Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Throughout history, propaganda and hate have existed. Is social media just a new vehicles for what’s always been there? Or is it different/worse, asks Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus .   Yes, he says, social media is different. Because what is seen/shown is determined by non-humans, i.e., algorithms. AI has only added fuel to that fire, but the problem was visible even before AI. Algorithms, for example, auto-play the next video in your feed. They decide what to show you based on what you’ve already liked and seen. They show more of content that provokes outrage and anger. Why? Not out of malice, but because they want to maximize the time you spend online (More time online = more ads = more money). “In a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose.” This is why Harari believes that more information doesn’t always lead to good outcomes. It was true up to a point – countries with free press were better than dictator-controlled news systems. But no more.   Over ...

Let us go in detail into a couple of princely states and their tales of “dethronement” (it’s the title of another book dedicated to the topic, I decided to use that term). Or as Sam Dalrymple puts it in Shattered Lands : “There is arguably no other revolution in world history that ended so many monarchies in so short a span of time.” ~~   Junagadh first. It had “neither the romance of Kashmir, nor the opulent wealth of Hyderabad”, yet being close to Gujarat, it carried an emotional connect to Gandhi, Patel and Jinnah (all Gujaratis, remember?). Its ruler was a Muslim; the majority of his subjects were Hindu. The Nawab, based on assurances from Jinnah, decided to join Pakistan.   But India was keen to prevent this for multiple reasons, including the presence of Somnath and Dwarka in it. Upon learning of the decision to join Pakistan, Home Minister Patel sent forces to surround Junagadh. Coal and petroleum couldn’t enter, the phone lines were all tapped. As its econ...

In Nexus , Yuval Noah Harari goes deeper into information networks involving humans. Early religions had a problem – how did one know whether the narrator/priest was indeed conveying the original instructions? What if he was changing things, accidentally or deliberately?   The invention of the book offered a solution. “After tens of thousands of years in which gods spoke to humans via shamans, priests, prophets, oracles and other human messengers, religious movements… began arguing that the gods spoke through this novel technology of the book.” In theory at least, all copies of the book could be identical.   Religions of the book (Semitic ones) though then ran into a new problem. “Who decides what to include in the holy book?” After all, the first copy didn’t come from heaven. But the faithful decided that a “once-and-for-all supreme effort” with the wisest and most trustworthy men could stitch the first book together. (It still led to debates on who would for...

Partition eventually produced India and Pakistan (East and West). But for a while, a 3 rd group existed in parallel – the princely states, writes Sam Dalrymple in Shattered Lands . The British even considered handing power separately to the provincial governments (they were honest in its name – Plan Balkan). How large a part of India were these princely states? This map is worth a thousand words (BROWN = India; GREEN = Pakistan; WHITE = “independent” princely states)   Nehru was apoplectic at the idea. So Mountbatten turned to the most competent civil servant in his staff, VP Menon, and gave him a single night to come up with an alternative proposal. Menon came up with the idea that each of the 565 princely states would have to pick a side; they couldn’t say “None of the above” (not just for independence. The kingdom of Dir, for example, considered joining Afghanistan !).   A senior political advisor to Mountbatten, Conrad Corfield didn’t agree – he wanted the princely states...

For humans to function as a group, records became critical, writes Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus . This makes sense – leaving things to memory led to disagreements. Over time though, the record didn’t just represent an aspect of reality (a loan, for example) – the record became the reality! “If somebody repaid the loan but failed to “kill the document”, the debt was still owed. Conversely, if someone didn’t repay the loan but the document “died” is some other way… the debt was no more.” This is exactly why during all revolutions, records are destroyed (That doesn’t work in a networked, digitized world though).   As societies advanced, the volume of records exploded. This created a new challenge: Retrieval. This need to organize information to make it easy to find led to the rise of the bureaucracy . “Bureaucracy too tends to sacrifice truth for order. By inventing a new order and imposing it on the world, bureaucracy distorted people’s understanding of the world in unique ...

For a man who would found the only country based on religion, Jinnah drank whiskey, ate pork, and was highly Anglicized! In fact, early on, he believed in a united India. He even married his Parsi girlfriend. What made such a man become the force behind the demand and eventual creation of Pakistan? Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands provides some answers and clues.   After his marriage, Jinnah found the Parsis would never accept him or forgive his wife. It would sow the seeds of Jinnah’s belief that (independent) India would never move past religion.   Gandhi bringing religion (spirituality?) into the freedom struggle annoyed Jinnah. Why? Because it induced fear that an independent India would mean Hindu rule. Lastly, as mentioned in an earlier blog, the creation of Burma on racial lines and the ethnic cleansing that followed there added to the fear about the fate of Muslims in a Hindu majority (independent) India.   In the Indian national elections of 1937, Jin...