A small note about completing War and Peace

Today, I’ve finished reading the epic tome, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I posted 20 days ago on social media that I was just three books away from the ending and I’ve given every moment of reading to this ridiculous (what’s another word for) epic.

Now that I’m done with the story, I will go back to the beginning and start again. I just want to go through all of the two thousand three hundred and twenty two notes and highlights that I’ve made across the book before I make them available publicly on my blog. It is a revision, yes, but this book deserves this second read.

There’s so much to say about this book but all of that will be said in my notes. Those notes will sit as a reference for me to come back to over time. I’ve realized the value of such notes sitting on my blog. I recently went back to my notes on A Room of One’s Own to figure out my thoughts on some related topics. I hope to use opportunities such as this to build a corpus of knowledge sitting publicly that I can always come back to and build on. If you find it interesting enough, you can refer to those notes too.

It has been an interesting and long journey. I’ve spent many hours peering through the lens of Tolstoy’s characters at an age gone by, and many of the questions Tolstoy raises are vital to understanding world history. All those topics too, will be reflected in my notes.

[Link] If you want to stay successful, learn to think like Leonardo da Vinci — Quartz

I wanted to highlight almost all of this article. It’s just so good. But for now, read this simple but strong quote –

Reality is redundant

Source: If you want to stay successful, learn to think like Leonardo da Vinci — Quartz

Whenever I think about learning, I am dismayed by a realization that we stop learning too quickly. Yes, we spend all of our childhood and some part of our adulthood learning. That does seem a lot. But once we stop, once we get jobs, ‘settle down’, and stop bringing homework home, the speed at which we stop learning is drastic.

This is wrong. Learning is a lifelong pursuit and we should relish it once we understand its value. There’s an ongoing conversation about careers and industries going under and leaving unemployment and ungainful employment in their wake. Learning is our strongest protection against this. Plus, it keeps our minds fresh and our brains active.

I once asked my Dad about the importance of education and how frequently should we go back to our studies. His answer was that we should head back to our books at least every five years to remain current. Often, familial and professional factors prevent us from doing that. But we should be aware of the importance of learning and follow up on it, even if by reading a few books a year.

Go read that article. It’s really good. We all need more learning in our lives and polymaths like Da Vinci are proofs of exactly that.

[Fiction] So

The other day, I was sitting and waiting for the bus, which was late as usual. It was an unusually warm day for that time of the year and there was no one sharing the bus stop with me. I had time on my hands and thus, the rare opportunity of noticing people passing by. I stared at everyone I could see, noticing their clothes and their mannerisms. I guessed at their convictions and imagined their stories. One such passerby – a man in his thirties, caught my eye. He had a balding head and ‘serious’ glasses, which placed him towards the latter part of the decade. He was wearing a checked reddish-brown shirt, as if he wanted to go for the hipster woodcutter look. At some point, he’d decided he’d overdone it and thus had not gone full-hipster. His boring jeans and the ID tag hanging from his neck made me place him as an IT professional. It is the bane of IT professionals to be dressed in such clothes, bordering on personal freedom and misplaced professionalism. My own blue jeans, green t-shirt, and ID tag mirrored him in dullness and unoriginality.

I first noticed him as he was crossing the street, maintaining his position in the middle of the zebra crossing. He’s cautious, I remember thinking. But he wasn’t rushing to get out of the road either. So he recognizes that he’s white, I also remember thinking. As he came near the end of the zebra crossing, he came to a bush, the kind you find in cities where local governments have a mandate to plant ‘greenery’ in every viable location they can find. It was dull, dying, dust colored, and definitely a catchall for pollution from the cars that drive on by.

I noticed that it was dull and dying, but I knew the reason for that too. The summers have been harsh and dry and we’re heading into fall. I cannot expect bushes to be green and flowering. But it irritated me nonetheless that the bush was a dead creature.

