Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I read this excellent history-by-the-hour book on Iran , from its independence onwards. It is full of flip-flops; so brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride.   Unlike India, the British never let go off Iran at independence – yes, because of oil. The Anglo-Iranian company was minting money for Britain, and left little for the Iranians. In 1952, its Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, transferred its ownership to the Iranian government. A furious Britain enforced a naval embargo on Iran. They also tried to get US support, but President Truman refused. His successor, Eisenhower flipped American policy and agreed to support Britain. Via the usual method – fomenting a regime change.   Meanwhile, the British blockade hurt Iran, and the masses became increasingly unhappy with Mosaddegh . The Shah of Iran, working with the CIA, dismissed Mosaddegh. But the people hated the Shah even more, and they came out in support of Mosaddegh. The Shah fled to Italy. The CIA began to pla...

I came to know of the number of Indian students studying in China only when the Wuhan lockdown happened. Ditto for the number of Indian students in Ukraine – I got to know the number only now when Russia attacked it. How come there are Indian students in these places? Sure, there must be some who go to either settle abroad, or because of genuine interest in a topic, but that can’t account for the destination being China or Ukraine…   Milind Sohoni’s article provides the big picture answer. Turns out there are 8 lakh Indians studying abroad. The biggest reason is, of course, the lack of jobs for a graduate in India. Sohoni shows this via back-of-the-envelope maths. A college grad would usually work for a company that deducts tax at source, i.e., he would be a tax-payer. There are only 3 crore tax payers in India. Assuming two-thirds of them are still working, and that people work for 20 years (which is low), he arrives at the figure of 10 lakh new jobs per year (this figure wou...

In one of his articles, Tomas Pueyo wrote that: “We think we’re taught History. But we’re really taught Propaganda.” That’s one of those statements whose truth value everyone agrees with. And yet, everyone disagrees on when it is History and when it is Propaganda. (Hint: When one’s own side writes the books, people call it History; when the other side writes it, it’s Propaganda).   Propaganda comes in many forms. Outright lying is one extreme of how history is written. Another way is to withhold inconvenient facts. Or to present one’s assessment of the facts as history. Or to present historical events as a story leading upto something – as if history has a direction or purpose. And then there’s what Calvin said:   All of which is why Pueyo says: “For every truth you hold about the past, somebody else has the opposite take.”   When I was at school, they taught about the Khilafat movement during India’s freedom struggle. It never made any sense why som...

You must have heard of Moore’s law. Technically, it was an observation/ prediction made by Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, way back in 1965 that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years (even as the cost of computers halved in the same period). But it’s held up for so long (except the 2 years period changed to 18 months), that it’s been called a “law”. The benefits are very visible: smaller, more powerful devices, affordable to all.   With all those benefits, a parallel thing emerged: there’s a piece of software for everything under the sun. Which brings its own set of risks, warns Marc Goodman in Future Crimes .   He cites many examples, but I’ll just list a few. In older times, if a burglar wanted to target a particular home, he’d look for “a pile of newspapers in front of the house or a porch light that remained off at night”. In Burglary 2.0, criminals search your postings on Facebook and Twitter to identify when you plan to be on vaca...

Carbon-14 is the famous isotope of carbon. It’s the one used for identifying the age of long dead things via the technique called radio-carbon dating. Less well known is the other isotope, carbon-13. Like “regular” carbon, carbon-13 has a stable nucleus and does not decay, writes Nick Lane in Oxygen . But carbon-13 too has found to be of use in identifying the age of something: the age of life itself, i.e., when life started on earth. Here’s that story.   Since neither carbon-12 nor carbon-13 decays, their ratio on or in the earth has remained constant at 99.89 to 1.11. Lane calls it the “unadulterated background ratio”. The process that can change that ratio (even by small amounts) are living things, “and so far as we know, only by living things”. Let’s see how that happens.   Take photosynthesis. It prefers to use carbon-12 over carbon-13. Why? Because the lighter isotope needs (slightly) less energy to set off the reaction involved. Which leads to the following c...

How do you make a new app become popular? I was sure the answer would be very different in the West v/s India or China. What’s legal, which laws can/are enforced, what’s tolerated by people: everything’s so different in these regions.   Matthew Brennan’s book on TikTok, Attention Factory , confirmed my suspicion. As he says, to go viral in China: “The team had to master the darker arts of growth hacking.” Imagine an airport, with crates full of new phones waiting to be shipped to different parts of China. There are companies whose job is to (1) unseal the phone boxes, (2) connect the phones to a device that has, say, 12 USB ports, (3) select the app(s) to install on the phones, (4) re-seal the phones in the boxes. On an average, this method can install apps on around 1 lakh phones per day.   But over time, this stopped being an effective to “distribute” your apps. Why? Because it is an endless cat and mouse game. Soon, app companies realized it was better to do the...

