The Iraq War started by President George W. Bush is still not over. One could never have predicted how quickly the irony of the misguided bigotry of US foreign policy would play out.

Let’s go back to some basic facts first, since everyone knows the history of Colin Powell forever condemning himself with that unforgettable image of him holding the model vial of anthrax at the United Nations Security Council to the dustbins of ignominy and shame. Tony Blair and George Bush got excited about the idea of competing with Osama Bin Ladin as to who could kill more innocent people and so the war began.

1. The non-partisan Center for Public Integrity state that the Bush administration made a total of 935 false statements between 2001 and 2003 about Iraq’s alleged threat to the United States.

2. In March 2013, the total cost of the Iraq War was estimated at $1.7 Trillion by the Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown University. Some estimate that the total cost of the war to the U.S. economy will range from $3-6 Trillion. The number does not really matter – it is just a ginormous amount.

3. 309,000 coalition forces killed over 650,000 civilians between March 2003-July 2006 alone, according to the Lancet Survey.  Clearly, Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush won that competition with Osama Bin Ladin in a landslide.

So, on the back of several lies, the United States enters Iraq and occupies Iraq. Overthrows the government of Saddam Hussein, and a new regime supportive of the United States takes over. Iraq splinters into effectively three separate regions – a Shia south controlled the government and aligned with Iran; a Sunni heartland in the middle leading to the genesis of ISIS; and a Kurdish in the north. One nation broken in three!

The United States went in there to displace the Sunni government that was a mortal enemy of Iran. Replaced it with a government that was mostly made up of militia leaders and imams schooled and groomed for decades by Iran. The US government had claimed that they would be welcome as heroes on the fall of Saddam Hussein. May be they were!

Yet in 2020, the Iraqi government has asked the United States to leave their country. The welcome did not even last twenty years! The irony should not be lost. $3-6 Trillion later, all they get is a “GET OUT” notice, alas.

The issue with war crimes is that it is not a crime to declare war – all it takes is a model vial of pretend anthrax.

The Supreme Court has spoken! The unanimous verdict is in.
One of the 5 judges is a Muslim – marginally more representative of the country’s Hindu-Muslim distribution.

Yet, one Muslim parliamentarian remains unhappy. Supreme but not infallible, he said of the Supreme Court.

What Muslims should have done many decades ago needed a Supreme Court decision to make happen. Muslims should have “gifted” the Babri Masjid complex to their Hindu older sibling (being the significant majority, permit me to refer to the Hindu population as the ‘older’ sibling). The younger sibling should have just asked the older sibling for an alternative location and the construction of an equivalent Masjid. Period. That is what Islam, true Islam, would teach.

But politicians like Asaduddin Owaisi know worse. It is the political leadership of the Muslims in India (should one say, lack thereof) that is actually their prime and real liability. One only needs to visit the Muslim-majority sections of old Hyderabad (wherein Owaisi thrives) and compare it to the rest of Hyderabad (places like Jubilee Hills and Gachibowli) to see what Oawaisi has done so well to freeze his constituents and community in time relative to the rest of Hyderabad. The family business must thrive – no matter what happens to the community.

In Islam, a house of worship is called a mosque. Many Muslims congregate in mosques for prayer while others choose to pray at home, work or wherever they may be. The beauty is that Muslims can pray wherever they want. Owaisi should focus on filling in the mosques they have in encouraging their followers to pray wherever they are, and not worry about one insignificant, prehistoric mosque that happens to be far more significant to their older siblings in this nation.

Over the past few decades, vacant and underutilized churches have become a familiar sight in American cities. In many cases, a congregation or a religious governing body – say, a Catholic diocese have had to sell their places of worship for various reasons. Often developers buy these properties and build new apartment buildings. In Buffalo, New York, two empty Roman Catholic churches were converted not into apartments or offices, but into other places of worship. One became an Islamic mosque, the other a Buddhist temple. Nobody even noticed!

Worshipping God is a comprehensive concept within Islam. Along with traditional rituals, such as praying and fasting, it also consists of any lawful action a person does with God-consciousness and in the hopes of earning reward from Almighty God. Therefore, devoting oneself to God in Islam does not require a person to enter a place of worship nor embrace monasticism. Rather, fulfilling this purpose of life is an active daily pursuit from the Islamic perspective. Hence, a Muslim can be engaged in worship throughout the day, be it at home, work or anywhere else.

