Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As one grows up into an adult, the impact of a slight difference in age on the abilities of two people decreases gradually. So much so that by the time we are adults, we don’t think that a few months (or even a year or two) makes any difference to people’s abilities. I guess that’s why what I saw today surprised me: I saw my 9 month old daughter play with her one and a half year old cousin. The difference in what each can do is staggering (obviously). Because, even that small difference in age (in adult age, that is) matters immensely for kids. Again an obvious thing when you think about it, but I was not used to thinking that way anymore (I’ve been an adult for too long) and so the realization was like a wake-up call. That realization reminded me of a point that Malcolm Gladwell made in his book, Outliers . Gladwell’s point was that once kids go to school, we just start assuming that all kids in a particular class must be at the same stage of development. But that same class has st...

John Lennon once said the following: “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” Love the thought, but then reality hits you. Unless you were born into wealth, you realize that you have to work. After all, who can be happy when they are hungry or don’t have a roof over their head? And so most people end up (settle?) with jobs like Dilbert’s. Steve Jobs exhorted people to “not settle” during his famous Stanford convocation address: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any gr...

"Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed" -          Marc Pincus, CEO of Zynga I liked the above quote the moment I read it. It took me a while, though, to realize that the statement reflects a philosophy as well. The same philosophy that it’s advocated in The Black Swan by Nicholas Nasim Taleb. If you haven’t read the book, let me state the philosophy. It states that in an environment that has tens (if not hundreds) of variables, it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to identify why exactly someone succeeded. Or failed. It could be just simple luck at times. At others, you pick Reason X for your success when in reality it was Reason Y! Like, most people in IT were lucky: we graduated at the right time (post liberalization and post all the communication investments done by the West in the dot com era). But many IT guys will delude themselves into believing that they...

Late last year, the German Interior Ministry published a list of all former members of the German government with a Nazi past. Turns out a total of 25 cabinet ministers, one president and one chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (postwar Germany) had been members of Nazi organizations! Now think for a minute: this is just the number of politicians who became ministers, so how many ex-Nazis must have been elected in total? More importantly, how did they all slip through the net? It gets worse. The Nazis found their way into pretty much all roles, as the records show: public servants, police, intelligence services, media, you name it, the Nazis were there. And once you have them all over the place, the old boys network will obviously protect each other. For example, diplomats with Nazi pasts would protect and warn their counterparts on the run in different countries. Others in the foreign ministry shaped policy towards Arab and South American countries. In the 195...

As a kid, one got bored very easily. Especially during summer vacation in Delhi, when it was boiling hot outside which meant going out to play was not an option for much of the day. There was only Doordarshan on TV, and even that started at 6 and had horribly uninteresting programs, except for the cartoons on Sunday! The playing outside part aside, I guess life must have been pretty much the same for adults as well back then. Fast forward to today and you have 24x7 TV channels: even if none of them has anything worth watching, you can keep surfing endlessly through the channels. There’s also the Internet which offers even more variety than TV. And smartphones have brought the endless stuff of the Internet to your fingertips even when you are stuck in traffic. And that pretty much means the end of boredom. Which should be a good thing: after all, who wants to be bored, right? I sure thought so, which is why I found Clay Shirky’s comment interesting: “It was only later that I realize...

I thought that the Left had taken Bengal to rock bottom, that getting worse was not an option anymore: it was either up or sideways. But Mamata Bannerjee showed that down was still an option! She just got a Bengali professor arrested for forwarding a cartoon that made fun of her. Wow! The guy didn’t even draw the cartoon: he just did what most of us do, which is to forward something he liked or found interesting or amusing. And for that, it’s off to the dungeons in Mamata-land. The way the woman was getting in the way of every policy from the Center (the Teesta river pact with Bangaladesh, the Railway Budget, FDI in retail, the centralized counter terrorism proposal), I was beginning to think she had nothing in common with the UPA anymore. She just showed me what she shares with the UPA: she’s the same as Kapil Sibal and gang when it comes to censorship! I guess when Mamata saw Sibal’s attack on the Internet getting thrown out of the courts, one company at a time (first Microsoft, ...

The Fermi paradox asks why we haven’t found any other civilizations in our massive universe? Surely, statistically, in such a large area, advanced civilizations that can broadcast signs of their existence and/or emit other signs of their existence must have come up multiple times. Why then haven’t we found any? Karl Schroeder, a science fiction author, has an interesting take on that. He starts by rephrasing Arthur C. Clarke's famous declaration that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems . I vote for the latter.” That is an interesting argument: it basically says we don’t find these other advanced civilizations because they are in perfect harmony with their environment. And so we can’t spot anything even when we are looking right a...

When the Naxalites kidnapped a couple of Italians recently, I wondered what was their thinking? That India would cave in to their demands because they kidnapped a Western country’s citizen? But Italy of all Western countries? Because that would imply they are woefully out of touch with the power equations that exist today! Maybe the Naxalites should start reading newspapers or websites instead of just communist literature. After all, Kerala insisted on and got custody of the Italian commandos who killed some fishermen. Italy as a country is considered to be a bankruptcy risk; India, on the other hand, is growing even in a recessionary environment. And yet, do the Naxalites believe that India is the weaker country in interactions with Italy? Or are they banking on Sonia’s (possible) soft corner for her country of birth to do the trick? That apart, I am curious what the moralists who support the Naxalites, like Arundhati Roy, have to say. Is it OK to kidnap random Italians, who have ...