“Always ask what is inside the package”

Said the smiling, imposing man with the handlebar moustache and the unmistakable demeanour of someone used to having his instructions written down and actioned upon forthwith. You could also tell from the firmness in his voice that he had an army background.

This is 2006, and I was back home in Chennai on vacation.At that time, San Antonio, Texas was home.It was also home to the girl I was going to marry, and she asked me to do her the favor of picking up new clothes her mom had bought for her and bringing it back to Texas. Just the usual “Kuruvier” service.

Just one thing she failed to mention.

I’d be collecting the package from the Chairman and Managing Director of Hindustan Diamond, a joint venture between the Government of India and DeBeers, a retired IAS officer, and an ex-army man who spent months in a tank fighting in the 1971 India-Pakistan war. And sporting above-mentioned imposing handlebar moustache.

And oh, he also happens to be her father, who will be meeting, for the first time, the distinctly unimposing 28-year-old IT guy that had popped the question (accompanied by the ironic non-diamond ring material choice of cubic zirconia) to his youngest daughter, the darling of the household. It was, for all practical purposes, a job interview in the guise of a package pickup.

And I had already failed the first test.

“Always ask what is inside the package”, he instructed with bemusement as I collected it without posing that very question. I wanted to signal my undying admiration for his daughter by offering to courier anything from contraband drugs to black market nuclear material, and he essentially schooled me for being, um, irresponsible.

Velaydhan Pillai Madhavan Nair was born on April 18 in Parvathipuram, Nagercoil and was one of 8 children. He went to Scott Christian College, joined the army (14 Scinde Horse), served in the 1971 war, joined the civil service, became collector of Tuticorin, then MD of Cholan transport, was Transport secretary under MGR before finally retiring as SEEPZ Development Commissioner, where he had a ringside view to the growth of the very company his 2 daughters & 1 son-in-law would go on to work at – Tata Consultancy Services.

His steadfast refusal to yield to political pressure resulted in a life filled with transfers. He smoked Wills Filter all his life till he decided one day in his 60s to stop cold turkey. He liked his whisky with water and because he had seen actual action in the war, even 2 large pegs never loosened his tongue to unleash war stories. In my experience, people who speak volubly about war have usually never experienced it. He had a green thumb.We turned our terrace into a food paradise, and his stint in the Army made dal, chicken curry, and roti his comfort food over Onam sadyas.

He died from chronic kidney disease on November 15, 2025 after a lifetime of serving the nation and his family.

Writing about fathers-in-law is hard.When my father passed away, I had a lifetime of experience being around him as a child, but men being men, we rarely let our guard down and share our insecurities with each other when we are alive. We hold binary images of the men in our lives – they are either the supportive friend or the dictator. In either case, emotional distance is typically measured in light years. It like men speak at each other, not speak to each other, and I was no different. I’d discuss politics and technology with him, but never desires, disappointments or regrets.

We don’t choose our fathers, but we do choose our fathers-in-law. They arrive in our lives playing, to varying degrees, the role of the chap outside Buckingham Palace wearing what looks like a bear on his head. Almost every wedding ritual in India feels like the changing of the guard. “You are now given the responsibility of taking care of my daughter”

But Madhavan Nair, or Maddy, as my wife would refer to him, had no such delusions. He told me that his younger daughter took excellent care of him and will now take excellent care of me. When the priest at my wedding asked him what gotra he was so that he could initiate the Vedically sanctioned “Gotra transfer protocol”, his response was “Manusha Gotram”, subtly suggesting that there was going to be no “transfer” of any kind.

Maddy lived the good life. He always hired people to get work done, and then ensured that their children got the best education and jobs. His wife and daughters would regularly be exasperated at what they believed was his “Ambala Singam” (Male Lion) behaviour, but in the truest sense of cognitively dissonant Indian multifaceted-ness, he was a progressive conservative, a pacifist soldier and a patriarchal feminist. And he kept control of the TV remote. And he truly loved his sons-in-laws. A few years back, he surprised me with a giant file – with newspaper cutouts of every single column I had written since 2008. They say the internet never forgets, but I’d be hard pressed to find everything I wrote.

That file was a ostensibly a collection of newspaper clippings but hiding an act of quiet devotion, the kind that involves scissors, glue, and the patience to wake up every morning and check if your son-in-law’s column made it to print. We live in an age where we can bookmark, screenshot, and save anything to the cloud, and yet we save nothing. We hoard terabytes of photographs we never look at, while that generation built careful, physical shrines to the people they loved. These objects carried weight, literal and emotional, and the act of preserving them was itself an expression of love and respect that never needed to be spoken aloud, almost compensating for our quintessentially male habit of never sharing feelings.

Some years ago, we were sharing a drink, and I decided to dig into his army past just to see if a private conversation would make him share.I asked him why he, a Malayali, would wear a Kada, the traditional Sikh bangle. He told me that his Army jeep driver took him to the Golden Temple in Amritsar before they were deployed to the front, and got it for him for his protection. The driver, he added, died in a landmine explosion during a recon mission, and he continued to wear it in remembrance.

And like many soldiers who build their own quiet armour against the traumatic memories of war that don’t leave, he smiled and added that the man (his Sikh driver) made the finest curry from chickens that were “persuasively sourced” from villages urged to support the war effort.

He remained an army man right up to the end, opting out of invasive treatments and a few days before he passed away, told his attendant nurses that his son-in-law was going to get him discharged because he was sick of having tubes stuck into him, and his daughters and wife weren’t listening to him. He died peacefully in his sleep..

After 2 episodes on Salt and Sugar respectively, we picked Fats as the theme for Episode 3, and as one does nowadays, I decided to seek the guidance of our Lord and Saviour, ChatGPT, for some inspiration before going live. 

The very first answer made me do a bit of Vadivelian double-take (memorably captured by this gif)

because the idea of using butter as currency seemed, on the face of it, slightly odd. While I’m not necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to personal finance and economics, it doesn’t take a Samurai sword to realize that currencies in general don’t tend to be things that disintegrate at room temperature. I mean, ghee as currency, I can still accept, although liquids tend to present their own challenges when used as monetary instruments. Being financially liquid is not something one interprets literally, but we digress. 

So, before I embarrassed myself going live and boldly claiming that Indians were actually “greasing each other’s palms” with butter back in the day, I asked ChatGPT a follow-up question.

 And I can only imagine that a few million nodes in a neural network did the silicon equivalent of “how dare this puny, cognitively challenged human being ask me for evidence?” because this is how its answer started

Basically

And it proceeded to unleash Exhibit A. 

Ok. Cows as currency is not unknown. In fact, they are still valuable commodities of trade among several tribal communities around the world today, but the logical leap from that to butter as currency felt a bit like an Olympic high jumper on anabolic steroids. But it was the next point that intrigued me further.

Alright. Now, very few people have actually read the Atharva Veda, but I’m reasonably familiar with the Mahabharata and I most certainly did not recall any butter-based wager, so I pressed further.

And it responded with the confidence of a techbro claiming that blockchain will solve global poverty

For starters – we need more than a like and dislike button as feedback. There needs to be “Holy Mother of Melmaruvathur” button as well. I mean, I’ve read the Amar Chitra Katha version, I’ve watched the Doordarshan series, and even read the full, unabridged version of the epic, but I do not recall any quadripedal perambulation by Dharmaraja as a penalty for losing that famous game of dice. And I most certainly did not recall him handing over half kg bricks of butter to Duryodhana, Sakuni et al. So at this point, I realized that the bot was, to put it mildly, pulling a fast one, so I decided to investigate everything that Yudhishtira actually wagered and lost in that game. 

