In defence of Profiling - My Name is Khan II

As the MyNameisKhan saga ensues, I trudge along a sea of data - transactions from one of our stores for a month, to spot patterns of purchase which are called trip types. In the absence of any data mining software, I have to rely on excel, since clustering cannot be done, and my intuition.

Right now I am concentrating on single-item focused purchases - purchases done to meet the need of a single item in an emergency. By intuition, I know such trips would have low sales and number of quantities and this comes to 20% of the trips. Further, from past experience in similar exercises with other retailers in my past job, I know some most prominent types of these trips are centred around - Dairy replenishment (Milk Run), Leafy vegetables (Coriander ex.), Banana, Bread and Meat.

After almost, a day of effort a story glimmers.

If I had not started from my hypothesis, if I had treated all data as a valid starting point, with more than 3000 items and 20000 transactions, I would have taken a long time to reach a story - if I could have.

There is bigotry and there is profiling.

Bigotry is what is happening to Indian students in Australia. Profiling is what happened to SRK.

What happened to SRK would have escalated to bigotry if

1. he had been segregated despite there not being any doubt in the mind of the assessor

2. After the doubt had been cleared conclusively, he would have still been detained

Profiling is the application of general knowledge to fuzzy data or where there is a lot of it.

We apply it all the time. If a stream of boys pass across you and without knowing about them, you have to pick a star basketball team - you would start with the taller boys.But if you persist in believing a taller boy is better than a bespectacled fat runt despite the fact that the runt is jumping three feet in the air and scoring three pointers, you've moved to bigotry.

I would be very concerned, if I were an American citizen, if the assessor does not detain a guy with a Muslim surname, or Asian looks, when he's not very sure about something. Simply because he's applying his general knowledge that it's mainly Muslims from Asian countries who're bombing planes.

This does not hold in the following cases -

1. There was enough time and not so many people that the guy had to rely on profiling. He could have strip searched everyone - including the nonagenarian nanny.

2. He takes the profiling beyond the seed of first doubt - that he approaches the research in a biased manner.

What the Americans did to the American-Japs after Pearl Harbor was unacceptable since they subjected them to unjust humiliations on the basis of their being Japs. But the opposite of this situation would have been disastrous - if they had not combed the population for espionage threats in times of war.

I say this as an Asian knowing that I will be subject to the same extra eying as I pass the immigration desk.

Why is the Indian government taking SRK's case, even if the detention (for 2 hrs?) was unjust? Many Indians have to face the same situation - what's so special about SRK traveling to dance at shows - independence or not - for megabucks?

This actually is a continuation of the VIP saga - . There are two types of people in our countries - VIP and non-VIP. We apply different rules for them, and are shocked when countries found on more liberal thoughts than ours do not follow the same practice.

Interestingly, Bob Dylan was picked up by the police on suspicion in NJ. Please read the story and compare the dignified manner in which the icon handled this compared to the angry Khan.

One thing that might come out of stories like these is that the VIPs might get a rude awakening of how the world really looks to the people they claim to represent - their dreams in movies, their representation in politics). I was reading how most MLAs have lived for decades now in lush bungalows or MLA houses where the water never runs dry, and the electricity never goes. And when have you ever seen a MLA rattle across the potted roads which are 99% of our roadways?

If all these MLAs have to spend 21st June in a non-AC old Ambassador, the windows rolled up, and seven to a car, careering and careening across Bannerghatta road, don't you think the nature of parliamentary debates might change?

similarly, Hindi cinema - dominated by star kids, with a combined IQ of 97, growing cross eyed and dumber than even their star parents with all the inbreeding and steroids in their muscles - might get a boost if these stars are subjected to more closer to reality situations like these.

My name is Con?

Regarding the detention of SRK at Newark Link, the plot eerily follows SRK's forthcoming venture -- My Name is Khan. Sample this plotline from wikipedia - "At that time, Rizwan (Khan) is arrested and detained when authorities mistake his disability for "suspicious" behavior."

