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1. Singularity, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, 18 Nov, 1996.

2. How To Become A Hacker, Eric Steven Raymond, 4 Oct, 2007.

3. How to Drop Out, Ran Prieur, 2 Apr, 2004.

4. An Open Letter To Open-minded Progressives, Mencius Moldbug, 17 Apr, 2008.

5. The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, Roger Williams, 14 Oct, 2003.

Singularity

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky's "Singularity" essay from 1996 is one of the early writings on the concept of the technological singularity.

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It’s been a while since I dropped a watch post and a whole four months since I picked up my latest watch. I’m back in Delhi which means I have time to push out content since half my free time will likely be spent in hour-long traffic and what better way to utilize that by jotting down some notes for my blog. In this writeup, I’ll touch upon my reasoning for purchasing the Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra Golf, how it fits into my rainbow collection, how I missed the opportunity to pick up a Grand Seiko, and why gatekeeping the horological industry is an inane and fruitless endeavor (specifically the Swatch incident/ collaboration).

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Boris Johnson had had a long day. Countless meetings, appraisals, and bills were stacked high upon his desk. He was in no mood for squabble, but took some time out to play the latest Wordle. While deciding between CRANE and ADIEU, the first two notes of Satie's Gnossienne 5 (but two semi-tones lower — C, F instead of D, G) played abruptly, leaving a ringing noise in ol’ Bojo’s ear. For the uninitiated, this was also the Gmail Notification sound on iOS. Unlike his ex-US counterpart, Mr. Johnson was fully prepared to make the switch from Blackberry to iPhone.

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I tried to stay away from cracking the crude ‘are the drapes matching the carpet’ joke because watches might be the only ‘asset’ I’m particularly fond of, but alas. Below, I walk through my decision-making process on picking up one of Rolex’s most accessible models, why I bit the bullet when I’d already purchased the Hulk less than five months ago, and dial color theory.

The Why

Relatively reckless purchase. Doubt a non-Datejust would retain any intrinsic value, but omg look at that tiffany turquoise. I know, I know, I said I had enough blue in the last grail post about my prismatic collection, but hear me out, this shade can’t honestly stand up to the vibrant intensity of the (now-antiquated) indigo-dial FC-303NN6B6.1 Also, I needed something for the upcoming summer + yacht season shenanigans.

The process to acquire the Oyster Perpetual was simple and straightforward — trot over to any of the countless Authorized Dealers in Hong Kong and grab the first attendant while simultaneously explaining your dire situation. Usually, they pay no heed to anyone under the ripe age of thirty, but armed with my Hulk and dressed in an unorthodox form-fitting crisp white shirt, I managed to convert hard cash into the lowest-priced model™, which is also the timepiece you’re rewatching in awfully low-quality GIF-form right above.2

Why the sudden need to splurge? The markets are doing well... and I can. Jokes aside, I have a dream — to own all colors of the rainbow in one way or the other, and I intend to achieve this by owning watches with distinct colored dials (or hands, I’m not picky)3.

I’m currently at V̶I̶B̶G̶YOR: three left. I already have black/ white faces in my possession and with each passing day, I feel more and more like a Pokémon Master. I imagine orange would most likely be the Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean 600M (obviously with the NATO strap)4 — I have no qualms about switching loyalties. This might also be because the other three Rolex colorways are fugly and I sincerely doubt I’d be able to pull them off. Once again, I’m accepting any and all candidates.

Accessible === Cheap?

But Viren, why would you lower your standards? Submariners over Oyster Perpetuals any day of the week. And why blue out of all variants? Well the TL;DR is that I like the color. From the perennial Forums:

I can’t comprehend some of the feedback I’ve received: “Go with the Milgauss, it’s rarer and stands out.” Or “Why go with the entry-line Rolex when you already have a Hulk — save up and splurge on a Daytona”. First of all, I doubt I’m ever going to wear the equivalent of a glow-in-the-dark Timex, and second, I’m not prepared to drop 17 large on the Cosmograph Platinum. Or: what if this watch only serves as a homage to the Ice-Blue Day-Date 40? I’d retort that if you knew me well enough you’d know I detest anything iced out or flashy. I just like the fucking color.

With Time & Tide placing 2:1 odds on my blue baby before The Hong Kong Watch Auction: XI hosted by Phillips last year, I thought I’d be in the clear from criticism:

Blue dial watches are always popular, but this turquoise variation glows with a spearmint freshness that’s enlivened by the lustre of the steel. As inviting as a swimming pool on a baking hot day, this is a head-turning colour but not so outré as to be off-putting.

Unfortunately, bidders didn’t feel the same way, and the results were questionable, to say the least. My watch got bested by the equivalent of two-thirds of a stoplight and the color pink. The final standings:

1. Red, Yellow, Pink @ HKD $107,100 apiece

2. Turquoise blue @ HKD $94,500

3. Green @ HKD 88,200 apiece

Eat the rich, I muttered to myself in indignation. Guess The Sky Is Pink. I reluctantly accept second place. Back to my quest of collecting the sorbet rainbow of colors.

A Problem: Teeny Tiny Wrists

And now a problem as old as time (ha) — the 41 is too large for my dainty wrists but I also wouldn’t be caught dead in the 36mm. The reference numbers change based on the case diameter, but for all intents and purposes, I’ve stuck to 41mm which is 124300. Pink dials max out at 36mm and rightly so, and are demarcated as 126000.5 A primer:

After watching this video one might understand why I can’t possibly cop the Coral Red. If it looks this bad on Caucasian skin I’d rather not test the hypothesis on brown complexions.

Cool Color Calculations

I noticed quite early on the dial color is similar to the (now ubiquitous) disposable surgical face masks. It offered a deeply disturbing lens into the lives of pseudo-insta-influencers who have different colored masks to match their OOTD.

I wanted to test my hypothesis, so I used a color picker to grab all the hex codes.

1. Bright blue: #013B5F

2. Bright black: #050505

3. Silver: #CFCDC2

4. Yellow: #FBB400

5. Green: #036033

6. Turquoise blue: #96D2D2

7. Coral red: #E83D0B

8. Candy pink: #F2D6DE

Now, these might not be exact — some of the variants (looking at you Black/ Silver/ Bright blue) have a sunray finish instead of the usual monochromic dials. Along with the gloss built-in into the paint, this meant it was particularly challenging to correctly deduce the shade. The mask was #7BD3EB. Cool, now how do I compare them? The correct answer is with some python code and good old dE.

Delta-E is a single number that represents the 'distance' between two colors.

from colormath.color_objects import sRGBColor, LabColor
from colormath.color_conversions import convert_color
from colormath.color_diff import delta_e_cie2000

# Watch Color
c1_rgb = sRGBColor(150, 210, 210)

# Mask Color
c2_rgb = sRGBColor(123, 211, 235)
# Convert from RGB to Lab Color Space
c1_lab = convert_color(c1_rgb, LabColor)
c2_lab = convert_color(c2_rgb, LabColor)

# Find the color difference
delta_e = delta_e_cie2000(c1_lab, c2_lab)
print ("The difference between the two colors are= ", delta_e)

This outputs 25.3145. Where does that fall under the standard perception range?

<= 1.0: Not perceptible by the human eye
1-2: Perceptible through close observation
2-10: Perceptible at a glance
11-49: More similar than the opposite
100: Exactly the opposite

It’ll pass. The actual Tiffany Blue (PMS number 1837) is #0ABAB5, also known as robin egg blue. How does this compare to our dial? 17.6284. Huh, who would have thought?

Stellar Silver & Sordid Sales Tales

Many fans have lampooned the brand for releasing these childish colored dials. Similar to my critics, they harped on the value of tradition, conformity, and a legacy of excellence. A Crown for Every Achievement. Fortunately, I possess none of these qualities and have no significant achievements.

As Zach Blass from Time & Tide rightly stated,

These watches may not have the same depth in the water as the Submariner and Sea-Dweller, but they have just as much depth on the wrist and present a lot of playful opportunities and expressions not previously found within the Rolex catalogue.

I instead draw a comparison to the Rolex’s of yesteryear. Quoting an article from Tariq Malik in WatchTime Middle East,

Rolex really pushed the envelope in the 1970’s & 80’s by introducing hard enamel dials known as Stella dials. These enamel watch faces came in a riot of colors, tones you wouldn’t expect to see on a Rolex. Interestingly, ‘Stella’ is not an invented nickname but Rolex themselves used the term ‘Lacquered Stella’ in their catalogues.

The difference between the Stella’s of the 70s and the OPs of today are not so subtle — diamond-set markers compared to the currently applied indexes, Eastern Arabic numerals superseded Roman numerals, Opal, Jasper, Bloodstone, Lapis, Onyx, Ammonite, Coral, and even Petrified Fossil for dials vs. the current lacquered finish. Fortunately, the current iteration wins in movement: 3055 automatic to caliber 3230. These watches command a high price tag in auction houses today, and for good reason — Rolex destroyed the remaining stock once they realized these watches were not only not selling well in their primary markets (America/ Europe) but their target demographic also, which was primarily Middle Eastern and Asian countries.

Give it to the century-old manufacturing company to further froth the tumultuous watch-wearing waters. I doubt there will be a similar demand for the current OPs, since Rolex seems hellbent on churning as many as humanely possible, up to the 800,000 limit per year. I’m not the type to resell. I’ll keep this as my lasting legacy, or my singular achievement. I also know there is no gold pot at the end of the rainbow, but I’m open to adopting the leprechaun or at the very least having a live-in relationship with him/ her/ them.

Further Reading: The Colorful World of Rolex Stella Dials by A Collected Man.

I have a love-hate relationship with delivery platforms. In this write-up, I’ll leverage the latest foodpanda iOS update — which introduced cute animations for some unfortunate routing regressions — and combine multiple discounts to save close to 45% per order. Skip to the ‘Process’ section for the meat ‘n gravy.

Premise

On one hand, I enjoy the convenience of sitting at home and not lifting a finger while someone delivers my chicken shawarma. On the other, I detest the competitive liberties and cutthroat business practices these companies undertake to unduly take advantage of the suffering food & beverage industry. Barring stranger danger (or the fear of riders eating your food) and unscrupulous business decisions, I do believe these unicorns have added some value, but by charging restaurants obscene fees (close to 30%!!), they might be doing more harm than good. Especially during a pandemic, where does one draw the ethical line on the proverbial plate? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Manic work hours (9-7) and the obligation to stay until your superior is at the office in Hong Kong limits the time one spends at home. This translates to most of your meals being take-outs or deliveries. Enter foodpanda, which eases the entire process at the expense of restaurant profit margins. I was driven towards them for a few reasons:

1. Heavy social-distancing restrictions prohibited eating-in at restaurants

2. HK doesn’t have a huge culture of home cooking (limited kitchen space and my inability to prepare a decent meal — I’ll blame it on Mageirocophobia)

3. I don’t have a whole lot of choices, besides Deliveroo, the other major player,

4. foodpanda had one of the more sophisticated React codebases, which I truly appreciate (and this made it easier to scrape information from my projects).

And so my journey with foodpanda was off to the races, albeit to a bumpy ethical start. I was a power user, an active daily user, and I was contributing a significant chunk of my monthly income to their service. Over time, I grew to understand their rationale for converting users through their funnel via usual tactics, whether that involved reducing the number of clicks on the checkout page to make purchasing food easier or offering a minimum 20% discount for pickup orders, and I fully intended to take advantage of these deals.

Too many clicks spoil the browse.

Enter every startup’s unique Marketing Department. Also enter: massive savings for the price-conscious consumer.

I broke even pretty early, and this doesn’t include my natural inclination of spending more per order (which usually happens when one uses these platforms) — I’ve averaged a pretty consistent 50 HKD (~6 USD) per meal.

Eager to gain market control in the financial capital of Asia, foodpanda introduced PandaBox last August, where they

target customers new to restaurants with 3 different limited-time deals*. Customers have 15 minutes to place their order before the PandaBox disappears.

They purposely disallowed the option to stack discounts, so the most I could have saved is 60 HKD off a 180 HKD order, and this wouldn’t include paying the flat-rate delivery of $25. Trust me, I tried my best to get the final sticker price down.

Anyway, one slow workday, I was ordering sushi for my company and I noticed they added a ‘switch’ component on the final order screen. This touchable button introduced the possibility of changing my delivery to a pickup.

I immediately realized this might be a new attack vector and after waiting the appropriate time for PandaBox to pop up once again, I tested my hypothesis. It worked. The final price immediately dropped

Adding an animated component to their final order screen inadvertently regressed their application and removed previously imposed restrictions.

I think you know where this is going. Tying this up together,

1. I was receiving a minimum of 20% off for takeaway,

2. A fixed discount (27.7 | 28.5 | 33.3)% based on relative order size,

3. and another 5% off because of my monthly subscription to pandapro.

This egregious footgun meant I could theoretically save 58.3%. Now you might say this is an intended action by foodpanda, driving up sales and urging me to splurge more, but the numbers speak for themselves.

I guess my previous experience of helping set up a restaurant certainly didn’t go to waste. Ironically, I have both a deliveroo plus and pandapro subscription — which might be why I’m flying under the radar. Oh, and also, probably because a significant portion of their userbase isn’t screwing around trying to find ways to crack the system.

Process

I’ll go into detail below on how you can replicate this yourself.

Ingredients List:

To concoct this recipe, you will need:

1. Access to the foodpanda app - (untested on Android phones)

2. A computer - to search for restaurants close to your location (you can also use Google Maps)

3. A pandapro subscription - (not required but a subscription will grant you deeper discounts)

4. An insatiable hunger for massive discounts and big meals :)

Preparation Time:

15 minutes (since once the PandaBox timer runs down you won’t be able to avail the time-sensitive discount).

Selecting a Restaurant

Open the foodpanda app. A modal should pop up displaying the various restaurants that have opted in to be included in PandaBox. You will receive around 9 choices. Out of the nine places, two or three will be close to your location. Foodpanda deliberately selects eateries that are under two kilometers to help their riders efficiently plan a route.

foodpanda hides the actual restaurant address and displays a relative ‘x metres away from your location’, which means you need to be cognizant that you aren’t too far away.

I use a combination of parsing their React website and a quick-and-dirty Google Maps search to see if the restaurants are actually close to my current location.

Remember: once you select a restaurant, it won’t be possible to select another restaurant from PandaBox — the option will disappear once you exit out. It’s best to stick to a cuisine once you’ve done your due diligence.

Switch to Pick-Up

Add any item to your cart, go to checkout, and at the top, switch to Pick-Up. If you’re looking to order now or later, take note of any time discrepancy.

Choosing Food

This is easily the hardest part. I detest choices so I usually go for set meals, which end up being cheaper priced than à la carte. Strike a balance between how much you want to spend and save (since the more you order the deeper the discounts).

Place the Order

I use Apple Pay but saved credit card details also work. Recheck the total, you should have saved close to 50% of the total order price. Go pick up your order from the restaurant and stay war of the curious looks from the staff.

Pitfalls

1. You might need a pandapro subscription to fully take advantage of this deal.

2. PandaBox isn’t available all the time. Based on my extensive testing, I’ve managed to generate the popup thrice a day, sometimes more.

3. Not all restaurants have signed up for PandaBox. You’re limited in terms of choices and the kind of cuisine you are allowed to choose.

   Theoretically, you should never run out of restaurant choices.

4. Time constraints on PandaBox. You have 15 minutes from the modal opening up to place an order. One should be prepared to order on impulse.

foodpanda operates in these countries. I’m also not sure if pandapro / PandaBox are available everywhere.

ProTips

1. Group order for insane rebates. I’ve once spent 20 HKD on a dinner.

2. Since this only works for takeaways, you’re limited to restaurants close to your location. I recommend either having extensive knowledge of the surrounding eateries or googling the closest options.

3. Credit cards with great cashback are a multiplier. Along with the 6% cashback I’m receiving from my virtual card (Mox or ZA Bank pick your poison), I’ve stopped calculating my potential savings.

What would one takeaway from this experience and ordeal?

1. Well for starters, a corporation of this size should limit its already expansive (and frankly expensive) exposure to discount disasters.

2. When introducing new screens to flows, test them thoroughly end-to-end to ensure cohesiveness. The simple addition of a component that allowed me to change from deliveries to pickups resulted in a 50% savings. I’ve received weird looks when picking up my food, and inquisitive managers have asked why my bills have been a hundred and fifty instead of three hundred. I usually end up onboarding them to localbee instead, double-dipping into personal marketing efforts and my own sustenance.

Next: How do you write your meal off as a business expense?

Enjoying these David v. Goliath stories? Check out localbee, where we have democratized the F&B industry. Entirely self-funded and registered as a non-profit, we are OnlyFans for Restaurants, where patrons can subscribe to their favorite restaurants and receive VIP benefits, and restaurants themselves can receive another supplementary second source of revenue. Currently based in Hong Kong, launching a pop-up restaurant in Q2 2021.

I’d like to thank Vickie Leung for the adorable illustrations supplementing this write-up.

Leveraging data to hit new personal records.

A Fresh Start

I started properly running around three years back when I registered for the JFK Runway Run organized by the Rotary Club. I’d honestly signed up for the 5k event solely for the location — the ‘race’ was taking place on a runway, specifically at John F. Kennedy. Five kilometers is peanuts in the world of distance running, but for a novice who had never placed prior, I wanted to see if I’d be able to clock a decent time.

Using the Nike Run Club, I trained somewhat religiously, starting the stopwatch at 200 Water St (my previous residence) and ending in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. I would pick up my pace around FDR Drive, overlooking the East River, cross Battery Park, the Clinton National Monument, continue my trail to the Hudson River stretch and then stop, out of breath, at the foot of the 9/11 Memorial.

Now, this entire route barely touched 4km, but I used to go once in the morning, and then run again on the treadmill in my building gym at night — for three weeks straight. In hindsight, I should have pushed myself further during my runs (for endurance) but I didn’t have the discipline nor the time. On top of that, my partner dropped out at the last moment, due to the predicted race day weather turning for the worse. On the day of, it was raining, cold, and there was a certain air of despair. Not one soul looked happy to be there on the runway, but I was gleaming — I love planes. For security reasons, the runway had been cordoned (coned) off, but I could still see multiple A380s (and his variants) and a single Queen of the Sky in the hangar. I ended up clocking a time of 00:28:08.43 and called it quits. A truly abysmal 9-minute mile pace. I was also out of breath and completely unfit and I didn’t end up racing or training for a race after that dreadful day. I look back on this experience rather distastefully — I should have continued, or at least hit newer personal bests.

2020 Vision

I have a problem — when I obsess over a certain hobby I go all in, whether that’s writing, chess, or (now) running. I utilize data to push myself to the absolute limit in whatever masochistic way possible. I follow relevant subreddits, research for hours, and surround myself in the literature — complete domination is the only goal. This infatuation usually lasts three months and dwindles off when I find the next big thing. Realizing this predicament and working around these restrictions has greatly benefitted my lifestyle — I barely get bored and can devote a solid ninety days to being the absolute best version of myself. Or the worst. I’ve been known on multiple counts to go on month-long benders. But I usually bounce back. After my last break up, I flew back to India and spent my entire time at the gym. Morning runs and evening training workouts. My breakfast consisted of boiled eggs without the yolk and lunch was dal and some chapatis. I hated myself but I was at my peak fitness.

