The ant and the grasshopper: behavioral implications of an age-old fable

Everybody, or at least most of us who have gone to the school have read Aesop's tale of the Ant and the Grasshopper. The grasshopper plays, has fun on a summer day while the ant labors to store up food in its dwelling. He even mocks the ant for slogging instead of having fun. But when the winter sets in the grasshopper finds himself starving and begging at the doorstep of the ant who has enough reserve to last the winter. The moral of the story is clear- there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In other words, hard work pays and also, if you are idle and are having fun now,you will have to pay for it in the future.

An interesting aspect of this tale is the ant's perspective. While the earliest version has the ant rebuking the grasshopper,later versions have her taking in the dying grasshopper out of kindness. In any case, it can be safely assumed that the ant finally has an almost sadistic pleasure when nature proves her right. We can almost hear her saying,"I told you so!". Indeed, vindication of her stand would not be complete with her having reserve of food only,the grasshopper should suffer too. Without that, her hard work during summer won't be justified!
However,things don't turn out the same all the time, Somerset Maugham's version of the Ant and the Grasshopper has two brothers, the elder brother, George is a hard-worker while Tom the younger one is an idler and a spendthrift. George lives a life of discipline, does all the right things, saves a third of his earnings so that he could retire bit early and live a comfortable life. Tom, on the other hand, lives to enjoy the present, he cares too little for the future and his expenses often have to be borne by the hard-working George.

However, as the narrator of the story finds from George, Tom doesn't really suffer in the end for all waywardness in youth. Just when George thinks that Tom is about to pay for not planning or saving money for the future, the latter goes on to marry a rich lady who dies within a few years leaving her fortune to Tom! George is outraged that his spendthrift brother has actually been rewarded for all his vanities and indulgence! Does George hate his brother? After all, he has, time and again spent his own hard-earned money to keep Tom out of trouble! Yet the narrator finds him unhappy at the good fortune of his younger brother! What has probably annoyed George the irony of fate that his own hard-work pays him far less than his brother's loose ways. It is a feeling all of us have had at some point in time.

This is such an integral part of human emotion that it can be seen in our casual behaviour too. And it doesn't always have to be hard work only, it could be anything which requires a certain amount of dedication, diligence and more importantly self-denial.
Indian society is going through an exciting phase, the traditionally subdued segments are asserting themselves and over-running elite bastions by sheer numerical superiority. It is not surprising to find the upwardly mobile middle class outraged by Rakhi ka Swayamvar or Mallika visiting Twitter headquarters. Rakhi at least, doesn't represent us (yes,i count myself too) in anyway! It takes a lot of hard-work and diligence to develop intellectually, so it is but natural that somebody so uncouth and crass gaining such fame and wealth be considered outrageous!

Which brings us back to the question, would the ant's retribution be complete if the grasshopper does not suffer?

Posted By Danish 3:08 AM

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A tiny moment of truth of our failings

I seem to attract a certain segment of people, street-kids, destitutes, invalids, people without food,shelter and the very basic amenities every human is entitled to. On my part, I am very comfortable with them and it must be very apparent since I get approached all too often. By the way, I am not talking about "beggars" one comes across traffic signals, these professionals are the easiest to please. As my very good friend says, anything that can be bought at a price however high is cheaper than that which requires your feelings and gestures.

But that is not the case with the people i am now talking about ,its not just money, they demand something more. For instance, there is this resident of our corner of the city, who would sometimes want soft-drink or ice-cream- not the sort of request a mentally-handicapped destitute should be making but the fact is that he gets it every time and its just not me or my friends. Most of the guys hanging around that area usually give in to his demand.

But I seem to attract far more people in need. Just a couple of hours back, 10-10:30 PM, these two kids stopped my bike, they wanted a lift home. Now, thats something I do nearly everyday but the problem in this case was the fact that I would have to go back quite some distance to drop them. However, i did give in to their insistence, and on the way learnt much about them. They were brothers, the elder one was 12 year old but was being guardian to his 10 year old sibling. Both of them worked at a food stall, couldn't be earning more than Rs. 30 combined but there was an air of confidence in them that made me think that these kids should be in school! I did tell them that I would make arrangements for schooling but don't have a clue on how to go about!

And yes,while returning I realized how uncanny the resemblance between these kids and the Slumdog Millionaire kids was. But unlike the characters in the movie, lady luck is not going to rescue them from poverty, it us who have to give them back their basic rights.

Posted By Danish 11:13 AM

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R.I.P Michael Jackson

Just finished watching Michael Jackson's memorial, it was once in a life-time event. The glamor and grandeur sorrounding the event seemed to commoditize death and grief but the memorial of the King of Pop could not have been a sombre affair!

Lets not forget that he was under constant pressure to perform,even until the day he died. From the time when the 5 year old wonder-kid MJ was thrushed into the entertainment industy to this date , he was always seen as an object of entertainment even if a very celebrated one. No wonder then, he was a bit strange, the world never considered or wanted him to be a normal person!

Michael Jackson's memorial will go down in history as the biggest televised event. Ordinarily i wouldn't participate in an event of this nature watching its live telecast but MJ's memorial was an exception as it reflected his greatest contribution. For the first time, millions of people from all across the globe were in unison doing the same thing. It is indeed a mighty acheivement.

Thank you Michael Jackson and Rest In Peace !

