How will you measure your life?

K. Ram Kumar, who sits on the board of directors at ICICI Bank and heads the group’s human resource function, is an interesting man to talk with about pretty much anything. He comes from a school of thought that firmly believes everybody ought to get a kick up their backsides in the 40s. Else, he says, nobody will rethink priorities and ask questions around what you ought to do as opposed to what you are currently doing.

This kick, he points out, should be serious—like getting fired from your job just when you’re close to the top. Or for that matter, getting superseded at work by somebody nowhere as competent as you are. Gut-wrenching as it may be, chances are, when events like these occur, it compels you to ask tough questions.

For instance, if you were doing something you didn’t enjoy and love, why did you do it? Even assuming that was not the case, why did you put in 80-hour work weeks? How do you look your spouse and children in the eye and acknowledge they were ignored because you placed work above all else? Why did you ignore personal growth at the altar of your career?

These are tough questions. “But inevitably people put away asking these until tomorrow,” says Vinayak Chatterjee, chairman at Gurgaon-based Feedback Infrastructure Services. He is one of those rare creatures, who, like Ram Kumar have spent an awful amount of time thinking through to avoid the metaphorical kick on the backside. But most importantly, when it does come and hit in the gut, do you have the personal equity to ride through a storm?

Building equity of this kind can be an incredibly tough ask. The question is when and where do you begin. Chatterjee thinks you ought to start by asking yourself the most basic one: What will make me happy?

The first time, he recalls, asking that question was when he was doing his summer training at Pond’s India. Training done, he took on an offer the company made him. Six months later, he resigned. “I realized selling cosmetics was not my calling.” Some thinking later, he decided the infrastructure business was where he’d be happy. “Rejection was my choice. Acceptance of what gives me joy followed later.”

In first asking this fundamental question, rejecting what he had on hand, and thinking through what would eventually make him happy, Chatterjee acquired a persona—or as he says, “in very loose terms, a personal brand”.

A persona, in his dictionary, is not fame—but the uniqueness every individual possesses and is presented to or perceived by others. It is often substituted for the term personal branding. He isn’t entirely comfortable though with how an individual’s persona and personal branding are used as interchangeable terms. “Because,” he cautions, “the brand is not the target. The target is what you want to do with your life.”

A caveat though—it is not entirely possible to ignore personal branding.Timothy Ferris, best-selling writer and “a shameless self-promoter” as described by critics, writes, “Personal branding is about managing your name—even if you don’t own a business—in a world of misinformation, disinformation, and semi-permanent Googlerecords. Going on a date? Chances are that your ‘blind’ date has googled your name. Going to a job interview? Ditto.”

That is where life coaches like Rajeev Raju comes in. Until very recently, he used to sit on the board of directors at Deutsche Bank and played key strategic roles at the bank’s advisory and analytics functions across various locations. Since then, he has moved on to set up Gravitas Consulting because he finds people interesting above all else. His proposition is that pretty much anything an individual does is because they want to influence outcomes. Therefore, he says, you ought to understand the nature of influence and try to tame the beast.

“At my workshops, when I ask people, why do you go to work everyday, not a single person in the audience tells me I go to work to gain influence,” he says. But, in attempting to discover your persona, it is important to understand “everything you do is about gaining influence”, he says. “Every little thing you do, from getting your child to eat something, your wife to watch a movie with you, or to create something bigger than yourself, you need to influence.”

By way of example, he speaks of Ramakant Achrekar, Sachin Tendulkar’s coach. “He convinced Sachin potential is on his side. Achrekar’s authority and influence came from observing how Sachin plays the game, asking him why did he do what he did, pointing out what he could possibly do, and then leaving Sachin alone to play the balls as it came to him on the field. Achrekar didn’t go out to bat. But his influence is there for all to see.”

But acquiring influence alone as a tool for personal branding is a rather shallow way of looking at things in the long run, argues Chatterjee. The more important thing is reaching to a place where there is no difference between your public and personal selves. Else, dichotomies creep into your persona. And this is where he thinks problems exist if you think of building a personal brand with the explicit intention of impressing the external world.

