Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Imagine someone wicked who wants to inherit a relative’s land. Imagine further that the person has some qualms… so he can’t get himself to kill off the relative in question. What does he do? This isn’t a thought experiment. Turns out that in UP, plenty of people bribe the authorities to declare the person to be dead! Once the paperwork is thus arranged, inheritance follows. One such zombie, a man named Lal Bihari, fought back… to get himself declared alive . But how? A court case would take decades; and government officials wouldn’t undo things since that would trigger an enquiry into how the man was declared dead in the first place. He decided to make a spectacle of himself. By adding to his name “mritak” (dead man) to his name. He then created a group called the Mritak Sangh, an association for all such zombies. With no way to contact others, however, the Sangh didn’t get any members. He tried to get himself arrested to draw attention, but that didn’t work. He registered a...

Is Germany, as Tyler Cowen argues , the “Silicon Valley of political innovation”? Here’s why he feels so: 1)       Post-war de-Nazification : As Cowen says, “it is difficult in world history to find a comparable switch in attitudes” anywhere in the world. 2)      German unification : The unification went through with barely a glitch, despite the vast economic differences between the two sides. And in record time. Most places split up, and “Large-scale political mergers seem to belong to the era of the 17th to early 20th centuries, but Germany pulled this one off”. It’s hard to argue with the above, but where Cowen goes wrong in my opinion is when he cites the EU (which was formed due to a large push by Germany) as yet another successful example of German innovation. What makes his view even more surprising is that he wrote this in May, 2017. After all, isn’t this the how most of us think of the EU today? -     ...

Have you heard of the term “virtue signaling”? Coined in 2015, the term is used to describe “the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous”. A snippet from the man who says he coined the term would help understand : “By saying that they hate the  Daily Mail   or Ukip , they are really telling you that they are admirably non-racist, left-wing or open-minded. One of the crucial aspects of virtue signalling is that it does not require actually doing anything virtuous.” This tendency is believed to be “endemic to the political left”. Predictably then, given the mood these days, there is now a backlash against said virtue signaling. Or as this New York Times article says: “When people offer their vehement condemnation of some injustice in the news, or change their Facebook profile photos to honor the victims of some new tragedy, or write status updates demanding federal action on climate change, observers like Bartholomew smell ...

The octopus is a creature so weird that author Sy Montgomery says “no sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange”. It has 3 hearts, parrot like beaks, 8 arms that can taste (yes, taste) the world, squirt ink, is poisonous, and can change both texture and form. (Google up videos for the kinds of spaces through which it can squeeze through, thanks to its ability to change form. It will blow your mind). As if such physical capabilities weren’t enough, an octopus at a genetic level, is “really weird”, writes Ed Yong . But first, a recap of how DNA works: “Genes encode instructions in the form of DNA—in the sequence of four building blocks represented by the letters A, C, G, and T. For those instructions to be used, the DNA must first be transcribed into a similar molecule called RNA, which contains roughly the same building blocks. The RNA is then translated and used to build proteins—the molecular machines that carry out all the important jobs inside our cells. So DNA stores informa...

The recent terror attack on the London tube made me wonder: how can the same Western capital be hit by terrorists over and over again, just in 2017? On the other hand, you don’t see Delhi or Mumbai getting hit (touchwood) with such ease, do you? Even when an attack does happen, security gets ramped up such that the next attack doesn’t happen for a long time. At least not in the same city. The same holds for Israel. How is it that India and Israel can protect their major cities while the Brits can’t seem to protect even their capital? I ran into a few examples of terrorist attacks that didn’t go through in India and Israel: 1)       Ashish Kulkarni wrote about the time a planned terrorist attack on IIM, Bangalore, timed to coincide with a seminar didn’t happen because the attacker “got caught in a traffic jam, and the seminar he was supposed to attack ended before he could get there”!! 2)      In the same article, Kulkarni says ...

Do intellectuals engaging in public life have a positive effect? That’s the topic of Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s book Thinking in Public . Do public intellectuals act as “public guardians of truth and justice and opponents of political corruption”? Or do intellectuals, as Jon Baskin wonders , become too prescriptive? Are they so convinced that they have the answers that they dismiss “public opinion as little more than gossip” and devalue the “ability of individuals to make informed political choices”? Are intellectuals willing to hear contradictory ideas, and then to integrate the valid points of their opponents? Or do they act as if they have all the answers, and think in terms of “accomplishment of pre-established tasks, rather than as an ongoing argument involving perennial questions about what we value, and why”? Traditionally, the role of intellectuals has been that of “agitating against unpopular state policy/conduct”, writes MK Raghavendra . But in India, they are now up ...

