Non-violence Wasn't Gandhi's Only Message

I have read only one book of Gandhi - "My Experiments with Truth". I read this when I was 13 or 14. I haven't re-read the book after that. But Gandhi's thoughts influences me to this day.

"I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills."

Today Gandhi is remembered whenever there is violence. Gandhi is used as a symbol of peace and love. We remember Gandhi mostly for non-violence.

But Gandhi's life was devoted to truth. Truth is a very important (if not the most important) message from Gandhi. "Devotion to this Truth is the sole justification for our existence. All our activities should be centered in Truth. Truth should be the very breath of our life." wrote Gandhi.

Gandhi teaches us that truth has great power. And in this post I will draw a direct connection between the power of truth and how a culture of dishonesty is ailing our society.

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Sonali Vaid had posted a thread with tips for people starting off in a public health career. The points 6 & 7 are especially illustrative of how many of us stray away from truth in our daily lives.

7. We can be polite & respectful without being deferential. You don’t have to put yourself down - even if its someone senior.
On the flip side some tend to disrespect boundaries if someone is friendly & not imposing seniority - don’t be this person!

— Dr. Sonali Vaid (@SonaliVaid) March 21, 2023

If I were an academic sociologist, I would do a paper on this topic connecting how the misguided Indian notion of "respect" is at the root of all things evil in India. Here is what happens. At a very young age, Indians are indoctrinated into "respecting" various things including elders, religious stuff, ancient stuff, and in general anything and everything. Now, there are two kinds of respect. There is the actual respect defined in dictionary as "A feeling of appreciative, often deferential regard; esteem" which is a deep emotion. And then there is a fake respect which is an act of showing someone "respect" by calling them honorific titles (like "sir", "madam") or by bending in front of them, touching their feet, etc. When young Indians are forced to "respect" people whom they do not respect in reality, they imbibe and internalize the fake respect. They touch the feet of the old relative while hating them. They call the teacher they hate "sir" or "ma'am". They go to the religious institutions without knowing why. 

This causes Indians to be greatly separated from truth in three very dangerous ways:

1) They learn to ignore their feelings
2) They learn to lie through their teeth
3) They learn that truth does not matter

When one learns to ignore their feelings, they can no longer be struck by conscience.
When one learns to lie, it becomes easier for them to cover-up the truth.
When one learns that the truth does not matter, truth dies.

This affects us in every single field.

India's elite scientific institutions engage in scientific fraud (and retract papers when caught). Nobody keeps these institutions accountable for the sub-standard work they do. And truth doesn't matter.

India's health system is not interested in Indian's health. Hospitals are the most violent places. Nobody keeps our healthcare system accountable for poor quality healthcare. And truth doesn't matter.

Judiciary, engineering, social science, film industry, sports, infrastructure, urban planning, environment, finance, ... Take any field. Truth doesn't matter.

Every Indian knows that Adani is just the most successful among businesses that do the same kind of unfair business practices in India. Everyone knows that there is a great deal of corruption in Indian politics and money is made by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats in various corrupted ways. Everyone knows that Indians are lying. And we gladly join the lie. Because truth doesn't matter.

And it all starts with us learning to lie by showing "respect" to people.

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It is possible to reverse this dishonesty in our individual lives. We need to follow just one principle:

A radical commitment to truth

Truth is very much misunderstood. What is truth? Is it something written down somewhere? Is it the same for everyone? Are there multiple truths?

Gandhi can be helpful here too: "WHAT...is Truth? A difficult question; but I have solved it for myself by saying that it is what the voice within tells you"

I concur with Gandhi on this. Truth is a very personal thing. Truth is when your thoughts, your speech, and your action are in 100% agreement with each other. Truth is when you don't lie.

Let me make it more practical. A radical commitment to truth requires the following:
1) Being in touch with your emotions and feelings, and showing commitment to try to label them accurately.
2) A commitment to yourself to not invalidate your own feelings. To not act in ways that go against your feelings.
3) A commitment to follow-up on things that you are uncertain of - so that you can arrive at the truth.

We often fail in all the three.

When we feel sad or annoyed, but don't recognize that we are so, we are being out of touch with our emotions.

When we tell ourselves that we should be grateful while we're actually disappointed, or when we act calm while we are furious, we are invalidating our feelings.

