Whats in a name?

I recently finished my first novel. As I was waiting for the editors and designers to finish their painstaking work, I chanced upon this article and started wondering if I would be better off - at least in book sales- if I too changed my name.

It seems that there are a number of prerequisites writers are usually told to acquire for their books or novels to grab people’s attention in a crowded marketplace – an eye-catching title, a good opening line. But perhaps another is something they have slightly less leeway with-- their name.

A book’s popularity can depend on its author’s name – and the more memorable, the better. Of course, nobody is stuck with the name they are given at birth, and writers can get by without shedding theirs in real life. Writers and many others have long taken pseudonyms to overcome what they might have perceived as social obstacles –– the Brontës and Georges Sand and Eliot taking on male monikers; Margarita Carmen Casino taking her mother’s maiden name to become Rita Hayworth and escape being typecast as a Latina; the Jewish movie stars who took on more “ethnically ambiguous” names such as Danny Kaye, Kirk Douglas or Tony Curtis.

Others simplified their names for the public in an adopted country – Józef Konrad Korzienowski to Joseph Conrad; Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky to Guillaume Apollinaire; Swedish director Viktor Sjöström produced his Hollywood work under the name Victor Seastrom. It has also become increasingly common for literary writers such as John Banville and Julian Barnes to write crime fiction under pseudonyms (an example that J K Rowling has followed in her new incarnation as Robert Galbraith), something many “career” crime writers have scorned.

The reasons for such changes are usually pragmatic, born of hard-nosed economic logic, but there is also a liberating potential for some writers to write under different guises – the various heteronyms of Brian Ó Nuallain (Flann O’Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, Brother Barnabas, George Knowall) all produced stylistically distinct work; Fernando Pessoa went so far as to conceive intricate biographies for his various alter egos (Bernardo Soares, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caiero and Álvaro de Campos, among many others) as well as giving them recognisably different authorial voices.

By and large though, evidence would appear to show that most people prefer to publish, make films, produce art and so on under their own name. It might be a matter of pride or simply because it never occurs to them that they might change it to another. So what of those writers, actors and others who persist with their birth name, regardless of whether it might already be ‘taken’.  Do they get lost in the mix? In the past, it might have been an advantage to give yourself as “normal” a name as possible but today you might not really want to be one of those people whose name on Wikipedia appears next to the word “disambiguation”. 

Geoff Dyer is finding himself being shadowed, in a manner akin to Poe’s William Wilson, by another Geoff Dyer, the Financial Times’ Beijing bureau chief, whose books on contemporary China have no doubt snared a few unsuspecting buyers on Amazon. David Cloud Atlas Mitchell has, on at least one occasion, been represented in a broadsheet newspaper by a photo of David Peep Show Mitchell. Dyer and Mitchell are sufficiently successful not to have been damaged by the confusion. Still, circumstances can change. Who now remembers the American writer Winston Churchill – three years Sir Winston’s senior – who was one of the world’s best-selling novelists of the early twentieth century?

It’s one thing if you are getting a lot of press from the off – even then, if one is called Smith, it’s surely better to be a Zadie than a Jenny – but if you are relying, like most writers do, on word of mouth and exposure in bookshops and libraries, an ordinary name might not be the one you want. While China Miéville’s success is fully merited from a literary point of view, having a stand-out name has probably never harmed him either. A writer by the name of Peter Jones or Tom Jenkins is going to have a much harder time being remembered.

Still, that level of familiarity would be something that foreign-language writers trying to break into the English-speaking market would kill for. Selling writers in translation in English-speaking countries is often a slog so having a foreign-sounding name most likely puts one at a disadvantage, even if "Günther Grass", "Javier Marías" and "Andrei Makine" are all fairly humdrum names in those writers’ native lands.

There do exist people who tend to sit up and pay attention when the writer’s name is something foreign-sounding, and the stranger, longer, or shorter it is, the better. Having special diacritics like carons, tildes, umlauts or those strokes though the O that appear in Scandinavian languages wins extra marks. Judging by the sales of literature in translation though, they are a small minority.

Male readers are known to be reluctant to read books by women. Female readers tend to be far less discriminating on the basis of an author’s gender. It is in the best interest of us male writers that female readers’ greater open-mindedness will hold, given they constitute the majority of readers of fiction. It wouldn’t do for a man to have to start disguising himself under a female pseudonym in order to sell books, would it?

So readers , do you have any suggestions for me? What name should I select? For your information, the novel is set in Bombay during and after the Bombay massacres in November of 2008. It follows the determination of three friends to pursue the killers and to exact revenge on the Pakistanis for their part in this venture. The novel spans three continents from Mexico to Myanmar and Islamabad to Hanoi and is a spy thriller in the mode of Robert Ludlum and perhaps John Le Carre. So lets have your suggestions before I go to the printers. Also the name of the novel is "A Just Cause".

