The cross-baldy effect

 Today’s woke world needs to wake up to a blatant bias

A sinister problem is seeping stealthily through society, spreading its tentacles and hounding good men. I became aware of it when a friend told me I was the splitting image of his cousin and showed me the cousin’s photograph on his phone. The man had a lighter complexion, rounder face and broader nose than me. His eyes were wider apart. And while friends have often remarked on the prominent nature of my chin (“It enters the room before you do”), his was almost non-existent.

In fact, we shared only one characteristic: a smooth, well-shaven head. The gross injustice, always hovering in the depths of my subconscious, surfaced suddenly. I realized that this was not the first time a bald man was being declared a close resemblance to another bald man and it won’t be the last. I recalled my bald friends relating instances of their friends, acquaintances and even strangers declaring them to be identical looking to a cousin, boss, colleague or distant uncle. The prejudice is everywhere: bald men are being mistaken for each other in WhatsApp forums, dimly lit pubs and crowded football stadiums in every country, every day.

Today’s woke world comes down hard on people exhibiting any form of this insidious bias of likening one human being to another just because they belong to a common category. For example, if you were to ask two of your black American colleagues whether they are related would you not get a severe and well-deserved reprimand from human resources? And if you ever express wonder at the resemblance between two Koreans because of the similarity in their passports, would they not immediately (and justifiably) scold you?

Indeed Wikipedia has a whole section called cross-race effect that covers mankind’s confusion in distinguishing between people of another race. It includes complex concepts like ‘emotion recognition’ and ‘cognitive disregard’. And for those afflicted, there is increasingly help available to handle the pain of the cross-race effect. For example, in 2016, The Washington Post wrote about “published guides to help readers distinguish between” Asians of different origin and went on to explain how “computer scientists at the University of Rochester tried to teach an algorithm to tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese and Korean faces.”

But is the cross-baldy effect raging around us getting the same indignant response from the same woke world? Far from it. Take Wikipedia for starters. Apart from a dry section on ‘hair loss’ offering the vapid and completely useless information that hair loss is also known as alopecia, there is nothing. There aren’t any training programmes to teach people how to distinguish between bald faces (Lesson 1: “The face starts above the eyebrows and proceeds downwards from there.”)? And no computer scientist is working on a baldy-recognition algorithm.

Perhaps we baldies are to blame. We have not come forward. We’ve accepted this grievous injustice with stoicism and resignation. That is why conducting research in Google on the topic of bald men being mistaken for each other throws up not examples of this happening but a variety of balderdash instead. There is an article in The Guardian offering tips for dealing with baldness, starting with asking you to accept it – and making bald men wonder if there were indeed a choice in the matter that not been conveyed to them – and then pontificating about the use of wigs, hair transplants and drugs. Other links lead you to examples of bald men who are famous and successful, hinting that if you’re bald you should simply hang in there, and your very hairlessness will one day catapult you to fame. (These articles fail to mention people who are famous and successful, and have a head of hair. I believe there are a few of them.) There is research to reassure bald men that their affliction is not their mother’s fault. And finally, there is some claptrap claiming that women find bald men attractive. All I can say on that matter is that the woman who chose to marry me often looks at old photographs featuring my hirsute days and sighs wistfully.

So I urge my bald brothers to take inspiration from this ground-breaking article and flood the internet with real stories of real hairless heroes. Tell the world that you don’t really care that you’re bald, that you like it, that you actually use a razor twice a week to achieve the effect. Clarify that you have not spent the better part of your life and a significant part of your mother’s blaming her for your baldness. Admit that you would not mind becoming rich and famous and successful, but you don’t believe baldness alone will take you there. And above all rave and rant about the injustice being reaped on you when you’re mistaken for another bald person. Tell them it rankles. Exhort them to stop.

But if they say they cannot help themselves, that, in order to earn a good night’s rest, they must equate one bald man’s looks with another, request them to aim higher: instead of mistaking you for an obscure second cousin on their father’s side, mistake you for Bruce Willis or Jeff Bezos and seek your autograph.

This article first appeared in The Strait Times, in Oct 2022

It's urgent to make sense of overwork

 A rose by any other name may smell as sweet but ‘overwork’ smells much sweeter when named ‘sense of urgency’

I was playing tennis with a friend, an entrepreneur. During every changeover, he would sit down and get engrossed with his phone. After being made to wait three or four times, I asked him what was so urgent.

“On email with my sales manager in India,” he replied crisply: “I reply to every email within 20 minutes of getting it.”

“But it’s 7:30 am on a Saturday morning! 5 am in India!”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We attend to everything with a sense of urgency. I’ve instilled a 24/7 work culture.” The pride in his voice, cloying and self-righteous, overflowed into the tennis court.

