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.

Judicial Juggling: The Case of Exploding Flowers

For a very long time, I suffered the illusion that USA has very little or no corruption. Compared to India the context I am most familiar with, of course, it is very different scale, but it seems the USA has interesting internalised and legal methods of corruption. Most often this corruption is in favor of large corporations.

Lobbying is a very popular example. And large political donations. But that is the institution of democratic legislative branch, flawed everywhere. But when instances come from the judiciary, it makes me sit up and take notice.

As a disclaimer I am not a student of the law, and my commentary is nothing more than a reflection.




There is a provision in the judiciary of the US called the Rational Basis Test.

The level of judicial review for determining the constitutionality of a federal or state statute that does not implicate either a fundamental right or a suspect classification under the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. When a court concludes that there is no fundamental liberty interest or suspect classification at stake, the law is presumed to be Constitutional unless it fails the rational basis test.

Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/rational_basis_test



In its face it seems a very smart idea, why change status-quo unless it is impeding a fundamental right or constitution? It is great not to have excess laws and lawsuits, right? But in practice this law means that as soon as someone challenges the status quo, the judges and the representatives of the government put their heads together and try to figure out a way to make the existing law pass the Rational Basis Test. And the instances of how brashly and indelicately this is done will illuminate why I was moved to write about it. One instance, the only one I will discuss here, on top of my list of absurd, is the case of Louisiana Florists.

The source I am quoting here has a serious conflict of interest as they represent the firm that challenged the status quo, but I think they make a coherent case.


I will summarize the case here paraphrasing the source:

Louisiana is the only state in the nation to require florists to obtain a government-issued license before they may create and sell floral arrangements.  In order to comply with the law, aspiring florists must take a test (sounds worse than Asia) judged by their future competition—licensed florists. The law makes it very difficult for new entrepreneurs to work as retail florists and gives existing florists protection form from new competition.

When this law was challenges by unlicensed florists, the judges and the lobbyists of  licensed florists and government officials put their heads together and found a way to sustain this law by finding a way to make it pass the rational basis test. They came up with an incredible (and I do not use this word lightly) defense: The unlicensed florists arranging flowers pose threat to public safety!


Again, individuals who want to be florists need to pass a written and practical test, conducted by their competitors, to become florists because the arrangement of flowers presents a threat of danger to public.

The curious case of exploding flowers.

Read more here:
http://www.ij.org/freeing-louisiana-florists-licensing-law-is-blooming-nonsense
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/03/florist_licensing_requirement.html

Or listen:
http://cato.ramp.com/m/audio/34499291/the-right-to-earn-a-living.htm

Pic-credit:
http://www.booooooom.com/2009/05/12/ori-gersht-photography/

Some More Pencil Drawings

Pencil Drawings Made in Aug - Nov

 Winter - 10/Nov/2013

 Nicole 2 - 24/Aug/2013

Nicole 1 - 24/Aug/2013

Statement of Purpose, PhD - Econ

Mz Personal - Applicant Ph.D. Economics - Fall 2013

SoP Page 1/1
draft  2

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

1\6 [opening]

The area of my interest is anything that has a lot of Greek symbols and makes me feel like I know more than anyone about a subject no one cares about. If selected for a PhD at the Great American University, I want to start understanding what these symbols stand for. In the short term my career goal is to make a stipend which is more than my salary in INR. In a few years' time I want to earn a title of doctor which will justify my claim that I had a plan in my mind all the many years that I did not have a consistent career. In the long term, everyone will leave me alone.

2\6 [education]

Throughout my education I have taken many courses in linear algebra, matrix algebra, methods of induction, conics, proof based calculus, multivariate differential and integral calculus and differential equations, 3-D calculus and thus have constantly been wondering if I was inside one of those never-ending nightmares where you keep falling. In preparation for a doctoral study I am in conversation with Professor Semiponnu of the Indian Statistical Institute who has agreed to write to you to say that I understand the title of the book he published, if I clean his motorcycle every day for six months.

In course of my dual master's degree from The School Indulged in Parties and Affair (TSIPA), Bigapple University and The Asian Version, Some University Notaversetoidiots (SUN), I studied International Economic and Monetary Finance with esteemed academics such as Prof. Bigshot Prezadvisor and Prof Eximf Economist.