The worlds largest democracy holds elections.

India, the world's largest democracy is holding its elections in the month of April and May this year. One of the real innovation which makes this tremendous task possible is the advent of the Electronic Voting Machines or EVMs. 

Holding India's titanic general election is no simple task. Voting is broken down into nine phases—the fifth and largest of which is scheduled for this Thursday—that are spread over six weeks. Over the six weeks, an army of 11 million election officials and security forces will staff and operate more than 935,000 polling stations in India's 543 electoral constituencies, where they will serve almost 815 million registered Indian voters. Central to this undertaking are India's 1.7 million electronic voting machines, or EVMs, the portable, affordable, and highly durable systems that help this massive exercise in democracy run smoothly. 

Each EVM comes in two parts. The control unit remains with election officials at each polling place and connects by cable to the balloting unit. When a voter enters a polling booth, an official activates the balloting unit. The voter then presses one of up to 64 blue buttons next to each candidate's name and political-party symbol to cast his or her vote. 

 EVMs help India overcome a number of electoral challenges. The machines are compact and portable, in contrast to bulkier booth-sized voting machines in the United States and elsewhere. They are also built to withstand India's diverse and sometimes-harsh climate. Since they run on two 6-volt alkaline batteries, EVMs can be readily used in rural India, where two-thirds of the country's 1.2 billion citizens live, and other areas with limited or no electricity. The symbol-oriented design also makes voting more widely accessible in a country with 287 million illiterate adults—nearly 37 percent of the worldwide total—and a multilingual electorate that speaks 22 officially-recognized languages and hundreds more unofficial ones. But perhaps the EVM's most impressive feature is its price tag: each unit costs only 10,500 Indian rupees, or about $175. By comparison, even older, used voting machines in the U.S. can cost around $6,000. After a decade of sporadic and unsanctioned use of EVMs, India legalized the devices in 1988 alongside the existing (and often-maligned) paper-ballot system. They became standard features of elections in 1998 and the sole method for casting votes in the 2004 general election, in which almost 1.1 million EVMs were deployed in polling stations across the country. 

The Indian government boasts that "EVM has become the leitmotif of the world's largest democratic exercise and gets smarter with each avatar." Official election materials cite the EVM's superiority over paper balloting by noting the reduction in environmental waste, the speediness of tabulating results, and the decrease in spoiled or improperly cast votes. Another strength, according to election officials, is the EVM's role in combating electoral fraud through "booth capturing"—an ugly tactic where a candidate's supporters storm a polling place, sideline legitimate voters, and cast ballots—and ballot-stuffing.

But the machines have their limitations as well. EVMs can only record a maximum of 3,840 votes each (the Election Commission says each polling place should only serve about 1,500 voters) and can only list a maximum of 64 candidates at a time to vote for. Because India's elections are staggered over a six-week period, votes are tabulated in one region and the machines are then reused in another. In March, the Election Commission estimated it would have 1.7 million ballot units and 1.8 million control units—some polling places have more than one ballot unit per control unit—for this year's election. Each Indian constituency is required to keep 10 percent more EVMs than necessary for emergency situations. Like all electronic voting systems, EVMs also invite concerns about outside tampering. 

Since implementing the devices nationwide, the Election Commission has insisted that the machines are not susceptible to hacking or other forms of fraud. But a 2010 report by Indian computer-security experts challenged this claim after examining one of the machines and cited numerous vulnerabilities, especially if a malicious user had access to the EVMs in advance. "The technology’s promise was that attacks on the ballot box and dishonesty in the counting process would be more difficult," the report concluded. "Yet we find that such attacks remain possible, while being potentially more difficult to detect." A few months after the report's release, Mumbai police arrived at the house of Hari Prasad, one of the researchers, and arrested and interrogated him for hours about where he had obtained the device his team analyzed, before releasing him on bail. 

After repeated legal challenges by activists, the Delhi High Court ruled in January 2012 that the EVMs weren't tamper-proof and ordered the Election Commission to add a paper trail as an extra security measure against electoral fraud. Election officials pledged to upgrade 600,000 old EVMs to comply with the new guidelines and procure new ones, and voters can now file complaints if there are still problems with the devices.

In India, popular sentiment toward EVMs is mixed. Amit Sheth, a professor at Wright State University in Ohio who studies social media's influence in elections like India's says that . "So far, I have not found systemic differences of one party's view towards EVM than other party's views."Occasionally, criticism of the machines takes bizarre forms. During last year's regional assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, for instance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) filed a formal complaint after an Indian National Congress party elder allegedly told tribal voters that the EVMs would electrocute them if they voted for non-Congress candidates. The BJP won the election, but the Election Commission's FAQ now reassures prospective voters that there is no chance of electrocution from "short-circuitry or [any] other reason."

