On Measurement and Immeasurables

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN SEPTEMBER 2016

Ever since I attended business school thirty five years ago I have been obsessed with measurement.  That is one thing business school does to you.  It teaches you that you cannot evaluate what you cannot measure.  And, at the risk of oversimplifying, management is all about evaluation or assessment.  So it teaches you to measure all kinds of phenomena.

So over time I took my tendency to measure to new levels of obsessiveness.  Long before we were invaded by fit bits I used to count the number of steps I walked.  I measure with great effort the time it takes me to chant various slokas and I have carried out extensive analyses of the speeds at which I chant the many slokas I know by heart and the time it takes to complete each of them at the various speeds I chant them. 

I measure the number of shaves I get with each disposable razor and therefore the cost of each shave.   I have a meter running in my head that calculates the cost of each shave. 

 

I estimated the number of cups of tea that I needed to make on the new water heater that I bought for Rs 900 for preparing myself tea in my office.  Each time I make a cup of tea I remind myself how many more cups I need to have made before the heater would have paid for itself.  I reset this number for the fact the price of a cup of tea in coffee shops increased even while I was recovering the cost of the heater. 

 

Let me also remind you that before I bought the heater I had figured out that the time taken to make my own tea was less than the time in going to the famed faculty lounge at IIMB for having tea.  And this did not include the time I spent often in unproductive conversations at the lounge.  When I worked out the time spent on such gossip it would often prove to be even more costly, as I took time to work out the emotions that would get stirred up on getting to know things that I would have been better off not knowing.

Before I bought my new scooter I worked out the number of trips I would need to make to my office to recover the investment I would make in a scooter that I wished to replace my car with for my office commute.  I did this under multiple scenarios depending on when I would sell the scooter in case it started giving me a back-ache.

Although I am a terrible penny pincher myself, occasionally I give away a minuscule fraction of my relatively meagre earnings to some people or causes I consider deserving.  I keep track of every paisa of it, right in my head.

I guess you get the picture – I am one helluva measurement monster.

Now that is not without many other collateral costs.  It makes me a miserable spouse, father, son, son-in-law, sibling, nephew, colleague and whatever else.  I can go on.  Luckily for me and the women of this world I have never been a boy-friend.  Imagine the reaction of this woman who realizes that I had been measuring dividing the cost of an evening out by the number of minutes I got to look at her beautiful face or hold her delicate hand!

 

I pressed on with my counting, remorselessly.  I have always believed that life would be one unstructured financial and emotional spaghetti if one did not measure.

 

But out of the blue, some weeks back this question struck me like a bolt:  What would I do with the results of all those measurements?  

 

The question crossed my mind a few weeks back when I had occasion to interact with this super wealthy benefactor.  He is a fairly old man. I first said to myself that the measurements that this man would have to deal with would be well beyond my puny, tiny brain. 

 

But then just as instantly this other thought started bothering me: What would happen when he left this world, as indeed he would have to some time?  How relevant would all that measurement be to him once he ceased to be in this world?

 

It struck me at that moment that what we measure in life did not seem to matter in the larger scheme of things.  That said, I do not know what makes for that larger scheme of things. 

 

It did occur to me though that once I am gone what would matter is what I have done for those that I leave behind.  The joy I would be able to give them out of what I have provided them would matter to them.  The misery I would leave behind by the hurt I may have caused would matter just as much.

 

Ironically, business school did not teach me how to measure such emotions.  Which is perhaps why we always talk about indescribable joy or immeasurable suffering.  If you cannot describe how can you measure?

 

Under the circumstances it appeared reasonably safe to say this about the larger scheme of things though:  What one can measure does not seem to matter.  And what matters, it seems, one can never measure.  And I think that crazy man called Albert Einstein said something to that effect, having spent a good part of his life calculating various things that other equally craze people measure today to see if his math was right after all!

Nanni….Namaskaaram…

Smitten, yet again

 The Open Air Theatre at IIMB was as still as stillness could get.  It was 4:30 am.  The January chill was well beyond being pleasant.  The coffee vendor at the venue could not cope with the long queue of people trying to deal with the cold, sipping steaming cuppas in quick succession.

The more than two hundred people in the audience stayed rooted to their seats, waiting for Bombay Jayashri.  It did not matter to them that they had been awake all night listening to equally lilting music from the Lalgudi siblings and Ustad Wasifuddin Dagar.  The cynical side of me said that it was probably the Oscar effect. 

All of that cynicism was soon replaced with tearful joy as Nattai was followed by Bhoopalam, Saveri and Vasantha with the grand culmination in Tilang.   The ragas flowed with BJ's patent, easy, lazy style that does not sometimes go down well with the aficionados in Chennai. 

My love affair with BJ's music started when I turned on the music in my father in law's car a year back.  The voice I heard had a languorous sensuality.  Yet the kambodhi was pure and chaste.  BJ took no liberties with the demanding canons of Carnatic music as the she meandered along the contours of the raga.  The aalapanai produced this nice feeling of being gently washed away by a stream as its swirling waters caressed you in a soothing massage.

It is now three days since I listened to BJ on that cold January morning. I still suffer from the dull feeling of a junkie who is savouring the slowly fading hangover from his last high.

As I reflect on the haunting effect that BJ has had on me I wonder what is the phenomenon at work?  Is it her music? Or, is it her charm, her poise and elan as a singer?  Or, the way she let her hands sway as she lost herself in the song, unfettered by the demands of the tricky taala? Or, all of it in some measure?  Does it really matter?  If the purpose of art is to delight the audience does it matter whether it is the art, the artist or the ensemble of the two that provides that joy? 

Khushwant Singh is once supposed to have said to Bangladesh, Give us Runa Laila and we will give you all the waters of the Farakka Barrage.  Clearly he seems to have been as much in love with the singer as he was with her song.  After all, Runa Laila's O laal meri itself, did not recognise- was much less bound by - the geographic limits of the modern nation state.

I am not sure I am as clear about what I want - as Khushwant Singh was about what he wanted.  For example, as a resident of Bangalore would I offer all the waters in the KR Sagar if BJ were to relocate to my city? I cannot say - only beacuse I dread what the KRRS would do to me.

For now, it is good enough for me to know that I am smitten.  I do not care whether it is by BJ's elan or her rendition.

Nanni.  Namaskaaram