Truth and Pretense

Okay, I have to write this. I am overflowing with a protest feeling. It’s strange how everything* just comes together at same time sometimes and one is forced to make generalizations.

I have discovered a new psychological trait in people now-a-days. Those who cannot lie on one side of a lie-scale. Their strategy is a very strange medium strategy – that of pretense and fake words. So if you don’t care for a person, why the pretense? I am okay with people not caring about others, but I get real disutility from people who feign to care. I am just trying to put the issue in perspective. Please don’t mistake the box below for a game box. I have used it to lend some clarity to my thoughts. There is only one player – your friend who can have different feelings. ‘Inside’ refers to what she has in her heart, and ‘outside’ refers to what she portrays to you. And those are not payoffs, just convenient labels for the grids. I describe the payoffs in words below.

OUTSIDE

INSIDE	CARE	DON’T CARE
CARE	1	3
DON’T CARE	2	4

People in the grids 1 and 4 are honest people – you see on their faces what is there in the heart.

However it is grid 2 and 3 which is the pretense sort of people. These people are alluded to in Sri Guru Granth Sahib as ‘Jin man hor, mukh hor’ – (Those who are somebody at their face and somebody else inside)

3 can occur very rarely, may be as a momentary emotional blackmail wherein an individual pretends that he hardly cares while in reality he cares a lot, this deceitful façade may be to teach the other person a lesson. I can’t think why this can be a permanent strategy for somebody.

My problem however stems from people in grid 2. I have been reading a bit of psychology and about lying behavior recently. So, the theory goes that there are some perceptible indicators which can be detected in the facial expressions/body language of a person – for instance, shallow smiles not reaching the eyes using only the muscles around the mouth, propensity to lean backward as if trying to run away or talking in an unusually exaggerated manner.

Pretense comes in varying degrees. I used to have a silly landlady at my PG in the first year – she would lie wildly, you could tell at her face and worse, she would have flawless justifications for all the castles in the air she would build up. However her pretense would soothe me sometimes, probably she could lie so flawlessly sometimes that it would appear as if she really cared. Haha!

And then there are people who are bad in their pretense. You don’t have to be exceptionally clairvoyant to decipher the pretense. So sometimes, logically contradictory statements or incomplete arguments might spew out from their mouths. Their eyes would be busy watching someone or somebody at a distance, while a standard compliment or word of concern would come out of their mouths, as if after a lot of hesitation. Sometimes, lying can occur even when the person is maintaining eye contact – unusual blinking or excessive shaking /nodding of head can occur. The worse thing is when you know this fact already and are able to make out. The realization is even worse that of (Don’t care, Don’t care). When suddenly you get up one morning and find out that your apparent well-wisher is using a (Don’t care, Care) strategy, the result can be heart- breaking.

It’s a little thing really, but that surely teaches me something. Assuming my friend and I are alike in our feelings, meaning that we get similar payoffs, then reasoning symmetrically, I should always refrain from 2 if I really consider her as a friend and would not like to cause her grief. Its okay, if she doesn’t adopt the same strategy out of common knowledge assumptions – but at least I get exonerated from the guilt causing hurt to someone.

Ah! I feel nice now – probably Waheguru did this to bring me to the above conclusion, channelizing my gripe to a logical lesson. :)

*Subhashish's insightful blog post, Aleesha's recent theory (both found here: http://dyspepsia-now.blogspot.in/2013/02/skeletons-in-cupboard.html ) and most importantly, a casual remark by someone this afternoon were the triggers.

For reading more about lies and how to detect them : read http://www.wikihow.com/Detect-Lies

Eclair - The Milestone

Tuesday comes just once a week. Isn't it such a sad thing? I get to meet my darlings only once in seven days!

But I must share a milestone. Its a little story that has stayed with me for long. I am touched, overjoyed and so shaken.

My perception of the beggar kids outside Hanuman temple has been static over time - they are violent, they are hungry and they love snatching things.

The first time my friend Priyanka and I had distributed ice creams, it had been a mess. We did a rough headcount of the kids and then ordered 25 ice creams. A mad crowd of kids had gathered around the ice cream seller who was previously standing alone on the road. We introduced some order, made them form a queue for the ice cream. One by one, the ice creams started getting distributed, but then we discovered that suddenly from nowhere more kids had come in the queue and those who had taken one ice cream had hidden theirs somewhere and joined the queue again. Some complained, others resorted to violence, there were numerous little fights in the course of it. By the end of it, Priyanka and I were more exhausted preventing the duels than satiated with our little philanthropy experiment. We ended up paying for 40 ice creams instead of 25!