My curiosity was piqued after I read SRK saying he was detained because his name is Khan and not the usual "Because I have a Muslim name". SRK is perhaps the greatest marketing genius of our time - and I vaguely remembered the name of this venture of his.

And guess who's directing this movie - apna Karan Johar! SRk ka marketing chela jo uske kandhe par apne hits ki bandook taanta hai aur jaane kya kya aur tannaata hai...

Now, why do I feel this incident might have been a little doctored? Or perhaps being played up a little?

Btw, inspired by the plotline - a decade after this post 9-11 genre has been done to death - I'm inspired to announce the biopic of Mr Johar himself.

My name is Gaa*d(u).

Indepinde 2009

A couple of years ago, after I had just moved to Delhi, an American colleague asked me what we do on Independence Days.

Nothing, I told him. Since most of the roads are blocked because of VIP movement, and the prime minister's address to the nation as stimulating as a scratched Kumar Sanu CD, we sit home and scratch our butts.

No, Fourth of July parades?

No, sir.

No crackers?

No, sir.

Oh.

So here's something to make the day more exciting. If you're in Delhi, leave for the red Fort (for other states, go where the CM is to unveil a flag) wearing some pretty ordinary cloths. If you have a beard or a skullcap handy, use it. Get a black polythene bag, stuff some tomatoes inside, and make way through the crowd where the elite commandos stand. Act suspicious, make sudden movements - do anything to catch their attention. Once you have it, run. Run for your life, clutching and waving the bag above your head, and do not stop even if you're asked to.

I promise you this - you'll definitely hear some crackers once you break clear from the crowd.

Anyway, as my prof HC Verma would have said, Happy Inde-Pinde.

Same Independence Day last year post.

Manhoos Mehsud

The US is 90% sure Mehsud is dead.

Where did this 90% figure come from? Either you’re sure or you’re not. Or you have degrees – reasonably sure, somewhat sure... but how do you ascribe a probability to an event like this?

These are my theories:

1. The US called up their agents and ignoring the “Cant Say”s, some multiple of nine agents told them he was dead, and a ninth of these agents told them he was not.
2. They did a complex scenario stimulation showing the last location of Mehsud, the impact of the bomb, and the probabilities that Mehsud did not run from the drop zone at the last minute because he had sudden pangs to be with one of his wives.
3. Some cigar-chewing top general asked someone ‘Well what the hell does reasonably sure mean?’ And the lackey improvised ‘Err – 90% sure sir.’

By the way, the question bothering me is ki marte waqt, kya Mehsud ko dard Mehsus hua tha?

Thoughts on How Society is Divided - III

Continuation from here: http://blandspice.blogspot.com/2009/08/thoughts-on-how-society-is-divided-ii.html

Presenting my grand theory on society - Ta Da!

Partly because I feel that the graph is fairly self-explanatory, and partly out of apathy, I will speak less here, and just explain the chart a little.

The circle stands for preservation. The circle with a top arrow stands for preservation while improving one's situation by conscious effort towards that end.

The down arrow is an inevitable trajectory for people in desperate circumstances who've given up the effort of even striving. The drunkards beating their wives for the money they bring from sweeping floors fall here. The wives fall in the strivers.

It's easy to imagine why anarchists come from where they come.

The role of noble elite is more difficult - a separate blog post - but has been perhaps the most critical one in shaping the modern world. For it was in their patronage where art, and ultimately schools of thought flourished. (I plan to write a defence for elitism in a separate post.) Back home, Akbar and Ashok, the noblest of elites, whose legacies are beyond question.

A line I will expound on later - the future of the world does not come from mere democratization, but the elitism which keeps these democracies noble.

Note a few of the elite migrate to the status of strivers. This is because even though they're born with an abilty to distinguish they trade that ability for resources. They act so much against their own convictions to achieve those resources that they lose what they had once and become strivers.

This also contains the cyncial intellectuals who choose to strive for something tangible rather than the intangibles they have started to lose faith in.

The thorns is the crown of thorns sitting on our head.

