SK – Page 136 – Pertinent Observations

Mental Health: Update

It’s been over six months since I got off my medication for depression (venlafaxine) and ADHD (methylphenidate), so I thought I should just provide an update. The immediate trigger for this post is that I’m reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile, in which among other things he rants against excess medication, and explicitly picks on medication for depression and ADHD.

Overall, I must mention that I’ve managed pretty well these last six months. Yes, there are depressive bouts. Yes, there are times when I can’t concentrate and I get increasingly restless. Sometimes it is perhaps as bad as it used to be before I started seeing a psychiatrist. But it’s ok. The most important outcome of going to a psychiatrist for a year has been that I’ve gotten diagnosed.

You might have heard this in several places – that ninety percent (or maybe more, or less) of treatment of a disease is diagnosis. And in case of my mental health I find that to be absolutely true. Yes, I took medication for a year. Yes, it helped back then. Yes, as I’ve written before, having those medicines provided me the necessary stimulus to get myself out of the depths I’d gotten into over the last few years. However, I’m certain that I don’t need them any more. But the diagnosis helps.

Two years back my biggest concern was that I wasn’t able to explain my life. There was no story. I had done a lot of things that were seemingly disparate and there were a lot of things that I’d done which I would later regret. So I had a lot of regrets, and I would expend a lot of my idle processor time (in my head) dwelling on these regrets, and wondering why I did certain things the way I did, or why I took the decisions I took. Every time I tried to come up with an explanation for something, I would get the “but everyone deals with that, why can’t you” response.

The biggest advantage of having diagnosed is that it now all fits in. I now know why after getting into IIT with such a good rank I drifted away and completely lost interest. I now know why so many of my initial crushes didn’t work out (ADHD among other things makes you impulsive and blurt out things you aren’t supposed to). I now know why I chose to literally run away from my first job (that’s a long story in itself. Will save it for another day). And I precisely know why I went in and out of three more jobs in the five years after that.

Yes, I might be overfitting in some things (you can see that I’m doing that in the previous paragraph to explain why no relationships worked out). Nevertheless, after a long and ardous search for that one variable or set of variables that would explain a large part of who I am or what I did, when I all I found was noise, I think I’ve found the signal. Till I was close to thirty, I led my life without having fully understood myself. And trying to blame myself for being inferior to other people in certain ways, and constantly regretting my decisions. The diagnosis changed all that. Yes, after a discussion on a mailing list on ADHD some three years back I’d posited that I might have it. Yet, a formal diagnosis from a qualified psychiatrist helped.

So you may ask why I discontinued medication if I know that I have some problems. Two different reasons for the two medicines I was taking. As for Venlafaxine (which I used to take for anxiety and depression), I had a harrowing time in November of last year when I ran out of supplies of the drug and couldn’t find it in any store near my house for a couple of weeks. During this time I would feel weak, have a fever and feel extremely numb in the limbs, but had no clue why that was happening. Later, the psychiatrist told me that these were withdrawal symptoms for failing to take my drugs regularly. I panicked. i didn’t want to get addicted to mind-altering substances. More importantly, around this time I got the feeling that the drug wasn’t doing much help. I would still have the same old bouts of depression. The psychiatrist agreed that I had plateaued in response to the drug. So she recommended a rather slow taper off from the drug (to prevent withdrawal symptoms), which I followed and got off it.

Methylphenidate was useful, and wasn’t addictive (some literature has likened it to wearing spectacles. It affects you only when you’re taking it). Yet, I found that it changed me. Yes, I know that I’m attention deficit and possibly hyperactive, but I refuse to believe now that it’s a ‘disorder’. The problem with the drug was that it was changing my mind. Yes, it made me concentrate so much better. Long strings of meetings when I would visit the client’s office were a breeze thanks to the drug. My concentration levels shot up. Yet, I found that it had impaired my creative thinking. I’m extremely proud of my ability to connect disparate things, but I felt that this drug was impairing my ability to do so. I just wasn’t being myself. And I had found that on days when I would forget to take the drug I would be more capable of creative non-linear thinking. And I figured that with the drug I wasn’t being myself.

