Oh Fudge

How does one fudge an interview? I have no idea. Perhaps I should give it my best shot because the company sulks and leaves without recruiting anybody whenever I do so. When I try to come off dumb, I appear to become irresistibly desirable as an employee. If I was feminist enough, I would probably call it chauvinism. As a placement coordinator who never sat for placements, I wondered why students had so much trouble making a choice. But things are rather different on the other side of the glass door. Especially for me. I doubt that people think as much about getting married to someone as I do about interviewing for a job. Accepting one job means forfeiting the opportunity to apply for all the others. Given that my preferences are not at all aligned with the rest of the batch, are nearly the reverse of the order in which companies were scheduled and that I don’t have complete information about the companies that will turn up in the future, I find it incredibly difficult to make a decision. The process is further complicated by chance variables and sudden changes in factors that were hitherto assumed fixed, and I’m just not equipped with sufficiently sophisticated modelling techniques to solve that sort of problem. I end up tossing more coins than most cricket umpires do in their entire careers.

By turning up for an interview and performing well, you are choosing a job that acts as a safety net over the opportunity to get a job that you really like. If the former choice is more realistic and rational, then I probably should have applied to more companies than I did. Rationality always lands me in knee-deep shit.

Showing up for an interview and “fudging it” amounts to insulting the interviewer’s intelligence. I already have enough issues with all the Catberts without incurring their wrath.

By not showing up for an interview, you’re honest about your intentions. But you risk pissing off your placement cell, your batch mates and the company you applied to. You also maintain your status quo as an unemployed person.

Three roads diverged in a yellow wood, all pointing to certain doom. 

Hair and There

I probably have the most difficult hair in the world. I’m honestly afraid of running my fingers through my hair when I’m frustrated for fear that they may never emerge again. I once showed up really late for a field trip and explained that my hair brush got stuck in my hair and I couldn’t get it out so I had to cut it, and nobody had any trouble believing that. Of course it was true that time, but it opened up a whole new vista of excuses for me. Not that I ever need to lie. My hair constantly outdoes my imagination.

In fact, I’m so used to hair jokes that I try to stay ahead of the curve and pre-empt any joke that might come my way. I once walked into the office during my internship after washing my hair and taking an auto rickshaw. I had a bad case of auto hair. One of the interns asked me if I’d been bitten by a poodle. After years of deciphering hair jokes before they were even complete, I quickly made the mental connect – Peter Parker got bitten by a spider and became Spider-Man, so my hair suggests that I got bitten by a poodle and hence showed up for work looking like one. I giggled and said, “Oh I’m sorry, that’s just how my hair is.” Turns out it had nothing to do with my hair. There really was a mad poodle downstairs that had attacked another girl in the office that morning. Talk about conceit.

So when the movie Tangled was released, I was super-excited at the prospect of a positive character with bad hair. I was totally let down. Ms. Rapunzel had the best hair in the world. She couldn’t have asked for more well-mannered hair if she wanted to. So I returned to consoling myself by observing that no rock star worth his salt has perfectly straight, tame hair. It’s got to have character. Yes, that’s what it is. My hair’s got character. 

Oh Karma, you used to be cool...

Few people would be as fond of karma as I was. It's "practically Newtonian": what goes around, comes around. And we all like to believe the world is fair. Even Bénabou and Tirole agree. Karma extends this idea to a multiple lifetimes with reincarnation setting. In every lifetime, you accumulate points for doing good things and get negative points for anything that makes God frown. The higher your score, the better your next life will be. It's quite an elegant system: it ensures that one has the will to live a decent life even when one is about to die. 

Lately, however, I've been having some misgivings. Or perhaps I should call them reasonable doubts. As I get older, it's a bit difficult for me to continue to believe that someone keeps score so fastidiously for the whole world's population. Is ignorance adequate grounds for arguing innocence? Do you need to create a good score for moksha too or is it based on seniority? If the latter is true, then everyone who spent all their lives amassing good karma would presumably want to spend all of it on a wonderfully hedonistic life in the last time period. Or at least bequeath it to the subsequent generation. How do inheritance laws work with karma? How does one know which time period is the last one before attaining moksha? 

Isn't it enough to have to chase so many things in one lifetime without the additional worry of topping the karma charts across lifetimes? 

Mind it

My family and friends like the way I write. Or at least they say so and I choose to believe them, partly because trust is the foundation of every relationship and all that but mostly because it does wonders for my ego. I suffer from a condition called the writer’s flow nearly as often as I court its daft and lazy brother writer’s block. I have a way of really holding people down to the words they utter and making them wish they hadn’t been quite so magnanimous with their compliments. I start sending them a lot of reading material, probably more than they have to go through at work. There comes a point after which they give up. Reader retention is not one of my strengths.

