not-so-high-voltage ~ london thru my own lens

i was never quite able to define what i thought was the 'quintessential london man'. on second thoughts, who cares...

photograph: local inhabitant, covent garden, london, summer 2006

high voltage ~ london thru my own lens

i was never quite able to define what i thought was the 'quintessential london woman'. it’s probably not even a good idea to try. with certainty, it’ll get me into trouble anyway, so why bother.

photograph: graffiti wall art, camden town, london, summer 2005

hell ~ london thru my own lens

i hate the tube. i always break into a cold sweat. i count seconds and yards in piston-tube-like dank darkness with only inches separating the metal housing of the speeding train and the concreted piping, exhaling only when i see the lights of the next station. bolt points into the light and fresh air.

call it an underground, the subway, a metro, or mass rapid transport systems, i measure a city’s progress by its ability to transport its masses quickly, quietly, efficiently and of course, safely.

singapore, tokyo, frankfurt all mitigate my urban commuter’s underground phobia by well-lit tunnels with emergency signage and clear escape routes. i am comforted by walking tracks all along these impermeable arteries. they assuage my insanity and diminish my exaggerated fears.

but what of those great cities in an advanced state of subterranean decay: new york, london ~ do i use a taxi or travel by bus?

drawn by the salacious innocence of roxy hart and her susceptibility, i am lured by temptacious promises of discovery. i stay underground and delay my search for a way out.

photographs: inside a tube station, london, summer 2005

envy ~ london thru my own lens

the immortal ghost, the silver ghost, the silver wraith , the silver shadow, the silver cloud, the silver spirit, the silver seraph, the phantom are not comic book super or anti-heroes. they are objects of desire. the rolls royce is not for everyone.

my understanding of a truly aspirational brand is vaguely related to a possessive desire to own something well outside the current elasticity of my purse strings, but reasonably within the realm of acquisition.

i interpret the luxe marketer’s message to me as neither belonging to the current consumer group, nor to a direct aspirational audience, but allow myself to be convinced that i am indeed, part of the larger, yet exclusive target audience. a nice idea that puts me closer to my roller than the far more amorphous 'exposure' group.

i’ll certainly want to think of myself as light years away from 'those' who see this creation as simply as an expensive car, or just a wraith, shadow, seraph, ghost or phantom.

i wonder why rolls royce never thought of a model called the grand delusion.

photograph: self portrait outside a roller showroom, mayfair, london, summer 2005

nescafé no es café; a cuppa coorg may be

i couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine why the tiny district of coorg in southern india has been likened to the scotland of india. i saw no men wearing kilts; didn’t hear the haunting echo of a lonely piper against a backdrop of craggy countryside pebbled by the stones of ancient castles; nor was i regaled with myths about monsters of the loch.

most significantly, i saw no evidence of the peaty soils that yield a fine a single malt***.

thru the ages, men have embarked on a futile search for an elixir of life. women, being more practical and less delusionary, haven’t wasted their time. but since my gender necessarily requires me to be off in pursuit of such, let me assert that a fine a single malt will always complement water and coffee on my elixir list.

just over 4,000 square kilometers, the district of coorg is only seven times the size of singapore. it finds tranquility in the lush western ghats of the southwest indian state of karnataka, kissing its better known neighbor, kerala. 

the rich soils, watered by the river cauvery and its veins, together with the shade of the offspring of ancient forests combine to produce one of the finest mild coffees, the world’s most traded commodity after oil.

coorg also produces exceptional pepper, cardamom and honey. here, where men are known for their martial bent and the women for their independence and beauty, success and achievement blend with a fair share of just getting by, off the generosity of the land. it is a place of magic.

being in a great coffee growing region does not alone make good coffee grow. foreplay impacts the final climax. a good planter must know the land and manage the interventions of the elements like you know your lover and his/her needs. great coffee is as much about the people who farm, manage and curate it, as it is about the complex processes of a growing cycle. it is a veritable labor of love.

i will continue my life-journey: opening with a 16 year-old lagavulin single malt; augment my entrée with a pure mineral water sourced from a spring titillated by thermal vapors; and drown in a coorg coffee, which like a woman, must be dark, hot, strong and steamy.

in age of instant gratification, there still is no such thing as instant coffee.

