Right to Repair Movement

I consider myself handy, probably a trait my younger brother and I imbibed from our father. While many men of my (and previous) generation pride themselves in being able to fix broken equipment around the house and/or being able to jerry rig things to get little projects going, I generally notice a decline in this aptitude amongst people of younger generation. This trend is accelerated by companies intentionally designing products that can't be serviced by owners, so that we will depend on the company's "certified technicians" that charge an arm and a leg to fix even simple things. There are few other reasons as well that exacerbates this trend. 

- More than 15 years ago, Wired published an article titled The Good Enough Revolution, that is still worth reading. It talked about companies intentionally choosing cheap materials to manufacture their products focusing on convenience and reduced cost. This of course made the products cheaper, rendering them affordable to lot more people. 

- The rapid product obsolescence that is becoming the norm in many domains (think electronics, fast fashion clothing) adds to this phenomenon. If you are not going to use a product for more than 2 years, why spend the time/money/energy to design it to last 20 years?

- To prevent competitors from copying their products, manufacturers often paint circuit boards with black paint (so that others can't find out the component details), glue pieces together (instead of using screws or other fasteners that can be taken apart and put back together) that will break when you take them apart, declare warranties void if you open the product and so on.  

- Manufacturers would like you to keep buying the same product again and again, when it breaks, rather than fix the product as increases the revenue for them. So, they have a clear incentive to make it as difficult and expensive as possible to fix broken products, making buying another new unit the easier choice. 

But for people like me, this trend is quite annoying, since we believe once you buy a product, you totally own it, should be able to service and keep it running for a long time as long as it is functioning well. One simple example of when this gets really irritating. My wife and I drink a cup of fruit smoothie for breakfast daily. The Nutribullet brand blender I use to make the smoothie, comes with a blade seen in this picture. It broke within a year of daily use. 

It was making a weird screeching noise and was heating up a lot when I was trying to use it. After digging around and searching online a bit, understood that the two small ball bearing (what is beneath the blue ring in the second photo) needed to get the blade spindle spin tends to go down quickly if you use it daily. 

I tried replacing it and ended up damaging the blade as it wasn't designed to be fixed by end user. Bought a replacement blade. It broke again within 2 months! Bought a 3rd blade that broke again in couple of months! Throwing out the whole blender or buying another blender just for making smoothie type ideas sounded silly. So, this time really sat down, figured out the way to remove the two small ball bearing carefully and replaced them with new ones. While the replacement blade costs $20 even for non-brand (i.e compatible but not made by Nutribullet) and lot more for "original", I could get 10 units of the ball bearing for $10 or so! (Third photo shows the blade and the remaining 8 ball bearings.)  

In addition to cost saving, not throwing a fully working electrical item that is not biodegradable into a landfill feels really good! It is the same joy one gets when completing a software debug to see a fix you coded fully resolves the issue. But Nutribullet is certainly not making it easy. I can immediately think of small tweaks they can do to resolve this issue, making the product last a lot longer. (Alternately the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner has a nice design that has many components that can be replaced by end user fairly easily.)

While I can write a lot more about dishwashers, coffee makers, washing machines and lawn mowers that I have fixed over the years and the trials and tribulations involved, will cut that short to say, I am really glad to see the "Right to Repair" movement gaining some traction in the US. It is sad that this has to become a "movement" for people to be able to use products longer. But at least it is a trend in the right direction that also seems to include older repair enthusiasts holding Saturday sessions in local community centers where anyone can walk-in with a broken appliance and get guidance on how to get it working again. You can read about the movement at https://www.repair.org/stand-up. The notion appears to be more popular in Europe, while in Asia people do tend to repair & use products as per tradition more often. You can also watch this short video, read this write up. There are articles/research like this one that suggest it is a lose-lose-lose movement as well! 

Couple of quick questions:

- Do you consider yourself handy? Any interesting repair story that made you proud of yourself? 

- What is the oldest product you own? Not asking about jewelry or a book that is a family heirloom, but something that "works"? 

Next photo shows a Casio fx-350 scientific calculator I bought during my first year of engineering in 1982 that I still have and continues to work well, after 43 years! I usually take good care of things and so they don't breakdown quickly. Still four decades is awesome for a calculator! I have used this calculator for some 100+ exams, though off late don't use it at all, since using the ones available on the PC or browser is easier. Not sure when I replaced its button cell last time, but it still comes on and works normally. 

