K. Kumar's Blog, page 16

The Stranger, Existence, and Self Righteousness

Towards the end of The Stranger, the main character is sitting in a jail cell, awaiting his death sentence, and is met by a chaplain. The chaplain makes a final plea to the punished man on the comfort of God and his own sin. Then this happens:

Then, I don't know how it was, but something seemed to break inside me, and I started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear. I'd taken...

Mural in Cali

I came across this mural in Cali, Colombia:

The Stranger

I recently reread The Stranger by Camus. At a superficial level it is easy to read as the translation was very accessible. But beyond that I found the book at times to be enlightening and also very dour on existence. The main character is a man who harbors no delusions about life, he accepts the certainty of death with all its purest implications. His actions reflect a kind of hostility towards human sentiments that seek to piece together meaning from life. The moral seems to be that we are a...

El Parque Del Gato

Source: Me





































I was in Cali some time back and normally I would just pass by this type of thing and not think much of it, but I was really impressed with this cat sculpture. There was just something about this cat that just drew me in...

Negative Interest Rates

Source: Zerohedge.com
I am not sure how widespread this is, it may just be anecdotal. But it is absurd to think of a scenario where people who borrow money get paid and people who save money have to pay a penalty. It is beyond bizarre, it is an inversion of the basics ideas we were all taught about savings and investment versus consumption. Apparently, the tables have turned.

Self Delusion II

I wrote about self delusion before, and I am still convinced that to some extent any person who strives for anything meaningful will need to rely a bit on self delusion. Because chances are you will start from nothing but an idea. And likely it will take a great deal of effort for that idea to blossom into anything meaningful. It starts with self delusion and then some magic happens and it all becomes more real until it is no longer a delusion. It actually is real.
I would take the simple exam...

Drawing Lines

From the New York Times:

Source: New York TimesIn looking closely at the news events the past couple weeks, perhaps it makes sense to draw some clearer lines about what the western world considers to be evil. This article comes about as close as one could get to illustrate where the line is not so blurry.
Nonetheless, its also sobering that for me the tactics employed by Boko Haram make perfect sense in a utilitarian or pragmatic manner. And I could even imagine the tactic being deployed more i...

France

A few weeks ago in France...

Source: New York Times

The reaction to attack was a combination of:


I think there are two interesting takeaways:

Free Speech: The initial reaction was that the attack was one against free speech, but I think the opposite is true. It was free speech itself that allowed for the radicalization to occur in the first place. My thought is that the tensions and emotions that push people to commit these types of acts have always been present, but with the proliferation o...

Buffalo

I came across this article a few weeks ago:

Source: BloombergYou read something like this and it is easy to get outraged and shake your head at the idea of breeding buffalos that are most attractive for hunters. Add in the fact that some consider it a bubble and the story becomes incredulous.
There are so many layers to a story like this that one cannot even begin to make sense of it. You can start with the simple notion that some humans value hunting, or more precisely the idea of hunting...

Changes

Having been listening to this tune more these days...