1sembiyan

This is a start, thanks!

I wonder if there’s an equivalent compilation of great books of the Eastern World.

I am not sure which book I will re-read for the rest of my life, but these past few years I have read multiple times chapters from How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen and Reflections on Silver River by Ken McLeod.

In Tamil Nadu, there are racial overtones to this call for violence. It’s targeted specifically at Tamil Brahmins, regarded as “outsider Aryans”. There are other wealthy landed castes, but they are not the target of this rhetoric (and they are the ones in power). So it’s not just “eat the rich”.

Along side this, there’s actual physical violence between other caste groups. The ones targeting Brahmins is interesting because of the language used (example above) and how normative it has become (Tamil mainstream media will not call it out, pop culture acceptance and tropes), their complete lack of political power in the state and the absence of much physical violence. There’s some very fascinating history behind this. In case you are interested in how the current moment came about, two books:

1. The Emergence of Provincial Politics, DA Washbrook - https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Provincial-Politics-Preside...

2. The politics of south India, CJ Baker - https://www.amazon.com/Politics-South-1920-1937-Cambridge-St...

> “You are making a terrible mistake,” I said, and I repeated the statement three times.

> “Yes, we may make mistakes,” he replied, “but”—and he firmly closed his lips and shook his head—“we never regret.”

And they never did. They don’t even acknowledge it. Interesting to contrast the response of the German state to its genocide and that of Turkey’s.

> We base our objections to the Armenians on three distinct grounds. In the first place, they have enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks.

Similar reasoning and calls for genocide are routine by the ideologues in power in Tamil Nadu, India: https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/national/south/dmk-spokespe... Thankfully no large scale violence so far though, they have just stuck to the rhetoric.

> Teams at the San Mateo office were tasked with evaluating customer vehicle data related to the Autopilot driver-assistance features and performing so-called data labeling.

My sympathies with the folks laid off, but do American firms still do data labeling in-house? I assume most of it is out-sourced via Scale or other vendors to eventually India, Vietnam etc.

This is great, my thanks!

Is there a good write up of how Sri Lanka got to here? I wonder what the non-obvious lessons here are..

It will keep you busy during work slumps but otherwise serves no purpose (at least in FAANGs)

I refer to Tamil and Malayalam movies, not Bollywood (and these are only one among many sources I mention). Like I said, Tamil movies have been exploring criminal-politician-state nexus for a few decades now, although that doesn’t stop the Tamils from electing famously authoritarian governments themselves.

I don’t buy the argument that mafia or middle eastern emigre have influenced these potrayals in Tamil cinema since the 70s and 80s. It’s the local politics that did. Maybe there’s merit to the argument about Hindi films (I don’t know), but not Tamil.

You couldn’t be more mistaken if you confuse the South Indian film industry (then centered around Madras/Chennai) with the Hindi film industry (Bollywood, centered in Bombay/Mumbai).

One little known Greek artifact in India is the Heliodorous pillar in central India: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliodorus_pillar

Erected around 113 BC by an ambassador of one of the Indo-Greek kings and dedicated to the god Vasudeva-Krishna.

The folks who end up reading comments for a living, they would be epitomizing bullshit jobs.

From the interview: “Steven Pinker talks about a language instinct—I think we may actually have a moral instinct. We come into the world, and we ask our parents to tell us right from wrong. We may kick against it because children do that, but to have that framework of right and wrong is important to us as human beings. As we get older, those ideas became more sophisticated. And that’s where I think the whole humanist idea comes in: that we work out for ourselves what is right and wrong. We don’t have it handed down to us.”

I almost never watch Bollywood. Some of the reasons why I hold the opinions I do can be explained partly by the references listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31795739

I just gave you a bunch of examples of the politicians using the police to restrict or restrain the Indian people in some manner in contravention to constitutional principles over the past few decades.

Sure, India is not a fully authoritarian state, but the folks elected have always had such tendencies. The current government still has to contest elections (and still loses them at state level), but you wouldn’t deny they are authoritarian. And many state governments (controlled by different parties of different political persuasions, as I have listed above) display the same tendencies: authority exercised via coercion and arbitrary rules.

Democracy and authoritarianism are not opposites. They occupy a spectrum - democracies can display authoritarian characteristics and vice versa.

Regarding police and politicians and the state, you will find this paper from the 80s insightful: https://online.ucpress.edu/as/article-abstract/23/4/484/2194...

