Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Time machines. Everyone wants one. After all, everyone can think of so many uses. The adults’ version, at least in the movies and books, always   involves deliberate or accidental tampering of events and the paradoxes they create. In real life, most adults would probably use a time machine to make a killing in the stock market, but that doesn’t make for an interesting story… Kids’ versions of time machines, on the other hand, are totally utilitarian. Calvin’s time machine, for example, was the simplest of them all: Like everyone who dreams of a time machine, Calvin too uses his time machine to go back in time to see the dinosaurs. One time, he planned to go into the future to see the latest tech but that didn’t work out the way he intended: Calvin is very creative in the oh-so-many ways to deal with homework: And another time: I was amused by my 8 yo daughter’s use of a time machine, something she came up during our holiday at Goa: “When...

As a kid, I loved playing Atari’s video games. All those memories came back as I was reading Stephen Levy’s book, Hackers , when he talked about the existential threat to companies like Atari when the (then) new home computers came to the market. Perhaps it was inevitable because one of the most popular use for home computers was, well, playing games. Sure, the graphics on home computers back then may have been non-existent (or sucked), but the primitive games were addictive nonetheless. A few pioneers thought they could even make money writing and selling computer games, and this gave rise to a small industry. That in turn soon attracted a certain class of programmers who considered it a challenge to render better graphics on the available hardware. Their success led to better graphics in computer games, which in turn attracted more buyers, which then created the need to write yet more games. The circle had begun. Since writing computer games was very effort intensive, it a...

In his book on how geography often dictates a country’s policies, Prisoners of Geography , Tim Marshall explains why Tibet and Xinjiang matter so much to China. If Tibet were not under Chinese control, it would allow an invading force (aka India) to use the Tibetan Plateau as the base “from which to push into the Chinese heartland”. Even more critical is that Tibet is “China’s Water Tower”, the source of China’s great rivers: the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong. An enemy who controlled Tibet could disrupt their water supply. Did you roll your eyes at all this? Aha, then let Marshall spell out the key point: “It matters not what whether India wants to cut off China’s river supply, only that it would have the power to do so… This is the geopolitics of fear.” And after taking over Tibet, China has built a railway line to Tibet. That line brings in modernity, consumer goods, tourists… and yes, “several million Han Chinese (mainland China) settlers”. The other troublesome region for C...

Ken Williams was one of the early buyers of a personal computer, an Apple computer. For a man who was used to dealing with mainframes that handled requests from multiple terminals, the “idea of this sleek, beige machine being a computer seemed in one sense ludicrous”, writes Stephen Levy in Hackers . So why did he buy one anyway? It was interactive, it ran pretty fast (the mainframe’s far superior speed was shared among multiple users, so on a per user metric, the Apple wasn’t bad), and it could be used “in the middle of the night”. At this early stage, “hardly anyone had done anything on the Apple”. So Ken decided to implement the FORTRAN language on Apple. He had what is called the tools-to-make-tools syndrome. And yet the “more significant revolution in computing was happening right there in his house”. Huh? It started when Ken coaxed his wife Roberta to try out a “really fun game” on the Apple. Back then, graphics were non-existent and the game was entirely textual! Th...

In the Internet age, most kids have never seen or written a letter. But school curriculums still include letter writing. And boy, did I have a tough time getting my 8 yo daughter to memorize the different components of a letter, and the order in which they need to be written. Getting her to come up with content for the letter was another challenge. Sound happy, write cheerful things, it’s a letter to your friend for god’s sake, you’re describing something you enjoyed, I railed. All I would get was a very resentful kid going through the motion… Then, a few days later, she was reading a Wimpy Kid book where one of the kids wrote this letter to the author of his favourite series of mystery books: My daughter pounced on the letter and went to town with her criticism: “Where’s the sender’s address?” , she snorted. “No date either” . On a roll now, she demanded, “Who starts a letter without even a “How are you?”” . “And he’s only complaining. He can’t even say one good thin...

