Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book, Corruptible , Brian Klass interviews former Thailand PM, Abhisit Vejjajiva. In early 2010, protestors numbering 1,20,000 gathered in the streets of Bangkok demanding his resignation. When the government sent in soldiers to clear the area, they (the soldiers, not the protestors) were met with bullets and grenades. The soldiers fired back, and 26 were killed, a thousand injured.   The heavily armed protestors started speaking of civil war. Sporadic gunfire in the streets started to become commonplace. Vejjajiva had helicopters drop pamphlets declaring some areas of the city as buffer zones between protestors and government troops. Anyone entering the buffer zone risked getting shot, said the leaflets. Eventually, troops were told to break through the barricades and go after the protestors. The protest was finally put down, at a cost of 87 killed.   Was Vejjajiva the stereotype ruler who tried to hold onto power at all costs? Maybe. But also listen to Vejjaji...

Brian Klass’ book, Corruptible , has many interesting and, at times, counter-intuitive points on the fact that people in power seem to be (become?) corrupt.   For one, he says people in power often have to make repeated decisions in scenarios where there are no good choices. But if all choices are bad, how does one make a decision, and not let the bad aspect of the decision not haunt one? “(One way is to) disregard compassion and focus on hard-nosed costs and benefits.” Here’s Klass point with all this. Does power attract people who have that mindset to begin with? Do kinder folks avoid power since they don’t have the stomach to pick from among a list of “unbearable moral choices”?   Two, he says, enforcement matters. The same set of people behave differently when the enforcement is strict v/s lax. Think of how the same Indian can behave when in Singapore v/s India.   Three, the system in which the person operates matters: “A decent person inheriting a b...

Why does the Center have so much power in India? Why doesn’t the country have a more federal (more power to the states) structure? Nilakantan RS goes into that question in South vs North . If you expect all blame to fall on the two most powerful PM’s of India – Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi – you will be disappointed. But if you want to understand a complex topic, read on.   The idea of more power to the Center comes from our colonial masters, the British. After all, they wanted to extract maximum benefit from the unit called India – they weren’t trying to administer each region best. Back then, when Bengal was given maximum powers as the Center, the states like Madras Presidency and Bombay Presidency protested. To little avail.   Ok, but why didn’t we change that at the time of independence? As independence approached, states did ask for greater power. Jinnah was one of its supporters – he was hedging his bets. If a separate country would not be created for the Musl...

After Sulla, it was Julius Caesar who seized power in Rome. I wrote on that a few years back here and here . Tom Holland’s Rubicon has an excellent account on what happened next. Remember, Caesar himself had never declared himself a king, just “dictator for life” (Now you know where Calvin got that phrase!). That may sound like wordplay, but Caesar didn’t want to provoke a backlash: “Caesar knew that the Romans would never tolerate a King Julius.”   Besides, his experiences in the East and Egypt had taught him something else: “The forms taken by greatness were relative, varying from nation to nation.” Kings, pharaohs, dictators – those were just forms of power: “What mattered was not the form but the reality of power.” Just to be sure, Caesar tested the Roman waters anyway: “(Caesar) ostentatiously (and publicly) refused (Mark) Antony’s offer of a crown.” Antony repeated the offer publicly again and Caesar turned it down again. Firmly. That’s what Shakespeare ta...

Fredrik de Boer wrote this anguished piece in the aftermath of the insurrection in the US to overturn an election that Trump lost. While he condemns the levels to which Trump and his supporters will go, his article was more about “my despair over the response from the left”. He wasn’t talking of the American left’s reaction to the rioting in particular, but what the left seems to have become.   The left, he says, seems to be only interested in identifying injustices: “I sometimes wonder if people understand that there is more to politics than saying “this is wrong.” But they show no interest in proposing solutions: “Proposing meaningful solutions is much more fraught. Solutions are hard. Solutions are messy. Solutions are inherently unsatisfying.”   The left demonizes all forms of power so much that they then have no option but to “constantly make appeals to the heavens because they believe, very deeply, that if you identify injustice often enough some cosmic ...

