Kindness

I dedicate this article to this unfortunate child:

On my way to work, I spotted a bumper sticker: 

"Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty."

At first glance, it seems a warm, uplifting sentiment. In a world filled with random cruelty, what could be more welcome than some unexpected kindness? With all the senseless violence human beings inflict on each other, we can all use a little more beauty in our lives. Who wouldn't welcome anything that can inspire deeds of kindness and beauty -- even if only an expression on a bumper sticker?

The words are sweet. But taken literally, they convey a troubling message.

For what our society needs more of is not random kindness, but sustained and dependable kindness; not senseless acts of beauty, but beautiful behavior that is deliberately cultivated. Of course a random kindness is better than no kindness at all.

The meaning that lurks in the interstices of "Practice random kindness" is that treating others with compassion and decency is something to be done as a lark. That is not a philosophy that promotes kindness as an essential element of good character. It is a philosophy that promotes kindness as a fun activity for a slow weekend.


The Kindness Society offers this on its Web site:

"Random acts of kindness are those sweet or lovely things we do for no reason except that, momentarily, the best of our humanity has sprung into full bloom. When you spontaneously give an old woman the bouquet of red carnations you had meant to take home to your own dinner table, when you give your lunch to the guitar-playing homeless person who makes music at the corner . . . when you anonymously put coins in someone else's parking meter . . . you are doing not what life requires of you, but what the best of your human soul invites you to do."


I am all for spontaneously giving bouquets to old women. Any good deed is to be encouraged, even those done on a whim. But if kindness is merely spur-of-the-moment gestures, if it is "not what life requires of you," why bother? Because it feels good? Then what happens when it doesn't feel good? What happens when it takes a real effort of will -- or a financial sacrifice -- or a significant commitment of time -- to treat someone with kindness and charity?

I brought this up at lunch with my colleagues and one of them had this to say: "Kindness is subjective and can’t be determined by the one responsible for the behavior – true kindness is determined by others."

So I came back to my desk and continued with this article thinking about what I had just heard. I guess an example would do nicely here. Assume a women drops something. I pick it up and hand it back to her. If she says "Thank You" and smiles, then I’ve committed an act of kindness. If she says nothing and walks away, the kindness is negated. Really? Just my opinion, mind you, but I do not agree with that point of view. Kindness is kindness, regardless of whether or not it is acknowledged or appreciated.  

Does that define kindness? I remember seeing a video on National Geographic, where a Hippopotamus tries to save a deer calf attacked by a crocodile. Was that an act of kindness? Did the Hippo feel his heart warming up? We will never know I guess.

Ironically, this thought process was set off by a news flash  I watched yesterday night. It was about finding the body of a five year old girl, who was allegedly sold into sex slavery, by her mother!!!! Yes, this article is dedicated to that child who looks like an angel to me.


Given the above two scenarios, I am at a loss to understand who the human is.

I like the way The Dalai Lama puts it: "This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy.Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."

I guess all of us need to occasionally remind ourselves that we are human.

Signing off...

Rajan

Humor

I tried to understand what Humor is. First, two explanations I heard so far (in my own words, but I am trying to be correct):

The general line here is: joke = humor = laughter

Sigmund Freud:
One can't express aggression and sexual drive directly, as it is prohibited in the society, so these desires get sublimated in telling "jokes". If you look at jokes, they are either about somebody getting hurt, or they have sexual connotations.

Marvin Minsky:
There are not only general social prohibitions. There are also things your mother told you not to do - like stick your finger into your eye. So when you tell a story about something stupid, you attack the rules of common sense, in a safe and socially acceptable manner.

So Minsky adds jokes about stupidity. Freud's advocate could explain jokes about stupidity as manifestations of aggression against other people - stupid things *you* do are never funny. I wouldn't call it a strong argument though. Minsky also shifts attention from urges to social prohibitions a bit; this raises the level of intelligence in the reasons, and includes jokes about stupidity in an integrated manner.


I feel there are some things though that both of these explanations do not account for - The biological origin of humor. The above explanations make humor appear as a function that is either programmed culturally, or if biological, then very recent - after the development of language, at least. These explanation suggest no ties with previous evolutionary development and pre-speech mental mechanisms.

Social role of humor, seeing how much joy (emotional reward) people derive from humor, one could assume that there should be more serious social reason why such behavior would be rewarded, then letting out steam of urges.

In many cases, people are ready to openly express more aggression, sexuality, and disagreement with authorities than they are suggesting in the jokes, so their jokes can hardly be viewed as a suppressed revolt. Peaceful people and innocent children find lots of things funny; children find things funny (such as peek-a-boo) that adults don't and wouldn't teach them; there is hardly any evidence that people with strongly suppressed anger or sexuality have more interest in jokes than people who do not have these interests, or feel free to express them.

Most of references to sex, violence and stupidity are not funny. Let me try a few non-jokes:


Gandhi died.

Appu is an idiot.

Suppan and Suppi had sex and then Suppi killed Suppan by mistake.

