Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Another aspect described in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please is isolation.   As everyone orders meals, members of the same house begin to order at different times. Gone is the catching up time as a family. On a related note, as one interviewee told the author: “Coffee shops are no longer places to socialize. People come to cafes to be alone with their laptops.” Quick commerce makes going to the grocery store redundant. And with fewer people coming to the shop, some of them close down, setting off a cycle.   Unlike those of us who work at offices, schools or colleges, gig workers don’t even get to interact (much) with co-workers since they are all on the move. Plus, attrition is high, so even the few one may know switch work frequently. Interactions with HR are through the app only.   Loneliness and lack of human contact aside, this also leads to the “atomization” of the workers. If they don’t know each other, how can they possibly group up to raise grievanc...

Cueta. It came into the news recently (July, ’26) when an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 people swam or crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave within a couple of days.   Tomas Pueyo dug into what that was all about.   First, you need to know where Cueta is. No, though part of Spain, it is not in Europe. Rather, it lies on the African (Morrocco) side of the Mediterranean.   Since Cueta is adjoining Morrocco, which is much poorer than Spain, people have been trying (for decades) to get into Cueta as an entry into Spain (and eventually Europe) for a better life. So much easier than having to cross the Mediterranean. Unsurprisingly, the Morocco - Cueta border is heavily fenced, has barb wires, and is monitored tightly by Spain. Not at all easy to cross.   But… it is possible to swim across the border! The pic explains the route.   See how easy that is? But also, nothing new. People have been trying this for ages. And getting deported back. Doesn’t work...

Once upon a time, people weren’t sure how inheritance worked. At that time, the Lamarckian inheritance was a legitimate candidate – it said that organisms could pass on acquired traits to their descendants. In this view, a giraffe whose neck got longer by stretching in its lifetime would pass on the longer neck characteristic to its babies. Once Mendel’s findings were re-discovered, it was generally accepted that inheritance didn’t work that way.   Not Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet biologist. He still believed in Lamarckian inheritance. He merged that idea with his political support for communism, declaring that subjecting crops to the harsh "power of collectivism" and environmental conditioning, they would magically adapt and transform!   Well, it was a crazy view and that could have been the end of the story. Except Stalin supported Lysenko. Unsurprisingly, Lysenko’s career bloomed. Since this was communist USSR, those scientists who didn’t agree with the view espoused b...

The next emotion in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please is anxiety.   Delivery boys have to drive through congested streets. Might they have an accident? Could a cop catch them? If deliveries are late, would the company penalize them? Street dogs can be a menace. Sometimes, they have been robbed on the way. Or college kids gang up, take the food and then refuse to pay (always a risk with Cash on Delivery).   In the subcontinent, the extreme heat is another problem. Being on the road in such conditions can be problematic, though to be fair, alternate jobs too expose them to the same elements.   Then there are the odd weird customers. In places like Greater Noida, with villages juxtaposed by urban life, rural folks try and trick. Like ordering food and then cancelling the order at the last minute. The restaurant won’t take the food back, and knowing this, the villagers will often offer (lesser) cash to the delivery boy to give them the food. Some folks taste the foo...

William Harvey famously discovered the circulatory system – the flow of blood from heart to the various body parts, and back. A lot of discoveries in science needed the relevant equipment to be invented first (think of Galileo and the telescope), but not in Harvey’s case, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Song of the Cell . “He used the simplest physiological experiments to understand the workings of the heart.” Let’s look at how Harvey went about it.   He punctured the arteries of animals when the blood had drained from them, “the veins were also eventually emptied of blood”. From this, he concluded that arteries and veins must be connected in a circuit.   When he pinched the aorta, the heart swelled up with blood. And when he pinched the main veins, the heart was drained of blood. This implied that arteries lead blood from the heart, and veins lead blood to the heart.   When Harvey examined the wall between the left and right side of the heart, he f...

Yes, admits Vandana Vasudevan in OTP Please , the gig economy has its ugly side of oppression too. And it’s a lot more complicated that you might imagine.   For starters, those ratings affect gig workers opaquely : “Every action is judged by people they can’t see, according to rules they don’t know.”   There is also a systemic bias against older workers. No, not due to their age. Rather, based on how long they’ve been with the company. Why? Shouldn’t longer term employees be valued more as they know the setup and expectations? Yes, but that gets countervailed by the fact that they become eligible for additional incentives as they stay longer. So the company’s algorithms reduce the amount of work assigned to them as they approach those milestones. As a result, their income reduces (since it was tied to number of orders fulfilled), and they end up leaving before they hit the milestone. Sneaky, right? “While capitalism hid exploitation behind a labour contract, digi...