So the guy that I hear a number of people seeing mimics Tom Hardy is hitting this summer real hard with this latest film upgrade. But how was it? Let's find out. My name is Brinicky Thavery and this is just my opinion. Hey everyone thank you so much for tuning in to my opinion slash review for upgrade I really do appreciate it. So a couple of months ago when I saw the trailer for this movie upgrade I was blown away. I didn't see the green brand trailer I saw the red band trailer anytime there's a red band trailer released for any film that I'm interested in I'm always going to choose that over the green band trailer because I want my expectations and my first impressions to be a good one. When my first impressions were great I was on board with this film you can go check out my reaction to it I strongly suggest you do but I was oozing and all in my seat jumping up and down just not could not believe all the crazy action and choreography that was going on in this film. I mean this was right up my alley and my expectations were through the roof like I said and I just could not wait to see it. Now this movie is being directed written and directed by Leigh Walnell and it's funny when I looked up his picture just now you know just to take some notes and I actually saw this film about three or four weeks ago but the embargo was this week and they had a question and answer segment afterwards and he just doesn't look like the guy that was in the picture that I saw I mean I didn't go up and shake his hand doing the Q&A I was kind of in the you know back middle but they just kind of threw me for a loop but if you know Leigh Walnell he's pretty popular writer he's done more writing than directing this is only his second film that he's directed the first one was in CDS Chapter 3 and he's also been part of the writing scene for the Saw franchise which came out with the first one in 2004 and I think they're even trying to make it eighth one which you know they made the Jigsaw movie last year so I brought his name up just to say that I think that he is a decent writer because at least the first three Saw films I'm a fan of I think those are pretty quality films for the most part especially the writing with all the intricacies that goes on with theirs so if you're a fan of him you're gonna you know he's part of the upgrade and this will make you satisfied but in the intro of this review excuse me in the intro of this review I was saying that hey you know the guy that a lot of people say reminds him of Tom Hardy that's Logan Marshall Green and if you look at the two he does kind of look like a younger version or or I hate to use this term or just like a watered down version of Tom Hardy Tom Hardy is great but at the same time I'm going to separate the two you know he has nothing to do with Tom Hardy he's his own great thing and as far as an actor is concerned and I have a lot of respect for him especially after watching this film here past films that he's been in I think he popped up on the scene for me which was in 2012 with Prometheus he also did Devil in 2010 I saw that film in theaters well I remember I took a date to go see that we had a good time he was also an Spider-Man homecoming and also Snowden that came out last year and you know he was he's the main character of the film his name is his name in the film is Gray and I don't know it's just kind of fitting I like Gray as his name and I also just like it kind of just tying in with something else that I like that I'm jumping around here that has to do with the cinematography and which is freaking fantastic in this film it really did set the tone and get you in the mood of this this futuristic type world that they're living in where technology is just becoming more and more prominent even more today I mean we think that we're slaves of technology today wait till you see this movie it some of it is quite scary but at the same time it is very intriguing because you're like man I wonder when we're going to have this type of device or that type of device so that's just something that I liked about the movie but going back to Logan Marshall Green and his character Gray for some reason just hearing his name Gray and with the cinematography and I know this kind of gets thrown around a lot with this kind of like a gritty realistic tone that's just kind of the tone I got so when I hear gritty and realistic one of the colors that pops in my mind is black and gray and so to hear his name being called Gray in the movie I don't know they just done something they just kind of did something for me kind of put a smile on my face and just kind of like you know entrench me you know into the film already than I was before and now as far as like I mean a lot of people are going to want to go see this film is because of the action and all that good stuff that you see in the trailers and you know all the viciousness and you know how visceral and just you know high intense this film is and I'll get to that in the second but what impressed me the most was the character development between Gray's character because you really do get to know him very early on in the film you know he's a married man this is a revenge plot you know in the trailers that his wife was murdered and he's trying to get revenge but he really does love his wife and what stood out to me is they didn't necessarily make this a point in the movie I kind of just filled in the blanks myself and kind of read between the lines but I think that his wife made more money than he did or his wife is the one that wore the pants well no I don't I take the pain I don't want to say she wore the pants but I just say I for some reason I got the sense that she was the breadwinner she was the breadmaker in this film now in today's world well not necessarily today in the past you know that would really get so a lot of male egos oh my god you know my my wife makes more than me or women can't make more than men or you know women are weak and men are strong and blah blah blah that stupid stuff but what I really did like about this in this film his character Gray Logan Marshall Green is if that was the case it really didn't seem like that was a problem for him it just really seemed like he was happy with the life that he had he had a loving wife that loved him they kind of joked around in a way that most couples or married people won't uh but you know you do whatever works for you in your relationship screw what everybody else says and that's just kind of like you know how it took it I mean he really does love his wife he doesn't let the fact that she makes more money than him or she's the one that's working and he's the one to stay at home bother him he's just a humble person that's really appreciative of everything that he has whether it's a material thing a metaphorical thing or a sentimental thing or whatever and that's just kind of like really humanize his character and got me on board with him and like when the crap hits the fan and his wife is murdered and you know he becomes a per is it a per it's a quadriplegic because he can't move his arms and legs I mean he's really like a vegetable in the in a sense you know you already cared about his character and then you care about his character even more you know when he's bedridden and he can't move I mean he's like freaking paralyzed you know and it's just like really sad and the film spent a good amount of time there just like no you're gonna wait for this action I'm gonna make sure you you know you earn it you know you're gonna have to deserve this action and the way to deserve it is you gotta get you gotta get to know local marshes green character and you have to understand where it's coming from and you just have to let that just seep in and they did that with a lot of long shots a great score you know with the music in the background it's like man you know the situation it's it's just not like you know I mean you felt sorry for John Wick when his dog died or whatever and you know there was just like a really short period of of not not remorse that I'm sorry guys the word is slipping you know but in that movie John Wick there was just a really really short time for him just to take in what happened before you know he's breaking out his old weapons going through about what a plan about the wreck shop you know you really did get to see you know him in this movie upgrade local marshes green character gray just really you know take in the tragedy that they had to go through you know with him losing his wife and him having to cope that not only did it lose his wife I mean the guy can't even you know move around even if he won even if he had all the resources in the world to help him seek revenge he can't even do that so you know that's just something that really just stood out to me there now like you guys you you you fell in love with the character and so when the nefarious character comes through like you know hey gray I have this device here cost him it can take you over and do this and do that you know the guy playing that role I did not like him at first he was extremely weird he was very slimy I think I don't even I don't even remember his name I yeah I'm looking at a picture right now and I am to be I don't think that's it but I wasn't really feeling the villain or the nefarious character first he was just like really creepy to me and I'm just like dude you have no social skills at all but at the same time I checked myself and I was like Brandon I mean most geniuses and just super rich people and all that good stuff they don't have a hold of reality like everybody else does they are socially awkward so I was kind of like well that kind of does fit within you know you know the two contexts of the world you know how they put it in the film so I eventually was able to accept it but of course you guys want to know how the action is okay even if you saw the red band trailer for this movie the trailers don't do any justice like the trailers are good but the action in this movie is like twice is better than it was in the trailer even the trait even if you like watch the trailer like five times in a row you're like ooh and all and like oh my god that was great yada yada yada when you see the it's like you know that's the the red band version of the trailer of the red band trailer versions of this movie is still like the watered down version of what they have in the movie I was like still blown away of a lot of scenes in this movie and the way that it's just choreographed it is just so freaking clean and and just precise you know there is like no wasted movement in this martial arts or whatever and I like ate up every second of it I was on and on in the