Category: general

Can any work be meaningful?

That’s a tough one. But I will try to answer. Let me share some context to why I am even attempting to do so.

At CoreVoice, we have recently started to ask CVlians (people who work at CoreVoice) to reflect on culture level observations about the company. We do that in weekly one-on-ones. One of the questions on which we want every CVlian to reflect / rate their feeling is:

How meaningful I found the work to be – overall (whatever I spent time on since the last 1:1)

A particular CVlian I was having our 1:1 with, shared something interesting. He said he has learnt not to ascribe meaning to anything. So this question doesn’t really mean much from his POV. Yet he wanted to understand what my take on something being labeled ‘meaningful’ was. I shared my thoughts with him. This blog is a summary of that + some more reflection.

There was definitely a phase in my college life (2002 to 2008 – IIT Madras) when I thought a lot about why we continue to live – what is the point? And I will be honest. Till date, I don’t think I have found out any specific point to life. You, me – all of us – we can choose to die today. The world will exist. It will carry on.

But given that for some reason or the other, the majority of us choose to live, day after another – I believe that this decision – to not put a plug to our lives, makes us want certain things – feeling valued, self-worth, love, excitement, joy, sense of having achieved something, sense of having played a positive and ‘meaningful’ role in someone else’s life etc.

Each of these needs & desires that we carry, means something to us – even when in the bigger scheme of things, why does any of it matter? It doesn’t – but, only when we truly exit the game. And since most of us don’t, I think ultimately, below is all that we really need from life (when we choose to accept its meaninglessness and continue to live):

• control – a sense of freedom and freewill in what we choose to do / how we choose to live our life / on what terms etc.
• material – the feeling of having as much money as may be needed any day for anything (in a way this is another way of feeling in control – but mentioning it specifically because in our present society its use-case is extremely well understood)
• excitement and joy – in what we do / how we spend a day
• social energy from others – it could be in the form of love, or respect or compliments – all those things
• contribution – a feeling that we made someone else’s life better / created something and put it out there

May be I am missing out on few points – but these are what come to my mind. When I started my consulting job, I could put a check box on material, excitement+joy and social energy, but I was unsure about my contribution. I also didn’t like the fact that the job had chosen me (via campus placement) and it was not something that I necessarily went after (say after considering many options). In short, I didn’t feel I had controlled my life.

When I took a one year sabbatical in 2012 (after four years of corporate life), I was essentially trying to feel more in control of my own life.

Even if I had to go back to the same job, the fact that I took a break to try finding what else I could do, was enough to give me that sense of control.

It’s another matter that I happened to be lucky. I figured out a way to buy myself a lot of paid time to figure out what to settle on to (which in many ways I have). The journey started when I turned into a wedding photographer (been a decade now). That decision allowed me to pick up storytelling, and gave me an opportunity to observe life and human beings from a perspective that would have simply been impossible from a corporate-job vantage point.

What was meaningful to me then, was getting clarity on what I wanted to do in this life (other than the default option that college gave me).

It’s been many years now that I have been super comfortable at being a storyteller.

In the early years of my 3MinuteStories.com (3MS) journey, I found it meaningful to get to interview different subjects and get to witness a slice of their lives (and often visit the native spaces they occupied / lived / worked).

3MS is my short video storytelling brand under which I create human interest stories from across India (and abroad).

Then something interesting happened. At some point, the idea of human-interest video-stories stopped being as meaningful to me, as it once used to. It still is delightful – don’t get me wrong – but I have become relatively detached. Let me explain.

What is the point of telling these stories? Does it really matter? As I said earlier, every time I have tried to get the ultimate reason to why anything matters at all, the answer always has been the same – it doesn’t. And yet I continue to live – finding little meanings in whatever way I can. And that’s the point I am making here.

You want to keep living? Then pick up something that matters to you the most right now and in the near term, and go do that. Live that. Be in control. Accumulate the material wealth that you think makes sense. Never do that at the expense of excitement and joy. Seek joy. Be nice and bask in the positive social energy that you will receive. Let negativity not affect you. And when you feel like, contribute. Leave the world a little better than how you saw it. Yes it wouldn’t really matter ultimately, but it may make you see some meaning in what you do, where ultimately, there is none.

Started a new series. Let me know how you like it?

PS: Link to the journal paper from which I share the insight in this video.

They have been using the pandemic for their vested political interests.

But truth can’t be suppressed.

Here are the facts.#IndiaFightsCorona pic.twitter.com/RaRJblTT4Y

— BJP (@BJP4India) May 13, 2021

Narrative 1 & 2 – Modi / Govt. didn’t see second wave coming / states were not warned.

