Posts

The House always wins: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram etc. as capitalism in miniature

Here's the broad picture: Videos posted by some people go viral, they make money as per the rules of, say, YouTube (you can substitute the name of any other video-hosting digital platform), depending on various terms and conditions related to advertisements, brand stores, promotions, and affiliate marketing (I won't go into the details of the various modes of earning money on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.; the companies themselves prominently display the information, and for those interested, there are thousands of websites advising on monetization strategies) Other folks open accounts/channels and start posting videos in the hope of going viral and making a lot of money; they gradually invest in fancy setups and post more and more videos in the hope of "making it" The ratio of video uploaders who make decent income to those who make very little or nothing at all is tiny Each time the platform company fine-tunes the criteria for algorithmically pr...
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On avid readers and voracious reading

Who is a reader? The Cambridge dictionary defines  a "reader" as someone who reads for pleasure, as someone who reads voraciously. I agree with this definition. In my mind, a reader is someone who reads whatever happens to cross her eyes, it may even be an advertisement or a junk article in a scrap of newspaper in which a parcel or some salted moongphali came wrapped in. A reader seeks out something to read; he begs, borrows, downloads, buys, steals books and other reading material. For him, reading is compulsive behaviour. On being asked if there are books that qualify as "comfort read" for him, the Pulitzer-winning Dominican-American author Junot D í az replied  that he is an incorrigible reader, that reading itself "is the comfort". Perfect! What makes a reader? It is my partner S's hypothesis that teenage years are the deadline for a person becoming a reader. If a person is not a reader (in the sense defined above) by the time she is stepping out o...
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Raw Impressions of "Saiyaara"

Spoiler Alert:  There is only one plot element that qualifies as a twist. This essay will reveal it. You have been warned!
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Out of action

An old injury flared up, had to undergo surgery and rehab, so could not blog for the past few months. Still recovering...  I will be back!
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Liberal Democracy's Swedish Fairytale: A slant-eyed perspective on Stieg Larsson's Millenium ("Lisbeth Salander") Trilogy

Human society is a collection of good gals and guys doing their jobs with honesty and vigour. There are a few bad guys determined to ruin this ideal state. They mostly succeed, but for the superheroes who circumstantially come together and foil the designs of the evil-doers. I know this sounds like the description of a comic book plot, but this is the explicit philosophy driving the various plots and sub-plots of all the books in Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy .
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Laments about WhatsApp and Signal voice messages: an illustration of insular Global North narratives

A few days ago, an electrician arrived at my house to investigate a disruption in power supply. During the course of his work, he whipped out his phone a few times and sent WhatsApp voice messages. He received replies as voice messages, which helped him to sort out the problem.
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Prologue

I have read this advice —all the way back from 2008—to NOT start a blog. A decade ago, Jason Kottke wrote an obituary of the blog . In a recent post marking the twentieth anniversary of his blog, the prolific Jai Arjun Singh's mood was pensive.
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