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(Update [March 3]: I am now providing full RSS feeds on all the sections of the new site, as well as a combined one across the site. More details here. In brief, the feed for the India Uncut Blog is http://feeds.feedburner.com/IUB. (Bloglines users, click here.) And the combined feed for the site is http://feeds.feedburner.com/indiauncut-full. (Bloglines.)

After much delay, let me finally invite you to the new India Uncut!

I first discussed the blueprint of this site with MadMan, who has designed and programmed it, in March last year. Immense procrastination ensued, largely on my part, but we finally got round to working on it a couple of months ago. A brief introduction to each of its sections follows below, taken from my detailed note on how this site came to be and what it contains, “About India Uncut.”

1] The India Uncut Blog: This will be, for all practical purposes, a continuation of the original India Uncut, with fewer links posts, and more comment and personal blogging. I continue to be its sole author.

2] Linkastic: This is a filter blog, whose purpose is to save you time by bringing you some of the most interesting stuff to read on the internet, across a range of categories. The idea: if you come here three times every day, you will find many new things to read every time. If even one of them interests you, your visit is worthwhile.

This will be a group blog, and besides myself, its contributors are Gautam, MadMan, Prabhu and Sanjeev Naik. I intend to expand the list to around eight to ten people. (Update [March 3]: Yazad Jal, Patrix, Ravages, Arzan Sam Wadia and Gaurav Mishra have also joined.)

3] Rave Out: In this blog, the contributors write short, succinct pieces on books or films or albums, focussing only on what they love. Life is too short to write negative things about stuff we don’t like, and there’ll be none of that here. Only the most joyous, uplifting, enlightening, thought-provoking, sexy works of art will be written about here, purely for the pleasure of being able to share something one feels passionate about.

The contributors, besides me, are Arun Simha, Chandrahas Choudhury, Falstaff, Jai Arjun Singh, KM, Nilanjana S Roy, PrufrockTwo and Sonia Faleiro. This list will also expand a bit. (Update (March 3): Amitava Kumar has joined up.)

4] Workoutable: Quizzing is one of my passions, though I’m not particularly good at it. I believe, as do many many fellow quizzers on at least the Mumbai and Pune circuits, that a good quiz question isn’t just about knowledge, but about problem-solving. Even if you don’t know the answer to a particular question, you should have a chance of working it out from clues given in the question. Every day we shall feature a question of that sort in this section. Its contributors include many stalwarts from the Mumbai and Pune quizzing circuits, and once a group of regulars firms up, I shall post the names here.

5] Extrowords: I enjoy making crosswords, and will be doing daily crosswords—barring Sundays—in this section. They will be themed crosswords, with themed words highlighted in each puzzle, and will be generally easy to solve. You need Java for this section, and if you don’t already have it on your computer, you can download it here. The first installment of Extrowords is themed around Indian bloggers, so go solve it!

Phew. The Blogspot version of India Uncut had a hard-to-achieve Pagerank of 7, which will no doubt take some time to reach on the new site. Also, I have no idea how this will impact my top position on the Blogstreet charts. But I’m excited, and I hope you like this development. If you’re reading this on your RSS feed, please do visit the new site and check it out. Do add me to your blogroll or update the existing link — I need to prepare a blogroll for my site as well, which is one of the pendings tasks I have. This site will be in Beta for a while, and we’ll still be adding stuff to it.

Feel free to write in with your feedback, immense joy will come!

A shorter version of this piece was published today as the second installment of my column, Thinking it Through, in Mint. The first is here.

Often when I argue with friends, or on the internet, I am dismayed by how intransigent some people are. No matter how many facts I throw before them, or how solid my reasoning is, I simply cannot convince them of my point of view. No doubt they feel the same about me. “He refuses to listen to reason,” they think, even as I bemoan how unreasonable they are.

This is not a phenomenon peculiar to me: we live in deeply polarised times, and around half the world believes that the other half ignores reason altogether. Well, it is my belief that we overestimate reason to begin with. The Scottish Philosopher David Hume once described reason as “the slave of the passions,” and I believe that much of the time when we feel we are being reasonable, we are actually rationalising conclusions we have already arrived at, positions that we already hold.

An excellent illustration of how our mind does this comes from neuroscience. In the 1960s, neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry carried out a series of experiments on patients with split-brain epilepsy. A common treatment for such patients used to be to sever the corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. This effectively splits the brain into two: rational thought is carried out by the left hemisphere, but the two halves of the brain stop being aware of the happenings the other half.

Describing the experiments in his book, “The Blank Slate,” Steven Pinker wrote of how “the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behaviour chosen without its knowledge by the right.” One example: the experimenters would flash the word “walk” in the visual field of the right hemisphere. The patient would get up and start walking. But when asked why he did so, his left brain, which would be unaware of what the right brain had seen, and would effectively be doing the replying, gave answers such as “to get a coke.” The remarkable thing is that the patients actually believed their explanation, even though the conscious mind arrived at it after the unconscious mind prompted the body to start walking.