*** i did not tarry a moment to look closer. and there are indeed similarities between scotland and coorg: this wee piece will illustrate more.

photographs: coorg, karnataka, southern india, october 2008

teutonic identity & conflict resolution

an old german friend, not known even for a wisp of xenophobia, recently remarked: 

f*#king austrians, their singular achievement has been to convince the world that hitler was german and mozart was austrian.

an austrian-german euro 2008 football final would have settled the issue, once and for all. india, after all, continues to extract revenge on the english for colonial subjugation by sustained mastery over them on the cricket pitch. (but then, the english seem to be absolutely rubbish at anything they ever invented). the chinese have comprehensively proven to the world that they’ll take on all challengers, in any sport. cuba, every now and then, gets one over the USA in baseball.

USA v afghanistan in buzkashi?

conscience

ground zero has infiltrated our daily-life vocabulary: “yo man, it was like mayhem out there, i was buzzing in ground zero...” a carefree infusion of cataclysmic descriptors to absorb mundane moments of everyday gore: conflict at our grocery store check-out counter, angry navigation of road-raged traffic jams, domestic upheaval...

contrary to the widely held belief on main street, the term ground zero was not coined on or around the ninth of september 2001. it describes an event of far greater destructive magnitude and brutality. ground zero pinpointed that apocalyptic space of earth immediately beneath the exploding atomic bombs that destroyed hiroshima and nagasaki.

then, thermal and nuclear radiation killed several hundred thousand people in flash that changed our world forever. manhattan project, one. on 9/11, thousands of people died in multiple instances of apparent divinity inspired madness that changed our world forever. manhattan project, two.

tragedy can never be relative. in both occurrences, people were instantaneously vaporized and dissipated as if they just never existed. but, back in those days, several million people didn’t watch the manhattan project one live on prime time TV, and then relive it for an eternity on youtube.

clearly, if you own enough billboard space and bandwidth, you can swiftboat any memory for as long as you wish; contort good guys into bad ones; establish just cause for retribution, casus belli; and in extreme cases, even tweak established historical fact. the holocaust didn’t happen, for example. for many, manhattan project one has become an event recessed into history, depersonalized, and largely forgotten.

one warm, sunny, summer’s day in new york, circa 1982, i attended a huge demonstration protesting the deployment of cruise and pershing missiles in europe, ostensibly to shield us from the evil empire.

there, amongst the the sea of several hundred thousand sundry sloganeering revelers meandering past the UN towards a free concert in central park, was an aging japanese man quietly sitting on the curb quenching his thirst. he wore a simple yellow t-shirt emblazoned with the words: i survived hiroshima ~ never again!

from his textured face, pierced by radiation; his eyes, preserving that single instant of horror, shone a gentleness, compassion and gravitas i have neither seen before or since; nor ever found the words to capture.

it was a rare moment of pure conscience. i went home, troubled.

the caducity of words

the definitive oxford english dictionary lists 171,476 words in current usage. these do not include a plethora of inflections, derivative words, interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, or for that matter, distinct senses of nouns and adjectives, and hyphenation... ah! the beloved hyphen, but let’s not even go there!

in trying to ascertain a final word count for the english language, there are all sorts of claimants of dubious legitimacy: 84 million chemical substances; at least a million species of insects; and numbers ~ are they words too, and if so, wouldn’t that take us pretty close to infinity?

then there are all those other languages that have so seditiously crept into our everyday parlance. all this morphing and mating means that etymologists (or do we call them linguistic anthropologists) can be kept busy trying to distill the DNA of the english language.

how many words does the average english-speaking person need, or actually use, in life? how do we organize our wordbanks? like luxe stores, are there elegantly sumptuous words used exclusively for pick-up-plays, but not necessary to navigate a fresh vegetable market?

what are the linguistic lines of communicative competence between a haute couture practitioner of style, a molecular bio-geneticist and a marketing person like myself when we interact in a variety of life (or death) situations? are there exclusive and common buckets of language which we can engage at an instant? what the synaptic threads that build our own personal lexica of life?

does a language have a saturation point beyond which it cannot grow? what happens then? is the expansion of language inorganic? who invents new words? is there a panel of wizards who vote on new entrants? do they have a period of probationary usage?

