Indian Highways (or roads in general)

noreply@blogger.com (Yatish) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:31:00 +0000

Just went to see an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery called Indian Highways.

Wasn't that impressed on exit. The MF Hussein stuff was kind of bleh, nothing as impacting as I would have *expected* it to be given the controversy.

One peice that reminded me of India was by Bose Krishnamachari; a room full of suspended tiffins containing mini LCDs playing videos. The cacaphony brought the noise of the bazaar back to me. I told my friends when they came for the wedding that one thing about India is that life hits you in all it's facets in your face all the time. This was like that.

On the way out a note by a painting caught my eye. To paraphrase: The Indian highways, whether tarred or digital are not about the people but about the consumption of wealth.

Well dah. What else are roads for? The Harrapan's standardised road widths, probably to allow the easy passage of traffic (i.e. goods) on main roads. The chinese standardised their roads to make it easy for goods to be transported. The Romans who were the greatest engineers of their time were prolific road builders to keep goods, communications and soldiers moving. And why? So their empire could keep a bunch of people at the top living in ridiculous wealth even when the empire should have theoretically stopped producing so much wealth.

The modern Indian Highway system is not for anything else, whether the new super smooth national highway system or the older state and border roads. Anyone who has travelled at night and seen the trucking knows what I am talking about.

A first post

noreply@blogger.com (Yatish) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:03:00 +0000

Some thoughts pertaining to blogging follow.

Some stats from last year on blogging here. 70'000 a day. That's crazy.

Marshall McLuhan - The medium is the massage. If communication methods are social determinism i.e. the method of communication determines the kind of society that we are then there is something definitely odd about us. Among all of these blogs out there only a few are actually read. The most popular blogs at anyone time are those that are extremly technologically or politically relevant, or those that are about crap. Two points from here 1) we all seem to be interested in trying to be heard (when will I be famous?) and 2) we are interested in trivial junk information.

A site that I check everyday is engadget, and this is nothing but a blog that collates information from other places. You don't even need peopel to do this anymore. Engadget could actually be a bunch of bots zooming around the web picking up information that meets certain criteria. HTML 5.0 is going to make this even easier to achieve.

I don't subscribe to either of the two popular media theories. One being that we get what we demand (in terms of information and entertainment). That is we want Paris Hilton and whatever else plastered on our screens and front pages. The other being that we are fed a diet of this stuff as some mass conspiracy in order to maintain hegemony. To me it's more a symbiosis of the two.

so where does it end up? Epic 2014

a few words

Indian Highways (or roads in general)

A first post