Fear of Flying

One evening, long time ago (mid 80s), I was flying from Kansas city to Boston, via Washington DC. The dinner served on the flight (remember those days) was finished and we were waiting for the trays to be cleared by the flight attendants before landing.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a loud boom and a flash, as a lightening struck the side of the plane I was sitting on. This was scary, to say the least, and the woman in the middle seat screamed. Then, what followed was most horrendous turbulence I had ever encountered as the plane made its way through a massive thunderstorm. The woman kept screaming, while the attendants shouted that we should put the trays below the seat in front of us, if we were concerned about the remaining food and drinks flying in our face.

The flight was over pretty soon, and we landed in Washington without any problems, but I was shaken up. I was not even sure if I wanted to get on the connecting flight to Boston. I did, because I had no choice, and it was a smooth flight.

However, that incidence left me with a fear of flying, or more accurately, fear of turbulence, that I cannot shake off even to this day.  I approach each upcoming flight with trepidation.  I check weather to see what I might encounter during the flight and sit near the window, so I can look outside and see what the clouds are doing. I sit apprehensively as the aircraft maneuvers around thunderstorms. If it is a night flight, I do not sleep well, with an illogical thought that somehow my keeping awake is important to my safety when the airplane encounters rough air.

This is a completely irrational fear. There is no chance that the plane will break apart or comedown as a result of turbulence. As an engineer, I can vouch for that. Even the Air France flight, which came down a few years ago in Atlantic while flying through violent weather, did so because of a faulty pitot tube combined with pilot error. Not due to turbulence.

However, the neural connections in my brain have become rewired because of that scary incidence near Washington and can not be reset to their previous state when, like most people, I had no fear and could calmly read a newspaper while the airplane was going through violent motions.

Of course, I have managed to figure out how to continue flying; not having done so would have been a major issue for a management consultant while I was working, and for a world traveller that I have been and hope to continue to be. I play games with mind to make it think that it is a rough bus ride not an airplane flight. I mentally establish thresholds for acceptable vibrations and make my mind ignore those that are below that threshold (a very engineering response to an irrational situation).  I have a glass of wine if it is an evening flight. Somehow I survive.

On the positive side, this has made me realize and accept that even the most rational person can behave irrationally.  Hopefully, it has made me a more tolerant person.

When to Buy a Fake

In my past Blog posts, I have advocated the virtues of buying fake instead of real stuff. In the following I further elaborate on my advice.

Let me start with an equation:

Price you pay = Intrinsic Value  + Bragging value

Intrinsic value equals the value of function the item performs or the real pleasure it provides. Bragging value is the pleasure you get by showing off what you purchased (primarily the pleasure of causing envy). The way to find the intrinsic value is to estimate what you would have paid for the item if you could not show it to anyone or talk about it, thereby rendering the bragging value to zero.

Next, let us consider four examples and see how these values play out, and what would be the difference in purchasing the real thing compared to a fake.

An expensive watch certainly has a lot of bragging value. However, it also has a higher intrinsic value than a fake one because it might last longer and require fewer repairs.

Similarly, Jewelry provides some intrinsic value because of the pleasure it brings by enhancing the beauty of a woman. Also, the material used in creating real jewelry is intrinsically more valuable than a fake one. However, it does have a lot of bragging value, and there is high probability that it will not be purchase it if it cannot be shown to others (and make them jealous).

A “classical” painting has some intrinsic value, in that it brings pleasure to our senses. Why does that happen is not something I fully understand, but it does happen. However, a fake painting will provide the same intrinsic value as the real one, which, done by a well-known artist, has a huge bragging value.

Finally, in my opinion, an abstract painting has practically no intrinsic value. Seeing a canvas with just color blue (yes, I am not making this up) does not do anything for me. However, even this, if done by a well-known artist (a conman?) has high bragging value, at least among people who are in that circle.

All this is shown in a figure below.  It shows both the intrinsic and bragging values of the four objects I talked about. In addition, I have shown what happens if a fake is purchased instead of real one.

My advice on when to buy a fake is based on my feeling that for an object that has higher bragging value than the intrinsic one, there is no point in spending the extra money. Besides, to get the bragging value, it has to be shown to the others and the others have to be convinced that what you have is real and not fake. This is a very risky proposition. I would not take the risk if most of what I spent was for buying the bragging value that may or may not materialize. Finally, for some things the intrinsic value is so small, it may not make sense to buy even a fake one. The “blue canvas” abstract comes to mind.

So, there you have it. Just keep my chart handy when you have to make a major decision on buying something.

PS: Of course, I am not including the investment value in my treatise. I know that many people in the world will ignore my advice and keep paying increasingly higher dollars for the stuff that has a high bragging value, thereby making it a sound investment.

Himalayan Bargain

As you may know, recently floods devastated the Himalayan area of Uttarakhand (“Northern Province”) in India. Thousands of people died in this tragedy and more than five thousand are still missing and presumed dead. The images of angry brown rivers and completely washed out roads were shown across the world on TV. Some videos, thought to be too graphic for the TV audience, made rounds through the YouTube channel. They showed a bunch of people getting caught in flash floods and drowning, a tourist bus plunging in the valley, and other similar horrors.

