Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In Nexus , Yuval Noah Harari uses the phrase “naïve view of information”. What does he mean by that? It is the belief that information is a good thing, and the more of it that we have/get, the better. Information, in this view, leads to truth which then leads to wisdom.   That is not true. Corrupt politicians get re-elected; film stars remain popular no matter what they do… even when the information is available to everyone. It is because, says Harari, people don’t connect to a person; rather, they connect to a story about the person. ~~   The other view of information, throughout history, is that order is critical for humans to thrive. Chaos and anarchy are to be avoided at all costs. For order (and thus governance) to exist, a group of people need to feel some sense of unity. Hard facts rarely serve that purpose. Good fiction, on the other hand, does the job splendidly. Why? Because the truth is always complicated, messy and has its share of dark episodes. “In ...

There is a lot of talk on if/how Modi has overturned Nerhru’vian doctrine on Israel as a result of the ongoing Gaza war. On foreign policy matters, countries act based on self-interest, so I don’t agree with that view. Of course, in domestic politics, the right will act as if Modi overturned Nehru’vian policy, and the left will behave as if yet another Nehru’vian achievement is being dismantled. But that is just politics as usual.   Pranay Kotasthane though says that nothing significant has changed in India’s Israel-Palestine policy now. He bases this on a Dutchman, Nicolas Blarel’s book on India’s policy on Israel since, believe it or not, 1922!   Between 1922 and 1947 , the Khilafat movement meant that India’s freedom struggle suddenly did care about matters in faraway (modern day) Middle East (See my earlier blog on that). As the Congress and the Muslim League jockeyed for the support of Indian Muslims, the Congress decided the smart move was to oppose the Zioni...

“Why do phones ring?” That is how Ellis Hamburger’s foreword to Golden Krishna’s Best Interface is No Interface starts! To draw our attention, obviously: “They sounded like alarms, shrill electrical burps and gurgles that duly represented the urgency.” That was when the phone was invented. With the advent of the cell phone, and now the smartphone, the sound of a phone ringing is annoying, even disruptive. “Why couldn’t someone just text to see if I’m available instead of calling and interrupting what I’m doing?”   Hamburger points out the solution of one app, Snapchat. You try chatting with someone on Snapchat, and only if they respond will the app allow you to call. While not perfect (there are many scenarios where this isn’t approach isn’t OK), it certainly is an improvement in many cases.   But, as Hamburger says, not all old interfaces are wrong or bad. Sometimes, the new interface can indeed be an improvement: “The ‘Hey, want to chat?’ text replaces th...

So what happened to Francisco Franco post-World War II? The Hourly History book continues into that phase. A man and a nation that could have been international pariahs instead traded on their anti-communist sentiments: “The pact stipulated the United States would provide Spain with financial and military aid as long as Spain allowed them to create American military bases and station troops on Spanish soil.”   In 1956, Morocco gained independence. It was a huge blow to Spain, setting of something like an identity crisis. Which in turn triggered student protests all over the country. What did the country stand for? Where was it headed? What plans did the government have? Franco buckled under the pressure: “(He was) showing a willingness for political change, even if he was not completely willing to step down from power.” Even while he wouldn’t step down, he still made structural changes in government that in turn led to reforms in “foreign investment, industrialization, e...

The Ukraine war is one of the very few things on which the Left and the Right in India seem to agree – it is the West’s fault, both sides feel. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, while the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, not only did NATO continue to exist, it even set about expanding and absorbing the ex-communist states. How long could Russia tolerate NATO’s expansion, goes the thinking, even as it was inching closer and closer to Russia’s doorstep?   Has this become a pivotal moment? The moment when Indian public opinion starts to get increasingly critical of more and more aspects of American foreign policy? The thought occurred as I was reading R Prasannan’s scathing commentary on the passing away of US Foreign Minister-equivalent from Clinton’s era, Madeleine Albright. The article starts off guns blazing: “Madeline Albright passed away, unmourned in India. No surprise. No American has hurt us more than she did, save Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger who sent nuclear war...

In 1694, the East India Company was just a corporation, not the rulers of India. Their operations in India were subject to the permission of the Mughals. Keep that in mind while you read what follows.   In that year, a man named Henry Every joined a privately sponsored British expedition to the Americas, writes Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind . But the ship got blocked in Spain indefinitely. With no end to the stoppage, their salaries no longer being paid, and rumours swirling that the men might be sold into slavery, Every and some of the crew took over the ship. It had now become a pirate ship.   Instead of going to the Caribbean though, Every made the fateful decision to round the Cape of Good Hope and find his prey among the trading ships between Arab lands and India. He ended up picking a much larger and wealthy ship called the Ganj-i-Sawai . Returning from the hajj , and laden with enormous wealth, it also had many women on board. Every’s ship shouldn’t ha...

