Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Beggars can’t be choosers. During COVID times, most kids couldn’t go down to play. They played in smaller groups indoors, but even that was constrained by the choice of the parents – whose house the kid allowed to go (or come from) was determined by the parents’ perception of how “cautious” that household was.   Under these constraints, a 5 yo girl upstairs ended up as one of the occasional playmates of my then 9/10 yo daughter. The age difference though proved insurmountable – but my wife grew a liking for that kid, so she’d often come to be with my wife! (Anyone is better than one’s own parent. Even an adult in COVID times apparently).   The 5 yo’s parents were very grateful - if we thought having a 9/10 yo indoors all the time was torture (for all of us), it must have been worse for the parents of that 5 yo girl. The father was a chef at a hotel, so they’d send the occasional homemade pizza. As the instances of such yummy food increased, my wife began to feel awkwar...

Andrew Sullivan is a Britisher-turned-American and thus perfectly positioned to write this piece when Rishi Sunak became the British PM (You’ll see what I mean as you read ahead).   Sullivan starts off by taking a stab at Joe Biden for getting Sunak’s name wrong (Biden called him Rashid Sunak): “He got the name wrong, but he’s Joe Biden. He gets names wrong. ” But, says Sullivan tongue-in-cheek, at least Biden is old enough to understand that Sunak as PM is a historic event. In what way? “(Britain) was defined by empire… and nothing defined that empire more than India… And it is simply a remarkable fact that a grandson of that distant colonized country now runs the former colonial power.” To drive the point home, he adds: “Imagine what Gandhi might have thought of that. Or Churchill for that matter. ”   I thought Sunak was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Not so, says Sullivan: “Sunak’s family was middle class — his father was a doctor and his mother...

Second time lucky. Rishi Sunak became the British PM so suddenly that the Indian media didn’t get any chance to publish reams on what his chances were. His father-in-law, Narayan Murthy’s statement is what triggered this blog. Murthy said: “We are confident he will do his best for the people of the United Kingdom.” Put the other way, don’t expect Sunak to be any more India friendly than any other British PM. In fact, Sunak may have to be extra careful that he doesn’t get seen to be favourable to the country of his ancestors, esp. since his wife is still an Indian citizen (in case you wondered, it’s for tax saving reasons – by not becoming a British citizen, her income from Infosys dividends remains tax-free in Britain – in 2022 alone, that amounts to ₹126.61 crore ($15.3 million): “Caeser’s wife must be above suspicion.”   That line reminds me of the tale behind it from Mary Beard’s SPQR . In 62 BC, there was a scandal in Rome. At a solemn, all-women, religious festival h...

So what happened to Francisco Franco post-World War II? The Hourly History book continues into that phase. A man and a nation that could have been international pariahs instead traded on their anti-communist sentiments: “The pact stipulated the United States would provide Spain with financial and military aid as long as Spain allowed them to create American military bases and station troops on Spanish soil.”   In 1956, Morocco gained independence. It was a huge blow to Spain, setting of something like an identity crisis. Which in turn triggered student protests all over the country. What did the country stand for? Where was it headed? What plans did the government have? Franco buckled under the pressure: “(He was) showing a willingness for political change, even if he was not completely willing to step down from power.” Even while he wouldn’t step down, he still made structural changes in government that in turn led to reforms in “foreign investment, industrialization, e...

Between the two World Wars, Europe was tri-polar. The democrats were one side, the communists the other, and the fascists the third. In Spain, when the communists tried to overthrow the government in 1933, it started what came to be known as the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, the left won the elections and formed the government. The democrats feared an outright communist takeover, and took up arms against the leftists.   The man who made this situation his calling was Francisco Franco, says this Hourly History book. At this point, Franco was an army man stationed in the Spanish colony of Morocco. In an interview, he announced: “I shall advance. I shall take the capital (Madrid). I shall save Spain from Marxism at whatever cost.” But he faced a problem: how to cross over from Morocco to Spain, when the waters were controlled by the enemy. So Franco turned to Mussolini for help. Initially reluctant, Mussolini ultimately obliged by giving Franco 12 bombers. Soon Nazi Germany len...

