Why Bran is so sad

One of my favourite formats of content on the internet is short clips of people saying one thing one day and then exactly the opposite a short time later. The best that I can recollect is Arnab Goswami absolutely laying into Yogi Adityanath for some of his comments and then criticising Narendra Modi as well while he's at it followed by a clip of him interviewing Yogi Adityanath where calling him "mild" would be an understatement and he praises Yogi for the same comments that he had castigated earlier. This is the video I'm talking about.

This is also hilarious when you look at two tweets or facebook posts where the person lauds something in one and criticises it in the other. Or someone tweets that they are very against people who do something, then later do that very same thing. 

It would be even more hilarious if it wasn't a serious problem. Along with fake news, this kind of hypocrisy among people we trust for our information and politicians who rule us is worrying. Not only do they lie, they also change tunes seemingly at will. And why has this come to the fore now? Why have people started spreading more lies and changing their tunes more frequently recently. 

My humble submission and pet theory is that they haven't. I think politicians and media-persons are as unscrupulous and hypocritical as ever, it's just that with social media, it is far easier to spot as well as far easier to spread information across so many channels. It's like the Chinese whispering game - you hear one bit of information at one end and the information the last person receives is something only mildly related, most often completely random. 

But more than this, I would quote Arsene Wenger here. "It’s difficult sometimes when you are paid to talk, to talk, to talk and only say things that are true and intelligent." When someone's job is to talk a lot, give speeches, moderate panels every single night, they very very quickly run out of intelligent things to say. The hundreds and thousands of contradictions and hypocrisies in their mind and action come to the fore - and I'm sure this would be true for every single one of us. Even us good conscientious citizens, if we gave vent to every single thought, would be seen as terrible hypocrites. And maybe this is why some very questionable characters have huge mass followings - I think human beings are by nature very comfortable with hypocrisy. If we weren't, we would never be comfortable with anybody on this planet. All public figures, to my mind, are by definition questionable characters.

Social media exacerbates the situation is two ways. It makes it so much easier to point these hypocrisies out, because there is a record of every video, every statement, every speech, every tweet that someone has made. And secondly, everyone who loves to talk and say a lot is given a voice to talk all the time. This information deluge leaves us exhausted and often extremely sad or pessimistic.

I have lived happily all my life in Bengaluru. But when I was young, reading the newspaper was really scary. And after a burglary at my house, I started paying special attention to the crime section. Every day there were a couple of murders, a person shooting someone else, chain-snatchings, etc. etc. Now I understand that Bengaluru is a really peaceful city. More than a crore people live there, you would expect way more crime, chaos and disorder. If this was a few hundred years back, maybe a desperate fight for food, water and resources would cause riots and mob violence everyday if those many people lived in such a small space. So I now appreciate that the city of Bengaluru is overall, a peaceful, not terribly unsafe place. At least for the vast majority of the city for the vast majority of people.

And this is why I sympathise with Brandon Stark. (Mild spoilers from Game of Thrones coming) He is always expressionless, brooding, sad and sombre. Here is a guy who knows practically everything that has ever happened. All the major and so many minor events of history. Here is a guy who at any time can tune into anything happening anywhere and just find out. This guy is living in the biggest possible information deluge. Of course he would be terribly sad all the time.

And how different is this from us. Any semi-major event happening anywhere on earth, we can always find someone making a Facebook live about it. We can find someone tweeting about it. It is a miracle we are all not like Bran. Because at some level, we don't like to believe all those on media.

As one of my favourite contemporary writers Manu Joseph said - "The elite, by their very nature, are few in number but exert a disproportionate influence on voters by controlling activism and influencing journalism through which they then transmit gloom and fear. Their greatest political success is in creating the notion that we are going through times that are dark, angry and insane, which are intrinsic qualities of social activists but not the nature of our age or the world at all. The world is mostly banal and hopeful, until it switches on the media."

I like being banal and hopeful. 

The Perfect Painting

The book which left the greatest impact on me was "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". It's a hard book to read and make sense of. On my first read, I understood about 20% of it and on my second try, I got confused about the 20% while still being quite clueless about the 80%.

I will not discuss the book directly, because I don't remember the exact chronology of events. I just remember some ideas and thoughts that stuck with me amidst all that confusion and just stayed with me, gestating in my mind. There was one line that stuck with me throughout, that for me epitomised everything that I think I understood, correctly or wrongly, about the book.

"How do you make a perfect painting? By becoming a perfect person and then painting naturally." This line seems inane and ludicrous at the same time. We've seen plenty of perfect paintings by imperfect people. We've seen perfect music by imperfect people. In fact, the whole trope of the troubled genius seems to be a refutation of this idea. Perhaps these people are outliers. Perhaps everything discussed in the book is fanciful nonsense. This isn't an academic forum so I'm just going to go ahead and repeat what I've learnt from the book, something that I believe to be true.

Now, about this perfect painting - what is the metaphor trying to say. For some reason, our mind jumps to someone making a perfect painting and thinking about whether this person is necessarily a perfect person. What is a perfect painting? There are no perfect paintings - this is just that - a metaphor.

