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.

'Busy'ness

I often wonder what is Seth Godin's typical day like or whether the concept of a typical day even exists for him. And yet amidst his daily entrepreneur+author+thinker superhuman day, he 'ships' blog posts so frequently as if they were tweets. Maybe his brilliant blog posts are really the usual stuff that's 'on his mind' but the point is as Seth very succinctly puts it - It's all about shipping! Quieting the lizard brain to get things moving and it pretty much applies to everything right from an amazing start-up idea to the long-lived intention of penning down your head onto your own blog.

Now that I have your attention, let me probe further into our sense of 'busy'ness. Let's just for sometime agree that doing a full-time job doesn't afford energy for non-work-related interests during weekdays. However, mostly everyone has 2 full days off every week and invariably everyone has a wishful list of want-to-dos. Typical items featuring on that close-to-heart list are start a hobby, read more, practice a sport or volunteer for a cause. Sigh! but who's got the time for it? Umm..the weekends are practically a third of our lifetime and yet the weekends are somehow not enough! Or is it that 'feeling' busy makes for a convenient way to explain inaction? Is "I don't have enough time" just a deluded version of "I have not been able to get myself to do it yet"? Is the real problem with not having enough free slots for the dear wish-list or is it with what actually makes it to those free slots? And I'll leave it at that.

Privacy lists on IM, anyone?

How we like talking to some people more than others? How we like to be interrupted (read pinged) by some people more often? How on some days, nostalgia makes us want to connect to one part of our life sooo much more than the rest of it? Oh and, how we sometimes want the rest of the world to drown out when we are in the middle of certain conversations! Times when other pings feel rather annoying..And yet, our flat IM (office communicator/gtalk/yahoo messenger) contacts list has everybody who we ever added to it since we began internet chatting! We can either be online to everyone or offline. On one hand, the invisible setting just blocks everyone out. As good as disabling the chat feature, right? And on the other, the block/blacklist feature is for non-friends! Well, not always useful :) Yahoo! messenger's stealth settings allow to either be online/offline(invisible) or permanently offline (=block) to someone but have to be set distinctly per contact. Aaargh! super tedious, ain't it?    

I want privacy lists in my IM! I want to be able to create lists of people based on the context of my interaction with them and be able to set my status separately for each of these lists. Imagine lists for family, school friends, college friends, work pals, close buddies, once-close buddies et al miscellaneous and the flexibility to set here/idle/brb/dnd/out/random custom status for all of them So if you want the privacy lists too, raise your hands and say Aye Aye Captain! or you know you can even just Like this post.

El goce de aprender una lengua nueva

Well that’s Spanish for ‘The joy of learning a new language’. A few years back, while helping out my kid sister with her English coursework, I came across one of Pablo Neruda’s poems ‘Keeping Still’. Impressed, I then went on to read more of his stuff in English and eventually stumbled upon a beautiful collection of his sonnets called Cien sonetos de amor - 100 sonnets of love. As I read more and more of his poetry ranging across war, communism, love and odes to heroes, the ‘lost in translation’ tag at the bottom of every poem kept irritating me. One day I decided, for what it’s worth, I’ll learn Español. After 3 months of formal lessons at Maitrise, now I can comprehend most Spanish constructs and actually read Nerudian poetry for myself rather than relying on an unknown translator’s impersonal interpretation. So what is the point of this post? 

First is to get me started as a blogger. Second is to talk about ‘One world, one language’. Whether it is going to be Esperanto or English, ever wondered how much more data can be exchanged and how many more connections can be forged between people across the world, at work or through online social networking, if we have one language that everyone knows. A common language in which everyone can think-blog-share-comment. Say if I were to travel to a country where no one except the hospitality staff spoke English, there are only two ways in which I could possibly soak in the people. I would either have to hike around with a translator or try to "ramp up" on the local language in a week or so. On a lighter note, learning common phrases can be useful for survival but this is what could happen to tourists who try to grasp a new language within a week. Besides, now even if I decide to fluently speak at least 3 more languages (3 already done!) before I die, I can only cover one-seventh of the total languages of my own country. Yes, India alone has 22 official languages.

Nelson Mandela said, 

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."

So true. We see this happen all the time, don’t we? Ever felt left out in a discussion when two friends suddenly started to argue in their native language? All of us tend to express ourselves better in the language that we can think in but internalizing as many languages as we might need is not a scalable option.

Only if the existing language barriers dilute away can we share content within the currently cross-lingual communities. Translation is okay but unless we all conceive thoughts in the same way, which is greatly influenced by our linguistic training (see linguistic relativity), we cannot really communicate as fully as we want to or like to think we are. An ideal scenario would be one where one common international language is learned by one and all which also implies that each one of us will have to be at least bilingual or even trilingual in the future so that we don't risk losing contact with the culture and literature associated with our homeland's history.

I have already added learning Esperanto on my to-do list.  Apparently the language is designed to be grasped by anyone in about 7-8 months and is proven to improve the learner's approach to learning other languages. Sure will be a useful exercise. Will update on how that goes!