Burn After Reading (2008): Movie Review *spoilers*

The Transfer of CIA analyst (John Malkovich) to a lower clearance level on seemingly dubious grounds sets in motion a sequence of events which find their denouement in either the Nervous breakdown,expatriation OR Murder of every central character except for that of the figurative agent(Frances McDormand) responsible for this bedlam and carnage.All … for half a done cosmetic surgeries. Chekhov anyone! (To compare is To Insult so I wont develop this analogy)

I however will take the liberty of deciphering and summarizing The Films Overarching precis :

>> Not only are we-from Federal Marshals to Fitness instructors without exception - inscrupulously self serving but are also criminally vacuous; and the amalgamation of these attributes in Individuals is invariably fatal for those who surround them.<< Furthermore, That summary almost defines the Black Comedy Genre .

The Man from Earth (2007): Movie Review

A Still from the movie

This one is an utterly cerebral affair. That Jerome Bixby let three decades pass between conceiving and completing the screenplay for this piece-of-art is altogether condonable. A 'remarkable cinematic accomplishment by a team of unremarkable people' has been the long-n-short of this films' post-release existence.

Released largely on the Internet and spread through p2p networks, it was the ordinary internetizens who proliferated the web with copious offerings of positive reviews which abetted the movie's emergence on the horizons of popular imagination.  The juggernaut still continues to roll as the movie has maintained its upward climb on all major ranking directories. 

A brief history of the philosophy of Management: Part 2

(This is the second and the final part of a two part guest post by management researcher Kunal Sharma, on a brief History of the Philosophy of Management. He chronicles the evolution of management practices, their philosophical bases and the attendant historical circumstances. He is crisp, precise and impartially analytical and, operating with a bare minimum of factoids, keeps your freedom of thought intact)

• The New Humanism

Douglas McGregor

In the last section we said that the time had come when organizations were ready to understand their most important constituents – the people. But every understanding will have different views. Though it might sound too harsh, but let us say that if we could start grouping people together in two different categories: in the first category we put those people who believe that people are by nature lazy and would avoid doing work until and unless they are forced to work. These people would, as obvious, think that workers in an organization would need guidance and control at all levels and it would be the organization’s responsibility to assign work to these people, control them, and put them in a strict hierarchy inside the organization. In the second category, we put those people who believe that people are by nature self motivated and exercise self control, therefore, no need for any control or a strict hierarchy. Douglas McGregor (1906 - 1964) was the person, a man of academia, who proposed the Theory X and Y. McGregor identified the people belonging to the first category as the managers who would focus more on authoritative approach to management (Theory X), while those falling in the second category as the one who would focus more on self-control by the workers (Theory Y). Self control by the workers would be thorough empowering the workers and giving them the responsibility for their task.

A brief history of the philosophy of Management: Part 1

(This is the first part of a two part guest post by management researcher Kunal Sharma, on a brief History of the Philosophy of Management. He chronicles the evolution of management practices, their philosophical bases and the attendant historical circumstances. He is crisp, precise and impartially analytical and, operating with a bare minimum of factoids, keeps your freedom of thought intact)

• Introduction

This short essay provides an overview of major schools of thought and philosophical perspectives in the field of management theory. The focus is on the contribution and the gradual growth of the management thought from the early 20th century to the modern theories of management which influence the thoughts of the 21st century management thinkers. We will focus on Individuals and their contributions to the development of management theory. As obvious, no theory is a product of a single mind, nor can it exist without any context. We will try to see what the situations were which gave rise to the theories – the contexts and the environments in which the thoughts took shape and yielded the well sung theories of management, many of which have become trite yet remain true. 

• Emergence of Management Philosophy in Academics

Industrial revolution:
The Impetus for management philosophy

When the words “Management Thought” skirt our ears, the alphabets MBA do resonate in our mind. Management has become the synonym of Business Management, and a MBA degree has become a much respected degree of the modern age. Let us spend some time going back to the history to find out when did “Management” gain its focus and when did it get incorporated into the regular courseware. It was in the year 1902 when Dartmouth College in New Hampshire (USA) started the first master’s degree in business education.

