The Ice Bucket List

Remember the ice bucket challenge? You probably don’t, given how, while everyone says that life is transient and fleeting and all that, it’s the social media fads that are truly transient and fleeting, and thank goodness for that. Still, back before the days of Pokemon Go and Prisma and Dubsmash videos, the ice bucket challenge was the first of the big social media fads that really made you wonder how crazy (or cray-cray, as the more with-it lot would say) people could really be. I suppose one should be thankful that the capacity for human lunacy is being channeled into absurd social media fads as opposed to, say, starting a world war, but the ice bucket challenge was still a strange phenomenon, whichever way you looked at it. One minute all seemed well with the world, the next, people were all over the Internet having a bucket of iced water poured over their heads. Something that should’ve died a quick death with the first case of pneumonia instead went on for months with celebrities, ‘fifteen-seconds-of-fame’ type internet sensations and even normal, sensible people dunking a bucket of iced over their heads and, for good measure, filming the whole damn thing. If you tried that now, randomly pouring a bucket of iced water over someone, they would probably beat you to pulp and swear never to talk to you again, but back in the day, for one glorious summer, someone was grateful if you did that to them.

While I was perfectly happy with the world dunking itself in iced water as long as it left me out of it, I was worried about what the ice bucket challenge was doing to the Internet. Think about it – at that point, if for some reason an alien species had decided to vaporize our entire planet and destroy all physical proof of planet earth, the only thing they’d be left with is the Internet. Consequently, the only thing the aliens would know about us humans is that we loved pouring iced water over our heads. Is that really a good legacy to be remembered by? It would not have extracted even the slightest pang of guilt amongst the aliens over destroying the human race. If an alien army inquiry into the destruction of planet earth did ever take place, this is how it would’ve played out:

Alien Commander: “What? You vaporized Earth? Have you no conscience? You just killed all life on an entire planet – there must’ve been millions of life forms on that planet, and you just vaporized it all! How could you?”

Alien Soldier: Well, they anyway spent all their time pouring ice cold water over themselves – that’s all they ever did.

Alien Commander: What nonsense! No race could be that daft – you’re just making it up to save your skin.

Alien Soldier: I swear it’s true. See – I have proof! Look at their Internet – all you see is humans having iced water dunked over their heads.

Alien Commander: Oh, all right. Then it’s fine. I probably would’ve done the same thing.

Perhaps someone should take on the responsibility to curate information about humanity for posterity, just in case the planet is vaporized by aliens or melted into oblivion by a nuclear holocaust. Sure, the ice bucket challenge is now history, but if you just let the Internet be as it is, the future generations will only see us as these massive perverts, because about 90% of the Internet is porn. Or they’d see us as this eccentric race that spent all its time looking for monsters on their mobile phones. At best, they’d think that we worshipped cats, because most of the videos on YouTube and photos on Instagram are of cats. It’s just like the way we think the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats. Perhaps the ancient Egyptians didn’t really worship cats – maybe they hated cats and that’s why they seized the opportunity to bury a cat or two whenever someone died. But we misinterpreted it to think that they loved cats so much that they buried their dead along with a cat.

The whole matter of legacies is why I was glad that somebody finally made a movie set during the Indus Valley Civilization. Here was an ancient civilization that must’ve been pretty cool in a lot of different ways, yet all I could remember about the Indus Valley Civilization from history books were two things:

1.    They loved making terracotta figurines. Every photograph in the history books about objects from that time was a terracotta figurine/object/artifact. I’m sure there would’ve been much more to the Indus Valley people than making terracotta figurines – for all you know they would’ve made music, played sports or even devised an elaborate cuisine that was way ahead of its time, but thanks to none of that being found, everyone thinks that making terracotta figurines was all they ever did.

2.   Life started with the Indus Valley Civilization. Ok, and the Egyptian, Chinese and Mesopotamian civilizations. Of course, we were later taught that we all evolved from monkeys, and that humanity first began in Africa millions of years ago. But for a few years before that, history always started with these four civilizations – it was as if there was nothing at all until they all just sprung up around the same time. But while the Egyptians had the pyramids, the Chinese had the Great Wall and the Mesopotamians invented the wheel; the Indus Valley’s claim to fame was terracotta. I like terracotta, but it’s not exactly the wheel in terms of civilizational contribution, is it?

