“If a black cat crosses your path, it signifies that the animal is going somewhere” — American comedian Groucho Marx

Psychologist B.F Skinner, put few pigeons in a specially designed box now called Skinner’s box and through a separate channel dropped some food pallet at some fixed intervals like one minute. Unlike the previous experiments on rats, this did not depend on the behaviour of the pigeons. Irrespective of what the pigeons did, the food pallets were going to be served after a fixed time. Skinner was curious to know how the pigeons react in such situations.

After some time, Skinner saw that the pigeons developed some weird behaviour. One of them for example started going around in a circle, which it was not doing before. Another one waited in one specific corner of the box. Skinner noticed that though the food pallet was not dependent on the pigeons’ action, the pigeons developed some weird habits.

Skinner explained this as a theory of superstition — though the act of getting the food pallet was random, pigeons developed wrong association with the act they were doing just before they got the food pallet. So, if a pigeon was going in circle when the food pallet dropped, it developed an association of the two. It believed that going in the circle caused the food pallet. It kept repeating the behaviour and few times it got reinforced as well though the act was completely random.

Such experiments have been done on humans as well with equally successful result. The psychologists call it conditioning. If the brain sees two events A and B in quick success and in that order, it can presume that A causes B. In fact, the brain is far to eager to associate the two random events. It is looking for a pattern all the while. This is how people develop superstition. Do you have a specific pen that help you answer all the questions in the exam and fetch good marks — that lucky pen? Do you notice that whenever you wore that black colour socks you were able to score the maximum goals in football? Or that blue T-shirt helps you win in the casino.

We call them ‘lucky shoe’, ‘lucky shirt’, ‘lucky bat’, ‘lucky pen’ — the list could be endless. Likewise, there is also a series of unlucky things. This is not limited to inanimate things only; we form similar superstitious about people around us. Some people we believe are lucky, some are unlucky.

Have you looked at cloudy sky during the day? Do you see faces or a garden or a jungle within few seconds without any effort? Do you see the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwich or Virgin Mary on a stained wall in the subway? Do you believe there must be something very special about the date 11–11–11?

If you thought that you are highly educated and rational and hence immune to all these superstitions, you may be wrong. Most of these conditioning is formed at the sub-conscious level and we may not be even aware of them. Most of the biases work in the same manner.

Why we love pattern and hate randomness?

Imagine there are two set of people in the foraging world — one quickly formed the pattern and other did not look for the pattern specifically. When both spotted some suspicious animal behind the green leaves the one with excessive love for pattern concluded it was a dangerous lion and ran towards the safety. The rational human was more circumspect, he waited there for some time, analysed the movement and presumed that it was monkey. He did not start running immediately. He laughed at the fear of the other person. The pattern loving person got fooled. This happened 9 out of 10 times but the tenth time it was a lion, rational man did a mistake and he was eaten away by the lion. He exited the gene pool. We are all descendants of the pattern loving superstitious brain.

Psychologically also we are scared to live in a random world. How do you decide to act in a completely unpredictable world? We must find a reason — every incident must have a reason. For our brain there is no place for randomness. Our brain hates stray incidents because it does not know how to guard against it. If a road accident happened, there must be a reason else it is discomforting to us. If a person got a disease there must be a reason behind that. With the knowledge of the reason we feel comforted of living in an unpredictable world with some predictability. If we are not able to find any clear reason we sometimes call ‘karma’.

Excessive love for pattern is known as ‘patternism’ which is triggered by conditioning. It can be healthy to start with but in some cases, it may grow into ‘superstition’. This tendency to assign causality can go to clinical level — when it is called ‘apophenia’. The point being made here is that we are wired to find pattern and discount randomness.

The fact could well be that most of the events in the external world are just random. A chance mutation can cause a disease, a random event can cause a road accident. Most of the events in the nature are random, it does not care for pattern or causality. Nature does not care for pattern only humans do. The evolution does not seem to have any grand plan. It would not care if tomorrow a giant asteroid hit earth and wiped out all living organism in one fireball.

For that matter even our individual lives could be a random event without any grand purpose or bigger meaning. But we can’t live with this thought — we must find meaning to our existence, grand design behind it and hence our brain keeps telling us stories. Not only that, it must invent some reasons when there may not exist any. In the end the story telling ability of our brain gives us the hope to manage this world.

“The universe may be random, but we must find patterns in it for a meaningful existence”.

#MysteriesOfMind #Superstitioon #Randomness

Many of us may be wondering why a movie that was written off by most film critiques (Indian Express gave it a rating of 1.5/5.0) is slowly becoming one of the most watched movie ever. Or how an Indian audience that is so used to ‘fantasy escape world of cinema’ is flocking in to watch this ‘documentary type movie’. The film has no songs, no one is dancing around, no hero-kills-villain type fight scenes — nothing that people can relate to a Bollywood movie. In the past such movies were called ‘art movie’ — which essentially meant that no one would watch them. Kashmir Files is a runaway commercial success on the contrary.

