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What a Concept! Learning Through Nomenclature A mind expanded by a new idea cannot go back to its original dimension. Most of the time, our thoughts are an amorphous fuzz. But occasionally, someone coins a single phrase and captures an idea so accurately that it opens up a whole avenue in the maze that is our thinking. I thought that it might be fun to list out and explore those concepts which have made me feel like I had discovered a whole new gear in a familiar stick-shift automobile that I had driven for years. Things that made me go, Hmm! I never thought of it quite that way. So here are the ideas that I believe enriched my repertoire, my arsenal of concepts and embedded themselves so undeniably that they have become an inherent part of my worldview. Let me start with one that is very common and a textbook example. My first formal introduction to Economics was in IIT. I learnt more from that Humanities course than I did from all my Chemical Engineering classes combined. Maybe it was the clarity of thinking displayed by Samuelson, the Nobel winning author of the textbook. There, for the first time, I encountered the now-very-familiar concept of Opportunity Cost, which basically says that no matter what you choose to do, you are the paying the price of not doing something else. I employ this concept to every action in life -- the opportunity cost of life. The opportunity cost of watching a movie is the book that remains unread. You get the idea. The concept of Opportunity Cost plays a major, major role in my life. The concept of Escalation was presented to me on the proverbial platter. It is laid out in the incredible book Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. (A first novel that is so lyrical and so gripping that you can only shake your head in disbelief.) The ten-year-old narrator's dad explains the principle of Escalation to the narrator (and thus also to us, the readers). We all know escalation -- how a small misunderstanding or a disagreement will grow into name-calling behind the back, then into actual verbal exchanges and then into physical blows and finally into a full-blown feud. Escalation is why countries end up going to war. Not really a new concept, but it was good to be able to label it and thus add to my understanding of things. Now I am trying to teach myself to catch Escalation unfolding, and knowing what is happening has helped me walk away gracefully. I was on the phone with my former housemate Kannan. He had called me up one morning, and we were shooting the breeze, bemoaning how everything had gone south in a general way. "The problem is," said Kannan, "that I find that the quality of thought has gone down." With a pleasant shock, I picked up a new (to me) concept -- I had never before thought about the Quality of Thought. When I was in high school I once hypothesized to my father that those who studied in English-medium (as opposed to the local language) were at a slight advantage because of the language's richer vocabulary of technical terms. My dad didn’t buy my argument, and I probably didn’t articulate it well at the time, but I now know that I was on to something. Just like Italian is suited for arias in operas, English seems to have a grown into one well suited for naming technical terms and phenomena. English continues to thrive and dominate because of the way it shamelessly cannibalizes and bastardizes words from every language it comes into contact with. All of this is just to say that a rich and nuanced vocabulary is a great aid for understanding. In musicology, medicine and the social sciences, there seem to be a large number of concepts that have been identified and named. An interesting and self-referential side note. As I started to collect this list of concepts, I started to wonder if there was a formal name to this process of recognizing a concept and naming it. When I did a little bit of research I found it. There is even an exact (but pompous-sounding) English word for this - Excogitation. The dictionary defines it as thinking something out with care in order to achieve complete understanding of it, or alternatively, as the creation of something in the mind. Okay, back to my list. Everybody at work understands job security. So they clutch possessively to what only they know how to do and hate to share their knowledge with others, and then they wonder why they never ever get promoted. It is because they have not encountered or understood the concept of an Exit Strategy. By grooming someone else to be your replacement, you actually help accelerate your promotion. Three concepts and phenomena about food came to mind. My friend Krishna and his wife Sita introduced me to their concept of Bore Aakali ("Boredom Hunger"). Aakali is hunger in Telugu. We are all guilty of it sometime or the other -- popping food into our mouths when we really aren't hungry, simply because there isn't anything better to do. (Very appropriately, in some buses and trains in India, peanuts (groundnuts) are sold as "Time Pass!") Knowing the concept of Bore Aakali has sometimes made me stop this stuffing. Analogous to this, I often catch myself flipping TV channels mindlessly when I don't really want to watch anything. Television sometimes seems to be merely bubble gum for the mind. All our lives, we (you and I) have absolutely loved certain foods and hated others. But it was again Krishna who made me realize that the scale is really a continuum. "In the scale of likes and dislikes, a banana is a perfect zero for me," he has told me a couple of times. He neither loves it or hates it, making a banana a completely neutral fool for him. Thus I learnt about the Zero-value food concept, and by extension the position of every food item in relation to this origin. Of course, not all excogitations are necessarily helpful. The way my wife and I have divided up the household chores, I prepare the lunch for us to take to office. In a conversation, my colleague Balan once let it slip that he had come to realize that it was Impossible to Cook After Having Eaten Dinner. Until then, I would often make lunch just before going to bed. But after he mentioned it to me, I have been practically unable to cook after dinner. When I attended IIT Madras, there used to be a very colorful physics professor in IITM, whom the students called Swami. I never enrolled in his class, but enough stories about him circulated, some true and some undoubtedly apocryphal. He was notorious for speaking his mind and not mincing words. (I have seen with my own eyes the detailed drawing of a donkey that he had drawn on a poor student's exam answer book, calling the fellow an ass.) I heard this story about Dr. Swami from my friend and colleague Srini about a dozen years ago, but the concept has stayed with me. Once, when Dr. Swami was being interviewed for some position, the interviewer had posed a question with the supercilious attitude that many interviewers subconsciously adopt. Instead of answering, Dr. Swami looked the other person in the eye and said, "Do you know that it is only a quirk of fate that you are on the other side of the table, and I am here on this side?" And that is how I added the Quirk of Fate concept to my repertoire. When I run into people completely unfit for the position they happen to be occupying, instead of ranting about how unfair life is, I remind myself that this is merely a manifestation of the Quirk of Fate principle at work. On the other side of the same coin, it also happens that I am often on the interviewing side in the table of life, and whenever I can catch the thought, I remind myself of how fickle things can be. All of the above are concepts and principles that I learnt from others. But as we all wind our ways in life, I suppose that we each end up formulating or naming a concept or two of our own. So, here are a couple that I stumbled into on my own. One minor phenomenon that I came to realize is one that I have started calling Petty People in Pockets of Power. (It is a close cousin of the Quirk of Fate concept.) You know those people who have been granted just a little power…the secretaries, the security guards, the ticket sellers… gatekeepers of one sort or another. They will often behave in petty ways. I believe that the reason is that they can demonstrate their miniscule power only by exercising it, and so they take it upon themselves to be an irritant to you. Usually, once you have acknowledged their power, you may pass through. Finally, I have come to recognize another one, a rather powerful concept, which is the Execution Gap concept. We are all visited by dreams of good and great intentions. We are all just about to start exercising, to write the story, make the painting, set our relationships right. And yet, there seems to be a greater inertia at work that stops us from ever leaving the starting block. The chasm between the good intentions and the actual doing of anything is the Execution Gap. One reason why emails are so popular as opposed to regular mail (finding paper, pen, envelope, the address, stamps and a mailbox) is the narrowness of the Execution Gap between thinking of sending an email and actually doing it. Recognizing the existence of the Execution Gap may be the first step in crossing it. That's it for my list of concepts. Surely, you have spotted and named concepts of your own. If you can overcome the execution gap, email me your concepts. I would love to read them. Ram Prasad March 2002 BACK to the Main Page