As I watched the redshirted man cross the bush, he reached close to it, bent down and picked something up from there. Did he really pick up a piece of trash from the sidewalk? Why would he do that? Was he a spy picking up a dead drop? I’ve been watching too many spy shows and movies, I told myself. Was it a message from a lover? No, certainly not. I was letting my imagination run too wild.

As he approached, I saw that the man had picked out what looked like a beer can, an empty “tall boy”, if you must know. It was black and emblazoned with some lettering and the image of a cold mountain. I watched him come to me, towards the bus stop that I alone occupied. He tossed the beer can playfully into the air and looked at it as if he had been the owner of it all along. Was he not worried of residual beer falling out? Perhaps it was an old beer can and he instinctively knew it to be dry.

But I get ahead of myself. As soon as I saw what he had picked out of the bushes, I asked myself a question – why? Why would someone take the effort of picking up garbage from the street? Was he a do-gooder who wanted to clean up his city? Was he concerned about the slow and painful degradation of the material of the can, polluting his airspace and the soil, destroying his city one tall boy at a time? Was it something he fancied and wanted to take home with himself? (I hoped it’s a firm no on that last one!)

What are, by the way, the ethics of removing garbage from the street? I have myself, on many occasions, picked up stray bits of paper, a can here or there, or discarded plastic straws, and dutifully deposited them to the bin. But have I known others to do so? Certainly not! My friends have chided me for it. I have heard the various diseases I could die of from other people’s garbage. I used to think that my small action made a difference to that one straw. But I’ve learnt that in the longer context, my actions do not matter at all.

Also, what are the economics of picking up said garbage? There would be a trash collector for the area. Does he go about checking every bush for waylaid beer cans? Are you stealing from his quota? What will he do when he comes around and sees that the bush is too clean? He’ll report that there is less garbage on this street. His superiors will decide to reduce the number of rounds he makes here. Trash will then accumulate for longer till the next time he comes around to pick it up. What of the IT professional himself? What if, god forbid, he does get some infection due to the beer can? Will his insurance give him any aid, when they find out he got ill because he picked up garbage from the street? Can he claim that the city is responsible in some way, because he was helping clean up the area he works in? They’ll ask him to prove that he’s a qualified trash collector and had the requisite equipment such as gloves and a trash grabber. Since I could see that he did not, why would the city come to his support when he falls ill?

What is, finally, the morality of picking up garbage and getting it off the streets? There is definitely some right in doing so. Every few years, in places like Gurgaon and Bangalore, in India, you’ll see some IT company donating semi-precious time, resources, and man-hours to cleaning up some extremely dirty road in the region and painting it in bright, boring shades of uniformity. NGOs often sponsor such events and with much ado. Is picking up this garbage on a per-beer-can basis an act of heroism? Is the balding man a hero in my eyes now? I cannot say that for certain, but I do have some newfound respect for him. I stopped doing this same thing due to peer pressure and societal mores. But this fellow marches on, solitary in his pursuit of cleaning up every beer can in every bush that comes in his path. He knows only one truth – it matters to this beer can that it gets to the recycling bin. The destiny of this one can is not to rot in some foul corner of the city. It must rot out there in the oceans, or head to Madras, where it can be safely dumped away from the prying eyes of bothered Americans. He is a hero in the way that heroes ought to be – unassuming, silent folk, soldiering on in their pursuits without regard for personal safety or peer pressure.

As he approached the bus station, this messiah of cleanliness stood with an aura around him. But there was confusion on his bright, beautiful face. I looked to where he looked and noticed what he noticed. Usually, bus stands have a trashcan or two accompanying them. But in this singular instance, this was not the case. Alas, there was no trash receptacle! Where would our hero deposit this beer can? How was he to complete his mission in leading another piece of discard to its destiny?

As he pondered on this dilemma, and I must confess, I did too, the bus arrived. Seeing this, he looked around and, noticing a USPS post box, tossed the can in there and got in line to board the bus.

