A long, sad marriage

The husband is not a bad person. The wife is not a bad person. But it's a bad marriage. The husband and the wife have very different values. Sometimes the wife thinks that the husband, indeed, is a bad person, but regarding this she is not always sure. But even when she does not think so, she does believe the wedding was a farce, a deceit; an imposition from her adoptive guardian whose decision she now sees no reason why she has to comply with. The wife wants a divorce, and the apartment she lives in. Make no mistake about that. The husband is always disappointed in her. He wonders to himself sometimes how disloyal she is. He reminds her of the copious amounts of money he has spent on her over the years. She is tired of hearing that, and just says she feels suffocated. He tells her she would be nothing without him, that she does not appreciate how good she has it, so stop being such an ungrateful wife. Sometimes in worse language than I just used. She is sick of the condescending tone. In the past, this has led to some domestic violence on both sides, some would say the point of no return to a past life of camaraderie has been reached. Even if you don't know whether it was due to the husband's actions or the wife's, it's hard not to see that irreparable damage has been done to the trust between the two. The husband's kins call her names, and tell her she's welcome to go away, but dare not think of the apartment! The wife throws similar expletives at them. The husband has reacted to all this by monitoring her with a heavy hand - something that is only worsening the wife's sense of dismay. And the more she gets fed up, she resorts to more extreme displays of spite, every couple of years trying to stir some serious harm in the husband's otherwise largely harmonious life, which includes his work life, on which, by the way, he's been focussing a lot more the last couple of years and has actually been making great strides; and although it's not all a bed of roses elsewhere on his large estate, it's this apartment with the missus in particular that most often leaves him sleepless. The wife, on the other hand, lacks this 'other' life of relative peace and progress - for her, it's all about the divorce.

All this has been going on for many, many, many years. Ask yourself: if you were asked to opine on their marriage, would you advocate that they separate amicably, or would you still argue for sticking it out. Oh, a possibly important piece of information while you make your mind, this apartment is one she already had before she got married.

And know that the conclusion you offer, is also what you think should happen about the Kashmir problem. Let there be no incongruity.

On the state of Eastern Philosophy today

One of my abiding interests is Eastern Philosophy. To be more specific, the Upanishads, which after years of study and deliberation, I'm fairly convinced had outlined in minute detail millenia ago whatever western philosophy converged to towards the mid 19th century, plus more that western philosophy will probably some day converge to, if it is able to circumvent some roadblocks it has built in to its approach. On the other hand, the problem with eastern philosophy is that little progress has been made since the ancient days, and whatever progress has been made has come after gaps of centuries. A lot of time has been wasted in centuries-long debates over inconsequential details. But even their most powerful contribution is not a recent addition: the idea that the process of learning, or of attaining truth for lack a better English translation, is clearly not an exercise to be carried out using only your intellect, a fundamental idea that western Philosophy is yet to accept, and chances are slim it ever will. Still, it must be admitted that a spirit of active debate is missing from eastern philosophy when you compare it to its western counterpart - the focus is instead on disseminating what is already out there, on eulogizing its past achievements - and is inhibiting further progress in the field. Alternately, I'm also open to the idea that progress must diminish asymptotically the closer you inch to the truth, and some of that may be at work here.

Who I'm awed by

Current favourites below. It is clearly a disservice to fit many of these people under a category, because clearly their influence and great talents are wide-ranging. In fact, the common theme in those that I'm awed by is as much breadth as depth. Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) it seems knows about everything well enough to teach it to you better than your specialist teacher. Bill Gates fluidly moves between high technology and philanthropy. Ramachandran is a brilliant and eccentric neuroscientist, but his ameteur attempts at archaeology are also very impressive. Tyler Cowen and Rajan look more like specialists in this group, but their breadth inside economics is wide ranging - unlike most economists who are limited to one or two areas. Some of it, I confess, is because of of my own inclinations in Economics. Daniel Kahneman is more of a specialist, yes, but in an area that has increased greatly our understanding of how breadth has a depth all its own. David Eagleman is an outstanding neuroscientist whose work of fiction "Sum" was equally outstanding. On a similar vein, Vikram Seth - delightful poet and mighty novelist; is also a pretty good painter; George Soros, who you might better know as a hedge fund manager, made seminal dents in the philosophy of markets. Charlie Rose is the most versatile interviewer I know - and betrays a good understanding of subjects from Literary theory to Macroeconomics to Hollywood to Brain sciences to Politics. In fact, he has been responsible for introducing me to several things I later got very interested in.