Vivek Agnihotri calls himself a Bollywood rebel, so it is not surprising that he has made an Anti-Bollywood movie. The notable part is that it is turning out to be a blockbuster. It questions the long held belief that only certain types of ideology can prosper in Bollywood. Though Bollywood professes to promote creative artistic freedom, it has always been lopsided in propagating certain narratives. If you watch Bollywood movies (more so of 70–80s), you notice that it has created stereotypes of communities that smells of an agenda driven approach. All those who have been part of this industry willingly or unwillingly succumb to that ideology. The left-leaning condescending Bollywood had co-opted everyone in an ‘elite club’. If you are not convinced, you need to follow @GemsOfBollywood on twitter.

Narrative Control is not just limited to Bollywood

When India got Independence, it had an option to choose a narrative that was factual, away from the propaganda of the colonizers. However people entrusted with writing the Indian history believed that too much of bare truth could be dangerous for the harmony of the newly created country. They instead took an approach of brushing away the uncomfortable truths and presented it as ‘the things should happen’ rather than ‘the way it happened’. To sustain this thinking the historians required to spin narratives that looked nice even though they were untrue. The Marxist historians hardly cared for the truth. The result was an education system that presents a very distorted view of Indian history that disparages everything that can lead to native pride. If you read NCERT books on Indian history you will only remember Mughal period and British Empire — for a civilization that is at least 4000 year old. End result — the narrative has spread to all the fields like films, art, writing, sports, academia, books, awards etc. and together they create a powerful ideological ecosystem.

Kashmir Files is the uncomfortable story that Indian intelligentsia would want to bury like many other uncomfortable truths because it runs counter to their narrative. It is not surprising that no mainstream media covered this story during the incident, no authentic movies were made , no court took up those cases and no school book discusses them in detail. But anyone who has read alternative narratives of India has got a sense that all that is being fed to us in the mainstream could be suspect. That’s why there is an eagerness to look at an alternative perspective as a challenge to the prevailing narratives. Kashmir Files is the counter narrative that has touched the chord of people.

A generation of ‘cultural orphans’

‘India must break with much of her past and not allow it to dominate the present,’ Nehru wrote in his book The Discovery of India. ‘Our lives are encumbered with the dead wood of the past; all that is dead and has served its purpose must go.’ As India’s first PM, Nehru had some disdain for Indian culture, specifically for the Hindu civilization. He was educated in an colonial era. Though his love for the country could not be in doubt, he was part of the English elite who Macaulay described as — a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. And Nehru was not alone, the colonial education had created a small but powerful elite who continued to perpetuate the colonizer’s narrative about the inferior past. What else can explain that recently made movie ‘Udham Singh’ could not be sent for Oscars because the reviewers thought it showed hatred towards British.

The result of the colonial sanitization was that any reference to India’s cultural past was ridiculed. Eventually it created a generation of cultural orphans that only has to look up to the west for anything of value. This was precisely the aim of English education that Macaulay envisaged. Native language is a living culture. Depriving the natives from their mother tounges can only produce a cultural apathy and a class of imitators. Yeats once said “Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English’ — he was just stating that Indians can only be a caricature of their British counterparts when they adopt English. However the lure of English and native cultural apathy continues till today. Nothing is more evident than the Bollywood stars who make their livelihood from Hindi movies but give all interviews invariably in English.

Taking the ecosystem head on

PM Modi’s rise in Indian politics was the counter narrative that challenged the status quo. When he speaks in Hindi in UN, he is making a statement that we are moving away from being in the race of best imitators. He does not hesitate to assert his Indian identity, does not try to be politically correct and there is some honesty that people identify him with. He promotes Yoga, respects cultural and religious heritage of distant past even at the cost of being ridiculed. He is an ideological rebel in that sense.

Vivek Agnihotri is trying something similar. Through his past work like the book ‘Urban Naxal’ and movie ‘Tashkent Files’ he has tried to take the narrative head on. He has been partly successful, as evident from The Kashmir Files. However, his job is more difficult because while PM Modi could claim victory by winning election, Vivek will have to fight the invisible ecosystem of intelligentsia who are no less powerful.

Einstein is known for his accomplishments in the theories of science, but few know that he was an amateur violinist. He created his own violin and nicknamed it as Lina.

“As a little girl,” Einstein’s second wife Elsa once remarked, “I fell in love with Albert because he played Mozart so beautifully on the violin. He also plays the piano. Music helps him when he is thinking about his theories. He goes to his study, comes back, strikes a few chords on the piano, jots something down, returns to his study.”

He also played piano that he learned from his mother. It appears he never played in public. So it was clear that he played music for himself because he enjoyed that. The complex challenge of physics could not engage his mind as much as the music from Mozart whom he called musical physicist.

As an old man he said — “I know that most joy in my life has come to me from my violin,”.

But Einstein was not the only one. Many other scientists are known to have deep love for painting, writing or even spirituality and religion. There is something about humanities that entices our mind more than the concrete area of science.

1. Art spurs the creativity, science restricts the degree of freedom

After a difficult mathematics exam, the students only check is the final answer. The answer keys are also created to match the final answer. The assumption is that if the answer is correct, process of arriving at the answer must have been correct. There is only one path to the right outcome. There are no alternative paths. The mind has little room to exercise creativity.

