02

Sep

Vitamin T: Your Pill for Transport Back in Time..or into the Future

On The Time Traveler’s Wife

by Audrey Niffeneger

The Time Traveler's Wife

I often wonder…what with all the inventions, innovations and the world literally at our fingertips now, why haven’t scientists invented a time machine yet? All limited resources follow the basic norm of economics. But time, the most limited of all resources, defies it – you can’t save it, can’t return it, there is no credit for wasting (read overspending) it.  Hence, making a more compelling case for people to find a way to manipulate it.

Think about how much time we spend thinking about time, either about traveling ahead or turning it back. I wish I could have done this or that, if I could change this, if I just knew this before…

We have medicines to cure the most complicated diseases, reverse the impact of age, even a science to predict future, why not have, say, a Vitamin T for Time? Popping a pill could give one more hours in a day, a 500 mg may even catapult us into the future for some time, or a Slow Release version of the pill that could slow us down and transport us back to the past for a bit. I know I’m getting carried away with this, but did anyone think cloning was possible 50 years back?

That was just some food for thought. In the meanwhile, till someone really manages to make this real, we can continue to feed on sci-fi books and movies. My recent read gave me a lot of fodder for this: The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Debut novel of author Audrey Niffenegger, it is a love story set in an unusual backdrop of time traveling. I have to say, along with the “bestseller” and “major motion picture” labels on the cover, it should also have one that reads “water-works”.

In the book, the protagonist Henry De Tamble suffers from a rare genetic anomaly, called Chrono-Impairment that causes him to involuntarily travel through time, to the future and to the past. His destinations are tied to his subconscious – places and times related to his own history. For instance, he visits his wife multiple times during her childhood, almost accompanying her growth from childhood to adulthood…on the other hand, he also tends to keep going back to the scene of his mother’s car accident in which he lost her to death. It’s not unusual for Henry to run into the other Henry from some other time period and help him out of a jam.

Difficult to comprehend? Yes it is, indeed. But Niffinegger makes this sound so real that at one point I felt compelled to google whether this is a real disease (feel free to laugh at me over this, I felt incredibly stupid for doing so myself).

Grown up Henry traveling back to Clare (6 yrs old)

Henry traveling back to Clare (6 yrs old)

Using the alternating first-person style, the novel narrates the stories of Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library in 1991 at the opening of the novel, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life. She has adored him for most of her life because he has been popping in and out of it since she was 6 years old.

This makes it mind bogglingly confusing at times, only to make sense after a coupe of pages or chapters and sometimes not at all. But the riveting he-said, she-said, he thinks – she thinks account makes you feel closer to the characters and keeps the reader engaged. You never notice when the story and the characters creep under your skin.

The book traces the evolution and strength of the love story that is fated to endure the trials and tribulations of Henry hopping around through decades, front and back, disappearing at odd hours with no guarantee of where he will be or when he will return. Sometimes hours, sometimes days (Ahem, does this sound too different from normal men? As a footnote, Niffenegger did write this novel after a series of heartbreaks, we can see the analogy).

The love story is endearing because of its simple, Erich Segal, expression. I don’t pretend to know what love is for everyone. But I do know that knowing everything about that person, especially the faults, but wanting him or her anyway, does define love. The book conjures beautiful images of that definition.

Niffenegger’s depiction of the relationship is romantic and realistic, humorous and intense. Her portrayal of their love reminds me of a parent-child relationship.  No matter what the circumstances, parents don’t have the option of breaking up with their children. Henry and Clare play those roles alternately with and for each other. You can see that when you can’t imagine Henry time traveling without Clare to travel to and from.

Their relationship stands the test of daily frustrations, absences; and despite yourself, the longing and uncertainty crawl out of the pages of the book to sting your eyes with tears.

At some point, I did wonder which aspect I enjoyed more: the love story or the opportunity presented by the book to ponder over the functions time can play in our daily lives.