The initial joy of a movie set in the Indus Valley Civilization quickly turned to deep despair when it turned out that Hrithik Roshan and Ashutosh Gowariker, the team behind Jodha Akbar, were responsible for the movie. Still, I thought I’d at least go ahead and take a look at the trailer, just to expand my knowledge of the Indus Valley Civilization. Thanks to the trailer, I now know that there was so much more to the Indus Valley Civilization – unarmed combat with crocodiles, elaborately choreographed dance sequences, Mediterranean dresses, Viking hats, Roman-style gladiatorial battles, greed, corruption and evil dictators. It’s the sort of stuff that’s too interesting to go into a history book, so maybe that’s why they only told us about the terracotta figurines!

Faster, Higher, Stranger

There’s something about the Olympics. For two weeks, you’re glued to your TV screen watching countries you haven’t even heard of participate in sports you barely even know about, with a sense of rapt fascination and keen anticipation. In an era when there’s such an overdose of sports that I barely even watch cricket matches involving India, I find myself cheering madly for an obscure Greco-Roman wrestler from Guinea Bissau because, well…you want something good to happen to Guinea Bissau because it sounds like one of those Sub-Saharan mosquito-infested countries that is always on the brink of civil war with a corrupt dictator on one side and ruthless tribal warlords on the other, the sort of country that has been neglected ever since the Cold War ended and the US was no longer worried that it might be taken over by the Communists. It’s a strange paradox, the Olympics – filled with sports that no one would ever watch individually, but put it all together and package it as this global competition that only happens once in four years, and suddenly everyone is hooked to it.

Officially, the Olympics is the world’s biggest sporting extravaganza that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit as manifested in awe-inspiring feats of sporting excellence. Sure, it’s a bloated, corporatised and elaborately expensive way of celebrating the human spirit, but still. For India, though, the Olympics is the world’s biggest sporting extravaganza that proves that no matter how far we have progressed in other spheres such as science, politics and economics, we’re still utterly shit at sports. As a forlorn sense of déjà vu engulfs the nation amidst the usual gloomy stories of tragic neglect of (non-cricket) sports and widespread corruption in sports administration that are held responsible for this quadrennial display of abject failure, there are still a lot of things to look forward to at each Olympics.

New Countries

The Olympics is a good way to bring you up to date on new countries that have been formed while you weren’t paying attention. Whether it’s through violent civil wars, long-drawn out secessionist movements or sheer boredom, new countries are being added to the world all the time. The Olympics is a good time to catch up on some of these – did you know that Sudan has now split into two countries – Sudan and South Sudan? And that there’s a country called Timor-Leste, tucked away in a tiny corner off a tiny island in Indonesia? Or that there is a country called Cook Islands, a group of tiny pacific islands in the middle of nowhere, whose parliament building is an old hotel and whose defence is handled by New Zealand?

Obscure Sports That Come Along Once In Four Years

Ordinarily, your sporting world is populated by sports such as cricket, football, tennis, hockey, Golf, Formula 1 and, at a stretch, athletics. Or if you were staying in America, you’d have your own parallel sporting universe populated by football (American football though, and not what’s seen as football by the rest of the world), ice hockey, baseball and basketball. Every four years, though, you realize that there are a whole lot of other sports such as judo, archery, kayaking, synchronized swimming, handball and a variety of equestrian events which only seem to come up each time the Olympics are round the corner. While I’m sure that there are other competitions keeping participants of such sports gainfully occupied for the remaining four years, it really feels like they all stay hidden under a rock for four years, come out each time the Olympics is round the corner, and go back to their respective rocks once the Olympics are over, gleefully clutching their medals or bitterly nursing their disappointment, as the case may be.

New Sports That You Thought Were Not Really Sports

The Olympics is also a time when you encounter baffling new sports that you weren’t even aware of, and aren’t sure if they ought to qualify as a ‘sport’ in the first place. Now, many of you might be aware that cricket has been trying to get itself into the Olympics, and unsuccessfully at that, for quite a long time. A lot of you might think this is fair enough since there are only about 8-9 countries that seriously play cricket. Sure, countries like UAE, Hong Kong and even the far-flung Papua New Guinea have cricket teams, but these are the sort of teams that you feel were formed by a group of South Asian expats with nothing much to do in their spare time, so it shouldn’t count. The kind of team where, if you moved to that country and so much as picked a cricket bat, you’d be invited to join their national team. But did you know that Trampoline is actually an Olympic sport? Yes, something that kids jump up and down on during birthday parties on American TV shows is now an Olympic sport, but cricket and rugby are not. In the past, the Olympics has had such obscure sports like Basque Pelota, Jeu de paume and Croque monsieur on its roster. Well, all right…not Croque monsieur – that’s actually a French dish involving ham, cheese and bread, but I bet you wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t clarified it. So, while cricket is unlikely to make it to the Olympics, it’s quite likely that Thumb Wrestling might!

