Category: personal

Losing My Religion

In terms of religion, I had a bit of a strange upbringing. My father was a rationalist, bordering on atheist. My mother was insanely religious, even following a godman. And no – I never once saw them fight about this.

Both of them tried to impress me with their own religions. My mother tried to inculcate in me the habit of praying every morning, and looking for strange patterns (“if this flower on this photo falls, then it will be a good day” types). My father would refute most of these things saying “how can you be a student of science and still believe this stuff?”. I suppose I consumed a lot of coffy bite when I was a kid.

In any case, with a combination of influences, both internal and external, in my early youth I was this strange concoction of “not religious but superstitious”. I had both a “lucky shirt” and a “lucky pen”. Back in class 12, I had convinced myself that “Wednesdays are a particularly bad day for me”.

I really don’t know if this has anything to do with my upbringing, but I would see patterns everywhere. I would draw correlations between random unconnected things, and assume causality. I staunchly refused to admit that I was religious, but allowed for strange patterns and correlations nevertheless.

When I had five minor car accidents during the course of 2007 (it wasn’t a great year for me, and I was quite messed up), I believed (or maybe was made to believe) that it was “my car’s way of protecting me” (I wasn’t hurt in any of those, though the car took a lot of beatings and scratchings). I had come to believe that a particular job didn’t go well because on the first day of work, I had splashed water on a kid on my way back by driving fast through a puddle.

The general discourse nowadays is that religion improves people’s mental health. That it helps people see meaning and purpose in their lives, and live through tragedies and other kinds of unhappiness. A common discourse on the right, on social media, is that it is the lack of religion that has led to the mental health epidemic that we have been going through for a while.

The way I see it, based on my own experience, this is completely backward. The basic thing about religion, at least based on my mixed upbringing, is “random correlations”. A lot of religion can be explained as “you do this, God will be happy with you and give you that”. Or that something was just “meant to be”, maybe based on actions in one’s past lives.

Religion is about “being a good person” and “karma”, and that all your mistakes will necessarily get punished, if not in this life in the next. The long period over which karma operates significantly increases the scope of random correlations that you can draw from life.

First of all I’m good at pattern recognition (something that has immensely helped me in my academics and careers). The downside of being good at pattern recognition is that there can be LOTS of false positives in patterns that you recognise. And when you recognise patterns that don’t really exist, you learn the wrong things, and after that live life the wrong way. And I think that was happening to me for a very very long time.

And so came the lucky shirts, the lucky pens, the precise order in which I would check websites at work every morning and many other things that were actually damaging to life, especially mental health. The pattern recognition was making me miserable, and the religion and superstition that I had come to believe in gave credence to these patterns, and (with the benefit of hindsight) made me more miserable.

In 2012, after having burnt out for the third time in six years, I began to see a psychiatrist and take antidepressants. It was the same time when I had started my “portfolio life”, and one of the items in that portfolio was volunteering with the Takshashila Institution, where I was asked to teach a class on logical fallacies.

That’s possibly a funny trigger, but hours of lecturing about “correlation not implying causation” meant that I started finally seeing the random correlations that I had formed in my own head. And one by one, I started dismantling them. There were no lucky days any more. There wasn’t that much karma any more. I started feeling less worried about things I wanted to say. I started realising that being “good” is good for its own merits, and not because some karma recommends that you should be good.

And I started feeling happier. Over the course of time, it seemed like a big load had been taken off my head. And so, whenever I see discourse on social media (and in books) that religion makes people happier, I fail to understand it.

In January 2014, I met an old friend for dinner. While walking back to the parking lot, he casually asked me what my views on religion were. I thought for a minute and said, “well, I firmly believe that correlation does not imply causation. And this means I can’t be religious”. That’s when I became convinced that I had lost my religion, and had become happier for it. And I continue to be happy because I’m not religious.

Ranga and Big Data

There are some meeting stories that are worth retelling and retelling. Sometimes you think it should be included in some movie (or at least a TV show). And you never tire of telling the stories.