A common complaint about schooling is that different students are at different levels, but the class proceeds at the same pace and style for everyone. I’d always felt this is a stupid complaint, because how on earth can a teacher customize things for every child? But now after reading about Mindspark , I wonder if computer aided teaching can address that complaint. Here are its 4 main features: 1)       It has more 45,000 test questions that evolved iteratively over the years. 2)      “Teaches at the right level” by starting with an initial diagnostic test and then adjusting based on student performance on each subsequent activity. 3)      “Adaptive in approach”: Essentially, this address the problem that different student may struggle for different reasons, for example : “If a student makes a mistake on which decimal is bigger (3.27 or 3.3), it may be due to “whole number thinking” (27 is bigger than 3) wher...

It is well known that it is the right that has used the Internet to its advantage, leaving the left not only far behind but also very embittered. The clamour has been growing for some time that Internet sites in general and Facebook in particular have enabled the rise of the right by providing the platform to circulate such views, including, of course, fake news. Recent bans by some sites in the West seem to be targeting the views of the extreme right (white supremacists and neo-Nazis). But, surely, you say that getting banned from one site will move those folks to other sites. And new sites and apps will spring up to offer new forums for those people, right? Not really. In fact, one such alternative to Twitter called Gab came up and next thing you know, both Apple and Google banned it from their app stores. Many find this trend troubling, especially Americans who worship freedom of speech above almost everything else. While many of them find the extreme right worrying, they...

My 6 year old has no opinion about the countries my wife talks fondly about (Belgium and France) or the one I’ve been to in recent times (China). But for whatever reason, she wants to go live in the US! (Taking us along, of course). But she never tells us why. Neither of us have ever spoken to her about the US, so it must be her friends or classmates who have influenced her. At the other end of the spectrum of countries on which she has an opinion lies Pakistan. In this case though, we do know how she formed her opinion. On the anniversary of the Kargil War, her school had a session on thanking the army and told the kids about Kargil. So she got to know that: -          India defeated Pakistan at Kargil; -          Pakistan is the enemy with whom India has fought many times. No wonder then that she was glued to the movie, The Ghazi Attack , which is about an Indian submarine crew who sank the P...

Santosh Desai rightly condemns what followed the Ram Rahim verdict: “What we saw in Panchkula and elsewhere was a surrender to a force that had no official standing, but was able to cause carnage without fear or hesitation.” He wonders if private armies are the norm? “Gau rakshaks and anti-Romeo squads are examples of how unregulated islands of muscle are used to enforce an agenda through intimidation and the use of informal power.” While I don’t deny any of Desai’s criticism, perhaps we should also check how we landed here? Is it a case of the Arab and his camel: did we start by giving an inch because it seemed inconsequential and before we knew it, the camel’s in the tent? After all, do we not allow weddings (especially in North India) and religious institutions to block roads and blare away via their loudspeakers? Do we not allow every random set of people to say they are offended by something or the other, and then let them dictate what gets banned (remember the ba...

We are used to images of the statues of former rulers being torn down, once that leader or ideology falls. Think Saddam or Stalin. Since the rulers were hated and feared by their own population, the statues were brought down with a vengeance. The statues being brought down in the US in recent times are different. They are statues of the defeated side from the American Civil War. Ironically, those statues were put up after the American south lost the Civil War. Not just that, most of those statues were put decades after the Civil War had ended! The statues reflected the fact that while the South may have lost the war, they hadn’t changed their minds about (most) of the issues over which the war had been fought; and that they respected their leaders who had fought, even if on the losing side. Not to be outdone by what parts of the general public want, the opposition Democrats in the US called for the removal of 10 such statues from the US Capitol building. Politicians everywh...

When the RBI announced that pretty much all the money (98.86%) returned to the system, it led to the inevitable question as to whether demonetization achieved anything useful at all in the fight against black money. It’s a valid question. So what just happened? -          The top guys had probably converted most of the black money into assets like forex, gold and real estate long back anyway. -          But that just means the black money got transferred to someone else’s hands. Did the last person(s) in such a chain of transference bring it all back into the system? -          And so that last person in the chain can (theoretically) be questioned by the IT department: where did he get so much cash? Why doesn’t that tally with his declared income and tax paid over the years? Let’s next consider the political impact of all this. Chidambaram has gone to town ...

I remember my boss getting very pissed that her daughter expected her holidays to be in London, New York or Dubai. But can you really blame the kid, I remember thinking back then. If that’s what she sees her friends at school and in the neighborhood do, then that’s what she’d want to do. I was also smug that such a thing wouldn’t happen to me since I didn’t make (anywhere near) as much money as my boss did. Sadly, my assumption is proving to be wrong, bit by bit. While my boss obviously lives in a far better house than mine, she doesn’t send her daughter to some fancy international school. Rather, her kid was going to an academics-is-the-most-important-thing kind of school, which means most kids come from middle/upper-middle class families. And yet, her kid expected foreign holidays. I should have seen it coming… My daughter started expecting holidays around when she was 4. For the last few years (and touchwood, even now), a holiday is good for her as long as we go to any pla...