Do I really need this?

The tendency to measure oneself on standards set by others is a very human failing. At work it is about the size of the division one manages or the speed of promotion, at home it is the size of one’s car, the square footage of one’s apartment or even the social stature of one’s partner. Each of these does not have as much intrinsic value to a person as the value placed on it by others. Even a field like academics, where people are perceived to have abjured these materialistic desires, is not without its own set of such false standards. High profile conferences, papers published in top journals and number of citations govern the self-worth of more academics than one would like to believe.

As a rule, I do not limit the choices I have in life by imposing too many “principles” on myself. But there are some principles that are more liberating than constraining. Not caring about what others think of you and having your own standards to measure yourself is one such principle. I must admit that I must have violated this principle many more times than I would have followed it, but whenever I have followed it I have found that it has opened up new and more fulfilling paths in life. It is hard to follow this principle simply because it is so easy to find a rationale for why you actually need that big car or that big project or the first rank in class. It is just so easy to fool oneself into believing something that one wants to believe but is just not true. I have fallen into this trap unknowingly (or rather knowingly) countless times but thankfully, life has presented me with moments where I could pause and ask myself the hard questions.

This is one such moment. And now that I have asked myself the question, I can clearly see the delusion I was pushing myself into by telling myself that I needed to study abroad and that a degree from a UK/US university was the best way of pursuing what I wanted to do in life. This is completely false. I wanted to study economics as a way to find solutions to the problems plaguing my country and that can best be done by being in the country and not by sitting in a foreign country listening to the hundred and fifty sixth discussion on how the financial system of the world (which means the US and Western Europe) needs to be changed.

I can now clearly see how this happened. I always knew that a corporate job was not what I wanted to do all my life, but I was unsure of what it was that I wanted to do. I happened to read P.Sainath’s book “Everyone Loves a Good Drought” and it opened my mind to what was happening in the country, unseen to the urban middle class whose eyes were dazzled by the “shining” economic growth. At the same time I came into contact with researchers working in wildlife conservation and realised that intelligent and educated people could make a difference and working towards making that difference did not necessarily mean living a penurious life. I decided to quit my job. What should have followed was that I should have become part of some project or organisation working in development while also educating myself in economics. But what happened was quite different. I knew that I would be able to get admitted into a “top” university and hence convinced myself that I needed to do that in order to pursue my plans. I got lured by the prestige attached to these Universities, or to be more precise, prestige that others attach to these universities.

This is not to say that studying at Cambridge has been a bad experience, far from it. But the opportunity cost (well, I did study economics) of studying here, in terms of what I could have done in India, has been greater than the benefit.

Once I had my epiphany, I thought that I should always be wary of falling into this trap of chasing vanity and adulation instead of self-actualisation and fulfilment. Hence, I am writing this post to remind my future self to always ask, “Do I really need this?”

Mr. Prime Minister

Dr. Manmohan Singh commands respect as an economist and an administrator. His detractors call him a weak prime minister, but given the kind of choice presented to the country, he was, by far, the best that we could have had. But, even with his wisdom, I see at least two major flaws in his economic and political approach.

His basic economic principle for running the country has been to promote growth, leading to increased revenue for the government and use this increased revenue to provide welfare and social security services for the poor. The thought behind the idea is benign but the idea itself can have a lot of adverse consequences. Unbridled capitalism of the American kind leads to increased inequality (even the most simplistic models of capitalism show that when people can use money to make more money, the rich get richer very fast). This inequality of control over the capital in the country will lead to the concentration of power into the hands of a small number of people who will then be able to manipulate public policy, either through bribes or lobbyists, to favour their concerns rather than the concerns of the society as a whole. This is all the more dangerous in India, where a large number of people have to struggle for the most basic needs like food and security and hence are not in a position to make their concerns heard. A much more effective approach is to concentrate the state's resources on providing services like health, education and governance much more effectively to the people with the existing resources at the government’s disposal. Once people don’t have to struggle for their basic needs, they will demand their rights and will be better placed to use the power that democracy bestows upon them.

The recent economic survey shows that government expenditure on health is a pathetic 2 percent of GDP. With India languishing below neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in most health indicators, I find the government’s expenditure strategy inexplicable. The fact, as shown by statistics, is that good health is a prerequisite for economic prosperity and not the other way around. So, I hope Dr Singh gets his priorities right, sooner rather than later.

I also have serious objections to his statements about compulsions of coalition politics preventing him from doing the right thing. He asked the reporters if they would rather have elections every six-months. The truth is that no one, not even the coalition partners want quick elections. Dr Singh could well have pressed for what he wanted, like he did with the nuclear deal against the left, but chose not to. He has to take responsibility. We are not responsible for the circumstances that surround us but we surely are responsible for the actions we take under those circumstances. At the very least, I would expect the Prime Minister to realise his folly and understand that doing the right thing is not necessarily bad politics.

