Tower of Babel and Irregular Verbs

We missed out on a golden opportunity to redress the wrongs done to us by the Gods at Babel. Different languages ensured that we will not be able to build the Tower of Babel. But surely the grammar was codified long after the languages themselves evolved to a quasi-steady state. SO WHICH IDIOT INVENTED IRREGULAR VERBS? Or perhaps Gods introduced to ensure that people may never master each others' language and make another attempt at Babel.

Frustrations in learning new language apart, I think that the Tower of Babel was the noblest endeavour that (hu)man ever attempted: the tower was dedicated to the glory of human beings; what could be nobler?

Stimulating Creativity

Some management studies surprise me no end. Take this study on How To Stimulate Creativity? for instance. "Go live abroad", it says. Immersing yourself in local experiences for a prolonged period helps stimulate creativity. People who are bi-lingual or tri-lingual are found to be more creative in the study.

I have no doubt it does. Different inputs fire different neurons in your brain. variety of experiences help trigger creative juices. You do not have to live abroad for that. Just do things differently.

Do you drive to your office everyday? Do you take the same route? Try a different one. Or go to office in a bus for a month. Or better still pedal to office.

Do you love thrillers? Go to your local bookshop or the library and pick up a genre that you would never think of reading.

You can't stand classical music? Listen to Carnatic / Hindustani / Wsetern classical for a month. Oh! You are already into classical music? Listen to Jazz then.

Learn a new language on your own.

You do not have to go live abroad to become creative. You can create your own different environment at home. And I promise you, each of my suggestions given above will increase your creativity. It is the new experience and the ability to weave the new experiences into your daily life that makes one creative.

And if creativity was linked to number of languages, then all Indians would be overflowing with creativity. Any educated Indian would know at least 3 languages, if not more.

Wait a minute! Perhaps, we Indians are really very creative.

Srinivasa Vardhan

Have you ever heard of S. R. Srinivasa Vardhan?

I bet you haven't.
This is a country that worships cricketers and movie stars. How could you have ever heard of a mathematician of International repute!!!

He is the only Indian to have won the Abel Prize. This prize is also known as the Mathematician's Nobel Prize. He received this Prize in 2007. And I do not recollect his photograph splashed across the front page of any paper or magazine, but then I do not read all the newspapers and magazines, and my memory is diminishing with age. In any case, I am quite certain there was no hoopla that was associated with, say, Sushmita Sen or even Amartya Sen.

Oh by the way, the Indian government has conferred upon him the Padma Bhushan in 2008 - AFTER he received the Abel Prize.

If you click on the 2008 list, you will also see a host of names, along with Mr. Vardhan's. How many of these can you recognise? Are we giving Padma awards to too many people?

The Spanish Understand Marriages

The Spanish language has two words for "be".

Thus, for example, "I am" could be "soy" (=saw-ee) or "estoy" (=es-toy-ee).
Soy is used for things that are permanent in nature, whereas Estoy is for those things that are in transition or if it is about location. (the infinitive forms are "ser" and "estar")

Example:
I am Amitabh = Soy Amitabh
I am ready = Estoy listo

I am from India = Soy de la India
I am working = Estoy trabajando

Just wondering why the ancient Spanish people decided to use the 'temporary be - estar' for marriage?!?!?!

Estoy casado = I'm married.

Spanish Potatoes

My fascination for the connection between Spanish and Hindi continues (see here). At times the connection stuns me. I hope you also will be.

The word "ki" (कि) in Hindi is equivalent to the English "that". "He said that ..." is "woh bola ki..."
Guess what is equivalent of the Hindi "ki" in Spanish?
You guessed right! It is "Que" - pronounced "kay". "él dijo que ..."

Ok consider this now ... slightly complicated.

है (ha-ay), in Hindi, is difficult to explain and can mean "is" or "... is there". Example, "Is there anyone?" is " कोई है?" (Ko-ee ha-ay). The word for "is there" in Spanish is "hay", pronounced aa-ee.

