The Maanga

I don’t understand why this hanging of one’s head in shame is any different from right wing nuts.

If you aren’t an individual, you are a mob.

PS: Title with due apologies to TON.

A request. At some point I had written a lot on RH. And at another point, Nilu deleted the entire blog, taking some of my writing with it. If any of you have some of the more readable posts that I wrote - either in your feedreaders, or mail accounts or in your heads. Send to me please? At theothernilu[at]gmail[dot]com. A sudden urge to revisit strikes.  - theothernilu 

Being older than Generation X or Generation Y, I may be one of the few to remember the number of times Doordarshan showed Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”. The film was about a magical “zone” which had the power to grant one’s deepest desires as a result of a meteor or spacecraft crash from a super-civilization. It was adapted from “Roadside Picnic” written by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. At that time, DD showed movies from Russia, Cuba or North Korea. Maybe Iran.

Recently, during an interminable flight, I read the Strugatsky brothers’ “Definitely Maybe”. Another meditation on super-civilizations, more nuanced, as a group of scientists in an apartment complex recognize the Godelian impossibility of a super-civilization.  

From a childhood filled with tales of Baba Yaga the witch, small green mathematics monographs that sold for a rupee from where I learnt Lobachevskian geometry, physics problems from Irodov, science fiction by Stanislaw Lem and the brothers Strugatsky, Dovzhenko’s “Earth” and Paradzhanov’s “Color of pomegranates”,  I moved to the west, read Veblen, but still became an enthusiastic supporter of capitalism.  

As the financial world crumbles,  it is to the brothers Strugatsky that I turn to figure out why super-civilizations are impossible. And console myself with the thought that the most intelligent man in the world is Russian.

This blog used to be a non-linear train wreck.

The real point of the debate: ban all TV that’s not PBS

Exec 1: What about the downturn?

Exec2: It won’t affect us. After all, the financial  sector is not our customer.

Exec1: Isn’t credit a problem for our clients? How about fresh investments?

Exec2: It won’t affect us. After all the financial  sector is not our customer. At least not directly.

Exec1: What about general recession? That won’t affect us?

Exec2: It won’t affect us. People still fall ill.

Exec 1: We aren’t in the doctor business. What if companies cut down on employee benefits or retrench?

Exec 2: It won’t affect us. People still fall ill.

Maybe I’m not as comfortable being powerless as you are.

Maybe.

Much like porn, one can’t define good writing; it can only be read. Though, bad writing, it is becoming increasingly clear, can. Especially those that attempt humor – a good example. Humor, or a particular style of it, by definition, has to become stale relatively quickly; after all, there are only so many ways in which it can be achieved. The poorer the quality of the writing, lesser its longevity. Barath falls into a category of appealing to emotions with some misdirection and ambiguity thrown in. The milieu is Tamil upbringing. That theme is so straight forward that someone who has read him a few times can predict the set up and punch line; assume the narrative drift and the mock philosophical conclusions. All without even reading his write-up. Maybe it’s unfair to him that I use his example — he is a poor writer — even the more gifted writers of prose with a greater degree of sophistication fall victims.

Greatbong, Krish Ashok and several others are ready examples of belabored attempts at humor that are way past their laugh by dates[1]. The simple yardstick to measure bad writing in all the above instances is — people started to react. Of course, if they had not, they would have still sucked. However, the feedback makes the slotting of oneself that much more easier and thus becomes an irreversible process. There is no way in which Greatbong or Barath can now become funny.

When I started this rant, I thought I had a great idea on how eventually all blogs or these extended forms of interactions will be self limiting. But that now seems so fucking obvious that I don’t know why I started to write on it. Which probably explains the point of this more beautifully than I can.

[1] — One could add this blog to that list as well — but that would again be a bad attempt at a bad joke.

Ritwik, in a fairly idiotic post, essentially blames an idiot for his growing up. If a blog continues to be interesting for more than a six months, the problem is with the reader — not the author. Anyway, that is not the point of this post.

The problem he alludes to is probably very old and yet interesting. Amit Varma’s understanding of political economy is at odds with Ritwik’s and possibly that of Aristotle. DG Boland explains that better than I can in a 1997 write-up,

We should avoid, then, such expressions as “managing” the economy when we mean the political economy. The civil community is not a household “run” by the government. The relationship between the Government (the State in the narrow sense) and the community (the State in the widest sense) is of a kind altogether different from that between the head of the household (or other analogous organisation) and the household itself. The head of the body politic has much less control over how the community (and therefore its economy) is “run”. The communism of modern times makes the same mistake in this regard as Plato did. But all forms of socialism and theories of economic “management” (macro-economics) do the same to a greater or lesser degree.

Anyway, since the MBA types like to bandy serious work and not random mentions of Aristotle, Hannah Arendt deserves mention. Since I am not avataram to write an entire book in two paragraphs, I will link to her personal library which may help you resolve the essential questions on the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. The elegance of much of her work exists in the fact that one gets the feeling of it being obvious after having read it — unlike a certain Taleb.

Tracing the origins of the joker´s rictus smile. The black dahlia is better than the dark knight.