2013 Assembly Election results

The results of Delhi election must have come as a surprise to many including those who voted for AAP even though most of us really wanted AAP to succeed but we had our doubts if it would happen in reality. So first I would like to congratulate Arvind for AAP's spectacular success on its debut. His own convincing victory against the stalwart Shiela is like icing on the cake. It is never easy to change any established system. In the corporate sector I have been involved in a number of transformation initiatives and know that to bring in change, even if it is very positive and desperately needed, is not always easy. To aim for changing our political system is a very ambitious one and he has succeeded admirably in this endeavour. In a country where most citizens are so poor that they are willing to sell their vote in exchange of some money or liquor it is extremely difficult to fight with the established players without power, money, muscle or manipulation. I wish AAP had got a clear majority so that Delhi could have been established as a model state. It would have clearly demonstrated what clean and honest governance can do to this country. Just now I heard Kiran Bedi expressing her view that AAP and BJP should come together to provide a stable government as that is the verdict of the citizens of Delhi. That came as a surprise. Even Anna's allegations just before the election were surprising. I am sure Aana is very experienced and is aware how our media sensationalize such issues not for the benefit of the country but for the TRP of their respective channels. He could have directly spoken to Aravind if he had any doubts. If Anna and Kiran had actively supported Aravind AAP could have got the majority.

This has been an impressive beginning. I personally feel AAP should not compromise on its core purpose or values, which is to provide an alternative political system. I am sure if there is re-election AAP will get a clear majority. Leaders of this country have looted thousands of crores over several decades and its citizen have gone through terrible sufferings that beggar description. I am sure the country can afford to spend a few crores and the citizens of Delhi can bear a little extra pain that will bring in a complete transformation in our political system that is completely rotten today. There are lot of people who might have voted for larger parties even if in their heart of hearts they wanted AAP to win lest their votes should go waste. People who have already voted for AAP will definitely voted for them again as they have done so after lot of thinking and out of conviction. There is no reason for AAP to compromise on its raison d'etre. It should not try to emulate the congress that holds on to power by hook or by crook, i.e. using CBI to extract support from parties with whom they have serious fundamental differences.

I personally feel this is like Sepoy Mutiny II. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 eventually didn't succeed and it established a possibility of freedom which was finally realised in 1947. Even though we got our freedom long back the democracy remains only on paper. In reality we have VIPcracy in India. This Sepoy Mutiny may be the harbinger of true democracy in this country. The path is difficult and may take several decades. Other states are not going to be like Delhi which is politically sensitive and well informed. There were several rallies by Aanna and Ramdev etc. which helped AAP to build the base there quickly. However, this has been a fitting reply to the arrogance of most of the senior leaders of the Congress party. Their hubris, corruption and poor governance had reached their limits.

We should be thankful to Aravind and the AAP party for rekindling some hope for this wonderful country that has immense potential. As he had pointed out it was now or never. This has come at a time when one had really given up and the country was getting into a hopeless situation. One expects that other parties like BJP will learn some lessons and rectify their ways before it is too late. Strong leaders like Advani will be able to take bold decisions without fear of losing power. The analysis paralysis and dilly dallying they displayed on the issue of corruption in Karnataka is a case in point.

I was in Chennai and election was held at that time for Tamilnadu. A party was formed by some IITians but nothing was heard about them after that. Dr. Jaiprakash Narayan started Loksatta party in AP but without any success though he is still active. So to replicate the success of Delhi in other states is not going to be easy and AAP has a long way to go before it will able to convert this Sepoy Mutiny II into a real democracy.

One must also congratulate BJP for their success in all 4 states, especially Chhattisgarh. We Indians are very sentimental and mix up issues. Sympathy at someone's death is fine but that should not influence our choice of leaders. Good at BJP retained power after a neck to neck fight that lasted long. Winning any election for 3rd time that too by a big margin as it happened in MP is a creditable achievement. Rajasthan is interesting as they never choose the same government in succession. This state should be the next target for AAP.

One hopes that like minded people like Anna and Kiran Bedi will actively support Aravind during this Herculean task of cleaning the Augean Stables. Aravind considers Anna as his guru. What remains to be seen whether the guru treats his disciple as Eklavya or Arjun. Anna is a Gandhian but even all actions of Mahatma Gandhi was not above board. He was a great individual, no doubt, but his insistence on Nehru becoming the first PM, even though Sardar Patel had 12 nominations and Nehru had none, remains the foundation of corruption and nepotism in independent India. One just hopes that Anna will support Aravind wholeheartedly for the sake of the nation.

