THROWING WATER TO SAVE ELECTRICITY: A REFLEXION ON OUR VALUE SYSTEM

November 2012

This morning when I was filling the kettle with tap water my attention got momentarily diverted and I overfilled it right up to the top. Obviously, I was not going to waste electricity to boil all that water, I only needed two cups of tea.   I just poured the excess water in the sink.

 I saved electricity but I wasted water and the reason I chose one over the other was based purely on the economy. We have meters for both but the cost of electricity is more than water.  If usefulness is any arbiter, the water should be more precious. Knowing and appreciating this does not make any difference because ultimately everything is being determined now on the basis of economy. If it brings money or saves money it must be good and worthy of preferential treatment.

Look at the City in London. The workers here are the most highly paid. They are bankers, financiers, investment brokers, fund managers and likes. They move and manage money that other people earn. They do not grow anything, they do not manufacture anything and are not part of the service industry either. One can live whole of one’s life without ever needing there help when push comes to shove. The worth of a business now a days does not depend on its real material worth but on the whims of the City. The value of shares will not fluctuate that much causing insecurity and havoc if it was not for the compulsive gambling habits of the city. But hey, they make money for their shareholders and the government.  Therefore, they are paid on average more than any other group and the government treats them with kid gloves.

Well, a good teacher is paid much less than even a third class footballer and a government that talks about moral obligations actively supports purest form of gambling by endorsing National Lottery. Why? Because they make more money.

As Thomas Paine said  “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”  The question is who decides the price?

Well I have no right to blame others as I am doing the same, judging everything in just pure economic terms: throwing water and saving electricity!

AUTUMN, GARDEN AND FRIENDS

Autumn is now here in its full glory. Our garden is about to go for a long winter sleep but before that it is having a last ball. It is like having a big laughter at the end of a party.

Walking this morning in the garden, I noticed these two trees in one corner of the garden. The amazing contrast of colours: deep dark green of the Leylandii on left and the bright flaming vermilion of the Philadelphus on right. The leaves from the Philadelphus were falling slowly gliding down on the grass below like confetti. When the sun finally came, the falling red-yellow leaves looked like floating candles.

Just in another few weeks, all the leaves will be gone and the Philadelphus will be standing there naked looking desolate. The Leylandii on the other hand will stay the same as it is now with all its majesty refuting the mighty winter.

Of course, in midsummer the Philadelphus will look very glamorous with shiny green leaves and fragrant delicate white flowers, like a girl in a bridal dress. The conifer though will not be phased by this display and will remain stithpragya (according to Geeta, being StithPragya is the ideal state for a person to be when one is neither affected by happiness nor sorrows) *

The Philadelphus has to pay the price for its vanity. It exhausts all its energy on flowering and fruiting, nothing left to maintain itself in the bleak winter months.

I am anthropomorphising, but you easily see the reflection of the  two types of friends, we all have. One like the conifer tree; dependable, always available, neither to indulge in nor affected by gossip mongering. Other like the Philadelphus, moody and variable; sometimes looking beautiful, gay, fun to be with, at other times sad, jealous and frankly a pain in the proverbial ***, not dependable at all. 

However, I would not like to part with either of them. How monotonous and sad the garden will be with just one kind of plants!

* Bhagavad-geeta,  Chapter 2, verse 55.

UTILITY OF OLYMPIC GAMES: A TONGUE IN CHEEK VIEW

The Olympic season has come and gone. Team GB got loads of medals, we all felt elated and good for a short while. The country is a bit quieter now. London has retuned back to normalcy. 

The politicians and the sports personalities justified the humongous cost of about 11 billion pounds by declaring that the country would get great health and economic benefits from it. Did it? Apart from providing a great entertainment at a massive cost, I do not think Olympics did or will do any good for the populace at large. Yes, some benefitted, namely, the athletes, their coaches, their managers, some sponsoring businesses and of course a few politicians.  Improvement of physical and economical health of the whole country?  Certainly not. 

Olympic type games do not provide much benefit to health. The professional Olympic athletes are not a good role model for that.  Throwing of heavy balls or lifting heavyweight 10 to 12 hrs a day is really not good for the body. The human joints and muscles are not meant for constant running, jumping and bending your body for all your waking hours. This is obvious by the high incidence of joint and muscle injuries to these professional athletes.

