Viswanathan K's Thoughts

During the revolution in Egypt, when Hosni Mubarak flew his air force over Cairo, I was surprised. I mean, did the man really intend to bomb Cairo from the air? I had heard of the police and even the army going after civilians in dictatorships, but the air force? Not only did that seem like overkill, it is also indiscriminate-kill! After all, an air force will take out buildings, hospitals and roads just as effectively as it will wipe out humans. One of my friends didn’t think the air bombing would happen. His reason was amusing: he felt that only communists indiscriminately slaughter their civilians. And that sounded right. After all, the rest only do targeted killings. And he turned out to be right about Egypt. But not Libya. Gaddafi has used his air force on his civilians. And Gaddafi isn’t a commie. Hear the deafening silence from the Islamic world on the slaughter of their “fellow Muslims”? The same guys who rant about Palestine, Kashmir and the West won’t mumble a sentence abo

It’s amusing how religious edicts have had an impact on the banking sector through the ages. Both Christianity and Islam forbade the charging of interest on loans. This was done with good intentions: to prevent excessive interest charging by the likes of moneylenders and loan sharks. But they seem to have forgotten to consider the practical impact of not charging interest. First, there’s inflation that eats away the purchasing power of money as time passes. Charging interest had been a way to compensate for inflation while issuing loans. Second, there’s always a risk of someone being unable to pay back the loan, willfully or otherwise. Charging interest was and is a way to compensate for that risk. So when Christianity and Islam forbade their flocks from charging interest, they effectively killed the entire lending industry in their communities. Enter the Jews to fill the vacuum. Judaism only prevented Jews from charging interest from fellow Jews, so apparently the Jewish God was OK wi

When Manmohan Singh finally came out and talked about the corruption scandals that are all in the news, boy, did he make a complete mess! Now I can see why he didn’t want to face the media all this while. It just goes to reaffirm that the guy is not a politician and that he is a very poor liar. Like when he said corruption is inevitable in coalition politics. Really? Didn’t Bofors happen without any coalition? Oh wait, as far as the Congress is concerned, Bofors never happened since it involved their royal family. And in what way were the Commonwealth Games and ISRO spectrum scams connected to coalitions? Did you hear Rahul Gandhi’s take on all the (Indian) black money lying in foreign banks? It belongs to the poor, he says. Really, Rahul? I thought it belongs to all Indian citizens, not just the poor. Manmohan said that the 2G loss is notional and similar to losses due to other subsidies. Wow! That “reasoning” really takes one’s breath away! But see how the Left reacted: they weren’t

Every time people like us complain about the kind of politicians we have or doesn’t bother to cast our vote, we’ll find a bunch of media commentators and politicians criticizing the middle class. For not participating. For not caring. For just complaining and not doing anything about it. That seems kind of dumb. After all, if someone doesn’t like the medical services they get, we don’t tell them to become doctors or come up with new drugs. Nor do we tell people who complain about the quality of construction of their houses to become architects or engineers! Other than the fact that we have jobs, the other reason “people like us” don’t care is that it seems like all our MP’s or ministers come from political families. And that’s not just a perception. In his book, India: A Portrait, Patrick French pulls up some statistics on the hereditary nature of Indian politics. Take these for example: - Every MP in the Lok Sabha under the age of 30 had inherited a seat. - More than t

With all the news around Egypt these days, it was fun to find a story that was non-political and non-current about the place: deciphering the hieroglyphics script. The scholars of the 17th century who tried to decipher the hieroglyphics script of the Egyptians were unwilling to consider the possibility that it could be a phonetic script (a script where each symbol/character was associated with a sound/syllable). Instead they assumed that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were semagrams, i.e., each symbol/character was an entire idea or a word, not a syllable. A part of the reason for this belief was the Egyptians-were-too-primitive-to-have-a-phonetic-script mindset of the Europeans. Another reason was that, well, the hieroglyphs do look like pictures, don’t they? And to put a seal on that belief, Athanasius Kircher, a highly respected Egyptologist and an author of a book on cryptography published a dictionary of his translations of the hieroglyphs. The man’s name carried so much weight that his

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein If what Wittgenstein said is true (and it sure sounds right), then by extension, a language that absorbs words into itself readily is indirectly absorbing the ideas that are associated with those words. On the other hand, a language that refuses to absorb words from other languages and instead coins new words loses the context and associations that were part of the source language. To see the point, imagine whether English speakers would have got the same ideas (philosophy?) that comes with words like karma and nirvana if they had insisted on coining new words for them, instead of taking them as-is. So the speakers/custodians who “safeguard” their language by not letting it get “corrupted” by foreign words end up losing the idea-set that comes with the original words. It’s like cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face! Maybe the French should wake up and take note. Of course

Can being good at what you do work to your disadvantage? Seems illogical. But consider this. How do most of us value a person’s effort? Based on his ability and skills? Or based on the time he put in? Check out this video for an example of how the same locksmith was perceived differently as he got better at his job. Why do so many people value the time and effort put into the task more than knowledge, skill and efficiency? (Except for those rare cases where the person can visibly demonstrate those qualities). At some level, I think that mindset is a legacy from our childhood where effort and sincerity were valued highly. Nothing wrong with that in childhood, of course. But as adults, we forget that we are expected to be somewhere between good and excellent at what we do, not hard-working-but-unsuccessful at our job! The other reason could be because the activity itself is invisible to us. So we never realize that the guy who did it faster may have come up with a new way of doing things