Category: arbit

Brand dilution at IIT/IIM

At the Aditya Birla Scholarship party on Saturday, one topic which a lot of people spoke about was about reservations at IITs and IIMs, and the consequent increase in batch size. The general consensus was about reservation being a bad thing and about the strain that is being put on the faculty at IIMs because of the sudden increase in batch size.

As the discussion continued, one popular thread that emerged was about “brand dilution”. About how with people with significantly inferior credentials getting degrees from IITs and IIMs, the brand of these institutes was getting diluted. At that point I disagreed, and I thought I should blog what I said.

The brand of a college that you go to, I said, is useful only for those people who lack a personal brand, and instead try to lean on to brands of institutes they are associated with as a crutch. If you want to really make a name for yourself, I said, you should let go of your institutional crutches and build your own brand. And if you have the self-confidence to do that, the brand of the college you went to shouldn’t matter.

That pretty much ended that discussion right there. What do you think about it? Should we be unduly worried about the “brand value” of the institutions we went to? Or of the companies we work at? Where does leaning on to our “portfolio of brands” stop and creation of our own brand begin?

Coming to think of it now, you can define the brand value of an institution as some sort of a weighted sum of the brand values of people associated with that institution. Right now I’m not bothered about the distribution of those weights. However, irrespective of how the weights are distributed, unless each and every person associated with the institute has equal brand value, there exists at least one person whose brand value is higher than that of the brand value of the institution, and at least one person whose brand value is lower than that of the institution (I’m not bothered about a formal proof of this now, but I guess it is intuitive. Section formulae and all that).

Without loss of generality, we can say that in the universe of people associated with an institution, there is a non-zero set of people whose personal brand values are superior to that of the institution and a non-zero set of people whose personal brand values are inferior to that of the institution. Now, which of these two groups, do you think, would be more likely to want to use the institute’s brand value as a crutch? And which of these two groups would be more concerned about “preserving the institute’s brand value”? I guess that explains why the discussion ended when I said what I said at the party on Saturday.

PS: my apologies if that last bit sounded arrogant.

 

The Aditya Birla Scholarship

I spent this evening attending this year’s Aditya Birla Scholarship awards function. Prior to that, there was a networking event for earlier winners of the scholarship, where among other things we interacted with Kumaramangalam Birla. Overall it was a fun evening, with lots of networking and some nostalgia, especially when they called out the names of this year’s award winners. My mind went back to that day in 2004, as I sat confident but tense, and almost jumped when I heard my named called out only to realize it was another Kart(h)ik!

You can read more about my experiences during that award ceremony here (my second ever blog post), but in this post I plan to talk about what the scholarship means to me. During the networking event today, one of the winners of the scholarship (from the first ever batch) talked about what the scholarship meant to him. As he spoke, I started mentally composing the speech I would have delivered had I been in his place. This blog post is an attempt to document that speech which I didn’t deliver.

People talk about the impact the scholarship has on your CV, and the bond that you form with the Birla group when you receive the scholarship. But for me, looking back from where I am now, the scholarship has primarily meant two things.

Back in the day, the scholarship covered most of my IIM tuition fee. When I’d joined IIM, my parents had told me that they wouldn’t fund my education, and I had taken a bank loan. However, the scholarship covered Rs. 2.5 lakh out of the Rs. 3 lakh I needed for my tuition fee, and the loan that I had taken for the remaining amount was cleared within a couple of months after I worked.

My first job turned out to be a horror story. It was six years before my ADHD would be discovered, but I was in this job where I was to put in long hours under extremely high pressure, and deliver results at 100% accuracy. I wilted, but refused to give up and pushed myself harder, and I’m not sure if I actually burnt out or only came close to it. But it is a fact that one rainy Mumbai morning, I literally ran away from my job, purchasing a one-way ticket to Bangalore and refusing to take calls from my colleagues until my parents told me that my behaviour wasn’t appropriate.

While my parents were broadly supportive, the absence of liabilities made the decision to quit easier. Of course I still had the task of finding myself another job, but I knew I would pull through fine even if I didn’t find another job for another six months (of course, I had saved some money from my internship at an investment bank, but the lack of liabilities really helped). The Aditya Birla Group, by funding my business school education, played an important role in my being free or financial obligations, and being able to chart out my own path in terms of my career.

My six-year career has seen several lows, aided in no small amount by my ADHD and depression, both of which weren’t diagnosed till the beginning of this year. I got into this vicious cycle of low confidence and low performance, and frequently got myself to believe that I was good for nothing, that I had become useless, and that I should just take some stupid steady job so that I could at least pay the bills.

During some of these low moments, my mind would go back to that day in September 2004 when I (at the end of the day) felt at the top of the world, having been awarded the Birla scholarship. I would then reason, that if I was capable of convincing a panel consisting of N. Ram, N K Singh and Wajahat Habibullah to recommend me for the Aditya Birla scholarship, there was nothing that was really beyond me. Memories of my interview and the events of the day I got the scholarship would make me believe in myself, and get me going again. Of course on several occasions, this “going again” didn’t last too long, but on other occasions it sustained. I credit the Aditya Birla scholarship for having given me the confidence to pull myself back up during the times when I’ve been low.

