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November 21, 2024

Category: social

April 23, 2021

Justice Course – an Indian Perspective

by viggy — Categories: experience, lectures, Panchatantra, social — Tags: , , — Leave a comment

I have just begun listening to the Justice: What is the right thing to do? Course by Micheal Sandel. The course puts forward many fundamental questions about our understanding of Justice, morality, behaviour. Many of the questions may seem very obvious and yet it is very difficult to put them together into a coherent thought. And the same understanding and answers look completely shattered when asking questions put in different perspective or in different scenarios. It is just amazing that as society advances, such very basic philosophical questions have endured. Micheal Sandel plays the role of a presenter who keeps presenting different questions in front of his audience and then pokes and helps them navigate to come up with better understanding of the answers, not necessarily a fixed complete answer.

As I am going through this course, I look for understanding within my cultural framework and how we have been introduced to the concept of justice and morality. For many of us, Hindu mythology and hundreds of stories around it was what introduced and gave us some idea of justice and morality. Rama killing Ravana as a fight to establish Ram Rajya, a just society. Krishna explaining Bhagavad Gita to Arjun convincing him to fight his own family. In my much younger days, it was the Panchatantra stories, the Tenali Raman and Birbal stories that introduced me to right and wrong.

Hindu mythology puts forward examples and stories for anyone to understand about justice and morality, I have not gone in-depth in it to be able to understand why it recommends what it does. The justice course looks at examples not to explain what is right or wrong but to give us a framework based on different western philosophers and their understanding of right and wrong. Hence it leaves the questions unanswered but still gives the audience enough information to allow them to make their own choices and their own understanding of justice and morality.
Given the limited understanding of both Indian and Western perspective on justice and morality, even at this introductory level, I can clearly identify two distinction between the western perspective and Indian perspective.

Firstly, it amazes me how much materialistic the western perspective is. It talks about rights of an individual, meaning of freedom within a society, etc, However it seems to revolve largely around the idea of value, monetary or otherwise and concept of utility to humankind. When it talks of nature, it either talks of something of value, something to be used by humankind or the humankind itself. There seem to be a very clear distinction between the life of an animal or plant as against the life of a human. While it gives utmost respect and importance to the life of human, the life of any other animal or plant seems to be equal to the utility it provides to human and maybe equivalent to utility provided by non-living materials. In contrast, the Hindu mythology seem to be able to give as much consideration to life of a human as to life in any other living being. The characters and the examples revolve as much around humans as plants and animals. The idea of nature is much more wholistic and the importance of any life much more sacred and prominent. The interactions of the characters are also much more complex than just utility based.

Secondly, the western perspective when talking of an individual is much wary of an individual very separated from any associations or attachments with others around him or her. When talking about pleasures, desires, needs, the individual seems to be the only in spotlight and everyone else around him just doesn’t seem to exist. The interactions with other individuals seem very transactional. This way, I believe that western perspective does not consider much more complex interactions between individuals and the idea of pleasures, desires and needs seem much more hollow in their outlook. The relationship of an individual and society is very much looked only through the prism of government and its laws. The idea of family is only considered as social organization and not as an entity in itself. This again highlights how much detached and distinct the individual is from the society around him. In contrast, Hindu mythology seem to consider individuals very much part of the society and their interactions are much deeper relationships and its impact in different scenarios. It is very difficult to isolate an individual and his/her actions. It seems to be much more an action of society manifested by the individual. The individual in many cases cannot be distinguished from the family they are part of and family seems to be just extrapolation of the individual. This directly impacts how individual rights, freedom and property is considered. Hence from philosophical point of view, individuals, family and society seem to be just different scales of the same unit and very difficult to distinguish.

These distinctions between western and Indian philosophy seem to give raise to completely different set of complexities in each scenario. I will continue to explore the distinctions and understand the two philosophies.