The below news is from 08 March. But I guess Harsh Vardhan was just cracking a joke while Modi was busy warning the states! Why take Health Minister seriously?

Narrative 3 – India has the highest number of cases in the world

HOW THE FCUK IS THIS A “NARRATIVE”?

So let me rephrase what they are probably trying to say? India’s situation is worst in the world because it has the maximum cases – is a misleading “narrative”. Agree. But who the fcuk is saying that in the first place?

Btw, here’s a tweet from the Health Minister again.

As #IndiaFightsCOVID19, the total number of samples tested upto May 5 has crossed 29 crore !
More than 19 Lakh samples were tested on May 5 !@PMOIndia @MoHFW_INDIA #Unite2FightCorona #IndiaFightsBack pic.twitter.com/K5J4q3hY2E

— Dr Harsh Vardhan (@drharshvardhan) May 6, 2021

Hello sir, India has more people than Europe and North America put together. So in absolute numbers India will obviously be higher.

Why you do this narrative-giri sir?

Narrative 4 – Modi’s Bengal Rallies and Kumbh caused second wave.

The response to this is “Rahul Gandhi bhi push-ups kara raha tha”? Isn’t Modiji 10x better than Rahul Gandhi? So how does it matter what he / others were doing? You yourself are saying that Modiji was busy warning everyone that second wave was coming – then at least he should have done what he could to control it no?

Narrative 5 – Why did India export vaccine while denying it to its own people? “This is nonsense” is how you choose to start your “truth”?

Bakchodi ki koi seema nahi hai. The “truth” itself says 1 in 3 vaccines were exported! And still this is a “narrative”!

I think it’s futile to lay bare this stupid table put out by BJP! I wonder if even Bhakts will feel comfortable forwarding this to anyone! I leave it at this.

I bought my first crypto-currrency on 31 Dec 2020 (Etherium). I spent 50,000 rupees. The present value of my Etherium asset is 1.45 lakh (May 2021) and I don’t plan to sell it at all. Let me explain.

Before I begin, this post is only for those who are not sure about this Crypto thing and are wondering what the first right step should be.

If you don’t own any stock, then forget about Crypto. That would be just weird. First understand how stock markets work, enter the market – see your money grow and then think about Crypto.

You already hold stock assets? Cool, let’s talk about Crypto. I will not focus too much on short-term trading because I don’t understand that much myself. My focus is on long-term growth of your money.

Buying a crypto-currency (like Etherium or BTC) essentially means buying an asset whose price is totally dependent on supply and demand – there is no physical real-world value. But then even a 500 rupee note is exactly that, isn’t it? After all, the physical real-value of the paper on which a currency is printed is negligible.

So what’s the difference between how a 500 rupee note works and how a Crypto works?

The value of a 500 rupees note is also dependent on supply (mostly) and demand but the supply is 100% controlled by RBI – it prints those notes – nobody else can.

But crypto’s are not generated by any central bank. By way of a technological hack (blockchain), the supply of any crypto currency is fixed (or let me say – severely limited, more so for those currencies that have been around for a long time – like BTC and Etherium). And this means that if enough people keep buying crypto-currencies, the price will keep going up. If people start selling what they have, the price will go down.

Sounds similar to stocks? It is. But the difference is – at some level a stock-price is also supposedly linked with the real valuation / business-performance of the company whose stock you own. In case of crypto – it is 100% supply and demand. It’s economics at its most basic.

And in my opinion, this is all there is to know about Crypto to start buying it.

Why did I begin with Ehterium?

When I bought it, BTC had highest market-cap, Etherium was at no. 2 (am not cross-checking it, but very likely that’s the case even today). So I just went with no. 2 because:

1. it’s cheaper than no. 1, and
2. it is still safe because it’s unlikely that people will stop buying Etherium any time soon – and that means the price will keep going up, year after year. It has some solid backers (Google it).

Last week, when BTC’s price went down I bought BTC too (worth another 50k). It is worth 54k as I write this post. I don’t think I am going to invest in random cryptos – there are hundreds of them. If you have high appetite for risk, you can buy whatever you feel like. If your bet is good, you will make more money than buying Etherium or BTC. All that you need to guess right is, will the rest of the world keep buying it year after year or sell it off?

How to actually buy any of the cryptos using Indian money?

When I asked around in Dec, Wazirx and Coinswitch by Kuber were the most recommended exchanges (I have used both). You download their app, do the KYC and then deposit money from your bank account to the exchange.

