Isn’t it funny?

I grew up in the then Madras city, Kanchipuram, Kanpur (after getting to be a half adult), then, as a full adult (please indulge me), in Jaipur (and still maturing), Mumbai,  and now, at the near-fag end of my life, in the suburbs of Thiruchirapalli, all in India. We enjoyed, repeat enjoyed, summer temperatures of 40^oC plus, I stress plus.

In 1991, I travelled nearly two days in an Indian Railways train in a not-airconditioned coach in the second week of May and went through the baking ovens of southern and central India, not to mention that I alighted in Delhi, the cauldron it was at that time of the year. I came out alive! I took care of myself as best as I could, thanks to my mother who knew a lot in this department.  

Yes, if nature thinks you deserve nothing less, all you can do is enjoy it. As some idiot said about something else some years ago, no point complaining about it.

In between, I spent, more than twelve years near abouts the Ohio River Valley where, if not the heat, the humidity kills you.

I have survived all these weather-wise almost-outliers, from the perspective of denizens of the developed world.

Now I read how France is under a heat wave. Oh, I pity the French for experiencing 37-38 degree Celsius temperatures! Oh, England (not Scotland) is on the verge of hitting 40^oC, and a huge song and dance is being made about it.

The rails may buckle under the heat, some rail people warn you in London. Metro services are going on leave, as they need their summer breaks! (Doubts about their brakes?)

About two decades ago, upwards of 3,000 people died in France due to record breaking heat, for those time. Now again, the records are being broken, but France appears to be prepared for this record-breaking performance.

France cannot complain it had not been warned. Perhaps it will not. But, why did England not learn from the French? Learn from the French? Yuk, I am better dead.

There is a recorded anecdote of two explorers setting off on a trek through the desert Australian outbacks, much against their friends’ advice. They were also told to take the help of the aboriginals they could meet, particularly about encountering and overcoming the heat the region is famous for. They could care less – gone mad, natives teaching us? - and died.

I would like French and English governments to send delegates to visit Barmer in Rajasthan to get first hand advice on survival!

I have survived heat and humidity in the normal course of my life, and am still doing so – adjusting to the ruthless traffic conditions on the roads of India.

This is, in an expanded sense, the proof of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection.

To get back to the title, the big brouhaha of heat wave in France, England, and other countries of southern and western Europe, is nothing more than a tempest in a tea pot. It is funny in the particular sense that such a normal situation for me is exceptional for some others and this difference gave me an opportunity to vent.

Thanks Europeans!

Raghuram Ekambaram

  

Ted Koppel of ABC and Invasion of Ukraine by Russia

Today is the 117^th day of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, or as Russians put it, “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine. I do not care for either name as I fancy myself a pacifist. The calendrical day count is given by the London based newspaper, The Guardian.

Somehow, I get the gut feeling that unless the number hits 444 – that is, the number of days of the invasion aka operation extends for that many days – this episode would not get over.

What is this 444 days, apparently plucked out of nowhere? Not so. It has a specific reference.

In 1979, Iranians held a number of Americans as hostages, for precisely 444 days. It ended on January 20, 1981, immediately after Ronald Regan was sworn in the President of the United States (POTUS, from this point on). This was an insult to the then outgoing POTUS, Jimmy Carter; an in-your-face spit that, in a way, endorsed Reagan.

Where does Ted Koppel come in this scenario that came true?

ABC began a news brief at the end of the day (11:30 PM) to update the American public on the developments of the day, on the hostage front. This is precisely what The Guardian is trying to do now. Its news brief in its e-news on what is happening in Donbas region carries the headline “Russia-Ukraine war at a glance” and under it, the equivalent of a strap line, “ … what we know on day 117 of the invasion”.

Day after day, as I have monitored, only the number changes; everything remains the same, and there has never been any byline.

The Guardian is too old fashioned in this dog-eat-dog world of media operations. It is the name that counts. Look across the Atlantic Ocean, and learn.