This post was edited by my dear friend Sayan Das. His edits and suggestions made this piece of writing worth reading. You can follow Sayan on Instagram here. His exceptional writing is an inspiration to me every day. He loves London and butter chicken.

Prophesizing about it

I’m currently reading a book called Great French Short Stories. It is a collection of famous short stories by famous French authors. The first story is “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaler” by Gustave Flaubert and I read it a few days ago. The story is interesting, if predictable. The main play of the story is between three competing prophesies, which all seem to come true, but as always, one is truer than the others. Now, prophesies are sometimes a very easy tool for authors to use. They’re a sort of Deus Ex Machina, making it easy to come to a foregone conclusion without much explanation. Of course, how much the author leans on the prophecy to cop out of writing the story is important, and Flaubert doesn’t lean too much. The story grows, largely ignoring the prophecies and silently fulfilling them, till the last and most important one.

This is where I feel there’s a flaw. Not in the story per se. The story is quite nice, but in… something.

See, I’ve mainly seen prophecies in science fiction and fantasy stories. In science fiction, prophecies are like ‘fixed points in time and space’, as Doctor Who calls them. They’re independent of external factors, least of all ‘God’. In fantasies, prophecies come from darker sources and often are convoluted. A prophecy may not get fulfilled in the exact way as it is said and the author often takes a roundabout way of explaining how the prophecy was indeed fulfilled. Anyone who’s read Harry Potter or watched Alt+Shift+X explanations of Game of Thrones knows this.

But Flaubert has written what to me seems to be religious fiction. In this, all prophecy and all of the story line flows ‘from God’ and thus, while the conclusion is inevitable (the title of the story is a strong hint for the ending), there is, for the longest time, the illusion of free will and coincidence in the story, thus leading to some chaos and some probabilistic chance that the prophecies might not get fulfilled. Flaubert shows off these vagaries beautifully, all the way up until a fatal line towards the end of the second part of the story. The line is –

Since there were no animals, he would willingly massacre humans.

Here’s my problem with this line –

Flaubert has knowingly or unknowingly given away the climax. We all know what it’s coming to, thanks to the prophecy, but how and when would it happen is supposed to be a mystery all the way up till it happens. So why introduce this idea that since this did not happen, therefore, the prophecy will be fulfilled. We don’t need that!
This line itself seems to show that there is no choice here. Yes, this moment is leading to the fulfillment of a prophecy, but till now, the protagonist fulfilled other prophecies unknowingly and as a side-effect of their actions. Why then, must this one prophecy need to be ‘set up’ and executed in this uncontrollable manner? Perhaps what Flaubert is showing is that this prophecy is controlled and executed by God and so there is no scope for variance. That it will happen just so, in hindsight. This line is why I want to put this story not in science fiction or fantasy or any of the other myriad forms of stories, but in religious fiction. The acts that follow are almost involuntary and directly cause the fulfillment of the prophecy, instead of indirectly, and after this, the only recourse available to the protagonist is repentance and turning towards God. It were much more natural if the entire story were unchanged and this one line removed, because in my eyes, this story tells us that God has directed this evil of “massacring humans” in order to then redeem the protagonist. Why must the rest of the story be by chance and natural while this part is supernaturally controlled?

People who have read this story, what are your thoughts on this?

Side note – Once every year or so, I remember that a long time ago, I purchased a device called the “Chromebook Mario” from someone on eBay when I was living in Boulder. He did not seem to have any use for it and wanted to part with it simply because one of the keys was broken and that somehow made the device ‘less pristine’. I got it for cheap. I remember that I still have it, so I find it, charge it, fire it up and play around with it. I do a lot of things in the browser, but not everything, so it can never be my primary device. It’s just an interesting thing to play with. What surprises me is that every time I fire it up, it has updates for me and yet, every time, the speed and performance I get from ChromeOS seems to not have changed. My logins change and need syncing, my extensions change and need setting up, and then I reboot the device to update the software.