Anyway, I was back in Hong Kong mid-pandemic and a desk job was causing me to be complacent. My week was filled with client work and calls, and weekends were brief moments where I could relax: or aggressively drink. I came across an SCMP article that mentioned a refurbished cycling trail opening up in Sha Tin. I forwarded the link to Julia who had recently learned how to cycle during the summer and she insisted on trying it out. On the last Saturday of November, we jumped on the MTR and rented cycles, cracking a solid 22km at a very reasonable pace. We talked, chatted about life, and caught up. I noticed she had turned on an app to track her segments and the route.

I remember opening up a Strava profile a long time back when I was in Delhi — I was engrossed testing the limits of my new iPhone. I tried breathing life into the old account, to no avail. They’d wiped out my sad runs, with good reason. I registered, signed up for the trial, and slipped down the fascinating lifestyle of distance running.

No one actually smiles while running. Never have words rung truer. The geography of HK Island complements this hypothesis. With residential areas being built on the side of a steep mountain, you’re essentially gaining ~250m of elevation for every 4km. Combine this with a surgical N95 (thanks COVID) you’re looking at a twisted DIY altitude training mask. At least I improve my Respiratory Compensation Threshold:

RCT is the boundary between high intensity activity and severe intensity exertion. Under normal conditions the bodies drive to breathe is based on carbon dioxide levels in the blood. When RCT is reached, the bodies drive to breathe is driven by lactate levels. This causes very heavy respiration and signifies a transition point in which fatigue starts to overcome the body’s ability to sustain exercise intensity. TrainingMask® increases RCT which allows the body to generate incrementally more effort before the point of exhaustion is reached.

Run through the pain they said. You’ll achieve runner’s high soon enough, burning off the holiday pounds is just icing on the cake.

Back to the actual content. I started off slow, with a couch to 5K mentality, but in my mind, the goal was already set. By the end of the month, I wanted to knock out 21.0975 kilometers. Now, the average half marathon training schedule requires 12 weeks, which includes running between 15-25 miles per week over 3-5 days. According to Road Runners, if one’s strapped for time, it’s possible to crash train and safely get into shape within 2 months. If you’re not working/ unemployed. My schedule didn't allow for this kind of flexibility, which meant all my runs were achieved post-twilight. I religiously followed McMillan Running’s Half-Marathon Training Plan but morphed the schedule according to working hours and Relative Effort. RE tracks one’s fitness trend to prevent injury and I habitually noted down progress in activity descriptions.

I set a goal of 30km a week, which quickly devolved, culminating in me setting the bar lower to fifteen kilometers. Now that might not seem like much, especially if I was seriously training for my race, but I was combining this with 45km cycling sessions on the weekend and 10km every single day, whether this trekking or jogging (I don’t count jogging as running). Hong Kong is blessed with multiple treks and trails, and I was knocking one out every week. Last year, Strava moved most if not all of their comprehensive features behind a paywall. Now, if one would like to view their month-on-month growth, visualize their route heatmaps, compare segment leaderboards or take a look at their training log, they will have to fork over the $5 a month. I’ve provided some examples of the locked content below —

Reaching the Mountains

There was also another milestone I wanted to touch. The concept of Everesting is fiendishly simple: Pick any hill, anywhere in the world, and complete repeats of it in a single activity until you climb 8,848m – the equivalent height of Mt Everest. Complete the challenge on a bike, on foot, or online, and you’ll find your name in the Hall of Fame, alongside the best climbers in the world.

Fiendishly simple, yet brutally hard. Everesting is the most difficult climbing challenge ever.

For context, for January, I’d barely even crossed the two base camps — South Base Camp is in Nepal at an altitude of 5,364m, while North’s in Tibet at 5,150m — let alone summit the entire Everest. And this is across 19+ activities, not just a single session. I have no doubt in my mind I’ll be able to cross the elusive peak in the next week since I end up targeting an elevation gain of ~250m++ per activity, but this is definitely some food for thought. I wonder when (and if) I’ll be able to do it one go.

Race Day

The last weekend of January was like any other, Friday meant drinks at Peak — the cafe, not Victoria Peak where I finished most of my uphill runs — wrapping up with poker at night with the boys and the girls joining shortly after. They had no interest in our degenerate gambling tendencies. Saturday was a solid drunch at MEATS, and we closed off the night with a few drinks at a friend’s apartment. I’d told everyone about my plans for Sunday morning and my want to complete a half marathon, and I’d slowly weened myself off alcohol and had switched to plain orange juice by 10pm.

6am, and I didn’t want to get out of bed. I’d barely slept the entire night, but I knew I wouldn’t forgive myself if I called it quits right at the finish line. In my pocket was HKD 100 (to get back home), my mask (I wore it only on public transport and didn’t intend to run with it), my phone (Strava + DND), and my earphones (I don’t like Airpods and had handed my last pair to my sister). With great apprehension, I took the #6 to the pier and stretching as much as humanly possible in the bus to avoid any early muscle pulls. The air was crisp, and I took the first running step at 7.14am.

I finished my first half-marathon 2 hours, 6 minutes, and 42 seconds later.

I’d roughly calculated I’d have to do run two laps from Instagram Pier to Wan Chai, but by starting off at Pier 3 and miscalculating the actual distance, I ended up running three circuits and a bit more. I passed the same people a few times, and they looked in infinitely better shape than I did. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have burnt myself out in the first half but that’s who I am as a person.

I’ll end this write-up with my current favorite metric of 2021.

I don’t think I ever achieved the coveted Runner’s High at any moment during the entire ordeal, but maybe I was just doing it all wrong.

You can check out my Strava profile here, and listen to my running playlist below.

Onwards and upwards, quite literally.

And another consulting story — one can never really get enough of ‘em. This one’s from the Summer of 2017, where I worked for the largest syndicated YouTube edutainment network in Asia. Here, I go into explicit detail on my roles and responsibilities at the media empire and how I built tools to manage and expand their already incredible reach, in various… unorthodox ways. I’ll write about my consulting misadventures in New Delhi (Restaurant), Florida (BioPharm), San Francisco (Tech), Boston (Real Estate), and LA (Marijuana) at a later time.

tl;dr:

If you’re looking for something more verbose read on.

Beginner’s Luck

This was my second time flying for work to Mumbai, the first instance in 2015 when I was seventeen — right after the culmination of my high school board examinations. I’d already received my acceptance letter from NYU and was itching to take advantage of the long summer break. I wanted to make some decent dough to blow in New York.

My Q215 clients had insisted on handholding and onsite work, so once they arranged the itinerary — and after I had handed in the final CBSE paper — I jetted off to the city I’d spent eight years of my preadolescence in. I was apprehensive because I had never left Delhi for work (just yet); nerves hit me while preboarding. All my previous engagements were either in person in the National Capital Region (a fancier way of saying New Delhi and some surrounding cities) or on Skype (for foreign clients). This was all about to change — this also paved the way for my love of flying and hoarding frequent flyer miles. I settled into the two-hour flight with Objective-C for Absolute Beginners: iPhone, iPad, and Mac Programming Made Easy by Gary Bennett and counted down the minutes till I arrived in my childhood city. Cathedral School, Marine Drive, Pedder Road. Unfortunately, I was only in town for a weekend which meant I couldn't revisit my favorite spots for some old school reminiscing or quick bites.

Overall, I had a great experience. I felt comfortable and in control because they had been referred to me by family friends. I planned out the requirements in the first few hours of touchdown and drew out a potential development roadmap they could follow, while also architecting a nascent data model. My primary objective was to build their website, a platform where potential customers could receive personalized shopping recommendations, and receive suggestions. Everything was clear-cut, well-defined, and I didn’t mind going above and beyond to please my clients.

This didn’t exactly hold the second time around.

Unscrupulous Referrals

Two years later, I was finally back in the City of Dreams. But why was I still anxious? Maybe because this time my employers had reached out by unscrupulous means. At the time I was an infrequent visitor of BlackHatWorld,

an internet forum focused on black-hat search engine optimization techniques and services, often known as spamdexing.

Imagine a toxic community revolving around script-kiddy technical nonsense, all hat no cattle. They had come across my profile after seeing some figures I’d shared on their message boards — for the two dozen or so sites I managed at the time, I was holding top organic positions in SERPS for several invaluable, high-value keywords. For a few good weeks, if you searched for ‘best web developers in Delhi’, my company website cropped up. I knew what I was doing, and was good at it. So they reached out, we negotiated a reasonable price for my services and I got to work. But they wanted me to fly to their headquarters in Mumbai. I was reluctant because I prefer to fly under the radar when I’m operating in murky waters. I didn’t care that they might be inviting me so they could understand the processes and potentially cut me out for their next ‘advertising’ cycle, I just preferred to stay at home. I’d also just got into a long-term relationship (London/ New York) and I found it tragically comedic that the one summer we’d get to spend time in the same state I was leaving.

They insisted, and so I left my haven and departed. Unfortunately, the unnerving feeling didn’t go away this time around — even after performing the usual background check on the company. So naive.

Conglomerate and Half

Wait, what exactly did the company do?

Have you ever come across any nursery rhyme video on YouTube which has an outrageous number of views, but on listening in, just sounds odd? And you can’t quite seem to put a finger on why? According to The Dangers of YouTube For Young Children, an Atlantic feature written by Alexis C. Madrigal, the company I worked for

ingests Anglo-American nursery rhymes and holidays, and produces new versions with subcontinental flair.

Think Johny Johny Yes Papa, but narrated by an Indian. Now one might scoff, but that single video (at the time of this publication) has garnered more than 4.3 billion views. A 100-second spot, pushed out in two weeks by two-odd animators, managed to secure their position as the 20th most-watched YouTube channel with only 393 videos to their name. 2nd in the education category by subscribers. They were the third largest YouTube channel in India, behind T-Series (yes, that one) and Sony Entertainment Television. Two media powerhouses and one nursery rhyme channel held the podium.

And this was only one of their channels. They also claim to compete with other big names and traditional competitors in the toddler-education-space such as Sesame Street, Disney, and Nickelodeon. And I can attest to this gravitas: I was present when the founder rejected an acquisition offer upwards of tens of millions of dollars. There were numerous articles about them, featuring their exponential growth and awe-inspiring numbers.

They had 200+ employees spread across two floors in Mumbai’s most sought-after commercial real estate building, Indiabulls Finance Center (IFC), and an upcoming property in the suburbs, AND their previous headquarters in Chennai.

The first floor of IFC housed the artists, in a dimly lit space with all blinds closed (I was told this was so they could focus on animating), and the top floor accommodated management, data crunchers, and miscellaneous employees. The walls were lined with the numerous accolades they received for passing 100K, 1MM, and 10MM subscribers.

They were definitely doing well. During my background checks, I’d done my research, but I clearly underestimated the scale of their operations. So why was I put off?

Grunt Work

If YouTube thought this company was a shining pillar of the community, why was I hesitant to put my best foot forward? Even Madrigal, the author from the previously linked Atlantic writeup, figured something was up. He changed the title from Raised by YouTube to the current iteration to accurately reflect his stance. Interestingly enough, the article isn’t proudly displayed on their website compared to other (less reputable) news sources, even though they specifically invited Madrigal to Chennai! First, a brief on some of the projects I tackled during my three-month tenure, along with some roles and responsibilities, with my comments interspersed:

1. A script that leverages the YouTube v3 API, categorizing, tagging, and updating video titles + descriptions, while maintaining parity across all channels.

This was a trivial task, involving a python script that accepted user inputs and then went and updated the already uploaded video’s metadata to accurately reflect new changes. A solid use-case would be if one wanted to change all social media links across all their video descriptions.

Fairly normal ask.

2. Technical Product Manager/ middleman for the app development company to ship their AVOD/ SVOD streaming app in time.

This was a hassle — the contracted developers working on the project were incompetent and constantly missed deadlines. The app was still in beta by the time I left. I was invited to the Google Analytics dashboard post-launch, and I’ve some statistics shared below:

Still in the scope of my ‘contract’, and relatively harmless.

3. Injecting a customizable smart app banner for iOS and Android onto the website

Smart Banner is a neat iOS-only feature that lets a company seamlessly promote their application on their website via a non-intrusive modal. We also wanted to implement this for Android users and did so by having a conditional JavaScript snippet that checked browser information to intimate the current device and then presents the appropriate banner. I was turned off by the browser fingerprinting but I was getting paid so I kept my mouth shut.

Getting murkier…

4. Keyword stuffing, Black Hat Search Engine Optimization, Cloaking, Spam Comments, Backlink Automation, and ‘Competitor Analysis’

Beautiful.

Disclaimer: I do not support penetration testing into national systems or any systems for that matter without authorized permission. This was purely an academic and educational exercise.

This was the main reason I was invited to Mumbai — everything else led up to this project. They tasked me to create a dashboard that displayed a competitor overview, relevant information, and whatnot, and the keywords they were using to bump their views. Once we knew the path, we generated backlinks along with their keywords across hundreds of pages back to our uploaded videos, essentially spamming numerous blogs concurrently. At its peak, this program was creating ~3 comments per second across many websites. I doubt this played a part in bumping up video relevance, but they told me to run so I ran. They had previously tried this on YouTube itself (when attempting to automate the removal of certain distasteful criticism) but ended up receiving a stern email and a warning from Support. Now they just disable the comments section entirely, but the like/ dislike ratio is a good indication of audience sentiment.

I would prefer not to get into the specifics of the blackhat SEO shenanigans I partook in, but picture a network of bots that wrote and rewrote articles about the aforementioned company to bump up their position on the coveted search results page. Across the many domains they owned, content flowed between them, and paragraphs were posted on the many blogs to increase ‘site value’. I also created a rudimentary crawler which checked to see the content Google was indexing, and take appropriate action. Among other asks, they also, on multiple occasions, requested me to use their seemingly unlimited bandwidth to create a botnet to DDoS their competitor’s websites, hiding behind the ‘stress testing’ veil. And this would have worked — they easily had a LAN of over 300 PCs, not including the render machines which were hosted offsite. I vehemently and immediately put my foot down.

And I’m really glad I did. A few months prior to this stint, I had the unfortunate chance of encountering a Rutgers University who boasted of using the feared Mirai botnet to launch cyberattacks against a large number of business websites (Sony), some odd-Minecraft servers (an extremely profitable strategy), and his university (to get his pick of classes). He showed off a lot on HackForums. In September 2018, Krebs on Security reported the U.S. District Court of New Jersey sentenced 22-year-old Paras Jha to six months of house arrest and ordered him to pay USD 8.6 million in damages.

All the crypto he gained from his malicious endeavors ended up paying for his lawyer bills.

Simple, Sunny, Consistent?

Again, heavily quoting the meticulously planned and well-written Atlantic article:

Many observers respond to their unexpected success by implying that the company has somehow gamed the system. ‘Whenever we [my client] go to the U.S.’, people say, ‘You guys cracked the algorithm.’ But we didn’t do anything. ‘The algorithm thing is a complete myth.’

‘We do not employ the weird keyword-stuffed titles used by lower-rent YouTube channels.’ The company’s titles are simple, sunny, consistent. Its theory of media is that good stuff wins, which is why its videos have won.

Laughable. But I was getting paid, why the backlash? When did I suddenly grow a conscience? A 2019 analysis by Pew Research Center found that videos including or featuring children younger than 13 get three times as many views as others.

My client’s target demographic was consuming ‘edutainment’ content at immense speeds, regardless of what they might watch, and the only barrier to entry was parents opting into their children-friendly service. But as Pew reported:

YouTube explicitly states that the platform is not intended for children under the age of 13. YouTube provides a YouTube Kids platform with enhanced parental controls and curated video playlists, but the analysis in this report focuses on YouTube as a whole.

In another study, a team of pediatricians at Einstein Medical Center, in Philadelphia, found that YouTube was popular among children under the age of 2. 96.6% of the kids in the study had used a mobile. Young children in an urban, low-income, minority community had almost universal exposure and most had their own device by 4. And that was in 2015. But why was this a problem? Madrigal had some strong opinions:

The new children’s media look nothing like what adults would have expected. They are exuberant, cheap, weird, and multicultural. YouTube’s content for young kids—what I think of as Toddler YouTube—is a mishmash, a bricolage, a trash fire, an explosion of creativity. It’s a largely unregulated, data-driven grab for toddlers’ attention, and, as we’ve seen with the rest of social media, its ramifications may be deeper and wider than you’d initially think.

Madrigal also sought out Colleen Russo Johnson, a co-director of UCLA’s Center for Scholars & Storytellers. Johnson did her doctoral work on kids’ media and serves as a consultant to studios that produce children’s programming. Her answer was simple:

‘Bright lights, extraneous elements, and faster pacing.’ In one of the videos I had her watch, a little boy dances flanked by two cows on a stage. A crowd waves its hands in the foreground. Lights flash and stars spin in the background. The boy and the cows perform ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,’ and as they do, the dance floor lights up à la Saturday Night Fever. Johnson told me all that movement risks distracting kids from any educational work the videos might do.

For kids to have the best chance of learning from a video, Johnson told me, it must unfold slowly, the way a book does when it is read to a child. ‘Calmer, slower-paced videos with less distracting features are more effective for younger children,’ she said. ‘This also allows the video to focus attention on the relevant visuals for the song, thus aiding in comprehension.’

But even in relatively limited doses, these videos can affect young toddlers’ development. If kids watch a lot of fast-paced videos, they come to expect that that is how videos should work, which could make other educational videos less compelling and effective. ‘If kids get used to all the crazy, distracting, superfluous visual movement, then they may start requiring that to hold their attention,’ Johnson says.

Generation Z was being subjected to the same low-quality repetitive bullshit, repeatedly. Let’s revisit their most popular video, Johny Johny Yes Papa:

With 4,308,457,676 views (as of November 27, 2020),
and the video running 1 minute, 40 seconds long (100 seconds),
assuming an average watch duration of 30% (30 seconds)

The future leaders of our free world had watched approximately 4098.6 years’ worth of garbage. While Alphabet and in turn Google has not released an official threshold, several third parties reported that ‘views’ do not appear to be counted unless a user (or child) watches at least 30 seconds of the respective video.

The tools I was creating were directly impacting and in turn adversely affecting millions of children. I was disillusioned and distraught. My 19-year-old naive self wanted to make a difference in the world, a grass-roots change, and in the worst sense of the definition, I definitely did.

PBS to Oranges

It’s not all bad. My client’s supposed old-school competitors (PBS, Sesame) were subjected to many regulations and government scrutiny before they created TV content suitable for children. Reformers like the Action for Children’s Television advocated for years to tweak their programming to make sure of this.

Among the specific findings, researchers demonstrated that Sesame Street improved children’s vocabulary, regardless of their parents’ education or attitudes. Another study found that regular adult TV stunted vocabulary development, while high-quality educational programs accelerated language acquisition.

