Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The preamble to the constitution. That’s the topic of Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble . Not the entire constitution, just the preamble. Why a book on just the preamble? The author explains: “The ideas and principles behind a clause can be more important than the mere mechanics of the clause itself.”   It starts with something we don’t even notice this: “WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA… IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of November, 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.” Not 26 January, 1950 (our Republic Day). Instead, 26 November 1949. And if it was ready on that earlier day, why did our Republic Day have to be later?   Therein lies a tale. In 1929, the Congress’ National Session made a call for complete independence. A while later, Gandhi published an article on 26 January 1930 saying India would settle for nothing less than “complete independence”. It was as a callback to that Gandhian demand that the coun...

The last pillar of India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) is privacy . We take that to mean control over who knows what, whether that info can be shared with others, for how long it can be retained etc. Yes, privacy is all those things.   But India’s DEPA takes it a lot further, explains Rahul Matthan in The Third Way . It actively seeks to ensure portability (Unlike those private corporations which deliberately have data is in non-standard formats to prevent interoperability). Even better, DEPA has “been designed to support requests for specific items of data ”. An example helps. When we apply for say a visa, the issuing country really only wants to know if we earn enough (salary month on month). But the bank statement exposes every transaction. The DEPA framework allows you to select only salary credits be shown and everything else blacked out.   The next issue with privacy is consent , i.e., explicit permission of the individual. In theory, the solution lie...

Eugene Wei makes some interesting points on the topic of copying the work of others. Quite often, it isn’t just copying – rather, what’s being “copied” serves as the inspiration: “Isn't this how innovation happens? We stand on the shoulder of giants and all that? Good artists copy, great artists steal?” In case you’re wondering, that last line (on what artists do) is by Steve Jobs.   If a work of literature (or parts of it) is copied, we rightly call it plagiarism. But interestingly, in the world of business, an old idea can be copied and tried again (as long as it doesn’t violate copyrights, patents and trademarks). How’s that? In layman English, we say an idea was ahead of its time. In business parlance, it’s called “product-market fit” mismatch – a product, like an idea, that is too ahead of its time won’t succeed. Which is why the same product/idea relaunched later might succeed: “One day, the conditions are finally right, and an idea that has failed ten times before...

In Range , David Epstein argues that the “ability to integrate broadly” is our greatest strength. Which is the “exact opposite of narrow specialization”. If we narrowly know only one area very well, we tend to look and find only the “same old patterns”. But: “In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.”   Most problems in a field can be solved by specialists in that field. That’s to be expected. But when experts in a field get stuck, quite often we see outsiders with a broad range of knowledge of multiple fields (even if they’re not specialists in most of those fields) finding solutions. Why/how? “The outside view probes for deep structural similarities to the current problem in different ones. The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the expert, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies.” ...

When we think of online retail in India, we think of Amazon and Flipkart. Which is why I found this article by Manish Singh so informative: “ Flipkart and Amazon’s displacement is coming from two directions simultaneously.”   The first of those are the urban “instant delivery” firms. Think Blinkit, Swiggy’s Instamart and Zepto. The second one are e-commerce sites aimed at the smaller cities and towns. “ Amazon and Flipkart now find themselves squeezed between two models they cannot easily replicate because their expensive infrastructure, designed for catalogue breadth and next-day delivery, proves ill-suited for either 10-minute deliveries in dense urban areas or ultra-low-price commerce in India’s interior.”   I won’t spend much time on the instant delivery firms since we (in urban centers) are very familiar with their speed and convenience.   I will talk more on the e-commerce sites for smaller cities and towns. Meesho is what few of us have ever used...

