Sharing is Caring

I believe a commentary on the public transport system in my new hometown is overdue. I miss the metro. Even the weird uncles who would repeat, "Metro sahi hai" to anyone who looked in their general direction. The buses here are no better than the buses anywhere else in India. But I must admit that the bus conductors here do have a better sense of irony than those in Delhi, who yell, "Andar ho jaao" to passengers who can't even find any space for their hands - in their desperation they put them in other people's pockets. Local trains are just larger versions of buses without the convenience of dropping you close enough to your destination, thereby ensuring that you to turn up for work looking far from presentable. 

Autowallahs here are so awful that I feel like I should start praying for the good health and longevity of the autowallahs in Delhi. On the bright side, autowallahs here don't discriminate. It doesn't matter if you're a local or an outsider; if you take an auto, you will be fleeced. It often costs more to take an auto than a cab. In exchange for the cost advantage, cabs are delightfully unreliable and cab companies are yet to figure out call wait. 

That leaves share autos. Travelling in a share auto is a lot like life. You keep waiting for an auto that will "be right" for you: not too crowded and headed towards the place you want to reach. But when you start feeling like time isn't on your side anymore, you take what you get. You struggle to get your foot in the door. You fight for your space. You let people step on your toes and put up with much discomfort because you have to reach your destination somehow. And as soon as you get comfortable, it's time to get off.

The level of ingenuity and dexterity displayed by most of the people on the road makes driving the sole preserve of those with infinite patience and wisdom. There are two activities that can seriously compromise your psychological health: dealing with bureaucracy and driving. I foolishly undertook both roughly around the same time. As a result, I have become  ridiculously foul-mouthed, at times surpassing my own knowledge of my proficiency in the area. 

Experience has taught me that in order to feel that warm afterglow after you swear, that feeling of being in perfect harmony with the universe, you have to swear in Hindi. Our national language is brilliant, for no other language could permit you to be so concise and still curse in such detail. 

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.

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. 

Embracing my Indianness

The exchange students in my college last semester complained about how everything in India happens “tomorrow.” I chuckled like I always do when I hear jokes that I don’t believe are at my expense. “Oh how Indian!” I thought to myself. What I’ve come to realise lately is that I’m more Indian than I think I am. I have been meaning to study “tomorrow” for the last 15 years and I’m yet to get around to it of my own accord. What’s a 2-month delay in installing an internet connection compared to that? I also unnecessarily add “only” at the end of each sentence, as if my conversations are really chequebooks. I use present continuous tense where simple present would suffice. I have no notion of punctuality. 

I remember having watched one of Russell Peters’ shows where he said that Indians probably don’t find jokes with the Indian accent offensive because they don’t think they have it. “They think there’s one guy in the country with that accent!” I think that logic can be extended for most Indian stereotypes. We are a part of the crowds we so detest. We’re exasperated that nobody stands in line although we always break it. I think we consider it okay to break the rules. We complain because everyone else breaks them at the same time and that inconveniences us. It’s as if we think we’ve landed up, quite by accident, in a place that’s so full of people who don’t behave as we would like them to. That we’re one of them is immaterial. 

An Illusion of Fitness

I feel rather guilty when I get a seat on the metro. The guilt is partly a celebration of my youth and partly self-deception. I imagine that anybody who can create customised playlists while reading books, rush up staircases to the beat of a song and choose the most aerobic route possible to get to college doesn’t need a seat as much as, well, anybody else does. The metro tells me to offer my seat to someone in need and I wouldn’t dream of disobeying metro rules and requests, such is my tremendous respect for it. So whenever I see someone with a child, someone fighting a losing battle with age using hair colour, someone struggling with their laptop bag or other luggage, someone overweight, someone tired, or someone who has moved towards an empty seat unsuccessfully on more than one occasion, I feel obliged to offer my seat to them. Of course, following the rules so closely means that I rarely sit for over five minutes of the journey. I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to just keep standing. It helps me feel fitter than I really am, counts as a workout in my head and saves me the guilt of sitting when so many more deserving souls wish for a seat. Superfluous courtesies of this sort are all I can afford to be altruistic with and I’m too grown up to play musical chairs every day. 

Four I's

So you left your glasses at home. “What do I need them for?” you must have muttered to yourself when your mother asked you if you were carrying them. Your youth and foolishness, and to some extent your newfound confidence in your ability to make do without glasses after switching to lenses, probably led you to say something to the effect of, “Am I not carrying enough already?” Your economic training was grossly inadequate to make you realise that hand sanitizer and spectacles are not perfect substitutes.

You went to college, slightly annoyed with your right eye for being so uncooperative on such a fine morning, but you blinked away your worries. You took off the lens, cleaned it and put it back on, commanding your eye to behave itself now that you had given it due attention. But when it started watering in class you realised that, unlike you, your eye doesn’t usually get unnecessarily belligerent, so you should probably go see what the matter is.

