Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The EU has 28 partner countries that speak “an unwieldy 23 languages” , as the Economist puts it. Some guy suggested that every Euro kid should learn two foreign languages. Others felt that everyone should just switch to English. Some of the arguments against English were interesting and informative, not jingoist: 1)       The language spoken by the maximum number of Europeans is, hold your breath, German! In 4 countries, German is an official language. 2)      French has just as many native speakers as English, and is official in 3 countries. 3)      And most embarrassing of all, Britain will soon be holding a referendum whether to quit the EU altogether! 4)      The EU’s official motto is “united in diversity”, a promise to not crush every member “under a homogenising wheel”. (Wait a minute, unity in diversity? Don’t we have a copyright on that slogan?) Now doesn’t all this make you...

George Orwell was asked by one Noel Willmett whether he really believed a 1984 like scenario was possible. Orwell’s reply ( via a letter ) is illuminating. Keep in mind that he wrote this letter in 1944, while World War II was still going on. Orwell feared the rising cult of leader-worship (Hitler, Stalin, Franco and de Gaulle). Taken to an extreme, he feared this resulted in “a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.” (Orwell even mentions Gandhi on his list! Which isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds as first. After all, Gandhi had quaint ideas on the role of villages in economic growth. And while he didn’t wield a machine gun to enforce his view, he did influence post-independent India’s stance on the topic, didn’t he?) Orwell argued that neither Britain nor the US should be too smug on this leader-worship topic because, he argued: “Britain and the USA ha...

Alex E. Jones once said: “The answer to 1984 is 1776.” If you don’t like the American slant of that line, feel free to replace 1776 with “a constitution”. And the Internet just made that a whole lot easier. Yes, that’s right: the Internet just made it easy to cross-reference material while you try to be the next BR Ambedkar or Thomas Jefferson. Which makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, with around 160 active constitutions around the globe, there’s a whole lot of material to refer to. The problem (until now) was that each one was written in a different format: so how does one pick and choose parts from each? As Google said in its blog : “Although the process of drafting constitutions has evolved from chisels and stone tablets to pens and modern computers, there has been little innovation in how their content is sourced and referenced.” That is where Google’s partnership with Comparative Constitutions Project comes into the picture. Together, they launched a site called C...

“We know that if you ask people what movie they want to see next week, they’re likely to mention a classy art film. But, if you ask them what movie they want to see tonight, they’re more likely to mention a mindless blockbuster.” -          David Brooks Netflix isn't that big a name in India, but it's huge in the US. The company was founded by Reed Hastings in 1997 who “saw a way to combine Americans' love of movies with their love of not getting off the sofa even to go to the video store”! So how did they do it? Remember this was way back in 1997, with the Internet just starting to catch on. So the company mailed DVD's to customers; who after viewing it, would mail the DVD back. Today, of course, with increased network speeds, the company streams movies (the way YouTube does) to your PC/laptop/phone/tablet. Netflix is famous for its recommendation algorithms that suggest what you might want to view next. So much so that Xavier Amatria...

I have often marveled at America for being the only country which goes to war and expects zero casualties! Of course, that’s mostly because the US fights its wars way outside its borders which inevitably raises the question domestically: why should our guys die for some reason associated with another corner of the world? Starting with the advent of missiles and now with drones, it’s entirely possible for the US to fight most wars without putting any “boots on the ground”. Jonathan Bernstein argues that this new type of warfare, with no soldiers on the ground, deserves a new term. Why? To make it clear to the American public that succeed or fail, they won’t see any body bags being flown in: “The press, along with the political establishment, utterly failed to find, or at least to consistently use, a vocabulary for what was on the table. Certainly air or missile strikes are an act of war, and should be reported as such; just as certainly, those sorts of limited attacks alway...

Remember that game Chinese Whispers? You whisper something into your neighbour’s ear; who whispers the same to his neighbour and so on. At the end, it can be very surprising how much (and how many times) the message got distorted. Of course, Chinese Whispers isn’t limited to just games or spoken stuff. It happens in the real world even with printed material! Way back in 1892 in an article titled “Imitators and Plagiarists”, W. H. Davenport Adams wrote about Tennyson’s tendency: “… great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.” But who decides whether the copier improved or not? TS Eliot addressed the subjectivity of that question: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal…The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” Leaving Eliot’s logic untouched, Marvin Magalaner did modify Eliot’s lines to refer ...

Charles Hartman wrote an interesting article on being plagiarized . Some guy from Qatar e-mailed Hartman (who lives in England) telling him that someone in England had plagiarized one of his poems. Soon enough, a bunch of (mostly) Brit poets working through Facebook groups exposed more and more such cases. Don’t you just love the Internet?! Hartman wondered why perpetrators (like David R. Morgan in his case) did it in an era where being found out and shamed in front of thousands is not at all difficult? Wouldn’t info about such acts now sitting for all eternity in Google’s servers, to be queried and found even decades later be a deterrent? Why do plagiarists still take such risks, Hartman wondered? Hartman also felt insulted: “The insult was partly that the plagiarist assumed my poem was too obscure for anyone to discover his theft.” That is partly the answer to the risk question, isn’t it? Guys like Morgan must have considered the odds of getting caught and decided guys ...

