Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Pranay Kotasthane pointed out that sugarcane prices did not spike despite the sharp increase in demand due to all the harvest festivals recently. Being a policy analyst, he tried to find out why that is the case. He found that global sugar and sugarcane prices have barely increased over the last 25 years (adjusting for inflation) even though incomes have risen across the world.   First, countries subsidize sugarcane production. Combined with better yields, it has resulted in a huge increase in sugarcane production, even over-production in India and Brazil. Then he zooms into India.   The Indian government tries to juggle two contradictory aims – keeping the cost of sugar low for the consumer while also ensuring a fair price to sugarcane producers. To avoid sharp price increases that would hurt consumers, the government procures and sells via ration shops. It also proactively bans exporting sugar if it anticipates a rise in inflation.   But the sugarcane farm...

I found Raghu S. Jaitley’s post on the Ayodhya ceremony on 22 nd January interesting. He starts with the late 80’s, when Hindu assertiveness started off – slogans like “ Garv se kaho hum Hindu hai ” (say with pride that we are Hindus). “In about a year from then, the Ram Janmanhoomi movement began dominating the Indian political landscape. The door-to-door collection of bricks for the shilanyas, the daily reports of the L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra and the trail it left behind and lumpenisation of Jai Shree Ram and Jai Bajrang Bali all followed soon after.” While it increased the Hindu assertive footprint, it was still limited to pockets of the North, nothing more. But eventually, it led to huge political wins: “To those who grew up in the 80s, the events on the 22 nd of January… will bookend a political issue that dominated all our adult lives.”   While the timing was deliberate (close to the next Lok Sabha elections), it raises a new question, sa...

Recently, two different tiny island nations turned pro-China – Maldives and Nauru. The Maldives case we know well (and care about) in India. A common consequence in both nations’ pivoting to be pro-China was something Indians don’t really care about – the stance on Taiwan. Both Maldives and Nauru declared that Taiwan was an inalienable part of China, there can only be one Chinese government etc.   Are these signs that China is “winning”? Not really.   The reason both countries pivoted to China was good old money. In Maldives’ case, it owes China a lot of money (by their standards), aren’t in a position to make their EMI payments, and therefore need the lender (China) to either extend the term of the loan or to defer payments.   This may be sound surprising to Indians, who see Maldives’ stance as driven by the new Islamist-leaning leader. Sure, yes, in Maldives politics, alternate leader flip-flop between India and China. But the problem of paying back to China...

For quite some time, I was hearing that Bangladesh was growing fast, that it was even outperforming India. I finally got around to pulling up the data on the two countries only recently and here is how the comparison looks:   The graph shows that Bangladesh hasn’t outperformed India, but yes, it has been growing steadily at a good pace and in some years, grown faster than India.   In one sector though, Bangladesh has eaten into India’s share – textile and apparel exports. Pranay Kotasthane looked into how and why that has happened. The reason this sector matters, he says, is that it can employ a lot of people and it doesn’t require any educational qualifications, thus making it a great fit for our population.   One reason is that the West has given preferential treatment to Bangladeshi exports as part of its policy of helping poorer countries. The other major reason, he says, is a self-inflicted wound by India. Let us understand that next.   The global ...

A couple of things from our Rajasthan holiday resonated with what I had read in Peggy Mohan’s Wanderers, Kings and Merchants . When I commented to the hotelier it was good for tourists like me that everyone spoke Hindi, his reaction surprised me. No, he said, it’s only Jaipur that has adopted Hindi. The rest, he said, have been learnt Hindi because (1) none of the state’s languages are recognized in the Indian constitution; and (2) the most common medium of education in the state is Hindi.   He then added that a couple of MLA’s in the recently concluded state elections took their swearing-in oath in Marwari. But then had to re-take it in Hindi as well since (obviously) you can’t take a constitutional oath in a language not recognized in the constitution. Ironic? Amusing? Hurts? You decide.   We are Marwaris, he then added proudly, we speak Marwari. I remembered Mohan’s point that many languages in north India that we take to be dialects of Hindi are, in fact, closer to...

The rise of Hindi. How and why did it happen? When languages clash for dominance, writes Peggy Mohan in Wanderers, Kings and Merchants , here is how things proceed. “Hindi, Braj and Awadhi did not sit down at a table to resolve their differences, shaping themselves into a single language with the best features of all… Like nature (the fight) is red in tooth and claw.”   Braj and Awadhi were older languages, with literature of their own. And yet Hindi won. Why? “There is nothing like being situated in a large urban center of commerce and political power (i.e., Delhi) to give a language an edge, even if the inner circle is speaking something else.” British rule then sealed the dominance of Hindi: “In British times, Hindi began its growth as a modern language of literacy, all the languages spoken in its sphere of political influence declared their loyalty.” Inevitably then: “As the size of the (Hindi) shadow grew, more and more of the one-time competitors found themsel...

Since ours was a last-minute trip to Rajasthan, we ended up in a hotel in a visibly run-down part of Jaisalmer. Narrow streets, garbage strewn everywhere, open drains, cows everywhere… you get the picture. (But like everything else in the Golden City, the hotel and buildings near it had the palace look and color).   This hotel even had a Terms & Conditions (T&C) card in the room; I’ve highlighted the funniest parts:   It was the kind of hotel where you have to call the Reception to operate things in the room (TV – where are the remotes? Geyser – master switch at the Reception). You get the idea. But hey, it offered free Wi-fi (but you had to ask Reception to get the password), which was all my 12 yo daughter really wanted. And she had a good laugh reading the T&C card. So did we. ~~   Meanwhile, at the other end of the hotels spectrum in Rajasthan are the heritage palace-turned-to-hotels. Of the palaces converted to hotels, some are way too expen...

