Brand Personality of a Business Newspaper

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I am attempting to create a scale to measure Brand Personality of Business Media which includes Newspaper, television and Magazines. This survey is exclusively for newspapers and therefore while giving your response please keep in mind newspapers like Economic Times, Business Line, Financial Express etc.

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Artist Hero and Rebel

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church is the way Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of the book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, puts it. Interestingly it is also the leitmotif of the life of its author James Joyce and most of his works. His mastery of the craft of writing induces him to scale newer heights in using language as an instrument and explore wider dimensions within the language through symbols and metaphors so as to enrich his works and also the body of literature in English language. His works like Dubliners, a collection of his poems, A Portrait…., Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake present this art as a wildly rising crescendo. The next work has a surrealism that was absent in the first and is succeeded by almost psychedelic fantasies in the following work. His craft finds its culmination in Finnegan’s Wake where the characters, time and place seldom remain fixed for more than a sentence. The ultimate male character appears in a wide variety of guises signaled by initials like HCE – Here Comes Everybody or in the garb of not so easily identifiable characters like Humpty Dumpty or King Mark of the Tristan. This figure merges into that of Tim Finnegan, hero of an Irish comic song about a man who arises at his own wake to share the drink and also morphed with the mythical Irish hero Finn, who is also a mountain. The character of the daughter Issy merges into virtually any young woman or splinters into groups of young women. In the novel, Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce created and followed a structure that mirrored the cycle of history which says history has a fourth phase of ricorso or return after passing through theocratic, aristocratic, democratic and chaotic phases. 

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin Ireland. His father was from merchants’ community and his mother from the Irish nationalist movement. They exercised such influence in the locality that a large area in the west of Ireland is still known as ‘the Joyce Country’. Joyce in his youth struggled with the narrow belief system of the church and society and only his precocious reading of modern and so called dangerous authors like Byron, Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen and W B Yeats instilled in him a critical attitude towards social institutions. By the time he entered university, he was permanently weaned away from Catholicism, much to the distress of his mother. Joyce had several of the poems of W B Yeats by heart and he probably veered towards prose as he feared that he could not compete with Yeats as a poet, who was seventeen years, his senior. Joyce met and in the Irish phrase ‘walked out with’ Nora Barnacle, a country girl who worked as a hotel chambermaid, in 1904 when he was all of twenty two years. She was to remain a central figure in the remainder part of his life though only in 1931 he married her so as to reconcile with his dying father. 

James Joyce is arguably the most influential modern writer in the western world. His influence on writers of all genres, from traditional to wildly experimental has been decisive. Though his Ulysses has evoked greater amount of critical discussion, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man remains the most widely read work and is among the most frequently taught novels in the modern university curriculum. Most under graduates though discover this novel on their own as Stephen Daedalus as a sensitive youth with remarkable self-involvement and continuous frustration under the authority of state, religion and parents, gets transfigured before their eyes by the idea of beauty.

Words move us, Sentences thrill.

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Germany – The Pure, The superior and An Inquiry

‘The Nameless One’ is an unlikely title for Napolean. This title was given by the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It was borne out of dashed hopes from the French revolution. Fichte (fikh-tuh) as he is called admired the revolution and clung to his hopes in France for much longer than many of his compatriots. As late as 1799, he writes: ‘It is clear that from now on only the French Republic can be the fatherland of the man of integrity, that only to it can he devote his energies; for from now on not only the dearest hopes of humanity but even its existence depend upon its  victory’. Napolean’s crowning as emperor was the last nail in the coffin of his hopes. 

Germany was at the centre of Europe and also at the heart of humanity. It was also in an impotent state then. Under Napolean’s rule, it was often called ‘poor in deeds but rich in thought’. The extraordinary blossoming of German literature, philosophy and poetry at the close of 18^th century bears testimony to this statement. Germany did not want to triumph with sword, but with the light of knowledge and understanding. If the goal of humanity were to be reached by advancement of science, Germans had just begun to possess science and therefore one could serve the cause of humanity as a whole by serving just the German cause.  

Fichte though was not the first to espouse Germany’s destiny, he was surely the most articulate, systematic and eloquent. His argument of German being a unique race, rested first on its language. German language alone, in his view, represented a preserved history. All other European languages lost their original identity when they came in contact with Latin and assumed a superficial though glamorous form. Little wonder then that French, Spanish and Italian are called Romance languages whereas German like Greek, developed uninterrupted and contained within itself a natural force that conferred upon it a remarkable ability to handle profundity and to exercise national imagination. 

Fichte’s believed that the love of fatherland was peculiar to Germans required an entirely different order of emotional investment. Only a love of fatherland can prompt people to behold the nation as terrestrial and divine, universal and particular at the same time. It made nation as manifestation of the divine and made it exist also in the pure realm of thought thus giving it an originality of life. Germany as a country answered basic needs of people that are normally answered by religion, the desire for eternity, the impulse to leave behind a trace of oneself in this world, the need for transcendence. 

Fichte was born to a lowly though literate weaver in 1762 in Saxony and was soon patronized by a local aristocrat for his precociously gifted nature. The turning point of his life was when he stumbled upon Immanuel Kant in 1791 which in his words revolutionized his thinking. He became a leading interpreter of Kant and was invited to University of Jena. He published the masterpiece of his life, wissenschaftslehre (The Science of Knowledge) in 1794. It dealt with source, limits and objects of human knowledge. In 1810, University of Berlin is established and Fichte becomes its first Rector.