screen you know the guy to my right this woman to my left because we saw this at a what was it the I'm not a studio movie grill Alamo Draft Houses where where we saw it at everybody in the freaking theater was screaming like oh shit oh snap sorry you know oh my god like oh oh oh oh oh like seriously just like oh oh man oh oh my god I mean like it was like really really really really violent and you know I kind of like that because the person the the um the device that is taking over Gray's body it is a computerized like robotic type of thing so it's not human it doesn't have you know you know decency of human life or whatever I mean even if I mean if you're you know doing self-defense or whatever and you're trying to kill somebody yeah you're gonna I mean you're doing self-defense and you kill somebody yeah you're probably gonna do what you have to do to put them down but at the same time you're not gonna stomp if the person is dead you're not gonna like stomp their head in the ground repeatedly or whatever and now I'm not necessarily saying that Stem did that in this movie but he has that mindset I'm just like dude was that really necessary I mean you won the fight did you really have to rip the guy's head off no no one's head got ripped off in this movie I'm not gonna spoil a particular death for you here but I was just like freaking blown away um the action just was freaking the same and like I cannot wait to see this again or buy this movie just you know because of the action alone and let's just go to the title of the movie upgrade that has more than one meaning of this in this movie I don't necessarily I don't know this is not I'm this is not a spoiler but the when they say upgrade yes gray was upgraded but upgrade is kind of like a race of new people you know I'm saying like kind of like half half a machine half human or whatever and there's different types of upgrades you know uh gray has this type of upgrade but another person that has the upgrades where you know they have a gun installed in their arm or whatever and they can load like shotgun shells in their hand and go around and blast them you like this or someone else may have an upgrade where they have like computerized eyes so they can like see something super duper well and process information very fast it's crazy all the technological advances they have in this movie so some of them do seem realistic some of them seem extremely far-fetched but it does scare me but also keep me intrigued for the future you know so when the film can kind of do all of that and like less than an hour and a half I think this came in like an hour and 31 minutes you know I just got to give us some kudos there I also like the relationship that Gray had with his mother it was really good and I felt very very sorry for the mother at the very end there was this one shot of her to where she was emoting about something and I actually said to myself damn you know it's like I'm not saying that I cried anything like that but you know I really I'm not a woman so I can't ever be a mother and imagine what mothers go through when they want to you know dealing with their children before this one moment not only could I sympathize with I could empathize with it as well and I'm just like man you know this just really really sucks there is a twist towards the end before I hit record on this camera I was like Brandon are you gonna bring up the twist because you went in I know that it was gonna be a twist so shouldn't everybody else well maybe but at the same time I think you should be prepared for it you won't see it coming and it was somewhat shocking and I actually said you know damn again you know for the second no I said damn when the twist came and I said damn again for the second time when I saw something I saw something with the mother towards the end of the film and it ended in a way I did not see coming it raised it answers some questions but also raised more which is a bad thing that's one of my knocks about the film when the twist came around I kind of said back was okay I see this now and I see it again and now that I know this I can't wait to watch it again because I know this information however I think there are some plot holes that revealed itself when the twist came about so where I was kind of asking myself okay if this is how everything is really going down was all this other stuff over here really necessary and I don't think that it was my only other gripe in the film was that there was a few times to where it did get a you know just kind of dip down in the boredom area maybe for about a minute or two before things picked up but for the most part this is a very smooth flowing entertaining film that is just high intensity violence excuse me and has some hand-to-hand choreography this one scene towards the end that is dang near competing with the raid and the raid redemption those indonesian films that came out a few years ago but I really did enjoy it and I think you would too if I have to rate upgrade out of a one out of ten I will get it I'm going to give it an eight out of ten yes an eight out of ten but guys in the end you know I said all that but it's really just my opinion okay what did you think about upgrade or have you seen it yet or do you want to see it how about turned you on how about turned you off do you agree with me or do you disagree with me let me know down in the comment section below let's get this conversation going to keep it flowing if you liked this video go ahead and give me the thumbs up and if you don't that's fine you can still subscribe to my channel you can also look me up on social media facebook instagram and twitter it's right at the bottom of the screen and I made it very easy by providing a link to all the good stuff down in the description box below and guys again thank you so much for helping me reach 5,000 subscribers please share this video as much as you can let's help me get to 10,000 subscribers and then next 100,000 and then 1 million but before you go don't forget that my name is Brennan Keith-Avery and that's just my opinion peace


In the era before automated blood counting was available everywhere. Hematologists used to get very upset by physicians transfusing their patients before consulting them. However, that is a thing of the past now. And you can go ahead and transfuse. What that might do will be to mask the true state of a patient's blood cell indices. So if somebody had microcytic anemia and was transfused with normalcytic cells, then the automated blood count may give you a normal MCV. However, when you look at the distribution curve, you will be able to recognize clearly two populations. That way you will not be deceived by the average, the number. It's always important to look at the distribution curve in all instances. Don't focus on the averages beyond necessary.


Thank you to the SOAS chandrummers A warm welcome literally I suppose a warm welcome to all of you and many thanks for making your way to SOAS on a summer evening I'm reminded nonetheless by this week's record heats We've all been suffering that a warm welcome in terravada lands is literally a cool welcome and Khmer one says to check the zoom To qualify what I would call in English in the English language warm hospitality So let me correct myself with a felicitous dual reference To our terravada and topic and to our London locale to wish you all a very cool welcome tonight Before introducing our speaker. I wanted to say a few words about the context in which we find ourselves together Here at SOAS we owe very deep thanks to the astoundingly generous and innovative Alphawood Foundation, which has enabled the establishment of the Southeast Asian Acad art Southeast Asian art academic program. We call it SAP around here It supports a broad range of activities from student bursaries to research to public-facing outreach work all focusing on the Hindu and Buddhist art of Southeast Asia and with a very broad Mission an ambitious mission. I should say to make a transformative contribution to the development of human research and Pedagogical resource in the Southeast Asian region itself It's been my pleasure to join the SOAS SAP this year and in this context to have had the opportunity to work with Kate Crosby Over there at Kings College to support a series of terravada research events in London this week So tonight is the crowning event of a first series of workshops held at Kings After the talk this evening you are all Courageously invited to attend a reception in the SOAS senior common room just one floor up in this building and Tomorrow is the full day devoted to research on the emergence of terravada in Cambodia from a number of Southeast Asian perspectives So tomorrow's is a is the last event in this week's terravada in London series And will be held at the William Goodenough House on Mecklenburg Square, and we hope to have many of you with us again tomorrow So now it's my great pleasure to introduce you all to Yuliana Schober She is the co-founder and co-director with Stephen Collins Ecy prison up here Of the terravada civilizations project about which she will be speaking this evening Yuliana Schober is professor of religious studies at Arizona State University where she is also director of the Center for Asian Research She is a multivalent Anthropologist focusing on Burmese Buddhism Her most recent book is entitled modern Buddhist conjuncture in Myanmar cultural narratives colonial legacies and civil society Yuliana's talk this evening as you can see on the screen is entitled How can the study of terravada Buddhism define as subject? So please join me in welcoming Yuliana Schober Thank you all. It's a real pleasure to be here today and Thank you in particular to Ashley Thompson and to Kate Crosby for the wonderful welcome that we've enjoyed this week here in London It's been great to have all these conversations with you And I appreciate all of the different inputs that we have Had from all of you who've attended the past The events over the past few days And I'm delighted to talk to you today about the terravada civilizations project And sketch out to you at some of what we've been doing. So Just to to Clarify That I'm indeed talking about other people's work and about a large project in progress so I am not actually providing answers to how to Define the study of terravada, but I hope to be able to raise questions about different approaches today and Look forward to your comments and Conversations in particular and just to be more concrete The talk will wind up referring specifically to if you oh, yeah See those tiny little things here indeed their bats their bats in the cave in Yunk in hill outside