Viswanathan K's Thoughts

During our Ladakh vacation, it was annoying to find our 11 yo daughter hooked onto the phone every time we reached the hotel. When we asked our guide cum driver in Ladakh, he confirmed that his kids too loved their apps.   We were put up at Nubra Valley for a couple of days. We noticed very few people lived there, and so there were practically no vehicles on the road most of the time. When we were walking around the place in the evening, we saw a 2 or so year-old toddler on the street, his back towards us. He seemed oblivious to the fact that his parents weren’t anywhere around. Strange. Just then, a vehicle came, saw the toddler on the street, stopped, and honked. The startled kid looked back, and we saw what had been holding his attention all this while, and the reason why he didn’t notice his parents weren’t hold – yes, a smartphone. He then quickly spotted his mother and went running to her, the precious phone clutched tightly. प्राण जाये   पर   वचन smartphone ...

This blog is an assorted set of tidbits about the Tata companies from Shashank Shah’s The Tata Group . There’s no unifying theme to what is listed below. ~~   The founder of the Tata companies, Jamsetji Tata, had been to many countries. He compared India with the industrialized countries of the West (this was all pre-independence) and concluded 3 things: “First, no country that did not manufacture iron and steel could become industrially great; second, no sustained economic growth was possible without the aid of science and technical education; and third, the prosperity of his favorite city Bombay depended upon the provision of cheap electric power.” Hence TISCO (now Tata Steel). Hence IISc. Hence Tata Power. ~~   When World War II started, an Indian student was stranded and couldn’t go to Cambridge for advanced research. His ideas impressed Tata Trusts, which “invested in his research by providing infrastructure and resources in Bangalore and Bombay”. The stud...

In my 11 yo daughter’s new class, they decided to appoint the monitors. There seemed to be a monitor for everything – from class monitor to vice-monitor to books monitor to uniform monitor to cubby (cupboard) monitor… by the end of it, half the class was a monitor of something or the other. It reminded me of how designations are created in the corporate world.   My daughter was in the other half, the half that weren’t monitors of anything. Really, I needled her, you couldn’t become a monitor even with so many openings? I didn’t want to be one, she said. Yeah, right, I said, a case of sour grapes. No, really, she said.   I expected her to give the Spiderman line – “With great power comes great responsibility” and the point that she didn’t want any responsibility. But no, her argument was different. The teachers will keep making the monitors do one thing or the other. Worse, based on her knowledge of the other branch of the school she was coming from, the teachers will...

This blog is an assorted sampling of the Tata group’s ethics. That they refuse to pay bribes is well known. A few examples from Shashank Shah’s The Tata Group . ~~ Here is what Jamsetji Tata had felt when he had visited Manchester: “What struck him the most were its industrial slums, which were as dark and sulphureous as the medieval version of hell.” It would be a sentiment that would continue way beyond Jamsetji. ~~   Tata Finance was, as the name suggests, a lending company. During the Dot Com boom, its MD started investing company money in Internet startups. This was illegal, of course. When the Internet companies collapsed in 2000, Tata Finance was in a deep soup. Technically, the Tatas weren’t liable – it was a fraudulent act by one employee. Yet Tata Sons stepped in and promised to fill in the lost funds since many of the depositors in the company were common folks: “(Contrast this with) global financial companies that filed for bankruptcy and evaded responsi...

During our vacation in Ladakh, I was blown away by the Himalayas. It is not just their height that was so impressive, it was also the fact that they are seemingly endless. And to think I was just seeing a tiny part of the range when the Himalayas stretch for thousands of kilometers.   I was awestruck by the physical mountains, their height, their ruggedness, their snow-capped beauty, and the visibility of the power of the erosive forces – first, along the slopes where the snow had melted and flown down year after year for millennia and carved paths through those hard rocks; and second, at the foot of the mountain, where the water accumulated and form a river that then cuts across rocks as it flows onward. One truly understands that phrase to convey difficulty, “a mountain to climb”, only against a backdrop like this.   For some reason, though I am neither religious nor spiritual, all this reminded me of a passage from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maint...

When Tata Steel tried to acquire the British steel giant, Corus, they didn’t expect a bidding war to start. But it did, with the entry of CSN from Brazil, says Shashank Shah in The Tata Group . The British panel on acquisitions and mergers didn’t want an endless bidding war to happen, so they declared “a nine-round bidding process”.   During the bidding process, the bidding CEO’s were in their respective countries while their lawyers were in England to submit the bids. Communication happened over the phone. Amusingly: “On two occasions, they (Ratan Tata and his lawyer) even changed phone numbers to ensure total secrecy.”   Tata Steel won eventually and acquired Corus. “Nearly a century ago, Jamsetji Tata had requested Lord George Hamilton, then Secretary of State in British India, for the government’s cooperation in starting India’s first steelworks. A 100 years later, in the centennial year of Tata Steel, it acquired one of the largest steel companies in England.”...

The English teacher in my 11 yo daughter’s new school decided to play a game. “I’ll tell the first line of a story, and then we’ll go round the class. Each student should add one (and only one) line to the story”.   The teacher started with, “As I lay asleep at night, I heard a loud bang.” The first kid promptly responded, “I don’t know how to continue, m’am”. Really? Already? Minus one .   Thankfully, the next kid had seen plenty of TV. “I got out of bed to check what had caused the noise.” Good . “I saw there were burglars with guns.” Next . “I went back and got back my nerve gun.” Continue . “I then realized the burglars were in the neighbor’s house, not mine”. What?! The teacher accepted this outrageous line, probably because it added a कहानी में twist… The tale continued its way across the class. Abruptly, one kid decided to end it all, “Then I died”, he announced. The end.   Sometimes, a bad ending can ruin a great story or movie. In this case, it m...

