Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Recently I read a book on Ambedkar’s role and influence on the preamble of the Constitution. Just the preamble, not the entire constitution! Boy, was it impressive – the sheer range of considerations he was aware and tried to balance is unbelievable, and the constraint that he could not copy from the West as-is leading to adjustments specific to India. But more on that book in later blogs.   If that sounds like gushing praise, well, that’s the theme of this blog. Pranay Kotasthane wrote of 3 levels at which discussions on Ambedkar are conducted. Level 0 is good old Hero Worship. “I call this the zeroth level because discussions at this level aren’t even about Ambedkar’s ideas. They are about raising him to demi-god status, statue included. It is indeed ironic that a person who warned India and Indians of the dangers of hero-worship has been put on pedestals across the country.”   So ironic indeed. Here is what Ambedkar wrote on the dangers of hero worship: “Ther...

Under imperialism, Christianity often came along with the white colonizers. Not in places which had their own strongly embedded religion (India, South East Asia etc) but in most of Africa, that was definitely the case.   In his autobiography, Born a Crime , Trevor Noah snarkily says: “It (Christianity) was forced on us (blacks). The white man was quite stern with the natives. “You need to pray to Jesus”, he said, “Jesus will save you”. To which the native replied, “Well, we do need to be saved – saved from you, but that’s beside the point. So let’s give this Jesus thing a shot.”   And adds another point in a different context: “If you’re native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense.” Reminds me of the contempt Islam and Christianity have for idol worship.   Santa Claus gets the...

In an earlier blog, we went over one of the benefits of India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) . In this one, we go over another benefit – engagement , as explained in Rahul Matthan’s The Third Way .   The most obvious reason why DPI has increased and improved citizens’ engagement is the cost reduction of everything digital as opposed to physical. People don’t need to create copies of documents; recipients don’t need to find storage space to keep it.   Even better, with a digitized system, identification no longer requires a trip; which saves both time and money. Workflows are easier to design and change. Digital trails help finding fraud or fault easier. Transactions are digitally signed and timestamped (sometimes geo-stamped, i.e., location coordinates included).   “Universally trusted digital rails” are now well and truly in place. The most used and well-known services of which is, yes, payments. UPI, a “blindingly simple system”, allows money transfer...

I was surprised to read Andrew Sullivan’s post on the decline in literacy in the West. No, not literally – everyone still goes to school and learns to read and write. It is the amount and quality of reading they read that has fallen, and the attendant consequences are becoming increasingly visible.   It started with the Internet. As bandwidth speeds increased, sites began to have more pictures and then more videos. “Visuals carry more visceral punch than sentences and paragraphs, and require less reason and effort.” Ominously: “The Internet, in other words, held the power to return us to the pre-literate culture from which a majority of humans had emerged only a few hundred years ago: images, symbols, memes.”   Today: “Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced re...

In earlier blogs, we saw the US and European policies on data. Coming to India, Rahul Matthan (in The Third Way ) points out it is one of those rare countries which has collected a huge amount of digital data before it became rich. This is entirely because of the combo of smartphone + cheap Internet plans. Even those of us who lived through this phase forget how quick it was – in 2014, just 15% of the population had a smartphone, by 2022 over 65% had one.   There is one element of the data equation on which India is unique, namely that its gathering was facilitated by deliberate government policies and protocols, not by private players. Yes, DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) , which includes everything from UPI to eKYC to DigiYatra to DigiLocker and more. It ensures “interoperable digital architectures” (contrast that with the silos of Google or Facebook in the West; Alibaba or WeChat in China). Does the Indian approach provide any benefits and opportunities? Yes, on 3 front...

The standup comedian Trevor Noah’s parents (white Swiss father, black African mother) loved each other, yet had to think long and hard before deciding to have a child. It was a criminal act under apartheid for a black and white to have relations, let alone a child. But they decided to have one anyway, with the understanding that they could never be a family (Criminal act, remember?), writes Noah in Born a Crime .   After he was born, the father found himself wanting to be near his son. But he couldn’t do so openly. So they’d all meet up secretly. As a toddler, when Trevor went to play in a park, his dad would follow at a distance, careful never to come too close to draw attention. It was a police state like situation, you never knew who might call the authorities. Inevitably, the kid (Trevor) would sometimes notice his dad in the distance and start shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” upon which his father would panic and run away…   Much later, Trevor would learn what happened t...