Peter Drucker on Science and Technology

Once upon a time, people used to seek Truth. Let us call that science. In the process, interesting facts come out, and some of those facts had practical use and thence came about applied sciece. Somewhere along the way, applied science became technology. Thus far, it was alright. But now (I think Drucker wrote this in the 50's) that technology started driving science. The following is my contention. You can stop reading now if you are a technophile. Let us say Steve Jobs wanted to make a phone that can be worn as an ear top by girls. He would hire Johns Hopkins university to find the best element that would fit the his technological matrix. Funds are not an issue. This is like putting the cart before the horse. A lot of research today is therefore trivial. When I was at a telecom company in Finland, they created a prototype (it never hit the market) a foldable type like a communicator, with a mirror on one side. Some science would have been commissioned for it? Mark my words, we are going to see ear-top phone, with a gold-tooth speaking device accompanying it. If only Steve jobs was around, this would happen sooner. Let us not talk about scientific findings of science that lead to nuclear power, enough to decimate cities, whether wantonly or accidentally.

The Pharma-medical science mafia

Look at the account sheets of any pharma company. A large sum goes into marketing. That includes buying gifts for doctors. And inventing problems and formulating solutions for it is described in Listerine and the invention of bad breath. Some Pharma company had this brilliant idea that they can make people buy a mouth wash, if they scared them into thinking that they might have bad breath. "Will he marry me if I have bad breath?" worries a young (beautiful) woman in one of their ads. And so half of America now uses some mouth wash or the other. My teeth are all yellow because of smoking, I once went to a dentist and had them scraped. But the yellow hue returned in no time, and I left it alone. A few years ago, hair fall was not a problem at all. Now if you turn on the TV, every other ad is about some shampoo or the other which arrests hairfall. Hair fall is a natual thing. As we grow old, the hair becomes thinner. Many men and some women even go bald. Is a two-bit shampoo going to alter the genetic structure? Or the creator's scheme of things. I am a miscreationist but I don't fault him/her for hairfall. So be it. Did any pharma company spend a penny on a pill that reduces hunger. A nourishing and satiating formulation. A few years ago, there was a lot of noise about HIV/AIDs. Even now there are, but not such a lot of drama. Interestingly, there used to be many sex clinics for other problems than AIDS; they seem to have vanished. A majority of the doctors are hand in glove with the drug mafia, I mean, pharma industry. Others are just plain ignorant and greedy. They nod in amazement at how wonderfully hasbeerin works, and tell their victims to 'take 2'. The booze guys are not far behind: they say that two drinks per day is good for the heart. I don't know about that but it is good for bowel movements. And who is gonna bother about the booze company ads about moderate drinking after two drinks. Bernard Shaw once threw a bunch of drugs into the bin. "Why the hell did you see the doctor and buy those medicines?" Shaw replied: The poor doctor has to make a living so I paid a visit. The druggist has to run his business so felt I must support his livelihood. "And you threw them out the window? Why" 'I want to live too' said shaw sardonically. And let us not talk about side effects here. An across-the-counter cold medicine can give you a heart attack, according to the brochure given to doctors. That is possibly to cover their backsides. (like in the urban legend, some coffee cups carrying a warning that the coffee is hot and might scald your mouth). There are some people who willingly go through pharma trials for money. As I said, India has enough lab rats.

angst in a fistful of lust (adults only)

Come under the shadow of this red rock
and i will show you something uglier than a handful of lust
something scarier than the shortening shadow of the afternoon
and the 5o'clockshade on your face; something curioser than a frajous fly

organized crime

One of my friends used to say that anything organized is a crime. He has a point. Any organization has a 'system' full of rules, and 'administrators' of the rules. There are some smart cookies in any organization who know how to 'game the system'. They are the trouble. Weeklings (or those who play it straight) are at the receiving end of this game. Naturally, the whole point of a game is that it helps you figure who is the winner and who is the loser. Now, losers often don't know all the rules. The administrators ensure that some laws are hidden from the losers. Be that as it may, this argument applies to one and all, including charitable organizations. One example is a meditation course offered by a philanthropic organization. The course is for ten days, and it is free. At the end of it, typically, those who can afford to, may offer a contribution/donation (which amount shall fund future programs. A friend recommended that (he has been to the program dozens of times: I did not see much difference in his character 'before and after' but I thought what the hell, let us give it a try. I was there for 3 days with great forbearance - they packed 3 of us in a small room. The sheets looked like they have last been washed years ago. I could not handle the physical discomfort. And I am a very bad meditator, and I would open my eyes in 5 minutes, when they instructed us to meditate for a half hour. There is a rule (prominently stated), that once you are in, you cannot leave until the end of the ten-day program. The hidden 'rule' (not at all mentioned anywhere) is the one has to cope with bad accommodation and share it with strangers. Anyway, I wanted to bail out and spoke to the Guru. He threw the rule book at me and said now way. With great persuasive skills, I managed to get the hell out of there. At least if I had packed a few sheets, things would have worked better, perhaps. That is a benign organization, and there are no legal papers. I am sure half the crowd go through the program till the end because of the 'rule.' I am not an anarchist. There have to be rules, but there should be a little room for individual freedom. 90 percent of us in various organizations go with the flow but some of us end up feeling suffocated. Of course the losers try to game the system too. But fail. That is why they are losers. I am one of those, it appears.