In this blog, I’ll go over Kanti Bajpai’s point from his book, India Versus China , that “power balancing” among actors not limited to India and China has meant that they’ve always been on “opposite sides”. By that, he means that the “India – China – US – USSR/Russia quadrilateral” has constantly “shaped Indian and Chinese choices”.   Between 1947 and 1958, Bajpai says the two countries were busy with the task of learning to govern their own countries, and it was thus a period of entente. While India tried to remain non-aligned in the Cold War, China found the US at its doorstep thanks to the Korean war. And so they leaned on the USSR to keep the Americans at bay.   By the late 50’s, China and the USSR fell apart – they disagreed on who was the leader of the communist movement, the Soviets had stopped supporting China’s nuclear weapons program, and they even fought a brief war against each other. During the 1962 war, the US sent its nuclear weapon armed aircraft carrie...

Kanti Bajpai’s book, India Versus China , is very informative on why the two countries have been neutral at best, and adversarial at all other times. In ancient times, the Himalayas were an insurmountable barrier. As Vikram Seth wrote in his travelogue through China: “The two countries, despite their contiguity, have had almost no contact in the course of history… the heartlands of the two great cultures have been almost untouched by each other.” Sure, a few well known travellers moved around, Buddhism spread, but there was no ruler-to-ruler contact nor any significant trade between the two. Thus, neither side has any positive memory of the other. And contact during the imperialist era had Indians as part of the British attack force on China…   Since independence, China views India the way we view Pakistan – the frustration that nothing can be done to settle things once and for all with a vastly weaker neighbour. Why not? The Himalayas prevent any full-scale Chinese invasio...

I read this excellent history-by-the-hour book on Iran , from its independence onwards. It is full of flip-flops; so brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride.   Unlike India, the British never let go off Iran at independence – yes, because of oil. The Anglo-Iranian company was minting money for Britain, and left little for the Iranians. In 1952, its Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, transferred its ownership to the Iranian government. A furious Britain enforced a naval embargo on Iran. They also tried to get US support, but President Truman refused. His successor, Eisenhower flipped American policy and agreed to support Britain. Via the usual method – fomenting a regime change.   Meanwhile, the British blockade hurt Iran, and the masses became increasingly unhappy with Mosaddegh . The Shah of Iran, working with the CIA, dismissed Mosaddegh. But the people hated the Shah even more, and they came out in support of Mosaddegh. The Shah fled to Italy. The CIA began to pla...

In his book on the road to quantum computing , John Gribbin made this remark about the multiverse: “In (David) Deutsch’s words, ‘all fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.’ So all of Jane Austen’s stories recount real events in parallel realities to our own; but The Lord of the Rings does not.” By that token, many things Calvin did in Bill Watterson’s books must happen some parallel universe. Or worse…   Calvin, like all boys his age, found girls repulsive. This 8 yo friend of my 10 yo daughter announced that she and a similar aged boy were now a couple. The older girls made fun of her singing the same K-I-S-S-I-N-G song Hobbes is singing above. The 8 yo brazenly said she didn’t care, and romped around holding hands with her “boyfriend”.   Kids are notorious for drawing totally wrong + self-serving conclusions: We have 2 car park slots, and had rented one of them to a neighbor. During play, their kid announced that since his car was in the sl...

In an earlier blog , we looked at sensory substitution capabilities of the brain. In Livewired , David Eagleman next looks at the brain’s capability to deal with sensory enhancement , even addition of entirely new senses.   He cites the case of a lady who lost her sense of balance (due to an inner ear problem). So a helmet that read the tilt of her head was placed on her head that would send tilt/balance signals via her tongue (her ear channel wasn’t working, remember?), and voila! Her brain learnt to “understand the strangely routed information” and her ability to balance improved tremendously.   In another instance, a color blind artist attached a device that converted color to sound signals delivered via “bone conduction behind his ear”. Now he can “see” and differentiate colors. Even better, he can see colors beyond the normal spectrum that us regular mortals can see, because the range of his color detection sensors are better than our eyes!   Impressive...

Moderna and Pfizer are expected to make $18 and $15 billion in revenue this year respectively, thanks to their COVID-19 vaccines. Guess how much Astra-Zeneca, the British company, will make? Zero profit. That’s right, AZ sells at cost price. And yet, see the amount of flak and negative publicity they draw in the West? Sarah Boseley looked into the reasons .   In America, the reasons are not political. Rather, it’s based on their (mis)handling of an early adverse reaction during clinical trial way back in September. In the UK, the trail was stopped and restarted within days. The US regulatory body though felt it had not been told of the issue early enough. The situation was also complicated, says Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmacoepidemiology in London by the intent of the trial: “I think that some of the difficulties were that the trials were being set up by Oxford to answer public health questions, whereas very clearly Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna’s trials in the US were...

As India nears the completion of Week 1 of a nationwide Coronavirus lockdown, in places like Bangalore, one can see folks cite what other countries are doing and suggesting we do the same in our apartment complexes. Are they justified? Or over-reacting? Are the countries being compared, well, comparable? First, let me call out my source for the analysis below. It’s this site that captures Coronavirus stats from all countries . It captures infection counts, recoveries, deaths and active cases on a daily basis and also plots graphs of the same over the last few weeks and months . On some topics, I do see patterns across countries. On others, hardly. And in yet others, patterns seem limited to race (Asians, Europeans etc), or to population size, or to climate. But the key is that one can’t be sure and no pattern is universal… yet I find most people talk as if there is certainty on all such matters. Take China and South Korea : only 4.2% and 2.9% of infected cases have res...

