Classical Misrepresentations

Some years ago, when I was reading The Sign of Four, I recollect having been particularly disturbed by the description of the little dart-welding, dark skinned, deceptive Indian native that the villain, Jonathon Small, smuggles from the Andamans to carry out his nefarious plans in England. It was representative of a particular brand of racial stereotyping that was rampant in the writings of classic authors like Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. Consider, for instance, this line from the Sherlock Holmes' mystery describing 'Tonga', the perfidious, snake-like havoc wreaking uncontrollable pygmy of an Indian:

"It was that little hell-hound; Tonga, who shot one of his cursed darts into him. I had no part in it, sir. I was as grieved as if it had been my blood-relation. I welted the little devil with the slack end of the rope for it, but it was done, and I could not undo it again."

Some would say that such a characterization should not be used to read too far into the author's mind and if anything, should be written off as a peccadillo subsumed under the larger umbrella of artistic freedom. Nonetheless, it is surprising how deeply progressive writers such as Doyle (someone who was singularly responsible for popularizing the methods of science and deductive reasoning) had a part of their minds that still lived in the past. And this was a time when the moral Zeitgeist was undergoing rapid progressive transformation, thanks to philosophers and visionaries in the West. This was a time when slavery had long ended in America, a time when feminism was already a significant social force in Europe, a time when philosophers like T. H. Huxley and John Stuart Mill had broke open conservative traditions through critical reasoning. Three years after the publication of The Sign of Four, Swami Vivekananda's speech at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago would be greeted by a thunderous applause by a prominently white audience.

But my thoughts in this vein were rekindled today, not by Conan Doyle's works, (which in spite of being masterful are filled with such racial innuendos) but by one of the most innocuous of authors in the English literature- the master comedian P. G. Wodehouse. While most of us fancy Wodehouse as light reading, I read Wodehouse carefully for I find his wit unparalleled and worthy of emulation. At the same time, his writing is pregnant with incredible perception and satirical irreverence of English orthodoxy. Dawkins' tells us how Wodehouse's writings were filled with extremely smart and appropriate biblical allusions (See The God Delusion):

P G Wodehouse is, for my money, the greatest writer of light comedy in the language, and I bet fully half my list of biblical phrases will be found as allusions within his pages. (A Google search will not find all of them, however. It will miss the derivation of the short story title, 'The Aunt and the Sluggard' from Proverbs 6: 6.) The Wodehouse canon is rich in other biblical phrases, not in my list above and not incorporated into the language as idioms or proverbs. Listen to Bertie Wooster's evocation of what it is like to wake up with a bad hangover:

I had been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head — not just ordinary spikes, as used by Jael the wife of Heber, but red-hot ones.

Coming back to what whetted my appetite to write a post was a growing consternation at regular negative allusions to the 'tropics' and the 'natives of the subcontinent' in Wodehouse's classic bestseller, Life at Blandings. In an otherwise hilarious racket of a series, these instances seemed like bad notes spoiling a well-woven melody. The first instance that I quote is from Summer Lightning(1929), when Millicent discusses Schopenhauer with Sue Brown, who is posing as Miss Schoonmaker in Blandings Castle.

Schopenhauer says suicide's absolutely O. K. He says Hindoos do it instead of going to church. They bung themselves into the Ganges and get eaten by crocodiles and call it a well-spent day.

For all his mystical infatuations with the wisdom of the east, I am pretty certain that Arthur Schopenhauer would not have made a statement that even suggested a practice similar to that described above. But while The Sign of Four was published in 1890, Summer Lightning was published much later in 1929, sixteen years after Rabindranath Tagore had won the Nobel Prize in Literature and ten years after Srinivasa Ramanujan had left Wodehouse's country after one of the most successful collaborations in the history of mathematics with England's most famous mathematician then. In less than a year's time, India would have its first Nobel laureate in Physics - C. V. Raman. Gandhi was already world-famous and highly respected in England. Yet, Wodehouse's representation of India is reminiscent of the arrogant Maculay and James Mill (who is said to have written the first 'authoritative' history of India) as opposed to the likes of his own contemporary writers like E. M. Forster. As an other example, consider the following statement of Colonel Horace in Something Fresh(1915) when he speculates what must be wrong with Rupert Baxter's disposition:

It's a well known form of insanity. Paranoia- isn't that what they call it? Rush of blood to the head, followed by a general running amuck. I've heard fellows who have been in India talk of it. Natives get it. Don't know what they're doing, and charge through the streets taking cracks at people with dashed whacking great knives.

