The blind leading the blind

What do you make of Chetan Bhagat, considering he's often credited to have gotten more and more Indians to read through his books?

I don't know. Is it that you write third rate books and people can't do much better than to read those third rate books? Is it really an achievement? What is the achievement exactly?

We can't count Chetan Bhagat as an airport novelist. He's not an airport novelist -- he apparently writes about important, relevant things. In other countries when they are having kind of a moment in which they are writing about significant things, you see some great literature come out. Chetan Bhagat is not great literature. 

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Chetan Bhagat doesn't find an audience because no one outside India can read him. He might just be a symptom of the fact that in English, India is basically a semi-literate country and Chetan Bhagat is the best it can do.

It doesn't seem to me that we need to look for a deeper explanation.

- Aatish Taseer

Human engineering

Read this awful article on a magazine called NewPhilosopher, where the author, Clive Hamilton, scoffed at the idea of human engineering. His article was a rebuttal of sorts to a paper by three bio-ethicists who published a paper titled, "Human engineering and climate change", where they discuss possibilities such as genetic engineering. One of the methods they discuss is genetic modification to obtain night vision (like cats) which would absolve the need for street lights. (I personally think that is an inspired idea)

I can't believe that the NewPhilosopher outright scoffed at the idea going so far as to calling it bizzare and laughable.  They write "Why not genetically modify people to make them white in order to cool the Earth by increasing its reflectivity?" - It's like they haven't even heard of reductio ad absurdum

He writes, "...the question of why anyone who is unwilling to buy a smaller car or switch to green power would be willing to genetically engineer their children".

Why is human engineering so absurd? Because it wouldn't work. So are a lot of plans of reducing emissions, but you wouldn't laugh at a guy who proposes smaller cars.

Of course some bio ethicists are going to write a paper saying what if the choice is between total annihilation and reinventing ourselves as a species . We know that in the past when threatened with extinction, various species have adapted by growing big, growing small, getting a hard shell, etc. One of evolutions tricks is that the size of humans will decrease over several generations if there is a resource drought.The problem is that humans may not have the luxury of waiting for hundreds of thousands of years to develop gills or something to adapt to new earth. So, perhaps human engineering and gene manipulation will not be optional. We will come to a time when changing a lightbulb is not going to be enough to save the human species and drastic changes, including some forms of human engineering will be necessary. You don't wait until after it becomes a reality to talk about the ethics of it. What can we do, what should we not. These discussions should happen now. And in magazines that call themselves NewPhilosopher. (What kind of a magazine are they, really?)

If Clive Hamilton can do nothing to contribute to this conversation but point fingers and sneer, maybe he should be sent to the naughty corner. No cat eyes for you.