2009

I turned 25

Slumdogged the Oscars

Obama happened and got a Nobel peace prize and he still got to send troops to Afghanistan... talk about CHANGE!

Copenhagen

Six friends got married- two of them were my ex’s

Tiger Woods finally proved to be human, let’s face it, sportsmen get a lot of good a**, case in point-Nehra, so I don’t blame him

Section 377

Didn’t confess for a year and the list now covers everything short of murder, contemplating to do that soon.

Michael Jackson went out with a whimper, but people made millions out of it. Guess, he is more valuable when dead

India’s first nuclear submarine INS Arihant was commissioned; incidentally we also had a small nuclear accident.

Did something meaningful for Christmas

The biggest show on earth- the Indian elections went off with not much of a hitch, it also proved the theory of collective intelligence

No more LTTE

YSR flew to his death

Most of Africa, South America, Iraq and Afghanistan occasionally went up in flames

Bored a lot of people to death by talking too much

Satyam proved to the world that we too can pull big scams

Did the cardinal mistake of helping others, which always seemed to bite me from behind

Tata dreamed big with Jag and small with Nano

Gatecrashing entered into the petite Indian vocabulary with the White House incident

The economy was boring

One whole year without a girlfriend since 2001-it was actually good

Liquor consumption grew by 16% in Kerala (our humble contribution to the country’s revenues)

Jenson Button and Brawn GP won F1, an underdog victory!

Nursed my pet dog to life

Bought a new dog, named it Cody, he clearly doesn’t like it though, pees every time you call him that.

The Indian test team ranked first, let’s hope it stays there long enough

Swiss banks started to spill their beans, wonder who all got a cold sweat after hearing that

Compromised on a lot of things, mainly education

Demand for two states in Andhra and all the other states followed suit, in other Andhra news governor N D Tiwari was caught with his pants down, literally!

Mayawati’s fetish for statues redefined heights of ego

Recession killed my brother’s business and his spirit but still drives an Audi though

Shoe throwing has been officially accepted in press circles as taking a stand.

Made a good friend but huge distances now separate us

Maserati Granturismo and Ferrari 458 Italia

25 years after the Bhopal gas tragedy, the affected are still to receive the basic right of having safe drinking water- the ugly face of capitalism

One hell of an year, ain't it?

The Poor

"Give me your tired, your poor.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

This is the inscription on the famous Statue of Liberty.

The world needs the tired and the poor. It was actually on them that the capitalistic world that exists today was built. America in its tumultuous ontogenesis needed them the most then and they came in by the thousands creating the leader of all nations that we know today. It was the colonial countries, which had the poor and needy, that built the English empire and also most of Europe.

So, you see, basic utopian theories on society are flawed on two counts- there can’t be economic equality and you can’t expect them to behave rationally. That is why perceptions and decisions formed by such systems go wrong most of the time and we end up resorting to the proverbial statement of ‘Man proposes, God disposes’ to lie to ourselves that life is all dandy. In fact, perfect society can be envisaged by factoring in selfishness and irrationality and then the only aberrations in the system would be random acts of kindness, which are rare enough.

But, that argument is for a different day. Let’s talk about economic inequality or the need for it. The rich need countries like Columbia to make sure that they get their weekly lines of cocaine, the tired from Africa so they can test their drugs, the needy from Mexico to give them their blood plasma to big drug companies so they can process it and resell it for 80 times the price to get it, the poor to provide their wombs so that women can have kids without having cellulite to worry about, they are needed to build Xanadus in deserts.

The poor do all this because they aspire for sustenance and better lives which the rich ideate everyday through extravagances. The inevitable consequence is that people eventually would grow out of poverty and the developed world would go in search for better pastures to exploit. Africa is still fertile with poverty and the lords of war make sure they stay that way by financing military governments. At least, when the rich are done with the world, people would at least have 3 square meals a day and then the relatively poor would have another chance to go up the ranks.

Mirage in the desert

This was an article that was published in the Economic Times on 1/12/09 as part of the editorial, couldn't stop myself to post it here..

