The Other Side of Life

I laughed when I saw the horror movie Scream 2. And it seems, I now have a good reason why. Back when television content was not available at a click of a button, at your whims and fancies, when there was no Google to answer all your questions, the biggest change in our lives was the introduction of cable television. And t he cable TV guide, of course. Every month, when the cable guy came for the cheque, he would drop a cable guide, with reams of pages full of lists of television programs, sorted by time, in a really small print. It required skill to get through that. And I thought I had it. One fine afternoon in March, right after school exams got over and we got the only vacation in the year, when there was no homework, tests or things to do, I decided to watch a movie. I poured over the TV Guide for an hour, trying to decide what to watch.  I pushed my pudgy finger along rows of data, trying to find just the right thing to watch. After much mental debate, I lan...

Don't read this post. Please. It's not meant for you. Why are you still reading? Because you don't like being told what to do, do you? You, independence-loving, autonomy-addicted, you. Some call it Reverse Psychology. Some call it just the good old plain logic. Many years ago, the King of Prussia, Fredrick the Great, also known as Fritz, heard about a new root called Potato. Enamoured by it's nutritional value, he decided that his subjects need to start including potato in their staple diet. Grand announcements were planned. Drummers would walk across town, singing paeans of the benefits of eating this potato. Cooks would publicly demonstrate recipes with potatoes. I would go out on a limb and say, French Fries was not one of those recipes, because what happened next would just not justify it.  The public rejected potatoes. That's right. Rejected. Hard as it may sound, the people didn't want to be told what to do. So, they d...

And just like that, we enter a new year.  Like a million other people, I did feel the past year just flew by.  But, you know what makes me happy? The knowledge that it has now been proven scientifically that time flies when you are having fun.  A bunch of scientists performed experiments where people were made to estimate time elapsed in different situations - when they were given a mundane task, when they were made to feel happy, when they were made to feel sad, when they were listening to a good song, etc. And without doubt, they proved that time indeed is a psychological construct, heavily influenced by hedonism or the pleasure we feel. In other words, if you felt the year just flew by, take solace in the fact that this means, you had a fun year!  With that out of way, how is the new year looking to you? Are you making resolutions? Here's a little truth about new year resolutions that you should know.  We are all victims of w...

Let's take a shot at a simple puzzle. You are the manager of a Day Care Centre. You notice that every week, around 6-7 parents arrive late to pick up their kids. Which means, you have to stay extra and look after them. You have to do something to change this habit. So, what do you do? An obvious answer is to introduce a Fine for late comers. A couple of researchers (Gneezy and Rustichini) did this in Israel to see if the introduction of a fine reduces the number of people coming late for pick-ups. And guess what they observed: (Source: Gneezy, et al, 2000) In short, the number of people who were coming late increased. And worse, even when the removed the fine in Week 17, the number of parents coming late never came down to the original level without fines. Quite a bazinga, isn't it? I mean, when you introduce a fine, you assume people are going to behave rationally and think, oh this is unwanted behaviour, so we should not be doing this. ...

My day has been made. With this news: http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/247390/ A startup called Crow-ded Cities from Netherlands  won the Dutch Accenture Innovation Award this year. Their objective? To train crows to pick up cigarette butts in return for food. This is amazing, at so many levels. That we thought it would be easier to train crows to pick up what we throw, than train people not to throw in the first place, speaks so much about us as a society. I am beginning to think, the cows that sit in the middle of the busiest roads in Bangalore are actually some intelligent startup's highly advanced way of making speeding cars slow down.  Or the monkey that entered someone's house in my society last week and stole a box full of cookies (this is true, not making it up), was  merely helping the residents stick to their diet and not cheat. But, more seriously, when and why did we give up on humans? Is that how hopeless we have become at following rules? ...