How I won the Pulitzer and other tales

After much bickering with friends on a WhatsApp group over the inflammatory content of a forwarded message that seemed clearly manipulated, I exited the battle. It was clear they wouldn’t consider any evidence I presented if it stood in the way of the alternative “facts” they subscribed to. The version of events presented in the forward aligned with an ideology and came from a source that they considered infallible. Their minds had been manipulated. I realised I would need an altogether different toolkit to prove this to them.

A war had to be waged. But how was it to be won? It occurred to me that few stories carry greater credibility than those that appear in a newspaper. That settled it.

It took 10 minutes to look up an online tool that allowed me to create a news clipping. Another 10 minutes to compose a story that insinuated it had appeared in The New York Times. The final output stated that I’d been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

I sent it out on the WhatsApp group with the comment: “Feeling overwhelmed. Thank you for your support guys over the years. Love you all!”

A stunned silence greeted my post. This was going to plan. I was messing with their heads. Eventually, the first message came in. Grudgingly. “Boss! You’ve made us proud!”

“Thanks man! Will call. Fielding too many calls right now and juggling work.” I responded.

A deluge of congratulatory messages from members of the group followed.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how quickly this would backfire as well. Happy with the clip I’d created, I shared it with my wife, daughter and some close friends who understand the news business. I assumed they’d see through it right away. My family knows I try to pull a fast one every once in a while, and if anyone in the news business with a sharp eye looked at it closely, they’d spot it as a fake. But in this case, almost no one did.

As I stepped out of my room a little later, a teary-eyed wife hugged me tight and the older daughter looked all proud of her dad. She couldn’t wait to show off to her friends! Not just that, they’d shared it over WhatsApp with others in the family. I could see messages from friends trickling in on my phone now. They desperately wanted me to get on a call to begin celebrating.

It broke my heart to begin telling everyone it was a fake. And hard to see those around me struggle to hide their disappointment — at having nothing to celebrate, at having been so wrong, and now feeling foolish. That’s when it hit me. People see and hear what they want to see and hear not just because they’re stubborn or incapable of admitting error. It’s also because it’s so much easier to dig the self in deeper than dig the self out of a hole. As with so many things, take enough turns in the road, and it’s almost impossible to turn back.

Those who craft fake narratives understand this intuitively. That is why, as a thumb rule, I don’t take any narrative on social media platforms at face value, even if they originate in people I know.

Why did friends who are ideologically opposed to me, then, buy into my Pulitzer nominee story? And why have they started to consider my opinions on all things more seriously?

Let me put it this way. Humans have fickle memories, and minds that are easily swayed. The story I crafted didn’t attack their ideology. Instead, it was something they wanted to be a part of. Suddenly, what they could see was a friend they grew up with, not an ideological opponent.

I haven’t bothered to clarify with them that it is a prank. But I will, eventually. When we argue as we often do around ideology, and they decline to consider evidence that does not fit their worldview, this clipping will be deployed to demonstrate how easily minds can be manipulated.

This piece was first published in Hindustan Times. Copyrights vest with HT Media

A festival of idiots

Over the last two months, I’ve participated at various literature festivals. It has much to do with that The Aadhaar Effect, a book I co-authored with NS Ramnath is now on the shelves. Having done the rounds, I feel compelled to conclude the few honest people that exist in the ecosystem are organizers (many of whom are volunteers) and the audiences who take much pain to get there. 

 Practically, every other creature at events such as these are either idiots or parasites. It was a thought that occurred last year when I moderated a panel discussion at the Bangalore Lit Fest. Following that, I exchanged notes with my former colleague and friend Manu Joseph. “Oftentimes, all a writer has to do is simply describe what he sees and the story tells itself," he told me. “It can be both amusing and insightful."

 With the benefit of hindsight, I now know Manu was right. I don’t have much to do here except describe the various kinds of creatures I saw off stage, on stage, behind the stage, and describe them. This story will tell itself. Indeed. Manu was right. They are regulars at all lit fests, some traits bind them all, and most are idiots to boot.

