Viswanathan K's Thoughts

From Tim Harford’s book on data and statistics, How to Make the World Add Up , let’s look at a couple of other things to watch out for when we see conclusions drawn.   Let’s start with an example: “Consider the historical under-representation of women in clinical trials. One grim landmark was thalidomide, which was widely used by pregnant women to ease morning sickness only for it to emerge that the drug could cause severe disability and death to unborn children.” Even if we try and collect data with the right representation of men/women, rich/poor, urban/rural etc, we still run into the problem that many don’t respond. Or certain types of people can’t be found easily. All these are a form of “dark data”. (This problem cannot be solved entirely). The general danger here is that all analysis is, by definition, done with “found data” only. And that is a lesson Harford asks us to remember: “We can and should remember to ask who or what might be missing from the data we’re b...

In this concluding blog, I’ll look at Gary Bass’ take from The Blood Telegram on the after-effects of the Bangladesh war on the different countries.   First up, Bangladesh itself. Its development would have been a challenge in any case, but things were even worse than normal: “(It was made far worse by) the loss of so many people… the decimation of the ranks of the educated… the devastation of infrastructure… the widespread availability of leftover weapons from the insurgency, and the burden of getting the refugees back home.” It was left, as one of Indira’s advisors said, as “a primordial slime. Out of this chaos, cosmos has to be created”. War crime tribunals were setup but they did nothing other than becoming a way to harass one’s political opponents. Mujib returned as the democratic leader, a lot of corruption followed, and in 1974, he seized emergency powers “gutting the constitution”. In turn he was assassinated during an army coup. It reminded me of that line from t...

The war finally started. And it happened on both the West and East P fronts. Yet another Yahya gamble had backfired: he had amassed troops on the Punjab border, hoping to spook India. Instead, India just used it as a justification to amass their own troops ensuring that the war, whenever it started, would be on both fronts. It got even better (for India). Pakistan attacked first on the west: “(Indira) had wanted Pakistan to get the blame. Now it would.” It had given India the moral high ground on yet another front.   You can make out how successful the war was from these lines in Gary Bass’ The Blood Telegram : “It is a measure of how well the war went that India’s generals have squabbled about credit ever since.” On the Bangladesh side, India knew it would not just be fighting Pakistan but also the clock. The US would try and stop the war as early as possible, preferably before India’s aims were achieved. So the army decided to race to Dhaka, and ignored other cities t...

As war looked inevitable, India went around the world capitals to gauge which way they’d lean in case of war, writes Gary Bass in The Blood Telegram . The response was disastrous, unsurprisingly. Western countries toed America’s line. South East Asia didn’t see any reason to stick their neck out, one way or the other. The Middle East openly backed Pakistan. Only Israel was supportive.   Was America likely to get involved militarily, when war came? India was confident that would never happen: “With the United State painfully trying to extricate itself from Vietnam, nobody wanted more military involvement in Asia.” To make sure, India also took its case publicly to the American public and media. Their aim? Make the optics of it (America supporting a genocidal regime) impossible for Nixon to intervene militarily. Remember Kennedy’s visit to the refugee camps from the earlier blog? Well, that helped too. India, being a democracy with a free press, knew how to play that game wit...

As the refugee count in India kept increasing, surely the US could see that the situation was becoming unbearable for India. War was looking inevitable, unless the refugees would return to East P. That would never happen with Yahya in charge, so why didn’t the US just dump Yahya? After all, countries have no loyalties to other countries. Replace Yahya, avoid a war, and the US would continue to have Pakistan as its Cold War ally. Gary Bass’ The Blood Telegram has the answer to these questions.   The answer starts off a few decades earlier. Mao had just taken control of China. The US refused to recognize Mao under China. Until war broke out between the Soviets and China. The US now saw an opening: the enemy of my enemy…   There was a problem though. Since the US didn’t recognize China, it didn’t have any embassy in Beijing. Ergo, they needed a middleman - Yahya fit the bill. He was a common friend of China and Nixon. The initiative started in 1970, before the elections...

It soon became clear, writes Gary Bass in The Blood Telegram that West P would not accept the outcome of the elections. They stalled, and as the resentment grew, started flying more and more troops into East P.   These events set off alarm bells in India. Would Yahya start a war with India to divert attention? To justify his martial law? So India suspended West P’s flights carrying troop from flying over Indian skies. That move raised fears in West P: was India trying to isolate East P? Would India foment rebellion in East P?   In parallel, Yahya had Mujib arrested, and his party was banned. And then the killings began. Yahya assumed that the “soft” Bengalis wouldn’t last long, and he could wipe out those who harped about election results and greater autonomy quickly. Had he and the West P army focussed on that agenda alone, they would have almost certainly succeeded. With America looking the other way, nobody else would have intervened (it was an “internal” matter, a...