Walter Cronkite and his, “And that’s the way it is …”  sign-off. An air of definitiveness, authority and a relatable name that aids the avuncular persona on the screen. In the case of the Iranian Hostage Crisis and Ted Koppel’s Nightline, it was the name, “Nightline” that grabbed viewers, there being a milder finality to the news of the day. This carried on for 444 days! In the Bible this block of 444 days foretells good things, like one person atoning for all the sins ever done by anyone and to be done by anyone till …,  happening.

So, for the US, the sins committed by James Earl Carter, Jr. were atoned symbolically by the return of the “Freedom Flight” carrying the hostages.

I expect, if not indeed foretelling, that this Ukraine-Russia war would continue till the gong strikes 444 days. So, would it not be better if news organizations (are you listening The Guardian?) gave a spiffy name (Nightline, for example) in place of the bland “Ukraine-Russia war”, anchored to a media personality with a personable media-face (Ted Koppel, for example) and a sub-masthead that is as attractive as “Tucker Carlson Tonight ” is to the frothing-at-the-mouth Fox News followers?

I think I should be paid for the service I have provided – improving the readership of The Guardian. I have been told that check (not cheque, as my old fashioned father corrected me in his response to my first letter from the US to him) is in the mail!

Raghuram Ekambaram

P.S I just noted. My post is 555 words long, excluding my name at the end and this post – midway between 444 and 666, Biblical numbers! Any meaning? 

Penumbra, where art thou?

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is in a mess. It has always been thus and has come into clear relief now, during the disastrous term of Donald J. Trump as POTUS (President of the United States).

Before I try explaining the title of this post, I may wish to, for the uninitiated, take a beginner’s class on Astronomy, AST101. During a Lunar Eclipse event, as the sun is very large and is at a great distance from the earth, the shadow of the earth falling on the moon as the latter transits behind the former has two phases – one, when the moon is directly behind the earth;   two, when it is in the outer shadow.

This penumbra thing gained a lot of traction thanks to an Associate Justice of SCOTUS mentioning it in his judgement in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1960s. Penumbra is a shadow but, at the same time, not a shadow. Some Hindu philosophy thing! It is in this shadowy region, SCOTUS located the right to privacy.

In the current SCOTUS, another associate justice found it wrong, from A to Z. He did not accept the possibility of a penumbra – it is a shadow or not a shadow, nothing in between.

Nowhere in the Constitution of the US is there a mention of the right to privacy; yet, in Griswold, SCOTUS ruled 7-2 that leading a married life of liberty, happiness etc. requires a right to privacy, hidden in the penumbra of rights emanating from the US Constitution.   

This was the fountainhead for various other decisions that asserted in many ways the rights of women to take decisions regarding their bodies, including abortion, and reaffirming it at least once.

While I am following the events in the US from a distance about the leaked draft of a decision discarding the logic and decision of Roe v. Wade, I am surprised that none of the newspaper articles I have read mention the source of the right of the women – the penumbra of rights!

Are lawyers and judges not aware of this piece of astronomy? Things are not black and white (even the moon has its spots!), and going beyond, we have an umbra and a penumbra.

I carry a backpack to the university to teach, slung from my shoulders on to my back. I have seen students carrying their backpacks, particularly when it rains, again slung from their backs, but on to their tummies, with their umbrellas tilted way forward! Are they trying to hide their stomach bulge?

No. They are smarter than me. When the bag is in the back, it is in the penumbra of the rain, and I cannot tilt way backward without drenching my front! But, sling the bag in the front, it is in the umbra with the whole of me and my bag getting some protection. Even such an elementary observation and inference seem to have been missed by the brain waves of some members of SCOTUS.

Penumbra has gone into hiding. Hence the title.

Raghuram Ekambaram   

 

There are prizes other than the Nobel, haven’t you heard?

