The Indian Bose in the universal boson

Read this article.

Do you think Indians are harping too much about the lack of mention of Satyendra Nath Bose's name in the media coverage of the CERN announcement last week? The articles in Hindustan Times and Economic Times seemed to be taking things too far with anthropological analyses that have nothing to do with Bose's work. The boson was named so around 1945 by the great Paul Dirac as a commemoration of Bose's work with Einstein. Much has happened since; why would we want to celebrate the Bose in the boson again and again?

[caption id="attachment_23631" align="aligncenter" width="275"] Dr. Satyendra Nath Bose[/caption]

The stage now belongs to the ATLAS and the CMS collaborations, and to Higgs, Kibble, Englert, Brout, Guralnik, and Hagen, and to physics itself as a triumph of worldwide cooperation in the face of many problems. Smarting because an Indian's mention was forgotten is jejune. Then again, this is mostly the layman and the media, because the physicists I met last week seemed to fully understand Bose's contribution to the field itself instead of count the frequency of his name's mention.

Priyamvada Natarajan, as she writes in the Hindustan Times, is wrong (and the Economic Times article's heading is just irritating). That Bose is not a household name like Einstein's is is not because of post-colonialism - the exceptions are abundant enough to warrant inclusion - but because we place too much faith in a name instead of remembering what the man behind the name did for physics.

The post-reporter era

One of the foundation stones of journalism is the process of reporting. That there is a messenger working the gap between an event and a story provides for news to exist and exist with myriad nuances attached to it. There are ethical and moral issues, technical considerations, writing styles, and presentation formats to perfect. The entire news-publishing industry is centered on the activities of reporters and streamlining them.

What the reporter requires the most is... well, a few things. The first is a domain of events, from which he picks issues to talk about. The second is a domain of stories, into which he publishes his reports. The third is a platform using which he may incentivize this process for himself, and acquire the tools with which he may publish his stories efficiently and effectively. The last entity is more commonly understood in the form of a publishing house.

The reason I've broken the working of a reporter into these categories is to understand what makes a reporter at all. Today, a reporter is most commonly understood in terms of an individual who is employed with a publishing house and publishes stories for them. Ideally, however, everyone is a reporter: simply the creation of knowledge by people based on experiences around them should be qualification enough. This calls into question the role of a publishing house: is it a platform working with which reporters may function efficiently, or is it an employer of reporters?

If it's an employer of reporters, then any publishing house wouldn't have to worry about where the course of journalism is going to take the organization itself. Reporters will have to change the way they work - how they spot issues, evolving writing styles to suit their audiences, so forth - but the publishing house will retain ownership of the reporters themselves. As long as it's not a platform which individuals use to function as reporters, things are going to be fine.



Now, let's move to the post-reporter era, where everyone is a reporter (of course, that's an idealized image, but even so). In this world, a reporter is not someone who works for a publishing house - that aspect of the word's meaning is left behind in the age of the publishing house. In this world, a reporter is someone who works simply as a messenger between the domains of events and stories, where the role of the publishing house as the owner of reportage is absent.

The nature of such a world throws light on the valuation of information. When multiple reporters cover different events and return to HQ to file their stories, the house decides which stories make the cut and which don't on the basis of a set of parameters. In other words, the house creates and assigns a particular value to each story, and then compares the values of different stories to determine their destiny.

In the post-reporter era, which is likely to be occupied by channels of individual presentation - ranging from word-of-mouth to full-scale websites - houses that thrive today on the valuation of information and the importance the houses' readers place on it  will steadily fade out. What exists will be an all-encompassing form of what is known as citizen journalism (CJ) today. Houses take to CJ because of the mutually beneficial relationship available therein: the CJ gets the coverage and the advantage of the issue pursued no longer being under wraps; the reporter gets a story that has both civic/criminal and human-interest angles to it.

However, when the CJ voids the relationship by refusing the intervention of a publishing/broadcasting house, and chooses to take his story straight to the people through a channel he finds effective enough, the house-level valuation of stories is replaced by a democratic institution that may or may not be guided by a paternalistic attitude.

Therefore, if a particular house has to survive into the post-reporter era, it must discard issue-valuation as an engine and instead rely on some other entity, such as one represented by a parameter whose efficiency is a maximizable quantity. This can be conceived as a fourth domain which, upon maximization, becomes the superset of which the three domains are subsets.

A counter-productive entity in this situation is that of property, which is accrued in great quantities by a high-achieving house in the present but which delays the onset of change in the future. Even when the house starts to experience slightly rougher weather, its first move will be to pump in more money, thereby offsetting change by some time. Only when the amount of property invested in delaying change is considerable will the house start to consider other alternatives, by which time other competing organizations will have moved into the future.

Consummation of the adversarial

The Vibrant Data Project attempts to make data more engaging, penetrative, and influential. As a first step toward achieving this goal, it has a definition of the modern press that is hinged on the role it played during the recent Arab Spring:

... disruptive flows of data, tools for analysis and visualization, and vehicles of communication and collaboration that have the potential to overthrow corrupt regimes, spread powerful new ideas, broaden economic opportunity, bust open corporate transparency, improve health and well being, and empower the protection of civil and political rights.

Even before the revolutions sprang up, the media's confrontational role was growing, broadening in terms of the issues it addressed and the kind of people it became relevant to. The Arab Spring was just the consummation of the adversarial.

The reason I'm going to have an eye out for this project (apart from contributing in any way I can) is that they're addressing the issue of information-penetration in just a way I would have: by democratizing data, assuring a routine delivery of value, and, most importantly, looking at data itself in terms of what it does rather than in terms of how it is generated.

Stay away from each other!

For being India’s largest English daily, the Times of India doesn’t sell as much as it is bought. And in all probability, those inflated numbers could’ve provided the newspaper the motivation and confidence to take on one of India most reputed dailies: The Hindu. Being only a regular-sized newbie in Chennai, it awakened the city one fine morning to its first salvo, “Stuck with the news that puts you to sleep?” Mildly-amused media historians would later testify that the Times brought the ensuing advertisement pogrom upon itself.

