The Sundarbans

I've been reading Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and have learnt a lot about the Sundarbans and dolphins. The book superbly explores environmental and political issues through a combination of fact and fiction. It's my favorite Amitav Ghosh novel thus far, and I've really liked the others I've read. And, the Sundarbans have been added to my list of places-to-visit-before-destroyed.

Reading the book got me thinking about a comment made by a Bangladeshi friend on how Bangladesh experiences at least one natural disaster every year. Bangladesh is, in fact, considered the country most susceptible to climate change. Its feared that one third of its current land mass, supporting 20 million people, could go under water. Here is a rather depressing article on the full extent of the effects of climate change.

What is behavioral economics?

Warning: Blatant self-propaganda

Here is an article I co-wrote on behavioral economics and what it means poor households and how they manage their finances.

Game of Thrones

A quick shout-out for my favorite fantasy series thus far - A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a seven book series, four of which have been published - Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords, and Feast of Crows. I'm on the third one book right now and haven't been able to put them down since I started (maybe getting the Kindle was not such a smart thing after all).

The books are special because of the way they are written. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a character, so you see the shades within each character. There are no heroes or villains and you will start loving characters that you previously hated. The plot surprises you constantly. The storyline is unpredictable and complex, but totally believable once it's revealed.

HBO is planning a TV series with one season per book. The first season should start next year depending on how the pilot goes.

Why we travel

NYT's new photo exhibition asks readers to post their favorite summer travel pictures. Check out this gallery

This would be my addition. It's not as glamorous as the others, but this was the highlight from our summer travels.

The picture is of Gimmelwald. It's a 700 year old, car-free village located in the Lauterbrunnen valley in Switzerland. The village was able to escape development because a school-teacher got it declared as an avalanche zone. You can "tour" the village in 20 minutes by foot. You'll see a line of houses with drying laundry, tricycles and piles of firewood outside (See Rick Steves' article here).

We hiked the 2.5 hour distance to Murren, a more developed car-free village. The hike was picture-perfect with a background soundtrack coming from cow bells.

Switzerland has tons of tourists, but the real Switzerland is only a 20 minute train, car or cable car ride away.

How smart is your right foot?

Try this. I know some of you will get a "kick" out of it.

1. Without anyone watching you and while sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles with it.

2. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand... Your foot will change direction!

Mine did and there was nothing I could do about it.

Apparently, one trick is to say "6" every time you draw "6". Even that didn't work for me.

Natural history

I enjoy museums because they always help me gain a fresh (or forgotten) perspective. Below are highlights from my trip to the American Museum of Natural History.

- The brown bear is probably the largest carnivorous mammal alive. A grown bear can get up to 1,600 pounds. I thought this was impressive, until I came across the walrus. 140 pounds at birth, adult males can go to 2,600 pounds. Ridiculous!

- Less than 5 percent of the ocean has been explored. Who knows what we don't know.

- I wonder how long it will take for the African mammals exhibit to look like the North American one. While the African exhibits showed dioramas from all across the continent, the North American exhibits were concentrated in Alaska and parts of Canada. Even the African exhibits that compared present prevalence to past terrains, showed the spread of animals shrinking. Many countries are protecting natural habitats, but how do you protect against climate change?

Potato, it's enough

From Chris Blattman's blog (dedicated to VK)

From 1000 to 1900 the world's population grew from 300 million to 1.6 billion. Urbanization more than quadrupled.

The culprit? According to a new paper by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian: the potato.

...Old World regions that were suitable for potato cultivation experienced disproportionately faster population and urbanization growth after the introduction of potatoes.

...our baseline estimates suggest that the potato accounts for 12% of the increase in population, 22% of the increase in population growth, 47% of the increase in urbanization, and 50% of the increase in urbanization growth.

The more traditional view credits modern medicine and public sanitation in the late 19th century for the population boom. Nunn and Qian argue the population boom came much earlier. As the potato spread from the NewWorld to the Old World, it carried a huge increase in calories and nutrients.

Something I didn't know:

Humans can subsist healthily on a diet of potatoes, supplemented with only milk or butter, which contain the two vitamins not provided for by potatoes, vitamins A and D. ...This, in fact, was the typical Irish diet, which although monotonous, was able to provide sufficient amounts of all vitamins and nutrients.

Seems my grandmother had it right all along...

Poverty, hunger, and numbers

Three pieces that are worth reading -

How many Indians are Poor?

Drawing a Line Under Poverty in India

How to tackle India's hunger

Its clear that we have a long way to go. The question is whether we are heading in the right direction.

Bing

I'm a fan of anything Google - gmail, G1, google reader, blogger. So when I read this NYT column on Bing, Microsoft's latest challenge to Google, I was skeptical. Still, some features seemed useful. On Bing, you can point to a search result and see a pop-up balloon that shows the first few paragraphs on text on the page. Saves you the trouble of clicking back and forth.

