control and the ability to wait

NB: My voice can be heard in the italics.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Self-control. Not exercising it is, as Coleridge implies, like waking up with a bad bad hangover. It's not a concept that I've spent too much time thinking about. It's a word I understand but how - 'self control is the thing people do to control themselves'. Sure. That's hardly even a dictionary definition of the word.

Wikipedia says: "Self control is the exertion of one's own will on their personal self - their behaviors, actions, thought processes. Much of this comes from the perception of self and the ability to set up boundaries for that self. Self-control can be expanded into several different areas, ranging from respect to willpower. People demonstrate great differences in their level of self-control. It can be affected because of illness and past experiences and it can be improved through the course of life."

Walter Michel's experiment on self-control is nicely described in this article:

Self-control is the key to success - David Brooks, The San Francisco Chronicle. May 9, 2006.

AROUND 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn't ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes -- desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years later and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32. (….)

Yet the Mischel experiments, along with everyday experience, tell us that self-control is essential. Young people who can delay gratification can sit through sometimes boring classes to get a degree. They can perform rote tasks in order to, say, master a language. They can avoid drugs and alcohol. For people without self-control skills, however, school is a series of failed ordeals. No wonder they drop out. Life is a parade of foolish decisions: teenage pregnancy, drug use, gambling, truancy and crime.

If you're a policymaker and you are not talking about core psychological traits such as delayed gratification skills, then you're just dancing around with proxy issues. The research we do have on delayed gratification tells us that differences in self-control skills are deeply rooted but also malleable. Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine months. But there is no consensus on how much of the ability to exercise self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.

The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlates with socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes do much worse on delayed gratification tests than children from middle-class homes. That's probably because children from poorer homes are more likely to have their lives disrupted by marital breakdown, violence, moving, etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.

The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emerge early and persist, that ability can be improved with conscious effort. Moral lectures don't work. Sheer willpower doesn't seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmallow didn't stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to think about other things.

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of "The Happiness Hypothesis," is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off -- and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it.

This pattern would be too obvious to mention if it weren't so largely ignored by educators and policymakers. Somehow we've entered a world in which we obsess over structural reforms and standardized tests, but skirt around the moral and psychological traits that are at the heart of actual success. Mischel tried to interest New York schools in programs based on his research. Needless to say, he found almost no takers.

(To read full article, visit: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/09/EDGFGINST41.DTL)


It's something we learn as early as 9 months. But I do think a lot of self-control is rooted in religion - atleast from where I'm looking. I'm a Sikh. This rather young religion had grand goals - among others, to eliminate the caste system, to shun meaningless rituals... But along with those, our Guru asked us not to fast. God cannot be found in hunger. The ideal behind it is wonderful, but something I am finding today is that Sikhs as a people have been tagged as self-indulgent. We're big drinkers, we love to eat, we love to host and we celebrate long and hard and grandly. None of these are such terrible things, I'm a particular kind of hedonist myself. But I do find myself at a disadvantage today. While it was my mother who taught me plenty of self-control ("only one coca-cola a week" and "no getting up until you eat all your vegetables"), we left her grasp early. And I find I am in a place where I cannot refuse myself very easily.

I spoke of religion because everytime a Muslim friend of mine tells me about how much self-control he has, he says, "When I fast, it doesn't matter if I'm hungry, I know I cannot eat till sunset." It led me to believe that self-control is a muscle that needs training before it can be flexed and exercised... and I think some rituals/ systems help strengthen it.

There's value in delayed gratification. The pleasure of the wait some say:

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. ~C.S. Lewis

Of course I tend to ignore Lewis' use of 'good' and 'bad'. The self-indulgent don't see in stark black and white! But how exactly does one train oneself to say "no", to wait? And what is the value in that? I know there is value, but what are the exact benefits?

I crave. I want. I feel. I need.

And when I do I seek it with a single-minded, selfish stubborness. But more and more I realise that "our vices are in the morning after we have committed them". And that gets tiring after a while.

Thoughts, anyone?

On Black Fridays and poignant Tuesdays

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" - Mahatma Gandhi.

I've seen/ heard this twice this week. Once during Parzania and again in Black Friday. By the end of Parzania, I dragged myself out of the theatre, glum and wondering what Gandhi's own country has done to itself. Black Friday though, ended up being a more cerebral experience. It showed the 1993 blasts from multiple different perspectives. It expressed the internal conflict of both the cop leading the investigations and some of the terrorists involved with the blasts. Maria's (the cop) frustration with the inhumame torture tactics he and his team used to interrogate suspects as well as his own feeling of impotence to change the system - in one scene he calmly informs a group of journalists asking him about the police's methods, that the only way to make the suspects speak was not just by rough-handling them but by doing the same to their women and children. Because the only way to break this kind of terrorist was through humiliation, not physical pain. On the other hand, the film showed the angst of the terrorist Badshah Khan too - eager to be recruited but quick to be disillusioned. While he swore his allegiance to Memon with jest, he was the first to express frustration once the blasts occurred and he had to go into hiding. His frustration with having to move from city to city to hide from the cops while hoping that Memon would call him to Dubai was brilliantly depicted.

The film also asked a few very hard hitting questions (without judgement)... but gave few answers. The last chapter of the film is titled "What is past is prologue". Will Shakespeare's line is well used here. This bit showed the Babri Masjid demolitions, the chaos and riots that followed. Simply put, it informed the audience that the people who lost their family, friends and businesses formed the next recruiting class for terrorism. Babri Masjid set the stage for the Bombay riots. Director Anurag Kashyap says on a Black Friday blog:

"The most time we took in casting was Jaaved Chikna. We couldn’t find one...then one day GK called me..”i have to show you something”. He showed me the audition tape of Arbaaz Ali Khan. I recognised him... Apparently he had heard about the film we were making and he knew we were looking for someone to play Jaaved Chikna. He had known Jaaved Chikna since childhood (he actually knew a lot of them from his Bandra childhood days). A lot of them played cricket together as children before they grew up into what they didn’t know, they would become...he was on board."

Imagine what those ordinary, cricket-playing children would have had to go through in order to be willing to blast a city to its knees.

Black Friday both condemned the blasts and showed the political handling of Babri Masjit as a possible reason for them. But it played both sides without judgement. The only kind of an answer to this cyclical problem was posed by the cop, Maria. In a moment of anger, he tells Badshah Khan that his religious fervour is foolish, as is the fervour of every Muslim or Hindu who performs acts of violence in the name of dharam. Therein lies a semblance of an answer, I think...

There was humour in the film too. The scene that had me in splits was the chor-police chase when 4-5 cops were chasing one of the terrorists through different parts of Mumbai. He keeps escaping and the chase gets longer and harder. By the end of it, one single, very exhausted hawaldar is practically walking 50 metres behind an equally tired terrorist and yelling, "ruk ja yaar"!

A must see... will keep you thinking for days.

do i want to do this?

do i really want to post notes and pictures from my life on the web for surfers to ride waves on?
not particularly...especially given that my phone, closet, drawers and secrets are each under a variety of locks.
yet, there's always politics to rant about, movies to review and complaints to be aired... it just seems easier when a listener/reader is assumed and you don't know who s/he is!
as for my friends, this is a way for them to know i'm alive when i go into hiding.
so, here goes...