United States of Economics

Economics research, like many other fields of study, is dominated by one country. The US produces most of the published research and most of the top researchers in economics. But along with being the biggest source of economic research, it is also the biggest topic. A disproportionately large fraction of journal articles in top economics journals is about the US. The fact that only 4 Nobel Laureates in economics have been from the “developing” countries may not be as important as the almost complete dominance of America (with a small role for Europe) over the economic discourse. The economic activities of 5% of the world’s population garner the attention of the world’s top economists, while whatever happens in the rest of the world is of little consequence to them and the field.

The place where this bias can be most dangerous is in education. Most standard economics textbooks are written by Americans and thus, not surprisingly, talk about the US. The chapters on Central Banking are about the Federal Reserve and the ones on policy are about Anglo-American style liberalisation. Economic theories are, because of their strong assumptions, highly context dependant and economic policies that are copy-pasted from the US are unlikely to work in a different environment. Some enlightened members of the economic community have started to realize this but have had great difficulty in making others see the light. They cry out loud that Singapore, where land is owned by the state, has performed economic miracles; that the Welfare states of Scandinavian countries have led their countries of the top of every index measuring the standard of life; that publicly owned companies, like Statoil, could also be efficient. Unfortunately, these members are few and far-between and have so far failed to break the hypnosis of US-centred economics.

People in countries like India still accord great value to foreign education without realising that economics education in the US (or even the UK, as I have discovered) introduces a bias favouring the Western economic system. That is why we find so many foreign educated economists returning to India and, guided by what they think are universal economic “principles”, zealously launching economic crusades to achieve the holy grail of the American economic system. The damage that they have caused so far is reflected in increasing inequality and alarming environmental degradation, and if they are allowed to continue the Americanisation of India then the results might be irreversible.

What's the right thing to do?

I am very thankful to one of my friends for introducing me to Michael Sandel and his course on morality at www.justiceharvard.org called Justice: What's the right thing to do?

I had stopped thinking about morality at some point without even realizing it. Although, we are regularly confronted by these choices that require us to pronounce moral judgements, we don't often think about where these moral inclinations come from and what, if anything, forms the basis of these pronouncements.

Sandel, in the first of the 12 episodes online, draws the distinction between consequentialist and categorical moral reasoning, essentially a distinction between ends and means. He throws up quite a few moral dilemmas and seeing that in most cases there was nowhere near an absolute majority for any of the moral positions, reaffirmed my belief that there is no absolute right or wrong and that each person has their own moral beliefs. But that being so, we still need to think about those beliefs, question and analyze them, as when those beliefs are tested in unfamiliar circumstances, we may ourselves be surprised by the results they lead to. As Sandel says "Philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know."

I also liked the fact that he warns against the results of such self-scrutiny, in a sense affirming to some extent the adage "ignorance is bliss", but then there are some people, and I guess I am one of them, who would rather have the pain of knowledge than the bliss of ignorance. Sandel says, "Self knowledge is like lost innocence, however unsettling you find it, it can never be un-thought, un-known."

I think I also gave him some plus points because of the way he summarizes, with a hint of disdain, the attempts made by Calicles to dissuade his friend Socrates from philosophizing and make him adopt a more "meaningful" life. Sandel says that Calicles was essentially saying, "Quit philosophizing, get real, go to business school." I loved that one. :-)

I am completely hooked on now and am definitely going to take the full course, and I think you should too.

Freedom

"I want to break free..." - Queen

Freedom – the word has evoked strong emotions in the hearts of millions of people for thousands of years and has lead to the creation of numerous poems, songs, movies and other forms of self expression. The correlation between freedom and happiness has been proven in many a sociological experiment. In fact, freedom of choice, be it choice of political ideology or choice of cereal brands, is inextricably linked to human progress.

Freedom means different things to different people at different points of time. In most cases it means political freedom; the right of a society to choose its leaders. Political freedom, in our country, has been obtained after a lot of struggle and sacrifice by numerous unknown men and women and it is not my intention to undermine the value of this hard-earned right. Nevertheless, I believe that political freedom is but a small subset of the freedom that we all aspire for, and deserve, in our lives. The basic tenet of freedom may run something like this – “Every person should be free to exercise his or her choice in any matter as long as such exercise of choice does not, directly or indirectly, impinge upon the freedom of another person to do the same”. Essentially, everybody should be able to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t come in the way of others doing the same. It may sound like I am making a case for anarchy, but that is not so. The constitutions of most democratic countries enshrine this principle, which is reflected in things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the code of laws.

If this kind of all pervasive freedom has already been granted to us, then why am I talking about it here? The question is not of what is available to us but of what we choose to exercise. Given that society has given us a license to do as we choose, each of use should be enjoying total freedom and hence happiness. But that is not so. Few of us choose to translate the freedom granted to us, to a personal level. Personal freedom is far more difficult to obtain and practise, than political freedom ever was, because political freedom had to be snatched from the clasping hands of a colonial power, whereas personal freedom needs to be rescued from within the closed labyrinths of our own minds.

