The purpose of life - Part 1

The quest for God is, to a large extent, intertwined with the search for the meaning of life. The answer is unknown, but mankind has to make its choices nonetheless. The situation is quite similar to Nietzsche's 'even if God didn't exist, he would need to have been invented'. Thus, we have invented answers, lies though they may be. The journey of life is too onerous if you do not start with an assumption (and assumptions are all we can make), even if it is a belief in nihilism. The answer differs for the atheist and the believer, and even though there are further sub categories for each, it is a nice place to start.

For the believer, the purpose of life is defined by his religion. But contrary to what people proclaim, believers are few and far between. The believer, generally speaking, sacrifices this life for a better time beyond. Sacrifices have to be made, except in certain sects where the journey itself is the reward. In most cases, the Mullah and the priest live a life of celibacy to enjoy material comforts thereafter. That, in the world of accounting, is just deferred taxation. It does not explain the purpose of life anymore than an examination conducted by God to check if you can be promoted. The Buddhist belief that humans should strive to attain Nirvana strikes a chord though. That is an instance where the journey too is a glimpse of Nirvana. But I shall handle the religion part later.

For the atheist, life is driven by science. With no reincarnation or afterlife in the picture, there are only two possible purposes of life. One, where man attempts to maximise his happiness earned over a lifetime. Two, where the purpose of mankind, like any other species, is to propagate and sustain itself. The former worldview is that of hedonism, and that is what majority of the world is engaged in. For is that not the cornerstone of capitalism - the general upliftment of mankind if everybody starts thinking of what's best for him? The trick here is to choose between materialism, where the path is well defined but doomed; or spiritualism, where the track of the atheist intersects with that of the believer. In any case, the path of maximising happiness demands a separate study in itself, so we shall leave it at a few conclusions. One, that since happiness is to be maximised for the entire lifetime and not for a single moment, it throws up a lot of dilemmas over a lifetime. For instance, do I watch this film or study for a better future? Should I vent my anger to feel satisfied or control it to avoid prison? Two, the idea of what makes one happy changes dynamically, making it difficult to decide on a course of action. To give an example, a child might like to become a soldier because he likes to play with guns, but the joy is short lived even if he continues to pursue this path.

The idea where man solely exists to procreate and sustain mankind is interesting. Now that we are too many in number, reproduction has taken a backseat. What might be crucial though is to ensure that mankind survives for as long as possible. The pursuit of immortality is, therefore, not the goal of the individual, but of mankind. It is this thought that makes scientists scan for habitable planets, and taken to an extreme, manifests itself in the theory that we too, are aliens on this planet, transported long back from a dying star system.

So then, what is the purpose of life for the ideal man? Logically then, it is to consume minimum resources and to ensure that posterity has a better chance of survival. The flawed man, on the other hand, is one who despite the best genetic makeup, comes up with a destructive concept like the nuclear bomb, or the AK-47.  It is not science that is to be feared though, but the conduit where it is channeled. Thus, where Oppenheimer takes a beating, Jonas Salk comes out with flying colours. Where do the spiritual and philosophical luminaries like Vivekananda, Spinoza or Descartes stand in this worldview? On a high pedestal, because, in the words of Neitzsche, they bridge the gap between man and superman. They hasten up the evolution of mankind, for the next leg has to come at the mental plane, not the physical one.

HUL - I told you so

Justice has been meted out, if only partially. HUL stock tumbled 2.5% on 26th Oct, after the company posted its Q2 results. Going by the kind of numbers we have been accustomed to see in the Indian economy since the past six months, the profit growth of 17% was quite respectable. But HUL is now under the 30+ PE curse, where any stock that is valued on a one year forward PE of more than 30 times has to keep the show going to sustain its valuations. This time, HUL failed to deliver strong volume growth. And profits were supported by an 83% jump in other income. As I had pointed out earlier, generating 10% plus volume growth, year on year, for the next ten years or so, is presumptuous.

