I just finished watching all 4 seasons of Mr. Robot - the cyberpunk TV/Web Series about a fictional sequence of events where a vigilante hacker group fsociety (styled on the Anonymous group) attacks E-Corp, the world's largest conglomerate (think GE + JP Morgan) and brings them down through a Ransomware attack. 

The objective of the attack is to free millions of people from massive debt which they are running - the fountainhead of debt across the US being E-Corp. With the hack, millions of loans become unserviceable because data for them is no longer available, but it also leads to E-corp being unable to dispense cash to its depositors and freezing of further lending, ultimately the entire hacking episode leads to an economic collapse!

While my initial interest in the series arose due to its cyberpunk lineage, my interest post Season 1 was retained more because of its depiction of the interplay between epochal events and the nature of human society. Eliot / Mr Robot's original intention in the ransomware attack is to bring down E-Corp and the entire 'elite society' which runs around it. But when the economic meltdown transpires, the exact opposite happens - credit freeze and restrictions on deposit withdrawals hit the poor the most, millions lose livelihoods, homes and relations go sour. The rich, on the other hand, do get impacted but only in losing the sheen of their lifestyles or social stature.

This made me think back of the various other such epochal events we have noticed in past several years - the 2008 economic collapse, some electoral changes in various countries, and most recent Covid-19. Just like the fictional Five/Nine hack in Mr Robot, most of these events haven't impacted 'natural order of human society'. The rich are still rich, the poor even poorer, the middle classes remain locked in a constant graze to crack the glass ceiling to become the rich.

This does not mean that the natural order never changes. For example, Independent India's most revolutionary land policy was the abolition of the Zamindari system (feudal landholding practices).  Another such change was the 'The Protection Of Civil Rights Act, 1955' which abolished the practice of untouchability in India. The American Civil War which abolished Slavery was another such epoch event globally, as was the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which followed his assassination. The 1994 South African general election which led to the abolishment of Apartheid in South Africa is another such epoch event which changed the social order.

However, while all these legislative events might have aimed at bringing instant changes to social order, their success has been excruciatingly slow at best. Casteism is still rampant in rural India, even though it may not take the extreme form of Untouchability. The recent Black Lives Matter campaign in the United States illustrates that African Americans still face discrimination in American society. Housing and economic differences are still quite pronounced between Whites and Blacks in South Africa. For this reason, such legislative changes are often not acceptable to 'revolutionaries' like Che Guevara or hackers of the Anonymous group or the fictional Eliot Anderson. They prefer a more radical approach, which often involves eliminating the privileged. 

At the same time, it is interesting to note that instead of revolutionary epochal events, the real march of civilisation towards being more egalitarian and impacting social order has been littered with technological progress of the human society. Industrialisation, for example, led to the formation of cities and as people moved to cities, it led to their intermingling and weakening of casteist structures among them. Another wave of awakening against casteism was a result of Indians travelling overseas for education and trade. Gandhi himself travelled to South Africa to set up a new legal practice and Ambedkar, while he was an anti-casteism torch bearer early on, strengthened his ideology while studying in London and the US. 

The American Civil war also has an interesting relationship with Industrialisation; while the key reason for Civil War was disagreement over the abolition of slavery, the reason why this became an issue was because of the economic makeup of the US circa 1860s. The Northern States were largely Industrialised while the Southern States more agrarian. Slavery was critical to the South mainly because it allowed them to remain economically competitive in spite of being agrarian, against the onslaught of industrialisation the world over. Slave labour was virtually free and hence the South could produce raw agricultural produce much cheaper than the rest of America or Europe. Europeans imported heavily from the Southern States and in turn, exported finished goods to America which were cheaper than finished goods produced by the Northern States themselves. This led the Northern States to propose the Tariffs of 1828 against cheap European imports, and the opposition of such Tariff by Southern states came in form of the Nullification Crisis. These two initial sparks ultimately spiralled slowly into the Civil War.

The 21st century has been different however. Industrialisation in the 19th century paved way for changes to social order in the 20th century. Laws and reforms mentioned above all belong to the early/mid 20th century. However, even though the Internet brought about massive changes in the way we live towards the end of the 20th century and early decade of the 21st, we haven't had any laws, regulations or revolutions challenging the social order for almost 50 years now. The Internet has changed a lot for humanity, and while millions are now getting educated on their own through the web, they haven't been able to uproot themselves from the social order they are born into. 

The continuance of caste mindset in Rural India or the police atrocities on African Americans which came to light following the killing of George Floyd only indicates the need for Social reforms across the globe, because of exactly what the fictional events in Mr Robot show, any form of a frontal attack on the social order has the exact opposite effect. 

