Frequently unasked questions.

I had planned to return home early and take my wife along to a wedding reception. Driving back from office, I bumped into a friend; we got chatting and catching up on old times and all that, and I reached home slightly - very slightly- later than I had promised. And what do you think wife asked me when I got in? “Why are you so late?”

As I settled down on the sofa to remove my shoes, I reminded myself to be careful. This was a situation that required delicate and adroit handling. On too many occasions, I had messed up the knot while untying the lace, and had to go through considerable agony the next morning while untangling it. The lace safely untied, I then pondered over the question that wife had asked me.

Life, I mused, was not about finding the right answers. It was all about asking the right questions. History is replete with stories of generals and philosophers who managed to have stunning insights merely by asking the right questions.

If Henry Ford had suffered from marketing myopia and had asked himself, “How can I make horse carriages run faster” we would still be going around in jutkas, and wading through tons of horse shit. Instead he asked, “How can I get people from Point A to Point B, faster and with more convenience?” and produced the motor car and we are breathing in tons of Nitrous oxide.

If Thomas Alva Edison had asked himself, “How can I make better candles?” instead of “How can I use electricity to produce light?” we would all be watching television in candlelight. Why, if Edison had asked the wrong question, the Ford Fiestas and Ford Ikons, would be fitted with head lamps made of candles (even if Henry Ford had asked the right question in the preceding para). Pretty messy it would have been.

And, believe me, if Gandhi had asked himself, “How can I make the British rule us better?” rather than “How do I make them get the hell out of India?” we would have had A.R.Rehman coming up with remix versions of “God save the Queen” instead of “Vande Matram”. The effect would have been completely different.

Abe Lincoln stressed the importance of the right question, when he said, “Don’t ask if God is on our side; instead ask if we are on God’s side”. Paraphrasing this a century later, John F Kennedy said, “Ask not what the country can do for you; ask what I can do with Marilyn Monroe?”

So, the whole thing is about asking the right question. Instead of the silly, inane question, ‘Why are you late?”, if wife had asked herself, “Now that my dear husband is home, what are the ways in which I can delight him?” she would have found some terrific answers. Much happiness would have resulted at home. The world would have been a much better place to inhabit.

The incredible surgical feat.

The child is on the operating table. An open-heart surgery is in progress and has reached a critical stage. The doctors are tense; so are the assistants. The mother of the child is pacing up and down the corridor outside, biting her lips and chewing her nails simultaneously. The anesthetist is counting the seconds. And, suddenly, the lights go out. All is dark.

“ Start the generator” says the chief surgeon. The assistant dials on the intercom. The watchman doesn’t answer the phone as he is sound asleep. “Where’s the emergency lamp?” screams the surgeon. “Sorry doc, it is not working” answers the assistant.

“Doc, only a minute left, for consciousness to come back.”warns the anesthetist .

Phew. What a situation to be in! What would you do if you were the surgeon?

Watch what Vijaykanth did in a similar situation. What presence of mind!

Fallen Heroes.

When I read a report that Tendulkar had injured his right ankle while negotiating a bouncer from S Sreesanth during practice at the conditioning camp for the Bangladesh-bound Indian team,I didn’t believe it one bit. Unless the injury happens in the full glare of a TV camera, I suspect that all such stories are fabricated. What must have happened was that he would have accidentally dropped a 2 litre Pepsi bottle on his foot that afternoon. Obviously, he can't be made to look so foolish in the public eye and so this elaborate yarn about bouncers, to make him suitably heroic.

I know. I once played a gentle game of football with my kid nephew, in our drawing room of size 12’ x 10’. He was all of 9 years, while I was around 27. While I was negotiating the ball, nephew kicked me hard on the left foot, causing a ligament to tear. Foot had to be bandaged for 15 days. It wouldn’t have befitted my stature if I had admitted that my foot couldn’t take a friendly blow from a 9-year old kid. “I sustained injury while playing football”, I told everyone truthfully, leaving them quite impressed.

Or that time when I was walking along the Marina beach, looking longingly at the cut mangoes, when my foot got caught in a hole that had been dug by some rat or bandicoot. Ankle got twisted, and foot bandaged as before. Now, I would have invited ridicule if I publicized the fact of the rat hole; so I had to come up with an explanation, the full details of which I forget, but I do remember that it involved cross-country race, obstacles and wild dogs.

I recall how a friend came in to our club once, with a bandaged foot and explained that he had just returned from a trekking expedition in the Himalayas. “You know how the mountains are”, he remarked, with just that trace of mystery. Something about that explanation did not sound right. Maybe it was his tone or his shrunk eyes? Anyway, I called up his wife that evening and advised her against sending her husband out on such dangerous expeditions again at his age. “What expedition?” she asked me. “Idiot slipped and fell in the bathroom. It was an Indian water closet. He didn’t notice the water and his foot went gliding in”.

So, next time, someone paints himself in glorious colours to highlight his heroics or gallantry, be skeptical. Scratch the surface and you will unearth a story of clumsiness, deception and bungling.

Twisted statistics.

That statistics can be presented or distorted in any convenient manner is a well-worn cliché.

Take this matter of CO2 emission that was discussed at the G8 meeting this week. The G8 countries present compelling evidence that India is already the fourth largest emitter of CO2 gas in the world and urges steps to control the trend. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with that deadpan expression and that mono-toned voice of his, uses same piece of statistics to explain that India’s per capita emission of CO2 is one of the lowest in the world, and please, don’t ask us to reduce.

In a different context, Rajaji had quoted per-capita figures to explain a point. In an editorial in the Swarajya magazine of May, 1961, he criticized the then Finance Minister, Mr Morarji Desai, who had claimed that the proportion of taxation to national income in India was only 9 per cent compared to 28 per cent in U.K., 33 per cent in U.S.A., 27 per cent in Germany, and so on, to make out a case that there was scope for additional taxation in India. Rajaji responded by providing the per-capita national income figures of these countries as Rs 289, Rs 4561, Rs 10124 and Rs 3530 respectively and added :

"Take off even 50 per cent from the other figures, we have still round about Rs. 2,300, Rs. 5,000, and Rs. 1,800 But any experiment of that sort on Rs. 289 would leave a calamitous result. Reduce the courses in a Raj Bhavan dinner by half, the guests can still be content. But reduce Oliver Twist’s ration by a little, and you will starve him to death. There is nothing so fallacious as percentage fairness when we are dealing with vastly unequal quantities. Mathematics is good when it is fully understood, dangerous when knowledge is incomplete."

So, using similar logic, it is unreasonable to expect India to cut down on its CO2 emission any further, when its per capita emission is one-ninth that of USA's.

But, why should per-capita consumption or emission be the basis for evaluation? Who defines the yardstick? Suppose, the USA were to argue that Indians having bred like rabbits had three times the population of USA’s in only one-third the land area, and therefore a better yardstick would be to measure the CO2 emitted per sq.m of land per person. The figures for USA and India would be the same then.

Happy Endings

Which of these two stories will leave you more satisfied?

Story A: Early in his life, the hero is kidnapped from his father’s castle and abandoned in the forests. He is raised by wolves and later by gypsies. He does back-breaking work for 18 hours a day, barely manages to make ends meet and struggles through middle age. When he is 53 years old, he finds out that he was actually born to a king. Against incredible odds, he manages to claw his way back to the castle and regain the kingdom that was rightfully his. He rules for another 5 years and dies a happy, contended man.

Story B: The hero is born to rich parents. He has a terrific time right through his early years; he marries a beautiful girl; they have delightful kids; he builds on his father’s business that sees explosive growth over the next few decades. He is considered one of the most successful men of the era. Alas, when he is 78 years old, disruptive changes in the business environment take place, his enterprise collapses, his family deserts him and he dies bankrupt and a broken hearted man.

A survey published in The Guardian last year showed that an overwhelming majority of respondents preferred books with a happy ending. In fact, 12% of readers even wanted to reverse an unhappy event in a story as recent as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (Via)

But, why is it important that the ‘ending’ must be happy, independent of how the rest of the life story has been?

Suppose we were to look instead at the percentage of time in one’s lifetime that one has been happy? Take the Ramayana. Why do we conclude that Rama was better off, because he triumphed over Ravana finally? If you consider the years of misery that Rama went through, his long stint in the forests in pathetic conditions, the agonizing search for Sita and the final showdown, it will be reasonable to conclude that 75% of his lifetime was a washout, and he was happy for only 25% of his lifetime – possibly his childhood years and later the post-war years. Whereas, Ravana had a whale of a time all through his life, till about two days before the final battle .The lucky devil spent 99.8% of his life in complete bliss and reckless revelry. His tragic ending and beheading be damned.

Coming back to the examples provided at the beginning of this post, more people are likely to vote for Story A, rather than Story B. But, why?

