Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The next emotional theme in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please was on gratitude.   How many gig workers are there in India? It’s impossible to know the numbers, simply because people will enrol but for how long are they actually working? COVID-19 forced millions who lost their jobs to sign up as drivers and delivery boys. But it’s not all bad. No more lining up outside employment agencies. No discrimination based on caste or region or religion. No interviews or job applications. “You upload a driver’s license on to the app on your smartphone and you’re on.”   For others, gig work is actually halka kaam (light work) compared to other alternatives like backbreaking labour. Finding a rider doesn’t involve driving around hoping to find someone. Others appreciate the opportunity for stop-gap employment until they find something better.   PickMe in Sri Lanka even offered insurance coverage for drivers. During COVID-19, such instances weren’t all that uncommon. Com...

A while back, they found several kids were bringing alcohol to a particular school in Bangalore. A kid from that school joined my 15 yo daughter’s school this year. Like so many kids, this new kid started with a cocky attitude extolling all the virtues of his old school and mocking things in the new one. After a point, the teacher got irritated and snapped at him, “This isn’t your old school. If you bring alcohol here, you’ll get rusticated”.   When I narrated this to a colleague (with no kids) at work, he was shocked. “And to think”, he said, “We took pride in thinking that we were the worst batch ever!”. ~~   Inevitably, alcohol at one school puts pressure on other schools to check if they had this problem too. In parallel, the teachers tried to instil some fear by threatening to issue TC’s (Transfer Certificate) to the kids. It might have had some effect had they used the threat occasionally and also based on the severity of the offense. Instead, they used the thr...

The next chapter in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please is the yang to the yin of the previous blog . Pleasure was the emotion in that blog, so this one is about guilt.   If everyone is ordering in, what happened to maa ka khana ? When kids want to order in, the mother wonders whether her cooking is bland? Is the food somehow lacking in something? Sometimes, she’ll try to hard-sell the nutritional value of home cooked meals – so many grams of protein in paruppu usli or arhar dal . To no avail. The argument of price doesn’t make any dent, since one can find food delivery at all price points.   It is a fact that a “nutrition transition” is underway. The thalis of India, the equivalent Thakali of Nepal are being replaced. Low-fat, high-fibre foods are replaced by ultra-processed foods high in saturated fats, sodium and sugar. Weight gain, gastric trouble, bacterial infection, diabetes, high BP and heart disease lurk in the future thanks to this dietary change as well as the...

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...