Viswanathan K's Thoughts

“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...