Category: Choices

  • Currencies of hope

    In The Narratives of our lives, I had written about how, thanks to the advances of civilisation, many institutional narratives like religion, nation, culture etc have assumed increasing levels of importance in our lives, and how these (and our personal) narratives are probably our way of ensuring a sense of belonging. ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines‘, criticism on the concept of singularity notwithstanding, has convinced me on the cold, sanitised nature of evolution, so these days, I try to see what evolution’s play is, in these narratives.

    Thanks to a wine-induced pop philosophy conversation, I got thinking about theism and atheism. The epiphany (for me) was that they are just two sides of the same coin, and the currency was hope. Simply put, the foundation of the theist’s hope is God, and that of the atheist’s is the ability to determine his own future. ‘Our beliefs create the world we live in’, but across belief systems, hope is a critical ingredient for man’s survival. I realised that as long as we are the dominant species, hope has to hang around, or vice versa. By virtue of providing a common imaginary friend to a sufficiently high mass, religion not only addresses our need to belong, it also gives us hope. What each of us hope for is a very subjective thing, but collectively, it makes religion a really dominant narrative in many lives. When I thought about it, I recognised an even bigger force – money. (more…)

  • Immaterialism

    I was in Kochi recently, and was quite happy to find Uber there! About four years ago, a similar experience led me to write about how malls create a kind of homogeneity across cities. This is probably an advanced version of that thought, because I felt as though these were baby steps towards living in the cloud. If the apps (services) I use become available across geographies, how long would it take before location became irrelevant?

    “Of course geography is relevant. I have a home in Bangalore, what do I do with that?” leads me to the real point of this post – ownership. TC had a fantastic (guest) post sometime back (by Tom Goodwin) titled “The Battle is for the Customer Interface“. Quoting from the first paragraph – Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. The post, of course, moves on to the business impact of this, but I felt that it is absolutely applicable in a personal context. (more…)

  • The Entrepreneur and the Professional

    A fantastic article in The Atlantic titled ‘The Case Against Credentialism‘ traces the social-cultural and academic  roots of America’s current business dynamics. The part that interested me most was what the author calls the tension between the two cultures – the entrepreneurial and the professional. While both are cultures of achievement, the basic tenet of the latter is that he who goes further in school will go further in life.

    It gave me an impetus to write about this in the Indian context. Nothing as exhaustive, but a little note based on my experiences thus far, with much generalisation. My skin in the game is that it affects me personally and professionally. (more…)

  • For Charlie to tango

    The interesting question is, just because something thinks differently from you, does that mean it’s not thinking? We allow that humans have such divergences from one another. You like strawberries. I hate ice-skating. You cry at sad films. I’m allergic to pollen. What does it mean to have different tastes – different preferences – other than to say that our brains work differently? That we think differently from one another?
    ~ The Imitation Game (via)

    I watched the movie last weekend, and this was one of the scenes that stayed with me. By sheer coincidence, the book I was reading then was The Age of Spiritual Machines, which dwells on the progress of artificial intelligence, and therefore, its impact on humanity. Humanity will be forced to reckon with AI sooner than later, (an earlier post) but long before that, we will need to learn to deal with ourselves. Have we really learned to live with our divergences? Take this as an example :

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  • Happy Tradeoffs

    It’s in the nature of thought that it never ceases to exist. In Happiness: The End, it would seem as though I’d found the track I wanted to follow. But it isn’t ever so simple, is it? The books I read somehow seem to have words that phrase my thoughts just right

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    The first roadblock I have found in the ‘happiness plan’ is sensitivity. It works in at least a couple of ways. On one hand, when I act with my own happiness as the key filter, I find it difficult to ignore the effect it has on other people. Do my actions make them unhappy? On the other hand, I am also in situations when others’ behaviour makes me unhappy but one or more constraints prevent me from doing anything about it. In both cases, I have to compromise.

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