The Untouchable City

I cannot remember the last time I touched any wall in my city. It's not as if I am obsessive compulsive about not touching anything outdoors, but one glimpse at the walls of this fateful town & it is apparent why you can't even dream of touching them. 

The average height of an adult Indian male is around 5 Feet 5 Inches. That means, the mouth of this average Indian male is at around 4 Feet 11 inches from the ground. The tobacco munching mouth can project a jet of murderous red spit on any wall at an average angle of 45 degrees at varying velocities. This is obviously assuming that the person spitting on the wall is at a reasonable distance from the wall to avoid any splatter on him. This archetypical male has been bestowed with god given powers to consume infinite amount of chewing tobacco. That translates directly into the city's latest murals. We are blessed with this art form which is the biggest ever crowd sourced art project ever imagined. It also works on a subliminal level to make the artist unaware of his contribution. With gravity doing most of the strokes, all the artist has to bring is fresh set of saliva & a large puddle of chewed tobacco. With the cutting edge pneumatic forces which took nature itself several million years to perfect, this unassuming street artist does this city a favour by contributing his talent for free.

No amount of dripping sarcasm is enough to speak of these dripping red walls. We are tactile animals. One of the largest & the most important sensory organs on our body is the skin. We count touch as one of the five basic senses which allow us to perceive our world. Although we are not limited to touch anything else, we are definitely limited in our ability to caress our own city walls. It can be a building of historic importance or some high rise commercial premises. These murals paint the city with a joyous abandon only found elsewhere in nature. As a matter of excretion, these artists were never taught any discretion. In a way they can't be blamed, no one ever taught them not to paint these walls. Another feature of this city, where if it isn't explicitly mentioned, anything is allowed. For instance, if there is no 'no parking' sign, even an entrance to a building is a place to park. If by some miracle there is an instruction like 'no parking', some of the courageous folks from the city do take pride in disobeying them, especially "Do Not Spit Here" signs.

So who's fault is it anyway? BMC (the local municipality) has tried half successfully to enforce an 'on the spot' fine a few years back. But with the city bubbling with new art work, it seems not to be working so well. What would it take for an average artist to avoid painting the wall? What incentive can we offer to that artist whose mouth does his work for free? 

Education is another futile concept for these artists who will gladly spit on it & move on. The very posters that tell not to spit in public would become open dart boards to test their projectile accuracy. The spittoons will be inundated with a smouldering red goo at the end of the day which is below any human being's dignity to clean. The beetle juice in these chewing products is itself corrosive by nature & takes more than just water to clean once it has dried. So something which is beyond anyone's dignity to clean, becomes even harder to clean after it dries.

I remember having taught in my school that littering, spitting & defecating in the open is bad. I don't know why I remember this, but somehow it must have made some impact subconsciously. I don't do any of these things in the open out of choice & which has now become a reflex. Any habit to form requires torturous repetition of some task to make it mundane & ordinary so that our body can carry it out automatically. How can we internalize the importance of hygiene in public places in these lost souls?

Is decency a matter here? Are people just not decent enough to acknowledge the fact that they are soiling something? I have had some rare glimpses of decency which I wouldn't have attributed to the city of Mumbai if I hadn't witnessed them myself. A white collar gets off the bus at CST bus depot & innocuously throws the ticket stub near the bus door. Now ideally this would be a normal sight in Mumbai, where people thoughtlessly litter. But he wasn't so lucky & had to spend some time thinking over what he did later. The Clean-Up Crew recruited by the BMC had apparently cleaned the area a few minutes ago & were resting on the foot path adjoining the bus stop. All of them watched the guy throw the stub & they suddenly sprang into action. They all rushed at once to have that person surrounded. The white collar obviously demanded to know in a rather animated way why he was being held up. When they told him that he had littered, I was half expecting an apology or at least some sign of shame. Perhaps that's what the clean up crew expected too but instead they heard him barking expletives. Now a cloud of anger shrouded the bus stop & shoving ensued. Clearly a crowd gathered demanding to know why an educated (looking) person was being held up & barking in an uneducated way at a bus stop full of uniformed clean guys. After a full 4 minutes, which seemed like half an hour of proving how he never even got off the bus, he relented & walked back to the bus door. There wasn't more drama in any soaps on the tele than what I saw next. A clean - up member had recovered the ticket stub & was holding it in his finger tips. He handed the stub to the white collar & made him dispose it in a nearby dust bin. No claps, no appreciative words from anyone, no thanks to the clean-up guys, the crowd dispersed as if nothing had happened & the white collar, mumbling expletives under his breath rushed off to catch his train.

