iNegotiate

I've spent a good part of my life negotiating with authority figures about how late I can return home. I belong to a certain social sect that thinks monsters and werewolves slink about the streets at night. The first time I did stay out late at night, I was quite disappointed by the conspicuous absence of vampires. 

Suppose the curfew-setters believe that the risk of something untoward happening at night is normally distributed, then after 9 PM, we can say that the probability of being a victim of crime increases steadily, reaching its peak at 1 AM. But even the criminals need to go home and get some sleep to be fresh and alert for the next day, so after 1 AM, the probability of crime reduces, returning to pre-9 PM levels at 5 AM. So parents shouldn't tell their kids to "return home by 12 or not return home at all." They should tell them to return home before midnight or after 3 AM, thereby avoiding travel during the peak crime hours. 

But behaviour usually doesn't follow this logic, so I'm forced to assume that the normal distribution idea doesn't appeal to most parents. In fact, considering how their impatience escalates with time, I surmise that they probably think that risk is uniformly distributed over the 9 PM to 6 AM interval. As time goes by, the total area under the curve increases and that explains their panic. Worry not. I have the perfect negotiation strategy. At all events, it is unlikely that the distribution of the probability of crime at night is a discrete distribution, because that would suggest that a crime can only be committed at specific points in time. A continuous distribution is far more plausible. However, in a continuous distribution, only intervals have positive probability. The probability of crime at any given point of time will be zero. Explain to your parents that while you understand that there is some risk spread over the time interval in question, if they think of your safety at a specific point in time, their fears are inconsistent with their beliefs. 

Let's assume that doesn't work either. As a final resort, I recommend negotiating for spending the night at a friend's place instead of coming home late. You don't actually have to spend the night at anyone's place. You push your friends to party till the wee hours of the morning and return home like a good kid just as the lamps are being lit and the prayers recited. Your parents will love your devotion to family life and your friends will think you are a party animal of sorts. If that isn't a win-win, I don't know what is. 

Acceptance

I've been telling myself that I'll update my blog for a while now. Evidently, I never got around to it. Until today. Today is the first day in a long time that I didn't have to fight my impulse to create a hectic plan to make the most of my weekend, mope about the fact that getting a job has made me a lot less interesting (and politically incorrect, thereby rendering most of the material I write unsuitable for such a public forum) or worry about how old I’ve become. Today is a day of epiphanies. It's a day of acceptance.

My age has finally caught up with me. I've decided that it's best to accept that. They say age is just a number. But so are all other numbers so it’s not particularly comforting.

I’ve accepted the fact that my memory is awful. I’ve been clinging to an illusion of good recollection based on a lousy internet connection that makes me type everything over so many times that I can't help but remember it. 

I've accepted the fact that my dreams are no longer as fun to recall as they once were because my sub-conscious mind is not as creative in its use of new imagery and abstraction as it once used to be. 

I've accepted the fact that inspiration will never strike when I want it to. I can only write when I have no point to make and my thoughts are only interesting when they fulfill no purpose, as they once used to be when I was truly jobless. I formally recognise joblessness as a virtue. Even the most casual youtuber will concur.

I've accepted that, all its idiocy notwithstanding, TV is an inspiration because of the sheer volume of writing material one could generate while staring idly at it. If I were to run a firm (to the ground), I'd put TVs in each cubicle instead of computers. Instead of ads, I'd slip in compulsory reading material. The employees’ brains would be so soupy by the time they've gone through two hours of programming that they wouldn't know enough to unglue their eyes from the screen. 

And lastly, most importantly, I've accepted that French toast is the only breakfast in the world that can reliably guarantee a good day.

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.

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.

Losing my Decisions

Choice has made me miserable. You might even say that the constant stress of decision-making has ruined my life. It’s the more trivial choices that drive me insane. This is how having to make a choice really makes me feel. I didn’t worry so much about my choices earlier and I’m forced to admit that the pursuit of economics has a not-entirely-unimportant role to play in this matter.

It would save me much mental turmoil if I could just appoint someone else to make decisions for me. But the rebel in me would start resenting the decision-maker and wondering if I should follow his advice and that will be yet another choice I have to make. I’m beginning to have serious misgivings about the economic assertion that more choice makes a person better off.