That’s probably why I’m not particularly generous with praise. I’m cautious with my compliments to begin with so that it’s easy to retract when the person’s work suddenly becomes absolute crap or escalate when it turns out to be a lot better than I expected. And it feels wonderful when others don’t do the same thing to me. Karma is great but the “do unto others” idea is far too anglicised for my taste. 

Lie Your Heart Out

Is it rational to be honest if you know you'll get into trouble? From the point of view of behavioural economics, there are three types of people: rational (they make an action choice in the first time period and stick to it), quasi-hyperbolic naive (they change their mind when the time comes to act on their choices) and quasi-hyperbolic sophisticated (they know that they are unlikely to stick to their original choice so they make arrangements to prevent themselves from deviating from the chosen strategy). 

I'm given to understand that rationalists are nasty, lying reprobates who act entirely in self-interest. I suppose they will lie every chance they get. Never trust a true rationalist. The quasi-hyperbolic sophisticated person wants to lie but knows that there's a good chance that he will end up telling the truth so he will make arrangements to commit himself to lying, say, by extinguishing the truth, brainwashing himself, testing himself to see if he holds up under torture: the sophisticated guy is classic contract killer material. 

A quasi-hyperbolic naive person is a spineless, useless creature. Being naive, he will want to lie but helplessly blabber the truth when the time comes. He is clearly the most lovable one of the three. 

Lane Walking is Sane Walking

I strongly advocate lane systems for walking inside metro stations. There is usually more traffic inside major metro stations during peak hours than there is on the most important flyovers in the city. I’m really tired of slamming into people or getting stuck behind slow movers.

Here’s how the system works. Elementary. On the staircases, we have three lanes. The right lane is for athletes and dreadfully unpunctual people, the centre lane is for people moving at an average speed and making good time, the left lane is for slow people. Everybody should stay to the left side of the divider on the staircase, just as we drive on the left. Escalators are only for people with luggage, arthritis or other reasonable liabilities. If anybody wants to run up the escalator, they should be forced to do so on those moving in the opposite direction. Elevators are for the elderly. Train doors opening is akin to a red light. Everyone on the platform should stop moving around and let the people from the train quietly file away in the wonderfully efficient lane system. For the incoming traffic, the left lane gets a green signal first because they need seats the most. It is reasonable to assume that anybody who has the energy to stay on the right lane also has the energy to stand on the train. Train doors closing is the next red light. Throw in a couple of roundabouts and some cardboard monuments and the metro will truly be world class. 

Relatively Speaking

I think I finally understand relativity. It’s a special theory because it often singles me out. Living at the edge of the city helps me experience the curves in the spacetime continuum on a daily basis. No matter how early I wake up time bends in a peculiar way, something well beyond the cognitive capacity of ordinary human beings, to ensure that I’m always late. Space, too, doesn’t take the ordinary rectilinear form I would expect it to. The tardier I am, the further away my college seems to be – space curves away from me, much like a good leg spin. To a stationary observer, I’m just a person with no sense of time. But I perceive time and space to be rushing away from me whenever I move in any direction. 

A Valentine Miracle

The Shiv Sena and the MNS decided not to make a spectacle of themselves as they usually do during that special time of the year. I was surprised and confused. Reading about the moral brigade’s new initiatives and applauding their creativity is as much a part of Valentine’s Day as Archie’s oversized teddy bears and heart-shaped balloons.

Perhaps the relatively young Mr. Raj Thackeray has found love? He decided not to harass lovers celebrating Valentine’s Day this year. In fact, the Shiv Sena and the MNS, easily two of the most entertaining parties in India despite stiff competition from their peers in Karnataka and elsewhere, made arrangements to ensure that election campaigns don’t interfere with the celebrations. It appears that these icons of exemplary behaviour are unable to disentangle matters of the heart from matters of the vote.

However, other right-wing groups across the country, eager to add to their core competency, decided to pick up where the story was left off and adopted new measures to combat the social evil of publicly proclaimed love. I hardly think carrying mangalsutras around to insist that any couple celebrating Valentine’s Day be married on the spot is awfully bright. But I'd be a fool not to acknowledge that it does solve the dowry problem quite neatly. 

To Chickens

The Hindus don’t eat beef because cows are to be revered and respected more than other animals. The Muslims don’t eat pork because pigs are far too unholy. I find both forms of discrimination very offensive. Other animals should certainly wonder what cows have that they don’t. Their holiness notwithstanding, they are still forced to eat garbage. Other animals must also wish they were as bad boy as the pig so that they could be detested by all and spared the ordeal of being cooked.

I sure feel bad for chickens. It’s quite unfair that nobody forbids their followers from eating them. Worse still, doctors recommend that they be eaten because they are healthier than red meat, although I do remember having read that goat is even healthier than chicken. I’d feel bad for goats but I’m given to understand that the rest of the world hasn’t taken quite the same sheen to them as Indians have.

