Sharing is Caring

I believe a commentary on the public transport system in my new hometown is overdue. I miss the metro. Even the weird uncles who would repeat, "Metro sahi hai" to anyone who looked in their general direction. The buses here are no better than the buses anywhere else in India. But I must admit that the bus conductors here do have a better sense of irony than those in Delhi, who yell, "Andar ho jaao" to passengers who can't even find any space for their hands - in their desperation they put them in other people's pockets. Local trains are just larger versions of buses without the convenience of dropping you close enough to your destination, thereby ensuring that you to turn up for work looking far from presentable. 

Autowallahs here are so awful that I feel like I should start praying for the good health and longevity of the autowallahs in Delhi. On the bright side, autowallahs here don't discriminate. It doesn't matter if you're a local or an outsider; if you take an auto, you will be fleeced. It often costs more to take an auto than a cab. In exchange for the cost advantage, cabs are delightfully unreliable and cab companies are yet to figure out call wait. 

That leaves share autos. Travelling in a share auto is a lot like life. You keep waiting for an auto that will "be right" for you: not too crowded and headed towards the place you want to reach. But when you start feeling like time isn't on your side anymore, you take what you get. You struggle to get your foot in the door. You fight for your space. You let people step on your toes and put up with much discomfort because you have to reach your destination somehow. And as soon as you get comfortable, it's time to get off.

The level of ingenuity and dexterity displayed by most of the people on the road makes driving the sole preserve of those with infinite patience and wisdom. There are two activities that can seriously compromise your psychological health: dealing with bureaucracy and driving. I foolishly undertook both roughly around the same time. As a result, I have become  ridiculously foul-mouthed, at times surpassing my own knowledge of my proficiency in the area. 

Experience has taught me that in order to feel that warm afterglow after you swear, that feeling of being in perfect harmony with the universe, you have to swear in Hindi. Our national language is brilliant, for no other language could permit you to be so concise and still curse in such detail. 

iNegotiate

I've spent a good part of my life negotiating with authority figures about how late I can return home. I belong to a certain social sect that thinks monsters and werewolves slink about the streets at night. The first time I did stay out late at night, I was quite disappointed by the conspicuous absence of vampires. 

Suppose the curfew-setters believe that the risk of something untoward happening at night is normally distributed, then after 9 PM, we can say that the probability of being a victim of crime increases steadily, reaching its peak at 1 AM. But even the criminals need to go home and get some sleep to be fresh and alert for the next day, so after 1 AM, the probability of crime reduces, returning to pre-9 PM levels at 5 AM. So parents shouldn't tell their kids to "return home by 12 or not return home at all." They should tell them to return home before midnight or after 3 AM, thereby avoiding travel during the peak crime hours. 

But behaviour usually doesn't follow this logic, so I'm forced to assume that the normal distribution idea doesn't appeal to most parents. In fact, considering how their impatience escalates with time, I surmise that they probably think that risk is uniformly distributed over the 9 PM to 6 AM interval. As time goes by, the total area under the curve increases and that explains their panic. Worry not. I have the perfect negotiation strategy. At all events, it is unlikely that the distribution of the probability of crime at night is a discrete distribution, because that would suggest that a crime can only be committed at specific points in time. A continuous distribution is far more plausible. However, in a continuous distribution, only intervals have positive probability. The probability of crime at any given point of time will be zero. Explain to your parents that while you understand that there is some risk spread over the time interval in question, if they think of your safety at a specific point in time, their fears are inconsistent with their beliefs. 

Let's assume that doesn't work either. As a final resort, I recommend negotiating for spending the night at a friend's place instead of coming home late. You don't actually have to spend the night at anyone's place. You push your friends to party till the wee hours of the morning and return home like a good kid just as the lamps are being lit and the prayers recited. Your parents will love your devotion to family life and your friends will think you are a party animal of sorts. If that isn't a win-win, I don't know what is. 

Ageing Gracefully and Other Lies

I am absolutely terrified of getting old. Not the lines, wrinkles and knee replacement fears, no. I’m afraid of turning into one of those people who are so not fun that you just can’t accept the fact that they were once kids. You take one look at them and it’s implausible. “Nooo! That guy? Why, he must have worn a well-tailored suit and a frown ever since he was a baby!” Horrifying, isn’t it?

Age figures quite prominently in pop culture. There are numerous hilarious references to ageing and old people.  And that’s just as well. Pop culture is, after all, a youth thing.

So do “I hope I die before I get old?” Well, I don’t really hope to die. I know I will someday, but I think we can all agree that it’s not something that most of us really look forward to. That said, I must admit that dying young has its perks. You never have to worry about ageing gracefully, whatever that is. You remain forever youthful in everyone’s memory because nobody has ever seen you any other way. You don’t get to the point where you have to eat your words because you don’t live long enough to be brought to account for your verbal diarrhea. And you get to leave the world having severely pissed off your insurers and bankers. That’s got to feel good.

How about Benjamin Button? Get old age over with as soon as you’re born? That arrangement makes dying early really suck. Besides, I’d hate to have to worry about my dentures and cataract when I should be a curious toddler excited about the world. Not taking that deal ever.

That leaves Dorian Gray: staying young forever. I would’ve said Peter Pan but the boy could never get a drink. Most of us fancy being Dorian Gray. Botox takes us halfway there. But I’m not impressed. I don’t think we stop doing foolish things until we realise how foolish we look doing them.

I think Biology has got it about right. 