P.S. When I sent this post out as an email, it resonated with a lot of friends, who are men of my age! Got responses from many in the US, India and Europe! It was gratifying to learn that the weekend repair gathering is active in UK as well:

Crowthorne Repair Café – Crowthorne Reduce Our Waste

Modern constructs sans electronics!

I read an article circa 2001 that talked about the "Perishability of Digital Content", discussing how something written on a stone tablet a millennium ago is still readable, while something written into a floppy disk a decade before may no longer be readable. Unless you kept transferring the content to Zip disks, USB drives and cloud storage obsessively, the contents may be lost. In fact, I have a set of Tamil language documents I still have, created using a software called Murasu Anjal around that time. Now those files won't open anymore. Knowing that this may happen, I took the precaution of saving the Murasu Anjal program installer as well in my archives, thinking I can always install the program to be able to open the documents. But that program won't install in Windows-11 machines! If you have a Windows-98 machine lying around, PLMK. Perhaps I can use your help to retrieve those documents, some of which include poetry written by an uncle of mine who passed away a decade ago. We can debate about how stone tablets and electronic documents are different, how efficient digital storage is and so on, but can't deny the underlying point related to perishability! 

I have spent my career working in the semiconductor industry, and I am truly fascinated by how far we have come in our own lifetime and what a transformation it has been to the human civilization as a whole. But I find complicated, beautiful non-electronic constructions equally fascinating and almost mesmerizing. While there is so much to discuss, and one can easily write a book on this topic, will sample just four items and stop. Please click through each link, without which this post is useless

I was talking to two of my cousins over the weekend, who are literally lot more qualified than I am on these topics. My cousin Sundar Narasimhan pointed me to this video, which is a bit dated (and so audio quality is not that great), related to passive dynamic bipedal walking. Pretty neat when you realize the bipedal construct is walking down the bench, simply due to incline using gravity! This led to my other cousin Ravi Sundaram to point us to this Veritasium video discussing the Stranderbeest. I came to know about it few years ago via a Simpsons TV show reference, that is mentioned in the Veritasium video as well. There are tons of videos online that discuss the construction details. But the Veritasium video nicely summarizes the project for someone with passing interest. 

That made me remember a project I was involved in few years ago, as a coach for a middle school Science Olympiad team. Here are the rules and starting point for that project called "Battery Buggy". Basic goal is to build a small battery powered vehicle, that travel a set distance and stops on its own, without any electronics/remote control involved. Unlike other projects discussed, this one involves batteries and electric motor, but still no electronics. Please read through the rules carefully as it may be difficult to fully understand all the details in one quick reading. Then see how you'd design the vehicle. Most difficult parts are 

- Making the vehicle stop on its own (i.e. no electronics/remote control allowed) after it traverses a set distance. This distance can be anywhere between 9 and 12 meters, specified by the judges on the day of the competition. 

- For bonus points making the vehicle travel in an arc to reach the same point. 

After you have thought through and have come up with some ideas, you can look at this link which has lot more details of our design. It would be good to watch through each video in chronological order so that you can see the progress we made slowly week after week. If you simply see the final version/run, lot of pain we went through will all be lost, which is what is important for learning. For example, you can see the initial photos/videos to understand how the vehicle stops on its own; how we achieved the arc comes much later. I have included some pictures of the competition, my daughter and her teammate winning medals. This is just to show you the number of competitions we have to attend to get to the state final, where we finished at number 2, missing first place just by couple of points. Since the teams finishing in third place was way behind, we practically tied for the state first finish! 

The three cases above (bipedal walker, Stranderbeest, and battery buggy) were interesting in slightly differing ways from science/construction points of view. But the most artistically beautiful construct is the evolution of mechanical sculptures designed over the years by a single engineer named David Roy. Blending his engineering skills with his sublime artistic skills, he has created a series of kinetic sculptures using no electricity or motors that can be hung on the wall as mesmerizing art pieces! This video put together by Wired very nicely summarizes all I'd like to explain! 

As I wrote in the beginning, there are many more projects of similar kind we can talk about. But PLMK if you were personally involved, designed, developed any such moving/dynamic constructs that did not use electronics. 

Catheter based Atrial Ablation

You may remember me talking about about A-Fib and A-Flutter episodes I have been having few years ago. Though it is fairly common (prevalence is about 10% of the population), once you have this cardiac issue, it normally tends to occur more often as you age. I had it only about 4 times over the last 7 years. Though my sample size is small, it did look like the frequency is increasing. So, after some deliberation and discussions with multiple cardiologists, I went through the Atrial Ablation procedure on April 15, 2025. Since this is a catheter-based (i.e. not an open-heart surgery) outpatient procedure (i.e. no need to stay overnight in the hospital), it is generally tolerated well, and the recovery time is shorter. I am sending out this email in the hope that it will nudge you to learn about this disorder and this technically sophisticated procedure being used more and more to address it.

