personal – Page 14 – Pertinent Observations

I completed the manuscript of my book

I had set myself an April 15 deadline to finish the first draft of my book, and I’m happy to let you know that I’ve achieved it. This draft weighs in at around 75,000 words, which is probably longer than I’d expected.

Now the hard part begins – of finding publishers, editing, promotions and all that jazz. I don’t even know where to start and which publishers to approach. This is a popular economics book where I use the concept of market liquidity (from finance) to explain why certain markets are structured the way they are, and how markets can be made more efficient.

Here is a brief introduction of the book that I’ve written. I’m yet to give it a name, but the subtitle is “How financial markets explain life”:

Why do people with specialised skills find it hard to switch jobs? Why do transfer fees for footballers always seem either too high or too low? Why are real estate brokers still in business despite the large number of online portals that have sought to replace them?

The answer to all this lies in liquidity. Broadly speaking, market liquidity refers to the ease with which a product or service can be bought or sold in a particular market. With its origins in financial markets, the concept has far-reaching implications in a large number of markets.

In this book, Karthik Shashidhar, a management consultant and public policy researcher, explores a large number of markets, financial and otherwise, and explains why they are structured the way they are. From relationships to property rights, from big macs to public transport, a large number of markets are dissected to show why liquidity remains a useful concept well beyond financial markets where it originated.

Now, while many of the examples are from India, I’ve written this book with a global audience in mind. Hopefully I should be able to publish and sell this book internationally.

There is a full chapter on the economics of Uber, and how surge pricing is critical to creating liquidity in the rides marketplace. There are also chapters on matchmaking, obsolete technologies, agricultural markets and why most Indians cook at home.

I haven’t really seen any other popular economics books from India, so don’t know where to start my publisher hunt. Any leads will be welcome. I’m currently in Barcelona, but will be returning to Bangalore in mid-May.

Oh, and there is very little intersection with this blog, or anything I’ve published so far. One chapter intersects one blogpost here, and another draws from a Mint piece I’ve written, but the rest is all fresh material. So, you people have no excuse but to buy the book when it does come out!

Wish me luck!

Why authors need convertible debt

At the end of a recent blogpost, I had referred to a piece by Matthew Yglesias where he refers to author advances as “convertible debt”.

An advance is bundled with a royalty agreement in which a majority of the sales revenue is allocated to someone other than the author of the book. In its role as venture capitalist, the publisher is effectively issuing what’s called convertible debt in corporate finance circles — a risky loan that becomes an ownership stake in the project if it succeeds.

While I agreed with Yglesias’s piece when I had first read it (around the time it was published), I’m not so sure I agree with it now. As I approache the “home stretch” with the first draft of my first book (it’s a popular economics book on liquidity and market design), I’m plunged in self-doubt every time I sit down to write it.

The problem with writing a book is that the author needs to work for months together without any feedback whatsoever. It is occasionally possible for the author to take feedback from a few family members and friends. While such feedback is sometimes useful, the problem is that the people providing the feedback represent only a very tiny fraction of the book’s overall client base (I hope lots of people will read my book once it gets published).

So there is always a reasonable chance that months of effort might result in an absolute dud, implying zero returns. It is also mildly probable, of course, that these months of efforts might result in a blockbuster, but while you are producing it you have no clue which way it will turn out.

This can create serious motivation issues, and on the occasional bad day at work you might be tempted to abandon the project altogether and get back to doing something more predictable. You can have some internal deadlines but they need not be binding (like I’d set the deadline to finish my first draft as the day I went for my vacation to al-Andalus. However I’ve already reneged on that and given myself a further fifteen days). Unless there is extremely strong internal motivation, it is hard to sustain your effort.

This is where convertible debt, in the form of a publisher’s advance, can help. On the upside, the advance will guarantee you some returns (however meagre) from the project. On the downside, the advance from the publisher comes with a deadline, which acts as a Damocles’s sword to ensure you are motivated and finish your book on time.

