Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Way back in 2002, an Indian non-profit organization named Simputer Trust created by 7 scientists and engineers created the eponymous Simputer. It stood for “simple, inexpensive and multilingual people's computer”.   It included very-advanced-for-the-time features. Text-to-speech software. Linux operating system. Size of the Palm Pilot. A touch sensitive screen! Operable via a stylus. Even a simple handwriting recognition software. A serial port. USB connections. Both a color and a black and white (greyscale) version.   The creators hoped it would enable even the poor to get familiar with computers, and eventually, get onto the still emerging-in-India Internet. Agricultural and fertilizer info was one obvious use. The market could have been not just the poor - sales teams on the move, insurance agents on the go could have stored content on it (Remember, laptops were very rare and expensive; the smartphone and the tablet had not yet been invented).   S...

Horsepower. A unit of power. Devansh Malik tells the story behind it and it is very interesting.   When the steam engine was invented, it served one purpose only. For 50 years! “(A steam engine) did only one job: pumping water out of coal mines, which flooded quite often. They could only move up and down, which is perfect for a pump but useless for anything else.”   James Watt (“the same dude from your physics textbooks”) was a builder of things – barometers, compasses, toys, musical instruments etc. Once, someone asked him to fix a broken steam engine. Those initial steam engines were very inefficient. So Watt decided to both fix it and improve its design. “His version did the same amount of work while burning about 75% less coal. He also worked out a gear system that turned the engine’s up-and-down motion into a spinning one. Which meant a steam engine could now turn a wheel.”   This hugely expanded the possible uses and applications of the steam engin...

Another aspect described in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please is isolation.   As everyone orders meals, members of the same house begin to order at different times. Gone is the catching up time as a family. On a related note, as one interviewee told the author: “Coffee shops are no longer places to socialize. People come to cafes to be alone with their laptops.” Quick commerce makes going to the grocery store redundant. And with fewer people coming to the shop, some of them close down, setting off a cycle.   Unlike those of us who work at offices, schools or colleges, gig workers don’t even get to interact (much) with co-workers since they are all on the move. Plus, attrition is high, so even the few one may know switch work frequently. Interactions with HR are through the app only.   Loneliness and lack of human contact aside, this also leads to the “atomization” of the workers. If they don’t know each other, how can they possibly group up to raise grievanc...

Cueta. It came into the news recently (July, ’26) when an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 people swam or crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave within a couple of days.   Tomas Pueyo dug into what that was all about.   First, you need to know where Cueta is. No, though part of Spain, it is not in Europe. Rather, it lies on the African (Morrocco) side of the Mediterranean.   Since Cueta is adjoining Morrocco, which is much poorer than Spain, people have been trying (for decades) to get into Cueta as an entry into Spain (and eventually Europe) for a better life. So much easier than having to cross the Mediterranean. Unsurprisingly, the Morocco - Cueta border is heavily fenced, has barb wires, and is monitored tightly by Spain. Not at all easy to cross.   But… it is possible to swim across the border! The pic explains the route.   See how easy that is? But also, nothing new. People have been trying this for ages. And getting deported back. Doesn’t work...

Once upon a time, people weren’t sure how inheritance worked. At that time, the Lamarckian inheritance was a legitimate candidate – it said that organisms could pass on acquired traits to their descendants. In this view, a giraffe whose neck got longer by stretching in its lifetime would pass on the longer neck characteristic to its babies. Once Mendel’s findings were re-discovered, it was generally accepted that inheritance didn’t work that way.   Not Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet biologist. He still believed in Lamarckian inheritance. He merged that idea with his political support for communism, declaring that subjecting crops to the harsh "power of collectivism" and environmental conditioning, they would magically adapt and transform!   Well, it was a crazy view and that could have been the end of the story. Except Stalin supported Lysenko. Unsurprisingly, Lysenko’s career bloomed. Since this was communist USSR, those scientists who didn’t agree with the view espoused b...

The next emotion in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please is anxiety.   Delivery boys have to drive through congested streets. Might they have an accident? Could a cop catch them? If deliveries are late, would the company penalize them? Street dogs can be a menace. Sometimes, they have been robbed on the way. Or college kids gang up, take the food and then refuse to pay (always a risk with Cash on Delivery).   In the subcontinent, the extreme heat is another problem. Being on the road in such conditions can be problematic, though to be fair, alternate jobs too expose them to the same elements.   Then there are the odd weird customers. In places like Greater Noida, with villages juxtaposed by urban life, rural folks try and trick. Like ordering food and then cancelling the order at the last minute. The restaurant won’t take the food back, and knowing this, the villagers will often offer (lesser) cash to the delivery boy to give them the food. Some folks taste the foo...