By displaying a keen sense of urgency, he was not really attending to work in between tennis; he was playing tennis in between his work. 

Like him, many of us take our work with us everywhere – to the tennis court, cinema, food court, even bed. We check our emails just before sleeping and immediately on waking up (even if it’s for a midnight toilet visit). Work consumes every hour of our day, every fibre of our being. 

THE GLAMOUR OF A 24/7 CULTURE

It was not meant to be like this. In a 1930 essay, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour week 100 years later. But the workweek has only grown since then. Mr Keynes rightly prophesised the advance in technology and leaps in productivity that could render shorter working hours, but grossly underestimated mankind’s resourcefulness in grappling with the problem. “If machines do much of what we did yesterday – we’ll do other stuff today!” seems to be our defiant response to Mr Keynes.

Thirty years ago, the New York Times lamented the increase in working hours and corresponding reduction in leisure, and every passing year has featured the same story. In Oct 2019, just months before Covid-19 ravaged the world, The Guardian cited overwork as a major cause of burnout.

What drives people to work so much? It’s “their own ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers”, suggests James Suzman in his book exploring the history of work. In a similar vein, a BBC article talks about how “Billionaire tech entrepreneurs advocate sacrificing sleep so that people can ‘change the world’”; and how, having bought the argument, we “devote ourselves to work and glamourise long-hours”.

But in recent years the glitz of overwork is being dimmed by a counter movement: work-life balance. Op-eds , TED talks, business literature and mainstream news are all exhorting people to live a more holistic life, with work occupying a part, not dominating its entirety. In this environment, it is unbecoming for chief executives to overtly demand overwork, and embarrassing for employees to wear it as a badge of honour.

A USEFUL EUPHEMISM

In typical fashion, business leaders found the answer to retain the allure of long hours – in business jargon. ‘Overwork’ sounds harsh, exhausting and degrading. ‘A sense of urgency’ sounds stylish, statesmanlike and purposeful. And when it is emblazoned on corporate walls with the inspirational image of a sprinter cutting the tape after a 100-metre dash, featured in CEO townhall addresses, and written into performance appraisals, it acquires an ethereal, spiritual, quality.

As a young executive, I was once told that, by taking two weeks to start work on an idea that our managing director had thrown our way, I had not exhibited an appropriate sense of urgency.

 “But that idea is for next year,” I said.

 “So?” My manager looked puzzled.

 “So it’s not urgent!” I said.

Shaking his head and adopting a fatherly tone, he explained how a sense of urgency could work for me, career-wise, especially if it were accompanied by fire in the belly.

“People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.” says Malcolm Gladwell. As a bestselling author – of Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink ­– Mr Gladwell’s words carry the weight of gospel to many. But his statement, while true, is grossly misleading. He has clubbed two irrefutable traits of change agents – courage and creative thinking – with a dubious third, one that is equally exhibited by successful change agents and resounding flops. I personally know entrepreneurs who pursued ideas without merit, but pursued them with a reverberating sense of urgency – and the only transformative change they effected was a downward one of their bank balances. 

To paraphrase Mr Gladwell with a sports analogy, I could say, “Tennis players who rise to the pinnacle have immense talent, an unwavering will to win and a decent pair of tennis shoes.”

THE CORONA-SENSE OF URGENCY

Under the guise of a sense of urgency the indoctrination of excessive work into our culture was complete well before Covid-19 hit us and irrevocably changed the world we knew, taking a tragic toll on lives and livelihoods, shrinking the economy, slowing businesses, and forcing us to work from home. In its midst, one might have expected some respite in working hours (for those not in healthcare).

But the reverse happened. The corporation’s answer to slowing consumer demand, disrupted supply chains and travel cessation? Work harder! The World Economic Forum reported that Covid-19 caused up to a 40% increase working hours in some countries. At home, reported in this paper last month, one in two Singaporeans has worked more hours since the onset of Covid-19; and many have added two hours to their workday.

Working from home has actually facilitated this by obliterating the office hour constraint. Like bananas into smoothies, days blend into nights and weekdays into weekends. “When the business slows down, we go faster,” leaders seem to suggest. “And since you work in your pyjamas anyway, why stop just because it’s 8 pm? Or a balmy Sunday morning?”

But the toll of overwork is now proving worse than just stress and burnout. Recent research suggests that around three-quarters of a million people die every year due to it. So, business leaders, please stop demanding a sense of urgency from your people; in fact eliminate the phrase from your business lexicon. And do it with a genuine sense of urgency. Otherwise the next time an employee tells you, “Excessive work is killing me”, they may not be speaking figuratively.

