The Tipping Point

"Tipping is an interesting behavior because tips are voluntary payments given after services have been rendered. Consumers rarely pay more than necessary for goods and services. Tipping represents a multibillion-dollar exception to this general rule. It is an exception that raises questions about why people tip."

Many restaurants have now started levying an “automatic gratituity” on every in house order. In staid, statist Europe, that’s par for the course. In America, you see it on cruise ships, in tony establishments run by celebrity chefs such as Thomas Keller, and in less luxe setting when parties of six or more are involved. But for a lone diner, grabbing lunch? Really ?

Of course an “automatic gratuity” is an impossible proposition. “Gratuity” has roots in the Latin word gratutus, which means voluntary. A gratuity, or tip, is a gift or reward given freely, without compulsion. There’s nothing automatic about it.
 Except of course that there is, even when it’s not described as such.

Then there's the business side of tipping: Restaurant patrons in the United States fork over approximately $16 billion in tips a year. Many restaurants introduce this new policy because they want to ensure that their waiters earn at least $7.50 per hour. The automatic 15 percent tip is supposed to help the restaurant achieve that goal, but there’s obviously another way to generate the necessary revenue — it could simply raise prices. Of course an automatic gratuity isn’t legally enforceable — if you don’t want to pay it, you don’t have to. But apparently the restaurateurs believes the bulk of its customers are likelier to comply with a fake mandatory increase of 15 percent than an unavoidable price increase of 10 percent! Which says something, no doubt, about how compulsory the average person now considers the once-voluntary act of tipping.



But is it any wonder we feel this way?
 There’s a tip jar on every retail counter these days. We give our spare change to baristas, pedicurists, dog groomers, massage therapists, grocery baggers — no wonder the homeless go hungry. The 20 percent tip, once the exclusive domain of the generous spendthrift, is now presented as the expected amount, even when the service is merely OK. According to The New York Post, the average New Yorker doles out over $ 3300 in tip per year.

These days, the idea of not tipping is almost as impossible to comprehend as the idea of paying for news. Who does that? Crazy people? Criminals? There isn’t any law against not tipping. Not yet anyway.



Things were much different a century ago. Between 1909 and 1926,six US states actually passed laws that made tipping illegal. Indeed many restaurants posted “Tipping is not American!” signs in their dining rooms. In a republic where the waiter was the political and moral equal of the millionaire factory owner, each endowed with the same essential rights and freedoms, tipping was seen as “a hangover of Old World flunkeyism” as one New York Times editorial opined. It divided a classless society into servant and served.
 But even when the practice was illegal in six states, it never fell out of favor, perhaps because it also helped servants achieve a level of prosperity few had ever achieved. A 1907 article from the Times reported that many of the city’s top waiters had earned enough money to become homeowners and landlords. One even bought a racehorse with his tips.



Michael Lynn, a professor at Cornell, has studied tipping for decades. “There is a rather weak relationship between the size of the tip and the level or quality of service one receives from their waiter or waitress," he concluded in a 1996 study.

Also the amount left as a tip by diners is influenced more by bill size and the fear of disappointing the server than by good service. Four years later, he determined that we tip better when a server crouches to take our order or lightly touches our shoulder. In May 2010, he confirmed what our wives have always asserted till today without proof that we tip better when a server has large breasts.
His results indicated that waitresses with larger bra sizes received higher tips — as did women with blonde hair and slender bodies. He referred to the popularity of Hooters and other similar “breastaurants” that openly capitalize on men’s affinity for “attractive” — and in particular, busty — servers. Ugly people are not a protected class, legally,” Lynn said. “It is not in fact illegal to hire only attractive waitresses.”

It now seems clear from all this research that :

1) Restaurant tips are poor measures of customer satisfaction with service and that they provide weak incentives for delivering good service.

2) Nonverbal server behaviors that communicate liking for the customer, such as lightly touching the customer and crouching next to the table when interacting with the customer, substantially increase the tips restaurant servers receive. Also it helps if you have big breasts!

