Monday, November 12, 2012

Hawk the Eager Young

In the middle of my applications, attempts at convincing people to employ me, I should be doing more of them, but here I am. For the following reasons:

1. I'm feeling the loss of not writing, it's been too many weeks, and I don't much feel like writing any economics.

2. Like someone says on Facebook, "I don't procrastinate, only don't feel motivated to do boring things." ha ha. 

3. This is an "important" time in my life, so it should be duly noted and recorded m'lord.

I maybe shouldn't feel so non-passionate about the job scene, but honestly I'm far too studied up to be out on the corner with begging bowl in hand. As I once politically incorrectly remarked in a seminar two years ago, "if that's what gets published, maybe it isn't so bad if I don't publish!". Kuch toh mil jayega, I tell a friend across the other side of the world.

A minor source of frustration finds itself in:

1. The lack of places looking for someone like me. Seems like most places care not a hoot about some institutional economics person. Who'd have thought it?

2. The incorrectly/poorly informed "mainstream" economists who profess to address the notion that peculiarly is still quite novel in economics: that people talk, such talk is often times an attempt to "gain surplus" (i.e. get more than what you ought to) and therefore ought to be attended to with some careful thought. Thus the profess-ors profess an incorrect profession. Aaargh!

Actually, it's quite good, all this you-guys-are-getting-it-wrong business, there is now "scope" for me to gain surplus, ah ha ha ha!

I ended up watching this English Vinglish movie, and was fairly let down. I simply don't get why the wife goes back to that awful bitchy family, instead of French hunk. Oh, and there had to be a French hunk, right? Why not the other stereotype - the South Indian engineer? (Which hello, but down South, us Indians learn to speak english, we got to, there's no melting pot Hindi to "unite"? ) What further put me off was the unnecessary anti-Amrika jibes, "ab inko hamse darna hain", all that.

What rubbish. Please. When you go for a Visa interview, there are separate lines if you wish your interview to be taken in Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Oriya, Bengali, whatever. The US has its source of problems, but come on. "How will you survive without speaking english?". You don't need to speak in English to get a tourist visa! Go to your nearest American embassy if you don't believe me. Cue - Aaargh! - again.

We don't need more disagreement, people! We find it hard enough to get along as it is. Why create all this unnecessary tension, why why why. Sometimes, really, us Indians should take a proper look at ourselves, the xenophobia is truly abnoxious.

See - once again - the costs (and benefits) of talk? Most important principle, I believe, in understanding social behavior.

And, postscript: What the hell is up with Sridevi? How is it possible to look the same 25 years on, who are her doctors, did they lock her up in Michael Jackson's hyperbolic (that can't be right) chamber?

Enough about that. Test cricket is back, and there's nothing better than Test match commentary as background noise while you plead your case - The sum total of our knowledge does not come by a few isolated geniuses, but rather by a far larger crowd who stood on the shoulders of those who came before them to see a bit further. Making students see this will more often than not make them feel as
equal participants.
- it is the very sound of civilization.

Talking to a friend who's trying the arranged marriage thing, and has turned down multiple "suitors", she claims she doesn't feel anything, and "I don't know what it is I should feel, shouldn't I feel something?". I do some silly verbal equivalent of a backrub "there there, let me get on to it, phir dekhna...".

But what strikes me most about this free spirit, now attempting to search for the right man, is how right Axl was.
"Don't you think that you need someone?
Everybody needs somebody, You're not the only one!"

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