So yes, I’ve been off the drugs for a while now and have adjusted to life with it. Yes there are days when I’m constantly fidgety and can’t concentrate to get work done. Yes, nowadays work that takes long bouts of intense concentration gets delayed. But I’m back to being myself. And I’m back to being good at what I thought I was always good at – big picture thinking and making disparate connections.

Yes, one important factor that has helped me to deal with my condition (no, it’s NOT a disorder) is my work. As a freelance management consultant who mostly works from home (and visits client once every couple of weeks) I can set my own pace. If i’m feeling particularly fidgety some day, I can take a break till I’m doing better. I don’t have daily or sub-daily deadlines to bother me (this was my biggest issue with most of my jobs). More importantly there’s no one looking over my shoulder to see what I’m doing, so I can freely switch between my work screen and twitter. And trust me, this helps. Immensely.

Since I visit my clients once in 2-3 weeks I end up having lots of meetings during these visits. But I simply draw up on my energy reserves during those times and buckle down and concentrate. Yes, last two or three times after I’ve visited the client I haven’t got much work done for the following three or four days – since I’d be recuperating from that intense expense of mental energy – but again I’m okay with that.

I plan to write on this again in the near future after I finish reading antifragile. I find this to be a rather important concept for me given that I’m prone to making errors (I’ve now accepted that). I think I’ve already started designing my life along antifragile principles. But more on that in another post.

Meanwhile, some other posts I’d written earlier about my mental condition.
1. How ADHD is like being perennially doped
2. On the importance of admitting mental illness and going to a specialist
3. On anti-depressants being like an economic stimulus
4. On mental illness in elite colleges in India
5. On anxiety being like a computer virus
6. On how ADHD can sometimes be advantageous

The Crow’s Designs

As I had mentioned in my blog post yesterday, I just finished reading Sanjeev Sanyal’s Land of seven rivers yesterday afternoon. And later in the evening I started reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Anti-fragile. And before you wonder, let me tell you that yesterday was a working day for me. Just that I had a long process running which gave me the flexibility to catch up on my reading.

So one topic that was mentioned both towards the end of Sanyal’s book and in the prologue of Taleb’s book was the issue of urban planning. And interestingly, the two agreed. In the prologue of Anti-fragile, Taleb has listed out a series of “fragile”, “robust” and “anti-fragile” systems. He has classified it by subject, and in each subject he gives us examples of the three systems. Being halfway through the first chapter, I understand that he is going to elaborate on each member of the list later on in his book, but I’m yet to reach the chapter (I’m still in chapter one, I told you) where he talks about urban planning. Yet, what he has written in that table in the preface on this chapter caught my eye. More so, given that it agreed with what Sanyal had written in his book. In the row on “urbanism”, Taleb has simply written “Le Corbusier” in the Fragile column and “Jane Jacobs” in the Anti-fragile column (the preface of the book is available on Taleb’s website. The relevant section of the table is on page 27).

In the last chapter of Land of seven rivers Sanyal talks about post-independence events that has affected the geography of India. One topic that he delves into is urban planning, where he contrasts the sterility of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh with the dynamism of unplanned Gurgaon. He mentions that despite careful planning, little economic value has been created in the city of Chandigarh itself, and one reason why it is supposedly clean is because there exist no space for the poor within the city! The city’s rigid master plan is actually a hindrance to economic activity as it allows for little space for entrepreneurial activity to take place. So whatever growth and innovation Chandigarh has seen, says Sanyal, has actually happened in its suburb of Mohali, which is in the state of Punjab.

Urban planning is a topic that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit in recent times, as I’m trying to figure out where to buy a house and “settle down”. Having examined several of Bangalore’s neighbourhoods, I’ve found a strong contrast between planned and unplanned neighbourhoods. The former (eg. Jayanagar) usually have wide roads, pavements, access to markets at frequent intervals (one thing where planning has failed, and for the good I think, is zoning. I wouldn’t want to walk to the main market for every one of my needs) and auto rickshaws. More importantly, they have people walking around on the streets all the time, which makes the neighbourhood safe. Unplanned neighbourhoods (eg. Sarjapur Road) usually have large condominiums, few shopping options and no auto rickshaws. You have either highways or small village roads and not too many people walk around. This makes the streets unsafe and makes you reliant on private transport, which in my opinion is not a good thing. Nevertheless, one must admit that given the massive influx into Bangalore in the last 10-12 years (on account of the IT boom), it is the unplanned neighbourhoods that have taken the lion’s share of housing the incoming population.

