Category: arbit

Money De-laundering

A few months back I got my kitchen remodelled. It set me back by a couple of lakhs, and the guy who did the work for me insisted that I pay him fully in cash. I, who has had all cash inflows so far via bank transfers, was thus forced to withdraw (in several iterations) from the ATM perfectly white money and then hand it over to this guy and permanently convert it to black. Now that I think about it, I overpaid.

The key fact here is that people pay to get their money laundered. If you have Rs. 100 of unaccounted money in wads of cash, you are willing to give it to someone who puts Rs. 80 in your bank (the spread has been pulled out of thin air. Don’t go after me for that) and also some documentation to prove that you legally earned the Rs. 80.

So you have this bunch of people who want their money laundered. And then there are bank-only guys like me who sometimes have to produce wads of hard cash. Why isn’t there an exchange (illegal, of course, but who’s talking legality here? I’m only talking money) where money can be laundered and people with excess bank balances (and little hard cash) can be paid for it? For example, instead of paying Rs. 200000 in hard cash to my carpenter, I would have paid (say) Rs. 160000 to someone by cheque and got a receipt for it, and that person would have paid Rs. 200000 cash to my carpenter.

What does it say about the black economy that no such exchange exists? Does it mean that the market is skewed in a way that the demand for money laundering is much larger than its supply, because of which people who would otherwise have been intermediaries doing one side of the deal themselves? Or does an exchange like this actually exist but I’m not aware of it partly because it’s underground (for obvious legal reasons) and partly I’m seen as too small a fry to be accosted by the exchanges?

Next time I pay wads of hard cash, though, I’m going to try and see if I can get a discount.

Swaminathan Ganesh and Murali Vijay and the Art of South Indian Patronymics

Most people not from South India have trouble understanding South Indian names. What sets South Indian names (talking primarily about Tamilian, Malayali and South Interior Kannadiga names here) apart is that they are patronymic, with the one’s father’s or husband’s given name ending up as your last name. There is no concept of surnames here, and names don’t travel generations. Sometimes you have the name of the native village or the ancestral profession as part of the name, but the latter was all but dropped from most names following the “anti-surname revolution” championed by Periyar EV Ramaswami (formerly Naicker) in Tamil Nadu.

Let me give you some examples of South Indian names before I proceed to propound my theory. Till the time I was twenty two, I was alternately known as “S Karthik” and “Karthik S” – the order of words in South Indian names don’t matter that much. “Karthik” is my given name. The “S” stands for “Shashidhar”, which is my father’s given name. Then, at the age of twenty two I happened to use my passport for the first time. And was faced with an employer who didn’t understand South Indian names, and so expanded my name to its “passportized form” – “Karthik Shashidhar”. My given name as my “first name” and my father’s given name as my “last name”.

Not everyone’s names are passportized the same way, though. My father, for example, had Shashidhar, which was his given name as his “last name” in the passport. His “given names” (as his passport described them) were “Gollahalli Suryanarayana Rao”, Gollahalli being my father’s native village and Suryanarayana Rao being his father’s given name. Notice that the word “Rao” was an honorific and not a surname and didn’t transcend generations. For the record, my father’s father’s father was Gollahalli Venkataramana Shastri and his father was Gollahalli Annadaana Bhat. I’m mentioning this here just to show you that till recently even words like “Shastri” and “Bhat” were honorifics added to one’s name based on one’s profession and didn’t transcend generations (my grandfather was ineligible for the honorific “Shastri” since he wasn’t a priest). Based on the names of my ancestors as I’ve written here, you might jump to the conclusion that “Gollahalli” can be seen as my family name, but then my father in his infinite wisdom decided that it didn’t deserve to be part of my name since 1. I’ve never been there and 2. It doesn’t sound good (it translates to “village of shepherds”).

Now that this short personal history is behind us, let me explain to you how patronymic South Indian names work. First of all, you need to take in to account that unlike most other parts of the world (primarily Europe) there has never been a law in South India that dictates what form one’s name should take (for example, in the 1930’s Mustapha Kemal (later Pasha) passed a law that forced all Turks to have surnames that transcended generations patrilineally). In agrarian economies where your entire network is not large, you don’t need too many words in your name to distinguish you. So most people simply went around with one name. Then, as networks expanded and people started migrating, they started prefixing the names of their native towns to their names – that was seen as some sort of qualifier. Then, for reasons I don’t completely comprehend, sometime in the middle of the last century, it became customary to add one’s father’s name as one of the words in your own name (notice how my grandfather and his ancestors did not include their fathers’ names as part of their names. But my father did). It could do with urbanization when from each town there was a considerable number of people with the same given name so adding one’s father’s name had to be used for discrimination.

