Why I Am Likely to Win The Nobel Prize

I am deeply touched that millions of people are buying cryptocurrency.  For years, I had been searching for a reliable way to measure the percentage of idiots in a population.  My ultimate goal, as you have now shrewdly guessed, is the Nobel Prize for Economics and Literature combined, and I was, until recently, about as far from it as Orion is from Earth.
ps: Orion is getting closer at the rate of six inches a year.  Persistence pays (but not in cryptocurrency).
 
The current population of gullible, naïve, inept, self-delused, infatuated, doting, obsessed, asinine, gauch, gumptionless, bird-witted, desipient, unstable idiots on our planet is officially at about 240 million, which translates to about 72% of the population of the United States (do not read anything more into this).  These are people (crypto buyers, not Americans) who wake up all animated in the morning and say, “Is there a new scheme to defraud me?” and, if they hear an echo, they do a funds transfer.
 
The most heartening news, of course, is that the population of idiots is exploding and new precious insights are a daily occurrence. For instance, one recent discovery is that crypto buyers do not know the difference between a virus and a cryptocurrency: apparently, Omicron, a cryptocurrency that was launched at the beginning of November moved from $65 to $325 after the virus variant was named.  They assumed (with crystal clear, profound, incontrovertible logic) that since both are invisible to the naked eye, they are the same.
 
Another one called Dogecoin that was set up as a joke even has its founder screaming, “Don’t buy, it’s a scam” Dogecoin buyer-idiots, who will not recognise a mistake if you present it to them in a lava-encrusted pressure cooker-with-weight, are convinced that this is reverse psychology at work, so they buy even more.  There is even a coin called SafeMoon that has been thoughtfully named by its creators who live there and prefer that the idiots stay on Earth. 

 

Then, there is the ultimate scam called Bitcoin that is today priced at Rs 37 lakhs a piece, which is the same price as a BMW X1 (which is where the similarity ends).  If someone had bought it years ago, being an Early Idiot and held on for years and years, he would now be worth Rs 37 lakhs in fake money.  Which, I must agree, is a lot of fake money to have, because I play Monopoly regularly and have never seen so much.
 
More later.  My Nobel is waiting. 

Car Seva

Exactly a year ago, I took my seven-year old car for its annual service.  I look forward to this day about as much as you would look forward to a new virus taking Corona maami’s place. 

The service technician walked around the car like a frowning radiologist and was the most demotivating guy I have seen in 2020 (and that year has had no shortage of such folks, so he dominates a highly competitive field). 

“Sir,” he said, “there’s a dent here,” This was so small that it took an electron microscope inside a binocular to view it.  “Leave it alone,” I weakly suggested, feeling that sinking feeling you get when you are feeling that feeling, if you see what I mean.

He then told me that it will rust in the rain, and the door will be eaten from within and will fall off when I am on a highway at top speed and that I will then be on an Instagram video the next day with the caption, ‘…and CAN YOU GUESS what happened next to the car behind this hideous monster’.
Actually, he didn’t say all of that, but you get the picture. 

Then, the headlights had a side scratch of 2 mm that could diminish lumens sufficiently to distract oncoming aircraft, and the top red light at the rear (I did not even know there was a top red light at the rear) was not working which was a threat to no one in particular (for a change) and the sunglass compartment – which I have never used other than to once hide dog food from Oscar (who is the greediest Labrador in the world, and let this be the last word on that issue) – was unhinged and the press-button to open the back door caused a slight noise that is only heard with sound recording equipment used by AR Rahman and the back window wouldn’t roll up right into its terminal socket which could, if the car was next to a Nasa rocket launcher, generate a wind tunnel effect and one back tyre had a width that was 1 mm below recommended operating standards on German Autobahns in winter.  He also noted that my rear-view mirror had insulation tape on it, which, in levels of sheer depravity on the Crime Index, ranks next to assault.

I took a break, announced bankruptcy-in-advance on WhatsApp and asked Anil Ambani to join me for a Buddies-who-are-bust beer. 

Then he saw the big scratch on the side door at the back and the eyes rolled upwards unbelievingly.  I told him to not do this job till I got a housing loan sanctioned (the Finance Minister had just announced her twenty-second economy-revival package in which cars are classified as movable houses).

“Are you sure?” he asked, with a look of Don’t Blame Me If You Are Fined For Driving An Ugly Car Near Cubbon Park and turned away in sheer disgust at the sort of customers who infest Bangalore these days.

The only good news is that the housing loan has been approved, so I can first fund that dinner with Anil bhai, who is the only chap more bust than I am at the moment.

post script: Every story should have a post script, so here it is: whatever be the quality of work done on your car, never (repeat, never.  Just in case you missed this, NEVER) rate it anything less than five-star (repeat, 5*.  Let me get this right: star+star+star+star+star) .

If you do not follow my priceless advice, you will receive the following (free of charges):
a) about 27 phone calls from customer service, of which twelve will be in the final over of the finest T-20 that you have ever seen.
b) each such call will begin with an apology that sounds as fake as Trump's hair colour.
c) one call from Head Office - Customer Service, Gurgaon, asking you politely for your address, so that you can be kidnapped. 

