Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When a baby arrives, the new parents get a lot of help and advice. Some of that advice is wanted, others not so much; some good, others bad; some wise, others funny. As with all advice, some you can ignore safely, others you ignore at your risk. We had a lot of trouble burping the baby. My mother-in-law seemed to be able to do it effortlessly, but she couldn't teach us how. So we tried the Internet, first via articles, and when that didn't work, via a YouTube video with a woman in a German dress. And bingo! Turns out one should hit (trust me, “hit” is the right word) the baby quite hard, not pat it gently the way we were doing. My wife now says we learnt how to burp a baby from a German lady. Go globalization! Turns out a baby is far more resilient than we imagined. Like how hot the water in which you bathe her. It can be really hot, way above the temperature at which we adults would bathe, as my mom showed us. But the baby has no problems at all bathing in the (what ...

The Bhagavad Gita trial in Russia on charges of preaching religious extremism is really the trial of the Russian edition of a particular translation/commentary of it, Bhagavad Gita As It Is . So is this an instance of communist persecution of religion? Partly yes, as seen in the way Russian authorities have gone after ISKCON in the past. But also it’s a fight among religions: the charges are reportedly instigated by the Russian Orthodox Church in order to restrict the activities of ISKCON . So what is this book, Bhagavad Gita As It Is ? It is the Russian version of the ISKCON founder’s translation and commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. It was first published in, hold your breath, 1968! It has been translated into 80 languages, with over 100 million copies distributed globally till date. And nowhere else was it accused of fomenting extremism. So what did the Russians find extremist? Well, it contained claims of exclusiveness of Krishna religion, and used some unpleasant words again...

Did you think that using technology to create images started with Photoshop and other photo editors on your PC? Guess again. It happened as far as back as the 1600’s! Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, because of his improvements to the microscope and being the first to observe and describe single celled organisms, was considered to have been an expert on gadgets that used light. Jan Vermeer, a painter world-famous for his use of light and considered one of the Old Masters, was considered a good (but not great) artist until the mid 1660’s. Then Vermeer met van Leeuwenhoek, and soon his career took off. Which led some to suspect that van Leeuwenhoek gave Vermeer high quality lenses to make a camera obscura , a device that allows an artist to simply trace (or paint) an exact copy of an image. Like take The Girl with the Red Hat : Notice the light on her nose, earrings, eyes and parts of the chair? That brilliance with light was Vermeer’s speciality. And also what a camera obscura coul...

Everyone tells you how a baby changes everything. It’s hard to imagine how much until one actually arrives. You also don’t realize how much your patience can increase until the baby comes. As a kid, I used to wonder how my parents seemed to be OK to watch parts of anything on TV whereas we kids felt the world would end if we missed a minute of anything. Now I know: a baby would have changed their normal viewing to a point where they no longer expect to be able to see anything continuously! We’d wanted to see Mission Impossible 4 the weekend the baby arrived. Now we don’t know when we’ll see our next movie in a theater. Same for eating out. An uninterrupted night’s sleep is now a distant memory. The occasional puke and spit on your clothes is to be expected. Midnight feeds are now a part of life. But a baby (girl) also teaches you a lot about women. Like why women can’t communicate clearly. Now I know: a baby girl has a single sound for everything: crying. And that’s when...

Given that everyone focuses on improving efficiencies, whether at a personal level or at work, it’s interesting to know that there are some situations where things are deliberately made inefficient. And not for the slow down to smell the roses reasons, but to actually improve the overall experience! The most well-known example of a system that was deliberately made inefficient is the way the letters are organized on a keyboard (the QWERTY arrangement). Designed for the typewriter era, the idea was to slow down a typist so that he couldn’t cause the typewriter’s keys to collide and jam. Now, of course, we’re stuck with the inefficient QWERTY arrangement because that’s what everyone’s learnt and is familiar with! Even in the realm of biology and life, there are advantages to being slightly inefficient. Like the pathogens that cause diseases. If they were uber-efficient and killed their hosts too fast, then they’d die out (along with the host) before they could be transmitted t...

