some eco-talk

Another set of exams finished a couple of days back. Then we had the gruelling Summer Placements where I made it to TBSL. I have got into this habit of posting once after every mid-term and end-term exam, which I desperately want to change. I wish I could post once every day. Won't make a resolution this time, but ya, am going to be more frequent now on in updating my blog. Promise!

The current financial crisis has left many thinking about how good we are at managing the resources of this world. Economics, which such an endeavor is called, has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. But is still imperfect and confusing. God, which may be another name for chance (depending on what you choose to assume), created this world within a framework governed by a set of rules. Man created two things to make his life easy - (i) money, and (ii) machine. Machine is our way of emulating God - the Creator. We have been o.k. at it, making inventions fitting into our ever increasing range of discoveries, to make our lives easier and convenient, to give a majority of us more time for higher intellectual pursuits and to some, who have the extra brains, to go for more research on complex phenomena and make more discoveries and inventions, so that the show never stops. We've probably only scratched the surface of what is there and can be done.

Money, for one, is the most interesting invention of man till date. It is the key driver of Economics. It is perhaps the only invention of man which he himself doesn't understand properly in spite of having worked with it for centuries in one form or another, upgrading it to forms thought to be simpler to comprehend and manage, but never too sure whether it works the way it has to. Of course not everyone needs to understand how it works to be able to use it. For example, we use the television without the slightest idea about how it works. But at the same time, there is someone in this world (in fact there is a good number), who understands everything about how the television does whatever it does to give me what I need. Ditto with other machines, and in fact, every other creation of man, besides money.

I wanted to write more on this topic, but am ending it here... am tired of seeing this incomplete article lying on my desktop for more than a week now... and of my inability to put more head into it at this stage... am also tired of seeing my blog craving for a post... so, there you go...

Sochvichaar Post Term-1...

We are witnessing the worst financial crisis of our times. Big giants like Lehman Brothers are getting bankrupt. One look at the events that led to it, and we see that it's all so funny. Now everybody asks - how the hell could they do such stupid things? No answers, everyone is quite silent about it. I guess it's obvious, at least to those who know the answers, that stupidity comes naturally to men, particularly when they work in groups.

I was in my home-town last week for a vacation. It was a hard-earned 5-day freedom from studies. I got some taste of UP as I travelled both sides by train and spent a few hours in Allahabad both times while waiting for the next train. I enjoyed it a lot too, coz in spite of staying in Lucknow, I was hardly able to get a feel of the local culture because of living on the outskirts of the city and in the confines of a campus that keeps me busy all the time. Being a lover of Hindi language since my childhood, I had always wished that I had been in UP - the heart of the Hindi Heartland - and now, I am in UP, and I am not making the best of my interest in the place. I try my best though, in my own little ways, whenever I get a chance. Sometimes I feel I am interested in too many things. Each one gets only a small share of my time. However, I guess, life's best this way!

One of the things I did during my stay in Bilaspur (my home-town), was to visit my school - the place where I studied for the 12 best years of my life. The last I went there was 6 years back. Thereafter, I stopped going for 2 reasons - (1) It was getting increasingly clear that I was getting bald and I couldn't stand my teachers and the kids constantly staring at my head in surprise. (2) I felt it was not so much fun being in school when you are not a student there.

I had an achievement to boast of this time - something that fooled people into believing that my career has a direction. And now I am more comfortable with my baldness too. Mainly after I got rid of the long strands of hair on the sides which desperately tried to cover the bald patches on top, giving me enough scope to believe everything's alright (though whenever I came to know, that everyone knew pretty well that it was empty underneath, I used to burst into tears that never came out). And I had an emotional attachment with the place, and wanted to see it once again and walk the memory lane for a while. So I was encouraged to visit the school.

The school has undergone lots of changes since I left. It is the same old building, but the where-happens-what has changed. There are 2 TT Tables now (kept in the room that earlier contained jars of preserved snakes and weird animals). There are many new teachers, only a few of those who were there in my time are left. The early morning prayer is quite different now. Earlier we had only the National Anthem and a prayer to God which started as "O My God, Teach me to love you....". There have been 3 additions to this sequence - a sanskrit shlok (Tamasoma Jyotirgamaya), a Hindi song (sung very badly) and another that I don't remember. After that someone reads a Thought of the Day on the mike, then another reads out the news headlines and yet another reads the Fact of the Day. Each child now belongs to one of the 4 Houses denoted by colors. The houses also have names after great leaders. The 'color' system was how it used to be. And I was told that 'someone' wanted the houses to have leaders' names. So now each house has 2 names - one after a color and one after a leader. The children wear badges of the colors of their respective houses, which looks nice as compared to the only-blue badges we had in our time. The houses are allocated in the beginning of the year, based on roll numbers.