Each one of us, if we look deep enough inside us, has dreams to accomplish and desires to fulfill. All of us want to climb to the top of Maslow’s pyramid and become the best persons that we think we can become. All of us may not realise all our dreams, but should we not at least aspire for the satisfaction of having tried? Why is the farmer tilling his land in a remote village happier than the corporate CXO? Why do we feel compelled to admire a software professional who leaves an established career to work for an NGO? What is it that we are missing?

These are not easy questions to answer. Most people will be able to rattle out a list of things they want to do or achieve without a moment of contemplation. But when asked about what is preventing them from doing so, they will take a long time to come up with an answer. That is because they don’t want to express the answer that their mind is telling them – nothing. Nothing prevents us from going after out dreams. All limitations that exist have been put by ourselves rather than by others

.

Recently, I saw a speech by a 50 year old blind man, who had, among other unbelievable feats, flown an aircraft across three continents. He was talking about how, when he went blind in his early twenties, he lost all hope. He had wanted to be a pilot but he realised that there was no way he was going to be able to that, and hence he gave up on life. Much later in his life, he was inspired by his brother, who was also blind, sailing a yatch from Africa to Australia. He realised that nothing but himself was stopping him from doing what he wanted. And then his life changed.

I don’t claim to have broken all the boundaries of my mind and obtained the kind of personal freedom I have talked about. But yes, I have taken the first small steps towards the same. I have stopped rationalising the gap between what I was doing and what I wanted to do, and have made an effort to bridge that gap. On the first day of the new year, I will not get up in the morning knowing that I have to go and do something that I don’t really want to do but am forcing myself to do for a myriad of reasons, the primary being that I don’t know what else to do. I will get up on that morning with a blank slate. And it will be up to me and only me to write whatever I want on that slate. That, for me, is freedom.

ANDE

It was definitely not a Near Death Experience (NDE). Calling it ANDE (Almost NDE) is still going a little over the line, but approximation is much less of a crime than exaggeration.

So, what happened was this. I had been at home for the past week as my mother had come down. The day before yeaterday, I was driving her down the highway to the airport, when all of a sudden my car went out of control. The brakes weren't working and the car was not responding to the steering wheel. It went and hit a car in front and then swerved to hit the median where it finally came to rest. Fortunately, there was no injury to anyone. But the moments where the car was out of control were exhilerating. It felt like having a cold shower on a chilling December morning. All my senses were tingling, taking in each stimulus like they were drops of life-nectar itself. Those few moments shook me out of the slumber I had been in for the last few weeks.

Things are a lot clearer now. The priorities in place. The path ahead visible, albeit a little nebulous. The mind is energised with an excitement that can be likened to the first time you step out of home and into a college hostel. The possibilities seem endless. The things you were struggling with so far seem so petty, so unimportant.

This is not the first time that I have felt that my life is going to change. But everytime I have felt like this, life has changed. It makes me feel like a strange mix of peace and anxiety is swirling around inside me. The time for action is here.

The more things change...

It’s been a while since I last posted here, and since then a lot of things have changed in my life. But, as someone has said, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Like America has a black president but the frequency of my blogging remains as abysmal as ever… :)

Well, as always, I have started writing the blog only to realise that I don’t have any ideas on what to write beyond the first few lines. So, I will use this time to put down my very own “bucket list”

Things to do before I die

1. Write a book
2. Play at a rock concert
3. Learn mountain climbing
4. Visit north-east India
5. Be jobless for one month

Now that I have put this down, these five things are circling around my head (much like canaries circling around Tom’s head after Jerry has made him crash into a cupboard full of utensils) and making me think along the lines of doing a reverse jigsaw puzzle, where I try to re-arrange the frame my life so that these little pieces can be fit into it. Having recently gone through a major life changing experience in the parallel universe where I quit my job, I see that in that universe, I was able to at least attempt all of the above. Hence, having gone around the proverbial circle, I will take this opportunity to jump to the centre and view things from a radial distant.

I had been thinking of quitting my 9 to 5 (officially of course, actual is more around 7) and taking some time out to think about what I should be doing. Then I thought that maybe I should first think and make up my mind about what I want to do and then think about quitting. Now, thanks to this post, I am again thinking along the earlier lines. You must think I am pretty crazy, but I believe this mental condition is not so rare and is commonly described as too much thinking.

Although the thoughts have been changing, the confusion and the indecision have remained unchanged. And they have remained like that irrespective of whether the thoughts are about choices related to professional, personal or moral issues. It feels like the clarity of decision is inversely proportional to how much the decision affects you. Hence, even as the road of life leads us through myriad landscapes, the dreaded fork can always be expected to crop up at the crucial moments. It is like a cheap video game which loops the same game sequence with changing backgrounds. So, as one goes farther down the road, one realises that the more things seem to change, the more they actually remain same.

PS: I derive a lot of satisfaction in doing this kind of… circular referencing, for the want of a better term, in linking the end of a piece to the beginning. Also, substituting what should be a literary term with a term from an MS Excel error message, shows where I have been spending most of my time and also validates my current line of thought.