Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The second design principle behind India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) is interoperability . As any engineer will tell you, systems rarely talk to each other. Every piece gets optimized for itself, and thus is rarely suited to work with anything else. Plus, companies deliberately choose to keep things in proprietary formats so customers cannot easily switch out.   When we say Aadhar is the world’s first digital ID system, it doesn’t just mean that the ID was created and stored in digital format. It means a lot more than that, as Rahul Matthan explains in The Third Way . It means that it was designed to be usable in all kinds of digital workflows, an example of which we saw in an earlier blog on the design of UPI by unbundling things first.   Another example is Aadhar’s integration with Jeevan Praman, a government pension service. Proof of life can be established remotely by a pensioner, thanks to Aadhar’s interoperability. This is hugely helpful in the rural...

Visualized data. That’s graphs, pie-charts and all kinds of creative representations of data. While they make it easier to understand many things, they can also be misleading, write Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West in Calling Bullshit . And not always because of malice or bad intentions…   As software makes visual graphics easy, people tend to come up with eye-catching ways of presenting data. Nothing wrong with that, unless… “The attempt to be cute makes it harder for the reader to understand the underlying data.” For example, a 3D graph makes it hard to compare the bars: how much taller is the 3 rd class bar compared to the 1 st class bar? It’s hard to say (visually) since the 1 st class bar is farther away and don’t far off objects look shorter than they are?   Sure, the numerical values are written, but if one has to read it to make sense, then why use a graphic? Even worse, why create an easy-to-misread graphic?   Another common error is to show informat...

There are 4 design principles behind India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) . The first one is unbundling , writes Rahul Matthan in The Third Way . What this means is that DPI didn’t just digitize existing workflows. Instead, it broke down existing workflows into their constituent elements and then restructured them to be resilient and interoperable. Then it assembled things back in entirely new ways.   An example helps understand how big an impact this can have. Take the old way of transferring money to someone.   This is why checks took time to encash. Banks had to perform checks and communicate with each other. Unbundling in this case started from scratch. It didn’t look how to accelerate the above system. Instead, it looked at the easiest form of money transfer. Yes, cash. The giver and sender don’t need to know anything about each other; nobody needs to check and confirm if the giver has enough in the account; you just hand the cash. Could payments be digitized...

The Yellow Line of the Bangalore Metro started operations in August. Why did it take 2 years after the completion of all construction for operations to start? Tannmay Kumar Baid and Pranay Kotasthane look into the causes.   The short answer? India-China geopolitics. Now for the longer version.   In 2019, bids were accepted for the trains. A Chinese state-owned company, CRRC, won. It was cheaper than the nearest Indian manufacturer by 2 crores per coach. The contract included a clause that 75% of the coaches be manufactured in India. CRRC was to build a new plant in Andhra Pradesh.   Then, in 2020, Galwan happened. India tightened its scrutiny of all Chinese investments. Cabinet clearance was made mandatory. The visa regime tightened and CRRC engineers were denied visas to come and set up the factory.   That apart, the usual Indian obstacles played their part. Land clearance took forever. Customs could and did hold up imports. BMRCL tried cancelling ...

In the Roman empire, one could end up a slave via, er, multiple channels – those defeated in war, unlucky victims of piracy, inability to repay debts, and by being found guilty of certain crimes. In theory, one could come out of slavery by buying one’s freedom or if one’s master was willing to release the individual. In practice, while such things did happen, they were very rare.   As you can imagine, slavery was “functional” – it existed to serve a need, cruel though it was. This was true not just in Rome but all ancient civilizations, from Egypt to Greece.   Rome though was the first empire that also used slavery for entertainment. That trend started off due to the Roman practice of re-enacting the acts of a military figure who had died – bit by bit, it extended to include athletic events, even chariot races, and eventually opened up to everyone around, not just relatives of the deceased! Like Indian weddings nowadays, it soon became a competition of sorts – who coul...