Are you laughing yet? Why not? These sentences contained all suggested ingredients of jokes. Maybe, these levels of references are socially acceptable? I think so, but we couldn't make these sentences funny by making "forbidden" references more explicit. Maybe they were too brief? Then imagine how much you'd laugh at a research paper on prostate cancer and corresponding mortality rates. Or maybe, some crucial ingredient of humor just wasn't there? Then what is that missing ingredient?


There are lots of things we consider funny that do not have anything to do with sex, violence or stupidity. The above theories offer no explanations.Why do kids consider peek-a-boo funny? Why is it funny when I pull a rabbit out of my pocket during a conversation?

How about the following jokes: (bear with me, it's for the sake of argument)
"Why does the giraffe have such a long neck?" - 

"because its head is so far away from its body that a long neck is simply necessary to reach it"

"What is in common between a plum and an elephant?" - 
"they are both purple, except for the elephant."

"why didn't the skeleton cross the road?" - 

"Because it didn't have the guts".

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three left turns do."

And a few quotations:

Oscar Wilde on his deathbed: "It's either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go."
Edgar W. Howe: Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: I hate quotations.

Others:
Computers are not intelligent. They just think they are.

If today is the first day of the rest of your life, what was yesterday?

A smile is a powerful weapon - you can even break ice with it.

Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.

Living on Earth includes an annual free trip around the Sun.

I hope you found at least some of these funny. Now, how many references to sex, violence and stupidity did you see there?


Enough of criticism. Now I want to suggest an explanation of humor that explains all of the above cases and has (or so it seems to me) apparent biological roots and social utility.

The keyword here is "surprise". Or, "twist". Something unexpected. Something that breaks the rules - not the social rules! - but the rules of logic, of common sense, breaks your expectations. Like a rabbit pulled out of a pocket. Or the peek-a-boo where a child finds the transition [now you see me - now you don't] amusing, but adults, for whom it is not new, don't. Or a "punch line" that adds a twist that all the joke was built for.

It is programmed into us biologically, to look for all kinds of exceptions in the outside world: changes in the level of signals, something suddenly appearing, blinking, bursting, jumping, etc. This attention to surprises is a result of millions of years of evolution, and can be traced from bacteria to humans. It is natural to expect that increasingly intelligent organisms would pay attention to increasingly complex surprises - including those that challenge their internal models of the world by suggesting unexpected connections between different ideas and interpretations. I heard a story about a dog that had its favorite joke, but my model example here would be closer to modern humans - e.g., a group of young Neanderthals. The first and most important common project of humans was joint construction of the mental models of the world. The cooperation went through the language, by sharing facts for building models, passing models that seemed right - AND sharing unexpected twists that either challenge the models, or help define limits of their applicability, or teach when [not] to use them, or just train your brain on amusing puzzles.

Neanderthals were too stupid (just as modern humans) to consciously seek and share semantic surprises "for betterment of the common knowledge base". Built-in neural loop producing pleasure upon detection of semantic twists helped a lot.

So, "funny" is an internal reaction to humor; it produces pleasure. Smile and laughter are social expressions of pleasure - but not just from humor. We smile or laugh when we see little kids play, or win lottery, or think of something nice, or are just happy. Humor is just one of the inputs for this reaction. When we tell people things, we try to make sure that all their elements are interesting, so we include twists, references to sex, things they may like to hear or see or things their enemies wouldn't like to see. Analogously, when we have a party, we provide space, drinks, light, heat, music, food, chairs, etc. This doesn't mean those are the same thing - they are different, have different reasons, and under other conditions may not be present together.

In the course of history, people learned to abuse the natural pleasures they used to receive from simple natural urges and sensations. Pleasures we derived from sweets, fats, watching rapidly moving objects and noticing simple contradictions and little logical surprises that used to be important for finding better food, avoiding predators, and learning new things, have long been artificially satisfied with donuts, video games, and jokes. If we want to understand their nature though, we should not play with current cultural artifacts, but look into the original reasons why these things were developed. And their roots were all developed for one purpose - to help the animals navigate the environment.

Unfortunately, humans are still wired as if they lived in the jungle. They could understand the environment a lot better if they studied more science and read some good philosophy - but they are still trying to get pleasure exercising their reactions to [simulated/perverted] fast-moving game objects, or sharing silly little twists of logic. Many people realize quite well that these things are a waste of time, but they still can't help it: the atavistic urges are still running us. Sometimes people try to combine "learning and fun", but this requires a lot of tricks, as most natural implementations of "fun" have lost their intended utility quite a while ago.

This also explains why there are so many more freelance comedians than philosophers. And why inventors of good video games are much richer than authors of great theories. It's because the comparisons of their values are performed by neural networks taken from animals.

I personally find some bitter irony in this situation.

Signing off....
Rajan

Selfishness

Ever since I started writing here, I have focused only on the negative traits of human behaviour. So, I thought, today, let me write about something positive. How can "Selfishness" be positive, you ask? Read on.

