Scheduling Sex

Twenty years ago, when I was at secondary school and much wiser than now, I was a major fan of creating schedules, or “time tables” as I called them then. My time table involved going to sleep at 10:30 PM, waking at 5:30, taking five minutes to brush my teeth, 25 minutes to exercise, studying for an hour, etc. I will admit that I was no better then at following those plans than I am now, but I was quite enamoured of the idea.

Then I learnt about sex, and scheduling sex turned into an intractable problem for me. I wasn’t actually having sex; my interest in sex was entirely Platonic. But I had decided that preparing time tables and leading one’s life according to them was a good way to lead one’s entire life, and I couldn’t understand how one could have sex at all if that were the case. The problem, as I understood it, was that the decision to have sex would be an impulsive one, and the act would take 20-25 minutes at the very least, if not more. If one got the impulse after one went to bed, it would mean that he (and she) would have to get less than eight hours of sleep, which was obviously unacceptable.

I don’t think I ever resolved the problem.

Immune to Irony

Somnath Chaterjee thinks that criticism of an MP is an attack on his freedom of expression, deserving of “action”

Speaker Somnath Chatterjee also made a strong plea to members to take their seats, saying, ”Parliament is in the position to take action if it found anyone showing disrespect to MPs and casting an aspersion on their freedom of expression”.

“If he (Sen) had said so, I will take action. I assure you no one can go scot free. Parliament of India is not powerless.”

Valuing Life

Yet, because it [life] cannot be valued, we ignore what we have achieved. Life expectancy in India is estimated to have gone up from 31 years in 1947 to 64 years in 2005. The death rate, which used to be around 45 per thousand, is down to just about 8 per thousand. Hundreds of millions who would have died in earlier times are alive.

You might think that is cause for celebration, but we saw no sign of it on Independence Day. Indeed, many people still talk gloomily about the population explosion, and come close to implying that India would be better off had millions more died.

Statisticians who measure GDP and poverty are silent about the rise in life expectancy. They are interested only in what can be measured and valued in rupees. An increase in years of life cannot be converted into rupees. And so the most precious thing of all is ignored.

Indeed, our measurement of GDP and poverty looks absurd when we consider matters of life and death. If a young couple has two children, per capita income is halved. That shows up statistically as an economic disaster that possibly pushes the couple below the poverty line. Yet, the couple will feel doubly blessed by their two children, not impoverished at all.

If on the other hand, the couple owns a cow that gives birth to a calf, statisticians will record that as a jump in their income. Our conventional way of measuring GDP per head regards the birth of a calf as a blessing, but the birth of a child as a tragedy. Further, the death of a calf is a tragedy (since it reduces measured wealth) but the death of a child is a boon (since it raises income per capita). How farcical!

That is Swaminathan Aiyar in yesterday’s Swaminomics. As long as his suggestions are not operationalised, I share the sentiment.

In Free India – I

  • If you start a company, the company’s name cannot have “Bank” in it if you are not actually a bank. So if Citibank starts an IT/ITES captive, it can’t be called “Citibank Solutions”. Presumably, my HR consultancy can’t be called Talent Bank, or my defensive driving franchise cannot be called Banking Angle. This creates a branding headache for my company, which is a subsidiary of Bank of America.

    Why? Because of RBI regulations. I shudder to think of what went on in the mind of the official who formulated such a regulation. I suppose he thought that commoners will see “Bank” and instantly line up with their money to open a savings account.

  • If you are a bank in India. You cannot offer only corporate banking. You have to allow consumers to make deposits as well. You want to set a minimum deposit limit of Rs. 50 lakhs to get around the problem? No problem.
  • There is an entire line of business called Wealth Management, which the RBI simply does not allow. In the US, if you are rich, your bank will offer to manage your wealth for you. You decide on your investment goals with your account manager, and then the portfolio manager allocates funds between equity and debt, takes buy and sell decisions and executes those decisions. You get a periodic report on how your investment has actually fared against your goals. It is like an individualised mutual fund. The RBI does not allow this practice, because banks cannot promise returns on equity and they do not trust consumers to understand the difference between “promising returns” and “promising to try to get those returns.” Actually, consumers can understand the difference when they invest in mutual funds, but their brain stays at home when they visit a bank. At least, that is what the RBI thinks.

    But banks are allowed to set up a Wealth Management practice, where they only provide advice, and their customers have to actually take the decisions. In ICICI’s case, this involves carefully discussing with the client what his investment needs are, and in every case, advising him to buy more insurance because they get hefty commisions from the insurance companies. That is allowed. But an honest business deal is not.

