On Being Cool

“Hey babe, how you doin?”
“Man, it’s an absolutely chilled out place.”
“I don’t believe this mother of shit.”

Coolness is not defined by an attitude, it is defined by language. In India, it is mostly defined in English. You can sound casual in your local language, but you cannot sound cool. For that you need English and a pair of jeans.

Coolness defines the bourgeois rebel, the bourgeois "creative attitude".

Professionalism

“By professionalism I mean thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior—not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and “objective.””

Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual

On Common Sense

What is common sense? Is it something that has been tested and proven in various contexts through the ages? If so, who tested it and who proved it?

The answers can wait. But competition is a common sense phenomenon, so are 'essential' hierarchies, professional efficiency and ‘free’ market. The consequences can be anything – inequality, exploitation, and a growing divide between the rich and the poor. But that’s how common sense wants it.

Therefore, it goes without saying that common sense has vested interests. It clings to what has worked in the past. It is driven by the ‘sense’ of those who have benefited maximum from the past. It may push the frontiers of the past (and in doing so, some may lose their privileged status) but it will not let the edifice collapse.