Weekly Update I

(Written on May 18, 2018)

I am sitting in Columbia's Lehman library preparing a presentation.

Really.

When I left my consulting life, I told myself that one of the things that'll transpire would be the prospect of eschewing the making of presentations. After all, while it's perfectly understandable why the consultant needs her slides it was, at least to my naive past self, somewhat obvious that an academic need only worry about getting her work convincing, novel and useful.

Well, I am sitting here making my fourth presentation in a month, well past 25 slides, and not finding an end point any time soon. 

I can bore you with the nuanced differences between presentations made in this life and my last one but I know you'd care about it as much as Spurs' chances of winning Silverware next season so let me not torture you.

I can talk about tennis. I guess I can only talk about tennis these days. In my free time and when I am tired but need to continue working I switch on my TennisTV and have a match playing in the background. This isn't very different from the last two years of my schooling though I suspect I was not too sincere about the balance between work and sport back in my teen years.

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I am reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan these days. Sagan represents the ideal skeptic for me - he carries a certain maturity about the limitations of human sentiments; that we cannot all go about expressing profound doubts on all that we come to believe in our daily lives. At the same time, he unleashes a spirited attack on the proliferation of what he calls pseudo-science and how it causes people to be led to "easy" beliefs about the way the world works. He's worried - this is in the 90s - by the growing market of peddlers of pseudo-science and his exasperation is endearing.

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Among the macro-literature that I am exploring these days is about "bunching" and its use in finding deep structural (that means used in economic theories) parameters such the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. This is part-attempt to learn something fascinating and part-desperation in trying to finish a course safely but it's not time wasted. And that, at least, is a relief.

This will be the last class of my life in a must-pass setting. And I never thought I'd say it but here it goes.

I am relieved.

Getting Fresh – III

(Written on June 8, 2019)

It’s been a while. Honestly though, it too me a while to fill up the pot again. I want to be vain at this point and tell you it’s because I upgraded to a much much bigger pot and I’ve been on a quest to make sure I add content over bluster and also that I have tried to rise above the melee again except that this time it’s more difficult because 30 is a little more than a year away and as anyone who is close to the cliff (or who has fallen off) can tell you it’s that much harder switching gears to a brand new field, especially if one refuses to eschew old habits – classical literature, classical music, physics, math, and deep suspicion of the social sciences.

The pot is full again. And with that milestone I must confess I have missed blabbering into the open on this blog. I am free to talk with myself once more!

What must be said first up is the reality of the gauntlet thrown at me by…me. Last semester meant 5 more subjects (for credit) and work for 4 professors in different capacities. Plus the onerous requirement to produce original research. Plus my own quest to go for research that was more than incremental. Some teaching work which everyone else does. And lastly, making sure I realize that research is a game – play it but don’t depend on it.

Yup, I could be vain like that. Except I will be throughout this post.

Research is very strange. Social science research is even stranger. The utility function is the ultimate non-falsifiable hypothesis. Theory is progressively becoming how you can use fancy math to produce counter-intuitive results that, these days, are as likely to be testable as building a particle collider that can detect strings. Empirical research is interesting but worryingly liable to fraud and more worryingly a case of looking for your keys under the street lamp while you house languishes in darkness. There are very few rules that apply in every context. And no good textbooks.

It’s not all bad. Then again most of it is so I’m not going to be overly-optimistic.

Let’s get on with this collection of moments from my pensieve.

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I am in Banaras (Varanasi). It’s where my paternal grandmother lives and from where effectively my father’s side of the family hails. Benaras is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Standing at Dashashwamedh Ghat, one of the most frequented riverside banks in this city, one can only lapse into deep philosophical ruminations while looking at the holy Ganges. Dashashmedh Ghat is so heavily frequented because it is in some ways in the most religiously and spiritually significant part of this already very holy city, a stone’s throw away from the Kashi Vishwanath temple. It also happens to be a stone’s throw away from where we live.

Varanasi is well known these days for being India’s Prime Minister’s constituency. People ask me if I see progress there. My first response is that this is not an easy task. Benaras is by its very nature a city of narrow lanes and winding alleys. And the people living in the corners and choked streets have been there for a hundred years or more. So you can’t just throw them out. As far as all these aspects are concerned there has been little or no change. The streets are still very dirty and the roads are still crumbling. People are no better off.

It’s where tourists visit that there has been change. This is somewhat related to the previous point – there’s a lot more scope to do stuff in these places. And by stuff I mainly mean roads. Indian leaders are poor at changing administrative systems and in completing soft targets – mortality indicators, employment, or even sanitation. They are much better at building one time infrastructure. And for our PM, roads have always been a way to show he’s doing work. In that vein, the road to the airport is fantastic. The posh locale of Ravindrapuri is posher. Assi Ghat, which was mostly jungle earlier, has been cleared and converted to a hip place where people can sit and relax. Old timers have a hard time seeing this metamorphosis of Assi Ghat. It’s really a great place to visit.

