Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Mention the Roman emperor, Nero, and the response will probably be “fiddling” (while Rome burnt). But of course, like all Roman history, Nero’s tale has so many other parts to it, as I found via this Hourly History book .   Nero, from age 4, was raised by his aunt. His father had died, and his mother, Agrippina, was exiled for treason against the emperor of the time, Caligula. When Caligula died, Agrippina was allowed to return to Rome. She set her eyes on the new emperor, Claudius, to secure her own as well as her son’s prospects…   Agrippina decided to marry the emperor even though she was his niece – but the Senate wouldn’t allow incestuous relations. Agrippina didn’t let that get in her way – she convinced Claudius to pass legislation to OK her marriage to him. Next, she got Nero to marry the emperor’s daughter from his previous marriage. And she browbeat the emperor to declare Nero, not his older son from the earlier marriage, as his successor. The stage was thus ...

If you come from a nomadic background, by definition, you don’t have much experience of building stuff. Or ruling anything bigger than a tribe. So when the Mongols stormed the world, how did Genghis Khan solve this problem?   Jack Weatherford’s The Secret History of the Mongol Queens gets into that part. Genghis divided up all the conquered lands and assigned rulers to them. Nothing special about that, except when you realize all the assigned rulers were women (his wives), not his sons or generals! His sons, he could see, were hardly promising material, while his generals were needed to expand the empire even further. But before that, Genghis needed to ensure peace in the already conquered areas. How did he do that? “Through a thick network of marriage alliances.” But he didn’t take on more wives. Instead, he made alliances for his children. The conquered tribe thus gained prestige and material benefits. Even more cleverly: “The husband (of his daughter) would go to war...

In her book on the Entrepreneurial State , Mariana Mazzucato says that even Apple, the company we associate with creativity (at least while Steve Jobs was in charge) didn’t really come up with new technologies. Rather, as Steve Jobs himself said about creativity: “Creativity is just connecting things… (Creative people) were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”   Mazzucato says the iPhone is the perfect example of “just connecting things”, each of which was created by the State, not the private sector. These include semiconductor devices, ranging from the CPU to dynamic RAM (DRAM) to hard-disk drives (HDD). LCD’s (Liquid Crystal Display) too originated from government funded labs. So too did those tiny enough to fit in a phone Lithium-ion batteries. The entire field of DSP (Digital Signal Processing) was based on advancements to the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Then there’s the Internet itself which was created by the US military. HTTP and HTML ...

In How Emotions are Made , Lisa Barrett asks the famous Zen question: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” As mentioned in an earlier blog , her book is about the “theory of constructed emotion”: “Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions.” Barrett answers the Zen question in the context of the theory of constructed emotion: “A tree falling itself makes no sound. Its descent merely creates vibrations in the air and the ground.” It becomes a sound only if “something special is present to receive and translate them: say, a ear connected to a brain”.   Here’s the connection she draws to the constructed-emotion theory: “A sound, therefore, is not an event that is detected in the world. It is an experience constructed when the world interacts with a body that detects changes in air pressure, and a brain that can make those chang...

In both his books on the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and its follow-up, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens , Jack Weatherford refers to something called The Secret History as a source. I always wondered why it is called “secret”. Sure, history is disputed, written by the winners, revised to suit whatever ideology is in vogue – we know all that. But “secret” history? That’s new…   Strangely, the Mongols didn’t seem to covet jewels and treasures as much as they did their documents and records! The Persian historian Rashid al-Din points out the Mongols went even further in how they maintained their records: “From age to age, they have kept their true history in Mongolian expression and script, unorganized and disarranged , chapter by chapter, scattered in treasures, hidden from the gaze of strangers and specialists, and no one was allowed access to learn of it.” Not only was it secret, it was deliberately chaotic in its organizatio...

In Labyrinths of Reason , William Poundstone, described the “rotating color wheel” as a thought experiment: “Suppose that all the colors are changing… What is green now will be blue in a thousand years, purple in 2000 years, red in 3000 years and come full cycle back to green in 6000 years… (This rate of change is to tiny) that hardly anybody would notice.”   Bill Watterson used that idea to allow Calvin’s dad to have some fun: Lisa Barrett has a very different take on the topic of colors. In her book, How Emotions are Made , she asks, “Is an apple red?”. While the common sense is Yes (or No, it’s green or some other color), that’s the wrong answer: “The scientific answer, however, is no. “Red” is not a color contained in an object. It is an experience involving reflected light, a human eye, and a human brain.” But wait, unlike the case of sound, even the eye and the brain aren’t enough! “For the brain to convert a visual sensation into the experience of red, it must po...

The Entrepreneurial State. That’s the seemingly contradictory title of Mariana Mazzucato’s book . Yes, it’s about the government as an entrepreneur! The opposite of the bureaucratic, bumbling institution that we think of it is as…   A clarification first. Here’s what she is and is not saying: “The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to them a little better or a little worse, but to do those things which at present are not done at all.” Rather, she is talking of the State creating new technologies from scratch, by making high risk investments as well as using other tools at its disposal: “Whether the State is making an investment in the Internet or clean energy… it can do so on a scale and with tools not available to businesses (i.e., taxation, regulation).”   Why can’t/won’t the private sector do that instead? Because: “Real innovation can take decades.” And the private sector is way too impatient, wa...

