Viswanathan K's Thoughts

James Barr‘s book, A Line in the Sand , explains how the Middle East became the intractable place we now see it to be. In the decades leading up to World War I, the Middle East was part of the Ottoman empire. Even then, it was clear that the Ottomans were fading. In the middle of World War I, Britain and France started drawing up plans on how to split the Ottoman empire, if and when they won the war ! That plan came to be known as the Sykes-Picot plan, based on a literal line on a map drawn by the two – everything south, which lay closer to the Suez, would go to the British; while everything north would go to France. Palestine was left out – it was too problematic, given its religious importance to both Muslims and Christians. Britain then had made Promise #1 to the French on the division of the Ottoman Empire – the Middle East – assuming they’d win World War I.   The Ottoman Sultan, as the ruler of the Middle East (and thus Mecca), used his authority as the Caliph to exhort t...

Jonas Bendiksen ’s wrote a photojournalistic essay, The Book of Veles. The eponymous Veles is a highly impoverished town in Macedonia; and Bendiksen had taken photos of the town, residents in different parts, and included quotes from some of those folks. Except It was all fake.   Nicholas Carr describes what Bendiksen had done: “He shot pictures of empty buildings and deserted cityscapes, and when he returned home to Norway he used video-game-production software to transform the images into three-dimensional renderings. He then downloaded digitized, 3D images of models from the web and placed them inside the scenes, carefully adjusting their poses, clothing, and lighting to make everything look as realistic as possible.” Wait, there’s more. Even the words in the book are fake – Bendiksen didn’t write them. He used computer programs that generate text instead!   Bendiksen wasn’t a fraud. Rather, he was trying to test these questions: “I started to ask myself the...

I remember these lines from a book on TikTok, Attention Factory , which explained why TikTok’s predecessor app (also by a Chinese company) was launched in the US, not China: “The early US adopters were middle and high schoolers who, after finishing class, had plenty of time for leisure and entertainment. In contrast, Chinese teens typically had a gruelling schedule of after-school tutoring and exam preparation homework. ” Did that sound similar to the life of Indian teens? No wonder then: “If social media was about sharing one’s life, Chinese teens didn’t have much to share.”   It’s easy to understand why this happened in both India and China. When a country is poor, then there aren’t that many jobs out there. To get those few good jobs, it’s key to go to the best colleges, which then leads to very hard entrance exams, in turn triggering a wave of coaching classes.   Over the last year or so, the Chinese government cracked down on its $100 billion “ out-of-school...

In this blog, I’ll go over Kanti Bajpai’s point from his book, India Versus China , that “power balancing” among actors not limited to India and China has meant that they’ve always been on “opposite sides”. By that, he means that the “India – China – US – USSR/Russia quadrilateral” has constantly “shaped Indian and Chinese choices”.   Between 1947 and 1958, Bajpai says the two countries were busy with the task of learning to govern their own countries, and it was thus a period of entente. While India tried to remain non-aligned in the Cold War, China found the US at its doorstep thanks to the Korean war. And so they leaned on the USSR to keep the Americans at bay.   By the late 50’s, China and the USSR fell apart – they disagreed on who was the leader of the communist movement, the Soviets had stopped supporting China’s nuclear weapons program, and they even fought a brief war against each other. During the 1962 war, the US sent its nuclear weapon armed aircraft carrie...

Kanti Bajpai’s book, India Versus China , is very informative on why the two countries have been neutral at best, and adversarial at all other times. In ancient times, the Himalayas were an insurmountable barrier. As Vikram Seth wrote in his travelogue through China: “The two countries, despite their contiguity, have had almost no contact in the course of history… the heartlands of the two great cultures have been almost untouched by each other.” Sure, a few well known travellers moved around, Buddhism spread, but there was no ruler-to-ruler contact nor any significant trade between the two. Thus, neither side has any positive memory of the other. And contact during the imperialist era had Indians as part of the British attack force on China…   Since independence, China views India the way we view Pakistan – the frustration that nothing can be done to settle things once and for all with a vastly weaker neighbour. Why not? The Himalayas prevent any full-scale Chinese invasio...

If a disaster is looming over society (or a part of a society), what is the best course of action? Preventing it would be ideal, of course. But what if prevention is not an option – what then is the best course of action? This is the question Tim Harford explores in his podcast .   He cites the nuclear plant in Fukushima as an example. A huge tsunami hit the nuclear reactor; and the safety systems proved inadequate. The risk of nuclear fuel leaking and the resultant radiation risks to everyone in the vicinity loomed large. The Japanese authorities evacuated all villages in a certain distance of the nuclear plant. It being a rich country, the evacuees were given compensation for relocation and a continued stipend after that. Over 1,64,000 of them.   Sounds good, right? Except a good number of them couldn’t adjust to life in new places. Some were too old; others had no skills relevant to the new places they had to move to. A handful even committed suicide. Worst of all, ...

Even when the contradictions and problems with the different-laws-for-different-religions slam into other values that liberals hold dear, they just look the other way, write Harsh Madhusudan and Rajeev Mantri in A New Idea of India .   Take gender equality, for example. Liberals do believe in it. And obviously, triple talaq clashes with that value. And yet, when triple talaq was made illegal: “A significant number of ‘secular’ politicians and intellectuals argue that women-friendly reform should come from within the community.” But the same folks have no problem when groups want to enact laws against over-the-top superstition (in Hinduism, of course), what they call “blind faith”: “This is a strange distinction, for faith, by definition, is blind.” And who decides what is blind faith v/s good old faith anyway? (The point here isn’t whether such efforts are good; the point is about the inconsistency).   Having differentiated Indians based on religion, assigning...