Source: Simply Fly by Rudyard Kipling

IF by Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Excerpts from "Inferno" by Dan Brown

INFERNO

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Exalted as one of the preeminent works of world literature, the Inferno was the first of three books that made up Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy – a 14233 line epic poem describing Dante’s brutal descent into the underworld, journey through purgatory, and eventual arrival in paradise. Of the Comedy’s three sections – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso – Inferno was by far the most widely read and memorable.

Composed by Dante in the early 1300s, Inferno had quite literally redefined medieval perception of damnation. The pit was constructed in 9 distinct levels, the Nine Rings of Hell, into which the sinners were cast in accordance with the depth of their sin.

Seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth.

The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death.

"When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere… the world will purge itself in one or another of these three ways (floods, plague and famine)." Nicolas Machiavelli – writer 1469 – 1527

When swimming into a dark tunnel, there arrives a point where of no return when you no longer have enough breath to double back. Your only choice is to swim forward into the unknown….. and pray for an exit.

cerca trova – seek and ye shall find. We sought an exit…. and found a dead end.

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called denial. Denial is a critical part of human coping mechanism. Without it, we would all wake up terrified every morning about all the ways we could die. Instead, our minds block out our existential fears by focusing on stresses we can handle.

In ancient mythology a hero in denial is the ultimate manifestation of hubris and pride. No man is more prideful than he who believes himself immune to the dangers of the world. Dante clearly agreed, denouncing pride as the worst of the seven deadly sins….. and punished the prideful in the deepest ring of the inferno.

Population growth is an exponential progression occurring within a system of finite space and limited resources. The end will arrive very abruptly.

It’s the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus – a famous dilemma in mythology. It’s the age old battle between mind and heart, which seldom want the same thing.

Agathusia means self sacrifice for common good; a benevolent suicide. A novel Logan’s Run depicted a future society in which everyone gladly agreed to commit suicide at age twenty one. The movie version had increased the termination age to thirty.

What do you think what soldiers do when they go to war? They kill innocent people and risk their own death. Anything is possible when people believe in a cause.

If you could throw a switch and randomly kill half the population on earth would you do it in order to save our species from extinction?

The grueling, nine-ringed ascent of mount purgatory is the only route from the depths of inferno to the glory of paradise. On this path you can see the repentant souls ascending….each paying an appropriate price for given sin.

P signifies peccatum – Latin word for sin. And the fact that it is written seven times is symbolic of seven deadly sins. With each new level you ascend an angel cleanses one of the Ps from your forehead until you reach the top, arriving with your brows cleansed of the seven Ps….and your soul purged of all sin.

Treachery is worst of the seven deadly sins punished in the ninth and final ring of hell. Treachery, as defined by Dante, was the act of betraying a loved one. History’s most notorious example of the sin had been Judas’s betrayal of his beloved Jesus.

I do not fear death…….for death transforms visionaries into martyrs…… converts noble ideas into powerful movements.

H+ is the symbol of Transhumanist movement. Transhumanism is an intellectual movement that essentially states that humans should use technology to transcend the weaknesses inherent in our human bodies. In other words, the next step in human evolution should be that we begin biologically engineering ourselves. These hypothetical ‘enhanced’ individuals are what Transhumanists refer to as posthumans, which some believe will be the future of our species.

It is physically impossible for the human mind to think of nothing. The soul craves emotion, and it will continue to seek fuel for that emotion – good or bad. Your problem is that you’re giving it the wrong fuel. You need to shift your intellectual focus.

All around her, she could see humanity overrun by its primal instinct for survival. When they face desperation………human beings become animals.

As with all great shrines, Hagia Sophia’s (in Istanbul) prodigious size served two purposes. First it was proof to God of the great lengths to which man would go to pay tribute to Him. And second, it served as a kind of shock treatment for worshippers – a physical space so imposing that those who entered felt dwarfed, their ego erased, their physical being and cosmic importance shrinking to the size of a mere speck in the face of God…..an atom in the hands of the Creator. Martin Luther King had said “Until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him.”

