Category: bangalore

69 is the answer

The IDFC-Duke-Chicago survey that concluded that 50% of Bangalore had covid-19 in late June only surveyed 69 people in the city. 

When it comes to most things in life, the answer is 42. However, if you are trying to rationalise the IDFC-Duke-Chicago survey that found that over 50% of people in Bangalore had had covid-19 by end-June, then the answer is not 42. It is 69.

For that is the sample size that the survey used in Bangalore.

Initially I had missed this as well. However, this evening I attended half of a webinar where some of the authors of the survey spoke about the survey and the paper, and there they let the penny drop. And then I found – it’s in one small table in the paper.

The IDFC-Duke-Chicago survey only surveyed 69 people in Bangalore

The above is the table in its glorious full size. It takes effort to read the numbers. Look at the second last line. In Bangalore Urban, the ELISA results (for antibodies) were available for only 69 people.

And if you look at the appendix, you find that 52.5% of respondents in Bangalore had antibodies to covid-19 (that is 36 people). So in late June, they surveyed 69 people and found that 36 had antibodies for covid-19. That’s it.

To their credit, they didn’t highlight this result (I sort of dug through their paper to find these numbers and call the survey into question). And they mentioned in tonight’s webinar as well that their objective was to get an idea of the prevalence in the state, and not just in one particular region (even if it be as important as Bangalore).

That said, two things that they said during the webinar in defence of the paper that I thought I should point out here.

First, Anu Acharya of MapMyGenome (also a co-author of the survey) said “people have said that a lot of people we approached refused consent to be surveyed. That’s a standard of all surveying”. That’s absolutely correct. In any random survey, you will always have an implicit bias because the sort of people who will refuse to get surveyed will show a pattern.

However, in this particular case, the point to note is the extremely high number of people who refused to be surveyed – over half the households in the panel refused to be surveyed, and in a further quarter of the panel households, the identified person refused to be surveyed (despite the family giving clearance).

One of the things with covid-19 in India is that in the early days of the pandemic, anyone found having the disease would be force-hospitalised. I had said back then (not sure where) that hospitalising asymptomatic people was similar to the “precogs” in Minority Report – you confine the people because they MIGHT INFECT OTHERS.

For this reason, people didn’t want to get tested for covid-19. If you accidentally tested positive, you would be institutionalised for a week or two (and be made to pay for it, if you demanded a private hospital). Rather, unless you had clear symptoms or were ill, you were afraid of being tested for covid-19 (whether RT-PCR or antibodies, a “representative sample” won’t understand).

However, if you had already got covid-19 and “served your sentence”, you would be far less likely to be “afraid of being tested”. This, in conjunction with the rather high proportion of the panel that refused to get tested, suggests that there was a clear bias in the sample. And since the numbers for Bangalore clearly don’t make sense, it lends credence to the sampling bias.

And sample size apart, there is nothing Bangalore-specific about this bias (apart from that in some parts of the state, the survey happened after people had sort of lost their fear of testing). This further suggests that overall state numbers are also an overestimate (which fits in with my conclusion in the previous blogpost).

The other thing that was mentioned in the webinar that sort of cracked me up was the reason why the sample size was so low in Bangalore – a lockdown got announced while the survey was on, and the sampling team fled. In today’s webinar, the paper authors went off on a rant about how surveying should be classified as an “essential activity”.

In any case, none of this matters. All that matters is that 69 is the answer.

 

Meet and beat

Soon after our first “date” (we didn’t know when we were going to meet that it was going to be a “date” that would ultimately lead to marriage), the person who is now my wife wrote a cute  blogpost titled “Karabath Series“.

In that she had written about “arranged louvvu”, and went on to write this:

First step is to keep your eyes open to delicious and nutritious tharkaris(potential marriage material girls/boys). Then, somehow through some network, make someone set you two up. Third, interact. with tact. Fourth, put meet. or beat. Fifth, this can go in three ways now. First, is a no. Definite no. Second, yes. Full yes. Third, Yes, but not yet. This is a lucrative possibility which gives super scope to put more meets, learn about each others funny faces, food tastes, sense of humour, patience, sense of dressing, chappliying, smells, etc

The fourth point is key, and it was amply clear to me after reading it that it was aimed at me. For a few days before this was written, we had met, and “put beat” (as they say in Bangalore parlance).

We had sort of been “google talk friends” for two years then, and “orkut friends” for three. I had been in the arranged marriage market, and I had out of the blue suggested that we meet. After a little song and dance about whether meeting would be appropriate or not, the discussion went on to where to meet.