Another slightly more graphic incident gripped me the other day waiting in a traffic jam trapped inside an auto rickshaw. There was no view staring at the back of the driver so I peeked outside & looked in the general direction. I noticed two beggars (perhaps husband & wife) along with a small kid. Perhaps 3 years old or may be less. The couple was begging at a street corner where a lot of pedestrians walked by. The small kid, was looking for a spot to take a dump around the same corner. I knew even before it actually happened what I was about to see, but I couldn't have been more wrong. I looked away from it, but could't seem to shake my mind from the idea that a piece of fresh turd was going to lie at the corner of the road for eternity. I turned around hoping that the horrible scene would have passed & saw something so unbelievably surprising that I couldn't believe my eyes. My hand reached to cover my mouth in total disbelief. The 3 year old kid was instructed by his mother to pick up the turd with a small plastic bag. She then took him to a dustbin nearby & they both threw the bag in. The mother & the kid got back to the corner & she started to beg again as if nothing had happened. The whole world went their way after the traffic cleared, completely missing the point of this miracle of decency which I am sure not many must have seen till the very end.

I am cherry picking examples due to sheer lack of them which display basic decency in the urban population of Mumbai. But I can never forget the torment of the cleaning crew or even the basic hygiene of a beggar. What are these if not examples of decency & an unsaid love towards our own city? Even if it was just part of the job description or a habit to clean it up.

One question I beg to ask these people, whoever they are & who are never going to read this. Is their artwork motivated by a systemic hatred towards the city? Do they hate the diversity, the financial inequity, the general throbbing pulse of the city so much that they choose to malign it with their sole contribution. I am yet to see a person spit inside his own home & then welcome any guest. Athithi devo bhava my ass. We can't even keep the financial capital of our nation clean, let alone invite anyone to walk through this god forsaken pile of filth.

After all this probing & venting out my frustration towards this art epidemic, I don't feel any better. I still can't touch my city & must forgo the biggest sensory attachment I have to the place I call home. 

Loose Ends

While reading the paper today I came across a comment - 'I love to watch films with no loose endings'. I don't remember the context anymore, but it definitely was a very unique point of view. Especially unique because I have the exact opposite one. 

I tried to dig deeper in this obsession for loose endedness. I don't know why incomplete information doesn't bother me. But it was fun to run through a few experiences where uncertainty had been really wonderful. In my work usually all the decisions are based on interpretation of incomplete information. At first it would only seem logical to find the entire picture and then decide what is to be done. But the best (for some, the worst) part is that nothing that we see in life is entirely obvious. Things are so dynamic, that even the want for complete information seems ridiculous. 

But here's the kicker, even if we have complete information about something, how do we know that it is complete?

I have prodded a lot over this and came up with nothing. I can either accept at face value that I love to deal with uncertainty and probability or I hate the discomfort it causes. I love it because it is fair and unbiased. Everybody gets the same odds of winning or losing given the same amount of information. Probably this is why there are complicated laws against insider trading which will reduce the chances to tilt this balance of information towards the insiders. 

Its nothing bold to love uncertainty. Its in fact fun to build an idea of the world on expectations and odds. Since this obsession, life has been cut in several parts which have gotten an automatic sense of probability. 'What platform a train will arrive at?' - given a choice of 4 empty platforms its usually fun to calculate these odds. 'What are the chances that the business I put my money in, would go belly up?' - well some decisions are complicated some become extremely simple. Probability automatically builds this rating mechanism which cuts through our decisions and saves a lot of time. Its not necessary to use a calculator to find the odds. Its just a inner sense of identifying more probable outcomes.

I can only imagine where this sense has come from, since even nature leans more towards probabilistic thinking than towards pre-determined actions. An ant colony doesn't get built by itself. There is an intricate system of close co-ordination of pheromone traces left by ants which indicates the odds of finding whether the path leads to food, or building an anthill, etc. Older traces of pheromone are colder than the newer traces, indicating that the newer trace has a higher probability of finding something of value, usually food and so on.

While reading about this, I came across swarm intelligence. It had changed my entire perspective of decision making a few years ago. Even though I only read about swarming a few hours back, but I had been introduced to it in a cruder form. The wisdom of crowds - as an investor it is a very important variable in understanding how crowds behave. Its fun too.

I don't know how a brain thinks, but I can now imagine a better visual picture of my thought flow. Probably any thought flow. There are so many pieces of the brain that work at the same time in tandem in order to create this sentence out of previously understood information. These processes make no sense as a standalone function. Only when all these various parts of the brain swarm together, can we get complex thoughts emerging out of it. 

Its weird how this same information can also be learned by studying the elements of a thought one at a time. But swarming makes it a lot easier to visualize. 

Why can't all films have happy endings? Why can't all decisions be made with complete information? Why isn't probability taught at the 6th grade? Can religion be classified as a swarm effect of conclusions based on incomplete information about our existence? 

Well, more questions....

Biased for Life?

Pre-programmed machines are dedicated to do certain tasks in a way humans would do. My automatic washing machine doesn’t have to discuss with me while washing clothes. It has decided the cycle even before I press start. Do humans come hardwired with instructions? (where’s the instruction manual?) When we say that we might inherit certain traits from our parents or from our family, which include behavioural traits as well, do we mean that they have been pre-programmed into our systems?

There is a book by Nassim Taleb called “Fooled by Randomness”, which deals with the human fallibility when it comes to uncertainty. One of the most important things I realized while reading it, was that we aren’t as smart as we think we are. We are prone to make errors in judgement even if the risks are calculated.

