My Heroes of 3rd Dec - Chennai Floods

you can help in many ways depending on your ability and reach:
http://www.oneindia.com/india/chennai-rains-floods-help-know-what-where-how-to-donate-1945428.html


*****

I spent much of the 3rd Dec 2015 in T P Chatram. Here thousands of homes are submerged in water.

I have a new respect for Chennai and its people. While I am sure there are brighter stars in the universe, in my system these are the heroes who shone the brightest:

1. Rajesh and his friends - take the first spot. These unassuming half dozen friends just standing idly in the darkness at the (knee deep water submerged) street corner, jumped into action and led me with all the sincerity, alacrity and courtesy of professionals. Helped me identify homes with infants and helped deliver baby formula. Also helped me distribute fever meds, milk and candles.

2. Unknown individuals and unnamed NGO who were distributing food in T P Chatram at lunch time.

3. Sub-inspectors of T P Chatram police station who were helping with all the efforts and keeping order. They also were making jokes and keeping people smiling, agreed I did not understand any of the jokes in Tamil but I know for sure some of these jokes were on me.

4. Ambulance drivers who worked relentlessly and helped all, especially infants and elderly reach hospital from T P Chatram.

From the rest of the city,

5. The solid waste disposal vehicle operators and drivers.

6. Bus conductors and drivers who kept the city connected.

7. Auto drivers who were willing to go in the direction no one was taking me to for making my work possible.

Perhaps these people will not go in any other history, but in my books, they are heroes.

*****

Incentives and preferences:

All the people who I rubbed shoulder with yesterday were excellent people. But everyone, perhaps, had motivations other than philanthropy.

     Rajesh and his friends decided who will lead in which building based on who (of perhaps which girl) lives in that building, make a good impression. All the people employed by city and state, were perhaps working on orders of their superiors and were getting paid for it for sure. NGO workers were employees. Auto drivers charged way above the usual fares

But does that reduce our contribution to the efforts? Does that make the food they delivered less nutritious or the candles burn dimmer? 

I guess my lesson for the day was that what one does counts at the end of the day. Why you started doing it and what you got out of it, who knows?

He knows a song will move the life along

It's all better with a song and a little magical dance.

Hakuna Matata is definitely not a passing fad.

What is around that river bend, now?

Can't really worry about what I could have done. I need to let it go!

Trust your feelings!*

It is the time and a city in the empire of  Rome. An augure sits in front of Angus Aurilius, a [made up] owner of a big business house. The augure cuts open the entrails of a pig and makes a prediction about the safety and profitability of next consignment of spices coming from India. He gets gold if his predictions turn out to be true.

Angus was literally trusting his guts. But we are all far above that kind of superstition aren't we?



My colleague and I are working on using someone else' code for making a data analysis result sheet for quite some time and are tired. After the [for a large number] 50th correction and they tell me that they feel the code will be debugged and work perfectly this time. They also add with a tired smile that they have felt that about ten times so far. 

Lo! the code is debugged. We celebrate, they assert that they have learnt that they should trust their feelings. 
 
Ten times of being wrong, and once being right, conclusion: I should trust my feelings.
A type II error - a false negative.



The position of a finance manager is vacant in a firm. There are three female candidate within the organization with the experience and qualification to do the job, but the general manager has interviewed them all and they feels in their guts that these candidates are not ready for the job. When they do find the perfect candidate, it turns out to be a guy with deep voice.

Aren't you glad they did not betray their gut-feelings?



A police person in the USA takes his gun out and shouts at two teenage black girls to "get their asses on the floor", does a gymnastic move and chases another set of black boys who were trying to run. 
The situation is one where someone has called the police to say a group of people are vandalizing a community pool. The police person act on their gut-feelings and get the situation sorted in less than a few seconds with the result of several teenagers sobbing and crying sitting on the floor, worried for their safety and life.

Great job, trusting your gut-instinct, white police person, except that these black-teenagers happen to have membership to this pool for many years. You could have just asked before jumping the gun. People in skimpy swim suits with rubber floater are not very likely to bring out concealed weapons and threaten you.



