Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Euphemisms. Often, they originate as a way of saying something in a way that is not considered offensive by others (people in general, religious authorities, governments). Like this example from Eleanor Stern’s article : “Consider the rate at which words for concepts like “toilet” are replaced and euphemized: ladies’ room, lavatory, privy, W.C., washroom.” There is even a term for it: “In linguistics, this would be called a “replacement vocabulary”. Or as Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert said: “A familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive.” In other words, taboos drive the creation of new words.”   In the Age of the Internet, there’s a new driver for euphemisms as social media censors certain content. It might be because that company (Facebook, Twitter etc) is for and against certain topics. Or because society’s mood calls for that stance. Or because governments demand it.   But social media is just filtering by algorithms...

In the previous blog , based on Prof. Karthik Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development , we went into the problems with India’s education system. This one is based on solutions he proposes and/or has seen to work.   Contract teachers often work out well. Because they are not permanent (unlike government teachers), they can be fired or replaced, which incentivizes them to work harder. Also, they are usually from the community, which means they care more, know the kids personally, and thus produce better outcomes.   Take the ITK ( Illam Thedi Kalvi ) programme in Tamil Nadu. During COVID, in 2021, around 2 lakh volunteers were paid a modest stipend (₹1,000 per month) to conduct remedial classes at schools for 60-90 minutes a day. Anyone could come free of cost. ITK was scaled up to cover 30 lakh students within a year. Studies showed it was “highly effective in bridging learning losses”, and the benefits far exceeded the money spent. In addition, it added to women...

Prof. Karthik Muralidharan wrote this very long (~900 pages) but excellent book, Accelerating India’s Development . One chapter is about education. This is the first of a two-part blog based on just that one chapter.   At independence, India paid more attention to tertiary education over primary education. This was because a technical workforce was considered vital for India’s modernization. In more recent times, while enrolment for primary education has exploded, the outcome (what they learnt) is still very poor.   The government’s approach is to focus on inputs (money, infrastructure, teacher count, mid-day meals, books and computers), not on harder to quantify but more important outputs . Take improvements in school infrastructure. While it may make the learning experience more pleasant, it doesn’t translate to better learning if the “teaching and learning processes are ineffective”. Computers are often kept under lock and key and never allowed to be used, for fear...

Economic growth v/s cost to the environment. In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane takes a stab at this very complex and important topic.   One , he says, the way a $2,000 per capita income country looks at the environment cannot be the same as the way a $50,000 per capita income country. Because the State doesn’t have the resources to enforce many measures (just framing laws doesn’t help). And because people cannot be condemned to stay poor because, hey, the alternative is bad for the environment.   Two , don’t create some clearance process that evaluates all projects for environmental impact. Because the State doesn’t have the resources for it. Clearance of projects will become the bottleneck and even worse, it will lead to corruption in clearing projects. It would be better to set limits on pollution or environmental damage; and then penalize companies that breach them. The approach should be like how tax returns are evaluated – randomly, because the State simply...

In the 90’s, after VP Singh had opened the Pandora’s box of reservation (Mandal), it set off another political wave – Ayodhya, Hindutva, or what came to be called Kamandal (the brass vessel to carry water, carried by sadhu s).   Today, after almost a decade of rule of Kamandal , we seem to have a revival of Mandal again, writes Raghu S Jaitley. As leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi criticized the budget saying: “The government of being of the forward castes, by the forward castes and for the forward castes. ” The Opposition is right in demanding that the census be conducted, but they also insist on a caste-based census. And then the Supreme Court passed a verdict: “permitting sub-classification for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in reservations by state governments. This will allow state governments to reserve seats for specific sub-groups within the quotas that are aimed at SC and ST communities based on the relative deprivation of those sub-groups.” Jaite...

What is GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and why does it matter? Pranay Kotasthane tries to answer that in Missing in Action . Until the Great Depression in the US in the 1920’s and 30’s, governments didn’t bother about it. But the magnitude of the economic catastrophe forced governments to act. But without data, how could they know the right measures or the areas in which actions were needed?   Therefore, the US started to create mechanisms to keep track of the “health” of the overall economy. This need only increased during World War II as the US needed to balance spending on war expenses with domestic needs. Thus, by the end of World War II, the idea of GDP as the metric of economic status and its use in helping decide government actions – where/when to step in, which sectors were doing well or poorly – was widely accepted.   GDP has many failings. Growth in GDP doesn’t indicate “quality of growth” – was the growth because of war? Polluting industries? Eco-friendly acti...

Albert Einstein, despite being a founder of quantum mechanics, never liked the theory. One particular aspect of it rankled him. But first, some context. Since Newton, physics had been exact. F = ma. No ambiguity. As more and more laws were discovered with similar exactitude, people became convinced that the universe worked like clockwork. Precise laws governed everything.   Quantum mechanics overturned the clockwork universe. By stating that uncertainty is inherent to nature. Not because we don’t know enough details. Not because our measurement systems have limitations. But because that is just how nature is. (At the tiniest of tiniest levels . At the bigger levels we experience, Newtonian physics still rules). Einstein hated this uncertainty-is-inherent-to-nature idea, and it is captured in his famous line: “God does not play dice.” He felt that  natural laws could not possibly be like the throw of dice, with its inherent randomness and probabilities.   In...