[caption id="attachment_21598" align="aligncenter" width="365" caption="Image courtesy Sandheep Adhwaryu"][/caption]

At a time when finger-pointing was absolutely unnecessary, Times pointed an entire arm at a newspaper that catered to a significantly different audience. Perhaps someone should have told it right then that if one messes with bulls, one only gets horns. Because when The Hindu struck, it transgressed the borders of Chennai that the Times had limited itself to: the YouTube videos parading the former’s ‘Stay ahead of the times!’ line went viral, advertisement banners sprung up all around Tamil Nadu, and the Times ship was all but sunk.



Unfortunately for Chennai, this jejune tussle was news for a week. Retired station-masters used to waking up every morning to a tumbler of filter coffee and The Hindu were now being alerted to the existence of Page 3 parties and wardrobe malfunctions. Large sections of important pages were given up to poking fun at the Times with thinly veiled smugness while readers tried to understand where the logic was in advertising about The Hindu in The Hindu to people who were already buying The Hindu. Masquerading media muscle under the pretext of snubbing the Times? Maybe.



Thinking it had thrown the kitchen sink into it its attack against The Hindu, the Times blanched when it got the bathtub back. Its first response was to acknowledge the “waking” of The Hindu to its competition. This led many to believe that the competition concerned the invention of catchphrases, prompting Dhanush to go back in time and record Kolaveri.

[caption id="attachment_21602" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Meteoric comeback!"][/caption]

To the Times, it is plausible that any publicity is good publicity, but The Hindu, in the opinion of many of its readers, overstated its strengths and wasted important space and time retaliating to a competitor’s notably specious claims. As the dust begins to settle now, residents of Chennai are finally waking up to a world where nothing has changed… except for a grim parting shot from the Times that makes too much sense.

[caption id="attachment_21603" align="alignleft" width="640" caption="The Hindu could take a leaf out of Einstein's book and (apart from running a daily science page) hold back from becoming a condescending news-giver."][/caption]

The glorified recycle bin

One of the better dailies in south India, The Hindu, brings out a science and technology section once a week (every Thursday). When you read the page, it becomes immediately evident that their science staff is either non-existent - which I hope is the case - or utterly incompetent.

For starters, none of the pieces they run on this page is original. All of them are picked from either science journalism organizations, like Discovery Magazine, PhysOrg, io9 or LiveScience, or from the blogs of prolific science journalists, like Ed Yong, Tom Levenson or Jennifer Ouellette. I'd have appreciated it had an effort been taken to contextualize those stories to an Indian audience, but all that's done is a textbook copy-paste manoeuvre.

[caption id="attachment_21377" align="aligncenter" width="254" caption="N. Ram, The Hindu's (now former) editor-in-chief"][/caption]

Further, the stories that the editor chooses to print on that day on that page are stories that have no time-value, i.e. the stories won't get stale even if they're read after a week. Things like muscles we thought we never had, weird animals, and some new images snapped by NASA's space telescopes make it there, and when I read them, I learn nothing knew that could be relevant except in a quiz.

News that never gets old will always be more of information than knowledge because the need of the hour keeps changing. And it keeps changing because our needs change the moment we read the paper and learn something new. Our needs change because we're constantly using knowledge of the world around us in different ways to move ahead, learn more and do more.

In such an environment, I'd like to know more about what's going on - particularly in science because science has been tipping the power scales in Asia's favour for the past few years. We could use such a shift away from the West to give ourselves an increasingly valuable competitive advantage. But no - it is India after all, and we, the newspapers, must feed only what the hungry want, not what the hungry deserve. And that's politics, dance, music and cricket.

I don't understand why only one page out of 20, or effectively only one page out of some 140 accounting for the entire week, is devoted to science and technology. For all that the nation touts to be its future and one of its major exports to the world, science news in the Indian publishing industry is as good as not represented. They can possibly have no excuse for this: there's enough going on just at the city-level to fill an entire page every day.

All I'm asking is, get science stories from the web - no issues - edit them a little, give credit to the original authors, and publish them on that day itself. There are new technologies being born and culled everyday, new inventors and innovators coming into the scene, new products, processes and techniques finding their way into our lives. There's news-value in all of those stories, so make use of it. (I myself read more than 150 articles per day, and that's after filtering out an equal number from my feeds.)

To conclude: dear The Hindu, don't ditch science because you think no one's eating it. No one's eating it because you're ditching it.

Comparative analysis of media literature on PSA testing in the USA

Ever since the Food and Drug Administration approved the deployment of PSA testing to check for prostate cancer amongst men over the age of 50, the project has morphed into a public health disaster. In fact, consequences of its improper administration have resulted in one of its most noted former advocates, Richard J. Ablin, distancing himself from it.



PSA stands for protein-specific antigens, which are produced by the prostate gland in the human body. When the protein level in the blood, as a result of the secretion, crosses 4 ng/mL, it is indicative of prostate cancer. However, in the last 17 years since the test was approved, only 3.8 per cent of the men tested turned out to have prostate cancer even though thousands underwent painful surgeries as a result of false positives. This has resulted in widespread debates on the subject emerging in the USA as well as in other countries that use the PSA test regarding its risks and cost benefits.

The issue was covered comprehensively by the mass media and especially by three publications in the United States: The New York Times, LA Times and the Washington Post. NYT also carried an essay by Ablin last year (dated 9 March, 2010). However, while the focus in all three publications was on the emerging dissatisfaction amongst test subjects, urologists and policy-makers, each of the newspapers focused on one distinct and important aspect of the story.

[caption id="attachment_20488" align="aligncenter" width="397" caption="Richard J. Ablin"][/caption]

The NY Times article evaluated the test and presented a series of numbers that highlighted its failure to be comprehensive, robust and reliable. Quoting the results of a study undertaken by the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), the article stresses on the test's inability to influence healthcare positively and the onus it places on the Ministry of Health to substitute it with one that works. Furthermore, the article also argues against the test's obsession with simply the symptoms of the cancer and its inability to discern the precise causes of those symptoms as being a significant contributor to its failure.

In doing so, it sidesteps the cost-versus risk conflict that has arisen as a result and instead, by condemning the technique, does not offer any judgment on the need to administer the test by the FDA. At the same time, the article fails to mention the absence of any urologists on the panel and, therefore, loses the balance it could have otherwise retained. Whether this was done deliberately to restrict the readers' attention to the shortcomings of the test or not is unknown.

