Take a deep breath, do nothing and change the world

For someone who's spent over 15 years making videos with important props, it's a heart-breaking realisation that good, compelling content isn't any longer the king

So an Indonesian man last month had an epiphany. He got up on what looked like his bed, sat in front of the camera in a dimly lit room and recorded himself doing 'absolutely nothing' to become an overnight YouTube sensation.  
 Five centuries ago when a young Isaac Newton sat under a tree doing absolutely nothing, he was bonked on the head by a falling apple. In a "eureka moment" next, he came up with the law of gravity and changed the world forever. But if the art of lolling needed a twenty-first century setting and a modern-day poster boy in the history of human evolution, then Muhammad Didit should get the crown four weeks after making the video with over 2.7 million views. Daft? Yes, but with 2.7 million views and counting, it's a crude reminder that 'nothing' does mean 'something' for today's people.  
For someone who's spent over 15 years making videos with gimbals, lights, cameras, and other important props including humans but with or without such viewership, it's a heart-breaking realisation that good, compelling content isn't any longer the king but it is the size and degree of absurdity (often sheer stupidity by some standards) that attracts attention. And that's how last year's semi-ripened banana secured to a wall with a duct tape fetched a tag of $120,000 in the name of art at an exhibition. Both simple and minimalistic yet as ludicrous and brainless as they may seem but both celebrated and feted with views, newsprint, and spotlight.  
Inspired, I stood at the balcony on Saturday evening with a cup of coffee to look out to the evening vanilla sky for my moment of honing the art of 'doing nothing'. But the monotony got to me in a couple of minutes and so I dumped the plan wondering if doing nothing was even a thing and if it was as easy as people make it out to be. After all, most of us have at some point in time and in some capacity been accused of 'doing nothing'. The boss at work has said this to me often and if I did a secret snap poll, I am pretty sure most of my colleagues would think so too. The missus at home who thinks I am up to no good has levelled such allegations as well and we the people as tax-paying voters back home in our country have often directed similar insult and insinuation at an incumbent leader or a past government, depending on our leanings and points of view! But not all allegations are true of course. Some half-baked, some part of libellous and malicious pursuits of people and some the result of men like me who fail to masquerade their downtime well enough to be caught out. Yet some moments of doing 'absolutely nothing' remain terribly classy. 
One of Samuel Beckett's lesser-known works is Breath, an unusually brief play that lasts about 35 seconds or about as long as Usain Bolt's Jamaican team took to set the world record in the 4 x 100 metres relay in 2012 Olympics. And during that entire passage of time, there's just the sound of a birth-cry, followed by an amplified sound of somebody slowly inhaling and exhaling, accompanied by an increase and decrease in the intensity of the light. The play ends with a second identical cry. No actor, no director, no call of honour at the end; just plain nothing like what many of Andy Warhol's pop art would seem to most of us - minimalistic and abstract minus the expressionism. But both Beckett and Warhol are institutions who changed the world in their own little way like Newton did with works that arose out of presumably 'doing nothing'.  -abhishek@khaleejtimes.com