Viswanathan K's Thoughts

What did all those princes do post-independence? Several of them joined politics. Their success rate (getting elected) was very high, at 80%, writes John Zubrzycki in Dethroned . “(They) were able to exploit traditional ties based on rank, caste and economic dependence.”   At first, they aligned with the Congress, to ensure their privy purses and privileges remained. But with success, the bitterness that some felt, the betrayal of some promises, led several to switch sides. Vijayaraje Scindia was the most prominent switch. She even “ruled” over ten parliamentary constituencies, where nobody could win unless she “approved” them. Many of the erstwhile princes of Orrisa, Gujarat and Rajasthan also fought and won elections against the Congress. Gayatri Devi from Jaipur won by the largest margin (at that time).   Nehru, never a fan of privy purses, had, from 1953 onwards (after Patel’s death), tried coaxing the princes to voluntarily give it up. He argued that giving so m...

India’s policy on minerals. A bone of contention between states and the Center. I started reading a book on “wicked problems”, i.e., problems that are very hard to solve yet hugely consequential. (Wicked problems can’t be blamed on just politicians or oligarchs. They have multiple aspects, often contradictory. Any proposed solution impacts too many stakeholders, and there is never a perfect solution). Mineral policy falls in that category of wicked problem. ~~   This Policy Mandala post dives into it. It starts with an example – Coal. Something used to produce electricity that is then used across the country, with enormous second, third and N-th order benefits. “This creates a basic contradiction in India’s mineral economy: the resource is found locally, its value is realised nationally, but many costs of extraction are borne by the states and communities where mining takes place.”   Such a scenario then raises valid questions: “ Who should control mineral res...

As more and more princely states signed the Instrument of Accession, Menon was elated that the Balkanization of India had been averted. Patel would describe such handovers as voluntary and said the rulers would be remembered with respect and admiration for their choice. But, as is clear, many of them signed under pressure, under threats, under explicit and implicit hints that post-British rule, local uprisings would happen to overthrow the rulers (it was left unsaid whether the Congress would instigate such uprisings, but that was obvious), says John Zubrzycki in Dethroned .   Ok, so most of the 565 princely states were now joining India. How best to integrate them into the political union? The first step that Patel and VP Menon came up with was to combine the smaller states with other larger states like Bombay or Orrisa. Only the really large princely states like Gwalior and Baroda were allowed to stay as separate states.   Mountbatten agreed with the idea, even claim...

Since I’ve already covered Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir in other blogs, I won’t repeat the tales of those princely states in this series. In this one, I’ll cover a few of the other states though. ~~   Travancore . A well-run princely state. With access to the main trades of the Indian Ocean. Resource rich – teak, sandalwood, tea, spices, rubber, mica. 47% literacy (three times higher than British India). Progressive in many ways. Plus, it had the world’s second largest monazite reserves. What’s that? A rare earth whose by-product was thorium, a nuclear fuel. Very important in a world that had just entered the atomic age.   Thus, it was a good candidate for independence post-Britain, writes John Zubrzycki in Dethroned . Unsurprisingly, its dewan , CP Ramaswami Aiyar, announced to do just that. Nehru threatened an economic blockade and promised Travancore would collapse within 3 months. In response, Travancore banned the Congress from the state.   On the monazite reserv...

I used to think the Holocaust became a well-known event (in the West) right after the second World War ended, when the concentration camps were found, when the Nurmeburg trials happened. Which is why it came as a shock to me when Malcolm Gladwell wrote about that aspect (when did the Holocaust became universally known in the West) in his book Revenge of the Tipping Point .   European historians barely mentioned the holocaust in books written in 1961. Lots of details of the two World Wars, hardly a few mentions of the holocaust. Contrast that with how it is talked about in recent decades! Turns out even the holocaust survivors didn’t talk much about it, even to their own children. Why remains a speculation. Maybe they weren’t sure if the Christian majority around them would take kindly to be reminded of it, maybe they didn’t want to keep reliving those horrors. Back then, Jewish groups too didn’t want to paint the image of Jews as eternal victims, always needing to be protected ...