As a first time author however, whose only published work so far has been 2000 odd posts on this blog and a 100 odd articles for Mint, I didn’t give myself too good a chance of snagging convertible debt, and so I soldier on, hoping my book turns out well.

Soon, once I finish the draft, I hope to start taking the book to publishers. If any of you has leads on who to approach, do let me know. It’s a non-fiction (popular economics) book with an Indian core but written for a global audience. For now I’m ruling out self-publication, since I’m looking at this book as providing me far more than royalty revenues and can do with some publisher validation.

Also, that might help me get some convertible debt for my next book!

Twitter and negativity

One of the reasons that sparked my departure from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter two weeks back was an argument with my wife where she claimed that Twitter had made me too negative, and highly prone to trolling (even in “real life”). Accepting a challenge from her, I offered to go through my tweets over the last few months, and identify those that were negative. I also offered to perform a similar exercise with my blog.

I started off with the intention to go through tweets in the last one year and delete anything that was negative or “troll-y”. I allocated myself an hour to accomplish this, along with a similar exercise for my blog.

I must have spent fifty minutes going through my twitter feed, and didn’t manage to go back more than two months. I was surprised by my own sheer volume of tweeting. What was more surprising was the amazing lack of insight in most of those tweets – there were horrible PJs that I’d cracked just because I could, there were random replies to other people which didn’t add any kind of value, there was outrage about the lack of outrage and some plain banal life stuff (apart from some downright trolly stuff which I deleted).

It made for extremely painful reading, and I could hardly recognise myself from my own tweets. Apart from some personal markers, I would find it hard to recognise most of these tweets as my own if they were to be presented to me a few months later. It was a clear indication that it was time to exit twitter (though since I have a rather kickass username there I’m not deleting my account).

The ten minutes I spent that day going through this blog, however, was a sheer delight. I did end up deleting a couple of outragey posts (both of which were essentially collections of tweets which I’d collated for posterity), but most of my posts were mostly sheer delight! There was some kind of insight in each of my posts, and I’d lie if I were to say that I’m not proud of what I’ve written.

It’s not that I’ve not written shit on this blog (or its predecessor), having written posts as late as 2008 which I’m definitely not proud of. What I’ve noticed, however, is that I’ve evolved over time, and my writing style has been refined, and I think I continue to add significant value to my readers.

Twitter’s constant engagement feature, however, meant that it was hard to evolve there and hard to escape from the cycle of banal and negative tweets. My tweets from this February are unlikely to be qualitatively very different from those 5 years back, and that’s not a positive thing to say.

The thing with Twitter is that its short format encourages a “shoot first ask questions later” kind of thinking. You end up posting shit without thinking through it, and without having to construct a reasonable argument. This encourages outrage, and posting banal stuff. Spending one minute typing out a banal tweet is far lower cost than spending 20 minutes typing out a banal blog post – the latter is unlikely to be written unless there’s some kind of insight in it.

Outrage is one thing, but what’s really got to me with respect to twitter is its sheer ordinariness, and temporality (most tweets lose value a short period of time after they’re posted). It’s insane that it’s taken me so long (and three longish sabbaticals from twitter) to find out!

Football in the rain

The weather in Barcelona had been excellent for the last couple of weeks. While it wasn’t warm (most days had required me to wear a rather heavy jacket), it was pleasant and sunny, with hardly any rain. For whatever reason, the rain gods had to choose today, when we had tickets to watch Barcelona play Arsenal in the Champions League, to pour down.

I had made a dash to a nearby supermarket to pick up light raincoats earlier this evening. In hindsight, I can attest that Quechua Rain Cut is a brilliant product and does its job. Among the best raincoats I’ve used. Very effective and light, and can be worn over other warm clothes!

Rain meant we had to take the bus to the stadium rather than walk (it’s 2km from home), and rain also meant that bus made painful and slow progress, dropping us near the Camp Nou some 15 minutes before kickoff. And then there was the lack of queueing at security check outside the stadium (made worse by the pouring rain).

