Thursday, December 28, 2006

Score

guess who got a blog.

it's almost like a commitment, this blogging.
i'd thought online communities and chatting would be just for novelty value but looked how that turned out...
so this is going to have very clear-cut boundaries in the interests of time. every story is a good one until the beginning. so this is going to have an end, as soon as i desire one.

so i shall talk about titles, well, names in general.
i chose 'Score!' for this one after a brief debate with my conscience; appropriateness, gravity and talismanic value were all considerations.

to me, the idea of using 'Score!' (which IS one of my favourite sentiments) is closely monitored by its appropriateness in particular situations. i mean, there's nothing wrong in pointing and laughing at people but there's a line between taking the mickey out of people and tastelessness as a mutated progeny of showmanship. you need to know when to use it, who won't get offended by it, who'll laugh at it, when YOU will feel good about it. which is where the conscience comes in.
and, uhm, a small point on procedure (sorry ashutosh but 'Score!'), i somehow think that if the accompanying clenched fist/arm-yanking action is done by the Scor-er's (for want of a better term) weaker arm. therefore, i would use my left (yes, boys and girls, i AM right-handed). but that's just an aside...

on to gravity. this isn't something i can overstate but i'll let Mick Foley, one of my favourite...AUTHORS do the talking on this one. in 'Have a Nice Day', his first autobiography, he discusses how the 'Federation creative team got carried away trying to come up with a cold-blooded-type personality name for Steve Williams, who would later, in one of the marketing coups of the century go on to take on the "Stone Cold" Steve Austin moniker. Foley, at some point, talks about how a good name doesn't necessarily make you, but a bad name sure as hell can break you. in his fascinating style (which i fully plan to exploit/cog shamelessly in the future), Foley says: same crashing glass, same middle finger, same beer, it wouldn't have made a difference, if he'd been announced as Baron von Ruthless, you could've put a fork through him, he'd be done.
quite succinct.

talismanic value. a title or name has to be something which is attractive and crowd-pulling, not just deep in meaning. my name is Eashan. it's a lovely name and has two distinct, wonderful, mythical, religious meanings which would fulfill the gravity bit of it well. but it's not a crowd-pulling, talismanic, iconic name. it's not something people would walk past on the broadway marquee without pointing and laughing.

which, quite neatly, ties back to appropriateness. in fact, the three characteristics are arranged in order of importance. appropriate, gravity-laden names/titles wouldn't REALLY catch on if they weren't talismanic. on the other side, gravity-laden, talismanic names wouldn't impress themselves THAT strongly if they were completely inappropriate either.

it all comes down to a unique combination of the three in the end, which can adequately be summed up under the larger category of 'timing.'

a title/name, if it fulfills the demands which appropriateness, gravity and talismanic value make of it, eventually ends up exhibiting the all-encompassing characteristic of being well-timed, not just in time and space but in context and flavour. a 'Score!' needs to be well-taken, well-received, generally appreciated. "Stone Cold" would've been a success only in the late 90's. and so on.

i had this idea of writing an autobiography with one idea flowing into another just like this. depending on how long i could keep my interest up and how much of it my publishers were willing NOT to throw in the garbage, i was thinking of calling it "(insert appropriate number) Memories."

but that's a part of my mind that i need to get in order before i write anything at all. this bit might well have sounded incoherent as well but it seemed to come out very naturally through my head to the keyboard. i'm treading on dangerous mental territory now so i'll close because i said before that everything here has to have an end.

so this is it.

I'm not sure if there's a point to this story but I'm going to tell it again.

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I've been wilfully caught up in the self-defeating quest to get to know myself for years. I've never expected anything beneficial to result from such a quest. I tend to evoke extremely polarised reactions from people I get to know in passing. Consequently, only those people who know me inside-out would honestly claim that I'm a person who's just "alright." It's not a coincidence that the description I've laid out above has no fewer than, title included, eleven references to me (make that twelve). I'm affectionately referred to as "Ego." I think that last statement might have given away a tad too much. Welcome Aboard.

IHTRTRS ke pichle episode mein aapne dekha...

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