The hero in Story A was happy for 10% of his life, whereas the hero in Story B was happy almost right through, say 98% of his lifetime.

So, would you rather be Hero A or Hero B?

Ctrl+Alt+Del

The American humourist, Art Buchwald, once lamented that television channels were depriving him of an undisturbed enjoyment of the commercials, by frequently interrupting them with baseball matches, movies, sitcoms, etc. Just when he was warming to the theme of the advertisement, he protested, the channel would slip in a long scene from a movie or a match and spoil his fun.

Coming to think of it, when you are glued to the TV, where commercials are aired for half the time, don’t you get confused if your original intention was to watch the cricket match with commercial breaks in-between, or watch the commercials with cricket breaks in between?

The philosopher, Nick Bostrom, had come out with such an argument when discussing the subject of simulated reality. Bostrom postulated that with strides in technology, it was possible to simulate, on a computer, entire planets or even entire universes including all the people on them, with all the sensory experiences built in. In such a scenario, he explained, the simulated people would be fully conscious beings, as much as the ‘real’ people.

His argument was, “So, maybe this has already been done and you are all simulated human beings living in a simulated planet? Maybe the real people like Raj are watching you on a computer screen, with head phones and 3-D glasses on.”

Ha. All you simulated, unreal creatures out there. Don’t try to get out of your virtual world. I’ll simply press Ctrl+Alt+Del and knock you off the screen.

Conversation with daughter- 13

Why does my daughter insist on working on her maths homework, parked on the sofa, in the drawing room, in front of the TV, with assorted books and notebooks strewn all around her ? Why can’t she do it in the comfort of her study room, which I have done up at considerable expense, believing that she needs peace and quiet to be able to concentrate?

Fifty years back, Orson Welles had inserted these famous lines, in his screenplay of Graham Greene’s “Third Man”:

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder,bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace -- and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

So, coming back to daughter, I have realized that disorderliness fosters creativity and provides the right kind of ambience to lick a few problems in calculus, whereas a sanitized environment seriously inhibits the functioning of her grey cells and results in zero output. Now, all I need to do is to figure out a way to introduce the right degree of messiness in the examination hall, when daughter is handed the question paper.

As I have said before, be messy, be happy.

Incidentally, some people confuse Graham Greene with Gunter Grass, arguing that Grass is Green. This is not correct; Grass is Grass whereas Greene is Greene.

Animal instinct

In an earlier post, I had referred to a book called, “Pulse : How Nature is inspiring technology in the 21st century” which explains how many of the modern designs and advances in material science have been made possible merely by observing Nature.

In his book titled, “ The Case of the Bonsai Manager”, published very recently, Mr R.Gopalakrishnan, Director, Tata Sons argues that management science can also draw several lessons from Nature, particularly the animal kingdom.

Just as crocodiles bred in a confined space tend to be much smaller in size, managers without adequate exposure to a variety of experiences will also have stunted growth. Snails grow longer when predatory lobsters are introduced in their midst, showing that hidden resources get stirred when threatened. Similarly, every company must be shaken out of its complacency and out of its comfort zone, by presence of strong competition, for it to survive and flourish. And many such examples.

Reading the book, I felt that it would be interesting to examine the possibility of distilling the strength of each animal and combining these strengths to create a hybrid manager. Say, someone who combines the speed of the cheetah, the competitive instinct of a snail threatened by a lobster, the nurturing instinct of a bird to create successors, the adaptive intelligence of monkeys, etc. This theme has already been explored in a Hollywood movie, “The Animal” where the hero would receive organ transplants from different animal donors and will find himself taking on the traits of those animals..

Not that the idea is new in real life too. As Ambrose Bierce says in his Devil’s Dictionary, “In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.”

Mango leaves

The friend that I had cited in my previous post, at least, was unabashed in his beliefs and made no attempt to couch them in pseudo-science. But, I can’t be so charitable with another friend who I ran across at a function.

Pointing to the traditional festoon of mango leaves at the entrance, he asked me if I knew what its real significance was. I mumbled something about decoration, how the green colour symbolized prosperity, and how mango leaves are of the right length and so lent themselves very well to being bent and tied around the rope. Besides, traditions need no justification; they are,..er.. traditions and I was all for following traditions, in a light-hearted way.

Friend, who is an engineer and who applies many of the analytical methods to make his living, said that there was much more to the mango leaves and we ought to give our forefathers more credit than what we do now.

Knowledgably, he explained that the mango leaves, were tied at the entrance of a hall where there was a function, because our ancestors knew that a congregation of tens of people resulted in large release of CO2 in a confined area, and the leaves, as students of botany know, have the ability to absorb CO2 and infuse fresh oxygen. And, why only mango leaves, I asked him. “Because”, he stated with authority, “only mango leaves have the ability to absorb CO2, even after they are removed from the parent tree”.

What he was trying to convince me was that a few, dead mango leaves had the amazing ability to absorb the CO2 released by hundreds of people in a packed hall and that our forefathers were blessed with so much intricate knowledge which scientists following western traditions have managed to figure out only now.

It is true that Indian philosophers and thinkers had several original insights, but, alas, the mango-leaves theory doesn’t count as one such.

The friend, in the previous post, who had no pretension of being a science student and who had unquestioning faith in his superstitions was not harming anybody but himself. He was cocooned in his own world and was perfectly comfortable in that environment.

This mango-leaf friend who felt the need to explain an old tradition in terms of modern scientific theory but without observing the other rules that scientific reasoning requires, was a complete hypocrite, capable of causing harm to society at large, by popularising myths in a thin garb of scientific argument.

Several self-styled spiritual leaders practice this deception with consummate ease, as is evident here and here., where the same mango-leaves theory has been propagated. These gurus seek to increase the acceptability of their ‘message’ among the more educated of their devotees, by giving a scientific spin to their discourse..

Given the Hobson’s choice, I would much prefer a godman who proclaims that he has some mystic powers that science cannot explain to one who uses bad science to hoodwink people.

In fairness to godmen however, they are not alone; many advertisers, companies peddling alternative medicines and quick cure devices, play this trick all the time, as this column in The Guardian keeps tracking..

The God of small things

A friend was in hospital, undergoing treatment for a severe infection and I called him up on his mobile phone, prudently deciding not to visit him. He told me that he had gone, the previous week, to his ancestral village, to take part in a festival in the local temple. In the midst of all the cult worship and myriad rituals, he had gorged on the temple food and bathed in the pond nearby along with hundreds of other human beings and assorted animals..

The doctors attending on him, and while waiting for the blood reports, suspected that he must have picked up the infection from the contaminated food there, or worse still, it could be a case of leptospirosis from the bacteria-infected pond.

Friend ruled out this diagnosis as absurd. His strong belief was that God does not punish devotees or inflict suffering on those who have come all the way to worship him. When one goes to a temple and eats the food offered to the gods, or takes a dip in the pond there, one does so unquestioningly and with full faith. The compassionate, benevolent God reciprocates in full measure and does not let down his worthy devotees.

I told this friend on whom sixteen years of science education had been wasted, “Granting, for a moment, that there is a compassionate, benevolent God up there, what makes you think that He is on your side all the time? The omnipotent, almighty God presides over everything in the Universe, not just the human beings, and is equitable in His protection of all living beings. Do you know that virus and bacteria have been around for a much longer time than we human beings have and therefore have had a head start with God when it comes to seeking favours from Him? God, with His divine sense of fairness, doesn’t see you as a higher life form and doesn’t discriminate between you and an insect or the bacteria. So, it is utterly fatuous to presume that he will support you in your endeavor to finish off millions of bacteria with your arsenal of antibiotics. So, when you entered the contaminated temple pond or ate the food made in low-hygiene conditions, you invited trouble and I am afraid that God will not intervene in the battle between one life form and another. You are on your own. Good luck to you”

After hanging up, I realized that it was a stupid thing to do. This friend’s world was such an uncomplicated place, where he could simply shift the burden of everyday existence on to a superior being called God. If you fall ill, He will take care of you, whether or not you have controlled your diet, exercised regularly, avoided contaminated food or taken your medicines as prescribed by the doctors. If you have your exams coming up, He will see to it that you get through. If you are starting on a new building, you just need to perform the Bhoomi Pooja and He will take care of the structure from that point onwards. Such a blind belief transferred the responsibility of maintenance and sustenance from one’s shoulders on to God and made you feel a lot lighter.

Science, unfortunately, wants you to believe that you can control your destiny to a large extent and holds you accountable for your own actions. The rigour that Science demands, the constant observation of what’s going on around you, the analysis of data that assault your senses and the need to find patterns – all these place a huge burden on your narrow shoulders and disturbs your peace of mind.

So, I should have let my friend wallow in his own blissful world, instead of trying to effect a disruptive change in his belief systems. He is probably a lot happier as he is.