The Los Angeles Times article went another way and evaluated the consequences of the administration of the test. While the debate on its administration perseveres, that the consequences are responsible for its happening in the first place were here brought to light. With a number like 3.8 per cent, the first thing that comes to mind is not the apparent commonality of the disease but the incredible failure rate - which is compounded by the painful implications of a prostatectomy.

When the prostate gland is removed, a man's capability to produce semen, or for that matter to get or sustain an erection, is severely reduced. Given the thousands of men tested since 1994, it arises that for every 48 people tested, 1 is diagnosed successfully with prostate cancer while 47 have unnecessary trouble staying out of the bathroom for long. In fact, a randomized study, where test subjects were divided between one group that received yearly PSA tests and another that received "usual care", reported in the same article highlights the disparity: 50 from the special group died over the course of 10 years as opposed to 44 from the "usual care" group.

In hindsight, this forces men to make tough choices post-testing, choices that can make or break a family in many cases. That this test is forcing such choices to be made is the point of condemnation and not the ineffectiveness of the test itself, argues the LA Times. If anything, the socio-economic outcome seems unconstitutional. As the writer puts it, it is "his prerogative, his prostate."

As the NYT article fails to point out, as Ablin argues in his essay for the NYT, as the LA Times post suggests, a small shift in the target demographic could yield far better results. Men in the age-group of 50 to 75 are "much more likely to die with prostate cancer and much less likely to die of prostate cancer". This is because the disease develops very slowly. Therefore, instead of getting every man older than 25 tested, it would make much more sense to not destroy the lives of most young men in all probability.

The third publication, the Washington Post, evaluated the options presented by the test. This is not to say that it didn't consider the test itself or its dire consequences. On the contrary, it has presented them in a way as to be balanced so its readers could judge their relevance based on the options that the test presented to those who underwent it.

In the last 17 years, the administration of the test has cost $3 billion, not to mention the costs of those who underwent surgeries and subsequent treatment. For someone who has read only the NYT and LAT articles, the presence of such a number instantly forces the conclusion that the test has to go. However, what about those whose lives were saved simply because of the test? How do you argue with them? This is the most important line of thought taken up by the WP, a line that has been missing from the other two newspapers. The lack of suggestions is made up for by increasing the awareness of the people so that public debate becomes more informed - instead of relying solely on the judgments of doctors.

After all, heaping condemnation on the most accessible test to detect for the most prevalent disease in the USA cannot go unopposed.

This comparison reminds me of something else I've been thinking about: if you were writing this article, would you go ahead and be responsibly suggestive like NYT and LAT were or would you hold back, stay fully neutral and continue to just provide information like the WP did?

The Spielberg-Kafka Impasse

The following are afterthoughts - as seems to have become the norm - concerning a good lecture by Prof. R. Radhakrishnan at the Asian College of Journalism on the 1st day of August, 2011.

--

Professionalism

I profess skill. Therefore, I join a profession. Do I therefore incur the responsibilities dictated by professionalism? Before we discuss the source of values, before we seek to include the mechanism of ethics in our discussion, it's important to address the basic conflict in the form of professionalism on the one hand and simply fulfilling responsibilities on the other.

Disregard the context for a minute: where do values come from? They are always self-imposed because they are the consequences of subjective evaluations of our reality by ourselves (they do not arise out of the context itself and, thus, the loss of context does not matter in understanding the nature of our values). When different people espouse different values, the institution no longer remains in a position to enjoin what those values are but still is able to hire or fire those it deems compatible with its goals.

Are values a priori? No. Are they necessary? They seem to be. Why? I've addressed this question earlier: the system of values that we deem necessary is a matter of personal choice; however, it is neither mandated nor forbidden. Are they the principle definitions of a general ethical code of conduct?

Possibly: the "goodness" quotient of the outcome of my actions is evaluated against the requirements of my profession together with certain humanistic unavoidables. In that light, my system of values - if any - is going to be influenced by the safeguarding of my interests and perhaps those of the organization, too. Values, I believe, are strictly a posteriori.

Freedom

Say what you will, freedom is a conversational piece. A flosculation. Perhaps its most palpable forms as such have all been macropolitical. In the micropolitical sense, however, it's a modality that gets diffused in various field logics, perhaps as a result of attempts by the freedom-seeker to contextualize it.

Reality itself has been undeniably victimized by such things as inflation and globalization: the "bigger picture" as I choose to see it does not step beyond the confines of my laptop. Consequently, my freedom is limited to the choices I will have a right to access and/or make, and so my freedom is to customize my Facebook profile, my freedom is my right to privacy on the web, and so forth.

There comes a difference when the macropolitical and the micropolitical engage, whereby a mitigating mediating force becomes apparent. When Gandhi asked those seeking to "do good" to consider what good they would do for the common man, did philanthropists and samaritans scurry to seek out the necessities of the common person? Or did they surmise the nature of the common man's micropolitical environment and scaled down the relevance of their ambitions?

In the name of what?

What am I speaking for? (Too many people go on at ACJ about how they've asked themselves this very question so many times - so what? I've asked myself the question many times, too, and I don't get the implied significance - are things all that ambivalent?).

Whether or not a collective is involved is irrelevant to me: as long as I am being representational, I will represent only that face of the collective that embodies all that is necessary for the representation to be accurate, i.e., like an individual who is the summa of all that the collective wishes communicated.

A minor reference to historicity becomes necessary (or, as Prof. Radhakrishnan chose to call it, temporality): to do something "in the name of an event that has become a part of history and acquired a political, social, cultural or economic flavour because of its eventual outcome."

(Say a man approaches a crossroads at which his friend awaits. The man says to his friend, "My cause is X." The friend replies, "I endorse your cause. Now, go forth." Presented with three options, the man picks the path straight ahead. He walks it, and its end he finds he has emerged a supporter of cause Y. Now, can the man's friend be said to endorse cause Y?)

What's your dharma?

Does idealism have its price in a world that constantly debates its pertinence? Is it fair to consistently toe the line as a matter of principle? Am I going to talk about just what shouldn't be talked about? It's the whole professionalism versus fundamentalism argument once more (I mean "fundamentalist" in its original sense).

