On how I want to live life

Imagine this - if you could, at age 80,  know what every second of your life was like, would you have lived any second differently? Would you have made any different choices? Would you have loved more deeply? Would you have smiled more at strangers? Would you have chosen to pay more attention to life? 

I have a choice everyday to write a different story. The only story worth writing is where I lived life paying complete attention, knowing what I am, and where I am. Besides, what else is there to do! 

Does this mean that I will live every moment like this? More than likely that would not be the case. But at the very least, that would be the intention. To live life not 10 feet above, but right there. Not a distance removed, but in the moment.

 

The power of Coursera and online learning

Coursera is a potent learning tool.

This declaration comes as a surprise to no one. However, it is essential to note that Coursera has innovated and created a platform that is only possible over the internet. Where it lacks in social interaction of schools and universities, it has made up through its unique pedagogy. I've gone through a few courses and have listed the ways Coursera currently brings value.

No filler content

Anyone who's gone through university has experienced a professor that adds filler content to classes. It is inevitable. The structure of classes on Coursera ensures that there is no filler content. The lessons are scripted, structured, and perfected before recording. Not only do students get to repeat lessons infinitely, but professors can also re-record a lecture to perfection.

Self-Paced 

Slow learner? Not an issue, you can repeat the same thing plenty of times. 

Fast learner? Not an issue, you can play the videos at 2x.

Forgot the previous class? Not an issue, you can go through the content the same way it was taught the first time, thus ensuring recall. 

The fact that a student is not forced to conform to the standards of 'the average' means that the student can learn at their own pace. They don't have to be bored or lost in class anymore. 

Atomic videos

Coursera developed a platform and a new way to learn. Students can learn concepts in videos of no longer than 10 minutes. Each concept is given a separate video and is (at times) independent of the other videos. What's better is that short quizzes follow videos. These quizzes serve as revision and proof of comprehension. If you haven't followed the concept, the quiz immediately reveals the fact, and you watch the video again!

This is a far cry from the way universities teach. At present, it is not possible to implement such an arrangement in universities. Even if the system is implemented, students are still held up to the standards of the average. There is no escaping the standards of the average in a university setting.

Value education over the certificate

You can attend most courses without having to pay. If you value education over the proof of education, Coursera is the perfect place to learn. There are no paywalls; there are no entrance criteria; you get to learn from the best whenever you like. 

World's best professors available 24/7

You get to learn from world-class professors at a moment's notice. You can learn whenever you want and wherever you want. You're not necessitated into staying close to the professor. All you need is an internet connection and an electronic device that can connect you to the internet. 

There is no time in history where the opportunity to learn from the world's greatest teachers is so economical and convenient. I believe that Coursera still has room to exploit the unique benefits of the internet and further develop its pedagogy. But it's clearly on the right path, and I want to see how they revolutionize education.

Who shall be the Millionth person to be infected by Coronavirus?

I don't intend to scare anyone more than they already are by the pandemic, however, COVID-19 is scarier than I thought. I did some basic analysis on the number of people infected with the disease, and the results are stunning.

Unless France, Germany, Italy and countries hit by the virus don't shut down as China did (which is very unlikely), the total number of cases can be expected to reach 1 million people in each country by late March/early April. I have attached a Spreadsheet that outlines projections for COVID-19. I believe such projections are not public to maintain calm. People must have an understanding of what is being dealt with at this very moment.

The analysis is straightforward; I found data regarding the Total number of Coronavirus cases from here. The data was converted to the logarithm of total cases as the growth of the virus, when unconstrained, is exponential. Slopes and intercepts were obtained using Simple Linear Regression. Using these slopes and intercepts, I further extrapolated the logarithm of cases up to 1st April 2020. The logarithm of Total cases was then converted back to Total number of cases. While the dataset is time series and ideally one shouldn't use Linear regression for analysis, it gives a good idea about the growth of the virus.

Further information and observations can be found on the blog post. I shall continue updating the blog over the next few days. [I shall add facts and observations here in some time]

The spreadsheet I used can be found here. I aim to expand the number of countries analysed and include more relevant metrics like Total Active Cases in future iterations.

All suggestions and comments are welcome

Amazon’s Fires will keep happening; except now, you won’t hear about them.

The Amazon Forest fires in August 2019 drew a considerable amount of attention. It was impossible to go through the internet without having heard about it, or seen images of the fire. Rightly so, it is a huge sink of atmospheric carbon for the entire world. The continued existence of the Amazon Rainforest ensures the survival of Humans with our present technology. So, what leads me to the title?