So I did just that 

It is pretty obvious the ACK and Doordarshan versions vastly shortened and simplified that infamous game. Here is the full sequence of things that he wagered and lost (along with some value-adding, insightful commentary from me)

1. Pearls that surfaced during the churning of the ocean – Clearly our man started out small, just to test the waters
2. Gold and Silver – Like seasoned gamblers do, our man must’ve gone – “Sakuni must have beginner’s luck, so now’s the time to take it to the next level” 
3. Royal chariot + 8 steeds – This is the part when the dude has no cash left on his person, so he goes “Imma bet my BMW 5-series parked outside” 
4. 100,000 serving girls who are young, have beautiful earrings, and can serve food 24×7 – OK. Um. So, at this point, he’s like – “You can have my BPO operation”
5. 1000 elephants (each one had 8 she-elephants) – I have a warehouse full of trucks. I bet those. 
6. Warriors – You can have my army
7. Super famous Gandharva Stallions – I bet my mutual funds
8. 10,000 draught animals – You can have my farmhouse near Gurgaon
9. 400 sheets of copper and iron – I wager my mining operations in conflict zones
10. (Not kidding – this is from the original) tens of thousands and millions and millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions and tens of billions and hundreds of billions and trillions and tens of trillions and hundreds of trillions and tens of quadrillions and hundreds of quadrillions and even more wealth – At this point, Yudhishtira was running NFT and Crypto scams to continue to be in the game
11. Lots of milch cows and goats – Aha, 100,000 serving girls, a fuckton of jewellery and a savanna-ful of herbivores later, he finally gets to his most precious possession – cows and goats. 
12. Entire city and country minus the Brahmins who advise him – As they say in the business, consultants never lose
13. Princes – At this point, we’ve entered human-trafficking territory
14. Nakula – Hmmm..let me think. Who is the most useless of the Pandavas?
15. Sahadeva – Tell me again what this chap does? 
16. Arjuna – Hmm, this fellow always had a very high opinion of his archery skills
17. Bhima – I wager Ser Gregor Clegane 
18. Himself – I got nothin’ else
19. Draupadi – Oh wait, I still have my wife who I technically cannot wager cos I am now property of Duryodhana but WTH Lulz worth a shot

Anyway, the crux of the matter is that there was no butter being wagered among all the jewellery, mineral resources, livestock and human beings. So, why did ChatGPT make this stuff up? If you are expecting a deep, technical analysis of Large Language Models, you will be disappointed. I can’t debug it any more than its own developers can. Turns out, explainability is indeed a bit of a problem, but a few other thoughts did come to mind.

It’s not like human beings don’t make stuff up. We do it all the time. In fact, one of my LinkedIn core competencies is the ability to stitch together 4 threads of fact with 100 threads of creative fabrication. Eyewitnesses regularly make stuff up under oath. Godmen regularly claim to confabulate with the divine. Children make up excuses with hilariously cute incompetence. Maybe we are also probabilistic auto-complete machines powered by wetware instead of software? 

I don’t know. Maybe I should ask ChatGPT. 

Of course, that unbridled sense of techno-utopian optimism toned down with age (doom-scrolling the slow-motion destruction of democracy around the world definitely helped hone the skepticism), so when the pandemic hit, I was in the throes of a digital detoxification routine. I realised that I remembered things I read on paper better than things I saw on a screen. I switched back to dead trees after cheerleading Kindles and iPads for many years. I had turned off all notifications and kept my phone permanently on silent mode, much to the chagrin of my wife. That was when I realised that maybe it’s the right time to sit down and write a book, so I put together a proposal for a series of absurdist, dark humour, science fiction short stories set in India, because, well, that fit in perfectly with the kind of writing I was comfortable with over the years.

As an afterthought, just to cover my bases, I put together a non-fiction proposal for a book on the science of Indian cooking. I had been reading (and bicep curling) Harold McGee’s weighty tome “On Food and Cooking” and was wondering why there wasn’t an equivalent (and slightly less attractive to the earth’s gravitational pull) version for Indian cooking. I mean, it’s not like ingredients behave more spiritually once they get south of the Tropic of Cancer while obeying the laws of physics and chemistry in the west. A quick search on Indian food science on Amazon only yielded textbooks meant for catering students, so I decided that if I was going to provide a plan B, it might as well be in a niche that hadn’t been filled yet.

Penguin, much to my surprise back then, jumped with great alacrity to green-light the food science book and told me that humour + sci-fi is a cute combination, but unless it helps the reader crack the IIT JEE, it will not sell. Food science, on the other hand, is clearly a niche waiting to be filled. The universe of food writing in India, while undeniably rich, diverse, steeped in tradition, marinated in exoticism and soaked in culture, largely tended to see home cooking as an art form, and at the starting point of an imminent pandemic, it felt like newbie cooks might warm to a crisp, kitchen 101 popular science book. They sent me a contract and my mind automatically searched for a “scroll to the end” and “I agree” button, and before I realised it, I was staring at a blank MS Word page, 60,000 words short of my contractual obligation.

But, in the immortal words of countless MBAs trying hard to sound smart in meetings, let me take a step back. 

I learnt to cook from a working mother at a point when she realised that I could boil water without causing an LPG explosion. To be fair, the lack of female siblings might have played a role in me learning the basics far earlier than most South Asian men, who tend to be enrolled in the “How to grow up to be a douchenozzle husband” advanced tutorial classes pretty early in life, thereby leaving them with little or no time to do basic chores involved in managing a house. Like most boys in this part of the world, I have to admit we also took my mother’s multi-tasking for granted, but fortunately we had a father who did his share of housework instead of reading The Hindu and demanding freshly brewed filter coffee three times a day.

And, when my job took me to the US for the first time, I undertook a minor documentation project of sorts, talking to every old person in the family and writing down their recipes. 

Just one problem.

Most of those old ladies never really thought in terms of recipes. They tended to think about cooking in terms of broader ratios of ingredients, acids, herbs, dry spices, legumes, rice and so on, and had developed heuristics on the function those ingredients played (sources of sourness, sources of strong aroma etc), and mental algorithms on how to extract flavour from those ingredients by cutting/chopping, acids and heat. With these basic building blocks, they didn’t cook by reading elaborate recipes with 37,283 ingredients, but approached it in the form of dish templates that are broad meta models for entire categories of dishes. A rasam, for instance, is essentially an aromatic, watery and sour broth, and thus the sourness can come from a variety of sources, from tomatoes, tamarind, or citrus, while aroma can come from any mix of spices you fancy. With this metamodel in mind, you can get creative. For instance, try replacing tamarind with Apple Cider Vinegar (and thank me later).

But, there is a curious irony here. They evolved these simple mental models to make their lives easier, given that the patriarchal setup in this part of the world has evolved a natural preference for freshly cooked food made only by women with little choice in the matter. And yet, it’s precisely these heuristics and generalised algorithms that we have largely failed to document in favour of some fraudulent notion of “authenticity” and elaborate recipes. My maternal grandmother would make sambar with whatever vegetables or legumes she had rather than shut the kitchen down because a specific kind of pumpkin was not available, and yet recipes tether us to this rigid notion of how a dish must be cooked with precisely a particular set of ingredients in precisely a particular sequence. And regularly fail to provide scientific causal relationships between cooking steps and outcomes.

At the same time, it would be bombastic marketing on my part to claim that I am somehow the first to rescue these golden nuggets of tacit engineering and food science wisdom our mothers and grandmothers had and record them for posterity. Far from it. If anything, the best book on the science of Indian cooking is yet to be written. My book is merely a small nudge to a gap I saw between point and cover and I’ve just taken a quick single. I’ll also freely admit that the novelty of a man writing a book on home cooking has likely contributed to its modest success. 

But, back to the writing process though. As someone who had only written blogposts and newspaper columns, I had to first evolve a method that was productive for me, so I approached the universal oracle of all knowledge (and part-time alt-right propaganda rabbit hole) – YouTube. I then installed an app called Scrivener, and 65,000 words later, my atheist self prostrated to this app in complete awe at its supreme magnificence. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without Scrivener. You know that saying about bad workmen blaming their tools? Well, this mediocre workman absolutely worships this tool. 

The first thing I did is write a table of contents and sub-headings for each chapter. And once I had that loaded into Scrivener, I set myself word count targets for each sub-chapter, and daily word count targets (3000). I dumped all of the relevant research into the Notes section of each sub-chapter, and then woke up every day at 6 am, read the notes and wrote 3000 words on a specific sub-topic before 9 am. Whenever I felt an illustration was required, I made a note of what exactly I wanted to convey in the illustration and then on weekends, did the illustrations. 

