Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In Through the Language Glass , Guy Deutscher looks at areas where languages differ. An area where culture dominates are the relationship words. Most Indian languages, for example, have different words for older/younger relatives and maternal/paternal side relatives. Not so with English. Why? Cultural differences.   Another area where there seems to be no pattern across languages is grammar. Word ordering is radically different across languages, the ordering of one can feel back-to-front in another.   A widespread belief is that the languages of “primitive” people must be as simple as their societies. Deutscher blames this misconception on the “sources”, i.e., “from Tintin to Westerns” where the natives speak in that rudimentary “me no come, Sahib” way. The problem of course is that the assessment is being made based on how they speak the language of the white man, a language with which natives have limited familiarity. Just check out how an English speaker talks in Ge...

As it lay ignored, Dubai had one special thing – its creek , writes Tomas Pueyo. Why did the creek matter? “A creek provides protection for ships from sea storms and pirates, so Dubai could theoretically be a port.” But with so many other ports around, why would anybody care for Dubai, which (remember) had nothing to trade or sell anyway? Well, Dubai’s rulers had progressively made sure the place was safe from pirates and robbers. The most important port under the Ottomans was Basra. But as Basra got taxed more and more, merchants and traders began to look for alternatives.   It was now (1901) that Dubai created what we would call an SEZ (Special Economic Zone) today. Easy land purchasing, no taxes, a safe haven, tolerance to all beliefs. Of course, this playbook could have been tried by other creeks in the region. Why then did Dubai capitalize the most? “A big reason was that it was weak. That weakness was an asset, not a liability: The port was not huge, the Sheikh was not power...

Dubai. The UAE. The posterchild of how a country can continue to be rich, even when the oil runs out. The story behind that is interesting, as I learnt as I read this (brief) history of Dubai by Tomas Pueyo. ( Note : Through this blog, Dubai means the entire emirate by the same name, not just the one city named Dubai).   The founder of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, feared this: “ My grandfather rode a camel; my father rode a camel. I ride a Mercedes. My son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson will ride a Land Rover. But his son will ride a camel.” Al Maktoum wanted to avoid that last line. And boy, has he succeeded: “Today, Dubai is not only a bustling city. It’s one of the most dynamic city-states on Earth.”   From ancient times, Dubai lay on/close to the trade routes (Mesopotamia to Persia and China; Mesopotamia to India and South East Asia). But that never helped! Dubai, after all, was just a desert, so nobody stopped there, nothing got traded...

When the West found oil in Persia/Iran, the Saudis started looking too and found it in 1938, writes Tomas Pueyo. They have the world’s largest onshore and offshore oil fields. Its oil is cheaper because it is nearer the surface, easy to access, and it spurts up easily. Oil today accounts for 80% of government income. That is scary and we will get to why that is the case.   The Saudis spend a bigger share of their income on the military than the US, Russia and Iran! Why spend so much? Partly the Shia and Iran threat, obviously. “Part of it is because the government has no legitimacy beyond that of the sword and religious radicalism, so it must make sure people are not scheming against it. This requires a big security apparatus.” And also, it creates many jobs in and related to the military, but again controllable by the government. And lastly, its location has too many choke points: the Suez Canal, the narrow strait from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, and the Straits of Hormuz. S...

At the end of Through the Language Glass , Guy Deutscher points out that colour, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. As is well known, the eye has rods and cones. Colour perception is because of the cones. In humans, we have 3 different types of cones which can detect 3 separate colours – red, blue and green (RGB). Only those three, nothing else. How then do we “see” so many other colours?   Well, if light happens to activate both red and green cones with equal intensity, it gets interpreted as yellow. Put differently, we are not capable of detecting if a light is “truly” yellow or just a combo of equal intensity red and green! So all those non-RGB colours we are able to see? It’s just a combo of those three colours we can detect (RGB) combined in different intensities (ratios).   In fact, colour TV’s use just this point. They (like our eye) only support 3 different colours (RGB). By varying the intensities of those three colours at each pixel on the screen, ...

Tomas Pueyo wrote a great post on Saudi Arabia, informative on so many fronts. “Saudi Arabia is the biggest country in the world with no rivers! It only has wadis, ephemeral river beds that only occasionally carry water after rain.” Sure, everyone knows about the sand and desert , but did you know: “ The sand is so sandy that there are dunes up to 250 m high!” It is also rocky and mountainous on one side. Did you know the mountains are so tall that it even snows there?   From the above pic, you’d also notice the country is next to two major sea routes – the Red Sea on the left (west) and the Persian Gulf on the top (north). The coastal areas have also been on the trade routes with the corresponding opportunities for enrichment. Which is why you find so many different countries along those coasts:   Based on all this, you’d expect only the coastal areas to be the well-known cities of Saudi Arabia. And yes, Mecca, Medina and Jeddah lie close to the coast. But not the capital, ...