Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Book of Procrustes"

Taleb coined the term "Black Swan" and the phrase never ceased to be ringed out of our minds since. From Tsunami to Sub-prime crisis, from freak terrorist attacks to epic catastrophes, anything that's remote and rare to occur is being attributed to a Black Swan event - meaning a tail risk event whose probability is rarest of rarities to occur. A few years ago, apart from writing books such as "Fooled by Randomness" and "Black Swan" and other thick books on exotic hedging derivatives, Taleb assembled his lifetime of observations in a compact volume of aphorisms - both philosophical and practical. "The Book of Procrustes" is a joy and celebration of some funny and many fantastic insights into human behavior and the world at large.

No speculative gyaan, its pure reassuring wisdom - sometimes profane and sometimes profound codified into about 25 chapters. Each chapter is enticingly captioned. "The scandal of Prediction" or "The Implicit and the Explicit" or "Economic Life and Other Very Vulgar Subjects" are few examples of how cryptic and yet endowed with sutble humor they are. As Taleb outlines in the preface, aphorisms lose their beauty and cadence if explained to death. So, he retains the surgical length of an aphorism in its purest form - out of his ingenious mind and vast body of experience- both worldly and otherwise. "What I learned on my own I still remember", as one aphorism goes probably strikes a chord with all of us who remember what we learnt conceptually rather than by rote.

Some are downright emphatic and indisputable ("What I learned on my own I still remember"). Some appear to be uproariously reflective ("We ...amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies."). Sometimes, he leads you through clear concepts into something that sounds good but abstract. ("Knowledge is subtractive, not additive - what we subtract, not what we add." Taleb has an opinion on everything from Freud and Einstein to Education and Ethics, from stockmarket to banks - on which he makes lot of money for jam, bread and butter. Hear this nugget that seems to tell all without telling it all: "You can be certain that the head of a corporation has a lot to worry about when he announces publicly that "there is nothing to worry about". Or, this one on scams: "It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions." (inspired by Madoff episode).

You can make out he has scant respect for ideology, orderliness, equilibrium and prediction abilities of experts. He has a take on too big to fail banks too as well as on Government bailouts. "The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement - this is my last cigarette - holds true." On banks, he says ,"The difference between banks and the Mafia is that  banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion."

You cannot argue with a man like Taleb - he bares it all, warts and all,  and most of them have such  rhetorical rectitude resting on the fulcrums of logic, wisdom and timeless appeal that it becomes a gospel like a Pythagoras theorem or Aesop's Fables or Panchatantra. Greek Mythology goes that Procrustes used to be a slayer of people invited to sleep on a specially prepared bed - where if the sleeper's body parts are protruding outside the rectangle of the bed - those body parts - be they limbs or head or fingers were ordered to be chopped off. Finally, Procrustes was slain on his own bed by a courageous Theseus who beats Procrustes at his own game. Similarly, the truths and nontruths in this volume are made to fit logic, wisdom and knowledge and the bed actually is the reader. So, instead of fitting the wisdom nuggets in the wrong box, its made like an inverse operation of changing the "wisdom" to the bed-like situation in life.That, friends, that comeuppance or a chance to be proved wrong after what we accept as truth is the essence of what Taleb wants us to imbibe when we see life through our prisms, our paradigms and our ways of seeing. Its a blast of a book something I would like to read and ponder, re-read and wonder. It will keep us anchored to the unfathomable unpredictability of life and appreciate that life cannot be an equation to analyse. 

Gold Merchants of Venice?

