Dealing with the past

So, Swati told me today that it had been quite some time since I've posted on my blog. Truly, it has been over a month now since my last post. She also added that my last few posts were not worthwhile. 'The one on economics was boring, and the other one was depressing'. This somehow beautifully related to what I thought I should write about - how much should one's past actions and emotions affect the present?

Where I started thinking about this was while reading this book my dearest papa David Clarance gifted to my on my birthday, Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life. It said 'you are a product of your past, but not its prisoner'. I loved this quote because it amalgamated with the stream of thoughts that I was having around that time. I felt an excessive burden of my past - the sense of emptiness, the shallowness of achievement, the depth of friendships, the burden of expectations - weigh down upon my thoughts. So, where was this line where I could stop being a 'prisoner' and be merely a 'product' of my past?

The answer, of course, is subjective from person to person, situation to situation. However, how this 'lakshman rekha' can be found is with a sense of detachment. Detachment from thoughts, detachment from emotions and generally, detachment from any kind of stimulus that solicits a response. When I am able to detach myself from emotions and look at thoughts, especially those about my past, without making judgments, then my assessment is going to be unbiased. That is probably when I am going to cease being a 'prisoner' of my past.

This is probably the idea behind vipassana, one of the most ancient meditation techniques in this world. It talks about feeling your emotions and thoughts without being judgmental. I urge my (few) readers to check up on vipassana meditation on youtube when you're not feeling too well - of course, hoping, that such a situation does not arise in your life.

But getting back to the question, what should my relation with my past be? My past should ideally be an instrument to make my present better - which means I should be able to take lessons from my past. However, in order to take correct lessons from my past, I must view it without prejudice. This will be achieved only with a sense of detachment. Hence, my relation with my past will be fruitful only when I am able to detach.

The Flawed and Tormented Genius

At the onset, I must specify that the ideas of the flawed and the tormented genius can, and often are, exclusive and distinct ideas, except for our fascination for them. The genius who gets his success as a return for his hard work is barely appreciated. However, the genius who is able to perform well despite putting in lesser effort is the one whom society looks up to. What makes the flawed genius so appealing to our sensibilities?

Firstly, there is a sense of enigma around the flawed genius - how does he/she do it? Second, there is the appeal of something forbidden, and the flawed genius often does things that are forbidden by society. Thirdly, we want to be like the flawed genius because people appreciate the flawed genius, and hence in this sense it is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Is it fair to those who've worked their way to the top that at the top they feel like an empty clap, because all applause rings for the flawed genius? Well, not really. The problem essentially is that there are the pretenders - those who're not really the flawed and tormented genius, but pretend to be so because of the adulation it brings. How does one differentiate between the real one and the pretenders? There is almost certainly no way - some people are good actors, and some are able to program themselves to behave like this flawed genius. Hence, to the world outside these people seem like the flawed genius.

I think the flawed genius thrives in a pool of mediocrity. For those who've tasted success, and for whom the lure of success is not great, the appeal of the flawed genius is non-existent. It is only for those who're a part of the masses, and for whom success holds a lot of value, that the flawed genius is an appealing concept.

Applied Economics - the story of the Phillip's Curve

The accusation most often leveled against economics as a subject is that it is ex-post in nature, i.e. it explains things after they occur, and hence are of no practical and applied consequence to the world around us. For example, they say that while economists have in hindsight explained what caused the recession of 2008, they failed to prevent it. Hence, what is the point of economics as a subject?

This is something that many economists and economics students too agree to. However, while reading my second year macroeconomics textbook, I came across the Philip's curve. The Philip's curve, in its original form, was an empirical relationship between inflation and unemployment, which concluded that if a Government wants to reduce unemployment (which results in higher growth), then it has to live with a certain bit of inflation.

The 'discovery' of the Phillip's curve, first in the U.K by Phillips and then in the US by Solou, was used extensively by macroeconomists and eventually policy makers in the 1960s. This trade-off that was observed by the Phillip's curve was exploited by policy-makers to ensure that the 1960s were a period of unprecedented growth in the developed world (coupled with the apparent success of Keynesian economics, this was the golden period of Keynesian economics). Hence, to those who say that economics is an ex-post science, an entire decade of growth was sustained on the basis of what economists observed. Rather, not only observed empirically, but argued theoretically.

However, in the 1970s, the theory behind the Phillip's curve began to falter (basically, that people began to expect inflation). However, this break-down was also predicted by a group of economists led by the monetarist Milton Friedman. Hence, even here economics was an ex-ante science, rather than an ex-post science.

Hence, for all those who say that economics is a useless science with no practical applications, it is a fitting rejoinder that one entire decade of high growth (of the sort unseen in modern history) was because a bunch of economists thought of a trade-off and showed it empirically. Truly, the power of economics.

Lessons from Economic History : Cutting Expenditure

Early 1990s: India, faced with a much-publicised balance of payment (BOP) crisis, had to turn to the IMF for help. The Washington-consensus, at that time, was to trim fiscal deficit (in layman terms, the Government's expenditure minus the Government's revenue) and go in for more balanced budgets. Thus, India was obligated to trim it's fiscal deficit.

Now, Government expenditure has two components - capital expenditure and current expenditure. I'm forgetting the exact difference between the two, but it goes somewhat like this - current expenditure includes things like salaries, subsidies etc. (which provide no long-term benefit) whereas capital expenditure would be on things like infrastructure projects etc (which provide benefit over a longer time span).

What India did at that time to reduce fiscal deficit was to cut capital expenditure. Almost two decades later, we see the results. The constraint to India's growth story today is the infrastructure shortfall, something that might not have happened had there been no reduction in capital expenditure.