Two experiences influenced my understanding of Monetary Finance greatly.

I was sitting in an exciting class on International Financial Markets at SUN and was dozing when I suddenly understood that the Greek Letters are not a language but stand as symbols for something else like bread and noodles. Consequently I unregistered myself from the class in Classic Greek.

The other was a class on Latin American crises taught jointly by Professors Raremoneymakingeconomist Whorunsahedgefund and Prof Thelawyerwho Knowshowtomakemoney. Like other professor who have ever taught me anything, they also listened to my questions and observation patiently, smiled at me and each other, and patted me on my back. I think they think I am smart.

I studied econometrics with Prof. Yetanother Greateconomist at SUN, for which I received an A+. It took inviting him to eight dinners and 20 hours of listening to his family woes. I also studied econometrics with Prof. Thirdauthorof Thetextbook at TSIPA who once openly expressed his complete shock and dismay about my being in his course.* I think he thinks I deserved much better. Both these teachers were very smart and made a course curriculum that I can send to Economics schools like yours. If you read it you will think I know a lot, but in reality, with people like me in their class, they were not able to go past page 2 of any of the readings.

3\6 [work and research experience]

In Aug 2011 I finished an internship in Investment Banking with a leading infrastructure finance company in India where I found out that some people, who have studied only till high school, make many times more money than you make. Precisely because they are good at typing very fast without making errors and they don't know or care too much about the problems of this world. They call them traders and worship them. Did you know this before you chose your career?

Since February 2012 I am working as a Research Associate with a Small Research Center Funded by an Ivyleague Prof. (SRCFIP) for a project funded by the Gatesandwindows Foundation, that studies something no one else will. Or should. I am working under the guidance of Prof. Whofundsthis Centre, Ivy League University.

At SRCFIP for the first time I came to know that graphs can also have numbers on the straight up and the sideways lines. At TSIPA and SUN we never had any numbers on the graphs.

My work at SRCFIP has directly inspired my interest in PhD. It took me three months to figure out what the project is about and five more to figure out that I cannot do it. So I needed to leave before they caught up. I also realized that at my current saving rate it will take me 102 year and 11 months to repay the loans I took to study at the Bigapple University.  Around the same time I also realized that universities are big and old and thus good places to hide.


4\6 [why Great American Uni?]

Through graduate education and work, I realized the need for more training in Economics and Mathematics to reveal my true potential and reach my goals. Of the places I am considering for my doctoral studies in Economics, Great American University is my first choice for many reasons.

At Great American University, I will learn from, and perhaps collaborate with researchers like Professor Ohmyhe Iscute and Prof. Ohmyshe Ishot.
Professor Ohmyhe Iscute the nobel laureate once gave a talk at SUN and during this talk he spoke looking in my direction. Of course he realized how smart I am. I went up to ask him some questions after the talk. He smiled at me and patted me on my back. I think he thinks I am very intelligent. Now that I think of it he never actually said anything to me.

Prof. Ohmyshe Ishot has been my goddess for many years since I saw a pic. of her on your university website. I can easily say she is the best looking professor in America. I know she also does some Economics research.^

At Great American University, I will have some of the brightest people from around the world as classmates and colleagues. In company of such colleagues, my superpower of invisibility becomes overcharged. These bright people seem to never be able to see that I am standing near, even in front of them. Or hear what I am saying for that matter. I do even better than Bilbo Baggins who could be heard when he was invisible.

The courses at Great American University are geared toward a strong base needed for rigorous research. Such as Math Camp. I think I will take it for a whole semester. The special focus on workshops and seminars in Monetary Economics/ Macroeconomics make the PhD at Great American University an ideal place for me. No home work.

And above all, you guys may actually pay me a stipend to live in your beautiful city for many years. If I was to try and look for jobs on my own, no one will give me even a janitor's job in that place.

5\6 [why me?]

I have demonstrated at every opportunity that I am a self-motivated, organized and disciplined individual (...not! If I had been I would not) have worked as a Research Associate/Assistant for two years. From 2004 to 2009 I was a school teacher. That was the only time I was in a roomful of people who knew less than me. But then they asked me to teach higher grades. Like 5 and 6. There were some moments in teaching higher and complicated grade 6 Math when I started wishing for powers of invisibility. As I mentioned earlier I have acquired these powers now. Which proves my point about being disciplined and finishing what I start.