I am including a lot of links that I found interesting. Please consider looking through them all, as each one will take only few mins of your time. 

If you have never heard of A-Fib, A-Flutter or SVT (Supra Ventricular Tachycardia), you can take a quick look at this Mayo Clinic explanation. This CDC site has a simple animation explaining A-Fib. It boils down to electrical signals that regulate our heart rhythm finding alternate paths and misfiring that results in heart quivering without periodicity instead of beating regularly.  The Atrial Flutter condition occurs when for no apparent reason, heart starts beating really fast while you are just sitting around (i.e. instead of 50 to 60bpm, it starts racing at 140-180bpm). Both are bad for the body since this may result in stroke, heart just stopping and other serious conditions. Some people do have A-Fib that results in occasional beats just missing but otherwise everything working normally, and they live many decades without the need for any intervention. 

If these unacceptable A-Fib or A-Flutter condition occur frequently and the heart doesn't reset itself back to sinus rhythm after a while, there are increasing levels of interventions suggested. 

- Initially you can take medications (pills) that are called Beta Blockers that will slow down the heart and make sure it never beats too fast. Downside is, since its effect is always on, you blood pressure, heart rate may remain perpetually low, making you feeling tired, slowing down your metabolism resulting in weight gain, etc. 

- If the heart doesn't return to normal rhythm for a long time, you can shock it back into rhythm. But that doesn't guarantee that you won't get into that state again in the next hour or tomorrow or next year.

- If this keeps occurring, pace maker installation is one solution. But that is invasive, need to be maintained and monitored regularly. 

Atrial Ablation is a newer answer to this issue. Ablation in medicine means removing or deactivating some tissue/part. In other ablation procedures, the ablated tissue may be excised. But in atrial ablation, since the amount of tissue ablated is so small, the killed tissue cells are just left to scar and heal. 

You can take a look at this short video to get more background information about the issue and procedure. 

Couple of weeks before the procedure, you are asked to go through a CT scan to make sure you are fit to undergo this treatment, your veins are in good shape, and there is nothing unusual about your heart chambers & access pathways that may prevent a successful procedure. This is followed by a blood test. If everything looks good, you check-in to the hospital one day morning (shouldn't eat or drink during the previous 12 hours), prepped (lot of shaving chest hair that still itches!), given IV, monitored for a while and then moved to the operation theater. There were 7, 8 people in the room working on me, that included the anesthesiologist, OR nurses, cardiologist and even a nurse representing the equipment company that marks different parts of the body to create a 3-D image of the torso. Since the procedure is performed under General Anesthesia, once I had the oxygen mask on me, remember taking couple of deep breaths as instructed and in the next instant waking up in the recovery room after 3 hours! BTW, I was under the impression that just one or two drugs are administered to anesthetize you during the procedure. Actually, a cocktail of 7, 8 drugs calibrated for you is administered and documented minute by min. During the process, I was intubated (to keep the airways open so that I will keep breathing while being unconscious). You can see the actual procedure done on some patient shown in this video, though with all the plastic covering in place, it is not very educational but for understanding how the catheters look on the monitor to the operating team during the procedure. 

Procedure itself involves pasting a lot of markers on you, to be able to get a consolidated 3-D image of your torso on the monitor, then making an incision (more of a small puncture) on the left and right sides of your groin area to access the femoral vein. This vein is big enough and is close to the skin surface and so you can think of this process more like the procedure used to draw blood from your elbow when you go in for blood test, just a little bigger (say the size of a punch hole size opening). A sheath is inserted into this hole that prevents blood flowing through the vein coming out. Then the catheter is inserted into this vein through the sheath. While the sheath provides a nice tight opening, the catheter is slowly pushed all the way through your body until it reaches the inside of your heart. Since I have had both A-Fib and A-Flutter, cardiologist told me that the procedure has to be done on both atrial chambers of the heart. I initially thought this is why we need access from both left and right sides of the groin, using two different catheters. Subsequently when I read the procedure report, saw a line that said, "Left heart catheterization by transseptal puncture through intact septum" that I didn't know was part of the procedure before! 🙂 So, only one catheter is used for ablation that starts from right groin and first reaches the right atrial chamber. The cardiologist then pierces the heart wall (septum) that separates left and right atrial chambers to make a hole, to push the catheter to the left side, repeat the procedure on that side and pull it back out. You can see this process explained in this short video. They then apply Heparin and let the hole heal! Realized the procedure is more invasive than I originally thought! The other catheter inserted is used for multiple purposes such as mapping the chamber, measuring electrical activity as well as possible ablation steps. 