Reducing this lesson to an individual level, a college student too is faced with two kinds of expenditure - current expenditure (movies, food etc), and capital expenditure (clothing, books, stationery etc). Unfortunately, what often tends to happen is that faced with a budget constraint, the average student tends to cut down both expenditures in an almost equivalent proportion. However, as the story above shows, capital expenditure should not be cut down that easily.

Again, that is contingent on certain conditions. Primary among them (and again drawing from India's economic history) is the utilisation of capital. Often, to utilise capital expenditure (eg books) effectively, you need to have a consistent current expenditure (eg. food). Hence, there is a certain 'optimal balance' between capital and current expenditure, and I suppose it will take everybody not less than three years to find that out.

Impatience - virtue or bane?

As I get along life dealing with the lethargy of societies and the administration in college, I keep thinking about what my brother used to say when I was really young - 'you're very impatient'. Along the way, I often termed this impatience as passion, but I now suppose that it was that, impatience, that expressed itself in impassioned forms.

Impatience is a great recipe for success. What that ensures is that things in life are moving faster, that you do not procrastinate over things. To an extent, it also helps you distinguish between what you really like to do (which you'll do more impatiently) and something that you don't (which you'll keep on hold to do the former). Applying the concept of future and present value that we learnt in our Grewalian microeconomics class today, it will (I suppose) ensure that in the present you do more pleasurable stuff, and hence ensures that you're generally a happier person [I'll try, once again, to work out a mathematical model for this, but that shall wait because writing this blog is now more pleasurable to me].

However, is that necessarily true? Is impatience really going to lead to more happiness? What is the cost to impatience? Dejection; and this dejection primarily emanates from delays in your external environment, and hence is exogenous to the proposed model that I set up above.

This post actually proved to be shorter than I had expected it to be, primarily because I seem to have arrived at a conclusion faster than I thought. The conclusion being this, that impatience leads to a better state of living as long as we are able to control the externalities. Hence, in things such as cleaning your room, exercising, playing video games, reading novels etc., where there are not too many externalities involved, impatience is a great virtue. However, in the cases where you are dealing with rather insurmountable externalities such as the bureaucracy, college societies (in some cases) and the college administration, then impatience can be a recipe for depression.

Living with Bronchitis

It has been three days, and hence an unusually long time for my current bout of bronchitis to last. Yes, the CWG did have a legacy - a legacy of extremely high SPM count. For me, it is a sense of deja vu. It is now decade since I was diagonised with bronchitis, and in between I went to Visakhapatnam for two years (where the air quality was far superior), and came back to a CNG-enabled Delhi that I grew to love. But now, with the SPM count on an upward trend again, life has truly come a full circle in a decade.

Living with bronchitis has surely been one of the highlights of my last decade. The most severe bout was, of course, back in 2003 when I came back to Delhi from Visakhapatnam and when, in the midst of a SARS scare, I had a severe bronchitis-and-fever round that lasted over a week and infected everybody around me. There were also the two incidents when because of the two jerks to the spine, I couldn't breathe. The first was scary, I felt I was going to die, and the second seemed rather routine. Yet, like every thing that tests you, living with bronchitis teaches me a lot too.

For one, it teaches me the power of hope. Hope not in terms of things improving, but in terms of things and bad phases passing. Often in life, we're depressed and we don't think things can improve. In this situation, i am always reminded that I have to life with bronchitis and other respiratory ailments for the rest of my life, but that they'll come infrequently and hence, that bad times come infrequently too. Bronchitis attacks are the aberrations, good health the regime. Similarly, sad times are (and should be) aberrations, and good times the regime.

Bronchitis has also taught me not to give up. Several times during a bronchitis attack, I lose the energy to persevere to breathe, but I know I can't. Every time that my body asks me to rest while trying to continue with breathing, I have to get my act together and try once more to carry on the divine rhythmic act of breathing. No questions asked, you just continue. Similarly, in life several times there is a temptation to quit, but there has to be the strength and stamina to carry on.

Would I like to be cured of bronchitis? For sure. Do I regret getting bronchitis? I don't know. Every dark cloud truely has a silver lining. Bronchitis has taught me discipline (waking up at 5-6 in the morning doing Baba Ramdev's asanas is not fun) that has helped me achieve so much more in life. It has taught me the importance of health, which though I won't claim to have completely attended to, I have not ignored. Most importantly, bronchitis has made me accept loneliness as a state of being - because at the end of the day, it is I who has to drive myself to take the next breath in. That day, that moment, I am alone.

The Economics of Durga Puja

Over the past few days, roaming the streets of Kolkata and watching in sheer awe the effort, creativity and, well, money invested in organising Durga Puja in Kolkata, my thoughts repeatedly went on to the same question - exactly how big is the Durga Puja in Kolkata? There would be no less than a thousand medium-to-large puja pandals in the city, and more smaller ones. With budgets for these pandals ranging from a lakh to a few crores, your mind would begin to spin looking at the sponsors for these events and other means of fund-raising. Also account for the fact that in preparation for the Puja, the Government of West Bengal and the Kolkata Municipality makes several arrangements (such as marking-off of walking space for devotees). Truly, Durga Puja in Kolkata is a large affair.

Any student of economics would probably understand the reason for my seemingly irrational exuberance - yes, the multiplier effect, and also something I learnt recently from Vedant one day - the splintering effect. Hence, you combine the two and then you realise why its a big deal. Every cog in the Durga Puja wheel has become a separate industry - idol making, flowers, the dhak (Bengal's percussion instrument) and may I dare say even the priests' services. Hence, the multiplier effect, I estimate, would be significantly greater in the Durga Puja 'industry' than it is in other parts of the economy.