End of history

The fourth and final part of my trilogy on “History of Chennai” that I had posted on Sulekha.

Due to popular demand, I had to stop the series with this piece.

Ayushman Bhava

I just read a report that a boy born in the mountainous enclave of San Marino in northeast Italy is likely to live to 80, the world’s longest life expectancy. For females, Japanese women traditionally lead the world tables- with a life expectancy of 86. You may ask who published the report and I will truthfully reply that WHO published the report.

Perverts amongst you will at once assume that an offspring of a relationship between a San Marino male and a Japanese female can then have the best odds of living well beyond 80. But, this is not correct, as life expectancy is dependant on a number of factors.

The spirit and rigour of scientific enquiry demand that we look at all the possible variables that can influence a result, observe afresh by eliminating one variable at a time and then zero in on the incriminating or the beneficial factor. That’s what we will do in this case as well.

Could it be the diet? I remember how, as a child, I used to be admonished by my great-grandfather for my tendency to eat fast food fried in crude oil, while he himself used to subsist on a frugal diet of hand-pounded rice and skimmed goat’s milk. But, as it turned out, I had the last laugh. The old man died long back, while I am still alive. So, it can’t be the diet.

Is it something in our genes? Sponsored by Levi’s and Lee, a team of scientists from the University of New Berkshire, worked, round the clock, for several years on a gene bank under controlled conditions and finally managed to isolate the one gene that controls the lifespan of human beings. For this breakthrough, they were awarded the Nobel Prize, posthumously, as the round-the-clock-working had taken its toll and they had died of exhaustion. So, the jury is still out on whether it is worth having the right genes. .

Maybe a simple, disciplined, lifestyle enhances the chances of living longer? Can brisk 5-km walks every day contribute to a longer life? Post mortem reports on a 250-year old tortoise that had been fitted with a walk-o-meter all its life, showed that the creature had managed to walk a sum total of 2.1 km during its entire life span, while twenty generations of zoo keepers who had attended on it, often walking 10 km a day from their villages to the zoo, kept dying with regularity. So, a sedentary lifestyle is not necessarily inimical to a long life.

As always, I will apply the principle of the Occam’s razor and accept the simplest explanation. The main reason why some of the San Marino men and the Japanese women are today over 80 years old is because they were born before 1927. Those of us who were born after this date will find it difficult to make such a claim. So, here’s the secret to a long life. Ensure that you are born early enough.

Finally, friends, countrymen, a touch of romance. As per Tamil folklore, a Japanese woman architect fell in love with an Italian man from San Marino and married him. When the man died at the age of 127, she was so stricken with woe that she built a memorial, which was an exact replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She gave it the name of Nikkumo Nikkadho ( “Will it stand, or won’t it?”)

Give me noise.

In his book, The Curtain, which he describes as an essay in seven parts, Milan Kundera refers to a book called The Internal-Combustion Monster, written by Jaromir John, a Czech novelist of the period between the two world wars. As Kundera explains,

The story is set in the year 1922 and has its main character, Mr Engelbert, moving to Prague from the countryside to live out his retirement years and struggling to cope with the aggressive modernity of the city. The horror is not the power of money or the arrogance of the people, but the noise; not the age-old noise of a thunderstorm or a hammer, but the new noise of engines, especially of automobiles and motor-cycles, the explosive “internal combustion monsters”.

Poor Mr Engelbert first settles in a house in a residential area; there cars are his first introduction to the evil that will turn his life into a never-ending flight. He moves to another street where cars are forbidden entry, only to hear the monsters roaring in the night, as the prohibition applies only to day time. From then on, he never goes to bed without cotton in his ears, realizing that sleeping is the most basic human desire and death caused by the impossibility of sleep must be the worst death there is. He goes to seek silence in country inns (in vain) and ends up spending his nights in trains, which, with their gentle archaic noise, provide him with a slumber that is relatively peaceful in his life as a beleagured man.

When this novel was written, Prague had probably one car to every hundred inhabitants, or perhaps to every thousand. It was precisely when it was still rare that the phenomenon of noise (motor noise) stood out in all its astonishing newness.

In 1920s, Engelbert was astonished by the noise of the ‘internal-combustion monster’; the generations that followed found it natural; after initially horrifying man, sickening him, noise gradually reshaped him; through its omnipresence and permanence it ultimately instilled in him the need for noise and with that, a whole different relation to nature, to repose, to joy, to beauty, to music and even speech. In the history of existence this was a change so profound, so enduring, that no war or revolution can produce its like, a change whose beginnings Jaromir John modestly noted and described.

I recently experienced Mr Engelbert’s plight, but in a reverse situation. I woke up early one morning, unable to bear the noise of a solitary bird outside my bedroom window. The incessant chirping or whatever it is that such birds do, drove me nuts.

On cooler reflection, I realized that on normal nights, the drone of traffic, the blaring of horns, the screeching of tyres, the din of garbage collection dumpers, the racket that water tankers make, the roar of earthmovers in the construction sites nearby, the chatter of pedestrians, all created a soothing, comforting noise to which I had got accustomed and which usually drowned out the chirping made by the occasional bird. During a rare break in the traffic, the cheeping and tweeting of the bird had stood out and shattered my sleep.

Engelbert may have been deeply disturbed by the newness of noise, but I require it with all its oldness.

Silence is something alien to our culture now and must be suppressed by noise, at all costs.

History of Chennai

History of Chennai- Parts 1, 2 and 3 that I had posted on my Sulekha blog. The second part was published in the Deccan Chronicle today, fetching me a handsome prize of Rs 2000/-

Ecologic

The famous anthropologist Gregory Bateson liked to tell a story about New College, in Oxford, England. The main hall there was built in the mid-seventeenth century with oak beams forty feet long and two feet thick. Recently they began to suffer from dry rot, and administrators couldn’t find English oaks large enough to replace them. A young faculty member said, “Why don’t we ask the college forester if some of the lands given to Oxford might have enough trees to call upon?” They brought in the forester, who said, “We’ve been wondering when you would ask this question. When the present building was constructed 350 years ago, the architects specified that a grove of trees be planted and maintained to replace the beams in the ceiling when they suffered from dry rot.” Bateson’s conclusion was “That’s the way to run a culture.” ( Source)

While googling for more on this subject, I came across this transcript of a lovely speech by an architect. An extract :

“We must realize that the things we make must not only rise from the ground but return to it, soil to soil, water to water, so everything that is received from the earth can be freely given back without causing harm to any living system. This is ecology. This is good design .

Unfortunately, our culture has adopted a design strategem that essentially says that if brute force or massive amounts of energy don't work, you're not using enough of it.

Instead if we looked around, we will find that there are certain fundamental laws that are inherent to the natural world that we can use as models and mentors for human design.

There are three defining characteristics that we can learn from natural design.

The first characteristic is that everything we have to work with is already here -- the stones, the clay, the woods, the water, the air. All materials given to us by nature are constantly returned to the earth, without even the concept of waste as we understand it. Everything is cycled constantly with all waste equaling food for other living systems.

The second characteristic is that one thing allowing nature to continually cycle itself through life is energy, and this energy comes from outside the system in the form of perpetual solar income. Not only does nature operate on "current income," it does not mine or extract energy from the past, it does not use its capital reserves and it does not borrow from the future. It is an extraordinarily complex and efficient system for creating and cycling nutrients, so economical that modern methods of manufacturing pale in comparison to the elegance of natural systems of production.

Finally, the characteristic that sustains this complex and efficient system of metabolism and creation is biodiversity. What prevents living systems from running down and veering into chaos is a miraculously intricate and symbiotic relationship between millions of organisms, no two of which are alike.”

If nature takes millions of years to produce coal or oil, and we manage to wipe them off in a matter of two hundred years......

Be good, live well.

I have just finished reading a book called “Everyday Greatness” that is packed with wisdom from the pages of Reader’s Digest and filled with inspiring, moving and timeless stories of lives lived to the fullest, often through adversity and challenge. It has an insightful commentary by Stephen Covey, (he of the 7-habits).

I am overflowing with this sense of goodness. From every pore of my body, there now oozes this feeling of benevolence towards my fellow human beings. I am convinced that I can take on the world and scale heights never imagined before by man or beast. That’s what Reader’s Digest does to a person.

I would urge all of you to abandon the decadent lives that you have chosen to lead and strive to clarify what you stand for and what purposes you choose to pursue. In other words, you must want to make a difference. Contribute. As Abraham Lincoln put it seven scores and five years ago, "a man who does not make a difference is indifferent".

Next, realize that it is in giving of ourselves, to others, that we find our greatest sense of being. And the best way to do this is by using the principle of charity. As Ralph Waldo Emerson described it in his inimitable manner, “A man who doesn’t practice charity is being completely uncharitable.”