The process of ablation was previously done using extreme heat (e.g. radio frequency rays triggered from the tip of the catheter) or cold (Nitrogen gas) that kills the cells. I was explaining this process as more like heating/cooling the vessel to cook what is inside, where the vessel and adjacent area also gets heated/cooled unnecessarily. Since last year PFA (Pulse Field Ablation) model has become common. Here the catheter emits pulses for very short duration (about 2.5 seconds for each firing) that is repeated about 8 times in two different configurations (called basket and flower) that affects only needed tissue without affecting adjacent cells much. This is more like induction cooking that heats up only the content of the vessel and not the vessel itself. Click on the PFA link to see a very short video that explains the two configurations and the counts. This CT scan picture below shows one of my own heart chambers that went through the procedure. 

Once the process is over (about 2 hours total in the OR), all the catheters are removed in the OR itself, entry point sutured (just couple of stitches) before you are wheeled back into the recovery room. Though the procedure itself is only 2 hours long, there is a 4-hour protocol that is administered during recovery that involves monitoring suture site every 30 mins to make sure there is no bleeding, making you walk for 1 min after 2 hours, walk for 3, 4 mins after 3 hours, then remove the sutures, monitor your heart/pulse/BP, etc. If all goes well, the incision areas do NOT become hard, don't bleed, then you are discharged out of the hospital the same day. Though I was clearly very conscious by the time I was discharged, since the effects of general anesthesia can take up to 24 hours to wear off, Maya had to drive me home. 

I was told not to lift anything that weighs more than 10lbs for couple of weeks. I thought by next day morning I will be back to normal. But had fever, headache for couple of days, sore throat (caused by intubation) for a week, and a lingering muscle ache & tiredness for almost two weeks! Made me realize that the procedure was a big trauma for the body since multiple catheters went in and out, heart chambers were touched, septum pierced and what not, and so it has to take its time to heal and recoup normalcy. Now I am back to normal baseline, except for having to take blood thinner for a month. Since catheters were used a lot, Eliquis is prescribed to ensure that there is no blood clot formation that may result in stroke. My wife suggested I don't cook/shave so that I won't nick myself resulting in non-stop bleeding. Used the opportunity to grow a beard (you can see pictures of bearded Sundar from 1985 to 2025 here! ). I am grateful that I have good health insurance, since I saw videos that said the procedure may cost as much as or even more than $300,000, that stunned me! 

I am really intrigued and impressed by the process & the procedure. Usually, the cardiologists who do the procedure get most of the credit and patient gratitude. Though they do deserve credit, to me, they appear more like skilled technicians executing precise steps they were taught to them. What I am more impressed by is the cumulative domain knowledge that has been developed by the researchers and equipment makers, that makes such a procedure to be executed via catheters even possible! Do check-out the details of the steps, how same catheter tube is used to do multiple steps, how the extremely sharp needle at the tip of the wire that pierces the wall (septum) that separates right and left atriums is designed to immediately bend so as not to accidentally cause any other unintended damage (explained in the video), the flower and basket formations formed by the same PFA catheter and so on! 

The procedure reports I saw does say that electrical conductance tests done after the procedure show electrical isolation that is in place now. Unfortunately, (unlike a clot for which a stent is installed, that very clearly addressing the root cause,) in this procedure, the cause/fix is not very clear. We just hope that this procedure takes care of the issue. That's all. In some cases, the issue returns, and they even do a second procedure. Hopefully in my case, this completed procedure will prevent all future episodes of A-Fib or A-Flutter, allowing me and my wife/family to live worry free! I am hoping to travel, stay alone without worrying much in the future. Wish me luck! 

If you search the web, you will find lot more information such as Watchman implants that are quite interesting to learn about. If you'd like any clarification or need any specific details, please let me know via comments or email. 

Fun with biology for weekend entertainment!

 We are often caught up in clips/news/forwards that are pushed by social as well as mainstream media that are mostly one or two minutes/pages long about things that are not going to matter much after a week or two To make sure our attention span is not monotonically getting atrophied, I nudge next gen youngsters in my circle to regularly read/listen/watch/focus on material related to ideas/research that span time & space, since that is what is going to have significant impact on societies in the longer term. I'd list the concepts behind mRNA vaccine or how High NA-EUV Lithography system works, as couple of such examples that took more than a decade to develop, with work spanning across a dozen countries/companies. 