Despite their drawbacks, EVMs help solve electoral problems that aren't unique to India. The Indian government provided 4,130 EVMs to neighboring Bhutan last year for its legislative elections, and other developing countries, ranging from Nepal to Namibia, have also imported the Indian-manufactured machines for use in their own contests. Although it's no panacea for poor governance or repressive regimes, this $150 device from the world's largest democracy could soon make voting easier in burgeoning democracies worldwide.

We now await the results which will be declared only a day after the elections are concluded on May 15, an achievement indeed.

Sudden death

Jacob M. Appel writes a eulogy for sudden death.

"Six decades after Great-Grandpa Simon plunged off his mortal coil, sudden death now threatens to go the way of rotary telephones and passenger pigeons. The exact rate at which we are not dropping dead is difficult to calculate: while the government keeps meticulous records on the causes of our deaths, and the ages at which we perish, it makes no effort to estimate the speed of our grand finales. Nonetheless, as a physician, my anecdotal sense is that we’re not dying nearly as suddenly as we once did. “When I started as an intern,” an elderly colleague recently observed at a staff meeting, “most patients only stayed in the hospital for a day or two. Either you got better or you didn’t. Lingering wasn’t part of the protocol.” Today, in contrast, lingering is the norm. Insurance companies force you out of the hospital, not rigor mortis. Where a generation ago, the expectation was for men to retire at sixty-five and keel over at sixty-seven—the basis for the pension plans now bankrupting municipal governments—a massive myocardial infarction in one’s fifth or sixth decade is no longer inevitable. Stress tests and statins and improved resuscitation methods mean we are more likely to survive to our second heart attack, live beyond our third stroke. Life ends with a whimper, not a bang.

That is not to say that the Grim Reaper never arrives on a bolt of lightning: I’ve lost a medical school mentor to a plane crash, a neighbor to suicide, a childhood friend to a brain aneurysm. Thousands of Americans, smoking less but eating more, still do succumb to heart attacks in their fifties and sixties. But we greet these swift departures not only with grief, as we have always done, but also with a sense of indignation simmering toward outrage. In an age of prenatal genetic testing and full-body PET scans and rampant agnosticism, all varieties of death strike many of us as anathema. Death without fair warning becomes truly obscene.

Increasingly, our first associations with “sudden death” are metaphorical. “Sudden death” terminates ice hockey games and World Cup matches, not the lives of our friends and relatives. ..We can speak figuratively about sudden death, trivialize it—even joke about it—because we do not actually expect to confront it. Not now, not soon, not until we’ve been afforded ample time to prepare. And with each new medical innovation, the odds are more likely that we won’t.

My own family doctor has a sign on his office door that reads: “Sudden death is God’s way of telling you to slow down.” If that is indeed the case, God has been letting us accelerate with impunity for some time now.

In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society reminded Americans that, for the first time in human history, we lived in a civilization where a majority of people did not have to worry about basic subsistence. More than five decades later, we find ourselves belonging to the first human civilization where sudden death is the glaring exception, not the expectation. The novelty of our position is all too easy to forget; it is even easier to assume without questioning that the present state of affairs reflects progress. After all, which of us wouldn’t rather die well-prepared at ninety than suddenly at fifty-five?

And yet, the more I see of death, the less convinced I become that, in this medical and social revolution, we have not lost something of considerable value. I certainly don’t mean to glorify premature death: I suspect both “dying with one’s boots on” and “living fast, loving hard and dying young” are highly overrated feats. I do not believe that it is either dulce or decorum to die at twenty-five for one’s country. My concern is also not with the economic effects of the long goodbye: the percent of Medicare dollars spent in the last six months of life, the prospect of every gainfully-employed worker supporting two retirees.

Rather, my disquiet is principally for lost human dignity. Canadian right-to-die activist Gloria Taylor, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, recently wrote: “I can accept death because I recognize it as a part of life. What I fear is a death that negates, as opposed to concludes, my life.” Sudden death is a conclusion. Too often, I fear, the long goodbye devolves into a negation.

In medical ethics—the field in which I do my academic research and writing—the way we now die has led to the birth of entirely novel schools of thought. When life was truly brutish and short, whether in Hobbes’s sixteenth century London or Great-Grandpa Simon’s mid-twentieth century New York, the idealistic notion that all life was sacred and must be preserved at any cost carried limited weight in medical and moral circles. Although we have come to think of the modern era, post-Karen Ann Quinlan and Terri Schiavo, as one in which we tolerate less excess medical care than in past generations, the reality is that physicians and patients were once much more accepting of death than they are now. They had to be. The so-called “culture of life,” so recently embraced by the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, generally advances the view that life in its essence, rather than its quality, is of paramount value. The impact of this viewpoint upon modern healthcare and medical discourse cannot be underestimated. Yet this dogma is far more a product of technology and material change than of theological evolution. In a world where people keeled over on street corners without advance notice, the notion of controlling (or even defeating) death made little sense.