3) Tipping is more prevalent in countries whose populations are achievement-oriented, status-seeking, extroverted, neurotic and tenderhearted.

And the rate of tipping keeps going up even if quality of service does not. Here are the latest guidelines from Emily Post no less:

Wait service (sit down)	15-20% pre-tax
Bartender	$1 per drink or 15-20% or tab
Restroom Attendant	$0.50-$3, depending on service
Valet	$2-$5
Skycap	$2 first bag, $1 per additional bag
Doorman	$1-$2 for carrying luggage $1-$2 for hailing cab $1-$4 beyond the call of duty
Bellhop	$2 first bag, $1 per additional bag
Housekeeper	$2-$5 per day, left daily
Concierge	$5 for tickets or reservations, $10 if hard to get; no need to tip for answering questions
Taxi driver	15% plus an extra $1-$2 if helped with bags

Improving Creativity

We have all been told when young how all great achievements were 99 % perspiration and 1 % inspiration and creative ideas. Everyone has suggestions on working hard, but few can tell us how to find inspiration or become more creative. Till now.

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).



Scholars, like Torrance, have been tracking a group of children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed. Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measured creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.



To understand exactly what should be done to improve creativity requires, first, understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.
 When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.
 Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.



Is this learnable? Yes. There are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. A lifetime of consistent habits can gradually change the neurological pattern.



Here is an interesting real life example: the National Inventors Hall of Fame School, a new public middle school in Akron, Ohio came up with a project for the fifth graders: figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. Its windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The students had four weeks to design proposals. Working in small teams, the fifth graders first engaged in what creativity theorist Donald Treffinger describes as fact-finding. How does sound travel through materials? What materials reduce noise the most? Then, problem-finding—anticipating all potential pitfalls so their designs are more likely to work. Next, idea-finding: generate as many ideas as possible. Drapes, plants, or large kites hung from the ceiling would all baffle sound. Or, instead of reducing the sound, maybe mask it by playing the sound of a gentle waterfall? A proposal for double-paned glass evolved into an idea to fill the space between panes with water. Next, solution-finding: which ideas were the most effective, cheapest, and aesthetically pleasing? Fiberglass absorbed sound the best but wouldn’t be safe. Would an aquarium with fish be easier than water-filled panes? Then teams developed a plan of action. They built scale models and chose fabric samples. They realized they’d need to persuade a janitor to care for the plants and fish during vacation. Teams persuaded others to support them—sometimes so well, teams decided to combine projects. Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing.

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function. Some scholars go further, arguing that lack of creativity—not having loads of it—is the real risk factor. In Runco’s subsequent research, those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.



Highly creative adults tended to grow up in families embodying opposites. Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished. It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.



“Creativity can be taught,” says James C. Kaufman, professor at California State University, San Bernardino.

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.



But not all techniques for improving creativity work. Take brainstorming. Brainstorming in a group became popular in 1953 with the publication of a business book, Applied Imagination. But it’s been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together. In fact, according to University of Oklahoma professor Michael Mumford, half of the commonly used techniques intended to spur creativity don’t work, or even have a negative impact. As for most commercially available creativity training, Mumford doesn’t mince words: it’s “garbage.” Whether for adults or kids, the worst of these programs focus solely on imagination exercises, expression of feelings, or imagery. They pander to an easy, unchallenging notion that all you have to do is let your natural creativity out of its shell.

So what is one to do? There are, however, are some techniques that do boost the creative process:

Don’t tell someone to ‘be creative.’ Such an instruction may just cause people to freeze up. However, according to the University of Georgia’s Mark Runco, there is a suggestion that works: “Do something only you would come up with—that none of your friends or family would think of.”

Get moving. Almost every dimension of cognition improves from 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, and creativity is no exception. The type of exercise doesn’t matter, and the boost lasts for at least two hours afterward. However, there’s a catch: this is the case only for the physically fit. For those who rarely exercise, the fatigue from aerobic activity counteracts the short-term benefits.

