Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The younger, seen-the-West generation has varying degrees of pride in India. Sure, they have their complaints and criticisms too, but when I was a kid, people rarely had any pride in any aspect of modern India. If at all, their pride was limited to ancient philosophies or ways of life from back then. But even today, there are still plenty of Indians who talk of the West as if it is better than us on parameters where the situation has actually turned 180˚, done a U-turn. Take the recent ranking of countries based on the confidence of citizens of a country in their government. Keep in mind this was done by the OECD, a grouping of most of the world’s largest economies, barring China and Brazil. While India was 3rd best on that list, both the US and UK were below even the average confidence ratings among the OECD countries! Some people tend to explain this as a Trump/Brexit induced effect. But even if that was true (and it probably is), it only raises another question. After al...

Some time back, one of my 6 year old daughter’s friends was being told by her parents that she shouldn’t lie. The girl turned around and asked: “Do you never lie?” Of course, we do. And kids figure that sooner or later. And then we get dragged deeper and deeper into the land of commands like “Do as I say, not as I do” and retorts like “Hypocrite” (or words to that effect). All that’s par for the course of parenting, of course… And then they graduate to the next level of this tussle. Like the time I got this monologue from my daughter recently: “So you lied to me back then on such-and-such topic. But remember, I am the Maharaja and you are the slave, so you cannot lie to me. But as the Maharaja, I can lie to you. As many times as I want.” Asymmetry: that’s a topic they get so very well! Another topic they love is the power of authority. Like when they are made class monitor, even if it’s by rotation and only for a week each. My daughter relished the power to boss aroun...

  Clichés. Since they have such a negative connotation (hackneyed, overused), why then are they still so popular? Orin Hargraves gave the question some thought and realized that clichés serve several purposes. Like keeping the conversation flowing (after all, how many of us can say something original on most topics anyway?!). Further, he says some clichés are actually useful since they have become a universally understood way of conveying something e.g. “On the other hand”. Even something as overused as “At the end of the day” serves a purpose: “In speech it has pragmatic value in notifying listeners of a juncture: for example, that the speaker has uttered, or is about to utter, the gist of her argument, or that a contrasting idea is about to be presented.” And then there is their use to new speakers of a language. Why? “The trepid speaker, with the vastness of the English lexicon lapping at his feet, can take comfort by easily stepping on to one of these clumpy islan...

In India, people will send their kids to schools at the other end of town if that’s where the good schools are. And costs in good schools are high too. In the West, on the other hand, schooling is free provided you send your kids to the neighborhood school. That provision has led parents in the West to want to live in areas with good schools, which in turn drives up real estate prices in those areas. But I am guessing you knew all that already. That leads me to what Carl Chancellor and Richard D. Kahlenberg ask : “Which sorts of investments in education give the greatest bang for the buck?” In the West, due to the neighborhood school model I described above, the choices were: a)      Increase spending in schools; or b)      Increase economic integration in schools. Option (a) is self-explanatory, so I’ll skip that. Option (b) requires making cheap housing available even in the more affluent/middle class areas. If you did that,...

I’ve written many blogs on the mathematical universe. This one looks at a slightly different angle. Has “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in describing the universe (as Eugene Wigner put it) caused us to go overboard to a point where we believe whatever the maths says, even if current technology doesn’t allow for checking the predictions of the maths (equations)? String theory is the poster child for my question. It started off with a perfectly sensible problem, as Brian Greene wrote in The Fabric of the Cosmos : “When the equations of general relativity commingle with those of quantum mechanics, the result is disastrous.” Here “disastrous” means that the equations lead to nonsensical answers like infinity and probabilities greater than 100%. Surely the maths describing our universe cannot be inconsistent with itself, cannot lead to nonsensical answers? String theory does produce meaningful answers to some of those nonsensical scenarios. As Brian Greene wrot...

My brief year and a half stint in the US was way back in 2000, long, long before Trump. Back then, I used to hear the words “liberal” and “conservative” used in American politics and it confused me greatly. Because “liberal” wasn’t always a positive term as used in their political debates. Nor was “conservative” always a negative term! So what was going on? Much later, I finally got it. “Liberal” in American politics is the equivalent of “secular” in Indian politics. In other words, the dictionary meaning of those terms is totally different from what those terms mean in domestic politics. The former is the literal meaning of the term whereas the latter is based on how people who claim to follow that value actually act. Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host, recently pointed out how accentuated this trend has become ever since Trump was elected: “At the heart of liberty in the Western world has been freedom of speech. From the beginning, people understood that this meant protecting...