 The more I get to hear about medals other than Nobel, I get more confused about why the Nobel has been placed at the apex of such awards, including the ersatz Nobel, for economics.

James Bates Clark prize, The Economist says is a little tougher to get than the Nobel for economics; I am no one to argue. Fields Medal is for mathematics and is awarded to mathematicians not more than 40 years old – a Nobel with an age limit! Obviously tougher than Nobel. Abel prize – Its only competition is Fields Medal, scat Nobel!

Now I come to Boltzmann Medal. Though my go-to-newspaper in the morning is The Hindu, (I am an armchair commentator and the paper’s leisurely pace suits me) I must point out that it slipped. The news of Prof. Deepak Dhar being awarded Boltzmann medal was carried in one of the interior pages.

In my humble opinion, it must have headlined the front page.

Why so? I have, at my very layman level with no chance of climbing up the ladder, fallen in love with statistics and it is this love that makes me appreciate the foundations of big data, AI etc. And, Prof. Dhar becomes a part of my narrative, just as E. C. G. Sudharshan did when he was spurned by physics Nobel.

We did not thump our chest when an India-origin achiever, Prof. Manjul Bhargava’s was awarded the Fields Medal some years ago, whose Indianness skips a generation. SASTRA Deemed-to-be University did confer its own award on Prof. Bhargava, notably earlier than he being awarded the Fields. Chalk up one for SASTRA. Where was GoI earlier to Fields? In hiding somewhere!

Prof. Akshay Venkatesh is one more such case - we will not celebrate an accomplishment till the same is acknowledged by a foreigner. Such inferiority/superiority (I do not know which) complex! Though, like Prof. Bhargava, Prof. Venkatesh too was awarded SASTRA Deemed-to-be University's award earlier than he got his Fields, his achievement did not get the rousing reception in Indian media – recall how the media went gaga over Venky’s Nobel award.

Such felicitations did not happen with Subramanian Chandrasekhar, the redoubtable Lahore born physicist who won the physics Nobel some fifty years after he postulated what came to be called Chandrasekhar Limit, and also the Abel prize winner S. Varadhan of Courant Institute, New York.

I am now forced to conclude that there are factors other than Indianness that occasions such chest thumping by Indians in India. Indians abroad couldn't care less. It could be that Prof. Dhar spent his career in Indian institutions, TIFR, Mumbai and IISER, Pune. Forget that the citation awarding him the prize mentioned his work as a Ph.D student at California Institute of Technology, the US west coast citadel of cutting-edge science and technology.

However, it is more than that. Just for this post, I scoured the Net and found that Boltzmann Medal does not carry any cash award. Be honest with yourself – the first thing that hits you in the face from the newspaper in October of every year is the crores of rupees the Nobel award carries.

Moreover, Boltzmann does impose the condition that downgrades the award – it cannot be conferred on anyone who is already a Nobel Laureate. This beggars belief. Why would a Boltzmann even indirectly imply that it is lower than a Nobel? It says to everyone and her cousin that once a Nobel has been awarded, all other awards lose their shine. The polar opposite of successful salesmanship! When you think someone deserves felicitation by you, why would anyone else facilitating him/her, earlier or later matter?

This is how Boltzmann loses out to Nobel. We, as poor as we are, are enamoured of money; perhaps because we ARE poor. A hungry person appreciates even a single morsel of food.

Prof. Dhar’s prize does not satisfy us, as Indians. Hence, the news about his winning a prestigious prize is consigned to inner pages.

Sad.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

  

Green pastures have turned brown – Get back on your own

 An article in a newspaper starts off, “... from Mahatma Gandhi, B. R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru to Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh” had gone abroad to pursue higher education. To my knowledge, none of these people had asked for or got assistance from the Government of India to return home. They did it on their own. It is a different matter that at least one of them was supported by the king of a princely state; still, it is a fact that the onward trip abroad had been sponsored and probably the return would also was likewise.