Unfortunately for HUL, it is not a multiple-reasons-to-buy story. The underlying theme is just growing consumption by the Indian masses. There are no benefits of reducing interest costs, or cyclical turnaround, or regulatory changes to be reaped here. And consumption, trust my words, is bound to falter. Disposable income has been propped up by NREGA in some years, and genuine all-round economic growth in others. Both these factors do not appear sustainable. Imported inflation, unemployment and indirect taxes are hitting discretionary spending hard. Look at the growth for consumer durables in the last two quarters (Hero moto, Maruti, TTK, Titan). Sales could pick up marginally in Q3 because of the festive season, but that would be a flash in the pan. Indians are not being pulled out of poverty at a fast pace anymore - the manpower intensive textile industry is struggling due to power issues and demand slowdown in Europe, and so are a lot of auto ancillaries. NREGA expansion would be difficult to sustain with this fiscal deficit.
For HUL, the high margin cosmetics segment is highly dependent on discretionary spend. The events at Zydus Wellness show that this is a tricky segment to operate in. Worse, history is not with HUL. Volume growth has dropped to 1.8% in the past.

As far as margins go, HUL is in its golden era. The prices of raw materials have declined, although HUL has not been able to capitalise on it because of rupee depreciation. The company's management aims at a volume growth of 9-11%, but cannot increase prices to achieve this ambitious target. Inflation matched hikes themselves are getting too heavy on the customer's purse. EBITDA margins are at record highs, and banking on EPS growth from substantial margin expansion might be too much to ask. Especially because the company posted profit CAGR of 10% in the past five years.
To cut a long story short, the going is so good for HUL, that it can only get bad.

The man who was too smart

Once upon a time there was a man who was so smart, that by the time he was twenty, he could see how the rest of his life would play out, and thus satisfied, he killed himself.

Just like a chessmaster knows how many and what moves would it take for a checkmate, the man knew how each moment, each hour, each day of the rest of his life would be. It was not a bleak future, but he knew it nonetheless. There was no novelty left now.

Once this was known, the only thing left was to experience the future through the senses. The mind already knew, it had enjoyed and suffered, just as one experiences reality. To keep on living, dragging the body along when the mind had lost interest, would have been a long drawn out prison sentence. Treading on a path already trodden on, chewing and tasting stale ideas. Life was now, thus, an insult to his intellect, and he ended it.

Life at Europa - 2

This is related to my earlier post on Life at Europa.
I tried finding out how the sun would appear from Jupiter and here is the link. Quite depressing actually, because you would not expect a bright morning from a sun this size. Consequently, surface temperature is expected to be lower than -160 degrees celsius. However, as I mentioned before, tidal flexing is believed to generate sufficient amount of energy to result in an immense ocean beneath the ice surface that covers Europa. The neighbouring moon, Io, is dotted with volcanoes because of the same phenomenon, with temperatures going up to 1200 degrees celsius where the molten lava boils over. This could keep the ocean at Europa reasonably warm, albeit not that bright.
A lot of gases that would be released into the waters would be poisonous for earth life, but who knows?

India's Unreal estate sector

Real estate prices in India are logic-defying, and to an extent, inhumane. It is difficult to think how urbanisation can increase in the country over the years, with house prices shooting through the stratosphere to totally unaffordable levels. High interest rates and a sinking economy seem to have caused no damage to the demand and pricing for real estate. Prices in Gurgaon are far more than Hong Kong and other prosperous areas of the world, despite sub-standard quality of life in the city, something that even Economist is balking at. Developers earn an operating profit margin of over 50% on sales (before interest payment). That is higher than most business sectors that I know of, especially for an area that does not require any special skills, apart from what KP Singh (the owner of DLF, one of the largest real estate groups in India) calls bribing officials for facilitating quicker disposal. Indian buildings and towns are no feats of civil engineering, are extremely expensive despite cheap labour, and shoddily constructed.

Unlike China, the Indian government is not interested in controlling the bubble, as real estate is the sector where most of the politicians have invested their ill-gotten money. The Vadera-DLF link is now public news. Everybody and his uncle seems to be in the real-estate business now. If you revalue the land to its current value, most of the Indian businesses would have pathetic RoCEs (return on capital employed). Promoters are thinking about monetisation of their land banks to keep the cash flow machine chugging along.

Sadly, real estate has been the culprit behind most of the economic disasters in the past thirty odd years. The most famous being Japan. Land was believed to be scarce on the island, and the growing economy made homes affordable for the populace. That was enough for the developers to play on. Prices soon touched unbelievable figures...and then collapsed, taking the Japanese economy along, which has been stagnant since then. Among the more recent ones, US housing bubble stands out, although the country has still managed to recover within four years because of the strength of the dollar, commendable policy action (partly because people could learn from Japan's mistake), and the entrepreneurship skills of the US population. However, Iceland and Spain have suffered badly, and the latter might take entire Europe along into a long, painful recession. China has been quick to react to asset bubbles, but the country still remains vulnerable to the housing sector. India, meanwhile, has its eyes closed till disaster strikes. The worst hit would be the newly established small-time businessmen in the sector, who have been lured into the bubble. They would be the ones left holding the baby. I shall write more on this later...till I am proved wrong.