Take a break.. Those who study multi-tasking report that you can’t work on two projects simultaneously, but the dynamic is different when you have more than one creative project to complete. In that situation, more projects get completed on time when you allow yourself to switch between them if solutions don’t come immediately.

Reduce screen time. According to University of Texas professor Elizabeth Vandewater, for every hour a kid regularly watches television, his overall time in creative activities—from fantasy play to arts projects—drops as much as 11 percent. With kids spending about three hours in front of televisions each day, that could be a one-third reduction in creative time—less time to develop a sense of creative self-efficacy through play.

Explore other cultures. Five experiments by Northwestern’s Adam Galinsky showed that those who have lived abroad outperform others on creativity tasks. Creativity is also higher on average for first- or second-generation immigrants and bilinguals. The theory is that cross-cultural experiences force people to adapt and be more flexible. Just studying another culture can help.

Follow a passion. Rena Subotnik, a researcher with the American Psychological Association, has studied children’s progression into adult creative careers. Kids do best when they are allowed to develop deep passions and pursue them wholeheartedly—at the expense of well-roundedness. “Kids who have deep identification with a field have better discipline and handle setbacks better,” she noted. By contrast, kids given superficial exposure to many activities don’t have the same centeredness to overcome periods of difficulty.

Ditch the suggestion box. If you want to increase innovation within an organization, one of the first things to do is tear out the suggestion box, advises Isaac Getz, professor at ESCP Europe Business School in Paris. Formalized suggestion protocols, whether a box on the wall, an e-mailed form, or an internal Web site, actually stifle innovation because employees feel that their ideas go into a black hole of bureaucracy. Instead, employees need to be able to put their own ideas into practice. One of the reasons that Toyota’s manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Ky., is so successful is that it implements up to 99 percent of employees’ ideas.

For the longest time, creativity was considered the work of a genius operating on his own. The cult of the designer held sway, with little attention being paid to the system that supports the creative genius. The perception still exists that creative businesses can just start up, when in fact it takes a while for an entire ecosystem to actually generate an industry. Creativity does depend on the intelligence, expertise, talent, and experience of an individual. But it also depends on creative thinking as a skill that involves qualities such as the propensity to take risks and to turn a problem on its head to get a new perspective. And that can be learned.

A premature obituary

In the summer of 2010, though the specifics may have differed from left to right, the political class in the US had reached a consensus - Obama's presidency was, in a word, doomed.

But if you examined the facts in some depth, the reality is quite different. Two recent pieces provide a more consistent and balanced view of just what Obama has achieved when you get away from the daily hysteria. It is true that the common man is frustrated by the lack of progress in the economy. But they are still looking for solutions more than someone to blame. What has passed under the radar are the very substantial achievements that Obama has had just in the past two years.

He and his team have helped avoid a second Great Depression. The bank bailout, however noxious, worked. The auto industry is now making profits for the first time in five years. Two new Supreme Court Justices are in place after failed attempts at culture war demagoguery. Crime - amazingly - has not jumped with the recession. America is no longer despised abroad the way it was; torture has been ended; relations with Russia have improved immensely; Iran's regime is more diplomatically and economically isolated than in its entire history; even the Greater Israel chorus has been challenged. Despite continued violence and political stalemate in Iraq, he is on track to withdraw combat troops by his stated August 2010 deadline. He scrapped the F-22 fighter, ended Homeland Security pork in states where terrorist threats are minimal, attached strings to US military aid to Pakistan. He pushed the Pentagon to abandon “don’t ask, don’t tell,” expanded AmeriCorps, increased funding for national parks and forests, and “overperformed on education”. And then there’s the piece de resistance, the health care bill, which among other things will extend Medicaid to some 16 million relatively poor people. Health insurance reform will stick despite the recent legal challenges and, with careful oversight, could even begin to curtail runaway healthcare costs. Another recent legislative victory for Obama’s domestic agenda was the enactment of what he has called “the toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression.”

In all of this "he had won ugly—without a single Republican—but won all the same,” writes Jonathen Alter in his book The Promise, “Whatever happened next—however bad it got—Barack Obama was in the company of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson now in terms of domestic achievement, a figure of history for reasons far beyond the color of his skin.”