Looks like most people felt the same way as me about Kapil Sibal’s attempt to censor free speech on the Net. The ignorant moron, Sibal, hadn’t listed Twitter on the list of companies that he wanted to “filter” content (he doesn’t even know the list of the most popular sites where people voice their opinions, but hey, he wants the Net filtered!). Maybe someone should tell him to read Shobhaa De’s tweet: “Sibalsaab,such outrage 2 protect privacy of one ‘Madam’ in a country of 100 million internet users? We like our freedom and we shall have it!” Maybe he will throw De into prison for that. Because jail is the “right” place for anyone in favour of free speech as per the Emergency party, er, Congress party. Sonia is definitely Indira’s heir! And Sibal could be her Sanjay Gandhi. Then the enemies of India (no, not terrorists or corrupt politicians but the users of the Net) hacked the Congress party’s website on Sonia’s b’day and added porn messages. So Sibal, tell me, would Go...

When Kapil Sibal came up with this brainwave to demand that sites like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! pre-screen all user generated content to prevent “disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory” content from being posted, my first reaction was that Sibal is a moron: does he not understand that what he asks for is impossible? That the only “solution” is blocking out the Net altogether? Or is that what our great telecom minister wants? Is he anti-freedom of speech? I am in total agreement with Mike Masnick’s comment on this and similar directives in other parts of the world, including the West: “Seriously, we're seeing this kind of insanity more and more these days, where politicians, who clearly have absolutely no freaking clue about the technology they're regulating, are coming up with positively insane suggestions, with no comprehension about the ramifications.” But surely even Sibal couldn’t be that dumb. The real reason is sycophancy: here’s what he did at the meetin...

During the good old days of the cold war, the West could call a spade a spade, an enemy an enemy. Not so with the fight against terrorism where they have to call the very people who murder them their friends. So the Saudis are “friends” as are the Pakistanis. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and the Pakistanis hosted Osama bin Laden in a military town. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Well ok, you could term those as the compulsions of oil and geography (also known as the ‘supply routes to Afghanistan’). But it’s not just the American politicians who practice this charade: even Hollywood does the same. Cold war era movies often revolved around rogue Russian generals, but today, they don’t make any movie on rogue ISI or Pakistani army generals. And while Iran and North Korea are the “axis of evil”, there's deafening silence on Egypt (the other supplier of the 9/11 perpetrators). And while there is an increasing effort to build US alliances against China ...

What happens when religious institutions get involved in causes and issues that have nothing to do with religion? Like the anti-Wall Street protests in the West? Or the anti-nuclear power plant protests in Tamil Nadu? Some churches, imams and rabbis supported the ongoing protests against Wall Street and “greedy bankers”. Those who favoured the involvement justified it saying that the underlying theme of the anti-Wall Street protests was equality, charity and justice, the same ideals that religions preach. Then it got messy (like all things in the real world): the Church of England decided to evict the anti-banker protesters camping in front of St.Paul’s Cathedral. Which is when the whispering started that the church was afraid of rubbing the bankers and the rich the wrong way for fear of having funds cut off. As the protests against the Koodankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu went on, police charged a bishop and four priests for using a place of worship to organize pr...

C14 dating, as mentioned in my last blog , is based on carbon. Which means, as we learnt at school, it can only be used for dating organic materials. How then are does one find the age of inorganic (non-Carbon) materials? Like the age of the earth, for example? That makes for an interesting tale. One always associates radioactivity with terrible things like cancer, nuclear bombs and Chernobyl. And yet, it was the principle of radioactivity that helped figure out the age of the earth! Radioactivity is the decay of one element into another, along with the emission of the catastrophic radiation. The rate of decay for different radioactive materials is fixed. That property means radioactive materials can be used like clocks. The idea was simple: uranium decays into lead. So if you found the ratio of uranium to lead in really, really old rocks, you could derive the age of the earth. The devil lay in the execution of the idea. How do you find uncontaminated really, really old ...

At school, you’re told about C14 dating and how it is used to date ancient humans and their tools. So it came as surprise to learn about all the questions and criticism that surround the accuracy of this dating technique. But first, one needs to understand a bit more about the background of C14 than what’s usually taught. And the first step in that path is to learn how C14 is produced in the first place. The short version is that cosmic rays bombard the atmosphere with enough force to produce C14. And this is also where the first criticism of C14 dating starts: the earth’s magnetic field influences how many cosmic rays are deflected away from earth. Which in turn influences the amount of C14 that is produced. And here’s the kicker: the earth’s magnetic field changes over time ! In other words, the amount of C14 at different periods of time varies. So how do you know the amount of C14 that was there in a sample that’s 20,000 years old v/s 3,000 years old? When an item is...

