Confessions of a Gossipaholic..

Well, admit it: Lately, Bollywood has become kind of predictable and boring -- what with everybody dating everybody else. As for hollywood, I am not (yet) "keeping up" with the Kardashians or Hiltons or the likes but I am fully tuned in when it comes to any gossip related to most of the mainstream artists.

So, an inappropriately significant fraction of my time is wasted in mulling over completely pointless things like —

• Why are Leo and Bradley so obsessed with models (with all due respect to the modeling profession)?
• Are Ben and Jen really through?
• Why won’t Ashton and Mila just admit to being married already?
• ...

I  recall spending embarrassingly long time browsing gossip magazines in aisles of superstores in the US.  What is it about celebrity rumors that makes them spread so widely and stick so hard? Research says — part of it is good old-fashioned schadenfreude. George Clooney is so annoyingly handsome that we want to believe he's really a sicko or in some way, flawed. And, of course it helps a little that the paparazzi industry cauldron is ever-so-simmering. A slightly logical part of my brain revolts at times by signaling this obsession is detrimental but to no avail.

If only it was limited to some harmless celebrity rumors!

Well, aren't some episodes just classic! Remember Ganesha idols milk-drinking miracles of 1995?  If I'm not gullible and you're not gullible, how come some improbable stories take a long time to die?  Clearly, rumor or gossip has a way of slipping under our mental defenses before we think to question it. The best ones seem to sidestep common sense entirely.

We don’t have to go too far looking for examples. Right here is your latest on - "Curiosity killed the cat!".
My gossip and rumor-spreading qualities recently reached a pinnacle when I almost wrote a premature obituary.  We are talking about a US-based colleague of some of my seniors at work.. A person I have never seen, met, heard from or never even sent a mail to..  In my defence (or so I would like to think..), if I did have a way to cross-check this “apparent” news, I would have probably bothered to do the verification part before passing the information on..
(Note: I had to Retouch and remove the “blemishes" on iPhoto! :P)

Hmm.. I really do not know where I possibly figure on the bell-curve(?) of gossip-mongers but I have a feeling I am somewhere worse off than I would like to believe. So why do you and I gossip anyway? Is it excitement, anxiety, boredom, envy, condescension, vulnerability, attention-seeking? Hormones, neurotransmitters? A bit of everything?   Or it’s just that thing from Silence of the Lambs: “Quid pro quo. I tell you things, you tell me things.”

I have come to realize this psycho-analysis is beyond my current ability.

Ahem.. So folks, what’s the latest on Bigg Boss 9 anyway?

<Your Name>_2.0

Here’s a "QWERTY quirk" that I recently came across: Now, the earliest typewriters were mechanical gadgets where, characters were mounted on metal arms or typebars, which would clash and jam if neighboring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession.  Jams were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by raising the carriage to inspect what had been typed. The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs far apart so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams. Thus (and here’s the slightly controversial part) the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down speed.

Knock knock.. we do not live in mechanical world anymore. And apparently, better keyboard layouts did come along, but QWERTY had that undeniable advantage of coming out first and becoming the norm. There might be disagreements on this one, but the idea should be clear: often enough, we get into a situation where sub-optimal choices are made and tend to persist.

So, pause, think, ask yourself: Are you trapped in inferior, inefficient solutions and too lazy to move away from the comfort of familiarity? Is that inertia keeping you from doing your risk/reward analysis and taking that leap of faith? Are you, dear reader, too scared to start everything from scratch even if that’s the only way to push the envelope?

This is where, an economist Joseph Schumpeter advised: we need something he called --“Creative destruction”. Voila! Do you think you can come up with two better words to describe AB?

Reinvent, AB de Villiers' style...

Honestly, Nicole Kidman couldn't have been worse in this ad. But the lyrics is just bang on!

 "Occasionally, people come along who are not content with simply moving things along. They want to take things further -- tear up the plans and start again, then take another brave step. They will see the future and knock down the walls to reach it, insist the dream is possible; overcome all indecision and take a running jump into the uncharted.  Bored by the reinvention of the superficial kind, they want more. Because their goal isn’t to improve what’s been done before; but totally reimagine it."