Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There’s this blogger who goes by the moniker Southern Punk. Recently, he (she?) wrote a thought-provoking post titled “Why does Rome keep showing up?” . As American power (hard and soft) seems to be on the decline, more and more parallels to the slow decline of Rome are common.   He then brings up that famous Roman phrase, “Bread and circuses”. “Most people think it means entertainment. It doesn't. Not exactly. The bread kept people fed. The circus kept people occupied. The point wasn't the games themselves. The point was attention .”   Attention. Nowadays, the US government “seems to communicate through spectacle” only . “I don't remember a time when everything felt this performative… Sometimes it feels like we're living inside a never-ending competition for screen time.” He contrasts that with how things used to be. Once upon a time. “I miss the idea that government was supposed to be boring. Boring meant people were working. Boring meant budgets were...

How is China positioning itself to become the new reserve/international currency? China, writes Way Yuhl, has learned from and copied America.   Remember the New Silk Road project (aka Belt and Road), whereby China “financed roads, railways, ports, power plants, and telecommunications networks” across Asia, Africa and Latin America? Well, that’s not entirely about profits from interest on the loans. It is also how China has built financial leverage with much of the developing world. If their infrastructure projects all rely on China, well, they are likely to align/agree with China on economic and financial matters. On a side note, Yuhl mentions the Sri Lanka port that was handed over to China for 99 years when Sri Lanka couldn’t repay. While India’s concern was Chinese presence so close to our borders/waters, the West cited it as an example of Chinese predatory lending ( zamindar style). Guess what? “America used the same mechanism after WWI, converting Britain’s debt depe...

While reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, I was amused by the discussion the US and Britain had as the tide of war started to turn in favour of the Allies. The Americans offered their bombers to assist the British air raids on Germany. One section of the US air force aspired for precision bombing – bombing precise targets that would yield the maximum benefits, rather than the prevalent indiscriminate reduce-everything-t0-rubble strategy. That section of the US air force was called the Bomber Mafia , the title of the book.   Illogical #1 : While this may sound great, both operationally and from a moral standpoint, the tech to do precision bombing did not exist! Equally relevant was that the if you intended to even try precision bombing, you needed to be able to see the target. Which meant you had to fly during the day (because radar tech was nothing like what it is today). That meant the enemy could see you and shoot at you that much more easily. All of this is why the British were...

How does an international currency get displaced? Does the contender need to do pre-work to take over when the transition point arrives? Way Yuhl looks at how the US dollar took over from the British pound as the international currency. As the colonial superpower, Britain ruled. The pound was the international reserve currency, and British banks handled most global commerce. “Deals that had nothing to do with Britain ran through British institutions.”   The popular belief is that the US dollar replaced the pound due to the second World War, the complete destruction of Europe and Britain, and the beginning of the end of the British empire. True, but that was just the tipping point. In the decades leading to that point, America had been preparing…   From the early 1900’s onwards, America progressively overtook Britain as the world’s largest industrial economy. It produced more steel than Britain and Germany combined. But that alone was never going to be enough to beco...

My 14 yo daughter is studying acids and bases in chemistry this year. Which is why I got a refresher that acids release hydrogen ions (H + ) when dissolved in water; and bases either accept those hydrogen ions (H + ) or release hydroxide ions (OH - ) when dissolved in water. Very elementary part of chemistry. ~~   Linus Pauling. In 1952, he hadn’t yet won a Nobel but was universally acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest chemists. At the time, the structure of the to-be-famous DNA molecule was unknown. Many teams were trying to figure it, including Watson and Crick. As also was Pauling – DNA was a molecule, so who better than a chemist to attack the problem? By the end of 1952, Pauling thought he had figured it, and communicated as much to his son, Peter, who was at Cambridge, same as Watson and Crick.   DNA’s structure was a rivalry – the British didn’t want to lose to the Americans. Peter mentions what his British colleagues were saying: “You know how childr...

As a kid, I struggled a lot with the assignment of gender to non-living things in Hindi. Neither of the other languages I knew (Tamil and English) have that concept, and it always felt weird why किताब (book) should have any gender. Even worse, there didn’t seem to be any logic to the assignment of gender.   English is an outlier in not assigning genders, says Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass . Most European languages (French, German) assign genders. On the other hand, several languages don’t even have words for ‘he’ and ‘she’! Like Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Vietnamese. Worst of all (confirming my childhood grouse on Hindi), most languages that assign genders to non-living objects don’t follow any pattern.   If a language loses gender words (he/she/it), well, it depends on which word(s) was lost. Spanish, French and Italian lost the “it” word (for non-living things) and so everything had to be male or female. Losing a gender word added to ...