Before the game I’d checked if backpacks would be allowed at the stadium and various forums had mentioned in the affirmative. As it turned out, they weren’t allowing them in today, which meant we had to drop my wife’s (fairly expensive) backpack at the gate before we got in. It was just before kickoff that we took our seats.

Rather, I took my assigned seat while my wife randomly occupied the empty seat next to mine, hoping to exchange it with her seat (which was one row in front) when the rightful occupant arrived. As it transpired, the rightful occupant never arrived (perhaps he was a season ticket holder deterred by the rain, else I can’t imagine someone letting go of a €150 ticket. I plan to do a post on season ticket pricing when back from vacation. Context is Hull City revamping their season ticket system. Interestingly the other seat adjacent to mine was also vacant! In fact, there were quite a few empty seats at the stadium).

There was this nice anecdote which can be used in economics classes on externalities – given that it was raining, it meant that people had an incentive to hold up an umbrella while sitting, but that would mean those in the rows behind would be inconvenienced – a negative externality. Usually, nudges and shouts did the trick to lower the umbrellas, but some umbrella men were steadfast.

Anyway, despite being in the third tier of stands, the view of the pitch was top class (apart from the occasional intrusive umbrella) and we soon got adjusted to the drizzle. The players weren’t that well adjusted, though, for they constantly kept slipping on the turf.

Photo taken at half time. The messy hair can be explained by the hood of the raincoat

Interestingly, the noise levels weren’t too high – when Barcelona scored, celebration was rather muted. There were no shouts of Vis?a Catalunya at 17 minutes 14 seconds (this had been rather vociferous the last time I was at the Camp Nou, but that was in the run up to the (later cancelled) secession referendum) – but that could be because that was exactly around the time Neymar scored.

Though there is another possible reason people didn’t celebrate too loudly – I belive people had gotten into certain positions that helped them beat the rain (like I’d pulled my raincoat forward and over my knees to protect my thighs from getting wet), and heavy celebration would disturb these positions. There was the usual drum band behind the south goal, but the crowd was otherwise rather quiet (the away stand directly behind us was an exception, though!).

Anticipating an exodus, we had decided to leave as soon as the clock opposite us struck 42 in the second half. As it happened, Barcelona scored their third goal just as we were about to disappear into the stands. The early exit helped – there was a bus right outside the stadium that would drop us next to home, and we managed to find seats on that.

Oh, and the backpack that we had abruptly discarded near the gate when we went in was still in the exact position where we’d left it, and we gleefully picked it up on our way out. Quite impressive for a city that is known for its high rate of petty crime (which I’ve been victim to. I lost my spare phone on the day I landed last month, between getting off the cab from the airport and getting into my apartment building!)!

The importance of queen side counterplay

Back in 1994 when I was still playing competitive chess (I practically retired in a year’s time after a series of blunders under pressure), I had played in this one special tournament that was played to “prepare Karnataka youngsters for national events”. Though I wasn’t travelling to any of these events, being a “promising youngster” I had received an invitation to play.

It was a weird kind of tournament, for apart from us “youngsters”, there were these senior players from the state who participated in the tournament on and off. Their scores weren’t tallied – all they did was to make sure each “youngster” played an equal number of games against a “senior player” and only youngsters’ scores counted.

In the first round of the tournament, I faced off against a senior named Nagesh (if I remember correctly). Nagesh played white and played a King’s Indian Attack against my Sicilian Defence (part of this special tournament was to expose us to non-standard openings and plays). It was a hard fought middle and end game where experience ultimately prevailed, and I lost.

In the analysis after the game, Nagesh pointed out that while he had an established centre and strong kind side attack, I had managed to build up a fairly expansive position on the queen side, and that I should have “pushed harder on the queenside for counterplay” rather than simply defending. While I took his point, I didn’t see the point of expanding on the queen side to grab a couple of pawns and (with a remote chance) threaten to queen one of my pawns there when my king was under heavy attack.

This bewilderment continued through the next year, as I studied openings for which the stated strategy was to “get counterplay on the queenside”. Not being a particularly great endgame player (though I did show some promise in that in my brief career), the advantage that could be gained by the gain of a pawn was lost to me, and I would prefer to go for a more tactical game (which usually didn’t go too well).