And of course, this was the easy part. Once the first draft was in place, Aslesha Kadian, my copy editor at Penguin, made me export this to good old MS Word for the next step – Editing with track changes. And beyond just checking for grammar and spellings, she checked for internal consistency, made me get rid of gratuitous nerdery, fix ambiguous explanations and well, even tested out some of the methods I described in her home kitchen to see if I was just making stuff up. And I know all of this seems rather banal, but in a world where surgeries are going horribly wrong because a patient’s blood had thinned dangerously from drinking turmeric water 3 times a day to prevent Covid-19 on the basis of a WhatsApp forward, the societal value of fact-checking far exceeds the Bitcoin-USD exchange rate (peer review, I am told, is less computationally intensive than blockchain consensus building) 

So, that’s how Masala Lab came to be. Against all expectations, it’s stayed at Number 1 on the Amazon food chart for over 4 months now, and will release internationally on April 15. It’s been a fun journey so far, and it’s a little odd to be suddenly treated as some kind of authority on food, when in reality, the book was written by someone who isn’t a natural good cook for people who find cooking knowledge intimidating. As the opening page of the book says,

And then we have “understanding”, which is rather vague, really. With a bachelor’s degree in engineering, I can still not understand the impenetrably dense (while precise) legalese used in contracts and risk documents for mutual fund investments. And then there is a more emergent sense of social or civic literacy. The ability to read with understanding is a crucial foundation for democracy, particularly if people are expected to understand their rights within a written constitution, and at a more tactical level, the ability to understand laws and rules, and thus abide by them. But what if we extend this definition to the ability for a society to read and appreciate the dilemmas between individual rights in a constitution and the contradictory messages that tradition, customs & religion amplify daily, like women’s rights or caste hierarchies? Is that too much too fast for Indian society? Who gets to determine the appropriateness of the pace of progress?

In the 18th century, Scandinavia was able to aggressively attain 100% literacy and one of the things that helped (among other things) was the Church deciding to allow marriages only if both parties were literate. And once women became literate, they were able to join professional guilds and thus make money to be able to own property, which then gave them voting rights almost a century ahead of most other parts of the world. So I realize that even a perfunctory tick mark based definition of literacy is still a step in the direction of progress.

I was standing near the door of my compartment on the Kanyakumari Express that was stationary outside Virudhunagar, waiting for trains from the Tanjore delta that were delayed by Cyclone Gaja to cross before heading northwards. That was when these thoughts about literacy wafted in, along with an unhealthy dose of passive smoke from two gentlemen who were puffing away right under the “No smoking” sign.

But for this story, we will need to rewind to a few days earlier.

I packed my bags and headed to a place I hadn’t been in a while, a railway station. The fact that I didn’t have to make a Shah Rukh Khan open arms pose while a strapping CISF guard groped me, or breathe stale, dehydrated, recycled air filed with pathogens coughed out by bawling toddlers, while forcing down microwaved-to-death food in a pressurized aluminium tube stabbing mother earth’s backside with a knife made of greenhouse gases, was a pleasant respite. I was headed to my late father’s native village, Gopalasamudram, a sleepy little hamlet hugging the sand-mafia ravaged banks of the Tamaraparani river that cultivated more banana than the soil and ground water could sustainably tolerate.

I was there to sort out a minor property dispute involving my late dad’s (and his siblings’) ancestral home, a train of compartmentalized rooms stretching from a “Thinnai” to a backyard where cows presumably named Nandhini grazed many years ago. A particularly avaricious neighbour had decided to encroach into this property through the cunning use of a fence. He simply built it a few meters into this backyard and declared, like the British did with flags, that what lay behind the fence was now his property.

The tenant living in that ancestral house had called me a few months back to complain about this shameless colonialist behavior and asked me for advice on how to deal with it. I sat in my privileged, upper caste ivory tower in Besant Nagar and asked him why he couldn’t just go to the police with a copy of the property deed and ask them to take care of the problem. After all, this is Tamil Nadu, not UP, I added (the desire to score pointless political points at all times with showboaty snark is truly a liberal disease)

He said – “Chaami, naan complaint kudutha yethukkamaattanga. Neengathaan varanum” (Elaborate translation with subtext: The police will not heed my complaint because the encroaching neighbour is upper caste. They will, however listen to you if you grace them with your presence)

Ah yes, of course, the encroacher’s relatively higher position in the caste ladder not only gave him a rather entitled and loose definition of property rights, but also a handicap when it came to access to public services like the police. So I went down there and found our tenant waiting with a handlebar-mustachioed gentleman named Esakki, who introduced himself as the “supreme navigator of all things government” in those parts. All small towns and villages in India typically have one such person, a consummately resourceful & extroverted networker who knows how many marks every local government clerk’s son scored in the engineering entrance exam, and could grease palms with the efficiency of WD40. All for a small fee, of course. Being mostly illiterate in all matters related to property ownership and such, I was happy to let him take the lead and advise us on the best course of action.

The Village AO (Administrative Officer) was our first port of call. The plan was to take our crumbling Akkadian era cuneiform “Patta” to the AO and have him issue a certificate that affirmed the location and dimensions of said property after a database lookup from a relatively less crumbled ledger, which we would then take to the Taluk office in nearby Cheranmadevi and request an official survey that would physically mark the extent of the property, and hopefully convince our encroacher to decommission his marauding fence. “Talk, before Authority. Authority, before Veecharuvaal”, Esakki explained his approach to sorting out disputes. Clearly, talk had failed, so we were going to use government authority to make our case.

The AO was a courteous man who made polite enquiries about whether the IT industry was still a promising career option for his daughter while his minion was conducting an index-search for which ledger was likely to contain the information we were looking for. That was when another elderly gentleman walked in, hesitatingly, holding a sheaf of documents. The AO asked him what he wanted and the old man said – “I was asked to make a missing person complaint to the AO before going to the police, so I’ve got someone to write this complaint letter for me” (Pre-empting any rebuke from the AO for semantic mistakes in the complaint with his frank admission of illiteracy). The AO took the sheaf of documents and perfunctorily glanced at them.

“25 year old daughter went missing last week, didn’t come back home from college, where she was pursuing a Masters degree”, he read out to us. Esakki, always the conversationalist, said something that was a fascinatingly disturbing mix of casteist bigotry and progressive, liberal values. “These SC fellows are always after our girls, but she is 25 years old, major, so there’s nothing we can do. Just wait for a few weeks and they will come back to you and ask for forgiveness. Forgive them and get them married because it doesn’t make sense to fight over these things nowadays”. My head was spinning, because while I expected zero bipartisan collaboration between social conservatism and liberalism, they were getting a registered marriage right in front of my eyes here.

While I was still processing this amazing bit of acrobatic ethical jugglery from Esakki, the AO’s minion had located our information and filled out a certificate that reaffirmed that our property had not, despite the colonial tendencies of the neighbour, shrunk in size over time. We thanked the AO and took a giant diesel powered Share-auto to the Cheranmadevi Taluk office. The place was at the highway crossroads, at the edge of the thin fertile belt of land on the banks of the Tamaraparani and the near Sub-Saharan African brush desert that is most of the rest of Tirunelveli and Tuticorin districts (Puliankulam, south of Cheranmadevi is famously featured in the brilliant film Pariyerum Perumal).

Just outside the office, under a sparse tree, was a scrawny and sprightly young girl who was surrounded by people holding file holders. She was filling forms for them, affixing revenue stamps and directing them to the right desk for the right problem. She charged 20 rupees for every form she filled out and every complaint letter she authored. She looked like a high-schooler and had a schoolgirlish enthusiasm (and delightful Tirunelveli accent) that put her already tense customers at ease while they anticipated the struggles & frustration of dealing with the Byzantine maze that is local government in India.

Esakki introduced us to her (“Chaami Madraslendhu vandhurkaaru. Surveyora paakaanum”) and asked her how long she’d been doing this because he’d never seen her at this office before. She said that it’s been a few weeks and she does this from 9 am to 4 pm after which she has to head home to take care of her 4 year old daughter who will be back home from kindergarten school.

