Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his blog on consumerism, Santosh Desai compared today’s scenario where: “The next big thing is awaited with anticipation, and gets absorbed into our lives virtually instantly, without creating a sense of satisfaction.” With the consumerism of our childhood, an era when: “Things lived twice over, once as yawning absences and then as presences that were made to linger, till every last drop of juice was extracted from it.” That sentiment isn’t all that uncommon. But what if consumerism is a good thing? A must have for the prosperity of all? Yuval Noah Harari’s awesome book Sapiens certainly seems to say so: Part 1: Origin of Capitalism : -          Long ago, money, that astounding thing that can “convert anything into almost anything else”, had a severe constraint: it could “convert only things that actually existed in the present”. -          And so “people agreed to represent imaginary ...

In his awesome book, Sapiens , Yuval Noah Harari says that the “historical record makes Homo Sapiens look like an ecological serial killer”. He says that while the speed at which we drive species to extinction has gone to warp speed in recent centuries and decades, we even managed to wipe out species with just Stone Age technologies at our disposal! He says it would be a remarkable coincidence if the timing of extinction events in Siberia, the Americas and Australia just happened to overlap with humans landing in those areas. The usual other suspect in such extinction events, climate change, is probably not the culprit in those cases because it was always life on land that suffered when man landed, never life in the seas (an area in which our capabilities have built only in recent centuries). Ian Fleming one wrote: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” Like it or not, humans have been the enemy for other life forms, long before modern techn...