Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In this tele-serial named Gotham (it’s about Gotham City while Batman was still the kid), there’s one episode where a vigilante nicknamed the Balloon Man, approaches known bad guys who are too rich and too powerful to ever be prosecuted. The Balloon Man would approach such people, suddenly snap on a handcuff, and set off the inflation of a weather balloon attached to the other end of the handcuff. Upon which the balloon would go up, taking the handcuffed man along with it… until the balloon broke and the man plunged to his death.   Fiction, right? Until I read of street magician, David Blaine, who “grabbed onto a bunch of big helium balloons and floated into the sky”: “Over the next 50 minutes, he rose to an altitude of almost 25,000 feet before letting go and skydiving/parachuting safely to the ground.” If you’re interested, check out the 2-hour video of the whole event on YouTube .   Which in turn reminded me of Austrian daredevil, Felix Baumgartner, who back i...

A few years back, author Ann Patchett complained that “this technology thing, the ever-encroaching creep of communications” was making it hard to write fiction: “I just don’t know how to write a novel in which the characters can get in touch with all the other characters at any moment…I don’t know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters.” Turns out many authors share Patchett’s “problem”. Steve Himmer says many solve this problem by using “settings close to the present, but far enough back to avoid such inconvenience”. Author Jared Yates Sexton calls this setting the “nostalgic present”. Himmer himself doesn’t approve of this technique. Instead, he recommends embracing the new world so that the disrupter of art becomes part of the art. After all, he says: “The more we expect to always have a signal, the harder it is to conceive a convincing situation in which a character does not.” He recomm...

“Any explanation is better than none.” -          Nietzsche We love to cite reasons for everything that happens. If the reason is correct, all the better; but that’s not a must. Obviously, nobody says that to themselves, but if you check out many of the “reasons” floating around, you’d see what I mean. It turns out that we don’t just stop at attributing causes to real life events. People even try and find root causes for battles from movies , like the Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back ! So what were the reasons Darth Vader and Co couldn’t crush and kill the rebels in that battle? “Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.” Well ok, those reasons would apply even today in the real world; so maybe this analysis wasn’t a total waste of time after all! A comment on Slashdot to the above analysis said: “…peo...