Brazil (both the government and the people) will, in general, undertake activities that economically benefit themselves. It will optimise for Brazil. Brazil has an unrecognised export to the world. As a result, it is not compensated for the export and hence does not see economic benefit to the ecological services it provides to the world. The export being Carbon Sequestering, Oxygen Generation, and rain generation through the Amazon Rainforest.

On the other hand, agriculture, especially cash crops grown in Brazil, such as Sugarcane and Soybean, directly benefit the economy. As a result, Brazil’s people and government are incentivised to either participate or, turn a blind eye to the destruction of the rainforest in their boundaries. The government is only truly optimised for the population within their borders, i.e., to whom they are accountable. The Brazilian government has to show economic development, economic development the rainforest cannot drive.

It is important to note that the fires in Brazil’s rainforests are human-made and not natural. Suppose they were natural, such as the ones in California or large parts of Africa, it would be harder to pin the issue on human economic activity.

Since Brazil does not see any immediate economic benefit from the Amazon, they are incentivised to find better economic utility of the land. A result of which is more of the Amazon turning into industrial and agricultural land for economic productivity. It must be noted; if Brazil sees economic benefit from the Amazon and the services it provides to the world, forest fires will cease. The natural tendency for further economic growth by burning down the forest will still exist, but at least there would be a direct consequence to the economy for burning the Amazon.

It’s reasonably clear that the Amazon will continue burning till the time that Brazil is not paid. It is the tragedy of commons on a global scale.

Now, why won’t you hear about it again? This goes back to the way modern media is designed. The story is not novel enough to garner attention for the precious ad dollars. One rarely hears a story on the same topic after the completion of the attention cycle. Think about it; how often does one hear or read follow up on a news story. If the headline does not draw clicks, it will not be published.

Proof lies in the search trends of the forest fire.

In summary, the Amazon Rainforest is a victim of the tragedy of global commons and attention apathy. A solution to this would be the creation of an economic model where Brazil is paid for environmental exports that it provides to the world.

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I have a lingering feeling that this is not a true case of Tragedy of the Commons. Brazil has full sovereignty over the land it holds. The consequences of the fires are felt globally, but the benefits of the fires only accrue to the owner of the land, i.e., it is not a public good at a global level, it is privately owned by Brazil. 

Coca Cola's Supply Chain for the good of Humanity

As part of student activities conducted in my college, we have a youth fest where students from across the country participate.  The youth fest is called Atharv. I was involved in organising the fest in several ways over the past three years.

This year I was the Person-in charge of the Case Study Competition, called Imperium. For the event, I designed case studies for both the preliminary and final rounds. I'm sharing the case study used in the preliminary round. The case study is based on The Coca Cola Company and its capability to do good using its supply chain.

I got this idea while interning at an organisation called Social Alpha. Social Alpha funds and incubates start-ups that focus on social good and aren't necessarily able to raise funds in the traditional market due to the long payback periods. During that time, I came up with this idea. I thought about the idea for two months before I had the opportunity to present it in the form of a competition. For the competition, I wrote a 6-page case study which has the question in full. I have linked the case study here.

Briefly, The Coca Cola Company has the best supply chain in the world. It reaches places where tap water and electricity doesn't. In India, I've seen Coca Cola bottles in the smallest of villages, with single stores; in the hills of India; obscure rest stops, and obviously big cities.

The distribution network of Coca Cola is optimised for pushing fizzy drinks across the globe. This distribution network could be exploited for social good, especially in countries like India that face issues on several fronts, such as healthcare, sanitation, pollution, and education.

Read the case study for more details. I hope you like it! If you found the question interesting, try solving the question and send it to paaras12 [at] gmail [dot] com. Good luck!

PS. I shall continue pushing updates to the case study for some time. 

A Sociology Field Trip & The Harrod-Domar Model

A couple of weeks ago, as part of my course work at college, I had to go for a field trip. The field trip was to a district near Indore (Where my college is located) called Jhabua. Jhabua is a district in the eastern region of Madhya Pradesh. It happens to be among the most poverty-stricken areas of India, scoring lower than several Sub-Sahara African countries in crucial poverty measures.^{[1] [You can go and play around with the data, it's fairly interesting to understand]}  The Purpose of the trip was to understand the living conditions of people residing in villages in the district. We had to administer a questionnaire and understand the living conditions of the individuals we interviewed.

This field trip was probably the toughest field trip I've been on so far. The sun was intense and the walk around the village even more grueling. It gave me an understanding of how tough life is as a tribal person, especially in this region.

For the field trip, we spent an entire day understanding their lives; we even had food with them! Initially, I was hesitant to eat the food they offered due to hygiene concerns, in my defence the water they provided had a yellowish tinge to it. But I powered through, and it turned out to be very tasty as well. I'm glad that I did eat there.

