India Uncut

Step into the new India Uncut

2007-02-15T21:15:00.000+05:30

(Update [March 3]: I am now providing full RSS feeds on all the sections of the new site, as well as a combined one across the site. More details here. In brief, the feed for the India Uncut Blog is http://feeds.feedburner.com/IUB. (Bloglines users, click here.) And the combined feed for the site is http://feeds.feedburner.com/indiauncut-full. (Bloglines.)

After much delay, let me finally invite you to the new India Uncut!

I first discussed the blueprint of this site with MadMan, who has designed and programmed it, in March last year. Immense procrastination ensued, largely on my part, but we finally got round to working on it a couple of months ago. A brief introduction to each of its sections follows below, taken from my detailed note on how this site came to be and what it contains, "About India Uncut."

1] The India Uncut Blog: This will be, for all practical purposes, a continuation of the original India Uncut, with fewer links posts, and more comment and personal blogging. I continue to be its sole author.

2] Linkastic: This is a filter blog, whose purpose is to save you time by bringing you some of the most interesting stuff to read on the internet, across a range of categories. The idea: if you come here three times every day, you will find many new things to read every time. If even one of them interests you, your visit is worthwhile.

This will be a group blog, and besides myself, its contributors are Gautam, MadMan, Prabhu and Sanjeev Naik. I intend to expand the list to around eight to ten people. (Update [March 3]: Yazad Jal, Patrix, Ravages, Arzan Sam Wadia and Gaurav Mishra have also joined.)

3] Rave Out: In this blog, the contributors write short, succinct pieces on books or films or albums, focussing only on what they love. Life is too short to write negative things about stuff we don’t like, and there’ll be none of that here. Only the most joyous, uplifting, enlightening, thought-provoking, sexy works of art will be written about here, purely for the pleasure of being able to share something one feels passionate about.

The contributors, besides me, are Arun Simha, Chandrahas Choudhury, Falstaff, Jai Arjun Singh, KM, Nilanjana S Roy, PrufrockTwo and Sonia Faleiro. This list will also expand a bit. (Update (March 3): Amitava Kumar has joined up.)

4] Workoutable: Quizzing is one of my passions, though I’m not particularly good at it. I believe, as do many many fellow quizzers on at least the Mumbai and Pune circuits, that a good quiz question isn’t just about knowledge, but about problem-solving. Even if you don’t know the answer to a particular question, you should have a chance of working it out from clues given in the question. Every day we shall feature a question of that sort in this section. Its contributors include many stalwarts from the Mumbai and Pune quizzing circuits, and once a group of regulars firms up, I shall post the names here.

5] Extrowords: I enjoy making crosswords, and will be doing daily crosswords—barring Sundays—in this section. They will be themed crosswords, with themed words highlighted in each puzzle, and will be generally easy to solve. You need Java for this section, and if you don’t already have it on your computer, you can download it here. The first installment of Extrowords is themed around Indian bloggers, so go solve it!

Phew. The Blogspot version of India Uncut had a hard-to-achieve Pagerank of 7, which will no doubt take some time to reach on the new site. Also, I have no idea how this will impact my top position on the Blogstreet charts. But I'm excited, and I hope you like this development. If you're reading this on your RSS feed, please do visit the new site and check it out. Do add me to your blogroll or update the existing link -- I need to prepare a blogroll for my site as well, which is one of the pendings tasks I have. This site will be in Beta for a while, and we'll still be adding stuff to it.

Feel free to write in with your feedback, immense joy will come!

Reason vs Rationalisation

2007-02-15T09:06:00.000+05:30

A shorter version of this piece was published today as the second installment of my column, Thinking it Through, in Mint. The first is here.

Often when I argue with friends, or on the internet, I am dismayed by how intransigent some people are. No matter how many facts I throw before them, or how solid my reasoning is, I simply cannot convince them of my point of view. No doubt they feel the same about me. "He refuses to listen to reason," they think, even as I bemoan how unreasonable they are.