Police in India serves the elected powers, always. The Indian state has always been authoritarian, more so in recent times. Given the nature of how power is shared and exercised at different levels in India, it’s easy to call Prime Minister a fool and get away with it - and many do. But you dare not publicly call your local municipal councilor that, or these days, the Chief Minister.

A recent example from

1. West Bengal: https://m.thewire.in/article/culture/pure-or-profane-roddur-...

2. There’s no shortage of such vindictiveness from the UP government and its CM: https://m.thewire.in/article/government/up-police-arrests-19...

3. From Maharashtra: https://groundreport.in/who-is-actress-ketaki-chitale-arrest...

A great recent movie exploring this aspect of the police and the state in India is Nayattu, available on Netflix: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayattu_(2021_film) This movie was scripted by an ex-cop and makes a sympathetic case for the sort of daily negotiations the cops are involved in. The “hunted” from the title are literally other cops.

Many Tamil movies have been exploring the police-politician nexus for a few decades now. Sathya (1989?) comes to my mind.

This is an incomplete list, and doesn’t really explore the causes of the violence, but I think in many cases it can be linked to the parties in power: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_police_brut...

Another overview of why the police in India are particularly susceptible to political pressure: https://www.fairobserver.com/region/central_south_asia/javee...

> They should serve the state, which is a creation of and responsible to the people. Serving a political party is corrupt and not serving the people;

Well, that’s Indian police for you. Designed to be corruptible even before we had a republic.

The police remains firmly in hands of the state in India. No matter the party in power. They don’t serve people, they serve politicians.

Designing Data Intensive Applications is 600 pages, but very readable.

100 page Machine Learning book is also pretty good.

A Philosophy of Software Design is short, and opinionated as such books go. I liked it - it articulates a few concepts that we encounter in our daily work and don’t really learn about in school. You don’t have to agree with what the author says, but by engaging with the ideas presented at least you will know what you have internalized about this business of writing code.

People have been discovering solace in work for a long time now; it can’t be just a Silicon Valley thing. Specifically I am thinking of some of the examples found in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s works.

> and now here you claim that they are orthogonal. How very convenient.

By that I meant for some group and people jati intersects with particular theologies and for others it doesn’t. What does that say about jati and theology?

> If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ?

Million dollar question. Why do some identities persist and others don’t? For jati, endogamy plays a significant role and it will disappear with the current out marriage rate in a century (that’s of course being optimistic). Making it about Hinduism or Brahmins will not get rid of jati. TN has the lowest ICM in the country despite a 100 years of non-Brahmin movement.

> It is easy to say the conversations get 'muddled' without bothering to learn why the thing under discussion even exists !!

Lol, let’s just say we read different things about the subject or even read the same things and come to different conclusions.

> that talking about caste somehow ends up being Hinduphobic.

If it ends up disparaging people with Hindu religious identity, one could argue its Hinduphobic (which happens sometimes with these conversations).

To the Brahmin, wearing the thread comes with religious obligations. Committing oneself to those religious obligations needn’t have anything to do other castes.

> Are you saying that you'd stop being a Hindu if you give up your Brahmin identity?

Surely there are many kinds of Hindus? To each community what’s important is different? And an answer to this question also depends on how the individual makes sense of his religion?

While jati as a feature of the Indian landscape has persisted for a few thousand years, I believe jati and religion/theology are orthogonal. You can belong to caste x and any religion y in the sub-continent. But as it happens, when one talks about being anti-caste today many times it is to call out and disparage one’s Hindu identity. This makes any conversion about caste extremely muddled, with folks arguing past each other.

That’s not true. Many other castes used to have their own thread ceremonies and wear it. In TN at least, I can think of the Chettiars and Nadars who did a 100 years ago, and who rid themselves of it after concerted efforts by the Justice Party. Example: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_elderly_Chettia...

Soundarapandian Nadar of Justice Party (and after whom Pondy Bazaar is named) campaigned in the Nadar community to get rid of the thread: https://alchetron.com/W-P-A-Soundarapandian-Nadar

Some Nairs wear it as well. Wearing the thread is not a “privilege” afforded to only Brahmins, although now in popular imagination it has become their identifier.

Echoing others here, quitting Twitter has given me a lot of time back that I now try to redirect to writing. Relatedly, downloading Obsidian on the phone means I now journal quite a bit, which is therapeutic in its own way. Each time I pick the phone up, something ends up in Obsidian.