Saturday, September 26, 2009

banker.in.trouble @ gmail. com

A friend of mine – I will call him Alex (not his real name, I re-emphasise) - was one of the earliest Indian adopters of gmail, which advantage gave him a ‘generic’ mail address: his email id is, simply, alex @ gmail.com. This initially was quite a bother, since he ended up with a number of mails offering propositions of marriage. Indeed, as he says, while some offered him loans, one mail offered him a transplanted heart, many combined the two to offer lonely hearts. As you can see, Alex is not without a sense of humour, and he has put it to good use.

Sometime ago, he received a cryptic email from a relationship manager at a foreign bank Alex has no connection with. “Please find enclosed your mutual fund statement and let me know if you want me to do anything.” Quite obviously, this banker had the wrong guy. When Alex clicked on the PDF file that had the statement, he got quite a shock. There were about two million dollars of savings in there, invested (wisely, no doubt), by an adroit man of the same name as he, in a set of mutual fund schemes.

Well, Alex thought a bit and sent a reply to the banker. “Please sell everything and transfer the proceeds to my account. Don’t tell my wife,” he added for good measure.

For some days there was no return mail. You can well visualise an assiduous banker, burning the midnight oil (and catalysing his ubiquitous ulcer) in carrying out the instruction from a wealthy client who was going through some active turbulence at home. About a week later, the banker sent Alex a terse mail that read: “Please delete all mail communication from this mail id. Do not respond to this mail.” One can only imagine the spanking that he must have got from his client, whose carefully built portfolio of gilt edged funds was now liquidated into a savings account.

I am sure there is a lesson here somewhere (other than, be careful of Alex)………

Monday, September 21, 2009

Wait Loss

I read, recently, this most useful bit from a book called ‘Complications’ by Atul Gawande, a surgeon.
Quote
Human beings are subject to what scientists call a ‘fat paradox’. When food enters your stomach and duodenum (the upper portion of the small intestine), it triggers stretch receptors, protein receptors and fat receptors that signal “I am full”. Nothing stimulates the reaction more quickly than fat. Even a small amount, once it reaches the duodenum will cause a person to stop eating. Yet, we eat too much fat. How can this be?

The reason is speed. Foods can trigger receptors in the mouth to accelerate our intake – and, again, the most potent stimulant is fat. A little bit on the tongue, and the receptors push us to eat fast, before the gut signals shut us down. We eat fast not by chewing faster, but by chewing less. In other words, we gulp.
Unquote.

The lesson that I took away from Complications was to mimic the bovine: eat slowly, chew your food and enjoy your meal (have you ever seen a dissatisfied cow?).

Any benefits other than keeping your weight in check ? Yes, eating less apparently means living longer as well.

The first evidence that mammalian longevity could be increased came in 1935; restricting calories (without malnutrition) in rodents could delay the onset of diseases and extend life. In the July 2009 issue of Science, scientists reported that a 20 year study on rhesus monkeys showed substantially reducing caloric intake leads to longer lifespans in primates. An interesting lesson in this study was also that a low calorie diet started at any point in adulthood brings rewards of a longer lifespan, complete prevention of diabetes and, indeed, remarkable brain health. While humans live longer than primates and are (allegedly) more capable, the conclusions are obvious. Poetically put:

Fend off potent yellow fat
Keep the carbs far way
Chew in
deliberate circular motion
Prolong your stay.

(with apologies for some poetic licence)

Monday, September 14, 2009

A tribute to someone I never knew

Being an agricultural scientist is infra dig, of course. Yet, for Norman Borlaug - who died yesterday at the age of 95 - his work was his mission. If there was one man who helped the World beat the gloomy prophecy of Malthus - a prediction that population would outrun food supply for it - it was Borlaug. I owe my existence, my full stomach, my absence of anxiety about my next meal to him. So do you.

If there is a flip side to this, it is in the excesses of the Green Revolution that we see today - the salinity of fertile land, the leaching of pesticides and fertiliser into ground water, the poisoning of animal populations (including our own species), yet none of this is due to Borlaug's work. It is the greed of those who took his work away from its foundation of values and into a world of production, distribution and profitability who have caused these excesses to occur.

We are now entering an age, hopefully, of a return to organic agriculture, based on a combination of science and tradition. We need Borlaug again (version 2.0) to help feed the future population of 8 billion.
An excellent note on this extraordinary human being, written by Justin Gillis for The New York Times News Service, was published in The Hindu today

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

In 1989, twenty years ago, Vikram Seth wrote, with deep anguish, on the Tiananmen massacre. A few days ago, I came across the cutting that I had made of that poem, a remarkable verse, for its depth of feeling.

No miracle will ever clean
The memory, brutal and obscene,
Of those who, having fouled their trust,
Grew warped with dread and powerlust -
And order fire on the Square,
On unarmed people everywhere,
Brave people seeking to be free,
Of rottenness, of tyranny.

George Santayana once said: Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. This piece of history – belonging to our generation – must never be forgotten.