Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As my 10 yo daughter’s grammar book said, a metaphor is a figure of speech that describes something via a comparison that isn’t literally true e.g. “The world is your oyster” and “All the world is a stage”.   If you combine multiple metaphors in a train of thought, it can be illuminating. Or funny. Or both. Like: “When you open that Pandora’s box, you will find it full of Trojan horses.” Or this line from the serial Futurama : “If we can hit that bull’s-eye then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards.” Or the time an Irish parliamentarian said: “Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat. I see him floating in the air. But mark me, sir, I will nip him in the bud.” We don’t nit-pick about the weirdness of such combined metaphors – they’re just too funny.   Funnily though, in the British comedies, Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister , Bernard Woolley did nit-pick, and yet one doesn’t feel put off by what he points out. In fact, it adds to the humour. '...

A fter the Vatican visit, the next day was all about going around in Rome. Starting with a guided tour of the Colosseum. Our guide asked us to guess how long it took to construct the Colosseum. The answer was surprising: just 10 years. It takes longer today to build a metro station in Rome today, she joked. Rome may not have been built in a day, but it sure wasn’t built at a crawling pace either. Jokes aside, our guide acknowledged that was possible because they used slave labour back then.   The underground system below the arena that housed the wild animals and gladiators with its many holding areas and passageways is open and visible. This guide too was an archaeologist (like the one at the Vatican), which explained why she was so keen to convey the reality of the Colosseum, not the nonsense that Hollywood peddles, she said contemptuously.   Yes, it was all bread and circus, something to keep the masses entertained. No, gladiators did not fight to the death. Sure, ...

If the US had such a powerful non-military weapon (secondary sanctions and mafia diplomacy), why didn’t they use it when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 – the “first” Ukraine “war”?   Multiple reasons, explains says Jordan Schneider’s interview with Eddie Fishman. (1) It happened suddenly and without warning. The Americans were caught unawares, and thus had no strategy in place on how to react. They found themselves continuously reacting to events on the ground. (2) Russia was (is) a huge economy and the world’s largest exporter of fossil fuels, so the cascading effects of crippling the Russian economy were too risky. (3) The world was still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, and Obama wasn’t sure if it was safe to rock the world’s economic boat. (4) Europe was entirely dependent on Russian oil and natural gas. “(The West) don’t know what kind of sanctions are tolerable to their own economies.” (5) Neither the US nor the EU was willing to risk all-out economic ...

The main item on our first full day in Italy was a guided tour of the Vatican. As I said earlier, our hotel was close to all the tourist spots of Rome, so we walked to the Vatican. Along the way, we stumbled upon an obscure, easy to miss church. Even that had such beautiful art on the walls and ceiling as well as mosaics. It would turn out to be a preview of the excellence of Italian art during all our trip.   Our group guide (about 10-12 people) was a part-time archaeologist. She pointed out that the Vatican is a separate country, not a part of the “ Republic of Italy” (I’d see that Italians everywhere take pride that since ancient times , they’ve been a republic, not a monarchy). The guides give everyone a radio receiver and earphones so you can hear the guide in crowded, noisy places even if you wander off or fall behind.   Right before going to the main part of the Vatican, our guide stopped us at an open area, and pulled out some chart paper sized prints of diffe...

By 2006, the US could see that sanctions against Iran weren’t working. That’s when an American civil servant named Stuart Levey realized the US “can leverage the dollar’s role in global financial flows”, says Jordan Schneider’s interview with Eddie Fishman. What does that mean?   The US began to threaten banks – stop transactions with Iran or you won’t be allowed to trade in the US dollar. This threat worked with most banks. Why? Because the dollar is the international currency of commerce; and not having access to it would lock a bank out of any international transactions.   Notice how it is a unilateral tool? America was using its status as the international currency as a stick (obey us or else you can’t do any transactions using the US dollar).   When Obama was President, a lot of members of Congress worried he was too soft on Iran (He’d campaigned saying diplomacy was the way forward with Iran). To thwart Obama, Congress passed many legislations wrt sanct...

Foreword : When in Rome, do as the Romans do. So I will use the Italian names for places. Only in the titles of the blogs though, not in the body. The other reason for using Italian names is that the language is musical to hear, due to the vowel ending sound to most words and also the way they say it. Even “Ferrari” sounds better when pronounced by an Italian. Enough said, let’s get started. ~~   We’d planned to visit Italy in December ’23 but didn’t because the visa came just a day before the journey. Even though we’d applied it for many, many weeks in advance. We didn’t have the stomach to wait for the visa until that close to the trip (we’d also lose a lot if we cancelled that late). The next time, we applied for a French visa which came so much faster and went to France, Netherlands and Austria last year. We used that same visa for the Italy trip this year.   I’ve never cleared immigration as quickly as we did in Rome! They just check for a valid visa and don’...