Acceptance

I've been telling myself that I'll update my blog for a while now. Evidently, I never got around to it. Until today. Today is the first day in a long time that I didn't have to fight my impulse to create a hectic plan to make the most of my weekend, mope about the fact that getting a job has made me a lot less interesting (and politically incorrect, thereby rendering most of the material I write unsuitable for such a public forum) or worry about how old I’ve become. Today is a day of epiphanies. It's a day of acceptance.

My age has finally caught up with me. I've decided that it's best to accept that. They say age is just a number. But so are all other numbers so it’s not particularly comforting.

I’ve accepted the fact that my memory is awful. I’ve been clinging to an illusion of good recollection based on a lousy internet connection that makes me type everything over so many times that I can't help but remember it. 

I've accepted the fact that my dreams are no longer as fun to recall as they once were because my sub-conscious mind is not as creative in its use of new imagery and abstraction as it once used to be. 

I've accepted the fact that inspiration will never strike when I want it to. I can only write when I have no point to make and my thoughts are only interesting when they fulfill no purpose, as they once used to be when I was truly jobless. I formally recognise joblessness as a virtue. Even the most casual youtuber will concur.

I've accepted that, all its idiocy notwithstanding, TV is an inspiration because of the sheer volume of writing material one could generate while staring idly at it. If I were to run a firm (to the ground), I'd put TVs in each cubicle instead of computers. Instead of ads, I'd slip in compulsory reading material. The employees’ brains would be so soupy by the time they've gone through two hours of programming that they wouldn't know enough to unglue their eyes from the screen. 

And lastly, most importantly, I've accepted that French toast is the only breakfast in the world that can reliably guarantee a good day.

Sick (on) Saturday

I know I hailed "casual Saturdays" as a day to... well, wear jeans. But I'm against the practice now. I strongly believe that the only acceptable garment for Saturdays is pyjamas and the only valid reason for asking you to turn up at work on a Saturday is if your firm is showing cartoons on a giant screen and offering you a non-stop supply of milk and cookies all day. 

I don't really believe in doing anything that may seem useful on Saturdays. I never bothered showing up in school or college on Saturdays if I was required to. I would hate to betray my own belief system, and so I'm trying to model the likelihood of falling sick each month so that I can use the rest of the sick leaves on Saturdays. On the non-academic side, I will probably need to learn to exercise some restraint to hide my boundless joy and triumph on Friday evenings right before I "fall sick." 

Last Saturday had the office looking more uniform than they do when they are conforming to some dress code. Almost everyone wore black T-shirts with blue jeans. One guy even wore the same T-shirt as I did in a slightly different colour, thereby making the gender divide meaningless too. The inference from all this is that there's really no need for standardisation. We all follow self-imposed dress codes and uniformity is assured by the retailers. Or perhaps my firm's HR department is exceedingly good at assessing the compatibility of new recruits - we even have the same taste in clothes. 

Little Joys

I wrote earlier about wanting to simulate exams so that I could enjoy doing nothing. I think the argument also applies to work. I don't see the point of reading comics when I have nothing else to do. I need some work so that I can feel happy about not doing it. It's a fairly simple concept but people seem to misunderstand. The interns offered to send me their college assignments. Others counselled me and told me to enjoy my breaks because they wouldn’t last long. Standard office talk.

Not having work when you're at work is oxymoronic. You can’t go home so you're basically forced to sit at your desk and do nothing all day. It's like summer vacations with a nightmarish babysitter. But I had my first truly busy week and I must say it was more interesting than the less busy ones so far. I got a real kick out of discreetly reading rubbish online. Getting a job means transitioning from a 24 hour feeling of guilt for not studying to 9 hours of feeling like you’re doing the world such a favour just by existing.

On average, most of the people in positions of authority lie on a downward sloping curve on the busyness-coolness plane; where busyness refers to the number of times one is called away from one’s desk and coolness is the general lack of interest in what you’re doing. The good news is that any boss who doesn’t understand your quest to accumulate completely useless information won’t be around all the time, and the ones who are around a lot will be somewhat sympathetic. This model doesn’t, however, preclude the possibility of anomalies.

I’ve found yet another unexpected payoff to being a girl. Last week, I stood holding a door open for a colleague insisting that he should go first and he did the same. My gender identity allowed me to end this comical, socially mandated exchange of courtesy. Imagine how long I would have been stuck there otherwise. 

Even Cheaper Talk

I’m quite intrigued by cheap talk, probably because it constitutes about 90 per cent of my conversations. Cheap talk models would probably be better understood if course instructors use more frequently occurring examples from the students’ lives. Consider the example of asking an instructor what the syllabus for an exam is. He has (or will) set the paper himself and he knows whether or not a student should read a certain paper with a probability of 100 percent. However, there are conflicting interests at work. The instructor wants the student to read and learn as much as possible and uses the exam as an incentive mechanism to achieve his end. He may also want to ask a student to read all the papers in a reading list because he wants to keep his options open (in the event that he is yet to draft the question paper). So when a student asks an instructor whether a paper that was not covered in class but was referred to in some lecture or is available in the reading list is important for the exam, the standard answer is, “You can read through it”: the babbling equilibrium. Just as the theory predicts, this isn’t reason enough for many students to understand that there’s no point in playing the game at all.

Economics students would probably be a lot smarter if they weren't so rational. 

Disappointing Sundays and Manic Mondays

I had big plans for Sunday. No, really. I planned to clean my room, finish a book, watch three movies, go shopping, start jogging and have a fit of inspiration that would solve all the policy issues plaguing the country, and if possible, the world. I needed to prove to myself that I do a better job with everything when I'm goofing off so I set very high targets for having fun, far more unrealistic than any of the exam deadlines I've set for myself. 