The Chinese Are Taking Over

Cyber warfare, human rights abuse and electronic goods are not the only fields where the Chinese are taking over – the Chinese are all over the Olympics. And it’s not just for China – Chinese athletes who don’t make it to their national teams are joining other countries just to play in the Olympics – so you have Portuguese table tennis players, Uzbek weight lifters and Armenian badminton players that are all actually Chinese, winning medals on behalf of their adopted countries.

Ok, so I’m not sure if that last point is something to look forward to. On the bright side, though, even strife-torn Kosovo, a country that broke away from a country that broke away from a country; a country that has only been in the news for ethnic cleansing all these years, has already gone and won an Olympic gold. The bad news, though, is that this probably means we can add Kosovo to the list of countries that will beat India at the medals tally. Back when I was growing up, there were a lot of kids learning judo, karate and taekwondo – I’d thought we’d at least be winning medals in these by the time I grew up. Sadly, it turned out it was only good for breaking wooden boards and wearing coloured belts.

What the Duck?

The grass is always greener on the other side, and it’s about time somebody blamed Monsanto and genetic modification for it.

Or the Japanese.

Wherever highly advanced technology is used in pursuit of the absurd, expect the Japanese to be there. Back when I was a kid, I’d seen a picture of square watermelons in the newspapers, and it turned out it was a Japanese thing. Since that day, I’d always been suspicious of the Japanese when it came to technology. If a country with the latest, greatest, state-of-the-art, cutting edge technology at its disposal could use it to come up with square watermelons, you wouldn’t put anything past them. Over the years, the Japanese have gone on to repeatedly demonstrate beyond a shadow of doubt that my fears were well founded. A vending machine that dispenses underwear? Check. A toilet with controls more complicated than an airline cockpit? Check. A robotic pet with all the trouble of a real pet but without the fun? Check. A device worn around your face that makes you look like a cartoon lion, to prevent your hair from falling into your bowl of soupy ramen? Check. While corporations use technology in pursuit of profit and Governments use it to make bombs, the Japanese use technology to create ridiculous vending machines.

While it can deliver dubious benefits when in the wrong hands, there is a lot of good that technology has done – it’s cured a lot of diseases, given us access to so much information and allowed us to watch Game of Thrones on the same day as it’s released in the US. Not being Amish, I’m by and large pro technology – I use smart phones, order groceries online and, thanks to Google Maps, am finally not in the embarrassing position of refusing to ask for directions and getting lost. I think Google Maps has done a great favour to all men – we finally don’t need to ask for directions, something that we hated doing in the first place.

Another example of good technology is predictive texting, although that’s probably the wrong term for it. Whatever it’s called officially, I’m impressed that my phone is able to predict the word I’m trying to form in the middle of typing, and suggesting options that would save me time. Of course, sometimes it’ll lead to massive gaffes, with auto correct deciding, in its infinite wisdom, that large bosoms are a more plausible reason for disconnecting a client’s call than being busy, and therefore changing “I’m busy” to “I’m busty”. Still, I can live with the occasional faux pas in exchange for the overall benefit this technology provides. What has utterly baffled me, though, is that the same predictive technology can also detect when you’re trying to use swear words, and then simply refuse to type them out. Ever. It’s as if there is some technological moral police coded into that software that’s decided that swearing is bad for you. I could understand if they had a child mode that enabled the phone to do this – but why have it on all phones? We’re swearing all the time anyway, so why does the phone have to step in and decide it’s not right? We get enough lessons in morality from religion, the censor board, assorted busybodies and the government. To compound the issue, the phone refuses to save any swear word even after I’ve used it repeatedly. Fuck is always changed to duck, bastard is changed to batter, bitch is changed to botch and asshole is changed to the mystifying ‘Anole’. Why?