This article first appeared in The Strait Times, Singapore, on 1^st May 2022

Wanted - vaccine against corporate speak

Business jargon is not new; neither are articles on it. But Covid-19 has augmented every professional’s game. Doctors are treating more patients, economists are suggesting larger structural reforms, politicians are holding more meetings and executives are indulging in greater corporate guff. So the pandemic’s boost to business gobbledygook is worth exploring.

Here’s what BCG, a consultancy, posted on its website two years ago, soon after Covid-19 was upon us: “Immediate action is critical, but leaders must also embrace a new agenda — one aimed squarely at what comes next, for business and all of society”. I was flummoxed when I read it for the first time… and the second. On the third reading the meaning finally seeped through: BCG was urging us to do stuff we have to do now and then do stuff that we have to do next. Not to be outdone, its rival EY-Parthenon raised the level of twaddle, saying, “through the crisis, long-term value is going to become a much brighter ‘North Star’ by which to navigate.”

As the pandemic has spread, so has business parlance to deal with it. Two years into Covid-19, BCG continues to offer such pearls of wisdom (on its landing page, no less): “Always-on business transformation is essential for surviving disruption.”  

Perhaps the most important lesson emerging from this tragic pandemic is the need for transformation, especially digital transformation. Google Trends shows the use of the phrase, already on a steady rise since 2015, has doubled in the last three years. When we hear a CEO say, “We need urgent digital transformation to prepare for the post-Covid world”, we are not sure whether they want employees to encourage customers to shop online, reply to inter-department emails faster or keep the camera on during Zoom meetings. Perhaps they’re not sure, either.

In my experience, managers use complex jargon for three reasons: to sound grand, obfuscate ignorance, and follow the herd. Perhaps a crisis like Covid-19 accentuates each motive.

Take sounding grand to start with. Consultants want to show that they know what they’re saying when advising companies to deal with a once-in-a-century pandemic that no living person has experienced. They could play it safe and advise clients to “do a few things at a time” but the CEO, who gets such advice from their grandmother, will baulk at paying big bucks to hear the same words from their consultant. So this is how one consultancy words the same advice: “Choose the journey carefully to start. It is too easy to try to boil the ocean.”  Similarly, get your ducks in a row sounds grander than prepare properly and think outside the box than think creatively.

Covid-19 also forces managers into hiding ignorance. When the pandemic hit us none of us knew what was happening – and we remain befuddled today. So there’s plenty of ignorance to camouflage. And Donald Rumsfeld has taught us that the best way to say “We have no clue” is by employing the phrase “unknown unknowns”. A Forbes article starts with this balderdash in its headline itself: “Leadership after Covid-19: learning to navigate the unknown unknowns”. And continues in the same vein in the article, offering incoherent advice like, “Post-crisis leadership requires tuning in to other frequencies and applying behaviours that are not as narrowly focused and have less immediate goals.”

We know that people follow the herd. And managers, who strive to do everything better, follow the herd with more gusto. During Covid-19 no managerial jargon has become trendier than ‘new normal’. In 2020, the World Health Organisation titled a webpage as ‘The new normal’. And just a few days ago, on 10^th February 2022, Forbes published an article on ‘Building effective remote teams in the new normal’. Meanwhile the Pew Research Centre issued a grim warning that “Experts say the ‘new normal’ in 2025 will be far more tech-driven,”. In our fast paced, fickle world, surely the new normal in 2021 would be an upgrade over the new normal in 2020 and the one in 2025 even more advanced? Maybe we should clear the confusion by using terms such as ‘newer normal’, ‘newest normal’ and ‘new normal 2.1’.

But managers don’t appear confused. Leaders in every industry – from agriculture to aeronautics, banking to building materials, and postal services to pharmaceuticals – are saying ‘new normal’ these days. Some of them are saying it several times a day.

The extend of corporate guff has been ridiculed often (like here and here). Despite this, managerial mumbo-jumbo has spread through organizations like an alarming virus. For example, in conference calls during Covid-19, hearing their CEO instructing them to take a discussion offline, employees start using the word at every opportunity, whether it’s warranted or not. For example, “To prepare for ACE (After-Covid Existence), I need to discuss key milestones with you offline. Or if you have time, we can discuss them offline now.”

New employees, listening to ear loads of such corporate blather from their managers – in the conference room, on the telephone, via email, and over drinks to celebrate the latest merger – begin speaking like that too.

As business leaders, we need to stop this nonsense. Let’s pivot from the jargon status quo and leverage normal language as a core competency. Whoops, sorry! I mean let’s stop using jargon and start speaking English.

If we don’t, jargon will become everyday parlance and employees will cease to understand us when we speak like ordinary humans. Soon you may face a situation like this.

You tell your manager to focus on only two things during the pandemic– e-commerce and delivery – because they are the “easiest to do and will produce quick results.”