As the title of this post suggests, I fell short. It's not that I under-performed on all counts. I didn't perform at all. I spent nearly the entire day sleeping. When I wasn't sleeping, I was eating. Even stray dogs have more productive days than that. At least they get into a fight and chase a car or two. 

Monday morning, understandably, felt like a new era because I seemed to have no sense of time when I woke up. It wasn't a very nice era. I spent much of the morning searching for things and abandoning the effort when I realised that I no longer remembered what I was looking for. I was late for work. I'm not too sure of what I did all day but I did feel awfully sleepy. And I felt like an overall underachiever. 

But I've always been the optimistic sort. I'll do all that I planned to and more. I've made a list of things I'm going to do next Sunday. 

I get by with a little help...

It's nice to write after a long time, mostly because I'm assuming that I'm at that ideal place where I'm not overly concerned with language but haven't lost the will to write altogether. In a single week I have acquired many years of wisdom that I’m eager to share.

I moved to a new city. My "hometown” and I must call it that after the many years of stereotyping. It wouldn't be fair to all the people who stereotyped me otherwise. The people here aren't quite as colourful as the characters one encounters in my other hometown. But it's always a pleasure to have more to crib about. 

I have officially lost my never-been-employed status and have become a non-parasitic human being, which is very upsetting. I've already understood the need for corporate guidelines for reports and other "corporate communication". It's because they use a lot of words that are not real words. So they constantly try to standardise it so that it doesn't become patently obvious that they're making it up as they go along. 

I’ve also stopped liking pictures accompanying the text. As a child, I loved books with pictures in them because it takes less mental engagement than reading does, so it was a bit like being able to take a break between reads without having to put the book down. The “corporate world” manipulates this subconscious preference for pictures by throwing in figures and exhibits all over the reports, which are often more tedious to go through than the actual text. And they're not even pretty. 

Other problems include being unable to let go of the 011 prefix and dialling wrong numbers all the time. However, I did fulfil some childhood aspirations by getting to open my office shutters – I don't know why I've always wanted to do that, but this must be what they call "living the dream". 

I have finally understood the point of “casual Saturdays”. I didn’t think it would really make a difference considering the fact that I insist on calling my flip flops ‘formal footwear’ and wearing them to work every day. But even if you’re upset about your Saturday mornings being spent deciding whether or not something looks “too casual” or “too formal”, a pair of jeans can solve half your problems in life. The world is beautiful again when you’re reminded that it’s possible for you to be so comfortable and look presentable at the same time.

Life, The Universe, But Not Everything

The long break in blog posts has been on account of what you could probably call direct marketing for my blog, although the truth is always more frivolous than my well-crafted lies.

During this period, I’ve taken quite a fancy to a number of things. I’m suddenly very fond of the subjunctive. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve found grammar so cool and moody. The subjunctive is insanely classy. The need to be judicious with its use is what makes that sweet spot – the maximum possible amount of class without being pedantic – even more unattainable and thereby even more awesome.

The sudden spike in socialising has also caused me to do a lot of thinking about language. I wondered how spelling errors like ‘pwned’ and meaningless abbreviations like ‘sup’ were assimilated in the language with such alacrity but nobody ever thought of designing some useful linguistic improvements. English sure could use them. We desperately need a gender neutral pronoun. ‘He’ is sexist, ‘she’ is feminist, ‘they’ is grammatically incongruent and ‘one’ is begins to sound comical after a point. It makes third person writing very challenging, which is probably why so many writers prefer the less accurate, more aggressive second person for everything other than fiction. Uniformity in spelling and pronunciation on both sides of the Atlantic would also be welcome. ‘Indian English’ incorporates elements of both, so I’ve spent half my life thinking ‘color’ looks incomplete and the other half wondering why ‘colour’ seems like a longer word than it should be. Phonetic spellings could eradicate spelling bees and accents on the alphabets could make English seem a lot artier than it is. If it were a computer language, we’d be cursing Microsoft (and it’s always Microsoft’s fault) and wailing for debugging at this point.

I have also realised that I no longer use the word 'random' as liberally as I used to. Economics has impressed the difficulty of achieving randomness. It's not something you can do randomly. 

Talk the Talk

I talk too much. It’s quite futile for me to try to keep this post concise in the hope that people will think I’m trying to reform. 

Consider the facts of the case. I talk almost all the time. When I’m not talking, I’m writing. When I’m not writing either, I’m probably talking to myself or sleeping (and I talk an awful lot even in my dreams). In fact, the reason I embrace blogs and steer clear of social networking is that Facebook doesn’t give me enough “talk time.” Facebook allows other people to talk as well and I see that as an infringement of my talking space. I reject Twitter because it doesn’t let me talk enough. My emails go on for pages and my messages parody the SMS abbreviation. Even when people ask me to talk about things I have no particular interest in, an examination for instance, I exceed the word limit.

But then I came across people who are far worse. It’s like they have some serious illness that will cause them to die if they stop talking. I don’t believe I’ve even seen them pause for breath. You’d think this would make me feel better and realise that I’m not all that bad. To some extent, it did. But it also gave me a taste of what those around me must feel like when I talk and it’s quite annoying.

This is an important lesson for me. I must not befriend people like myself.

The Need for Mediocrity

Everyone should watch Aaj Tak once in a while. Rakhi ka Swayamvar was India’s answer to The Bachelorette. Masterchef India was in a league of its own. They have all brought much laughter to the world. But mediocrity extends well beyond TV shows.

Consider Chetan Bhagat or Stephanie Meyer. But they are relatively popular authors with mediocre abilities. Think of all the lousy books you’ve ever tried to read by authors whose names you don’t remember. Would you fully appreciate a good story if you had nothing worse to compare it to?