But it comes back quickly and works like a charm! Kudos to Google for making this excellent device and supporting it for so long (I currently own a Mac on which Chrome specifically warns me that the browser version I’m running is no longer supported and I need to update the OS and then Chrome to get the latest security features). I wrote this post on the Mario and can perhaps use it as a writing-only device, if only it didn’t also have all the trappings I’ve come to associate with the Internet (the first tab I always open in a browser is my RSS reader).

A note about people taking the time on the Internet

I read a very interesting post through one of the linkblogs I follow. This link, through the blog kateva.org talks about how Facebook is experimenting with linking Groups and Pages, the two ‘community’ offerings by Facebook with the use of Saas affiliate marketing software. I’m part of a few groups and a few pages (I’ve cut down on the latter a lot in recent years because it’s mostly noise) and I see real value in merging the two and creating a single entity that simplifies group interactions on FB.

But what was interesting to me was John Gordon’s comment on the link – “I miss blogs that used to explain things like this.” Of course, he’s not talking about the change FB is bringing but the blog he’s linked to. The comment resonated with me because there’s something along those lines that I’ve been thinking about since some time now.

When the Internet began, people started filling out blogs and sites talking about the most mundane of things – small changes in their favorite newspapers, versions of textbooks and differences between them, software and the differences between versions, events of their days, to name a few. These discussions were then swept up by sites who collected these minutae, stripped out all ownership information, and presented the collected works as their own. This has been acceptable practice and what certain sites are borne out of (cough cough). This practice both helps grow the Internet at an exponential rate and harms the original authors as their work and name gets lost along the way.

So people on the Internet slowed down. Content creation moved from everywhere on the Internet to either large syndications or small blogs or forums. The large swathe of users on the Internet became consumers. This is part of the problem for most social networks – when a majority of people are consumers, only a choice few are creating value. Thus is born the consumer’s content creation – likes and shares and retweets and reposts. These became the content of today. I don’t have a problem with this.

My problem is with the loss of the minutae. That value that was once created on blogs and static pages is now created on reddit and stackoverflow and obscure forums, if at all. That often means that the type of value creation that I (and Gordon) am looking for has just about disappeared. If no one asks the question on Quora or Stackoverflow, no one answers what the changes FB is making look like.

What I’m looking for is even more specific. I am often faced with a very difficult choice – whether or not to update a particular software. With apps, it’s much more difficult because we notice those changes quickly and it is almost a split second decision whether to update or not (click that button!). Further, there are so many apps that we use and so many updates that get pushed through that it would be draining to discuss what each update brings to the table and whether it is destructive in any way for any specific scenario. For updates on a computer, there’s still some open discussion one can find. People take these a little more seriously and often it’s easy to find information about version changes and impact on systems similar to one’s own.

Let’s take a few examples –

I recently updated to the latest version of the WordPress app on iOS. It was on a whim and I paid dearly for that. The new update brings the ability to manage plugins on your WP blog. But the update is borked. One of my blogs has well over fifty installed updates (not all are enabled) and when I go into that blog, the app crashes and then keeps crashing. I’ve seen no update for this issue in the last two days and haven’t bothered to write up a report to WP for it. I learnt after a few tries that if I don’t open that blog’s admin page from my app, the app doesn’t crash (letting me use the app for other blogs). Presumably this has something to do with not loading the plugins list from that site. I wouldn’t know, I’ve not explored the issue further. Funny thing is, if I’d have waited a little and read a few reviews, I still wouldn’t have come across this issue because people usually don’t blog about specific versions of an app and I’d have to trawl through a bunch of issues pages on GitHub to find some mention of the issue.

The other example I have is of a BIOS update. I have the option of pulling in this update and I know that if I want to go exploring issues around it, I’ll find at least a few pages talking about people’s positive or negative experiences around it. Why the difference? Apps affect our lives just as much as BIOS updates do, because they take up more of our time now than computers do. The only thing is that BIOS updates are infrequent and cause system-wide failure. Plus, the BIOS update has been out there for a while and if it had been problematic, I would be able to find more information about it, and is a big problem since people love to use computers, for work, game or even listen to music using the 5.1 computer speakers 2017 that give the best audio quality to any computer.