March 11, 2021

Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on Human Behavioral Biology

by viggy — Categories: experience, lectures, social — Tags: , , , , , , — Leave a comment

Thanks to the pandemic, I have been gifted with lot of time for walks on my terrace and one of the best ways I used these walks was listening to Dr. Robert Sapolsky and his Stanford University lectures on “Human Behavioral Biology”. The lectures were mentioned by Anand Gandhi in his discussion with Kunal Shah on the topic “Biology of Money” and it got me curious to start watching them. Luckily the complete series of 25 lectures is available in Youtube for everyone to watch.

The lectures just opens you to so many questions in the realm of animal and in particular human behavior. And along with these questions, it just provides you a very loose framework on how you can go about trying to find some high level pointers to make sense of the exhibited behavior. The first half of the series impresses on you the different steps of the framework and why it is so difficult to conclude concretely on the cause of the behavior. The second half tries to explain different common behaviors exhibited by animals using the framework and shows how each step may have contributed to the cause of the behaviors. The image below summarizes this framework and I have picked it from a more recent talk by Dr. Sapolsky in JCCSF.

Robert Sapolsky's framework to analyze a behavior

Just to give few examples on the kind of questions the lecture series touches upon, I am listing down few that I made notes of.

1) How did allowing abortion judgement help in decrease in crime rate in US states?
2) How do children pick accent from where they live and not from their parents?
3) What impact does violent childhood have on kids and does it mean they are going to be violent themselves in their adulthood?
4) Is there any relation between genes and sexuality?
5) Does stress in early life cause aggression in adulthood?
6) Does stress of pregnant mother cause the child to be more aggressive in adulthood?

7) How do new born animals identify their parents? Can they identify their relatives?
8) Why do dogs and animals in general lick other animals?

9) Are patients suffering from Schizophrenia actually more violent compared to normal people?
10) What role does genes play in deciding a human’s behavior in different situation?
11) What do hormones contribute to a human’s reaction to certain situations?

13) Do we see instances of sacrifice in animals for the betterment of their own species?
14) Finally if human behavior is anyways controlled by such a framework, is there then anything called free will of a human?

The above list is a very small subset of questions that you are introduced to as part of these lectures.

Not only do we get introduced to this vast breadth of possibilities and explanation on how different things are connected to analyze a human social behavior, the course work as part of this lecture series also introduces you to a completely different topic of Chaos Theory from the world of Physics. It is Chaos Theory which forms the basis of the framework introduced in this lecture series. As explained by Chaos Theory, some minute change in the initial conditions can cause large variations in later state. The lecture series impresses upon you how minute changes that might have happened hundreds of years ago in the evolution process or some minute change in environment just seconds ago might cause major variations in how an animal might react to a given situation.

This beautiful amalgamation of Chaos Theory to explain the framework to understand human social behavior is what makes this lecture series so unique.

August 8, 2020

Divorce: The last door to freedom for women

by viggy — Categories: social — Tags: , , , — Leave a comment

While taking an evening stroll at Sanky Tank, I had once observed an old couple. The man was very frail trying to walk with stick, the woman quite aged herself carrying a bag, his essentials, helping him walk slowly. That is when it struck me that women in the previous generation in India only become free when their husbands die. It is only after that they truly would think of themselves and their life. Till then, it completely revolves around their husband and his choices and needs.

Of course they still have to deal with the patriarchal society at large but that they are trained to deal with anyways right from birth. The constant looking over the shoulders, the constant fear before any action, the hundreds of calculations before any decisions, all this have to be taken care of when dealing with outside society. Society waiting for their fall, society waiting to pass judgement, society looking for blood to divert attention from its own failures.

But it is the family and close ones which are much more dangerous. The husband who rapes, the relative who molests, the in-laws who bicker, the brother who controls, the father who doesn’t stand with you and the silent ones from your own gender, these are the chains that leave them with many scars and decide their boundaries. The freedom I am talking are from these chains. From birth, she is chained by her father as he is now responsible for her and hence dictates everything to her. As she grows older, the brother shares the responsibility and starts dictating. And then with marriage the reigns are transferred to the husband. Much more demanding and much more ruthless, chains are tightened, expectations set and the life is expected to go on. There was no break from this for most of the women in the previous generation except to wait for her husband’s death and pray that her children will somehow just ignore her so that she lives her own life. Of course by then, most of them are too dependent and weak to do anything and make use of the opportunity. But still at least the choice to take some decisions, that freedom is much a relief in whatever form it is.