Thus, by the middle of the 20th century, one pattern of South Indian patronymic names became dominant – among both men and women. <Village Name> <Father’s given name> <Own given name>. Like Gollahalli Suryanarayana Rao Shashidhar or Holenarasipura Ramaswamy Prabha. Things were not so simple, though, since a woman was required to change her name to include her husband’s after marriage. In rural areas, women typically used only one name so this wasn’t so much of a problem (my father’s mother still uses only one name which is her given name). In urban areas, where it was customary to have two or more words in a name, some women simply added their husbands’ given names as their last names while others decided to go the <husband’s village name > <husband’s given name> <own given name> format. It was all quite complicated. So complicated that many women in my mother’s generation (including my mother) decided against changing their names after marriage.

The problem with South Indian patronymic names has been that there has never been a particular format that has been allowed to settle. At all points of time in history, there have always been competing formats, and “regulatory”/customary changes have meant that each of these formats have died a quick death. This is the cause of much confusion. However, with increasing globalization and “passportization”, we seem to be getting somewhere close to some sort of a standard format.

As I mentioned a while earlier, I was forced to “expand” my name when I had to apply for my passport, since the passport form doesn’t recognize initials. Going by the way my father had expanded his name I thought I had filled up the application form to indicate my name as “Shashidhar Karthik” but my name ended up there as “Karthik Shashidhar”. While at that point of time it didn’t matter much, the advent of GMail has meant that I’m happy my name is not the other way round – since in conversation view only a person’s first name is shown.

Yet, there are people who have chosen to expand their names the other way, and this is more likely among people in professions where it is customary to refer to someone only by their last name. With most people not wanting to be called by their father’s names, they’ve ordered the words in the names (this needs to be done only when one gets a passport –  remember – and for most people that’s when you’ve decided your profession) in a way that their given name actually appears as their last name. For example neither of the cricketers Murali Kartik or Murali Vijay is actually named Murali – both their fathers are named Murali and their respective given names are Kartik and Vijay.

So, looking at what is now turning out to be a standard format South Indian name, how does one figure out what is the person’s given name and what is his father’s name? This is where some cultural understanding helps. About a hundred years ago, South Indian names were quite long (as is evident from the names of my ancestors I’ve published above). With time, however, names are getting progressively shorter. Perhaps a hundred years ago, the set of names given to boys in South India was disjoint from the set given to boys in North India, and the same was true with girls. With increasing globalization and national integration, though, this has changed rapidly over the last century. While some might attribute it to the so-called Nehruvian Hindi Imperialism, the flow has largely been one way, with more South Indians being given what were traditionally North Indian names rather than the other way round (the only North Indian I know with a South Indian sounding first name is Kumar Mangalam Birla, and his name can be explained by the fact that his mother is a native of Madurai).

Because of this cultural integration, over the generations South Indian names have tended to get shorter, because of which you can generalize with a rule that in any given family, it is more likely that a son’s name is shorter than his father’s. So when you look at someone with “two first names” as their name, a general rule of thumb is that the shorter of the two names is their own name and the longer one is their father’s. Based on this rule it is extremely likely that Viswanathan Anand’s given name is Anand, and Hariharan Rahul’s given name is Rahul, never mind the order in which they are written.

We are however now reaching a stage where people with rather short (mono or bi-syllabic) names are becoming fathers and they can’t pick shorter names for their sons, so you have a situation where father and son have names of similar length. Perhaps this is the reason a number of people are resorting to rather unusual names for their kids these days (like Aarav, for example), without realizing that these names are going to become last names one generation hence.

My wife thinks that “Karthik” is a lousy last name, so there have already been many debates about how we should name our children (whenever we have them). I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem with South Indian patronymics is that the father’s name is used as it is and not modified like in other patronymic cultures which is the cause of all this confusion. Going by this principle, I think my kids should have something like “Karthikovitch” or “bin Karthik” as their last name.