They stare at you, puzzled. “But why?” they ask. “I don’t see the logic.”

Now you are puzzled. “I just told you why,” you reply. “Because they’re the easiest and will yield results soon.”

The manager’s face clears. “Oh, you mean I should go after the low-hanging fruit? Why didn’t you speak plainly in the first instance? 

This article first appeared in The Strait Times, Singapore, on 27 Feb 2022

Programming the driverless car for India

In Google’s California campus, the spooky spectacle of driverless cars moving quietly on the road is apparently common. Now Google is letting these cars roam the city streets, and, according to a recent article in the New York Times by Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty, the cars are not enjoying sharing the road with human drivers.

The article describes how, seeing a pedestrian at a zebra crossing, a self-driving car slowed down, but the car behind it didn’t. The result? The pedestrian was unharmed, but the Google car ‘was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan’.

I smiled. Then, as I read what Donald Norman, an expert on autonomous vehicles, had to say, I chortled aloud: “They (driverless cars) have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”

How appropriate it would be for the car to be trained in India, I thought, affectionately reflecting upon our famous driving culture. I imagine being tasked to travel in the driverless car in Chennai (with the ability to take over control at my whim) to figure out what changes are needed in the car’s programming to inculcate an appropriate sense of aggressiveness in it.

I get into the car and input my destination into the map. The car reverses silently into my colony road. When we reach the main road, instead of turning right, the car switches on its indicator and waits. Immediately the driver behind us blares his car’s horn and gesticulates ‘Move, idiot!’ with his arm.

The phone may be smart, but...

Do you remember the traditional camera, a box-like thing with a lens in front and something black and plastic-like called the film inside? The film served the useful purpose of limiting the number of photographs that could be taken and therefore ensuring that people were judicious in using the camera, taking pictures only of stuff they needed.

Then along came the digital camera. Immediately the need for thrift and common sense vanished. Instead of limiting themselves to perhaps 20 pictures of their child’s birthday party, people took 200. Where earlier an animal lover might have exhausted a full reel on a visit to the zoo, returning home with 36 photographs, they started taking 36 of each animal! I once took a visiting friend, his family and their newly-purchased digital camera to the zoo. The 17-year old daughter, assigned as official photographer, was enthusiastic and unrelenting in her duties. I felt sorry for her, clicking so furiously that she did not have the time to view a single animal through her naked eye.

“Why don’t you look at the animals, Ritu?” I asked and reached for her camera. “Let me hold that for a while.”

She pulled the camera close to her chest and looked at me as if a trunk had replaced my nose. “Why?! I’ve captured all the animals here and I can see them later at leisure, on the computer.”

However, even the most prolific digital photographer didn’t carry the camera everywhere: so they only photographed worthy occasions like birthdays, weddings and zoo visits. And they could share these only after removing the card from their camera and loading it into their computer.

But now, with the smart phone and its built-in camera, things have got out of hand.

Telling a good story

I’m tired of people in every sphere of life telling me, in voices gushing with excitement, how wonderful the internet is and how it has made life easier in every way. But it has not. Take the subject of party conversations for example. In the halcyon pre-internet era I found it very easy to hold audiences spellbound on topics that I had only a vague knowledge about and others on which I knew nothing.

For example, I clearly remember one dinner I attended in that splendid period before www.something invaded our lives. A few days before the dinner, I had watched a television programme about the meat-eating customs in different countries and was keen to share some insights with my friends.

“In China,” I declared, “they eat frog legs.”

“Wow!” said someone. Others gathered around me to listen, the topic having piqued their interest.

“Yes, they do,” said Ganesh Subramanian with an air of authority. “In Thailand too…”

“They also eat snakes in China.” I said sharply. Having introduced the topic and secured attention, I was not going to let it be hijacked. “In fact, they not only eat snakes, they drink their blood.”

I smiled to myself as Ganesh closed his mouth and others opened theirs. This was obviously something new to all of them.

“They believe the blood is a potent aphrodisiac,” I continued. People drew closer, mouths opened wider and words like ‘Wow!’, ‘Fascinating’ and ‘Disgusting’ were muttered.

Crazy pricing is the right pricing

My accountant friend KS Srinivasan invited me for a quiet dinner at a restaurant to seek my advice. He described his large ancestral property in Kodaikanal and told me he was converting it into a resort. Now that his children had left home, he and his wife wanted to move there permanently from Chennai and run the resort.

“But I have no qualification to be an hotelier,” he said.

“Nonsense, Srini!” I said. “You own the property – that’s the most important qualification. And you’re an accountant, able to count the money as it comes pouring in. That’s all you need. Hire people for the rest. How many rooms in the resort?”

“30, with half of them air-conditioned.”

“How will you charge for the rooms?”