We are fortunate to have so much to dislike and mock. Imagine how boring life would be if every TV show was fantastic, every book was a masterpiece and every song was pure genius. What would we make fun of? What could possibly peel us away from TVs and computers? More importantly, how would one come to terms with their own mediocrity if they are surrounded by excellence?

Chances are that we won’t be able to take it. Conversations would taper away if everything was praiseworthy. We would actively seek mediocrity or pressure those who are great to generate so much material that some of it is bound to tend towards the average. We might even entirely lose the ability to recognise brilliance. 

The law of large numbers is fantastic. It makes life worth living.

Examination Simulation

I must admit that after two years of claiming to have every weekend ruined by an exam the following week, I find life extremely boring without them. I always thought that whoever came up with the idea of formalised tests must have been an evil, miserable person. I was suitably elated when my exams ended this week and proudly declared that they are “over forever.”

However, when I struggled to come up with a birthday surprise for a friend, I sighed and realised how “naturally” the idea would have formed itself in my head if I were to have an exam the next day. It really brings out the best in me in every aspect other than the subject matter of the exam. I don't feel motivated to do anything anymore because I no longer feel like I'm engaging in shenanigans. I try to fool myself into believing that I should be studying so that I can enjoy the things I usually spend my time on. 

As you draw close to an exam, every second of your time is so valuable, so precious that you feel rather kingly about squandering it. Without exams, wasting time is the equivalent of being a useless lout – nobody cares about your time anyway. Just as stolen apples taste better, time always seems well-spent when it is misallocated. Watching TV when you’re supposed to be studying is a lot of fun when you’re negotiating with your conscience for another hour’s break. Watching TV because you don’t have anything else to do is just sad.

In fact, exams are worth taking just for the joy of having them end – that goofy, incomparable feeling when you realise that you can stop pretending to study. 

The Hell with Airtel

Airtel has crossed the not-so-fine line between being friendly and being creepy. Their new scheme that “takes care of customer needs” without being asked to do so is nearly as stupid as its advertisement, which has a creepy guy asking a sweet shop to mix a lot of sweets together to match his friend’s revolting taste. In order to customise services to match customer needs, Airtel has decided to take it upon itself to activate Value Added Services automatically if a subscriber uses a facility frequently enough.

This scheme is the anti-Robin Hood: stealing from the poor to distribute to the rich. The epiphany came to me when my domestic help told me that she always runs out of balance within days of a recharge even though she never calls anybody. Someone called Airtel on her behalf and found out that they had “automatically” activated services that she didn’t want and her balance was being eaten away.

A large number of mobile phone owners in India don’t know how to use a phone beyond making and receiving calls. My domestic help is illiterate so she can’t even understand the messages that tell her that a service has been activated. It’s also quite unethical to levy the same rate for a service when the charge is deducted from the talk time as opposed to a cash payment. Not every recharge gives you full talk time so by automatically activating services, Airtel is actually overcharging customers.

Tut tut, Airtel. Shame on you. You’ve become a stalker. A creep. And a thief. Oo you.

Never Again

I don’t like equations and equations don’t like me. We maintain a comfortable distance at all times to avoid any awkward social situations. We had a pretty long relationship but things ended badly and it’s a bit difficult to claim to study economics and be at war with equations at the same time. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Many of my exams require me to memorise equations. This is something that I neither enjoy nor excel at. So I put it off. I procrastinate until the night before the exam. At night, I tell myself that I must get adequate sleep before the exam and that it’s a good idea to go over the equations in the morning, arguing with myself that my memory has a recency bias. I wake up freakishly early in the morning and procrastinate some more. In the metro, I casually glance through the equations and tell myself that I’m smart enough to work it out, still putting off the actual memorising. As last minute panic grips me before I enter the exam hall, I frantically leaf through my notes, but I tell myself that it’s impossible for me to know what I don’t already know in the next 5 minutes. So I put it off for “some other time.”

During the exam, predictably, I don’t remember the equations. For the ones I think I remember, I can’t correctly derive the results, possibly because I can’t remember all the parameters correctly. As gloom descends upon me I curse the evaluation methodology, the examination pattern, the education system and the universe in general.

After the exam, I tell myself that I’ll do better next time. The bad news is that I lied to myself each time. The good news is I’ve run out of exams. Somehow I don’t feel quite as happy as I thought I would about that. It’s as if there is no point in wasting time anymore.

My Last Superpower

I was a bit concerned when I scrolled through my blog a few weeks ago and realised that the average length of my posts was about 200 words. Such brevity is very unusual for me. It may be enough to make a point, but it’s certainly not enough to be particularly articulate.   

I wondered if I was unconsciously responding to the fact that most people have short attention spans (thank you for that, Google) or if I was unable to elucidate my own ideas. Worse still, what if 200 words were all I ever really had to say about anything? I'm not suggesting that ranting is good writing, but my rationale for disliking Twitter is that it doesn’t allow you to say much that makes sense because the word limit is crippling. All that nose-in-the-air-ing breaks down if I voluntarily operate within a word limit, even if it's self-prescribed. 

It’s quite intriguing that being concise has suddenly become important. If nobody likes reading or listening for very long and the average person, in general, favours succinctness, why did the world ever have such long articles, essays and books in the past? Perhaps the speaker/author’s conceit allowed them to get carried away. Or maybe preferences do change. Were the lengthy speeches of yore social constructs – unnecessary chatter to sustain social gatherings before alcohol and dancing were invented? Or has our grasp of language improved so tremendously in such a short span of time as to allow us to communicate so much by saying so little?

Well, I’m glad to say, I don’t care. The length of the last couple of posts has allayed my fears. I’ve still got it!