This is not a phenomenon peculiar to me: we live in deeply polarised times, and around half the world believes that the other half ignores reason altogether. Well, it is my belief that we overestimate reason to begin with. The Scottish Philosopher David Hume once described reason as “the slave of the passions,” and I believe that much of the time when we feel we are being reasonable, we are actually rationalising conclusions we have already arrived at, positions that we already hold.

An excellent illustration of how our mind does this comes from neuroscience. In the 1960s, neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry carried out a series of experiments on patients with split-brain epilepsy. A common treatment for such patients used to be to sever the corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. This effectively splits the brain into two: rational thought is carried out by the left hemisphere, but the two halves of the brain stop being aware of the happenings the other half.

Describing the experiments in his book, “The Blank Slate,” Steven Pinker wrote of how “the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behaviour chosen without its knowledge by the right.” One example: the experimenters would flash the word “walk” in the visual field of the right hemisphere. The patient would get up and start walking. But when asked why he did so, his left brain, which would be unaware of what the right brain had seen, and would effectively be doing the replying, gave answers such as “to get a coke.” The remarkable thing is that the patients actually believed their explanation, even though the conscious mind arrived at it after the unconscious mind prompted the body to start walking.

Pinker called the conscious mind “a spin doctor, not the commander in chief,” while Gazzaniga referred to the left brain as “the interpreter.” In his book, “Phantoms in the Brain,” VS Ramachandran wrote, “[t]he left hemisphere’s job is to create a belief system or model and to fold new experiences into that belief system. If confronted with some new information that doesn’t fit the model, it relies on Freudian defence mechanisms to deny, repress or confabulate – anything to preserve the status quo.”

In other words, the left brain’s job to to make sense of the world and build a coherent worldview. This isn’t easy. The world is full of complicated phenomena, and the most intelligent among us would not be able to make sense of it all if we tried to place each disparate event in its proper perspective. We would be perpetually bewildered.

To deal with this, our brains evolved to seek patterns in everything. Michael Shermer, in his book “How We believe,” wrote: “Those who were best at finding patterns (standing upwind of game animals is bad for the hunt, cow manure is good for the crops) left behind the most offspring.” Of course, while we are especially good at seeking patterns in everything, not all patterns are meaningful, and many simply come from confusing correlation with causation. Thus, a cricketer who makes a century when he happens to have a red handkerchief in his pocket may carry that handkerchief with him for the rest of his career.

Indeed, this explains religion. For much of our existence, science hasn’t been around (or able) to answer the big questions of the day. We’d have gone mad thinking about it all if we didn’t have religion to give us ready-made patterns that explained everything. Similarly, in the modern world, we have all kinds of belief systems that help make sense of the world around us, and provide us with cognitive shortcuts to think about the world.

When these belief systems are attacked, it is natural for us to not want to have to rethink them. As an economist would say, that would be inefficient, wasting too much time and energy. Thus, various kinds of defence mechanisms originate for this purpose, such as the confirmation bias, which is a tendency to consider only evidence that fits our existing beliefs. A believer in astrology would do this, for example, by considering all correct predictions by an astrologer to be proof of its validity, while ignoring the ones that turn out false.

And indeed, this is why most arguments, especially about politics and economics, are so frustrating. If both sides have firm beliefs, they stand little chance of convincing the other person, for most reasoned argument in such cases is rationalisation couched as reason. The next time you get into one of those arguments, and witness one of them, you will actually be able to observe this happening. The delight of it all is that the people involved will not be aware of this process, and will honestly believe themselves to be open-minded individuals who are, well, thinking it through. But that is mostly self-deception.

The Bajrang Dal in Bangkok?

2007-02-14T23:36:00.000+05:30

Or so it would seem. Joy.

And to think that's where so many middle-aged, pot-bellied Indians go for some action. "Bangkok? Oh, there's a conference there, darling. You'll get bored."