So the question is how much planning a city needs. Too much planning (as in Chandigarh and Delhi) can make the cities static, and not provide enough for potential immigration – which is necessary for increased economic activity. On the other hand, unplanned areas are inherently unsafe and don’t provide for a great urban quality of life (as far as I’m concerned one of the primary indicators of urbanism is public transport). Is there a middle ground of “light touch regulation” which derives the best of both worlds? How should urban planners approach this issue? How can we make our cities both dynamic and safe? As of now, I don’t have the answers.

PS: The title of this post is in reference to the name “Le Corbusier” which is French for “The Crow”.

Rice to coffee to programming

I just finished reading Sanjeev Sanyal’s Land of Seven Rivers, a book on the history of India’s geography. In most places it turns into a book on history rather than a book of geography, but has lots of interesting fundaes (using that word since I’m unable to find a perfect synonym in English). It is basically a retelling of Indian history with a focus on how what we currently know as India came to be, and the various expansions and contractions in the country over the years.

This is not a review of the book (unless you consider the preceding paragraph as a review). The purpose of this post is about one interesting concept I found in the book. Sanyal mentions that the traditional name for Java (the Indonesian island which houses Djakarta, among others) is “yavadwipa”. Now, while online dictionaries that I just consulted say that “yava” is the Sanskrit word for “barley” or “barleycorn”, the only other time I’ve come across the word has been while performing my parents’ death ceremonies – where the priest chants something to the effect of “offer yava” and then asks you to take some rice in your hand and wash it off with a spoonful of water. It is possible, though, that “yava” simply means “grain” and can refer to any kind of grain, including rice and barley.

Earlier in the book, Sanyal mentions that while wheat and barley originated in the fertile crescent (in and around modern Iraq), where they were first cultivated, rice has an eastern origin. Rice, he mentions, was probably first cultivated in South East Asia and came to India from the east. Taking this in conjunction with the fact that the Sanskrit name for Java is yavadwipa, can we posit that it meant “island of rice”? It may not be that rice originated in Java, but it is fully possible that Ancient and Medieval India imported rice from Java, thanks to which the island got its name.

So over the years “yavadwipa” became simply “yava” which I posit that the Dutch wrote as “Java” (considering that in most of continental Europe J is pronounced as Y), which gives the island its current name. What makes this nomenclature more interesting is that Java is now a major producer of coffee, and if you go by Wikipedia, some Americans refer to all coffee as “java”. It is interesting how the same island which was known for a particular kind of food in the ancient and middle ages is now known for another name of food!

Maybe I should start a brand called “rice coffee”.

Accuracy of GDP Numbers

Earlier today on Twitter, RahulRG pointed out a research report by Credit Suisse analysts Neelkanth Mishra and Ravi Shankar which talks about India’s massive informal economy. The report says that by nature the informal economy cannot be measured, because of which our estimates of GDP may not be accurate. The analysts point out that every time we move to a new series of GDP (we last did so in 2004, and are likely to do so again shortly), there is an upward revision in the GDP for the preceding series, which they attribute to underestimation of the contribution of the informal sector.

While these numbers are likely to get fixed when we move to a new series, what I’m concerned about is what this uncertainty in GDP estimation means with respect to the GDP growth rate, since that is the one number that analysts of all hues track when trying to understand how the country is doing. For example, if you google around you will see analysts arguing about whether India’s GDP growth in the next quarter will be 4.7% or 4.8%. Before we settle to argue on such minutae, I argue, we first need to understand the possible uncertainty in GDP estimates.

In order to estimate the impact of uncertainty of the GDP calculation on uncertainty in GDP growth, I did what I know best – a simulation. For different levels of accuracy, I calculated the range that the actual GDP growth can take. The results are presented in the following table. The first column in the table refers to the accuracy of the GDP estimate at the 95% confidence level. That is, if the first column shows 1%, it means that if the GDP is estimated to be 100, the “true” value of the GDP will be between 99 and 101 95% of the time.

