Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When anyone comes up with a new narrative of historical events or paints a new picture of an important character, some look at it as a genuine attempt at revisiting the facts. Others wonder if it is just another attempt to rewrite history to suit an agenda. With events that are very old, one can never be sure what really happened. Even with more recent, better documented events, one never knows the motives behind actions: Malice? Incompetence? Greed? Ambition? Miscalculation? Or something else? Three recent incidents got me thinking about all this. The first was this Shekhar Gupta talk on some of the long-reaching and/or courageous decisions made by India’s short-term PM’s like VP Singh, Chandra Shekhar, IK Gujral and Deve Gowda. That was an eye-opener for me, because (a) I had dismissed them as inconsequential due to their short tenures, plus they felt opportunistic PM’s, and (b) “official” history only talks of the Nehru-Gandhi scions (Even PV Narasimha Rao who wasn’t “short-...

For the first time in her life, my 8 yo daughter was fascinated by something taught at school: Helen Keller. That there was a means for the blind to read (Braille) blew her away. An assignment to write 2 pages on Braille helped. She got to see how Braille script looked and that there is Braille script for languages like Hindi too, not just English. (The fact that Braille was originally devised to enable soldiers to read in the dark without turning on candles/lanterns and giving away their positions to the enemy was of interest to me, not so much to her). But my daughter’s interest wasn’t done yet. A week later, she came and asked me, “How did Helen Keller learn to read?”. Via Braille, remember? “I mean, how did she learn which symbols mapped to a particular letter?” As she moved her hand over the raised symbols of Braille, they must have told which letter those symbols mapped to. Then came her question that knocked me out: “But she was deaf. So how could they tell her anythi...

Given the pin drop silence in international response to the abrogation of Article 370 and the status of J&K within India, I’d wondered if Modi was copying the Chinese playbook: if you criticize us, we’ll (temporarily) prevent companies from your country from doing business in our country. An NBA manager tweeted in support of Hong Kong, and China took all NBA matches off the air. An EPL footballer criticized the treatment of Uighur Muslims, and China prevented the broadcast of the match of his club, Arsenal, in China. You get the drift… And then I read this Tyler Cowen article confirming what I had suspected: “Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is an avowed student of the Chinese experiment. Is it so far-fetched to imagine that he would help to create comparable pressures on speech for institutions doing business with India?” But it seems like there’s one area where Modi does not seem to follow the Chinese playbook: how to deal with areas that want to secede. The ...

After Caesar’s assassination, Mark Antony made the blunder of having his will read in public assuming he’d be the heir, says Edward Watts in the podcast . Instead, the will declared Caesar’s nephew, Octavian, the heir, not Mark Antony. But remember, here “heir” didn’t mean the next emperor. Because that post was not institutionalized, and Caesar was a one-off exception to the way Rome’s (distributed) power system operated. Octavian was only going to inherit Caesar’s sizable wealth and name. As luck would have it, Octavian was far from Rome at the time, and just 19. Nobody thought he’d claim the legacy as, with his youth and inexperience, that would be like signing his own death warrant in the vicious power struggle that was sure to follow. But Octavian surprised everybody: he fought a vicious civil war over who'd succeed Caesar (him or Mark A), won, and took over the emperor's position (He renamed himself Augustus Caesar). Along the way, Octavian had chased Mark A to...

How does a democracy transform into one-man rule? In an age where strongmen are increasingly the norm (US, China, Russia, India, Turkey etc), this question is more than just academic. We’re told to learn from history, so let’s turn to ancient Rome. How did ancient Rome change from a Republic into a monarchy? That’s the question physicist Sean Carroll asks historian Edward Watts in his podcast . If you thought, “Simple. Julius Caesar took over, and that was that”, you’d be wrong. The institutions that governed Rome had been there for centuries, and they wouldn’t have gone out easily. Let Watts explain how things really played out. Caesar knew that the existing institutions were well entrenched, which is why he never wanted to become the emperor. All he wanted was a guarantee that he wouldn’t be prosecuted for his crimes from his earlier term as Consul. But could he trust any promises by the Senate? What if they went back on their word? The Senate, on the other hand, didn’t ap...

All insurgencies aren’t the same. And yet, I tended to bucketize all insurgencies in the North East as pretty much based on the same issues: step-motherly treatment by the Center, resulting in lack of development, in turn fueling demands for either greater autonomy or outright secession. I was so wrong, as Tim Marshall’s book, Divided , showed me. The Naga insurgency is very different. But first, who are the Nagas? “The Nagas are a collection of forested hill tribes.” Like the better-known Kurds who got split across multiple nations (Iraq, Turkey, Syria), the Nagas got split across India and Myanmar (Burma) in 1947-48. They want a united homeland, something that neither India nor Myanmar will agree to. Ergo, the problem spills over into two countries, so much so that: “(It) has led to the construction of a fence, not by the Indians but by Myanmar, along parts of that section of the border.” There are approximately 2 million Nagas on either side of the border. The Mya...