William Harvey famously discovered the circulatory system – the flow of blood from heart to the various body parts, and back. A lot of discoveries in science needed the relevant equipment to be invented first (think of Galileo and the telescope), but not in Harvey’s case, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Song of the Cell . “He used the simplest physiological experiments to understand the workings of the heart.” Let’s look at how Harvey went about it.   He punctured the arteries of animals when the blood had drained from them, “the veins were also eventually emptied of blood”. From this, he concluded that arteries and veins must be connected in a circuit.   When he pinched the aorta, the heart swelled up with blood. And when he pinched the main veins, the heart was drained of blood. This implied that arteries lead blood from the heart, and veins lead blood to the heart.   When Harvey examined the wall between the left and right side of the heart, he f...

Yes, admits Vandana Vasudevan in OTP Please , the gig economy has its ugly side of oppression too. And it’s a lot more complicated that you might imagine.   For starters, those ratings affect gig workers opaquely : “Every action is judged by people they can’t see, according to rules they don’t know.”   There is also a systemic bias against older workers. No, not due to their age. Rather, based on how long they’ve been with the company. Why? Shouldn’t longer term employees be valued more as they know the setup and expectations? Yes, but that gets countervailed by the fact that they become eligible for additional incentives as they stay longer. So the company’s algorithms reduce the amount of work assigned to them as they approach those milestones. As a result, their income reduces (since it was tied to number of orders fulfilled), and they end up leaving before they hit the milestone. Sneaky, right? “While capitalism hid exploitation behind a labour contract, digi...

Anurag Minus Verma. Yes, that’s his name on Internet posts and his books! He’s a Dalit, and it was his joke-cum-commentary-on-society to “drop” the surname, a dead giveaway on caste (Kind of like how Tamilians dropped surnames long ago).   I could relate 100% with his post on travelling to South East Asia. “A few years ago, when you said “Thailand” to an Indian man, his face would undergo a minor muscular transformation. A smirk would appear on face that can be interpreted as half-guilt for the sins he’s committed or half-anticipation for the sins he desires to commit.” In recent years though, things changed. “Flights got cheaper. Visas on arrival made it incredibly easy for Indians to travel.”   Suddenly, Indians were travelling all around. And they began to realize their preconceived notions of South East Asia were all wrong, they landed “expecting moral chaos but finding civic order”. “The driver doesn’t honk. He doesn’t curse. He simply drives in his lane...

One of the chapters in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please is about an obvious benefit to all those online services, namely freedom. “Online food delivery gives urban working women a breather from the non-stop treadmill of meal preparation…” Or when unannounced guests popup. Or for that older era scenario when they even came “from other towns and staying on for days to watch a temple festival”.   Bachelors (male and female) working in a city, coming home late, find the convenience of being to get food by clicking a few buttons a lifesaver. I could relate to this line: “Young migrants to the city have rarely cooked because they are too busy studying or working. Technology has replaced the old support systems that offered comfort to those away from home.”   Home delivery liberates Muslim women in the subcontinent from the nuisance of putting on a burqa every time they step out. Such use cases are endless and endlessly South Asia specific.   Only when one goes...

The Southern Punk article’s heading was an obvious click-bait because it read “Are We on the Verge of World War III?”. Set aside the provocative headline, the article itself is quite well-written.   The article’s focus is on the eternal starting point for big wars – Europe. Yes, the Ukraine War. Many NATO countries support and supply arms to Ukraine. North Korea sends weapons and troops to fight along with the Russian. This war already has many countries involved, far more than the Iran War.   The trigger for this article was an explosive drone that was was found at Leipzig airport in Germany, near Ukrainian cargo planes that support NATO. The obvious suspect is Russia. But here’s the crazy part – the drone is Ukrainian! It is possible (not proven) that it is a Ukrainian drone captured by the Russians who then sent it to Germany. What happens if German investigation concludes that it was sent by the Russians? Would that activate NATO’s “attack on one is an attack on a...

The next emotional theme in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please was on gratitude.   How many gig workers are there in India? It’s impossible to know the numbers, simply because people will enrol but for how long are they actually working? COVID-19 forced millions who lost their jobs to sign up as drivers and delivery boys. But it’s not all bad. No more lining up outside employment agencies. No discrimination based on caste or region or religion. No interviews or job applications. “You upload a driver’s license on to the app on your smartphone and you’re on.”   For others, gig work is actually halka kaam (light work) compared to other alternatives like backbreaking labour. Finding a rider doesn’t involve driving around hoping to find someone. Others appreciate the opportunity for stop-gap employment until they find something better.   PickMe in Sri Lanka even offered insurance coverage for drivers. During COVID-19, such instances weren’t all that uncommon. Com...

