Change

Ah, the beast awakens once more.

Time then, to turn it up a gear or three.

界王拳

(last in the series)

A Balanced Budget

(A follow-up to the post Fiscal Crisis)

There comes a point in every man's life when he must confront his past.

For some weeks in May every single day, I boarded a time machine. The dust-filled, at times soggy and almost always heavy trips took me as far back as 5th April 2013. I was sorely tested... at times stretched to the limits of crazy self-flagellation.

Let's talk about the mathematics of the situation. If you read my last post, you would find an estimate of some 150 newspapers piled up in a neglected and inconspicuous corner of my office. It seemed a decent guess back then.

With an inflated assumption of 180 I guessed the entire series could be wrapped up with 12 a day (I get 4 newspapers daily). Elementary maths. And so it began. I was diligent in completing my daily target.

There was just this small problem. The pile wasn't coming down.

I increased my paper intake. I raised the bar to 20. I toiled for a fortnight with the revised strategy. My challenge soon unfolded, the denouement a sinister joke around my infantile obsession. A series of revised estimates told me a depressing and demoralizing fact.

There were 800 newspapers in there.

It seemed a worthless struggle. I could have done better with that time. But deep reluctance in throwing away all that knowledge to the kabaadi was too much to bear - I held on.

After the tenth day something remarkable happened. On a pure whim, I upped my intake to 30 a day. And a few days after I completed 50. Something clicked. I was on fire.

My personal highest?

One Hundred Sixty Seven. In a Day.

Yeah. I did it.

HWR - 11

Haaris' Weekly Round-up is back up and running. I can sense the groans from the back-alleys of Facebook already. If there was ever a written feature that had a shambolic history of laziness behind it, I would be gutted if that wasn't HWR.

1. A great article on the stringers that get the nine racquets of Federer ready. And for Djokovic and Murray.
2. The maddening urge to continuously check one's email has followed me to A. An article that argues against this monstrosity.
3. The great but senile Ed Wilson wants to set aside half of the world for the other species of the planet. Is that possible?
4. A great piece on how the great statistician R A Fischer devised a wonderful experiment to test a person's claim of knowing whether milk was poured before or after the tea. Courtesy Prof Apratim Guha.

The promise is renewed. The dirty slate is wiped to its former pristine self once more. I will return next time with a new edition of HWR. Really, I will.

For previous versions of HWR: http://hamstersqueaks.blogspot.in/search/label/Weekly%20Round-ups

A Failed Book Review

A couple of years ago I had read Rebecca Costa's The Watchman's Rattle. It was a zealous and somewhat perplexing attempt to explain off most of the plagues ailing our civilization to socio-evolutionary concepts. My first guess (as could be yours) was that Rebecca was a believer in kin selection famously propounded by Edward Wilson. A back ground check revealed I was right - she had been a student of the legendary evolutionist.

The cause and effect relationship the book sought to push requires a separate blog post in itself but the message was clear - we're running out of time to save our planet. The signs are there and there's no need to bring in voodoo or faith into the mixture. The evidence was in the realm of facts and science.

There's a charm to alarmist books and movies. To contemplate the collapse of all that mankind has achieved requires a certain amount of effort. In movies it takes something really big, such as an alien invasion or a cataclysmic freak climate event to cut it. And that only serves to put it safely into the cabinet of sci-fi.

Then there are books that genuinely aim to persuade the reader of the perils of real life phenomena such as climate change or the collapse of the financial system. To be sure, these works are very cautious in their treatment of the subject, knowing too well the dangers of straying into hyperbole or dystopic territory. Anthropogenic climate change, for example, is almost certainly true. But the measured debate we're witnessing has eminent thinkers like Bjorn Lomborg on the other side of the field. Read The Sceptical Environmentalist for more.

So when I picked up The Third Curve, I had mixed expectations. The author is definitely unknown but the topic is enticing enough to make a good story. You flip to the backside of the book and you read words of restrained praise from Shashi Tharoor and Jairam Ramesh, and people from TERI and civil society.

I read the book. There's nothing to write about it.

I am not kidding. 

Learning Restraint

I feel terrible today.

All the months approaching the elections I was happily ensconced in a bubble of disregard and disinterest. I didn't worry about the anxious heart-on-the-sleeve debates neither was I piqued by the shocking absence of knowledge in what many friends said.

As the months went by the mood of excitement was undeniable. There was much to be argued on and there were too many people saying all the things that needed to be questioned. I succumbed to the irrestible fervour of the moment. I talked and argued. I attacked and parried. And I chose to draw conclusions on the state of the nation when all I had was paltry understanding (not a bad effort though).

