Smooth Transitions

I have a New Years Eve tradition. Well, I call it a tradition though I've only done it maybe a handful of times. It all started in a hotel room with my cousin somewhere during high school. It was a pilgrimage to Madurai and Rameshwaram with my aunt's family. In Madurai on New Year's Eve we were watching the TV where Cyrus Broacha was hosting "The Year That Wasn't" with snippets from the various episodes of "The Week That Wasn't" from the year. 

Today I would call the show reasonably comedic and a good option when you are hard-pressed for choices of what to watch. Back then though, with it's "adult" humour, ie., some slight inneundos thrown in every now and then, I thought it was the zenith of comedy. So I began to watch the weekly episodes as well and when the next New Year's Eve rolled around, I searched again for the yearly recap, this time armed already with some memories from episodes of the year. And so it began, the little tradition. 

Perhaps in the years from that night in Madurai to today, I have skipped this tradition more often than I have followed it. I have no epic memories of ushering in the New Year. I remember traveling on the YPR Sampark Kranti Express train from Yeshwantpur station to Pune a couple of times. A truly excellent train ride, hop on in the afternoon after lunch, nap for a bit, wake up, read, relax. Sleep. Wake up around sunrise when the train is passing through the mountains. This particular stretch is scenic and has only a single-lane track. 

I'm going to go off track here (pun intended) and say something about the tea that they serve you in Indian Railway stations. Let's get one thing straight - it's bad tea. In fact, with the amount of water in it, it's barely tea. And about 3 spoons of sugar in a tiny cup. Piping hot. But that's the secret. It's so bad that it's good. You are under no illusions about the taste. In that moment, you would like a caffeiny, hot drink and what you're feeling truly is thirst. You could satiate the feeling with a couple of sips of water, but we've trained our bodies to feel a hot liquid on your tongue at such moments. And with that amount of sugar, there's really no disliking it. 

Coming back to the scenic stretch of track through the hills, it is a good moment to contemplate on life, take in some rare early morning sunlight and as the hot tea flows into your stomach, answer the age-old question of whether it's better to live with an uncomfortable feeling for a few hours or to spend 5 minutes in a train bathroom. 

Apart from this, I remember a New Year's Eve night in Manali with friends. There we had FIFA and live football to keep us company, but the focus was mostly on waking up early the next day. And the last two New Year's Eve nights in Rome. The first, in the company of a couple of friends, probably watching Friends and whiling away the time. The next one in solitude. Every other year was spent at home, watching The Year That Wasn't, probably. I can't think of anything else I might have done, anywhere else I might have been. 

At some point these traditions begin to wither. Today I remember this little run I've had and the first thing that New Year's Eve brings to my mind is Cyrus Broacha. Perhaps ten years from now I won't even remember this. There are things that we assign a disproportionate weight to in our mental space, memories and feelings. Take Deepavali firecrackers. When I think of Deepavali from my childhood, I remember it to be a total riot of firecackers and fun. But I truly began to play with them only from maybe age 8 or 9. And there were years when we were travelling, years when we went to other's houses. And I stopped by the time I turned 16. All said and done, I had at most 5 years of Deepavali with fireworks. But childhood Deepavali feels like an endless line of mad cracker days. And they define it for me, so much so that the smell and smoke from the bomb we call bijali in Kannada (sutli bomb is the term in Hindi, I believe, the standard red ones that come in 100/1000/100000 waalahs) brings me a flood of good memories and good feelings.  

One other thing that takes up way more than warranted mental space is the changing of the calendar year. Birthdays make way more sense. New Year is just an arbitrary selected point to keep track of the earth going around the sun. No law of nature respects the distinction between the years. Viruses (virii??) aren't going to become less virulent suddenly, for example. But it's still nice. It helps us package things, break time into little chunks and process it. When I have to figure out how old I was when something happened, I try to remember which semester/school year I was in, then figure out which year that was and then calculate my age. Life is full of smooth transitions, and usually we keep track of them from more personally relevant milestones and large events. When I think of good times, some particular year in school, some months before and after graduation, etc. I think of Deepavali firecrackers and Ganesha Chaturthi in my grandfather's brother's house. Smooth transitions keep happening. It's only when we look back that we appreciate how sharp the cummulative effect of all these smooth transitions have been. 

And so we need the event. The tradition, the ritual. The event might be a quiet night watching a particular show, or a night of hard partying. It is all the din around you and all the people you know wishing you a happy new year. It helps us set a marker. Much like the small explosions of Deepavali fireworks, the immersion of Ganesha in the well or the collective throwing up of black hats while dressed in robes. 

