Epistles

In conversation with a friend I have known for 20 years asking him to give his take on turning 26. Lets turn over the mike to him.

Its hard to believe that I am 26. There was a time when people would talk about “today’s kids” and they would mean us. Its not us any more.

When was the first time you used the phrase “Current generation” to refer to another group ? Kids People of what approximate age would you consider to be of your generation ? How old should a person be so you can use the phrase “current generation” and he/she won’t think its him/her ? When did you first think that you should not desist from engaging in certain activities because life is too short and life in a healthy body that can take strenuous shocks is even shorter ? When did it first occur to you (if it did) as to what kind of a place your grand kids would grow up and how much technology would have changed things by then ? Rather among the many future developments that you anticipate, which do you think will not happen in your lifetime ?

No you don’t have to be the brooding Eeyore when it comes to the above thoughts. I am talking about the first time many of these thoughts you actually felt – not read, not heard, not spoken to – but felt personally.

There is this really cool website called Edge.org. One of the many things they do is to ask over 100 odd experts and public thinkers from several fields one question each year and have their answers put up online. You can catch the series of questions here and clicking on each of those the answers as well.

One of the questions asked (2005) was “What do you believe is true though you cannot prove it ?”. Of course, my answers won’t really deserve to show up there anyway, but hey, I will answer anyway !

I think social networks are overrated.

I have lot of respect for and faith in the ability of experts to explain the past. Seldom in their ability to predict the future in matters such as these. We just don’t know.

What else explains things like sub-prime lending crisis – entirely man-made, partly wall-street made and they have some of the smartest brains, right ! What about the tech boom/bust at the turn of the century -  all those entrepreneurs and venture capitalists hailed as superstars ?

Go back to read some of the magazine articles from 1999/2000 and am sure most of the guys making predictions were around then as well and often it looks like mistakes have not been lessons. Or maybe its whole new set of people doing the same mistakes. Today we make fun of how people (that often includes ourselves) evaluated companies from their market capitalization even if that number was 100 times the actual revenue. Now with facebook at $250 M in revenue and $15 B in evaluation (thats 60 times), its interesting to see where this goes. And each time you hear the same thing – “This time its different because blah…blah..blah.”.

A relevant link from Abi : A video

P.S: Somebody else concurs too.

I was trying to write something today – write, not type and not fill a form which is a more structured activity, but write something as unstructured and impromptu as writing a letter. I realized how awful it had gotten over the years given that there has been little writing activity. Hardly taking notes during college and grad school, you lose that art of writing anything at all, without mistakes, misspelling, poor construction. Infact, don’t be surprised if this also takes a toll on your ability to ace exams where you have to write long answers ;  it sure did to me, or so I am given to think.  ( a good enough reason to take notes in class).

I don’t know at when in the last years I must have crossed the point where I had typed more characters than I ever wrote (I used to keep count, you know ). To be sure, its impossible to know if it ever did, but I imagine it must have. Also interesting – and I am sure this happened – is the point in life where your fastest typing speed just exceeded your best writing speed (for a given number of mistakes).

I still feel that I am a better writer with the keyboard than I ever was writing on paper. Its not just the obvious advantage of the backspace key but the ability to move entire sentences around which I often tend to do overdo. And once you move sentences around, you tend to (often justifiably) modify sentences themselves and this can often mean moving around sentences again . But then one might argue that one sentence very well thought that went out on paper is better than several iterations of a sentence where the most frequently occurring ‘letter’ is the backspace.

Its hard to measure any of this however, even assuming you come up with a measure of what good writing really is. This is because there is an inherent bias in that most of my writing on paper was done a few years ago and arguably one might have improved writing skills over time by just having hung in there and written more. Ideally then you would need snapshots from around the same point in life where you wrote quite a bit and typed in as well. Fortunately for me, the time around 1997-2000 would qualify for such a study, except having to do any automatic analysis of paper-written material is rather cumbersome and time-consuming. And the nature of content is such that there is little scope to outsource the typing work.

Sorry about that silly, ungrammatical title – the best I could come up with. Maybe if I were writing this post, I would have come up with something ….well, whatever !