Every once in a while I notice a gaping hole in my knowledge. A few years ago I started wondering what exactly the economy was. What did it mean when people said the economy was growing? Who was Adam Smith, and what was so revolutionary about his book, "The Wealth of Nations"? In order to fill that hole, I bought the book.


Aside from getting my questions answered and learning a little about the world, I learned a lot about life. Adam Smith, while a bit loquacious, was also a genius. His economic theory was so simple, yet so misunderstood, even 231 years later. In a nutshell, what Adam Smith said was this:

1. Wealth is not gold and silver. Wealth is living a comfortable life.

2. People should concentrate on doing what they are good at.

3. People should delegate what they are not good at to others.


By doing what you do most efficiently, you have the most power to trade the produce of your labour with others who are, in turn, doing what they do most efficiently. Thus, the most overall good is produced with the least amount of effort, and we will all become rich, which is to say, we all live a comfortable life. The keyword here is all. In the old way of thinking, there was a limited amount of happiness in the world, so nobody could be happy, except at the expense of others. Adam Smith realized that, actually, we can all be happy.

I am an analyst. Analyzing situations and coming up with novel solutions to problems is what I do for a living. Ideas are cheap, though; you have to design and build a system to implement your idea. A system to make sure everyone in the world manages to produce and receive such that everyone achieves the greatest possible happiness seems extremely complicated.

No, said Adam Smith. It’s actually extremely simple. All you have to do is follow three simple rules.

1. Act selfishly to fulfill your own desires

2. ...within reason

3. ...and with an eye toward the greater good.

Selfishness is the basis of good design.

What’s magical about this system is that it’s realistic. A system based on people being unselfish is a system that is designed to fail. This not only applies to people; this applies to all systems. A selfish system is an automated system. A selfish system is an object-oriented system. It’s a system where individual actors pursue their own best interests and all that’s good comes as a side effect of those actions.


Consider the problem of hard drive fragmentation. Till recently, Microsoft addressed this problem by providing a utility that people can remember to run from time to time that will take all of their files and move them around on disk to make the most efficient use of the file system given the available space. This is a system that’s designed to fail. Why would I run some pain-in-the-neck utility? How does that make my day better or more productive?

On the other hand, Apple’s file system automatically defragments itself as a side effect of normal file system operations. When I selfishly move, copy, and delete files, I’m defragmenting my drive as a side effect. This is a system that takes advantage of what I’m going to do anyway. Microsoft’s system is a stationary bike that relies on my being willing to exercise, while Apple’s system is a 12-speed street bike that takes advantage of the fact that I want to go to the store.

Apple is not blameless in this regard. Consider Disk Utility, which requires people to know about and remember to run some application to repair permissions on their drive so that everything works properly. This is a system that is designed to fail, and which does fail. Nearly every person who has lost their Delicious Library data has done so because of a permissions error. The root cause of this loss? Some engineer shortsightedly  expecting a user to altruistically repair some esoteric aspect of their file system.

Selfishness is the way of nature.


People who have read Adam Smith’s book, must have heard of invisible hand, and they might even be aware that the invisible hand is the apparent force that automatically balances the market when people act in their own best interests. However, what most people fail to realize is that the whole “be selfish” message has two extremely large caveats. First, you have to be reasonable. There’s nothing wrong with having a beer or smoking a cigarette, nor is there anything wrong with making money. However, if you let the pursuit of  balance of your bank account become the only thing you do, you are being unreasonable. Having a million and having ten million is the exact same thing. At a certain point, you have to step back and say, OK, I have enough. Time to do something else.

The other catch follows from the idea that I should be free to act in my own self-interest. If I do things that are unnecessarily detrimental to society, I am preventing other people from acting in their own self-interest. You have the right to do what’s best for you, but not if it infringes on my right to do what’s best for me. That doesn’t mean there can’t be competition. Competition for limited resources is inevitable. It’s the basis of nature, and the driving force behind another brilliant theory, natural selection. If there are two people and one job, let the one most qualified get the job. If there are two products that do the same thing, let the better one be the one you buy. Luckily, there’s a lot of people and a lot of needs, so chances are, even second place walks away with a nice prize.What that means is you have to take care that your life doesn’t spill over into other people’s lives. Antisocial behavior is a crime against society.

The one thing that makes me red-faced, cross-eyed angry is when people do things that are antisocial. I don’t mean not wanting to go out or talk to people. No, by antisocial I’m talking about things that are actively incompatible with being around other people. I’m talking about cutting in line, stealing, and driving like a moron. I’m talking about breaking car windows, graffiti, and bumping other cars when you parallel park. I’m talking about littering, throwing cigarette butts all over the place and throwing rubbish out car windows on the highways.