But coming back to good technology, while I don’t care much for drones delivering pizzas or any other packages, I am excited about driverless cars. But while driverless cars are perfect for those Western countries where traffic rules are taken seriously and good driving skills are enough to get by on the roads, what happens in a country like India where you’ll often land up in trouble or cause a traffic jam if you’re following traffic rules? More crucially, what happens when a driverless car gets into an accident with a human-driven car on a busy Delhi road? Can the car start abusing in chaste Hindi, to create the right aura of menace and intimidation? Will the driverless car be able to threaten the guy in the other car by claiming to know the police commissioner or a local politician? And what about the human in the other car – how does he go about hurling abuses at a car or beating up a car?

It’s the sort of oversight that could result in driverless cars failing in India. Just like it happened with vending machines – I think the reason they didn’t succeed in India is that they don’t allow you to bargain. In a country that boasts a proud tradition of bargaining, that’s suicide. It deprives one of the sweet satisfaction of a well-earned bargain, that proud glow of vanquishing the shopkeeper in his own game and getting a deal that someone of a weaker disposition would not have obtained, which makes the purchase worth savouring. Perhaps with the advent of artificial intelligence, they could come up with a vending machine that could bargain – it would be just the sort of vending machine that would work in India.

Picture this – there’s a vending machine that lists the price of a Coke can as Rs 30. A man enters a ten-rupee note and presses the button to dispense the coke.

Vending Machine: Rupees ten? Are you kidding me? That wont even cover the cost of electricity I’m using up in this transaction.

Man: It’s water and sugar, pretty much. I can get the same thing for 20 elsewhere. 30 is too much. I could give you 15, but not a paisa more than that.

Vending Machine: Oh come on, have a heart. I know I don’t, but that’s because I’m a vending machine. Still, everyone has to make a living…you think I’ll be allowed to operate here if I don’t earn money? It’ll be the junkyard for me – rotting away in obscurity alongside old TVs and refrigerators, valued only as scrap metal. Make it 25 at least.

Man: No way, I know all your tricks; I wont fall for that sob story. 20 is the best I can do – I know you’ll still make a neat little profit out of that. Otherwise I’ll walk away.

Man starts walking away.

Vending machine: Fine – see if you can get the Coke for lesser anywhere else. I promise you my Coke is the cheapest.

(Secretly hoping that man will turn around and come back. But man continues to walk away, secretly hoping that vending machine will call out after him.)

Vending machine: All right, all right, 20 rupees it is! Here, come back and take it.

Man walks away glugging the can of Coke, refreshed more by the sweet satisfaction of a perfectly executed bargain than the Coke itself.

Scientific Progress Goes Boink

A couple of months ago, the scientific community, the community of people that get excited about everything, and the larger community in general, were falling over themselves in excitement at the discovery of gravitational waves. It was hailed as the next big scientific discovery, the biggest thing to have happened to science since quantum mechanics. Of course, with the advent of social media, everything seems like the biggest thing since sliced bread, the iPhone & the season finale of Game of Thrones put together, so it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between real news and something trivial that just happens to be trending on social media. Still, it all seemed like a terribly big deal and made me curious enough to know what gravitational waves were, and how it would make a difference to my life. While every news article seemed supremely thrilled about gravitational waves and kept stressing that it was a huge, game-changing discovery, most descriptions of gravitational waves made absolutely no sense to me, no matter how hard I tried to pay attention. Then I came across one site that claimed to explain it in layman’s terms, promising that it was so simple that even a 5 year old, or a person with the IQ of Donald Trump, would understand it. It promptly proceeded to use big words like space-time continuum (I know 5-year-olds these days are a lot smarter than I was as 5, but which 5 year old will understand space time continuum?) that perplexed me even further. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not complaining that I couldn’t understand what gravitational waves were – in fact it was quite the opposite. I was satisfied that here, at last, was some legitimate science.