Having been to the Himalayas some eight times made these images look all too familiar to me. I (we) have travelled through villages that looked like those on the screen being devastated. We have encountered numerous times roads that were washed out or almost so. Specifically, here are some such events that have happened in my (our) Himalayan journeys:

·            1963: On a trip to Kashmir, a massive landslide washed out the only road connecting the fabled valley to the rest of the country. Our family was stranded in a village for two nights while they fixed the road. Then we had to wait for several hours to let a military convoy get by before finally proceeding further.

·            1977: While going by a jeep from Darjeeling to a place called Sandakphu, our driver missed a turn and the jeep overturned. There happened to be a ledge just where the jeep landed, otherwise we would have gone down three thousand feet. Amazingly, we were not hurt and the local military personnel arranged for a ride back to Darjeeling for us.

                 2000: This time we did not go to the Himalayas, but our children did, accompanied by relatives. There was a major flood in a river they were supposed to cross, washing away all major bridges. Fortunately, they were on this side of the river not the other. That saved them at least from major hardship if not something worse.

·            2007: Before we left for Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, on way to a trek, major flooding washed out the highway, isolating the town. Fortunately, the road was repaired in time but the place where we landed, Gauhati was rocked by racial riots, and vehicles were burned. We managed to get transportation by selecting the driver of the right ethnic background. On our way to the trailhead for the trek, the road was washed out, requiring manual transport to the other side.

·            2012:  Before we left Delhi on way to Ladakh, we got the all to familiar news that because of rain the road was cutoff at Manali. By the time we got there, the road was “repaired” but the trip on Rhotang Pass just beyond Manali, going up to 12,000’, was as muddy and dangerous as it could be. Next, at the end of the trip, we got the news that because of rain; the other aide of the road, leading to Srinagar, was cut off at Zoji-La pass. Again, it was repaired, and again, we had a harrowing journey on that pass on a barely drivable road.

All these events would make one think, why do it?  That’s where the positive side of these trips comes in.

I can think of no other region as exciting as the Himalayas, and I have been to many remote corners of the world. It is not just the world-class scenery, but people who live in that region.

Where would you see four of the five highest mountains in the world at one glance, as you could from Sandakphu? Where would you hike up to the bottom of a 28,000 feet mountain as you would on the trek in Sikkim mentioned above? How about the arid, multi-hued, and spectacular region of Ladakh, where the road, bad as it is, takes one up above 18,000 feet and there are multiple opportunities, even for mere mortal like me, to hike higher than one can anywhere else in the world? Do you think a Swiss shepard you meet in the pristine area of Zermatt would ever invite not just you but your entire group for dinner? That would, and did happen to us on one of the treks.

This is the Himalayan Bargain. You take a lot of risks but gain a lot in return.

However, after experiencing this magical part of the world as many times as I have had the good fortune to, I now feel that the risk outweighs benefits. As the roads continue to deteriorate, weather becomes increasingly fierce, and the number of travellers keeps increasing, there may come a day when our luck would run out. We may need to be evacuated or worse, end up in a hospital or a morgue. Yes, there is always one more trek or trip to be done before we really become old, but is it worth doing after having already experienced so much?

Maybe not. 

Our Ancestors Knew That...

One very interesting book I have read recently, “A Universe From Nothing” by Lawrence Krauss, describes, as the name implies, a theory that would explain how our universe popped out of nothing---it has to do with something called quantum gravity. When I wrote about it in a group email to my ex-classmates at IIT, one of the guys shot back saying that this is nothing new and that our ancestors knew that way back when. Then he quoted some reference in the Vedas, the “good books” for Hindus.

When I though about this, I became intrigued by the question---Assuming that what my friend was saying is true, and knowing his scholarly bona fide I have no doubt that it is, how did our ancestors know about how the universe was created? For that matter, how did the Greeks know about atoms in the fifth century BCE (Leucippus and Democritus)?

First of all, I am certain that they did not know that universe popped out of nothing or that matter is indeed composed of atoms---they speculated. There is no way that they could have proven that their speculation was anything but that. The fact that some of these speculations have turned out to be right is not because of some extraordinary knowledge that our ancients possessed or aliens helping out. It can be explained by our selective memory.

These ancients speculated all kinds of things, and we tend to remember only those that have proven to be true. For example, the Jain scriptures talk about earth balanced on a mountain, and that certainly did not turn out to be true. Devout Christians talk about the universe being created in six-days by god some six thousand years ago.  That speculation is not widely used to demonstrate that our ancients knew everything.

Science makes progress when someone speculates, or creates a hypothesis, to explain something and then sets about proving or disproving it. That being the case, I am wondering if any of these ancient speculations played any part in developing modern scientific hypotheses. For example, did John Dalton, who is credited with the scientific theory of atom, rely on what the ancients were speculating?  If so, one has to give credit where the credit is due, and the ancients deserve a pat on the back.

However, that does not take away any credit from the ones who prove a hypothesis to be true. It is only through extraordinary work that the scientific community has developed such a precise picture of what our universe is like. It is one thing to speculate that it is so, and another to prove it.

The ancients were smart and contributed a lot to the development of our civilization, but so are our current scientists and let’s not forget that.