Vinay Kumaran

I took a road test for a Driver's License for the 6th time today (24th June, 2017). I passed. It has been an unhappy series of events. My first driver's test was when I was in college. I must have been about 19. I had taken a series of lessons from a driving school in Munirka. I had also been driving the family car under my mother's supervision. My father had stopped driving by then. The driving school had not done much by way of actually teaching me to drive but they would set up the logistics of taking the test. The test would be at a place called 'Majnu Ka Tila' in the far north of Delhi. A driver was engaged for the day to take me there. The car to be used for the test would be provided by the driving school. Their people would be there to organize things and presumably to persuade the examiner to be nice to their students. The first few students went through the test uneventfully. It was a fairly basic test. They just wanted to make sure you we could drive...

Where do morals and ethics come from and is there a difference between them? If you ask a religious person they will say that morals come from religious books and represent a kind of code of conduct handed to us by God. They use the Bible or the Quran or the Upanishads or the Torah or whatever their religion prescribes as their moral compass. Whatever is written in the Holy Book is God's message to humans and should be followed without question as a matter of faith. This can be corrupted and has often been used to justify Crusades or Jihad. Killing someone who belonged to a different faith became 'moral'. Religious people are deeply distrustful of atheists. They think that since we do not accept the 'word of God' as given in the 'Holy Book', we must be immoral people. They seem to think that without religion (fear of God) there is nothing to prevent humans from killing, raping, stealing and the various other crimes that their 'Holy Book' proscri...

A child is riding a tricycle wearing a helmet with a disgustingly smug expression on her face. She looks across at the road and sees a woman (presumably her mother) driving a car. They progress side by side for a while. A boy riding a skateboard gets out of the way of the tricycle. The car pulls into the driveway outside the garage. The tricycle also reaches the spot and spills a bucket of paint. How is this supposed to make someone more likely to buy that model car? Why are advertisements in the US so bad?

I've done a fair bit of driving since I've come to the US. I drove from Pittsburgh to Ann Arbor to Brooklyn (in Michigan) to Cleveland and back again to Pittsburgh and more recently, to New Jersey and back to Pittsburgh. It did not take long to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road or using units of measurements which make no sense (miles). In most cases, I found that the speed limits posted on the roads were sensible limits and more or less the speed I considered to be reasonably safe. Unfortunately, nearly everyone else on the road wanted to drive considerably faster than the posted speed limit. There were periods of time when I found a truck driving at the speed limit (for cars) in the slow lane and I was able to spend long periods of time behind the truck without having to worry about being overtaken or changing lanes. At other times, I found myself on State Highways with only a single lane. Here I determinedly drove at the speed limit (typically 35 or 45 miles...

What this country (USA) needs is a bit of improvisation from time to time instead of a programmed formulaic response to situations. Driving back from Michigan, we stopped at my friend Praveer's house in Cleveland. As we were about to leave, we noticed that there was a puncture in one of the tires. Fortunately, there was a shop nearby for tire repair and we went there. The guy at the shop looked at the tire and said "yes, that'll have to be replaced" and began looking at the other tires (which were fine) and measuring their tread marks. I asked him what he was looking for and he said "if the treads on the other tires are worn to less than (some strange fraction of inches) then we'll have to replace all the tires." I pointed out that the car had done less than 10,000 miles (why do these people insist on not using the perfectly logical metric system?) and that it was unlikely that all the tires were worn out and needed to be replaced. Now if this was...

As I drove from Pittsburgh to Ann Arbor yesterday, I was ruminating on the differences between road traffic in India and that in the US. The highways are generally good although it seems to me that they are not in as good condition as they were 10 years ago. Maybe Trump has a point when he talks about decaying infrastructure. The speed I felt was safe was about 90 to 100 kmph. However it was impossible to drive at that speed even in the slow lane on the right. Trucks (which are supposed to have a speed limit of about 85) would come right up behind me, then swing over to the faster lane (which they are not supposed to do in most stretches of the highway) and swing back into the slow lane sufficiently close to my car to emphasize that they were not happy about having to perform the maneuver. Those trucks are huge. We passed one truck which was carrying five more trucks. It was like a rigid train. I changed tactics and increased my speed to just under the speed limit. The speed limit i...

An earlier version of this article had some unsubstantiated information taken taken from newspaper articles as well as a statement based on rumour which was inappropriate to post on a public forum. This version has been edited to remove the contentious content. A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association reminded me of an article I had written for 'Borborygmi' and later posted (with permission) on my Quora blog. The article in JAMA points out that the 'pay for service' model of compensation for doctors creates a 'perverse incentive' to perform unnecessary investigations or procedures. A fixed salary seems like the best model with a degree of accountability built in. http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2623619 My article is reproduced below. The Great Depression, Perverse Incentives and Liver Transplantation  I spent five years in the US from 2002 to 2007 at a time when the country was preparing to descend into one ...