The Internet was supposed to not just lift millions out of poverty but also transfer wealth from the rich to the poor. However, the Fed expanding its balance sheet following the collapse of 2008, and other such schemes have ensured that the rich are insulated from the downsides of wealth erosion at the cost of the tax-payer; these bail-outs also have robbed the poor of the welfare funds meant for social upliftment. At the same time, the gains from the massive wealth generation - whether it is the Silicon Valley growth or that from cheap Chinese labour - are well protected in coffers of the rich. 

The entire world today is moving towards a 'Zamindari system' where massive wealth is locked in hands of the top 1%, who also control governments, central bankers, mainstream media and through them, even the electorate. They use this power to secure the continuance of wealth in their hands. We've tried hacking the social order by revealing how the rich do what they do [WikiLeaks, Inside Job] - the manipulation of elections, media and people is virtually public information. With Social Media, social atrocities too are no longer hidden in plain sight. We've had epochal events - from 9/11 to 2008 crash to Covid-19. None of these have managed to dent the natural order of things!

What is lacking I believe is laws and regulations same as the abolition of the Zamindari system to uproot these inequalities and to give a fillip to the furtherance of equality for all of mankind. In India, the Modi govt has enacted a few laws in its first term such as the IBC which prevents large corporate borrowers turning into 'wilful defaulters', and forcing govt and regulators to rely on bailouts from Depositor's / Taxpayers money to keep Banks afloat. 

But there's much more to be done here - recently Modi's own party has been a part of political shenanigans where lawmakers were traded from one party to the other to topple and form new state governments. It may be unconfirmed, but public perception is that massive money exchanged hands - allegations and accusations may not have been proven, but then how does one explain a series of such events happening across states? And where does the money used for horsetrading lawmakers come from? It comes from businesses, who then surely would expect qui-pro-quo from the Chief Minister who's government was saved or formed. Such events only make the inequalities persist longer because it necessitates the nexus between politicians and the rich and prevents creation of laws or policies to counter inequality.  

And India is just about a sixth of the world's population - what about Canada, the US, Europe, China, Russia, Far East, Africa and South America? The problem of inequality is global and the rich are one-force globally. Globalisation means that rich investors own corporations (or parts of corporations) which span across nations and continents. Bailouts in the US have a massive impact on Indian markets and vice-versa. Until there are reforms globally, we will not be able to reduce or even prevent inequality from rising as it has, in the past several decades.

Yes, the problem of inequality is as old as human civilisation itself - and inequalities will exist until there is a human society. It isn't inequality but the unfairness of inequality which we need to fight. The phenomenon where the privileged remaining privileged for generations, while the poor suffer - the sterilisation of social structure from technological progress, is what we need to fight. As mankind progresses, we must make our social structures more malleable where it should become increasingly easier for the underprivileged to rise up and difficult for the privileged to protect their turf.

Global laws need to change for this to happen and this possibly is the biggest challenge that the post-knowledge-economy / post-globalisation generation faces.  

. 

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus - Mumbai Unprecedented Lockdown

Its been a month and 10 days of the lockdown here in India, an attempt to contain the outbreak of Covid-19; the deadly virus which has engulfed the whole world and caused the death of thousands - possibly the most deaths mankind has seen in a span of few months since the Second World War. [I mean this only in the global context though, locally we have had wars, calamities and similar viral outbreaks which have outnumbered Covid-19.]

As the founder of a travel startup, I was initially terribly shaken at how life has been thrown completely out of gear by this deadly virus. Travel is the worst affected sector; suddenly 2020 which we had planned to be the 'explosive growth' year for us has thrown us into an existential crisis. The situation has taken such a wild turn that I've grown comfortably numb only shifting the timeline of our 'explosive' growth to the next calendar year [or potentially even further] while we try to figure out how we will survive till we hit that point.

However, among all the bad news - there's a lot of positive stuff that's happening and some of that I wanted to record here today.

Consumerism has taken a backseat 

The second aspect is of Family time going up. Social media which had destroyed dinner table conversations is now going reverse - I am so fed up of the screen by the time I start my dinner that I'd rather listen to my daughter's chattering than stare away into the mobile. And if I still dare to look at my mobile, now that I am spending my entire day at home, my daughter knows that I was working all day and so she won't let me stare away into the last email on my phone as I munch my food. My work-life balance may be screwed (it always was!) but irrespective, I am indeed spending more time with family than what I used to.

We are discovering ourselves and our community
And Social Media - well, its finally connecting us back. We have daily video calls with parents who live far, we have family video call gatherings. We are also Zooming with school friends whom we haven't talked to in decades.