That is why he talks dismissively of makeover consultants who exist to advise people on what and how they ought to build personal brands.

This includes everything from how an individual appears in public to the kind of noises they make in polite company and obsessing over metrics such as the numbers of followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook to measure influence.

Makeover consultants of such kinds have left one of India’s largest businessmen with interests in diverse sectors across the world frustrated. For all the professional successes, his personal brand—as perceived by a majority of employees and common people—trusted advisors told him wasn’t pretty. They told him he was sniggered at behind his back; and that he ought to engage the services of a global makeover firm to project him in decent light.

After the consultants took over, it was only a matter of time before the man acquired a veneer of sophistication. His ill-fitting suits gave way to well-tailored ones. His accent got polished and the rougher edges he’d acquired in the rough and tumble of business were smoothened to make way for a man who appeared and sounded thoughtful. Public appearances were carefully calibrated and the sceptre of ruthlessness he always carried was passed on to lieutenants to handle. Be that as it may, he continues to be viewed suspiciously. It remains unknown whether the services of his advisory firm have been retained or terminated.

“It doesn’t give me great comfort to hear that,” says Chatterjee. “If I don’t snap at a client, I don’t see any reason why I ought to snap at my wife. I don’t see that as a positive. You exude your natural behavioural pattern. The issue here is, are you putting on an air? Are you trying to put on something you are not? Being your true self is the true test of a brand.”

Such dichotomies, Chatterjee says, exists because people often think of themselves as a product that ought to be branded and marketed well.

Product branding, he explains, is about selling something. And it is often times at variance with what a human actually is. Getting to be an accomplished human being is the outcome of something you do distinctively. It evolves over a lifetime of pursuing what you believe in. “There is no point in building a personal brand consciously. That is too commercial and you have to guard against it. That forced measure of acquiring a brand is not good, because the best brands are built over a lifetime.”

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, summed it all up wisely: Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.
 

This article was first published in Mint on December 26, 2014. No parts of this article may be reproduced without permission from the publisher

The Hinduism versus Hindutva debate

Blog RSS

Mohandas Pai

A blog post in Economic Times  by TV Mohandas Pai, chairman of Manipal Global and a former board member at Infosys caught my attention. I thought his voice one for the saner ones that has emerged from a vociferous right-wing led by a bunch of loonies and their high decibel campaigns to convert Christians and Muslims back to the Hindu fold--or ghar wapsi as now they call it.

While for most part loony elements across all faiths are best left alone, these are the kind of times that call for introspection. To that extent, Pai is right in criticising evangelical Christian groups that have been on overdrive for a long time in their proselytizing efforts--to convert the pagans if you will.  For a long time, I've watched with mild amusement at times, and indignation at others as preachers from both Christianity and Islam attempted to wean non-believers to their faith.  And these are very sophisticated operations. As Pai writes in his post. 

"There is a very sophisticated operation in place by the evangelical groups, with a clear target for souls, marketing campaigns, mass prayer and fraudulent healing meetings. Evidence is available in plenty on videos on YouTube, social media, press reports, and on the ground. Pastors have been openly tweeting about souls converted, and saving people from idol worshippers. Some pastors have tweeted with glee about converts reaching 60 million, declaring a target of 100 million, and have also requested for financial support for this openly. Violence in some areas due to this has vitiated the atmosphere. The traditional institutions of both denominations are losing out to the new age evangelicals with their sophisticated marketing, money and legion of supporters from the West. One can almost classify these groups as hyper-growth startups – with a cost per acquisition, a roadmap for acquiring followers, a fund-raising machine, and a gamified approach (with rewards and incentives) to “conquering” new markets."

But that said, the rise of "Hindutva" is an uncomfortable one as well. This is because I think of Hindutva as defined by current political rhetoric abhorrent, its perpetrators despicable, and an idea that ought to be rejected outright by practitioners of Hinduism.

