Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There was this news about a sculptor, Hussaini, who made a sculpture of Jayalalithaa, using 11 litres of frozen blood . The morbidity and stupidity of it aside, why couldn’t this guy (and the others who donated a part of that blood) have donated to a blood bank instead and possibly saved several people’s lives? You could, of course, argue that it’s their blood and they can do what they wish. But considering that this guy isn’t some AIADMK bigshot, can’t Jayalalithaa speak out and suggest that people donate to blood banks instead? You know, act like a leader by converting this idiotic act into something positive for society? After all, blood isn’t money: if she asked people to donate money, she would be accused of hypocrisy. But blood, that’s free and voluntary… Why is it our politicians never try to bring about a positive change even when the cost to them is zero?

As we were returning from work, one of my colleagues was giving vent to his irritation with the kind of assignments his daughter is given at school: the kind that can only be done by parents. Looks like India has improved on a whole lot of thing since the time I was a kid, but (sigh) not on this front. But what was amusing about my friend’s ranting were the following “learnings” he listed for his daughter every time her parents did the assignment: -          Take credit for what others did, -          Lie if asked who made the stuff, -          Assignments will always be way beyond your abilities or skills or involve instruments your parents don’t want you to use (like scissors and knives). Sad to say but every one of us can say, “Been there, learnt that” about his list of learnings from our own childhood, can’t we? But I remember this one time when ...

In earlier times when the only way to get rich was by being evil or corrupt, the criminals that the audiences could support were variants of Robin Hood: guys who robbed from the (criminal) rich and gave it to the poor. Modern day stories and movies are a bit greyer and so the reason that the audience would still root for the “bad guy” became something personal about the criminal. You support Ocean’s Eleven (apart from the fact that it includes George Clooney and Brad Pitt) because it’s the robbing of a jerk who has also “stolen” Clooney’s girlfriend. The Italian Job is about a bunch of thieves who want to take revenge on their ex-partner who betrayed them and killed their boss. And so on. And now there is Special 26 . Akshay Kumar and his gang of conmen have no noble motive; they’re not right’ing any wrongs; and they they’re half Robin Hood’s: they steal from the rich, but don’t give to the poor. Their victims are chosen not because they are corrupt (which they are) but be...

All of us remember that little boy who called the emperor naked. We remember it as a lesson to be independent, to be willing to stand out in a crowd, to state what we believe and not just parrot what everyone else is saying. Recently I saw this xkcd comic (copied below) on why it is ok to sometimes do what everyone else is doing, even if that something happens to be jumping off the proverbial bridge! As always, there is no universal right answer about what one should do. It always depends on the scenario and context. Which is what makes life so damned complicated. And interesting.

When the Pope resigned, I saw an article on the Net with the headline “ Pope Resigns, Internet has a Field Day ”. If you thought that was a field day, what would you call all those pics and videos of that massive meteor flying through the sky of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk that have gone viral on the Net? In fact, the number of such videos of the meteor from so many different angles was so high and so many of them were taken by motorists ( not standing people with their camera phones) that it raised the obvious suspicion: were these for real? How could so many different motorists have taken all those videos? The answer: most of them must be for real. And it’s got to do with the fact that the meteor blew up over Russia. You can thank Russian laws, the Russian legal system and the corruption of the Russian law enforcement system for all those videos! Huh? Well, because of all the above mentioned reasons, motorists found they need video evidence to back them up if they go...

Late one night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I decided to watch some TV. And as luck would have it, I ended up watching a very thought provoking exchange of dialogues in the movie, The International . The movie’s a regular Hollywood masala flick about a very powerful, evil bank versus an Interpol agent, Louis Salinger . The part I saw has Salinger trying to get a very old ex-communist from East Germany, Wilhelm Wexler (who is now a senior guy at the bank) to spill the beans on the bank. Salinger tries to use ideology to persuade Wexler to defect and asks him how a man who supported communism and hated capitalism all his life could now be working for such a big, capitalistic institution? I loved Wexler’s answer: “Well, this is the difference between truth and fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” That is so true. Our lives don’t necessarily have a “purpose”, it often just seems to meander on; and I don’t mean that in a “I am so depressed; let me kill myself” kind of way. ...

I have this retired uncle of mine who sends (e)mails of pretty much everything that he finds interesting during the course of the day. Including huge attachments. I so wish he would switch to posting that stuff on Facebook instead. Where I can choose to ignore it or watch it; anything instead of flooding my mailbox. Of course, most people flood Facebook with any and all personal trivia, not just stuff they found interesting on the Net. Which is why Alan Jacobs wrote : “I’ve heard people say that they don’t get together for dinner or drinks for friends as much as they used to because they stay in touch so regularly on Facebook and Twitter that it seems unnecessary. People who live two miles from one another could end up two thousand miles apart without any evident change in their relationship.” I realized I must have unconsciously decreased that “two miles” radius Jacobs talks about to two feet! The realization hit me when I didn’t tell my wife about this award I won at of...

In a recent blog , I argued about how sometimes wars are necessary. That’s what they call the Big Picture. But what about the soldier who fights that war? I am not talking about the guy who died during the war; I am talking about the guy who killed during the war and returns home. I read this article by an ex-US marine, Timothy Kudo, titled “ I killed people in Afghanistan. Was I right or wrong? ” and it raised some interesting questions. How do soldiers get themselves to kill people during war? Isn’t it the exact opposite of what all our ethics and sense of morality tells us? That one seemed easy to answer, at least for a Hindu: Didn’t the Gita call it the dharma of a soldier? But even that Krishna-Arjuna conversation brought up the point about the war being justified (or what they called a dharma yudh ). But doesn’t every country call its wars justified? In any case, armies today are professional units where a soldier could get court-martialed if he says he will pick...