Fichte died in 1814 of typhoid fever at the age of 51. In 51 years of his life, he gave a purpose to nations of the world that the eternal and the divine may flourish in this world and never cease to become ever more pure, perfect and excellent. More significantly, he prepared Germany to play the role of the pivot on which the world will balance itself. Little wonder then that he exhorted to the germans, “If you sink, all humanity sinks with you”.

The Mind of God

Yesterday we remember well but that is not the case with tomorrow. Quite strangely and disappointingly the theories that govern our life are valid regardless of past or future and yet they do not allow us to know what is going to happen tomorrow.  If we could travel across time, probably this will be likely, but is time travel really possible? 

Who can forget the imaginative and yet depressing novel of H G Wells, the Time Machine, which takes the Time Traveler to 802701 AD. Physics and Mathematics are not silent on this topic. The most beautiful and illuminating essay comes from the greatest living physicist Stephen Hawking, titled Arrow of Time. The universe is moving from Order to Disorder, from Past to Future and is continuously expanding. These three movements and their direction are represented by Thermodynamic Arrow, Psychological Arrow and Cosmological Arrow respectively. 

A jigsaw puzzle has only one ordered state but several states of disorder. The tendency is always to be in a state with greater disorder and a special effort is needed to arrive at the complete picture, which is only one. A broken cup on the floor has greater disorder than a tea-cup on the table. This is thermodynamic arrow according to which with time, we will see greater disorder. It is difficult to say much about human memory as it relates to brain and we know precious little about it. However we do know about the functioning of a computer which can safely be assumed to be like a human brain. When data is ordered in the computer or any application is processed, a certain energy is required which in turn is dissipated in the form of heat and sound in some cases. This further increases the disorder in the universe and also implies that thermodynamic and psychological arrows are one and the same. 

The universe would have started with sudden and explosive expansion which we call Big Bang and the fragments of cosmos are scattered across the space thus forming galaxies and stars and beings like us, also increasing the disorder from the ordered state of one cosmic egg.  That disorder increases with expanding universe is not difficult to answer, given our understanding of thermodynamic arrow. The expanding universe also provides sufficient conditions for intelligent life to exist. A contracting universe is like being in a black hole where before you try to remember your past or future, you will turn in to spaghetti. 

Stephen Hawking was born in Oxford on 8^th January 1942, 300 years after the death of Galileo and is today considered to be the greatest scientific thinker since Newton and Einstein. He studied physics at Oxford University and pursued graduate and doctoral studies at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He did not do very well in his early education at Oxford and at a point of time had to undergo an oral examination. His physics tutor Robert Berman remarked about the examination “And of course the examiners then were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far more clever than most of themselves”. 

Stephen Hawking was unlucky to get ALS or Motor Neuron Disease. He is now almost completely paralyzed and communicates through a speech generating device. He frequently posed questions to himself, what do we know about the universe and how do we know it? Where did it come from and where is it going? Did it have a beginning and what happened before then? What is the nature of time, will it ever come to an end? These questions bewildered him and he wanted to make sense of what he saw around him. He is currently working towards creating a Grand Unified Theory that explains everything. He believes that if he is able to find it, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason and then, we would know the mind of God.

A Victorious Submission

"If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined”, said Pyrrhus in 280 BC after their war against the Romans. A victory that brings enormous losses of life and limb and property and leaves little to cheer about is called Pyrrhic victory.  One such victory happened long time ago, when one of India’s greatest Kings, Ashoka, waged a war against the kalinga. This victory was to create a new ideal for Kings to live up to and today, more than two thousand years later, there are only handfuls in the world history who can claim to be treated at par. 

Victory makes us rejoice and defeat, pensive. With King Ashoka, it was just the opposite. As he went through the battle ground and the cities, he saw only corpses and burnt houses and uttered the famous monologue:

What have I done? If this is a victory, what's a defeat then? Is this a victory or a defeat? Is this justice or injustice? Is it gallantry or a rout? Is it valor to kill innocent children and women? Do I do it to widen the empire and for prosperity or to destroy the other's kingdom and splendor? One has lost her husband, someone else a father, someone a child, someone an unborn infant.... What's this debris of the corpses? Are these marks of victory or defeat? Are these vultures, crows, eagles the messengers of death or evil?

And something changed in him, and with him changed the course of India. He abandoned warfare in the full tide of victory. He embraced the tenets of Buddhism and devoted himself to the spread of Buddha’s teachings. His messengers went far off places like Syria, Egypt, Macedonia, Cyrene, Epirus and also to Burma, Siam and Ceylon. Everywhere an appeal was made to mind and the heart and yet it was only an appeal and there was no compulsion. He showed respect and consideration for all other faiths and proclaimed in an edict ‘All sects deserve reverence for one reason or another. By thus acting a man exalts his own sect and at the same time does service to the sects of other people’. We hear a similar voice again almost one thousand years later in India, the voice of Akbar. Indeed it was the voice of India. 

Ashoka the Great was born in 304 BC to King Bindusara in Pataliputra, now Patna. He was grandson of Chandragupta Maurya. He became King in 274 BC and his reign lasted till 232 BC. His empire stretched from Afghanistan to Assam, Myanmar and Bangladesh, from Central Asia to Tamil Nadu. This has been the largest spread of Indian empire ever. Neither the Mughal Empire nor the British Empire was as big in administrative influence. And nothing of it changed, when he took to the path of love and renounced war. Ashoka died in 232 BC after ruling strenuously for forty one years. Of him H G Wells says in his Outline of History:

Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and graciousness and serenities and royal highness and the like, the name of Ashoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan his name is still honored. China, Tibet and even India, though it has left his doctrine, preserve the tradition of his greatness. More living men cherish his memory today than have ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne.