If Google were a prophet...

If Google be imagined as a new prophet, the “auto-complete” feature it possess offer glimpses into the minds of people in a geography. That is why, often times, I tinker around with it to figure what are people in my part of the world be thinking of.

 By way example:

 On typing, “What does my”, the search engine offers to complete the sentence with options such as

1. name mean

2. dream mean

3. g mean

4. day look like

5. kundalini say about me

 I had to look up Google to figure “g” is short in texting lingo for “Gangsta” and is used much in urban India. But who asks a search engine what does their day look like or what does their kundalini mean? 

 On attempting “Why am I”, auto-complete offeres insights into the many kinds of angst.

1. still single

2. always sleepy

3. a Hindu

4. not losing weight

   &

5. gaining weight

… emerge as questions playing the minds of most people.

Indian men sound dim-witted. Perhaps that explains their questions such as “Why do women”;

1. Get period

2. Wear bras

3. Wear panties

4. Have periods

5. Show cleavage

 If men are dim-witted, the women sound floozy as well. Perspective comes by way the questions they ask. Such as, “Why do men” 

1.  Marry

2. Get angry

3. Have beards

4. Snore

I never imagined “snoring” could be be cause for marital discord or sexual incompatibility.

Having impregenated a woman, married men sound incompetent. Why else may they look up Google to find out “Is my wife” 

1. pregnant

2. cheating on me test

3. interested in another man

4. a narcissist

 As for women, they sound either angry or lonely. Perhaps, that puts into perspective questions such as “Is my husband”

1. nephew my mahram

2. attracted to me

3. having an affair

4. asexual

 Mahram, incidentally, is Urdu for a close friend with whom a woman can move and talk closely with like she would with her husband, father or brother.

 It has become the go-to place for most people to ask questions of all kinds that they not ask of other humans. Perhaps, it has much to do with that us humans are afraid of being perceived of as frail and seek refuge in anonymity — an illusion Google confers conveniently. 

 What I suspect is on display, is heart breaking human naivete.

Why a lover's sulk must be indulged

In popular imagination, the brief act of courtship is misunderstood as the act of being in love. It is actually the precursor to love. The real act of being in love is when one human chooses to stay invested in another human, over time, even when their hidden flaws show up, after having gone through rituals such as marriage and the traumas of child-rearing.

This ideal love is a romantic notion and is difficult to stay invested in. That is why sulking has an important role to play, even if that does not make itself immediately evident. 

The sulk is a very odd emotion that possesses some unique traits. It is a feeling that emerges out of intense anger on the one hand. But on the other, this anger insists it must not be articulated. Above all else, the sulk is an act we humans engage in only with someone we trust will neither abandon nor stop loving us.

This peculiar nature of the sulk lends itself to much philosophical inquiry. In contemporary literature,  Alain de Botton, the Swiss-British author and philosopher, has spent much time examining the sulk, most notably in his meditations titled The Course of Love, where he makes a very compelling case for celebrating a lover’s sulk.

Upon close inspection, de Botton explains, the sulker makes no attempt to communicate why or what it is they are angry about. Silence is the sulker’s way of stating that an unspoken grievance must be addressed. The easiest thing for the recipient of a sulk to do is dismiss the silence as petulant behaviour. But that would be a mistake. Because what the sulker really needs is attention and they are asking for it at great risk by staying silent.

de Botton’s meditations on the theme suggest that the only other time we humans were comforted when in silent discomfort was when we were in the womb. That was a time when, even in our silence, we were heard, and efforts were made to alleviate the source of our discomfort. This may have also been the only time we felt completely loved.

When thought of from that perspective, the recipient of any sulk is a very privileged and much-loved creature. The most honorable thing for the recipient to do then is engage with the sulker and do all that is humanly possible to ameliorate the anger, whether it be real or imagined. 

It is afternoon now. I have sulked since morning after a minor tiff and have been indulged much since then. Time now to re-engage with the acts of living and loving.

This piece was first published in the Sunday edition of Hindustan Times

Astrologers, Homeopaths & Economists

Astrologers, homeopaths and economic forecasts cannot be trusted because the so-called science they practice is fuzzy at best and hocus-pocus at worst.

Consider, for instance, this delightful anecdote recounted by a senior journalist at a popular Mumbai-based newspaper. Sometime in 1998 or 1999, he wrote on his Facebook wall, the hugely popular astrologer Marjorie Orr took a break. Fearing a backlash from readers, his editor suggested the young man, along with two of his colleagues, ghost write the column until Orr got back to work. Some trepidation later, he got down to follow orders. He did it for six weeks until the astrologer got back from her vacation. Not a single reader from the newspaper’s erudite, English-speaking community wrote in with an angry word that his predictions were off the mark.