The thing is, I realize I am too immature. I am too ignorant and unenligtened to have ventured so bravely forth into the world of political science. And that is what this short piece is about.

We like to be indignant about things that rankle and bite into our conceptions of the world. We defend our turf and we use all the tools and tricks at our disposal. But to what end?

How does supporting one particular side help your cause? Are we sure of our vision for the country? Have we spent time working out those demands that we as citizens are entitled to have? Is your side defining your view of life, rather than the reverse?

The trigger for this post of self-doubt is only a small consequence of the innumerous debates on the Edit Pages of the best newspapers we have. When I read the arguments I feel meek and childish. I realize my vigorous nods of approval were, at times, instinctive and unsubstantiated. I realize that a good rebuttal can shake out well-written critiques with amazing effectiveness. And I realize I didn't spend enough time to analyze the arguments as I could have.

I feel terrible.

Have you subsconsciously attached this post to refer to my stand on some issue - seeing it as a moment of personal victory? That you feel a sense of righteous justice at feeling my doubt and are therefore vindicated on your unweighted opinion?

Then you're as much a victim as I am.

I think it is time for conscious self-restraint. I think it is time to question the country we want before looking at the poor stock of merchandise on hand. It is time to restrain oneself from judging anyone so soon, positively or negatively.

I need to know more first.

Addiction

It disrupts my essence today - a precursor to inevitable future regret. Riven by guilt and haunted by fear I stay...impossible to escape this cesspool of depravity. My addled state delays the inevitable pain that is mine to bear. I run. I aspire to aid my convalescence by an ephemeral balm of sensory amnesia. It is hopeless.

The sins of the present will be paid with interest in the future.

The procrastinated pursuit of predestined purpose will prove to be mere pusillanimity.

Normative logic and a sense of severe urgency scream at me senseless attempting to overturn the tide of desperation building in me. It is useless. It is pointless. I walk down the damned and dreaded avenue towards refuge.

I shall reason on the morrow.
Knowing I reasoned every morning before the one that is to come.

Lesson from a Facebook debate - Questioning Intentions of the Author

I recently had a small Facebook fist fight with a good friend over the relative merits of an article that was being shared a lot. The article elicited cries of protest from several people who took offense at its free-wheeling and rambunctious dismissal of India's prospects for the future, particularly if seen in the light of the idea of India that was sought after by stalwarts such as Gandhi, Nehru and Patel.

The skirmish started and ended in a couple of hours and when I looked back at it today I realized a simple problem that was at the heart of the debate -  the question over authorial intentions.

It should be simple enough, in hindsight of course. Before that, an overview of the type of arguments offered today is necessitated.

The lowest, the basest of arguments, take place when people just stand by their opinions and tell the opposite side to accept the divinely inherited wisdom they propound. As useless as this description sounds, it's in most vogue on our public fora.

Then, comes the interesting part. Ideally, any debate should be on the arguments of the piece. That's difficult. For that one needs to either have subject expertise or she has to make the effort to individually research the points made and come out with conclusions and rebuttals. It is even more difficult than it sounds.

And then there's the middle rung. The one where you don't consider yourself foolish enough to reiterate your beliefs but you also can't find the time to understand the nuances of the argument. You still dislike the article but you feel you're intellectual (or neutral) enough to not simply say that.

That is the case when a debate is fought over questioning the intention of the author. As was the case in my little battle. If you can't go into the claims of the author, just disparage him by claiming he works against the nation, or that he is part of an elite, or that he is part of a West appeasing cult. There, you say that and you build your case over protecting the honour of your nation. In which case, a randomly lurking lackey will latch onto your topic with relish and fight for honour (never mind the ensuing hilarious implications).

What I missed, however, is the fact that a battle over intentions is also difficult. And well nigh impossible especially when dealing with acclaimed intellectuals. That's because you have no way of judging the intent of an author without knowing her body of work. A brief study tells you about her stature, her consistency (+1) and periodic if any instabilities in sticking to a stance (-2). In my example, the author is universally known as a man who disputes the assumption of western superiority, going on to embellish the stature of Asian statesmen. That implies a fair amount of cognitive dissonance when connected with an appeasement narrative. That is if my friend had that knowledge, obviously. Instead, the claim was coupled with vague assertions of finding weak arguments and not believing in the data shared. Without sharing the weak points and coming out with the right data, of course.

I didn't freely see it then. A debate on intention is not possible without any knowledge of the author's oeuvre. It's like calling Tarantino a racist because he uses the n word a lot. But that was the case in my spat.

Lesson learnt.