In Islam, Muslims do not even recognize where their Prophet (PBUH) was born. But if a certain place is indeed important to their Hindu siblings, they must voluntarily vacate and move out if they had occupied it or even owned it.

The conversion of non-Islamic places of worship into mosques occurred during the life of their Prophet (PBUH) and continued during subsequent conquests and with historical Muslim expansion. Indigenous population of many subcontinents or regions converted to Islam and that is indeed how Islam grew. The math of procreation would not support a population of 1.6 Billion in less than 1,500 years!

As so, Hindu temples, Jain temples, Zoroastrian temples, Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and the Parthenon were converted into mosques. Several such mosques in Muslim or former Muslim lands have since reverted or become museums, such as the Hagia Sophia in Turkey (which is a predominantly Muslim country) and numerous mosques in Spain.

If Muslim lands were to have been occupied and taken over by rulers of other faiths, it is only reasonable to assume that mosques would have been converted to places of worship of other faiths. It just so happens that Islam is the youngest of the major religions of the world; and so not many (if any) muslim nations have been totally taken over and ruled by other faiths (and no, the Americans occupying Iraq or Afghanistan do not count!). The Christian colonial powers from Europe that ruled many of the muslim nations (including India) did promote and forcibly convert local populations to their faith but they focused on introducing their faiths in other ways versus converting places of worship. Suffice to say, while it is a whole other discussion, they were much better at marketing and packaging than the swords of the muslim invaders.

History is not a hundred years, Mr. Owaisi. He should focus not on only leaving behind his family business (the MP’s seat for his progeny) but on actually bringing development and progress to his people. Except for the main prayers on Eid, most mosques in Hyderabad are partially empty even during the five mandated time of prayer every day. Yet there is not enough space on Eids for the faithful to pray.

Leave the Ram Janambhoomi dispute behind. It is time for Muslims to volunteer and help in the building of a wonderful place of worship for their elder siblings and design and build a new mosque close by where all children of all religions (or, no religion) come and celebrate life.

While the primary use of a mosque is prayer, it should also serves as a community center with people gathering to listen to lectures, attend study groups, or enjoy communal dinners. Will the Muslims make the new Babri Masjid one such place where everyone is welcome and everyone is “us” and not “we” and “them”.

He said that he was told there would be 150 deaths which he said was not proportional to the loss of the $180 million U.S. Navy spy drone.

The US White House confirmed that he overruled “unanimous” advisors including Mr. Mike Pompeo and Mr. John Bolton when he called off strikes on Iran at the last minute. Whether the machines of war were already airborne or not is only of academic interest.

For the first time in recent American history has the American President shown true spine and courage, humanism and leadership in a world otherwise dictated by the mantra of reaction first, rationalizing later.

One could be pardoned for imagining that this American President is not the current President but rather the immediate predecessor, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

And yet the world refuses to recognize this immense act of leadership on the part of an American President that everyone simply refuses to study and acknowledge. Juxtapose the predecessor Nobel Peace Prize winner who was single handedly responsible for the death of more innocent men, women and children killed by joystick wielders in dark video game parlors in the middle of America with little to no analysis of the human tool and no arithmetic of the value of even human life, leave alone hundreds and thousands killed with every trigger of a joystick; to the actions of the current occupant of the most powerful residence in this world and yet the world’s left leaning media refuses to acknowledge this sincere act of leadership that for the first time, no matter how flawed, establishes the need for a necessary calculus before human lives are swatted away …

Will the Democrats applaud the current President or will be politics as usual? Will the Nobel Peace Prize Committee set the same standards for the current incumbent as their rushed to decision with what had to be a very low standard for the immediate predecessor to be lauded as Nobel Peace Laureate?

Bigotry cuts both ways….

The Allied landings in Normandy on 6th June 1944 is amongst the most  desperate military undertakings in the history of war. An amphibious operation against a formidable and prepared enemy would almost always lead to heavy casualties.  It was an operation with unprecedented risk and no amount of preparation was ever going to be enough.

It was an undertaking of such epic proportions that the Allied leadership was in a state of neurotic anxiety even on the eve of the operation. A little after midnight of 6th June, a very anxious Winston Churchill, bade his wife goodnight with the words, “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand men may have been killed?”