 Sports and games for an hour or two as a form of physical exercise are certainly good for the health.  The money should have been better spent on large number of small projects in schools and communities to achieve that rather than on Olympics.

There was a time hundreds of years ago when running faster than anyone else or throwing things farther than anyone else was useful to society (mainly for war or hunting). If one could lift very heavy objects, he would be in demand to bring big rocks for building works or for transporting kings & queens on palanquins, but now machines are much better for these jobs. Similarly, an excellent javelin thrower would have been a great asset in a war or a hunt.  But in this day and age what use is there for the best runner or swimmer apart from providing entertainment.  Even as an entertainment it is not good enough to economically support itself without taxpayer's help.

The skills which are honoured in Olympic games are of no use to the modern society. It is a hangover from the ancient days and glamorized by the vested interest groups. Why not instead, glorify and honour the skills, which really matter to the society now? Why not celebrate the best teacher, the best engineer, the best social worker, the best doctor, the best nurse, the best author etc? Yes, we do bestow  a few prizes such as Nobel, Pulitzer etc. But they are celebrated at nowhere near the same scale as Olympics.

To improve the general health of the populace and make better future citizens there must be better ways to spend 11 billion pounds than on these obsolete archaic pursuits.

Cloud Busting : Feeling Of Dominance And Happiness

                                    Cloud Busting by Kate Bush

Yesterday it was a beautiful sunny day. The garden was looking nice with green lawn and vibrant colours in the boarder. I put the lounger under the apple tree and settled there with a book. In Manchester, it is not often that you get a clear blue sky. I put the book down and just looked up at this vast blue canopy. A few small white clouds were wandering around. 

I was suddenly transported back in time. I remembered lying on the roof of our house in Bachari, a small village in India with my cousin brother who was about the same age as me. We selected a small white cloud in the sky and stared at it with all the concentration we could muster at that age. Hey presto! The cloud started to disintegrate and completely disappeared. We felt very powerful and very happy. After we discovered this, anytime we saw a cloud in the sky we would try to banish it. It only worked on the smaller ones but still we felt like superman.

I tried it again on this Manchester cloud. It still worked. I know the clouds form and disappear on their own accord, without any help or hindrance from me but still it made me smile. 

Human desire to dominate and feel powerful is very strong. When it is fulfilled, one feels happy.  Desire to dominate is reminiscent of the greatest evolutionary process of dominance of one species over another. Triggering of happiness switch in the brain when one feels powerful is probably a necessary evolutionary tool.

This on occasions where desire to dominate is too strong and the resultant feeling of happiness is too great, can become a vicious circle.  This is what produces bullies, tyrants and despots.

On the other hand it can be a virtuous circle when feeling of happiness comes from dominating by legitimate means in one’s chosen field of science, arts or sports. This is what makes the Nobel laureate, great artists and sporting legends.

In majority of people including me, it just produces a circle, neither vicious nor virtuous. That explains why I am not a warlord or a Nobel laureate. 

The power to vanish the cloud made me just happy enough to try staring on the next piece of cloud rather than try my power on my better half who was calling me from the kitchen.

                                

SPORTS AND BIG MONEY: AN UNHOLY BUT NECESSARY ALLIANCE?

Yesterday evening, we watched the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic from the comfort of the sofa in our sitting room. It was spectacular, much more than what I was expecting. It depicted the evolution of the country from an idyllic agrarian society to rich but ugly industrial giant and finally to a modern computer savvy, compassionate social democracy. Danny Boyle and his team did this with hilarious comedy of Mr. Bean, punk of the bucket drums and playfulness of Her Majesty the Queen.  Laughter, glamour and controlled chaos.  

 Of course, it was not a lesion in history, or a commentary on the politico-economic status of Britain. It celebrated the achievements of the country without triumphalism and carefully kept off the painful and risqué subjects. It tacitly celebrated the golden jubilee of James Bond Films and the first hit song of the Beetles by giving due spaces to Daniel Craig and Sir Paul.

