Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When I was a kid, I used to think that the food at a 5-star hotel would be great. Ah, the ignorance of youth. Today, I see my 11 yo daughter has the same misconception – she thinks coffee served at Starbucks is good. At that age, we’re used to assuming that the best things cost more. And that they come from the West…   When the Pune raised Laxman Narasimhan became the new CEO of Starbucks, unsurprisingly , filter coffee jokes like this circulated in India: Juxtaposing food and potty in a sentence is something that comes naturally to kids and their fathers. Like this Amazon Prime serial, Mind the Malhotras, where the kid announces to his parents that the pasta tastes like potty (Only a kid can come across a pasta that tastes bad). While his mom is taken aback, his dad asks him, “How do you know what potty tastes like? When did you taste it?” I put the same skillset to use as we were walking in HSR Layout. I pointed to a roadside tea stall to my daughter and putting in all the...

From my school days, I remember a chapter on the man who did the first heart transplant: Christiaan Barnard. Bill Bryson’s excellent book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants , brings up an interesting point that was instrumental in why a doctor in South Africa got there first, as opposed to the regular haunts of Europe and America. It had to do with (hold your breath) the definition of death in Europe and the US! “A person could not be declared dead until his heart had been stopped for a specified period, but that was all but certain to render the heart unusable for transplant. To remove a beating heart, no matter how far gone the owner was in all other respects, was to risk prosecution for murder.” But in South Africa, the definition of death was based on brain inactivity, which meant the heart could still be active. And that, apart from his skills, was key to why Dr.Barnard from South Africa was the first man to do a heart transplant. Not surprisingly then, after Barnard’s success, ...

In The Great Tech Game , Anirudh Suri made an interesting list that got me thinking about how distorted Western versions of history are. He writes: “In recent history, the world has lived through Pax Romana, Pax Islamica, Pax Mongolica, Pax Britannica and Pax Americana.” Pax Islamica? Pax Mongolica? I’d only heard of the other three Pax’es…   Pax Islamica is Suri’s term for the era when the Muslims controlled the global trade routes, both on land and via the sea. Until the Muslims took over, each region on these routes had its own trading practices and different legal traditions. The Muslims standardized a lot of that – from Arabia to Malaysia, the same tax and import-export rules were followed. This made things stable, predictable and trade increased. The West won’t mean even mention this phase since they were locked out of these routes by the Muslims who weren’t interested in the “backwaters of Europe”…   While the era of Muslim dominance is ignored in Western n...

It’s hard to know what the status of the Ukraine war is. Western publications will always say Russia is failing, that the Ukrainians have done remarkably well. More problematically, some things are true, but the extent of their impact is harder to gauge. Yes, the Russian army is suffering losses, but what is their morale? How would you or I know the answer to that, if all we read are Western outlets? Yes, there is Western sanctions induced chip shortage in Russia, but how badly does it affect the Russian army and the Russian public? Is it swaying Russian opinion against the war? Or is it uniting them against the West?   That is why I liked Andrew Sullivan’s article, which analyzes the impact on both Russia and Europe. Just because Russia isn’t winning doesn’t mean that Europe is winning. There are other options – stalemate, and ruinous costs on both sides.   Large parts of Europe, including Germany, were heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas. With Russia having tur...

Remember the privateers? From my earlier blog : “What we’d call pirates were either pirates or privateers to the British. The difference? Privateers had legal authorization from the Crown to attack vessels of other countries with which Britain was at war. In return for this “privilege” and exemption from prosecution, the Crown got a percentage of the profits.”   I was amused and surprised to hear that one legislator in present-day Texas has introduced a legislation that “would allow U.S. citizens to seize the yachts, jets, and other property belonging to Russian oligarchs who have been sanctioned in response to the invasion of Ukraine”!   This bill, should it become law, would “require President Biden to issue letters of marque to seize yachts and other assets belonging to sanctioned Russian citizens”.   One can imagine why a government can be authorized to seize assets, but authorizing private citizens to do it as well, in return for a cut? And here you th...

After that description of the Hand of God goal, could Brian Phillips do justice to the other goal – the goal of the century? Yes, he could . He begins: “I want you to picture Maradona getting the ball 65, 70 yards from the goal. He’s a mile from the goal. He’s on the far side of the halfway line. The whole England team is between him and the goal. You’re not even thinking about him scoring from this spot. Sixty-five yards out.”   In case you didn’t get it, he spells it out for you: “For the next 11 seconds, in this sort of beautiful slow-fast tempo, in which he’s hurrying but also taking his time, he just takes England apart. Do you know how hard it is to dribble through an entire soccer team? You have to control the ball with your feet. You have to set up your next move and your next move and your next move. And all a defender has to do is just—pfft—bap it away from you. Just one little misstep, one guy pokes the ball with his toe, and the move is over.” And then adds wh...