Genes and Economic Development

A few days back Nilu sent me an NY Times article about Gregory Clark, an economic historian who is arguing that there may be a genetic explanation for the industrial revolution in the West. The article does mention that he is considering both genetic and cultural explanations, but leaning towards the genetic. He has brought out a book on the subject.

The theory is that the inhabitants of Europe today are the descendents of the rich of the middle ages. Because they are rich, they must have had the qualities that made them rich. These qualities correspond to the “middle class values” of today, such as thrift and prudence. When the poor of those times died out because of hunger or in wars, the surviving population ended up with the same qualities – transmitted through the genes or through culture- that are conducive to capitalist institutions that enable the current prosperity. This theory is put forward as an alternative to the idea that it is the lack of institutions that keep countries poor.

Stated in those simple terms the error seems so obvious that I wonder why the theory is being taken seriously. The qualities of thrift and prudence will make you rich only in an environment where property rights are respected. In a lawless society, your willingness to loot and rape enable your genes to survive. The article mentions declining interest rates as evidence that the propensity to save increased during the middle ages. But as far as I remember, one of the reasons for high interest rates in the middle ages is that princes borrowed from Jewish moneylenders and then defaulted. The moneylenders had to charge higher interest rates to cover the risk, giving Jews a reputation for usury. It is hard to believe that these princes had a gene for thrift.

Of course, every quality that we humans possess, thrift or shopaholism, anger or a sense of humour, must have enabled our ancestors to survive at some time in the past. To say that genes for a specific combination of qualities suddenly gained supremacy over a few generations is a far weaker explanation than any I have heard so far.

The Nation and the Anthem

Some time back, there was a furore because Narayana Murthy played the instrumental version of the National Anthem because singing it aloud would embarrass Infosys’ foreign employees. I suspect that the actual reason was that Murthy gets embarrassed by overt displays of patriotism, just as he would get embarrassed by overt displays of any strong emotions. This embarrassment would be all the more in the presence of foreigners, just as any strange practices at your house would make you squirm all the more when outsiders are present.

This makes Murthy a bit of a bore, like some people who,when they watch cricket matches, clap politely, but refuse to take part in Mexican waves. In my young days, such people used to be given the bums. We also used to call them traitors, but we weren’t serious. Those who jumped on Murthy were. There was no question of accepting a charitable explanation for his words. The only possible explanation was that his words betrayed his servile attitude to foreigners, and this made him unfit to be the country’s president. Of course, considering who was elected eventually, it is probably true that Murthy was in fact unfit for the post.

Incidentally, who came to your mind when Murthy mentioned “foreigners”?

Americans?

Would your reaction be any different if the foreigners in question were Sri Lankans?

Those foreigners were actually employees. Being nice to your employees and to make allowance for their sensibilities is generally considered a sign of magnanimity. I can understand the criticism that Murthy went overboard on this, but to take it as a sign of servility, suggests that the problem lay more in his critics’ mind than in his.

I work with Bank of America. My employer’s branding exercise takes its identity as an American company quite seriously. The company’s logo is derived from the American flag. The corporate colours are red and blue, from the same flag. The company’s logo is “Bank of Opportunity”, which echoes “Land of Opportunity”. The company’s induction programme harks back to its links with American founding fathers.

But the fact is, these connections are made in an understated way. The need for understatement comes from relative strength. If you are are the powerful guy, being subtle is a better way to convey your values. If you are secure in your power, you don’t need to convey power.

If citizens of a country are prone to singing the Anthem aloud, looking around to see who is not singing it and using this non-singing as evidence of insufficient patriotism, it indicates a very insecure country to me. If you use the singing of your anthem loud to demonstrate your position in the power game, it is more likely that you are the weaker party.

The furore, if it demonstrated anything, showed us the extent of the chasm between Murthy’s image of India and his critics’ image of India – between those who think that it goes without saying that India is an equal member of the community of nations and those who think that India still needs to demonstrate it. As India turns sixty, I note with satisfaction that the former image is truer to reality than the latter.

The Examined Life, v4.0

With the Jagadguru’s blessings, I hereby declare this revision of The Examined Life open to the public.

Officially, The Examined Life was founded on August 14, 2002, exactly five years back. I wasn’t using any standard blogging software then. I had rigged up something in ASP and used an MS Access database. Those posts were always available with me, but they were not online, which I am sure was a great loss to humanity. Fortunately, I have found time to extract the posts and integrate it with WordPress. They are now available in my archives (all posts before Jan 2004), or you can find them by going to: http://vintage.ravikiran.com. (Warning: Lots of broken links, and I haven’t imported any comments. I will do so later.)