The way I met Ranga can qualify as one such story. At the outset, there was nothing special about it – both of us had joined IIT Madras at the same time, to do a B.Tech. in Computer Science. But the first conversation itself was epic, and something worth telling again and again.

During our orientation, one of the planned events was “a visit to the facilities”, where a professor would take us around to see the library, the workshops, a few prominent labs and other things.

I remember that the gathering point for Computer Science students was right behind the Central Lecture Theatre. This was the second day of orientation and I’d already met a few classmates by then. And that’s where I found Ranga.

The conversation went somewhat like this:

“Hi I’m Karthik. I’m from Bangalore”.
“Hi I’m Ranga. I’m from Madras. What are your hobbies?”
“I play the violin, I play chess…. ”
“Oh, you play chess? Me too. Why don’t we play a blindfold game right now?”
“Er. What? What do you want to do? Now?”
“Yeah. Let’s start. e4”.
(I finally managed to gather my senses) “c5”

And so we played for the next two hours. I clearly remember playing a Sicilian Dragon. It was a hard fought game until we ended up in an endgame with opposite coloured bishops. Coincidentally, by that time the tour of the facilities had ended. And we called it a draw.

We kept playing through our B.Techs., mostly blindfold in the backbenches of classrooms. Most of the time I would get soundly thrashed. One time I remember going from our class, with the half-played game in our heads, setting it up on a board in Ranga’s room, and continued to play.

In any case, chess apart, we’ve also had a lot of nice conversations over the last 21 years. Ranga runs a big data and AI company called TheDataTeam, so I thought it would be good to record one of our conversations and share it with the world.

And so I present to you the second episode of my new “Data Chatter” podcast. Ranga and I talk about all things “big data”, data architectures, warehousing, data engineering and all that.

As usual, the podcast is available on all podcasting platforms (though, curiously, each episode takes much longer to appear on Google Podcasts after it has released. So this second episode is already there on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, CastBox, etc. but not on Google yet).

Give it a listen. Share it with whoever you think might like it. Subscribe to my podcast. And let me know what you think of it.

Reliving my first ever cricket match

Earlier this week, I came cross the recent Sky Sports documentary “spin wash” – about England’s 3-0 Test series defeat in India in 1993. That’s a rather memorable series for me, since it was the first time that I actually saw India win, and win comfortably (I had started watching cricket on my ninth birthday, with the 126-126 tie at Perth).

Prior to the series I remember chatting with an “uncle” at the local circulating library, and he asked me what I thought would happen to the series. I had confidently told him that England would win comfortably. I was  very wrong.

Anyway, one video led to another. I finished the series, and then remembered that it was during the same tour that I had gone for my first ever cricket match. It was an ODI in Bangalore, either the 3rd or the 4th of the series (depending on whether you count the first ODI in Ahmedabad that got cancelled). This came just after the “spin wash” and the expectations from the Indian team were high.

A granduncle who was a member at the KSCA had got us tickets, and my father and I went to see the game. I remember waking up early, and first going to my father’s office on his scooter. I remember him taking a few printouts in his office (a year earlier he had got a big promotion, and so had both a computer and a printer in his private office), and then leaving me there as he went upstairs to drop it off in his manager’s (the finance director) office.

Then we drove to the ground in his scooter. I don’t remember where we parked. I only know there was a massive line to get in, and we somehow managed to get in before the game began. I also remember taking lots of food and snacks and drinks to eat during the game. While entering the group, I remember someone handing over large “4” placards, and cardboard caps (the types which only shaded the eyes and were held at the back by a string).

Anyway, back to present. I searched for the game on YouTube, and duly found it. And having taken the day off work on account of my wife’s birthday, I decided to watch the highlights in full. This was the first time I was watching highlights of this game, apart from the game itself that I watched from the B stand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuDzyJTqIr0

Some pertinent observations about the video, in no particular order:

  • The outfield was terrible. You see LOTS of brown patches all over the place. When you see Paul Jarvis come in to bowl, you see a very reddish brown all over his trousers – you don’t really see that colour in (even red ball) cricket now
  • There was a LOT of rubbish on the outfield. Random paper and other things being thrown around. Remember that this was prior to the infamous 1999 game against Pakistan in Bangalore where the crowd threw lots of things on to the pitch, so I’m not sure there was anything to prevent things from being thrown on the pitch
  • The India shirt was sponsored by some “Lord and Master”. I don’t remember at all what that is. Never seen its ads on TV (and I watched a lot of TV in the 1990s).
  • There was a hoarding by the Indian Telephone Industries (state owned telephone manufacturing monopoly that collapsed once the monopoly was broken) that said “allrounders in communications”. I found it funny.
  • There were lots of hoardings by the local business Murudeshwar Ceramics / Naveen Diamontile. The business still exists, but it’s interesting that a local player got hoarding space – I guess TV wasn’t yet a big deal then
  • There was a hoarding by “Kuber finance”. I found that interesting since we’ve almost come a full circle with “Coinswitch Kuber” ads during the 2021 IPL.
  • The Bangalore crowd looked MASSIVE on TV. and the Sky Sports commentators kept referring to how big a crowd it was. Coming soon after Test matches in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, this is “interesting”.
  • Every time the camera panned towards the B stand in the highlights reel, I tried to look for myself (I was 10 years old at the time of the game!). No success of course. But I do remember stuff like Srinath getting his 5-41 bowling from “our end” (BEML End, going away from where I was sitting). And Sidhu fielding right in front of us at third man when India was bowling from the pavilion end
  • I remember leaving the ground early after India collapsed (from 61-1 to 115-7). I remember my father saying that there would be riots once the match finished and we should get out before that. One of my school classmates who also went to the game said he watched till the very end and I was jealous of him.
  • The highlights showed Mexican waves. I clearly remember enthusiastically participating in those
  • This was 3.5 years before the famous Kumble-Srinath partnership in Bangalore against Australia but from the highlights I see that Kumble and Kapil Dev had started one such partnership in this game. Again I remember none of it since I had left the ground by then.
  • I’ll end with a poem. I had written it on the day of the game, on the back of the “4” placard I had been given while entering the ground, and waving it every time it seemed the camera was facing my section of the crowd.

Graeme Hick
You’ll get a kick
From a mighty stick
And you’ll fall sick

He ended up top scoring in the game.

Getting into a new public hobby

As I had recently announced on Twitter, I’m planning a new “side gig”. It’s been a long time coming, mainly because when you are doing a portfolio life it is pretty much impossible to have a side gig – everything becomes a part of your portfolio instead.

Now that I’m in a full time job, and after a very long time, maybe for the first time I have a real “side gig”.

I’m planning to start a podcast, on all things data. I’ve started working on it, and recorded a couple of episodes already. Another 3-4 recordings are scheduled for next weekend, and if all things go well, I should start releasing in June. The podcast will be in a typical “interview” format, where I interview people about different things to do with data. So each episode needs a guest (or two).

So far so good.

The downside about picking up a new side gig at this advanced age (38) is that initially I’m not going to be good at it. And this has been something that is hard to accept.

After one of the recordings, for example, I realised that I’d not asked the guest a few questions I should have asked him. And that while these questions had been playing on my mind a while back I hadn’t thought of it in the lead to the podcast at all.

After another recording, I realised that the sound hasn’t been recorded properly for large parts (because of a failing internet connection – either at my end or my guest’s). What guts me is that it was a truly awesome episode (based on what the guest told me).

Rookie mistakes, basically. And I’ve been thinking so much about these rookie mistakes of late that there is a small downside that the side gig might “cost me” more than I had bargained for.  For example, yesterday evening I was listening to other podcasts while doing the dishes and instinctively started comparing them to my own, and about whether I’m doing mine properly.

Similarly, back in 2016, when I was writing and publishing a book, I had become conscious about how others were going about their books. I kept comparing my books to others, and worrying about what I did right or wrong. It was nerve-wracking.

Again while doing the dishes last night, though, I had another revelation – this kind of comparison or beating myself has NEVER happened in terms of my blogging. I’ve written because I’ve wanted to write, and the way I want to write, and not bothered about what others are doing or whether what I’m doing is “right”.