More than that, this PM has managed to grant people the most rare of feelings – he has instilled in the people of Benaras (and I imagine in many other places) a sense of hope. People believe more substantive changes will be made.

For what it’s worth one can only hope they are right. Progress will be progress. And much respected and loved.

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Change

(Written on March 14, 2021)

Where to begin? This is the penultimate March of PhD life but it may well be the last one of note. I've been juggling multiple possible job market papers and it seems nothing is truly clicking. I do have more ten papers in some stage of being written and I think at least half of them will be top quality so it's not all bad. Whatever else that may happen, I'll get out with some genuine research in my name.

This is easily the longest I've spent away from home. Sure, COVID is a good reason to stay put. But the mental health costs of staying essentially in the same room for 14 months and counting are huge. Work has progressed but the mind has suffered. The quest has been undertaken but it has been more lonely than first imagined or bargained for.

In the next six months, I will try to produce a paper of some note. If I make it, then phew. If I don't my degree will be complete and I will see what pastures await a person who can think through anything under seconds but is not research material. What am I meant to do?

(Last post in this series)

Clarke's Three Laws

In the huge universe of inspirational quotes, books, and movies, Clarke's Three Laws burn bright like an O-type star.

Briefly, they are:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The third one has received a lot of attention and fame but I find the first two to be more instructive. And inspiring. 

[From October 24, 2018]

Draft Pick: Guilty?

After a rough week, the best I could do to extract productivity from a languid Friday was to clean up old drafts. I found I was preparing a follow-up draft to my post on The Battle for Grammar about 7 years ago. It has been far too long for me to do justice to my thought process as on June 9, 2013, and so the only sensible step was to retain the hyperlink to this wonderful kinetic typography YouTube video of Stephen Fry expounding on the same topic except with an eloquence not within my current capabilities. I had intended to share the video as ringing validation of my thoughts developed independently of Fry's own exquisite tirade though this video and the text behind it easily predate my blog post.

Draft Pick III: A Life Update

[Written on 24th September, 2016]

I treat the Econ PhD program as a kind of baptism by fire that brings me back to what I always wanted to be. When I was a teenager among the many visions of the future I had was imagining what my teenage self would say to what I became in the future. For me at that time, becoming a scientist was the only path that made sense. It was pure, it was beautiful, and it was enduring. Running a company was never even a possibility - despite my father having been in the corporate world - and I wasn't even sure what was meant by engineering.

The knowledge about the IITs came some time in the 11th grade and I was resistant. It seemed a dumb thing to try for boring derivative stuff like engineering (I mean you were applying principles; yuck). For an entire year, I didn't study anything related to any exam. I was part of the NASA build-a-space-city challenge, a Delhi Government Vision 2020 contest, I was socializing (and miserably failing), and I was reading cool stuff about physics (not least of which was a paper by Seth Lloyd on Black Hole Computers). 

Till that time my life had been based on some principles, long discarded. Number one, exams didn't matter. Don't get me wrong, I was always in the top five of any class but rarely, if ever, at number one. I loved giving exams because they were intensely exhilarating but I didn't believe in preparing for them. Number two, it didn't matter where you studied or what grades you had. I thought such superficiality had no place in modern society. I knew many friends who were studying very well but they were never impressive enough. And then there was this world of creative tinkerers who had reasonable grades but were doing awesomely.

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Today, I am finding it difficult to study. After starving myself for over 30 hours (no real reason) I went over to Chipotle to have a burrito. In the past few weeks the burritos have been a God send. I have always hated Mexican food but with home so far away the combination of "rajma" (Pinto beans) and "chawal" seems familiar and tasty. The burrito was heavy and unhealthy. I loved it.

I came back to my room to start revising Microecon except I looked at my bed and a voice told me it'd be better to study on the bed. You know where this goes. The blanket never seemed more comfortable and I barely remember dozing off to better process my burrito. The nap was comfortable but ended with an old school friend visiting me in a garden. I woke up at this point (again not sure of the reason) and realized my entire body felt like a mottled old cardboard carton. Every joint was paining. I turned left and right in bed trying to sort my body out. I got up eventually. The last thought I had before sleeping was the strangeness of life and how incredibly far fetched (but probably true) was the fact we were living in a glorious vacuum of indifference. It's like the discrete metric. If it's not about you it's equally far away but no point is really better than any other. 

