Month March 2019

No Brainer

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Stop and Think!

Jellyfish. Its a fish that looks, feels like a moving jelly. So naming it a jelly fish is a No Brainer. No, I dont mean that you don’t have to use any grey matter to arrive at this name. I mean it literally. A jelly fish has no Brain. So do a lot of other organisms. But it is a well known and recognised creature, so I’ll stick with it to make my point.

Now Jelly fish has no brain but it survives. It just survives it doesn’t bother about the rest of the world. But we humans do. None of the other 8.7 million species on earth do it. Just us. So, we think that we are superior to them. We think our brains are more advanced than all the other species. This hasn’t yet been scientifically proven but just for the sake of this argument, let’s assume they are. Now are we using this brain? Or May be let me rephrase the question. Are we using our brains correctly?

There are 2 types of humans that I see. Ones who just accept what ever they are told. Ones who don’t. Now, if you just accept what ever is told to you without reasoning, technically you might as well be born as a jelly fish. In other words, you might as well not have a brain. Why carry the weight of 3 pounds that is not needed. Well may be not all of it, just the Grey part. You will still need the white part to remember what is told to you. You just don’t need the part that gives cognitive abilities.

I would like to venture a guess that while reading this blog, especially the previous paragraph, you have categorised yourself as the second kind. The Reasoning Kind. But I’d like to disagree. It might sound a arrogant statement. But I honestly believe that most people do not put their brains to good use and I wholeheartedly wish they did. May be they don’t realise the need to question the status quo. 

Now, I’ll go through a list of few things that I bet you never bothered to think twice about. You learnt them in school, stuffed them in our memory bank and left them there. For Instance, why does one stop at a red light and drive when it is green? Who decided it? Why did they choose those colours? 

But one question always drives me in circles. Well, spheres and ellipses to be honest.
Earth is a sphere and it revolves around the Sun in an elliptical orbit. So, how do we determine the starting point of a sphere or a ellipse?
Well they did do that. In 1850, people from some so called western came together and said, we need to create time zones. This started when railroad connectivity established between Canada and the US. Business men had a tough time with ‘time’. Obviously they did not invite all the countries with people who have melanin in their skin. Then everyone that were invited wanted their country to be taken as a reference point. Now who do you think won in this situation. Take a guess. It was the English. They made England the centre of Earth.
One can argue that there was a very good necessity to draw longitudes. But then they have established the so called East and West. 

Directions are pretty straight forward. The direction that sun rises from is the east. eg: For India Singapore is East. For England, France is East. But its funny that their definition was not relative. Japan is far east, even for Hawaii. And For Korea, US is West. That doesn’t make any sense.

Now lets get back to the concept of time for a moment. A calendar is also a way to keep time. Time will exist even of no one will keep track of it. Now, the best way to make a formula for anything is to find as few exceptions as possible and a unit of time has to fall under same criteria. But they did all kinds of reverse engineering and forward engineering. Its just like the non-metric system in US and UK. Its stupid. An year is defined as time it takes for earth to complete one rotation around the sun. So, where does an orbit start? Why start counting on January 1st. Again you might argue that its a problem with no solution. Some one had to start counting at some point in the orbit. Why not January? Agree.

I’ll use a final example that in completely and utterly illogical. Now. A week has 7 days. There are 5/6 work/week days and 2/1 weekend days respectively (depending on which part of the world you are in). Now why is Sunday a holiday? Why not any other 6 days of the week? This is a stupid thing that was written in bible that no one is supposed to work of Sabbath as its the day of the lord. Now that is fine, but what about the rest of the world. Its not the day of ‘their’ lord. Well except Saudi Arabia, they saw the right through this logic and declared that their holiday would be on Friday. 

You may think that I’m crazy to say that such kind of things are worth thinking about. But I’d argue that these are the exact kind of things that one should ponder about. If we silently follow what we are told, what’s the difference between a sheep(or Jellyfish) and us. 



Poor preferences

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Supply vs Demand



Today, My wife and I were watching a rerun of Top Gear. It was a 2018 episode being telecast in 2019. Yes, in India a lot of foreign shows are not that popular. We’ll get to that later. It was Season 25 Episode 6. They were test driving 3 SUV’s on a rugged course and each of the SUV had to tow a horse box or a horse caravan. In this trailer was a horse shaped piñata. After each SUV ran the course, they were checking the state of the piñata. After the second SUV, a new range rover, had finished its run, they opened the horse box and found that the piñatas’ head broke off. One of the host commented that it was a ‘Sicilian Stallion’. On hearing this, both my wife and me broke into a hysterical laughter. It was a very clever joke. Now if you do not understand why it is funny, you are the exact kind of person that inspired me to write this blog post.

After the laughter settled, I told my wife that we cannot share this joke with anyone we know. We again giggled for a while. Well not everyone, but almost everyone. Now, we were not insulting almost everyone of our friends. It was actually an ironic laughter on the poor preferences most our friends have. See, to get the joke, you should have read The God Father by Mario Puzo or should have watched Francis Coppola’s movie adaptation of the book. The joke is actually a reference to one of the most epic scenes in the history of cinema. 

A lot of good humor has references to pop culture. Not just humor, pop culture gives you insights into a lot of things. For example, there is a small but busy branch of culture studies known as “Buffy studies”; it’s even part of a Masters program at Brunel University, London. Topics include moral philosophy, gender constructs, textual analysis, and linguistic culture, all of which are explored using examples from “Buffy” and its spinoff “Angel.” The delighted show creator Joss Whedon said,

“If it’s successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why. Buffy, on the other hand is, I hope, not idiotic. We think very carefully about what we’re trying to say emotionally, politically, and even philosophically while we’re writing it… it really is, apart from being a pop-culture phenomenon, something that is deeply layered textually episode by episode.”

Now, traditionally TV and comics have been considered a low art. But in the 21st century, this is the art that most people are exposed to, thus it the most popular art. Any popular art form that becomes a part of culture and thus pop culture is very important. There are a multitude of reasons to study it. It’s not just entertainment, it also gives you a glimpse of culture of that period. 

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m no all pro western art and pop culture. If someone from India after an exam says, that question was more difficult than the question “Why kattappa killed bahubali”. It is pop culture and I respect that. One could argue that no one outside India would understand the reference to bahubali and kattappa. That’s true. But that’s because it is not popular there.  There are a lot of film makers and writers pouring good content in Indian screens too. But this good content  is too less and too infrequent. Let’s take Bahubali, the most expensive Indian movie ever made, broke all records in terms of money it made. If you have watched the 2 part saga, answer a couple of my questions. 
What was the plot? Did this plot if it existed require 329 minutes of running time and such a huge budget? 
There are a few very iconic scenes in the movie but did the wafer thin plot and need less emotional drama warrant an outlay of 430 crores? 

But when it comes to TV, Films or even cartoons in India, There is a generalization by the makers for each genre. 
1) Daily soaps – are for women, only melodrama sells
2) News is for men. Needs no fact checking only as much controversy as possible.
3) Cartoons are not entertainment, they need to be addictive, should be able to sell merchandise, content need not be filtered for children.




Media industry like all businesses caters to demand. So, if the demand for quality content increases, the supply will automatically start. In a way internet streaming services have already started a phase.It will take time to bring up the quality but until then we have alternatives.One of the side effects of British colonization of India was that most of the educated Indian’s know English. This is a blessing in a way because this gives us an opportunity to tap into books, TV, Cinema and comics in English. The internet now has erased all boundaries, you can find subtitles for most of the popular TV and Film content in any language. So, it’s not the old days of doordarshan where you had only one option, Now you have lots of options.

You just have reach out and grab it.