Two Roads

Read this article about two paths to marital happiness - either have no kids at all or have a whole bunch of them. Doing something in between apparently does not bode well for a couple's happiness. This is how the plight of folks such as myself is described :

Attempting to balance being an autonomous individual and a social animal produces a kind of incoherence that leads to misery. You're constantly confused and being pushed in different directions.  You can't even explain to people who you are.

I find that to be a harsh indictment. In the modern world where a village is often lacking to help with the raising of our children, bringing up four or more of them is no walk in the park. One has to assume that one or both parents have to go to work to put food on the table -in either case, the time and energy required to raise the children is seriously diminished. I am not sure how a perpetually over-worked, at-capacity couple can have a great marriage - where would they find the time to nurture their relationship ?

The distinction between an autonomous individual and a social individual does not make sense either. To be a social animal (a parent) an adult has to be an autonomous individual first - they have to be functional and competent independently before they can take responsibility for any number of offspring. I am not sure that it is actually possible to be one or the other. As for the incoherence leading to misery - it could be argued that a social animal without a well developed autonomous individuality could be even more so and fall apart under the demands of  parenting four or more children

Spellbound

I have written before of my disappointment with reading Jhumpa Lahiri's books specially because she has such amazing facility with language. From lesser talent, the reader expects a lot less and is not nearly as disappointed.

Finally, I read a piece by Lahiri that is completely satisfying. This is the kind of writing I have been waiting to read. Each word in this essay is like a smooth pebble, the sentences themselves so precisely balanced that one word less or more and nothing would be quite the same. If this essay was food, it would be an ethereal lemon souffle - delightfully light but far from frivolous. 

What I specially loved about this piece is that she made no reference to her immigrant roots or invoke her signature diaspora angst. Leaving those tropes behind, did not take anything away from the deeply personal voice of her writing, instead it rendered the piece universally appealing. This is the Lahiri that I've been waiting to read a long time.

I can't wait for her to write a volume of essays - if they are nearly as good as this one, it would have the reader absolutely spellbound.

Curiosity

This interesting post by Scott Adams on the nature and purpose of curiosity made me think about how I have experienced it - both in being curious about someone or having them be curious about me. Adams says :

If someone asks personal questions about your past, your plans, your likes and dislikes, that is an unambiguous sign of attraction. If someone tries to steer you into the bedroom without some conspicuous data gathering, that is a sign of simple horniness.

That is definitely true in my experience. Sometimes, curiosity has grown over time or at least remained unabated. It was like they wanted to be there with me, experience everything I was going through - from the mundane to the exceptional. 

Then there has been curiosity borne out of a jealousy or a sense of competitiveness - something Adams does not discuss in his post. This is the kind of curiosity most people would find repelling but the same need to know the many insignificant details of your life when coming from a lover, could be most desirable. 

Finally there is idle curiosity - coming from someone acting out of boredom or lack of etiquette or both.

Foxes And Hedgehogs

I have blogged about the dearth of enthralling works of fiction or non-fiction despite the mind boggling number of publications these days. A lot of people have things to say and they are all clamoring to be heard. Only a couple of problems - no one is really saying anything astonishingly new and too many are not even saying what they have to say exceptionally well.

Then there are those who publish online - applying the rule of a million monkeys at as many keyboards, it is easy enough to find essays, opinion and commentary that is very well crafted. It may be the only one piece of writing in someone's voluminous output, but it is good enough to hold it's own among the best. If one knows where to look and what to seek, it is not too hard to find a lot of writing that is of high quality and being produced by non-writers. This article by Ben McIntrye considers how the information torrent that the internet is, impacts our way of thinking. He writes :

In 1953, when the internet was not even a technological twinkle in the eye, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously divided thinkers into two categories: the hedgehog and the fox: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Hedgehog writers, argued Berlin, see the world through the prism of a single overriding idea, whereas foxes dart hither and thither, gathering inspiration from the widest variety of experiences and sources. Marx, Nietzsche and Plato were hedgehogs; Aristotle, Shakespeare and Berlin himself were foxes.

