Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Given how similar modern day democracies are to ancient Rome in their power sharing structures, elections, and term limits, it’s not surprising that Tom Holland writes in his wonderful book, Rubicon : “We flatter ourselves, in the democracies of the West, as if we trace our roots back to Athens alone. We are, for better as well as ill, the heirs of the Roman Republic.”   Rome itself was extremely functional. Why then did they care about prophecies? “The Romans, being a people as practical as they were devout, had no patience for fatalism. They were interested in knowing the future only because they believed that it could then better be kept at bay.”   The Romans’ admiration for ancient Greece was mixed with contempt: “While the cities of ancient Greece were regularly shattered by civil wars and revolutions, Rome proved herself impervious to such disasters. Not once, despite all the social upheavals of the Republic’s first century of existence, had the blood of he...

The other day, while we were watching this Indian spy series, The Family Man , there was this scene where the main character was called to the principal’s office at his daughter’s school. And like any parent in that situation, he was saying things like “My daughter is a very good girl” and “She’d never do something like that”. Hearing which, my 9 yo daughter snorted, “Hmmph… no parent would ever say such things about their child”.   Yes, kiddo, I can see why you would think that.   I told her that I’d say the same if her principal called me in. You’d think she’d be glad to hear that I would have her back, should the need arise. But no. “No need. I am a very well-behaved kid at school” . At least she had the honesty to say “at school”…   Another time, she wasn’t happy with the song being played in the car. So I changed it and asked if the newer one was acceptable to her Royal Highness. A simple Yes/No would have sufficed. Instead, she gave an exaggerated sigh ...

John Milton famously wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”. After reading David Eagleman’s hugely entertaining set of (very) short stories, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives , (yes, each tale is about the afterlife), I was left wondering if that tendency of the mind doesn’t stop even with death…   That story is titled Egalitaire . Imagine a compassionate God, one who acknowledges that life isn’t (wasn’t?) black and white: “Humans could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and meanspirited in other ways. How was She to arbitrate who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell?” Stuck with this impossible choice, She simply eliminated the choice! “She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the Devil, and brought every last human to be by Her side in Heaven.”   Most importantly now, everyone was treated equally. True equality had become the norm. You’d think the humans would be ha...

All of us use Amazon. Brian Dumaine’s book Bezonomics (titled after its founder and ex-CEO, Jeff Bezos) gives an awesome overview of how the company operates. Bezos truly believes that a key factor about Amazon is: “We are genuinely customer-centric… (unlike other companies that) are focussed on the competitor, rather than the customer.” Of course, customer satisfaction is a moving target. Because customers are “divinely discontent”. No wonder then Bezos has insisted on having a Day 1 mentality, to act with the same enthusiasm and fear like it is the first day of the job/company. At an all-hands, he was asked would Day 2 would be like. His answer says it all: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death.” In fact, just a few years back, he said something hard to imagine today: “Amazon is not too big to fail… One day, Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their life spans tend to b...

“They have eyes but cannot see…” goes that famous saying. Except the issue isn’t with the eyes… If you don’t believe me, take this famous “selective attention test” (it takes less than 90 seconds). Believe it or not, half the people miss it!   And no, there’s no discernible pattern to who spots v/s misses it, say the folks who framed that test in The Invisible Gorilla . Not by age, gender, profession, IQ… anywhere you conduct the test, about half the people miss it. Almost unbelievably, they say: “We truly are arguing that directing our eyes at something does not guarantee we will consciously see it.” How can anyone possibly say, let alone prove, such a ridiculous statement? Aha, another scientist ran the gorilla experiment using his eye tracker and found that those who spotted and those missed it, both spent “a full second looking right at it”! The brain is apparently very good at filtering stuff, resulting in the illusion of attention (“we experience less of our visual w...

Did you know that Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, is built on a lake? Roma Agarwal in her book, Built , points out that it started off as a small island but: “The city now spreads far beyond its original site, but the center of town, which contains most of the historical Aztec and Spanish buildings, sits on that lake.” So why was the city built on/near a lake in the first place? “The site of the city was determined by a (Aztec) vision.” But the Aztecs just built on that island and near it. The Spanish came in 1521 and “cut down trees around the lake, causing mudslides and erosion that made the lake be shallower”. Chaos, devastation and flooding. Eventually, the lake was filled with soil to “allow the city to expand”.   Which brings us to the topic of soil. Since this is a book on how things are constructed, Agarwal gets into the details of piles (“columns put deep into the ground to help support the structure above them”). The type of pile and how well it works depe...

Why did Rome, unlike every other kingdom and empire, back then come up with a distributed power structure like the Republic? Here’s how Tom Holland summarizes it in his book, Rubicon : “What else had the Republic been founded upon if not this single great perception – that the taste of kingly authority was addictive and corrupting?... It was the intoxicating quality of power that made it so dangerous.”   But, as mentioned in earlier blogs, the model still created the problem that wars had to be fought, rebellions put down. The victorious general always returned with fame, adulation, riches and influence. A first among equals in the Republic. To avoid this, the Senate would often not authorize wars! “If Rome’s interests were not immediately threatened, then senators might prefer to tolerate any amount of low-level anarchy rather than grant one of their peers a license to clear things up.”   This explains why piracy lasted for so long during Roman rule. To begin wit...