Life at Europa

It is claimed that sandwiched between the thick ice sheets of Europa (a satellite of Jupiter) and its rocky surface, could be a vast ocean almost twice as large that of earth, making the satellite a prime candidate for supporting extra terrestrial life. Although Europa is a fair distance from the sun, part of the enormous amount of ice could have melted due to the varying gravitational pull of Jupiter. Even though the Star Wars series covered almost all kinds of planets  - icy, swampy, desert covered, those with thick jungles and where people dwelt in clouds - they missed out on a world like Europa.

Europa itself is not a large heavenly body, being slightly smaller than our own moon, but the volume of water is so humungous that the oceans there should be more than 100km deep (Mariana trench is just 10km deep). Europa also would be a strange world, with an ice sheet acting as the skies and absolute absence of any land mass over the waterline. It is a world that only the seals can understand, that too partially. The depth of the ocean and the distance from the sun also translates to a predominantly dark place, where light could be as scarce as aurora borealis and conventional eyes could be meaningless. Few life specimens are likely to make it to the outer surface of Europa, the ice covering itself being extremely thick, ranging from 10-30km. By contrast, the ice thickness at Antarctica is only 2km (The thin ice model of Europa puts the thickness at just about 600 metres though). It would be interesting to know what kind of religion develops in a world where you can never go past the impenetrable skies of ice (till you have an earth equivalent of a rocket). 

The little amount of sunlight that reaches the surface is an impediment to supporting life, but evidence has been found on earth of creatures, who base their food chain on a bacterium that fulfill its energy needs with just water and other chemicals like hydrogen. So, you can throw photosynthesis out of the window and still build a planet teeming with life.

If such an ocean does exist, I am going with the possibility of extra terrestrial life existing at Europa. What intrigues me though is the composition of life - does it feature simple microbes, or fairly intelligent specimens as well? It would be even interesting to find out how life evolves at Europa. What creatures survive and prosper over the next million of years, who stands out on the top of the evolution chain, how do the creatures communicate, and which senses are most prized? If they had to travel into space, what propulsion would they use, as fire would not be as common as on earth. And then there could be science fiction material - dolphins are originally the denizens of Europa, the creatures who originally carried life to earth. So long, and thanks for all the fish!

The World is not Enough

A select group of people in China are of the view that Japan, which has been a source of constant humilation for the Chinese in the past, should be nuked and exterminated for good, to end the dispute over a handful of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. The idea has also been put forward by a Chinese newspaper and seems to have quite a respectable following now. The underlying tenet of the nuclear aggression policy could be to set an example to the world, that all claims on Chinese territory, however trivial they may be, would be suppressed by an iron hand. The future superpower of the world deserves to have blood on its hands, and China's experience with suppression has yielded extremely satisfactory results in the past. Economic necessity may hold back China for now, but the country seems to see enemies everywhere, and if it has one less after Japan is nuked into obscurity, one thing less to worry about.

In the other part of the world, the United States and Israel are getting jittery about Iran's nuclear stockpile. The country has been severely ostracised, and punished to an extent that by comparison, even the worst human rights offenders seem to have escaped with a rap on the knuckle. Iran has held out for long, but now the currency has depreciated by 40%, causing mass unrest (which might have been orchestrated by the CIA and Mossad). The country cannot sell its crude oil, is unable to buy rice in return, and has become a global pariah. It seems while the West considers itself mature enough to build a nuclear stockpile so vast, that even 1% of it is adequate to obliterate the world, it has no faith in the reckless people of the Middle East. Paradoxically, it was the US and the USSR who brought the world on the edge of annhiliation on the eve of the Cuban crisis. It remains to be seen if the US would take similar action against China if the country flexes its nuclear muscles. Also, nobody seems to worry about the nuclear stockpile of Pakistan, which the Islamic fundamentalists have been salivating at. Of course, at the heart of much of the pain of Iran lies the insecurity of the people of Israel. The world suddenly seems too small for all of us.

Reminds me of the lines by Piyush Mishra (order tweaked, sorry Mishraji),
Chhut put si baaton mein jalne lagegi sambhalo yeh duniya;
Jaisi bachi hai, waisi ki waisi bacha lo yeh duniya.