Ring out the old. Ring out the new.

Matryoshka dolls, clairvoyance & First Day Third Shows

Welcome back!

Firstly, thank you so so much for the overwhelming response to my first post. The feeling has been beyond words. I hope I am able to live up to the expectations – whatever each one of you might have from me.

It is kind of ironical that the start of the new - the newsletter - is an outcome of clearing up of the old - the cleaning up my PC’s, hard drives, pen drives and other storage devices - of all the duplication that has happened over the years. It is also here that I chanced upon some essays and notes that I had written which became a catalyst for me taking the leap of starting this newsletter.

All in all, the process of decluttering has been quite a task. In order to avoid the risk (and the pain) of losing out on some ‘valuable’ data, files, pics, articles, and what not, I ended up creating multiple Matryoshka dolls.

My OCD of filing away stuff in folders actually did, and didn’t, come in handy. Did because it was all neatly organised. Didn’t because there were back-ups and then there were back-ups of the back-ups!

It dawned on me that I had kind of become like the guy in the joke who used to travel alone, but bought two local train tickets everyday. When asked by a fellow co-traveller about this quirk the guy explained that it was just in case one ticket got lost, he would always have the other. So the co-traveller asks what if both the tickets got lost? To which our man replies quite matter-of-factly that he has a monthly pass!

Just when I thought that I had cleared up one folder, up would come another with almost the same stuff and a little more, or a little less. Every now and then I had to go rinse my eyes as they would be swimming in file names and folder names which sounded similar, and yet were different because the file/folder size was different. Which meant that I had edited some of the content and yet had stored the earlier version. Which told me that there must have been some reason at that point in time that I had retained both the original as well as the edited version. I reached a point where, mainly for the sake of my sanity, I took on a mercenary avatar. The ‘delete’ key became my favourite.

A whole bunch of documents and presentations that were in my archives from each of my places of work. DELETE. At a point in time in the past I had found them to be worthy enough to be stored. What were thought to be cast-in-stone fundamentals now seemed so archaic in the new world order. Now they seemed quite irrelevant as the world had moved on quite some distance, and pretty fast too.

Digital photos by the thousands of every small or big act or expression, but not too many ‘moments’ that one can cherish. DELETE.

Movies and music albums and collections that were painstakingly downloaded even when the moral compass was still inclined towards anti-piracy. DELETE. Perhaps it was the thrill of being a pirate with a mine-is-bigger-than-yours (collection, I mean) attitude more than a real need to enrich the cultural faculties of the self that led to the hoarding.

I just dumped the whole lot – may be upto 500 gb of it – at the click of a mouse. Seeing the files vanish reminded me of Verbal Kint’s ‘poof’ from The Usual Suspects.

The surprising thing was that I didn’t even feel a tinge of regret. I am safe in the knowledge that technology will always be there to rescue, support, help.

But it got me thinking …

What is it about my generation (Gen Xers, in case you haven’t figured it out yet) that many of us are afflicted with this storing/collecting mentality? Is it the fact that having been raised in an era of deprivation, but having matured in an era of plenty, that we find some of the ‘firsts’ in our lives so valuable as to store/collect them? My home, for instance, has so many of these ‘firsts’ that it kind of resembles a museum. Since old habits die hard, same was the case when we took on computerisation with gusto and started storing a whole lot of stuff in digital format. It is what has given rise to the Marie Kondo’s of the world. The irony is not lost on me that Marie Kondo’s website has a store! A bit like ‘Let me help you discard your old stuff and then help you buy new stuff from me so that I can help you hoard so that I can then help you discard!!’

This affliction began with our generation and, if you grant me the license to be a clairvoyant, will also end with our generation. Fortunately (?). The generation that raised us didn’t hoard too many things as there were not too many things in the first place! And the generation that we are raising has a problem of plenty where nothing is permanently valuable. Everything is for the now. There is no effort – physical or mental – involved in obtaining something. It's just a click here or a click there and there it is, right in your lap – literally! And if it were to be misplaced, click some more. Is this use-and-throw attitude leading to a loss in things being valued, moments being cherished? But then who will miss it? Definitely not the generations to come. Because you miss only what you know. And the upcoming generations will never know what it feels like to not have something.

Be braver. Be kinder.

Backgrounder to how I got into writing short reviews

Thanks to the gang from my management college days, we had gotten into the habit of watching any, and almost, every new (mostly Hindi) movie that got released every Friday. We even got our respective spouses complicit in this habit. I was known as ‘First Day Third Show’ in my first place of work. Colleagues used to keep asking me how a particular movie was. It kind of got tiring to sit down and give a brief heads up to everyone. So I started writing short text messages that succinctly captured the movie, which I would then send out to quite a few friends. And while I have stopped living up to my First Day Third Show moniker long back, the habit of writing a review hasn’t. Now the reviews encompass movies, web series and documentaries that straddle multiple OTT platforms and languages. These are by no means anywhere close to proper reviews one gets to read in newspapers or watch on audio-visual platforms. But they are, I feel, an audience’s and not an expert’s way of watching content. I have also been accused of either being too lenient or too strict with my ratings. To which I say, ‘you can’t please everyone’.

I plan to share a review under the title of ‘Keep Watching’ at the end of every post. Some of you may have already read some of them thanks to my WhatsApp posts. Please accept my appreciation for your patience in spite of being subjected to them again.

Fresh off the once in a lifetime finals, decided to watch this documentary. And boy, does it rip apart the veneer behind the greatest spectacle on earth, aka the FIFA World Cup!! The documentary traces the lofty beginnings of the organisation, its commercialisation in the late 70’s and its subsequent downward spiral into a vortex of corruption, bribery, scandals and sport washing that take root during the tenure of Havelange, and are subsequently institutionalised under Blatter. And though there’s a new regime in place under Infantino, you get the feeling that the more things have changed, the more they are going to remain the same. All that we can do is watch the beautiful game for its beauty, and gloss over the intrigue, machinations and politics that go behind the event.

FIFA Uncovered on Netflix, Documentary, 4 episodes | Rating: 4*