Also, let us finally get down to the scale of the rather 'ancillary' activities. Go to any pooja pandal or a restaurant at night after 9 PM during the pujas and you'll understand what I mean. Every other pandal has a serpentine queue outside it, and waiting time of a up to a couple of hours. Ditto for restaurants in Kolkata. Hence, every part of the travel and tourism industry - transportation, restaurants etc - see a huge, massive jump in footfalls this time of the year. Taxi drivers demand, and receive, a premium over the regular fare. Basically, the entire population of Kolkata is out of their homes this time of the year - and businesses make a killing.

To conclude, something that I was asked when I was buying an ice-cream at 7 AM in the morning at a Puja Pandal - raatier-er ki sholak-er?. A close approximation is 'night (tourist) or day (tourist)?' Hence, imagine that people leave their homes at 11-12 in the night, and reach back well into the day. This isn't a rarity, it is a phenomenon.

The only problem here is that I do not put in numbers to this argument. Hopefully, some day I can sit down and put numbers. Probably it will happen soon - hopefully, in the next issue of the F&I newsletter, WTF. A little bit of free advertisement at this stage: to subscribe to the F&I newsletter's e-version, write a mail to us at wtf.fni@gmail.com with your details.

Signing off!

Who causes poverty - the poor or the rich?

This was just a passing thought as I passed by a huge hording of Mamata Bannerjee. Yes, she's all set to displace the left, but is she capable of developing West Bengal, specifically Kolkata, and pulling it out of decadence? Well, most people say 'no'. In that case, who is responsible for this mess called Kolkata? Of course, those who vote these people to power.

Arundhati Roy and other 'social activists' would say how it's sad that billionaires hold such high assets, whereas 80% of India's population earns less than $2 per day. Who is responsible for their state and the ineffectiveness of poverty alleviation programs? The Government. And who elects the Government? This 'majority' of 80%.

This is one of the arguments behind making cities like Mumbai a union territory. That would help because then those who govern this city will be directly elected by the people of the city, and not those sitting in the villages of Vidarbha. Will that result in a massive loss of revenue to the Maharashtra government? Well, there can be a memorandum of understanding under which this demerger will take place, which can ensure that flow of funds to Vidarbha isn't stopped. Anyway, most of funding in India comes from the central government, rather than the cash-strapped state governments.

Hence, the basic point being that you can't blame the so-called 'rich' for the poverty of the poor. It's a vicious cycle. They remain poor, hence they vote for the wrong guys, these wrong guys hamper effective policy-making, and hence they remain poor. It's not fair to lay all the blame for poverty on the likes of Mukesh Ambani. Okay, that guy earns a lot, but he isn't hampering your administration. Probably the blame for the mess in the slum next to our houses lies with people in the slum. Partly, but definitely.

A Tale of Two Metros

This has been on my mind since morning when I travelled on the Kolkata metro after seven years. The last memory was blurred with images of the Kolkata suburban 'local' trains, and today I realised why. For Delhi metro rail travellers, the Kolkata metro rail is like a local train - there are no electronic displays, no advertisements anywhere on the train (and I don't think even on the station there are any) and no airconditioning. What there are, instead, are fans and the dull, steely look that reminded me of those movies in which I saw prisoners transported from place to place. But to be fair to the Kolkata metro, it was built under a completely different set of constraints than in Delhi, and hence in this post I attempt to compare the two.

1. Indigenously built (Kolkata) V/s. Most Imported (Delhi)

The Kolkata metro was almost entirely an indigenous effort - right from the coaches, equipment to the funding. The Delhi metro, in contrast, was constructed using imported coaches and equipment and foreign aid from Japan. In this regard, the Kolkata metro was tougher. But ask any economics student, and they'd let you know it's not much of an excuse. The Kolkata metro, by being constructed almost entirely in India, might have created some jobs in the short run, but because it was essentially inefficient, it is in the long term draining the taxpayer's money by making losses repeatedly. If professionalism comes by importing stuff from abroad, so be it. Yes, the Delhi metro cost a bomb w.r.t the Kolkata metro, but it served its purpose efficiently and hey, makes an operating profit!

2. Alternative transport systems

A major reason for the 'failure' of the Kolkata metro was the easy availability of alternative transport, such as buses, taxis and suburban trains, which are much cheaper in Kolkata. In Delhi, in contrast, the only 'economical' alternative are the buses, which are irregular and quite inefficient in themselves. Hence, Delhi had there pockets of high-density traffic that the metro could utilise. No such 'corridors' existed in Kolkata, and hence the Kolkata metro was killed by the very competition that it sought to complement.

3. Subsidy

All said, the Delhi metro was heavily subsidized by the Central and Delhi Government. However, as a welfare measure, the Delhi metro does have to get subsidies from the Government. Plus, if you come to think of it, with an operating ratio of 1:1.95, the Kolkata metro makes expenditure of 1.95 unit for every 1 unit of revenue. Isn't that a form of subsidy in keeping this metro system running?

4. Safety

Most Kolkattans felt proud of their metro when the Delhi metro was beset by a series of accidents. True, the utmost safety standards have to be met, and there can be no condoning of any lapses on this part. The Kolkata metro has a much better safety track record, so let us be sure of that. However, the accidents took place while construction was on, and not during operations. the Delhi metro, too, has impeccable operational safety.

Finally, some news snippets:

(1) Around 100,000 passengers are reported to be using the Kolkata Metro daily without tickets, as the ticket-checking infrastructure is in a shambles

(2) the underground Kolkata Metro was constructed at a cost of just over Rs 100 crore per km as against the first phase of the Delhi Metro — with a 13.01-km underground corridor and a 52.10-km elevated track — that was completed at the average cost of Rs 162.63 crore per km.