Only one form of contagion travels faster than virus and that’s fear.

The worst kind of loneliness in the world is isolation that comes from being misunderstood. It can make people lose their grasp on reality.

Remember tonight…………..for it’s the beginning of forever.

So long as they speak your name, you shall never die.

Dante’s poem was not so much about the misery of hell as it was about the power of the human spirit to endure any challenge, no matter how daunting.

 

Excerpts from "And the Mountains Echoed" by Khalid Hosseini

Out beyond ideas

Of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
                   Jelaluddin Rumi, 13^th century

In the end, the solution Baba Ayub found was a simple one, as the best solutions are: he removed a tiny bell from around the neck of one of his goats and hung it instead around Qais’s neck. This way the bell would wake someone if Qais were to rise in the middle of the night. The sleepwalking stopped after a time, but Qais grew attached to the bell and refused to part with it. And so even though it didn’t serve its original use, the bell remained fastened to the string around the boy’s neck.

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.

There was a flat rock at the edge of his field and he lowered himself upon it. He often sat there for an hour or more, gazing up at the stars, the clouds floating past the moon. He thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy that he had been given. To want more,  to wish for yet more, he knew, would be petty.

These were gestures, Abdullah knew. Acts of duty, drawn from a well far shallower than the one she reached into for Iqbal. In the end it came down to a simple thing: they were not her children, he and Pari.

Abdullah knew it was not a sensible thing he had done. But when he knelt beside Pari, gently shook her away from a nap, and produced the feather from behind his back like a magician, it was all worth it – worth it for the way her face broke open with surprise first, then delight; for the way she stamped his cheeks with kisses; for how she cackled when he tickled her chin with soft end of the feather - and suddenly his feet didn’t hurt at all.

Her hair reminded Abdullah of his mother’s, and he ached for her all over again, for her gentleness, her inborn happiness, her bewilderment at people’s cruelty. He used to wonder how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness. It couldn’t. It spilled out of her, came pouring out of her eyes. He knew that in their mother’s dying, something of her had passed on to Pari; something of her cheerful devotion, her guilelessness, her unabashed hopefulness. Pari was the only person in the world who would never, could never, hurt him. Some days, Abdullah felt she was the only true family he had.

He loved the fact that he was the one to help her with her first step, to gasp at her ffirst uttered word. This was his purpose, he believed, the reason God had made him, so he would be there to take care of Pari when He took away their mother.

There was no forgetting. Pari hovered, unbidden, at the edge of Abdullah’s vision everywhere he went. She was like dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent in the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell.

All her life Parwana had made sure to avoid standing in front of a mirror with her sister. It robbed her of hope to see her face beside Masooma’s, to see so plainly what she had been denied. But in public, every stranger’s eye was a mirror. There was no escape.

No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with mountains only. The question whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.

I could only infer that for some people, particularly women, marriage – even an unhappy one such as this - is an escape from even greater unhappiness.

I rarely heard him address her by anything other than aziz, which means “beloved”, “darling” and yet never did the couple seem more distant from each other than when he said it, and never this term of endearment sound so starched as when it came from Mr. Wahdati’s lips.

I took those two helpless children, in whom love of the simplest and purest kind had found expression, and I tore one from the other. I will never forget the sudden emotional mayhem.

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

Now I was free to do as I wished, but I found the freedom illusory, for what I wished for the most had been taken from me. They say, find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.

I was not altogether surprised to learn that she had taken her own life. I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately; intensely; and without recourse.

It seemed to him that Timur was a man who wrote his own press kit, and his generosity, Idris suspected, was a calculated piece of an intricately constructed character.

In the last month, Roshi has become something abstract to him, like a character in a play. Their connection has frayed. The unexpected intimacy he had stumbled upon in that hospital, so urgent and acute, has eroded into something dull. The experience has lost its power. He recognizes the fierce determination that had seized him for what it really was, an illusion, a mirage. He had fallen under the influence of something like a drug. The distance between him and the girl feels vast now. It feels infinite, insurmountable, and her promise to her misguided, a reckless mistake, a terrible misreading of the measures of his own powers and will and character; something best forgotten.

I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent most of my childhood years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self.