Allow me put that into perspective. While I am no authority on the scriptures, like anybody who has cursorily been through the Rig Veda, the oldest of the Vedas, I find the Nasadiya Sukta or “Hymn of Creation”, in the 10th chapter or Mandala both intriguing and inspiring:

 “But after all, who knows, and who can say

whence it all came and how creation happened?

the gods themselves are later than creation,

so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,

he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,

he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,

he knows—or maybe even he doesn’t know

Implicit to these verses is an acknowledgement that it is entirely possible god does not exist. And even if god exists, does this creature completely appreciate and understand all there is to about creation? To my mind, what these verses do is urge the reader to probe deeper, develop a scientific temperament and engage in an intense philosophical inquiry into the nature of our existence.

Then there are parts of Hindu scriptures that come across as retrograde and demand reason be set aside, much like monotheistic religions with claims to divine origins demand. But these are dealt with by the likes of Gandhi, an avowed believer in Hinduism as a religion. “My belief in the Hindu scriptures does not require me to accept every word and every verse as divinely inspired. I decline to be bound by any interpretation, however learned it may be, if it is repugnant to reason or moral sense,” he wrote in the Aspects of Hinduism.

But when placed in contemporary settings, Hinduism, which places a premium on liberty above all else, is under threat. Current political discourses and societal conversations terrify me. Hinduism has been hijacked and Hindutva has taken over.

While the meaning of Hindutva can be debated ad nauseam, it now comes across as an ideology that seeks to establish the hegemony of Hindus and the Hindu way of life. And hegemonies by their very nature insist violence has its way. 

If more recent evidence is needed the word Hindutva has indeed been bastardized, consider this. While the word has been around for a while, an nGram search on Google Books reveal when “Hindutva” first gained traction in the mid forties, it culminated in Gandhi’s assassination, stayed in public domain for a while, and then conceded ground to Hinduism. When the word started to raise its head again beginning the mid eighties and overtook Hinduism in the early nineties, it led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and communal riots ensued. The graph has, since then, been on the upswing and India lives under a constant specter of violence.

Ahimsa (non violence) and himsa (violence) have for long co-existed uneasily in Hinduism. Those, who subscribe to deploying violence, like advocates of Hindutva often times do, seek refuge in the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna’s exhortations to a devastated Arjuna that he take up arms in a dharma yuddha—a war fought to defend justice for the security and well being of a community.

A closer examination of Krishna’s discourse though on dharma yuddha reveals it does not sanction violence to seize the assets of another community, or to gain power through conquest and control of others. Battles fought on these turfs, Krishna tells Arjuna, are the primary sources of greed and evil. Equally important, in a dharma yuddha, the opponent is not demonized and there is complete absence of rhetoric that accompanies hatred and contempt.

But Hindutva is very different from the kind of Hinduism Krishna preaches, and the one I, like many Indians have been weaned on and live by.

As personal beliefs go, I am an atheist. But that said, I refuse to listen to extreme voices from either the Left or the Right. Instead, I think more saner voices ought to emerge from both camps, like Mohandas Pai, whom I haven't met, but comes across in his writings as part of the liberal Right as so many of my friends are. 

The Art of Living

Atul Gawande

At the appointed hour, Atul Gawande answers the phone at his hotel room in Bengaluru, where he is on tour to promote his most recent book Being Mortal. He is polite and succinct to a fault.

Five weeks ago, this column dwelt on man’s quest for immortality. If an inquiry be conducted into the nature of man’s inevitable mortality, Gawande is the man to pick for it. He knows how to conduct such inquiries with the precision of a surgeon, the compassion of a writer and the outlook of a philosopher. Perhaps that is because he is a trained surgeon, award-winning writer and student of philosophy. That is also why his book comes across as a manifesto for medical practitioners who deal with the dying, a manual for the living on conversing with death, and a guide with pointers to the art of living.

Our conversation begins with some reflections on faultlines in contemporary medicine. For instance, the aggressive world view that argues ageing is a disease that ought to be fought and fended off. “The problem is,” Gawande says, “as doctors, we often experience pain, frailty and dying as failures of our skills—or ones where we feel our skills are irrelevant.” This, he points out, is because the human mind is such that it is pleased when it spots a problem that can be fixed or made substantially better.