The Progressives seemed disappointed that he had met all the promises he made during the campaign. Yet even here the facts are quite different. PolitiFact.com, a database of the St. Petersburg Times that won a Pulitzer Prize for its fact-checking of the 2008 campaign, had catalogued 502 promises that Obama made during the campaign. At the one-year mark the totals showed that he had already kept 91 of them and made progress on another 285. The database’s “Obameter” rated 14 promises as “broken” and 87 as “stalled.” With promises ranging from “Remove more brush and vegetation that fuel wildfires” to “Establish a playoff system for college football,” PolitiFact selected 25 as Obama’s most significant. Of those, an impressive 20 were “kept” or “in the works.”

And these were accomplished in spite of obstacles that would fell most mortals—the almost uncountable messes he inherited from Bush-Cheney, a cratered economy, a sclerotic Congress in thrall to lobbyists and special-interest money, and a rabid opposition underwritten by a media empire that owns both America’s most-watched cable news channel and its most highly circulated newspaper.

Of course Barack Obama was too hot not to cool down. He was the one so many were waiting for—not only the first African-American president but also the nation’s long-awaited liberator after eight years of Bush-Cheney, the golden-tongued evangelist who could at long last revive and sell the old liberal faith, the first American president in memory to speak to voters as if they might be thinking adults, the first national politician in years to electrify the young. He was even, of all implausible oddities, a contemporary politician- author who actually wrote his own books. Most people thought, correctly, that the Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama, a mere chief executive, to follow.

But the facts here too show that despite the hysteria, his achievements have been substantial. Indeed they far outstrip those of his recent predecessors. And there one contradictory footnote to the many provisional Obama obituaries of early summer 2010. For all the President’s travails, his approval rating, somewhere between 45 and 50 percent depending on the poll, still made him the most popular national politician in the country.

And as Andrew Sullivan cannily observes in this piece on Obama's long game. "I've learned over time", he writes, " to respect the canniness of this president's restraint. His gift is patience and perseverance and allowing his enemies to destroy themselves."

What price friendship?

Not so long ago, friendship belonged to a dwindling list of desirable outcomes – including happiness, wisdom and good weather – that money couldn't buy. In a cold and indifferent world full of cold and indifferent strangers, a friend was something you had to find yourself and cultivate over a lifetime. ( see my blog posts on "Friends and friendship" and " Circles of friends").

But no more: now you can purchase friendship at your convenience, by the hour. For a certain consideration, you can hire someone to go to a museum with you, or hang out at the gym, or keep you company while you shop. A stranger, you might say, is just a friend who hasn't invoiced you yet.

This disturbing development had its origins in Japan. There a new a new type of "social service" industry is helping folks fill their social void. Renting a friend, or professional stand-in, is a logical and effective Japanese solution to singledom issues -- particularly for those who prefer to keep their dirty laundry closeted, along with their marital status, sexual orientation and employment history. Ryuichi Ichinokawa, founder of one of Japan's first rent-a-friend agencies, says he feels Japan's traditions and formal culture drive many of its citizens to push personal problems out of public view. So even if keeping personal proclivities private requires hiring a professional to fill in the gaps, it's worth the price.

Ichinokawa has seen first-hand the growing popularity of the faux friend agencies since founding Hagemashi Tai (or I Want to Cheer You Up) three years ago. In the beginning, Ichinokawa played all the roles himself, but now he employs more than 30 "friends" who, for a pre-arranged rate, will fill almost any social role: friend, relative, colleague, spouse, parent, classmate, even best man. The roles agents are asked to play range from being best man at a wedding, to being a child's 'uncle' at a sports event, to being a parent attending a matchmaking party. They might be asked to be a husband at a social gathering, or even a rival suitor.