In time, I'm sure this list will change as my own interests evolve, but for now I'm pretty happy with this. There are so many others I admire a lot, but in condensing the list I know I've tended to favor those who are not just great, but whose greatness exerts itself across many disciplines, as well as into a human element I love.

Entrepreneurs:
Salman Khan
Bill Gates

Academics:
VS Ramachandran
Raghuram Rajan
Tyler Cowen
David Eagleman

Philosophy:
Iain McGilchrist
Jaggi Vasudev

Artists:
Vikram Seth
Jagjit Singh
Hugh Laurie

Eloquence:
Shashi Tharoor
Barack Obama

Inchoate

The thoughts we entertain today enslave us tomorrow. If it is an identity, not a hypothesis, then the choice we have is not regarding whether we will be enslaved, but what we will be enslaved by.  

Calling a spade a spade

Rational discourse is standing on its last legs. After all, it is such a drag in front of impressive intellectual outbursts, especially when directed against somebody well-known. Calling oneself smart is cleverly understood to be in bad taste, but hey, there's an easy fix - calling others imbeciles is fine! It obviates the need to explicitly state how you're so much more evolved. Unfortunately, this quickest road to eternal smarts is gaining widespread traction. Who needs to do the hard work of understanding complicated policy implications, when calling Rahul Gandhi a pappu suffices, never mind your own secret failures at telling stare from stair.

 Let me state my disagreement with the extent of slamming Salman Khan, the bollywood actor, is facing for comparing his physically damaging routine while shooting for Sultan, a movie where he plays a wrestler, to rape. I'm no Salman Khan fan, but I'm a fan of trying to understand things in their context. Level-headedness and humility demand that one weigh their conclusions and metaphors before spewing them out to fawning followers. And that is also why I think the comparison Salman Khan drew was ill-advised. But the same preference for carefully weighing what you say is now surprisingly amiss, also, in those who castigate him in every possible way, for what was in all likelihood more a conversational gaffe than the all-out assault on women power it is now being portrayed to be.

 Intellectual heft, today, increasingly depends on identifying the prevailing fashions of the intelligentsia and magnifying that rhetoric in passably good prose. Thinking for oneself is a minority sport, and objectivity is for losers. By his admittedly imperfect usage, did Salman Khan really mean to "trivialize" rape, or did he mean to intensify his expression of the debilitating nature of his wrestling sequences? The answer to this question is not determined by morality or sentiment, but by plain old verbal comprehension. Yes, that boring thing that we only care about when preparing for CAT. Approaching it thus, Salman Khan used a simile - and similes don't have to be perfectly logical, or perfectly concordant. In a simile one often compares A to a more widely understood thing B, often to aggrandize the effect of A. In Hindi we refer to it as Atishyokti alankar - in English, I guess, one would call that hyperbole. As far as my comprehension serves me, in comparing his training/stunts to rape, he grossly over-aggrandized, and which I'm not defending. What I intend to bring forth, in fact, is that it was much more an aggrandizement (excessive, yes, and definitely unwarranted) of his stunts, than a downplaying or trivializing of rape. Efforts to understand and portray it as primarily the latter, in my opinion, distort the reality.

 Let me take the example of the talented singer Sona Mohapatra, of whom, unlike Salman Khan, I actually am a fan, and who took to social media recently to lambaste Salman Khan, calling him stupid, nasty, dangerous and an imbecile, for trivializing rape. Except that when you call a functioning individual an imbecile, you trivialize the hardships faced by the mentally challenged. "Ah, that's silly, you're twisting her intention." Well, maybe. So how about a song of hers she posted the very same day, titled qatl-e-aam, with its recurring "aap ki aankhon mein warna aaj qatl-e-aam hai". As heinous as rape obviously is, I'm sure qatl-e-aam, or mass murder, is just as bad. So is she trivializing murder when she compares it to some arbitrary dude's eyes, insensitive to all those whose loved ones have, in the long bloody history of time, been murdered?

 "Come on, now, you're making no sense - you're just pissed with Sona Mohapatra" you might be tempted to say at this point. And I would whole-heartedly agree - that the reasoning I provide can only be considered spite with Sona Mohapatra, not a cogent advocacy of victims of mass murders. I've already made up my mind on who I want to put down, and I'm stretching things way out of context to prove my point. Alas, that is precisely the point I've been trying to make.