Empowerment via DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) , that is the next benefit described in Rahul Matthan’s The Third Way . That refers to empowerment of the individual over the data collected about him and what it can be used for. On this front, India has created DEPA (Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture) . What is that? “A consented (consent based) data-sharing framework capable of being applied across various sectors.”   An example helps understand it. Matthan takes a vegetable vendor, Rajini. Say, she goes to the wholesale market early every morning, buys ₹25,000 worth of vegetables. Then she brings it to the neighbourhood, and sells it for ₹28,000 per day, netting a profit of ₹3,000 per day. That’s a lakh a month. Thanks to digitization and UPI, there is a digital trail of these transactions. With which she could prove her credibility and success to seek a loan at better terms.   The problem though is that her bank transaction record will show many, man...

Recently I read a book on Ambedkar’s role and influence on the preamble of the Constitution. Just the preamble, not the entire constitution! Boy, was it impressive – the sheer range of considerations he was aware and tried to balance is unbelievable, and the constraint that he could not copy from the West as-is leading to adjustments specific to India. But more on that book in later blogs.   If that sounds like gushing praise, well, that’s the theme of this blog. Pranay Kotasthane wrote of 3 levels at which discussions on Ambedkar are conducted. Level 0 is good old Hero Worship. “I call this the zeroth level because discussions at this level aren’t even about Ambedkar’s ideas. They are about raising him to demi-god status, statue included. It is indeed ironic that a person who warned India and Indians of the dangers of hero-worship has been put on pedestals across the country.”   So ironic indeed. Here is what Ambedkar wrote on the dangers of hero worship: “Ther...

Under imperialism, Christianity often came along with the white colonizers. Not in places which had their own strongly embedded religion (India, South East Asia etc) but in most of Africa, that was definitely the case.   In his autobiography, Born a Crime , Trevor Noah snarkily says: “It (Christianity) was forced on us (blacks). The white man was quite stern with the natives. “You need to pray to Jesus”, he said, “Jesus will save you”. To which the native replied, “Well, we do need to be saved – saved from you, but that’s beside the point. So let’s give this Jesus thing a shot.”   And adds another point in a different context: “If you’re native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense.” Reminds me of the contempt Islam and Christianity have for idol worship.   Santa Claus gets the...

In an earlier blog, we went over one of the benefits of India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) . In this one, we go over another benefit – engagement , as explained in Rahul Matthan’s The Third Way .   The most obvious reason why DPI has increased and improved citizens’ engagement is the cost reduction of everything digital as opposed to physical. People don’t need to create copies of documents; recipients don’t need to find storage space to keep it.   Even better, with a digitized system, identification no longer requires a trip; which saves both time and money. Workflows are easier to design and change. Digital trails help finding fraud or fault easier. Transactions are digitally signed and timestamped (sometimes geo-stamped, i.e., location coordinates included).   “Universally trusted digital rails” are now well and truly in place. The most used and well-known services of which is, yes, payments. UPI, a “blindingly simple system”, allows money transfer...

I was surprised to read Andrew Sullivan’s post on the decline in literacy in the West. No, not literally – everyone still goes to school and learns to read and write. It is the amount and quality of reading they read that has fallen, and the attendant consequences are becoming increasingly visible.   It started with the Internet. As bandwidth speeds increased, sites began to have more pictures and then more videos. “Visuals carry more visceral punch than sentences and paragraphs, and require less reason and effort.” Ominously: “The Internet, in other words, held the power to return us to the pre-literate culture from which a majority of humans had emerged only a few hundred years ago: images, symbols, memes.”   Today: “Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced re...

In earlier blogs, we saw the US and European policies on data. Coming to India, Rahul Matthan (in The Third Way ) points out it is one of those rare countries which has collected a huge amount of digital data before it became rich. This is entirely because of the combo of smartphone + cheap Internet plans. Even those of us who lived through this phase forget how quick it was – in 2014, just 15% of the population had a smartphone, by 2022 over 65% had one.   There is one element of the data equation on which India is unique, namely that its gathering was facilitated by deliberate government policies and protocols, not by private players. Yes, DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) , which includes everything from UPI to eKYC to DigiYatra to DigiLocker and more. It ensures “interoperable digital architectures” (contrast that with the silos of Google or Facebook in the West; Alibaba or WeChat in China). Does the Indian approach provide any benefits and opportunities? Yes, on 3 front...