The post attracted a barrage of amused comments from other journalists who’ve ghosted for popular astrologers like Peter Vidal in Indian newspapers. Vidal apparently recycles his column by replacing the text for one star sign with something he’s written in the past for another star sign. Most people don’t notice. Then there is Panditji from Jaipur who misses his deadlines every once a while and the poor sub-editor at the desk had to think up “good" days of the week, “lucky" colours to be worn and “numbers to bet on" for each star sign.

“The trick," wrote this veteran desk hand at the magazine in response to the Facebook post, “was to make people believe they were on the verge of a quantum leap in life."

Then there is homeopathy: Generous column inches are devoted to it in newspapers and magazines, and practitioners make a pretty damn good living out of it. The premise around which this tub of crock continues to exist — in spite of a mountain of evidence to prove homeopathy is indeed crock — is that water molecules have memory. 

But even Class VIII students exposed to elementary chemistry and concepts like Avogadro’s number know water molecules have no memory. This is because by then, they are taught the mechanics of dilution. Whatever botanical compound goes into making a homeopathic drug is diluted to an extent that there would be no trace of the molecule left in the drug — except the sugary coating made of powdered lactose, of course.

In homeopathic parlance, on average, most compounds are diluted by 30C. That is 10 to the power of 60, or one followed by 60 zeroes.

To understand how much of a dilution that is, imagine a drop of water with a diameter of 150 million km — the distance from the earth to the sun. It takes light eight minutes to travel that distance. Now imagine a drop of water with one molecule of a substance in it. That is a 30C dilution. 

It is entirely possible that Samuel Hahnemann, who thought up modern homeopathy, had figured he’d gotten it all wrong in the face of this evidence. That is perhaps why he continued to argue water has memory and that even after dilution of the kind he propagated, water retains a “spirit-like" essence of the original compound that is “no longer perceptible to the senses".

Ben Goldacre writes sardonically in his superb book Bad Science: “If water has a memory, as homeopaths claim…water has been sloshing around the globe for a very long time, after all, and the water in my body as I sit here typing in London has been through plenty of other people’s bodies before mine. Maybe some of the water molecules sitting in my fingertips as I type this sentence are currently in your eyeball. Maybe some of the water molecules fleshing out my neurons as I decide whether to write ‘wee’ or ‘urine’ in this sentence are now in the Queen’s bladder (God bless her): water is the great leveler."

Both of these disciplines are similar to another perverted discipline—economic forecasts. It draws from the worst of astrology and homeopathy. While the chances of getting a prediction right using astrology are as good as flipping a coin, homeopathic remedies are no better than placebos where there is no relationship between cause and effect. But economic forecasting relies on both of these to get by and there are suckers by the millions buying into them.

To sift through why economic forecasting is fraught with inconsistencies, Nate Silver’s outstanding book, The Signal and the Noise is a good place to start. He argues this discipline faces three fundamental challenges:

“First, it is very hard to determine cause and effect from economic statistics alone. Second, the economy is always changing, so explanations of economic behaviour that hold in one business cycle may not apply to future ones. And third, as bad as their forecasts have been, the data that economists have to work with isn’t much good either."

To get a sense of how difficult this really is, let’s consider the most reliable data we have on the US economy (because it is the most closely tracked). The US government puts out 45,000 indicators each year and private data providers track as many as four million statistics. Since World War II though, they have witnessed only 11 recessions. How in the world is anybody to choose 11 outputs specifically from the data on hand that caused these recessions?

By way of example, consider the maxim “co-relation does not imply causation". What it means is that just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other, it does not mean one is responsible for the other. For instance, Silver points out, ice cream sales and forest fires are related because both occur more often in summers. But there is no causation. You don’t set off a bush fire in some desert when you buy a tub of ice cream.

On the face of it, there seem to be three reasons why economic forecasts go horribly wrong. The first is arrogance on the part of a large majority of economists. The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), based out of New York and London, is widely respected. In 2011, the firm predicted double-dip recession, which is a recession followed by a short recovery and leading into another recession.

