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Influence: That Misunderstood Word

Ian Leslie starts of his article with something everyone experiences: “Being influenced by others is inevitable and essential. But it’s also true that when we over-conform to influences, we surrender individuality. ” A balance is needed. Easier said than done: “Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become easily manipulable, boring, and unhappy. ”   But do we have the term “influence” all backwards? Consider this long (but totally worth reading) passage by Michael Baxandall: “If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality…. If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from,...
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Takeaways from the Shivaji Movie

We saw this Hindi movie on the Maratha king, Shivaji named Raja Shivaji at the theatre. To be honest, my knowledge of Shivaji is entirely based on Amar Chitra Katha ’s (ACK’s), I don’t remember anything from my (school) history books.   The move is very so-so, but several things made the experience interesting.   Since the central character is a beloved figure in Maharashtra, the movie starts with the customary disclaimer on being part fictionalization, edited for entertainment, not meant to hurt religious or regional sentiments etc. The usual stuff. What was different was that the disclaimer was a whole page long! So what, you say, who reads them. Aha, this one was read out for all to hear! At breakneck speed. With words nobody uses in day-to-day life. It was taking forever to complete. We were beginning to dread that they’d follow this with a translated English reading, but thankfully that didn’t happen. ~~   I struggled with the first 45 minutes of the m...
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Color me Dead

Once upon a time, humans “gathered colors from naturally occuring materials in the world around them”, writes Whitney Balick. Ochre dug from the earth, charcoal, minerals found locally, local plants, saffron, those were the sources.   All that changed in 1856 when William Perkin, a British chemist, stumbled upon a way to turn coal tar sludge into a colored dye: “Perkin’s discovery jump-started a revolution in synthetic dye-making that would change the way most of the world made color. It wasn’t long before other chemists began to figure out how to synthesize seemingly every color of the rainbow from coal tar and other petrochemical products.” This industrialization of color set off huge environmental damage.   Multicolored waste would find its way from industry into waterways and poison the local ecosystem. Humans nearby had reactions to the chemicals, from rashes to outright poisoning. The colored products could also wreak havoc, like the lead used in paints perm...
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Singapore #4: Changi Airport

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American airports suck (to be fair, they’re not international hubs). European airports are overcrowded, chaotic and unintuitive. Bangalore’s T2 terminal is beautiful and scenic, though it doesn’t have many shops or eating places (yet). Hong Kong airport is spacious, sparkling, and has lots of shops.   And then there’s Singapore’s Changi airport. It is the only airport one would like to be “stuck” due to a delayed flight or a long layover! That’s partly because parts of the airport are a mall cum fun area open for all, not just people catching a flight. Locals come for family visits, the way you might go to a mall or a movie!   It even has a (paid) swimming pool and gym. The food options are numerous, though the more popular ones can be very crowded (it’s like a mall for the locals, remember?). Like a few European airports, it offers a city tour between flights for an overview of Singapore, though you’d need to apply for a visa if you are just passing through.   ...
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Singapore #3: Zoo and Reimbursements

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The Mustafa Center in Singapore is the go-to mall for affordably priced items. Everything from phones to clothes to watches to daily use items. We spent a few hours there shopping for various things. Most malls in the city have a counter where you can apply for the reimbursement of VAT (only for foreigners like us). The details (including your passport) get keyed in, but the reimbursement happens later. How/when?   When you are leaving the country, at the airport, there’s a section for the reimbursement. Go over to the scanners and scan your passport. Bingo! It pulls up all the reimbursements from all those shop counters, adds them up and asks you whether you want it paid in cash or credited to your credit card. That simple. Quick, frictionless, no struggling to find receipts (The contrast to the difficulty in equivalent reimbursements in Europe is zameen aasmaan ka farak) . ~~   Then we went to the Singapore zoo. It is way out of the city (not surprising) which mean...
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Facts, Opinions, Stories

Facts rarely make anyone change their mind. We know that all too well. This is true not just about political matters but also about every belief that people hold.   Why is that? Seth Godin takes a stab at the question. We have consciously or unconsciously built stories around our beliefs, political or otherwise. And that, he says, explains why facts rarely convince anyone: “Because a good story feels true. A good story resonates.” So he says: “If I bring facts to rebut your story, they will fail .”   Is there no hope then? Godin says one can succeed: “(If) the facts I bring are the foundation for a new story .” Therefore, he says: “Part of the job of making change is working to make sure a bad story doesn’t get in the way of good facts. ”
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Viruses - Phage Therapy

In an earlier blog , I mentioned the discovery of bacteriophages (viruses that kill bacteria) and asked why they weren’t used as treatment/prevention for bacterial diseases? Pranay Lal’s Invisible Empire answers that question.   First, says Lal, hierarchy matters. Some top biologists at the time offered alternate explanations – what if, they said, the killer wasn’t a virus but enzymes released by other bacteria? While d’Herelle was outranked, he used bacteriophages to treat a handful of patients suffering from bacterial dysentery. Years later, he cured a few more patients suffering from the bubonic plague. He tried his method in India to treat cholera outbreaks with great success. Sadly, his successes were few and even with the India case, where the effects were on large number of people, the trials had to stop due to the start of the Satyagraha movement (non-cooperation).   The few trials conducted after that didn’t help the case for various reasons: “The small-...
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