Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In an earlier blog , I’d mentioned that Apple in India accepts RuPay cards. This blog is on RuPay, why it came to be, and how it has grabbed the (Indian) market. RuPay (shortened from Rupee and Payment) is an initiative of NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India). It was launched in 2012. It is an alternative to VISA and MasterCard.   This Think School video does a good job of providing many details. First, it explains how VISA/MasterCard works. Say, you want to use your HDFC (debit or credit) card to pay a shop, whose account is with ICICI. Someone has to act as an intermediary who can check if the card is valid, whether the amount is within limits, then authorize (or decline) the transaction, and finally transfer the money from HDFC to ICICI. That intermediary has always been VISA or MasterCard.   Doing all this takes effort, requires servers to run, software to integrate with banks and shops; and it is a convenience. Which is why VISA and MasterCard charge a f...

Social media started to play a role in geopolitical events with the Arab Spring. Back then, it meant Facebook and Twitter. Today, the social media on which the Ukraine war is fought is TikTok. The Ukraine related content on TikTok is higher than any other social media. It’s almost an official channel, writes Kari Paul: “In a speech, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, appealed to “TikTokers” as a group that could help end the war. Last week, Joe Biden spoke to dozens of top users on the app in a first-of-its kind meeting to brief the influencers on the conflict in Ukraine and how the US is addressing it.”   Not everyone is happy with this though. Some are horrified at world leaders seemingly legitimizing such “frivolous” apps. Others disagree: “Many of the problems we are seeing with it today stem from this false idea that it is just a dancing app.”   Of course, like any other social media, fake content flows through TikTok as well: “Videos of unrelate...

Even if you don’t know (nor care) about quantum mechanics, this blog might still be interesting in understanding how/why change doesn’t happen easily in any prevailing system of any kind – science, philosophy, politics… Try and see the parallels of many of the things described in this blog into other areas.   The maths of quantum mechanics is unparalleled and unquestioned. But what is the underlying reality that the theory describes? This is the “interpretation” question that Adam Becker explores in What is Real?   The ruling interpretation is called the Copenhagen interpretation. Why despite so many unanswered, contradictory, and vague aspects does it still remain Number One? Why didn’t any of the alternative interpretations catch on for so long?   For one, John von Neumann, the great mathematician, had come up with a proof very early that a certain class of alternative interpretations was impossible: “The mere name of ‘von Neuman’ and the mere word ‘proof...

I stopped watching news channels on TV a long while back. Then the newspaper was stopped in Covid times; and we never renewed it. So my source of news are the websites of various news publications.   This blogger named David Cain wrote about his experience of “quitting the news” . Like me, by that he only means news channels and Internet newscasts, not all of journalism. I could relate to most things he wrote of.   First, he says, your mood improves: “The idea that you can get a meaningful sense of the “state of the world” by watching the news is absurd… What appears is whatever sells, and what sells is fear, and contempt for other groups of people.”   Second, you realize that watching the news didn’t really benefit you in any way: “A month after you’ve quit the news, it’s hard to name anything useful that’s been lost. It becomes clear that those years of news-watching amounted to virtually nothing in terms of improvement to your quality of life, lasting k...

The usage of UPI, both in terms of the number of transactions (green line) as well as the amount of money being transferred (blue bars), has been increasingly exponentially over the years. In 2021, it hit $840 billion.   But UPI was restricted to those who had a smartphone. (That means 40 crore feature phone subscribers were left out). Which is why the RBI launched UPI for feature phones, aka UPI123Pay on 9 th March.   UPI123Pay doesn’t even require an Internet connection! Here’s how it works: the “123” refers to it being a 3-step process to transfer money via the feature phone – call, choose, and pay. But first, the user has to link his (feature) phone to his bank account. At which point, he’d be asked to set his UPI PIN using his debit card. With that, he is good to use UPI123Pay.   To transfer money, (1) he needs to call an IVR number from his feature phone (the IVR works in multiple languages) (2) He then selects whom to transfer the money to – another in...

A face-saving option. Giving one to the enemy doesn’t come naturally. It can feel abhorrent. But sometimes, it is the smarter move. Richard Haass in his book, The World , talks of two such examples.   The first one is how the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was defused. Yes, the US insisted that Soviet missiles be removed from Cuba. But they also gave the Soviets something in return – they removed their own missiles from Turkey. And the US declared publicly declared that it wouldn’t invade Cuba (if the Soviets backed out). Technically, they needn’t have made either “concession”. But doing so gave the Soviets a face-saving option: the Soviets could spin the Turkey aspect as a win domestically; and the not-invading-Cuba-declaration as a signal to the world that the Soviets didn’t hang their allies out to dry.   Why did the US give the face-saving option? Because the alternative was unknowable and thus dangerous. For example, a complete loss of face could have led to a domes...

There’s this concept called “end of history”. No, it doesn’t refer to the point when the world has ended. Rather, it is a phrase that is limited to some areas only: “The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.” Notice that the phrase does not mean that events will stop occurring.   In our lifetime, the period most associated with this phrase is when the Berlin Wall fell – it seemed to signify the point when capitalism and democracy had triumphed; from here on, the assumption was that only the details might change, not the basic principles themselves.   Today, while capitalism is still ruling, it’s hard to argue that democracy is still the ruling system. Several of the threats to Western ideals are external, from outsiders. In that bucket fall Is...