However, the present generation seem to have come a long way in this regard. While the chains from father, brother and husband still continue, the economic contributions that they make as the families need more and more working hands, in turn is giving them more options to consider. While many choose to free themselves from the chains of father and brother through this economic growth, many still end up in the hands of husbands who are waiting to lure them into the maze of marriage. After all human is a social being and hence the need for relationships continue to exists however torturous they are. Divorce hence has become the last door to freedom for many women where they are ultimately able to choose consciously on breaking the chains around them. The compatibility demon that break relationships, are in fact for many women a tool to break the chains from their husbands. After all, what is compatibility and adjustments if not in equal terms.

The path of divorce seems to be the only path of true choice for many women, the one where, finally, she is in control of her own actions, free from chains of expectations from the close ones as they discard her lest the other women in chains gets such ideas. The freedom is contagious and hence scares those who are controlling the society. The free women can cause many problems to the existing system of control. They corrode the chains of other women too, they help show the path to many others in their own situations. They assert their right to have a seat in different tables of society where the representation was always by men from the family. As more and more women choose to open the door of divorce, they are paving the way to many more women to freedom and forcing the society to reconsider so many of its own practices and mend itself.

While most of what I have written seems prophetic, I believe that the path itself is a much more rigorous exercise that the woman has to go through herself before she reaches the final decision and chooses to open that door. I will try to elaborate on it more in my next blog.

June 13, 2020

Gulabo Sitabo – common man in his full nakedness

by viggy — Categories: experience, social — Tags: , , , , — Leave a comment

I just finished watching the movie, “Gulabo Sitabo” few hours ago. This movie is definitely not the regular movie, it has many layers, many aspects which can become food for thought. One important aspect which hit me was how every character in the movie was as despicable as the other. You can very momentarily feel for someone in the movie before being disgusted by them again. Or atleast the story attempts to do the same. Another important aspect of the movie is the complete focus on the so called “common man” in the movie. Anything that does not relate to the common man is given very less attention in the movie, except at the end which shows the rich enjoying while the common man rejected after their petty fights amongst each other. This combination of the two aspects seems to be sending a very powerful message, it shows the disgusting behavior of the common man in full limelight. From stealing of items by the house owner to finding excuses to pay rent, it shows the complete lack of morality in common man. This same theme is extended to each and every character. The lawyer, the sister, the girl friend, the broker friend, the government servant, the dumb servant, each of them are only looking for their own benefit in each and every situation.

The word that keeps resounding of this behaviour is “Jugaad”. This 6 letter word has become the common man’s excuse of any wrongdoing to suit his or her selfish interest. What is worst, from excuse, it has become a matter of pride. That is why there is no remorse in any of the character even till the end and their lives go on. This lack of remorse and even acknowledgement of wrong doing is made very evident in the scene between Mirza and lawyer after they are thrown out from one of the Begum’s relatives house. When lawyer asks Mirza so to why everyone hates him, Mirza is surprised and says he did not notice any enmity. Guddo, Banke’s sister, also exemplifies this Jugaad behaviour. She tries to get herself a job within all the chaos by trying to sleep with the government officer and then goes and even works for the lawyer to try make some money as part of selling the haveli. She feels everything she is doing is ok and goes on about it. The broker friend of Mirza keeps giving him ideas while his interest lies in trying to sell the haveli to the builder. The government servant promises something to the tenants, does not show any sense of shame and uses his power to ignore them and continue with his lives.

In all, while many bollywood movies have been made to reflect the despicable behaviour of those with money, the upper class, like Corporate, Fashion, Rajneeti, this movie has completely focused on the common man’s despicable behaviour and how it is no different in the lives of common man and displays him in his full nakedness.