And, don’t think, charity involves huge donations. The best acts of charity are those that occur in small, one-to-one ways, when you take time out of your busy schedule to focus your attention on a solitary individual, if only for a moment. As Mother Teresa preached to her congregation, “He who bestows attention on others alone will have attention bestowed on himself. He who doesn’t will be cursed with tension”.

And, be courageous. Courage can help you overcome everything. even the curses of Mother Teresa. As Norman Vincent Peale mentioned in his autobiography that he wrote posthumously, “A man without courage is like curd rice without mango pickle. And how meaningless life can be without mango pickle?"

Taking charge of your life requires discipline. Yes, tons of it. Discipline demands the mental stamina to overcome empty passions and faulty habits. It requires a relentless focus. Remember the story of Dale Carnegie? Once he realized the importance of discipline, there was no stopping him. “A woman with discipline is” he said, restoring gender equality to this blog post, “is like Popeye after a meal of spinach”, ending up with a mix-up of the genders.

In all these principles, integrity is the common denominator. People with integrity can be trusted. They are committed. A shining example was Martin Luther King, Jr, who in that memorable speech of his just before his birth, said, “I would much rather trust an honest man than a dishonest woman”.

Mahatma Gandhi said that one of the greatest challenges of our times was to stay united, in the face of adversity. So, stick together, in difficult times. Remember the words of Winston Churchill after the Battle of Britain, “Never has so much been owed by so many united people to a few people who thankfully broke away from the losing group and decimated the enemy”

Finally, don’t complicate life. Keep it uncluttered and simple. As Cdr Gopinath of Air Deccan is never tired of saying, “Simplifly”.

No Logo

( via) The International Herald Tribune had reported in Dec 2006,

“Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom.

Sao Paulo, a city of 11 million, overwhelmed by what the authorities call visual pollution, has planned to press the "delete all" button and offer its residents unimpeded views of their surroundings.”

Now, the city has put the rule into effect as this photo illustrates

More such photos on Flickr

I really wish we could implement this idea in our cities here. I am not saying that the hoardings should be banned. After all, the wheel of commerce needs to keep spinning and advertising is an integral part of this activity. Thousands of people are gainfully employed and all that. But, it would be nice if we could start all over again after introducing some basic rules on the dimensions and the overall aesthetics.

How the blinkered directors harass the directionally-challenged

Notice how when you ask for directions to reach a particular place, different people refer to different landmarks to guide you? Might make perfect sense to them, but leaves you clueless.

For auto-rickshaw drivers in Chennai, theatres and residences of actors provide the frame of reference. I once tried to convince a driver to take me to SIET College, believing that it was a well-known landmark. “Isn’t that near Koundamani’s house?” he asked me, referring to a veteran comedian in Tamil movies, before demanding twice the meter rate from me presumably for the privilege of being driven close to Koundamani’s house..

For some, the city is just a series of temples strung together and all other structures mere aberrations or blots in the landscape. A friend invited me to his daughter’s wedding in Kamakshi Kalyana Mandapam, near Ayodhya temple. I asked him where Ayodhya temple was. He scratched his head for a few seconds and enquired, “Do you know the Murugan temple in Arya Road?” When I said, “No”, he had no idea how to guide me further. His worldview held no other landmarks for him. As if he had put on special filters over his eyes, designed to cut off everything that wasn’t a temple.

And those cashier-types with bank-blinkers on. After I had given elaborate instructions to a colleague on how to reach my house, he asked me if it was close to the Canara Bank branch there. I swear that I have not noticed that Bank at all, although it is located less than 100 metres from my house. But, imagine what dreary lives these guys live. They see banks, banks and only banks all around them.

But, do you want to know where I live? Let me guide you. It’s very simple really. It is very close to Carnival Restaurant. You don’t know where that is? Do you, at least. know Cream Centre, the new vegetarian place that opened recently? Or, the Pizza Corner on C.P.R. Road? What about Casablanca, the multi-cuisine restaurant?

Nature- the master designer

In his book, “Pulse : How Nature is inspiring Technology of the 21st century”, Robert Freaney provides a fascinating glimpse into advances in - inter alia- material science, made possible by adopting some astonishing designs and features that Nature has used in the creation of so many living organisms.

Take elastin. That’s the stuff that forms the big ligament on the back of a grazing animal’s neck- as in a cow- connecting the base of the skull to the joint of its shoulders. The ligament is a strong elastic band which counterbalances the weight of the head and the neck more than or less in the manner of the spring balancing an overhead garage door. Elastin functions by storing energy when mechanically stretched and providing the recoil. And the primary ligament in the cattle is a beautiful example. As are the aortic arch and the walls of the descending aorta which are made of elastin.

Inspired by these, synthetic elastin sheets that respond to temperature have been developed. If the temperature is lowered slightly, the sheet will expand and if the temperature rises slightly it will contract. You can add a weight on it, and when it contracts it will pick up the weight. Some can lift more than a thousand times their dry weight.

Hedgehogs fall out of trees all the time without getting hurt. What scientists have found is that the sharp hollow spines protecting it from attack are also exceptionally good shock absorbers. The core of its spines are filled with a natural honeycomb that prevents the tubes from collapsing like crimped drinking straws when they are bent by an attacking predator or when hitting the ground. So much so that a puncture-proof tire has been designed by ringing a wheel with a bristling fringe of hedgehog spines.

When looking to Nature for lessons, dandelions provide a good illustration. Their flowering stems are only 7 percent solids and yet grow nearly a foot tall and withstand all kinds of weather. A good example for lightweight buildings and aerospace design.

Or consider how a spider handles one of the toughest problems in engineering- attaching one kind of material to another at a right angle. When a spider glues the main support for its web to a leaf, it does so with one hundred tiny threads that it generates, by dropping its bottom on the ground twice for about half a second. In that brief moment it achieves a near-perfect adhesive joint, of a quality equal to what you may find at the terminus of a well-designed bridge.

Then there’s the a project looking at pinecones and transpiration methods in leaves in order to design military clothing that adapts to different weather conditions by changing its ‘breathability’. A study of the cockroach’s excellent sensing mechanisms, for use in fighter aircraft is paralleled by a scheme to use beetle carapaces as models for light, superstrong body armour. Another looks at how insect wings unfold as clue to designing deployable arrays for space missions. NASA engineers imagine a plane with wings that change their shapes in reaction to changing flight conditions just as those of birds do,

This aping of nature has to be tempered with the skeptical realism of a good engineer. Many of the materials used by nature are effective only within the fairly small temperature ranges inhabited by the plants and animals that create them. Spider silk is a case in point; synthetic versions are avidly being sought due to its tremendous strength, but it degrades above 80 degree centigrade. Also when nature makes materials, it takes its time. There are trees a century old. Simple creatures like mollusks may need years to form their shells.

A major difference between human creations and the way nature does things lies in our overall approach to design. Taking a linear, machine age approach, we are normally concerned with finding a specific answer to some specific questions. But a living thing is a complex answer drawn from nature’s response to a multitude of questions- and from a need to answer them all at once. The humble swallow can fly and has a very good visioning system and coordination for capturing prey and it reproduces. Then this very small creature can travel thousands of miles, migrating to the south and back north again. That’s quite an extraordinary thing when you think of it .It’s that integration of many different systems, the optimization of all those systems that is the real impressive thing about nature.

Another extraordinary thing about Nature is the surprisingly few components from which natural materials are made. For their ceramics, most organisms use only two calcium salts. Organic fibres in animals are largely collagen, a protein. In plants they are mostly cellulose, a sugar polymer. Chitin, a strong fiber related to cellulose, turns up in anthropods- insects, spiders, crabs, prawns, and fungi. And then there are keratins, another protein family, which figure in various guises as nails, horns, hair and feathers, not to mention hedgehog spines.

Broadly speaking, Nature has no more than two main types of ceramics, two fibrous sugar polymers, four fibrous proteins and some globular structural protein. Compare these with the surfeit of artificial material we’ve come up with; ten main types of ceramics, fifteen plastics, ten fibres all of which require vast amount of energy during production.

Given the subtlety economy and infinite variety of nature’s designs and how simple and clean her methods are, we still have a lot to learn.

We have the same one here. Dont' worry.

Yesterday’s edition of The Hindu has this story filed from Colombo :

The serial strike by the Tamil Tigers on the main base of the Sri Lankan Air force has led to disagreement between New Delhi and Colombo on the efficacy of the radars gifted by India to guard Sri Lankan skies.

Suggestions from the Sri Lankan side that deficiencies in the air defence system installed by India helped the Tigers sneak through the aerial route has been met with a curt 'no’ from India.

New Delhi’s response was that it was an operational problem not a system problem. It was made known to Colombo that the Air Defence System made available to it is the same that is operational in India.

That last line is interesting, to put it mildly. Isn’t it reassuring to know that the air defence systems in India are the same as the one installed in Sri Lanka which did not work when it mattered most, for whatever reason?

