Tethered Time versus Kitsch Infraordinary

Rarely has time been eulogised and barely even culture has been disparaged. Culture has been invented from kitsch to make generations' behaviour beautiful but time-invariant. Culture does not celebrate the unsettled dregs of intuiting individuals that ferment and spout unexpected florid expressions. There is a genre called horror for such people.

We raise hullabaloo when one culture throws bait at another. Look into how radical and rebellious are our stories and movies, and mostly you would find the un-tame-able protagonist turns into a tamed hero. One movie (Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai) where the protagonist is bent upon taunting everything he sees and owns, ends in losing his objectivity. Another example would be the poet Oliver Goldsmith ranting against depravity of capitalism and carpetbaggers in "The Deserted Village". Yet we see bespoke individuals who are not mis-directed and who make prolonged dedicated effort to enrich and grow science, art and business. These people including the iconic Silicon Valley gods puff airs but then they are galloping astride a steed called time.

A bespoke individual is ensnared by a dire possessive calling to tether - mind your own mind by your leave - and summon all internal forces upon a cause, and angrily distance from the circumstantial to find a mooring. Time is the only natural element - an adhesive if you will - that helps such individuals to re-inforce, variegate, synthesise and deliver an experience. It can be strong enough to bring lasting recogntion. These bespoke individuals accuse other individuals of failures and show strength to control the inputs and the output, regardless of who or what they sacrifice. Obviously they cannot sacrifice themselves. We can externally observe the pain of giving birth to an experience but not all such experiments succeed. Somewhere we are too much held back by our time-invariant culture to enter into the process of creativity and lighten the individual's burdening possessive call. There are therapies and medicines if you can afford it after failure.

Culture wants to worship its ownself through its followers. If you start behaving like a CEO and join the group of wannabe CEO s then you shall certainly become one. But if you want to discover bots and widgets, you have to unsheath your relationships and unbutton your behaviour, See the movie Birdman on how to do it.  Till such time that you succeed the people can call you an emperor without a kingdom, who is flaunting some exquisite concept.

Diffident Death-Eaters versus Dredging Dragoons

India's comic book equivalent of a Marvel hero is long absent. Earlier there was a contender called Chacha Chaudhury. He and his bosom pal were saviours of the distressed. The duo were extroverts, grinning from ear to ear and did not wear the burdening guilt of hero unlike their contemporaries Phantom and Mandrake,
Marvel comic book heroes wear a masochistic attitude like villains, do not seek help, complicate matters by not explaining anything to anyone, and are engaged in self-gratifying pursuit. Their female consorts are equally tortured, secretive and imprudent.
Not just the Marvel heroes, even Chacha and his friend from Jupiter forgot to say Wow ! for what God bestowed (bountiful Earth, misery of the individual mind and determination to overcome) and what the human society upholds (the enduring achievements that act as beacons for overcoming an individual's misery).
The branding of comic book heroes isolates the individual. Even the exclusivity tagged to cowboy consumer brands of FMCG / Auto MNC s, allows an individual to swagger in public and feel omnipotent. Nature has laid out a journey before us and while we travel, we cannot afford to lose the equanimity of the equilibrium between Nature and ourselves.
Just like air for lungs, the mind has to be fed on information and knowledge to meet challenges. The concepts and theories have to be owned like a precious stones before we collectively understand the true import and validate it as extension of existing knowledge. Then after assimilation obviously we can pass them like cooking recipes into textbooks.
We have to re-organise knowledge based on solving an activity. For example a hands-on study of tools, their materials and their contextual solutions in the first year of an engineering degree course,  Another one on adhesives, drills and fasteners. If the students and governments knew how much emissions come from a diesel engine, then the market could have rationed gasoline and priced diesel far higher than gasoline.
Surely one has to  invent comic books to create the chilled miasma of research. We need to showcase that many average IQ minds working in sync are better than solo brilliance. It is OK to understand late than never understand at all. 

Tyrannical Love, Conformist Logic and other Parasitic Paradigms

When we want status quo, we shall unwittingly parade greed and fear. Many people have realised that markets function in silos, particularly when these fail to address the issues of deprivation and sustainability. But there is a more pressing issue. The emergence of credit risk in a flat world (where import duties are very low and capital can move freely) has overwhelmed all large players, namely, governments and banks. Although banks will own their country's credit rating, we have not seen governments taking cognisance of conflict of interest between the activities carried out by banks and the broader multiple objectives of the government. Governments and hence taxpayers seem to be owning the one-sided responsibility of cleaning up the fallout of the systemic build-up (called economic growth) created by banks and now the "too-big-to-fail" banks.

Governments are using a behind- the- scene approach to monitor and regulate banks. As if the agents of economic growth need not be alerted by public suasion. The government has tied its own hands by not bringing in law because free markets do not expect heavy handed regulation. That way the government has officially refused to filter the good and the bad and mostly waits until a crisis engulfing the entire system is precipitated. A law would bring the bourgeois to know that some growth is unwanted, and it would ask for early alarms in the system. It would de-couple the nexus between governments, banks and businesses. That is to say that the balance sheets of the businesses do not tell the entire story. Their promoters are using the tax havens and funny named vehicles to subvert the legitimate tax share of the country they reside / do business in. Otherwise the promoters stash a lot of wealth into the trusts and societies which have fig leaf signature of social development.

We have seen the emergence of arcane risk management paradigms which are based on sparse data and just the price data. We are made to believe that risk shall reveal itself in the price series which is the only observable truth in the market. We are asked to depend on models that carry model risk. All merely to hide the practices and the products that spew risk in the first place.

Suffocation by Knowledge, Exhileration by Ignorance and other Scaffolded States in Between

We live in an antipodal dystopia torn between native intelligence and bookish wisdom. Native Intelligence is defined by what we want to look like. Native Intelligence makes us good sales guys. We learn and adapt according to whom we speak to. But if we perceive ourselves in an inferior position, we start manipulating. If we let Native Intelligence become individualistic, we become selfish and thence follows survival of the fittest. Native Intelligence breeds functional responses including the ridiculous zombian state of Pavlov's dog. Not to be extinguished, Native Intelligence is passed on from generation to generation, and refuses to become forward looking.

Not all is that bad. Native Intelligence teaches us what to expect of ourselves and others, what to want and to let go. It does not necessarily correlate with time and situation but if does, it creates beautiful human relationships.

But to speak of bookish wisdom is to talk of understanding the wind in the willows. Although we talk about one concept at a time, we always hear the rising and falling tide of the other concepts tied into it. Bookish Wisdom is not practical to day to day living but essential nonetheless to build a beautiful world with enough resources for everyone. Bookish wisdom is the currency of language. Bookish wisdom can be converted into Inference models, a fire which can always keep burning. Bookish Wisdom is a road which winds down into new Concepts through research. But why not fusion as well, say between fluid dynamics and econometrics. Both deal with flows but offer different treatments.

People sincerely believe that there is an inner voice which tells us what to do. My opinon about this inner voice it is nothing but what we have imbibed from our parents and our society, until one starts interpreting and that happens when we become self dependent. We can always take other's opinions until we find out that the consequences lie with one's ownself.

Deduction is as different from Inference as Chalk from Cheese. Deduction is very specific and contextual. It is the necessary tool for urban survival and used by all clever and pragmatic people. Inference is less obvious and quintessential, tested over many situations and across time. Only half mad people can pursue inference as some kind of distilled truth or philosopher's stone. But mathematics has grown in modern era and now offers many scientific tools to make Inference.

An Inferential model is a great leveller, It makes achievement and fallibility, prosperity and poverty and any pair of opposites amenable to measurement based and un- biased study.  It cannot be constructed on few observations of one individual which are at best deductive and on the worst side, a cuckoo in the hat. The very existence of contradictions like market based economy that increases inequity and welfare economics that seeks to reduce inequity can be studied through an inferential model.

The Basel regulation of the Banking sector implemented across all nations is an example of an Inferential Model. It captures capital requirement of various competing sub-businesses of banking and lays down prudential norms. Yet its existence reminds us that the role of the Banking sector in creating asset prices has been kept outside the ambit of the model and is a stark need of the hour. That is where the political economy steps in with its received wisdom.

It is true that we all have to fight the daily onslaught of traffic on the road and bacteria in our food and we make some good deductive decisions everyday to manage our time and to keep ourselves healthy. But getting the Inferential piece correct becomes the raison d' etre for institutions and corporations. If it doesn't exist then we have accountants running these organisations !!!