Tag: Friends

• The pleasures of rewatching

  Daily writing prompt

  What movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times?

  View all responses

  I’m afraid the answer is F.R.I.E.N.D.S. My sister and I watched it growing up, then rewatched it, the re-rewatched it, and now then have it playing in the background as I work. I have some problems with it but I’ve realised that memories of watching the show are in my head intertwined with good times with my family simply because they happened very close to each other — the same evening, for example — so thinking of one has often meant thinking of the other. I suppose I also like that all its seasons end on a happy note, which sometimes strains credulity but I think that’s been a small price to pay, these days, for some laughter and the knowledge that it will all end well.

  As for films: I’ve watched several more than five times, but the ones I’ve rewatched the most are compilations of the actors Vadivelu and Goundamani. I’m not sure how familiar people beyond India are with how comedy scenes exist in our films. Watch few a dozen or so featuring the best comic actors of Tamil cinema and you will realise they’re drop-ins — little skits or vignettes that an actor and his crew will have crafted to be connected loosely or strongly to the film’s narrative at large but which can often still be removed without much consequence.

  This has also allowed studios, network operators, and others to compile scenes featuring a single actor across films into a single YouTube video, often a few hours long. And I’ve rewatched those featuring the talents of Vadivelu and Goundamani (separately) several hundred times. In fact, I’d wager there isn’t a scene featuring Vadivelu I haven’t watched, and that would likely go for most Tamilians. I also know his lines by heart and they haven’t become more boring with repetition. I only know the names of a few films, however, but in Vadivelu’s case everyone knows that doesn’t matter. His scenes often stand on their own.

  2026.03.13

• A limit of ‘show, don’t tell’

  The virtue of ‘show, don’t tell’ in writing, including in journalism, lies in its power to create a more vivid, immersive, and emotionally engaging reading experience. Instead of simply providing information or summarising events, the technique encourages writers to use evocative imagery, action, dialogue, and sensory details to invite readers into the world of the story.

  The idea is that once they’re in there, they’ll be able to do a lot of the task of engaging for you.

  However, perhaps this depends on the world the reader is being invited to enter.

  There’s an episode in season 10 of ‘Friends’ where a palaeontologist tells Joey she doesn’t own a TV. Joey is confused and asks, “Then what’s all your furniture pointed at?”

  Most of the (textual) journalism of physics I’m seeing these days frames narratives around the application of some discovery or concept. For example, here’s the last paragraph of one of the top articles on Physics World today:

  The trio hopes that its technique will help us understand polaron behaviours. “The method we developed could also help study strong interactions between light and matter, or even provide the blueprint to efficiently add up Feynman diagrams in entirely different physical theories,” Bernardi says. In turn, it could help to provide deeper insights into a variety of effects where polarons contribute – including electrical transport, spectroscopy, and superconductivity.

  I’m not sure if there’s something implicitly bad about this framing but I do believe it gives the impression that the research is in pursuit of those applications, which in my view is often misguided. Scientific research is incremental and theories and data often takes many turns before they can be stitched together cleanly enough for a technological application in the real world.

  Yet I’m also aware that, just like pointing all your furniture at the TV can simplify your decisions about arranging your house, drafting narratives in order to convey the relevance of some research for specific applications can help hold readers’ attention better. Yes, this is a populist approach to the extent that it panders to what readers know they want rather than what they may not know, but it’s useful — especially when the communicator or journalist is pressed for time and/or doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to craft a thoughtful narrative.

  But this narrative choice may also imply a partial triumph of “tell, don’t show” over “show, don’t tell”. This is because the narrative has an incentive to restrict itself to communicating whatever physics is required to describe the technology and still be considered complete rather than wade into waters that will potentially complicate the narrative.

  A closely related issue here is that a lot of physics worth knowing about — if for no reason other than that they’re windows into scientists’ spirit and ingenuity — is quite involved. (It doesn’t help that it’s also mostly mathematical.) The concepts are simply impossible to show, at least not without the liberal use of metaphors and, inevitably, some oversimplification.

  Of course, it’s not possible to compare a physics news piece in Physics World with that in The Hindu: the former will be able to show more by telling itself because its target audience is physicists and other scientists, and they will see more detail in the word “polaron” than readers of The Hindu can be expected to. But even if The Hindu’s readers need more showing, I can’t show them the physics without expecting they will be interested in complicated theoretical ideas.

  In fact, I’ll be hard-pressed to be a better communicator than if I resorted to telling. Thus my lesson is that ‘show, don’t tell’ isn’t always a virtue. Sometimes what you show can bore or maybe scare readers off, and for reasons that have nothing to do with your skills as a communicator. Obviously the point isn’t to condescend readers here. Instead, we need to acknowledge that telling is virtuous in its own right, and in the proper context may be the more engaging way to communicate science.