This is when she mentioned we could “simply walk around Gandhi Bazaar together”. Things moved fast after that. We met in front of Vidyarthi Bhavan at 4 o’clock on the long weekend Monday, and then started walking. Two hours of walking around Basavanagudi later, we stopped at a Cafe Coffee Day (now closed) to sit for a bit and have coffee. Five years later I documented what we’ve now retrofitted as our “first date” here.

This is not a “personal” post. This is yet another post about how the world might change after the covid crisis. It just has a long preamble, that’s all.

One of the things that is going to suffer after the crisis is over is cafes. I’d written in my post on verandahs about how cafes have served well as good “third places” to meet people. That option is not going to be too much of an option going forward, for even after cafes reopen, people will be loathe to go there and sit in close proximity to strangers.

So how do we do “general catchups”? How do we do dates? How do we discuss business ideas with people? The solution for all this lies in what we ended up doing on our first date. I don’t claim we invented it. Well before we went on this date, journalist Shekhar Gupta had started this series on NDTV called “walk the talk”.

What do you do? You just meet at an agreed place, pick up something to munch on or drink, and start walking. You can take side roads to make sure there isn’t too much traffic. The length of the walk can vary based on how interesting you find each other, and how much time you have.

The best part of meeting someone while walking is that there are no awkward silences. Rather, since you aren’t looking at each other constantly, the silences won’t be awkward. When you run out of things to talk about, there will be some visual stimulus by something you walk by. What’s not to like?

The only issue with walking and talking is that it might be an excellent idea for Bangalore, but not so much for a lot of other cities. Delhi and Bombay, for example, are impossible to step outside in for at least the summer. Maybe in those places we’ll end up having heavily “air cooled” or heavily fanned outdoor places.

It’s not for nothing that the phrase “putting beat” (for aimlessly walking around) was invented in Bangalore.

 

 

The future of work, and cities

Ok this is the sort of speculative predictive post that I don’t usually indulge in. However, I think my blog is at the right level of obscurity that makes it conducive for making speculative predictions. It is not popular enough that enough people will remember this prediction in case this doesn’t come through. And it’s not that obscure as well – in case it does come through, I can claim credit.

So my claim is that companies whose work doesn’t involve physically making stuff haven’t explored the possibilities of remote work enough before the current (covid-19) crisis hit. With the gatherings of large people, especially in air-conditioned spaces being strongly discouraged, companies that hadn’t given remote working enough thought are being forced to consider the opportunity now.

My prediction is that once the crisis over and things go back to “normal”, there will be converts. Organisations and teams and individuals who had never before thought that working from home would have taken enough of a liking to the concept to give it a better try. Companies will become more open to remote working, having seen the benefits (or lack of costs) of it in the period of the crisis. People will commute less. They will travel less (at least for work purposes). This is going to have a major impact on the economy, and on cities.

I’m still not done with cities.

For most of history, there has always been a sort of natural upper limit to urbanisation, in the form of disease. Before germ theory became a thing, and vaccinations and cures came about for a lot of common illnesses, it was routine for epidemics to rage through cities from time to time, thus decimating their population. As a consequence, people didn’t live in cities if they could help it.

Over the last hundred years or so (after the “Spanish” flu of 1918), medicine has made sufficient progress that we haven’t seen such disease or epidemics (maybe until now). And so the network effect of cities has far outweighed the problem of living in close proximity to lots of other people.

Especially in the last 30 years or so, as “knowledge work” has formed a larger part of the economies, a disproportionate part of the economic growth (and population growth) has been in large cities. Across the world – Mumbai, Bangalore, London, the Bay Area – a large part of the growth has come in large urban agglomerations.

One impact of this has been a rapid rise in property prices in such cities – it is in the same period that these cities have become virtually unaffordable for the young to buy houses in. The existing large size and rapid growth contribute to this.

Now that we have a scary epidemic around us, which is likely to spread far more in dense urban agglomerations, I imagine people at the margin to reconsider their decisions to live in large cities. If they can help it, they might try to move to smaller towns or suburbs. And the rise of remote work will aid this – if you hardly go to office and it doesn’t really matter where you live, do you want to live in a crowded city with a high chance of being hit by a stray virus?

This won’t be a drastic movement, but I see a marginal redistribution of population in the next decade away from the largest cities, and in favour of smaller towns and cities.It won’t be large, but significant enough to have an impact on property prices. The bull run we’ve seen in property prices, especially in large and fast-growing cities, is likely to see some corrections. Property holders in smaller cities that aren’t too unpleasant to live in can expect some appreciation.

