Classic movie week...

My wife was out of town last week — on a 4200m hike to Sar Pass in Himachal Pradesh — and my daughter & I ended up spending a lot of time together.

My daughter and I watched 4 classic movies together last week: it was the last week before her summer break, the last week of school. Here are the movies we watched:

• Deewar: I wasn’t sure whether my daughter would like this classic Bollywood movie. I’ve always loved the swag of Amitabh in the movie: in watching movies like Anand, Deewar, and Sholay, you know why Amitabh became the superstar that he did, something understated and yet with so much presence on-screen. Anyway, my daughter loved this movie and was moved by it.

• Casablanca: Casablanca, like Deewar (yes, this is the only place you’ll find that comparison!), is a movie that is written so well. The dialogues (dialogbaazi) are brilliant, and Bogie delivers them not unlike Amitabh with an understated presence. Both movies show us an unlikely hero who is flawed and so human. I love Casablanca, especially the ending.

• Cinema Paradiso: I was watching this movie after many, many years, and fell in love with it again. What a fantastic movie! I love the soundtrack, I love the acting, I love how it is shot, and I love the ending, even better than Casablanca!

• 12 Angry Men: My daughter and I had a conversation about why I don’t speak up in parties when I don’t agree with something that is said, say a sexist or a racist remark dropped casually with a laugh in a social setting. After a good discussion about this, I felt it was appropriate to watch “12 angry men”, one of my favorite movies. My daughter loved the movie too! Each of the characters in the movie are developed so well, and Henry Fonda’s role of being in doubt and bringing the other jurors over to his side because of his doubt was so powerful. It has been said before in so many ways, and it is so true: those who don’t know are sure of their convictions, and those who do know are so much in doubt…

Last week my daughter had her “Theory of Knowledge” (ToK) exhibition as part of her IBDP curriculum. She had told me many times that I’d enjoy learning more about ToK, and I really did!

The distinction between knowledge and personal beliefs, the exploration of different ways of knowing, and the different areas of knowledge were all areas I’ve been interested in. The children did a wonderful job to showcase their understanding through their exhibition, each through a “Knowledge Question” that they had taken up.

In the course of spending time at the different exhibits, I was reminded of two of my favourite science fiction books:

1. Babel 17 by Samuel Delaney: This book explores the power of knowledge to shape action, which I felt was very relevant in the context of ToK. Is knowledge shaped by language (and more broadly the tools that we use)? These are questions that some of the children were exploring and I remembered this wonderful science-fiction book.

2. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card: I remembered this book because of some of the questions that were being explored in ToK about the relationship between Knowledge and Culture, and understanding different cultures. This has to be founded in empathy: but empathy is hard, as ethnographers know, and Speaker for the Dead powerfully depicts.

Anyway, I spent the first half of Thursday in school learning more about ToK, and enjoying every bit of it!

I completed reading “The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Suleyman. Despite mixed reviews of the book, I found the book good: not a 5 stars, but a solid 4 stars. To give a more detailed review:

1. Overall, the book does a great job in laying out the scale of changes that Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Biology (and to a lesser extent Robotics, Quantum Computing, and Nuclear Fusion) to our lives in the next few decades.

2. The book does a good job in making us optimistic about the potential of such technologies to improve our conditions; the book also shows how it is almost inevitable that these technologies will be developed.

3. The book also does a good job in showing that the pace of development of these new technologies and their different characteristics (asymmetry, hyper-evolution, omni-use) make it hard to contain. So, we are presented with the containment problem.

4. The book does a good job in presenting the containment problem, and making us get very worried about how important it is to find a way to solve the problem.

5. Where the book falls a bit flat for me — but to be honest, it is a tough problem — is in presenting solutions to the problem. What I liked was that there wasn’t a “silver bullet” solution for the problem, and that several multi-pronged, multi-stakeholder solutions were presented. However, the solution itself seemed no different than what has been done before, let us say for Nuclear Containment, despite the fact that the author calls out that this time the problem is different.

Overall, I came away from the book with a feeling of — the solution presented is not enough, what more can be done, what more can I do? And this is not a bad place to be at the end of reading a book like this one. Overall, 4.5 stars out of 5 for me.

I haven’t heard much new music in the last few weeks, since my daughter flicked my earbuds. However, I did get some cheap new buds, and heard a good album that had been on my “To Listen” list for a while… the eponymous album by Fleet Foxes. Good folksy music: not anywhere close to my favourite album of the year, but still a good one-off listen…

What’s a best way to reconnect with old friends? Write a book! My book, Failing Well, has been read by many old acquaintances and friends who have reached out to me, and we’ve ended up reconnecting and chatting. I reconnected with Bhavik Kaul, James Hsu, Shreyas Deshmukh, and a few other friends as a result of my book: that makes me happy!

Keep reading, and write a book if you want to reconnect with old friends! Till next week…