We hear stories all the time of how products of Western companies are copied brazenly by the Chinese. Of how copyright, patent laws and intellectual property are violated with impunity by Chinese companies.   As I was reading Chinese venture capitalist and ex-Googler, ex-Microsoft, Kai-Fu Lee’s book on AI, I realized this is how Chinese companies operate against everybody – including each other. It’s not something restricted only to their dealings with the West.   Here are two examples of how brutal, vicious and underhanded the fights between Chinese companies are. Before the smartphone, TenCent had a popular messenger/chat application for the desktop called QQ. Another company, Qihoo , came up with a popular antivirus software. Unrelated areas, right? Until TenCent decided to enter the antivirus market. Sneakily, TenCent changed the installation program – if a user tired to install QQ, it would also install TenCent’s antivirus software . Given how popular QQ was, t...

Shemin Joy’s article saying that AAP is “ideology free” got me thinking. Her article’s trigger was the forced resignation of AAP’s Delhi minster, Rajendra Pal Gautam, for being present at an event when Dalits converted to Buddhism and also ridiculing Hindu deities.   AAP, says Joy, seems to be willing to take on (or dump) whatever stance is relevant to the state they contest in – Delhi, Punjab and now Gujarat. If Dalits are important in Delhi, but not so much in Gujarat, the party’s policy on Dalit matters seems very different in the two states.   But isn’t that just politics as usual? The difference, as per Joy, and others she quotes in the article, is that AAP calls itself a “welfare” oriented party only . They try and stay agnostic on all other matters – Muslims, Dalits, CAA and pretty much all other polarizing matters. That’s the official policy and most of the time, the party sticks to it: “With an “ideology-less” framework, Kejriwal tries to project that the A...

This blog is a view on a group of assorted events related to or triggered to by the ongoing Ukraine war. There is no unifying thread to these observations.   ~~   The New York Times wrote that as Russia is dragged deeper than planned in Ukraine, their ability to keep the peace in some of the older parts of the Soviet Union has decreased – this includes both Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan etc), as well as the Caucasian side (Armenia, Azerbaijan   etc). With Moscow tied down in Ukraine, skirmishes and even war has broken out among various pairs of these countries. Yes, I know, those wars don’t make the news, while Ukraine hogs all the space –only wars that affect the West make the news…   In this setup, China has started to step into Central Asia as the peacemaker/ peacekeeper. After all, the Belt and Road projects extend into many of those countries. Whether China is doing a stop gap job until Russia is back, only time can tell.   In the Ca...

What are “smart” and “connected” products? “Smart” means they have sensors to measure things, software to analyze that data, and memory to store the data. And “connected” means it has ports, and wireless communication capabilities.   Earlier, the software logic to interpret the data and spot patterns in it was written by humans. But increasingly, it’s done by “machine learning” algorithms – the machine “learns” on its own by looking at huge data sets. Now, with 5G, we may be on the cusp of the next wave of changes. As communication speeds increase, it will become cheap and practical to collate multiple data sources (say tractor data with other farm equipment data with weather data) to produce previously unimaginable insights. There’s a lot of money in such intelligence.   In The Great Tech Game , Anirudh Suri says that in such a world, data is king: “Will the next retail innovation likely come from those professionals who have the data to identify new opportunities,...

As we were going to Goa on a weekday, the airport queues were quite short. As luck would have it, both the slots of the ladies’ security check queues were empty at the same time. So my wife told our 11 yo daughter to go in one while she went in the other.   The lady doing the security check asked my daughter where she was going. Panic stricken, my daughter yelled for help, “Amma!”. This from the same kid who will talk incessantly all the time. The one who can speak a mile a minute. The girl who can argue about any topic under the sun, even when she has no clue about the matter . But ask Miss Chatterbox a simple query with a one-word answer, and suddenly she is dumbstruck. Like the betaal had finally posed the question for which even Vikram does not have the answer.   The two ladies doing the security check had a hearty laugh. Like they were expecting just such a reaction. That this was par for the course among kids. A way for them to liven things up at work.   ...