Failure would have been a disaster of epic repercussions and the world history would take a turn for uncharted territory. History would be made one way or the other. The Americans had come to Europe to finish the war as quickly as  possible, and this meant taking the shortest, most direct route to Germany. Thus the D-Day landings were to be the most highly planned operations in military history. 

Success was never guaranteed and celebrating the success and the sacrifices make sense even today and the world needs to remember so that the same evil never rises again. A celebration is to honor the heroes who saved the world that day!! D-Day will forever remain and deserves to be so.

Contrast that celebration to the 9-11 celebrations. A ghastly event of epic monstrosity was orchestrated by a group of people of the most evil ilk imaginable. They had one objective – to cause destruction and inflict fear on their target of hatred. They wanted to make a statement and a statement the made that resonated across the world and united the civilized world like never before.

Yet remembering 9-11 publicly and in the scale that the United States does every year only provides a megaphone to the same wicked and cowardly terrorists and only fuels their ambitions. WE SHALL NEVER FORGET is a slogan that sounds great but makes little sense. It is time to forget. Never forgetting is exactly what the terrorists want us to do – to be always reminded of their agenda or fear and hatred.

The US Congress struggles to fund the medical care of the brave New York policeman and firemen (and women) who cared little for their own health and rushed in to the two World Trade Center buildings to save as many lives as possible, defying logic and the innate human instincts to survive. The United States should allow the innocent victims of that day to mourn in private, it must never forget the sacrifices of the brave men and women of New York Police Department and Fire Department, but it makes little sense to remember 9-11 as a historical event at all – doing so only facilitates the perpetrators of that horrific tragedy continuing to get a global stage every year to tout their “achievement” with no expense.

We should consider celebrating success and sacrifice and stop remembering acts of violence and inadvertently facilitate the objective of the perpetrators of that violence.

In our own personal lives, we celebrate happy events and forget the sad ones! Why not as a country, or as a society?

The oft repeated response from both men and women to men who mistreat or ill-treat a woman is “what if this happened to your mother (or sister or daughter)?” as if to critique their behavior and conduct. The same is rampant on the internet and social media today. Even educated men (and women) proffer such a lesson to those responsible for any real or perceived wrong towards a woman. But that lesson has mostly been lost as the rampant misconduct towards women sees no perceptible decline.

Leaving aside the impact (or lack thereof!) of such a lesson imparted on offenders, one is left wondering with bigger question on the pervasiveness of this sexist bigotry of both men and women towards women!! Why should it even take the (hypothetical) desecration of another woman (his mother / sister / daughter) for a man to understand that actions are unacceptable and improper (or even criminal!). Why? And why do both men and women universally proffer such a retarded lesson deeply founded on bigotry. The (hypothetical) rape of another woman to prevent the rape of a woman. The (hypothetical) teasing of another women to explain that it is not right to tease a woman in the first place!

It is time we as a society stop this unacceptable (even if hypothetical) desecration of an innocent woman to try and prevent the real desecration of another. It just cannot be right. One can argue there is little difference between the wishful and the real, no matter what the intent.

If one is to try and reason with the offender (mostly a male!), the hypothetical should be explained as him as the subject and recipient of the offense and not his innocent female relatives. If a (potential) rapist is to be taught a lesson, explain to him how it would feel if he were raped!! Not his mother, or sister, or daughter. Then and only then will it hit home and not create a case of more desecration to prevent one. Intent cannot justify the objectification of women under any circumstances.

* The subject matter here is based on the intellectual inspiration from another person – the writer simply shoulders the blame for any misinterpretation and intellectual shortcomings, while the credit for everything right goes to someone else with gratitude.

Alabama Governor Ms. Kay Ivey signed her state’s highly controversial near total ban on abortion in May 2019 . The new law is the most restrictive anti-abortion measure passed in the United States since Roe v. Wade was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1973.

The legislation that was passed by a male-dominated legislature earlier effectively bans all abortions in Alabama except when “abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk” to the mother. It , therefore, criminalizes the procedure, reclassifying abortion as a Class A felony, punishable by up to 99 years in prison for anyone performing such procedure. Attempted abortions similarly will be reclassified as a Class C penalty. What is even more amazing is that the legislation makes no exceptions for victims of rape or even incest, thereby rendering on the victim of such heinous crime further ignominy and the psychological torture of bearing a child produced by a criminal of the most deplorable kind.