And people reopening their hobbies - someone I know started an Origamy class online. Another of my mentors is writing long Facebook / LinkedIn posts sharing nuggets of wisdom from his two-decade long entrepreneurial journey. My wife is busy destressing herself by drawing and painting; as I type this, the wall next to me has a half-painted unicorn sketch which will possibly be coloured tomorrow. And I am finally writing on my blog! :-) 

As I sipped my cutting cup of of tea at the tea stall, I couldn't but help notice the guffaws of the sabzi waala (vegetable vendor) sitting right next - from what I could overhear in the cacophony of street traffic, he was watching some Bhojpuri standup comedy. The chai waala (tea vendor) noticed my scrutiny of his neighbour, smiled and then said:

Jio ने सबको बीज़ी कर दिया है! ग्राहक आए या ना आए - ये अपना भोजपुरी इन्टरटेंमेंट में ही लगा रहता है! 😆 

With the economic headwinds strong, and no sight of respite - it amused me to notice the scene I was in. The poor vendor was not disappointed or dejected; he wasn't looking forward to his job or future either - notably, food inflation has remained at its lowest levels in the last few years due to efforts of Modi government and the vegetable vendor has surely not had or expected higher earnings. Other forms of inflation - housing, transport (fuel) etc - are moderate and hence his savings, if he has any, would not have grown,  rather would have been depleting. The only thing that may have improved for him is what his preoccupation thence - cheaper data speeds and thus access to cheap personalised entertainment.

Mulling over all this, I proceeded to board the metro train. It was rush hour and the metro was jampacked with people - most were texting or watching videos on their phones here too. Most of them would be midlevel executives going by their attire - I wondered why they were in a metro? I knew the answer because it was the same reason I was in the metro - the roads were worse than the jampacked metro - there were not only jampacked, they were worse in terms of commute time; Mumbai ranked #4 in traffic congestion and the city's roads saw 119% congestion in 2019.

Again, for the mid-level city executive, a look at the last 5 years was the same as that for the vegetable vendor - traffic hadn't gotten any better, commute times have only risen; so have fuel costs.

Interestingly, we've had two dips in international crude oil in these 5 years - but on both occasions [rather time periods], the govt has chosen to enjoy the gains of the lower pricing to fund its own deficit than pass on the benefits to the consumers/citizens. Not that cheaper fuel would have helped - it would only have made the terrible traffic woes even more terrible.

Food inflation has stayed low but real estate is so damn expensive that people have no choice but to rent/buy housing farther and farther from the city. Recession, or stagnation in the industry is not going away - Banks are stretched and hence credit is not flowing, so there is hardly any new investment and hence fewer opportunities on the horizon. Professional growth isn't something most mid-level executives are vying for - several, in fact, maybe just trying to keep their jobs and their salaries intact.

Back to the scene in the metro, a phone rang - given that there was no space when the co-passenger pulled out his mobile, I had no choice but to peep into this phone. I could see the Trucaller screen pop up the name of the caller - a telemarketing agency. He cut the call without bothering to pick it up and went back to the Netflix show he was watching. Had it been a friend, I would have lectured him on the HUGE privacy nightmare that TrueCaller is! On this occasion though, I kept quiet not to offend an unknown bloke.

I got down from the metro and started to look for an Uber - it took the usual 4 minutes of search and 10 minutes of waiting time for me to board one. The driver was estranged, almost as if he had resigned to the traffic which he stared at. I tried to make small talk asking him where else he had driven during the day and if traffic was any better.

D - सssब  तरफ़ ऐसाही ही है साहब!! जहाँ देखो रास्ता खोदे रक्खे हैं!
Me - चलो कम से कम waiting का तो पैसा मिलता है आपको
D - कोई फ़ायदा नहीं साहब - २ साल से Uber वाले commission कम कर दिए हैं! और traffic में गाड़ी कम चलता है तो उतना कमाई भी नहीं पूरी होती
Me - पर पहले से तो अच्छा है ना ?
D - पहले मैं काली पीली चलाता था; Uber वालों ने पहले तो सपनें दिखाए, तो हम सबने नई गाड़ी खरीदी loan लेकर - अब commission कम किया तो हमारा गाड़ी का हफ्ता ही महंगा पड़ रहा है हमें | इस से अच्छा तो हम पुरानी काली पीली ही चलाते!

The gist of the above conversation is that he bought a new Car on loan in hope of better earnings when Ridesharing companies were offering better commissions. But now that the commissions have reduced, he is finding it difficult to even manage to pay off his EMIs for the car loan. But now that he was caught in the vicious circle of the Loan-EMI repayment, there is no way he can go back. He has to continue being an Uber driver in the hope that someday his EMI will be paid off and he will start earning money - assuming the maintenance costs of his vehicle do no rise by then.

I got home and a friend was already there waiting for our pre-planned dinner. He had flown in from Delhi for a day and we decided to meet for dinner. We compared notes - Delhi was no better, real estate was marginally cheaper but public transport was worse off. His preferred method in spite of traffic woes was driving his car and his commute time was worse than mine - almost 2 hours one way. Delhi had one more problem, acute pollution which gets especially worse in winter months; he was worried if his daughter would develop asthma with the kind of air she was breathing at a young age.