The human body, on the other hand, has to deal with devastating ailments such as dementia or terminal illnesses, which cannot be wished away. While it is important that medicine learns to get more competent and helpful at dealing with these, it cannot until it lets go of the mentality that mortality is a disease. Instead, he argues gently, we ought to accept “death is not a failure. Death is normal. Death is part of life”.

What we ought to recognize instead is that we are gradually arriving at new ways of dying, not all of which are good. To put that into perspective, 50 years ago, Gawande points out, most people died at home. This was because healthcare didn’t have much to offer the dying. But as it evolved, at least in the West, over 80% of people now die in institutions and facilities surrounded by strangers.

While most people in the heart of India still die at home, prosperity has translated into a large number of people moving into institutions, hooked to life-extending machines and suffering pangs of separation from home. Add to this the trauma that accompanies pain and hopelessly limited access to narcotic medications like morphine. “It is a hard life. But this is the kind of dying that is happening,” says Gawande.

The question that arises then is, how do we live and die well?

Gawande’s father, Atmaram, he reminisces, is a good example of somebody who got the best of both worlds. Before death came calling (from cancer), he had the wisdom to ask of himself what his priorities were. Among things that topped the list was his social life. He had a dinner party every week. Having a circle of friends around was important to him as part of the meaning of life. “If you took that away, then it amounted to trying to extend his life by sacrificing his autonomy. It was clear he didn’t want to do that.”

But the structures imposed by modern medicine place safety for the elderly over autonomy. As this conflict plays itself out and medical treatment takes over, it also takes away the things important for existence. For instance, the ability to have an intact brain, or to be awake, or for some people, simply the ability to eat. In all of these cases, medicine demands you sacrifice all that you value for a little more time. So much so that it is now accepted wisdom. You can’t eat what you want to because it may cause pain and in the interest of safety, but this joy ought to be taken away.

What is often missed out is that people have priorities and values other than just surviving another day. Those differ from person to person. Because Gawande’s father had prioritized, he was clear he didn’t want to go through more surgery, radiation or chemotherapy. Instead, he wanted to go home. Even as the family supported him with pain control medications, Atmaram Gawande focused on what he wanted—a good life in the remaining time he had. It lasted all of four months. But he got the best of both worlds.

The reality is that giving people autonomy to make these decisions, in general, doesn’t shorten their life. On average for the population, if anything, it lengthens their life. Gawande argues that there is research to indicate that as people get older, they actually suffer lower rates of depression and anxiety than others in society. They are happier and content. But when they are put into institutions, their lives are no longer their own. They live under rules somebody else imposes, get depressed, witness severe decline and lose the will to live.

As ideas go, this is a difficult one to consume. For instance, what if you have somebody in the family who has dementia and doesn’t know where he is or who the caregiver is? Do you still keep this person at home? “You keep looking for what they want,” says Gawande, “because even in the worst of situations, people express themselves. And one of the joys is in simply eating.”

Eighty-five year old patients may be prohibited from having anything but puréed food because they may choke. Alzheimer’s patients may be stealing cookies and hoarding them. This may sound like morally ambiguous territory. But Gawande is clear. “You let them have the cookies. If their life is reduced to the point that the one joy they have is from eating, then you as a family member should have the ability to say, they should be allowed to have the cookies if they want to. If they choke, they choke.”

This ambiguous territory gets even more muddled when you are witness to a loved one going through suffering or misery so great, you think they’re better off dead. But at times like these, do you pull life support? Do you proactively assist their dying when there is no hope of doing anything better?

“So if you have somebody who has cancer, like my father who had it in his brain and his spine, the pain from the tumour in his spine was so severe that he was immobilized and incapacitated and made him miserable. Then you could say, well, you should get him assisted dying.”

That said, Gawande files a caveat. “It alarms me, if what we do is provide a method of assisted death rather than first making sure people have access to basic pain medications. We have to get those systems in place as a first step and then find ways to provide possibilities for people who choose to end their own lives.”

