JOST A MON

The idle ramblings of a Jack of some trades, Master of none

Jan 20, 2011

Daniel of Beccles

I first came across Daniel of Beccles, writer of the Book of the Civilised Man, a 13th century guide to manners, in Danny Danziger and John Gillingham's 1215: The Year of Magna Carta. Daniel was a man much taken by social hierarchy, the ins and outs of behaviour before one's superiors, and (naturally, in that ribald time) by matters sexual. He was also, for some reason, obsessed with ceilings. For example:
When you are a cuckold, learn to stare at the ceiling...
If you want to belch, be mindful to look at the ceiling...
I've noticed among many Englishmen a predilection to dig into their noses, and then, having carefully examined their fingernails, to pop the snot into their mouths. The sister-in-law once saw a friend do this, and, aghast, she challenged him. 'Everybody does it,' was his nonchalant reply. An ex-boss of mine, too, was wont to do the same. Valuing my job, I never excoriated him - either in private or in public. In retrospect, I should have mentioned Daniel of Beccles' admonition, which I had come across at the same time:
In front of grandees, do not openly excavate your nose, twisting your fingers.
Other notable tips included: feign illness if your lord's wife makes sexual advances to you; do not piss in the hall (unless it's your hall, in which case by all means feel free); do not fart indoors; and, for crying out loud, don't attack a man when he's taking a dump. I mean, really, where is your sense of chivalry?


[I'm on a bit of a trudge through medieval English history, and you won't believe the amount of filth and ribaldry and bodily function that was bandied about in this country. At least, I suspect you won't believe me, and hence these posts.


First: London Tales]

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Dec 17, 2010

Polynesian Dog

Joseph Banks, that great naturalist and doyen of the Royal Society, was one of the very first real ethnologists. In Tahiti, his investigations into the lives of the islanders were deep and immersive. In the superb The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes is a brief account of the lengths Banks went to understand his native friends:
Food remained a source of mutual interest, and one remarkable culinary event featured a dog, which the priest Tupia killed, dressed and roasted, while Banks carefully took down the recipe. Most of the sailors were repelled, but Banks declared the results to be delicious. 'A most excellent dish he made for us who were not much prejudicd against any species of food. I cannot however promise than an European dog would eat as well, as these scarce in their lives touch animal food, Cocoa nut kernel, Bread fruit, yams &c, being what their masters can best afford to give them and what indeed from custom I suppose they preferr to any kind of food.'

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Aug 6, 2010

Heavy Sleep

One autumn, a young woman arrived in IISc from Calcutta, and handed out questionnaires to various unsuspecting students she found lazing about the campus. It consisted of rather detailed queries on the respondent's mental health, all couched in rather bland prose, and suggesting multiple-choice answers. I was one of the unsuspecting students, and - as the young woman was rather pretty - was among the earliest to hand in my answers.

Pleased with my alacrity, she told me she was investigating the incidence of suicide in the more cut-throat academic institutions in the country.

"Whoa!" I said. "Suicide? You didn't say anything about suicide."

"Well, naturally," she said, impatiently. "You understand I didn't want to bias your responses."

As she was rather pretty, I overlooked this jibe. And I sat hopefully at the same table as her in the mess hall for the next few nights. She ignored me for the most part, except to hand back the questionnaire after she was done with it.

"You'll be glad to know you don't show any suicidal tendencies," she said.

"And you know that how?" I said, huffily.

"These first few questions are designed to detect those with depressive or self-destructive thoughts," she said.

"Well, that's good to know," I said. "Can you pass me the sambar?"

"But you are prone to stress," she continued. She didn't pass me the sambar.

"Eh, what?" I said. "How?"

"You sleep a lot as exams approach. That's a classic sign of stress. Some people get insomnia. Others don't get out of bed."

"Well," I said. "Now that you know me so well, how about we go for this concert?"

Her eyes glazed over, and she turned away, and I didn't see her again.

Still, her analysis turned out to be both topical and trenchant. During my four years on campus, at least 3 or 4 people committed suicide every year; this in a population of fewer than a thousand students.