Enter coin. My pride won’t allow me to outsource decision-making to anybody else, so I use the humble coin. It’s a dear. It has no ideological leanings that could cause me to see its recommendations through a tinted glass. It always has the time for me. It never judges me. And so far, it has never been wrong. I must mention here, before you dismiss my decision-making mechanism, that I’m not alone in randomising decisions and hoping that on an average, no other decision-making algorithm can consistently outperform a coin toss.

Much as I hate to make choices, the truth is that I have already chosen. The answer is in my head but I don’t know it because it’s hidden under many layers of rationalisations and tautological arguments. The coin forces the truth out of me: I keep increasing the sample size until the coin tells me what I want to hear. Or so I tell myself lest the rebel in me should start resenting the coin too. 

Bravo

I know I should respect the Indian police. They are brave guys. No, really. They work hard to get where they are and I can only assume their job isn’t a picnic. In fact, considering how many of their comments leave me dumbstruck, I must admit that I’m finally able to see why large organisations spend so much on public relations. Multi-tasking isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

If you try to search for tales of the Indian police’s valour, however, you’re mistaken about their core competency. As a nation, we’re the brain over brawn sort. The Indian police is known for its intelligence and investigative brilliance, prompt registration of obscenity complaints, winning arguments over jurisdiction and most importantly, their fashion sense. Maybe I should have said style over brawn.

But I do pity them sometimes. Our country is a strange one to police. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Oh Shopping, why must you be a Nightmare?

I recently went to Great India Place (GIP) mall. Let’s just say my sisterly concern caused me to be roaming around a part of what isn’t Delhi. I felt more claustrophobic than one would on Blueline buses that ply on what is Delhi.

The said sister was slightly upset with me. I had misled her into believing that I would arrive an hour earlier than I did and I was also dreadfully tardy in responding to her queries about my location because I wasn’t in the mood to put my book down. I wondered why she messaged me with such regularity from a mall. Sure, it’s boring to shop alone but not so much as to have to send messages every 8 minutes? Turned out she was waiting for me at the metro station, hoping against hope that I would indeed arrive at the agreed time.

It wasn’t entirely my fault. All right, it was mostly my fault. I tried to explain to her that I had done everything I could to be on time – skipped the lens routine, reached the metro by car, ran up the stairs and took the train to Vaishali even though I needed to go to Noida because I couldn’t stand to be doing nothing while she waited for me. She pointed out that I should’ve left early, writing all in caps to indicate her displeasure. Unfortunately that idea hadn’t occurred to me. I had already decided to have a lazy morning so it was a bit difficult to change the course of things. She didn’t know it at the time, but I saved her life by making her wait.

You see, GIP isn’t a mall so much as it is a poorly stocked labyrinth of colourful signs with girls who are no longer teenagers humming the tunes of 90s boy bands and short boy-men who wear too much cologne cheap deodorant. It also has more children on a weekend than the average pre-school on weekdays. Most of these children have a delightful way of slamming themselves into passers-by, doing their child-launched-from-a-cannon-at-a-moving-target imitation.

When I did enter the mall, it had so many people that I thought there must be something really wonderful to buy there. Every shop was overflowing with people but nowhere did I find anything that I would be caught dead wearing. They couldn’t possibly all be keen social scientists observing behavioural patterns like me.

Thankfully, I wasn’t shopping for myself. My sister asked me if it isn’t the most wonderful thing to be shopping for someone else, even more so than shopping for oneself. I thought for a minute. She must be making some less obvious point because she most certainly isn’t an altruist. I nodded. “Yes it is,” I said. “When you shop for someone else you get the satisfaction of buying something that you consider worth buying without the guilt of having spent your money.” “Exactly!” she smiled happily.

At one of the shops we wandered into she found a sweater that she considered pretty. I noticed that you could see through it and observed that it probably wasn’t very warm. “Who cares about warmth?” “Well, it’s a sweater, isn’t that what it’s supposed to do?” I asked, somewhat naively. “No! It’s supposed to look good!”I put my finger on my chin thoughtfully and asked her why she didn’t just buy a t-shirt in that case – it would certainly not be bulky, it would be cheaper and probably more stylish. “But then I wouldn’t be dressed for the weather,” she shrewdly pointed out. “Ah! I see it now!” I said. “You want to look like you chose comfort over style but you’re really choosing style over comfort.” “Exactly!” And I always thought it was the reverse.

