Choices and hypothesis

Q- If you could use a time travel device once, what time period would you go to? I.e. what year would you choose to start your new life in? A- Would I take my current 67-year-old body with me? If so, then what's the point? I'm only marginally capable of living this long-established life. And if I start over with a young body, but keeping all my present memories, then I would miss all the pleasures of discovery, the agony of suspense, the relief of things finally learned. And if I don't take my memories with me, then how is that new person me? So … none of the above, thank you. -  Orson Scott Card

You murder a random guy in the street. You are charged with a 2nd degree murder. Then your diary is found where you had written a murder plan. Now you are charged with 1st degree murder. Accidents and murders are treated differently. And, one is accountable for one's thoughts/ intentions . Ouch. Suppose you, a Hindu, finds out that the victim, a Muslim, is sleeping with your wife. You are now motivated to plan and execute the above murder. Let's change the context. You, a Hindu extremist, plan and murder a Muslim guy out of hatred. Now do the contexts matter, should the punishments be different as well? How to apply this new found wisdom? Low probability of capture will encourage crime, so the state should be efficient. Low penalty will also encourage crime, so the state should not go easy on crimes . Ouch. Also your personal value for committing a crime can be unusually high. And consider the state, its  efficiency  is constant/ equal for all citizens. ...

In the past 5 years I have put a lot of efforts to avoid writing. Not that I was a great writer and my decision has put the whole world at loss, but I consciously never gave it a shot. I even avoided posting things on Facebook and engaged in lots of 1-on-1 chats on topics of my concerns with a handful of close friends of mine. I discovered a few people in my friend list also have taken this route. Then things changed slightly when I recently started posting posts related to the socio-politics of my country. I didn’t attract that lot of attention but something funny happened. Few friends pinged me to mention this change of my trend, and few friends and strangers who never were in touch with me tried engaging with longer discussions. Overall I don’t mind it but then it made me leisurely analyze a few things and articulate my hypothesis and choices around this cross disciplinary topic. I will try to structure the rest of my article in 3 sections: 1: The burden of talents 2...

Shared first on Facebook, 13 April: Whoever is reading this long post, I hope I do justice to your time. In the light of the ongoing socio-political crisis India had steadily sunk into, especially since last 3 years or so, I would like to share one of my thoughts on Hinduism. A decade ago I was a strong believer. I was raised in essentially a Hindu family (but I wasn't exposed to its dark sides until recently in a small town of Rajasthan (another story)) and during few difficult times I guess faith had helped us tremendously. During college one of the things which plunged me into a phase of depression was exploring my religious nature. I transitioned into an agnostic, then to anti theist and finally, while India was still being ran by an economist, I identified myself as an atheist with a liberal view towards others. I think the whole point should be to let people live peacefully, protect them and empathize with them regardless of their personal beliefs. But then when I loo...

In a span of one hour I happen to make myself witness an incident (this is how I try to live by each day in my own way :) ). Micro-incident 1: I come across  this article , where Katie Couric, the journalist who had been a television host at all 3 big three television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) and was recently the Global News Anchor at Yahoo had shared some of her experience at a tech giant. Micro-incident 2: One of my close friends shares this  video  on his Facebook wall. Please watch that video since the rest of my article centers around it. And then you may agree or disagree with my summarization here: It is about Bernie Sanders talking about the flaw in the principle which gives US President the supreme command over the military forces, which he proposes to be in hands of Congress. At the beginning he cites the examples of  Yemen war crisis and then at the end emphasizes on the triviality of this particular case, and its the principle on which US goes t...

Statistically talents are rare individuals.  Convincing the above statement You may argue talents are hyped and every person/child is special in his own way. So you may want to discard the notion of some individuals being talents. But please read on: Consider you are trying to hire the best instructor for your child with unlimited budget for expenses. Or your son has met with an accident and you want the best doctor to operate, again with an unlimited budget at your end. Or while looking for a lawyer for your daughter in her marital case. Or while hiring the CFO of your company about to file its IPO. You will look for the most qualified person. You will be biasing towards someone one with a flawless track record, achievements or high profile recommendation under her belt. Suddenly you will respond to phrases like: "He practiced in Harvard Medical School" or "He was VP Finance at Goldman Sachs" etc. etc. as if earning such tags or brands require some quali...

Why is it that despite the best efforts non profits fail? Startups (for profit) fail spectacularly and more often. But there is a profound difference in those two types of failures. One fail in its quest for finding a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem doesn't exist at a primary level even. While the other fails despite having identified a very fundamental problem which often needs urgently to be tackled. Now let's merge this distinction among profits and non profits for sometime and take a more fundamental dig on them. There are already too much of meanings and stereotypes attached with terms like corporate, organization, startup, non profit etc. Fundamentally people, both outsiders and insiders, often don't acknowledge the core components of these entities. This often lead to failures. Well, some do get a certain things right and manage to outshine spectacularly. Having worked with over 15 entities in a span of 5 years, from killed startups to IGOs, I spent ...

In my years and years of growing up I have encountered a curious habit among the people I have interacted with. They have always functioned in a mental framework incorporating their abstract take on the world around them. And all of us in some way do that. These metrics give a sense of rationality to the individual. Now to what degree the rationality holds is altogether a different discussion. But the basic hypothesis still holds: Each one of has a scale. There is another curious observation further on these lines: these metrics often tend to be one dimensional. My parents, my teachers, my friends and even the Bollywood stories around me followed this pattern. For the early years of my life I struggled to put things in this format. As my world got bigger I discovered a vast majority of crowd also religiously follow some version of this model either consciously or sub consciously while interacting or making sense of themselves, the people within and outside their communities, objects an...