To me, these crimes of selfishness are the worst crimes in the world. If you and your friend get into a fight and you kill him, that’s unfortunate, but isn’t it worse to completely destroy the world’s ability to communicate because you insist on sending out millions of messages advertising some pills which I don't need, some sites which I do not want to visit, and whatever else it is that’s clogging my inbox? Murder is a crime against another person and their friends and family. Spam is a crime against society itself. Society is more than just a person. Society is all people. Sometimes we, as society, have to move to rectify abuses that threaten our right to be selfish. Ultimately, the selfishness of the many must outweigh the selfishness of the few.

This is why, despite thinking Adam Smith is a genius, I think we need to realize that some things are just too important to leave to individuals so we, as a society, have to make a decision. We all want to be healthy, and I don’t think anyone can honestly believe that one person is more entitled to being healthy than another. Breathe all the air you want, but if someone decides to pollute the air, we need to shut them down. The air belongs to all of us. The environment belongs to all of us. Selfishness must regulate selfishness.

Selfishness defines the value of everything.
Another thing to come out of all this invisible hand business is the idea of supply and demand. The idea is that the cost of something and the availability of something must balance out. If you’re selling something faster than you can make it, you have to raise the price. If you’re making something faster than you’re selling it, you have to lower the price. The reason this works is the law of marginal utility, which states that something is worth exactly what I am willing to pay for it. If I’m starving to death I’d probably pay you a thousand for a meal. But if you hope to open a business selling meals at a thousand a pop, then you are an idiot.

Adam Smith didn’t understand this. He talked around it, but he never quite figured out price. He assumed it had to do with the amount of labour that goes into something, but we’ve since figured out that this is untrue. If I spend a year producing an ugly sweater with my poor knitting skills, and you make a lakh a year, logic dictates you should pay me a lakh for my sweater.

Common sense says this is untrue. Even if we took out all the labour and I charged you 100 for the yarn, that doesn’t make the sweater worth 100, if you’re unwilling to pay it. You, and only you, decide how much you’re willing to pay. If I’m lucky, someone who is going to an ugly sweater party will offer me 200, and I’ll take it. If you decide that you want the sweater after all, that’s too bad. I’m not willing to spend another year making a sweater for hundred bucks and the cost of yarn. 

So, I am now starting to believe that Ayn Rand is after all right in saying "Selfishness is a Virtue"

Signing off....

Rajan 

Inconsideration

All of us express unhappiness over poor customer service and littering. Sometimes, remedial suggestions are proposed, and even implemented, but some time later, nothing much will seem to have changed.


Despite the government's initiatives for clean and green clean cities, which is limited to public hoarding which exhort the virtues, it's quite obvious to anybody who has spent time looking at real behavior, that Indians litter all the time. There are cigarette butts and trash everywhere. We push household rubbish out to the common corridors and lift landings.


A few months ago, I was walking towards a building with 2 levels of shops, on the ground floor and the floor above, with the upper shops fronting a common balcony-walkway.

By chance I noticed a group of people walking on the balcony, just a second before one of the men finished his cigarette, flicking what remained of it over the parapet. He didn't look before he tossed it out. The still-lit cigarette landed on the head of a 5- or 6-year-old girl with frizzy, bulked-up hair, so rather than bounce off, the cigarette nestled into it. She didn't seem to have noticed it at first -– and her lack of reaction led me to think the cigarette landed safely away from her -- but when her hair was on fire, she and her mother most certainly did. By that time, the men on the balcony had disappeared. To this day, they are probably oblivious to what they had done.


I went to a popular store in an equally popular shopping mall. As I pulled open the glass door with my right hand to enter, a woman cut into my path from my left to step in before me. I had to hold the door open for her. However, instead of moving into the shop, she stopped at the doorway to remind the shop assistant of something. From the conversation, I could make out that this woman also worked in the same shop The shop assistant was some 3 metres away, and so the woman could well have, indeed should have, moved closer in, so that she wouldn't need to speak as loudly as she did. But speak loudly she did, from the doorway, while blocked by her, I had to keep holding the door open, waiting for her to finish. When she was done, she turned around and scraped past me on her way out, as if I didn't exist.


Inside, I asked the shop assistant, "Do you have glue?". "Yeah," she said, without looking up from shaping her nails while chatting on her mobile nestled between her shoulder and her head. "Where would I find it?" I asked. "Over there," she said with a perfunctory wave of her hand. "Don't bother me," she must have wanted to say. I dutifully went over to the corner that I figured she had indicated, but of course, couldn't see any glue there.

"Look systematically," I told myself, but as I traveled my eye along the messy shelves, I became vaguely aware of another shop assistant watching me from behind. She made no offer to help; she was making sure that I was not shoplifting.


I am sure any Indian reading this would not consider my experience anything but typical.


A while ago, I remember reading an article in a magazine, which reported that they had conducted a "poll of 500 Indians aged 18 to 80 in a shopping mall" which "revealed surprising attitudes" on the subject of littering. Quite frankly, I was not surprised.


A majority of the people polled said they did not feel any need to pick up after themselves, with 21 shamelessly admitting it might be 'too inconvenient' or that they were just 'too lazy'. Another 19 expected someone else to pick up after them; others blamed a lack of rubbish bins.


