Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Some guy tweeted a pic that captured the fraction of the world’s population ( not India’s population, but the entire world’s) living in each state of India: While most of us wouldn’t have known the actual percentages the way the map shows it, overall, it is hardly surprising to most Indians.   Pranay Kotasthane drew an interesting inference from the map. Taking UP as the example, he points out: “There’s no way an Indian state government with current levels of capacity can provide for 2.5% of humanity. ” He added another very relevant comparison: “UP, for example, is twice as populous as China's most populous province, Guangdong.” Therefore, he says: “We probably need twice the number of states as we currently do. ”   He then takes an interesting digression into the basis on which the states were created at independence. Yes, on linguistic basis. On that: “(BR Ambedkar ) made the critical distinction between “one language, one state” and “one state, one ...

When the smartphone arrived, why did Nokia fade away? Why could it not, unlike say Samsung, shift from feature phones to smartphones? The answer is obviously complex and involves many reasons, so I’ll just focus on a few points from Jayadevan PK’s book on Xiaomi .   Nokia, he says, had two choices – switch to Android, or try and create its own OS for smartphones. To be fair, at that point, Android hadn’t succeeded, so this was not an obvious choice to make. In addition, since Nokia had its own feature phone OS named Symbian (and engineers who worked on it), there would have been push from within the company to either convert Symbian or to create a new OS of their own to compete with iOS and Android.   As Nokia’s feature phone sales collapsed, they got bought over by Microsoft. The new bosses were hoping their own smartphone OS, Windows Phone, would succeed. And they wanted to use Nokia phones as the vehicle for that OS. That decision by its new owners sunk Nokia for go...

Challenge trials. It is the process of deliberately infecting healthy individuals with a disease. The intent can be to confirm how a disease is transmitted. Or it can be to check if a possible cure works.   This sounds terrible to most of us. Didn’t many of those medical experiments conducted by the Nazis and Japanese during World War II involved deliberately infecting POW’s? Didn’t the Americans do such experiments on blacks and mentally retarded patients in the past?   But it turns out there are many valid reasons for this practice. Let’s look at an actual example from the past – challenge trials are how they found that mosquitoes are responsible for transmitting malaria! One is inclined to argue with the other need – testing a cure. Why not test the cure on someone who is already infected? And yes, that is the preferred method indeed. But sometimes, the patient having one disease inevitably has other conditions, which makes it hard to test and confirm if a cure act...

Nilakantan RS’s South vs North has a chapter on the state of education across different states in India. He starts off by pointing out that literacy rate is a lagging indicator of the state of things (that means it takes a long while to reflect in the numbers). Instead, like he did for healthcare, he suggests looking at multiple data points to evaluate education.   Even with literacy rate, he points out that in a country like India one should compare the literacy rate of older folks (say, above 80) with that of the younger kids (say, 5-14). What does that convey? It shows what the trend is – if most older folks are not literate, whereas most young kids are literate, it means the state is moving in the right direction. You might think surely all states would be improving on that comparison, but you’d be wrong. The ratio is moving in the wrong direction in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Assam (independence v/s today), which means things have deteriorated in those states. The so...

One of the greatest mathematicians of all time was Carl Gauss . One of his earliest achievement was the invention of clock arithmetic, writes Marcus du Sautoy in Music of the Primes . It is easy to understand.   It is 10 o’clock. If someone says they will be back in 4 hours, we add 4 to 10 to get 14. But since the clock only has 12 hours, we don’t say the person will be back at 14 o’clock; instead we say 2 o’clock. Stop for a moment and think of how you knew 14 meant 2 o’clock. Because it is the remainder when 14 (the answer) is divided by 12 (the number of hours on the clock). That’s clock arithmetic.   Gauss found a different use for it. Say, you want to find the remainder when 3 x 9 x 12 is divided by 1 1. You start by calculating 3 x 9 = 27. Find the remainder when 27 is divided by 11 – the answer is 5. Now multiply this remainder (5) by the other number (12) to get 5 x 12 = 60. Again, find the remainder when 60 is divided by 11 – the answer is 5. That’s your fina...

What is it that the (former) Ashoka University assistant professor, Sabyasachi Das , did that stirred up such a storm? He did a rigorous analysis of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in his paper, “Democratic Backsliding in the World's Largest Democracy ” . But what exactly did the paper say/find?   Yogendra Yadav wrote this excellent piece describing what that paper said (and equally important, what it did not say). First, this wasn’t an economist writing about politics. Rather, this was a statistical analysis of certain patterns Das found. As with many things in statistics, it cannot prove something; but it sure can raise valid suspicions . Das himself admits as much in the paper: “The tests are, however, not proofs of fraud, nor does it suggest that manipulation was widespread.”   Second, since this is a purely statistical analysis, it does not get into topics like EVM tampering – one needs to prove that happened, just throwing accusations is pointless. Instead, ...

In his book on the Chinese smartphone company, Xiaomi , Jayadevan PK says the startup started to plan to expand into India in 2013. It’s hard to imagine now, but in 2013, India’s transition to smartphones was still slow. India was a MENS club – no, not the sexist one, MENS here stood for phones from Motorola, Ericson, Nokia and Samsung. Along with those companies, like in China, home-grown companies had started to make cheap smartphones – they were the MILK, an acronym for Micromax, Intex, Lava and Karbonn.   The timing of Xiaomi’s entry into India in 2014 was lucky – it coincided with a steep fall in Internet prices, brutal data plan wars among telecom providers, and Reliance Jio forcing data prices to absolute rock bottom. The “great Indian smartphone migration” had begun.   But first, Xiaomi had a few changes to make. The name, to start with. People outside China didn’t know how to pronounce it! It meant “millet” and alluded to the Communist Party’s use of the “mill...

