CHEATING ECONOMICS

In a previous post I had outlined a specific situation from my life to which I had applied common economic sense. To recap: 1. Our domestic help was highly irregular. 2. She was also deep in debt. I thought these two aspects were connected and that the latter was the cause of the former. Thinking that if her debt problems were solved she would be more regular, I paid off her usurious debt. She stopped working for me the very next day.

Consider the facts: her crushingly usurious debt was cancelled and replaced with one at a modest rate of interest. Even this cost would be refunded to her once the principal was repaid to me. In short she was getting a interest-free loan without any collateral. Furthermore, by giving her this loan I rendered her employment with me secure at least until the loan was repaid, for if we fired her anytime before, there was no way I could recover the loan. To sum up, she got an interest free loan, a bonus at the end, and job security. Some fall-out benefits too: no more threats from the loan shark and possibly no more beatings from her husband. Why then did this "rational" economic agent act in a patently irrational manner?

Classical economics has no answer.

Let us see if the "Game Theory" can explain it. The most famous example of this theory is the Prisoner's Dilemma. In short, two political prisoners are each offered a deal by their captors. By confessing and betraying his friend he will get a lenient sentence and the friend will go to Siberia. Refusal to betray the friend will attract a stiffer punishment. I will not burden you with the detailed logic of it, but suffice it to say that in a situation involving only two prisoners the better strategy is to betray the friend. But In situations involving more than two, it is better to clam up and not betray any one. The latter is like a prison for the real baddies where, if you betray anyone, the others will get you and the best option is maintaining a code of silence.

The maid situation is somewhat similar. By betraying our trust, she has ensured we will never lend money to any other maid, however dire her situation and howsoever trustworthy she would turn out to be. Actually this is now one of the very first conditions we stipulate in discussions with potential employees. As our story spreads, more and more employers would be put off by the possibility of a loss and would avoid lending any money to their domestics; this in turn would put off the other maids in the market who would turn on the one who was the cause of it all. So according to Game Theory, the maid made the wrong choice.

You might argue that the maid was ignorant of von Neumann, Nash et al and the theory they developed. You will be right there. But game theory has got embedded in many societies as part of social norms and mores (in order that the collective interests are not affected by the acts of individuals). The above example has a parallel in almost all societies. Simply put, do good unto others so that others can be good to you. There is a negative form of this: don't do bad unto others so nothing bad is done unto you. The maid may have been ignorant of Game Theory but not this injunction which is very strongly inculcated in our communities down south.

So why did she do what she did?

"The poor cannot afford finer sensibilities like loyalty, gratitude and the nicer things of social intercourse", I hear you say. Not true. Recent research suggests altruism is hard-wired into human brains. Given that the class of people who do domestic duty all live in urban slums - possibly as one another's neighbours - they are likely to know each other and thus there is a very good chance that their common codes are enforceable quite easily. This should discourage deviant behaviour inimical to the common interest.

All the more reason for wondering why she did a bunk with my money.

Recent research (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130905085913.htm) has the answer: people get a "high" when cheating. Cheating may not be necessitated by want or desire. The act of cheating, doing what is not expected, getting something without paying for it, depriving someone else, or outsmarting another gives the perpetrator a high it seems. Which is why billionaires renege on agreements and cheat on taxes; why the powerful are corrupt, etc. Alcohol high costs money and women in this part of the world generally do not imbibe. Cheaper forms of intoxication like grass and weed are youth fad amongst upper classes, but not the lower classes. The only high my ex-maid probably could afford in her problem-prone life was to take off with my money. So when the opportunity presented itself, she did.

She had the added benefit of having her debts wiped off so she could borrow again, perhaps to buy a flat panel TV.

POOR ECONOMICS

This post's title unabashedly borrows from that of an eponymous book by an MIT economist of Indian origin and his French colleague, also of MIT. Their book was bought by many in India but read by a minuscule proportion of those who bought it. Not that it was dense or esoteric or otherwise incomprehensible; quite the contrary. Indian executives who criss cross the country and beyond in airplanes like to be seen with serious sounding tomes at domestic and international airport lounges and on board flights. There was a time when these gents carried copies of John Grisham's latest as evidence of their erudition. Those times are gone. Now they want to be seen with "serious" books. Once on board, they put away their books and start playing angry birds on their iPads.

I am proud to say that I have read that book. Perhaps because I don't travel much these days, let alone criss cross the world. My travels are limited to thrice-a-week visits to the veggie shop and daily ones to the gym. Somehow I get the feeling that the crowd I encounter in those places are unlikely to appreciate the kind of serious stuff that one needs to carry to impress. I have acquired credibility at the former by expertly picking okra (ladies' fingers, bhindi) and sagely commenting on the relative freshness of veggies. At the gym I don't even try to get some street-cred with the weights or the treadmill; instead, I sit and do sudoku (an easier version that appears in the local daily).