If you look at most of the things that we do via the Internet (checking mails, accessing information, downloading freeware, sharing stuff), they have one thing in common: it’s all Free! Dig a bit deeper, and you’ll realize that companies have found (Google) or are trying to find (Facebook) ways to make money on the Net. But the rest, specially the stuff put out there by individuals, is mostly free. With no intent (or ability) to make money of it at any point . Almost sounds like socialism! But unlike, the pre-21 st century version, Socialism 2.0 is neither enforced nor an act of governments. “Digital socialism is socialism without the state”, to quote Kevin Kelly . Socialism 2.0 even does revolutions better than the Marxist version of socialism. You have no clue who is behind the revolutions in the Arab countries or the occupy Wall Street movements or the UK riots. Things are so decentralized that it makes it impossible for any government to respond. There is no face of th...

When I was a kid, we once went to a town in Algeria to see the dunes and the desert. We’d gone on top of a minaret to see the view of the place and my dad had started taking photos with his camera. A couple of French tourists were also doing the same. Suddenly, a couple of cops came up and were screaming that photography was prohibited. Turned out there was a sign but since it was in Arabic, nobody could read it. When my dad explained that to the cop, he let us off with a warning. But he was harsh with the French tourists. Much later, I understood that Algeria had been a French colony and unlike India, the Algerian struggle for independence was very violent and brutal. And so, the Algerians’ dislike for the French was extremely high. That’s in sharp contrast to the British who were both smart as well as willing to forge long term relations with almost all their former colonies. As Seth Godin wrote in his blog : “Or consider the excellent relationship that the UK has with bo...

Yeduyarappa is out on bail, so are the Satyam scamsters. Imagine that: Ramalinga Raju defrauded investors and cost so many employees their jobs, and yet he walks out. So do all politicians and rich guys get bail always? The simpletons who still believe that’s not the case cite Kanimozhi as the counter-example. Sure, when Kanimozhi was denied bail, there was lots of news channel coverage on whether the courts had (finally) decided to do the right thing. But the fact remains that most of the people who cheered the denial of bail to Kanimozhi did so because they have such low faith in the judicial system that they felt eventually she’ll walk out free with a not guilty verdict, so whatever time she spends in jail is an unexpected bonus. So is there any politician who might not get the Get Out of Jail Free card? It seems to depend on geography. If a politician is ever imprisoned in the state where he wields influence, he’ll be out in no time. Kanimozhi must be wishing she’d been h...

When Mamata Banerjee started yelling against the petrol price hike, I thought, “God! Is this woman insane or what?!”. As a sort of challenge, I decided I’d try and find something positive to say about her by the end of the blog. Even though she’s part of the ruling coalition, she didn’t attend the EGoM meeting where it was decided to deregulate petrol prices. I am guessing her attendance record at EGoM meetings must be similar to most MPs’ attendance in Parliament! If she didn’t understand what the word “deregulation” means, she should have asked. She had plenty time to learn what the term meant: after all, the decision to deregulate petrol prices wasn’t made recently (it was made in June last year). Didi apparently decided that ignorance is bliss. Typical. I guess it’s too much to ask this genius CM of Bengal to look at some figures of the extent of losses on the still-regulated fuels like diesel, kerosene and LPG (she could ask the center or search the Internet, but I...

I saw this caption to an article on the Net about the floods in Thailand: “Thailand is 20% underwater, and is second-biggest hard drive producer after China. Now do you care about the floods?” Provocative caption indeed. Do we always need to be told how something affects us before we care? The answer’s not that simple. Sometimes, there are too many other tragedies and accidents closer home for us to care about something far away. At other times, the news we see is too vague: we don’t know how many died. Or how many are stranded without food or medicines. And sometimes, it’s just too tiring and draining to feel or care about everybody’s problems. Dan Ariely wrote about a county in the US where firefighters are not available on-call to everyone . Instead, the right to firefighters is only for those who an annual “premium”. So when a house (whose owner hadn’t paid the fee) caught fire, the firefighters refused to come douse the fire. They finally came only when the neighbour’s ...