Thrice in a row the made-up augure of the roman times saw that the gut of the pig had small specks of dark brown when the rain destroyed the spice consignment of the made-up business owner, enough to make him genuinely believe his correlations of pig-gut and storms.

Add to the mix some greed, profit motive, clever language, and rigged consequences - good prediction gets him lots of gold and bad only perhaps he has to change his patron, no one will hang an augure.



Modern day blind-faiths are not much different from reading guts. If you lost a job in the 2008 crisis or had a bunch of your savings lose their value due to market devaluations, you should be one to hate gut-thinking. What do you think the executioners of the financial deals were doing when they were betting on products (or the meaning of the assigned risk) they did not understand?

Add to the mix some greed ...




From global financial crises, to personal level reservations and chauvinism - gut-instincts are a close second to religion when it comes to the motivation of acting bigoted, racist, nationalist, and gender-biased. And I say that with all the rigor of gut-feeling analysis and zero data.

There is no non-thinking. What some of us very happily want to call instincts is sub-conscious or unconscious thinking. Humanly and scientifically there is no voluntary action possible without some level of thought. For a science refresher, involuntary are actions humans have little or no direct control over, such as the beating of heart, the working of nerves, or the knee-jerk reflex.

So then what is this feeling or gut-feeling we keep talking about?
Perhaps harmless hope and impatience, as in the case of code debugging. But not always harmless - sometimes it is the act of following deep rooted beliefs as a default, as in the case of the police person, the general manager, or the financial executive.

Conscious thoughts, reflexes, blind faiths and myths, cat-calls and wolf-whistles, smiles and frowns, all our reactions come from millions of years of evolution. Identify the pattern of wrongs in the following of gut-feelings all around you, and do what we do best: evolve! Let's be better humans.



*Apologies for the title. The kind of people I write this piece for, would not have even clicked to open the link if the title said do not trust your gut-feelings. But I expect they will not read this through to get to this part, so I write of them in third person.

Lunch With an Expat. - A Data Report

Description of Sample: 

N (effective stupid expat(s) [see 1]) = 1
N (foreign nationals) = 2 

N (total) = 7

Instances of the Phrase
"Indian roads suck/are horrible"	3
"It is so hot"	999
"POON-jabi" [see 2]	10

Topics of Conversation
Restaurants (run by Indians) serving other cuisines suck	10
Indian food is too hot [see 3]   (not spicy, she likes spicy)	5
Making fun of Indian head motion	7
Bollywood, Tamil cinema  (without any clue)	9
Laughing and making fun of people who went out of their way to help her [see 4]	21

Other Important Numbers
Indians looking at each other and smiling at the silliness of expats	= SUM(Cells above - [see 4])
Indians enlightening the expat  with some facts	3
Expat quickly changing topic to  POON-jabi or head movement	3
Expat thinking "Indians suck at making conversations"	51
Number of jokes that came out of the lunch, keeping Indians entertained [see 5]	17

[1] This number is not calculated based on nationality but by demonstrated faith and dedication to expatism
[2] A POON-jabi is a special variation of the regular Punjabi that is found only in the head of the expat

[3] In the head of an expat English is a monolithic language, spoken only in the way they speak it in their country. And thus, spicy can only mean "using non-hot spices" and all Indians are dumb to use the word in any other way

[4] Say the meanness+ugliness index of such thinking and conversation is X

[5] The meanness+ugliness index of such thinking and conversations is Y,  then 

X >> 4*Y 

Thus, I can post this without guilt. 

I weight a tonne

Running - a poem

I run a lot, since I like to run.
You should try it too,  it's a lot of fun.

I start running early at 5 am,
to beat the Chennai heat,
That is just something I like to say,
watch the sun rise is the real treat!

I hear the morning azaan,
when I run by the Adyar mosque.
I smell the fresh sambar,
cooked by the girl in blue frock.