Pinker called the conscious mind “a spin doctor, not the commander in chief,” while Gazzaniga referred to the left brain as “the interpreter.” In his book, “Phantoms in the Brain,” VS Ramachandran wrote, “[t]he left hemisphere’s job is to create a belief system or model and to fold new experiences into that belief system. If confronted with some new information that doesn’t fit the model, it relies on Freudian defence mechanisms to deny, repress or confabulate – anything to preserve the status quo.”

In other words, the left brain’s job to to make sense of the world and build a coherent worldview. This isn’t easy. The world is full of complicated phenomena, and the most intelligent among us would not be able to make sense of it all if we tried to place each disparate event in its proper perspective. We would be perpetually bewildered.

To deal with this, our brains evolved to seek patterns in everything. Michael Shermer, in his book “How We believe,” wrote: “Those who were best at finding patterns (standing upwind of game animals is bad for the hunt, cow manure is good for the crops) left behind the most offspring.” Of course, while we are especially good at seeking patterns in everything, not all patterns are meaningful, and many simply come from confusing correlation with causation. Thus, a cricketer who makes a century when he happens to have a red handkerchief in his pocket may carry that handkerchief with him for the rest of his career.

Indeed, this explains religion. For much of our existence, science hasn’t been around (or able) to answer the big questions of the day. We’d have gone mad thinking about it all if we didn’t have religion to give us ready-made patterns that explained everything. Similarly, in the modern world, we have all kinds of belief systems that help make sense of the world around us, and provide us with cognitive shortcuts to think about the world.

When these belief systems are attacked, it is natural for us to not want to have to rethink them. As an economist would say, that would be inefficient, wasting too much time and energy. Thus, various kinds of defence mechanisms originate for this purpose, such as the confirmation bias, which is a tendency to consider only evidence that fits our existing beliefs. A believer in astrology would do this, for example, by considering all correct predictions by an astrologer to be proof of its validity, while ignoring the ones that turn out false.

And indeed, this is why most arguments, especially about politics and economics, are so frustrating. If both sides have firm beliefs, they stand little chance of convincing the other person, for most reasoned argument in such cases is rationalisation couched as reason. The next time you get into one of those arguments, and witness one of them, you will actually be able to observe this happening. The delight of it all is that the people involved will not be aware of this process, and will honestly believe themselves to be open-minded individuals who are, well, thinking it through. But that is mostly self-deception.

Or so it would seem. Joy.

And to think that’s where so many middle-aged, pot-bellied Indians go for some action. “Bangkok? Oh, there’s a conference there, darling. You’ll get bored.”

(Link via email from Gautam John.)

No, I’m not making any untoward suggestion to you, dear reader, but merely proposing a geographical expedition. You see, there are eight cities in the US named Climax: in Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Alabama and Pennsylvania also have Intercourse, and I wonder if the road to Climax leads through there.

Now you know why we have so many Indians applying for the H1B visa every year. Land of opportunity my foot!

(Link via email from Arjun Narayan, who blogs on it here.)

Indian cinema never ceases to amaze me. Watch this:

Can they do that in Hollywood? Huh? Huh?

(Link via email from Naveen Mandava.)

Nanubhai Desai relates at the Indian Economy Blog how he went to a lunch meeting with a bunch of Indian MPs, and someone asked them:

To what extent is bad governance retarding growth and poverty reduction? And what specific steps do you think Parliament can take to change that over the coming years?

At this point Sachin Pilot asked for the mike and said:

We are part of the problem… and hopefully, we can be part of the solution.

Bang on about the diagnosis, but I’m not sure I share Pilot’s optimism about the treatment. Even if a handful of politicians are sincere and want change, there is little chance of parliament coming together to reform a system from which they benefit. As long as their main incentives are money or power, Indian politicians will not reform our system of governance.

Or do you think that there is a chance that some of the younger politicians, who come from political families and were born to money and power, are driven differently? We shall see.

In an article in the Guardian titled “Subcontinental shift,” Kathleen McCaul examines a new trend of Indian writers who are choosing to write while remaining in India, instead of going abroad. As far as I’m concerned, vocation matters more than location.

Having got that smartass copywriter line out of the way, let me point you to the most delightful headline ever: “Man in contention for romantic novel prize.”

The horror!

No power on earth can stop me from clicking furiously on headlines that say: “Learn to speak English in 10 days flat!” This particular story is about “Jacob Nettikkadan, a 68-year-old philologist,” who claims to have perfected an especially fast way of teaching English. The gentleman is quoted as saying:

In 10 days, the learner gets 10 times more knowledge in the language because the method of constructing 1,877 types of sentences in English is through 1,877 usages of verb - one type of sentence based on one usage of verb.

Joy. If that’s the kind of English they learn…

I can’t help but share this romantic tale with you:

Surendra (25) and Poonam (23) Gupta seemed like just another newly-wed couple going on their honeymoon when they boarded the train to Goa on February 5.

However, two days later, while Surendra, a product executive with a pharma company, was found in an unconscious state in Goa, Poonam was found in a similar condition at Kalyan station.

Now, a week after the incident, both are accusing the other of trickery.

Have a good day, and don’t do anything silly!