Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As a kid, I played plenty of board games. Snakes and ladders, ludo, Chinese checkers, chess, Scotland Yard and Monopoly . In the age of the Internet, of course, there are sites to rank your favorite board games. Like BoardGameGeek . Oliver Roeder wrote an article after checking out the site. The best game? It’s called Twilight Struggle . I’d never heard of it! Then again, I’ve not played board games for a long, long time. Note that despite the name the site includes card games and pencil-and-paper games like Tic-Tac-Toe (also called Noughts and Crosses). Which, by the way, is the lowest ranked game on the site. At 10,505 th place (I’m betting you didn’t know that there are that many games to rank! Me neither). It’s easy to understand why Tic-Tac-Toe is bottom of the heap: “It’s a solved game — if both players are above the age of roughly 5, the game ends in a draw.” And yet everyone of us has played Tic-Tac-Toe. Why? Here’s Roeder’s answer: “Tic-tac-toe represents a ...

Reporters Sans Frontiers just came up with their rankings of how much journalistic freedom is allowed in different countries around the world. As with any such system that tries to rank 180 odd countries around the world, a colour coded pictorial representation is what one cares about: One thing I noticed was that the US and much of western Europe (apart from Germany) are graded as “Satisfactory”, not “Good”. Wonder if that downgrade has something to do with the inevitable price of countries facing terrorism? The other thing to note is that India is rated as having “Noticeable problems”. But put that in context of what the rest of Asia looks like: either “Difficult” or “Very serious”, and we don’t look too bad. The road ahead though looks terrible. India’s role model, as per our government, is China. And no, not in terms of economic growth (which we just can’t seem to achieve) or in making Mumbai into a Shanghai. Rather, China is our government’s role model in censorship (remember ...