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It’s easy to handle success in installments. But when is comes upon like a cascading wave, things go completely out of hand. Twitter has apparently gone in one and a half years from 1 million users to 44 million users. That’s not growth, it’s a nightmare. It’s wonderful for a musician who sees a song go from complete obscurity to being the most downloaded song of all time. But when you have a service that people thought was only slightly better than an ego trip go on to become a real-time news breaker (Iran riots anyone), things can go out of hand.

I know people pray for that kind of success. Because the twitter obituaries about information overload have already begun. How can anyone ‘follow’ 3000 people and make any sense of the conversation. Even if they spent just 10 minutes a day doing it. Twitter has made the fastest transition from pointlessness to red hot to has been faster than any other ’success story’. Here’s hoping that it doesn’t end in a whimper.

Chennai has a real paucity of parking spaces. Shops appear right next to the road. Pavements in busy areas are taken over by street markets selling everything from trinkets to plastic knick knacks to shoes to pins, toys and clothes. It’s like a parallel economy functioning at the second level – High Street coexisting with Main Street. In this scenario, parking is not for the faint-hearted. Slipping a car into the narrowest of spaces requires a level of skill that combines dexterity with split-second timing and judgement. The traffic never eases off. Reversing into the traffic flow if you’ve got the first try wrong can make a nervous wreck out of most drivers.

With typical Indian ingenuity, the shopkeepers have now started offering Valet Parking in order to ensure that they don’t lose out on customers who simply drive away than face the prospect of wrestling with the problem. I stood watching the other day as an intricate ballet played out between several valet parking assistants who had to ease one car out, another one in and simultaneously take over a car that had just arrived. It’s a miracle that cars emerge unscathed from the experience becasue there are literally centimeters to spare between spaces. 15 cars fit into a place meant for 12. India, as usual learns to adjust. We must be the ultimate ‘compromise’ nation figuring a way around a problem rather than solving it. If the owners, who so regally drop off their car keys with the assistants were to stop and watch the elaborate parking routine, they would probably lose their appetite or their urge to shop.

I don’t know if it has anything to do with the mushrooming of news channels or the sudden urge to exercise their political franchise, but elections are more of a talking point this year – which may not be so good for politicians, who have thrived on keeping a certain section of the populace at home on election day. It was seen as infra dig to vote – but there is the realisation that we are being governed by people whom we do not really know, or trust.

Jaago re pioneered the concept of the voting among young people but there is a momentum building among independents, marginalised constituets and the middle class that their voice is not being heard. That they will continue to be on the fringes until they dive in to the rough and tumble of Indian politics if they have to change the way the country is run. Towards that end, Manmohan Singh represents the voice of reason – a man admired as much for his intellect as his ability to hold his own among leaders around the world.

It will be good to see a leader emerge from the middle class – and see if it makes a difference to the way our country is run.

Finding a great film or music you never heard about used to be happenstance. The next wave of music and film engines are making it easy for you to discover the long tail. It would have been impossible to find the music I like without Pandora. Unfortunately, it disappeared behind a copyright wall a year ago, when the music industry deemed that the site could only play the favourites of people residing within the US. Luckily there’s Last FM. Type in the name of an artist you like and you’ll arrive at a whole lot of others in the same genre without having to search for them.

Films have been a far more tricky proposition. People are loathe to spend two hours on a film they have never heard about. But Netflix developed an algorithm that pushed their rentals up by over 60% on films that were complete unknowns. They have tried everything in-house on trying to tweak the engine but got only incremental benefits. So they offered a million dollar prize in 2006 to anyone who could improve the recommendation by 10%. Hundreds of teams have given it a shot but the magical 10% goal has still not produced a winner. The problem apparently is ‘eccentric films’ the ones that polarise tastes of the people who watch them. They either hate it or love it.

Rotten Tomatoes is a great site to find obscure gems of films. But sites like Jinni are trying to make it even easier. Looks like we won’t have to rely on our friends to provide us even that favour. An algorithm wants to take that place.

As a street festival, it has an infectious kind of vibrancy. Immersing yourself in the crowd and fighting to get to the front of the queue to haul off a plate of Dindigul Venu\’s biriyani and holding it balanced above the head while finding a place to dig into it is humbling. Having forgotten what queues were like, it’s not fun to be caught up in one again. But for the kind of acts and the food that was on display, it was worth enduring. The karagattam competes with the other folk arts. Everywhere you turn, there are bodies swaying, drums throbbing and faces shining with sweat. In the middle of all this is the street food, made by the five star restaurants of the city and sold at very reasonable rates.