As an adult, while I don’t play competitively any more, I continue to follow chess and watch videos from time to time for entertainment. I’ve developed more nuance on strategy, and in playing a positional game. I’ve seen how small advantages (like space, or even a pawn) can be turned into decisive victories, and given myself shit for not learning to play endgames better back during my playing career. It’s a more holistic view of chess than the one I had formed as a schoolboy having mugged up all the moves of Morphy’s 17-move win against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard (I still remember that game by heart).

Though it doesn’t take much convincing now for me to appreciate the joys of positional play, and going for queen side counterplay when your king is under attack, I found the game played by Viswanathan Anand against Veselin Topalov in the first round of the ongoing Candidates tournament rather interesting.

The two players go for different strategies – while Topalov builds up for an attack against Anand’s king, Anand goes for queen side counterplay (the bit I didn’t get back when I was a young player) and goes pawn grabbing. It was a rather complex game and both players played rather inaccurately under time pressure, but it is an excellent example of how queen side counterplay can help defuse an attack.

Anand’s queen nearly gets trapped (in the press conference after the game, he said he was reconciled to giving it up if attacked). There is a massive piledriver of pieces Topalov stacks up on the king side to attack Anand’s king. There is absolutely no threat of danger on Topalov’s king.

Yet, from time to time, Anand’s pawn grabbing strategy means Topalov has to move back some pieces to the queen side for its defence, blunting the attack. Then, Topalov needs to recover lost material, and moves his rooks to the queen side for that purpose. There is a mad scramble around the time control (both players got into time trouble) when the position gets liquidated with a lot of pieces exchanged.

After the dust settles, we find that Topalov’s remaining pieces are horribly misplaced on the queenside (on a pawn recovery campaign), while Anand’s are now trained towards an attack on Topalov’s king. As Topalov scrambles to defuse this attack, he loses material, and ultimately resigns.

It was a fascinating game to get a potentially fascinating tournament underway. I hope to follow it as best as I can, though that might not be so trivial given the holiday I’m taking later this month. Watching GM Daniel King’s analysis of Anand’s game (linked above) started making me wonder if I’d have played differently had I had access to such high quality commentary when I was still a competitive player two decades ago.

As for that tournament, I ended up beating the other senior player I played against. He blundered his queen in a typical tactical Sicilian Dragon Yugoslav Attack position (I was white). I placed second among all the “youngsters” there, and got my only prize money from chess after that game – a princely Rs. 80 (which wasn’t that bad for a schoolboy in 1994)!

Admission of errors and bad bank loans

I have a policy that whenever I make a mistake, I admit it. I believe that suppressing an error does more harm than good in the long run, and it is superior to admit it at the time of discovery and correct course rather than keeping things under wraps until the shit hits the fan (a la Nick Leeson, for example).

There is another reason I like to admit to my mistakes – by doing so frequently, I want to send the signal that I’m self-aware and self-critical and aware of what I’ve done wrong. This, I believe, sends a signal that I should be trusted more, since I have a grip on rights and wrongs.

It doesn’t always work that way. There was a company I once worked for, where my responsibilities meant that my errors had an immediate material impact on the company. I don’t know if this (direct material impact) mattered, but my signalling went horribly wrong there.

The powers-that-were came from a prior belief that people would suppress their mistakes as much as they could, and that I was admitting to them only because I couldn’t suppress them further. Their reaction to my constant admission of mistakes (I was writing production code, a bad bad idea given my ADHD) was that if I were admitting to so many mistakes, how many more of my mistakes were yet to be discovered?

In other words, the strategy backfired spectacularly, possibly given the mismatch of our priors, and I later figured I might have done better had I tried suppressing (or quietly fixing) rather than admitting. That, however, hasn’t led to a change in my general strategy on this issue.

I was reminded of this strategy when State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank released their quarterly results last week. Their stocks got hammered on the back of drastically reduced profits on account of higher provisions – an admission that a significantly higher proportion of their loans had gone bad compared to their earlier admissions.