Gold merchants are holding the entire country to ransom with their strike against FM's budget proposals to hike tax on import of gold, besides other taxing proposals on cash sales of gold over Rs.2 lacs etc.I feel the strike by Gold Merchants is irresponsible for many reasons. For centuries, these merchants have been fleecing the womenfolk with their bizarre methods of weighing,making charges, and under-billing and sometimes no billing ("Take "Estimate/Quotation" instead of bill madam"). Economics means looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. Most of the fallacies in economics are a result of ignoring this lesson. You look only at the immediate consequence of an act or proposal and then look at the consequences only for a particular group to the neglect of other groups. Gold Merchants are looking at only their self-interest and not at what the FM wants to re-direct priorities to from this measure.
Let's keep aside the fact that Gold Merchants are inherently incentivised to cheat public and the government for decades due to lax tax policies and innocent women who "have to" buy gold. From the government's point of view, Gold is an unproductive import. In 2000, we were importing around $ 4 Billion worth of gold. That same year we imported $ 15 Billion worth of crude oil. While I don't know what our GDP was in 2000, I have been tracking the corresponding figures over the years of various imports we do which were leading to inflated current account deficits. Last year or so, we have imported about $ 54 Billion worth of Gold and $ 154 Billion worth of crude oil. That means, at the current GDP of $ 1.50 Trillion, we are importing $ 154 Billion of Crude oil and using up our precious dollars for driving growth. This is happening at a time when per capita car consumption is around 6-7 cars per 1000 people. Imagine what will happen over the next five or eight or ten years as our GDP jumps to $ 3 Trillion or eventually $ 5 Trillion over the next 10 years. We need to continuously import Crude oil and maybe other commodities priced in dollars like Coal etc. to drive our infrastructure and overall growth in the economy. In one stroke, the Govt. has imposed import duty to drive home the hard truth that Gold is unproductive and need not burden our exchequer when we can't live without other crucial items like crude oil, coal, energy etc. The whole country should stand in one voice against the irresponsible Gold Traders for taking up cudgels against the government for their selfish motives. They are basically dishonest, don't pay taxes even on 30 per cent of the gold imported or 50 per cent of the gold sold to the retail households, cheat on the quality, branding of gold, underpay the labour, under-report cash sales, generate more black money adding to the present woes, and never give genuine discounts to the public. Its always been a fool's paradise for them now that they are making a picture as if government is the culprit. We need to coinserve every dollar we spend importing crude oil before its cascading effect on the GDP. We have already about $800 Billion Gold reserves in the country's households (excluding whatever reserves temple excavations reveal). Thats roughly Rs.4 lac crores.
Whereas for every dollar of crude oil we import, there is a multiplier effect and more importantly, economy moves. (Of course, there is huge wastage of crude oil in items of conspicuous consumption but lets's park it aside). I personally invest in Gold too on pressure from wife and mom but detest the large-scale immorality rampant in gold retailing shops. I am no Nagarjuna to shout on rooftops with megaphones on the malpractices but definitely feel its high time somebody rein in the gold merchants into the tax stream. Import Duty and the cash sale tax is a progressive measure in that direction. Gold, in any case, is an honorable exception to the law of demand and supply. Generally, if prices rise, demand drops. But Gold has aspirational value besides scarcity and is well counted as an exception to the law of demand (Its called "Giffin's Paradox"). So, what are the Mackenna's Gold Merchants worried about? Pay your bloody taxes and get on with the sales. Don't give lame excuses and avuncular laments.