I’m also proud to say that I’ve stopped caring a terrible lot about grammatical perfection. It’s very liberating. Exams give me a lot of time to think about nothing and that brings so many ideas all at once that I have to scribble them down quickly, sometimes even before they are fully formed in my head. Have you ever had an idea and forgotten it? You feel like you lost the one spark of brilliance that could have changed your life forever. You progressively inflate its importance and genius until you remember that it was something stupid like having eggs for breakfast. It’s times like these when you wish you had just forgotten it altogether, so that you could continue feeling like you could have ruled the universe had fate not promptly snatched the opportunity. 

But to return to my original point, when I went back to read the scribbles, I realised they were not bad. Sure, there are errors. But just as researchers should not give precedence to method over matter, I, too, have learnt to stop prioritising language over content. It really is the thought that counts.

Size Matters

A lot of economics is about predicting people’s behaviour using axioms akin to laws in physics. The assumption that economics is like the physical sciences really bothers me. I side with Friedrich Hayek: the system is too complex for us to be able to provide a precise model of economic behaviour.

That scientific tools should not be directly applied in economics has been said many times before, but it’s not a point that usually receives the attention that it should, probably because most (but not all) of the people who say so are those who suck at maths. It’s hard to say why people persist with the use of complex calculus in behavioural modelling even though it is impossible for a majority of the population to even understand the reasoning process being ascribed to them, and the minority that does understand it would have to be in need of therapy if they really stood around at supermarkets trying to figure out how many units they should buy to equate the marginal utility to their marginal utility from money.

Russ Roberts argues that economics is more like biology than physics, and draws an interesting analogy between the two:

“We do not expect a biologist to forecast how many squirrels will be alive in ten years if we increase the number of trees in the United States by 20%. A biologist would laugh at you. But that is what people ask of economists all the time.”

Economists are rather cocky and don’t acknowledge the limitations of the field. We can look for the causes, try to understand the relationships between variables, figure out what incentives work, which ones don’t and in what settings or the channels through which a policy or action can take effect – but to believe we can predict the exact outcome and mathematically calculate the magnitude of the change in different variables is, well, cute – we can’t, and we’ve been wrong nearly every time we tried.

But perhaps there is something we can learn from physics. In his talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, Richard Feynman says,

“Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics... we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things.”

Early models of the atom had subatomic particles arranged like the solar system: a nucleus at the centre with electrons orbiting it. There was no reason to assume such perfect symmetry between the two. It later turned out that the atom looked quite different.

In economics, we assume identical, rational micro agents and predict macro results by aggregating their behaviour. Microeconomics is more intuitive, in a sense more reliable because it is reasonable to assume that individuals try to maximise over certain parameters. But expecting perfect conformity between micro and macro outcomes may not be quite so reasonable. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that on the macro level, the presence of some non-rational agents or collective decision-making leads to thoroughly counterintuitive results.

The results might be quite different if we focus on studying macro behaviour as a whole instead of specifying individual motives for each micro agent beforehand. All we can really say is that when a lot of people’s behaviour is aggregated, on average it tends to produce certain types of results. 

You're in Hell, Potter

I was all of 11 when I first read Harry Potter. Even at that tender age, I had had enough of fairytales. I was coaxed to read it by many but I still put it off for about a year. When I finally got around to reading it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the plot wasn’t absolute rubbish like I expected it to be.

But the magic world didn’t fascinate me nearly as much as it should have. As a little girl, I thought Harry’s world sucked for two reasons: limited wardrobe options and the absence of telephones. I didn’t like the idea of wearing robes all the time or sticking my head in a fireplace every time I felt like talking to a friend.

Today, I’m older and wiser and I must admit that I feel sorry for anybody who thinks travelling by apparating or floo powder is better than driving a Jaguar. I abhor the shameless slavery – wizards and witches need house elves to work around the house because they don’t have any labour laws or dishwashers. I’m forced to call their education system to question if there’s just one school in each country instead of one in each neighbourhood. What of free choice and competition? I must also point out the sexism apparent in the narrative. Although Rowling is one of the few authors to use the word “witch” with a positive connotation, she often lapses into sexist linguistic patterns: “Triwizard” tournament in the “wizarding world” even though “witching world” sounds so much better.

All of Harry’s adventures would end even before they started if he had a cell phone with a network that worked in dungeons. But there’s so much more that’s wrong with his decision to live with the magic folk instead of the muggles. Wizards don’t have much by way of entertainment. They don’t have iPods or TV and pop culture is basically Voldemort myths and three weird sisters. They don’t even have cartoons or animated movies: they have to make do with photographs that wave at them. What is childhood without cartoons?

Adulthood isn’t much better. There’s no social life in prison because the dementors are such party poopers. I’d feel terribly insecure if owls were smart enough to find absconding criminals but law enforcers were not (although that may well be the case in my world too). Hell, even our bankers are capable of being far more evil than the stupid little goblins at Gringotts.

Most of all, I feel sad about the fact that they live in a world where there can never be any innovation. The best they can manage has already been done and they refuse to take a page out of the muggle book and get internet. Frankly, I don’t see how owl mail can ever be cooler than email. Magic folk have to buy expensive books because they don’t have Amazon, eBay, Flipkart or Kindle. They can’t send huge gifts because they use owls instead of FedEx. And when I think about how their Christmas gifts are broomsticks instead of MacBooks, I feel so sad that I want to cry for them. Technology makes magic look like such a loser.

When I tell anybody a fairytale, it’s probably going to be the story of Steve Jobs. That’s the stuff dreams are, and should, be made of.