Using the money deposited in the exchange, you buy whatever currency you want. That’s your crypto asset. You can keep this asset in the exchange itself (if you plan to sell soon) but like me if you don’t plan to sell any time soon, then best practice is to withdraw your asset and keep it with you. Why should you ever withdraw the asset when eventually you need the exchange to sell it and get back Indian rupees anyway?

Well, because exchanges get hacked.

An exchange-hack is very different than a bank getting robbed. When a bank gets robbed, you can still claim your money. When an exchange gets hacked, there is no way to show that it was not ‘you’ who withdrew your asset (the same technology that enables crypto, creates this issue).

So I would suggest you take out the asset from the exchange. You can keep your crypto with yourself in a device like nano ledger (looks like a pen-drive but essentially stores the unique code for each crypto transaction).

Whenever you want to sell your asset – you can transfer the asset to any exchange (using your physical device), sell the crypto in that exchange and receive the money in INR. Then you transfer the money from exchange to your bank account. As simple as that. You may have to pay Capital Gains tax.

What if the government bans Crypto?

Government can ban an exchange (another reason, you shouldn’t keep your purchased crypto in the exchange). But banning Crypto is not implementable.

For example let’s imagine you hold 1.5 lakh worth of Etherium with you and when you plan to sell it, exchanges in India stop working. What do you do?

Well, sell it in some other exchange of any country (if you have to). You will then end up owning “money” in that particular country’s currency (say if you sell it in a US exchange, you will end up owning dollars). That’s still your money though. Figure out a way to transfer those dollars to your Indian account!

There is so much money in BTC / Etherium today that if GoI stops Indian exchanges, multiple startups will flourish just to enable you to receive your foreign currency asset (be it dollars or anything) to your Indian account in INR. So ‘ban’ has zero risk per say to your money – it will only cause inconvenience and raised transaction cost perhaps.

Also, most likely, when GoI will finally realize that it cannot ban Crypto, it would rather let the exchanges run so that at least the capital gain tax flows to the Government and not gets wasted.

So yeah, this is all that I have learnt and had to share. Before I end, few cautionary words – only put that much money in buying Crypto that you don’t need now and would have used to invest in buying more stocks / MFs / gold etc. anyway.

Some people do make money by short-term buying and selling but I am too busy doing other interesting things in life to waste it on becoming mildly richer by continuous buying and selling. My post is only for those who are in it for the long run and understand that eventually the benefit of compounding pays off so much more than this whole daily-trading business.

Alright, hope this post helps you get started. The best way to learn is to put in some real money. All the best.

I grew up believing that opportunities in life – from job to everything else – should be merit-based. May be you did too. This book challenges all of that. When you do read the book, I hope you find the arguments as fascinating as I did. Let me take you through some of them.

Meritocracy or the idea / philosophy that society should allocate economic rewards according to merit is appealing for two primary reasons – efficiency and fairness. As per the meritocratic ethic, we do not deserve to be rewarded, or held back, based on factors beyond our control. So far so good. But wait a second, do you notice the contradiction? Is having (or lacking) certain talents really our own doing? And if not, is meritocracy really all that ‘fair’?

All of us will agree that our having this talent or that is not our doing. It’s just a matter of luck. We do not merit or ‘deserve‘ the benefits (or burdens) that derive from luck. But what about those of us who ‘work hard‘? Talent or luck is not everything, right? Really? Just look around at any poor person – your maid, your driver, the guy who delivers you Swiggy or Amazon. Do you really believe they don’t work as hard as you do?

For decades, meritocratic elites have believed and propagated the mantra of the “rhetoric of rising” – those who work hard and play by the rules deserve to rise as far as their talents and dreams will take them.

But the same elites often fail to notice that for those stuck at the bottom or struggling to stay afloat, the rhetoric of rising is less a promise, and more a taunt!

In the book, the author sums up the issue beautifully (an eye opener for me): the meritocratic ideal is about mobility, not equality. And that’s where the problem lies. Meritocracy does not say there is anything wrong with yawning gaps between rich and poor; it only insists that the children of the rich and the children of the poor should be able to, over time, swap places based on merits. How often does that happen though?

In reality, the explosion of inequality in recent decades has not at all quickened upward mobility! To the contrary, it has enabled those on top, to consolidate their advantages and pass on to their children. Today’s meritocracy has hardened into hereditary aristocracy.

Pandemic wealth transfer, recapped:
Richest 1%: got 35% of all wealth
Poorest half: got 4% of all wealth

And those super-rich pay a smaller tax rate than the poor and middle-class do.

