Gender bias

Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination for president because of "gender bias" in the news media, according to a Johns Hopkins University analysis that found the New York Democrat has attracted marked press discrimination. ( Source)

An article in Slate, in November last year, had discussed this possibility and had cited a study done in India, to predict that even if Hillary were to win the elections, she might not last more than one term.

The study that Slate referred to was one carried out by economists Esther Duflo and Petia Topalova.

In 1991, explains the article, almost none of India's village councils were headed by women; the 1991 constitutional amendment passed to redress this imbalance mandated the election of women as pradhans, or council heads, in a third of villages that were chosen entirely at random. This meant the villages reserved for female candidates were no different from other villages before the women-only elections.

Based on a survey they carried out, Duflo and Topalova found that the villages headed by women invested in more services that benefited the entire community than did those with gender-neutral elections, nearly all of which were won by men. Corruption was noticeably less. Issues such as supply of drinking water were tackled far better.

But, alas, the survey also brought the reality that ‘India's female pradhans were remarkably unappreciated for their efforts. Despite the objective upgrades in village amenities, both men and women living in villages headed by women expressed lower satisfaction with public services.’

Why this disconnect between the performance and recognition of female leaders? To find out the answer, Slate refers to another study. In an experiment on gender perceptions, psychologists Cameron Anderson and Francis Flynn gave one group of MBA students the original case study done by Harvard Business School on a venture capitalist, Heidi Roizen. Another group received a copy that was identical in every way, except that "Heidi" became "Howard."

How was Ms. Roizen perceived by students who read of her assertive style in the case? It depended whether she was presented as a man or as a woman.

‘Anderson and Flynn report that while both Howard and Heidi were rated as equally competent (they were the same person, after all), students described the female version of the character as overly aggressive, and were much less likely to want to work with or hire her. So the decisive, assertive traits that are often valued in leaders are received very differently when observed in women than when seen in men. Howard was a go-getter. Heidi was unlikably power-hungry.’

‘But there is some preliminary evidence (PDF), that the success of India's first wave of female pradhans is starting to change attitudes, perhaps bringing India one step closer to gender-neutral village politics.’

Hmm, I wonder how the findings on the Indian women pradhans would have been received had Esther Duflo been a man?

@#$%!*

Without meaning to pass any moral judgement on fellow bloggers, I have often wondered, why so many of them feel the need to use ‘f’ and other ‘swear’ words routinely. In fact, some of these swear words are used as mere fillers, often out of context. As many of these said bloggers are excellent writers, this cannot be due to inadequate vocabulary. There must be a deeper reason.

But, why do we need to curse, at all? And why do most curse words invariably contain reference to a sexual act, some bodily functions or excreta?

Steven Pinker dwelt on this theme in his book, “The Stuff of thought”. ( I have not read the book, just a review). Pinker believes cursing is rooted in a primordial part of our brains and swearing was actually the first form of language. He points to the fact that brain-damaged patients who lose the power of articulate speech often retain the ability to curse like a sailor. "Since swearing involves clearly more ancient parts of the brain," Pinker says, "it could be a missing link between animal vocalization and human language." So, cursing is ‘animal behaviour’. The same parts of the brain are involved when you bump your head and yell, ‘Oh f#@&!' as when you step on a dog's tail and get a very sudden howl."

An article in New York Times, titled. “Almost before we spoke, we swore” explored the same subject. Cursing, it said, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech.

‘The very concept of a swear word or an oath originates from the profound importance that ancient cultures placed on swearing by the name of a god or gods. At the same time, there was a commandment that the “Lord’s name cannot be used in vain”. So, an ever-fresh selection of euphemisms about dirty subjects has long served as an impressive engine of linguistic invention.’

‘Using PET scans of the brain, investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word, and how complex an act the urge to speak the unspeakable may be. Participants show signs of instant arousal. Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow. The person is gripped by a desire to curse, to voice something wildly inappropriate. Higher-order linguistic circuits are tapped, to contrive the content of the curse. The brain's impulse control center struggles to short-circuit the collusion between limbic system urge and neocortical craft, and it may succeed for a time. Yet the urge mounts, until at last the speech pathways fire, the verboten is spoken, and archaic and refined brains alike must shoulder the blame.’

Or, perhaps cursing is a coping mechanism, a form of anger management that is often underappreciated.

A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures, but just goes ahead and attacks. By the same token, nothing is more deadly than a person who is too enraged for expletives - who cleanly and quietly picks up a gun and starts shooting.

So, rather let him curse and let off steam, than pick up a gun to shoot you.

Zero-intelligence investors

Whenever the Sensex dips a bit, the papers carry a photograph, the next day, of shell-shocked traders staring disbelievingly at the screen in front of them and watching the prices slide rapidly before their eyes. My usual reaction is, “Good. Serves the idiots right”. A system where stock prices don’t correlate with the fundamentals or the technical parameters is as good as a lottery to me.

In fact, the only correlation that I could discern, before I got over the madness, was that the Sensex would unfailingly rise, a few minutes after I had sold off some shares, and tumble a few minutes after I had bought some shares. In a manner of speaking, I was cross-subsidizing the Stock Market.

Jeffrey Kluger, author of the book “Simplexity”, writes about the ways of the stock market:

Never mind what you think about the exquisitely complex organism that is the world’s financial market. Never mind the hundreds of millions of thoughtful investors and their billions of well-considered trades. For every market analyst who sees traders as the informed and educated people they surely can be, there are scientists who see them another way entirely; as atoms in a box, billiard balls on a table, unthinking actors who obey not so much the laws of economics, as the laws of physics. The things that result from those actions may be undeniably extraordinary- the creation or destruction of trillions of dollars of wealth in a matter of hours- but down at the fine-grained level at which the transactions are made, the players themselves can be remarkably simple things.

..When the tide of the market shifts, most of us shift with it; when it flows back, the other way , we do the same. We like to think we are informed by trends, but often as not, we’re simply misled by them, snookered by what everyone else is doing into concluding that we ought to do the same.

..Economic models always begin with the assumption of perfect rationality, of a universe of logical people, all doing what they can to master their utility. But, physicists studying economics begin with the assumption that people can’t think.

I agree with the physicists. When a Ponzi scheme is exposed, one is always amazed, in hindsight, at the fact that so many seemingly sensible people allowed themselves to be conned.

Take a print-out of this post..

After reading through all the enlightening, online responses to the question, “What are you optimistic about?” posed by The Edge Foundation, in 2007, I still felt the need, recently, to pick up the book that has been published by them, with the same compilation.

Reading stuff online is all very well, but there’s nothing to beat the print version and the convenience of reading it wherever you want to, be it on a flight, in the bathroom, at work…

One of the contributors, Walter Isaacson, has expressed his optimism on this very point, namely, that he is hopeful about the future of printing technology:

I am very optimistic about print as a technology. Words on paper are a wonderful information storage, retrieval, distribution, and consumer product. That is why I appreciate the fact that many Edge forums are transformed into books, and it's why I hope someday that there is a gorgeous Edge Magazine that I can flip through and touch. Imagine if we had been getting our information delivered digitally to our screens for the past 400 years. Then some modern Gutenberg had come up with a technology that was able to transfer these words and pictures onto pages that could be delivered to our doorstep, and we could take them to the backyard, the bath, or the bus. We would be thrilled with this technological leap forward, and we would predict that someday it might replace the internet.

This is an interesting way of looking at progress, from both directions. Imagine if we had been going around only by automobiles for 500 years. Then some inventor came up with an amazing two-wheeled vehicle that eliminated the need to fill any fuel, which could be pedalled manually and which could be parked easily against a tree, and which did not belch out any smoke, we would be thrilled at this technological leap and predict that some day, this device- let’s call it the bicycle- might replace the car…

Why I look so young.

“If I am looking much younger now than ever, it is because I have stopped eating any food item that is white in colour- such as rice, milk, curd ,salt, sugar, etc, from the age of forty”, actor Rajnikanth is quoted in today’s papers.

I found this very interesting.

I have met, and I am sure you too have met, many people with their own dietary preferences. I know some hard core vegetarians, a few vegans, and one or two who swear by organically-grown vegetables and fruits.

