Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Steven Johnson’s book, Enemy of all Mankind , is about a British pirate who set off a world-changing set of events when he attacked and looted a ship that belonged to the Mughal emperor, Aurungzeb.   I learnt several new things about the Mughals, Aurungzeb and that age. First: “When a Mughal died, his power did not pass directly to the eldest son. Each male descendant was considered to have a legitimate claim to the throne.” Inevitably then: “The death of a Mughal was often immediately followed by an outbreak of royal fratricide, as the surviving sons battled one another…”   Also, from the time of Akbar onwards: “Sisters of the Grand Mughal (i.e., the emperor) were not allowed to marry for fear of producing offspring that might challenge the already fraught line of royal succession.”   Vicious, murderous moves. Pre-emptive moves. It was all par for the course when it came to succession – the stakes were that high, after all.   We hear a lot of...

In 1980, a philosopher named John Searle came up with a famous thought experiment called the Chinese Room experiment. It goes like this: “Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room. ”   The narrow conclusion was that a digital computer could only appear to understand language, but it could never truly understand it. The broader conclusion was that the thought experiment disproved the idea that the mind was just a computing/analytical machine. Its implications thus fell into semantics, language, mind, consciousness, computer science and cognitive science.   Does Google’s Pathways Langu...

Andrey Mir wrote this interesting article on how and why American media has become so polarized. He starts from the very beginning. Once upon a time: “Since the revenue from copy sales was not sufficient to maintain news production, news outlets needed to attract advertising.” The dependence on ads for revenue had a side-effect – ads only made sense only when aimed at those who had money to buy! And so, the media’s market became the “buying audience—the affluent middle class”. It also led to another trend (most of the time, anyway): “If the audience was supposed to be affluent, mature, and capable, so, too, were journalists expected to avoid judgment when reporting.” The audience could be trusted to draw its own conclusions. And this lack of judgment by the media had an interesting side-effect: “All of this cooled the political activity of the public.”   And then the Internet came along. And suddenly the classified ads moved online (eBay, Craigslist) – the media outlets had lost a...

Reading the Hourly History biography of the German Field Marshal nicknamed the Desert Fox, aka Erwin Rommel, reminded me how complicated the time he lived in was, how messy wars are, and how complicated real life is.   Like many Germans, Rommel had felt betrayed by the German government that had surrendered in World War I. As Germany imploded under the weight of the harsh terms of the peace treaty, the government looked to its army brass to train folks “not as wartime soldiers but as a quickly assembled force of riot police”: “Instead of fighting glorious battles against foreign aggressors, Rommel now had to fight his own people.” Unhappy at the prospect of Germans shedding German blood, Rommel would often lean towards “negotiation than force” when dealing with internal mayhem.   In an increasingly dysfunctional republic, made worse by the Great Depression and runaway inflation, the possibility of German communists taking control grew larger. Rommel was horrified ...

In the Victorian era, the complexity of the eye was often cited as proof of “intelligent design”, that God had created the world (and living things). Bill Bryson, in his romp through the human body, aptly titled The Body: A Guide for Occupants , points out that: “It was an odd choice because the eye is really rather the reverse.”   First, it is “built back to front”: “The rods and cones that detect light are at the rear, but the blood vessels that keep it oxygenated are in front of them.” Even worse: “There are vessels and nerve fibres and other incidental detritus all over, and your eye has to see through all this.” And: “All the nerve fibres leave the eye via a single channel at the back, resulting in a blind spot… in our field of vision.”   If you’re wondering why we don’t see a “gap” in our field of view (corresponding to the blind spot), it’s because “your brain continually fills the void for you”. And since the blind spot is not exactly tiny, it leads...

The visit to Taiwan by the American Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has resulted in an (I loved this phrase from the Financial Express ) “overdrive of fire and brimstone” from China. That China considers Taiwan a breakaway province is well known. That the US considers Taiwan a quasi-independent entity that should not be forcibly occupied by China is equally well known. What then was the purpose of Pelosi’s visit?   That’s a question for which I’ve not heard any clear answer. When China protested and ranted as Pelosi’s visit approached, did the US find itself in a position where to back down from the visit would mean a loss of face, a signal to China of change in the power equation? Was the US forced to go through with the visit then?   But once Pelosi landed and left, the Chinese government found itself in a problem – it left them red-faced that she’d ignored their protests. Worse, so did a lot of Chinese citizens, who poured scorn on their country’s leadership for...

Long, long ago, when I was still at school, teachers didn’t just frown upon kids in the same school being boy/girlfriends, they actively tried to shoot it down. The intention was understandable – given how competitive the environment is, it’s best you focus on academics for now, and not get distracted by other things. There’s always time for all that after 12 th …   In today’s world though, one never knows what will go viral on WhatsApp/ Twitter/ Facebook if teachers did something like that. Freedom of choice. It’s his/her life. Stick to your job, i.e., teaching. Stop being the moral police…   I realized that when my 11 yo daughter mentioned that a boy in her class dropped a folded piece of paper accidentally. The teacher picked it up, opened it, found it was a love letter to a girl in the class, and read it aloud (I guess the teacher was not one of those who believed in asking the dreaded, rhetorical question – “Do you have something you’d like to share with the class...