And so, let us hope the smooth transition towards better days is already underway and we haven't realised it yet. And years from now, tonight will be remembered as the marker, the harbinger of good times.

Turbulent Equilibrium

Big whorls have little whorls 

Which feed on their velocity, 

And little whorls have lesser whorls 

And so on to viscosity.

Self-perception can be interesting. The idea that you conceive of yourself to be a certain way is fascinating to me. And more than that, with all our cognitive biases and skewed perceptions, a lot of self-perception is actually incorrect. This incorrectness too is not necessarily a flaw - it can be merely an evolutionary short-cut towards efficiency. After all, we are made to survive, not to be optimum observers of objective reality as it is. 

Mindfulness is an idea that has rather captured me ever since I heard of it. To be mindful, sthitha prajna (ಸ್ಥಿತ ಪ್ರಜ್ಞ) as my father repeated over and over during my childhood, is an ideal that has always drawn me in. I have never actually taken any deliberate or organised steps towards becoming mindful but once I read about the concept and it became an ideal, I felt that it was a quality that I was imbibing, almost on auto-pilot. The knowledge of something, the act of giving something a name, can be powerful. For example, "mansplaining". You don't necessarily conceive of it on our own, but once you learn the word, you start seeing it often. 

Similarly I felt that my own state of mind and behaviour was titlting towards mindfulness. But alas, it was only self-perception. 

Let me take a small detour into turbulence. Not the kind that plays pinball with aircrafts. Well that is turbulence, but I mean it in a more general, physicsy sense. Turbulence is very precisely defined by physicists as "that kind of thingy which makes everything all swirly and stirs things up". That is what turbulence is, what a turbulent flow is. Turbulence isn't remarkable. In fact, it is the absence of turbulence that is remarkable. Which is why it has a special name - a laminar flow. 

A laminar flow is a flow where everything is very streamlined and smooth. Say a really slowly flowing stream of water. Turbulence on the other hand is choppy, murky. Any fountain, any river, any ocean is always turbulent. Take a pristine, placid lake and throw a tiny, irregularly shaped pebble in it, and you have created some turbulence. Yes, it would fritter away soon, but another pebble, a twig, a leaf, a fish, can spark it all off again. 

So what's turbulent equilibrium? Let's come back to this lake. The act of throwing a rock or a stick into the lake is essentially an act of adding energy to the water of the lake. So why does the lake return to being placid a minute or so later? Where did the energy go? The energy "dissipates". When you churn some liquid (or a gas) around, you dissipate energy because of friction. Much like friction between any two solids, a fluid sloshing around also experiences friction within itself. The liquid is rubbing against itself. This friction is known as viscosity. And the more sloshy, the more frothy the liquid is, the more the churn and the little shapes and patterns, the more the friction, and the more the dissipation of energy. 

In turbulence, you pump more and more and more energy into the liquid, maybe by heating it, maybe by shaking it around vigorously or maybe by some other ingenious way. The fluid shakes around, becomes more and more whorly, more sloshy, because all this energy has to find a way out. In a way, the liquid "shakes off" this excess energy by bouncing around a lot more. But this bouncing around isn't random, it has patterns. The most recognisable is perhaps the "vortex" pattern, like a whirlpool or a tornado. Even the giant red spot of Jupiter is a huge vortex of turbulent fluid. If you want to see more stunning turbulent patterns, you can check out the cloud patterns of Heard Island. And if you're interested in the a great explanation of turbulence and how important it is, I suggest this excellent video by Veritasium. 

Of course, this is all turbulent. What is this equilibrium then? It doesn't occur very often in the world, except in carefully constructed experiments. However, the concept is easy to grasp. It is a situation where whatever extra energy you add to the liquid just makes it more and more swirly and whorly so it can shake this extra energy off. Now imagine you kept supplying energy in a very constant way. And the liquid kept shaking of this energy. This is a rough situation of equilibrium. Whatever you put in, comes out by this creation of whorly thingies and the liquid friction (viscosity) associated with this. 

The mind is like this lake. The pebbles, twigs, the fish - they're all the various things that happen to us in life, the various incidents that we witness, the information that is relayed to us via the senses and our cognition. The mind gets perturbed, agitated, turbulent, due to these objects. 

Mindfulness, from what I understand, is about stillness. Where your mind is a lake that is never perturbed. No matter how many pebbles you throw, no matter how many fish ferret around in the water. No sensory input comes to you as a shock, nothing is a surprise. Perfect equanimity. Perfect equilibrium. This doesn't mean you live separate from the world of your senses. It is not a disengagement from the world, but rather an extra layer, a pause before reaction. As Viktor Frankl says "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.". Mindfulness is about using the power of this space. This would take supreme awareness. 

