On Being Particular About Generalization

As our freedom of expression gains alarmingly greater significance with each passing day, people have been increasingly likely to shun being 'labelled', being 'typecast' or...God forbid...being Stereotyped ! It is this intense disdain for stereotyping that makes people turn away from personality testing in high dudgeon, even to question possible patterns among the results of IQ tests and to add highly creative politically correct terms to our lexicon every year (relax, you're no longer ugly, you're just 'visually challenging')

Human beings are 'cognitive misers', as Fiske put it. It has been demonstrated experimentally that the complexity of stimuli from the social environment leads people to systematically ignore chunks of information in order to be able to process it with ease, by aiding the brain in storing data based on similarity. Racial and gender based stereotyping have been extensively studied. There exists some evidence that stereotyping is, to an extent, automatic or implicit, rather than being subject to a person's conscious control. (the Implicit Associations Test sheds some light on the phenomenon). Furthermore, the tendency to stereotype is heightened in certain situations; experiments involving greater time pressure have been seen to increase subjects' tendency to stereotype. Also, the more accessible the information regarding a particular category (say, Indians or lawyers or blondes), the greater is a person's propensity to stereotype. Information regarding a category can be made more accessible to a person's brain, by sub conscious 'priming' (for instance, there are experiments, where subjects are asked to read or view material containing very subtle hints about a particular stereotype and this, in turn, leads them to apply the information in making their own judgements).

Does this mean, that human beings have an innate, non conscious tendency to stereotype? To a certain extent, yes. But is that such a bad thing, anyway? We all love to label each other and more than anything else, we love to label ourselves. It's only when the labels do not conform to our preferred self image, that we begin to carp about stereotyping. From shoes to phones to status updates, a lot of what we wear/say/use has the intended or unintended purpose of labelling ourselves. Labelling is our way of making sense of the social world.
Of course, like every innate tendency, this tendency needs to be tempered and like every freedom, this freedom cannot be exercised with abandon. But, it helps to understand the source of stereotypes before mindlessly dismissing them. And as much as try not to crack HR jokes these days (even to actively and fervently oppose them), I will be the first to admit that the world is a much more fun place with them in it !

When Push Comes to Shove : My Experiments with the Mumbai Local Train

The ladies' compartment of the Mumbai local train is the apt crucible for the ultimate representation of female psychology. The experience can be said to elicit the finer qualities in the character of a woman, like patience, fortitude and equanimity, laced with indomitable determination. My own experience with this inextricable part of what constitutes 'Mumbai', was one of my most profound learnings during my two years in the city. Before long, I had devised my own series of "Steps for using the Mumbai local train to reach your destination, alive"

1. Make sure that all your belongings are in your bag. To ensure that this happens on time, start fumbling for your phone 15 minutes prior to this. It is advisable for the bag to be on your front. Apart from the obvious advantage of protecting your purse, it can also prove useful in shielding your face from overt attack and / or murderous looks and / or the steady streams of invective pouring from all directions.

2. The right place to stand in a throng of large and fiercely determined women is right in the middle of it. This results in the large and fierce vanguard protecting you from likely injury caused by the phalanx charging out from the train, while at the same time, ensuring that the part of the horde exactly behind you pushes you all the way inside the train.

3. When 'the moment' arrives, close your eyes, lower your head and let your muscles relax. Open your eyes, once it becomes apparent that you are no longer moving and then try to ascertain that you are inside by peering through a tiny crack in the solid wall formed by bodies hurtling on to you.

4. Make sure that you cling on to something. Make sure that whatever you cling on to is not human.

5. It helps to be mindful of the fact that your more seasoned fellow travelers, may spontaneously erupt in an earsplitting version of a Bollywood song from the early 90s.

6. Risk periodical peeks from the tiny crack in the wall to maintain your bearings.

7. While getting down, close your eyes again and follow the same procedure. In a broad and general sense, remember, that travelling in the Mumbai local train is a lot like giving birth: Take a deep breath and…Push!

