Weekly Note 39 | You must not be so direct, Lakhnawi Tehzeeb and censor | Adhavan Sivaraj

My father asks me about the tone of my talk at IndiaFOSS last week. The imagery, the political perspectives and the choice of examples, are all things he pointed out to have been somewhere inbetween being direct, and a slippery, unclear direction. Neradiyavum sollala, ennavo solla vara, aana maluppura… There is concern, why need I talk about all of this? I realised that I use big words that act as euphemisims/placeholders for more direct speech. I like to say ‘context’, I like to end sentences with enquiries and questions rather than certain statements. With all of this in mind, I saw 12th Fail and Homebound on the same day. They are both good movies within their efforts and both feel very real - with simple, clear scenes in language that does not attempt to assess or require much esoteric thinking. My mother said this out aloud: that for all the accessibility I advocated for, the language itself was not accessible.

Shoaib and Chandan in Homebound talk with an interesting mix of words, I learn that it is called Lakhnawi Tehzeeb, ‘~ Lucknowhi Culture’. One uses ‘hum’ instead of ‘mera’ to talk in first person, along with a general difference I noticed in their zubaan, ‘~ language’. I found this blog of anecdotes of Lakhnawi Tehzeeb a nice read.
In mid 1960s Ravindralaya, in front of Railway Station, was the most important indoor theatre in Lucknow. All major musical programs, theater and other cultural events used to take place in it. If I remember correctly in mid 1960s a Russian Ballet group had come to Lucknow to perform. I and my mother were very keen on going to see it. Since the tickets were costly my father was not very keen to take us. So he procrastinated and we reached Ravindralaya very late - almost near interval time.

My father asked the man at the theatre gate whether it was possible to get the tickets to which he replied that now it is too late. Then my father asked him what the price of the ticket was. The gateman got little annoyed and said in chaste Urdu; “Huzoor, gustakhi maaf ho, pur jab janaza uth gaya to kaffan ke bare me kyon bat kari jaae”! (Sir, please pardon me, but when the coffin has already left why talk about the shroud to cover the dead body!). My father was speechless, but I really marveled at the finesse and politeness of the gate usherer

I have for a long time been critical of Notion like abstractions of file formats. They abstract and lock us into their ecosystem that cannot reliably be rendered or read anywhere else. For all the simplicity they claim to offer, their abstraction makes difficult 2 key things. For a writer, reader and user to understand and really grasp how their labour is stored, where it is stored and the fact that they cannot really store it by themselves. Notion is the sole reader. I carry the same view in the last few weeks about nocode database tools, which abstract away so much of what databases actually do…you can’t do joins, cannot create views, will not support simple postgres features - all of this is locked into small corners of their apps. Budibase, Baserow and all the similar apps are just like this!