Raising the BAR?

Is it sadistic hinging on cruel to make mileage of the fact that men think you are doing them a favor by letting them buy you coffee? I ask this purely in the context of work. I personally dont think so, given the disadvantages women face in workplaces, esp in India - for example, we almost always lose out on the special bonding that men indulge in only over drinks - decisions made, friendships created, secrets spilled, information shared - we very rarely get to even know about it, let alone be part of a drinks-do!

So think about it - there emerges a pretty strong case for women to use their appeal to the same end.

Random Rant

Know whats really annoying??? Arbitrage!!  Kept afloat to enable opportunities and customization is a sweeter way of saying free-rider!

A visit of sorts - nD musings

It will take around 14,000 million years to travel to the edge of the observable Universe, even if we travel at the speed of light. 

The operative word here is observable. This fact never ceases to astound me. How distressingly small are we! It is as if the Universe and its existence is this wondrous machine and we on Earth have access to one tiny part of it. And with our limited resources and our exposure to that tiny part, we are trying to fathom how the entire machine works...

This may never happen because we are limited by our abilities. For example, we know that some animals and birds can see colors that we can’t see or hear sounds that we can’t hear. There may be countless other such things  we may never know of. So how can we understand something if we are not aware that it is there?

Moreover, we are limited to a mere three dimensions (apart from time) while the Superstring Theory accurately predicts ten dimensions of space and time in existence. Think of the huge limitations we face because of this!

Just as an example of what we might be missing, imagine a 2D world like a sheet of paper. Take a look at this picture I’ve painstakingly drawn. Person A (the one with a red left arm and a green right arm ) can never assume the position of person B (arm color reversed) in a 2D scenario simply because there is no height or rather the space to make the transition. Left and right cannot be interchaged on a 2D surface. But we in 3D can lift him up, simply flip him over and he can be converted to person B. So what seems impossible in a 2D world is easy in 3D.

Interestingly, A can be converted to B if he moves on a Mobius Strip (see pic). Just take a strip of paper, twist it in the center and join the edges. So if A moves along the surface of the strip, even in a 2D world, he can flip over. So it is possible, after all...Wouldnt it be awesome if we too had something like this? Ive racked my brains enough to come up with a possible counterpart in 3D, but no avail. If you have any ideas, please tell me.

Imagine the miracles we can perform if we had access to just another dimension. But unfortunately, we can’t even imagine it :( Access to a fourth dimension would definitely give us God-like powers. For instance, we can walk out of closed doors, pass right through objects, see everything that happens on the Earth at any given moment, etc. To understand this, once again consider a person who is in prison in a 2D world (see pic). So for him to get out, the circle around him should be broken. But we in 3D can lift him out; wont it seem miraculous to the other people in 2D that he got out without breaking the circle? So think of similar miracles someone in a higher dimension can perform on us?

Ive thought a lot about this. Its very unsettling. The possibilities are unending. Think about this – we believe that our Earth is rotating and revolving around the Sun. What if someone from a higher dimension who can see it from outside in its entirety tells us that the Earth is actually stationary and it is everything else that is moving? Yeah, I know this is far-fetched :) But really, what if all our beliefs are false?

That’s anyways happening now - Space is flat is turning out to be a baseless assumption – we now find it more likely to be curved. Moreover, the shortest distance between two points need not be a straight line. It could be an interstellar chasm. Oh, the possibilities….

Anyhow, the laws of nature formulated on Earth seem counter-intuitive since they are fragmented and disparate, almost inelegant I would say. And by saying this, I mean absolutely no disrespect to all the brilliant theoretical physicists who spent their lives discovering and formulating them. All I am saying is that it seems as if they are the parts of a jigsaw puzzle which even after pieced together completely makes no sense. And that’s supposed to be the beauty of the fourth dimension - the laws have “space” to fit there and that one glorifying equation can emerge.

But speaking of nature, I think man is unnatural. This is my personal opinion – because as we know, nature always abhors a gradient but man totally thrives on it.

All that you have is your soul

Maybe everyone has got it wrong. I think we as humans sold ourselves real short by settling  down with sound as the prime means of communication, its so shaky and fickle, untenable and vanishes into air without a record or a mark...ummm...an intentional loophole in the so-called design????  if hedges and walls could talk, it'll be a dark day...

And why didnt we evolve so that our minds and hearts could speak on their own???? There must be a reason...imagine if you cant control what you communicate :P wow !!!

Wish there was not a vanity gene...Wish there was not a cover...Wish what we reap is what we sow...Wish man could start over...

When you say nothing at all

Q: What is the biggest challenge that sports in India has to overcome? 
A:  Lack of infrastructure and a change in the mindset of people. 

Q: What is the one reform that will help banks and financial institutions in India function smoothly? 
A: De-regulation. There are too many controls. 

Q: What are the major issues in the education system today? 
A: Lack of professionals trained to meet the actual needs of the sector.

Note that the answers for the three questions are inter-changeable, and would make perfect sense if we did so.