Here lie the people who perpetuate the tyrannies of existence of others. They smother the masses with pillows to rest their fat asses on. They control the media and put the world to an opiate fantasy, who unleash the propaganda and mediocrity, who unleash sanitised digestible realities, where even horror is a stimulant and not a weapon of anger, who drown the thoughts which veer from the mass hysteria to take a harsher look at reality.

Herein lies organised religion. Organized thought.

Herein lies the roots of mediocrity which is digging and eating into the core of our greatness.

Thoughts on How Society is divided - II

Continuation from here - http://blandspice.blogspot.com/2009/08/thoughts-on-how-socity-is-divided-i.html

This is to complete this post. I had developed the second part in conjunction but my usual apathy got in between.

The comments on the last post have hit quite a few nails in the head. Alam asks what an intellectual really means. His questions are so well constructed that I’ll have to reproduce it in full.

I will dedicate this post to the problem of defining the individual - something I do not claim to be an expert of.

“Does your definition of intellectualism cover only the ability to deconstruct --> reconstruct (which i would like to restate as developing a stand/understanding based on one’s own standards, experiences biases etc) ….In other words is it primarily a method of comprehending the world ….or….. does it factor in other qualitative parameters like the depth and beauty of understanding, the uniqueness of the stand, the simplicity of solution....etc etc... ?

In your scale of intellectualism -

How important in the quality of stand/understanding?

How important is method of arriving at the stand/understanding?

How important is the diversity of fields in which intellectualism can be shown?

And how important is the ability to meaningfully communicate/action on this stand/understanding?”

The dilemma of any clear-cut definition here is beautifully explained by Kesavan – ‘any understanding of reality is built on overlapping categories and leaking definitions.’

The problem emanates since human phenomena are way more complex than our vocabulary.

Intellectualism starts with first understanding this fundamental premise – the limit of the definitions we have put in the world we see. In that the ability to deconstruct is primarily an ability to dissociate a reality with its vocabulary.

Reconstruction, in my opinion, is able to see things without the dogma of vocabulary. To ascribe an enhanced new vocabulary to a reality, and yet to realise that even this vocabulary has its limits. And there it differs from biases and prejudices which applies one simple rule to all realities it faces. (An hour ago, I was developing an interesting theory on the statistical fallacies of prejudices in a separate thought.)

Intellectualism is depth – for me there is no ambiguity here. A man with half understanding in everything is incapable of appreciating anything. A man with a deep understanding in even a single field knows the value of something and in that appreciation of the value he can understand the values other things might reach. Actually, this depth is more like a negation of mediocrity than an affirmation of intellectualism. If you would remember, I had shown mediocrity less prevalent in the people with least resources since they know the depth of their labour and have first-hand appreciation of all value created by labour. On the other hand, the privileged man who’s never known the depth of anything is mediocre.

About simplicity of solutions, I don’t know. It sounds romantic that the best solutions are the simplest ones; but I doubt it. A solution is a solution which works best. From my days of Chemical Engineering, I craved something simpler to understand than formulae which ran into pages. And yet, if these formulae had not been what they were, we might be having more Chernobyls than we’ve had. Here, I make no claim to distinguishing clearly between complexity and simplicity other than simplicity is easier to grasp. I have seen professors who must have been the worst teachers ever since they could never break the complexities into digestible simplicities for us – but they still were top rated researchers.

Diversity is not a precondition for intellectualism. An intellectual who can hover over the world he inherits can actually dive-bomb anywhere he wants, the only limit being the innate talents he’s born with. This ties with the appreciation of depth that he has from first-hand experience. However, the fields of human endeavours is so so vast that it is presumptuous of anyone, even an intellectual, to stray far beyond what he’s capable of without developing a fresh way of looking at the new things.

Can a housewife be an intellectual? Certainly, if she’s aware of her context, has deconstructed and reconstructed the world she inherited, and then chosen to be a housewife.