i have more questions than i can answer; it is my search for the disambiguation of the english language.

but just in case there is indeed a finite space for words, every now and again the language oracles issue a pink slip to the under-utilized. here is a list, from the collins dictionary people, of words soon to be expunged:

abstergent: cleansing or scouring
grestic: rural; rustic; unpolished; uncouth
apodeictic: anquestionably true by virtue of demonstration
caducity: perishableness; senility
caliginosity: dimness; darkness
compossible: possible in coexistence with something else
embrangle: to confuse or entangle
exuviate: to shed (a skin or similar outer covering)
fatidical: prophetic
fubsy: short and stout; squat
griseous: streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey
malison: a curse
mansuetude: gentleness or mildness
muliebrity: the condition of being a woman
niddering: cowardly
nitid: bright: glistening
olid: foul-smelling
oppugnant: combative, antagonistic or contrary
periapt: a charm or amulet
recrement: waste matter; refuse; dross
roborant: tending to fortify or increase strength
skirr: a whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight
vaticinate: to foretell; prophesy
vilipend: to treat or regard with contempt

instant gratification

a dear friend expressed his “ambivalence” about both facebook and blogs.  he is by no stretch of the imagination internet averse, and is one of the most informed people i know ~ on and offline. but i have taken issue with him.

personally, i believe, for better or worse, we are governed by an age of instant gratification and vicarious needs.  the internet fulfills both aspirations.  there is a profoundly adequate german verb that predates the internet: darstellungsbeduerfnis (approximately translated as: the need to project oneself) ~ which i find best captures the zeitgeist of our times.

facebook has allowed me to reconnect with many people, lost over time.  one of the articulating features of my own life has been a continuous state of transition and flux.  this transience has meant that from the age of eight, i have been permanently on the move across continents.  schools were never more that a three year sojourn and the friends of my youth have simply evaporated.

on the charge that facebook is more an "openbook": i manage my facebook page closely, allowing only controlled interface.  i share information with only a closed user group of "friends" ~ selected as such and according to my whim (my  prerogative). because it is open to only that group, lewd and inappropriate behavior is largely self-regulated. which good, no? it is text messages which have today become the preferred weapon of salacious solicitation!

politically, i find it interesting that the internet, in its various avatars, facebook and blogs included, hark back to a primordial (if flawed, idealistic and largely unattainable) form of direct participatory democracy ~ what the americans so euphemistically call townhalls.  this is best exemplified by what CNN calls i-reporters or i-reporting.  i don't i-report, but i have entered into dialogue with various news correspondents whose views have found resonance with me. the internet has also allowed me to engage authors of books i have read.  more often than not, they have responded, and this has lead to interesting conversations.

the biggest challenge in the internet space is deciding where you want to go.  if tattoos and harleys are not your thing, then you don't have to go there.  there is just too much stuff on the internet. it is your responsibility to decide how and where you expend your bandwidth and energy.

one of the most positive outcomes of the internet, info sharing, and immediate gratification is that it has allowed me to reconnect with friends long lost.  and while i may not be able to dialogue with these friends and former lovers over a single malt and gaze into their eyes, it entirely eliminates the need to compose letters and subsidize the royal mail, the US postal services or the indian posts and telegraphs!

for those who cannot strip in a sauna, there’s always the internet.

poverty, in a relative way

anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
james baldwin

photograph: central london, summer 2006

gender storms

in the eye of a storm sounds like a truly fearful place to be. when you watch, courtesy CNN, google et al, the havoc wrought on the american atlantic coast by the likes of benign sounding weather phenomenon like katrina and ike, it’s likely you’ll want to be as far away from any eye as possible.

it sounds almost epic, even heroic, evocative of the great battles of the ages to suggest that one was caught in the eye of the storm. bullshit! i haven’t been there, but it’s probably a safe bet that if you’re caught in the eye of such a storm, you could probably do worse than just staying put. remember, the eye of a storm is defined as a region of calm weather right in the middle of a storm.

but the problem is intuitively obvious: how does one get there? and from a newscaster’s perspective, what’s the point: TV ratings never go up where nothing ever happens.

tropical storm names used to be exclusively feminine. this last great frontier of gender discrimination was finally drowned out in 1979, allowing male and female waves to breech levies in equal measure of destruction. but where do these names come from?