The Wright brothers conducted the first manned flight: you’d expect that to be the end of their biography, right? Wrong, says this Hourly History book : “The brothers’ first flight is the middle of their story, not the beginning or the end.” As kids, their interest in flight was initiated by a toy helicopter “though the helicopter soon broke”. It helped that they came from “a family of adventurous individuals”. Years later, the brothers referred to tables developed by an expert in aeronautical experimentation, Octave Chanute to “calculate the amount of headwind they would need to make the plans for their glider work”. The answer was 15 to 20 miles per hour. They got in touch with the US Weather Bureau to find a location with that type of wind. The answer? Chicago. They dropped Chicago since it would attract too much attention. Instead, they settled on remote Kitty Hawk. The first successful flight in 1903 lasted just 12 seconds and covered a distance of 120 feet ! Over ...

Sanjeev Sanyal’s Land of Seven Rivers is an entertaining romp through India’s history, with endless tidbits, and the author’s own opinion on events. The book starts off with the plate tectonics that caused the Indian landmass to break away from Africa/Madagascar and set it off on its course to its present location. Unfortunately, that fact leads many to the erroneous conclusion that it explains why India and Africa share animals like elephants and lions. But: “This cannot be the case because India separated from Africa during the age of the dinosaur.” In fact, the reality is far more weird. Thanks to DNA analysis, we know that: “The Asian elephant is more closely related to the mammoth than to the African elephant.” Sanyal talks about the tendency of kings from time immemorial to try and present their best (and not entirely true?) persona for posterity to remember them by. Take Ashoka’s famous edicts on rocks and stone pillars: “One should always take statements by polit...

In a recent blog , I said that the coronavirus wasn’t an epidemic yet, regardless of the panic and fear. Sadly, now it’s official, writes Ed Yong: the WHO declared it a “public-health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC) — a designation that puts it in the same bucket as the infamous epidemics of H1N1 swine flu, polio, Ebola, Zika, and Ebola again. In his article, Yong focusses on the following aspect: “Each epidemic is also different, and each is a mirror that reflects the society it affects.” Let’s explore that line in detail. Coronavirus seems to be spreading at a blistering pace compared even to SARS, which for all the hue and cry, infected 8,100 people in 8 months . But that’s not an apples to apples comparison, say many. Back then in 2002-03, the world didn’t know how fast and how wide a new virus could spread. Today, we have panic, which leads to more people checking in for anything resembling the symptoms. Plus, the number of people flying across the world ha...

My 8 yo daughter came over and said she wanted a new cycle. She was clear that she didn’t want an “ordinary” cycle. What does “ordinary” mean, I asked. She couldn’t quite articulate it, but I finally realized a bike from any place other than a Decathlon store is deemed “ordinary” in her snobbish circle of friends. We were mulling whether the next cycle size would fit in the car, and so we went and borrowed the (next size) bike from her friend downstairs. To see if it would fit in the car. Surprisingly, and to my daughter’s immense relief, it fit. Then a wicked thought occurred to me: “Hop in”, I told her, “Let’s go live in a new house from today. We can take your friend’s cycle with us. She won’t know your new address and we’ll get a cycle for free”. It never amuses me that at such moments, she’s still never quite sure if I am kidding. I let her stew in the suspense, then got in the car, had her join me, and turned on the ignition. She had an alarmed look on her face. Takin...

Tim Marshall’s book, Divided , talks about the increasing divisions that are arising and asserting themselves world-over, from the usual suspects (the Middle East) to China, India, the EU (and Brexit) and the US. The chapter on the US was an eye-opener for me, both in terms of the more nuanced aspects of Trump’ism (no, it’s not all racist) as well as its parallels to some of the things in India. Take the (in)famous wall that Trump wants to build on the Mexican border. Critics look at only the literal aspects of the wall: the cost, the difficulty (impossibility?) of the terrain etc, and whether it would really prevent illegal immigration at all. But, as Marshall writes: “Trump’s wall is attempting to define what America is – both physically and ideologically.” Let’s get into the ideological aspects. The percentage of Hispanics (Spanish speaking) is expected to rise from 17% today to 29% by 2050. More importantly, by 2050, the white population would fall below 50%. In oth...

The coronavirus, the epidemic(?) that’s been spreading in (and from) China. But how contagious is it exactly? Ed Yong wrote this superb article explaining the number used to measure such things in general. It is called the “basic reproduction number”, or just R0, pronounced R- nought : “R0 is the average number of people who will catch the disease from a single infected person, in a population that’s never seen the disease before. If R0 is 3, then on average every case will create three new cases.” In case of the coronavirus, 6 research teams have come up with a value for R0, spread over a wide range from 1.4 to 5.5. Why such a discrepancy in values? Because in the early days, there’s just not enough data: “Some people might have been infected without showing symptoms. Others might not have reported their symptoms to health authorities.” Unfortunately, a Harvard doctor seized upon the R0 value of 3.8 from one of those studies and called it “thermonuclear pandemic...