It seems to be the general trend in everything. The microprocessor-software combo seems to do most things that was done by humans much faster and way better. Except language. That’s one area that still resists the tech juggernaut. Items related to language, like translations and speech, seem too tough to crack. Let’s start with translation. Word Lens , an app developed for the iPhone, became very famous due to videos like this: Point your phone, take a picture and voila! The translated text appears. Awesome, isn’t it (even if it only worked between English and Spanish)? People certainly thought so and shelled out money to buy the app. Which is when the complaints started: the translations weren’t always right. Nor were they context sensitive. Google Translate creates and scans (massive) databases, and then applies algorithms to decide (guess?) which words mean the same thing in different languages. Now Google’s taken it to the next level by combing translations with speech recognition:...

Academics and even science seem to place a great deal of weightage on opinions of the big names. Like, in the 1920’s, when Ralph Kronig proposed an interpretation of quantum spin, he ran his paper by 2 big-shots, Neils Bohr and Pauli. Both dismissed the idea. And so Kronig did not publish his paper. A couple of other scientists did publish the same idea and walked away with the glory. Kronig was furious and cursed physicists “who are always so damned sure of, and inflated with, the correctness of their opinion”. In private, Bohr said that Kronig “was a fool”, who should have published if he had been that sure. Easier said than done. In the academic and scientific worlds, a nod from a bigwig is necessary to get published. Kronig wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting published once it was known that both Pauli and Bohr had rejected his paper. Fast forward to today. Were things any different nowadays, I wondered? Has the Internet changed the way scientific papers are published...

Pluto has the dubious distinction of being the only one that got thrown out of the Planets Club. So why did Pluto get downgraded? It wasn’t a simple case of the telescopes back in those days not being sophisticated enough (although that did play its role too). Rather, people were looking for a planet. Why were they looking for one? Well, because Uranus’ orbit appeared to be disturbed in the 1840’s. They suspected another planet beyond Uranus was the culprit. And thus they found Neptune. On further analysis, it looked as if Neptune couldn’t have done it alone. And hence the hunt for another planet started. Percival Lowell (of the family referred to in the ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while the Cabots spoke only to God) assigned his observatory to finding Planet X, as it was called then. Clyde Tombaugh found Planet X after Lowell’s death. And that’s why Pluto got to be called a planet. Then the questions sta...

I’ve never understood this obsession many have with evaluating a writer’s personal life. Like it has any relation to their work. With a new Tintin movie ready for release ( The Adventures of Tintin ), the latest guy to get judged in this manner is Hergé . For his collaboration with the Nazis . And for writing a very racist Tintin ( Tintin in the Congo ). So much so, that they don’t even show it on the list of Tintin books anymore! So have people stopped buying Tintin’s for their kids, to voice their protest? No, but that doesn’t stop them from criticizing him. Others like to bring up Wodehouse’s broadcasts on behalf of the Nazis . Did that make his novels less funny? Do you laugh less at Bertie Wooster’s crazy adventures because of that? Does it make his language any less brilliant? Or take the endless discussions as to who wrote Shakespeare’s works. One author or multiple authors , would we quote Shakespeare (knowingly or unknowingly) any less for that? It seems such a...

Open up a car or a generator and it’s easy to see what Jack Zylkin, creator of the USB Typewriter (see pic below) calls the “muggle magic of gears and pulleys and solenoids fitting together in perfect harmony”. Zylkin says one can’t see the same magic upon opening electronic gadgets up. True, but just because you can’t “see” the harmony in your phone or laptop doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In any case, is it even worth anybody’s time to design an electronics gadget very well? After all, electronic items are born and die at Mach speed. It’s like evolution on steroids. I find the combination of a digital tablet with an analog typewriter amusing: after all, the QWERTY keyboard was designed specifically to slow down typists (so that a fast typist on a typewriter wouldn’t cause the keys to collide), while pretty much every keyboard on a phone or a tablet today tries to speed up typing by predicting words as you type! Stone Age, meet the Digital Age.

I’ve read 2 different sets of people not agreeing entirely with some of Anna’s proposals. And no, I don’t refer to the politicians and bureaucrats. It came from other quarters and surprisingly, they gave reasons rather than just shouting in some stupid TV show. The first instance was from a financial paper, the Wall Street Journal (India edition). Their reasons were two-fold: first, they asked whether it made more sense to knock off the existing system and replace it with what the Lokpal wants rather than having two parallel, bloated, bureaucratic/policing, expensive systems? WSJ’s second argument was that the Lokpal addresses the symptoms (corruption) rather than the root causes (why is their corruption in the first place?). In WSJ’s opinion, the root cause is the red tape that surrounds everything, that takes forever to decide or execute anything, that places discretionary power in the hands of the politicians and the bureaucrats. WSJ’s preferred solution? Reduce the red tape. The ot...

