Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In 1694, the East India Company was just a corporation, not the rulers of India. Their operations in India were subject to the permission of the Mughals. Keep that in mind while you read what follows.   In that year, a man named Henry Every joined a privately sponsored British expedition to the Americas, writes Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind . But the ship got blocked in Spain indefinitely. With no end to the stoppage, their salaries no longer being paid, and rumours swirling that the men might be sold into slavery, Every and some of the crew took over the ship. It had now become a pirate ship.   Instead of going to the Caribbean though, Every made the fateful decision to round the Cape of Good Hope and find his prey among the trading ships between Arab lands and India. He ended up picking a much larger and wealthy ship called the Ganj-i-Sawai . Returning from the hajj , and laden with enormous wealth, it also had many women on board. Every’s ship shouldn’t ha...

As Rome began to expand and the empire became larger and larger, it sowed the seed for newer problems, writes Mary Beard in SPQR . Transportation and communication systems being what they were in that age, it meant that moving troops and information across the vast expanse of the empire took far too long.   At times of war, or when a rebellion had to be put down, there was simply no time to wait for instructions, troops or money from Headquarters (i.e., Rome): “The demands of defending, policing and sometimes extending the empire encouraged, or compelled, the Romans to hand over enormous financial and military resources to individual commanders for years on end, in a way that challenged the traditional structures of the state.” It was almost inevitable that at one point or the other, a super-successful general like Pompey and Julius Caesar would come to be. Their enormous success brought them wealth and influence. It also made them a lot of enemies. It was such enemies, bot...

Have diseases shaped the course of history? Most of us know that the Spaniards brought small-pox and measles to the Americas with them, diseases that the natives had never experienced. The death toll of the diseases played a major role in what followed: the Spaniards wiped out the ancient civilizations of the Americas. In addition, as Michael Oldstone writes in Viruses, Plagues and History , since the diseases seemed to selectively kill the natives but not the Spaniards (who had experienced and survived it in Spain), the natives came to accept that the Spanish gods must be superior than theirs: why else were they dieing while nothing seemed to happen to the Spaniards? This accelerated the conversion of millions of survivors to Christianity.   Another disease, yellow fever, brought to the Americas by the white man, killed both the natives and the Caucasians . This one came via blacks who had come trading or as slaves. It turned out the blacks were far more resilient to yellow fe...

We crave for origin stories. A story that makes things seem destined. A story that assigns a greater purpose to things. Ancient Rome, once it began to be successful, was no different. The foundation story of Rome dates it to 753 BC, writes Mary Beard in SPQR . It even got narrowed down to a specific date - 21 April. That’s the date modern Romans still celebrate as the birthday of their city “with some tacky parades and mock gladiatorial spectacles”.   Rome’s foundation story starts with a man called Romulus. Did the founder really start off Rome? Or was the founder an “imaginative construction out of ‘Roma’”? Probably the latter, says Beard, since one can find a “shifting and sometimes self-contradictory amalgam” of stories around the man and his time, “constantly adjusted in the telling and retelling to changing circumstances and audiences”: “(The Romans had not) inherited the priorities and concerns of their founder. Quite the reverse… (the people had) constructed and recon...

Recently, my wife mentioned that she’d learnt that one of her apartment friends used to smoke. My 10 yo daughter was all ears – “Does her (12 yo) son know?”, she asked (They are in the same basketball class). My wife warned her not to mention it to the kid. I, on the other hand, told her to definitely tell him. “Let’s give the boy some ammunition for the time when his mom gives him parental gyan on why smoking is bad”, I said to her amusement (my daughter’s, that is).   The conversation continued with my wife wondering what the connection between road-side chai and smoking was, something her friend had mentioned. “Oh that”, I said wisely, “it happens because you can’t smoke within these AC’ed offices. So one has to step out of the building. And nobody carries a pack on them – it ensures their pack isn’t used by others”. My daughter was hearing all this intently. “Instead, these guys will buy a cigarette each from the stall outside, which also sells munchies and chai . Thus, ...

While reading Mary Beard’s SPQR on ancient Rome, I was struck by how almost all of Rome’s problems and solutions to the problem called governance are still there even today. In 2,000 years, have we solved and improved nothing?   Within 2 centuries of its founding, Rome had (unbelievably) gotten rid of not just a particular king, but the very idea of a king itself. Monarchy was replaced by “liberty” and the “free Republic of Rome”. Here’s how Rome defined a Republic: “Two central tenets of Republican government were that office holding should always be temporary and that, except in emergencies when one man might need to take control for a short while, power should always be shared.” The dislike towards the idea of a king was deeply entrenched: “To be accused of wanting to be rex (king) was a political death sentence for any Roman; and no Roman emperor would ever countenance being called a king, even though some cynical observers wondered what the difference was.” Even J...

Abundance. The opposite of scarcity and shortage. While abundance may sound like a good thing, that’s only for some people, writes David Parell: “Abundance is a paradox. Environments of abundance are bad for the median consumer but extremely good for a small number of conscious ones. Average consumers are doomed to the tyranny of instinct. Meanwhile, consumers at the top are propelled by unlimited access to nutritious food and information. ”   The parallels between abundance of food and information are revealing: “The parking lot was full of restaurants, but there were no healthy options. Americans are overweight, not because of scarcity but because of abundance — just like the news. ”   While there’s abundance of information on the Internet, he says, “the Internet makes it hard to find nutrient-dense information”. You can find the junk food equivalent of information effortlessly on the Net: “On the Internet, low-quality content drives out high-quality content, ...