When quizzed on the prediction, the firm threw up a lot of data that seemed incomprehensible to most people and obfuscated it with jargon that made no sense. Like this: “ECRI’s recession call isn’t based on just one or two leading indexes, but on dozens of specialized leading indexes including the US Long Leading Index…to be followed by downturns in the Weekly Leading Index and other shorter-leading indexes. In fact, the most reliable forward-looking indicators are now collectively behaving as they did on the cusp of full blown recessions." 

Silver tracked their approach to a stance articulated to their clients as far back as 2004: “Just as you do not need to know exactly how a car engine works in order to drive safely, you do not need to understand all the intricacies of the economy to accurately read those gauges." 

When looked at from this prism, the only thing that matters is data and more complex data—and not even an attempt to get to the story. “There were certainly reasons for economic pessimism in September 2011—for instance, the unfolding debt crisis in Europe—but ECRI wasn’t looking at those. Instead, it had a random soup of variables that mistook co-relation for causation," concludes Silver.

The second reason economic forecasts are notoriously difficult to handle is that the society and the systems they try to predict are dynamic. Nobel Prize winner  F.A. Hayek, in his acceptance speech in 1974, had explained why these systems are difficult to deal with.

Physical scientists can observe and measure the things that drive systems they are studying. But society, and therefore, the economy, is not a physical system. There are millions of variables that cannot be measured or seen. For instance, how will an individual respond to a set of stimuli in a given set of circumstances? There are no universal answers.

But economists, in their attempt to be rigorous, infuse techniques and models used by physical scientists. This is fundamentally flawed because in doing that, they have to ignore that which cannot be measured, in spite of it being integral to economics. The outcomes are incorrect predictions and actions that can harm society.

The third is that humans and the institutions they build are inherently biased. As an experiment, Silver conducted economic polls across organizations that engage in forecasting. Given the same data, he figured that the lower an entity’s reputation, the wilder its predictions. And if your reputation in the markets is higher, chances are your estimates are conservative.

The dichotomy is explained by the fact that if your reputation is on the lower side, you have little to lose. So perchance you hit bull’s eye, the chances of drawing attention is higher. If reputation is high on the other hand, there is an incentive to protect it and you’d much rather err on the side of caution.

Perhaps these are the reasons why Ezra Solomon, an influential US economist and professor at Stanford University, once caustically said: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

This piece was originally published in Mint on Dec 05, 201

On Essentialism

I confess I have been a bad husband and an even worse father. I must also concede that the missus has demonstrated the magnanimity to give me a long rope. I wonder why. If I were her, I’d have had me flogged at a public square. This, because I have amply demonstrated my inability to deploy a two-letter word when needed most: No.

Mahatma Gandhi put it succinctly: “A ‘no’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."

That he practised this mantra diligently is well known. In an interview to Greg McKeown author of the global best-seller Essentialism, Gandhi’s grandson Arun spoke of how the Mahatma practised this in his personal life.

For various reasons that had affected Arun badly, he was packed off to his grandfather’s place. Gandhi was hugely popular then and his time came at a premium. Be that as it may, through all of the 18 months that Arun spent with his grandfather, Gandhi made it a point to spend at least two hours every day listening to all of what Arun had to talk about. Gandhi’s patient listening had a profound impact on young Arun. Over the years, as the boy grew up, the significance of Gandhi’s daily ritual of listening started to dawn on him.

The Mahatma had his priorities in place. In spite of pretty much everybody in the world clamouring for his time, he knew how important it was that he say ‘no’ to everybody else, so that he could be with Arun. Gandhi knew if he deprioritized his grandson over everybody else, in the longer run he’d strike a fool’s bargain. Because he’d have missed out on an opportunity to provide what only a grandfather can. Equally pertinent, people around Gandhi would take him for granted.

When I first read of this episode, I was ashamed. I can think of so many instances when I have been an idiot. There was this once, for instance, when my wife and I had just had our second child. She was still recuperating and could have done with all of me around.

That was also the time when I was a recent entrant to a fancy gym. I didn’t know too many people there. But as is the wont, like vultures, the instructors swooped on me and demanded a party to celebrate the birth of my newborn. I am not sure if it was the reluctance to say ‘no’ or the exuberance of a proud father. But, in hindsight, I know it was the wrong call. I said, ‘yes’ and took a bunch of protein-craving beasts to pile in all of the meat they could consume.

Even as they raised toasts to my newborn, I could tell from their faces that they were laughing their backsides off at how gullible I was. Nothing came of the banquet. When I visited the gym the next day, all of the blokes who had eaten their way into my wallet were expending energies on their personal clients. I didn’t matter. And rightly so.