From some weird reason, our judicial system has decided that Ajmal Kasab is the poster child to show that our system “works”. How? By prolonging his trial endlessly. Imagine that: there’s the CC TV evidence from 26/11 that shows that he was killing people randomly. He is not even an Indian citizen. More than 160 people slaughtered by this animal and his friends and our system needs 3 years (and counting) to decide whether or not this is a “rarest of rare” crime that deserves the death penalty. And then it’ll go to our President’s desk who will let it lie unresponded to for years on end. Bravo! Yes, we are all convinced by how (and for how long) Kasab’s case has been handled that the system “works”. Could our system not find better candidates to show that it works? Like speeding up Kalmadi or Raja’s trials? Like not allowing Yeduyarappa to go around hospital hopping? Apparently not. Taking 3 years brooding over Kasab with the possibility of commuting or overturning his sentence: yes, th...

Just when you think Manmohan Singh can’t drag the UPA any lower, he does. Like his recent suggestion to relook the Right to Information Act (RTI). One can see why he feels that way: after all, it was one of the RTI responses that brought to the fore Pranab Mukherjee’s allegation that Chidambaram was (also) responsible for the 2G scam. Another RTI reply cast doubts on the CAG’s assessment of the extent of losses in the 2G scam. For a government that claims it likes and does things for the aam aadmi , it’s surprising that they want to focus their energies on muzzling RTI instead of providing protection to the aam aadmi who asks inconvenient questions. Both politicians and bureaucrats claim that too much transparency hampers government functioning. Of course, it does. Never used to any kind of accountability, one can see how transparency can hamper corruption, incompetence and inefficiencies (or what they call “governance”). Manmohan Singh can be educated in the West and the guy who brou...

If you thought it was only dictatorships that had problems with the Internet, think again. In the democratic world, music and media companies blame the Internet for piracy and loss of their clientele (who wants to pay for a newspaper or a song when you can find the same free online?). At least one can understand those companies’ gripe with the Internet. What’s harder to understand is the way some democratic countries still can’t come to terms with the fact that the rules of the Internet are/should be/need to be different. Like take this proposal that the Italian government is considering whereby all websites would need to publish, within 48 hours of the request, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image. That proposal is so idiotic that one doesn’t even know where to begin. For starters, one is not allowed to evaluate if what’s said is correct or not. The only parameter to consider is whether or not some nut job considers it detrimental to his im...

Almost all of the reactions to Steve Jobs’s demise lie in one edge of the spectrum: the lavish praise to hagiography (worshipful biography) end. Yes, even hagiography. Kind of apt, given that the anticipation for his next, new product always bordered on religious fervor. Take this byline in one of the articles on Jobs base on Apple’s logo (pic above), “Steve Jobs turned Eve's apple, the symbol of fallen humankind, into a religious icon for true believers in technology. But can salvation be downloaded?” And it’s not as if only others talk about Jobs that way. Take these lines, for instance: “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long f...

Heard that story of how the native (Red) Indians sold the area known as New York today to the whites for a bunch of beads? Sounds crazy, until you realize that different cultures value different things. But if you thought all that was ancient history, think again. Like take this example: in most parts of the world, a kid who wins an award gets a gold star, a certificate, a pat on the back or sometimes even cash. In others? Well, they win guns and bombs! No really, I mean it: A couple of weeks back, an Islamist insurgent-run radio station in Somalia said it was awarding guns, bombs and books to three children in a Koran recital contest . I guess it’s stuff like this which led the Brits and Germans to announce that multiculturalism has failed in their countries. Because there is such a thing as too much tolerance.

“Like all of life’s rich, emotional experiences, the full flavor of losing important money cannot be conveyed by literature.” - Fred Schwed Apparently, most academics in the field of economics have never heard the quote or known the feeling. How else can you explain why they come up with all kinds of theories, and yet we keep lurching from financial crisis to bubble to collapse? Take one of their favourite recommendations/theories: diversification and buying securities (bonds, stocks etc) that are not correlated. Like all theories, they don’t get into the details of how to identify whether the securities you buy are correlated or not. After all, if they had spelled out the details, we’d never have had the financial crisis of 2008 where investments banks (and even a few countries) all ended up owning highly correlated securities and had to be (and still are being) bailed out. To me, it just sounds like talk. It sounds good in theory, but nobody has a clue on how to apply it in real life...

