The tyranny of the half-knowing

Time of India

2 days ago

As the Business Head for The Times of India, I lead strategic initiatives and drive growth for one of the nation's most influential media organisations. My journalist friends believe I've crossed over to the proverbial dark side. Living on the edges of a dynamic newsroom, I dabble infrequently into these times that we live and believe in the spectatorial axiom – 'distance provides perspective'. LESS ... MORE
There's a certain species of startup savant who walks into a room, eyes blazing with conviction, and says, 'I've thought of this, so it must be a problem worth solving.'
And just like that, the room adjusts its moral compass.
But often, I find myself surrounded by people greatly learned in parts but ignorant overall—a paraphrase of Alexander Pope's 'a little learning is a dangerous thing,' except here the danger is not malice, but misplaced certainty.
They quote Kahneman before reading him. They seek 'first principles' with all the sincerity of a WhatsApp forward. What they chase is not truth, but validation—preferably with a pitch deck. The trouble, of course, isn't ignorance. It's the unwillingness to admit it.
'The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.' — Stephen Hawking
A few weeks ago, someone pitched me a product that aimed to 'redefine curiosity.' Yes, redefine. The room nodded. I blinked. I asked: 'Is the problem that people are not curious, or that your investors aren't?' Silence. Then pivot. Always a pivot.
This is not to dunk on startups—some of the most elegant truths emerge from fog. But fog must be acknowledged. We live in an age where defining the 'problem' is often a post-hoc rationalization of the 'solution' one stumbled into on a Red Bull high.
'We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.' — Marshall McLuhan
Nowhere is this more visible than in founders trying to solve for things they haven't experienced—trying to rewire empathy through APIs. It's like building bridges without visiting rivers. Sometimes, the best thing one can do is say: 'I don't know what I'm solving yet.'
That's not a weakness. That's the beginning of wisdom. Tangential thought? Maybe. Midlife crisis? Possibly. Or maybe, like Sahir wrote:
'Tang aa chuke hain kashmakash-e-zindagi se hum
Thukra na dein jahan ko kahin be-dili se hum…'
We're just tired of the noise. Of the breathless problem-statements chasing VC dollars with the intensity of a headline. Perhaps what we crave now is clarity. Or at least the grace to say we don't have it.
And then there are the engineers.
No, not the steam-and-brick ones who built bridges and broke their backs. I mean the clean-palmed coders who now build 'systems' to fix life.
To an engineer, every problem has a root cause—and preferably, a GitHub repo. They're trained to break the universe into modules: authentication, caching, payment gateway, healing. Life, in this world, is just a stack of services with failing dependencies. So when something goes wrong—say, a breakup, a war, a failing democracy—they say: 'Let's isolate the bug.'
'If only we had tracked the metrics better. If only we'd added a validation layer. If only we'd decoupled emotions from logic.' What they don't see is that not everything in life scales. Not everything has unit tests. And—most inconveniently—not everything has causality.
Often, causality is what we reverse-engineer in hindsight to make peace with chaos. Your friend got divorced? Must be because they didn't schedule enough 'date nights.' The startup failed? Must be because of poor onboarding UX. Maybe. Or maybe life just threw a dice and laughed.
'The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.' — Hegel
(Wisdom arrives after the fact. If at all.)
Engineers want neat edges. But most of life happens at the margins—where your logic tree runs out of branches and you're left staring into the grey, wondering why the deployment of your best intentions failed.There is no rollback. No clean patch. Just versions of yourself you can't merge anymore. Edge cases? That's where the story actually is.
I once asked a brilliant coder why he never liked reading fiction. 'Because it's not real,' he said.
'Neither is your API documentation,' I muttered. But fiction, poetry, Sahir, Faiz—they teach you about the fog. About probabilities without guarantees. About living with questions. The engineers will call this soft. I call it honest.
Maybe what we need today is a few more poets in product. A few more playwrights in boardrooms.
Someone who can stare at a dashboard and say: 'There's no pattern here. And that's not a bug—it's life.'
Startups are obsessed with MVPs.
Minimum Viable Product.
But maybe what we need more urgently… is MVI: Minimum Viable Insight. Not a market fit, but a moment of honesty.
And in that spirit, one final Sahir couplet—an echo to leave in the glass-and-chrome war rooms:
'ज़िंदगी सिर्फ़ हक़ीक़त नहीं, ख़्वाब भी है
दिल को खोने न दे, होश को जाने न दे…'
(Life isn't just reality, it's dreams too—
Don't let your heart be lost. But don't let awareness slip either.)
Debug that.
Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author's own.