These are not the only benefits of the scholarship, of course. The scholarship has helped build a relationship with the Aditya Birla group. In the short run, when I won the scholarship, it helped me consolidate my reputation on campus. And last but not the least, it was a major catalyst in reviving a friendship which had gone awry thanks to some of my earlier indiscretions. Most important, though, was the financial security that scholarship offered, which made potentially tough decisions easier, and the confidence it offered me which has carried me through tough times.

 

Devoid of attention

Thought is not continuous. Using metaphors, it is more a train like a stream. It’s like thought is organized in “packets” (think Digital communication), which we can call as “bogies” (and hence, a train of thought). For you to think coherently, the bogies should be inter-connected.

So one bogie should connect to the next, and that will help make a coherent thought. Occasionally, though, there can be “slippage”, or derailment. When that happens, you jump a thought, you digress, the normal bogie connection gets broken, and thus your attention breaks.

So, we can model the system thus: your thought is a train of thought packets, each of which contain Q units of thought, and R thoughts per second are produced. Now, with a probability p, the thought i “is connected to” thought i+1 (the rest is the “slippage” we talked about).

Now, for a normal human being, p is low, extremely low  high, extremely high (I don’t know about Q and R, but I guess that depends on (or rather defines) the person’s IQ, sharpness, resourcefulness, etc. It would be an interesting project to research that). Hence, he is able to focus well on work, drive without accidents, speak continuously and properly, etc.

However, when you are doped (by smoking up or whatever other methods), what happens is that p increases decreases significantly. R also increases significantly. So you are now thinking faster (producing more thought units per second) but also there is a higher chance of your thought slipping. You are unable to focus, there are too many things going on in your head, you switch between parallel trains of thought, etc. Because you can’t focus, you are unable to function, and even if you try to function “normally” (by avoiding mistakes, driving well, speaking without a stammer) you do so at a significantly higher mental cost (because you get distracted so easily, you need to put in extra effort to keep trains of thought “alive” as you switch from one to another; so you need to run another process to just keep track of these thoughts, and make sure you can function). You end up not getting as much done as you would normally when you were sober.

There can be several other implications of this. Sometimes, because you are maintaining track of two strains of thought, if you are normally a visual person (if you remember things based on images rather than on sounds or text or any other stimulus), images from two separate trains of thought can occasionally overlap, creating a bizarre and spurious image. And sometimes that might make you think that the spurious image is actually a real image (this can happen if similar overlaps of your different trains of thought occur repeatedly, and thus the superpositions themselves seem to you as another train) and that can lead you to hallucinate!

Sometimes, one train of thought is planning a certain activity, while another train is simultaneously trying to imagine what it would be like when that activity is completed. Now, the superposition of these two trains of thought can occasionally create a picture that the task is actually complete. And then when reality strikes and you realize that the activity is actually not complete, it leads to significant disappointment, and you are prone to feeling disgusted with the task, and giving up.

Higher Lower p and higher R means that activities that involve significant “stimulation” of the brain are likely to completely feed your need for thought, and thus you are likely to get engrossed in such activities and you begin to love them. As a corollary, activities that aren’t as stimulating are likely to bore you (since it doesn’t fully feel your need for thought). So you have trouble successfully completing routine tasks!

A high low p can also (at this moment, my wife walked in and this chain of thought broke, maybe lost forever… so whatever i write to complete this para may not be what i originally intended) mean that your train of thoughts might break when you are performing an activity that demands precision and complete focus. That might result in your becoming clumsy, dropping things, not being able to be delicate, and being highly prone to making tiny mistakes.

So when you are doped, thanks to the higher bit-rate of thoughts, and higher chance of distractions, you function significantly slower and with much higher mental effort, you get distracted extremely easily, you are simply unable to focus, and are prone to occasionally hallucinate. You are easily irritable, impatient, and get pissed if there is inadequate food in order to feed your expanded bitrate of thought (so if there isn’t enough to think about, you feel fidgety, and do random stuff). You are prone to accidents, look for things to stimulate you, want to keep doing something and can give up easily!

Now imagine a state where p and R are higher  p is lower and R is higher than what it normally is for a normal human being, but not as much as it would be when you are drunk. And imagine that this “higher” rate of p and R *lower* rate of p and *higher* rate of R are “permanent” and you are forever in this state. That is ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). It affects 5% of the population, including the author of this piece. It leads to fidgetiness, and can lead to lower productivity and possible learning difficulty. It results in inability to execute, inability to focus, and finish things (think about it in terms of the model that I’ve described above. It will help you understand what it’s likely to lead to.).