The article quoted a 19-year-old student saying: "If I leave small things like tissue on the table, I don't consider it littering because cleaners will clear it anyway." And another 20-year-old said: "I litter because there are not many rubbish bins around. Besides, the cleaners pick up the trash most of the time. I do not think it is all right to litter, but sometimes I am just too tired and lazy."


There is no gender bias here. Said a 19 year old girl, a student of a local college: "I care very little about the environment, I never think of it. I am aware that what I do affects the environment, but I don't think of it when I litter."


Do adults know any better? No. The magazine also had a quote from a vendor in his 40s: "Usually I throw litter on the ground. I can be lazy like that but I think that works fine, I after all pay Hafta regularly."


Year in year out, no one can think of any solution. We just resort to blaming the Government to enforce laws, though we all know that is not going to happen. The same with poor customer service. We're still stuck on the mindset of running Courtesy campaigns, which is really little more than exhortation with a dash of public-service advertisements.


It's not that we never see good service in India. At some establishments, like the 5-star hotels, from what I've noticed, I think Indian staff are comparable to many other countries.


At an electronics store a few months ago, I wanted to buy a particular model of lens for my camera, but they had just run out of stock. The salesman however, asked me to wait while he telephoned other branches of the chain to locate one for me. He spent some 20 minutes doing that (because at each outlet, they had to check the inventory), even though, at the end of the day, I don't think any sales commission would be credited to him, since I'd be buying it from another branch. I thanked him, but regretfully didn't think to note his name.


However, I sometimes wonder whether, once outside their structured environments, where no management has taught them how to anticipate and provide for clients' needs, where in fact there is no hierarchy of service provider and client, the same Indians will litter, spit, brush past people and rush in through train doors.


Here is what happened, when I went into a leading Mobile service provider's office to get a replacement SIM card. I first wait at the help desk, where 2 men are busy talking to each other. After a couple of "Excuse me"s, the second one far more louder than the first, they notice me and direct me to a counter. The lady in that counter hands me a form with instructions to fill it up and come back with a copy of proof of ID. No, they do not have a copier. I will have to go out and get a copy made.


When I return, she verifies my details and directs me to another counter, where I am supposed to pay for the replacement and then come back to her. Which I do and then she enters few details in her computer and says "It is done. You SIM will be activated in 1 hour". Wow. The process took me 1 hour 30 minutes. But, should it really require 4 people and 90 minutes for this process? 


It doesn't need much insight to see that littering, antisocial behaviour and poor service standards have related causes: people don't care enough about other people and the environment around them. There's a distinct lack of empathy for others or concern for common property and spaces. The times when we see Indians giving a good account of themselves, it's mostly when they're doing their job, which is the result of training and management insistence, as well as due to their self-interest. Once we lift these factors the real ugliness is revealed.


Likewise, when enforcement action is taken to demand respect for our numerous laws, people behave, but other times, they slip back into their old ways. For example, we've extended our smoking ban to food centers and bus-stops, but not a day passes when I do not see someone flouting it. They don't even try to hide what they are doing anymore. Like me, they probably have not seen any enforcement action either. Then we go ahead and blame others. I am sure most of us have heard some thing similar to this - "I was cruising along at just 100 kmph and that stupid cyclist suddenly cut across". The unstated fact here is that it is a 60 kmph speed limit zone.


And still we exhort, and think that exhortation is enough.


Clearly this problem is very deep-rooted, and no one, not me certainly, really knows its roots and its solutions. But after 62 years of independence, what is most striking is that no serious attempt is made to enquire more deeply. We'll never solve the problem unless we know why things are the way they are. An in-depth sociological study is obviously needed, yet it seems to me that we're almost afraid to ask.

What demons lurk within India that produces such ugly citizens?


Let me speculate with three:

1. We have internalised a feeling that it is beneath our dignity to pick up after ourselves, or be of service to others. And why would that be? Possibly, the average Indian is subconsciously reacting to the daily slights he gets from the elitist, snobbish upper strata of Indian society, making it necessary for him to maintain a certain (false) pride. If the rulers treat me like dirt, then at least I should be able to treat the sanitation workers like dirt too. I have a right to litter!

2. Perhaps the emphasis on being competitive, coupled with constant reminders of scarce resources and external threat has produced a kind of citizen that prioritises a selfish looking out for himself, over caring for others. Is the competitive spirit, so necessary for economic survival incompatible with a more gracious society? If we had to choose, which would we choose?

3. Why do people have no sense of ownership either of the common space, or of the society in which we live -- which sense of ownership engenders courtesy and consideration for others in the same community?


The idea that ownership leads naturally to a person taking care of an object, space or process is commonsense. One would have to be blind not to see this. Indians do take good care of their flats, possessions, cars. But they dump rubbish a mere 5 metres outside their front door, or toss empty water bottles out the window on highways indicating clearly that they have no sense of ownership beyond what they own. It is a common sight to see people litter Railway carriages with peanut shells. How many would do the same at home?