Most of continental Europe, and Germany in particular, is highly critical of the disruption that the Internet wreaks on traditional companies. One such article by Shoshana Zuboff was a criticism that a new form of capitalism is taking over the world. She calls it “surveillance capitalism”: “(It is) a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior.” And who’s doing this surveillance? The big bad wolf, aka the Internet companies. She elaborates what she means: “The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.” Why is it so easy for companies to collect data about us? “(Because it combines) the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism (of people).” It’s hard to argue with any of that. But typical of such criticisms, she then ...

There are so many quotations out there that are, ironically, mis-quotes! The most famous one is “Ignorance is bliss”. What Thomas Gray really said was: “Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.” Totally different statements, aren’t they? Another such instance is what almost all companies believe in: “What can’t be measured can’t be managed.” What Paul Drucker actually said was: “What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.” The first part got faithfully (albeit in a twisted, double negative kind of way) rephrased, but dropping the rest of what Drucker said distorts his message altogether. During their fight with Hachette, Amazon willfully quoted George Orwell (but only partially) to distort what he said entirely. Amazon wrote : “The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if "publishers had any sen...

In his book, Our Mathematical Universe , Max Tegmark writes that: “A spectrum is a goldmine of astronomical information, and every time you think you’ve milked it for all it’s worth, you find more clues encoded in it.” The word “spectrum” above refers to electromagnetic waves coming from different objects. This includes (but is not limited to) visible light as well as ultraviolet and infrared radiation. Without getting into the details of how, but using just that one signal (and a lot of “clever detective work”), astronomers can calculate the following aspects of objects in space: -          How far away are they? -          How hot (or cold) are they? -          How big are they? -          How fast are they moving? -          How heavy are they? -    ...

Did the assassination of Gandhi make it “impossible for the anger (of Hindu hurt) to find an address”, wonders Santosh Desai . Did that one act result in the whole of Hindu hurt to be linked “with an act of violence so unpalatable that it rendered the feeling illegitimate”? All of which may not have been a bad thing, if we had become a truly secular nation. But instead this is where we ended up: “Over time secularism, became less a principled belief and more a politically useful instrument that was used to build electoral constituencies.” All of that started crumbling with Advani’s rath yatra and “his attack on pseudo-secularism”. It began the “re-legitimising of the Hindu right in political terms”. And when Islamic terrorism went global with 9/11, the anti-Muslim feeling in India began to seem like a universally felt feeling. All of which leads Desai to muse: “Perhaps the past never goes away. It waits in the shadows, gathering evidence of its relevance, and slides back i...

Remember the title of that Bryan Adams hit, “18 Till I Die” ? Why eighteen? It’s the age at which you enter college, have no responsibilities, enjoy all your newfound freedom and  parents still send you money… all of which make it a very desirable age indeed. Except if you’re a 5-6 year old like my daughter. This year, she moved from the small school to the big school. Apparently the heavier bag, long and boring assembly, longer hours, more studies and less playtime at school, more homework, monthly tests are all making her realize the downsides of growing older! She told my wife that she wished one could age in reverse: old to middle age to youth to toddler to baby so that your “troubles” decreased as you went along, not increased. Kiddo, you’re not the first one to have that idea. Standup comedian George Carlin beat you to that thought : “I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first; get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You g...

There used to be a company 23andMe that sequenced your genome using your saliva sample and then sent you back a list of diseases you might get in the future. The intention was that people start taking preventive steps early in life for specific possibilities. In 2013, Tyler Cowen wrote a blog explaining why he decided against getting such a test done. Even though he knew the risk of not getting himself tested: “An absence of negative information might have encouraged me to slack on exercise, to the detriment of my eventual health outcomes.” But, on the other hand:  “I thought the “worry cost” of negative information would exceed the benefit of whatever specific preventive measures I might take.” But 23andMe was shut down. Why? As more and more people started using its services to make medical choices, the US government was forced to step in to check the accuracy of these tests. One finding : “The interpretation of 23andme results involves examining a large numb...

The difference in attitudes towards freedom of speech and being practical about what is do’able is quite severe between Europe and the US. This is repeatedly brought out in all its gory detail every time you see the attitudes of the two sides when it comes to the Internet. Others say the clashes on Internet policy is not really an attitudinal one; rather, it is rooted in European resentment that all the big Internet companies are American (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple) with barely any European company. Regardless of the reason, take a look at recent European rulings on these two topics. Germany has framed a new rule to fine Internet companies upto €50 million if they don’t quickly remove offending content. As Mike Masnick wrote : “Three loosely defined (and easily abused) categories: hate speech, criminal material and fake news.” And as with so many other instances in the past, the Europeans still don’t understand that Facebook, Twitter and Google don’t cre...