“How old are you?”, Esakki asked, echoing my surprise at how young she looked.

“20”, she said.

“What does your girl’s father do?”, he added.

“He died in a road accident a few weeks ago, that’s why I’m doing this to keep the lights on”.

This was the moment that stayed with me as I was inhaling second hand smoke on Kanyakumari express while it was waiting outside Virudhunagar. What is literacy, really? Is it just the ability to sign your name and recognize numbers? Does it extend to being able to understand government forms? Or use an ATM? This is a state that is objectively among the better places in India from a literacy standpoint. And yet, there are hundreds of people standing outside a Cheranmadevi Taluk office taking the help of a Class VII educated, 20 year old single mother with no social safety net, who was married at 16, to fill forms.

That magical “one thing” is the subcontinent’s other great, albeit lesser known contribution because what everyone knows is step two of the “one thing” phenomenon – Jugaad. “You do one thing” is almost always followed by a short cut, hack, regularly unethical, non-scalable idea that the world celebrates as Jugaad. The darker side of the “One thing – Jugaad” industrial complex is that we never really solve large and complex problems in any meaningful way.

Like the terrible quality of service from mobile service providers. (Were you expecting a thesis on a more serious social problem after that build-up? Apologies.)

Some weeks ago, I had a conversation with my wife that went roughly along the lines of

Me: (dials her number)

Mobile operator: (in Tamil) The customer you are trying to reach is currently unreachable due to national security reasons. Please try again

Me: (dials her number again). (Rings)

Me: Hello. Hello.

Silence

Disconnects automatically

Me: (Dials again) Hello. Hello

Her: Hello?

Me: Oh finally. Ok, listen, my phone is about to die, so note this down carefully. I got a call from the bank. They threatened to withdraw all our money and burn it in a bonfire and post the video on Facebook if we don’t link our Aadhar to our bank account. So can you take my aadhar card copy and take it to the bank tomorrow and get that KYC (Kankutthufy Your Customer) thing done. And also, I’ve forgot to turn off the gas, so make sure you don’t use the butane blowtorch at home today.

Her: Hello?

Me: (Phone dies from running out of battery)

So, after several such unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the family using a cellular device, I called my service provider. After navigating through an IVR designed to ensure that I do not come into any contact with a carbon-based life form, I chose an option that suggested that I might be interested in upgrading to some newer, expensive plan. The IVR immediately yielded control to someone speaking English in a Gurgaon accent. I then told him that I was having trouble, you know, putting my mobile phone to use. He said that I had to choose a different option from the menu because his was the “sell more expensive call dropping services” department . I said – “Ah, ok, I’d like to cancel my connection then”.

He panicked and then immediately transferred me to the “technical department” that was in charge of call-dropping in my state (Tamil Nadu). That guy then asked me what issues I was facing. I told him – “Um, I am unable to talk to fellow human beings”. He said – “we are sorry for your bad experience sir, we will help you. Please tell us the GPS coordinates where you have this problem. I gave him my home and office address and he told me that he will send an engineer with Ghostbuster equipment to “test the signal” at those locations.

A day later, I got a call from the Ghostbuster guy.

Him: Hello

Me: Hello

Him: Hello, … … hear ..?

Me Hello?

Him: Hello. Kek…..?

Me: Hello?

Him: Sir, whether … …. landline?

Me: Hello?

Him: Sir, you ……… …. compl… can you tell what .. … issue?

Me: In the immortal words of Senthil, this is the banana

Him: Hello?

Call drops.

After a week, we have a family discussion and decide that paying this service provider for seamless city-wide call dropping was not a sound idea, so we would all take advantage of TRAI’s gift to the empowered Indian mobile customer – PORTING.

I took the lead and messaged PORT to 1900 from my phone.

It immediately rang.

Guy: Sir, we noticed that you made a Porting request. Can I know what the reason is?

Me: Continuous call dropping

Guy: I’m sorry… …. ….help….fix…issue….chance

Me: Hello?

Guy: We ….fix…inconvenience..

Me: Hello?

Guy: Sir, whether…. … landline

Me: Do you see the Inception-level irony in me not being able to describe the problem I have due to the problem I have to the guy whose job is to validate the problem I have and keep me paying to continue having aforementioned problem?

Guy: Hello?

Call drops.

I sat through the “We are willing to do anything to retain you as a customer” call, stood steadfast, and said NO. With great sadness and resignation, my mobile service provider of 15 years let me go. I asked them what the final bill amount was. He consulted a lunar almanac and explained, with the pseudoscientific authority of an astrologer fixing marriage dates, how my billing cycle would intersect the orbits of Jupiter’s moons and therefore how, right now, I’d be paying the previous month’s bill and 15 business days later, I’d get the final bill.

A week later, I was on a new network. The sunlight seemed brighter, the air crisper, the signal bars full. The word “Connecting…” disappeared from my WhatsApp window and forwards about Vedic nanotechnology downloaded seamlessly. Days passed. 4K videos streamed. Life was good. Till an ominous SMS arrived from my new service provider.

It said something to the effect of – “you have a pending bill of Rs. 3000 with your previous provider. Please pay it to ensure continued service”.

I ignored that SMS along with the one about Thai massages and plots of land in Thiruvallur, and then one day, another SMS arrived, to the effect of “I told you to settle your bill with your old provider and now we are compelled to cut you off.”

So I called my new provider and told them that I was in possession of a receipt that proved to God, Man and the Holy TASMAC Spirit that i had settled my final bill.

The man told me – “Sir maybe you might not have paid attention, but they never settle the final bill in one shot. They would have explained with arcane astrological references that there will be another actual final all reals final bill that you have to settle.”

With my face adopting a “Vadivelu realizes that he has been put in a tricky situation” expression, I said “Ahaaaa” and drove over to the nearest “Customer nursing and terminal illness care center” of my previous provider and asked them what the actual final mother promise final payment was.

He said “532 rupees as calculated by solving this complex integral involving prorated rates as influenced by the retrograde motion of Mercury”. Adopting the “Keemedi” variant of the skeptical Vadivelu face, I showed him an SMS from my current provider that the all reals mother promise final bill amount was in the vicinity of Rs. 3000 and asked him if the difference between 3000 and 532 was another bill hidden in the Ark of the Covenant. He assured me 532 was indeed the final deal and my separation was indeed confirmed.

I handed him the cash in the manner of Beemboy vs Avinashi, and he gave me a hand written paper receipt. I asked why not something printed out. He said “no saar you are not a customer in the systeth anymore so I can’t do printout. For you, only 1 kg tomato bill from Pazhamudhir Nilayam”

I then scanned this bill and whatsapped it to my new provider and then he told me something interesting. He said that he will forward it to a neutral third party who adjudicates porting situations where people switch without clearing final final all reals bills!!

Of course, my earlier provider had no incentive to make it easy for me to settle my dues and switch, and I’m quite certain my current provider likely does the same to its dissatisfied customers. And it’s a perfectly Indian solution to introduce a bureaucratic middleman to fix a problem arising from initial bureaucratic meddling by a government that unfortunately operates in what is largely a zero-trust, self-centered culture. Companies don’t trust customers and customers don’t trust anyone and the only reason third parties exist is that the mutual distrust both parties have for them cancel one another.

Think about this. Even to reach my service provider, I wasn’t going to obey the rules of obfuscatory navigation that the company put in place in their IVR because they weren’t making enough money to afford more people in their call-centers. I used a jugaad (which came from a “You do one thing. Press the option for upgrade and they will always find a human being to talk to you” suggestion from a friend) to get to a human being nonetheless. The company then used a hostile process design aimed at making it hard for me to switch despite the presence of governmental regulation and this cycle of small scale tragedies of the common continued unabated.

Those from a left of center economic persuasion will argue that if there was no regulation, the telcos would collude and screw you. Those on the right will argue that a truly free market would have magically sorted this out in much the same way that a beaker of amino acids will spontaneously react and form life. And those in Silicon Valley will offer Blockchain as a solution to this problem.