Dharma is a perception of the self when between objective reality and subjective reality, and as such the former's existence is a matter of debate. However, irrespective of the conflict between a way of thinking and a way of practising, my dharma is a mechanism constituted by my experiences to model them (i.e., the ways).

However, there is some abrasion in the form of my individual autonomy. When extant in some reality, is it possible for me to not precipitate the antecedence of reality to my intervention? In other words, can I act without being acted upon, perhaps without reality having been presumptuous of my actions?

It wouldn't be right, I conclude, that the truth, per se, exists independent of my existence and so constitutes an independent reality with the employ of which I can reflect myself. Reality will always be antecedent of my intervention because I am involved in the constitution of that reality, and when I act, I can only do so in spaces that have room for the outcome/effect.

The truth is a negotiated simplification because I exist relative to a totality. (This reminds me of a post I wrote quite some time ago on the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis in linguistic theory.)

The simulacrum

When moving from being real to being intelligible, we move away from the objective existence of reality and toward the subjective counterpart (as if they're distinct!), and in the process attempt to include our understanding of reality. This "understanding" is encapsulated by the production of intelligibility (tied in with, but different from, the production of meaning).

So, what does it mean to have a point of view?

Just as in the previous statements, intelligibility also suffers from the marriage of existence and subjectivity: the question of a universally extant intelligibility is mired with the likelihood of the creation of new frames of knowledge in order to create such understanding. Just like the notion of freedom is extra-political, the moment we put something into words in order to understand it, we suffuse it with the persisting symbolism in language: a mediator rises like a snake on the bosom.

Ultimately, all of this condenses into the nature of the posthuman subject: just like Abhinavagupta's Shaivite position held that the individual consciousness is an individuation of the universal consciousness that is God, the posthuman is an individuation of the unified human entity. Being in possession of an emergent ontology, only the posthuman subject is capable of self-reflexivity, i.e., to avail the option of defying norms, etc., simply by availing the tools with which to study his reflection.

If you've read Edwin Abbott's Flatland (1884), the nature of self-reflexivity (as in social theories) can be explained by the inability of the two-dimensional objects to understand the real nature of the three-dimensional sphere. Going another way, it can also be analogized to the sphere's ability to view Flatland in its entirety while the lines and shapes can't.

And that brings us to...

The Spielberg-Kafka Impasse

Steven Spielberg must never adapt Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis for the silver-screen. Kafka's insectoid captured perhaps the uncapturable aspect of change and of displacement, and its now-Kafkaesque surrealism is befitting because it leaves ample space for interpretation.

If Spielberg made a movie out of it, the imagery would become set in stone, its changeable nature lost to the mass of readers who find solace in Kafka's consideration of such emotions. The posthuman would settle down back into the human entity, no longer capable of assuming different identities at will, the mediating ghosts would turn into phantoms, in their wake leaving a world incapable of change.

The Spielberg-Kafka Impasse

The following are afterthoughts - as seems to have become the norm - concerning a good lecture by Prof. R. Radhakrishnan at the Asian College of Journalism on the 1st day of August, 2011.

--

Professionalism

I profess skill. Therefore, I join a profession. Do I therefore incur the responsibilities dictated by professionalism? Before we discuss the source of values, before we seek to include the mechanism of ethics in our discussion, it's important to address the basic conflict in the form of professionalism on the one hand and simply fulfilling responsibilities on the other.

Disregard the context for a minute: where do values come from? They are always self-imposed because they are the consequences of subjective evaluations of our reality by ourselves (they do not arise out of the context itself and, thus, the loss of context does not matter in understanding the nature of our values). When different people espouse different values, the institution no longer remains in a position to enjoin what those values are but still is able to hire or fire those it deems compatible with its goals.

Are values a priori? No. Are they necessary? They seem to be. Why? I've addressed this question earlier: the system of values that we deem necessary is a matter of personal choice; however, it is neither mandated nor forbidden. Are they the principle definitions of a general ethical code of conduct?

Possibly: the "goodness" quotient of the outcome of my actions is evaluated against the requirements of my profession together with certain humanistic unavoidables. In that light, my system of values - if any - is going to be influenced by the safeguarding of my interests and perhaps those of the organization, too. Values, I believe, are strictly a posteriori.

Freedom

Say what you will, freedom is a conversational piece. A flosculation. Perhaps its most palpable forms as such have all been macropolitical. In the micropolitical sense, however, it's a modality that gets diffused in various field logics, perhaps as a result of attempts by the freedom-seeker to contextualize it.

Reality itself has been undeniably victimized by such things as inflation and globalization: the "bigger picture" as I choose to see it does not step beyond the confines of my laptop. Consequently, my freedom is limited to the choices I will have a right to access and/or make, and so my freedom is to customize my Facebook profile, my freedom is my right to privacy on the web, and so forth.

There comes a difference when the macropolitical and the micropolitical engage, whereby a mitigating mediating force becomes apparent. When Gandhi asked those seeking to "do good" to consider what good they would do for the common man, did philanthropists and samaritans scurry to seek out the necessities of the common person? Or did they surmise the nature of the common man's micropolitical environment and scaled down the relevance of their ambitions?

In the name of what?

What am I speaking for? (Too many people go on at ACJ about how they've asked themselves this very question so many times - so what? I've asked myself the question many times, too, and I don't get the implied significance - are things all that ambivalent?).

Whether or not a collective is involved is irrelevant to me: as long as I am being representational, I will represent only that face of the collective that embodies all that is necessary for the representation to be accurate, i.e., like an individual who is the summa of all that the collective wishes communicated.

A minor reference to historicity becomes necessary (or, as Prof. Radhakrishnan chose to call it, temporality): to do something "in the name of an event that has become a part of history and acquired a political, social, cultural or economic flavour because of its eventual outcome."

(Say a man approaches a crossroads at which his friend awaits. The man says to his friend, "My cause is X." The friend replies, "I endorse your cause. Now, go forth." Presented with three options, the man picks the path straight ahead. He walks it, and its end he finds he has emerged a supporter of cause Y. Now, can the man's friend be said to endorse cause Y?)