Time does a lot of things for us – it heals the way logic, reason and medicine cannot. It is our companion, always there in the past, present, future…watching us grow, even facilitating achievements and success. Who ever achieved anything without deadlines?

My favorite moment of the book – Henry’s helplessness at not being able to prevent bad events from happening, despite knowing of them prior to their unfolding.  His explanation reminds you of the most fundamental laws of life: “There is only one free will, when you are in time, in present. In the past we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there”.

We’ve always been coming to where we are currently since our time began. There is no amount of time travel that could perhaps change that. As much as we may repent/regret/ want to change the past actions, if not those, some other circumstances would have led us to exactly where we are now.

Also, life, in general, is all about timing. As Stacey Charter says, “(with time) the unreachable becomes reachable, unavailable becomes available, unattainable…attainable, and have patience, wait it out. It is all about timing.”

So often, I have found myself frustrated at things not going my way. And each time, have also found that those delays were not denials, that what eventually does come your way was worth the wait.

Coincidentally, I purchased the book when I really wanted to hold onto time. I was at a Barnes and Nobles store, in New York on a bright sunny summer day, with a hotdog stall staring straight at me through the glass door. It was perfect.  My flight back to reality was the following day and what I wouldn’t have done for a Vitamin T right then.

Which brings me to the million-dollar question. Henry travels to the past more than the future. Which I thought would be an interesting question to ponder for each one of us. If you could time travel, would you travel in the past or in the future? (Hence the poll below, punch in your preference, this makes for an interesting dipstick)

My guess is this would be a tough one to answer. As you think about this, do read the book, it is certainly an entertaining read… if you are a romantic, definitely. If you enjoy thinking about science fiction stuff and time machines, you may find yourself wondering about the authors’ mechanism for this, but not necessarily find the answers in there.

But most importantly, for those of us, who frequently itch to be in the future or in the past, it provides a good reference to understand that the trajectory of time travel that we are actually used to, of moving one day at a time at the rate of 60 seconds per minute into the future, has a critical function for us. Displacement of this one-way street, backward or forward, might be more distressing than one would think. Vitamin T, like all other pills, could be counter-productive if overdosed.


“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.” – Douglas Adams

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19

Aug

New York, New York – The Business of Life

The Empire State of Mind

I’ve been harvesting this thought for a some time now, pondering over why this city is so endearing to most people…to me, given that it has never technically been my home.  So I did some quote-searching online and found a couple that succinctly expressed it, but one in particular stood out:New York

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless – Simone De Beauvoir

Simple. That’s why it really is the city that never sleeps, why most people are either succeeding or striving, all types of people – artists, musicians, models, investment bankers – and people like me who were just break-ing for a bit in the city, yet woke up no later at 8:00am everyday just because it didn’t make sense to waste time sleeping in New York (Of course now that I am back at work and have to wake up at unearthly hours everyday, I’m having a tough time relating to my own holiday behavior)

But, even if you’re just visiting, the restlessness of the city creeps up on you. If you are  not actively trying to make something of yourself, you suddenly want to, just so you can justify your position on those crowded streets. If you’re going to push and shove, it must be for a cause!

What is the romance of New York? It’s not an exotic place; it is certainly not a relaxing place. But it is a lot of other things rolled into one. As Meyer Berger said, every one reads his own meaning into New York, and so I have mine.

Let me warn you, if you’re looking for a light read, this might get slightly philosophical. I may be over intellectualizing this but I feel the need to  articulate to myself, my own reasons for selecting this place. I need that connection between sense and sensibility for this one.

The whole objective of my break was to consolidate my 25 years in some way, make sense of events, experiences, just sit still with them for a bit. But more than that, to reinforce and never forget that there is so so so much more to do, to achieve, places to visit, people to meet, to succeed.

And if you really want to experience aspiration anywhere, it is this City. On the faces of people on the road, walking as if there is no tomorrow, in the lights that seem like if they shut down for few minutes, the universe might as well shut itself down, the yellow cabs that almost add to the illumination at night, the Statue that stands tall and upright, Times Square that is a little microcosm of the city really.

