Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The EU has 28 partner countries that speak “an unwieldy 23 languages” , as the Economist puts it. Some guy suggested that every Euro kid should learn two foreign languages. Others felt that everyone should just switch to English. Some of the arguments against English were interesting and informative, not jingoist: 1)       The language spoken by the maximum number of Europeans is, hold your breath, German! In 4 countries, German is an official language. 2)      French has just as many native speakers as English, and is official in 3 countries. 3)      And most embarrassing of all, Britain will soon be holding a referendum whether to quit the EU altogether! 4)      The EU’s official motto is “united in diversity”, a promise to not crush every member “under a homogenising wheel”. (Wait a minute, unity in diversity? Don’t we have a copyright on that slogan?) Now doesn’t all this make you...

George Orwell was asked by one Noel Willmett whether he really believed a 1984 like scenario was possible. Orwell’s reply ( via a letter ) is illuminating. Keep in mind that he wrote this letter in 1944, while World War II was still going on. Orwell feared the rising cult of leader-worship (Hitler, Stalin, Franco and de Gaulle). Taken to an extreme, he feared this resulted in “a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.” (Orwell even mentions Gandhi on his list! Which isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds as first. After all, Gandhi had quaint ideas on the role of villages in economic growth. And while he didn’t wield a machine gun to enforce his view, he did influence post-independent India’s stance on the topic, didn’t he?) Orwell argued that neither Britain nor the US should be too smug on this leader-worship topic because, he argued: “Britain and the USA ha...

Alex E. Jones once said: “The answer to 1984 is 1776.” If you don’t like the American slant of that line, feel free to replace 1776 with “a constitution”. And the Internet just made that a whole lot easier. Yes, that’s right: the Internet just made it easy to cross-reference material while you try to be the next BR Ambedkar or Thomas Jefferson. Which makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, with around 160 active constitutions around the globe, there’s a whole lot of material to refer to. The problem (until now) was that each one was written in a different format: so how does one pick and choose parts from each? As Google said in its blog : “Although the process of drafting constitutions has evolved from chisels and stone tablets to pens and modern computers, there has been little innovation in how their content is sourced and referenced.” That is where Google’s partnership with Comparative Constitutions Project comes into the picture. Together, they launched a site called C...

“We know that if you ask people what movie they want to see next week, they’re likely to mention a classy art film. But, if you ask them what movie they want to see tonight, they’re more likely to mention a mindless blockbuster.” -          David Brooks Netflix isn't that big a name in India, but it's huge in the US. The company was founded by Reed Hastings in 1997 who “saw a way to combine Americans' love of movies with their love of not getting off the sofa even to go to the video store”! So how did they do it? Remember this was way back in 1997, with the Internet just starting to catch on. So the company mailed DVD's to customers; who after viewing it, would mail the DVD back. Today, of course, with increased network speeds, the company streams movies (the way YouTube does) to your PC/laptop/phone/tablet. Netflix is famous for its recommendation algorithms that suggest what you might want to view next. So much so that Xavier Amatria...

I have often marveled at America for being the only country which goes to war and expects zero casualties! Of course, that’s mostly because the US fights its wars way outside its borders which inevitably raises the question domestically: why should our guys die for some reason associated with another corner of the world? Starting with the advent of missiles and now with drones, it’s entirely possible for the US to fight most wars without putting any “boots on the ground”. Jonathan Bernstein argues that this new type of warfare, with no soldiers on the ground, deserves a new term. Why? To make it clear to the American public that succeed or fail, they won’t see any body bags being flown in: “The press, along with the political establishment, utterly failed to find, or at least to consistently use, a vocabulary for what was on the table. Certainly air or missile strikes are an act of war, and should be reported as such; just as certainly, those sorts of limited attacks alway...

Remember that game Chinese Whispers? You whisper something into your neighbour’s ear; who whispers the same to his neighbour and so on. At the end, it can be very surprising how much (and how many times) the message got distorted. Of course, Chinese Whispers isn’t limited to just games or spoken stuff. It happens in the real world even with printed material! Way back in 1892 in an article titled “Imitators and Plagiarists”, W. H. Davenport Adams wrote about Tennyson’s tendency: “… great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.” But who decides whether the copier improved or not? TS Eliot addressed the subjectivity of that question: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal…The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” Leaving Eliot’s logic untouched, Marvin Magalaner did modify Eliot’s lines to refer ...

Charles Hartman wrote an interesting article on being plagiarized . Some guy from Qatar e-mailed Hartman (who lives in England) telling him that someone in England had plagiarized one of his poems. Soon enough, a bunch of (mostly) Brit poets working through Facebook groups exposed more and more such cases. Don’t you just love the Internet?! Hartman wondered why perpetrators (like David R. Morgan in his case) did it in an era where being found out and shamed in front of thousands is not at all difficult? Wouldn’t info about such acts now sitting for all eternity in Google’s servers, to be queried and found even decades later be a deterrent? Why do plagiarists still take such risks, Hartman wondered? Hartman also felt insulted: “The insult was partly that the plagiarist assumed my poem was too obscure for anyone to discover his theft.” That is partly the answer to the risk question, isn’t it? Guys like Morgan must have considered the odds of getting caught and decided guys ...