Will they? Won’t they? Finally, it looks like the question as to whether the US would attack Syria has been sorted out…at least for now. Syria can thank George W. Bush and Tony Blair (apart from the Russians): after all, had the “leader” and the poodle not embarked on the Iraq mis-adventure, chances are both Obama and Cameron would have found it easy to garner domestic support to launch their offensive on Syria. I remember this quote of the day in The Dish when Cameron was “thwarted” by the British Parliament: “I accept that Britain can’t be part, and won’t be part, of any military action on that front but we must not in any degree give up our utter revulsion at the chemical weapons attacks that we have seen and we must press this point in every forum that we are a member,” – British prime minister, David Cameron, up-ended by something called democracy. The last remark, “up-ended by something called democracy”, was meant as a wake-up call to the US Senate/Congress to do thei...

I read this old article on Twitter by Nicholas Carr only recently (he wrote it when Twitter was just starting to catch on) but it was still fun to read. I loved his description what Twitter does: “Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.” The difference from the telegraph is illuminating: “The telegraph required you to stop and ask yourself: Is this worth it? Twitter says: Everything’s worth it!” Nothing seems to have changed between now and then it comes to what people tweet: “And what exactly are we broadcasting? The minutiae of our lives.” Or to put it more colourfully: “Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin.” Reduced to tweet size, that would be: “Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking?” And once Twitter got critical mass, it b...

Tim Harford writes “rogue” economics books, where things are explained in a manner that is “neither too lofty nor dumbed down” using day to day scenarios, and avoiding all that financial/economic gobbledygook. I loved this line from his book, The Logic of Life : “Not many people lie on their deathbeds wishing that they had spent more time in the office.” Not many people? You mean there are any such people on the planet? Jokes aside, the obvious truth of that statement would suggest that people would try and minimize their unhappiness at the workplace. By not taking up roles they don’t like. But is that what people do in real life? In the IT sector, it is common to find an American or a European staying on as “just” a software developer for 30 years whereas many Indians want to be leads, architects or managers well before they turn 30! Of course, that difference isn’t restricted to IT alone: you’ll find the same contrast between continuing to do what you like v/s seekin...

Malcolm Gladwell. Author of best sellers like Blink and The Tipping Point . A guy who is referenced everywhere, from bars to boardrooms. And hugely popular on the speaking circuit. His books and articles are informative and fun to read, a very rare combination. Other books like Freakonomics follow the same style. But it was Gladwell who invented that genre. As Ian Leslie puts it: “Gladwell has done more than anyone else to turn ideas into one of the most valuable currencies of the internet age. He did this by unearthing material lying dormant in the rarefied realms of academic psychology, sociology and anthropology and shooting bolts of narrative electricity through it.” And, he is a terrific writer: “His finest pieces are put together like a Bach cantata: the themes are introduced, then played in counterpoint, building to a polyphonic climax. They are full of feints, false leads and playful misdirects that make the insights, when they arrive, all the more thrilling.” ...

There are plenty of examples of companies seeing the Next Big Thing right in front of them and yet passing on them. Like Xerox PARC when it developed both the mouse and the graphical user interface (GUI) and yet sold them to Apple for peanuts! How could Xerox have been so dumb, we wonder? Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very interesting article on the creativity myth where he told the “true” story of the mouse (the mouse wasn’t Xerox’s idea; rather, it was devised by a computer scientist, Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute). Here’s the interesting part that doesn’t get told often: “If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.” The GUI too evolved from what was at Xerox to what Apple finally sold to users. The key word here? Evolution. Xerox didn’t have the next big thing ready…they had a concept. Apple took the next step in both cases and product...

People on TV tend to be very opinionated. Sure, many of those guys are idiots, but is it also a problem created by the restrictions of the forum? What Tim Kreider described as: “…in a thousand-word essay you can’t include every qualification or second thought that occurs to you or you’d expend your allotted space refuting your own argument instead of making it.” Replace “thousand-word essay” with “30 second voice clip” and the point would hold good again. And then there are the news anchors who yell, interrupt and talk garbage. (There’s that Facebook joke that asks “What is common between Google and Arnab Goswamy?” Answer: Neither lets you finish your sentence!) Is there any reason for that insanity beyond the obvious one that they are morons? Or is Kreidman right when he says: “The one thing no editorialist or commentator in any media is ever supposed to say is I don’t know: that they’re too ignorant about the science of climate change to have an informed opinion; that the...

“Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of  engineering , for problems which are essentially problems of  life .” -          T.S. Eliot It’s the eternal problem women have with men: women just want the guy to listen to her problem. The guy insists on trying to fix the problem. (Well ok, it’s just one of the problems women have with men, but that’s a topic a woman should write about). There is a term for this mindset: solutionism. (And before you ask, no, the origin of that term does not lie in women’s opinion about men). I wrote about the problems with TED thinking a few blogs back. That too mentioned solutionism as one of the problems with that way of thinking. Remember that saying about how to a man with a hammer, every problem appears like a nail? Guess what, it gets even worse: We humans even invent solutions and then l...