6\6 [closing]

My zeal and acumen for Economics research, work with esteemed professors, an excellent graduate education and power of invisibility make me a highly qualified candidate for a PhD in Economics. Add to that, my other attributes that render me utterly unable to work at anything else, you have someone that you can bet will finish the PhD program even if it takes him ten years. I have nowhere else to go.

I look forward to a favorable response from the admissions committee of the Great American University.

THE END

---

* This one is factual. Not that other things are not, but this prof actually asked me to explain the z- test to him and after listening to my response said, "I think you should not be in this course. All your colleagues are at a different level of learning. But since this is 6 weeks into the course, I will pretend this meeting never happened."

^ I must apologize for this joke, really! It does reflect some people's (and presidents') attitude towards women, not mine.

Family or Ambition - Is It That Simple?

I came across this article published in The Atlantic just now. It has got few of my Facebook friends reviewing their lives and priorities.

The article starts by making itself relevant in this particular month, this is the time of the year when many youngsters will leave homes for college or University for degrees and maybe never return home. It talks about a person who left his small town in Louisiana for good, a long time ago and was thus separated from his sister. While this person went on to be a hot-shot reporter with all the glamour and living the life of big cities, his sister stayed in the town, lived near parents, and worked as a school teacher in a local school. Many years later when the sister was diagnosed with lung cancer the reporter came back to be with her for 19 months. In this time he saw how the closely knit community supported her and took care of her. So the reporter decided to give up his career and moved to the town with his wife and two children.

The article quotes Barry Schwartz. I have been read and listened to Barry many times since I first heard his Ted Talk about happiness and constrains. In this article he is quoted to mention that family members and community are constrains and as his theory goes, restrictions can lead to a more satisfied and happy life, if not the most accomplished one.

The author characterizes ambitious people as inhuman: ambitious people tend to use other people as objects are unable to empathize with others, are unwilling to give up anything for the community, etc.. You get a picture of Dicken's Ebenezer Scrooge.

I want to make a few observations about this article:

First of all, I agree with the article and the general idea that ambition and accomplishment may not be correlated with long term happiness. This although can work in either direction. While this article uses it to say that ambitious people gave up a lot and ended up only as happy as the people who stayed with the community, I can use it to say the less ambitious gave up all the fun, experiences, and perhaps money and did not end up being happier than the (successful) ambitious person even if the ambitious person is more lonely at the end of life perhaps.

I like the qualifier that Barry Schwarz uses for the ambitious people'’s happiness. He says the ambitious people “who achieved what they wanted” are as happy... … Many ambitious people will not achieve what they want. That is the nature of the quest of ambition, whether it is for finding the gold mine (migrating with community and family and making new ones) or of discovering/fashioning mathematical theories (utilizing the stereotype of scientists) success is not guaranteed. You may end up as unhappy a person as your country cousin! 

I have read some Tolstoy, Robert Brown, and other poets who idealize the idyllic bucolic life. And then I have also read Anton Chekhov who italisizes (being Chekhov he would not have highlighted (: ) the frustrations of such a life.

Isn'’t it the personal ambition that has driven the Edward Jenners of our world to work against the ridicule of the community and experiment with inoculation? In fact the word Vaccine comes from the jokes the community members played on him when they suggested he was turning people into cows (Vacca, latin - n. cow). Later he decided to call the inocculations as vaccinations to make a point.

And isn't it that the idyllic and beautiful community in the article can also be the most mean and narrow minded community, keeping an eye on every move you make and telling you what to wear, who to talk to, what to talk about, and in some instances, how the world was made and how it will end. 

Which directly brings me to my next point. Being with a community is not always a personal choice. I know a man (a Muslim) and a woman (a Hindu/Buddhist) who married each other in love, and their family was given up on by their communities (which is to put it mildly since the man was attacked many times to the threat of death.)

10 years after the marriage when a brother of this man passed away, family and community members asked him to return to the native town. So the man decided to leave his job relocate his family. Children were in the middle of the school year. As soon as the family arrived everyone tried to convert his wife to Islam and telling the children that their mother was going to go to hell. And if they love their mother and be like her they too may be triple fried and salted. Luckily the man saw his senses and came back to his life and the far away city where he had made his ambitious career. In less than 3 months these same people who wanted him to come were fed up of him and his kafir family.