April 26, 2020

Time is ticking, where is my social security

by viggy — Categories: experience, social — Tags: , — Leave a comment

As me and most of my friends cross their 30 mark reluctantly and realize it more reluctantly, we now face the question of what our social security will be couple of decades from now. While we earn handsomely and enjoy the best healthcare and environment currently, all of us working in private sector and increasingly now even in public sector have this constant fear of uncertainty. Of course our jobs are not safe, but we know we can keep up with times and ensure that we continue enjoying our current standard of living for quite sometime. However what after that. When our bodies become frail and number of health issues increase, will we have enough with us to take care of us. This fear gets compounded as we look at our parents and their bodies and reflect it on ourselves. While most of us are taking care of our parents, we definitely know that as our society goes through the transformation to modernity, more and more from our generation and the next generation would value their individual independence more than responsibilities. Moral compulsions are very few and excuses umpteen to continue enjoying your life than taking care of someone old. Gone are the times when children could be depended on for the old times. As a friend put it perfectly, children were the fixed deposit which you could wait to mature in your old age and then enjoy the benefits. As families become “nuclear”, connection between parents and children are already very very limited and transactional.

While we see individuals breaking away from their family now, much before this, we saw families completely move away from their communities. The sense of association with any community was only seen as unnecessary responsibility and distraction from the race of growing in your career and life. This breakage is also one more reason why there has been so much pressure on family ties. Everything good or bad is now just limited to the nuclear family and has pressure mounts, the bad times take over the good making it impossible for the family to survive as one unit.

There are two reactions to this conundrum. Many people when faced with this, choose to live like there is no tomorrow. They indulge in everything that is possible to make them forget these realities. Some push the accelerator on their work, devoting almost all their time in chasing their work goals, taking more and more responsibilities. The inhuman corporate structure loves this, when a human has decided to work as a machine, there is always enough work to keep the machine occupied. For others, there is an industry which has come up to keep them indulged to forget from these realities. The spiritual industry, the activists industry, the gypsy travelers industry and many more. All recently mushroomed such that you get some or other experiences which can keep you away from thinking about the future and your life down the road. This seems to work for many.

Then, there is the second reaction. The ones who decide to come up with a plan, a plan to develop assets, a plan to save and invest, a plan to live for the future. Naturally, most in this group continue to invest in children, hoping against hope that indeed their child will turn to be different than others. They invest in some assets, land, apartments with long term prospects. I believe, I am personally from this group and this has been my reaction. However, as I look at this problem, I believe an important aspect of investing for the future is investing in community, not just family. It is important that we ensure that we put enough efforts to create a community that cares for everyone irrespective of whether they are part of family or not. A community that cares for humans and believes that all humans have the right to live with good standard of living. In investment planning, there is a concept of diversifying your portfolio. In normal parlance, it is described as not putting all your eggs in one basket. I believe the same needs to be done when we are planning for the future. While we continue to invest in our children, invest in our family by developing assets, it is important that we invest in other children, other humans, especially those who are not being invested on by their families. Maybe a better education for the children, maybe ways to give better nutrition to infants, doing some things consistently such that the disadvantaged have little better in their lives than what they currently have. I believe that this is an important aspect of investing for the future. What use will all the assets be when even staying safe at home becomes a big issue? If each and every individuals are forced to only think about their short term gains, they have very little to help anyone around them. With everyone around struggling for food, struggling for their own life, will there be any question of social security for yourself even with money in your hands.

As I propound this idea, it is purely in our selfish interests. It is important that we understand that the human civilization evolved with different social concepts purely with selfish interests and to keeping that individual’s interest in mind. Investing in community, investing in people around you is investing on yourself for the future. We need to continue working on giving every individual a better life such that they in turn contribute in improving lives of everyone around them.

April 13, 2020

Nishachar’s view of kumbakaran

by viggy — Categories: experience, Fun, social — Leave a comment

I am personally insomniac and have a great deal of struggle on regular basis to get some good sleep. However, I have seen people close to me who love to sleep, so much so that I believe their aim is to sleep. This has led me to take my imagination to the next level.