This series is about the Bangladesh war of 1971, based on Gary Bass’s book The Blood Telegram (Blood is the name of an American consulate official in Dhaka).   Let’s start with the US, since it was their relation with Pakistan and the lack of it with India that played a major role in how events played out. Richard Nixon, America’s president at the time, was a man who took offense easily, and held grudges forever. His political career at/near the top spanned several decades (he was a Vice-President under Eisenhower, lost to Kennedy, and then became President), which meant his list of personal grudges was very long indeed.   At an ideological level, Nixon believed that US foreign policy should be based on what a country did outside its borders, not how it treated people within its borders. By that token, India was a problem: it called itself non-aligned, but clearly leaned towards the Soviets. Pakistan, on the other hand, was rabidly anti-communist. On top of that, there was ...

Why did the Tatas buy Air India (AI) for ₹18,000 crores? Since the Tatas used to own the brand in pre-independence times, before Nehru forcibly nationalized it, there were several jokes on the Net : “As news of the Tatas taking over Air India spread, snappy jokes about  ghar wapasi , “airlooms” and “Tata does not always mean goodbye’’ flooded social media.”   Jokes aside, I couldn’t find any article on the Net that explained what the Tatas might have in mind. But one of those articles made me realize I was missing another equally important question wrt this sale… for which there is an answer.   But first, let’s look at state of AI. It includes the erstwhile Indian Airlines under itself since 2007. And it’s been bleeding money for a long time. At the rate of ₹20 crores per day. That’s ₹7,300 crores per year. Were the Tatas arm-twisted into buying such a loss-making entity with huge loans to boot (over ₹61,000 crores)?   Look closer at the numbers, and yo...

Tim Harford, in How to Make the World Add Up , his book on how to make sense of data and statistics, highlights the problem with what comes to our attention: “When media outlets want to grab our attention, they look for stories that are novel and unexpected over a short time horizon – and these stories are more likely to be bad than good.”   As an example, he cites all those headlines about the growth in global inequality. As always, the devil is in the details: yes, the gap between the richest of the richest and the poorest of the poor is indeed growing by leaps and bounds. But it’s also true that about 150,000 people are coming out of poverty every day. Yes, every day. Over the last couple of decades, China and India have pulled out almost a billion people out of poverty. See how this example aligns with Harford’s point on the headlines? Short term v/s long term; bad news v/s good news.   Plus, as Harford reminds us, both “Another terrible crime has occurred!” and...

Ed Yong wrote this excellent analysis of why the US seems to be particularly bad in dealing with COVID-19. Initially, people thought it all due to Trump’s actions and inactions, but as subsequent events have shown: “The weaknesses were in the rootstock, not high up in the trees.” Around March-April, Biden had declared “victory”. As case counts fell: “Abbott Laboratories, which makes a rapid COVID-19 test, discarded inventory, canceled contracts, and laid off workers.” The Americans had seen what the highly infectious Delta variant did in India. And yet they were totally unprepared when it landed in the US: “Models failed to predict Delta’s early arrival. The variant then ripped through the U.S.’s half-vaccinated populace.” Leading to the question: “Delta was an audition for the next pandemic, and one that America flubbed. How can a country hope to stay 10 steps ahead of tomorrow’s viruses when it can’t stay one step ahead of today’s?”   At the heart of it, the p...

Starting about a year back, the Chinese government has started shaking things up. Within China. Sharply and suddenly, writes Peter Hoskins: “Everything from insurance agents, private tutoring firms, real estate developers and even companies planning to sell shares in the US have come under intense scrutiny.” What’s going on? One can’t be sure, since China's leaders do not give interviews. So one can only guess the reasons.   A couple of problems have been looming for some time. China’s population is beginning to age, and they need more young people to keep the economy growing. Hence the decision to allow upto 3 children per family. Another issue is the lack of “common prosperity”. There is an ever-increasing number of super-rich folks, a huge middle class and yet… there’s still a big chunk of the population that is not well off at all. Some of the recent moves would certainly seem to be based on these troubles-on-the-horizon.   The tech industry bore the brunt of...

In his book on how to make sense of data and statistics titled How to Make the World Add Up , Tim Harford points out that even when we ask questions, we tend to start by asking about the sample size, the margins of error etc. Whereas there’s an even more basic question we should be asking first.   Let’s go over a few examples he cites to get to that question. In the US, for example, a foetus born at 24 weeks (and then dies) is counted as “infant mortality”. Whereas the same thing in Finland would be counted as a “miscarriage”. As you can see, such definitions affect the infant mortality rate numbers in the two countries. See the danger? If you didn’t know this, you’d likely have concluded that there is a difference in the two countries, tried to find a cause for it, and depending on your leanings, even concluded that it’s another sign that Scandinavia rocks in public welfare spending!   How do you measure poverty? A proxy that is used often is net worth (what you have...

In his book, Seeing Like a State , James C Scott wrote: “The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people.” The land and the people were both “illegible” to the government.   It therefore seemed obvious that knowing the land and the people, and even organizing them to make things “legible” to government would lead to better governance. From there, it is a short trip to what Venkatesh Rao describes : “(The state) merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic.” That might sound ominous, but as Rao explains: “The attempt to maximize returns need not arise from the grasping greed of a predatory state. In fact, the dynamic is most often driven by a g...