Words From Vaish

Judging Dredd As a child, I didn’t much care for the few British comic books we did get in India . The condescendingly simplistic stories, burdened with a lot of explanatory exposition, talked down to us and seemed to be mostly about schoolboy football heroes or jingoistic World War 2 action (I found the histories of the actual conflict far more interesting). The art was usually a dreary black-and-white and pretty static, too.  The British comic strips’ art lacked the quality, color and fluid dynamism of the American imp orts. Honorable exceptions were the comic book adaptations of the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV shows; Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Stingray, Fireball XL5… The optimistic 1960s view of the future that those TV Century 21 comic strips had, with all their glamorous high technology, has now dated somewhat. Ironically, what was once futuristic has now become nostalgic.  The Anderson stable did serve to get me hooked on science fiction, though. A l...

I’ve recently read “The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” by Stephen Pinker. The author’s contention is that a plethora of civilizing influences such as the rule of law replacing vendetta, humanistic education and the complex socio-political inter-relationships caused by commerce have caused a general decline in violence worldwide. Your chances of getting murdered were much more in 1700 than today. While this may be hard to believe, given the accounts of sexual assault and homicide that greet us in the daily newspapers every morning, I think that Pinker might be on to something.  To be fair, the author makes explicit that social violence has declined, but not uniformly worldwide, and is still far from completely extinct. The level of decline also depends on how evolved a society is and how far removed from tribalism it is. Pinker also makes the point that if the conditions that caused this decline are reversed, violence could well enjoy a late resurg...