Moving along the continuum, I have a vegetarian friend who is partial to fish and some who consume only white meat, not red meat. There is a European colleague who takes only red meat, mainly beef, that too after making sure that the cattle had been allowed to graze in open meadows (eating chicken, according to him, induces stress in our bodies, as the meat comes from creatures raised and traumatised in packed poultry farms. Avoid at all cost, he implores).

Some consultants recommend green leafy vegetables, some advise you to lay off fats and some like Atkins who have made a fortune by asking people to avoid carbohydrates. So, there are so many categories in which you can slot people based on the diet they prefer or the diet they steer clear of.

But, this is the first time I have come across a person who shuns food that is white in colour.

I too would like to start a new category. Suppose, I start a fad by limiting my diet to food substances that begin only with the letter ‘b’, like bread, butter, broccoli, biryani, bisi bela bath, bagala bath, beans, baby corn, beef, batata vada, burger, boori ( as poori is pronounced is some parts of Tamilnadu), barotta ( as pronounced in some parts of….), biscuits, bakery products, butterscotch ice cream… Raj’s B-Diet, it will be called. No, that won’t find me followers. Maybe, I should simply start a cult that avoids all items with names that begin with the letter “x’ or “z”. “The secret of my eternal youthfulness is that I have always shunned zebra meat…” I will proclaim

Weather forecast by drinking wine.

In his book, “Super Crunchers”, the author Ian Ayres refers to the work done by Princeton economist, Orley Ashtenfelter, on the parameters that affect quality of wine. Ashtenfelter went on to develop a quantitative analysis to predict the price of wine, from the weather data in the year in which the grapes were grown. He had the temerity, says Ayers, to reduce his theory to a formula:

Wine quality= 12.145+0.00117 winter rainfall+0.0614 average growing season temperature- 0.00386 harvest rainfall.

Though this might prove useful to connoisseurs of wine and those who need to invest in the vineyards, I don’t see much practical use, outside this narrow domain.

If we can use Ashtenfelter’s formula in reverse, and predict the next year’s average temperature and harvest rainfall, based on the quality of wine sold this year, there might be some interesting applications.

Catch the phrase?

An article in The Slate, ‘hunts for clues on what makes a catchphrase catch on and which ones deserve to be cast aside. And to make distinctions among the welter of catchphrases in use today, to identify variations and to distinguish the ones that still have some life in them’ and explains the different phases :

It is possible to think of catchphrase use in stages. There's Stage 1, when you first hear a phrase and take pleasure in its imaginative use of language on the literal and metaphorical level.

Then there's Stage 2, when you use it to establish "street cred” or convey a sense of being au courant.

Then there's Stage 3, when the user acknowledges a phrase's over-ness and tries to extract some final mileage out of it by gently mocking it, usually by using ironic quotes, or adding "as they say" to the end.

Finally, there's Stage 4: terminal obsolence, dead phrase walking.

As an example of Stage 4, the author mentions the phrase, “at the end of the day”. (In a post, I had also wondered why this particular phrase was so popular with cricket commentators and players.).

Being part of the corporate world, and as a regular in the seminar circuit, I hear and help spread quite a few catchphrases myself. At a recent meeting, I heard the phrase, “in terms of” used more than a hundred times (starting with “What I want to present in terms of setting the agenda for the meeting” and ending with, “ what I want to summarise here in terms of concluding this meeting….”).

Lights on, ready, double action...

Why do Indian movies where actors play double or multiple roles continue to enthrall audiences? Why are stories where the same actor plays the parts of son, father and grandfather, or quadruplets separated at birth so common here?

What is it about Kamal Haasan’s ten-role film that has people queuing up to watch it on the day of release? And, why is this type of multi-roling rare in Hollywood fims? A character going out in disguise, yes, but donning roles of different characters, quite rare.

Some decades back, when stage play was the norm, double roles would have been a novelty and also a necessity due to shortage of actors. It was an interesting stage-craft and watching the actors live and switching roles with rapidity would have drawn gasps of admiration from the viewers. This fascination would have been carried over when movies came on to the scene, thanks to the tricks that the camera could be made to play.

But, in these days of graphics and sophisticated animation, when voices can be dubbed and sound-engineered, where make-up techniques have evolved to make the ugliest of males look like the prettiest of females (and vice versa, to keep the post gender neutral), where cinematographic methods can easily enable Kamal Haasan to act out all the characters of Mahabharatha (including the 100 sons of Dhritarashtra), why should we be surprised or awed by the performance at all? Any two-bit artist who has a sufficient reserve of narcissism, who has the patience to let his/her face be painted, glued and otherwise brutalized can show off his/her histrionic/hertrionic talents without much difficulty. So, why the fuss? What purpose do these ‘double roles’ serve?

The best example of someone donning a double role in real life for a very noble cause was revealed to me a few years back. In one of the minor cricket matches (Chennai, fifth division league), a star opening batsman of the team batting first, got out cheaply. He was immediately whisked away to the nearest barber shop, his head tonsured and sent in again at No.5 or 6 as a different batsman. He managed to score an impressive 64 runs. Of course, the opening batsman didn’t come out to field, due to ‘injury’.

Learning from this excellent story, we should make better use of Tendulkar. Due to practical limitations, we can’t let him bat eleven times, but let’s say he is sent in to bat at No 2, 6, and 10 positions, named respectively Twodulkar, Sixdulkar and Tendulkar. He goes in at No 2, whacks a century, comes back to the pavilion, colours his hair, goes back at No 6, scores another century, runs back to the pavilion, puts on a fake moustache, goes in at No 10, scores another half century… Of course, batsmen at No 3,5,7,8,9 have to play out their parts well, and make sure that they don’t create a situation where Tendulkar has to play out a double role in real time. And, when India is fielding, the look-alikes of Two-dulkar and Sixdulkar, created by the make-up crew of Shahrukh Khan, will have to stand at third man and long on, with caps and goggles. No one will notice the difference, especially since the real Tendulkar’s fielding is nothing much to write about, these days.

This would be a far better application of multi-roling, don't you think?

Traffic discipline

A typical morning at the railway level crossing near Bangalore and a typical evening at the road junction at Hanoi. (both videos via BoingBoing.)

Nothing warms the heart more than viewing such scenes where complete orderliness prevails and life goes on peacefully.

Diamonds may not be forever.

In a post, two years back, I had linked to the e-book titled Diamond Invention that reported on the illusion created about the scarcity of diamond, to prop up the prices artificially.

A recent article in The Smithsonian says:

Natural diamonds aren't particularly rare. In 2006, more than 75,000 pounds were produced worldwide. A diamond is a precious commodity because everyone thinks it's a precious commodity, the geological equivalent of a bouquet of red roses, elegant and alluring, a symbol of romance, but ultimately pretty ordinary……diamonds are simply crystallized pure carbon, just as rock candy is crystallized sugar—an ordered array of atoms or molecules.

Credit for the modern cult of the diamond goes primarily to South Africa-based De Beers, the world's largest diamond producer. Before the 1940s, diamond rings were rarely given as engagement gifts. But De Beers' marketing campaigns established the idea that the gems are the supreme token of love and affection. Their "A Diamond Is Forever" slogan, first deployed in 1948, is considered one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time. Through a near total control of supply, De Beers held almost complete power over the diamond market for decades, carefully hoarding the gemstones to keep prices—and profits—high

.

The article reports that lab-grown gemstones are now available, that are indistinguishable from natural diamonds and this could trigger the beginning of the end of the high-price era. True, artificially diamonds are not exactly cheap today, but once the development costs are amortised, the price is bound to come down.

“A diamond for everyone” could be the new marketing slogan.

There's hope for this planet.....

In a lovely post, Sunil Laxman makes an ‘astute observation’ on the ‘land of liberty’.

“I learnt one of the first rules of living in a consumer paradise. In order to live the American life, one had to buy lots of stuff continuously, but remember to upgrade constantly, and get rid of the old stuff. .. There is a ton of “junk” here in this country that is perfectly good and useable, and which would be very valuable to lots of people around the world.”

He goes on to discuss a corollary to this observation – that, if you happened by chance to retain the stuff long enough, they would acquire antique value, and you could end up making a fortune.

Leaving aside the corollary for the moment, consumerism of the American variety has been discussed much in recent years, with a self-evident fact being reinforced that a linear process of production, distribution, consumption and disposal cannot last long in a planet with finite resources.

One solution is proposed in this article in WorldChanging, which I heartily endorse. What we need to do to save the planet, says the author, is to work less.