Then, we came across a troop of Bhangra dancers. Tall, fair and swaying to a completely different beat. The local crowd gathered and enthusiastically joined in. At 10 pm in the night, it seemed like Baisakh again. Where yellow fields of mustard painted the whole landscape. Watching performances where the performers are distant and elevated on a stage is completely different from having them in touching distance. it gives the art a kind of intimacy that rivals anything you can watch.

If this grows the way it is growing right now, Chennai Sangamam could transform Chennai’s already illustrious cultural landscape into a world-beating event.

Pop psychology is in. Somehow, the idea of getting blasted on television, doing tasks that make perfectly decent kids look like idiots is acceptable. They will not be lectured by their parents and teachers, but some pretentious MTV producer called Raghu Ram can throw four letter words in their face, abuse them in the foulest language possible and they are fine with it. Coming out of a ridiculous interview where they are asked in turn to be ‘interesting’ and witty’ at the drop of a hat, they either break down or speak glowingly about the chance to become ‘roadies’. It’s like boot camp made for TV. Not just guys but pretty girls as well.

It gives Mr Raghu the chace to play God. And does he revel in it. His claim to fame is that he’s produced a successful reality show. Done 92 shows at a trot. Abused his way to glory. There’s no background as to where he came from or what gives him the chance to permanently scar some poor souls who were looking at some shortcuts to fame and fortune. The promos show a task where guys are whacked in the testicles. It keeps playing. The guys are strung with their legs spread wide, hands tied waiting to be hit right between their legs. And their agonised reactions when they are struck where it hurts.

Makes for good television, all in the name of fun and reality shows. Tells you that we haven’t moved very far from the time when entertainment was about hangings and lynching people in public.

If you’ve heard the music of ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ you know that this is special. Starting with the first track, where the sound of drums segues seamlessly into the train tracks, this is elemental AR Rahman. From the time he transformed from composing advertising jingles way back in the late 80’s and was known to the advertising fraternity as ‘Dileep’, he has never looked back after ‘Roja‘ in 1992.

He oeuvre is magnificent, especially for someone who just turned 43 this Jan\’09. It is the kind of work that is hard to pigeonhole and slot and while he does have his signature bits, they never rankle. Shekhar Kapur once said that Rahman can make music out of sounds that people consider noise. If you’ve hear ‘Ayudha Ezhuthu’ you know exactly what he means. There is the sound of breaking bottles, doors being slammed and crowd noises, all woven into the kind of song that throbs with energy.

There’s also the realm of the unfamiliar. You may never like an A R Rahman song on the first hearing, probably because it sounds so unfamiliar. But give it time and it washes over you, never to release it’s grip. The last year has 6 releases from Rahman. It’s hard to be good and prolific. Somehow, he manages to make it happen.

Jason Kottke is one blogger I have immense respect for. Not just because of the way he has soldiered on for 10 long years but because he picks the gems from the forest of trivia out there on the net. He has an eye for the truly unusual and he revels in revealing it. Almost like a narrator draws you into a never-ending story and points out all the interesting twists and turns along the way. I don’t even have to come here regularly. Drop by occasionally and I am sure to come away with some little nugget or information that I haven’t picked up yet.

There are a billion websites and 99% of them are the boring ones. It’s good to have a navigator who points out the interesting stuff. His domain ends with .org, unlike the .com that most blogs and websites prefer. He caught a trend very early on and rode it to success.

The headlines have settled down. The holiday season is over and people are back to work – those who have jobs, that is. Just read the other day about Wall Street bankers now trying their hands at comedy. Some of them may actually be glad several years from now that they found their true calling.

Losing a job forces people to to develop new perspectives. The same old routine cannot continue. Reassessing potential can be devastating or illuminating. As Tony Robbins makes the point in this inspiring TED Video, our choices shape our destiny. People losing their jobs can believe that their worth is destroyed or they can infer that they have been given a fresh chance to do things differently. How they act on this inference determines, to a large extent, their success or their failure in future.

It’s getting hard to find inspiring stories these days. The stockmarkets are down, Mumbai has been hit by the worst terror attacks in the country’s history, Chennai had its worst spell of floods in November and it looked as if the world just turned upside down from that fateful news of Lehman Brothers going under on September 18th.

Grim-faced news announcers talk of another spell of layoffs at another prominent company. Nobody’s buying. Nobody’s selling. It’s as if the world is mired in stasis, waiting in terrified anticipation of the next downturn. Company share values have declined to less than the costs of their plants and still, no one’s buying.

What has changed? The appetite for risk. The US just sold zero interest rate bonds and they were lapped up. Doesn’t it make more sense just to leave the money where it is? How do you get people to dream again? That’s going to be the problem for governments the world over. It’s weird. People are scared and they do not know what they are scared about. Looks like we are back in 1929.