Too tired to write what it feels like right now. But heck, launching Founding Fuel Publishing has been such joy. More to follow. For now, do take a look at the pages we collaborated on with Mint and our audio casts with Ping Network. The highlight of the day was a firecracker of a story by my friend and former colleague Rohin Dharmakumar on Micromax.
Confessions of a recovering junkie
Kuldeep Datay wears the calm of a man who’s been-there-seen-it-all. A Mumbai-based clinical psychologist affiliated to the Institute for Psychological Health (IPH), he often faces worried parents seeking help for their zombie like adolescents who’ve withdrawn from the mainstream. Intelligent, but socially inept, and aggressive, these kids behave much like crack or heroin addicts. There is no evidence though to prove they are on mind-altering substances as conventionally understood.
Conversations and evaluations with these kids later, Datay often times concludes, their behavior is a function of technology addiction. “There is a reason why it is called dope. When deeply engaged with with gadgets, social media, or just the Internet, you get a dopamine kick, much like you do with drugs. So they go back to it again and again. When denied access, they withdraw, or get aggressive,” explains Datay.
The problem isn’t an adolescent phenomenon. At the time of writing this article, RescueTime, a piece of software that resides on my laptop, tells me it’s been a little over 653 hours since I first installed it. What I’ve discovered about myself since then disturbs me.
- Of the 653 hours RescueTime has been around, the dashboard tells me I’ve been actively engaged with my laptop for 309 hours, or a staggering 47 percent of my waking hours.
- Of these 309 hours, 183 hours, just about 60 percent of my time was spent on productive work.
- The 126 hours that remained were spent on mindless, distracting tasks. Mildly put, I spent an obscene 40 percent doing nothing more than reading tweets, posting and arguing on social media, watching videos and everything else RescueTime calls “Uncategorized” stuff. “That’s it?” asks Datay. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it is around 70 percent,” he says. He’s right. If I sere to factor time spent on my smartphone on tablet, I know most of it was on random surfing, texting, following tweets, clicking links, and digging myself deeper into an unproductive rabbit hole.
- Now, if 309 hours were spent on the laptop, technically, I had 344 hours for myself to rest, recuperate, and engage in activities I enjoy.
- But FitBit, an activity tracker I wear on my wrist 24/7 tells me I am not rested. It informs me I slept on average 4:17 hours every night, just a little over half that my body actually needs. Worse, not all of these sleeping hours were deep. The graphs show I slip, on average, four to five times into interrupted or light sleep.
- If that isn’t bad enough, I didn’t use my waking hours to provide my body with at least 30 minutes of physical activity it needs everyday. If I did, FitBit would have logged it.
By every yardstick, I had turned into an Internet junkie, much like cocaine or heroin addicts. If you think that harmless, here’s a fact. The pleasure centers that tickle Internet junkies and drug addicts are the same. We know this because of recent advances in the neurosciences.
Susan Weinschenk, a behavioral psychologist explains in her blog post on Pyschology Today, “With the Internet, Twitter, and texting you now have almost instant gratification of your desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type your request into Google. Want to see what your colleagues are up to? Go to Linked In. It's easy to get in a dopamine-induced loop. Dopamine starts you seeking, then you get rewarded for the seeking, which makes you seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, or stop checking your cell phone to see if you have a message or a new text.”
“Interestingly brain scan research shows that the brain has more activity when people are anticipating a reward than getting one. Research on rats shows that if you destroy dopamine neurons, rats can walk, chew, and swallow, but will starve to death even when food is right next to them. They have lost the anticipation and desire to go get the food. Although wanting and liking are related, research also shows that the dopamine system doesn't have satiety built in….How many times have you searched for something on Google, found the answer, and yet realize a half hour later that you are still online looking for more information?” she writes.
This phenomenon has also been described as the Compulsion Loop. It compels you to continually check email on your smartphone in anticipation of receiving good news. When kept away from smartphones, researchers discovered power users experience “phantom smartphone buzzing” which tricks our brains into thinking our phone is vibrating when it isn't. I confess to being a victim to this syndrome.
