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“We become very impressed when we get to look inside ourselves, through pictures. That’s the relationship we have with pictures. Every picture is a piece of the inside of ourselves.” – Oliviero Toscani Oliviero Toscani born 28 February 1942 – passed away on 13 January 2025. He was a master of photographic moment, impact and visual shock. I admired his work even though much of it was controversial. He was the single biggest force behind creation of the brand Benetton He once said “Everybody in advertising content is blonde, beautiful, families are happy,cars are never in traffic, everything is shiny, food looks like it’s incredibly tasteful. I ask myself, “How stupid are we? How come the world is going one direction and advertising is going in a completely different direction?” This is an article about him that I wrote earlier last year. RIP Oliviero Toscani.

An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants, separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. This circle is commonly known as a “death spiral” because the ants eventually die of exhaustion. The phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant merely follows the ant in front of it, which functions until a slight deviation begins to occur, typically by an environmental trigger, and an ant mill forms. An ant mill was first described in 1921 by the American naturalist William Beebe who sighted it in a jungle in Guyana . The circle he saw was 1,200 feet in circumference, and it took each ant two and a half hours to complete the loop. The ants went around and around thecircle for two days until most of them dropped dead. Similar phenomena have been noted in caterpillars and fish. As Steven Johnson showed in his illuminating book ‘Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software’ , an ant colony normally works remarkably well. Each individual ant knows, on its own, almost nothing. Yet the colony successfully finds food,gets all its work done, and reproduces itself. But the simple tools that make ants so successful are also responsible for the demise of the ants who get trapped in the circular mill. Every move an antmakes depends on what its fellow ants do, and an ant cannot act independently, which would help break the march to death. Independence needs relative freedom from the influence of others. To think on our own. To not march to death in a circle just because the ants in front of us are doing so. Independence is important to intelligent decision making. It prevents aggregation of the mistakes that people make. Errors in individual judgment should not become additive. Systemic bias emerges because one depends on the one ahead for information. The ants need NEW information rather than the same old info everyone is already familiar with.

Hoy, sin miedo que libre escandalice, puede hablar el ingenio, asegurado de que mayor poder le atemorice. En otros siglos pudo ser pecado severo estudio, y la verdad desnuda, y romper el silencio el bien hablado. – Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580-1645) ( “These days, without fear that his freedom will offend, an intelligent man may speak, safe from the intimidation of the more powerful. In other centuries, rigorous criticism,the naked truth, and the eloquent man’s breaking of silence, could have been crimes.” ) ——— ——— ——— After an interval of 4 years, I finally finished the Latin American trilogy by Louis de Bernières ! 1.The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts 2 Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord. 3. The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman Really outstanding. Each in its own right. This is classical satire lifted up into the modern age. A critique of corruption, authoritarianism, and the dark entanglements of religion and politics with colorful characters coloured with hopes of resistance, rebellion, and redemption. Many of the strange events and characters symbolize real-world issues, such as dictatorship, colonialism, and religious corruption. How important people take themselves so seriously only to go to dust. The inflated sense of self leads to negative emotions such as pride, arrogance, and insecurity. Self-importance dissolves when we understand our brief role in the universe. Memento Mori : Remember ,you must die. Bernières’ prose is lyrical and poetic.

The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have split the atom, mapped the universe, sequenced our genome and walked on the moon. But, we are also amazingly mean, egotistical, petty and self obsessed. The big issue of being in committed hierarchies -socially, culturally and in organisations – is the conflated sense of mistaking position with knowledge and an inflated sense of the little knowledge we actually do possess, as individuals. Knowledge is the product — in the words of philosopher Philip Kitcher — “of a cognitive division of labour.” We all depend on intelligence and knowledge available to us courtesy civilisation but we assume that we -as individuals- know more than we really do. Wonder why the mean and stupid thrive, and why there are so many moronic proclamations ? The answer is : dogma. How do you recognise people with an inflated sense of dogmatic knowledge? 1. They believe they know everything and what they know is right2. They are irrefutable3. If proven wrong, they question the evidence not their lack of knowledge. Consider what’s become known as the “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. In their book, “The Enigma of Reason”, the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber use the term “myside bias.”Humans, they point out, aren’t random believers . Presented with someone else’s argument, we are experts at spotting the weaknesses. But when it comes to our own positions we’re quite blind. I highly recommend “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone”, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach and “The Enigma of Reason”, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.”– Walter Lippmann I recently finished reading an excellent book “A Culture Of Growth: The Origin of The Modern Economy “ by Joel Mokyr that answers the question: “Why was Europe the first region to industrialise ?” With its answer, it makes a prescription for all of humanity. It also spells out how groups should work and what is a truly democratic spirit . According to the author, Europe rose to greatness because ideas of free debate and free markets became embedded in everyday life. The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, had “nullius in verba”—“take nobody’s word for it”, as its motto. It says a lot. Such institutions provided platforms for vocal disagreements but everyone recognised that they were -ultimately- working towards a common cause advancing their national and economic agenda. Geography probably played a role in facilitating this in Western Europe of all places. Fractured into lots of states, a market for talent developed there. Small kingdoms vied with each other for artists, thinkers, traders and innovators. They tolerated dissent and allowed for unions /guilds. The rise of the Protestant church in Northern and Western Europe accelerated this new thinking which began with the Renaissance. Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest NOT consensus or compromise. An intelligent group, especiallywhen confronted with challenges of acceptance and understanding, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to usemechanisms—like market prices, or intelligent voting systems to aggregate and produce collective judgments. Such output is always better than what one person in the group thinks because it represents what they all think. Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

One of the greatest of all time , director Andrei Tarkovsky passed away on this day 29th of December 1986. “Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win. Because what has hardened will never win…..” – Andrei TarkovskyStalker (1979) In 1972, Tarkovsky told film historian Leonid Kozlov his ten favorite films. The list is as follows: Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette by Robert Bresson Winter Light, Wild Strawberries, and Persona by Ingmar Bergman Nazarín by Luis Buñuel City Lights by Charlie Chaplin Ugetsu by Kenji Mizoguchi Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa, and Woman in the Dunes by Hiroshi Teshigahara.