Error	True GDP Growth Rate
Error	5%	6%	7%	8%
0.05%	4.93-5.07	5.93-6.07	6.92-7.08	7.92-8.08
0.1%	4.85-5.15	5.85-6.15	6.85-7.15	7.85-8.15
0.2%	4.7-5.3	5.7-6.3	6.7-7.3	7.69-8.31
0.5%	4.26-5.74	5.26-6.75	6.25-7.76	7.24-8.77
1%	3.54-6.49	4.51-7.52	5.5-8.52	6.48-9.53
2%	2.09-8.03	3.03-9.02	4-10.05	4.98-11.13

Notice that even if the measurement of the actual GDP is accurate up to 0.05% (or 5 basis points), we can estimate the growth in GDP only up to an accuracy of 15 basis points! So arguing whether the GDP growth will be 4.7% or 4.8% is, in my opinion, moot! Unless our statisticians can say that the accuracy in measurement of the GDP is within 5 basis points that is!

PS: Also read Neelkanth Mishra’s excellent op-ed in the Indian Express on India’s informal economy.

Literature Survey Articles

Of late I’ve come across a number of articles which I describe as “literature survey articles”. The distinguishing feature of these articles is that the author draws upon the wisdom of respected predecessors (“stand on the shoulders of giants”, to put it figuratively). The article is filled with quotes from people who are either famous or respected in the topic that the article pertains to. The contribution of the author of the piece is limited to putting together the quotes from various sources and binding them together with a coherent narrative.

I don’t like such articles. While it is important from time to time that certain old ideas that currently make sense be revitalized, I find articles such as these difficult to read and hard to truly appreciate. Speaking about the former part, when you quote verbatim from several sources in the same article, the article ends up having a number of voices. The reader is not allowed to settle into “listening one voice”, and this can make the article rather incoherent (this is especially true of articles with lots of short quotes).

My more important beef with such articles is that the fact that someone famous or respected said something doesn’t make it right. Everybody makes mistakes, and it is unlikely to find famous speakers or scholars who did not say anything wrong in their lives. So unless it is accompanied by rational reasoning, saying “this famous person said that, so that must be true” has no point. Also, using quotes as arguments doesn’t accommodate for the fact that the opinions of famous or scholarly people often change, and the fact that the quote may have been something they contradicted later on in their lives (not that there is a problem with it. When the facts change, as John Maynard Keynes once said, one ought to change their opinions). Then there is the issue of cherry picking – if some scholar has said a bunch of contradictory things about a particular issue, you can get away with picking only those statements that are in consonance with your opinion.

There is one type of literature survey article that I don’t mind, though – when you declare upfront (either in the title of the article or towards the beginning) that the article is about channeling a particular person or persons’ view of a particular issue. When this is made explicit, the reader knows that you are only channeling someone else’s argument, and you are not presenting their arguments as “proof” for your own argument. It is like famous people’s twitter bios, which say “RTs are not endorsements”.

Lest I be mistaken, I must also mention here that I have nothing against quoting (you might notice that I’ve paraphrased Keynes earlier in this article). You may quote liberally, as long as you don’t exclusively rely on those quotes for your arguments. Just make sure you don’t significantly disturb the flow of the piece, that is all.

Basavanagudi

Recently the Deccan Herald carried an article on how Basavanagudi was an extremely well-planned area. It showed the original plan of Basavanagudi (drawn up in the late 1890s in the wake of the plague that hit the Pete area), and showed how well planned it was – demarcating public spaces, market areas, clubs, schools and residential areas. What is remarkable to me is that an area that was drawn up in the late 1890s has roads that are mostly wide enough to take even today’s traffic (a contrast in Malleswaram, built in the same area, but with extremely narrow roads by today’s standards).