Posted By Danish 2:39 AM

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A Tribute To The Boy King

Waking up in the morning to hear the news of legend passing away is never an easy thing to handle but it was surprising for me to be sulking about it even late in the day when i had some very important decisions to take. What was more surprising for me was the fact that Michael Jackson was not such an important part of my growing up years as it was for others. I never followed Western music, i still don't. But Michael Jackson was different, he had reached every nook and corner of the globe even before the cold war was over and globalization had begun. Much of what i know about him was from reading stuffs and not real-time participation. I did love his music and dance but i still can't claim to have listened to all of his songs. So why then was i was so affected?

Perhaps it was his charisma, his fan following, his life-style and his life-story that had us fascinated us all this time. Despite unimaginable fame and wealth his life seemed one tragic story. He was the first African-American to have reached the pinnacle of glory and that may have something to do with the controversies that dogged his later life. There was something deeply tragical that made him yearn for childhood and his unwillingness to grow up. Half of the controversies seem to have arisen from his reclusiveness, the other half may have something to do with him being sorrounded by greedy gold-diggers. But one cannot deny that the way the media, the authorities and even the people reacted to the controversaries everytime,envy , if not prejudice may have something to do with it.

One of the most distubing things that followed MJ's demise was the number of nasty jokes and criticism doing the rounds on the web. Most likely these people have no clue to what MJ has contributed or are simply sick,envious of him or worse, racially prejudiced. i don't need to enumerate the contributions of Michael Jackson to entertainment industry or the records he holds. It is there for all to see. Neither video albums nor MTV could have been as popular without MJ's mersmerizing steps, artists across the world made careers just by imitating him.

Michael Jackson's final act to silence his critics and naysayers was by his death which created so much furore that it almost took the Internet down. Shortly after the news of his cardiac arrest appeared on the Internet, there such a huge surge of online traffick that Google mistook it for an automated attack and for 25 minutes Google searches on Michael Jackson returned an error page. The official Google blog gives a first-hand account in the following post: Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson.

But Google was not the only one, Twitter saw the number of tweets per second double as news of MJ's death was out and soon the site crashed from overload. The Yahoo News page reporting on MJ being rushed to hospital had a record number of 16.4 million visitors and Yahoo News overall had a record number of 175 million pageviews! Yahoo blog entry "Losing Michael Jackson" shares some insights on how it handled the situation. All popular search engines and services including Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, AOL had to deal with an unusual situation and had to allocate all available resources to cover the news.

In his last years Michael Jackson's had lost some of his popularity, the slated comeback tour could have salvaged some but his untimely death and the fact that the major players in web technologies including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were brought to the knees by the news only reaffirms the belief that Michael Jackson was the greatest entertainer ever.

Posted By Danish 6:10 AM

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Tweeting a revolution or is it a black operation ?

For the past 24 hours #Iranelection and hash tags related to Iranian election has been trending on Twitter . What it essentially means, (for those unfamiliar with Twitter) is that the election in Iran and its fallout are the most talked about topic on Twitter. We have already seen the profound impact ¹ that Twitter has had on socio-political events in the past but this could be the biggest one considering the fact that the mainstream media was late in reporting the protests and has since been lagging behind the micro-blogging service. ( Please check out, Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter For News About Iran )

However, what really intrigues me is the question, whether the protest in Iran truly reflects the aspiration of the nation as a whole or is just a partisan struggle fueled by external powers. Once again the sources of most these news are either almost anonymous twitterers or those belonging to the opposition camp. The truth perhaps lies somewhere in between, the call for probe by Ayotallah Khameini indicates it. Ironically, Ashton Kucher, who has the largest following in Twitter, has likened the issue to the controversy around G.W. Bush's electoral victory in 2000!

Either way it is Iran's internal issue, it is, after all, the only country in the region that has some sort of democracy (that has not been forced on). So why is the global social media so obsessed with Iranian election results ? I guess it has more to do with the fact that the West is not comfortable with the fact that a hardliner like Ahmadinejad came so close to defeat and still survive. Of course, i am just speculating that he survived but anyway, this was an opportunity that a lot of people would have hated to let go of. That would also explain why the opposition is on the street but euphemisms like "tweeting revolution", coming from American and West European "social media activists" seem to me part of propaganda warfare in the lines of black operations. Only this time the agenda has been outsourced to the crowd populating the social web. John Robb has in his earlier blog posts discussed various 4GW strategies and manoeuvres that the US could adopt to bring down Iran, some of the proposed ones have been black operations of these nature.

At this juncture ishould confess that i don't have much love for Ahmadinejad nor for the ruling elite of Iran, but i cannot deny the fact that he has considerable support from the Iranian electorate as the numerous pro-Ahmadinejad demonstrations indicate. So all talks of freedom and democracy by activists on web sound hollow when one considers the fact that there was hardly any murmur of protest when China banned nearly all major web sites and services on the anniversary of the Tianmen massacre. Similarly, the torch-bearers of liberty and democracy were conspicuously silent when just few weeks back the Burmese junta filed fresh case against the famous Burmese pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi just days before her 13 year old detention was about to expire! As i have already mentioned what we are witnessing might well be a crowdsourced black operation, not unlike propaganda warfare except for the fact that in this instance its far too decentralized and viral in nature. The majority of the participants may actually have no clue about the underlying agenda if at all there is one !

Update:
1. Twitter one hour maintenance downtime has been postponed as demanded by bloggers/twitterers.

Posted By Danish 4:06 AM

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