Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Why and how had India’s economic condition become as precarious as it was in 1991? There were multiple reasons, explains Sanjaya Baru in 1991 . (1) Successive government policies over the previous decade had been adding to increasingly unsustainable government debt. (2) Forex reserves were falling as India continued to have few goods or services to sell abroad. (3) The USSR fell, and overnight a country with whom India traded a lot and in non-US dollars had ceased to exist. (4) Saddam invaded Kuwait, oil prices spiked and that was the straw that finally broke the Indian camel. (5) From 1989, India had a string of coalition governments. I will explain next why that last point mattered.   When we think of the 1989-91 period, we think of short-lived governments and unknown compromise candidates suddenly becoming Prime Ministers. (1) It also meant that no meaningful policy decisions could be made by such coalition governments as things began to slide downwards. (2) Global cr...

China is the world’s factory. Everything is made in China. Every country buys from China. And therefore, pretty much every country has a trade deficit (total value of exports minus total value of imports) with China. While more and more countries rightly worry that China can lock them out of more and more critical items (rare earths being the most recent example), the US under Trump in particular is also worried about the trade deficit with China.   It was in this context that I was struck by Tomas Pueyo’s post . “What happens when the West owes China so much they can’t repay the debt? How should we understand the current trade war between the US and China? What we don’t realize is that this isn’t the first time this has happened. ” Huh? Pueyo elaborates.   Go back around 2,000 years, when Rome ruled Europe. Pliny the Elder lamented even back then: “India, China and the Arabian peninsula take one hundred million sesterces from our empire per annum at a conse...

India had been lurching towards an economic crisis for a while – 1991 was just the culmination of where things had been heading, writes Sanjaya Baru in 1991 . In August, 1990, VP Singh was being urged to seek an IMF loan. An IMF loan was (and has been) more than just the dollar amount of the loan issued. “(An IMF loan) was a character certificate that would help India deal increasingly worried creditors.” But VP Singh did not ask for the loan, largely because he needed the support of the Left for his coalition to stay in power.   It was a really, really bad time for India, and not just on the economic front. The Mandal agitation, the Ram Mandir agitation, insurgencies in the North East and Punjab, and the resentment in Tamil Nadu over the aborted attempt to help the LTTE in Sri Lanka…   By December, 1990, Chandra Shekhar was the PM and things had become worse. When he asked for a loan, the IMF demurred. In that case, said Chandra Shekhar, India would have no option...

In his book, Life’s Edge , Carl Zimmer explains why the leaves of some trees change color in autumn. Chlorophyll is what gives leave their green color – it is needed for photosynthesis, the green color is incidental. In turn, chlorophyll is made of 4 atoms of nitrogen. Therein lies the answer.   If the tree just dropped the leaves at autumn, it would have to spend a lot of effort later to first find nitrogen in the soil, then pump it up from the roots to the branches to make the chlorophyll for the new leaves. “Instead, the tree spent the autumn carefully dismantling its chlorophyll into molecular parts, which it moves down little tunnels from the leaves into the branches. There the parts would spend the winter in safekeeping, ready to be quickly moved into new leaves in the spring and reassembled into fresh chlorophyll.”   This is a smart strategy, but it creates a new problem. Because chlorophyll serves another purpose – it acts as a sunscreen protecting the protei...

Trump makes these announcements (more tariffs, no support for Ukraine etc) and then, a while later, backs off. Rob Armstrong coined an acronym: Taco. Trump always chickens out . Here is what he means: Trump announces something, the markets fall, Trump panics and retracts earlier announcement.   If the markets are part of the story, well, there is money to be made in such situations. It is called the Taco trade! Explanation: Trump makes announcement, market falls, so you buy stocks at this point, Trump panics and retracts his announcement, markets rise, and you sell the stock at this higher point.   Sounded logical? Except, as Tim Harford says , pull on the story a bit and it begins to unravel: “The fact that the markets were so alarmed in early April suggests that they weren’t really swallowing the Taco hypothesis.”   Harford then does an intellectual exercise. So stock traders stop believing in the Taco trade. Hence, after the next weird announcement by Trump (“deporting...