 In a world full of politically-correct bandwagon-jumping, calling BS is a public good. Happy to do my part. Check her song out though, it is pretty awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vosWN0CkDP4&sns=em

On cliches

The trouble with cliches is not their content, the trouble is the fact that they're cliched, so the message passes you by without registering itself. The trouble is that you fail to really take notice of it even once because it is floated around hundreds of times. In other words, the trouble with cliches is nothing, the trouble is with you. Notice.

These Economists

Time for some armchair speculation. Since Subramanian Swamy, being an Econ PhD from Harvard and one-time professor there, couldn't possibly be as ignorant about Economics as his letter to the PMO suggests he is, he is most probably being manipulative, in my opinion. If real world politics is as smart as 'House of Cards' and 'The West Wing' would have us believe, then it might be a tactic to elicit even louder public support for Rajan, and make keeping him for another term easier for the government, in the face of opposition from factions of business that the government can't openly defy. But my theory 2 is that the real world is not American television, and that Swamy is a bit of an egomaniac and a little dismayed in his old age that he is not more widely thought of as the Econ genius he is inside his own head, so he takes any opportunity he gets to attack others who are thought of in that way. In the past, he has slandered Amartya Sen as merely a Gandhi family flatterer, and now, it's Raghuram Rajan's turn.

On my mysterious liking for Mad Men

Mad Men is one of my favorite TV shows, and I don't even know why. It doesn't keep you on the edge of your seat the way Breaking Bad does. It does not betray the caustic, clever brilliance of House. It has not the comic genius that makes the commonplace become the source of everyday laughter and joy for your soul, like The Office has.  In fact, I can only talk of Mad Men in terms of all the things it is not, than the things it is. Because of what it is I have little clue.

Many of its episodes just linger, like life, without a set goal or aim. Like an afternoon spent without knowing what to do or who to call.

Unlike my other favorite shows, which I watch with rapt attention whenever I watch them, with Mad Men I often find myself drifting away, zoning out, and realizing it 10 minutes later, at which point I scroll back to wherever I last was with the show, and watch again. Reviewers of the show tell us that it is about the feminist movement, about the changing social mores in the 1960s USA, but I've never bought it. I like the show because it doesn't pretend to know any answers, propose any theories. Because it is interested in different kinds of people, its characters, without painting with a heavy hand exactly how their stories should look and be interpreted. Because it is more interested in knowing than in telling. I like the show because it has the spirit of someone who knows they do not know.

Don Draper, the lead character of the show, is one of my favorite TV characters. Media reports extensively on his looks, his womanizing habits, his affairs, as though that is what Don Draper is about. Don Draper, if you ask me, is about trying to feel meaningful the possibly meaningless, about trying to act like stuff matters, day in and day out, when he doesn't know if it does. And that is why I like this character. 

Mad Men is a show I really like and never recommend to others, not only because I'm not sure they'd like it, but also because I'm not sure what I could say to recommend it convincingly. My feelings about Mad Men are very similar to my feelings about John Banville, the novelist.

Day 76

The thing that halted my blogging isn't over until the 20th, but I have resumed already. I am not sure that I will be able to complete what I set out to, which is not to say that I won't continue to try. My mom asks me on the phone if I will be able to finish the thing off in time, and I say "I don't know". My mom knows that I don't say yes, unless I am sure.

She has asked me over the years if I would qualify for this college, secure that job, pass that exam, and she knows that I rarely said that I would, even when I did end up passing those hurdles. It is not the case that I decide to be conservative for fear of making a fool of myself. 'How would it be if I turn out to be wrong' is never at play. What is at play is only saying things I can also say to myself without feeling like I'm fooling myself (and I am the easiest person for me to fool).

Last year when mummy came to stay with me for the summer, it was the happiest period of my life in many, many years. We weren't having rollicking fun, but I suppose I've outgrown the charms of rollicking fun some time ago. I used to take her to the usual places - temples, Gita discourses, and, of course, shopping, which, with her, is invariably grocery shopping. I loved it all, which I guess doesn't bode well for my romantic success with girls my age, who, I'm told, hate bloody mumma's boys.

That aside, grocery shopping reminds me of a particular trend that I find a little annoying, although perhaps no one shares my opinion on this. I'm all for using technology to make our lives easier (in fact, what I've been working on fits the description) but when I see one startup after another making apps to get your groceries to you, I have to stop and wonder: where are we going?

Call me a lunatic, but grocery shopping, I think, is one of those integral parts of life that make us who we are. So much of my growing up days was sometimes being excited about grocery shopping because I'd secretly sneak in that other thing I also want, and sometimes being so unwilling to go for it because its such a chore and "I have more important things to do" but then getting over myself and doing it anyway. And then there is the time when you're actually getting stuff, waiting in lines, waiting for your turn, being careful about discriminating between two similar looking but significantly different products, learning how 1000 rupees don't go a long way and altering one shampoo for another as a last minute decision, and so on. Grocery shopping was at least as formative for me, if not wildly more, than reading Camus, Frankl, Wallace and Nida Fazli combined.

Now I've grown up, but grocery shopping is still a part of life I don't want to relegate to an app. It has its value for adults, as it brings us to appreciate and engage with the daily, the nondescript, the commonplace, which is what real life is, once you get past the concoctions of grandiosity. It is one thing to use apps to ease our lives, and it is another to invite them to substitute our lives. For this reason, and I hate to say this, those of you making grocery-delivery apps, I hope you don't succeed.

Blogging platforms and moonlight

I'm contemplating moving the blog to wordpress. Since a big chunk of what I post nowadays tends to be code with all these greater than and less than signs, it totally throws the html on the blogger off. It is amazing to me that blogger won't add this small little feature that let's you insert code seamlessly with something like a code tag that wordpress provides. It is 2015 and it is very surprising to see that blogger would let so many users slip away but not pluck the low hanging fruit of adding code tags. I personally do not want to move the blog, but that is out of two entirely irrational reasons: one, that I'm lazy and do not have the time or enthusiasm to set up a blog from scratch, and two, that I've been on here for ten years now and it feels like home and so I don't want to leave.

I've been meaning to add tutorials for some great R libraries like dplyr, ggplot2, and shiny, and also some Python tutorials but before that I have fulfill the promise I made to myself of adding tutorials for the relatively uninspiring parts of R that form its basics. And, at any rate, to get started with any of that - it seems like moving to wordpress is the way. A couple of days ago, I tried to embed code snippets in earlier R posts but the results were clumsy and off-putting.

In any case, an interesting thing I learned today (let's assume I won't be adding anything else tonight): the earth's moon was once an asteroid that struck the earth and the hot molten ball that rebounded extremely slowly became the moon a couple hundred million years later. All that romantic poetry with moon as the evergreen metaphor seems a little incongruent now, doesn't it?

What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?

In a recent post, Paul Graham suggests that we ask ourselves this question, and that our answers to this question, are things we are well suited for. I totally agree.

I have always wanted to do a lot of things. Ever since I assumed a semblance of adulthood, I have wanted to to do many different things, have many different occupations. I don't use the term "wanted to" very loosely. When I say "wanted to" I mean that I have actively tried to better myself at those things for at least a month, with a view to do them professionally. These have included becoming a poet, a programmer, a short story writer, a singer, an investor, a quant, a film critic, a photographer, a cartoonist. Fundamentally, I am not a subscriber of the notion that one has to become this one specific thing in life. Right from my teenage, the one thing that the popularly reinforced idea of "you have just one life" has made me a little frantic about is the desire to pack a number of different professions into this one life. To many other people, this same idea is a great motivator pushing themselves in the opposite direction, of devoting themselves entirely to one great pursuit, and making a mark in it. I admire those people, but for some reason, doing many different things holds more sway to me than being a master of any one thing, and I think this is guided by my regret minimization utility function. Would I regret it more if I couldn't be great at one thing, or would I regret it more to not try having done so many others. For me, it is the latter.

At the same time, I very much believe in the other popular notion that "if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well". And it would be foolish not to concede to the oft proven point that trying to do several things is a big impediment in developing expertise in any one thing. Therefore, for people with dispositions such as mine, it is all that much more important that they choose their targets well, because they are only going to be good at so many things.

Which brings me back to Paul Graham's question. It is a great guide.
My answers: Writing essays, Studying statistics and probability, walking. I wish debugging was also on this list. But I suppose this list will change.
It is useful to create one's own list in answer to this question, and to come back to it periodically: both as a reminder to follow it, and as a reminder to update it.

Turn of the year musings

I used to think until fairly recently that people don't change. I still think so, by and large, but have mellowed down the firmness with which I think so. On the one hand, a person's character is something I'm still positive does not change, but on the other hand, I do agree now that it is possible for people to start experiencing the same old things in new ways that they had not known earlier. Somewhere in the beginning of last year, I found myself having entered a new kind of life where I spend a massive proportion of my waking hours entirely alone. I wouldn't say it changed the person I am, but things have started to happen that never did before. For example, I get unusually pensive while taking a shower. It works like magic, as if the knob of the shower were a switch into my sometimes dark, often colourful past. The moment I stand before the warm water springing onto me, I have recollections, very fine and vivid and almost hyper-real, of episodes of my past. Only I don't get to choose the episodes. It could be anything from a long day spent waiting for a phonecall, an evening where my dad corrected my spellings, to fighting over the sole plate of chowmein with five of my contending classmates, or reliving the heated anticipation of walking into a fresh acquaintance's apartment while she unnecessarily brings her cat for both of us to play with. It's amazing what a hot shower can do. And how life comes back to the forever nondescript present, the second the shower is stopped.

It's not a resolution, but I've planned to update the blog daily with a new thing I learn. Mostly, it's just to impel myself to keep learning, for I'm starting to realize that time spent away from any kind of learning really rusts your brains and makes you slower. And older. Which reminds me, I don't like getting older. In two months, I will be 29. I'm already at the age that if I were a world-class tennis player, which I'm far from, I would be considered a fading veteran by now. On my 29th birthday, I will take a picture of myself, and compare it to my older pictures, and try to conclude that I hardly look older. I am willing to resort to Adobe Photoshop to reach my goal.

A room of one's own

In this very week, 17 years ago, I moved to a new place. It was a huge change. I moved from New Delhi to, well, New Delhi, but in my own little life it was a development of colossal proportions. The new place was, well, a mile from the old one, but it was still quite honestly a huge change. I don't live at the said new place anymore. Haven't for a very long time in fact, but it was quite something, the giddy euphoria I used to feel back in those days at the prospect of having my own private place, a den, as it were, a room of my own. I was eleven years old, and wasn't doing any of the things that people most require a room of their own for. But, anyway, those were the days.

Also, these. These are also THE days. But let's come to that later.

Since I believe the blog should betray continuity of some sort, let me fill the large absences on my blog with a quick recap of my whereabouts since I seem to have shifted base frequently in the last couple of years. After completing my education in Pittsburgh at the end of last year, I spent more than two months at my brother's place in Cleveland, traveled to Florida for a bit and have since been working and living in Princeton. Now that the ambiguity regarding my whereabouts has been resolved, the point of the post is that my parents flew in here from New Delhi a few days ago! I just can't remember the last time I had felt this happy. When I graduated? I have to say that was the culmination of 17 months of the hardest I ever worked, but, no. When I found a job? That was a massive relief, because it immediately freed me from worrying about paying off a gargantuan debt, but, hell no. What are some other candidates? When I first fell in love, that was close, but no, not really quite there.

Until a few days ago, I used to doze off on most weekdays at around 9. It was a major departure from my grad school days when I was wide awake at school at 3 AM everyday but for some reason, it felt as if after an eleven hour workday starting at 7 AM, and watching a nominal amount of TV, it was the a natural and even necessary thing. It doesn't help that I know, in a non-professional way, a sum total of zero people in the city I live in. Besides, you've got to get up on time, right? Wrong, apparently. The thirst for sleep vanished as if by magic, and cheesy as it sounds, I feel so effusively happy reliving my teenage days of watching news on TV every night with dad that it is even somewhat embarrassing to admit. So effusively happy, secretly. Also, again, as if by magic, I who could not bear to stay awake until last week can't possibly go to sleep now, and feel like I have all the energy in the world to cook my parents dishes I've learned to cook over the last 2 years, drive them everywhere and be the the world's best bad tour guide.

I must have been foolish when I was 11. Or I must be foolish now, that the thing I least want, almost dread, is a place of my own, even though I can no longer say that I amn't doing any of the things that people most require a place of their own for. Yes, yes, I admit I had begun watching Bigg Boss. But they're off season anyway.

Lost on the sofa

I watched this travel series today, Stephen Fry in America, all episodes in one day. It was an amazing experience. The sheer geographical and cultural diversity of USA blows your mind, as does Stephen Fry's unmistakable charm. I have been watching a lot of travel shows lately, one other that I liked greatly was Happy People, a comparatively slow moving chronicle of the trials and tribulations, and most of all, unfading happiness, of the people that inhabit the Serbian lands in north Russia: the Serbians and the Russians. I could write long rambling posts on my experience of watching each of these two programs, but continuing being the lazy ass that I've been lately, I'd just briefly state how bloody significant I increasingly find it is to travel. And to end by the silvery consolation that watching travel shows, since not everyone can hope to travel so much while keeping up with their myriad, uncanny responsibilities, watching good travel shows can sometimes indeed be a great option.

