Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Euphemisms. Often, they originate as a way of saying something in a way that is not considered offensive by others (people in general, religious authorities, governments). Like this example from Eleanor Stern’s article : “Consider the rate at which words for concepts like “toilet” are replaced and euphemized: ladies’ room, lavatory, privy, W.C., washroom.” There is even a term for it: “In linguistics, this would be called a “replacement vocabulary”. Or as Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert said: “A familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive.” In other words, taboos drive the creation of new words.”   In the Age of the Internet, there’s a new driver for euphemisms as social media censors certain content. It might be because that company (Facebook, Twitter etc) is for and against certain topics. Or because society’s mood calls for that stance. Or because governments demand it.   But social media is just filtering by algorithms...

In the previous blog , based on Prof. Karthik Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development , we went into the problems with India’s education system. This one is based on solutions he proposes and/or has seen to work.   Contract teachers often work out well. Because they are not permanent (unlike government teachers), they can be fired or replaced, which incentivizes them to work harder. Also, they are usually from the community, which means they care more, know the kids personally, and thus produce better outcomes.   Take the ITK ( Illam Thedi Kalvi ) programme in Tamil Nadu. During COVID, in 2021, around 2 lakh volunteers were paid a modest stipend (₹1,000 per month) to conduct remedial classes at schools for 60-90 minutes a day. Anyone could come free of cost. ITK was scaled up to cover 30 lakh students within a year. Studies showed it was “highly effective in bridging learning losses”, and the benefits far exceeded the money spent. In addition, it added to women...

Prof. Karthik Muralidharan wrote this very long (~900 pages) but excellent book, Accelerating India’s Development . One chapter is about education. This is the first of a two-part blog based on just that one chapter.   At independence, India paid more attention to tertiary education over primary education. This was because a technical workforce was considered vital for India’s modernization. In more recent times, while enrolment for primary education has exploded, the outcome (what they learnt) is still very poor.   The government’s approach is to focus on inputs (money, infrastructure, teacher count, mid-day meals, books and computers), not on harder to quantify but more important outputs . Take improvements in school infrastructure. While it may make the learning experience more pleasant, it doesn’t translate to better learning if the “teaching and learning processes are ineffective”. Computers are often kept under lock and key and never allowed to be used, for fear...

Economic growth v/s cost to the environment. In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane takes a stab at this very complex and important topic.   One , he says, the way a $2,000 per capita income country looks at the environment cannot be the same as the way a $50,000 per capita income country. Because the State doesn’t have the resources to enforce many measures (just framing laws doesn’t help). And because people cannot be condemned to stay poor because, hey, the alternative is bad for the environment.   Two , don’t create some clearance process that evaluates all projects for environmental impact. Because the State doesn’t have the resources for it. Clearance of projects will become the bottleneck and even worse, it will lead to corruption in clearing projects. It would be better to set limits on pollution or environmental damage; and then penalize companies that breach them. The approach should be like how tax returns are evaluated – randomly, because the State simply...

In the 90’s, after VP Singh had opened the Pandora’s box of reservation (Mandal), it set off another political wave – Ayodhya, Hindutva, or what came to be called Kamandal (the brass vessel to carry water, carried by sadhu s).   Today, after almost a decade of rule of Kamandal , we seem to have a revival of Mandal again, writes Raghu S Jaitley. As leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi criticized the budget saying: “The government of being of the forward castes, by the forward castes and for the forward castes. ” The Opposition is right in demanding that the census be conducted, but they also insist on a caste-based census. And then the Supreme Court passed a verdict: “permitting sub-classification for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in reservations by state governments. This will allow state governments to reserve seats for specific sub-groups within the quotas that are aimed at SC and ST communities based on the relative deprivation of those sub-groups.” Jaite...

What is GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and why does it matter? Pranay Kotasthane tries to answer that in Missing in Action . Until the Great Depression in the US in the 1920’s and 30’s, governments didn’t bother about it. But the magnitude of the economic catastrophe forced governments to act. But without data, how could they know the right measures or the areas in which actions were needed?   Therefore, the US started to create mechanisms to keep track of the “health” of the overall economy. This need only increased during World War II as the US needed to balance spending on war expenses with domestic needs. Thus, by the end of World War II, the idea of GDP as the metric of economic status and its use in helping decide government actions – where/when to step in, which sectors were doing well or poorly – was widely accepted.   GDP has many failings. Growth in GDP doesn’t indicate “quality of growth” – was the growth because of war? Polluting industries? Eco-friendly acti...

