Polyculture

In California, someone asked me whether I liked people watching. We were at a mall somewhere in Sunnyvale, CA and I was out shopping with an American colleague and his wife.

I don't normally observe people and I looked out to see whether I liked what I saw. And there it was - too many people of different races, wearing different things, buying different things, differently. There was too much diversity.

Of course every person is unique and race is not an identity. But your race still says a lot about you - the color of your skin, your diet, your religious propensity, your family values and so on.

There is beauty in the uni-cultural settings of Kerala, conservative Japan, communist China, even cosmopolitan Mumbai. But too much of diversity is not my taste.

Better off this way

There is always this topic most people are ambivalent on whether innovation is worth it. Whether we suck by not being like the Navii's in Pandora. My take is that there would not have been any other way. Our brains are such that even if we were to set the clock back to a few ten thousand years, we would still have become the way we are. Humans would have always invented the wheel, traveled across the seas and created the impossible. We are predisposed to innovate. The fact that civilizations like Mayan to Mohenjodaro took off in totally disconnected areas reaffirm this.

Ofcourse, there are still tribes that are afraid of the dark. But you have to read 'Guns, Germs and Steel' to know why they didn't evolve.