Oh, and speaking of remote work, I have an article in today’s Times Of India about the joys of working from home. It’s not yet available online, so I’ve attached a clipping.

Schelling segregation on High Streets

We’ve spoken about Thomas Schelling’s segregation model here before. The basic idea is this – people move houses if not enough people like them live around them. A simple rule is – if at least 3 of your 8 neighbours around you aren’t like you, you move.

And Schelling’s insight was that even such a simple rule – that you only need more than a third of neighbours like yourself  to stay in your place, when applied system wide, can quickly result in near-complete segregation.

I had done a quick simulation of Schelling’s model a few years back, and here is a picture from that

Of late I’ve started noticing this in retail as well. The operative phrase in the previous sentence is “I’ve started noticing”, for I think there is nothing new about this phenomenon.

Essentially retail outlets want to be located close to other stores that belong to the same category, or at least the same segment. One piece of rationale here is spillovers – someone who comes to a Louis Philippe store, upon not finding what they want, might want to hop over to the Arrow store next door. And then to the Woodland store across the road to buy shoes. And so on.

When a store is located with stores selling stuff targeted at a disjoint market, this spillover is lost.

And then there is the branding issue. A store that is located along with more downmarket stores risks losing its own brand value. This is one reason you see, across time, malls becoming segmented by the kind of stores they have.

A year and half back, I’d written about how the Jayanagar Shopping Complex “died”, thanks to non-increase of rents which resulted in cheap shops taking over, resulting in all the nicer shops moving out. In that I’d written:

On the other hand, the area immediately around the now-dying shopping complex has emerged as a brilliant retail destination.

And now I see this Schelling-ian game playing out in the area around the Jayanagar Shopping Complex. This is especially visible on two roads that attract a lot of shoppers – 11th main and 30th cross (which intersect at the Cool Joint junction).

These are two roads that have historically had a lot of good branded stores, but the way they’ve developed in the last year or so is interesting.

I don’t know if it has to do with drainage works that have been taking forever, but 32nd Cross seems to be moving more and more downmarket. A Woodland’s shoe store moved out. As did a Peter England store. Shree Sagar, which once served excellent chaats, now looks desolate.

The road has instead been taken over by stores selling “export reject garments” and knock down brands. And as I’ve observed over the last few months, these kind of shops continue take over more and more of the retail space on that road. In that sense, it is surprising that a new Jockey store took over three floors of a building on that road – seems completely out of character there. I expect it to move in short order.

I must mention here that over the last few years, the supply of retail space in Jayanagar has exploded, and that has automatically meant that all kinds of brands have space to operate there. It was only natural that a process takes place where certain roads become more upmarket than others.

Nevertheless, the way 30th cross (between 10th and 11th mains) and 10th main have visibly evolved over the last year or so is rather interesting.

Bad signalling

About a month or two back, a new set of traffic lights came up on the way from home to my daughter’s school. It’s among the least effective set of lights I’ve seen.

For starters, the signal cycles are too long to justify the traffic, so if everyone decides to follow the lights, the traffic will only get worse.

Then, on two sides of the signal (the east and west approach roads) the lights aren’t displayed properly. There are lights on the left side of the road just before the signal, but no corresponding lights at a height across the intersection. So if someone is too close to the intersection they can’t see the lights.

Most importantly there has been no attempt at all so far to enforce the lights. There wasn’t even a cop standing there in the days leading up to the installation of the lights. The intersection was never really that crowded to necessitate a signal (ok I have limited data on this). And one day suddenly the lights went up and it was expected that people will follow.

People, for the most part, haven’t, and that’s a good thing considering the signal cycle. The east and west sides (who don’t have lights on the opposite side of the intersection to reinforce the signal) started the jumping first. The north and south sides joined.

I usually approach it from the south side, and the only times I stop at the signal is if someone in front of me has decided to obey the signal and doesn’t let me past. And I suppose that as people hit the signal multiple times they too make an independent judgment that everyone is jumping the signal, and that’s the optimal strategy.

I see this as a case of failed mechanism design. A set of traffic lights is good if and only if everyone has an incentive to follow it, or is made to follow it. For example, once a set of lights go up, having a cop stationed at the intersection for a few weeks means that most regular commuters across the intersection will get used to the lights, and start following it. And once you have a critical mass of commuters following the signal, the rest simply obey.

