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. 

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.

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.

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. 

Business Communication

 “…for the businessman, the greatest gift is to be able to speak so many words which seem to signify something but don’t, which convey a general attitude but are free from commitment.”

For 3 years I studied business and desperately groped for words to describe the exasperating imprecision of every statement I read. Mr. R.K. Narayan puts it so accurately, succinctly and seemingly effortlessly, that I’m afraid I may have become a business(wo)man myself.  

Much as I lament the English language’s limitations for expressing romanticism, I must praise its pliability for business: the scope for ambiguity is immense.

That said I’m quite scandalised with my English these days. It started when I first discovered online dictionaries that would pronounce words like the Americans and the British do: I realised that I didn’t speak like either of them and to add to it, my pronunciation didn’t even resemble the spelling – I was wrong in every way it was possible to be wrong.

We don’t realise how much of the “good English” we speak is actually very bad English. Being able to string a sentence together is hardly indicative of mastery of the language. If the British ever come back to visit they’ll never guess that we’re speaking their language. We can try to speak in a polished accent or use big words, but speaking correctly is a far cry for most of us, and is unlikely to become a reality unless we decide to spend a lot of time scanning Wren & Martin (oh, you boys) and listening to that stuck up witch on TFD speak “propahly” everyday. 

In Defence of my Frenemy

I read a wonderful article about maths recently. It drew my attention to the treatment of maths in economics. Social scientists hold what can only be described as militant views on the use of mathematics. Those who are good at it insist that it is the only plausible reasoning mechanism. Those who aren’t argue that it’s hogwash. Oh what well-reasoned arguments.

The need for mathematics is well-established in the physical sciences. But it is, after all, just a tool. Considering a paper good just because it is sufficiently mathematical is akin to rewarding the methods employed rather than the result achieved. It could be argued that the result is more rigorous when proven mathematically, but that’s not always a valid argument when one is trying to describe human behaviour. Given that there are more than enough people who hate maths, it is probably reasonable to assume that nobody will employ a very complex reasoning process merely because some researcher believes that it is the only one sufficiently sophisticated to be attributed to a rational individual.

Asserting that the use of mathematics to derive economic results is rubbish just because it is beyond one’s comprehension is pretentious. It takes an ostrich’s brain to insist that something is not true merely because one lacks the cognitive capacity to understand it. The use of maths brings some regularity and predictability to behaviour, a necessary simplification for modelling anything. 

There might, however, be a case for substituting bedtime stories for children with bedtime mathematical equations. They’ll fall asleep quicker, there is a lower chance of them imbibing any prejudices on account of the parents’ carelessness in choosing a story and who knows, they might turn out smarter. 

Stop Writing Already

I can’t help marvelling the amount of completely superfluous writing we all do on a daily basis. We write blogs and text messages but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Think about all the writing that goes into reports, business proposals, university applications, job applications, any application, college projects, official reports – most of this is solicited work, rewarded with grades, admission or money. And yet, most of it goes unread. Nobody wants to read it. We pay money to make people who don’t want to write, write reports that nobody wants to read. Why?

The demand for “writing skills” in almost every job profile is nearly comical. Apparently the need for strong communication skills overshadows any technical or industry-specific skill one would require to get a job done. It’s more important to be able to talk or write about what one plans to do. Is this because the information age has put us out of touch with skills like writing complete sentences or being able to make conversation beyond “suuup?” or is it because jobs must involve useless, joyless activities? I suspect it’s a bit of both. And maybe much else that management never taught me. 

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. 

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. 

Tipping my Imaginary Hat to old Astrology

I have decided to get a job by accumulating good karma. I’m helping a very dear friend with her university applications. I’m looking for a word that would convey the exact opposite of nostalgia but I haven’t been able to find it. Usually when people look back at things they smile and say, “Oh some things never change.” Now picture me saying the same thing but throwing my hands up and shaking my head wistfully as I speak. That’s exactly what I do when I look at the questions in such applications.

Everybody’s favourite question is, “Describe your strengths and weaknesses.” This is a rather dumb question to ask, because self-evaluation will almost always seek to mislead. It’s not that the candidate can’t help disclosing some useful information. No, not at all. When you include this question in your application, you reduce all your candidates to a single strength and a single weakness: they are all liars. They bend or stretch the truth. Some may take the liberty of extinguishing the truth altogether. Poor truth, everyone discriminates against it.

