south of France? try south of the Mason-Dixon.

I attend a tech festival in Birmingham, Alabama

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I told a friend in Oregon that I was going to Birmingham, Alabama for a tech festival. he said we should have let them secede. I pursed my lips.

as our plane descended into Birmingham I pursed my lips again, but it’s important you know I’m a bit of a drama queen. when I fly over Europe I think about WW II and all the bodies buried in the European countryside. on my way to India as we clear the Middle East I’m no fun. so I felt some dread flying over Alabama. was I seeing former plantations below? had slaves once toiled in that patch of grass over there? did we just fly over a farmhouse that head quartered the Klan?

(and who was I in this mix? I am quite fond of my past and present here, and while I really see and get America, I do not at all feel seen or gotten by her, even with an Indian-American presidential nominee)

and then the humidity of Birmingham disarmed me and I was back in India. ‘maybe I should give this place a chance?’ I thought to myself. from the airport to the hotel, hotel to the conference, to coffee shops for 1:1 meetings, a bar, a restaurant, a historical venue, an office building, the Civil Rights Institute, back to the hotel, back to the airport — each hour I became happier and happier. exchanges with taxi drivers, restaurant staff, festival attendees, hosts, and local technologists steadily compounded into borderline maniacal joy, and by the end of 48 such hours I was left with a taste of ecstasy and frustration. why did we all live so damn far apart?

I returned to San Francisco and the following morning I walked to my neighborhood café. the barista looked at me and said, ‘what’s up? how was your trip?’

did you know that Cleopatra (30 BC) lived closer to the moon landing (1969) than the construction of the pyramids (2560 BC)?

my trip to Birmingham made me think about ‘culture’ differently. I used to think culture was the clothes we wear, the language we speak, music, food, religion, etc. but I now think these are byproducts of culture. I think at its core, culture might be the why behind these byproducts. why is our language structured this way? why do we wear this dress? why do we dance like this? where did this world come from?

I used to think that I straddled different cultural worlds. India and America, Art and Tech, Brown and White — but really what I’ve straddled is different temporal worlds.

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let me explain — I used to think of my family in India who farm as living in ‘the past’. I would say ‘they are still farmers’, as if their entire occupation and way of life was an intermediate step. I would think of our white-collar life in America as ‘the future’. I thought of my household’s Hindu values as ‘old’ and the values I was learning outside the home as ‘new’. I perceived the Art world as ‘behind’ and the Tech world as ‘ahead’.

I’ve been time traveling all along and I didn’t know it.

so why did Birmingham feel like time travel? it’s obviously historic. the Civil Rights Institute alone condenses complex American history into a single experience. it could also be that Birmingham is a small yet mythical place. it has little parks, quaint brick buildings, and unassuming streets, yet people changed the course of humanity from this place. they ushered all of us, India included, into a new moral paradigm of striving for equality. being in Birmingham makes the people behind the Civil Rights movement feel real. you can imagine them walking into church across the street or sitting on park benches, waving a piece of paper to cool off. all this makes racial progress feel so fragile — it was and is dependent on mere people, not gods.

and like that a spell was broken. what was seen as ‘old’ didn’t feel so old. it felt relevant. current. even futuristic. Birmingham, just like India, is not ‘in the past’. it is the present- future. it is on its own temporal path. and in some ways it is also ahead of San Francisco.

people will always co-create with the forces of change around them

there’s this notion that India will eventually become like America. what is ‘behind’ will morph into what is ‘ahead’. but I don’t think this is true. indeed these temporal worlds are not ignorant of each other. ideas flow freely between them and the dominant world influences those with less power, but to say that ‘India will become America’ or ‘Birmingham will become San Francisco’ is to rob places of their agency and individuality. these places will change, but people will always co-create with the forces of change around them. you just have to see it.

my trip to Birmingham got me thinking about why we build technology companies and how technology doesn’t always need to be futuristic. it can be for the now. in Birmingham they are building for what they need, both materially and economically. in Silicon Valley we build for markets and needs far beyond our geographic location. it reminds me of what my friend said about Kendrick versus Drake, ‘Kendrick makes art that is located in a specific community and history, with a specific purpose. Drake’s art is just trying to capture a universal feeling.”

even though I am not a descendant of the African-American or white American freedom fighters, I think being an American means believing that we are all part of their legacy. our connection to one another is not through blood but through a shared vision, and how freaking cool is that?