My grandfather retired from the Army in 1962 after the Indo-China war. A King’s commissioned officer , he was a very objective critic of the authoritarian style despite being a proud army man. One book he quoted often from was “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence” by Norman F. Dixon. It was first published only in 1976, as a set of psychological insights into military history. It examines military disasters from the preceding 120 years, primarily focusing on British military failures. The focus is on how the personality and psychological traits of military commanders contribute to military failures. Numerous pertinent cases are evaluated :-Crimean War blunders by Raglan– Second Boer War failures by Buller– World War I casualties under Haig– World War II disasters like the fall of Singapore It identifies several characteristics of incompetent military leaders, including: – Rejection of contradictory information– Fundamental conservatism– Underestimating expertise– Indecisiveness– Obstinate persistence fed by ego and;– Authoritarian personality traits After this catalogue of traits, he addresses how such large and costly enterprises as armed forces can be put in the hands of such men. Here he discerns a vicious circle: it is people of a certain type who are recruited and promoted, so others either do not apply or languish in insignificant positions. Among characteristics of the British officer class in the period under examination are: a narrow social segment admitted, scorn of intellectual and artistic endeavour, subservience to tradition, and emphasis on virility. This leads, in his view, to the prevalence of an authoritarian type, fawning to superiors and often harsh or uncaring to inferiors. Such a commander therefore ignores people and facts which do not conform to his world view, learns little from experience and clings to external rules, applying them even when the situation demands other approaches (for example Haig sacrificing hundreds of thousands of men he ordered to walk through mud into German machine gun fire). I remember my grandfather’s words often “A gentleman doesn’t hide behind paper when others are facing bullets”. (Pics are circa 1941-50 as a young officer in the WW II and then in India.)

Contrary to its provocative title, “Surrounded by Idiots” by Thomas Erikson is an engaging and deep work that explores human communication and behavior using a simple and relatable model. Written in a light ,narrative style it focuses on understanding different personality types and improving interactions with others. Erikson categorizes people into four personality types, each represented by a color: Red (Dominant): Direct, result-oriented, competitive, and decisive. Reds prefer efficiency and action. Yellow (Inspirational): Enthusiastic, social, creative, and optimistic. Yellows value relationships and fun. Green (Stable): Calm, empathetic, patient, and loyal. Greens prioritize harmony and avoid confrontation. Blue (Analytical): Precise, logical, detail-oriented, and cautious. Blues thrive on facts and structure. That said, there are those who operate with innate prejudice and search for evidence to suit their inflexible judgement. And there are those who intelligently suspend judgment and operate with integrity, instinctual empathy, reference to context and facts. A must read for communication professionals.

‘With the Renaissance, the cardinal lines of European man were laid down. All subsequent centuries, in consequence of sharing the same psychic disposition, were bound to see in the Renaissance and in its parallel phenomenon the Antique, a fulfilment, a kind of ultimate goal; this effect was uncomprehendingly attributed, since the artistic instinct simultaneously flagged, to the outward result, not to the inner experience that preceded it. Because a hint was still felt of the powerful effect and nobility of that art, and because this art still employed reality as an artistic means in the loftiest sense, the real inevitably appeared to the later centuries, with their slackened artistic instinct, as the criterion of art; truth to nature and art gradually came to be looked upon as inseparable concepts. Once this fallacious inference had been drawn it was a short step from regarding the real as the aim of art, to looking upon imitation of the real as art. Thus secondary phenomena were looked upon as decisive values and criteria of judgement, and instead of pressing forward to the psychic process which gave birth to those works of art, critics stopped short at their outward appearance and derived from it a mass of incontestable truths which, however, seen from a higher standpoint, are inadequate and un-convincing.’

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” a conceptual artwork comprising a banana stuck to a wall with duct tape, sold on Wednesday for $6.24 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York. Sotheby’s revealed that Justin Sun, a Chinese collector and founder of a cryptocurrency platform, had acquired the work. He has proceeded to eat the banana ! But, the first recorded instance of “shock art” happened in 1917. The man who did it was Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dadaism, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as the troika that defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts Duchamp walked into a plumbing supply store in New York City and selected a Bedfordshire-style urinal. Later he proceeded to sign it “R.Mutt,” named it ‘Fountain’, and called it art. Duchamp anonymously submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists— which he served as the founder and director of—for exhibition. The society was forward-thinking and away from the highbrow elitist definitions of art but it refused to display the piece. “R. Mutt” was trashed. Only one single photograph of it, by Alfred Stieglitz, survives. The point Duchamp was making, though, lived on. “Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder”. There is no “acceptable basis for defining art” Anything is serious art or ridiculous irreverence, depending only on how one perceives it.