This will only change if we get money out of politics.https://t.co/CYshInMXz8

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) March 22, 2021

The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality.

There is another consequence – under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate (“rhetoric of responsibility”) and deserve what we get, erodes and demoralizes those who get left behind. The principle of merit can easily take a tyrannical turn, not only when societies fail to live up to it, but also – indeed especially – when they do.

Allocating jobs and opportunists according to merit does not reduce inequality; it re-configures inequality to alight with ability. This reconfiguration creates a presumption that people get what they deserve.

The Tyranny of Merit – Michael J. Sandel

Confusing value with price

The assertion that people morally deserve whatever income a competitive free market assigns them goes back to the early days of neoclassical economics. In reality, what people earn depends less on their native abilities and more on the vagaries of supply and demand! Water is more valuable than diamond but priced at a fraction of what diamond costs.

Isn’t meeting a demand a valuable thing to do, you ask? Sure, but most of the times, the demands which the economic system operates to gratify are largely produced by the workings of the system itself.

Being good at making money measures neither our merit nor the value of our contribution.

All the successful can honestly say is that they have managed – through some unfathomable mix of genius or guile, timing or talent, luck or pluck or grim determination – to cater effectively to the jumble of wants and desires, however weighty or frivolous, that constitute consumer demand at any moment.

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Education & Meritocracy

To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future. But it’s really not an answer at all – it’s a moral judgement.

In the mid 1970s, Stanford accepted nearly 1/3rd of those who applied. In the 1980s, Harvard and Stanford admitted about one in five. In 2019, they accepted fewer than one in twenty. It is difficult to emerge from this gauntlet of stress and striving without believing that you have earned – through effort and hard work – whatever success may come your way.

But the fact remains that even the best, most inclusive educational system would be hard pressed to equip students from poor backgrounds to compete on equal terms with children from families that bestow copious amounts of attention, resources and connections.

On this topic I highly recommend you watch the new Netflix documentary on the 2019 US college admission scandal.

Back to the book. See, encouraging more people to go to college is a good thing. Making college more accessible to those of modest means is even better. But as a solution to inequality, the single-minded focus on education has a damaging side-effect – it erodes the social esteem accorded those who have not gone to college. The notion that the system rewards talent and hard work ends up encouraging the winners (wrongfully) to consider their success their own doing and in turn they start to look down upon those less fortunate than themselves.

One last thing – dumb Vs. smart

In every age, politicians and opinion makers, publicists and advertisers, reach for a language of judgement and evaluation. Such rhetoric typically draws upon evaluative contrasts: just vs. unjust, free vs. un-free, progressive vs. reactionary, strong vs. weak, open vs. closed and so on and so forth.

In recent decades, with the rise in meritocratic modes of thinking, the reigning evaluative contrast has become “smart vs. dumb”.

Everything and everybody must be smart – smart city, smart-phone, smart parents, smart students, smart thinking, smart farmers and on and on.

You are opposed to climate change? You are not smart. You are dumb. But is that always true?

If the primary source of opposition to action on climate change were lack of information or a refusal to accept science, one would expect opposition to be stronger among those with less education / scientific knowledge. It so happens that this is not the case really. Studies of public opinion show that the more people know about science, the more polarized are their views on climate change (rather than converging). What about those who oppose government action to reduce carbon emissions, not because they reject science, but because they do not trust the government to act in their interest? Meritocracy creates the illusion that everything can be split into smart vs. dumb.

Sorry for making this post so long. I appreciate your patience. Let me try to wrap it up now.

The term meritocracy was invented by a British sociologist Michael Young who wrote a book in 1958 called The Rise of Meritocracy. But for Young himself, meritocracy described a dystopia, not an ideal. In his book, he already anticipated that the toxic brew of hubris and resentment created from meritocracy would fuel a backlash. In fact he concluded his dystopian tale by predicting (all the way back in 1958) that in 2034, the less educated classes would rise up in a populist revolt against meritocratic elites. I guess his prediction came true 18 years before time (both Brexit and Trump happened in 2016)?

May be the real problem with meritocracy is not that we have failed to achieve it, but that the ideal itself is flawed.

If you learnt something useful by reading my blog, I’d appreciate if you dropped in a comment. Thanks.

Did you know that the entire sugar industry in the Americas, until the mid-nineteenth century, was based on slavery?

Slaves were acquired from Africa and transported to the Americas to be exchanged for sugar. Sugar was then exported to England (and other parts of Europe). From there, the ships would carry goods to be exchanged for slaves in Africa. And then from Africa, the slaves were transported to America (the Caribbean) to work on sugar plantations. This became known as the ‘Triangle Trade’.”