(3) While the Delhi Metro system pays a subsidised Rs 3 per unit for its power, the Kolkata Metro has to do with a non-concessional industrial rate which hovers around the Rs 4 per unit mark.

Defending Economics as a Science

This entry was a long time in the coming. After countless arguments with many physics, maths and chemistry guys on why economics is a science, I should really put it down together.

The main grouse people have against economics is that there are too many assumptions. "If everything but prices are kept constant, and prices are dependent on quantity, then how does quantity demanded change" is what Aashik asked. Yes, a brilliant question that had me perplexed for some time. To be honest, I myself had this grouse against economics, but it all got sorted out once I heard Ritwika speak at the VC Memorial debate. Economics is an abstraction away from reality that will help explain reality.

For example, just today morning while I was thinking about the motion of a pendulum. In a real world, there is the wind speed, the the friction and so many things. However, what we learn in classes is a simplified version where there are no externalities at play. Why do we do that? So that we can have a basic framework over which we can then go on to add the other externalities.

Exactly what economics does. We take a phenomenon, we strip it down to the basics, analyse the basics, and then try to put back everything. For example, did you know that over 95% of the food grain production in India can be explained by a Cobb-Douglas function using barely five or six variables, which does not include the monsoons? That is amazing accuracy for something as unpredictable as agricultural output. The result? That agricultural output depends significantly on availability of credit and net sown area. Both are stagnating in India, hence alarm bells need to go off and hence we really need to work on this. Hence, for our future to be secure, we need simplifications and models such as these.

The second argument leveled against economics as a subject is 'how can you rationalise human behaviour?'. Well, the idea is the same as above. You take something complicated (such as the human mind), you strip it down, then understand it, and then build in the different layers. Intuitively beautiful ideas such as the multiplier effect are such beautiful examples of this 'rationalisation' process at work. True, the size of the multiplier in the real world is much smaller than what it is in theory, but there are economic arguments for that too.

Yes, to the detractors one must give one argument - economics is not a science in the same mold as physics and chemistry (I do not include mathematics, because mathematics is the language of science, rather than a science itself). Honestly, that is not what economics aspires to be, either. To think of it, I'm sure it's easier to discover secrets than to, proverbially, rationalise the human mind. Economics sits on a very exalted position of being a bridge between the arts and the sciences. We put together psychology and differential equations, history and optimisation in a beautiful manner.

Whatever happens to the 'real' India

It has been some time since I've wanted to write a piece on the Indian media. For an institution that probably takes itself a little too seriously at times, the Indian media is actually very unrepresentative of 'real' India. No, I'm not talking about India TV and their 'bangley mein bhoot' kind of stories. I'm talking about serious journalism here, of CNBC TV18, Times Now, Aaj Tak and the like.

Okay. Let's first really get rid of my frustrations at Arnab Goswami. The media is supposed to be unbiased and informed. However, Mr. Goswami has a clear tendency to take things to rhetorical pitch and then to force his viewpoint on the guests on his show. He has a tendency to cut those who don't agree to him, and give more screen time to those who do. In short, Mr. Goswami's coverage is centered around himself, in which case what he propagates is essentially his viewpoint and not what 'news' is supposed to be.

But let's get back to the larger malaise of which Mr. Goswami is but a symptom. The english media suffers from an urban-myopia. All talks of 'youth of India' going to multiplexes, moving over Ayodhya (which I don't dispute) and the like is pathetically city-centric. It is kind of sad imagining that over 60% of India still lives in villages, and that supposedly 80% of India earns below Rs. 20 a day. No, this is not run-of-the-mill leftist arguments. I don't say distribute foodgrains for free. Not by far! All I say is that news should cover these 'silent' people too. That the kind of audience that is portrayed on our news channels should be expanded to cover these people.

Yes, there are administrative cost constraints. But then, next time you say that it is 'new India', it is nothing but a shallow claim. Because this 'new India' is not representative of India at all. It is representative of a small urban population (again, the problem is that even this 'urban' would not cover cities such as Gorakhpur, Asansol etc). So, the plea in the end is to make journalism more inclusive. To give the rustic India and small-city India a voice and a platform on the national media. Let, literally, truth prevail!

First Term, Second Year

Oh well, it's been an entire term since I last wrote an entry and so much water has literally flown under the bridge (what with the Yamuna overflowing). So much has changed, and so much change is in the offing. To be honest, it was a depressing term, but through this depression, and keeping in line with my tradition of professional success in times of personal crisis, I came out of the term triumphant professionally, but ruined personally.

So, to begin with, college politics. Aditya Kiran Kakati stood for president. A good man, yes, but with a team that, for me, consisted of many power-credit hungry parasites. And that is why I refused to support his campaign. The only reason for me to support him was by process of elimination, and that is why I finally voted for him. Then there was the Students' Council elections. The Students' Council has been a defunct body and thus, the elections are a means for people to prove their popularity in college. However, I wanted to change that, but was unsure whether I'll be able to. But I thought, might as well try. So, I stood and I won (despite my entire class not turning up to vote because of no classes). And now, as I sit back at home, I have to think of ways to work and make the council work. Unfortunately, the Union (and hence, the Council) are still very much caught up in the shackles of red-tapism and hence, it is tough, almost impossible, to get things moving. Yet, I will try, not because I want credit or benefit out of it, but because I want personal satisfaction of having made a defunct body work.