Empathy as skill

Today, on linkedin, I saw an article headlined "Why empathy is your most important skill." I thought it was wrong on so many levels, I wonder where to begin. Also, I have no motivation to write long posts. So I'll just record that while I have nothing against skill-building, in fact it's a most noble activity, but the moment you start thinking of empathy as a skill, you miss the whole point of it, and basically guarantee that you probably won't be acquiring any, and stand to lose some of what you were born with. 

As we turn 66 ..

I have to admit I am pessimistic about India's future. When I first came to the US for graduate studies, India was definitely already on a declining track, but even so, I couldn't have imagined things were going to be this bad this soon. In its characteristic way of priding itself on things that deserve no pride, India has for the last several years prided itself on its attractive demographic dividend. There were doubtless proponents of this putative panacea elsewhere too. Many famous pop-thinkers such as Thomas Friedman, the big-4 consulting firms, even the likes of IMF never failed to remind us of what it means. Perhaps it would have paid to be careful to read it as what it 'can mean' than what it 'means'. Clearly, the demographic dividend comes with significant downsides too, that we didn't and in many ways still don't want to see. The foreigners' enthusiasm about it was justified; they didn't have to share the downside, and could participate in the upside at their discretion.  But for the Indian people and administration to be too happy about this demographic dividend, which is always a product of an uninhibited population growth rate, was like a stock-trader being too happy about financial volatility. True, the skilled and astute trader cannot make nearly as much money in a low volatility environment as he can in a high volatility environment, but a mediocre one invariably gets killed by volatility. Now the question that needs no answering is whether astute and skillful are words that better describe the Indian administration or is it words like mediocre. A huge percentage of Indian population today is already young, and unless population growth rate slows down, which it hasn’t been showing any signs of, the Indian population is getting progressively younger. If the Indian government and India Inc together are able to build the health and education infrastructure to support this huge young population, India can undo any and all of its previous failings. But that’s a big 'if' that we take very lightly. And it has gotten much bigger of late, with India's dismal current account deficits, depleting reserves, and the government's continuation of ever increasing and indiscriminate spending beyond its means. Foreign institutional investors have the most negative outlook for India amongst all emerging markets, and most if not all are decisively uninterested in having anything to do with India for quite some time to come. It is high time we face facts rather than languish mired in a web of emotional and ideology-ridden never ending discourse, and the fact of the matter is India has little chance of meeting its infrastructural needs for supporting the future of its young population in the absence of foreign investment. I hope that as Indians we show the courage to swallow the bitter pill for a brighter future, and I hope different people in different states of India, with vastly different and sometimes conflicting goals, can come together this time, because if we don't, the consequences are not pretty. A relapse into the sluggishness of the 1980s is not far, to begin with, but what lies ahead is more disheartening - an unimportant place in the global order, and maybe farther into the future, the need for foreign investment morphing into a need for foreign aid.

In the coming elections I am going to be rooting for Narendra Modi if for no other reason than that it would be a change from the present system. I do not think he is the miracle some people seem to think he is. It is important to notice that the state he inhabited as a chief and no doubt improved, was already prosperous, and had all the makings of a progressive society. Most of the rest of India is either only prosperous or only progressive or, in many cases, neither. Leading India with its remarkable heterogeneities is, if you ask me, a completely different ballgame. But he says that he can bring about a turnaround, and as a nobody, that and his past track record is all I have to go with. The other alternative that has recently emerged is AAP under the leadership of Arvind Kejriwal (who, most importantly, buys morning milk and bread from my best friend's general store but that falls just short of reason enough for me to support him). Despite his possibly good intentions, his campaign for the Delhi assembly elections proves beyond doubt that in finding the balance between populism and bitter-medicine, he tilts all too much towards populism. How else can we justify his plans for de-syncing of oil prices from the global markets, at a time when India's two biggest oil companies, both public sector undertakings, have already been incurring huge losses for several years running, owing to heavy government subsidies. How else to interpret a most juvenile claim to reduce electricity prices by seventy percent! Unless the power distribution companies are grossly manipulating their accounting statements, it seems unreasonable to believe that they can still be in business following a price slash of this magnitude. But besides these specific points, he has failed to come up with any ideas for India's growth going forward, except that he will let common people have their ideas implemented. This is what I have to say to that: the majority of the 'common people' are not intelligent enough (Actually they are not honest and well-intentioned enough either, but even if we assume they are) to guide India's road forward from the pit that we're currently in. And if it is true that the common people by and large will dictate India's economic, defence, home and foreign policy under a future AAP government, I am scared. And you should be too.

