Events on Feb 23

Couple of interesting events on Saturday, Feb 23:

1. TiE hosts a discussion on ‘Understanding the Logic of Consumer India’ between Rama Bijapurkar and Vinita Bali | Venue: Taj Residency, Bangalore | Date: Feb 23, 2008 | Time: 10:00am to 12:30pm
   Rama Bijapurkar, has of course been in the news recently for her book, “We’re like that only” (interestingly, I read somewhere that the title of the book outside India is different…and that did seem like a wise move, considering those not from India wouldn’t get the concept of “We’re like that only!”).
   I bought Rama’s book a month ago but haven’t got around to reading it yet. Given we’re in a similar profession of understanding consumers’ needs in India, I’m really looking forward to this event.
2. iCamp (the BarCamp for Innovation) | Venue: MindTree campus (Bangalore) | Date: Feb 23, 2008 | Time: 10am
   After the huge success of BarCamps in Bangalore, now it’s the turn of ‘Innovation Camps’. Interesting idea. Looking forward to an ‘unconference’ concept being extended to Innovation.

Language as a window into human nature

Steven Pinker on TED…

In an exclusive preview of his new book, The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language, and the way it expresses the workings of our minds. By analyzing common sentences and words, he shows us how, in what we say and how we say it, we’re communicating much more than we realize.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the reviews of his book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, on Amazon by Robert L. Moore.

Is there a difference between the meanings of these two sentences?

(1) Hal loaded hay into the wagon, and,

(2) Hal loaded the wagon with hay.

Well, Steven Pinker claims there is a difference and it’s a difference that reveals something about the way the mind conceptualizes experience. That is “the stuff of thought” with which Pinker’s latest book is concerned, and this “stuff,” as he convincingly demonstrates, can be made accessible through a careful analysis of “the stuff of language,” i.e., word categories and their syntactic habitats.

In the case of the two sentences above, we can see the human capacity to frame events in alternate ways through the dual function of verbs like “load.” This verb draws attention to the hay and its movement in the first sentence, but to the transformation (a kind of metaphorical “movement”) of the wagon in the second.

Intriguing wall

Found in Ulsoor in Bangalore, this is really really interesting.

Though I have no clue what this signifies, the sheer association of two seemingly different worlds, the Thirukural and The DaVinci Code, is very intriguing. And maybe that was the whole point! One can only guess.

It happened in India

Currently reading, among half a dozen other books, Kishore Biyani’s new book, “It happened in India“. As one would guess, it’s all about the Pantaloon group’s meteoric rise and how Kishore Biyani has contributed to this growth. More when I complete reading this book. But, here’s couple of quick highlights…

a) There’s almost a whole chapter on Idiom, the design consulting company that Kishore Biyani has funded. And there’s considerable focus on design management and his conviction in the ‘rapid prototyping + testing + iterate & then rollout’ approach. Good stuff.

b) His daughter’s written the foreword and later, I got to hear that she’s a design school graduate. Design thinking begins at home, it seems!