I have been wondering if these people who love to sleep so much are actually motivated to sleep as it is their purpose of life. We have always heard of people day dreaming about what they want to achieve, also of people losing their sleeps for their dreams. However, what if there are people who plan their day so that they can sleep really well. People who wake up so that they do everything to ensure that their sleep is undisturbed.
While there are people trying to achieve their best in their life awake, what if there are opposite set of people who are living a completely different life, unnoticed by everyone around them, in their sleep. The time they are awake is just the effort taken to ensure that they do enough, get enough energy so that they can sustain their sleep. In the nature, we know about bears who go into hibernation mode in winters for close to 5-6 months. It is their requirement of the surroundings that to survive they need to hibernate such that they consume very little energy. In case of humans, I imagine them to be aiming to hibernate for the sake of it so that they can live through the hibernation. And during this time, while in animals the brain activity goes to the minimum, the humans in their sleep might be taking their brain activity to the maximum.
Meditation is another such example that we can relate to. Often people talk about meditation as a state where you are awake but then you take the mind to such a state where it does not revolve around anything and reaches a trance state. What if there are set of humans who are trying to reach a state of active brain usage while their physical body is sleeping. Is it possible that there is a world where everyone who is going to sleep can connect to each other and then be very active in that world.

July 31, 2019

Plague of depression

by viggy — Categories: experience, social — Tags: , , , — Leave a comment

We are plagued with zombies all around us. Those living with deep and serious mental depressions, with a very intense war going on inside them. They are neither equipped to handle it nor do they have any support system to help them take through these times. They are living one day at a time and yet seem very much reluctant to take the issues head on.

While it is completely true that joblessness is a much bigger plague of our times with a large chunk of youth of our time just lost in the world searching for a job to earn a decent livelihood. Their complete life currently revolves around landing that job, leaving very little time for something like a personal life. But here in this article, I am talking about the remaining small minority, mainly upper class/caste, who the current system has been much more favourable in giving a comfortable livelihood with good purchasing power and standard of living. One would have expected this class of youth to be living their dream lives, enjoying to the fullest, use the opportunity to the best of their ability. And yet what we see is this set of youth are completely muddled with depressions with no sense of direction or purpose.

For them, everything seems like a grave responsibility with little or no chance of failure. Every moment is intense. Every failure seems like the end of the world. Combine this deep fear of failure with an even stronger sense of freedom, we have individuals who feel suffocated with any sense of association and all relationships become a responsibility in due course of time. Any association either with ideology or with an individual only leads to them being always aware to maintain their individuality and yet they seem to have spend least amount of time understanding themselves. With hardly any purpose in life of their own, their ideology or commitment for anything just seems to be adopted from someone and is so shallow that they are hardly able to explain or convince anyone of their position.

Having been babysit by their parents throughout their childhood, this group never had to face any difficult situations in their life with everything planned out for them by their parents. Now as adults, the lack of understanding of oneself with lack of any association or lack of any strong ideology makes them completely indecisive. They regularly allow others to take hard decision for them. This choice of outsourcing of decisions to someone else, either in form of God, or tradition, or what seems to be cool at the time in the society again leads them often to situations completely unprepared for the repercussions of their decisions.

We can see this play out in many ways in their lives. One of the central issues faced by this group is the brittle relationships they have with their partners. Being completely ill-prepared for taking decisions, any uncomfortable situation seems like a crisis like situation, always questioning their relationship and ready to quit. This in turn leads to added fear for any future relationships and being overtly cautious in getting emotionally involved with someone.

Another major issue this group faces is constant struggle to find their career direction and that work life balance. Having difficult relationship in personal life, they constantly look to get themselves involved completely into their work. They depend on work to provide them the kind of satisfaction and comfort that a personal relationship would give. This in turn causes them to burn out soon even in their work. There is constant complain of not being recognized for the effort and at same time complain about everyone in team not contributing as aggressively as themselves. This causes constrained relationships in workplace too.

All this makes them to look for opportunities to get away from the current society they are in, hoping that they might get more freedom and be better understood by societies abroad. While this matches the escapist attitude already discussed, the group again soon finds them out of place in any new society too. The lack of association with new society is combined with memories back home making their life again unstable with respect to the future.

