Christopher Hitchens

I am late with this news because of my enforced absence from the blogosphere due to lack of net connection. Christopher Hitchens died last week due to cancer, a disease that first made its presence felt in mid-2010.Here is a tribute. Here is his final column for Vanity Fair.

I have not read any of Hitchens' works. I first heard of him as one of the Four Horsemen. I have listened to many of his debates with apologists for religion that are available on the net. I had not heard such plain speaking about religion before and it came as a breath of fresh air. I am sure some believers would have been more than a little flustered by his dismissive comments about their cherished beliefs as exemplified by the Hitchslap, "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." He was contemptuous of the false comfort provided by religion even after he was diagnosed with cancer.

I used to be amazed at his command over literature and history. He could conjure up quotes and anecdotes without skipping a beat. He was a formidable opponent to debate against. He would have been great to have my kind of conversation with - the kind where I do all the listening and the other person does all the talking. I don't think I would have got bored.

He wrote some articles about prayer, 'cures' and etiquette which struck a chord in me. I could see where he was coming from. I came to know of him about when I was getting irritated with this 'respect' business so I was a receptive audience for his combative rhetoric, accusations of being 'strident' be damned. As Dan Dennett says, there is a time to be rude.

PS: Know who is a hitchling?

Dev Anand, 1923-2011

Another actor whose songs I love has passed away. I don't recall having seen any of his movies fully but the songs are another matter. He had a quirky, man about town style which is hard to replicate. Here are some of my favourite songs:

1. Tujhe Jeevan Ki Dor Se
2. Are yaar meri tum bhi ho gazab
3. Hai apna dil to awara
4. Achcha Jee Main Haari
5. Dil Ka Bhanwar Kare
6. Chod Do Aanchal
7. Main Zindagi Ka Saath
8. KHOYA KHOYA CHAND
9. Deewana Mastana Hua
10. Mana Janab Ne Pukara Nahin

I could easily replace these songs with others; there are so many. A pertinent point to note is that all the songs are B&W. Confirms my old fogey status, doesn't it?

‘Kolaveri Di’

I first saw ‘Kolaveri Di’on NDTV and wondered why a Tamil song was being played in an English channel. I learned that the song had gone viral on Youtube so I downloaded it. Initially Jaya and I were underwhelmed by the song but we slowly became fans. It was everywhere. There was a program regarding it in NDTV which also had a spoof in this tune. It was an item in some program in Sujit's school.I wanted to link to it in the blog and was trying to think of a way to do it. Then I saw that it had even made it to Language Log and thought that this was it.

The old fogey that I am, I usually dig songs written in ancient times or parodies (say, Mohanlal imitating MGR). Now it is ‘Kolaveri Di’ all the way. So what if some of the lyrics don't make sense? As a news item in The Times of India says:

If you haven't heard "Kolaveri Di", you are supposed to be out of sync with the world.

Search for simple explanations

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. -- Bertrand Russell

Every year, the literary agent John Brockman asks several public intellectuals to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year's question was "WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?" One of the responses was 'Randomness'. It is a difficult concept to accept which results in simplistic explanations for complicated phenomena. In Endless Forms Most Beautiful,Sean B. Carroll writes:

Francois Jacob has pointed out that all of our explanatory systems, whether mythic, magic, or scientific, share a common principle. They all seek, in the words of physicist Jean Perrin, "to explain the complicated visible by some simple invisible."

It was obvious that my sudden stroke would bring forth many such explanations. For example one person persuaded my mother to sell her house by telling her that my stroke happened because there were statues of some gods on the grounds that were not supposed to be there and if she sold the house, I will be cured. One guy wanted to know if I had an implacable foe who could have put some sort of hex on me to cause the stroke. I assured him that there was no such person.

Another person said that I had made many bitter enemies in my life and a few of them had got together and performed some black magic that had resulted in my stroke. Another person told Jaya that one person had wanted to marry her but I entered the scene and spoiled his well-laid plans so he took some steps to put a clot in my head. Mostly people will claim that they were the revelations of some guru with capacious learning who had unparalleled insight into these issues.As Javed Akhtar says:

It’s not surprising that in Pune there is an ashram and I used to go there. I loved the oratory. On the gate of the lecture hall there was a placard. Leave your shoes and minds here. There are other gurus who don’t mind if you carry your shoes. But minds?…sorry.

When Jaya was explaining the circumstances of my stroke to one woman, she was told that many people in the flat suffered from a 'bone problem' which happens if some puja is not done. Doing the puja will solve these problems. A brain stem stroke is due to a 'bone problem'? H'm.

What used to astonish me was that so many people uncritically accepted the idea that you can clot the blood in somebody by mumbling some mumbo-jumbo. This thought is not limited to fringe elements of society. It is mainstream. Education goes only so far and no further in eliminating these superstitions. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson says, education helps to reduce superstitious beliefs but it eventually asymptotes to a non-zero value. (For example, listen to this interview with Father George Coyne. He comes across as a pleasant, intelligent, articulate person but at times he churns out word salad.)

Perhaps I had heard similar things before my stroke but they didn't register with me probably because of two reasons: 1) I usually did not hang around for long listening to superstitious talk and 2) I was not the focus of these talks. Now it was different. I had no option now but to sit silently and listen 'with a patient shrug, for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.'