•  They carry an impression of themselves—that they are created of a different mud as opposed to the “masses" who frequent cinema halls to watch Shah Rukh Khan serenade his love interests in the Bollywood version of Switzerland. 

• They also imagine themselves as more intelligent than everybody else because they are professional critics often employed at a media house. So, they think it incumbent to criticize everything. 

• These creatures get invited to events like these and are put up at plush places. They talk well, look good, and carry a certain demeanor. And, for all practical purposes, they “travel in a pack". But the serious critics are often ignored and work in mofussil places.

• Funnier still is that, unlike the Shah Rukh Khan fan who will pay hard-earned money to watch a movie first day first show, this vocal minority pays nothing for anything. But their criticism is taken seriously. “The rooms at Cannes last week were so much more better than the crap ones here," for instance. 

Take the media critic for instance. This creature is of two kinds—the uninformed and the idiot. The uninformed exists because it hasn’t done its homework and lucked out to get to where it is. 

 Idiots exist because they can scream from the rooftops. But they lack substance. That is the tragedy with both Indian liberals and those on the extreme right wing. Push them hard and they cannot defend their position beyond 500 words in print. But their decibel levels are high on television and are parasites to boot.

 Idiots then pick and choose what can cause the most impact, craft it to suit their interests, and bomb the place with it. All else is ignored conveniently.

When questioned, they have a standard question to throw: who funds you?

But popular narratives are shaped by either the uninformed or the idiot.

 To put that into perspective, from all forums that matter, I have stated that for all its flaws, to provide a unique identity to over a billion people is a staggering accomplishment. And to completely diss Aadhaar is stupid. But the so-called liberals don’t like this narrative.

 At the Bangalore Lit Fest, when I said that in as many words, some media outlets and social media handles reported the next morning that I was heckled by a packed audience. This was in contrast to what I could see from stage. I thought I could see an audience keen to listen to different perspectives. Because, until then, the only narrative most people have been told is that Aadhaar is a dystopian idea and intended to hijack their lives.

 But because local media reports had it that I was heckled, I thought I’d check with a few friends who were in the audience. They told me the only dissonant notes were by some angry voices in the front. Darned right I was. The larger audience wanted to listen in to the multiple perspectives. But if it got reported, it would hijack the contemporary narrative now controlled by a vocal minority. 

 Manu thought the audience was a receptive one as well. That is why my initial irritation gave way to much amusement when my colleague Ramnath reminded me of a quote by Oscar Wilde. “There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."

This is not to suggest I have no biases. “Why," I argued in my head, “does Twinkle Khanna have to be at a lit fest? What is her claim to fame? Is it because she is pretty? What were the organizers thinking? Or smoking? And why is she always surrounded by people who want selfies with her?" I always maintained her book sold as many copies as it did because she is pretty and was a popular actor.

 Another part of me confronted myself, though, and said that it is a terribly unfair thing to suggest. I haven’t read her book and arrived at a conclusion based on some assumptions—not the truth. I haven’t met her or made any attempt to meet her either. But later in the evening, over dinner, Manu told me that he has met her while on an assignment and thinks of her as an intelligent and beautiful woman. 

 But the media can shape popular narrative and informed opinions are hard to come by. To that extent, I suspect I am the kind of liberal who give liberals a bad name.

 It was driven home harder still when I walked over to the table where Makarand Paranjape, was seated. He asked me my name. And then went on to tell me the historical significance of its origins and why I ought to be happy to possess it. When I told him I am not a practicing Catholic, he went on to offer me a brief treatise on the history of Catholicism and asked me some tough questions on why I gave up my faith. So much for all narratives of him being called a right winger. If he is on the right wing, give me a right winger like him any day, as opposed to a shallow liberal.

