Viswanathan K's Thoughts

James Murphy uses the word “prophet” in a way I’d never heard of. No, he says, a prophet isn’t always the “bearded and eccentric biblical seer delivering God’s judgment on his people”. In fact, the ways he defines it, a prophet need not even be a messenger of God at all!   Who is a prophet, in Murphy’s way of thinking? “Prophets wage war against statesmen for their amoral realpolitik; and against priests for focusing on ritual rather than righteousness.” Somebody needs to speak up to those in power, sometime to expose their excesses, at others to push for measures that neither group would ever advocate. Sometimes the reason those in power don’t change things is because it suits them; at other times, the reason is that it is very hard to change society.   By his definition, Martin Luther King was a prophet who fought for racial equality. So too are activists like Greta Thunberg who fight for measures against global warming. Note these are not religious reformers, t...

I was intrigued by the title of Rwitwika Bhattacharya-Agarwal’s book, What Makes a Politician . This is not a book about politicians at the top of the pecking order. Rather, it is about the countless unknown politicians who are the overwhelming majority. The book (1) explains what life in politics is really like for the majority of politicians; and (2) how someone without a political background or dynastic connections can enter politics, if they wanted to.   This then is not a cynical book about bashing politics and politicians. That is why Baijayant Panda, a Lok Sabha MP, wrote in the foreword: “This book is a welcome move away from caricaturing, stereotyping, or straightforward dismissing the work of public officials.” ~~ What is a political party?   A political party offers a “product”, i.e., an ideology (e.g. equitable society; protecting the vulnerable; you get the idea). Ironically, therein are sown the seeds of discord. A party that starts by primarily c...

People unaffected by certain historical events find it hard to understand why others seem to care so much about those events, why they seem affected even today decades or centuries later, when they were never even directly affected by it? Why can’t they let go of the past?   I got a part of the answer to those questions during our trip to Rajasthan via the contrasting attitudes towards Muslims. At Chittorgarh, the undercurrent of anger towards Muslims was evident in our guide’s narrative. At first sight, it seems strange – why let such ancient events affect today’s perspective? But then as we saw the vandalized temples in the fort, I could understand. An atrocity, a massacre, a graphic event (like the mass suicide of Padmini and the women of Chittor) will eventually feel old and fade in the emotion it evokes (or even be forgotten altogether). But a monument that stands till today, with very easily visible signs of the acts of yesteryear can end up serving as a continuing remind...

Shivshankar Menon’s book on some of India’s major foreign policy decisions, Choices , gives the history and the reasons for India’s continually changing stance in the LTTE story in Sri Lanka.   Sri Lanka’s original Tamils are very different from the Tamils of India. Under Britain’s divide and rule policy, they were the favoured elite – the English-speaking class that was disproportionately represented in the civil services. Another big chunk of Tamils in Sri Lanka were brought in by the British to work on the plantations. After independence, a resentful Sinhalese majority declared the Indian-origin Tamils stateless, i.e., non-citizens, and changed the national language to Sinhalese. Tamils were next discriminated against in jobs.   By the 70’s, the Tamils’ resentment boiled over and violent outfits sprang up. Amongst them, the LTTE went on to dominate. Tit for tat violence soon became the norm. In the 80’s, the growing violence in Sri Lanka raised 2 concerns in India: ...

In an earlier blog , we went over the story of India that was picked in 1947 at its formation. And as Pranay Kotasthane says in Missing in Action : “It follows that since a nation is a mental construct, it can be and is reimagined.”   Today, he says: “There is an alternative imagination… it believes the lack of real reckoning with our past before the British era, the choice by Nehru and his ilk of an imagination that wasn’t true… and the constant peddling of this fake narrative have not allowed us to move ahead.”   The “idea of India” is truly being fought over between the “adherents of the old imagination” and the “proponents of the alternative”. And as we saw in the other blog, that involves “reworking of history to fit past events into this imagination”. It happened in 1947; and another attempt to rewrite it is underway today.   Will India survive as a united nation? On the one hand: “America was going through a bloody civil war that was threating to ...