It is one thing for patterns of overlap and relevance to emerge between physics and maths. But to make the actors in the two fields actively work with the belief that work in one can yield insights into the other, that is a different thing altogether. For the latter to happen, you need someone very charismatic, very persuasive, someone “inclined to whip up enthusiasm for wild ideas”. The mathematician, Michael Atiyah , was just that guy.   He convinced (math) geometers and (physics) gauge theorists that they were working on the same subject, just from different perspectives. Subatomic physicists were surprised that a very hard problem in their field could be solved using a maths theorem that connected topology and calculus. So much was the overlap that the Wu-Yang dictionary was created to enable physicists and topologists to talk to each other! In fact, repeatedly, both sides found advances or a new theory in the other field gave insights into questions on their side. “The...

Some decisions have huge long term impact. Slog in 11 th and 12 th standard and you are far more likely to end up comfortably off for the rest of your life, for example. But of course, we want multiple things – happiness, money, health, to name just a few. And different choices can lead to more of one and less (even none) of the other. Even worse, at the time you make a choice, you can’t be sure how things will play out.   Mark Koslow points out that: “With this frame of mind, decisions can become paralyzing.” Then again: “Certain people can float while others fall into analysis paralysis.”   He quotes Barry Schwartz on the two types of decision makers: “ Maximizers , when faced with a decision, need to know they are choosing the  best  option.  Satisficers   don’t  need to know they’re choosing the best option. Instead, they’re comfortable making a decision when they see an option that is good enough and meets their standards.” Of...

On the Internet, there is pretty much no way for a site to know a person’s age. The most obvious kind of sites where this becomes a problem are pornographic sites. Of course, there are other sites which trick and manipulate children on the Internet in other ways. How does one identify and protect minors on the Net?   To try and address this, California passed a law in 2022 making it mandatory for sites to have checks in place to avoid exposing under-age children to certain kinds of content. You’d think it would be hard to argue against this, right? But this was America. A lawsuit was filed against the law, a court granted an injunction. On what grounds? Free speech rights! (In the US, that one is baked into the constitution and many there hold it almost sacred).   Rahul Matthan wrote an interesting post on the matter, contrasting things with India. While the concern of what kids can access and how they are manipulated by web sites holds in India, there are two major d...

At the end of World War II came the “ long divorce ” of physics and maths. Physicists only worked with well-established maths; and mathematicians had no interest in physics. Neither side looked to advances in the other field for new ideas or seeds that might be relevant to their own fields. Why had this happened?   Part of the reason was that mathematicians feared that their field was becoming a “ragtag of unconnected ideas and results”. Kurt Godel’s theorems had struck a dagger at the very heart of maths – maths seemed to be in tatters. Best for mathematicians to decide how their field could proceed, they felt. Another reason was that physicists found they were able to make progress with existing maths. And lastly, applied physics was in vogue, esp. solid state physics. The engineering mindset – approximations were acceptable as long as they worked – was becoming the norm. This, of course, made theoreticians in both physics and maths wary, uncomfortable and even contemptuous o...

There are a lot of unsung heroes. That’s life. But it’s always good to see the odd, sincere acknowledgment of such folks. Shruti Rajagopalan does just that in case of Dr C Rangarajan, the RBI deputy director in 1991 and then the RBI director from 1992-97; along with the bureaucrats and technocrats behind the scenes.   Typically, a country on the verge of bankruptcy (like India in 1991) ends up with a “tin pot currency”. Desperate countries, in such circumstances, take IMF loans. Those loans come with conditions to restructure the economy. The country can’t or won’t restructure (internal pressures, political compulsions, ideological aversion), and so the cycle repeats itself.   India itself went through such cycles in its past. Why didn’t history repeat itself in/after 1991? Because, this time, says Rangarajan, the desire to reform the economy came from within. It was not just something, unlike the last few times, when it was being imposed from outside . As Rangarajan ...

