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Month: January 2020

On Not Meeting Your Heroes: Clay Christensen

Published January 28, 2020 by Senthil

Never meet your heroes. So goes the saying.

For they’re sure to disappoint you, some say.

The advice lives on because some men found their heroes to be made of clay.  The exalted heroes they had imagined, with the glow of monochrome Clark Gable luminescence were suddenly all drab and bored. Their imagined heroes were no more. When your heroes fade in such a way, I suppose that what transpires is not just a failure of a single hero, but the collapse of an entire model of heroism.

Yet, there are heroes that perfectly demolish the myth above. Giant souls who expand the horizons of our thought: They prove that genius, humility, and compassion can all at once reside in our frail bodies.

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Review: The Peregrine

Published January 18, 2020 by Senthil

JA Baker’s The Peregrine exemplifies the best in nature writing. Short staccato sentences set the mis-en-scene and longer descriptions zoom in like a telescope into the plumes and colors of birds, with precision and care. The writing teaches us how to write interesting papers, to expose the brilliance of underlying ideas, even when bounded by rote “rules”.

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Jane Eyre and the Sound of A Language

Published January 15, 2020 by Senthil

An interesting perspective about growing up in an erstwhile British colony, is that we fail to truly absorb how illogical the spellings and pronunciations in English are.  Sanskrit, and a number of Indian languages such as Malayalam and Marathi, possess a long history of codified grammar and detailed pronunciation. So, reading and pronunciation in many Indian languages is almost wysiwig.  This is of course not true for English. It is hard to see know the pronunciation differences in words (say, tough, cough and dough) before hearing them.

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2019 Essay

Published January 8, 2020 by Senthil

I’ll begin with a story that is one of my favorite essays, from Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa) by Yoshida Kenko a world-wise Japanese monk from 1331.  Kenko writes:

When I went to see the horse racing at the Kamo Shrine on the fifth day of the fifth month, the view from our carriage was blocked by a throng of common folk. We all got down and moved towards the fence for a better view, but that area was particularly crowded and we couldn’t make our way through…

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