As things stand now, I’m happy that nobody really follows these lights – for if people did, it would only slow things down!

These lights, by the way, are at the intersection of 26th main and 39th cross roads in Jayanagar 9th Block.

Trip To Indiranagar

The first time I recall going to Indiranagar was in 1992, when we purchased a used car from someone who used to live there. While walking from the nearest bus stop to the house of the previous owner of our car, we had taken a longish route, as my parents admired all the “beautiful houses” in the area.

Six years later I went to school in that part of town. The “beautiful houses” were still there, and I used to walk past them on my way to school from the bus stop every morning. While I found the culture of the place to be quite different from that of Jayanagar (where I lived), I found the part of town to be nice, and liked going there (though not necessarily for school).

And it was another 6-year gap after school before I resumed my visits to Indiranagar. This time round, it wasn’t as regular as going to school, and most of the time the agenda was eating. Indiranagar by the mid 2000s had a lot of wonderful restaurants serving a nice variety of cuisines. Some of these restaurants were also rather fancy, and so when I met up with college friends living in Bangalore from time to time, it was usually in one place of another in Indiranagar. I continued to find the place nice.

Marriage and child and change in profession have all meant that visits to Indiranagar have become less frequent, and most of them nowadays are work-related. I spend time in coffee shops there. I take the metro to go there. I occasionally walk around a bit from meeting to meeting, but don’t notice the surroundings around. Some eateries there continue to be nice, though there are a lot more of them nowadays than before.

Something snapped today when we went there for lunch.

Lunch was at “Burma Burma” which the wife had rather hyped up over the years, and where it is reportedly incredibly hard to find a table. The drive to there was smooth, the car was handed over to the valet, and off we went inside to our table. The service was excellent, but the food was so-so. I’ve never eaten burmese food in my life so I don’t know if Burmese food is supposed to taste that way, but it tasted extremely Indian. Moreover the food was “low density” – I ate until my stomach was full but still didn’t feel like I’d gotten sufficient energy.

It was after the meal that I realised how much Indiranagar has changed, and not for the better. Immediately after we got out of the restaurant, I ran after the valet to tell him to leave my car where it was (on a side road) since I had “other business on the road”.

I wanted to check out the newly opened Blue Tokai Coffee Shop, also on 12th main. The walk to get there was horrendous. It was only 200 metres from Burma Burma (made a bit longer by our walking for a bit in the wrong direction), but it was impossible to walk anywhere but in the middle of the road. Footpaths were fully occupied by trees, dug up drains and parked vehicles. And there was a continuous line of parked vehicles right next to the footpath.

It was as if the 12th Main (the same road on which I would walk to school) area has been redesigned such that you drive from shop to shop, giving your car to valets who will then proceed to park it in some side road.

Oh, and Blue Tokai is a non-starter. It’s a small space on the first floor with acoustics so bad that one loud group in the place can render the whole place unbearable. It didn’t help that they took forever to take our order, and we decided to decamp to the (tried and trusted, for me) Third Wave Coffee Roasters on CMH Road.

And that meant another walk, though we eschewed 12th main this time, and then a short drive. Both of us noticed that the roads of Indiranagar seemed narrower than what we remembered – maybe the multitude of restaurants there means valets keep parking all through the inside roads, and double parked roads can be narrow indeed. And the area around CMH where Third Wave is located isn’t particularly nice either.

It seems to me that Indiranagar is not posh any more. In a way it was so posh at one point in time that everyone sought to set up shop there, and all the shops meant that the area has lost its character. The “beautiful houses” are being torn down one by one, replaced by commercial buildings full of restaurants, cars parked by whose valets will flood more and more of the inner roads, and make the entire area unwalkable.

I’m pretty sure most of the posh people in the area have left, having sold their houses into the real estate boom. I just wonder where they have moved to!

PS: The coffee at Third Wave was incredibly bad as well. It’s not usually so – I keep saying that they’re the best coffee shop in Bangalore. The milk today was scalding hot, and the barista poured so much of it in our cups, and without any of the finesse you associate with flat white, that it was completely tasteless.

 

 

Couples on trains

When I first visited London in 2005, the way some couples travelled on the underground caught my fancy. The usual algorithm would be that the taller partner (usually the guy) would hold on to the bar on top, and the other partner (usually the girl) would stand holding him. I clearly remember seeing this enough times back then for it to be a pattern.