---

The entire day reminded me of the dystopian movie In Time, where people stop ageing past 25 so time has become the universal currency traded between people. When the time "bank account" on an implanted clock reaches zero, that impoverished person "times out" and is euthanized. So everyone earns so that they may live a little longer, and each luxury they enjoy reduces their time to live. In a heart-wrenching scene - the protagonist goes to meet his mother when the city bus fare rises from 1 to 2 hours, and she only has 90 minutes. She tries to run to meet her son, but times out at the last moment and dies in his arms!

It feels like we are living in a parallel era, where people pay with their Privacy, their time and their Health. The vegetable vendor gets his ₹300 a month entertainment - just like Opium to fulfil his desires, while his future remains suspended in his current state; the Uber driver is perennially under debt but yet unable to give up his profession; the mid level executive stuck in his day job and stuck in the traffic of the city; also a parent stuck with poor environment and constant worry about his offspring's health!

It is as if the Big Bad Corporation - the Mobile Operator, the ride-sharing app, the MNC corp, the Govt and the Carmakers have all managed to lock the common man into a vicious cycle of selling their time, their privacy and their lives for luxuries they cannot afford anyway. It is, as if, these citizens would have been better off without the luxury - without having to pay for it, and without having enjoyed it - but alas, they are paying for these luxuries by reducing precious hours from their lifetimes!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

There have been a lot of controversies of late - a movie which was claimed to have twisted historical facts, a caste-based protest, a politically influenced crime or the issue of sharing river water between two states. In all these cases, facts elude the public and the vote always remains is pretty divided and vitriolic because there are always two sides of every story.

It is no-one's guess that a filmmaker may have apparently taken a lot of liberties in historical depiction or that a particular law may have been misused or water or financial devolution could have been fairer or anything else. However, protestors have often gone wild with threats to kill or even cause damage to public and private property.

Sane voices argue that these non-issues keep people and media away from discussing real issues like the state of the economy, the rise of crony capitalism, deteriorating finances of the middle class or farmers committing suicide. So why is it that that large hordes of people keep thronging the streets. Why is it that the public today is paying attention to non-issues, why is it that "youth leaders" are spewing venom or announcing bounties on actors and directors or threatening bloodshed in the name of a river - when there are many other major issues they could pick up even if it were to win elections.

The answer probably lies in the role models which the society has conjured up to the masses - especially young people's minds. [Sidenote: It is usually the Young who control what gets discussed in public sphere, but due to the majority of the youth demographic, this is especially true of India].

I love Firefox and the Mozilla foundation - it was the beacon of innovation when Microsoft tried to kill it with repeated versions of its buggy Internet Explorer! If you were involved in software development or managing online products circa 2005-2008, you would know the nightmare it was to develop a website compatible with IE and its myriad of versions (IE6 was especially notorious)!

At that time, Firefox was our ray of hope, and I would have tried to evangelise almost every friend, family or client to ditch IE and embrace FF. With clients, however, the big problem was, Firefox was an Open Source software and the corporate world has a certain amount of scepticism towards this species of software. [Ironical because most of the largest software services in the world run on Operating Systems which are clones of Linux and most of the web's websites run on Apache - these two being probably the largest Open Source projects in the world!]

Source: Netcraft Webserver survey 2017

In spite of this, when I got this blog post from Mozilla (the non-profit which runs Firefox) in my mailbox, I got thinking about whether Open Source community is right in thinking that Software, where no one takes credit, is really the reason for the success of Open Source? I quote:

My apartment building has a community garden. The building owner started it with a donation of raised beds and soil. What happened next amazes me to this day.

One day tools appeared, the next a shed to store them. Seeds were planted. Someone put up string trellises for tomatoes. No one took credit. 

Honestly, other philosophies that pride in "no-one, in particular, taking credit" (or Common Ownership) are Communism and Socialism. The concept of everyone contributing to the best of their abilities and being rewarded universally is very Marxist and the Chinese story notwithstanding, we've seen the model failing to deliver in the erstwhile USSR and several other communist colonies which broke down in mid-90s.

My doubts also emerge from the fact that while Firefox did help keep the hope alive during the dark period of 2000-2010 for browser innovation, the real clincher was Google supported Chrome browser.

Today most organisations - SMBs to MNC Enterprises use (or allow) the Chrome browser. Google did significant amount of (subtle) marketing to ensure that it was able to usurp the hegemony of Microsoft over the browser market since Chrome's launch in 2008. And these 'for profit' dollars poured into evangelising corporations probably helped sideline Internet Explorer.

As this chart shows, IE declined steadily once Chrome was launched, while Firefox's penetration levels have remained steady but not really grown much (proportionally) in the intervening years.