What each situation has in common is that the client wants the agent to fill in the gap in his or her life - a gap they feel unable to broach publicly. Behind the example of the 'uncle' watching his nephew's sports event, for example, is the fact that the child's mother is a divorcee, the father is absent, and the son is being bullied at school by his peers. It is clear that the divorcee is attempting to fill in the gap of her missing husband and her son's missing father in the hope, apart from anything else, that this will solve the problem of her son being bullied. The uncle is also a stand-in father and, at least in the mother's mind, will quite literally represent the protective authority figure that is missing in their lives. Another situation described is acting to rescue love affairs that are failing. A woman client employs an agent to act as a potential rival in order to re-kindle her lover's interest. When she is in public with her inattentive boyfriend, the agent is programmed to 'accidentally' turn up, show that they've met before and express overt interest in her. Here the agent is asked to collude with the woman in trying to cover up the fact that her boyfriend has lost interest in her, if he was ever interested in the first place. Whatever role the agent is asked to play points to an underlying emotional gap in the client that is too painful to know about - much less risk exposing.

Japan is a culture which has an extreme fear of vulnerability and defeat and that prides itself on the importance of form and structure ­ on putting on a good public appearance . Here it is perhaps especially shameful when the facts of one's life don't correspond to how they are supposed to be. For many people, these discrepancies convey a terrible sense of failure and inadequacy. Having to hire friends and relatives only highlights the isolation of these clients and how much intimacy is lacking in their lives. However, in helping clients cover up their problems, the agents or “friends”seem to be acting more in the role of social prostitutes, giving short-term relief that must be kept secret at all costs. Creating the façade of a life without problems is immensely seductive but it is the client who is fooled in the end.

But rent a friend has also become big in the US and is well on its way in UK. The website rentafriend.com maintains a database with 218,000 names on it, chums-for-hire from all over the US and Canada. Apparently, 2,000 people pay to subscribe in order to find friends to take to dinner or to invite round for some scrapbooking. It may all sound a bit suspicious, but Rentafriend founder Scott Rosenbaum insists that the service furnishes platonic friendship only. Those seeking or offering more are struck off. Rent A Friend is not an escort site. It does not proffer or offer "ladies of the night" or any form of salubrious services. Instead, it simply exists to rent out strangers who will be happy to be your friend. For a set amount of time. For money.

You can rent them by the hour for a social event, or simply to teach you a new skill. Indeed, there are a whole variety of things your (paid-for) friend can help with: "You can rent a local Friend to hang out with", states the website. "[Someone to] go to a movie or restaurant with, someone to go with you to a party or event, someone to teach you a new skill or hobby, or someone to show you around an unfamiliar town". After all human beings are sociable animals and needs companionship(real market demand).How companionship is priced(heart felt affection,money &/or time) is up to a mutual agreement between parties involved.

And how much does friendship cost. I bet you didn’t know. But the market rate for a friend is apparently around $10 per hour!

The MSG mystery

"It enhances the flavor of your food, all foods".

"No, it causes heart palpitations and should be avoided at all costs".

Therein lies the mystery of MSG, the little know white powder that causes such divergent opinions. I went in search for answers after my recent trip to Vietnam where it was clear that the food we had enjoyed for so long during our stay of eight years was no longer innocent of causing various strange effects on the body. What was the truth? Can this flavoring really cause damage?

By 1901 scientists had drawn a map of the tongue, showing crudely the whereabouts of the different nerve endings that identify the four accepted primary tastes- sweet, sour, bitter and salty. But Professor Kidunae Ikeda of the Tokyo Imperial University was convinced that there was something missing in these definitions.' There is,' he said, 'a taste which is common to asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat but which is not one of the four well-known tastes.' He decided to call the fifth taste 'umami' - a common Japanese word that is usually translated as 'savoury' - or, with more magic, as 'deliciousness'. But it took him eight long years to prove its existence.

