Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The largest Austronesian language is Malay (#9, 275 million speakers), spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. Gaston Dorren’s Babel on Malay focuses on Indonesia because it is a segue into an interesting question. In countries with multiple pre-existing languages, which one dominates? Is there a pattern? (In case you were wondering, Indonesia, spread over a thousand islands, has over 700 languages. Yet, the adoption of Malay as the official language has never created problems.)     Group 1 are countries with one clear dominant language e.g. Saudi Arabia, the Koreas, Bangladesh. These are no-brainers in the choice of language. At the other end of the spectrum is Group 4 – a lot of languages, with one as the largest spoken one but nowhere near an absolute majority e.g. Philippines and many African countries. Here, any one language is unlikely to dominate since the others can unify in protest. They usually pick a former colonial language as the VIL (Very Imp...

Tim Harford gives a quick and dirty list of actions to tackle COVID-19: China and South Korea imposed severe curtailments, south east Asia and India imposed slightly milder versions, Germany focussed on massive testing and contact-tracing, Sweden focussed on herd immunity and the US? “The response has been so diverse across different states as to defy easy description.” Then there’s the issue I’ve mentioned many times: the West stubbornly refuses to learn from the East. Harford digs into why that is the case: “One problem they identified — which is both pathetic and all too human — is that it is simply more convenient to learn from countries with a shared language. There is plenty of information in the UK about what is going on in New Zealand, the US, and Anglo-fluent Sweden. Dispatches from South Korea or Vietnam seem to come from a different planet.” But having access to that info isn’t enough: “The people in the UK government with contacts in Hanoi and Seoul are not...

My 6 year old has no opinion about the countries my wife talks fondly about (Belgium and France) or the one I’ve been to in recent times (China). But for whatever reason, she wants to go live in the US! (Taking us along, of course). But she never tells us why. Neither of us have ever spoken to her about the US, so it must be her friends or classmates who have influenced her. At the other end of the spectrum of countries on which she has an opinion lies Pakistan. In this case though, we do know how she formed her opinion. On the anniversary of the Kargil War, her school had a session on thanking the army and told the kids about Kargil. So she got to know that: -          India defeated Pakistan at Kargil; -          Pakistan is the enemy with whom India has fought many times. No wonder then that she was glued to the movie, The Ghazi Attack , which is about an Indian submarine crew who sank the P...

Is the majority always wrong, simply because it is the majority? Conversely, is the minority always to be excused, simply because it is the minority? These questions are increasingly becoming the major fault line between the left and the right in more and more countries. Things have gone so far that Roger Scruton says that: “The great difference between left and right, in every matter that impacts on our survival, is that the left turns against us, whereas the right believes that, on the whole, we are not to blame for wanting to hold on to our way of life.” Remember the mass scale molestation of German women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve? Sadly, for many, it was unacceptable to call out the ethnicity of the perpetrators (Arab and North African). Turns out reports of a similar assault on women in Sweden during the We Are Sthlm music festival were suppressed because the assaulters were ‘so-called refugee youths primarily from Afghanistan’. In Sweden: “If you mention anything n...

In response to a recent blog on (even) Russia being better than Islam, my dad asked me why I disliked Russia. Was it because I associated it with communism? But wasn’t that incorrect, he continued: communism was what the former USSR was about; but surely not present day Russia? If that was all he’d asked, my answer would have been simple (and not worth a blog!): no, I don’t dislike present day Russia because of an error in associating it with communism. And that would have been that. But he also asked: if I dislike Russia because of its muscle flexing, then how is that any different from any other country? That’s when I realize a detailed answer is warranted. Ask yourself these questions: Is Russia a free country? How does it treat its own citizens? Does it allow freedom of speech and expression? Is dissent and criticism of the government tolerated? Is it democratic? Do common people have any say in who rules? Or to put it very simply, I ask myself this: would I like...