Mozilla Foundation is a great organisation - if you are concerned about your privacy, if you are someone who believes in rights of individuals over the state, if you want to keep the web open and secure - you should support them. Geeks and Intellectuals still use the Firefox browser more than they use Chrome. (I am not one of them, I use FF only on special purpose - bit the self-confessed Google fan that I am, Chrome is my mainstay).

Organisations like Mozilla need to exist so that if one day Google, even against its corporate motto, turns evil - we have a ray of hope. However, the example does set back the hope of the early 90s that Open Source will trump Proprietery software one day to create a truly "Free Software" world.

.

Chance and serendipity can often spring profound thoughts and insights; I experienced one such moment today. I was driving towards office and switched on the Radio. All India Radio FM Gold channel was broadcasting an audio re-run of the famed Mahabharat TV Serial.

The Economist argues in this article how online services which provide for personalised services are breaching some age-old notions of privacy.

Google mines the data it collects from users for two purposes. One is to improve the user experience, making its various online services more personal, useful and rewarding for the individual—and thereby increasing their popularity. The other purpose is to provide better targeted information for advertisers.
That is fine for the vast majority of internet users, who are happy to trade a measure of privacy for the convenience. However, most people (though not all) stop short of blurting out more intimate details about their private lives.
Even so, all those innocuous bits of self-revelation can be pieced together, jig-saw fashion, by intelligent algorithms. Throw in the digital paper-trails stashed in Google searches and Amazon purchases, and things can begin to get a little scary.

The above is a foregone conclusion - we all are ignoring the looming fear of privacy invasion for the convenience that online services give us. In fact, after much brouhaha about the US NSA snooping over a vast majority of the world (incl. politicians in other countries), not much seems to have changed in the world perception given how social media platforms (hosted in US data centers and subject to US laws) have snowballed into world's largest corporations.

However, another concern is now coming up which is not so much about someone knowing about the underwear brand I wear (which wouldn't really be very devastating), but about me NOT knowing what I don't know.

One of the foundational principles of democracy - which underpins other more explicit principles like freedom of speech or freedom of practising one's religion - is the freedom and the right to have access to unfettered information. One of the reasons North Korea and even China are castigated by proponents freedom is because of the conditions imposed by these regimes on the flow of information to their citizens.

Recent studies have shown that excessive personalization of say our Facebook feeds or WhatsApp Group based news which we receive, makes us as blind to other perspectives as may be people of a restrictive or oppressed regime.

The information we take in is so personalized that we’re blind to other perspectives. Thats why Trump was a surprisehttps://t.co/MtN8np3jHE

— Nikhil Kulkarni (@kulkarninikhil) November 10, 2016

No wonder that religious preachers, right wing activists and even divisive religion based military group like the ISIS find Social Media a good source of recruiting volunteers!

Activist Eli Pariser who has coined the term Filter Bubble argues that "while we might think of the internet as an impartial, universal library with Google serving as a superhuman Dewey decimal system, it’s remarkably, and perhaps pathologically, individualised". Another article by Rohit Prasad of MDI, Gurgaon, in India, argues that -

"The institution of paid search raises barriers to entry for firms that do not have the required marketing budgets and that apart from paid search which is quite evidently non-neutral, the paradigm of neutral search itself is being questioned as anti-competition"

This is still quite benign as it only attacks the laissez-faire economy principles of the free market, but he also adds that -

"the use of personalization rules in serving search returns implies that we get to see what the search engine thinks we would like based on surfing information it has gathered about any people, rather than some ‘objective’ listing"

Veterans of journalism - the fourth pillar of a democracy - agree with this sentiment. As Rich Jaroslovsky, the chief journalist at SmartNews, puts it - "Excessive personalization creates a rabbit hole ... you never discover anything that you didn't know already and your world view gets narrower .. and ultimately leads people to feel dissatisfied" (Source: futureof.news)

The filter bubble or rabbit hole - whatever you may want to call it is a very dangerous phenomenon for multiple reasons:

1. The Internet is entering  every sphere of our lives - from 'where to buy a house' to 'which route to take for the morning commute to office. If personalised technology makes us take biased decisions, it may be impacting our whole life! Further, it may be preventing us from benefits of serendipity by forcing us to take the beaten path, dumbing us down or killing that chance we have to be more creative!
2. Internet penetration is increasing at an exponential pace and hence more people are being subjected to decision making assisted or influenced by Social Media. Whether it is about the route on your daily commute or who should be your President or Prime Minister; all of us are being subjected to filter bubbles while contributing to these decisions. The ubiquity of internet means that we are at a greater risk of making a collective mistake in making decisions!
3. In the last few years, as the propensity of political leaders to take tough decisions has reduced and the trend of referendums has gained traction. The United Kingdom (who's Westminster model is a template for democracy in several countries), has witnessed two referendums in recent past - one on Scotland remaining a part of the UK and another on UK leaving the EU. As technology - electronic voting et. al. - makes it  easier to conduct elections; direct democracy might become the norm. Some low population countries like Switzerland are already making the switch. This makes over personalised social media even scarier as biases may influence specific political decisions not just personal decision or choice of leader. 
4. In a world where we are heading towards making some very crucial decisions regarding climate change or future of robotics or spacefaring - combined with point #3, biases influenced by narrow social media networks and incomprehensibly tested personalization algorithms (technology), we might just take a wrong decision which may have far reaching impact on future generations and the very existence of mankind!