The above is a curious start to an article that pleads for Government of India’s assistance in and arrangements for having the students who had gone to Ukraine for medical studies back on home soil.

The article appears to focus on “aspirational students”, whoever they may be. For me, it more or less says that these students, if they could have had it their way under normal circumstances, would not return to India for service but come back to India only to get married and fly off to perhaps another foreign land (Ukraine, though it has been in the news on and off for the past eight years or more, is not a glamorous country).

Not very long ago (less than half century), India thought of such college-bound emigrants as a burden on India - “Brain Drain”. The same group is now called, “brand ambassadors” – the brand is India. They are also called, “living bridge”, as though those who had gone earlier and have been settled abroad for decades are desiccated wood! See, what a few decades do to society’s view of its citizens! So fickle, it is!

I am not aware, but going by what the article says, those who had stayed back to pursue higher studies in India treat those who went abroad with contempt. This does not sit well with the writers of the article; “benefits in terms of soft power, knowledge transfer and remittances,” apparently more than compensates.

As Ukraine is currently a severely troubled country, Indians who had gone did not bargain for it. They did not assess their risks – visible in plain sight since 2014 – properly and did not provide for the same. So, the lender of last resort – the Government of India.

What really gets my goat is down a column inch, authors say that bringing these students back is the “duty of any responsible government and any moral people (my emphasis),” Why is the action of the Indian government of the day brought to bear on my, the individual, morality?

Let us see this issue in clear terms. When the students went abroad for their studies, it was their individual economic calculations that set them out. “I have the wherewithal, so I go abroad.” True that many of them, perhaps not from the top fifty percentile of the population per their economic positioning on the ladder of Indian economy, took out loans from banks to enable them to go abroad. Now, they find that their calculations had led them down the primrose path. They wish to be rescued from their own miscalculations. It is to this end authors have invoked “moral people” in their justifications.

I do not have any problem in GoI extending any help to these students. But to put a heavy moral burden on the people of India is unnecessary, and indeed unjustifiable. We are inching towards a libertarian regime – doing a robust risk analysis before venturing out on a path is sine qua non. You do not do this; you must be on your own.

Let us look at it from another angle – moral hazard. Given this example (and earlier efforts of the same kind), students could start to make claims on GoI, even before a risk appears in the horizon. We already lose our sights (literally and figuratively) reading through the fine print in any loan paper. Now, it just got expanded – political risk would not be tagged under force majeure; it would be the specific risk to be borne by the borrower. If GoI comes to the aid of students stranded in a foreign country in one occasion (not connected to any action of GoI), how long would it be before similar claims, apriori, would be made? Don’t answer that! Lay out the red carpet for moral hazard.

The next claim takes my breath away! The “ecosystem” that enables transferring risk to the government helps in “transferring advanced knowledge and best practices.”  Oh, we have seen mounds and mounds of this, to make the vaunted Tirumala Hills in Andhra Pradesh green with envy!

Then comes another demand, on the host country – the responsibility for the safety and safe return of students from Ukraine thrust upon the besieged Govt. Of Ukraine!

The final statement is the one I have an antidote for: “When the achievements of Indians abroad are ours to celebrate, so is the responsibility to safeguard their welfare.” My antidote – celebrate the successes of individuals as successes of individuals and not of any collective.

I am able to enjoy the fading images of M. S. Dhoni as the success of M. S, Dhoni only and not of the team Chennai Super Kings. When it comes to celebrating the successes of Mumbai Indians, it is of that entity and not of the individuals that make up that team.

Do not hang onto the tailcoat of individuals to make the case for the collective. This is what the authors did by mentioning the various luminaries listed at the beginning of the article. Besides, it was not an auspicious start!

Not good, not good at all.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Revision of Curriculum, from emerging to extinct technologies

 An article in the newspaper set me thinking on what is the purpose of revising the curriculum of an educational institution ostensibly preparing students for the ever changing real world.