The book is all about the economics of poverty and how to make the poor less poor, although the authors go easy on the prescriptive bit, no doubt having learnt from the venerable Mr Jeffrey Sachs and his millennium development goals. It appears that the millennium communities that Mr Sachs poured much money into, in the glare of a million flash bulbs, have ended up poorer or at best have remained the same. Messrs Banerjee and Duflo may be younger, but are certainly wiser than their media-savvy fellow traveller in the treacherous world of the dismal science. I suspect that their title may be a tongue in cheek comment on the state of the dismal science itself.

A short paragraph about the dismal state of the wanna-be science is in order. It all started with a scottish geezer postulating that supply will rise to meet the demand and prices will drop as supply increased and so on. He invoked an invisible hand to keep all of this working. He did not specify if this invisible was a steadying hand on the till or a hand that dipped into the till now and then. In practice it turned out to be the latter. This theory worked well until the world got bigger, industrial age was born, rapid transportation became the norm, and mass production and paper money were invented. The invisible hand was no more sufficient to explain how things worked - it could barely pass muster in explaining Maradona's goal in a world cup.

Physics and Chemistry in the meantime were making dramatic progress and could explain a lot of things around us and could even predict many new things. No wonder then that Economists got a case of Physics Envy. Like Physicists did they also wanted to explain the real world in terms of elegant equations, integrate, differentiate, and talk about velocity, acceleration, rate of change of inflation and stuff like that. Economists became good at explaining why something happened the way it did after the event; physicists could predict what would happen next and mostly it did. Some economists tried substituting dense prose for equations but the results remained the same. Then economics borrowed a mathematician turned physicist to posit that it was all a game and tried to formulate a whole new discipline called game theory - the kind of stuff the American forces use to clobber the bad guys with in simulations but which in real life doesn't prevent them getting clobbered by goat herds wielding ancient rifles. Some others are trying to explain, with more success than the mathematically minded it must be said, economic activity in terms of human behaviour.

Notwithstanding Prose, Physics, Mathematics, Game theory or Behaviourism, the dismal science remains dismal.

There is a real purpose, apart from an acute case of Economics Envy, why I am posting this. I have a real problem which I want to share and for which I want a solution.

Our maid was deep in debt as most people of her economic stratum are. She earned about Rs.5000 a month out of which she had to pay interest of Rs.3000 to a loan shark. The remainder was insufficient to feed her child and husband - we provided all her meals every day. From time to time she had to look for other sources of cash to pay off her monthly interest due or simply to feed her family. This and her necessity to hide out when the creditor came calling resulted in her absenting herself from work about two days every week.

To curb her absenteeism, I proposed a win-win solution (I have Economics envy, remember?). I would pay off her loan shark and become her creditor. My loan would carry not the gazillion percent per annum interest, but a reasonable ten percent. Even that interest would be paid back to her as a bonus when she repaid the loan fully. As a result, her cash flows would improve by about Rs.2000 every month, even after paying the EMIs on the loan I provided. My maid would be free from an exponentially escalating loan and I would be assured of more regular help at home. I would have thought this was a fantastic deal and patted myself on the back for coming up with it. A beneficial corollary for her was not having to face the creditor who was not above roughing her up now and then. She could also be spared beatings from her husband but that was not certain - I surmised he simply loved beating her and would invent some other reason in the absence of dire financial situation.

Duly money was handed over to the shark and I went round with a huge grin on my face for having shown the way where Sachs et al have failed. Surely, from then on my wife could look forward to regular help at home and I could do sudoku puzzles uninterrupted by the need to help do the dishes. The maid could even look forward to splurging on a movie now and then. Clearly mine was a triumph of logic over the dismal science.

The maid stopped coming to work from the next day.

SHOBHAA'S DAY

Today must belong to to the formidable Ms Shobhaa De. I am possibly getting my knickers in a twist about this, but Ms.De appears to have discarded hers altogether.

Ms De, as everyone knows, has some fan following amongst the ignorati in Mumbai and for reasons I cannot yet fathom gets column space in otherwise respectable newspapers. You are not anyone if you don't know who she is. She was a quintessential Marathi mulgi who parlayed her good looks into a successful career in modeling which in turn she used to edit a gossip weekly focusing on the lives and loves of Bollywood glitterati. Or was it a monthly? Whatever it was, it should never have been allowed out in the interest of good taste.