It's only Inertia, Dear Boy

The London Olympics brings back fond memories of the 2010 Commonwealth Games – the media always had something to do. They were so happy. The world seemed so eventful.

Here is some of the fodder that the London Olympics is providing for the journalists: the logo is hideous, the allegations that Olympics uniforms are being manufactured in sweatshop labour conditions in Indonesia are being taken “very seriously”, the security threat of lone idiots disrupting the events has been recognised and the closing ceremony will include a tribute to British pop culture called “Symphony of Rock”.

The London Olympics Organising Committee is also taking the Symphony of Rock “very seriously”. No, really. They’ve pulled out all the stops. The list of performers is expected to include the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Coldplay, among others. You might even say they went overboard with their enthusiasm. Among those invited was The Who’s legendary drummer, Keith Moon. It’s very nice of the organisers to ask, of course. But they just missed him – by nearly 34 years. In an uncharacteristically selfish move, Keith Moon has declined the invitation to play at the Olympics because he is dead. What a bummer.

Well, you can’t argue with that. It certainly is a valid reason, possibly the only one acceptable for refusing the honour of representing one’s country on a global stage. But 1978 was such a long time ago. Things change. Perhaps the organisers were just checking if he’s still dead.

I suspect they saw pictures of Moon dressed like a sex kitten and assumed he had nine lives. Or maybe, since he is Keith Moon after all, they believed that he could do pretty much anything he wanted to, including rising from the dead to detonate a drum kit for an Olympics ceremony. The Who’s manager, Bill Curbishley, hasn’t ruled out the possibility. In his polite response to the invitation, he helpfully suggested, “If they have a round table, some glasses and candles, we might contact him.”

I would totally watch that.

Talk is Trash

I recently studied a few cheap talk models, beginning with the seminal paper by Crawford and Sobel in 1982. By “cheap talk”, most economists really mean free talk. A cheap talk game is one where one agent can send a message without incurring any exogenous cost: the only cost incurred is endogenous, i.e. it affects the sender’s payoff by influencing the receiver’s action choice. In short, cheap talk is a costless signal.

From a linguistic perspective, the “talk is cheap” maxim is traditionally taken to mean that the words in a message could be meaningless and need not be supported by truth, actions or evidence. The rising popularity of sarcasm should lend some added meaning to the phrase: what is said is very different from what is meant because the inherent meaning of our words is often diluted by how we say it.

So is the game theoretic use of the phrase cheap talk itself cheap talk? No! Economists are nothing if not precise. But it is possible that calling an entire subset of signalling games “Cheap Talk” is an attempt to make it sound a lot more interesting than it really is. If cheap talk is enough to make a paper sound interesting, imagine how much more intriguing a trash talk model would seem. Measuring the cost of indulging in trash talk and weighing it against the psychological advantage it confers could help us calculate whether being courteous is worthwhile at all. Children waste much of their childhood learning social conventions and much of their adult life brimming with resentment as they teach their children to fight their instinct to be frank.

Such a model might do to social relations what the prisoner’s dilemma did to gang loyalty – although it is socially optimal for all of us to be nice and the outcome is Pareto superior to any other, if each of us acts in a self-interested manner, being nasty would be a dominant strategy unless social ostracism outweighs the personal gain from feeling smug. However, if the psychological cost of courtesy is greater than its social benefit, we could adjust social structures to eliminate the rationale for teenage rebellion and angst altogether. It would be fascinating to see teenagers rebel by being excessively nice to everyone because their parents were so blunt all the time. Gandhi would be so proud. 

Goodbye Standing Around

I’ve encountered many people with a mortal fear of escalators. On the metro, there’s a queue at the ticket counter, a queue at the customer care centre, a queue at the security check, a queue to get in the train, a queue to get off, a queue to get out of the station and just as you’re about to pat yourself on the back for your endurance, there’s a queue to get on the escalator because someone’s trying to summon the courage to step on it. It’s pretty funny at first because they almost behave as if you’re asking them to jump onboard a moving train. But I don’t imagine it’s easy to face your fears when everyone asks you to hurry up.

Patience is at a premium at this point. There are those who are in an awful hurry and have had it with queues. They push everyone aside, pretty annoyed that they can’t part crowds like Moses parted seas, get on the escalator and start running on it. Perhaps they feel rather smart about adding their own speed to the escalator's, but given how crowded most metro stations tend to be, this isn’t any more helpful than leaning forward on a bicycle to make yourself more aerodynamic and imagining that this will get you through the traffic in half the time. These mixed signals are not amenable to any behavioural modelling. An escalator is an expression of laziness. Urgency does not go with it. 

I have also discovered that escalators can double up as shoe polishers. Delhi’s wonderfully quirky populace ensures that I never stop learning new things. People run their shoes on the deflector brushes along the sides of the escalator, often turning around and rotating their foot to make sure their shoes are perfectly clean: intriguingly meticulous for someone who left home wearing dirty shoes. Sometimes I just have to feel proud of our ability to optimise. 

Safety, impatience, rationality and unbridled athleticism – four excellent reasons for people with clean shoes to avoid escalators, but neo-rationalists don’t think quite so linearly. It’s not that I’m afraid of escalators or oppose them on health grounds. I just have trouble believing that you can get where you want to simply by standing around.

Addiction and Overdose

I have a confession to make: I’m a pop culture addict. And when it doesn't give me the kick I need, I dabble in counterculture and cult classics. I use movies, books and music to drive me to distraction, more so when I’m under stress, quite the same way that others in my position would use alcohol. The condition becomes very acute during exams.