It started innocuously enough – one day he asked his wife why her soup was so delicious. She pointed to strips of dried seaweed, called kombu, a heavy kelp which when soaked in hot water provided the essence of dashi, the stock base of Japanese soups. Ikeda worked on kombu and by 1901 was able to announce that he had isolated a chemical whose properties were exactly the same as those of glutamic acid, which when broken down during cooking, fermentation or ripening- became glutamate. And glutamate is contained in the broth of seaweed and is what causes the taste sensation “unami”. It was easily stabilized with ordinary salt and water and made into mono sodium glutamate- a white crystal soluble in water. This was the birth of the ubiquitous MSG marketed initially as Aji-no-moto or “ essence of taste”. Later on they found a simpler and cheaper process using fermented molasses or wheat and the product took off all over Asia.

It spread to the US as the aftermath of the end of the world war two. As mass production of processed food was booming, MSG provided a cheap and simple additive that made everything taste better. Pretty soon it went into tinned soups, salad dressings, processed meats, carbohydrate-based snacks, ice cream, bread, canned tuna, chewing gum, baby food and soft drinks. As the industry progressed, it was used in frozen, chilled and dehydrated ready meals as well. Ajinimoto started manufacturing in the US in 1956, joining up with Kellog in 1962 and was soon selling everywhere under the brand Accent.

But in 1968, came the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome (CRS), which claimed that MSG was the cause of various ailments like numbness, general weakness and palpitations. Thus began a extended period of debate about MSG and its ill effects. Much research was done but no one could correlate these ailments with the intake of MSG. Indeed no official body was willing to warn humans against consuming MSG.

But popular opinion travelled spectacularly to this science. MSG's name soon became utter mud. It was blamed for causing asthma attacks, migraines, hypertension and heart disease, dehydration, chest pains, depression, attention deficit disorder, anaphylactic shock, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and a host of diverse allergies. Chinese restaurants started placing placards in their windows stating “ No MSG used “ and there were lines in many menus of even other restaurants claiming that there taste did not come from the use of MSG.

The food processing industry by then had a huge stake since almost all its products used MSG. Their response was to bury it by giving MSG new names- starting with the innocuous sounding “natural flavoring” to the more esoteric E 621.

The problem of MSG becomes even more complicated when we learn that glutamate is present in almost every food stuff and that the protein is so vital to our functioning that our own bodies produce 40 grams of it a day. Human milk contains large amounts of glutamate, ripe cheese is full of glutamate as are tomatoes. Almost all foods have some naturally occurring glutamate in them but the ones with most are obvious: ripe tomatoes, cured meats, dried mushrooms, soy sauce, Bovril and of course Worcester sauce, nam pla (with 950mg per 100g) and the other fermented fish sauces of Asia. Marmite, with 1750mg per 100g, has more glutamate in it than any other manufactured product on the planet!

So what is the truth about this little white powder that provides taste and “unami” but may also cause various ailments?

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has classified MSG as a food ingredient that's "generally recognized as safe," but the use of MSG remains controversial. Over the years, however, the FDA has received many anecdotal reports of adverse reactions to foods containing MSG. These reactions — known as MSG symptom complex — include: headache, flushing, sweating, facial pressure or tightness, numbness, tingling or burning in face, neck and other areas, rapid, fluttering heartbeats (heart palpitations), chest pain, nausea, weakness, etc. For this reason, when MSG is added to food, the FDA requires that it be listed on the label. However, researchers have found no definitive evidence of a link between MSG and these symptoms.

So the mystery remains. Is MSG bad for you or is it a simple food additive that does you no harm? No one seems to know for sure!