The other nugget that came my way is that there are “paid critics" who are “professional socialites". There is a reason they get invited to these dos. They have large followings on social medias platforms and columns as well in popular newspapers—usually tabloids or on Page 3. A tweet from them or a line insidiously implying a brand is a good one can get their accounts credited with as much as Rs.5 lakh. In much the same way, they can destroy a carefully crafted reputation as well with a single line. They must be humoured and kept in the good books. 

The other joker who is a regular on the circuit, has answers to everybody’s questions, likes to publicly diss Ruskin Bond as an “old fart”, is a tall, lanky, light-eyed, idiot based out of Mumbai. He claims to be a Bombay-boy, has answers to everything visiting white folks at lit festivals are curious about. As for us “desi-boys”, we don’t cut ice with him. But yes, he lives a nice, “cheap" life of the kind I envy.

(A longer version of this piece was originally published in Mint last year)

Get out off Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, please!

That I hate Facebook and chose to opt out of it because I thought it is making me dumb is something I have articulated earlier. I’m happier for it. Quite honestly, I am not interested in knowing how people spend their vacations, their frustrations at work, nor will I bother to hit a like on their “oh-so-cute” family pictures. Add to that Facebook’s privacy polices that milk every ounce of you that it may make the billions of dollars it is sitting on.

But as recently as last week, in this series, I posited that I continue to remain on Twitter because of the news feeds it offers. And on LinkedIn because it allows me to look up the backgrounds of people.

But that said, a part of me continued to argue there is a larger problem that I was unable to put my finger on. This debate with the self ended when I stumbled on two interesting arguments on what is the problem with Twitter. May I point you to “The End of Twitter” in The New Yorker and “Why Twitter’s Dying” on Medium? I couldn’t agree more with the sum and substance of both the arguments.

Twitter has an existential crisis on hand because it is struggling to remain relevant in a world being overrun by social media platforms of all kinds. The fine minds who thought up Twitter are leaving in hordes in order to create newer platforms. And the folks coming in to replace them are trying to figure out how can they continuously reinvent the platform so that they stay on top of the game. Cash is not an issue. With the kind of valuations it currently commands, Joshua Topolsky points out in the New Yorker article that it can continue to exist in its current avatar for 412 years.

So, what is the crisis really? And why is it being overrun? Umair Haque argues eloquently on Medium that over time, most social media platforms have morphed into platforms for abuse. And Twitter is the one that amplifies abuse the most.

“The social web became a nasty, brutish place. And that’s because the companies that make it up simply do not just take abuse seriously... they don’t really consider it at all. Can you remember the last time you heard the CEO of a major tech company talking about... abuse... not ads? Why not? Here’s the harsh truth: they see it as peripheral to their ‘business models’, a minor nuisance, certainly nothing worth investing in, for theirs is the great endeavor of... selling more ads,” he writes.

And damn right he is.

For a moment, consider how things are in India now. Twitter has degenerated into a place occupied by three warring tribes—“bhakts”, “libtards” and “presstitutes”.

“Bhakts” have come to mean anybody who is on the political right and supports the current ruling coalition. On their part, “bhakts” describe anybody who doesn’t agree with their world view as “libtards”—short for liberal retards. And finally, “presstitutes”, a term contemptuously thrown by both “bhakts” and “libtards” to describe people like journalists, writers, filmmakers or anybody, for that matter, who belongs to a tribe that may not subscribe to either school. I confess I have fallen victim to the crossfire, have indulged in name calling with both “bhakts”and “libtards” and am now labelled a “presstitute”.

When I think about it, this isn’t what I had signed up for. Twitter was intended to be a worldwide community of people who shared thoughts, links and ideas, all in 140 characters. And what a lovely place it was!

The easiest thing to do now is just get out of Twitter because it is no longer what it was intended to be. But that would be a cop-out and giving in to the warring tribes. So, what am I to do? Because at the end of the day, there is no taking away from the fact that when you dig deeper, meaningful conversations can be had on Twitter.