In his book, Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, Leonard Mlodinow talks about the stress of being in Caltech, the university with the highest suicide rate in the US. IISc and the IITs are not that different. Academic pressure is a terrible thing, particularly among the brighter and more ambitious scholars. If it is not the intense competition among them, it is the stress of finding oneself caught short, or the severe insecurity that stems from fear of exposure as a fraud, or as someone who has no right to be in that academic setting. Mlodinow himself had received a fellowship to Caltech that allowed him to do whatever he wanted, and he found himself petrified with fear. He could think of nothing he wanted to investigate. He thought he'd be exposed as an impostor. Were it not for the coincidence of Richard Feynman in the office next door to him who ended up mentoring him not only in science but also in an attitude to life, Mlodinow might have burned out, or collapsed, or quit, or, worst of all, killed himself.

Fortunately for me, I was more self-satisfied than ambitious, unlike those unfortunates who took their lives. The sleep restored me from the stress, and I somehow passed the exams. But that Bengali girl's diagnosis has stayed with me. To this day, when I am under some pressure or the other, I begin to feel horribly drowsy. You'd think that knowing the cause of the drowsiness would help to mitigate it. Not on your life.

This summer, as I said, I'm busy swotting away for the IMC. And I am feeling somnolent all the time. Until Friday the 13th, therefore, you'll only hear snoring noises coming from this part of town. So keep your voices down, people.

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May 7, 2010

Thinking Thai, Talking Tamazight - A Poll

Simon Winder, in his recent book Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern, recalls a multilingual friend, who once told him that he could feel his personality change quite drastically when using German or Italian - the former making him punctilious, waspish, acrid, remote, extremely polite, the latter making him expressive, promiscuous and a pleasure to be with.

Remarkable. I'm a bit of a multilinguist myself, and I see nothing remotely different in my behaviour when I switch from, say, English to Hindi. I hem and haw in both languages and I struggle for the mot juste. In fact, not only does my demeanour remain identical in either language, I am interrupted as often. Just the other day, I tried to say something in Malayalam to the wife, and by the time I opened my mouth, she had announced a shopping list and I found myself in front of Tesco, jawing gormlessly at the checkout machine.

I console myself with the thought that Winder's friend is slightly manic and slightly depressive. But before I can conclude that conclusively I'd like to take a poll.

So: who among you finds your temperament changing when you switch from language to language?

And: what sort of temperament corresponds to each language?

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Feb 18, 2010

I Have A Cunning Plan

I took the tyke to the barber's the other day. He's been there before. The barber likes him, and he invariably gets away with a lollipop.

The wife has impressed upon him that it's not nice to ask for lollies. If he's given one, he can have it. But he shouldn't ask for treats.

As soon as we walk in the door of the salon, the tyke says, "My amma said I should not ask for a lolly."

The barber looks taken aback for a moment. His English is not very good, and I suspect he thinks the boy is asking for a sweet. So he grabs his sweets-box, fishes out a lolly, and gives it to the little chap.

I wonder now - is it a stealthy ploy on the part of the boy? He looked innocent enough when he spoke. When I chide him, he says he is sorry. Then he says, "Please don't tell amma."

When I look back upon my own youthful days of low cunning, I recall being as devious only after I turned eight years of age. The wife informs me that in the scales of skullduggery, I clearly come up short. She is pleased to inform me that her wiles began much earlier. When she was four or five, in fact. Her tales do not bear repeating.

According to studies of developmental behaviour, there are stages in a child's progress towards full-fledged hypocrisy, deviousness, and empathy. Here's an excerpt from a paper by O. Chesnokova and E. Subbotsky that explains why, if a child is clever, he or she is not immediately cunning. (This cunning is a manifestation of Social Intelligence (SI))
What is needed to have the SI mind?

(1) Understanding that people’s minds are private (that adults cannot peep straight into the child’s mind and see what’s in it). This comes at the age of about 3 years (Estes, Wellman & Woolley, 1989)
(2) Understanding that other people can have false beliefs (i.e., they would believe that the deceptive perspective and the child’s own perspective are the same). This is achieved at the age of about 4 years (Perner, 1992)
(3) Understanding that others can have false beliefs about beliefs (the 2nd order beliefs). This is acquired at the age of 5 (Sallivan et al., 1994)
My imp doesn't usually tell tales to clear himself of wrongdoing. He is, in fact, disarmingly honest most of the time (I think). Does this mean that his social intelligence is not sufficiently developed? Or has he been cleverly pulling the wool over my eyes all this time?

Either way, should I be worried?

