Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Does a language influence how and even what its users think (or don’t think)? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. Even if a language doesn’t have a word for a concept, surely users will just describe the concept using a group of words when needed, right? The absence of a word definitely does not mean that users of a language don’t know or understand the associated concept, reiterates Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass .   Wilhelm von Humbldt explained that the point of the above question was more nuanced, i.e., to check “what (a language) encourages and simulates its speakers to do from its own inner force”. Max Muller said something similar: “The words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready made for us!” Bertrand Russell expressed this point even more strongly: “Language misleads us by its vocabulary and by its syntax. We must be on our guard in both respects if our logic is not to lead to false...

By the turn of the century, urban development was the driving force for Dubai, writes Tomas Pueyo.. The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, is the most famous landmark. The world’s 2 nd largest mall, the Dubai Mall (with an aquarium and underwater zoo), came up. Land was reclaimed to create the famous Palm Jumeirah.   Dubai understood the synergies between different modes of transportation, so: “It didn’t only invest in its port and coast. It continued investing in its airport and airline.” Today, Dubai is the world’s 2 nd busiest international airport, and Emirates airlines is a synonym for opulence and coverage.   Those old selling points from when it became an SEZ – safety, low taxes, tolerance – continue and remain key attractions even today. Dubai is (was?) as safe as Tokyo and Singapore, and definitely a whole lot safer than any Western city.   Criticism of the rulers or religion is not allowed. Media is controlled by the state. Public protests are not a...

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, ...

How does one check whether language reflects reality? Or if it is a lens that affects what we perceive and register? At this point, Europeans realized none of their languages could help answer the question – they were too similar, and had intermixed too much. So they began to pay attention to the languages of far off places, including the so-called “primitives”, writes Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass . “The deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages all over the world… (for example) red was always the first of the prismatic colours to receive a name.”   On the other hand, the eyesight data contradicted the idea of “defective colour vision” – no tribe was found that couldn’t make out the difference among colours. What had seemed impossible was now a reality – even if people could notice a difference, they didn’t always bother to assign it a word.   Magnus now tweaked his theory. Agreed, he said, everyo...

As I read the chapter on Greece in Tim Marshall’s Power of Geography , I was surprised by how little I knew of the country’s history, beyond the usual Athens-democracy-Plato-Aristotle-Alexander parts! “Mountains and water are the key to understanding the past, present and future of Greece.” Greece has lots of mountains all over its north. From ancient times to present day, they made trade in the northward direction very hard. It also meant that people couldn’t move around easily and mix, leading to the lack of any unified identity. With the land/mountain route severely constrained, Greece turned to the only available option – the sea. The Aegean Sea. More on that later. The mountainous terrain meant no invader could control all of Greece – from Rome to Persia to the Ottomans to the Balkan states to the British. But the strategic value of control of the Aegean Sea meant all those empires would vie for rule over Greece. Greece, thus, was never an independent nation, even as recentl...

In the last blog , we saw how Gladstone’s analysis seemed to suggest that the Homerian Greeks were colour blind. Lazarus Geiger came to a similar conclusion when he went over the Vedas – the ancient Indians seemed colour blind too, as were the Old Testament era folks. No word for blue, for example. The Icelandic sage and the Koran share some of these characteristics, writes Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass .   Therefore, concluded Geiger, all of mankind must have been colour blind (relative to us today) in that era (Ancient Egypt didn’t fit in: they used blue paint and even had a name for it. But they were considered the exception to the rule). But how does one check if this colour blindness theory was true? ~~   Enter Hugo Magnus, a Prussian ophthalmologist. His contribution was facilitated by events which made the topic of colour detection a practically important topic, not just a philosophical musing.   In 1875, two Swedish trains had a mass...

Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass , is a very interesting book. Simply put, the question it explores is this (controversial) one: “Do different languages lend their speakers to different perspectives? Is our particular language a lens through which we view the world?” In other words, is language a neutral medium? Or does language influence the way we see/think of the world?   Common sense would suggest that: “Each culture is free to bestow labels onto concepts as it pleases, but the concepts behind these labels have been formed by the dictates of nature.” No language, surely, would have a term that includes both birds and stones, since they are so obviously unrelated and non-overlapping physical concepts. No child, learning a language, ever asks, “How do I know if this is a cat or a dog?” Distinct terms for obviously distinct physical things in the real world.   Except… that isn’t entirely true. Take the arm and the hand. Or the hand and the fing...

Ian Leslie starts of his article with something everyone experiences: “Being influenced by others is inevitable and essential. But it’s also true that when we over-conform to influences, we surrender individuality. ” A balance is needed. Easier said than done: “Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become easily manipulable, boring, and unhappy. ”   But do we have the term “influence” all backwards? Consider this long (but totally worth reading) passage by Michael Baxandall: “If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality…. If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from,...

We saw this Hindi movie on the Maratha king, Shivaji named Raja Shivaji at the theatre. To be honest, my knowledge of Shivaji is entirely based on Amar Chitra Katha ’s (ACK’s), I don’t remember anything from my (school) history books.   The move is very so-so, but several things made the experience interesting.   Since the central character is a beloved figure in Maharashtra, the movie starts with the customary disclaimer on being part fictionalization, edited for entertainment, not meant to hurt religious or regional sentiments etc. The usual stuff. What was different was that the disclaimer was a whole page long! So what, you say, who reads them. Aha, this one was read out for all to hear! At breakneck speed. With words nobody uses in day-to-day life. It was taking forever to complete. We were beginning to dread that they’d follow this with a translated English reading, but thankfully that didn’t happen. ~~   I struggled with the first 45 minutes of the m...

