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China's Manufacturing Story #2 - Non-fatal Errors

The Zerodha article points out that slowly but steadily, Chinese manufacturing moved up the value chain. Patience and strategy matter. Uniquely, the Chinese government identified some sectors as critical (e.g. telecom) and poured money and helped arm-twist Western companies into sharing technological knowhow with Chinese partners. To help domestic companies grow in those sectors, when they were new and inferior initially, China would prevent Western (superior) tech from being sold, thereby creating a “protected home market to develop in”. “This model played out in multiple sectors — solar panels, electric vehicles, high-speed rail equipment. The value chain expanded.” Of course, this can be risky –local companies may stay at low quality only with no fear of competition from superior products. Remember the License Raj? ~~   China adopted a spray-and-pray approach. “They just threw money at everything and hoped something worked… even if the waste along the way was colossal… China go...
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China's Manufacturing Story #1 - Lessons for India

This Zerodha article analyzed how China became the manufacturing hub of the world. And whether India could replicate those steps. When Mao died, Deng Xiaoping took over. A major decision at this point was to learn from Singapore “a once backwater little fishing island had begun to cement its place in world conversations”. It was a good place to start because Singapore had started poor with a lot of Chinese origin citizens with little or no qualifications, a situation similar to China in ’79. ~~   A major outcome of the Singapore visit was the creation of the SEZ (Special Economic Zone): “These special enclaves didn’t have the same rules as the rest of China. Different rules applied — freer movement of capital, flexible labour laws, easy land acquisition, consistent, uninterrupted electricity. And quick customs clearances.” (India followed the same SEZ technique for the IT sector).   Crucially, one of the most famous SEZ’s was created in (now famous) Shenzhen bec...
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Ethanol Fuel Debate

The ethanol-as-fuel topic is in the news. Thankfully, it seems to be without too many politicians (for now, at least). And so the points being made by both sides make sense; they are not the usual mudslinging based on one’s political affiliations. I read two such well-written articles on the topic, one by Nithin Sasikumar and the other by Ajit Ranade in Deccan Herald . ~~   The drive to ethanol didn’t start recently; it has been going on steadily since 2013-14. The E20 target (The number ‘20’ here means 20% ethanol) has in fact been reached 5 years ahead of plan – imagine that, for government execution cutting across parties and spread over a decade! (India reached E10 in 2022; its target is 100% eventually). ~~   What are the reasons for the ethanol policy? The first one is that India imports a huge amount of oil; and that bill is only going to keep increasing. Saving money and forex was the primary driver. As the ratio of ethanol increases, the savings on that ...
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Detecting the Enemy Within

A virus, so to speak, “goes native”, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Song of the Cell , i.e., it infiltrates the cell and hijacks the cell’s protein making apparatus to manufacture viral proteins.   This raises an intriguing question – since antibodies “cannot enter cells” (the cell membrane prevents them from entering), how then do they identify which cells have been infected?   If the antibody couldn’t “peek” inside the cell, was the viral protein coming out of the cell? Nope, that wasn’t the case either. The mystery only deepened – how then were the antibodies identifying which cell was infected?   The answer was found only in the 1980’s. Any cell, as we know, produces energy by processing the food we eat. And like every process in the universe, this produces waste by-products. “The cell’s meat grinder – the proteasome - … then chews them (the waste, including the viral protein) into smaller pieces.” The waste of course has to be ejected from the cell. And, as we ju...
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Why Write

Why should one write, asks (and answers) Shane Parrish. No, writing is “not just a vehicle to share ideas with others”. Rather: “Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.”   Paul Graham wrote the same thing: “A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”   In addition, writes Parrish: “Writing requires the compression of an idea. When done poorly, compression removes insights. When done well, compression keeps the insights and removes the rest. Compression requires both thinking and understanding.” I guess that’s what summary writing at school was trying to teach!   Another purpose of writing is to understand things for yourself – this is often called the Feynman learning technique , after the p...
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How Penicillin Works

Penicillin . The most famous antibiotic of all time. In The Song of the Cell , Siddhartha Mukherjee asks and answers two questions about penicillin that had never even occurred to me. How does penicillin differentiate microbial cells from human cells? How did it work so well against such a wide range of microbes? (Before our overuse of antibiotics undid its effectiveness)   A slight digression first. In my 11 yo daughter’s Biology book, there is a chapter on cells. It mentions bacteria as examples of unicellular plants. Plants, that’s right, bacteria are plants!   Though Mukherjee doesn’t mention it, that weird fact (bacteria are plants) is the starting point of the answer to both questions. A plant cell has a cell wall. Bacteria being plants have cell walls. To create those cell walls, they have a particular enzyme. Humans cells, being animal cells, don’t have cell walls – hence, human cells don’t need or have that enzyme.   Penicillin “kills” those enzymes that create...
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Valleys of Silence

In The Song of the Cell , Siddhartha Mukherjee writes : “In the history of biology, there are valleys of silence that follow the peaks of monumental discoveries.” Like when Benjamin Marten reasoned that TB was caused by microscopic organisms in 1720. It would take another century before Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur linked diseases to microbial cells. Or when Mendel discovered genes in 1865. It was followed by 40+ years of no mention of genes.   But the reality is different: “If you zoom into these valleys of history, they are far from silent or inactive. They represent extraordinarily fecund periods when scientists try to wrap their minds around the magnitude, generality, and explanatory power of a discovery.” More questions follow in this period. Does the new idea explain any other “previously inexplicable observations”? Are there any further levels of organization beyond what was proposed?   Quite often, writes Mukherjee, one needs new instruments and model...
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