The lighting of the Olympic cauldron was very impressive with unexpected composition and filled to the brim with symbolisms: one petal for each participating country and passing of the standard to the younger generation. 

Did you notice that the big multinational sponsors were conspicuous by their absence? Probably it was arranged to appear so at the last minute in the face of quite strong adverse public reaction to McDonald's and Coca-Cola sponsoring the Olympics. 

Olympic Games celebrate the excellence of the physical capability of the human species and promote freedom and justice through the code of fair play.  Certainly many multinationals do not actively practice either of these ideals in their single-minded pursuit to increase their wealth. 

No one can justify promoting these companies through Olympic Games but and this is a big but, where else can you get the money to make the Olympics so full of glamour and glitter? We have made the sports so expensive that we cannot pay for them without using our begging bowls to get money to subsidise the tickets. 

I saw a documentary on BBC a few months ago about some East Europeans using their children to beg on the streets of London. They used that money to build big houses and buy new cars back home. I, similar to most of the Britons was very angry and upset. We wanted our government to stop this practice and prosecute these people.

Are we any different while using the unscrupulous money to subsidise our luxuries?   We have probably become so used to our luxuries that we are doomed forever to this unholy alliance of sports and big money.

Moral & Legal Bankruptcy in the Business of Healing

Mr Mann develops pain in his abdomen in the night. He waits till morning. The pain is almost gone but he and his wife remain worried. Now consider the following three scenarios

  Scenario one:  He goes to a surgeon Dr. A.

Even though there is no evidence, the surgeon tells him that he has got appendicitis and if he does not get operated right now, he would die. The surgeon does an urgent operation under general anaesthesia for a very fat fee. He removes the appendix which is of course completely normal. Mr Mann stays in nursing home for a week and after the stiches are out he is allowed to go home after paying a large bill to the nursing home.

    Scenario two: He goes to another surgeon Dr B.

DR.B again does not find any evidence of any serious disease but tells the patient more or less the same things and arranges for an urgent surgery. When the patient is asleep under anaesthesia the surgeon just makes a shallow cut in the skin and then stitches  the skin back. He charges about the same amount of fee. Patient goes home same day.

    Scenario three: The wife is a devotee of a well-known Baba swami. She insisted on consulting him first.

The Baba is very busy but he agrees to see them in the evening. By the time he sees them the patient is fine but Baba plays on the couple’s worry and arranges to remove his appendix by spiritual surgery.  In a room with strong smell of burning incense and in total darkness with chanting of some mantras Baba Swami pretends to remove the burst appendix. In the morning a disciple of Baba advises the couple that before going home they should pay their respect to Baba Swami by donating a kilo of gold in his benefit fund.  

Legally Dr. A can defend himself well. He made an error of judgement but he did what he said will do and got his fee.

Dr. B and Baba Swami both played on the couple’s fear and gullibility. They did not remove his appendix. They did not do what they said would do. Legally they do not have a leg to stand. However some societies do believe in spiritual surgery and Baba Swami will never be called to the court.

As for value for money the patient got worst deal from surgeon A. He did a quite invasive surgery on the patient. Patient had more pain, loss of more working days from his treatment than the other two treatments. He could have got serious complications from his unnecessary surgery and in future he might get further problems.

Dr B. certainly did not do much harm, made only a scar in tummy. But in future this may prove very dangerous for Mr. Mann if he really develops appendicitis. The doctors will not consider appendicitis if he has a history of appendix operation in past with a scar in the right place.

It seems Baba Swami has done least harm to Mr. Mann. Or has he? In future if Mr. Mann or any of his family members really develops a serious medical problem, he may prefer to go to Baba rather than seek medical help. But again with doctors like A & B, Baba Swami may be a better option!

Morally all three are despicable. But if Baba Swami really and insanely believes that he could remove the appendix by spiritual surgery then he is only guilty of greed. Moreover if he denies any knowledge or has not given implicit consent to his disciple’s demand, he can be exonerated of even greed. That is the plea most of the Baba-swamis of this world make and get away both legally and morally. 

After considering these scenarios can you decide who among these three lowlifes is the lowest? 

Live In Present: Ramblings on its cogency

 “Live in present” is the message we are bombarded with all the time.  It sounds rational. Past is already gone, you cannot change it. Who has seen the future? Anything could happen, not under your control at all.