There are moments of lucidity when I can see the world as it is and everything seems so simple and straightforward. But for the most part, I’m just stumbling through life, trying to push time along its way quickly in the hope that something nice will happen, much like trying to peek at the last few pages of a book in anticipation of a happy ending when things look particularly grim. It is a measure of the severity of my condition that I can’t describe reality without references to the details of my addictive behaviour. The only advantage over alcohol and other more popular addictions is the absence of major after-effects like hangovers or permanent brain damage.


I wonder what would happen if you make a pop culture addict go cold turkey. Just the thought sends shivers down my spine. I can see it: pop culture rehab. It must be where bad folks go when they die. 

Potayto Potahto

If we are what we eat, I’d probably be a potato (or a chicken?). I really feel for the potato. It’s one of my favourite vegetables and it is severely discriminated against. There is nothing villainous about it. In fact, if there was a king of vegetables (and clearly mango is the king of fruits), it would undoubtedly be the potato. Your brain loves potatoes. No, seriously. The human brain requires starch to function and what better source than the humble, delicious potato? And yet, we are so ungrateful to it: couch potato, potato head, dumb as a sack of potatoes - what’s so smart about a sack of onions?

I’ve always thought onions are evil and deceptive. They are so brash and overpowering that they make you cry. Broccoli is obviously the smartest vegetable. It’s green, it helps your body absorb calcium, it’s great for your health and it looks like a brilliant professor with crazy hair. And nobody likes it: it's an exceptionally smart anomaly in a family of otherwise stupid vegetables. 

If you want a dumb vegetable, think cauliflower. It looks like such an air-head. It has an even dumber cousin, cabbage, which has more layers of ignorance than anybody else in the vegetable world. Turnip heads are foolish and incompetent. Carrots are ferocious. Brinjals are seedy and not to be trusted. Okra looks a bit like Cruella’s fingers – definitely wicked. So many perfectly acceptable insults and people whale on the potato instead. It's a wild world. 

Losing my Decisions

Choice has made me miserable. You might even say that the constant stress of decision-making has ruined my life. It’s the more trivial choices that drive me insane. This is how having to make a choice really makes me feel. I didn’t worry so much about my choices earlier and I’m forced to admit that the pursuit of economics has a not-entirely-unimportant role to play in this matter.

It would save me much mental turmoil if I could just appoint someone else to make decisions for me. But the rebel in me would start resenting the decision-maker and wondering if I should follow his advice and that will be yet another choice I have to make. I’m beginning to have serious misgivings about the economic assertion that more choice makes a person better off.

Enter coin. My pride won’t allow me to outsource decision-making to anybody else, so I use the humble coin. It’s a dear. It has no ideological leanings that could cause me to see its recommendations through a tinted glass. It always has the time for me. It never judges me. And so far, it has never been wrong. I must mention here, before you dismiss my decision-making mechanism, that I’m not alone in randomising decisions and hoping that on an average, no other decision-making algorithm can consistently outperform a coin toss.

Much as I hate to make choices, the truth is that I have already chosen. The answer is in my head but I don’t know it because it’s hidden under many layers of rationalisations and tautological arguments. The coin forces the truth out of me: I keep increasing the sample size until the coin tells me what I want to hear. Or so I tell myself lest the rebel in me should start resenting the coin too. 

Ba Ba Ba Ba Barbara-Ann

I recently had an interview (another firm that decided it didn’t want to hire at all as soon as they met me) where they asked me what I would like to be questioned about. My interviewer, a rather dashing man, helpfully added that, “It’s no fun if you have no clue about the topic,” just to boost my confidence, I suppose. The only answer I could think of at the time was pop culture. And I turn up my nose at quite a lot of that too. Considering the fact that they didn’t hire me anyway, I realise now that I should have overcome my inhibitions and said it: “Ask me anything about pop culture.” And if he dared to ask me about some horrible single that’s topping the charts I could’ve sneered at him and refused to work with someone with such an awful taste in music.

Pop culture is such a wonderfully unnecessary social construct that I can’t help wanting to waste all of my time on it. The connection between two people who listen to the same music or love the same TV show is instantaneous, maybe more so than two people who grew up in the same neighbourhood. The more obscure the reference, the stronger the kinship you feel with the person who was able to identify it.

Lately, however, it’s started bothering me that all my conversations are an awfully tangled mess of pop culture references. I can’t for the life of me remember the last time I went an entire day without alluding to anything that I came across through popular media. For someone who, as a rule, avoids social networking sites like the plague, this is a real bummer. This means that if I was cut off from the internet, television, reading material and my iPod for a few weeks, I would have absolutely nothing new to talk about. Oh, the horror!

But let’s think about the alternative. Let’s assume for a moment that I wasn’t quite so obsessed with music, movies and suchlike and that I had “real” conversations with people. Exactly how would these conversations go? Would I talk about my feelings? The meaning of life? Idle gossip? I’ll take pop culture any day. Don’t kid yourselves. We’re not Einstein reincarnations. It is time to accept the fact that there is no life beyond youtube.

Tiptoe

I came across an interesting read today. Being more comfortable with skin show rather than talking about sex is by no means a purely Indian problem. You’d think it would be more of a male problem if you trusted enough stereotypes. Apparently it isn’t.

This is probably the only issue I can think of where words can indeed be louder than actions. We get outrageous advice from our politicians. And movies, well, let’s just say our dialogue writers aren’t up to the task of writing out a regular conversation on the subject. We still prefer the flower analogy. Is that why parks are such creepy places? In fact, even our censors seem oddly squeamish on the matter although item numbers are considered perfectly normal.

God knows, our MPs sure could have used some sex education in school. 