With the next World Cup a few months away, I stumbled upon this post by Brian Phillips (who has also created a podcast called 22 Goals). The topic of the first one in the series is, unsurprising: “Diego Maradona scored two of the most famous, two of the most iconic goals in the history of the World Cup, back to back, in three minutes and 49 seconds of real time.”   Phillips defines clearly what the theme of his podcasts and posts will be: “This is not a soccer essay; this is a euphoria machine.” Euphoria machine? What’s that? Read on. You’ll get what he means as he describes the first of those iconic goals – the Hand of God goal.   But first, history matters. Take Maradona’s start as a child prodigy: “He has passion. More than that he has vision. He has timing. He sees where things are going five seconds before they get there. Adults take notice. They alert other adults. Some of these adults are coaches on high-level youth teams. Does money change hands? Yeah....

Andrew Sullivan, a Britisher-turned-American, wrote this excellent piece upon the passing away of Queen Elizabeth (QE II, from here on). I am no fan of monarchies, and hold the view that Sullivan perfectly captures in this line: “It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit…”   And yet, I found Sullivan’s tribute/commentary on QE II brilliant: “Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human —  for the rest of her life. ” Boy, did she pull it off, he says later: “Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained a sphinx, hard to decipher, impossible to label .” And: “Whatever else happened to the other royals, she stayed the same. And whatever else happened in Britain — from the end of Empire to Brexit — she stayed the same. This is an achievement of nearly inhuman proportions, re...

Segregating the recyclable waste. The organic waste. All that is a good thing, no doubt. At least the organic waste doesn’t do any harm, I used to think. Unlike plastics and other wastes, at least nature has microbes and processes to break down organic waste.   I realized I wasn’t entirely correct, as I read Spoorthy Raman’s article . The problem lies in the quantity of organic waste we generate, which is then compounded by how landfills operate in India: “As new layers of waste push older layers down in a landfill, the supply of oxygen is cut off from the lower layers of organic waste, forcing it to undergo anaerobic decomposition.”   This anaerobic decomposition releases a cocktail of gases, two of which (methane and carbon dioxide) are “infamous greenhouse gases that warm up our planet and cause climate change”. India’s share of methane generation (as a fraction of its greenhouse gases generation) is much higher than the global average.   It’s sad that ou...

Most restaurants these days have a QR code at the table. You can scan it to see the menu; most then take you to a website that allows you to order and pay. Jordan McGillis isn’t a fan of this trend .   First, he says, it robs us of the value that some waiters provide: “(The waiter) interprets the menu, offers personal insight, captures the diners’ attention, and brings the experience to life.”   Two, he points out, it leads to the continuation of a trend that was a necessity in the COVID period: “Already battered by two years of masking, the practice of manners and of ordinary social interaction has been degraded further. For the shy child, the chance to interact maturely with an unknown adult is lost. For the laptop-class adult, a chance to interact with someone from outside of that bubble disappears. ”   Thirdly, it increases the power of the smartphone even more: “Ordering each course requires the diner to redirect his attention to the mobile device. ...

Almost all the obituaries of Mikhail Gorbachev struck me by how positive they were. That didn’t make sense to me – how can everyone be positive about any political figure, let alone one who presided over the collapse of one of the most powerful countries in the world, the USSR.   That communism was proving to be unworkable was undeniable. But as an Indian obituary pointed out, many Russians today feel that while perestroika (restructuring) was necessary, it was glasnost (freedom) that broke the Soviet Union. After all, China is the prime example of doing only the first, not the second, and shown how to turnaround a country without imploding, they feel.   Take these lines from Jonathan Steele’s article : “Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration. It was not the objective he set himself when he was elected general secretary of the Soviet Communist party i...

Even as heat waves and forest fires rage through Europe, China’s extreme summers have their own consequences. The Yangtze river’s level is at its lowest level since 1865, says this Bloomberg article . This is a major problem for China since the river feeds “much of the country’s food and massive hydroelectric stations, including the Three Gorges Dam — the world’s biggest power plant”.   As the water level kept falling, electricity generation at the hydropower plants decreased. In turn, that reduction in electricity has hit everything from malls to factories.   Which brings me to a worrying point. Yes, we know global warming is real. Yes, we know the world needs to take more steps to switch to less polluting and alternate forms of energy. China had been increasing its share of hydro, solar and wind power contribution in that context.   But with successive years of droughts in different rivers hitting hydro power production, and “given that wind and so...