Viswanathan K's Thoughts

One of the first uses of the word “terrorism” was by Thomas Jefferson in 1795, says Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind . He used it in for what was happening in Paris several years after the French Revolution, the so called Reign of Terror. “Robespierre’s terror took the state’s legal monopoly on violence to devastating extremes.”   Today, the meaning of the term has flipped on one significant aspect: “(Modern terrorism) grants a disproportionate power to small bands of insurgents and shadow networks.” And who were the first practitioners in its modern form? Pirates! “Extreme violence carried out by non-state actors, creating disproportionate effects through media dissemination.”   Media dissemination? Yes, even back then, the tabloid culture had begun to flourish – across “pamphlets, newspapers, magazines and books”.   “Dead men tell no tales” – it’s the pirate mantra we’ve all heard. We associate it with ruthlessness. But pirates also took that sta...

We think of Akbar a certain way today. But people change and evolve with time. That is even more true for emperors who rule for very long periods, like Akbar. And lastly, a boy king almost feels “compelled” to exert and demonstrate his authority, to enemies and courtiers alike.   After Akbar became the Padshah, he could see a major structural risk to himself, writes Ira Mukhoty in Akbar . One was that certain clans, like the Turanis, held too much power. How did he neutralize this? Over a decade, Akbar would purposefully promote more Persians and Rajputs into the nobility, thereby reducing the clout of the Turanis.   He also aggressively expanded the empire because he feared anyone at the borders could become a challenger. Defeat them before they became a threat became his motto.   The Rajputs had the practice of giving a daughter in marriage as a sign of subjugation. This is how Akbar got started with his Rajput wives. What he did differently was to allow the...

Timur (the Lame) was the most famous ancestor of the group that would come to be known as the Mughals. He was not a descendant of Genghis Khan himself, but had married women from Genghis’ line so he could claim Chingizid heritage.   When still in Central Asia, Babur was kicked out of his kingdom by the Uzbeks, who claimed Chingizid blood, writes Ira Mukhoty in her biography of the Mughal emperor, Akbar . No surprise that Babur hated the Chingizid. Obviously, he did not want to be called a Chingizid. Instead, he preferred to be known as a Timurid (descendant of Timur). It is ironic that when they came to rule India, Babur’s line came to be known as the Mughals, the Persian word for Mongols (Chingizid), not as the Timurids! Even the victors don’t get to decide what they are called.   Being kingdom-less also explains why Babur came to India to settle, not just loot and return the way Timur and so many other Central Asians had in the past. It also explains Babur’s tolera...

I remember our history books mentioning many famines in India. I always assumed it was tragic but unavoidable for that era. Which is why I was taken aback when I read Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness .   Here is a startling contrast. During British rule, between 30 to 35 million Indians died due to famines. Post independence, no famines have taken place. Even though our own governments were inefficient, corrupt and not exactly quick to respond. How come? Because in democracies with a free press, governments are held more accountable, which then triggers effective response. “Lack of (true) democracy and public accountability, however, is what was characterized British rule in India.”   Lack of accountability aside, the British had 3 considerations that drove them to intervene as minimally as possible to famine. (1) They believed in letting the market forces decide (demand and supply), (2) the Malthusian doctrine (overpopulation was the cause and the famine was na...

Other people, other groups, other organizations, other countries seem to do it <replace with the topic of your choice> effortlessly. They’re better. They’re having more fun. Those are feelings all of us experience.   Morgan Housel argues that it almost certainly isn’t true. Ask yourself if what you are seeing is the complete picture about that entity. Chances are that it isn’t. “There’s a filter. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden. ” Even seemingly coherent teams aren’t that way, if only you could pull back the curtain: “All the messy personalities and difficult decisions that you only see when you’re inside, in the trenches. ” And no, others aren’t having a better life than you all the time: “Instagram is full of beach vacation photos, not flight delay photos.”   There’s even a saying about this: “The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.”   Occasionally, we do get to learn of the cracks behind the perfe...