One idea at a time

There is a view that says that most people can only have one top idea in their mind at one time. When I was writing a report which was overdue, I remember trying to focus on the main ideas in my work but other ideas kept hovering around like pesky gnats constantly distracting me. I finally found the way to keep my mind centered on the big idea was to write down the small ones floating around on a piece of paper on my bedside. It was as if I had finally nailed these pesky gnats and I could now work in peace on my magnum opus. The hard fact is that most people have only one top idea in their mind at any given time as Paul , in an interesting article, insists. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that any form of creative thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind. Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control your own thoughts only indirectly. Everyone know that you can’t really directly control where your thoughts drift. Therein lies the paradox- if you’re controlling them, they’re not drifting. And if they are not allowed to drift, how will you ever get those great new ideas that light up bulbs. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. You need to try instead to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about. You don’t have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind. And to do that the first thing you have to do is make sure you are not distracted by some kinds of ideas that are peskier than the gnats I mentioned in the begining. There are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts which push out more interesting ideas. The most obdurate one is thinking about money. Anything to do with money is almost by definition an attention sink. I have known people who get up from deep sleep to turn on their computers to figure out if they could buy something cheaper or raise their bid in one of those awful internet auctions. Others just worry about money or lack there of. But if you think about money, you can forget thinking about anything else. The other is disputes. All fights are essentially idea destroyers. They may feel like that they get your creative juices flowing but really there is no real substance to them. There is another aspect of disputes worth thinking about. While disputes themselves are indeed a creative thought sink, it is their aftermath that is even more damaging. Think of it this way – once the dispute is over, you rarely turn it off but instead keep brooding about what you could have done differently to have won the argument. It is here that the old adage of “turning the other cheek” may actually turn out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. You can avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to you by telling yourself: this doesn’t deserve space in your head. If you have forgotten the details of old disputes, you are on way to recovery because that means you have not been thinking about them leaving space for creative thinking instead and for new ideas. I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what is the top idea in their mind at any given time. Or how to get to be in a position to receive them? In short, how do you become creative? How do you get to that top idea in your mind. First don’t think about money, second avoid disputes or if you have them, get over them quickly. But to get the real top idea, go take a shower, for the ideas you have in the shower will really be the top ones!

The Uses of Tragedy

As I look back, I sometimes recall my two heart attacks with some fondness. No, no , not because they were not traumatic for all concerned – they were; but because paradoxically they remind me of the periods when I was in the midst of some of most exciting and productive work of my professional life!

The first occurred some thirty years ago. It was July of 1981 and I had been the director of offshore oil operations of our national oil company, ONGC for about eighteen months and was busy in hectic preparations for doubling our offshore oil output. Some two years prior, I had written a piece about how India could double its offshore production in five years and I had been summoned by aides to Mrs Gandhi ( I had been her science adviser some five years earlier) and grilled on my assertions. In one of those strange twists of fate, six months later the then director of offshore operations was denounced as a US spy and removed from his post forthwith and I was pitchforked into that job – hoist with his own petard, some observers were heard to snicker. Anyway I put together a plan to double the offshore oil output, which our French consultants, CFP asserted was simply not practicable given Indias bureaucracy and red tape. But in the next four years, we installed 48 deepwater offshore platforms at an average of one platform a month and by 1985, offshore oil production had not only doubled but grown four times. I write of these exciting times in my book “ A Passion to build”.

The second heart attack came in March of 2005 as I was in the final stages of my career in Vietnam where one of my major projects was providing electricity to the rural areas in the country. Starting in 1997, we had been able to provide power to over 30 million rural people and by 2010, Vietnam had reached the unprecented level of 98% rural access. Of course, this would have largely remained unknown- as many of World Bank’s most successful projects do- but for a chance visit by the new President of the Bank, Bob Zoellick. He visited some of the rural areas and talked to the policy makers and returned to Washington, deeply impressed by the country’s achievements and enthusiastic about Bank’s role in helping make them possible. On his return he directed his staff to produce a film to document this achievement and to help other poor developing countries. Here is that 20 minute documentary called "The Last Mile".

But he also wanted to know how it was done and what lessons it held for other developing countries. Again by the fickle finger of fate, I was asked in March of this year to produce a handbook for bringing power to the people which could be used as a companion piece to the documentary above for politicians, policy makers and practioners in other developing countries. I just finished writing this handbook and here it is: Bringing power to the people: a handbook.

As they say, sometimes tragedy comes attended with some good fortune as well! Perhaps we do not look hard enough. After all were the heart attacks a protest of the body to my overwork and stress or were they telling me “ you have only a little time left on this earth. Use it wisely”.