working together in weather, climate and water (really!) is the tag line of the world meteorological organization. these guys have an international committee that has exclusive naming rights over all global storms. is this the last great marketing wilderness to be conquered before space?

unlikely. it’s a safe bet that hurricane names are not going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. i mean which marketing guy would want to spend millions of dollars for the branding rights of something with no guarantee of delivery and impact. I know, for example, that the 10th atlantic storm in 2010 is going to be called julia, but i still can’t see many takers.

which makes me think, thank god we use an english language naming convention for tropical storms and hurricanes. i mean, try getting your tongue around julia in latvian (dzulija, with various squiggles over 'z' and 'u'); or albanian (xhuliana); or greek (loulia). clearly, only english will work.

in an apparent concession to global harmony, the exception is the western north pacific where impacted countries are given a last wish by contributing naming rights. so north korea proffers kalmaegi; hong kong, fung-wong; the philippines, hagupit and lupit; and laos gives us nock-ten. but i don’t think any of these countries actually pay for the privilege of getting beat up on.

but going back to this committee, imagine being compensated for making up lists of names that bring only misery.

there are name-lists for every area of the world prone to tropical storms, cyclones, hurricanes. and this is how it works: for each storm season, a list of 21 names are compiled starting with the alphabet 'a' and ending with 'w' ('q' and 'u' are excluded).

six such lists are put together and then, simply keep repeating themselves. of course, particularly virulent and violent storms are dropped or retired. therefore, unlike lightening, katrina never strikes twice! but, this naming convention allows me to accurately tell you her progeny till 2013, starting this year: kyle, kate, karl, katia, kirk and karen.

auspiciously for most of us, i could find no list for any geographic area anywhere that contained either the name sarah or palin.

inauspiciously for alaska, storm hilary is due to hit the eastern north pacific in 2011, 8th in sequence for that season. isn’t that about when campaigning for the next presidential elections begin?

perhaps this would have been one gender battle better lost, and storms should continue to wear lipstick.

ode to akron

akron, ohio is still a place associated with the decline of america. as sunrise industries found birth in warmer climes and the manufacturing base of industrial america shrank, places like akron became the proverbial post modern moonscape of downturn and despair. a far cry from the city once billed as the rubber capital of the world, fumes and all, where success and prosperity was tied to that great symbol of american freedom and mobility, the automobile.

for four years i lived within touching distance of akron and never mustered the courage to go there. i did go once though, for a bob dylan concert, during the appropriately apocalyptic times of his slow train coming album tour. it was night, and there wasn’t much to see. but the air didn’t seem right, and there was an imagined or real pungent whiff of decay.

this summer, 30 years later, i did visit akron. it is a transformed city; a model of re-invention, re-vibrancy, re-gentrification, and re-diversification into new-age industries. there are great places to eat where olive oil isn’t the lapel pin of a damn communist, and art is not a metaphor for people who inhale mind altering substances. i stayed in a delightful 1920s tudor style B&B joint that rivals anything i’ve seen in europe. still, i don’t think Akron is on anyone’s list of ‘must visit’ cities, let alone a destination for relocation. akron can’t be blamed for that, america is just too diverse and beautiful for it to legitimately compete. but it does have some pretty good claims to fame:

lebron james, he’s from there! that’s pretty damn good. the first car tires rolled out of there. it had the first automobile police patrol wagon. imagine if that hadn’t been invented: there’d be no high-speed car chases in the movies. bohh-ring! the first (not led) zeppelin in america was built in akron, as were space suits. and finally, for good measure, two brothers who lived and worked in akron invented the hamburger. whether you like it or not, akron really does touch our lives in more ways than we can imagine.

but of all the things that found root in akron, my favorite is the handmade glass marble. glass marbles have been around for yonks. but it was here that they were commercially produced on a mass scale. that’s the photo of the red house up top.

and over across the globe, millions of indian children amused and engaged themselves with glass marbles. you were, at least when i was young, an incomplete manboy without the clinking (if that’s the appropriate sound descriptor) of glass marbles in the trouser pockets of your school uniform.

akron, my white friends assure me, is gonna vote obama. following akron, it might just be that america gets it right. again.

next time i’m in akron, i’ll just have to visit the american toy marble museum.