(Link via email from Gautam John.)

Coming to Climax?

2007-02-14T19:10:00.000+05:30

No, I'm not making any untoward suggestion to you, dear reader, but merely proposing a geographical expedition. You see, there are eight cities in the US named Climax: in Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Alabama and Pennsylvania also have Intercourse, and I wonder if the road to Climax leads through there.

Now you know why we have so many Indians applying for the H1B visa every year. Land of opportunity my foot!

(Link via email from Arjun Narayan, who blogs on it here.)

Is it a horse or a bike?

2007-02-14T11:26:00.000+05:30

Indian cinema never ceases to amaze me. Watch this:

Can they do that in Hollywood? Huh? Huh?

(Link via email from Naveen Mandava.)

Part of the problem, part of the solution

2007-02-14T11:11:00.000+05:30

Nanubhai Desai relates at the Indian Economy Blog how he went to a lunch meeting with a bunch of Indian MPs, and someone asked them:

To what extent is bad governance retarding growth and poverty reduction? And what specific steps do you think Parliament can take to change that over the coming years?

At this point Sachin Pilot asked for the mike and said:

We are part of the problem… and hopefully, we can be part of the solution.

Bang on about the diagnosis, but I'm not sure I share Pilot's optimism about the treatment. Even if a handful of politicians are sincere and want change, there is little chance of parliament coming together to reform a system from which they benefit. As long as their main incentives are money or power, Indian politicians will not reform our system of governance.

Or do you think that there is a chance that some of the younger politicians, who come from political families and were born to money and power, are driven differently? We shall see.

On new trends in writing

2007-02-14T03:45:00.000+05:30

In an article in the Guardian titled "Subcontinental shift," Kathleen McCaul examines a new trend of Indian writers who are choosing to write while remaining in India, instead of going abroad. As far as I'm concerned, vocation matters more than location.

Having got that smartass copywriter line out of the way, let me point you to the most delightful headline ever: "Man in contention for romantic novel prize."

The horror!

On learning English

2007-02-14T03:27:00.000+05:30

No power on earth can stop me from clicking furiously on headlines that say: "Learn to speak English in 10 days flat!" This particular story is about "Jacob Nettikkadan, a 68-year-old philologist," who claims to have perfected an especially fast way of teaching English. The gentleman is quoted as saying:

In 10 days, the learner gets 10 times more knowledge in the language because the method of constructing 1,877 types of sentences in English is through 1,877 usages of verb - one type of sentence based on one usage of verb.

Joy. If that's the kind of English they learn...

A Valentine's Day story

2007-02-14T03:21:00.000+05:30

I can't help but share this romantic tale with you:

Surendra (25) and Poonam (23) Gupta seemed like just another newly-wed couple going on their honeymoon when they boarded the train to Goa on February 5.

However, two days later, while Surendra, a product executive with a pharma company, was found in an unconscious state in Goa, Poonam was found in a similar condition at Kalyan station.

Now, a week after the incident, both are accusing the other of trickery.

Have a good day, and don't do anything silly!

"Good girls do what they are told"

2007-02-14T03:07:00.000+05:30

What is most chilling about this story is that it happened repeatedly, across America, to people just like you and me. It show just how authority can exert such a powerful influence, and can suppress conscience and empathy.

That, of course, was quite what the famous Milgram experiment also demonstrated.

Valentine's Day and Indian culture

2007-02-14T00:44:00.000+05:30

The lines below are from a street-play I saw today, which was a parody of cultural protectionism. They were spoken by a character who was a member of the Bajrang Dal protesting Valentine's Day:

We will protest with all our might. We will do anything it takes to stop young couples in a behaviour that is against Indian culture.

Even exchanging cards at a young age is against Indian culture because it pollutes young minds.

Ok, ok, I lied. It wasn't from a parody: this is real.

How can you parody something that is so ridiculous to begin with?

Also, young people these days are more likely to exchange business cards than greeting cards. Pah.