She married into a once-famous business family whose taste in women was as questionable as its business calls - they are now a has-been business family. Continuing the trend of relentless social climbing she divorced and married more money and became self appointed arbiter of taste and fashion amongst the nouveau riche and wanna-be rich in Mumbai. Harking back to her days as a pretty and petty hack, she wrote many a column, mostly on the doings of the wannabe-rich and the wanna-be famous, bequeathing to Indian English such apt, if somewhat unoriginal, acronyms as SoBo (stands for South Bombay where the glitterati mostly lived). And a a couple of books too, whose themes consisted mainly of permutations and combinations of organs and orifices.

Her recent avatar has been that of a Social commentator. She also expresses herself on the political and economic situations obtaining in India at this juncture. Her good looks have not faded, despite the relentless march of time. On the looks department, she is like a good vintage wine - sharp edges rounded a bit, well maintained and very much agreeable. her thoughts, though continue to be simple, personality-focused and quite irrelevant.

Today she has commented on the change of guard at the RBI, the Indian central bank. Of all the things she could think of to comment upon - the credentials of the outgoing and incoming Governors, their track records, the problems that face(d) them and the policy options available to them, etc etc - the one thing she chose to comment on was their respective sex appeal. Raghuram Rajan's looks and purported "hotness" seem the raging issue amongst the Mumbai glitterati, judging by their favourite columnist, socialite, and author. Even for someone of her vacuity this is like plumbing the Pacific depths.

It is said that the American has sex on his mind, and that the Indian has sex on his mind and fear in his heart. Shobhaa De is the exceptional Indian - she has sex in her heart but has no mind.

HOLI INSIGHTS

Holi '72 finally arrived. It was quite unlike Holi '71. I had attempted to run away from the latter but it nevertheless caught up with me in an unexpected way.

During ‘71 I was in a hostel that mainly housed engineering undergrads.  While there was nothing wrong with undergrads per se, even Engineering ones, they were not the same as us, the Grad students. We were like a handful of domestic cattle in the midst of a large herd of charging wild bison. They were rambunctious, energetic, robust, direct, not too subtle in their ways and were always in various states of high energy. We, on the other hand, were quiet, meek, even studious, world weary and in a state of perpetual stress.

Close to the Holi festival in 1971, the undergrads began planning the festivities. It was rumoured most of them would be staying back at the hostel on Holi day. Given that most of them disappeared into town for the smallest break, staying back could only be for very strong reasons. This atypical behaviour of lads who were strongly attracted to the big city lights troubled me. Never having celebrated Holi before, my expectations of it were based on hearsay which  indicated that it was one wild orgy of  colours, noise, intoxicants (especially bhang) and socially-approved groping of women. 

I heard whispers suggesting that the reason for the undergrads forsaking a holiday out on town was that dire plans were being hatched in which the chief entertainment was us Grad students.  Whispers further suggested that in addition to the traditional sprinkling of colours and water-fights, they intended to dunk us in a mud pool being dug for that purpose.  This would be preceded by heavy infusion of bhang, by force if necessary. For a person whose preferred stimulant until that time was tea, this was disturbing news indeed.

The dunking involved the victim being swung by his feet and arms and thrown into a mud pond. A safe dunking depended on the distance over which the victim was hurled and the exact point of his release by his tormentors. The undergrads’ grasp of the physics of oscillations was tenuous at the best of times.  Liberal consumption of bhang-infused milk would do nothing to improve their grasp of Physics, nor their aim. As a result the victim would more likely land on hard turf than in soft mud. The victims' howls of pain and humiliation were supposed to spice up the intoxicated revelries of the day. Given the absence of targets suitable for groping, this was perhaps the best - albeit a distant second -  entertainment they could think of.

  So it was good to get away from the Holi celebrations if one could. That was tricky considering I had no family in Bombay whose doors I could darken under the pretext of a religious observance. It was at this juncture I became aware of a rock climbing expedition of some sort organized by a Professor. I was not given to much trekking and was totally unfamiliar with rock climbing, but the chief attraction of this expedition to me was that it would take me well away from the campus, mud ponds, and excited undergrads baying for grads in the mud. 

So rock-climbing I went, early on the morning of Holi day in 1971 long before the undergrads had woken up. The trekking and climbing went off without a hitch save for Prof getting detached from his safety harness and being in danger of going over the cliff edge. Somehow we managed to get him back to safety – he was a good one, you see. Had it been Prof XYZ  in that situation, I am sure we would have been found wanting.

While returning to campus in the evening, we encountered a group of young boys from a village en route who were wielding not water pistols but tar and brush procured from a nearby road-repair gang. No one had apparently educated them on the rules of engagement on Holi day which was that post lunch, all colour and water throwing must cease. Untutored in the finer social conventions, they were still playing Holi at 5 pm and demanded that we join in, noting that we were "unmarked". They did offer to exempt us for a tenner each. This is what I love about Bombay - everything could be reduced to a business transaction and settled with money. A tenner was probably a small price to pay to escape the dire alternative.