But, this is India. Nothing is really that simple. No one trusts anybody and middlemen (like these companies whose sole job is to adjudicate billing disputes among customers who switch between telcos!) exist everywhere. You can’t fully solve a universal lack of trust with technology, economic policy or law. Every solution is practically an evolutionary step-by-step tinkering that balances trust (and its lack thereof) in a complex web of relentlessly selfish players.

So you do one thing. Stop solutionizing.

The count turned his face, raised his eyebrows and looked at the portly man behind him. Heiliger Berg, the rogue philosopher at his court who almost always asked the oddest of questions. He had this immediate desire to kick the man and call him names, but he desisted. He had an errand for him and the use of violence this early in the day was, well, not prudent.

He would, he convinced himself, take Berg’s bait and engage the man in a conversation on philosophy.

Amani: Interesting question, Berg. Are cows conscious? I don’t know. But I wonder what it means to be conscious?

Berg: Perhaps it it the awareness of the self. Knowing one’s identity. Do cows give each other names?

Amani: Hmm, but what is identity, I wonder?

Berg:  Identity is the relation that everything bears only to itself.

Amani: Ah, so in that case, what does it mean when we say that two things are identical? Are any of those cows identical? They do look identical to me.

Berg: Well, it’s not that simple. My good friend, Herr Gottfried Leibnitz, who is currently busy fighting an English charlatan alchemist over credit for some new mathematical method he’s invented, constructed a rather simple principle, the Identity of Indiscernibles –  If any two things are identical, they must share all the same properties.

Amani: Hmm. That’s a bit too general, don’t you think?

Berg: Alright – let me take an example to make this simpler. Consider a Mysore Bonda.

Amani: (Raising eyebrows). Alright. I have, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly crisp Bonda de Mysoeur, filled with the finest potatoes from the Andes. Go on.

Berg: Essentially, things are identical to themselves.

Amani: I was going to say “Dei”, but it means God in Latin and I, for one, shall not take his name in vain.

Berg: A single Mysore Bonda is identical to itself, as in, the same aforementioned Mysore Bonda. It has the perfectly soft lumps of potato in the exact same places and is also the same exact dimensions, which shouldn’t be surprising, because it’s the same Mysore Bonda. Identical Mysore bondas are indiscernible. So a second Mysore Bonda, no matter how skilled the cook, cannot be identical to the the first Mysore Bonda, because only the first Mysore Bonda is truly identical to the first Mysore Bonda. That, is the essence of identity.

Amani: So you are saying that the basic foundation of the definition of identity is that “I am similar to myself”? The profession of beggary is less demeaning than this kind of intellectual obscurantism. But alright. Let’s take this forward. Would this definition not run into the Ship of Theseus problem?

If a ship that left the port of Theseus and over the next several years changed and replaced every single wooden board and crew member before returning, would it still remain the same ship that departed? Similarly, let’s say I upgrade my heart to the new steampunk chrome plated artificial heart from Ferrari, would I still remain Count Amani? Would Sarah La Covaye still love me?

Berg: Good point, and yes, the original definition of identity did not distinguish between bodily attributes and attributes of consciousness. The former, I would argue, are not that important. You might physically change over time, and you might even replace parts, but your mind has memory of your past self, and that’s what makes you identical to your past self. John Locke said that it’s the mind and consciousness that defines your identity. Your body might replace cells all the time, but your consciousness remains the same.

Amani: But what happens in situations where you don’t remember? Say, a boy grows up to to be a soldier and then, later in life, a general. The general may not remember being a boy. Would you then say that the general is a different person from the boy. I would argue that the general is, indeed, a different person. The boy clearly has different attributes. He might have, for instance, liked upma. Surely the general will never tolerate such an abomination?

Berg: The general may not remember being a boy, and the general may very well have a few different attributes. But two things. One – we have a chain of memory, the upma-hating general remembers being a soldier on the front, and the battle weary soldier remembers the upma-loving innocence of his childhood. Psychological continuity is what matters here. And two – I’d argue that we also need to distinguish between essential attributes and accidental attributes. The choice of liking upma, is, for example, an accidental attribute, while your conscious memory of your self is an essential attribute.

Amani: I’m not convinced that memory or consciousness is somehow a more important attribute. Prove it to me.

Berg: OK. Consider Bernard Williams’ thought experiment. Imagine an evil scientist, who possessed the technology to transfer the contents of your mind to another person’s brain and transfer the contents of their brain to yours.

Amani: I’m imagining him doing that for our minds and I shudder at the terrible one-sidedness of that exchange.

Berg: (smoothly ignoring that insult) Now let’s say that he does indeed transfer your mind into my brain and my mind into your brain. Once he is done with the transfer, he then makes an offer. He will give one of the parties a million dollars and will torture the other one for eternity. Perhaps he will feed the tortured party only upma. Now tell me, if you had to make a choice of who will get tortured and who will get the million dollars after the mind exchange, who would you pick right now?

Amani: Hmmm…hmmm…Not bad Herr Heiliger Berg, your logic is sounder than I expected it to be. But unfortunately, it’s not convincing. Consider people who suffer from permanent loss of memory, total amnesia. Would we then say that the person who wakes up from a coma is a “different person”? Or consider Bruce Wayne and Batman. Or Clark Kent and Superman. Are they the same person? Are they identical? And wait, consider episode 24 from Season 6 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. You are familiar with transporter technology, I assume. Or do you rural bumpkins not watch Star Trek?

Anyway, a transporter scans every atom in your body, records its position, recreates you at your choice of destination and disintegrates your original self, all while playing a small musical crescendo for extra dramatic effect. I know your party-pooper German friend Heisenberg will protest, but suspend your disbelief for a moment.

A transporter malfunction involving Commander Riker results in source Riker not getting disintegrated, thus resulting in 2 Rikers, one at the source, and one at the destination. Using Locke, Leibnitz and every other philosopher’s theories you just propounded, tell me if both these Rikers are “identical”. Perhaps you might say that Star Trek stories don’t count. In that case, tell me how your fancy theories of identity deal with genetic clones? Tell me? Tell me?

Berg: I give up. Your superior whataboutery humbles my puny mind. Now, you had an errand for me, I hear.

Amani: Ah yes. Good you reminded me. A good friend of mine, William Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, has invented a new, astonishingly delicious variety of banana. Interestingly, every one of those bananas is a genetic clone of one another! Now, here’s some money to get 2 of them. I’d like you to take my steam powered airship and return posthaste with these 2 bananas.

Berg: With pleasure.

Heiliger (Saint, in German) Berg (Hill in German) proceeds to collect the bananas, eats one of them, and returns to the estate of Amani and presents the Count with the one remaining banana

Amani: Wait. I asked you to get 2 bananas. This is one. Where is the other one?

Berg: This is the other one.

Good evening.

Tonight’s programme is going to be different. The Nation demands to know how a prime time TV panel debate is designed by my illustrious channel. So, tonight, instead of just seeing a debate in action, I will take you through the backstage process that we have perfected over the years. Some viewers might wonder why I am revealing our trade secrets to the world, but like Elon Musk, I believe that the nation will not improve till every TV channel in every regional language puts the nation first and transforms news into a choreographed cockfight between false equivalences every. single. night.

Lesson number 1: Pick the Story

Our day begins in the morning, when we sit in a meeting room looking at the news stories of the day.

For example, today, we had the following stories.

1. Environmental damage by large company in clear violation of law.
2. Large complex bill that is about to be passed by parliament has problematic provisions and unseen impacts.
3. Massive Scam involving hospitals, government employees and private contractors.
4. Female actor posts instagram pic of herself wearing a tank top with a goddess Durga picture.

Story number 1 – Let’s reject it because their parent company advertises here, so it’s…um…best avoided.

Story number 2 is boring because the experts who understand this shit are terrible on TV. Our viewers would rather watch paint dry. And again, if the impact is unseen, let it stay unseen no?