I find such similarity amazing. It is easy to ascribe such similarities to Indo-European langauges (Sanskrit, Spanish, German, all belong to this group of languages.) However, Hindi did not evolve from Sanskrit. It evolved from Prakrit, like other dialects, such as Braj and Awadhi. But absorbed heavily from Sanskrit to become a standard version. So the basic structure still remains different from Sanskrit.

Thus, the word है does not have any equivalent in Sanskrit. But yet, has similar sounding word in Spanish. I wonder what the connection is?

The only other strange connection I can see is in an entirely different domain - culinary. There is hardly any day when potato does not form part of the North Indian meal. Potatoes were introduced to India by the Portuguese - who were, of course, once upon a time part of Spain. Spanish and Portuguese most definitely have got this from Peru and Chile. I do not know the exact mechanism of how Potato was made popular in India by the Portuguese but I find it very difficult to believe that it was merely a case of dumping a sackful of potatoes on an Indian door step.

So is there a connection? After all both - language and cuisine - are the subject of the tongue.

This post is merely a flight of imagination. I do not claim any scholarly knowledge on this subject. There are much more learned people than I in this domain. If you are one such and happen to read this blog, I will be obliged if you could throw some light on this.

Spanish and Hindi

All I know is German and Sanskrit are close relatives in the Indo-European group of languages. Spanish does not seem to be. But the more I listen to the audio lessons the more it is clear to me that there must be some link somewhere.

Now, what would you say if I say 'tu'. All Hindi speaking people will say that is the informal you (तू). Bingo! A Spanish speaking person would say the same; except they write it as 'tú'. And amazingly the pronunciation is identical - yes with a soft 't'.

Alright, here are a few more:

'pagar' in Spanish is 'to pay'. Guess what it means to Hindi speaking people? To them 'pagar' (पगार) is salary. The pronunciation is identical(=pagaar)

'pero' (=pay-row) in Spanish is similar to पर (=purr) in Hindi (meaning 'but')
'que' (=kay) in Spanish is similar to क्या (=kya) in Hindi (meaning 'what')

Now, this could be coincidence. In any case, I will dig deeper and report soon.

Bindeshwar Pathak

Bindeshwar who?
You are unlikely to know this name unless you are preparing for the Civil Services Exams or you read newspapers till page 12.
Bindeshwar Pathak has been awarded the 2009 Stockholm Water Prize - equivalent to Nobel Prize on Environmental Issues. And the headline (if you can call it that at page 12 of the Times of India) merely mentions "Sanitation expert bags Water Prize" - no name in the headline. Contrast this with the star status accorded to Amartya Sen for a pseudo-Nobel Prize on Economics. This in an era when environmental issues need to be addressed with screaming headlines on the front pages of every newspaper and magazine (imagine the awareness that would come if everyday the headlines of all newspapers talk of environmental issues.)

Still do not know who Bindeshwar Pathak is?
Seen Sulabh Toilets?
Ah! Now you know him!

Honouring mothers

I just learned that people in many Spanish speaking countries have two surnames. One from father and the other from mother. And it goes like this.

If Carlos Garcia Sanchez marries Maria Jose Escudaro and they have a child called Marta.
Her complete name will be Marta Garcia Jose.

Now isn't that nice?

Portuguese, I believe reverses the algorithm and puts mother's surname first. That way mother's surname gets carried forward instead of father's surname.

I think this is even better.

Artificial Language - Loglan

A few posts ago, I discussed Esperanto as a language that failed ("used to day by only a few million speakers (with varying degree of expertise), one tenth of 1 percent of the world's population"). Clearly I am an ignoramus. For there is a language that is an even greater disaster.

The following is a from a delightful little book called Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus.

