One way to find out where people’s heads are at is by looking at the top of the App Store rankings. Last year it was Zoom, in February it was Robinhood, and yesterday, with the Colonial pipeline shutdown causing all kinds of havoc, GasBuddy topped the list for the first time ever.
I looked at the Play Store India rankings. I’d have expected the Aarogya Setu and CoWin apps to be higher on that list, although entertainment apps domainating is a good sign.
Because there were a lot of Covid-19 vaccine names mentioned in the Indian and other press, I put together a list of vaccines that appear to be in the market or in Phase 3 trials as of 10 May 2021.
I recently read a detailed two-part article exploring the constraints holding back vaccine manufacturing and distribution. Written by a professor of Law at Yale. Part One, Part Two.
The material focuses on patent law, and is probably the writer’s expertise.
But I am also interested in understanding manufacturing constraints: how long it takes for existing manufacturers to ramp up vaccine facilities, build new ones and repurpose other vaccine/drug facilities for a Covid vaccine. From a Financial Times article:
While some EU leaders do not want to appear intransigent on the IP waiver issue, they mostly agree that it is a distraction from the more pressing issue of expanding near-term production capacity through licensing deals and sharing technology… But that puts the onus on the EU to come up with industrial solutions for increasing production and for sharing its own supplies, due to expand vastly in the second half of the year, with developing countries.
After all, India’s SII already has a license and has transferred tech for the AstraZeneca vaccine. Another company, along with a couple of government agencies, has developed an effective indigenous vaccine branded Covaxin. A third pharmaceutical firm has licensed the Russian-origin vaccine, Sputnik V, but even after having been cleared for administration in India on 13 April, as of 13 May, a fresh round of ‘local testing’ means there is no clarity on when distribution will begin, despite 150,000 doses having arrived from overseas on 1 May.
So. Licensing has not alleviated the vaccination crisis in India.
While there are legitimate and necessary debates about granting other vaccine makers the rights to the locally-created vaccine, the high lead time to expand production capacity means a terrible slowdown in India’s vaccination rollout:
From the Indian government’s ‘cowin’ dashboard. Vaccination has declined for five straight weeks. The slower the vaccination rollout, the slower the current ‘wave’ will recede; the longer the patchwork of lockdowns will last.
and has meant that despite being home to the world’s largest manufacturer, despite having a vaccine not limited by global IP rules, despite having a decentralised distribution mechanism, despite having no anti-vaxx movement, vaccination coverage in India is dismal.
In the introduction to his book Glimpses of Bengal (1885-1895), Rabindranath Tagore writes about letters:
He felt “the writing of letters… to be a delightful necessity” which he considered as “a form of literary extravagance only possible when a surplus of thought and emotion accumulates”.
So why have we been swallowing these notions about work and value that were nonsense to begin with, and just getting sillier? We have known that the “higher mission” idea … was just fake, just another way of getting people to work 24 hours a day.
But a lot of status came with feeling so indispensable. Unemployment is a famous driver of misery, and overemployment, to be so needed, can feel very bolstering. Many people describe having been anxious about the loss of status before they left their jobs; more anxious than about the money, where you can at least count what you are likely to have and plan around it.
– “Is the exhausting cult of productivity finally over?”, The Guardian, Apr 2021
I don’t disagree with the writer. Certainly the prospect or threat of unemployment causes disproportionate stress to the person whose work is her identity.
I also think think this is only part of the reason why people are taking another look at their participation in hustle culture. I think it’s that the overhead of the constant ambient stress of the pandemic has left little room for rejuvenation of the minds of us people already working ourselves to the limit.
Whether we peep into Twitter or Facebook or the websites we have bookmarked for quick between-meetings distraction, or catch the evening news, or scroll through our Whatsapp groups, distress is rife. We cannot relax. And therefore, there is no slack in our systems.
No wonder so many of us are re-evaluating our relationship with work and its rewards – we have to make room in our minds somewhere.
I’ve written sporadically on this site from 2002. On 12 December 2019, I began a project to write one blog post a day.
Today marks five hundred days of daily writing.
I’ve written about the experience before: when I hit three hundred days and when I hit one year. Skim through them.
During good times, I have looked forward to reading, thinking, synthesising and writing. When times are bad, writing has served me as an anchor for a routine. These five hundred days have had both good and bad phases in plenty. I wonder what the next five hundred will be like.
It being me joy that children today have the Internet to explore and inquire freely, and to supplement their learning at school.
There are well known destinations like Khan Academy of course, but you can also find the odd gem in the wild.
Just a couple of days ago, I ran into this comment on Reddit, to the question “I genuinely don’t understand how light is both a particle and a wave”:
It’s neither. It’s something that we don’t have a word for and that doesn’t exist in a way that we can sense directly. But this unnamed thing happens to acts in a way similar to a wave in some situations and like a particle in others. A cylinder will role like a sphere in one direction but not roll like a cube in the other. That doesn’t make it a sphere and a cube at the same time. It makes it something different.