Roles Re-verse(d)

 A snake and a purple heron in plume

Engaged in an argument (they weren't on Zoom)

The twist and the thrust

Was the question of, first

Who should do what and to whom !

Dhan

 Above everything else, it is helplessness that gets you angry. 

At a nearby Reading Room, I browse through the Business Standard and stop at a page that should not merit a second glance.  The next page looks exactly the same.  Turn over.  The same.  And a half-page more.  On these three-and-a-half pages are thousands of account numbers in tiny print, so small that they seem like lines of badly sewn stitches.  
It is a gold auction notice.  

This we – you and I - know: there is an alternate universe where men and, more significantly, women pledge their gold for small loans to address a medical issue or perhaps admission fees for a child in a private school or, unhappily, the costs of adhering to social mores for an unaffordable wedding.  Often, one loan repays another, one crisis ends, another begins, but they soldier on, sometimes lurching and stumbling their way through the maze of crippling interest rates, processing charges, late fees that choke and unforgiving penalties. They never forget that the gold loan needs to be repaid, for gold is never sold, only pledged.  Gold – though I am no fan of it – is social acceptance, comfort, protection, insurance, even identity.  There is a hidden language in that metal in this alternate universe. 

In this auction notice, read the signs of a crisis in that universe. 

That universe isn’t far away: our domestic help’s family could be living there, as could a family in interior Karnataka struck by Covid or a welder in Pudukottai whose machine shop shut for good after two waves of perdition.  It is their gold that will be sold to feed the collection-and-recovery frenzy reported with diligence to anxious collection managers.  In the old days, these gold hand-loan sort of guys were called ‘blade companies’ in God’s own country, but one can buy respectability:  get the  Kaun Banega Crorepati mascot to endorse you (he was once bust too, but has misplaced the experience).  Or, better still, IPL.   

To take my mind of this, I pick the Business Line up.  Lost reprieve, for it comes right back, this time through an ad.  The same lender has, on this same day, yet in another newspaper, announced its financial results: record profits and collections are the highlights.  As I read this, I wonder if that distressed family in interior Karnataka made this financial performance happen.  I know the answer.
And that makes me angry, in a feeble, helpless way. 

But in the universe I inhabit, the stock markets are booming, Dhanteras rocked while the crackers wouldn’t cease and economic news is about the recovery that the experts did not expect.  The chimera is real here and only a party-pooper would think otherwise, for the collateral damage is below the bonnet.  Only the paint matters. 

Yes, those three-and-a-half pages of badly sewn stitches in the Business Standard tell a story.  We need to listen. 
And help in every way we can. 

 

 

The Stock Market Bull Is On My Heels

 “It’s not, like, fair.  All the guys from my class have, like, made heaps of money from crypto and investing in stocks in the last year.  The girls have been left out and are only now beginning to put money in….”  my 23-year old daughter complains  (this Gen says ‘like’ 224 times a day, plus/minus standard deviation of 30.  Even when they have a problem with someone they say, ‘I like dislike him’, which drives me, like, nuts).  

She continues “This investing, why is this, like, a guy thing?”  

“That’s because girls, including you, generally have much more common sense,” I counter.  Good strategy to apply praise with a butter-coated spoon, but lost on her.  Completely.

We are in a traffic jam, approaching an intersection and an argument (in reverse order).  I try to tell her that the stock market has been insanely over-valued for a long time and has now gone completely cuckoo (Cuculus canorus, if you are a micro-details bird-watcher with disdain for writers and other fungi).  “If the markets are crazily high and risky, how did these guys, like, make money?” she demands, and quite rightly so.

“Well, they could have lost too, because this is not investing, it’s gambling.”

“But they didn’t!  That’s the point!  And, like, K has made 12 lakhs this year…”

“Which bank did he rob?”

“Serious, Pa!”  

“Ok, tell me what he did then?”

“He lost in crypto, but has been, like, buying and selling shares in the last few months everyday.  He quit his job last month and four of them have taken up a flat where they, like, play video games all day and invest in stocks.”

“Correction.  They gamble in stocks.”

“HOW is it gambling if they are winning all the time?”

Well, she has a point there.  

“A crash is overdue and can happen, like, anytime.  Will you stop saying Like, it’s getting infectious.”

“Like, the crash last year?”

“No, that was like the pothole, like, on 9th Main.  This will be a big crash.”

“Like, when was it last?”

“Long ago, when you first got on to Harry Potter.  K is making a big big mistake by quitting his job.  I knew he was weak in the head, this confirms it.”

“At the moment, he is way richer than me, Papa!”

“That means Jacks**t and bull string.  It’s not real money, just the current value of his shares.”

She’s not understood what I said, so she changes the topic. Good thinking, I do the same (these things run in families). “Ok, so he’s agreed to, like, help me invest some money.”

“No.  Not invest, gamble. Plus, don’t do it.” Anti-Nike.

“Then, what should I do?”

“See if visas to Argentina are being issued now.  Backpack a month in Tierra del Fuego.”

“Pa! That doesn’t make any sense.”

