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Time of India
10-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
The tyranny of the half-knowing
As the Business Head for The Times of India, I lead strategic initiatives and drive growth for one of the nation's most influential media organisations. My journalist friends believe I've crossed over to the proverbial dark side. Living on the edges of a dynamic newsroom, I dabble infrequently into these times that we live and believe in the spectatorial axiom – 'distance provides perspective'. LESS ... MORE There's a certain species of startup savant who walks into a room, eyes blazing with conviction, and says, 'I've thought of this, so it must be a problem worth solving.' And just like that, the room adjusts its moral compass. But often, I find myself surrounded by people greatly learned in parts but ignorant overall—a paraphrase of Alexander Pope's 'a little learning is a dangerous thing,' except here the danger is not malice, but misplaced certainty. They quote Kahneman before reading him. They seek 'first principles' with all the sincerity of a WhatsApp forward. What they chase is not truth, but validation—preferably with a pitch deck. The trouble, of course, isn't ignorance. It's the unwillingness to admit it. 'The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.' — Stephen Hawking A few weeks ago, someone pitched me a product that aimed to 'redefine curiosity.' Yes, redefine. The room nodded. I blinked. I asked: 'Is the problem that people are not curious, or that your investors aren't?' Silence. Then pivot. Always a pivot. This is not to dunk on startups—some of the most elegant truths emerge from fog. But fog must be acknowledged. We live in an age where defining the 'problem' is often a post-hoc rationalization of the 'solution' one stumbled into on a Red Bull high. 'We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.' — Marshall McLuhan Nowhere is this more visible than in founders trying to solve for things they haven't experienced—trying to rewire empathy through APIs. It's like building bridges without visiting rivers. Sometimes, the best thing one can do is say: 'I don't know what I'm solving yet.' That's not a weakness. That's the beginning of wisdom. Tangential thought? Maybe. Midlife crisis? Possibly. Or maybe, like Sahir wrote: 'Tang aa chuke hain kashmakash-e-zindagi se hum Thukra na dein jahan ko kahin be-dili se hum…' We're just tired of the noise. Of the breathless problem-statements chasing VC dollars with the intensity of a headline. Perhaps what we crave now is clarity. Or at least the grace to say we don't have it. And then there are the engineers. No, not the steam-and-brick ones who built bridges and broke their backs. I mean the clean-palmed coders who now build 'systems' to fix life. To an engineer, every problem has a root cause—and preferably, a GitHub repo. They're trained to break the universe into modules: authentication, caching, payment gateway, healing. Life, in this world, is just a stack of services with failing dependencies. So when something goes wrong—say, a breakup, a war, a failing democracy—they say: 'Let's isolate the bug.' 'If only we had tracked the metrics better. If only we'd added a validation layer. If only we'd decoupled emotions from logic.' What they don't see is that not everything in life scales. Not everything has unit tests. And—most inconveniently—not everything has causality. Often, causality is what we reverse-engineer in hindsight to make peace with chaos. Your friend got divorced? Must be because they didn't schedule enough 'date nights.' The startup failed? Must be because of poor onboarding UX. Maybe. Or maybe life just threw a dice and laughed. 'The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.' — Hegel (Wisdom arrives after the fact. If at all.) Engineers want neat edges. But most of life happens at the margins—where your logic tree runs out of branches and you're left staring into the grey, wondering why the deployment of your best intentions is no rollback. No clean patch. Just versions of yourself you can't merge anymore. Edge cases? That's where the story actually is. I once asked a brilliant coder why he never liked reading fiction. 'Because it's not real,' he said. 'Neither is your API documentation,' I muttered. But fiction, poetry, Sahir, Faiz—they teach you about the fog. About probabilities without guarantees. About living with questions. The engineers will call this soft. I call it honest. Maybe what we need today is a few more poets in product. A few more playwrights in boardrooms. Someone who can stare at a dashboard and say: 'There's no pattern here. And that's not a bug—it's life.' Startups are obsessed with MVPs. Minimum Viable Product. But maybe what we need more urgently… is MVI: Minimum Viable Insight. Not a market fit, but a moment of honesty. And in that spirit, one final Sahir couplet—an echo to leave in the glass-and-chrome war rooms: 'ज़िंदगी सिर्फ़ हक़ीक़त नहीं, ख़्वाब भी है दिल को खोने न दे, होश को जाने न दे…' (Life isn't just reality, it's dreams too— Don't let your heart be lost. But don't let awareness slip either.) Debug that. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Hindustan Times