The age of entertainment (adults only)

Maybe I wrote about it already so now I will keep it short. I read this book (borrowed from a library in Singapore); now I cannot find it on any internet site! You know the joke about there being a dog and a man on earth, with a huge machine which does all work. The man's job is to feed the dog and the dog's duty is to make sure the man does not go any where near the equipment. The Age of Entertainment forwards a similar argument: that in the future all the work will be done by machines and all that humans have to do with their time is to keep themselves enertained. It is a pretty entertaining argument. But the only problem is humans are too busy inventing newer and newer machines (what kind of kick that gives them?) The internet got us email and blogs, which is nice but but along came negerian lottery frauds and unsolicited messages offering penile enhancements! In our childhood we had a story called God sees the truth but waits. It is about a guy who is jailed on false charges but after 20 years, the truth is out and he is released (call it a tragicomedy?) Reminds me of Siddhartha's claim: I can think, I can fast, I can wait. We humans, poor souls, cannot fast and wait endlessly - and lose the power to think. Hunger is a bad thing. Some help out through soup kitchens and some through charitable Buffets. Only if you encounter hunger head on, will you understand why some bother to speak up.

The Road Ahead: Revisited after 20 years

I remember one thing from BillG's The Road Ahead. He wrote that in the future, there will be one number, one user password for all things in God's creation. It is a cruel joke. I lost my wallet recently with a few credit cards. I am a disorganized person, and don't write down numbers in a booklet. And to block my cards was a superhuman task. oh yeah, that is not to do with internet, but internets sites have each a different password. If you are the kind who writes down your password (and use the same for all sites), if the booklet gets into the wrong hands, you are done for. That is the road ahead thus far. One is scared of what horrors are going to visit upon us further. While at it, what do you think Bill-Mel foundation is doing here? Using Indian victims as lab rats for new drugs. Many software companies refer to themselves as the India lab of xyz coroporation. We are a nation of rats. And to get ahead in the rat race, you have to bow down to Uncle Sham.

Asaduddin Owaisi hires a Telugu tutor

This is fairly old news: to expand MIM beyond Hyderabad, specially where Muslims speak Telugu (and to improve rapport with Telugu-based parties), Owaisi decided to learn Telugu and hired a tutor for that purpose. Let us go back in history a bit. In 1981, when I moved to Hyderabad (aged 15), with no facility to speak in Hindi (urdu is referred to as Hindi in Hyderabad; another time about this fallacy), I was not able to cope because in the streets everyone spoke Hindi. At college, I used to try broken English in response to Hindi talk of others. They used to call me 'Spoken English'. When I see posters advertizing Spoken English classes, even now I cringe. Over time, a lot of change happened. The common muslim auto driver speaks in Telugu. Muslims are in general not averse to speaking in Telugu. Owaisi's decision will go a long way in integrating the two communities. The day Hindus and muslims develop genuine rapport, linguistically - true communal harmony will be established in the city. On the other hand, there is a disturbing tendancy in Kerala, where many important Muslim writers wrote in Malayalam (To be fair, there are many muslim writers in Telugu as well) and everyone spoke Malayalam - now there are some people who are gravitating toward Urdu (in speech). Which language one speaks is a personal choice but I am only talking of trends. Kudos to Asad bhai. Sankara the language enthusiast

The temple of Geek God and Bellyana

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Next time you visit visakhapatnam, make it a point to pay obeisance to the Geek God and Bellyana bhama - in the temple near RK beach. Geek God is a screen god for whom they built a temple. outside the temple, you will find stylish looking false beards. Bellyana bhama is well known down south and even Bollywood screen godmen are taking note of her now. So they built a temple for her too. Like Saraswathi is the goddess of the arts, Bellyana is the goddess of the perfect navel. Indians, for long given to navel gazing have now found a novel way of turning it into worspip. They sell strings of belly buttons made of fake pearls outside the temple; don't forget to pick up one.