Then, let me turn to a round-up of the societies. The Economics Society is surprisingly such a free society in second year. I can nearly do anything I want to, and I am exploiting this creative freedom to the maximum extent. It gives me liberty to do things that I've always wanted to do, and hence came the M S Excel Lecture Series (now known as M S Excel Workshops), the Microfinance Seminar, the V C Memorial Debate among others. Yes, Karan seems to feel that I like ecosoc more. But hey, F&I's National DreaMerger was the defining moment of my college life in first term. And now with a bundle of ideas I approach the second term.

But the happiest moments of life in first term has been to discover new people in the form of juniors. Not that I had many good friends in the third years (except for Karan), but when my immediate seniors pass out, I'll really miss people like Vedant, Pallavi, Sanjay among others. Hence, it feels nice to have a new bunch of friends from first years.

Finally, I realised that life is actually a huge constrained optimisation problem. There are a million constraints, primary among them energy and time, and we have to optimise joy in that time. Doing 'new' things has really been the joy of first term, second year, and I hope that the rest of the year too will be a wonderful ride.

Of leadership and motivation

Leadership. It's a thrill like nothing else, and a responsibility too. That brings us to the question about what are the responsibilities of a leader? For one, to be able to lead from the front, in that you take most of the criticism that comes your group's way, and you also are able to guide your team. The second, and in my case the more important one, is to be able to inspire others around you, and to be able to create sustainability in the organisation/endeavour, so that the organisation/endeavour lives on even after you go.

That is where I think my failure as a leader emanates from. For example, while I was the President of ECONOX, I was unable to effectively delegate work to my colleagues in the society. Now, a part of it can be ascribed to the fact that (1) DPS, R.K. Puram's societies function more as CV-building exercises than anything else (2) the level of bonding between dipsites is abysmal at most. True, that does not account for all my insufficiencies in this regard, but most other societies also functioned in that way. Kritika and I ended up doing most of the work. So, yes, I was able to inspire Kritika (and she was able to inspire me) and then Sneha did a lot of work during ECONORM week and we sailed through as a fairly successful society. However, I always felt I had been a bad leader. My juniors at school, those to whom I could talk later on, told me that I was indeed a very good President, and that those who succeeded me had not been able to either involve or inspire others. In this regard, familiarity with your colleagues becomes of exceptional importance. Some call it 'networking', but I guess this familiarity is absolutely essential for leadership.

Then, coming to college and working with individuals, in societies and otherwise, I realised how tough it sometimes gets to coordinate with people, to get them to do their part of the work on time. A part of this can be ascribed to my own hyper-activism as far as it comes to work, but seriously, there has to be a reason why those working with me procrastinate so much. Well, to be honest, I've seen everybody procrastinate, and I at times do it myself. That's it about discipline in life. It depends on the way you grew up, your upbringing, and your experiences in life. I like to do things fast, because I generally do things the way I like them. True, I won't get this liberty later on in life, but as long as I am enjoying it, it's fine.

So, why are others not able to keep pace. There are two possible reasons (1) they don't feel as strongly about the goal as I do (2) they are not able to discipline their minds enough. By 'disciplining the mind', I do not refer to any yogic exercises, because I've seen yoga practitioners procrastinate too; I mean it in an extremely professional sense - i.e. do work as fast as you can. One day Aditi Bajpayi told me, 'asap means whenever you can, in a day or two', which it literally does, but for me, asap means immediately, it's like a red sign to get working. I still haven't found the key to inspiration and motivation, as I have not found the key to several problems in life, but I shall keep trying as much as I can to perfect this art. Hopefully, that will not involve giving up on my own enthusiasm for things.

Counting Academics in Numbers

Before I write this, I must clarify something. I have utmost respect for people who score well. This is not meant to be a biased tirade against the mode of education in our educational system, but it is meant to present my opinion about what is the ultimate importance of scoring in examinations.

Most of us find it hard to find a balance between academics and co-curricular and extra-curricular activities. I have seen many students so engrossed in debating and 'MUN-ing', that it is almost a sickening sight. Then there are also those who are so thoroughly into their books, that it is a sickening sight in itself. Now the problem is this, that people often do not reveal themselves entirely. So, for example, even if somebody studies a lot, he/she might not be willing to accept it publicly because to study a lot (higher input) raises expectations for better results (higher output), and hence greater scrutiny on your performance. That is something most of us don't like, so we avoid. In this situation of information asymmetry, to make valuations about people becomes a rather difficult job.

However, let me be honest about what I like and what I respect. I like to put together things, to connect things. For example, I like to use statistics and mathematics that I study in my first year Economics (H) syllabus to problems presented in my principles of economics papers. Or another example where I like to apply what I learn about valuation of stocks in finance to the performance of MicroFinance institutions in India. Or as I've already mentioned on this blog before, how I used trigonometry back in class 10th to calculate the area of Tamil Nadu. Fairly simple all these things were, but it just gives me a high to connect things and disciplines in this manner. Makes my education seem much more holistic.

Now to what I respect. Firstly, i respect an independent thinking and innovation. For example, I don't see merit in conditioning the mind to think on pre-specified lines. This is what happens many times in our examination systems, JEE included. There has to be scope, and incentive, for innovation, at least at the undergraduate level. Yes, path-breaking research is not to be found at the undergraduate level, but a small beginning can be. Second what I respect is self-confidence. Fine, if you want to be a scoring maniac, be it, but do it confidently. You have to be, in short, sure of what you want to do. You have to be able to justify your actions to yourself.

It's true that I probably am sounding very confused, because I am really, when I talk about this. I want the good grades, yes, the best grades in fact. But why do I want them? Do I want to trade doing the work I'm doing now (which I really enjoy) for the best grades? I don't know, probably no, I won't. I suppose the problem is one of limitless ambition - I want to have this and I want to have that. A lot of it probably owes it to the passive pressure of being 'Delhi Topper', people let this expectation build into them. I tried to impress this upon people several times last year that i'm not a brilliant student, I'm just mediocre. But the expectation didn't go away. Hopefully, it will go away this time (that's one of the best things about the results) and hopefully not manifest itself in taunts.