Yes, I can understand the utility of dynamic changes in the curriculum if such changes happened in real time, emerging engineering knowledge going mainstream without any lapse of time, or minimal delay at best.

25 years is not minimal delay. Yes, you read it right – for 25 years supposedly one of the oldest and premier government engineering universities in India had not revised its engineering curriculum.

Now, it is pertinent to ask how forward looking was the previous revision, carried out 25 years earlier. My guess is, it was not at all, at least not in one of the “core engineering subjects” – civil engineering.

I can say the above with some level of confidence because I see that the curriculum now has barely nudged since the time I studied, nearly 50 years ago! Sorry if I am not flying high upon hearing the news about curriculum revision – been there, done that etc.

Yes, when I scan through the laboratory experiments students carry out now and compare it with what I did in my days, beyond the basics, there are indeed a number of them that are Greek and Latin to me. I refuse to acknowledge these as anywhere near forward looking. In doing these experiments, students do not, indeed are not required to ask the critical question “Why?” of the results. The presentation skills of students are the foci in the laboratory reports.

I wonder how students would ever learn how to move forward. This is not something unique to laboratory experiments; similar situation exists in the subjects and topics handled in classrooms also. I am teaching – forced to teach – what I learned fifty years ago. You may come back with, “1+1 = 2 has not changed for thousands of years!” True. Yet, if we do not go further and stick only to decimal system in arithmetic, would we have come to the so-called digital world? 1+1 = 10!

In the civil engineering department of private universities where the metric of a faculty member’s productivity is the number of research papers published, there is a preponderance of what I call “substitution” research and concomitant technical papers.

Cement is a four letter word because in its manufacture CO₂ is released copiously. Therefore, any cement substitute in concrete is taken to lead us to Nirvana, through a “Green” construction material!

The above is as absurd as absurd can be. I have enquired dozens of times whether anyone of the researchers I meet daily has quantified “Green”ness of a substitute they are researching. The answer is a big NO!

Some of the substitutes are esoteric – glass fibres, crimped steel fibres, silica fume ... Yes, some of these, like silica fume, fly ash are finding use in building industry, but their environmental benefits or negatives do not seem to be vigorously studied. In real life, the transport lead distances for these materials are likely to tilt the environmental scale from “Green” to “Red” even compared to cement!

In classrooms, students do study about these cement substitutes, but the context does not include any environmental concerns. Indeed, we also need to be worried about the substitutes being causal agents of lung diseases – we will have a “Green” economy for an unhealthy population!

These matters fly below the radar in classrooms. Would the so-called experts think on these lines while revising the curriculum? I am not optimistic. Your guess is as good as mine.

More than about two decades ago, there was a lot of noise about river water transfer from surplus basins to deficient basins – no droughts anywhere in India! An astounding sum, about one trillion USD, was estimated as the required investment. I gave a speech to kind of shore up civil engineering graduates-to-be in a forum that when they do graduate they will be grabbled by their collars and offered jobs. I played my part as a snake-oil salesman to these gullible students to the hilt. But, as we know, it is all water under the bridge. Are students exposed to these ideas in classrooms? No. Would the purported revisions deal with these? No.

We are talking about disaster management as a course. So far so good. But, look beyond the name, it would shock you. As a course in a syllabus, I would expect it to be almost exclusively case-study oriented with analysis, scenario-building etc. In reality, it is none of these. Just a text book to be memorized and regurgitated in examinations. What revision are you talking about, pray tell.

The focus, per the article, is “emerging technologies”. What this means, going by past experience, we will be teaching these when the technologies have gone extinct. Emerging to extinct in the blink of an eye, measured as the period between revisions to the curriculum!

If I lean on what I have learnt on these societal processes, the revision would end up being mere colourful flyers and festoons on pre-existing curriculum, nothing more.