Overall, it is important to recognize the issues that we face currently as individuals and as a community and take some initial steps towards recognizing and solving this plague. Firstly, we should definitely need to communicate more, not in smileys but in big passages. It is important to convey our thoughts in clear words and encourage discussions as a community. Secondly, it is time we put our minds to work on difficult issues. As a society and as an individual, we need to ask some tough questions to ourselves, recognize issues plaguing the society and address them head on. It might be questions related to career, questions related to personal choices, questions about the uncertain future. It is time we address these issues ourselves, understand the repercussions, identify solutions and work towards implementing them. Thirdly, it is time we accept failure as part of life. The cost of failure should not be grave and as a society, we need to be more forgiving for failures and encourage open discussions of various experiments and its results.

P.S. This article is work in progress. I am giving words to thoughts that I have based on discussions with many close friends and colleagues in last few months. As author, I am aware that the article might have my biases in-grained in it in many of the conclusions. Please do point it out to me.
I am also sharing below the various phrases, sentences that I had initially captured while writing this article.

Phrases: false sense of individualness, cheating themselves without understanding themselves, their needs, their future, lack of direction, purpose

outsourcing decision making, ignoring difficult questions that one needs to ask themselves,

fake sense of authority and stability over life which is completely a sham

no support system built, no sense of commitment,

brittle relationships, false sense of association, fear of association,

giving birth as responsibility, taking care of parents as responsibility, taking care of themselves as responsibility,

freedom with no meaning, empty ideology, fake ego, fake sense of proudness

constant fear, constant insecurity, lack of confidence

career as escape route, direction set by others, decisions made by others

without understanding their current society they live in, they feel there is heaven in some society abroad or in some hidden valley up in the mountains

grass is greener on other side

ignorant about their own surroundings and sufferings of people, every problem seems to overwhelm them

anger towards marginalized, otherization, hate towards other culture/class

(Lack of decision making, lack of direction, lack of ideology, lack of association) -> (Mistrust, fear)-> (brittle relationship, false sense of individuality) -> (ready to quit, depressions, fear to take any initiative, lack of persistence, escapist)

May 20, 2018

The Paddles

by viggy — Categories: social, Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Leave a comment

The river roared and thundered in its full glory. The Fate was enjoying the discussions happening within the boathouse. The paddles in the boathoues are all having their own confusions. Made my the reckless and drunk boatman, each and everyone of them are of different shapes and sizes. The paddles having looked at the mightly river and heard the scary stories of how their friends and elders were crushed by the river are wondering how to survive the river. Finding the right partner to paddle with was one way to ensure the safety. Drunk that boatman was, it was important to ensure that paddles worked together to keep the boat steady anytime.

The Long paddle having dejected by everyone never got to enter the water. It was told the river in these parts was too shallow for him. He knew he would just be used as the firewood in the boatman’s home. Then there was the Fat paddle, the one which was too heavy to paddle. Some tried to row the boat with it but the boat would just tilt on its direction and topple. The Fate had heard all these stories long ago and was too bored of it.

It was curious about the discussion between the two paddle lying together in a corner. Silently and away from everyone’s eyes, the two were trying to understand each other and discussing on how the river would be and how they would tackle it. They were different than each other as was every paddle in the boathouse thanks to the drunk boatman but still they saw each other similar in many ways. They came from similar wood, were almost made on same day, one in morning when the boatman still had a heavy hangover and other in the night when the boatman was hardly able to stand. They saw the chance of being able to work together and row the river. The questions and uncertainties that they were trying to tackle. Each with its own bruises with brief past experiences of going just into the riverbed with someone else. The Left Paddle would ask what will you do if I am lost in river, the Right would ask do you know swim and stay afloat. The Right would ask ‘Have you ever been hit by a rock?’, The Left would ask have you every been in a fight with another paddle? Each with their own fear, hoping the other would help in finding a more reassuring answer of what lies in the river.