Another similar episode had occured later, this time over pencils than ice creams.

And so I had concluded that it wasn't their fault after all. Poverty and hunger were the causan cause. They had so little, that they craved for a little more which was still not enough to fill their tummies. And so the tendency to snatch and fight were the direct manifestations of the inherent competitive tendencies that scarcity often gives rise to.

Over time, I internalised the conclusion. I would go and play and teach, but I took a vow never to distribute anything.

This tuesday, things changed. They challenged my conclusion.

My friend Sarda had called me excitedly on Tuesday morning expressing her desire to come to Eclair. In all her enthusiasm, she told me, 'I want to give biscuits to all of them'.

I hesitated. I told her the entire story of previous experiments and left the decision to her.

The class turned out to be really fun - we made paper boats and painted. And they laughed a lot at Sarda's jokes. We clicked pictures by the roadside. There were numerous curious onlookers, eager to help.

And then, the biscuit time came. Sarda had done an approximate count probably and had gone and got a whole bag of biscuits.

We were cautious this time.

'Let's form a circle', she suggested. Indeed, its less difficult to cheat when things are distributed to circular recipients than linear ones - I guess :p - they can't get out of the circle and join it again, and are under constant gaze of each other, you see! No fights occurred. I was surprised to find them behaving like well mannered children.

Anyways, it turned out that we fell short of 6 biscuits. Six cute faces looked up to the empty bag with disappointment and resentment rather.

'Hume nahi mila' - that tall girl Sonam looked into my eyes and asserted her right to a biscuit.

"Okay, I will get 6 more biscuits" - Sarda announced and went to buy more biscuits.

To our shock, somehow scarcity cropped again. There were 6 biscuits and 7 kids. One of them had probably been playing on the side and we had missed her on the count. Or she might have pocketed her biscuit and might have come back for a second one, I thought.

I tried to convince one of the little girls - Roshni about the value of 'sharing' and how sharing doubles up the joy of having biscuits. So, I proposed, 'Why don't we open the pack of biscuits and share half with Sonam?' Her face drooped and she was hesitant to concede. 

In another moment, magic occurs. 

Deepa - the cute girl watching the little fight with her innocent but mature eyes comes forward, advances her pack of biscuits and says, "Sonam ko mera packet de do" (Sonam can take my pack my biscuits)

Generosity! Those little kids! Aww...I was so touched.
I could have never imagined those little, half clad kids practising generosity. I saw it before my eyes.

And yes, one more thing. I had taken three boxes of colours for the kids, which they used and replaced in the colour box, some shove the little crayons into my bag. I had axiomatically believed that anyways some colours would be lost - they were little kids....

Guess what? I came back to my room and counted all the colours - 36! ALL of them were there. Somehow from somewhere, as if honesty had crept into our classroom. I had never sermonised to them about honesty or the value of truth, not even any of the volunteers. 

It was a suo moto change...yeah, its a BIG milestone. I am great hopes about the future!

Eclair - new lessons :)

"Even the interaction has a value in itself, the fact that somebody came to them and thought them to be worthy to talk to, will be a memory in their lives. Even if nothing concrete comes out of it, it is a humbling experience for you and a joy forever for them". I keep on looking at her - my professor, lost in the profundity of her words, reveling in every inch of truth in them. I had gone to her with all my worries, how my efforts were not bearing fruit, how things were back to square one, how I could never get a bunch of kids enrolled in a hobby class. And there, she tells me the crux of it.

I had started Eclair with exactly same intentions but had eventually started measuring it by the result of it than the journey throughout. So if the kids were enrolled, I thought 'that' was the achievement, now I know what the achievement was - the joy of laughing together and playing together.

This Tuesday was a memorable one - its a mela outside the temple always, hordes of kids throng the footpath seeking food and alms from the devotees.

And then their didi comes - 'jal didi"! They had laughed at the strange name. Now they wait for the next Tuesday, for another round of fun and frolic and the joy of aiming darts at the dart board and playing with the huge hoola-hoo ring. Suddenly, the world becomes lighter for them and they are kids again, away from the burden of collecting coins which the devotees throw at them from a distance.

"okay - agle mangalwar ko khelenge - bye" - I bid goodbye to the energetic little class, trying hard to convince them that it was time and that I had to return. After a lot of pestering, and playing the game 'one last time', they finally heeded to my call.

"Bye" - I wave at them, "Go back to your homes now" ... I wait for them to depart.