Guess which sport is still being run by a bunch of dinosaurs? Athletics. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) recently decided to drop the women’s world record for a marathon because, hold your breath, it was run in a mixed environment! ‘Mixed’ means a race involving both men and women. So what’s the problem with a mixed environment? Apparently, having men in the race sets a faster pace compared to an all-women race. Huh? If the pace set by the men is too fast for the women, wouldn’t the women just tire out? On the other hand, if the women are able to run faster because they can keep up, how is that not a fair record? Even the dinos realized that they couldn’t completely bury the faster time set in a mixed environment. Their solution? Call the time set in a mixed environment the “world best”. Which, of course, would be different (and faster) than the “world record”. Wow! How dumb can you get?

A couple of days back, I heard that the government of Karnataka banned an event called “Le Tomatina”. What’s that, you ask? It’s a copy of a similar festival in Spain where people pelt (huge amounts of) tomatoes at each other for fun. You can also see it in song from the movie, Zindagi Na Milegi Doobara . The reason for the ban makes sense: How can it be right to waste food like this, especially in a country where so many starve or barely get enough to eat? For once, a politician did something right. So far so good. A couple of days later, though, I saw a bunch of people performing sheerabhishekam (pouring milk) on giant placards of a Kannada movie star because it was his birthday. I don’t get this: how can it be OK to waste food in one case but not the other? And while everyone likes to criticize lavish spending during weddings, pouring milk down the drain evokes no response. Wonder why? It’s almost as if wasting, per se, is neither good nor bad. Rather, the attitude seems to be to t...

Guess which country put up a half-page ad in an American newspaper on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks? Jihadistan, of course (also known as Pakistan)! The ad asked, “Which country can do more for your peace?” and went on to list the “sacrifices” and “effort” by the Pakistanis in “fighting” terrorism. You might ask hasn’t the story of Pakistan always been to “run with the hare and hunt with the hound”? Yes, and even they unintentionally acknowledge that by putting Benazir’s photo on an ad about terrorism. After all, wasn’t she the one who said she’d foster terrorism to bleed India to death by a thousand cuts? Yes, Benazir sure is the face of Pakistan’s stance on terror. Very quickly, everyone realized that the ad had, well, bombed. Nobody was buying it. No wonder then that when the Wall Street Journal tried to find who’s idea the ad was, the Pak government said it came from the army’s public relations division. Who, in turn, said it came from the Information & Broadcasting...

It’s a sickening sense of déjà vu. Another blast at the Delhi High Court within months. Since our bureaucrats and politicians practised their trademark inertia between the previous blast and now, there were no CC TV cameras in the vicinity. And the political parties have started trading charging of incompetence and unwillingness to fight terrorism. So has nothing changed? Well, no, 2 things have changed. Firstly, the politicians got boo’ed when they went for their photo-ops, sorry, I meant when they went to visit the victims at the hospital. The other difference? Digvijay Singh hasn’t come out to blame the RSS or Hindus in general. Then again, maybe I am being too hasty; maybe Digvijay Singh will accuse some Hindu outfit in the next few days. While the government always says that one shouldn’t associate a religion with terrorism, the United Colours of “Secularism” apparently doesn’t include saffron, as per Digvijay Singh.

I learnt quite a bit based on events, actions and comments made before, during and shortly after the Anna Hazare fast: Pre-event arrests are easier than post-event arrests : It is possible to arrest guys who plan to lead peaceful protests at the speed of light. But it is not possible to arrest politicians even after the crime (think of how long it took to arrest Kalmadi or Raja). But even that comes up with a caveat: “political activists” who block highways and burn buses when they go on strike cannot be arrested before the bundh . The right to free speech is selective : It’s OK for MP’s to do name calling (e.g. Manish Tiwari can call Anna to be “steeped in corruption”). But it is not OK for non-MP’s to call MP’s as illiterate or donning masks. That’s free speech, the MP version. The meaning of “cut and thrust in a debate” : Manish Tiwari’s apology for calling Anna corrupt? It happened during the “cut and thrust of debate”, he says! Apparently, calling names is Parliament lingo for a...