On my part, I have started out by giving up on the theory of reciprocity, which meant that if somebody started to follow me, I followed them back as a gesture of acknowledgement to their existence. When I think about it, it makes no sense.

Add to this the fact that I am seen as an influencer of sorts on Twitter by many folks—not because I have accomplished anything significant, but because it is terribly easy to be seen as an influencer, and because I had deployed some devious techniques and a few hundred rupees to be seen as one. The network effect kicked in and now people of all kinds follow me for whatever reason.

By falling into the “follow back” trap, the voices of people who really matter to me get drowned. This is because Twitter moves incredibly fast. By the time you finish reading this sentence, back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate 40,509 tweets will be published. And by Twitter’s acknowledgement, half a billion updates are posted every day. So, the chances of me finding what I am looking for is lower than that of looking for a needle in a haystack.

So, I have started on a painful exercise that will take a while to complete—to start unfollowing people who don’t add value. The easiest way to get out of this trap is to start out by unfollowing everybody I follow right now. On Chrome, my browser of choice, this can be done by using a plugin called Twitter Unfollow. Every browser has similar tools that allow you to do it.

I have chosen to take the longer and more tortuous path. When I have time on hand, I review the profile of people I follow and slot them into lists. A list, on Twitter, is a curated group of accounts. You can create your own lists or subscribe to lists created by others. Viewing the timeline on a list will show you a stream of tweets from only those accounts present on that list.

In my case, for instance, themes I am interested in include media, psychology, medicine, philosophy, books, entrepreneurship and politics among others. So, I have started looking up people interested in these themes and am convinced are on top of their game.

Each time I feel the need to look a theme up, which is pretty much every day, I go to the relevant list and look at what resource they have pointed to or what comment they may have to make on a theme. What it offers me, in turn, is a completely personalized experience. Everything else that exists is noise and opinion that gets filtered out. To put it politely, everybody has an opinion. And opinions are like orifices at the bottom end of your rear. Everybody has one.

Over time, my intent is to follow nobody but those on the lists I am interested in. Whether or not I choose to make these lists public is something I haven’t made my mind up about. I am inclined to keep it private because a public list that others can subscribe to tells everybody what my interests are. The downside to a private list, though, is that it goes against the principle of sharing, which Twitter, or any social media platform for that matter, as it was originally intended is based on.

This isn’t a technique I thought up. But something social media wonks such as Luis Suarez have perfected over the years. The outcome of the many years of his experience and how he got to mastering Twitter that it may be leveraged for maximum impact is . I owe Harold Jarche, whom I had written about last week in this series, a hat tip for the pointer to this hack.

Then there is LinkedIn. At the time of writing and preparing this dispatch, I have deleted my LinkedIn account. I don’t see any value in it any more. All of its default settings are intended to spam my personal account. My initial position was that I stayed on LinkedIn since it allowed me to look up backgrounds of people. But when used effectively, Google is such a sneaky tool, it allows me to get into pretty much wherever I want to.

And heck no, LinkedIn is not where I go to look for career opportunities or make fresh acquaintances. Nor do I fancy posts from self-styled “thought leaders” no editor would touch with a bargepole. The only reason most people put their posts there is to tom-tom their accomplishments or congratulate people for something as trivial as moving from being an assistant manager to manager, show off to idiotic recruiters and human resource people how wide and deep their networks really are. How much more daft can organizations get?

I don’t really know most of the people I am linked in on LinkedIn. Nor do I care for them. Add to all of this the fact that premium users who subscribe to LinkedIn can view all of my personal details. Unacceptable! What firmed my mind up are two snarky provisions I noticed in the Terms of Service under the provisions for Privacy.

2.2: We offer a premium service to recruiters and others, which can be used to search for, organize, and communicate with potential candidates or offer business opportunities. In some cases we allow the export of public profile information. You can control how your information is exported by changing which parts of your public profile are accessible to search engines.

