Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Most people support socialism to some extent. Taking care of everyone feels right. Compassionate . Moral. Upto a point. Beyond that, it just feels parasitic. One attempt at this was through communism. The model turned out to be financially unsustainable. There was no incentive to be creative or innovative. No reward for performance. That system just doesn’t work. How about socialism funded through a capitalistic model? Can that work? That’s the model that Europe uses. So far, the results are good. But the critical question is whether they can sustain it in future? Does Europe have enough to pay for healthcare and pension even as the number of people needing it increases and the number of people contributing to that kitty decreases ? An increasing life expectancy increases the time for which people need to be taken care of. The recession has resulted in stimulus packages and bailouts. Which in turn has added huge debts to the state’s accounts. And has to be paid back. Given all th...

So much controversy surrounding the now on-hold Women’s Reservation Bill in Parliament. Is this legislation a good thing? Will it achieve the intended results? Time will tell. On a positive note, look at all the steps taken over time towards gender equality all over the world. At the work place, in sports, in the entertainment industry, in the armed forces, just to name a few areas. Women got the right to vote. To stand for elections. It’s been slow but at least there’s been some progress. Contrast that with the way most religions have treated (and often continue to treat) women. Locked them behind burqas . Condemned widows to the funeral pyre of their dead husbands. Barred them from becoming part of the clergy. Prohibited them from even reading scriptures. Banned them from certain places of worship . Left them at the mercy of triple talaq . Burnt them at the stake. Not treated a woman’s testimony as equal to a man’s. No wonder one religion even has a prayer that thanks God fo...

When it comes to explaining concepts and ideas to others, we Indians are pretty bad. I’ve wondered why that is so. One reason is ignorance. The person trying to explain or teach doesn’t understand the concept himself! But obviously, that can’t be true about everyone. How about the people who do understand the idea? Maybe they don’t want to explain . (Only) I know; therefore I am promoted, get bigger hikes and command respect . Knowledge is power. And withholding knowledge confers even greater power. For others, the reason is pettiness: when I struggled to comprehend something, why then should others get an easy ride to enlightenment? But I feel that the biggest reason is that most people have no idea how to explain things well! Why’s that? Because we almost never learnt from good text books at school. Rarely had great teachers who could explain concepts well. Most of us just learnt by rote in school and college. But that just pushes the question one level back. Why ar...

There are a lot of Indians (mostly but not only older people) who only find faults with IPL. At the heart of it, their reasons reflect the mindset many of them still have: that we can’t do anything well; that the West is better at executing ideas; that we are a poor country; and that ours is the “spiritual domain”, not the material world. The detractors complain that IPL promotes jingoism in Indians. But what exactly is wrong in feeling a sense of pride? After all, the concept has been planned, organized and executed spectacularly well. But the same people will praise China for conducting the Olympics! Another complaint is that IPL adds to players’ injuries. They’ll cite Dhoni and Gambhir as Exhibits A and B for the prosecution. But don’t injuries happen even without IPL? Didn’t Dravid break his jaw in a test match recently? And if a player is willing to risk injury, that’s his choice. Last I checked this was still a free country. These people admire the West for the freed...

Look at the state of so many sports today. In football, many European clubs are on the verge of bankruptcy. World Cup or not, does anybody even follow hockey anywhere? Name one golfer you know other than Tiger Woods. Tennis is so boring (unless you are a Federer fan). In Formula 1, many of the top manufacturers dropped out. And they had to get Michael Schumacher out of retirement to try and bring in the crowds! And then there is the IPL in stark contrast to all of the above. Consider this: we are not talking of cricket, the sport. Or even T20 in general. Just IPL, an under 2 months extravaganza once a year. Check out IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi’s confidence. He said, “ Our objective is to be the single largest sporting league in the world ”. Such naked ambition is the exact opposite of the traditional British sentiments normally associated with cricket. But can he get there? For starters, he has commercialized cricket to a level never thought possible. The IPL brand is v...

We often curse our lawmakers (politicians) for being so dumb, for not understanding complex issues, and for coming up with ad-hoc rules based on sheer ignorance. Let’s see if things are better elsewhere. Let’s start with American Congress(wo)man Eleanor Holmes Norton. Asked how Toyota handled complaints, Toyota’s President said that his engineers started by trying to duplicate the reported problem in their labs. Norton’s response? “Your answer -- we'll wait to see if this is duplicated -- is very troublesome” . I am stumped: how can an engineering company fix an issue that they cannot reproduce ? Did the Congressman not understand how engineering is done? Or was she just playing to the galleries? In UK, they have a law that allows a few other select entities to archive a copy of every printed publication in UK without being charged with copyright infringement. The reason behind that is to preserve articles for posterity. But when it comes to doing the same for British In...

Recently, lots of sites started pointing out a very old article that was published in Newsweek in 1995. Titled “ The Internet? Bah! ”, the author, Clifford Stoll, explained why he felt the Internet would never live up to its hype. So how accurate were his predictions? Stoll felt that the global bulletin boards that the Internet promised where anyone could post their views “leapfrogging editors and publishers” would only result in cacophony. His point was that if everyone was busy voicing (shouting?) their opinion, who was doing the listening? What did happen was that people started posting comments and responses to published articles. And even their opinions via blog sites. And people posted comments below those as well. If that isn’t reading and listening, what is? He also predicted that “no online database will replace your daily newspaper”. Now that one he got totally wrong. People just decided to read the information for free online rather than pay for the printed e...