The Rashomon effect

Two recent events- one professional and the other personal- reminded me of a movie I had seen some fifty years ago. It reminded me once again that oftentimes perspective is relative and that each person can see the same event, but perceive the details of the event completely differently and hence reach a conclusion which, while plausible, is not what the others have seen. Since the facts of the event are rarely in dispute, the fact that different eyewitnesses can reach profoundly different conclusions is one that should give us pause in our certainties of what we seen and know.

Kurosawa's (1950) Rashomon is a movie, which shows how any individual's perception and telling of an event can differ, often radically, from another's version. It tells the story, set in medieval Japan, of two men who have taken refuge from a downpour under the Rasho Gate in Kyoto who relate to a third the events they had earlier witnessed at the trial of a bandit. They tell of how a man and his wife, while travelling through a forest, were met by a highwayman, who murdered the man and raped the woman. Their presentations of the testimony of each of the persons involved in the crime make it apparent, however, that each of the individuals involved saw the events in which he was participating in a different way than had the others, or, at the least, represented those events very differently.

Kurosawa shows how people can perceive the same physical occurrences in radically different ways. Whether the film's characters, and human beings generally, merely interpret what they have seen or done according to their own opinions and assumptions about the world or transform the events themselves, molding them into whatever new narratives are required for their emotional well-being, their differing representations are not overt lies, that is, representations known by the given person telling them to be untrue, but can be, in fact, accurate reflections of that person's understanding of the events he has witnessed.

By so letting the moviegoer see the world from the perspective of each of the individuals around whom Rashomon revolves, Kurosawa not only reminds the viewer just how fluid reality is, but also allows him to engage with each of the film's characters. The viewer is, consequently, not simply affected by the tragic murder of a man, the rape of a woman, and the execution of their attacker, but also by an awareness of how human beings are unable to deal with the universe around them without imposing upon it whatever constructs are needed to make that world an easier place for them to inhabit. For example, in the story told by the murdered man, which is related by a medium, the viewer sees how the man perceives himself as a completely innocent victim, betrayed even by his wife, who is revealed as a faithless creature who callously begs the robber to murder her husband and take her with him. In the wife's tale, by contrast, it is the man who is cruel and heartless, who is ready to abandon a spouse he sees as being tainted by the rape she has suffered. Each person interprets the events occurring to him as colored by his own often selfish perspectives so that whatever wrongs are committed are always done by others and never by himself. It also shows what lengths people will go to protect their own self-image from lies and deceit to a sense of importance belied by facts.

A few weeks ago I was invited by the World Bank, my erstwhile employers, to visit Vietnam and write about the reasons for the success of their rural electrification program which had gone from 3 % to 98 % access in less than two decades. I had first visited Vietnam in 20 years ago, lived there for almost 8 years, written two widely acclaimed energy sector reports besides helping design and implement the rural electrification effort in the late nineties. The government had even bestowed two medals on me for my contribution to this effort. So I went in confident that I would be able to chronicle this effort with a degree of competence and personal knowledge that perhaps other lacked. But even as I completed the report I found two other persons with different perspectives, each profoundly convinced of the accuracy of his assessment. Since the events over the two decades were not in doubt, it was puzzling to find two professionals with such differing views which they held with equal fervour and conviction. How can people perceive the same physical occurrences in radically different ways, and, more importantly, how does one decide which version is the truth?

The personal story has a similar puzzling but somewhat more familiar event at its center. It is the age old conflict of a doting mother and an aggressive daughter in law fighting ever so gently, and sometimes not so gently, over the life of the son. Mild criticisms become slights not to be forgotten, little events balloon into full blown conflicts till it leads to an open confrontation with each one giving his or her own version of how it led to this. The same events once again are seen in completely different light – a version of where you stand depends upon where you sit. Tragically, sometimes these events tend not to get resolved as one's ego and bruised feelings make reconciliation impossible as no one outside can decipher the real truth of the matter to offer help and counsel.

And tragically, as in Rashomon, at the end, it still remains unclear which of the stories told is true. No one is willing to take that extra step of walking in the other persons shoes even for a while, which could lead to a happy conclusion for all.