I found out about this while reading Sugar: A Global History by Andrew F. Smith. The way we consume sugar all the time, even when it’s bad for our health*, fascinates me. And that’s why I felt like digging up some history books on this topic (haven’t found any worth recommending).

Honey, by the way is a relatively healthier option compared to refined sugar. But as we all read in news this week, most brands have apparently been cheating us!

Dabur, Patanjali among 13 brands adulterating honey with sugar syrup: CSE study – Business News https://t.co/PRuzwFqDfW

— Dr Soumitra Pathare (@netshrink) December 5, 2020

Let me share one more history trivia (gathered from the same book). It’s about tea.

A random Bri-Tea-sh trivia!

During mid 17th century in England, tea was not common in houses (it was expensive). The well-to-do would visit coffee-houses to have tea there (same for coffee / chocolate). The lower classes would typically drink beer in taverns.

Only once the British East India Company began to import tea in bulk (annual imports increased from just a little over hundred thousand Kg in 1725 to almost 11 million Kg in 1800), did the price of tea fall below that of chocolate and coffee, and it became affordable for the middle class. So yeah, that’s how tea became England’s hot beverage of choice!

Now, here’s a quick question: for the not-so-well-to-do Britishers of the 18th century, what was their preferred sweetener for tea / coffee? Honey or sugar?

Right answer: Honey.

Yes, back then, honey was six to ten times cheaper than sugar!. Of course with time, the price of sugar kept falling (thanks to cheap slave labour / triangle trade) and its consumption rose from 2 kg per capita in early 1700 to 10 Kg per capita by beginning of 1800.

How much is the sugar consumption in UK today? Around 30 Kg per capita. What about India? 20. Not so sweet, right? That’s it – that was the blog.

*A quick summary of how sugar damages your health (this is not from the book; this is just basic knowledge that I have via reading, and discussions with folks from the fitness field).

Your body needs both calories and nutrients, for all the internal organs and muscles and other such things to be healthy and functional. Now technically you can consume pure sugar for calories and take all the required nutrients from different supplements but the thing with nutrients is that, there are just too many of them!

So it’s pretty much impossible to consume all that’s needed by your body, through tablets. The best and easiest and cheapest and full-proof way to supply all kinds of nutrients to your body is to just eat food that has less sugar (or carb – which gets converted to sugar) and more nutrients (vegetables > whole grain rice and wheat > maida > sugar).

When your body converts the vegetable you eat to sugar, it also ends up absorbing all the nutrients in that vegetable and you stay healthy. But when you eat just sugar, you end up providing calories to your body without nutrients. See the issue?

Even when you eat both sugar and vegetable, your body will ignore the vegetable and rather take the calories from sugar directly (nobody wants to work hard, you see). So the vegetable gets wasted. And doing this as a habit (offering the option of sugar to your body) leads you on a path of cumulative nutrient deficiency. Over time, your organs get unhealthy and you die. So yeah, in short, this is the primary way sugar fucks you up. There are other ways it harms too (by making you diabetic for example), but let that be for some other time!

Brandolini’s principle states that ‘the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than [that needed] to produce it’. But what does that have to do with vaccines? Read on!

I found this out while reading an interesting book – Calling Bullshit – by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West.

Within the field of medicine, Brandolini’s principle is exemplified by the pernicious falsehood that vaccines cause autism.

Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West – Calling Bullshit

I had to look up the meaning of pernicious by the way! 😀 It means something that is highly injurious or has destructive consequences. Lovely word – can be used to describe most of BJP’s policies! 😛

Anyway so I looked at data from USA and even when only a small percentage of the overall population seems to be definitive about vaccination causing autism in children, way many are ‘unsure’!

Look at the below graph that I created from a Gallup survey data. Only post-grads are mostly clear that vaccines don’t cause autism (longest yellow bar); next best are 18-29 year olds.

The trend is even bad – while currently 10% of U.S. adults believe vaccines cause autism in children, in 2015 only 6% used to.

The Calling Bullshit book tells us that this misinformation about vaccines persists, due in large part, to a shockingly poor 1998 study published in The Lancet by British physician Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues.

THE WAKEFIELD FRAUD

There is a whole Wiki article on this scandal if you are interested, but let me quickly share what I read about it in the book, and how it connects to the Brandolini’s principle.

Wakefield’s research team raised the possibility that a syndrome involving autism paired with inflammatory bowel disease may be associated with MMR vaccine. MMR vaccine is given to children to save them from measles and mumps etc. Btw back in June, I had mentioned the developer of the MMR vaccine in my video on ‘why vaccine for Covid-19 is taking so long‘.