Before the lockdown, I assumed that I was pretty near, or at least not too far from this state. The lockdown exposed this faulty self-perception quite badly. Agitation! My racing mind is a lake filled with ripples and splashes and waves. What I had thought was tranquility was actually a kind of turbulent equilibrium. Life was predictable. A constant stream of incidents and information. And I had learnt to shuffle, to sway and whorl around to stay in equilibrium. The water in the lake never got too choppy, too agitated, too turbulent that I couldn't handle it. And thus it was a quasi-stable arrangement. 

Not that there is anything wrong with this. If mindfulness was so easy, there wouldn't be a gazillion videos and books and articles on how to do it. Our lives are all turbulent. Those for whom it is in turbulent equilibrium are perhaps the lucky ones. Better than turbulent unequilibrium. 

One agent I would blame is certainly social media. With it's power to lure you into endless scrolling and the stream of new information, with every new word a little pebble is flung into the lake. Even if no pebbles are thrown in, the reverberations of every thrown pebble last a few minutes before the water is placid again. 

It doesn't matter though. It is great that being alone with my thoughts with the swirling chaos all around me, stories of filled hospitals and mass burials in my country of residence, I understand this error in my self-perception. As Jordan Peterson once put it, "Competence is the acceptance of vulnerability". Onward is the only direction worth going. 

And I truly believe the mind is like a muscle. To use the language of Nassim Taleb, it is Anti-Fragile. It reacts positively to stress. You do 10 push-ups today, tomorrow you have the strength to do 11. However, this power is not endless. You suddenly try to lift a huge weight and your back will forget how to lift you up from the floor. A still mind is a strong mind. 

Unintended Consequences

My attention to this topic was drawn by something very interesting that I saw - a statement by a minister of Kerala. The backdrop of the statement was this - several states in India amended their labour laws to essentially grant fewer rights to workers. The argument was that strict labour laws forced companies to think twice before setting up industries in these states. The Kerala government however refused to follow this trend and said there are better ways of attracting labour than by denying them rights. And several people applauded this stance.

I am not an expert in this topic and I have also read a counter-view - that in fact the lack of industry in states has nothing to do with the labour laws. And economics is a topic I'm always afraid of saying anything due to my own ignorance. It's a topic I never understand even from a layman's perspective.

This however was an interesting point - the laws brought in to protect labour ended up causing a lack of demand for labour, allegedly. Why I found it interesting was that the state which was being hailed as the one who stood by the workers (ie. Kerala) is also the state whose young workers are willing to toil in the heat of the deserts of the Arabian peninsula where they are not guaranteed even human rights under theological monarchies, so labour rights are a far-cry away. Surely, if they had a chance to work in decent conditions back in their home state, with this high level of protection of labour rights, they would have chosen this? Or maybe we know nothing about human nature and people are just willing to jeopardise their health, futures and lives at the prospect of making a lot more money. Either way, a law on the books clearly does precious little other than allowing a government to thump its chest.

Take the example of the house I'm living in. The landlord is an extremely environmentally conscious individual. All the lights are low-electricity consuming lights, heating is switched on only at some hours during the winter. One of the measures along with these is the installation of water-saving shower heads. These shower heads partially block the flow of water and so it forces you to use less water while taking a shower. One doesn't need the full pressure flow to take a shower.

Alas, there is a problem with this. For the hot water to maintain a continuous flow, it needs the water to be running continuously. In usual circumstances, if you turn on the hot water tap, switch it off and then turn it on again, you get cold water and you've to again wait for a couple of minutes for the water to heat up. What the water-saving shower head does is that due to its blocking effect, the hot water flow keeps getting blocked and so even if the shower is kept open continuously, the water keeps getting cold. To call this a slight inconvenience is a gargantuan understatement. A nice shower of hot water is what keeps spirits of a tropical boy up in the (admittedly mild) Roman winter. There are two solutions to this - remove the shower head, which allows unobstructed flow of water, or to open another tap of hot water at a low speed to ensure the continuous flow. Either solution causes a huge amount of wastage of water and I end up using way more water than I would with a normal, high-pressure shower-head.

Let us say you want to increase the tax-revenues of a state or a country. What is the way to go about it? Of course, you increase the tax-rates. However, it could happen that when you increase the tax-rates, more people will work harder to evade the taxes and you end up pouring all your resources into chasing after tax evaders rather than just enjoying a larger inflow of tax. In fact, you might end-up hurting your tax revenue though at the surface level, you increased taxes.