When Rajiv Gandhi overturned the Shah Bano verdict, he was just reaffirming that a uniform civil code need not be a part of the way we run our country. Turns out he has opened the doors for every group to say they can pick and choose which laws should be applied to them. It’s kind of ironical that the same “different laws for different people” policy is now attempting to be extended to require that his killers be left alive because they are Tamilians! Maybe we should amend the laws to state that Tamils and LTTE members cannot be executed. And while we’re at it, let’s extend the “death penalty not applicable” list to Punjabis and let that other guy on death roll, Bhullar, live as well. Omar Abdullah is right: how can it be fair to allow the persecution of Muslim women to continue (which is what overturning the Shah Bano verdict was all about) and at the same time, go ahead with the killing of a Muslim man, Afzal Guru? So let’s add Muslims too to the groups that are exempt from the de...

After the recent riots in UK, there was a lot of coverage of this 11 yr old boy who was among those arrested. And more importantly, among those who the British government said would be charged. I found that very surprising: was this the same British government that had leaned on Scotland a few months back to release the Libyan convicted over the Lockerbie bombing ? So they want to release a convicted (by a Western court) mass murderer who is a foreigner but also charge a 11 year old who is a British citizen? Back home, Kapil Sibal feels that Anna Hazare putting ultimatums to the government violates the “sanctity of Parliament”. So let me get this straight: as per the Congress, arresting Hazare for calling a spade a spade (saying that MP’s are criminals who won’t do a thing to prevent corruption) does more for the sanctity of Parliament than, say, weeding out corruption? Or how about hanging Afzal Guru, the man convicted of attacking Parliament in 2001. How launching a terrorist atta...

I didn’t realize how much dislike and fear that most of Europe still has when it comes to German influence until I read this article by Michael Lewis . The article itself is very long, gets quite vulgar at times and is still very informative. While the rest of the Western world (Iceland, Greece, Ireland, the US) behaved like lunatics when loans were easily available at low interest rates, the Germans showed restraint. Commendable? Not entirely. Because the Germans lent their “own money to enable foreigners to behave insanely”. I guess that’s why they say “Neither a lender nor a borrower be”. (Of course, like any advice, overdoing that one isn’t a good thing either because it brings all economic activity to a halt). Today, to avert financial Armageddon in Europe, everyone wants the Germans to bail out the Greeks (and presumably, the Irish, the Italians and the Spanish after that). The Germans, obviously, are not enthusiastic about doing any such thing. But even if they do agree, t...

The knives are out in UK. In so many different ways. The rioters have taken out the literal ones. It’s surprising that it can go on for so many nights, with the police unable to do anything. Then there all the other types of knives, the non-literal ones. Like from the people who’ve decided to attribute reasons for the riots. The reasons range from had-enough-with-racial-discrimination to feeling-excluded-from-prosperity to feeling-of-hopelessness to simply-looting. Based on their reasons, these people blame the riots on everything from discrimination to non-inclusive growth (sound familiar?) to the recession and cuts in spending to lack of good parenting! When the British PM said that social networking sites like Twitter were partly responsible because they acted as tools for co-ordinating such riots, another set pointed out how, just a few months back, the Brits were so in favour of Twitter when it was used in the Arab risings. How quickly times change. The Chinese took a sho...

S&P’s downgrade of the US government’s credit rating is all over the news. Will that be the straw that pushes the US into Round 2 of the recession? And if the US situation worsens, will it take down most of the world with it? Who can say? So I’ll just stick to some other aspects linked to the downgrade. Even as S&P downgraded the US rating, the US treasury officials pointed out a $2 trillion error in S&P's math . S&P has acknowledged the error. So how reliable is the downgrade assessment then? (I don’t know how big an error that is with respect to the US, my only reference is that $2 trillion is the size of India’s GDP!). Secondly, the other rating agencies haven’t downgraded the US… yet. Then again, all these rating agencies were assigning high ratings to all the crap that the investment banks sold before 2008. So how much trust should one put on anything they say? Or are the rating agencies now in the “boy who cried wolf” situation? Maybe it’s a case of nobody bel...

One of my friends pointed me to this article in The Economist that criticized India’s attitude towards its neighbours . It correctly pointed out that India has good relations with almost none of its neighbours (except the tiny and inconsequential ones like Maldives and Bhutan). But some of the criticisms and reasons given in that article are just, well, what you’d expect of any holier-than-thou European publication. Like when it condemns India on its Myanmar policy because it “snuggles up to the country’s thuggish dictators”. I’m curious how we are any different from the Brits who snuggle up to Libya (until recently)? Or the West that mollycoddles the Saudis? As Kissinger said, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch". That’s realpolitik. And that’s the way all nations work. But apparently when India does the same, it’s time to be sanctimonious! Methinks The Economist is just being hypocritical. Remember our dear neighbour, Pakistan, that even the Brit P...

