Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Parag Khanna wrote a long article on the changing world order, as America’s dominance reduces, and multiple players flex their muscles and try to grab pieces of the power pie. Are we then heading for a “return of great power rivalry”? Possibly, but unlike the unipolar era of America’s dominance, Khanna feels geopolitical power is heading to be distributed, not centralized. “The most accurate description of today’s world is high entropy, in which energy is dissipating rapidly and even chaotically through the global system.”   Entropy, he reminds us, is not chaos. And the tools of power are many – military, financial and technological. On the financial front, at the end of World War II, America accounted for half of global GDP. Today, China and EU have greatly reduced America’s share of global GDP, and India is slated to further reduce America’s share. On the military front, from a time when only America had nuclear weapons, today, at least 9 countries have it. “The structure o

Adrian Goldsworthy’s Pax Romana has an interesting description of the sequence of events that led to Christ’s crucification. As per Roman law, Christians could be executed if they refused to recant. While provincial governors enforced this law, they did not actively seek out and hunt Christians. Hunting them down cost money and effort, and to what end? They didn’t pose a threat to the empire, so why bother? Thus, prosecution of Christians was rare, and even then initiated only if influential locals called for it.   One time, Paul (later apostle) was accused of being a troublemaker. His crime? He had “cured” a slave girl who possessed by an evil spirit. The slave’s owner was furious because in her possessed state, she used to tell fortunes for money (that went to the slave owner, of course). A large crowd gathered, forcing the magistrate to act: “Without a hearing, Paul (was) stripped, beaten and imprisoned.”   Roman citizens were entitled to (slightly) better treatment – the

Continued from the Hourly History book on Che Guevara… At the UN, as the head of the Cuban delegation, an angry Che ripped into the US for interference throughout Latin America. In 1965, during a visit to Algiers, he tore into the USSR saying they were practically imperialists, looting third world countries for resources. Castro was furious. The two soon parted ways.   Che seemed to vanish. Until he surfaced in Tanzania (Africa). From there, he went to Congo, always trying to spread his revolutionary ideals. But he had no success. So he decided to return to Latin America, to Bolivia.   The Bolivian communists weren’t willing to cede leadership to Che. Che was now stranded in Bolivia, with barely any supporters. Yet, his small guerrilla outfit managed to surround and defeat a Bolivian army unit of 35 soldiers. Che could have executed those soldiers. Instead, he let them go. A fatal mistake.   For the commander of that army unit, it was very embarrassing. And so, when he ret

We tend to believe that empathy is better than compassion. After all, as Pranay Kotasthane writes : “Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It involves stepping into someone else's shoes and experiencing their emotional state as if it were one's own. ”   But policy makers would do better to experience compassion, but not go as far as empathy, he says. Here’s why. Empathy, he says, can lead one to care too much about one individual (or one group) only . It creates the risk that the policy maker frames simplistic solutions that address the problem of that one set with whom he experienced empathy. Or as Rutger Bregman once wrote: “Empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspectives of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view. ” I think this is a good point. After

Che Guevara. His image is the “countercultural symbol of rebellion” world-over: That’s all I knew about him, until I read the Hourly History book on him. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was born in 1928 to a privileged Argentine family. As a pre-medical student, he went on his motorcycle for a 5,000 mile ride across South America. He was deeply impacted by a leper colony in Peru. Outcasts from society, they had forged a colony away from everyone else: “It was no longer the sickness of the individual body he sought to cure; his main interest was curing the sickness of society.”   In 1954, Che was drawn like a magnet to Guatemala when their elected president started redistributing land from the rich to the poor. Corporations whose lands were seized complained to the US, whose ears perked up at signs of communist leanings. They backed a military coup to overthrow the president. Che’s view of the US was now of a “domineering, imperialist power, seeking to destroy Latin America’s democracy

You’d think when a government is able to reduce poverty, it would make positive headlines. So when the UPA government announced that poverty had fallen on both counts, as a percentage of total population and also in absolute numbers, Montek Singh Ahluwalia was surprised by what followed. He explains what followed in Backstage .   First , the opposition questioned the data – fake and hoax, said Mulayam Singh Yadav. Not surprising. Second , even many Congress MP’s were unhappy about such announcements. That was surprising. It took a while for Ahluwalia to understand the reaction of the Congress MP’s – (a) They feared that their vote bank would assume that the party would reduce their focus on the poor and shift attention to other areas; and (b) They feared that parts of their vote bank who were now deemed above the poverty line would lose some of their benefits, like subsidized grains. Third , many questioned the changes to the definition of the poverty line – it is logical that