Albert Einstein, despite being a founder of quantum mechanics, never liked the theory. One particular aspect of it rankled him. But first, some context. Since Newton, physics had been exact. F = ma. No ambiguity. As more and more laws were discovered with similar exactitude, people became convinced that the universe worked like clockwork. Precise laws governed everything.   Quantum mechanics overturned the clockwork universe. By stating that uncertainty is inherent to nature. Not because we don’t know enough details. Not because our measurement systems have limitations. But because that is just how nature is. (At the tiniest of tiniest levels . At the bigger levels we experience, Newtonian physics still rules). Einstein hated this uncertainty-is-inherent-to-nature idea, and it is captured in his famous line: “God does not play dice.” He felt that  natural laws could not possibly be like the throw of dice, with its inherent randomness and probabilities.   In...

How has the role of the elected representative evolved in India? Pranay Kotasthane looks the question in Missing in Action . The usual question worldover has been whether the representative is a delegate or a trustee of the people? What do the terms mean? “In the delegate model, the representative is a mere mouthpiece for the will of her constituents and has limited autonomy of her own.” On the other hand, a trustee is allowed to exercise her discretion, her judgment and her conscience in how she votes in Parliament.   In most democracies, including India, representatives gradually became trustees.   By the 80’s and 90’s, India found these representatives would be bought over, flip parties, and bring down governments. When this problem got out of hand, the anti-defection law was framed – representatives had to follow their party whips; if they didn’t, they would be disqualified. An unintended effect of this new law was that the representative didn’t couldn’t v...

When people try to understand Chinese tech companies, they tend to use some American company as the “anchor” to compare and understand it. Use Amazon to understand Alibaba; Google to understand Baidu… That’s a good way to start, but only upto a point, writes Kevin Shimota in The First Superapp .   WeChat, the Chinese superapp (more on that term in a bit), started as a messaging service, so one might be tempted tend to use WhatsApp as the anchor. But unlike WhatsApp, WeChat started as a PC app in the pre-smartphone era. Over time, WeChat expanded to become a social networking app as well, so a Facebook comparison seemed to make sense. Then WeChat expanded into a way for businesses and individuals to interact (and buy/sell), so was Amazon the right anchor? Then WeChat added online payment mechanisms, so was PayPal the right anchor?   By now, it is obvious that no American company can serve as an anchor to understand WeChat. It is like a combo of WhatsApp + Facebook + Ama...

In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane looks at how the concept of the nation called India evolved at independence. It had to be different from its (British) predecessor for multiple reasons. The predecessor form of government (1) answered to the British Parliament; (2) had limited powers; and (3) was elected by a small electorate. None of these attributes could be retained in independent India, obviously.   Several leaders at the time of Independence felt that society was too mired in regional identities, superstition, caste and religion. They felt that it was the responsibility of the state (independent India) to change society to move away from these tendencies. “The modern Indian constitution in its intent… was fashioned to be a tool not just for an economic and political revolution, but a social revolution.”   One can certainly understand that intent. Inevitably though, the state became increasingly paternalistic – it knew what was good for society and the i...

We think of the Internet as one large network. Technically, that is true since the Internet literally means the connected network of computer systems. The software that runs on it (websites, apps etc) is called the web. In reality, most people mean websites and apps when they use the term “Internet”.   In his book on the Chinese app named WeChat, The First Superapp , Kevin Shimota says it might be more accurate to define the Internet as the consolidation of services and information that are made accessible through a digital device (PC, phone, tablet). This, in fact, is how most of think of it today.   Initially, the Internet was almost entirely in English, he says. But as it began to spread, its diversity increased. Which brings us to the term, “splinternet” – a part of the Internet formed by splintering from the global Internet.   In China’s case, he says most of the content is in Chinese. Most Chinese don’t know English, and so don’t bother to access the res...