The thing with ADHD is that in most cases, the change in p (from “normal”) is so mild (especially compared to the change in p when one is doped) that it is easy to ignore it, and you think your p value is normal. And trying to function at the same efficiency as others, you end up spending significantly higher mental energy, and find yourself falling behind, and not being able to execute. You know the story further.

So ADHD is like being in a perennial state of being mildly doped. And that is the “normal” for people like me.

I’m now on a medicine that lowers my ADHD, i.e. lowers my normal p and R increases my normal p and decreases my normal R. I guess I can call it “antidope”. It is one of those drugs that is distributed in a controlled manner, strictly issued on the handing over of a doctor’s prescription (the copy of the prescription you get is sealed saying “drugs delivered”). If it is an “anti-dope”, I wonder why the control. Perhaps too much of a medicine is also not a good thing.

Update:

This post was edited on 29Sep2012 to correct the inconsistency in the model that I used. Thanks to the commenters for point this out. As you might know by now, the post was written when my p was at an extremely low value, and hence I got my notation muddled up.

Diet redesign

I’m in the course of redesigning my diet. For one, I’ve started tilting the scales upwards again, having “recovered” half of the 20 kilos I rather shockingly lost in the second half of 2009. Given that I aspire to be “party types”, it is important that I look fit, so I need to let go of that paunch. More importantly, traditional South Indian food (rice with sambar/rasam) doesn’t impress my tastebuds any more. Neither does it impress my stomach – I feel hungry soon after I eat that.

The problem with rice (rather, the polished white rice that most of us consume) is that it is extremely low-density. In order to get a certain amount of nutrition (that makes you feel “full”) you need to eat a lot of rice. Consequently, you are full up to the esophagus after your meal, and some rather uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing belching follows. Of late, thanks to a “natural experiment” (due to travel, etc. I ate a highly rice-heavy diet for a while, then a highly wheat-heavy diet, and then back to rice-heavy diet) I’ve figured (I know the textbooks told me this) that rice lacks fibre, and a rice-sambar-rasam based diet can lead to scatological issues that can be rather embarrassing.

As the more perceptive of you would have noticed, we have moved house recently, and as a consequence “lost” our cook (she finds this house too far for her to come). As we look for a new cook (we’re still not 100% convinced we need a cook, given what you’re going to read), it is up to the wife and me to prepare our own food. We are both rather busy professionals, and seek to have good lives outside of work, so neither of us wants to spend too much time cooking.

So the challenge that lies ahead of us now is to redesign our diet, such that it gives us balanced nutrition (while not fattening me up), and consists of easy to make yet tasty foods (if it isn’t tasty it isn’t sustainable). We’ve been doing some experiments over the last 2-3 weeks to see what works. We both like phulka, but it takes way too long to make (more importantly economies of scale are not there in making phulkas). We occasionally have salad with bread, but the wife doesn’t find that filling. We occasionally make pasta, I’ve made Thai curries a couple of times and today I made a (rather tasty) coconut-milk based tofu-and-egg curry to go with brown rice.

With respect to breakfast we’ve achieved the transition. On most days for the last 3 weeks, we’ve eaten boiled egg and muesli/oatmeal porridge for breakfast (occasionally Priyanka has eaten some “traditional breakfast” though, mostly when she hasn’t had the time to eat breakfast before catching her bus). We try and supplement that with some fresh fruit/fruit juice though that hasn’t particularly worked out.

Coming back to the problem at hand, we need to redesign our menu/diet so that we get adequate and balanced nutrition while not spending too much time in the kitchen. No meat is cooked at home (we are a traditional Brohmin family, you see), but we consume eggs regularly. I expect most of my protein intake to come from there – since dals are rather tough to make. We need to eat sufficient greens, and vegetables, and in a form where they’re not overcooked, so that they provide good nutrition. We should probably start using sprouts, and maybe more tofu and mushroom. And we need to find a cereal substitute for white rice that’s easy to cook – brown rice takes way too long to cook (and doesn’t cook in the pressure cooker); chapatis take too long to make.

It seems like a rather hard problem, but I hope to do some good research in this direction and redesign my menu. I’ll write about this as and when I get some interesting ideas, and might even share with you some recipes. In the meantime, if you can think of tasty, easy-to-cook vegetarian food items that provide balanced nutrition, do let me know. If we like that enough, we might call you home and cook for you!

Wannabe no more

Right from the time I started subscribing to the Times of India (and consequently, “Bangalore Times”) back in 1998, I’ve wanted to be a “party types”. While I’ve always been quite nerdy and anti-social and socially awkward, I’ve always wanted to attend parties, and perhaps even attain the holy grail of being a “party types” – having my face on a tiny corner of Page Three of Bangalore Times (my wife, five years younger than me, beat me to this “achievement” in February this year; I was away romancing my bike and the roads (and cows) of Rajasthan when she unlocked this achievement).