As feminists across the globe reacted and responded to this most outrageous law, one must not lose sight of the pro-life arguments in light of recent and modern scientific evidence that does support their position that life does commence very early in the process of pregnancy. That debate on when life actually begins is best left to experts on the field. Surely if it is a crime to kill a newborn baby, it must be an equal crime to kill a baby that is 6-months since inception but inside the mother’s womb. If indeed it is a crime to kill a 6-month fetus, it must be an equal crime to kill a 6-week fetus if indeed life commences much earlier as science would lead us to now accept as an irrefutable fact.

Be that as may be, the debate now needs to shift to the more relevant question as to who gets to decide on matters that exclusively relate to women’s rights — reproductive or otherwise.

Women all over the world must feel outraged that men get to decide on issues that relate exclusively to their bodies. Men should stand aside and not dictate anything to women any more. 25 old, white men have absolutely as much right to determine how and what women should do with their bodies and their lives as 25 old, black women would have in determining how men should or should not undergo circumcision, for example, as a mandatory requirement pre-wedding

This argument is not far fetched at all. Medical science would support the beneficial effects of circumcision (and let us assume that to be a fact even for the sake of this argument). Would men accept such a legislation if women voted overwhelmingly for it? No way in hell.

Same way, it is high time men stand aside and let the community of women (who are as smart and as qualified if not more than the community of men) decide on all matters that relate exclusively to women’s health and women’s rights. Men have no rights to intervene and interfere. And those who do should submit to whatever barbaric rule women choose to impose on men.

And those who quote scripture should well remember that more than 5 million babies die every year globally before the age of 5! And the alleged source of their knowledge stands by and does absolutely nothing about it. They should divert their energies pleading to the source of their knowledge and expertise to stop that mass genocide repeated every year before preaching to women to save their one child whether caused by mistake, error, incest, or rape or some other crime. They have no moral right at all to do so before they can prevent the annual mass genocide of 5 million children that is accepted as normal by the same people.

“We are still the masters of our fate. Rational thinking, even assisted by any conceivable electronic computers, cannot predict the future. All it can do is to map out the probability space as it appears at the present and which will be different tomorrow when one of the infinity of possible states will have materialized. Technological and social inventions are broadening this probability space all the time; it is now incomparably larger than it was before the industrial revolution—for good or for evil”.

“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive”.

                                                                       – Dennis Gabor, Nobel Laureate (Physics), 1971

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535-475BC) is credited with having said that “the only constant in this world is change”.   That statement could not be truer today in a globally connected and interdependent world.   It is probable that even Heraclitus could not have imagined the rate of change that the world is going through today – and no credible indicators exist to suggest a slowing down of the rate of change in the world as we know it now.    Today’s kids will grow up completely unaware of many of the things that their parents would have grown up being part of their daily lives.   One just needs to look at one’s daily activities to be able to quickly identify many such things – starting with a newspaper to an analog phone at home.

Yet even the smartest philosophers, technologists, and even leaders of every age and century have failed to accept the implications of emerging technologies and the tectonic changes emerging technologies would bring about all around them.   One can often be excused for not being able to recognize the impact of change in areas outside one’s areas of knowledge, but it is clearly disturbing when leaders and recognized pundits fail to see and acknowledge emerging trends and changes in their own areas of subject matter expertise. 

Oftentimes, as an entrepreneur, one would salivate at the prospect of having someone famous and successful invest in one’s startup or, better still, if she was to join the Board of Directors or Advisors.   Sure, the prestige and the validation such an addition makes is beyond any debate but one should always be guarded against and circumspect about all the gyaan (a Hindi word for “knowledge and insights” that better encapsulates the concept than any other word known to the author; and the one who possesses gyaan is called the gyaani) that such an addition would bring to the Company.   The derivative outcome, often not considered fully at the very beginning, is that when one takes money from anyone, or adds anyone to the Board, her input and feedback have to be taken and considered; even if not always sought or valued.     

One can hardly debate the impact printing has had on the preservation, proliferation, propagation, and even procurement of knowledge across the world.   One can hardly argue that, at least till the advent and global proliferation of the Internet, the human race and its progress has been magnificently impacted by the printing press.   It was in the early years of the last millennium that movable presses using ceramics were actively used in China.  The first metallic presses were in used in Korea in the late 1300s.   It was around 1440 that the first printing press was introduced to the western world by Johannes Gutenberg, and that led to the mass production of religious books initially.  It is probably the deployment of the printing press that was singularly responsible for significant acceleration in the global propagation of Christianity after its use by the Holy Roman Church.  For the first time ever in human history, books could be printed in hundreds of millions of copies – an inconceivable pipedream a century earlier.   The printing press was such a revolutionary thing that it was considered “one of the three inventions that changed the world” in 1620 by the English philosopher, Francis Bacon.   