Compare that to a paper in literature. How did Macbeth die — can be answered in many ways and all of them could be correct. There is no fixed answer key (at least not one). The respondents also know that they can never be 100% wrong or 100% right. This gives a lot of room to exercise your creativity. The mind enjoys this space the most when it is unconstrained to traverse.

2. Art focuses on journey while science focuses on the outcome

A piece of art is never perfect. There is never a perfect story, a perfect painting or a perfect song. A popular quote is — a work of art is never complete; it is only abandoned. Each iteration is a better version of the previous ones, but the number of iterations could be infinite. For a perfect learner the journey never ends.

A problem in physics on the contrary is about the final theory, outcomes and experimental result. Once the theory has been established and proven, it can be repeated with the same outcome. The constancy of the outcome is important. If each iteration changes the outcome, then the theory gets rejected.

3. Art is intrinsic but science is extrinsic

There is something about the art that makes it intrinsic. Our mind loves art, because it is fuzzy and inexact, just like our mind that is fickle and fleeting. Most inspiration of the art are not driven by external rewards. People do it because they enjoy that. Inspiration of art comes from within.

Science on the other hand do not come naturally to humans. We need to focus on that to learn. Though our mind likes cognitive challenge in the form of scientific questions, there are fewer amateur scientists than guitarists.

We all live in the technology powered world today, so we might be tempted to believe that science has made humans what we are today. Some may even conclude that the pursuit of art and humanities could be waste of time. But Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens mentions that what created cognitive revolution in humans was not the ability to see truths but the ability to create fictional stories. No animal can ever believe in things that it has not seen, but humans can imagine 10 headed demons and flying elephants.

Fiction aligned people, they believed in things that did not exist. When many people believed in the same thing, it was easier to draw co-operation from them. The civilization started. Even today — societies are driven not by scientific discoveries but ideologies that are more fuzzy than exact.

• The Guardian, Inside Technology, 17th May 2007

It was not only Guardian but most of the technology commentators were very bullish about this new idea of virtual reality. Second Life self-reported a GDP of $ 500 million. It appeared at the cover of Business week. New York Times covered it as the next big idea. The house prices started soaring. It appeared that soon we will all transport ourselves to the virtual world and abandon the physical world in a way.

But nothing like that happened. Instead, the second life homes were deserted. The user base never grew as expected. The founders eventually gave up on the hype.

Fast forward to 2021, 14 years later we are more or less talking of the same concept — metaverse.

Facebook is so convinced of the idea that it changed the company name to Meta to reflect the direction the company wants to move. Certainly, it is betting big on the social VR.

“Today at Connect 2021, Mark Zuckerberg laid out our vision of the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet — a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world. Importantly, it’ll be characterized by social presence, the feeling that you’re right there with another person, no matter where in the world you happen to be.”

Is this the same old wine in new bottle? Is it going to meet the same fate as the hype of Second Life? Could these tech companies be wrong?

Well, I can draw some parallel with the AI evolution. During the second world war the various governments pumped a lot of money in AI technologies, specially around language translation. It showed huge potential. But the technology did not live up to the expectations. Soon the funding dried up, scientists gave up and people went back to their usual business. This is commonly known as AI winter. This happened multiple time in the past but today we know that AI is everywhere and growing. Of course, one of the reasons are powerful computers, cloud technologies, better connectivity etc. But the same reasons apply for social VR as well.

Yuval Harari in his book “Homo Deus” makes two predictions for future of mankind — that they will be heavily into virtual reality and drugs. Both predictions are depressing but could well be true. In my book “Who Stole My Time” the protagonist moves into the social VR from Facebook kind of application and takes the users by the storm. I strongly believe we will move in that direction because the way our social brain has evolved.

Social Brain in a Vat

Our brains are larger in size not due to extra calculations or analytics that we have to do, but because we have a strong need to gossip. We need to know what others think of us, what others think of what we think of them and so on. The psychologists call it ‘Theory of Mind’. We may feel embarrassed for gossiping but that is fundamentally the basis behind all our social structures, including communities and organizations. This innate need of socializing has been behind the growth of all social media. Mark Zuckerberg is a psychology expert and knows this ‘developmental bug of human brain’. Our need to socialize will never end.

One of the famous conundrums in Philosophy is explained as a ‘brain in the vat’ example. They ask us to imagine our brain is housed in a small jar and is being fed all electric signals through our neurons (just as in the real world). We are seeing the physical world and sensing things. But factually, nothing is happening. It’s just that our brain is being fed those signals. Now can you prove that you are not the ‘brain in the vat’? Well, you can’t prove it. But would we like to be a ‘Brain in the vat’ where we will have exciting life as per our wishes and beyond all limitations that we face in the real world. I bet many will opt for the same. The virtual lives could be more eventful and interesting than the mundane daily lives. In reality, we are fooling our innocent brains with false experiences to create the dopamine hits, but that makes us happy.

Better technologies

There are other reasons that metaverse can succeed this time. One of the reasons is better VR technologies. We hate putting big boxes in front of our eyes and wire ourselves like zombies. Now the devices from Oculus (acquired by FB), HoloLens from Microsoft and several other companies are more manageable and there is no reason to believe that they will not become more like glasses that we can conveniently carry.