Things are not all bad, for sure. India still has vast untapped potential - no one can deny that. But potential alone is useless unless it can be tapped. While India Inc is getting increasingly disenchanted with India, and the government is as effete as it has ever been, India's social sector is also far from effective. Of the five nonprofits I closely worked with, two are downright corrupt, two are too lavish for a nonprofit and do creative things that really help no one, and the one that works hard is not well-funded. There are those like Teach-for-India which are great successes, but the number of such successes is very very few compared to how many we need. The most remarkable aspect of Teach-for-India's success is in being able to mesh the technically advanced graduates of IITs with the world of social work in a big way. We will need many more TFIs in the years to come. Broadly speaking, India needs more maths, more coding, and more manufacturing. I went to one of India's supposedly premier engineering colleges, and yet, I say with neither compunction nor doubt that most of my college's graduates were technically weak even in their own respective engineering trades, let alone the fact that an alarmingly high number of them didn't know how to code at all, and hardly any could code at a level that merits any special appreciation. Compare this to US universities, where everybody from Econ to Stat majors do a significant amount of coding. It might sound naive that I stretch the particular topic of coding so dear, but it is more naive yet to find it naive. All areas of enterprise, from manufacturing to banking to medicine, receive huge advancements in productivity from the simple sounding aspect of ‘coding it’ well. The thing common to the best mechanical engineers, best financial modelers, the best medical researchers, even the best movie studios of today is an abundance of coding talent. I cannot imagine a truly competitive economy of ten years from now, where a significant number of people cannot code well. Whether we like it or not, we today have huge unmet educational needs, and when your needs are as big as this, programs on philosophy and psychology are a forbidden luxury, and here I'm pointing to the massively expensive Nalanda University under preparation for the last few years. I truly hope India is rich enough one day to afford these indulgences, but till then that's what they are - indulgences we cannot afford, things to be put in the same bracket as the Commonwealth games.

Here’s wishing India well and hoping I can be of some use.

Takings from a small list

A casual scroll down the list of Bharat Ratnas gave much pop trivia to indulge in.

Ever wondered how there's a marked increase in musicians getting the Bharat Ratna? All of our last three Bharat Ratnas have been musicians. Five out of the last eight Bharat Ratnas are musicians. Incidentally, these are the only five musicians to have received the Bharat Ratna till date. The first musician to be so honoured was MS Subbulakshmi in 1998, that is, forty-four years after the awards began. However, this must not be construed as some musical wave that has swept our country lately, as all these eminent musicians were born in 1910s and 1920s. Nearly a century back.

Eleven of the thirty nine Indians who've been given the Bharat Ratna were not alive to receive it. Add to this sixteen more people who received the award in the mostly uneventful last five years of their big, eventful lives, and you know that we in India think really long and hard before making this big decision.

The awareness of such thoughtfulness on the part of the authorities must be juxtaposed with another awareness: Of India's first nine PMs, six were from the Indian National Congress. The same six are all Bharat Ratnas.

As a sidenote, all of India's first four Presidents were awarded the Bharat Ratna, as was President number eleven, APJ Abdul Kalam. This does not seem odd or untoward as Presidents in India, thankfully, are anyway chosen from a pool of highly accomplished people. An exception being our present President who, as her saving grace, was justified to the public by virtue of her being the first woman to the post. A smart political statement needed to be made, I guess, so meritocracy had to take a backseat. That's quite alright, really.

Film Review: Black Swan

Screenwriter Andres Heinz smoked up and wrote a story. He presented it to a drunk Darren Aronofsky who selected it for his next movie. Now Darren smoked up and made the movie. It would all have turned out perfect, but I hadn't smoked up before going to see it.

Mind-Boggling

"The top 1% of households accounted for only 8.9% of the income in 1976, but this share grew to 23.5% of the total income generated by the United States in 2007."*

You would say that's quite a shift, but still not mind boggling. But what when you look at it this way:

"Put differently, of every dollar of real income growth that was generated between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the top 1% of the households."*

If that isn't mind boggling, the author of this blog certainly doesn't know what is.