Here froggie, catch this fly...

In his book, “Marketers are liars”, author and blogger, Seth Godin makes this interesting point :

"An average frog’s brain weighs ten grams. A human’s weighs about sixty times as much. Despite the substantial evolutionary investment in human brain power, despite the vast number of brain cells devoted to our eyes and our ability to process what we see, most people are unable to snatch a housefly out of midair, with or without their tongue. The fly is too fast and we are too slow.

Yet frogs do this every day.

How does a frog get by with so little? How can a frog, with its minuscule brain, find a fly, track it, aim its tongue, launch it and then capture the fly in less than a second?

The frog has optimized its brain for hunting flies. It turns out that a frog is unable to see anything that is motionless. A frog surrounded by recently killed bugs will starve to death, unaware there is plenty of nutrition just inches away. At the same time, a frog can grab a fly out of the air with its tongue faster than any person can.

The frog’s secret? It watches only for changes in the environment. It has a brain that can only do one thing well, and that’s watch the sky for moving bugs. By ignoring the static environment and only focusing on what’s new, it can be far more efficient than a human when it comes to catching flies.

Humans use the strategy far more than we realize. Not to catch flies, of course, but to keep up with the huge influx of data we wrestle with every day. We are constantly scanning the world around us for changes; Walk into your house and within a heartbeat you know if something has changed. . We can’t grab a fly, but we can walk into a supermarket and at a glance tell, if there’s a new brand of beer."

This human trait to notice change is precisely what the advertisers target, to grab and engage your attention, and thereby promote a new product. We are all frog-like in our behaviour and can be enticed by moving flies or baits that marketers dangle in front of our eyes..

Reminds me of a cartoon by Don Martin in Mad magazine, in which the fairy-tale princess would kiss the frog and turn it into Prince Charming. Then they get married and ride off blissfully in the coach together, when the prince will suddenly notice a fly and zap it with his ten foot tongue.

Once a frog, always a frog.

Somewhere within your large brain, probably deep inside the reptilian complex, there lurks this frog mentality which is what the advertisers try to tap into.

New species.

First came the news that Conservationists working in Peru got their first natural glimpse of a rare and unusual bird called the long-whiskered owlet last month while working in a private mountain reserve. With their diminutive size, bright orange eyes, and wild, wispy facial feathers, the dainty birds belong to their own genus, dubbed Xenoglaux, or "strange owl."

Next came the announcement that a monster ‘toxic’ toad has been caught in Darwin, Australia. Nearly 15 inches (38 centimeters) long and weighing about 2 pounds (0.9 kilogram), the croaker is one of the largest specimens ever caught in Australia. The toads were imported from South America to eradicate scarab beetles that were feasting on sugar cane crops. But soon it was the toxic toads that were the pests, causing the deaths of countless native animals that eat them, from snakes to crocodiles.

Finally, there is this report that the clouded leopard of the Southeast Asian islands of Borneo and Sumatra is its own unique species, according to genetic test results announced by WWF, the international conservation organization. Until now the cat was believed to be of the same species as the mainland clouded leopard.

In the case of the diminutive owl, I will give credit to the conservationists for tracking the rare creature in the wilderness. In the case of the toxic toad, I will give full marks to the scientists for wading deep into the waters and catching the giant creature. But, my prize for the most ingenious claim goes to the WWF for declaring the widely found clouded leopard as a different species and claiming brownie points for it. Next they will claim that the animal we always thought was an elephant wasn’t an elephant at all, but an identical animal.

Incidentally, what happens if the toxic toads take a liking for the whiskered owl and eat them all up? And then the clouded leopards swallow all the giant toads and die of toxicity? All three species will be wiped out. Too bad.

Conversation with daughter- 12

Daughter to wife: Can I borrow a book from the library today?

Wife: No way! You have your exams. Take out your text books.

Daughter to me: Can I borrow a book from the library?

Me: You just asked that question to Amma, and she said no.

Daughter: But, what is your answer?

Me: How does it matter? What if I said yes?

Daughter: Then I will take the book from the library.

Me: But, amma has said no.

Daughter: There are some circumstances when I will listen to Amma and some circumstances when I will listen to you.

Me: How do you decide under which circumstances you will listen to Amma and which circumstances you will listen to me?

Daughter: I listen to whoever has the answer I want

Reconciling my battling trinity...

I read these lines here and have been profoundly impacted:

"It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about). You could say it would be a lifetime's quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole "

What this means is that when the person who I think I am is writing this piece to be read by the person who I think you are, it is actually the person who you think you are that is reading the piece that you believe was written by the person who you think I am. Meanwhile, the person who I think you think I am is logging on to your blogsite trying to understand the mind of the person who you think I think you are.

All very complicated, if you ask me. Six different people, two sets of trinities at work sitting on just two chairs and trying to reconcile into two different seamless wholes. Makes my head spin. In fact, when it turns 180 degrees during each spin, I can look down and see my own backside. But, wait a minute. How do I know that it is my head spinning? Maybe it is my body spinning and creating the illusion of my head spinning.

Reminds me of a story about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who one time asked a friend "Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for men to assume that the sun went round the earth, rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend said, "Well, obviously, because it looks as if the sun is going round the earth." To which the philosopher replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?"

If you really are the person I think you are, you will make sense of what I think I am trying to mean.

Why we lost ......

In the hullabaloo and hysteria over India’s loss in the World Cup, so many different theories have been put forward to explain what happened. Women have joined in too in the bashing, with their herteria.

Some say that India should never have batted first against Bangladesh and, in the match against Sri Lanka, should never have asked the opponents to bat first. In the match against Bangladesh, the Indians appeared to be saving their energy for the next encounter against Bermuda; in the match against Sri Lanka they appeared quite exhausted after the Bermuda match in which they had given all that they had.

Others have questioned the exclusion of Kumble, Dinesh Kartik and Irfan Pathan from the team and have criticized Dravid for his shortsightedness in limiting the number of players to eleven, in a crucial match.

A blogger has suggested that Indians lacked the hunger to win. The trick is, he concluded in his thought-provoking post, is to pack the team with millions of hungry men.

A famous ex-cricketer has opined that our fielding let us down and observed that in the race involving the ball and Indian fielders up to the boundary line, the former invariably won. In his own time, he pointed out, fielders used to be strategically positioned outside the boundary line.

Media has been quite vocal in its criticism. One newspaper has written in its editorial that the cricketers got carried away by all the hype that was created by the media and strongly recommended that newspapers must be banned.

My own theory- and I could be wrong occasionally- is that one of the main reasons that India lost to Sri Lanka was because we failed to score as many runs in the match as the Sri Lankan batsmen did. In the final analysis, this cost us the match.

In fact, I would be so bold as to predict that the winner of this edition of the World Cup would be the team that scores more runs than its opponent in the final. Duckworth-Lewis could prove me wrong, but I am sticking my neck out.

Welcome to my Space.

I am gladdened by the news that India's latest communications satellite, INSAT-4B, was successfully launched on Monday by Arianespace's Ariane-5 vehicle from the Kourou Island in French Guiana.

I remember when INSAT-2B was launched some years back, many people had serious reservations about the whole program. Incorrigible cynics in distant hamlets soliloquized loudly, “INSAT-2B or not 2B, that’s the question’. Only Dr. Abdul Kalam and I were convinced that it would work.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to share with you what President Kalam had to say when the INSAT-4B was launched. Some of you have subscribed to the RSS feed of my blog just to keep yourself updated on the President’s articulations and I won’t let you down. I will tell you know in just a minute what he remarked soon after the launch. But, before that, let me give you some background.

The Universe came into being through a cataclysmic event called the Big Bang that happened billions of years back. That was so long ago that even Vajpayee was yet to be born. Why am I rambling about Vajpayee when you wanted to hear about Kalam, some of you ask in righteous indignation, especially you there from Boise, Idaho who Google-searched for “role model Abdul kalam’ and was led to this eminent site. Why, sitting in Boise, Idaho, you want to know about role model Kalam is more than I can understand. Anyway, Boise will be Boise. I’ll let that pass. But, I forgot, you wanted to hear the statement issued by President Kalam soon after the launch. Be a little patient. I am coming to that, but I have to touch upon something quite important.

Soon after the Big Bang, the Universe started expanding in all directions and it still is. After some eons, interstellar clouds condensed to form galaxies, stars and planets. Fusion of hydrogen atoms led to formation of other higher elements, one by one. Some people mistake fission for fusion. That’s confusion. Suffice to say that all elements including gold were created through fusion in a star or by a supernova. Isn’t it a humbling thought that the gold ring that you presented to your boy/girl friend on Valentine’s Day owes its existence to the element created by inter-stellar clouds? And, do you know why Valentine’s Day is celebrated on February 14th? That’s because it is exactly 9 months before Nov 14th, Children’s Day. But, I digress. You don’t want to hear about Nehru. You are waiting to hear what Dr Kalam said after the launch of INSAT 4B. I can see the reader there, yes you with the IP code 74.121.235, tearing your hair and chewing your nails unable to stand the suspense. Hang on, for just a while. I am coming round to the speech presently.