They just stand and look at me, smiling ear to ear and conveying me a world of thoughts through their innocent eyes. Probably, they are amused. Delighted, may be. People by the roadside hardly smile at them, do they?. They've seen people moving past in a hurry all the time, failing to even acknowledge their existence by the side. They had to get themselves noticed always, by shouting, by running wildly in the middle of the road or by just coming in the way of some passers-by. And now, its a new world.

Begging has become a side vocation now, they are here to play and learn.

One of the little girls - Roshni looks at me and says, 'chankyoo'

She somehow remembered the lesson from many Tuesdays back.

"Par kyun?" - I quip.

"Aapne humare saath khela" - she says blushing. And then the rest also shout, "Chaankyoo"

I am all smiles. Its a different feeling :)

The McKinsey Moment

Like most other third years, I have been vacillating this year. The future is uncertain and my preferences are incomplete.  I have been mostly clueless about what I really want to do after this year. Not that I don’t have choices, but that I have a plethora of choices – in short, I am spoiled by choices. I can go for a Masters in Economics – in D-school or ISI or abroad at LSE, I can go for a job – there are plenty of recruiters coming through the Campus Placement Cell or I could make long term plans and plan to sit for civils or still, I could go for a PhD in an area of interest and choose to teach (I would love to do that!). To decide what I want to do next, I need to be clear about the long term plan. I wish I had constraints of some kind – that would help me eliminate choices and zero down to one or two. Well, I ought to be happy about that, you would say. Anyways, read on.

The pre placement talk made me feel as if McKinsey was looking for me. I had all the qualities they were looking for (I thought) – and better still, I liked the job profile. I have been recently entranced by the world of psychology and counseling. A little bit of practical exposure to counseling (and success at it!) made me feel as if I really liked solving problems. So, McKinsey I thought would be the same. Just the way I counsel a friend who is all forlorn and gloomy and make her see her own strengths and weaknesses, I would be here, consulting big companies who would approach McK with all their financial, organizational blues. Relationship problems would have similarities with financial problems, I presumed and the approach adopted to counsel the client would have some resemblance. Also, the profile of a Business Analyst would give me both – hands on experience in practical economics as well as that in practical psychology, since they mentioned in the talk how ‘inter-personal skills’ were crucial to the life of a BA.

The initial process was smooth, I got through the CV shortlisting round and was called for interview. I also got a taste of luxury through one trip to the McK office in Gurgaon for the case interview workshop. It was a different world – a secret world where crack teams were assigned sealed cabins to brainstorm and reach solutions to real life cases. (I was more wonderstruck by the slew of jhuggis in the plot adjoining the gargantuan building, where construction work was in progress and dark, nude kids roamed around in piles of sand in the morning sunlight – construction sites never fail to evade me…anyways) A walk inside the huge, green office with the spacious gym and soothing lawns made me fall in love with it.

The interview was scheduled for 8^th October and I was diagnosed positive for dengue. I sent a mail to the Recruitment Officer describing my circumstances.  I got an instant reply and then a personal call from her side. My dad attended the call and I could hear the female voice telling him – ‘Please let her rest and let her know that we would take her interview later, only once she recuperates completely.’ I was even more touched and became more determined. I had once more reason to go for the job – they valued the quality of lives of not only their employees but even prospective employees! So, profile, office, and people. I now had three reasons to seriously consider aiming for it.

Its November now and I have recovered from dengue. I was called for interview with McKinsey and Co. on 8^th of this month. I didn’t really prepare hard for the case interviews, apart from watching some Victor Cheng videos and reading his long email tips. Somehow, the idea of ‘preparing’ for the interview vexes me. All through the Victor Cheng videos, I felt as if he was trying to train people to a certain way of thinking. People who are really desperate about it supposedly go through his LOMS program multiple times just to start thinking like a consultant. It then becomes a drill, you walk through the framework, let the client see the state of things and then synthesise and conclude. Probably it suits them, but I would rather prefer a job where I don’t have to change myself for the job – I would like a job which suits my way of thinking. Not that I have a better way of thinking – in fact, I discovered how chaotic my initial attempts at solving cases were. They got more structured and clear over time with a bit of practice. It helps if you can calculate with clerical accuracy and speed and handle astronomical calculations of client turnovers and profits. Overall, I discovered on the way till 8^th of this month that a considerable chunk of my skills were disjunct from the skills they were looking for and that I would have to institute real changes in my ways of thinking about issues and yes, that I wasn’t that comfortable with exponential number crunching. They look for people who have an appetite to handle ‘ambiguity’ they say – so missing data, ballpark calculations and uncertain results were part of the lives of consultants. I also discovered I would have to overcome my level of ambiguity aversion till the 8^th.

