close your ears and open your mind

Ah. A Ted video after a long time. I will have to go back to reading and listening a bit more. Some of that has taken a back seat for the moment. The cliché goes that we are so busy doing what is urgent that we forget to do what is important. Thats one has rung true for so long and for so many people and almost everywhere I see, especially in corporate life. I am actually tired of chasing these crazy things we do all the while, and hence I am trying  little bit, bit by bit to reclaim my life. It’s not going to be an easy thing to do. But I see an opportunity to do so for the next few months if things play right. Focus on basics, improve your mind, expand it, read, experiment and learn.

The reason I like this particular video is that the rock star Hans Rosling and his son make some very interesting points. Yes there is tons of ignorance in this world. People feed of it and spread the disease of ignorance.  The problem is not ignorance itself but the ignorance of ignorance. One thing for sure I have learnt by reading like crazy – is that we are all ignorant. Nobody knows anything really. There are only angles and more angles. In our quest for science we have expanded the frontiers of knowledge but they are only theories. I learnt that even Newton’s laws which we hold so sacrosanct in school don’t really hold up and hence required Einstein to help us around. I was telling a friend the other day – in fact I tell almost any one who would care to listen; that after readings o much, I have turned a cynic, an atheist or an agnostic who possibly questions everything. Nothing is taken for granted, no knowledge is taken for sure, everyone has motives and nothing is held to be pure. There is no pure emotion and there is no pure instinct. Everything has layers and is influenced by almost everything around it. I think the best way to describe life is using Shrek – life is like an onion – it has many layers.

I try and remove biases from my life, thought and action all the time but I still fail. I fail miserably but hell, I try. Knowing that I have these biases makes me a cynic. A complete cynic cannot love, learn and live and be happy, but I am a turncoat. I am a cynic but I shut it off to live happy. I love being loved and I happily bask in it while I stop myself from seeing the cynicism in it. It’s like a reality check that keeps it in line. Hans Rosling the video says that biasis come thanks to three things – one – personal bias. Of course this is something that we all have, it defines who we are and how we interact with everyone. The challenge is to see everything through this lens – the fact that we know what we know is immediately a bias. This is what we must fight everyday. Just because we have had this experience then we shouldn’t be sure of it. Like I say – your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. That is the bias in our life.

Second outdated facts – that’s a simple one. we stopped reading after school and hence – bad facts! Its worse than a personal bias. Here we believe so much in the fact but forget one single fact – the time value of this fact!

Third – news bias – this is especially dangerous as mass hysteria is a result of this stupidity. As mark twain (or whoever) said – if you don’t read the news you are uninformed but if you do, you are misinformed. News today is even more dangerous as it takes the form of entertainment and those on TV are seen as credible. And there starts all the crazy idea formation. If you control propaganda you control people’s mind – it is not by accident that amongst the most powerful people in the Nazi government was the minister of Propaganda - Joseph Goebbels.

Listen to a few pearls of wisdom from his mouth -

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”

“Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.”

“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”

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Now the next time you watch news or entertainment or anything else – close your ears and open your mind!

Why so serious?

Nah… if you see this I don’t like you to think of it as inspirational. Nopes. It doesn’t inspire me. It’s not that if you have cerebral palsy or any such thing you can still defeat the odds and come out trumps. That is something I take for granted. You can defeat all odds and come out trumps. The question is simply what sacrifices you want to make and how much will power you have.

The big thing in this I see is simply a little bit of me. This chic doesn’t need your sympathy or special treatment; she has accepted what wrong and moved on. She accepted what’s not there and moved on in life. It’s a freaking joke. Have fun. Now can you move on?

I have sick many numbers of times. I have been a sickly kid all my childhood. I would fall sick every year and most of the time more than three times a year. I was pretty frustrated. All my college life I was weighing around 58 kgs. I would look at weighing scale and hope it inches upwards. In variably there was a pattern – I move up to 60 and boom – I would fall sick. Back to eth dreaded 58. So when people tell me that today I look lean – I wonder – I am 73 kgs now. imagine me with 15 kgs less! Wow. That is LEAN. But I have always been sick so being sick is pretty cool with me. I moved on from being sick and grumpy to being sick and funny. I mean who the hell cares – its fun. I don’t want to be seen as a dumb grumpy guy with an issue. I want to be as a fun guy who is fun not because he is healthy but is fun because he is. Sick or not.

Today I live with two big issues. The first one is my right knee. It simply dislocates time and again. Ya. Any side strain on it and – pop, it dislocates. I have learnt to play with the issue. No extra stress on the right knee. Short steps and less long strides that put outward pressure. And when it pops, I go through some pain – straighten it till it pops back in. those around me go “oh shit, I heard the click when it popped in”. So there. It popped back in and I stand up and say, come on, lets continue. And I SMILE. I never fail to smile. Hopefully I crack a joke or two at myself. Good fun.

The second affliction I now have to live with my entire life – lactose intolerant. That too is fun. Jopke about it and move on. What’s the big deal. Move on.

