Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Suzanne Evans wrote this book on parenting titled (hold your breath ), Machiavelli for Moms: Maxims on the Effective Governance of Children. But isn’t the man synonymous with “duplicity, deceit and the cunning, ruthless use of power”? How did she discover anything in Machiavelli relevant to parenting? The reason: desperation. Nothing she tried seemed to work. While reading The Prince in that state of frustration, she realized that : “He saw power as a tool for securing the safety and stability of the state. He wanted to show princes how to ensure the happiness and well-being of their subjects. A stable and safe home? Full of happy and prosperous subjects? It sounded like a worthy goal, not just for a prince but for a parent too.” So what were the lessons she learnt? “Nothing wastes so rapidly as liberality, for even whilst you exercise it you lose the power to do so, and so become either poor or despised or, in avoiding poverty, rapacious and hated.” As applied to...

Bianca London wrote this hilarious post on how to test if you are ready for parenthood (actually, she didn’t come up with the test but she did post the article with the 14 questions from the original source). Here are the ones I liked best: 1)       “Go to a local chemist, tip the contents of your wallet onto the counter and tell the pharmacist to help himself.” 2)      “Buy a live octopus and a string bag. Attempt to put the octopus into the string bag so that no arms hangout. Time Allowed: 5 minutes.” 3)      “Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment. Leave it there. Get a coin. Insert it into the CD player. Take a box of chocolate biscuits; mash them into the back seat.” 4)      “Repeat everything you say at least 5 times.” 5)      “Go to the local supermarket. Take with you the nearest thing you can find to a pre-school child - a fully gr...

Politicians love to give soundbytes, catchy phrases that stick. They don’t care if it’s just talk, doesn’t mean anything and will never be fulfilled anyway. And then there’s Neil Gaiman, author of science fiction, fantasy and children’s literature who is such a good speaker that “he has millions of devoted fans who eat his every word like air”. He doesn’t do soundbytes, he enthralls you with entire paragraphs! Back in 2012, at a keynote address at the University of the Arts , Gaiman said: “The problems of failure are hard. The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.” I was curious about the second line, the problems of success. In another interview , he elaborated based on his own experience: “This (success as an author) has huge problems, which are mostly about writing. I’m currently dealing with how to go back to being a writer. Rather than whatever it is that I am. A traveller, a signer, a promoter, a talker, a lecturer. I’m building new w...

A few months back, I had written about the positive side of Machiavelli’ism . More recently, I read this article by Michael Ignatieff , who pointed out that when it comes to Machiavelli’s book, The Prince : “The outrage has not dimmed with time.” This is one of those hidden in plain sight questions: why is the book still considered so relevant today? Doesn’t every politician pretend they are un-Machiavellian? And isn’t it true that every citizen “knows that politics is one of those realms of life where you put your soul at risk” ? Michael Walzer, a Princeton philosopher, once said: “We want our politicians to be…lying awake at night, wrestling with the conflict between private morality and the public good.” Modern thinkers call this the “problem of dirty hands”. Machiavelli’s take on that? Don’t think about it! “He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn’t worry about it.” Because: “In politics, the...

Salman Khan. No, not the actor. I meant the guy who formed Khan Academy, the non-profit educational website with free videos on pretty much any subject. He gave a commencement address at his alma mater, MIT. I was very amused by two parts of his address. The first was when he mentioned that among his close friends from MIT, “90 percent are married to each other”. Snobs, you assume. Not so, says Khan: “In fact, so extreme is the coupling that I have observed here that I have sometimes suspected that this whole place is just a front for a DARPA-funded human breeding project.” Or perhaps the explanation is much less sinister: “However, there are simpler explanations for all of this MIT-MIT love. The most likely of which is that the admissions office here has a somewhat unhealthy habit of only accepting incredibly attractive people.” The other part I loved was his comparing MIT with “Hogwarts — Harry Potter’s wizarding school”! “The science and innovation that occurs ...

If you’re lucky enough to be happily married (like me), then, as Anil Dash says : “It's fun! You've got somebody you like who goes with you wherever you go, and it's someone who knows your sense of humor and what kind of food you like and what makes you laugh. BFF!” Sadly though, that’s not a description of most people’s marriages. Can the Internet, creator of so many good things, improve on the very idea of marriage, wonders Scott Adams . He starts by pointing out that on the Internet: “You can find lovers who don't want a commitment. You can find people willing to trade sex for travel experiences. You can find surrogates to have your baby, or you can adopt from another country. Then you can find a nanny who is willing to work primarily for room and board. You can find an intellectual partner, a business partner, a tennis partner, you name it.” And so, says Adams: “For the first time in history it is feasible to create a virtual spouse comprised of a doze...