Most of Hamish McDonald’s awesome book, Ambani & Sons , is about Dhirubhai. One thing I realized from the book is that the backdrop to how things were in India back then cannot be separated from Dhirubhai’s actions. Thus: “Dhirubhai had learnt that relationships were the key to unlocking help and that the law could be argued with.” If connections were king, this attribute probably helped him immensely: “Dhirubhai was endowed with a photographic memory for faces and names, and he would try to turn any contact – however fleeting – into a common background on which some affection could be based.” So good was Dhirubhai at this that Arun Shorie wrote (decades later): “He had sources in places where mere journalists like me do not even know there are places.”   It was a time when, as McDonald writes: “A lot of grovelling indeed was required for businessmen to get the clearances they needed.” And Dhirubhai was willing to do whatever was needed: “I am willing to sal...

While the (British) East India Company is far more famous, the first such company that was created for trading purposes but went on to form an empire was the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch, though, were the new kids on the “trading” block: after all, the Netherlands itself came to exist only after it seceded from Spain. By the time the Dutch started looking east for spices and other luxury goods, other European nations were already established players in the East Indies: Spain, Portugal and even England.   The Dutch East India Company (known by its Dutch initials as the VOC) had its first major skirmish with another European power when it captured a Portuguese ship named Santa Catarina off the coast of Singapore, as narrated in this Captivating History book on the VOC : “The Dutch took its precious cargo. It consisted of Chinese raw silk, clothing, and spices.” But more than that, it exposed the vulnerability of the Portuguese. It also raised other questions: was thi...

In her book, Built , Roma Agarwal tells the story of the elevator (lift). The problem since the age of Rome when gladiators “rose from the pits of the Colosseum up into the fighting arena on a moving platform” was the lack of safety: if the rope snapped, the platform fell and injured or killed people. Elisha Otis (yes, the same Otis name you see on lifts) came up with this ingenious solution.   He decided to use the “wagon spring”. Like any spring, it “springs” back into shape once the force is removed. But a wagon spring had one additional characteristic: “When it has a force on it, the wagon spring is flat, but when it’s released, it curves.” It was this change in shape that was the basis of Otis’ idea.   First, he replaced the “smooth guide rails (which kept the platform in position)… with toothed or ratcheted rails”. Then he created a structure to hold the lift, but with “feet sticking out at the base”. The rope was attached to the wagon spring which in turn w...

Here are a few interesting factoids from Marcus Chown’s book, Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand . First up, the unknowable. We think of computers as machines that can solve any problem. But did you know that the man who broke the Enigma code, Alan Turing, being a mathematician, was more interested in knowing the ultimate limit to what a computer could do? And this, at a time, when computers were not even a reality. Mathematicians! “Incredibly, it turns out that most problems cannot be computed by computers. It is as if there exists a small archipelago of computable problems – which mathematicians have found – lost in a vast ocean of uncomputable problems.” Even more incredibly, this has “ not held us back technologically”!   Helium is a liquid that can never freeze. No, not even at absolute zero. It’s got something to do with quantum uncertainty, which I won’t bore you with. Why then did I even mention it? To share his punchline: “Hell will freeze over long before liquid...

In his book on why ideas that don’t make any sense yet often work in real life, Alchemy , Rory Sutherland, marketing guru at Ogilvy & Mather, gives away the reason very early: “If you expose every one of the world’s problems to ostensibly logical solutions, those that can easily be solved by logic will rapidly disappear, and all that will be left are the ones that are logic-proof.” Most political and foreign policy problems are “logic-proof”! Half tongue-in-cheek, Sutherland goes on to add: “This isn’t the Middle Ages, which had too many alchemists and not enough scientists. Now it’s the other way around.” He clarifies his book isn’t an assault on “logic or reason”; rather, it is an “attack on a dangerous kind of logical overreach, which demands that every solution should have a convincing rationale”. Statistics is the butt of a lot of jokes, and rightly so. No, not because the field is flawed, but because it is all too easy to draw the wrong conclusions: “Bad maths can l...

On May 6, 1944, Germany surrendered unconditionally, signalling the end of World War II in Europe. But, writes Ian Buruma in Year Zero : “Stalin was furious that General Eisenhower had presumed to accept the German surrender for the eastern as well as western fronts. Only the Soviets should have that privilege, in Berlin. Stalin wanted to postpone V-E Day till May 9.” Even as the Allies were arguing, in the general confusion Admiral Doenitz announced the German surrender on radio. Was the cat out of the bag? “But still there was no official announcement from the Allied leaders that the war with Germany was over.”   On 8 th May, the Russians accepted the surrender of the Germans (again). Churchill decided to ignore the Russians and not wait for 9 th ; instead, he decided to formally announce the victory in England on 8 th at 3 p.m. But wait: “General Charles de Gaulle, refusing to be upstaged by Churchill, insisted on making his announcement to the French at exactly th...