Digging for Meaning

[This is a  ridiculous diagnosis] Beware! A ghastly disease is on rise these days. It turns a perfectly capable adult into a challenged toddler who needs assistance. Who is at risk? It is sweeping across glass towers, big cars and countless cabins in city offices across India. Specifically, perfectly capable adults who start earning 7 figure salaries tend to be at high risk of turning into a differently-abled toddler. So the initial observations allude to it being a classist disease. Recent studies have revealed that, being wealthy is not the only determinant - it affects people who tend to make irrational choices - such as purchase of INR 35,000 for a laptop bag when one can buy another that is just as good for around INR 1,000. The irrationality alludes to it being a mental disease rather than a physical disability. Symptoms   They seem perfectly capable, healthy even, but are unable to do the most basic human action ever - of carrying one's own ...

Men in air-conditioned glass boxes often feel the need to powerpoint. This might be because what they want to say (or what their counterparts want to hear) is not well formed enough. And saying it simply will unravel the artifice. Powerpoint in that sense is a tool that holds together the artifice. The red ribbon on top of a decorated gift package which possibly holds junk inside. Or the shiny credit rating that hides the shitty credit quality of CDOs.  You might now say that - "No no, it is only a tool. It depends on who uses it for what purpose." Wrong. The medium is the message. And the message is 'suspension of disbelief'. Here the medium necessitates one speaker who often is standing to deliver the message and as such gets into an authoritative position and the listeners have to hold their horses and give their attention to the presenter for a period of time. It gives enough space and time for the con to take effect. The medium of powerpoint intrinsical...

The original reason I thought of against efficiency was really an empirical observation, with parallel to a natural sciences maxim. Any system naturally degenerates to higher entropy. The third law of thermodynamic s says so. The only way to continuously improve (increased order…going against disorder) is to segregate the components into an efficient system apart from a degenerate one. For eg. Essentially it could translate to the increased cleanliness inside our houses at the cost of dirtier and infertile land outside. Think of the nuclear wastage in ocean beds that has killed entire species of fishes. All for our want of efficient energy. So increased efficiency here means you r screwing up something else somewhere, all the more. So in Capitalism, where a select few get more and more resources at their disposal without an iota of understanding of it's cost, a third world country is perhaps paying the price through it's deforestation, increased pollution, de humanization, infe...

I am against hyper efficiencies sought in these days in everything. These hyper efficiencies are being sought without an understanding of the implications thereof. Take the case of energy systems. May it be the invention of the nuclear weapons, which has made extinction of human race a possibility in immediate future. Or see how this need for efficiency is fueling our irrational want for everything. There is a chasm of understanding between how things get made and how they get consumed. The hyper efficiencies are created by specialization of work. Vocations are getting more and more specialized. As such, human is getting distanced from the understanding of mechanisms of production of things that one consumes. This is harmful, because one then doesn’t understand the cost that natural resources, human life and flora and fauna is paying in producing something that may be totally superfluous. This drives irrational wants and creates a maddening consumerist race towards annihilation of wo...