As for the names in the title, Swaminathan Ganesh is a friend from college and I’ve included his name because it fails the “length test”. His given name is Swaminathan and his father’s name is Ganesh. For the record, his brother is Krishnamurti Ganesh, another name that fails the length test. I propose that “Swaminathan Ganesh” be the generic terms for individuals from whose names it is impossible to make out which word their given name is.

I’ve talked about Murali Vijay earlier in the post. It’s amusing how most commentators still refer to him as “Murali”.

From time to time I get phone calls asking for “Mr. Shashidhar”. Each time I almost instinctively tell them that it’s been a few years since “Mr. Shashidhar” (my father) died, and then realize they’re asking for me.

Depression and Stimulus

Ok so this post has nothing to do with macroeconomics, though it borrows its concepts from there. As the more perceptive of you might have figured out by now (ha, i love that line!) I was diagnosed with clinical depression about a year back. Actually that was the second time I had been diagnosed with that diagnosis, the first being a full six months earlier, when I had suddenly stopped medication after I had lost trust in that psychiatrist.

For over a year now, I have been on anti-depressants. It started with 37.5 mg per day of Venlafaxine (brand name Veniz), which got slowly bumped up until at 187.5 mg per day I started going crazy and having crazy mood swings and had to be scaled back to 150 mg. I was at that level for over six months when I realized that I had plateaued – that there was no real improvement in my mental situation thanks to continuous intake of the drug and perhaps I should consider getting off.

I proposed this idea to the psychiatrist when I met her last month and amazingly she agreed without any hesitation and quickly drew up a plan on how I need to get off the drug (you need to decrease dosage slowly else you’ll have withdrawal symptoms which are pretty bad). I found it a little disconcerting that she so readily agreed to take me off the drug, given that she had herself not given any indication of wanting to take me off the drug. I was disconcerted that I had been taking the drug for much longer than necessary, perhaps.

The doctor, however, paired the paring of my anti-depressant with doubling the dosage of the stimulant that I have been taking for my ADHD for the last six months. As it happened, though, I went through a major bout of NED that evening, and didn’t muster the enthu to go to the one pharmacy that legally sells Methylphenidate (the ADHD drug,  supposed to have similar chemical composition as cocaine) in Bangalore. That I managed to function pretty well the following one week, including the three days spent at my client’s office, meant that I probably didn’t need teh ADHD drug also. So as I write this I’m off all mind-altering substances (apart from my several-times-a-day doses of caffeine and occasional ingestion of ethanol).

Recently I met a friend who told me that I had been too generous in my praise of psychiatric drugs in my blog, and that I hadn’t taken into consideration their various side effects and addictive symptoms. I’ve heard this from other people also – that I probably wasn’t doing the right thing by taking anti-depressants. So do I now regret taking them, given that I’ve chosen to go off them? Probably not.

This is where the analogy of economic depression and clinical depression comes in. In an economic depression, there is a halt in economic activity thanks to which there isn’t much circulation of money. When people start earning less, they start spending less, which further depresses their income and the whole economy goes into a tailspin. Going by Keynes’s theory, letting the economy slowly repair itself would take an extraordinarily long time (in the course of which we will all be dead, as the joke goes), so it is recommended that the government steps in and spends heavily in order to “stimulate” the economy and break the vicious circle it was getting itself into.

When you suffer from clinical depression, there is a shortage of flow of this chemical compound called Seretonin in your brain. Thanks to that, your mental energy is at a much lower level and you get tired and stressed out easily. Moreover, depression also leads to a significant drop in your confidence levels. You start believing that you are useless and not capable of anything. But then, your lowered mental energy levels mean that it is tough for you to be good at work, and do things that are likely to give your confidence a boost. And this in turn leads to further lowering of confidence and there is no way out for you to break out of this vicious circle.

A number of people believe that depression can be conquered with “willpower”, but this is applicable only if you’ve recognized it in its early stages. In most cases though, you realize it only when it’s deep into the vicious circle, and your “willpower”, much like “normal economics” during an economic depression, will take way too long to break you out of the vicious circle, and by then half your productive life will be gone.