I started noticing the Dunning-Kruger Effect only after my stroke. I have been fortunate enough to associate with plenty of very smart people throughout my life. I am not exaggerating if I say that they were rarely as proud of their intelligence as some of these people were of their of their ignorance.I began to understand why Edith Sitwell said, "I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it." I learned quickly that it was useless to argue. My best option was to fall back on Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer - "Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other."

Interesting links

Is Self-Knowledge Overrated?

Have you heard of a “happiness engineer”?

Different perspectives

I saw a program on the National Geographic Channel a couple of months back about the Ferrari factory. One guy who was working in engine assembly said that whenever he saw a Ferrari car his heart swelled with pride at the thought that he had contributed to its making. Another woman who sewed the leather upholstery said a similar thing. Would I have a similar feeling if I making hundred of the same thing everyday? I don't think so. At the very least, I would have had frequent bouts of trumspringa.

It reminded me of a couple of essays in the Organisational Behaviour book in IIMA. I don't remember the details but the idea behind the two essays was as follows.

The first was by Lee Iacocca who was in some top position in Ford at that time, probably its President. He talked about his exclusive car parking space, how excited he was every morning while coming to the office, about the plush executive dining room and the exotic fruits that are flown in from around the world for the dining pleasure of top executives. In short, he was chuffed with life.

The next essay was by a worker in the Ford assembly line. He talked about the monotony of his job, about the drug pushers in the Assembly line, about the bills that he had to pay, about the difficulties in educating his kids etc. In short, he was not thrilled about his job. The title of this piece was, 'It is the same company.'

That is why I was not convinced when I heard the statements of the workers. I won't be surprised if the workers were coached about what to say in the T.V. program in order to project a wholesome image of the company.

Careers

When I see people come on T.V. and talk excitedly about the various jobs that they are doing, I tend to ask myself if I would have liked to spend my day doing similar things and the answer would invariably be negative. For example, this type of job will bore me in no time (not the genome sequencing part - that may be interesting.) Many people remind me of the soldier in the marching band whose mother shouts out, 'There goes my boy - he is the only one in step.'

Sometime back, a classmate of mine at IIMA, Rashmi Bansal gave me her latest book I Have A Dream, It was the first book about the business world that I was reading in many years. (It is not strictly about business. It is about many entrepreneurs who work in the social sector. Anyway it is very different from the kinds of topics that I had been reading about for the past few years.) As is my wont, I frequently asked myself whether I would have liked to be in the entrepreneurs' shoes and the answer always was 'No'. I would have felt overwhelmed by the challenges that the entrepreneurs faced and would have quickly given up.

Perhaps I have got used to my slothful existence and reading whatever catches my fancy. As this song says,'Na naukri ki chinta, na roti ki fikar...' Of course I do feel sometimes that I am being an enormous burden for other people although no one has ever said so. I get out of this hole by thinking that I will not help anybody by wallowing in self-pity. As Bertie Wooster would have put the cliché, what cannot be c must be e.

I listen with a quiet smile to glowing accounts of the seduction routines that most corporates put on show for new recruits. Talks of multiplexes, shopping malls, grooming accessories etc. will be rather uninteresting and I will think that people are wasting their time on kiddish stuff. (But I will be psyched by this kid. At that age I would not have started on Enid Blyton.) Perhaps it is all an elaborate rationalisation on my part to hide my envy. Whatever it is, it works.

Actually, since I became interested in reading about evolution, I become interested in jobs connected to it or in related areas like ecology or biogeography and most other jobs seem boring in comparison. (But not if it involves squeezing through narrow gaps.) Not surprisingly, the project that caught my eye in Rashmi's book was Project Chilika for cultivating seaweeds started by a marine biologist, Dinabandu Sahoo. I was interested to learn that he was part of an international team for deliberating on the problem of ocean acidification which I had read about some months ago.

Another project that caught my eye was Super 30 because I had seen a program about it on Discovery Channel. I was also interested to read about Prof. Trilochan Sastry, who joined IIMA as a professor when I was a student there. I didn't know that he had done some remarkable things (while also running a couple of NGOs and carrying out his professorial duties).

There were many tales of struggle and deprivation in the book but none more hair-raising than the one related by Anshu Gupta of Goonj:

Given the lack of excitement in his career, Anshu was getting his 'kick' from other sources. And that story started in 1992, when he wrote a moving piece for Hindi newspaper "Saptahik Hindustan".

"I was a new journalist so I went to old Delhi to look for a story. There I see a rickshaw, and on that were the words 'Delhi police corpse carrier'. So I wrote about this man whose job was to pick up unclaimed dead bodies from the roadside."

The man received Rs.20 for every body he brought in, and a piece of white cloth. Two things he said really shook Anshu; in fact they haunted him for a long time.

The corpse carrier remarked, 'In the winter business is good, sometimes there is so much work that I can't handle it.'

And his five-year-old daughter added, 'When I feel cold, I cuddle a dead body and go to sleep'.

I kept thinking how lucky I had been at most stages of my life. I didn't have the luxuries but I never had to struggle for the necessities or the educational opportunities which cannot be said for the people among whom these entrepreneurs work. I should guard against falling into the trap of privilege blindness. John Rawls also has some points to ponder.