You patiently removed the lens once more, and with your other eye you noticed that the edge was chipped. Oops. How did you even manage to wear that in the first place? Your poor eye had to put up with all your crap in addition to this. “Oh well, left eye, looks like it’s just you and me then,” you said. But when you failed to notice a step on your way out and your brain grew positively confused with extremely clear and extremely blurred vision, you decided to remove the other lens too. “I don’t need lenses either,” you told yourself proudly. Or so you thought. Until someone waved at you and you waved back without knowing who the person was and whether they had waved at you or someone else.

It so happened that on this day you wanted to return some notes. You walked, in fact strutted, to the photocopy shop, secure in the knowledge that you won’t have to spend any money there today. You saw three men, approximately the same height and build, all wearing vests and grey trousers. “Will Prem bhaiya raise his hand if I call out his name?” you wondered. But the problem solved itself when someone called him and he turned around. Mission accomplished!

All you had to do was get home. You could do that part with your eyes closed. Taking the wrong exit or the wrong metro is too routine to be considered a detour anymore. Oddly enough, you didn’t even do that, despite not being able to read any sign boards and voluntarily impairing your hearing with earphones. In fact, things were surprisingly easy. You didn’t have to worry about protecting your glasses or lenses from the rain. You were able to figure out which escalator went up and which one went down even though you couldn’t see them properly. You held your book five inches from your face and looked positively captivated by whatever was on the page. You didn’t have to look sheepish when you dropped your phone and iPod because you couldn’t make out if anybody was looking at you. The metro ride itself made you see Delhi as an awesomely green city because you couldn’t see the garbage. You counted stations and managed to get off at the right one even though you were listening to music and reading a book at the same time, thereby feeling smug about your ability to multi-task. And most of all, it was so much fun pretending to stare at everyone very attentively, even though you couldn’t make out much other than the colour of their clothes.

“What a day it has been,” you told yourself as you wore your spectacles to write about how you don’t need them at all. 

What is Geekonomics?

That’s how almost every introductory Economics textbook that I have read began. Pretty sad, I agree. And when that’s followed by all that “allocating resources optimally” stuff, it really makes you wonder what possessed people like me to take it up in the first place.

There is much that is geeky about me these days. My glasses get thicker each year. I got retainers for my teeth at the rather too advanced age of 21. I stopped bothering with my hair a couple of years ago when I realised nobody noticed the difference when I forgot to do them one day. And I usually dress in loose kurtas and jeans - the trademark attire of social activists and the unemployed. 

Another reason why everyone (including me) should wonder why I took up Economics is I hate Maths, and Economics is really just Mathematics in disguise. My brain switches off, winds up for the day and leaves for some healthy meandering every time I see a page full of numbers and/or Greek alphabets. I suppose they don’t like using English alphabets because they are too easy to pronounce.

But the choice, it was made, and Economics I chose. So I’m doing exactly what economic models claim to do all the time, albeit in a wildly inaccurate and admirably haphazard fashion – stripping away unnecessary details and layers of complexity so that I can look at what I want to see. I present to you Geekonomics. 

I was travelling by the metro again. It's what I do. My association with the metro is a long and eventful one. The ladies' compartment is one of the best things about the metro. During my undergraduate days, the metro was still something of an elitist form of transport; it was new and shiny with the occasional “metro sahi hai” chants from first-time users. Today it's as bad as a blueline bus. In the ladies' compartment you have the privilege of only having to claw your way in without punching or kicking. 

But since there are no "gents" in the compartment, the ladies are very "adjusting". A bench designed for 7 people always has at least 8 people sitting on it, and often 9 or 10. To begin with, let’s assume the utility from getting a seat on the metro, no matter how little the space, is very high because it’s like winning a game of musical chairs; so high that it’s greater than the aggregate disutility to those already seated from having to accommodate an extra person. Let’s also assume that each person's marginal utility from getting a seat is directly proportional to the distance they have to travel, and that the utility from standing is zero. After the eleventh person, the marginal utility from being seated should turn negative, or you could say that seating is maximised with a constraint of 11 per bench. This is not an arbitrary number – it is the empirically observed maximum with daily observations made over a year. The utilitarian school of thought will tell you that Indians are the best utility maximisers ever. 

The Rawlsians aren't going to be so happy about it, though. They think the worst off should get a seat, i.e. those travelling the longest distances should have a chance to sit. Then to optimise under this school of thought, everyone should get up once they've had a seat for more than half their journey and seats will be shared on a rolling basis. It is possible that total utility is higher this way since there is likely to be less disutility from seat sharing. Also, if we adopt this method, senior citizens, heavily pregnant women and women with annoying children should definitely be offered seats by their younger, career-oriented peers. This doesn't happen on the Delhi metro. No, really. Indians would completely fail this test. 

So I suppose somewhere in our heads we're utilitarians. We can't stand to see an inch of empty space on the bench. We have to fill it up with our asses. Pareto optimisation? All public utilities in India are used many times over their capacity. Under-utilisation is an alien concept here. It's only meant for balding white men with thick glasses and a morning shadow: what a geekonomist would look like if I were a white male.