VP Menon was happy to be the behind-the-scenes man. Let Patel be the face. Menon was also astute enough to use flattery to persuade Mountbatten (“earning the gratitude of Indians for generations” by “achieving the basic unity of the country”) to tell the princes that they would have to pick a country – India or Pakistan; that independence was not an option. There was another reason he (and Patel) wanted Mountbatten involved – failure could be laid at his door; and everyone knew how much Mountbatten cared for glory and posterity, so he could be trusted to do his best once his name was publicly tied to the endeavour, explains John Zubrzycki in Dethroned .   But it became evident many princes didn’t like the options. Patel told Mountbatten not to worry, that India could(?) take them by force once the British left. Mountbatten wasn’t so sure – some of the bigger states had armies, were well-armed. He told Patel that such an approach might lead to civil war. One version of events sa...

A key aspect to how things played out once Lord Mountbatten became Viceroy was the fact that the British PM, Attlee, wanted to close shop in India. Quickly. He wanted Britain to focus on rebuilding itself after World War II. Therefore, he gave plenipotentiary powers to the new Viceroy. Discretionary powers. London need not be consulted. Unheard of powers, writes John Zubrzycki in Dethroned .   A Cabinet Mission led by Cripps, in 1946, proposed India start as a union of all provinces, both Hindu- and Muslim-majority, and princely states. Foreign relations, defense, and communications would be common policy. Post-independence, they could all choose their future course.   This set the cat among the pigeons. The princely states (rightly) worried that the new Indian government would have no reason to allow them their personal rule. Many saw which way the wind was blowing, and started to think of how best to secure whatever they could. Others, however, thought they could cha...

I was amused that a North Indian like Devansh Malik could write about how Udupi restaurants and hotels spread across the country (It’s because he has lived in Udupi for 2 years).   As someone who lived there, he knows the local cuisine: “No, I’m not talking about the typical dosa, idli, sambhar kind of south indian comfort food. That’s what most people (read: my fellow North Indians) picture.” The local cuisine specialities of Udupi are all non-veg . Chicken ghee roast. Kori roti . Chicken sukka with some neer dosa . Fish curries. And yet, he says Udupi restaurants are almost always vegetarian! “They don’t serve the non-veg food I just described.” What was the story behind all this? How come everywhere? Why only veg? ~~   The tale starts with Udupi, the temple town, built around the Sri Krishna Matha. “Krishna is worshiped as Anna Brahma, the god of food. And feeding people is one of the core religious duties of the temple. Every single day, the temple k...

John Zubrzycki’s book, Dethroned , is the tale of how the princely states were integrated into India at independence by the combo of Sardar Patel and VP Menon. Patel was a mix of “charm and persuasion with coercion”, complemented well by VP Menon’s “skills as a tactician”.   The terms and conditions of accession kept changing during that chaotic period. Mountbatten started off by saying the princely states would have authority on all matters, except defense, foreign affairs and communication. In the same breath, Mountbatten also added that while in theory, the princely states would have a choice, in practice, a majority of the 565 states were geographically and inextricably tied to be part of India. Why no mention of Pakistan here? Because, as this map shows, almost all the princely states lay on the India side. Also, the few princely states on the Pakistan side were Muslim-majority and Muslim-ruled, so Jinnah wasn’t too worried. Contrast that with India, where several princely...

The last topic in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please is courage.   If gig workers cannot unite (they aren’t employees, and they don’t meet each other, nor is there a physical office), how can/do they hope to improve things? Well, some of them have turned activists getting in touch with MLA’s and sometimes CM’s to ask for upper limits on the number of cabs. They tell the government of the risk of so many jobs being tied to private companies that are often unprofitable for years on end and run the risk of shutting shop.   Some have lobbied for new laws to protect and give benefits to gig workers, like insurance and health benefits. Social media can be used as a forum to vent about the worst practices, and sometimes it helps move the needle.   Such gig work related problems (and solutions) aren’t unique to the subcontinent. Europe has its share of both problems and attempted solutions for gig workers. Sometimes, they flow from one region to the other.   Som...

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...