Maybe it helped that I started this at a young age (I was 21 when I started), and that gave me a period of fearlessness before I actually became somewhat good at it. Maybe it helped that I was writing as a way of “rebelling” (if you see some of my early posts (pre 2006), they’re really angsty), and so I didn’t care at all. And by the time I started caring, I had either become good at it, or that it had become second nature to me, and so I didn’t have to worry at all.

The positive lesson to take away from that is that you are unlikely to be good at something the first time you do it. You will have a few duds. You will inevitably make the rookie errors. And irrespective of how well you plan or prepare, these rookie errors and duds will happen. The only way to get over them is to keep doing it again and again.

So now, before every recording I tell myself that it is okay if the first season of my podcast doesn’t end up being as good as I want it to. I might be “experienced” in other ways, but that in podcasting I’m a rookie, and I must judge myself like a rookie.

And after I’ve done it for a while, one of two things would have happened:

  1. I know that I absolutely suck at podcasting, which is a good sign to bury the side gig
  2. I actually become good at podcasting, in which case I will continue.

The important thing now is to recognise that there is a non-zero chance of 2 happening. And I should keep at it until this situation “collapses” (in the quantum physics sense).

 

Not all minutes are equal

I seem to be on a bit of a self-reflection roll today. Last night I had this insight about my first ever job (which I’ve  said I’ll write about sometime). This morning, I wrote about how in my 15 years of professional life I’ve become more positive sum, and stopped seeing everything as a competition.

This blogpost is about an insight I realised a long time back, but haven’t been able to quantify until today. The basic concept, which I might have written about in other ways, is that “not all minutes are created equal”.

Back when I was in IIT, I wasn’t particularly happy. With the benefit of hindsight, I think my mental illness troubles started around that time. One of the mindsets I had got into then (maybe thanks to the insecurity of having just taken a highly competitive, and status-seeking, exam) was that I “need to earn the right to relax”.

In the two years prior to going to IIT, it had been drilled into my head that it was wrong to relax or have fun until I had “achieved my goals”, which at that point in time was basically about getting into IIT. I did have some fun in that period, but it usually came with a heavy dose of guilt – that I was straying from my goal.

In any case, I got into IIT and the attitude continued. I felt that I couldn’t relax until I had “finished my work”. And since IIT was this constant treadmill of tests and exams and assignments and grades, this meant that this kind of “achievement” of finishing work didn’t come easily. And so I went about my life without chilling. And was unhappy.

The problem with IIT was that it was full of “puritan toppers“. Maybe because the exam selected for extreme fighters, people at IIT largely belonged to one of two categories – those that continued to put extreme fight, and those who completely gave up. And thanks to this, the opinion formed in my head that if I were to “have fun before finishing my work” I would join the ranks of the latter.

IIMB was different – the entrance exam itself selected for studness, and the process that included essays and interviews meant that people who were not necessary insane fighters made it. You had a rather large cohort of people who managed to do well academically without studying much (a cohort I happily joined. It was definitely a good thing that there were at least two others in my hostel wing who did rather well without studying at all).

And since you had a significant number of people who both had fun and did well academically, it impacted me massively in terms of my attitude. I realised that it was actually okay to have fun without “having finished one’s work”. The campus parties every Saturday night contributed in no small measure in driving this attitude.

That is an attitude I have carried with me since. And if I were to describe it simply, I would say “not all minutes are created equal”. Let me explain with a metaphor, again from IIMB.

The favourite phrase of Dr. Prem Chander, a visiting professor who taught us Mergers and Acquisitions, was “you can never eliminate risk. You can only transfer it to someone who can handle it better”. In terms of personal life and work, it can be translated to “you can never eliminate work. However, you can transfer it to a time when you can do it better”.

Earlier this evening I was staring at the huge pile of vessels in my sink (we need to get some civil work done before we can buy a dishwasher, so we’ve been putting off that decision). I was already feeling tired, and in our domestic lockdown time division of household chores, doing the dishes falls under my remit.

My instinct was “ok let me just finish this off first. I can chill later”. This was the 2002 me speaking. And then a minute later I decided “no, but I’m feeling insanely tired now having just cooked dinner and <… > and <….. >. So I might as well chill now, and do this when I’m in a better frame of mind”.