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Aug 17, 2009

You Titbits Of The Devil

Peter Damian, full of brimstone and Latin rhetoric, raged against the 'wives' of priests. (Did he fulminate against those sinful priests as well? I don't know.)
Interea et vos alloquor; o lepores clericorum, pulpamenta diaboli, proiectio paradisi, virus mentium, gladius animarum, aconita bibentium, toxica convivarium, materia peccandi, occasio pereundi. Vos, inquam, alloquor ginecea bostis antiqui, upupae, ululae, noctuae, lupae, sanguisugae, "affer; affer" sine cessatione dicentes. Venite itaque, audite me, scorta, prostibula, savia, volutabra porcorum pinguium, cubilia spirituum inmundorum, nimphae, sirenae, lamiae, dianae.
Stirring stuff, eh? Pulpamenta diaboli! I wish I could use that on someone.

Oh wait, you want the translation.
Meanwhile, I address you too, you charmers of the clergy, you titbits of the devil, you refuse of paradise, slime that fouls minds, blade that slays souls, wolfsbane of drinkers, poison of table companions, the stuff of sin, the occasion of death. You I address, you harem of the ancient enemy, you hoopoes, screech owls, night owls, she-wolves, horse leeches saying over and over, 'Produce again, again.' Come then and hear my words, you whores, harlots, kissing-mouths, sloughs for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits, nymphs, sirens, bloodsucking witches, dianas..."
(Technically speaking, this is the rhetoric of invective (more about it here): composed in rhymed, rhythmic prose, makes use of stressed phonic effects that tend the turn the rich vocabulary emplyed into what are in effect maledictory formulae)

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Sep 3, 2008

Aida in Marketing

My pal Labsji over at the Joy of Innovation has presented a tailored approach to seducing customers, based on lectures by Mr S.K. Palekar of Eureka Forbes. I quote:

Idea is to start with a customer at zero, Convert them into Aware customers(A), then into Interested customer(I), then to someone who desires the offering(D), and Ultimately create action(A). And there is After Market engagement too to worry about.
This is singular, my friends, and related to Giuseppe Verdi's grand opus, Aida. Why, you ask? Well, the initials of the desirable characteristics of one's customers as outlined in the above quote spell out the name of Verdi's heroine. Coincidence? I think not. Mr Palekar focuses on a 7-step procedure to selling. It is evident that he is inspired by the opera. See here:

1. Prospecting - Radames, the hero, is busy exploring and prospecting in Nubia
2. Calls - he is called back to court by sundry intrigue
3. Presentation - he presents Aida to his wife-to-be
4. Closing - everyone's upset his marriage (and thus, the close of his life of prospecting) is nigh
5. Transaction - what is marriage of royals other than a transaction?
6. Handholding - and holding a lot of other things as well
7. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - you have to see the opera to believe it. There's all sorts of skullduggery and dissatisfied parties. It all ends in blood.

Tsk, tsk.

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Aug 15, 2008

useR Conference 2008 - Dortmund, Germany

  I attended the latest useR! conference this week, which lasted three days (Aug 12-14) at Dortmund. We've been using R at work for about a year or so now, and there's much to learn about this incredible statistical language and its ancillary 'packages', tools developed by academicians and practitioners in a variety of disciplines, all available free and online, supported by a vast cast of enthusiasts and gurus. So here I was, toting my little bag of goodies, and ambling from room to room to listen to some very interesting presentations across the R user spectrum.

The conference was held at the Statistics department of the Technical University of Dortmund. Only two weeks earlier, torrential rains had flooded the large auditorium of the department. Stains were still visible, but a massive cleanup before our arrival meant that everything appeared as it should - ready for four hundred visitors.

Unlike Curving Normality who blogged regularly and live from the various sessions he attended, I am doing this from back at home. I did take notes during the talks on a little pad that was given to us courtesy Google, but my handwriting these days is much worse than it used to be, and I doubt even a pharmacist would be able to make much of it. Still, here goes - summaries of three of the more interesting talks I attended.

The first talk I attended was on Loss Functions by a professor of actuarial studies, Vincent Goulet. Actuaries are interested in such things as ruin, the distribution of insurance claims, and the probabilistic properties of insurance payouts. To model these events, Goulet introduced an R package named 'actuar', in which he proposed several families of distributions, including those called censored. These, in particular, are interesting to insurance specialists. A client with a deductible is not going to make a claim if he thinks his damages cost less than the deductible to make good. In such a situation, the distribution of claims would be left-censored. Likewise, insurance payouts are usually capped by the size of the cover. Payouts, therefore, follow a right-censored distribution.