The best thing about the day, other than all this worldly wisdom, was the plate of golgappas I ate outside the mall. Not just because they were quite good, but because it was a refreshing change to be surrounded by cars instead of people. 

How Not to Make Decisions

Students of economics are armed with a formidable array of tools to “make decisions”. Being the keen scholar that I am, I wanted to see how they apply these to a “real-world setting”. I decided to look at the choice of optional courses in the final semester. The goals vary from “taking it easy” and “doing something different” to “preparing for a PhD”. So at the outset, I should say that there is no “correct” choice of bundles, and the choice depends entirely on the constraints (in terms of choices available and ability) and preferences (or goals).

I found that we aren’t spiritual enough to be able to optimise. There isn’t enough knowledge of the self, of self’s abilities, self’s preferences and whatnot. There also appears to be much social pressure that operates indirectly through social conditioning (even now!) – smart people take difficult papers, wise guys take “scoring papers” (I’ve never come across these in all my life, I used to think it’s an oxymoron. I know now that it’s just moronic), geeks take “theory papers” and the “take it easy” guys take the most mind-numbing courses available. Most of them don’t attend classes.

This is not optimisation! Dear old Slutsky and Hicks must be turning in their graves. We study all of consumer theory in the first semester, are introduced to choice under uncertainty soon after, ace exams in permutations and combinations in the second semester and then choose courses based on, well, none of the above. I agree that we were spoilt for choice in the previous semester and are generally spoiled in the last semester, but isn’t constrained optimisation the cornerstone of microeconomics? 

Why I'm not an economist

One of the things I did when I was studying for my exams was making a list of great people I would invite to my imaginary birthday party. Sometimes I'm really thankful for exams because such an exercise won't be excusable under any other circumstances. I looked over the list to see how many economists were on it. Zero. Musicians, authors, actors, physicists, comedians, cartoonists, artists and chefs but no economists. I had only considered two and chose to exclude them, not just because my list was restricted to 25 people, but also because I thought they would bring the party down. 


And that's when I realised that I would never be cool enough to get invited to my own party. 

Choice for Spoilt

Economists often claim that, from a welfare perspective, more choice can never make one worse off. The argument is that if I’m given more options to choose from, I can’t possibly do worse because I still have all the options that were available to me in a smaller choice set. It’s a compelling argument. But what if the choice set is too large? Being lazy sounds pretty rational to me.

My inspiration for this argument, of course, is my job hunt. I started by staring blankly at the Google homepage wondering what I should type. I don’t even know which industry I want to work in so there really is no logical starting point to browse through all the choices unless I choose something entirely arbitrary. I like to think of myself as a new breed of ‘reasonably rational people’ or ‘neo-rational’. And I was somewhat relieved when I found that there are only about 5 firms that might bother to look at my CV. To think of all the time I would’ve spent writing preposterous cover letters had this realization not dawned upon me. The mental and psychological costs of browsing through choices are immense, particularly when you are required to repeatedly weigh the options of hating your job against not having one. The opportunity cost in terms of time is the loss of some serious youtubing.

Being neo-rational, I’m a strong believer in making decisions based on empirical evidence. I often toss an unbiased coin. Needless to say the coin can’t come to my rescue this time. Too much of anything in a non-theoretical world is bad. Listen to the old wise men who bothered to write proverbs that you could use when you don’t know how to end a blog post.

The Perils of Optimisation and the Gift of Time

One of the most important skills required for someone who has to spend a lot of time travelling everyday is the ability to convince oneself that it really is “the gift of time”. It turns out, however, that when you have so many ways to kill time, such a gift really can’t be taken lightly. So I set about my optimisation exercise like I often do (somewhat unnecessarily). Of course I was only concerned with making optimal use of the time I spent travelling because that was the only “additional gift” I perceived – the rest of it was wasted exactly as before.

I took this optimisation exercise rather seriously so I constantly tried to read faster on the metro so that I wouldn’t have to carry the book around for too long (I’m not sure what my reasoning was for this because I always replaced it with an equally heavy book). While changing trains I’d hurriedly create playlists while running up the stairs, often running into people or nearly falling down. I was something of a nuisance to other passengers. All this running around was, of course, to pretend that I was following some sort of exercise regimen. I also wanted to minimise travel time because I did recognise that everything I did on the metro was just very organised time wasting.