**

The existence of Intelligent Extraterrestrial life is a common topic for Science fiction - stories, movies or even discussions. There are various visions of an alien proposed - doomsday / apocalypse themed movies portray them as reptiles with high frequency reproduction capabilities. However, few other more benevolent themes like the E.T. or Avatar show them as humanoid. Which of these two versions are more likely to be true?

Let us look at it from another perspective, what are some of the characteristics of an intelligent animal? Some which come to mind are [Source]:

• The use of tools
• The ability to learn and remember (obtain knowledge) through experience, study, or instruction
• The ability to communicate (the ability to give and receive information)
• The ability to solve complex problems

Humans have fingers which gives them a lot of flexibility to handle complex tasks such as writing or drawing art. We can't be exactly sure whether our fingers evolved by usage of increasingly complex tools which finally led to us becoming interested in refined usage of fingers like drawing or writing; or whether our intellectual development resulted in physical needs of having long versatile fingers? The likely answer is that both physical and intellectual development happened simultaneously.

Next is our ability to learn from instruction which takes us to our eyes, ears and mouth - eyes and ears allow us to receive instruction while the mouth helps in giving instruction. Again, cognitive development plays its own role in interpretation of what the eyes see or ears hear.

Next is our ability to communicate - as earlier we communicate using sounds from our mouth (and receive through ears), but one often unappreciated difference between human and animal communication is our ability to form facial expressions. While other animals also emote expressions from faces, none is as versatile as humans. We can communicate through eyes or certain facial muscles as well.

And finally, the last thing which differentiates mankind from other animals is our ability to think and solve complex problems. Our brain is a powerhouse of not only cognitive intelligence which makes our other 'sensory organs' effective, but also analytical intelligence which is responsible for everything from language to say our ability to build rockets that go into outer space!

Any intelligent animal or say an alien - if intelligent will most probably have to be equal to humans in all the above capabilities and it follows that they will need eyes, ears, mouth, fingers and a significantly large brain! So aliens shaped like cows or goat or sheep or giant lizard or dinosaurs may not be practical. Any advanced life form will mostly evolve into humanoid shapes to able able to carry out complex tasks. In fact, not only will aliens be humanoid, they will actually be Carbon based or at best Silicon based given that Carbon and Silicon are most abundant elements in the Universe!

One caveat here is that we are only talking about intelligent animals capable of being at least as intelligent as a chimpanzee or more. So a Godzilla like alien is still possible, provided we do not call it an 'intelligent animal'! However, most extraterrestrial themed movies show the alien civilizations contacting humans by flying to earth in a spaceship which presumes they are intelligent animals.

To cap the subject, it isn't really necessary that, if there is life elsewhere in the Universe, it is intelligent. Here's an interesting debate between Niel De'grass Tyson and Richard Dawkins on the same subject.


**Image Credit: 'Dobbie the Extra-Terrestrial' on Flickr

My daughter was watching one of those Kindergarten videos on shapes [YouTube] and at this scene where a car is waiting for the 'Shape Train' to cross the level crossing; I ruminated a conversation between the vehicles where ...

The car wonders to itself  - "I wish I could go as fast as the train!"
The train itself responds "I wish I could roam anywhere like the car does!" [and not be forced to run only where the track goes]

I realized my rumination had a lot of similarity to the differences, perceptions and expectations of 'Corporate' vs. 'Entrepreneur' career paths. Corporate career is like the Railway - you have a defined career path to progress up, if you perform well, play your moves properly (including living with or harnessing office politics and networking), you can reach the top echelons very fast and without much financial risk on yourself.

Entrepreneurship is like driving a car on the road - you have a lot of freedom whether to take the highway, the arterial roads, by lanes and if you like it, just wander off into a cozy small village. It is this aspect that attracts professional most to it - 'independence', 'work on any idea', 'freedom to choose your work hours' etc. - a very rosy side of freelance lifestyle.