You didn’t need flashing lights to educate, inspire, and connect with children. But the ubiquitousness of the Internet paved way for a ‘new kid on the block’: one that could mass-manufacture clickbait, churn drivel, and use ‘correct tags’ by successfully reverse-engineering whatever someone might enter into the YouTube search box to hit the oh-so-important KPIs like increased retention rate, watch time, and subscriber count. Profit was the end all be all. There wasn’t any novel content no more.

My client’s executives and animators weren’t working with academics who could help them shape their content to promote the healthy development of young brains — instead, they were using analytics and data points to fine-tune content on what ‘works’ and quickly pivot if the goalpost shifted.

It quickly takes a dark turn when you compare content on both platforms. Television has a quality and decency barrier. YouTube videos today are made by randoms with a minimal amount of moderation. The difference is a kid’s TV show in the 90s wouldn’t use an image of a woman dressed as Elsa cutting off her tongue with real scissors to try and clickbait children into watching it. You might ask what I’m talking about, but how can one forget ElsaGate? From the subreddit’s description:

#ElsaGate refers to a wave of videos being produced by different channels, containing pop culture characters (typically Western) that are shown doing bizarre and usually violent/ sexual acts. The reasoning for the existence of these varies. For example — some believe, controversially, that it is a form of communication used by child pornographers; others believe that it is to appeal to children for maximum ad revenue. Others believe that it started as a project for maximum revenue, and has now derailed into a bizarre competition. The majority of the live-action videos are made in Russia and the animations in India.

You slowly start realizing YouTube might have a bigger part to play in this mess.

Rage Against The Machine

If the above tweet doesn’t load (likely a shadowbanned user), it was a screenshot surveying children among the age of 8 to 12 on what they wanted to be when they grew up. From the Harris Poll, funded by LEGO, kids from China are more likely to hope to be an astronaut (56%) than kids from the US or UK (11% in both). In contrast, Western counterparts prefer to be YouTuber’s or Vloggers. Now, this could be attributed to Google’s ban in China, but I do think the survey was a classic misdirection at best, disinformation at worst. Another way to read into this: an astronaut is the 5th most popular profession for kids in the USA and the UK today.*
* out of the 5 professions provided in the multiple-choice question poll

But it still does provide some food for thought.

Money Money Money

As Theodore Porter — the great historian of science and technology — put it in his book Trust in Numbers,

Quantification is a way of making decisions without seeming to decide.

I base most, if not all of my decisions on data. I can attest to this statement by linking to the various articles I have on probability, quant, trading, and chess. And YouTube does so too. But from the above example it is clear that if you torture the data long enough, it will say whatever you want.

Let’s try an experiment. Go to the front page of YouTube on your incognito browser and tell me what you see. Corporations, Millionaires, Product Reviews, Music Recommendations, and Movie Trailers. Ah, really emphasizing the ‘you’ part of YouTube. The most creative people have fallen into irrelevancy, whether it is because of algorithm changes to prioritize watch time, the demonization debacle making some of the most opinionated creators upload less or censor themselves entirely, or vague policies banning people for not conforming to the sites new family-friendly direction.

Last year, YouTube got into hot water for rolling out P-Scores, an internal rating given by Google to channels to rate them based on five key metrics, which are:

1. Popularity: Watch time. Also, longer videos rank better.

2. Passion: Leans more on audience engagement. Devoted fanbases who like, comment, and subscribe will propel their respective channel.

3. Protection: Content’s advertiser friendliness. No swearing, sexual content, or violence, and you’re in the green.

4. Platform: Reviews the platforms on which the content is being watched, for instance, on phones, TV, or other devices or websites. Beneficial to content that is frequently watched on larger screens, primarily TV screens. Seems to target growing audiences.

5. Production: Focuses on high production value. Industry-grade editing, professionally shot cinematic masterpieces will succeed here.

Combine these metrics and the algorithm generates a grade to determine what kind of advertisements could appear on your video. The higher the score, the better the ads, the more money you make. Ratings seem to be extremely important not only to an individual video’s popularity but also to the overall channel success. The issue, however, is that creators have no way of determining or identifying the individual values for each of these benchmarks. I also wonder how a proprietary algorithm can determine the value of a video uploaded based on these particular features.

When you look at how they’ve structured this, you’ll realize that YouTube has been internally judging creators’ videos on this scale for a while now without telling them, once again not giving homegrown creators a chance to play fairly.

Around the same time, three YouTubers reverse-engineered the P-score that judged a channel’s advertising worth based on the content they created. They documented over two hundred YouTubers P Scores, and the only channels with over a thousand are news stations or talk shows. The same channels you saw on the incognito homepage.

Creators like PewDePie (the 2nd most subscribed channel) ranked sub-1000. Casey Neistat, a highschool dropout but prolific YouTuber scored 789. And another egregious example. In 2017, Neistat posted mentioning all ad revenue from his video would go to victims of the Vegas shootings. One can only guess what happened.

His score suddenly made a lot of sense. YouTube replied:

If these were the rules, I can respect the stance. But the very same day, the Late Night brigaded and uploaded a video titled Jimmy Kimmel on Mass Shooting in Las Vegas and ads were present. This dichotomy and preference for television networks mean that P-Scores are also manually edited and coded by people at YouTube HQ. No matter what you do, it seems like if you have enough green, you can swing the ratings your way.

I digress: By using P-Score, YouTube is forcing creators to create more cookie-cutter, standardized content, which follows the rules and the book to the tee, favoring brand-appropriate content over videos that might have a more personal touch. And the data-driven edutainment animated shorts that my clients were producing fit this bucket.

What does this say about the content Google is promoting?

Uncanny Valley

Let’s ignore the red flags and assume the content they’re creating benefits children. I read through some of the comments defending my client:

My youngest son has been watching [my client’s videos] and a year ago he could count to 10 in English, and knew the name of every color in English as well. Most 2-year-olds can do that, but not in a foreign language, so for us, it has been educational.

But then I came across an entirely different beast:

My kids watch this stuff constantly and it's just too much and too random to vet it all. I’m putting a lot of trust in YouTube Kids to filter it to quality content.

That trust was shaken the other day when they said ‘daddy did you know you shouldn't sleep under trees because you can't breathe properly?’ I’m like who told you that. ‘A video.’

Turns out it was a ‘learning’ video produced by one of these outfits, not [my client] but a competitor AumSum. It's some weird urban myth that has traction in South Asia. Compare the locations of the authors with pro-myth vs anti-myth answers. It’s a bastardization of tree respiration biology. They think it puts out enough CO₂ at night to impact humans. So don’t sleep near it because then you’ll be oxygen-deprived.

Apparently, someone green-lit that stinker and turned it into a cute animation. This is funny until you realize AumSum as a whole has 139MM views. Their singular mission is to make educational science videos. And my kids are 100% addicted to YouTube Kids.

From AumSum’s About Us section:

We try our level best to create highly creative and refreshing videos of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. This channel can prove to be useful for students studying in schools, colleges as well as for people of all ages who have a curious scientific mind.

It’s now been edited to a single-line sentence:

We try our level best to create highly creative and refreshing videos of Science.

Touché.

Think of the Children

And for the explanation of billions of views for these mindless videos? I’ll pass the torch to Calvin & Hobbes (from their 28/12/1998 strip) to assist:

Young children actually prefer watching the same episode(s) over and over again, because it’s rewarding when their expectations (of what happens next) get fulfilled. Dr. Jessica Horst of the University of Sussex, in Get the Story Straight: Contextual Repetition Promotes Word Learning from Storybooks, conducted a study where children were divided into two groups. One read the same book with new vocabulary multiple times. The other read a variety of books with new vocabulary. The children were then tested, and those who had been exposed to the same story over and over demonstrated understanding of many new words, while the control group retained very little new information.

Young people assimilate these stories as a pattern. They are chains of meaning that can decipher better and better. And of course, if their parent is present while they’re experiencing this Brave New World, they get used to the comfort.

Though having a big library at home is a great thing, Dr. Horst says, ‘It’s not the number of books, but the repetition of each book that leads to greater learning. We know that children who watch the same TV program over and over again do better in comprehension tests afterward.’

It’s actually exciting to watch the hero fight the villain; it’s really sad when tragedies happen; if anything, knowing the ending makes it better because they can invest more safely or securely in the emotion of the moment. I may be older now but I still remember those feelings. My client’s library is low effort content. I mean: it’s really quite terrible and a waste of your kid’s time. The only reason they have views is that they know how to game the system. Parents search for a popular nursery rhyme and leave kids with auto-play or suggestions, and channels like my client know how to game the recommendation algorithms to keep the kids within their content.

You might say I’m racist. There are other channels in the toddler entertainment business, from other countries, which do the same thing. I blacklist them as well. There are good Indian educational channels on youtube. My client is not one of them.

Another feather in India’s proverbial edutainment cap is the story of WhiteHatJr, an ed-tech startup that was acquired for a USD $300MM all-cash deal in August 2020.

The story might seem rosy, but numerous articles stating that people who have criticized the kids coding startup’s methods or marketing campaigns have found their posts swiftly wiped off the internet. Experts say this could be corporate censorship, which points to a larger debate around transparency in content moderation. This post is long enough as it is, so I’ve linked to some of the more engaging discussions below:

1. India's WhiteHat Jr is startup hell | Comments

2. Script used by WhiteHatJr to teach coding to 9-year-old kids | Comments

3. WhiteHat Jr and the curious case of disappearing dissent | Forbes India

4. WhiteHatJr giving me death threats & Indian media is sold out | Reddit

5. WhiteHat Jr’s founder files $2.6M defamation suit against critics | Comments

Even Netflix needs some restrictions and regulations. With autoplay on these services, it’s not like they have the interests of us or our kids at heart. YouTube is designed to tempt you down the rabbit hole. They want to maximize the amount of time you spend on their website. Do we go back to the reform-regulated PBS and Sesame Street then? A lot of the DVD collections of Sesame Street now have warnings that mention their content might be dated and not suitable for small children anymore. Content that once seemed ‘timeless’ to people who grew up with it will seem wildly out of place now. One can find higher quality video entertainment for children. Maybe the newer more-modern PBS Kids Video and Games apps. Another option would be to find them something useful or interesting to do that doesn’t involve being a stationary recipient of an audio-video feed. So what choices do children have? How can we distract them?

Older teen kids do seem to think they’re entitled to continuous digital mental stimulation via passive consumption — I also wonder this instant gratification robs them of the experience of ever being bored. And if that might influence them. Here:

We regularly make sure they get experience doing nothing too. My wife and I are big believers in the importance of doing nothing, for imagination/ creativity, and also just because it’s an important skill to have in life, to be able to sit and wait.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, the more constantly stimulated the kid is, the more difficult it is for them to pay attention when it’s important.

Recourse?

Does the onus then fall on parents? How do one juggle a job, hobbies, engagements, as well as the responsibility of curating the content your child is watching? Is this indicative of an Orwellian controlling future for our progeny?

In yesteryears, television was used as a tool by our parents to keep us occupied, and in this current day and age, YouTube serves the same purpose. It is downright impossible to control what you’re kids are doing online, I myself was browsing weird forums at 15. What you can do is be a mindful and engaged parent and make the content they watch more actionable. If they end up watching a mindless Vox video on Why no aquarium has a great white shark ask them the right questions:

1. if there could potentially be suitable places to house sharks in the near future,

2. how would you calculate the resources required to hold one in an oceanariums,

3. and the environmental and governmental bodies one would have to go through to get the green light.

They should attempt to see the larger picture and connect the dots. Make them draw a plan and a roadmap. Figure out all the edge cases. Or go the Pacifist route, and task them to create a protest worthy of banning shark captivity forever. Or even focus on the animals themselves, and construct and design an elaborate tank. Don’t ever let them slide — a rolling stone gathers no moss. I personally feel like the best approach is moderation for everything, but hey, people who don’t watch media probably have more interesting hobbies than I do. And would probably harass their kids less.

Further Reading

1. The heavily quoted Atlantic writeup Raised by YouTube by Alexis C. Madrigal

2. In 2018, writer and artist James Bridle gave a TED talk titled The nightmare videos of children's YouTube — what's wrong with the internet today

3. Miscellaneous DDoS Scripts, Retrieved from GitHub

4. Mirai Co-Author Gets 6 Months Confinement, $8.6M in Fines for Rutgers Attacks by KrebsOnSecurity

5. ElsaGate and its respective subreddit

6. YouTube’s P-Scores, Video Throttling, and More: A Comprehensive Guide by Bowblax, Nicholas DeOrio, Optimus, Pescatore

7. All the WhiteHatJr links provided above, separated by article and Y Combinator Comments.

Wanted to share a GIF of my long-time Grail, new acquisition, and first Rolex — the 116610LV Submariner. I’ve wanted the Hulk for quite a while now, but it’s insanely difficult to pick this piece at retail. After talking to tens of authorized dealers, running through hundreds of Chrono24 listings, and talking to God knows how many enthusiasts on the Rolex forums, I received a call from my favorite person of November 2020.

Viren, I’ve locked you in — but there are ten people right behind asking for the same (watch).

I was in a meeting, algorithmically calculating the credit risk worthiness of our users, but saw the message and immediately excused myself. Walked outside of the office and sent the ten grand deposit into the same escrow account I used to secure my Patek mid-March.

Never once did I hesitate in pulling the trigger on this gorgeous timepiece. The online pictures don’t do it any justice. Featuring a green sunburst dial that catches any light beautifully — forcing the watch to morph looks and change personality depending on how the rays hit the face. From some angles, the dial can seem black, and from others, it can showcase a striking bright green color. Fifty shades of green. I’m enamored and haven’t stopped staring since I received it a few hours ago.

My boy went through his usual routine cleanup and authenticity check, and as soon as my dealer verified the authenticity I sent the remaining amount and securely shipped the box and paperwork to my address. I doubt I slept a minute for the two days I waited for it to arrive.

Only one of my friends has had the opportunity to meet my dealer in person — Aman. This was three years ago, and the first few hours of his arrival in Hong Kong were quite hectic. It was my sister’s birthday so we got a boat; he didn’t have time to catch a single breath.

I digress: I picked up the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms and Aman stared, stunned, as he watched the silent deal take place. I chose that particular watch in 2017 because it was the first store you see when you exit out of the Central MTR station. The all familiar clock juts out of the side of the building, surrounded by McDonald’s signage. I said to myself as soon as I could independently support myself I’d pick up the sports watch. And I did just that. Albeit from a second-hand dealer.

I usually choose two watches a year — for spring and fall respectively. The only reason I could afford a watch of this caliber was because of the outrageous gains I made this month. Glad I kept the pedal to the metal on healthcare stocks. I’m also thankful for the immense support from friends and family.

I’m obsessed with grabbing all the (dial) colors of the rainbow to complete my collection. I’ve been told on many occasions I’m trying to achieve the impossible; I feel like a discount leprechaun trying to get my pot of gold. I’ve knocked out three — violet, indigo, blue — and can now add another to my checklist. Please inform me if you know of any watches which look good in yellow, orange, or red. I’d imagine one would be hard-pressed to find a suitable candidate.

There isn’t much I can say about this watch that hasn't already been said. It looks great, super comfortable with glide-lock adjustments, and is probably the most versatile watch I've ever worn. Dress, sporty, at the beach, on a flight traveling for business (can’t wait), any occasion works.

One of my more sensible investments. Happy Early Birthday to me.

Bharadwaja was father of warrior Droṇācārya, a main character in Mahabharata who was an instructor to both Pandava and Kaurava princes. He was the grandfather of Aśvatthāma, a legendary warrior in Mahabharata.

His library, with the undulating books, formed the skyscrapers from which I built my own literary stronghold. He was the only person who I revered and respected enough to have Nanu as the first name on my phone.

Inder Pal Bhardwaj, son of Shri. Kishore Chand Bhardwaj was admitted to Maharaja Agrasen Hospital on the 21st of October 2020 and peacefully passed away a week later at 10:45am. A successful entrepreneur and family man, Nanu not only provided for his nuclear family but also his three children and six grandchildren. He did this through his excellent business acumen and unrelenting love that persisted even when he knew we were all wrong.

He excelled at studies and focused on work output and efficiency. Nanu ended up marrying my grandmother, my Nani, Shubh Bhardwaj, at a pretty young age. Now, I’m not sure of the specifics, but from what I can gather, he was enamored enough to pursue her every day after college. And my nani wasn’t one to acquiesce after a few proposals. She knew her value and waited for the one. And my Nanu was the one for her. They married at the ripe age of 24 (her 18) and proceeded to have one daughter, a son, and another daughter respectively. My mother, Ritu, was the youngest of the bunch. They make up the entire progeny of the Bhardwaj Empire and continue to be the kindest warmest people I’ve ever met in my life. Only last year my grandparents celebrated their silver jubilee, with people traveling from all corners of the world. I can only attribute this fastidiousness to his powerful enigmatic personality — his ability to draw in people no matter what.

Nanu had a certain persona that can’t be chiseled out of a rock, a disposition that separated him from the rest of the Indian grandfathers. I recall walking into his room, requesting some Kurkure. He awoke from his slumber and immediately attended to my desires. He was the type of person who would put other people’s needs ahead of his, and this attitude persisted throughout the entire time I knew him, from birth to adolescence to adulthood. Another instance: I crashed one of the cars, and he never once chastised me for my egregious behavior. I had called him, explaining the situation, and he first asked if I was safe, and then requested me to come home. I wish he shouted at me. I really wish he had shouted at me.

He carried an entire company, multiple families, and numerous generations, on his shoulders, till his final breath. Even when he was in the ICU, he had explicit instructions that my nani shouldn’t worry.

I am fine. Take care of yourself first.

How can one be this good? I wish I spent more time in Punjabi Bagh. His voice calmed (and silenced) everyone in the household. No one would dare to cross a line after he had drawn it into the sand. I wish he would call me nalayak just once more. Nanu is quite possibly the strongest, tender, resilient person I’ve ever had the chance of meeting and I hope I can be half the man he was.

This is the fifth and final post in a series of long-form write-ups on my experiences in helping out in the food & beverage industry in a developing country. This particular section dives into future plans, and what I learned from this experience. TL;DR, we failed. I go into how and why we failed below.

1. Introduction, The First Week & Bargaining 101
2. Licenses, The Bridge Conundrum & Picking Potted Plants
3. Locked Social Media Accounts, Staffing, Utensil Shopping & PR nightmares
4. The Menu, First Look (Video), COVID-19, Kitchen Setup & Bulk Computer Equipment
5. Some Statistics, A Failure, Stopping the Bleeding & Future Plans — you are here

The electronic-jazz music I curated for Maruchi, inspired by Dubai Marina restaurants. Ehrling’s a vibe.

Prologue

When I first came around to penning my thoughts about the restaurant in April — which was mid-pandemic, during the second wave in Hong Kong — I had a general idea that these writeups would, at the very minimum, span multiple sections and thousands of words. At the time, I thought it would be best to preface each writeup with a hook for prospective readers. I explain the formative sentence below:

‘.. on my experiences in helping out in the food & beverage industry in a developing country.’