A Time Of Fear And Loathing In Dubai

It was a monument to overvaulting human ambition, a fantasy fuelled by frenetic investment-dollars and oxymoronic benevolent despotism. A desert mirage built to rival the sheen and glitz of Las Vegas. Crass spectacle on a surreal scale. And it seems to have ended in a nightmare. Welcome to fear and loathing in Dubai. The emirate for which the term metropolitan disorder seems to have been solely invented. Sure, given its paucity of oil, Dubai did the right thing to posit itself as a model of the new economy. But the fun and games bits were grandiloquent. An attempt to cast the world anew, according to fantasy. Thus, the 24-squaremile archipelago of islands in the shape of a world map jigsaw ; the new Pyramids and the Colosseum; hyper resorts, mega-hotels , sky-scraping towers, amusement parks and an array of kitschy mansions in the middle of water. Buildings that echo the Tower of Babel: half a mile high, higher than the Empire State Building doubled. The childish wonderland extended downwards too a hotel like the Hydropolis , jellyfish-shaped and 66 feet below the surface of the sea where you could presumably have your sharkfin soup while gazing at a live specimen. That, perhaps, is what happens when a small sea-trading town fantasises about becoming a megapolis. Megalomania as a way of life.

You didnt need a financial whiz to suspect something was wrong here. At best, it was like watching an unrestrained kid pile on the lego blocks, amazement tinged with the lingering certainty of the impending collapse. And it did. The bust is as staggering as the spectacle. The total debt estimated at a jaw-dropping $80 billion. This was a citystate built as an anti-thesis of the original Greek conception. One that ballooned using the exploited labour of masses of south Asians, subject to total control, working inhuman shifts in white heat to enable the sheikhdom to wallow in refrigerated swimming pools. Often, it was compared to indentured labour under colonial rule. Livelihoods might have been lost, but the moot point is whether such a colonial Xanadu was ever workable in the first place.

Books, Movies and Music

I can’t take it anymore! The constant yammering of lectures, formulaic books, romantic comedies and all that is called mundane has driven me to the point of desperation. I reached a point in time when you feel you have to speak out or forever hold your breath. Why? You may ask. Well, the best the reason I can conjure up is ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ and my threshold to tolerate bullshit has gone down a lot.

People would attribute it to my apparent smugness, well, I pride myself for having an opinion of my own and so I don’t give a damn. Let me explain myself why I snapped.

I read ‘The Lost Symbol’ by Dan Brown.

My verdict- a waste of 7 hours of my life! It follows the same formula, Langdon wakes up the morning having no idea what shit is going down that evening, some superhuman crazy guy who is borderline gay, likes playing dress-up and is trying to get ‘atonement’, of course, the damsel in distress, a sceptical Langdon (on the premise which crazy rituals thought up by show-off scientists are explained), symbols and architecture explained by half truths, a near death experience for Langdon… yada yada yada… Sounds familiar? It’s the formula that revived the sheen ridden ‘thriller literature’. It’s as if though, the writer did not even try to conjure up something original. It’s a disgrace.

It’s the same for movies and music, all formulaic and even copied; we then nurture it by consuming them without criticism. The whole point of creativity is to be fresh and inspiring. If you are a serious follower of art, please don’t encourage such mediocrity and give fresh ideas and fresh minds a chance.

The Business of being Politically Correct

After the scare of the cold war, the fear-mongers of the world found something else- “Global Warming”. It was a perfect cause for the resurgent hippie community and also kept the intellectual community occupied. Pressure groups went all out on this, convinced us that we were really, really bad people and created terms such as carbon footprint to add more guilt to our already depressing lives.

Lets us bear in mind that pressure groups like Greenpeace and Environment Defence Fund are now part of a multi-billion dollar industry. The top officials draw handsome salaries and run these well-oiled organisations to amass huge fortunes as donations. They made it fashionable to donate; they got celebrity darlings to pose for them, they even made it heroic by an ad-campaign that exalted people who went to jail for these causes.

The biggest criticism I have against them was the anti-DDT campaign. The National Academy of Sciences once reported, "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria." During the 60’s an uproar shunning DDT, as it was ending up in our bodies led to litigations against it and eventually was banned  in the US, even though it was ruled that DDT was not a hazard to man. The cause was taken up by the pressure groups and it led to the complete ban of DDT.

Since the ban in 1972, over 50 million people have died from this once nearly vanquished disease and India is particularly notorious in Malaria-related deaths. Instead of the DDT that didn’t harm human beings we now use Prallethrin, which is like the Anton LaVey of being nice.

There are lots of other examples of them effing things up, so given their track record; Is Global Warming a hoax? If it’s true, are the measures done by them productive or counter-productive?