17-05-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Stephen Greenblatt: 'Shakespeare is like an enormous planet Jupiter'
How did you arrive at the theory of New Historicism, which you espoused in the 1987 essay, Towards A Poetics of Culture? When I was at the university, the overwhelmingly dominant approach to literature and culture was via New Criticism, which I had a deep immersion into. We were told that we shouldn't be interested in anything outside the text. I remember reading Alexander Pope, and coming across an extremely misogynistic and unpleasant reference to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. And I said, 'Who is Lady Mary Worley Montagu?' I was told that wasn't a relevant question. In the 1960s, after I graduated from Yale, I went to Cambridge on a grant, and one of my teachers was Raymond Williams. I'd never encountered a Marxist nor had I encountered anyone before who had a powerful, vital sense of a world outside the text. That vital sense had a huge influence upon me. When I returned to graduate school and to Berkeley to teach, it seemed crucially important to read the texts and understand the world in which they were participating. This did not seem to me a betrayal of literature but quite the opposite. What I always wanted to do was love the work, care about it, and understand it better. And I still feel that way as I look back on my 50-year career. Tell me about your fascination with Shakespeare. In Will in the World, you call him a 'person who wrote the most important body of imaginative literature of the last thousand years.' My love for Shakespeare started fairly late. I remember being 13 years old and having my junior high school teacher teach As You Like It, and I hated it. I thought this was the worst thing I'd ever encountered. But then somewhat later than that, still in high school, I had a teacher who taught us King Lear, which is a crazy thing to teach high school kids. What I most remember is that this incredibly wise teacher once said 'I don't understand a certain portion of the play'. And none of my teachers had ever said that. And the fact there was an enigma that he couldn't understand had a powerful effect on me for reasons I can't explain. As an undergraduate I did not take a Shakespeare course, and as a graduate student I wrote on Raleigh, not on Shakespeare. And yet Shakespeare is like an enormous planet Jupiter, and it just slowly pulls everything that's floating around closer and closer to the centre. Beyond Shakespeare, why does Renaissance fascinate you? A lot of it is not because of Shakespeare, but because of Christopher Marlowe, a crazy person murdered at 29, who had the mad courage to break the mould and start doing things. I'm interested in moments in which something breaks the mould, in which things happen. If you suddenly think of why, in the 15th century in Italy, there was one genius after another doing unbelievable things, it's partly competitive, and partly they echo each other. I'm fascinated by how culture does that; why it turns a corner. How did you stumble upon the story of the Florentine book hunter, Poggio Braccionlini and his discovery of the 500-year-old copy of Lucretius' The Nature of Things, which you argue paved the way for modernity in your book, The Swerve? The immediate occasion that led me to write The Swerve was an academic conference I attended in Scotland. The assignment was to write about when an ancient work returned to circulation. I had discovered Lucretius' De rerum natura in translation when I was a student at Yale. The paperback cover had a provocative painting by the surrealist Max Ernst, and I bought it for 10 cents. A poem about ancient physics does not seem ideal for summer reading, but I did end up reading it, and I thought about how it radically suggested a secular world view, including a universe made up of little atoms. So, at the conference, I chose to think about the person who recovered Lucretius' poem, and I thought, who's this odd book hunter, a papal secretary? He seems to be a very strange character. In your book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, you comment on contemporary politics, including on Donald Trump. How can reading Shakespeare help us understand Trump's return to the presidency? Often, Shakespeare asks himself, 'How can a country fall into the hands of a catastrophic leader? And he thinks the principal answer is election, not assassination. This is the whole point about Richard the Third, who only becomes what he is because enough people support him. Donald Trump is not Superman who miraculously has so many powers. He has to have many people who feel they have a stake in what is being done and want it to be done. The question is, why should you think about literature in this context? The reason is that great literature, Shakespeare's plays being an example, tend to show the complicated, mixed motives that lead to catastrophes of this kind. During your session at the Jaipur Literature Festival, you mentioned feeding Shakespeare's reading list to a Large Language Model. What was your experiment about and what is your stand on AI? Shakespeare at the end of his life was reading Cervantes' Don Quixote, the first and possibly