This is of relevance to us in finance as well, especially if we want to model the effects of management fees on a portfolio. Because irrespective of how well a manager performs, he always gets his management fee, the returns to a client from the manager are always that much less than the manager's overall performance. For the manager's revenue stream, on the other hand, there's an effective floor - and that can be modelled by a left-censored distribution.

An example of the multifarious uses of statistical tools came from Miriam Marusiakova, of the Charles University of Prague, who presented an R package 'forensic' to help in DNA fingerprinting. It is well-known that the DNA composition of any two human beings (other than identical twins) are distinct. Since it is unfeasible to compare DNA strands in their entirety from various possible sources,  forensic scientists have isolated certain markers that can serve as witnesses for distinction. Unfortunately, these markers themselves do not provide sufficiency of difference, and so a statistical analysis is required to determine how likely it is that the DNA found at a location came from one person or many.

Naturally, this is important! Let's say that a certain amount of DNA was found at a crime scene. There is a victim V and a suspect S. There are three possibilities: a portion of the DNA is known to be of the victim; there's only one type of DNA, suspected to be that of the offender; there's several sources of DNA found. The prosecution's hypothesis is that some of the DNA came from S. The defence's hypothesis is that the remaining DNA came from persons unknown U. How to determine which of the hypotheses is the correct one?

Miriam explained that external information needs to feed into the statistics. For instance, certain genetic factors are present to a greater or smaller degree in various populations. Not incorporating these factors into the statistics leads to overstating the case against the defendant. The classical probability law, named the Hardy-Weinberg law, is inapplicable in this case.

Another twist is that the offender and/or the victim, and the defendant are related! Usually, there is an assumption that the offender and the victim are independent. Miriam's package enables the analysis of all the above possibilities.

As a concrete example, she showed the widely different conclusions that could be drawn from the O.J. Simpson murder trial of the early 1990s in California. If the various factors and match probabilities were not estimated correctly, it was as easy to prove that the DNA found at the crime site was Simpson's as it was not. Lesson - estimate accurately and account for all possible variations.

The effervescent Janet Rosenbaum of Harvard University produced one of the most entertaining examples of research I've ever come across. She dealt with the notorious abstinence (virginity) pledge in the USA, and examined whether the sexual behaviour of teenagers who took the pledge was any different from those who didn't. (See here for some of her work, and this news report at the Washington Post.) I can do no better than quote from her very thorough abstract at the conference:

Objective: The US government spends over $200 million annually on abstinence-promotion programs, including virginity pledges, and measures abstinence program effectiveness as the proportion of participants who take a virginity pledge. Past research used non-robust regression methods. This paper examines whether adolescents who take virginity pledges are less sexually active than matched non-pledgers.

Previous researchers had compared the sexual behaviour of pledging teenagers against the general population of teenagers, and concluded that, indeed, the former were less likely to have had sex, and had a lower incidence of sexually-transmitted disease. For the US conservatives, this was brilliant news, meaning they could cut federal funding for contraception and women's sexual health, and provide instead abstinence coaching and use the numbers of pledgers as a metric of success.

But, of course, the comparison is not fair. The correct thing to do would be to match pledging teens with non-pledging teens who have similar backgrounds and ideologies. After all, the people who take the pledge are not average US teens. Many of them are from evangelical families, deeply religious, often born-again. When this matching is done, the results are quite clear:

Five years post-pledge, 84% of pledgers denied having ever pledged. Pledgers and matched non-pledgers did not differ in premarital sex, STDs, anal, and oral sex. Pledgers had 0.1 fewer past year partners, but the same number of lifetime sexual partners and age of first sex. Pledgers were 10 percentage-points less likely than matched non-pledgers to use condoms in the last year, and also less likely to use birth control in the past year and at last sex.

The behaviour of pledging and non-pledging teens is statistically identical! Worse, one to five years after having taken the pledge, 84% of those teens denied having pledged. Egregiously, many who had sex before taking the pledge declared themselves virgins shortly thereafter. To add insult to injury, pledgers were often more ignorant of contraception when they did succumb and have sex, and were thus less likely to protect themselves from disease or pregnancy before marriage.

Rosenbaum concluded that federal funds would be better spent in teaching effective birth and STD control than on abstinence measures.

