Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Police and public safety. That is another topic Karthik Muralidharan covers in Accelerating India’s Development .  Unfortunately, he says, Indian policing is built on the same structure as the British colonial police system, so it is designed to rule over people, not to serve them.   To add to that, the fraction of the budget spent on the police is tiny, which in turn translates into staff shortages. Even that low ratio of police to population is an inflated one because it includes reserved police forces. “The combination of overwork, unpredictable hours, frequent time away from family, and poor working conditions leads to severe mental health challenges among the police.”   Many committees have pointed out the need for training the police in soft skills like how to interact with the public. The budget for training, unfortunately, is ridiculously low, just ₹8,000 per employee during their entire career . This weakness in training impacts everything else too, fr...

Search on Instagram for “sky mirror photos” and you will see beautiful pics of people in colorful clothes and their perfect reflections on a thin film of water. Malaysia has one of the few places in the world where those pics are possible in Kuala Selangor, about an hour’s drive from KL. We left a little before 6 a.m.   The cab took us to the place from where we had to take a speed boat. Another hour on that going into the open sea and I could see no land (or island) anywhere. How much further, I wondered. And then suddenly, in the middle of the sea, we could see a lot of people standing… on water! No land anywhere, in the middle of the sea: how were these people standing in ankle deep water?   When we got near them, our boat stopped and we were told to walk in too! Turns out there is a land mass there which starts to show up with the tides. It was a surreal experience, standing in ankle deep water, the sea on all sides, no land anywhere (not even where we stood, at le...

Farsi , the language of Iran (#15, 110 million speakers) is a very old language and Persia was a mighty ancient empire, says Gaston Dorren in Babel . You’d think Farsi must have expanded its coverage and influence on the back of the mighty Persian empire. But no, it didn’t. Why not? Because Farsi was not the language of the court. It was the language of the masses…   With the rise of Islam, the Arabs conquered Persia. Farsi’s script changed to the Arabic one, and a lot of Arabic words became part of the Farsi language. Yet Persian culture thrived since the “Persians had thousands of years of urban life and empire-building under their belt” whereas the Arabs were, er, just conquering tribals. And so: “Arabic remained the language of religion, but Persian (Farsi) became the language of fine culture throughout the Middle East.” When Islamic rulers, both Sunni and Shia, conquered more and more lands, the language of culture and the ruling class was Farsi. Which is why the infl...

N ext we went back to Kuala Lumpur (or KL, as it is called in Malaysia). The airport, like Bangalore, is way outside the city. The roads were excellent but we experienced jams as we got closer to the city center. While the traffic crawls close to the city center and the tourist/ mall/ office areas, everyone follows lane discipline and you never hear cars honking.   The first day in KL, we had the Petronas Towers visit booked. Since we didn’t know the walking route from the hotel and didn’t know how bad KL jams are, we took a cab. Bad idea. Anyways, we got to the Towers on time. The towers are right next to a very popular mall, so we made more trips to the mall on other days. Those times, we walked to avoid the jam - it took a predictable 15 minutes.   The view from the Petronas Towers was a bit disappointing. Why? While the Towers are very tall, KL is full of high-rise buildings, many right next to the Towers. So wherever you look, your view is obstructed by the other ...

With Chinese/Mandarin (#2, 1.3 billion speakers), Gaston Dorren’s Babel focuses on the script. There are a lot of misconceptions about the script, and they never go away because they contain a kernel of truth. Let’s learn more.   Chinese is written top to bottom; its columns then ordered left to right . Long, long ago, both statements were true. But for a long time now, it has been written left to right on horizontal lines.   Chinese characters are pictures or ideograms. A very small fraction (2%), yes. But the majority (98%) are not.   Chinese characters are over 3,500 years old. Yes, writing in China is that old. But the characters have changed a lot over that period, so much so that most modern Chinese readers cannot read the ancient texts.   Chinese has over 50,000 characters. As per some official dictionaries, yes. But in practice, many of those are very niche used only in some places or professions. Only a quarter of that is relevant to dai...

One of the reasons for picking Malaysia for our year end vacation was that it offered visa on arrival. And the scheme was expiring by the end of the year (2024). A lot (and I mean a lot) of Indians were thinking the same(!) and so clearing Malaysian immigration took a long time as they had to check everyone’s documents (bank statements, return tickets etc), not an already issued visa.   We got a taste of how much Malaysia values tourism upon landing in Kuala Lumpur (or KL as the locals call it). Upon disembarking from the flight, they give every passenger a welcome kit, which thoughtfully included a power adaptor and a USB charging cable (for the phone). Accompanied by a cheerful namaste .   From KL, we took a flight to an archipelago of 99 islands called Langkawi. We went go to the Langkawi Wildlife Park. You can literally feed the birds off your hand. There’s even a python that you can drape around your shoulders for a great photo op, though we were too scared. For ...