It's a pokémon world!

there's a saying in marathi that 'a converted muslim eats more onions. '


this basically means that a person who has changed faith or has become something he didn't use to be, follows the new regime more strictly and methodically than a person originally from that regime.


japanese are doing well. very well. they all wear suits now. and they have even bigger automobiles than fords etc. they have preserved their originally borrowed script and used it effectively to mean exactly what american-english means.


anyway, i'm no one to comment on geo politics and cultural meltdowns in a big pot called corporation.


but basically whatever americans can do, the japanese can do it much better. ( i'm assuming good-bad as relative terms, at times interchangeable.)


americans merchandised from a given content and then moved on to produce content that can leave scope for merchandising. japanese, went ahead. they made the boundaries between merchandising and conetnt disappear. americans placed existing products into films. Like how cast-away is a very entertaining advertisement for fed-ex. or made products based on existing content. (bugs bunny stuffed toy, or wwe playing cards).


but pokémon the animated series is an advert, a prologue, an epilogue, folklore, legend and an educational video for the avid users of pokémon video games and playing cards and much more.


if you were to find out what came first the product or the content, you'd have to open history pages. the content by itself is so well bound, it's an entire system, a parallel world and what came first doesn't even matter. it's an evolutionary step in product-content relationship.


but when merchandising evolves, it does much more than just bring in money. it brings visual content into life. real life. (no relative terms here.)


of course it's most effective when similar archetypes or concepts are present in the mass consciousness and in the individual consciousness of people..

like how anybody who looks at the tightly woven world of interjecting co-incidences and increasing virtuality of real life talks about 'the matrix'. it's a work of art that simplifies certain yet intangible thoughts in your mind and simplifies them and categorises them for future reference. this makes us aware of these thoughts and they become archetypal knowledge for us. something we know deep down. (or we have an illusion of knowledge.)

such visual concrete works speed up the process of folklore and legend and thoughts become knowledge without the churning of time.


the real bitch is when we start acting upon this knowledge. when we naturalise it.


every common insect, every common animal or bird is a pokémon now. a pocket monster that fights itself dizzy for you. a friend who lives inside a small ball, that you can carry about in your pocket. you love it and it loves you and you throw it on a battlefeild to fight for a ribbon or a badge.

(and we thought dog fighting was illegal..)



is it slavery and 'love your slave' ideology?

tha could be valid if there was a clear division that human beings are masters and pokémon are to be captured and made slaves of. butthere's an interesting twist to the whole thing.

pokémon try to catch other pokémon! (dog eat dog!)

so is it animals we're talking about or is it other people?

a friend of mine is very organized, so he has 'organizaton power'! how can i use him? how can i capture him?

A friend is very logical in his thinking so he has 'logical power' how do i put him in a ball and unleeche him when i need?

the utility of people and the collection o people has been an old concept, but the physical appearance of it in real life is very intriguing...

I don't think i have what it takes to be a pokémon trainer (i.e. the collector)

I often wondered what the pokémon do while they are in the ball...

I guess they wait for being called upon and in the meanwhile, I guess they write blogs.

of becoming.

the word metaphor sounds like a butterfly to me. it's difficult to explain.. may be it's something to do with Marathi, because 'butterfly' is called fulpakharu in marathi and the pronunciation is like opening up something with your fingers. like unfolding a cool object made of paper. anyway, this is not about metaphors.

So, i had heard that caterpillars become butterflies. they go into cocoons and become butterflies! in marathi the itchy caterpillars are called 'Surwanta' they're furry and your hands itch really badly if you touch them, and they're really slow. 'Ali' on the other hand (is the green worm in green peas.) is much faster and cold and you can touch it. it feels like a very soft but cold lip of some sort. i used to find them very adorable to be frank. (and it's not because of my pretentious sensitivity.)
i also liked butterflies a lot. my father used to get me this plastic packet full of tiny butterflies made of some papers. very colourful. i used to empty the entire pack out of our balcony and watch them swirl. quite a few times we had real butterflies fly into our home on the third floor. My mother used to say they've come here to die. because most of them would be really tired and our cats would eventually eat them anyway. but there were the really vivid ones. ones which had a substantial body and comparitively smaller wings. The kind that does not stick its wings together when it perches, insteads holds them down like an aeroplane. i recently found out that those ones are called moths.
look at the difference : 'butterfly' and 'moth'

anyway, i liked them too. but most of them would be really sick and tired and even if i tried to protect them from my cats, they'd refuse to fly. most of them when they were really old, would have a reddish bulge on their backs. without any fur. quite smooth. they ran but couldn't fly much.
ofcourse i had tried to pluck wings off some of them sometimes but i didn't enjoy that and felt very bad for doing it so i didn't do it much. instead i'd try to keep them out of reach of our cats. my very sensitive arts teacher aunt had told me that it was a great idea to keep their wings in the notebooks. i thought that was a ghastly idea. (this same aunt who teaches poetry to children, also had procured a bunny's tail once for me and preserved a wing of a sparrow my cat once killed. she used to read poems to me and i used to love them! i still remember our lazy afternoons over 'aathvanitlya kavita'. but i didn't like this dead animal body parts storage.)

anyway, so those bulgy moths. i never thought they were beautiful, but i always thought they were sick and needed help.

once or twice i had tried to make butterflies myself. i had learnt that you can put a worm 'Ali' in an empty matchbox put some food and holes in the matchbox and wait till it makes a cocoon.
my previous attempts were not exactly successful. once the Ali mysteriously disappeared. i still don't know how.
once i found this really meaty ali but when i touched it it stuck out two big red horns and began to stink. i got scared and threw it away. ( i later found out that those stinkers and the itchy ones become the most beautiful butterflies.)
the third time however, i found a nice big ali in our kadhipatta. i put her in the matchbox and put some corriander and other green vegetables for her to eat. though the ali didn't eat much, she began to become brown and hard . i waited for weeks then i realised it was not a cocoon. the ali had died and it had hardened and changed colours.
i didn't try much after that.
but i still had empty matchboxes.
so after a few years, i tried again. i found an ali in peas so i put her in the matchbox, and kept peas for her there. she ate the peas like a hog, i had to give her peas all the time. she shat like anything in the matchbox, i cleaned that too.
soon she formed what looked like a cocoon. but i wasn't sure coz the cocoon was substantially smaller than the ali. so i probed a little. i touched the cocoon quite often. but once i was sure it was really a cocoon, i decided to quit it.
but it was taking too long to become a butterfly. and i had had this image of a nice BIG black butterfly with white patterns on the wings and the kind that sticks its wigs together when it perches. the beautiful kind.
after a few days, i had kept the matchbox open and i was probing the cocoon, just to check whether it was still alive, it made some movements. it began to crack and an insect did come out. it had very small brown wings. it hopped onto the window and began to open its wings. the wings were folded and rounded, but when it sat on the window, it began unfolding them. it had become a brown moth. the wings were forming right in front of me. i had expected this to be a beautiful event, but somehow it was very sad. it's mostly because it was a very ugly moth, improperly formed, and i didn't like it. it flew away. didn't even turn back. it was big one though. i looked at the broken cocoon. and tried to smile. succeeded to fake happiness. i jumped about and told everyone that it had become such a beautiful butterfly and i saw it come out and fly away. i acted brilliantly and everybody believed me. but secretly i blamed myself. i thought had i not touched its cocoon and not probed it, it would have become a nice big butterfly. it was my fault that it had become that ugly thing that flew away.
it had hurt me very deeply and i was acting ecstatic. holding on to the brown cocoon in the matchbox.

my aunt suggested i should preserve it.

the next afternoon, when i was alone, i burnt it.