K. Kumar's Blog, page 22

Does She

Mural by Diego Rivera at the DIA

I have been to a fair share of museums in my life and have seen the works of great artists like the Dutch painters, renaissance painters, Egyptian art, Greek and Roman art, and Asian art. These great art works can serve as powerful inspiration, they demonstrate the power of art and the power of artists to create works and showcase a different reality. This art is the highest form of truth, to me it exceeds any spoken word or song. I recently had an opportunity to witness the Diego Rivera mura...

Current Events

This is a screen shot from the Bloomberg website I took the other day:







































If you look at the headlines, individually and all together, you might become very sad at the state of the world. How could things get worse? On one single day, you see humanitary military strikes in Iraq in order to prevent genocide and starvation, a breakout of the ebola virus in Africa, war in eastern Europe, war in the Middle East, corporations that produce defective products that kill people and then don't tell an...

Basic Income

An idea that has been getting a lot attention these days is basic income. From Wikipedia:


Some of the proponents see this as a more efficient and fair way of government assistance than typical welfare programs, some see basic income as social justice and fairness, some see it as the only way to manage a future with less and less job opportunities, wage deflation, and price inflation.
Basic income may come about some day, but it likely won't be the panacea that people expect. Likely, any am...

The Role of the Artist

In political science and development, you'll hear people talk about the best forms of government and the tools needed to provide for personal freedom and liberty for citizens. These people will often talk about a free press, a democratically elected political body, an independent judicial system, a strong military, the need for strong civil society organizations, and the need for a private sector. A good mix of all of these things, as they say, is what you'll find in any good, functioning soc...

Gandhi-Experiments with Truth

I recently completed Gandhi's Experiments with Truth. It is an important book in order to understand Gandhi and how he helped realize independence in India. It was not a lucky break or happenstance, Gandhi was a deep thinker who applied a certain code to get people to follow him and legitimize the struggle against colonialism. It was not inevitable and he ended up paying a high price. I particularly enjoyed the Farewell chapter. This is a part that drew my attention:

It is not without a wrench...

An Honest Conversation II

There exists this sort of circle of comfort in the world where most daily conversations emanate from. These are things like the weather, entertainment, sports, apolitical current events, family, facts, and other bits of trivial information. These are all the purely superficial realm of daily existence, and in most cases there is little disagreement and little controversy. One can pick someone at random and engage in an endless conversation on these various topics for hours and days until the...

Book Review: The Sun Also Rises

I just finished reading The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. Overall, it was a short, enjoyable read. It took a little while for the story to take shape, but then the story came alive when the characters made their trip to Spain.
I am not as familiar with the WWI background, so I am not sure I picked up all the nuance of the story. In spite of that, the book is written in pretty clear prose. I interpreted this book as a story about friends struggling to make sense of the world. The book paint...

Sic Strap

I recently published my first novel, Sic Strap. It is a project I had been working on for the past ten years, and I honestly thought I would never finish it. It was something I wanted to do, but always put it to the side and picked it up later. I assumed it would one of those unattainable goals that I would always hope to complete. But, in fact, I did complete it and published it last month.
The book is about a man possessed with a sense of optimism about the future. He wants to become a...

Fireside Chat

I came across this fireside chat between Vinod Khosla, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page.

I thought a couple statements were very interesting in regards to the future:

VK In this group, there are a bunch of people who are addressing the beginnings of the machine-learning revolution. There are people replacing farm workers, so you can weed plants and provide plant-by-plant care. People who are doing machines to make hamburgers automatically, all the way up the chain to people who are replaci...