For the love of money – the story of a wealth addict

For the Love of Money is an opinion article that appeared in NY Times today. A former Wall Street Hedge fund manager quit his job few years ago to start a philanthropic organization, and these are his personal experience of the Wall Street culture.

This is an amazing writeup. It also reminds me of the time when I took mathematical finance courses in graduate school, hoping to know more about what Wall Street quants do and if I could get into this “prestigious” crowd of number-crunching smart mathematcians. The classes were just disappointing. I couldn’t believe that all these smart math phds spent so much time building complicated models to find out if there’s an arbitrage of 0.01 cents somewhere in the data. The whole notion of it sounded very bland and too much materialistic. Those classes just demonstrated to me what wealth addiction looks like, from the micro level of cents scaling up to millions.

The other trend that I currently see is the increasing number of young Bangladeshis I keep meeting here in the US who are aiming to become one of those wealth addicts. Some medical and finance students tell me (or simply imply with their words) with pride that they will earn 500k when they graduate — their way to ridicule me when they learn that I am simply “wasting” my time and energy pursuing something that will not provide me a “decent” salary of $500k, while I have all the opportunities in my vicinity to do so.

Wealth addicts are not very few in number, this addiction exists in different cultural settings. Here’s a chart from The Economist (and you can download the actual paper from the link there), even though a little bit misleading because of the log scale, that shows how people positively correlate money with their happiness.

It is a sad, harshly competitive, and unfair world we live in — we get reminded of that everyday and most of us try to appease ourselves saying “I am better than others, because I have not done .. bla bla .. .” In reality, all of us contribute(d), again from a micro to a macro scale, towards the mess that’s created so far. From a dynamical systems perspective, living in a society makes me affect the society (both in good and bad ways) every moment I interact with it in some way. We cannot control these micro effects, but in my personal observation I have noticed that people who deliberately cause macro level disasters tend to rationalize their actions using the micro level. They tend to say, “we are smart and we work hard, so we deserve it, and the rest of the world is unfair anyway.”

To be honest, I do not know if I should despise or agree with their arguments. It is true that the world is unfair because of the everlasting greed and needs of humans. Sometimes, I look around myself keeping in mind that same view, and I see that those wealth addicts are right to some extent. There are moral rules and religions, but morality is nowhere to be found, unless you have been living too much in the internet and reading those “20 photos that put our faith back in humanity” type articles. There are constitutions and legal norms, but justice is nowhere, unless you think the increasing number of people in the jails is a justice indicator. There are stories of love and romance, but true love is very very rare, unless you live in the world of Disney, or basically, most Hollywood movies.

The world’s not cruel, it’s just nature’s laws that are strict. We survive over many animals, we control the earth over all other species. It’s just natural that we are good at competition, we are good at it, otherwise we wouldn’t have made it this far over other species. That doesn’t mean we win everything, it just means that most humans have a competitive nature, and we can’t get rid of it. Nature built us like this, and there’s no denying of our own characteristics. It just looks like a harsh truth that wealth addicts are right — there’s no point caring about others really, as the world just moves on. It moved on, and will move on. Eternity doesn’t care about you or me or the poverty-stricken children. Things move on. One species destroys another species. New species are born. We eat animals, animals eat animals, animals eat plants, we eat plants, plants eat oxygen, we eat oxygen, everyone gives out wastes, everything gets recycled. Every breathing entity is just another energy converter.

In this seemingly chaotic process, it doesn’t really matter what is democracy, communism, socialism, who killed whom and what’s justice and sin, all borders get blurred, all definitions get redefined each century, decade, year, day, or even in a matter of seconds. We delude ourselves into thinking that there’s order in this random universe, there is none. It looks like the wealth addicts are doing it right.

At this point in my thought process, the other part of myself tells me that there’s still justice and morality, they are disguised in different forms. In the same way a dynamical system converges to an equilibrium state, there are times when we really see what is called ‘poetic justice’. And I don’t only mean the big events like the financial crisis or a dictator going down. Poetic justice comes in every subtle form in our daily lives. We just choose to ignore to see them. Let’s talk about that sometime later.

Urvasi, with some male bashing

A. R. Rahman’s Urvasi is one of my favorites among his creations. It’s not only the catchy rhythm, the video with Prabhu Deva’s hilarious (and definitely very skilled) dance moves is something worth watching.

Here’s a thought that comes to my mind whenever I watch the video. Actually, two thoughts.

These dudes are getting into a female bus to harass some women. The setting looks funny, with all the funny faces and stupid acts. When I watched it the first time, I was laughing. I was enjoying their acts. Wearing Burkha to sneak in a women bus, stealing food from passengers, dancing on their bus roof, making weird faces, proposing to women trying to be the macho man, all kinds of frustration stemming from rejections leading to hilarious acts and dance moves — it all looks funny. However, when I watched it later, I started rethinking, and retracting from my previous judgement. I think the video only encourages the roadside romeos to tease women, and it tells them that it’s OK to do so.