I must say I got a chance rather early. The school I had just joined then (National Public School, Indiranagar) was full of interesting people, and my classmates used to organize “parties” every month or so. The “party hall” at an apartment complex where one of the classmates lived would be booked, audio equipment would be rented, out of which “music” of the likes of Prodigy and the Beastie Boys would be blared out. Girls would dress up (I was positively shocked when, just before one of these parties, two of my classmates were talking about buying new dresses for the forthcoming party!), boys wouldn’t, strobe lights flashed, and we would cry our throats hoarse trying to make conversation over the “music”. There wouldn’t be any alcohol, of course, as we were all under-age (we were in class XI), but that didn’t prevent us from having a good time.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have too much fun, as I attended a grand total of three parties over the course of two years, during which four or five times that number were organized! It didn’t help that I lived quite far off from most of my classmates (I was in Jayanagar; I’d bus 12 kilometers each way to school, and most classmates lived close enough to school to cycle). It didn’t help either that those were “JEE mugging years”, and my parents thought I shouldn’t be “wasting my time” partying. Adding to the mix was my parents’ conservativeness and their view of dance parties as being immoral imports of undesirable aspects of western civilization. My “party life” was off to a slow start, and I continued to be socially awkward.

The less I talk about the “party scene” over the next four years (when I was at IIT Madras), the better. The only thing that “happened” was an article I wrote decrying the page three scene for Total Perspective Vortex, the newly launched “literary magazine” on campus. It was like a frustrated old fogey writing about sour grapes, but I thought I wrote quite well.

The famous bi-weekly “L square” parties on campus at IIMB revived my party life. I continued to be socially awkward, but here you knew most people, and most of them knew about my awkwardness. This was around the time I started drinking alcohol, though I wouldn’t drink much. When I drank, though, I let go of myself and I think I had a good time, though I continued to be socially awkward. I developed a reputation of hugging women when drunk. And when I decided to not drink and only observe, I would feel miserable, and “left out”. My red bandana became famous, though!

I contributed significantly to the literature on partying in those two years. It helped that I had started this blog (ok it’s predecessor on LJ) back then. I documented my first ever experience of getting drunk. Another day, I had one drink, stood aside and made pertinent observations. And then, on another occasion, I decided to write a letter to my mother (!! ) about partying.

The downside of L square was that I was used to partying “among my own people”, at organized parties. I never “went out”. As part of my first job, I remember going out one night for a party, but I was so tired from work that I wasn’t able to let go. There was another occasion when I went with a bunch of seemingly random people to Insomnia, the disco at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai. Was again way too self conscious, and made my exit pretty quickly. Same story at my favourite “cousin sister”‘s bachelorette party. Too self-conscious. I should have perhaps interpreted those as first signs of my anxiety.

Priyanka had always claimed to be a “party types”, but would artfully dodge every time I suggested we go out “partying”. She perhaps recognized my social awkwardness (yes, that part never changed) and didn’t want to embarrass herself. She kept saying we should go out “with other people”, and put the onus on me to find other people to go out with, knowing fully well that I was completely incapable of convincing my friends that we should go out “partying”.

So the first “party” we attended together ended up being at the mantap, on the night before our wedding. We had arranged for a DJ, and while some elderly relatives looked on, shocked at our “lack of culture”, others gamely joined in. The music was kept in line to the median demographics of the crowd, and songs such as “aa anTe amalaapuram” sought to drill into my head that I was condemned to lead the rest of my life married to a Gult. The party ended abruptly when the cops from the nearby station made an appearance asking us to tone down the volume, and most people promptly went home.

I could say that my life changed last night. At long last, at the ripe old age of twenty nine, nearly three years after I met and fell in love with the self-proclaimed “party types” Priyanka, and nearly two years after we moved in together, she “obliged” and took me for a party. Joining us for the evening was her spiritual guru (hereby referred to as “Guru”) and a common friend of theirs (who we shall refer to as “Date”). We were headed to the City Bar at UB city, which was hosting a party with DJ R3hab (sic) at the turntable. Priyanka (we’ll call her “Wife” henceforth) would be my “guide” into the world of partying. For the record, she had only recently finished reading Raghu Karnad’s excellent essay on how the liquor industry shaped Bangalore. I had read it maybe a month back.

People talk about female infanticide and selective abortions, when they talk about the ticking time bomb that is India’s declining sex ratio. They quote numbers such as “914 girls for every 1000 boys for population aged 0-6”, and compare it to other countries, and our own numbers in the past. They talk about “wife sharing” and migration of girls from poor states such as Bihar to states starved of women such as Haryana. The starker story about India’s gender gap, though, can be told by observing the crowd trying to get into nightclubs.

In the Western world, nightclubs are frequently seen as places to “hang out”, and find interesting people, typically of the sexually preferred gender. Men and women alike, looking for interesting company, hang out at nightclubs, and many a relationship is formed because people “happened to meet at a party”. It is approximately as likely for a group of men to go out, as it is for a group of women, so most of these clubs typically see fairly balanced gender ratios. Apart from perhaps a few exclusive clubs, few see the need to take measures to ensure a balanced gender ratio, and this too is done “gently”, through measures such as “ladies’ nights”, where women get free drinks.

