Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Facts rarely make anyone change their mind. We know that all too well. This is true not just about political matters but also about every belief that people hold.   Why is that? Seth Godin takes a stab at the question. We have consciously or unconsciously built stories around our beliefs, political or otherwise. And that, he says, explains why facts rarely convince anyone: “Because a good story feels true. A good story resonates.” So he says: “If I bring facts to rebut your story, they will fail .”   Is there no hope then? Godin says one can succeed: “(If) the facts I bring are the foundation for a new story .” Therefore, he says: “Part of the job of making change is working to make sure a bad story doesn’t get in the way of good facts. ”

In an earlier blog , we went over the story of India that was picked in 1947 at its formation. And as Pranay Kotasthane says in Missing in Action : “It follows that since a nation is a mental construct, it can be and is reimagined.”   Today, he says: “There is an alternative imagination… it believes the lack of real reckoning with our past before the British era, the choice by Nehru and his ilk of an imagination that wasn’t true… and the constant peddling of this fake narrative have not allowed us to move ahead.”   The “idea of India” is truly being fought over between the “adherents of the old imagination” and the “proponents of the alternative”. And as we saw in the other blog, that involves “reworking of history to fit past events into this imagination”. It happened in 1947; and another attempt to rewrite it is underway today.   Will India survive as a united nation? On the one hand: “America was going through a bloody civil war that was threating to ...

One of the main “superpowers” that humans have, as per Yuval Noah Harari, is the ability to tell stories. Not only of the fairy-tale variety, but also the grander ones that can unify people into massive groups based on some common theme (real or imagined), stretching in size from regional to national to global.   In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane says the same:             “Narratives have the power to make the unreal real.” Narratives are critical when a nation is formed: “Every newly formed nation has to define this imagination.” This involved 3 steps: (1) Call for a new beginning, a fresh start; (2) if a region has a long history that can’t be wished away, then “use the trope of slumber and reawakening to represent a departure from the past”; and (3) use historians to “reframe history that show past events as serving the nation-building… objectives of the present”.   If you found some of the ab...

Have you read those books where you get to pick options at different points of a story? If you want the hero to take the injured man to the hospital, go to Page 35. Or if you want the hero to pursue his assailants, go to Page 40. I ran into a variant of that with my 5 year old daughter. There’s this filler on one of the kids’ channels where they tell the same short story each time. It goes something like this: there are 3 goats who must cross a bridge to get to the grass to graze. As the first one tried to cross the bridge, a troll caught it and wanted to eat it. The frightened goat told the troll to leave him and catch his bigger brother instead. The troll lets him go and catches the second goat. It too escaped citing that the next goat is even bigger. When the troll tries to catch the biggest goat, he head-butts the troll and escapes. Upon which, my daughter suggested this variant, “Couldn’t the 3 rd goat just have said catch the next one, he’s even bigger? And then of cou...

My 4 year old likes to hear stories that involve her stuffed toys going to school. It’s fun for her only if they do dumb and/or outrageous things in those stories. Every now and then, I’ll tell her the stuffed toys went to school, studied, listened to their teachers and came back like good boys. That’ll make her very angry: what kind of useless story is that, she’ll ask? I am guessing she’d agree with these lines from Grey’s Anatomy : “Smooth rides make for boring stories. A little calamity? That’s worth talking about.” Noah Berlatsky lists a few not-so-little calamities that make for great stories: “The robots revolt and kill us all. Religious fanatics take over and treat women as chattel. A vicious dictatorship is instituted that kills children for sport. The planet runs out of food, water, fuel, or all of them, and civilization tears itself apart. The aliens invade, the meteor hits, the zombies arise, the rapture raptures.” On the other hand, there is also that hugely pop...

God said, “Let there be light!” Then scientists like Newton, Faraday and Young started studying light. And finally came Maxwell, who proved that light is not limited to what we can see...it extends far beyond in the electromagnetic spectrum. And that is the starting point for Philip Ball's article titled provocatively, Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark . He starts by saying Maxwell's discovery shifted “the whole focus of physics...from the visible to the invisible”! Physics today has “not only unseen force fields and insensible rays but particles too small to see even with the most advanced microscopes”. While that may sound like a belief or something based on faith, it is supported by the facts: telescopes today use “radio waves, infrared radiation, and X-rays”. And it was kind of funny that X-rays “not only were invisible but revealed the invisible (bones under the flesh)”! Then came quantum mechanics. While the maths behind it was unquestionable, it le...