Paan Singh Tomar - Movie Review

“Pan Singh Tomar” is an audacious winner from Ronnie Screwala about an ill-forgotten hero from the 50s who becomes a runner of Indian Army pride, then national pride and almost of Asiatic fame. Then he retires prematurely, becomes a farmer and in a fit of family feud becomes a dacoit of dreaded proportions in Chambal Valley. The script sizzles from the start as director Timangshu Dhulia reconstruc...ts from the lesser-known pages of sports history, some memorable sequences in the runup to being a runner first, dacoit next in the second half. He brings out the authenticity of the era, the irony of the sportspersons (who don’t get to wear spiked shoes mostly), the psychology behind achievement, the deception and the treachery in games and later, dejection and resentment - when society discards the man behind the medals. Pan Singh eventually turns from an excellent sprinter who still had great civil potential into becoming one of criminal portents.
Even though the dialect is desi Hindi drawn from the hinterlands, the subtitles smoothen the viewing easily. The story moves at remarkable speed and every frame stands out for grandness of execution and class usually seen for top actors’ films. Irfan Khan gets a script that allows him to portray a wide range of emotions without missing ever, ever to make a point in his slurring, wry humored voice. His entry is grand and so is the exit in the end as he fights the police. There are many points in the film that make you whistle, clap, cry, laugh out and even stand up to give an ovation. It’s a rare cinematic experience to see a film so honest, well-scripted, entertaining and crafty enough to make you want to own a DVD asap.
Because the director fitted about 200-250 visually and audibly arresting shots into credible scenes and because of a narrative style that’s neither too filmy nor too documentary-like, you get an immersive experience that seems just a bit extended in the second half. I love the vision of Ronnie Screwala in encouraging bold cinema – cinema that’s rooted in lost fictions of history that brings out an aspect of a sportsperson that’s ironic – there’s a thin line between security and insecurity in a sportsperson’s life which the society never recognizes. Watching the movie in fourth week in a multiplex at midnight eve gave me joy to see full-house for a hero who deserves wider audience – Irfan Khan. Now that UTV Motion Pictures has sold off fully to Walt Disney, Ronnie should do what Walt Disney does in the US – get many characters like these out of the closet into the celluloid. Good cinema doesn't need advertisement, you get wind of it anyhow.

The Iron Lady - Movie Review

“The Iron Lady” starring Merrill Streep is every foot of the film a fitting tribute to the living legend of Margaret Thatcher – the western world’s first Head of State not seen since the days of Queen Victoria. A brilliant screenplay by Abby Morgan and telltale direction by Phillida Lloyd apart from a mesmerizing portrayal of title role by Merrill Streep make this a delightful story of Britain’s ...most famous Prime Minister since Winston Churchill and Lloyd George. What makes the movie memorable is the intelligent use of pause and play and rewind buttons in the retelling of Maggie’s life – with snatches of her youthful exuberance, her iron-clad will, her quintessential feminity and yet, a lifelong struggle against the efforts to undermine her from self-righteous men in public life all captured in semi-documentary and anecdotal style.
I have always thought that Margaret Thatcher is the one lady who started the movement of privatization before it engulfed the whole of Europe, Eurasia including the erstwhile USSR, France, Germany and eventually the Asian Tigers – China and India. What shaped her fertile imagination to embrace Free-Market Economics was brought out well as of all the salient epoch-making events that punctuated her life – the Trade Union dismantling, the privatization of the Steel Industry, the epic swift battle to reclaim the naval base of Falklands from Argentina (which used to be a hit amongst school students of the 1980s – remember “Time” cover story – The Empire Strikes Back!), the battles of wit she waged in the British Parliament, her uprighteous and stubborn demeanour to never give up despite her deposing…The reels move on at lightning speed never failing to sizzle even when Maggie lapses into momentary brooding.
There are other human moments and enormous attempts to ensnare with proper British blood traits – Maggie’s and her hubby Dennis’s lifelong attempts to quiz each other and search for what’s the good word, Maggie’s nonchalance about bringing her children in any privileged manner but that of a commoner, and she continues to this day as they show at the beginning and the end how she buys milk from the grocery store and cares for the country when London was bombed in 2007. Merrill rightfully won the Oscar for portraying a true-to-life Margaret Thatcher – it’s a story that inspired several women in western society and might do so to leaders in every part of the world – either stand on principles or make no attempts hide it if you can’t. There are some other defining moments brought out with the dignity of a stiff upper lip – like when Margaret Thatcher is counseled by the doctor on her health checkup and she says, “All the young care for is about the emotions of the old people, but do they know its about ideas and thoughts too.” Makes a powerful statement about the things one should get old with. Recommended for all parental and grand-parental viewing for dollops of inspiration.