The Ants and the Gas Chamber

I define ants as that curious species of self proclaimed ‘left brain’ (refer to “Splitting Headache” for an update on the absurdity of such a category) individuals, who simply dismiss what they do not understand, as not being worth understanding, or worse, as simply not existing at all. These ants assiduously (hence the name ‘ants’) work towards an answer, when a question is framed for them and given to them in the clearest and most systematic form, along with a set of rules that determine the method of solution. But these are, invariably, the individuals, who can never think in terms of questions. They will feel angry, jealous, sad, confused, nervous, but will scarcely be aware of the reasons for this; they will in fact summarily dismiss everything they cannot understand as ‘wind’ or ‘gas’, effectively consigning it to that dreaded place, where no one wishes to venture...the gas chamber. With a patient and gentle smile, they “confess”, that they can only understand hard, observable, measurable phenomena. Then, presumably, to make humanities students like me feel a little better about themselves, they hasten to add, that, such softer disciplines are the ones that are in fact the most challenging to study. This generosity of spirit sometimes moves me deeply. But I have observed that when it comes to disciplines in which they have not received formal training, then these ants talk more gas than anyone else. This is because they have always been so preoccupied with solving specified defined problems that they are very comfortably insulated from a world where they often have to begin with finding out what the problem is. I have witnessed instances of elaborate, step by step solutions that address the wrong issue. These elaborate solutions often contain abstruse formulas thrown in specifically for the benefit of those, who will not be able to understand them. Ants mostly end up missing the wood for the trees. Ants are adept at breaking down, but can rarely construct. I once heard an ant state: “All the goals and effort stuff is just ‘fundas’; if you want to do something, then you just do it” (which made me wonder, wasn’t this statement, in itself, another ‘funda’?). But, of course, the ant did not realise this rather obvious implication, as having linked A to B, the ant’s work there was done.

Of course, I often sympathize with ants. Many of them are simple, honest individuals, who are simply terrified of ambiguity. But the species I detest is the pseudo ants. These are individuals, who simply mimic ants, their primary objective is to create a semblance of rationality. This is the formula dropping, jargon spewing species that is neither good at maths, nor at anything else. The pseudo ants extol the virtues of the ants and use them as a bulwark against the non ants. While ants are at least good at doing what they know to do; the pseudo ants are not good at anything, but showing off. They will be the first to have recourse to terms like ‘logic’, ‘objective’ and ‘black and white’, but will hardly be able to go deeper in their arguments than merely stating these terms.

It’s time ants grasped (I don’t expect pseudo ants to grasp this) that being logical does not mean finding the solution; being logical means reasoning. This involves analyzing the problem and all the factors affecting it, trying to move towards a solution, while simultaneously exploring loopholes or possible contradictions in one’s analysis. The extent of logic is determined by the quality of an argument and not necessarily by the solution itself. We can, of course, scornfully dismiss the idea that every problem does not have one correct answer or that asking questions often reflects a person’s logical reasoning, as much as answering them does. But I think, that to dismiss such ideas would not be very wise of us. To relegate these ideas to the gas chamber, would be to delude ourselves into believing, "We do not understand this at present, therefore this does not exist."

The Church of Real Life

The Real Life Movement arose at the start of the 21st century. Beginning to spread its tentacles in the nation’s leading educational institutions, it found its most ferocious adherents in young, restless students, eager to free themselves of the stifling shackles of Education and enter the JAIL (Journey of Active and Indiscriminate Learning).

The members of the movement bore the unmistakable hallmarks of the age, whether it was their progressively blasé world view or their frothingly high energy levels (in many cases, attributable to varying degrees of ADHD). The thread that bound them inextricably was , however, the shared disdain for theory and the asphyxiating confines imposed by axioms, premises, propositions.....It was all so redundant, so comically circular! But the Real Life Movement was at pains to abjure the code of circular reasoning and had a new, radical credo: Learning is Experiencing and Experiencing is Learning. Several members of the RLM have written about their JAIL experiences, at times expatiating at length on how the JAIL was a source of freedom and self fulfilment. Notable among these works is “From Crisis to Crisis: Hurtling down the Path of Life” and, of course, the immensely popular Real Life self improvement book “Because Things Have Always Been the Way They Are”. RLM members averred that the JAIL had inculcated in them a sense of indomitable confidence, as their experiences continued incessantly to confirm and reinforce their beliefs and convictions.