Our fast-food culture’s vicious impact on our thinking is not just a potential threat, but a horrifying reality now. But how?
There were times when families used to spend hours preparing, choosing the right vegetables from the market, cutting them, and cooking them diligently. But today, in this Swiggy/Zomato era, that level of diligence and patience is dying or nearly extinct. People want instant delivery, instant consumption, and instant gratification. However, that gratification is hallucinating because there’s neither sincerely invested effort nor a sense of having “earned”.
Those who lived in the 90s era as kids will not be alienated with the fact that we used to find happiness in small, trivial stuff: Weekend movie on DD, going to a movie theatre and sweating out in a long queue to get the tickets, that too if you are lucky. Restaurant foods used to be a weekend or monthly luxury, being able to watch TV during your favorite show slot was nothing less than a treat itself. Things seemed worth because it had to be earned; there was no instant treat except 2-minute Maggie. But then smartphones came, and such small trivial joys became history in no time.
There are three types of cooking that are recognized in Indian culture: Tawa, Kadai, and Dum. While tawa cooking is quick, kadai cooking is moderate, and dum cooking is a slow process that takes hours to produce a flavorful result. I think this reflects the basic truth of life: we need to put in time, patience, and effort if we are to genuinely savor and enjoy.
So, isn’t the same fundamentals applied to our life? “To savor and enjoy soulfully, it becomes necessary to put in your time, patience, and efforts.”
How is trivial in the AI era, but the thing which gives human an edge is to dig what and why. A very subtle observation from Ramayan, taught by my teacher:
Shree Ram was the master and Hanumanji was his sevak, but still Shree Ram went to ashram for study. But do you recall Hanumanji ever went to any ashram? Why? But that’s the catch: master needs to learn to what command to be given and when. Master needs a teaching to become a master, sevak doesn’t need teaching to serve. For this, we need to be a keen student of the practical world.
Unfortunately, excessive materialism has turned everything into commodities. The sense of critical thinking and evaluation acumen has been lost. As a result, many people talk about many things, but their voice remains shallow as it lacks sincere in-depth study and analytical insights. This is evident when highly advanced android robots are given, but individuals lack the vision and motivation on how to utilize them effectively. One of the team leaders has a quote on his team's profile: “love what you do”. I wonder as I have always been following otherwise, “doing what I love”.
After attending two successive marathon meetings (1.5 hours falls under a “marathon” based on my personal metric for suffering), after witnessing big bosses making attempts to play around with the newly discovered fire called a “webhook”, which turned me into a silent frozen voice, when I saw those big minds discussing their interpretation of this new beast, with inaccurate words and misplaced understanding. Sorry, but I am a man of profound semantics and subtle specificity. It becomes heart-wrenching when I see the merciless botching of proof-of-concept or an idea with wasted misuse of some fancy but irrelevant technical jargons and speculated theories. When I initially saw most people being busy in calls/meetings, it made me wonder what exactly do they discuss, from where they are getting the contents to discuss when they spend all their time in meetings. My limited understanding of any discussion/meeting is it should precede as well as succeed with concrete work. But here, just like the process wasting time on waiting for I/O operations than actual processing, I see more discussion than actual work. When someone says this solution is “good”, my immediate (internal) response would be, “good in terms of what parameters?” Something can be good/better relative to another thing. If you have nothing else to compare to, then there is no meaning of tagging it good or bad. I am not a person who would expect credit or recognition for my job work, but I am also not insensitive to the fact that managers trying to gain diplomatic incentives by diluting my sole contribution by unethically crediting other members!
I remember Steve Jobs’ remarkable quote:
"We hired professional managers but most of them were bozos, they knew how to manage but they didn’t know how to do anything. Why would you want to work for someone, whom you cannot learn anything from?"
But that’s the beauty of life, tomorrow when (if) I wake up from the bed, I would still pursue things like an amazed curious child in a new supermarket, seeking to explore, to observe and to enjoy things, with an undying perseverance of keeping the student kid in me alive…
अस्तु।
DESSERT:
“Experience taught tigers to be silent because hunting is not done by just roaring..!!”