On Thursday, I had to go someplace in Gandhi Bazaar (in Basavanagudi) from my grandmother’s place in Jayanagar, and that was when it struck me how small Basavaanagudi is. South End Circle and South End Road actually demarcated the southern end of Basavanagudi, while the so-called “North Road” (also called Vani Vilas Road) marked the northen end of this area. And I ended up walking from my grandmother’s house (about half a kilometer south-east of South End Circle) to National College in about fifteen minutes – and if you go by the map shown in the article linked above, it is the entire span of Basavanagudi! If this was one of the “major” planned extensions of Bangalore in that era, it goes to indicate the city’s population at that time.

It is interesting to note in the plan (as published by Deccan Herald) that the area that is now MN Krishna Rao park was demarcated as a “public square”. While the area is still being put to public use nowadays I couldn’t help but think of New York’s Union Square, which is build on an area much smaller than Krishna Rao park, but which has multiple uses to different sections of the population. Krishna Rao Park, on the other hand, is now a typical example of a “Jairaj Park” (nomenclature I’ve come up with after the former BBMP Commissioner, who was responsible for populating the city with a certain kind of park). I wonder if people still play cricket inside the park.

Until I saw the plan of Basavanagudi I hadn’t realized the symmetry in design. If you notice, at each corner of the public square there is a large roundabout which is somewhat off-centre (Armugam Circle, Netkallappa Circle, Tagore Circle and Dewan Madhava Rao circle). Of these, Tagore “Circle” is actually a square which doesn’t particularly serve the purpose of the roundabout thanks to which an ungainly underpass had to be built recently. And if you notice in the map, beyond each of these roundabouts is a “diagonal” road. The symmetry in design is remarkable. As an aside, while I was walking back to Jayanagar from Gandhi Bazaar on Thursday, I realized that large roundabouts are pedestrian-unfriendly! Unless they allow the pedestrian to cut across them (like in New York’s squares), of course.

For a long time I used to wonder why there is a Muslim Ghetto in the south-eastern quadrant of Basavanagudi (area between RV Road, Patalamma Street and the extension of BP Wadia road towards “teachers college”). The plan explains this. In line with the sensibilities of those times, Basavanagudi had dedicated areas for different castes and communities, and this sector was probably the area “reserved” for Muslims. It is the same with other areas developed in that time – for example Malleswaram also has a “Mohammedan block”. What is interesting, though, is that even Jayanagar, which was planned post-independence, when secularism was in vogue, has its pockets of Muslim Ghettos. I wonder if they grew organically or were by design. Also, read the map carefully. You will see that different parts of Basavanagudi have been earmarked for different castes!

It would be interesting if someone were to dig up the original masterplans for different localities in Bangalore, and also in other cities. It would be instructive to see how cities were developed at different points in time (for example, immediately after independence came the massive localities of Jayanagar and Rajajinagar – neither of which can be walked across in fifteen minutes). Also, this plan for Basavanagudi indicates that there were no villages in the area where it came up – which was not the case with areas such as Jayanagar which were planned around such villages. Again it would be interesting to see how villages were co-opted into the city.

I can go on but will stop here. I encourage you to also take a close look at the map and make your own inferences, and share them in the comments section.

Bloggers writing books

There have been times in the past when I would have read a book and then concluded that “it’s a blog post expanded into a book”. One book that I clearly remember that followed this model was Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”. An idea that can be easily explained in 3000 words instead taking 30000, so that it can then qualify to be a “book”, the economics of whose publications are much different from that of a “long form article”. I remember thinking this even more about this book called “Why Popcorn Costs So Much At The Movies“. It was all about price discrimination, a concept that could have been explained well in a blog length article (500-1000 words). Even a long-form article would have been too much for it.

The topic of this post, however, is not about books that should have been blogposts. It is about bloggers writing books. For dinner on Saturday I met two friends who also happen to be renowned twitter trolls. Somewhere between the soups and the pizzas the conversation moved to books being written by bloggers (and there are many of those). And the three of us came to the unanimous decision that bloggers are lousy at writing books (I haven’t read any of the books they were talking about, but could attest to it since I’ve been trying to write a couple of books for a couple of years now and getting nowhere).

The fundamental point is that the art of holding someone’s attention over 1000 words (the normal length of a blog post) is very different from holding someone’s attention over 50000 words (the length of a typical book). So if you’ve been a blogger for a few years now, through sheer practice you would be great at using 1000 words to put across your ideas. However, when you want to write something longer, you either get discontinuous (with lots of mini-chapters of 1000 words each) or you end up saying the same thing over and over again.