The Universe is believed to have 80 billion galaxies, each containing an average of 80 billion stars. That makes it sound as if the Universe is over-crowded. Actually it is not. Most of it is empty space. But, there’s lot of diversity. Why, as George Lucas brilliantly captured in his movie Star Wars, there’s even a Bar in Outer Space, where you will be served exotic drinks. You can see the bar there in front of you. No, not on the monitor. On your key board. The long key at the bottom. That’s right. The Space Bar.

Now, I can see you hopping mad. I can sight some of you backbenchers removing your slippers menacingly, to beat me up. “We want Kalam”, I hear you shout hysterically. Hey, that person over there, yes the one from Bangalore – I can spot your company’s URL – calm down. Browsing on official time, are you? You are going to be stressed out completely if you don’t control your rage. What? You will kill me if I don’t reveal immediately what President Kalam said soon after the launch of INSAT 4B? Are you seriously threatening me?

I confess that I am getting irritated with this constant and rude interruption. In fact, I will go to the extent of saying that I am infuriated. Are you all under the impression that I am some kind of a chronicler of all the President’s activities? Here I am trying to educate you on the origin of the Universe and all about the galaxies and stars – believe me, it is a vast subject- and you don’t let me get in a word edgeways. All you want to hear is ….. Forget it. Those of you who want to know what he said, log on to his personal website and dig it out yourself.

As for the few others still hanging around, I will continue. When the Universe was around 5.6 billion years old…………

Caveat Emptor

A friend – an IIT/IIM combo- works for the credit card business of a multinational bank. His job, as I understand it, is to comb and mine the rich data available with the bank on purchases made by millions of customers, identify people with similar spending patterns and lump them in clusters. The bank would then indulge in some ‘focused marketing’ and approach each cluster with appropriate offerings, brochures, etc that would have maximum appeal. Some complex mathematical modeling is involved, but my friend tells me that this is a fairly reliable science and he can claim a success rate of over 90% in his predictions. I have no reason to disbelieve him. After all, his pay and incentives are linked to the accuracy of his forecasting.

It is fascinating how our purchasing behaviour is subtly manipulated by so many different agencies, using methods that have been validated by psychologists in scientific studies. Why do most malls sell perfumes in the ground floor, as close to the entrance as possible? Why not have the perfumes counters in the top floor? That’s probably because some study done by one of the Universities in the US would have shown that more the number of senses that are stimulated, the more favourably disposed the customer would be to part with his money. As he enters the mall, his eyes feast on the colourful displays, his ears hear some soothing music and his nose picks up the fragrance from the perfume spray. He is ‘pre-sold’ by the time he reaches the clothes section. Like those sublimal messages reportedly planted by advertisers, indiscernible to the conscious mind, but perceived by the sub-conscious mind. So, just before the intermission, a sublimal message, “Drink Coke” is embedded on the screen and you, like a zombie, walk to the counter outside and pick up a Coke tin, as if it was the most natural thing to do.

When you went to the white goods shop to buy a microwave oven, were you first shown a model that costs Rs 10000/- , but you ended up buying one that costs Rs 8000/- ? The 10000-Rs model was probably a ‘decoy’ planted there, to provide the right contrast or the frame of reference. In other words, Rs 10000/- was planted in your mind as an anchor and helped in showing subsequent, slightly cheaper models in a favourable light.

Or, when you went in to buy the used car, did the broker say that he had already received better offers and it was already sold, but later called you up to break the news that there was a slight chance that the earlier deal he had may fall through, and you could have it if you paid up the advance amount the same day? The broker is applying the ‘scarcity’ principle. People tend to buy and pay a higher price when there is perceived scarcity.

Did you get an offer from Reader’s Digest to buy a book titled “The Home Cure Manual’ that you could return in ten days if you didn’t like it and get full refund? What they are trying to exploit is the principle that the pain experienced by people in losing what they already possess is far more intense than the pleasure gained when they are acquiring something. So, the trick is to lure you to ‘possess’ a book. You won’t part with it too easily.

Of course, all these studies talk only about probability. That is, they predict that 60-70% of the customers would behave in a certain way under certain conditions. The remaining will not succumb to these methods. The hit rate may therefore vary. That’s the chance that marketing companies take.

The IIT/IIM combo friend that I cited above may be smart, but my favourite salesman is a vegetable vendor near my house. Tomato prices, as we all know, can vary from Rs 5-20 per kg ( or even more). When the ruling price is Rs 5/kg, he would call out, “ Saar, tomato very cheap today. Rs 5 a kg”. When the price shoots up to Rs 20/kg, he would yell out cheerfully, “Saar, Tomato very cheap today. Rs 5 for quarter kg.”

Full disclosure : I am a flag carrying member of the Sales fraternity.

Needless to say that...

.

Conversation with daughter- 11

Guy Kawasaki links to an article titled The Effort Effect, about Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck. It examines her thirty-year study of why some people excel and others don’t. The article postulates that people have two kinds of mindsets: growth or fixed. People with the growth mindset view life as a series of challenges and opportunities for improving. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are “set” as either good or bad. The issue is that the good ones believe they don’t have to work hard, and the bad ones believe that working hard won’t change anything.

The article has a sidebar called, ‘What do we tell the kids?” If you have a bright kid and you want her to succeed, do you tell her she is smart? No, Prof Dweck tells us ,because such labels, though positive, may instill a harmful mindset and all the baggage that goes with it, from performance anxiety to a tendency to give up quickly. Well-meaning words can sap children’s motivation and enjoyment of learning and undermine their performance.

Rather than praising their intelligence, Professor Dweck advises parents to focus on the processes the children use,. Examples :

“That homework was so long and involved. I really admire the way you concentrated and finished it.”

“That picture has so many beautiful colors. Tell me about them.”

“You put so much thought into that essay. It really makes me think about Shakespeare in a new way.”

When I read anything as instructive and enlightening as this, I naturally try to put it to use, at the first opportunity. So, imagine my happiness, when I found my daughter on her favourite sofa, engrossed in her homework. I started off with this perfect line, that would have made both Carol Dweck and Guy Kawasaki proud of me :

Me: That homework must be pretty long and involved. I really admire the way you are concentrating and finishing it.

Daughter: What?

Me: That homework. Must be long and involved. Admirable, the way you are concentrating and finishing it.

Wife, walking into the room, to daughter: What’s he saying?

Daughter: He is rambling something about how long and involved my homework is and how I am concentrating and finishing it.

Wife to me: Why don’t you leave her alone and let her complete her work? It is pretty long and involved and it must be difficult enough to concentrate and finish , without you interrupting her...

Me:I was just commenting that her homework must be long and involved and complimenting her on her concentration and her determination to finish it. Just as Carol Dweck has advised parents to.

Daughter: I don’t know what you are talking about, but if you leave me alone, I’ll be able to concentrate better and finish this long and involved homework much faster.

Me to other daughter: That drawing of yours has so many beautiful colours. Tell me about them……..

Tyranny of freedom

In his book, “The Power of Persuasion”, psychologist Robert Levine talks about a recent series of experiments, in which social psychologists, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, demonstrated that too many choices could be overwhelming and counter-productive.

In their study, a group of Columbia University chocolate lovers were given a choice of six different flavors of Godiva chocolate and asked to taste a sample of any one. A second group was asked to choose among thirty different flavours. Subjects given the extensive flavour choices rated their selection as less tasty, less enjoyable and less satisfying than did the limited choices group. The thirty-flavour subjects expressed more regrets about their selection and were less likely to choose chocolate as payment for participating in the experiment.

In another experiment, Iyengar and Leppar set up a jam-tasting table in Draeger’s supermarket, an upscale grocery store in Menlo Park, California, with a reputation for extensive selection. In one condition, the researchers offered shoppers tastes of six different exotic flavours of Wilkin & Sons jam. In a second condition, they offered twenty-four different Wilkin & Sons flavours. Easy choices like strawberry and raspberry were left out. The displays were rotated hourly over two Saturdays. Once again, Lepper and Iyengar found, shoppers were won over by the smaller selection. 60% of the customers who passed by the 6-flavour table stopped for a sample, compared with 40% of customers who passed by the 24-flavour table.

Apparently, the human threshold for number of choices is 6. Beyond this number, the law of diminishing returns sets in.