New York, at all points seems as if it is in business everyday, the business of life. Representing truly, what one wise man once said: The business of life is to be, to do, to be without, and to depart. You can’t really speak of the City without using a lot of verbs, to be, to do, to be without and to depart seems just right for the place.

 

Addressing the being and doing part, the whole world is in the city…literally (On day one, I bumped into three people I hadn’t met in years randomly). The mini-countries in Chinatown, Little Italy, little India-s spurting here and there; the immigrants, it seems, moved there and promptly plopped their countries alongside as well, and the city said “the more, the merrier” and adopted them as natural extensions of itself.

The theatre, art, glamour, commerce, fashion, the Hollywood and even the Bollywood, whatever you want to do or be, you have it. Just know how to get there, the map is important in the city.

Which bring me to the walking, one of the most delightful aspects of my trip. It isn’t called the Walking City for nothing. For one, try hailing a cab in NY. I walked on one hand, out of sheer pleasure and joy of being a traveler, and on the other hand because of my sheer disability to acquire a cab for myself.  There is too much competition, a line of people competing with you to catch one, and apparently the city disqualifies me for this game altogether because even if I manage to get one, I can’t keep one…somehow I never go to a place the cab driver would like to take me to, but the next person after me is always a perfect match. And let’s hope this is limited to cabs in NY only.

So back to the walking, this is when I overdid it and injured my Plantar Fascia (somewhere in the feet, my latest biological discovery). Apart from the obvious delights of the walking tours, you come across bakeries that promise “Happiness Unlimited” in the chocolate muffins. What a lovely idea I thought, why wouldn’t one go in to buy some happiness in the form of a chocolate muffin!

Man Shopping for Wife, NY

Man shopping for wife, NY

They don’t say this city is all business for nothing. Now look at this picture alongside, in which the man is “shopping” for a wife.  This is what his front and back read, “ Hi Friends, looking for a wealthy lady to be my wife. My name is Robert. Single, Never Married, No children. Call me…”

It transforms you a little too. In one of my first cab rides (the ONLY one) the Italian cab driver, when asked to take me to Chinatown, insisted that he must take me home instead, and I, in fact had a conversation about whose home he should take me, mine or his, till I reached my destination. This is what the city does to you. I do not typically chat with cab drivers, I don’t even receive telephone calls from numbers that don’t seem familiar. But here I was sitting in a cab, flirting with the cabbie, who feigned heartbreak as he dropped me off (thankfully) at Chinatown.

The city also brought my Sociology classes back to me. You are the place that you are in, you are the society, you are the environment.  In New York then, you are a lot of things at once. One time, at Madison Square Garden, I decided to stop and people watch. If I stayed there long enough, I’m pretty sure I would have caught the frequencies of the thoughts of all those diverse people frantically going somewhere: happy, sad, distressed, frustrated, exhilarated, success, failure.

It reminds you of all your life’s experiences at once. Somehow, I think the physical representation of grids; the right angled cross of avenues and numbered streets did this for me. I think the cross represents the cross between expectation and disappointment, excitement and gloom, hope and despair all rolled into one.  You take 5th Ave and 75 street and maybe buy some happiness at the big Apple store, you walk 42nd, and you’re bound to stumble upon excitement at Times Square, walk through Central Park, and you may experience contentment, take the financial district and you experience the despair a little, or stop earlier at WTC and some more gloom.  There are days when the tall buildings may seem like they’re all falling on you at once and other days when you feel like you are a part of them stretching unto the sky, into the universe gleefully, touching the stars and all that.

There is something so tangible about the fact that such is life, c’est la vie, be it, live it. The disappointments, the frustrations, the insecurities, all are a part of it, and sometimes do come up on one street and that is fate. But there are times, when all you need to do is walk away, the next street is right there, holding in itself a completely different set of options and experiences, always running parallel tempting you to choose it as an option. You can decide what to do, to be, to live without and to depart from. Life is always an option that way, I thought.  Happiness is the consequence of personal effort and that effort is to get off that street and take the next one. Because it is right there, in front of you, just a block to your right or left, depending upon what you’re looking for.