It is instructive that one of the most popular sports bars in Bangalore (Xtreme sports bar in Indiranagar) prevents stag entry. It is hilarious, because watching sport is usually a male-bonding activity. If I want to get together with a bunch of fellow Liverpool F.C. fans and go watch a game, it is impossible to do so unless at least half of us are women (and I know only one woman who is a Liverpool F.C. fan and she doesn’t live in Bangalore). Preventing stag entry, as drastic it seems, however, seems like the only practical way for clubs to ensure a fair gender ratio and enable people to have fun.

As we rode up the escalator to the “Piazza” area of UB City last evening, we were greeted by a massive, mostly male, crowd. Most of them were trying to get into City Bar, but were being held off by bouncers who had declared a “couples only entry” policy. The few women we saw there were perhaps waiting for friends, for there was nothing stopping them from entering. The stags didn’t have any such option, but still hung on in the hope of being let in (City Bar usually doesn’t have any restrictions. My guess is that the rule was made on the go in order to ensure a balanced crowd for the party), and in the process made it difficult for couples and hinds to get past them and get in. The scene at the bar there told the story.

This was a puzzle that had puzzled me back when I was looking for a long-term gene propagating partner. Every social network I had been part of, every seemingly upwardly mobile cohort, there seemed to be a disproportionate number of men. A woman for every sixteen men at IIT. One in six at IIM. One in three, one in ten, none in ten and one in twenty in my four jobs. The story was similar in most engineering colleges and IT companies. And the heavy imbalances reflected in the club scene also. Where, I wonder, where have all the women gone?

Priyanka argues that it is down to our conservative culture and relative ease of boys to live away from their parents and to be able to “go out”. Another reason she gives pertains to girls getting married at a much younger age in our country (relative to boys). While  these make sense, the latter is a “problem” Western countries also face, but they don’t seem to have a problem attracting balanced crowds to public spaces. Nevertheless, we seem to have fallen into a Nash equilibrium where most single women stay home, for a multitude of reasons, and most single men go to bars searching for single women, mostly in futility. It is only the arranged marriage market that perhaps clears this deadlock.

“No one drinks at clubs”, the experienced Wife had informed me, “everyone gets drunk before they go in”. In accordance to this diktat, and also seeking to warm myself after a swim in reasonably cold water earlier in the evening, I had carried along some (excellent) Amrut fusion in the car. Wife and I drank from it before we made our way to City bar. We were to realize we hadn’t been too “liberal” when we had stocked up liquor for the car.

If you are tall and big, like me, it is easy to get spotted in the crowd, and this can help people locate and keep track of you when you are at public spaces (like a club or a crowded market or a concert). But it can work against you when you have to weave through human traffic in order to get somewhere, like to the gates of the club as we had to last night. Wife, however, had chosen our company well, as the tiny Guru expertly weaved past the crowds and got us past the gates, with stamps on our wrists. My life as a “party types” was actually about to begin.

The alcohol took a long time to act, and even mixing drinks (the entry fee included a free Bacardi+Lime, which I gulped down to go over the Amrut I had drunk earlier) didn’t help. I instinctively reached for and fidgeted with my phone, to tweet, but met disapproval from Wife, who thought that was too geeky. I actually tweeted that I wanted to blog about what I was observing. Then things started to get interesting.

Wife and I decided to look out for interesting people. She quickly found two boys to lech at, and pointed them out to me. I wasn’t so lucky with the women. There was a sameness about their appearance. They all seemed to be wearing similar clothes, or perhaps most of them could be classified into two or three types based on the clothes they wore. Most of them were in skirts/dresses, though some wore trousers. Most shoulders were bare, with strappy and strapless tops/dresses ruling the roost. Long straightened hair was the norm, as were high-heeled shoes. To the slowly-getting-drunk me, even their faces all looked alike. There was little idiosyncracy about the looks of any of them, to particularly draw my attention. The only one I found remotely interesting, of course, was Date, who I had briefly talked to while we were getting in (she too, of course, was “in uniform”, as was Wife). I walked a bit after I finished my rum to dispose of the bottle, looked back, and thought I saw a girl who caught my eye. Turned out it was the Wife!!

We moved into the heart of the party, close to the stage where R3hab had by now taken over. I noticed a pile of women’s shoes near a pillar, and soon discovered that Wife and Date, too, were dancing barefoot! What is the point in wearing fancy shoes, I thought, if one has to take them off to have fun. However, I guess such questions are not to be asked about one’s wives.