Banned Books in India

"Banned books in India". Thats an interesting feature in recent issue of  "Hindu". Since my dad and I started collecting, sharing and reading books (almost in a Naipaulian way) we were always on the prowl for books. When I was growing up, my wish was his command - to get books out of print and out of bounds. Now, when he is slowing down, his wish is my command. I can track down a book down to its bare... form wherever on earth its hiding from my home. Over the years, its become a useful skill but built an audacious disposition especially around banned books which is what I wanted to ask of many of you. How many of you have such banned books in India? "Hindu" gives a complete low-down on such banned books and I still don't understand why only English books need be banned. Even vernacular press can turn out vicious and seditious books in India probably with much more vicarious consequences. There is more than a little adventure in seeking out banned books - firstly, they are like liquor during prohibition days - you know where to get after an effort and then you want to tell the whole world about it. Its almost as intoxicating as the book-hunt and denouement that you have it in your hands is more addicting than reading the book itself. Here are the books that my dad and I read between the both of us -
1. "Nine Hours to Rama" - the story about Gandhi's assassination.
2. "The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubai Ambani". I heard about this book in my second job. I got to read it during my sixth job. It was never allowed during Dhirubhai's tenure. Only during his last days did it re-surface as a pirated copy on Mumbai streets.
3. "Such a long journey" by Rohinton Mistry. Didn't know why Shiv Sena found it derogatory.
4. "Lajja" by Taslima Nasreen. Again mysteriously banned for "secular" reasons. Its a nice piece of literature by a woman writer.
5. "Lady Chatterley's Lover". It is not a book on porn, I repeat, and both of us enjoyed reading it.
6. "Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence" (banned in only Gujarat but not worth the ban).

Now that the "Hindu" has given some amazingly interesting books banned in India that is longer than you think, it should make my dad several years younger in assigning me to ferret these out. His choice commands from the list are salivating to say the least:- 1. "The heart of India" 2. "Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India". 3. "Hindu heaven" 4. "The land of the Lingam". 5. "Soft Target: How the Indian Intelligence Service penetrated Canada." Its interesting what is concealed seeks to reveal itself.

The Artist - Movie Review

"The Artist" directed by Michael Hazanavicius (Oscar winner), produced by Thomas Langman (Oscar winner) and starring Jean Dujardin (again Oscar Best Actor) is a visual silent treat in the era of noisy films. Its a story of two characters - George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and Pepppy Miller (Bernice Bejo) in the era of silent films before "talkie" technology took the charm away. George is the ruling superstar of silent era films and he encourages Peppy to get introduced as a Fred and Ginger foot-tapping dancer in his movie. George has all the opulence that stardom can buy and the vanity that he doesn't need to ever "talk" ; even when the studio which catapults him to fame demands they should now make movies with "spoken" dialogues.

By contrast, Peppy Miller is fast on the update, she starts getting meaty roles and eventually stars in talkie films and becomes a superstar. George, meanwhile sulks into a manic depression as both his wife and stardom both desert him. He sells his car, his bungalow, his wares and even destroys his movies in a fit of rage. His dog (feted at the Oscars for a stunning performance) remains the sole companion.

There are other quirky twists in this tale of reversal of fortunes of two different stars besides the subtle romance thats always in the air. A thoroughly enchanting movie with so many first-time experiments that have not only won the top honours at the BAFTA and the Oscars (five in all) that you wonder why they stoppped making silent films since the times of Charlie Chaplin. Of course, Chaplin's movies had a slapstick comedy and uneasy pathos with less intrusions by layers of characterisations that underpin this film. In flat 98 minutes, the movie is a feast of unbridled exhibition of cinematic genius sans dialogues (except for moments in the end). Will we see more movies of this kind? Will we see silent movies (last attempted by Kamal Hasan in "Pushpak")? Time will tell.

There is a scene where the Artist (sorry for the pun) wakes up to a nightmare where everything around him - the dog, the microphone, the phone all produce Bose-quality sounds and yet when he tries to speak and shout and yell, there's uneasy silence. A highlight scene in which the director shows how the hero's silence has turned against him. For most of the movie, Ludovic Bource scores loud and orchestral soundtrack that defines the emotional undercurrents in the story. Even though the director uses the same format of the old B&W films with the motions, the interludes and the mega font exclamationary quotes circling the dialogues between the characters, there is no noise in the film except the music.

