Category: Corona

  • Bonding Over Radio

    Bonding Over Radio

    Yesterday’s weather was uncharacteristically pleasant for the month of May in Delhi. I was lying in my room after dinner and listening to Ruskin Bond narrate his “The Eyes Have it” on the radio. I had switched off the lights in my room. I had my window open because it had been a rainy day and there was a nice cool breeze. The reception was patchy and I the could hear lots of static. It had taken some effort to find a corner of the room where the static was low. Bond’s warm voice flowing from the radio with his impeccable English made the experience timeless.
    Source: https://pixabay.com/photos/rain-water-window-dark-night-room-2589417/
    This picture captures how I saw the world outside my window, lying on my bed. Bond’s narration lasted for just 15 min but
    those 15 min seemed borrowed from another era. I was reminded of those
    small radio clips of important historical announcements that you get in
    movies and documentaries. The opening lines of Nehru’s tryst with
    destiny speech, IG announcing the imposition of emergency and a news
    announcer declaring that India was now in a state of war with Pakistan
    after airfields in Ambala had been bombed by the PAF. I was filled with a
    strange feeling which I find hard to describe. I guess it was the just
    the similarity in the medium for those broadcasts- the radio. Or perhaps
    just a yearning for being present at those pivotal occasions. Whatever
    the cause may have been, at that moment, I was filled with what I can
    best describe in a word as nostalgia. A quick google search shows that there is a word for that- anemoia. I guess, nostalgia is a feeling of familiarity which doesn’t always connect to actual memories. Politicians seem to exploit it all the time. Isn’t it what makes Trump’s supporters fired up about “Making America Great Again”? Or, Hindu Nationalists misty eyed about India as a “Sone ki Chidiya”. The relationship between nostalgia and populism deserves a separate post. I will try to do it, but no promises.

    For now, I wonder which
    announcements (videos and not audio most likely) will go down in documentaries
    for the COVID19 pandemic? I think the lockdown announcements will
    surely make it and also Trump’s many faux pas. But, what about the
    millions who are starving or migrants whose trains home were cancelled?
    None of that will make it into the big budget movies/documentaries, of
    course. Perhaps, in the age of social media and camera phones
    everywhere, their voices might get recorded. And, they may find a
    place somewhere in the audio/visual historiography. I really hope they
    do. 

     

  • Uncertain Thoughts On Uncertainty

    Uncertain Thoughts On Uncertainty

    I don’t know if we are living in the best of times or the worst of times. It’s likely worse for most people compared to what they were living in a few months back. At the same time, it’s definitely the best of times for Jeff Bezos who saw his fortune increase by 40% in the same period. It’s a time for heroes- our doctors and health workers who are treating the infected and policemen who are enforcing the lockdown, some of them without adequate protection. And a time for villains spreading misinformation and profiteering off desperate people. The only thing that I am absolutely sure of is that we are all living in the most uncertain of times.

    I find the idea of uncertainty intriguing. The mathematical view of uncertainty is embodied in the concept of probability. Consider the tossing a coin and assigning 0.5 to the chance of getting a head. The number 0.5 is our assessment of an even happening in an uncertain future. There are two ways of interpreting this assessment, given by two schools of probability- Frequentist and Bayesian. The Frequentists will say that 0.5 is the asymptotic ratio of number of times a head comes up by the total times number of times the coin is tossed. You might get 2 heads and 1 tails for a ratio of 0.6 if you toss a coin thrice. But, if you repeat the experiment a large number of times, the ratio will always converge to 0.5. The Bayesians on the other hand will say that 0.5 is the quantification of a reasonable belief that the coin will come up heads, consistent with evidence after a large number of experiments and updates. A Bayesian acolyte might start with a prior belief that the probability of a coin being heads is 1 but he will update his belief with data from experiments and reach the correct belief which in our case would be 0.5. Thus, there is a certain degree of uncertainty about how to interpret the idea of uncertainty in Mathematics itself, arguably the most certain of sciences.
    Well purity is just a measure of lack of uncertainty, right?
    Source: https://xkcd.com/435/

    Adding
    economics to diagram above would probably put it far to the left in the diagram, even
    further left than sociology. Most 18th and 19th century economists
    like Adam Smith, Marx, Ricardo, and Marshall would probably have put it there. Basically,
    at any time before the mathematical revolution in economics, starting in the 50s,
    the goal of an economist would have been to apply ideas from sociology and
    psychology to understand how the economy behaves. The pioneers of the mathematical
    revolution aimed to take economics more right on the diagram and dreamed of bringing
    it near physics. The economic models that emerged were mathematically elegant but
    were based on the core tenet of agents being rational- fully optimizing- in
    every situation. These models, especially in microeconomics, could not explain real-world
    data that became increasingly available from the 80s. The pioneering work of Simon,
    followed by Kahneman, Tversky and others provided alternative models for behavior
    that did not rely on rationality assumptions. This started a movement towards
    the left diagram from the diagram and today economics has again started to
    incorporate ideas from sociology and psychology into understanding how economic
    agents actually behave. 

     

    Literature
    (incomplete)

  • Death and the Pigeon

    Death and the Penguin is a Russian novel set in 90s Ukraine by Andrey Kurkov. It is a dark, satirical, and strangely surreal look at the adventures of a down on his luck every-man, living in Kyiv, with his pet penguin. The bond shared by the man and his penguin is deeply emotional and has been written beautifully. It captures the effect of the turbulent political situation and financial ruin faced by people in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

    The unpredictability of everyday life where the economy had collapsed and the state had been taken over by rival mafia gangs pervades the pages of the book. This book, more than any work of non-fiction, gave me a glimpse of how it must’ve felt for people to live though those times when the rigid certainties of the Soviet era were suddenly replaced by anarchy and uncertainty within a few years or even months. Developing an understanding of this period of history helped me appreciate how politics in Russia and Ukraine in the Putin era are shaped by people’s dread of the chaos of the early 90s. It also gave me an idea why middle aged Russians today support Putin’s policies advocating security and stability of the state at all costs. I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in this period of history.
    The bird that prompted me to write this post was not a penguin, but a more commonplace member of the avian family. A couple of days ago, a pigeon crashed into my room’s glass window and died. I usually draw my curtains in the morning because the summer sun in Delhi can get really hot. I forgot to draw them the entire way that day and the pigeon mistook a section of glass window, not covered by  curtains, as a portal to shade in my room in the afternoon heat. Unfortunately, the way to that shade was blocked by two inch thick glass- an inch (two) far. The coronavirus lockdown in India has been hard on the poor and other people on the margins, especially migrants who eke out a precarious living in the best of times. Even animals like dogs, cows and pigeons who, in a way, also live on the margins of human society, have been affected by the lockdown. 
    The incident with the pigeon brought home, quite literally, the uncertainty and chaos being faced by a large section of our population to my comfortable middle-class existence. News reports about people walking hundreds of kilometers in the summer heat to their homes, not getting enough food and being mistreated seem more corporeal. A friend had recently shared an article talking about how these people who face so much uncertainty due to the coronavirus pandemic and the consequent lockdown have been forgotten by not just the government, but also us- their more privileged fellow citizens.