Useless Hobbies

After a while, “hobbies” also start becoming “work”. As you progress in them, and get better at them, your own expectations of your “performance” in the hobbies goes up, and consequently you’ll stop enjoying as much as you used to.

For example, over seven years back writing started as a hobby. I started writing for myself, and managed to get some readers. I continued writing, and the readership grew. Soon I realized I was writing for an audience, so I’d to be more conscious about what I wrote. I got some articles published, and that upped expectations further, and now that I think of writing being a possible avenue of income-supplementation sometime in the future, it has ceased to be a hobby.

It was the same with the game of chess. Back when I was 12 years old, I started playing competitively. The first few tournaments were good. I may not have done that well, but I enjoyed it enough to think of playing at higher levels. I hired a coach, went for a few more tournaments, and soon found that I was buckling under my own pressure. And I had this particular weakness under incandescent lamps, and would blunder away in all my evening matches. Tournaments would be frequently followed by fever. Soon I stopped enjoying it, and at the ripe old age of fourteen, I “retired”. I still can’t enjoy a simple game of chess without being worked up. It’s not a hobby any more.

In this context, it is always useful to have a couple of things to do that you’re not so good at, so that you have no expectations of yourself, and you can just have a good time while “performing” the hobby. It was the reason I bought a guitar (having been trained in the Carnatic classical style in the violin; speaking of which you HAVE to read this Krish Ashok post; completely empathize with that), and have decided to not learn it formally, but generally strum it. Playing the guitar gives me mental peace, because I have no expectations out of it.

It was on a similar note that I took up the sketch book and pencil (helps having an artist wife, which ensures supplies of such materials at home) and drew that thamma hazare caricature. Later on that evening, I flipped around the page of the sketch book, borrowed paints from the wife and started painting. Randomly. It did help that I’m a horrible painter. That meant I didn’t set any expectations for myself. I felt totally at peace at the end of it.

So along with your “regular hobbies”, which you can use to fill up your resume, it’s important to have a portfolio of “useless hobbies”, stuff you aren’t good at, since those are the ones that will give you “inner peace”.

Internal Conflict

When a bunch of friends and I described ourselves as a pantheon a few years back, I was War. Part of the reason was that in Hindu Mythology Karthik is the God of War, but more importantly, I was War because I was always at war with myself. With three others being conveniently called Disease, Hunger and Madness, and another being Death, we formed a formidable force indeed.

True to the name that these guys gave me all those years ago, for the last six months or so, I’ve been absolutely consumed by internal conflict. It mostly has to do with my professional career, which hasn’t particularly taken off the way I imagined it would when I graduated from IIMB some 5 years ago. For the first time ever, I’ve completed two years in a job, and things don’t particularly look rosy, especially if I evaluate myself based on where I could have been had I not made those big blunders.

A part of me wants to go easy upon myself, and not be too harsh. Everyone goes through tough phases, that part tells me, and that mine has been a wee bit longer than most people’s. This part tells me to not worry about peer pressure, and to concentrate on keeping myself peaceful and enjoying the good things in life. This part further asks me to not worry too much about the future and that things will get into a flow. And that despite my corporate career not exactly taking off, life isn’t all that bad.

The other part, on the other hand, holds me responsible for all my troubles. It tells me that it’s because of my mistakes in the past that I’m where I am, and that I need to work really hard to rectify them. This part takes me to LinkedIn, and shows me the wonderfully sculpted oh-so-successful careers some of my old associates seem to be having, just to prove the point that I’ve messed up. This part wants me to conform, and be a good employee, and climb the stairs in the same way others have, and follow the well-trodden path into successful corporate whoredom. And this path is also supported by those pesky relatives who ask you uncomfortable questions about your career every time you are unfortunate enough to bump into them.

The first part is quite worried about my health, both mental and physical, and believes that messing up one’s health is too high a price to pay for corporate success and the associate perks that it brings. The second says I need to learn to adapt, and somehow reduce the impact of my health, while still being a good corporate whore.

And like in that old Coffy Bite ad, the argument continues. Except that these two parts of myself have completely ravaged my head over the last few months. I’m reminded of the story of the Bherunda bird (the “state bird” of Karnataka) which has two heads and one body. The two heads get into a quarrel. One of them gets so upset that he drinks some poison, thus killing “both of them”. These two parts of me, by means of their continued conflict have ended up completely consuming me, and my head.

And here I am, trying to figure out once again what it means to chill.