Do check this video out, if you haven’t already, my post might make more sense:

14 years ago Short URL 12 Comments

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01

Aug

Travel-ism or Tourism?

Apparently, there IS a difference

Each time I travel, I am faced by the same dilemma. Must I follow convention and go visit all the tourist-y places in the town first, or  follow my heart that is urging me to pick up a map, walk the street, try the food, meet the people and then perhaps if time allows, go see the tourist-y spots?

Walking in NYC, 2010

 I took some time to reflect on this travel quirk. Last year, I visited Hong Kong and Macau, had a great time. Then my sister and her husband did exactly the same trip two weeks later, and came back with pictures that looked entirely different from mine! Did we visit different places?

When I pondered more, it struck me that I have been to New York about a zillion times, but have never actually taken the trouble to go see the Statue of Liberty. I know great bars, eating joints, my favorite avenues, but no I can’t say I hate or love one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Thoughts accelerating now…I am living in Delhi and I haven’t seen the Red Fort. I was in Boston for three years and I didn’t take the trouble to go on the History Walk, or the Duck Tour (you can’t blame me for this though, this tour is on a “vehicle” in the shape of a duck that first drives you around the city, and then randomly enters the Charles river turning into a boat!).

This is enough to be identified as a pattern. Am I lazy? I don’t think so; I can spring out of bed for  Six Flags at 6:00am.  If the best crepes in town are 2 hours away, I’ll put an alarm to trek there too, just to catch the freshest ones. But an alarm for a packed day of city landmarks…

I’m not saying I never sight see, I do. I have been to Agra for the Taj Mahal and everything. But I do tend towards being a slightly eccentric tourist, for which I recently found a term.  Apparently, I fall under the category of what they call travelers. I spent some time researching this and found this definition that best explains this distinction:

“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” G.K. Chesterton

It seems a tourist is a visitor then, a traveler more of a wanderer. When I started this trip, my first alone-trip, the objective was just that, to wander. Without a time schedule to be anywhere (unless it’s a movie), arrive somewhere accidentally and marvel at the places on the way. So I did exactly that…through the streets of New York, the little Italy in Boston, woods of Maine, countryside in Texas and so on. Hungrily walking from one place to the next, only taking public transport when necessary. And I started to make mental notes on 1) handy tips, how you can be a good traveler and 2) why travel-ism maybe picking up as distinct from tourism. The How part first:

1)      Whenever possible, walk. This saves cost and is the best way to feel the pulse of the city, the smells, people, and culture…

2)      Smile at people (try not to be creepy)– There is so much you can learn about the culture of the city if the smile returned (or not returned) is wide and bright (like in California) or suspicious (Hong Kong) or brief (New York).

3)      Food! This is a big one for me; this is one research I do do. From Chandni Chowk in Delhi to French food in California, to the eclectic mix in NYC, I can’t call a vacation a vacation if I haven’t devoured the food

4)      Gain weight: Don’t bother dieting on a holiday! And this is coming from an obsessive weight freak, but I have successfully convinced myself that holiday weight is fashionable, yes it is.

5)      Taste local wine: The best wine I have had was in the oldest restaurant

Casal Gracias, Macau 2009

in Macau. I have never found it after much search anywhere in India, America or even Hong Kong! (picture alongside for reference, if anyone can find me that wine for purchase, there will be a cash prize!).

6)      Marvel – always best to set aside time to just marvel. You don’t have to miss the slow sunset over Hudson, just because you have to be at Times Square to see the night-lights. In my experience, the refreshing moments that serve the purpose of the vacation come from what you see when you happen to see it, rather than plan to.