To pull us back from the non-stop "Breaking News" cycle that mostly pumps out trivial stuff that is not going to matter next week, one approach suggests imagining a newspaper that gets published only once in 50 years. If you are the editor of that newspaper, what will you put out as the headlines (both good & bad) for the new issue going out next week?

Thinking along such slow lines, wanted to provide few good pointers I came across in the realm of biology.

Within the human body, we know blood flows all around, providing the needed nourishment for different body parts to function. Still there is a serious barrier at the brain that doesn't allow most things to get through. Here is an interesting article that nicely explains the blood-brain barrier.

Similarly, when a foreign body (e.g. a germ) enters our body, we know there is serious defense mechanism in place to fight it off. But when an expectant mother is carrying the baby, the fetus should normally be treated as a foreign body, as it has different blood type, DNA, etc. and so should be fought off by the mother's body. This doesn't happen. Why? It is because of the placenta, which is now understood to be a much more complicated organ than it was previously thought of. This Radiolab podcast does an excellent job of discussing this topic. A closely related article discusses discusses possibility of microbiome existing in human brain. 

On a somewhat related note, saw a nice video titled Post Human that talked about using our skin cells to create stem cells that can then be goaded to become egg & sperm cells, so that one can potentially have one's own baby without the need for another partner's sperm or egg. While this is one form of cloning, the documentary is not about cloning at all but about developments in biology (e.g. growing a baby outside the womb, developing a digital model that can be used to experiment drug or surgical procedures to see what will work for the real patient) in multiple areas that could be around the corner. https://youtu.be/88DPXE1thw4

If such things are possible, will it be possible to grow the human baby totally outside a woman's womb? That is the "What if?" question being explored in this Netflix movie, where in the near future, babies go through gestational development in a pod, provided by a private company. You can rent the pod, choose various options by paying for them, and use a crypto key to unlock the pod during the birthing process. While the concept is nicely explored, ending is just meh. https://youtu.be/rGMx_7oAeUM

Going back in time, Netflix also has a new movie titled Joy, that presents the development of IVF tech in the 1970's.

https://youtu.be/Ix8Hzwc81XA

Robert Edwards & Patrick Steptoe, the pioneers that brought Louisa Brown (the first test tube baby) to this world, have written a book titled "A Matter of Life". It is one of the first non-fiction book I read in English, way back in the 1980's and so vividly remember, which is what this movie is about. Just like the way we are worried about the unknown repercussions of CRISPR based editing of human genome today, in the 1970s, there was massive opposition to IVF, since church, public and even the scientific community (including James Watson of DNA fame) were all worried that this is going against nature, that may produce Frankenstein monsters! 

Let me know how many of these pointers you were able to explore and what you found interesting or if you have pointers for me. 

Not so well disguised Book Reviews!

A while back I heard an interview of Nina Kraus on the radio discussing her book titled "Of Sound Mind - How our brain constructs a meaningful sonic world" that emphasized the importance of the sense of hearing, that we don't take as seriously as vision. The pun in the main title was amusing, making the book name stick to my mind. As I age, there has been some age based deterioration in my own hearing as shown in the chart below, and so I wanted to dig into this area a bit more to see if there is anything for me to do/practice to slow down or reverse the trend before I am forced to go for hearing aids, etc. in the future (very similar to what I was doing with CGM - Continuous Glucose Monitoring). 

In a totally different context came across the old Pulitzer Prize winner "The Soul of a New Machine" (when straplines for book titles were not in vogue!) by Tracy Kidder that came out in 1981. Though I have heard of it, never picked it up, though it was considered a classic in computer science world. Decided to order a copy. Since I read these two books back-to-back, my usual triggers, comparing the authors' writing style, their background and how the material was presented were all swirling around in my mind. 

Just for fun, I first asked ChatGPT to write a book review in my style for the Soul of the machine book. I could do that by pointing it to my blogsite that has archives of my previous reviews so that it can learn. Here is the exact prompt I gave, and the review it wrote. This is to see how close its writeup is compared to how I felt. 