So yes, as you might have figured out from my Project Thirty/Thirty One filings, I’m writing a book. And no, it’s not about Studs and Fighters (thanks to your valuable feedback I’ve given up on that concept). I’ve been trying to write lots of small chapters. Somehow, I’m not able to go beyond 1000 words per chapter (2000 is the intention). There is a bigger problem. I begin to take myself too seriously when I think I’m writing a book. I stop writing in the informal conversational style I normally use on my blog. And it becomes excruciating, both to write and to read (I’ve tried reading some of my own “serious” pieces and given up).

Maybe all this tells me something. That having been writing this blog (and its predecessor on LiveJournal) for 9 years now, and having got many an accolade for it, I should simply stick to writing blog posts. Maybe it’s time to accept that when it comes to writing books mEre sE nahIn hOga

Up North

So it’s exactly a year since I moved to the north. North Bangalore that is. For exactly the last one year, I’ve called a place in Rajajinagar 2nd Stage (not to be confused with Rajajinagar 2nd Block) my home. It’s been a roller-coaster ride, I must say. Lots of ups, lots of downs. I must admit a year in I still haven’t settled in completely, and for the record, I’m already plotting a move back south.

The problem with the area where I live is that it is an area of houses built on 30 feet by 40 feet plots. While that itself is not a problem (with an FSI of 1.5, you can build a 1800 square foot house here, which is pretty massive), the problem is that this area was “built” in the early 1970s. Back then, nobody had cars, and given the economic situation nobody aspired to have a car. This, coupled with the smallish plots meant that people didn’t make a provision in their plots to park cars. Again – given the economic situation when this layout was built, it is a perfectly rational decision.

Now, forty years later, with rapid economic growth in the last 20 odd, everybody has a car. And since there’s no space to park them inside the houses, people park them on the streets. So on every street in my locality, you will find cars parked continuously on both sides of the road. Unfortunately people haven’t figured out a protocol of one-ways, so sometimes that leads to traffic deadlocks when cars approach from both sides of the road. Thankfully we are spared of such deadlocks since we live on a road that leads to a dead end (a real dead end, not a “Bangalore dead end”, which is just a T-junction).

Thinking about it, I find the land use here rather suboptimal. Most plots have two-storeyed houses, and given the size of the plots, the plots are fully built. So there is less than five feet space between my window and my neighbour’s – and on Sunday mornings we get woken up because Neighbour Uncle likes to talk loudly on the phone sitting in his porch (the neighbours reconstructed their house a few years back, so they have a porch to park their car). Essentially there is little privacy.

There is little of other things also – like open spaces and trees, again a function of the plot sizes. I have a solution for this, but it is going to be hard to implement, and I don’t want to be the ones doing that. Yes, everyone has a plot of land to call their own. But they live in houses that aren’t too large and don’t have much privacy or open spaces or gardens.So I think it would be a profitable enterprise for a real estate developer to buy up the entire area (let’s say about two or three roads at least), merge the sites and build a high rise apartment here with all “facilities”. Even if the realtor were to pay above market rates (necessary since a lot of people wouldn’t want to sell) and compensate the incumbents handsomely in terms of houses, there is profit to be made. But then everyone wants their own “piece of land”.

Notwithstanding any of this, where I live is a great area. It is residential and solidly middle-class, and I can buy just about anything I want within a kilometer of my house. I only need to walk about 100m to catch an auto rickshaw, and it isn’t that hard to get an auto home at any time in the day. The biggest problem I find here, though, is infrastructure.

Malleswaram is a pre-car area. It was built in the 1890s to rehabilitate people from the old city (pete) area following an outbreak of plague. Consequently, the roads aren’t particularly wide. Which ever way I want to get out, I’m faced with narrow roads, and that combined with heavy traffic means travel times to the centre of town and beyond are large. And to make matters worse, Dr. Rajkumar Road (one boundary of “mainstream” Rajajinagar) is a highway, with buses leaving for all parts of Karnataka passing through this road.