The next part of the physics-maths story starts with quantum mechanics. When Heisenberg tried to explain things, he ran into mathematical array with strange properties. To him, they were strange. Mathematicians, however, had known it for long by the name of array matrices .   Dirac entered the quantum mechanical story late. He was more mathematician than physicist. When he investigated Heisenberg’s and Schrodinger’s equations, he “bent the rule of mathematics”. He made extensive use of a “mathematical function that made purists blanch”. Dirac didn’t care. If the physics worked (as quantum mechanics did), then any mathematical implication of it, however weird it may seem, must be true, argued Dirac. Dirac was reversing the directionality – so far, maths had helped physics; but now Dirac was saying physics could lead to new maths too. Oh, that function that made purists blanch? Decades later, other mathematicians would prove the function was correct.   Dirac wasn’t do...

There are so many who rave about AI, and its many forms like ChatGPT. Yes, the output of many of these AI’s is very impressive. And yes, they hallucinate too (cook up facts). All that’s well known.   What’s less well known is that many AI’s make mistakes with these two simple questions. The first one: Which is bigger? 9.2 or 9.11? The other one is just as simple: How many r’s does the word “strawberry” have?   Believe it or not, a lot of AI’s get those two questions wrong! What is going on? As you know, the AI’s can (on many topics) explain their reasoning. So they were asked to explain how they come to the wrong answers.   On the 9.2 v/s 9.11 question, the AI’s say there are multiple interpretational patterns to evaluate the question. The maths way is just one of them . The maths way leads to the obvious answer (9.2 is the same as 9.20; and so 9.20 or 9.2 is bigger). But there are other ways to look at the question. One such way is to read them as “2” and “...

I was thinking of the entire sequence of events that was set off when Hamas invaded and kidnapped those 100+ Israelis in October, ’23. Since then, in response, Israel has practically wiped out Hamas, bombed Gaza to the ground, attacked Lebanon, weakened Hezbollah enormously, and most recently, attacked Iran’s military leaders and its nuclear sites. A righteous war taken too far? ~~   All this reminded me of a point the standup comedian, Trevor Noah, makes in  his autobiography, Born a Crime . The Holocaust was a terrible and evil act, no doubt. But there have been plenty of other terrible and evil acts through history, many of which are not even disputed. Why is it that the Holocaust gets so much disproportional attention?   A key point, he says, is that the Nazis maintained meticulous records of the numbers and methods they used to exterminate Jews. When the perpetrator maintains records, well, the data cannot be disputed. No such luck for the Africans of Congo...

Max Planck is known as the founder of quantum theory. He came up with the idea of the quantum as “an act of desperation”, to explain weird experimental observations that could not be explained by theory. He found he could explain the observations “only by butchering the mathematics of the underlying theory”, by assuming the existence of “quanta”. But to him, quanta were just mathematical constructs, not real-world constituents.   Albert Einstein , in trying to explain the photoelectric effect, concluded that the energy of light (and all electromagnetic waves) was quantized. Quantization was real, argued Einstein, not just a mathematical convenience.   Many had noted that Maxwell’s laws were “symmetrical” in certain mathematical ways. Einstein went further than others. Not just Maxwell’s laws, he said, (mathematical) symmetry applies to all universal laws of nature . Conversely, he said, if a universal law isn’t symmetrical, it’s wrong. So far, all experiments show th...

You can’t do physics without maths. It’s been that way since Newton. But has it gone too far, many have asked, to a point where physicists fall in love with “beautiful” mathematical theories and stop caring if it aligns with the real world? Phrases like “fairy tale physics”, “not even wrong”, and “lost in math” capture that sentiment.   Farmelo Graham’s book, The Universe Speaks in Numbers , traces the history of the relation between physics and maths. The story starts with Newton ’s theory of gravity – the equations matched observations, but, complained the critics (even back then), it didn’t describe the physical mechanism behind gravity. This was also a case of Continental envy – the British worshipped Newton, while the Continent felt he was a mathematician, not a physicist.   A generation later, the roles reversed. Frenchmen like Laplace advocated and advanced physics via maths, while the British dismissed such an approach as “flowery regions of algebra”. Not jus...