The recent announcement by WhatsApp to update its privacy terms - and 'accept or leave the app' stance - led to an exodus of users from Whastapp to competing, privacy-conscious apps such as Telegram or Signal. A week after the exodus began, Whatsapp clarified its stance - and WhatsApp's CEO went about providing a long Twitter clarification . And then, many returned, many who considered moving stayed put on Whatsapp. This post is meant for those who are still sitting on the fence - it clarifies questions like: What is this all about? What do I do? Is Whatsapp safe? I've heard Telegram is Russian - so how is it safer than Whatsapp? I can't move because my business contacts are on Whastapp - how do I secure myself? PS: I've modeled this post based on several conversations I've had with friends and family on this subject, dealing with the chain of questions they ask, then objections they raise, then clarifications they seek - and finally the change resistance ...

The Lal Quila or Red Fort was in the news recently when a tractor rally by farmers, against three contentious farm laws of the Modi government, turned violent after protesters deviated from the route approved by the Delhi Police, entered the city and reached the Red Fort located in central Delhi and one of the protestors put the Nishan Sahib on the dome at Red Fort. The Lal Quila has an interesting history; the Fort was built by Shah Jahan, who in the struggle for succession, was imprisoned by his own son Aurangzeb. Subsequently, th e Mughal Dynasty declined rapidly after Aurangzeb. After Mughal decline, Jahandar Shah took over the Lal Quila in 1712 - within a year of beginning his rule, Shah was murdered and replaced by Farrukhsiyar. In 1739, Persian emperor Nadir Shah defeated the Mughal army, plundering the Red Fort, including the Peacock Throne. Less than a decade after that, (upon return to Persia) Nadir Shah was assassinated (probably) by his own nephew Adil Shah who replaced ...

 As I glanced through this article on my newsfeed, the picture caught my eye - so elegant, so mesmerising and so neat! Wow! What a view of Paris - the city of Love. Compare this image of Paris to any Indian city and the Indian city will look ugly, disorganized and pitiful - you'd probably use these images to label cities as First World and Third World countries.  But scratch under the surface of your reactionary thoughts, you will realise that the pictures reveal a very different story. Paris or for that matter any city which looks well organized are usually a result of one regime, one ruler being dominant at the time of development of the city - such that the ruler could convert huge swathes of land from private ownership to state ownership, and then develop them into planned cities. A chaotic disorganized city, on the other hand, is a result of common people having exercised their individual rights, their ingenuity, their individual personas, their likes, dislikes to create...

The Covid-19 pandemic rages on - a new fast-spreader strain was discovered in the UK last week leading to a fresh round of lockdowns and flight bans across the globe, but the good news is that a vaccine is on the anvil. News reports say that it's been approved in the UK and even if the vaccine is delayed but launches by Q2-2021, this will be the fastest developed vaccine in the history of mankind. This is not surprising - medical science has been making rapid progress since 2003 when the Human Genome Project got completed. Since Covid-19 impacts different people in different ways , its vaccine development also needs to take this into account. In fact, this is true of almost every vaccine and while there may not be a direct correlation between the Genome project and Covid-19, but the completion of Human Genome sequencing along with other medical strides has helped our ability to react to diseases and come up with cures faster than ever. What has happened in medicine is but an indic...

7 years ago today, Nelson Mandela left us - committed to ending differences in human race and a keen follower of Gandian values, Mandela is a powerful role model for leaders in the 21st century.   But before there was Mandela, there was Robert Mugabe, the Premier and later President of Zimbabwe who was heralded as the statesman of Africa and the model for good governance. [ 1 ]. As history tells us however, Mugabe and his politics failed miserably.  The reason why Zimbabwe became a failed state and South Africa a successful one was because of the Gandhian values, mainly ' Hate the Sin, Not the Sinner ' imbibed by Nelson Mandela, and a contrasting revengeful reign by Mugabe in Zimbabwe (especially in the 1990s). The story about how Mandela used the Rugby World cup [ 2 ] to reconcile and reach out for his erstwhile oppressors is a case in point [The subject was used in the movie Invictus , which is titled on one of Mandela's favourite poems - and mine too!]. Mugabe vs ...