What's your dharma?

Does idealism have its price in a world that constantly debates its pertinence? Is it fair to consistently toe the line as a matter of principle? Am I going to talk about just what shouldn't be talked about? It's the whole professionalism versus fundamentalism argument once more (I mean "fundamentalist" in its original sense).

Dharma is a perception of the self when between objective reality and subjective reality, and as such the former's existence is a matter of debate. However, irrespective of the conflict between a way of thinking and a way of practising, my dharma is a mechanism constituted by my experiences to model them (i.e., the ways).

However, there is some abrasion in the form of my individual autonomy. When extant in some reality, is it possible for me to not precipitate the antecedence of reality to my intervention? In other words, can I act without being acted upon, perhaps without reality having been presumptuous of my actions?

It wouldn't be right, I conclude, that the truth, per se, exists independent of my existence and so constitutes an independent reality with the employ of which I can reflect myself. Reality will always be antecedent of my intervention because I am involved in the constitution of that reality, and when I act, I can only do so in spaces that have room for the outcome/effect.

The truth is a negotiated simplification because I exist relative to a totality. (This reminds me of a post I wrote quite some time ago on the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis in linguistic theory.)

The simulacrum

When moving from being real to being intelligible, we move away from the objective existence of reality and toward the subjective counterpart (as if they're distinct!), and in the process attempt to include our understanding of reality. This "understanding" is encapsulated by the production of intelligibility (tied in with, but different from, the production of meaning).

So, what does it mean to have a point of view?

Just as in the previous statements, intelligibility also suffers from the marriage of existence and subjectivity: the question of a universally extant intelligibility is mired with the likelihood of the creation of new frames of knowledge in order to create such understanding. Just like the notion of freedom is extra-political, the moment we put something into words in order to understand it, we suffuse it with the persisting symbolism in language: a mediator rises like a snake on the bosom.

Ultimately, all of this condenses into the nature of the posthuman subject: just like Abhinavagupta's Shaivite position held that the individual consciousness is an individuation of the universal consciousness that is God, the posthuman is an individuation of the unified human entity. Being in possession of an emergent ontology, only the posthuman subject is capable of self-reflexivity, i.e., to avail the option of defying norms, etc., simply by availing the tools with which to study his reflection.

If you've read Edwin Abbott's Flatland (1884), the nature of self-reflexivity (as in social theories) can be explained by the inability of the two-dimensional objects to understand the real nature of the three-dimensional sphere. Going another way, it can also be analogized to the sphere's ability to view Flatland in its entirety while the lines and shapes can't.

And that brings us to...

The Spielberg-Kafka Impasse

Steven Spielberg must never adapt Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis for the silver-screen. Kafka's insectoid captured perhaps the uncapturable aspect of change and of displacement, and its now-Kafkaesque surrealism is befitting because it leaves ample space for interpretation.

If Spielberg made a movie out of it, the imagery would become set in stone, its changeable nature lost to the mass of readers who find solace in Kafka's consideration of such emotions. The posthuman would settle down back into the human entity, no longer capable of assuming different identities at will, the mediating ghosts would turn into phantoms, in their wake leaving a world incapable of change.

A superficial look at tech's future

In the technological sphere, the end of history will be marked by its death, a definite conclusion that will establish the death of institutions and discrete social units as the technological community will recognize it to be. Connectivity as a measure of development, as a measure of a product's strength irrespective of its classification as a social media service, will dissolve into the greater and increasingly accessible resource called progression.

Before Facebook was launched in 2004, Wikipedia was the most prominent face of social media: what Wikipedia essentially represented was free information sharing (apart from providing a structure for the exercising of a collective social responsibility). After February 2004, the increased penetration of the social media tools into communities resulted in the conspicuous breakage of borders.

Consequently, products that addressed themselves to certain demographics found it harder to utilize the business value of such divisions, finding the way into the future being led not by the social parameters that were unaffected but by those that were indeed affected by social networking. People were confused and wanted to "belong" somewhere, to the same extent (if not more) as they did earlier, and so began to form communities on the web.

However, demand and supply of certain necessities were beginning to become skewed as well because, with increased social participation and representation, access to products began to increase. Therefore, users no longer came together based on what they needed as much as what they thought needed preservation in the face of a loss of context: their interests. In fact, both Facebook and Wikipedia have only magnified or downplayed necessities, and outright changes have not been effected simply because social media has not substituted any other social institution any of whose functions it replicates more efficiently.

Perhaps the most detrimental move at this point would be to attempt to institutionalize processes for the purpose of evaluation or commercial utilization. As technological advancements continue to happen, trying to create borders and limit the pervasion of continuity could very well result in the rigidization of such borders because discrimination at this point of time is bound to result in separately evolving data architectures and platforms, perhaps growing to acquire a significantly different morphology.

Being all complex mechanisms with which to express ourselves in essence, products and services like the smartphones, tablets, blogs, e-mail, and social networks will come to replace existing social mechanisms in their entirety.

For example, with the advent of citizen journalism and the easy access to blogging tools, information distribution systems such as media establishments will have to reorganize everything from their attitude toward journalism to their revenue models constantly. At some point, when broadband penetration has hit a maximum, for example, the fall of the newspaper will begin to accelerate drastically because news will no longer remain a commodity to be purchased but interactions with which are taken for granted.

When the trajectory of connectivity becomes flattened, when there exists the politico-economic gap mandated between those well-connected and those loosely distributed, any product and service created to enhance the experience of "being connected" is going to result in a bloating, resulting in an eventual defiance of its growth trends and a collapse into the primeval form of a newly-birthed successor trend: the direct deployment of the social network.

*

Beyond which point can it be said that humankind's access to the destructive elements of common technology has begun? I believe that it is our skin - the violation of our biological construction. All that has transpired in the past has been the result of the continued constitution of social institution.

And, for as long as we don't willingly violate that constitution, for as long as we continue to serve our naturally mandated purpose, for as long as we don't interfere with the evolutionary process, I think we ought to be safe from the harmful consequences of letting technology associate with us closely.

