Prolog

Priya Raju had written 2 wonderful posts on Happiness Quotient part 1 and part 2. It may be worth your while to read them both, before reading this post.

Upside of Irrrationality

I wanted to add another dimension to the topic based on some recent learnings from Dan Ariely’s brilliant book Upside of Irrationality (I strongly recommend this book to all of you). Based on the book I and Priya Raju had some discussions and this post is an output of those discussions.

In the book, Dan has a chapter on a phenomenon called Hedonic Adaptation. Without giving away too much from his book, Hedonic Adaptation is the process by which our mind becomes accustomed to pleasure and pain.

Since happiness is associated mostly with pleasure, we will look into pleasure.

Diwali Dress

To illustrate Hedonic Adaptation, let me share a story. When I was a child, my parents used to buy us a new dress once a year during the festival of Diwali. The sheer anticipation of the new dress and the joy of wearing the new dress for Diwali still lingers in my memory.

Through the years I have bought so many clothes that, buying a new dress is more like a chore, these days. No more joy left in buying a new dress.

This is how we get accustomed to buying gadgets, cars or in general objects/things. This may also be the reason why our wise ancients have talked extensively about why material possessions don’t give us happiness.

Obviously, we can’t all renounce our livelihood and walk off to the Himalayas and become spiritual beings, whatever that means

How do we beat Hedonic Adaptation then?

One of the ways is to avoid the focus on buying things and focus on experiences like vacations (many researchers have pointed this out). Since we tend to go to different places every time we go on vacation, Hedonic Adaptation can be avoided.

One other way, self and Priya spotted is art – as Keats said long ago “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”. Thanks to Priya, we have a collected a lot of art objects in our home. Every time I feel down, I look at them and feel instantly better. Even when I’m not feeling down these art objects give me happiness and inspiration. Hedonic Adaptation doesn’t seem to occur even though these are still objects.

I have been thinking and reading recently about Zen Buddhism and Mindfulness. I haven’t fully understood mindfulness to be able to practice it. But the emphasis on staying in the present and enjoying every moment might offer a way out of Hedonic Adaptation.

Epilog

What are your thoughts on Hedonic Adaptation? Are there other ways to beat Hedonic Adaptation that you have discovered?

The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

Nehru’s birthday, November 14, as we all know, is celebrated as Children’s Day every year in India. On this occasion, it is appropriate to pay tribute to a formative leader of India who illuminated a lot during his lifetime and beyond. Through his intellectual legacy, he continues until this day to guide India on the path of liberal democracy. His vision of India was that of a secular and modern nation. A flamboyant personality and yet a clear thinker, he held his own during much of the freedom struggle.

Nehru led from the front, expressing his positions during the course of various constitutional, political and other debates in the colonial period thereby indelibly stamping free India-to-come with his vision. He became India’s first Prime Minister and held that post for almost 17 years. He has been described severally as architect of modern India, world statesman and great administrator.

In the days that freedom fighters were incarcerated, many of them took to writing. Nehru showed his capacity as a historian of the first order, even though his own first degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, England was in the natural sciences. The strength of his scholarship lingers on in the form of the ‘Discovery of India’, ‘Glimpses of World History’ and ‘An Autobiography.’ It is difficult to condense the thought of such a complex body of work in such a short space. In this post, I choose to focus on the concept of “scientific temper” that was very dear to Nehru. He considered science to be rational, universal and inspired by the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment.

This was not to be mistaken with scientific expertise or building resources in science and technology, the latter having been pursued in different ways. For Nehru, who was an agnostic, science had multiple functions to perform: not only was it an instrument to solve the economic problems of a developing society like ours, it also had to make India a strong and self-reliant country with scientists competent to hold their own in the world scientific community. Part of this policy was the building of top-notch scientific educational and research institutions that Nehru promoted like the IIT’s, CSIR, ICMR, ICAR,  and, aided by business houses, institutions like the IISc and the TIFR.

While many celebrate the fact today that its India’s large pool of managerial and scientific manpower that is winning accolades worldwide and also bringing in the moolah, very few acknowledge that it was Nehru’s educational and scientific policies that made possible such an achievement including the Indian “IT revolution” [R. Guha, p. 1962]. That makes him a great visionary who though much derided for his economic policies could peep into the future and build the foundation for the Knowledge-based Economy (KBE) that we are all busy celebrating as the current and future source of wealth-generation.