Other interesting presentations:

  1. Tomoaki Nakatani, ccgarch: An R package for modelling multivariate GARCH with conditional correlations.
  2. Rory Winston, Real-Time Market Data Interfaces in R. (How to connect to Reuters from R)
  3. Susana Barbosa, ArDec: Autoregressive-based time series decomposition in R.
  4. Ray Brownrigg, Tricks and Traps for Young Players.
  5. Wei-Han Liu, A Closer Examination of Extreme Value Theory Modelling in Value-at-Risk Estimation.
  6. R. Ferstl, J. Hayden, Hedging Interest-Rate Risk with the Dynamic Nelson-Siegel Model.

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May 29, 2008

Good Reason

Apparently, there's a good reason to blog. In case you wondered about your health and the strain on your eyes and painfully stretched backs and repetitive stress syndromes, you should realise that while you are downing yourself physically, mentally you've never been in better condition.

My pal Sridhar sent me this link. Check it out!
Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs.

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Jan 2, 2008

Sartorius

My sartorial misdemeanours started at an early age. In Caracas, during Carnival, kids at my nursery were to appear in fancy-dress. My classmates were all agog. Some were going to wear regal costumes, others wanted to be Simon Bolivar. A couple of Disney fans announced that they would appear as Mickey Mouse. I boasted to everyone that I would be Batman. On the day, I went wearing a t-shirt with Goofy's face emblazoned on it. "We can't afford fancy-dress", my amma had said. I was not too bothered until my best enemy, radiant in a Robin outfit, asked me where my mask was. I shrugged him off and, when later in the day, he ran into a swing and cut his face, I thought of it as fine payback for his villainy.

In Moscow, we lived in a diplomatic enclave, surrounded by rich Europeans and Americans and their fancy-schmancy clothes and ever-present chewing-gum. I was cheerfully oblivious - clothes never did hold any particular attraction for me. (The only thing I truly envied them was their collections of superhero comics. I was starved for Marvel heroes, you understand. For being untidy and leaving our comics on various articles of furniture, my father had torn up the lot - to teach my sister and me a lesson. I'm not sure the lesson sank in very deeply - I'm still not the tidiest person on the planet - but the pain of the loss of all those books lasted a long time. But that's neither here nor there.) We used to do our shopping at the local Russian stores, wearing bright nylon outfits that would have sent Armani into paroxysms of despair. When Richard, the one pompous American boy in a crowd of generally decent Americans, taunted me for wearing a particularly bilious blue shirt ("You got it at the bazaar, didntcha?"), I yelled, "It's Canadian, you bastard!" and jumped him. He was two years older than me and heavier and he was taken aback by my onslaught, but it didn't take him long to throw me off and mutter, "You're a crazy fucker." I was seven years old at the time.

My fashion sense got progressively worse. By the time I was at St. Stephen's College, I was wearing floppy-collared shirts and bell-bottomed trousers. Add to this mix a head slick with Keo Karpin Hair Oil, a straggly moustache, a three-day stubble, and a rich accent acquired in the international school in Jakarta (where any Indian sing-song was mercilessly put down), and I was an incendiary vision. My friends flinched every time they saw me. Women ran for cover. Those who didn't escape in time found themselves introduced to me several times a week (each time they saw me they pretended they didn't know who I was - took me about a month to figure out I was being shaded, as the slang went.) "Hey!" wagged some wags, "It's the seventies again!"

As usual, I ignored the comments. In truth, they didn't bother me too much, except once when worn down by the sniping, I said, "As long as I dress neatly, what does it matter whether the clothes are fashionable or not?"

My pal Eki was not entirely sympathetic. "You may dress cleanly," he said, drily. "But I wouldn't call this neat."

Meanwhile, my good buddy Guru was attracting widespread attention for his wardrobe of Pierre Cardins and Yves Saint Laurents. Cunningly, he had stocked up in Panama where he had lived before coming to college. Women followed him around, gazing at him adoringly. (It later turned out that they wanted his class notes.)

Epiphany struck (ouch) a bit later when I chanced upon the khadi kurta. This worn with faded jeans and Hawaiian sandals (or hawai-chappal in the vernacular) was the costume of choice for the self-regarding pseudo-intellectual. I took to the combo like a Frenchman to goose liver. Visiting the Khadi Gram Udyog Bhavan, fount of Indian handicraft and rough cotton, in Connaught Place was a religious experience. And the kurtas were cheap! Fifteen rupees a pop. Yay.

Around that time I also started parting my hair in the centre and my stock in college fell to somewhere among the slimes. Ah, memories, memories.