Not that my friend is a liar. I may be one, but she’s an absolute gem of a person. I couldn’t think of any weakness that would seem acceptable, so I googled weaknesses. It wasn’t very useful. But for the first time ever, astrology came to my rescue. I looked up weaknesses for different zodiac signs and astrologers are just so good at cushioning the blow, you don’t need to do anything more! I’m convinced that all these “What’s your personality type” and “Do you know your ruling planet” tests were devised expressly to help with application forms. I tip my hat to you, astrology. 

Talk to the Hand

In my experience, the smartest people have perfectly awful handwritings, barely legible, almost as if the brain is too engrossed in more complex thoughts to care about aesthetics. This observation bothered me. What gets you a slap on the wrist with a ruler (not that I was in that kind of school) when you’re young is perceived as character and the willingness to be different when you’re older. This was a matter of great concern for me because my writing has always been more than legible. I was quite worried that I would come off rather dense, as I probably do in this neatly typed post.

Lately, however, I’ve changed my mind. Yes, a lot of smart people I know do have dreadful handwritings. But any handwriting that’s legible and doesn’t look like it’s straight out of a cursive writing book is a mark of artistic ability. I write like crap when I’m “not in the mood.” Can a person with a lousy hand write well when they “feel like it?” More choice means better optimisation. So there.

Sometimes I can’t help feeling that 2 years of economics hasn’t done much for me other than adding the words “optimisation” and “equilibrium” to my daily vocabulary. 

Holy Matrimony

I must be a pretty big fan of matrimony because I keep trying to marry things – like finance and development or business and research. In writing a blog, I tried to marry my expertise in fake news with my desire to make a last ditch attempt at salvaging my interest in economics. The first couple of months passed in absolute wedded bliss. Then fake news started paying more attention to politics. When real news started getting funnier than fake news, the latter had a midlife crisis. Economics, meanwhile, pregnant with the aftermath of the financial crisis started having severe mood swings. The marriage is in shambles now. The financial crisis is a 21^st century bastard. I’ve decided to stop playing matchmaker for a bit.

Mostly Harmless Econometrics: the Voice of Marvin

I never wanted to exist in this Econometrics universe. Indeed, when it was first created, it was considered a bad idea by many. But it does exist and life in it is dull, dreary and depressing. You’d think someone with the capacity for such alliteration would be appreciated. Did they recognise my talent? Of course they didn’t. They left me stewing in a miserable mass of regression equations for 6 months. My only friend was youtube, a window to a fictitious universe far less depressing than my own. One day my internet connection died.

Vocabulary larger than the data collection problems involved in a medium-scale field experiment and they ask me to run data through Stata. I’m just a disregarded student who must study things that she doesn’t need to know so that she can get a job that she doesn’t want to do. Call that foresight? Because I don’t.

I spent 6 months rehearsing excuses for getting no useful results from my econometric exercises, often blaming the data instead of acknowledging our own incompetence. Oh I told them it was a futile exercise to begin with. But nobody ever listens. Lyrical verses flowing through my veins and they ask me to use crude words like heteroscedasticity.

Just when I was wishing most fervently that the universe itself would end, they started calling perfectly normal sectors of different galaxies – Beta 1 and Beta 2 – “regression coefficients”. It was too much for me to take. Had they taught me something useful, like how to combust spontaneously, I could have adequately expressed my thoughts. Words often don’t make the point: something that makes me feel very depressed. 

"You're lying to yourselves," PCI Head tells Indian media

Former Supreme Court justice Markandey Katju, who is now the head of the Press Council of India, is facing a backlash from the Indian media for suggesting that they have poor journalistic standards, as opposed to this page.

Holding up a copy of Mail Today which had a picture of the Duke and the Duchess of Cambridge on the front page with “Kiss Me Kate!” written below it, Mr. Katju said, “Seriously. What is this?” to his interviewer, Mr. Karan Thapar, who nodded grimly.

“I want to have more teeth,” Mr. Katju continued, examining his dentures. “I want the power to regulate the electronic media, I want the power to stop government advertisements, I want power, power, power!” he exclaimed with an evil laugh.