Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his Guardian article , Michael Wolff pointed out the difference between two magazines published by the New York Times: The New York Times Magazine and T: The New York Times Style Magazine . “T looks like a modern magazine. It has lots of photos and illustrations, both small and large, many call outs, and keeps its type blocks to a minimum. You flip it, rather than read it. The Times Magazine, although it has tried to add modern details, still seems old fashioned, page after page of type. It needs to be read and that seems, I believe to almost everybody, exhausting. ” I loved Andrew Sullivan's response to that last line about it needing to be read: “ Reading: who needs that shit any more?” But when I thought about it, I realize that I am in that set of “almost everybody” who finds reading articles in the newspapers to be “exhausting” (I can still read long paper books though). As I wondered why my reading habit differed between books and newspapers in the physical wo...

Maciej Cegłowski gave this talk on the dangers of the Internet : it was great when it started but the impossible-to-anticipate effects are becoming the problem. A big issue is that the Internet never forgets. He compares it to the concept of the “permanent record” in American schools, which were made to sound as follows: “The permanent record would follow you through life, and whenever you changed schools, or looked for a job or moved to a new house, people would see the shameful things you had done in fifth grade.” We feared the accidental deletes that could end up “undoing months of work with a single keystroke”. And so when storage costs dropped to the ground, “we learn to save everything, log everything, and keep it forever (because) you never know what will come in useful”. But on the Internet, the problem has become that “everything is recorded by default, and you may not know where or by whom”. The tech companies’ response to that: “Wake up, grandpa, this is the new ...

Once you buy a (physical) book, it’s yours not only to read but also to edit (e.g. you are free to underline or strike out parts or add your own comments). The Kindle allows you to do the same with e-books (except that you can’t strike out anything). An app called Clean Reader swaps out swear words from your e-books (‘breast’ might become ‘chest’ and so on). Charlie Stross feels this goes too far : “(As an author, he) deeply resents the idea of his books being mutilated to fit the prejudices of a curious reader's blue-nosed and over-protective parents.” Cory Doctorow argues that one has the right to like or dislike such an app, but one cannot ask that it be banned for mangling what the author wrote. After all, even if you banned such an app, Doctorow asks whether readers won’t find equivalent info anyway? He cites this example: “Imagine a website ("ebooktriggerw1arnings.com") that indexed all the pages you should skip if you have experienced trauma and wan...

Garry Trudeau recently wrote an article about what he calls the “abuse of satire” . He starts with what satire was meant to be: “Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule.” He contrasts the above with Charlie Hebdo , the French publication that lampooned Mohammed and whose office got attacked in Paris in January: “By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence.” And so he concludes: “It’s always worth asking this question: Is anyone, anyone at all, laughing? If not, maybe you crossed it.” All of the above would make sense,...

Heard of Amazon’s latest innovation, the Dash Button? Let the Wall Street Journal describe it : “Each button bears a different brightly colored product logo…The buttons mount with an adhesive strip on the back, or fit into a plastic clip.” See pic below for an example of where/how the button is placed: Here’s how the Dash Button works: “You set up the buttons using the Amazon mobile shopping app, connecting them to your home Wi-Fi network and assigning the specific products and the quantities you’ll want to receive with each click. When the button is clicked, you get a smartphone notification, and you can cancel that order within a half hour. And if somebody in your house pushes the Gatorade button 15 times, you won’t get 15 orders—just one (or none, if an order is already on its way to you). ” (This is in addition to the hand-held Dash device that can automatically place orders for household goods by scanning barcodes or speech recognition). The same “action at the pr...

Why was the Internet so destructive to the music and newspaper industry but not to books? (While bookstores have indeed got hit, books haven’t). Evan Hughes points out the difference between those industries in his article titled Books Don't Want to Be Free , a shot at the Internet mantra of “Information Wants to Be Free”: “Part of the problem for journalism, music, and television is that they are vulnerable to disaggregation. Their products are made up of songs and articles and shows that have long been consumed in those individual units. Once the Internet made it possible to ignore the unwanted material, overall value slipped.” But books are different: “It would make little sense to break novels or biographies into pieces, and they’re not dependent on the advertising that has kept journalism and television artificially inexpensive and that deceives the consumer into thinking the content is inexpensive to make.” To put it differently, the Internet showed us that t...

Before the recent J&K elections, a local politician declared that only a Muslim was permitted to be Chief Minister of the state. Then, after the government was formed, the CM of the state thanked Pakistan for allowing the elections to be held. Not the Indian Army, but Pakistan. Contrast all that with the reaction of the Center to the evacuation of over 2,300 Indians from war-torn Yemen. Narendra Modi tweeted: “Seamless co-operation between organisations- MEA, Navy, Air Force, Air India, Shipping, Railways & State Govts greatly helped in rescue work.” Note Modi says “state govts”, not just BJP ruled states. And if you’re wondering what the Railways have to do with this, then let Sushma Swaraj explain: “ Indian Railways are providing all hospitality and confirmed tickets free of charge for onward journey to their homes.” No wonder then that Modi tweeted: “ Salute the services of our civilian & defence officials & organisations in helping evacuate our citiz...

Plenty of people can relate to characters from fiction. Some take it a step further and start “conjuring fanciful biographies for the characters”, as Alan Jacobs puts it . Heard of fan-fiction? It’s the fiction written by fans of serials/books write based who then post it on the Internet. Lev Grossman describes it thus: “They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.” A few years back, when the last of the Harry Potter books was released, the “Is Dumbledore gay?” question became red-hot on the Internet. Author JK Rowling’s take on the question was very interesting: “My truthful answer to you…I always thought of Dumbledore as gay…Yeah, that’s how I always saw Dumbledore.” I personally agree with Jacobs’ comment on Rowling’s response: “Rowling see...

After the emphatic Modi (BJP?) win of 2014, some fear that Hindu fanaticism is now in the driver’s seat. Some of the events fueling that feeling/fear are ghar vapasi (re-converting back to Hinduism), the campaign against love jihad, ban on beef in a few states, introduction of the Gita in curriculum, appointment of Sangh-linked people in educational bodies and attacks against churches. Are these events real? Absolutely. But do they mean that we are getting Talibanized or becoming similar to the Islamic countries? That’s highly debatable. (It is one thing to say that we are heading down that road; but it’s nonsense to say that we are already very similar to them). In fact, such gross exaggeration actually has a negative impact. Here’s why. The folks who don’t believe we are anything even remotely like the Islamic countries (not yet anyway) then wonder why even a small to moderate bad act of the Hindu is treated at par with the worst of Islam. From there, it’s a short drive to ...