What I once told a couple of friends of mine was then. Let's just visualise and think everything is ideal, and then work accordingly. We won't get to ideal, but we'll come closer. What is my ideal? I want to contribute to others' lives, academically and otherwise. I want to see St. Stephen's College contribute more (academically) to a student's life than what it currently does. Okay, the ideal is there. What's the plan? The plan is to start in a small way, to start with helping people around you, your friends. Does that pre-suppose superiority? No. There are things I might be better at (currently) and there are things they might be better at and this is a simple give-and-take thing.

So, yes. That is what I want to be my ideal life and that is the assumption under which I shall hopefully be spending the next year of my life.

Some Newspaper Clippings

The Times of India

Times of India (Kolkata Edition)

Hindustan Times

A Bengali Newspaper

Bandhan Documentary Film

Bandhan Microfinance Field Visits

Just as the failure to get a summer internship was getting severe, a sliver of hope emerged in the form of Micro Home Solutions - a start-up, associated with microfinance institutions, that I really wanted to work with. But I always knew it was kind of tough, and it turned out it was. But that was when I think I kept my cool and moved ahead and applied to Bandhan. It was my last resort - had it not succeeded, I would've been spending the summer vacation sitting at home. However, now when I look back at it, I truly accept the saying "What happens always happens for the best".

Through this internship, I have fulfilled some of my longest-standing desires in life. I visited villages and talked to their inhabitants. I saw poverty first-hand, and this experience was life-changing. Whether it was cycling 50km on the first field visit, and consequently suffering a heat stroke, or having my feet sink into the soil after the rain, or even interacting with poor children attending Bandhan's schools, it brought me closer to India's villages. I talked to a lot of Bandhan's THP beneficiaries. THP stands for Targeting the Hard-Core Poor, and is Bandhan's program to bring to microfinance level those households that are too poor even for microcredit. This was where I saw the transformational role that Bandhan and microcredit is playing in India's villages. These THP beneficiaries are the ones who earlier couldn't eat two square meals and their houses were dilapitated, but with Bandhan's aid, they have progressed to microcredit level, live in good quality houses now, and eat reguarly. The best thing is that Bandhan achieves this by setting up businesses for them, rather than giving hard cash, so that income generation is sustainable. Many of them have now started taking loans to expand the business that bandhan set up for them. I talked and videotaped many of them, and in talking to them I came up with the idea of my next novel - the struggles of people in India's villages.

The next major impact that this internship had for me was having me travel alone around Kolkata, from the Bangladesh border to the Bay of Bengal. I travelled in the Kolkata suburban trains, sometimes in such crowd that could squeeze the life out of people. I woke up at 4 AM reguarly, and sleepily made my way from my house to the Baghajatin station, from there to Sealdah station, from Sealdah to Howrah by bus, and from Howrah to my destination. It was amazing. By the time I ended my 3 hour journey to my destinations, it would be 7:30 AM, a time at which I, and most of my friends, would not even have woken up on regular days. And here came the solution to my life's biggest regret. When I had to board buses, i'd be clueless - after all, all the buses carried information in Bengali and I cannot read Bengali. So, I had to get back home and start to learn how to read Bengali. And the necessity of doing so ensured that I learnt Bengali fast. Now, I am in a relatively comfortable position as far as reading Bengali is concerned, and all thanks to this internship.

But more was to come. I went back to office with all the primary data I had collected (I'd pushed myself to touch 109 samples, instead of the designated 90). And there I explored the wonders that MS Excel hid. And that inspired me to go ahead and learn these things so that I can use that in future. My thing for computers, which I had lost mid-way, has been reignited again.

The hardest part was, in the midst of all this, the 'personal problems' that I went through. Yes, the common teenage problems - dil, dosti etc. But this internship made me realise how trivial all these problems were. There are people living a daily tighrope between life and death, and I'm worried about this. And by the end of my internship (actually, by the end of the field visits), I find myself in a situation of much greater mental peace. And I've started enjoying my internship in ways that I am sure nobody else enjoys his/her internship. Because I love going to office, meeting everybody there, talking to them, doing my work, learning new things and everything that comes along with them. Yes, my last resort of an internship is now the best internship I could have hoped for.

Writing a Novel

Today was a wonderful day, I've been reading my novel since morning and I'm only half way through it. Reminds me of the days when I read others' novels and was desperate to reach the climax, but I had to go through all the pages in between. In that sense, finally reading my novel is tending to reading somebody else's novel and that's a satisfactory thing, I suppose.

When did I decide to write the novel? I remember having read Jahangir's autobiography sometime probably in Class XI. And after I completed reading it, I just randomly sat down, took out a register and began writing. Initially, I calculated how long I need to write to make a novel. Thankfully, I over-estimated four times over. So, what that meant is that I thought I had to write eight such registers, but I've written just about two-three and it's an average novel length right now.

A lot of my novel consists of disjointed events that I wanted to write about. Like I wanted to write about the moral brigade, so I put in that chapter. I wanted to write about staying away from home and the fears and paranoia of doing so, thus I put in a couple of chapters about that. These are issues I wanted to talk about, and on the way I tried to weave it all together by a narrative. Hence, as of what I see it, the narrative does lose hold at several places, but I think the heart is in the right place still. My novel isn't pretentious, it talks about things I want to write. Like ambition, failure, dejection, attachment etc.