Why was piracy so attractive in Britain? The prospect of all those stolen riches, you say. Yes, obviously, but there were other aspects of piracy back then that added to it appeal, explains Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind .   Unlike the East India Company, unlike every modern-day corporation: “The distribution of profits on almost all pirate ships was radically egalitarian.” Think of the ratio of the salary of any CEO and its average employee. It’s a big number, right? In the British Navy of the 1700’s, the ratio of the captain’s salary to the average seaman was about 10 times. On privateer ships (if you forgot the difference between privateers and pirates, see my earlier blog ), the ratio was 5 times.   How about pirate ships? The ratio of the share of the captain to the lowest seaman was (hold your breath) just 2 times. But wait, the egalitarianism didn’t stop at just salaries, at least based on the surviving documents from the pirate ship/incident describ...

In the 1600’s, the Barbary pirates operated in the Mediterranean, from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. They were a threat and menace for European shipping in those days. Their reach was such that at times, they’d even raid the coast of Britain, loot and sometimes abduct the locals to be sold into slavery.   Africans abducting and selling white Europeans into slavery – that was like the worst possible crime in British eyes, writes Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind . It qualified them as hostis humani generis – “enemies of all mankind”. This was more than just verbal grandstanding – it was also a matter of jurisdiction. By declaring the Barbary pirates thus, it gave the British legal justification to prosecute them anywhere in the world, not just for crimes committed in Britain. (The same principle was used by the US after 9/11 to justify any torture on those accused of terrorism – terrorists became the new “enemies of all mankind”).   But let’s go back to the 17 th c...

OTP’s are an example of what is called 2FA (2-factor authentication), i.e., two independent steps to confirm something. Logging into the bank’s website isn’t safe enough – what if someone else stole your ID and password? And so the RBI mandated 2FA in 2008 – a second check, the OTP, would be sent to your registered mobile number. The odds that someone hacked your bank account (digital theft) and also got your phone (physical theft) were very low.   Banks send periodic reminders that one should never reveal the OTP, even to the bank. It is just something to be typed on the website. Yet, in The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities , Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayan point out that in Gurgaon, despite its well-off and educated population, OTP sharing by the victim is the most common mode of cyber-crimes. What is going on?   First, the authors point out that a large section of the population cannot differentiate between: (1) Public identifiers (name, phone numb...

My 10 yo daughter’s English was terrible. It drove us up a wall – it was not as if she knew other languages well (Tamil, Hindi, Kannada) and English was the weak spot. No, English was her strongest language, and even that sucked .   In despair, during this year’s summer holidays, we enrolled her in Kumon classes. In addition, we threw in a couple of other daily measures (read a book, one-page of writing, watch a National Geographic episode). One/some of them helped, and in just two months, her English has improved by leaps and bounds. ~~~   Though she is just 10, many of her friends are a couple of years older. Unfortunately, that means she has a teenager-like attitude already. In one of those moods, she announced that the world sucks. Upon which I helpfully asked if she planned shift to Mars, perhaps? Of course, she’d have to make some new friends there, I reminded. She immediately changed her mind, “Nah, I’ll continue to stay here only”. I commended her on her wil...

The second Big Billion Day went off far better than the first one, writes Mihir Dalal in The Big Billion Startup . But sales could have been even higher if not for Sachin’s decision to close the website and support only the app. Fixel, the biggest investor, forced Sachin to step down as CEO - he wanted someone who would care about the present. Binny Bansal became the new CEO.   Amazon announced it would invest $3 billion in India, on top of the $2 billion already spent. Having lost China, Amazon seemed determined to win India. They launched their famed Prime membership in India. This was war. A worried Fixel insisted on bringing Kalyan back – Flipkart, he felt, needed a “professional CEO”. They need a war chest to fight Amazon. And so they sought and got $1.4 billion from Microsoft, Tencent and eBay; and another $2.5 billion from Softbank.   While Flipkart could fight Amazon, Fixel was not sure if/when Flipkart would ever be profitable at this rate. Which meant investo...

We know microbes cause diseases. We also know that parts of the microbiome (the trillions of bacteria that live within us) helps us digest food. We’ve even coined terms like ‘pathogens’ (bad), ‘commensal’ (neutral), and ‘mutualists’ (beneficial) to describe microbes. But as Ed Yong writes : “But these are hardly fixed categories. Some microbes can slide from one end of this parasite-mutualist spectrum to the other.”   While seemingly contradictory, some microbes can be “pathogen and mutualist at the exact same time”! Yong cites h.pylori as an example: it “protects against oesophageal cancer” while also being a “cause of ulcers and stomach cancer”. In addition, context matters. A microbe may be a ‘mutualist’ if it stays in the gut, but behave like a ‘pathogen’ if it enters the bloodstream.   All of which is why Yong says: “All of this means that labels like mutualist, commensal, pathogen or parasite don’t work as definitive badges of identity. These terms are more...

In 2011, Flipkart introduced another inspired move: customers could return a product within 30 days. Until then reluctant folks came to Flipkart in great numbers driving sales even further, writes Mihir Dalal in The Big Billion Startup .   In further rounds of investments, new investors didn’t feel the accounts were clear. The company had grown too fast to track such things clearly. It was a very dangerous time for Flipkart. Worse, Amazon had (re)entered India. Fixel, the biggest investor in Flipkart, was in a bind. If others weren’t willing to invest, his investment would go down the drain. And so he sent in his man, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, as interim CFO (Chief Financial Officer).   Remember that shady arrangement Flipkart had come up with to stock up on items to follow the letter but not the spirit of the law? The government started an inquiry into it. Sachin was sucked into that matter, and Kalyan started stepping into the vacuum thus created.   Under Sachin...