Cartooning

For the first time ever in my life, yesterday, I tried my hand at cartooning. It’s a very shady cartoon. Basically I was playing around with a sketch pad and pencil, drawing random lines, and didn’t have any idea about what I was going to draw till I drew. And then once I realized a theme was emerging, I force-fit a caption on it and finished the cartoon.

From 2011-08-28

I realize that some people have easily caricaturable features and some don’t. For example, it was insanely easy for a first timer like me to fairly accurately represent Anna Hazare (called thamma (younger brother) hazare in my cartoon. I hope to make this a series). Given his gandhi topi, triangular face, kurta-pyjama, etc. it wasn’t hard at all to represent him.

Ishant Sharma was next – given the long hair and goatee. Though, when my wife saw my caricature she thought I’d drawn Jesus Christ. I thought Harbhajan will be easy, given he’s a surd, but my cartoon of his looks like a young Bishen Singh Bedi! I guess I need to retract my earlier statement that all turbaned Sikhs look like one another.

The hardest of all (for a novice like me) were the other Indian fast bowlers – Sreesanth, Zaheer Khan, Praveen Kumar and Munaf Patel, while having idiosyncratic faces, don’t have any idiosyncratic features that makes it easy to caricature them, and hence it requires a greater degree of skill in order to draw them.

Thus, the trick with good caricaturing, I guess, is to identify those features of a person which are easily sketchable, and which (given minor context) will make them identifiable. Yes, I need to definitely improve my drawing skills, which I know are abysmal. But I also need to learn how to represent people without really drawing them accurately.

Romantic Comedies in Hollywood and Bollywood

Assumption: The median age for marriage in urban India is much lower than the median age of marriage in urban United States of America

Hence, romantic comedies in hollywood, usually end up having characters who are older than corresponding comedies made by Bollywood. Thus, Hollywood romantic comedies can be made to be more mature than corresponding Bollywood romantic comedies.

Data point: Serendipity was remade as “Milenge Milenge”. I was watching the latter movie a few days back (couldn’t sit through more than five minutes of it, as I kept comparing each scene to the corresponding scene in the original). In Serendipity the protagonists are around 35, and thus show a maturity that corresponds to that age. You can see that in the way they behave, go about things, etc. And here, in Milenge Milenge you have Shahid Kapur and Kareena Kapoor singing and prancing around like Jackasses. You can’t watch too much of that, can you?

Tailpiece: My all time favourite romantic comedy (across languages) remains Ganeshana Maduve, starring Anant Nag and Vinaya Prasad. I’ll talk about the virtues of the movie in another post but I can’t think of any other movie that even comes close to this one. Meanwhile, if you haven’t watched this movie, get hold of a subtitled copy of it and watch it. Now.

Corporate Culture

In good times, when you like the core aspects of your job, you don’t really care about your “organizational culture”. You don’t care so much about how they treat you, about how they make you feel. All you care about is that you are enjoying your time there, that you think there’s some value that the job is adding to your life, and you are happy receiving your salary.

When your organization’s “culture” starts mattering is when things aren’t going all that well in your job. It’s when you stop liking the core aspects of your job, and start wondering why you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s the time when all the “cultural” and “feel good” things about your job that come to the fore. That’s the time when any problems that you have with the organizational culture get highlighted, and you start focusing more on that and less on your work (after all, you’re trying to think whether there’s a reason apart from your core work for you to stay in the job).

As an employer, the risk with not paying attention to your organization’s culture is that when one of your employees doesn’t feel that good about his/her job (and this is bound to happen; irrespective of how much one loves his job, one is bound to go through these cycles), if he realizes that he doesn’t like the culture of your organization, it is that much more easier for him to get extremely disgruntled, and think of deserting ship. By maintaining a great organizational culture, on the other hand, even when someone is going through the troughs (in terms of core work), there is value that they see in sticking on to job, and living to see another day in the job, when (hopefully) the cycle would’ve been reversed.

As a prospective employee, if you see a high degree of attrition in a prospective employer, think twice before joining even if the core nature of work really appeals to you. For, the attrition indicates something is possibly wrong with the culture of the place, and that sooner or later that is bound to bite you.

The Importance of Discipline

I’ve never been a fan of discipline. I think it is a major constraint and hinders creativity, and puts too many walls within which you need to live your life. Despite constant exhortations by my father, I never wanted to join the army. Hell, I tried my best (successfully) in order to even avoid NCC when I was at IIT. I pride myself on being some sort of a free spirit who isn’t held back by any arbitrary rules that I create for myself to live my life by.