One could very reasonably argue that Bacon’s assessment was probably true till the advent of the Internet, and maybe true even today alongside the Internet itself.

Hilariously unbelievable as it may sound today, it is indeed true that at the time of the early 15^th Century, many in the Church and religious order who vehemently opposed and disliked the utilization of the printing press.  It was very well articulated and argued that the ease of printing would make monks lazy and impact their souls and eventually drive them out of work.    The core argument at that time was that the labor in copying manuscripts was an integral part of the process of devotion to their vocation.   The printing press was perceived to be the greatest danger to their devout souls.   The arguments were juxtaposed with reasoned and somewhat accurate arguments like the superior durability of parchment over paper, and the relatively inferior then quality of artistry of the printing press compared to the variety and beauty of the handwritten manuscripts. 

The standard line applied back then is so similar to more modern refrains “it just is not good enough like the old stuff”.  Nostalgia, it seems, is deeply engineered in the human DNA, especially that of the experts. 

And when everything else failed to stop the advent and use of the printing press, the naysayers of course resorted to the same old strategy of emotional blackmail – “he who ceases from the zeal of writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures”.

It was probably only fortunate that human beings died relatively young back then – because the ignominy from making such outrageous statements proven to be incorrect in one’s lifetime did not happen too often.    At the speed at which new technologies and changes get accepted in every aspect of human life today, one doubts if that truth still holds true – thus calling for greater caution in making such provocative, and often futile, projections and predictions.

Looking further back, a written word had to exist for it to be printed in the first place.  How was the historical treatment of the written word any different?   Progress can come only from change – and the opposition to change always hides the deep rooted fear or hatred for progress.   Whether it is the fear of becoming irrelevant in a new world order, or plain hatred in seeing the old comfortable ethos being broken down by the incumbents, it is always the case that otherwise learned and well-meaning folks always end up on the wrong side of history.   It is not as though this articulated opposition to change arises from anything inherent negative but rather from a deep rooted human trait of naivety or even comfort with the status quo and a human trait of protecting the next generation from making mistakes. 

It is doubtful there is any philosopher more widely quoted and revered than Socrates himself.    Yet, one reading of what Socrates had to say about the written word and the invention of letters would probably leave the reader either doubting the veracity of the passage below, laugh at its almost innocence and incredulous theory, or simply ignore it.   Yet if the same passage was left unattributed to such a great man as Socrates, one would probably dismiss these words as those from a cockney or a savant idiot.

“He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person, and in truth ignorant of the prophecy of Ammon, if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written”.  

“Writing has this strange quality, and is very much like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.  And so it is with the written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.  And every word, when  once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows no to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself”.   

“Now tell me; is there not another kind of speech, or word, which shows itself to be the legitimate brother of this bastard one, both in the manner of its begetting and in its better and more powerful nature?”

“The word which is written with intelligence in the mind of the learner, which is able to defend itself and knows to whom it should speak, and before whom to be silent”.

Socrates goes on to detail a very elaborate set of arguments against the written word with sympathy for its muteness and lifelessness.   He concluded that the writing would not be able to teach anyone anything worth knowing.  He defended the method in which he had learnt – the method of back and forth debate and discussion amongst peers with similar intellect.    He compared reading mere written words to looking at a pond rather than swimming in it.    In fact, he made the argument that reading the written word was akin to looking at the pond and concluding or claiming that one could now even swim!  

The irony of it all is that the written word indeed is probably the only reason we, today and for all generations to come will, benefit from his unquestionably great works and unmatched intellect – ignoring for a moment that his hilarious commentary about the utility of the written word would have not faced this scrutiny either without the written word!   To be fair, Socrates never left behind anything that was written and it was left to future students and disciples to cement Socrates’ words and ideas in the form of the written word.   And maybe, just maybe, scalability was not a word discovered back then or maybe there were more pressing issues of life and death at stake than worrying about concepts like scalability or mass adoption.    Had it not been for the discovery of the written word, and the printing press, we would not have stood on the shoulders of these giant men like Socrates – or, at the very least, not so soon!