Story 3 requires actual investigative journalism, like we have to actually send reporters to Bihar and research the story. Our training budget only covers “Shove mic into Shashi Tharoor’s face”, so forget about it. While we can work in a political angle, like maybe go all the way back and blame the Mauryas for the poor state of healthcare in Patna, we can’t bring a radical mullah, fundamentalist pastor and an outraged godman into this, so the story is rejected.

Story 4 – Now that’s what we run with. Hey social media intern, trawl though her Instagram feed and find me the hottest pics she’s posted. While we are going after the outrage angle, let’s not forget that titillation brings us an extra audience. Actually, in many cases, the same fellows get titillated and then outraged.

Now that we have the news story, we move on to lesson 2

Lesson 2: Frame the Debate

At this point, many of you might wonder – on the face of it, is this even worth a debate? It’s just someone who is using her personal social media account to post a picture of herself. Also, do we really think our gods are so insecure that they don’t like being featured on modern clothing? Not a big deal really. I mean, how do we deal with rebellious young people who cock a snook at religion at home? We mostly just either ignore them, or at the very least, we tolerate them. That’s the normal course of things in a religion that prides itself on tolerance, no?

NO.

WE ARE TV NEWS. OUR JOB IS NOT TO CURATE THE NORMAL. IT’S TO AMPLIFY THE ABNORMAL.

WE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF CURATING AND AMPLIFYING RARE EVENTS AND MAKING THEM SEEM LIKE THE NORMAL COURSE OF EVENTS. ACTUAL NORMALITY IS OUR ENEMY.

SO AN INSTAGRAM PIC IS A BIG DEAL BECAUSE I SAY IT’S A BIG DEAL. THE NATION DEMANDS TO KNOW BECAUSE I STICK A ROD INTO THE NATION’S POSTERIOR TILL IT VIOLENTLY AGREES THAT IT DEMANDS TO KNOW WHATEVER IT IS I DEMAND IT DEMAND TO KNOW.

WE ARE NOT IN THE NEWS BUSINESS. WE ARE IN THE OUTRAGE MONETIZATION BUSINESS.

So our debate title is – Does Durga belong on a Tank Top?

Lesson number 3: Panel Selection, part 1

For all things t, there is a fringe outraged group g. The key to a successful debate panel is to find as many extremist outraged groups as possible.

If the picture of the goddess had been on a regular T-shirt, there’s no cause for outrage here. But if we define a positive length l between the hemline and waistline, l is the gap of moral decay. The more the l, the more outraged parties we can find.

Now who are these outraged groups. At the top of my head, I can think of 3 obvious candidates.

1. Men who cannot tolerate independent women. This is quite easy. That’s pretty much most men. So let’s find a middle aged uncle who is the admin of a “Sanskaari values” Facebook group and invite him to our panel.
2. Uptight people who believe that religious symbols should not be mixed with anything remotely sexual. I know, Durga says “Eh? Have you ever read mythology or seen temple sculptures” but listen to me – there is no one more ignorant of religion than really religious types. So we can still target them. Let’s call them the “Tee + Durga is ok, but tank top + Durga is not” group.
3. Insecure types who feel that only Hindu symbols are disrespected while other religions are protected. Let’s call this species Hypocriticus whataboutasaurus.

Now, if you think that looks like a comprehensive list, you are wrong. That’s why I’m the primetime host of a noise show and you are not.

You forgot number 4. Men’s rights activists!! Sanskaari uncle is fine, but we can also invite a young guy convicted under section 498A to provide his perspective on why women get away with things that men would be crucified for because there is misandry everywhere.

Yeah yeah, of course we know #NotAllMen is bullshit, but hey, TV news debates are about seating 8 well fed bulls in 8 panels, all dropping A-grade organic manure on Live TV but looking like pundits sharing valuable counter perspectives.

WE ARE NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF INFORMING OUR VIEWERS THAT NOT ALL OPINIONS ARE EQUAL. WE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF SUSTAINING THE ILLUSION THAT ALL OPINIONS DESERVE EQUAL AIRTIME.

Lesson 4: Panel Selection, Part Deux

For each outraged group, find a counter outrage group that this group hates. And more importantly, find a particular individual who the outraged group will loathe from the bottom of their hearts.

For panelist 1 (men who cannot tolerate independent women) – let’s find a 20 year old feminist, and let’s make sure we let her interrupt the Sanskaari uncle every 2 minutes. Get her to wear a #YesAllMen T-shirt as well.

For panelist 2 (the upright religious types) – Let’s get a gay sex toy designer for this. Nothing pisses of religious nut jobs more than gay people. Also, make sure he is dressed in leather and is wearing black lipstick.

For panelist 3 (the Y U ONLY VILIFY HINDU whiny godman) – let’s get the most unhinged fundamentalist, medieval minded Imam and a Crusading, Inquisition seeking, frock wearing hardcore catholic priest with a “Conversion 4 Lyf” tattoo on his cheek. They can counter the baba’s view that only Hindu symbols are denigrated.

But we are not done. That’s 6 people. We need one more person, so that we have 8 with the host. We need an actual expert on Hindu symbology. Let’s get a white, female academic who specialises in Hinduism and get her on Skype. That way, the uncle ji and baba are guaranteed to get triggered and go after the “you orientalizing western outsiders” angle as well, and being female, we will certainly get a healthy entertaining dose of misogyny as well.

PS: I tried hard to see if I could squeeze in a retired Pakistani Major-general into the panel but couldn’t.

Lesson 5: Social Media Masalafication

It’s not just enough to announce on Social media that you have an upcoming debate. Today’s movies have trailers, previews for trailers, motion posters for previews of trailers and previews for motion posters for previews of trailers. So, for our debate, we need to generate several provocative posters with different headlines and a common hashtag for the debate.

Let’s start with the #hashtag. I recommend #DurgaInATankTop 

I know what you are thinking – shouldn’t it be “Durga On a Tank Top”, since that’s a more accurate representation of the actual event?

NO. THE EVENT IS WHAT WE SAY IT IS. NOT WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS.

Think about the kind of shallow minded, lazy bigot (ps: our audience) who jumps to conclusions based on newspaper headlines and hashtags. Now, consider what will sound more outrageous to him. Durga on a tank top, or Durga in a tank top. The latter is more outrage worthy, and will get us more shares on Social media from people who can’t be bothered to actually find out what the actual story is. If someone calls us out on the semantics of “in” vs “on” we will call them “Shashi Tharoor Elites” and move on. Let people assume the worst.

IN FACT, IT IS OUR JOB TO MAKE PEOPLE ASSUME THE WORST.

Now, for the social media headlines.

You might wonder, why different headlines? Why not just the debate title?

That’s why you are a luddite and I’m a primetime TV show host. Our social media strategy is to try and target groups of people who are likely to support our guests.

The idea is – Frame a sentence that one of our unhinged extremist panelists is vehemently going to agree with, and then turn that into a question – It will lend an official stamp of journalistic approval to that extremist viewpoint while attracting closet bigots with that confirmation bias to come watch our show. We are not saying we agree with that viewpoint, but we are not saying we don’t either.

Here – let’s take an example.

Is it ok to hurt religious and traditional sentiments in the name of a woman’s right to personal expression?

But it’s too many words. Our audience has a short attention span topped with confirmation bias. We need to hit home with brevity. So I’d recommend

Has FoE gone too far when it puts Durga on a tank top?

Durga Desecration: Are other religions getting preferential treatment? 

I know, some of you might go – Hey, Betteridge Law states that any news headline that is framed as a question can be safely answered by No, but that’s for print journalism and a wise, informed audience.

Our question template is rather simple – Have you stopped beating your wife yet? 

Our job is to take nuance out of every complex subject and turn it into simple yes or no questions. People prefer the certainty of ignorant confidence than the uncertainty of informed doubt.

Sometimes people ask if journalism should be about holding a mirror to society. It is, but I’d make a small change to this apparatus. I’d place a convex lens in front of the mirror that will let us focus on just a few things, and once in awhile, we can turn the convex lens towards the sun and start a small fire at the place we want to focus on.

THE NATION DEMANDS TO KNOW WHERE THE FIRE (we started) IS.

