Idle Thoughts

Today measures and numbers have become essential inputs to any decision, whether it is personal decisions, organizational decisions, or decisions by experts like doctors. This has significantly improved the ease of taking decisions as well as the objectivity of decision making. People today can look at the performance numbers  for their MPs before they vote, doctors have many vital measures and counts that they look at before they diagnose or prescribe remedy, managers have many performance numbers that they can look at before they take their decision. But like all good things, this has some bad side effects as well. The sheer availability of so many numbers and the over-dependence on ‘objectivity’ sometimes lulls us into letting numbers take its own decision. Here I have attempted to list down some cautions that we need to exercise to avoid the common pitfalls of over-dependence and misuse of data. It’s mostly written in the context of management decision making, with occasion...

While talking of evolution, Richard Dawkins lamented that many still consider evolution as a theory and not as a fact. He was surprised that people hung on to ideas that were scientifically proven wrong. Unlike Dawkins, I am not surprised. As I see the reluctance of some of the ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ minded in letting go of theories in the face of facts, it does not surprise me that the 'believers' are still hanging on to various religious ‘theories’ on the topic. For example, consider how a so called fact based discipline like history hangs on to its ideas in the face of contradicting evidence. A century back, some Europeans ventured into learning Vedas and Sanskrit. They were stricken by the similarity of the language to their own. In the absence of any other fact, they postulated that Aryans invaded India and spread their language and culture in India. This was not founded on much, but we can’t blame those who made this theory because there was no other fact to cont...

Historian Romila Thapar, while delivering the 3rd Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture organised by The Book Review Literary Trust in New Delhi, this November talked about the hesitation of free thinking Indians to question the authority. See Swapan Dasgupta's response to this speech here . During this speech, she expressed concern on the narrowing of liberal spaces in the last couple of decades. Though it was fought back, she laments that it is upon us again. She does not specifically name the events that led her to this conclusion, but indicates the types of events.  To quote a summary of the speech from Rediff: “This is evident from the ease with which books are banned and pulped, or demands made that they be burned, and syllabuses changed under religious and political pressure, or the intervention of the state .” Let us inspect each of these cases. Subramanyan Swamy recently called for burning Romila Thapar’s history books. It appears a gross exaggeration to pronou...