Viswanathan K's Thoughts

It was Wembley, 1966 all over again. This time, though, the decision went in favour of the Germans. Goal scored but (this time) not given by the referee/linesman. Did that decision change the course of the match? That, of course, is debatable. Some would say that because the goal was not given, England threw everyone into attack; and when the Germans counter-attacked, there was nobody at the back to defend. Others would say Germany was the better team and would have won in any case. But let’s leave aside the exact impact of that decision on this particular match. The Americans use technology to make decisions in (American) football and basketball. Apparently, their fans have enough to argue and discuss in terms of who should have played and what strategy should have been adopted! Sports like cricket and tennis use Hawk-Eye to trace the ball’s trajectory to predict where the ball would have gone or landed. Is that perfect? Obviously not; but at least, it is consistent to both teams. B...

When you think of the ongoing World Cup, what comes to your mind? The French team’s strike ? The pathetic referee’ing, like when Kaka got a red card ? The abuse hurled at the Jabulani football in use? Portugal’s goal feast against North Korea? Or your favourite team’s performances so far? If you said Yes to any of the above, you’d be in a microscopic minority! Most people only think (or is it hear?) of the sound of a million angry bees swarming. In other words, the instrument known as the vuvuzela . Yeah, yeah, I know. It is a part of South African culture. We should be tolerant. But come on. It drowns the sound of the fans cheering. Ever wondered what’s a World Cup without the sound of Brazilian music and drums? Well, now you know. It’s not as if this horrible instrument is played only when the play is interesting. Or boring. Or when a goal is scored. They blow on it for all 90 minutes. Of every game. Given these South Africans’ lack of knowledge or interest in what’s worth cheering...

During the Enlightenment era in Europe, many people who read a lot used to maintain a “ commonplace book ”. Commonplace what? That was the practice of noting down interesting passages from one’s reading. How’s that different from a scrapbook, you ask? Well, it’s what they did next that made things interesting. They created systems to index the commonplace book’s contents. But not just an ordinary alphabetical index. Instead, they created systems of indexing with a large degree of order and a small degree of chaos. Like John Locke’s system of placing an item using its first letter and first subsequent vowel (instead of its second letter). Thus EPISTOLA would be placed under E. i. (‘E’ being its first letter, ‘i’ the first vowel after the first letter). That seems weird. What’s the point of such a system? It resulted in unrelated topics being listed next to each other. Which would sometimes result in finding unexpected new links of association between topics. But does anyone do anything ...

Marshall McLuhan once said, “The medium is the message”. That sounds wrong at first. Our gut feeling is that content is more important than the medium. What McLuhan meant was that the medium has a far bigger role than we realize. It’s not as if the message isn’t important; just that the medium has a far greater impact on the nature and scale of the change it brings about. To get McLuhan’s point, you have to compare the world before and after that particular medium came into existence. McLuhan himself used books as an example to explain his point. To start with, books gradually led to the standardization of language (After all, if everyone spoke a different variant, it wouldn’t be easy to read the same book). Next, since books are read page by page, it led people to start describing things in a sequential format. Broadcast of instructions suddenly became possible. And that in turn enabled the coming of the Mechanical Age where workers had to follow a fixed set of instruction...

The football World Cup started when the President of FIFA , Jules Rimet , invited nations to play in a ‘football Olympics’. 13 nations agreed. It came to be called the Jules Rimet Trophy and was first played in 1930 in Uruguay. Why Uruguay? One reason was that it was willing to pick up all the travelling costs. And that was important given that the Great Depression was on! The 1934 and 1978 editions were politicized. Mussolini ruled Italy during the 1934 World Cup. He understood the propaganda potential and left no stone unturned to give his Azzuri an advantage, even recruiting several Argentinians. Many countries didn ’t want Argentina to be hosts of the 1978 edition since it was then under military rule and political killings were commonplace. In both instances, the host nation won the tournament. And then there’s Brazil, the country synonymous with football. Samba Futbol gained center stage in 1958, thanks to the all conquering Brazilians and Pele. Brazil went on to def...

Why doesn’t democracy work in some areas? Why are women treated as equals in others? Why are some societies tolerant? There is a tendency to attribute all such differences among people to “culture”. But that really doesn’t explain anything. It just means that’s how things have been for a long time. But the culture answer doesn’t explain why things continue to stay that way. Or even how things got to be that way. So is the c-word just a fancy way of saying we don’t know? When used to describe others, is culture just a euphemism that means another set of people is too primitive to be any different (better)? And when used to describe ourselves, is culture just a form of ancestor worship? A way to say that our ancestors came up with the best set of rules and conventions and we couldn’t possibly improve anything? Are culture and inertia two sides of the same coin? Or is culture a part of the snob mindset? Or did Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek, get it right when he w...

From ancient times, men have valued and wanted gold. As a consequence, they made a lot of effort to try and convert materials into gold. The process was called alchemy. Many legends and stories had the alchemy theme in them. The Midas Touch is the most famous instance. The Philosopher’s Stone was supposed to be able to convert anything into gold (The Philosopher’s Stone in the Harry Potter book had nothing to do with gold though). Did anyone actually succeed at alchemy though? According to Marco Polo, the answer was Yes. Kublai Khan had “mastered the art of alchemy”! Huh? Why Marco Polo came to that conclusion makes for an interesting story. Today, we take paper currency for granted. But that was not always the case. In fact, the Chinese were the first to use paper currency. During Marco Polo’s time, the Europeans still used gold or silver or other metals as currency, not paper. So when Marco Polo came to China and saw the Khan give his paper currency in return for gold with...

I read this article by Bill Bonner on how America, Europe and Japan are increasingly becoming what he calls the “submerging economies” (as in they-are-drowning-in-debt). As opposed to the “emerging economies” like China. But Bonner seems to forget where China gets its money. They make most of their money through exports. Everything you see today has a “Made in China” tag on it. Guess who is buying those goods? It’s those submerging economies. If they collapse, who does China sell to? Plus, if America does go under, nobody would accept American money. And that’s a problem for China since they hold more dollars than any country other than the US itself! 2 trillion dollars or so. Chunks of that money are invested in Uncle Sam’s bonds and stocks. All of which would be worthless if the US collapses! Chinese domestic consumption is not too big yet. If they want to offset the decrease in Western consumption, they need their people to consume more. Spend more. But the Chinese (like most Asian...