Why should they have respected a man who deprioritized his wife and child for people he didn’t know? A firm ‘no’ from me and all of them would have backed off. Chances are if I’d said ‘no’, they’d have treated me a lot more seriously the next day.

I can say much the same thing about work. I quit my last assignment under rather acrimonious circumstances. I don’t intend to use this space to get into the gory details of all that transpired. Suffice to say that a significant portion of my time was apportioned to a promoter who didn’t think twice before condemning me to the guillotine. Once again, in hindsight, if I had managed myself well, there was enough time on that that could have been apportioned to family—notably my older daughter who needed her father around.

But it would be ridiculous on my part to hold the firm’s promoter responsible for how I conducted myself at the workplace. He didn’t demand I sweat my blood or spill my guts. I painted myself into a corner where I believed I had to work bloody hard. This, in spite of the logic in my head arguing I had a choice to say ‘no’. I gave in to the emotional part of me that argued even louder that I had no choice but to cave into an imaginary construct.

As McKeown puts it: “Every time we say, ‘I have to take this call’ or ‘I have to send this piece of work off’ or ‘I have to go to this client meeting’, we are assuming that previous commitments are non-negotiable. Every time you use the phrase ‘I have to’ over the next week, stop and replace it with ‘I choose to’. It can feel a little odd at first—and in some cases it can even be gut-wrenching (if we are choosing the wrong priority). But ultimately, using this language reminds us that we are making choices, which enables us to make a different choice."

What if I had chosen to say ‘no’ to instructors at the gym or the promoter at the earlier firm I worked for? If anything, my life would have been better off. But hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.

This is borne out in a lovely book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, by an Australian palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware. For a long time, her career was focused on people living out the last 12 weeks of their lives. In all of her conversations with them, five themes recurred.

1. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

On all counts, this is the kind of clarity that terrifies a middle-class man in his midlife. Until now, I have lived to please those around me. I work like a mule. I find it difficult to articulate my emotions. I don’t stay in touch with friends. My happiness is oftentimes sacrificed at the altar of the greater common good, as I perceive what is the greater common good.

Between hindsight and the insights offered by Ware, I know I have some way to go—a long way to go actually.

To start with, I now begin my days at 4.30am and am outdoors by 5 am until 7.30 am. The solitude that comes during the early hours allows me to spend time with myself, thinking of what really matters. I have come to believe there is a fine line that divides what matters from what doesn’t. In these hours, I take brutal calls on what ought to be given a pass and what must be acted upon.

I have begun to take fewer calls on my phone after 9pm. That is time I now spend with my older daughter to make up for all that I didn’t give her in the past. As my brother once asked me much to my shame: “What more can a child ask for other than a little bit of your time? And if you can’t spare her that, why did you have to get her into this world?"

I couldn’t agree more. In the short time that I have practised this way of life, I am happier for it.

This was first published in Livemint

A festival of idiots

Over the last two months, I’ve participated at various literature festivals. It has much to do with that The Aadhaar Effect, a book I co-authored with NS Ramnath is now on the shelves. Having done the rounds, I feel compelled to conclude the few honest people that exist in the ecosystem are organizers (many of whom are volunteers) and the audiences who take much pain to get there. 

 Practically, every other creature at events such as these are either idiots or parasites. It was a thought that occurred last year when I moderated a panel discussion at the Bangalore Lit Fest. Following that, I exchanged notes with my former colleague and friend Manu Joseph. “Oftentimes, all a writer has to do is simply describe what he sees and the story tells itself," he told me. “It can be both amusing and insightful."

 With the benefit of hindsight, I now know Manu was right. I don’t have much to do here except describe the various kinds of creatures I saw off stage, on stage, behind the stage, and describe them. This story will tell itself. Indeed. Manu was right. They are regulars at all lit fests, some traits bind them all, and most are idiots to boot.

•  They carry an impression of themselves—that they are created of a different mud as opposed to the “masses" who frequent cinema halls to watch Shah Rukh Khan serenade his love interests in the Bollywood version of Switzerland. 

• They also imagine themselves as more intelligent than everybody else because they are professional critics often employed at a media house. So, they think it incumbent to criticize everything. 

• These creatures get invited to events like these and are put up at plush places. They talk well, look good, and carry a certain demeanor. And, for all practical purposes, they “travel in a pack". But the serious critics are often ignored and work in mofussil places.