I’ve always had a strange equation with science – from afar, it’s been fascinating, but when science gets really serious, I don’t understand a thing. When science is watered down and made into popular science with books like The Brief History of Nearly Everything, I’m utterly fascinated and captivated by it. Sometimes I even think that if this is how science was taught in school, I’d perhaps not have been so hopeless at it. But deep in my heart, I know that this is rubbish. Sure, one may enjoy Bill Bryson’s fascinating stories about science or Carl Sagan talking about the Pale Blue Dot or Morgan Freeman narrating about the Cosmos (somehow, since the Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman has emerged as a universal narrator for all manner of movies and shows, so much so that most people will listen in awestruck fascination even if Morgan Freeman narrated about watching paint dry). But serious science still involves solving complex equations on projectile motion or mastering calculus and all manner of complex formulae – something I never got the hang of when I was 16, and that’s certainly not going to change now.

So my thrill when I couldn’t understand gravitational waves was derived from the satisfaction that it was actual science, as opposed to what you mostly come across as science in the papers these days, with headlines like “Teenage Boys Most Likely To Watch Porn”. Most of these scientific studies feel like science that’s not just watered down, but also positively dumbed down to remove any shred of intelligence. They’ll often be backed by august universities or institutions, but that doesn’t make them any less daft. That’s why most of what passes off as science in the newspapers looks like this:

“Staying Alone Can Make You Lonely”

Scientists at the Institute for Blindingly Obvious Research Studies have discovered that staying on your own can sometimes make you feel lonely, thereby inducing pangs of longing and enhancing the need for company. In a study conducted across 2000 people, it was concluded that people staying alone were 26% more likely to feel lonely every once in while than people who were staying with flat mates or a spouse.

“Eating Cheese Could Lead to Longer Life”

Scientists at the Institute that Does a New Food Research Everyday to Confuse You on What’s Good and What’s Bad have discovered that eating cheese could lead to a longer lifespan. In a completely bonkers study conducted over five decades across two groups – one that ate cheese regularly and one that rarely ate cheese – it was found that the cheese-eating group lived, on average, five years longer. While the cheese lobby was elated at the findings, scientists cautioned that the longer lifespan could also be because the cheese eating group led a healthier life overall with a daily routine of cycling, circuit training, long-distance running, weight training and yoga, combined with living in the countryside.  However, it could just as well be cheese, so to be safe it’s best to eat cheese anyway, said the Chief Scientist.

“Men More Likely to Stare at Busty Women”

Scientists at the Institute that Specialises in Creepy & Pointless Research have concluded that men are twice as likely to ogle at women with bigger breasts than women with regular breasts. In a controversial study that reeks of sexism and had feminists fuming and men queuing up in eager anticipation, 500 men were asked to sit down and ogle at a bunch of women passing by. Surprise, surprise - it was discovered that the men were twice more likely to ogle at women with larger breasts.

I'm sure there is real science going on all the time - maybe it just doesn't make it to the news. The last time real science was in the news was when the God particle was discovered, although, much like God Himself, it disappeared after a week of frenzied activity. Whatever happened of the Large Hadron Collider once the God particle was found? It’s probably lying unused, gathering cobwebs and dust, to the extent that something can gather dust when it’s located along the pristine alpine-ness of the Franco-Swiss border. My guess is they're trying to flog it off to some Elon Musk/Bruce Wayne type playboy tech millionaire:

LHC Salesman: Good evening, sir. We’re calling from CERN, and we were wondering if you’d be interested in purchasing the Large Hadron Collider?

Playboy Tech Millionaire: A large hadron collider? What on earth for?

LHC Salesman: It’s great for splitting atoms at very high speeds. In fact, it’s the best particle accelerator ever built – far better than your run-of-the-mill, everyday cyclotron.

Millionaire: But I’m not really in the habit of splitting atoms in my spare time. 

LHC: You should, then! There's nothing quite like the thrill of a high speed collision between subatomic particles. It’s also a chance to own a piece of scientific history. Plus it’s a 14 km long tunnel – you could use it as an escape route, for rave parties, or your kids could use it to play hide and seek, or…

(Line disconnected)