I was surprised to find not two but five or six instances throughout the Life of Blandings where the tropics were used with great dexterity and with to make fantastic allusions to degrees of madness and insanity that can manifest themselves in humans. I was far from outraged when I read these things :-). However, they invariably led me to reflect upon the biases that writers carry in spite of not wanting to be labeled as such. My only take-home from this is that in the process of being funny and witty, one just ends up being squarely obnoxious and unjust to a largely heterodoxical culture, worthy of kinder words. Such misrepresentation is more of an indicative verdict on the intellectual limitations of the author as compared to being defamatory on the an entire culture/community. I still stand by my love for Wodehouse and Conan Doyle - they are to me, the greatest comedy and mystery writers respectively and absolute masters of the English language. No reader can miss the feeling of a rejuvenated ability to write and speak after reading a single chapter of any book by either of them. But a writer must exercise caution; it is easy to get carried away forgetting that there is a thin red line separating satire and stupidity.

Conundrums

I made an honest confession to myself yesterday- I suck at math puzzles. Unless the puzzle has a familiar character, attacking the conundrum is to feel like a monkey trying to pluck a banana using two long wooden sticks. To begin with, he feels confident and sophisticated thanks to the impeccable machinery in possession- sticks and opposable thumbs. But he soon realizes that neither of the sticks is long enough to reach the banana and finds himself unable to conjure a successful contraption with the tools at hand. Incapacity turns into frustration and the monkey begins to gnaw his teeth in exasperation. And finally, he ends up doing what he always wanted to avoid- break the entire creeper with his might for that one measly banana. That's the (similar) feeling that this monkey gets when all intuition fails and one has to resort to the savage way of doing puzzles. And when out pops an elegant solution from a smarter friend or the answers on the back of the book or the bottom of the page, one feels really really stupid.

I spent a nearly half an hour trying to write down the solution to a pretty looking problem that was suggested by Onkar yesterday morning- Given any group of 6 people, prove that you can always find a sub-group of three individuals that has one of the following properties - (a) Everybody knows everybody in that group (b) Nobody knows anybody in that group. (Also, assume that only two kinds of relationships exist between a pair of individuals- they either know each other or they don't; eliminating one-sided acquaintances). I have this infatuation with generalization. Naturally I started playing with variables, started writing comprehensive combinatorial possibilities, applying PHP and doing all sorts of tortuous things that only made life more difficult. Ultimately, I arrived at a solution that I knew was far from elegant as soon as I had finished it. A complicated solution is worth the effort if it leads to new insights about the problem- (say) like what should be the minimum number of people to make the same statement about groups of four, five, etc. But my solution was a mess; brute, lacking any new insight and boring.

But I still felt the relief of solving a problem; or to rephrase, this was how I felt until I heard the solution from Onkar, after which I felt incredibly stupid, like a monkey who's outsmarted by a smarter monkey in the banana game. The elegant solution proceeds like this. Imagine you are one of those five people. Then (convince yourself) that there will be (at least) three people, all of whom are either your acquaintances or completely unfamiliar. Assume without loss of generality that it is the former case (for if it is the latter, the arguments are completely analogous). Now among the three people who are your acquaintances, if you can find two persons who know each other then, combined with you, we have a group of three individuals, all acquaintances of each other. If this does not happen, then we have three individuals, all strangers and we have the required set. Complementary arguments apply if the original set of three are complete strangers to you and it can be trivially seen that one can always find a set of three individuals satisfying either of the two properties required. Incidentally, one needs a minimum of seventeen people (I haven't checked this yet) to be assured of having a sub group of four individuals who are all acquaintances or complete strangers.

