September Rain

I love rains. I’ve always loved the rainy season.

As a kid, I would eagerly wait for the first monsoon showers in the month of June. Floating paper boats around with friends, getting thoroughly drenched in the torrential downpour for hours together; ah, those good old innocent days!

I still love rains. There is absolutely nothing like sitting in the balcony with a hot cuppa tea, listening to the pitter patter raindrops, watching them lash against window panes, uprooting trees around, thundering with all their might and showing man what an infinitesimally small and helpless creature he is in front of nature’s fury. And of course, rains are supposed to be one of the most romantic things on earth!

But today was different. Completely different. No paper boats, no cuppa tea, no pitter patter, and surely nothing romantic; Instead, for the first time ever in my life I was wishing so badly for the rain to stop.

September 24^th 2010

At 6.40 pm, I decided to call it a day and bade goodbye to my colleagues in office. Just when I stepped out on my Honda Aviator (it’s an awesome bike by the way), it started drizzling lightly. I chose to ignore the drizzle, as the day had been pretty hot otherwise and I estimated I would reach home in 30 minutes, ample time before it starts heavily (if at all). Turned out I was wrong. Within 5 minutes, the rain turned bad. I have driven in rains before, so I thought I would get through this as well.

Again, turned out I was wrong. The rain only got bad to worse and I really wanted to get out of it quickly. But unfortunately, I had to stop to fill fuel on the way. At the petrol bunk, there were several motorists who had halted just waiting for the rains to stop. Instead of doing the same, I just filled in fuel and decided to brave through the downpour. A wrong decision.

I went on for a while, but after a point it got so bad that my vision was beginning to get compromised and I desperately was looking out for some shelter. As Murphy’s Law would necessitate, there was none around. No shops, no petrol bunks, no bus stops, just a long stretch of road lay ahead of me. I somehow managed another 10 minutes very slowly, trying hard to see what was in front of me and finally reached a place where I could see a lot of bikes parked. So I too stopped, parked my bike there and decided to wait for the rain to reduce. Another wrong decision. There was no real shelter there; all of us just had to stand under a tree!! All I had was my helmet for protection.

We were standing right outside the police academy on Hosur main road. The entrance to the police academy was sloping slightly upwards and as a result water was gradually getting accumulated where we were standing. All of a sudden the security guards over there opened the two front gates. Immediately, water started gushing out of the gates with so much force, that it was as though the floodgates of a dam were opened up. The force would have been enough to run a turbine and generate electricity, in fact! Within minutes, the water was almost knee deep at that place and a few of the bikes got half submerged. Luckily mine was parked at a higher elevation, so was better off.

At this point, I realized that it was absolutely futile to fight against Mother Nature and decided to wait right there under the tree till it stopped raining. I would have waited for almost an hour there, just getting drenched. It was freaking cold, especially as I did not even have a warm jacket. And this is the point when, for the first time in my life, I was wishing so badly for the rain to stop.

Finally, when the intensity of the downpour reduced a bit, I decide to leave. I had to wade through knee deep water with the bike, for about 20-30 metres to get onto the road itself. And when I did get onto the road, I was faced with yet another obstacle. Heavy Traffic Jam. Sigh, I resigned to my fate.

Somehow I got through the ordeal, fighting my way through the traffic, the water flooding, the potholes and the unruly motorists. By the time I reached home it took me 2 hours for a journey of 30 minutes, I was soaking wet, almost frozen, teeth shivering, hands so numb that I couldn’t even feel my fingers. But yeah, I was there. Safe and Sound.

So much for a rainy day in Bangalore. But yes, I still do love rains!

Here are some pics:

Superfreakonomics

I had been wanting to write about this book for quite sometime now, given that I had read it almost a year ago. I had read Freakonomics, the first book by the authors Dubner and Levitt and loved it so much that I blindly ordered a copy of the sequel without even bothering to read the reviews. Perhaps it wasn’t such a wise decision after all.

The basic premise that the authors worked on in the original Freakonomics is “People respond to incentives”; whether it is a suicide bomber, a real estate agent, a drug dealer, a sumo wrestler or a street prostitute. Superfreakonomics was intended as a sequel with the same premise, based on which, the authors have aggregated a number of unrelated topics which are in reality no more than anecdotes, short stories if you will. Somewhere along the entire book, I never got the impression that “People respond to incentives”. Either the authors have completely digressed from the basic premise that they claim to be a unifying theme between both the books, or I have somehow failed to read between the lines.

The very first chapter that gives a detailed ‘analysis’ of the economics of prostitution, is not only quite crude and obnoxious, in my view, but also really tells us nothing significant or interesting. It looks as though the authors have deliberately thrust the chapter right in the beginning of the book in order to engage the reader enough so that he/she will end up reading the rest of the book; this of course is the popular trend these days and it works!

Then there is this other chapter that talks about how the brouhaha over global warming is uncalled for, with only a 5% probability of an actual catastrophe happening, and this number itself is uncertain as well. The authors further say that the issue of global warming has become a ‘religion’ where the true believers are going all out to reduce carbon emissions while the agnostics claim that human activity contributes just 2% of global CO2 emissions, the rest coming from natural processes like plant decay. Obviously, this kind of an assertion had to incur the wrath of the scientist community. A few other smaller stories are thrown in such as about how ‘global cooling’ and not ‘global warming’ was the major issue in the 1970s, and the impact of Mount Pinatubo’s volcanic eruption on the world climate.