..our long work hours allow us to produce and buy more and more “stuff,” resulting in a greater pressure on resources and an inevitably stream of more waste…..by reducing work hours, Americans would reduce the energy used for transportation, and even more importantly, that they would reduce the energy necessary for the production of goods – as Americans trade time for money, they would consume and produce less.

The good news is that some American companies are beginning to think that a 4-day week is a good idea. Unfortunately, they want to make it a 10-hour day. This is completely wrong, argues the author. This will only increase stress levels. ‘The real solution to this problem is to go to a four-day workweek of eight-hour days. Total production would be reduced slightly, but this will make us more sustainable”, he recommends.

I support this idea. Not just for America, but India too. Not because I will need to work less, believe me. Because I want to make a supreme sacrifice of my working hours to save this planet.

May I use this opportunity to reiterate my humble suggestion of redesigning the calendar and banning Mondays forever?

How to become a famous blogger

(Source)

To see or smell?

While reflecting here on the challenges posed by dysfunctional sense organs, I had quoted Oliver Sacks to the effect that a person born deaf was likely to be more handicapped than a person born blind.

What about ‘becoming blind” and ‘becoming anosmic ( losing the ability to smell)? Jonah Lehrer quotes from a book called “Scent of desire” by Rachel Herz:

In one study that contrasted the trauma of being blinded or becoming anosmic [losing you sense of smell] after an accident, it was found that those who were blinded initially felt much more traumatized by their loss than those who had lost their sense of smell. But follow-up analyses on the emotional health of these patients one year later showed that the anosmics were faring much more poorly than the blind. The emotional health of anosmic patients typically continues to deteriorate with passing time, in some cases requiring hospitalization

.

Jonah adds:

As you can probably guess, the French novelist was right: there is something uniquely sentimental about the buttery whiff of a seashell-shaped cookie (or any other odor). This is because smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory. Their mark is primal and indelible. All our other senses (sight, touch and hearing) are first processed by the thalamus and only then sent along to the hippocampus. As a result, these senses are much less efficient at summoning up our past

.

What a finely tuned and optimized system the human body is!

Update 09/07/08; An article in Slate, written by a person suffering from anosmia, talks about the miseries of losing one’s smell. The author, Elizabeth Zierah, partially disabled by a stroke at an early age, writes that she found the experience of losing her smelling ability later on, far more traumatic. “As the scentless and flavorless days passed” she writes, I felt trapped inside my own head, a kind of bodily claustrophobia, disassociated. It was as though I were watching a movie of my own life. When we see actors in a love scene, we accept that we can't smell the sweat; when they take a sip of wine, we don't expect to taste the grapes. That's how I felt, like an observer watching the character of me”

God!

In this post written soon after his mother’s death, Amit Varma narrates how he, as a non-believer in God or souls, and without the attendant comforting philosophies of the afterlife, had to deal with death as simply death. He defends his atheism thus:

The conviction that there is no God is irrational because one cannot prove a negative. (How do you prove that something does not exist?) However, it is entirely rational to not believe in something whose existence has not been demonstrated. I don’t believe in dragons or fairies because no one has yet proved to me that they exist. Ditto God. I am not asserting that God does not exist, but simply saying that I don’t believe in the existence of God because I see no evidence of Him (or Her, or It). This is not a dogmatic position: if you can prove to me tomorrow that God or dragons exist, I will start to believe in them. Until then, I remain in disbelief. That’s atheism.

But his is not a militant brand of atheism, adds Amit:

What other people choose to believe in is none of my business, and I respect their right to their beliefs. But the right to religion does not imply the right to force it on others. I object when people try to coerce others into conforming with their beliefs, believing that their religion gives them the license to infringe on the rights of others. Religion in the private domain and in community settings can be useful, and a force for good, but too often in recent times, it has been used to justify the worst excesses: genocides, riots, terrorism, and all kinds of coercion.

Christopher Hitchkens, author of the book,” God is not great” is far more critical of religion, the medium through which the illusion of God is constantly propagated. Religion, he argues, poisons everything and will be responsible for the destruction of all the hard won human attainments. In the concluding chapter, he writes:

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything impossible. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a world-view, to prevent the emergence of rituals, it can now only impede and retard- or try to turn back- the measurable advances that we have made

.

Christopher furnishes exhaustive data on the destruction caused in the name of God and argues that religion must be stamped out ruthlessly.

While agreeing with Christopher’s conclusions, I still think that his reasoning and logic could have been better. He fails to establish clearly that religion does more harm than good. Citing incidents that reveal the destructive capabilities of religion or arguing that it has caused “harm” or has the potential to cause harm are not enough. Because a corresponding argument can be put forth, with examples, that religion has also done some good, binding people together, providing a framework for moral values, etc.

For instance, I can, with equal ease, put together a fat book called “Sports must be banned”, completely ignoring the plus points of brotherhood and harmony that sports have promoted, and instead packing it with stories of how fans have gone on murder sprees after football games, or talk about the killing during the Munich Olympics, or about the scandals involving drugs and betting to rest my case.

Unlike Christopher, Amit has made his point in a moderate and balanced manner and, further, is open to changing his views if evidence presents itself at a later date. Which is what ‘scientific temper’ is all about.

Which of the senses would you give up?

In an outbound team-building exercise that I took part, we were split into three groups of five members each and marooned on three different “islands”. Members of Group A (of which I was a part) had their feet tied together and were ‘immobile’. Members of Group B were deaf and dumb and gagged and fitted with ear-plugs. While those from Group C were blind-folded. The objective was to get the members of Groups B and C from their islands that were about to be deluged, over to Island A, in about 45 minutes. Vital information on survival tools was available only with the deaf and dumb, and needed to be communicated to others through sign language..

The pressure and the intensity could be experienced, thanks to the build-up provided by the coordinator. And, finally, of course, we could empathise profoundly with the challenges of being disabled in any manner.

Later, we were discussing which of the disabilities was more “preferable”, under the circumstances, if we had been given the Hobson’s choice. Obviously, we could not come to a consensus. Each had its own drawbacks and a silver lining. And, for us, it was only a temporary disability. Those of us who were blindfolded could still be made to visualize, by providing graphic description. The deaf could lip-read as they had the language skills.

What about those unfortunate ones who are born with such infirmity, in the real world? Does being born blind pose more challenges than being born deaf? Or, is it the other way?

In an absorbing article called “A deaf world”, Oliver Sacks says:

“Whether deafness is ‘preferable’ to blindness, if happens in later life, is arguable; but to be born deaf is infinitely more serious than to be born blind- at least potentially so. For the prelingually deaf, unable to hear their parents, risk being severely retarded, if not permanently defective, in their grasp of language, unless early and effective measures are taken. And to be defective in language, for a human being, is one of the most desperate of calamities, for it is only through language that we enter fully into our human estate and culture, communicate freely with our fellows, acquire and share information. If we cannot do this, we will be bizarrely disabled and cut off- whatever our desires, or endeavours, or native capabilities. And indeed we may be so little able to realize our intellectual capacities as to appear mentally defective.”

Beethoven would never have managed his musical feats, had he been pre-lingually deaf. He was ‘lucky’ to have developed deafness, only after he was 26 years old, and had developed the ‘ear’ for music.

The manholes of Mumbai

In Mumbai, city officials are upset by an American warning about the risks of falling into manholes in India's commercial capital during the monsoon season. Jairaj Phatak, the municipal commissioner, estimates that 10 people or fewer have died in such a manner in recent years. (via).

A post in the Mumbai Metblogs links to the news item on the travel advisory and comments angrily:“Maybe they should deploy more staff to sort out visa backlogs instead of such studies”

Here is an old post, I came across via the same Mumbai Metblogs, where the blogger narrates his nightmarish encounter with the Mumbai sewage system, thanks to an open manhole.

Maybe the bloggers at Mumbai Metblogs ought to dip into their archives, once in a while.

Use cash, spend less

That we tend to spend more when we use a credit card than when we use physical cash, is stating the obvious. When we use cash, the ‘pleasure of buying’ is instantly weighed against the ‘pain of making the payment” and this forces us to pause a bit. With credit cards, the pain of payment comes much later, and the temptation of buying meets with reduced resistance.