Monumental Madness

One of the reasons I found history interesting was that it always had some truly bizarre, utterly crazy, completely bonkers occurrences that were happening all the time. At the same time, I’d also found history terribly boring because all these absurdly fascinating tales were narrated in a very matter-of-fact way and you were simply expected to remember it as a bunch of facts and figures instead of really getting into the stories. Take the Mughal emperors, for example. All of them were painted as such great rulers, but their stories always began with “Shah Jahan was one of the greatest Mughal emperors known for being a patron of the arts and architecture. He ascended the throne after killing his brothers, and then went on to rule for three decades. He is most famous for building the Taj Mahal, India’s greatest monument of all time.” I mean, isn’t it crazy how the fact that he killed his brothers to ascend to the throne has just been glossed over like it was some humdrum, everyday task that he performed, like waking up and brushing his teeth? Only Aurangzeb, who’d ruthlessly accumulated a staggeringly large portfolio of atrocities that was impossible to ignore, was painted in negative light. It would’ve been so much more interesting, and possibly accurate, if the paragraph on Shah Jahan were changed to “Best known for building the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan was certifiably crazy. He had no qualms about indulging in a spot of fratricide to ascend to the throne. He then developed an unhealthy, psychotic obsession with his wife Mumtaz, which led to an early onset of senility that manifested itself in devoting 22 years of his life to building the Taj Mahal. As if this wasn’t enough, he proceeded to chop off the hands of the people who’d worked on the Taj Mahal – certainly not the sort of thanks you’d expect for helping someone build a great monument. In this day and age, such a man would be locked away in an asylum or run for the US Presidency, but the 15^th century was a little more lax about such degenerate behaviour”.

The craziness was not just confined to the Mughals – the Vikings had their terrible fashion sense, the English were always fighting with everyone, the Greeks were busy inventing philosophy and triggering off long, pointless arguments on the human condition that continue to this day, and the Mongols spent so much time looting, plundering and pillaging everyone else that they had no culture or cuisine to speak of despite being around for so long. Perhaps the greatest sign that ancient man was just as crazy as modern man, though, was in the monuments. Sure, most of them are magnificent structures that make you gape in awe and marvel at their breathtaking beauty, but once you get past all that, the lingering feeling you’re left behind with is “What on earth were they thinking?”

Take the Great Wall of China, for example. It was built over hundreds of years with the aim of protecting China from regular Mongol invasions. It seems that the ancient Mongols had made it a habit to invade China regularly – probably whenever they were bored, which was pretty often given that there’s nothing much to do in Mongolia. So the Mongols were pretty crazy, but the Chinese were even more so given that they were perfectly happy spending hundreds of years just to build a wall. Surely, while it was getting built, the Mongols must’ve had a great time merrily raiding China from the sides where the wall wasn’t ready – but the Chinese still thought that putting up with periodic pillaging was worth it as long as, eventually, it stopped the Mongols.

To its credit, though, the Great Wall at least had some functional purpose. What are truly baffling, though, are the pyramids.  Sure, ancient man was highly enthusiastic in celebrating the dead and forever building monuments to commemorate them – but even by those standards, the Egyptians took it to an altogether different level. Today, after thousands of years, the pyramids remain truly magnificent structures that stand testament to how bonkers the ancient Egyptians really were. Yes, it’s an engineering marvel and a remarkable architectural feat. You wonder how the Egyptians moved all those huge boulders and created those impossibly big triangular buildings – but the bigger question is – “Why?” Like most civilizations, the Egyptians did slightly nutty things like burying the dead along with their cats and some slightly cool things like inventing paper – but what were they thinking when they decided to build the pyramids? What possessed them to wake up one day and announce – I’m going to spend the next decade building a giant stone triangular building, and then spend the next few hundred years building many more of the same? I'm guessing it set civilization back a few hundred years – the Egyptians could’ve invented a lot more things if they weren’t spending their entire time building pyramid after pyramid.

The Pyramids and the Great Wall provide an insight into why, even today, the Arabs and the Chinese spend so much time building absurd things. I’d recently seen a TV program on a ridiculous elevator being built all the way up a mountain, along the face of a cliff, and was not at all surprised to know that it was in China. It’s the same whenever someone sends you a link about some preposterous new thing that’s built like an underwater complex that’s as big as a city, or a skiing lodge in the middle of a desert, or an entire European-looking village being built in the middle of nowhere – you know it’s either China or the UAE that’s committed the atrocity. Although given that a good chunk of taxpayer money has now been allocated to building a pointlessly gigantic statue of Sardar Patel, India might soon be joining that list.

Perhaps if history had been taught in a more interesting way in school, we would not be repeating the mistakes of the past. But no one was really paying any attention, were they?

