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.