We humans have lungs. But ants don’t. Why do some living things need lungs while others don’t?   In So Simple a Beginning , Raghuveer Parthasarathy starts from the basics. All creatures need a way to exchange gases, usually to take in oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. The easiest way is for the surface of the creature to do the gas exchange. A tiny creature like an ant does exactly this – the surface areas of its internal tubing is sufficient for gas exchange of its tissues.   Next, take a larger creature. Simple physics kicks in. The surface area of the living thing increases as a square of the increase in its length whereas its volume increases as the cube. If you increase the length by a factor of 3, the area increases by a factor of 3 2 = 9 times while its volume increases by 3 3 = 27 times. The volume, as you see, increases much faster than the area. The larger volume means the creature has a lot more cells, which in turn means, the creature needs a lot more gas...

In China, Kublai did what the Romans did for northern Europe, writes John May in The Mongol Empire . By that, he means the creation of physical artifacts (roads, canals) and systems (efficient taxation, trade, postal-relay). And of course, the introduction of paper money (as an easier, lighter, convenient alternative to coins made of various metals). ~~   By the time Genghis died, the man had created an empire 4 times larger than Alexander’s and twice the size of Rome, ha had not made great inroads into China. His successors doubled that size.   And yet, while the Romans have left a lot of both “hardware” (aqueducts, stadia) and “software” (art, law, language), very little of either survives from the Mongol era. (Other than in China, as we saw in the earlier blog on Kublai). “No buildings, no philosophies, no universities, no moral guidance, no literature for the subject peoples.”   Why the difference? “Because the Romans, the Greeks and the British had something to say, ...

Many say the railways were a positive product of British rule of India. Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness looks into this. In 1843, Governor General Lord Hardinge was at least honest when he said that the railways would be beneficial for the “commerce, government and military control of the country”.   Look at how it was constructed. (1) The British government guaranteed 5% return on bonds (very high for that time) used to raise money to build the railways. And why not? After all, it was taxes on India that would be used to pay the interest, not British taxpayer money. (2) This created a perverse incentive for British companies laying the tracks in India. That 5% interest was on the principal, so the more money the company claimed it needed, the higher the interest payment. Thus, there was no incentive to optimize or reduce costs. The opposite was the case. Each mile in India thus cost £ 18,000. For comparison, a mile at the same time was costing just £ 2,000 in the US. ...

Large organisms don’t look anything like magnified versions of tiny organisms. Why not? Because of the (physics) principle of scaling. And it’s not just limited t0 physical structure. In So Simple a Beginning , Raghuveer Parthasarathy asks an interesting question: Why can’t a bacterium swim like a whale?   Swimming involves pushing the water to move. There are two aspects that make this action hard: inertia and viscosity. The ratio of these two forces is called the Reynolds number. The higher the Reynolds number, the higher the inertia. Which means the liquid appears turbulent to the act of swimming. The lower the Reynolds number, the higher the viscous force.   Wait, it gets trickier. The Reynolds number also depends on the size of the object trying to swim. To a tiny bacterium, the water has a low Reynolds number. But to a whale, the Reynolds number is huge. This has other consequences: “This fact has deep consequences for how aquatic creatures can or cannot move....

In The Mongol Empire , John May says: “Two of the strangest (things) are that today’s China owes its shape and size… to a barbarian non-Chinese who was its greatest enemy; and that the same barbarian is now honoured as an insider, the founder of a Chinese dynasty.” It also explains why China considers Tibet a part of itself.   No, this tale is not about Genghis Khan.   Genghis’ descendants split the empire. Some ruled the Middle East, others towards Hungary, and the last group a little into China. “Little” is the right word, China was huge and had different rulers in different places. It was on the Chinese side that Kublai was the frontman for his brother, Mönkhe.   After hard fought wins in China, Kublai followed Genghis’s approach. Mass slaughter was perpetrated on the losers only if it would serve as a signal to the next kingdom in their path – surrender and you live, fight and be slaughtered. But if there was no kingdom nearby waiting to be conquered...