Jonah Lehrer explains the physiological activity in the brain:

“What's interesting to me is the way credit cards take advantage of some innate flaws in the brain. When we buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss - our wallet is literally lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract, so that we don't really feel the downside of spending money. Brain imaging experiments suggest that paying with credit cards actually reduces activity in the insula, a brain region associated with negative feelings. As George Loewenstein, a neuroeconomist at Carnegie-Mellon says, "The nature of credit cards ensures that your brain is anaesthetized against the pain of payment." Spending money doesn't feel bad, so you spend more money.”

That’s why you should, right now, cut your credit cards (all eight of them) into small pieces and flush them down your toilet. Carry cash wherever you go.

A thing about cash. For some reason, I am more reluctant to part with a five-rupee note than with a five-rupee coin, although the metallic coin should, logically, give the impression of higher value than the paper note. I have this careless habit of leaving loose change on a table or desk, as the coins make the wallet a lot heavier. This is ok with Indian currency, but once when I was travelling in Europe, I counted the Euro coins that I had left behind in the hotel room. It added up to more than Rs 1000/- , a sum if available in the form of notes, I would safely deposit in a locker. I wonder if the note and the coin tickle different parts of the brain

I also wonder if I can sponsor a research on how to manipulate the insula region of the brains of my daughters, to trigger sharp negative feelings whenever they force me to take out my credit card...or cash.

The reaction to 'the elements'.

In a post, a few weeks back, I had referred to Shashi Tharoor’s criticism of R.K.Narayan- that the latter was one-dimensional and his repertoire extremely narrow. My point was that if that was how RKN chose to be, and if that fetched him loyal readership, there was no need for him to strive to be multi-dimensional or to make effort to widen his range.

Actually, I wrote that post after reading something about the ‘elements’ that a writer needs to master while narrating a story. So, RKN was free to choose his mix of elements, I had argued.

The post elicited this comment from Manasi:

“I don't know who you folks are, but from the brief introduction it appears that most of you are engineering/technocrat/cyber-coolie types, which makes this rant not so surprising. Really, calling RKN's prose pedestrian is generous at best. Surely, no one takes him very seriously except for folks that speak English as a second language. It is with good reason that RKN is not seriously in India or abroad, his prose is "Wren and Martin" meets "Illustrated Weekly" lacking any aesthetic beauty whatsoever, his analysis is banal and mindless, though I understand that may be difficult for engineering types to appreciate. Perhaps the one use RKN may be good for is to train the legions of call center workers and cyber coolies to somewhat gramatically correct English (which would be an improvement), while also providing them a reaffirmation of their simple minded view of life.”

Reading between the lines and delving into the sub-text of Manasi’s subtle comment, what I discern is that the engineering/technocrat/cyber-coolie types must stick to their narrow domain and not pretend to be literary/author/ types. Other e/t/c-c types in the blogosphere- please note.

Wow!

One of the most famous palindromes is “ A man, a plan, a canal: Panama”, said to have been coined by one Leigh Mercer in the November 13 1948 issue of Notes & Queries, to capture in one line the story behind the construction of the Panama Canal. I could appreciate this palindrome a lot better after reading the absorbing story of the Panama Canal told by Henry Petroski in one of his books.

This was a rare instance of a palindrome fitting into a context and making sense. The other one was “Able was I ere I saw Elba”, to describe Napolean’s final days.

The Panama palindrome has been gradually expanded further into meaningless sentences.

“A man, a plan, a cat, a canal – Panama!”

“A man, a plan, a cam, a yak, a yam, a canal – Panama!”

“A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal – Panama!”

“A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal – Panama!”

As the linked article says, in 1984 , someone used a computer program and the Unix spelling dictionary to generate a 540-word Panama palindrome. It doesn't read so well as the others because the simple program allowed abstract nouns and mass nouns like a ten, a salt and a wax.

This record has been beaten hollow by this 17259-word effort , referred by Tyler Cowen here. It took me a few minutes to even scroll down to get to the bottom of the palindrome.

Enough to give one an acute attack of aibohphobia. the fear of palindromes or words that spell the same backwards- such as aibohphobia.

Sale! Sale!

I remember a scene in a Tamil play where one of the characters would manage to sell the Chennai Central Station to a gullible villager visiting the city. When the buyer showed signs of hesitation, he would sweeten the deal further by offering the adjoining Moore Market at no extra charge.

This is not such a novel idea, as there are reports of enterprising salesmen in New York who perfected the art of selling public property, as early as 1900. According to Carl Sifakis, who tells his story in "Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles," George C Parker produced impressive forged documents to prove that he was the owner of Brooklyn Bridge, then convinced his buyers that they could make a fortune by controlling access to the roadway. "Several times," Mr. Sifakis wrote, "Parker's victims had to be rousted from the bridge by police when they tried to erect toll barriers." (source).

Not that Parker was a one-trick pony. He was also adept at selling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty and Grant's Tomb.

Maybe this Parker was the one who sold the lighthouse at Massachusetts to some sucker. And, for good measure, also threw in a 4000-year old Egyptian pyramid for free. Both these monuments that were presumed lost have been found recently. (via)

Anybody interested in buying the Taj Mahal? I can give it to you at a good price. And add some freebie too, the Agra Fort.

Conversation with daughter-23

Me: Getting admission into an Engineering College is too much trouble. I don’t think you should get into the Science group when you come into your 11th standard.

Daughter: Appa, you can’t decide that. It’s my choice.

Me: Hey, my parents decided for me, ok? So, I will decide for you. You, in turn, can decide for your child. That’s how life works.

Daughter: It may have worked that way for you. But, I will decide what I want to do.

Me: Look, my parents wouldn’t let me choose what I wanted to study, and if you don’t let me choose what you have to study, I would be sandwiched between an autocratic ancestor and a defiant descendant. I would end up not making the decision for anyone. That wouldn’t’ be fair to me, would it?

Daughter: Too bad. But, if I let you decide on my course, and years later, my daughter refuses to let me choose hers, then I would have lost out. So, rather you than me.

Have money? Want to be happy?

Can money buy you happiness?

No, not if you earn it and greedily spend it on yourself.

But, there’s a way you can buy happiness with money. Just, give it all to me.

That's the insight into the secret of happiness by HBS professor Michael Norton and two colleagues from the University of British Columbia, Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin. Their article, "Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness," appeared in the March 21, 2008 issue of Science.

And, it’s not the absolute amount that matters, but the percentage of what you have. So, don’t worry about the actual figure. Just send me 50% of whatever you have in your bank. There will be a demonstrable increase in your level of happiness, trust me.

You have lived all your life struggling with the paradox that having more money did not necessarily make you happier. I am glad that I would be putting an end to your misery, through this insight. Subject to receipt of your money, of course.

I can hear some of you state cynically that, if I then kept all your money with me, I won’t be happy and I ought to spend it on others, going by the same logic.

Luckily, I have no less an authority than Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick to fall back on. He says that there is a direct correlation between financial windfalls and happiness and that the more you get.. the cheerier you’ll become. Large sums are better than small sums.

So, by allowing you to give me all your money and then not sharing the windfall with anybody else, I will ensure that both of us are happy.

The perfect voice

In my previous post, I had referred to the plight of frogs and crickets whose mating calls get drowned in the high noise generated by human beings and, sadly, do not reach the intended recipients.

The problem is no less acute for the human race, believe me. There is far too much competition. And far too many voices riding the sound waves.

So, if you are a human being, as I suspect you are, and you want your voice to stand out amidst that of thousands of human beings and reach out to your potential mate, what do you do?

What you need to do is speak in such a manner that you utter no more than 164 words per minute and pause for 0.48 seconds between sentences. Sentences themselves should fall rather than rise in intonation. Make sure that your voice exhibits vocal traits associated with positive characteristics, such as confidence and trust. (source)

Using that formula, unleash the cultivated voice in the vicinity of the prospective mate and watch him or her, as the case may be, swoon and drop into your waiting arms.

And, when you arms are free, remember to send me a ‘thank you’ note

Anthrophonix

While on a trek through the elephant sanctuary near Thekkadi, after we had walked a couple of km, the guide asked us to stop, to remain absolutely silent and to start behaving like animals. Not what you imagine. What he was trying to tell us was that, once we were inside a forest, we should alert all our senses and watch out for small cues such as footmarks, or pick up sounds from different types of birds and animals. In a matter of a few minutes, he identified and pointed out the sounds from twelve different bird types, bearing exotic names such as blue-billed cockatoo, white-eyed mockatoo, red-tailed sockatoo, green-winged lockatoo, etc.

