Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Claude Lévi-Strauss once said: “The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.” Of course, that’s true for many areas outside science as well. In his wonderful book, The Gene , Siddhartha Mukherjee gives an awesome example of the danger of mis-defining something: “If we define “intelligence” as the performance on only one kind of problem in only one kind of test, then we will, indeed, find a “gene for intelligence”. In A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , the inhabitants of Magrathea didn’t know Lévi-Stauss’ point. They asked their super computer the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. After millions of years of computing, the super computer states the answer (drum rolls, please): “Forty-two.” The characters in the story were as dismayed, perplexed and disappointed as you probably were by the answer. And so the computer explained: “Once you understand what the question actua

When I was a kid, a Hollywood blockbuster would take months to come to India (if at all). Same with TV shows. Now, simultaneous worldwide releases are becoming quite common. And at times, even big name movies, like the recently released The Amazing Spider-Man 2 gets released in India before the US! TV shows are getting broadcast in India within days (or a week or two) of the US/BBC broadcast. The reasons are easy to see: there is no longer the constraint of only so many reels; digital content can be sent almost instantly to any corner of the planet; and if they wait too long, people would have already seen the pirated version. But with music, the digital medium has changed things in a different way. Describing Beyoncé’s last album released on 13 Dec last year, David Hepworth points out something very strange : “The window of ballyhoo around a big album, which in the past would have lasted a couple of months, was finished in a week, leaving the rest of us wondering whether