Second life was designed as a game, which was also one of its lacunae. You exit a game once you win or lose. Metaverse is not designed as a game with specific goals. It is goal-less and left to explore just like our life is. This will have greater stickiness to the virtual world. We will have more reasons to wander aimlessly in a purposeless metaverse than in a specially designed game setup like Second Life.

Second life also had issues with financial transactions. Metaverse uses blockchain based currency that will be much easier and trustworthy to handle. Already NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) is Colins Dictionary word of the year. One can buy assets in Metaverse using NFTs that can be easily verified. And people are spending real money already to buy digital properties. Recently a New York-based company Republic Realm announced it had spent a record-breaking $4.3 million on digital land through The Sandbox, one of several “virtual world” websites where people can socialise, play games, and even attend concert. There are many such examples.

So, the final question — will you move to metaverse? What will you do if your bank, your company, your football club and most importantly some of your friends have setup their existence in metaverse? What if you hear that some of your friends have even started making money. Do you want to be left out?

In psychology this is commonly known as FOMO — fear of missing out. None of us want to be a sitting duck while the opportunities pass by us. When that happens is a matter of speculation, but that will happen one day is more likely than not.

We experience the outer world through our senses. We see things, hear sound, smell odor, feel an object, taste food and have awareness of our body. With these six senses our brain creates a model of the world that we deal with. Many neuroscientists will tell us that this image of the world is only a approximate representation of the real world and many times it is illusionary. We don’t see things as they are but as they make sense to us. We don’t know the world objectively, and only go by the subjective perception constructed by our brain. However, this subjective reality still forms the most critical part of our living experience.

We very well know that we don’t know much about the world we live in. The billions of galaxies, innumerable creatures on earth and never-ending incidents in the physical and natural world humble us into believing that our knowledge of the world is very limited. We have accepted that our world is very complex, and our tiny brain may not be able to comprehend at all. Our experience of the external world is partial — only a miniscule fraction that is necessary for our survival and well-being.

Our inner world

Experiencing the outer world through the senses is only half of the story. Our happiness does not depend on the external objects and events alone, it also depends on our internal state that we call ‘feeling’. Our experience of the world has a large component of this strange input called ‘feeling’. We exist not because the world exists but because we have an inner state of living experience.

This is one of the great dilemmas for the scientists who try to design robots that can act like humans. A robot can scan the world, do all the computations and then can give the smartest response. But humans also take into consideration their internal state — ‘feeling’ before taking any action. In fact, in many situations feeling is the most dominant factor. When feeling takes control, it shuts down the logical brain.

One of the Greek mythologies says that man is more like a charioteer who has two horses at his command ‘reason’ and ‘passion’ both driving away from each other. The job of the man is to balance the two forces. Our experience of life is the story of these two horses.

Scientists can design a machine for the reason but how can they design a machine for feeling, at least not until they know how the feelings in human work.

What are the rules that govern our feeling? How we feel happy, sad, angry or loved? We have an inner world and a massive information processing system called brain that is perhaps more complex than the outer world. Each neuron is connected to up to thousands of other neurons and we have about 100 billion neurons in our brain. If the outer world was too complex, the inner world is equally scary. Every second there are 11 million bits of information being sent to our brain. We may feel bored, but our brain never stops being busy.

An efficient program that we don’t know

Some scientists postulate that feeling is biological process based on the hormones and chemical activities of the brain. We feel happy when have a rush of dopamine and feel depressed when our synapses lack serotonin. But this is like replacing one unknown variable with another unknown variable.

The evolutionary scientists may explain the ‘feeling’ as most efficient programs of the brain that have helped us in survival. The ‘reasoning’ that is triggered by the conscious brain is slow and inefficient. You can wonder about the apple falling from the tree and discover gravity after several hours of thinking, but it does not help when you see a tiger in front of you. The brain must quickly react and think later. In fact, the rational thinking process must be shut down under such circumstances. That is why brain evokes fear, pumps some adrenalin into the body and prepares the body for a safe escape. In this case feeling has helped us in survival by shutting down the conscious brain.

As per evolutionary psychologists most of the feelings can be traced back to the survival need for the humans. They have been burnt into the circuitry of the brain over the millions of years of existence and then passed on the surviving gene pool. Those who did not develop the efficient ‘feeling’ program probably exited the gene pool.

Our dilemma is that we don’t understand how the feeling work. We only know it is important for our survival and a meaningful living experience, but we have no idea if it is a physical or meta-physical process. We have formula that can predict the position of an object in motion, but we have no scientific way to predict the inner state of a human being. The problem is that we can’t deny the existence of feeling — they are real. In fact, they are more real than the physical world we live in. It dictates the quality of our experience.

The world of feeling is so complex that computational science is completely helpless in unravelling it through the available tools and theories. Perhaps they may never be discovered because the nature has not designed our brain to study its own genesis. It has devoted a small fraction of our brain called ‘conscious world of reasons’ that are necessary for our survival, but the large portion of our subconscious brain is out of bound for us. We may never know what creates it, how it is run efficiently and how complex it is.

