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.