It's a small world after all...

In the liberal worldview, informed consent is seen as the cornerstone of all kinds of relationships, be it personal or professional. Often times, relationships operate under some form of a "power asymmetry" where one party dominates over the other in some matters. For instance, bosses can overrule their reportees, a higher court can upturn the decision of a lower court, and so on. Sometimes, power asymmetry crosses objective boundaries and tread into the personal lives and the individuality of the people involved. For instance, the military controls personal lives of its personnel to a large extent and agents in the movie industry often dictate to their clients when they can get married, and so on. Such cases often poses ethical dilemmas, which are often sought to be resolved using the "informed consent" axiom. Basically, it means that if someone willfully and knowingly enters into a relationship where they experience power asymmetry positioned against them,...

As a researcher interested in understanding how the Web is shaping the world, studying cultural challenges in India provides enormous insight into issues that the world at large is facing. India is a country with incredible, innate diversity. This diversity is not something that is brought by immigrants joining a great big melting pot, like in the case of the US. Our diversity is innate . It has been there for centuries. There is no larger melting-pot infrastructure that can override and overrule cultural differences. Each cultural group believes they represent the real India. In addition to myriad languages and cultural practices, there is also diversity in paradigms -- or mental models about how the world works. There is a saying that Indian culture is like a long snake. One end of the snake is in the 21st century, writing software and launching Mars missions; while the other end of the snake lives with a lifestyle that has not changed ever since recorded history. There are ...

That Hinduism is grossly misunderstood in the West (which still wield a lot of influence and power in India) is an understatement. Given that a significant percentage of the population in India practice some form of Hinduism, this often leads to controversies and skirmishes that captures and polarizes popular opinion. The most recent episode is the recent controversy around a ban on cow slaughter and consumption of beef in several parts of the country. This post is not about the particularities of the above controversy -- it is about how the controversy is understood and interpreted in the two different parts of the world. I remember several years ago in Europe, when someone asked me to explain "Manu Smriti," I asked him, "What is Manu Smriti"? I was not in denial; I had never really heard of it till then. Neither had I heard of Paneer Tikka Masala, which according to them was our favourite food. After listening to my story of how we practiced Hinduism in o...

For a couple of years now, I have been practicing a technique called "mindfulness" -- a term, which is used in several senses by different people, so let me define it here. It is a technique by which we try to understand our emotional disposition or emotional profile , by observing our emotions over a long period of time. Emotional disposition is different from our emotional "state" -- the latter simply refers to how we are feeling right now. Emotional states are transient, and in fact, just asking someone how are they feeling, may make them feel different. Our emotional disposition is our strategic tendency to be in certain areas of the emotional state space, than certain others. It is how we tend to feel and what we tend to pursue when we are under no external pressure. In that sense, our emotional disposition is "who we are" as a person. But, it is more than just about who we are. If we find out things about ourselves -- things that we int...

Farmers in south India know that the monsoon arrives sometime in June-July. Crops have to be planted such that when the monsoon arrives they are neither too nascent, nor too old. If for instance, there is heavy rain right after the seeds are sown, then they get washed away. On the other hand, if there is no rain for weeks after the seeds are sown, the crop becomes malnourished. So, timing of the crop is critical. Only problem is that, while the phenomenon of monsoon itself is deterministic, it is "imprecise". We don't know when exactly it will arrive and on what exact date will we get our first big rain. This "deterministic imprecision" results in a number of collaborative and strategic activities among the farmers. They hedge crops so minimize risk, they cooperate with one another to reduce costs, and so on. Deterministic imprecision is a characteristic property of nature. We can predict natural phenomenon at a coarse level. But we cannot predict spe...

Most policy-making models are based on estimating demand and production in terms of "per capita" units, where an individual is the unit of resource consumption or production. This foundation is used to make major strategic decisions, like say how much water will a town or city use, how much garbage will it generate, and so on. However, it is easy to see that in reality, the unit of consumption is rarely the individual. Consumption and production are primarily driven by systems of individuals like households, companies and other forms of organizations. Let me use the generic term "organization" to refer to all of these. In a small place that is (say) primarily driven by agriculture managed by families, the relationship between the number of individuals and the number of families (which are the elements that drive major consumption) remain fairly static. However, as the population grows, the relationship between individuals and organizations is not static. In...

South Indian states are known to have the highest levels of suicides in the world, which is starkly different from north Indian states. Suicide is the culminating state of an intensely depressed mind. I have been to hell and back myself, including attempts to take my life during my school days back in the '80s. Since then, I have tried hard to understand and model what is happening around us. And what I have learned is if anything, even more depressing. The roots of our depression problem go deep. Worldwide, there is a stigma around depression and other mental illnesses. There are several well-intentioned initiatives to address this stigma by calling depression as just an illness. Like this video for example, which basically repeats several oft-heard statements about depression, like women suffer are more likely to suffer from depression than men, and it is an illness that can be treated. But look at the statistics from the NIH study linked earlier, in south India, me...