{"id":451,"date":"2006-03-22T10:33:45","date_gmt":"2006-03-22T05:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/2006\/03\/22\/taste-and-tastelessness\/"},"modified":"2006-03-22T10:33:45","modified_gmt":"2006-03-22T05:03:45","slug":"taste-and-tastelessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200603\/taste-and-tastelessness\/","title":{"rendered":"Taste and tastelessness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am currently reading &#8220;The confusion&#8221; by Neal Stephenson, and I found in it  a particularly perceptive passage<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;These distinctions that you draw &#8216;tween noble and common, what is proper and what is not, seem as arbitrary and senseless to me, as the castes and customs of the Hindoos would to you,&#8221; Eliza returned.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined,&#8221; d&#8217;Avaux corrected her. &#8220;If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am currently reading &#8220;The confusion&#8221; by Neal Stephenson, and I found in it a particularly perceptive passage &#8220;These distinctions that you draw &#8216;tween noble and common, what is proper and what is not, seem as arbitrary and senseless to me, as the castes and customs of the Hindoos would to you,&#8221; Eliza returned. &#8220;It [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}