7)      Wear flat shoes and bring a camera: these are two things I share with the tourist-y clan. Always bring a camera; even if it’s a small walk, it can be memorable. And wear flats; I have been doing this even as NYC women tower over me in their mind blowing heels (I’ve come to believe, their legs must have a nutrition inlet of their own)

8)   Laugh: if you are a traveler, you will get lost. Also since you haven’t taken the trouble to research the place, you will make a lot of other cultural or social boo-boos. But that’s the fun of it, so laugh

On why travel is picking up as distinct from tourism. I think travel in general relates back to the human need to move. Historically, our predecessors first traveled out of necessity, then for religion, migration, emigration, commerce, enlightenment and finally for pleasure. But pleasure as a reason for the need to move has been around for too long to accept it for what it is, so we spend some time intellectualizing it.

We have heard the word rejuvenate so often that it has lost its impact. But it is something to ponder. Traveling is the only time we sit still for a bit. In real life, we are always on the go. The “go” often makes us do things uncharacteristic of us; at work, we may become competitive even if we are not, in personal life there may be other pressures we may have to succumb to.

 

Central Park Zoo, 2010

Travel, from time to time, gives us the space and time to just be, in a manner that tourism doesn’t. Joseph Campbell very succinctly said that a sacred place is an absolute necessity for everyone today. “You must have a room, or hour, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

 

I think Travel-ism has picked up because it allows us to find that sacred place, where instead of getting out of the hustle bustle of real life and getting into the hustle bustle of being a tourist, it allows people to be still for sometime and come back really refreshed and ready to bustle again. So I guess, a little bit of a wandering once in a while is good. I’m reminded of the old adage, not all those who wander are lost.

 

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” Lao Tzu


Visit Top Quotes, This and That for my other favorite quotes on travel. Do add in your own too!

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23

Jul

Eat Pray Love – if books could be soul mates

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Okay,  hard one for me. This is probably how actors feel when they act in remakes of their favorite actors’ movies…or singers when they perform on a Beatles number…

But I’m going to take a cue from the book and practice “Parla Come Mangi‘ – literally, ‘speak the way you eat”.  It’s a reminder – when you’re making a big deal out of explaining something, searching for the right words – to keep your language as simple and direct, just lay it on the table.

Let me say it right off the bat then, I loved this book from the first page to the last, so this is a biased opinion…in fact, if books could be soul mates, this is it, I can cuddle up to it on a cold night and everything.

If you haven’t heard of it already, this is the Julia Roberts about-to-be big motion picture (with the gorgeous, Javier Bardem as the male protagonist, loud applause for the casting team every body…)

Memoir of author Elizabeth Gilbert, it is a travelogue tracing the year she chose to travel to three countries in her “search for everything”. Italy, where else would you go for pleasure? India, for peace…ok this is seriously debatable…and Indonesia, Bali to find a balance between the two.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what did this woman lose that had her hopping around three countries searching for it. In fact, the plot does sound chic-flicky  – with a divorce and painful love affair leading to her journey into self-discovery. But here is why I think the book was a worldwide bestseller, even with the men (yes, unhhuh, I do know men who have not only read it, but also admitted to have enjoyed it)…

In endurance sports, there is an expression called “hitting the wall”.  A condition in which a runner or cyclist simply runs out of energy to go any further. Sportsmen, who have learnt the art of breaking that wall, survive; others fall by the wayside.

I think in life too, we reach a point when we sometimes simply hit a wall. Eat Pray Love is about learning the art of breaking that wall. My take – when we are born, we learn how to live on the job. We fall, we stand, learn, grudge, complain…we stumble upon life accidentally. But there does come a point, with different circumstances for everyone that makes us stop and just ponder. Is there another way for us to happen to life instead of life happening to us? One that we choose instead of accidentally stumbling upon?

The book helped me recognize that it doesn’t take a tragedy to realize this; as we grow older, we build our inventory of daily disappointments, frustrations and patterns. That inventory needs occasional purging, for the future to truly rush in. But that’s easier said than done.  Sometimes we can’t help but haul our past around for decades even. Gilbert takes an unusual route to purge hers. Not a spiritual one of abstinence, but a meticulously thought through 3-pronged strategy: eating, praying and making love happen.