When Holi 72 came along, we grad students had our own separate hostel, and did not have any undergrads hatching diabolical schemes in our midst. The celebrations would be voluntary and with everyone's wholehearted participation. Those that could not participate physically were, however, persuaded to contribute monetarily – we had absorbed the Bombay spirit after all. The planning began a month in advance.The organizers were not from the North, but appeared to have intimate knowledge of Holi celebrations in general and about bhang in particular. They received expert advice from my friends from Geology who were a cornucopia of information relating to Holi and Bhang. There was one ingredient we had to do without - women, a commodity in short supply on campus.

Contributions were collected,  colours and  bhang procured (and beer too - the organizers skimmed a bit off the collections for a private party where beer would be served), and ground rules framed and disseminated. Some of the mess employees were co-opted for the preparations of the bhang for a liberal share of the intoxicants plus some cash gratuity.

The H-day dawned peacefully and quietly in our hostel in contrast to the feverish, high energy and high-decibel activity that was evident in nearby undergrad Hostels. We awoke,  breakfasted, read the day's papers and then by common consent declared the festivities open. There was some perfunctory splashing of colours and water as a prelude to the main event which was the consumption of bhang. Everyone had seconds and may be thirds too. Possibly not N, who was - and remains - a sober sort of a chap. “Brain” was home in Bandra. When H had his Nth helping there was only a thick sludge of ground bhang left over. He was grateful for what he could get and helped himself rather liberally.

Lunch time approached and we showered, ate lunch, and were soon overcome by sleep by about 2 pm or so. A loud discussion outside my door, more lively in my opinion than was warranted,  woke me up from my siesta. Upon investigation I found H and R having a very highly animated discussion on the relative complexities of BCS Theory and A-B Effect. I don't quite recall exactly what R was on about, but it was something about two gents named A and B and an eponymous effect in which electromagnetic fields were doing things they were not supposed to do. H was animatedly explaining how he was actually seeing some scalars, vectors and matrices jiggling about inside a crystal, making some theory or the other crystal clear. 

H was a very placid sort of a chap and totally unflappable in any situation, a veritable iceberg in temperament and size. I had never seen H so excited about anything, not even when his brother bought him a Grundig 8 track spool-type tape recorder with spools full of Jethro Tull. The bhang had clarified to him things in a way the faculty had failed to. Life is like that; simplest and the most unlikeliest of things and situations have the most profound consequences. It was H's Eureka moment. We had to contain his enthusiasm lest he do an Archimedean dash round the block or, worse, round the campus.

Art this point I spied a delegation of Physics girls bearing down on our hostel and it was clear they were intending to call on us to extend Holi greetings. I remember going down to the lounge area to receive the ladies and stall them from proceeding up to "our" wing, leaving R and the rest of the gang to try and “sanitize” our respective rooms and to bring H down to ground state. One was flying so high that he was reporting altitude sickness and had to taken to the campus hospital. The visit was managed with reputations fairly intact.

H and R went on to work on BCS theory and AB effect respectively for their dissertations. At that time I hated it that whereas my encounter with bhang had left me groggy and grumpy for a week,  it had made it easier for them to comprehend their world. H went on to pursue this line of inquiry for the rest of his life which was cruelly cut short by illness. His work may yet usher in room-temperature super conductors. R moved on to other pastures. 

As for me, bhang could not compensate for my lack of critical insights in Physics and therefore I dropped them both soon after the above events.

COMING HOME

For me the best part of every semester at college was going home. Not that I missed Madras or home much. Holiday time was an escape from the indescribably bad food in the Hostel.  Vacations also provided a respite, however brief, from the onslaught of lectures, assignments, quizzes and deadlines, not to mention doing one's own laundry. Every course was like a rough sea from which one needed a safe haven now and then. Much later I understood that a certain level of stress actually facilitates learning but by then I was too old to care.

These periodic escapes from the rigours of academia were not without their own set of problems: the chief among them being procuring a ticket on a train going home, which would ordinarily be a very mundane task but which in Socialist India was a great, exciting adventure and an almost insurmountable challenge.

You see, in socialist India, a vast majority could not afford a train ticket which probably cost near about a month's earnings of the average villager. In order to even things out – isn’t that what Socialism is all about, evening things out? –government of the day decided to make the act of procuring a ticket difficult for those that could indeed afford the fare. The idea was that if you have got one thing (money) you can’t have the other (ticket), for Socialism is all about keeping everyone in a state of equal deprivation. 