It is important to understand why Jhabua has such high poverty levels. The region has been dealt a bad set of cards; Jhabua has an acute water shortage problem, they lack access to water even for basic purposes. The water shortage makes agriculture very tough and severely limits their ability to grow different crops. The village I had visited had all the villagers growing just one variety of grain, you can begin to understand the constraints they face in their livelihood. Along with this, the failure of implementation of state sponsored programs has led to a double whammy. While these two probably aren't the only reasons for poverty, they are major contributing factors and have to be dealt with.

The entire trip was planned and executed by officials at IIM Indore and the people at ShivGanga. ShivGanga is an NGO that works exclusively in the Jhabua region. The founder of ShivGanga, as I understood provides the know-how and education to the tribals in the area. They aim at creating self-sufficiency among the tribals. The self-sufficiency concept boils down to the empowerment of the tribals so that they don't have to look up to someone and be dependent on them for their own upliftment. Reminds me of the story of giving a man a fish and teaching a man to fish. The whole approach also seemed to be very interesting. You could read up more about the foundation here and here.

In essence, it makes sense to train the villagers to look out for themselves and teach them how to get what they need without having to wait for someone to look at them as a charity case.

Now, all the above information is neat, but this is interesting because we learnt this in our Development Economics course right at the start of this term. The name of the theory is the Harrod-Domar Model. Briefly, it says that economic development can be stimulated by the introduction of capital to an economy. The simple act of giving money to an underdeveloped country is sufficient to push it towards growth. One can understand why believing in the theory is tempting, just one simple act is sufficient to bring the worlds poorest out of poverty. You could also argue that it makes sense. Backward countries are backward because they do not have the requisite industries, if we give money to these countries, they'll be able to develop said industries and viola, you'll stimulate growth.

Obviously, the above model failed. It failed so bad that in some literature it is also called the most expensive failed experiment in human history because of the number of policies that were developed based on this very economic theory. The reason for its failure you ask? There is one crucial factor that this model doesn't account for; the human factor. Humans are equally important, if not more important in the development of an economy. Simply put, if an industry doesn't have enough trained labour, what would one do with all the industries. There wouldn't be enough people to run the machines!

This simple fact was well reflected in the field trip. The basic argument being that you need to develop the people for progress, it'll take longer but in the long run, will result in successfully reaching the goal of development. If not entirely right, I did find this relation interesting. In my mind, it did seem like another nail in the coffin of the Harrod-Domar model.

Trying new things is scary: City Planning

Trying new things is scary. You're out of your comfort zone, you don't know where to start and you generally lack any "Knowledge by induction"in that field. But it also presents to you an opportunity one that you wouldn't have had if you learnt it formally. An opportunity of bringing fresh perspective.

City planning has always been of interest to me. I remember an assignment my brother was given a long long time ago. He had to plan out what an island should look like where the roads should go and everything down to the last detail and he was supposed to present it. This memory has stuck on since I was in Grade 1 or 2. I've always tried to make drawings and plan thereafter, some attempts being more successful than others.

But I believe this time, it's worth trying as a complete project. A new project, something that is absolutely novel, for me at least. I have no knowledge of the field whatsoever and am studying as an undergraduate that doesn't directly present an opportunity to take up a job in this field. It just seems like an interesting challenge to take up; something to do from the ground up. Designing a city and thinking of ideas down to their finest details. I hope you do join me in the effort, I'm open sourcing it and I'll be publishing updates as and when I am able to think of them.

I'll use git as a tool to make it easier for multiple people to work on it at once. I'll be laying down the formal beginnings in the article I publish there. Please do check it out!

For those of you not well versed in technology, I'll be publishing a PDF version on the blog, do go through it and recommend changes that you think should be made at paaras12 [at] gmail [dot] com!

Okay's the worst

Okay is the worst. It is the worst reply that you could give to someone. If someone sends you something, anything. A document, a text or whatever else that could be sent, the worst reply the person could receive is just "okay". It infuriates me whenever I receive one without anything following it. This is why. A person, a living feeling person, who's taken the effort to type something, used his time and focus (which is in very short supply) to send you a document for you to read and respond to; the absolute minimum, nadir equivalent reply effort that you could send is 'okay.' It lacks any insight.

Absolute minimum effort meaning that you barely used any of your cognitive effort at all. Now this implies one of two things:

1. You really don't want to do the work that the person might have asked you to do and hence you simply respond with the word. Or,
2. You deem the document sent to you by the person not worthy enough to receive your time. A person who (obviously) believes that you're worth theirs. 