My prompt to ChatGPT: Write a book review for "The soul of a new machine" by Tracy Kidder in the style of Sundar Vedantham using book reviews posted at https://sundarvedantham.blogspot.com 

Here is what it came up with:

I was expecting it to write a review exactly like what I'd have written (i.e. if I copy/paste and send it out as my review, no one will know the difference). But it interpreted the prompt to mean that it should mimic someone else writing the review, referring to my style (hence the "as Vedantham would ask" lines). While it did manage to write prose that is similar to how I may write, actual takeaways were quite the opposite to what I felt reading the book! I have read couple of other books in the past, with major expectations that turned out to be duds for me. Along those lines, despite this one being a Pulitzer Prize winner, I didn't find it very engaging. Being a 4 decade old book, perhaps it hasn't aged well. It is written by the author Tracy Kidder who is a writer (i.e. not computer scientist). He was invited to hang around the design team of a computer company called Data General, as they were designing a new Mini-Computer (similar to DEC's PDP-11) called Eclipse. 

Data General was a badass computer company in the 70's. It was known for aggressive sales techniques, bold advertisements (look up "They Say IBM’s Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome." advertisement that never actually went out) and so forth. While the DG's efforts & style were unique and heroic compared to IBM type companies at that time, to me Kidder kept sounding like a total outsider (perhaps because I am an insider) who was trying to sound like an insider, explaining geeky technical details of computer design in not so easy to understand prose for common audience. Author who is not a techie trying to sound like he is very tightly integrated as part of the tech team, describing how he was in the lab, went fishing with the tech leads, ate dinner with them, describing everything in first person singular (I did this, I asked him, my wife said) sounded odd. Reminded me of Carly Fiorina, when she became CEO of HP, putting up her picture next to Hewlett & Packard in their corporate office. It made HP engineers giggle since they didn't see her as an equivalent techie that deserved to have her portrait next to the founders, both of whom had passed away! Kidder certainly didn't go that far. But more of an observer style reporting in third person might have come across better. Perhaps it is just me. If you have read it and consider it a classic, educate me as to what I am missing and what impressed you so much.  

OTOH, Kraus is a Prof. at Northwestern University, running a lab called Brainvolts for decades, guided about 30 PhD students and has written just this one book that captures her lifelong work spanning decades. While this profile matches that of some very good books I have read in the past, I found Kraus' prose unnecessarily technical for a mass audience book. Here is an example, "Their hearing threshold did not change, but the way the auditory cortex responded to sound changed, reflecting a disorganized tonotopic pitch-processing mechanism". Takes a while to get used to her discussing the differences between afferent (moving upstream from ear towards brain) and efferent (moving downstream) in such language elaborately. I often complain that books usually contain walls and walls of text but instead should sprinkle around many more figures & pictures to help illustrate the discussion. While I was delighted to see Kraus using a lot of pictures, I found many pictures that didn't add much value. They felt so unnecessary, perhaps only helping to increase page count nudging it towards the 300-page mark, which is typical for books of this kind (this one is only 267 pages long). In addition, there were several pictures reused with permission from somewhere else. Probably the originals were color pictures that were meant to be seen in larger format. Rendered in B&W, small format portrayal in this book, things written inside those images by hand were hard to read and so again were annoying. 

But once we get past those annoyances, this book nicely covers the importance of good auditory capacity we should strive to retain for our mental health. Kraus writes in first person, talking often about her family, children, husband, mother, and students. In this case, since it is all her research, it does sound appropriate, at least to my ears. She covers the subject from multiple angles, the ear-brain functionality that enables us to hear & comprehend sound, bird songs, poverty are just few angles she takes up. Often when you dig into any specific areas of research, you unearth very interesting facts and nuances that are not intuitive. Kraus does a lot of research by measuring midbrain electrical signals that can be measured from our scalp (FFR - Frequency Following Response), that she uses as a point of departure to study the effects of sound on autism, aging, and so on. Here are some such findings Kraus talks about:

- Both musicians and athletes are better at hearing & understanding speech under noisy conditions. But the brains of the musicians amplify the signal (i.e. speech) to understand what is being said better, while athletes suppress the noise to reach the same level of understanding. 

- Plants are able to "hear" or are sensitive to sound. Her team demonstrates it using a pot that has two diverging legs at the bottom. Since plants grow their roots towards the area where water is found, without really providing water, but by creating the sound of water, they are able to observe the root growing towards that leg of the pot!

- Marine lives thrive near coral reefs that have a lot of activity reflected by the level of sound. By playing marine sounds through speakers near dead coral, we are able to attract more fish and other marine beings to settle down in that area, helping the area revive!

- Being a practicing bilingual and performing music of any kind are two areas that really help. 

- I have attached a 7 min long radio interview she gave. Near minute 6:30 see how by measuring the electric signals on the scalp as our brain listens to a piece of audio (few seconds of music, in this case) we can even recreate the audio back. 