The GPS system used in most places across the world is owned and operated by the US. Given how important GPS is, many countries have developed their own GPS systems so that they are not at the mercy of America turning it off at a time of conflict. This is why Russia, the EU and China developed their own GPS systems. While all those systems are global in the extent of their coverage, Japan created its own system with only Japan as the covered area. India’s GPS system is officially IRNSS (Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System) but more commonly it is called NavIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation). It was named so since it can also be pronounced as नाविक (sailor or navigator). Its coverage area is limited to India and a region extending 1,500 beyond its borders. (The plan is to eventually have global coverage). The seeds for this were sown in 1999, during the Kargil war, when the US refused to share GPS data for Kargil. The project was approved in 2006. The ubiquitous of GPS in...

Was Putin serious when he threatened the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in the Ukraine war? (In case you wondered, a “strategic” nuclear weapon is long range – intercontinental – and usually with far more destructive power, whereas a “tactical” one is short range and with lesser power. But even a tactical one is more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima).   It's impossible to know for sure, obviously. As an Indian who has heard periodic threats of various Pakistanis at various rungs of their government and military on exactly this topic, I don’t remember anyone losing any sleep over such threats. But in this case, it is the US which has to decide whether to take the threat seriously, not India.   Is Putin getting desperate enough to actually thinking of using one? Or is he just bluffing, as a way to force NATO to consider if Ukraine is worth the risk of setting off a nuclear war? On the other side, remember how Trump had trashed the Europeans over NATO – he acc...

My 11 yo daughter is at an age where she will only listen to songs that her peers listen to and approve of. At her age, she also assumes the previous generation can’t appreciate good music, i.e., the stuff her generation likes.   Which is why she was very surprised that I loved the song, Dance Monkey . She had inadvertently introduced me to that song when it played as the background music of a smartphone game she was playing…   The other day, she was watching a musical version of Cinderella . At one point, the prince breaks into song before the grand ball - it was the hit Queen song, Somebody to Love . My daughter was shocked that I not only liked it but that I even knew the words. “How do you know this song?”, she asked, “It’s too good for someone like you”. I tried pricking her balloon by telling her this was a 40 odd year-old song. “Imagine someone from your generation liking such an old song”, I sneered. Never one to back away from verbal jousting, she responded, ...

Games like chess can and have been played online. Not just friends playing with each other, even tournaments have been conducted that way. That creates a problem, writes Joe Posnanski: “Because computers are so much better than people at chess now, there’s a big, big problem with cheating. People playing online will often use a chess engine to defeat people and build up their ratings.” This has set off a cat and mouse game: “Chess.com has instituted ultra-sophisticated methods of tracking down cheaters and then closing their accounts.”   Some time back, the rising star, Hans Niemann, defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen. An upset, no doubt. But Niemann didn’t get a single point in the rest of the tournament. So this guy can beat the world champion but not even a scrape a draw in his other matches? Then it happened again… soon after, Niemann beat Carlsen again. Carlsen was convinced Niemann was cheating – he didn’t say it officially – but he tweeted something that indi...

From time immemorial, people have worried about the negative impact of every new technology. Would it lead to the “numbing” and “amputation” of organs and skills formerly responsible for certain tasks? Would written records lead to a decline in how much we could remember? Has a phone’s contact list led to an inability to remember 8/9/10 digit numbers?   What’s different about the Internet though is the speed at which it has had its impact, writes Andrey Mir: “In the 1990s, the Internet was praised as a great repository of knowledge. In the 2000s, it was hailed as an environment of free communication. But since the 2010s, it has often been considered a danger—both to people and institutions.”   Mir points out something interesting – what the Internet “takes” from us: “We’re not just spending time on the Internet. We are investing time in its improvement… Every time we click a link, react to a story, or share it with others, we help the Internet to evolve.” ...