I have a habit of living in cusps. My last residence was at the trijunction of Jayanagar, Basavanagudi and Banashankari. This one is on the border of Malleswaram and Rajajinagar. Maybe the next time I move, I should think of going into the “middle” of some area.

Levi’s Price Discrimination

So I’ve never managed to buy jeans on discount. Let me explain. Unlike most other people (if you go by what the store assistants tell you), I don’t like to wear faded jeans. It is perhaps an inherited hangover since my father used to consider jeans to be inherently dirty and would make me discard jeans as soon as they faded a little bit. It could also be more practical – since I sometimes like to wear jeans to official meetings, I want to wear jeans that look neat.

Now I’ve managed to drive my wife crazy with my shopping (and we’ve known each other for barely four years, shopped together for three maybe). She thinks I’m way too fussy about clothes, and can’t make up my mind easily. I’ve explained earlier on this blog why I take a long time over shoes (my sandals are now wearing out, so I’m getting ready for another ordeal). But the more fundamental differences that my wife and I have is with respect to jeans.

The problem is that we fundamentally disagree on what purpose jeans serve. I have traditionally looked at jeans as comfort wear. Trousers I’m absolutely comfortable in (I sometimes even sleep in my jeans), which I don’t need to wash too frequently, and which can be worn even after they get torn in non-strategic places. I’ve always bought “comfort fit” jeans, and after I graduated to branded jeans towards the end of my teens, my staple had been the comfort-fit Lee Chicago.

The problem is that my wife thinks of jeans as fashion-wear – things you need to necessarily look good in. Some of the jeans she owns are so skinny that sometimes she takes a really long time to change. She looks great in them, no doubt, but the problem is that she expects that I too wear such jeans. And so after some ten years, I have given up my loyalty towards Lee Chicago, and instead have to try out various skinny fits (as things stand now, I own only one pair of Lee Chicago, bought in 2009).

Ok all this is besides the point of this post (and the point of another post which I never wrote). Coming back to the point of this post, the deal is that nowadays I find it extremely hard to shop for jeans. Of course it doesn’t help that I don’t live in Kathriguppe (with its dozens of factory outlets) any more, and that in my part of town (Malleswaram-Rajajinagar) the only place you can find decent branded clothes is in malls, which are a pain. The bigger problem, though, is that it is very hard to find stores that stock my kind of jeans.

In the last couple of years, our strategy for shopping clothes has been to visit a multi-brand outlet in one of the two malls near our place, so that we have a wide variety of choice. Except that I have no choice. Because stores such as Lifestyle or Shopper’s Stop or Westside (which now mostly stocks private labels) or Central don’t stock my kind of jeans. At all. If you happen to locate a store clerk and ask him for “mid blue straight cut non-faded jeans” he will look at you as if you have just landed from another planet. He can be excused for giving you those looks, for his store simply doesn’t stock non-faded jeans, because of which he has never sold them!

So I happened to be on Brigade road over the weekend, and I had a small gap of about half an hour between two meetings, and thought I should visit the Levi’s flagship store there. I must mention that the salespeople there were definitely significantly more polite than I’ve ever seen at a multi=brand store. However, as soon as I repeated my mantra (mid blue straight cut non-faded jeans), the first thing the salesperson who approached me told me was “oh Sir, but there’s not discount on that!”.

It’s clever price discrimination by Levi’s, to not sell non-faded jeans on discount. For they know that people who buy non-faded jeans tend to be older (hey I’m only thirty), or will be buying them for office wear, and they are less price elastic than the typical college kid who buys faded stuff. So while the college kid needs discounts to be attracted during the “discount season”, the “formal jeans” buyer needs no such attractions, and will pay full price for his stuff.

It is interesting to note, however, that companies that make formal clothes (not Levi’s) also offer massive discounts during the “discount seassons” (one of which is on now). That, though, can be explained by the fact that most people need a few sets of formal clothes (even those that normally wear faded jeans), and discounts are necessary to attract customers.

Now I’m beginning to think that the market for “formal jeans” in India is extremely niche, and if I”m acting above my age because I prefer such jeans. I half-expect my wife to call me an “uncle” be cause of this.