The principal-agent problem [PAP], in political science and economics, occurs when one person or entity (the "agent"), is able to make decisions and/or take actions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity: the "principal". This dilemma exists in circumstances where agents are motivated to act in their own best interests, which are contrary to those of their principals, and is an example of moral hazard. One of the relatable cases of PAP is sales - the sales executive is likely to motivate you to buy those products where s/he earns more commissions, rather than those which are cheaper or beneficial for you. This problem occurs in any kind of a sale whether its a kitchen appliance or insurance product. Maybe you've already guessed where I am going with this - the PAP with taxes. The government is an agent which levies a charge (taxes) on its people - possibly the strangest of principal-agent relationships [in all other cases, the agent is usually pa...

I had surmised four years ago that the future of education was clear to me, just that the path to get to this future wasn't clear then. The future I predicted was - and I quote:  Take a leap into future, learning could be transitioning back to the heydays of Indian Gurukul system - just that these Gurukul's will be online. What will be known is not universities, colleges or degrees; what will be known is teachers and professors of repute (the Guru's) and the subjects they teach. Thanks to the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, Guru's could be running a course on several platforms or several courses on one platform. People will take courses from Guru's of repute to learn what they want to, not because they want a degree from the platform which they represent! I believe the path to get to this future of education has been found and it runs through the Pandemic zone called Covid-19. Covid-19 is a warp zone which has accelerated the transition from the brick-and-mortar...

v/s I've written earlier about my musings on Clustered cities vs Suburban Sprawls being the two contrasting futures mankind stares at. I concluded in the 3 part series that the future of humanity, at least until the developing world gets to a median level of development, will be to be present in clustered cities. The other alternative which I envisaged for the longer term was to set up a colony on Mars. However, since then we've had many developments and Covid-19 impacting the whole world. While Covid-19 has been devastating on economies across the globe, its impact on climate has been benign  - fall in economic frenzy has only led to a reduction in carbon emissions, a civilizational realization about the value of boosting natural human immunity and end to wasteful ways of living .  The other side of Covid-19 is the realization that the pandemic is also an impact of human activities much like climate change itself. And as Covid-19 rages on forcing people ...

A thread on Hindi Diwas; for the last few months I have been influencing my daughter to learn Hindi by telling her greatness & elegance of Hindi हिंदी दिवस के उपलक्ष्य में एक ट्वीटमाला; पिछले कुछ माह से मैं अपनी बेटी को हिंदी की महत्ता और लालित्य के बारे में समझा रहा हूँ| She is in Grade 2 and just started learning the Hindi alphabet and grammar.  वह कक्षा २ में है और अभी हिंदी वर्णमाला और व्याकरण के पहले पाठ पढ़ रही है|  Yesterday, she asked me why I think Hindi is a great language. Context being India has so many languages and our mother tongue is Marathi.  कल उसने मुझे पूछा कि मैं हिंदी को एक महानतम भाषा क्यों मानता हूँ - जबकी भारत में इतनी सारी भाषाएँ हैं और हमारी मातृभाषा मराठी है|  My answer - No doubt Hindi is a rich language in terms of literature, vocabulary, variety and its script Devnagiri is very scientific in nature...  मेरा उत्तर था की यद्यपी हिंदी साहित्य, शब्दावली, विविधता से परिपूर्ण हैं और उसकी प्रमुख लिपी देवनागिरी वैज्ञानिक ...

I just finished watching all 4 seasons of Mr. Robot - the cyberpunk TV/Web Series about a fictional sequence of events where a vigilante hacker group fsociety (styled on the  Anonymous group ) attacks E-Corp, the world's largest conglomerate (think GE + JP Morgan) and brings them down through a Ransomware attack.  The objective of the attack is to free millions of people from massive debt which they are running - the fountainhead of debt across the US being E-Corp. With the hack, millions of loans become unserviceable because data for them is no longer available, but it also leads to E-corp being unable to dispense cash to its depositors and freezing of further lending, ultimately the entire hacking episode leads to an economic collapse! While my initial interest in the series arose due to its cyberpunk lineage, my interest post Season 1 was retained more because of its depiction of the interplay between epochal events and the nature of human society. Eliot / Mr Robot's origi...