It is one thing for men of religion to put their blind faith in status quo – their product itself not suited to or open for any disruption or innovation.   After all, punishment of biblical proportions included banishment and contentment was expected and demanded.   A pursuit of anything at all would demonstrate dissatisfaction with the natural laws of God and hence, would invite His wrath and more. 

“God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions”: Eccles. 7:29.

“Then they provoked Him to anger with their inventions, and the plague broke in upon them”: Psalms 106:29.

Pundits of more recent vintage thankfully cannot invoke such wrath, yet in the political and social fields there abounds aplenty of curmudgeons that immediately create a cause and effect relationship between any disaster, be it man made or natural, with the deviant ways of the newer generation – the disaster being a signal from God that is only interpretable and understandable to such men of wisdom.     

The reason it is worth studying the history and the evolution of the written word in some detail from a historical perspective is because it so clearly demonstrates over and over again the gyaan that the incumbent gyaani championed at any time of history where change was emerging – mostly driven by technology and its own evolution – was often misplaced or, with the benefit of hindsight, hilarious bordering on the absurd.   In its early infancy, it would be too much to expect any new or emerging tool or technology to be as robust as the incumbent – and its potential greatness easy to dismiss and berate.

Things turned on its head once again a few centuries later – the telephone was discovered in the late 1800s.    The pundits and the gyaanis of that age started worrying about the impact of the telephone on the spread of knowledge.   It was argued then that the spoken mode of communication would be full or errors and there would be global miscommunication and misunderstanding – unlike the written word of the telegraph (the incumbent), the telephone (the challenger) would not retain a trace of record.   It would almost seem unreal today to imagine that the wise and the brave all debated how destructive telephony could be as a new means of communication – worried about the increasing number of railroad accidents that would happen because verbal instructions could be misunderstood; concerned how disputes would be resolved with he-said-she-said arguments in court with no evidence at all.   If the concerns were around security and convenience, and the related trade-offs, the debates should have been around how to make telephony more secure and telegraphy more convenient.   But often these discussions are relegated to the background while real and imaginary fears come to the forefront of contemporary discussions.   It is scary how many regulatory discussions also focus on fears and worries versus the underlying need for improvement on one feature front or another – whether it is convenience, security, safety, ease of use, distribution etc. 

Is it not ironic then that some centuries (or a few millennium) later, we are in the midst of another tectonic shift that has dominated the globe more quickly than in the past.     The decline in voice-based communication has been rapid and marked.  Some research by Nielsen reports that there has been more than a 50% decline in the monthly voice minutes of all telephone calls; while Washington Post reports a more than doubling in text messages in the same period.    Many young folks would rather text than call – and they do that hundreds of times a day.    The same questions of convenience and efficiency are being raised today.   Is texting more convenient than calling?   Is it more time consuming to write out a text versus asking a quick question on a phone?  Is it more impersonal and less intrusive?   Does it allow for greater freedom to the recipient to either ignore or only respond when she wishes to?  Which mode is more open to misunderstanding or more secure?  What is more public or more private?  Does sharing or forwarding of text messages make it more or less attractive or effective?   The encouraging news is that there is a solution that is emerging for each of these legitimate concerns today even as there is no paucity of pundits expressing their narrow moralistic views pontificating on the challenger and the incumbent.

What cannot be debated at all, however, is how large and successful companies like Facebook have emerged so quickly to capitalize on its users commenting on other users comments and exponentially growing its advertisement inventory in the process; all by disrupting or enabling communication methods.    There was no way any of this monetization possibility existed in the past on people’s mostly private conversations and discussions on varied topics ranging from the mundane to the intimate without text and only on speech.    It is not unreasonable to think that the same recurrence of this text versus speech could potentially disrupt and eventually kill companies like Facebook and Twitter, the elites of the social media market today, down the line.   And the pundits of that time, will undoubtedly, once again defend text over speech!  And may be some innovation is already occurring in a basement somewhere in Silicon Valley or Seoul that will make that happen sooner than anyone expects.

The fact is that society at large accept and are open to new technologies – else how would all these amazing technologies and disruptions gain acceptance and eventually succeed.   Human society at large has always proven to be a far better judge of the survival of the fittest.   If not here, definitely there – but eventually the appropriate technologies and disruptions have always found a home and have thrived.  The killer application has always emerged for the legitimate disruptors.  It is the self-proclaimed pundits that end up looking like cranes with their heads buried in the sand with the fullness of time.