Arriving at the Indian Institute of Science in the summer of 1990 was a true eye-opener. I witnessed an entire campus of geeks, none of whom had any sartorial sense. And if I, fashion illiterate that I was, noticed that, you may imagine the scene yourselves. The population was largely Tamilian supported by a big contingent of Bengalis and Andhras. The Tams were an austere lot, wearing bush-shirts untucked, and baggy trousers in various shades of grey. The Bengalis were wreathed in bidi smoke, so nobody could tell what it was they wore. The Andhra types were veritable peacocks. Orange shirts and yellow trousers. Walrus moustaches. My mind was numbed.

So I found myself suddenly - in my khadi kurtas and jeans - the best-dressed on campus. The others recognised a nonpareil in me. I was beset by sundry classmates who were willing to offer me their unborn children as slaves if I brought them kurtas from my next trip to Delhi. The kurtas in Bangalore were a sorry mess: bad cotton, awful lines, terrible cuts. The fashionistas at Khadi Gram Udyog Bhavan in Delhi would have committed suicide en masse had the Bangalore kurtas been attributed to them. But I didn't sell my soul, oh no, and refused all blandishments. I remained top kurta man in IISc throughout my four years there.

Once I found myself gainfully employed, the first article of high fashion I procured for myself was a pair of round spectacles in gold. Ooh yes. Gandhi, eat your heart out. The next thing I did was to buy a bunch of shirts from an export-surplus store in Bhikaiji Cama Place. Sadly, I can't remember the name of the brand. It was good stuff, though. Two hundred rupees for a shirt that wouldn't shame Van Heusen. The Keo Karpin Hair Oil was forgotten, my parting returned to the left, and I moved on to locally produced Christian Dior toiletries. These were so potent that after applying a judicious amount of cologne after a bath, the aroma was destroyed by the time I got dressed. Still, I thought it was better than Keo Karpin's cloying fug.

By 1996, I was in the USA, land of Walmart and shabby-chic clothes on discount. I splurged. I splurged, I tell you! My glasses were Armani now, and my boots Timberland. My moustache glistened under authentic (and liberally applied) Davidoff Cool Water aftershave. Women looked me for longer than two seconds before averting their eyes and nostrils. I was king of my game.

When I met the wife for the first time, I was impeccably coutoured and on top form. My moustache was long gone. I had thoughtfully shaven it wa-a-ay before - a superb bit of foresight, in hindsight (the wife gags every time she sees my old photos). Fellow Malloos1 would have been outraged. As one said (not to me), "Who do you think you are? North Indian?"

My pals Amarnath and Sriram had told me to lay off the poor jokes and to put on the boots they had thoughtfully presented me with on my birthday. Soft leather, very spiffy. Sure to slay any full-blooded woman. I wore Diesel shirts and Dockers chinos. And a London Fog jacket to ward off the London elements. The wife, though, didn't think much of my jacket and parked her posterior on it in Hyde Park while I held her hand and did my thing. She didn't want to get her bottom wet, you see. But she did agree to marry me, so I guess the shoes, at least, did their trick.

To prepare my outfit for our engagement, I went to South Extension, Delhi's top fashion district. I got myself an elegant kurta - not khadi! It was fine silk. Or possibly cotton. Or was it polyester? I don't remember. Anyway, I wore this kurta and a Kerala mundu, and arrived resplendent for the engagement ceremony. The wife was in her room beautifying herself when her sister ran up to her, eyes round.

"He's wearing a long kurta", she gasped. [To explain: we Malloos, you see, have a short kurta. My North Indian kurta, on the other hand, dropped to below my knees. To be worn with the pyjama, you understand. My mundu was pretty much hidden behind the mass of fabric.]

"How long?" said the wife.

"Long", said her sister.

Meanwhile, my cousin Beena was staggered.

"What are you wearing?" she cried when she found her voice.

"National integration", I said, crisply. "North Indian kurta, South Indian mundu."

A friend of mine told me later that I looked like a fucking priest.

The wife was affability itself. She assured me that I looked cute. What can I say? I love the woman and she is a total sweetie-pie.

She maintained the fiction of my cuteness for seven years, until recently she admitted that she had been shocked (shocked) when she saw me. "Cute?" she said. "More like weird."

"Why do you think I insisted that you wear a Kerala ensemble for the wedding? So you wouldn't slay the guests with your haute couture", she added.

It's good to know that we have no secrets between us now. Ahem.