greatest novel ever written, and he wrote a play based on an episode in Don Quixote called Cardenio. It's lost (An adaptation of the play called Double Falsehood was found later). So, I wrote a version (performed in Kolkata in 2007) based on Double Falsehood and I thought it would be fun, just as an experiment, to see what happened if you fed the play into AI and say, 'Write Cardenio'. It will almost certainly fail to give us something truly powerful because AI is not human. It doesn't have the craziness that human beings have, but also because there are guardrails built into AI so it can't be misogynistic, or homophobic. It's actually difficult to write a Shakespeare play without crossing all kinds of lines. That's the nature of plays that they're full of offence. I asked the same AI model to do a version of Taming The Shrew that wasn't misogynistic, and it erased virtually the entire play. You speak of loving a work of literature, but lately, cancel culture has overpowered this narrative. Walter Benjamin, the great German critic, said, 'Every monument of civilization is a monument of Barbarism'. If you look hard at Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, you realize it's complicit in horrendous colonial acts in Ireland, but you must love the poetry simultaneously. Understand that if you don't have an aesthetic appreciation or if you simply hate it, you're missing 9/10ths of what matters. I want to tell my students, 'I want you to have some reason to believe that the works are worth spending time with.' When you love them, you and others will feel some resonance inside you while reading them. It's also difficult to have your mind in two or three places simultaneously, but that's the whole point. It's a point that goes back to the Iliad or the Odyssey. The works of art that most matter put you in this uncomfortable position of having your mind in multiple places simultaneously. My teacher, Harold Bloom called Shakespeare God. He attacked what I was doing because he said I was the Chief of the School of Resentment. But I don't hate the works. I love them, but I also want to understand what they're complicit in. Kanika Sharma is an independent journalist.
Indian Express
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Goodbye, Justice Khanna
A good judge builds a life for generations yet unborn. Integrity is his cardinal virtue. Alexander Pope wrote in 'An Essay on Man': 'Act well your part, there all the honour lies'. Justice Sanjiv Khanna, like his father Justice D R Khanna of the Delhi High Court and his uncle Justice H R Khanna, has been honest, upright and bold in the discharge of his duties. Chief Justice Khanna faced attacks, both personal and on the judiciary, from persons holding constitutional positions. He stood steadfast and — in the words of Lord Denning — was 'coolness under fire'. The way he responded to those attacking him and the Court reminds one of the wisdom of the Old Testament: 'Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.' This is not to say that he did not have his failings. The Places of Worship Act, 1991, came up before his immediate predecessor. Despite the Act prohibiting the alteration of the status of religious places that existed at the time of Indian Independence, he permitted the survey of such places to determine their character. The same issue came before the bench presided over by Justice Khanna in the Shahi Jama Masjid dispute at Sambhal. Though the bench rightly passed an order directing that the status quo be maintained, and succeeded in restoring law and order in the district — a number of deaths had occured in the wake of the dispute — it missed the opportunity to do away with the real source of mischief, which lay in his predecessor's order. Had the observation by the earlier bench been done away with, it would have closed doors for all times to any further mischief by fundamentalists. Then came the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025. The Muslim community regards it as direct interference in its religious affairs in contravention of Articles 25 to 28 of the Constitution of India. A number of petitions have been filed in the Supreme Court challenging the constitutional validity of the Act. The matter was taken up by the bench presided over by Justice Khanna. Given the observations made by him about the importance of the issue and its implications, it was expected that the matter would be given precedence. However, on May 5, when the matter was supposed to be heard, Justice Khanna refused to take it up on the grounds that he was on the verge of retirement. Unfortunately, again, he failed to pass an order staying the provisions of the Act. During his tenure, a sitting judge of the Allahabad High Court made a statement from a public platform that was allegedly laden with objectionable and inflammatory communal remarks. The speech came as a shock to the nation and appropriate action was expected against him. Chief Justice Khanna called the judge, and reportedly asked him to publicly apologise. The latter refused. The fire in the house of Justice Yashwant Varma of the Delhi High Court and the alleged discovery of burning currency notes put Justice Khanna to the test, too. His prompt action in appointing a committee of three judges and reporting the incident were welcome steps. Justice Khanna's prompt action on the report by calling upon the judge to resign and on his refusal to do so, sending the report to the President of India and the government, shows his commitment to honesty and integrity in the institution he has presided over. The nation thanks Justice Khanna for his direction to his colleagues to disclose their assets in the public domain. A step towards transparency is always welcome. Goodbye, Justice Khanna. You have done well for the nation and honoured the memory of your respected father and uncle. The writer is a former judge of the Delhi High Court
