2 posts tagged with "life"

What is fear?

It is the evolutionary response built into our brain when we are about to do something new or we are in a new situation. It makes you evaluate carefully the pros and cons of doing something, carefully scan your environment to understand if there are anythings which could be life threatening.

This was at least the evolutionary origin of this feeling. When men was resting in a cave at night, "fear" of getting eaten by carnivorous animals would prevent him from getting out of the cave and risking himself.

But as society evolved, and got more safer - at least from a danger to our life perspective, this feeling didn't just go away.  Many situations where we now feel fear, our life is not at stake - but we still feel it. It may be fear of doing something new, something which we have not done before. It doesn't necessarily kill us - but may hamper our chances in life. It may be triggered by the anticipation of facing rejection from the girl you love. Or from loss in social esteem in front of your colleagues or friends.

And if you consider groups of people as units, fear takes a new turn of its own. Societies can start fearing punishment by govt. Or what we are facing now, a deadly virus. The whole human civilization is fearing it ( though in this case, it is actually case of life and death).

But apart from situation like now, when there is real  danger of losing life, I think "fear" situation more than we need it. There are many experiments which prove that humans are loss averse. We fear a new situation more than we should. We are more happy in status quo.

Why are we so? May be the way evolution has chosen our genes, those early humans who played more conservatively were able to survive more and hence pass their gene. People who were more adventurous - died early.

10 yrs is a long time .. long enough for a man to reflect on what happened, how it happened and how he felt about it.

2009 December - I was a recent graduate from IITM, in my first job. I had experienced the joy of earning your own money and was fully enjoying it. The monthly salary seemed good enough for me and I hardly spent about 20% of it. The work was interesting. I was working on fingerprint recognition - which I never thought would become so important with coming of Aadhar. Random company outing @ first job I never felt as rich as I did in my first job - though I have earned several times what I used to earn at that time. Someone wise must have said something around - Happiness being the difference of what you expect and what you get.

In 2011, got admissions from UCSD and Georgia Tech in their MSCS program - but decided to stay in India, doing MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. While working for 2 yrs as a software engineer, I had realised that its much more interesting to solve business problem - rather than doing things which you are told. Little did I know, that there are other ways to do this. Startups were not a thing then - Flipkart was just starting and we still used to buy books from book shops.

So here I was in WIMWI (Well known Institute of Management in Western India) as folks fondly recall IIMA. The first few days made me think that this was the worst decision of my life - the amount of work was just insane. But slowly, it got better. Everybody there was someone who had excelled in one field or other  - and the environment was very intense. The courses were not particularly tough, but you had to put time to understand stuff - and time was the one thing we didn't have. We used to spend 4-5 hrs sleeping and that too seemed a luxury. Last quiz of first yearIn our section - First year@WIMWI We used to joke that dogs at IIMA had much better lives than they students. Rushing to the classes in the morning, we would see dogs peacefully basking in the fresh sun - and we would be so envious of them. But things got better with time.

I got a summer internsip in RBS London at their trading desk. This was at the centre of the City of London - which is the no.2 financial centre in the world after Wall Street. During my first year at IIMA, somehow I had figured that finance would be a good place to try - as it was glamorous and was supposed to involved math. And I always thought I was good at it.

And London was a sweet heart. The moist, cold  weather was stark opposite to the dry, hot weather of Ahmedabad. From taking the double decker busses to reach office, yoghurt for breakfast, mexican wrap for lunch to tube back to lodge - all my actions were optimised to save every penny. Some random street in London circa 2012Isle of Skye - Scotland It was not that the internship stipend was meagre - in fact it was quite abundant. But, I couldn't make myself spend money after multiplying all prices by 80 (1 GBP was ~80 INR then) - so a 5 GBP coffee would quickly translate in my mind to 400 INR - and it was difficult for me to shell that amout for a mere coffee :)

(This is turning out to be a longer post than I initially thought. Will continue it in the next post)