In a related story I found in this blog of Jonah Lehrer :

Stanford professor Baba Shiv invented an experiment where he manipulated the "cognitive load" of subjects. Shiv gave half of the subjects a two-digit number to memorize (low load), while the other half were given a seven-digit number (high load). Subjects were then instructed to walk to another room in the building. On the way they passed by a table at which they were presented with a choice between a caloric slice of chocolate cake and a bowl of fruit salad. Fifty-nine percent of the people trying to remember seven digits (high load) chose the cake, while sixty-three percent of the two-digit subjects (low load) chose the fruit salad. In other words, having people memorize an extra five digits made them exhibit significantly less self-control.

Why did the number of digits have such a strong effect? Shiv speculates that the effort required to memorize seven numbers drew cognitive resources away from our ability to control our urges. Having to remember seven numbers occupied neurons that would otherwise help us decide what to eat, which causes us to become more reliant on our impulsive emotions.

As my loyal readers know, I don’t write book reviews just for the heck of it. I always look for some learning from each book and make it a point to enlighten and educate my readers. So, what I want to share with you this time is this.

In supermarkets, in various parts of the world, University professors are going around with crates of jam bottles and tins of milky chocolates and, in the name of research, are giving away free samples, to all and sundry, while you and I have been frittering away our time on the computer and reading up on some mind-numbing nonsense.

Quick. Memorise a 7-digit number, get out of that chair right now and head for the nearest grocery story. 24 different and exotic flavours of ‘Wilkin & Sons’ jams and 32 different types of Godiva chocolates are up for grabs, free of cost.

How we won the World Cup

World Cup Cricket is round the corner and it is our patriotic duty to remind ourselves of our glorious triumph in the 1983 version of the tournament.Not that we are ever allowed to forget it , but I felt that I should do my bit for the cause of keeping the memory alive.

As studies have shown that the average age of the Indian blogger is 16.5 years, you were probably not around in 1983. Whereas, I was not only born, but had also been house-broken by then. So, the burden of providing the highlights of the tournament falls on my broad shoulders.

Remember that nobody gave us any chance whatsoever to return home with or without the Cup. The West Indies were ruling strong. There was England playing on their home turf. And, don’t forget that cricket was patronized by the Royalty. Even today, at the Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth bats, while Prince Charles fields and Camilla-Parker Bowles.

So, to cut a long story short, we started as the underdogs. A ragtag outfit, straight out of Lagaan, but we had some hidden talent.

The lethal weapon in our hands then was the gentle medium pace of Mohinder Amarnath. After a leisurely stroll to the top of his bowling mark which was 1.5 meters behind the crease, Mohinder would run up lazily and toss the ball generally in the direction of the batsman, humming a Hindi film song in that rum-soaked voice of his. Legend has it that one of the balls he bowled to Viv Richards in that memorable finals in 1983 was so slow that it is yet to reach the other end of the pitch, at least till the time this post made it to the blogosphere.

Then, there was Balwinder Singh Sandhu, who could swing the ball both ways. ‘Ball Winder’ Sandhu he was called. A delivery that he bowled at Lord’s is still etched in my memory. It pitched slightly short, swung all the way to Ireland, swung back and knocked the stumps all the way to Scotland, leaving the batsman Gordon Greenidge dumbstruck in England.

And, Krish Srikkant. Simultaneously praying to the Sun God, wiping his nose and spitting on the pitch, he went down on one knee and knocked the stuffing out of a ball from Andy Roberts, sending it straight into the pavilion. Unfortunately, the knee wanted to continue to stay on the ground after that and Srikkant got out while bravely batting on with the rest of his body.

And the manner in which Viv Richards was dismissed! As I told you, Viv was still waiting for that ball from Mohinder to reach him, when the wily Kapil got Madanlal to bowl to him, with a different ball, which ricocheted off Viv’s bat and went straight to Kapil. Viv naturally thought that the whole thing was a camera trick and an optical illusion and squatted on the pich, till the Queen came up and said, “Rise, Sir Vivian” and knighted him.

By that time, the World Cup was ours.

We taught them Mathematics.....

In an earlier post, I had quoted some passages from a book, which gave a fascinating insight into India’s role as the epicenter of global spice trade for centuries.

A recent entry in the Brittanica Blog suggests that a by-product of the spice trade was that there was exchange of scientific knowledge, and in the process, mathematical discoveries of the ‘school of Madhava’ could have been passed on to the Europeans:

"As historical research on mathematics has improved, other claims to priority have been put forth for China and South Asia. Among the most interesting stories concerns the Indian mathematical school in Kerala, along the Malabar Coast. This region has been associated with the spice trade for thousands of years. Vasco da Gama arrived in India in 1498, and European traders were soon accompanied by Jesuits (after the order’s formation in 1540) intent on exchanging scientific knowledge—in particular, knowledge about navigation and how to reform the increasingly inaccurate Julian calendar. Among the most famous visitors was Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit missionary instructed in astronomy and mathematics, who is best known for his 30-year sojourn in China. Less well known are the events of his two-year stay in Cochin, Kerala. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the mathematical discoveries of the school of Madhava in Kerala, such as infinite series (hundreds of years before Europeans would even consider infinity) for trigonometric functions, may have been transmitted through Jesuit reports, which were disseminated throughout Europe. Some Indian scholars go further, claiming that the calculus was actually discovered in India and that the priority dispute between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz is therefore moot. "

Good to know about the glorious past. Now, to create a glorious future....

Conversation with children -10

This conversation between Socratic-minded parents and children was reported in The Science Creative Quarterly.


OLDER CHILD: Remember that car we saw when we were walking to school, with the vapor coming out of its tailpipe?

YOUNGER CHILD: I made vapor come out of my mouth, too. It was cold.

FATHER: What do you suppose that vapor was that came out of the tailpipe?

OLDER CHILD: Was it steam?

MOTHER: Sounds good to me.

YOUNGER CHILD: Why was there steam coming out of its tailpipe?

FATHER: What is steam?

OLDER CHILD: Gaseous water.

MOTHER: So why would a car have gaseous water coming out of its tailpipe?

OLDER CHILD: Maybe there was water in the fuel tank?

FATHER: Can you think of any other reason?

MOTHER: What’s the fuel people usually put in the fuel tanks of their cars?

YOUNGER CHILD: Gasoline!

FATHER: That’s right.

OLDER CHILD: But how does gasoline end up making steam come out the tailpipe?

MOTHER: Do you know what the car has to do with the gasoline to get the energy out of it?

YOUNGER CHILD: No.

MOTHER: It has to burn the gasoline.

YOUNGER CHILD: Like a fire?

FATHER: Yep. And do you remember what a fire needs to burn?

OLDER CHILD: Oxygen!

MOTHER: That’s right.

FATHER: So, do you remember what happens when we light candles and then let them burn all the way down?

YOUNGER CHILD: They melt!

MOTHER: But if they just melted, all the wax that started out in the candles would end up dripping onto the table. We get a few drips, but not whole candles’ worth of drips.

OLDER CHILD: What happens to the wax?

YOUNGER CHILD: Yeah, where does it go?

FATHER: Let’s see if we can figure that out. (Grabs a tealight candle, a 4 ounce canning jar, and a lighter.) OK, I’m lighting the candle. What will happen if I lower the jar over the candle?

OLDER CHILD: The flame will go out!

YOUNGER CHILD: (As the flame does go out) It ran out of oxygen!

MOTHER: That’s right. So that must mean that the oxygen gets used up when something is burning.

FATHER: (Relighting the candle) What if I lower the jar more slowly so the oxygen doesn’t run out so quickly? Can you see something forming on the inside of the jar?

YOUNGER CHILD: Is that wax?

MOTHER: Soot?

OLDER CHILD: Steam! It’s steam!

FATHER: That’s right. So, burning uses up oxygen …

OLDER CHILD: And makes water!

MOTHER: Do you know what else is produced when you burn something?

OLDER CHILD: Carbon dioxide.

YOUNGER CHILD: How do you know that?

OLDER CHILD: I don’t remember. I must’ve heard it somewhere.

FATHER: So, if burning the wax uses up oxygen and makes carbon dioxide and water, what can you say about what the wax is made of?

MOTHER: (After some blank looks) What is carbon dioxide made of?

YOUNGER CHILD: Carbon and dioxide.

OLDER CHILD: Carbon and oxygen.

MOTHER: And what’s water made of?

OLDER CHILD: Hydrogen and oxygen.

MOTHER: And you know that oxygen is getting used up when you burn the candle — the oxygen that goes to make the water and carbon dioxide.

OLDER CHILD: So the carbon and the hydrogen come from the wax?

FATHER: Yep. Wax has carbon and hydrogen, and so does gasoline.

MOTHER: Hydrocarbon fuels. And the foods your body burns for fuel have carbon and hydrogen in them.

OLDER CHILD: Like carbohydrates?

FATHER: And fats, and proteins.

YOUNGER CHILD: We burn our food?

OLDER CHILD: And sometimes have tailpipe emissions.

