Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book on the road to quantum computing , John Gribbin made this remark about the multiverse: “In (David) Deutsch’s words, ‘all fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.’ So all of Jane Austen’s stories recount real events in parallel realities to our own; but The Lord of the Rings does not.” By that token, many things Calvin did in Bill Watterson’s books must happen some parallel universe. Or worse…   Calvin, like all boys his age, found girls repulsive. This 8 yo friend of my 10 yo daughter announced that she and a similar aged boy were now a couple. The older girls made fun of her singing the same K-I-S-S-I-N-G song Hobbes is singing above. The 8 yo brazenly said she didn’t care, and romped around holding hands with her “boyfriend”.   Kids are notorious for drawing totally wrong + self-serving conclusions: We have 2 car park slots, and had rented one of them to a neighbor. During play, their kid announced that since his car was in the sl...

Until a certain age, the usual meal time “conversation” with a kid will revolve around the fact that the kid doesn’t like/want to eat that dish. The problem’s never about the way the dish has been prepared on that day. At least that’s the way it seems to me so far (my daughter’s now 6). Except when it comes to sandwiches. That’s the one “dish” on which kids are connoisseurs and authorities on. I learnt it the hard way when my wife travelled to Amsterdam and the kid decided to fall sick a day before she left. So I was left holding the (sick) baby… I’d been told not to force her to eat while she was sick, except if it was necessary that she have something before she could be given medicines. So around breakfast time, I asked if she wanted to eat something? Bread, she replied. Ok, I said breathing a sigh of relief. Toasted, she added. No problem. And then she had a look at the toast I got her. It’s not brown all over, she declared. Yes, it is. Not the right shade of brown. W...

If you already know what the term “grammar Nazi” means, feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph.  Here is how Urban Dictionary defines it: 1)       “A person who believes proper grammar (and spelling) should be used by everyone whenever possible”; 2)      “One who uses proper grammar and spelling to subtly mock or deride those who do not; an exhibitor of grammatical superiority”. Ok, now to the topic of the blog. As I mentioned some time back, my 6 year-old daughter has taken a liking to Calvin and Hobbes. Recently, I was reading her this strip where Calvin gets a Valentine card from Susie. Like all boys that age (and only that age), Calvin was horrified. Predictably then, Hobbes teased him: I had to sing (yes, sing, not just read) Hobbes’ song to my kid. Again and again. And I felt exactly like Calvin’s dad from a different strip: Finally, I switched off the light, tucked her in and waited for her to...

When I ran out of books to read to my 6 year old, I took out Calvin and Hobbes with the idea of reading her a few strips that night and find something she’d like later on. But boy, is she hooked! So what’s appealing to her? The naughtiness, obviously. Calvin’s imagination is highly relatable. And as a girl with a stuffed toy, she finds the idea of a stuffed boy that comes to life as simply awesome. But what surprised me was her appreciation of Bill Watterson’s drawings, especially when he draws Calvin’s expressions. I guess the ability to appreciate drawings is a side-effect of the art work that she does as part of her yoga classes near home. At school, she’s been learning addition. So I read her this strip: Never one to let go off a chance to show off, she added 3 + 8 on her fingers. Then with an even-I-know-the-answer smugness declared that the correct answer was “11”. The icing on the cake though was when she added, “Obviously, the answer has to be greater than 8 (sinc...

There was this time when Calvin “kidnapped” Binky Betsy (Susie’s doll) and wrote out a ransom note: If Bill Watterson redid that scene today, he’d probably have Calvin using this site called (what else) the Ransomizer ! You key in the message and the site generates an output that looks like this: Great, right? Say goodbye to hunting through magazines to find letters in different fonts and sizes! It would be the recipe for the perfect ransom note provided you don’t make the mistake that Calvin made: So ironical that the master criminal got tripped up by something he learnt at (who’d have thought?) school!

I am reading this book titled “What If?” by Randall Munroe. It’s a book on “serious, scientific answers” to “weird, hypothetical questions”. Munroe also writes a webcomic called xkcd that’s very popular among the kind of people who usually read the above mentioned book: geeks, science fans and engineers! (Personally, I believe anyone can learn from such informative yet entertaining books, but that’s a different topic…) Talking of his webcomic made me think of how comics require you to be able to write as well as to draw. Or does it? Let’s look at some popular comics over the ages to check the validity of that hypothesis (I know, I know: I am in that “What If?” frame of mind when I use words like “validity” and “hypothesis”!) Let’s evaluate in chronological order. The Asterix comics were done by a team: one guy wrote; the other drew. Awesome outcome, wasn’t it? Then there is the Tintin series: the same guy did everything. The drawings are good, the stories even better: ...

I remember this article by Jon Dick a year back whose theme is captured in these lines:  “Imagine a person who’s underwhelmed by everything you tell him. You ran the mile in five minutes? Big deal. He doesn’t raise an eyebrow for anything over four. You scored a scholarship to Yale? Meh. Was Harvard full? You designed a new car that gets 100 miles to the gallon? Cool, but does it fly?             …. That’s how Apple must feel when it takes the stage to show off a new product. If that gadget does anything less than carve out a new niche, or at least revolutionize an existing one, and simultaneously cure cancer, the company’s criticized by throngs of media and consumers who can’t believe they wasted their time on such uninspired crap.” And now, a few days back, when Samsung launched its flagship smartphone, the S4, the response was pretty much the same: people were underwhelmed! I guess that is yet another sign t...

There are plenty of people who didn’t quit while they are still at the top (look no further than Tendulkar); instead they keep hanging in there until they become a joke and then are forced out. One guy who bucked that trend was Bill Watterson, author of the awesome Calvin and Hobbes who quit while he was still at his peak. Given the power of all those photo editing tools we have today, if only Watterson was willing to photoshop his famous characters onto photos that seem to the exact backdrop that we imagined when we saw those strips. But Watterson being Watterson is unlikely to oblige. So it is left to others like photographer Michael S. Den Beste to do that instead. And thanks to the Internet, we can sit back, open the popcorn and go down memory lane … Take the first one below… one can almost hear their philosophical discussions as they get ready to plunge down the cliff on their sledge: I always loved that Duplicator series where Calvin made copies of hims...

Most people who go to work curse and crib about their jobs. But a strange transformation seems to happen when some of those same folks retire. Several of them go back to work! It’s not like they start doing the sort of things they wanted to but couldn’t. They go back to the same profession! Sure, in some cases, it may have to do with money problems. A few of my dad’s office colleagues have even gone abroad for engineering jobs post-retirement. I’ve always wondered what possessed them to do that at their age. After all, there are very few things you don’t get in India today. What could possibly be so appealing about going to another country and adapting to their culture and their systems? And, oh yeah, working again? Another set gets back to the workplace because they are bored. Again, something I don’t understand. C’mon, guys, there are a zillion options today. Watch TV. Surf the Net. Read a book. Blog about something. Paint. Do day-trading. Watch that game. Or see those saas-bahu seri...