In a recent blog , I had mentioned infant mortality rate (IMR) as a good proxy for the quality of life in a country. But, as Nilakantan RS says in South vs North : “Describing India with one metric is as accurate as describing the planet with one metric.”   Which is why in his chapter on health, he uses several other metrics to compare the southern states with the rest of India. Life expectancy is not one of them. Why not? Because it is a lagging metric, i.e., it takes a very long time for any improvement to show up (a person has to die for it to show up in the data!). Nilakantan uses IMR (Infant Mortality Rate), U5MR (Under 5 Mortality Rate), and MMR (Maternal Mortality Rate). On all of these parameters, the south does far better than the north. It speaks about the kind of governance over time: “(The strategies to improve these metrics) call for time, effort, long-term commitment and budgetary support from state governments.”   A lot of child and mother deaths...

How does one measure “quality of life” in a country? The topic is subjective, after all. Which criteria do you select for comparison? Can those criteria always be quantified? On the other hand, some quantifiable items are debatable – is a high value necessarily a sign that things are better? Others, like per-capita income (average income) are messy – the kind of life one can have with a salary of say, $50,000 per year in the US is vastly worse than the kind of life one can have with the equivalent ( ₹ 40 lakhs per year) in India because purchasing power differs. What about the unquantifiables, like the convenience of door delivery, and affordability of, say, maids?   In Numbers Don’t Lie , Vaclav Slim suggests that one particular metric, while not perfect, might be a good way to determine quality of life. What is that? The infant mortality rate –the number of babies per thousand births that die in the first year of life.   Why that number? Because, he says, it is a goo...

Judicial activism. Years back, there was a phase when it was in vogue in India. “Judicial activism is the exercise of the power of judicial review to set aside government acts. Generally, the phrase is used to identify undesirable exercises of that power, but there is little agreement on which instances are undesirable.”   This is a problematic topic. As our Civics course taught us, it is the legislature’s job to draw up laws, not the judiciary’s. An obvious exception can/should be made if a law violates the constitution.   But what about the scenario where the legislature can’t/won’t frame a law? Because the ruling party doesn’t have the numbers? Or because the issue at hand is too divisive and no party wants to risk a backlash?   In the US, one such divisive issue is abortion. The constitution doesn’t say anything about the topic. And politicians won’t frame a law about it (for or against) since it has always been a deeply polarizing topic (not just ...

I was glad that Rahul Gandhi’s conviction on defamation (commenting that every thief has the surname Modi) was overturned by the Supreme Court. Not because I like Rahul; but because it felt ridiculous to imprison someone for a comment like that. Almost everyone makes such statements about some group or the other. While not in good taste, a prison sentence of any duration is going way too far.   In politics though, everything can swing both ways. It could be due to cynical rivals, or campaign managers’ masterstrokes and blunders, or the unpredictable perception of the common man.   Asim Ali raised some interesting points about Rahul’s “return”: “The martyrdom parade might have been stopped…” While it is also true that: “The judgment also lends credibility to Congress’ claim of unjust punishment.”   It also brings back a fundamental contradiction to the fore: “(Congress’) 2024 strategy is composed of two mutually contradictory goals: the achievement of a...

With Trump getting indicted on charges of inciting a rebellion that led to a violent mob ransacking the US Capitol when he lost the last election, Andrew Sullivan presents a grim picture of what might follow.   Trump doesn’t lie the way normal politicians do, he says. “It is not lying in the usual sense — which depends on a shared reality that the liar knowingly distorts. ” Rather: “Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality.. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission. ” Even worse: “Because his whims oscillate, so do the non-facts he invents to satisfy them.”   What do you think has been Trump and the American right’s response to the formal charges? Well, the timing is suspicious, they argue. Why file the charges only now? Is it because Trump is campaigning to be President again? How come Bid...

The best medical products were developed in the West. Inevitably, clinical trials were done on Western folks. Were there differences between white people and the rest (black, brown, yellow) that were relevant to the product – nobody knew for sure. The trust in Western processes, the aura around their products, and the lack of alternatives meant the rest of the world would use those medical products.   But now, writes Rahul Matthan, concerns are being raised. He cites pulse oximeters, those easy-to-use devices that measure oxygen saturation. Their usage spiked as even the common man started using them as a quick and cheap check to be run during COVID-19 times. “The fact is that these devices have largely been tested on lighter-skinned people, their algorithms tuned to the light absorption and reflection characteristics of paler skin. As a result, they perform poorly on darker complexions.” The same problem, he says, is being found with melanoma (cancer) detection algorithms...

Remember that phrase, “Yes, but…”? It was the phrase used when someone didn’t want to take a stance on a topic. But, wonders Andrew Sullivan, in the age of polarization, has that reviled phrase become the need of the hour? “One of the enduring frustrations of living in a politically polarized country is the evaporation of nuance. As the muscles of liberal democracy atrophy, and as cultural tribalism infects everyone’s consciousness, it becomes more and more difficult to say, “Yes, but …” Sullivan clarifies: “It’s important to point out that the “yes, but” formula is not about “both sides-ing” everything, or picking a middle position every time. It’s about getting things right.”   It is easy to understand why the “Yes, but…” phrase can be so annoying: “Everyone hates the but. It complicates; it muddles; it can disable a slogan; and puncture a politically useful myth.” So much easier to take a binary Yes/No, true/false, good/evil stance. This is especially true on polit...