of Mandalay and as we've learned at the Abidam a conference and because of He jaws paper They're not just bats, but they're also disciples of Sariputra who have just listened to the Patana. So Just staying with the concrete Hopefully we'll get back there by the end of this conversation But let me begin by saying that in 2009 Group of initially 12 and then 21 scholars have been engaged in discussions about teravada Buddhism as the Civilizational force across South and Southeast Asia Our initial purpose was to delineate the parameters of comparisons of modern Teravada Buddhism, but in the course of that we also came to rethink scholarly approaches in the field of teravada Studies and its subject Teravada practices both of which are rapidly changing Our project came to engage several trajectories including on the one hand a Collaboration of scholars drawn from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences Including history anthropology Art history the study of poly and vernacular Literatures and on the other searching for new ways to explain local and cultural diversity in the terawada Repertoire to borrow a term from Justin McDaniel Let me see if I oh, yeah a lousy map of the teravada world, but these bear with me All right, so the terawada project facilitates then an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars That is multilingual multi-sighted and Comparative in its scope it is the kind of project that can only be undertaken by a group of scholars Because it's some is greater than the individual contributions Initially the project was organized by Steve Collins and myself And then we were able to gain the support of the Henry Luce foundation Our meetings were supported also then by many institutions including the University of Toronto Pennsylvania Chicago Arizona state the Coles Francaise The extrema ryan and now also so as and Kings College here in London And we are very grateful for the reception and hospitality and Conversations we've received during the course of the six-year project thus far Okay, in addition to our conferences Which mostly consists of conversations we have We also are preparing for publication several edited volumes And we've been hosting annual dissertation workshops we've developed a website as you'll see in a while and Steve Collins and I published a short preview of our collaborative project in the Journal of Contemporary Buddhism a year or two ago, so The study of teravada Buddhism then encompasses at its core a Literary tradition in Polly that Steven Collins has termed the Polly Imagineer It has inspired particular forms of civilizations Hegemonic kingdoms religious institutions practices for more than a millennium indeed Benedict Anderson singled out Polly as the one language that exemplifies translocal imagining of regional communities before the advent of print capitalism and modern nation states Polly Buddhist texts and inscriptions inscriptions have also shaped the development of vernacular literature Art local practices in what we now call the modern nations of mainland Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka and here in particular, I want to refer you to the work of Professor Professor Ashley Thompson and and concerning the emergence of early Buddhism in Cambodia and The conference that she has mentioned will be taking place tomorrow We are looking forward to that with great enthusiasm Teravada Buddhism is practiced now by more than a hundred and fifty million people around the world from Sri Lanka Southeast Asia and southwestern China to Vietnam Indonesia Nepal Including Dalits in India and throughout the diaspora networks of Europe North America and Australia They contribute to a discourse through which Teravada practices continue to be imagined among Buddhist communities and take on local and modern articulations in rapidly changing contexts of globalization and digitization The goal of our project then was not To compile a dictionary of Teravada Buddhism or to map its local articulations Nor did we seek out to reify some vision of a pure Teravada world Indeed, we wanted to describe the diverse practices of different places and times and show what they might have in common while asserting from the start that We are dealing with Continuities and differences that are inflected by local histories with vernacular Languages that together give rise to specific Teravada formations our discussions focused on core themes in the Pali imaginary Such as the conceptions of the Buddhist world, Dhadana or history, Vamsa And we compare such Teravada iterations across different cultural and historical contexts Indeed to trace an account for family Resemblances can be more vexing and challenging than to acknowledge difference in variation and practice and content. I Would say that over the past six years the group has Generated a unique synergy and we've come to understand each other's work in more compelling ways Our collaboration stimulated also life lead discussions about academic differences and inspired work By individual participants, or at least I'd like to think that some of that is true Many of whom have been Extraordinarily productive in their publications and I'm thinking here for example of Kate Crosby's recent books on Teravada and on its traditional Forms of meditation. I'm thinking about Christoph Emery's forthcoming book on Teravada rituals among Navari girls and I'm thinking about John Holt's forthcoming book on Buddhism and violence as well as Jake carbine's translation of the Kalyani inscriptions and other works in progress And I also think that our collaborative work has opened up new perspectives on particular research questions as we broop disciplinary boundaries and push thematic comparisons across regions cultures Histories and media our conversations also interrogated Received scholarship on Teravada traditions and here Charlie Halsey has made particularly valuable Contributions to that discussion as you all know that in fact preceded the initiation of the project But none the less continued to contribute to it Because thematic research is inherently Interdisciplinary comparative and multi-sighted our collaborations changed how we constructed Teravada studies and how we framed our inquiries Looking back it seems that we started the project with greater certainty about what constitutes Teravada then some and perhaps even most of us would assert today, but then We were so much older than As you know, I'm an anthropologist of Religion and I work on Buddhist practices in Myanmar And if you will permit me that I enter into How to locate the project from a vantage point that is familiar to me from my perspective and In particularly I wanted to focus for a moment on an earlier Development that generated new approaches in the study of Teravada Buddhism in particularly a point that was In a point in time that was Notable because of the publication of world conqueror and world renouncing by Stanley Tambaya At least for me to buy as analysis drew on both Buddhist texts Thai Ethnography and history reflecting his collaboration with Frank Reynolds during their time at the University of Chicago arguing that cosmological structures described in Practice and literature Also gave rise to galactic polities throughout Southeast Asia. This study was seen as an early Beginning of If you want a conceptual Imaginaire and its contextual historical and sources and Sources and practice in context. Okay And since then major intellectual shifts have taken place in Teravada studies Today scholars routinely draw on both textual and contextual sources and on cultural history and genealogies of knowledge Studies in the history of religion make use of ethnography and vice versa Anthropological work on Buddhism incorporates the literature and of the poly imaginary Let me briefly summarize then where I think The intellect or where I think the field was at 30 years ago and what kinds of intellectual shifts have taken place since the publication of world conqueror and world renouncer and admittedly this is rather Rough in its outlines, but nonetheless, I think it's worth noting just for the moment to give us an opportunity to locate a Collaborative project on the study of Teravada Buddhism All right, so then firstly a few if any scholars today Would argue that Teravada Buddhism is merely a philosophy That wasn't always the case And instead I think most of us would recognize that this tradition involves practices and a religious discourse And this intellectual shift locates authority and authenticity within the community of practice Practitioners and withholds judgments about theological questions I think that is very important to our approach to how to study Teravada today and in particularly The work of Anne Blackburn and also of Tom Borchard have contributed to these questions in recent publications Most scholars would accept also that orthodox doctrines of the elders reflect historically and contextually constructed discourse as well as the authorship of powerful actors and the agency of hegemonic institutions We focus in our discussions on how these debates are authorized Individually locally and socially that is to say in terms of a dynamic that goes beyond the individual This kind of intellectual shift opened up new insights into connections between Buddhism and politics and in particular Catherine Bowie's work Is something that relates here and this particular turn towards We Examining the relationships between Religion and politics or Buddhism and politics and how they intermingle has led us to re-evaluate the social function and the social effects of monastic reforms the authority of monastic lineages and institutions Finally it brought into scholarly focus a wide range of lay practices in meditation and in ritual and Illuminated their complex interactions with the Sangha this by the way is the Chinese tooth relic in young girl Rituals like the veneration of Buddha images pilgrimages or Ordinations are no longer seen as defiling Acquisitions of history, but rather as transformative practices that constitute Teravada truth in history text and culture a Fourth element and one that I think we all still struggle with in many ways because It's not when that's particularly easy to let go of is an Intellectual shift away from essentializing Buddhist notions That we might sometimes call the original words of the Buddha that comes with and yet we come to it We're now with the recognition that the Teravada Canon is an involving tradition Constructed by communities to be the pristine teachings of the Buddha This recognition and the reeds against statements as they're Asserting that in my village people do things in a