Symmetry

If there's one thing most people need from most of their relationships in life, in one word, it is symmetry.

For you to care for someone as much as they care for you. If you under-achieve, you either tend to resent or feel guilty. If you feel they do less, you feel cheated, victimized, resentful or worse. Whether it is your wife, your boyfriend, your employer, your best friend, your room mate, your child - the underlying notion of symmetry is surprisingly universal, whether we can feel and articulate it in that way or not.

I wonder how can we work on reducing the gaps in healthy ways...

Tadap

Mujhe apne dil mein chhupa ke rakh lo
Is duniya mein akele ab raha nahi jata

Maana tum haseen ho, kabhi humein bhi gale laga lo
Door se sitam-e-husn tumhara ab saha nahi jata

Khud padh lo meri aankhon mein deewangi meri
Tum saamne aa jao to hum se kuch nahi kaha nahi jata

Duniya ke chaand mein daag hai, mere chaand mein nahi
Raat bhar dekhe bina tumko ab raha nahi jata

Memories and crises

One of the interesting learnings of first week of this tern at school: memories of past crises matter more than we think.

They tend to shape our future actions and we often tend to over correct for them. E.g. if you believe saving six months equivalent of income is a fair risk insurance if you lost your job, and then suppose you lose it and things turn really bad and it takes 9 months for you to find a job again. Note your risk perception changes and you save for say 18 months equivalent in the future, perhaps overdoing it.

Yet it is also true that with time we forget the crisis, we forget what we learnt and we forget what we corrected for. Years later, if your career has been going smoothly for long, you may wonder why you keep so much money locked up as savings. You may forget what unemployment felt like, and you may then start keeping only 2 months equivalent as savings, because the crisis it's well forgotten by now.

Think of this not in terms of individuals but in terms of nations and how societies remember their history, and the world starts making a tiny bit more sense.

Where we will go does depend considerably on where we are coming from.