Last Man Blogging!

I have always been curious to understand why God and religion hold such sway over all of humanity. I can’t fathom why so many of us believe in an omnipotent super-man/woman who supposedly controls us as if we were some puppets tethered to a string. God is truly mankind’s greatest invention and I have hence grappled with a variety of questions in my mind. Does belief in God make a person happier? Will blind faith help us handle the ups and downs of life with equanimity because everything happens due to His/Her will? Why have generations after generations of people so consumed this Kool-Aid of faith? Why do most people of one religion disbelieve in the Gods of other religions? Is there a far greater good to come out of people’s fear of an all-powerful mythical being even if one were to take into account all of the bloodshed and hatred caused by bigots? Will crime rates spiral if we all became atheistic? Will the people of 3000 A.D. laugh at us for our misplaced beliefs or will they continue to be beholden to the divine? Is God, after all, an invention out of necessity?

These are just some of the questions I cogitate upon ever so often. I don’t have the answers but I do know that there are others who invest far more time into this so that the rest of us can see the light. One such man is Richard Dawkins. If you are curious about how life started, I recommend reading “The Selfish Gene”; or you could even start with his essays archived on the internet. I, for one, can’t wait to read his latest book, “The God Delusion”. For now, I will stop preaching and just go back into my atheist-closet!

VentureWoods is a blog dedicated to the Indian venture capital and start-up industy. I read it almost everyday to hear from the people who have “been there and done that”. Yesterday, there was an interesting post that described a ludicrous process employed by the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India to verify whether some of its policy-holders were indeed alive. In order to prove that one is actually alive, a policy holder has to supposedly get an “existence certificate” signed by specified officers every three years. The poster asked the readers to come up with a simpler system to reduce the pain inflicted on genuine customers. I felt like taking a stab at it and replied to the post. Before I copy-paste my comment here, I’d like to clarify that my big-picture answer is merely my attempt at correcting something that is broken. It is not meant to be a step-by-step blueprint of how the system should be rolled out. I leave that as an exercise for the people working in these mega corporations because it is high time they listened to their customers and actually tried solving problems such as these.

So, here’s my comment (reproduced verbatim):

I would probably go with a voice identification system so that anyone who has access to a phone can call up a toll free number, enter a unique policy number and identify himself or herself by speaking a few sentences as directed by the system. Although I have no idea about the state-of-the-art, I would venture to say that such a system should have no problems with supporting even Indian languages.

Advantages:
+ The system should be able to identify a large number of genuine policy holders like Sanjay. Thus, the burden on genuine customers is considerably reduced.
+ The system would cover a lot of policy holders as the person just needs to be located near the vicinity of a phone.
+ The insurance company needs to purchase just one centralized voice recognition system (as opposed to installing, say, some sort of a fingerprint machine in every town in the country).

Disadvantages:
- Survivors may still be able to cheat the process by mimicking the original policy-holder
- This process would unfortunately have false negatives. Such genuine customers not identified by the system would perhaps have to resort to the original process of identification (i.e. certification from the bank/medical/gazetted officers).

There may be more disadvantages. But I believe that I could think of something to iron iron out the wrinkles by adding more fail-safes, if I really spent some time thinking about the problem. To summarize, the big-picture is that I would go with voice-identification (if such technologies exist . If it doesn’t exist, let’s just go and invent it.

I am hard-pressed for words because I’ve just had the life force sucked out of me. Yes, I was yet another victim of the gruesome Walt Disney flick, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”. The movie was released in the theatres near me only this week and I had unwittingly fallen prey to the Disney propaganda machine. Surely, a movie that is on its way to becoming one of the 10 most successful box-office hits of all time can’t really be that bad, could it?

Turns out that P.T. Barnum was right. Every minute a sucker is indeed born and yesterday night, it was my turn. Atleast, Barnum was a merciful showman. His shams mostly involved midgets, freaks and a poor, paralyzed woman whom he exhibited as George Washington’s 160 year old nanny. One might even be generous enough to describe his shows as mildly entertaining. But I wonder how cruel one has to be to recommend a movie like the Pirates. As scene after scene of mindless characters were unveiled before my teary eyes, I began to empathize with any one of Hannibal Lecter’s many human entrees during the last moments of their lives.

When Captain Jack Sparrow was devoured by a grotesque underwater creature, I could not help but pray that he be properly digested in the monster’s belly. I was even grateful for a few moments to this despicable, multi-tentacled leviathan until the not-so subtle hint was dropped that Sparrow could actually be rescued alive. For this, however, you just have to wait for the third edition of this never-ending and mind-numbing multi-part series. Pirates gets an A+ for pure, unadulterated bull crap. Savvy?

P.S: I would recommend that one read the Wikipedia stories behind the principal characters of the movie before heading out to the theatres. Otherwise, you, like me, are likely to have nary a clue.