There are many lessons that struck a chord from her journey and that I love the book for…I discovered that happiness is a consequence of consistent personal effort, about the healing powers of pizza,  accepting embarrassing facts about one-self, that solitude can impact our mind in ways nothing else can, the beauty of doing nothing (this is truly an art btw, from recent personal experience), that you can choose your thoughts (shocking), that eventually, good and bad, both pass… the humor in tragedy…(I have tried to cover all of these in a collection of my favorite quotes from the book. Click here to browse these)

But the one thing, that stands out as a the reason for my love of the book is summarized in the following quote:

“We do spiritual ceremonies to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.”

How wonderful, I think that thought is. I’m not sure if I can think of myself as a poet, but somehow I love the idea of being my own plumber. Remodeling and upgrading myself whenever need be, fixing the nuts and bolts, in some cases maybe loosening them a little.

No matter what life deals us, I have come to believe that these self-created rituals sort of become our duty then. To enjoy life, is to let go.  This can be scary. For me, changing residences, cities, relationships, careers, jobs, all become a tad more challenging because I tend to look back for too long. I am a hyper-thinker, examining everything way too much, past, present and future. So when Gilbert sits at lunch and asks God “Look–I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?” I totally get what she means.

But what if we can truly accept, that what happens has to happen. Or let me change that paradigm a little…that what happened was never not going to happen, it changes perspective. When I examined my own life vis-à-vis this, I thought that’s true, I was never not going to be on this  break, never not working where I am, never not dated who I did, never not found friends that I did. That makes you think, if everything, pleasant and unpleasant, was happening anyway, then letting go becomes a lot easier. Does that make sense?

Our own rituals help us accept what was never not going to happen and welcome more of what has to happen. I know people who don’t wait for catastrophic events to indulge in this, they just go annually to Vipasana camps…the intensive meditation yoga camps that put you through rigorous schedule of work and prayer, disallowing any communication or speech for ten days (you can see why this could never be my ritual; I mean, I’m on my first alone-holiday and I decided to start a blog).

Gilbert identified travel across three countries in search of peace as her ritual.  The chapters trace her experience in Italy where she explores the sheer pleasure of food and nothingness. In India, with the guidance of her formal Guru, and informal Guru in a friend, (called Richard from Texas), she creates many other smaller rituals for her personal healing. In Indonesia, amongst other prophesies, she learns how to “smile from her liver” from medicine man Ketut, who teaches her “everything he knows” about life. And finally, yes, discovers love again, this time in a whole different light.

A great entertainer, this one will make you laugh, nod and grudgingly accept that you too may have harbored regrets, disappointments, could-haves and would-haves for too long.  And if you have, there is so much you may have missed out on, so much that couldn’t get in because it was houseful and a lot was yet to get out. So, fun times really…time to find your own ritual…where would you go if you had one year off?

These are my personal comments and ruminations. For a formal review, please visit New York Times Review.

Also I have changed my mind about my next post. I am putting the post on the movie “Up in the Air” as promised in my first post, on hold. I recently discovered the glorious difference between a tourist and a traveller and am itching to share that…till then, do visit This and That, for a collection of Eat Pray Love quotes. Please feel free to share your favorite ones and a completely different view on the book too, particularly look forward to the critics.

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18

Jul

Blink, Don’t Think- What explains the famous “Gut Feel”?

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell

Speed Dating is Speed Thinking. Does that make sense?

How often have you made snap judgments and been amazed at how spot-on they were? Classic one-liner follows, “I went with my gut”.

How often have you not gone with your snap judgment because you felt it wasn’t an “informed decision”. But all your due diligence lands you with the wrong decision anyway. Another classic one-liner follows, “Damn I knew It!”