The minute when I had this thought is not the same as the minute an hour from now (when I’ll actually get down to doing this work). In the intervening time, I’ve would’ve had a few drinks,  had dinner,  written this blogpost, hung out with my daughter as she’s going to bed, and might have also caught some IPL action. And I foresee that I will be in a far better frame of mind when I finally go out to do the dishes, than I was when I saw the pile in the sink.

It is important to be able to make this distinction easily. It is important to recognise that in “real life” (unlike in entrance exam life) it is seldom that “all work will be done”. It is important to realise that not all minutes are made equal. And some minutes are better for working than others, and to optimise life accordingly.

If you’ve gotten this far, you might think this is all rather obvious stuff, but having been on the other side, let me assure you that it isn’t. And some people can take it to an extreme extreme, like the protagonists of Ganesha Subramanya who decide that they will not interact with women until they’ve achieved something!

Fifteen years of professional life

I was supposed to begin my first job on the 1st of May 2006. A week before, I got a call from HR stating that my joining date had been shifted to the 2nd. “1st May is Maharashtra Day, and all Mumbai-based employees have a holiday that day. So you start on the second”, she said.

I was thinking about this particular job (where I lasted all of three months) for a totally different reason last night. We will talk about that sometime in another blogpost (once those thoughts are well formed).

The other day I was thinking about how I have changed since the time I was working. I mean there are a lot of cosmetic changes – I’m older now. I can claim to have “experience”. I have a family. I have a better idea now of what I’m good at and all that.

However, if I think about the biggest change from a professional front that has happened to me, it is in (finally, belatedly) coming to realise that the world (especially, “wealth games”) is positive sum, and not zero sum.

The eight years before I started my first job in 2006 were spent in insanely competitive environments. First there was mugging for IIT JEE, where what mattered was the rank, not the absolute number of marks. Then, in IIT, people targeted “branch position” (relative position in class) rather than absolute CGPA. We even had a term for it – “RG” (for relative grading).

And so it went along. More entrance exams. Another round of RG. And then campus interviews where companies came with a fixed number of open positions. I don’t think I realised this then, but all of my late teens and early twenties spent in ultra competitive environments meant that I entered corporate life also thinking that it was a zero sum thing.

I kept comparing myself to everyone around. It didn’t matter if it was the company’s CEO, or my boss, or some junior, or someone completely unconnected in another part of the firm. The only thing that was constant was that I would instinctively compare myself

“Why do people think this person is good? I’m smarter than him”
“Oh, she seems to be much smarter than me. I should be like her”

And that went on for a while. Somewhere along the way I decided to quit corporate altogether and start my own consulting business. Along the way I met a lot of people. Some were people I was trying to sell to. Others I worked with after having sold to some of their colleagues. I saw companies in action. I saw diverse people get together to get work done.

Along the way something flipped. I don’t exactly know what. And I started seeing how things in the real world are not a zero sum game after all. It didn’t matter who was good at what. It didn’t matter if one person “dominated” another (was good at the latter on all counts). People worked together and got things done.

My own sales process also contributed. I spoke to several people. And every sale I achieved was a win-win. Every assignment came about because I was adding value to them, and because they were adding (monetary) value to me. It was all positive sum. There were no favours involved.

And so by the time I got back to corporate life once again at the end of last year, I had changed completely. I had started seeing everything in a “positive sum” sort of way and not “zero sum” like I used to in my first stint in corporate life. That is possibly one reason why I’m enjoying this corporate stint much better.

PS: If you haven’t already done so, listen to this podcast by Naval Ravikant. It is rather profound (I don’t say that easily). Talks about how wealth is a positive sum game while status is a zero sum game. And to summarise this post, I had spent eight years immediately before I started building wealth by competing for status, in zero sum games.

JEE Rank, branch position, getting the “most coveted job” – they were all games of status. It is interesting (and unfortunate) that it took me so long to change my perspective to what was useful in the wealth business.