35 years after the marriage their second born daughter decided to try to mend the gaps in the families and start by going to a marriage function of a cousin on mother’s side (the Hindu/Buddhist version). She traveled to another city with much effort and sacrifice with her little daughters (3,5) where they were taunted, ridiculed and insulted repeatedly over her stay. She called her father and brothers and cried a lot and returned a smarter person with a rigid determination to never ever mix with the uneducated, uncouth and uncivilized lot.

My next thought is about being alone or loneliness at an older age. 

Charles Darwin was not a particularly dislikeable person. He was a nervous sort, but him and his family were destined to be lonely not because of that. He was bound to be lonely since he believed in, and said out loud, outrageous things like humans evolved out of monkey like species by some convoluted process of evolution instead of the nice and simple, and thus utmost logical theory that God created us from muck on His last working day, just before He went on a long vacation and stopped worrying about us. [By the way this does explain how George Bush became the president of the most influential nation of the world, evolution and logic cannot explain this.]


Inside of a quaint, cute, and cuddly little community, you can be forced to be lonely. Driving the wrong kind of motored vehicle (a motorcycle for example) can make you an outcast, forget about asking tough questions, or many other simple reasons: having a child with special needs, falling in love with the wrong person (different religion or caste) or at the wrong time (too young or too old), or with a wrong gendered person. 

There is a good reason why creative, ambitious, and generally different people flock to the cities. Cities and metro centers are (comparatively more) liberated spaces, where people are allowed to be different without the penalty of banishment or good old fashioned lynching. We are still left with the reported problem of ambitious people who are left alone at the end of their lives. Is that something any ambitious (and/or curious and/or individualistic) person should worry so much about that they live all their lives doing a job they don'’t like, stay married to a wrong person (or a person of wrong gender) or say hollow prayers to the God of the community per force? Or give up live music performances? Museums? International cuisines?

I guess the answer is personal. Your native community may be based in city and may be more educated, sensitive, flexible, and accommodating than mine. I guess the answer also changes depending on where you are in life. 

This month I have been accepted at a university in USA for a PhD course in Economics. I am going to leave India for a few years. I am not very ambitious in terms of a career, I just want to be an expert at a subject. I don’'t want to make a lot of money, just enough to be able to afford myself and my parents a comfortable life. I can’'t say I like everyone I meet, but no one can accuse me of using people as objects (and escape the projectile of the first heavy person I can get hold of). I have a couple of amazing friends a half-dozen family members I truly care about. But I am proving, even to myself, to be different. I am hoping I will find like-minded people in  my university, but I have a feeling that it is not the dearth of like-minded people that keeps me alone. I am just turned inwards. I am emotionally and socially different from most people.

Today I think: 'naaaahhh! I don'’t mind being alone'. I don’'t mind being alone in Chennai, I don’t mind being alone in Santa Cruz. There is so much to do and learn and read and write. And then there is Facebook (hah!). I will learn to live and be alone like a pro and when I am 70, I will be an expert loner. But this is today. Perhaps when I am sick and old, I may not agree with what I am thinking and saying now. I may regret my choices. I may even have become religious then!

What the eff, everything rots.

Higher Pleasures and Willingness to Pay

John Stuart Mill was inclined on improving the much debated utilitarian theory proposed by Bentham. For one he tried to deal with the differentiation between kinds of pleasures.


The basic force for choice in the utilitarian world is the love for pleasure and the dislike of displeasure including effort. In his analysis Bentham does not differentiate between types of pleasures, which makes him one of the most egalitarian people I know. No judgments based on who you are what you derive pleasure from. But of course people who are used to living in societies steeped in religion cannot have any of such non-sense. Stuart Mill was working on making the utilitarian theory reflect the reality of the word by differentiating higher and lower pleasures. He came up with definitions for higher and lower pleasures.


Everyone will agree that some pleasures need more socializing and education, such as classical music, or excellent art, some people would say wine and dark chocolate. Mill differentiates between higher and lower pleasure by saying, if people are educated in many kinds of pleasure, higher pleasure are the ones which they will choose repetedly.