A diamond that is free of impurities is valued highly. So is one that glitters and reflects light. The Kohinoor, even after it was cut (more on why it was cut later), is not the best on either count. It barely makes it to the 100 Biggest Diamonds list today (in case you were wondering, it’s 89 th ). And yet, as William Dalrymple and Anita Anand write in their book : “It retains a fame and celebrity unmatched by any of its larger or more perfect rivals.”   Nobody knows for sure where the diamond was originally found, but it certainly pre-dates the Mughals. In pre-Mughal India: “Diamonds were not just valued for their usefulness and beauty, they were believed to be supremely auspicious objects, able to channel planetary influences, and so were given an almost semi-divine status.” When the Mughals came to India, they (0bviously) bought their own Persian values, one that did not place diamonds on a pedestal! “(In Persia) it was not diamonds but ‘red stones of light’ that...

This is how Lisa Barrett’s book, How Emotions are Made , explains the “theory of constructed emotion”: “Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions.” If correct, the theory leads to a nuanced idea of whether emotions are “real”: “Emotions are real, but not in the objective sense that molecules or neurons are real. They are real in the same sense that money is real – that is, hardly an illusion, but a product of human agreement.” But that doesn’t sound right. When we detect anger or fear or happiness in others, it feels natural, not a “product of human agreement”.   Her counterargument is that we internalize such agreed interpretations from the time we are born, without realizing it. Which makes emotions culture specific. Further, even within the same culture, “emotional granularity” varies: “A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt,...

Hamish McDonald’s awesome book, Ambani & Sons , talks at length about the tussle between Mukesh and Anil over the Reliance empire. Reliance always had a twisted maze of “holding companies” behind which the ownership of the flagship, Reliance Industries, was hidden. The reasons for this were many, including (1) Tax saving, and (2) Having options to make, er, certain kinds of moves.   The second reason, well, you can imagine what kinds of moves it would have enabled. It also allowed Dhirubhai to use those companies to ensure that the Reliance share price didn’t fall at times when traders were trying to hammer it down. Keeping the share price from falling also helped small investors...   But what has that got to do with the fight between the brothers? Aha, at one point, Dhirubhai had “asked Mukesh to reconfigure the entire network”. While he was at it, someone put an idea in Mukesh’s head: “What if the new configuration could be effected to his advantage? What if he...

Remember the nursery rhyme, “London Bridge is Falling Down” ? That’s a bridge that Roma Agarwal talks about in her wonderful book, Built . It’s a building she never saw because, hey, it was demolished in 1831, after being in existence for a whopping 600 years! “Despite its impressive longevity, Old London Bridge failed as a structure.”   From the start, it was a tough ask. Nobody had built a stone bridge on a tidal river. Getting stones transported was another challenge. It took one year just to create one arch of the bridge. 18 more arches later, 33 years later, the bridge was finally ready in 1209. At its center was a drawbridge to allow tall ships to pass. Since the bridge was 8 meters wide and no cars/lorries existed: “Houses began appearing on the bridge.” Over a hundred of them, including shops. Some buildings were 3 to 4 stories tall. With so many “residents”, stalls mushroomed! Obviously, the bridge had never been designed for buildings. The houses were too close to...

The Scottish chess Grand Master, Jonathan Rowson, hovered around the Top 100 chess rankings, at his peak. So yes, you’re not likely to have heard of him. But he does have many interesting points on what chess can teach us about life in his book, The Moves that Matter . He knocks off the obvious one first: “The connection between chess and life is usually assumed to be almost exclusively about the application of strategic thinking.” After all, we hear a remark like this in so many contexts, don’t we? “Sporting commentators often announce disconcertingly that the tennis or cricket match you thought you were watching is now ‘a chess game’.”   Another obvious thing in chess is that you need to concentrate. Very hard: “The experience of how concentration ebbs and flows, how we replenish intellectual bandwidth so that we can keep examining the same set of things while also accommodating new things without the whole wave of thought collapsing on itself. To concentrate, we need...

If you complain about gadgets having too many features, I wonder what you’d have to say about the famous (notorious?) toilets of Japan. I mean, their toilets can play music, have “featured buttons”, and “cleaning sprays that automatically sanitized”. Like any foreigner, Roma Agarwal, author of Built , experimented: “I did press a few buttons and regretted it pretty quickly – but hey, I felt cleaner afterwards, if a little violated.”   The Japanese interest in, er, “solid human waste” was established centuries back, writes Agarwal. No, it wasn’t some kind of weird fetish; it was a necessity. The land wasn’t too fertile, but the population was booming, and so increasing food production was literally a life and death matter. It also meant the soil was being depleted of nutrients at an alarming rate since leaving the land uncultivated for any period wasn’t an option: “They found the answer in their own sanitation: the burgeoning population created a lot of waste.”   Th...