On beaches of Chennai, my home,
New Delhi through the smog and din.
Through Hong Kong once, I had a stop-over,
I run in any city I am in.

In the french quarters of Pondicherry,
through the morning markets of Bombay,
in Santa Cruz, so many times,
through San Francisco too, but only one day.

I ran with a policeman once,
who was much taller than I am.
She had magical stories to tell
of far away Asom and Mizoram.

I have run with a few children,
who are no good at it;
but if someone else runs past them,
could they just watch and sit?

I run with this dog everyday,
in the morning coolness she basks.
She owns and reigns the streets,
before people start their tasks.

Dogs are a considerate lot,
they run around me to-and-fro.
They would leave me far behind if they didn't;
oh! I run so slow.

I ran with a horse one day,
I beat him at a 5 k by a shot.
The horse was only walking by the way,
while I ran with all I'd got!

I run across people who look at me,
And loudly wonder why I run.
I look at people who zip past me,
and silently ponder why I can't.

When that happens, I feel bad and tired.
But then I remember why I run:
It's not because I am good at it,
but because it is so much fun!

Madras Again

I ate at a road side dosa place for first two weeks of my arrival in Chennai. It was run by an old couple. Their children, two boys in their twenties and a younger girl also helped them in running the everyday show.

As usual all my communications were limited to key words and numbers, since I still do not know Tamil. Shame on me. Well, that's topic for another blog. In this one interesting things happen on the day 9.

After 9 days, the lady, I called her akka, which means older sister, spoke to me in clear and well pronounced Hindi. She pattered away in good bambaiya Hindi as I looked at her with my mouth open.

When I did speak I only said Kyun? (Why?) She laughed a hearty laugh and her family joined in. 


**********


I was in Mahabalipuram, there are some really good granite rocks for climbing around there.

I reached very early and tried my hand at a few easy climbs, warming up for a decently steep climb. I had run 30 km a day before and I did have much faith in my toes. I could barely trust my hands: it had rained the morning: I would keep chalking them up and water hidden in cracks would keep wetting my hands. You get the picture, I was struggling and making excuses.

There was a pair of friends (males) watching me sitting near the carved elephants. When I reached the top, they seemed so far away.

I could not trust myself on the way down, but luckily there  was a tree for me to climb down on. And so I started my hesitant descent on the tree.

"Shoes Tamil Tamil" one of them shouted. I understood he was asking me to take my shoes off.

"No, no. Okay. Special rubber" I replied in my excellent Tamil.

"Grip-pa?" he replied in amazement and approval.

I got down and went to speak with them. They smiled and asked me in a friendly way: "training-ga?"

"Ama."

"Training two Tamil Tamil"

"Oh no, I am okay alone." I tried to explain. And added a joke "one man army," trying to be friendly to the uninteresting but interested locals. I come here and climb their rocks, they probably never think of climbing these. Maybe they will get inspired. Maybe one day they will also try climbing.

They spoke to each other for some time. "He going, one man army" said Arun pointing at Karthik. And I turned to see Karthik attempt the climb. I was worried I may have made it look too easy. "Rain, slippery" I tried to warn Karthik. But he did not listen, he slipped at the second foothold and slipped all the way down (8 feet or so) scratching his face on the way down. I felt rally bad. I tried to pick him up, but he refused help, a little embarrased.

Arun was laughing at him insensitively. I felt like saying something but I said nothing.

"I go" Arun said bragging. Foolhardy locals.

He made the whole climb in 30 second with bare feet. And screamed from the top. "Easy". Then he climbed down. Karthik and I urged him to take the tree after he was near the second from bottom foothold. He conceded.

I had still not got over the fact that an untrained local had done so much better than me. What do you do I asked. "Fisherman, two" he explained. Mahabalipuram is a fishing town! It all came together to me. 

I have been humbled many times before in life, and I should be smarter by now. But, well.

I hope to remember next time.

As a face saver, I should add this: "You army?" Arun asked me. It is one of the best compliments I have got in a very long time.