• Funnier still is that, unlike the Shah Rukh Khan fan who will pay hard-earned money to watch a movie first day first show, this vocal minority pays nothing for anything. But their criticism is taken seriously. “The rooms at Cannes last week were so much more better than the crap ones here," for instance. 

Take the media critic for instance. This creature is of two kinds—the uninformed and the idiot. The uninformed exists because it hasn’t done its homework and lucked out to get to where it is. 

 Idiots exist because they can scream from the rooftops. But they lack substance. That is the tragedy with both Indian liberals and those on the extreme right wing. Push them hard and they cannot defend their position beyond 500 words in print. But their decibel levels are high on television and are parasites to boot.

 Idiots then pick and choose what can cause the most impact, craft it to suit their interests, and bomb the place with it. All else is ignored conveniently.

When questioned, they have a standard question to throw: who funds you?

But popular narratives are shaped by either the uninformed or the idiot.

 To put that into perspective, from all forums that matter, I have stated that for all its flaws, to provide a unique identity to over a billion people is a staggering accomplishment. And to completely diss Aadhaar is stupid. But the so-called liberals don’t like this narrative.

 At the Bangalore Lit Fest, when I said that in as many words, some media outlets and social media handles reported the next morning that I was heckled by a packed audience. This was in contrast to what I could see from stage. I thought I could see an audience keen to listen to different perspectives. Because, until then, the only narrative most people have been told is that Aadhaar is a dystopian idea and intended to hijack their lives.

 But because local media reports had it that I was heckled, I thought I’d check with a few friends who were in the audience. They told me the only dissonant notes were by some angry voices in the front. Darned right I was. The larger audience wanted to listen in to the multiple perspectives. But if it got reported, it would hijack the contemporary narrative now controlled by a vocal minority. 

 Manu thought the audience was a receptive one as well. That is why my initial irritation gave way to much amusement when my colleague Ramnath reminded me of a quote by Oscar Wilde. “There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."

This is not to suggest I have no biases. “Why," I argued in my head, “does Twinkle Khanna have to be at a lit fest? What is her claim to fame? Is it because she is pretty? What were the organizers thinking? Or smoking? And why is she always surrounded by people who want selfies with her?" I always maintained her book sold as many copies as it did because she is pretty and was a popular actor.

 Another part of me confronted myself, though, and said that it is a terribly unfair thing to suggest. I haven’t read her book and arrived at a conclusion based on some assumptions—not the truth. I haven’t met her or made any attempt to meet her either. But later in the evening, over dinner, Manu told me that he has met her while on an assignment and thinks of her as an intelligent and beautiful woman. 

 But the media can shape popular narrative and informed opinions are hard to come by. To that extent, I suspect I am the kind of liberal who give liberals a bad name.

 It was driven home harder still when I walked over to the table where Makarand Paranjape, was seated. He asked me my name. And then went on to tell me the historical significance of its origins and why I ought to be happy to possess it. When I told him I am not a practicing Catholic, he went on to offer me a brief treatise on the history of Catholicism and asked me some tough questions on why I gave up my faith. So much for all narratives of him being called a right winger. If he is on the right wing, give me a right winger like him any day, as opposed to a shallow liberal.

The other nugget that came my way is that there are “paid critics" who are “professional socialites". There is a reason they get invited to these dos. They have large followings on social medias platforms and columns as well in popular newspapers—usually tabloids or on Page 3. A tweet from them or a line insidiously implying a brand is a good one can get their accounts credited with as much as Rs.5 lakh. In much the same way, they can destroy a carefully crafted reputation as well with a single line. They must be humoured and kept in the good books. 

The other joker who is a regular on the circuit, has answers to everybody’s questions, likes to publicly diss Ruskin Bond as an “old fart”, is a tall, lanky, light-eyed, idiot based out of Mumbai. He claims to be a Bombay-boy, has answers to everything visiting white folks at lit festivals are curious about. As for us “desi-boys”, we don’t cut ice with him. But yes, he lives a nice, “cheap" life of the kind I envy.

(A longer version of this piece was originally published in Mint last year)

Grace

The gap

between

knowing and doing

can be as wide

as a universe

says Debbie

Bridging it is

a struggle

a daily toil

and on some

luminous days

sometimes succeed

in narrowing

the gap

and even slip

from doing

to being

This poem was posted on Twitter by R Sriram in response to a Confucian Proverb I posted: “It’s not the knowing that is difficult. But the doing.”

Sriram is not just a voracious reader, but one of the most thoughtful people I have met. The lines he posted struck a chord with me someplace.