The Infernal Diurnal Journal

  The trip to the USA went quite smoothly, it must be said. I am always on tenterhooks when travelling to such places with the family. This time, right off the bat I was worried that P’s new UAE visa might not arrive before she left- or in any case, even if it did arrive, it would not be enough time to receive the physical Emirates ID before departing. In the end, the electronic version came through and it was enough to let her board the plane for New York and also the flight back to Dubai. The Indian Passport, while offering us a chance at professing a faux-Patriotism- for what that was worth, is always an inconvenience when you want to travel internationally. Between the visa application process, and depositing your passport and so on, your travel plan has to be micro-managed in advance to a razor-sharp level of detail. This is a job an a half- and people don’t realise how much time and energy goes into it. However, from my personal standpoint, I am making some progress on the ...

The day of June 26, 2024, should really be written about. Upon rummaging through the ad-hoc and inconsistent mess that is my blog currently, I realise that a month has passed since that date, and I have not mentioned the events of the day. As it happens, there were two major events on the day. The first one was the Hoichoi cultural program, which was to start at 1 pm. This is the event for which I had put in a lot of work along with my team. All was not rosy during the practice sessions, as tends to happen when you try to get multiple egos and sensibilities together to play ball. Let us say it was equally a test of my potential as an arranger of a music performance, as well as my emotional intelligence. I had a lot to do this day, I could not sleep well the previous night. I had to move my piano to the stage. The stage happened to be in a school which thankfully was nearby. The piano move went quite smoothly- I followed th movers to the venue and after some clarification with the sec...

  The caste system in India is heavily criticised. By all types of stakeholders. The obvious ones are non-hindus- after all, they have to believe that they are absolutely the best- infact, anything different is simply not allowable under their belief system.   So this fabled caste-system provides a nice brickbat to perpetuate and substantiate their delusion. However, there is merit in the criticism on an absolute level, which is why lots of hindus at the receiving end of the travails of this system have opted to change their faith completely. They have, in the millions, migrated to warmer climes of Islam and Christianity which are, atleast putatively,   inherently more egalitarian. The exodus of these good people away from hinduism is not a myth but an absolute fact. Hindus criticise missionaries for conversion, but any reasonable hindu ( of which thankfully there are many ) will realise the the fault is not in the missionary but in the inadequacy of the existing environm...

Is Digital Transformation overrated? The answer is “No, but….” I attended an intriguing presentation at the CRU Wire & Cable conference in Amsterdam where one of the talks was on one of the several inevitable buzzwords that seem to be doing the rounds these days in the work-life area- ensconced within the increasingly cliched pantheon of catch-phrases like “VUCA”, “Supply Chain Resilience”, and “Generative AI”. I refer of course to “Digital Transformation”. Here is an interesting Mckinsey statistic that was quoted: 90% of CEOs see Digital Transformation as a key priority- and yet 70 % of CEOs say that their Digital Transformation programs did not work out as intended. I, for one, am not in the least  bit surprised atleast in the area of process industries- where I have spent my entire career. As someone that takes pride in scratching the surface of a buzzword for fun, it seemed self-evident to me that this was going to be almost untenable. We would like to transform m...

  Some weeks have passed and I have not written a word. Initially I thought it was because I was too occupied with pressing priorities- and these are priorities outside of work. In particular the preparation for the musical program for Hoichoi on June 29 th . This is part of the story. The other part is that I was mentally quite shattered and scarred by an incident at one of my friend’s house on a relatively innocuous Sunday afternoon. It has now been atleast 2 weeks and I have gotten some of my usual sangofroid back, but I have not exactly gotten over it. Since it involves my partner, I am not even sure if I should write about it. On the one hand, I believe I should, because now I can write about it without emotion, but on the other, it is not something I would be comfortable sharing widely. And I have thus far typically avoided this precarious rabbit-hole. But while I still debate in mind how to treat this subject, I would like to begin writing again, in a bid to catch up. One ...

Yesterday was the first meeting of the  Hoichoi  Music team for 2024. I invited not the full team, but most of the team to discuss the concept and the music arrangement ideas. I must admit I was  underwhelemed . This is also a learning experience for me wherein I have participated in this type of deal before in Singapore- which is to say working with a team on Bengali artistes to put on a show for a Bengali audience. The problem is I have only been a participant at best, and a relatively peripheral one at that. The last such format I was a part of was back in 2013 when I had played my  Korg  M50 Synth to a program of recitation and  rabindrasangeet  led by this one harridan Bengali woman whose name now escapes me. We had  myself  on synth, someone on  Tabla  and an ace on Sitar. The main idea was recitation performed by the lead herself- with a background score on synth improvised by me. Interspersed within this recitation piece wer...

I received a call today from the organizing committee of BCD requesting me to lead the Music section of an upcoming annual ritual organized by them called Hoichoi- which is a variety entertainment cultural program consisting of a Dance section, a Drama  section  and a Music section. Now, usually I think people who  had  in previous years taken the lead in the Music section have essentially resorted to choosing singers and songs and the sequence. Rarely has the music been of particular concern- in fact in the previous year there were  a number of  Rabindra Sangeet songs delivered with a pre-recorded track. I am not even sure who created those tracks- I would suspect they were obtained from the internet. I could not be bothered with just selecting singers and sequencing songs- although I suspect this is what everyone expects. This becomes a platform where everyone wants to showcase their singing talent and therefore wants to perform something that they alread...