The Takshashila Survey on Scientific Bias

Recently, my colleague Pavan Srinath put out a post on testing whether someone “defers to scientific reason above and beyond ideologies”. In his post, he made three statements, which he said are all strongly backed by scientific evidence:

The core argument in climate change is that the earth’s surface warmed significantly in the 20th century due to human-linked emissions of greenhouse gases.

The argument with nuclear safety is that health risks from nuclear power generation, both chronic and acute, have been grossly exaggerated and that due to an obsession with nuclear safety for the past 6 decades, nuclear power is now safer than most other sources of energy.

The argument with genetically modified crops is that they are just as safe as other crops, both for growing and for consumption. Additionally, crop modification through targeted molecular biology techniques is in fact less genetically invasive than conventional hybridisation techniques.

All three arguments have overwhelming scientific evidence on their side, and the nature of the scientific debate is very different from the public and political discussions regarding the same.

If you were not ideologically biased and if you were scientifically aware, he said, you would be extremely likely to agree with all the three above statements. If, however, you were biased to the “left” you were likely to agree with the first statement but not with the last two. If biased to the “right”, you were likely to agree with the latter two and not with the first.

We decided to test these beliefs by putting out a survey. The survey had exactly three questions – the above three statements that Pavan mentioned in his blog, and the respondent was supposed to agree or disagree with these statements on a five-point Likert scale. The “sample” on which the survey was administered was biased – most respondents we believe were connected on Facebook or Twitter (the two avenues we used to publicize the survey) to someone in the Takshashila community. It is very likely that most of the respondents were educated urban upper-middle-class Indians (this is a guess; we didn’t ask for these data points in the survey itself).

142 people responded to the survey. Most of these responses came within a day of our putting out the survey. Here are the results of the survey:

Firstly, we will look at the individual responses to each of the three questions:

This shows that opinion in favour of global warming is fairly strong.

While a majority of the people believe that health risks from nuclear power have been exaggerated, the opinion is not as overwhelming as it is on the global warming front. There still exist a significant number of doubters of safety of nuclear energy.

When it comes to GM crops, however, public opinion is largely divided. As many people agree that GM crops are safe, as do people who believe they are unsafe.

Next, we will look at interactions. The next three graphs here show bilateral “heatmaps” of responses to the three questions. The greater the redness of a particular cell in this map, the greater the number of respondents who fall in that cell.

There seems to be a positive correlation between these two beliefs that are towards different ends of the political spectrum. Among people who agree that global warming exists, more people believe that nuclear power risks are exaggerated than otherwise.

An interesting thing here is that extreme views on one issue are correlated with extreme views on another. Note that people who strongly agree on global warming are more likely to strongly agree or disagree with GM Food safety, while those who merely “agree” with global warming are more likely to simply “agree” or “disagree” with GM Food safety. Also notice the large mass of people who strongly agree with global warming but are neutral about the safety of GM Foods. This indicates that there isn’t as much debate and discourse on the safety of GM foods as there should be.

These are the two “right wing issues”. Notice that the top left and bottom right areas are almost empty. People who agree with one of these are more likely to agree with the other.

So how many of our respondents can be classified as being “scientifically aware” based on Pavan’s metrics? Given that Pavan states that someone who is scientifically aware should agree with all three statements, we will consider someone who has “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with all three statements as being “scientifically aware”. This number comes out to 27 out of 142 respondents or about 19%.

How many of our respondents are scientifically unaware? For this we will look at people who either disagree or strongly disagree with each of the above statements. There are only 3 people among those we surveyed who can be thus classified (and one of them has given his/her name as “Troll” so we may not take that seriously).

Then, again going back to Pavan’s definitions, how many left-wingers do we have? For this we will consider people who agree with the statement on global warming and disagree with the other two. There are 17 such people. What about right wingers? These are people who disagree with the statement on global warming but agree with the other two. There are 7 of them. There are 63 respondents who have said that they are neutral on at least one of the three questions.

There is so much more one can do with these responses. I have anonymized the responses and put up the data here for your benefit. You are free to analyze it and draw your own conclusions. However, I would encourage you to share your conclusions with the larger community by leaving a comment on this post.