The slow demise of sudden death has also reshaped vast aspects of our culture and our iconography with little notice and less comment. How does it alter our society to live in a world influenced by elder statement—and then to watch those elder statesmen dotter into decrepitude? Franklin Roosevelt will forever be a jaunty sixty-three, Adlai Stevenson a distinguished sixty-five, Estes Kefauver—for those who still remember him—a scrappy sixty. In contrast, Ronald Reagan, as his memory faded and his world grew smaller, lost much of his magic. Clark Gable didn’t lock in his permanent sex appeal as Rhett Butler or Fletcher Christian, but with a catastrophic thrombosis at fifty-nine. It’s not so clear that an extra two decades enhanced Marlon Brando’s legacy.

Whether these changes are beneficial or deleterious, they are likely irreversible—at least by rational planning. Needless to say, we can’t ethically go around inducing cardiac arrests in healthy sixty year olds. What we can do—and what we have not been doing—is paying closer attention to the complex ways in which how we die is transforming how we live.

I fear the most subtle, yet most pernicious, consequence of a world in which people do not die suddenly is a world in which people do not appreciate life. ..Today, a brush with death often drives us to reexamine our lives.. Half a century ago, men like my great-grandfather didn’t require such a brush with death: living past fifty was itself enough of a risk to generate reflection and gratitude.

The dilemna of Aging

Jenny reflects on the problem of aging in a rather depressing article.

"One of the problems of ageing" she writes, " is knowing when to start complaining about being old."

And she continues in this veing. "It’s decidedly irritating, but also rather tragic, when head-turning young women, not content with being what they presently are, take the time to look at you in triumph, never doubting that they are going to stay young for ever – or perhaps they think the old and the young are born that way. The only defence against them is also a kindness: silence and knowledge. Even if we don’t take the Stoics to heart and live every moment as if it were our last, we should try to mitigate the awful shock that comes later on when we can’t fail to remember that the direction we live in goes only one way.

People are going to be cross with you for declaring agedness too soon as well as too late, but it’s not that easy to identify the right moment. According to Scientific American, we ought to be able to sniff out where we are at.  It confirms what we all know but hesitate to say: old people smell. Apparently it isn’t an unpleasant smell – like ‘cucumbers and aged beer’ or comparable to ‘old book smell’ – but it’s there. I am of the cohort which lived inside a gilded bubble when young, and made a proper song and dance about it. Now that group is clearly beginning to think of itself as old, and you can be sure this won’t happen quietly.

Back then, in the early 1970s, we baby boomers threatened our elders with radical change without thinking that we would ever change ourselves. But we have changed, in the ineluctable way, and not, as we assumed, as a result of personal choice. The irony of ‘I hope I die before I get old’ was that we didn’t believe for a second that we could become the old as we knew them. And we weren’t just young, but young in a way no previous generation had been young. We used ‘young’ and ‘old’ as time-free categories. ‘Young’ meant new and different, able to see what the old couldn’t (certain visionaries excepted): we had reinvented the terms to mean us and them. They, the old, would die out: we would change the world and remain forever ourselves, meaning forever young.

Without the constraints and necessities of war or strong memories of having had to manage austerity, we could believe that there was a single something that we purely were, and always would be. We made a fuss about being young, without understanding how much being young enabled us to make the fuss. Now, we’re going to make a fuss about being old and that’s going to be rather less straightforward. It’s certain that only a small fraction of my generation were doing any of the wild and wilful things people think (that we thought) we were all up to and that the same fraction are probably the ones who are going to write, talk, march and legislate about getting old in order to let the world – and ourselves – know what we think about it.

The young of our old age have expressed considerable resentment at the noise we have made about our activities in the 1960s and 1970s – just wait till we’ve all got our old age books out. By squinting slightly, I can see what a gloomy prospect that might be for you young ’uns, but given that you will be rid of us soon enough, you might just as well put up with it. Read, don’t read, it’s up to you. It’s our last shout. We will read one another, then notate, cross-reference and append our thoughts in our own books. When we’re dead I suspect it will be as if we had never been. The feminists, the radical left, the communards: all will dissolve into a trivial pop culture history called the Sixties, much slighter and less consequential than it thought itself to be. So bear with us. Those few of our parents, aunts and uncles who remain still disapprove of us. The young now disapprove of us too. Even some of our own demographic disapprove of us. So nothing, really, has changed for the self-loving unloved baby boomers.