That was many years back. Today, if you were to go into the same forest, you will not be able to hear the cockatoo or the mockatoo, or for that matter the sockatoo and lockatoo. That’s because their characteristic sounds have been drowned by the racket made by human machinery.

Bernie Kraus, a field recording scientist, says that the natural sound of the world is vanishing. He'll be deep inside the Amazon, recording that cricket, but when he listens carefully he also hears machinery: The distant howl of a 747 or the dull roar of a Hummer miles way. (source)

Krause has a word for the pristine acoustics of nature: biophony. It's what the world sounds like in the absence of humans. But in 40 percent of the locations where Krause has recorded over the past 40 years, human-generated noise has infiltrated the wilderness. "It's getting harder and harder to find places that aren't contaminated," he says.

According to Kraus, in a biophony, animals divide up the acoustic spectrum so they don't interfere with one another's voices. So, a spectrogram of a wilderness recording, in which all the component noises are mapped according to pitch would look like the musical score for an orchestra, with each instrument in its place. No two species are using the same frequency. When they issue mating calls or all-important warning cries, they aren't masked by the noises of other animals.

But what happens when man-made noise — anthrophony, as Krause dubs it — intrudes on the natural symphony? Maybe it's the low rumble of nearby construction or the high whine of a turboprop. Either way, it interferes with a segment of the spectrum already in use, and suddenly some animal can't make itself heard. The information flow in the jungle is compromised.

So, if you are a male frog and you send out a mating call hoping to get a favourable response from a female of your species ( or vice versa to keep this blog gender neutral), you might not get any, as your croaking for all its sex appeal would have been jammed by the noise from a tractor nearby. Soon, no frogs and no Prince Charmings would be around.

All due to the anthrophonic acoustic imprint that you selfish human beings imposed on this planet.

Shame on you.

Well fed

“For 50 years, the Dalai Lama asked us to use peaceful means to solve the problems, and that achieved nothing. China just criticizes him. After he’s gone, there definitely will be violent resistance”- a monk is quoted as saying in an article titled “Fed up with peace”.

Whereas Gandhi used non-violence as a principle and as a tactic, the Dalai Lama, according to his critics, has mistaken non-violence for mere, passive resistance and has been ineffective.

Observers also point out that such a weak movement is unlikely to cut ice with the Chinese, who unlike the British against India, and without the burden of democracy, don’t have to worry about public sentiment.

Why is the Dalai Lama persisting with his policy of peaceful protests and not showing more aggression? One reason I can think of is that he is starving all the time. According to his official website, for breakfast, His Holiness typically has hot porridge, tsampa (barley powder), bread with preserves, and tea. For lunch, when in Dharamsala, he eats a light vegetarian meal. He has a cup of tea at 6 pm, and as ordained for Buddhist monks, skips dinner.

How can you expect him to shed his inhibitions and turn to aggression against the Chinese, when he is not feeding himself properly?

As P.G.Wodehouse wrote in one of his Mulliner stories, “"Why is there unrest in India? Because its inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly pudding and a spot of Stilton, you will see the end of all this nonsense of Civil Disobedience”

Bradbury tales

What is the earliest event in your life that you can remember? Think back. Maybe a wedding you went along with your parents or a vacation. It is unlikely that you were less than three years old then.

Ray Bradbury has claimed in his autobiography that he clearly remembers the day he was born. “"I have what might be called almost total recall back to my birth," he says.”This is a thing I have debated with psychologists and with friends over the years. They say, 'It's impossible.' Yet I remember." Ray had overstayed his time in the womb by a month, and it was his theory that the additional incubation time may have heightened his senses. (source)

A chapter titled ‘Can a person remember being born?”, in “How Stuff works” provides an explanation.

Psychologists refer to the inability of most adults to remember events from early life, including their birth, as childhood amnesia. More than a century later, researchers have yet to pin down a precise explanation for why childhood amnesia occurs.

For a long time, the rationale behind childhood amnesia rested on the assumption that the memory-making parts of babies' brains were undeveloped and that, around age 3, children's memory capabilities rapidly accelerate to adult levels. However, psychologists have discovered that children as young as 3 months old and 6 months old can form long-term memories.

To form memories, humans must create synapses, or connections between brain cells, that encode sensory information from an event into our memory. From there, our brains organize that information into categories and link it to other similar data, which is called consolidation. In order for that memory to last, we must periodically retrieve these memories and retrace those initial synapses, reinforcing those connections.

Now we know that babies have a strong implicit memory and can encode explicit ones as well, which indicates that childhood amnesia may stem from faulty explicit memory retrieval. Unless we're thinking specifically about a past event, it takes some sort of cue to prompt an explicit memory in all age groups [source: Bauer].

What are those cues?

Language skills.

Our earliest memories may remain blocked from our consciousness because we had no language skills at that time. A 2004 study traced the verbal development in 27- and 39-month old boys and girls as a measure of how well they could recall a past event. The researchers found that if the children didn't know the words to describe the event when it happened, they couldn't describe it later after learning the appropriate words [source: Simcock and Hayne].

In addition, we develop knowledge of our personal past when we begin to organize memories into a context. Many preschool-age children can explain the different parts of an event in sequential order, such as what happened when they went to a circus. But it isn't until their fifth year that they can understand the ideas of time and the past and are able to place that trip to the circus on a mental time line.

So, Ray Bradbury may have had a brain structure that was superior to that of all other babies ever born, but he would not have had the language skills, the sense of self, or the awareness of the context, for him to retrieve the moment of his birth from memory.

So, how do you explain his claim then? Simple. He was just pulling a fast one.

Were Tamilians the first Pakistanis?

Here is someone putting forward a theory – or, perhaps reviving an old one- that there was an Indus Valley civilization which belonged to the Vedic culture. The Aryans, the horse-chariot people, displaced and pushed it south. The horse-people with no culture of their own adopted the Vedic culture and the Vedic Indus Valley civilization had a second innings.

Also, he adds, while an entire swathe of land stretching from Gujarat to Spain shares an Indo-European family of languages, a notable exception is the Kalat region of Baluchistan, where more than two million people speak Bruhai, a Dravidian group of language. Ergo, Tamil is the oldest of all present Indian languages and Tamilians were perhaps the first Sindhis.

Then, he digresses slightly and wonders if the Ramayana took place in Russia? The epic mentions horses, which were not to be found in India then. Was Ram a Cossack, the most famed of all horse-people? Doesn’t “Valmiki” sound Russian, perhaps a corruption of Vladmikhailovich, who lived in the present Russian town named Sverdlovsk, formerly perhaps Swargalok?

My own theory is that the Ramayan wasn’t written by Valmiki at all, but by someone else bearing the same name.

Chatter, beware.

As a frequent traveller, I’ve had my share of aggressive co-passengers intent on starting a conversation and hell-bent on ruining my sleep. Not that I am particularly unsociable or hostile, but there are times when a man just wants to be left alone.

How does one stop the nuisance without appearing too rude or impolite?

Charlie Brooker, a columnist in The Guardian, who had a similar misfortune of being driven back home by a garrulous taxi-driver, recalls a passage from a book he had read once and which might just do the trick :

“Turn to your unwanted companion at the first opportunity, and explain to him or her that you have a condition which makes you sleep with your eyes open. It's harmless, you say, but it can be quite creepy - so you're taking the opportunity to warn them in advance so they don't freak out later. Then you sit back in your chair and silently wait a while. After about 10 minutes, slowly loll your head sideways toward them, keeping your eyes wide open the whole time, and stay there, staring at the side of their face, for as long as possible. They'll be far too weirded out to utter a word”

I will try this out next time.

Raw carrots and processed tomatoes

Numerous studies show that people who consume lots of vegetables have lower rates of heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, eye problems and even cancer, according to this article.

But, you’ve got to find the best way to eat them.

If you eat them raw, you will have high levels of Vitamin A and relatively high dose of beta carotene, but you will fall short on lycopene. On the other hand if you cook spinach, you rob it of 64% of its Vitamin A.

Processed tomatoes actually have higher lycopene than fresh tomatoes. Boiling is better for carrots than steaming, frying or serving them raw, though it results in the complete loss of polyphenols.