The cheapest and most effective drug to alleviate pain is morphine. The problem, though, is a complete misunderstanding of what the drug can possibly do. There are laws in place that regulate how it is used. But many doctors and nursing homes shy away from the drug because it is seen as a horribly addictive narcotic substance. What makes it worse still is that on the rare occasions morphine is prescribed, people in pain and their families give up hope because it is perceived as a palliative—something that is administered when all hope is lost.

But hope is a relative term. Gawande says people who live well are the ones who have come to terms with the fact that their times are limited. And almost always, it is because they have had time to think about it in advance.

Having accepted that, it is then possible to live the good life. But it is for an individual to define what constitutes the good life. When probed on that, Gawande says “I was really struck by the philosopher Josiah Royce, who argued people have an intrinsic need to search for themselves bigger than the self.”

Royce argued that the thing an individual is willing to sacrifice his life for is what is bigger than the self. It could be loyalty to friends, love for your children, commitment to your country, the urge to serve a community, an ideal you worship or a god you believe in.

To illustrate that point, Gawande asks a rhetorical question. “Imagine you are told one hour after you die, the entire world will be destroyed, including everybody you know. Do you care?” All of the many thousands of people he asked the question said they care. The next question that emerges is: Why do you care if you’re gone? Because your life has no meaning if the rest of the world is destroyed. Implicit to that answer is that you live for something bigger than yourself. “Just because you end up in a wheelchair does not mean you cannot have a purpose, loyalties or contributions to things most meaningful to you.”

By way of example, Gawande talks of a woman he met who was found abandoned on the streets, infected with maggots. After being treated, bathed and fed, the volunteers who got her to the nursing home put her to work. She chose to work in the kitchen. She liked it. She had a purpose. She had a role. Having that role made her happy and made it the place she wanted to be in.

The medicalized version of mortality, though, insists that you get into a wheelchair when you are in a hospital. “That is when people feel empty because there is no respect or purpose left in that phase of life.”

“For me,” Gawande says, “purpose is being able to continue to converse and have dialogues with people and to keep on writing and contributing in some way. Maybe I will change my mind as time goes on. But it’s the dialogue and mental preparation that matters. Death is out of our control. It is not dignified. It is never pretty. But it is okay. The key is giving whatever hand you are dealt with that chance to have something still worth living for.”

But modern medicine is such that it makes dying a prolonged event. It allows illnesses to be diagnosed early and then live with it for months, if not years. What it cannot take away is the inevitable feeling that you are in decline. As much as it provides an opportunity to explore whether your life can be extended and made better, efforts ought to be made to articulate what you want to be alive for and what you will not sacrifice.

And in that understanding lies the art of living. People who are able to navigate that road are those who have had crucial conversations with people they care about. Unfortunately, death is not something most people like have conversations around. But Gawande insists it must be had—both with the self, and the immediate family—at a time when an individual is in full control of all faculties.

A few of those questions open the door to asking somebody their fears, worries, hopes and priorities if time is short. “I think these are normal conversations we need to have instead of treating them as extraordinary ones with our friends, family and not just doctors.”

But even that done, the answers won’t come easy. Because as Gawande writes in his book, “Even more daunting is the courage to act on the truth we find. The problem is that the wise course is so frequently unclear. For a long while, I thought that this was simply because of uncertainty. When it is hard to know what will happen, it is hard to know what to do. But the challenge, I’ve come to see, is more fundamental than that. One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most.”

This article was first published in Mint on December 19, 2014. All copyrights vest with the newspaper and this cannot be reproduced without permission from the publishers 

The 9th, Bernstein, Tafelspitz & Vienna

Blog RSS

What I'd give right now to listen to Leonard Bernstein conduct Beethoven's 9th in Vienna, my favorite city in the world. It's the kind of music one can't fail to be moved by. And Bernstein the kind of conductor who could move a mountain if he wanted to. And after having heard this, I so want to walk the city's lovely streets to the Plachutta Wollzeile and go over a finely cooked Tafelspitz. An apple strudel after all of that would be nice.