What I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they’re all the same, give or take. Some are more polished, granted. They may come with a bit of charm – or a lot – and that can fool you. But really they are all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage. They feel wronged. They haven’t been given their due. No one loved them enough. Of course they expect you to love them. They want to be held, rocked, reassured. But it’s a mistake to give it to them. They can’t accept it. They can’t accept the very thing they are needing. They end up hating you for it.  And it never ends because they can’t hate you enough. It never ends – the misery, the apologies, the promises, the reneging, the wretchedness of it all.

I don’t recognize myself in this version of the story. I resent him for being the way he is. I resent him for the narrowed borders of my existence, for being the reason my best years are draining away from me. There are days when all I want is to be free of him and his petulance and neediness. I am nothing like a saint.

I knew my father was a wounded person, that his love for me was as true, vast, and permanent  as the sky, and it would always bear down upon me. It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.

It was easier with mother – always had been – less complicated, less treacherous. I didn’t have to be on my guard so much. I didn’t have to watch what I said all the time for fear of inflicting a wound.

I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old; “ah I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that”.

I can barely admit it to myself. Namely, how afraid I am to be free despite my frequent desire for it. Afraid of what will happen to me, what I will do with myself. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath. The truth I rarely admit to is, I have always needed the weight of Baba on my back.

You say you felt a presence, but I sensed only an absence; a vague pain without a source. I was like the patient who can’t explain to the doctor where it hurts, but only that it does.

They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I have this on the shore for you, I pray you find it sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.

Excerpts from "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Taleb

Although he has not yet practiced the profession of high-sea piracy, he is now convinced that even that occupation would present more dull moments than that of the trader.

Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics, Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than signal.

Nero believes that risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

His wife had rarely encountered repressed new wealth – the type of people who have felt the sting of indigence at some point in their lives and want to get even by exhibiting their wares. The only dark side of being a trader, Nero often says, is the sight of money being showered on unprepared people.

She felt as if she had been somewhat swamped in the competition of life. Somehow words and reason became ineffectual in front of an oversized diamond, a monstrous house and a sports car collection.

Nero tried to soothe his jealousy by investigating the rules of pecking order. Psychologists have shown that most people prefer to make $70000 when others around them are making $60000 than to make $80000 when others around them are making $90000.

Nero felt ashamed of his feelings of Schadenfreude, the joy humans can experience upon their rivals’ misfortunes. But in this case, Nero’s merriment did not come from the fact that John went back to his place in life, so much as it was from the fact that Nero’s methods, beliefs and track record had suddenly gained in credibility. Part of Nero’s elation also came from the fact that he felt proud of his sticking to his strategy for so long, in spite of the pressure to be the alpha male.

Lucky fools will act as they deserved the money. Their strings of successes will inject them with so much serotonin (or some similar substance) that they will even fool themselves about their ability to outperform markets (our hormonal system doesn’t know whether our successes depend on randomness).

There seems to be curious evidence of a link between leadership and a form of psychopathology (the sociopath) that encourages the non-blinking, self-confident, insensitive person to rally followers.

One can’t judge a performance in any given field by the results, but by the costs of the alternatives. Such substitute courses of events are called alternative histories. The public observes the external signs of wealth without even having a glimpse at the source. USD 10 million earned through Russian roulette doesn’t have the same value as USD 10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry. They are the same, can buy the same goods, except that one’s dependence on randomness is greater than the other. To an accountant, though, they would be identical; to your next door neighbor too. Yet, deep down, I can’t help but consider them as qualitatively different. The notion of such alternative accounting has interesting intellectual extensions and lends itself to mathematical formulation (illustrative). Mathematics is just not a “numbers game”, it is a way of thinking.

For Leibniz God’s mind included infinity of possible worlds, of which he selected just one.

Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette where the risk is visible to everyone. One doesn’t observe the barrel of reality.

It can be disturbing for many self-styled “bottom lone” oriented people to be questioned about the histories that didn’t take place rather than the ones that actually happened.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior not because they won or lost.

As a derivative trader I noticed that people do not like to insure against something abstract; the risk that merits their attention is always something vivid.

Both risk detection and risk avoidance are not mediated in the “thinking” part of the brain but largely in the emotional one. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one’s actions by fitting some logic to them.