The D-Day and the H-Hour came. And went.

I am a bit less uncertain about future now. Guess what?

I have decided I am not going for it.

The two rounds of interviews with the Engagement Managers made me conclude two things about myself:

One, I don’t really ‘love’ solving cases – they are interesting, I can handle them with ease, I can think about things logically and rationally, but I don’t really enjoy doing them over and over again.

Two, the most interesting part of the interview was the personal part.

I was asked about the ‘self-driven’ study I had done with regard to RSBY (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana) in the summer (as my CV put it) – I could go on and on about it, in the interview. I started with the story – of how the DG Labour Welfare had delivered a talk in college about the construct and design of RSBY and how I was amazed with the whole idea of health insurance for the poor via smart cards and how I had then gone to the office of the DG at Jaisalmer House and got encouraged to conduct an independent assessment. The enumeration team, the interviews with migrant laborers, the travails to the far ends of my city – I described each and every aspect. For a moment, I was transported back to the summer with my peers – Harshpreet, Ganga and Gurbachan veer. I found I gleaned more joy out of those scooter rides to empanelled hospitals than the Innova ride to the McK office.

I had to wait for long at the office on the D-Day after the Problem Solving Test (PST) for my case interviews. One was in person, and another was via video conferencing. I could rant about the waiting time – how I had to spend one and a half hour in a posh steel and wooden chamber with modern art paintings on the wall, but in retrospection, I think it was ‘reflection time’ for me. I didn’t like the silence that hung in the corridors, it was as if all conversation happened behind closed doors, in confidential cabins. I didn’t like the luxury of the world here. Something strangulated me, as I longed to get out and fly in my world. Something told me, we were just not meant for each other.

And there I am. Much tranquil and calm. I have one less choice now. I am nearing my focus. I would probably try considering civil services (something I started abhorring after I spent a day in the office of a District Collector) – if I could design and implement such ambitious schemes like RSBY, the way Anil Swarup did, I would give everything else for it. For now I see, the civil services are also about problem solving – just that the context is different. The paycheque is smaller and the world is a bit more humble and a bit lackluster.

But I am still not sure about the civil thing – please don’t ask me the next time you bump into me, ‘how’s the prep going?’ I just added it in my preference spectrum.

I like this ambiguity of life, I guess. Each day life unfolds itself to you and you discover new things about your own self. I will always remain grateful to McKinsey for providing me some of its silent consultancy services in the waiting room and during the case interviews, about the case of my life’s career and that too for free!

Hey Reader, 

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www.eurekawow.com

PREFACE

If you think the paper ‘Economic History of India’ in the course of the Economics Honors is a monster, something that an innocent economics lover has to grapple with, day in and day out in his sophomore year, and that things could be made much simpler, then you are the person this book has been written for.

We have consolidated, crystallized, summarized and organized the material to be read in a friendly format. The book will provide a heavenly respite from the spiral reading and in some probability act as a perfect substitute to the reading, as far as the examination is concerned.

The authors are third year students (rolling in the annual mode) who went through the ordeal of the paper and felt an empathy deficit in the system when the market would have no worthwhile help books or notes for the students. This is a humble attempt to share our knowledge that we gained over the entire year and the notes that we individually made for our personal reference.

However history lovers are strictly warned against the shallowness of the text. Probably you could search for some extra references on Indian Economic History in the library for strengthening your knowledge and then get back to us for helping write the successive editions of this book.

How to Study? 

1. It is advisable to read the prescribed reading to get a feel of the time period which has been described. 

2. Then check out the corresponding chapter in your EurekaWow help book and go through thoroughly. You will find that the chapter in many places may be a repetition of the original reading but that it very elegantly puts paras and paras of useless babbling in the text in perspective and arranges them in neat paragraphs. 

Since most economics students are not adept at the art of writing long digressive answers, we offer you enough material to remember for writing your final answer in the exam. Since the material is structured, you would be able to have the twin qualities of length and structure in your answer! 

A word of advice - shh…please don’t tell anyone

Logically thinking, that appears true since any sensible individual would get tired of reading sheets after sheets of cursive writing blurting out the same thing. The trick here to score is – product differentiation. Make your answer different from a clichéd one. Write the same material, don’t digress much, but write it in a manner which pleases the eyes of examiners. Leave enough spacing, margins at the corners, give a lot of sub headings, try making little flow charts here and there just to put your point across and be sure to extract a decent score for each answer 

P.S. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors. All errors are our own. 

