My theory..

"Earth Quake in Kuchh....tremors in indonesia too of magnitude 4.5" read the morning news papers. Rajiv seemed a little disappointed after reading this. The numbers weren't BIG. It was the first piece of news that caught his attention that morning but soon he was turning pages searching for better stuff. In the 14th page there was an article about a child who lost her parents to the earth quake. He felt sorry for the poor child and wished he could do something to help her. So what kind of a person was he? Was he an indurate,cold hearted impenitent sociopath? or was he a compassionate,benevolent philanthropist? or was he just a confused soul ? What was it about numbers that his mind so effortlessly defied all tenets that have been carefully and relentlessly fed to it? What was it about detail that it evoked the right response?

Alvin Toffler in his Future Shock points out "the human mind can be thought of as a storehouse of images. A Snapshot of each and every incident of our life is stored as an image. The related images are grouped together to obtain a higher abstraction". Though this might not be exactly how the mind forms opinions, it serves the purpose of explaining Rajiv's behaviour. Before trying to identify the possible reasons for such a behaviour, it would be apt to try and answer the following questions. Considering that the mind has limited storage what happens when it runs out of space? What happens to the image when a higher abstraction is created? Are there any priorities? Are these images or abstractions static? Do the abstractions or images have some attributes?No one knows exactly, but, it seems most likely that they are overwritten but never deleted. They are overwritten by a higher priority image, the priorities being manifold. Most often the priority is the freshness of the image while it can be very complex at times. Images and abstractions do have attributes, based on which they are grouped. This grouping is used to create higher abstractions and also determines how we react to a particular situation. While the images themselves are static their attributes are not. The abstractions on the otherhand do not have any concrete form but are defined entirely based on the attributes and hence are not static. Attributes can be anything, every feeling that you experience when you think of an incident is an attribute. Images are powerful in the sense that they have the potential to change the attributes of other images or abstractions. This change might trigger an avalanche of changes all the way up to the root of the classification tree.

Now, how does a new image get recorded? What is the snapshot? Snapshot apart from having the visual image (most important or the frame when your mind was absolutely concentrated) also has the attributes. The attributes as pointed out earlier are the feelings we experience at the time of incident. Every feling that we experience has two components- the history of reactions as well as impulse. The impulse is the ability of the mind to generate new responses in the wake of new knowledge. The mix of these might vary from incident to incident depending on the intensity of impulse. The intensity of impulse depends on myriad other factors like the state of mind, the physical strain, available time, personal life etc... The new image is recorded at the bottom of the tree and it tries to percolate up the tree, stopping when it finds an abstraction of which it is a subset. An entirely new set of attributes might even force a new branch out of the classificaton tree (at any level.Even at the root). It might also create a new thread that reorganizes the abstractions in the light of the image.

How is the history information obtained? This is obtained top down. Immediately after we percieve something a thread gets activated in the mind. This thread tries to match the current image to the existing entries and returns the attributes once it finds a match.Then the immediate question that follows is - Why is then our reaction to the same kind of situation different at different times? Apart from the impulse factor the most prominent reason for such a behaviour is the vicissitudeness of the definition of a match. The factors that influence this change are the same as the ones that leverage the intensity of impulse. Depending on the influence an entry at different levels of abstraction is returned each time. Additionally a record of the results is kept that helps in further searches.

Even if I Consider rajiv's reaction to the first incident only, I won't call him a psychopath(are u already calling me one?). It all depends on the snapshot that gets fed in. To explain this more I would identify the four factors (that I have already discussed) in the context of this incident. Whats the impulse? Here its not reading about a calamity but reading some sensational news. The intensity of impulse depends on the time between the previous sensational news that he had heard (of same or different kind) and the current apart from the other factors that I have listed (which in this case is difficult to determine). What is the history information? History information is not the feeling that he had towards such incident(at a higher level) but the magnitude of sensationalism that he had experienced previously. There might be a branch further down which represents the sympathy or concern he had for the people who were affected. But in this case the equality condition was satisfied at a much higher level. The factor that terminated the search early might be time. This seems to be acceptable reason considering that we are impatient to get hand on some interesting news as soon as we pick up the news paper, though this might not be the only one. The second reaction which seems more normal can again be explained on the same lines. The impulse factor is less dominating in this case, considering that he is more relaxed( has more time..also more patient..) the equality search might go further down. Also it might be the case that his mind is no more looking for sensational news and hence takes a different branch at the root itself.

This should explain Why, the name of a particular community evokes hatred instantaneously and yet you condemn atrocities against the same, Why, sometimes caste,religion seems to be worthless notions and why at other the reason for your existence, Why, your mind ping-pongs between Ayn Rand and Karl Marx, Why, you make and break friends or enemies,Why, the favourite pastime of your childhood is no longer your favourite and why you feel the way you feel now, after reading this.