Well, I have reconciled myself to this fate of mine- I suck at math puzzles. However, there have been a handful of times when I have felt the bulb glow in my head while working on a puzzle/problem and those times have been memorable. But the great thing about these puzzles even to someone who is fairly mediocre at solving them like me is that solutions often contain brilliant insights that stretch your intuition. In spite of possessing fairly competent analytical skills, people often get their intuition wrong with these puzzles. The best examples come from those involving probabilistic reasoning involving variable change (or conditional probability). I shall quote two examples:

1. The first is the often mentioned Monty Hall Problem or The Game Show Host problem- You are playing a game show where the host shows you three shut doors (A, B, C) and asks you to select one. In one out of the three doors lies the sports car of your dreams while inside the other two, sits a goat each. You select 'door A' because your mother's name starts with the letter 'A' and you think that will bring you luck. The host the opens door 'C' that contains a goat, and asks you, "Mr. K, so would you like to stick with door A or would you like to switch your choice?". The question is, what must you do to maximize the chances of winning the car? Stick or switch?

There used to be a show called 'Khulja Sim Sim' on television some years ago with the same format. And whenever confronted with above question, most people used to stick to their choices. There is a certain sense poetic justice, a moral high ground that people associate with following a set of ideals and that makes them avoid caprice. I am not aware of the statistics of the show but I won't be far from the truth if I claimed that two out of three people who would have stuck to their choices would have ended up with the goat. That's what simple probabilistic bookkeeping tells us. Though I cannot remember the exact details, I think I was properly bowled by this question when I had heard it first as a kid. It is very likely I would have felt that the prudent (and moral) thing to do is to stick to your choice.

Now that I know the solution to the problem (if you switch, you are likely to win the car 2 out of 3 times), I know what was wrong in my thinking so. But since the time I understood the problem, I have posed this question to many people and I have observed that it shocks most of them. It was just yesterday when I communicated the problem and explained its solution to an acquaintance and while he acknowledged the solution he kept wondering that there was some 'deep mathematical flaw' in the reasoning. It is not surprising that when Marilyn vos Savant posed the problem and the solution in 1984, many people, including PhD graduates and professors disagreed with her solution. In spite of the fact that the mathematical reasoning was as clean as a virgin's honeypot (and not terribly difficult either, one had to simply account for the conditional probability) vos Savant arguments had to be validated using computer simulations and mock trials in classrooms. I shall not bother writing down the solution here; it can be looked up online in hundreds of sites.

2. The other problem is called the double toss problem and is much more straightforward compared to the earlier one. The problem goes as this: I have tossed a coin (assume unbiased) twice and I tell you that one of the tosses turned out to be a head. I ask you the probability that the other toss was also a head.

Most respondents (primarily non-mathematicians) tend to answer half as the probability. Their reasoning is simple yet specious - since the tosses are independent why would the outcome of the other toss depend upon this one. While this is true in the literal sense, the context of the problem asks you to go a little deeper. To make a small digression, suppose I told you instead that my first toss was a head and asked you what is the probability that the second toss turned out to be a head. Many people cannot differentiate between this and the original problem. Yet they are fundamentally different.

Let us look at the set of possible outcomes of the two tosses - TT, TH, HT, HH, each with a probability 0.25 with H denoting 'head' and T denoting a 'tail'. Now when I say that 'one of the tosses turned out to be a head', this confines us to the sample space - TH, HT, HH. Now the only case where both the outcomes were a head is the case 'HH' but since it is one of three possible outcomes, the chance associated with it is 0.33. But when I say that 'the first outcome was a 'head'' as in the second case, the set of possible outcomes are - HT and HH. In this case, the probability is 0.5.

Interestingly, even this problem created a lot of controversy leading to lot of experimental validation in spite of a clean mathematical explanation. But the funny part is that the problem was not posed in this form in its original version. The original problem went something like this : You meet a person who confesses to having two children. If she tells you that one of them is a boy, what is the probability that the other one is too. Incidentally, survey forms were dispensed to mothers known to have two children of whom one was a boy to calculate the chance that the other one was too. The survey results showed that 35 % of respondents had a second boy-child, a figure that is close to 33% than to 50%. But it is nonetheless funny that such an experimental validation had to be carried out to resolve a clean mathematical argument (assuming of course that the sex ratio was 1:1).