With half a decade clocked in the professional tech field, I’d previously only worked on software consulting services, which at the very ground level, are intangible assets. App development could constantly be iterated on and reworked if mistakes (bug fixes) occurred. By conveniently choosing this easier option compared to working with my hands, I lost out on the gratification you gain building a product that you can touch and feel. I’ve tried satisfying this curiosity by either lending a helping hand to friends who need furniture built or by working on electrical circuits at PwC, but nothing truly scratched the itch. I have always wanted to walk into an establishment and have ‘presence’. This was one of the biggest reasons which attracted me to Maruchi and in a similar vein, work in the restaurant industry. The brick & mortar space has a certain appeal, especially in a developing country like India, where the guards salute you when you walk in. It’s always the little things for me.

Always Hungry, Always Analytical

I ran a quick analysis of all my writing, including this post. The figures tell a tale:

18 pages, 249 Paragraphs, 396 sentences, 8,109 words 46,908 characters.

35% of words were unique.

Reading Time — 31 minutes, 29 seconds
Speaking Time — 45 minutes, 03 seconds
Hand Writing Time — 11 hours, 30 minutes

My nights post-work was spent writing, re-writing, and consequently removing entire paragraphs of text related to the inner-workings of the restaurant. I chose to omit large sections about optimal CCTV camera placement, minimum-guarantee contracts, building an online presence, and the various tie-ups with meat vendors because the content neither fit the narrative nor did it add any substance. No one cared where we sourced our meat from. It was a fine balance, workshopping with Dhruv, my writer friend from Columbia, and figuring out what would be interesting to readers.

If I would commit to a project of this undertaking again I would have preferred to log each and every day and journal my thoughts. I instead leveraged three tools which helped me keep track of the trove of information I collected over three months:

1. Google Photos and my incessant need to pictographically document each and every aspect of a process. This helped a lot when framing concepts for my writeups because I could easily go online, search for a relevant date, and plug in a picture for context. Everyone loves pictures and love captions even more.

2. My Notes, which started off as a seed on my Notes app ended up flowering on Roam Research. Creating a mindmap was essential to filling in the gaps. Whenever I learned something new about the restaurant industry I wrote.

3. My conversations with Shubham, the owner, and my friend, across WhatsApp and Discord. Before this, I barely used the messaging platform, but the ubiquitous nature of the green-colored app and its pervasiveness of group chats forced my hand. I can safely say I don’t know a single person in India who hasn’t received a forward morning greetings message on Whatsapp.

I wasn’t entirely sure how to go about conducting a post-mortem investigation for Maruchi, so I went back to my schooling days and used the scientific method of testing.

1. Posing a Testable Question (or making an observation)
2. Conduct Background Research.
3. State a Hypothesis.
4. Design & Perform your Experiment.
5. Collect Data.
6. Draw Conclusions.
7. Publish one’s findings: I think it’s safe to say I covered this ground adequately.

Brave New World

In my first writeup, my sub-headline was 30 days, 70 Uber trips, 3 states, and 1 restaurant. Post failure, I can safely venture and say I worked tirelessly for longer than a month, took more than a hundred-odd round Uber trips, and crossed as many continents as the aforementioned states. I’ve spent thousands of hours on this project, across multiple timezones, because I love the service industry. For some reason, putting a smile on the face of strangers comes more naturally to me than helping close friends. It’s not that I don’t help friends, but assisting an outsider makes me happier because I know I’m not doing my actions with malicious intent. Not that I have malicious intent when helping friends. Landing at the property at 9 in the morning, getting back home at midnight, unsurprisingly ended up being worse than my consulting hours.

Now the main question. Why did we fail? Allow me to flip the script with a quote first from Shakespeare’s Brutus at Philippi:

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.’

Unfortunately, in most of these cases, the tide had not led to fortune. Brutus had been defeated at Philippi. Working on Maruchi was tough. Every step we took forward was hindered by problems stemming from electrical, staffing, or interior design. Everything lagged, and making progress and following up with vendors took more time than I necessarily had the patience I had on hand. This wasn’t specific to our restaurant, and as I mentioned in my first writeup, collaborating with the Indian government is analogous to drowning in quicksand. Also, the protests in Delhi limited the outside exposure and purchasing power of the people living in the NCR region. As soon as our project started picking up speed around mid-December, the Government of India enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), sparking widespread national protests (especially in Delhi). No one wanted to go out during these tumultuous times or spend money.

And if you really want to talk about tumultuous times COVID-19 really screwed the project sideways. The coronavirus pandemic contributed to the declining of the f&b industry worldwide.

‘90 percent of New York restaurants haven’t made rent.’ — Gothamist

There is only so much liquid capital a company can have before they bleed. And bleed Management did. With strong opposition to taking on outside capital or loans from banks, how can one singlehandedly build up a restaurant when a step forward means two steps back?

Coming to terms with this failure isn’t easy at all. All along the way, patrons who had visited the previous versions of nightclubs and restaurants on the property stated that the place was haunted, or had bad karma. Looking back, would I still take part in this process knowing what I know now? That it might fail? The answer wouldn’t change.

‘Around 60 percent of new restaurants fail within the first year. And nearly 80 percent shutter before their fifth anniversary.’ ¹

I am young and PRIVILEGED enough to take on a huge amount of risk, with little to no downside. I get to work on projects that I like because of the emotional support I’ve received from family and friends and appreciating investments from other slightly questionable endeavors. Bouncing back when you’re in tech means discarding ideas and processes with no regard because, in the end, everything you make is intangible. I can’t feel what I’ve touched and everything else even remotely personable is veneered through numbers and data. I wanted to work at a restaurant, similar to my want to be a farmer, because of the ‘get your hands dirty’ philosophy. The farmer occupation is a story for another day. This may come across as extremely narcissistic, but I wanted to walk into a place and get my salaam from the guards.

Monkey Tilt

From the Entrepreneur publication (I hate this word with all my heart), an excerpt from Michael Noice. There are generally three types of failure:

1. Preventable failures

   These could have been foreseen but weren’t. This is the worst kind of failure, and it usually occurs because one didn’t follow best practices, didn’t have the right talent, or didn’t pay attention to detail. If you’ve experienced a preventable failure, it’s time to more deeply analyze the effort’s weaknesses and stick to what works in future ventures.

2. Unavoidable failures

   These often happen in complex situations and involve unique sets of factors. This is the type of failure currently dogging energy firms beset by an oil price collapse that almost no one saw coming. The lesson from this type of failure is to create systems to try to spot small failures resulting from complex factors and take corrective action before it snowballs and destroys the company.

3. Intelligent failures

   These are the best kind. They happen fast and don’t consume too many resources. They provide the most useful information for the least cost. This is the philosophy behind the trial-and-error approach, in which a business conducts experiments to find a product or business model that works. The lesson here is clear: If something works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, go back to the drawing board.

Imagine hitting the trifecta without even being privy to this acclimation.

• Preventable in regards to not being aware of the slowness of the Indian Government (even after dealing with them for over half a century),

• Unavoidable because of the protests and the pandemic, and

• Intelligent since Management still managed to flip the place and lock-in a lease for 5-years, with a minimum monthly rent guarantee and a percentage of the profits on top.

Unknown Unknowns

There's a difference between taking a calculated risk, and being reckless — and reckless people more often than not believe they were taking a calculated risk. This is especially true of people with gambler personalities. I am this person.

Excuse the brevity, but calculated risks, no matter how the numbers look, or how precise the calculations, often still fail. The idea that all risk can be eliminated is a fallacy, as there is always a risk of failure unless you're already independently wealthy.

Venture Capitalists talk about the Friends, Family & Fools Round, which is a sardonic way of saying you scammed the people closest to you to invest in your vision. Management never took outside capital, whether this was in the form of friends, family, or banks and that is a massive accomplishment. They were never in debt and still managed to make a profit (and continuing profit, for the next 5 years at least). Hindsight truly is 20/20, but if you don’t try risky projects, what’s the point?

Grammarly indicated the tone of this piece was sad, worried, and dissatisfied. I’m not entirely sure if this was because of the penultimate writeup or because of the bleak outlook of the restaurant and in effect the service industry (due to the pandemic).

As an old Chinese saying goes,

‘留得青山在，那怕没柴烧。’

It means, as long as you are here to stay, there will always be a chance.

Management isn’t going anywhere.

Some More Pictures

G., Self, J. T., Njite, D., & King, T. (2005). Why Restaurants Fail. Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 46(3), 304–322. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010880405275598

Every once in a while a movie comes out which defines the tone for its generation:

• Wiz for the Great Depression kids of the late 30s, providing a real shock of color in a world that seemed bleak and gray. And if ever a remake who better to cast than Lizzo; an artist who can singlehandedly carry the entire cast, no challenge.

• Star Wars for the angst-ridden tweens growing weary of their cultural landscape and looking for a respite from their earth-bound lives. Successfully answering the age-old question of what is good or evil? We don’t talk about The Mandalorian.

• Harry Potter. Loss and love. Hubris and humility. Rules and Rebellion.

And especially in cult classics about love or coming-of-age, these films represent and exemplify that specific era, with a helping hand from the music, fashion, and outlook from one’s life to completely flesh the experience out. But cracks start to form when you judge the story through one lens and don’t let it breathe. Marination of food is essential to adding flavor by immersion and similar to critiquing a diegesis, it’s a process that shouldn’t be rushed.

In this writeup, I explore the nonlinear narrative of (500) Days of Summer and how single viewing film criticism is not a reliable method of gauging a director’s vision and a second watch might be essential to painting the whole picture.

Love? Love! Love.

500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy featuring Tom Hansen and Summer Finn, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel respectively. Over the course of 95 minutes, we are allowed to explore both characters (characters) and their intimate interdependency (or lack thereof). With divorce rates rising and the ubiquitousness of broken families, young adults struggle to know if love is even possible — which is the main theme of Marc Webb’s sleeper hit. I remember watching when I was fourteen and hating Summer: her personality her dialogue, her clothes, and her. Just all of her.

Jesse Tribble and his video essay, ‘3 Interpretations of Summer’, said it best: ‘As we grow older our perspective changes, and over time we have different interpretations of the same film.’ Revisiting this motion picture on its eleventh anniversary this year mid-pandemic opened many doors for further analysis.

Summers’s dismissiveness towards Tom can be quickly judged as negative and hurtful but as viewers, we need to closely examine wants and needs before we ourselves make rash decisions. I break down why Tom’s opening lines create a veneered prejudice:

This is not a love story.

By employing his (and only his) point-of-view we immediately feel bad for him. We all but fell for this films wholly uncommon trope: the ‘damoiseau in distress.’

Tom’s (romanticism)

Tom is a Romantic — his entire identity is built around hipster movies and songs. And the film doesn’t shy away from this hyperbole: carefully chosen brown palette tones, worn vintage thrift, dreams in parodies of Ingmar Bergman, and a square aspect ratio with rounded corners evoking memories of album covers and monochromatic classics. Even the OST has the sweet summery notes of fling, flirtatiousness, and frisson.

He’s also an architect but works as a low-level writer for a greeting card company. He meets Summer and instantly falls for her. But there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. Paraphrasing the 2009 star-studded rom-com: She’s just not that into you.

I’m not really looking for anything serious. Is that okay?
Yeah.

Tom projects his fantasies and desire to find his soulmate onto a girl who, at the start of their relationship, makes it explicitly clear to him that she is not looking for something serious. His agreeability is a catalyst that paves the way for his future pain. For some reason, he convinces himself that he will be the one to change her mind on love, and convince her that soulmates are real. From the minute he meets Summer to the last time they talk, he never sees her in his mind as her own individual person. He creates a fantasy version of her in his head and then feels betrayed when she has needs and wants that don’t align with his. This is a fairly predictable response from someone who considers himself to be the ‘nice guy’; he believes Summer owes him an explanation and a relationship label because he has given her time and love. But ultimately it is not Summer who lets him down, it is his own unrealistic expectations.

After everything he goes through, the idea of Tom as a flawed hero garners feelings of sympathy. After all, he clearly does care about her and he only wants to be loved in return. Despite his flaws, Tom is not an unlikeable character, nor is he entirely in the wrong. But when you really pay attention to the relationship and the dynamics, it is easy to see that Tom acts selfishly from the get-go. He ignores fairly clear signs from Summer that not only is she not particularly happy at the end of their relationship, but she was never looking for her soulmate, to begin with.

I think we should stop seeing each other.
Just like that?
Just like that!

History is written by the Victors

(500) Days of Summer reminds us that women do not exist to be the fantasies of men, which is an interesting and refreshing perspective from a rom-com. You control the narrative when you’re narrating the story and your first piece of dialogue is one to deceive viewers. It’s his perspective, so we get to see when he’s happy and we get to see when he’s depressed. But there’s another deeper level to this misaligned loyalty we end up manufacturing. We superimpose our perception of love along with our experiences onto this film. And that’s why we like it — it feeds our carnal desires, and in this case to be loved by someone who doesn’t share those same feelings back. Tom’s schpiel is the very string that unravels his entire personality. After watching one of Zoeey’s interviews it was interesting to realize that not only men (or this film’s wronged sex), but women too shared feelings of resentment towards Summer’s character. Rejection is universal. Marc Webb subverted the romantic comedy formula by using a dashing lead with misguided ideas about love that he has to unlearn in some way. And that’s alright, for the most part, expectations never match reality.

The problem is Summer is a Cynic.

Summer’s (cynicism)

(Summer): Let me break it down for you.
(McKenzie): Break it down.
Okay, I... like being on my own.
Relationships are messy, and people’s feelings get hurt. Who needs it?

Now at first, a cynical attitude can sound pessimistic and maybe even unhappy. Especially coming off the heels of someone so bright and optimistic. But look at how miserable Tom is throughout the movie. Summer wants to be happier by having realistic expectations about her relationships.

You’re happy?
You’re not?
Well, all we do is argue.
That is bullshit!

Zooey Deschanel flawlessly plays a mysterious, upfront, carefree woman that Tom cannot truly have. She is bubbly, whimsical, but above all: she is her own woman. But also she clearly doesn’t know what she wants or at least fails to communicate it effectively. She sowed the seed of the relationship, and in all aspects incepted the thought into Tom’s mind. By not shutting him down at the start and letting everything play out, her instigation included ignoring fairly (and objectively) obvious points of contention. While Tom is flawed in many ways, Summer is no less guilty. For starters, Summer led him on knowing his intentions. Mixed signals don’t even cut it. More importantly, there was a moment in the climax of the relationship when Tom felt a lull, and flat out asked her what they’re doing and she stalled. She wasn’t looking for anything serious but Tom made extremely valid points regarding a particular romp.

Shower sex? You don’t do that with a friend.

After her silence, Tom realized the nature of their relationship and that he was never going to be her one and stormed out. It would’ve taken him some time to get over her, but that would’ve been his out. However, Summer ends up going to his place to further exacerbate the situation. I do believe Summer’s feelings clearly changed along the way. I think she wanted to try to be that person that Tom desired, even though as far as she knew herself, she never could be. She didn’t immediately back out when the red flags waved high, but it wasn’t out of malice or selfishness. So while she had grown cynical at a young age, she still explored her options in what could maybe be seen as a contradictory way. She proclaimed to not want to belong to anyone but also told Tom about her exes. She truly felt and believed that while still actively pursuing different relationships.

After a couple of heartbreaks, people stop looking for every new relationship to be the one. The novelty wears off, and love becomes seasonal. So it’s easier to distance yourself from partners because that feeling may go away. And nobody wants to be trapped. Summer still likes music and pop culture though. It’s what they bond over. It’s just that Summer doesn’t see music as a sign of a soulmate.

I think people sympathize with Summer when they have had enough. And a lot of that starts by realizing all of Tom’s mistakes. He doesn’t listen when Summer tells him upfront that she doesn’t want a serious relationship. He doesn’t listen to his friends when they try to give him realistic advice.

I think it’s kind of like how they say, ‘There’s uh...there’s plenty of other fish in the sea.’
No.
They — they say that.
Well, they’re lying.

He’s stuck in his own dream world, and he never learns his lesson. So he keeps making the same mistakes. So meeting Autumn can be seen as destiny, but it can also illustrate how deluded Tom is. And to this day, Joseph Gordon-Levitt encourages viewers to watch the film from Summer’s perspective, to understand what it’s about.

The older I get, the more sympathy I have for Summer. The film makes it clear that women like Summer spend much of their lives existing as the objects of male fantasy and carry the burden of navigating a minefield of fragile egos, expectations, and the male gaze. That is a lot of emotional labor that these women did not remotely ask for. Moreover, besides the toxic emotional carriage, depending on the guy and the circumstances, that attention can actually be literally, physically dangerous. Author Margaret Atwood in The Robber Bride, explains this feeling of an internal audience as the result of centuries of misogyny,

‘Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.’

So that’s it, right? Tom is stubborn and has silly ideas about love, and Summer has it all figured out? Well, not exactly. After a breakup, we start playing the blame game. They did this, and they did that. The non-linear narrative plays an interesting role here because one never really remembers every moment (whether good or bad) in chronological order. You always end up bunching the negatives together to form a single opinion. Rachel tells Tom that she does not believe Summer was ‘the one’ and that his depression is being worsened by the fact that he is only looking back on the positive aspects of their relationship. If we’re self-aware enough, we might admit our own mistakes in a relationship. But unless something goes horribly wrong, most relationships end because of compatibility.

A Breather

Now, an excerpt from Brain Pickings:

‘What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?’

I’ve written about Hannah Arendt before but I thought it would be good to complement this essay with a question her friend, Mary McCarthy, asked her in their correspondence about love.

Maria Popova writes, love invariably does change us, deconditioning our painful pathologies and elevating us toward our highest human potential. It allows us, as Barack Obama so eloquently wrote in his reflections on what his mother taught him about love,

‘to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, [be] finally transformed into something firmer.’

But in the romantic ideal upon which our modern mythos of love is built, the solidity of that togetherness is taken to such an extreme as to render love fragile. When lovers are expected to fuse together so closely and completely, mutuality mutates into a paralyzing codependence — a calcified and rigid firmness that becomes brittle to the possibility of growth. In the most nourishing kind of love, the communion of togetherness coexists with the integrity of individuality, the two aspects always in dynamic and fluid dialogue. The philosopher Martin Heidegger captured this beautifully in his love letters to Arendt:

‘Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.’

This difficult balance of intimacy and independence is what the great Lebanese-American artist, poet, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran explores with uncommon insight and poetic precision in a passage from his 1923 masterwork The Prophet.

By way of advice on the secret to a loving and lasting marriage, Gibran offers:

Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

Back to the film.

A Mile in each other’s Shoes

By sympathizing with Tom or Summer, the first two interpretations, the corollary is that the other person is wrong. I don’t think Summer is innocent or a victim but a participant. Compatibility means focusing less on the shortcomings of individuals, and more on their problems together. I can’t say either way that Romanticism or Cynicism is the only way to behave in a relationship. I think this is shown best in the ‘Expectation vs. Reality’ scene. It represents their two philosophies clashing.

