• God Plus

    The thread that interested me most in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (Volume One of The Baroque Cycle) was on Predestination vs Free Will, something I’ll continue to read up on. The book has a conversation between Daniel Waterhouse, a fictional character and Gottfried Leibniz, in the chapter Daniel and Leibniz Discourse (II), in which Leibniz puts forward a thought that there is an incorporeal organising principle, which organises and informs the body. He calls it the Cogitatio, and later uses it interchangeably with Mind, but different from brain, which is a mechanical phenomenon. With this, he attempts to find a middle ground between free will and predestination by stating that Mind and Matter grew out of a common centre and “I have complete freedom of action… but God knows in advance what I will do, because it is in my nature to act in harmony with the world..” (seems close to Molinism)

    While the recent exploits of humans would dispel this last thought in a jiffy, it did set me thinking on another subject of fascination – Singularity, “the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than human intelligence.” I still wonder whether it would be a ‘Skynet’ version (a superb post by Chris Anderson) or a an augmented human. (something I wrote earlier)

    The thought is whether God’s design had anticipated a Singularity for humans. A state in which the human being will understand and create things far more ‘advanced’ than God can? What would be the relevance of the idea of God then? And in parallel, what would be the human’s role if machines are the way to technological singularity?

    On the flip side, as i wrote in the earlier post, if augmented humans are the way to singularity, would the human mind as we know now exist then? Most probably not, and that would explain why if indeed God did make us in his form, we have no recollection of him or his idea of Singularity.

    Or maybe, some among our species already have reached it, without artificial augmentation, and that’s what we call nirvana, when you can bend the spoon, if it exists. 🙂

    until next time, the God complex is also a possibility 🙂

  • TaxiGuide.in

    TaxiGuide.in is an online car rental booking service that allows you to search, compare and make an online reservation of cars on rent/hire in 77 Indian cities. In conversation with co-founder Ashok Ananthakrishnan

    [scribd id=63958354 key=key-27hhilv5qmfjxfi3q19f mode=list]

  • The Wish Maker

    Ali Sethi

    Ali Sethi’s debut novel would have been just another coming of age novel, if it were not for the milieu it is set in, and the characters that make up the narrative. Zaki Shirazi lands in Lahore for the marriage of his childhood companion Samar. As the house is caught up in the wedding, the book goes through the life of three generations of women – each layer peeled back to reveal another.

    Samar, who lives with her Daadi, away from her own parents, and in the company of her cousin’s son, Zaki, though they are close enough in age to be cousins themselves. The adventures, and misadventures of childhood, fleeting friendships soon forgotten, adolescence, crushes, rivalries, booze and hash have all been well captured and the generation that has grown up with video cassettes, ‘dedication’ audio tapes, the beginning of cable television – Kevin Arnold etc will be able to identify with this.

    Zaki’s mother, forced to bring up her son on her own, after her fighter pilot husband dies in a crash, has an uneasy relationship with her mother in law and tries to balance the needs of her young son with her own need of having an identity, as a journalist (who staunchly supported Benazir Bhutto only to feel let down and then become pragmatic) and magazine editor.

    And finally Zaki’s grandmother (Daadi) who has a strong influence on everyone who lives in the house, and her relationship with her sister, and the people who live with her.

    In the course of their lives, we get to see glimpses of Pakistan’s turbulent history, and present – from Partition to the hanging of Zulfikar Bhutto to the reigns of Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Musharraf. Through different characters, the author also manages to give us snapshots of the cultural/religious/social landscape.

    Ali Sethi lets Zaki and a few other characters meander a little outside of the structure he has built, but much of it adds to their depth, a reason for why they are the way they are. There is clearly an element of autobiography in the book, and what I would have really liked is for the author to dwell on the relationship between Samar and Zaki in the present and if/how it has changed with time. Perhaps the only glimpse he offers is in the last line of the book, and that was a bit disappointing especially since the author has created many interactions between Zaki and the other characters to portray the changes/constant nature of bonds.

    Poignant at times, wistful a bit, and humorous once in a while, this is a good read if only to show how similar we are in many ways to those across the border.

    Psst, a small milestone, this happens to be post #900 Thanks for reading 🙂

  • Social : Means or Outcome?

    In the last few weeks, I have had several interesting conversations on the subject of social’s utility to brand building. I realised that I often veered towards building the product/service ground up with social inherent in it. I was trying to understand why and that took me back to the ‘aligning business to social’ vs ‘aligning social to business’ perspectives. (earlier post and source)

    Though fundamentally the same concept, its application brought about the title of the post. With a pragmatic approach, I realise it is impossible for existing organisations to suddenly transform one day and change/align their business to a socially relevant purpose. It requires evolution. So once they identify the need for this evolution, their challenge is two fold – to build social into existing products/services and simultaneously look at identifying need gaps (of the users) in their domain which have the potential for social resonance. (either by giving the individual user such an excellent experience that he shares it in his circle willingly, or by delivering a utility by using his social connections on other platforms) The first is using social as just another means to meeting an existing objective, and the second is building something that by its inherent nature will have a social outcome that also delivers business results.

    They differ not only in approach and design, but also in terms of gestation, returns and time frames. Depending on the organisation’s evolution appetite, they will have to choose how much they would like to focus on each.

    until next time, social output is where buttons come in 😉

  • Adept Us

    The blog (and its readers) have been victims of many a ‘baggage’ post, but this one is slightly different. The ‘insight’ must seem a no-brainer on hindsight, but because it isn’t a direction I’d thought in, it did seem a bit of a revelation.

    From my own experiences and from observing others, I realised that there was one thing that makes baggage shed itself at whatever pace is required at the moment – survival. And it works across all kinds, say physical eg.cleanliness, or emotional eg.hatred for a person and it looks like the subconscious has a way of dealing with it such that we don’t even realise it is happening. Maybe it doesn’t work the same way for everyone, but I know it does for me, at least to a certain extent.

    The other realisation was the paradox in adaption working both ways. There are many baggage items that started out as a sort of protection when dealing with others eg. the aggression that hides a timid character slowly eclipsing the latter completely. This then becomes a part of character till we don’t even realise that we weren’t always that way. Until the day something forces it to be dropped – not just for a few hours, but a longer stretch of time.

    We have been wired for survival but since it is not really possible to simulate situations that threaten it, I come back to the original square – of watching oneself, being really ‘aware’ of every instant, and guarding against baggage accumulation. Now that’s a how-to I am yet to crack.

    until next time, survival of the fib test