What was important to Nehru was not just the change in the mere economic status of his country but also a change in the attitudes or the narrow-mindedness of its citizens. He said, “It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people. . . . Who indeed could afford to ignore science today? At every turn we have to seek its aid.”

But what did he mean by scientific temper? Srirupa Roy in her book “Beyond belief: India and the politics of postcolonial nationalism” notes that Nehru’s emphasis on the need for scientific temper predated independence (p.123). The features of scientific temper were mainly two-fold as Roy elaborates:

1. Scientific temper referred to a mentality or an outlook rather than a specialized body of knowledge. It addressed itself to universalist concerns of “values of life” rather than to narrow and specialized questions of scientific research and application (Roy, p.124)

2. Unlike scientific expertise alone, the project of scientific temper was a call for the diffusion of “science mindedness” throughout the population. The growth of scientific temper was measured by the extent to which ordinary people were using the methods of science to life’s problems (Roy, p.125)

Clearly what the above meant was that science would not just play a role in building scientific expertise but also help reject superstition, prejudice and injustice As Prof. Yashpal has noted, “science will also have to come forward in changing our thoughts and eradicating various social evils, including casteism, extremism…”(Times of India, 16th May 2005). India, in Nehru’s vision, could become a great country if the people adopted such a ‘scientific temper.’ Nehru pointed to the contradictions in the lives of scientists themselves who uphold science in the laboratories but discard science in everything else they do in their life.

Beyond Nehru’s lifetime, the propagation of the concept of ‘scientific temper’ was negligible and became reduced to a debate among intellectuals of various hues. As part of the 42nd amendment to the Indian Constitution in 1976, ‘scientific temper’ joined the list of Fundamental Duties of every Indian citizen vide Part IV-A, Article 51-A (h): ‘to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.’

A group of intellectuals led by P. N. Haksar released a “Statement on Scientific Temper” in October 1980. It has on and off been noticed at the highest levels of governance as a concept bearing great transformative potential. In his first Independence Day address to the nation from the Red Fort in 2004, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also called for the promotion of scientific temper, which he added must become a “national movement” and not a prisoner of bureaucracy or ideology.

A full and proper assessment of the impact of ‘scientific temper’ in the 62 years since independence is yet to be made. There is countervailing data that superstition, occult, irrationality, prejudice, gender inequality and injustices are very resilient in Indian private and public life, in other words, the idea of ‘scientific temper’ has not sufficiently penetrated Indian society. These days, because of the electronic media, news travels faster and there is greater awareness of these issues. A positive fallout of such media analysis and debates might be greater skepticism of superstitions and their peddlers. A moot point for research could be the ways in which the concept has panned out in the context of urbanization.

In the final analysis, to do justice to Nehru’s vision for India, ‘scientific temper could be a useful concept in ‘deschooling’ our society from received wisdom about obscurantist and superstitious practices that it is led to believe is in its interest. Scientific temper has to be an essential component of the socialization of our populace and needs to be promoted as an integral approach to nation-building. If that succeeds, then there can be no greater tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru and the millions of children who form the destiny of our nation.

References:

1. R. Guha, ‘Verdicts on Nehru’, Economic and Political Weekly, May 7, 2005.
2. Srirupa Roy, “Beyond belief: India and the politics of postcolonial nationalism”(Duke University Press, USA: 2007).

***An important recent contribution to the discussion on scientific temper is Prof. Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian : Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Penguin, 2006).
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FTOTW [Fine Tastings of the Week]

Dina talks about a wonderful innovation from Nokia that could have a major impact on rural India.  A brilliant 4.5 min video on how to find and pursue your passion by Randy Komisar (via @athick2) [Flashback - can passion can be taught? ].

Prolog

Today, thanks to a friend,  i had the good fortune to attend the launch event of a learning company called  iDiscoveri. They are trying to revolutionize grade school teaching methods using their XSEED methodology. Some School Leaders, who have tried the XSEED system in their schools,  spoke in glowing and inspiring terms about the system.