There’s no such thing as love. It’s a fantasy.
Well, I think you’re wrong.
Can they exist at the same time?
I don’t know, it depends on how people reconcile their differences.

Somebody has to compromise. But if the biggest issue in a relationship is the definition of that relationship, then probably not.

Well, you’re not the only one who gets a say in this! I do too!
And I say we’re a couple, goddammit!

Intimacy can come in different forms. Sometimes a stranger can feel the closest to you. Or you can share your whole life with someone without wanting to commit to them forever. But as much as Tom idolizes Summer, she knows that. She makes the first move. So both of them enter a relationship knowing that they fundamentally disagree on what their relationship is. And jumping around narratively shows the consequences of that. First, a scene where Summer reassures Tom.

I’m happy. Aren’t you happy?
Yeah.

Then two scenes later, they’re arguing about it.

This is not how you treat your friend!
Kissing in the copy room.
Holding hands in Ikea.
Shower sex! Come on, friends my balls!

For Summer, it’s as simple as:

Because I wanted to.
You just do what you want, don’t you?

Her response that she danced with Tom in the third act because ‘she wanted to’ even today strikes me as casually cruel to the impact she must have known she was having on him. She had a lot of the emotional power in that relationship and she was not at all thoughtful in the way she wielded it. I don’t think there’s nothing to the idea that Summer bears responsibility for Tom’s pain. There aren’t magic words you can say that absolve you of the emotional impact you have on other people. It’s extremely unlikely Summer wasn’t aware of the emotional impact her confused and vacillating attentions were having on Tom.

But why did Tom agree to a casual relationship, other than he really wanted to be with her? Maybe Tom felt like he could change Summer. How many of us have entered a relationship thinking we can love someone enough that they’ll change? Maybe Tom thought Summer could change him. Some people call Summer a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term coined by Nathan Rabin criticizing the film Elizabethtown. He writes,

‘The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.’

It’s funny, because if anything I think Tom was also meant to be the Manic Pixie Dream Boy. Summer feels like a more developed character. Tom believes in one-dimensional romantic love, he pines after Summer, he ‘stalks’ her. He’s exhibiting the typical MPDG ideals. All of this brings up another point, though — is Summer without fault in their break-up? No, of course not. Relationships are hardly ever that simple. There are definitely ways she could have handled things better, and there are moments when she is rather blasé about Tom’s desires and feelings. But she is certainly not responsible for Tom’s imagination of what their relationship could have been, and she is not responsible for being his dream girl.

She makes the first move so our sensitive main character doesn’t have to do any heavy lifting, or she’s just out of reach so our guy is constantly chasing her. You can look at Summer as an evasive, promiscuous ingénue who’s in and out of Tom’s life so he can learn a big lesson at the end. Or she’s an independent character who illustrates how possessive Tom is. I think both can be true. Summer motivates Tom to be an architect, and she moves on and gets married.

You never wanted to be anybody’s girlfriend, and now you’re... somebody's wife.
It surprised me too.
I don’t think I’ll ever understand that.

But ultimately, Summer finds what she never knew what she was looking for. What she never believed in or thought she could have. She tried it out with Tom, but I’m sure when she ended things with him she was more cynical than ever. It’s just that her future husband changed everything and she never saw it coming. She could never even imagine that it could work out with anybody, even if she had wanted it to, because of her parents’ divorce. Summer’s marriage may seem like a 180-degree flip, but people change. That’s life. It’s just that Tom wasn’t the one who made it happen like he was hoping. Change can’t be forced. You can’t say all the right things, sing the right songs, or love someone enough. And maybe it hurts to realize the people we love are more compatible with somebody else.

beech ka bichhoo

And the reason the movie clicks is that it’s only from Tom’s perspective. It tricks the viewer into sympathizing with him, then gradually makes the flaws in his personality more apparent while still using him as the protagonist. It forces the viewer to reassess things as they go, making them more likely to draw parallels between Tom and themselves. I think that this is the whole genius of the film. It so accurately describes most people’s reality — rarely black and white. Tom’s loveable and loathable. Summer is too. Their relationship is at times picturesque and at other times a total mess.

TL;DR: So what’s the verdict? Neither positive nor negative, which is what this essay is about. Personally, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Anyone who claims Summer wasn’t sending mixed messages is not being objective, in my opinion. She was aware of his overtly romantic side. She also proves Tom partially right by marrying the first guy she meets out of the blue after their break up. She was willing to commit to a relationship contrary to her claims, just not with him. On the topic of what could have been: if the film had been remade this year, it would have been interesting to see a perspective shift, with the film shot through Summer’s lens, how she handled the situation, and how this entire ordeal affected her.

Hopefully, our interpretations reflect our own growth, not projecting our Romanticism or Cynicism, but finding someone who complements us. And if we can’t, learning to step back and say:

I guess we can just agree to disagree.
Yeah.

The other thing I’ve seen viewers disagree over is what exactly the ending means. The optimistic viewpoint is that Tom has learned and grown as a person and will handle future relationships differently. And when he meets Autumn, he’s finally found the right girl for him who wants the same things as him. Which is all he really wanted.

(500) Days of Summer shows us that love stories are complicated, and the best thing you can take away from it is that if we allow people to be who they really are rather than what we expect them to be, you’ll be much better off. Tom certainly learns this by the end of the film, and his growth as a character is quite compelling and really makes you root for him. And although their relationship was deeply flawed, they both become better people because of it.

The Soviet government was once trying to clamp down on alcohol consumption and chess grandmaster Tal famously said,

‘The state versus vodka? I'm on the side of vodka.’

His first wife, Salli Landau, described Mikhail's personality:

‘Misha was so ill-equipped for living... When he travelled to a tournament, he couldn't even pack his own suitcase... He didn't even know how to turn on the gas for cooking. If I had a headache, and there happened to be no one home but him, he would fall into a panic: “How do I make a hot-water bottle?” And when I got behind the wheel of a car, he would look at me as though I were a visitor from another planet. Of course, if he had made some effort, he could have learned all of this. But it was all boring to him. He just didn't need to. A lot of people have said that if Tal had looked after his health, if he hadn't led such a dissolute life... and so forth. But with people like Tal, the idea of “if only” is just absurd. He wouldn't have been Tal then.’

There are many great chess players, and in this writeup, I’m focusing on the intoxicated bunch. The ones who didn’t let a round-robin stop their drinking. The battle over the board and their battle with alcohol. The shifting pieces and dizzying perspectives. One move, another, and repeat. Order a shot, bottoms up, and repeat.

Alekhine. Ivanov. Tkachiev. Unsurprisingly, all of Russian descent. Vodka might have ruined USSR, but it fueled these masters. This isn’t a recent notion, nor was it pervasive only in Eastern Europe. James Mason, the Irish-born British-American, led the pack in the 1880s, and was one of the better early chess authors, too.  He occasionally fell out of his chair because of his intoxication.

American master and Pillsbury second W.E. Napier related his experience of seeing Mason helped into the playing hall and seat because he could not walk on his own, proceed to win in brilliant fashion against a strong opponent, and then stagger off after the game to celebrate at a pub.

I've heard Bogoljubov referred to as ‘the jovial, beer-drinking Russian.’ And Blackburne was quoted after stealing his opponents drink: He left it en prise, so I took it en passant. I can’t imagine his British accent helped him with these atrocities. Alexander Wojtkiewicz, aka Wojo, had similar traits. Shabalov recalled:

Aleks began playing chess at an early age, and by the time I joined the Riga Chess Club at age 7 — Aleks was five years older than me — he had become the strongest and most promising junior in the city. He was always Tal’s favorite student, because of his talent and his obvious affinity to the three required non-chess components of Tal’s chess school: smoking, drinking, and womanizing.

The Genesis of a God Complex

These examples are not so much as to prove a point, but more of a syllogism. I can’t count the number of times a friend has sent me the picture of a board with the pieces replaced with shot glasses. The countless occasions I competed while inebriated at my very own parties. A concoction of short attention span (proudly sponsored by gin), rapid thinking, and a massive over-inflated ego always spelled trouble.

‘If I can beat this person while intoxicated, who can stop me sober?’

In my head, destroying someone over the board was the ultimate form of intelligence. Post pleasantries aside — ‘Good Game, Well Played’, the usual bullshit) — the scoreboard was the only judge, and I emerged victoriously. Once, when I was closing an older account, I saw a recently estranged friend come online to play a few games. Rage consumed me. Over the next few hours, I bumped up my score by 400 points. And for what reason? The shame I felt after was incomparable. The game of chess is so closely tied to Ego that we, as players, frequently find that our most difficult adversary is not our opponent but actually ourselves. When we find ourselves in inferior or difficult situations, sometimes we like to tell ourselves sweet little lies.

After playing chess for a year with friends, I qualified for the under 1500 elo tournament. With much chagrin, I walked into the room full of apathetic losers, deadbeats, and some of the smartest people I knew, and picked up my tiny trophy. I hold as much value to this medal I won as I would one of the top buttons on my white cotton shirt. Unnecessary, but essential to keep me together. The button would be left open when I chose the greater evil, Durden’s: a collegiate bar I frequented — which accepted tons of fakes and closed not shortly after for the same exact reason.

Chess Club was hosted weekly on Thursday’s, and unfortunately, that fell right on the day my weekend started. The weekend where I would proceed to get absolutely sloshed, completely obliterated, and forget my roots. Two roads diverged.

It’s not that I drank to forget but to stop thinking, or overthink, or calculate. And honestly, it didn’t help that my roommate was a bartender who constantly woke me up with daiquiris. But I took my love for chess everywhere with me, whether this was in the streets of New York…

or my sister’s dorm in Philadelphia…

or the clubs of Hong Kong.

And around the same time sophomore year, I met a similar sick soul.

The водка whisperer

I met him sophomore year in college. At 17, he achieved National Chess Master status. I was hospitalized for a massive bender at seventeen. But we weren’t completely mentally different. A man can hope. He was a frequent trader and a moderator of /r/wallstreetbets, and I was the subscriber. He competed at a high level, while I had just got my bearings. I lost count of the number of times he drank me under the table. A kid can hope.

Instead of immediate burning jealousy, I took the path less traveled and chose to learn from this degenerate. He was also the very alcoholic who visited me in Hong Kong one summer. I was nineteen years old and him 20, and we walked into Lan Kwai Fong at a breezy 3 pm. A gin and tonic, a whisky on the rocks. Slip a note to the waitress to keep the tap running. Also a voracious reader, he introduced me to his local haunt (or was it his study area?) in New York. A stone’s throw away from Bobst, the premier (and only half-decent) NYU library, Triona’s was suspiciously close to the Chess Forum. 237 Sullivan Street. 237 Sullivan St. 237 Sullivan. I repeated my Chalisa and entered the bar, carrying the heavy Tolstoy book I had borrowed from him the week prior. I don’t know if it was the stories that kept me coming back for more or the promise of free drinks, but my most vivid memory of him was when he got into an intense debate with another patron of the bar on the topic of martinis. Dirty, dry, and perfect, nothing else, but the poor customer had the horrid notion of requesting a vodka-based (base) gimlet.

‘Instead of sommeliers, I really think bars should hire alcoholics with standards, so atrocities like this can be corrected.’

Fast forward a few months and it was the end of a grueling semester. And I was a local at Triona’s. A typical weekday: First few rounds of drinks, followed by picklebacks, and I was off to the races with a cigarette in my mouth. Sparking the lighter before I had even gotten off the premises onto the cold, disjointed roads of lower Manhattan. Sometimes the hostess followed closely, and she did her usual routine of taking off her apron and requesting to bum a cig. I never found her attractive. We shared the lit cigarette. Unknowingly burning a hole into one of my favorite jackets. She shared her story, as did I, but her old eyes knew I was bullshitting through my teeth. She hoped I would make some real mistakes of my own. And to also stop wasting my time at her bar. I didn’t want her to know the truth. I really never found her that attractive.

Don’t come here next week. We’re not open for you.

As Tal changed the way one would think of attack and sacrifice, my budget slowly shifted from popping bottles at clubs to training with the homeless at Washington Square Park. They weren’t really homeless, they just acted the part. I spent countless hours with them, practicing tactics, repeating positions, memorizing chess notations.

Once, at Union Park, on a cold winter night, I didn’t have spare cash for a game, so I instead walked into the closing Starbucks and ordered a large black coffee for my friend. He hopefully greatly appreciated the barter.

ELO & EGO

One of my many parlor tricks was to remember a previous game a master had previously played and regurgitate the positions with swift deciding action. It greatly impressed the ladies.

I think a lot about my inability to process emotions properly without ending up on extremes. Either caring deeply for one significant other or running through as many I can in a fortnight.
I think a lot about where my friend is now in the world. We don’t talk much anymore.
I think a lot about what would his schools of thought would be in contrast to Tal’s.

I doubt they’d differ.

Is that what makes me me?

All I know is I’m still going to tell myself the sweet little lies, to protect my tiny trophy and tiny heart, and even tinier ego, before it’s shattered by someone who can actually see through the facade. At the end of the day all you really have is your memory and your thoughts, and trust me I’d hate to be left alone with them without my liquid companion. As for my halted US chess career, according to the 7th Edition:

USCF standards mention if you are drunk then you are not allowed to participate.

It's why we play here in Asia.

Further reading

1. ‘Even Now, He Will Not Leave Me...’ by Sally Landau. The following interview appeared in 2003 in Russian in the newspaper Chess Week (Russia).

2. Alekhine and Alcohol by Edward Winter. Recollections of grandmaster Alexander Alekhine’s run-ins with alcohol.

A Discourse on Inequality

After a cathartic boxing experience with my vertically challenged friends, I was back to business. I was consulting in the Philippines for a local company, calculating last-mile delivery logistics and pricing estimates for the neighboring isles. After pushing the last line of code I requested a few days off to recover from my carpal tunnel, both from the ring and from the hours spent on my IDE. My advanced diving certification was still a work-in-progress and what better place to become a certified diver than the Pearl of the Orient Seas, known for its beautiful beaches, atrocious golf courses, and a number of five-star villas which would really be four-star villas in a more developed country. But the service was much better here, so I couldn’t complain much.

I’d blocked the entire weekend for this quick getaway, but taking into consideration travel times many of the more exquisite islands were out of my reach. The more pressing questions were: did I want ...

(To go) cave or muck diving?
(To see) reefs or shipwrecks?
(To play with) thresher sharks or sardines?

I made an informed (read: impulsive) decision after a quick Reddit search and an enlightening discussion with my employers.

‘Topside, Puerto Galera is a social place, with easily walkable restaurants, picturesque happy hours on piers overlooking the water, and small shops. Underwater, it offers diverse diving including great macro within a 10-minute boat ride and incredible wide-angle including nice corals and huge sea fans at nearby Verde Island.’ — Bluewater Dive Travel Founder, Scott Gietler

The sun hadn’t risen yet but I set off, hoping to catch the early bus from Manila to the closest pier. I almost missed the bus by a hair. I jumped on and managed to snag a seat at the back, but my success was short-lived. The konduktor emerged behind me, asking for my ticket, and when one couldn’t be produced, he charged me and told me to stand. Seating was for ticketed riders only. Penance for not waiting patiently in line at the terminal. For the entirety of the four-hour bus ride, I was stuck between a fat man and a hard place. It wasn’t the worst experience — I perfected the art of sleeping upright. As the number of passengers dwindled, the conductor stopped caring about the lone-standing Indian, and I was able to grab a seat. We arrived a half-hour later. I walked towards the Batangas pier to wait for the first ferry that would finally take me to Puerto Galera.

Two hours later, the water was crystal clear.

Swimming with the Fishes

I met the divemaster on the first day arriving at Tamaraw Beach Resort. Australian by accent but sunburnt like a native Filipino, the man stood six feet tall and offered only two diving spots at the same location, one for beginners which stopped at twelve feet, and the other which took you towards the famous Midoro Canyons, which featured a current, making it a highly sought out drift dive.

Schooling reef fish, including jacks, snappers, fairy basslets, triggerfish, groupers, trevally, drummers, and barracuda set the scene against vibrant coral reefs that burst with color and teemed with marine life. Turtles, moray eels, cephalopods, and macro crustaceans are all found in abundance.

Like an inquisitive teacher’s pet, I feigned interest and prodded him for the other sites I’d come across on my brief bus google searches, and he warily mentioned the resting turtles, the Kilima steps, and the main attraction. the Shark Cave. Some figures:

Dive depth: 22 - 30m (72 - 98ft)
Visibility: 10 - 30m (33 - 98ft)
Water temperature: 27 - 30℃ (81 - 86℉)
Current: none - slight
Dive type: cave and shark
Difficulty: experienced/advance divers
Boat dive

I couldn’t hold my excitement potentially swimming with nature’s top predators that occupy the blue. He then prompted me on my previous dives. Are you certified? I didn’t answer... I knew if I gave away this vital piece of information he would limit my depth. And I wanted to go deep.

Don’t worry, I’m a Sagittarius, this is in my blood. Co-Star coming in clutch.

After all, I was the buyer and no one else was in the shop, so why would he care? While I dreamt of my sun signs I paused for another second. The hesitation was all he needed. He went around the desk and searched my name on the PADI database. A Hail Mary: I asked if it would be possible to get certified, but he said he didn’t have the time to prep me. I gave up. I’d have to try convincing him underwater via hand signals.

I placed my valuables — wallet and glasses (pre-LASIK) — in the locker and donned the wetsuit. We exited the dilapidated shed and into an outside pit area to wash our equipment. I watched the sediment slide off the neoprene material and drain into the shore. The other tourists looked at us, intrigued, from a nearby infinity pool, and in order to escape their boring gaze, we surrendered to the sea which was on the verge of pulling us in, with its wave after tempestuous wave. We strapped on the chest and ankle weights and slipped on the heavy tank. I almost tipped over and William laughed half-heartedly. No gloves for this expedition and the fins and masks aren’t worn till you’re in the water. We were all set. I regretted not swiping my father’s diving watch. We walked across the powdery white sands and waded in. The lukewarm water hit immediately and I prayed for a riptide to carry me to the boat. I put the regulator in my mouth as an initial test and continued to swim towards the boat. My heart rate did the exact opposite. But it wasn’t panic. What was it?

Fear is a Survival Mechanism

Do you remember the primary school game we played where a student would go around poking everyone with a pointy object? And if you flinched you were ‘it’? I could never really understand the rationale behind this activity — why should one lose because of a functioning central nervous system?

I wasn’t in my mind when I entered the sea. Until then, I had been dealing with a breakup in the only way I knew how: by aggressively trading cryptocurrencies. Ernest Cambell wrote, in his ‘Psychological Issues in Diving’:

Little research exists to characterize the relationship between mental conditions and scuba diving. Other than the obvious reasons people shouldn't dive -- i.e., they are out of touch with reality, severely depressed and suicidal or paranoid with delusions and hallucinations — many people with everyday anxieties, fears and neuroses can dive and do so safely.

Successful divers have psychological profiles that are positively correlated to intelligence and characterized by an average or below-average level of neuroticism. These divers generally score well on studies of self-sufficiency and emotional stability, according to diving physiologist Dr. Glen Egstrom.

