Hard Yards

You know how it is at reunions. You and your podgy ilk descend upon the alma mater, loaded with nostalgia and determined to re-live the glory days. The inconvenient fact that a couple of decades have passed in the interim is comprehensively ignored. This is your trip back in time, and you fully expect the old school to have kept itself in some kind of temporal stasis too.

But it hasn’t, has it? So, it is in those well-remembered ancient corridors that you are most likely to take a once-familiar turn and suddenly get kicked in the jaw by Change. You stop at the door of your old classroom and peep in through a glass panel, only to find that it has now become a server room. You walk around to the back of the building to inspect the air quality, only to find yourself amidst an unsuspected swimming pool. ‘Oh well, the old insti is staying up with the times,’ you say. ‘Probably free wi-fi all over campus too. Good for the students.’

It was pretty much like that at a recent reunion I attended in the company of a hundred and a half of the country’s finest minds. A two-day affair replete with Campus Walk, Faculty Interaction, Spectacular Dinner and Sozzled Dance Party. Then, full of the spirit of nostalgia and the spirit of Scotland, we came to the favoured activity of those too tired to dance anymore – the singsong.

Our batch had been blessed with an immensely gifted singer. With a soaring voice that could carry a tune and our moods effortlessly through any plastered night. And unless there was an end-term exam nigh, you could generally talk her into limbering up her larynx and singing you a Lata standard or two. And if it were an extended evening, she’d pull out this diary where she’d written down the words of a dozen more evergreen hits. We’d sit quietly, swaying our heads in time and gratefully wallowing in the magic she wove.

That’s not quite how it went at the reunion.

As the first dulcet notes floated on the air, they were joined by half a dozen well-intentioned but definitely sub-prime voices – a bunch of the current students armed with mobile phones, free wi-fi and lyrics.com. Some of our own lot, too, pulled out their phones and waded in. As more people joined in, our star performer welcomed them with encouraging smiles, then quietly slipped away to catch a drink. So did I.

And it was while consuming a large-whisky-and-small-ice-cubes with her that the epiphany about Change hit me on the back of the head like a sock filled with wet sand. Free access – that’s what’s really changed. Earlier, if you wanted something, you put in time and rigour to reach it. Now you just pull out your phone and google it, or sqwiggy it, or stream it. Same result, but minus the magic.

The magic is in the journey, in the effort, in memorising the lyrics and practicing them while walking to class. The words are the same on lyrics.com, but if you’re going to be using your phone why stop at the lyrics? Why not take the logical next step and stream the damn song on to a portable Bluetooth speaker and kill the thing entirely?

I know you’re going to scream “Luddite”, but bear with me awhile. When I started working in advertising, creating a print ad was a large task. The copywriter wrote the headline and body copy with paper and ball-point pen. The art director made a sketch of the ad that included the headline, an outline of the visual and the logo scribbled in into the desired position. The body copy was jotted in as x’s and o’s. This, sometimes accompanied by a colour photocopy of a reference picture, is what was presented to the client for approval.

Later, the copy was typed on a computer in the DTP department and set in place in the typeface, point size and kerning that the art director liked. Someone put this on a floppy disk and took it to a specialist outfit for a sharp output on a photographic bromide. A dexterous artist in the agency studio then cut the bromide and pasted it with micro-precise accuracy on an ‘artwork’ using set squares, rubber solution and nerves of steel. The logo emerged from the studio’s darkroom and was pasted on the artwork, also with micro-precise accuracy. The artwork would be signed by the art director, the copywriter, the studio head and the client-servicing executive and given a ceremonious send-off to the press along with a 35mm transparency of the picture. And that, as anyone who was in advertising at the time will tell you, is an over-simplified description of maybe half the actual process.

The point I’m making with all this is much simpler.

Imagine you’re the brand manager sitting upstream of all this. You know it’s going to take time and a lot of effort to actually produce the ad once you’ve okayed the concept, and making changes later on will be bloody. So you put in a lot of thought into the brief you send to the agency; and when you’ve approved something, you lock it and throw the key away. No changing your mind, no getting assailed by self-doubt at the 11^th hour. Everyone had to put in a lot of rigour. There wasn’t much room for mistakes, so you made sure you didn’t make any. You became bloody good at what you did; and though the journey was often uphill, it was its own reward.

Now it’s more like pulling up the lyrics on your mobile. Because technology has made making changes easier, anyone can have a go, any number of times. ‘Options’ have replaced precision.

Call it ‘the hard yards’, call it the ‘thrill of the chase’, call it ‘the full experience’; call it what you like. The fact is that a road trip where you spend hours, maybe days, driving to a place feels a lot more special than if you’d just taken a flight to get there in sanitized comfort. And a dish slow-cooked at home with granny’s recipe, hand-ground spices and garden-grown greens tastes much better than the same food ordered online and delivered in thirty minutes. A labour of love and sweat.

Now, I know I’ve a terrible singing voice, and no number of hard yards is going to make it pleasant. But in these days of being house bound, why not put in some rigour anyway, I’m thinking? So I’m going to pick up a guitar and put some callouses on the fingertips till the neighbours holler uncle. Or maybe blow the socks off a flute every day. Three weeks might not make me the next Satch or Ian; but who knows, when the next reunion rolls around it just might find me strangling the strings in the wee hours after the DJ’s folded. And that’s something no batallion of batchmates with mobile phones and free wi-fi will be able to put a stop to.

You've been warned.