The Promise

Every good business book delivers a promise to the reader. You’ll always find it in the opening pages of the book, whether in the introduction or first chapter. And most times, you gloss right over it because the author has been reeling you with a story or their passion for the subject, but the promise is an explicit statement about what the reader is going to get out of spending time with a book.

SYSTEM OF UNITS (2004, short, IndieFlix, runtime: 22 mins., director: Richie Mehta)

“In an online world, people have forgotten how to connect…”

System of Units opens with this convincing post-apocalyptic premise. The world’s gone totally virtual, with nary a moment to waste. Human beings are connected exclusively via the Net-Work (yes, written just like that!) and even the merest of muscular exertions, like fashioning words into sentences in one’s mouth, is an extraneous chore which been cleverly evolved out of our bipedal species. Human touch has been rendered non-existent, peoples’ emotions and passions have been outlawed, and human sympathy is a fossilized relic of a now-forgotten bygone era.