Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In recent times, a large number of hit novels have the word “Girl” in their title. The Girl on the Train . Gone Girl . Razor Girl . Stieg Larsson’s series starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . There are many others. Emily St. John Mandel did a data analysis of this trend (apparently looking into the “girl” trend is a bit of a trend in itself!). The article has charts and everything else you’d expect when someone crunches the numbers! But the part that really caught my attention was these lines: “Why are there so many of these books? Well, because publishing is an industry ruled by mystery and chance… Because there is a certain element of mystery to the whole thing, when a book does explode, there’s a natural tendency to try to copy elements of its success. ” So if the word “Girl” shows up disproportionately in the titles of hit books, no prizes for guessing what’s going to happen to the next set of books. Until this one stops “working”. Or they find the next patter...

It's just a game: that's something nobody ever feels when playing chess. Not even Viswanathan Anand , one of the nicest guys in the game: “When you lose, you really feel a sense of self...You actually feel that you are being taken apart, rather than just your pieces.” Anand acknowledges the other guy feels the same way too: “I understand that if I win, I’m probably crushing my opponent’s ego” But unlike Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov, Anand says that: “It’s not like I do that with great satisfaction.” You can see why Anand has the nice guy image when you realize he even finds a reason as to why Kasparov felt that chess “required the domination and demoralisation of their opponents”: “It’s true that someone like Kasparov has this sense of history, and I’m talking world history rather than chess history. He has a sense of himself being in it, which, for me, is very hard to understand or even relate to in any way.” But beyond not relating to that feeling, “The...