Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Check out this idol of Lord Ganesha reclining comfortably and (browsing possibly?) on his Mac: Nice, right? Thankfully, regardless of what the likes of Digvijay Singh say, we are still a liberal enough nation to not be offended by it. Most of us would enjoy it. Without fear of a death threat. Or a reward on your head issued by the nearest religious nutjob. Well ok, maybe I exaggerate. There do still exist areas in India, like Mamata-land, where you could be arrested for forwarding e-mails, as one professor found out! The only criticism I have with the idol is that it shows a laptop: after all, aren’t laptops ancient technology even on earth, let alone the heavens? So I am guessing Version 2.0 of this idol series would have Lord Ganesha with the latest iPad. Or whatever fancy tech-toy that Apple has released by that time!

“When you stop looking at India through the prism of China, the authors argue, the picture looks very different.” -          Book review in Wall Street Journal George Gilboy and Eric Heginbotham wrote this book titled “ Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior ” where they question whether America is blindly assuming that India is an ally, a country with similar interests simply because of the fear of a rising China. The book suggests a hard look at each country independently instead of looking at the two as a yin-yang pair where if one is your enemy, then the other must be your friend by definition. The authors’ conclusion? India and China spell double trouble for the US. Now for their reasons. They point at India’s stance on issues like Iran, Syria and Libya where it never aligns with the West. Both India and China, they argue, repeatedly vote against any foreign intervention anywhere, including Myanmar and Sudan. As for the argument that democracies make natural allies, the author

Finally. The All India Tennis Association (AITA) announced the tennis teams to send for the Olympics in men’s doubles (Mahesh Bhupathi and Rohan Bopanna ) and mixed doubles (Leander Paes and Sania Mirza). All the commotion prior to this decision was because the AITA (and Paes) wanted the men’s doubles team to be Paes and Bhupathi. Which is the best pair if you look at their past record: they’ve won multiple Grand Slams, haven’t they? But anyone with half a brain would also consider when was the last time they played together ? Answer: ages back. Surely, the fact that the two don’t get along (to put it mildly) would have an impact in a team sport, right? Not according to the AITA, it doesn’t. Well ok, said the AITA. If Paes and Bhupathi refuse to pair up, then it should be Paes and the next highest ranked player. Why? The AITA argument went like this: Paes has the highest men’s doubles ranking; hence he should definitely be part of the men’s doubles team. Really? What if his ranking

I was reading this book on Facebook and it described Mark Zuckerberg’s first attempt at building a social networking site at Harvard. In order to get all the student data to fill on his site, he either hacked into the university servers or asked his friends’ with access to that data to give it to him. When the complaints came in, the university hauled Zuckerberg and his friends in. The university felt that Zuckerberg hadn’t tried to use that data for personal gain, just to build a university wide network. So it decided that they were just young and foolish and let them off with a rap on the knuckles. While Zuckerberg was celebrating the fact that he hadn’t got suspended, the father of one of his friends (Joe Green) who had helped get the data illegally was in the campus. He was shocked to see that Zuckerberg didn’t seem to realize he had just had a close shave with being suspended. And so the father told his son that Zuckerberg was nothing but trouble and that the son should avoid hi

The post of President of India is supposed to be a symbolic one. Devoid of any real powers, the only time the President gets any coverage is if there is a hung Parliament and he gets to decide whom to give first shot at forming a government. Or so I thought. I should have known better: if that were indeed true, why do we need a Vice-President? I mean, if the post is powerless, why do we need a fallback guy for that role? Pratibha Patel showed that the Presidents can get rides on fighter jets and demand exorbitant sums for “renovating” her house post-retirement. All at tax payers’ expense, of course. And now we had the circus of who will be the next President? Pranab Mukehrjee? Some nutjob that Mamata would support? And the drama got lots of coverage in the news. Like anyone should even care. Get real: when was the last time you heard of the President make any decision that made the slightest difference to anything in the country? And yet the news channels covered it as if this was t

I’ve always wondered how some chess players play against multiple players simultaneously? (Not only do they play, but they also win against most of the others). It seems hard enough to keep track of one board, how do they keep track of so many as they keep moving from one opponent to the other? I read about some studies on top chess players that included scanners to track which areas of the brain they used during games. The surprising answer was that it was not the analytical areas. Instead, it was the memory areas that were used more! This is very counter-intuitive: most of us assume chess is all about cognitive skills. Turns out top players have great memories of board positions, clusters of pieces that indicate go-for-the-kill scenarios, weaknesses and helps them spot pieces that “stick out” from standard positions. In other words, they don’t see 32 pieces, they see clusters and pivot points. I think the results of those studies answers my question at the top of this blog: ho

I’m guessing the title grabs one’s attention, so here’s the story. Recently, the US shot down a proposed law to address the issue of selective abortion of female fetuses. Which surprised me on two counts: 1)       Did that mean Americans prefer male children over female the way Indians and Chinese do? 2)      Had the scale of such gender based abortions reached the point for the need for such a law even in the US ? Then I read that several women’s organizations had opposed the law. That didn’t make sense: surely, women’s organizations should support such a law, I thought. So I decided to read up more on this. Turns out the proposed law would impose fines and prison terms on the doctors ( not the person undergoing abortion) who performed such sex selective abortions. Many legislators voted against the law because it was unfair to expect the doc to identify the reason for an abortion. Women’s organizations opposed it because they didn’t want abortion to get banned altogether and c

My parents tried learning Kannada when they shifted to Bangalore a few years back. Not that anyone living in Bangalore needs to, but they tried it anyway. They didn’t get very far because all the people they practiced on (bus conductors, maids, shop keepers) would shift to a language that my parents did know once they realized that my parents didn’t know Kannada (you see, they didn’t want to lose business). Which made me think: other than when it is necessary , is there ever any advantage to learning multiple languages? I never considered being able to read literature or watching a movie in another language as something worth the effort, so to me the answer was No. And then I saw this article that pointed out that being multilingual could help you overcome certain biases. How? Well ok, it is really a 2-step process, but the first step was to be at least bilingual, if not multilingual.  The second step? Force yourself to think in the language that you’re least comfortable in. Wonder

As the start of Euro 2012 draws near, the BBC showed a documentary with details of the extent of racism and support of neo-fascism and non-Nazism among the football fans in the two host countries, Poland and Ukraine. But wouldn’t stadium security and the cops prevent such incidents? Not necessarily. As in most non-Western countries, when the violence happens, in these two countries, the police sit back and let things happen. Things have reached a point where many non-white players from the participating countries feel it safer to not call their relatives to cheer them on from the stadiums. Why then were these two eastern European countries picked as the hosts for the Euro Cup? Turns out the European football governing body did know of these risks, but decided to go ahead anyway. Why? Partly, it was the usual “let’s bring eastern Europe to the fold” reason. Another was political correctness. Bad choice: sometimes, one just has to call a spade a spade. Being blunt was something Obama