Stay at home and online schooling is the call of the hour. How will the Digital Native generation react to being taught through the vacuum of the screen? Pre pandemic, being glued to the screen meant having fun, hanging out, playing games, surfing scanning everything n anything. It was about freedom and ‘my’ will. And the parents trying their best to get the kids off the screen.
The drastic impact of the pandemic – children isolated at home, attending ‘virtual school’ on screens, will perhaps change the relationship of the digital natives with their screens.
It can be a fish-takes-to-water tech scenario;
OR could it be that the kids resist the school-on-screen..coerced screenified, for long hours, without having fun with friends in school
Perhaps, this could lead to GenNext organically giving their screen a break! …watch out for this space, as we move on in real time.
Nassim Taleb (author, the black swan) quotes – “…the need to use the extreme event as a starting point, and not treat it as an exception to be pushed under carpet
Covivid it is! It was fascinating working with sacred geometry- the geometry occurring in the universe/nature. So vividly, so organically, it demonstrated the interconnectedness, the repetitive precision of tessallation occurring in the Universe.
Today, this painting from my Indiglo Series 2018, stares in my face …isn’t the corona virus riding on the sacred pattern of the universe.
Covid Sound Byte: When shutterbugs go shut in a lockdown, the sound of music goes LIVE . It’s calming to wake up to live music streaming on a lockdown morning. Thank you Subrataji.
So Covivid is the sound of silence and the power of music. We can now listen to the birds chirping, thanks to the noise lockdown. Here’s to all my SoundBug friends…just pick up the mike, click on Live and sing/ play to your heart’s content….we are all there listening…let’s rock n roll in lockdown times.
Covid 19 Reality Bite: work-FROM-home And work-FOR-home. So Covivid is the ‘Maid-in-India’ crisis today. It takes a corona virus to show the double-responsibility-double- stress the Indian working woman has borne, in the double income households. The maid has been her COO at home, making sure all gets done well at home and office. Her right hand man! Sadly, the Indian Man, conditioned by the woman herself, as the ‘lord and master of the house’ to be served.
Now it’s the time for the Man to change and not just do a lip-service of pitching in. More often than ever, its easier n faster for the woman to do the HH jobs and the Man happily gets left behind!
Black Swan – a random event, highly improbable, nearly impossible to predict, unknown but having a huge impact on our lives. This Pandemic is surely a Black Swan event, changing the world by 180 degrees.
Travel n Trade – the lifeline of globalisation became the vehicle of this rapid spread, across boundaries. It attacked the DNA of the globalised world- mobility. The global world is forced to shift from being outward to inward driven… pushing people back to the base camp, back to the essentials. The rest is irrelevant!
The impact of this pandemic is not just on health, but it’s going to disrupt the very way we live, work, think and breathe… As Nassim Nicholas Taleb ( author of the black swan) quotes – “ Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable, – and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talks, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This implies the need to use the extreme event as a starting point, and not treat it as an exception to be pushed under the carpet.” ..watch out for this space, as we move on in real time.
It was a typical day at work, brainstorming on a hair-care brand. A young colleague, with a puzzled look, asked me – ‘ Please tell me, why did you get your hair cut so short?” It felt like someone asking me – Why do you have such a long nose?
She just couldn’t fathom why a girl would cut her hair so short. She insisted on seeing my face-book timeline, hoping to see ‘my days with long hair’, but with no such luck. The older colleague (grappling with baldness) conjectured that it must have been the issue of ‘bad’ hair that made me take this (drastic) step!! I was quite taken up with the team brainstorming on my short hair.
By God’s grace, I have thick, black hair, with natural curls. It’s just that I like it short! Till now, I owed this ‘long-haired beauty quotient’ to the old-traditional-stereotypical mindset. But that day, I realized that it is integral and intrinsic to the Indian psyche, across age, class and gender.
It made me delve deeper on the cultural codes related to length of hair and beauty. Yes, my femininity quotient used to get challenged, every time I went for a haircut,. My mom would exclaim, expressing her displeasure – ‘Gosh, you have cut it so short! You are looking like a BOY!’ In her days ( 1960’s), the short hair symbolized a wamp- a manipulative woman with loose morals, as against the idealized ‘Sati Savitri’ persona of the Indian wife, with long hair.
After all, I am born to the land called India, where ‘kale ghane lambe baal‘ (long, black, thick hair) is the celebrated symbol of Indian beauty and sensuality. We, Indians, are very possessive about the length of our hair. It’s always a tug of war with the hairdresser on each inch of hair cut. A senior hairstylist remarked – ‘ In India, the husbands and the mother-in-laws sit with an inch tape, measuring the length of the girl’s hair.
Finding a hairstylist for my short hair can get equally challenging in India
I had a hard time when my regular hairstylist left the city. Every month it would be a ‘new’ cut. Either cut it in a jiffy, or cropped too short in the name of a ‘creative cut’ or be done with the ‘squarish’ boy-cut. Eventually, I discovered a East European hairstylist, who specialises in short hair style! Something unheard of in India. Interestingly, I have always loved to experiment with a hair cut on my travels.
I observed a pattern in my journey with hair stylists across cultures. It made me dwell deeper… The international hair stylist always handled my short hair with love, care and style. They were conscious of the length, the line and the shape to make the cut feminine, not masculine. Indian hair stylists are at par with the international standards and trends. Then why is it that when it comes to short haircut for women, they seem to be failing? By and large, they have a cut-n–dry approach cut, as if they just want the job-done quick. They cut-chop-crop the hair, thinking it’s a man sitting on the chair. Definitely, short hairstyle is neither their focus nor interest. It requires far more technical expertise, with a risk attached. To top it all, there is limited scope of practice in the Indian market! Long hair is what the client wants, and long hair style is what the Indian hair dresser happily gives. The client is happy, and the hairstylist is happy. I guess, it’s a case of demand and supply. Viewing from a deeper cultural perspective, the attitude and expertise of the Indian hairdresser is simply conforming to the inherent Indian code of beauty and grooming.
I simply love my hair short and sleek. It has nothing to do with hair-problems, compelling me to cut short my tresses. Nor did my short hair make me feel tomboyish, or any less feminine.
Keeping my hair short has been an individual choice of expressing personal style and femininity. Nothing more. Nothing less. True, not everyone can carry off a short hair cut. But little did I realize by sporting a short hairstyle, all my life, I was unconsciously defying and challenging the ingrained Indian cultural code of beauty. My style was not born out of an act of rebellion. And yet, it gets perceived as a non-conformist <p style=”padding-left: This semiotic decoding highlights the GAP between self-expression and the cultural perception of short hair, within the Indian context. It raises pertinent questions and boundaries around choices we make, as people and as brands, within the cultural context-