Anyway, back to Wakefield’s paper in The Lancet. It galvanized the contemporary “antivax” movement, created a remarkably enduring fear of vaccines, and contributed to the resurgence of measles around the world.

After millions of dollars and countless research hours devoted to checking and rechecking the Wakefield study, today it is one of the most utterly and incontrovertibly discredited studies done in the scientific world.

• 2004 – ten co-authors of the paper formally retracted the “interpretations” section; the same year, Wakefield was found guilty of serious professional misconduct by Britain’s General Medical Council and his license to practice medicine in the UK was revoked.
• 2010 – the paper was fully retracted by The Lancet.
• 2011 – British Medical Journal editor in chief Fiona Godlee formally declared the original study to be a fraud, and argued that there must have been intent to deceive; mere incompetence could not explain the numerous issues surrounding the paper.

Wakefield eventually directed a documentary titled Vaxxed, which alleged that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was covering up safety problems surrounding vaccines. The film received a large amount of press attention and reinvigorated the vaccine scare.

Despite all the findings against Wakefield and the crushing avalanche of evidence against his hypothesis, Wakefield retains credibility with a segment of the public, and unfounded fears about a vaccine-autism link persist.

Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West – Calling Bullshit

What did this intentional misleading lead to? The US, which had nearly eliminated measles entirely, now suffers large outbreaks on an annual basis. Other diseases such as mumps and whooping cough (pertussis) are making a comeback.

So why has it been so hard to debunk the rumors of a connection between vaccines and autism?

This is Brandolini’s principle at work – explain the authors of Calling Bullshit. Researchers have to invest vastly more time to debunk Wakefield’s arguments than he did to produce them in the first place.

Alright, that’s the end of the story. What else comes to your mind when you think of Brandolini’s principle? Let me know!

I was reading a pre-history book – Early Indians by Tony Joseph – when I stumbled upon the below paragraph.

If you want to get as close as possible to the lives of the first modern humans in India, one of the best places to go to is Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh’s Raisen district, about forty-five kilometres from the state capital, Bhopal.

Tony Joseph, Early Indians

The reason I got so excited about it was that just few weeks ago, my wife and I had named one of threada.in dresses, the Bhimbetka Dress! I had never heard of Bhimbetka before!

threada (pronounced thread-aa) is her clothing brand btw. I just help her in marketing and stuff, and of course photography and illustration. Anyway, back to the caves. Below is a photograph of one of the caves at Bhimbetka (sourced from Wikipedia). How old do you think these line-drawings (technical word is petroglyph) are?

Since I have never been to this place myself, let me borrow Joseph’s description to share more about these caves and the drawings / paintings we see there.

The caves were first occupied some 100,000 years ago! Ever since, the area has never lain vacant for too long.

The paintings are not well-dated, so it is quite likely that most of them, though not all, were made within the last few thousand years, rather than many tens of thousands of years ago. But there are a few petroglyphs that could be the earliest evidence of art created by members of the Homo species anywhere in the world – a few perfect cupules (small cup-like depressions) with lines beside them.

The location itself deserves a mention too. The overall area is spread over seven hills that are full of naturally occurring rock shelters. The elevation of the hills makes it possible for the residents to keep track of who is approaching them: food or predator, nilgai or leopard!

There are perennial springs, creeks and streams filled with fish; plenty of fruits, tubers and roots; deer, boar and hare; and as many quartzite rocks as you need to make all the tools you want.

In the world of early humans, this must have been the equivalent of a much sought-after luxury resort.

Tony Joseph on Bhimbetka Caves, Early Indians

Now here’s the big question – even when we know that the caves were first occupied about 100,000 years ago, do we know exactly when the first modern humans set foot in Bhimbetka (or, for that matter, in India)?

The answer to the above question is pretty much what the book Early Indians explores. Read it if you want to (I am yet to finish it – there is a lot of info in there and I am not really a pre-history reader as such, so going slow – this is probably the first book in this genre that I have picked up).

Is there any pre-history book that you want to recommend? Do let me know! Let me end this post with an overtly dramatic 7 min History channel video on Bhimbetka (it’s in Hindi though).

I read a very interesting article in this week’s Business Standard where Abhjijit Banerjee explains what India should be doing to improve the learning outcomes of majority of its schools.

To understand what one means by learning outcomes, do watch my below short-film – you will love it and it’s super insightful. Plus, it shows how the problem can be resolved in a sustainable way.