13

If there’s one thing we all absolutely adore, it’s superstition; even if it isn’t our own creation. If a lot of people seem to believe it, then it must be true. The lack of logic just gives it some mystique. Everyone could use some mystique, right?

It is courtesy our charming ways and beliefs that many buildings don’t have a 13^th floor. They call it the 14^th floor instead. As if poor counting will negate bad luck. Apparently two wrongs do make a right. The number 13 being unlucky is an old Christian belief but it seems to have found resonance across cultures. My research informs me that there’s actually a word for it: triskaidekaphobia. 

It’s quite interesting to me that an arbitrary set of beliefs can affect outcomes. People believe 13 is unlucky and so very few of them are willing to buy a house or an office on the 13^th floor. This  causes prices and/or the probability of sale to fall, thereby ensuring that the number becomes unlucky for real estate developers merely because enough buyers believe it to be. So people choose to drop poor 13 from the number system altogether. Self-fulfilling prophecies don’t get any stranger than this.

I must consult a numerologist about the importance of lowest common multiples and highest common factors in arriving at decisions about how lucky a number is. Are multiples of 13 also unlucky? Would people be all right with living on the 26^th floor or is that twice as unlucky as 13? The problem with detecting self-fulfilling prophecies that are irrational is that you don’t gain any predictive power from such knowledge. 

Poise

I think part of the reason why I didn’t have a job for such a long time was that I was afraid of getting one. I'm still afraid of getting started. Right now, my record is clean. Empty. Not a spot. There’s a certain amount of liberty you can take with the way you see yourself when you’re unemployed. You get neatly boxed and labelled once you have a job. When I tried to explain my immense loss of identity from getting a job to a friend, he directed me to First World Pains. I’m offended.

Speaking of jobs, I know of a man who knows how to get exactly the one he wants. I do envy his self-assured, confident poise, his manly tears at his unsurprising victory and the eyes that twinkle under the neatly Botoxed forehead. Putin’s election has also generated some classy headlines, the likes of which may never be seen again. Congratulations, Mr. Putin. But I don’t believe you.

This time I'm on Facebook's side

I came across a news report about employers “requesting” prospective employees to provide their Facebook passwords so that they can “predict possible negative behaviours and attitudes.” You’d think after the 2008 recession that companies would be too busy covering their arses to insist that their employees be squeaky clean even in their personal communications. A big ask, you’d think, from a bunch of indicted frauds. Or a swindling of frauds. Isn't that a nice collective noun? 

How bad does the economy have to be for such demands to be acceptable? Are the legal departments getting that bored? Or is this a last ditch attempt by HR managers to find something to live for – other people’s friends?

I think it’s about time we all got a bit cocky too. Let’s ask an interviewer why he chose a life of such mind-numbing drudgery. Ask them about the fraud allegations their company faced the year before last and the funds being channelled to the firm through tax havens. Or better still, let’s ask them for their Facebook passwords and mock them for their sad single-digit friend lists.

We Are All Rock Stars

Mr. Keith Moon was known for blowing up drum kits, toilets and pretty much anything else that took his fancy. It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill thing for us Indians – we set off explosives far more powerful than cherry bombs every Diwali. Even five-year-olds do it. So clearly, that can’t be what sets the Indian rock star apart. People will just jeer at him for not knowing when Diwali is.

Mr. David Bowie thought he was quite the star because he liked to play dress up. Children grudgingly do so for school plays and fancy dress competitions each year. Any rock star who tries to use this route to fame will get laughed off the stage. Mr. Bowie himself had to court this fate sometimes.

Let's consider Ms. Grace Slick's TUI habit: "Talking Under Influence." Would that work? In all honesty, our politicians often say things that make me wish they could use being drunk as an excuse. 

What of getting drunk and throwing things at people? Surely that should qualify as rock star-like behaviour? Nope, sorry. Half of India does that every year on Holi. Kids often do so with more precision than most adults.

On average, I believe that sober Indians drive worse than drunk drivers elsewhere. So this form of recklessness would not get a rock star noticed either. General violence and destruction are things at least some Indians indulge in on a daily basis, and unlike most rock stars, they don’t even pay for the damages. So far, so bad.

We have arrived at the last arrow in the rock star’s quiver: setting things on fire. Oh wait. We’ve got Lohri. And Dussehra. Indian festivals make the most badass western icons appear endearingly childish for taking such joy in doing what we do so regularly, not to mention a bit stupid for spending so much on it.

So what can an Indian rock star do? Oh I know! Wear an unfashionable cap and starve himself.

Getting in Tune

As much as I love writing, I’m extremely lazy about writing assignments. It’s difficult to feel inspired when someone tells you what to write and sets a deadline for it. The only thing I can do within a deadline is bullshit, and that I do with great reluctance.

Most good writing is whimsical, born of a sudden fit of inspiration, a great idea that struck you out of nowhere and had to be written immediately before it lost its charm and original form. A good idea is a lot like love. It doesn't happen on command. Most people spend their lives looking for it. Everyone's sure it's out there somewhere. Some people devote their lives to one idea while others have a series of idea flings. It is often unexpected. And you're surprised that it was staring you in the face right from the start. Now that's what I call an intellectual romantic comedy. 


Good writing is usually not born from trying to string together averages to make a mildly interesting write-up. Sadly, writing with a purpose can rarely be done at leisure. Nobody's going to wait for you to “get to know your stuff”, “feel inspired”, “get in the mood to write” and finally, “write whatever you feel like writing”. 

Sometimes I feel quite sure that if the world wasn’t in such a hurry to get wherever it is that it is going, we might produce much better work. Douglas Adams was probably working on a deadline when he said he didn't like writing so much as he liked having written.