The naysayers often have strong vested interests in defending the incumbents.  But often the naysayers are mighty successful and famous in their own rights – but old and advanced in their years.  

It has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt today that electric vehicles are here to stay and are extremely popular.   The most common gyaani refrains, mostly advocated by leading automobiles executives and experts, have centred around four key ideas – that the range of EVs is too limited; that it takes way too long to recharge a car’s battery; that EVs are just as environmentally harmful as their gasoline powered grandfathers; and that EVs are too expensive.    These are probably the most hilarious set of arguments one could have heard and hence, not even worth refuting.   Yet the naysayers have always said it all with a face as straight as a Tendulkar straight drive. 

On the surface, it would be the most obvious option to salivate if a successful stalwart were to be available or to offer to invest and / or join the board of a young company.  But one should exercise due caution in such excitement.   May be exceptions make the rule, but it is quite proven but many of the smartest people have also ended up making some of the dumbest predictions when it comes to technologies that would survive and thrive versus those that just won’t gain any traction. 

Of course, only the rich and the famous get their words printed to be ever remembered and therein itself runs the risk that those words could come back to haunt them.   With arrogance often comes irrational confidence, which can be a great asset, but also exposes people to ridicule later on.    Here are a few such confident, but totally unfounded, predictions some of the most famous and successful of men made about emerging technologies and trends of their time. 

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”— Steve Ballmer

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946

“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company, 1903

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” — Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1876

“No one will need more than 637KB of memory for a personal computer.  640KB ought to be enough for anybody” – Bill Gates

Doubt there are too many contemporary people as gifted and smart as Christopher Stoll, a brilliant American author and astronomer.   Yet his 1995 book “Silicon Snake Oil” makes for almost embarrassing reading and one wonders whether a man as smart as him could have actually written that book.  In the book, Stoll calls eCommerce “baloney” and “nonviable” because of the lack of personal contact and the lack of security around fund transfers.   Again, the pattern is all too obvious – rather than looking at whether and how the shortcomings can be adequately addressed and, hence, mitigated, even the smartest people cannot help but rush to judgment.   Stoll probably also would have gone long on old media newspaper companies because he believed that no online database could replace the daily newspaper.   Subconscious nostalgia clouds the judgment of even the smartest men.

“I predict the Internet will go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse”.  This statement was made by none other than Bob MetCalfe, the Father and Inventor Ethernet, which pretty much enabled the globalization of the Internet.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” – Thomas Watson, IBM in 1943.

The respected technology writer and now a senior executive with Yahoo!, David Pogue has this to say in 2006 about the future iPhone; “Everyone’s asking me when Apple is coming out with a cell phone, and my answer is – probably never”.  Of course he can be excused because he was not an insider from Apple and hence not expected to know their strategic plans, but his public proclamations prove he too was arrogant enough to predict something he had no knowledge or business to do so.

YouTube co-founder, Steve Chen said “There’s just not that many videos I want to watch” – that was before he decided to sell his company to Google.    Even the disruptor had no idea how big his own disruptive idea would grow to be!   

The lesson from all of this is quite humbling and instructive.  Successful and smart, famous and rich human beings are not necessarily the best crystal balls of wisdom when it comes to predicting the future and picking disruptive winners.   Status quo is quite comforting and success intoxicates us all. And like anything intoxicating, it ends up blurring one’s vision at the very least.     Everything from one’s past and present set of experiences carry a normative feeling of comfort and nostalgia.    From birth to age 30 or so, one is mostly not successful and famous or rich yet, and hence everything new is cool and exciting.    Older folks call them the enthusiasm of youth – the enthusiasm used as a patronizing term for foolish inexperience.   After the age of 30 or thereabouts, most human beings become nostalgic and nostalgia is a drug that numbs one’s imagination – the past, not the future, is the utopia.     

Technology disruption is about believing in what may come across as impossible.   The road to greatness and disruptive success is undeniably tough and lonely.    One probably would be better off without the company of arrogance of past success and rather seek the humility of the wise who know that it is far tougher to invent or to disrupt than to predict.    Entrepreneurs should never be easily impressed and seek out wisdom over material past successes in their advisors and backers.