P.S: I think i have taken a very bold step of proposing a new theory on the working of mind. It might turn out that it is nothing but bullshit. But if Newton was allowed this luxury for three centuries...may be I deserve three hours atleast ( the time it took to write this blog)

When a word is bold and italicised it indicates that its a generally percieved notion which might not always be true or which is not the only truth.

Media of late............

When I was a child I used to maintain a list of people whom I could term 'good'. The major factor that determined this classification was the movies I watched at that time. Guess who was on the top of the list...editor of any newspaper. It hardly mattered who. After 15 years of input from this world, my idea of editors and massmedia in general took a u-turn, heroes no longer remained heroes, 'good' were not even 'normal'. Ironically, even now it doesn't matter 'who'.

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media "
-- Noam Chomsky.

The startling point is that in Indian context these words had begun to take shape even before anyone realized. What is more startling is the rate at which the Indian media has started to assimilate the 'tricks' of the west and the sincerity with which these have been applied. A typical metropolitan Indian roughly leads the life of a Newyorker,thirty years before his time. The gap is closing in at a pretty handsome rate but it is nowhere comparable to that between the western and Indian media. Long live globalization.

When chomsky speaks of 'obedience' he was largely referring to the obedience to the government and its men. Trying to draw an analogy, we soon realize that there is a very complex machinery in place, logistics of which are really hard to understand. The word uniformity has a different meaning here. Its not the uniformity of action but the uniformity of the purpose. The purpose being, benefit of an individual,organisation or sect. There is no common benefactor except a common victim, the people. The point of conern is not that Media as a responsible constituent of the society has seized to exist but that it has transformed itself into a monster that eats its own kin when its hungry. The sad part of this transformation is that the media monster's apetite is never satisfied.

How else would someone justify the criticism of the president of India on the office of profit bill, the opposition to the striking doctors against reservation, the front page coverage of raakhi sawanth's cleavage show, the undue importance to the page three parties, the crime serials with actors enacting the crime as if oral description would fall short of providing support for a fresh plan, the callousness with which opinions are sought from families affected by crime,accident etc...,the making and breaking of celebrities and intervention in their personal space,the portrayal of obscenity in the name of despising it, the craving for sensationalism, the misinterpretation of facts and history, the liberty with which news is manufactured and dumped over people...the list only goes on.

Whether each of the above mentioned issues is bad is a matter of opinion and many might have reservations against calling a few or most of them faults, yet I will. Every rational indian knows the real motive behind the office of profit bill. In this context 'honouring the cabinet and parliament' which nolonger command any 'honour' so important that the editor of a leading newspaper was willing to criticise a perfectly sincere, constitution-compliant action by a respected man to restore faith of the commonman in democracy. It seems even the court has taken for granted the politicians of this country to be callous,obdurate swindlers that it does not expect anything from them. Thus providing the opportunity for the media ( puppet in the hands of political parties) to lay the onus on the doctors fighting for their rights. Is public health not as much a responsibility of the government as it is of the doctors? Why hasn't any newspaper questioned the double-game (no written assurance and no fresh caste census) and caste politics in staright terms? There might be a few instances where some direct questions have been fired at the government but these have been washed away in the current of criticism and analysis. Isn't truth above everything else?

Newspaper was born out of the man's urge to know about the world arround him. With passage of time the purpose for which it was meant also took different meanings. People started seeing it as food to both their knowledge and intellect. As the options increased, the second factor gained significance in determining their choice. The first few generations of media-men were men of honour who held social responsibility above personal interest. They were men, who fought and won freedom of press, who championed the people's rights and their own, who made media a saviour ( true, media's role in any revolution in the world cannot be undermined) . Sadly now a days, this popular belief is working against the people.By blindly believing the stuff he reads the commonman is falling prey to the politicians' and other organisations' trap. Already most of the population of this country is oblivious to others' problems and if this trend continues they will turn oblivious to their own problems (many of them not even knowing that they have been deprived of their rights). It is high time the media realise that, by poisoning their minds with mis-interpreted facts and cooked-up stories, by killing their intellect with steady feed of useless information, by mis-directing people's energy they are destroying the very base on which they stand.

P.S: Though I have added the quote by Noam Chomsky I haven't yet read his popular book about media- "Manufacturing Consent". Hopefully I can add more to this and to my own knowledge when I read the book.

Great stuff..............

Links to great articles I came across on the net......I will update it from time to time

Global Issues

The Algebra Of Infinite Justice By Arundhati Roy....article in Guardian...pretty old yet very relevant
Another good one by her....article in outlook....few days after attack on afghanisthan
A report detailing the nature and consequences of a possible attack on iran
The Greater common good.....the true story of BIG DAMS
We...arundhati roys' speech in the US....video


Current Politics

Arjun Singh's Interview by Karan Thapar....heights of deception and hypocrisy

Algorithms

MIT assignments on Algorithms