Back in 1956, computers were still new. They were as large as rooms and broke down frequently (they used vacuum tubes, not the IC’s of today). They consumed a huge amount of power, heated up, and had to be cooled. Interaction was via punched cards and printouts – there was no keyboard or monitors, no mouse or GUI. There were no programming languages yet, instructions had to be entered in 1’s and 0’s format. Access to computers was a precious and expensive service. One had to book slots to use the computer. Usage was designed with “efficiency” of the machine, not users. After all: “Machine time was far more valuable than human time.”   Yet, even then, writes Mitchell Waldrop in The Dream Machine , a handful of people were already imagining a world where computers could be used for fun! Reactions to this outrageous idea? “Some people thought it was wrong . They almost spoke in ethical terms. Computers are serious, you shouldn’t treat them lightly. You shouldn’t have fun with ...

For a while now, America has had the ability to impose unilateral sanctions. That means no UN or international consensus is needed, the US can cut off pretty much any country from international markets. How did that happen?   The knee-jerk response may be to say the powerful can do whatever they like. But the truth is a lot more interesting, as I found via this Jordan Schneider interview of Eddie Fishman.   As recently as 2003, America was finding even UN-authorized, naval blockade enforced sanctions on Iraq were not working. The other option the US had was to prevent American companies from trading with its enemies. This was crippling for many countries, but not say, Iran with who America had almost no trade anyway. Successive US Presidents found all this frustrating.   So what changed since then? Why is it now that the US is able to cut off anyone, from Iran to Russia, whenever it likes? ~~   It starts with how the US dollar stayed on as the int...

Our hotel in Rome was walking distance from the Vatican, and we stumbled upon this church on the way. Almost invisible, its entrance was easy to miss, appearing like the door of all the buildings next to it. Even that unknown church (Google couldn’t help) gave us a glimpse of the artworks of Italy that we would experience over the next 10 days. It even had a finely polished table at the center, which provided a perfect reflection of its ceiling. So much easier to take a pic via the reflection (us doing just that in the pic below). Later, I felt they could have created this “reflection” system too for ease of photography. But then again, no photos allowed in the Sistine Chapel.   After a point, the endless religious themed sculptures can feel repetitive. So sculptures like these in the Vatican provide a good break. Only later after seeing the Statue of David in Florence did I notice something about the goat (top-left above) – like David, the statue cannot stand on just the legs, s...

When it comes to Big Data, privacy and security, India’s view is totally different than that of the West. The difference is due to the answer to the following question – Do the benefits and applications of analyzing large data outweigh the privacy and security risks? And it’s not just India, all countries without pre-existing well-functioning systems look at data sets, AI and machine learning favourably since they enable better systems and better governance.   It reminded me of that term WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It was used a lot to refer to the Western view of how things should be, how studies and research should be done etc is unconsciously skewed since they didn’t know or understand non-Western (or non-WEIRD) countries and cultures. Today, more and more people think that the Western views on privacy and security should be added to the list of WEIRD worldview topics , i.e., matters where Western views are inapplicable to non-WEIRD coun...

Europe has been forced to face the reality, which was true since the end of World War II. All these decades, Europe chose to ignore that reality – militarily, Europe is nothing without American support. Certainly nowhere enough to take on Russia (or the USSR earlier).   The ramming home of this reality couldn’t have come at a worse time for Europe. As if the military side of things wasn’t bad enough news, as Tomas Pueyo writes : “China is decimating European industries, and nowhere is this truer than in cars… China is using its dominance in batteries to leapfrog internal combustion engine (ICE) cars and become the #1 exporter of electric cars in the world.”   And to top all that already terrible situation: “This whole geopolitical nightmare is happening as Europeans grow old.” How does an ageing population tie into all this? Because a welfare state (like Europe) with old people means a larger and larger chunk of government income (tax etc) is spent on pensions a...