Once upon a time, humans “gathered colors from naturally occuring materials in the world around them”, writes Whitney Balick. Ochre dug from the earth, charcoal, minerals found locally, local plants, saffron, those were the sources.   All that changed in 1856 when William Perkin, a British chemist, stumbled upon a way to turn coal tar sludge into a colored dye: “Perkin’s discovery jump-started a revolution in synthetic dye-making that would change the way most of the world made color. It wasn’t long before other chemists began to figure out how to synthesize seemingly every color of the rainbow from coal tar and other petrochemical products.” This industrialization of color set off huge environmental damage.   Multicolored waste would find its way from industry into waterways and poison the local ecosystem. Humans nearby had reactions to the chemicals, from rashes to outright poisoning. The colored products could also wreak havoc, like the lead used in paints perm...

American airports suck (to be fair, they’re not international hubs). European airports are overcrowded, chaotic and unintuitive. Bangalore’s T2 terminal is beautiful and scenic, though it doesn’t have many shops or eating places (yet). Hong Kong airport is spacious, sparkling, and has lots of shops.   And then there’s Singapore’s Changi airport. It is the only airport one would like to be “stuck” due to a delayed flight or a long layover! That’s partly because parts of the airport are a mall cum fun area open for all, not just people catching a flight. Locals come for family visits, the way you might go to a mall or a movie!   It even has a (paid) swimming pool and gym. The food options are numerous, though the more popular ones can be very crowded (it’s like a mall for the locals, remember?). Like a few European airports, it offers a city tour between flights for an overview of Singapore, though you’d need to apply for a visa if you are just passing through.   ...

The Mustafa Center in Singapore is the go-to mall for affordably priced items. Everything from phones to clothes to watches to daily use items. We spent a few hours there shopping for various things. Most malls in the city have a counter where you can apply for the reimbursement of VAT (only for foreigners like us). The details (including your passport) get keyed in, but the reimbursement happens later. How/when?   When you are leaving the country, at the airport, there’s a section for the reimbursement. Go over to the scanners and scan your passport. Bingo! It pulls up all the reimbursements from all those shop counters, adds them up and asks you whether you want it paid in cash or credited to your credit card. That simple. Quick, frictionless, no struggling to find receipts (The contrast to the difficulty in equivalent reimbursements in Europe is zameen aasmaan ka farak) . ~~   Then we went to the Singapore zoo. It is way out of the city (not surprising) which mean...

Facts rarely make anyone change their mind. We know that all too well. This is true not just about political matters but also about every belief that people hold.   Why is that? Seth Godin takes a stab at the question. We have consciously or unconsciously built stories around our beliefs, political or otherwise. And that, he says, explains why facts rarely convince anyone: “Because a good story feels true. A good story resonates.” So he says: “If I bring facts to rebut your story, they will fail .”   Is there no hope then? Godin says one can succeed: “(If) the facts I bring are the foundation for a new story .” Therefore, he says: “Part of the job of making change is working to make sure a bad story doesn’t get in the way of good facts. ”

In an earlier blog , I mentioned the discovery of bacteriophages (viruses that kill bacteria) and asked why they weren’t used as treatment/prevention for bacterial diseases? Pranay Lal’s Invisible Empire answers that question.   First, says Lal, hierarchy matters. Some top biologists at the time offered alternate explanations – what if, they said, the killer wasn’t a virus but enzymes released by other bacteria? While d’Herelle was outranked, he used bacteriophages to treat a handful of patients suffering from bacterial dysentery. Years later, he cured a few more patients suffering from the bubonic plague. He tried his method in India to treat cholera outbreaks with great success. Sadly, his successes were few and even with the India case, where the effects were on large number of people, the trials had to stop due to the start of the Satyagraha movement (non-cooperation).   The few trials conducted after that didn’t help the case for various reasons: “The small-...

Marina Bay Sands. An iconic landmark of Singapore.   A 5-star resort with a casino. It includes a luxury shopping mall. An ArtScience museum. A huge theatre. A floating Apple store. Celebrity chef and signature restaurants. The hotel part consists of 3 curved towers of 55 floors each. Joining their tops is the Sands Skypark, a 340 meter skyway shaped like a ship. The purpose of this resort? To aid with Singapore’s economic and tourism objectives. The video below gives an all-round view.   As our 14 yo daughter never tires of reminding us, we rarely never splurge on anything. So we decided to spend two days at this iconic hotel (We initially considered a one-day stay, but that would have meant we’d barely have unpacked before it would be time to checkout).   Our room was on the 13 th floor, with a great view of the Gardens by the Bay and its light show. That is a huge urban park with cooled conservatories (lounges for growing delicate plants), a (pay) area with a spe...

This summer, we’d planned to visit Dubai. But repeated attacks on Iran early this year made us reconsider. What if another round of attacks happened during our visit? What if our flight got cancelled at the last minute? What if we got stranded after reaching there?   (This was before all out war began).   So we switched to Singapore as the destination, even though we’d been there before. Even then, we were nervous – what if jet fuel ran out due to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz? Anyways, we went ahead. A benefit in all this? My wife found if we re-did the hotel bookings with the uncertainty of the war and the ceasefire, prices were a lot less! ~~   Singapore immigration was impressive. You place your passport on a scanner, look at the camera and the system compares details and face with the visa application already submitted. That’s it – the turnstile opens and you’re done. No human interaction, no questions from an immigration official about purpose of v...