There were many other changes that I noticed. I am sure many missed my eye, coz it was a brief and casual glance over the place. Many things had improved, a few looked the same.

The teachers took some time to recognize me and then digest how different I looked. Their stares made me nervous. As I flaunted my newly acquired IIM tag, the teachers got struck with the idea which I was always afraid they would. They asked me to speak to all the school children about career goals, hard-work, motivation and stuff. I showed reluctance, trying my best to show expressions of scare and not of air. It is easy to be misunderstood in this kind of situations. But I am sure I must have screwed up, coz the expressions that usually show up on my face are never what I intend.

I was asked to speak to all the students after the Prayer next morning. I ran back home and slept. I find sleep the best remedy for tension. Then later in the evening, I chatted with Preeta, my educationist friend, who made the entire speech for me in 5 minutes. And Sindhu pumped in some confidence into me. And I was ready to go and deliver!

The next day, after the Prayer, the Principal went to the mike to introduce me. She discovered after she talked some globe about me, that she didn't know my name. With one hand on the mike, she asked me my name, and I had to tell her thrice before she understood half of it. She made some sound to take care of the other half. The children didn't care. It didn't matter to them. And soon thereafter, she asked the children to go back to their classes. She turned and walked back to her office. I was taken aback. What about the speech I had in my pocket? Surprisingly, the kids were still standing, as if they knew what was coming. I quickly grabbed the mike and started with my speech by saying that I'd like to share my experiences and learnings.

The speech went on nicely for about 10 minutes. I talked about the importance of short-term and long-term goals, knowledge, information, internet, extra-curriculars, art, decision making etc. Not sure how many understood what I was talking. The kids, who were standing in the sun, in straight lines with their respective classmates, were looking here and there (The guys were looking at the girls, the girls were looking at me). After about 10 mins of my speech, one girl fell on the ground, dropped unconscious. One Sir, who was standing on the stage next to me, asked me to wrap up my speech soon, otherwise more kids would start falling, according to him. Not because of the speech, but because they come to school without having proper breakfasts, he added. I immediately jumped to the end of my 'prepared' speech leaving whatever I was talking right at that point. The end was 4 lines from a hindi poem (courtesy - our Sanskrit Sir) written by Jaishankar Prasad -

Is path ka uddeshya nahi hai,
Shraant bhavan mein tik rehna,
Kintu pahunchna us seema tak,
Jiske aage raah nahi...

The speech ended. The students seemed very happy. They clapped with full energy. I got down the stage. Came accross Mams. Asked them how it was. They said I spoke well. One mam was laughing a lot. Not sure what the matter was. I said bye byes and ran away before anyone else could catch me.

As I was driving back on my Kinetic Zoom, I felt good about my speech. I made one more addition to my looooong list of career options - Motivational Speaker. Made another mental note - to add this point in my CV for the summer placements - that I gave a motivational speech to school kids.

I am back in Lucknow now, after my short vacation. It's 2nd term of PGP now. New courses, new profs, Summer Placements... Life Rocks!

Limits

I once did a mistake of declaring in a B-School interview that I had a great sense of humor. I was asked to crack a joke, and I froze. It happened again today. I didn't freeze, and managed to blabber something. And one of the interviewers burst out laughing, unusually loud, while the others had no clue what was going on. Don't know what the funny guy found funny in my joke, but there must have been something. I find it really hard to crack a joke when somebody asks me to. I find it hard to demonstrate any of my talents when asked to. I can do it when I like, but not on request.

I have conducted various kinds of experiments with people's sense of humor, and each one has been a great experience. It's really amazing how people behave at the very upper limit of their sense of humor, the point at which everything breaks down and they behave in strange and unexpected ways. It's like the Zero Kelvin - you never know how things would behave until you reach there. Teasing people is fun, even at the extreme limits. I feel proud to say that I was beaten once and was on the verge of being beaten on multiple occasions. Some started crying. Some embarrassed me in public. Once a strong guy got so pissed off that he lifted me and held me upside down for about 5 minutes, until I promised I'd never tease him again. People have tested my limits too. But we'll talk about my limits some other time ;-)

I think, not only humor, but for every personality trait, the best way to judge a person is to take him/her to the extreme limit. That's where you get the real picture of the personality. This reminds me of Stress Interviews, which are based on the same concept. So it seems I am not talking "globe", as they say in the IIMs :-)

Law

The weirdest thing about Law is that it is never taught to us, though we are all expected to be law-abiding citizens. How much can we learn from movies, family, society and media? It is easy to miss a lot. Most of our sense of law is out of common sense and the inherent human moral and ethical values. Besides that, we don't know what's there in the books. The only people who know law are those who are there to punish us or defend us. That's funny.

Sochvichaar Post Mid-Term...