Either you could not afford a ticket and did not travel or if you dared to travel then you must be made to jump through convoluted hoops at great personal discomfort and financial cost. I cannot imagine, even after all these years, a better way of leveling disparities between people. Pulling poor people up, the oft-suggested cure for poverty, could work; pulling others down down was certain to work, easier to accomplish, and a lot more satisfying. Hence that was the preferred mode of achieving social and economic equality in India circa 1970. 

The politicians and the Babus had their own special quotas in everything from foodstuff to transportation. Trains and planes waited for them to come aboard before commencing their journey – the business of Socialism was a serious one and the movers and shakers of Socialism had to go places and move and shake things for it to work.

The act of procuring a ticket involved standing in queues which were long and doubled back on themselves many times over and criss-crossed each other. It was usually very hard to spot which ticket window a queue led to. This was important, for if yours ended in the “wrong” window, you could be buying a ticket to an East-bound train while you actually wanted to go West. You usually discovered if you were in the right queue only upon reaching the window and thrust your application form in the face of a very hassled, harried, resentful and sweaty clerk.

At the end of the day, usually 5.30 pm, the clerk would shut shop noisily, without a look in your direction and would leave his post, thus nullifying all your efforts of faithfully queuing up the entire day. His preparations for shutting would start as early as 4.30 p.m when a glazed and absent-minded look would descend on him. Thereafter he would orally cross-check four or more times all the details which were in front of him in writing, on the “prescribed” form. Socialism was all about vigilance against waste in general and unnecessary travel in particular and vigilance tended to flag towards the end of a long hot day. If the clerk were a woman the preparations for closing would start an hour earlier.

At the appointed “closing time” everything was “reset” and the progress you had made during the day was erased and you would have to start all over again the next day. Or, like the vast majority of our countrymen, you could choose not to travel. This was Socialism at its best: all were equalized at the end of the day should the aberration of individual progress raise its ugly head during the course of the day. Socialism wasn’t perfect, and could be corrupted in the course of the day, but no longer; by the end of the day the incipient error was noted and rectified and the situation restored to normal.

Soviet Russia and Communist China dealt with the problem rather peremptorily: there the government decided when, where, and if at all you could travel. Given to democratic pretenses, Indian government couldn't take away your right to travel, but they could and did make it damn sight difficult, thus in effect, achieving what they could not mandate but would have liked to. Thus was kept alive the flimsy fiction of Democracy with Socialist underpinnings. 

But this kind of Socialism gave rise to an unexpected consequence: Free Enterprise - the very thing that Socialism sought so assiduously to eliminate.

In this case the free enterprise involved “touts” substituting for you in the queue until you were ready to take your place - in return for a fee of course. That was the first hesitant step towards outsourcing at we which we have become rather good today. Over time it evolved into the touts actually purchasing the tickets on your behalf – being smart entrepreneurs they figured that the margins were better in end-to-end servicing of clients. 

This comprehensive service involved paying the tout a multiple of the official price for the journey. Soon the queues comprised solely of touts, which attracted new rules (like how many tickets a single person can buy at one time) which in turn elicited even cleverer responses from the entrepreneurial touts, which resulted in ever more complex rules, and so on, ad infinitum. It was a Darwinian prey-Vs-predator ball, played out in railway ticket offices all over India to the strains of L’Internationale.

My friends from Kerala, who were born pink and tended to lean left preferred to thumb their noses at us by traveling in "unreserved" coaches. It was darkly muttered that even they employed touts – a different kind, to occupy the required number of seats while the coaches were still in their sheds. Upon the coach arriving at the station platform, and was still in motion, the intending passengers would dive headlong into them through windows strategically opened at the right time by the touts lurking inside. Reserved coach or otherwise, the touts had to be paid in advance. Instances of money and tout disappearing were not uncommon.

As for reservations procured at high cost, they were usually not of much value.   I was once presented with a very clever argument by a gentleman with his family of nine occupying the seat that had been reserved for me: he claimed that “reservation” was only valid while the train was stationary at the starting point and that once it started moving, those rules did not apply. Surely this guy had read Einstein, and understood that things were different in a moving frame of reference. Years later I read an article on the net by a professor of physics that the principles of Relativity were contained in the teachings of Prophet Mohamed. Perhaps it was written by the man on the train.

One time a group of us managed to keep away the "unreserved" hordes from  form entering our coach by the simple expedient of standing at the door at every station and barring aspirants from getting in, shouting “rejerbed” (= reserved) in what we thought was a North Indian accent. This worked well until we crossed over into the state of Uttar Pradesh at which point our resistance turned futile. With a collective "han, han dekh lenge" (oh yes, we'll see) the mob just burst past us. Things today remain very much the same in that part of India.