I was able to understand the premise for regular vegetarianism which I grew up with – no dead animals are to be eaten, unborn, murdered, accidentally dead or any other form. Being vegan sounds like a prescription for malnourishment. People who don’t eat meat but eat fish, people who eat all meat except beef/pork, people who refrain from eating meat on specific days of the week – they all baffle me. You’re either for eating meat or you’re against it. Temporary abstinence suggests that you consider the act of eating meat “wrong”, so you should probably consider permanently turning vegetarian. Excluding certain animals is akin to building hierarchies in the animal world and attaching different weights to the lives of each group of animals.  It’s just very complex insanity. 

A Social Evil called Super-Specialisation

I’ve never been a big fan of specialisation. I’m far too indecisive to choose what I want to wear. Choosing a field to specialise in for all my life could give me a panic attack; which is why I do something that almost amounts to reversing my choice every time I’m forced to make one. As a student of economics, admitting my inability to choose is going to leave some eyebrows permanently raised. It’s really a question of convenience. Once I’m sure of my choice, I’m stubborn enough to get on my own nerves.

But I ramble. To return to my original point, super-specialisation causes you to see your own field as the only one that matters. At least to you, in any case. That’s why we need managers. Management theories created a bunch of people too focused to care about why they’re doing whatever it is that they do, so that they would need managers who make them take an interest in other smaller joys of life.

I refuse to specialise because I don’t believe in being excessively focused. I also refuse to take an interest in anything else because I don’t believe in management. I will specialise in doing nothing. It makes a strong statement. 

Girl Power

You can’t be sexist when you are a girl, right? Wrong. I’ve been sexist for most of my life – whined about how there are no (or not enough) female icons, how girls are given stupid dolls to play with while boys get cars, and so on. As a kid, I hated having to play with other girls because the games would almost never be any test of athletic ability, involve very little, if any, competition and never get around to being half as fun as football. Being a tomboy was a convenient social construct that allowed me to straddle the gender divide in the playground.

It wasn’t until I grew older and wiser (I like to believe) that I understood that the reason women seemed a lot less cooler was because they hadn’t had a chance to do much for a very long time. A lot of behavioural patterns that bothered me were the result of social conditioning. I also came across some truly impressive women in fields that are traditionally male-dominated, and that ended my whining for good.

When I was a kid, I wasn't particularly girly. But I do think it’s a lot better to be a woman than a man. I’m really happy that I can never think with any part of my anatomy other than my brain. 

Stage Fright

I’ve always been pretty good at taking notes. If there was an award for the most photocopied notebooks in school, I would most certainly get it. This was partly due to my obsessive need for record keeping and partly because my school was the sort where I was unlikely to find anybody else who bothered to bring a notebook at all.

As a Master’s student with no background in economics, I make notes that are too detailed even by my standards. I rationalise this to myself by arguing that what is obvious to people who have already studied economics for three years is not obvious at all to me. But lately I’ve been suffering from stage fright because of all the photocopying my registers undergo. I’m very acutely aware of the fact that everything I write will be read by people other than me so I try to sound more authoritative, I double-check my grammar, I avoid scribbling in the margins like I would otherwise. Self-censorship. It makes me quite uncomfortable and I only find solace in the fact that I’m not writing anything even mildly interesting anyway.

Any prospective employers finding my blog would be bad news for me. My posts put together suggest that I’m awful at making decisions and interpret theories as I please but I have a pretty handwriting and I’m good at taking notes. I would almost certainly wind up as a secretary. 

Popular Media Invokes Economics Correctly

Nice story, this. Rawls and Nozick were really political philosophers whose ideas were later applied in economics. Economists like to revere those who don't call themselves economists. Nevertheless, it's nice to know something I studied is applicable in a relevant debate. This is sort of what I had in mind when I started this blog but I suppose I'd be a lot less entertaining if I really wrote such articles. 

A Matter of Class

I’m quite a fan of an online cartoonist who has devoted much of his time to researching minor behaviour and speech modifications that can make you appear “100% classy.”While he usually deals with more serious issues like the possibility of adding, “You may quote me,” at the end of each sentence or naming your dog ‘Sir’, I decided to turn my attention towards the more mundane matter of appearing classy on paper so that I could help people ooze class on their webpage or blog. I have the first step all figured out. It’s quite elementary, really. In order to appear classy, I must do exactly what Wikipedia does to be mistaken for a real source of information: obsessively reference everything I write and add footnotes wherever possible.[1]

The second step, obviously, is to use hyperlinks. Now this step calls for some prudence. If you hyperlink everything, your page ends up looking rather shady. Hyperlinks must be evenly distributed, thoughtful and used judiciously. One hyperlink for every 150-200 words is ideal.

The third step is to replace a few words with more complex synonyms. This will require a little bit of effort to ensure the context is correct. Another excellent idea is the use of third person. “One” is just so much classier than you or I.

The last step of course is style. If one doesn’t have that, there’s not much one can do.

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[1] Support for this school for thought can be found here.