But I wonder, what is present? It is normally conceived almost as a real and tangible period between the past and the future. But how long it is: an hour, a day, a year?  A nanosecond before is past and a nanosecond in front is future.   As Einstein put it “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion".

I think no one can live in present or past. We are fabricated to live in future. Whether it is a blessing or a curse depends on our viewpoint. We are always thinking/planning what to do next. It may be the next second or the next year but all our waking time we are going to do something. I am writing this piece now but is it in present? Before I type the word on the keyboard the brain/mind has to think ahead as to what I would be doing next. Take another example cooking a dinner. One is always planning what to do next, cut the vegetables, put the cooker on , pour the oil in the pan and so on. Not just these mundane chores but even building a nation or executing a war is done on what next basis. What we call present is actually immediate future. People then quantify the length of future time that is assigned as present according to their own preconceptions. And now it becomes even more interesting because preconception is nothing but past. So past determines the bit of future which we call present.

Does it mean then that future and present both are predetermined? No, it does not have to be because luckily, past itself is not certain in our universe even though it has already passed. This seems completely bonkers but such is the world of quantum physics.

At the moment the best rational explanation of the intricacies of our universe is by the model which incorporates quantum theory. Although I have serious problem in understanding it, I have to take the words of Professor Stephen W. Hawking: “Quantum physics --------------- leads us to accept a new form of determinism: Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty” (Grand Design, 2010).

Present Time by Antony Gormley
1986 - 1989

As the past is not fixed we are free to try to make our future and hence our present as best as we can. And this is I think what represents “live in present”.

What a tortuous way to appreciate the obvious! 

TO WEED OR NOT TO WEED: THE ETERNAL HORTICULTURAL DILEMMA

If Shakespeare was a gardener he would have said “To weed, or not to weed, that is the question.”  Every time I go in my garden, I try to evade this eternal horticultural dilemma. 

 We just cleaned and weeded our small garden last month after the long winter hibernation. I purposely left some weeds, which were flowering. I could not will myself to pull them out, not with their lovely blue flowers. Besides, at that time of the year there were not that many “non weed flowers “in the garden.

After all what is a weed? Shakespeare refers to such plants as lacking “both beauty and utility.” According to The Oxford dictionary, weed is “a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants”.  This provides me with a loophole.  No plant as such is a weed, only when one is not wanted, cherished or loved then it becomes a weed*. Moreover, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  A plant deemed to have no utility just shows our ignorance. So many things science has yet to discover. Indeed, there is a famous quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson the eminent American essayist, poet, and philosopher “What is a weed?  A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” (Fortune of the Republic, 1878). 

Another thing derogatorily said about the weeds is that they grow abundantly and encroach on the other desired plants in spite of  incessant human assault. I think it only proves that Mother Nature really loves them. In the war between Weed and Man, Nature favours the Weed! We detest these plants because they do not do as we command them and they are winners.

The cutest quote about weeds was by Janice Maeditere** “Weeds are nature's graffiti”. Well some graffiti are work of art!

Of course, this entire dissertation was to justify to my better half as to why I left most of the weeds in my side of the garden! Well I tried, didn’t I?

* A parallel with child rearing here!

**  I do not know who is Janice Maeditere. Even Google could not tell me, though her quote is sited profusely by the search engine!

24/7 SOCIETY: REAL NEED OR JUSTIFICATION OF TECHNOLOGY

I do not know about you but to me it appears that lately every profession has become busier and to do your job to the satisfaction of your peers you need more than 24 hrs in the day.  With the advent of smart mobile phones and internet, every person seems to be intractably connected to the workplace all their waking hours. Every job nowadays seems to be 24/7.

Before the mobile phones and internet took over the whole world, only hospitals, police and fire services were really required to provide a service all the time.  To this list, you might add a few key personnel for example the president of USA!

But now even the banks and universities are providing a 24/7 service! Moreover, to add insult to injury you can buy the extra virgin olive oil in your local supermarket in the dead of the night.

Does the society need it or technology has created the need to justify its existence?  This is not a new question. It is as old as humanity itself or at least since the human mind became aware enough to ask a question and ponder.