One of our primary concerns is the war between the generations. The one in which, to our surprise, we are now the old and tiresome. But this time, there are worse accusations being chucked around. We are the baby boomers, the demographic catastrophe waiting to happen that is now happening. Baby boomers lived their youth in a golden time. Far from having to go into tens of thousands of pounds of debt, we had free tuition and decent grants to live on while we received a higher education. The generation that bore us and lived through the hardships of war and austerity, while disapproving of us, also provided us with welfare benefits that allowed us to take time off from earning a living, to play with ideas and new ways (we thought) of organising socially and politically, of exploring other cultures, drugs, craziness, clothes and music. Now, this free time seems mythic. If we wanted jobs, there were plenty of them. If we didn’t, we benefited in a way that would be called scrounging now (it was then, but no one stopped it).

We are costing a fortune as we age and we’ll go on to cost much more because medical science has promised us twenty more years of some sort of life than our parents expected. Our pensions, the medical expertise and equipment, the time and energy needed to care and cater for a disproportionately large aged population: all this, the young have been told, is coming out of their earnings and limiting their wellbeing. We got grants to do up houses we bought cheaply. They can’t get a mortgage. Workers to our queens, they are providing our good life, in suburbia, beside the sea, in sunny Spain, filling hospital beds, out of their taxes. We take our pensions, our cold weather payments, foreign holidays and cruises, while the young struggle to find jobs to pay for our needs, our strokes, our previously unhealthy lifestyles that caused the sicknesses which the impoverished NHS is obliged to cure. The one demographic group that has not seen its incomes fall since the recession is those over the age of sixty. Pensioner incomes have continued to rise on average, albeit very modestly.’ Beware of the albeits. A relatively small rise in income during the recession doesn’t mean a relatively high income level to start with....

Opposition between the generations is a perfect shield for a government under fire for cutting welfare while destroying the NHS, privatising education and doing nothing about the depletion of reasonably priced housing.  We are told to take our wellbeing and our ageing process into our own hands. The idea of ageing badly looms over us: those who become ill or develop age-related conditions are to blame for failing to keep themselves bright and sparky. They have grown wilfully old and expect the world to take care of them. It all plays into the neoliberal notion that the old are demanding welfare and medical aid which the young have to pay for. Dependency, more or less inevitable with increasing age, becomes something about which the old should apologise.

What we had then was a ‘kind of hopefulness, the energy that buoyed one up in those days [that] nobody with any kind of sophistication can really entertain now. You can’t believe there is something to be done that can be done by you.’ Maybe we were so high on our intentions that we failed to see the fog of Thatcherism creeping up around our ankles. As for costing the young money, it’s a marvellous distortion of the point of a welfare state. Perhaps we should apologise for being alive at a time when medical science is advanced enough and will do its best to keep us alive. But that’s also going to be true of the next generation. It was our generation that came up with the phrase ‘the personal is the political’.

If it never occurred to us that we would grow old, it also never crossed our minds that we would baulk at growing old. Being desirable, and staying desirable for longer, is the main thrust of marketing for clothes, cosmetics, medication and food.

It turns out to be harder than we thought it would be. The ageing flesh is not so fascinating, erotic or irrelevant to our sense of ourselves as we had planned to make it. Everywhere culture still teaches us shame and disgust at our ageing reflections, and makes it seem reasonable that men see older women in that way too. The older woman becomes invisible in public, just part of a crowd, while recalling how when young she was catcalled and handled by strangers as soon as she stepped out on the street. Like young women now, we were spectacle whether we wanted it or not. We were always visible, even when alone. It is almost impossible to be a young woman and not imagine yourself being looked at. Some of us tell ourselves that invisibility is an improvement, and so it can be, but the release comes with, it’s accepted, a loss of our sexual selves. Visibility and our sexuality are relegated to the past, youthful self, and it’s not surprising if those selves grown older breathe a sigh of relief at being free from the incessant gaze, the time-consuming achings of desire and the desire to be desired.

Another definitive non-sexual way of knowing you’re old is the moment when your doctor tells you that ‘you’ll have to learn to live with it,’ or that whatever ails or pains you is ‘the result of wear and tear’. You wait for the suggestion of a procedure, the next appointment, and then realise that you aren’t going to be considered for it. You see a virtual shrug that says you are no longer young enough for a resource-strapped institution to be overly concerned with getting you back to full health. There are higher priorities, and they are higher because the patients are younger. It comes to you that whatever ailment you’ve got at this point is decay inflected by decay, in one form or another, and, to people who aren’t you, only to be expected. It is, to put it simply, which they won’t, a recognition of the beginnings of the approach of death. And it can come to you in many ways, none of them alone necessarily recognisable. 

