Beautiful losers

My friend is an inventor of maybe a useless thing. He walks around in the city and his walking patterns form words which are smsed to people’s cell phones.

He was explaining the technology of this, in what must be the mania that gripped Edison. UnEdison like though he is deliberately making communication harder: it takes seven hours for him to sms a sentence.

He said he is using cell phone networks to communicate in his own way.

But. If he wants to send a message to lots of people why not simply sms large groups of people?

I wanted to flee and take him with me, as us beautiful losers need to stick together. Please read the novel, whose title is that odd phrase, by Leonard Cohen.

The story is about characters who put a lot of energy in fanciful things, whose lives are not marketable but make living worth it.

My friend played me a BBC interview of him talking about his invention. The two interviewers were fascinated that he had slowed down communication, done the opposite of what technology is usually doing.

I was about to switch off, as my mind was dwelling on how his landlord has raised the rent on his one bhk near Juhu Versova Linking road. The murkiness of the sunset that we were watching from a certain angle on his ‘balcony,’ where you can sit only in the lotus position, promised a drove of mosquitoes in 5 minutes.

Suddenly a vision descended upon the room: many people were walking the streets, sending messages worth the seven hour effort of sending them, the effort put in making the message that much more worthy for an audience.

Imagine the impact of an sms that shows up in cell phones from New York to Delhi generated after a day-long walking protest in Yangon: ‘ Screw you generals’.

Yesterday he told me that a gallery in town is very interested in his invention.

Today he says he is working on another one: ‘a gesture-driven gaming interface for a mobile device.”  :)

Watch for it on algomantra.com

—ansari.rehan@gmail.com