Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Vandana Vasudevan organizes her book, OTP Please with one emotion per chapter. The first one is, unsurprisingly, pleasure.   Gen Z and Millennials are more willing to experiment with their food, try new things. Continental, North Indian, South Indian, Mughlai, Chinese – those have been there for ages. Add Italian, Korean, Thai, Japanese, Afghan, Lebanese, Bengali, Kashmiri, Rajasthani, North Eastern, Goan, Punjabi… Because hey, YOLO – You Only Live Once. “Sushi was never expected to work in India… (raw fish, after all)… Our chefs have… created sushi rolls which have cooked fish and masala!” When the author asked for masala tea in Sri Lanka, she was asked to choose between fresh, powdered and condensed milk! Variety, spice, life.   Not all combos work. Over time, you figure it out: “Pizzas may not be hot, naans wilt, and chaats turn soggy. However, through practice, one learns what works from where.”   This willingness to order in and try new food has resulted in the rise...

Gig workers. Vandana Vasudevan explains the original meaning of the term in her awesome book on the topic, OTP Please . It was coined for jazz musicians in the US, who carried their instruments with them and performed wherever anyone was willing to pay them. Ad hoc work, ad hoc payment, not employed. Today it refers to the delivery boys of Amazon to Zepto, the cab and auto drivers of Uber and Namma Yatri , the handymen (and women) of Urban Clap.   Her book is about gig work only in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), so it is very relatable and yet surprising in the details. Bhutan is the only miss; though by the time she was wrapping up her book, even they had food delivery apps!   In the digital world, everything is available via the smartphone. “We are wonderstruck, as Yashodha might have been when she asked her toddler to open his mouth and saw the entire brahmaand (universe) inside it.” Never before in history has so much been dem...

There are two broad kinds of problems in science, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Song of the Cell . He calls the first category the “eye in the sandstorm” problem. That’s the kind of field where there is immense confusion (the sandstorm) and no pattern or map on how to navigate exists. “Quantum theory serves as a good example…. A shifted paradigm about this atomic/ subatomic world was required to get out of the sandstorm.”   The second category is the inverse of the above, what he calls the “sand in the eye” problem. “Everything makes perfect sense, except one ugly fact that just won’t fit the beautiful theory. It irritates the scientist like a sand grain lodged in the eye – why, why, she asks herself, won’t this one irritating contradictory fact go away?” He uses that as the runway to explain such a problem from the world of neurons, but that requires you to read the book to understand things. So I will cite an easily understandable example from the world of physics – when Me...

Pranay Kotasthane’s starts off with a deliberately provocative statement after the forced resignation of the Union Education Minister recently. “Let me propose an idea that sounds radical but isn’t: India does not need a Union Education Ministry.”   He elaborates why. How did the constitution originally envision education? “General education was a State List subject, meaning that states had exclusive legislative power over schools and colleges.” But yes, the center had control over central universities (AMU, BHU), certain technical institutions it considered as being of national importance and a few other areas. All central ministry ideas on school education were advisory, and states could reject or accept them as they wished.   Like so many things, all that changed during the Emergency. The 42 nd amendment added “education, including technical education, medical education and universities” to the Concurrent (center) List. And with that: “The Union gained le...

How fast can a camera take photos? Vaclav Slim talks about just that topic in Numbers Don’t Lie . In the early 1870’s, Leland Stanford challenged his employee, Easweard Muybridge, to develop a camera that could settle an old debate: Are all four legs of a horse in the air when it runs? To answer the question, Muybridge came up with a camera with a shutter speed of 1/1,000 of a second in 1878. The question could finally be answered, with (photographic) proof: Yes, all four hooves of a horse are indeed airborne at the same time.   Soon, the shutter speed increased to 1/10,000 of a second. By 1940, it hit the millionth of a second mark.   In 1999, Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a rapid laser technique that could capture the transition states of chemical reactions on a scale of femtoseconds (a millionth of a billionth of a second). Today, we can detect events separated by attoseconds (a billionth of a billionth of a second). It allows us to “s...

In The Song of the Cell , Siddhartha Mukherjee narrates an amusing incident from his younger days. He was still a very junior person in the medical chain, and his mentor was an Italian postdoc, Enzo Cerundolo, a garrulous man who nonetheless barely spoke to Mukherjee: “He rushed around the lab, navigating his way past me as if I were some irritating piece of equipment that someone had off-loaded in the wrong place.”   One aspect of the project the lab was working on at the time involved repeatedly freezing, then thawing a sample. The sequencing mattered – two thaws in a row, or two freezes in a row would kill whatever was in the sample. Unfortunately for Enzo, the assistant in charge of it (also an Italian) had gone on vacation. Nobody knew if the next step was to freeze or to thaw.   Mukherjee asked to see the tube. On its bottom, in barely visible ink, he saw the letters C, S, C, S, C, S. He asked Enzo what the Italian word for “freeze” was. Congelare . And the Ita...