Today, feasting on the anarchic, ubiquitous, limitless and uncontrolled information cornucopia that is the web, we are all foxes. We browse and scavenge thoughts and influences, picking up what we want, discarding the rest, collecting, linking, hunting and gathering our information, social life and entertainment. 

With the foxes far outnumbering the hedgehogs in the world today, it is probably getting harder and harder to find a book that takes one idea takes it to its full, logical conclusion.

Art of Bragging

Found this article on how to brag via Marginal Revolution. The insights are interesting but not necessarily path-breaking. Being blatantly boastful is painfully obvious both to the person who is participating in the conversation and to on-lookers. It definitely makes them unpopular. Subtlety definitely helps but even that becomes evident after a while when there is a pattern to leading questions and remarks that open the opportunity to brag. Bragging just a little on occasion clearly has its uses :

'In situations ranging from a first date to a job interview, people commonly face the dilemma of how to make their listeners aware of their success without being perceived as braggers,' Tal-Or said. 'The present research provides a possible solution to this dilemma.'

There is also the issue of the person chosing not to be boastful being at a distinct disadvantage because they have to stand out in a crowd where everyone else is not making any effort to be humble. This is a lot like being the only at a party in jeans when every one is dressed to the nines. You stand out for being different but not necessarily in the most favorable light.

Greatness Today

Reading this article by Anil Dash on the perks and perils of being on Twitter's A-List, brought to mind lines from  Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and of course the irony in having made that connection itself :

"but be not afraid of greatness: some
are born great, some achieve greatness, and some
have greatness thrust upon 'em."

In the Twitter situation, Dash has had "greatness thrust upon" him but as a blogger, did "achieve greatness" on his own . In that both are true are true for and about him, one might hazard a guess that he may have also been "born great" as in he had always possessed some innate, natural ability that would turn him into something of a celebrity geek in due season.

In Shakespeare's view greatness could come by in one of three ways to an individual - and presumably they were exclusive. But the modern world, challenges that notion. Greatness and fame are related and Francis Bacon considered some questions about the nature of fame:

What are false fames; and what are true fames; and how they may be best discerned; how fames may be sown, and raised; how they may be spread, and multiplied; and how they may be checked, and laid dead.

Extending the Twitter parallel, Biz Stone has probably given us the modern response to Bacon's question " how fames may be sown, and raised; how they may be spread, and multiplied;". It would probably fall to Dash and other like him to determine "how they may be checked" or if they were so disposed "laid dead"

Fresh Thought

A lot has and will be said by both pro-life and pro-choice activists in defense of their respective positions. You figure you have heard both sides and the argument and neither has anything new to add. Richard Dawkins says something that I had not read before :

If you follow the 'pro-life' logic to its conclusion, a fertile woman is guilty of something equivalent to murder every time she refuses an offer of copulation.

Such may be intended consequences of taking things to their logical conclusion. His argument might be "logical", but it  ends up diluting the case of pro-choice advocates. It should not be necessary to go quite this far to make a point. In that it does, exposes a weakness or lack of convinction the other side could exploit. You have to wonder if Dawkins had taken his line of reasoning to it's logical conclusion as well.

List Of Ten

List of the past years' best and worst are inevitable around the end of December. When it becomes the business of revisiting the first decade of a new millennium, the lists turn even more ubiquitous and voluminous. Of the many that I have read in the last few weeks, this list of ten from The Atlantic is my favorite.

I don't entirely agree that all of the ideas are American but they most likely found fertile ground in this country to blossom and were definitive of the decade. Numero Uno :  Everything is Free (or It Should Be) is clearly a big theme of the decade and it is not only Gawker Media and Huffington Post  that have "found fortunes in aggregating and repackaging free news".

Further afield from the likes of Gawker and HuffPost, are rag-pickers of all stripes making a living  from ferreting out content from free on-line sources that they can rehash, recycle, repackage and sell as compilations web or print. Since a book in print still enjoys cachet with folks who write, those with the marketing smarts and business savvy are able to turn this to their advantage. In return for credit to the author (a bio, a permalink and a token of appreciation), they assume the rights to what they will do with the content. The author (or garbage generator to keep the narrative in synch with rag-pickers) may find this a fair trade (or not) depending on the reach and size of their on-line audience.