I went for an audiology exam recently. The plot below shows my left/right (blue/red respectively) hearing thresholds. This is typical age-related hearing deterioration at different frequencies. 

I did do well on speech audiometry, word recognition tympanometry, and other such tests. Bur from previous test results completed couple of years ago, I can see a 5db drop in most frequencies. Kraus points out how if we see bleary road signs, we won't blame the highway department for installing fuzzy signs but get our eyes checked but when we don't hear well, we blame the noise around us and don't rush to get our ears tested! As we lose hearing slowly, as almost all of us will as we age, conversations become difficult. We slowly become apprehensive and hesitant about annoying others by asking them to repeat what they said. We then start to avoid interactions and tend to become more and more isolated leading to depression. We may also see this behavior in our own family elders. Simple fixes are getting tested by an audiologist to track any deterioration over time, learning a new language, playing music, avoiding excessive noise that can damage our ears, getting the right kind of hearing aids, and so on. I am planning to put these ideas into practice in my life. Do check out the Brainvolts lab website that has interesting short videos, papers, tests. If you won't pick up this book, you can search for her name online and listen to interviews/talks.

Book Review: Accelerating India's Development by Karthik Muralidharan

I was listening to Amit Varma's The Seen and the Unseen, long form podcast when I came to know about this author. Karthik Muralidharan's first two appearances on that podcast series where he discussed education and healthcare in India were domain specific and were excellent. Third one that is five hours long discussed the Indian state, its faults and short comings and ways through which it can be improved considerably. When that episode aired two years ago (in 2022), KM was working on this book. Since it piqued my interest, asked my friend Sanjay to buy it, read it and then give it to me when I went to India last summer. Sanjay did the first and third part but did the second only partially, since this is an 800-page tome! Now that I am done, I can give it back to him to finish reading. 😀

Muralidharan is an academic who went to grad school in the US and is a faculty at UCSD but also has done a ton of field work in India, working with various state governments, NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and academic institutions. Since this book titled Accelerating India's Development - A State Led Roadmap for Effective Governance, distills everything he had learned and gathered over the last two decades, it is panoramic, comprehensive and impressively detailed. Though it spans 800 pages, the last 200 pages are notes & references, leaving a good 600 pages for us to read, in very accessible language. 

Initial chapters set out the current status and the problems that need to be solved. When India got its independence from the British 77 years ago, many thought it may break apart into dozen different pieces due to its diversity in people, culture, languages, religion, wealth and geography. While the union has endured, thriving as the world's largest democracy, there are still humungous problems in service delivery, lack of trust in the government & politicians, corruption, poverty and so forth that need to be solved. General apathy or disillusionment among the citizenry is quite common making such problem solving quite difficult. 

After setting up that background, with a lot of facts, data and charts, Muralidharan goes around breaking several myths and presents current problems & status from different perspectives. Couple of examples:

- Western scholars or even people in India tend to compare current conditions in India with developed countries as they exist today to complain how bad the situation in India is. Author points out that countries like the US initially became democracies where only a very small minority (i.e. white men) had the ability to vote, and the state was able to provide the guarantees and services that small voting block desired (e.g. land rights). With that initial trust built, more citizens could be enfranchised slowly (e.g. women, blacks), over the decades, if not centuries. With raising tax revenue in the same period, additional services like education, health, etc. could be provided by the government. This ladder of starting small, delivering a small set of services, gaining the trust and slowly expanding the tax base, capacity and services worked in the histories of developed countries. But in case of India, right off the bat, everyone in the country was enfranchised from the beginning as the constitution was written when India got its freedom in 1947. But the state had no tax revenue or other needed capacity to deliver so many things like food, jobs, education, healthcare, defense. etc. the citizenry expected from the government! This led to distrust, resulting in people cheating on taxes, moving to private services for their education, healthcare needs, preventing the state from ever acquiring the capacity or ability or trust to deliver all the expected services. When we look at India's evolution in this light, we may not bad mouth the country so much. 

- Indian citizenry often feels that most of the government funds are swindled by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. The author argues that a pie chart of funds not reaching the intended goals, shows only 13% swallowed by corruption, while the remaining 87% loss is due to poor and ineffective/inefficient implementation. If we can tweak the system to eliminate inefficiencies even a little, it may have 10X improvements in deliveries! As the deliveries and services improve, corruption may start to go down on its own. Thus, there is a lot of hope for fixing the system. 

