Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In her book, Wanderers, Kings and Merchants , Peggy Mohan talks of another feature of Sanskrit that is absent from the Indo-European languages - aspiration . That refers to the sound of the following letters – ख , घ , छ , झ , ठ , ढ , थ , ध , फ and भ . As Peggy Mohan amusingly puts it, these are sounds that require the vocal cords from being close together to suddenly move away from each other, a feat “difficult for anyone not used to such acrobatics to manage”. Dravidian languages too lack these sounds.   Strangely, while Hindi has these aspirated sounds, other languages of the North West (like Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, and Pashto) don’t! This suggests, says Mohan, that even the North Western languages have a Dravidian substratum – and Sanskrit is the exception when it comes to the aspirated sounds.   Such sounds that are unique to a language, writes Mohan, can help track population movements. How? By seeing if they start to “absorb” new sounds, structure and grammar;...

In her book on Indian languages, Wanderers, Kings and Merchants , Peggy Mohan writes: “(Languages) did not sprout in continuity like new branches from the same tree from where they started, but were like different trees that happened to be neighbours stretching their branches, touching each other and sharing structure.”   Take Sanskrit. It seems to have taken an entire sound system from other languages, feels Madhav Deshpande from Michigan University. (Note the difference – he isn’t talking of individual words ; he is referring to sounds ). How did he come to that conclusion? To understand that, we first need to understand “dental” sounds and “retroflexion” sounds. If you’re like me, you probably have no idea what that meant! But worry not.   Dental sounds are made by the tongue touching the upper teeth (that means त , थ , द , ध , न , and श) . Whereas retroflexion sounds are made by the tongue curled upwards ( ट , ठ , ड , ढ , ण , ष ).   Sanskrit started o...

In the Healthcare industry I work in, we have to “validate” the product before we start selling it. In our context, the term “validate” means something more than just “to test”. Rather, it means “testing by the person who would be the actual user of the product”. Why is this so important? An example will clarify.   An engineer who is designing the product may use the touch interface on the screen and conclude it’s all good. But what if the nurse or doctor wears gloves in their work environment? Does the touch interface still work fine? Or maybe the terms used onscreen are obvious to engineers but make no sense to anyone else? It is to try and discover such issues that validation by a “real user” is critical.   But even our doctors who validate our products won’t help validate the manuals. Who wants to go over a manual and give feedback as to whether it is clear or not? This, of course, is a problem with all manuals, across product categories and across industries. ...

Seth Godin made an interesting point : we tend to assume all kinds of data has a “normal distribution”, the famous Bell curve shape, even when it doesn’t. It’s become the default option in most people’s heads: the one thing that sticks from statistics taught at school.   The problem, of course, is that lots of things don’t follow a Bell curve. As Steven Strogatz writes in The Joy of x : “Curiously, these types of distributions are barely mentioned in the elementary statistics textbooks, and when they are, they’re usually trotted out as pathological specimens. It’s outrageous.” That bias explains why the Bell curve is called the “normal” curve.   But the real world is different. A flood or earthquake can cause a huge spike in damage in a particular area, raising the cost to insurance companies. Stock market can have massive moves on a particular day, not a steady movement. The number of deaths in wars follows the same pattern: an outlier can be off the charts (like ...

In his book on the Chinese mobile phone manufacturer, Xiaomi , Jayadevan PK describes Clayton Christiensen’s “Greek tragedy of outsourcing”. Outsourcing starts off for the obvious reason – it’s cheaper to get certain work elsewhere. Which in turn adds to the company’s profit. Progressively, the agencies and companies to which outsourcing happens move up the value chain. They learn about the technology, manufacturing and other aspects of the product. In China’s case, as the importance of China as hub grew, the government actively pushed for technology and knowledge transfer to happen. Most Western companies had no choice – if they disagreed, they might be kicked out while their competitor who agreed, would continue to get products made for cheaper. At some point, the entity to which outsourcing is being done has learnt enough to make its own products. Sure, those products are not great to begin with. But sooner or later, they become good enough. They are much cheaper. And so they begin ...