If only two people including their mother had read a piece of writing now on its way to  being in a book, they figure it's not such a terrible deal. The rag-picker has a vested interest in making that book sell and for their trouble, they get to keep most if not all of the proceeds.There is certainly a lot of effort that must go into the selection process given the sheer volume of content that is out there so it can be argued they are only being compensated for their work.  

The right to free that is increasingly becoming implicit can cut both ways depending on which side of the equation you find yourself in and sometimes it is impossible to be certain of the side or to know if you are winning or losing in the deal.

Samarkand And Dylan

I don't know anything about the Blues genre and very little about Bob Dylan's music. The last time, I read about Central Asia was in the high school history text book. With qualifications like that, I would be exactly the kind of reader who would not get an article on Central Asian current affairs explained using lyrics from a Dylan song.

I found the idea  fascinating specially in the context of my complete ignorance on all aspects of the topic. Bravely, I plunged into reading the article and was pleasantly surprised by how most of it made sense. Loved the way two very unfamiliar things came together to create something that is accessible to readers of all stripes.

The sophisticated variety who know enough about the topics the author discusses, have critiqued the essay on its technical merits but for the lowest common denominator (such as myself), this is a painless introduction to something that would have been far out of reach otherwise.

Infomavore

Learned a new word today - informavore. The term informavore characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food.

It is a long winded article and I found it hard to stay engaged to the end. That said, there are some very interesting ideas in it that are worth pondering. For instance, the author suggests that in the future our brains will be in a cloud - what is important to us will not be self-determined but will be a function of what the community deems important. The fact that we don't make an effort to relegate the business of holding what is significant in our lives to Facebook and blogs instead of keeping that information in our heads is a telling sign according to Schirrmacher.

Then there is the idea that there is not enough brains to hold and process the information that is being spewed online and that Darwinism will determine how we will deal with information overload, what will survive and what will perish.Definitely worth reading despite the length.

Essays On Math

Recently I read two essays on math. Two very different perspectives - one by PhD in literature , Mark Slouka and the other by a mathematician , Paul Lockhart. The former considers the consequences of math and science trumping frivolous subjects like literature in our education system. The later laments the way math is taught in schools. Both perspectives stand on their own are excellent on their own merits when you read them together, the convergences are fascinating. Slouka says :

The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be.

Lockhart says of math present day math education :

In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural
curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

Neither art nor math is winning when they treated as fundamentally different things, meant to serve different objectives. If they did converge as Lockhart suggests - because math is an art form too - then they may both benefit. He quotes G.H Hardy :

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Colors In America

The response of two readers to Hua Hsu's article in The Atlantic The End of White America ? do a great job of explaining the assimilation experience of immigrants in America.

One reader Claude B. Fischer writes :

"Hsu gets it wrong by focusing on the cultural froth, like music, food and clothes. The real story, at the deeper level, is how much and how quickly the children of immigrants from many continents apart come to adopt WASP culture ..."

He goes on to cite the facets of WASP culture that have universal appeal to immigrants of all stripes. Marrying for love, the pursuit of personal success. He calls it "the culture of personal expression and personal salvation, material achievement, voluntarism in social matters, and egalitarianism"

Another reader Ryan Karerat who is Indian American, writes :

"There may be no "white culture" but white people still dictate our societal norms. To become a cultural elite in America, one has to whiten him-or herself."

I can't help comparing the non-white immigrant experience in America to the unique way in which Parsis have assimilated the local culture and enriched the lives of Indians they have come into contact with - some in small ways, other very profoundly. They have made good on their promise to be like sugar in milk, but have not given up their unique identity. While some Parsis may argue it has become too much of a good thing and their survival as a distinct race is at risk because of their ability to blend in a little too harmoniously.

If a people have lived in a foreign country for over thousand years and yet managed to preserve a distinctive character, that should in all fairness count as a good deal more than mere "survival". Apparently, the dragnet of WASP culture is America is far too strong for immigrants to resist. As a result none of the non-white ethnicities that come to make this country their "home" will be able to emulate what the Parsis have achieved as a community in India. It is hard to tell whose loss will be greater - the milk's or that of the sugar and spices which failed improve the medium they were thrown into.