The British are often credited with creating the civil services in India. Take a closer look at that institution, says Shashi Tharoor in An Era of Darkness . Indians were only recruited for the lower-level posts. Conversely, they were never allowed to rise above a certain rank.   While that was the practice, the British were careful to keep up the pretence that the locals could rise through the ranks. The reality, as the viceroy Lord Lytton wrote was very different: “(Let them believe that they are) entitled to expect and claim appointment in the fair course of promotion to the highest posts of the service. We all know that these claims and expectations never can or will be fulfilled. We have had to choose between prohibiting them and cheating them, and we have chosen the least straight-forward course.”   Today, we know that many bureaucrats in independent India have the experience and capabilities of General Managers and CEO’s of corporations. No such human capabili...

At the molecular level, nothing is ever still. Thus, every picture of DNA or proteins is fundamentally flawed – everything is a blur of motion. Yes, the famous Brownian motion at work. Brown had shown this was not a concept limited to living things only; it was something rooted in physics. It is totally random. Mathematical analysis can predict, on average , how far a particle would move from its starting point if the direction of each step is random. Hence the term “predictable randomness”. Also, the larger a molecule, the less it moves.   Ok, how is any of this relevant to biology and life? Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains in So Simple a Beginning : “(Brownian motion) solves a nagging problem with our discussion of self-assembly.” In earlier blogs, we saw proteins can arrange themselves into patterns. But Lego blocks don’t do that. What’s the difference? Brownian motion gives the answer – the size (Lego blocks are too large to undergo Brownian motion). “The recipe for self-assem...

In the 1500’s, Britain’s transition from feudalism to capitalism was, as you might have expected, very disruptive, writes Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind : “(The transition) disgorged a whole class of society – small, commons-based cottage laborers – and turned them into itinerant free agents.”   While these folks were now free to move around the country, they had few skills, and thus no jobs: “Serfs once grounded in a coherent, if oppressive, feudal system found themselves flotsam on the twisting stream of early capitalism.”   So many jobless people with few prospects roaming around inevitably created problems wherever they passed. No wonder they soon became public enemy number one. In response, the Vagabond Act was passed – such folks could be rounded up by the authorities, and then whipped in public.   Around the same time, Britain was starting to become a sea-faring nation. The Royal Navy needed plenty of recruits. The “recruiters” came to be ...

Self-assembly. It is the “ability” of molecules to assemble themselves into certain shapes. Imagine an ice cream cone shaped molecule with two opposing halves – the ice-cream part is attracted to water (hydrophilic); the cone part avoids water (hydrophobic). Put enough of them in water, and they will automatically arrange themselves to “shield the hydrophobic cones”, writes Raghuveer Parthasarathy in So Simple a Beginning .   The base principle here is: “Molecular shape is a key determinant of self-assembly.” This is just a physical property. The organism doesn’t need DNA instructions for certain molecules to arrange themselves a certain way! “The cell does need genes to encode the proteins that synthesize (certain) molecules; once made, the lipids can organize themselves.” To put it differently: “Physical simplicity may underlie biological complexity.”

Poetry in those school going years. I was never a fan of it, to put it mildly. When most kids struggle with the language (English, or Hindi for non-Hindi speakers), why add a format that is not used in daily life?   In India, we make things even worse on this front. Take English where the books will have poems by Keats, Wordsworth, Dickenson, Frost and Blake. They may be great poets, but a lot of their poem involve direct or indirect contextual references to England. Like seasons that don’t exist in India. An example of this is etched in my memory. One of my cousins had this to say on the famous poem, Daffodils - What on earth is a daffodil, he vented? That was the pre-Internet era where one couldn’t whip up a photo or video of the daffodil. If kids didn’t even get what was the object in question was, how could the poem possibly make any sense?     Poetry is often about reflections and life experiences, personification and memories, nostalgia and parallels. All a...

