TED Community » Ankur Surendra Verma

About Me

[A scene from my play Six Days, says it all]
Cole: Don’t look at me like that.
Apprentice: Did you not get the story?
Cole: I did.
You know why I became your … apprentice?
[pause]
Cole: This is what I used to fight for. Look what I’ve turned myself into, a nice genial old man, trying to belong, say the right things, put on the best smile, be polite.
Cole: You remember Space Ship earth? Kenneth Boulding said, “The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.”
Cole: Put a cap on emission and sanction it is a good approach in an ideal world, where politicians don’t exist. We’ve been grandfathering our way out of it. The traders are buying to sell them in future at higher premiums to governments who may not have achieved their reduction targets. Where is carbon reduction in all this?
[video of two fat men kicking a tin can back and forth between their yards]
Cole: Governments shouldn’t be allowed to keep acting like morons who think they can restructure their way out of it, keep on exchanging credits, and fill our books with stats and activity, but do something about it, it’s not an ethics issue so much as a stupidity issue, with all of us on the same planet we are all in the same neighborhood, selling your garbage to your neighbor means it stays in the neighborhood, selling and buying of garbage makes little sense then especially when you have been given the mandate to do something about it and not just take turns holding it and waste people’s money and human race’s limited time, doing that.
Cole: These have all become games,
Cole: We have sucked up everybody’s money, and we have been playing games with it, so unfounded and complex that now it’s has secretly gone absolutely mad, but we cant tell nobody, when a person who actually earned his living, with which we play our games comes asking for his money, he just cant track where his money is in the game, and it is subtextually told to him that he cant have his money back, because people who have it are too busy playing with it.
Cole: We keep getting opportunities for solutions and we keep converting them to trades, making money out of them, we never solve the problems, all these unsolved problems is our legacy to our children.
Cole: We’d be sending them with money in their hands to deserts with nothing left to buy there.
Cole: Our children would need this Planet need its trees, its rivers, its sparrows, glaciers.
You remember when you came with that asbsurd idea of using our associate’s computer farms to automate arbitrage transactions and in no time we would have as much money as we want.
Cole: You know that idea is not totally absurd? And that, without ever having to predict anything. You know our people on Wall Street are putting super computers at work for risk management, but really the aim is to predict better. We are able to predict universal phenomena with those things. But if there was ever a system that could predict stock market, it would kill it. If there is nothing to speculate than the business of speculating would die immediately. There would be nothing to hide, no waiting till quarterly figures are out. It would all stay online, updated. Our financial people who rely on things staying complicated and hidden and amenable to speculation, our rating companies, would all go bust, when everything is always known.
But you know that may never happen, a computer that can predict universe may never be able to predict our stock market, you know why?
Cole: Because we don’t want them to.
Cole: It’s, because we ourselves keep changing things. The chase to predict better, is a show put up for common folks, the chase has no logic behind it.
Cole: A dog chasing its own tail, won’t ever be able to bite it, computers or no computes.
Cole: You know what happened to those black box scientists, Swarovski had the last laugh, like Buffets and the likes always do.
Cole: We’ve gotta learn something from these old timers, there are no short cut, none without pitfalls.
Cole: I can’t take responsibility for all that, but I can for myself. That’s what I’m gonna do.
Cole: Rather me than my children.
Apprentice: “A dog chasing its own tail, won’t ever be able to bite it, computers or no computes.” hmmm may I suggest something better?
Cole: Better? As in?
Apprentice: “A dog chasing its own tail, won’t ever be able to bite it, byes or no bytes.”
[smiles]