The other interesting piece of literature originates from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. They discovered spending two hours in front of a backlit electronic gadget like a tablet or smartphone suppresses production of melatonin by 22 percent. This hormone regulates sleep cycles. Any deficit in its production leads to delayed sleep, interrupted circadian patterns, and early waking times.
In the weeks leading up to writing this piece, I tried a few experiments on myself. I asked myself to watch what happens on days I disconnect from the Internet and all of my devices after 9:30 pm until 7:30 am. A few interesting things showed up right away.
Without access to the Internet or my phone, anxiety levels, consumption of junk food and smoking cigarettes went up. Higher anxiety levels have to do with a drop in dopamine production. Junk food and nicotine, in cigarettes, incidentally, induces dopamine production. Perhaps, it was my body’s way of making up for the hit it was taking from being denied what it wanted.
That said, FitBit data showed on days I cut access early, I slept deeper, longer and with fewer interruptions. This ties into what I pointed out earlier on melatonin production.
It isn’t easy. But I’m trying. And I’m giving the Sabbath Manifesto a shot—one day of the week, every week.
- Avoid technology
- Connect with loved ones
- Nurture your health
- Get outside
- Avoid Commerce
- Light candles
- Drink wine
- Eat bread
- Find silence
- Give back
Manifestoes of this kind, says Datay, can be aided by prescription drugs to control impulsive behavior.
This piece was originally published in Mint. All copyrights vest with the newspaper and this article may not be reproduced without permission from the Editor.
The Essar Leaks
Since the time Indian Express broke the story on the Essar Leaks, everybody wants to get their hands on the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Prashant Bhushan. This is the document. Feel free to download, read, and make your own judgements. I have nothing else to say
Why BJP losing Delhi is bad news
Yesterday, I asked my friend S Srinivasan what he thinks of BJP and Narendra Modi's spectacular loss in Delhi. I have the highest respect for Srini's views. We've worked together in the past and he has an impeccable reputation for being on top of the game. Now based out of London, I thought his answer to my question the sharpest piece of commentary I have come across any place. Reproducing his response below ad verbatim.
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I had written a Facebook post yesterday, articulating a very cautious tone on the results. That was more from a moral perspective, saying the fight against racism is our main project, not the defeat of an individual. So it is too early to gloat.
But from a more political viewpoint, I have to double that dose of caution. I think the results are very bad news for India in the long term. The society may divide like never before and may move towards more turmoil. This view is based on my understanding of Narendra Modi's political philosophy, the long-term ambitions of the forces supporting him and the benefit of history.
Many think that this result serves as a wake-up call to BJP and Modi. They say that people rejected the party because Modi had failed to deliver in the first eight months and this will jolt him to introspect. The sanguine among us hope that he will change his approach to governance -- reining in loose talkers such as the sadhvis and babas, silencing ghar wapsi campaigners, and ask his ministers to abandon controversial interventions and focus on governance. A spate of economic reforms will come in the budget and all will thank the Delhi results for the happy change, or so the reasoning goes.
Alas, life ain't that simple.
If you look at Modi's voter base in 2014, it is arranged in three concentric circles. His core audience is the radicalized Hindu, who believes in the supremacy of his/her religion over others and the dictum that "India is Hindu." There are subdivisions within this inner circle, with those arguing this viewpoint with academic theory and those making the same argument by burning Muslims and Christians. It is truly a rainbow coalition, but the intellectual underpinning is same from everybody from Gurumurthy to Dara Singh. That is why they are called the Sangh Parivar.
Let us call this the Group 1.
Group 2 consists of self-serving voters. The business class, caste-based voters, NRIs all fall into this concentric circle. They vote him because they think that he will tweak the system to benefit them more than it benefits the others. This is often the group that calls for a "benign dictator."
The outermost concentric circle is the neutral voter. Disgusted with the aloofness of UPA II and being naïve enough to believe the APCO-engineered mythology of Modi's economic miracle in Gujarat, this group voted for him in the belief that they were saving the country from a corrupt regime and delivering it into the hands of a modern leader.
Modi built his career by serving the needs of these three concentric circles in quick succession. He engineered the Gujarat riots to satisfy his core support base, transformed Gujarat's economic system into a crony-capitalist institution and won over Group 2 and used his PR machinery to make over his image and position himself as the alternative to the "corrupt" regime of the UPA.