photographs: akron, ohio, june 2008

black & white

people tell stories; they also tell lies. i've always wondered if pictures tell any kind of truth. this was as close as i got to something that defines the south africa i saw: still largely white on the inside, in many ways sheltered from the storm outside. does the rainbow coalition of inclusion still need to break down transparent walls...

photograph: cafe, johannesburg, south africa, january 2007

perfect men

i’m having an i-crisis. i haven’t defined myself, yet. i’m not sure who i should to be. if i don’t blog, can i have an i-story?

nano seconds ago, if you didn’t have an email ID you didn’t really exist. much like the ubiquitous credit card denied your existence in the days of yore. today, at least for now, a defining fashion identity accessory is your blog. it’s a part of your personal software DNA. it’s about who we are; who we choose to be; and how we want to tell an i-story.

not that the i-world is anything new. but lately, it seems to have very successfully crept up upon us. we got mugged by a consumer product company. i have no problem with that. they appear to be doing a pretty good job at all things prefixed with “i”. i have an i-pod; i just bought a macbook pro; i salivate at the thought of an i-phone; and i’m enthralled by the idea that we might be in the midst of an i-revolution. i might even be cool. is this the big idea that we’ve all been waiting for?

in previous, more pedestrian times, scientific revolutions and change were quite the rage. there were loads of big ideas. really, really big ideas. and there seemed to be no end to new ideas. there were paradigmatic shifts and always new products to arouse and exhilarate. the wheel was invented once, and therefore the adage: why reinvent the wheel? why indeed!

the i-world, as far as i can ascertain, finds its modern roots in 17th century european rationalism; a world inhabited by such characters as rené descartes. yes, the very same of cogito ergo sum fame. as both philosopher and mathematician, he was a truly a renaissance guy whose work, it could be argued, influenced the field of artificial intelligence and far beyond. for someone to come up with a line like, i think; therefore i am, that’s rockstar icon level, a marketers dream and a passport to certain wealth. talk about being born in the wrong era!

fast forward 300 years and along came a whole host of other over-achievers who dropped out of school and became billionaires. it was steve jobs who once said, i want to put a ding in the universe, perhaps taking inspiration from rené, who said, everything is self evident.

no one really knows how many blogs are out there; who writes them; why they are written; how many people actually really read them; whether they are temporary or temporal; and if they’re genuinely contributing to our already overloaded body of knowledge and information?

so, my point really is, to get out of this malaise, i need to find the courage and blog. open myself to ridicule and derision. impose a viewpoint on people that don’t really care what i think. add to the mounting volume of i-perspectives, safe in the knowledge that i have written for posterity. or, more simplistically, to be able to assert: i blog, therefore i exist.

perfect men, descartes once said, like perfect numbers are very rare.

Remembering Harambee House at the College of Wooster

On 28th August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered that famous speech about his dream and his vision for America. Among other things, he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”.

45 years later, to the day, after Barack Obamba’s historical acceptance speech in Denver, we can genuinely ask the question: “has freedom finally rung from the snow capped rockies of Colorado?”

It seems like an eternity since we were members of Harambee House more than 25 years ago. In June this year some of us returned to College for our reunion. We recalled our rites of passage and coming of age. We did spend moments looking back at what those times meant for each one as individuals; as minority students; as part of the larger world of people of color; of how we bridged divides across continents; we shared and remembered our aspirations for different world. We looked back, and then looked ahead!

It was my sophomore year (80-81) when you elected me Vice President of Harambee House. At the time, the house was seen more as a social club or the Black American (the term in vogue at the time) fraternity on campus. I challenged many of you to broaden this narrow view to include all men of color, as it were, not just American. With your support we made our voices heard on campus. We raised issues of that were neither parochial in nature, nor limited to the narrow confines of race. We tried, and to some extent succeeded, in painting a much broader canvas of topical issues of common concern to all of us. We let our voices be heard!

Let me quickly remind you of what Harambee means. It is a Swahili call to unity or, “working together for a common purpose”. And we took it to heart, allowing it to become a guiding principle that articulated our time as undergraduates. Only later did we discover how that principle helped us to navigate subsequent careers and lives, wherever we chose to go.