(Link via email from Shrek.)

Vote for me in the Indibloggies!

2007-02-13T12:13:00.000+05:30

Great joy comes in informing you that India Uncut has been nominated for Best IndiBlog in this year's Indibloggies. I won this award last year, all thanks to the kindness of my readers, but the competition this time promises to be tougher.

If you feel India Uncut has given you a few moments of pleasure in the last year, and that it deserves this award, please feel free to vote for me. Immense hard work goes into giving you many things to read everyday, and I assure you that the sacrifices I have made for India Uncut include no cows.

Some other nominees in other categories I'd highly recommend:

Best Group/Community IndiBlog: The Indian Economy Blog by various contributors, including me.

Best Humanities IndiBlog: The Middle Stage by Chandrahas Choudhury.

Best New IndiBlog: Kalachakra by Shruti Rajagopalan.

Blogs like Digital Inspiration (Science/Technology) and Trivial Matters (Photoblog and Travel) are also well worth your time, and I hope they win in their respective categories.

Do express your preferences by voting here. It will take five minutes, and no, you do not need to have a blog to vote, that field is optional. I think you're allowed one vote per email ID.

Update: Debashish, the administrator of the Indibloggies, updates:

If you don’t get an email after registration or after completing the survey, please check your spam folder, many Gmail users have reported this. I am not sure why this happens coz the mails are being sent from indibloggies mail ID only.

Also, do read the top of that post for his update about a repoll for the Science and Technology category.

Don't let all this scare you away, I need your vote!

The old lady on the moon...

2007-02-13T12:12:00.000+05:30

... has been explained.

Separate rumours exist that the moon isn't made of cheese and that Armstrong and Aldrin actually went there, and not to Nevada. Should I believe those?

Low taxes and free trade

2007-02-13T11:35:00.000+05:30

Immense amusement -- and some consternation -- arises when I read this on Cato @ Liberty:

In a move that is both remarkable and disturbing, the European Commission plans to file a complaint - and threaten protectionist trade barriers - because attractive Swiss tax policies are supposedly a violation of a free-trade accord. The bureaucrats in Brussels are not arguing that Switzerland is imposing barriers against EU products. Instead, the Commission actually is taking the position that low taxes are attracting businesses that might otherwise operate in high-tax nations.

And this is wrong? You'd imagine people would learn from this, and figure out that low taxes draws more investment, driving up employment and productivity, which is good for the economy and the people, probably doing more good than the tax revenue sacrificed ever could. But no, if some countries are more attractive to investors than others, these gentlemen would like them all to be equally unattractive. Go figure.

(Link via email from Gautam John.)

Google in 1997

2007-02-12T14:56:00.000+05:30

Who would have thunk?

Ten years later, I can imagine someone (maybe me!) writing a post titled, "____ in 2007."

What's that ____?

(Link via Stephen Dubner at the Freakonomics blog.)

How we think about caste

2007-02-12T14:35:00.000+05:30

Sify has a report on the various people who could be the next president of India -- they name Amitabh Bachchan as a candidate! -- and I found the following line, about Sushil Kumar Shinde, to be somewhat odd:

From the Congress camp, Shinde has emerged as a frontrunner as a Dalit candidate but the appointment of a Dalit Chief Justice has now reduced his chances a wee bit.

It's like someone is handing out rations. Ideally, Shinde's caste should not even matter, only his competence should. And yet, in this era of identity politics, it is crucial. Pity.

(Link via email from BV Harish Kumar.)

From idealism springs horror

2007-02-12T13:41:00.000+05:30

Adam Gopnik, reviewing David A Bell's "The First Total War," writes in the New Yorker:

Before the modern period, wars were just part of life, like taxes and sickness. Every country fought them and was expected to fight them—they were a necessary sign of aristocratic virtue among the officers who led them—but they were fought largely along established lines, and among soldiers who were, like Renaissance mercenaries, more devoted to the profession than to any cause. [...]