One quality of intellectualism I have assumed is doubt. As I said, the intellectual is aware of the limits of human vocabulary. And in that sense he’s also aware of the limits of its experience. An intellectual is not a guy who goes on applying commonsense to everything he sees. Instead if confronted by a phenomenon he has insufficient knowledge and experience of, instead of applying the commonsense he’s developed (which becomes prejudices in this case), he pauses and reconsiders.

Ultimately, intellectualism is about action. The awareness with how we live our life. And how we adhere to the right action which this awareness proposes. And therein lies the problem of the “cynical intellectual”, someone aware of the right action but convinced about the futility of all action.

Carefully Selected Garbage

Found this here: http://www.carefullyselectedgarbage.com/

The crassness of popular taste - it's been always burning, since the world's been turning

Come here, my dear, good, beautiful doggie, and smell this excellent perfume which comes from the best perfumer of Paris.

And the dog, wagging his tail, which, I believe, is that poor creature's way of laughing and smiling, came up and put his
curious nose on the uncorked bottle. Then suddenly, he backed away in terror, barking at me reproachfully.

"Ah miserable dog, if I had offered you a package of excrement you would have sniffed at it with delight and perhaps gobbled
it up. In this you resemble the public, which should never be offered delicate perfumes that infuriate them, but only carefully selected garbage."

- Charles Baudelaire

Thoughts on how socity is divided - I

A foolish but valiant attempt to state my developing notions about our society graphically.

I see society in two dimensions – resources and intellectualism.

Resources is linked to wealth and income and hence is the economic stratification with the upper, middle class and lower class depicted in the vertical axis roughly according to their distribution.

Intellectualism is tougher to define – it can begin with an innate genius or be the result of sustained application – but it ultimately results in a mind which deconstructs the world it inherits and tries to reconstruct it based on what it sees. It often entails much inner suffering and courage to break the rules of the mob.

Strivers are people who understand and respect intellectualism, somewhat, but realise their limitations and choose to follow the herd and even strive to get ahead.

A mediocre mind is one who does not even realise that there might be doubts and happily follow the herd.

I would dwell on this as this is a very important parameter and most often mistaken. Intellectualism is not about petty academic achievements , wealth and corporate jobs. In fact, almost all the high flying job descriptions – consultancies, investment bankings, CXOs – fall in the striver bracket – since intellectuals are people who cannot function within a structure (since they are essentially deinstitutionalized) and work either alone or in small groups – and chase ideas and not profit. Here, a special note – I included that rare but persistent breed “the cynical intellectuals” among strivers since they choose to behave so.

Intellectualism is the ability to see where we are as individuals and societies in the continuum of history – and the courage act on our ideas of which direction it should take. A striver has limited vision and courage while a mediocre man has neither.

Intellectualism requires, among other things, that the person is not exactly at the threshold of survival (As Camus points our bodily instincts of preservation supersede our mind), that he sees a world where he sees the ideas and rhetoric of his class fail, and that he has the resources of literature art and other intellectuals to give him some direction where he might find his answers.

Hence, the graph shows that the thin slice of intellectual elitism in each income segment increases with income since the survival necessity decreases and the availability of resources increases.

On the other hand, mediocrity also follows the same pattern. The reason being that a mediocre man is more or less impervious to the flaws of the arguments of the society he inherits and instead follows it blindly. To achieve this state of mind, a man has to essentially be without work. To labour is to struggles, and to realise the essential inequalities inherent on the system. Only a man who does not have to labour can be blind to this - though of course there are always room for baffling exceptions.

Hence, the richer you are, the more the probability that you do not have to be in a situation where you realise that the world is not actually fair - that production is no way linked to claims of consumption.

This is not so hard to accept. Imagine our own rich gentry. Some of them are artists and most of them are snobs - since snobbery is the last refuge of the incompetent against the deluge of upwardly-mobile strivers invading the world which fell in their laps but they do not have the ability of defending on the very fundamental principles which made those riches possible. Hence, the story is more or less the usual. A couple of generations strive to build an empire and the succeeding generations either become artists or loll around in cocktail lounges snorting at the accents of a nouveau-rich invading their erstwhile territories -- or the manner in which he holds the stem of the wine glass.