The first cop made his appearance at about 11:05 pm (the deadline for bars and restaurants is 11:30). Wife and I decided it was time to move on, and since I hadn’t eaten anything after the swim (and had quite a bit to drink – I would drink another shot of whisky at the bar), I thought it would be a good idea to hit a “midnight buffet”. We presently left the party, bidding goodbye to Guru and Date, partly in our effort to beat the crowd out of the parking lot. Bangalore, and UB City continued to party on as we drove out (yes, I was sober enough to drive). Some aimless wandering followed (I remembered people mention the Midnight buffet at Windsor, and promptly drove there without checking only to be told they had stopped it some time ago) before we settled down for the midnight buffet at the ITC Gardenia. It was past 1 am by the time we got home.

I’m a wannabe no more. I’ve always wanted to be “party types”, and I took my baby steps in that direction last night. “Project Thirty” is well and truly on, I must say! Much fun was had last night, and I kept telling Wife that “we should do this more often”. It helps that Bangalore has moderately relaxed the dancing-at-bars laws. My friend Deepak who runs Eclipse at The Leela tells me that there is a new “discotheque license” which enables an establishment to permit dancing. Of course, the 11:30 deadline remains, but I shall not complain.

I mentioned earlier that I had a reputation at IlIMB of hugging girls when drunk. I lived up to that last night as I repeatedly put my arm around Date and posed for photos, and gave her a hug as we were about to leave (Wife looked on, and clicked photos). However, Wife maintains that I lack social skills, and I really need to make an effort in the art of making conversation with women, and etiquette of taking a woman out (I continue to commit silly yet cardinal mistakes, like when I took Wife to the Windsor yesterday before checking if they had a buffet). I’m looking for a “social skills” coach. If any of you are willing to help me on that, I would be extremely glad. If you agree to guide me, I will treat you every time we meet as part of “my course”.

I’ve told the story of fourteen years of my life in this rather long essay, along with some comments and tidbits on India’s social structure. In these fourteen years, a lot has changed, in India, in Bangalore and in my life. One thing, however, refuses to change. I continue to be socially awkward.

 

Anxiety and computer viruses

I think, and hope, that I’ve been cured of anxiety, which I was probably suffering from for over six years. It was a case of Murphy’s Law taken to its extreme. If anything can go wrong, it will, states the law, and in those six or seven years, I would subconsciously search for things that could possibly go wrong, and then worry about them. And worry about them so much that I would get paranoid.

Let me give you an example. Back in 2008, after a four-month spell of unemployment, I had signed up with a startup. Two days after I signed, which was three weeks before I was going to start work, I started worrying about the health of the startup founder, and what would happen to my career in case he happened to croak between then and my joining the company! It had been a major effort on my part to try and get back to finance, and that job was extremely important to me from a career signaling standpoint (it played a major role in my joining Goldman Sachs, subsequently, I think). So I started getting worried that if for some reason the founder died before I joined, that signaling wouldn’t happen! I worried about it for three days and broke my head about it, until sanity reigned.

This wasn’t a one-off. I would take ages to reply to emails because I would be paranoid that I had said something inappropriate. When I landed in Venice on vacation last year, my office blackberry didn’t get connected for an hour or so, and I thought that was because they had fired me while I was on vacation. It would be similar when I would look at my blackberry first thing in the morning after I woke up, and found no mails. I needed no real reason to worry about something. It was crazy.

When a virus attacks your computer, one of the ways in which it slows down the computer is by running “background processes”. These processes run in the background, independent of what you intend to do, but nevertheless take up so much of your computing power that it becomes extremely hard to function. Anxiety works pretty much the same way. Because there is always so much going on in your mind (most of it unintended, of course), a lot of your brain’s “computing power” is taken up in processing those unwanted thoughts (the brain, unfortunately, has no way of figuring out that those thoughts are unintended). And that leaves you with so much lesser mindspace to do what you want to do.

So you stop functioning. You stop being able to do as much as you were able to. Initially you don’t recognize this, until you bite of more than you could possibly chew a number of times in succession. And then, having failed to deliver on so many occasions, you lose confidence. And lesser confidence means more worry. Which means more background process. And means diminished mental ability. Things can spiral out of hand way too quickly.

I’ve been on anxiety medication for over seven months now, and the only times when I realize how bad things were are when I happen to miss a dose or two, and there is relapse. And having been through it, trust me, it is quite bad.

On the positive side, the impact a well-guided medication process (administered by an expert psychiatrist) can have on anxiety is also tremendous. For the six years I suffered, I had no clue that I was under a cloud of a clinically treatable condition. I didn’t know that it was only a virus that had attacked my CPU, which could be got rid off with sustained dosage of anti-virus, and I had instead thought my CPU itself was slowing down, maybe rusting (at the ripe old age of late twenties). After I started responding to my medication, I was delirious with happiness, with the realization that I hadn’t become dumb, after all.

It was sometime in March or April, I think, when I realized that my medication had come into effect, thus freeing up so much mind space, and I started feeling smart again. When I met the psychiatrist next, I told her, “I feel exactly the way I felt back in 2005 once again!”.