Hence, to draw the Keynesian analogy, you need a stimulus. You need some sort of an artificial stimulus that breaks you out of your vicious cycle of low self-esteem and low performance. Sometimes, there can be a fortuitous life event which by matter of chance gives you a sudden sense of achievement and helps you break out of the cycle (for example, I was quite depressed (most likely clinically) through most of my life at IIT, but success in CAT proved to be a good stimulant in helping me break out of that cycle). But then, most of the time, life is structured such that there are few opportunities for such positive black swans, especially when you are older and especially when your mental energy levels are in general quite low.

Under these circumstances, I believe, there is no way out but chemical stimulants to help you get out of your depressive state. Clinical researchers and psychiatrists over the years have found the answer to be this molecule called “SSRI” which slows down the rate of seretonin uptake into the brain, with the result that there is greater flow of seretonin in your nervous system (continuing our economic analogy this is like the government cutting taxes as a form of stimulus). Greater seretonin in the system means greater mental energy, and sometimes the difference in energy levels is itself enough to push up your self-esteem levels, and the new energy levels means you have given yourself a chance to perform, and the cycle breaks.

Keynes said, as part of his theory, that it is important that a stimulus is short and targeted, and that in good times a government needs to be fiscally conservative so that, if not anything else, it has the necessary firepower to deliver a stimulus when necessary. Similarly, it is important that you don’t get yourself addicted on these anti-depressants and that you don’t become immune to them. Which is why psychiatrists typically wean you off your anti-depressants six months to a year after you started on it. By then, they expect, and in my case it did, that the stimulus would have been delivered.

Khamir Rouge

I spent most of the last weekend at a workshop organized by this not-for-profit called Khamir somewhere near Bhuj in Kutch. It was a rather small-scale festival they had organized called the Desert Art and Music Festival (though the fees were anything but small scale, setting each participant back by seven and a half kilorupees). The art on display were crafts local to the Kutch region, and we were given hands-on training in various crafts by artisans that worked with Khamir. The music, sadly, wasn’t Kutchi, as two rather large bands had been imported from Rajasthan (from Bikaner and Jaisalmer) and local musicians only played the opening acts.

I’m not entirely convinced by Khamir’s business model. Ok that may not be an accurate statement since strictly speaking Khamir isn’t a business, but to put it in another way, I’m not convinced that Khamir’s contribution to the ecosystem of handicraft artisans in Kutch is entirely positive. It may not be possible to make a convincing economic argument right now, but my sense is that they are distorting the market for handicrafts.

Actually it may not even be their fault. In a rare conversation on economics with one of the artisans, I found that it is actually easier to start a not-for-profit than a for-profit. This artisan wanted to train youth in his village and surrounding areas, and had found that there was considerable demand abroad for what he made. When I asked him why he didn’t set up a for-profit company instead, the answer was that it was next to impossible for him to get a bank loan for one such venture. But he had found some means by which he had tied up a rather large no-questions-asked donation from the Government of Gujarat.

Coming back to Khamir, they are in the business (ok it’s impossible for me to think in a non-business sense) of promoting the crafts of Kutch. They have a number of “studios” where local artisans, who have been given raw material, work and they sell the products in their own local shop and also in the US and Canada. Apart from this, they procure stuff from other local artisans and sell it on. In that sense, they are just like any other middlemen – except that they are not for profit.

If you ask why this is a problem, I point you to the Indian airline industry. When one player in the market doesn’t have a strict profit motive (like Air India), they can work on wafer thin (or even negative) margins, a level at which their for-profit competitors cannot really compete. Sooner or later, the for-profit competitors get driven out of business (like Kingfisher Airlines, for example), and soon the market itself has disappeared!

While Khamir itself might be too small (their campus suggests they are rather well funded, but their scale of operations doesn’t seem commensurate), the fact that it is easier to get funding for not-for-profit than to start a for-profit business in this space (as the artisan alluded) raises the sceptre that there could soon be more such not-for-profit middlemen in this business, which might make a real dent in the business of Kutchi crafts.

The story of intermediation in this market is also interesting and deserves to be sold. Both the artisans we spoke to said they don’t prefer to do business with large for-profit middlemen such as FabIndia or Mother Earth since the latter demand a high degree of standardization, which is tough to achieve in a hand-craft environment. Rather than face high rejection rates at such middlemen, the artisans instead find it more profitable to peddle their wares at sundry craft exhibitions all over India, where they are more likely to sell their stuff, though with a higher risk in terms of profits and considerable hardship in terms of travel and sales.

