What the hell is going on?

Coalgate is the latest feather in the UPA government's cap. And the latest ingredient in the spicy saga of corruption in India. If it hadn't been for a couple of Finance chapters I read during my adventures with academic pursuits, I wouldn't have appreciated the rationale behind something being called a loss just coz it could have been earned and the government gave up the possibility of earning it. I still don't often understand that way of looking at things, but if that's the rule, so be it.

It would be interesting to go through the methodology of calculating the loss, although my past record with Valuation tells me that I won't understand much of it. Damodaran on Valuation is considered a good book on the subject, but books are never the best way to learn stuff in college. And as far as learning from peers is concerned, stuff like laziness, inferiority complex, superiority complex, shyness, arrogance, etc etc., each applicable to different subset of peers, stopped me from reaching out, and I was left wondering on most topics, but passed the course nonetheless, like I did most others at IIM and IIT, from whatever bits I understood and from whatever bits I managed to cover up with good english.

I didn't intend to discuss this topic here, but like law, my articles take their own course. I was a great notes-writer at IIM. I wrote good notes at IIT too, but there I was outdone by people like Abhishek Bhargava by miles of written crap. I did have a couple of loyal customers like Ratnesh Bansal and Jeetu. And a few others who played safe by xeroxing notes by Abhishek, Saumya and me, just to make sure they don't miss anything at all. But sadly, half of my time at IIT was spent figuring out what the seemingly better people did, and writing good notes with the mind shut and ears open was one of them. I utilized in IIM that skill developed over 2 years in IIT, and it didn't take me long to become the 'notes-guy' of my section. IIMs are culturally a little different from IITs, in that you cannot and need not totally rely on class-notes. The curriculum is full of the so called 'Case Studies' which you can solve, resolve, analyse and answer just from common sense. Some part of the remaining stuff can be tackled through the gyaan in class-notes, which must also be there in some form in the books, I am sure. But you need to be a Schizophrenic John Nash to find those bits and connect them in a way that it makes any sense. So a few who care a little, look at the notes. For those who care more than a little, and there a few of those, there are the books. You are charged in your fees for books and they are thrown to your face, even if you don't want them. And naturally, very few actually see those books after the day they register for a term, when they have to collect the books from the Academic Office. So proud or amused they are on that day that they take pictures of stacks of books and put them on facebook. Some perverts see a phallus and worship it in hope that it bears some fruit. The few who do study them, are either in BCG (and the like) or in some unknown company which they joined after they were forced to sign out of placements without job just coz it was convocation day and the diro had to declare 100% placements!

Coming back to Coalgate... Why the hell do they make a 'gate' out of every damn scandal? They should have avoided that here, at least, coz they ended up naming the scandal after a popular toothpaste, sticking to the phonetics. But who are 'they'? I don't know. I wish we had some democratic way of naming popular newsy stuff. A discussion in Parliament may be a good idea. Afterall when we are known by our Scandals, we better have good names for those.

As it gets more and more ridiculous with our leaders throwing blames in defence and playing defence when blamed, some channel(s) highlighted yesterday or the day before the fact that we lost 147 crore in the Parliament sessions where nothing happened except shouting and gossip. Well, I wonder if we should consider this a loss at all, given that even otherwise, those parliament sessions are no good. However, from similar to but slightly different from the Chidambaram logic, one can say that if the session happened and the cost of the session was incurred, where is the loss? At some level this makes sense coz there is always a way to justify chaos in Parliament, as something done in National Interest. Also, given the fact that our leaders do everything for National interest by default - from watching porn in Parliament when they are not sleeping to dancing naked with prostitutes to making favors to lobbies for 'nominal' monetary gains. 'Nominal' because the numbers are so huge, you can't key them into calculators, and have to settle with the names only. Of course technology has advanced and now we have stuff that take long numbers... but we will not tell those politicians of the ancestral generations. Otherwise, they may think beyond their calculators. They already carry iPads and stuff, although turned off. The moment they learn how to poke into their screens, India will have bigger scams. Unless somebody comes up with 'politician-lock' app like they have child-locks in TVs.

Lastly, with all this talk about huge numbers, that too of money, stuck in various messes - some here, some there, some nowhere - I am really confused how money really works. Does anyone really know how much there is, how much there can be and how much there needs to be, and what the hell is going on?

Fighting over Religion - Can we stop it?

Many Pakistani Hindus are seeking refuge in India and none of them wants to go back to Pakistan. They say they had miserable lives in Pakistan. Pakistani government officials say it's not about religion, but just the feudal system in Pakistan which affects the poorest guys most, and that's Hindus. Feudal system may be responsible to a certain extent, but for a nation like Pakistan which came into being purely on religious grounds, it is hard to imagine a secular environment with equal status for people with all faiths.