Andrew Sullivan, a Republican supporter but not a Trump supporter, has been saying for long that if the Democrats could put up a half-decent candidate, then many Republican voters who are appalled by Trump, would be willing to vote for the other side. Biden finally stepped back when the pressure became too much, not by choice. Will his replacement be inspiring? Only time will tell.   Today: “Donald J. Trump, by sheer luck, dogged persistence, and the over-reach of his enemies, now bestrides our political scene with such dominance.” The failed assassination attempt on Trump has only helped: “If you believe, as I do, that history is made by both structural change and pure, random chance, then that bullet’s trajectory, and Trump’s subtle shift of his head, is up there with Gavrilo Princip’s but in reverse. The shooter missed, thank God. I shudder to think where we would be now if the bullet had blown Trump’s head apart — as it was right on target to do. We would be in a nea...

One of the main “superpowers” that humans have, as per Yuval Noah Harari, is the ability to tell stories. Not only of the fairy-tale variety, but also the grander ones that can unify people into massive groups based on some common theme (real or imagined), stretching in size from regional to national to global.   In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane says the same:             “Narratives have the power to make the unreal real.” Narratives are critical when a nation is formed: “Every newly formed nation has to define this imagination.” This involved 3 steps: (1) Call for a new beginning, a fresh start; (2) if a region has a long history that can’t be wished away, then “use the trope of slumber and reawakening to represent a departure from the past”; and (3) use historians to “reframe history that show past events as serving the nation-building… objectives of the present”.   If you found some of the ab...

The South African cleric and activist, Desmond Tutu once said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This sounds right, doesn’t it? Until you realize the truth of what this post says: “If a quote could summarize the current political zeitgeist, especially on social media, it would be this one. Today, politics permeates virtually all aspects of our lives, and many people feel pressured to make public political statements .” And: “Mob justice, groupthink, and ill-conceived policy making are just as likely to be symptoms of a ‘silence is violence’ mentality as is the encouragement of good people to do the right thing. ”   Instead, argue the authors, political neutrality should be a perfectly acceptable option. They cite two benefits of neutrality. First , jumping into a controversy where one doesn’t really understand the topic or its finer points can cause as much (or even more) damage than staying neutral. Besides, ...

Ex-India NSA and Foreign Secretary (among a host of other roles), Shivshankar Menon’s book, Choices , is about some of the major foreign policy decisions made since the 90’s, and the why’s behind those, er, choices: “The examination of choices suggests there is no single correct or right answer to the questions foreign policy throws up, no answers that are valid in all circumstances… Choice involves uncertainty, risk, and immediacy.”   A major foreign policy decision, esp. a 180˚ change in course, he says wryly, requires a crisis. A situation that forces you to think and act differently. When “more of the same” is not an option. He cites the 1993 border agreement with China during Narasimha Rao’s tenure as one such example.   Given the bitter history and the “emotional baggage” of 1962 that India carries, why were the 2 countries even willing to start talking? It was a pragmatic choice on both sides, given the internal challenges they faced at that time. China felt s...

As Biden clings on and insists he will run again for President, the American left isn’t unanimous in putting up a different candidate. Even as it is increasingly likely that concerns about Biden’s mental faculties in a second term will cost the party the election. Surely Biden cannot be the best/only option in the Left?   This reminded me of the Deccan Herald editorial about the deadlocked French election recently. After the first round, it looked like the Far Right would come to power – I’ve been hearing this since I was in college: the French Far Right will do best in the first round; alarm bells and media frenzy will start; the remaining parties will pair (gang?) up; the Far Right won’t win; and France will heave a collective sigh of relief. It turned out the same this time too. Except, this time, nobody got anything close to a majority. And yet, the editorial says: “(The French election) revives the hope that the lurch to the Right the world over is not inevitable, espec...

