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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

Picketing, Pocketing

Suppose each of your pockets can be picked with an equal probability on any given day. I’m going to take a conservative estimate of 10% and assume that the probabilities are independently and identically distributed. You have some money, say Rs. 500 that you would like to carry. Would you prefer to distribute them across both pockets so that the probability of you having nothing is minimised, or would you prefer to keep it in a single pocket to maximise the probability of getting to keep all your money? To put it another way, by putting your money in a lot of different pockets, are you actually raising the probability of at least something getting stolen?

Is it correct to say that the probability of each pocket being picked is independent? We could argue in favour of this assumption because it is unlikely that pickpockets would take the risk of checking all the pockets of the same person once they’ve found something. But if the assumption is correct, then you should be indifferent between the distributions (250, 250) and (499, 1), which you are not. So let us further simplify by assuming that the money is equally divided between all pockets.

Let’s calculate what you should do, shall we? If you put all your money in one pocket, the expected value of the money that you can expect to have at the end of the day is 0.9 * 500 = Rs. 450. Since we assume that the probability of the first pocket being picked is completely unrelated to the probability of the second pocket being picked, the intersection of the events should simply be the product of the two probabilities. So the probability both pockets being picked is 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.01. If you equally distribute your money over both pockets, the expected value will be 500 – P(AUB) = 0.1*250 + 0.1+250 – 0.01*500 = Rs. 455. While the amount you put in each pocket doesn’t affect the expected value, the number of pockets will. So it’s rather rational to keep your money in many different pockets if you’re an average person.

But there could be pickpockets who grab opportunities with both hands. Assuming a probability distribution over all pockets instead of conditioning it on the individual does not allow for a fantastically unlucky individual who has all pockets picked on a single metro ride. Let’s just say nobody likes that guy too much anyway so we aren’t relaxing any assumptions for him. This also means that we don’t think a person’s pocket is more likely to be picked just because he has a lot of them. I’m forced to concede that this, too, isn’t very unrealistic. Where will the pickpocket look in a pair of Dockers?

So even without accounting for risk aversion, our model shows that it is indeed rational not to put all your eggs in one basket. In any case, the preference for not losing everything is probably stronger than the preference for not losing anything. But extend this concept to too many pockets and regardless of what the calculations tell you, you should know that you will end up losing at least some money just by forgetting about it (true story). It is reasonable to say that there is an upper bound to the number of pockets you will split your money across: just as it would be embarrassing to find out that you are broke because your pocket has been picked, it would be rather awkward to have to fish out tenners from four different pockets to pay for a doughnut. The answer, my friend, is moderation. 

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. 

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.