As we know things today, we can design robots that can walk and talk like humans but can never have an inner world of their own existence like us.

Andrew Sullivan published an article “I used to be a human being” in New York magazine in 2016. The article said that “An endless bombardment of news and gossips and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you too.”

This article became immediate hit and was widely shared. Many people could relate to this. It is not hard to imazine why?

Digitization has been the most commonly used term in the business world in this decade. There is an increased focus on automating and enabling all consumer services on mobile phones. The assumption is that a customer is always accessible through his smartphone. Our world is entrapped in our smartphones.

But how much of digitization is good in your personal life? What is the healthy usage of smartphone in a day? Does it have any negative effect on your quality of life? Do you think we are way more dependent on our cellphones. Instead of you using your phones, your phones are using you? Are you feeling exhausted and anxious?

If you are wondering about any of the above questions, then the book “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport can be a good primer. Newport is a computer scientist at Georgetown university and studies this topic from biological, psychological and neurological perspective. His previous book “Deep Work” was about how the digital distractions are affecting our brain and cognitive capabilities. However, this book is more direct and offers some practical tips to get around it.

Modern day social media apps are like slot machines. The likes and notifications work in the same way in brain as the gambling addiction. It creates the same rush of dopamine. Checking the likes on your post is the new smoking. In an HBS story Bill Maher says — “Philip Morris just wanted your lungs,” and “the App store just wants your soul”.

The notification symbol for Facebook was originally in blue to match the palette of Facebook and it seems no one used that. So, they changed it to red — a danger sign and the usage skyrocketed. If Facebook removed the like and notification buttons it will be like Orkut or Myspace. They were good platform but did not have any addictive power. The likes and comments start a vicious cycle of feedback loop and binds all users in a never-ending interrupt. At the same time, it starts an anxiety that the psychologist called ‘FOMO’ — fear of missing out. This sets an unending loop of scrolling down to see what is happening in the world around us.

The book suggests following ways :-

1. Digital Declutter — Take out all the optional apps from your cellphones for the first 30 days. During this break explore and re-discover the activities and behavior that you find meaningful. At the end of the period you can reintroduce only those select optional app that serve your value. Be very strict in selection this time as you start on a blank slate.

2. Spend time Alone — The author says today we all suffer from what he calls ‘solitude — deprivation”. We have lost the art of having conversation with ourselves. This is one of the sources of happiness that we have forgotten. He defines solitude not as physical aloofness but the ability of brain to be free from someone else’s thought. Before the smartphone age we had ample opportunities to be ‘thought alone’ — waiting in a queue or travelling by train etc. In the smartphone age today all the filler time has been used up by smartphones. The suggestion that the author gives

a. Leave your phone at home

b. Practice long walk

c. Write letters to yourself

3. Don’t click “Like” — Likes are the digital slot machine that dominate the user’s time and attention. Our mind takes it like much sought after social approval. The unpredictable nature of the number of ‘likes’ make it a perfect recipe for addiction.

4. Reclaim leisure — It is more difficult to enjoy vacation than specific work because the vacation does not have a goal, no criteria of success or failure. Our brain finds it difficult if there is little or no cognitive challenge. Engaging in a high-quality leisure activity be it learning new skill, participating in a social engagement or playing a sport is the only way to stave off passive leisure activities like social media browsing.

5. Join the attention resistance — The social media companies are no better than the attention merchants. Their revenue depends on the number of hours we spend on their platform. They sell our attention to the advertisers. Their entire design of the social media is capturing our undivided attention and stay hooked on to it. But this is a no-win battle for the users. Some of the ways to resist this temptation could be — fixing the time for apps, removing all notifications, deleting the optional apps and in some cases dumbing down the smartphones to basic feature phone.

— — — — — — — — — -

reference — Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Mark twain was once asked to comment on the rumor about his death. An American newspaper had published his obituary while he was actually in London. He responded in his characteristic humor — “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” To me, this quote aptly summarizes the perception about the role of branches in the banking world today.

Branches have traditionally been the cornerstone of banking evolution over many decades. However, the emergence of digital channels and changing consumer preferences over the last few years have impacted its importance in a bank’s channel mix.

To understand the future of branch banking, I had the privilege to moderate a virtual panel discussion titled “Branch Banking Post COVID19 — What banks need to do.” with an eminent group of banking technology leaders across regions. Here, I have summarized some of the insights shared during the discussion.

TAKING THE PHYGITAL ROUTE

Siew Choo Soh, MD Group Head of Consumer Banking and Big Data at DBS Bank spoke about how a combination of digital and physical is the way to go in the post pandemic world. The new buzzword is ‘phygital’. Accordingly, DBS bank has redesigned the branch experience for different personas to strengthen the existing network. DBS is also seeing an accelerated adoption of their digital banking services app, ‘digibank’, and their payment app, ‘PayLah!’ as well.