Another design principle of India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) is protocols . As opposed to platforms. This needs some explanation, as done by Rahul Matthan in The Third Way . A platform (like Facebook or YouTube) provides a forum where anyone can post material but there are no guarantees on what will be permitted (or how the rules could change with time). A protocol, on the other hand, is a set of rules that are defined upfront so all participants know what is allowed and expected.   The DPI’s protocol model means any participant can create entirely new applications that nobody had thought of, as long as they follow the protocols. This allows for enormous creativity and evolution of applications over time.   And lastly, since protocols are rules, regulations can be enforced via the protocol. The government doesn’t have to chase down every participant to see if they follow the rules. The mere act of agreeing to follow the protocol (in software, remember this ...

Tactics are short-term actions whereas strategy is long-term vision. Surprisingly (to me at least), it turns out that “chess is 99 percent tactics”. Many top chess players admit that you can go a long distance by being very good at tactics alone, i.e., by knowing a lot of patterns.   Computers, even the non-AI variety, are “tactically flawless compared to humans”, writes David Epstein in Range . What happens when man and machine combine forces on a chess board?   While the machine handles tactics, the human can focus on strategy. “It changed the pecking order instantly.” In 1998, when he was still near his peak, Garry Kasparov drew a man-machine match 3-3 with the same opponent whom he had crushed 4-0 in man-only competition… Kasparov, like most top chess players, had been so dominant because he was vastly better at tactics. The difference between him and others when it came to strategy wasn’t much. Shocking.   Once you combine man and machine, it turns ou...

The second design principle behind India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) is interoperability . As any engineer will tell you, systems rarely talk to each other. Every piece gets optimized for itself, and thus is rarely suited to work with anything else. Plus, companies deliberately choose to keep things in proprietary formats so customers cannot easily switch out.   When we say Aadhar is the world’s first digital ID system, it doesn’t just mean that the ID was created and stored in digital format. It means a lot more than that, as Rahul Matthan explains in The Third Way . It means that it was designed to be usable in all kinds of digital workflows, an example of which we saw in an earlier blog on the design of UPI by unbundling things first.   Another example is Aadhar’s integration with Jeevan Praman, a government pension service. Proof of life can be established remotely by a pensioner, thanks to Aadhar’s interoperability. This is hugely helpful in the rural...

Visualized data. That’s graphs, pie-charts and all kinds of creative representations of data. While they make it easier to understand many things, they can also be misleading, write Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West in Calling Bullshit . And not always because of malice or bad intentions…   As software makes visual graphics easy, people tend to come up with eye-catching ways of presenting data. Nothing wrong with that, unless… “The attempt to be cute makes it harder for the reader to understand the underlying data.” For example, a 3D graph makes it hard to compare the bars: how much taller is the 3 rd class bar compared to the 1 st class bar? It’s hard to say (visually) since the 1 st class bar is farther away and don’t far off objects look shorter than they are?   Sure, the numerical values are written, but if one has to read it to make sense, then why use a graphic? Even worse, why create an easy-to-misread graphic?   Another common error is to show informat...

There are 4 design principles behind India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) . The first one is unbundling , writes Rahul Matthan in The Third Way . What this means is that DPI didn’t just digitize existing workflows. Instead, it broke down existing workflows into their constituent elements and then restructured them to be resilient and interoperable. Then it assembled things back in entirely new ways.   An example helps understand how big an impact this can have. Take the old way of transferring money to someone.   This is why checks took time to encash. Banks had to perform checks and communicate with each other. Unbundling in this case started from scratch. It didn’t look how to accelerate the above system. Instead, it looked at the easiest form of money transfer. Yes, cash. The giver and sender don’t need to know anything about each other; nobody needs to check and confirm if the giver has enough in the account; you just hand the cash. Could payments be digitized...

The Yellow Line of the Bangalore Metro started operations in August. Why did it take 2 years after the completion of all construction for operations to start? Tannmay Kumar Baid and Pranay Kotasthane look into the causes.   The short answer? India-China geopolitics. Now for the longer version.   In 2019, bids were accepted for the trains. A Chinese state-owned company, CRRC, won. It was cheaper than the nearest Indian manufacturer by 2 crores per coach. The contract included a clause that 75% of the coaches be manufactured in India. CRRC was to build a new plant in Andhra Pradesh.   Then, in 2020, Galwan happened. India tightened its scrutiny of all Chinese investments. Cabinet clearance was made mandatory. The visa regime tightened and CRRC engineers were denied visas to come and set up the factory.   That apart, the usual Indian obstacles played their part. Land clearance took forever. Customs could and did hold up imports. BMRCL tried cancelling ...