So as a kind gesture, instead of merely sending 'Okay.' as a response, you might as well experiment with newer, slightly more effortful replies to the person who made it obvious that you are worth theirs. 

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I was given this realization by my brother, how much ever I hate it, that at times I too fall for this. And fall hard. I shall attempt to rectify. If you catch me falling for this (And you happen to read this) send an 'Aaaand?'. I'll try to make it up to you.

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This time I was listening to Bach while I wrote. I thought I'd give classical music a shot; I enjoyed it a fair bit. 

Creative Thinking

I have come to respect the process that goes into writing and orating anything. Influenced by a philosopher by the name of Alan Watts, I too have attempted to write a 3,000-word long essay, which needs a bloody ton of work to be done on it even to finish (I've written ~500 words, and it's already descended into utter chaos.) The more I think about the process of thinking of something new, and expressing it in words, the more I realise that it is a herculean task. Alan Watts had some inspiration to draw from in the form of the philosophies of the eastern books that he espoused. On the other hand, philosophers of the likes of Kautilya and Aristotle would think of something entirely new. Now, the more I think about that, the more I respect them. They had undertaken the truly daunting task of making new arguments; arguments that became the foundation of the topics they talked about. The breadth was just astounding. They would talk about everything from philosophy to Math and Science. And they'd be at the cutting edge; they thought and expressed what we take for granted now.

This line of thought eventually leads me to think about creative thinking itself and the how the process eventually leads to the unique identification of a creation to the creator. Each invention has an inventor or a set of inventors who inevitably leave a mark on whatever it is they created. And eventually, through the invention, they'd leave their mark on the world. This, this is something that astounds me. And as is clear from the previous paragraph. It isn't necessarily just physical devices that they create. In fact, more often than not, these physical devices are forgotten, while the arguments and the expressions given by such greats live on.

One of the toughest part of creation for me has always been the part where we have to vocalise it and need to put it in words to tell others what I'm thinking of. I somehow have a picture in my head, which I'm not necessarily able to adequately put in words ( Part of the reason why this blog is necessary)

The process of creation requires a tremendous amount of focus. For first you have to think of the thing, and eventually put the damn thing into words. Which isn't very easy once you start thinking about it.

The talk of creation and invention reminds me of one of my physics teachers. When asked how Newton came up with his laws, or questions on similar lines, questions that inquired about the origin of a theory; he'd respond with "They dream it up." And I'd always think I want those dreams. But in retrospect it requires deep insight through focused work. Work that needs effort and a considerable amount of time. I guess this is where I start.

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I generally write listening to a song on repeat, I've been listening to this one, while I finished up with this post. A very nice rendition of the song. 

Freshman year

Freshman year of college is over, and I still feel like I came here yesterday.

Side note: I ought to write more. There's a lot to write about. 

Freshman year was all that I expected and a lot more, there are a lot of stories to share, some of which will come in the following days. But first, you'll need an introduction. It's been quite some time since I had an actual post and for quite a good reason (That's what I like to tell myself). I was am studying in India. I was studying for a centralised exam that's supposed to judge whether you're good enough to enter one of the "Premier Institutes of Education."

I was studying for it for two loooooong years, not many stories from that time, but plenty of memories and lessons. That finally got over sometime in May 2017. It was a relief. Even though I enjoyed studying the material, it was quite a bit of stress and the text to cover across two years was insane. But once it got over, I finally started doing the things I really really wanted to do!

And then the results started coming. Things weren't looking quite good; I wasn't getting the results I was hoping for, and not due to lack of effort, I was plain unlucky (Yes, a very bold statement I know), nothing else. This was till I got into IIM Indore! (Which happens to be a premier institute) And boy did things change.

Side note: IIM Indore is the only IIM in India that grants an undergraduate degree and the education provided in itself is unique if you want to read more, the course is called IPM and is linked here; I'll be writing about this as well. If you want to contact me or want to know more feel free to connect, send me a mail at paaras12 [at] gmail [dot] com.

The weeks after the admission were a whirl, parties, pure joy and whatnot. Finally, the day came, and I went to IIM Indore. The first term was absolute bliss. I got whatever I'd hoped for during the two years of JEE (This was a fairly critical time, up till now at least so you might see the JEE reference quite a bit in the near future.) and more, besides the course structure fit what I wanted to learn. There are a lot of stories to tell from this point on, I've had a staggering number of changes in my life in this past year and many experiences that I would want to share. And since I have my summer holidays coming up, I think I'll be able to manage at the very least five posts over the next 45 days. 

So I'll be seeing you soon, hopefully after my last exam which is on the 29th of May. Till then!