Surely I don’t have anything as severe as this lady has. She obviously has fought much more. But I am only inspired not by what she has achieved. People who work hard will achieve, but I am inspired by her being able to joke at it. I too want to go on a lactose intolerant stand-up comedy show and talk about the various shit I face when I talk about being lactose intolerant. I went to Punjab recently and people there wondered if I had lost it completely and what kind of quack I must have met. Who the hell doesn’t have lassi or butter? I already have decent ammo for this. I think in some time I will be a stand up comic joking about lactose intolerance. My best retort is simply – well – all humans are lactose intolerant but a lot of us have developed a mutation that helps us manage and digest lactose. Don’t believe me? Well you are a mutant according to Wikipedia : “Most mammals normally cease to produce lactase, becoming lactose intolerant, after weaning, but some human populations have developed lactase persistence, in which lactase production continues into adulthood. It is estimated that 75% of adults worldwide show some decrease in lactase activity during adulthood. The frequency of decreased lactase activity ranges from 5% in northern Europe through 71% for Sicily to more than 90% in some African and Asian countries. This distribution is now thought to have been caused by recent natural selection favoring lactase-persistent individuals in cultures in which dairy products are available as a food source. While it was first thought that this would mean that populations in Europe, India, Arabia and Africa had high frequencies of lactase persistence because of a particular mutation, it was later shown that lactase persistence is caused by several independently occurring mutations”

So you are the mutant Ninja turtle, not me. See your pic…

Ok ok… I guess you prefer Wolverine:

See you wished for super powers – you did not know it but you were actually part of the Mutant project and soon enough you will be called to join the mutant force to protect Planet Earth.

Ok fine – it sounds much more funnier when I say it than when I write it. But you get the drift. I surely hope that I don’t go through much more pain in life. But I surely don’t want to be the guy who would sulk over it. I want to be the fun guy who went down laughing – laughing my gut out. Why so serious?

how little

When we grew up in an India of less resources we fought for more and more for ourselves. The age was characterized by have nots and an amazing string of shortages. I have heard stories (probably not apocryphal) about 7 year waitlists for cars. I know for sure that when my dad came to Mumbai from Dubai, he bought the Bajaj Chetak scooter and got it immediately by paying in foreign currency. I think it was almost exclusively available in foreign currency. A lower end brand was available if you paid local currency.

Like idiots we fought and discussed all the issues that lay before us. Corruption, economics and everything else. The big cause as we and almost everyone saw it was a Malthusian curse of over population. It was only natural to think so. When you have less to go around, you think the best solution was to have less demand to start with. Everything boiled down to lowering population. Having less children was patriotic. First I remember the family planning programs having this slogan – hum do humare do. (we two ours two), alluding to one couple having two kids.

I remember noticing when the not so subtle shift happened to the program showing one couple and the male child simply removed from the posters. It was one couple with one girl.

All of us looked forward to the China model where they strictly enforced a one child policy to curb the effects of population growth and enough and more statistics emerged which showed that while being larger for now China will soon be eclipsed by India as the most populous country the world. We would have the ignominious reputation by, I remember, something like 2035! Wow that was a scary statistic. If you thought there wasn’t enough, here – have even less. Compete with more people. Eat less food. Wear less clothes. It was crazy.

I am suddenly reminded of these arguments as on Independence Day I was at the club where there was a bit of flag hoisting and celebration. The chairman or someone got up to make a short speech and he highlighted the population problem. He obviously was from the 60’s. I sniggered to my wife that he definitely hasn’t heard about the demographic dividend. China with its one child policy has another weird set of issues. You have older population that now has a much smaller younger  population to support it. India seems to have a, what they now term as, demographic dividend. A larger younger population earning money for a smaller older population. Some even split India into four zones and talk about how the demographic dividend has already been witnessed in the west and south while the north and east are now poised for reaping the benefits while a host of factors need to be considered.

So it’s a bit of a U turn that we see. Similarly such views are also seen in immigrants. At first cities flourish thanks to the waves of immigrants that come in and then we suddenly hate them with the right wing stroking fears of ‘them’ overpowering ‘us’. Then we want to throw them out. Then different statistics come out explaining how the immigrants that come in are the best brains from around the world and that if we shut them out our own innovations die out and we as a city we will die. Today India’s (arguably) two richest cities – Mumbai and Delhi are completely immigrant led. You would struggle to find anyone in these two cities who could trace their ancestry for greater than two generations. I haven’t found any son of the soil in Mumbai at least, nor known of anyone like this in Delhi.

Such u turns are common and thanks to the amount of reading I do –I am reconciled to them. In fact the law of unexpected consequences shows up almost in everything. In a lot of my life I have seen myself turning around and questioning my own beliefs. There are two sides to the coin. These days I have been far less opinionated on a lot of issues. I have spoken of this in my earlier blogs as well. This has also led to me blogging a lot less. If you have fewer opinions to talk about you obviously are going to talk less. Unless of course you have this space and time to rant on both sides. It becomes difficult to talk to start with.

You can hear about a bit of it the demographic dividend and other stuff at this talk.

And here is the link to why population growth is required –

In fact I never would have imagined seeing a story title like this  - ‘Low Birth Rates: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies.’ Remedy for LOW BIRTH RATES? I thought that was the cure. Oh man… how little we know. How little.

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/08/low-birth-rates-causes-consequences-and-remedies-becker.html