I am a mis-creationist

The lame hand of creation In case you did not catch on, the title is a take off on The Left Hand of Creation. To be frank, I did not read the book. When God was creating humans, in his own image, he worked on the likes of Sai Baba and Steve Jobs: Nice work, he thought to himself. And for a bit of fun, he went out in a sports car and raded for a while. He had a terrible crash! He broke his hand and it went lame for good. Nevertheless, he had work to do: complete the creation of humankind. one would say, in hindsight, it would be more like human-unkind. Well, he went ahead to create humans. The hungry, the poor, the hapless, the insane and all such are the creation of the lame hand. I disagree with this conjecture. It seems that the devil got into some people. Let us call them the system administrators. They devised a way to keep half of humanity desperate. It is a happy situation for them. AS long as you have half of humans desperate, you can play around with them. You can hire them for two hours, and pay what you want to. And bulge your bank accounts. You can uproot an entire population in xanadu and pack them off to nowhere. And build a pleasure dome there. you might ask, why not use this popoulation to build the pleasure dome? Duh, they are not well-versed with windows 16 and doors 64. So what is the road ahead like? Read on in the next blog.

The Govern'mental' hospital of vizag

The Govern'mental' hospital at china waltair: A house of insane victims and inhuman staff. visakhakhapatnam has two areas called Waltair: china (small) and peda (big) waltairs. There is governmental hospital in china waltair. It has a high sounding name: Neurosurgigal hospital; however, people call it govern'mental hospital. It is actually a highly guarded prison for poor and haplesss. Those who get psychotic because of hunger and no shelter to sleep under and wander the streets are rounded up and kept in prison cells and fed rather nourishing meals. It is a noble cause and in a poor country like ours, a poor government cannot do better. The sinister thing about it is really, when some of thise 'mad' people resist to be moved into the comfort of those guarded cells, they are beaten up badly by 'ward boys'. I believe these 'boys' with an average age of 40 pull down 20k per month. An entry-levela 'boy' gets a couple of thousands less. An entry-level doctor gets about 15k, I presume. These boys treat everyone as dirt: one kept insisting that I have to shave. How I ended up is an interesting story: I left my job and was at a loose end, drinking away to glory. Things got a bit rough and my sister said do youwant to go into rehab. I said yes, and voluntarily (with the word mentioned) gave a request to them and they admitted me. It was a 'special ward' but there were restrictions on movement, which I could cope with (and with the mosquitoes). But the vast campus could not accommodate a coffee stall or a snack bar: one's 'attendant' (every victim, I mean patient had to have an attendant - relative or paid), had to walk a long distance to bring coffee or samosas. Mercifully, they used to server food, but only to the victims. The sanitary staff were contractors and they haven't been paid for six months and the place was a dump. The sinister thing here is really not the garbage around, buthow do they expect contract employees without pay for six months? That is the govern'mental' hospital for you. All the wellgroomed doctors were blaming the striking contract staff! The reason I mentioned about admitting myself voluntarily was I could not cope with the inhumity of it all. Some patients had attendants but they could not afford to buy food for them from ouside. One old lady used to come to our room and ask if there is any left over food. I asked for discharge after a week. They said No way. Here, we are the ones who decide when you are ok with the finality of God-like finality. In sanskrit, they say: vaidyo (doctor), narayan o'harry! Finally I managed to check out (amd am sane enough to write this sober report on this savage govern'mental' hospital. Another hassle was the only water outlet was the loo. the sink got blocked and there was no other way out for water. Then there was this counselor for de-addiction: Pregant Mishra. She used to torment us in groups. My idea of therapy was a lengthy one-on-one conversation. However, this one was like: Francis, tell me what are the harms of drinking? I told you in the last session. Hmm, you forgot; it is like I am talking to a wall. OK, Tipster, you tell me how you are going to get rid of this habit? ("I thought you were going to tell us?") And the best of all: to one regular vicim - "why do you show up here every six months? why don't you drink until you die at once? I think she got a bit insane talking to crazy people. It was a free hospital, so the doctors and staff including ward 'boys' used to treat everyone as if the victims were parasites. The same governmental staff got paid handsomely and without us, they would be jobless. And the gods must be crazy to have created so many hapless feeble-minded.

the lame hand of creation (forthcoming)