A Harvard Prof. who is teaching the EdX class where I am getting all these thoughts (https://www.edx.org/courses/HarvardX/ER22x/2013_Spring/about) shows 3 clippings, one of a Shakespeare soliloquy, a scene from Fear Factor, and a short clipping from The Simpsons and asks students to make a choice. A large no. of students vote to show that Shakespeare'’s art is ‘higher pleasure’, but they will still repeatedly choose Simpsons over Shakespeare.


I could dismiss this evidence by saying these are young Harvard students, who may not have yet been educated in Shakespeare enough. I have been“educated” in appreciation of Classical India music for quite some time and I always hold it in high regard, until, as I discovered, I am asked to pay for it.


When I search for things to do on Indiastage.in or bookmyshow.com, and I come across classical music performance that are ticketed, I ignore them. In contrast, this weekend alone I paid a total of Rs. 145 and 220 respectively for watching Chashme Baddor a cheap vulgar but very funny Hindi movie and GI Goe Retaliation (3D), a gory gun and action movie which I did not even enjoy very much.


I tried to reasons my behavior and came up with the following.

There are many many good classical music performers in this country. Too many in fact for me to be able to differentiate in the quality of their art. In other words I have not been educated enough in the landscape, to differentiate the artists by abilities. So I leave it to experts such as Kalakshetra, a highly respected classical dance school, to decide for me. Barring a few occasion, Kalakshetra performances are free. So I have perhaps actually never experienced a true willingness to pay based on my own knowledge for this higher pleasure.


An important observation in this case is the exceptional time when Kalakshetra had annual festival in end-Dec 2012 with ticketed performances, I bought many tickets for Rs. 500 a show, again without knowing the performers based only of my faith in Kalakshetra. This amount is more than I would pay for a movie in India, by at least 30% but up to 128%.


An important point that this discussion brings out for me is that one has to be educated not only in the appreciation of the art, but also must gather the knowledge about various artists, and be educated the process of purchasing tickets. While for movies, even bad ones, I know everything from where to purchase the tickets, to how I will feel later on, that is not the case with classical music. Which makes movies an easier choice for me to make.


This brings into picture the cost and time of learnings associated with any pleasure, which was assumed to be zero in the simpler version of utilitarian analysis I guess.

Insignicant Chatter

Eat, Pay, Leave

I was surprised to find large vegetable or fruit shops being manned by one or two people in the USA, when I was there for the first time. The idea that anyone who wants to buy something will get it and come to the counter and pay for it, was alien to me. Since then I rave about this system based on trust and honesty. I am sure there are losses when the assumption of honesty breaks down. And rationally, perhaps in USA where labour is expensive, the losses may not be balanced by the cost of preventing them. But perhaps the shop owners are people who value this system based on trust in others and want to believe in it.

Now I am in Chennai, India and I have been eating most of my meals in one of the ubiquitous Andhra messes, for over 8 months.

Yesterday I went to a little more expensive and "professional" food joint called Hot Chips. Many readers may not associate this place with expensive, but food was 3 times the cost I have gotten used to paying. I was asked to purchase a coupon before I get anything; the workers were uncouth and unsmiling; I had to stand at a dirty table, no chair to sit and no one around to clean the tables; and there was no way for me to ask for extra serving of one or more of the condiments. This place is overstaffed, but the lack of trust and lack of respect for humans from the management seeps down the hierarchy. The workers were not expected to make natural human connections or receive feedback, they were not even expected to keep the place clean.

I ate unhappily and as I was leaving, I realised that I had made a payment up front. This organisation had no trust in me and they had found a system to not have to put their money in trust, and it dawned on me (many obvious things light up in my dim brain after experiencing shock). In smaller establishments like Andhra Mess someone may have kept track of what I eat, but I have no evidence for that. I am given, if I need something by smiling workers, in fact I am asked politely many times during the meal if I need anything. I can physically leave premises to wash hands, or get tea and come back, greet the cashier, praise them about their prowess with numbers, tell them what I ate, most often without any testimony from the serving staff and pay. If there is lack of change amounts on both sides, I don't mind paying a little more and they don't mind getting a little less.

