Viswanathan K's Thoughts

“The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.” -          Maria Montessori, developer of the Montessori educational system Maria Montessori was born in 1870 and died in 1952. Keep those dates in mind and re-read the quote at the top of the blog. Done? Ok. Now answer this: do you think Montessori would be turning in her grave to learn that developers who write baby and toddler apps for smartphones and iPads quote her lines to ennoble the touchscreen age?!  (I realized my 20 month young daughter expects everything to be touch enabled when she swiped PC monitors and expected a response!). So many apps on the iPad that my daughter plays with are interactive: fairy tales have options to dress the princess...with matching shoes and a tiara to boot (not that she understands any of it). She could paint the scenery (which she can’t, so my wife and I do it…happily) or do puzzles as she goes through the fairy tale. Welcome to the ...

A young writer presented his first work to Philip Roth and this was how the conversation went: “he (Roth) told the guy to quit writing. Here’s the exact quote: “I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.” Elizabeth Gilbert argued against Roth’s advice: “Now, listen. While it is certainly not historically unheard of for famous authors to complain about their torturous lives (Balzac: “I am a galley slave to pen and ink”; Styron: “Let’s face it. Writing is hell”; Mailer: “Every one of my books killed me a little more”) this statement — by one of America’s most lauded living novelists — struck me as particularly cranky. Because, seriously — is writing really all that difficult? Yes, of course, it is; I know this personally — but is it that much more...

Even if you don’t own (or care about) a smartphone, you should still read this blog. Substitute the smartphone platform references in the rest of this blog with the names of religions, sportsmen or club names and it would still be just as meaningful! Mat Honan wrote an article titled “ Please Stop Fighting About Your Smartphone ” where he made these points: “People love to fight and fight about phone platforms; to toss around the term fanboi and other insults and invective.  … Nobody cares what kind of smartphone you believe in. It’s not a religion. It’s not your local sports team even. Stop being a soldier. You are not a soldier. You are just wrong. Shut up. … “But, but, but,” I hear you stammering like some sort of horrible person who has mistaken a code base for a system of moral beliefs.” …No. You’re wrong. … And he (and it will almost certainly be a he) will be right to love that hunk of metal and glass. Completely and totally right. All the way up until ...

My dad has this habit of reading non-fiction in, well, random order. He will read a passage here; skip to a totally different part of the book, read a piece there and so on. That approach never made any sense to me; and I assumed he did that because the topic or style of writing of most books didn’t appeal enough for him to want to read all of it. Recently I heard of this proposal by Linda Holliday, the CEO of a digital publishing company called Semi-Linear with her “a book is not a straight line” philosophy : “Holliday threw up her hands, wishing to dispel “the myth that a book is a straight line, or a string of pages,” as publishers see it. “Nonfiction is a constellation of ideas that you have to string into a straight line,” she said. Holliday envisions a Pinterest-type board, where readers could post their favorite cards. “They might read pieces of hundreds of thousands of books, and not one whole book,” she said. “Is that so bad?” Against which Alan Jacobs argued : ...

On the Net, and especially since the advent of Facebook, the question of privacy is often responded to with the following statement that almost makes you feel ashamed to demand privacy: “If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.” That line always felt wrong to me. But I never could say what exactly I found wrong about it. Until I saw the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic explain it : “Everyone has something to hide and usually no one cares. By surveilling everyone, you catch the benign breaches of law and taboo. If the public are all guilty, the executive part of the government can selectively enforce laws.” The lines above from that comic hits the nail right on the head about what’s wrong with the “If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide” argument. Who says comics aren’t educational?!

Benoit Mandelbrot (mathematician and the guy behind fractal geometry) was the kind of guy who didn’t stick to one topic; he liked to flit across subjects. Before you think of him as a rolling stone, check out how Mandelbrot saw himself in his memoir: “In Dante’s Divine Comedy , the deceased sentenced to eternal searching are pushed to the deepest level of the Inferno. But for me, an eternal search across countless scientific fields beyond obvious connection managed to add up to a happy life. A rolling stone perhaps, but not an unresponsive one.” If “eternal search” is what hell is all about, I don’t think it’s such a bad place at all! Unless, of course, the search is an impossible one (like finding the last digit of pi or something like that). But most of the time, finding new questions to ask, the pursuit of those answers and then finding those answers is what makes life (and work) interesting. It is icing on the cake if along the way you get to draw parallels and join th...

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...