In this blog, I am sharing six insights from the Abhijit Banerjee interview, interspersed with few related short documentary films that I have made over the last few years.

#1 – The mindset needs to shift from focusing excessively on the curriculum.

The new National Education Policy (NEP) of India acknowledges that ‘learning-gap’ is a critical problem. In many places, Grade 5 children are at Grade 2 level, but they are taught as if that doesn’t make a difference. There is an overemphasis on completing the entire curriculum.

If the child is still struggling with reading, what sense will the curriculum make?

Abhijit Banerjee

As per Banerjee, the NEP also recognizes the importance of basic skills of reading and numeracy, but they have not been made explicit enough.

Let’s forget about infrastructure investments for now – testing children on basic competencies needs more focus.

Abhijit Banerjee – Business Standard interview

On the point of testing, let me share the story of a startup that I created some time back. They focus on the right way for teachers to test whether a child has really grasped a concept (the startup calls their service ‘Thinking Classrooms’). Simple but efficient. Also, this ‘testing’ can be done in every class instead of waiting for exams to find out what the children have learnt.

#2 – There is evidence to show that enough people don’t know about the benefits of education.

This was a pretty surprising insight for me (and I guess for you too). These insights are coming from a recent large scale study done by a newly formed Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel by World Bank. Banerjee is a panel member.

The panel waded through the several hundred interventions tried around the world to improve learning outcomes and then identified the most cost-effective ones. Here’s the full report if you want to check that out. The best and most credible ‘buys’ that have been identified, can be replicated by other countries – is the hope and intention.

Only after parents understand the benefits (which many don’t), they alter their behaviour in a manner that helps improve learning outcomes for the child.

#3 – India’s Right to Education (RTE) policy doesn’t care much about ‘outcomes’

It is almost exclusively focused on the size of playgrounds, classrooms etc. – trying to dictate brick and mortar standards for the schools instead of focusing on verifiable learning outcomes.

There is another major issue with implementing a super important aspect of RTE – getting underprivileged children to access good schools. I created the below story some time back to show how some folks are trying to solve this problem by sheer persistence.

#4 – Handing out tablets, computers and other similar devices to students by Govt. is a “bad buy”

ICT (Information & Communications Tech), unless you combine it with the right pedagogical tools, is pointless – shares Banerjee. There are things ICT can help with, but in a thought-out manner. Just handing out laptops or tablets with little or no guidance will probably not yield any great strides in learning.

Five years ago, I was flown to a village in Gujarat to show how ICICI bank was helping a village digitalize (so that I could bring out the story via my 3MS). I did notice a similar problem there as far as using ‘tech’ in the village school went. Digital devices had been issued to the village school – but it all looked a bit superficial. Watch below?

Banerjee shares that one of the interventions tried in Rajasthan – MindSpark (run by a private company), has proved effective with science and math learning, where it first identifies the stage at which the child is and then uses a personalized learning journey to take them to the next level.

#5 – India has an ‘elitist mindset’ issue – one of the primary reasons why so many children are left behind

A central education minister once told me that the idea that no child should be left behind is not something he sympathies with.

Abhijit Banerjee – Business Standard interview

A few privileged kids do well but the rest fall behind. The Indian education system often destroys the confidence of children in their own abilities – claims Banerjee. This reminds me of my story on Arvind Gupta – the below film literally opens with a very similar line about schools killing some important things in children.

THE VEGETABLE SELLER EXPERIMENT

Abhijit Banerjee and team conducted a small experiment in some markets in Delhi and Kolkata among young children selling vegetables. They had shoppers buying a few vegetables from each child in varying quantities. Almost all the children reverted with the exact change, meaning they were managing to multiply, total up and subtract within a few seconds. They were doing math, doing it mentally, and almost instantaneously and perfectly.

But when similar problems were given to children in a Delhi government school (incidentally, better than most other government schools), they had a hard time solving. The moment children start thinking they have to solve a math problem, they lose their confidence.

Talking about Delhi Govt. schools – below is a story I documented few years ago to show how they have been improving, year after year. The Education Alliance – a Delhi based non-profit has played a major role behind the transformation of many Govt. schools in Delhi by making it easier for non-profits to work with government.

#6 – India can learn a lot from Vietnam

Vietnam is a stellar example of a country that’s made a lot of progress in ensuring that no child is left behind. People tend to think Vietnam is a much smaller country than India, but Vietnam is like Bihar, with a population of around 100 million. And since many of the Indian states are much smaller than Vietnam, there’s no reason why every Indian state cannot replicate Vietnam’s success.