To my knowledge, only one person ever seriously tried to construct an ambiguity-free, mathematically perfect human language, mathematically perfect not just in vocabulary but also in sentence construction. In the late 1950s a linguist by the name of James Cooke Brown constructed a language known as Loglan, short for "logical language." In addition to a Wilkins-esque systematic vocabulary, it includes 112 "little words"that govern logic and structure. ... The English word he, for example, would translate as da if it refers to the first singular antecedent in a discourse, de if it refers to the second, di if it refers to the third, do is it refers to the fourth, and du if it refers to the fifth. [It is not as difficult as it seems - it merely follows the vowel sequence of a, e, i, o, u - da, de, di, do, du] ... To see why this is useful, consider the English sentence He runs and he walks. It might describe a single person who runs and walks, or two different people, one running, the other walking; by contrast in Loglan, the former would be rendered unambiguously as Da prano i da dzoru, the later unambiguously as Da prano i de dzoru.

But Loglan has made even few inroads than Esperanto. Despite its "scientific" origins, it has no native speakers. On the Loglan website [http://www.loglan.org/], Brown reports that at "The Loglan Institute ... live-in apprentices learned the language directly from me (and I from them!), I am happy to report that sustained daily Loglan-only conversation lasting three-quarters of an hour or more were achieved," but so far as I know, nobody has gotten much further. For all its ambiguity and idiosyncrasy, English goes down much smoother for the human mind. We couldn't learn a perfect language if we tried.

I wonder if it possible to write poetry using Loglan.

Life Factors Are Not Mutually Exclusive

Half a century ago, Frederick Herzberg discovered that the factors that affect satisfaction are not the same as the the factors that affect motivation on the job. He called them Hygiene Factors and Motivators.

He found out that absence of Hygiene Factors cause dissatisfaction. That, of course, does not mean that presence of Hygiene Factors result in Motivation. Example of Hygiene Factors are security, status, salary, peer relationship. Herzberg, in fact, found that presence of Hygiene Factors has very less impact on the motivation level. On the other hand, absence of factors like Good Job Content, Recognition, Achievement, Responsibility, etc. - termed Motivators - had a huge impact on Motivation. Their absence did little to remove dissatisfaction from the job. So, in essence, a great paying job that goes nowhere is satisfactory but you will not be motivate to give your best.

Fair enough!

What is good for a job should be applicable to life too, isn't it?
So why do we focus on aspects that are (apparently) mutually exclusive?

Success in job at the cost of family life.
Wealth but no true friends.
Palaces but no home.

Perhaps we do understand the basic dynamics of life. I am sure laughter and responsibility can go hand in hand.

Good Manager, Bad Manager, Good Economist, Bad Economist

Any book that has the following statement is worth reading:

The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequence of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

For a second I thought this was one of the many post-meltdown books that are flooding the markets today. (All those who could not predict it are now explaining it, funny!) But no. Economics In One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt was first published in 1946 that is not a typo - it is 1946) and then updated in 1962.

Actually, if I were a plagiarist I could replace the word 'economist' by 'manager' and publish a sure shot best seller. This is how ...

The bad manager sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good manager also looks beyond. The bad manager sees only the direct consequence of a proposed course; the good manager looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad manager sees only what effect of a given decision has been or will be on one particular group; the good manager inquires also what the effect of the decision will be on all groups.

Hmmm.... May be I will learn a lot about management by reading this gem of a book on economics.

Free Will and external influence

You're the man! (or woman!)
You believe in free will.
You make your own decisions.
What you are today is because of your efforts and because you were ready for the opportunities that presented themselves.

I don't dispute this. But did you know how easy it is to manipulate you.
"Manipulate me?". you say with a scorn.

Okay. Let us touch on another topic.
Have you heard of 'priming'?

Psychologists have conducted experiments that show that it is possible to make you act differently merely by seeding your brain with relevant words, without your knowledge, of course.

You must have experienced this yourself. At the watering hole you talk to a bunch of guys talking negative. Haven't you come away feeling miserable?

An experiment devised by a psychologist John Bargh shows how this works. If you are given a scrambled-sentence test, such as ...

1. him was worried she always
2. shoes give replace old the
3. sky the seamless gray is
4. sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins
etc.

The idea is to form 4 word-sentences.

It turns out that people giving this test walked slowly. Their brain was being primed with words, "worried", "old", gray", "wrinkle". These made the brain think of being old.