Rather than criticise this answer for its lack of depth, for flaws in its analogy, imagine the spark it’ll kindle in minds both young and adult. We need more popular science.
[they were] unplanned and shaped by accidents and intuitive decisions but often seem to carry memories of ‘primitive’ art objects he should have seen in books and museums.
Something of this spilled into his early paintings. Many of them represent animals, but they are seldom of the real ones we know of; more often they represent what he has described as ‘a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence’ or ‘a bird that only can soar in our dreams’.
I am most interested in artists that imagine and express something that does not yet exist in the world:
New perspectives, like that of M C Escher’s Hand With Reflecting Sphere
Or new worlds that deal with new issues, like Neal Stephenson’s books Anathem, REAMDE and (although I read it much too late to have the impact it could have had), Snow Crash.
Or fevered visualisations of otherworldly concepts like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and – in principle – Tagore’s early paintings.
Finally, I’m reminded of Salman Rushdie’s answer to what his book The Satanic Verses was about:
[it] celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and bit of that is how newness enters the world.
I read this years ago (the answer is from 1991) and it made an instant impact on me.
I live in a noisy neighbourhood with road traffic and trains honking. It’s bad enough, made worse by my tinnitus and associated noise sensitivity. And recently major road maintenance and a nearby apartment renovation project had made it near-unbearable for months. I resorted to a combination of earplugs, noise-cancelling headphones and piping white noise though them. It didn’t shut out everything but it made me functional.
The immediate noise spike has passed, but I’m now dealing with a new double whammy: a serious crisis within the family and the second coronavirus wave outside. As I spend a lot of time simply waiting (the crisis has sapped my ability to think, consult, advise, even write meaningfully), I spend a lot more time scrolling through news websites, reddit and twitter – hours on end. Relatives I’m staying with watch local news that operates in perennial breaking news mode, sensationalising the simple and optimising for outrage.
Twitter’s algorithms themselves undermine my experience – my deliberately curated follower list and keyword filters amount to nought as I’m suggested topics I have no interest in or am actively trying to avoid, and alerted to actions by people related to the people I follow – people who discuss the very subjects I’m keeping away from. Reddit is full of outrage from the United States. I can no longer rely on news, whether TV or online, for perspective. The constant optimization for eyeballs and clicks is beyond disheartening (right now: oxygen tank leak kills 22 followed a few dozen pixels below by katrina kaif tests negative for covid).
All in all, I will have to apply the same damping techniques to information noise that I did to real-world noise: specifically, training myself to run off reddit, twitter and news websites. Limit how often I read though my whatsapp groups. Catch up on my reading on the kindle. It’s only been twenty four hours. I hope it helps.
Sometimes it feels like the paradigm has inverted. Technology was the mold growing across human systems. Software was eating the world. Now it feels like humans are the mold growing on technology.
By and large the writer is right. Participating in today online-offline urban society means accepting monopolies (Facebook, Gmail) or duopolies (Amazon/Flipkart, iOS/Android, Uber/Ola, Zomato/Swiggy, MakeMyTrip/Cleartrip).
In theory, you can resist. You can think carefully about data custody and use open source software wherever possible. You can minimise software and data lock in, for instance by avoiding smart devices that require an internet connection to work or unlock features. You can support local businesses.
But being largely free of the influence of tech giants? That requires a major change in the way you live. Even homesteading isn’t going to be a solution.
The biggest thing I learned is that people will like you for who you are. This sounds obvious and simple, but for years I just figured that there were one or two “very likeable” archetypes, and I wasn’t one of them. Media and pop culture set this trap and it’s an easy one for anyone to fall into.
What I found was very nearly the opposite. Someone acting cool is not scarce or interesting. Someone being genuine and authentic and presenting themselves through the clearest lens possible is extremely rare. These people are so rare that when you meet them you immediately like and respect them, even if you don’t have much in common with them or even want to be friends with them
This is a lot easier if you know who you are, know what you believe in, know what you stand for, and know what your values are. Imagine that you know all of those things and you know that you are doing a reasonably good job living by them and are striving to get better. If someone thinks negatively of you, you can know for sure that they just don’t know you well enough to know the truth. You have the proof that you are living up to the standards you have set for yourself.
Some of this occurs naturally with most of us as our life ahead of us recedes, piling up year after year behind us: as the possibilities of what we can do with our lives shrink, we unconsciously end up making peace with the person we have become.
We can also be proactive – we can be deliberate about how, with who and in what we spend our time. Not only does it slow down the passage of time, it brings each of us face to face with the person we’ve become, and presents us opportunity after opportunity to adjust course. This turns passive acceptance into active shaping.
As you become aware of yourself as a person – your likes, dislikes, successes, failures, warts and virtues – you feel more secure. This is the essence of Tynan’s post. I also think being deliberate about how you spend your time helps you discover and shape yourself, accelerating your journey to self-assuredness.