Into this often bloody but still limited and cautious warfare came, alas, the intellectuals. The French philosophes of the Enlightenment began to see war not as one of those things which happen but as one of those things which must be forbidden. [...] Of course, once the philosophes had dreamed of an end to war, the fact that war hadn’t ended could mean only that someone was keeping it from ending. The vexing remnant of the old-fashioned had to be swept away. Through the one-last-time exertions of total war, total peace would arrive at last.

And so, Bell argues—using a reverse spin familiar to all readers of Foucault and company—from the germ of Enlightenment idealism springs modern horror. Instead of limited battles, we have entire nations swept up together in ideological or nationalist crusades: the long line of misery that led to “the war to end all wars,” “the decisive ideological struggle of our time,” and so on, each designed to use maximum violence to end violence in the world, with predictable results. Wars to end all wars give way to wars that never end.

Indeed, there is nothing more horrible than a dream of utopia. And Bell's book and Gopnik's article aren't just about history -- idealism and war are inevitable bedmates in our times as well, no matter which side you look at. No?

Children and horoscopes

2007-02-12T13:03:00.000+05:30

I've long believed that most people who have kids are not fit to be parents. That might be part of the explanation for why we humans are so screwed up. My belief finds support in a report in today's DNA that says:

More and more couples are exploiting Caesarean sections to manipulate the horoscope of the baby.

It is regrettable that the parents of these couples did not practice birth control more vigorously. Most of us, frankly, are better off flushed down or bled away*.

(Some earlier posts on astrology etc: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.)

*Apologies for the imagery. News reports about blind superstition don't generally put me in such a foul mood, but there are babies involved here, who could be adversely affected by this nonsense. Pah!

Update (February13): Reader Aboli Salvi writes in:

Oh, this is nothing. A chart was actually published and made available to all sometime in the 1980's. The chart very accurately predicts the baby's sex based on the day he/she was conceived. That way, parents who wanted babies born under particular zodiac sign and those who wanted only baby boys could make sure they were conceived on a particular day,month and time. My mother has such a chart and when I checked my birth date....it pretty accurately predicted a girl:) this is not a new concept at all...but it has been mostly misused by parents wanting "boys" :| such a pity :(

Aboli sends an example of one such chart used in China. Hell and damnation.

Rakhi Sawant's Valentine's Day message

2007-02-12T12:20:00.000+05:30

Hindustan Times asks Rakhi Sawant if she has a Valentine's Day message for her boyfriend, Abhishek. Her message:

Don't object to whatever I wear, small or big.

Heh.

What I find charming about Rakhi -- and people who watched Bigg Boss regularly will surely agree with me -- is that at any given point of time, she says what's on her mind with complete honesty. WYSIWYG. A few months ago I would have imagined her saying the quoted words above for effect, but it now seems to me that she is being entirely candid about what she would really have told Abhishek. Her answer to the next question in the interview is another indication of that candour. Who among us could be so open in public?

We're a society of voyeurs, of course, which ensures that Rakhi will get much more than 15 minutes of fame, with her life and her thoughts an open book. I'm not sure that's good for her, but the tabloids love it, and so it goes.

(Some posts on Bigg Boss: 1, 2, 3, 4. And on the Mika/Rakhi episode: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

A surge of Indianness?

2007-02-12T12:01:00.000+05:30

Indiatimes reports:

The Republic Day that just went by has had a greater impact on Akshay Kumar than any previous ‘flag’ day ever has. Reason? He feels he’s grown closer to his Indian roots than ever before. And the feelings of idealism and ‘Indianness’ are surging within him like a new source of adrenalin.

I can imagine Akshay going to the gym and bench-pressing a flag. Or doing the bicep curl with a mango (our national fruit), loving his country more with every flex. Joy.

(Previous posts with Purplocity/Verniness: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33.)