The other difficulty in going home was the journey itself, which could last between 32 and 82hours, depending which train I traveled by. It could be longer if the train was "delayed" which was often the case, especially if I took the “people’s express” train. The latter was a brilliant example of Socialism: it was an attempt to please everyone but in reality failed all of them. They had the worst equipment, often broke down,  no lights at night, no water any time, had no priority over anything  else on the tracks and had elastic schedules. They stopped at every wayside station and for good measure in between them too. This train leveled everyone by reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator.

The so-called People's Express trains were hauled by wheezy steam locomotives which were slow and clanged in a most alarming manner as if something big and critical was about to give way rather spectacularly. They also bathed the passengers in considerable amount of coal smoke and soot which evened out the skin tones of the passengers by the end of the journey. It never arrived at the scheduled meal stops at the  appointed meal time and thus every one, irrespective of his station in life, went hungry - a brilliant example of socialism at work. People's Expresses was classless, and always yielded to other trains, presumably carrying important Babus and politicians in plush Air Conditioned First Class.

When the 1971 war broke out I was aboard one such People's Express, heading back to Bombay. It was forced to make way for long trains with their contents (army tanks and field guns) barely covered by inadequate tarpaulins. At one station we were told of a minimum stoppage of 12 hours before we would start moving again; some pious passengers made a quick dash to Tirupathi temple, which was not far off; I watched cock-fights in a nearby village.We did not have to switch off our lights at night as a precaution against air attacks, for lights never worked in these trains any way.

Meals on trains were a challenge. Railways were well organized, providing meals at wayside stations as well as packed ones on board. Both were limited in numbers. If you weren't fast enough off the train at the meal stop or if you weren't awake when orders for on-train meals were taken, you could go hungry  I preferred the former challenge. Alighting nimbly even before the train came to a complete halt, I would make a smart dash to the dining hall where meals were laid out on rows of tables. If I made the first round, I was OK.

The real challenge was catching breakfast at a station named Daund en route to Bombay. The trains usually stopped for 10 minutes which seems like a lot, but actually wasn't. There was no time to order a la carte. I had to choose the table which served my kind of breakfast. I got it right most of the time. The reward was freshly made masala omelets, crisp buttered toast and hot Darjeeling tea. On a cold winter morning that was heaven.

Most times a few of us traveled together – two heading to Madras and the rest further south. The latter's coach would be detached from our train and re-attached to a different train at a station one hour from Madras. On the way to Bombay their coach would be attached to the Bombay bound train at this station. We would spend the almost the entire journey together playing cards, chatting or simply smoking and reading. This involved leaving my luggage in my allotted seat and moving to where the rest of the gang was. I always found my luggage intact when I got back to my own coach, something that cannot happen today.

Sometimes all of us did not get sleeper berths and therefore the available berths would be used by turns. Once, in my absence, my shoes had been moved by someone and had fallen into a gaping hole in the side panel of the coach, far beyond my reach. To the considerable irritation of my brother who had come to receive me at the destination, I arrived barefoot, wearing a colourful batik-printed T shirt in psychedelic patterns and with longish hair. My appearance provided much grist to the family mill.

The biggest problem going home presented was not any of the above. It was timing my smoking so as not to run out of nicotine-high too early or reek of tobacco upon arrival at Madras. You see, mum suspected that I smoked, but hoped otherwise. Breaking that illusion would have been of painful consequences for everyone.The trick was to stop smoking about four hours before arrival at Madras. On the return journey the problem was one of procuring cigarettes: the pater invariably came to see me off and stayed on until the train actually started moving, affording little opportunity to procure cigarettes. He would stoically decline all my entreaties to leave early to beat the traffic. I had to wait till the next big station, two hours away, before being able to buy cigarettes, the longest two hours of my life. The next station brought a double bonus - friends from Kerala and cigarettes.The rest of the journey was heaven.

Arriving at Bombay still left a few mountains to climb: getting on and off commuter trains with all my luggage, fighting for and getting a taxi or fighting to get on the bus with my luggage and finally the long trek from the college gate to my hostel which was at the other end of the campus. 

Back at the hostel I felt as if I had finally come home!

MY FIRST TIPPLE

If there was an impression that when I left home for a Graduate programme I was a naive, callow, youth unwise to the ways of the wicked world, it is absolutely correct. This was also the impression my parents carried. I might have smoked a cigarette or two (at college parties and such like events to look cool in front of the girls) but never inhaled. When it came to spirits I had not even inhaled their fumes, let alone imbibing or swallowing.

I was introduced to the pleasures of alcohol by a "senior" - at that time it seemed more a pain and an acquired taste wholly without any redeeming features, an impression I quickly corrected over the next couple of years. The senior, let's call him K, was a Brown Sahib if ever there was one. He could put on a clipped Brit accent just as easily as he could break into rickshaw-puller's patois laden with the choicest expletives. He also regularly beat me at badminton and once he made me run around so much that I was too knackered to wrangle with Lagrange and Hamilton preparatory to my end-of- term exam the next day. I had to renew my acquaintance with Messieurs Lagrange et Hamilton at the end of the year.

