Know thy readers

Just added a Guestbook to my blog. The blogger audience tracker tells me that my blog has reached people in more than 20 countries. So I thought I should try to find out more about my readers - how you landed onto my blog, which posts did you like/dislike and which of my blog's labels interest you the most. Do drop a note! 

Since BC

The quote 'Love begets love' comes from Virgil, a Roman poet (70-19 before Christ). That line is over 2,000 years old and has lost none of its power. Hugh expressed it with this cartoon that he drew in 2004 (just before FB). He added that it's funny how LOVE makes one feel hyper-connected, like a node on a circuit board, and how isolated one feels without it.

I don't know whether Hugh tried to depict a family tree or our social structure using the graph. What I found striking though is that, a simple graph, with heart-shaped nodes, could fully capture the idea behind the 2,000 year old line. Another interesting link to it is that all social networking websites internally use graphs as the data structure to represent relationships among people. Well, what begets what?

Marking time

Well, the strip for sure is a thought on marking time i.e. waiting in readiness for the right or opportune moment to start a new phase or set on an adventure. 

Sorry about the freakish inclusion of the death bit. I got a little carried away experimenting with the drag-n-drop comics at pixton.com! If you have wanted to create your own comic strips but are as artistically challenged as I am, do give it a shot! If you like it, do post links to your comics  in  the comments below. Would love to go check them out.

To Mr. Allen

With my intolerant (almost pro-Kira from 'Death Note') view on crime and punishment, some of Woody Allen's movies manage to get to me in a rather, umm, stimulating way. The question of whether we have a (sufficient) moral structure has been, well to say the least, open-ended. Mr. Allen takes it on quite directly in his 'Crimes and Misdemeanors' and the more recent 'Match Point'. More than his movies, I love his laconic quotes which have had a major influence on the way I do what I do; the strongest one being "Eighty percent of success is showing up". So, this post is to share an IMHO interesting thought,

"We're all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale; most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly. Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more".

- 'Crimes and Misdemeanors', Film

Written and Directed by Woody Allen

Counting change

So after you have become the change you want to see in the world, after you have gotten things moving and after you have begun your "impact", till when do you continue what you started? How do you know if doing something differently can create more "impact"? Where do you improvise and course-correct?

That can be tricky. Establishing a sound model for measuring change might not be the simplest task but delving straight into execution without one in place is only an effort well-wasted. The key to making an effort count for is to make its results countable. It holds true for almost anything that you might want to change. They now have scale-o-meters even for fairness creams and whitening toothpastes!

Here's my 2-step guide to making your own change-counting model,

• Make a metric system – Define numeric parameters that will indicate progress or not. For instance, a tutor uses the reading speed of the kids in her classroom as a parameter to measure her impact. A good metric system gives the advantage of setting quantifiable goals – when has ‘must reach X number in Y time’ not helped?

• Don’t forget a peer comparator – Always make room for measuring how peers are faring w.r.t. the parameters in the metric system. States of more, less and equal impact are all useful indicators. For instance, if a kid in a tutor’s classroom has the same improvement in reading speed as any other kid of the same age, then where’s the impact?