Cult o' SAoS

You are like a flower,
so sweet, and pretty, and pure.
I look at you, and sorrow
steals into my heart.

I feel that I ought to lay
my hands upon your head,
Praying that God should keep you
so pure, and pretty, and sweet.

translation to "Du Bist Wie Eine Blume", by Heinrich Heine, in his "Book of Ballads" (1825)
Has to be one of the most austere of poems.
The lines rhyme in German, imagine its beauty and the genius.

If you have no idea of the incident, you can go here
On ABC News
On CNN
I'm not professing any theories or consequences.

Here is the script to a scene from Richard Linklater's Waking Life

4 - Alienation

(Main character walking down the street with a man who is holding a can of gasoline).
"A self-destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He's an outsider to the human community. He thinks to himself, "I must be insane." What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does, a vested interest in considerable losses and catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-defined needs. Man wants chaos. In fact, he's gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We're irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It's in all of us. We revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies. But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven't given us any other options outside the occasional, purely symbolic, participatory act of voting. You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left? I feel that the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dissatisfactions into the socio-political and scientific schemes, let my own lack of a voice be heard."
(He pours gasoline all over himself and lights himself on fire.)

A moment of passion, an eternal symbol of love

In 1950 Robert Doisneau included one of his photographs, "The Kiss by the Hotel de Ville" (Le Baiser Du Trattoir), in Life magazine. The photograph of a man and woman kissing on a populated street in Paris has become his most famous works. Not only does it represent love and romance, it also defines Paris as the city of love. The photograph has become a symbol for those around the world. Today it can be found on postcards, note cards, and posters reminding people of the romance that pervades the image of Paris.

text

This universe that we live in is a creation. We're living in expressions of total field of universal creativity.
As expressions or little nodes of that colossal cosmic creativity, there's almost a responsibility of pressing or expressing what we stand for in the world.
An artist takes on the burden of manifesting the sort of unconscious world dream that is lying beneath the surface and maybe happens in people's visions or dreams or thoughts or reflections like that.
But artists find a way to make it into icons. Expressing it in the spirit of the times. By presenting what's latent but unexpressed it gives them another benchmark to succeed and to progress themselves.
This evolutionary sweep of consciousness is training itself back to spirit, even through the atrocities and tragedies of human histories.
The Ecological movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement - these are things that we recognise as common good.
These are to me signals that humanity is gaining a conscience, and that things are moving forward.

After finding myself restricted to sleeping and/or being delusional, I have decided to put up some stuff by the more interesting people out there.

The Trouble With India - A very long, but informative and thorough read that highlights how India has begun on the wrong foot and how the rot is setting in.

9 Lessons for Would-be Bloggers - A bit of blogging wisdom for the starters shared during the SxSW over at Texas in the mid of March

Five Principles to Design By - This partially covers my rant on the need for good design - remind you, not art - for a more sane world.

"Nature is cruel", they say. Being sarcastic, I guess.

UPDATE: After finding it difficult to integrate the SpikedHumor media player on this page, I've put up a YouTube version of the same clip.
Originally, I saw clip here. Strangely enough, it was posted earlier on YouTube but escaped attention.

The complete version of a rare short film from our side, "Flight of Imagination" just went live on iFilm. It was quite tiresome translating the Hindi narration into English and then adding subtitles to the whole clip, but I hope it would be worth it. Anything for a wider reach.
If you don't know about the short film, read my earlier post. Or visit the link on iFilm.

DIRECT LINK HERE
Here is a teaser for our first mobile short film titled "Flight of Imagination". Finding youtube crowded as well as too blue, I've put it up on iFilm.
The short film is about imagination and how they work alongside our dreams. It was created for Nokia's Indian edition of Short Film Awards, and the results for that will take quite some time.

Shooting on a mobile camera, that too one made ages before the whole "mobile short film" revolution, was a big difficulty. The size, the frame rate, the video quality, the ergonomics...I could go on.
More info and/or teasers to be put up regularly. Or do you think that would just be littering the interweb?

Update: The content is apparently reviewed by iFilm before being put up. If the above video does not lead you anywhere, please be a bit patient. You can open new tabs in the meanwhile.

Vannevar Bush - "As We May Think" (1945)

It has been quite some time that I had postponed a reading of this article. Even after being aware of the repeated references and a plethora of adjectives associated with it, I had been delaying it at my own leisurely pace. And now that I have read it, it feels almost like an epiphany. It is awe-inspiring in every aspect - the sheer foresight of Vannevar Bush, his suggested implementations and his proposed foundation for the way we might be able to record and access information. He pens his thoughts so vividly that you sometimes feel like he had access to a time capsule.


Alongside, he mentions of "Memex", an intelligent device of the future which would allow us to access all human knowledge. It has striking similarity to some of the computers of today - a Ninetendo DS seems a distant hand-held representation - but much of its suggested features are yet to be completely realised.

Leave this ugly website right now, and jump to the article which, I promise, would be one of your most fulfilling reads if you've got an aptitude for technology.

"Happy Birthday to you", the default birthday song across the planet, not to forget the most well-known, is a copyright work! That's right: you use it commercially without prior permissions and you get the stick.
Wikipedia, Kuro5hin and Snopes provide more information on this little known fact. Its genesis dates back to 1893, when two sisters in Kentucky collaborated to create a small melody for wishing their kindergarten students a goodmorning. Through adaptations, the lyrics changed to ones that we know of today, and through a lucky court ruling, the copyrights went to the sisters. Warner Chappell Records currently holds the rights to the song, so beware of the big label scare next time you use it. The rights expire in 2030.
Have fun watching Ms. Marilyn Monroe performing this song on JFK's birthday in '62.