Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The RTI Act (Right to Information gave anyone the right to ask for information & the government had to respond to it. Within certain limits and categories, of course. Plus, it forced every public authority to computerize their records for wide dissemination and to proactively publish certain categories of information so that the citizens need minimum recourse to request for information formally. But is providing access to information enough to empower people? No, says Mike Gurstein who analyzed the impact of the digitization of land records in Bangalore: “Their findings were that newly available access to land ownership and title information in Bangalore was primarily being put to use by middle and upper income people and by corporations to gain ownership of land from the marginalized and the poor. The newly digitized and openly accessible data allowed the well-to-do to take the information provided and use that as the basis for instructions to land surveyors and lawyer...

Recently, there was news that the Indian government wants to write its own operating system (OS) for use in national security contexts. The belief is that it would be proprietary and hence harder for hackers and terrorists to break into to steal data. While there is no guarantee it will come through or be better at security than what’s in use today, it does raise interesting possibilities. America has a history of items developed for defense purposes that eventually got used in the civilian domain. The most famous example of that is the Internet itself which was designed as a structure/format using which American installations could communicate even after a Soviet nuclear attack. Given India’s increasing tendency to copy/paste everything from the US (the good, the bad and the ugly), here’s hoping we too create similar spillover effects from military into civilian areas. Whether or not this OS effort succeeds.

Guys don’t get what gals feel. Women say the reason for that is we guys are insensitive. But I think the real reason is to be found in the book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix . Check out this passage: “Don’t you understand how Cho’s feeling at the moment?” she asked. “No,” said Harry and Ron together. Hermione sighed and laid down her quill. “Well, obviously, she’s feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying. Then I expect she’s feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can’t work out who she likes best. Then she’ll be feeling guilty, thinking it’s an insult to Cedric’s memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she’ll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry. And she probably can’t work out what her feelings toward Harry are anyway, because he was the one who was with Cedric when Cedric died, so that’s all very mixed up and painful. Oh, and she’s afraid she’s going to be thr...

The idea of “ comparative advantage ” is very counter-intuitive. Popularized by David Ricardo, it says that free trade can work to everyone’s advantage even when one participant is more efficient/cheaper than the other on every parameter. I saw a very good explanation of how that’s possible in a TED talk by Matt Ridley . He showed this picture of two guys, Adam and Oz, and how long each takes to make a spear and an axe: As you saw above, Oz is faster at making both spears and axes. So it would appear that Oz wouldn’t benefit through any interaction (trade) with Adam since he (Oz) is faster on both fronts: spears and axes. So there’s nothing to be gained through trade in such a scenario, right? Wrong, says the comparative advantage theory. Here’s why. See the picture below to see what happens if Oz makes 2 spears and Adam makes 2 axes: You have to look closely to see what each of them gained: Time! By splitting it this way and then swapping items, each still gets a spear and an ax but...

So many people place way too much emphasis on intent . It sometimes even reaches a stage where they ignore the success or failure of what was intended! Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, pointed out the problem with that misplaced emphasis when he made this comment about NGO’s: “I am relatively negative on most N.G.O.’s and their effectiveness . I am not negative on their intentions .” I sometimes wonder whether that overdone focus on intentions is partly a cultural thing. Doesn’t the Bhagwad Gita tell us to focus on the act and not on the reward? Sure, going to the other end of the spectrum and focusing only on the success/reward isn’t good either. The ongoing (or just ended, depending on who you ask) Recession is an example of what results from the other extreme. That said, if we want the lives of the poorest to improve, it is important to focus on the methods that work. Rather than terming every sincere attempt as p...

When I was a kid, one of my aunts used to send clippings of newspaper or magazine articles that she found interesting. I don’t remember any of those clippings (maybe I was too young or maybe the topic didn’t interest me), but it got me thinking on how easy it is to share articles that you like today. You can send it via e-mail. Or you could put a link to that article on Facebook or Twitter. You can even recommend an article to people you don’t even know with recommendation sites like Digg and Delicious . I remember reading this very amusing article on the wicked character in Indian soaps recently. I read it at office; so obviously, I couldn’t cut out the article. Solution? Google for the article, copy/paste it and send it to whoever I wanted. Of course, the downside of all this is that we can broadcast every article we like. Which may feel like spam to the receiver (I am pretty sure I am guilty on that front). Unlike the old days when people sent the article by snail m...

The preparations for the Commonwealth Games have been a complete and utter disaster. Footbridges and false ceilings collapsed even before the games had started. A budget overshoot by a factor of 30 times; you can imagine the scale of corruption. On the other hand, there’s the Goldman Sachs prediction about India becoming the world’s 3 rd largest economy by 2050. How exactly do we manage to be so corrupt, so incompetent and so behind schedule on so many fronts and yet seem to be racing ahead overall? Despite the corruption and inefficiencies that are so obvious, why are so many (foreigners and Indians alike) still confident about India’s growth prospects? Part of the answer seems to be the faith in the private sector. Not just in getting the work done but increasingly even in funding it! Take infrastructure funding, for example. Around 50% of every incremental rupee in Indian infrastructure is being funded by the private sector. Case in point: IDFC just launched an infrastructur...