Leonardo da Vinci declared that nothing in nature has precise mathematical lines or borders. This sounds idiotic. In his biography of Leonarda da Vinci , Walter Isaacson says that the statement was based on a “Leonardesque blend of observation, optics, and mathematics”.   A line is of invisible thickness, ergo it followed that boundaries in nature must really be blurred. This was the origin of the sfumato , the technique of using hazy and smoky outlines in paintings.   Leonardo came to this conclusion via his study of optics. He wrote: “If all the images which come to the eye converged in a mathematical point, which is proved to be indivisible, then all the things in the universe would appear to be one and indivisible.” Rather, he (almost) correctly said: “The visual faculty does not occur in a point; it is diffused throughout the pupil (actually the retina) of the eye.” He came to this conclusion by moving a needle closer and closer to one eye. No matter how c...

Today, the most valuable companies on the planet are all “platforms”, say the authors of The Business of Platforms . Huh, what are platforms? Naming them would make it easier to understand, so let’s list a few: Amazon, Facebook, the app stores of Apple and Android, Microsoft, Uber, Ola, Flipkart, Swiggy and Zomato.   Ok, now let’s look at the common theme. First, the platform owner owns very little of the content or assets that are transacted on the platform itself. Other firms produce and sell stuff on Amazon and Flipkart; other folks develop apps for the Apple and Android app stores; other people own the taxis availed via Uber and Ola; other companies develop most applications that run on Windows; other restaurants cook the stuff sold and delivered via Swiggy and Zomato.   Second, the platform’s value increases as it “tap(s) the innovation capabilities of outside firms to enhance value” e.g. the more apps that are available for the iPhone/iPad and Android phone...

In an earlier blog on Michelangelo , I mentioned that the man synonymous with artistic genius considered himself a sculptor, not an artist (ironically, he said that while he was painting the Sistine Chapel!). Michelangelo took on the famous statue of David assignment “not wanting to be outdone by an artist that he considered only a part-time sculptor”, i.e., Leonardo da Vinci.   And therein lies a tale of a rivalry of two forms of art: painting v/s sculpting. In his biography of Leonarda da Vinci , Walter Isaacson writes about Leonardo’s view on which was the greater form of art: paintings or sculptures? As you might have guessed, Leonardo sided with paintings.   True creativity, argued Leonardo, “involves the ability to combine observation with imaginations, blurring the boundary between reality and fantasy”. And while he was in comparison mode, he took a shot at poetry, something that “is less noble than painting”. While admitting he was wasn’t well read, he said tha...

Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayan‘s excellent book titled The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities describes of how polarization is achieved: “Unlike most wars across history though, the target of this one is not the accumulation of territory, riches or even fame. The reward is something even greater – the power to shape our thoughts.”   Early on, the authors talk of a con woman who dupes a large number of men at her office into “helping” her with money based on false sob stories. She was asked why none of her victims filed a case against her, even after realizing they’d been taken for a ride. Her answer is revealing: “I was recruiting friends. Friends who wanted to be the hero of their own stories. A story in which they were intelligent, charming, good-looking and witty… And now you’ve come into the story and you’re trying to make them the villain, or even worse, the village idiot of their own story. By asking them to lodge a complaint against me, you want th...

Have you heard of any natural nuclear reactors, other than stars? In Oxygen , Nick Lane talks about the one in Gabon (Africa), and how that came to be. But first, remember how fission bomb works? Uranium’s isotope, U-235 decays and emits a few neutrons. Slow down those neutrons using hard water, and you’ve increased the odds of those neutrons hitting the next U-235 atom. The process starts to repeat itself. If this process can continue long enough, you have a nuclear explosion. The key, of course, is to get enough concentration of that U-235 in the first place. So how did all this happen naturally on earth?   The solubility of uranium in water depends on the oxygen level. As the oxygen level started rising about 2 billion years back, “oxidized uranium salts leached out of uraninite ores in the rocks and washed away in streams”. Of course, it was very dilute, fewer than a few parts per million.   Many such streams converged in Gabon’s shallow lakes. As it turned out, t...

Say the word “Texas”, and what pops into everyone’s minds are cowboys, the desert, oil riches, big-everything ( even by American standards), country music, and of course, the famous Texan drawl and slang (Howdy, pardner?).   While Texas may be synonymous with America for many around the world, once upon a time, Texas was a part of Mexico. This interesting snippet from a book says that as the global demand for cotton in the 1820’s and 30’s spiked, Texas “became part of the mad rush to grow cotton”. Soil conditions and climate aside, Texas was also located close to the hugely important port of New Orleans. “But growing cotton meant slaves, and slavery was illegal in Mexico, so the Americans that had gone to Texas to grow cotton made herculean efforts to ignore or circumvent the Mexican slavery ban.” After all, without slaves, “Anglo Texas” was doomed.   With Mexico not budging on its stance of the illegality of slavery, Anglo Texas did what anyone in an equivalent ...