Wine buying

Today, for the first time ever, I went out to buy wine, and in hindsight (I’m writing it having finished half of half the bottle) I think I did a pretty good job.

I had gone to this “Not just wine and cheese” store in Jayanagar hoping to pick up some real good wine to go with our cooking experiments for the evening (we’re making pizza and pasta). Having had really bad experiences with Indian wines (Nine Hills, Grover’s, Sula), I gave them a wide berth and moved over to the international section. The selection wasn’t particularly vast, and interestingly as soon as I moved over to the international section, one of the shopkeepers came over to assist me.

He first showed me a 2009 wine from France, when i asked him to show something older. For a slightly higher price, he pulled out a 2006 wine from France. The pricing seemed suspicious to me. A six year old wine from France, one of the more sought after wine-producing countries, for just Rs. 1600 (inclusive of 110% tax, so the duty free dollar price comes to around $15)? May not be very good wine, I reasoned, and now I decided to let go of all details on production date, etc. and simply asked the shopkeeper to recommend to me a good bottle.

Maybe it was the fact that I had quickly moved over to the international section, or that I was talking about year of bottling, but the shopkeeper assumed I was a rather serious buyer, and enthusiastically recommended to me a few bottles. Now, picking wines is tougher than picking whiskeys (where it’s easy to have favourite brands. Mine, if you would ask, is Talisker). Each country has several estates, the year of bottling, weather in the country in various years and several other factors go into determining how good a bottle is. Also, there’s inverse pricing, where you perceive more expensive wines to be better. So one has to look upon raw economics skills in order to judge wine bottles and pick something that is likely to be good.

What particularly interested me was a bottle of 2010 wine from Chile. Now, at Rs. 1300, it seemed rather highly priced for its vintage (given that France 2006 went for 1600). And then, I realized that Chile is a rather unfashionable wine producer, since most people tend to prefer European wines, and that being in the temperate weather zone, it is capable of producing good wines.

The shopkeeper mentioned that the particular bottle had been procured after a customer had specifically asked for it, and that it was made of superior quality grapes. Now, given that it was a wine of recent vintage and from an unfashionable producer, that it cost almost as much as a much older wine from a much older vintage told me something. That it was likely to be good.

It’s about two hours since I got home, and the bottle is half empty. The wine has been absolutely fabulous, and I hope this is the beginning of a great wine-buying career.

Sensitivity

This post is not about any statistical analysis. Neither is it about people’s sensitivity about others, which is associated with empathy. This post is about what I can, incorrectly but more specifically, call “self-sensitivity”. About people who are really thin-skinned and who are likely to “feel bad” at the drop of a hat. I argue that as far as social impact goes, it is no better than arrogance. For purposes of the rest of this post, the word “sensitivity” is to be read in this context – about sensitivity towards one’s own feelings.

A number of people see sensitivity as a positive trait. “Oh, she’s such a sensitive person” is usually bandied about as a compliment to the sensitive person. One is supposed to feel some sort of sympathy to the sensitive people, and remain sensitive (!) to their feelings while interacting with them. It somehow so happens that, more often than not, sensitive people also happen to be nice, and it is as if in return for this niceness you need to take extra care of them.

Thinking about it, sensitivity arises thanks to some deep-rooted insecurity, or some kind of inferior complex. This insecurity means that the person is more likely to associate some kind of malevolent intent to the counterparty’s words or actions, leading to much disagreement and tears and loss of trust. While it is okay for a sensitive person to expect counterparties to be sensitive to their sensitiveness (!), it needs to be understood that over the long run, this could cause friction and be counterproductive to the cause of the relationship.

The problem with both sensitivity and arrogance is that it increases the effort involved in talking to a person. If you talk to an arrogant person, you need to put up with his/her arrogance and the possibility that he/she might put you down for no fault of yours. You need to be always prepared for the conversation to go unpleasant, and thus overall your costs of conversation go up, which as a student of economics, you will understand, decreases the total amount of conversation.

While arrogance is a well-known cause of friction in conversation, less understood is that sensitivity can also have a similar impact. While dealing with a sensitive person, you may not be required to be prepared to be humiliated, or for the conversation to go really bad. However, at all points during your conversation, you will need to keep in your head that the counterparty is extra-sensitive, and that means you have a constant background process that censors your speech, and makes sure you don’t hurt the counterparty. This can again have an adverse impact on the conversation itself, and might tire you out quickly. Again, simple economics tells us that it affects quantum of conversation adversely.

While in the short run, it is okay for sensitive people to ask people around them to be aware of their sensitivity, expecting similar support in the longer run, while making no effort on one’s own part to get rid of one’s insecurities or inferiority complex, is not fair on the part of the sensitive person. Like arrogant people, sensitive people need to understand that their sensitivity is a cause of friction and it can affect their relationships in the longer run; and they need to work on it.