Perhaps a polity that includes a government that likes to use laws and penalties to give direction to people invariably disconnects the citizen from his community. It is a known fact that the more the citizen finds himself having to direct his attention to the government's demands, the more his lateral relationships with fellow citizens wither. A sense of community cannot thrive when the government tends to monopolize all initiative. It may be that increasingly Indians have come to see India as the property of the government, not their shared inheritance.


Together with the feeling that the government is not theirs anyway – there is the well-known pessimism about ever being able to influence or even engage meaningfully with it – the average Indian ends up with no sense of ownership over "the government's property", and no concern about other people. We are all automatons anyway. 


In other words, are littering and rudeness symptoms of how our politics has shaped our society? Would sociological research to uncover the causes for our behavior end up asking too many "sensitive" questions?


Well, maybe we should play safe and stick to exhortation for the next 38 years and then go ahead and have grand celebrations for 100 years of freedom. I shudder to think of the litter those celebrations will leave behind.

Signing off....

Rajan

Jealousy

We all want to be unique. We do not want to like others. We have to be different. We have to be better than the others. When we work to be better than the others, then that would be "Healthy Competition". Good for those of us who succeed. What about those who do not?


That is where jealousy rears its ugly head. Jealousy dates back to the time of Cain and Abel, where jealousy ended up in death. To this day it continues all over the world because one person assumes being inferior to another. While that is not the only root cause of jealousy, it is a major contributor in many cases.

Jealousy is a master of disguise. It comes in various shapes, sizes and forms. Some use caring as an excuse for their jealous ways. If one cares for another and wants to dominate the activity of another, a spouse, for example, the dominated one looks at the jealousy as an admired trait with a label of he or she cares deeply for me. Since the jealous person gets admiration for those gestures, the positive enforcement encourages that behavior even more. The result some times can be wife abuse, husband abuse and could result in a death too. There are many levels of jealousy masked as caring developing into anything from the silent treatment, embarassment in front of others, not including a partner in important decisions as well as all forms of anger.

A jealous person can exhibit that characteristic as a strength of theirs, when in reality, it is a weakness. The weakness is that there is a low self esteem either deeply rooted or superficially kept in that jealous person. In order not to admit a damaging flaw of a jealous nature, that person belittles and bullies others to make themselves look better. The focus is sometimes so easily transferred to an unsuspecting passerby, that the jealous person gets away with hiding that insecurity of theirs. How many times have we come across people bad-mouthing their ex-employer? My question to them, if your ex-employer was so bad then what took you so long to get out? Most often such employees would be the ones that did not leave the employment, but were fired. And the irony is, they will poke holes in whatever you are doing, while they themselves would be far from perfect.


Not all jealousy is noisy, some can be shy, reserved and unsuspecting. Most of those people let someone else do the leg work for their jealous streak. There might be a protective family member that takes on the role of bringing out the jealously of the silent person or even a co-worker that is blinded by some characteristics of that jealous person and comes to their aid. Without intervention, one keeps doing the walk of jealousy while the helper is the enabler. The strength of the union gives momentum to both. One becomes more diligent to step in so the quiet, jealous person can act like a victim. 

A classic example from my workplace - a programmer joined us and his project manager was so impressed by the programmer's ability to identify and fix bugs, that he blindly accepted whatever the programmer recommended. Turns out that this new programmer was introducing bugs in other team members' code and then pretending to help them, with the project manager blindly nodding his head in approval. Last I heard, the project manager is making calls to companies and trying to get an entry level opening and the programmer is trying to make a livelihood on the internet, not to mention the money that this programmer owed people in my company had to be written off.

Some jokers are jealous people hiding behind a funny story so the environment will be light and jovial. The harsh reality of the underlying facts are the jokes redirect the focus on the pleasant traits of the jealous individual and not on the unpleasant ones. If someone gets hurt by their joke, it could be slight, annoying, painful or anywhere in between those stated. If you are on the receiving end of an uncomfortable joke and your emotional stability is solid, you might not pay too much attention and even get over it quickly to not give it any more thought. If you are a sensitive person, going through some personal difficulties at the time of the prankster playing his pranks, it could do serious damage to you.


There are sarcastic individuals that are deeply jealous. Downing anything or anybody as often as they can, seems to be the road they frequently travel. The most unusual thing about these people are that they hate that sarcastic trait in others and some times don't realize their behavior is on that target as well. A person who has jealousy intermingled with sarcasm mixes the two, so few people see the most undesireable trait being jealousy. The overwhelming sarcastic way seems to be taken as amusing by some and not to others, so it is a take it or leave it sort of characteristic. These are the ones to watch out. Such people are the true blood hypocrites. They will do all they can to criticize others. But when they are criticized for what they are doing, everything will come crashing down and such people are known to become dangerous. Then these people will go around preaching about being resilient and being able to take what one gives.