In that sense the description coming out of journalism is certainly not just an unrealistic representation of the world but rather the one that can fool you the most by grabbing your attention via your emotional apparatus - the cheapest to deliver sensation. This sensationalism can divert empathy towards wrong causes.  Malnutrition in Africa and Southeast Asia no longer causes the emotional impact- so it literally dropped out of the picture.

The discussions in the media of the “terrorist threats” magnified the effect of these market moves in people’s heads. This is one of the many reasons that journalism may be the greatest plague we face today.

From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction.

Things are always obvious after the fact. When you look at the past the past will always be deterministic since only one single observation took place. Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but rather to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny. A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point. A more vicious effect of such hindsight bias is that those who are very good at predicting the past will think of themselves as good at predicting the future, and will feel confident about their ability to do so.

Look at the dramatic changes that have been brought about by the arrival of new technologies, such as the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, and the personal computer. Middlebrow inference (inference stripped of probabilistic thinking) would lead one to believe that all new technologies and inventions would likewise revolutionize our lives. But the answer is not so obvious: here we only see and count the winners, to the exclusion of the losers. The opportunity cost of missing a “new new thing” like the airplane and the automobile is miniscule compared to the toxicity of all the garbage one has to go through to get to these jewels (assuming these have brought some improvement to our lives, which I frequently doubt).

People do not realize that the media is paid to get their attention.

Let us remember that economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound , not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.

The reason is that John was never skilled in the first place. He is one of those people who happened to be there when it all happened. He may have looked the part but there are plenty of people who look the part.

The economist Robert Lucas dealt a blow to econometrics by arguing that if people were rational then their rationality would cause them to figure out predictable patterns from the past and adapt so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future.

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

There are only two types of theories:

1.    Theories that are known to be wrong, as they were tested and adequately rejected (falsified)

2.    Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong.

The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian.

The major problem with inference in general is that those whose profession is to derive conclusions from data often fall into the trap faster and more confidently than others. The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

In real life one sees only the winners - it is natural for those who failed to vanish completely.

Here we have a woman who married an extremely successful man but all she can see is comparative failure, for she cannot emotionally compare him to a sample that would do him justice. You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again (social treadmill effect). 

Optimism, it is said, is predictive of success. Predictive? It can also be predictive of failure. Optimistic people certainly take more risks as they are over confident about the odds; those who win show up among the rich and famous, others fail and disappear from the analyses. Sadly.

Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, but only in his failure.

Carl Sagan examined the cures from cancer that resulted from a visit to Lourdes in France, where people were healed by simple contact with the holy waters, and found out the interesting fact that of the total cancer patients who visited the place, the cure rate was, if anything, lower than the statistical one for spontaneous remissions. It was lower than the average for those who did not go to Lourdes!

Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory.

What has gone wrong with the development of economics as a science? There was a bunch of intelligent people who felt compelled to use mathematics just to tell themselves that they were rigorous in their thinking, that theirs was a science.

Buridan’s donkey: Imagine a donkey equally hungry and thirsty placed at equal distance from sources of food and water. In such a framework, he would die of both thirst and hunger as he would be unable to decide which one to get to first. The reader no doubt has played a version of Buridan’s donkey, by flipping a coin to break some of the minor stalemates in life where one lets randomness help with the decision process.

We can conjure up one and only one state at a given time, i.e. either 0 or $2000. Left to our own devices, we are likely to bet in an irrational way, as one of the states would dominate the picture – the fear of ending with nothing or the excitement of an extra $1000.

Rules have their value. We just follow them not because they are the best but because they are useful and they save time and effort.

Satisficing (melding together of satisfy and suffice) was the idea of Herbert Simon. We are rational but in a limited way: boundedly rational.

Since the Kahneman and Tversky results, an entire discipline called behavioral finance and economics has flourished.

Neurobiologists believe that we have three brains: a very old one, the reptilian brain that dictates heartbeat that we share with all animals; the limbic brain centre of emotions that we share with mammals; and the neocortex or cognitive brain that distinguishes primates and humans.

Damasio reported that the purely unemotional man was incapable of making the simplest decision. It seems that the emotions are the ones doing the job. Psychologists call them lubricants of reason.

Unless the source of the statement has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him. Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.

We are not made to view things as independent from each other. When viewing two events A and B, it is hard not to assume that A causes B, B causes A, or both cause each other. Our bias is immediately to establish a causal link.

It is emotionally harder to reject a hypothesis than to accept it.

The Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who advocated a life of equanimity and indifference, was criticized for failing to keep his composure during a critical circumstance (he was chased by an ox). His answer was that he found it sometimes difficult to rid himself of his humanity.

Most of us know pretty much how we should behave. It is the execution that is the problem, not the absence of knowledge.

Many people get married to their ideas all the way to the grave. Beliefs are said to be path dependent if the sequence of ideas is such that the first one dominates.

When French writer Henry de Montherlant was told that he was about to lose his eyesight to a degenerative disease, he found it most appropriate to take his own life. The stioc’s prescription was precisely to elect what one can do to control one’s destiny in front of a random outcome. At the end, one is allowed to choose between no life at all and what one is given by destiny; we always have an option against uncertainty.

Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions and not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word. We are left only with dignity as a solution – dignity defined as the execution of a protocol of behavior that doesn’t depend on the immediate circumstance. It may not the optimal one, but it certainly is the one that makes us feel best.

The poem “Apoleipein o Theos Antonion” (The God abandons Antony) by Greek poet Cavafy addresses Marc  Antony, who has just lost the battle against Octavius and was forsaken by Bacchus, the god who until then had protected him. It is a beautiful poem advising a man who had just received a crushing reversal of fortune (According to legend even his horse deserted him to go to his enemy Octavius). It asks him just to bid her farewell, Alexandria the city that is leaving him. It tells him not to mourn his luck, not to enter denial, not to believe that his ears and eyes are deceiving him. Antony, do not degrade yourself with false hopes.

The God Abandons Antony 

If unexpectedly, in middle night,

an unseen company be heard to pass,

with music and with voices exquisite, —

turn not away and uselessly lament

your fortune that is giving in, your work

that came to nothing, the projects of your life

that proved illusory from first to last.

As one prepared long since, as fits the brave,

bid now farewell to the departing city,

farewell to the Alexandria you love.

And above all, do not deceive yourself:

say not that your impression was a dream,

that, it may be, your hearing played you false:

to futile hopes like these never descend.

As one prepared long since, as fits the brave,

as most fits you who gained so great a city,

approach the open window steadily,

and with emotion, but without the plaints

and supplications of the timorous,

listen — knowing it to be your last delight —

listen to the elysian sounds, the exquisite

instruments of the mystic company;

and bid farewell to the city you are losing,

farewell to the Alexandria you love.

 

(Poems by C. P. Cavafy. Translated, from the Greek, by J. C. Cavafy. Ikaros, 2003)

Bharat Ratna to Sachin

Though I am a great admirer of Sachin Tendulkar both as a sportsman and an individual, I am not very comfortable about Bharat Ratna being conferred upon him. This highest civilian award should go to people who have immensely contributed to the upliftment of the country or its citizens. Then there are others like Dhyan Chand, Vishwanath Anand etc who also deserve this award. Hockey being our national game, Dhyan Chand perhaps deserved it more. Amitabh Bachan would have also definitely got it if he had cordial relations with the Nehru-Gandhi family. It is disturbing to see that popular sportsperson and actors getting nominated to the Rajya Sabha. If it is someone like Shabana Azmi then it is ok as she is actively involved in social work. I am not sure if Rekha or Sachin are right choices for membership of Rajya Sabha. However, this decision is mostly made by the politicians for whom popular sentiment is more important than anything else. They couldn't have chosen a better moment than this as everyone is very sentimental after hearing Sachin's speech today which was indeed very touching. Prof. CNR should also perhaps thank Sachin. He is perhaps a more deserving candidate but one wonders if our leaders would have done it without the need for awarding Sachin. In any case, Sachin is definitely more deserving than some of them who have been awarded Bharat Ratna in the past purely on political ground. One wonders why did Gopinath Bordoloi win this award only in 1999 even though he passed away in 1950? Same is the case with Dr. Ambedkar. If Indira Gandhi who had imposed emergency can win this award (she won it before emergency) and if Rajiv Gandhi and M. G. Ramachandran can be given this award then why not Sachin? At least he is an excellent human being and he has set insurmountable standards in his chosen field.

Dusk by Saki

Today I read a book after a long time. It was a collection of short stories. I really liked the story "Dusk" by Saki (H. H. Munro). "A king that is conquered must see strange looks So bitter a thing is the heart of man."