The question that comes to mind is whether the increase in provisioning and admission of bad loans should be taken as a credible signal that these banks are cleaning up their balance sheets (which is a good thing) or whether it only indicates a bigger tip of a bigger iceberg (in which case I’d be paranoid about my deposits).

Not knowing what strategy these banks are playing (though statements from the RBI suggest they’re likely to be cleaning up), I guess we have to wait for results over the next couple of quarters to learn their signals better.

Letters to my wife

As I turned Thirty Three yesterday, my wife dug up some letters (emails to be precise) I’d written to her over the years and compiled them for me, urging me to create at “Project Thirty Four” (on the lines of my Project Thirty). What is pleasantly surprising is that I’ve actually managed to make a life plan for myself, and execute it (surprising considering I don’t consider myself to be too good a planner in general).

In February 2011, after having returned from a rather strenuous work trip to New York, this is what I had to say (emphasis added later, typos as in original):

For me steady state is when I’ll be doing lots of part-time jobs, consulting gigs, where I’m mostly owrking from home, getting out only to meet people, getting to meet a lot of people (somethign taht doesn’t happen in this job), having fun in the evenings and all that

I wrote this six months before I exited my last job, and it is interesting that it almost perfectly reflects my life nowadays (except for the “have fun in the evenings” bit, but that can be put down to being long distance).

I’ve just started a part time job. I have a couple of consulting gigs going. I write for a newspaper (and get paid for it). I mostly work from home. I’ve had one “general catch up” a day on an average (this data is from this Quantified Life sheet my wife set up for me).

A week later I had already started planning what I wanted to do next. Some excerpts from a letter I wrote in March 2011:

Ok so I plan to start a business. I don’t know when I’ll start, but I’m targeting sometime mid 2012.

I want to offer data consultancy services.

Basically companies will have shitloads of data that they can’t make sense of. They need someone who is well-versed in working with and looking at data, who can help them make sense of all that they’ve got. And I’m going to be that person.

Too many people think of data analysis as a science and just through at data all the analytical and statistical weapons that they’ve got. I believe that is the wrong approach and leads to spurious results that can be harmful for the client’s business.

However, I think it is an art. Making sense of data is like taming a pet dog. There is a way you communicate with it. There is a way you make it do tricks (give you the required information). And one needs to proceed slowly and cautiously in order to get the desired results.

I think of myself as a “semi-quant”. While I am well-versed in all the quantitative techniques in data analysis and financial modeling, I’m also deeply aware that using quantitative tools indiscriminately can lead to mismanagement of risks, which can be harmful to the client. I believe in limited and “sustainable” use of quantitative tools, so that it can lead without misleading.

My past experience with working with data is that data analysis can be disruptive. I don’t promise results that will be of particular liking for the client – but I promise that what I diagnose is good for the client’s business. When you dig through mountains of data, you are bound to get some bitter pills. I expect my clients to handle the bad news professionally and not shoot the messenger.

I don’t promise to find a “signal” in every data set that I’m given. There are chances that what I’m working with is pure noise, and in case I find that, I’ll make efforts to prove that to the client (I think that is also valuable information).

And these paragraphs, written a full year before I started out doing what I’m doing now, pretty much encapsulate what I’m doing now. Very little has changed over nearly five years! I feel rather proud of myself!

And a thousand thanks to my wife for picking out these emails I had sent her and showing me that I can work to a plan.

Now on to making Project Thirty Four, which I hope to publish by the end of today, and hope to execute by the end of next year.

Quantifying life

During a casual conversation on Monday, the wife remarked that given my interests and my profession (where I mostly try to derive insights from data), she was really surprised that I had never tried using data to optimise my own life.

This is a problem I’ve had in the past – I can look at clients’ data and advise them on how exactly to build their business, but I’m thoroughly incapable of doing similar analysis of my own business. I berate people for not using data and relying too much on “gut”, but “gut” is what I use for most of my own life decisions.