When I was in college, I used be really disillusioned with such suggestions from experts and practitioners. I hated what I thought were their usual bromides - innovation, collaboration, working together, all-inclusive solutions, holistic approaches blah blah. To me, they always seemed disinclined to take a stand or say something concrete. After every such speech or interview, I used to ask myself - Have I learnt anything new from this? The answer used to be an invariable NO. So, I stopped listening when they spoke, I used to automatically tune out. I decided not to read their interviews anymore (unless it contained facts).

To me, they sounded like the horoscope pages which print stuff like "The week ahead will be slightly disturbing. You should believe more in yourself and not take things so seriously. You should be careful with your spending and be more assertive".

Well, really !! This is equivalent to saying nothing. Almost everyone on earth will identify with something so loosely-worded and it will always sound like good advice in hindsight. Even my dog can do better, you dont have to be a fortune-teller to come up with stuff like this. Atleast, thats what I used to think.....

So anyway, coming back to what I was saying, the answers from so-called industry experts seemed as lame as these ambiguous insights from the horoscope tellers. And I held them in very low regard until very recently, until I found myself doing the same thing.

There is this socio-economico-political crisis in some districts of Karnataka that I have been covering for the past six months or so. I had interviewed most of the concerned stake-holders, seen the relevant records, had access to the related data and traced the developments. Therefore, I know most of what there is to know about the issue, which makes me a sort of an expert, given that not many people have too many insights into this.

When this problem was being discussed in blogs at work, I felt compelled to point out the biggest problem  as I saw it  -“The poor who are most affected due to the crisis, are not being involved in the negotiations. This should be corrected”.

Now really, did I have to do all that researching and all those field visits to be able to say this? Its only common sense that the people who are directly affected by anything should be involved in the decisions concerning it. The statement I made is even vaguer than the interviews quoted above.  It is like saying  power to the people, which has got to be the oldest glitterary ever. But to me, it made perfect sense, because in my opinion, no solution could ensue without that…This was the one reform that was needed…But if someone read my "informed opinion", they would think no more of me than what I thought of others.

It really got me thinking about how judgmental I had been. Maybe, their answers seem so over-arching to us because we view the problem from a very low perspective. After all, the more you know about something, the more strategic you are bound to get. And at a really high level, everything seems the sameJ

Though it is well-known that most people willfully say nothing, I should really stop dissing all of them so regardlessly.

Lesson learnt truly and well….

Quick Fixes?

Sometimes we look at the way we do things and then cant remember why we do it that way. Just take a look at the Bharat Nirman scheme or the debt relief scheme of the GOI. We've spent thousands of crores and dont have much to show for it.  Someone once said that instead of waiving the loans, if we give each poor person one hundred thousand rupees, it will be far more effective. I agree with this - we could use an effective self selection mechanism like choosing the people who sign up for the NREGA. I mean, with the backbreaking work and low pay, only the poorest of the poor people who dont have other options are likely to sign up for it, and lets give each of them some money. It will be far far cheaper than the loan waiver which cost the taxpayer 600,00,00,00,000 rupees or the Bharat Nirman which cost  480,00,00,00,000  rupees or other such schemes. But any suggestions like these will not be well-received because of mainly the following:

1. For some reason, it is believed that the benefits should "trickle down" through means of a strong policy that is self sustaining in the long run.  True, but while we are perfecting the system, there is an unfortunate mass of people who suffer in the short-run for it.

2. It is not in the interest of the person/ people/ party implementing it because they will get little or no mileage out of it since it will not be politically popular.

3. There is this concept of inclusion of various sections of people. People might argue for example, that the statistics show that NREGA is not working in all states, so what about the poor in those states? And then we will digress in our effort to do the right thing by all. I really think that in an effort to benefit all (read: please everyone), we really end up with blurry goals.

I can think of many more reasons but I will leave it to the readers to think this through. You would all have heard of the suggestion to the American President that came to be known as "Patriotic Retirement" in the St. Petersburg Times. For the benefit of those who haven't read it, 

Dear Mr. President,

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings. Unemployment fixed.
2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered. Auto industry fixed.
3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage. Housing crisis fixed.

It can't get any easier than that!
P.S. If more money is needed, have all members in Congress and their constituents pay their taxes.
 

For some reason, I was curious to see what various critics had to say about this, so I combed many of  the blogs and opinion pieces online. It was surprising - most people contented themselves with pointing out that the cost of this scheme would be $ 40 trillion and therefore it is unrealistic. I am sure we could argue a reasonable case for this plan by pointing out the huge costs saved on bailouts (pegged at $ 24 trillion),  the  costs saved on the "Stimulus Plan"  and the other numerous plans etc, but thats not the point...the point is that such a direct approach which is too low-lying compared to policy measures (which have the backing of the "sound" economic theories, of course) and for all the other reasons pointed out above is not appreciated.

The not so vast debatabase....

Well, you could say I was totally jobless at 4.30 am in Thanjavur railway station waiting for someone who was supposed to arrive at 7. So for two hours or so this morning I didn't know what to do with myself...Amidst the stares (its actually more pronounced in Tamil Nadu, that is a proven fact now), I decided to be the Devil's advocate for everything I wouldve died defending otherwise...yes, I know there are better ways to kill time...Anyways, after musing for a while, I more or less concluded the following...