While I often despair my lack of the fast mathematical intuition to penetrate such simple yet confounding problems, I am happy to know that I can fairly easily grasp the arguments that explain these riddles. I refer to the feeling as 'enjoying artificially sweetened sour grapes' :P.

Article on Predatory growth in India

The Economist recently speculated that the inflation rate could hit 10 percent, stated a CNN-IBN article that I came across yesterday. This is despite the fact that this year, India is all set to register a record growth rate. Those of us who commonly cite the Chinese model of economic growth might want to know that both India and China have suffered this paradoxical phenomenon- a high rate of growth going brothers-in-arms with increasing economic inequality among classes.

The problems of welfare and developmental economics are really deep and complex. Many (including me) cannot even get their dialectic parlance beyond commonalities like 'free-market economy', 'socialism', 'demand elasticity' or 'marginal utility'. And I couldn't disagree more with G. B. Shaw who insinuated that the economists were a group who if laid end-to-end, could not reach a conclusion. They are a set of people I have come to deeply respect for their ability and courage to articulate these problems so well. But I often wonder whether the ability to penetrate conventional wisdoms to disinter latent insights ever translates into good public policy.

I came across this article yesterday and it was one of the most deep and perceptive essays that I have read in recent times. Only after finishing the article did I find out that the author was an emeritus professor at JNU, Delhi (such thoroughness and erudition can come only from an academic) by the name of Amit Bhaduri. On the problem of China/India growth-inequality paradox, Bhaduri delineates:

A central fact stands out. Despite vast differences in the political systems of the two countries, the common factor has been increasing inequality accompanying higher growth. What is not usually realized is that the growth in output and in inequality are not two isolated phenomena. One frequently comes across the platitude that high growth will soon be trickling down to the poor, or that redistributive action by the state through fiscal measures could decrease inequality while keeping up the growth rate. These statements are comfortable but unworkable, because they miss the main characteristic of the growth process underway. This pattern of growth is propelled by a powerful reinforcing mechanism, which the economist Gunner Myrdal had once described as ‘cumulative causation’. The mechanism by which growing inequality drives growth, and growth fuels further inequality has its origin in two different factors, both related to some extent to globalisation.

I strongly recommend the article to anyone who, like me, has felt the paralysis from old cliches and the lack of fresh perspectives while discussing these issues. With the UPA brandishing the increasing growth rate as the natural panacea to all the socioeconomic inequalities that continue to affect nearly a quarter of our population, with evangelical platitudes like "high growth will soon be trickling down to the poor" being constantly mouthed, this article analyzes the apparent Indian economical dilemma- is product growth going to really solve the problems of inequality in India?

Bhaduri's critique of 'predatory growth' can be summarized by a quote forwarded to me by Anirudh Patil (who incidentally was responsible in leading me to this article) - Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

McCain can?

An excerpt from an article describing Senator John McCain's health reports:

The doctors also said McCain has occasional momentary episodes of dizziness when he suddenly stands up, high cholesterol, blood in his urine from an enlarged prostate and kidney stones. Additionally, McCain had his most recent colonoscopy in April, when six benign polyps were removed.

He also suffers from degenerative arthritis in his joints from broken arms, legs and shoulders suffered when his plane crashed in Vietnam.

His medical records revealed that he takes simvastin to control his cholesterol, hydrochlorothiazide for kidney stone prevention, aspirin for blood clot prevention, Zyrtec for nasal allergies and a multiple vitamin tablet.

If McCain is elected (personally I hope he doesn't for I have reasons to fear the Republicans), he would become the oldest President in the history of the United States. Apart from what is mentioned above, the article stated that the Senator's history puts him at increased risk of skin cancer. He also recently underwent treatment for a 'minor skin cancer in his leg'.

But in true Monty Python style, the same article concludes:

However, McCain’s age is not a problem for voters, according to recent national polls. Now that the medical records are also in the open and do not reveal worrisome health conditions, he is more than ready to compete.