particular way and that is Buddhist or in my preferred Buddhist text in my particular Buddha the following statement has been made and so on Those letting go of that kind of essentialism allows us to assess texts and narratives as part of a living Imagineer and it allows us to visit revisit the roles of monks as gatekeepers of Buddhist Teachings and in this regard I want to bring to your attention of course the work of Stephen Collins and Louis Gabbard If we were to concede then that we know indeed very little with a great deal of certainty about early Buddhism as Steve Collins has proposed at his Truanto Keynote, then we would also conclude that Teravada's understandings of early Buddhism are constructed primarily in mythic terms and So therefore the focus of our work as a group has been to historicize but Foucault referred to in his 1978 lectures at the École de France as the Dispositive meaning those genealogies and traces of civilization that map out particular and historically embedded inclinations in the normative network of social reality by tracing genealogies of practice and Disciplines in Buddhist lives we uncovered a new vocabulary and It allows us to be cognizant of a range of Teravada articulations across cultures across histories and across literary Imagineers so This is the Ananda temple in Pagan What do we mean then by the polyimaginaire and how does that relate to the Teravada civilizations project The polyimaginaire embodies Literatures and histories that are admittedly much older than the term Teravada itself We're cognizant of the limitations that underlie the term Teravada as a historical construct with different meanings at different moments in time and as a discursive field within disciplinary practices that shape sentiments dispositions institutions authority and hegemon hegemonies of merit-making Indeed In another very important volume Stephen, sorry Peter skilling Todd Pereira and Jake Carpine as well as others asked How Teravada is Teravada in order to historicize the term Teravada as a construction of late modernity, okay however, Pat Branky Made clear in his recent work that the notion of Teravada was used to refer to a particular world prior to the advent of British colonialism in Burma Important conceptual questions about how to find how to define the subject of Teravada studies emerged therefore from our conversations Indeed questions are how do we theorize links between practice text and history? Other questions that came to the fore are how can we move from the Universal to the local and vice-versa How can we move from individual narratives to larger social and salient Formations that shape the lives of communities and civilizations? How do we avoid the dangers of Extrapolating too much information from particular narratives and over interpret in this manner and what can be compared across Teravada civilizations and how can we describe those phenomena as they are refracted in individual lives Questions like these and their score the need for interdisciplinary Collaboration and I think that's really what is novel and new and different about our project and It also underscored the need to find new methods to extract information from our material I don't mean to suggest that we re-resolved all of those questions far be it from that but There's a great deal to be gained by asking them and As we worked to redefine the subject of our study Teravada across national Linguistic ethnic and social boundaries. We also wanted to make explicit how themes in the poly imagineers Came to be articulated locally as our initial perspectives changed new concerns emerged about Translation about readings of texts and contexts about shifts in language between poly and vernacular languages and about the construction of meaning and its social relevance at any particular moment in time and We've worked to develop a new kind of meta language that would capture shared premises of this Collaborative workshop or of this collaborative project by rethinking how and what we study And so we're looking forward to the publication of edited volumes That will bring some of these issues to the fore Some of those contributions of essays will be think single authored and some of them will be jointly authored, but I think you will find that they constitute or are reflective of a larger collaborative project so What then are the themes in the study of Teravada? Civilizations with that in mind of what I've just all laid out. Can we go back to work? I would argue yes, we can but in a different way and so for the remainder of my talk I want to outline some examples of What that new vocabulary entails and How we might proceed with that Okay, I think I'm a little ahead of my pictures, but that's all right For the purposes of the project Civilization denotes not an essentialized classic model of refinement, but rather a generative open-ended poly-imaginaire involving discourses, practices, discipline, sensibilities to construct meaningful reality across multi-ethnic social and historical geographies As we trace these genealogies of knowledge through time and space we came to historicize the Dispositive of those traces and technologies that form an enduring formation and form enduring institutions as Talal Assad reminds us Religious ideas and practices are inseparable from the social context within which they emerge Religion after all is a product of the human imagination By the same token Buddhist discourses and practices draw upon Repertoire in the poly-imaginaire about cultural narratives told in emic terms like Bhavana, Nibbana, Datu, Kudo, Kutla, Dana, Samsara, Sangha and so on and They create cultural meaning in particular social formations and hegemonies From this premise we began to develop new insights into how for example Hegeographical genres about the Buddha continued to shape the lives of Theravada Buddhists today narratives about the Buddha's lives about the Jadakas and about apocryphal versions link individual lives to That larger universe and by the same token they also connect the periphery to the center and to previously uncivilized places Theravada seek to discipline the self Through techniques like meditation and ritual ordination to establish membership in an ascetic community of the Sangha Such practices train individuals to transcend as Steve Collins has put it recently To transcend I hope I'm not misquoting To transcend self-interest and in praise an ideal Of personhood that is defined as a non-self They are conveyed for instance in the social habitus of monks in the physical and mental training They undergo in the careful folding of their monastic ropes in the measured movements with which they trans With which they trans walk across this space and also By the ways in which they rehearse chanting of memorized texts Those are Shri Jin monks reciting their evening meditation and we can also see it in the protocols of veneration Shown to sources of merit like monastic elders relics and Buddha images in other words Disciplines of the self embody the Theravada tradition and evoke the Pali imaginary these practices Sustained particularly privileged status of aesthetics and their technologies in complex social systems Civilizations that again has been a point that Steve has made in his recent work on asceticism the attainment of nibbana therefore Constitutes an authoritative social status that is central to that particular civilization and epistemology This is a Burmese painted pair bike. I believe the original is in the British Museum depicting the enlightenment of the Buddha or the moment just prior to as he's being attacked by Mara's armies and I wanted to use this image as a segue into talking about Visual representations of the Buddha, but also in the case of this particular image I wanted to try to your attention that Mara of course is understood as the embodiment of evil and the threat to the Dispensation that the Buddha overcomes at this particular moment And so this episode depicting the assault of Mara can also be used as a justification for the defense of Buddhism which in recent Events we have seen both in Myanmar as well in Sri Lanka and elsewhere So this scene can thus also be read as a defense of samsara and the ultimate victory of the teachings over its detractors Defending the Dhamma can be interpreted as a noble action indicating highest spiritual attainment So but really I wanted to use it as an entree to talk about images and about Buddhist relics and note that Buddhist material and visual objects like images and relics are Representations of enlightenment that figure importantly in the creation of communities This is my daughter by the way And this is in Mandalay Buddha pointing to the site that was to become the place where Mindong built the last gongbong palace All right, so Peter Pells has argued that icons are objects with agency mediate social realities Buddhist objects are informed by aesthetic styles of the poly-imaginaire and yet also Express local histories in becoming the Buddha Don Swearer shows us how Buddhist images Become embodied in the presence of the Buddha through ritual settings the mediation of narrative through material form and aesthetic style in painting film digital and virtual media thus constitutes a kind of a Dhamma scape and I use that word in reference to Charles Hershkin's notion of a soundscape in the study of Islamic preachings on video and Cassettes in Egypt and I think that it has been very usefully used or Employed that notion in the study of the anthropology of religion Recently, so I wanted to bring it into this particular project Artistic styles of Buddha images are usually named after dynasties to indicate not historical chronology, but instead the powerful patrons of the fields of merit Constituted through the orders through the consecration of the image for example the Mahamuni image and tears the close up of it as you can see It's it's laden with golden jewels and every once in a while It's also slimmed down and most recently. I think that was done by the bar Perhaps to generate some income, but In any case the Mahamuni image continues to figure importantly in its current location in Mandalay and It presents a particular kind of reading of the history in place fashioned by centuries of Erichanese Burmese narratives about Subjugation and hegemony its presence in Mandalay today Here you can see how indeed the image has been distorted by the many offerings of gold leaf it has received It's image in press its presence in Mandalay today Continues to transform the lives of many pilgrims who offer food and wash the images face Each day a dawn the comic results of these transformative narrative Rituals are