“`5,000 per night for AC and `3,000 for non-AC rooms.”

I shook my head gravely. “You should charge `7,000 for rooms without air-conditioning.”

“That’s crazy!”

“Crazy pricing is the right pricing today,” I said. “Say Person A flies from Mumbai to Hong Kong, via Singapore. Person B takes the same flight, but gets off at Singapore. Who pays more, A or B?”

“A!” he said immediately. “He’s flying a much longer distance.”

“Wrong! B pays more because his flight from Mumbai to Singapore is non-stop, whereas A’s is not! Pricing based on the logical cost of providing the service is so old hat it smells of mould. Pricing today is based on perceived value only. The trick is to name your rooms appropriately. Call the cheaper room ‘normal air-conditioned room’; call the other ‘premium natural weather room’ and describe it as: ‘Kodaikanal’s natural beauty and fragrances brought inside your room’.”

Watching the watch

A month after I had met my friend Balwant Sinha and gained a useless understanding of measuring sleep, I ran into him at the mall.

“Got to show you this!” he said briskly, holding up a shopping bag. “Come, let’s have coffee.”

“Is it another device to measure sleep?” I asked with some foreboding when we had sat down.

“No! But it measures stuff that will help me sleep better. Since Monday I’ve slept only an average of 5 hours 23 minutes each night – that’s 5.3833 hours, if you prefer irrational numbers – against my target of 6 hours. And you recall my ZQ target, right?”

“No. In fact I don’t recall what ZQ is.”

“I told you last time,” said Sinha, sounding annoyed. “It’s a single sleep measure capturing the positives (REM and deep sleep) and the negatives (sleep disruptions). I’m scoring 36% against my target of 65%. And I’m not able to lift my game.”

“Talking about lifting the game,” I said, trying to change the topic, “did you see how Chennai Super Kings played against Knight Riders?”

“Exercising helps in sleeping,” he said, ignoring my intervention. “So I started running after dinner. But it worsened things: my average ZQ dropped 7%! Then further research revealed that one should exercise at least six hours before bedtime. In the immediate period after exercise your metabolism is quicker and you’re more alert, energetic and not sleepy.”

“Dhoni, they say, does his workout in the early afternoon.” I tried a diversion again. “In last night’s…”

“I too have started exercising in the afternoon,” said Sinha. “But I also learnt that overdoing exercise can worsen the quality of your sleep.”

The science of sleep

“Hi Paddy: over here!” my friend Balwant Sinha cried from across the room. “I’ve been dying to talk to you.”

I was touched by his greeting. I didn’t realize how much my company meant to him. There was obviously something heavy on his mind that the poor fellow needed my opinion on, some weighty problem that only I could solve.

“Really sorry,” I said, sitting down next to him. I looked deep into his eyes with empathy. “What’s troubling you?”

“How well did you sleep last night?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Forget that. What are you dying to talk to me about?”

“That’s it: your sleep, man! How well did you sleep last night?”

“Ok, I guess,” I said, “but…”

“Don’t guess!” Sinha sounded cross. “Do you know that extensive studies have highlighted that not getting proper sleep is a key issue today?”

“Yes, I’ve read something like that. But getting to something more important, why…”

“Nothing is more important,” said Sinha. “So think: did you sleep well last night?”

I threw my mind back (not literally, of course) and said, “Yes, I slept well.”

Our bureaucracy is alive and well: part 3

A week after being thwarted at the passport office my friend re-submitted his application with a fresh schedule F stating unequivocally that he had been staying at his present address, as opposed to his permanent address or his previous address, for the past six months. Three days later he received his new passport. But he also received a text message requesting his presence at the neighbourhood police station for post-passport-issue verification; so he went there and handed his passport to the sub-inspector.

“Show me proof of citizenship,” the police officer said.

“It’s in your hand,” my friend replied.

“No, I need your birth certificate or school leaving certificate, preferably CBSE.”

My friend was surprised that the police thought so poorly about the passport’s ability to prove one’s citizenship but since he had carried his thick ‘passport-preparation file’, he did not press the point.

“Take both,” he said.

Instead of showering him with kudos for providing two documents where only one was required, the policeman said, “Also need proof of residence.”

“Again?!” My friend was shocked but also well prepared, ‘proof of residence’ being the biggest obstacle he had had to overcome on the path to passport. “Here’s my employer’s letter showing my address. Using it I transferred my private sector bank account to Mumbai: here’s that passbook stating my address. With this I acquired a public sector bank account: here’s that passbook. Submitting this I got the passport, already with you. That’s four proofs of residence and please note – all carry the same address, exactly.”

