Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In an episode of The Big Bang Theory , the girls will be having a discussion about this sexiest scientists competition (or was it a photo-shoot, I forget) that Bernadette plans to enter. Her friend, Amy, will disapprove while Penny will support her: Amy : Bernadette is a successful microbiologist. She should be celebrated for her achievements, not her looks. I mean, what kind of message does that send? Penny : I think the message is – “Check out the rack on that scientist.” Thankfully, even feminists knew it was a comedy and didn’t see red. But that’s not always the case. Take the time when Kaley Cuoco, the actress who plays Penny, was asked if she was a feminist. Her reply: “Is it bad if I say No?” Notice how defensive even a woman has to be with the f- word? Debbie Chachra talks about a not in-your-face type of gender bias that hides under most people’s noses: the pride of place given to roles that involve the word “make”: “The cultural primacy of   making , esp...

Hunter S. Thompson, at the age of 20, gave this piece of advice on life to a friend. He started with the Hamlet quote on choices: “To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles… And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives…A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.” Thompson recommends avoiding setting goals for life: “Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.” While Thompson’s advice makes sense, it is very hard to follow. That is why most people tend to look back and feel that if only a few choices had been made differently, life would have been so ...

Maybe the self-proclaimed liberal and secular folks should take a step back and see why India seems to be headed the RSS/Hindutva way (Actually, they should check whether that’s even true on the scale they believe it’s happening but that’s too much to ask). Steven Emerson proclaimed on Fox News that there are “places where the governments — like France, Britain, Sweden, Germany — don’t exercise any sovereignty. . . . You basically have zones where sharia courts were set up, where Muslim density is very intense, where the police don’t go in, and where it’s basically a separate country almost, a country within a country”. (Note that Fox is a notoriously right-wing, Bush-supporting news channel in the US, but that doesn’t change the validity of the rest of this blog). As expected, this triggered a huge reaction including a threat to sue from the Paris officials. Emerson and Fox apologized. Daniel Pipes, however, says that we should do a reality-check. Sure, h...

Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote : “In reading, the work of thinking is, for the greater part, done for us…our head is, however, really only the arena of some one else’s thoughts.” And so, he wrote, someone who only reads but never reflects or analyzes would have “have read themselves stupid”! Not everyone is a passive reader, of course. As Shane Parrish pointed out : “One of the ways we chew and digest what we’re reading is to comment on something someone else has written. We do this through Marginalia — the broken fragments of thought that appear scribbled in the margins of books. These fragments help us connect ideas, translate jargon, and spur critical thinking.” I’ve never been able to get myself to write notes or even mark passages on a book. Besides, the margins aren’t always large enough to write enough, are they? So the ability to highlight passages and make notes on an e-book via a Kindle is like a God send for someone like me. Even better, the next time the Kin...

My niece’s class discussion on free speech concluded that free speech does not mean limitless power to hurt. It’s understandable for school or college kids to come to such conclusions. After all, that sounds so reasonable. But, and this is a huge ‘but’, in the real world, the immediate question we have to consider is who decides that limit? Can there even be a single rule to demarcate that line? And if not, would we have different limits for different groups/topics? Would such differences in limits then trigger accusations of bias, caring about some and ignoring the rest? If those accusations get ignored for too long, would it trigger a backlash later? Is the implementation so impractical that we will just tie ourselves in knots? If it was me, I would have set up Round 2 of that class discussion with these questions! At least kids can be excused on their stance because of their idealism, inexperience and lack of practical world scenarios. But adults, what’s their excuse? Lik...

Yesterday , I quoted extensively from Andrew Sullivan’s blog on the “religious roots of today’s era of terrorism ”. Today, he had a follow-up with many good points. He seems to feel that many flinch at the prospect of calling Islamic terrorism what it is because they fear the world may go Nazi on the Muslims. Actually a fear of the world going all George W. Bush on the Muslims is a more valid fear: “I think it’s perfectly possible to agree with that analysis of what is going on, while disagreeing on what to actually do about it. There’s this tendency to conflate a willingness to recognize some core illiberal parts of Islam as the problem with an invade-occupy-and-torture strategy of the last administration. But the two are easily separable. ” An all-military approach won’t work: it’s been tried and not only did it not work; it also added fuel to the terrorist recruiting fire. Reforming them from outside is not possible (how can the hated, lowly kafir point out anything to imp...

When the rally in Paris happened after the Charlie Hebdo murders, I was curious: What was the purpose of this rally? What were they trying to show? To whom? Turns out it may have served a purpose after all. I say that after reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog : “I was actually surprised and gladdened by the response to the slaughter – an overwhelming wave of revulsion and disgust, expressed with great dignity and courage .” That dignified, non-violent response has robbed the liberals of the world the option of changing the topic on Charlie Hebdo. Their choice to never call a spade a spade is visible to all: “Even now, many will not concede that religion was the root cause of the attack, and that the name of that religion is Islam.” The usual weasel approach of the liberals flies in the face of the facts, says Sullivan: “(They say)   Islam has nothing to do with this. There are just a few loonies who are suffering from false consciousness, and their real motivations are econo...

After a long time (too long actually), I was reading some of Vir Sanghvi’s blogs. It got me thinking (the man does argue and articulate well, whether or not you agree with him). This blog is triggered by some of his recent blogs. When Modi won by a landslide, many weren’t sure why he had won. Was it a vote for Hindutva? Or was it a vote for a strong, decisive leader (one, who as Sanghvi put it , “who did not take orders from party high commands and whose word was final”) who had, equally importantly, demonstrated that he could deliver on promises of progress? In recent time, many Indians are getting wary of the Hindutva brigade running amock now that “their man” is the PM. The major trigger for that were the religious conversions that started in Agra. Sanghvi raises some very interesting questions for the liberals on that topic: 1)       Yes, forced conversions are bad. But does anyone really believe that Hindu conversions are being done the way the...