2.5: We may share your personal information with our affiliates (meaning entities controlled by, controlling or under common control with LinkedIn) outside of the LinkedIn entity that is your data controller (for example, LinkedIn Corp. may share your information with LinkedIn Ireland, or other LinkedIn operating entities) as reasonably necessary to provide
the Services. You are consenting to this sharing.

We combine information internally across different Services. For example, SlideShare may recommend better content to you based on your LinkedIn content preferences and the articles you read on Pulse, and LinkedIn could present you a better tailored network update stream based on your SlideShare activity, whether or not you tied your SlideShare, Pulse and/or LinkedIn accounts (e.g. by signing in SlideShare or Pulse with your LinkedIn account), as we may be able to identify you across different Services using cookies or similar technologies.

Plainly put, all of my personal information does not belong to me. The sharks at LinkedIn can trade me for a few dollars and I don’t have a say in it because by accepting their terms and signing in to use their service, I have given all of my rights away to them.

Thank you. But no thank you. I would much rather spend quality time with my little girls who are curled up by my side, waiting for me to wrap this piece up, so that I may entertain them with magic tricks and share the warmth of a few giggles and laughs I bring with my faux magic tricks that can only impress little girls who look up to their dad with awe. The joy, I suspect, will last only a few years before some joker tries to woo them, while I look back wistfully at the years they worshipped me. I might as well spend all of my time doting on them.

This piece was originally published in Mint on Sunday

The Old Lady of Boribunder...

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...Or the Times of India group as we all know it, just instituted one of the most bizarre policies I've ever heard of in a long, long time. Quartz India reports: 

"Hundreds of journalists working at the Times of India and its sister publications have received a peculiar request from their employer: hand over your Twitter and Facebook passwords and let us post for you.

Even after you leave the company.

Under a contract unveiled to employees last week, Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd—India’s largest media conglomerate and publisher of the Times of India, Economic Times, among many other properties—told staffers they are not to post any news links on their personal Twitter and Facebook accounts. This runs counter to many social-media policies in newsrooms across the world, which often encourage journalists to share content widely.

But BCCL, as the company is known, is telling journalists that they must start a company-authorised account on various social media platforms. They also have the option of converting existing personal social media accounts to company accounts. On these, they are free to discuss news and related material. The company will possess log-in credentials to such accounts and will be free to post any material to the account without journalists’ knowledge. It is now also mandatory to disclose all personal social-media accounts held by the journalist to the company."

My reaction to this ordinance is summed up by this quote @shiningpath1 posted on Twitter

Why I quit Facebook

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Because Facebook was making me dumb.

After much deliberation, I deactivated my account.  I must file a caveat here. I’m not a Neo-Luddite; you know, the kind who dislikes technology. I’m the kind most people call a geek. So why quit Facebook?

A little over two years ago, I read a lovely book, Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed by Howard Gardner, an American developmental psychologist at Harvard University. The book compelled me to write him a note and ask for an interaction. The man was gracious and offered me his time. Several interactions over email and some face time on one of his visits to India later, I published a piece in Forbes India, where I used to work until very recently.

Gardner’s hypothesis is this. The world we live in is one where it is ridiculously simple to find people who agree with you. But there is a downside to that. Because everybody around seems to agree with you, prejudices that exist in your mind, are reinforced.

As theories go, I thought it compelling. But the implications weren’t evident to me, until very recently when I started to examine my media consumption habits, Facebook included.

Each time I checked my Facebook feed I thought I could see a pattern. On the one hand, I had in excess of 500 “friends” and subscribed to at least a dozen groups. On the other hand, my feed was populated by posts from “friends” that ran into just double digits.