Back to K. I am going to let you you all in on a secret that no one in college knew: at home he was known as "Jilly". He could kill me if he read this and knew where I lived. May be his parents were hoping to have a baby girl but K was born instead. It is my good fortune that I have not met K after I got to know this fact from his family circles. If I had, I'd be dead by now.

K started working for a "Foreign" Bank after passing out in 1971 and used to visit  me not infrequently in the campus. The reasons for such visits were rumoured to be a few, not the least of which was his infatuation with one of the girls in my junior class. The other reason, which I knew to be a fact, was he wished to avoid the expensive weekends that staying on in the City entailed. When the junior girl found out about the infatuation part, instead of being thankful for the attentions of what was considered a prize catch, she took off on me as if I had put K up to it. Such is the lack of gratitude in this world.

On one such visit he decided to treat some of us to a beer or two at our dorm which we shall call H9. For some mysterious reason I  paid for it and also procured it whereas it was supposed to be his treat - that was the charm he could exercise over people if he chose to. What's a beer (or two) between friends? Besides, at Rs.2.50 a bottle one couldn't go terribly out of pocket. Back in '71 that was equivalent to 30 American cents which probably was a lot for a bottle of beer, but then we were in India and in the middle of a "prohibition" which resulted in a hefty premium, no doubt. 

K insisted on proper beer mugs which we couldn't manage. So he got the only glass tumbler around  and the rest of us made do with stainless steel tumblers from the H9 cafeteria (a.k.a. "mess", perhaps in reference to the quality of food served therein). K thought that drinking beer from steel tumbler was terribly plebeian. He could say such things and still make us feel that he had said something profound.

The beer was warm and therefore we proceeded to cool it with some ice which that experience taught me never again to do. But I was callow, and knew not a warm beer from a chilled one. He then proceeded to tell how the beer tasted like horse's p**s. I did not know anything about horse's bodily fluids but thought that the man of the world that he was, he would have known. Attracted by all the hullabaloo a crowd had gathered wanting a piece of the action. All of this resulted in further dilution of the beer which by this time was really beginning to taste like horse's p**s, even to an inexperienced palate like mine. Tiring of the raucous plebeian masses and commandeering my bed K soon went to sleep, thoroughly disappointed with my bungling of his beer party (paid for by me of course which he conveniently overlooked).

Having thus had a very disagreeable introduction to beer, I was to stay away from it for some considerable time. Having given up on beer for its close association with horses, I turned my attention to spirits. Surely they must taste better, have nothing to do with horses and thus provide an agreeable experience. I was all agog and was looking forward to my encounter with spirits.

My introduction to spirits was courtesy of S's cousin from Dubai - or was it Aden? Those days the Middle East meant the area between Turkey and Israel and what we now know as Emirates was known by the un-glamorous name of Trucial Oman. Oil had just begun to flow out in shiploads and Keralites were flying in by plane loads. S's said cousin was one of the early ones. On a home visit the gent thoughtfully brought S a bottle of White Horse Whiskey (damn horse again!), a few cola tablets that fizzed in water and tasted like coca cola, and a Marlborough calendar featuring the best bikini clad babes. Understandably the demand was most for the last-named item, followed by the fizzy tablets, and the White Horse was a distant third.

The calendar was soon in pieces with sheets stuck strategically behind room doors such that when the door opened, it did so flush against the wall, and the picture was invisible to the visitor - this was important, for those days parents, uncles, aunts, grand parents, cousins, second cousins and even Nth cousins could all arrive unannounced to check on the welfare of "the poor boy living all alone in a hostel". I drew February 71 and a jolly good February it was too, right on until May '72 when it was time for me to pack up and go home. After the initial enthusiasm for the lissome lasses wore off, our attention turned to the fizzy stuff and the White Horse both of which had remained surprisingly unmolested, something I cannot say for the Calendar. 

I was determined that I should taste the spirit, equine reference notwithstanding. Water was procured, fizzy tablets dropped into it and the whiskey was added. The fizzy tablet was quite strong and managed to mask the burn and the taste of the whiskey. In all the excitement of the  "booze session", we forgot all about dinner and by the time we remembered it, the "mess" had closed for the night and we had to go hungry. With the cola masking the taste of whiskey, the drinks went down a treat and not at all like horse's p**s which was my only previous exposure to an alcoholic beverage. Soon all of it was consumed with most of us taking judicious sips whereas yours truly had had a rather injudicious and somewhat generous helpings. S had wooden legs and in any case he was a reticent sort of a bloke, so the effects of the whiskey on him could not be properly estimated.