With this contradiction in mind, it made sense for me to start quantifying my life. Except that I didn’t know where to start. The first thing you think of when you want to do something new is to buy new gadgets for it, and I quickly asked the wife to pick up a Fitbit for me on her way back from the US next month. She would have none of it – I should use the tools that I have, she said.

I’ve tried logging stuff and writing diaries in the past but it’s mostly been tedious business (unless I’ve had to write my diary free form, which I’ve quite liked). A couple of days is all that most logs have lasted before I’ve lost interest. I hate making checklists (looking at them psyches me out), I maintain my calendar in my head (thus wasting precious memory space) and had nightmares writing notes in school.

A couple of times when I’ve visited dieticians or running coaches I’ve been asked to make a log of what I’ve been eating, and I’ve never been able to do it for more than one meal – there is too much ambiguity in the data (a “cup of dal” can mean several things) to be entered which makes the data entry process tedious.

This time, however, I’m quite bullish about maintaining the log that the wife has created for me. Helpfully, it’s on Google Docs, so I can access it on the move. More importantly, she has structured the sheet in a way that there is no fatigue in entry. The number of columns is more than what I would have liked, but having used it for two days so far, I don’t see why I should be tired of this.

The key is the simplicity of questions, and amount of effort required to fill them in. Most questions are straightforward (“what time did you wake up?” “what time did you have breakfast” etc.) and have deterministic answers. There are subjective questions (“quality of pre-lunch work”) but the wife has designed them such that I only need to enter a rating (she had put in a 3-point Likert scale which I changed to a 5-point Likert scale since I found the latter more useful here).

There are no essays. No comments. Very little ambiguity on how I should fill. And minimal judgment required.

I might be jumping to conclusions already (it’s been but two days since I started filling), but the design of this questionnaire holds important lessons in how to design a survey or questionnaire in order to get credible.
1. Keep things simple
2. Reduce subjectivity as much as possible
3. Don’t tax the filler’s mind too much. The less the mental effort required the better.
4. Account for NED. Don’t make the questionnaire too long else it causes fatigue. My instructions to the wife was that the questionnaire should be small enough to fit in my browser window (when viewed on computer). This would have limited the questions to 11 but she’s put 14, which is still not too bad.

The current plan is to collect data over the next 45 days after which we will analyse it. I may or may not share the results of the analysis here. But I’ll surely recommend my wife’s skills in designing questionnaires! Maybe she should take a hint from this in terms of her post-MBA career.

Shorts

So I’ve been trying to overcome my self-imposed taboos on online shopping, and trying to buy things online, especially brands and sizes that I already know and items that offline shops don’t stock much of.

As the title of this post might suggest to you I’m trying to buy shorts. I’ve had to decommission several pairs over the last couple of years for a number of reasons – some became too loose, some too tight, others wore out, more are fading away. And the lack of inventory of shorts in my wardrobe means that I end up wearing this one red pair pretty much everywhere.

While the beauty of online shopping is supposed to be that you get massive variety, and the long tail can get served, the problem is that the way sites are designed makes it hard to discover them. Here are two images, one each from Amazon and Jabong.

So I have two basic problems with the shorts that are available for sale online, based on these two sites.

Too long: Check out the Jabong picture here. First of all, Jabong groups shorts and “3/4ths” (when did those abominations even become a thing) in the same category. But they are nice and allow you to specify length. I said “thigh length” and this is what they show me:

I mean, shorts by definition are supposed to be short right? I grew up in an era when Pete Sampras was bossing Wimbledon and shorts of this length were classified as “bermudas”. If you look at the image above, save a couple of “sports shorts” (it’s sad that Jabong doesn’t even allow me to filter those out, since I’m not looking for them), they’re all knee length! Which is too long for a pair of shorts!
Too narrow: Jabong refuses to admit that there is something called “relaxed fit” (even for cargos). Amazon has no fit filters for shorts. And the shorts all look like they’re just truncated pants rather than shorts. The difference between shorts and pants (apart from the extent of leg they cover of course) is that while the latter are narrow, shorts are more relaxed, and shouldn’t stick to your leg! And this is what Amazon shows me (while Amazon has a separate sportswear section, it continues to show sports shorts along with the regular shorts. They even showed boxers. There is no option to specify I want the button-zip-belt kind of “casual wear” shorts):

All of them are way too narrow! Of the radius where they get stuck to the thigh when you sit down leaving you with the potential embarrassment of pulling them down when you get up.