The venture capitalist, Paul Graham, made some very interesting points about why anything related to religion and politics quickly turns into, er, a religious argument. For one, he says: “Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.”   But why is that the case? “One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.” That’s a possibility, but then Graham points out the reverse isn’t true: “It's a mistake to conclude that because a question tends to provoke religious wars, it must have no answer.”   The key, he says, could be something else: “I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never ha...

The quality of the photos on Instagram are unbelievably great. How did that happen? Its founder Kevin Systrom loved art – he even went to Florence to learn photography, write Sarah Frier in her biography of Instagram . His teacher took away his camera and instead gave him a smaller device that could only take blurry, black and white, square photographs. “The idea – of a square photo transformed into art through editing – stuck in the middle of Systrom’s mind.”   This weird form of training would prove useful. When the first mass market smartphone, the iPhone, was launched, it suddenly became possible for anyone to take a photo anytime. Except that its camera (and hence the quality of the photos) sucked. Besides, Internet speeds were low, which meant it was a pain to upload high-res photos anyway (I know, it feels a lifetime away). It was almost as if the stars had lined up for Instagram – it became the app with filters (“art through editing”). The app caught on fast, so much ...

Now that we’ve seen the origin/ original meaning of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in politics, let’s take a quick look at the role of religion in these two groups in some of the major (English speaking) democracies. Why English speaking only? Because those are the countries whose news sites I can read and understand.   British politics today shows minimal signs of religion or religious groups having a huge say. (Before you applaud them too much, the keyword there is ‘today’ – in the past, politics and religions have mixed and interfered freely). Though there are signs of rising hatred of Islam in recent times – but that’s more an anti-Islam feeling than a pro-Christianity feeling.   In the US, on the other hand, Christianity is projected openly by almost all politicians (Even the Indian origin politicians who made national headlines like Kamala Harris and Bobby Jindal are Christians – it’s hard to find too many non-Christians rising high in American politics). Actually, America p...

I was surprised to learn that India’s largest brokerage firm is not ICICI Direct, but a startup named Zerodha. It’s the largest in number of clients and trading turnover on the stock exchanges. Its founder, Nithin Kamath, started trading in the stock markets in the late 90’s, a time when everything was still offline, writes Ashish B in his book on the company.   Despite the inconvenience of the offline world, Kamath was hooked. He worked at a call center in the night; and traded during the day. One time, he bumped into a US returned guy at the gym, who asked Kamath to invest ₹25 lakhs on his behalf! Kamath quit the call center and started Kamath Associates. Soon, he had more clients, and found “logging into ten different accounts was difficult” and painful. His solution? Become a sub-broker of an existing broker (Reliance Money) of the stock exchange – it would allow him to handle multiple accounts simultaneously. He did just that in 2006.   The brokerage fees soon be...

Douglas Adams’ famous book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , has a famous “answer to life, the universe and everything”, produced by a supercomputer (who else?). The answer (drumbeats): “42” What the hell?! Here is tech blogger Venkatesh Rao’s take on that answer: “(Adams nails) the fact that it’s an extremely ill-posed question by giving this ludicrous answer (which) forces you to do a lot of philosophical soul-searching and understand what it is you’re actually trying to think about.”   In recent weeks, I stumbled upon 3 great articles on these related points: the “meaning” of life, and not knowing what one is passionate about.   The first one was a letter Hunter S Thompson wrote to his friend. He quoted Shakespeare’s famous “To be, or not to be: that is the question” line: “Indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal.” Even if you find your passion, your goal, Thompson calls it the “tragedy of life”: “We se...

What do the terms, “left” and “right”, as used in politics, mean? Let’s start with the origin of those terms because that gives a general feel of those terms – the underlying theme, so to say.   In The Righteous Mind , Jonathan Haidt says that the two sides diverge wrt a fundamental question of governance: “Preserve the present order, or change it?” In 1789, at the French Assembly, the delegates who favoured ‘preservation’ sat on the right, while those favoured ‘change’ sat on the left. “The terms right and left have stood for conservation and liberalism ever since.” From that, it is obvious why the terms “conservatives” and “liberals” are used as synonyms for the right (preserve) and the left (change) respectively.   The terms are a bit unfortunate because the word “conservatives”, even when used in a political context, gets mistaken for religious conservatism. Even though the side that favours retaining the existing system may not be religious at all. Somet...

Code is a book that I wish I had read in college. At one point, Charles Petzold explains the Braille system used by the blind and (beat this) how relevant it is to modern day computers! (Actually, I am not sure if that’s because computer science/communication ideas flowed back into Braille; or the other way around).   Louis Braille was French, went blind at the age of 3 in the year 1812 and “would have been doomed to a life of ignorance and poverty” (There was no system of reading for the blind back then). The closest system arose in 1819 via a captain of the French army, Charles Barbier. Called “night writing”, it was a pattern of raised dots and dashes meant for soldiers to communicate at night, without giving away their positions by lighting candles. But it was too complex a system for the blind to use, at best OK for short messages, but not scalable to entire books. Braille took that system and tailored it for the blind.   Now to the relevance of that code to mod...