Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The popularity of the Internet and social media has triggered a reaction from many, albeit still a very small minority, who have made “digital detox”, “disconnection”, and “unplugging” buzzwords in their criticism of the virtual world we live in. Nathan Jurgenson took a look at this reaction and wrote this is what the naysayers feel: “Once upon a pre-digital era, there existed a golden age of personal authenticity, a time before social-media profiles when we were more true to ourselves, when the sense of who we are was held firmly together by geographic space, physical reality, the visceral actuality of flesh.” But he calls this view of how the world was pre-Internet as “fairytale”: “ According to this popular fairytale, the Internet arrived and real conversation, interaction, identity slowly came to be displaced by the allure of the virtual — the simulated second life that uproots and disembodies the authentic self in favor of digital status-posturing, empty...

The Americans believe that everyone should get equal opportunities. Whether you use or squander those opportunities decides your outcome; and that’s that. The system doesn’t owe or guarantee you success. Of course, even the Americans haven’t managed to implement that. College education is expensive; which is why most students (including Americans) need scholarships. Now deciding who should get a scholarship isn’t easy: the difficulty of identifying the most meritorious kid is obvious (it is so subjective and how much time can you spend with each kid to even and try guess anyway?). So some groups decide to base it on money, money that the kid (or his parents) has. And contrary to what you might expect, many of these groups give scholarships to the relatively richer ones (middle class instead of poor). Why? Jordan Weissmann in The Atlantic : “"After all," Burd writes, "it's more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce afflue...

It’s the question we often agonize about: do we wait and perfect things or do we ship it as it is? Perfection might take too long…but ship too early and it might crash and burn. Getting it absolutely right would increase costs…worse, the guy who shipped as is might grab the market. Seth Godin advocates shipping. He believes in a practical definition of perfection : “Perfect doesn't mean flawless. Perfect means it does exactly what I need it to do.” If you are focusing on perfection on aspects other than what the product needs to do, then you are wasting your effort: “Polished perfect isn't better than perfect, it's merely shinier. And late.” Then there’s the Steve Jobs view on perfection. Today it is hard to imagine a phone without apps. Yet Jobs actually hated the idea of letting unknown people write software that would run on his beloved iPhone! Luke Dormehl explains why: “The way he (Steve Jobs) viewed it, loosening his grip on the perfect Zen aura tha...

There’s that famous observation that if someone tells you to not think about an elephant, then that’s the exact thing that will leap to your mind. Pretty much all of us know that’s how our minds work, right? Reverse psychology is the technical term for the phenomenon. Except, it turns out only we humans know that. The Gods apparently didn’t know. At least not the Western ones anyway. Remember what they told Eve in the Garden of Eden? Eat anything except that apple. No prizes for guessing what she was going to do, is there? She didn’t need a snake to “make her do it”; she’d have done it anyway. That’s just the way we humans are wired. Or take that tale about Pandora’s box: the Gods gave her a box and tell her to not open it. Yeah, like she was not going to let curiosity or rebellious tendencies get the better of her! Almost makes you think that the (Western) gods were either dumb or wanted some wicked fun, doesn’t it? Take your pick which reason it was: it’s kind of like...