The standup comedian Trevor Noah’s parents (white Swiss father, black African mother) loved each other, yet had to think long and hard before deciding to have a child. It was a criminal act under apartheid for a black and white to have relations, let alone a child. But they decided to have one anyway, with the understanding that they could never be a family (Criminal act, remember?), writes Noah in Born a Crime .   After he was born, the father found himself wanting to be near his son. But he couldn’t do so openly. So they’d all meet up secretly. As a toddler, when Trevor went to play in a park, his dad would follow at a distance, careful never to come too close to draw attention. It was a police state like situation, you never knew who might call the authorities. Inevitably, the kid (Trevor) would sometimes notice his dad in the distance and start shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” upon which his father would panic and run away…   Much later, Trevor would learn what happened t...

In an earlier blog, we saw the American attitude towards data and how it became the philosophy of the Internet, simply because the US was the first country on the Net and also its biggest market. Over time, the EU became a big market too. A significant difference in European views is rooted in the fact that few, if any, big Internet companies are European. Thus, the lobbying against data/privacy laws in the EU was far less (though the big American ones do lobby in EU), explains Rahul Matthan in The Third Way .   The EU attitude data is far more citizen-centric. Even before the Internet, that was the case in (Western) Europe largely because of their experience with fascism, Nazism and communism over the past century.   That history culminated in the GDPR doctrine for EU, a “full blown regulation… which became the most advanced data protection framework”. It says (1) all data about an individual belongs to that individual, not the company that collected it, (2) any dat...

The standup comedian Trevor Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime , is about his life in South Africa only , so it doesn’t talk of his career as a comedian or life in the West. What it describes about the apartheid regime in South Africa is horrifying. Unlike many evils of the West, this is a recent one that continued till the 1990’s. It is thus not something that can be brushed aside as “It was a different era, you can’t apply today’s standards to older times”.   Apartheid was created after “studying” the institutionalized racism of Australia, America and Netherlands.   America, for example, moved the natives to specific areas called “reservations”, practiced slavery and then moved onto segregation. In South Africa, they did all of the above to the same group (blacks). The outcome? “The most advanced system of racial oppression known to man”.   A system built on the idea that races should not mix has to declare inter-racial relations (romance, marriage, children) i...

Many believe that computers and software knowing and monitoring everything about us is a recent phenomenon. Not so, says Rahul Matthan in The Third Way : “Since they were first created, computers have been designed to monitor, categorize and classify us. Everything that followed from there was just the natural consequence of that original objective.”   He elaborates on that. It started in 1890, when the US wanted to conduct its census. By then, it was taking too long to conduct one. By the time they could finish conducting and collating it, it was time for the next census! The task needed to be automated and Herman Hollerith gave it a shot. He first reduced the data into a standard format – age, sex, religion, occupation etc – and second called for it to be digitized by giving census takers a card in which they had to punch holes to indicate answers. He then fed each card into a machine that “read” the information by pressing a set of electrical pins on the card. “The pins ...

War Thunder is a free online video game that goes all out in its simulation of “realistic vehicle and weapon physics ”, writes Rich Stanton here and here . Since the weapons and tanks they have in the game exist in the real world, there are many online arguments “about the accuracy or otherwise of particular hardware”.   In one such incident, the argument was over the French Leclerc Main Battle Tank. Specifically, the question was about exact speed of rotation of the tank’s turret. One participant thought the best way to prove he was right was by (hold your breath) posting portions of the manual of the real tank! So much for such documents being classified material…   It turns out this wasn’t the first or last time classified military material was posted to settle online debates. The site owners are now used to being on the lookout for any material on their forums that may be classified and try to take it down.   This being the Internet, the argument then cha...