Our bureaucracy is alive and well: part 2

A month ago I ended my article feeling sanguine about my friend’s passport prospects. To recap for readers with a weak memory and other readers who, to their great regret of course, missed the article completely, my friend had, after three unsuccessful attempts to submit his application for a fresh passport, finally collected all the required documents, in the right format, texture and sequence. He now had to go back online, submit a fresh application, seek a fresh appointment and pay up a fresh `2,000.

“All the best,” I had said to him on the phone and added a tennis analogy, as I often do in life’s crisis moments, “Serve well and keep your eye on the ball.”

The good man followed my advice. He went back to the passport office, having practised his serve and his forehand, determined to win this tournament. When he saw that his previous nemesis had been replaced with a new clerk at the desk, he took it was a positive sign that he had been handed an easy draw. But, watching her as she pored over his documents, he realized that this new player was a seasoned member of the circuit. Soon she looked up and said, “This passport was issued in a different city. You can’t renew in tatkaal!” But it was a weak ball. Like Sampras at the net, my friend dispatched it gleefully: “Doesn’t matter. Old clerk said it was okay. Also, the passport instruction booklet carries no mention of this rule if I provide annexure F, which I have.” She was flummoxed. Quietly, she proceeded to examine annexure F before finally accepting defeat by handing the documents to him and asking him to get them signed by the officer before coming come back to her for a token.

My friend then swiftly proceeded to the officer as directed, confident but not complacent. He knew that a first round victory is a far cry from winning the Wimbledon trophy and that this officer was a top-ranked player, a veteran of the tour.  So he handed the papers over to this champion, who immediately began examining them closely – making a tick here and a mark there. My friend waited, prancing on his toes, preparing for a strong service to be fired at him.

Our bureaucracy is alive and well

When an old tennis friend of mine had to renew his soon-to-expire passport, I warned him that the process might be bureaucratic and that he should exhibit patience, tenacity and an unwavering will to win if he hoped for success. He said that I was mistaken, that doing it today was as easy as sitting on a cushioned bench. All he had to do was fill an application form online, submit it online, pay `2,000 online, apply for an appointment online, land up on the scheduled date with the required papers – just his old passport and a proof of residence – in his hand.

“Three days later I’ll have a new passport in the same hand,” he said, sounding smug.

I was curious to know what happened; so I called him a day after his appointment. 

“I missed it,” he said morosely. “The proof of residence proved tricky. I don’t have an electricity, telephone or water bill since I moved to Mumbai recently and am staying in my company flat. The passport office accepts a public sector bank passbook showing my address; so I went to one to open an account. But they asked me for proof of residence. I explained to the manager that I was opening an account in his bank because I did not have the proof and for no other reason. Instead of showing sympathy, the man got annoyed; but then relented to say he’d accept a private bank passbook as proof. Unfortunately private banks require proof of residence too! Luckily my private bank accepts a letter from employer if you’re ‘changing address’. So I transferred the account from my previous city to Mumbai submitting my employer’s letter as proof of residence, then opened an account with the public sector bank submitting the private sector bank passbook as proof of residence, so that I can apply for the passport submitting the public sector bank passbook as proof of residence. It’s like progressing through levels of the computer game Warcraft, but not as much fun. I’ve asked for a second appointment in three days, by when the public sector bank will complete the paperwork.”

When he reached the counter for this appointment, the clerk told him that annexures F and I were missing. My shocked friend said that this was because the website made no reference to them. In a bored voice the clerk informed him that he had heard that story many times before and had not found it gripping on any of the occasions.

iParenting

“It’s amazing how we brought up our children without the help of technology,” I said to my wife, looking up from the newspaper. I often introduced deep, philosophical topics like this over our morning cup of coffee.

“You mean disposable diapers?” she asked.

“No, but good point! We should discuss that another time. But I was wondering how we brought up two children without even one iPad?”

“Jordy Kaufman of Swinburne University, Melbourne,” I continued, reading from the newspaper, “claims that using an iPad is intuitive to babies and it fosters creativity and intelligence. According to Ofcom's report, 51% of UK households own a tablet and where children are in those households, they tend to be users too. And in the US, as many children have their own iPads as did adults two years ago! All our kids had was the rattle.”

My wife nodded sagely.

A few days after this intellectual exchange, our friends Mithun and Amrita came home for dinner with their six-year old twin boys and infant girl of eight months. Like a good host, I moved to help them dismantle the baby’s pram. That’s when I noticed it had an iPad mounted two feet above the baby’s face.

“Wow! That’s neat,” I said, reaching out to pluck it out of its mount.

“No! Don’t!” screamed Mithun, but too late. I had already removed the device. Immediately the baby began howling and thrashing about in the pram, making it impossible for me to clip the iPad back.

A newcomer's guide to the Singapore language

When I first came to Singapore I thought communication would be a breeze as English is the national language. But I soon realized that knowing English before entering Singapore is like knowing running before entering the tennis court: it helps you to get around but not actually play.