Comic book heroes are sometimes the source of profound dialogs. “With great power comes great responsibility.” – Spiderman   Another such line is from the Batman movie by Christopher Nolan: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Nolan says that line haunts him for multiple reasons. One, he didn’t come up with the line; his brother did. Two, at the time, he didn’t even appreciate it! “I was like ‘Alright, I’ll keep it in there, but I don’t really know what it means. Is that really a thing?’ ” Three, Nolan finds it applicable to his more recent smash hit, Oppenheimer : “In [ Oppenheimer ] it’s absolutely that. Build them up, tear them down. It’s how we treat people.” As Nolan says, if Oppenheimer had to be summarized in one line, it would be the “Die a hero” line.   In recent times, I realized that the line is even more profound if taken beyond its literal meaning. Here’s what I mean. “Die a hero” doesn’t refer to just the physic...

In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane looks at how one of the initial assumption of democracies changed over the centuries. Which assumption is that? The one that most citizens knew what was happening around them. This wasn’t an unreasonable assumption in simpler times – at some level, it was reasonably true. But as the world got more and more complicated…   At that point, the solution was “an enlightened oligarchy of experts” who would guide and influence policy making. Further, since politicians were (and are) swayed by whatever is popular, the role of experts to act as guardrails only increased their importance. Experts thus became central to most democracies.   Not surprisingly, experts (often in good faith) started to differ in their opinions and advice. This led to the next logical step in the sequence: “In a marketplace of ideas, lobbying is natural.” Lobbying wasn’t the bad term it is today, at least not initially. Until: “Vested interests willing to o...

In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane talks about eight ways of thinking that don’t make for good policy making. First up is the idea that you know what a good policy looks like. Nobody does, because the world is too complicated. Actions have unintended consequences. People don’t always react in ways you (or the policy maker) hoped. Second one is related to this – a belief that one needs to be consistent on policy matters. No, he says, one should be flexible and change one’s views based on how policies have fared. Un-learning is just as important as learning.   Third is the belief that good intentions translate into good policies. The fate of all attempts at prohibition across the world are a perfect example of this. Fourth is the wrong idea that a policy is good, just that its implementation or execution is where the fault lay. No, he argues, a “policy formulated bereft of implementation details” cannot be a good policy. All of us know both these points from our own lif...

Use the word “money” in the same sentence as “politics” and the next words that leap to our mind are “corruption” and “bribes”. While that association is indeed true, the reality is far more complicated and strewn with the misfiring of good intentions, says Rwitwika Bhattacharya-Agarwal in What Makes a Politician . ~~ Everyone needs money to live   She starts with the basic point – everyone needs money. Obviously. But how does one make money in politics? Political parties don’t pay salaries; and politics is a full-time job… you see the structural problem with such a setup?   Note that this problem isn’t limited to MLA’s and MP’s alone – it applies for the party workers as well. This leads to two common outcomes – many people avoid politics altogether; and the other set have to find ways within the context of politics and influence. With that in mind, consider a party worker who doesn’t get to contest the election but gets to be, say, the secretary to the elected ...

The Karnataka government’s bill to reserve 75% in non-management jobs and 50% management jobs for “local candidates” was quickly put in hold. Raghu S Jaitley explained well why such an idea is “plain stupid and regressive”.   Reservation, he says, makes sense if a group has been and continues to be discriminated for a long time. It cannot be anybody’s case that the “youth of Karnataka have been discriminated against for generations”!   Does Karnataka have enough candidates with the appropriate skills or talent if such a bill came into force? Obviously not (no state does). Companies will choose to exit the state rather than “settle” for less.   Such a bill disincentivizes the youth of Karnataka to do well in studies in the long run. After all, they’d be guaranteed jobs. And once they got into jobs, would they bother to upskill themselves? Obviously not. Progressively, the quality of the labour force in Karnataka would drop, and more companies would exit. ...

Say, you are a citizen who doesn’t just want to curse the kind of politicians we have. Instead, you are willing to become one to improve things. How would you even go about becoming a politician and getting the party ticket? After all, unless elected, you can’t change anything. Rwitwika Bhattacharya-Agarwal explains how to go about those aspects in What Makes a Politician . ~~ Professional “bias” in politics   How do you prepare for a political career? The first step for most would be to join the youth wing of a political party to learn the ropes, and meet party leaders. But if you’re too old for youth wings, then the profession you are in may help. Lawyers, for example, are the most common profession that joins politics. That is because of their understanding of the constitution, laws, and yes, they may have represented the party or a political leader in the past in a legal case. Bureaucrats stand a good chance for similar reasons – experience, proximity, and thus relation...