There’s that famous line from Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s song, War , that goes: “ War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'! ”. A lot of such opposition to all wars comes right in the middle of a war (The lines above were written during the Vietnam War) or right after a major one ends. But does anybody subscribe to that view entirely? Does India’s war that created Bangaladesh qualify as a useless war? Or the first Gulf War that freed Kuwait? Or how about the dharma yudh of the Mahabharata? So what’s common to those 3 wars? They all had a purpose that was defined before the war started, not some noble cause associated after the event by the victors. Which is why I totally disagree with Ambrose Bierce’s stance (as described below by Benjamin Schwarz): “Emerging from the charnel house, (Ambrose) Bierce shunned any effort to invest the butchery with meaning. . . . For him the war was nothing more—could be nothing more—than a meaningless and murderous slaug...

Note : Even though this blog talks about how stars die, you don’t need to know or even care about physics to (hopefully) enjoy it. Most stars, including our sun, will run out of fuel and then the light will go off. Pretty tame. Then there are the bigger stars that could end up as white dwarfs or neutron stars. These stars, once they run out of fuel, get compressed to extraordinary densities and eventually all that compressed and heated matter begins to glow. But once it has radiated away the heat, it’s over. That’s more interesting than the ultimate fate of our sun, but not exactly riveting stuff either. Next come the supernovas: even more massive stars that literally blow themselves up at the end. Spectacular to watch no doubt but very dangerous if one happens too close to home because of all that radiation. Somewhat like the way suicide bombers die, except the star didn’t “want” to kill itself or others around it. Until now, I thought supernovas are the most specta...

When one of my friends bought the Kindle, I was very impressed with the screen without a backlight and also by the much vaunted E Ink technology. The Kindle felt just like a book, you know, without any of the brightness (or irritation) associated with a PC/laptop screen. In fact, Amazon made it a point to highlight the device’s “paper-like” screen. And Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos wasn’t exaggerating when he declared, “Amazon Kindle is for reading”. So why didn’t the e-reader sweep the reading world off its feet? Why didn’t people switch from the world of atoms (books) to the world of bits (e-books)? Because of Steve Jobs. When he announced the iPad, people had to make a choice: did they want a single purpose device or a multi-purpose device? Something specialized for one use or something generalized for most things? Did they want to go back to uni-tasking or continue with multitasking? The world voted overwhelming for the tablet. But here’s an unintended consequence ...

The budget’s always been a cloak and dagger affair (to the extent that any ship that leaks at the top, er, government operation can be kept secret). And so, when the curtain is raised every year and people’s guesses are proved right or wrong, stocks would go up or down; and we’d know if our take home would increase or decrease; whether a new avenue had opened up to cut down on taxes or if an existing avenue no longer existed. That is also why the budget gets so much coverage. But the current budget looks like it may be the first non-secret budget we’ll have. Chidambaram has been going around the world indicating what the budget will contain; the intent to cut fiscal deficit with specific figures stated; measures like possible increases in tax rates for the super-rich; the intent to not fiddle with tax rates for companies and the rest of us because it creates uncertainty and scares away investments etc. You might be inclined to dismiss this as empty talk or at best the govern...

I always thought of metaphors as something from poetry, which never appealed to me anyway (I am one of those “if you want to say something, say it, don’t rhyme it” kind of guys). So it was interesting to learn that : “Metaphors are much more than a poetic imagination or rhetorical flourish. They can help us translate ideas into mental models” Most of us can’t recognize an idea or model outside of its context. Don’t believe me? Then try naming a principle that is central to both economics and physics. Give up? Answer: it’s called demand and supply in economics; equilibrium in physics. (It doesn’t have to be exactly the same, just very close). So why do most of us not see such similarities? It’s because we are highly domain dependent when it comes to concepts, ideas and models. Or as Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile : “It is as if we are doomed to be deceived by the most superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift wrapping.” Well ok, you might say, but so what...

Heard of the Goldilocks Zone? It was a term defined nearly 2 decades back to refer to a belt around a star that scientists felt would be right for life to exist. Any closer and things would be too hot; any farther and it would be too cold. Hence the name of the belt after the fussy girl from the fairy tale. Well, since then satellites and telescopes have collected a lot more data about the atmosphere of other planets. And since the atmosphere affects how much heat a planet absorbed (if you hadn’t slept through most of your schooling days, you’d have known that), it follows that all the new data should trigger a revision of the Goldilocks Zone limits. So a team of astronomers did just that. Based on the data, they pushed back the Goldilocks belt further back from the respective star. That move obviously means some of the planets earlier considered good candidates for life would now be too close to the fire and need to be dropped from the prospective candidates list. Now c...

We’ve inherited the Brit way of talking and using words like “distinguished”, “honourable” and “gentleman”. So MP’s are referred to as honourable people. Never mind the murders, rapes and thefts they may have committed. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to just drop all such syrupy sweet, ass kissing terms for entire categories of people? After all, if we use those terms selectively for some guys in the category but not for others, it would just create a new issue of why use it for this guy but not for that guy? I prefer the American way of just addressing people as “President” or “Senator” or “Judge” or whatever. I guess that’s American pragmatism at work: while both Lincoln and Nixon (or George W. Bush, if you prefer) were presidents, it would be insane to place them in the same category! And why grovel before a judge? Wondering what triggered this blog? I just saw something on the Internet where the usage of such terms crossed a line: “…to be helmed by the distinguished p...