The language related AI (the ones that generate text-based responses) are called LLM (Large Language Models) . They “learn” by being trained (by humans) on texts that are fed to them. Over time, once the LLM gets the hang of things, it is let loose on different parts of the Internet to continue to learn on its own.   It is that last part – learning from content on the Internet – that raised the charge of copyright violation from various content provider sites e.g. news agencies, book sites and many authors. Is this a valid charge? LLM supporters say the AI is no different from humans who read content and generate new content that is influenced by, but not a copy of the material they read. The copyright violation brigade responds that humans read a small quantity, whereas LLM’s have changed the game by the sheer volume of content they read, and are thus a risk to the livelihood of the content creators.   Rahul Matthan has an interesting take on the matter. Sure, a lot ...

AI needs a different kind of specialized chip. So no, it is not just a faster CPU (Central Processing Unit). Rather, it is a specialized variant of CPU called GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) . GPU’s were originally designed ages back for one purpose – video games! What?! The “G” was for Graphical, remember. In a video game, the screen (1) has to be rendered at insane speeds, (2) how to render each pixel involves a combo of RGB values (among other things) which have to be crunched via matrix multiplication, and (3) rendering of pixels can be done in parallel, not in sequence the way traditional computing is done.   Decade later, the raw data for AI needed just such a processor – insane speed, matrix multiplications, and parallel processing. Traditional CPU’s were not designed for that, but these were exactly what GPU’s already did. Ergo, the company that started off decades back with GPU’s for video games pivoted to AI chips and is the world’s most valuable company today – Nv...

India fares very poorly in most sporting competitions (other than cricket, and in recent times, at badminton and chess). The National Sports Governance Bill tabled this monsoon tries to address the root causes for this. Policy Mandala analyses the bill.   What are the problems with the existing system? It is entirely structural: “For decades, India’s sports governance has been plagued by dynastic control, opaque selections, budget leaks, lifetime presidencies, and a culture where politics often trumps performance.”   How does the new sports bill try to fix things? (1) It sets up a National Sports Tribunal to fast-track the closure of sports related disputes. This is indeed important since our civil courts take forever and: “In sports, where careers peak in a handful of years, a delay like this doesn’t just hurt, it ends futures.”   (2) It makes Ethics and Election panels compulsory in every federation to try and root out conflicts of interest. (3) It b...

There’s a disorder called hemochromatosis in which extra iron builds up in the body. One treatment is for such people to donate their blood regularly. The good thing? The extra iron doesn’t come into their blood, so their blood can be infused into recipients without any risk. Nor is there any risk of transfer of genetic diseases.   Sounds perfect, right? Except the American Red Cross has a policy that: “Potential donors are not allowed to receive direct compensation for their donation (beyond the usual orange juice and cookie) .” See how this becomes a problem? “Because people with hemochromatosis would otherwise have to pay for their therapeutic phlebotomies (removing blood from them), they would in effect be getting something of value for being able to donate for free. Thus the Red Cross has ruled that such donations violate their policy. ”   It gets even more weird. When a hemochromatosis patient pays to have his blood removed, most American agencies will thro...

One of the reasons Akbar was “so willing to look beyond Islam for truths and validation” was the relative recency of the conversion of the Mongols to Islam, says Ira Mukhoty in Akbar . Thus, as a group, they were “less tenacious in their allegiance to religion alone”.   As mentioned in an earlier blog, this trend existed from Babur’s time. Babur had pragmatically added many Hindustani noblemen into his court. Very strict adherence to sharia would have been “politically catastrophic”. Being a Muslim was not mandatory to be in the good books of the Mughals.   Further, Akbar encouraged the entry of Persian Shia and Hindu Rajput noblemen into the ranks of the Mughal aristocracy. Why? To reduce the “worrying influence” of one large clan in the existing setup.   Of course, Akbar went far beyond what those reasons alone could explain – he was almost “cavalier” in his attitude towards the ulemas ! This wasn’t entirely because Akbar was, to apply a modern word, secula...