Another argument lost.  It’s time to ask that driver in front if he has any idea how important I am.

The Mammoth from Mannuthy

The only useful thing I learnt last week was that, thirty years ago, a chap from the Vet College in Mannuthy in Kerala changed the course of inter-disciplinary science by developing a mathematical formula to calculate -hold your breath, no, not breadth, I said breath - the surface area of the elephant.

You read that right.

He had been trying to solve Fermat’s Last theorem and, in the haze induced by that process, decided that the best way to do so would be to ask an elephant to lie flat on a carpet (“Stay still, Jumbo”), while he took out his tailoring tape. 

I just made this up, sorry.  

Apparently, he used the least-squares method – whatever that is (and may mathematics and its mother-in-law never torment my life again).  From all accounts of this method that I looked up online written in (reasonably) lucid English, it does not involve drawing the largest possible squares on parts of the elephant. If it did, any elephant with self-respecting nerve endings would be tickled to bits, each such bit including the remains of an erstwhile researcher as well. 

So, the question that now haunts you no doubt (and for which you continue to hold your breath – it’s getting dangerous, so think of roses) is: why did this genius, this doyen, this man-of-substance, this Einstein-of-Mannuthy do this?  (All this talk of haze and substance is controversial.  Curb the urge.)

Well, he was sipping his naadan chaya one day, when he saw a mahout struggle to climb his charge and it struck him (no, the elephant did not strike him, that would have been the end of the research using the least-square method) that all he had to do was to give the mahout a formula.  (A mahout who knows elephant-surface-area climbs easy.  Old Jungle Saying).

Sorry, I just made that story up again. 

The most notable feature of the task was that they even measured the elephant’s tail, missing no detail however slight (Sherlock H, not me). The tail was considered – for the formula – to be a cylinder, which, if you stretch your imagination with chewing gum and a rubber band coated in coconut oil, it is.  But, if the elephant’s tail is a cylinder, what is its leg, a parallelogram? (this qualifies him right away for a senior job in the Forest Department in some states in India, because that is how they count tigers). 

Finally, he calculated the areas of about 13 parts of 24 elephants (this can only be done in Kerala, one must emphasise; if you try this in Bandipur, there will be 13 parts of yours with 24 elephants, but, in serious matters of reporting facts, one should not digress).  Once that was done, he did some nifty correlation and then declared, in the spirit of Darwin, Wallace, and other luminaries who preceded him, that the formula only needed the elephant’s height and its forefoot pad circumference, both of which, of course, the said elephant is always ready to provide when (politely) asked.  Every elephant, be assured, is salivating to know its surface area.  

But, being the damp squib that I am, I have a problem with this research.  What you need to worry about with an elephant - trust me - is not its surface area, but its volume.  

And, therein, lies a tale (no, not cylindrical).

You will never have the measure of me.

The Poker Table Called Farming

Often, a photo hides far more than it reveals.  
These flowers – white chrysanthemums –  are pretty to the eye and, as I walk past fields filled with them, farmers – more women than men – are hard at work, plucking them in time for the Ganesha festival that could fetch them decent returns.  Some have – to use a metaphor entirely out of place – missed the boat, for their plants are yet to flower and, if that happens before Dassehra, the crop falls between two stools (another metaphor out of place, you point out?).  It will then fetch just a modest return which belies the effort that has gone in.  Hard work, investment in saplings, labour and pesticides and risks to each individual who sprays these toxic cocktails, a risk these farmers accept as punishment and perdition. 

This flowering field is their poker table.

What is missing in this picture is the crop that should rightfully be growing in this season.  Ragi.  

An economist will argue, from his armchair, that this is the way markets work.  I will argue, in turn, that he, like most armchair economists, should go to hell. I am a hobby economist, so I guess I can pass judgement without indicting myself.

The story is familiar: the price of ragi collapsed at the time of harvest this January and has inched back to about Rs 25 a kilo.  At that price, the few farmers who grow an acre of ragi will make a return of around Rs 8000 in six months – the family pitches in with labour (that is not added in the calc) and the male farmer spends two cold winter months guarding the crop at night from a machan on a tree (which is why we have some big trees left), for elephants and wild boar will visit with food on their mind.  

The Minimum Support Price for ragi is close to Rs 34 a kilo, but the TN Government has never bought ragi from farmers.  Never.

So, these farmers – call them the Last Resistance - grow ragi for their daily mudde, and for the stalk that is fed to cattle: milk provides them their weekly cash flow and insurance. The surplus ragi – heaps of it – is sold to middlemen, often to repay a debt.  
Ragi is a perfect crop: hardy, with minimal irrigation needs, no pesticide and sparse fertiliser, if any.  As nutrition, it cannot get better.  Much of this is true for all our millets, each of which is now, in the hyperbolic symbolism used by modern day dieticians, a Super-Food.

Try telling a farmer this, when he gets twenty five bucks a kilo. 
.…and, oh, lest I forget, on Flipkart, ragi flour sells for between Rs 90 and Rs 200 a kilo.

Make a difference: buy ragi from the family that grows it or a farmers’ collective, at market price.  
And do take their photo, for they are heroes, no less.