2019 is ending, and it’s going to be 2020, which, fifteen years ago, was the deadline for India to become a developed country. It was highly talked about and termed ‘Vision 2020’.
I’m not sure how far along we are on those goals, but it underlines the need to look back on how far we’ve come every now and then, and the end of a year is a good place to do so.
This year, I’ll do a roundup on the coolest thoughts and ideas I’ve come across.
The book I’ve been gifting everyone has been Sea People - The Puzzle of Polynesia. It’s a thrilling, fun, informative read that shows us how the history of the Pacific islands was written. The one big thing I took away was how colonialists force-fit findings to justify colonialism. There was this common theme of tall, fairer-skinned invaders coming in, and conquering the shorter-darker natives as an origin story for where they came from. I realized it was the same as the Aryan Invasion theory that has been used to justify British colonialism in India! And then it turned out that Thor Heyerdahl, whose book, Kon Tiki, had gotten me extremely interested in the history of the Pacific islands, was a huge fraud and his long trips were to just get away from his terrible marriage.
On those same lines, I came across this paper about gene studies of sites of the Indus Valley civilization, which proves that the current inhabitants of India are descendants of the original inhabitants of the Indus Valley. Which means there weren’t any Aryans who suddenly showed up and drove away the Indus Valley people.
Paying For The Party has been a very influential book that I read earlier this year. I summarized it here. It’s a great book about an extended case study of women in college. It shows us how college, rather than reduce inequality, ends up perpetuating it, and if you’re a first-generation college-goer at the typical American college, you’re worse off than if you just didn’t go. Since I read the book, I’ve been seeing confirmations of this theory everywhere around me. It’s deeply influenced how I think about education and college.
I’ve been very into XKCD since 2005, and nothing gives me more pleasure than telling everyone to buy Randall Munroe’s latest book, called How To - Absurd Scientific Advice For Common Real-World Problems. I went to his book event, and was impressed by everything about him - his deep interest in talking about the content he generates, his process, and his extreme kindness and interest in his fans. As I stood in the book signing line, I assumed I’d have to be quick and keep going, but Mr. Munroe actually wanted to hear about me, my work, and my thoughts about XKCD, before inscribing my book with a personalized XKCD cartoon. And he did this for everyone in that line!
GIF of the week: Guy Naruto-Running on a news item about Alienstock/Storm Area 51 festival. Storm Area 51 appealed to me at a deep level, a uniting of regular people for something vaguely anti-authority, but with a huge serving of goofiness, and it made my year!