Broccoli is best eaten after microwaving or pressure-cooking rather than boiling or steaming, as it then retains 90% of its nutrients.

So, don’t take chances. Hedge your risks by eating a variety of vegetables with a variety of nutrients and prepared in a variety of ways. By consuming tons of these vegetables, you will prevent heart attacks, hypertension, diabetes, eye problems and even cancer. You may die of lycopene poisoning or carotene toxicity, though. Too bad.

Look what I found in a New York cab...

Via Kottke, I came across this recent piece in The New York Times, that gives a list of interesting things that were lost and found in New York taxi cabs. Unbeknownst to the driver, one of the lost suitcases contained 31 diamond rings and he got a $100 tip for returning it to the owner.

The list reminded me of a lovely short story by the Italian author, Corrado Alvaro, in which a ruby as big as a hazelnut, a famous stone, bearing a famous name and said to be of enormous value, is left behind in a cab, by an Indian Maharaja travelling to New York. It is picked up by an Italian emigrant, a simpleton, who is about to return home. He had a habit of picking up odds and ends and was thrilled to add this red crystal to his impressive collection of twelve fountain pens, hair clippers, American cloth and a metal object whose function mystified him.

He decides to keep it as a lucky charm for the future, reasoning that “ the various objects one picks up just before leaving a foreign country are apt to acquire an extraordinary souvenir value, giving one, as it were, a foretaste of distance and nostalgia”. It was just such an affection he felt for this lump of crystal. He regarded it as a kind of talisman. “It became one of those useless objects we cherish all our lives and never have the strength to get rid of, so that in the end they become part of us and even family heirlooms.”

Whereas important things that we watch over or hide away disappear, trivia such as the crystal lump he had never got lost, he noted. It would always remain with him and remind him of the day he was returning home to his village in Italy, after 5 years in New York.

One day, his son picks up the crystal to use as a missile in a game played by boys of the village, that involved knocking down castles of hazelnuts by throwing a heavier one at it. And, that was the end of the priceless ruby or the lump of crystal.

So, the next time you are in a New York cab, do not forget to slip your fingers under the seat cushion and grab whatever object you can find. And, unlike the Italian simpleton, remember it could be of enormous value.

Scientific faith

Neha argues, in a recent post, that it is futile to give a scientific spin to some faith-based action.

If, for instance, you believe in rahukala and auspicious time, by all means cling to that belief. I have no right to question your faith just as you have no right to impose said faith on me. If you want to tie mango leaves on your door on a festive occasion, you should go right ahead, without feeling the need to defend that practice in scientific terms. ( To absorb the CO2, as a friend claimed once).

In the case involving the Ram Sethu, several self-styled experts have tried to produce scientific proof ( NASA satellite photos,etc) or archeological evidence, and made complete fools of themselves. By their senseless arguments, they actually weakened the case. In contrast, senior advocate Soli Sorabjee, told the Supreme Court last week that it was not for the Court to sit in judgement on whether there was scientific evidence or not. ““There is no need to look for any historical or scientific evidences whether Lord Rama made it or not, but that it is the faith of millions of people in this country.”

Quite simply, it is an article of faith. No further explanation is necessary.

Update 20-06-08 : The Slate carries this article on the tendency of some to drape religious beliefs in a cloak of scientific legitimacy. Especially the propensity to quote Einstein. A recently unearthed letter ( written by Einstein in 1954) puts paid to the argument that he believed in religion and a divine presence. An extract from the letter:

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilized interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything "chosen" about them. "

The elements

In a collection of short stories that I read recently, the editor had taken pains to group together stories that had similar ‘elements’. The elements of a short story, he explained in the introduction to the book, are setting (time and location), plot (the sequence in which the author arranges events), conflict (one central struggle or one dominant struggle with other minor ones), character (persons or their characteristics), point of view (first person, character-centric) and the theme ( the controlling idea or insight). A good story is the price of admission into the ranks of good writers, but to engage your readers you’ve got to pay attention to all these elements.

All this may be old hat for students of English Literature, but I have never been taught this in my engineering course; so I read on.

Now different authors in different stories use different types and mix of these elements, to get the readers in their grip. So, if you were reading Hemingway and got conditioned to a certain set of elements in his stories, and then you suddenly shift to James Joyce, who uses different sub-sets of these elements, you are going to find it difficult to accept the change.

The idea in grouping together stories with similar elements was to spare the reader the discomfort and disorientation that are inevitable when moving from one ‘set of elements’ to another.

I guess that the same is true with long stories and novels too. If you try to read Tolstoy, after having finished one of Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle stories, you would do injustice to both yourself and Tolstoy. Not just because one is humorous and the other filled with melancholic stuff about the lives of poverty-stricken Russian peasants. Because, each employs a different structure and mix of elements. You get the point.

Authors ought to know this, right? That’s why I find Shashi Tharoor’s criticism of R.K.Narayan’s style surprising. Here is an extract from one of his columns written in 2001:

The gentle wit, the simple sentences, the easy assumption of the inevitabilities of the tolerant Hindu social and philosophical system, the characteristically straightforward plotting, were all hallmarks of Narayan's charm and helped make many of his novels and stories interesting and often pleasurable.

But I felt that they also pointed to the banality of Narayan's concerns, the narrowness of his vision, the predictability of his prose, and the shallowness of the pool of experience and vocabulary from which he drew. Like Austen, his fiction was restricted to the concerns of a small society portrayed with precision and empathy; unlike Austen, his prose could not elevate those concerns beyond the ordinariness of its subjects. Narayan wrote of, and from, the mindset of the small-town South Indian Brahmin, and did not seem capable of a greater range. His metronomic style was frequently not equal to the demands of his situations. Intense and potentially charged scenes were rendered pathetic by the inadequacy of the language used to describe them. In much of his writing, stories with extraordinary possibilities unfolded in flat,monotonous sentences that frustrated rather than convinced me, and in a tone that ranged from the cliched to the flippant. At its worst, Narayan's prose was like the bullock- cart: a vehicle that can move only in one gear, is unable to turn, accelerate or reverse, and remains yoked to traditional creatures who have long since been overtaken but know no better.

I was, I must admit, particularly frustrated to find that Narayan was indifferent to the wider canon of English fiction and to the use of the English language by other writers, Western or Indian……Narayan's was an impoverished English, limited and conventional, its potential unexplored, its bones bare.

Why should RKN not choose to limit his range? Why should he bother about the wider canon of English fiction, when his bare-bones style and methods managed to get him loyal readership? Why should he pretend to have a wide repertoire, just to impress Tharoor? Can’t this guy understand that RKN’s mix of elements was unique and certainly different from Tharoor’s? In fact, I am sure if RKN had to pick up one of Tharoor’s books, he would have tossed it into the River Sarayu, after reading a couple of lines of his pompous drivel.

And, why did I wait till 2008 to comment on Tharoor’s column of 2001? Because I didn’t know about the ‘elements’ then. Besides, I wasn’t blogging then.

Which reminds me. I read stuff written by more than 50 bloggers, and I realise that each one of them has a different style and ‘mix of elements’. Blogger A gets into the depth of the subject, analyses it threadbare and writes long treatises. Blogger B likes width and to flit from one subject to another, merely providing links. Blogger C sees the world through his lens of libertarianism, while Blogger D wants to project herself as a crusader against social inequity. All very different. So, when I keep surfing from one blog to another, my brain must be getting bombarded with rays of different frequencies.

To avoid a collapse of the hard-disc in my head, I am going to group ‘like bloggers, together in my Google Reader. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

Tendulkar can do no wrong - 2

I had commented some time back on the ingenuity shown by the media in lavishing praise on Tendulkar, even on occasions when he had failed miserably.

The other day, he was out for 12 runs, with Jayasuriya firing on all cylinders at the other end. One of the papers reported that there was something about Sachin’s inspiring presence that brought out the best in Jayasuriya. “When you have someone of the stature of Sachin at the other end, you want to rise to the occasion too…..

In the next match, chasing a total of 66 runs, he got out for a duck. The champion batsman delighted the home crowd, by taking four catches, when Kolkata had batted, reported one of the papers.

Now, Sachin himself is quite level-headed and, in all his interviews, accepts his failures as an inevitable part of the cycle of ups and downs in one’s career. After all, you can’t score a century every time you go in to bat.