But the pace of the movie never slackens and the atttention to detail doesn't show signs of laziness. Because this is the only movie that celebrates the struggle of an actor on the brink of sunset by sunrise technologies since whatever must have come in the 50s, and because the audience is not color-blind anymore - the director takes close and comfortable shots that get you glimpse the emotional highs and lows more effectively than the old movies made with a constrained technology. So you see the greenback, the speck of a black dot planted by George on Peppy's face to give her a star-turn, the dog's sudden energy burst to save his master from getting incinerated - all these are captured in ensnaring detail.

Just before the End, when the stars get re-aligned to shoot for another foot-tapping dance, and the camera rolls on, the director plays out his last trick - the music syncronises with the couple in their moves but you hear the words - "Cut" and still the magic of the dance continues and you doubt still that the silent march is over - you are yet to get out of that stupor of charmed silence. Its a memorable movie thats worth all the honors that greeted. The magic of movies will continue even if you make silent movies that don't talk or movies that silence you. "The Artist" has been a moving experience and suddenly my count of better movies has gotten the better of my love for mediocre dishum-and-dance movies in 2012. You will not come out of the movie hall with just one feeling.

And the Oscar goes to...

3.5 inches high, 6.75 pounds, tin and copper, with gold plating. A rough sketch of  a figure holding a sword hanging on the reel of a film. Not the best of designs but since 1927, its the hallmark of recognition and respect. It is probably the best-known statue in the world, known as the Oscar, because Margaret Herrick, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts (MPAA)'s first Librarian, named it as Oscar because it resembled a lot like her uncle Oscar. Monday mornings in India on 27th Feb-1st March are something to look forward to  - Its the night of Oscars telecast live in this part of the world, thanks to Star Movies. An awards ceremony that celebrates the achievements of cinema the Hollywood way, the night of limited dance and song, of solemn remembrances, of a brief snapshot of the non-Hollywood cinema seen through the prisms of "Foreign Language" category. The night of all-colour men and women dressed in Black and White and Red array of shining, coal-black, shining costumes. The night which has epic commentary on how Hollywood breathes life into the annals of society through its movies of the year.
I always admired the preciseness, grand scale of executions, class and charishma that underlines the Oscar awards. Only the best talent who usually vie with one another - screenwriters, costume designers, animators, editors, sound recordists, stage and setting designers, actors and actresses, playwrights and lyricists, writers and comedians - all of them get together, give their best flat foot forward, lend their voice, pen, nerve and sinew to make it the spectacle that counts. Somehow, the humor that comes out of this one night, according to me, is enough to drive you to raptures of laughter. Its like the night when the wit and received wisdom of PG.Wodehouse, Groucho Marx,  Erma Bombeck and  Woody Allen pillorie the pale lines off your face.
Talk about the comperes, I grew up catching up of the best comedians and standup-champions chaperone the Awards nights - from Bob Hope to Woody Allen, Billy Crystal to Eddie Murphy to Robert Downey Jr. Over the years, the Awards represent an assemblage of talents coming together to give the best glimpse of the Industry' united strength - although it is never the case because all folks can't be satisfied. I remember Bob Hope the great humorian who lived till the age of 100 - he started the whole tradition of hosting the funny side up. He never won an Oscar and rubbed it in at one of the Awards Ceremonies: "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Academy Awards, or as it's known in our house, Passover."
Tonight (or tomorrow morning for us in India), you have some of the best contemporary actors competing for the top honours - the likes of Brad Pitt ("Moneyball") and George Clooney ("The Descendants") and the classic legends like Merryll Streep. Sophistication and class, subtety and style  - you can expect to see a harvest of all of these in the Awards ceremony especially with Billy Crystal - Oscar Awards Host for the ninth time - replacing Eddie Murphy. Contrast this with the crassness of the Filmfare Awards - OMG! Come on, Oscars, lights on!