#dnaEdit: Week's analysis in brief

Neutralising Airtel Zero
E-commerce giant Flipkart’s dalliance with the Airtel Zero platform was a poor business proposition considering the negative publicity it has generated. Its loyal customer base began downrating and even uninstalling the Flipkart app, and starting hashtags that went viral alongside the savetheinternet.in social media campaign. Airtel Zero would have allowed consumers to access the Flipkart app without paying any data charges. What seemed an innocuous, even beneficial, deal is not what it appears to be. How will Airtel then treat Flipkart’s competitors, big and small? Would rival e-commerce sites and apps be slower to load and be forced to pay? Would these charges be passed to customers? Airtel Zero poses grave dangers to small businesses and the start-up culture spawned by the Internet. Customers  and companies already pay hefty monthly sums for data usage and the network infrastructure, and Airtel already makes huge profits from these. For network providers to now demand money for over-the-top applications is plain corporate greed.

Günter Grass: the phenomenon
The Nobel Prize winning author Gunter Grass, who many described as Germany’s moral conscience, died on Monday. A playwright, essayist, poet, sculptor as well as novelist, Günter’s multi-faceted persona earned him a place in the sun in the universe of arts and letters. But the writer’s notoriety stemmed primarily from his status as a political and social critic. Günter’s novel The Tin Drum, published in 1959 — the first in the ‘Danzig Trilogy’ — received worldwide acclaim as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. The Tin Drum captured Grass’s astonishing sweep of literary imagination with its severed horse’s head thronging with eels and the piercing voice of a child shattering windows. Günter’s revelation of his Nazi past — coming on the eve of publishing of his memoir Peeling the Orange — pitched him in the line of fire of critics accusing him of hypocrisy.  “It was a weight on me,” Günter, then 78, said. “My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote the book. It had to come out in the end.”

Climatologists woo physicists
Climatologists — the specialists — who are supposed to tell us all about what has gone wrong with climate in the last 200 years, seem to have realised that they need physicists to understand the many uncertainties in this particular field of study. The climate scientists are now trying to persuade physicists who might opt for studying astro-physics or cosmology to turn their attention to climate change. Their argument — there are greater challenges in climate studies than in the discipline of pure physics. Is this a late realisation on the part of climatologists that they need more sophisticated approaches in their field of study to make it more credible? For quite some time, the evidence for global warming has been based on thin evidence and thick rhetoric. It surely will be a good thing if solid evidence replaces apocalyptic rant.