Look at the chronology of this journey: The core audience was won over in 2002, Group 2 in the years of the financial crisis and Group three after 2011.
While Group 1 is the unshakeable support base for his extreme-right Hindutva product positioning, Group 2 provides both the financial means and the media build-up of his image. But Group 3 is where the numbers are. So, power comes from Group 1, money comes from Group 2, votes come from Group 3.
Now to the Delhi elections.
The equation is very simple: Group 1 and Group 2 are still with Modi. Group 3 is not.
Arignar Anna, the founder of the DMK, once said that the goodwill of a political party falls by 50 percent the day it assumes power. That is because it is impossible, even for the most sincere and capable leader, to fulfil election promises. The reason lies in the way the Indian psyche works. There can never be revolutionary changes in India. All change is organic and happens by itself. This is a subject that deserves a separate discussion, but suffice to say that you can't legislate anything into or out of existence in India. When the time comes, things happen and you can take credit. Otherwise, make do with incremental changes.
So this invariably leads Group 3 into disappointment. They start complaining that their leader let them down, while the truth is the fault lies within themselves. They put a burden on the leader that he/she could not possibly carry. For instance, eliminating corruption is one of the tasks Modi has been entrusted with. We all know he can't. As a political reporter in Tamil Nadu, I was often amazed at how politicians were disgusted with the corruption of the common people. Our daily lives are intensely corrupt. Politicians are just aggregators of these ocean drops and the pressure on them to comply with the system is enormous. So, when Modi fails to lead Group 3 into the la-la land of bribe-less purity, he is ditched unceremoniously.
While this clearly shows that Arvind Kejriwal will "fail" to fulfil his promises and the neutral voters supporting him will ditch him at some point, this also throws up a disturbing possibility of what Modi could do.
Any politician's first objective is to survive. If your skin is not in the game, it means you have been skinned alive. So Modi may look at the election results and realize that Group 3 is no longer with him. As per Arignar Anna's First Law of Politics, pre-election supporters are different from post-election supporters. So, while he can't fulfil the impractical demands of Group 3, he needs to nurture Group 1 and Group 2 to survive in the party. History shows that Sonia Gandhi's downfall has to do with her failure to sustain her own Group 1 (fundamentalist supporters), she also failed to take care of Group 2 (self-serving groups). She also promptly lost her Group 3 one day after the election results. So, it is vitally important for Modi to pander to his two main support bases: The core of Hindu racists and the middle layer of capitalist cronies.
So, here is my conclusion: Modi will not only allow the rainbow shades of the Sangh Parivar to rear their ugly heads, he will give them enough room to run riot. He will continue to tweak economic policies to benefit his financiers and wheeler-dealers.
As Clayton Christensen said, companies fail not because they did the wrong thing, but because they the absolutely right thing to survive, but that it wasn't future-proof.
Modi will fall one day, not because he failed to provide good governance, but because he divided the country into a million pieces to further his own existence. His legacy will outlive his political career. And then, only then, can India start the long road to regeneration.
As for Arvind Kejriwal, his search for his Group 1 has just begun. When he realizes that his core audience cannot be the disgruntled (and fickle) Modi voters, he will become a serious politician.
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By the way, this is what I posted on FB yesterday:
I'm amused by the epic trolling that's happening against Narendra Modi as if we've proven a point to him. We haven't. In a country of 1.3 billion people, it's just one municipality which also happens to be the headquarters of most TV channels.
Politics is a musical chair; one party wins today and the other wins tomorrow. The shifting sands don't validate or negate an ideology. So to think that our campaign is against one individual or party would miss the point completely.
Our fight is against the radicalization of India. From Hindus to Muslims to Christians, common people are taking extreme positions and are ready to condone mass murder in their cause. Their leaders are upping the ante against each other in a race to apocalypse.
We want India to go back to being the integral and tolerant society we have known and grew up with. Destructive characters, irrespective of which religion they come from, are all the same. Modi, Togadia, Owaisi, Uma Shankar are all in one camp and we are in the other.
That is the main fight. Election results are a sideshow.
Nindiya Re...
....for my two baby girls. A man's happiness is a multiple of the number of the daughters he has.