Apart from factual/ existential debates, everything else we opine on comes under one of these 2 categories :

1. Whether something ought to be/ have been done and in this/ that way.
2. Who ought to do it/ not do it.

Really, I couldn't find a third...I somehow see a distinction between black-white, on-off, true-false etc and the categories above...I feel it is a subset of the on-off but a super-set of the spirit of the actual debates. Please let me know if you have any that does not fit in...Try it, pick a topic and see. Moreover, all questions more or less agree with any one side of the should be/ should not be controlled frame also. But I haven't thought this one through though...2 hours was not enough you see :)

If you are wondering why this exercise, well...this may sound vague, but I have always wondered (in the biggest possible scheme of things) if everything is same or not, in the sense of belonging to some kind of unifying equation at different levels...I am not really able to articulate what I mean to say coherently, so I will leave it for now....

As I see it

The play of perspectives !!!

The cost of one rupee

Take a look at this:

I gave my friend the following options and asked him to choose.

Option A - Rs. 50,000
Option B - A 50-50 chance on Rs. 1 lakh.

(Please substitute the rupee with whatever currency you think in, and for those who don't use the term, One lakh is 1,00,000).

He said he will go with option A. So I reduced option A to Rs. 25,000 and asked him to choose. Still it was option A. I further reduced A to Rs. 20,000 - still it was option A. So I reduced option A further still to Rs. 15,000/- and THEN he says option B. So the turning point was somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000. We decided to find out exactly where. So we tried 15,500, 16,000 etc. It transpired that the the choice flipped at Rs. 17,500. So, to put it more lucidly:

Option A - Rs. 17,500
Option B - A 50-50 chance on Rs. 1 lakh

He will choose option A. If I reduce A by a mere one rupee to 17,499, he would choose option B.

This made me wonder - In the ordinary course if I asked him to give away one rupee, he would do it without thinking even once, let alone twice. Why is it that the same one rupee is making him gamble 17,499?? Yes, you would reply that it is the perceived reward of a probable one lakh, but if you look at it aside from the one lakh, it is very puzzling.

We go blue in the face bargaining at a roadside shop or with an auto-driver, and its sometimes a question of just 10 rupees to make or break the deal. But the same 10 rupees if charged to us as extra by CCD or Pizza Hut, many of us would not even notice. I sometimes drink tea at restaurants because I don't want to pay the extra 10 rupees for coffee. But I would still buy that pair of Levis jeans even if it costs 500 bucks more.

Money takes on different values in different contexts. The perceived cost of money is different to us at different places. And if you look at how inconsistent it is, its mind-boggling. Somehow, we are not able to think in terms of "real" money, outside of the context of where we spend it. We crib about spending 1 rupee more per SMS or feel cheated if we pay 10 bucks more to the auto guy. But we don't really differentiate between 10,000 and 10,500 while buying a new phone. While buying a laptop, a margin of 2-3 thousand is ok. While buying a car, we dont let an extra 25,000 influence our choice. If it is a flat, then an added 50,000 doesn't really count when we are spending 45-50 lakhs. We see money only in the backdrop of things, never on its own.

I have always tried not to be penny-wise and pound foolish. But I now realise that being pound-wise and penny-foolish is equally dumb, even though it might cost you less.

I am what I am?

A scary concept I recently read about - When we extend the theory of natural selection to ourselves, it throws up something that we should all be happy to hear - we are who we are only because it suits us the best. It even discounts a person's will by saying a person's subconcious will allow him to change himself only if it helps him survive better than before. So as per this theory, we needn't blame ourselves for not being able to change. Think about it - If a person is rude, it is because he will survive best by being rude. Ditto lazy, mean, dishonest, truthful, cheerful, kind, insensitive, absent-minded, crazy, shabby, neat-freak, pious, double-faced, rigid, open-minded etc. Food for thought indeed. And the Emergent state is stable which may/may not be desirable (to others), the operative word being stable here. The same argument as order/ survival as opposed to chaos/ disintegration even if it is not "good". Imagine if this was proved true - all our laws have to be repealed since theres no way we can have laws that threaten survival instincts that aid existence :) And all our judgements will disappear since we would give everyone equal credit for being who they are, and understand that they are because they cannot be anything else :) But hey, but its not totally foregone and being aware is definitely a way out. But what about those who can't allow themselves to be aware, under the same rule?

Chessbored?

As a chess player, I sometimes really wonder why we always play by the rules. The current form of chess has been in vogue since as long as the 15th century. The moves of each of the pieces are given and accepted worldwide generation after generation. Yet, every game is different and we never get tired of it. Does the game really allow us such a wide berth that our minds never find the rules limiting and each game has something new to offer? If so ,was this by design or is this random?? Will there ever be a day when we'll say lets change the moves of a bishop, it'll make it more exciting? Why haven't we ever questioned these fundamentals? Maybe this is true of all games, or maybe we're too busy winning to see if we can get anything more out of it. Or maybe this thought is just a parallel to all what we hold as given vis-à-vis what we are willing to change or question.