Imagine that I have an imaginary HOT girlfriend. We are in an imaginary stable relationship. One fine evening she spots me with a HOTTER chick at a coffee shop. Even though my girlfriend knows that we are in a stable relationship she can’t resist believing that I am seeing someone else. Jealousy seeps in, but she lets me go for that moment (since she might have most certainly read Taleb’s book as well). The next time, she spots me with some other HOTTER chick at some different coffee shop. These are completely random events, she just happens to be in the neighbourhood, not that she is stalking me. But then she has observed & decided to let go, yet again, I love my imaginary girlfriend for that. The third time on yet another random occasion she spots me with some other HOT chick. What should be the most rational reaction of my imaginary girlfriend?

Options include;

Believe firmly that I am seeing someone else

Believe that it was just a coincidence that she saw me with three different girls

Believe that I am a polygamous asshole dating 4 chicks at the same time

Now this is how we run into the problem of induction. Even though she is sensible, tolerant, understanding, caring, did I mention HOT? She is still prone to react emotionally. She has to think a posteriori of the whole incident. She has seen the final outcome; she has to reach to the cause through inductive reasoning. Taleb says that the human brain isn’t capable, sometimes, of handling this problem. We jump to conclusions without considering all the available data.

He cites the example of people in the old world who had almost concluded that all swans are white, strictly based on empirical evidence. After a few years, one fine day, someone spotted a black swan in Australia which shattered their results. This must have hit some ornithologists by the balls to have come across a so called anomaly in their knowledge. This is just a peek into our learning process through observations or experience & shows (in Taleb’s Words) the fragility of our knowledge.

Data, or to be precise, a theory, is subject to falsification. We can’t always certainly say that the given data is absolutely correct. Take for instance, theoretical physics. There are so many base theories in it & over the years so many ideas have accumulated over these base theories, that each new offshoot has become a specialisation subject per se. On the basis of few known facts, many theories have spawned which make us believe that we get closer to understanding our own existence in the universe. I am not saying all these theories can be falsified, but certainly some of them can be, in the same way Einstein’s did to Newton’s. We hit the wall when we start assuming that the theory is a proven fact & start using it as a foundation to build new theories on. When we do that & suddenly the base theory is falsified, what happens to all the new ideas built on it? Poof. Proof, is yet another problem, not all things can be physically proven to exist, some things can be mathematically or theoretically proven to exist. How are we to assume that these proofs are absolute? Or so to speak, should we or should we not assume in the first place?

In defence to the argument of the problem of induction, many scientists have said that when a person who asks for proof of scientific understanding while sitting on a plane, is a hypocrite, since he is using the same product of scientific belief that is helping him stay afloat in a mega tonne mass transport unit.

The problem Taleb highlights, is marriage to our ideas & our convictions. We tend to believe that our convictions are absolute & indisputable. This is a cultural flaw of the human society & can be observed across the globe. People who are non conformists also fall for it sometimes. But amidst all this, there are a few people who allow the inclusion of luck, randomness & uncertainty into their thinking.

Are some people actually prone to take more risks than others? Are some people actually risk averse? To cite examples, there are successful investors, adrenalin junkies, stunt professionals, people employed in public services who have to constantly deal with natural calamities & so on. These people have chosen professions which account for a considerable amount of risk. How they play the risk is another story. But if we try & peek into the lives of these people, we might find that they lead perfectly normal lives yet play with risks which might potentially wipe them off the planet, metaphorically speaking. Are these people genetically programmed to indulge in risk seeking behaviour? Do they deliberately make such professional choices when there can be other ways to do the same job? Safer ways?

Yes, if we peek into the life of humans some 10,000 years ago, the period to which we can attribute the beginning of actual human life, we would see that the clans of people were hunter gatherer types. Surviving in the wild along with other animals, or to be precise, predators; must have been a real task. Right from hunting for food, to hunting for protection, the humans must have used their above average intelligence to gain the ability to survive. This might have included, formulating ways to defend & attack, especially without having any lethal physical characteristics. So they had to rely on their instincts, depend fully on their senses & on their intelligent brain to devise weapons. To survive in those conditions must have involved a lot of risk. The people who were incapable to risk their lives would usually die of hunger or would be killed by a predator.

This potential to deal with risk in order to survive must have driven mankind since a really long time. Also altruistic behaviour towards fellow humans allowed the risk-averse types to thrive along with risk seekers. That’s we find both risk seekers & risk averse people living side by side in today’s world, diversifying the gene pool.

What possible advantage can risk seeking bring? For starters it would help us grasp opportunities which might pop out of the blue. Reaching a point where we are uncertain about the outcome, we might look out for escape routes & might find a profitable one. We ideally wouldn’t have found this route if we hadn’t taken the risk to venture to the unknown. This is what drives adrenalin junkies to sheer excitement & insurance companies to sheer panic & high premiums.

Incorporating risk into everyday life creates lot of room for luck. Interpreting luck as luck & not attributing every win to sheer skill is what we can learn from our natural instincts.