In his book, David and Goliath , Malcolm Gladwell makes this point: “When the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.” Most systems of power have understood the need to establish legitimacy as the basis for their rule. That’s why kings were considered the descendants of the Gods in many civilizations. But that led to the question as to who could confirm the legitimacy? Most kings gave that power to the priests, and that’s why priests became so powerful in those very civilizations. In the Game of Thrones series, legitimacy is why Cersei goes to the priests called the Sparrows: to get them to declare her son, Tommen, the “true king” when there were so many contenders for the throne. But the high priest, the High Sparrow, asks for his pound of flesh in return for any such declaration: “The realm is full of kings. For the Faith to exalt one above the rest we must be certain.” And so Cersei...

Some time back, one of my 6 year old daughter’s friends was being told by her parents that she shouldn’t lie. The girl turned around and asked: “Do you never lie?” Of course, we do. And kids figure that sooner or later. And then we get dragged deeper and deeper into the land of commands like “Do as I say, not as I do” and retorts like “Hypocrite” (or words to that effect). All that’s par for the course of parenting, of course… And then they graduate to the next level of this tussle. Like the time I got this monologue from my daughter recently: “So you lied to me back then on such-and-such topic. But remember, I am the Maharaja and you are the slave, so you cannot lie to me. But as the Maharaja, I can lie to you. As many times as I want.” Asymmetry: that’s a topic they get so very well! Another topic they love is the power of authority. Like when they are made class monitor, even if it’s by rotation and only for a week each. My daughter relished the power to boss aroun...

Some time back, the WWE wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media for publishing a sex tape video. He won $140 million in damages. And that was that. Until it came out (later) that Hogan had been financed in his lawsuit by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal. Because, a decade earlier, the same Gawker had outed Thiel as being gay. It was Thiel’s revenge, cried some. Gawker is disgusting and sleazy and meddling in people’s private lives: they deserved it, said others. Is this the beginning of a trend where the rich can destroy media companies they don’t like, worried others. Are we on a slippery slope to muzzling the media, asked others. Ben Thompson quoted the famous Spiderman line (“With great power comes great responsibility”) and went on to point out the complexity of the issue : “No matter how badly Thiel was personally hurt by Gawker, or how morally wrong their actions were, he is the one with far greater power, and the appropriate approach is not to leverage...

Private companies that become very large, influential, corrupt and “evil” are not all that uncommon. In the pre-Internet age, to become bigger beyond a point required government support (legally or illegally). Even in capitalistic nations. Just consider the coal scam and 2G scam to see the role of government in enabling private companies on their way to dominance. Or take the East India Company that even got military backing from the British government: it was so big that it accounted for “half of the world's trade” as per Wikipedia! But the Internet era companies, while equally big (and potentially evil), don't rely on government backing to become what they are, especially in capitalistic countries (did the government force you to join Facebook? To search using Google? To buy via Amazon? Conversely, did the government do anything to prevent others from competing with these companies?). And then there’s Apple. Apple had accumulated a cash hoard of $150 billion jus...

The transformation from a David to a Goliath brings with it a huge number of changes in how one is perceived. Corporations like Apple and Google find themselves now being looked like 800-pound gorillas (which they truly are), not the struggling startups that they once were. And that change in perception reduces the sympathy and simultaneously increases the criticism that they face. Israel is a country in a somewhat similar situation. Long gone is their underdog status: in fact, they are Top Dog in the Middle East today (actually, for several decades). The common underlying theme in both of the above cases is power. There are several superhero quotes that teach one a lot about power, how to deal with it and what it does to the one possessing it. Which is not at all surprising: after all, who has more power than a superhero? Spiderman’s uncle hit the nail on the head when he said, “With great power comes great responsibility”. Because once you have the power (like He-Man’s “I have t...