Eventually, I realised this monotony in feeds that populated my timeline was because all of it originated from two kinds of people. Those whose posts I hit the most number of “likes” on; and those who frequently hit “like” on my posts. Other “friends” on my network were invisible entities—unless I chose to actively seek their timelines out. The more I thought of it, the more I was convinced this is a problem. What I “like” is inevitably what I agree with. What about those I disagree with, or whose posts I don’t hit a “like” on? Why should they be invisible?

Interestingly enough, the numbers of people whose feeds I could see also ties in with the Dunbar Number. First proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, he argued, a human being could on average maintain 150 meaningful relationships. By “meaningful” he meant, if all of these people were in the same room, everybody would be comfortable. Implicit to comfort is that everybody shares more or less similar worldviews.

My reading’s suggests social media architects of the kind who work at Facebook deploy this idea in their algorithms to limit interactions and visible ideas to the boundaries imposed by this number. Else, their product may seem chaotic to most humans. While the architects may be right in deploying the wisdom Dunbar’s Number contains, I am convinced these interactions in the digital world contain a fatal flaw.

In the offline world, I live in a space different from the one my elders do, or the one my sibling does. My friends come from backgrounds dramatically different from mine.

That is why when my folks chide me for my lack of spiritual beliefs; my sibling disagrees with me on what constitutes the good life; and my friends vehemently argue over political ideology, there is no acrimony—at best, animated conversations. I can’t hit a “like” button here or “unfriend” them. By the very nature of my relationships, my biases aren’t confirmed. Instead, they are challenged, unlike Facebook, which provides me comfort that comes with homogeneity.

That said Facebook is only a metaphor for a larger problem that terrifies me. Allow me to put that into context.

I recently took to drinking green tea because I was told it is good. To understand why, I punched “Is green tea good for me” into Google.  Practically every answer the engine threw up pointed me to resources that argued why it is indeed good.

As a little experiment, I typed “Is green tea bad for me”. The numbers of arguments on why it may not be so good after all, were as many as why it is good.

The answers I was looking for were dependent on the bias built into my question. The algorithms that power the searches were feeding my biases.

To understand what happens if I eliminate the implicit bias in my question, I typed “green tea” into the search bar. This time around, the results were mixed. Some pointed to why it is good and others to why it is bad.

This is where my problem really is. We live in times where the potential to find ways that amplify our biases is unprecedented.

Most of us carry tablets, smartphones, and every kind of always-on device. Every media company, whether established or in start up mode, has latched on to the ubiquity of these devices. That explains the explosion of applications, which offer “personalised news feeds”, the “communities” they seek to build, and “relationships” they hope to forge on their platforms. This includes RSS feeds, bloggers you follow, Twitter, Flipboard, Zite, Storify, and everything else you can think of.

The ability to “personalise” allows you choose filters of all kinds: the media outfits you want to patronise, subjects that interest you, writers and opinion makers you like. You get what you like. Nothing more, nothing less!

This explosion in personalisation is killing diversity and making us dumber.

To draw yet another parallel, think food. Once upon a time, food was at a premium. Human ingenuity took over and agriculture was industrialised. Scarcity gave way to abundance and foraging became a thing of the past. Fast food culture took root. This culture though came with an underside. Humans became sedentary, turned corpulent and acquired lifestyle diseases. To combat these diseases, we are now compelled to make informed choices on the food we consume and proactively avoid sedentary lifestyles.

If this analogy is extrapolated into our world, Clay Johnson’s advice in the The Information Diet resonates loud. “Consume deliberately. Take in information over affirmation.”

In our own interests, therefore, it is incumbent to deliberately decide what information to consume, what communities to be part of, and what relationships to nurture.

The alternative is: Be dumb, stay dumb.

This post was first published by K RamKumar, ED at ICICI Bank on his personal website www.otherview.in

Why I quit Facebook

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Because I thought Facebook was making me dumb. 

K RamKumar who sits on the board of directors at ICICI Bank graciously accepted my post that articulates why I did something that seems counter-intuitive in today's hyper connected world on his personal blog The Other View.