I've sat on it one full year. I remember when I was writing with fury - back in April last year, right after my rejections from the Ivy Leagues, I was writing frantically and completed at least half of my novel in those days. So many of the characters in my novel I created in those days, and almost all my favourite scenes (including my favourite where Mehrunissa sits on the banks of the Hooghly reflecting on life) I have written in that duration.

Yes, that reminds me of how the novel is also a story of my journey across India. I've written about Kolkata, about Diamond Harbour, about crossing the Ganga on a river bridge and the like. And I've imagined places I want to go to - Darjeeling, London etc. So, every time I went to an exciting place or saw an exciting sight, I put it down in my novel. I would have put the Sunderban trip too, but I can't change the plot of my novel at this stage.

So, my novel is done. I'm half-way through what, I promise, will be the last edit. After this, I'll never look back at the novel unless a publisher tells me to. Because probably I've crossed that stage, but editing a novel beyond a point will simply kill it.

Heaps of Failure

My e-mail to my friends, Aashik and Manchit, regarding my fear of failure, and my fear of being 'left behind'.

Hi,

I feel it useless to write to you in such manner, but I will - because I probably need to tell somebody.

If you ask somebody to tell you something about me, they'll probably talk about topping Delhi. But as Pallavi once told me, that was a matter of chance. In every REAL world interaction, I have always failed. And that includes my foreign application rejections and my failure at internships. Let me also add that to be honest, I'm not a good debater, of even if I am, I'm not a "winner" debater. Yaar, I'm honestly just a (moderately) big-brained guy, who has failed at most things that do not involve a very large academic component.

Why does this bother me, the internship failure? Well, I tried a lot, more than I've ever done. Either I didn't try as hard as you guys did, or I wasn't as lucky. I'm very bad at interacting with people, but I tried this time - as I did try for my foreign admissions. Yes, I try to keep up a strong face, but I'm very fearful and shy at heart - i get hurt easily, and often. It's just that I'm so tired of getting hurt, I have to ignore them to feel happy.

Getting back, I fear people will move ahead of me, overtake me. No matter what you think I am, I am your ordinary college-going boy, I share your fears, aspirations, insecurities and everything else. I too do not want to be left behind, and I'm quite convinced I will be when I don't do anything this summer and others do. You are not the cause of my worries, you are the signs. Remember Aashik how you said I just need to keep up with people in college to be ahead of them? People have moved ahead of me in college, Aashik. I am failing.

My health battered, morale shattered - I just feel very lost now. I have no idea where I am going in life. Also, please don't tell me you guys have the same feelings about your life - I am sure we all have problems, and I am not claiming that mine is greater than yours, all I'm saying is that mine is different from yours - because they originated due to different reasons. So, the next time I talk to you, and if I am sad, please do not ask me to be happy, for I cannot carry on a fake smile anymore.

Now to answer a basic question of life - what makes me happy in life? Am I chasing success? Well, I tried to find joy in others' happiness, and I got rebuked - because I was accused of having an acerbic tongue by my closest of friends, and thus my words defeated my actions. I achieved success, and I can probably do that again. But I can't have infinite success, and there will always be somebody more successful than me. My fears will soon overcome me, and will pull me into the depths of inferiority complex. So be it.

Regards,

Subhashish

Health Blues

So, it's been a tiresome few weeks. It started somewhere in the middle of March, when the construction around college began in full earnest. Digging of roads to lay something in the ground, dust flying all over the air, dusty roads, dusty air ... basically, dust everywhere. That triggered my bronchitis attack, just that this time it was very severe. Just two days back, my fever reached 101 F, and I finally had to go consult a doctor.

Now, the point that I must realise at this point is that my health simply has to be my top priority. This isn't necessarily true for everybody else - somebody might give priority to his/her studies, and that is completely justified. But I start with an inherent disadvantage with regard to my health, and that only increases my duties towards my health.

So, yes, as soon as the exams get over, I do intend to embark on a more healthy lifestyle. I've tried before, and evidently failed, at improving my health. But I have no other option but try - if I give up and sit down, nothing is ever going to improve. I have to take care of my health, with the hope that one day I too can live a completely normal life.

Still Hurt

Here is an e-mail that I wrote to Karan Nagpal, my senior at St. Stephen's, who did not go to the University of Chicago because he fell in love with St. Stephen's. It is now exactly a year since my biggest loss in life thus far.

Hi Karan,

It's now exactly a year since my rejections. One year ago at this time, I was numb with pain, the pain of absolute failure, and more importantly great relative failure. It had seemed as if good luck had closed its doors on me. I did not find any reason to live anymore. That time, in retrospect, was amazing. I spent two months with absolutely no idea of where life was going. I was weightless - I had nothing to do, and I could not plan anything for the future. It taught me great humility, yes, when I had to shed my arrogance of not applying to NTU/NUS in Singapore, to apply to the much-lower-ranked SMU in the same city just to save myself. When I had to swallow my disgust for Mamta Sharma to call her up for admissions to a shady university in Japan.

Then the doors of good luck did open, and how! Topping Delhi was, as Pallo jaan later reiterated (after the loss in the Sumitomo race), a matter of pure chance. In that sense, getting into Yale or Princeton is not much a matter of chance. So, I had been, in that sense, much luckier and probably less deserving than those who got into Yale and Princeton. And to be honest, what hurt me most was that those who did get into these places were the "elite" MUN-er types, whom I had grown a disgust for. I had grown a severe inferiority complex, which was only accentuated by the rejections. And now, as I look back, I feel comfortable in my place and I realise my folly - I should not have made my education so relative. I was somewhere going wrong as far as educating myself was concerned.