I learnt quite a few interesting things from our driver-cum-guide during our Ladakh vacation. About tourism in the place.   Until even recent times, the place had very tight restrictions. This had an amusing consequence when Ladakh, as part of J&K, was still a state. States, if you remember, have MLA’s. But for security reasons, even the MLA needed permission to visit parts of Ladakh right at the border! As often as not, permission would be denied even to the MLA.   But ever since the BJP came to power at the center in 2014, the emphasis and promotion of tourism right upto the border has increased. Why? Multiple reasons. One, it is a very public way of telling the other country (China, Pakistan) that this is our land. Two, if tourists come right to the border, the locals in those areas have an incentive to live there and not migrate inland. Three, if our people live/visit a place all the time, it is hard for the enemy to arbitrarily move the (border) line in the sa...

Flashback to the 70’s. IBM didn’t dominate the mainframe market yet. A company called Burroughs was also a contender. Burroughs had a joint venture with the Tatas to sell and maintain Burroughs in India. It gave the fledgling TCS a toehold to the world of computers and international projects, writes Shashank Shah in The Tata Group . Until the partnership ended in 1978.   Suddenly TCS, a company of engineers only, had to find customers and clients. Faqir Kohli was pulled in from Tata Power. Though reluctant to move to what seemed like a career dead end company, he was persuaded by JRD Tata.   Kohli persuaded Burroughs to sign the first outsourcing contract in Indian IT history. At a time when TCS didn’t even have a single Burroughs machine! Importing one was impossible in those days. So TCS acquired an ICL computer from LIC (whose trade unions wouldn’t allow LIC to use it since they feared computers would wipe out jobs): “TCS built an ingenious filter to transfer the ...

It was the mid-80’s. India was still under the License Raj.   The joint MD of Tata Steel told JRD Tata that if they didn’t renovate the plant totally: “You and I will be standing outside the gate selling tickets to people to come and see the steel museum.” Things looked that dire for Tata Steel, writes Shashank Shah in The Tata Group .   ~~   Though the Tata companies are all separate entities, they are a group with a common Chairman. In 1994, Ratan Tata instituted the JRD Quality Value (QV) award – it would go to the Tata company that scored the most in the internationally recognized Baldridge National Quality Programme methodology.   The first year, the average score across 12 group companies was 215. Out of 1,000. Nobody got the prize – they were all too low: “The benchmark for winning the (Baldridge) award was 600 points.” It was a crushing moment to realize how poorly they rated on global scales.   Six more years passed. Still no com...

Last year, my then 10 yo daughter changed schools. Her new school used the much-tougher ICSE books even though they were officially a CBSE school. This year, we shifted her to another branch of the same school that was closer to home.   This one being a brand new branch, all the students were new to the school. So the first couple of days, the teachers tried to get a feel of how much the kids knew - after all, since everyone came from a different school, there was no common knowledge level that the teachers could assume. In Physics, the teacher tried testing the waters by asking questions about force.   I remember being very impressed by the way ICSE books taught force from my daughter’s previous year. The explanation started by describing what a force could do to an object (change its speed, change its direction, change it shape etc). It then went into the ways forces could act – via contact, and without contact. It named and described the different forces, from pus...

The list of the richest Indians includes the Adani’s, Ambani’s, Birla’s… but not the Tata’s. Even though their business empire covers everything under the sun.   The answer, writes Shashank Shah in The Tata Group , lies in the ownership structure. The first set of Tata’s donated a huge part of their estate to two charitable trusts. Those two trusts hold a lot of shares in Tata Sons. What is Tata Sons? It is the promoting company of the entire Tata Group and a significant share holder in many of the companies shown in the pic above. Today, all the trusts (more were created over the generations) put together hold over 66% of Tata Sons.   What is Ratan Tata’s share of Tata Sons? A mere 0.83%. That is the answer as to why the Tata family and Ratan Tata don’t show up as the richest folks in India.   Note : The trusts are mandated to spend 85% of the dividends received from all those Tata companies. That’s a huge amount of money that the Tatas have been ploughing ba...

In an earlier blog , we looked at why Mars doesn’t have any water. How about our neighbour on the other side – Venus – why doesn’t it have any either? The knee jerk answer (it’s closer to the sun, so it’s hotter) doesn’t hold up on closer inspection. In his book, H2O , Philip Ball points out that Venus’ surface temperature is 500˚C, far, far more than what its proximity to the sun should dictate. So what happened to Venus?   Well, the volcanoes of Venus released a huge amount of CO2. This led to the greenhouse effect, which then caused whatever water was on the planet to evaporate. It isn’t as well known, but water vapour too is a greenhouse gas, i.e., it raises the temperature. A vicious loop had been set off: the evaporated water added to the greenhouse effect, leading to even faster evaporation of water: “With nothing to hold this process in check, the entire oceans boiled dry… This is the greenhouse effect taken to its terrifying conclusion.” Further, even the evaporate...