To quote further from Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell:

Even more impressive, however, is how mysterious these priming effects are. When you took that sentence completion test, you didn't know that you were being primed to think "old." Why would you? The clues are pretty subtle. What is striking, though, is that even after people walked slowly out of the room and down the hall, they still weren't aware of how their behavior had been affected. ... Aronson and Steele [two psychologists] found the same thing with the black students who did so poorly after they were reminded of their race. ... The results of these experiments are obviously quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on autopilot, and the way we think and act - and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment - are a lot more susceptible to outside influence than we realize.

Hmmmm... So, there is merit in listening to 'positive mental attitude' CDs when you drive to work after all. Imagine your effectiveness improving just be listening to something that seeds your brain with words like "can do", "good", "effective", "smart", "positive", and "tops"

The 2 personality types

You can dump all psycho-analysis books. There are only two types of people in this world.
One, I call them Accommodators, who give you space before you ask for it.
Second, I call them Space-Hoggers, who will not move unless you ask them to.

You can find these types everywhere.

Go to a library for instance. The Accommodators will move and give you space to go past even when they are busy browsing the book titles on the shelf. The same think happens in the supermarkets. They let you pass. They are concerned as much about others as about self.

And Space-Hoggers? They stand in the middle of the aisle browsing, reading labels, talking to other Space-Hoggers or whatever, but will not move till you reach them and say "excuse me". They would then graciously move aside. Their convenience comes first; Others have to ask for their rights.

The Accommodators dislike Space-Hoggers. The Space-Hoggers could not care less.

All other personality types that you will read in books are variants of these two personality types. Think about it.

Have you observed thee types when you go to shopping or to a library?
Which type are you?

Emotions in written communication

Written communication is not a patch on face to face communication, they say.
80% of all communication is non-verbal, they say.
Why then do we cry or laugh when we read books?
If an author can evoke such emotions in a 'broadcast' mode, surely when you send an e-mail directed to a particular person you should should be able to convey all your emotions even better.
And surely, emoticons are not the only way to convey your emotions.
Think about it.

Defending Darwin

Most of us claim that we understand Darwin's theory. Many amongst us understand it so well that they are ready with their arguments against it. The fact remains that most of us do not have the slightest idea beyond what is very superficially taught in schools.

It is with this background that I never picked up any book that was remotely connected to evolution. I thought I understood the concept of evolution and, in my mind, any book on evolution would be variation of what is shown on National Geographic or Discovery Channel. Until now that is.

(I am not taking into account the one other occasion where I was forced to read Survival Of the Sickest (see here) though I am glad I did.)

The book in my hand right now is The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. It is of 1986 vintage (reissued in 2006 - so perhaps it is not that old).

In his 2006 preface, Dawkins says:

Aside from some vague nonsense about 'monkeys', they simply did not know what Darwinism was.

In his 1986 preface he says:

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe. Take, for instance, the issue of 'chance', often dramatized as blind chance. The great majority of people that attack Darwinism leap with almost unseemly eagerness to the mistaken idea that there is nothing other than random chance in it. ... One of my tasks will be to destroy this eagerly believed myth that Darwinism is a theory of 'chance'.

I think I am going to enjoy this book.

Picture courtesy: Carsten Issels

Keynes Warning To The Financial Institutions

This is taken from the book by Peter L. Bernstein Against The Gods.

John Maynard Keynes, the great English economist had predicted today’s financial chaos.

“When the capital development of a country becomes the by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

In the coming days I will extract some more interesting extracts from this international bestseller.

Note: The picture used belongs to Richard Styles. To see more of his photographs visit his gallery.

Nokia tops in Greenpeace ranking

I am reminded of what Thomas L Friedman said in his lecture titled 'The World is Flat 3.0' This was delivered at MIT as part of their open courseware program and can be freely downloaded on iTunesU. In this lecture he ridicules the current so called green revolution. He says: It is not a revolution. When have you heard of no one getting hurt in a revolution. It is a party out there. (or something similar to that effect).

I agree.