Wooster, in those days, was a different place. The African-American (transitioning from ‘Black’) population on campus was small, largely uncertain of how to articulate an identity post vietnam and post the hey-day of the civil rights movement. Many believed that the battle for racial equality had been won. Many believed that now was the time to join the mainstream, and slice out their section of the American dream. Because many of the overt barriers to entry had been lifted, it wasn’t a time for most of us to question the hidden legacy of inequality.

Wooster, in those days, was a different place. The international student population on campus was miniscule, living out a dream of having made it to America! Many believed that this placed them in highest percentiles of privilege and that destiny had dealt them roles of leadership when they returned to their own countries. Many were blissfully unaware of their own status as minorities in America. Most were unaware of the social and political turmoil that American society had undergone over the preceding 30 years. Most international students from what was then fashionably called the ‘third world’, found their comfort zone in mainstream white middle class Americana.

In hindsight, all students on campus, were oblivious to our own roles as eyewitnesses to the historical transitioning of America. Reagan was President; the idealism of the peanut farmer from Georgia had been crushed; evil empires needed to be dealt with; the erstwhile Soviet Union had outraged the modesty of Afghanistan by their invasion; the despotic Shah had been deposed to be replaced by a tyrannical man of the cloth; and Americans were held against their will for 444 days.

What we could not see, nestling in the events of those days, were the nascent threat that would come to haunt the entire world today: the threat of terror as the United States became a direct target.

Our responsive was charged and emotive, but I believe, profoundly telling, “Hey America, we’ve been hostages for 444 years!”. This was in no way an attempt to belittle the release of the American hostages held in Tehran for 444 days, but a simple indication that the vestiges of racial inequality were still present in different ways and forms.

You will remember how it polarized the campus. There was outright hostility, and even a very real danger to our personal safety! The house across the way put up an American flag with the slogan, “America, love it or leave”. The lesson we learnt from those events was the need to talk to one another, to dialogue!

But, as America has so often proven to itself, the American flag and all its symbolism, is far stronger and resilient to an ‘either or’ choice. We were not burning the flag; we were asking for it to fulfill its own promises of inclusion.

Later, through the formation of the Divestment Coalition, we provoked the venom of campus authorities by raising the issue of College investments in Apartheid-ruled South Africa. To continue to invest in South Africa, they told us, was the best possible instrument for change. We were looked at with scorn and derision at even thinking that dialogue was possible with the vilified Nelson Mandela! The idealistic passions of youth!

But, from those experiences, we learnt important strategic and tactical lessons. We learnt how to build consensus. We learnt how to make a compelling argument. We learnt how to better understand how our opponents and map out an action plan. The most important lesson that many of us learnt through that experience was how the world was linked. But most importantly we learnt how financial and financial decisions taken in a small liberal arts college in Ohio could be a catalyst for change in a far off land: that as the world was linked, so too were our futures interconnected.

It is ironic perhaps, that some years after leaving college, divestment in South Africa and mainstream opposition to apartheid became celebrity causes, and Mandela revered as the voice of reason!

This was our education at Wooster. We felt a call to unity and responded! Through these experiences we all grew to understand each more profoundly. International students of color came to appreciate the story of the African American: their hopes, their aspirations, their struggles, their food, their music, and yes, even their beautiful women. But their was reciprocity too. As our brothers and sisters shared their friendship, they also saw our side of a world that had many, if different, challenges. In that call to unity we became friends. Life-long friends.

As this four year cycle of American presidential election nears its climax, we can look back proudly at our time together at Wooster. We may not have made the history books, but we were agents of change in some small way.

Today an African American is the nominated candidate of a major political party for the office of the President of the Unites States. It shows us just how far we have come. Barack Obama is an exact contemporary of ours. He too, was an undergraduate at the same time and I’m sure, was confronted with many of the same challenges and issues that faced us.

As I look back at those times with great fondness, I know that we all grew in some way, believing in a dream. What Barack Obama said tonight validates so much of what we did, what we spoke about, what we dreamt about all those many years ago!

But today, my friends, it is no longer a dream. It is an historic moment. I hope you will "work together for common purpose" to make sure the right thing happens on November 4th 2008!

palistic missile from alaska

i invented a new adjective today: palistic, meaning to ride above one's station in life on a premise of extremist mediocrity without vision or aspiration to a greater good.