Things happens, this and that, which don’t in themselves mean anything, until the incremental signs pile up to the fact that there’s nothing to be done that’s worth doing. You are old, getting older, you won’t get younger, you are physically wearing out. You will die, sooner rather than later. Some things about ageing, such as whether we mind showing our wrinkled arms or living alone, are perhaps a matter of choice and decision, but then there comes the ordinary decay and breakdown of the old body. Eventually it’s out of our control and even our social and economic situation will affect only the conditions not the way in which we die. None of the gung-ho books on ageing has more than a brief mention of the proximity of death as one of the symptoms of old age to be dealt with. ‘Acceptance’, they say, without much elaboration, and then move rapidly on. Even if it won’t kill you imminently, the degeneration of the body will alter and limit how you can live, whether you can get out, continue to work and travel. I can’t think of anything about the reality of ageing which improves a person’s life. The wisdom people speak of that is supposed to come to us in old age seems to be in much shorter supply than I imagined, and apart from that, it’s a matter of how self-deceptively, or stoically, you are able or prepared to put up with the depletions, dependency and indignities of getting old....

Beauvoir’s solution of decent ageing was : ‘One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.’ A sense of love and community, a life vested in equality and the rights of women, certainly adds up to a proper life, even a good one, but I’m not sure that a good life, even the best life, is enough compensation for the multiple ills of ageing and what seems the single piece of wisdom I’ve learned from my past – the fact that the world is immune to benign liberal longings.

John Berger writing in his eighties said: ‘One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests … in order to save the present moment, whatever the future holds.’ 

The advice seems to be to do what will prevent you from despairing, because being old and having been young, we are very well aware of the world’s capacity to remain utterly unchanged by our efforts. And that awareness alone is enough to make the end of life grim and disappointing unless you have the capacity to grin and bear it.

The lure of lists

All of us love lists. David Letterman has his favorite list of ten that he often trots out and which become the chatter at the coffee bars around town. We make lists when we go to the mall and want to ensure that we dont craze buying stuff we dont need but which looks too attractive to pass up. " The deals, the deals, how can you give them up". You can if you have a list. Otherwise you are doomed to bankruptcy in the near future if advertisers have their way with you.

1. Neil Strauss even wrote a book called The Game which book told you that you would have more luck with women if you wore crazy hats at night clubs. It also taught you about false time constraints. If you approach someone and say, “I’ve got to get back to my friends in five minutes but I wanted to ask you…”, then the person you’re approaching will be less likely to feel you are intruding or being invasive. They lower their barriers because their subconscious rationalizes that they will only have to endure you for five minutes if things get awkward — they become mentally prepared for a known finite encounter. So too with lists. You know from the outset that this thing is only going to be 10 points, that’s how long you will have to endure. The end is in sight right up front, as is the reward (in this case, learning 10 reasons why you will read this).

2. Your brain is a lazy drug addict; its drug of choice is content and its preferred method of delivery is “as easily as possible” Your mind craves information. In fact, it craves information for the sake of it, regardless of whether that information leads to a reward. Scientists call this “information-seeking-behaviour,” and its compulsion is rooted in the evolutionary adaptation of our dopamine neurons. Uncertainty feels to the brain like a threat to your life and it’s easy to see how treating information as a reward would be useful to increasing our chances of survival. Unfortunately, the dopamine centers are not good at discerning the useful from the useless, opting instead for the broad filter “does this decrease uncertainty?” And so, as the internet alters the way we consume content, the general “law of least effort” directs our preferred method of content consumption. Specifically, “if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action.” In our era of near-infinite information, lists provide unparalleled cognitive ease of satiating the content craving instigated by our dopamine centers. Lists remove the mental burden of conception, categorization, and analysis thereby limiting uncertainty around a subject that the list, again, determines upfront. Simply put, lists feel better.

3. You trust anyone dressed as a police officer. Lists evoke an appeal to authority and a deference that has been drummed into you since you were a child. Think back to your first day of preschool. How did you make sense of your new and chaotic surrounding? You abided by a list of rules that told you what and what not to do (Rule 1: raise your hand if you want to speak, Rule 2: … etc.). And you almost certainly did it unquestioningly for you lacked the intellectual fortitude to question the constructs of the system (don’t feel bad, you were only four years old). Think back even earlier, what was your first encounter with dogmatic morality? Likely the 10 Commandments, that most immutable of lists. This pattern of critical lists handed down by authority repeats itself throughout our lives (the Amendments to the Constitution, the FBI’s Most Wanted list, even the sacrosanct Eight Rules of Fight Club) and reinforces a habit loop that suggests positive feedback in exchange for some degree of assumed validity and compliance. When you see the title of a list, no matter how asinine ..you are likely to fall into the habit of assuming a degree of legitimacy.

4. You love sex. When you have sex, your brain releases large amounts of the neurotransmitter dopamine (amongst other chemicals and hormones). Dopamine makes you experience “pleasure.” It is also a culprit in the habit loop of addiction, heightened attention, motivation and, importantly for our purposes, reward. Keystone habits, like making your bed, are effective atincreasing productivity and well-being because task completion triggers the release of dopamine. Similarly, we click on lists because reading them is pleasurable in the realest sense. We know lists are finite, self-contained, and imminently completable and so our mesolimbic pathway releases dopamine in anticipation of the task completion to come. Lists are an easy way to get a small win and evoke the pleasurable feeling of a job well done. Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes,argues that this process is self-reinforcing: “we recall with pleasure that we were able to complete the task instead of leaving it undone and that satisfaction, in turn, makes us more likely to click on lists again—even ones we hate-read.”