CHANGING THE PURPOSE

Dennis D Omila, EVP and CIO at UnionBank of Philippines (UBP) believes that the purpose and role of the branches will have some changes going forward. He believes that, along with a focus on transactions, branches would increasingly drive digital conversion and advisory services. Accordingly, UPB has created distinct sales and transaction teams in their branches, and created a unique lounge-like experience for their customers. Dennis also believes that while some branches will adopt the self-service model, UBP would like to experiment on futuristic branch models like ‘ARK’, their fully digital bank branch, and ‘Branch-on-wheel’.

“Even during the current lockdown we have kept our branches open because we believe our customers need our services even more in the current situation. We have a unique concept called Branch-on-wheels’ that can take the banking facilities to the neighborhood. This has been particularly helpful in the current situation. We have ‘high-tech and high touch’ strategy where customer care is the prime objective,” Dennis explained.

MANAGAING OPERATIONAL COSTS FOR BRANCHES

Peter Neufeld, Head of Customer Digital Experience, Financial Services — EMEA at EY, says it will be hard to argue that we will not see a reduction in number of branches across most markets. However, Peter also observed that some banks are leveraging branches to play a proactive role in engaging the local community during current crisis. He believes that people will continue to depend on branches for complex decisions like buying a home or arranging business loans.

DIGITIZING BRANCH PROCESSES

Biswabrata Chakravorty, CIO at IndusInd Bank, observed that today with customers preferring digital banking that is available 24X7, IndusInd bank has focused on digitizing the branch processes. An example he quoted was the successful launch of video KYC that can enable digital onboarding of customers for credit cards, personal loans and savings account.

The bank has also enabled branch staff to work-from-home effectively during the pandemic. In a country like India, this not only reduces the dependency on a good branch location, it also helps serve a significant proportion of the population that needs assistance for transactions. The bank continues to welcome customers to the branch keeping the norms of the pandemic protocol, as the bank has prioritized financial inclusion.

INNOVATING AT BRANCHES

Barid Neogi, SVP and Head of Group Operations at Emirates NBD, spoke about the bank’s successful digital-only offerings, called “Liv.” targeting millennials and “E20” for SMEs. “But everyone may not move to the digital channels,” Barid observed. He stressed that the branch network will continue to be very important for incumbent banks but there is a need to focus on innovation to increase its relevance.

Emirates NBD has conducted some interesting experiments in the ‘branch of the future’ space in Dubai — one such was launch of Pepper, the humanoid, which provided a fun experience to customers at the branch. He believes that in the near future, humanoids can perform services like giving a token to maintain the queue system responding to basic queries or processing simple service requests.

REDESIGNING THE BRANCH EXPERIENCE

Adrian Vermooten, Group Head Digital Innovation at Standard bank, commented that their initial focus on the digitization journey was on mobile and internet banking channels. But soon they realized that the branch also plays a critical role in creating a unified omnichannel customer experience. He calls it focusing on “2Cs” — Convenience & Complexity.

The focus on convenience for everyday banking is move to digital. But, it is critical to provide customers a consistent cross channel journey when they choose to shift from digital channels to physical branches. Hence, Standard Bank embarked on a branch digitization program to match the experience on digital apps leading to significant improvement in customer satisfaction. Complexity on the other hand is about focusing branches for high value transactions that will continue to require a human touch. Adrian believes that, especially in a market like Africa, the role of a branch in financial inclusion and literacy is critical.

CONCLUSION

Consider this recent survey by Simon-Kutcher & Partners in in Canada, which studied the impact of COVID lockdown on branch banking. Their finding was that 57% of the respondents said they would open accounts with banks having physical branches compared to 3% who were fine with digital only banks. 62% of the respondents said that they would move their account to some other banks if their bank closed all physical branches.

While it is true that the number of branches may be being optimized in many countries, they are far from disappearing and are in fact being strengthened with digital upgrades to deliver new services and experiences. I, for one, believe that branches of the future may very well be like Apple stores, and will play an integral role in creating trust, providing high value advice and explaining complex products, while also aiding financial inclusion.

Human life is a unique gift that we have got. We are the only creature that has got consciousness. We have what we call ‘mind’. We can think about the stars in the galaxy and postulate about the quantum theory. Our mind has no bound — it is unlimited. It can go beyond the boundary of space and time to conceive things that ever existed or would ever exist in the future. Our mind is super powerful, our consciousness can expand to merge with the universe. Our symbolic experience can have no boundaries. As symbolic existence, our potential has no limits. The mind does not follow any rules — it doesn’t have to subscribe to laws of motion or gravitational force. We are a gift to the nature, we are all ‘Angels’. We are super-powerful. We have a unique place in this universe, we have an individuality, we are immortal.

And yet we know that we have a physical existence that restricts ourselves to the time and space we live in. The body limits our potential. The body is a deadweight for the flight of mind. It ties us back. It restricts us to fly. It needs continuous attention; it needs tremendous care and nourishment. Even after all this the body decays and eventually dies. It disappears forever. We have a physical self that is no different from the other animals. We are a worm and food for the worm. Our immortal, symbolic existence gets trapped in the physical casing we call body.

So we experience life through two different spectacles — the free unshackled symbolic existence and a constrained physical existence. From the times of Rene Descartes humans have struggled to accept this mind-body dualism.

