Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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.