Affection for Acronyms

The enthusiasm for abbreviating names into acronyms in the country is unparalleled. The World Bank places Singapore no. 3 in the world in population density (with 7,713 people per square kilometre) but if we reapplied the measure to acronyms used in everyday life, Singapore would be world leader in acronyms per square kilometre.

“Where’s PIE?” I asked my Singapore colleague in my early days here. “The road signs pointing to it are very prominent.”

“It stands for Pan Island Expressway,” he explained.

“Ah!” I said. “And CTE?”

“Likewise: Central Expressway.”

“But that’s CE. What does the ‘T’ stand for?”

“For ‘Tral’, in ‘Central’. Singaporeans love three-letter acronyms; we think two-letter ones just don’t make the cut.”

“What’s BKE?” I asked.

“Bukit Timah Expressway,” he said.

“Wrong! That’s BTE, not BKE!”

“No! The ‘K’ stands for ‘Kit’ in ‘Bukit’.”

“But why?!” I cried. “Unlike CTE, we have a perfectly legitimate ‘T’ waiting to be used here.”

“That’s why! If we have CTE and BTE, where’s the creativity? People would wonder if future highways would be DTE, ETE and so on.  And how silly would ATE sound? People would wonder who ate it!”

I thought if we already had a PIE, there should be no problem if someone ATE it but I didn’t say so.

The 'uncle and aunty' syndrome

We all know that age carries clout in India. As the website indianchild.com says, “respect for elders is a major component in Indian culture”. In ancient times, this meant youngsters would touch the feet of elders in greeting, talk to them deferentially and fetch things for them. But the modern guideline for respecting elders in India is crisper: simply address them ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’.

I discovered this truth early in my marriage, at the tender age of 24. A couple older than us and their three-year old daughter were staying in the ground floor of our apartment building. On our first visit to their house, the girl smiled sweetly at us and said, “Hello uncle; hello aunty’. My wife and I found it endearing to be addressed like this by the little one.

Two days later, we were trudging up the stairs to our flat when the door of the apartment on the second floor opened and a man walked out. He politely moved out of the way to let us pass and smiled.

“Hullo uncle; hullo aunty,” he said. I looked at him closely. He had a thick moustache and a three-day stubble that made him look more adult than me. Yet he was calling me ‘uncle’ and his only excuse was that I was married!

“Hullo,” I said coldly and offered him my hand. “I’m Paddy. And you?”

As he shook hands with me his smile became more friendly. I thought he had recognized his error and would now address me by my name.

“I’m Ajit, uncle,” he said. “I just finished my B. Com and am looking for a job.”

Maybe he needed a broader hint.

A league apart

When I was visiting Mumbai recently, my friend Rakesh Joshi called me.

“I have to tell you about the revolution taking place in Indian sports!” he gushed over the phone.  We agreed to meet that evening for a drink.

When I reached the bar, Joshi was already there, a half-consumed mug of beer in front of him.

As soon as I sat down he said, “Do you know how the sports scene in India is transforming into something spectacular and mind-boggling at the same time?”

He hadn’t even asked me what I would like to drink! This told me how excited he was because otherwise this polite man would never have committed such a breach of etiquette. However, I was not excited and my etiquette was very much intact; so I calmly ordered a mug of beer for myself, waited for it to arrive, took a deep sip, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and then spoke.

“No, I have no idea. Please tell me.”

“Simple concept,” he said, “Learning from the huge success of the IPL – the Indian Premier League – for cricket, Indians have launched similar leagues to promote other games.”

“But I thought the IPL was a success because cricket is popular,” I said.

“So did I! But we were wrong. It appears that cricket is popular because IPL is a success!”

I frowned and tried to concentrate. “I’m sorry, I don’t get that. What do you mean, cricket is popular because IPL is a success?”

“Not sure,” he said briskly. “It sounded nice, so I said it.But what I do mean to say is that by shortening the format of cricket, IPL has made cricket even more popular. And it’s doing the same to badminton and kabbadi and hockey!”

Been There Bungled That

A piece of news: my book Been There Bungled That is being published by Random House.

Been There Bungled That is a funny look at our everyday journey through life – navigating career, managing relationships, encountering people and traveling outside our comfort zone (physically and metaphorically) – through the eyes of the fictitious Jags Srinivasan.

In a way Jags is a reflection of me. Many of his fictional fumbles are based on my real-life ones. Like him, I studied engineering not out of passion for the field but because I made it into a good engineering college. However Jags and I are not alone in this regard. A large section of my class applied for engineering because that was what you did after school. And if you secured admission, you went on to study engineering (though ‘study’ may be a strong term to apply to what I did in engineering college).