I took it down around Jan 2004 and shifted to Movable Type with MadMan’s help in April. Later he helped me move to WordPress. Counting this as a major redesign, we are at v 4.0. This version will continue to uphold the fine traditions established by this blog – viz. defend the good, oppose the wicked and make bad puns.

I had formed a mailing list of some friends to get feedback on the redesign effort (which I codenamed Plato because I am pompous and self-important). I had actually softlaunched this blog and started posting a few days back; just scroll down for more posts. I would like to thank them for giving me advice and blame them for anything that has gone wrong.

Like any great software development effort, Plato was and still is behind schedule. I am launching this on August 14 because I wanted to launch on the fifth anniversary of my blog. There are still lots of things to do. We will probably get to 4.2 or 4.3 before it stabilizes. Please update your bookmarks to blog.ravikiran.com, because ravikiran.com will contain my homepage, not my blog. My old permalinks will stay that way till I get around to redirecting them. My feeds have automatically been redirected – or so I think. But nonetheless you can find my RSS 2.0 feed at: https://www.ravikiran.com/blog/feed/ and my comments feed at: https://www.ravikiran.com/blog/comments/feed/. Please let me know if you find anything broken or if something can be better.

Cramped marketplaces

Last sunday, I was wandering through a rythu bazaar – “farmer’s markets” where farmers directly sell their produce to consumers and eliminate middlemen – set up by Chandrababu Naidu as part of his drive to, like, totally neglect farmers and focus on the IT industry.

As designed, the market had a broad corridor for the buyers to walk through, with granite-floored galas for the sellers to sit. But every single one of the sellers had abandoned those galas and were sitting on the corridors, getting in the shoppers’ way. The actual galas were badly underutilized. They were being used for storage, but not very efficiently. If the sellers had wanted, they could have used it for both.

I thought that this was a perverse result, which had occurred as a result of the fallacy of composition. One seller must have found that he could get a share of the customer’s attention by moving to the corridor and squatting there. Competition must have forced the others to follow. The result was that no seller was better off, but the buyers were worse off, because the shopping experience had worsened. The solution to this problem, I thought like any good free market fundamentalist, was to have marketplaces compete in giving a better experience to customers. I was like totally going to blog it, but didn’t find the time.

It was a good thing I waited, because Prashant Kothari sent me a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal that tells me that this is actually what the customers prefer.

Mr. Biyani redesigned his stores to make them messier, noisier and more cramped. “The shouting, the untidiness, the chaos is part of the design,” he says, as he surveys his Mumbai store where he just spent around $50,000 to replace long, wide aisles with narrow, crooked ones: “Making it chaotic is not easy.”

Even the dirty, black-spotted onions serve a function. For the average Indian, dusty and dirty produce means fresh from the farm, he says. Indian shoppers also love to bargain. Mr. Biyani doesn’t allow haggling, but having damaged as well as good quality produce in the same box gives customers a chance to choose and think they are getting a better deal. “They should get a sense of victory,” he says.

…

Instead of long aisles and tall shelves, the stores cluster products in bins and on low shelves. With long aisles, he says, “the customers never stopped. They kept on walking on and on so we had to create blockages
The bins let customers handle products from different sides. Decades of shopping from stalls also means that most customers feel more comfortable looking down when they shop, he says. Narrow, winding aisles create small traffic jams that make people stop and look at products. Last month, one of his first stores in Mumbai changed from long, straight aisles to the haphazard cluster design. “Sales are up 30% since the change,” Mr. Biyani said, as he struggled to walk through the knots of shoppers at the store.

Indian consumers aren’t used to processed and packaged goods, so the stores sell wheat, rice, lentils and other products out of large buckets. Housewives want to grab handfuls, checking them out for pebbles, quality and smell, he says. Mr. Biyani tells his staff not to tidy up, as he noticed that customers are less likely to check out a product if it is in neat stacks. He scoops up a handful of plastic razors from a pile in a bin. “When it is like this,” he says, “it feels like a good deal.”

(Link might stay good only for a week.)

Annals of Innumeracy I

This is a new series, where I point out instances of mathematical illiteracy so that I can be a smartarse.

According to sociologist Walter Fernandes, 40 percent of those displaced by development projects are tribals, although they constitute less than 8 percent of the population. Put another way, a tribal is five times as likely as a nontribal to have his property seized by the state.

This is Ram Guha, in an otherwise excellent article in the Nation about the roots of the Naxal threat. The correct number is not five. It is 7.66 times.