There’s a hundred other things associated with these scenarios which I’ve ignored to simplify them – iOS is a closed garden, so the number of users who get affected by an individual app are much fewer than from any BIOS update; app updates are now automated so people don’t even have this dilemma that I have; there is a lot of software out there no one talks about and I’ve not included in my examples.

(By the way, I feel Apple should go the WordPress.org way. It should allow people to report back on app versions with respect to iOS versions, to say that, e.g. “2000 people report 100% compatiblity with iOS 11.2 for version 1.3 of this app”. This will give both us and them so much more information about how stables apps and updates are.)

People have stopped taking the time to talk on the open Internet about changes that affect us all. That’s because the return on investment of time and effort is all but enough to warrant this approach to life – documenting every small change.

That’s somewhat sad, frankly.

To: The Awl, Subject: Before you die

Hey Sylvia and Team,

I knew about The Awl only when Sylvia was heading it. I discovered it last year or so and bothered to send in a few typos along the way. I loved the writing, I loved the off-current-affairs topics, I loved the esoteric posts. I loved Fran Hoepfner’s writing as well as music recommendations, specially since they pointed squarely to playlists on Spotify. Here’s a list of five posts that I have bookmarked. (There were probably more, but I lost some data from my RSS reader one day and didn’t bother to go looking for that)

Now The Awl is dying. People are celebrating this amazing blog/site/publishing platform. They’re talking about what a grand experiment it was, they’re talking about how it began and how it seemed to forever be bootstrapped (this is one of my failings – I do not bother with initial intent, so I don’t know when something will turn on me. I should be more careful of this). They’re relishing in the long list of people who ‘graduated’ from The Awl and the platform it gave to the many who now work elsewhere. They’re toasting to the feeling of having a personal blog but with an editor and getting paid to write on it.

Well I’m a little pissed. I discovered The Awl too late. I supported it too late. I want to discover more writers (and I sure am not going to use Medium to do it) and read more content and send more letters to the Editor. But they’re going away. At the end of the month, no less! I may be an infrequent reader of the site, but I don’t remember seeing any discussion with the readers, or any indication that it’s going under. All I see now are articles written in other publications by people who moved on from The Awl and know its inner workings. They’re waxing poetic about how there were never any investors, how The Awl always had a blog-y feel instead of a publication, how the end was inevitable because 2008-2013 was the time when small ad networks supported small blogs, but we all knew this was going to end some day.

Well, it did and frankly, if you’re in the business of publishing online, you should know one thing – ads are dead. Everyone, when they get a new computer, follow this format –

Open default browser
Download Google Chrome
Install Adblock

That’s the way this works now. If you don’t know that, well, sorry. If The Awl thought that life in the Adworld was tough because the site wasn’t targeted enough, here’s a tip –

2012 may have been the age of small ad networks, but 2018 is the age of ASKING YOUR USERS FOR SUPPORT.

Seriously, if writing apps (like Ulysses and Bear) can move to a subscription model, if The New York Times can politely remind people to donate, if the Guardian can ask for as little as $1, the least you could have done was to mid-2017 start a darn Patreon page. If nothing else, you’d see who out of the thousands of people who visit your pages found your content worth supporting.

But I get it, you’ve thrown your hat in the ring. You’ve decided that the thing you knew – ads – is no longer going to keep the virtual doors open and so it’s time to move on. So be it. I’ve followed my favorites on twitter and Instagram and hopefully will find some meaningful voices on Medium (ugh) and indie blogs (have you heard? they’re making a come-back. ping me, anyone, who needs help setting up a WordPress blog for ~$3/mo). In the meanwhile, I’ll be looking for ways to start my own Awl, in memory of this interesting ‘experiment’.

The Awl is dead, but its marks remain.

Photo by maritimeantiques