And then coming to Stephen's and meeting people like you, Manchit, Aashik, Vedant, Shalaka, Swati and everybody else. Your love is so precious to me that I would not be willing to exchange it for anything now. When people asked me why I didn't apply abroad this year, I would say "I am tired", but honestly, the reason is that I love being in Stephens and am not willing to exchange it for anything. Probably I felt that people might think of it as a looser's excuse and that is why I didn't say it so directly.

My Stephen's experience has not been very productive on the professional front. In that sense, I'm still caught in the time warp of being the "DT", i.e. Delhi Topper. But it has given me so much in the sense of personal joy that this one year will remain the best year of my life. Every other evening, I sit down in my room and have so much affection even for the people whom I'm not supposed to like, because of the simple fact that they are a part of my Stephen's experience.

But yes, today - one year later - that I read about the new set of admissions (Divya Balaji got through Yale, somebody else got through Princeton and somebody got through University of Chicago), there's a regret. Regret that I failed, that I could not make it. And that is why I have this obsession now with going to the US (Mr. Raghunathan grilled me in one of his tutes on this - he said "you cannot NOT know what you want to study abroad). And thus, sometimes I feel that I should make my CV more attuned to foreign admissions.

I try to ask myself - why this obsession? It has moved beyond the "experience" bit that I quoted as my reason for going abroad. It seems like an idea of righting a wrong done to me. I did not feel I deserved to be denied admission. And this is why I still think I should go abroad for education, but now I want to go at a time when nobody can deny me admission.

But then I think about your Dismissal Service speech (which I, of course, missed), and I think about that analogy with the cricketer you gave. And in everything I do nowadays, I think of that - every action I do from now on has to be guided by that feeling. I do not want to be weighed down by the fear and hope of what I do, I want every action I do to be of my own free ill.

Regards,
Subhashish

The Effects of 3 Idiots

So, I finally stopped being another of the fast-diminishing group of idiots who haven't watched 3 Idiots, the film that has shattered all box office records till date (and to be frank to the movie, rightly so). The reviews I received before the movie were all exceptional, and I had made up my mind that this movie I must catch in a cinema hall, and more so because it talked about something that I felt that I had perfected in my own little way, as have many other people - how to handle education.

The movie was cinematically breath-taking, probably the finest movie I have ever seen, more so because it could make you empathise with such funny situations and absurd expressions (like the deep empathy, mixed with laughter, for Raju Rastogi's family). Of course, too many liberties were taken, especially the last delivery scene and the entire "All Izz Well" jingle could well have been toned down, if not removed entirely. Yet, the idea of this post is not to act like another of those wannabe film - critics. What I shall focus on is the idea of education as set out in the movie.

The movie first talks about dichotomising between success and excellence. Commendable. Yet, I feel tempted to add that success is, unfortunately, a barometer of excellence. How do you define excellence? How do you measure it? Success. This dichotomy would have stood had it been between satisfaction and success, or for that matter personal enrichment versus success. But as a trade-off between success and excellence, I feel it clearly falls, mostly because these two terms are so fluid that they can't be put into strict boundaries and compared. The idea of success is transient, and very personal too. For a lot of people, I might be a successful boy (being the Delhi CBSE topper), but for me success is something that people like Shloka Joshi (national swimmer, trained dancer, part-time musician) are. I feel myself totally dwarfed by them. Yet, for the common public, I would probably be the greater success. Are we both epitomising excellence? Shloka does, she's touching the pinnacle of what she does. I don't, clearly - because my net innovation factor in life tends to zero. But I do have a lot of fun in life, I do my own things - but I don't "excel" in them or even feel the need to excel. So, the film fails in this department.

Now, what I really had a problem with, as far as the movie was concerned, was the feel-good "victory" of Aamir Khan over Omi at the end. Why did Aamir Khan have to become Phunsuk Wangde at the end for the writers to prove that he was the more successful man in life? Couldn't he be just another primary school teacher, as long as he was happy with his job and more satisfied than the MNC-employed Omi? In the end, the movie defeated a lot of its purpose, by equating the "victory" to success in life, to Omi having to run behind Aamir Khan. Hindi movies need not always have the "happiest" ending, they can also have "relatively less happy" endings too.

The movie, to sum it up, showed the battle of extremes, between the carefree-but-intelligent Aamir Khan, the poor-and-God-fearing Sharman Joshi, the lost-in-the-jungle Madhavan and the hitler-cum-director Boman Irani, and to that extent it did justice to what it was meant to be. But it was too far-fetched as a film to be taken as a serious guide to the education system's ills. Yet, I do give it out to the film-makers for at least having raised issues, tending very close to what really ought to be raised. This is a beautiful time for public debate and discussion over how education is being carried out.

What is my take on India's education system? It doesn't stifle talent, or it hasn't done so in my case (for my pursuit of debating and quizzing, that is). Yes, it does nothing at all to encourage it, and if this is ground enough for reform, reform must come. But in the race to make it easier and less stressful for the students (like in the case of the Semester System in Delhi University), it must be ensured that the quality of education is not diluted.

Actually if you ask me, I disagree with the very concept of examinations. I prefer being tested in assignments and projects, that have liberal deadlines and no fixed word limits. I prefer to be tested on innovation and creativity in a particular subject rather than an ability to apply concepts to fixed questions. Unrealistic? Maybe in India as a whole. But at least in the premier institutions, like the one in which I currently am in, this could be done. Rather, if this is not done here, how does this institution remain a "premier" institution? And so it stands for the IITs too. Why not just get rid of exams, and have projects instead? The most beautiful assignment I did in my life was to use trigonometry to calculate the area of the state of Tamil Nadu, given the distance between Pondicherry and Madras. I want to do such things again, but what better than do that to score marks instead of sitting in an examination hall for two-three hours and just writing on sheets?