Charlie Hebdo is back. The Huffington Post reports : “The cover shows the Prophet Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign with the caption, “All is forgiven.” The newspaper said that it will print over 1 million copies this week, with financial help from Google, Le Monde and other organizations. It usually prints around 60,000.” Imagine that: 60,000 went to 10 million! As Stephen Fry points out : “Had the brothers stayed their bloody hands it would have been 60,000 at the very most. Mohammed must be very cross indeed that his two cretinous representatives have spread the ‘insults’ so unimaginably far and wide.” Of course, not all of these new found “supporters” of Charlie Hebdo are exactly saints or angels. Daniel Wickham fired off tweets on “some of the staunch defenders of the free press attending the solidarity rally in Paris”. His barbs list included King Abdullah of Jordan, Turkey’s PM (“which imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world”), th...

I’ve had plenty of discussions with my parents that involve the Western approach towards individual freedom and rights. I always felt that they considered US and Europe only marginally different on these topics; and no matter how much I tried, I don’t think I could convince them that the differences were much deeper and not just in the details. So let me take another stab at it. Judah Grunstein wrote this article recently: “Both France and America make the sanctity of free speech a core principle. But at various times over the past 14 years that I have lived here in France, I have been called on by my American friends to “translate” just what the French mean by “free speech.” In particular, they have been perplexed by the willingness to place limits on speech and, relatedly, religious expression here.” He elaborates on that: “Put simply, in France, racist and anti-Semitic speech, as well as historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust, is illegal, as is all speech that c...

After Islamic extremists opened fire inside Charlie Hebdo’s offices, editors worldwide had to decide whether or not to publish the offending cartoons. Some did, most didn’t. Big surprise. Christopher Massie cites the reason Slate’s editor-in-chief Julia Turner gave as to why she did publish them: “What kind of magazine is Charlie Hebdo? What kind of work does it publish? What are the controversies it’s been embroiled in in the past? To help our readers begin to understand the answers to these questions and grasp what happened this morning in Paris, we wanted to show them the work.” But hey, let not something as inconvenient as the facts or the truth get in the way of the offense takers and the never-give-offense-to-Muslims brigade who call themselves secular and liberal (Ironical, they call themselves liberal but don't want freedom of speech and expression!). Unless, of course, it ridicules or mocks Christians (in India, replace that with Hindus). Like Time ’s “giving i...

In Flirting with Disaster , Marc Gerstein wrote about the (short term) behavioral change due to terrorism and its consequence: “After 9/11, many people were terrified to fly, and they took to the roads instead…the shift of people from commercial airlines (which are extremely safe) to cars (which are less safe when measured on a comparable basis) meant that one thousand more people died in the three months after 9/11 than would have if people had travelled as they usually do.” It’s exactly this kind of behavioral change that Simon Phipps warned about more recently: “Terrorism isn’t just performing a terrifying act. It’s provoking society’s immune system into attacking itself, making its defence systems attack the values and people they are supposed to be defending.” During the recent Sony hack , and the related threats against airing the movie The Interview , David Carr wondered (he wrote this when Sony had yielded to the threats): “Now that cultural discourse has become ...

A while back, I expressed my surprise at Vincent van Gogh’s rational/logical side . Turns out Bruce Lee was not just brawn; he was also brain. This is what Lee had to say about perfectionism in his book, Bruce Lee: Artist of Life : “Since this ideal (perfectionism) is an impossibility, you can never live up to it. You are merely in love with this ideal, and there is no end to the self-torture, to the self-nagging, self-castrating. It hides under the mask of “self-improvement.” It never works.” I am sure all perfectionists can totally relate to that. Lee also talks about the image people try and portray. No, he isn’t talking of hypocrites. Rather his remarks about people going overboard in projecting what others expect from them: “Many people dedicate their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like, rather than actualizing themselves. This difference between self-actualizing and self-image actualizing is very important. Most people only live for their image....

Charles Darwin wondered why people are shy: what evolutionary advantage did this “odd state of mind” provide, especially in social creatures? Darwin didn’t find an answer to the question, but was Joe Moran right in suspecting that: “there might also be some value in their being cautious and risk-avoiding, traits that might over-evolve into excessive timidity.” In recent centuries, as the rules of “polite society” were formed and lines were drawn about what was acceptable behaviour, especially with strangers, perhaps it opened up more reasons to be shy. After all: “Shyness reminds us that all human interaction is fraught with ambiguity, and that insecurity and self-doubt are natural.” Seth Godin once argued that we eliminate the word “embarrassment” from the language (he was saying this wrt our hesitance to trying something new, to taking a chance and possibly failing). He anticipated one argument in favour of embarrassment: “One reason to avoid doing something is becau...

I recently read a book my mom had bought, What Is Karma? , by Eknath Easwaran and I remember these lines right at the beginning of the book: “What we do, say, and even think has consequences. Words and thoughts are included, for they cause things to happen.” That inclusion of “words and thoughts” is such a fundamental difference between East and West: it’s why most Eastern societies don’t consider freedom of speech sacrosanct the way the Western societies do (Remember that famous line, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”? Depending on which site you look up, the source is either Evelyn Beatrice Hall , or Voltaire ). When one thinks of Vincent van Gogh, many things come to the mind. Great artist. Post-impressionism. Night Watch . Sunflowers . Self portraits. Suicide. And of course, the chopped off ear. The one thing I didn’t associate with van Gogh was well thought out and well articulated views! So it was a surprise to read ...