- There is a general perception that there are way too many Indian government employees. But in reality, there are only 16 public employees for every 1000 citizens in India, while the number is 57, 77, 138 and 159 respectively in China, US, Sweden and Norway! This shows that the number of public servants per capita are one of the least in the world for India! Even the limited state capacity (e.g. police) is used to provide services for the rich and powerful (e.g. VIP escort) rather than ensuring the safety of ordinary citizens.

After several chapters of such interesting juxtaposing of facts, book gets into ideas for improving the system area by area. Since the suggestions are not just armchair analysis but are tested in field, author is keenly aware of what is practical. He focuses on changes that can be implemented by politicians with their eyes on the next election that they need to win. Hence many suggestions are ones that are especially low hanging fruits that can be picked with minimum effort and expense. While many of the suggestions are worth discussing, to keep the review short, we can summarize them as follows:

- Everywhere focus in India to improve services is on allotting more resources but not on measuring outcomes. Thus, when it comes to education, a school may get 10 computers. But since the school principal will be in deep trouble during audit if a computer is found missing, he will tend to keep it under lock and key ensuring its safety, though this may result in a situation where students don't learn much from it. Every ministry/secretory/NGO continues to ask for more funding for their pet area. But simply improving efficiency by ceding a lot of control to local entities may solve a lot of these limited resource issues. Book cites China and Vietnam as two countries that have improved quality of education delivery without increasing the teachers' salary. Particularly China that is often seen as a very strong centrally controlled country, is cited many times for the level of decision making, budgeting, spending that is taking place at the local government level. 

- In a field trial, the author worked with an Indian state government to setup a calling center with minimal expense. They then used it to contact end recipients of a government grant to check if they got the disbursed money. While doing this, they advertised this process of checking widely to the bureaucrats that are the intermediary, delivering the funds to the state's citizens. This apparently eliminated most of the swindling and the money reached the intended recipients properly. Thus, implementing some such small but highly visible check may make a dramatic difference in the quality of service delivered. 

- Since firing ineffective government workers may not be easy, author suggests hiring new interns to assist existing employees on a contract basis for 3 to 5 years. Government employees won't object to this since they are getting extra help. The temporary employees will work better since the carrot of a small percentage of them becoming permanent later could be dangled in front of them. Many who don't become permanent can apply for another temporary term or would have at least gathered valuable skills they can use elsewhere to get gainful employment. Over the years, quality of service should improve considerably with older inefficient employees retiring.

There are many more such field-tested ideas for healthcare, court system (that is creaking under the backlogged case load), agriculture, policing, and so on that are all worth exploring. Author argues that many of these ideas can be implemented with results starting to show up within about four years. Since Indian elections are held once in five years, politicians can wade into these ideas with the hope of being able to take credit for the positive results during the following election cycle. Book focuses more on what can be done at the state level, rather than at the central/federal govt level, since the needs of the Indian states vary widely. This approach will allow more customized solutions that could be tried out quickly at a smaller scale at the state level. If they are successful, other states can adopt them. If not, they can tweak the programs and iterate to perfect them. He cites the example of Illam Thedi Kalvi  (Education at your door step), a program pioneered by the state of Tamilnadu during the Covid pandemic to ensure children got access to enough schooling at their home, that turned out to be a great success. This approach makes each one of the 28 Indian states smaller labs that can move more nimbly. 

In more than one section, including the last chapter, author talks about the Aadhar biometric ID system India has implemented, as a poster child for excellent solution development that is customized for India and deployed in such massive scale for the first time in the world. Such initiatives manage to prove naysayers within India, who think India can't innovate at that scale, wrong. The Unified Payment Interface (UPI) is the next innovation that has leap frogged many other developed nations' systems in being developed, deployed and being operated smoothly on a massive scale. Both of these solutions are now being exported to other countries. This is used to illustrate the point that due to its size and scale, solutions being put together for India can potentially help the world as well. Thus, book concludes that though it may appear daunting, there is a lot that could be done to smoothly to accelerate India's development. 

There is not much to say that is negative about the book. Language is simple, areas covered are comprehensive, ideas are presented for central, state, local governments to try out, bureaucrats and individual citizens to take up, and corporations and NGOs to contribute. While one can complain about the length of the book (800 pages), the scope seems to warrant it. Even if you are not interested in India particularly, if you are a policy geek like me, it might be an interesting read. I am also sure many ideas presented will be applicable to several other countries in the world. If you don't have the time and patience to read the book, you can atleast consider listening to the podcast episode where many of these ideas were first discussed.