mediated not only by the original icon shown here But equally importantly by countless copies of the Mahamuni image that Mediate Terada sentiments and dispositions and replicate fields of merit across time and space Merit gained from ritual practice like the face washing becomes manifest Not only through future rewards, but it is also constructed But also constructs the social fabric of social and political relationships particularly in traditional settings giving dana and giving oneself through ordination our central tropes in this Reality the reality of the Sasana and in Burma as elsewhere in the Teravada world Buddhist practices particularly those involving merit-making rituals have long been inseparable from politics Traditionally kings were expected to be patrons of Buddhist institutions and their power was understood as a reflection of their moral practice Teravada social formations produced classic Buddhist kingdoms ensuring the longevity and profound influence of the Teravada tradition creating a Tathana creating a Buddhist world Royal and local chronicles often Describe those hegemonic fields of marriage of merit and their patrons and affirm their charisma authenticity and authority Such history gives voice to epistemologies of the Pali imaginary in order to create specifically Teravada world views and here I want to mention the work of shocklighter Pat prankie and Steve Burke was all of whom who have have contributed to Investigating these aspects in their publications Through this discourse Teravada's Construct an understanding of the Sasana that profoundly shapes the world that they inhabit socially intellectually and culturally where the Buddha is present and venerated and where as Bob Hefner would say the really real constitutes semiotic ideologies This Teravada understanding of time and place creates a particular historical consciousness expressed in chronicles and in other junior law genealogies of the dispensation This is a view of the top of Shwitagong It's a photograph on exhibit at least when I was there at the museum at Shwitagong in Yangon and I thought it was interesting because it showed the very tip of the pagoda against the skyline of What was at least an imagined modern city? So I want to turn our attention then to questions of modernity and Buddhism Most Teravada's experienced modernity as part of a secular power and part of colonization introduced by European powers and here I want to refer you to the work of Anne Blackburn who has written about that with regard to changes and Continuities in Buddhism it Modernity profoundly affected traditional life ways Predicated on a holistic Teravada that Anna and its social relationships new Teravada formations emerged in response to competing secular knowledge political power and Social practices and Tom Borgert has written about that with regard to a contemporary Thailand as well monks and kings and Thailand Burma Cambodia and elsewhere in the Teravada world and acted far-reaching institutional changes and reforms and Formulated modern ethics as Anne Hansen has shown in her book how to behave How can the Vinaya remain relevant in modern contexts? in the early 20th century Burma and Sri Lanka Transgressions of monastic discipline formed the plot of provocative novels that depicted monastic individuals as narrative subjects and Express their profound disenchantment with the modern Colonial period and so here's a moment where monks who elsewhere in the Teravada tradition have been almost Anonymous authors and progressively more known authors, but here they actually become subject of modern narratives and the Focus of the subject is their disenchantment with traditional Buddhist practice I think that's a quite remarkable moment of Modernity and I think at least at one point one of Charlie's students with Thinking about doing a dissertation on this, but I'm not sure if that's still so So in his recent work on ways a Buddhist wizards who practice Meditation and some form of self-ordination oftentimes Pat prankie has indeed documented alternate responses to rationalizing reforms that are not beauty and other Popularization of Buddhism through lay meditation and other practices in Prankie's work, but also in Kate Crosby's new book on the suppression of traditional meditation We find that successful Buddhist reforms silence disempower and marginalize Those who alleged use of magic is said to subvert Righteous fields of merits Those who elude reforms initiated by the center often retreat to the forest This move is not merely an attempt to elude coercion from the center Departing for the forest is also a common trope for the quest for enlightenment as stories about such charismatic individuals Recall salient episodes in the life of the Buddha and I want to introduce you to one of those places That is a way the perspective is a little difficult to capture, but it is also difficult to photograph This is indeed yonkin hill where you find staircase going down into a crotto And it is in that grotto that I took the picture that is on the poster for today's talk so Yonkin hill is a way a way a place away from the center. It's away from the Mandalay City and former court as a place where people took refuge at the end of World War two and As its name indicates it is a place that is supposed to provide protection Okay so It also houses a number of small forest monasteries and meditation cells and And it houses many several powerful icons as you can see here and It is also home to Burmese ways us and a number of smaller Hidden caves that seem to be dedicated more to personal practices So you find this larger public space, but also very hidden Caves within that hill region outside of Mandalay yonkin hill and you also find occasional Pilgrims that visit the crotto on top of the mountain and Deep inside it other responses to modern Transfurbations compromise change a comprised changes in modern education curricula in the rise of lay authority through meditation and In changes of in gender roles in the roles of women in Buddhist orders And here I want to refer you again to the work of Nancy Eberhard and also Christoph Emery both of whom have worked on gender and Buddhist practice and another aspect of modern response in Buddhist practices concerns the commodification of some modern Buddhist practices Here you see a shop in the Mandalay market where monks can Buy robes and things of that sort Okay, we know that the rise of inside meditation Vipassana has not just been an innovation for lay practice, but also has become an epitome of modern Buddhism and Cosmopolitanism it's widely popular and varied forms of practice have been disembedded from the cultural context of their production and appropriated by other religious and secular communities Diverse forms of Buddhist modernism and contemporary Tera Vada now extend to a global multi-ethnic and multi-sided diaspora digitized modes of the communication and virtual realities that shape emergent Tera Vada formations and And I want to conclude my Traversing of the Tera Vada world by focusing for a moment on others Tera Vada Buddhism and others to know that Monolithic representation like I've just engaged you in the Tera Vada Buddhist Sangha and Buddhist practices in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka Have been sort of at the forefront of our study and they have occupied the attention of their academic interlocutors and they have often submerged tensions with surrounding religious and ethnic the different communities Tera Vada civilizational narratives their Teological histories and their moral reasoning are not accepted by many religiously and ethnically different groups that inhabit the same geography We therefore must ask how Tera Vada civilizations encounter the other Those living right outside the Pali Imagineer How do Tera Vada's accommodate other religious epistemologies in times of prosperity? Questions about who belongs to Tera Vada communities may not be pressing but in recent crises Buddhists have advocated a defense of the Dharma that became manifest as violent attacks on non Buddhist others Exclusionary formations of identity and belonging have come to characterize a sizable number of Buddhists who like their non Buddhist neighbors have become both victims and perpetrators of communal violence and And here I want to work refer you to the work of Shaq Leiter and John Holt and perhaps also to some of my own writings as well as the fact that we hope to Dedicate some of our future Conversations on the Buddhist Tera Vada Buddhist encounter with others Let me conclude then today with an image of A Buddhist relics in Mandalay you can see here they are encased although the hard to make out and I think that's the purpose of it In any case Here we are at our website and I invite you all to take a closer look at This particular website that also serves community that of scholars that you may join if you so wish at Tera Vada Siv.org It's free for anyone who is interested and it is it serves a professional group that We've started up a year or two ago and that is now formally associated with the Association for Asian Studies That means we meet once a year In a public meeting in conjunction with the Association for Asian Studies So next time it would be in March in Seattle when the Association for Asian Studies meets But we hope that this net Website will help facilitate a scholarly network engaged In the study of Torah Tera Vada and particularly bring in the interests of younger scholars Who might be interested in becoming involved through conferences or by applying to the annual dissertation workshop Or even just through virtual participation on the website you can establish a profile You can list your publications. You can even begin discussions So and you can look for new announcements of publications events conferences and the like all right So by now we have a newsletter as well as more than 200 members of the Tera Vada studies group around the world and I Invite you to join if you are interested and I'd like to thank you for indulging me in Traversing a reimagined kind of study of Tera Vada Buddhism one that I don't own But I have merely tried to represent An effort of a scholarly group that is working collaboratively and I think that has a great many Benefits to it because we can draw on everybody's expertise. So thank you for your attention


For the future of cohesion policy it's necessary to have less regulation all over Europe and cutting-rate tape in the best sense for small and medium-sized enterprises because less regulation and cutting-rate tape means creating new jobs, creating growth, so it's in the best interest of the people all over Europe.