And herein lies an intellectosocial question to the John Galts** and Alan Greenspans*** of the world. It is no CIA secret that Mrs. Alissa, through her model John Galt, almost came to the conclusion (or a proposal?) that the bottom inhabitants of the economic pyramid feed like parasites off the talents and enterprise of the top inhabitants. Although I have long doubted that she was a great possesor of humanity, I have no doubts whatsoever that she possesed mental faculties of considerable might. Which brings me to my question. Now did they, people well endowed with IQ that they were, did they really think the bottom 99% chunk was so utterly dismally unproductive that it could be responsible for (or be adjudged responsible for) only 42% of hard growth while the 1% of Galts accounted for 58% in the capitalist system that followed Alissa's vision almost to the T. I'm not questioning their conclusion****, I'm merely asking really? To this extent?



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*from 'Fault Lines', Raghuram G. Rajan, published by Collins Business, 2010.
**Read Alissa Rosenbaums, since John Galts are only their theoretical models.
***who led us through the great utopian-while-it-lasted, dystopian-once-it-didn't capitalist extravaganza, taking (more than) a leaf from the John Galts, and broadcasting openly their megafanhood to Alissa Rosenbaum.
****which I don't believe in anyway, and won't after four million liters of alcohol down my throat.

On Black Swan Green

Book reviews are supposed to be written from a disinterested standpoint, they are supposed to stay between hyperbole and underplaying, avoid hero-worship and personal prejudices alike. Most of all they must be restrained. Restrain, in particular, I cannot bring in my appraisal of Black Swan Green, or in writing of David Mitchell's superhuman talents that shine through his oeuvre of just four novels. His previous novels, which made the world of literature stand up and applaud his pathbreaking contributions, were also exercises in complex pyrotechnics - they brought together several remarkable, seemingly disparate tales all set in completely different worlds and eras by startling connections which would be found when the reader would least expect, or look for them; his narratives were always inventive - a minor character in one tale of a novel emerges as the narrator of some subsequent one in the novel - or - complex chronology of events which goes back in time step by step only to come back step by step to the present, or even to the future, among other boggling things. Black Swan Green, in complete contrast, is a straight story of a boy of thirteen, and of thirteen months in his life. It looks like an experiment in going one eighty degrees from his mastery, but even if it is, it beats seasoned writers of dense, concentrated, one-life tales on a lot of counts.

Jason Taylor, the protagonist, is a boy who is undemonstrative, shy, somewhat timid. He reminds me of Swami in RK Narayan's 'Swami and Friends' but also, he reminds me of myself, the one who was thirteen year old, because in so many years the two of you - the present you and the thirteen year old you almost appear like two different persons. Of course, in actuality, 'you never change who you are', just to quote Rocky, weirdly, from the movie I saw when I was thirteen. Now I am really getting an irking feeling this isn't turning out to be a book-review, of all things. Heck, I am not sending it to some literary journal, so who cares.

I would not say the story is unbelievable, and that's a thing that, for me, goes for it rather than against it. It is not a novel of artificial thrills, of twists, of walloping coincidences. In stead, it is a true from T to E photoshoot inside the mind and heart of the character.

Among the ideas it explores, of note is the one chapter devoted to his stammer. The novel will thankfully bring a lot of people to understand the plight of kids growing up with speech impediments, for it is something that hasn't adequately been dissected in literature, except to evoke sadist humour. The faint revelation that many more people than those openly identified as stammerers are those who have just come to working arrangements for passing it all okay, is particularly important for public information. Jason's life, as anyone else's, is a web of small troubles, but what is so endearing to me about it is that he invokes your sympathy/empathy without inviting it.

David Mitchell has come to be regarded as a master ventriloquist, after he took the voice of such diverse narrators with clinical precision in all his stories. In Black Swan Green, he is near perfect as a thirteen year old kid wanting not to be a kid. Which is a great thing, but not if you are someone who has been pitch perfect in your previous attempts. However, on instances on which he deviates from his usual early-teenager voice, he also delights. His John Banvillian imaginative influences pour out spoiling the unifying, childish voice, and you sit wondering if that particular sentence is apt from the mouth of a thirteen year old. Sometimes, I concede, they are not. 'Listening's reading if you close your eyes', ‘Sunlight on waves is drowsy tinsel.’, ‘Rooks craw … craw … crawed, like old people who’ve forgotten why they’ve come upstairs.’ - to point out just a few.

I won't reveal the plot for I would rather want people to read it for themselves. It is not for me, however, to recommend Black Swan Green for reading, for that should come out of one's own volition, but I would say that it commands, yes that's the word, reading, out of its own strengths. Twice.