5. There is nothing sexier than a 10. Look at this number: 37.9. Aghhh yuck. So ugly. Now look at this: 100.00. Ahhhh beautiful. Economists Michael Lynn et al. found that when customers were asked to pump their own gas, 56% of sales ended in .00 and an additional 7% ended in .01 (which suggests an attempt to stop at .00 and marginally missing). When restaurant patrons tip, they are likely to favor round numbers. A paper in Psychological Science found that students who take the SAT and end up with a score just below a round number — like 990 or 1090 on what used to be a 1600 point scale — are much more likely to retake the test than those who score a round number or just above. Psychologists call this round number bias. You prefer round numbers (like Top 10 lists) and may in fact associate them with higher quality.

6. You donated a dollar to your alma mater. Do you know why your alma mater tries to get you to make a donation, no matter how small, as soon as possible after graduation? Because if you donate $1 today then you are far more likely to donate $100 in five years and $1 million in 20 years in a series of ever increasing increments. It’s called the foot-in-the-door technique and has been a psychological weapon of salesmen for years. The technique works due to what social scientists call “successive approximations.” When a subject goes along with small requests or commitments, such as clicking the link to this list, that subject is more likely to continue in a desired direction and feel obligated to go along withlarger requests, such as reading this list to completion.

7. You are searching for the Philosopher’s Stone. Lapis philosophorum, or the Philosopher’s Stone, is the fabled alchemical substance said to be able to turn base metals into gold and grant immortality. It is perhaps most widely recognized as the object of Lord Voldemort’s desire in the first Harry Potter book. But the story of the Stone transcends the literal and becomes allegory of mankind’s deep-seated yearning for a quick and simple fix to an overwhelmingly vexing problem (in the case of the Stone, the problem of death). Desire for a quick fix is the business model of drug dealers, psychics, spiritual healers, con men, and (in certain cases) pharmaceutical companies. The informational equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone is a self-contained and wholly digestible chunk of information that promises deep insight and requires little or no work. Lists are the holy grail of this apocryphal temptation. They are the allure of profundity and insight and answers for the convenient price of minimal cognitive exertion. We are continually drawn to lists in the hopes of acquiring comprehensive wisdom without putting in the hard work.

8. You want to prove me wrong. You want to feel unique. Indeed we all do. As David Foster Wallace puts it: “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.” And any assumption that you are predictable feels insulting, it detracts from your individuality. When you see a title that tells you it will predict your actions, part of you clicks that link just so you can have the option to walk away from the list halfway through and prove me wrong. In Yiddish, this is called being “Davka.” You are proud and you want to prove that my blanket statement doesn’t apply to you, that you are in control of your destiny. Feeling like you control your destinymakes you happier. You click this list for an easy opportunity to reassert that control — you can prove me wrong at any point after all (although you may be cutting off your nose to spite your face).

9. You involuntarily live in a palace. You are not so good at remembering random numbers or bits of information. Can you recall the number I said was ugly moments ago? What about the score McKayla Maroney got on the vault? George Miller famously proposed that people are able to keep track of a “magic number 7 plus or minus 2” chunks of information in short term working memory. Those memories then decay over time. However, you are exceptionally good at recalling where you sat when you went for dinner with your friends last week or the route you took to get there. It turns out that your brain is good at remembering spatial information. This cognitive strength was supposedlyfirst documented by the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos after surviving a banquet-hall collapse. When asked to recall who was buried in the debris, he found he was able to reconstruct the building in his imagination and remember where each of the guests had been sitting, despite having made no conscious effort to memorize this layout. The generalized version of Simonides’ epiphany is known as the method of loci, or memory palace. Evidence suggests your brain automatically and involuntarily categorizes information that is sees and that it processes this information spatially. Since lists are spatially organized by design and seek to categorize by intention, they reinforce natural cognitive tendencies and facilitate easier recall and absorption. Lists are appealing because they are engaging without being demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. They appeal to our proclivity for spatial reasoning and categorization.

10. You’ve gone this far…Maybe you hated this list. Maybe you disagreed with every proposition and found it painful to continue. You could have walked away at any point between 1 and 10. But you didn’t. As you progressed you became increasingly committed to seeing this through to completion — you succumbed to the sunk cost fallacy. Spurred by the cognitive quirks offraming effects and loss aversion, you felt compelled to finish this list as you progressed from point to point, despite the fact that the time spent on each point is irrecoverable, i.e. a sunk cost. Farmville and World of Warcraft are so addictive partially because they are mired in a pit of sunk costs. Players can never get back the time they have spent but they keep playing to avoid the pain of loss and waste. As the blog You Are Not So Smart puts it, “Your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it.”