I started planning fastidiously for the next day’s commute, often spending more time planning than I did travelling. My plans were overambitious. I almost always fell short of my goals and I would get off the metro thoroughly exhausted, relieved to have reached home/college so that I could waste time out of my pre-existing quota in a more regular fashion.

I try not to optimise too much these days. There's a time and place for everything.

  

Optimising the Contents of your Bag

When I first read an article by Jeremy Clarkson where he complained about how women carry far too many things in their handbags, I chuckled, feeling strangely superior to all those lost women out there. I carry a big backpack – it makes me look 21 instead of almost 22 – but the bag was always nearly empty at the time.

Then I moved to the other end of the city and my bag became heavy. A big backpack became practical instead of being an accessory. If that’s not a sign of ageing, I don’t know what is. I started carrying things that I never had at all earlier – hand sanitizer, wet tissues, books to read on the metro, extra pens, notes, band aid, cough lozenges and God alone knows what else. I’m even a bit afraid of emptying out my bag these days because I don’t know what will turn up. And it’s not that the change occurred overnight. They are adaptations to problems – I had to face the prospect of eating with dirty hands, inexplicable injuries when I’m 30 minutes away from anything that’s even mildly familiar, a cold, boredom, guilt for not studying, and so on. After a month of shuttling between New Delhi and not-so-new Delhi in order to “pursue Economics at the Master's level”, I felt it’s about time Economics gave me something in return. I decided to apply what I had learnt to optimise the contents of my bag. I wanted to regain the respect that I once imagined Mr. Clarkson would have for me.

The first thing I discovered was that it helps to carry “big stuff”. This might seem counterintuitive, but the idea is to keep your bag clean and everything easy to find. If everything in your bag is large and heavy, you’re unlikely to carry anything you don’t need. It’s because the weight or space taken up by something is negligible that you throw it in and never take it out. For instance you would always remember to remove a big, heavy book once you finish reading it rather than a newspaper, 2-page notes, comics and suchlike. It also prevents you from buying crap that you’ll never take out. If you carry a small bottle you’ll invariably have many half-empty bottles of water you bought somewhere left in your bag.

The second rule is a monthly stock-taking. Ideally it should be weekly but it might not give you the same satisfaction because there won’t be as much rubbish and Mr. Clarkson will think you’re fastidious. Throw out everything you didn’t use that month. If everything you carry is pretty large, you might end up cleaning your room this way.

The third rule is not to carry substitutes. For instance you don’t need an iPod if it’s possible to load songs on to your phone, which will always be the case because it’s unlikely that you’re willing to spend on an iPod but not on a halfway decent phone. The iPod does give you an image advantage but that will be negated by the amount of crap you sift through in your bag to find it.

The fourth rule is never to buy anything unless you’re thoroughly psyched about it. That’s the only way you will remember to take it out of your bag when you get home. It will also prevent you from throwing in receipts that could line the bottom of your bag for many years.

The last rule is not to plan for contingencies. A lot of the material that I write is generated when I wind up in unfortunate circumstances. If I make it a point to carry everything I could possibly need when I fall, tear my lenses, get drenched in the rain, spill food on my clothes, find myself in a medical emergency or face the dilemma of ingesting food that could potentially cause jaundice, I wouldn’t have anything to write about.

Prime Minister to reduce MSP by epsilon to control inflation

Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has decided to take stern measures against double digit food inflation by reducing minimum support prices for rice and wheat by epsilon, which is an arbitrarily small positive quantity.

“I just had to take stock of my life and wonder what the role of Economics was in it. And the answer was quite clear: it was about the same as my current role in the government. I’m there and I seem important but it would be unfair to say I did a terrible lot. So I decided to make a change.”

Economic theory often postulates that changing the parameters of the existing equilibrium by epsilon will upset the balance and lead to another dynamic adjustment process, something most economists prefer to wave their hands through or draw confusing arrows all over the place to describe.

Waving his left hand as he spoke and drawing an upward arrow on a hypothetical approval ratings sheet with his right, Dr. Singh explained that he expects the new equilibrium to be established at a healthy 5 percent level of inflation. When asked how he thought epsilon could effect this change, he said, “It’s pretty powerful.”