When we are uncertain of what our inner voice is telling us and we give up on reflecting, without experimenting to understand the truth - we're breaking our commitment towards truth.

Psychotherapy often helps with 1 & 2 above. It helps us to label our feelings. And it trains us not to invalidate our feelings. Although the very act of therapy can be a pursuit of truth, point 3 is deeper than that. A commitment to follow-up on things that we are uncertain of - is essentially about what we do with our lives. It is about deeply engaging with questions and finding "truth" through our engagement. 

Gandhi did this through politics. "To see the universal and all-pervading spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means"

It is why I'm committed to interdisciplinarity and generalism. If you're drawn to truth, you can no longer visualize the world in isolated subjects and topics. The curiosity will make you read, listen, travel, experience, and understand people. The commitment will make you a truth-seeker, a "scientist", it will make you devise your own methodologies. The positive energy of truth-seeking will force you to build, create, teach, write, and share.

Truth is as spiritual as it is science. It is as abstract as it is real. It is as hard as it is simple.

It takes nothing to start seeking truth, it takes everything to start seeking truth.

Book Review: Everything is Obvious - Once You Know The Answers

I first saw this book in the Internet Freedom Foundation thread on which books people there were reading. Then I saw it on Scott Young's blog which I have been following since childhood. I never got around to reading it till yesterday when I got into a 19 hour train ride to reach Sevagram for medico friend circle's annual meeting.

There was no better time to read the book because mfc's meeting this year is on caste; caste is one of those sociological phenomenons that defy common sense thinking every day; and this book is about "how common sense fails us" and why sociology is not  merely common sense.

What Duncan Watts has done is write a book specifically for a particular niche of people. This niche includes those people who become so used to straightforward deterministic sciences that they start seeing the limitations of it and look at larger and more comprehensive studies of human kind. Duncan went from learning physics to becoming a sociologist. This is exactly the route that Nihal is taking (from law to policy). And the route I'm taking from medicine to history. And the biggest issue that we face when we take this route is this unprecedented predominance of uncertainty.

That sociology is more complicated than rocket science. That there are no grand rules waiting to be discovered which will solve all questions. That there are no silver bullets. This is a hard realization. Not one that's impossible. With enough interdisciplinary exploration and generalization people like Nihal and I do discover that the world is full of uncertainties. But it's just so difficult to settle for that. "It feels wrong". 

And this book makes it feel right. Well, not exactly. But at least it makes it a palatable truth that the world is extremely complicated. It also protects us from common sense thinking that makes us settle for simplistic explanations that push us into silver bullet solutions. This book, you must read, if you have asked this question "What on earth does a sociologist do?" Once you read it, you'll feel like the contents of the book itself is obvious. And that's the whole point of the book. Everything is obvious, once you know the answers.

Money Matters

Warning: This post discusses money. Like, it's going to talk about my account balance. Now, for some of the people reading this, their account balance might be much lower than mine. And for others, vice versa. So, if you don't want to compare lives, you're better off not reading this.

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Like I said when I was interviewing Shreyas for IBComputing, I don't believe that we should wait till we grow old to write about the strategies we use to live our lives. The main reason is that what we do today is probably going to get outdated in a couple of years and therefore writing/talking about it 20 years from now is not going to help anyone.

A few years ago I saw a blog post by Michael Lynch, who had quit job at Google and started out as a solo developer. In that post, M discusses how much money M was making - profit, loss, revenue, everything. M made another post after a year, and another, and another. These annual posts talking about finances were very inspiring to see.

I am also attempting something like that here. For the sake of completeness, in this post I will do a recap of what's been happening to my bank accounts till now.

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Privilege.

Like I hinted in the warning, each life is different. Someone who has more expenses than I have might not be able to save as much money as I can. Someone who started out with a tougher deal might not be able to make as much money as I can. And vice versa. The purpose of this post is not to tell people that they can follow what I did and make money. Neither do I think that I'm making more money than everyone else. This is not a self-help/advice/moral blog post. This is simply about making my financial life transparent.

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The first salary I have gotten came from the compulsory internship I did as part of MBBS course at Mysore Medical College. Till then it was only my family putting money in my pocket and bank account to pay hostel fees, eat food, etc.