So let us flip it around - let us say you're a person who wants to make a painting that is close to perfection. Or for those of you who have a problem with the subjective nature of a perfect painting, let us take an example that can be measured and that I also relate to far more. Let us I want to execute a perfect run, where the perfect run is being able to run 21 km in 2 hours and then not be bedridden for the next several weeks. Right now I can't paint very well, nor can I run very well. I have to practice running. The question is though, should I only practice running. Robert Pirsig (the author of the book) disagrees. He says, you must improve your entire life. All aspects.

I like to think of our personality, or our selves as a tighly-wrung web, each string representing some one particular aspect of ourselves, be it physical or mental or spiritual or whatever. Pulling on any string will move every other string. Of course, some strings are close to each other, some are far away and will feel only a light pull. There are some surprising connections that you can never uncover no matter how hard you examine the web. One string might look very tangled with another but actually are weakly connected, while another far away that looks completely unrelated might be closely linked.

The point the author makes repeatedly is that everything you do affects who you are, and this becomes you and dictates what you do next. We tend to think of things in isolation. It is easy to see why a good night's sleep and a healthy breakfast will help you in that jog, but it isn't obvious for the painting. I think many people will disagree. But I think it's true.

I think the book doesn't try to make it a direct effect. Of course, on a healthy diet, on a good sleep, one can think better, work better, move better and pretty much do every thing better. But can a person get better at painting by becoming a better person? No, but the converse is the point being made here and the lesson to be learnt - you cannot become a better painter without becoming a better person.

Sounds absurd, but this brings me back to running and another book I read about it which I've discussed on this blog before. A leading running guru who coached several ultra-marathoners firmly believed (and did his own little pet experiments) that becoming a better runner is closely linked to becoming more empathetic. Recent research has shown very very close connections between psychological well-being and the health of your digestive system - so much so that some doctors believe that those complaining of chronic stomach and gut related problems being referred to psychologists will become routine practice soon.

Recently, I had a great rhythm going with my running - one shorter, quicker run, one longer, slower run and one long cycle ride per week, and everything was great. Work was getting done, I was eating better, I was actually cooking more instead of feeling lazy. Then one sleep-deprived, work-filled night ruined every thing. Not only did my stamina miraculously disappear for the next few days (understandable), I got back into some bad habits I'd been avoiding - nothing too serious, just a habit of binge re-watching a TV show that I'd decided to stop doing. It doesn't make direct sense that a break in routine should affect my will-power, especially given that the sleepless night had been a couple of days previously and I was technically caught up on my sleep.

I remember watching a talk by a guy, some kind of special force dude from UK or USA, who was captured and kept in a kind of well for some 11 months. It was a deep hole in the ground which he had no way of climbing. It was just wide enough for him to sleep and he was given some form of food every day, obviously not of the best quality. He explained what helped him survive - he never allowed himself to lapse into disorder. He mentally "arranged" the hole into different regions, one corner for sleeping, one corner for answering nature's calls, another place for sitting idle. He exercised in a particular corner of the hole everyday at a particular time and kept track of the date. All this while having no contact with anyone he knew and the sun beating down upon him every day as long as sunlight fell directly at the bottom of the hole.

This is an extreme example. In the same situation, I am sure that for me, it would be a slow descent into craziness, disorientation, etc. But this man avoided it, because he kept pulling on every string of the web. And if one thing gave way, if one day he said screw this and just slumped and slept where he exercised, then it was far from game over, but it was the first step of the descent and it would have undone a lot of hard work.

None of us are so perfect. Perhaps the nature of this man's special service training, whatever it was, gave him the right temperament to have this kind of steely determination. And I'm not saying that there is zero room for error. I think that this web of who we are is something we need to pull on and to balance continuously. A talent or a skill or a habit cannot suddenly bloom in a vacuum. You cannot suddenly just become a great painter while still not being regular with your meals or nice to your friends.

I think this picture of the personality, or of a persona, that this book gave me cuts both ways. It can be overwhelming to constantly think about. Oh no, if I don't eat properly now, will I be able to give that talk properly three days from now. Constant vigilance can very quickly become constant anxiety.

But there is a circularity to it. When everything seems to be going terribly, haphazardly, maybe all you need to do is pull on one string, and everything will fall in place. If you have a terrible sleep-cycle, if you're not eating properly, you're not working well, you're procrastinating, all you need is that one good jog. Not the perfect run. Even a terrible run is closer to a perfect run than no run. And this tug pulls the whole web forward. You're tired and you sleep well, so you have a better day at work. So you feel better and you're sweeter to the people around you.

When nothing is going right, a little tug anywhere can solve the problem everywhere. And when everything is going right, a little carelessness anywhere can ruin everything. It's just a more holistic way of looking at things. And for some reason, perhaps due to modernity, due to culture, due to human nature, whatever, we don't naturally look at things this way. At least I didn't, until I read this book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is "neither about Zen nor about Motorcycle Maintenance".