Viswanathan K's Thoughts

No triumph is preordained, unless one side is overwhelmingly stronger. Strike that: even then, the occasional David does defeat the Goliath. And yet, the fact that we don’t know the outcome until the fight ends doesn’t stop us from believing that the victor’s victory was preordained. And so we continue to write history as if the victor was known all along! I read this blog that cited the triumph of capitalism as an example of what many now believe as something that was inevitable all along. The blog mentions multiple examples that proves the reality of how things were really perceived while the capitalism v/s communism fight was still ongoing, even in the US: “(The US fought the disastrous Vietnam war) because it feared communism would succeed, not that it would fail – that communism could supplant capitalism… When Khrushchev spoke of “burying” and “overtaking” western capitalism, nobody laughed. The danger was a serious one. And the launch of Sputnik suggested to the world ...

“A storm is blowing in from Paradise… This storm is what we call progress.” -          Walter Benjamin’s essay, “On the Concept of History” As the liberal left and its ideology finds itself under assault in all the major democracies, Tim Carmody points out the problem of believing in a direction to history: “It’s not a sudden eruption of chaos, but a manifestation of an ongoing vortex of chaos that stretches back indefinitely, without any unique origin. When we’re thrust into danger, in a flash we get a more truthful glimpse of history than the simple narratives that suffice in moments of safety.” Carmody doesn’t mince words in pointing out who believes in a direction to history: it’s the defeated or oppressed ones. Heaven is (only) for the poor. Labour will overthrow its chains. You get the idea: “The perfect theory that links events into beautiful chains of causality is elusive enough to be a dream for a fallen people.” But th...

History is taught in schools as if there is a clear cause-and-effect relation between events and a certain inevitability to what happened. And yet, none of the events that happen during our own lifetime ever seem to indicate any such clarity! Nassim Taleb in his book, The Black Swan , describes this tendency to spin clear stories of all past events as the “narrative fallacy”: “The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths…(our inability) to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship , upon them.” I believe that history just a story where every writer (and reader) thinks that he is wise, without realizing anyone can call himself a genius after the event! Even worse are the people who talk as if history has a direction. Personally, I think this blogger Yago describes things far more accurately: “Act...

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, recently wrote a 3,100 words memo on the company’s new direction. It rambles on without any indication of how Microsoft intends to deal with the post-PC world that even Nadella acknowledges: “We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world.” Microsoft is singularly badly placed to do anything about mobile. Here’s why: 1)       Their original plan had been to license the Windows Phone OS to manufacturers. Google destroyed that plan by making Android free. 2)      With nobody other than Nokia making Windows phones, Microsoft had to buy Nokia. Because Nokia was going bankrupt and also “defecting” to Android. 3)      Having refused to write Office apps for iOS and Android until very recently, they found that the mobile world had moved onto other editors. Or to non-Microsoft Office apps. Like the Polaris Office suite. 4)      Microsoft makes around $2 billion a ...