Many of the good buys identified in the report have in fact been tried in India. Some have worked but have not been fully implemented.

For instance, it is now understood that access to schooling is not a problem for younger kids – there are private and public schools that are easily accessible in villages. But for older children, especially girls, access to high schools can be a problem. In Bihar, the government’s initiative of offering bicycles to girls helped tremendously in this regard.

So yeah, these were the six insights that I gained from reading up the interview. Hope this was useful and you learnt something new. Also, do watch at least one of the films shared here – they are nice – you will like what you see.

I follow author Puja Mehra on twitter. She has written a nice book – The Lost Decade: 2008-2018. She tweeted this recently –

1. Even those from Delhi do it. But when someone from outside Delhi does you presume there is nothing good they know about Delhi.
2. People diss to share their frustration. Not to be told where to live. Just like your tweet is mostly your feeling of annoyance.

— Vatsap? (@amritvatsa) November 15, 2020

Now some of you may instinctively agree with her line of thought. I would like you guys to hold on to your instinct and read my blog with an open mind to understand why we fall for this trap that sounds logical in our head – but is driven more from irritation than logic, and is often the starting point of migrant hatred / fear.

In short what a local ends up saying is – ‘if you have so much of problem, fuck off. Nobody asked you to move in anyway’. Before I explain the problem with this logic, let me share a nice video that I made about Chennai few years ago. A lot of response to this video (you can go read the comment section on Youtube) had a similar problem.

Many who you see speaking in the above video were born and brought up in Chennai itself (including some Tamils). We didn’t mention this fact in the video. And if you don’t watch the whole thing, it may look like (especially to a local Chennaite) that ‘outsiders’ are unnecessarily cribbing about a ‘great’ city and so you will find several comments on the same line – ‘if you have so much of problem, fuck off. Nobody asked you to move in anyway’.

Here’s the logical error with such annoyance / hatred – the presumptuous illusion of choice!

Just because someone has moved to a city does not mean they had the choice to work anywhere in India. Some may have that choice, most don’t! Other than job, many move simply because of marriage. Even data supports this. The thing is, shittiniess / awesomeness of a city is not the most important factor basis which people relocate and for a vast majority, that’s hardly a choice!

Here’s the second problem with such ‘fuck off’ responses – they attack only those who are not originally from the city. If you are from the city, then well, what can they be told – they apparently don’t have a ‘choice’ because they are ‘originally’ from the place. But like really? You can’t move out of Delhi just because you were born in the city? Ask around who have been buying houses after houses in Goa!

Such kind of complaints by locals, sugar-coated with logic, are essentially an expression of annoyance. They might fail the logic-test but they make the person bitching about outsiders complaining about ‘their’ city feel good. But hey, I have a news. That is exactly why anyone complains!

We complain (those of us who do) because complaining often releases stress.

It’s an emotional response to a situation. Of course, if all that we do is complain all the time about everything, then eventually we may get depressed and all that but it is one thing to be reminded of the negative effect of over-complaining and a totally different thing to be told to ‘not complain’ because ‘hey you have a choice’.

I will not blame Puja though. It is extremely easy to fall for this trap and use pseudo-logic to make the comment sensible in one’s head. It often originates from lack of empathy. When you have less empathy to relate to why an outsider complains about the city they have moved to, instead of viewing the situation as a ‘feeling’ response of the person, you end up viewing it as an ‘attack’ on your own identity. And when you feel attacked, you fight back. You tell them to go back to where they came from, or find some other city. The illusion of choice doesn’t feel like illusion at all. Some may view such a nativist rant as benign but there’s a big problem with letting it go unchecked.

When we let this nativist instinct take over, it doesn’t take much for the same argument to gradually move from a passive-aggressive tweet like Puja’s to severe case of hatred – often fueled by politicians who are masters at the art of exploiting the Us Vs. them fear.

Hostility – whether experienced by a group or an individual – stems from the same principles: seeing the adversary as wrong or bad, and the self as right and good. In either case, the aggressor shows the same “thinking disorder”: construing the facts in his favor, exaggerating the supposed transgression, and attributing malice to the opposition.

Aaron T. Beck – Prisoners of Hate

The reality is that, you will find people from Delhi working in Chennai complaining about Chennai and you will also find people from Chennai working in Delhi, complaining about Delhi. People are the same. You will obviously also have many who love their new city. There are just all sorts of people and all of them have the right to exist and be respected without being asked to fuck off (in however polite way) by any dick-acting local.

PS: Puja’s book is pretty nice and insightful – do check it out.