A really nice article that I read today, however, makes me think twice about this stand. So this article is about “decision fatigue” and is not very dissimilar to what I’d read a long time back (again in the NYT) about the Law of Conservation of Willpower. So this article talks about how every time you need to make a decision it consumes some part of your mental energy. Irrespective of the size of the decision that is to be made, there is some willpower that is lost, and that causes you to be suboptimal in your decision making as the day progresses.

The article really struck a chord with me, and I realize I’m also heavily prone to decision fatigue. Sometimes the smallest decisions take away so much energy from me that I simply put NED. And yeah, on a related note, I’ve got the wife upset innumerable times solely because of my indecisiveness, a part of which can be attributed to decision fatigue. I even remember not going to a wedding reception some three years back because I couldn’t decide which shirt to wear! And no, I’m not making this up.

So on that note, here’s where I think discipline has a part to play in life. By putting certain constraints on your life, you are reducing the number of decisions that you have to make. And that implies your willpower and mental energy will be reserved for those things where it’s really important that you decide carefully. By making a schedule for yourself, you are outsourcing to you-the-planner all the trivial decisions of your life. Yes, you might feel constrained at times. But it saves you so much energy by way of saving you from several trivial decisions.

Of course, feeling constrained can also affect your mental energy in a negative way, and prevent you from giving your best. Nevertheless, this decision fatigue thingy implies that discipline may not be all that bad. Or maybe I need to think about it some more.

The Lingaraj Effect and Financial Regulation

Lingaraj was a driver who used to work for my father. He had a unique way of dealing with traffic jams on two-lane roads without a divider down the middle. He would instinctively swing the ambassador into the right lane – meant for traffic in the opposite direction (the jam ahead meant there was little traffic flow in that direction).

I remember both my father and I abusing him (Lingaraj) for this method which would only make the jam worse. However, he would persist. And we soon found that he wasn’t unique in his methods. It is the favoured method of most Bangalore drivers. Thus, whenever there is a minor jam somewhere, thousands of Lingarajs clog the “return lane” in all directions, and end up making it worse.

The funny thing about Lingaraj’s method was that it was “too big to fail”. Having switched to the right lane, we would progress much faster (till the site of the jam, of course) than our law-abiding brethren stuck in the left lane. There, someone who had taken responsibility of clearing the jam (not necessarily a cop) would realize that a necessary condition to clear the jam was to get our ambassador out of the right lane. And we would be given passage to shift to the left lane, and past the jam site, much ahead of those suckers who stuck to the law.

For drivers like Lingaraj, moving to the right lane in the wake of a jam is seen as “arbitrage”. And a necessary condition for it to be an arbitrage is that the offending vehicle is “too big to fail”, as I mentioned earlier. And given that in Bangalore, measures like traffic tickets sent by post aren’t that effective, this continues to be an arbitrage, and hence you still see so many drivers use this “method”.

While stuck in a traffic jam like that one last weekend (I was driving, and I consider myself socially responsible so stuck to the left lane), I realized how similar this was to the financial crisis of three years ago.

Traders noticed an “arbitrage” that didn’t really exist (namely, some AAA rated bonds traded at higher yields than other AAA rated bonds) and proceeded to trade on it. When they got into trouble the regulators realized that they had to be bailed out in order to clear the larger mess. The resemblance is uncanny.

So what should the regulators have done? Basically, drivers should’ve been prevented from getting to the right lane in the first place. Then there would have been no requirement to bail them out. In some places, this is done by installing road dividers, but in my experience I’ve seen that doesn’t help, too. People use whatever gaps are available in the divider to go to the right lane, and contribute to the jam.

The only option I can think of is some variation of postal tickets – having bailed out the drivers for going to the right lane, they need to be made to pay for it. Yeah, postal tickets (sending tickets by post for traffic violations) may not be effective, but that seems like the best we can do to regulate this problem. The upshot is that once we figure out how to solve this problem on the road, we can extend the solution to financial regulation, too!

Name mutilation

Like Bangalore supposedly became Bengaluru a few years back (when HDK was cheap minister), West Bengal is going to change its name to “Poschim Bongo” or some such thing. Now, unlike Bombay-Mumbai or Madras-Chennai, the thing with these name changes is that they are merely globalization of local names. Let me explain.

Bombay (bom bahia or good port in Portuguese) and Mumbai (of Mumba Devi) are fundamentally different. Madras (mad race? ) and Chennai (beautiful) are again fundamentally different. While I disagree with those name changes and still prefer to call those cities by their former names, I see that the change in those names at least has some merit. They wanted to get rid of their colonial British-given names (and i’m sure Tams wanted to prove they aren’t a mad race, though they might have achieved the opposite through this action) and chose local names in the local language.

