discounted refinement

Sometimes I feel you can be either articulate and feel happy or escape to be a poet and seek refuge in the discounted refinement of thought and stay perpetually thirsty. I hate to become nevertheless becoming a clipart junkie who is trying to put together a collage.

hit and duck in the game of blow
be a meek or simple its way to grow
power play is on try and understand
Pawns we are, you sit or you stand

I have been a gifted fool sofar
see dejection in ashoka's eye even before the war
piggy bank the pain know not since when
shatter it into raptures to start the count again

endure we must

The filth and degenration all around me..
am losing my ability to disgust
what have become of this collective dream
aint a perfect world, its all we got and endure we must

Have you voted today?

This post is like a ideas put in the bottle and thrown in the sea.
Polls are around the corner. We live in the biggest democracy of the world and to make it work in its true sense we should vote. IDC, my design school, I am proud to say, was instrumental in designing the electronic voting machine.
Today we need a ad-push like Jaago-re or we need people coming down to our doorsteps to create that necessary stir that is a driving force if the things got to change.
Through 'jaago-re', I understand one can register on web, provide ID proof and residence proof and automatically your old voting card gets cancelled and new one gets delivered at the given address. For the mobile population like us, who like to throw empty rhetorics from the AC cabins of IT companies and post blogs filled with angst (like this one), who are 'supposed' to be worried about the running the nation than any other guy on the street, such convenience of 'getting hold' of voting card is not enough. We want more.
Here are some ways to make voting a faster, secure, cheap and all-inclusive.
1. Make voting machines talk to server in real time (if it is not already), if tampered with will black list all the entries uploaded.
2. Use ATM machines as a means of voting or online authentication followed by a voting interface. Since postal ballot is allowed for 'army bhaiyon' ko, then we might as well adapt the new ways of picking options. (Can a government body rent out / ask for already existing privately owned infrastructure by raising the issue of national forum and cooperation / participation?)
3. Mobile banks concept is picking up fast to connect the last mile 'the grassroot', so this can act as polling booth in villages as well where ATMs are not there.
4.Telephone based interface for authentication and voting. So one can start with any proof like PAN, DL, Passport, and land into the voting options. This sounds like a best option since today the connectivity is snowballing and Poll can be another prime mover to this 'telephony based economy'
5. The issue of lack of secrecy and possibility of coercion is significant in all the above discussed options, I agree, but some work around can be found and such thing evolve on its own if let develop. Atleast the chances of coercion is far more if the people are made to wait in a que in the scrotching heat where a free distribution of cold-drink can also sway the lesser minds. I am not trying to over-simplify but atleast the next poll should be far different than this one in its intrumentation is what I want.
6. how about social softwares to facilitate the voting or a quick app on facebook/orkut? May be tehre is quick links to party manifesto and 'whats there for me' comes filtered based on your demographics. Assume I login to facebook and decide to vote, it says, this party is offering tax reliefs, while this one is notching up the reform expenditures, etc... and I would be rational enough to vote with a reason than becoming a victim of tailered propaganda.

थोड़ा सा रूमानी हो जाए

उन दो निगाहों के साए
जब से इस ज़िन्दगी मे आए
सो न पाऊ मैं इस डर से अब कभी
सपना ये टूटे गर आँख लग जाए

Designing for India is like designing font for ransom letter

I dropped into Pune after a gap of few months. When I left, the whole city was undergoing construction and road widening.
The deal was to have the city (some parts of the city) ready for the youth game events. But the city municipal corporation in their usual style kept missing the milestones and then somehow on the eve before the d-day fixed the ‘stuff’ to adorn the roads; even the paint was wet when guests arrived.
Think of a bachelor’s house and girlfriend drops in unannounced, how the things are shoved under the bed, tucked under the pillow, forced into overflowing cupboard, giving a temporary look of tidiness; it’s the same.
But it is a city, a larger living space we are dealing with. It affect the mind and psyche of its inhabitants and it feels bad when you look at such gross misuse of power to decide in what kind of place 'we' live in.
When I look at the graphics and visual identity designed for the youth games; it’s like crude, unfinished makeshift thing. Giving insights into how bad we are at detailing or how insensitive we have become to the visual and the visible aspects of the things around us. I am not a kind of person who believes in real design is what comply with the taste of Europe or few cartelised bunch of people. But it takes deep dive into the collective consciousness of the people, which we forgot about as a design community.
I remember we discussing kitsch as a way of ‘filler’ design back while studying design, think of how meters in the auto-rick are adorned or small town furniture are detailed by stuffing the motifs and elements with no regards to the end result.
Our lack of taste or lack of ‘consistent’ taste with definite personality is visible in every aspect. May it is a result of the fact that we are not a homogeneous society anymore, we are one 'big layered cake' if they like to call US as 'melting pot'; or it reminds me of one sanskrit song we used to taught in texts about 'Sthala-pistatakam' a dish like theple (guju) where all ingredients maintain their tastes . We are bad at discovering the values and mores that are so much authentic and original. The days are of fusion and not khichadi.
In our childhood, we used to hear “Pune thethe kai une” (rhetorical – “what on earth you won’t find in pune?”) now i guess i know the answer. We lack good designs.

What Goldmans and Lehmans did to aspirations...

Sandstorms

One believes in beauty of dice, the other in conscious act of creation
whichever shore I stand, freaking other looks a perfect illusion

conviction in either erode as scheme pattern irony make a crisp gestalt
when the humblest and the earnest bend down to the tragedies of lie and fault

thoughts lie down stranded and stare me in face,
eyes pleading for higher scheme to this maze,
but when..and then I go aghast
sandstorms in time altering the scapes of my past