My qualms arise out of the unsubstantiated and skewed reports circulated by activists, they show drastic pictures of ice-caps melting while we know for a fact that some ice-caps are actually growing, surface temperatures have indeed gone up in some places but its not true for all over the world, in fact many cities in the US have grown colder after adjusting the increases due to concrete density (number of buildings) and so on.

Climate is something that we have not even begun to understand properly because of the very fact that there are far too many variables involved, even the best models of climatic prediction should be taken with a pinch of salt.

I cannot say it’s all been bad, companies have made conscious efforts to reduce their impact on the environment. Research for clean fuels and to increase efficiency of existing systems has been funded because of this. It’s just that when we make opinions we should see all sides of an issue rather than blatantly accepting public sentiment.

Fun Fact:  A recent report by the UN revealed that the total livestock produces more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world. So I am offsetting the greenhouse gases produced by my 3-litre car by eating as much as beef as possible. Wink!

                                                                                                        

Memes

I am truly fascinated by memes and the power of ideas. Ideas can be infectious, empires were built on it, coups were initiated by it, religions are propagated by it, and wars were fought for it. So, what is a meme? It’s a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. In basic terms, it is the ideas or practices we inherit from our upbringing and also from our environment.

To understand the power of memes, consider the Muslim movement of Jihad or if it’s too clichéd let’s take the Nazis, they created anti-Semitism in the minds of the millions of Germans, the holocaust that followed is considered to be the very low point of human civilization. Closer to home, the idea of regionalism seems to be catching on with the help of opportunistic politicians like the Shiv Sena. Memes are also quite notorious in the markets, it’s commonly known as market-sentiments, and millions are lost because the idea of poor performance or the reverse catches on faster than wild fire.

So, why understand memes? As educated individuals, understanding the power of memes and their implications would help us to use our intellect and rationality to use them for our own means and obviously, in positive ways.

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry"-Richard Dawkins

Differences

People are different. It’s these differences that make us so interesting or we would be just bland as British cuisine. These differences dictate our beliefs, our tastes, our partners, our opinions and even our fights. The fights have been quite prominent enough that the masons of society tried to use universals to segregate us or rather restrict our differences. This led to basic segregation based on gender, religion, race, colour and so on. These segregates then developed rules and practices. Crude segregation like this was done to rein in the chaos that arose out of these differences. Simply put, rules keep us alive or we would just kill each other at the drop of a hat.

This worked well for some time because these rules have evolved with society and now as we believe it, constitutes the civilized society. The evolution was not without its hiccups, some really bad practices and rules led to unnecessary stifling of individualism, like casteism and subjugation of women. However, as society evolves, it corrects its mistakes and such practices would eventually come to an end. That’s the beauty of evolution.

Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist, on his quest to find the perfect Diet Pepsi (he was consulting for them to find the perfect blend for their new product ‘Diet Pepsi’) stumbled on the fact, that there can never be the perfect PEPSI only Perfect PEPSIS. He realized that people have different preferences so the perfect Pepsi is a delusion. The best way is to get people into clusters of preferences and develop products to satisfy that particular clusters. Even though, Pepsi just went with only one diet Pepsi, his later clients took his advice and bought out different choices for their products. This unwittingly started the revolution of choices.

Today, the ruling dogma of all western industrial societies is that “if we are interested in maximising the welfare of citizens, then the way to do that would be to maximise individual freedom. The way to maximise freedom is to maximise choice.” This was explained by Barry Schwartz the writer of “The Paradox of Choice”. This contradicts our accepted segregation.

This was ground breaking; the advent of choices and cheap customised servicing with the help of technology has changed the way we live. We are spoilt with choices today. Individualism rules over collectivism. It’s our very own differences that are being harnessed by marketers to sell products. Product lines are being horizontally expanded to service everybody’s needs. Life can’t get any better.

The downside for all this is something called as ‘opportunity cost’. We are so spoilt with choices that we can’t make up our minds on anything and is always bothered by the missed opportunity. For example, when we order something at a restaurant, we always wonder what it would have been to have the other dish, it’s the same with men choosing partners, and why else do you think men cheat? ‘It’s all because of choices’. So inadvertently, we end up with regret or anticipated regret, its opportunity costs, an escalation of expectations and self-blame which all spiral into being miserable.

Everything seems to be a good idea the night before.