One of the Civics chapters for my 12 yo daughter is on advertising. After describing the purpose of advertising (to persuade you to do something), it gets into the various types of advertising – commercial (buy something), social (change your behavior), and political (vote for X). Interestingly, it also has a section on “covert advertisements”. I tried explaining that to my daughter with an example – if Virat Kohli wears Ray Ban glasses when he is out at an event, notice that he is never saying that Ray Ban is the best. But people notice what he is wearing and may decide it is a good set of shades and buy it. That’s covert advertising, I told her. I was very amused that her teacher had used a similar example too. Back in 2020, Cristiano Ronaldo had famously pushed aside Coca Cola bottles at a press conference as if to say it wasn’t good (either in taste or for health – Ronaldo is a fitness freak). If you haven’t seen it, or don’t remember it, have a look at the video before you read fu...

Guess what the man who said these things does for a living? Vision : “When I look at something, I don’t see it for what it is, I see it for what it could be. When I look at something, I see how it ends.” Ambition : “What I’m doing here… is building an empire.” Calmness : “I am afraid of panic. Turns out it’s bad for business.” Adaptability : “Business is changing and we must change with it.”   Made your guess? Did you think they are all by some business leader? Nope, they’re by a drug lord from the real world! Netflix’s series, Narcos – Mexico , tells the story of the Mexican drug cartels and their top boss, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. That’s quite a mouthful, so I’ll refer to him the way everyone in the serial does – Felix.   Before Felix, Mexico was splintered into rival groups, each owning a part of the country – this was called the ‘plaza system’. Felix managed to bring all the plazas under a single umbrella – for which, of course, he’d be the boss...

I remember the dare from childhood that said nobody can fold a piece of paper 7 times. I tried and failed, of course. Since nobody else seemed able to do it either, I assumed it had to do with strength (or rather, the lack of it).   But that’s not the answer, explains Steven Strogatz in The Joy of x . The reason is more prosaic: “Each folding approximately doubles the thickness of the wad, causing it to grow exponentially (1, 2, 4, 8, 16…). Meanwhile, the wad’s length shrinks in half every time, and thus decreases exponentially fast (1, ½, ¼, 1/8…)” That much is obvious. But here’s the next step in the train of thought that most of us don’t think of: “For a standard sheet of notebook paper, after seven folds, the wad becomes thicker than it is long, so it can’t be folded again. It doesn’t matter how strong the person doing the folding is… (It) can’t happen if the wad is thicker than it is long.”   Britney Gallivan, in high school, derived the formula for how man...

The view from the other side. There can be nothing more “other side” than China, so I was happy to see there are many Indian blogs based on reading up Chinese publications (in English, of course).   How, for example, do the Chinese view the Indo-Canadian spat ? Amit Kumar went over the articles in the Chinese media on it, and the view is interesting, to say the least. Just as we view more and more things with China-in-the-equation, China views most things with America-in-the-equation. Thus, the fact that the US did nothing to pressurize India wrt Canada’s allegations is taken as a clear sign in China that India is super-critical from America’s Asia strategy, that America will look the other way to Indian actions (this was written before the US indictment of an Indian hand in a plot to kill a Khalistani leader in the US). Further, China feels India knows how important it is to America in Asia, and is hence increasingly emboldened to do whatever it likes, be it in Canada or in ...

In his book, The Joy of x , Steven Strogatz points out every field of maths has “one notoriously difficult topic”: “In algebra, it’s word problems. And in geometry, it’s proofs.” The reason why proofs are so hard is because it’s usually the first time in their life a student has to prove something. Everything until then was always “because I said so”, be it from the teacher or the parents…   With hindsight, with the benefit of life and experience, (some) adults look back at proofs in a different way, as something relevant to areas of life far beyond “triangles, circles, and parallel lines”: “It trains you to think clearly and logically… What’s important is the axiomatic method, the process of building a rigorous argument, step by step, until a desired conclusion has been established.”   Half tongue-in-cheek, he cites the American Declaration of Independence as an example. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident”, and listed the basic thin...