• The video is funny, at least to most of us (the everyday middle class guys). The dancing and acting go with our taste and the general Asian sense of humor. That’s the point exactly. It encourages the guy’s subconscious to think that doing those things is a mere innocent act of fun. My personal interaction with some roadside romeos reveal that many of them think they are just having fun by teasing the girls, and the girls should also “take it easy,” just like the song.
• The girls should take it easy even if a stranger guy is “having fun” by resting his head on her lap, or ogling her breasts etc. In return, the girls will simply give them gentle appreciative slaps, and still smile back at the guys’ “stupid and innocent” acts. (0:37 – 0:45 in the video).
• These are energetic guys having their one-of-a-kind time of life, roaming and dancing around the whole city, enjoying life to the fullest. A part of that enjoyment is dancing on women bus roofs, showing their extraordinary dance moves to the random women in order to propose them, doesn’t matter you know her or not. Enough said, enough fuel for some stupid roadside romeo.
• I can carry on with the list of things that’s just wrong in this video despite its innocent nature, and that’s a big list. The point is, newspapers in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan (countries that follow Bollywood) get filled with the news of college girl abuse and subsequent suicides, abduction or murders. The Bollywood culture (and the Bangladeshi film industry too) promote these things in entertaining ways. The message is, “zindegi mein ayesh karo” and one good way to do it is to tease and even physically abuse girls.
• 

  Sunil Sethi and his cool macho motorbiking dude team running and dancing behind Raveena. She is apparently enjoying it (grin on her face). [Song: Shehar ki Ladki, Rakshak]

  

  Guys are teasing the girl in yellow top. (Urvasi)

  Notice something similar in the above pictures? How many times have you seen the above scenario in the Bollywood, Bangladeshi or Pakistani films, music videos and songs? It’s a recurring scene: a group of guys teasing one good looking girl (good looks in the traditional sense), and apparently the girl seems to enjoy it, although sometimes she seems to put on an annoyed face she will eventually accept the guy. I am not a big follower of these movie industries, but I have watched quite a lot of movies to safely say that 60% – 70% of the 1990’s and early 2000’s movies would have that scene. It’s a psychological training to these young roadside romeos. These young guys (and even girls too) can be very easily inspired by the motives of these movies. I just read a news few days ago that a young high-school-going couple tried to commit suicide together since their parents won’t accept them.

• I don’t think this culture is gone yet. The same scenarios are there in the movies, which are subtler but good enough to indicate the same philosophy. And in reality, abuse is and has been present everywhere, starting from the home to the office.
• This brings me to my next point…

It’s hard to define what is abuse. Guys chase women, and women chase guys too, but guys are usually more active it seems, and we usually take these things in a physical way. The reason for the guys is biological, and of course cultural too. The other thing this video reminds me is the extreme eagerness among guys to find their mates. Many guys are ready to do anything funny (that fits within their sense of humor), anything macho, or even anything that apparently establishes them as intelligent just to attract females. All these Urvasi dances and video just remind me that, and put a grin on my face about how we give in to our physical desires. I am no different, and that habit is normal, but looking at it from a distance makes me pity all of us — the humans.

OK I’m done with my indignant rant, so here’s a rock version of Urvasi that I particularly liked. The rhythm and riffs in the original song are quite catchy, a rock version gives it a different flavor.

Data privacy and the netizen culture

Someone posted this article on facebook today, and this is quite an issue nowadays. Data privacy, privacy breach, how big companies are using our data, the services are really not free, etc. etc.

I wonder if these people who are protesting and asking for a data privacy reformation are still living in the dreamland.

The article states:

“Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has not been shy about his company’s views on Internet privacy: People don’t have any, nor should they expect it. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” he infamously told CNBC in 2009. And he’s right. Because true Internet privacy and real surveillance reform would be the end of Google.”

and also:

“To the uninitiated, Google’s offering of free services — from email, to amazing mobile maps, to a powerful replacement for Microsoft Office — might seem like charity. Why give away this stuff for free? But to think that way is to miss the fundamental purpose that Google serves and why it can generate nearly $20 billion in profits a year.”

I think this is fair. Nothing in the human society is really free, every transaction is a business transaction, even charity too, from one perspective. When we greedily sign up for commercial technology thinking we will get 10 gb space free, we should really know that it’s not free rather very expensive if you think about the cloud service management process. A company simply can’t survive by spending billions of dollars in its infrastructure and earning nothing in return. And, the company is here to make profits, not to provide free giveaways, and that is just natural. If we think our personal information is really that important (as if people care what a random guy, out of a billion other random guys, is doing in his daily life), we shouldn’t be keeping it out there for everyone to see. I kind of agree with Eric Schmidt there.

(Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

Many are talking about data privacy reformation policies within the companies, I think this is due to a lack of knowledge about how these things really work. No reformation policy will actually make one’s data safe, as long as it’s out there. If you keep your jewelry in a box and put the box in the middle of a busy street for everyone to see, then it’s not the police’s responsibility to safeguard it. In fact, they will try to steal it too.

I think currently we are in a transition period, from our older concepts of life to a newer, fast-paced tech life. That’s why people are getting confused about how to live as a netizen. I think the philosophy of living in a society remained, and will remain the same in the foreseeable future. It’s just too simple, don’t share your data if you don’t want others to peek at it. Keep it to yourself if you think it’s valuable. If someone thinks what locations he travelled is important data for him, then stop using the service, or better yet, he should use his own technology. Living as a netizen or a techizen requires tech expertise, giving one’s duties away to someone else and feeling safe about it doesn’t sound right.

Personally, when I signed up for gmail back in 2007 I knew as long as my data is out there in some online database, it’s vulnerable. Honestly, I wasn’t very concerned and am still not very concerned. My netizen philosophy is that we should share our data. Privacy is something that mostly shady people care about, and no doubt we all have some of that inside us. Unless someone is a government official or a journalist covering some dangerous news (and scenarios like that, and for which, opensource tech like Tor exists), I don’t see why we should be concerned about sharing our data.