Raghuram Ekambaram  

Education be Damned

 I think there is a mistake in the title of this post ... it should have been ”Education be Dammed”. If one wanted education to be a frozen artefact in a museum, they could not do worse than follow the so-called Academic Bank of Credits (ABC). I, to the extent I understand Indian higher education, endorse the opinion expressed here.

Indian higher education as a buffet; or, a potluck, if you will. There is an element of first-come first-served in it.

Imagine you go to a wedding and there are a number of weddings going on around the place. What is on offer at the specific function you were invited to is not to your taste buds; you take your plate around (you do not have to sneak out or sneak in; this is your entitlement) and scan all the items spread out at the venues nearby and fill your plate. Yet, when you finish your dinner you offer thanks only to the host of the wedding you were invited to! The others who contributed to your sumptuous dinner are almost unacknowledged.

This is what ABC does, and the analogy to the wedding venue market gets more relevant still. The various higher educational establishments are accredited-cum-ranked. Only supposedly the very best government institutions draw a premium in the job market (I do not want to mention ***s or #####s by name here) and though they are subsidized, the entry barrier they have erected is very tall such that to enter their portals you must have been well endowed, not merely intellectually but wallet-wise. One’ parents must also be risk-takers. There is prior distillation but pretty much unseen and definitely unacknowledged.

Just imagine – hundreds of students from many private deemed-universities would desire the imprimatur of the above unnamed yet undeservedly highly esteemed institutions and higher education entities, at least for some courses.

Many of the deemed universities run on shoe-string budgets, not because they are not well endowed but because the profit is to be maximized. If you do not do much research, you do not belong there. If you do not have a congested network of similar researchers, that is another strike against you.

Never mind that the research output in these places is nothing to write home about. After all, through networking what you have done is not dissimilar to breeding within a species! The output is there to be seen, but within a generation, it becomes sterile.

Why am I talking about research in deemed universities when the focus is ostensibly on academics, courses and teaching? Hold your horses, as I am just coming to it. Richard Feynman said that he could not do research if he did not also teach alongside. There are very few teachers with that kind of temperament - holistic viewpoint, you may want to call it (I do not, as I find it hard to define what “holistic” could, bereft of context, even mean).

It is this context that is being stripped off by ABC. How so?  By begging the question. Suppose I see in a student’s academic record that she got an ‘A’ in a course conducted by an *** faculty member instead of one from the institution in which she had registered (call it the ‘home’ institution), human tendency being what it is (and I am sure I carry this), in all likelihood I would put a premium on the marks she has scored. This is not the end of it – there must be competition even among these elite ***s or #####s, each vying to outdo the others and we end up on a slippery upslope and reach the apex – nothing is impossible in Indian higher education scenario! It is like parachuting down on to the peak of Everest! The article under reference hints at this as regards MOOC courses, and I do not discard this observation.

What is the benefit for the teacher in the ‘home’ institution? One gets more time to do research, of howsoever dubious value! Hope you now understand how research essentially cannibalizes teaching in an institution supposedly nurturing students, student researchers and researchers, all simultaneously.

One last thing – student-centric. What is this animal? Or, how much does this vegetable cost per kilo? Only very few students truly care a lot about learning; their focus is very sharp on earning-potential. I do not blame them. Look at the parents. I don’t blame them either. Look at the marriage-market. Yes, I do not need to go any further.

Let us for a moment think on the shibboleth – learning should be fun! Oh, yeah, let us have a food-fight in the cafeteria and let us learn experientially (an often abused word), how far the piece of cake would fly! The last few frames of the James Bond movie Diamonds are Forever came to mind!

Learning is fun – this is the idea that should be drilled into the minds of students. Even memorizing multiplication table, even in these days of calculators on the move, should be fun.

Why go as far as multiplication, nothing but successive addition, when we can think even addition as a fun activity. Really, how?

Add any two three-digit numbers ensuring you get a four-digit number, with carry over in each place – 624 + 397 = 1021. Do it once, mentally and remember how you did it. Take a rest, comeback and do the summation again. Surprise, the way you did it the second time is unlikely to be the method/sequence you used the first time.

