Viswanathan K's Thoughts

During the Israeli elections, I was very surprised to learn that it has a huge number of political parties (50+), and that coalition governments have been the norm for a long time. Imagine that: a country with a population of less than 10 million has more than 50 political parties!   I was reminded of that as I was reading Tim Marshall’s book, Divided . Jews make up 75% of the population, Muslims 17%. Jews fall under two categories: Ashkenazi and Sephardi. The former are mostly European origin, the latter from the Arab world. The Ashkenazi dominated Israeli politics because they were better educated, and they came earlier to the areas that became Israel. But the Sephardi have grown in power since then, and religious parties make or break coalitions, so their clout is disproportional.   The Jews are split into secular (49%), traditional (29%), religious (13%) and ultra-orthodox (9%). The last group is called Haredim. More on them later. Many neighborhoods are actually d...

Last year, I wrote that China was creating a digital currency . Should India follow suit and create a digital rupee? What would be the benefits? One of Silicon Valley’s prophets, Balaji Srinivasan, wrote a great blog explaining the reasons.   When we hear of a digital rupee, most of us ask what it even means: “The concept can be confusing for many people; after all, don’t they see a digital balance of rupees in their bank account already? So what would a digital rupee  do  anyway?” To answer that, it helps to compare good old physical currency (paper notes and coins) with the digital balance you see when you login to your bank account.   You can transfer physical currency to anyone. Whereas you can transfer the digital balance you see on your bank’s website only to others with a bank account . But in countries like India, not everyone has a bank account because of (i) Lack of branches and ATM’s in remote areas, and (ii) Minimum balance requirements are t...

In my apartment, several people who got diagnosed as having Covid-19 were asymptomatic. They only got found because they had to be tested prior to international travel or upon arrival in the state.   The most famous asymptomatic carrier (and spreader) of a disease is a cook and housekeeper named Mary Mallon, who became notorious as Typhoid Mary. Bill Bryson’s terrific book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants , tells her story. As an adult, she worked in many well-to-do households of New York City. Wherever she went, two things happened: “People came down with typhoid and Mary abruptly disappeared.”   In 1907, after a particularly bad outbreak, she was tracked down, tested, and found to be infectious but without symptoms – the first asymptomatic carrier. Well, earlier ones were probably burnt as witches.   Typhoid Mary was held in protective custody for 3 years, against her will. She was released on promising never to take a job handling food. Upon which, she im...

Bill Watterson, the author of the Calvin and Hobbes , was an Arts major. He hated the constraints and rules imposed on comics by the newspapers (size, panels, rules for Sunday strips etc) and the syndicates. He stuck to his guns and the result was, well, the greatest comic ever. Watterson’s work was, of course, utterly comprehensible and full of deep significance. It remains popular even today, long after he stopped drawing them.   Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert , on the other hand is an MBA. When he started Dilbert , it got published via one of the syndicates. And after a year, it was just stagnating in a handful of newspapers. So Adams did what his MBA training had taught him: seek the customer’s feedback, and the customer is always right. It was the start of the Internet age, and so Adams added his mail ID next to the strip. Voila! The feedback came in bucketloads and Adams learnt that people loved the strip when the main character was in office, not outside. Until the...

Now that we’ve gone over the idea behind and the fears with China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR), let’s look at India’s reaction via Bruno Macaes’ book, Belt and Road .   First, India feels OBOR in its current form creates “unsustainable burdens of debt” (remember the Sri Lankan port that China took over via a 99-year lease?). We’ll come to the “in its current form” part of the criticism a bit later in this blog.   The other problem that India has with OBOR is far more intractable, namely that parts of it run through Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK): “Most obviously, it threatens to turn Pakistan’s occupation of part of Kashmir into a fait accompli.”   The other danger for India is long-term. As India’s economy gets bigger, it will inevitably want to “develop deep international links and supply chains, most immediately in its neighbourhood”. But OBOR threatens to create a scenario wherein by the time India is economically rich enough to act, it’ll be too late....

We saw in the last blog that China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) has many purposes. From early on, China intended to use it as a lever for geopolitics, as Bruno Macaes writes in his awesome book, Belt and Road : “Revealingly, the launch of the Belt and Road was accompanied by a process of merger and acquisitions enabling the creation of truly massive industrial conglomerates.” State capitalism, in other words. With all “its associated power relations”.   Of course, all those countries on the New Silk Road need massive investments and loans for projects on the scale of OBOR. Between $4 trillion to $8 trillion by some accounts. No prizes who can lend on that scale? Yes, Chinese finance companies. In India, we rightly focus on the possibilities that affect us: “Pakistan and Myanmar may become China’s California, granting it access to a second ocean (Indian Ocean) and resolving the Malacca dilemma.” But the same OBOR financing structure creates risks for China: the risk of lo...

China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR). Belt and Road. The New Silk Road. It’s known by many names, but what exactly is it? Bruno Macaes’ wonderful book, Belt and Road , explains it all.   Most of us know/think of OBOR as an “interconnected system of transport, energy, and digital infrastructure”, cutting across land in Central Asia to connect China to Europe, and also creating sea routes from the Middle East to China via Pakistan or Bangladesh or Myanmar. China calls it all for “trade”, while India, Japan and the West worry over the “thinly disguised military element” of OBOR.   The idea for OBOR started in 2008. As the financial crisis brought to the West to its knees, China’s steel industry got hit hard. China’s own infrastructure needs wasn’t enough to compensate for the recession in the West. Ergo, China decided that it needed new markets to “absorb China’s steel production”. But for that it needed countries of Central Asia to have road connectivity (they’re all inland...