Having promised a friend I was going to study with him was just about enough to take me to the Social Sciences library. I walked the now familiar way there, with the St. John's Cathedral looming over my head as I turned left to look at all the fashionable people on the street (they look the same to me); I ascended towards my department. The library was closing early. So much for that.

I am now sitting in the Science and Engineering library. As I entered twenty minutes back I felt this feeling of familiarity and a recognition that I was acknowledged by the world where I truly belonged. Economics is a great discipline but it doesn't match the purity of the pure sciences (with due apologies to the engineers). It's a pretty decent compromise, doing a PhD in Economics.

I think my teenage self would give a terse nod to the decision I made.

[The previous post in this series.]

Draft Pick II: Building history

[Some time after the French Open, 2015]

Federer fans have a lot to thank Novak Djokovic for.

Think about it. Roger has 17 slams. In 2011, the only man preventing Nadal from usurping his throne (distressingly fast as well) was Novak, when he convincingly beat Rafa in multiple slam finals.

This year's French was no different. You may argue that Nadal was doomed to lose in 2015 but say that convincingly with his nine French cups in front of you. It took a man of assured faith in his own abilities to flay the Spanish beast, and that was what Novak did.

But Federer fans also need to make a gracious hat tip to Stan Wawrinka too.

It was Wawrinka who stopped Nadal from winning the 2014 Australian Open (when no one believed it was possible) thereby stopping him from getting to his 14th slam before the French Open.

And it was Wawrinka again who bludgeoned Djokovic's resolve. He denied the Serb's quest for a career Grand Slam and dented his credentials in becoming another pretender to the crown of the GOAT. Novak may win the next two slams (I don't think that's happening) but that's not the same kind of history that he was building a day before today.

All in all I think what we need to appreciate is that this is not the outcome of luck. It is a fact often underestimated when we weigh Rod Laver's achievements and, I would argue, Roger Federer's place in the history of tennis. Winning slams consistently is no mean feat. It means going through seven five set matches battling the other top stars but also driven athletes who are good to beat you on their day. Even Roger Federer feels that more now, when he finds himself ousted on off-days.

No. This is not about luck. It's about greatness. Look back at the records of Federer, at his consistency and you may no longer find them prosaic. It's worth a gasp. And a shudder.

Novak will fight for some more years but once again Stan has changed the future of tennis' history.

Thanks, Stan.

[The previous post in this series] 

Draft Pick: Great Resilience

[I have at least a hundred draft blogs that I haven't published. Seeing that I am working on a few well-researched posts, I think it's a good time to release these sulking thoughts from the confines of the bench and into the bedlam that is the real world]

I: Written some time in August 2015

It's a familiar story.

At the end of every year commentators, sports writers and critics bring out a set of eulogies announcing the demise of yet another star player. It is a remarkable study in coordination, for the obituaries are similar and their glorious assessment of the sports player in question is marked by a dressing of pity.

These gurus can't be strictly mocked. It is a fact that a huge gamut of players undergo the steps of the product life cycle diagram (I am a student at a B school after all).

Books are published, interviews are scheduled and the verdict is quickly absorbed by the masses so that most of us share a feeling of dismissal for the once venerated player. Life's like that.

Except there are people - a handful of them today - who throw these premature judgement out of the window and into the gutter.

Lionel Messi is a case in point. No one would dare place him in the bracket of a has been. But over the course of a year whispers steadily strengthened to declarations that he was no longer that Messi the world admired. He had lost the Ballon D'Or to Cristiano Ronaldo, and before the start of this year, he was hopelessly behind him in the number of goals scored. Barcelona were flailing helplessly while Real Madrid were marching imperiously to the Liga title. Messi was fed up of the team he played for all his life. The world was changing.

Roger Federer is another, perhaps stronger example. It's been close to five years since the first set of journalists predicted his eviction from the top tier of tennis; the last couple have solidly questioned the damage played on his legacy if he dare continue. And they have a point. I mean Roger hasn't won a Grand Slam major since Wimbledon 2012 (even that was won after many outright dismissals of his chances). He's 33 for God's sake. Some of the commentators retired much before - at that age they were certainly not playing at the level Roger's at. But last year's run and the victory at Dubai over Novak Djokovic have wrecked havoc with these predictions. Not even a third round exit from the Australian Open could dampen the feeling of awe one felt for Roger's brilliance. No one has missed the transition in his playing style. How many greats can change their game the way he did?

More than sporting talent though my post posits we ought to spend our moments thinking about the belief these greats have in themselves. It is extraordinary - the world spent its collective breath elbowing the likes of Sachin Tendulkar (excuse the pun) out of the sport. And these people persevered. I cannot know if they were affected by the articles written and verdicts passed but I admire the way they dismissed the wave of dismissals.