So, from 2016 March to 2017 March I was making about ₹20,000 (if my memory serves me right) monthly. When I started earning my dad stopped putting money into my account. So, it was only when I went home my grandmother giving me 5k-10k once in 4 months or so that was my additional income.

At the end of this internship, I vaguely remember having around ₹1,40,000 in my account.

March 2017: ~₹1,40,000

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Then I joined SVYM as a resident medical officer. The rural economy of Saraguru combined with the cheap food and accommodation there meant that I could save almost all of the ₹35,000 I was getting as salary there.

In the last few months of working there, I was also moonlighting (remotely) in a Bengauluru start-up in an engineering role. I was being paid hourly there.

In August 2018 I left SVYM and moved to Bengaluru. This is when I started tracking my financial situation seriously. And therefore, from here on I have very good numbers.

August 2018: ₹4,47,613.61

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The first house Swathi and I lived in was in Mathikere in Bengaluru. We paid ₹10,000 rent per month. We did have a splitwise group between us that we maintained quite well in those times. (Nowadays we only put large numbers, like house rent, in that splitwise group). We used to eat outside a lot (lots of Kerala restaurants near Ramiah hospital). Traveling was mostly by metro and BMTC buses. Sometimes Uber.

I have a simple way of tracking money that doesn't take my time regularly, and can be done whenever I have time. I keep a google sheet titled Vitamin M (see picture)

The first column is date. Then there are columns for each bank account I have. Then a column for cash in hand. Another for money I'm owed. A couple of columns for totals (one is total liquid cash, the other is total virtual worth (liquid + owed)). I also kept a column to track the difference between the total at any moment and the money I had when I first came to Bangalore.

There is no rule on when to update this sheet. I used to update it whenever I had a chance, I remembered, or I felt like I wanted my life in order. The procedure to update is also simple. I enter the date. I login to all bank websites and enter the current balance. Then I count the money in my wallet. Then I open splitwise and other trackers to see how much money people owe me. And the rest of the calculations is done by formulae.

If you can see the picture, you'll notice that from August 2018 (when I moved to Bangalore) till the end of 2019, my balance was always below the baseline (of 4.5 lakh). But it was also not going too far below. Basically, I was making almost as much money as I was spending in the initial year of being in Bangalore. This was through working as a doctor and also as a developer.

Around August of 2019 we had moved to a house in Kadiranapalaya which is equidistant from Indiranagar metro, Halasuru metro, and Swami Vivekananda metro. The rent here was ₹14,000. And the living costs were also slightly higher than Mathikere. The startups I was working with were all struggling to pay at that time and by around October 2019, I had dipped to ~₹3,20,000.

But towards the end of that year I started working with a non-profit as a software developer and that's how I first crossed the baseline after coming to Bangalore.

October 2019: ~₹3,20,000

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As unfair as it is, as I was making more money, more projects were coming to me with even more money attached. I was an investigator in a public health intervention/research study. I was seeing patients. I was developing software for various people. I was getting paid for workshops I facilitated.

By April 2021, my worth was about ₹10,00,000. I was a millionaire in Indian rupees. And remember all of this was when the world was burning with COVID.

April 2021: ₹10,00,000

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About time the second wave of COVID hit I was getting disillusioned by the things I were doing. I quit almost all paid work and sat at home.

My calculation was that at the rate I was burning money, I could easily float for 3 years, or even 5 years if I tried. So I was under no pressure to make more money. 

I did various things from around May 2021 to May 2022. Lots of different experiences. I stretched myself in all possible directions and figured out my limits and possibilities.

May 2022: ~₹7,50,000

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In June 2022 at the compulsion of my friend I started another paid, part time role as a software developer at Kinara Capital. Coincidentally on the day I joined there I also took up the responsibility of leading an archival effort through SOCHARA who also decided to pay me against my wishes. And many tiny projects/workshops as earlier still keep coming.

While I'm writing this, I updated the Vitamin M sheet. And it tells me that I'm a millionaire again.

November 2022: ₹10,78,646.30

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Addendum: It is not just Michael Lynch who has inspired this post. The financial life of Pirate Praveen is also public information because Praveen has disclosed it as a candidate in many elections. Between those and the financial reports of various non-profits, I do not see any reason why I shouldn't be writing this blog post.

I'm also the director of an LLP and I assure you that the numbers in that bank account changes nothing in this analysis. If you know what I mean.