Viswanathan K's Thoughts

How far should one take the freedom of speech? India goes to one extreme: just think of how we ban anything and everything the moment any random person says it offends him. Salman Rushdie’s book, MF Hussain’s paintings, Danish cartoons, the list is endless. Vir Sanghvi wrote that that freedom of speech is really the freedom to offend . That doesn’t sound right at first, but Sanghvi’s went something like this: Isn’t freedom of speech the right of the speaker to say what he wishes, criticize who he wants? Otherwise, the way we yield to every radical group, aren’t we treating it as the right of the listener to not be offended by what others say? Most countries that allow freedom of speech include the right to lie under its purview. Before you get all moralistic about it, consider taking things to an extreme and making all forms of lieing illegal. You’d then be stuck with having to differentiate the guy who lied knowingly from the guy who genuinely (but mistakenly) thought something w...

Can we ever get rid of cash altogether? Is it practical? Or desirable? What would be the full ramifications of such a decision? After all, all Western countries still use cash: even they haven’t they gotten rid of it in the Internet age. Or is it just a matter of time? To analyze the prospect, one should look at Sweden, a country that has gone quite some distance in getting rid of cash. Not the full distance of eliminating cash, but much farther than any other country. So what’s been the upside and downside of their decision? In most Swedish cities, for example, public buses don't accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. One can almost immediately see the downside of that: what if you are a visitor to the country? How would you ride the bus? I don’t know how many foreigners visit Sweden, but this would surely be a problem in tourist centers like the US, Paris and Rome. Several Swedish banks refuse to deal in cash. That’s because they make mo...

Thanks to the ongoing recession, it’s easy to find people today who say that formulas (and the associated maths) don’t work in finance. I don’t know if that’s becoming the widespread belief in finance today, but if it is, it would make it hard for the quants (the guys who apply the maths to finance and come up with the formulas) to find jobs. Then again, the same feeling persisted more than a decade back when a huge hedge fund, LTCM, failed and threatened to take down the system with it. Even back then, there was a comment in the book, When Genius Failed , by a guy who thought that quants picked a physics formula to “jam into finance”! Another quote which I liked questioned the accuracy of formulas in a very funny way: this one by Max Bublitz, a former investment banker: “You take Monica Lewinsky, who walks into Clinton’s office with a pizza. You have no idea where that’s going to go. Yet if you apply math to it, you come up with a thirty-eight percent chance she’s going to go down ...

Google’s famous 20% rule encourages its employees to spend 20% of their time working on ideas that interest them without worrying how the company would make money out of them. Of the huge number of mini-projects that Google launches, more than 60% fail. Yes, that’s a failure rate of more than 60%. So one guy told Eric Schmidt, Google’s ex-CEO, that the company’s attitude towards experimentation, trials and risk of failure didn’t make any sense: “You tell employees to waste their time, 20% of the week, you have this strange management approach where people are treated like peers and you don’t mind failure. This makes no sense what so ever.” If a company like Google has such a high failure rate, I felt that it explained why our education system never encourages us to take a chance, to try out something new (or something never tried before). If you’re that likely to fail, surely, it must be safer to play safe: do things by rote, repeat what’s already been done and proven, right? Or wer...

I read somewhere that it’s almost as if Amsterdam is stuck with the label of being tolerant. Even to things like drugs and prostitution. The article wondered whether Amsterdam was now stuck having to be tolerant to pretty much everything. Otherwise they risked being asked: so drugs are OK but you draw the line at graffiti? Really? I think Hinduism is stuck in the same situation. It declared that all religions were the same (or equivalent): so now it gets stuck when asked how Jainism and Islam can possibly be considered the same. Like Hobbes says in the strip above, there is such a thing as too much tolerance. A point beyond which an evil figure will twist tolerance to condone pretty much everything. A point beyond which tolerance is sickening. And wrong. But you can realize that only if you still have the capacity to think and haven’t yet been blinded by faith at the altar of, well, Tolerance.

The UP election results are out...finally. It was a bit of an anti-climax for many because one party got an absolute majority. Which meant there would be no continued uncertainty, no horse-trading, no “I’ll give you MLA's in the Assembly and you give me MP's at the Center” exchange offers, no more endless yapping in the TV studios. Now it’s confirmed that Rahul baba is not a vote winner. No surprise in that unless you were a Congress sycophant. What I did find surprising was a remark that Sonia made after the results, “Probably high inflation had a role in how the Congress did in UP”. So why does that remark surprise me? Because it implies that voters understand that the Center is responsible for inflation, not the state government. Which I find very impressive since it indicates a pretty good understanding of the power and roles of state and central governments! The paradox, though, is that the same “smart” voters don't understand even a wee bit of finance: how else can...

I have been reading this travelogue, Neither Here Nor There , where Bill Bryson talks very humorously of his travels through most of Europe. His experience in Italy got me thinking: Rome, Naples, Milan and Florence. Bryson found corruption to be rampant. People parked their cars whichever way they liked, drivers didn’t follow any rules (in fact nobody followed any rules). Beggars and pickpockets targeted tourists and cops wouldn’t register complaints. The Italians didn’t bother to maintain their museums or other tourist attractions: Bryson says (and I don’t know if he said that tongue in cheek or if it’s true) that the Colosseum isn’t the ruin that it is because of wear and tear, rather it is a ruin because people used to chip away at it with sledgehammers and take the chunks to kilns to make cement! That reminded me of a comment one of our neighbours had made decades back, “What great ruins the Italians make!” Back then, we were amused by his lack of understanding of the...

I’ve always wanted to introduce quantum mechanics into a blog without boring most people to death. Finally, I have found an opportunity: well OK, it’s a somewhat contrived opportunity, but what the hell… There’s this testing team guy at work who was asked to work with me and write specifications for the system. I wasn’t sure whether he was unhappy or happy shifting from his original role (testing) to a new role (defining the system). Things were further complicated by the fact that he continued to report to his lead from his old role, and not me. So even though I wondered whether he liked or disliked the new work, I never asked him because of, well, 2 reasons. The first one was that he reported to the lead from his old role, so technically, keeping track of his happiness was her responsibility. The second reason, a consequence of the first one, was that since he didn’t report to me, what could I possibly do even if he said he didn’t like the new role? So this guy is like Schrod...

The transformation from a David to a Goliath brings with it a huge number of changes in how one is perceived. Corporations like Apple and Google find themselves now being looked like 800-pound gorillas (which they truly are), not the struggling startups that they once were. And that change in perception reduces the sympathy and simultaneously increases the criticism that they face. Israel is a country in a somewhat similar situation. Long gone is their underdog status: in fact, they are Top Dog in the Middle East today (actually, for several decades). The common underlying theme in both of the above cases is power. There are several superhero quotes that teach one a lot about power, how to deal with it and what it does to the one possessing it. Which is not at all surprising: after all, who has more power than a superhero? Spiderman’s uncle hit the nail on the head when he said, “With great power comes great responsibility”. Because once you have the power (like He-Man’s “I have t...