The myth of Individuality: A contrarian take

Individual... In Dividual... Not Divisible... A whole thing... Self-contained... An end unto itself in matters of living. An Individual has in the modern world become a unit-of-existence that is the normative 'level-of-analysis' in deriving ethical wisdom, social conventions, economic structures and institutions of governance among other things.

An individual is often assumed to have autonomous motives, is reposited with agency of causation, credited with full awareness of his needs, considered the locus of morality and each one is thought of as a complete instantiation of humanity. While this view took root first in the west, it is now a credo preached in just about every modern institution in much of all nations of the world. When considered theoretically, it is found to constitute the very foundations of 'classical economics' in particular, the 'capitalist' weltanschauung in general and the popular imagination of urban-middle classes enthymematically.

But the truth, viewed from a dispassionate distance, is that there is scant individualistic about most men, only bantam individualistic about some men and something remarkably individualistic is to be found in only an exiguous few  in a whole generation of men. 
 

On the Mind-Body relation: A New Look at Consciousness and Free will

What is thought to be mind? Whence from it cometh? Whither does it go? In what relation to the corporeal organism does it exist? What are, if any, the physical and physiological bases for the mind to emerge? And does it do so as a differentiated organ of the body itself, i.e. is it merely identical with brain or is the unmistakably distinct 'qualia' of mind sufficient reason to consider it a phenomena of its own accord?

CAVEAT LECTOR 

Reductionist view: Mind=Mechanics of the Brain

It should be theoretically profitable to consider all these questions as occupants of certain positions on a continuum, at one end of which is a conception of mind-body relation as a strict dichotomy to reconcile, i.e mind and body as 'separate things', the other end of which condenses around the mind-body relation conceived as only an 'illusion of separatedness' and as such (being only an illusion) is to somehow be explained away to establish that mind=brain. The latter view is commonly ascribed the label 'monism' (often 'material monism') and the former 'dualism'. While 'dualism' has been very explicit since Plato in theology and in the popular imagination, the reductionistic Monist view has gained philosophical legitimacy in the scientific age. Though patent limitations of both the positions, when conjured simplistically in the absolute, have launched a frenetic academic search since at least the mid-twentieth century for a viable alternative to the two extremes.

A peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn: Book Review

Best Quote from the book -

Susan B Anthony: “Give us suffrage and we’ll give you socialism.”

Eugene V Debs: “Give us socialism and we’ll give you suffrage.”

This book with its thoroughly substantiated arguments for expensive social safety nets might proselytize me into socialism.

Ironically, I am at an institution which preaches the creed and postulates of The Efficient market hypothesis and and exhorts us to avoid "Dead weight loss" at all costs.

Now thats what results in cognitive dissonance. I am torn!

The sociological, political and moral reality of 'Blasphemy'

Naked Face of Fundamentalist Suppression: Stoning to death for Blasphemy

That human life on earth, or at least its moral underpinnings, aren't based on any immutable, pre-existing divinely-ordained moral wisdom is an arrangement that every wise man comes to comprehend fairly early on in his inquiry into life. 

In fact, it is one of the set of 'exceedingly rare  and but unmistakably accurate' insights into human condition that isn't entombed underneath several intractable layers of deductive logic and is, as it were, accessible to anyone willing just to think free from popular prejudices and in spite of religious compunctions. Unmistakable just as much, is the need to base the human morality on a foundation more stable and less whimsical than mere 'human nature' - as it is given to all evil and vice just as much to all good and virtue. 

It is perhaps a pragmatic compromise then, between these two antagonistic realizations, that in the popular imagination even our manifestly terrestrial moral precepts tend to be fastened and legitimized by divine entrapment and providential diktats.

Make no mistake, even in a secular-rational weltanschauung the 'need for solidity' of moral structures is just as acute as in a worldview that coalesces around a central divinity; and this is served in such case by a more mature philosophical approach, that of 'attributions of universality', i.e, by consecration and elevation of certain moral maxims to the status of 'universals' that have somehow been extracted by the human mind, by contemplation and genius, out of deposits of universal truth that lay deeply buried in an imagined realm of ideas.