• Mother Mary Comes to Me

    Arundhati Roy

    I have been an unabashed fan of whatever Arundhati Roy writes, and Mother Mary Comes to Me is no exception. This is a memoir, but I’d say it’s her love letter to her mother, and to some extent, others whom she loves, including characters in her works of fiction. It is also very Arundhati Roy – poignant and visceral to the point of tear-jerking, and yet funny – sometimes with wit – both the scathing and irreverent as well as the loving kind, and sometimes with the inherent hilarity of situations.

    (more…)

  • Uncertainty’s Principles

    Though I have approached the subject in many ways, the immediate inspiration was the title of this post – The Allergy to Uncertainty. As is my wont, I projected it onto myself, and began (over?)analysing. 😀

    Reasons & Seasons

    Why do I have the allergy? At one level, I could answer that I am (at least partly) a product of my past. I think I had a lot of uncertainty in my formative years – change of schools and friends, change of homes, change of what I’d call a security system. And as a child, I think certainty in the context of academic/ singing/ quizzing results brought validation and less punishment. It created the “false self” constructed to survive childhood – something I learned from this excellent book.

    (more…)

  • The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding

    by Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber

    ‘The Case Against Reality’ was among my favourite books last year. As almost an aside somewhere, it goes, ‘we did not evolve our ability to reason in order to pursue the truth. We evolved it as a tool of social persuasion.‘ Quite a statement to make, and I was intrigued. The Enigma of Reason expands on this, and with the rigour of scientific reasoning (no pun intended) has me quite convinced.

    (more…)

  • Mutual favourites, ok?

    Dear N,

    It’s been a week. Thanks to you and your acha, I had a viral fever almost the entire week. You can keep your ayyo to yourself. 😠

    But I not really angry with you. It seems your amma told D that you used to say I was your favourite cousin. I don’t know if that is true. I do know that I don’t deserve it. But you were easily my favourite cousin, and I know that I gave you less than you deserved.

    (more…)

  • Reshuffle: Who wins when AI restacks the knowledge economy

    Sangeet Paul Choudary

    Reshuffle is a book I had been looking forward to reading ever since I started seeing Sangeet Paul Choudary’s excerpts and related posts. And despite reading all those posts, the book had sufficient meat to make it an excellent read. One that offers great perspectives on dealing with the influx of AI in work – at an individual and business level.

    I think I have a bias for the book because of a few reasons. One, it follows a clear systems thinking approach, and the logic and reasoning is robust. Two, it is a strategic and framework-driven exploration, which means it offers tools to think about this in one’s own contexts. Three, it’s not just theory. The book provides sufficient examples that can serve as starting points on how to think through this. That, as you’d notice is an elegant why-what-how approach.

    (more…)