Stream

The Grammar of Silence

I attended Thiru R. Seshasayee’s book launch at the Tagore Film Centre, NFDC.

The room was presumably filled with industry titans I didn’t recognise. I came straight there after a very long day at work (we’re approaching a launch and the teams have been on overdrive for a while now), and I had no idea what to expect from an evening like this.

The book is about patriarchy and feminism. Three women, living across five centuries of Tamil history, each facing patriarchy at a different level and with different nuance.

A few things I picked up there:

• Educated and graduated are completely different things. A well educated person may not be a graduate. A person with impressive qualifications may not be well educated.
• Power leads to absolute power, and then to abuse of power. He came back to this several times, with real conviction behind it. I want to sit with that one.
• Someone asked how an industry titan could also be a creative writer (put more politely than that, but that was the gist). He said a person can hold multiple identities, and that it’s a stereotype to assume a captain of industry has no room for other forms of art. The identities part stuck with me. I have a forming theory about individual and group identities. Who am I as a person is the individual one. Who am I as a friend, a Zoho-ite, a Tamilian, an Indian, a Hindu, a millennial: those are group identities. What I realised today is that the individual self also splits. Who am I as a writer? As a product manager? As a DnD player? As a teammate? Maybe I’m blurring the two categories. Needs more brewing.
• Another person asked whether, in all his research on how patriarchy shaped our culture, he found evidence that it ever served a real purpose. His answer: it did, back when gender roles weren’t a rule but a survival arrangement. A pregnant homo sapiens couldn’t hunt, or defend herself and everyone around her, when things turned dangerous. It served a purpose there.

I left motivated enough to buy a signed copy, and more energised than when I walked in.

Good design follows human intuition

I regularly use Wispr Flow for dictating into my Mac for work. That’s how I communicate with my AI agents, and I’m adopting it more for all forms of communication where rambling doesn’t matter, or when my mind already has the exact information I want to convey, neatly formed.

Previously, I was leaning down to my MacBook mic and whispering so that others aren’t disturbed, or grabbing my AirPods just for this (which has a slight delay). For this purpose, I bought a JBL earphone, which has a mic, and I can just talk into it without much delay.

I noticed my hand started to go toward the button near the mic on the earphone. Intuitively, I reach for that button to trigger Wispr Flow.

Unfortunately, Wispr Flow doesn’t provide an option to capture a media button hold to trigger dictation.

Good design follows human intuition. Not every answer comes this easily. You often have to iterate through every possible solution before finding the one that follows human instinct. Which is why it’s easy to look at good design and say, “Isn’t that obvious?” Not everyone sees the hard work behind that.

Agentic tools make that kind of ad hoc, one-person fix worth building at all.