The thing with handicrafts is that the market is rather fragmented and it is only really large-scale players such as FabIndia or Mother Earth who have cracked the model in terms of effective intermediation (the large scale is necessary given the fragmentation of the market). The “illiquidity” in the market means that inventory costs can get rather high, and thus a considerable retail margin needs to be allowed for to enable effective intermediation. In the face of this, organizations such as Khamir who “work to give as much money as possible to artisans” can get rather distortionary.

Two minutes was watching a weaver work at the Khamir facility drove me nuts (it was such a laborious process I wasn’t able to take it any longer). So there is this wooden piece that has to be tossed from one side of the loom to the other each time a thread is passed (and the thread has to be practically hammered in to the rest of the cloth) so even a full day of work by a skilled artisan can only produce a few meters of cloth. Watching the hand loom weavers work even made me wonder if promotion of such arts only serves to keep people poor.

So the problem is that handloom weaving is a rather laborious process, and extremely inefficient economically. The same kind of cloth when produced by a machine results in significantly lower cost, and by that logic, handloom weaving being an ineffective process should probably go extinct. While premium branding for handloom in certain circles has ensured higher prices that could possibly compensate the weavers, it is not unfathomable that machines will be soon able to make (if not already) cloth in a texture similar to what is produced by hand looms.

For someone with a short attention span and ADHD and for someone who is a computer programmer, it was unfathomable that people do a rather laborious task repeatedly through the course of the day, and over several days, to earn their living. We asked an artisan why he continued to make cloth by hand, and he replied that the handloom tag helped him earn a better margin. When I suggested to him that greater volumes would make up for the lesser margins that powered looms would offer, he talked about certain intricate designs that according to him only hand loom could create. I could only think of one thing at that moment – the CNC Lathe.

I find the entire ecosystem disturbing. That it is easier to find funding for a not-for-profit venture than for for-profit. That these funds are being used to keep alive trades that have no business to do business (given their inefficiencies). That these efforts put the artisans into a false lull that there actually exists demand for their produce, and at a level that can compensate for their inefficient processes. Which prevents creative destruction, and holds back innovation. And leads to the not-for-profits painting a rather romanticized picture of poverty and traditional rural crafts to get more funding. The cycle continues.

Given that the festival did not have sponsors, I would assume that a significant portion of the fee I paid would have gone into paying the musicians. For that level of fee, I expected a rather small and intimate concert. Instead what I got was two public concerts (where the general public got to watch for free) where there were more speeches than there was music, and one of which started so late into the night that I drifted off.

In the world of not-for-profits, I suspect that “value for money” is perhaps a dirty phrase.

Bhakti Hinduism versus Sanatana Dharma

Around the turn of the last millennium, the Sanatana Dharma found itself under threat, and not for the first time. The previous threats had been dealt with cleverly and skilfully, with the most masterful stroke having been the co-option of the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu. Jainism had been similarly dealt with and reduced to margins of the subcontinent.

The new threat, however, was of a different kind. Unlike the philosophy-heavy religions of the subcontinent, the Abrahamic religions were much simplified in their message. Having been stripped off concepts such as rebirth and multiple gods, they had a simple message, based on the concept of an Armageddon. They also came with a handy “with us or against us” message, with evangelists of these faiths not hesitating from putting to sword people who refused to obey them.

Not to be outdone by faiths that were significantly more simplistic, religious leaders of the day figured that the only response was to simplify their own religion, and thus was born what has now come to be known as the “Bhakti movement”. At this point, it is important to keep in mind that the Bhakti movement as not one movement but a collection of a large number of independent movements all of which were in a similar direction.

So how did the Bhakti saints counter the monotheistic simple Abrahamic religions? They each chose a single God from among the pantheon, and professed worship towards this particular God. Tulasidas chose Rama, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu chose Krishna and so forth. More importantly, the divine aspect of Gods who were hitherto human avatars (such as Rama and Krishna) was amplified, and the more “human” grey areas of the epics and scriptures were played down. In retelling of the epics from this time onward, Ramayana became a story of the “ideal king” Rama. Mahabharata was cast as the story of Krishna, rather than that of a battle between cousins over property. The Bhagavad Gita part of the Mahabharata, which receives scant importance in the earlier texts (source: Irawati Karve’s Yuganta) got played up.