Opinions are like assholes

Blog RSS

It gives me no pleasure to write this. But R Jagannathan must be told, opinions are like assholes--everybody has one. And today he sounds like just another asshole with an opinion.

What has gotten me riled completely is a piece he wrote on Gandhi versus Godse. Allow me quote from the piece: "So to posit Gandhi as anything other than a hero and Godse as nothing more than a villain, is to try and create black-and-white, cardboard characters, Bollywood style."

The sum and substance of his argument is that Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse be accepted for whatever he was and the ideologies he espoused. "Gandhi was as grey, as was Godse," Jagannathan argues.

Before I go any further, I have a few confessions to make. I know Jagannathan as "Jaggi". That's how all of us in journalism know him. The Jaggi I knew was gentle, mild mannered, cerebral and often ahead of his times. A wry humor accompanied him and it always had the newsroom rolling on the floor, laughing their guts off.  

I don't know why. I never asked him. And he never told me. But 17 odd years ago, he picked me, then an untested entity in the mid-twenties to edit a supplement he had in mind for the Financial Express, of which he was editor. The dot com boom was beginning to take off. Jaggi had quietly thought up eFE, an eight page daily pull out to go with the newspaper. He asked me to focus exclusively on technology, gave me a free hand, all the resources I needed and turbo charged my career. Along the way, he transformed that ghastly rag the Financial Express was into a newspaper everybody wanted to either be a part of or featured in. He taught me to edit copy, create headlines, appreciate the nuances of design, handle a team and carry everybody along.

I can't think of anybody who ever had an unkind word to say of him. As is usual, he went on to other assignments and I charted my own course.

Our paths crossed again at Network18, where I used to be managing editor of Forbes India, a group publication, until I was compelled to leave under rather unsavory circumstances. Jaggi, who was then my super boss, did not utter a word in my defence. Instead, he acquiesced when he knew all of what had transpired was wrong. But I don't hold that against him. Perhaps, he had his compulsions and in hindsight, I am glad I left.

That said, over the years I've watched Jaggi's trajectory with interest, as anybody would of their mentor. For many years, I thought of him a liberal. But in recent years, he came across as a  right winger--a closet Sanghi if you will. Nothing else explains his position on issues, of which the most dangerous and recent one is a rather lame attempt to defend the man who assassinated Gandhi.

Yes, Jaggi is right in that Gandhi has his quirks. But allow me quote Jaggi once again: "...where is our tolerance of dissent and freedom of thought and speech? If someone has the right to eulogise Gandhi, surely others have a right to criticise him or praise his nemesis? If we can today write books giving imaginary versions of Ravana's side of the story (and not Ram's), surely we can live with the ideas of those who think Godse was not pure evil?"

A couple of things come to mind.

• Is Jaggi suggesting dissent and freedom of thought and speech that leads to an assassination ought to be condoned? Surely, surely, he can't couch the act in a line that says "The only thing absolutely wrong about what Godse did was putting bullets through the Mahatma..." 
• That he espouses a violent world view is obvious when you read closely what he says next. "At best, complete non-violence can be an individual idea, not something for societies as a whole to emulate." But societies that have eschewed arms exist. Having an army might be practical, but it is not obligatory.
• And then there are those like Martin Luther King who embraced Gandhi's ideals and principles to extract what they wanted. And what of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people who have shunned violence in spite of all the atrocities committed on them?
• What of religions like Jainism and Buddhism that have flourished and continue to inspire millions? 
• Assuming you buy the Jaggi argument for a moment, you might as well obliterate all history that exists on India's freedom struggle led by Gandhi. For all of their efforts, Bhagat Singh and Subhash Chandra Bose could not deliver what Gandhi eventually did. 
• And what exactly is the "imaginary version of Ravana's side of the story?" Are we to believe a 10-headed monster "actually" existed against whom Ram went to battle?