In the Roman empire, one could end up a slave via, er, multiple channels – those defeated in war, unlucky victims of piracy, inability to repay debts, and by being found guilty of certain crimes. In theory, one could come out of slavery by buying one’s freedom or if one’s master was willing to release the individual. In practice, while such things did happen, they were very rare.   As you can imagine, slavery was “functional” – it existed to serve a need, cruel though it was. This was true not just in Rome but all ancient civilizations, from Egypt to Greece.   Rome though was the first empire that also used slavery for entertainment. That trend started off due to the Roman practice of re-enacting the acts of a military figure who had died – bit by bit, it extended to include athletic events, even chariot races, and eventually opened up to everyone around, not just relatives of the deceased! Like Indian weddings nowadays, it soon became a competition of sorts – who coul...

Empowerment via DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) , that is the next benefit described in Rahul Matthan’s The Third Way . That refers to empowerment of the individual over the data collected about him and what it can be used for. On this front, India has created DEPA (Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture) . What is that? “A consented (consent based) data-sharing framework capable of being applied across various sectors.”   An example helps understand it. Matthan takes a vegetable vendor, Rajini. Say, she goes to the wholesale market early every morning, buys ₹25,000 worth of vegetables. Then she brings it to the neighbourhood, and sells it for ₹28,000 per day, netting a profit of ₹3,000 per day. That’s a lakh a month. Thanks to digitization and UPI, there is a digital trail of these transactions. With which she could prove her credibility and success to seek a loan at better terms.   The problem though is that her bank transaction record will show many, man...

Recently I read a book on Ambedkar’s role and influence on the preamble of the Constitution. Just the preamble, not the entire constitution! Boy, was it impressive – the sheer range of considerations he was aware and tried to balance is unbelievable, and the constraint that he could not copy from the West as-is leading to adjustments specific to India. But more on that book in later blogs.   If that sounds like gushing praise, well, that’s the theme of this blog. Pranay Kotasthane wrote of 3 levels at which discussions on Ambedkar are conducted. Level 0 is good old Hero Worship. “I call this the zeroth level because discussions at this level aren’t even about Ambedkar’s ideas. They are about raising him to demi-god status, statue included. It is indeed ironic that a person who warned India and Indians of the dangers of hero-worship has been put on pedestals across the country.”   So ironic indeed. Here is what Ambedkar wrote on the dangers of hero worship: “Ther...

Under imperialism, Christianity often came along with the white colonizers. Not in places which had their own strongly embedded religion (India, South East Asia etc) but in most of Africa, that was definitely the case.   In his autobiography, Born a Crime , Trevor Noah snarkily says: “It (Christianity) was forced on us (blacks). The white man was quite stern with the natives. “You need to pray to Jesus”, he said, “Jesus will save you”. To which the native replied, “Well, we do need to be saved – saved from you, but that’s beside the point. So let’s give this Jesus thing a shot.”   And adds another point in a different context: “If you’re native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense.” Reminds me of the contempt Islam and Christianity have for idol worship.   Santa Claus gets the...

In an earlier blog, we went over one of the benefits of India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) . In this one, we go over another benefit – engagement , as explained in Rahul Matthan’s The Third Way .   The most obvious reason why DPI has increased and improved citizens’ engagement is the cost reduction of everything digital as opposed to physical. People don’t need to create copies of documents; recipients don’t need to find storage space to keep it.   Even better, with a digitized system, identification no longer requires a trip; which saves both time and money. Workflows are easier to design and change. Digital trails help finding fraud or fault easier. Transactions are digitally signed and timestamped (sometimes geo-stamped, i.e., location coordinates included).   “Universally trusted digital rails” are now well and truly in place. The most used and well-known services of which is, yes, payments. UPI, a “blindingly simple system”, allows money transfer...