Just to make this more concrete, the first time I did the above, I did it as (397 + 3) + (624 – 3), whereas the second time, it went 600 + 400 + 24 -3! Your mind is playing games with you! THAT IS FUN!

Likewise, teaching should also be fun, not of the boisterous kind, but of the deeper fun of “pleasure of finding things out”, in Feynman’s words.

How do you get such a pleasure from a “fabulous teacher” from any ***s teaching you remotely? The path is not visible to me.

“Remotely’ is a two-edged word: One, from a distance, a positive sense when we were locked-in; two, now when we are not, without involvement, as in “reserved in manner”. You be reserved and expect your students to have fun in learning! Fine, and we know what that leads to!

ABC must have been the brainchild of a neophyte management graduate – learnt how to coin catchy abbreviations – ABC is truly catchy, as in the old phrase, “As easy as ABC!”

Try to get education on track not through fancy phrases, but through old fashioned ways, true engagement between the teacher and the taught (no corporeal punishment), or between learners at two different levels of learning.

Show me a teacher who says she does not learn while teaching, I will show you a teacher who does not teach!

Say Good-bye to ABC. XYZ, anyone?

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

Geopolitical Entities – How many?

Neither am I a political scientist nor a geographer. Yet, I am intrigued by what I keep hearing about the current brouhaha (I don’t want to take sides, calling it what the west wants to call it or how Russians mention it – the situation in Ukraine).

The geopolitical entities that are in operation are Ukraine, Russia, the west, China and some sundry players like Australia.

Who have been left out? The nations that make up much of Central and South America, the Indian sub-continent, Africa, Polynesian islands, other nations of Asia, like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore, Arab nations, and the shit-hole countries (as Donald Trump called them) of the Caribbean. Pardon me for not mentioning Antarctica as while it is indeed a geographically interesting part of the world, there is no exclusive national politics associated with it.

These nations, check that, the citizens and leaders of these nations (did you notice how grovelling Scott Morrison’s statement was; the External Affairs Minister of India, Mr. Jaishankar was at his slimiest best) do not count in any discussion on what is happening in the hot-spot of the moment. Indian foreign policy clan is tying itself up in knots trying to placate both sides.

So, to answer the question in the title of this post, I say, there are four geopolitical entities – Russia, the west, Ukraine, and China. The heft of this set is about 40-45% of world population.

Now, to the war perspective. What we now call World War was so named only after its successor World War II perhaps ended; till then it was called the Great War!

Then, if it did indeed happen that the skirmish in Ukraine developed into a full-scale war around the world, what would we call them?

The above begs the question that we would survive such a war. Putin seemed to have given the ultimatum that his enemies have not yet even imagined what he would do. If that is not a threat of a nuclear conflict, what is? We have to discard the MAD defence scenario – Mutually Assured Destruction – that is rendered ineffective within the scenario!

The question is, who would be affected first. Will there, indeed, be a first and the last to go extinct as implied by MAD? If, say, Saudi Arabia is one of the first to go (Iran is in the war is an assumption here), who will they take along with them? What if it is Pakistan? India? Sri Lanka? Israel? South Africa? Venezuela? Brazil? Definitely not Antarctica!

World War III is a copycat name, and it is most inappropriate. Why? There would be nobody to call anything. MAD’s assurance has been realized!

Looking at the past forty odd years, we can get a glimpse that while Russia is the proximate aggressor, the west, with its aggressive eastward expansion of NATO is the Ur aggressor. Why is the west, the supposed cradle of liberal thinking, is so illiberal when it comes to the current issue?

Blame neo-liberal economics currently in vogue in the west; yes, the same west, the self-defined geopolitical entity, that is in the news. Its power. Its demand for consumption in unsustainable forms and amounts.

Panting and ranting … You read it at your own risk!

Raghuram Ekambaram