Inscrutable is our appetite for contradictions and absurdity!

Kaifi aur main

He often finds himself in the society of things that leave him overawed and humbled. He can locate his position in many of these situations; a mute witness to an unconquerable, brilliant expression of art. And like Salieri, he curses God to have given him the longing but denied him the talent. All his vanity and hubris are uprooted mercilessly and flung beyond the horizons of his imagination. His identity thins beyond recognition and the only place he finds solace is in the gentle indifference of the world that has accommodated his mediocrity long before finding a place for him in its vast bosom. Nothing defeats a person like a beauty that he can sense but cannot conquer. Nothing makes him feel more human.

I saw a play in Urdu yesterday. On recollection, I cannot help but think that every moment of that play was pure gold and I am yearning to catch it once again. Bearing the yoke of an unfamiliar language was certainly a severe limitation, yet the feeling that I experienced was that of a wanderer who had fortuitously arrived into a foreign land where, despite the atrophy of language, he could understand the feelings of the native culture better than those of its own. The machinery of expression was more friendly and even without resorting to sophistication, it was pregnant with the inconceivable variety of human experience.

I am reminded of Jack Kerouac immortal lines (Source: On the road):

"..and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.."

However I try, I can simply not get myself to write a part by part review of the play. It suddenly seems a task too formidable and it would be presumptuous of me to make a half-hearted attempt. I shall refrain.

A few days ago, I read an article about a poor Kolhapur Dalit boy Sridhar Kamble, who, owing to his single minded dedication to astronomy, had landed a NASA scholarship. This news piece and the one in TOI were both really heartening to read; they made me happy with the thought that true scholarship paid off. This was rural India making a statement. The voice and will of the oppressed triumphs. The article mentioned the numerous hardships the boy's poor farmer father had to endure to make his son study. In spite of selling more than half of his land, the boy was short of meeting his travel expenses and I was satisfied to read that the state had intervened with a scholarship to fund his expenses.

But the words jumping the gun could not have been more ominous. The first CNN-IBN article that hit my face this morning was about the entire business of Sridhar going to NASA being a fake and a case of deceit and forgery. He probably did have a genuine interest in astronomy, but he had faked documents starting from his 10th marks to his correspondence with NASA, in order to get funds from the government. Unfortunately, this momentary lapse of the boy (who is all of seventeen and cannot be guilty of dreaming high) is going to extract a heavy price on his future career and education.

Selective abortion in nature

A Danish researcher proposes an incredibly intriguing hypothesis - that the sex of the progeny is related to the stress levels experienced by the expecting mother during her pregnancy. Based on data collected from surveys that were administered to nearly 8000 expecting mothers between 1989 and 1992, the researcher arrived at a startling correlation- the more stressed a mother had been, the less chance she had of having given birth to a boy.

Most of us are statisticians enough to appreciate that correlation does not imply causality. However, the goal of scientific investigation is to look at possible causal structures that manifest themselves through final correlation. The investigator believes that if at all there is such a causal mechanism that directs the sex of the baby according to the stress experienced by its mother, the reasons are likely to be adaptive rather than pathological.

But all said and done, in spite of being a Darwinist at heart (not a social one though), I cannot say I am not surprised (even amused to an extent) when I read paragraphs such as these:

That is because the chances are that a daughter who reaches adulthood will find a mate and thus produce grandchildren. A son is a different matter. Healthy, strapping sons are likely to produce lots of grandchildren, by several women—or would have done in the hunter-gatherer societies in which most human evolution took place. Weak ones would be marginalized and maybe even killed in the cut and thrust of male competition. If a mother's stress adversely affects the development of her fetus (as it is likely to do) then selectively aborting boys, rather than wasting time and resources on bringing them to term, would make evolutionary sense. That, in turn, would explain why women in rich countries, who are less likely to suffer from hunger and disease, are more likely to give birth to sons.

- From The Economist

In so much as the contextual premises that such arguments are based upon, they seem perfectly reasonable. But there is still a part of me that feels something clinically lacking in these reasonings. A lazy disposition holds me back from thinking further in the present moment, so I'll leave it for the record.