When Bangalore’s name was supposedly changed to “Bengaluru” a few years back, Kannada newspapers (I used to subscribe to Vijaya Karnataka back then) had a tough time explaining the name change. Because Bangalore has forever been known as “Bengaluru” in Kannada. Even now, when I speak in Kannada I say “Bengaluru” but I say “Bangalore” when speaking in any other language. While it might have been a noble intention by HDK and UR Ananthamurthy and others behind the name change to get the non-Kannadigas to use the Kannada name, the effect has been completely counterproductive.

Till date, I’m yet to meet someone who is not conversant in Kannada to pronounce “BengaLuru” correctly. First of all, most people can’t say the “L” sound and instead pronounce it as “l” (in Kannada that can make a profound difference. for example “hELu” is “tell” while “hElu” is “shit” ). Next (this is the problem with most North Indians), people have trouble pronouncing the short ‘e’ sound. Finally, it’s hard for people to figure out that the first U in Bengaluru is to be pronounced long and the terminal u should be pronounced short. The combination of all these means horribly messed up pronunciation, which makes one wonder why they bothered to “change” the name at all.

West Bengal doesn’t seem to have learnt from this experience of Bangalore. They want to call themselves “Poschim Bongo” it seems. Not being a bong, I’m going to have major difficulty in pronouncing that name, and I might end up pronouncing it in a way that makes most bongs cringe. I really hope they see sense before they make this name change official and opt for a saner name, if they want to change their name at all that is.

One thing they could try would be to knock that “west” off their name (I believe the Times of India has been campaigning for this). West Bengal was the primary reason that I got my directions and geography horribly wrong till I was some eight years old. I used to assume that “West Bengal” was at the western edge of India! Especially since Bangladesh is no more called “East Bengal”.

Given that they are mostly commie, one thing they could try is probably to go the East Germany or North Korea way, and name themselves “Democratic State of Bengal” or some such thing.

LJ

Today, maybe for the first time in over two or three years, I logged in to Livejournal. Nowadays, at my home, LJ is for the exclusive use of the wife, and I haven’t been there at all since moving my blog here. And the first thing I did was to look at my LJ Friends page.

There was a post about ubuntu by randomwalker, which I put well left to. And then there was a friends-only post by al_lude  (no use linking that here since you won’t be able to read it unless he’s friended you on LJ). And now I know the one thing I’ve been missing about LJ ever since I moved here. The friends-only post!

I realize that in the last couple of years or so, I’ve been writing less because all those posts that would’ve been written as “friends only” posts on LJ are now not written at all. I do intend to re-start writing that kind of stuff. I’m thinking of Google Plus as a medium for doing that. For that one reason I really hope G+ takes off and more people begin to use it, so that it becomes more meaningful.

The Trouble with Mental Illness

  • The “patient” has an incentive to overestimate the extent of his illness, since he can “get away” with certain things by claiming to be more sick than he is
  • People around the patient have an incentive to underestimate the extent of illness. They think the person is claiming illness only to extract sympathy and get away with things that would be otherwise not permissible
  • The second point here leads to internal conflict in the patient, as he can’t express himself fully (since others tend to underestimate). Feelings of self-doubt begin to creep in, and only make the problem worse
  • There are no laboratory tests in order to detect most kinds of “mental illness”. Diagnosis is “clinical” (eg. if 8 out of following 10 check boxes are ticked, patient suffers from XYZ). This leads to errors in diagnosis
  • The method of diagnosis also leads to a lot of people in believing that psychiatry is unscientific and some reduce it to quackery. So there is little the medical profession can do to help either the patient or people around him
  • That diagnosis is subjective means patients have incentive to claim they’re under-diagnosed and people around are incentivized to say they’re over-diagnosed
  • I don’t think the effect of a lot of medicines to cure mental illness have been studied very rigorously. There are various side effects (some cause you to sleep more, others cause you to sleep less, some cause impotence, others increase your mojo, and so on ), and these medicines are slow to act making it tough to figure out their efficacy.
  • There is a sort of stigma associated with admitting to mental illness. Even if one were to “come out” to people close to him/her, those people might dissuade the patient from “coming out” to a larger section of people
  • If you were to be brave and admit to mental illness, people are likely to regard you as a loser, and someone who gives up too soon. That’s the last thing you need! And again, the underestimate-overestimate bias kicks in.
  • Some recent studies, though, show a positive correlation between mental illness and leadership and being able to see the big picture. So there is some hope, at least.