 Do you really need a fire or a wheel?  

I think technology becomes a real need out of fear that others will use it to exploit us.  This inherent flaw in human nature to exploit others is the catalyst that metamorphoses  a novel technology into an indispensible  need. 

FLIPPING A COIN: PROBABILITY AND DECISION MAKING

February 2012

  When you toss a coin there is a 50% chance that you will get the winning side up, may it be the head or tail. By the law of probability, you should get lucky half the time. Why is it then, when I toss a coin I always seem to get the wrong side up? I choose the side with very careful consideration but at the final moment, the coin decides to turn the other cheek. In a civilized society, turning the other cheek should quell any violent thoughts but this time it elicits the exactly opposite response. I feel like killing the coin.

 Two very fundamental questions arise here. Firstly, how does the coin know what side I have chosen?  Secondly, why it then decides to hide the very side I so fervently desire? Ok, it does not happen all the time, but it does seem like that.

 Surely I can predict correctly if I compute all the factors involved here, such as the magnitude of tossing force, the comparative mass of the top and bottom halves of the coin, the temperature, humidity and velocity of surrounding air particles, the earth’s gravitational and magnetic field forces, the precise angle of the coin at the start of the toss, the direction, height and distance travelled by the coin. Oh, should I take in to account the relative positions of Moon, Sun and other massive stellar bodies? Will the train running about half a kilometre away affect the result? What about the baby, crying next door?  I give up. One can never have absolutely all the information. 

  

  As you have guessed, the flipping of coin is just a metaphor for myriads of decisions we have to take every day consciously and unconsciously without having all the information. We make a guess sometimes half educated, mostly uneducated and hope for the best, the so-called intuitive choice. The law of probability rules our universe. This is also not absolutely certain but is the most probable truth.

  “One can never have absolutely all the information” does not give a licence to make a decision without any information. Even before you make a choice on coin flipping, do check if the two sides of the coin are different. Making a decision without taking into account the available information is morally wrong even if the outcome turns out to be right. Rationality is what makes us a sane human being. Gambling without compunction is for complete idiots or tyrannical dictators.

                                     CLICK ON THE COIN TO FLIP

RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGE V/S DUTY AND FAVOUR: DEGRADATION OF CIVIC SOCIETY

I had surgery on my left elbow a few days ago. I was not asleep for the surgery; just my whole left arm was anaesthetised by injecting drugs around the nerves in the armpit.  The surgeon and all the staff were nice and very helpful. At the end of the surgery, one of the nurses telephoned my wife who came and brought me home. This was a government hospital and I did not have to pay for the treatment. 

I just thought how different it would have been if I were in India. Even in a private hospital, one would have needed some extra favour from a minister or a senior civil servant to get half the care.

I am one of those people who feel awkward receiving extra privilege. It does not mean I do not like it or I do not appreciate it. Is this dichotomy peculiar to me or is it quite common? Or bluntly put, am I a hypocrite? To some people the feeling of entitlement to privilege comes naturally, just like breathing, and just like breathing, it does become essential to their existence. I know a colleague of mine who will always look for someone in authority who knows him at the airport even if the check-in counter is not very busy. I on the other hand will not like to jump the queue unless, and here is the hypocrite bit, the queue is chaotic and/or the person behind the counter is a complete dork.  Getting a good service from an airline, if you have paid your dues, is your right. There should not be a need to use someone’s favour to get what is yours by right. I feel similar principle should apply in any other civil environment.

There is another evolutionary reason for not using favours. The people who use privilege are usually influential in society. If they use their rights instead of privilege, the whole institutional machinery will improve and all the members of the society will benefit. On the other hand, if they use their privilege to get what the institute should provide them as its duty, the whole system is gradually downgraded to the detriment of the whole society.  If people use their privilege where they should use their rights, the institutions learn not to provide the services as their duty but as a favour and then because of this shift people need to use privilege more often.  It becomes a viscous circle.

The word privilege is derived from Latin privilegium; from privus meaning private and leg meaning law. In a feudal society may be, but in a democratic society there should be no need for it.

 I do avail and provide privileges. However when I have to do it for something which one should get it by right, I do feel a bit diminished.