PPS: I’ve written this blogpost over nearly two hours, while half-watching an old Rajkumar movie. My apologies if it seems a bit rambling or incoherent or repetitive.

 

 

Diabetes, sugar and insulin

Last weekend I finished off Jason Fung’s The Complete Guide to Fasting. Like his earlier book that I read (The Obesity Code), this book makes a very compelling case to fast as a means of reversing type 2 diabetes, lose weight and generally have a much better life.

I’m compelled enough by the book to have put its message into practice immediately. Apart from days when I go to the gym early in the morning, I’ve been making it a point to not eat breakfast (this isn’t the first time I’m trying this, I must mention). And while the weighing scales haven’t moved yet, I’m pretty happy.

In any case, in both his books, one thing that Fung rails against is the conventional medical practice of telling people suffering from Type 2 Diabetes to “eat 6 meals a day”, while most medical research shows that this leads to higher insulin resistance (and thus worse diabetes), and that what is better is to eat a smaller number of meals in a day.

So a few days ago, I came across this tweetstorm by this guy who installed a continuous glucose monitor in his blood. The tweetstorm is very instructive.

And this helped explain to me why despite research showing the contrary, eating “several meals a day” has been part of the treatment manual for diabetes, even if in reality (as per Fung’s book), it hasn’t helped.

This graph from the tweetstorm is instructive:

Blood glucose spike after a meal

Look at how his blood glucose spiked immediately after a meal that he ate after a longish fast. The conventional medical wisdom has been that if a diabetic eats infrequently, every meal will spike his blood glucose, which then leads to a spike in insulin, and that is not good for the person.

Instead, the wisdom goes (I’m guessing here) that if you have several small meals, then you don’t have a single big jump in glucose levels like this. And so you don’t have single big jumps in insulin levels.

Moreover, the big risk with Type 2 diabetes is hypoglycemia – where your blood sugar drops to such a low level that you start sweating rapidly and come under the risk of a heart attack. And when you don’t eat frequently, your blood sugar can drop like crazy. And so several small meals works.

Logical right? I guess that’s what most doctors have been thinking over time.

The little problem, of course, is that if you eat too many meals (and small meals at that), your blood glucose doesn’t spike by a lot at any one point in time. However, that you haven’t given sufficient gap in your meals means that your insulin levels never drop below a point. And that means that your body becomes resistant to insulin. Which means your diabetes becomes worse.

So what do you do? How do you let your insulin level drop to an extent where your body is not resistant to it, while also making the spike in insulin when you finally eat not so much? Again, I’m NOT a medical professional, but seems like what you eat matters – fat spikes insulin much less than carbs or protein.

Maybe I should change the nature of my lunch on days I don’t eat breakfast.

PS: This entire blogpost is entirely my conjecture, and none of it is to be taken as any kind of medical opinion.

 

More on Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity and Inclusion are words that are normally thrown around by people of a certain persuasion. In fact, they were among the key principles espoused by one of my earlier employers as well (to their credit, some of their diversity and inclusion sessions did a lot of help broaden my worldview).

However, as I’ve argued earlier on this blog, in a lot of cases, arguments on diversity and inclusion are (literally) only skin deep – people go big on diversity of sex, sexuality, skin colour, nationality and so on while giving short shrift to things like diversity of thought, which in my opinion plays a larger role in building a more successful team.

I’ve also mentioned earlier on this blog about how some simple acts of inclusion can go a long way – for example, I’d mentioned about how building a pedestrian walkway, or pedestrian crossing with signals, would help make one of the roads in Bangalore more inclusive towards pedestrians (a class of people the usual proponents of diversity and inclusion don’t care about).

I was reminded of diversity and inclusion when the recent hoopla about messaging apps happened. A number of my contacts said they were leaving WhatsApp and moving to Telegram or Signal. Others said they weren’t going anywhere and were sticking to WhatsApp, and that Facebook’s new privacy rules were nothing new.

From my personal point of view, since I didn’t have a view on this messaging apps issue, the best solution turned out to be “inclusion”.

