7 highlights
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“The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.” ― Robert Penn Warren
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And be prepared to be called a high-brow cultural snob if you ask for greater care while reading the nuances of Eliot’s or Nirala’s poems, than the instant consumption of Prasoon Joshi’s lyrics for a Bollywood potboiler.
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A sense of history is obviously becoming a rare commodity and aesthetic sensibilities are undergoing a digital redefinition with shorter attention spans. Calling it philistine may be too self-righteous a judgment, but it’s certainly lacking the urge to “stand and stare”…and perhaps, reflect historically, aesthetically and critically
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I sometimes wonder whether Richard Foreman could have been be more precise when he remarked that the digital information age would produce people who could be called the “pancake” generation – information and understanding spread thinly over an area, but lacking any depth at any point.
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I am young enough to be denied the privilege of using the “those were the days” cliché too often. But you do carry a piece of something which you witness with you. Something that unfolds before you and in the process makes you either a nostalgic raconteur or a chronicler of the times.
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It is also a sign of times that what was talked about more was how China managed to pull off such a grand spectacle, than the actual feats of athletes.
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Sports is just a case in point of a greater crisis in the cognitive structure of the times which is grappling with the bombarding tyranny of digital “characters”, myriad images at the press of a key, and where every second throws out something “spectacular/ historical”. The times in which elevating Naipaul over Bhagat is condemned as the last resort of pedantic connoisseurs, the times in which economic punditry of a ponytailed Chaudhary can enjoy equal attention-span as that of someone who goes by the name of Sen/Stiglitz/Krugman.