TikTok. It’s taken the world by storm. One of the only Chinese apps to have become insanely popular globally. Matthew Brennan’s book, Attention Factory , says TikTok’s recommendation system is the differentiator.   But first, let’s see what TikTok is not. It is not a social media app, unlike Facebook or Twitter. In a social media app, you create an account (to identify yourself), then pick your “friends” or people you want to “follow”, and then the algorithm decides how to prioritize the feeds from those folks.   In TikTok, on the other hand, you don’t pick anyone as a friend or someone to follow. The algorithm decides what to show you next: it could be from literally anyone on the planet (Since you don’t tell the app whom to follow, the app isn’t restricted to showing only the videos from those people).   In fact, if you’re a new user, TikTok does not insist you create an account: “(This approach) allowed people the freedom to experience TikTok without co...

The title of the book was provocative but intriguing – Bose or Gandhi: Who Got India her Freedom? Taken at face value, the answer is obvious: whoever or whatever events got us independence, surely it could not be Bose. After all, the man and his Japan backed-Indian National Army (INA) were defeated by the British after some initial successes, chased out of India. In any case, all that during World War II. Bose then died in an air crash, and we got freedom 2 years later in 1947. Case closed, right?   A more accurate title of GD Bakshi’s book would have been “Role of INA in India’s Freedom”, but that’s nowhere near as catchy, is it? But that is what the theme of the book really is – not Bose, but the INA .   The INA were (largely) soldiers of the British Indian Army who turned against the British and joined hands with the Japanese under Bose. While Bose may have died, not every solider in the INA died (obviously not). After World War II, the British brought them back ...

We know that the earth was snow covered, even at/very close to the equator, repeatedly. There’s even a very evocative term for it: “snowball earth”. The most recent series of snowball earths, comprising of four great ice ages, started about 750 million years back, writes Nick Lane in Oxygen . What may have set off that chain makes for fascinating reading.   The most plausible explanation is based on those tectonic plates moving around. If you didn’t know already, the movement of those tectonic plates is what causes earthquakes, created the Himalayas, and why the coasts of Africa and South America seem like jig saw puzzle pieces that fit so well. But what’s that got to do with ice ages?   Lane explains. When rock is exposed to carbon dioxide in the air, it is eroded (since CO2 is weakly acidic). In the process, carbonates are formed and the CO2 level in the air reduces correspondingly. Now imagine an ice age where ice covers the land. In this scenario, the rocks and C...

Chamberlain is remembered as the (British) Prime Minister who fell for Hitler’s lies, repeatedly appeasing him all the way until World War II broke out. Recently I saw this Netflix called Munich – Edge of War about the conference in 1938 where Chamberlain “let” Hitler have the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and then came home to (supposedly) say that it was “peace for our time”.   The movie is nothing great, but one aspect that was interesting was Chamberlain’s reasons for appeasing Hitler. One, Chamberlain was quite old (he died soon after World War II started). That meant he had seen the destruction caused by the first World War and did not want that to recur. In his mind, that meant he had to try, to do everything possible to avoid another war.   Second, he knew that Britain was nowhere near ready to go to war. A treaty with Hitler would at best get peace; at worst, it would buy Britain time to prepare itself for war. This reason then was sheer pragmatism. ...

I read this book on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine by two scientists involved in it. The book talks of the technical, political and practical aspects. Everything about America’s behavior through all matters infuriated the authors, and since the anti-vaccine US folks are called anti-vaxxers, so this book’s title is Vaxxers !   The World was Prepared (Somewhat) : The authors point out that the Ebola scare of 2014 showed how unprepared the world was for a disease that spread and killed quickly. Fortunately, Ebola didn’t spread beyond a few African countries, but it set off alarm bells on the need to have mechanisms and processes ready for whichever Disease X did go global. While by no means perfect, some baby steps had been taken by the WHO and many countries. For example, platform technologies were recommended – make as many steps in the process common, regardless of the final vaccine. This would also for each new disease/vaccine to require only a few tweaks to the constituent in...

Why is Ukraine so important to Putin and Russia? There are several reasons.   One, Crimea (in Ukraine) is the only port that the Russians have that remains unfrozen all year around. Imagine having a navy that can’t go to war because, hey, winter is here! That makes Crimea indispensable to Russia. I wrote about it the last time Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014: “The EU had been wooing an in-dire-economic-straits Ukraine for some time to come into their orbit. Just when it looked Ukraine would say Yes (and Russia would lose access to the Crimean naval bases), Putin got the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, to back off. A revolution followed, Yanukovych was overthrown and Ukraine seemed to be slipping away. And that is when Putin moved in with his military might.”   Two, Russia has fretted and fumed in impotence even has NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War, taking more and more eastern European countries under its wing. NATO in Ukraine is simply unacceptable...

While Khomeini had acquired power, he feared the US would betray him, try and reinstate the Shah, says the history-by-the-hour book on Iran . So Iran asked the US to extradite the Shah to stand trial in Iran; which the US refused. In response, Iranians stormed the US embassy and took Americans hostage: “They figured that as long as they were holding American hostages, the US would have to think twice about regime change.” The US had expected a Gandhi-like peacemaker; instead they got chants of “Death to America”.   After an aborted rescue attempt, the US turned to Saddam Hussein in Iraq to attack Iran. Hard though it is to imagine today, Saddam was a hero to the West, and to the Arab world! Iranians were furious and stuck behind Khomeini – their fury and thus willingness to die for the country meant that Saddam’s better trained troops couldn’t win quickly. This bought enough time for Iran’s trained forces to step in, and war would continue for a decade.   The long ...