This, more or less, is how I think our society is structured.

In the next post, I will put forward my thesis on their roles.

Ghettos of Modern India

A look at the morning headlines.

Shahrukh brushes off Hashmi's remarks as a "one-off incident" citing that he himself has never faced such discrimination.

Maybe, that's because you're Shahrukh, SK. Braithwaite describes his own mistake of confusing the general warm reception of the man in the uniform with the acceptance of the black man wearing the uniform in 'To Sir with Love'. The rude fact hits him only when he dons the civilian suit again.

I am not sure about the reasons why Hashmi didn't get his Pali hill flat -- for me the reason that he is Emraan Hashmi is reason enough to refuse -- but these incidents are certainly not one-off. Profiling on religion while leasing out apartments is rampant -- especially if you're a Muslim. A few years ago, while looking for an apartment to share with a Muslim friend, a couple of parties backed away at the brink of closing the deal after hearing his name. Ultimately, it took someone from the institution of army, with its exposure to the plurality of our social fabric, to rent out an apartment to us. Another friend in Delhi faced the same situation a year back.

The vicious spiral of ghettoizing, accelerated after the Bombay riots, where the Sena boys profiled apartments door to door, has been too visible to be brushed off.

I am usually sceptic about ever reclaiming the secular threads with the unfolding momentum of uneducated hyperbolic stridency of our nation. But there is still hope in reversing these disturbing trends of more and more separation. More and more participation in the public space. Coming from a vastly Muslim city, it took me some years to realise that the average Indian has never had much interaction with people of different faiths and, as a result, much of their understanding is based on stereotypes.

Secularize all education (education, I believe, belongs to the secular arm of the state and not the religious arm of the community the child is born into), and ensure that profiling at workplaces are dealt severely.

The differences between the communities, especially in modern India, are too superficial to be not overcome if only a forum for regular participation is created. And that forum can only be the stairs and the cubicles of our offices if we create equal opportunities - and aptitude - to take these opportunities for all Indians.

Remember, most terrorists come from ghettos -- physical or those of the alienated mind.

And let's not allow blabbering idiots like SK brush aside such serious issues (note: SK not only declares that Hashmi's got it wrong -- which he might have -- but brand the issue as one-off incident). Recognition of the problem precedes its solution -- and we Indians are notorious in brushing the dust of our most heinous practices under lush green carpets of Swiss countrysides where our hero-heroine caper and tell us - in the voice of Anu Malik which belongs to hell - East or West, India is the best.

Gulzaar-e-fariyaad

Yesterday, the president felicitated some of the Oscar winners, the Indian variety that is.

It seems somewhat pathetic that a head of such a vast nation felicitate people because some other people felicitated them - people who, in the past, have even felicitated movies like Titanic. But that's the way it's always been. Satyajit Ray, who was mostly ignored in his own lifetime, and even blamed at one time by none other than Nargis in the Rajya Sabha of selling India's poverty to the West (notwithstanding the fact that much of his oeuvre concentrated on middle-class India), was suddenly deemed a Bharat Ratna once he got the Lifetime Oscars. Such is our reverence for Uncle Oscar.

But my contention here is why do we keep on insisting that Gulzar also is one of the recepients of Oscars? He was the lyricist to a score in a tongue foreign to, I would believe, the entire panel which voted for the song. So what difference would it have made to the score's chances, if he'd substituted:

Ratti Ratti Sachi Maine Jaan Gavayi Hai
Nach Nach Koylo Pe Raat Bitayi Hai

with

Tatti Tatti Mein Maine Bhaang Milaayee Hai
Kuchh Kuchh Bhadwon ko paand sunghaayee hai

It would have still won - unless, of course, somebody told the people in the panel what they were swaying their heads to.

I like Gulzar. I think he was a better director than a lyricist and has never been recognized to the wonderful movies he made in the 70s (Kitaab, Mere Apne, Achaanak, Namkeen). But let's not recognize him for something he didn't do.