In the end, we have what Charlie Munger calls the Lollapalooza Effect: when multiple psychological biases combine together in the same direction, the effect is compounded on a tremendous scale. You never stood a chance.

Writing a novel

After retirement I had started writing my blogs but I had never written a novel. I had written seven books ( the last is in the printing stage) but never a novel non fiction or fiction. So I decided to try my hand at a novel and because it would be easier , I started with fiction. The book is now about half done but let me tell you it has been one big pain.

I did not start with an outline or a fixed idea in my mind. I just started writing the first chapter and the others flowed from it. Soon the structure of the novel was more or less established though I was adding new chapters as I went along. The problem soon became that my mind was always revolving around the novel. I would be sitting on the dining table with my wife desperatley trying to make conversation but I would be elsewhere with the characters in my novel. I would be eavesdropping on conversations hoping to replicate the tones and contents of these voices. But by far the hardest thing was writing the love scenes. I must have started that chapter a dozen times but was never able to get it right. I even thought of reading the " Fifty Shades of Grey" for inspiration but to no avail. I reproduce below part of the opening chapter -- no not the unfinished love chapter, you should be so lucky- and hope that by the end of the year I will have completed my magnum opus.

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The plan

The two old men sat comfortably sipping their cups of tea. Amal and Raj were old friends. But little did they realize that their idle musings that day would help topple the government in a neighboring country.

Amal was now a distinguished looking 65. His luxurious beard now almost all white with a few streaks of grey made him look like a junior Santa Claus. His twinkling eyes added to the illusion. He had a spritely gait and he walked with care that the formally obese normally adapt. He had shed his middle age potbelly but his clothes still draped loosely on him. He was too lazy to go for a new wardrobe despite his daughters nagging. “I am too old”, he would say laughingly, “ to become a clothes horse.”

His companion was, by contrast, impeccably dressed. Raj was you touching 70 but his wiry frame and close-cropped hair, streaked generously with grey, made him look closer to 60. He wore gold-rimmed eye glasses which accentuated his intellectual appearance. But behind his mild exterior lay one of the sharpest minds in the country. He had been a very successful cabinet secretary and for his work the PM had offers him a state governorship on his retirement. But now he was really retired and spent his days doing crosswords and chatting with friends. His eyes still twinkled behind the golden-rimmed glasses he wore but there was still  a wariness in them. He seemed disinterested in day-to-day life, a feeling that had intensified after the death of his daughter. He took great delight in talking about his grandson as if to compensate for his loss and it took a little effort to get him to talk about his days as the cabinet secretary and governor of a border state. But if you could get him to talk about those days in power, there were a many a tale he could tell. 

Amal occupied a special place in his heart after his daughter’s suicide some two years ago. He had yet to recover from the shock but he deeply appreciated the fact that Amal had come every single day to sit by his side and hold his hand. Amal would just sit by him without saying a word but his very presence spoke volumes.

Amal and Raj had become fast friends from the time Amal had been pitchforked into the prestigious job of the director of the national oil company. He was new to the bureaucracy and the fact that he had been selected over the minister’s preferred candidate made him a marked man. His every decision was watched with a hawk's eye just waiting for any missteps. It was Raj who had guided him during the early days and, with his bureaucratic experience and expertise, saving him from many a blunder. He had repaid Raj’s help when Raj got into some hot water for his alleged participation in a cement diversion scam some years later. He organized his defense and  also managed to mobilize his friends in the media. The charges against Raj were soon dropped but these events had brought them  even closer.

They would often discuss the sorry state of affairs in the country. And when Amal’s indignation would rise as would his voice - a throwback to his early days as a university lecturer, Raj would gently chide him and bring him back to earth. They made an interesting pair- Amal with his incandescent brilliance and Raj with his down to earth pragmatism, one so deeply involved in current affairs with a deeply analytical mind and the other with an encyclopedic knowledge of public life in the country.

“So what do we know now? “ asked Amal of his friend.

“ Well we know that the prime minister is surrounded by scoundrels and that a few of them are not above selling the country out to the highest bidder. One of these so-called lobbyists has been killed in suspicious circumstances and he had a suitcase filled with state secrets. He was in touch with his Pakistani masters to exchange them for a Swiss bank account when he was caught by our RAW. We know there is a mole in RAW to whom we have been feeding wrong information to ISI. With this information we have been slowly rounding up various cells in the country that could cause mischief without ISI realizing it. We know that ISI is up to some mischief. We think that  ISI is planning an attack on Bombay hotels in the month of October but we don’t know where or precisely when or with how big a team. Our mole does not know these details but may be we can pry them out of his masters. The issue is how do we use this to land a more vicious blow to counter these constant, continuos pinpricks and make ISI pay a greater penalty for their interference in our country. ........."