My Kafeel has my passport : Travails of Indians in the Gulf

One evening, I walked into a small Internet café near my hotel. Two young Indian men managed the café. After I had answered my e-mails, I bought a coffee and we chatted. They were from Faizabad, a small town in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Sohail, the younger, a wiry man who served coffee and tea and cleaned the place, had been working there for a year. When I told him that I had been to his town several times as a reporter, his eyes brimmed with tears. “I worked in a garage as a mechanic, but I didn’t make enough. I got married and had a child. So I came here. I thought I am going to Mecca. I will get to perform the Hajj and earn a lot more than I ever would,” he said. “I didn’t know people here would treat us like dirt.” He pointed to a chubby Saudi boy, who was a regular at the café and called himself “Funky Monkey” (his video-game username). “Every time he feels like, he would slap me. It is the same with other local customers. You are a little late complying an order and they bark at you, slap you.” He added, “Here you can’t appeal to anyone. My passport is with my kafeel and I can only go home when he allows me to.” Imran, the older counterman, consoled him. “You are here now! Get used to it. Do I cry? I haven’t been able to return home in three years,” Imran said.

“Why not?” I asked Imran.

“My kafeel has my passport. He keeps making excuses, delaying it. He doesn’t want to lose business if I go away. And he has to pay all my money that is with him and buy me the return ticket home.”

And yet, Imran said, “We still have it easy. Working here is much worse for the maids.”

There are about one-and-a-half million female domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.

Basharat Peer in The New Yorker. Here

Is Self-Knowledge overrated?

Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and the author of the new book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” changed the way people think about thinking by asking them questions. They weren’t trick questions, either. Instead, Kahneman relied almost exclusively on straightforward surveys, in which he described various scenarios. Here’s a sample:
The U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor?

When Kahneman put this question to a few hundred physicians, seventy-two per cent chose option A, the safe-and-sure strategy. Most doctors would rather save a certain number of people for sure than risk the possibility that everyone might die.

Now consider this scenario:

The U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. If program C is adopted, 400 people will die. If program D is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die. Which of the two programs would you favor?

The two different hypotheticals, of course, examine identical dilemmas: saving one-third of the population is the same as losing two-thirds. And yet, doctors reacted very differently depending on how the question was framed. When the possible outcomes were stated in terms of deaths (and not survivors), physicians were suddenly eager to take chances: seventy-eight per cent chose option D.

Why are doctors so inconsistent? Kahneman and his longtime collaborator, Amos Tversky, explained these contradictory responses in terms of loss aversion, or the fact that losses hurt more than gains feel good. In fact, people hate losses so much that merely framing a choice in terms of a potential loss can shift their preferences. Like those physicians, people are suddenly willing to risk losing everything if there’s a chance they might lose nothing.

Although our dislike of losses might seem obvious—“You need to have studied economics for many years before you’d be surprised by my research; it didn’t shock my mother at all,” Kahneman says—the discovery of loss aversion proved to be an important refutation of human rationality.

Jonah Lehrer in The NewYorker. Here

When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle: Jhumpa Lahiri

Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is a librarian, and perhaps because he believed in collective property, or perhaps because my parents considered buying books for me an extravagance, or perhaps because people generally acquired less then than they do now, I had almost no books to call my own. I remember coveting and eventually being permitted to own a book for the first time. I was five or six. The book was diminutive, about four inches square, and was called “You’ll Never Have to Look for Friends.” It lived among the penny candy and the Wacky Packs at the old-fashioned general store across the street from our first house in Rhode Island. The plot was trite, more an extended greeting card than a story. But I remember the excitement of watching my mother purchase it for me and of bringing it home. Inside the front cover, beneath the declaration “This book is especially for,” was a line on which to write my name. My mother did so, and also wrote the word “mother” to indicate that the book had been given to me by her, though I did not call her Mother but Ma. “Mother” was an alternate guardian. But she had given me a book that, nearly forty years later, still dwells on a bookcase in my childhood room.

Our house was not devoid of things to read, but the offerings felt scant, and were of little interest to me. There were books about China and Russia that my father read for his graduate studies in political science, and issues of Time that he read to relax. My mother owned novels and short stories and stacks of a literary magazine called Desh, but they were in Bengali, even the titles illegible to me. She kept her reading material on metal shelves in the basement, or off limits by her bedside. I remember a yellow volume of lyrics by the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, which seemed to be a holy text to her, and a thick, fraying English dictionary with a maroon cover that was pulled out for Scrabble games. At one point, we bought the first few volumes of a set of encyclopedias that the supermarket where we shopped was promoting, but we never got them all. There was an arbitrary, haphazard quality to the books in our house, as there was to certain other aspects of our material lives. I craved the opposite: a house where books were a solid presence, piled on every surface and cheerfully lining the walls. At times, my family’s effort to fill our house with books seemed thwarted; this was the case when my father mounted rods and brackets to hold a set of olive-green shelves. Within a few days the shelves collapsed, the Sheetrocked walls of our seventies-era Colonial unable to support them.

When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that, in the beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to connect with others. I did not write alone but with another student in my class at school. We would sit together, this friend and I, dreaming up characters and plots, taking turns writing sections of the story, passing the pages back and forth. Our handwriting was the only thing that separated us, the only way to determine which section was whose. I always preferred rainy days to bright ones, so that we could stay indoors at recess, sit in the hallway, and concentrate. But even on nice days I found somewhere to sit, under a tree or on the ledge of the sandbox, with this friend, and sometimes one or two others, to continue the work on our tale. The stories were transparent riffs on what I was reading at the time: families living on prairies, orphaned girls sent off to boarding schools or educated by stern governesses, children with supernatural powers, or the ability to slip through closets into alternate worlds. My reading was my mirror, and my material; I saw no other part of myself.

Jhumpa Lahiri in The New Yorker. Here

Procrastination : Facts, myths and remedies

Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. The combination of Indian bureaucracy and what Akerlof called “my own ineptitude in such matters” meant that doing so was going to be a hassle—indeed, he estimated that it would take an entire workday. So he put off dealing with it, week after week. This went on for more than eight months, and it was only shortly before Akerlof himself returned home that he managed to solve his problem: another friend happened to be sending some things back to the U.S., and Akerlof was able to add Stiglitz’s clothes to the shipment. Given the vagaries of intercontinental mail, it’s possible that Akerlof made it back to the States before Stiglitz’s shirts did.

There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. But Akerlof saw the experience, for all its familiarity, as mysterious. He genuinely intended to send the box to his friend, yet, as he wrote, in a paper called “Procrastination and Obedience” (1991), “each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.” He was always about to send the box, but the moment to act never arrived. Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as diverse as substance abuse and savings habits. Since his essay was published, the study of procrastination has become a significant field in academia, with philosophers, psychologists, and economists all weighing in.

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. More Here