The Pink in Pink Floyd

2007-02-12T11:14:00.000+05:30

"Chef Jitendra Kumar is a huge Pink Floyd fan," reports DNA. Kumar is the executive chef of Taj Lands End, where Roger Waters will stay when he comes here for his Mumbai concert, and he has plans. DNA reports:

“On the three nights Roger Waters is staying with us I am going to have three different themes,” says Chef Jitendra. And each theme is going to be based on Pink Floyd’s popular numbers.

The first night sees the room based on the band’s name itself — everything’s going to be pink. “I am getting pink chocolates in the shape of CDs done; I’ve imported all kinds of berries that are pink or close so they can be used in the fruit sushi that I am making; also to drop in a little cocktail that I am whipping up,” says a very excited Chef. Want more? He’s dehydrating rose petals, getting organic chocolates (Callebaut) and laying out little chocolate Florentines.

Immense laughter erupts. Just as hamburgers got their name from Hamburg and not the use of ham, the naming of Pink Floyd has little to do with the colour pink. A quizzing nugget you learn in standard one is that the band was named after blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, and their Wikipedia page reveals that it might also have been named after the cats of Waters's one-time room-mate, Mick Steadman. Either way, the colour had nothing to do with it.

Fun comes just thinking of Waters entering his pink room. All you need is Boy George popping out from below the bed saying, "Surprise!" One nice little party that will be.

Launch of the new India Uncut delayed...

2007-02-12T11:08:00.000+05:30

... by two or three days. I know I'd promised to launch it today, and the site is more or less ready, but some final polishing is being done, and then I want to send it to friends for a day or two of testing. It should be up on Wednesday or Thursday. Sorry for the delay!

:(

Love, or a British passport?

2007-02-12T00:34:00.000+05:30

This could have been a nice love story if not for this bit towards the end of the piece:

Subhiya's father has accused Ashwani of marrying his daughter only to obtain a British passport. Is this true, I ask him. He replies "Yes" just as Subhiya interrupts.

Sigh. Some would argue, of course, that a British passport lasts forever, unlike love. That is a cynical view, but I am more cynical: nothing lasts forever.

Even cold November rain.

(Link via email from Arjun Swarup.)

Karnataka and Quebec

2007-02-11T23:59:00.000+05:30

Andrew Coulson is dismayed by the impending crackdown in Karnataka on English-language schools, and points to Quebec as a cautionary tale of having an "English-hostile language law." He writes:

[T]hat’s a lesson that Kannada activists could learn from… Canada. In a fascinating 2004 study of interprovincial migration, geographer Kao-Lee Liaw showed that non-Francophones were five times more likely to emigrate to another province if they lived in Quebec than if they lived in Ontario. And there’s no end in sight. A new report from the Association for Canadian Studies finds that, in 2006, Quebec incurred its single largest net population loss since 2000.

Given that attracting and retaining skilled immigrants is an important ingredient to sustained economic growth, the effects of this non-Francophone exodus are inevitable. Quebec’s economy consistently lags those of Ontario, Canada, and the United States. In fact, Quebec's per capita income ranks 54th in North America—behind all but two U.S. states and four Canadian provinces.

Indeed, Karnataka's status as the IT state of India could be threatened if the local supply of English speakers dries up. But while the economic implications of these new anti-English policies may be scary, the primary issue here is one of choice.

Coulson feels that parents should be empowered to choose the kind of education that their children should get, and that schools should be allowed to compete freely to meet the demands of those parents. I couldn't agree more. If I was a parent, I'd be mighty pissed if the state tried to dictate what kind of education my child could or could not avail of. Wouldn't you?

Also read: Coulson's excellent study, "How Markets Affect Quality" (pdf link), which was a useful source for my WSJA Op-Ed, "Why India needs school vouchers."

The greatest dad ever

2007-02-11T23:55:00.000+05:30

He fathered "at least 100,000 daughters and countless sons," and now he is dead. RIP, Galtee Merci, in Cow Heaven.

Immense sadness lactates.

(Link via email from Ravikiran Rao.

Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81.)