I am not claiming this is the best system in the world, but I feel more human and real in this system. And this feeling is not less important than getting my nourishment. Perhaps for some vegetable and fruit shop owners in the USA and the Andhra Mess owners in Chennai it is not less important than making profit doing their business.

---

The God of the Insignificant

A few weeks ago I watched a debate about the significance of religion in 21st century organised by the Cambridge Union a year or so ago. The way the title of the debate is worded is very classy: this house believes that organised religion has no place in the 21st century. Parts of this debate keep playing in a loop in my brain.

In this debate Prof. Richard Dawkins says, and I am paraphrasing him, that some people believe there is a god who can control everything. Who knows the values of all the constants and can controls the value of these constants to the umpteenth decimal value to lead the chaos from the big bang to the evolution of human beings, to the birth of his son on earth, ultimately, the people of faith believe, to have him killed him brutally. Such a knob twiddler, prof. Dawkins echoes my thoughts, he can put his trust in. But then, we should not worship such a god, because it would be pointless. Such a god should not be bothered with the concerns of one significant human on a rather small planet, in a solar system with a rather average sized star, in the outer arm of a rather average galaxy among the billions of galaxies in the endless universe. Such a god should not be bothered with our insignificant demands and prayers, she has better things to do. So many knobs to twiddle.

What Prof. presents as a reason for such god being beyond belief, is I think the very reason why many people need a god. To feel that there is justice on the whole, that there is a life after this unjust one, a life that starts after this one ceases to exist, where justice will be brought. Insignificant will become significant; poor, rich; and sinners, cheaters, bullies, schemers, smarter people, better equipped people will be punished for being the medium of evil.

Is it likely that this need is a manufactured one? Imagine a child growing up without knowing the power of the possibility of getting even in the hell-ish fashion: having heavenly bouncers and goons fry and toast your adversaries. In such a person's mind will such a need exist? Perhaps the whole concept of justice of the heavenly variety is mislaid. I want to hear more about connection of justice and religion in this EdX class.

The Sad Book of Religion

I can't have enough of them. I keep listening to the songs of the 8 Tony winning musical The Book of Mormon , again and again. I was intrigued by what did the Mormon community think of it. And so I googled the key words "Mormon Criticism of Musical The book of Mormon."

My first hit was this site. The writer is a mormon. The article is a review of the story and personal reactions such as "The song “Spooky Mormon Hell” is hilarious (check out the life-size dancing Starbucks cups; I could not stop laughing) but theologically inaccurate."; and ends with the note: "It is an honor to be thus lampooned."

The next other interesting one is similar in it's criticism: "All in all, it’s vulgar, but fairly harmless towards the Church directly. It has about as much impact as an episode of South Park. For any believers in God – not just members of the LDS Church—you’ll probably not be wishing to see it again."
He also mentions that Mormon church’s official statement "sums it up quite nicely - The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ."

Now I have only heard the songs, but I found them beyond just a bit offensive towards the Mormon community and their prophet. But I was happily listening away, because the musical reflects my views on organised religions.

While elsewhere in USA someone decided to make a movie deriding Prophet Mohammed and post a trailer on the youtube (extended version). From what is visible in the trailer, the movie presents prophet Muhammed and many other people who surround the mythology/history of beginning of Islam pretty seriously, showing him as a womaniser, a paedophile and an insane, brutal person.

This trailer video has triggered a mob in Libya that killed 3 US nationals of the US Embassy, including the ambassador. And the fire has spread to Yemen.

Even thought now it is suspected that the mob may not have been spontaneous, the immediate reason seems to be the protest against the video. I expect more countries to join in, religious fervour is infectious.

The actors have now issued a ridiculous statement through CNN denying "that they had any idea about the anti-Islamic sentiments expressed in the final product."

I am not perturbed by the movie trailer, it is a view many people hold about the prophet of Islam. This will not be first such movie, and of course there are many books which are in circulation which present the views many people in the world hold about Islam and its prophet. I will have to say they are not factually inaccurate on many points.

But the making of such a hateful movie, the killing of multiple innocent people who have nothing to do with the movie and destruction of public property yet confirms my views on the dangers of organised religions and faiths - where each religions asks, nay, requires a follower to announce that all other religions and thoughts are at least incomplete, untrue, and in fact worthy of hatred.

Hassadiga Eebowai.