Once an authority figure says something, we tend to believe it. You’d think this is not true in science and maths, but sadly, you’d be wrong.   Remember Millikan’s famous oil drop experiment to measure the charge of an electron from school days? Well, Millikan got the answer wrong. There was nothing wrong with the experiment itself, it was just that he’d used the incorrect value for the viscosity of air! It should have been easy for others to notice and correct this, right? Yes, but only at the beginning . But the error wasn’t caught early, and Millikan’s number becomes the accepted value everywhere. From that point onwards, it’s not easy to change it. Richard Feynman points out that: “It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan.  If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigg...

At the Jodhpur fort, there were a bunch of folk singers near the main entrance playing their instruments. Our guide told them to sing me a personalized song – I was curious what they’d sing, or whether I’d understand it. Guess what they sang? The guy first asked me what my mother tongue was, and when I said Tamil, the group sang Kolavari. My very own personal welcome song from the land of पधारो म्हारे देश .   At Saheliyon ki Bari in Udaipur, the guide asked us to stand at a particular spot near the central fountains and told us to clap our hands together. Magically, the flow stopped. Clap again, he said. Abracadabra, the fountains resumed. Where were the sensors, we wondered? Surely this could not have worked centuries back? Only later did he tell us that there was a worker in another part of the garden who pulled a level to start/stop the water when he saw people clapping!   At Saheliyon ki Bari , we also took pictures of ourselves wearing traditional Rajasthani dre...

Earlier, in Wanderers, Kings and Merchants , we saw Peggy Mohan use the words “Dravidian substratum”. What exactly is a substratum? Literally, it means the underlying layer. In the context of Indian languages, it refers to the “unconscious” layer of the language that seeps in when the ruled classes tried to learn the language of the ruler/conqueror (Aryans, Mughals etc).   In that context, Peggy Mohan wonders how the Dravidian language substratum sounds seeped into Sanskrit? To recap, she is referring to retroflexion sounds ( ट , ठ , ड , ढ , ण , ष ). After all, she says: “The substratum does not ‘leak up’ to infiltrate a privileged group that is proud of its language, and not overly eager to reach out to locals it regards as inferior.” Remember the British? “The British lived amidst ट , ठ , ड , ढ , ण , ष during their time in India, but simply did not hear (or absorb) those sounds.” If the language of the rulers isn’t seeking to absorb anything new from the languages of...

Rajasthan is a big state and the cities of tourist interest are far apart. Some of them do have airports, but that can be expensive. Or you may find that the time lost at the airport with its check-in and security checks wipes out any saving in commuting time. Fortunately though, the roads and highways are in very good shape, so travelling by car is an option.   On the drive to Jaisalmer, I was surprised to see that there were road signs to Pokran. Somehow, I always thought that the site of India’s nuclear tests was some point in the desert, not an actual place. Or maybe it was always a remote military base that shot to fame with the nuclear tests.   We went to Jaisalmer primarily to see the desert. And to spend a night in a tent in the desert. I hadn’t realized the place had tents of all kinds, including luxury ones with geyser and heater! There were so many groups of tents by different vendors, some for families-only. This arrangement meant that the groups of tents w...

पधारो म्हारे देश . Welcome to my country. That’s the line that greeted us when we landed in Udaipur, Rajasthan. And boy, these guys understand tourism and hospitality like no other state.   Rajasthan is famous for its magnificent forts and palaces. Plus, there’s the desert. Talking of which, I thought of all of Rajasthan as a dry place, so I was taken aback to be told that Udaipur is called the City of Lakes. Then I remembered something from my 12 yo daughter’s Geography book - the parts of the state in the rain shadow of the Aravallis get a lot of rain; while the parts on the other side barely get any. Udaipur is in the rain shadow.   The guides at the forts and palaces at all the places we visited – Udaipur, Chittorgarh, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Nagaur, and Jaipur – were excellent and knowledgeable. Left to ourselves, we’d have never even noticed half the stuff in those places, let alone appreciated them. Like design choices to keep the place cool, and ingenious ways t...

English has prepositions, whereas most Indian languages have post-positions , writes Peggy Mohan in Wanderers, Kings and Merchants . In English we say “in Mumbai”, in Hindi it is “ मुंबई में ”, in Tamil it is “ மும்பையில் ”. Notice the contrast in the “position word” and the noun – in English it comes before (pre); in Indian languages it comes after (post).   Unlike English, in many north Indian languages, verbs have a gender . In English, “eats” tells nothing about the gender of the eater whereas “ खाता ” tells it is a male eater (the same goes for Marathi). When you dig deeper, you realize the structure of the languages are very different. In English, you “are ill” while in Hindi “ तबियत ठीक नहीं ”. Mohan says “ तबियत ” is a noun – state of health. Which leads Mohan to wonder – are languages of the north “noun-friendly”? And if so, why? Is it because, she wonders, for the same reason that Kerala absorbed nouns from Sanskrit, but not verbs: “Do nouns travel better, or wit...

In his book, Mind Master , Viswanathan Anand talks about the evolution of chess playing machines. “In the beginning the (chess) engines were ridiculously weak… The way they approached a problem was to consider every possible move to counter it, but because they were not looking far enough they would sometimes offer the most ludicrous solutions.”   Since computers did brute force calculations of every possible move, they could calculate only X number of moves. Yes, that number X would keep increasing, but that just moved the limit. Such a limit would sometimes led to weird situations: “For a long time… the machines would go wrong at a point where a long-term decision came into play.” While computer couldn’t calculate that far out, humans could intuitively feel it.   But even with that constraint, over time, humans began to find it increasingly difficult to beat computers. Why? “Even when we’d outplayed engines for long stretches in a game, we’d end up making a ...