Rarely does a strongly jealous person see this as a flaw. The people around them have either accepted this by categorizing it in the ones suggested above or have manufactured their own category. When a severely jealous person acts out, it is with a strong force and yet sometimes a person comes to give reasons or make excuses for that action of force. Cover ups are constantly being invented mostly by the victims of this emotion.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to deal with such people. Mostly, I just stay away.

Signing off.....

Rajan

Anger

In the past one week, since I started posting here, a lot has happened. I have gained a few more friends, who not only visit my blog to see what I am talking about, but also send me emails asking questions. Though I have made an effort to reply to them individually, I thought posting a reply to the one common question on yesterday's post, "Revenge", would make sense. Before I begin to discuss what I am talking about here, I request my readers to please acknowledge the fact that I am far from qualified to give any kind of advise. What I post here are my views of human behaviour that I see around me and how I understand and deal with it.

Now that we have that out of the way, the one common question was "How do I deal with the anger, without getting my revenge?". Let me elaborate - we have all been victims of backstabbing and betrayal at some point in time and most of us are angry. Some of us are even angered to the point of contemplating revenge and I am advocating against revenge in my post yesterday. So, the question remains - Now, how do I deal with my anger ?.


While I cannot answer that question to everyone's satisfaction, let me try and explain how I handle it. To start with, we have to come to terms with the fact, that what has been done, cannot be undone. The deed that angered us is already done. Typically, people who suffer with what I like to call Tunnel Vision, would only think about revenge. 


Then what other options do we have? We have a great option available to us. Forgive. Now, before you shake your head in disgust and close this page, or scroll right down and leave a nasty comment, please read on.


Do not forgive the act that angered us. If that is done again, we will still get angered, wouldn't we? Forgive the person that angered you, but keep the anger. Anger with hate is malice. And it is malice that makes us seek revenge. Remember you cannot erase the past, you can only heal the pain it has left behind. When you are wronged, that wrong becomes an indestructible reality of your life. 

When you forgive, you heal your hate for the person or group who created that reality. But you do not change the facts. And you do not undo all of their consequences. The dead stay dead; the wounded are often crippled still. I fail to understand what purpose it serves to kill and maim more people. That is not going to change the situation.The reality of evil and its damage to human beings is not magically undone and it can still make us very angry - how can you remember except in anger? Can you look back on the painful moment - or painful years - without a passionate, furious, aching longing that what hurt you so much had never happened? Some people probably can. But I don't think we should except such placid escape from terrible memories.




YOU CAN BE ANGRY STILL, BUT, HAVE YOUR ANGER WITHOUT THE HATE.


I am not saying here that you forgive the person and give that person another chance. That would depend on the person we are talking about and what he/she did to anger you.


For example, the last time I was travelling overseas, I gave my car to a friend for his use. He had sold his car and was waiting for a new model, so was without a car. He allowed his son to drive my car in my absence, which I had expressly told him not to allow, as the boy did not have a valid driver's license, though he could drive fairly well. Upon my return, I came to know of this. When I confronted him, to add to my anger, he denied the whole thing. Of course I was angry and of course I felt betrayed. But, I forgave them. My friend and his son as people - are forgiven. Not the act. This time when I had to travel back, I just left the car sitting in my driveway, though I personally took his son for a test and made sure he got his driver's license. By doing that, I eliminated the cause - the boy will not be on the wrong side of the law again. But I am still angry at the betrayal and the lying. I may never trust him again with my car, but that does not mean to say that I have severed ties with him and am plotting revenge against him.


We do not even have to look that far for an example. Most of us know why and how I started this blog. I was let down by a group of people I considered my friends and was angry with the betrayal, when I found out that they would not even allow me a chance to reply. I would have let it go right then, had the dispute been private. Sadly, I was singled out, maligned and called names in public, but was denied a chance to explain my stand point to the same audience. As you might remember, I tried posting my response, found that it has to be moderated by the same people that maligned me, still waited for 12 hours, before I posted it here. What many do not know is that I actually contacted one of the people in the group and explained what I was planning on doing and confirmed that they did not have any objections. All I wanted was my side to be heard by the same audience. 


Then I forgave them. Forgave them as people. I have not and never will forgive the betrayal and hurt, but forgave the people. And I walked away.


I retained the anger and still continue to do so. But am I plotting revenge? Absolutely not. What would I benefit from that? Anger without malice gives hope. Malice, unrelieved, will gradually choke you. But anger can goad you to prevent the wrong from happening again. Malice keeps the pain alive and raw inside your feelings, anger pushes you with hope toward better things.


There are things one can do to discover the secret of forgiving; you don't have to choke your anger, you only have to surrender your malice. For your own sake. Malice is the misery that needs healing. Anger is energy that needs direction. After malice, let anger do its reforming work. Forgiving and anger can be partners in a good cause.


Lets look at what has changed in the past few days. Have they lost anything? Is my leaving a big loss for them? I hope they still continue doing what they were doing - before I joined, while I was there and after I left. So, I assume they have not lost anything.