And then there are times when your judgment call has simply been wrong and you wonder how your instinct failed you this time ( This time, “but my intuitions are always right…”)

All of us have had the above experiences at some point or the other. Blink hooks you into reading further in the first few pages itself because you are as familiar as you are confused by your gut feel and want to know more.

Personally, reading this book was a little like therapy for me, I have to confess. Notorious with friends and family for taking intuition-based decisions, or not taking a decision because it didn’t feel right, I was joyous as I found scientific explanations for this kind of decision-making, and childishly clapped on reading about the accuracy and soundness of such decisions (Thanks Malcolm, much gratitude!).

Let’s face it; some people are at peace with the process of decision-making. I am certainly not one of them; in fact, decision making for me has been historically so stressful, that I sometimes actually wish there were no choices to choose from (this is heightened at grocery stores, in the cereal aisle, where I temporarily become anti-capitalist each time).

But can’t run away from them, can we? Our life is almost entirely, a representation of the decisions we have made. They are a part of daily life: which bridges to burn, which ones to cross?  Which career paths to go for, what friends and partners to select? Some of us need a little help. Blink it seems can provide some of that.

This is interesting. After all the flak we have received for being judgmental, about people, situations, events in the first few seconds without knowing “enough”, it turns out those few-second judgments are critical. These are what term as gut feels/intuitions/hunches.

But Malcolm doesn’t like to call it any of that. What he says about calling them intuitions explains the flavor of the entire book, the scientific inquiry that has been built up through the chapters to prove that those two seconds are thinking. It’s just thinking that “moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with thinking”. So if you’re looking for a spiritual explanation for your epiphanies, this is not the right read for you (although if you do happen to find one, please let me know)…

In those few seconds, our brain engages in “thin-slicing”, i.e., the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. This is the reason why stress is known to improve performance, because in situations such as war or emergencies, extraneous information falls out and the brain focuses only on what’s critical.

Hence, Blink. Don’t think. It made me wonder that maybe that’s why blinking is such an important part of our everyday cognition. I think maybe we do need to miss out on a little bit of information all the time as we close our eyes to blink, so that the mind can make sense of the world.

The chapters of the book have been masterfully organized to demonstrate these thin-slicing experiences, in wars, police encounters, WW2 Code breaking, medical malpractice and so on. There are others we may relate to more such as Speed-Dating. This is a classic thin slicing experience, where you’re allowed few second/minutes to get a “sense” of the other person with limited time for more information.

It makes you stop and think when a man like Malcolm Gladwell, a science and business reporter, explores the gray areas in snap judgments to finally recommend that for vital matters such as your profession, or your life partners, “the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves.”

At this point, I really sat up thinking, Are you Serious??

And actually, think about it, does your unconscious ever kick in for routine decisions? Like the cereal aisle, my gut has never leaped out and pointed at strawberry versus honey bran. Our “sense” doesn’t want to expend itself on matters such as cereal apparently.

It is however reassuring to know that science backs the hunches because taking calls based on hunches is both very difficult and very easy. Easy because it comes instinctively…difficult, because it may turn out to be a second guessing nightmare, especially if it is not backed by evidence, or rationale to fall back on in the moments that need reassurance.

Because sometimes these judgment calls can be wrong. In fact, one of the lessons of Blink is that to “understand the true nature of instinctive decision-making is to be forgiving of the people that are trapped in circumstances that imperil good judgment”…bodyguards who could not prevent assassinations, police encounters that killed the wrong people, your own mistakes that resulted from rushing headfirst into a catastrophe despite knowing otherwise. These are moments when we go “mind-blind”, and judgments become fragile. This is perhaps the reason when otherwise normal people take significantly and catastrophically wrong decisions. This is why it is important to know the perils of wrong judgment. This is why, in some cases, we still need information.

Gladwell acknowledges that combining rational deliberation with judgment is then the biggest challenge…we see it in our lives too; entrepreneurs looking to decide on a product despite contradicting market intelligence; women and men going head first into relationships and marriages, despite warnings from friends, families that the partnership may be bad news.