Michelangelo’s David. It was commissioned by Florence’s famous cathedral, the Opera del Duomo, to be placed on the roofline. But it proved too heavy and was instead placed in a public square. In the 1800’s, it was moved into the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence to protect it from damage.   The statue is huge (17 feet tall) and stands on a pedestal which is 7’6” tall, so it looks even taller. Our guide pointed out that it is placed under a skylight (dome light) so you see it in natural lighting which enhances its visual impact. Mission accomplished – right from the moment we saw it from a distance.   You can walk around the pedestal to view it from multiple angles. Our guide first gave us the frontal view we know. A man, not the Biblical boy who slayed Goliath (Michelangelo intended to depict David as the “pinnacle of male perfection”, hence as a man, not a boy). The scene is right before the battle with Goliath, breaking the traditional depictions of the time (whic...

As Brazil gets richer, inevitably the expansion into the rainforest rises. Unlike environmental damage in other countries, this one is guaranteed to affect the world since the Amazon rainforest absorbs 25% of global carbon dioxide. From a moral side, it is hardly fair for the rest of the world to tell Brazilians to stay poor because the environment is important. Any forced solution in such a situation is sure to fail. And yet Brazil has framed the CAR , its rural environmental registry, to “promote sustainable land use and encourage environmental preservation”, writes Rahul Matthan. How did that happen? More importantly, does it work as intended? The EU framed regulations that restrict the sale of unsustainably cultivated produce from other countries. This made it necessary for Brazilian farmers to demonstrate compliance to sell to the EU. Hence the establishment of CAR: “(It is) a digital framework designed to map, monitor and regulate rural properties around the country to est...

Michelangelo did not like to paint; he considered sculptures the superior art form. So how did he end up painting the famous Sistine Chapel? Short answer: Michelangelo was forced to paint, since Pope Julius II insisted he do it, explained our guide.   There were other reasons why Michelangelo wasn’t keen to paint the Sistine Chapel. What was asked for sounded impossible: (1) paint all the major themes of Christianity on a single painting; (2) not on a canvas, but on a huge room (ceiling + walls). Plus, he feared that if he failed to do justice to it, it would be a very public failure that would tar his reputation.   Plus, the work was literally backbreaking. So much so Michelangelo even wrote a poem on how he suffered (“hunched up here like a cat”, “ My brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings” and ends by saying “ My painting is dead. Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor. I am not in the right place—I am not a...

Apurva Kumar wrote a series on Tamil Nadu’s economic growth. It is informative in bits and pieces. I’ll try and collate them here.   First , TN has, over decades, moved a good number of people away from agriculture to higher income (and growth) sectors like industry, construction and services. Even within agriculture, there is greater diversity than most other states (e.g. diary, poultry and egg processing apart from regular crops).   Second , industrialization has been cluster-based, i.e: “ A group of enterprises located within an identifiable and as far as practicable, contiguous area.” Examples include Tirupur (cotton knitware) and Coimbatore (spinning mills and engineering goods). Such cluster-based setups work best if infrastructure to link these enterprises is in good shape. Even among the more industrialized states, TN has done better on such infrastructure projects. Such clusters also provide an alternative to farm workers – they can move to industria...

We know of the Internet of Things (IoT) – it refers to interconnected devices that “talk” to each other. Like the wearable fitness sensors that report back to your smartphone. A decade or so back, there was also talk of the industrial variant of it, the so called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), writes Nicholas Welch: “The belief was that the falling cost of cloud computing, sensor costs, and machine learning — coupled with new connectivity technologies such as 5G or IPv6 — would lead to a revolution.” Revolution in what? In manufacturing efficiency, in predicting when an equipment would have problems (say your washing machine or a wind turbine) and then proactively sending the service guy to fix it, in reducing system downtime and thus productivity increases. Add data analytics on top of that, and we should have had massive productivity increases. So why didn’t that happen?   Simply put, there are too many different players whose systems needed to be integrated. (1) ...

In one of the tales in Nitin Pai’s Nitopadesha , an elephant sees a tiger getting ready to attack a deer and its fawn. If she thumped the ground, the deer and her fawn could escape. But that would mean the tiger would instead attack a stag on the other side. The question of the story: what should the elephant do? Either choice would mean the death of someone.   The tale takes us through the way one would assess. Is saving two lives better than saving one? But saving two lives means sentencing the stag to death – who gave the elephant the authority to decide that? Round and round the arguments go. The moment one has an argument for one, there is a counterargument for the other. We might have the luxury of time, but the elephant has to make a choice within moments. Worst of all, not making a choice still leads to the deer’s death.   No, it’s not a Vikram - Vetaal story with a right answer. Instead, the moral is to remind us that governance is hard and involves such decisions. ...