Mid-term exams ended yesterday. I had a good time writing the exams. In fact it was my best time at IIML so far - I had enough time to sleep (almost 10 hours everyday), there was no running around doing assignments, no "uninteresting-but-attendance-mandatory" stuff organized by the seniors and no lectures to attend. And as far as studying for the exams was concerned, it didn't require much effort. That is because we are forced to study soon after the lecture whatever is taught in it. Otherwise we will not be able to do the assignments or take the quizzes, which are in plenty and evenly spread all over the terms.

Not that I did all exams well, in fact I screwed a few so badly that I feel ashamed when I think of what I wrote in those, but that is what exams are all about. And when they end, it's celebration time. It doesn't matter whether you were mugging day and night or sleeping 10 hours. When the exams end, you must chill out.

So to chill out, I went in the evening with a few of my friends to the most popular hang-out for IIML guys - the Saharaganj mall. It's a good mall by all standards and has a multiplex too (PVR Cinemas). The quality of the crowd is not even as good as it is in Chennai, but sometimes you get to spot cute faces with their moms and dads.

I also watched a movie - the latest one in the Mummy series. It was gross. I had tried hard to convince everyone for "Ugly aur Pagli" but nobody agreed. It seemed that everyone was incredibly prejudiced when it came to selecting a movie. I was not able to decide whether it's past experiences that determine people's future decisions, or whether it's prejudice, or whether it's the fear of accepting a liking for something that is not socially popular or has a low acceptance. Probably it's the sum of all three, and a few other factors. But I am forced to conclude based on this, that not many people form opinions by looking at things in isolation with an open mind. And moreover, there is always some gap, which may be huge for some people, between the opinions that they express and the opinions that they truly hold. The latter may even be buried inside oneself, with people lying to themselves about what they truly believe in.

I also had plans to drink, but finally I didn't because of lack of enthu and lack company. Another strange phenomenon - not many seem to drink at IIML, not the majority for sure.

A thought crossed my mind as I was sitting through the economics lecture today. All my understanding about human beings has come out of a domain of people with whom I have interacted to a certain degree. And it's a natural tendency of every human being to interact more with people he/she is more comfortable with, which is usually people who are similar to him/her. Complementarity of personality could be another criterion - like a person who is weak in his leadership skills would try to be in either of 2 kinds of groups, again depending on his motivation. One - a group with a strong leader, if he chooses and likes to be a follower. Two - a group full of people with weaker leadership skills or stronger skills of 'following', where he can assume leadership position, if he really wants to lead inspite of his disability. (Is following a skill? It is normally seen as lack of a skill rather than a skill in itself. There are quite a few qualities like this. But over time, some of these voids have come to be seen as skills. Can you name a few such qualities? Am I writing a textbook :P?)

I concluded from the analysis in the last para that howsoever I try, I will never be able to understand all people. Because finally I'd always project myself over them and look at them as if they are like me. If not me, very similar to me. I realize that it's very difficult to appreciate the fact that all human beings are different. Though we know it, we never accept it or recognize it. Perhaps because that would make us feel different from others. Which is scary; because the way we see things and ourselves, we accentuate all negative differences and even tend to see the positive ones in a negative light. That's our internal defense mechanism. We want to get rid of all negative differences before it hurts. This kind of short-sightedness and bias in judging people pervades all our personalities and so it is never possible really, to even understand people with a free and independent mind. Perhaps that's the reason many books on personality development ask you not to try to understand people because no matter how much you try, you'd never be able to understand people fully. That may be on the very extreme, but the reality lies somewhere not very far from it.

Our classes started today itself, the day after the last mid-term exam. It feels as if nothing happened the last one week. As if it was a beautiful night of sleep with dreams both good and bad, but then we woke up again in the morning, just early enough to manage some corn flakes for the breakfast and then run to reach for the lecture on time, so that we don't miss the attendance.

IIT vs IIM - First Impressions

I wanted to make a long post on my first experiences after joining IIML before I make any other post about life here, but laziness and business have kept me so occupied that I couldn't even get started. So I thought, let's forget it, and write whatever comes to mind and at least be active on the blog.

Being from an IIT, I can't stop comparing IITs and IIMs. Although there are huge differences in terms of scale of operations and the kind of people who fill the respective campuses, which further leads to significant cultural differences, there are lots of similarities between the two categories of premier institutes of India. The infrastructure, facilities, food-standards and the academic format is more or less the same, with the obvious differences here and there based on the need and scale. The number of females is awfully low in both places. However the ones in IIMs seem more approachable, reachable, amiable and amicable to me. The level of interaction is good. A common mess for all at IIML helps a lot. On the whole, I felt that students at IIMs are more down-to-earth, interactive and friendly than IITians. The latter have serious attitude problems (it's totally my opinion).