The Roman empire did not have the mechanism to collect revenue on its own, points out Adrian Goldsworthy in Pax Romana . It therefore outsourced that job to private individuals called the publicani . Not surprisingly, the publicani got rich by siphoning off some of the tax collected.   Obviously, some publicani would loot without a thought for tomorrow. Given the wealth and thus power of these groups, it wasn’t easy for Rome to rein them in. Both the emperor and the Roman Senate were wary of taking them on. It was the eternal political problem: “Balancing the needs of the influential publicani and saving the provincials from penury demanded a ‘divine’ virtue.”   While Rome demanded a certain amount of revenue from the provinces, the emperor and senate often demanded the provincial governors not loot too much. The aim was steady year-on-year revenue flow, as emperor Tiberius once angrily reminded a provincial governor. The aim was “to shear the sheep, not skin them”...

Dan Williams wrote an interesting post on ideologies. The term “ideology”, as we know all too well, refers to “belief systems”. While some like Karl Marx viewed ideologies as “inherently bad”, not everyone agrees. For most people, the term doesn’t necessarily have a bad connotation. It just refers to belief systems.   Except, as Williams says, when the term is used in politics. He quotes Christopher Federico and Ariel Malka who say, in politics, ideologies serve a purpose. Huh? Politics, they say, covers a huge and diverse set of matters from economics to trade policy to social matters to immigration to geopolitics to taxation. Voters cannot evaluate any political party issue by issue. “(Ideology) derives in large part from the inherent complexity of politics… By providing leaders and citizens alike with comprehensive, organised frameworks for making sense of politics, ideologies supply political actors with ready-made judgements about the state of the world and many issues...

The constitution. It defines the core principles of how a country should be governed, with which all laws must align. Put differently, the government of the day, no matter how popular it is or how many elected members it has, cannot frame laws that violate the constitution. Sure, one can amend the constitution and then frame new kinds of laws, but amending the constitution isn’t easy. That is by design, a feature of the constitution, not a bug. It ensures core principles of nationhood and governance cannot be overturned or changed too easily. This can be frustrating at times, but it has a deeper reason –nations were formed based on some common values, beliefs and principles. The constitution is way to ensure those core components that brought a nation together don’t get erased easily. Otherwise, the nation could split since many parts may not want to be part of a union that doesn’t care for certain values. Another key point to most democratic constitutions is that they declare the laws...

An earlier blog talked about how geography influences history. In another blog , Tomas Pueyo makes an interesting point: “Both China and India have external barriers that are much more impenetrable than the internal ones. The more time passed, the more they developed, and the more they united.” A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. This is one of those pictures.   Strong external barriers made China and India practically impenetrable by outsiders. Europe was the opposite – there were no impenetrable barriers separating most European empires and countries from each other; hence the eternal warfare amongst them. On the other hand, the lack of such barriers also made it easier for ideas and technologies to flow (relatively) freely across Europe.   Another important determiner is the axis on which a region is spread. North-South or East-West? Europe, India, and China have East-West spread; whereas Africa and the Americas are mostly spread in the North-Sout...

Once upon a time, economics was based on the assumption that human beings are rational. This is obviously false, so why was the assumption even made? Because without such an assumption, the field of economics couldn’t progress – how far can a theory that assumes people do irrational things ever progress? As that old saying goes, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.   As economic theory started to influence government policies, the scrutiny and criticism of economic theories increased. Inevitably, that core assumption of rationality began to draw a lot of flak.   A new field called behavioral science developed – this basically said that humans often make irrational choices. The factors for that extend far beyond stupidity – they include all the unconscious biases that make us, er, human. Such as generalizing from just a couple of personal incidents to the universal; or only noticing facts that align with what we already believe. With this as the basis, a new fo...

  Why is there such a huge mismatch between the number of medical seats and the number of kids applying for them? Going by instinct alone, and from what we hear from parents of kids, well, that approach doesn’t get us to all the right reasons, I realized as I read Pranay Kotasthane’s post.   Few, he says, talk of the topic dispassionately: “Ask anyone about MBBS education in India, and they will launch into a tirade about how the “commercialisation” of medical education has turned it unaffordable.”   But let us be more analytical than emotional. Prices are high because the demand is far greater than the supply. Usually, when such a condition exists, more producers enter the market, i.e., more medical colleges should have opened up. So why didn’t that happen?   Because nobody wants us every Tom, Dick and Harry to open medical schools, do we? What kind of doctors would we end up with? Obviously then, regulations are needed on the criteria to open medica...