Once the Roman Republic was replaced with emperors, wouldn’t the ego and greed of emperors have triggered more wars for expansion? Adrian Goldsworthy analyses just that question in Pax Romana .   Ironically (at first sight), once the era of the emperor started, Rome became less aggressive in its expansion plans. The reason is interesting. The emperor, of course, had to stay in Rome. Whom should he entrust with the role of the military commander leading any expansion efforts into faraway lands? “(The emperor) risked giving that man fame and glory, perhaps even allowing him to subvert the loyalty of the soldiers under his command.” This concern is exemplified by this instance where a general advanced deep into Germany. He was quickly recalled by the emperor, leading to his lament: “How lucky Roman generals were in the old days.”   For this very reason, few emperors trusted family or senators to “hold too many major commands”. Provincial bosses were not allowed to control m

The Satyam scam. How does that fit into Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s book on reforms in India, Backstage ? The reason is that, as both NASSCOM and the government of India felt: “(Satyam’s) collapse would create a great deal of disruption for clients worldwide and seriously damage India’s reputation as a reliable source of software services.”   Therefore, the government decided to work with the private sector to “organize a quick takeover by a reputable new buyer, who would quickly restart the company”. But that could not be done overnight. In the meantime, the new board would have to reach out to Satyam’s clients and “reassure them that the company would survive”.   For the new board to have credibility when it made that statement, it had to be staffed with people who understood the private sector, the IT sector in particular, and commanded respect and trust. Deepak Parikh from HDFC was made chairman, and other members of the board included a former NASSCOM chairman, CII member,

“In the past, Geography ruled History”, writes Tomas Pueyo. To some extent, most of us know that. After all, all major civilizations arose on the banks of rivers – Nile, Ganga, Indus, Euphrates…   Pueyo then gets into other aspects that, once told, seem obvious. (And yet, I’d not registered most of them). You need plains for a civilization to flourish. “Conversely, you want to avoid mountains. A 2% slope makes cultivation impractical, and above 6% it’s impossible.” But just having plains isn’t enough – they need to be fertile : “Places that are less fertile feed fewer people, so they get less population density, less specialization, and less wealth overall. With longer times to communicate and transport goods, commerce is much more expensive, and hence there’s less of it. Perishable goods are especially less valuable. Hence, again, less wealth.”   He then takes into real world examples. Take Italy:   The Blue lines are the rivers. The Green parts are the plains. Th

In this blog, we’ll see some of the entirely selfish reasons why peace suited Rome and also at some of the checks and balances to minimize excesses and violations.   Negotiations for peace are always tricky, points out Adrian Goldsworthy in Pax Romana . Even more so in ancient times. A side that surrendered always worried whether they’d be enslaved or killed. Rome wanted its enemies to trust them in such scenarios. Not out of any goodness of heart, but just practical calculations. Wars were costly, and a quick surrender was preferable. Additionally, the animosity generated by acts of savagery and trickery post-surrender hurt in the long run. Revenue via empire, remember, was the goal.   Inevitably though, individual commanders and governors sometimes did not follow these rules. The wrath of Rome would usually follow major violations. Mostly because it hurt the long-term prospects of Rome. Political opponents of the offender would seize the opportunity to imprison or exile a riv

The Harshad Mehta scam of the ‘90’s. What has this scam got to do with the reforms story that is the theme of Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s Backstage ? To answer that, one needs to understand how the scam worked.   Banks buy and sell bonds to/from each other, either to meet regulatory requirements, or sometimes to earn money via interest for short durations. Back then, with no electronic systems, banks would do such transactions via brokers. The buying bank would issue a check, and the selling bank would issue a BR (banker’s receipt) to convey money had been received. So far so good.   Centralized records of the owners of government securities was maintained by the Public Debt Office (PDO). With non-electronic record systems, it would take time for a change in the owner (seller to buyer bank) to be recorded in PDO records. Since many inter-bank transactions of this kind were of short durations (15 days), it often made no sense to even record such transactions with the PDO – after al

Pax Romana. Literally, it means “Roman peace”, a period of around 200 years from 27 BC to 180 AD with relative peace and order. In the modern day, when empires are “not fashionable”, it is easy for many to be dismissive of such a thing, writes Adrian Goldsworthy in Pax Romana : “For many, anything associated with empires and imperialism must be a bad thing.” To know if, and to what extent, Pax Romana worked, one needs to set aside one’s ideology on the matter. “Dislike of empire leads to encourage scepticism over its achievements.”   Others point out that the Roman empire was created via violence and war. Savagery was needed to then maintain Rome’s dominance. In the midst of all this, could Pax Romana even have existed?   Yet more point out that rebellions persisted, in some areas for long periods, in others it erupted multiple times. Banditry and piracy existed for long periods in various parts of the empire. Where’s the Pax Romana?   Peace, Goldsworthy reminds us, is a relative term.