  2025.08.03

• Friends no more

  Growing up, watching Friends was a source of much amusement and happiness. Now, as a grownup, I can’t watch a single episode without deeply resenting how the show caricatures all science as avoidable and all scientists as boring. The way Monica, Rachael, Phoebe, Chandler and Joey respond to Ross’s attempts to tell them something interesting from his work or passions always provokes strong consternation and an impulse to move away from him. In one episode, Monica condemns comet-watching to be a “stupid” exercise. When Ross starts to talk about its (fictitious) discoverer, Joey muffles his ears, screams “No, no, no!” and begins banging on a door pleading to be let out. Pathetic.

  This sort of reaction is at the heart of my (im)mortal enemy: the Invisible Barrier that has erupted between many people and science/mathematics. These people, all adults, passively – and sometimes actively – keep away from numbers and equations of any kind. The moment any symbols are invoked in an article or introduced in a conversation, they want to put as much distance as possible between them and what they perceive to be a monster that will make them think. This is why I doubly resent that Friends continues to be popular, that it continues to celebrate the deliberate mediocrity of its characters and the profound lack of inspiration that comes with it.

  David Hopkins wrote a nice piece on Medium a year ago about this:

  I want to discuss a popular TV show my wife and I have been binge-watching on Netflix. It’s the story of a family man, a man of science, a genius who fell in with the wrong crowd. He slowly descends into madness and desperation, lead by his own egotism. With one mishap after another, he becomes a monster. I’m talking, of course, about Friends and its tragic hero, Ross Geller. …

  Eventually, the Friends audience — roughly 52.5 million people — turned on Ross. But the characters of the show were pitted against him from the beginning (consider episode 1, when Joey says of Ross: “This guy says hello, I wanna kill myself.”) In fact, any time Ross would say anything about his interests, his studies, his ideas, whenever he was mid-sentence, one of his “friends” was sure to groan and say how boring Ross was, how stupid it is to be smart, and that nobody cares. Cue the laughter of the live studio audience. This gag went on, pretty much every episode, for 10 seasons. Can you blame Ross for going crazy?

  He goes on to say that Friends in fact portended a bad time for America in general and that the show may have even precipitated it – a period of remarkable anti-intellectualism and consumerism. But towards the end, Hopkins says we must not bully the nerds, we must protect them, because “they make the world a better place” – a curious call given that nerds are also building things like Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, etc., services that, by and large, have negatively disrupted the quality of life for those not in the top 1%. These are nerds that first come to mind when we say they’re shaping the world, doing great things for it – but they’re not. Instead, these are really smart people either bereft of social consciousness or trapped in corporate assemblages that have little commitment to social responsibilities outside of their token CSR programmes. And together, they have only made the world a worse place.

  But I don’t blame the nerd, if only because I can’t blame anyone for being smart. I blame the Invisible Barrier, which is slowly but surely making it harder for people embrace technical knowledge before it has been processed, refined, flavoured and served on a platter. The Barrier takes many shapes, too, making it harder to hunt down. Sometimes, it’s a scientist who refuses to engage with an audience that’s interested in listening to what she has to say. Sometimes, it’s a member of the audience who doesn’t believe science can do anything to improve one’s quality of life. But mostly, rather most problematically, the Barrier is a scientist who thinks she’s engaging with an enthusiast but is really not, and a self-proclaimed enthusiast who thinks she’s doing her bit to promote science but is really not.

  This is why we have people who will undertake a ‘March for Science’ once a year but not otherwise pressure the government to make scientific outreach activities count more towards their career advancement or demand an astrology workshop at a research centre be cancelled and withdraw into their bubbles unmindful of such workshops being held everywhere all the time. This is why we have people who will mindlessly mortgage invaluable opportunities to build research stations against a chance to score political points or refuse to fund fundamental research programmes because they won’t yield any short-term benefits.

  Unfortunately, these are all the people who matter – the people with the power and ability to effect change on a scale that is meaningful to the rest of us but won’t in order to protect their interests. The Monicas, Rachaels, Phoebes, Chandlers and Joeys of the world, all entertainers who thought they were doing good and being good, enjoying life as it should be, without stopping to think about the foundations of their lives and the worms that were eating into them. The fantasy that their combined performance had constructed asked, and still asks, its followers to give up, go home and watch TV.

  Fucking clowns.

  Featured image: A poster of the TV show ‘Friends’: (L-R) Chandler, Rachael, Ross, Monica, Joey and Phoebe. Source: Warner Bros.

  2017.12.17