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)

Quote of the Week - XIII

 Some excerpts from the wonderful Gilgamesh - The Life of a Poem, by Michael Schmidt:

Page 32, Tablet 1

He who saw everything, of him learn, o my land, learn

of him who sought to know what lands are for, & people, to turn

to fruitfulness after the wastings and the idlenesses, the ways

to use what is called strength after its misuse, he who had tidings

of times when deltas were of use as deltas and not floodings of excrement...

~ Charles Olson, 'Bigmans II'

Page 46, Tablet 1

"His and Gilgamesh's relationship, whatever its intended nature, is emblematic of the ways in which narrative fact requires the complementarity of invention and its illuminating irony, to find the sense in it. Fiction throws a raking light over fact; it also projects the shadows that make for three-dimensionality in an otherwise flattened chronicle."

Back Home

This morning while I lay in bed blinking away my jet lagged eyes I took a moment to savor the familiar chirping of the birds and the energy of a Delhi street; I involuntarily relaxed knowing I was back home. The tranquility was short-lived. Sirens punctuated my state of bliss. Once. Twice. Far too many times. We're living through hell in India. The only thing that makes me feel better is that I am here too.

Quote of the Week - XI

 "Don't fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail."

~ Bruce Lee

Previous post in the series.

Quote of the Week - X

The heavens and all below them,
Earth and her creatures,
All change,
And we, part of creation,
Also must suffer change.

~ Ovid

Previous post in the series.