Some actual psychological disturbances are well known, but, as for the risks of scuba diving, documented and studied cases are few in number. These include the depressions, bipolar disorder, anxiety and phobias, panic disorders, narcolepsy and schizophrenia.

All said and done, one probably shouldn’t subject their body to 0.445 psi of pressure per foot of seawater if one’s a psychological flight risk. Diving combines three of humanity’s greatest fears — aquaphobia, claustrophobia, and thalassophobia. So why would any sane person engage in this activity? Pushing one’s body to its absolute limits releases a trove of chemicals which are synonymous with an increased appetite for sex, pain relief, and love. By diving (or venturing into the unknown), I would either be attempting to recreate these memories or at least trying to relive them till my oxygen runs out. After not caring for so long (whether manifested by my egregious trades or by me not pulling my weight in my relationship), I just wanted to nurture the pit in my stomach. I wanted a feeling of belonging, happiness, and warmth in the cold depths of the sea. But this would come at a cost. A trove of neurological issues can cloud the diver’s judgment and compromise the safety of those around him. I never reached that point. I never compromised my instructor’s safety. But underlying my descent into the sea, there were other sinking feelings cropping up.

A Big Boy

We dropped anchor. Some people might feel constricted tens of feet underwater, but I feel fucking alive. Because fear is, by definition, exciting. Senses are sharpened, pain is dulled, and all the gears in your body work seamlessly to prepare you to fight. As we descended deeper into the ocean, I could feel numbness around my head. It might have been the tightness of the mask and I adjusted the silicone rubber skirt accordingly but broke the top seal. Seawater filled the mask pocket and I methodically repeated the steps to clear the water so I could see better. Press in on the top of the windows with two index fingers, lifting with the thumbs, and exhaling out the collected water. I could finally see the sea life around me and it was breathtaking. I motioned that I wanted to go deeper by pointing my thumb down with a closed fist. Imagine an inverted Facebook like button. My instructor was skeptical but relented. I cast a quick look at my gauge and noticed we had almost reached 20-feet. I guess my instructor wanted to explore, too.

Once we achieved neutral buoyancy the sea floor opened up in front of us. I settled on the seabed, releasing a mushroom cloud of soil in the process. The nearby demersal fish scattered frantically, and the previous long stretch of beautiful white sand beach was replaced with the current long stretch of beautiful white sand floor. Everything was at a standstill. I motioned the OK ring gesture👌 and we pushed off to the coral reefs on the right. Big mistake. My sudden finning over the reef ignited a cramp and I vividly remembering lashing out to increase blood circulation. I ignored the striking pain to not draw attention to my inexperience. Fortunately, he didn’t see my agitated movements. We glided over and watched the sharks sleep. Hydrodynamic and greyscale, with raw power to spare, I’d never laid my eyes on an animal more divine. One of his eyes flutteringly opened and he bared his rows of teeth. Frisson flooded my body from my toes through to my head. I’d never felt more alive.

Fear is a Social Construct

How can you aptly explain the phenomenon of getting off to a shark sighting? Type-A’s usually float around these personality traits. Marvin Zuckerman of the University of Delaware aptly coined the term ‘Sensation Seeking’:

the search for experiences and feelings, that are ‘varied, novel, complex and intense’, and by the readiness to ‘take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experiences.’ Risk is not an essential part of the trait, as many activities associated with it are not risky. However, risk may be ignored, tolerated, or minimized and may even be considered to add to the excitement of the activity.

Maybe I should stick to other kinds of risk that don’t cause bodily harm, like trading. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux at New York University discovered the amygdala’s role in the unconscious learning of fears in the 1990s:

‘Under acute stress, the brain releases endocannabinoids and opioids – natural pain-relievers that create the pleasant sensation runners enjoy and users seek with recreational drugs.’

Diving, to me, was the vessel (or syringe) to force myself in an aquatic environment where I was at the mercy of the current. Swimming with sharks was the drug, the intense rush which would wash over me like waves. I just needed to descend and press down on the plunger. I was at Puerto Galera for three days, and for three days I beat the sunrise to go diving. The only feeling I can remember vividly is the sense of deep tranquility.

To balance these emotions, I rented a bike, and drove from one side of the island to the other, bumping into a father and son at Pebble Beach who were spending their last few days together before summer stood still.

I also managed to create a playlist with some of the songs I was listening to on repeat while traveling.

Captioned: ‘The Divers Alert Network (DAN) recommends a 12-hour minimum surface interval before flying.’

I can’t think of the happiest moment of my life off the top of my head, but I do have the oddest.

Bueller's Day Off

Another Philippines account. Circa 2019.

I’d recently gotten out of a long-term relationship and had some consulting work in the main metropolitan city, Manila. Clearly hurting, and after roaming unshaven for months, I was in a truly decrepit state. Throwing myself into work usually worked, but this time was different. I got out of the office and was chauffeured to a friend’s place in Makati. I pleaded with him to organize a fun night of distractions and he said he had ‘just the thing’. We walked out of the gated community and hailed a cab where he whispered some Filipino. I looked out the window and could see the red-light district. I stalled.

‘I’m not looking for this right now.’
‘Trust me.’

We passed by scores of strip clubs and I didn’t have the heart to look. Dodgy men approached us, offering us the best of both worlds — a dose of Viagra (to energize us) or a massage (to relax our bodies). We ignored and trudged on. I was getting increasingly restless and made a pit stop at the local Circle K. The Filipinos' preferred tobacco product is Marlboro, which is my choice too. You can purchase loosies (similar to India) but I wasn’t about that life. We paid and with cigarette lit, the crackling and smoke filled the dingy trail we navigated and took us to roads we would never dare walk under daylight. And in the middle of all the dives and nightclubs stood Ringside Bar. Rated as one of the top five nightlife spots in Luzon, the combination of Chinese lanterns and marquee signage depicting tonight’s events really tied the joint together. Posters of Filipino’s dressed up as superheroes were plastered along the walls of this fine establishment. It was unnervingly heroic and asked more questions than it answered. We apprehensively stepped in and the heavy doors closed behind us.

Round 1: of drinks?

I had already assumed the worst. I wasn’t wrong. Unclad women surrounded us, and we were drowning in a sea of breasts and bright lights. I rolled my eyes. Enjoy the view, he said. I don’t feel safe, I shot right back. In hindsight, carrying a quarter of the average annual household income in my back pocket wasn’t the best decision I had made that evening. And as usual, there were many more bad choices to be made.

I switched on my phone to knock out a few games of chess. A notification popped up signaling low battery. This was going to be a long night. We each grabbed an overpriced beer and waited as an hour passed while we spent each minute prodigally, chatting with the bartenders about the current state of affairs in the Philippines. The neon lights dimmed and a spotlight shone on the ring. A British man, six-foot-tall, few drinks down, walked out with a mike to a flurry of cheers from the excited ex-pat audience and the drunken regulars. The British man was dressed as a referee, and I wondered if this was a particularly lucrative occupation or if he just liked the ambiance. In a monotone voice, he ran through the events for the night: Midget Boxing, Wrestling, and a final surprise. For a brief second, his voice cracked; unfortunately, Lady Oil was to be postponed for a later date. I looked at my friend with raised eyebrows and told him it wasn’t too late to back out — we could still head back to my place, close the night, and live to tell the tale. Hush!, he said, the show’s about to start.

‘There are two paths you can take. Yours or the path others choose for you.’

My friend bastardized Emerson’s quote but he had a point.

Pugilism — to not cause much offense

Out came — for a lack of a politer phrase — five vertically challenged men, and as they entered the ring, they threw chairs, punches, toys, and cigarette butts at one another, rallying the spectators. For a good hour, these men attacked one another with ferocity, while the announcer described, in great detail, their bouts and jabs. I had a creeping suspicion this wasn’t entirely staged. And then the surprise. The announcer hadn’t forgotten about the special gift he was about to bestow on his captivated audience. My friend started laughing as if he knew something that I didn’t. What did he know? I hope he wasn’t a drunken regular here.

The announcer-referee walked into the ring and requested one of the audience members to fight the midgets. My friend lept up from his chair and pointed at me. I was halfway through a chess game and my phone was on its final breath. He snatched the phone from my hands and pushed me into the ring. Startled, I slid in between the ropes and stumbled into the middle. Fuck it, I said, and with a princely disposition, I awaited my gloves and personified Ali in his prime. There was silence.

The announcer was shouting and he forced me to get on my knees and to take off my glasses (this was before I got LASIK). Was I really about to wrestle bare-knuckle box against these professional midgets? As if my handicap and skill wasn’t enough, he also mentioned I would have to fight with one arm behind my back. The Brit left the potential crime scene and the five fighters entered.

Five of them. Bare-fisted. Me on my knees. With an arm behind my back.

Reality hit me like the smoke which hung in the air, smoke which I could feel in my lungs and which only now began to worry me — because how could I fight one-armed against regulars, glasses-off, with this thick layer of cigarette smoke separating me from my Joe Fraziers? I crawled to the first man I could see and pleaded my case. I have a family and children, I lied, go easy on me. He assured me this was a ‘safe space’, and no harm would ensue. But I didn’t trust him.

The Fantastic Five

I walked to my corner and evaluated the situation. The best way to go about this would be to have my back against one post and take them on one at a time. My arm span, for the most part, would keep them away until I could figure out their weakest link. I should have observed them while they were play-fighting.

The announcer rings the bell, and they immediately pounce. Two came straight at me with one of them rushing from the left, landing a solid right hook onto my ribs. Fight or flight kicked in and I stood up and started swinging. I landed a solid kick on the closest boxer and managed to slap the other. I used both my hands — I wasn’t planning on keeping any survivors. The music stopped, the announcer stepped in and said I can’t fight dirty. The round was supposed to last a minute but with the crowd jeering on, and with my lashing and kicking not permitted in their rulebook, the official called it only thirty seconds later. The five started laughing and said we should commemorate this moment — and on the tippiest of toes, they held my hand up.

My friend posted this on Instagram on my behalf and I was immediately swamped with messages from people I’d never talked to asking me if I was okay. I don’t know if I was, or am. This was the most-viewed story on my account. My phone died shortly after.

‘500 pesos.’

I paid to get beaten up. Would I do it again? Probably.

From Kenny Rogers, The Gambler:

You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run
You never count your money
When you're sittin' at the table
There'll be time enough for countin'
When the dealin's done

Salamat.

The morning after, I got out of bed at 6, witnessed the sunrise above Dasmariñas, jumped into the pool, and cleansed my soul. Paid penance. My next step was to pick up a safety razor. I shaved my entire beard. A clean and fresh start.

This was one of my many cathartic experiences in Makati. I am recounting this story a year late. All in all, I’d rate the incident a 7/10.

Atomic is a chess variant where standard rules apply, but a piece capture results in the death of its closest surrounding pieces. Imagine the most fire collab between Minesweeper and Chess — and the result is this ugly child. The name was derived from the ‘explosive’ ability of the captor, and in hindsight, probably doesn’t leave the best taste in one’s mouth.

Only close friends could understand the destructive appeal for someone of my stature.

This variant is much more popular online compared to playing OTB because it is difficult to predict which pieces are to be removed once captured. Many times I’ve been in winning positions where I forgot my king was in check and ended up moving another piece — instantly losing on the spot after performing an illegal move. Touch-move is another pet peeve since I’m fidgety by nature. Competing online removes these hurdles, but mouse slips abound.

Other variants might shine brighter and have a gradual learning curve. 960 (or Fischer Random Chess) was recently played at the highest level between Super GMs Carlsen and Nakamura in an online tournament. Or Crazyhouse, a common drinking game at New York University, where you can revive your opponent’s captured pieces for one’s own. Both have their charm, but I always end up going back to basics.

Checks, Captures, Threats

The basis of any game can be distilled into a series of checks, captures, or threats. In a tactical position, your principal goal should be to make forcing moves to rustle the king's castle. Exposing him should be of paramount importance. Now, it might not be possible to put the king under check in the starting moves or outright capture a piece in the middle game, but these step-by-step instructions direct a player to prioritize and triage when they’re in an unfamiliar position. And trust me, there are many unfamiliar positions in chess. A friend jokes that the game has been solved (with the advent of supercomputers and chess engines), but the truth is we haven’t fully explored all possible moves, and probably never will.

The number easily exceeds the amount of atoms in the known universe.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Reaching the top of any website is pretty difficult, and I realized I needed a niche to define myself. Practicing endgames and theory for an alternative form of chess is challenging because of the dearth of learning material posted online. But the flip side is you’re not competing with a lot of people.

There are only five titled players ranked higher than me on the leaderboard, varying in skill and ability. Grandmasters really don’t care about Atomic, which is hurtfully telling.

As the highest-rated players usually do, defining a tablebase of best moves is crucial in ceding control of one’s actions to muscle memory and pure instinct.

Chess, the prototypical game of thinking and reflection, turns out to be largely a game of memory among those who are very skilled. Some researchers estimate that the best chess players have between 10,000 and 300,000 chess-piece chunks in memory (Gobet and Simon, 2000).¹

I suspect that few among us would be willing to say that chess is just a memory game, which challenges our devotion to the game. Which is why these variants stand out. A series of checks, captures, and threats don’t fit into the narrative of Atomic, which is why you need to either:

1. Watch the professionals and rote-learn from them (through videos or games),

2. or Explore the board and permutations and combinations by yourself.

With access to an engine to keep you ‘in check’, you can greatly increase your chances of success. After following my advice, and a string of easy wins later, crossing the 2000 ELO mark for me was as mentally challenging as hitting the runner’s wall. How could I combat this? I switched to Zen Mode on Lichess, which removes all distractions and simplifies the interface. Gone are the ratings, the player titles, and chatbox. One doesn’t realize that chess is as much as a mind game as it as a mind game. Intimidation is a veritable tool in your rival’s arsenal and when wielded can alter the entire position for their benefit.

The board and time are all you need to see, and in effect, all you need to win.

To prove this hypothesis, I played a game against a rated player in relatively slower time control and ended up pinning the queen on the 15th move. With a +9.1 score post-analysis, one can only imagine the next crushing moves that would be administered.

Sorry to call you out like this Bhavesh-S_2007.

I say relatively slower time control because I prefer faster time controls. And by faster, I mean mostly bullet. My play-style is aggressive, which works since a constant attacking pace can result in a quick win. I can also safely say I am outrageously quick online, with premoves composing the bulk of my preparation.

When you’re better than 96.9% of Bullet players, you know something is wrong. Bullet is where you have an absolute maximum of two minutes per side (with a minimum of one), and if you run out of time, you’re lost.

Premoves are a way of predicting your adversary’s move before they play them. You can bust out a ton of moves if you have a general idea of what your foe might play, whether this is during the beginning — when you’re going through your usual opening theory — or in the final moments, when there is a forced mate over the board. Now, this all sounds well and good but can backfire hard. For example, if you’re playing as black and your regular repertoire is the Queens Pawn Game, you can end up losing an entire queen with the following set of moves:

1. d4 d5 2. Bg5 e5(??) 3. Bxd8

The funny thing is we’ve figured how to resolve this by going full circle.

Prophylaxis // προφυλαξις

When your enemy knows you’re running low on time, the next best way for them to win is to either time you out by complicating the position, forcing you to think. And running your clock down. From Wikipedia, prophylaxis is defined as:

a move that stops the opponent from taking action in a certain area for fear of some type of reprisal. Prophylactic moves are aimed at not just improving one's position, but preventing the opponent from improving their own.

By using this tactic, one can stop a desperate premove in its tracks. Picture this: you’re blitzing out your last few moves and there are mere seconds on the clock. There is a forced mate — only a handful of moves stand in the way of you and victory. The board:

If you don’t play the correct sequence — which is to guide the king along with the past pawn — and end up premoving your pawn to the end of the board, the black king can very easily enter and pick up the potential queen resulting in a drawn game.

It’s similar to zugzwang, but the opposite: a laughable situation in which street smarts and a situational awareness outweighs base knowledge.

CS Stuff, mais bien sûr!

I also wanted to see how many titled players I’d defeated over the years, but unfortunately, Lichess didn’t have this feature yet. Why not add it in? The site was open-source anyway. Unacquainted with Scala, I perused the codebase to see how they were passing data through to familiarize myself and send a pull request.

tl;dr: 40 titled players, two women grandmasters, and a handful of national masters.

¹ An exploration

1. The quote was directly taken from Fernand Gobet and Herbert A. Simon’s ‘Five Seconds or Sixty? Presentation Time in Expert Memory.’

2. Bruce D. Burns from Michigan State University explores the ‘The Effects of Speed on Skilled Chess Performance.’

3. For his Ph.D. thesis, Andrew Cook has an in-depth look at ‘Computational Chunking in Chess.’

I hope these resources provide more direction.

Aman Adlakha had the vision to create a film that blends magical realism with a gritty narrative: serving the deeper theme of taking care of one’s family — and the lengths one will go to do so. I merely served as his personal piggy bank. In this writeup, I dive into how we brought this project to fruition and the challenges encountered along the way, including producing a movie during a global pandemic.

Chapter 0: Conception

I remember the first conversation on Christmas day, where he showed me the initial draft of his script. It wasn’t so much his forcing me to read it during a party surrounded by intoxicated friends, but more his insistence which compelled me to join this project. Also, the story was pretty good. Later, we went down to his room and he showed me his research, the screenshots from films he wanted to emulate, and a series of visual references he had collected over the course of the year. Irishman, Joker, and The Lighthouse. I had worked with Aman on numerous projects before and noticed a continuous improvement in his storytelling which further pushed me to get involved at the ground level. The only problem was that I would be in New York and the shooting would take place in Los Angeles. He graciously invited me to the premiere of the film but not the actual production. Worrying.

Reading the script in low light while house music played in the background (diegetic sounds; I’m a filmmaker too) was surreal. As the director/ writer, and later the editor and color corrector(?), Aman managed to weave a story together I’d not normally read or watch. The first draft was in my hands on the 3rd of January, 2020, but the script lock only happened around Valentine’s Day.

To supplement this writeup, I searched for questions one should ask a director post-mortem, and teachwithmovies came through, although I’ve just now realized there were so many better questions on the next page of the website which I conveniently ignored. Oh well.

If you had a chance to ask the screenwriter a question, what would it be?

I am the screenwriter. Bruh.

If you were writing the screenplay for this movie, would you have changed the ending? Explain your answer.

Wtf are you on right now.

Didn’t work as well as I had expected.

Chapter 1: Development

Synopsis: Matthew, a single dad, struggles to make ends meet while working as a nurse for senior citizens. His desire to get rich and give his daughter a good life results in a bizarre sequence of events that change the course of their lives.

I wasn’t as involved in pre-production as I would have liked but I ended up hosting weekly standups to check on the progress and to see if we were on track. Aman posted the casting notice on Breakdown Express and held auditions on the 30th and 31st January, with callbacks a few days later. Before we could hold these interviews, we had to prepare the sides, which are the lines from the script that an actor must learn before an audition.