I returned to London in 2017 to live there, and interestingly, this way of couple travel had gone missing. I don’t know if there was a cultural shift in the way that people travelled. My best guess is that it’s due to carriage redesign – in 2005, most of my travel (and thus observation) was on the District Line, and the District Line had got a whole new (and modern) set of carriages by 2017.

Perhaps it was the design of the old carriage (which possibly had too few railings to hold on to) that encouraged this couple behaviour. And the better designed new carriage meant that this way of one partner holding on to the other wasn’t that necessary.

The other explanation I have for this is personal – in 2005 I was a much under-exposed 22 year old who would notice every single act of public display of affection. And so every time I saw a couple travel this way (or kiss on escalators at tube stations) I would notice. By 2017, I was much better exposed, and didn’t find PDA all that fascinating and so didn’t notice even though I did many many train journeys.

In any case, the reason this observation about London trains becomes pertinent now is because of the Bangalore Metro, which seems to be showing shades of London 2005 behaviour. At least on four or five occasions in the last one month I’ve seen couples travel this way on the Bangalore metro – one holds the handrail on the ceiling, and the other holds the partner.

I begin to wonder if this is a necessary step in the evolution of any city’s metro system.

Glass Houses

When I was in middle or high school, I learnt about the greenhouse effect, and learnt from my textbook that “glass houses” are an example of greenhouses. These glass houses are used to control temperature inside, I read, and this helps to grow a specific kind of plants. While all this sounded good in theory, the problem was that it didn’t really fit the example I had seen in real life.

I’ve known glass houses from the time I was very young, thanks to the one in Lalbagh in Bangalore, which was erected in 1889 to commemorate the visit of Prince Albert Victor (Queen Victoria’s husband) to Bangalore. Lalbagh being located close to home,  I would go there every other weekend, and the routine consisted of walking through the glass house and sitting on one of the bull statues in front of it.

From memory (I’ve hardly gone to Lalbagh in adulthood), the glass house was always empty, except for exhibition times in August and January every year, when it would be full of flowering plants. And the glass house being largely open, the temperature and humidity insight wasn’t noticeably different from that outside. And that meant that I couldn’t particularly appreciate my science lesson that glass houses are greenhouses.

All that changed yesterday when we visited the Palm House in Kew Gardens in London. It was an unusually warm day for February in London, but even then the difference between the inside and outside of the glass house was rather noticeable. The Palm House houses tropical plants from Asia, Africa and the Americas, and consequently a tropical weather is maintained. And this is achieved by dint of it being a glass house (i.e. a grenhouse), and also frequent waterings to increase humidity in the house. And this meant that while it’s still winter in London, tropical plants were blooming and buzzing in the Palm House!

I don’t know what it will cost Lalbagh to maintain a permanent collection of plants in the glass house. Also Bangalore can get warm in summer and maintaining a different temperature inside may not be desirable. Nevertheless, thinking back, it would have immensely helped me in high school had the glass house in Bangalore actually functioned as a Glass House!

Bangalore names are getting shorter

The Bangalore Names Dataset, derived from the Bangalore Voter Rolls (cleaned version here), validates a hypothesis that a lot of people had – that given names in Bangalore are becoming shorter. From an average of 9 letters in the name for a male aged around 80, the length of the name comes down to 6.5 letters for a 20 year old male. 

What is interesting from the graph (click through for a larger version) is the difference in lengths of male and female names – notice the crossover around the age 25 or so. At some point in time, men’s names continue to become shorter while women’s names’ lengths stagnate.

So how are names becoming shorter? For one, honorific endings such as -appa, -amma, -anna, -aiah and -akka are becoming increasingly less common. Someone named “Krishnappa” (the most common name with the ‘appa’ suffix) in Bangalore is on average 56 years old, while someone named Krishna (the same name without the suffix) is on average only 44 years old. Similarly, the average age of people named Lakshmamma is 55, while that of everyone named Lakshmi is just 40.  while the average Lakshmi (same name no suffix) is just 40.

In fact, if we look at the top 12 male and female names with a honorific ending, the average age of the version without the ending is lower than that of the version with the ending. I’ve even graphed some of the distributions to illustrate this.

  In each case, the red line shows the distribution of the longer version of the name, and the blue line the distribution of the shorter version

In one of the posts yesterday, we looked at the most typical names by age in Bangalore. What happens when we flip the question? Can we define what are the “oldest” and “youngest” names? Can we define these based on the average age of people who hold that name? In order to rule out fads, let’s stick to names that are held by at least 10000 people each.