In the space of a few centuries, as the Bhakti movement (decentralized, still – remember) took shape across different parts of the country, the very nature of the religion underwent a massive change. Gone was the worship of the general pantheon, its place now taken up by worship towards a single God/Goddess. The latter would even be interpreted as a particular idol of a particular God/Goddess, as now the Venkataramana of Tirupati was now supposed to have a lot more “mahime” than the idol of the same deity at say Devagiri in Banashankari, Bangalore. Out went the philosophical underpinnings of a religious education. In came a list of dos and don’ts. Debate was replaced by obeisance towards the guru.

The Bhakti period had been immediately preceded by a period of immense development of Hindu philosophy, by the likes of Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya and Madhwacharya. The importance of that was suddenly lost, as the devotion to a particular God took precedence over understanding of a philosophy. I’m supposed to be a Smartha, and am from a priestly family (my greatgrandfather was a priest). None of my religious education, however (mostly received from grandfather and uncles) consisted of anything of Shankara’s Advaitha philosophy – the foundation of the Smartha sect.

Behind my house in Jayanagar is this hall called Shankara Krupa (set up, incidentally, by my grand-uncle), which plays host to lectures of a religious nature every evening. During the day the hall is let out for other functions, typically of a religious nature, and I’ve hosted and attended several events there. There is a podium on stage, from where the speakers deliver their lectures every evening. And on the podium is a large sign, in bold letters in both English and Kannada. “Please do not disturb the lectures by asking questions or engaging in debate”.

This signboard at a place called “Shankara Krupa” sums up where the Bhakti movement has taken the great Sanatana Dharma.

Hundred Percentile

Ok so what is this 100 percentile business? How can IIMs with an entire department dedicated to Quantitative Methods declare a score that sounds so absurd?

My thoughts were just that when I had first heard from a friend that another had got “100 percentile”. It sounded plain absurd. It continued to sound absurd even after I found out (a few hours later) that I had also got “100 percentile”.

After some thought, though, I figured out what it is. Basically CAT gives out “percentile” up to two places of decimal (I know that sounds so wrong. Percentile is the wrong word there. It should be whatever 1/10000th is called).

So what they do is this. In good scientific fashion, to declare your percentile up to two digits of decimal, it is calculated up to three digits of decimal and then the last digit is rounded off. Great scientific practice. Except that if you’ve got a score in CAT that is more than what 99.995% of all CAT-takers have got, your “percentile” gets rounded off to 100.00 !

So if 10 people get “100 percentile” in CAT, it means that 10 people got more than what the rest of the 99.995% of the people who took the exam got. It could as well be a CAT question to calculate the number of people who took the exam given the number of people who got “100 percentile”!

CEO Presentations and Rocky Movies

As part of my consulting assignment, yesterday I had to make a presentation to the CEO of my client. The process of preparing the presentation reminded me of Rocky (or any other Martial Arts movie). In these movies, before the protagonist can challenge the antagonist, he has to go through a series of underlings. Only after the protagonists has defeated all the underlings does the antagonist accept his challenge to a fight.

The work itself was done in consultation with a mid-level manager who heads the division that follows the process that I was going to recommend. While we had had a few rounds of discussions which led to the recommendations, I had prepared the presentation all by myself, and most of Wednesday was spent with him fixing the presentation.

Next we went to his boss, and repeated the process. Then to the boss’s boss. Then to someone else in the top management who would not be available for the main presentation! The hour before the main presentation was spent with the head of the division in whose realm the processes I was recommending fell. And then I got to the CEO.

Two hours before the meeting with the CEO, a couple of client team members and I were discussing the finer points of seppuku and hara-kiri. An hour before the presentation, the division head and I were discussing the Mahabharata!

The entire hierarchy was present for the meeting with the CEO (the mid-manager I had worked with, his boss, his underling, his boss’s boss and a couple of other people). Still typing away on his iPhone, without looking up, the CEO asked, “are all of you in agreement with what is in this presentation or are these Karthik’s recommendations alone?”

The Rocky Process was worth it, after all!

PS: I’m writing this sitting at the client’s office, in between meetings.