What are we? A timeless, limitless energy in the cosmos or a puny organic composition like a flash in the pan. If we are just a organic body with a fixed lifespan — we are just a link in the chain of the long survival history of humans just like other animals. Our existence has little purpose just as the worms have no purpose other than creating other worms before disappearing. But worms don’t see it as an issue because they don’t have a symbolic existence. They live in their physical bodies only, they have no conscience. They live in the present they have no fear of death. They don’t know when the death will come or if there is something called death. If there is no knowledge of death, there can’t be any fear for that. They don’t have a grandiose view of their own exceptionalism.

This creates an existential crisis for humans. What to do with live? It is an important question because we can choose. It is not a problem if you give up your free thinking and just follow a role model (e.g. the one provided by social values, religion etc). But if you ever choose to explore this deeply, it is a terrible dilemna. This is why Jean-Paul Sartre said that “Man is condemed to be free; because once thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does.” He believed that human beings live in constant anguish, not solely because life is miserable, but because we are ‘condemned to be free’.

Earnest Becker in his book ‘Denial of death’ says that terror of death is repressed otherwise humans can’t function. In our daily life we pretend that we are not going to die because the truth is too scary to absorb. It may just paralyze us to do anything. If all that we are going to leave is a long silence, any activity in our life does not matter at all. No one’s life matter for that reason. Philosopher William James famously said that the knowledge of death is the ‘worm at the core’ for humans.

4th century stoic philosopher Seneca contests this in his book ‘Shortness of life’; human life is not short, he says. It is sufficiently long enough to achieve anything that one may want. On the contrary he argues that life is valuable because it has a fixed span. People want to achieve something in this span — this is the basis of all industry. This is why we want to do things that can outlive us. We create art, buildings, products and organizations that we can call our legacy. Only way to debunk death is the merge with a larger symbol that has no physical existence or least an existence much beyond our physical bodies. Shakespeare is as relevant today as he was when alive. We know our physical existence is temporal but we attempt to create a symbolic footprint so that we can be immortal.

So all our life is an ‘immortality project’. Everything that we see in what we call civilization is part of someone’s immortality project. Our life is a story of an attempt of the symbolic self to grow beyond our physical casing.

Dr Robert Provine once conducted an experiment with the students of his university. He was curious to find what makes people laugh. He and his assistant hung around with the student groups surreptitiously and noted the incidents that triggered laughter. The finding — a typical laugh line was “I will see you guys later” or “what was that supposed to mean”.

They analyzed 1200 lines that triggered laughter and none of the jokes were funny by any imagination. The funniest joke among the sample was “You don’t have to drink, just buy us drinks” or “do you date within your species?”

Provine, considered to be an authority in the study of laughter concludes “the frequent laughter heard at the social gathering is not due to furious rates of jokes telling by the guests.” Of course, we know this from our daily experience but Provine’s experiment just proves it empirically.

This also explains why Dad jokes and Pedro jokes still work fine. There is a genre of bad jokes that are popular because they have opposite of humor.

Jokes trigger laughter?

People don’t laugh at jokes; they celebrate the togetherness by laughter. The ultimate test of friendship among any peer group is, they can laugh at the same joke. Each peer group have the same sense of humor (however weird that may be).

It is almost impossible to laugh alone and if you by any chance do that, people will suspect your sanity. Even in the movie hall it is difficult to burst into laughter if you are watching the movie alone. Laughing alone is considered weird and neurotic. For laughing out loud you need to be among people, most often with friends. Laughing is out an out a social activity. Laughter induces laugh that is why comedy serials pre-package canned laughter. However, it only induces a smile if we are watching the show alone. Laughter is one the easiest emotion to catch for its fakeness.

Laughter to scare?

Some of the evolutionary psychologists believe the reason people laugh, is not to welcome but to scare other people. They display their teeth to intimidate others when they meet first. For Homo Sapiens it was like signaling — “Don’t mess with me — my teeth are sharper and stronger than yours”. Tooth being used as one of the main tools in case of any fight, this advantage could have been quite significant. Similarly, when the kids tickle each other, they feign mock attack and they laugh, as there is no real danger. Even adults laugh at other people — they heap insult and fake violence in a form of humor called slapstick comedy.

We may never know if the evolutionary psychologies were right or not. But today we do know that laughter releases hormones that can reduce the stress and relieve even physical pain. It boosts the anti-bodies producing cells and increases our immunity. In a nutshell laughter makes us happy.

The current practice of social distancing might have taken its biggest toll on one of the most pristine habit of humans to cope with stress. Covid19 has not only created the fear of virus but also taken away our natural defense to cope with the stress.

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reference book

How Mind Works by Steven Pinker

Sapiens by Yuval Harari

Imagine you get an opportunity to go for your most sought after vacation in the beautiful natural surroundings in a far off exotic place. You are on top of the world and raring to fulfill your dream. However, there is problem — you are told that you can’t click any photograph of the place. You can’t carry any camera. As if this was not enough you are told that at the end of the trip your memory will be cleaned up for the trip (by some magical power) and you will have no recollection of the vacation.

Will you go for such a vacation? Well some of you might still go but for most others it will be a waste of time and money.