A superficial look at tech's future

In the technological sphere, the end of history will be marked by its death, a definite conclusion that will establish the death of institutions and discrete social units as the technological community will recognize it to be. Connectivity as a measure of development, as a measure of a product's strength irrespective of its classification as a social media service, will dissolve into the greater and increasingly accessible resource called progression.

Before Facebook was launched in 2004, Wikipedia was the most prominent face of social media: what Wikipedia essentially represented was free information sharing (apart from providing a structure for the exercising of a collective social responsibility). After February 2004, the increased penetration of the social media tools into communities resulted in the conspicuous breakage of borders.

Consequently, products that addressed themselves to certain demographics found it harder to utilize the business value of such divisions, finding the way into the future being led not by the social parameters that were unaffected but by those that were indeed affected by social networking. People were confused and wanted to "belong" somewhere, to the same extent (if not more) as they did earlier, and so began to form communities on the web.

However, demand and supply of certain necessities were beginning to become skewed as well because, with increased social participation and representation, access to products began to increase. Therefore, users no longer came together based on what they needed as much as what they thought needed preservation in the face of a loss of context: their interests. In fact, both Facebook and Wikipedia have only magnified or downplayed necessities, and outright changes have not been effected simply because social media has not substituted any other social institution any of whose functions it replicates more efficiently.

Perhaps the most detrimental move at this point would be to attempt to institutionalize processes for the purpose of evaluation or commercial utilization. As technological advancements continue to happen, trying to create borders and limit the pervasion of continuity could very well result in the rigidization of such borders because discrimination at this point of time is bound to result in separately evolving data architectures and platforms, perhaps growing to acquire a significantly different morphology.

Being all complex mechanisms with which to express ourselves in essence, products and services like the smartphones, tablets, blogs, e-mail, and social networks will come to replace existing social mechanisms in their entirety.

For example, with the advent of citizen journalism and the easy access to blogging tools, information distribution systems such as media establishments will have to reorganize everything from their attitude toward journalism to their revenue models constantly. At some point, when broadband penetration has hit a maximum, for example, the fall of the newspaper will begin to accelerate drastically because news will no longer remain a commodity to be purchased but interactions with which are taken for granted.

When the trajectory of connectivity becomes flattened, when there exists the politico-economic gap mandated between those well-connected and those loosely distributed, any product and service created to enhance the experience of "being connected" is going to result in a bloating, resulting in an eventual defiance of its growth trends and a collapse into the primeval form of a newly-birthed successor trend: the direct deployment of the social network.

*

Beyond which point can it be said that humankind's access to the destructive elements of common technology has begun? I believe that it is our skin - the violation of our biological construction. All that has transpired in the past has been the result of the continued constitution of social institution.

And, for as long as we don't willingly violate that constitution, for as long as we continue to serve our naturally mandated purpose, for as long as we don't interfere with the evolutionary process, I think we ought to be safe from the harmful consequences of letting technology associate with us closely.

A superficial look at tech's future

In the technological sphere, the end of history will be marked by its death, a definite conclusion that will establish the death of institutions and discrete social units as the technological community will recognize it to be. Connectivity as a measure of development, as a measure of a product's strength irrespective of its classification as a social media service, will dissolve into the greater and increasingly accessible resource called progression.

Before Facebook was launched in 2004, Wikipedia was the most prominent face of social media: what Wikipedia essentially represented was free information sharing (apart from providing a structure for the exercising of a collective social responsibility). After February 2004, the increased penetration of the social media tools into communities resulted in the conspicuous breakage of borders.

Consequently, products that addressed themselves to certain demographics found it harder to utilize the business value of such divisions, finding the way into the future being led not by the social parameters that were unaffected but by those that were indeed affected by social networking. People were confused and wanted to "belong" somewhere, to the same extent (if not more) as they did earlier, and so began to form communities on the web.

However, demand and supply of certain necessities were beginning to become skewed as well because, with increased social participation and representation, access to products began to increase. Therefore, users no longer came together based on what they needed as much as what they thought needed preservation in the face of a loss of context: their interests. In fact, both Facebook and Wikipedia have only magnified or downplayed necessities, and outright changes have not been effected simply because social media has not substituted any other social institution any of whose functions it replicates more efficiently.

Perhaps the most detrimental move at this point would be to attempt to institutionalize processes for the purpose of evaluation or commercial utilization. As technological advancements continue to happen, trying to create borders and limit the pervasion of continuity could very well result in the rigidization of such borders because discrimination at this point of time is bound to result in separately evolving data architectures and platforms, perhaps growing to acquire a significantly different morphology.

Being all complex mechanisms with which to express ourselves in essence, products and services like the smartphones, tablets, blogs, e-mail, and social networks will come to replace existing social mechanisms in their entirety.

For example, with the advent of citizen journalism and the easy access to blogging tools, information distribution systems such as media establishments will have to reorganize everything from their attitude toward journalism to their revenue models constantly. At some point, when broadband penetration has hit a maximum, for example, the fall of the newspaper will begin to accelerate drastically because news will no longer remain a commodity to be purchased but interactions with which are taken for granted.

When the trajectory of connectivity becomes flattened, when there exists the politico-economic gap mandated between those well-connected and those loosely distributed, any product and service created to enhance the experience of "being connected" is going to result in a bloating, resulting in an eventual defiance of its growth trends and a collapse into the primeval form of a newly-birthed successor trend: the direct deployment of the social network.

*

Beyond which point can it be said that humankind's access to the destructive elements of common technology has begun? I believe that it is our skin - the violation of our biological construction. All that has transpired in the past has been the result of the continued constitution of social institution.

And, for as long as we don't willingly violate that constitution, for as long as we continue to serve our naturally mandated purpose, for as long as we don't interfere with the evolutionary process, I think we ought to be safe from the harmful consequences of letting technology associate with us closely.

A velvet fist in an iron glove

The United Progressive Alliance ruling the country has to get tougher, more resilient, if it expects the period of its rule to be smooth and unmarred whatsoever. One of the principle differences between the BJP and the Congress (which forms the majority in the coalition) is the commanding of loyalty. Everybody knows that the lesser the party does for the ministry, the lesser it is considered to have done for the people, and the more it demands loyalty than commands it.