Religion, which for most of us is a hereditary attribute rather than a chosen belief, is the root cause of most tensions between humans. I was wondering about the possibility of abolishing all the existing religions and starting afresh. I realized that it requires a round of devastation of human civilization at a scale big enough to wipe out all our luxuries and take us to a level of misery such that we lose faith in the existing manifestations of God we believe in or have imagined. If that really happens, and we do indeed start afresh, it is very unlikely that the humans spread all over the globe will develop new concepts of god and religion with consensus. There is bound to be different schools of thought and imagination, and therefore we will most likely end up again with this situation with many religions. If we cannot have one religion, we should somehow have peaceful coexistence of all religions. Is it possible with where we stand right now, with our 2000-3000 years old religions or is there an easier way to achieve it with a new set of religions? If it is possible now itself, what should be done to make it happen?

An Opportunity Wasted...

It is difficult to say whether forming a political party is the right thing to do for team Anna. Sadly this anti-corruption movement by Anna Hazare and his team has come to a point where most people just don't care any more. There was a time when everyone looked up to them with admiration and hope. For once, the public did make them heroes by placing them all on a pedestal. But they wasted it.

I wondered for a moment whether wasted is the right word. Possibly they are honest individuals with genuine concern for the country and they did what they felt was right. If that is true, they should not be blamed for losing an opportunity, coz according to their judgement they were making the best of it. Their fighting against corruption was totally voluntary. So it is not really justified that we blame them for misjudging at a certain point and leading the movement to its doom, coz we did not elect them for the cause. We, the common people, were only going to be beneficiaries if the movement succeeded, i.e., we were there to share all rewards, but not contributors to the movement in any significant way. Of course the public support did give strength to the movement, but the public also left when it got bored.

But the opportunity was indeed wasted by team Anna, thinking from their own point of view, for whatever aspirations they had. May be they indeed want a clean political system. Or may be this whole movement was one huge show to gain publicity and build a reputation, that can lead to a direct and strong entry into politics with possibilities of fastest rise to the top. Or may be it is something else. In any case, they wouldn't be happy about the way things flopped for them after the first two super-hit shows. So much so that they couldn't even motivate themselves to fast for the cause they so much expressed belief in, and ended it all in haste, as if they found it totally useless to do it any further when people didn't care and government didn't bother.

On another note, it is interesting to understand what could be the incentive for someone to launch a movement against corruption and fight for a clean system. At an individual level, the motivations and benefits sought are generally too personal and micro to really justify a mass-movement. Still, we have definitely come across individuals who have died for causes beyond their own. Or did they internally link the cause to something their own and found a personal benefit big enough to justify embracing death? Suicide bombers, army men, social and political fighters who don't fear death - what really drives them?

the pursuits of unhappiness

A few days after Rajesh Khanna's death, we now have lots of articles pouring in which talk about his being just lucky in getting a super star status, his failure to manage his career, his failure as a politician, his fear and hatred of Amitabh Bachchan, how bad he was with relationships and his inability to handle success or failure.

The world is a damn competitive and ruthless place, where struggling for success in everything and maintaining a happy face have to go hand-in-hand. And if they don't lead to tangible achievements, you are simply lost. And if you do achieve success of the magnitude the world envies, you become the object of criticism in whatever you do. And if you are not in control of your emotions, and by controlling we mean suppressing them to an extent that they are practically non-existent, you will die of the immense stress the world subjects you to. So, you are either unhappy or incapable of experiencing any emotion including happiness. Success sucks. Even wanting it sucks. But without it life sucks because of limited resources. We are basically trapped in endless unhappiness or as emotionless dummies. My feeling is that emotionlessness is an impossible situation. At a practical level, what it means is that nothing happening in one's life is able to create any emotional change in the individual, and his/her mind is instead occupied by an endless emotion of sadness. That endless emotion could also have been happiness, but that happens only with spiritually enlightened people who reportedly existed only in 4th century BC and before. So, basically, it's all unhappiness. Only possibilities are the kinds of unhappiness - i.e., unhappiness coz of scarcity and physical pain or unhappiness coz of stress and mental agony or unhappiness coz of emotional suppression. We can choose which one we want to pursue. What we get is again not necessarily what we want. The pursuit of happiness is just a euphemism. We do want to be happy and often consciously indulge in many experiences that make us happy. However the pursuits of life, which we want to believe are pursuits of happiness, are really pursuits of unhappiness.

Intellectual Pursuits and Intellectual Growth

As we go through life, we learn a lot of things - most of them about dealing with human creations and humans. None of us knows where we, as a kind, came from and why we are here. We may be incapable of knowing that, or perhaps we'll know in future (or past if we manage to travel back). The restlessness in our mind arising from the lack of knowledge about our origins and the purpose of our existence is not as great as the instinct to protect our life and the desire to continue living forever without pain. I can imagine why Maslow must have come up with the concept of the hierarchy of needs, which broadly states that humans crave for satisfaction of physiological needs and such, before they seek filling their intellectual voids. However, from my own observation, I feel that human cravings come as multiple threads of parallel processes rather than as stacks of needs approached bottom up. And the intellectual growth of an individual is best derived and achieved out of struggle for what one would technically consider purely physiological needs. One may argue that it is accidental and not intended, and what Maslow is really talking about is the perceived and pursued need of an individual - i.e., a person will not strive for intellectual growth until he feels he has fully satisfied his physiological needs and is in a comfortable position to do that on a continuous basis, as physiological needs need to be satiated on a daily basis.