Everyone’s heard of Galileo and how the Church persecuted him. But what I didn’t know was why . Sure, Christianity considered the earth to be the center of the universe, but was that such a central belief of Christianity that they’d kill a guy over it? I always felt like there was something more to it. Like everything else in the Western world, the story starts in ancient Greece. Pythagoras believed the earth was at the center of the universe. The sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around the earth, with each pinned inside a sphere. How far did these spheres within spheres extend? To infinity? Or did they stop at some point? If they stopped, what lay beyond the last sphere? Aristotle denied the existence of both the void and the infinite. As far he was concerned, both the void and the infinite were just constructs of the mind: and he felt there’s nothing in the real world (universe) that was infinite. So Aristotle’s answer was that there were only a finite number of spheres and that...

What’s common about Arundhati Ray, VS Naipaul and MF Husain? Apart from the obvious “Creative people, Indian by origin” answer? They’re all admired by a section of India that feels an obligation to like and/or respect anyone who’s won recognition from the West. Don’t get it? Let me explain. Do you think most of the English speaking, liberal/secular gang would support a “murder is justified” stand? Or a male chauvinist? Or a guy who mocks others’ religion? Almost always they’d not, except when the person expressing those views was recognized by the West. Take Arundhati Roy: she’s always ready to rationalize murders by the “poor” and “persecuted”. And yet, does she write in Bengali or Oriya, the languages of Maoists? Oh no, she’ll spew her venom in English. Really, Arundhati, you think the people you claim to speak for understand English? But I guess if you wrote in Bengali or Oriya, you’d never get a Booker or whatever prize you won. A prize given by the evil West! The people you love t...

Take how all of this Baba Ramdev “issue” started. With Anna Hazare’s fast against corruption and his insistence on framing new laws. Technically, an unelected set of people shouldn’t have the right to “force” the creation of any law. The operative word in that last sentence, of course, is “technically”. Because, technically, the elected crooks…er, representatives of the poor people (note it’s always about the poor, never people like you and me)…are supposed to be framing those very laws. And they’re supposed to give the law enforcers the clout to enforce those laws. But since the elected representatives don’t do their job, somebody else had to step up. Next, look at this Baba Ramdev’s aims. At least, Hazare and his group aimed at realistic targets. Demands many of us could relate to. Not so with Ramdev. This guy decides he wants to aim for everything under the sun: retrieve money from Switzerland, hang the corrupt, and oh yes, even unrelated demands like making Hindi the medium of educ...

Ever notice how people assume that people who did well till college are necessarily the smartest people around for the rest of their lives? Like look at how people talk about IIT’ians (I don’t refer to the IIT’ians who brag, rather I refer to the rest who talk about that guy’s IIT pedigree as a guaranteed sign of greatness in everything he does for all time)? Or the same thing, except replace “IIT’ian” with “IAS topper” in the previous line? Or “law school topper”? I mean, sure, all those guys worked very hard at a certain point of their life . But how do you extrapolate from the fact that they slogged when they were 17 or 22 (or whenever) that they’re necessarily the smartest guys around till they die? Do people seriously believe that our academic system teaches people skills that are relevant to real life or the workplace? If not, doesn’t it follow that those guys may not do well through the rest of their lives unless they learn new skills and adapt? And where does it say that those ...

You’d have to live in a cave to not know that MS Dhoni is popular. But that he was #10 in the most marketable sportspeople worldwide ? That’s beyond imagination. Think about it: the guy plays cricket, a game followed only in a handful of countries (IPL notwithstanding). The others on the list are from football, athletics, F1, tennis…the usual suspects. Coming from games with huge followings. Playing sports that are popular worldwide. And yet, a guy earning in rupees beat the Euro and dollar guys. Wow! Maybe India is shining. But if you think that it must be because of IPL or India winning the World Cup, then how come the cricketer so many Indians idolize, Sachin Tendulkar, is nowhere to be seen on this list? Even Yuvraj is ahead of Tendulkar! Just goes to show that being good isn’t the same as being marketable. Tendulkar’s like Facebook: popular but with no clear idea on how to translate that into money. And Dhoni’s like Apple: the brand everyone wants to have a piece of.