Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The Ukraine war is one of the very few things on which the Left and the Right in India seem to agree – it is the West’s fault, both sides feel. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, while the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, not only did NATO continue to exist, it even set about expanding and absorbing the ex-communist states. How long could Russia tolerate NATO’s expansion, goes the thinking, even as it was inching closer and closer to Russia’s doorstep?   Has this become a pivotal moment? The moment when Indian public opinion starts to get increasingly critical of more and more aspects of American foreign policy? The thought occurred as I was reading R Prasannan’s scathing commentary on the passing away of US Foreign Minister-equivalent from Clinton’s era, Madeleine Albright. The article starts off guns blazing: “Madeline Albright passed away, unmourned in India. No surprise. No American has hurt us more than she did, save Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger who sent nuclear war...

The profit motive did not exist always, writes Yanis Varoufakis in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy . Really? “No, it (profit motive) was not. Greed, yes.” How and why did the profit motive come to be?   With agriculture, the sequence was production à distribution à surplus. At some point, when industrial production began, everything changed. Suddenly land-owners found other uses of land, more remunerative than having serfs work the farms. Land too was now a commodity, to be sold or rented.   And so the serfs got evicted. Given how their lives had been, you’d think this was a good thing for the serfs. Not entirely. Until then, the serfs at least got some guaranteed employment and thus the basic necessities. But once evicted, how were they earn money? They had to offer their labour to whoever needed it. At the price that suited both parties. The labour market was getting started.   But now a new problem arose. An industrial entrepreneur could see...

“What’s in a name?”, Shakespeare had asked famously. In a world of machines, he’d have been right. But of course, we live in a world of humans.   Isis was never a common name in the West, but over the last decade or so, as Joe Pinsker writes : “Parents ran from the name Isis (as an option for their new-borns) when it became connected to terrorism.”   But what about people who’ve already been named before the association changes to something else? Take Apple’s voice assistant which is named named Siri. A journalist with the same name, Siri Bulusu, lamented about this phrase she’s heard every time she introduces herself: “‘OMG, Siri like the iPhone,’ should be engraved on my tombstone.”   Fortunately, Siri was never a popular name to begin with. But that’s not true for Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant. Sure, Amazon may have picked the name based on (and shortened from) Alexandria, the library with that huge book collection in ancient times. But as Alexa, the...

Yanis Varoufakis explains how the economy operates in a conversational style, as if he were explaining/discussing it with his 16 yo daughter. Hence the title of the book is: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy .   A true economy, he says, needs a surplus: “Surplus is the extra bit that allows for accumulation and future use.” He points out that a hunter gatherer society cannot produce surpluses, only an agricultural one can. Why is that? Because hunter gatherer items like fish, rabbits and bananas rot quickly and thus cannot be preserved. Whereas agricultural outputs (corn, rice etc) can be stored for long periods.   Once surpluses became possible with the advent of agriculture, it set us of on the path to other things that changed mankind forever. Let us elaborate on that. Once enough people have surplus produce, it is efficient to build common granaries. That in turn creates the need for a mechanism to keep records – who stored how much – and thus written r...

Taxis in every city are regulated. How then did Uber enter and disrupt the market, in city after city, country after country? The Uber Files leak has the answer – but you knew the gist of it anyway. Evasive practices, favours from politicians, a global expansion that was “rife with violations of local transportation laws”. Uber Files just confirms what everyone always suspected: “The investigation is based on a leak of sensitive texts, emails, invoices, briefing notes, presentations and other documents exchanged by top Uber executives, government bureaucrats and world leaders in nearly 30 countries.”   On the one hand, of course, this is nothing new. Doesn’t every big company have lobbyists? Don’t all such companies have access – and thus influence – on politicians and thus policies? Yes, indeed. The Uber Files just provides a detailed glimpse of how one such company operated, how easy it is to get access to top politicians – in short, the system is built and operated for su...

Is it right or fair to dishonour somebody from earlier eras based on today’s criteria of right and wrong? We’re used to that happening to political figures, but I didn’t realize it’s been happening in other non-political areas (science, philosophy, and ideologies) as well until I read Sean Welsh’s article .   Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, did a lot of data crunching of family trees and thereby strengthened the belief in the role of genetics. Inevitably, the data led him to being a supporter of eugenics, both selective breeding (positive eugenics) as well as discouraging the breeding of those with undesirable characteristics (negative eugenics). Given what followed next (Nazism, forced sterilizations in the US etc), perhaps you think it isn’t wrong that Galton’s name is being removed from several institutions in recent times? Wrong, says Welsh: “(Because you’re tarring) Galton with the Nazi brush even though he died 32 years before Hitler came to power.” Besides, isn’t p...