Pinda

I had written this as a note on facebook a long time back, in an introduction to another of my blogposts. It went largely unnoticed – I claim it is because it made way too many people uncomfortable. For posterity’s sake, I thought it needs to go somewhere more permanent – like this blog, so reprising it here. 

One of the several post-death rituals in the Sanatana Dharma is called “sapinDikaraNa” – in which the “pinda” (departed soul) of the deceased is “tied” to the pindas of their ancestors. This is apparently done to make sure that the pinda doesn’t end up as a free radical and come back to haunt its descendants.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this today, but the way they “connect” the pindas is quite funny. They just tell the gotra and given name of the deceased, and then the given names of the deceased’s father, father’s father and father’s father’s father (for women it is mother-in-law, mother-in-law’s mother-in-law and mother-in-law’s mother-in-law’s mother-in-law).

I think this is a rather poor addressing system, and not one designed for today’s populations. Maybe back in the days when this was invented, not more than one person belonging to a particular gotra had the same name. So this system of addressing worked (like in villages and small towns, houses don’t have door numbers – the postman knows everyone by name). Why is it that the system hasn’t been changed even though there are possibly thousands of people with the same given names and gotras?

If religion truly ever worked, its working would have broken down through the ages when its addressing system became obsolete. Why then, do so many people still “religiously” believe in it?

It’s all pinda wonly, I must say.

On Schooling

Usually I’m quick to defend the school where I studied between 1986 and 1998. I made lots of good friends there and generally had a good time. Of late, however, in discussions on schooling, I find myself mention teachers from that school who I considered particularly horrible, mostly for their method of teaching.

Yesterday I was chatting with a classmate from this school who now works in the education sector, and she happened to mention that she considered her schooling to be mostly “a waste” and that she didn’t learn too much there. And I quickly concurred with her, saying all that I had learnt was at home, and school didn’t teach me much. So what explains my love for the school even though they might not have done a great teaching job?

From 1998 to 2000, I went to another school, where again they didn’t teach much, and instead assumed all of us went to JEE factories which would teach us anyway. What made things bad there, though, was that they didn’t treat us well. That school had a strict disciplinary code which was enforced more in letter than in spirit. Teachers there had a habit of loading us with homework, calling us for Saturday classes and having surprise tests. The problem with School 2 was that not only did they not teach well, but they also made life miserable in several other ways. The only redeeming factor for that school was the truckload of interesting people I got to meet during my two years there.

So what explains my love for School 1 despite the fact that they didn’t do a great job of teaching? The fact that they treated us well, and left us alone. The uniform wasn’t very strictly enforced, as long as you wore blue and grey. The school had an explicit “no homework” policy. Exams happened only according to schedule and there were few assignments. Even in class 10, we had three “periods” a week dedicated to “games” where we played volleyball or basketball rather than wasting our time in “PT”. Teachers were mostly very friendly and the atmosphere on the whole was collaborative and not so competitive.

My friend might think she “wasted” her 10 years in the school because she didn’t learn much there, but I argue that it was better than her going to another school where she wouldn’t be treated as well and where her life wouldn’t have been as peaceful.

Pot and cocaine

Methylphenidate, the drug I take to contain my ADHD, is supposed to be similar to cocaine. Overdosing on Methylphenidate, I’m told, produces the same effects on the mind that snorting cocaine would, because of which it is a tightly controlled drug. It is available only in two pharmacies in Bangalore, and they stamp your prescription with a “drugs issued” stamp before giving you the drugs.

Extrapolating, and referring to the model in my post on pot and ADHD, snorting cocaine increases the probability that two consecutive thoughts are connected, and that there is more coherence in your thought. However, going back to the same post, which was written in a pot-induced state of mind, pot actually pushes you in the other direction, and makes your thoughts less connected.

So essentially, pot and cocaine are extremely dissimilar drugs in the sense that they act in opposite directions! One increases the connectedness in your train of thought, while the other decreases it!

I’ve never imbibed cocaine, so this is not first-hand info, but I’ve noticed that alcohol when taken in heavy doses (which I never reach since I’m the designated driver most of the time) acts in the same direction of cocaine/methylphenidate – it increases the coherence in your thoughts. Now you know why junkies in your college would claim that the kind of “high” that pot gives is very different from the kind of high that alcohol gives.