Unfortunately, sensitivity is seen as a largely positive trait, mostly by people who are unaware of the friction it can cause. More importantly, how do you tell a sensitive person that he/she should be less sensitive while at the same time not hurting him/her? In that sense, dealing with arrogant people is simpler – you can speak your mind to them without much long-term impact, and the general understanding of arrogance in society means that it is easier for you to at least make an attempt to tell an arrogant person to be less arrogant.

But how does one deal with sensitive people? Who will bell the cat?

 

Generalists and specialists

So you have generalists and specialists. Generalists are fundamentally smart people who can do a variety of things. They take a look at a problem, take some time to understand the basics, and then go about solving it. They get bored easily, and move from problem to problem. Generally, they don’t dig deep but are well equipped enough to solve most problems.

Specialists, as the name suggests, dig deep into a particular problem. They are the kings of all they survey within their domain, and know every little trick in the book. However, they are usually unaware of the world outside of their wells, and suffer from the hammer-nail problem (to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail). They are also deeply insecure – for if their area of specialization gets invaded by generalists, they are likely to lose their livelihood. So, they are incentivized to build walls, and make it harder for generalists to invade. Generalists don’t have any such problem. Given their nature, if one fort gets invaded, they can soon go ransack another.

The world is dominated by specialists, and they continue to build walls around themselves. Artificial barriers to entry get created (such as “experience requirements”). While this keeps their domains safe, it leads to an increase in transaction costs and overall decrease in efficiency.

Take accounting as an example. In principle, it is not a particularly hard practice. What makes it particularly hard for aspiring accountants is the way you go about becoming an accountant. You need to pass an exam, set by the association of accountants, and then intern under an already qualified accountant (who pays you less than minimum wage) and pass another exam (again set by the association of accountants) in order to practice accounting. The exam and internship are rigorous enough that you need to devote two or more years of your life (full time) in trying to get your charter. All for a profession that is fundamentally fairly intuitive. So that the specialists’ turf is protected (of course the accountants have every incentive to keep the requirements to the charter prohibitively tough – for more chartered accountants would mean more competition and hence less margins).

Another example is in math papers. They are so formula and jargon ridden that it is prohibitively difficult for anyone who is not a full-time mathematician to make much sense of them. While some of the rigour may actually be justified, most of it is for the sake of preserving the mathematicians’ turf. The same applies in general to all peer-reviewed paper publication journals and conferences.

Social scientists are afraid of economists. Financial traders (from a commerce background) are afraid of engineers. In business schools, “marketing students” are afraid of “finance students” (more on this in another post). Their only defence is raising barriers, forming cliques and spewing jargon.

Tear Down The Wall! TEAR DOWN THE WALL!! TEAR DOWN THE WALL!!!

 

Helmets, Tinted Glasses and Low Hanging Fruit

I’m opposed to the law that makes wearing of helmets and seatbelts mandatory for two wheeler and four wheeler drivers (respectively). I might have argued earlier that they cause perverse incentives (a driver wearing a seatbelt is likely to feel “safer” and thus drive more rashly, causing more collateral damage). There is another important reason I add now – these provide too much low hanging fruit for cops to provide them enough incentive to go after real crime. Let me explain.

Cops are an overworked and underpaid lot. So they try to improve their lot by extracting rents wherever possible. So you have random traffic cops flagging you down to “check your documents” so that some deficiency can be pointed out and a fast buck can be made. Or you have (non-traffic) cops “inspecting” bars to ensure that excise rules are being followed – once again to make a fast buck. What Inspector Dhoble and co in Mumbai are doing is to similarly go after low hanging fruit – easy targets who they can “catch” and hopefully make a fast buck of.

While rules such as compulsory helmets, not having tinted glasses and drinking permits might be desirable from the social perspective (even that is highly debatable), the bigger damage such rules do is to over-stress an already overworked police force. Policemen have a choice between doing “real” police work which could actually lead to reduction of crime, but which may not pay in terms of “rents”; and the “low-hanging fruit” work which may not go that far in controlling crime but allows the policeman to make a fast buck. Given the general stress that goes with being a policeman, it is no surprise if most policemen would opt to do the latter kind of work.

One obvious solution is to expand the police force, provide better training and better pay so that policemen spend more of their time spending real crime. But that involves strategic changes which might take a long time to put in place. Police reforms are important and the sooner we start them the better. However, it needs to be recognized that it’s a long-term project  and has a long gestation period.

So what needs to be done to increase police efficiency in the short run? Cut opportunities for policemen to pick the low hanging fruit. Repeal the helmet and seatbelt laws, stop summary stopping of vehicles and document checking (except for drunken driving) and shift to a notice-and-voucher system, repeal archaic laws that allow policemen to disturb business, legalize prostitution and the like.

We already have an over-stretched police force. We don’t need further stretching by means of increasing their workload. Simplify the rules and make it easier for policemen to implement them, and crime is more likely to drop that way.