As the author notes -

People won’t start dumping Google en masse; Google is a habit. Everyone already knows how to work it, and it may be built right into your Web browser. But if you value your time, you should give Bing a fling.

Have you used Bing?

MJ

Over the weekend, we were talking about MJ and how he is probably the world's most recognized super star (the other MJ comes close). For many of us growing up in India, MJ was our introduction to Pop music. My guess is that Thriller or Bad was amongst the first five albums you bought, if not the first one. Mine was Billy Joel's Storm Front, but that's only because my brother already had all the MJ albums.

Read this terrific MJ tribute written by a friend. What's your favorite MJ track?

Saina, not Sania

I saw Saina Nehwal lose in the Olympics quarterfinals last year, and liked her immediately. Composed in defeat, you got the feeling that she took the loss as a step forward. She is currently ranked #8 in in the world and just won the Indonesian Open, her first BWF Super Series tournament. The BWF Super Series consisting of 12 tournaments are a new phenomena, akin to the grand slams in tennis.

I can't understand why we don't hear more about Saina; we hear more than needed about Sania Mirza (who, btw, ranks #85). Is it because tennis is more popular than badminton or because controversy sells more than solid performances?

The "Twitter Revolution"

There has been a lot of talk about the role of Twitter in Iran's elections. People are calling it a powerful display of the reach of social media, and the US State Department appears to feel the same. It asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled outage so that people could keep sending tweets from Iran. The outage was eventually scheduled during Iran's night.

I'm a supporter of social media, but calling it the "twitter revolution" is bit much. I'm sure more people are organizing by word of mouth and SMS inside Iran rather than Twitter. Twitter is probably their avenue to inform the rest of us outside Iran. While you can't rely on individual tweets, you get a good sense of the situation when you look at the tweets in aggregate (here is a compilation of them).

Frugal Traveler

I follow Matt Gross' Frugal Traveler blog, which is both useful and interesting.

Here are two recent entries with great trip planning trips -
Research: The Traveler's Best Friend

Travel Websites: A Click-On Showdown

Overall, the blog is fantastic if you like to be a cheapo traveler like me!

The bags are here! The bags are here!

I finally have some bags to distribute. The big canvas bag (white) is $3 and the small cloth ones are $1.

Bulk orders get a discount :)

If you don't know what I'm talking about, read this.

A little corny and a little true... How To Be Happy In a Recession

By Deepak Chopra

"When a box turtle is crossing the road and it hears a car coming, it reacts by drawing in its head and feet, contracting for protection. Evolution has kept turtles alive for hundreds of millions of years that way. What works as a natural defense isn't much use, though, when a Yukon or Explorer is barreling toward you. There are times when contracting inward is the very worst thing you can do.

That's true now in the recession that economists see barreling toward us -- the road noise has gotten alarmingly loud already. But as the economy contracts, we must resist our natural reflex to contract with it. Instead, we need to do the opposite. Expansion is the best way to survive any crisis.

The lesson should have sunk in after 9/11, when the whole country learned what it means to contract with fear, anxiety, suspicion, and distrust. We felt threatened by a vast, unseen enemy, which was magnified as large as fear itself.Fear deprives people of choice. Fear shrinks the world into isolated, defensive enclaves. Fear spirals out of control. Fear makes everyday life seem clouded over with danger.

A lot of people are approaching the economy that way, and not enough leaders are warning them that it's the worst possible reaction.

To be happy in a recession means, first and foremost, resisting all the threats that fear possesses. Don't obsess anxiously over what you could lose. Don't reduce your world to a bank account or a 401k. Isn't there an upside to losing some "consumer buying power"? To be honest, we went too far with consumerist mania. By any measure this is an inordinately rich country, and instead of mourning sagging profit margins, can't we use the current slowdown to ask what makes for true personal happiness?

Relationship. Gratitude. Appreciation. Compassion. Mutual regard. Strong social connections. Love you can trust.I don't know why it takes a crisis to bring out those fundamental human qualities. But it often does. We all realize that the next video game, the next new car, the next flat-screen TV means nothing compared to the rewards of relating to other people. Yet we live as if the opposite is true. The pursuit of happiness is blocked just as much by indulgent over-consumption as by an economic downturn. More, in fact, an impoverished country like Nigeria recently scored number one in a survey of the happiest countries on earth, while the U.S. has never broken the top ten in any such survey.

Some may protest that expanding and becoming more human is all well and good if you have a job but totally unrealistic if your livelihood is threatened. I don't think so. Whatever happens, the worst-off will be the ones who need more compassion, kindness, and relating to. They will need real coping skills, not a show of group pity.

There's a lot more to say about how to be happy in a recession, but the main thing is to remind yourself that it's possible. Refuse to contract just because the economy does. You have the tools to be happy in the worst of times. They're just hidden under the box your new iPhone came in.

Physical strength is measured by what we can carry; spiritual by what we can bear."