These graphs are candidates for my own Bad Visualisations Tumblr, but I couldn’t think of a better way to represent the data. These graphs show the most popular male and female names, with the average age of a voter with that given name on the X axis, and the number of voters with that name on the Y axis. The information is all in the X axis – the Y axis is there just so that names don’t overlap.

So Karthik is among the youngest names among men, with an average age among voters being about 28 (remember this is not the average age of all Karthiks in Bangalore – those aged below 18 or otherwise not eligible to vote have been excluded). On the women’s side, Divya, Pavithra and Ramya are among the “youngest names”.

At the other end, you can see all the -appas and -ammas. The “oldest male name” is Krishnappa, with an average age 56. And then you have Krishnamurthy and Narayana, which don’t have the -appa suffix but represent an old population anyway (the other -appa names just don’t clear the 10000 people cutoff).

More women’s names with the -amma suffix clear the 10000 names cutoff, and we can see that pretty much all women’s names with an average age of 50 and above have that suffix. And the “oldest female name”, subject to 10000 people having that name, is Muniyamma. And then you have Sarojamma and Jayamma and Lakshmamma. And a lot of other ammas.

What will be the oldest and youngest names we relax the popularity cutoff, and instead look at names with at least 1000 people? The five youngest names are Dhanush, Prajwal, Harshitha, Tejas and Rakshitha, all with an average age (among voters) less than 24. The five oldest names are Papamma, Kannamma, Munivenkatappa, Seethamma and Ramaiah.

This should give another indication of where names are headed in Bangalore!

Smashing the Law of Conservation of H

A decade and half ago, Ravikiran Rao came up with what he called the “law of conservation of H“. The concept has to do with the South Indian practice of adding a “H” to denote a soft consonant, a practice not shared by North Indians (Karthik instead of Kartik for example). This practice, Ravikiran claims, is balanced by the “South Indian” practice of using “S” instead of “Sh”, because of which the number of Hs in a name is conserved.

Ravikiran writes:

The Law of conservation of H states that the total number of H’s in the universe will be conserved. So the extra H’s that are added when Southies have to write names like Sunitha and Savitha are taken from the words Sasi and Sri Sri Ravisankar, thus maintaining a balance in the language.

Using data from the Bangalore first names data set (warning: very large file), it is clear that this theory doesn’t hold water, in Bangalore at least. For what the data shows is that not only do Bangaloreans love the “th” and “dh” for the soft T and D, they also use “sh” to mean “sh” rather than use “s” instead.

The most commonly cited examples of LoCoH are Swetha/Shweta and Sruthi/Shruti. In both cases, the former is the supposed “South Indian” spelling (with th for the soft T, and S instead of sh), while the latter is the “North Indian” spelling. As it turns out, in Bangalore, both these combinations are rather unpopular. Instead, it seems like if Bangaloreans can add a H to their name, they do. This table shows the number of people in Bangalore with different spellings for Shwetha and Shruthi (now I’m using the dominant Bangalorean spellings).

As you can see, Shwetha and Shruthi are miles ahead of any of the alternate ways in which the names can be spelt. And this heavy usage of H can be attributed to the way Kannada incorporates both Sanskrit and Dravidian history.

Kannada has a pretty large vocabulary of consonants. Every consonant has both the aspirated and unaspirated version, and voiced and unvoiced. There are three different S sounds (compared to Tamil which has none) and two Ls. And we need a way to transliterate each of them when writing in English. And while capitalising letters in the middle of a word (as per Harvard Kyoto convention) is not common practice, standard transliteration tries to differentiate as much as possible.

And so, since aspirated Tha and Dha aren’t that common in Kannada (except in the “Tha-Tha” symbols used by non-Kannadigas to show raised eyes), th and dh are used for the dental letters. And since Sh exists (and in two forms), there is no reason to substitute it with S (unlike Tamil). And so we have H everywhere.

Now, lest you were to think that I’m using just two names (Shwetha and Shruthi) to make my point, I dug through the names dataset to see how often names with interchangeable T and Th, and names with interchangeable S and Sh, appear in the Bangalore dataset. Here is a sample of both:

There are 13002 Karthiks registered to vote in Bangalore, but only 213 Kartiks. There are a hundred times as many Lathas as Latas. Shobha is far more common than Sobha, and Chandrashekhar much more common than Chandrasekhar.

 

So while other South Indians might conserve H, by not using them with S to compensate for using it with T and D, it doesn’t apply to Bangalore. Thinking about it, I wonder how a Kannadiga (Ravikiran) came up with this theory. Perhaps the fact that he has never lived in Karnataka explains it.