Many fields use scientific jargon because it gives them the illusion of having rigour and intellectual depth. Like certain (post-modern) philosophies. In his book, Intellectual Impostures , Alan Sokal had this to say about one such philosopher, Jean Baudrillard: “One finds in Baudrillard’s work a profusion of scientific terms used with total disregard for their meaning, and above all in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity.” But let’s forget the charlatans for now. Instead, let’s focus on the cases where the reason for aping science and its methods isn’t malicious. Stephen Law points out that people genuinely believing that they are scientific even while believing in pseudo-science : “Our cultural landscape contains many belief systems which are intellectual black holes: as you approach them you find yourself getting drawn in. E...

Evgeny Morozov calls Silicon Valley the Teflon Industry : “no matter how much dirt one throws at it, nothing seems to stick”! Part of the reason, he says, is that any criticism gets “framed as a debate over “the digital”: “This is where the “digital debate” leads us astray: it knows how to talk about tools but is barely capable of talking about social, political, and economic systems that these tools enable and disable, amplify and pacify.” And then there’s the lingo of such debates: they involve words like “information”, “networks” and “Internet”. Which, let’s face it, are terms synonymous with progress. And that would make any critic of the same a Luddite! Morozov is also pissed with Silicon Valley’s grand mission statements about changing the world and making it a better place. As if that’s the only thing driving them, not profits. Branding (bragging?) aside, he points out there are privacy risks with the: “data-centric model of Silicon Valley capitalism seeks to conve...

Jon Stewart gave the commencement address at his alma mater the year they gave him an honourary doctorate, 2012. Given his occupation (he’s a comedian), you know what kind of address he’d have made. He started with something most people feel about, well, everything: “I had forgotten how crushingly dull these ceremonies are.” He then reassured parents about the language he’d use by saying: “I want to assure you that you will not hear any language that is not common at, say, a dock workers union meeting, or Tourrett’s convention, or profanity seminar.” He thanked the university for the honourary doctorate: “It has always been a dream of mine to receive a doctorate and to know that today, without putting in any effort, I will. It’s incredibly gratifying. Thank you.” And in the next breath, remarked on the falling standards of the university! “When I think back to the people that have been in this position (being awarded an honourary doctorate) before me from Benjamin Fr...

During one of his (as usual) awesome closing arguments in Boston Legal , Alan Shore asked: “ When did religion get such a good name, anyway? Be it the Crusades, the Reformation genocides, the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, mass slaughters supposedly in the name of Allah, and then, of course, the obligatory reciprocal retribution.” Religion now has such a bad name that even Buddhism isn’t spared. The wickedly satirical The Onion posted this hilarious article on how a Buddhist extremist cell (yup, you read that right) vows to unleash (hold your breath) tranquility on the West! The group’s leader, Tsuglag Rinpoche, declared: “In the name of the Great Teacher, we will stop at nothing to unleash a firestorm of empathy, compassion, and true selflessness upon the West… we will bring the entire United States to its knees in deep meditation.” Criticizing the US for “blatant disregard of karmic balance within the universe”, he vowed that his “ soldiers would cont...

A few years back, Chris Anderson wrote this book called Free , where he talked about how different models of free get their money back (advertisers, goodwill, charging for premium versions etc). But as James Surowiecki wrote , free has far more widespread ramifications. This has become particularly true in the Internet world we live in, where:  “Digital goods and services are everywhere you look, but their impact is hard to see in economic statistics… You may think that Wikipedia, Twitter, Snapchat, Google Maps, and so on are valuable. But, as far as G.D.P. is concerned, they barely exist.” This problem of assessing the economic value of free can no longer be pushed under the rug. As M.I.T. economist Erik Brynjolfsson says: “As digital goods make up a bigger share of economic activity, that means we’re likely getting a distorted picture of the economy as a whole.” It’s not just the economic value of the free stuff isn’t being added to our GDP calculations. At times,...

Blake Gopnik pointed out that when it comes to art forgeries, most people can “marvel at the forgers’ skill and lament their misdeeds”. Besides, he says: “If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight.” And: “In some ways, they (forgeries) are by him (the famous artist), in the profound sense that they almost perfectly capture his unique contribution to art. If they didn’t, no one would imagine he’d made them.” And isn’t the only difference between a forgery and the standard practice of earlier times that one was authorized by the master and the other wasn’t? “Many wonderful works of art by figures such as Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens were executed partly or even mostly by their studio assistants, which doesn’t make them any less expressive of Titian or Rembrandt’s innovations.” Then Gopnik uses the art-should-be-for-all argument: “Our current market, geared toward the ultra-wealthy, is helping few and hur...