Did the British create a united India? Shashi Tharoor takes a stab at that in An Era of Darkness . Even at first glance, that “claim” runs into trouble – wasn’t British rule openly a policy of divide and rule? Both in India and other colonies?   If they were so into uniting India, why did they allow for multiple rulers across so many “princely states” (never to be called kingdoms because the only monarch was, of course, in Britain)? Why was there an elaborate hierarchy amongst them, if not to foster rivalry and enmity?   The codification of the caste system started with Warren Hastings who hired eleven pandits to help frame laws for the country based on some kind of continuation of the shastras . Even if the intent was sincere (continuity, sensitivity to local practices), the mode of defining the laws (via the eleven pandits) led to major flaws. First , the pandits made (genuine) mistakes in their interpretation of parts of the shastras . Second , they took advantage o...

The circadian rhythm. It’s a natural oscillation within the bodies of living things with a periodicity of a day – 24 hours (It’s why we experience jet lag). What acts as this clock in living things? Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains the concept in So Simple a Beginning : “The simplest possible oscillator is a gene that represses itself.” This sounds crazy at first: once repressed, how would it activate itself again? “The answer lies in the fact that both expression and repression take time.”   He elaborates. But first, a quick recap from an earlier blog: DNA has the gene to create the protein, and promoter and repressor sites before it. When read, the gene produces the protein (red blob) which attaches itself to the repressor site, thus physically blocking any RNA attempts to read the gene.   Coming back to the oscillator. All the above steps (creating the protein, then for the protein to “meander and find the promoter region”) take time. Ok, so it took time. But isn’t the gen...

Back in 2016, Shashi Tharoor wrote this book, An Era of Darkness , on the impact of British rule of India. He starts off with a few important disclaimers: (1) The fact that successive Indian governments since independence have made their share of mistakes, been corrupt etc does not impact the truth value of the damage done by the British; (2) It is impossible to put a number value of the amount lost/stolen from India, so the intent is not to seek specific reparations from Britain (who’d enforce it anyway?); (3) The point is not about the return of specific items like the famous Kohinoor diamond.   He starts by pointing out India’s share of the world economy before and after British rule – it fell from 23% to 3%. The one-line reason? “India was governed for the benefit of Britain.” After all: “Unlike every other foreign overlord who stayed on to rule, the British had no intention of becoming one with the land.”   Some argue that the decline was mostly due to...

After invading Iraq, the Americans fired all individuals at the top of most institutions (army, police, bureaucracy). Why? Because, by definition, the top guys would have appointed by and thus supportive of Saddam’s policies. The results were disastrous since now there was nobody with “work experience” available to take the top jobs of governance and providing security.   But when Nazi Germany fell, nobody did any such cleansing. Sure, the very top Nazis were prosecuted (if captured). But the majority of the next rung weren’t. William Boyd writes in his summary of Danny Orbach’s book, Fugitives : “Most – it stands to reason – quietly blended back in to postwar German society. It is estimated that at the end of the conflict in 1945 the Nazi party had around 8.5 million members. Only a tiny percentage were hunted down and prosecuted. What happened to the millions of others?” These Nazis had no good choices, esp. if they were ideologically inclined. Join the hated West (whom ...

DNA strands are long (several meters long). How on earth do they then fit inside the nucleus of a cell? By bending and folding themselves. But not in any random way. They wrap themselves around proteins 10 nanometers in size called histones . But it would require a lot of force to compress them like this. What is the source of that much force? The answer is electrostatic force, between the negatively charged DNA and the positively charged histone.   This isn’t just “intellectual curiosity”. Which parts of the DNA are “expressed” as proteins depends on the packaging and wrapping of the DNA. How? Remember DNA strands are read by a transcription molecule called RNA. Parts of the DNA that are inaccessible (due to the way they are wrapped) won’t be expressed. It has thus been turned “off”! Accessible = On; inaccessible = Off. “The physical arrangement of DNA is a powerful tool for regulating the activities of the cell.” writes Raghuveer Parthasarathy in So Simple a Beginning . ...