Life has been changing the environment almost from the minute it got started. In Origin Story , David Christian points out that almost 3 billion years back, cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis: H 2 O + CO 2 + energy from the sun = Carbohydrates + O 2 As a result, carbon dioxide levels started falling in the atmosphere. But the oxygen levels did not start rising, at least not for some time. Why not?   As this BBC podcast says, the reason is obvious once you hear it: oxygen is among the most reactive elements in the universe. Ergo, the released oxygen reacted with pretty much everything out there and never stayed “free” in the atmosphere.   But eventually, all the oxygen “sinks” were full. And then the oxygen levels in the atmosphere began to rise massively and rapidly, all the way from practically non-existent levels to 35% (Current levels are 21%). This spike in oxygen levels was lethal to most life forms back then for a reason that’ll sound very weird to us fr...

As we saw, AIDS hit the West in the 1980’s. In his awesome book, Spillover , David Quammen gets into how it came out of Africa. That story starts off with a heated debate between two theories on the origin of HIV in humans: (1) the cut-hunter theory that said assumed a hunter killed an African primate, and got infected due to a wound/cut in his body; v/s (2) the polio-vaccine theory that blamed contaminated vaccines which had been tested on Africans in 1957-60.   To test the polio-vaccine theory, Dirk Teuwen went to the Congo to test one of the earliest HIV-1 samples from 1960. It was improbable anything would have survived that long, but as luck would have it, those samples had been preserved in just the right way. That strain was given the name DRC60. It was compared against another strain named ZR59. The two strains were very different: “Every virus has its own rate (of mutation)… The amount of difference between two viral strains can therefore reveal how much time has...

In his awesome book, Spillover , David Quammen talks of the story of yet another famous zoonotic disease, AIDS. This is the history most of us know of how AIDS came to be. Gaëtan Dugas, a young Canadian flight attendant, was the notorious “Patient Zero”, the man who “carried the virus out of Africa and introduced it into the Western gay community”. His job was the catalyst that lit the fire: “As a flight attendant, with almost cost-free privileges of personal travel, he flew often between major cities in North America… notching up (sexual) conquests, living the life of a sexually voracious gay man… He was handsome, sandy-haired, vain but charming.” The man contributed to the idea of his outsized role in the spread of AIDS: “Dugas himself reckoned that in the decade since becoming actively gay he had at least twenty-five hundred sexual partners.”   No wonder it’s easy to see Dugas as “Patient Zero”. But, as Quammen writes: “What the word “Zero” belies, what the number “0...

Readers don’t won’t objectivity. Instead, all they want is “moral clarity” and “narrative shaping” style of journalism, writes Andrew Sullivan. He cites the recent shootings at 3 Asian massage parlors in Atlanta as an example. The man who did it confessed. The parlors doubled up as places of sexual activity, and the man didn’t approve. Yet he had frequented two of those very places earlier. Huh? “He took out his angst on the source of what he saw as his temptation, and committed mass murder.” Twisted, right?   Was there any anti-Asian angle to it? The man himself denied it. But of course, he could be lying. His room mates say they’d asked him earlier if he picked the spas for sex because the women were Asian. His response? “He denied it, saying he thought those spas were just the safest way to have quick sex.” Again, that’s not proof of anything. But if one is objective, Sullivan says: “The only piece of evidence about possible anti-Asian bias points away, not toward ...

Back in the days before steam began to power ships, they were all wind powered. That, by definition, meant the trip was entirely dependent on the winds. In A Splendid Exchange , William Bernstein brings out two such instances. The first one was the route from the Middle East to India: “The seasonal dance of the monsoons – southwest in summer, northeast in winter – would dictate the annual rhythm of trade in the Indian Ocean.”   The second instance is brought out in the problem for a trip from Portugal to the bottom of Africa by trying to hug the curve of the African coastline: “South of the equator, as southerly trade winds increasingly blew against his ships, progress became ever more difficult.”   This was such a big pain that Vasco da Gama was willing to experiment with an alternative route, even one as long winded as this: “(As they passed Sierra Leone), they turned right, departed the coast for the open Atlantic… Then the ships gradually executed a counter-...

Smartphones are dirt cheap. That’s for people like us. There’s still a huge chunk of Indians for whom it’s still not cheap enough to afford. Buying it on EMI’s is always an option. But increasingly, there’s a new option in town: “collateralized smartphones”, writes Nilesh Christopher.   Here’s how it works: vendors lend the buyer the money for the phone. At high interest rates, of course. Nothing new so far. Here’s the difference: “Users install an undeletable app at the point of sale. The apps can then monitor repayment behavior throughout the duration of the loan.” Say, the buyer misses an instalment. Initially, the app will show audio-visual reminders. Then it starts doing annoying things like changing your wallpaper. Or showing a reminder the next time you turn on the camera. Then the app takes more serious measures like blocking social media apps like Facebook (Imagine what blocking WhatsApp would do to the user!). Eventually, the app just shuts the phone down altoge...