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
I am once again asking Ohio lawmakers to please just feed the children
Students getting their l lunch at a primary school. (Photo by Amanda Mills/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) I am once again asking Ohio lawmakers to please just feed the children. For all that is good and decent, at long last, may we please at least just make sure schoolchildren aren't going hungry? Pleading for the state government to make sure that Ohio schoolchildren aren't spending their days dealing with hunger pangs, tired, irritable, distracted, unable to concentrate, unable to learn, well, that has traditionally been an obscene and mind-boggling ask for too many Ohio lawmakers. They keep declining to do it. But as my buddy Alexander Pope says, hope springs eternal in the human breast. Feed Ohio school children. Please. At the very least, feed the children. So I will continue sounding the call, because I hold the firm and unshakeable, but apparently insane opinion that schoolchildren shouldn't be going hungry. They should be fed. All of them. Whatever meals they need. Student hunger is pervasive in Ohio. With more than 1.6 million public school students, about 57% of them meet qualifications and are participating in free and reduced lunch programs. Data from Feeding America shows 1 in 5 Ohio children live in homes that are food insecure. In some counties like Cuyahoga and Adams and Scioto, it's 1 in 4. Here's the rub: A 2023 report from Children's Defense Fund Ohio found that 1 in 3 children who live in those food insecure homes don't qualify for free school meals because their households are technically over the 185% of poverty line. Many others don't participate for fear of judgment. This means that hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in Ohio are going hungry during the school day because either they're not covered or fear the stigma. Rubbing gravel on the wound, Republicans in U.S. Congress are right now looking at making cuts that would slash national school meal programs, impacting 280,000 Ohio kids. Bipartisan Ohio Senate bill aims to pay for public school breakfast and lunch But in Ohio, a new bipartisan bill, Ohio Senate Bill 109, would make sure that no Ohio K-12 student has to go through the day hungry. The legislation sponsored by state Sen. Bill Blessing, R-Colerain Twp., and state Sen. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, would provide breakfast and lunch at no cost to public and chartered nonpublic school students. During the 2023 Ohio budget season, a proposal for universal school meals was made but was never passed. Under this cycle's proposal, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce would be directed to reimburse public and chartered nonpublic schools who participate in the national school breakfast and lunch programs by covering the gap between the federal reimbursements for free and reduced-price breakfasts and lunches and those who would be required to pay because they don't qualify for meal assistance. The bill lists an appropriation of $300 million to support the state reimbursements. The state operating budget is projected at $108 billion for fiscal year 2026 and $110 billion for fiscal year 2027. Blessing and Smith plan to push for the bill to be included in the two-year budget due July 1, currently under negotiation in the Ohio House. A group of high schoolers from across Ohio rallied at the Statehouse this past Tuesday advocating for it. Ohio students plead with lawmakers for free breakfast and lunch in schools Every teacher I've ever talked to about it has told me the same thing: Hunger is an enormous barrier to learning. Meanwhile, kids are being put into social situations where they either go hungry or face the judgment of their peers. As we all know, the antenna of fear of social stigma and judgment is sky high in childhood and adolescence. We have a simple and effective solution: Remove the stigma, remove the fear of judgment, remove the school meal caste system, and just feed the children, all of the children. If the basic humanity and decency of it isn't compelling enough, I can make an economic argument. Well-fed kids make for more attentive and engaged students. Attentive and engaged students have better academic success. Most successful students become successful citizens. Successful citizens grow the economy. So, feed the children. All of the children, all the same. Please just feed the children. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