Have I lost anything? The answer is an emphatic NO. As a matter of fact, I have gained. I have learnt to express myself here. I have gained a few more friends who understand me for what I am. My ties with a few existing friends has become stronger. And I have discovered a new activity that I enjoy thoroughly. Today, I can proudly say that some of the very same people that maligned me, visit my blog every day. Maybe to read my post, or maybe to see if am still alive - it really does not matter. I do not try to find out what they are up to any longer. I do not have the need to do that. I am at peace with myself here and am not worried about what they are up to. 


I am a happier man today than I was ten days back. Would I be happier if I sought to get even? You decide.


Signing off...


Rajan

Revenge

When I was a kid and used get into fist fights with my brother because I believed he had wronged me, my mother used to always reprimand me saying "Why are you behaving like an animal?" We often hear the same dialog in our films, something like "He his not human, he is an animal" and such dialogs are usually directed at villains. Why do we seek revenge?


People want revenge because "Revenge is sweet."  That expression holds a lot of truth when seeking revenge.  For most human beings, revenge feels good.  At the moment that one is seeking revenge, there is nothing "sweeter."  Nothing can make one feel better than getting even with someone.  So, it is the feeling of satisfaction that people receive when performing the act of revenge. Most of us would have heard the story of a man asking to be blinded in one eye as a wish, when he realizes that his enemy would get twice what he wished for. That is revenge at its zenith and the man at the nadir.


Now, lets get real. Seeking revenge is not always the best decision given a situation. Usually, it is not going to help to solve anything and it will probably make the situation worse! Revenge is unhealthy and chances are...the person will come back after you because they want revenge, creating a vicious cycle that is difficult to break! 

Before seeking revenge, have you considered that maybe, just maybe, the person who you are up against is probably more resourceful than you thought he was? Maybe he is in an impregnable fortress and you do not have the resources to break in? What happens then? Bad luck. If you were being brave, or is it bravado, to engage in direct conflict, you probably lick your wounds and resort to preaching karma. If you however were sly, you probably will pretend that nothing ever happened. However, there will be at least two people that know what you did - yourself and the one who you tried to take revenge upon.


I know revenge sounds like a good idea because it will show others that you cannot be dealt an unfair blow, but how is this going to affect your body and mind. Generally, people do harm because they misunderstand, they have their own problems they cannot handle, or they are seekers of power and/or attention. Is it worth it to try and hurt this person back? 


When people take revenge it’s usually because they are angry and unhappy about how they were treated. I am generalizing here. There could be more reasons to it but I believe basically revenge is an act resulting out of anger. If we think deep enough we will find that those who take revenge are trying to satisfy their own righteousness. It’s as if saying, “Oh alright. Since you did that to me, I am going to do this to you”.


I am sure many of us may have felt this way before but if we are thinking of taking a revenge on someone, it only shows one truth: people who take revenge are those who don’t know how to manage their own emotions correctly. 


It’s common to feel hurt and angry when we feel mistreated but no matter how we are being treated, there is no such thing as righteous anger. Anything done out of anger is always wrong. It’s not an act based on balanced thinking. If you are saying, you are not taking revenge because you are angry but because you just want to show what is right, it’s an act wanting to prove that you are right and the other person is wrong.


Remember, what’s right for us may not be what’s right for others. 


Here is what we can do: When we are being ill-treated, instead of taking revenge, we can ask ourself, “Why are we being treated this way?” and find the answer and take the necessary action. If we believe that we did not do anything wrong but we are being mistreated, we have a choice of  two actions. We can try to rectify it by influencing the person(s) who is/are mistreating us by means of taking a positive action or two, like presenting our side of the story or explaining why we did, what we did. This usually works for people who have assumed they have been wronged, because they believe that we have wronged them. Such people are usually quick to see the reality and are mature enough to understand and patch up.


There is another breed - people who seek revenge, not because they have been wronged, but because they  get pleasure in destruction. If you get pleasure from causing other people pain, you should probably take a long look in the mirror at yourself. For such people - just walk away.


I have learned over time that some people are mean and its just better to stay away from them. If you have hopes that they are going to change, they probably won't. Losers never stop trying, even though they realize that they are losing the battle.


Now, let me tell you, the act of walking away is not wrong at all. It’s not being a coward but it’s being smart. Walking away only shows your maturity and inner strength. If you know someone is mistreating you, because they want to, why would you want to waste your time and energy with such a person and hurt yourself? Sometimes, you need to think about yourself, of what is good for you.


If you do take the revenge, the only feelings you probably will get out of taking revenge is some kind of inner fulfillment of successfully getting even with that person, but it doesn’t make any difference between you and that person. People who take revenge are those who don’t know how to let go. If you believe you need to take revenge on someone, it means you cannot let them be. When you cannot let others be it means you cannot let others go. To let go means to let other people be themselves. 


I cannot but wonder how wrong my mother's analogy was. Since there in no recorded evidence of animals seeking revenge or holding a grudge, I think I would rather be an animal.


Bottomline: The more you let others be themselves, the more you are going to be yourself. 


Signing off....


Rajan