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The world goes around ‘more’

Our planet is obviously not the limit, there is outer space and beyond. Jeff Bezos of Amazon opened Blue Origin, the space tourism company, in 2000
Last Updated 19 August 2022, 03:21 IST

It wasn’t just Oliver Twist and King Midas who wanted more. The world is centred firmly around it. More is part of commerce. More food, more varieties, more places to go, more to buy, wear, see, experience and watch.

Some of us come from a time when there were just a couple of brands of soap, oil, footwear, chocolate and so on, to be had. So more was more of the same. I once sent a child in a boarding school a box of mithai. “Thank you, I loved the 36 sweets,” he said, and added, “Can I have 36 more?”

It was 36 of the same, though. More-ness today stems from choice. Sitting here at my laptop, I want a lighter, smarter, more advanced one. Products are also the centre around which extensions and accessories compete for our attention. Something we buy and eat may fail to be re-ordered because we have options and what we call ‘taste’ is actually our whim, derived from choice. A pizza or kebab we don’t like can be replaced, quickly, with another. More and better now go together.

In cinema or on television, the work of ‘more’ never ends. In the midst of a mounting choice of channels and films, we are often unable to select something, so we switch-switch-switch. Market intelligence kills itself on understanding this phenomenon and pushes itself more to match our viewing preferences.

Sequels and prequels are a clear part of more. Recently, we saw Squid Game on Netflix. The brilliant survival shocker film seemed to end perfectly in itself. But no, there’s a season 2 announced. When the Star Wars sequel VII, The Force Awakens, opened in Los Angeles in 2015, fans queued and slept on pavements the night before. Hundreds travelled across the country to see it early before it opened in other parts of the US, just four days later. Clearly primacy and ‘more’ go together. In the old days, some people just had to do a ‘first-day-first-show’ of a new film to stay in the club.

Our planet is obviously not the limit, there is outer space and beyond. Jeff Bezos of Amazon opened Blue Origin, the space tourism company, in 2000. It aims to make space travel more accessible and cheaper. Years ahead, people have paid for unbelievable destinations, and are in a queue.

In 2018, SpaceX (co-owned by Elon Musk of Tesla) announced a private circumnavigation mission, slated for 2023, to the moon. It is called the dearMoon Project. Musk and Bezos themselves went into the orbit in crewed spacecrafts.

And finally, the lines of wisdom on ‘more’ as a goal, an aspiration. In the movie Kung Fu Panda, Master Shifu, senior master-trainer in the Jade Palace, sternly challenges Po the panda who pleads for a softer, slower approach: ‘If you only do what you can do, you will never be more than you are now.’

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(Published 18 August 2022, 17:33 IST)

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