We’ve all heard of IPL. It’s unlikely though that you’d have heard of the Century Hitters T20 League. It had 6 teams from different Indian states, with names like Chennai Fighters and Gandhinagar Challengers, writes Soutik Biswas: “The outfield is brown and dusty, and the cricket pitch is a whitish carpet nailed to the ground.” Two HD cameras beamed the matches on a YouTube channel. The screen included the usual info: score, run rate, projected score, required run rate, the batsmen and bowler’s names.   Inevitably, there was betting on the matches. From Russia, of all places! “Except this was part of what the police call a "fake" cricket tournament involving a group of unemployed men in Gujarat.” All for punters from Russia to place bets.   The “players” were farmers and unemployed locals who were paid 400 rupees a game. They wore jerseys of the kind seen in the IPL. As this other article said: “They were commented by a person who could do a very good impe...

In most cultures, the eldest son was the heir to the throne. Rome wasn’t like most cultures, as Mary Beard points out in SPQR : “There was no presumption in Roman law that the firstborn son would be the sole or principal heir.” Instead, what decided the successor was cold realpolitik: “A successful claim to power also rested on behind-the-scene manoeuvres, on the support of key interest groups, on being groomed for the part and on the careful manipulation of opinion. It also depended on being in the right place at the right time.”   So what happened if a Roman emperor didn’t have any living heirs? Or they turned out to be incompetent? Or if the emperor didn’t like his children? The most common solution was: adoption!   But no, Romans didn’t adopt a baby in such cases. Why not? For one, infant mortality rates were high, so who knew if the baby would survive into adulthood? Secondly, even if it did survive, who knew if it would grow up to be competent or still be i...

Long before the imperialist West came to China, opium’s use in China had expanded from being “limited to religious or medical purposes” to slowly gaining enough widespread usage to be “made a taxable commodity”, says the book, The Opium Wars .   China was a country from whom the West bought things – silk, porcelain, and tea – but the West had nothing to sell that China cared about. This asymmetry in trade continued for centuries because the West had “discovered” the Americas and with it, a seemingly endless stream of gold and silver (theft and mining) that came back to Spain, and from Spain to the rest of Europe. It was this silver that was used to buy things from China. Eventually though, the Americas began to dry up and with it, so too did European ability to buy from China. The West tried again to find something they could sell to the Chinese: “Finding nothing, their more creative minds decided to just invent one.”   Yes, that “creative” solution was to get China ...

Gabriel Kahane decided to take a year-long break from the Internet! Until he said it, I didn’t realize that also meant taking a year-long break from the smartphone (shudder). Barely 15 years after the iPhone was launched (2007), life without a smartphone is almost inconceivable.   Kahane noticed something beneficial very soon: “I realized how much my sense of necessity had been shaped by convenience, by lack of friction. If nothing else, this saved me a ton of money. Without an internet connection, impulse buys were out of the question.” And adds snarkily: “…not to mention the 3,285,317 bits of trivia that I couldn’t Google.”   Indisputably, the Internet and the smartphone have reduced “friction” in so many of our activities – from shopping to standing in queues to book tickets to paying our bills and paying our taxes. And this is obviously a good thing: “Most people’s lives are already chockablock with friction and tedium. These are often functions of poverty...

Moral justification. Even Roman emperors craved it if their predecessor was assassinated. Even back then, the new emperor didn’t want to be seen as a power-hungry murderer. And so, as Mary Beard muses in SPQR , one never knows what the truth was in Roman history: “(The previous emperor) may have been assassinated because he was a monster, but it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated.”   This is a pattern that continues even today: “The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were… demonised. Those who died in their beds, succeeded by a son and heir, natural or adopted, were praised as generous and avuncular characters.”   Every contender couches his reasons behind ideals (“Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more”, said Brutus). Yet killing a dictator rarely achieves the change its proponents hope for: “What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one-man rule was really a war ...

As mentioned in the earlier blog , Henry Every and his crew were now the target of the largest global manhunt in history. But there was a problem, writes Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind : “It was… handicapped by the sluggish communication channels of the day.” By the time word was out, Every already had a 10 month headstart!   By then, Every had dumped his ship. And he and his crew had started to launder their money, so that one day they could go back home to Britain as rich men. The easiest way to launder money then? Horrific while it may sound, the answer was in slave trading. Who could ever prove how much money anyone made that way?   Some of the crew made their way to the US, an area that was indifferent to piracy and thus a safe haven. Others went to Britain. Where some of them got arrested. “At long last, the world – and Aurungzeb most of all – would have a chance to see England’s true position on piracy.” The biggest problem was finding any witnes...