Daniel Kahneman says that we have two selves — an experiencing self and a remembering self. Experiencing self is the doer and remembering self is the reflector. We seek a balance between the two in our daily lives. Happiness is a mix of the two.

Why I am bringing this topic in the context of writing? Well, I think the experiencing self is ‘the doer’ and the remembering self is ‘the comentator of the experience — author of our unique stories’.

We all have a writer in us just that we need to nourish it. How to wake-up the author in you — here are some tips:-

1. Write like no one will ever read and edit like everyone is going to read

Book writing is two step process — writing and editing. Most of the first time authors make the mistake of combining the two and they keep tearing the pages after writing. Writing should be exploratory and free flowing. If you review every page you write you will feel awful about yourself.

The trick is continuing to write till you reach a critical length what we call ‘minimum viable product’ in software. Since then it becomes your intellectual property. After this stage, you will review and edit your writing many times but never throw it away. The book writing is an iterative process just like drawing sketches.

2. Time is just an excuse

During one the literature festival a young girl asked an author — “Being an author and celebrity, how do you find time to write?”

“It is easy, and I can show that you can do that as well,” replied the author.

“I am quite busy in work, I hardly have time for anything,” the girl said.

“What time you wake up in the morning?”

“6 am,” replied the girl.

“Ok, then start waking up at 5 am and you have one hour every day to write.”

Everyone in the audience laughed but most of us got the purport of the conversation. We always find time for the things that we prioritize and that at times includes several hours of wasteful activities. If you can’t find time for reading or writing, then the reason might well be that it not in your priority list.

3. Write for yourself

Once I presented my book to a friend of mine. He mentioned that he was also an author and he had written 3 books, but he had not published. He had no intent to publish at all. Initially this puzzled me — why would anyone write but not publish. But on second thought it became clear — writing itself is a journey. I recall writing diary notes in school days. The intent was never to publish or even show others. It was a conversation with self and as Aristotle once said — ‘pleasure of having a good conversation’ could be an objective by itself.

Dont get ever bogged down by what genre is most popular, what readers will like so on and so forth. Instead find what you would enjoy writing and learning. There will always be enough people around whose interest would match yours.

4. Habit formation — Twenty One days rule

The ancient rule of 21 days says that if you repeat an activity for 21 days in a row, it will be installed as habit e.g. waking up at 5 am or going to gym every day. While 21 days may be debated, there is a scientific reason behind this saying. If you repeat an activity for few days your brain re-wires itself to produce new pattern. It forms what is known as ‘muscle memory’. It gets subconscious and does not take any more effort from you. In fact, the brain start enjoying the new pattern. Thanks to neuroplasticity we can always build new habit and drop the old ones.

Writing could be just another pattern building for our brain. We need to force ourselves into a routine for few days after which we are naturally drawn into it.

5. A crappy page is easier to edit than blank page

Is a bad idea better than no idea?

In writing it appears so, because you can improve upon a bad plot and make it better. You can modify the characters of your story or iteratively change the line of arguments.

Many times, we keep waiting for a grand plot or a big idea to strike us. In real life, there are no such things as a grand idea. Most of the time we start with a bad solution and continuously improve it to make better. So, a bad story is a good start to writing a good story.

6. Be an avid reader

There is a saying that one should read at least 100 books before attempting to write one. At some point a passive reader of books transforms himself into an active producer of content.

Reading books enriches your life and gives you confidence. Your first few writings might very well be the paraphrasing of the books you have read and that is alright.

7. Don’t focus on outcome

When you write a Facebook post or a medium article — do you check it often to find out how people are reacting to it? Well in this age of instant gratification we are are tempted to do the same. But just as you are more likely to be sad if you watch your trading portfolio every hour, too much obsession with outcome can be bad.

Today, thanks to social media, the feedback loop is instant, and this can affects your writing. While the feedback is always valuable, you should average it out over a long period to tweak your writing style.

8. Be ready to explore

If you are writing a non-fiction you can create a structure for each chapter and the topics to cover. You can also create the broad outline page-wise. This is very analytical and structured process just like when you make a large ppt.

In case of fiction however it works very differently. You may never have the complete plot in mind when you start. Many times you discover with the story — it is an exploratory process. It is like travelling into unknown.

9. Research the topic well

One of reasons I like writing is, it gives me reason to learn new things which otherwise I would never have. In my latest book, one of the protagonists was a neurosurgeon. I read several books on brain science and did some online courses as well.

It is quite natural that we do lot of due diligence before mentioning anything in the book. This is a good excuse to learn a new area.

10. Completing the book is only the first step

If you have finished your manuscript after several months of disciplined writing, congratulations. But just be aware that most of the good publishers reject 95% of the book proposal submitted to them. Book publishing is a very competitive industry where ‘winners take it all’. There are just a handful of books every year that make it big, rest all languish in anonymity. Statistically speaking your book has only a one in a million chance to be a NYT bestseller. But this should not be dampener. There are several options — including self-publishing to take your story to the world.

Writing a book is tumultuous ride but in the end the journey may well be worth it.

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Sunil is the author of 3 books — “Transit Lounge”, “Who Stole My Job”and “Who Stole My Time”