The Fate laughed at their innocence. It knew what lies ahead for them and how clueless they were about it.

April 7, 2018

Respecting belief systems

by viggy — Categories: experience, social — Tags: , , — Leave a comment

As an atheist, one of the constant lines that you hear from someone new you meet is that I have my own belief system but I respect anyone’s belief or faith. The polite and socially acceptable answer to the same is that I also agree to it. However, I have to constantly keep testing this. How can I respect a belief system where the person who believes it is also blindly following it and then also expects the same from me.

Amongst us are people who live in an age of blind faith and ignorance. Their faith system is so weak that they themselves are scared to test it. Imagine the level of deceit a person must be living to believe in something that they themselves fear to test it. The level of conditioning of mind to be able to completely ignore any evidence contrary to your belief system and holding the belief system so tightly that even a slightest nudge to it, not only breaks the belief system but also ends up breaking the person itself. Such is the pressure on oneself in current times that they need the belief system to be true and anything otherwise will shatter them.

Around you the world is behaving in so many ways that we fail to make any sense of it. In such a stage, you need something to hold on to. For some, it might be their political belief system. For others, it might be their religious belief system. A unknown belief that in the chaos around us, there is some force, even though invisible that is probably making sense of the chaos. Nowhere can we even comprehend that maybe such a force does not exist. That what we see around is our own doing and we need to take control of it and only we can try to make a sense out of it.

Our systems around have failed us so miserably that we cannot any longer trust a human without knowing whether they adhere to the same belief system that we have. Any slight digression from it and we tend to alienate the person from our life as we know it would lead to uncomfortable situations where we may end up questioning our own belief systems.
How can someone settle in such a system? Can you raise a question in such times where an individual cannot even answer and can only contribute to the noise that the crowd is able to make? Everyone is thinking that by following the group of their belief system, they are able to chant a beautiful hymn, creating that peaceful symphony while all they are doing is making noise which neither anyone understands, nor they want someone to understand.

Hence, no I do not respect your belief system, I would love to discuss it, learn from it, understand what you have understood based on your experience and why you continue to believe it.

July 6, 2017

Using Browser plugin to crowdsource against fake images

by viggy — Categories: internet, social, software, tech — Tags: , , , , — Leave a comment

Recently we have seen an exponential increase in circulation of fake news and images. Fake images play a major role as with some simple image editting, a completely different context can be conveyed. This menace has been used by various political parties to spread their propaganda.
With Google Image search being so powerful, I propose that it should be possible to use a browser plugin to verify the originality of the image. We can use Google Image Search to find other sources where the image is used and hence get different contexts of the image. Once this is developed, a repository of responses from the users may be created where they can easily report images which they feel are being used in wrong context on a particular website. As this repository improves, what we will see is that most of the images can be captured in the repository so that for the same image, we do not have to depend on Google Image Search everytime but rather use the repository itself.

Let us now look at how a common user would use the plugin.
A user who has the plugin installed browses a webpage with different images on it. Suppose he/she is interested in understanding the source of the image, the user right clicks on the image and selects the option, “Search For Source”. Initially, this should cause a Google Image Search Query and the results along with the websource of the images found should be displayed in a dailog box. The user should be given an option of reporting the image as original or fake based on the results shown along with option of marking what the user thinks is the original source of the image along with some comments.
This usecase seems to be a good starting point to release the plugin as version 1.

In the next version, we should be able to first look at the repository of all the reported images and give a much better information about the image based on all previous reportings of the image. As the community grows, we would ofcourse want moderation of reportings to ensure that false reportings by the very people spreading false news is avoided. An open structure similar to Wikipedia would be needed to ensure a fair community is developed to keep the system unbiased and trustworthy.
An API of the repository can also be created so that social networking sites and messaging platforms can develop support in their platform so that when images are shared on their platform, users automatically get the information from the repository. For example, a simple bot for telegram messaging platform can be developed which can be asked to show the information from the repository based on a certain command when a image is shared in a group. Ofcourse we need to ensure that private images from people’s chat is not shared in the repository and necessary checks and balances are put in place for the same.