A while back, they found several kids were bringing alcohol to a particular school in Bangalore. A kid from that school joined my 15 yo daughter’s school this year. Like so many kids, this new kid started with a cocky attitude extolling all the virtues of his old school and mocking things in the new one. After a point, the teacher got irritated and snapped at him, “This isn’t your old school. If you bring alcohol here, you’ll get rusticated”.   When I narrated this to a colleague (with no kids) at work, he was shocked. “And to think”, he said, “We took pride in thinking that we were the worst batch ever!”. ~~   Inevitably, alcohol at one school puts pressure on other schools to check if they had this problem too. In parallel, the teachers tried to instil some fear by threatening to issue TC’s (Transfer Certificate) to the kids. It might have had some effect had they used the threat occasionally and also based on the severity of the offense. Instead, they used the thr...

The next chapter in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please is the yang to the yin of the previous blog . Pleasure was the emotion in that blog, so this one is about guilt.   If everyone is ordering in, what happened to maa ka khana ? When kids want to order in, the mother wonders whether her cooking is bland? Is the food somehow lacking in something? Sometimes, she’ll try to hard-sell the nutritional value of home cooked meals – so many grams of protein in paruppu usli or arhar dal . To no avail. The argument of price doesn’t make any dent, since one can find food delivery at all price points.   It is a fact that a “nutrition transition” is underway. The thalis of India, the equivalent Thakali of Nepal are being replaced. Low-fat, high-fibre foods are replaced by ultra-processed foods high in saturated fats, sodium and sugar. Weight gain, gastric trouble, bacterial infection, diabetes, high BP and heart disease lurk in the future thanks to this dietary change as well as the...

Vandana Vasudevan organizes her book, OTP Please with one emotion per chapter. The first one is, unsurprisingly, pleasure.   Gen Z and Millennials are more willing to experiment with their food, try new things. Continental, North Indian, South Indian, Mughlai, Chinese – those have been there for ages. Add Italian, Korean, Thai, Japanese, Afghan, Lebanese, Bengali, Kashmiri, Rajasthani, North Eastern, Goan, Punjabi… Because hey, YOLO – You Only Live Once. “Sushi was never expected to work in India… (raw fish, after all)… Our chefs have… created sushi rolls which have cooked fish and masala!” When the author asked for masala tea in Sri Lanka, she was asked to choose between fresh, powdered and condensed milk! Variety, spice, life.   Not all combos work. Over time, you figure it out: “Pizzas may not be hot, naans wilt, and chaats turn soggy. However, through practice, one learns what works from where.”   This willingness to order in and try new food has resulted in the rise...

Gig workers. Vandana Vasudevan explains the original meaning of the term in her awesome book on the topic, OTP Please . It was coined for jazz musicians in the US, who carried their instruments with them and performed wherever anyone was willing to pay them. Ad hoc work, ad hoc payment, not employed. Today it refers to the delivery boys of Amazon to Zepto, the cab and auto drivers of Uber and Namma Yatri , the handymen (and women) of Urban Clap.   Her book is about gig work only in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal), so it is very relatable and yet surprising in the details. Bhutan is the only miss; though by the time she was wrapping up her book, even they had food delivery apps!   In the digital world, everything is available via the smartphone. “We are wonderstruck, as Yashodha might have been when she asked her toddler to open his mouth and saw the entire brahmaand (universe) inside it.” Never before in history has so much been dem...

There are two broad kinds of problems in science, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Song of the Cell . He calls the first category the “eye in the sandstorm” problem. That’s the kind of field where there is immense confusion (the sandstorm) and no pattern or map on how to navigate exists. “Quantum theory serves as a good example…. A shifted paradigm about this atomic/ subatomic world was required to get out of the sandstorm.”   The second category is the inverse of the above, what he calls the “sand in the eye” problem. “Everything makes perfect sense, except one ugly fact that just won’t fit the beautiful theory. It irritates the scientist like a sand grain lodged in the eye – why, why, she asks herself, won’t this one irritating contradictory fact go away?” He uses that as the runway to explain such a problem from the world of neurons, but that requires you to read the book to understand things. So I will cite an easily understandable example from the world of physics – when Me...

Pranay Kotasthane’s starts off with a deliberately provocative statement after the forced resignation of the Union Education Minister recently. “Let me propose an idea that sounds radical but isn’t: India does not need a Union Education Ministry.”   He elaborates why. How did the constitution originally envision education? “General education was a State List subject, meaning that states had exclusive legislative power over schools and colleges.” But yes, the center had control over central universities (AMU, BHU), certain technical institutions it considered as being of national importance and a few other areas. All central ministry ideas on school education were advisory, and states could reject or accept them as they wished.   Like so many things, all that changed during the Emergency. The 42 nd amendment added “education, including technical education, medical education and universities” to the Concurrent (center) List. And with that: “The Union gained le...