There have already been three instances during which unreasonable demands have been the order of the day. The first one was the Telengana issue, which has found new vigour today with AP's Congress MLAs demanding a separate state against the sanction of an en masse resignation from the legislative assembly. Sri Krishna report or no, the Congress must do what the BJP does best: large-scale mobilization of emotions.

The second was the Baba Ramdev fiasco. What the Congress failed to do, he thought he did. Demanding the death penalty for black money hoarders and not safeguarding against communal influences did quite damage the credibility of Anna Hazare's campaign, but how much is Ramdev to blame when the ruling government constantly allows such people to come up? Apart from arguing it out for the media, the leaders haven't galvanized support for even when the government is right about something.

The third is the ongoing Anna Hazare tussle. If the UPA's rebuttal is that Hazare is a stubborn man hardly budged from his position, I'd say valid argument, invalid sufficiency. The government's very much in a position to take the battle to Hazare, and all it must do is what he's doing very well against it: isolating people support.

Those sections of the Lokpal Bill that are meaningful and constructive could be tabled separately in the Parliament, even in the absence of Hazare. For the contentious points: work around Hazare and force him to suffer the people's ire if he doesn't seem to be complying with the intentions of a government that is doing something.

The sooner these people are put down, the better. While that's the truth, it's only a partial truth: it's even better when such people are not given opportunities to turn up. Kapil Sibal talking jurisprudence with Karan Thapar is going to keep the educated urban population from thinking the UPA is trying to blindside the anti-corruption fight. In the eyes of everyone else, on the other hand, the govt. is easily accused of dereliction of duty.

In the Telengana issue, discordance in the ranks of the MLAs has reached a maximum. Yes, too many things cropped up, but that's no excuse to let the matter slide out of focus. A reworking of the state's legislature as recommended by the SKC report would have sufficed to quell the unrest in its early stages. Then, there was the case of certain sections of the report indicating an assumption of liberty more than was entitled to the SKC. If the UPA had gone through it beforehand, they could've easily removed it and prevented it from acting against their interests. That wasn't done.

Next, against an earlier threat of losing the majority in the AP state assembly, the Congress let a debate even begin as to whether the separation of the state was necessary. This was so even when the only difference between the proposed statutorily-empowered Telengana Regional Council and a separate state was the existence of a line on the map - a fact known by both factions. Now, it's assumed heinously political proportions.

As for Baba Ramdev: the forced eviction was the right thing to do but only at that point of time.

A velvet fist in an iron glove

The United Progressive Alliance ruling the country has to get tougher, more resilient, if it expects the period of its rule to be smooth and unmarred whatsoever. One of the principle differences between the BJP and the Congress (which forms the majority in the coalition) is the commanding of loyalty. Everybody knows that the lesser the party does for the ministry, the lesser it is considered to have done for the people, and the more it demands loyalty than commands it.

There have already been three instances during which unreasonable demands have been the order of the day. The first one was the Telengana issue, which has found new vigour today with AP's Congress MLAs demanding a separate state against the sanction of an en masse resignation from the legislative assembly. Sri Krishna report or no, the Congress must do what the BJP does best: large-scale mobilization of emotions.

The second was the Baba Ramdev fiasco. What the Congress failed to do, he thought he did. Demanding the death penalty for black money hoarders and not safeguarding against communal influences did quite damage the credibility of Anna Hazare's campaign, but how much is Ramdev to blame when the ruling government constantly allows such people to come up? Apart from arguing it out for the media, the leaders haven't galvanized support for even when the government is right about something.

The third is the ongoing Anna Hazare tussle. If the UPA's rebuttal is that Hazare is a stubborn man hardly budged from his position, I'd say valid argument, invalid sufficiency. The government's very much in a position to take the battle to Hazare, and all it must do is what he's doing very well against it: isolating people support.

Those sections of the Lokpal Bill that are meaningful and constructive could be tabled separately in the Parliament, even in the absence of Hazare. For the contentious points: work around Hazare and force him to suffer the people's ire if he doesn't seem to be complying with the intentions of a government that is doing something.

The sooner these people are put down, the better. While that's the truth, it's only a partial truth: it's even better when such people are not given opportunities to turn up. Kapil Sibal talking jurisprudence with Karan Thapar is going to keep the educated urban population from thinking the UPA is trying to blindside the anti-corruption fight. In the eyes of everyone else, on the other hand, the govt. is easily accused of dereliction of duty.

In the Telengana issue, discordance in the ranks of the MLAs has reached a maximum. Yes, too many things cropped up, but that's no excuse to let the matter slide out of focus. A reworking of the state's legislature as recommended by the SKC report would have sufficed to quell the unrest in its early stages. Then, there was the case of certain sections of the report indicating an assumption of liberty more than was entitled to the SKC. If the UPA had gone through it beforehand, they could've easily removed it and prevented it from acting against their interests. That wasn't done.

Next, against an earlier threat of losing the majority in the AP state assembly, the Congress let a debate even begin as to whether the separation of the state was necessary. This was so even when the only difference between the proposed statutorily-empowered Telengana Regional Council and a separate state was the existence of a line on the map - a fact known by both factions. Now, it's assumed heinously political proportions.

As for Baba Ramdev: the forced eviction was the right thing to do but only at that point of time.

How is one difference of opinion sufficient to qualify the truth of a rift in the Anna Hazare camp between Hegde and Hazare himself in the eyes of the media? It only seems as if the media is hounding after something to stoke up the anti-graft debate in the minds of its audience again. Also, I don't like the newsreader on CNN IBN who comes on at about 10 in the morning (can't recall his name): he speaks with a vocal intonation that is heavily implicative and almost immediately rules out the possibility that he's trying any bit to be objective about the news.

How is one difference of opinion sufficient to qualify the truth of a rift in the Anna Hazare camp between Hegde and Hazare himself in the eyes of the media? It only seems as if the media is hounding after something to stoke up the anti-graft debate in the minds of its audience again. Also, I don't like the newsreader on CNN IBN who comes on at about 10 in the morning (can't recall his name): he speaks with a vocal intonation that is heavily implicative and almost immediately rules out the possibility that he's trying any bit to be objective about the news.