They're made out of meat

A classic 7-minute video of a sci-fi story. (via)

PC

I heard a Political Commentary on Prannoy’s Channel that P.Chidambaram is to be Publicly Criticised for the Punishing Cess he has introduced on everything from Pillow Covers and Potato Chips to Portland Cement, Pepsi Cola and Personal Computers. It is Perfect Clear that Premji’s Company will not be such a lucrative Profit Centre any more. Nor, for that matter, Pizza Corner. True, he has granted Petty Concessions on food for Pet Cats and brought it under Price Control. But, People Complain & Protest Ceaselessly that he has Pitilessly Consumed most of what comes into their Pay Checks. But, Poor Chap, what can he Possibly Control? His Party Congress presides over a Precarious Coalition. He has to Please Constantly his Partnering Communists who claim to Promote Cause of Poor Comrades. Otherwise, his Parliamentary Career would be Pre-maturely Cut.

The Finance Bill will receive Presidential Consent, as soon as the Pontificating Chief at Rashtrapathi Bhavan takes a minute off from his Prior Commitments of having Periodic Conversations, nay Persistent Chats with Precocious Children.

But, all this is Pointless Controversy, when the Earth is Perilously Close to Permanent Collapse, as Conan Doyle Predicted Correctly in one of his Professor Challenger stories. Because atmosphere is filled with Poisonous Chemicals and there has been no Pollution Control, Polar Caps are melting. All of us - you, me, the Positively Charming Priyanka Chopra, ex-President Clinton and his wife Hillary, a Potential Candidate in next elections, Prince Charles and his wife Parker Camella, the Pakisthani Cricketers and their Portly Captain now camping at Paradise Caribbean, everybody- will have to abandon all this Puerile Crap about Pecuniary Concerns and, instead Prevent Contamination of environment. So, Pay Charges that P.Chidambaram wants to Painstakingly Collect from rich or Poor Citizens. Or Practise Conservation of Precious Commodities and help improve Planetary Conditions.

This Post Certainly is Pretty Contrived and Pathetically Constructed. But, at least it is not Plagiarised Content. Do Publish Comments. Pelt Curses, if you must, but my Preferred Choice will be Pleasing Compliments.

Mosama has his revenge..

Deep in thought, Mosama Po Navan stroked his seven-day old stubble. Though he shaved everyday, somehow, he never seemed to be able to clear the backlog.

He was all alone at home. His wife had run away with his best friend last year. It wasn’t that he had a best friend who had shamelessly snatched his wife away from him. It was just that Mosama considered whosoever the person was who ran away with his wife as his best friend and saviour.

But, that was the last time something good had happened to him. In recent months, life had been rather harsh on him. His pet dog had been bitten by the three-month old child next door and no amount of anti-babies injection had helped. Vandals had broken into his house and substituted his Apple iPod with a Pattani pea-pod. The software company he worked for had decided to close down and get into underwear business, where he was told, his code-writing competencies would be redundant.

As Wodehouse put it, it would be a slight exaggeration to say he was disgruntled, but he was certainly far from gruntled.

Yes, he took a vow, that very minute, to teach this inconsiderate society a lesson. Mosama would inflict a terrific blow and extract his revenge.

His first idea was to break into Aavin milk factory on the outskirts of Chennai and inject a strong dose of potassium cyanide into the milk concentrator vat, from which all the sachets would be filled and distributed far and wide. The Chennai citizen liked his morning cup of coffee and what better way to get some cyanide into his blood-stream than by poisoning the milk? Diabolical, but he aborted the plan when the auto-rickshaw driver demanded an astronomical amount of Rs 300 as fare to take him to Madhavaram, over and above the meter reading. Man proposes, auto-driver disposes, Mosama mused.

His next idea was to get on to a plane and carpet bomb the whole city. Unfortunately, Air-Deccan cancelled the flight he was booked on, and the whole plan fell through. Damn all these low-cost airlines, he thought.

Finally, Mosama hit upon the perfect idea. What do all citizens of Chennai have in common, he asked himself. All of them carry mobile phones. If he could somehow manipulate the radio-frequency signals embedded in the electromagnetic waves that emanate from cellular base stations, he could wipe out the whole population. Google search had told him that, “it has been known for many years that exposure to very high levels of RF radiation can be harmful due to the ability of RF energy to heat biological tissue rapidly. This is the principle by which microwave ovens cook food.” As a techie, Mosama knew that all he had to do was to transmit a radio-frequency signal well above the safe limit of 2 watts/kg of body weight and at a frequency of 100 Hz where the rate of absorption was the highest. And, the Chennai mobile users would be cooked alive.

He quickly made it to the Airtel Master Control room which oversees all their base stations, and when the inmates were watching the cricket match on TV, sneaked in and turned the frequency switch to the ‘extreme’ position and walked out unnoticed. This would activate all base stations and all mobile phones simultaneously. It would blanket Chennai with high-frequency RF signals and increase body temperatures drastically

Plan failed. What Mosama had not factored in was that the Chennai citizen was so used to the blazing heat that an addition of another 10-15 deg C around his vicinity did not have the desired effect on the tissues, which had a high melting point.

But, some neuroscientists say that the electromagnetic frequency that Mosama had used was, coincidentally, so close to the frequency of the signals in the neural circuitry of the human brain, and that this resonance could cause serious damage to the mental health of Chennai citizens. Their speech could become incomprehensible and their writing gibberish. They may bgdj maosie kasotr iwoppska &*()%$ wahddklf ooeuwnwnw sskskk ksk; 9ufjakls lillksksk aleosl lalsirr…………………………………………………………………….

What am I?

Via this blogsite, I came across a poll, where people of different countries were asked whether they considered themselves first as citizens of their country or as Muslims/Christians. Except for Indonesia, Muslims in most countries swore first allegiance to their faith. And, among countries dominated by Christians, America was where the most number of people (42%) considered themselves Christians first, citizens next. Though 48% of Americans polled did swear loyalty to the country first, the fact that such a high percentage (42%) of people had primary affiliation to their religion did cause some surprise, even concern.

In one of my posts, I had used the metaphor of a railway compartment- filled with people of different faiths, states, and food habits- to make a point about the amazing diversity in India and the fact that we take unique positions on different issues and find ourselves in different groups at different times.

Is your first loyalty to your nation, your language, your religion or your caste? Do I, for example, see myself first as an Indian or a Tamilian or a Hindu or a Brahmin? As we are divided in so many different ways, there could be a billion different answers if the same question is asked to each person in India. What is the collective identity we have in this melting pot?

Maybe, as the blogger suggests, nationalism itself is an outdated concept and needs to be abandoned in due course.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how mad are you?

In case you missed out the news item, the Assamese chilli, known as Bih Jolokio Chilli, has been adjudged the hottest chilli in the world.

I wonder how the jury came to the conclusion. Did the members test each of the chilli samples on their tongues and set their pants on fire? Then arrive at a consensus? No, that’s not the way it was done.

Apparently, there is a unit of measurement called the Scoville heat Unit (SHU) which tells us how ‘hot’ a substance is. Bih Jolokia Chilli clocked in at 1,041,127 SHUs. The test procedure involves measuring the amount of capsaicin present. (capsaicin is a chemical known to stimulate the nerve endings) Thus, bell pepper which has no capsaicin at all has a SHU value of zero. Tabasca sauce is around 8000, Jamaican pepper 100000-200000 and so on. But, the winner, ladies and gentleman, is Bih Jolokio Chilli.

So, you don’t have to be vague when you describe the ‘hotness’ of a chilli; you can state with arithmetical precision how hot it is, thanks to Scoville.

But why this obsession with reducing everything to numbers. Taking the fun out of chillies and making life complicated for the chillee and the chiller. What kind of sadists inflict such scales on mankind? What a pain they are?

Speaking of pain, have you found it difficult to describe how painful something, is? If so, use the Wong-Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale. The Wong-Baker scale goes from 0 to 5, from 'no hurt' ( zero rating) to 'hurts worst' ( rating of 5)

What about specific pain, like that from an insect sting? Don’t worry. There’s a Schmidt Sting Pain Index which has classified the pain from stings of 78 different species. So, the next time you are stung by a Bullet Ant and experience pure, intense, brilliant pain, like walking over flaming charcoal, with a 3-inch nail in your heel, your doctor will take out the Schmidt scale and assess your pain number as 3.0 on the scale and prescribe medicines accordingly.

And, there is this Dr. Michel Welner, a forensic psychiatrist, who is working on a Depravity Scale that will help courts decide the seriousness of a crime in quantified terms, and decide on the sentence. There is a Goldberg depresssion scale available in case you want to monitor your mood on a daily basis and report to your shrink. There have been light-hearted proposals for emotional distress scale, and insanity quotient.

So, no more guess work. No more talking in vague terms. You have a scale and an index for everything.