I can go on and on picking holes in Jaggi's rather ridiculous arguments that bat for Godse. I don't want to, because to my mind, Jaggi's world views are emblematic of a larger problem looming over Indian journalism. It is hopelessly outdated and lazy.

What he is churning out doesn't fit the definition of either reportage or informed opinion. Because both of these are built on the back of conversations with people, facts that are checked, and well formed after debates and interactions with those who know more. Jaggi isn't doing any of this.

Instead, I get the feeling he's just pounding his keyboard furiously to churn provocative words, attract eyeballs, valuations, and earn hosannahs on social media from an unwashed army of trolls who cheer anybody with blood on their hands.

I hate to say this again Jaggi. But opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one. You. Me. Everybody. That is why, opinions, particularly uninformed ones, are best kept wrapped under the trousers. Or khaki knickers if you insist. 

Astrologers, Homeopaths & Economic Forecasts

Astrologers, homeopaths and economic forecasts can’t be trusted. Because the so-called science they practice is fuzzy at best and hocus-pocus at worst.

Consider, for instance, this delightful anecdote recounted by a senior journalist at a popular Mumbai-based newspaper. Sometime in 1998 or 1999, he wrote a few days ago on his Facebook wall, the hugely popular astrologer Marjorie Orrtook a break. Fearing a backlash from readers, hiseditor suggested that the young man, along with two of his colleagues, should ghost write the column until Orr got back to work. Some trepidation later, he got down to following orders for six weeks until the astrologer got back from her vacation. Not a single reader from the newspaper’s erudite, English-speaking community wrote in with an angry word that his predictions were off the mark.

The post attracted a barrage of amused comments from other journalists who’ve ghosted for popular astrologers like Peter Vidal in Indian newspapers. Vidal apparently recycles his column by replacing the text for one star sign with something he’s written in the past for another star sign. Most people don’t notice. Then there is Panditji from Jaipur who misses his deadlines every once a while and the poor sub-editor at the desk had to think up “good” days of the week, “lucky” colours to be worn and “numbers to bet on” for each star sign. “The trick,” wrote this veteran desk hand at the magazine in response to the Facebook post, “was to make people believe they were on the verge of a quantum leap in life.”

Then there is homeopathy: generous column inches are devoted to it in newspapers and magazines, and practitioners make a pretty damn good living out of it. The premise around which this tub of crock continues to exist—in spite of a mountain of evidence to prove homeopathy is indeed crock—is that water molecules have memory.

But even Class VIII students exposed to elementary chemistry and concepts like Avogadro’s number know water molecules have no memory. This is because by then, they’re taught the mechanics of dilution. Whatever the botanical compound that goes into making a homeopathic drug, it is diluted to an extent that there would be no trace of the molecule left in the drug—except the sugary coating made of powdered lactose, of course.

In homeopathic parlance, on average, most compounds are diluted by 30C. That is 10 , or one followed by 60 zeroes. To understand how much of a dilution that is, imagine a drop of water with a diameter of 150 million km—the distance from the earth to the sun. It takes light eight minutes to travel that distance. Now imagine a drop of water with one molecule of a substance in it. That is a 30C dilution.

It is entirely possible that Samuel Hahnemann, who thought up modern homeopathy, had figured he’d gotten it all wrong in the face of this evidence. That is perhaps why he continued to argue water has memory and that even after dilution of the kind he propagated, water retains a “spirit-like” essence of the original compound that is “no longer perceptible to the senses”.

Ben Goldacre writes sardonically in his superb book Bad Science: “If water has a memory, as homeopaths claim…water has been sloshing around the globe for a very long time, after all, and the water in my body as I sit here typing in London has been through plenty of other people’s bodies before mine. Maybe some of the water molecules sitting in my fingertips as I type this sentence are currently in your eyeball. Maybe some of the water molecules fleshing out my neurons as I decide whether to write ‘wee’ or ‘urine’ in this sentence are now in the Queen’s bladder (God bless her): water is the great leveler.”