In due course good nights were bid and everyone turned in. That's when the horses kicked in.  On an empty stomach. Thence the horses proceeded north to my head. I was in all manner of difficulties and never having experienced alcohol before wasn't sure if it was the effect of alcohol or if it was the onset of something terminal. My room was spinning on a strange oblique axis if I opened my eyes; if I did not, then my stomach wanted to exit through my mouth. I have never prayed as hard  as I did that night for the experience to end.

When I woke up the next morning the horses were still prancing inside my head and even two full sticks of S's strong Charminar cigarettes could not quell the rebellion. The night's prayers and vows were soon forgotten to be replaced by the justification that there must be a better way to consume spirits, like in a proper crystal glass for example.

I learnt later that as in learning, the trick with alcohol is to persevere. 

By persevering I have learnt the art of making spirits  an agreeable experience, something that I cannot say I did with Messieurs Lagrange and Hamilton..

SORRY SEEMS TO BE HARDEST WORD (OR NOT)

"Sorry seems to be the hardest word", sang Elton John in 1976 to great popular acclaim and economic success. He has covered that song many times over since, with Ray Charles wailing in a plaintive voice in a recent oeuvre.

I disagree with Elton. Not because of his outlandish shades and his even more weird dress sense. Nor even for his pitiful choice of vague-looking boyfriends. I used to dislike him in his younger days. His songs were very popular on both sides of the Atlantic then and I could not fathom why. Elton has mellowed and so have I. I am less intolerant of weirdness (including the quantum variety of which I remain clueless). I actually like him these days.

But I digress.Sorry. That wasn't so difficult. Not at all. That brings me to the real reason why I differ with Elton John about sorry being the hardest word: It simply isn't. 

Linguists and statisticians claim the article "the" to be the most commonly used English word. I beg to differ with them too. I think the honour goes to "sorry" and my conclusion is based on solid empirical evidence, not on some namby-pamby statistical sampling.

Just look around yourself and listen carefully for a few minutes and you will hear the word sorry spoken a million times. Sorry I'm late; sorry I don't have any change; sorry I have run out of juice in my phone, can I borrow yours?; sorry it is not for sale; sorry it is not available; sorry (and then again, may be not) I stepped on your toe; etc, etc ad infinitum. More plentiful in use or not, "sorry" certainly rolls off people's tongues more easily, with greater regularity and ease than "the".

The word "the" also suffers from being uttered unconsciously, as part of routine English usage, without having to be consciously employed. It is almost a "space filler" in the English language. Its abundance also owes considerably to the usage in most parts of India, where it is considered mandatory to prefix proper nouns with the word "the", as in "have you seen the Joshi?", "have been to the Madras?" etc etc. I look down upon such loose usage. However, I do not hesitate to say "the U.S.A." even as I shrink from a visit to "the England".

Sorry; my intent was not to give a lesson in English grammar although one would not be wasted in the days of text-language devoid of vowels and articles and filled with emoticons. I was merely pointing out that the exalted status of "the" owes more to liberal misapplication of it rather than to proper use. Hence, I humbly submit that the honour of being the most used word in English belongs to the word "sorry".

The word "sorry" is not capable of being grammatically misused,  as in "sorry Chennai" or "sorry Manmohan Singh",  , for both these usages are quite legitimate and correct.

The ease with which "sorry" rolls off people's tongues also renders it devoid of any emotion attached to it. In that sense it is closer to its rival, "the". When was the last time you attached any emotion to "the"? How many different ways can you say "the" aside from the two different pronunciations while preceding a vowel or a consonant? It sounds and means the same irrespective of your state of mind.

Sorry has become so routine that the speaker is generally acknowledged not to be expressing contrition at all. It is merely a face-saving device, a filler, a time-buyer when you have done something you ought not to have, like stepping on toes, or walking into a room without knocking first. Even as you are formulating something clever to say when faced with the embarrassment of unintentionally catching someone with their pants down (sometimes literally too), "sorry" comes in handy and buys you precious time as you arrange your thoughts and the other party  their dress.

When someone digs you in the ribs with their elbow or the tip of their umbrella in a crowded train, and if you happen to take note and shoot a cross look at them, "sorry" rolls of their tongue. No contrition, no apology. It is just something that they say; like when the dulcet voice informs you, "sorry, the number you have dialed is not available" over and over again without in anyway conveying a sense of apology, regret or contrition for the inconvenience the unavailability has caused you.

Sorry, however, is not mandatory under all circumstances. In love, for example, you don't have to say sorry or so the famous tear-jerker "The Love Story" informed us decades ago ("Love Means never having to say sorry").

Rest of the world may over-use the word sorry, howsoever insincerely.
In Chennai we love every one.