Sincerely, 

GP, JK, DB

Of life, onions and novels

Now I know why people write novels. That’s because little stories are unfolding around us practically all the times. The past few months have been quite a revelation for me. Characters, natures, dispositions somehow came to the forefront and I discovered how every being around had his/her own way of dealing with things. Of course, that is not something new. The fact about the diversity of human natures has always been known.

Probably it’s a part of growing up. Monali – my roommate, has been my tutor in this regard during the last year – I have to some extent learnt over this year how one should read between lines, see beyond the surface and learn to look at the real intentions of people around. Not all that is said in this world is true and not all that is promised is necessarily kept. In the end, probably simpletons can find it very tough. You have to be vigilant and diplomatic lest you are duped. In fact, the name of this blog was inspired from that very thought long time back – the fact that all of us are nothing but human onions but probably for a while I found exceptions to the quote and sidelined it. But now I am convinced.

Right now, I feel as if I am living in the world of a novelist. Umpteen little stories are unfolding around, not without a reason. Things I couldn’t have dreamt about are transpiring and there are another umpteen stories which are making sense to me now, stories that unfolded way back. Probably that’s why people write novels. Actually what they are actually writing is nothing but an autobiography but just wrapping and packaging it as fictionalized accounts. Those little real stories which transpire are just tinkered a bit, bits and pieces of fiction are then injected and then the novelist simply threads them all into one big account in a single volume. Isn’t it strange, the novelist then signs the novel as ‘his’ creation, whereas his creation is nothing but a replica or a microcosm of the Real creation.

Some time back, I stopped reading fiction because I actually felt that I had outgrown it. It irritated me when the novel would come to an end and I would jump back into reality suddenly. I would get the same feeling in a movie hall at the end of three hours. The immersion into the reel world would abruptly come to an end and leave me dejected. Every time it was like receiving a hard blow on the face in the end – after all, all that was mere fiction – a lie.

My views have changed a bit now. There are elements of truth in that big lie. Even the lie is not unadulterated!  And probably that’s why I have decided I’m gonna write short stories, touching ones. The soul of the stories would be the same as I witnessed in the real world but the names of characters and places would be fabricated. This is because my characters would then be living persons and so that my perceptions would not in any way cause any harm to them. But the lesson would be intact. And I’m surely going to share those stories, in the near future some time. 

On Attaining Equilibrium

I found something! Amazingly beautiful. Probably you already discovered it long time back, but my moment of discovery came just now and I have been ecstatic since ….hmm, not ecstatic exactly because that would contradict the essence of my discovery…but certainly elated.

I have seen two of my professors remaining at an unusual calm with themselves and yeah, they spread it around – that slowness in their voice, that peace in their words, that stability in their lectures. I find it contagious – I find myself unconsciously revising their notes at the same pace as they were taught by them in the classroom.

It struck me one day while writing my diary, that the word ‘sehaj’ in my language could describe it all – that stability and stillness. But an all capturing English word for that – I groped for the right word.

It had the same meanings as ‘thehraao’ – you would have noticed distinguished classical music singers – when they would take the alaap at a fast pace, although it would be a flurry of notes, but each one of the sur would come with clarity and with a certain stability in itself.

And then, I am reminded of the example that my dad always gives me when my mood is upset and I would nudge him by his side. ‘You see that toy – ‘Hit Me’, you hit it and it rocks from one side to the other. The harder you hit, the longer it rocks and then after a while the oscillations become smaller and smaller until it comes to rest again. So are we human beings, little ‘HitMe’s. Trials and tribulations of life hit us and then we rock from side to side, sometimes for days and weeks and months until we finally discover our core and come to rest.’

The other day while reading Sukhmani Sahib from an English translation – I found the word. Guess what?

Equilibrium.

The word would be so common and close to my life – I had not expected.

The discovery has given me a new perspective of all the equilibria I study in my course. The fact that someone could be at an equilibrium with oneself is just so captive for me.

I have seen myself going through periods of volatile moods and emotions – just ecstatic one moment and inexplicably sad, the other. At the end of the day, I find it a zero-sum game as if the sadness simply eclipsed and canceled the happiness of the morning. What is the use, I ask – of such ephemeral joys and sorrows?

So I took a decision – I vowed to myself. As far as possible, I am going to maintain an equilibrium with myself. Basking in joy should not make me forget the transitoriness of it, right? Similarly for difficult moments.

I have been doing 'Sehaj Paath' since school time and now I have realized the real meaning of it. Attaining sehaj that is, equilibrium.

I have a nice time now, doing the 'Equilibrium Paath' every night before going to bed and true, it stabilizes me!