Anyway, after marriage, we retreated to the USA again. Out went the Walmart outfits. "But it's shabby chic", I wailed as the wife tossed one well-loved shirt after another. She snorted. "Forget chic. It's just shabby."

She propelled me, in one tremendous swoop, to Banana Republic. Suddenly, I was a preppy dude. Women took longer looks at me, perhaps lasting all of five seconds.

When we met my old pal Nitish in Boston, he gasped, "You two look like total yuppies." Back at Stephen's, he'd never have said that about me.

Meanwhile he - at the time still a student - was wearing that old favoured staple: khadi kurta and jeans. He looked extremely comfortable. I, on the other hand, I just glowered with envy.

Footnote:

1. Malloos: diminutive for Malayalis, the denizens of Kerala.

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Dec 12, 2007

Behaviour Modifications

For the seventh time in as many weeks, I've fallen victim to a new variant of the cold virus. It's all the boy's fault, of course. His nursery is a hotbed of virulent mutants and pernicious disease, and my immune system can barely cope with the constant onslaught. So I sniffle and I snuffle and you better not shake hands with me.

I have a theory. Laugh all you want or propose me for the next Nobel Prize in Medicine. I swear it makes sense. I think these viruses actually modify human behaviour! Look at the facts dispassionately before you roll your eyes.

What does one do when faced with an epidemic? One flees the cities for the countryside, where one promptly spreads the infection among the unsuspecting peasants. Do you honestly think that a city dweller wants to go live in the boonies? He'd sooner kill himself. The reason he doesn't is that the virus won't allow it.

What does the AIDS victim do? Why, if he is particularly weak-willed, he has unprotected sex with as many partners as he can, so that the virus is disseminated far and wide. How about that, then?

Why has no cure ever been found for the common cold? The viruses have prevented it. Why would they permit their own destruction? Hoo-boy, bet you didn't think of that, did you?

Immigrants from tropical climes come to the dreary countries of the north and fall victim to various colds and flus. Does this rash of ill-health impel them to return to their more salubrious ancestral homes? No! Why not? Because the virus would not have much of a chance there, eh? The virus wants a growing pool of victims to live on, so the immigrant stays on in London. He faces cold after cold, convinces himself that his life is immeasurably better in this city of despair.

The mighty virus, meanwhile, continues to multiply, mutate, and laugh itself silly at yet another pusillanimous punter who continues to believe in free will.

Eh? Eh?

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Dec 4, 2007

I'm not judging, but baby is

The next time the boy launches himself off the bed and flies several feet into my arms, I had better be very, very sure to catch him. If I don't, I might lose his trust forever.

He began these leaps of faith when he was about eight months old. I would pluck him out of mid-air each time he jumped, much to his delight. I was, unconsciously of course, building his feeling of security and showing him that I was a dependable sort of chap. This possibly explains why, nowadays, sometimes he likes to leap even when I am not looking: he is convinced that I will somehow save him from gravity. (Or - more likely - his aim and his grip are much better than ever, and he can latch himself around my neck quite comfortably. As I choke and stagger, he yells - Elephant!)

It appears that babies as young as 6 months old are excellent judges of character. A recent paper in Nature by J. Kiley Hamlin and others, shows that infants almost always reach for a toy shape that appeared to have behaved as a good guy rather than one that behaved as a bad guy.

A researcher, hidden from view of the infants, would move a Circle up a slope, whereupon either a Square would shove it down the slope, or a Triangle would help it up. After repeated demonstrations, the babies were offered Triangle and Square, and in almost every case, they would reach for Triangle. The researchers proved there was no favouritism shown to the particular shape, by swapping the roles of Triangle and Square. Also, the colour of the shape did not matter, nor was there any predisposition towards pushing up or down motions.

They conclude that this is an untaught behaviour improving the infant's survivability to separate friends from foes. It might possibly be hardwired in their brains, but that hypothesis requires more testing.

In the first few months of her life, a baby shows preferences for others based on the attractiveness of their faces. (No wonder, then, that the tiny fellow yelled for his mum when I picked him up. My baleful countenance would stop a hippo in its tracks, particularly if I hadn't shaved. Or it might have been halitosis.) Now it appears that, as she grows older, an infant is able to make choices to discern character, develop moral thought, and indeed act upon these choices with appropriate amity or animosity.

J.K.Hamlin et al: Social Evaluation by Preverbial Infants, Nature 450, 557-559 (22 November 2007)

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