Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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,...

When the constitution was being framed, many of the members pointed out it was not assigning importance to the village as a unit of governance. Wasn’t that violating Gandhi’s view and input, they asked.   Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble goes into that. As mentioned in an earlier blog, Ambedkar had fallen out with Gandhi over the forced 1932 Poona Pact where he had to give up on the reservation of constituencies for the lower castes. Ambedkar was dead against the village as the smallest unit of governance because the “village is a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism”.   Several members objected to this. Wasn’t this a violation of the principle of local governance, they asked. Ambedkar stood his ground pointing to Gandhi’s own admission, that “You will not understand me if you think about the villages of today… My villages… exist in my imagination”. For an uber-pragmatist like Ambedkar, governance systems could not be based...

Ben Thompson, author of the blog Stratechery , found this question on Quora , asking who he was. He was bit irritated with the question (I’ll get to why in a minute): Re-read that question again: the person asking the question knows Thompson to be the author of the blog, which, by the way, is how Thompson wants to be known:  “I’m a person, I put myself out there on this blog, and I trust that what I write represents me well.” But that’s never enough, is it? Thompson again: “I’ve been quoted as “Microsoft’s Ben Thompson,” as “former Apple intern Ben Thompson,” and “batshit crazy Ben Thompson.” I actually wish the third were true, because, unlike the first two, the descriptor rests on what I write, not on some sort of vague authority derived from whoever is signing my paychecks.” A variant of the Thompson’s point is why authors often write anonymously.  As Maria Bustillos explained : “Anonymous is more than a pseudonym. It is a stark declaration of intent: a...

We love our touch based devices, from the iPad to the smartphone to the Kindle. But are there better interfaces than touch that could be created? Bret Victor certainly thinks so . He points out that almost every real world object offers some feedback to our hands (“texture, pliability, temperature; their distribution of weight; their edges, curves, and ridges; and how they respond in your hand as you use them.”). Now contrast that with what you feel when you interact via touchscreens (“Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?”). That is why Victor terms current touch tech as “ Pictures Under Glass ”: “It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.” So what is the future then? As per Victor: “Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn't just happen. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people...

Nicholas Carr (he of the “ Is Google making us stupid? ” article fame) just released his new book, The Big Switch . In his blog , he wrote an essay adapted from one of the chapters of the book. He starts with what he seeks to question, the notion that the Internet is the great emancipator: “The Net is “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” declare Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their new book,   The New Digital Age . “Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips.”… Seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the Web was routinely portrayed as a new frontier .” Then Carr gets down to business, calling the above notion “at best a half-truth and at worst a delusion ”: “The Internet in particular put enormous power into the hands of individuals, but they put even greater power into the hands of companies, governments, and other institutions .” He may be partly right about that; but he gets his history al...

I didn’t realize how much dislike and fear that most of Europe still has when it comes to German influence until I read this article by Michael Lewis . The article itself is very long, gets quite vulgar at times and is still very informative. While the rest of the Western world (Iceland, Greece, Ireland, the US) behaved like lunatics when loans were easily available at low interest rates, the Germans showed restraint. Commendable? Not entirely. Because the Germans lent their “own money to enable foreigners to behave insanely”. I guess that’s why they say “Neither a lender nor a borrower be”. (Of course, like any advice, overdoing that one isn’t a good thing either because it brings all economic activity to a halt). Today, to avert financial Armageddon in Europe, everyone wants the Germans to bail out the Greeks (and presumably, the Irish, the Italians and the Spanish after that). The Germans, obviously, are not enthusiastic about doing any such thing. But even if they do agree, t...