I’m on all apps. I’m on Signal, and Telegram, and WhatsApp, and iMessage, and good old SMS. However you choose to reach me, I’m there to receive your message and respond to you. In that sense, when you don’t have a strong opinion, the best thing to do is to be inclusive.

Of late I’ve realised it’s the same with language. Since I now work for a company that is headquartered in Gurgaon, a number of colleagues instinctively speak in Hindi. Initially I used to be a bit snobbish, and tell them that my Hindi sucked, and when they spoke Hindi, I would reply in English.

Over time, however, I’ve realised that I’m only being an asshole by refusing to be inclusive. Since I know Hindi (I got more marks in Hindi in Class 10 board exams than I did in English – not that that says anything), I should let the people decide whether I’m worth talking to in Hindi at all. I’ll talk to them in my broken Hindi, and if they think it’s too broken they can choose to switch to a language I’m more comfortable in.

And a week ago, Pranay and Saurabh of the Puliyabaazi podcast asked me if I’m willing to go on their (Hindi) podcast to talk about logical fallacies and “how not to use data”. I immediately accepted, not only because it’s a great podcast to be on (they’re fun to talk to), but it also gives me an opportunity to show off my broken Hindi.

The episode dropped on Thursday. You can listen to it here:

I realised while I was recording that my Hindi has become really rusty, and I found myself struggling for words many times. I also realised after the episode dropped that I don’t even understand what the title means, yet I’ve been happily sharing it around in my office! (a colleague kept asking me if I knew this word and that word, and I realised the answer to all that was no. Yet I had made assumptions and gone on with the podcast – another example of my own “inclusiveness”!)

Henceforth I’m never telling a colleague that I don’t know Hindi. However, if I find that someone overestimates my level of Hindi I might inflict this podcast on them. Even then, if they choose to speak to me in Hindi, so be it! I’m going to make an attempt to be more inclusive, after all.

 

The Law is an Ape

I’ve always known that I have long arms relative to the size of the rest of my body. I think I discovered this sometime in the late 90s, around the time I both stopped growing vertically and started wearing full arm shirts. I remember being forced to buy shirts one size too large for my shoulders because otherwise the sleeves wouldn’t reach all the way down.

My father had the same problem as well, and so he wore shirts one size too large as well. Over time, I managed to find brands that fit both my shoulders and my arms properly (the Aditya Birla stable is good for this -Loius Phillippe, Van Heusen, etc. Arrow never fits me). And then I took to getting my formal shirts tailored. Last year I bought a bunch at Gap, after I found that they fit me well.

Only recently, while I was trying to analyse my performances at the gym, that I realised that my long arms might be affecting stuff apart from my attire as well. For the longest time now, I’ve been trying to learn to power clean, and have never quite managed it.

The power clean involves, among other things, holding the bar with your arms outstretched where it touches the fold in your waist (where your torso meets your groin). The idea is that as you pull the bar up past your thighs, you make it touch the fold in your waist while performing a “triple extension” and jumping, and that will power the bar up.

And I recently discovered that I can’t make my bar touch the fold of my waist unless I hold it really really wide, like you do for a snatch. “Maybe I have long arms”, I thought, and then remembered my troubles with buying shirts.

And then I started wondering if I could quantify if I actually had long arms. Looked around a little and found that there is the concept of the “wing span” or “arm span“. I figured how to measure it, and got my wife to measure it for me. It’s 192 cm. My height is between 179 and 180 cm. This means my arm span is 12-13 cm, or nearly 5 inches longer than my height.

Most humans have their arm spans about the same as their height, or just a little longer. According to this article, my long arms mean that I could have been an elite basketball player or a swimmer, since these sports are good for people with long arms. That perhaps explains why I was a decent defender in basketball in school, though I was among the least athletic people you could find.

I kept looking, and reading articles. I thought of myself as being “the Law” (long arms, get it?). And then I came across this measure where rather than subtracting your height from your arm span, you take the ratio. The ratio of your arm span to your height is called “ape index“.

Most humans have an ape index close to 1. NBA players have an average ape index of 1.06. My ape index is higher than 1.07. Shortly after she had measured my arm span, I told my wife about this. “Well, I always knew you were an ape”, she said.

