later in this post.
Does corporate encourage, at least tolerate beards? Most of them from personal experience do not. The ones that do would be the creative sector, advertising, film making, etc. There is this popular notion that creativity and a beard are soul sisters. But a more likely reason may be that the creative sector also has more liberals.

Liberty - Liberty is a concept of political philosophy and identifies the condition in which an individual has the right to act according to his or her own will.

Like the recent supreme court decision not to allow a muslim student to wear a full beard, to avoid ‘talibanisation of india’. Now with full respect to the supreme court, I do think that talibanisation is not wearing a full beard, it is quashing of the individual liberty, and this decision is ironic as it is the supreme court which acted like the taliban.

Another report in TOI, made me ROTFL. Who am I kidding? there are people out there who follow trends like these. In between all the words like ‘new age man’, ’sexuality’, there was a line by a psychiatrist which caught my attention.

During recession, women look for security. So, they’re reverting to the original cave man prototype - someone combining strength and sensuality. The beard is the symbol of a primordial male energy.

Now that is something. Letting it grow, could also mean that the guy is in touch with his baser instincts, the lizard brain. The one which makes us clench our fist and grit our teeth, flex our neck muscles when excited. The one that the culture doesn’t teach us. So is society afraid of the cave man? It has sufficient reason to be, as there are violent men out there. And some types of violence also originate in the lizard brain. And this may be the reason that black cat commandos or NSGs are encouraged to sport a beard. To make the enemy afraid just by looking at a bearded guy is surely  way cheaper than very expensive weapons.

But there is another angle to the full beard. The ultra long flowy beard. Which has always demanded respect. Think Rabindranath Tagore, or Bheeshma Pitamah from Mahabharat, or the countless spiritual gurus. At what length does the beard loose its violent streak and turn into spirtual respect seeking body. Even the logic here is convoluted. Do you remember any famous indian god with a full beard? If a long flowy beard is an indicator of hightened spirituality, why does’nt the main gods, Vishnu and Shiva don’t sport one. Brahma does have a beard, but he is too mired in controversy to be worshippable. Still more mystery is how come shiva lost his moustache and beard. I have seen statues and paintings of shiva in himachal where he sports a full beard. And even without any factual data, one would assume that the dreadlocked shiva would hardly care about shaving. Who decided to shave shiva and why?

These are all questions still unanswered, mysteries to be undiscovered.

update - 2 june ‘09 - I have found a greater enemy of the beard, more dangerous than ’society’. It is called split ends.

This is the second post where I ponder about design. Here I am thinking aloud my experiences with developers. You can read the first post here.

A good developer is a very good problem solver. You give him a problem and he will give you the most fast, or the most efficient, or the most cost effective solution. Now having said that who defines and words the problem? The right answer would be the designer. The designer would consider different aspects of the problem, among them marketing, usability, etc, and then give a very specific and unambiguous problem statement to the developer.

The problem comes at this point. It seems as if everyone knows what the problem is. From the developer to anyone who knows about the project thinks he knows exactly what the problem is. And this in fact is the main problem. This is the problem which I guess is the root reason of why Open source software is difficult to use and not widely accepted.

There are various facets of this. Lets take an example which I hope will demonstrate this clearly. Clearly when I say developer it could also mean engineer for other fields. So there’s a furniture company called Woodworks. (more…)

Saw two coming off age movies, and that too in a row. It was a coincidence because I knew little about them, having downloaded them on a whim. First one was ‘Souffle au coeur, Le’ or ‘Murmur of the Heart’. The director has handled a very controversial issue, that of incest. Still there’s nothing vulgar about it. Also loved the non-judgemental way of the director. As in he did’nt want to show any character as the sum of their parts. The most appropriate parallel would be a wildlife filmmaker, who just observes and shows. Needless to say loved it. Also it reminded me of P.Padmaraj’s Rathi Nirvedam.

Compared to Murmur of the hearts, which was a great story well told, the second one ‘Marilena de la P7′ is an example of very good film making. The editing, the screenplay everything is just right. And this film earns the director, Cristian Nemescu a place on my best directors list.

And both of them go into my favorite movie list.

Design is both a noun and a verb. Understanding the meaning of ‘design’ is necessary to define a designer. This series of posts is to thus to verbalize my own thoughts and collate what designing means, and what are the different parts which sum it up.

Dictionary.com gives a few meanings of design off which these two would come close to what I have in mind.

• esp. to plan the form and structure of
• to form or conceive in the mind; contrive; plan

According to wikipedia,

As a verb, “to design” refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component with intention

Laying it on a spectrum, it would come between arts and engineering. And by arts and engineering I don’t mean the crafts associated but the philosophies. The philosophy of art would be, what someone does with his senses which has an affect on others’ senses. Also if pure art is defined strictly, it would also mean that it is made with no prior intention. If even an iota of intention comes into art it becomes a design/applied arts.This diagram shows what design encompasses. It has components of arts as well as components of engineering.

For example, if an artist is hired to create a painting to be hung in the lounge of 5 star hotel. The interior decorator tells the artist, that the painting should evoke a sense of calm, and zen simplicity, which are the key components of that hotel’s brand. If the artist then paints something keeping in mind those two points, then he becomes a designer. The same situation could have been handled by the interior decorator by browsing through various art galleries and finding a (more…)