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