I wonder where all this fits into experience. Experience does call for good judgments. The book says it too. But doesn’t experience then by definition mean more information and this all becomes  a little contradictory? As the old adage goes, good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. 25-35 is a better age-box because a lot of our bad decisions are out of the way, paving way for more sound ones. Those bad decisions, I guess then become a part of our backstage inventory of biases, and come back in the form of judgments when needed…maybe what experience does is that it trains us to identify the perils of rapid cognition. There are people, who after bad experiences, introspect way too much. Those people perhaps fall into the other peril of introspection, where everything is over thought through, is confusing and impairing for the brain’s ability to focus on what’s important.

I wish Gladwell delved deeper into how all the bits come together. It is good to know that snap judgments are not necessarily reckless and for the intuitive decision makers like me, very insightful indeed. But it would be nice to know more about how to differentiate situations when rapid condition must be accompanied with analysis and when we can entirely trust the gut.

Let’s hope Gladwell publishes a sequel soon and delves deeper into the unconscious…till then, please feel free to enjoy snap judgments, if nothing else, they are certainly much more fun than introspection. So make that judgment and either buy the book, if u have it, then read it, if you have read it, then do share your thoughts on it…Till then, I’m going to clap some more at the thumbs up for speed thinking.

Disclaimer: This is not a review of the book,  given that I am not qualified to review a book like this; these are my personal ruminations and comments  on the read. For a more formal review, please visit New York Times, Reviews

14 years ago Short URL 2 Comments

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14

Jul

The genesis – books can be mirrors to our souls, so can movies, landscapes and long rides…

Blogging they say is an unedited version of yourself…apparently not for the first post…given how many times I have gone back and forth editing this 🙂

Probably, because I’m an unlikely candidate to start a blog. For one, a self-confessed workaholic, I never leave time for hobbies (unless you consider drinking and eating one), and two because blogging requires a mental regimen around one topic. Unfortunately, I have ADD or what literary circles are now calling the “monkey mind” …swinging mindlessly from one topic/thought to another.

But now it seems I have the time and collected thoughts to do this. Time because of the wonderful happenstance of my current project away from work – all the way in Boston. Hence the time for books, movies and landscape, mentioned in the subtitle of the blog. The thoughts…are a side effect of growing up/older. Dancing as I am in this wonderful age – yes I can, finally, tick in the 25 – 30 age box! (Phew, passing through the 21st was the toughest yet!) When you’re not 16, 18 or 21 anymore, perspective gains a new meaning

But you’d agree the 15-24 age box was interesting, one that holds a lot of chaos for most of us, discovering life, love, friendships, careers, achievements, frustrations. Does the newfound perspective coming from what we will now call “experience” just delete all that…probably not…it remains, and is additive really…we are in fact and will continue to be a manifestation of the decade gone by.

My twenty, thirty-somethings agreed when I discussed this with them. Having enjoyed their views too, I realized there is an opportunity here to start a larger dialogue on this. I chose the lens of Books, Movies and Travel (this includes a taxi ride in NYC to Kayaking, both offer inspiration, believe me) my three current distractions and what can most closely be termed as hobbies.

All three can be mirrors to our own lives, or expose us to experiences that can be completely alien to us. This is an evolutionary discussion on stuff that keeps us busy …nothing too heavy, the fun stuff really, the stuff we love and sometimes hate to love and love to hate in our daily lives…decision making, mistakes, love, happiness, complications, careers and this could go on.

Anything that appeals to the sense, sensibility and sometimes prejudice (Click to know more about why this title, I would tell you here, but people tell me there is a protocol on length of posts, I may have exceeded it already)

But just to keep you engaged and reading, my next few posts are going to be about two books and a movie:1) Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell (this man made me wean off Fiction) 2) Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert  (touched a personal chord all along) 3) Up in the Air (this has George Clooney, need I say more?)

14 years ago Short URL 3 Comments

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