I agree it is not fully justified to compare IITs and IIMs coz they comprise students of different age groups, qualifications, maturity and experience levels; and most of the cultural and behavioral differences are due to that. The personality of an IIM student is the consequence of all the learnings he has had during his graduation, job and relationships, while an IITian, when he starts, is just out of school and is very immature in his thinking and approach to life.

Probably that explains why IIM guys are bigger muggus than IITians. And to take it further, it seems to have some interesting effects on characteristics of the products these institutes produce. Because of being less dependant on books and technical knowledge, and being more capable of sailing through courses and stuff inspite of not learning anything, IITians tend to be more open and comfortable in getting into stuff they don't have any clue about to start with. In other words, IITians are better risk takers and IIM guys are more focussed and hard-working. It's a sweeping statement though, and I see exceptions on both sides. But broadly, this seems to be the case.

A very special case is - guys in IIM who graduated from IIT; a category I have not thoroughly studied yet, as it includes me too. Hmmm, may be I am stereotyping a lot, which is not always a good thing to do. But in many cases, stereotypes do exist, and represent a majority of their kind.

Again, these are totally my views, based on my observations. I have seen too much of IITians. But I must say, I've just got started with the IIMs. So hold on and keep visiting for more, as I see more of it.

Is Democracy the best form of Government?

Government Hospitals are awful in India. They commit all kinds of crimes ranging from bribery to using same syringes multiple times to denying treatment to the most needy.

It's funny that each and every body associated with the Government in India is so inefficient, corrupt and uncivilized that you'd be a fool if you trust any of them with anything. Any democratic system is bound to become like that, if it is of a size bigger than a certain maximum, because it is hard to establish accountability and control in huge democracies. Hence, I believe that democracy is really not an appropriate system to run a Country or a Province. Democracy is good for a smaller group of people - I guess a few hundreds in number, at the maximum.

I think the reason Democracy has become so popular is that it provides a wonderful and perfect playground for people who are cunning and adept at playing politics to satiate their political appetites at someone else's expense, by sitting in safe positions of power, and since such people have great convincing abilities and remarkable assertiveness, they are able to persuade people to accepting Democracy and also propagate it all over so that they expand their grounds to play on. They tag the enemies of Democracy as evil and get united to crush them. And the masses stay in an illusion that they are in control of the systems of governance which are held by their own representatives elected by vote and nurtured by the money they pay as taxes. But we all know how fake it is. It's strange nobody says it very often in public.

For example, India is the world's largest democracy - 1.2 bn people. Are our governments really of the people, for the people, by the people? They are none of them, as we all know. Even if we go by sheer numbers, the fact is, only a small percentage of us vote, and most of those who do are the least aware of what's going on in the country. And to make matters worse, the winner in any election is the guy who gets a simple majority, which is just a small percentage of the votes cast, coz there are so many parties contesting for a seat that each party gets just a handful of votes. So the guy who finally gets elected has the support only from a minority in his constituency. But in the end we fix the number of seats a party has to have in the houses of parliament to stake its claim to form the government - to give ourselves an illusion again that our governments indeed are run by those who have support from more than 50% (or whatever it is) of the country. And to top it all, parties with a few seats join together and form coalitions. What about the citizens who voted for one of those parties to keep the other out? What about parties' ideologies and stuff like that?

And obviously it is all not so clean either. The voters are lured, bought and made happy (as the girl says in the movie Bombay to Bangkok... did ya see it?) in many ways. Then there are booth-captures and fake votes. And even if the voting had been clean, the question as to whether the common man is shrewd enough to decide who's the best to rule him cannot be answered on the affirmative with utmost confidence. And with the way things are done in India, it is not even the government of those chosen by the majority of the adult citizens. It is simply one randomly elected government that forms as a result of manipulating, voting, manipulating again, lots of crap and lots of things too complicated to comprehend or talk about.

One may argue that India is still just a Third World and an Underdeveloped country. (Think why it is so. I suspect democracy might be one of the crippling factors). But even the democracies which are rich and developed are not so because they are democratic. Most of the time, democracy drags back what is running smoothly. Such democracies also have sound economic models and intelligentsia at the right places which allow them to efficiently cover up the inefficiencies that democracy brings with it. If democracy had been a sufficient condition for prosperity, then all democratic nations would have been rich and prosperous, but that is hardly the reality. I feel that democracy is not even a condition, let alone a sufficient one.

So, if not Democracy, what is the best from of government? (Check out this link - Forms of Government - and try to figure out.) Is it the rule by philosophers and intellectuals as Plato suggested in his famous book The Republic? If it really is, then it can certainly be implemented after 2012, when the current world order will come to an end, and all evil people will die and only the intellectuals and the spiritually inclined will survive. I'll be one of the survivors. Wish you all the best!