Ps: you can listen to this while you read this post https://soundcloud.com/parodesynoise/interrupception

I think human beings suck at online discourse. Let me rephrase that – I think social media technology is designed in a way to amplify a particular kind of human suckiness. For starters, it is constantly nudging and persuading us to share more stuff online. Apparently, 70% of our smartphone time is spent inside some form of messaging/social app like Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter. And the average smartphone user is spending at least 4-5 hours a day checking their phones.

And I don’t buy into the “Oh, the internet was a nicer place a decade ago”. No, it wasn’t. Online discussions have been pointless and nasty since the days steampunk pigeons transmitted usenet messages, but it was just fewer people using it, that’s all. But now, we have American presidents retweeting racist stuff. It’s all part of a predictable path from the heady days of Godwin’s law on Internet forums to drive-by screenshotting on Twitter.

So all in all, we are gloriously magnifying our suckiness by being addicted to technology that is exceptionally good at magnifying our suckiness (Silicon Valley calls this business model “monetizing attention”)

And to pull myself out of this toxic miasma of depressing thoughts, I am going to tell you a story.

It’s a true story about a horse named Hans.

Hans was an Orlov Trotter Horse, Russia’s most famous breed of horse, one that was famous for its trotting speed (particularly suited to uptempo OP Nayyar songs) and high stamina. The breed was developed as the outcome of love jihad between Arabian stallions and European mares.

But Hans’ core competency was not laying down rhythm tracks for OP Nayyar songs or racing. He was good at mathematics. In fact, he was astoundingly good at it.

He was owned by a Wilhelm Von Osten, a mathematics teacher, amateur horse trainer and phrenologist. Phrenology was one of the most fascinating forms of pseudomedicine in the 19th century, much like homoeopathy. It took a scientifically valid foundational premise, that different areas of the brain have different functions, and then went on to depart liberally from science through buses of creative extrapolation leaving a Mofussil bus terminus. For instance, professional phrenologists would diagnose problems of the mind by merely looking at the shape of a patient’s skull.

While we do not know if Osten practised his skills with Hans’ graceful head, we do know that he managed to “teach” the horse to add, subtract, multiply, divide, work with fractions, tell the time and manipulate calendars.

You could ask Hans an arithmetic question and he would use his foot to tap the answer out. “Hans, what is 11 minus 5?” and he would tap 6 times. “Hans, what day is next Friday?” and he would tap the number of times that represented the date in question.

Understandably, people were astounded. Here was an elegant beast of burden, known for utmost docility and a preference for snacking on apples, demonstrating that humankind’s estimation of the cognitive capabilities of animals was utterly wrong. A sudden rush of “OMG these animals are even closer to human beings than we assumed” guilt washed over his audience, all of whom got to see him for free because Von Osten wasn’t interested in making money with der Kluge Hans (Clever Hans).

He became a nationwide phenomenon in Germany and was even featured in the New York Times.

Understandably, all this public attention got the interest of the German board of education, which appointed a panel of 13 experts, ranging from Circus trainers, psychologists, veterinarians, cavalry officers and school teachers led by philosopher Carl Stumpf (pronounced while attempting to vomit and saying Stoomp at the same time). They were tasked with investigating Von Osten’s claims and determining if he was committing any fraud.

Was he perhaps signaling the answer to the horse so that it knew when to stop tapping?

No. They used different people to ask Hans questions and he aced the answers as usual.

Perhaps Von Osten was using a third party hidden among the spectators to signal to the horse?

No. The horse was able to answer questions even when he was alone with a questioner. He was even able to answer questions that were written down by hand!

The panel was stupefied. They were almost about to declare Hans the Kalki avatar of Vishnu when psychologist Oskar Pfungst (pronounced by trying to spit out mouthwash while saying Fungst), who was presented with the results of the investigation decided to redo some of these tests. And once he put a certain amount of scientific rigour into the experimentation, he came to this most astonishing conclusion.

Clever Hans was not a fraud. He was indeed capable of answering math questions. But, he was able to do so only if the questioner knew the answer to the question he was asking. When written questions were given to a person who had to show it to the horse, but wasn’t aware of the question himself, Hans almost always got it wrong.

Pfungst eventually concluded that Hans was picking up tiny, unconscious body language cues from his questioners. When the number of taps got close to the correct answer, Hans was able to sense tension in his questioners posture and slowed his tapping down. And when he had tapped the right answer and waited a bit, the questioner would declare that he had got it right and applaud or nod his head, so Hans wouldn’t need to tap any further.

So, with that, we quickly reassured ourselves that our math skills were exclusively ours and no apple munching Orlov Trotters were going to take over the planet anytime soon.

But, we got the conclusion wrong.

Of course, Clever Hans wasn’t a mathematical genius, but that’s not the important conclusion. Can you imagine what an incredible feat it was to be able to observe body language cues with such amazing precision to pull off what almost feels like psychic mind reading?

We weren’t overestimating animals’ mathematical abilities. We were grossly underestimating their observation skills.

Pfungst eventually went on to term it the Clever Hans Effect, essentially an Observer-Expectancy fallacy where psychological experimenters tend to influence test subjects with their own cognitive biases, and then come to wrong conclusions based on that.

And now think about this – so much of human communication is non-verbal, and we’ve evolved to both send and receive these unconscious cues when we talk to fellow human beings in person. So when we disagree with someone online, we do it on the basis of literally trying to watch a movie where we only get to see the subtitles translated from another language, a black screen and no audio. So the more we argue and debate by typing on smartphones, the less we are using our amazing evolutionary ability to read a fellow human being beyond the words coming out of their mouth.

In short, you are far more likely to give someone the benefit of doubt in person than online.

And on top of all of this, if what you are getting angry about is a news report where a third party is cherry picking quotes and then extracting the most clickbaity part of what he/she thought someone said and then posting it on social media, I urge you to close your eyes, imagine a magnificent gray horse named Hans, munching on apples and tapping out the answer to “How many more days left before humanity descends into a dystopia where we completely stop talking in person and only fling passive aggressive quote replies at each other on social platforms?”

But first, consider this question – Why is milk considered vegetarian while eggs are not? This was the subject of a discussion I had with a gentleman who forwarded me a “Cow farts cause global warming and ancient India knew about it” WhatsApp message and likely came to regret it later and made a mental note to not forward anything to yours truly.

So why, indeed? I’m not actually interested in food choices individuals make. I’m interested in how they moralise, rationalise and publicise their personal choices.

Jonathan Haidt, in his book, “The Righteous Mind” describes 3 approaches to understanding how we process morality in our heads, and uses an “Elephant and Rider” metaphor to explain these. The elephant represents passion and intuition. Gut feelings, essentially. In addition to sitting in rooms, the elephant has a tendency to rush to judgement based on primal programming. The rider is usually a malnourished chap with a small stick trying to reason with the elephant.

The oldest approach, attributed to Plato, suggests that reason should always trump passion when we make moral judgements. The rider must control the elephant. One must keep emotions aside when making moral judgements.

The second approach, attributed to Scottish philosopher David Hume, insists that passion or intuition always comes first naturally and that reason should be subservient to passion because that is the way we are wired. The elephant is intrinsically hard to control and the rider must let the elephant express itself. If the elephant wants Cassata ice cream and 4 buckets of Rasna, the rider should avoid lecturing the pachyderm on glycemic indices and keto diets.

The third approach, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, claims that reason and passion are equal co-rulers and must keep each other in check.

He then goes on to suggest that contemporary research indicates that moral psychology seems to be a bit of Hume and Jefferson (Plato, it turns out, is still busy admiring his shadow in a cave, all alone). The elephant almost always reacts first, and then enlists the rider to help justify his gut reaction.

And therefore, if you want to persuade someone to change their mind on a political or moral issue, or at the every least, consider your idea, your rider must offer Cassata ice cream to the other person’s elephant, and that’s something we simply don’t do often. Our riders jump to berate their riders as being inferior, a tactic that has essentially polarized the world along ideological lines and arnabized all forms of political debate.

He uses this rather simple, yet illuminating example to illustrate his point. If your spouse leaves you a note on the fridge that says “Please put the used dishes in the dishwasher”, that’s a request, and your brain is likely to just acknowledge and then hopefully go ahead and do it.