I was surprised to read Andrew Sullivan’s post on the decline in literacy in the West. No, not literally – everyone still goes to school and learns to read and write. It is the amount and quality of reading they read that has fallen, and the attendant consequences are becoming increasingly visible.   It started with the Internet. As bandwidth speeds increased, sites began to have more pictures and then more videos. “Visuals carry more visceral punch than sentences and paragraphs, and require less reason and effort.” Ominously: “The Internet, in other words, held the power to return us to the pre-literate culture from which a majority of humans had emerged only a few hundred years ago: images, symbols, memes.”   Today: “Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced re...

In earlier blogs, we saw the US and European policies on data. Coming to India, Rahul Matthan (in The Third Way ) points out it is one of those rare countries which has collected a huge amount of digital data before it became rich. This is entirely because of the combo of smartphone + cheap Internet plans. Even those of us who lived through this phase forget how quick it was – in 2014, just 15% of the population had a smartphone, by 2022 over 65% had one.   There is one element of the data equation on which India is unique, namely that its gathering was facilitated by deliberate government policies and protocols, not by private players. Yes, DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) , which includes everything from UPI to eKYC to DigiYatra to DigiLocker and more. It ensures “interoperable digital architectures” (contrast that with the silos of Google or Facebook in the West; Alibaba or WeChat in China). Does the Indian approach provide any benefits and opportunities? Yes, on 3 front...

The standup comedian Trevor Noah’s parents (white Swiss father, black African mother) loved each other, yet had to think long and hard before deciding to have a child. It was a criminal act under apartheid for a black and white to have relations, let alone a child. But they decided to have one anyway, with the understanding that they could never be a family (Criminal act, remember?), writes Noah in Born a Crime .   After he was born, the father found himself wanting to be near his son. But he couldn’t do so openly. So they’d all meet up secretly. As a toddler, when Trevor went to play in a park, his dad would follow at a distance, careful never to come too close to draw attention. It was a police state like situation, you never knew who might call the authorities. Inevitably, the kid (Trevor) would sometimes notice his dad in the distance and start shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” upon which his father would panic and run away…   Much later, Trevor would learn what happened t...

In an earlier blog, we saw the American attitude towards data and how it became the philosophy of the Internet, simply because the US was the first country on the Net and also its biggest market. Over time, the EU became a big market too. A significant difference in European views is rooted in the fact that few, if any, big Internet companies are European. Thus, the lobbying against data/privacy laws in the EU was far less (though the big American ones do lobby in EU), explains Rahul Matthan in The Third Way .   The EU attitude data is far more citizen-centric. Even before the Internet, that was the case in (Western) Europe largely because of their experience with fascism, Nazism and communism over the past century.   That history culminated in the GDPR doctrine for EU, a “full blown regulation… which became the most advanced data protection framework”. It says (1) all data about an individual belongs to that individual, not the company that collected it, (2) any dat...

The standup comedian Trevor Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime , is about his life in South Africa only , so it doesn’t talk of his career as a comedian or life in the West. What it describes about the apartheid regime in South Africa is horrifying. Unlike many evils of the West, this is a recent one that continued till the 1990’s. It is thus not something that can be brushed aside as “It was a different era, you can’t apply today’s standards to older times”.   Apartheid was created after “studying” the institutionalized racism of Australia, America and Netherlands.   America, for example, moved the natives to specific areas called “reservations”, practiced slavery and then moved onto segregation. In South Africa, they did all of the above to the same group (blacks). The outcome? “The most advanced system of racial oppression known to man”.   A system built on the idea that races should not mix has to declare inter-racial relations (romance, marriage, children) i...