Nerves of Dubious Quality

Quantum mechanics, The Tree of Life, women and finance are amongst the most difficult things to understand that I’ve encountered in my life so far. As someone who’s had a hard time understanding anything remotely financial, I always held finance people in high regard. Sure, they were earning obscenely high amounts of money that most people felt they were undeserving of, but I’d always figured that if anyone could actually comprehend all that financial mumbo-jumbo, they were worth all that money. In any case, if you were in finance, you always seemed to be studying and giving all manner of exams for certifications that sounded truly serious and weighty – so perhaps all that money you earned was in some way compensation for the lack of a life otherwise. If you wanted to spend a lifetime studying and didn’t care much about the money, academia was your career of choice. But if you wanted to spend a lifetime studying, and be richly rewarded for all the trouble you went to, it was either finance or law.

The blind assumption that the finance sorts were supremely intelligent humans, though, is something that I’ve started to question whenever I read anything related to the stock markets, and my worst fears have now been confirmed with stock markets all over the world crashing over Brexit. The reality is that the finance people are not the smartest in the world; they are simply the most nervous in the world. From my limited understanding of the stock markets, here’s how it works: If you’re happy about something you go about buying shares, and if you’re sad about something, you go about selling shares. After doing this for a decade you either get very rich, have an apartment in Manhattan, a yacht in Monte Carlo and a lifestyle disease; or you get very poor, still have a lifestyle disease and are out on the streets scraping through dustbins for your next meal.

Coming to Brexit, it seems that all the finance types expected Brexit to not happen. They were so thrilled with themselves about this that they decided to go out and celebrate by buying a whole lot of shares. And now that Brexit has happened, they’re a panic-stricken bundle of nerves running about like headless chickens selling these shares left, right and centre. That just doesn’t make any sense, does it? It’s like printing the invitations to your wedding when you haven’t even started dating. And what was the rush to buy all those shares? If Brexit were anyway round the corner, wouldn’t any normal person just wait a few more days and then decide? 

Now, a lot of you might think that Brexit is a huge deal, and it’s only natural that the financial markets react to such a big development in the political and financial world. And I would’ve been fine with that if it was just Brexit that led to the nervousness – but the stock market guys are always nervous, aren’t they? It’s not just the big recessions or financial crises – every political announcement, every time interest rates are changed, every time interest rates are not changed, every by poll in every obscure constituency seems to make the stock markets nervous and collapse in a heap of panic. I can’t think of a bunch of people that get as nervous as often as the stock market guys. The entire financial system seems to be based around getting together the most nervous bunch of people you ever came across, handing them all your money and saying “Here, buy and sell shares as you please”.

Perhaps all those exams and certifications that the finance people write are not full of questions regarding the economy and derivatives and PE ratios and all that, but instead look like this:

Exam for Aspiring Financial People Who Buy & Sell Shares & Determine the Fate of the World Economy

1. The US has just had an election and voted in a Republican government. Will you:
1. Celebrate because you’re fond of right wing policies and feel they might benefit trade with India.
2. Be disappointed because your political leanings are more left liberal.
3. Not be affected as it doesn’t truly affect you in any way, plus you’ve started seeing this shrink who’s told you to be Zen about such things.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.
2. Beyonce has delivered yet another number one hit and her new song is the rage at all parties. Will you:
1. Rejoice as Beyonce has just the kind of foot-tapping dance music that you love, and sometimes even writes vaguely feminist lyrics.
2. Rave on about how music isn’t what it used to be and how it was so much better in the 60s and the 70s.
3. Not be affected too much as you can always download stuff you like anyway.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.
3. Tanmay Bhat has yet again said something in poor taste about another eminent personality. Will you:
1. Join the chorus of outrage and loudly condemn Tanmay Bhat and wish ill upon him.
2. Jump to his defense because you believe in freedom of speech and are appalled by people taking the moral high ground.
3. Not be affected too much as you know this will all be forgotten two days later when Salman Khan says something even more daft.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.
4. Pluto has just been stripped of its planetary status. Do you:
1. Break into a celebratory jig, as you were always suspicious of Pluto being a planet because of its unusually inclined orbit.
2. Break down in tears, as Pluto was your favourite planet because it shared its name with a cartoon dog.
3. Not be affected, as you’re no longer in school so you need not remember any of this anyway.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.

As you may guess, it’s only if you answered D for every single question that you would pass the test. After all, Spiderman’s uncle may have said, “With great power comes great responsibility”. But in the financial world, with great power comes great nerves.