If the same note read – “Please put the used dishes in the dishwasher, like I’ve told you a hundred times before”, it’s as if a different part of your brain reacts to this. It first puts out an advanced Google search to locate every possible reasonable justification for why you didn’t put the dishes in the dishwasher on previous occasions. If it can’t find any, it makes up a few reasons. It then filters it down to a few candidates that have the maximum emotional blackmail potential, and finally comes up with “Our son was late for school and the new dishwashing liquid gives me rashes, like I’ve told you a hundred times”.

If you challenge the other person’s rider, their elephant will respond, and will take the support of its rider to boot. Emotional blackmail, backed by alternative facts.

So, Eggs and Milk.

Can we not alter the nature of political debate by being more empathetic to each other’s Cassata loving elephants? Because the only difference between liberals and conservatives is that they prioritize different aspects of the moral universe.

Armed with Haidt’s insight, I replied to the Cow (BMKJ) farts cause global warming chap with a disarming opening salvo.

The rest of this conversation has been slightly altered for dramatic purposes.

“Hello!”

This was disarming because he was clearly sending a scientifico-dharmic rider to appeal to my purely scientific rider, and did not expect pleasantries.

He replied – “Hi”, the fewest letters one must type to push the conversation forward.

I said – “Interesting article”. That was disarming salvo number 2. I don’t think he expected me to even read it fully. He expected me to read the headline, seethe with lefteous anger, dismiss it right away and argue in favour of filet mignons and Syrian beef from Kalpaka restaurant.

He asked hopefully – “So you agree?”

Me: I am not doubting that large scale animal husbandry is terrible for the environment. I’m with you on that.

Him: It is not only about the environment. Killing is intrinsically immoral. (His elephant was now trying to squeeze through a cycle gap of opportunity to reason-jihad a left liberal)

Now, I could have gone down the silly “But plants have life too” route, but that would again be my rider trying to outsmart his rider too early in the game with a flimsy play.

Me: I agree. It is immoral, but tell me, would you eat eggs? After all, you do consume milk. And cows tend to fart regardless of whether we make burgers out of them or squeeze milk out of them.

Him: Of course not. Eggs are non-vegetarian.

Me: But eggs don’t involve the killing of anything, much like milk. You do realise that the eggs we eat are unfertilised and have no embryo inside them.

Him: Hmm

Me: And..consider this. To get milk from a cow, you have to keep getting it pregnant pretty much once a year. To get eggs from a hen, you just have to prevent it from getting pregnant. Which one sounds more cruel?

Him: hmmmm..(his elephant was clearly discombobulated, so his rider was scrambling to support him) You know, denying someone sex is more cruel. The cow must enjoy the blessed celebration of giving birth…

Me: Umm..on account of the neither of us having a uterus, I’m afraid that’s one judgement we have no qualifications to make. You might want to ask anyone who’s given birth if they would be ok to do it 4-5 times back to back, just so that you could have your milk.

Him: hmmmm..anyway, I don’t like the smell of eggs.

Me: Now that’s a perfectly good reason. But hey, a good masala omelette is totally amazing and devoid of any raw egg smell. Have a nice day.

I spent the next few minutes basking in the muscle stretch that comes from patting ones own back. I hoped our man will now research the amazingness of eggs and perhaps even muster the courage to try a masala omelette. A few days later, that gentleman posted a “WHY WE MUST STOP GMO EGGS IN GOVT SCHOOL MID-DAY MEALS” plea in another WhatsApp group.

So yeah. Liberals win arguments. Conservatives win elections.

So, on my 11th wedding anniversary, I’ve decided that I’m going to take my wife’s advice and go back to blogging. The pedantic among you might argue that blogging’s social media too, but hey, here, I get to edit all your comments.

This post is a story I heard from an elderly school teacher of mine back in the 1990s.

In the 1950s and 60s, the government of India undertook a massive exercise in electrifying the nation. No, they didn’t go around setting up disco dancing extravaganzas across rural India. They literally brought lights, fans and electric motors to a population that was, for all intents and purposes, still living in the middle ages. In fact, some villages in India were so disconnected and remote that many still thought “God save the King” was the national anthem.

An English teacher of mine who used to be an electrical engineer in his younger years told me a fascinating story about this undertaking. He was part of a contingent of young engineers that was bringing “Bijli” to a tiny hamlet in Uttar Pradesh in the 1960s and, rather unsurprisingly, the village elders were suspicious of this exercise. All of a sudden, men dressed in strange looking western wear started digging the place up and installing poles and slinging wires across mud paths and bringing them inside homes. And to make things worse, those wires did nothing for weeks on end because the electricity wasn’t flowing through them yet. The plan was to turn the switch on only after everything was thoroughly tested for problems and challenges such as “cow scratched back on junction box, tipping it over” and “Bandicoot rat chewed up wire” were overcome.

If you were a village headman in that era, you had the unique responsibility of being the prescient protector of the populace from all things dangerously modern while at the same time being generally clueless about the world at large. You might be the largest land owner in town with an entourage that included a personal moustache maintainer among others, but in an era before the internet & television, you didn’t know any more than the chap that held your umbrella while you pompously strutted around town doling out ramrams.

One such paternalistic figure called upon our aforementioned electrical engineer (later to be high school English teacher) to express some concerns about this new “Bijli” thing that was wrapping its copper wired tentacles around his village. His first concern was rather representative of that time and place. He wanted to know if this Bijli thing was going to be available to all residents of the village. Our electrical engineer, himself a Punjabi, was able to read the subtext latent the question but still decided to, well, troll the headman. He answered – “Oh yes, of course, every single house in the village will get electricity”.

The headman squirmed in his seat and sighed at the prospect of having to rephrase his concern in more direct terms. “Why do the lower castes need electricity? Wouldn’t the government save money by first prioritising the upper castes?”. Essentially, the very idea that some thing was available to all human beings equally seemed to shake the foundation of his worldview and threatened the social order he was responsible for maintaining. A universal lack of something is acceptable, but everyone getting something new at the same time? That was literally a slap on the face of Manu.

Our engineer had an answer to that question too. It turns out that some of the babus in Delhi who originally came from the hinterland had a pretty good idea of the kind of concerns that rural India will likely have about a new fangled thing like electricity and put together a comprehensive communication plan for the engineers. That included answers to concerns such as these:

Will every one get electricity in the village?

Subtext: Why do the lower castes need electricity? It’s not like they can read, so why need lights?

Answer: Mukhiya ji, don’t worry. One has to pay monthly charges for electricity.

Subtext: They won’t be able to afford the monthly charges, so we will cut off supply to them then.

Is the same wire going to our houses and “their” houses?

Subtext: We refuse to use something that is also available to the lower castes. If they touch it, won’t the Bijli be “polluted”?

Answer: Mukhiya ji, no one can touch electricity. It will kill you if you touch it, so don’t worry about pollution.

But then, this resulted in a new concern – if electricity could kill you, is it not dangerous? Hindi even lacked vocabulary to describe the sensation of electricity. So our headman wondered if Bijli was “very hot” and thus presented a danger. Apparently, temperature & heat seemed to be the closest relatable metaphor to the idea of current and electric shock.

Our engineer then smiled because his training included an answer to this concern too. He said – “Mukhiya ji, this particular electricity that is coming to your village is coming from the Bhakra-Nangal Dam, high up in the Himalayas. So this electricity is very cool, so there is no need to worry!”

When I first heard this story, I was 14 years old, and all that registered was my English teacher’s ingenuity at using his asymmetrical access to knowledge to persuade an ignorant headman. Later came the realisation of how insidious caste used to be (and for most part, still is). But it’s 2017, and there are folks in my WhatsApp groups that believe that a combination of Homoeopathy and Aditya Hridayam chanting can cure Cancer. They share forwards that claim to have scientific DNA evidence of Brahmin superiority. They also believe Nehru was Aurangzeb’s descendant and that demonetisation has fixed the problem of black money. With all the access to the entirety of the world’s knowledge on the internet, most of us are still really no different from that village headman.