Did you come to respect any of the characters in this movie? If so, who was it and why?
Respect is a weird term to use. The goal is to make them distinct or similar in ways that serve the story I’m trying to tell. There are moments of reflection and even comparison throughout that reinforce those ideas, e.g.: Sal seeing a younger version of himself in Matthew and even in their relationships with their kids. Sal lost touch with his children and Matthew’s actions all point to him ending up in a very similar, grim situation.

A brief breakdown on the roles which we were casting for:

Matthew (Father, mid to late 30s, any ethnicity) — a single, struggling dad, always looking for shortcuts to success, sometimes at a great cost to himself. He has a tough exterior but it is clear that his love for his daughter is his strongest motivator. 

Jo (Daughter, 8-13, any ethnicity,) — Precocious and intelligent, Jo has always been the smart one in the family. While other kids may spend their time playing on the swings, you would almost certainly find Jo hidden away in the nooks of the library devouring a book about magical creatures in faraway lands. She’s had a tough life after her mother passed away and spends a large portion of her day at home with her dog to keep her company. If there’s anything Jo loves more than books, it’s Benny. 

Sal (60 and above, any ethnicity) — Formerly a traveling businessman, in the final stages of his life, Sal now finds himself isolated. Well-traveled, one can only imagine the stories and anecdotes he has collected along the way. However, he now realizes that his need to be on the road comes at a heavy price — estranged from his wife and kids, he is all alone in his castle of riches and has no one to share it with. Matthew takes care of him in his spare time.

We managed to cast Christopher Parks, Ivy Paige, and Carson Grant for each of these respective roles.

Who was your favorite character in the movie? Why?
Can’t answer that.

Who was your least favorite character in the film? Why?
Same answer.

Usually, cast & crew aren’t paid in student shorts and involve other forms of compensation, like gas remittance​ and meals. Where necessary, we remit the specialized roles for their time, like the sound designer and composer. The call sheet consisted of other filmmakers and working professionals willing to work on the project. We were running a tight ship, with a limited budget and barely any room for error. For complete transparency, I’ve uploaded the major above-the-line costs below —

Another way we saved an exorbitant amount of the budget was by sourcing a relatively unknown camera brand, Kinefinity. An excellent alternative to RED’s, we used Canon mounts to leverage their frontrunner MAVO to achieve an UltraHD full-frame picture. Also, by saving money on the camera body, we could put our capital to use by grabbing a great set of cinematic lenses on ShareGrid, the rental website we used for equipment.

On ShareGrid, a weekend rental costs the same as a single day lease. This is an industry-standard discount and gives access to the ordinary layman/ student who doesn’t shoot during a typical work-week or works on big-budget productions. We ended up using Thursday’s as a buffer to test and figure out the technicals.

Our cinematographer, Harit, tested out the camera extensively before we finally used it for The Caretaker.

Chapter 2: Changes

With our equipment ready, all that was left to shoot was the short. Fortunately, we were working with a 4-5 person crew, instead of a full crew, which meant we had a tighter feedback loop. Delays occur, this project was no different. The plan was to start slow, in close vicinity to LA, and if things went wrong we could revert and reset for another day. For the locations close to USC, the cast could commute on their own, but the Bombay beach shoot required logistical planning. The night before the shoot, our production designer and director went to prep the area and by the time the actors showed up the next day everything was ready to go.

To add insult to injury, Aman faced a flat after returning from a coffee run at Bombay Beach and had to change the tire while also attempting to keep the coffee warm.

And the broken mirror. When you’re working on a rented property, you’re supposed to account for resetting the layout when you’re done. Our talented production/ set designer, Rachael Garcia, had already taken pictures of the previous setup but one of the mirrors we had brought for miscellaneous use broke mid-shoot and was left in the backyard. The cleaning lady arrived later that day and ended up telling the owners the crew had completely trashed the place. A fun conversation.

The desert scene in Lancaster was over-ambitious and almost completely fell apart. The weatherman mentioned a torrential downpour, which would have delayed production, and dampened the mood of the entire set. Fortunately, there was no rain on the day of, but we could see the clouds lingering over our heads, like a sick omen.

Was there something you didn’t understand about the film? What was that?
Not sure if this is referring to the script or development/ production but things always change from script to screen and with this project the ‘magical’ aspects of the story were something that became a lot clearer as we found our set and cast our actors because it helped me contextualize some aspects of the script to fit those choices that we made.

By some miracle, it didn’t rain but stayed overcast. This was particularly egregious in the driving scene, which we had to constantly correct in post because the color balance shifted multiple times. With heavy winds, the tent kept blowing over, which meant resetting on numerous occasions. On top of that, our youngest actress, Ivy, was freezing. With 5-6 pages of dialogue in the tent, which meant 8-9 setups, and losing daylight, ultimately the hardest decision we had to make was to completely rework the scene since we wouldn’t be able to do sequence justice. We had to compromise and work our movie magic and fake the interior of the tent in a decrepit Los Angeles neighborhood. This on-the-spot creative producing was taxing on the director, and on this particular weekend, Aman barely managed to get four hours of sleep.

What did you like least about the film? Why?
Having to wake up at 5 am more than once. Not my thing.

When you’re shooting in interior locations it’s 10x easier to control and micromanage every aspect of the mise en scene. Sometimes along the way you have to come to terms with ‘the plan’ not working out. What is the best possible way to get quality footage without sacrificing performance?

What feelings did you share with any of the characters in the movie?

Their motivations had to feel justified so it helps to picture yourself in their shoes. I also love doggos and magic.

It wasn’t all bad. One of the best days we had was at Matthews's apartment set and the coveted dinner conversation. The actors were way more comfortable, and everyone on set was in their groove. As the executive producer, this was great to hear, because this was also the most expensive location, coming out to ~$520/ day, ignoring other incidental costs. This was also the most thoroughly scouted apartment location, and Rachael had made a whole diagram which we followed to the tee. Thanks to her, we knew the entrance and exits, what clothes actors were wearing, and the schedule like the back of our hand. Pre-planning was key, and all of this meant we wrapped ahead of schedule, getting our money back for the remaining few hours.

The first successful day of shooting was crucial and set the tone of the entire production. In hindsight, starting our shoot with two exteriors where we had little control was a bold choice.

Did you learn anything from this movie? If you did, what was it?
Approaching everything from an ‘is it essential to the story’ viewpoint can help to keep costs down and also narrow the focus of what you need to spend your time working on. We had a very small crew on this project, so it was important to prioritize our time and energy towards what was crucial and not worry about the grandness of anything.

Chapter 3: Complications

Permits are the bane of guerilla and indie filmmakers. I understand the need for bureaucratic paperwork to protect locations and provide blanket insurance for any sort of liability that might occur on set but they slow down the creative process. While we managed to secure permits for almost every place we hit a roadblock for one of our exterior alleyway locations. With our second weekend shoot around the corner, we turned to our mentors for advice. The USC film professors (who will go unnamed) encouraged us to move forward with production and deal with the consequences, should there be any.

What did you like best about the movie? Why?
I loved the effort we put into building the world, especially with such a limited budget. We could’ve easily spent more on fancy equipment and VFX but I thought our focus would be better directed at creating a sense of momentum and tension through the environments we put the characters in. Looking back at the cut, it seems to have worked so I’m glad.

Chapter 4: Birth

Editing over Zoom calls during a pandemic was taxing. Over the entire month of March, we hunkered down and edited the film on LA and HK timezones. We went back to the drawing board multiple times. One of the first scenes we edited ended up being the one we cut from the film entirely. By March 26, we had the first rough cut and received feedback from friends regarding changing/ removing scenes. Over the next week, we reworked sections of the film and even interchanged scenes to see if this affected the flow. The first half of April was dedicated to color correction and grading. I forgot the number of times we watched the film front to back, but by my estimates, we had spent close to 60 hours working on revisions.

What were you thinking as you finished watching the film?
Which time?

The first draft was around thirty-five minutes and I immediately shut it down. There was no way any sane person in this day and age would watch a half-hour short online. The pandemic was affecting our ability to promote the film. Communicating with our audio engineer and composer was difficult. We commissioned Jagrati Marwaha, a visual artist to design our title cards with Community’s style in mind.

Chapter 5: COVID — Complications II

The pandemic had a two-pronged effect on the film, with positive as well as negative connotations. Since production wrapped up in March, just before the pandemic had shut down the entire world, we managed to start editing at the start of lockdown, which meant our entire focus was on pushing out the first cut for internal review.

Did anything that happened in this movie remind you of something that has occurred in your own life or that you have seen occur to others?
Not particularly, my life is very dull in comparison. I’d happily apply to be a caretaker given the recession we’re likely heading into.

The problem was that with everything shutdown we weren’t able to do a ‘normal’ festival run, like attending events and promoting the film through natural channels. Everything was pushed online and using FilmFreeway, we submitted our film to all relevant contests.

Film festivals have deadlines for early entries, and even though we were in lockdown and I was in mandatory quarantine, we knew we had to get our product out. With no response from the first few festivals, things were looking bleak but we managed to pull through.

Chapter 6: Technicals

I thought it would be cool to convert the entire film into a barcode, where each vertical line represents the average color of a single individual frame. Creating the image was as simple as typing a command into the terminal:

python process_video.py movie.mp4 320 180 

Where the last two numbers are the respective height and width of the generated image. The output —

Interesting to note how the film starts with darker tones and gradually moves towards a lighter palette, following the narrative. The orange spike in the third act is a significant scene, and it’s fascinating to see how easily the program picked up the dominant colors.

What is the message of this movie? Do you agree or disagree with it?
I don’t write too often with a message in mind — it’s more about creating interesting characters and putting them in situations that reveal flaws and some sort of evolution in their behavior. I’m sure if you read into every line and action you could find some hints to thematic connections but I’ll leave that to the audience to interpret as they like.

Chapter 7: Pregnancy

Would you recommend this movie to a friend?
I made something that I worked hard on and it’d be cool if other people saw it. lol

What part of the story told by the movie was the most powerful? Why?
The movie and the story are sort of the same thing in this case so I’ll just pick my favorite moment. SPOILER: Matthew in the bathroom after he murders Sal while Jo’s reading the fairytale. That along with the shot of the door as the landlord comes to evict Matthew — the whole scene just played out just as I’d hoped.

If you had a chance to ask a character in this movie a question, what would it be?
I’d ask Matthew when he’d last worn a different outfit? I am definitely to blame for this.

And now the film —

Hope you enjoy the viewing. Thank you to all the other people who made this possible —

Rob Fabiani, Caroline Cai, Miranda Wilcox, Kyle Miller, Ellis Sutton, Jessica Rahmani, Aditya Vempaty, Scott Johnson, Siddhant Lohia, Rohan Meghnani, Pino Henry, and the Adlakha family.

This is the fourth in a series of long-form write-ups on my experiences in helping out in the food & beverage industry in a developing country. This particular section dives into how we delegated, set up the PoS system, possibly got scammed again while bulk-purchasing computer equipment, and broke into a laptop.

1. Introduction, The First Week & Bargaining 101
2. Licenses, The Bridge Conundrum & Picking Potted Plants
3. Locked Social Media Accounts, Staffing, Utensil Shopping & PR nightmares
4. The Menu, First Look (Video), COVID-19, Kitchen Setup & Bulk PC’s — you are here
5. Some Statistics, A Failure, Stopping the Bleeding & Future Plans

Groundhog Month

I find delegating responsibility challenging and with my flight to New York around the corner, I wanted to achieve as much as possible. I went full throttle. My day started at 9 with rounds — either checking the progress on equipment installation or following up on interiors — and ended at midnight. I remember reaching home and immediately having to jump on a call for a couple of hours to plan out the next day.

My main responsibility was to assist in overseeing all managerial operations, but because of constant delays, we weren’t hitting our deadlines on time. While we could complete most of our tasks with a little bit of googling, delegation, and what we call jugaad, the remaining bits had to be outsourced to people more capable than us who knew what they were doing. To reduce our workload, I brought on as many people as we could rely on. The previous logo was swapped out with this current iteration (props to Angad, our in-house designer).

After having gone through many rounds of tastings and after finalizing most of our dishes, the menu design had to come together. We roped in Dhruv, a writer from Columbia and our resident NRI pal, to draft the prose poem for the bar leaflet.

As we were still waiting on our Excise License, we couldn’t officially taste the cocktails we had curated. Drawing inspiration from the speakeasies of Hong Kong, New York, and Bangkok, we formed a drink list that had an international appeal but was still rooted at home:

Setting expectations and having a tight feedback loop was essential in hitting our daily goals, but there was always a crisis of faith. The artist who had been commissioned to paint murals of cherry blossoms behind the bar had messed up. We had envisioned an entirely different outcome for the blossoms that we saw on the day she told us she had finished, and she was charging a higher rate to redo the work. Instead of passing on blame, we took it upon ourselves to compromise — and requested her to extend the branches to hide the dearth of flowers.

Going back to our priority list time and time again was essential. Slowly, but surely, everything was coming together.

Videos are Worth a Thousand Pictures

I've written a lot about my experience at Maruchi, and after three articles without giving you a clear image, I hope you wouldn't mind watching a 30-second teaser of the place:

Nothing is Certain but Death & Taxes

From the video, you will see the restaurant is massive — sprawling over 10,000 square feet in the center of Delhi. Four floors are demarcated into the main, alfresco, bar, glasshouse, private lounge, and underground space. The place is so huge that the Indian government said they couldn’t provide service to the area, which meant internet services would be run via broadband dongles. Since the pond is right above the wine cellar and the administrative office, my civil experience was put to test — how do I prevent water leaking into the sub-basements without cramping the koi?

Problems I never thought I’d have to face cropped up everywhere, and I absorbed more experience about this industry than my previous consulting stint.

Restaurant kitchens are divided into multiple sections for efficiency and management. A pre-COVID operation would have designated areas for a service station, dispatching counter, stewarding (dishwashing area), and food preparation. Even with all of this ready, the pandemic wiped out any possibility of the restaurant opening up in the first quarter of 2020. Now, running lean was paramount to keeping our heads above water. Three kitchens turned into one and the staff was furloughed until further notice. Coming to terms with the pandemic was tough on management, who had been working on this project for the better part of a year. Watching them let go of employees who they had hired mere months ago was humbling. Fortunately, family values run deep and we provided them with as much of a monetary buffer as was humanly possible to offset the loss of their job. We had no choice but to trudge on and to work on the remaining tasks at hand. We had to be transparent — with ourselves and with the remaining staff. But how could we be transparent when we weren’t even sure if we could survive the coming months?

Running the Pass

Ten minutes. Ten minutes is sort of our internal standard for how long from when a ticket comes into the kitchen till the food is sent out — every single dish at the restaurant should be completed within this allotted time, which means a lot of prep work. A Point of Sale system is essential to mitigate mistakes, as well as increase effectiveness. Each different station (whether this is Poissonnier, Rotisseur, Entremetier, or Pâtissier) figured out how to get all their different dishes to a table at a specific time. Gordon Ramsey has a great writeup explaining the specifics in his restaurant.

Orders come into the PoS system from the waiters at a table and are inputted in by the expeditor (usually the sous chef or someone from the front of the house), who then coordinates with the cooks that work on the other side of the line. This is also known as ‘running the pass.’ Management had a great relationship with IDS, one of the premier players in the hospitality solution software industry, and we wanted to integrate their platform into our ecosystem. We also wanted a way to keep track of our most loyal patrons. A third-party firm, EZ Dining, allowed us to do just that. Our requirements were case-specific —

1. Loyalty integration for customers (OTP, mobile #, DOB, anniversary) + SMS notifications for special events

2. Customer analytics. How much they spent, how frequently they visited, and how many people they brought to the restaurant

3. Variable discount rates

At any given time, numerous waiters were running around, and we needed an appropriate number of tablets to handle the influx of orders. Prep happened in the basement, which also housed the Commissary, Butchery, Bakery, Dry Store, Liquor Store, and walk-in fridge. Each store also needed a computer to manage inventory. Ideally, we wouldn’t want to walk up and down between prep and service, but the blueprint of the restaurant gave us no choice. Communication was key.

A keen eye would realize this means a lot of tablets and computers would need to be purchased to digitize the entire operation. By my estimates, we required 4 (3 + 1 standby) desktops, 5 Samsung tablets, and one store controller to back everything up. It was time to go shopping.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (at Nehru Place)

The moment had arrived — we were ready to get scammed again and this time it was closer to home. Nehru Place: an amalgamation of multiple shops stacked on top of each other, where you can find everything you’re looking for if you know where to search. We decided to go to this discount version of an IT hub with Dhruv and my owner friend. As soon as we entered, we were surrounded by hawkers hoping to offload their miscellaneous trash.

Fortunately for them, we had come for exactly that purpose. To buy their trash, to bulk order second-hand computers, and to pick up some new tablets. But as always nothing went as planned. We had only walked a few steps when we lost my friend to a store with bright, flashing lights. His excuse was that he needed to purchase some iPhone charging cables because his pet chihuahua, Waffles, had obliterated his cables at home. I recommended sticking to originals or at the very least purchasing from a reputable shop, but he came back giddily, saying he’d got a great deal and that he had picked up three wires for the price of one. Not to be deterred, and knowing I would ask for warranty information, he swiftly pulled out the card info. We ended up eating at a local South Indian joint and called it a day. The wires lasted approximately eight hours before short-circuiting.

We went back, more determined than ever, after having purchased the required components for assembling. I was also assigned a mission: to break into a laptop. A bit of history: before this restaurant, the property was leased out to a bunch of people who had run the place to the ground. There was a court case between the owner (my friend) and the renters.  I can’t speak much about the court case, but the previous tenant’s laptop had fallen into our hands when they had vacated the premises. The problem wasn’t that it was running an older Windows system but that we didn’t have the charger — which meant the shady places at Nehru place would prove to be useful. For the low price of $10, we made an exact duplicate of the contents of the hard drive while we waited for our computers to get assembled.

In the next and final part, I’ll talk about future plans, and what I learned from this experience. TL;DR, we failed. I go into how and why we failed below.

This is the third in a series of long-form write-ups on my experiences in helping out in the food & beverage industry in a developing country. This particular section dives into how we got blocked by Instagram, retained staff, ordered cutlery, and let go of a Juul-smoking representative of a PR company.

1. Introduction, The First Week & Bargaining 101
2. Licenses, The Bridge Conundrum & Picking Potted Plants
3. Locked Social Media Accounts, Staffing, Utensil Shopping & PR nightmares — you are here
4. The Menu, First Look (Video), COVID-19, Kitchen Setup & Bulk Computer Equipment
5. Some Statistics, A Failure, Stopping the Bleeding & Future Plans

The Curious Case of the Locked Account in the Night-time

In this day and age, social media is an integral aspect of running a successful restaurant. Unfortunately, the owner of the restaurant — my dear friend — hasn’t fully grasped the intricacies of traversing online platforms (yet). His personal profile has the most predatory name you could possibly think of, has photos of him planking, wearing a professional wrestling mask, and logos of previous failed projects. He only uses Instagram to follow animal accounts except for one account of a female chess streamer, and honestly, I can respect the hustle.