Philosophiae homis

The 'Book Summary' makes me wonder... why are the likes of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman so few and so far in between? The popularization of science may not seem like a necessary fixture to its acceptance in mainstream media, but over the years it has become increasingly necessary to clarify its role in the eyes of the common man—even roles such as those played in the maintenance of the Large Hadron Collider or of the International Space Station. That Einstein's papers on special and general relativity need a "redesigning" betokens a moment's reflection on the dependence of our day-to-day activities on scientific research and development, whether the increasing investment in experimental apparatuses sees justification just like military spending does, and if anyone ascribes the need for that investment to anything apart from science's utilitarian value.

Philosophiae homis

The 'Book Summary' makes me wonder... why are the likes of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman so few and so far in between? The popularization of science may not seem like a necessary fixture to its acceptance in mainstream media, but over the years it has become increasingly necessary to clarify its role in the eyes of the common man—even roles such as those played in the maintenance of the Large Hadron Collider or of the International Space Station. That Einstein's papers on special and general relativity need a "redesigning" betokens a moment's reflection on the dependence of our day-to-day activities on scientific research and development, whether the increasing investment in experimental apparatuses sees justification just like military spending does, and if anyone ascribes the need for that investment to anything apart from science's utilitarian value.

Font Fables

Times New Roman was my first and longest-serving font of choice. Always called back into action when the overconfident newbie fails to live up to his promises, Times New Roman takes on the challenge without the slightest of murmurs and gets things done. It can’t fly, it can’t see through walls, it can’t halt speeding trucks in their tracks. What it can do is make things happen. There is not a hint of arrogance about the apertures and the ligatures, and you can feel the humility boring into you. Times' rewards are its moments – the wilful verification of its veracity, the surrender you must enact unto it. Times speaks not much, and when it does, it does so beautifully and with commensurate elegance. Times compliments the blandiloquence of your imagery, equivocally denigrating the stunted and the deformed.

Times New Roman was born in 1932, the daughter of Plantin and the ideas of Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent. Times (the newspaper) was once criticized by Morison himself earlier in the same year, and the administration let him supervise the designing of the new font along with Lardent, who was an established typographer. The outcome of this oft-forgotten project was one of the most ubiquitous fonts of all time, a font that stayed with the Times for over 40 years. A daughter font, Georgia, is also very popular.

Over the years, with the advent of digital typography threatening to phase out Times New Roman and its cousins, people began to regard the font as a symbol of the times past: it survived hundreds of wars, two of them devastating most of Europe and Asia, plagues, climactic crescendos and devastating denouements.

[caption id="attachment_558" align="aligncenter" width="645" caption="Champion."][/caption]

There was something about it that people found hard to resist, a placid nonchalance that also sometimes disturbed the reader with an air of neutrality. Whether it was Marx, Fawkes, Stalin, Hitler, Truman or Gandhi, the speaker of the war-torn parliament that is this world was always Times New Roman: stories from all corners, about all kinds of things, quotations uttered by men from splintered political factions – all of them found no favouritism with the font. It would always be the same distance between the letters, between the words, between the sentences, between the eye that read them and the mind that interpreted them. Tell me, have you ever heard of any such thing as a Communist or a capitalist font? Although that sounds absurd, the designs imbued in the behaviour of Times New Roman answer the question without hesitation: Times New Roman is both, if not more.

Why I pay this tribute is because of two things. First, the digital age has enhanced productivity possible; a craftsman does not have to sit at his board for hours on end and design each letter. There is the computer that performs all those millions of calculations in a second, and voila! ‘A’ has been sculpted. Times itself changed its font in the 1970s because of this typographic revolution. The second reason is that Microsoft, whose Office Word has long been a close associate of Times New Roman (a relationship advertised by having it as the default font), has now introduced a new default, Calibri. Given a hundred more years, Calibri may perhaps prove its mettle. But it can never do what Times New Roman has done.

Love,

A writer.

No Candy For Right. Lesser Candy For Wrong.

Enough has been said over the last 10 years about the deluge of information on the web, and on the TV, the radio and the papers. All of it has contributed – one way or another – to change the way we look at the world around us; significant bits of it have even gone on to dictate newer with which we can interact with it. Unsurprisingly, however, there is also in place a different protocol, an upgraded one, that includes a new set of mistakes we could commit, a new set of implications and an altogether new rewards program, speaking as such, for not committing those mistakes in the first place.

Amongst them, there is a certain “mistake profile” that strategically underlies a lot of mistakes committed by unifying them with one principle: “doing it right makes no difference, doing it wrong makes a world of it”, and this kind of mistake has become more common; so common, in fact, that in some institutions, of investigations and reportage to be specific, they have attained the critical pedestal of being called systematic simply because they are not corrected even if exposed glaringly.

[caption id="attachment_317" align="aligncenter" width="386" caption="The Indian division of CNN"][/caption]

Commas once held the privileged position of inducing the most of such mistakes in writing. Using the commas in the right place leaves the reader with a smooth flow of thought, although he or she would ultimately take away the point being made at the end of the reading session. However, once the writer uses a comma in the wrong place, that sudden jerk in the flow of thought leaves the reader only with a dissonance that lasts the whole time – and he or she is bound to leave without giving a damn about your ideas. So also in reportage: just today, I was watching CNN-IBN cover the story of the Indian Navy capturing a pirate vessel off the coast of “Lakshwadeep”. If the presenter had pronounced it right, it would have gone a very short distance, if at all, in corroborating the care taken by the presenter to pronounce it correct. However, the moment she pronounced it wrong, it gave away a sense of journalistic nonchalance - especially when there is no hurry associated with covering the piece.

As long as the media is under the scanner, there is a critical difference between “showing” and “telling” that needs to be discussed. In order to understand this, consider the genre of creative writing: when such a piece is being constructed, the author needs to state something to the reader, not declare it. Similarly, facts need to be presented separately wherever possible, and not as cause and effect. This ensures the utmost neutrality even when an extremely suggestive event is unfolding. Such is the difference between statement and declaration. I principally address the contexts of writing and reporting first because they address a larger audience and quickly. However, there are other industries that face significant challenges in the long run because they didn’t look before they leapt.

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The writer, at this point, was struck by a writers’ block arrow and regrets announcing that the article is done.