The similarities don't end here - in fact the analogy gives us several insights into the norms, habits and paradigms of success in both fields. Few examples:

• The train must follow rules, signals, stoppages and follow timings strictly to be efficient and reach its destination on time. For the train, the key metric that matters is reaching on time because the rest of the variables are already controlled by the Railroad company.
• The car, while free to roam exteriors, interiors - whatever - needs self discipline to stay the course. If it lacks its own discipline, it risks just making the journey, but never reaching the destination. On the positive side, that is usually something many people wish for - enjoy the journey, not the outcome.
• Also, the railway comes with its own amenities - food in pantry (nowadays even Wifi onboard!), while you need to manage your own provisions while riding in a car.
• There are times when both cars and trains can run at similar speeds - but cars at high speed are much riskier to drive than a train at similar speed. Hence, a good driver is more important in a car ride than a train. 
• Finally, the train can never be owned by smaller individuals, needs huge capex to set-up and run but lacks maneuverability but cars are nimble, can get 'up-and-running' on any destination fairly quickly but are usually used only for short hauls and run on lower capacities. 

What are lessons from the analogy:

• If you want to do well in a Corporate career - understand the explicit and tacit 'rules of the game' and follow them strictly; sometimes 'challenging status quo / establishment' may be one of the 'rules of the game'; but either ways - the better you follow the rules, the faster you will grow. When you don't get that promotion you believe you deserved - try to analyze which rules you overlooked and how to follow them in future!
• Entrepreneurship require self discipline if you want to prosper - else you will be one of those millions of freelancers or 'small businesses' who dwarf out and remain stuck-in-the-middle without any chance of making that million dollar valuation. (It's a different matter if that's what you choose to remain - dont-report-to-anyone-small-biz-boss!)
• Don't underestimate the importance of scaffolding when planning for Entrepreneurship; from the coffee machine to courier service and office boys, all need money. Unlike 'Intrapreneurship' roles, Entrepreneurship requires that you either take care of the amenities yourself or spend on them (usually more than what big Corporates do on a per head basis). 
• Never underestimate the importance of having a good team in a Entrepreneurial venture - in a corporate set up, a bad accountant doesn't do much harm, but for a small business venture where margins are low, making mistake of one zero can wipe of profits. Relations are more intertwined in a startup - good cofounder relationship can make or break ventures. 
• Corporate set-ups are good for established industries requiring large capex (even if they are "new" - like Solar Power or Space travel ventures) but startups are more suited for low capex businesses which need to be agile in changing processes to 'figure out' their business models.

As Steve Blank puts it:

a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

Also note that I didn't compare 'Salaried' vs. 'Business' because several Business folk today feel the same 'locked in' feeling of being restricted as several 'Corporate' guys feel; while several 'Salaried' Intrapreneurs exist who have the freedom to work around their passions - some example being professionals like Devdutt Patnaik or Ajit Ranade.

So, if your objective is just to pursue your passion - you need not necessarily embrace the 'Entrepreneur' track; there are ways to pursue passions in Corporate roles as well.

This analogy can be extended much farther, but you get the gist - hope it helps those in the process of deciding to make the shift!

The irony of our times ...

• Those who oppose crimes against themselves, inflict crimes on their own people 
• Those who want peace within, advocate bombing the 'criminal' states 
• Those who oppose 'repressive' regimes, side with them when the 'rebels' start bombing their countries 
• Those who work for off-shoring IT businesses, condemn governments for allowing cheap Chinese imports 
• 'Export' cloth manufacturers encourage laws restricting of foreign manufactured vehicles
• Families who built houses with repatriation money castigate illegal immigrants from neighboring countries 
• Those who worship most feverishly are also those who preach hatred
• People conduct 'culture' festivals at the Bank of rivers damaging fragile ecosystems on the riverbed 
• Those who find affirmation action 'unfair' to the majority cringe when the government taxes their savings 
• Minorities always cite the law; majorities make the law! 
• My opportunity is fair - if they trouble you, you are incapable of adapting to change 
• My troubles are unfair because they result from injustice meted out by chosen few to the majority 

It is easy to get drowned in the cacophony of media - especially the very personalized Social Media - but it is too damn hard to think with a clear mind about right vs. wrong, courageous vs. tactical, hard-work vs. smart-shortcut; and the answers are often too damning in the short term! History however proves that in the long run, justice is delivered and truth prevails - as they say सत्यमेव जयते !!

davewinerabttwtr

As @DaveWiner, tweeted about twitter's innovation stalling because it closed its API than open it, another friend of mine emailed me asking about which Social Bookmarking service I use.

To put it in context, in 2008-9, I too had started to build a social bookmarking application Bloozle, which was aimed at sharing links (bookmarks) by users, tagging them (to create 'folksonomies), enable sharing and finally presenting a technology curated 'magazine' for end users to browse.

What we envisaged as bloozle, is today available as a combination of Twitter / Facebook based link sharing (with #hashtags acting as tags) and Flipboard based 'curation' of those links for you to read.