Already on his second warning on Facebook and final notice on LinkedIn, any infraction would result in complete closure of his account(s). It certainly didn’t help that he regularly reported my stories for abuse, which essentially negated his vote and pushed him to the bottom of the totem pole for assistance via the helpdesk.

I digress — he asked for login credentials for the business’ Instagram, and I had to push back. I make it a point to limit his access for good reason, but after multiple attempts at manipulation, coercion, and blackmail, I gave in. Not an hour later, the account was suspended, with the support team requesting additional information about our organization while simultaneously barring us from using most of the features on the app.

I've helped scale close to a hundred companies, building their online presence from the ground up, and never have I ever jumped through so many hoops.

The support team shot over an email suspecting us of unusual bot-like activities, and they wanted to confirm with us the nature of the business. We required to send a verification code, name, and the current date written on a piece of paper while we held it up — as if we were part of some sick TV kidnapping trope.

After a week, the support team reverted their decision, but to this day, I can still see him DMing the chess personality from the restaurant's Instagram, challenging her to a 3-minute blitz date on his favorite chess website. No, she never responded.

Slash & Burn

And he’s also the type of person I’d prefer to keep away from my spreadsheets full of important information. One day, after being asked to update the outdated spreadsheets that keep track of our employees’ salaries, I discovered that the total monthly spend wasn’t adding up. My friend came over to tell me that I had messed up, but when I asked him what had changed, he didn’t have an answer. Later that night, I went through the previous edits, and I discovered him overwriting a cell with random numbers at three in the morning. When I showed him the receipts, he didn’t talk to me for the remainder of the day, except to say, ‘See, this is why we don’t like change here at Maruchi.’

It took me sometime before I realized this wasn’t his way of deterring progress, but more so protecting what was sacred to him. His hotel, the one his family has been running for the past half-century, has the same workers that his grandfather hired on the first day of inauguration. This is the very staff that watched him grow up, cared for him when his parents were away, and nurtured him back to health when he was unwell, so I can understand his reluctance towards the current workforce trends which have overturned his worldview:

‘The attrition rate in the hospitality industry in India is set to double to nearly 50% by 2010, up from the earlier 25% growing at an alarming rate of 10 percent per annum.’ — Economic Times

The sharp growth of the food and beverage industry in India has come with its host of problems — staff looking over the white picket fence for greener pastures and better opportunities. Gone were the days where you could reliably depend on a person to stay for the long haul. Hiring for the restaurant was challenging, and we had a lot of positions to fill. A quick primer on the kitchen hierarchy in India:

At the very top, there are the experienced hands, the chefs who have put in the hours and worked their way to the top. As you move down the levels, roles become more niche and siloed, where a single person could be tasked to cut and clean vegetables or only fillet fish. You can manage with a single employee for the top three positions in a classic kitchen brigade, but expect to expand headcount for basic chefs and apprentices exponentially. For our restaurant, the bottom section clocked in at 15 workers each.

Also, front-line hires have a historically high turnover. Training new staff isn’t particularly easy, and loyalty wavers at the first signs of distress. There are three ways to mitigate employees leaving: 

1. Better working hours

2. Supplemental benefits (pickup/ drop-off + service charge incentives)

3. Restaurant prestige and name combined with potential upwards career trajectory

Fortunately, management offered all of the above. We were running everything in parallel — managing a kitchen of over 40, onboarding a service staff of 25, taking interviews, and hiring on the spot if they fit the bill. These particulars also didn’t take into account security and contract workers. Interviews were interspersed with the other tasks on the daily mission list, and sometimes we came across some special characters.

I was drinking with friends at my local haunt, and one of the younger bartenders who was showcasing his bartending tenacity caught my eye. He wasn’t serving as much as flair bartending, and that probably should have been the first red flag, but he was good at throwing the empty bottles above his head, piquing my interest. I ended up scheduling an in-person interview the very next day.

Bruh.

The Golden Touch

Ordering cutlery sets for your home is a hassle in and of itself. Confirming a fulfillment for a 150-cover-restaurant is an entirely different ball game. It’s no longer enough to provide a knife and fork; patrons expect different utensils for desserts and amuse-bouche. The audacity. For this very reason choosing appropriate cutlery was as much as a creative decision as finding something in the right price range.

Scaling costs aside, our objective was to get rates from the two leading brands in India: Venus and FNS, respectively. For a good half hour, we tested the tensile strength (dropping it multiple times) of silverware and weighed it in our hands. Venus provided chai, while FNS was in one of the most dilapidated and depressing malls I’ve ever had the chance of visiting. We preferred copper — as the color would go well with the ceramics we picked up from Khurja — but settled with silver as copper was eight times as expensive.

Copper also has a shorter lifespan compared to silver-plated utensils, required hand-washing instead of directly throwing in a washing machine, and get buffed every six months.

A PR Nightmare

In my notes, I had split up the various tasks into the departments they fell under. Marketing had this notable distinction —

hire a firm that can handle the influx of patrons during pre/ post-launch

Public Relations firms in Delhi have a multi-pronged approach. They will work with the restaurant two weeks before launch:

1. posting on social media

2. preparing a promotional gift basket which will be sent out to media houses (essentially a bribe to get a ‘news piece’ on page 3)

3. and bring in in private parties with influencers who would share on their respective platforms about the ‘new kid in the block.’

This cookie-cutter approach was essential to get noticed, and diverting from the script wouldn’t be advised. The Indian dining demographics were such that upcoming eateries were built on the success of previous enterprises, founders’ names, word-of-mouth, and the number and frequency of celebrities visiting the property.

Dining awards were a joke that could be purchased along with your chosen PR package, and your success as a business correlated with how much you spent pre-launch.

I walked into the restaurant after a grueling previous day — back-to-back Gelato tastings and figuring out what to cut out of the menu — and interrupted a meeting with our first PR firm. It was all going well: the entire team was young and excited, and the project manager had great ideas on how to expand reach further; when she pulled out her Juul and took a hit. Immediate silence. I heard her exhale and excused myself. Outside, I asked her where she picked up the Juul from (there was a dearth in India and prices were skyrocketing), and she mentioned if I sourced a dealer for her she would cut the rate in half. Suffice to say we did not hire her.

In the next part, we discuss how we delegated, set up the PoS system, possibly got scammed again while bulk-purchasing computer equipment, and broke into a laptop.

When I was younger, my mother used to switch off the car when we stopped at red lights. Why would she do that? It seemed like a waste. I was told to hush and not worry. Google wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous in my childhood — I couldn’t bring up that repeatedly turning the ignition on would guzzle up a similar amount while also increasing wear and tear because I honestly didn’t know myself.

This informed laziness was present everywhere, to accept information as fact without double-checking. WhatsApp forwards, the advent of fake news. People would rather take the path of least resistance, and skimming news titles seemed to be enough to form half-baked opinions on today’s water cooler talk. These were smart people I learned from, looked up to, and emulated. News moved on fast enough, challenging deliberate disinformation today wouldn’t even matter tomorrow. Was I unnecessarily spending time that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things? Was it more economical to just not care? It took years before I cultivated the inquisitiveness (or asked the right questions), and a decade before I pushed back (without coming off as pretentious).

In this unnecessarily long writeup, I’m going to attempt to tackle the factors influencing ignorance regarding decision-making through multiple lenses and why overthinking and over-analyzing only works 60% of the time, every time.

The Piano Dilemma ⚓

You’re out shopping for a piano and enter the first Steinway showroom, hoping for a discount. You scoff at the price and walk to the nearby Yamaha store, which has significantly cheaper stock — and outright end up purchasing one. Interestingly enough, historically, both companies rarely offer sales on their products. Still, the pricier option acted as an anchor for the upper limit, which erroneously made you believe you were ‘saving money.’ There were no comparisons made; no research was done, just a sense of unwarranted accomplishment for picking a ‘better choice.’

‘People have a tendency to rely on the first piece of information they receive.’

This haphazard analogy of a psychological cognitive bias is the very foundation of Anchoring Bias. But is it even possible to make all these comparisons? Playing devil’s advocate, we attempt to support this claim, adding more constraints to explain our rationale:

1. rationality is limited,

2. by the tractability of the decision problem,

3. the cognitive limitations of the mind,

4. and the time available to make the decision.

Wikipedia definition aside for Bounded Rationality, ‘decision-makers, in this view, act as satisfiers, seeking a satisfactory solution rather than an optimal one.’ We are incapable of getting all the details which are present (information overload), and the solution which is easier to control and influence will, of course, pull you towards it.

Humans are inherently physically limited by the number of permutations and combinations they can solve for. In the case of the piano purchase, besides maybe looking at the grade, size, cost, and tone of the sound, it is taxing to add another feature before you end up mentally breaking down. And doing this all in a finite time-space? Good luck.

Defaulting to comfort will always garner more sympathy than a rational, well-thought-out approach, which generates discussion and requires thought. Unfortunately, this is the very epigenetic source code that limits us as a species. Where did it all go wrong?

vṛṣabha / كيوثاء / 🐮

I was five when my grandmother mentioned off-hand that I should be cognizant of my actions because Earth (yes, our Earth) rests on top of a bull’s horn, and any disturbance will throw my life off-course. I revisited this statement, and her usual read — The Vedas — didn’t mention this anywhere. The closest reference to this bull theory was derived from traditional Islamic cosmetology, where various animals stand on each other with the breath of the animal controlling the tides. How could I possibly go about correcting my seventy-two-year-old grandmother without getting cut off?

Another unfortunate byproduct of this cognitive bias is a person’s ability to attribute their choice as the right choice. Combined with decades worth of misinformation from elders and sparse access to education, human beings side with the metaphysical and ethereal answers to life's questions. Even with these heuristic crutches, people can combat comfort in predictability by looking inwards. We have an obligational tendency to take our elders’ words for a fact — like my grandmother respectfully did for hers. But, as we reach adolescence, you end up creating memories and pulling from your own experiences, which add new facets to your outlook.

‘The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.’ ― Albert Einstein

Those ideologies that you so quickly adopted when you were younger begin to seem less reliable. Universally accepted truths from the past turned out to be not so true.

This silver lining — the ‘maybe that's true, I simply don't know’ approach — replaces the knee jerk, know-it-all reactions to everything. Or at least replaces intelligent ignorance with a more systematic, careful approach. Is this also pervasive in finance?

Stock Market & Nazi’s

During the financial crisis, bankers knew homeowners couldn’t afford multiple sub-prime mortgages and that they would most probably (read: definitely) lose their cushy jobs once this bubble burst, but why didn’t they stop? Two factors:

1. The lucrative aspect of this business,

2. The market itself providing price signals and them responding appropriately.

If your colleague was pulling in double-digit returns with a guaranteed strategy, would you ever take the road less traveled?

‘ “Rational Irrationality” asks us to ignore the repercussions of our behaviors. We can rationalize short term gains at the expense of long term losses because we need to obtain quarterly profits regardless.’ — Barry Ritholtz, via John Cassidy, New Yorker.

Putting a pin in economics, we touch upon Hannah Arendt im Gespräch mit Joachim Fest (1964), one of the last interviews conducted by controversial philosopher Arendt. In the conversation, highly-decorated ex-Nazi soldier Ernst Jünger came across a farmer who had captured Russian POWs straight from camps, and naturally, they were utterly starving. The farmer retorts:

‘Well, they’re subhuman, just like cattle — look how they devour food like cattle.’

Why wouldn’t they be eating in haste? It may very well have been their last meal. Jünger — who was previously regarded as a radicalistic nationalist but in reality a conservative — comments on this story, ‘It’s sometimes as if the German people were being possessed by the Devil.’ There was simply a reluctance ever to imagine what the prisoners were experiencing. Arendt developed the idea of how:

‘ “evil” is often the result of lack of thought, meaning that people usually don't want to do evil, and certainly don't think of themselves as evildoers. But they also tend to follow the general opinion without critical analysis, and indeed they are often convinced that they are doing a good job.’

People today might have more mundane and less destructive life examples, but the differences stop right there. Both were invested in ideology and employing whatever intellectual dishonesty was necessary to protect their self-images. How dangerous can this complacency get?

In Politics & Healthcare

There are three types of people: the uninformed, the informed, and those who believe they are ‘informed’ by reading one partisan news source and refusing to engage with the other side. Refusing to engage with any alternative information that challenges one’s preconceived notion is an atrocity in and of itself.

I could see this with Trump Tracker — a neutral site I built that tracks the 45th President’s verbal and written promises and attempts to hold him accountable. I analyzed the 1100 tweets that were posted with the link and followed the breadcrumbs.

Out of the 1100+ tweets of the link, over 91% of them were democratic, left-leaning users leveraging the broken promises as a way to neg the President.

I peeked at Google Analytics and noticed another discrepancy. A high bounce rate is atypical for Multi-Page Apps (MPA’s). They were barely reading the promises and not engaging in a conversation or challenging the norm, instead unabashedly posting it on social media.

There is clear empiric evidence that the US healthcare system costs more money and produces worse outcomes than any other developed nation's government-funded healthcare systems. Yet conservatives refuse to entertain any bill that attempts to let the government intervene in healthcare on a mass scale, despite conservatives being generally supportive of more accessible and equitable healthcare outcomes.

Now, of course, there are many areas where the left-leaning are too naively optimistic, but when it comes to economic issues, the conservative ideology prevents many from looking at evidence that goes against it without any bias. They start with the solution (the free-market fixes everything) and immediately discount any other proposed solutions.

On One’s Opinion

Bias on one’s opinion comes in many flavors and forms, ranging from cognitive dissonance to complete disregard of other people's opinions based on your belief system. David Gal and Derek D. Rucker, in their paper When in Doubt, Shout!: Paradoxical Influences of Doubt on Proselytizing asked students to write about their views on animal testing for consumer goods, but the catch was only half of them were allowed to use their preferred hand.

When asked later, candidates who used their less dominant hand were less confident in their views; however, they were more likely to try and persuade someone else about their opinions.

Humans have an innate ability to double down when cornered.

This effect is stronger if:

1. someone’s identity is threatened,

2. the belief is important to them,

3. they think that others will listen.

In Personal Health

I choose to smoke in social situations after drinking. I know the effects it causes on my body and how disastrous it may be in 20 years, but that instant gratification, the hit, is something I hold far more valuable than a future problem. I stupidly rationalize and fall back to the quitting smoking timeline:

1. After 20 minutes, heart rate and blood pressure drop to normal levels

2. After 12 hours, carbon monoxide levels return to normal

3. After 48, nerve endings regenerate

4. In 2 weeks, lung functions improve

5. Coughing and shortness of breath decrease in a month

6. Risk of coronary heart disease is half of a smokers risk in a year

I can go on, but my irrational rationality kicks in: why would I want to deal with nicotine withdrawals — craving, restlessness, irritability, headaches — when I can instead absolve myself with an immediate head high?

Another thread is the vaccination argument, and why hordes of people fall privy to non-vaccination with complete disregard for proven scientific methods. Case in point: Steve Jobs used alternative medicine for treatable cancer.

‘I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.’ — Tolstoy

When did we first happen upon this gross negligence and complete oversight? When did the renowned philosophers of yesteryear figure out that humans are inherently flawed in one’s own bias? Tying this all up together, you eventually arrive at Stoicism.

Allegory of the Cave

I’d like to paint a picture: there are inmates in a cave dimly lit by a fire. The fire is directly behind them, and their only view is the wall they are facing. A roadway separates the prisoners, and the fire and puppet showmen perform using their hands to cast shadows on the wall. Since the prisoners can’t turn their heads back to see the source of these shadows, their only source of truth is the silhouettes themselves. They have no desire to leave, for they know no better life. The one prisoner who manages to break his bonds discovers that reality is not what they thought it was — which is the disorienting ascent towards sunset (or knowledge).

Plato created a thought experiment where the only world the prisoners knew was encapsulated inside a cave. Shadows and the echoes of unseen objects — defined in philosophy as The Level of Mind/ Psyche — deemed their manufactured reality. If the chained ever managed to escape and experience the world around them, it was like nothing they could have ever known. Instead of a black swan event, their freedom, emancipation, or psychological shackles, marks a black swan life — since they had no hindsight whatsoever. Even if you descend the walls of the cave, walk past the conniving puppeteers, and describe to the enslaved inmates the wonders of the sun and the trees, the inmates would still respond with backlash, citing a complete disillusionment to the enlightened, and laugh him right back out. This false belief was prevalent during Copernicus’ time when the sun allegedly revolved around Earth, and again with Galileo Galilei. A similar trend arises when you go against the grain and question herd mentality.

The man who has left the cave annoys the great beast. Cf. Stendhal: ‘All good reasoning causes offense.’

Intelligence by its very nature offends, and in this situation, thinking annoys the Captive. Cognitive dissonance is a fight-or-flight response, and the refusal to understand is the semantic illusion — the glue — that holds their world together. Your brain is subconsciously telling you that taking on this new perspective might harm you. How can we combat this?

Epilogue

All of these examples cropped up in personal experiences, readings, and my albeit recent philosophical endeavors. I didn’t have the answers when I was sitting at the red light, and I honestly don’t have the answers now. What I do have are some of the ways I’ve tried to reduce this prejudice.

We assume everyone else is more susceptible to lapses in judgment, a tendency known as the ‘bias blind spot.’ There was a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto,

‘indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.’

Even if you consider yourself intelligent, you’re not exactly out of the woods. The rationalization of a decision or an action blinds a person from recognizing their perceived stupidity by others. If you choose to rationalize your actions and thoughts without questioning them beforehand, you are willfully ignorant.

‘People who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.’

In ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow,’ Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman mentions that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to improve his mental awareness significantly.

‘My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy — a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task — as it was before I made a study of these issues.’

So what do you do? Reduce risk and exposure.

1. Attentiveness can counter most of the biases mentioned above. I’m not saying one should overthink every single situation, but taking a step back and looking at their current problem from a macro-level perspective might benefit oneself. Form your own opinions, invert them, and always challenge them. Charlie Munger, a staunch proponent of inverting, says it best —

   ‘… it is in the nature of things that many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backwards.’

2. There is also no reason to ever settle for an adequate answer — explore all options and routes and traverse them to the best of your abilities. Even if your decision doesn’t change, the dopamine release will be well worth it.

3. Stop defaulting to comfort. I wouldn’t even want to get into the plight of people who ‘feel’ when they talk, an easy way to dissociate oneself from a formed opinion by relying on emotional support. In Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’', Molly Worthen writes,

   ‘This linguistic hedging is particularly common at universities, where calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces may have eroded students’ inclination to assert or argue.

   … We should argue rationally, feel deeply, and take full responsibility for our interaction with the world.’

4. As was the case with the Bankers and Nazi’s, reluctance (whether this while raking in gains or war-profiteering) is also precisely how and why intelligent people come to hold destructive and invalid ideas — simply because they have a stake in them. Ending on an aphorism:

   Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I have Google now, mother, and can finally retort. The money you save by switching off the car for a few moments at the stoplight is negligible compared to properly tuning the engine, and after a certain threshold, you might end up using more gas to start the car again.

This also doesn’t mean she is going to change, but that’s alright.