The spectators too come to terms with this reality and move on.

But, not some of these reporters. They have this compulsive need to shower accolades on him. Suffering from a variant of the Tolstoy syndrome, they simply cannot accept evidence that is contrary to some belief that they hold dear. Or, believe that their readers hold dear and want reinforced. It is almost as if the press wants to apply the maxim of ‘the king can do no wrong’ and, in the resulting cognitive bias, confer on Sachin, the immunity from any kind of criticism.

When Sachin himself seeks no such immunity or the demi-god status. And, I am sure, nor do most of the readers.

The boy in the well-2

In this post, I had wondered what was it about ‘boys falling into wells” that had the television channels pitching their tents to provide a minute-by-minute commentary on the rescue effort, when incidents involving lives of greater number of people do not get as much attention. For instance, thousands have died in Myanmar recently in the havoc wreaked by a cyclone. It doesn’t seem to capture so much of media space.

Jonah Lehrer links to a study done by Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, on this subject.

According to Slovic, the problem with statistics is that they don't activate our moral emotions, which are what compel us to act. The depressing numbers leave us cold: our mind can't comprehend suffering on such an unimaginable scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well, but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water. Or why we donate thousands of dollars to help a single African war orphan featured on the cover of a magazine, but ignore widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur. As Mother Theresa put it, "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."

Or, as Stalin ( the original, not the one in Chennai) is supposed to have said, ““One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic”

Statistics stay silent in us.

Light Bulb moments

I remember the first time that I convinced myself to buy a Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL), to replace one of the humble incandescent bulbs in my house. After all, as an engineer and one involved with the power sector, wasn't it my duty to set an example, save energy and reduce my carbon footprint?

The electrical shop owner had given me a sales pitch that, though the CFL cost 20 times as much as the bulb, it had a much longer life (around 10000 hours) and that a CFL of 25 watts produced the same luminescence as that from a 100 watt bulb. Considering that I would be using the CFL for a max of 4 hours a day, I calculated that it would last for around 8 years.

As an engineer, and one involved with the power sector, I ought to have known that the life of the CFL was dependent on voltage conditions (which in most parts of India can fluctuate wildly) and the number of times you switched it on or off (which, given the frugality that characterizes Indian mindsets, can happen many times a day, - every time you leave the room) So, instead of the 8 years that it was supposed to last, mine went bust in a few months. Payback calculations made with good intentions while buying the CFL were rendered invalid, for reasons that the Techno explains in this interesting conversation.

Ever since, I remain a CFL- skeptic and cling to the bulb, as much as I can.

So, this report in the L.A.Times ( via Boing Boing) about an incandescent bulb that has been burning continuously for 107 years, appealed to me greatly. Explaining the longevity of the bulb, Tom Brammel, the bulb-keeper says, “Most people just consider it a freak of engineering. But I believe the bulb has stayed alive so many years because the makers gave it a perfect seal, so no air gets inside the bulb to help disintegrate the carbon filament. This bulb operates in a vacuum and it doesn't burn hot. That's the secret."

To which, my question to the engineers in the power sector and the lighting industry is, “ Why don’t you provide a perfect seal in all the bulbs that come out of your factories, so no air gets into it to disintegrate the carbon filament? I realise that you may have to close down your factories, in the absence of repeat business, but we will build well-lit memorials for you, with plenty of your bulbs glowing. Think of the glory that will be yours.

Entomophagy

Rice is in short supply, the world over. So is wheat.. Eating more meat is not the answer, as grain production will need to go up by a factor of 10, to feed the livestock.

The most eco-friendly and least resource-consuming solution is to eat insects, says David Gracer of the Gastronauts, as reported in Discover magazine. The practice, though jarring to western sensibilities, is quite common in many parts of the world.

“If you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.” Insects, he claims, are nutritious. Although they typically contain less protein by weight than beef or chicken—100 grams of giant water bugs or small grasshoppers, for example, have about 20 grams of protein, compared with 27 grams in the same amount of lean ground beef—they do have other benefits. For instance, grasshoppers contain just one-third of the fat found in beef, and water bugs offer almost four times as much iron. A 100-gram portion of the cooked caterpillar Usata terpsichore has about 28 grams of protein. In their dried form, as they are commonly sold in Africa, insects such as grasshoppers may contain up to 60 percent protein."

The Guardian also referred to a UN report of 2004 that promoted insects as an environmentally friendly food source: low impact, consuming very little in the way of feed, easy to harvest, with no special measures required for their husbandry. Insects are arthropods, like lobster, crab and shrimp. They are plentiful, and account for over half of the known species on the planet. We spend billions of pounds trying to control or eradicate them, when we could just be eating them. So why don't we?

We could all become cricket lovers, in a different sense

Daddy's day out

“The kind of knowing you get from experience”, writes Joe Kissell in this post, “is qualitatively different from what you get by reading about something or hearing a story. This is why people travel instead of just reading travel books. However much you may trust other sources of information, they can’t provide what your own senses can. And just as some foods are worth eating even though they don’t taste good, some potentially unpleasant experiences are worth having.”

“From Descartes, who said, “I think, therefore I am,” through phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger, who tried to create a rigorous science of experience, philosophers have time and again reaffirmed the importance of one’s own experience in understanding the world. Yet it is a tacit principle of modern western culture that only pleasant experiences are worth pursuing, that any experience you can’t reasonably expect to enjoy should be avoided if possible. This attitude effectively puts the evaluation of experiences in other people’s hands, but other people will never experience things exactly the way you will. You may enjoy an experience someone else does not, and even if you don’t, you may appreciate the value of collecting that knowledge for yourself.”

That’s more or less how I felt too, yesterday, when I let myself be convinced by my daughter’s persuasion, to watch the cricket match at the Chepauk. Though I have been to the Chepauk several times in the past, the last time I went there was around 1980. Since then, I have dreaded the thought of even going there, getting put off by the prospects of navigating my way through the crowds, bearing the sweltering heat and humidity and finding the transport to get me back home. The pleasant thoughts of watching exciting cricket were always outweighed by these negative ones, and the couch potato always settled down in front of the television in the comfort of one’s home.

The transport issue was solved when daughter suggested that we could take the local train to Chepauk and use the same mode to return, as someone in authority had thoughtfully arranged for a train at midnight. The heat and humidity were tolerated admirably and the navigation through the crowd successfuly managed.

I must say that it was a great experience. The noise was deafening and the atmosphere at the ground electrifying. I realized that nothing can equal the pleasure of watching cricket live at the ground/ To settle for the sanitized version one is offered on television was a poor and unequal compromise. To avoid going to the match, fearing the crowd and the traffic, was to deny oneself the joy that comes with it.

It is so, too, with many other things in life.

Bring on the trainees...

In the barber shop that I go to, there is a certain protocol for training new hands. The first few weeks, the new recruit does some basic and miscellaneous work, like putting on the towel, spraying some water, handing over scissors or knife to the master, dusting the hair off the face – in short, activities with no scope for inflicting any harm on the customer. After some time, he moves up the ladder and tackles responsibilities such as shampooing, drying, an odd shave or two, head and neck massage and such stuff. Then he is gradually entrusted with the responsibility of hair-cut, through a surreptitious process. He will be inflicted on unwary customers or small boys who can’t complain or won’t spot the difference. If a trainee barber were to be assigned to a seasoned campaigner like me, the pretender will be pushed aside summarily and a demand raised for the real one.

So, how does the trainee get trained? If never allowed to get hands-on, he is never going to get the confidence and the master will never get to have subordinates he could delegate the work to.

If the training process for hair-cuts has to overcome so many obstacles, imagine the plight of the trainee surgeons in the medical profession. In his book, “Complications: Notes from the life of a young surgeon” written when he was a Resident, Dr.Atul Gawande observes :

In surgery, as in anything else, skill and confidence are learned through experience- haltingly and humiliatingly. Like the tennis player and the oboist, we need practice to get good at what we do. There is one difference though in medicine: it is people we practice on.

.. We find it hard in medicine to talk about this with patients. The moral burden of practicing on people is always with us, but for the most part unspoken. ..There is always that conflict between the imperative to give patients the best possible care and the need to provide novices with experience.