Does Trump have a vision, a doctrine towards which he works? (Forget the “how”, the question is about the “what”). Or does he do whatever catches his attention next, gets fixated on it, until the next thing comes along? (North Korea yesterday, trade war with China today, who knows what tomorrow). I found this article, The Trump Doctrine , by Bruno Maçães intriguing: 1)       Trump’s inauguration speech was odd, he writes, because: “ It left out the core of what an elected politician in the United States would include: an appeal to the universal principles of freedom, democracy and equality guiding America in its action(s).” 2)      But it may have been an indicator that Trump wants to copy whatever works elsewhere, including China’s policy of achieving economic growth by any and all means necessary. 3)      He may also think of Europe as a “has-been”, a continent which in the last 3 decades, has “produced a ...

Back in 2008, Chris Anderson wrote an oft-quoted article on what he called the “End of Theory” (exaggerated for effect) in science. Here’s the summary of his article: -          The scientific way has been to come up with models that describe reality; then test those models for any errors or mismatches with what is observed. -          Conversely, he said: “Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two.,,Data without a model is just noise.” -          Then came Anderson’s kicker: in an age where we were getting enormous amounts of data about just about everything (aka Big Data), he said that “this approach to science — hypothesize, model, t...

Do intellectuals engaging in public life have a positive effect? That’s the topic of Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s book Thinking in Public . Do public intellectuals act as “public guardians of truth and justice and opponents of political corruption”? Or do intellectuals, as Jon Baskin wonders , become too prescriptive? Are they so convinced that they have the answers that they dismiss “public opinion as little more than gossip” and devalue the “ability of individuals to make informed political choices”? Are intellectuals willing to hear contradictory ideas, and then to integrate the valid points of their opponents? Or do they act as if they have all the answers, and think in terms of “accomplishment of pre-established tasks, rather than as an ongoing argument involving perennial questions about what we value, and why”? Traditionally, the role of intellectuals has been that of “agitating against unpopular state policy/conduct”, writes MK Raghavendra . But in India, they are now up ...

Often, to understand the events of a period, one has to be given context: what was the value system of the day? What was taken as obviously true? Or the “right” thing to be doing? That’s obvious; but it came as a shock to me to see that it can be true even when analyzing seemingly recent events. Like the infamous sterilization drive of Sanjay Gandhi & Co. In his book Imagining India , former Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani says that as recently as the mid-twentieth century, even the West was fearful of the Malthusian population bomb, namely that population would grow much faster than food supply. India and China were watched with the utmost fear on this front. In that age, sterilization of the unfit and termination of “defective” babies were considered reasonable even in the West. Is it really a surprise then that both Sanjay Gandhi in India and the Chinese government enforced population control? Hell, as recently as 1983, Indira Gandhi and China’s family planning minister recei...

I have heard how all kids these days get awards at almost any event the school organizes. I disapprove. Strongly. Very strongly. How is it OK to tell every kid that they are just as good as everyone else? At anything they try? This seems to be a weird practice we have imported from the West of late (I don’t remember anyone awarding awards to everyone when I was a kid). And so I read with interest Molly Knefel’s article titled Trophy Season . She would explain the West’s justification for this practice. Or so I hoped. She has 2 reasons: 1)       She says that branding a kid a “winner” or a “loser” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; and so we should avoid those terms by awarding everyone. But that makes no sense at all. A kid doesn’t do better because he is called a winner . Rather, he is called a winner because he did better than the rest . How insane does one have to be to not get that? 2)      The other reason is only slightly...

When I thought of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I (obviously) thought of it as an engineer (disorder, entropy, blah blah). But no more. Thanks to this amusing and profound take by Steven Pinker, a non-science guy, who listed that very law as the scientific term/concept that deserves to be known widely ! So what makes the Second Law worth knowing? Pinker points out the psychological benefits of knowing this law! “The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.” The Second Law answers or rather, flips the why-poverty question on its head: “Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter ...

A few years back, I’d written about the talk that Nandan Nilekani , the man behind Aadhar, gave on the reasons for yet another ID at my office. In his book Imagining India , he has one section on digitization/electronification initiatives in India over the decades. The first attempt to computerize the passport department in 1986 “got stuck in a quagmire of resistance from department officials”. That being the general attitude, most attempts in those days were “covert, backdoor operations”. The needle was moving, albeit very slowly… -          Liberalization in 1991 brought out the need for easy ways to monitor our institutions. The Harshad Mehta scam brought matters to a head. The BSE and its brokers fought any digitization measures tooth and nail. Ok then, said SEBI, we’ll just create a new stock exchange, the NSE, which will be digitized from the get go. The NDSL was next and “demat” became the norm. All this increased investor confidenc...