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Last year we noted in a breaking analysis that the cloud ecosystem is innovating beyond the idea or notion of multicloud. We've said for years that multicloud is really not a strategy, but rather a symptom of multi-vendor. And we coined this term super cloud to describe an abstraction layer that lives above the hyperscale infrastructure that hides the underlying complexities, the APIs, and the primitives of each of the respective clouds that interconnects whether it's on-prem, AWS, Azure, Google, stretching out to the edge and creates a value layer on top of that. So our vision is that super cloud is more than running an individual service in cloud native mode within an individual cloud, rather it's this new layer that builds on top of the hyperscalers and does things irrespective of location, adds value, and we'll get into that in more detail. Now it turns out that we weren't the only ones thinking about this, not surprisingly, the majority of the technology ecosystem has been working towards this vision in various forms, including some examples that actually don't try to hide the underlying primitives. And we'll talk about that, but give a consistent experience across the DevSecOps tool chain. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR and this breaking analysis, we're going to share some recent examples and direct quotes about super cloud from the many cube guests that we've had on over the last several weeks and months. And we've been trying to test this concept of super cloud, is it technically feasible? Is it business rational? Is there a business case for it? We'll also share some recent ETR data to put this into context with some of the players that we think are going after this opportunity and where they are in their super cloud build out. And as you can see, I'm not in the studio, everybody's got COVID so the studio is shut down temporarily but breaking analysis continues. So here we go. Now, first thing is we uncovered an article from earlier this year by Lori McVitty is entitled super cloud, the 22 answer to multi-cloud challenges. What a great title of course, we love it. Now, what really interested us here is not just the title, but the notion that it really doesn't matter what it's called. Who cares? Super cloud, distributed cloud, someone even called it meta cloud recently and we'll get into that. But Lori is a technologist, she's a developer by background. She works at F5 and she's partial to the super cloud definition that was put forth by Cornell and you can see it here. That's a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers, et cetera, et cetera. And that the super cloud provides interfaces to allocate, migrate and terminate resources, dot, dot, dot and can span all major public cloud providers as well as private clouds. Now, of course we would take that as well to the edge. So sure, that sounds about right and provides further confirmation that something new is really happening out there. And that was kind of our initial premise when we put this forth last year. Now, we want to dig deeper and hear from the many cube guests that we've interviewed recently, probing about this topic. We're going to start with Chuck Whitten. He's Dell's new co-COO and most likely part of the Dell succession plan many years down the road, hopefully. He coined the phrase multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And he also, he provides a really good business perspective. He's not a deep technologist. We're going to hear from Chuck a couple of times today, including one where John Furrier asks him about leveraging hyperscale CAPEX. That's an important concept that's fundamental to super cloud. Now, Ashash Badani heads products at Red Hat and he talks about what he calls metacloud. Again, it doesn't matter to us what you call it, but it's the ecosystem gathering and innovating and we're going to get his perspective. Now we have a couple of clips from Danny Allen. He is the CTO of Veeam. He's a deep technologist and can get super into the weeds, which we love. And he talks about how Veeam abstracts the cloud layer. Again, a concept that's fundamental to super cloud and he describes what a super cloud is to him. And we also bring with Danny the edge discussion to the conversation. Now the bottom line from Danny is we want to know is super cloud technically feasible and is it a thing? And then we have Jeff Clark. Jeff Clark is the co-COO and vice chairman of Dell Super Experience Individual. He lays out his vision of super cloud and what John Furrier calls a business operating system. You're going to hear from John a couple of times. And Jeff Clark has a drop the mic moment where he says, if we can do this X, you'll describe what X is, it's game over, okay? So of course we want to then go to HPE, one of Dell's biggest competitors. And Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And so given Jeff Clark's game over strategy, we want to understand how HPE sees super cloud. And the bottom line, according to Patrick Osborne, is it's real. So you'll hear from him. And now Raghu Raghuram is the CEO of VMware. He kind of threw a curve ball at the super cloud concept and he flat out says, no, we don't want to hide the underlying primitives. We want to give developers access to those. We want to create a consistent developer experience in that DevSecOps tool chain and Kubernetes runtime environments and connect all the elements in the application development stack. So that's a really interesting perspective that Raghu brings. And then we end on, it's right. Itzik is a technologist and a technical team leader who's worked as a go between customers and product developers for a number of years. And we asked Itzik, is super cloud technically feasible and will it be a reality? So let's hear from these experts and you can decide for yourselves how real super cloud is today and where it is. Run the sizzle. Operative phrase is multi-cloud by default. That's kind of the buzz from your keynote. What do you mean by that? Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds, on-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for a customer's clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be and it should be. It is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they want to maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge clouds. So it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud by default, we mean that's the state of the world today. Our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design as you heard. Really, really great question. Actually, since you and I talked, Dave, I've been spending some time, you know, sort of noodling just over that, right? And you're right, right? There's probably some terminology, something sort of, you know, that will get developed, you know, either by us or, you know, in collaboration with industry. You know, we sort of almost have the next, almost like a meta-cloud, right? That we're sort of working our way towards. So we manage both the snapshots and we convert it into the Veeam portable data format. And here's where the super cloud comes into play. Because if I can convert it into the Veeam portable data format, I can move that OS anywhere. I can move it from physical to virtual to cloud to another cloud back to virtual. I can put it back on physical if I want to. It actually abstracts the cloud layer. You know, there are things that we do when we go between clouds. Some use BIOS, some use UEFI. But we have the data in backup format, not snapshot format, that's theirs. But we have it in backup format that we can move around and abstract workloads across all of the infrastructure. And your catalog is in control of that, is that right? Am I thinking about that the right way? That is 100%. And you know what's interesting about our catalog, Dave? The catalog is inside the backup. Yes, so here's what's interesting about the edge. Two things, on the edge, you don't want to have any state if you can help it. And so containers help with that, right? You can have stateless environment, some persistent data storage. But we not only provide the portability in operating systems, we also do this for containers. And that's true, if you go to the cloud and you're using, say, EKS with relational database services, RDS for the persistent data later, we can pick that up and move it to GKE or move it to OpenShift on premises. And so that's why I call this the super cloud. We have all of this data, actually, I think you termed the term super cloud. Yeah, but thank you for, I mean, I'm looking for confirmation from a technologist that it's technically feasible. It is technically feasible and you can do it today. You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can. And at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. Well, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. Platforms that are providing, whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that, they plumb up into the cloud, they have an operational experience in the cloud and they now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in Green Lake. So it's a reality, right? We have a number of platforms that support that. We're gonna have a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover, right? So we led with Electra and we have a block service. We have VM backup as a service and DR on top of that. So that's something that we're provided today. Green Lake has over, I think it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the Green Lake platform itself, right? Everything from security, single sign-on, customer IDs, everything. So it's real. We have the proof point. So I want to clarify something that you said because this tends to be very commonly confused by customers. I use the word abstraction. Usually when people think of abstraction, they think it hides capabilities of the cloud providers. That's not what we are trying to do. In fact, that's the last thing we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is to provide a consistent developer experience regardless of where you want to build your application so that you can use the cloud provider services that's what you want to use. But the DevSecOps toolchain, the runtime environment which tends out to be Kubernetes and how you control the Kubernetes environment, how do you manage and secure and connect all of these things. Those are the places where we are adding the value, right? And so really the VMware value proposition is you can build on the cloud of your choice but providing these consistent elements. Number one, you can make better use of us, your scarce developer or operator resources and expertise, right? And number two, you can move faster. And number three, you can spend less as a result of this. So that's really what we are trying to do. So I just wanted to clarify the word abstraction. In terms of where are we, we are still I would say in the early stages. So if you look at what customers are trying to do, they're trying to build these green field applications and there is an entire ecosystem and merging around Kubernetes. That is still Kubernetes is not a developer platform. The developer experience on top of Kubernetes is highly inconsistent. And so those are some of the areas where we are introducing new innovations with our Tanzu application platform. And then if you take enterprise applications, what does it take to have enterprise applications running all the time, be entirely secure, et cetera, et cetera? Well, look, the multi-cloud by default today are isolated clouds. They don't work together, your data is siloed, it's locked up, and it is expensive to move and make sense of it. So, you know, I think the word you and I were batting around before this is an interconnected tissue. That's what the world needs. They need the clouds to work together as a single platform. That's the problem that we're trying to solve. And you saw it in some of our announcements here that we started starting to make steps on that journey to make multi-cloud work together much simpler. It's interesting, you mentioned the hyperscalers and all that CapEx investments. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of a cloud and build on the CapEx and then ultimately have the solutions machine learning as one area, you see some specialization with the clouds. But you start to see the rise of super clouds, Dave calls them. And that's where you can innovate on a cloud, then go to the multiple clouds. Snowflakes one, we see a lot of examples of super clouds. Project Alpine was another one. I mean, it's early, but it's clearly where you're going. The technology is just starting to come around. I mean, it's real. Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of all of the cloud innovation out there? Is that something that's, you know, that super cloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective? I think it is. So for example, Caitlyn Gordon, which I believe you've interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect, which is another project. That's exactly part of the, it's rational, the rational of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why are we doing it? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the Apex console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them in tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So yes, we are working on all of those different aspects. Okay, let's take a quick look at some of the ETR data. This is an XY graph you've seen in a number of times on breaking analysis. It plots the net score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR dataset on the X axis. It used to be called market share. I think that term was sort of off-putting to some people. But anyway, it's an indicator of presence in the dataset. Now that red dotted line, that's kind of rarefied air where anything above that line is considered highly elevated. Now you can see we've plotted Azure and AWS in the upper right, GCP is in there and Kubernetes. We've done that as reference points. Okay, they're not necessarily building SuperCloud platforms. We'll see if they ever want to do so and Kubernetes of course is not a company, but we put them in there for context. And we've cherry picked a few players that we believe are building out or are important for SuperCloud build out. Let's start with Snowflake. We've talked a lot about this company. You can see they're very highly elevated on the vertical axis. We see the data cloud as a SuperCloud in the making. You've got pure storage in there. They made the sort of public, the early part of its SuperCloud journey at Accelerate 2019 when it unveiled a hybrid block storage service inside of AWS. It connects its on-prem to AWS and creates that singular experience for pure customers. We see Hashi Corp as an enabling infrastructure as code. So they're enabling infrastructure as code across different clouds and different locations. You see Nutanix, they're embarking on their multi-cloud strategy, but it's doing so in a way that we think is SuperCloud-like. Now, Veeam, we were just at Veeam on and this company has tied Dell for the number one revenue player in data protection. That's according to IDC. And we don't think it won't be long before it holds that position alone at the top as it's growing faster than Dell in the space. We'll see, you know, Dell is kind of waking up a little bit and putting more resource on that, but Veeam, they're a pure play vendor in data protection. And you heard their CTO, Danny Allen's view on SuperCloud, they're doing it today. And we heard extensive comments as well from Dell. That's clearly where they're headed. Project Alpine was an early example from Dell Technologies World of SuperCloud in our view and HPE with GreenLake. You're finally beginning to talk about that cross-cloud experience. I think initially HPE has been more focused on the private cloud, we'll continue to probe, we'll be at HPE Discover later on this spring, actually end of June, and we'll continue to probe to see what HPE is doing specifically with GreenLake. Now, finally Cisco, we put them on the chart. We don't have direct quotes from recent shows and events, but this data really shows you the size of Cisco's footprint within the ETR dataset that's on the X axis. Now, the cut of this ETR data includes all sectors across the ETR taxonomy, which is not something that we commonly show, but you can see the magnitude of Cisco's presence. It's impressive. Now, they had better, Cisco that has had better be building out a SuperCloud in our view where they're going to be left behind and I'm quite certain that they're actually going to do so. Okay, so we have a lot of evidence that we're putting forth here and seeing in the marketplace what we said last year, the ecosystem is taking shape, SuperCloud is forming and becoming a thing. And really in our view is the future of cloud, but there are always risks to these predictive scenarios and we want to acknowledge those. So first, look, we could end up with a bunch of bespoke SuperClouds. Now, one SuperCloud is better than three separate cloud native services that do fundamentally the same thing from the same vendor, one for AWS, one for GCP and one for Azure. So maybe that's not all that bad, but to point number two, we hope there evolves a set of open standards for self-service infrastructure, federated governance and data sharing that will evolve as a horizontal layer versus a set of proprietary vendor specific tools. Now, maybe a company like Veeam will provide that as a data management layer or some of Veeam's competitors or maybe it'll emerge again as open source as well. And this next point, we see the potential for edge disruptions changing the economics of the data center. The edge in fact could evolve on its own independent of the cloud. In fact, David Floyer sees the edge somewhat differently from Danny Allen. Floyer says he sees a requirement for distributed, stateful environments that are ephemeral where recovery is built in. And I said, David, stateful, ephemeral, stateful ephemeral, isn't that an oxymoron? And he responded that, look, if it's not ephemeral the costs are going to be prohibitive. He said the biggest mistake the companies could make is thinking that the edge is simply an extension of their current cloud strategies. We're seeing that a lot. Dell largely talks about the edge as retail. Now, and Telco is a little bit different but back to Floyer's comments, he feels companies have to completely reimagine an integrated file and recovery system which is much more data efficient. And he believes that the technology will evolve with massive volumes and eventually seep into enterprise cloud and distributed data centers with better economics. In other words, as David Michela recently wrote, we're about 15 years into the most recent cloud cycle and history shows that every 15 years or so something new comes along that is a blind spot and highly disruptive to existing leaders. So number four here is really important. Remember in 2007 before AWS introduced the modern cloud, IBM outspent Amazon and Google and R&D and CapEx and it was really comparable to Microsoft. But instead of inventing cloud, IBM spent hundreds of billions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends. And so our view is that innovation rewards leaders and while it's not without risks, it's what powers the technology industry always has and likely always will. So we'll be watching that very closely, how companies choose to spend their free cash flow. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks for watching this episode of The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who does some of the background research. Alex Meyerson is on production and is going to compile all this stuff. Thank you, Alex, we're all remote this week. Kristen, Nicole and Cheryl Knight do Cube distribution and social distribution and get the word out. So thank you, Rob Hope is our editor-in-chief. Don't forget to check out ETR.ai for all the survey action. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can check out all the breaking analysis podcasts. All you can do is search breaking analysis podcast so you can pop in the headphones and listen while you're on a walk. You can email me at david.volante at siliconangle.com if you want to get in touch or DM me at dvolante. You can always hit me up and or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante. So thank you for watching this episode of Break Analysis. Stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time.


Hello and welcome to a special episode of 420grams here on NewsClick.in. We have with us the man who was the star of India's recent historic nil-nil draw against the Asian champions, Qatar in Doha on September 10th. He also captained the side for that game, Gurpreet Singh Sandhu is with us. The goalkeeper, the number one choice goalkeeper for both India as well as Bangalore FC. Great to have you on the show, it's the first time, bye. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me here, it's a pleasure. How are you doing man? How are things going? How is the recent stint with the national team been and how excited are you to be back in the flow of the next season? Well, those are a lot of questions, but I'm doing well. I was a little bit tired after the travel and everything, but really happy to join the club again and really happy to meet all of the boys and get back into that setup with the club. It has been a while, to be honest, so it's good to see everyone back and start working again with the club. We have some new faces as well in talented players like Rafael is there, young talent in Ashik, probably one of the best young keepers in Prapsukun Gill and legend of the club Eugene is back. So a lot of exciting things happening in the club, new faces, it's good to have that fresh energy around. So just trying to enjoy it with everyone and make sure that this one month, one and a half month is injury-free and everyone is ready for the league. And yeah, on the other side with the national team, it was sweet and sour, losing the first game at home. It wasn't exactly something that we wanted, but kudos to the boys to get back out there against Qatar and getting that result, man, because it's very hard to bounce back when there are least expectations regarding the performance and the result and getting that clean sheet and point against the best team in Asia right now was phenomenal. And just trying to build on that, because it's very important to have that consistency now, because we have shown ourselves that how much we are capable of when it comes to facing stronger teams. And now when we face Bangladesh and Afghanistan, which will be not easy, many people might think it's easy, but it won't be that easy. So we just need to be a bit more like sharp in our approach when we see those guys on the pitch. So yeah, a couple of things just leading from where you left off. Firstly, even in the national setup now, there's a lot that's been happening over the past few months with the new sort of backroom staff coming in. The new head coach, obviously, you have a new goalkeeping coach who you've spoken very highly of. So let's just start there actually, Gripreet. How much of a difference has the new backroom staff made in terms of the attitude as well as the tactical way in which the national team is playing and the way in which we saw you guys play the last two games? It has been a huge role, man. It's just been four months, we shouldn't forget that. And within these four months, the amount of progression each individual has made in terms of taking care of themselves physically and getting stronger mentally has been paramount and maybe the players who haven't been able to do that, unfortunately, don't join the camp again. But the boys who learn and keep going and do it, called once again in the camp, the backroom stuff is very, very experienced. We have Professor Luca, who's the physical trainer, highly experienced guy and knows what he's doing and, you know, he can probably get you in shape as well if you give time. It has been good so far, learning a lot from them. It's just that we need more time, you know, as I said, it's just been four months. I think with time, we'll learn more and, you know, try to enhance our performance and try to get as close as we can to our best selves and, you know, potential-wise as well. If you can add a little bit more about the mental side of things, would be because like now over the past, almost 10 years that you've been with the senior national team and it has almost been that long. Can't believe man. Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. So that's how quickly the time is going past and how quickly also things are developing on the football front. I mean, when you started out, things were completely different in terms of the structure of both the domestic football as well as the national team. So from a mental point of view, what is sort of making you guys come together so much as a unit?  What is the sort of mental bits that you're getting now that are different or helping you guys sort of step it up? See, it's a very interesting question and the answer to it is very lengthy because things have changed drastically in the last 10 years. You know, I have been lucky enough to experience that one of the big differences that we have in the national team is that we have new faces, fresh faces and people that who haven't been with the national team. For the last 10 years, only two players are there, you know, to maximum three, if JJ comes and that gives you a huge opportunity as a player when you're young to learn so much and bring in what you have learned. And what I have seen that the amount of attention paid on stuff which happens outside the field is so huge that it brings the team together, you know, you talk about how to eat, how to sleep, people go on YouTube and search about, you know, stuff they can do individually to get better. So that focus towards becoming a great individual into best of themselves is something that is there in the team right now, which I think wasn't there 10 years ago when I was there in the team. So that progression mentally has been, has been there. And so watching from outside, one of the things that a lot of some of us have commented on about your game personally is the impact of the number of games, competitive games that you get to play, and how that leads into your decision making, particularly when you're in such a critical position as that of a goalkeeper, where, I mean, set pieces or anything like that, your decision making when you come off the line, to grab a corner or whatever it is, is critically important to what happens in that sort of chunk of the pitch. And in the game against Qatar again, you didn't put a foot wrong and you could see that the confidence in you when you were coming out to grab those corners, etc, was whether you were punching it or catching the ball. It seemed like there's an up in your sort of thought process as well as your confidence levels. So why is the, is Rogic, the goalkeeping coach doing something differently for you as well as the other keepers in the national setup? See, in terms of training, it is really good because he's come from a level where we all want to go. And the training is very demanding and he's also very demanding. I want you to do your best in every single session. And when it comes to goalkeeping, I think it's all about experience. Like for me now, I have played enough games that I know that I can trust on my anticipation and go for a certain ball or not. But games do help a lot. I think I was good enough in Qatar only because I got to play those 90 minutes before against Oman because it was kind of getting the rest off that we had by not playing enough games before the Oman game. So I think the more games you play, it's better. And I think I was talking to one of my friends, Joe Morrison, I know, and he was talking about this with me that if you look at all the goalkeepers or any players outside India or maybe in Europe, by the time they are 21, they have already played so many games that they already have done those mistakes that we do at the age of 24, 25, because we haven't got that much of game time as kids. So that's why you see players like Ansu Farhi scoring and assisting in the bus and jersey. It's all about having that game time and that experience at a very young age so that you do all your mistakes and then by the time you're 21, 22, you're ready to play at a high level. That's what implies us as well. So how do you think this will pan out and you guys have now, some of you senior players, yourselves, Andesh, you've come out and talked about this issue with the number of competitive fixtures. In your opinion, what is an ideal way to achieve this sort of a structure where you're getting 35, 40 games, competitive games every year? See, it's a very complicated situation and I know that people are working on it and it's difficult to do it in a snap because there might be like previous commitments or something like that. But I'm not in a position to tell people what to do. I'm pretty sure that they know it already because Indian football used to have that many games before in the past. So I mean people know the outside just how to achieve that. How to put it together basically. Coming back, I just want to talk a little bit about some of these younger players in the national setup particularly. Are you thinking or when you see it from your perspective, are they coming into like some of those, you know, the either technical aspects of training or the fact that at age group levels, they are getting more and more games increasingly. At least something is happening there. Youth leagues are happening. You get to go outside if you're with the national team. So plus coaching is of a much higher standard I think right now. At least it's similar to what happens elsewhere in the world. So these things are being achieved. How do you look at these young boys who come in, whether it's Narendra or Amarjit or even Manvi and these guys. It's amazing man. The more talent you have at your disposal, it's better. I mean I'm very, very happy from what they have experienced in the past two years, three years in the junior setups. And that's just the beginning. You know, if it happens for a long time, we have many more players, many more young talents which come through the ranks. And it's all about giving it time because these players are good enough. What we were at 16, they are way beyond that level. You know, they have more awareness. They are good with the ball, confident with the ball, not scared to play. Look at Amarjit, look at all these players. You can't imagine a player like me playing for India at the age of 17. We weren't that good enough back then. And now you have players who are 17, 18, taking into the national team. That shows that if you trust in the process of giving young talent and giving them enough resources, you have players at your disposal. This is something you've said actually over, it's quite remarkable, but you've said it to me at least a number of times. Whether it was before you went off to Norway or while you were there or even after coming back, that her cheese ka apna sahi time hota hai and if you maintain or if you stay patient and trust in the process then things happen. Trust in the process is superb and we're seeing it happen in the short run here very quickly. But I'm sure some of these younger guys, because you've gone and played in Europe, Europa League and all of that, younger guys must be asking you what is the way forward, what is the answer. How important is it for young Indians to get out, see more, play in different parts of the world, learn from there and then perhaps come back. Param, the importance of that is incomparable to what they get in India. No doubt we are progressing, but if you look at, especially just the Asian countries, all the best players are playing outside of their countries and the best leagues of the world because for a reason. And I mean it depends on person to person. Some people at a young age want to play more, want to earn more, especially with the hyping offers flowing around in India right now. I understand it's difficult, circumstances are difficult, but for me personally, if you're 16, 17, 18 and you have an opportunity to go outside, sit on a reserve bench, train with the reserve team day in, day out, you should do it because it'll make you a different player. I wish I went there at the age of 16. Chetri Bhai tells me all the time he wishes he went at 16 because we know what happens once you play. You won't get to play, but you learn so much. So do you see guys who have the potential to get reserve team squads spots? Of course, without a doubt. If I can make, that's what I give as an example.  It's just about the potentiality to do it. Because if a medium talent like me can go into it, a highly talented player, for example, I'm just giving an example.  Why it's the truth? Hard work and natural attributes. Basically, you're saying it's down to luck? It's not like that. Something will be talented. Fair enough. So coming to the club squad and of course one of the most successful franchises in new clubs in the country. How are you guys prepping for the upcoming season? Anything you're doing differently this time round? I don't think so. What our coach has said from day one is that we are not going to give complacence. Yes, we won but that doesn't change anything. The mentality of the club has been to start from zero, start from scratch and try to reach the playoffs in the ISL and then see what happens in those knockout games. But for me as a player, I know that if we are able to achieve that consistency that we had last year, we have more chances of doing better. So as a team, the most difficult thing is consistency and repetition. Champions team and not champions team, that's the difference. They're consistent and some not. One last question and of course you are not in a position to really say much on this except that from a fans perspective, over the past few years, Bangalore have built up a pretty great community around the club and a lot of that community action is based at the Kanthirva stadium where your home games happen. With this ongoing tussle for the ground itself, for the use of the stadium between Bangalore FC and the other people, the PSI athletes that use the stadium, if, God forbid, you have to move somewhere, then how much difference will it make as a club that you have tried to build up? See, it will make a huge difference. You can't close your eyes and be like, there's no difference. We have to address the elephant in the room. Of course, it's going to make a huge difference if Bangalore is not playing in Bangalore. But we understand the circumstances that if it's not in our control, then we'll have to look at the other option and still do the job. That's what a professional has to do. The decision is yet to come. So we just need to have our fingers crossed and let's see what happens. Fair enough. I think on that note, we'll wrap it up. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and we will keep bothering you. I am very impressed with our spoke. The English has got better. Much better. With time as all things do. With time. Of course. Just like a beard. Thanks for taking the time. Good luck for the rest of pre-season. We'll see you in Calcutta for the game against Bangladesh on the 15th of next month. Thank you. Just make sure everything is recorded. Everything is recorded. Thanks brother. Take care. Thank you. Bye.