I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I think people who have facebook accounts are super losers. Let’s face it, the overwhelmingly vast majority of the people (including yours truly) are losers in some way or the other. But what sets… Read More ›
Stupidity
The Management of Air India are SEFs
As commercial airlines go, Air India is nothing to write home about. Air India ranked third-worst performing airline in the world, reported Economic Times in Jan 2017. Air India’s all-round dismal performance–customer service, timeliness, cabin service, heavy commercial losses, etc.,… Read More ›
Ministry of Power, Coal, and New and Renewable Energy
Government bureaucrats can hardly be accused of being the sharpest knives in the drawer. I have met many of them and have been uniformly underwhelmed by their understanding of the subject that they are charged with governing. Here’s an example…. Read More ›
Daylight Saving Time is Plain Idiocy
The year’s in the Spring. And the clocks spring forward an hour. It’s daylight saving time from today to Nov 1st. The persistence of generalized collective idiocy can be explained by some kind of social inertia. Daylight saving time is… Read More ›
The Unbearable Collective Stupidity of the Masses
It’s all karma, neh? I usually use that line as a sign off to some of my posts. But this time I lead with it because — well, let me come to that. Karma is a Sanskrit word whose meaning… Read More ›
A Taxonomy of the Stupid
I have mentioned the basic laws of human stupidity enunciated by Prof Cipolla before on this blog. For your convenience, I repeat the basic laws here:
Innumerates of the Times of India
Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to speak nonsense. That one is a favorite quote from a computer science guru John McCarthy. To it I would add that those who are incapable of reasoning are doomed to being… Read More ›
When in Rome, only Monotheism
I gather from Kanchan Gupta’s piece — “In Rome, Durga is not welcome” — the officials in Rome are jerking around Hindus who want to celebrate puja. But for the efforts of the Indian Ambassador, Mr Arif Shahid Khan, this… Read More ›
We cannot ignore what we don’t know
Too often I see this quoted. “Per laws of aerodynamics, the “bumble bee” cannot fly. Its body weight is not the right proportion to its wingspan. Ignoring these laws of science, the bee flies anyway.” It is one of those… Read More ›
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
The prime directive that the Buddha gave to humanity was as simple as it was wise: First do no harm; then try to do good. Easy enough to state but it is astonishingly hard to follow for the average human… Read More ›