In a nutshell, I making two points here:

1. Human efforts to fulfill their various kinds of needs are not in a perfect hierarchy as Maslow put it, but are rather in the form of multiple, parallel complex threads of striving for everything. However, this observation still does not refute Maslow's theory, as I am sure Maslow realized the complexity of the human mind, and knew that his overly simplistic hierarchy of needs is really true at a broad level. For example, a man hanging from a window of a building on fire, would not really think about anything else but saving his life. A man whose life is going fine (i.e., enough food and water), would then look at his days more closely and contemplate about people and situations. And so on.
2. Intellectual growth of an individual is of the deepest and highest quality when it is drawn from the real struggles of and for life. All struggles of our lives are to work with and around people to get what we want to make our lives better. We are not born equal and so our struggles to grow also vary. Humans are selfish and self-centered creatures at a very basic level, and it takes immense amount of hard work and persistence to really make our lives work. The fight for resources is never ending. But the inequality, right from the moment we are born, and the greed with which humans want to amass and disproportionately grow and protect the resources they own and control, makes this world a ruthless opponent to fight with. It not only takes all the strength of the individual, especially those who are unfortunate at the start, but also demands that all their mental and intellectual resources be fully focussed on getting the best they can out of this world. And I believe the intellectual ability of the highest order is the understanding of human behavior and the ways of the world. Philosophy and meaning of life are ingrained in this ability, and the stuff in books written by scholars looking out of windows of their cozy cottages in snow is just confusing pieces of interesting literature which entertains and enchants coz it speaks of the ultimate truth, which neither they know nor does anybody. Drawing inferences based on assumptions is like assuming the inferences. It is through dealing with life's hardships that one learns the truth that is relevant to us. Beyond that, it's pure academics, which has huge respect but no utility.

Energy and Blah

I think, on the whole, we have made ourselves too dependent on petroleum. Even our renewable means of energy production require some bit of petroleum input, to be produced and sustained. To really derisk ourselves from this erratic and mad scramble for oil, I think we need to look for ways of energy production that don't have any dependence on petroleum whatsoever.

Yesterday, the petrol price increased by a whopping 10%. And over the past couple of years, it has increased many times. Well, it doesn't affect me so much, as I do have some extra money, and it really doesn't matter to me if my monthly expenses increase by a few hundreds or even a few thousands. I won't even come to know if it's just that much, coz I don't really keep track of exactly how much I'm spending (beyond some approximation). And I don't have to support a family. But for the millions of Indians who just manage to make the ends meet, and for those who don't, every rupee rise in petrol price is a new disaster. Not that if we have another powerful and efficient energy source, the problems will end, coz politics will spread its wings to engulf all opportunities for political exploitation at the cost of the common man. But may be having another means will spread and lessen the intensity of the pain. Having said that, I am sure capable people are researching on ways and means of energy production that can replace petrol and other fossil fuels, and are also safe. And I am sure the world will change tremendously in the next 50 years, as the fossils will reach their exhaustion, and human energy needs will keep on increasing.

It's crazy how we discovered an energy source and finished it off in a couple of centuries. And in the process created a human world running on interesting stuff that work with energy controlled, stored, flown, burnt, etc. to give us great lives. And soon we need to find another energy source big enough to keep this going and grow it further.

Probably this post does not bring in any new insights or thoughts or information. Anyway, I had to do something lying down in this beautiful park :-)

Have a great weekend!

Let's live and die

Life is so uncertain, particularly when it comes to the end of it. I feel that more nowadays than ever before. Probably after the death recently of one of my batchmates at IIML. And the thought has been getting reinforced by news of deaths of famous young people.

The realization that all this is going to end soon for me too, and possibly at any moment, and that we all have very limited and short time alive, is so sad and disillusioning. Of what consequence is all that I think, feel and do? What and why is all this going on? Why should anything be given any importance?

Thanks to our design, we all have an internal urge to live, to create, to want, to understand things, apply and demand logic, feel emotions - enough of a recipe to make us do something of our lifetimes. Come out of it, though I guess we can't, our existence is over. Or rather, we are not capable of talking about what we would be if we are not what we are. Is death that state of liberation from the trap of being human? Of life? Or is it just and end of what is, and there is nothing thereafter? We don't know. We can only imagine and write stories of crazy Gods, who are supposed to know everything but never show up. May be we are designed too weak to get into all that. But certainly we do poke our noses into everything that's going on. May be our innocent laws and equations, to explain what is, amuse some infant God, for whom we are metaphorical teddy bears who play when the key is wound, and who stop when it's totally unwound. Rewind and we are in a new life. Perhaps God needs a rechargeable battery for us. Perhaps we'll create one for him some day. Till then, let's live and die.