..By traditional ethics and public insistence, a patient’s right to the best care possible must trump the objective of training novices. We want perfection without practice. Yet everyone is harmed if no one is trained for the future. So learning is hidden behind drapes and the anesthesia and the elisions of language.

..Do we ever tell patients that because we are still new at something, their risks will be inevitably higher, and that they’d likely do better with others who are more experienced?.. I’ve never seen it. Given the stakes, who in the right mind would agree to be practiced upon?

Can people be persuaded to take on chances for societal benefit? We’d ask patients- honestly, openly- and then they say yes? Hard to imagine.

In fact, Dr Gawande answers that last question, by admitting that when he was confronted with a medical emergency involving his son, he decided to go to the cardiologist-in-chief, rather than a junior surgeon, as he wanted the best medical care for him. So, he concedes that, if at all the choice is offered, it is not done equally. The rich and the knowledgeable have and exercise that choice. The doctor’s child has that choice, but not the truck driver’s.

So, the next time you are at that humble barber’s shop, the swanky beauty parlour. in a plane or, unfortunately at the surgeon’s table, spare a thought for that trainee. Because, even if you don't spare that thought, the work is probably getting done by the trainee anyway. Who knows who is operating on you, under cover of anesthesia, or who is flying that plane inside that locked cockpit?

Revenge

‘Revenge’ is such a recurring theme in our movies and is an important ingredient in the masala mix. Why, even in sports, a common headline in the media is that ‘so-and-so avenged their defeat’. A stated policy of Israel– well, I am not sure if it stated- is swift retribution. When Jayalalitha came to power last time, one of her first moves was to imprison the former CM, Karunanidhi. According to the popular story, she had vowed that she would make him eat from the same plate in the same jail that he had thrown her into, when he was in power. Kids caught red-handed in the act of knocking out another kid will come up with a solid defence, “ He hit me first, so I hit him back” and this is usually seen as fair. Taking revenge is ‘acceptable behaviour”.

In his absorbing article in the New Yorker, that I came across via Guru’s blog,( warning: do read the article first, as this post gives away many of the punch lines) ,Jared Diamond narrates a story of revenge set in the highlands of New Guinea. Daniel of the Handa clan was expected to avenge the death of his uncle Soll, who had been murdered by one Isum of the neighbouring Ombal clan. The act of revenge alone would redeem the family honour. Through a series of discussions with Daniel, Jared Diamond understands and explains that “we forget that before there were states, Daniel’s method of resolving major disputes—either violently or by payment of compensation—was the worldwide norm.” Even after nation states came into being and disputes are referred to the Govt for disposal, old tribal methods of personal pursuit of justice continue to co-exist with state legal systems. Fights between two tribes come to an end only when a third tribe emerges as a common enemy, or when the state govt introduces and administers effectively the apparatus to resolve disputes.

What Diamond found interesting was the fact that Daniel was completely at peace with himself after he had successfully avenged the death of his uncle, as if his life mission had been accomplished.

As a contrast, Diamond provides the story of his own father-in-law, Josef Nabel, who as a Jew in Poland was witness to mindless atrocities committed on his family. He then set out, a la Sholay, to nab the perpetrators an, indeed, came face to face with the man who had wiped out his family. Just when he was about to shoot the man , a thought ran through his mind, ““I’ve seen enough of people killing, and behaving like animals. I’ve done enough killing myself. This man behaved like an animal, but I don’t want to become an animal myself by shooting him.” Josef decided to hand over the man to the newly formed Polish Govt, only to see him being released in a year. According to Diamond, Josef died, many decades later, an embittered man overcome with guilt over the fact that he had let go of the murderer of his wife”.

Jared Diamond concludes “We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend” and adds, “state societies and their associated religions and moral codes teach us that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged”.

While I found the story itself quite gripping, that last line made me gulp.

Also, I see the story of “ Priyanka Vadra visiting her father's killer in Vellore jail to come to terms with his death” in a new light. Completely un-tribal.

India- the vibrant democracy

The Bharatiya Custodians of Public Morality (BHACUPUMO) has condemned the organizers of the IPL league for allowing cheerleaders to take part in the cricket festivities. They are outraged by the fact that scantily clad women are being paraded before a mixed crowd (age group 10-70) in an attempt to tarnish the image of India. This, they argue, must be stopped forthwith.

In response, the Progressive Organisation of Women’s Rights ( POWOR) has come out with a strong statement that such a ban would be an infringement on the right of women to express themselves in a manner that they deem fit. The National Cheerleaders Union (NACHU) while endorsing the views of the POW however asked them not to be presumptuous, as there were male members too in the cheerleader squad.

Representing the Bollywood Association of Pensioned Villains (BASSOPEVI) Shatrughan Sinha issued a press release supporting the stand of BHACUPUMO and pointed out how in the hundreds of scenes that he had acted as the rapist, he had ensured that the rapee was always appropriately dressed. Not to be left out, J.Jayalitha of AIADMK demanded the resignation of M.Karunanidhi holding him responsible for the display of skimpily-clad girls at the Chepauk. In a concurrent message as President of the Group of Ex-Heroines of MGR movies ( GROEXHEM), she clarified in Freudian terms that her own insufficient attires in those movies should not invite criticism, as all that had happened in dream scenes, over which she had no control..

The Pediatric Society of India (PEDSOCI) and the Geriatric Community of India (GERCOMMI), took strong exception to one part of BHACUPOMO’s statement which referred to the age band as 10-70. In a joint communiqué, the PEDSOCI and GERCOMMI, while maintaining that they had no specific opinion on the advisability of having cheerleaders, insisted that those aged between 0-10 and above 70, were also part of the mixed crowd.

In an interview to NDTV, Mandira Bedi, (MABE) cricket expert, read out an ex-tempore poem that ridiculed the moral policing done in the name of safeguarding national culture.

The All-India Forum of Ex-tempore Poets (AIFEXPO) immediately was up in arms and expressed shock that a non-member had been given the chance to narrate poems. The AIFEXPO called upon its subscription-paying members to boycott all the programs of NDTV, until further instructions. “If you fail, to obey the mail, we’ll clip your tail, till you wail, and throw you in jail, without the option of bail”, the AIFEXPO’s letter said in lyrical, categorical terms.

Meanwhile, Nestle issued a legal notice to Mandira Bedi, their brand ambassador for 2-minute Maggie, for appearing for two minutes in a public show without her noodle straps that the terms of contract required her to wear all the time.

Last evening, the Prime Minister, under the aegis of the Sonia Gandhi Sycophants Syndicate ( SOGASYCSYN) called all warring factions for a meeting, during which a compromise was worked out, with the cheerleaders agreeing to increase their skirt length by an inch and reduce the angle of their hip sway by twenty degrees. A peace pipe was smoked, signaling the end of the dispute. However, it is understood that this symbolic ritual has incurred the wrath of Anbumani Ramadoss, self-appointed Chairman of the Anti-Smokers Brigade of India (ASBIN).

At the time of posting this, Plus Ultra has been served a stern notice by the Controller of Abbreviated Names ( COABNAM) that use of unauthorized and unregistered acronyms was ultra vires the guidelines issued by the COABNAM and to refrain from violating those norms. Reliable soruces say that Plus Ultra plans to rope in the support of the Fraternity of Bloggers of the Indian Diaspora ( FRABLOINDIA)

Not a clean Slate

Slate refers to a recent, as yet unpublished study, that reports that those Muslims who went to Mecca came back with more moderate views on a range of issues, both religious and nonreligious, suggesting that the Hajj may be helpful in curbing the spread of extremism in the Islamic world. .. it's heartening to find that the Hajj may help to undermine support for the violent methods that have been so devastatingly deployed against Americans in the past.

The tone of the article is so patronising and, even demeaning. I mean, has anyone done a study on the impact of the visits to the Vatican and the Lourdes by the Catholics, and if it makes them more benevolent in their views? Or, what about the millions of devotees who go to Sabarimala, year after year? Do they come back exuding brotherly love, after the pilgrimage? And, since I can’t think of a religious context for the Americans, does their presence at the Super Bowl, rubbing shoulders with thousands of human beings, in a charged atmosphere, convert them into paragons of virtue?

And, a slight digression. If I understood it correctly, the Super Bowl involves a match between winners of two different football leagues. Do you think that the winners of the ICL and IPL leagues must similarly have a match to decide the real champion? Let’s call it the Super Bat.