However, even with my strong penchant to goof things up, I would have found it difficult to stumble through five distinct careers in one lifetime. After a brief stint in engineering, I settled upon marketing and have restricted my bungling to this field ever since. But I’ve made Jags jump from engineering to consultancy to advertising to marketing to banking because it’s funnier that way. And while ‘truth may be stranger than fiction’, fiction should at least be funnier.

Which brings me to the next point: Been There Bungled That is unabashedly a humour book. It may offer you pearls of wisdom that redefine your life and make you a better person, both physically and philosophically, but most likely it won’t. However I hope it will make you laugh. And that’s not a bad thing, I say. Consider how many things don’t make you laugh today. The price of onions, corruption in high places, corruption in low places, delayed flights, stressful job, pollution, irritating co-workers… I could go on, but you can read today’s newspaper to get a better idea of what I’m talking about. If George Mallory climbed Mount Everest ‘because it is there’, I write humour for the opposite reason: because it is not there in everyday life, at least not in sufficient quantity to enjoy.

As a famous person said – or if he didn’t, he should have – ‘Humour may not make the world spin but it will help keep you from spinning off it.’

If you would like to read the book (and you missed all the links I helpfully provided above!) you can pre-order it here.

“Thank you for not apologizing”

A few days ago, I was to meet my wife at a mall at 6.30 p.m. but what with having to deal with a few delicious last-minute emails at work, it was 6.50 by the time I reached there.

“Thank you for coming early,” I said.

“I didn’t come early,” she said coldly. “You came late.”

“Yes!” I said enthusiastically. “Thank you for waiting.”

She didn’t take it well. “At least have the decency to say ‘I’m sorry’,” she said in a clear healthy voice that carried to nearby shoppers.

“Don’t embarrass us in front of all these people,” I hissed, lowering my voice. I clutched her elbow and took her to a secluded area in the mall. “Etiquette has evolved, woman. You need to keep up with the times. It’s no longer chic to say ‘I’m sorry’. The right form nowadays is to thank the other person for the inconvenience.”

“What nonsense are you talking?” she said.

“I don’t blame you for not understanding,” I said. “I myself picked up this new form of manners only in the last week.” I began to relate what I had learnt.

The problem with tennis in America

In my youth – that is, a few years ago – America was known for Big Business, Disneyland and Tennis. Having observed (with mild amusement) British aristocrats in white flannels and full-sleeved shirts moving sedately around the court and sipping tea afterwards, the Americans took up tennis with gusto and soon began to dominate it. In the eighties and nineties the US had so soundly established its supremacy over the game that it was difficult to find a non-American male player in the top 10. Today things are reversed: Sam Querrey, the highest-ranked American man, is at Number 20!

When I visited the United States two weeks ago, I came face-to-face with the problem with tennis in the country. I landed on the weekend of the Rome Masters 1000 tennis finals, a much-anticipated repeat of the phenomenal rivalry between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Obviously the first thing I did, even before ironing my shirts, was to check out the room television set.

“Wow, digital!” I said and began looking for Tennis, the only channel showing the match. After clicking through the hotel’s 43 channels three times, I rang the concierge.

“I can’t find the Tennis channel on television.”

“Which channel, Sir?” he asked.

“Tennis.”

“How do you spell it?”

After I helped him out, he checked while I waited.

“Sorry, Sir. We have many options: entertainment, sports, news, travel… we just don’t seem to have this particular channel.” His tone conveyed a hint of reproach at my unreasonable, exotic request. “Perhaps you’d like to watch the action-packed thriller Taken 2 available ‘on demand’?”

Rajnikanth and the Japanese

In Tamil Nadu, we worship our film stars (in many cases literally: by building temples, installing their images as deities and actually conducting pooja). And of course among all the stars we adulate, Rajnikanth has a special place of his own. This macho hero, who can fell twenty rogues with one punch and cause a building to collapse by simply blowing hard on it, is revered in every nook and canny of Tamil Nadu, loved elsewhere in South India and pretty well-known even in the rest of the country. But I always took it for granted that the super star’s popularity, like the big rivers of the country, stopped at the shores of the nation.

“Do you think,” a friend asked me a few years ago, “Rajnikanth has fans outside India?”

I shook my head.

“Well, he does – in Japan!” he said.

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “That’s like telling me the Japanese have suddenly started eating uttapam instead of sushi.”

“They may not have taken to uttapam”, he said, “but they’ve definitely taken to Rajnikanth in a big way. In fact,” he continued when he saw me still looking sceptical, “Rajni’s 1998 film ‘Muthu’ was the first Tamil film to be dubbed into Japanese: it was released under the endearing name of ‘Mutu: Odoru Maharaja’ and it grossed a record $1.6 million in Japan.”