So yes, for my height I have really long arms. This means I find it hard to buy shirts that fit me. This also means I find it relatively easier to deadlift. Long arms also mean that I find movements where I have to lock out my hands upwards, like the bench press or the overhead press, really difficult. Maybe this explains why I have piddly bench and overhead numbers compared to my squat or deadlift? Long arms also make it harder to do pull ups, which possibly explains why completed my first ever pull up in life at 37.

You could think I am the law. You could also think I am an ape. Or maybe, the law is an ape?

Why I quit public policy

This is yet another of those posts that elaborates something I’ve put on twitter.

I remember getting interested in public policy sometime in 2005. I think that was around the time when I stopped solely talking about gossip (and random “life issues”) on this blog, and started commenting about random “issues” here.

That was also the time when Madman Aadisht introduced me to his blog circle that he called the “libertarian cartel”. Reading blogposts by this cartel (included the likes of Ravikiran Rao, Amit Varma, Gaurav Sabnis (who was once a libertarian), Nitin Pai, etc.), I was hooked. I too wanted in on this “libertarian cartel”.

Soon enough, I started work and did one project that involved the study of some economic reforms. I soon quit that job but wrote about this, and other issues. I started getting into the “econ blogosphere”. Between the libertarian cartel, the opinion pages of the Business Standard (back when TN Ninan was the editor) and “econ blogs” (the likes of Marginal Revolution and EconLog), I got deeply interested in “policy issues”. And I thought I wanted to do public policy.

Of course, what public policy pays is nothing comparable to what post-MBA jobs pay, so I never explored it seriously as a career. I kept moving from one highly paid job to another, though I kept writing about “policy issues” on this blog, and then on Twitter (when I opened an account there in 2008). I even wrote on the “Indian Economy Blog”. And while the libertarian cartel never admitted me as a member, when they did form a mailing list, I got invited to join it soon enough (thanks to Aadisht once again).

“Policy work”, or “policy blogging” (which might be a more accurate term), in the late noughties was enjoyable because most people (at least those I bothered to read) were issue driven. So you had the aforementioned libertarians who analysed issues through a libertarian lens. You had leftists like the Jagadguru Krish and “Jihvaa”.  You had right wingers like SandeepWeb. Each class largely evaluated each issue based on their own philosophies, and commented about them. People avoided being partisan.

And so, in 2011, when I quit full time employment and decided to lead a portfolio life, I decided that public policy should be part of my portfolio. And the Takshashila Institution was kind enough to appoint me as its “resident quant” (for the most part, there were no formal responsibilities for the role and I wasn’t paid. However, we mutually enjoyed it, I would like to think).

That was a fantastic opportunity. I didn’t have to commit that much time, but got the optionality to participate in a large number of fairly interesting discussions with fairly interesting people. I did some work here and there, doing some research and teaching and course designing and lecturing, and it was most enjoyable. More enjoyable, of course, was the set of people I met through this assignment.

Somewhere down the line, maybe in 2015 or 2016 (or maybe even earlier), things changed. Basically policy became partisan. Out went the libertarians and totalitarians and right wingers and left wingers. In came the “Congressis” and “bhakts”, and republicans and democrats.

Output of policy analysis everywhere, except in academic journals (which I can’t comment on since I don’t bother reading them), became a function of the author’s political preferences. One year, an author might be favourable to the BJP and everything he/she wrote would nicely tally with the BJP’s view of the world. And then maybe the author would change political preferences, and there was a 180 degree turn on most issues!

On twitter, on mainstream media, on blogs, even on Instagram – “policy analysis” became rather predictable. Once you knew a person’s political preferences and leanings, it became clear what their view on any topic would be – it was identical to the view of their chosen party at that point in time. This partisanship meant there was “no information content” in any of this writing.

And that is how I started getting disillusioned. And the disillusionment grew over time, until a point when I started actively avoiding policy discussions (I’ve even muted the word “policy” on twitter).

I’m happy living my life, and doing my work, and earning my money, and paying my taxes. In the spirit of 2020, I’ll “leave public policy to the experts”.