The accident happened because the driver fell asleep. How can so many people fall asleep while driving, I’ve always wondered?! Turns out my question is valid, as Matthew Walker writes in his wonderful book, Why We Sleep . The number of people “falling completely asleep at the wheel” is rare. (That would require severe sleep deprivation, 24 hours or longer without sleep). What’s far more common is something called “microsleep”: “During a microsleep, your brain becomes completely blind to the outside world for a brief moment – and not just the visual domain, but in all channels of perception.” It is suffered by individuals who are chronically sleep restricted (getting less than 7 hours of sleep on a regular basis). Scarily, a microsleep lasts for as little as 2 seconds. Yes, that’s right: 2 seconds. And you don’t even realize it happened most of the time… unless you have an accident. As Walker writes, this explains why drowsy driving causes more accidents than those caus...

William Davies wrote about why we can’t seem to agree on what’s true anymore. And no, he doesn’t agree the problem is mainly due to fake news and filter bubbles. Left or right, he says there’s one thing everybody agrees on: “The news and information we receive is biased.” And everyone tends to blame the mainstream media and the independent expert: “Both the left and the right feel misrepresented and misunderstood by political institutions and the media.” Which is why it’s fair to say: “Outrage with “mainstream” institutions has become a mass sentiment.” Thanks to the Internet: “Everyone can point to evidence that justifies their outrage. This arms race in cultural analysis is unwinnable.” The following points are true for both sides:       Those Internet searches begin with “legitimate curiosity about what motivates a given media story”;        Every utterance is scrutinized for an ulterior motive;        ...

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors have a chapter on art, “one of the most peculiar and celebrated of all human behaviors”: “(Art is) costly behavior, both in time and energy, but at the same time it’s impractical … Natural selection doesn’t look kindly on waste. How, then, did our instinct for art evolve?” Their answer is that art may be like the proverbial peacock’s tail! “What’s valuable isn’t the waste itself, but what the waste says about the survival surplus – health, wealth, energy levels, and so forth – of a potential mate.” Of course, there’s a difference from the peacock: in case of humans, “both sexes are avid artists, and both are art aficionados”. Then again, in our species, “even males invest a lot in their offspring and, consequently, need to be choosy about their mates”. Note that the authors don’t deny the other uses of art: self-expression; conveying ideas, emotions, and experiences; the evoking of strong feelings like awe; a sen...

Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid...

Why are so many people so anti-Aadhar? The book, The Aadhar Effect , goes into the reasons, and offer their take on the validity (or not) of those concerns. One concern is that Aadhar has changed from an identity project to an identification project: “An identity project would give power to the people… An identification project empowers the state.” Another concern is that it has morphed from a voluntary system to practically a mandatory system. A third concern from certain social activists is, well, interesting. They worry that Aadhar is changing the process of how a government is made to take care of the poor. Earlier, the model was to push for and get a legal resolution (e.g. an entitled amount or whatever) and then use that as the basis to demand that the government pay up. But with Aadhar, everything changes to a money transfer program. Would this model gradually erode the need for legal resolutions? And if that happened, could governments just stop paying altoget...

Ok, so Aadhar was now being deployed the way it was designed : for incentive driven usage. The deployed Aadhar soon took shape into what is now called India Stack. India Stack has 5 elements, as the book, The Aadhar Effect , explains: eKYC : an electronic KYC that would be acceptable proof of identity; Aadhar Payment Bridge : Your Aadhar ID became your financial address. By definition, it would be unique for each person; eSign : Digital signature that one could affix to documents; UPI : Or Unified Payment Interface. “A platform on which payment apps can be built and money transferred”. Examples include the government’s BHIM app, PayTm, Google Pay and WhatsApp Pay; Consent Layer : To share personal data with, say, a bank, university or employer for a limited period for a specific purpose. Note that not all of these were visualized by Nilekani himself, but he had designed the system in a way that allowed for such innovations. To see how all this adds valu...

The story behind why Aadhar was launched is well known. Sonia Gandhi wanted a system that would enable subsidies to reach the people, ergo a unique identity for everyone. She brought in Nandan Nilekani, who demanded a cabinet minister post, so he would have the clout and power with the different ministries and bureaucrats he knew he’d have run-ins with. The book, The Aadhar Effect , describes the two options Nilekani had: build a pipe, or build a platform. But, first here’s the difference between the two options: “In the pipe model, value gets created at one end (by the producers) and it gets consumed at the other end (by the users)… A platform, on the other hand, just attracts producers and consumers to it, and enables transactions between them.” YouTube, Uber and Facebook are platforms. See what a platform can do? “Platforms can scale up… (they) can cater to a range of services… Platforms can nurture diversity… (They) can gain momentum very fast… (And they) can dramatic...