Long story short - this friend of mine was a part of the team for Bloozle and hence, we share the love to hate Twitter-Flipboard combo for 'stealing' away our success! :-)

My friend commented (sic)- "i am just back on delicious and find it way better than twitter or facebook even now for researching and studying on the internet." Valid point - there are several features which Twitter / Facebook link sharing lack to be used as effective Social Bookmarking services.

For example, Twitter/ Facebook do a pretty good job at broadcast (twitter) or targetted (facebook) sharing of links, they do not provide effective methods of tagging and categorization. The 'preview' which they display is default, and it is not possible to 'quote' a particular part of an article (or a particular segment of a video) in the preview that gets shared. Twitter's 140 character limit makes it harder to 'comment' on the links; the newsfeed style of display is not particularly suited for rapid browsing the consumption ..... I can go on about why Twitter and Facebook suck at Social Bookmarking features.

However, the bottomline is, there are more people on Twitter than Delicious (the Social Bookmarking app / website), even though using it for social bookmarking is more of a 'hack' than a feature. What can I do of the advanced link-sharing features, if I can't consume links from Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Taylor Swift, Paolo Coelho and Amitabh Bachchan and there is no point of sharing my blog post on Delicious if some of my friends can't consume it there!

It's similar to saying that, as an artist, while Baroda is a great city to live, given the cost vs. time trade offs and will offer you a more creative lifestyle, but you'd still choose to be in Bombay because that's where the art circuit is (there's Kala Ghoda, Bollywood, TV, media houses etc.)  and hence you are able to interact with more likeminded people here. So you give up the luxury of low cost and high time to live in Bombay.

And so I am staying with Twitter and Flipboard combination. Twitter is my bloozler and Flipboard is my bloozpaper. It works - its functional; though there are features I'd desire in them, but without users those features are useless. so having users is more imp than features. IMHO!

So, even though Dave Winer is correct that if Twitter itself would have kept its API open, several 'features' could have been developed on it by third party developers but since it already had a critical mass of users prior to closing down the API, it didn't matter much!

That's one hard truth most consumer startups will have to digest - a superior product without user traction is a failure! 

Your next door neighbour may not be techie enough, he may have an inferior product but if s/he has a rich uncle or knows a VC or lives in the US where funding is easier to get and s/he can fund user acquisition through TV adverts or Google Ads or door-to-door selling or any other means - they are better placed to 'disrupt' the market than you who has superior technical knowledge or better 'product ideas'!


This also has a subtle 'philosophical' meaning - your product is an enabler for superior experience for the end user. But your product alone is not the cause of that superior user experience. For consumer startups, especially those reliant on network effects, the number of users you have is an integral part of the user experience. And so, unless you find out ways of user acquisition; there is no way you are going to succeed.

While this may not be true for B2B startups in the absolute sense, but the importance of having user traction can't be belittled for any business - whether consumer or business facing.

Photo credit: https://www.useronboard.com/features-vs-benefits/

The IT geek world is unequivocally undivided since more than a decade on the superiority of the Command Line Interface over the GUI!

For the uninitiated, Command Line is the black screen, that comes up when you go to 'Start Menu' > 'Run' and Type 'cmd', which you often use to do a 'ping' or 'ipconfig'. GUI expands to Graphical User Interface, a technical name to the point-and-click interface we all use in computers today. 

The geekdom has had debates on why we haven't evolved from a purely textual entry mode into something better, a debate which always concludes accepting that Command line is a superior form of human-computer interaction. With introduction of Siri, Google Now and Cortana - while we have added voice commands also to the debate; its uses are currently limited to searching, giving pre-ordained commands like calling someone in your contacts list. For performing complex tasks such as say formatting your hard disk, checking whether a server is up or crashed, or starting a new program - GUI or CLI (another acronym for Command Line Interface) are the only choice or at least far more convenient options.

More importantly, for programming the computer for more complex tasks, we still rely on 'textual code' which issues 'commands' to the computer similar to those used in CLI.

I today want to however point towards a fast emerging offspring of both CLI and GUI - the CLGI. Have you ever started searching for something in Google only to have it 'auto-complete' it for you?
Jira - a popular bug tracking application - has taken this concept to another level. It allows users to create a 'query' in order to customize what gets displayed on the page using their custom Jira Query Language or JQL in short. Since Jira is used by both developers and business users, they have used the auto complete feature to make it simple for non-tech users to build JQL queries.

---

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAYo0IgOxs4
2. https://raam.org/2008/google-autocomplete-for-search/
3. http://www.javacorrection.com/2015/08/spring-interview-questions.html
4. http://blogs.atlassian.com/2009/10/jql/
5. Self created
6. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2006/06/05/contextual-spelling-in-the-2007-microsoft-office-system.aspx

Note: My thoughts on this subject remain unfinished, and I will try to post more as I do more research on the subject.