What are words worth?

Credit: CNN Image s The Tang Building sits on the southern edge of the MIT campus, overlooking the river whose grey this autumn afternoon acts as a foil to the gold and auburn of the trees across its wide span. I rush up the stairs to the second floor—I am a minute past the appointed hour—and arrive, just a little out of breath, on the second floor. The corridor is dark and the roomy lobby leading to the room that bears the number I’ve been given is even darker. I check my phone again to make sure I have it right and then venture inside, flipping the light switch and finding a spot on a comfortable sofa. One never feels quite prepared for an interview. Especially when it involves someone who has already been in the media eye over the years, whose engaging commentaries on life in the digital age have found their way to the TED stage and from there into millions of YouTube and Facebook shares, whose books straddle the academic and popular; someone who could be the Nora Ephron ...

For those of us who grew up in urban, English-speaking India in the 70s (that's a sure sign of the academic, the need to qualify and delimit the who, when, where, otherwise known as the subject location! ), the title of this post may ring a bell (remember the song Psychobabble by the Alan Parsons Project?). But that's just the inspiration for the title. Last week Prof Ananda Mitra of Wake Forest University (North Carolina, USA) visited Hyderabad briefly and talked about his current passion, the idea of "big data" and the "narrative bits" (see http://www.narbs.info/ for more) that we generate as we leave our verbal traces on the Internet through facebook posts and gmail status messages. As I listened to him, this is the verbal trace I generated... Update your status Tweet a tweet Post a post maybe upload an insta-picture and geo-tag yourself into existence. Tell a story of the self and the Other using a virtual machinery of clicks and comment...

Ever since I got back from a Manthan lecture and discussion led by Arun Shourie I’ve been wondering about the nature of participation in such events: they are meant to make us think, open up lines of discussion and explore ideas in a way that they are laid bare, making visible the spaces and interconnections between them and the attitudes they lie/build upon. Mr Shourie, who, I must confess, was one of the heroes of my early journalistic dreams. His front pagers in the Indian Express of the immediate post-Emergency era fuelled my own ambitions and made me feel really proud to be part of a tribe that seemingly was out to catapult the country into a new era of honesty, transparency and fair and clean governance. I was much younger then and could be forgiven for my simple and uncomplicated faith in the power of the press. Much water has passed under the many bridges that make up our fragile polity and I have revised my ideas somewhat, although I try to keep my ideals burnis...

As we travel into town on an uncharacteristically quiet Sunday evening, the Bangalore roads are relatively traffic free, but the driver of the Meru cab decides to take me by the "easy route" where we will drive uninterrupted by traffic lights. He swings off the four lane highway into a quiet side street that seems to go on and on in the darkness, and I am beginning to wonder if I should have insisted on the bright lights of the main road. But just as my anxiety is beginning to take a dangerous turn, he points out to me a looming wall on my left. It is very high, and soon we come to a pair of massive gates that seem to hide something very important inside. "That's YSR's son's house," the driver notes. "Jagan. That's where he stays when he comes to Bangalore. He owns this whole stretch of land." I made suitably amazed-disbelieving-indignant sounding noises. Just enough to make him go on. "I once took a passenger in there, he was a guest...

"Is it a difficult drive to the airport at this time of day?" I ask the balding gentleman in the front seat who drives my car to the airport in Melbourne. He looks up at me in the rear view mirror and smiles patiently. "It depends," he says. Before I can jump to "on what?" he continues: "If you begin the drive thinking that it's going to be easy, considering that most people are on the roads heading home, then you're bound to find it difficult. But if you just know that's the way it is, that five o'clock traffic can't be any different, and simply focus on getting there, it's just another drive." That wise comment was prelude to one of the most interesting conversations I've had, one that made the 45-minute drive in peak Melbourne traffic go by like a breeze. We discussed religion, working class politics in Australia and (a topic close to my heart) school education. He told me about his 11-year-old son who goes to a cha...