Both of these disciplines are similar to another perverted discipline—economic forecasts. It draws from the worst of astrology and homeopathy. While the chances of getting a prediction right using astrology are as good as flipping a coin, homeopathic remedies are no better than placebos where there is no relationship between cause and effect. But economic forecasting relies on both of these to get by and there are suckers by the millions buying into them.

To sift through why economic forecasting is fraught with inconsistencies, Nate Silver’s outstanding book, The Signal and the Noise is a good place to start. He argues that this discipline faces three fundamental challenges: “First, it is very hard to determine cause and effect from economic statistics alone. Second, the economy is always changing, so explanations of economic behaviour that hold in one business cycle may not apply to future ones. And third, as bad as their forecasts have been, the data that economists have to work with isn’t much good either.”

To get a sense of how difficult this really is, let’s consider the most reliable data we have on the US economy (because it is the most closely tracked). The US government puts out 45,000 indicators each year and private data providers track as many as four million statistics. Since World War II though, they have witnessed only 11 recessions. How in the world is anybody to choose 11 outputs specifically from the data on hand that caused these recessions?

By way of example, consider the maxim “co-relation does not imply causation”. What it means is that just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other, it does not mean one is responsible for the other. For instance, Silver points out, ice cream sales and forest fires are related because both occur more often in summers. But there is no causation. You don’t set off a bush fire in some desert when you buy a tub of ice cream.

On the face of it, there seem to be three reasons why economic forecasts go horribly wrong. The first is arrogance on the part of a large majority of economists. The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), based out of New York and London, is widely respected. In 2011, the firm predicted double-dip recession, which is a recession followed by a short recovery and leading into another recession.

When quizzed on the prediction, the firm threw up a lot of data that seemed incomprehensible to most people and obfuscated it with jargon that made no sense. Like this: “ECRI’s recession call isn’t based on just one or two leading indexes, but on dozens of specialized leading indexes including the US Long Leading Index…to be followed by downturns in the Weekly Leading Index and other shorter-leading indexes. In fact, the most reliable forward-looking indicators are now collectively behaving as they did on the cusp of full blown recessions.”

Silver tracked their approach to a stance articulated to their clients as far back as 2004: “Just as you do not need to know exactly how a car engine works in order to drive safely, you do not need to understand all the intricacies of the economy to accurately read those gauges.”

When looked at from this prism, the only thing that matters is data and more complex data—and not even an attempt to get to the story. “There were certainly reasons for economic pessimism in September 2011—for instance, the unfolding debt crisis in Europe—but ECRI wasn’t looking at those. Instead, it had a random soup of variables that mistook co-relation for causation,” concludes Silver.

The second reason economic forecasts are notoriously difficult to handle is that the society and the systems they try to predict are dynamic. Nobel Prize winnerF.A. Hayek, in his acceptance speech in 1974, had explained why these systems are difficult to deal with.

Physical scientists can observe and measure the things that drive systems they are studying. But society, and therefore, the economy, is not a physical system. There are millions of variables that cannot be measured or seen. For instance, how will an individual respond to a set of stimuli in a given set of circumstances? There are no universal answers.

But economists, in their attempt to be rigorous, infuse techniques and models used by physical scientists. This is fundamentally flawed because in doing that, they have to ignore that which cannot be measured, in spite of it being integral to economics. The outcomes are incorrect predictions and actions that can harm society.

The third is that humans and the institutions they build are inherently biased. As an experiment, Silver conducted economic polls across organizations that engage in forecasting. Given the same data, he figured that the lower an entity’s reputation, the wilder its predictions. And if your reputation in the markets is higher, chances are your estimates are conservative.

The dichotomy is explained by the fact that if your reputation is on the lower side, you have little to lose. So perchance you hit bull’s eye, the chances of drawing attention is higher. If reputation is high on the other hand, there is an incentive to protect it and you’d much rather err on the side of caution.

Perhaps these are the reasons why Ezra Solomon, an influential US economist and professor at Stanford University, once caustically said: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

This article was first published in Mint on December 5, 2014 . No parts of this article may be reproduced without permission from the publishers.