| Sunday, 13 October 2024 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Hello dear reader, how are you this fine Sunday morning? I hope you had a joyous Dussehra and managed to get some quality time with friends and family.
Back in Chennai, where I grew up, Durga Puja pandals weren’t that common a thing; the celebrations down there have their own little idiosyncrasies. So my first encounter with the pandals came when I moved to Delhi in 2017 and some of my Bengali friends invited my wife and I to go visit a few of them and pay our respects.
Until I stepped inside one, the image of the typical pandal I’d built in my head was, of necessity, crafted from second- and third-hand experiences. And so as the night grew old, and we moved from pandal to pandal, each had its own little collection of revelations to offer.
Can you believe that until that night, I had no clue that exploring cultural and artistic themes in pandals was such a huge thing? Or how much effort and resources went into conceptualising and creating them?
This is not to fault my wonderful friends whose accounts had informed my initial assumptions. Naturally, they’d told me what they presumed I didn’t know, and left out stuff they believed was common knowledge. The result was that the map I’d sketched out in my head gave me a pretty good idea of the general lay of the land, but there were also a bunch of holes and distortions.
I was caught by surprise that night, albeit a very pleasant one, because I’d forgotten one of the most important things about maps.
The map is not the terrain.
It is a useful model. But it is an abstraction, not reality.
And forgetting that can lead to surprise when you actually set foot in the terrain.
Quoting from mathematician Alfred Korzybski, who first introduced the phrase:
If we consider an actual territory, say, Paris, Dresden, Warsaw, and build up a map in which the order of these cities would be represented as Dresden, Paris, Warsaw, to travel by such a map would be misguiding, wasteful of effort…
[…]
An ideal map would contain the map of the map of the map of the map of the map, endlessly.
Essentially, even if a map is correct, it is a reduction of reality (it has to be) and you can end up losing some information. And you, the reader, have to interpret the information that is present.
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Chairman and MD, InvAscent
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CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay
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Executive Chairperson, Biocon Limited
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