Okay, fine. Now while I am still trying to figure out what on earth any of the above stories have to do with economics or have any meaningful data backing them, the authors shift gears. Enter “Intellectual Ventures (IV)” and its founder Mr. Nathan Myhrvold. The rest of the chapter (which is around 60-70%) is all about glorifying the ingenuity of Mr. Myhrvold and how he has found the ‘magical’ solution to the global warming problem at a very low cost – Inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere using a really high hose. The Sulfur dioxide, combined with the water vapor in the atmosphere, has the property of reflecting sunlight back into space. Voila! An alternative solution suggested by IV is to form man-made clouds that would induce a cooling effect in the atmosphere. And how is this done? Use a fleet of boats with underwater turbines to kick up a steady stream of water spray into the air, several yards above the ocean’s surface. Sounds simple enough?

And not just global warming, IV seems to have a solution to every other global problem. For e.g, a simple solution to avert hurricanes in future is to continually keep flushing out the warm surface water of oceans to the bottom, so that the colder water comes to the surface; and this can be done by using huge floating cylinders in the ocean!

The whole chapter was nothing more than a long winding epic story, phew!

Now that was about global warming. There was this other chapter on why suicide bombers should buy life insurance. This topic particularly caught my attention, as the chapter summary hinted at something like “How to catch a terrorist?” which made me quite curious. And instead what do I get? I get to know about some guy called Ian Horsley (“name changed for security reasons”) who mined a lot of data on the terrorists, and created an algorithm that would identify a terrorist with 99% accuracy. And what more, the most potent metric that truly made the algorithm work was “Variable X”, that cannot be disclosed “in the interest of national security”. What a bummer this was!

I do not want to sound overtly critical; the book was definitely engaging to a good extent and does provide good entertainment value. There are also several interesting facts and theories that I learnt from the book. And yeah, the epilogue section on the experiments with monkeys was quite hilarious. But still, on the whole, the book turned out to be far below my expectations and was simply not up to the high standards set by Freakonomics. several claims were either not so believable or were incomplete, and not so much backed by data while some were plain irresponsible. One can read it purely for the entertainment it provides, and not look for applications of economic heories in day-to-day life, unlike Freakonomics which stuck to its theme pretty much.

The Paradox of Choices...

A while ago I was reading an article about the small car market in India and how the Indian consumer is overwhelmed with a myriad of options, to an extent where she is unable to make a rational purchasing decision. I can completely relate to the statement. If I were to purchase a car right now, I would perhaps end up using a random number generator to make my decision.

As consumers, it is not just about small cars, but about every single thing that governs our lives where we make choices. Be it our mobile phones, our day to day FMCG products, white goods, the idiot box with its innumerable channels, our retail products and even the basic food that we eat; there is a plethora of choices everywhere.

Of course, some choices that we make are more important than others, choices that shape one’s destiny; career choices for instance.
While I was growing up, at different points in time I wanted to become a different person. At times I thought I would make a great Bollywood actress, at others I thought it would be super cool to become a CID Detective! There were other times when I imagined myself as a school teacher, and at other instances I was a scientist winning a Nobel Prize. Ultimately, I guess I was destined to be an Equity Research Analyst (Sigh, so much for my dream of fighting crime and solving mysteries).

On the other hand, some choices can be relatively insignificant, and yet can tax the mind to no end. For e.g. the decision I had to make on my derivatives position. The payoffs were like this – a) Exit and make immediate profits of Rs. 600 b) Wait and bear the risk of unlimited losses or another opportunity to make bigger profits.
During my first tryst with derivatives, I opted for (b) and ended up making colossal losses. Fortunately (or no?) this time I went for choice (a) and settled for lower profits, but got rid of the unwanted stress of the huge uncertainty that lay ahead.

Now isn't it supposed to be a good thing to have so many choices? Or is it like the situation of Buridan’s ass? (A hypothetical situation wherein an ass is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. The assumption is that the ass will always go to whichever is closer, but ultimately it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other.)

There have been several occasions where I have faced a similar situation (not that I am comparing myself to Buridan’s ass, but the analogy holds nevertheless) wherein I was unable to make a choice and ultimately ended up leaving the decision incomplete. For e.g. my plan to purchase a house – of course for such a big ticket purchase a random number generator will not be apt. Nevertheless, I could not decide upon the budget, the locality, and worse still not even the city; and therefore cancelled the idea of a purchase altogether.

I think we as humans are so spoilt for choices that we fail to appreciate the finer things in life. I also think that too many choices in life lead to excessive hubris, greed, envy, and a lack of focus and confidence.
And there is always this constant stress of 'what if I had made the other choice, would things have been better?'

But quite often I have wondered “What if?” What if we could actually live an entire life for each of the choices we make in our lives? That would be like living a million lives within a single lifetime. Each of the million lives can be lived in a fast forward motion within the original lifetime. Finally, we can take a combination of the best choices that results in the best kind of life, and ultimately live that life alone in our original allotted timeframe of life.
This will surely make a good movie script, a la Chris Nolan types right? But oh well, that’s another story altogether.