An apocryphal tale from the British Raj about snakes. Due to the menace of cobras in Delhi, the British-Indian government announced a reward for those catch these snakes. This led to a bunch of enterprising Indians to start breeding cobras to claim the reward money. When the government got wind of this scheme, they discontinued the reward and so the cobra breeding reward-hunters had to release all their cobras, thus increasing the total count of cobras in Delhi.

I don't really have a point with this blog. It has been a while since I've published anything. And I found these examples to be really cute and with the potential to completely change the way we think - not just a linear jump from action to consequence, but hundreds of steps in between which can turn things any which way. At least it made me look at the world in a very different way.

For Whom the Bells Toll

There is a large church right outside my balcony. The dome looks grand and quite beautiful. I remember the day I moved in - I expressed the same sentiment to my flatmate. I would love to go inside the church, I said, because from my experience, every single large church I've been to in Rome, actually in all of Europe, is beautiful, very often stunningly so.

She scoffed at my suggestion. I hate that place, she said. I was surprised. She went on to explain how that particular church is run by a criminal gang and when the leader of this gang passed away, this man, with several charges of heinous crimes against him, was given a grand funeral at this church, with helicopters flying in and dropping flowers from the sky to honour his departed soul. I later found out it was an extremely controversial event that made the headlines across Italy.

I still wish to go to the church. And despite it being right next door, despite passing by it so often, I haven't gone even once even 6 months after moving here. I don't know why, something about what she said. We have a saying in Kannada, never go looking for the source/roots of a river or a sage. Both will leave you disappointed, the former because it is perhaps some tiny, unimpressive trickle of water somewhere, the latter because, like Rishi Valmiki, he was maybe a dacoit or a brute. And what is true of the sage must be true of the place of worship as well.

These days though, every time I stand on my balcony, which is pretty often, I feel a sense of longing to visit the church. Perhaps because it is next door. Unfortunately , "I wish to check out the interiors of this domed building that looks great from the outside" is not a sentence I want to learn in Italian so I can say it to the police officer, who I'm guessing will not have much patience for my lockdown breaking behaviour. The luckiest scenario would be me being slapped with a massive fine, in the thousands of Euros, while the worst case would be having to spend 3 months in prison.

All these months, every time I looked at the church and felt "I should go in sometime", going there was actually an option. I could just choose an evening or a weekend and pop in. Not anymore. Now that I do not know when I will be able to go, it just makes me think more and more about the inside of that majestic building.

The bells of the church toll at 7 pm everyday. I noticed this exact timing only around a week ago. Now it has become a rather sombre reminder. Everyday at 6 pm, the "protezione civile", the equivalent of the Home Ministry, gives a press conference about the corona virus. I don't know enough Italian to follow the press conference, but I know one little feature of the press conference. The first thing they mention is the number of people who have recovered. First, the recoveries and then all the other numbers - new infections, deaths, region-wise distribution of these numbers, etc. At the end of the press conference, around 6.40 pm, the numbers from the press conference are released on the official website of the Protezione Civile. And by 7pm, some great soul somewhere, updates the "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in Italy" entry of Wikipedia with these latest numbers.

When the bells toll, I open my laptop  I switch from the Facebook tab to a new tab and navigate to this Wikipedia entry. I don my statistician hat and draw on my couple of years of experience in research of staring at numbers, imagining the graphs, looking for patterns, etc. to do my own little mental analysis. Was it a good day? Was it a bad day? Is the curve "flattening"? How does this compare with what happened in Wuhan? Are the Chinese lying? Surely they are. I mean, they did it before to start the whole thing. How is Lazio doing? Is the curve flattening at least in some regions? Which region dominates the numbers? What number of new infections tomorrow would indicate good news?

There are no good days. Good news? I think we'll get to hear that only 3 months from now. Or maybe 18, whoever knows.

But somehow I'm grateful for this little exercise. Time can sometimes seem to move fast, when you're doing a lot. But time can also seem to be moving fast when you're doing nothing. Minutes go slow, the days fly by. And you miss the activity. You miss the feeling of keeping track of time using how much you've done. When how tired you felt was a clue on how far past Monday it was.

When the bells toll though, there is a semblance of order. To know that across the deserted streets where the occasional ambulance passes by, in the building I imagine to be oh so beautiful, though empty, someone sits there diligently and makes sure the bell tolls at 7 pm. And I sit here diligently, a little anxiously, peering at the numbers. Until the next day, then the next. Until the lockdown is lifted and on day 1 of freedom, I finally visit the church.

Or so I plan, as I have for the last 6 months.