Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Time


"Time is an illusion" thundered Professor.

It was a special night with Professor Rajkumar on the topic of "Time". Rajkumar was highly skilled not only in his chosen subject (Physics) but also in spiritual topics (particularly those relating to Hinduism), and their parallels. All the attendants of the session were listening with rapt attention. Pin-drop silence.

"Have you not heard the famous Einstein quote that an hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour? That's relativity. Everything is only relative and there's absolutely nothing absolute." Some of the audience, their mouth agape, wondered at the professor's word play.

Professor went on. "What science and religion are saying is one and the same. That time is just a perspective based on the frame of reference. So never worry about anything in your life. There is nothing urgent. Life is your own. Learn how to enjoy it in your own terms and in your own time."

Crowd was now very quiet as if in trance. Professor continued to milk them. "Now, close your eyes, and take 5 deep breaths."

Everyone instinctively started breathing and closing their eyes. Then, the professor's mobile vibrated.

---

"How did you feel? Let's try one more thing to understand the illusion of time better. Now, close your eyes again, take few deep breaths for few minutes and keep listening to the sound around you till I ask you to open your eyes." With this statement, professor went to the backstage to check his mobile.

It was a reminder. On reading the reminder, the professor's eyes started dilating. He immediately placed a call to his best friend Santhosh.

"Hey Prof, how are you man? Great to hear from such a busy fellow!" said Santhosh with a joyful tone.

"Santhosh, I have an urgent request. Can you ..."

"Hey, just a minute. My grandson is asking for my attention. Achuchu, jijipa, you wet the diapers so frequently uh?" Santhosh started changing the diapers of his grandson.

Now, professor's patience went through the roof. He was praying Santhosh to get back to the call quickly. "Tell me prof" Santhosh said. Professor was relieved. "Great, I ..."

"Oh no, sorry prof. Hey kutti, don't climb that .... Oh God!" Santhosh was gone again. Professor was now feeling helpless. Time was moving ahead.

After another minute, Santhosh came back to the line. "Sorry prof!"

"You idiot! I need Rs.10000 urgently in my HDFC bank account. There's an ECS pending mid-night, and I already missed it twice in the past year. I don't want my name in CIBIL and get into more troubles with loans in future. You got it? Can you transfer now or not? I'm running out of time!" Professor blasted his friend in muted anger.

"Cool down buddy. I'll do it right away. Ok then, how is..."

"Fine, I'm in the mid of a session. Talk to you in a minute. Be on the line."

---

"Please open your eyes. See, how you feel? What happened to you? What happened in this world that you missed? Nothing! So, remember, time is an illusion!"

Santhosh was chuckling on the other side of the phone.

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Money, Economy and Maslow's Hierarchy

Image Courtesy: Wikipedia

While I was traveling to work this morning, I thought of Abraham's Maslow's hierarchy of needs for an individual and how the society as a whole could be impacted by that.


Once I reached the office and did my routine of checking mails and looking through new content in Internet, I was slightly surprised to find that someone just wrote about this recently. What does this tell? Perhaps, hundredth monkey effect. I'm digressing.

But though the broad strokes are similar, what I thought specifically is something different and the topic of this post.

Broadly, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs says that human beings have certain needs at various levels in the order of physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualization. Many of us may not agree with the exact representations (particularly in upper levels of pyramid), but the underpinning of this hierarchy can't be ignored.

I have an observation. With the formation (and the eventual dominance) of money (which is a placeholder for value promised by a party you trust), it became easy for people to satisfy the needs at lower levels. Let me explain.

While bartering was the main source of fulfilling needs, people might not have known the value of product (whether products or services) that they needed. Hence, in all probability, they would have given more value than they got. (I agree this is subjective, since value in those days depended more on the utility than an artificial assignment as it is today. Still, it's possible that the buyer might have been exploited by the seller, if the seller was able to extract better value for himself by his smartness.) It is relatively tougher (though not impossible) for farmer who barters rice for a dhoti to figure out what quantity of rice could be bartered for a given number of dhotis. (Let's even leave out the quality issue here.) Unless there was a system of values maintained and controlled by government, bartering was based strictly on utility.

With the advent of money, the exchange of value mainly based on utility diminished. But a fixed rate (i.e. fixed by market) became the norm and it was easy for people to exchange information on values far more easily. This now makes it clear to people how much money (i.e. value) they need to satisfy their basic needs and hence strive to earn that much through producing/creating something or selling labour for money (also called "employment"! :)). 

But by the same measure, it has now become difficult for people to satisfy the needs at higher levels. Why? For the simple reason that needs at lower level are more concrete and as we go higher, they become more abstract. Obviously, it's difficult to put a value on an abstract thing.

During bartering days, every one had to be a seller. And most of the people would have naturally tended to sell lower level things (as they are concrete, hence easy to understand, produce and sell compared to the higher ones). Nevertheless, due to lack of information on exchange value, such lower level things should have remained "expensive" compared to higher level things. Simply put, it was simply hard to find something that fulfills higher level needs. So, people naturally tended to find ways (by cooperating with others, organizing competetions that were not for prize-value but for pride-value) in order to satisfy those needs. And hence arts would have flourished.


Now, with money being a clear placeholder of value, but higher level stuff remaining as abstract as they were earlier, people only tend to become more confused. Now that buyers have a clear place holder of value, they naturally think there should be a clear value for higher level stuff also. Because, money (information) not only enabled the buyer to easily spot value of lower things and keeps them confused on the higher things, the sellers of higher level stuff take advantage of this and sell their stuff for a high-fixed value money (i.e. not based on utility).


I arrive at a conclusion that as much as we try to "buy" stuff that's high in Maslow's hierarchy, it will remain elusive. So, "buying" that is not best way, but "finding" it is better!


If you're still here, kudos to you! :)

Sunday, May 05, 2013

May Be, I'll Probably Try To ...

Have you been in a status/pre-sales call in IT service companies? If so, you might have noticed one thing - that words like "may be", "probably", "try to" are used very often. (Few years back, I once deliberately counted the number of "probably" in one of the calls, and it was 17 in that 1-hour call). What's more, they are not used in proper context, but only as fillers. Let's give these words a collective name - words of ambiguity.

These words are meant to be used in situations where we don't have clarity. Not having clarity is not crime per se, but saying something that has a clear meaning and making use of these words is "probably" not good. ;)

Let's assume I'm saying "I'll send you a mail by 5 pm". It has a clear meaning. But saying "I'll probably send you a mail by 5 pm" is irksome. Why? Because:
  • I'm not convinced myself that what I said will happen.
  • It might give me a comfort feeling that I can't be held responsible for what I said, but for the listener, the expectation is that I'll take responsibility for what I said. (Ultimately, it's obvious that I'm responsible for what I said despite my use of "probably".)

So, in situations where it's not apt, let's probably try to avoid the use of these words.