I had ranted during an earlier attempt to buy online about the difficulty of sorting through inventories so I won’t go into that here.

All I have to say here is that it seems like “shorts” don’t mean what they used to, and I’m extremely unhappy about it.

Sudden death and the discount rate

It’s six years today since my mother passed away. She died in the early hours of Friday, 23rd October 2009 following a rather brief illness. The official death summary that the hospital issued reported the cause of her death as “sepsis”. She only officially died on the 23rd. As far as I’m concerned, I’d lost her two Mondays earlier, on 12th October 2009, when she complained of extreme breathing difficulty and was put on ventilator in the ICU.

Looking back (this year’s calendar is identical to that of 2009, so memories of that year have been coming back rather strongly this year), I realise that the suddenness with which it all happened have left me with a deep sense of paranoia, which can be described in financial terms as a “high discount rate”.

Having moved back from Gurgaon in June of that year, my mother and I had settled down in a rented house in Tata Silk Farm (she didn’t want to go back to our own house in Kathriguppe where we’d lived until 2008). She had settled well, and living not far from her sisters, had developed a nice routine. There were certain temples she would visit on certain days of the week, for example.

And then suddenly one day in September she complained of breathing trouble (she took thirty minutes to walk from our then house to my aunt’s house, which is only a ten minute walk away). Initial medical tests revealed nothing. More tests were prescribed, as her breathing got worse. There was no diagnosis yet.

She started seeing specialists – a pulmonologist and her cardiovascular surgeon (she had had trouble with some veins for a few years). More tests. Things getting worse. And before we knew it, she was in hospital – for a “routine three day admission” for an invasive test. The test got postponed, and the surgery finally done a week later. She got out of the ICU and remained there for hardly two days before she complained of insane breathing trouble and had to be put on ventilator – the only purpose the 12 days she spent on that served was to help me prepare for her impending death.

In all, it took less than a month end to end – from initially complaining of breathlessness to going on ventilator. What seemed to be a harmless problem leading to death.

I realise it’s caused insane paranoia in me which I’m yet to come out of. Every time I, or a relative or a friend, show minor signs of sickness, I start fearing the worst. I stop thinking about the symptoms in a Bayesian fashion – by looking at prior probabilities of the various illnesses that could be causing them – and overweight the more morbid causes of the symptoms. And that adds paranoia and anxiety to what I’m already suffering from.

Like two weeks back I had a little trouble breathing, but no apparent cold. It wasn’t something that happens to me normally. A quick Bayesian analysis would have revealed that the most probable cause is a sinus (which it was), but I spent half a day wondering what had become of me before I applied Vicks and quickly recovered. When my wife told me a week after she reached the US that she had got a high fever, I got paranoid again before realising that the most probable cause was a flu caused due to a change of seasons (which it was!).

Another consequence of my mother’s rather sudden death in 2009 (and my father’s death in 2007, though that was by no means sudden, as he had been diagnosed with cancer two years earlier) was that I suddenly stopped being able to make plans. I started overestimating the odds of something drastic happening, and planning didn’t make sense in such scenarios, I reasoned. As a consequence I became extremely short-term in my thinking, and couldn’t see beyond a few days away.

There have been several occasions where I’ve left a decision (such as booking tickets for something, for example) until it has been too late. There have been times when I’ve optimised for too short a term in some of my decisions, effectively jacking up my “discount rate”.

I’d written a while earlier about how in case of rare events, the probabilities we observe can be much higher than actual probabilities, and how that can lead to impaired decision-making. Thinking about it now, I’ve seen that playing out in my life over the last six years. And it will take a considerable amount of effort to become more rational (i.e. use the “true” rather than “observed” probabilities) in these things.