As i was waiting for the event to start, i had an interesting conversation with one of the attendees.  We discussed a number of things about training programs in the corporations and also in general about learning.  One question she asked stuck in my mind – do you keep track of learnings and how do you know you have learnt something new?

Learning

Later in the evening today, i and Priya Raju had a discussion on this subject. There seem to be 2 broad kinds of learnings – one is what we called the regular or routine kind – say we learn how to cook a dish or to ride a bicycle.

We feel it is the second kind of learning – which are breakthrough learnings that we distinctly remember as learnings. These breakthrough learnings are the ones we usually refer to  by the term “Aha Moment”.

Aha Moment

The question is – when do these Aha Moments occur?  We went over some examples:

1.  We keep thinking about a problem or a question long and hard and all of a sudden something clicks in our brain and we find the answer.  For example, my single arm bangle hypothesis is one such.

2.  While  cooking a dish, sometimes, by mistake, we skip a step  or add the wrong ingredient. But if the dish turns out great,  it results in an  Aha Moment – a new recipe got created.

3. In grade school, we hear a lot about the solar system and how planets move around the sun in an elliptical orbit.  Then when we hear about Pluto’s unusual orbit, it creates an Aha Moment.

4.  A few years back, stereograms became popular.  You had to squint and bring your eyes to a particular position  - lo & behold, you can see a  3D image.  When she first came across these, Priya Raju thought it was a scam because after several tries, she couldn’t see the 3D effect. But one day, she picked up the stereogram and somehow  the eyes came into the correct position and she was able to see the 3D effect. An Aha Moment.

As with most ideas in the world,  there is even a website dedicated to Aha Moments.  The featured Aha Moments on the site are pretty good.

Epilog

What are your Aha Moments? Are there other categories of Aha Moments that we have not considered?  From the answers, we want to construct a model for how and when these occur. If we are successful in doing that, we can use that in constructing better learning programs.

Updated 2 May 2009: Received some wisdom from twitterers – @Shogun1947 @priyraju @akumaran

Prolog

On my internal to company blog i had introduced a new idea a few months back – in the prolog section of every blog post, i provide a link to interesting posts i had read that week. To my surprise, this has become very popular. This is somewhat like the FTOTW (fine tastings of the week) series i used to run on this blog. I decided to try the same idea on this blog also.

FTOTW

First, A. Prem, one of Cognizant’s Social CRM experts, blogs regularly about Social CRM on his blog. He has a tremendous grasp of the subject. He writes one of the leading blogs inside the company as well.  Rachel Laudan, one of my food anthropology blog friends, lives and blogs from Mexico. She has some great updates on the Swine Flu epidemic.  Bob Sutton paraphrases Scott Berkun to explain how managers become a**holes. How Apple Cofounder Steve Wozniak gets things done.  Saraswathi, a former colleague, who now works in the social sector, had written a brilliant post on relationships a while back. must read.

Science  & Technology Careers in America

As someone who had lived in the USA for 10 years, i feel sad about the fact that American kids don’t take up science & technology careers as much as America needs them to.  The huge skills shortage that America faces is either filled by immigration or by outsourcing to other countries like India and China.

The stats from graduate programs and PhD programs also don’t bode that well. As of 2006, over 51% in grad programs in EE were foreign nationals and 71% in PhD programs were foreign. I don’t know how accurate these stats are. But the general perception in America is that Americans don’t like science & technology careers.

Paradise of Science

During our time in America, we used to wonder about, the kind of resources that are available to an American kid that Indian kids can not even dream. Every small city has a well-stocked library, a science center in the vicinity, several museums.

Even if one is a wee bit scientifically minded, there is plenty of resources to tap into.

By contrast, a city that plays host to over 6 MM people, Chennai, India does not have one well equipped museum or science center or library.

But Indian middle class kids, are taught right from when they are in the womb, that science  & technology careers are the be-all and end-all of living in this world.  Yes, this does create a large stereotypical population. But hey, how does that matter? When we want to find folks for science & technology jobs, we can find them easily without having to import them.

I am trying to find out, why American kids consider science & technology careers boring or geeky or nerdy or whatever?

What can be done to change this attitude of the American kids?

Epilog

If i am lucky, i may get to work in a project to improve American kids’ attitude towards science & technology careers. Please help me with your wisdom.