Equitable and fair institutions are the foundation of modern democracies. Bias, as referring to “inclination or prejudice against one person or group, especially in a way considered to be unfair” is naturally anathema to such ideals. Unfortunately, efforts to reduce impact of bias have been slow and difficult. This is because it is scientifically acknowledged that humans are innately inclined to bias. A significant share of those biases isn’t even known to persons who are supposed to hold them: hence called ‘unconscious bias’. It is also established in many scientific studies that members of a group which was supposed to be biased against also hold the same biases towards their own group (e.g., women being biased against women). So why is bias so inherent part of our biology? Consider the early man in Savannah. He is suspicious of – as in, biased against – people who don’t look like him, bcause people who don’t look like him are usually from different tribes and people from different tribes are usually at war with his tribe. It’s s survival heuristic his brain has evolved. This is no different from other heuristics we are still encumbered with in the modern world which have roots in the early environment, such as ‘fat is tasty’, ‘sweet s edible’, etc. One way we can model bias is by borrowing from one of the canonical formulae in statistics: Bayes’ Law. In English, and in the context of this discussion, this means that my magnitude of bias against a certain group, after observing an incident related to that group, is the output of multiplication of two numbers: what’s the magnitude of bias I held against that group before the incident (“prior”), and how directionally aligned that incident was to direction of bias (“evidence”). This change in magnitude of bias is called Bayesian update. In other words, if I was highly biased against the group, but recently observed an incident where a person/group behaved in the way opposite of what bias would have expected, then my bias against that group will reduce. How can we leverage this Bayesian perspective to understand our fight against bias? One way focuses not on reducing bias, but on reducing the impact of bias: by reducing reliance on human decision making by better use of data; and by tracking the impact of bias on outcomes, and aiming for equity in outcomes by giving preferential treatments to protected groups. However, the majority of sociological and psychological methods of reducing bias typically focus on making people aware of biases, reiterating the need for reducing bias, and counting on the moral compass for people to behave differently (first two articles on the Google search). In Bayesian formulation, these efforts focus on reducing prior and are valid means to combat bias. Yet, prior is often formed in early childhood and adolescent experiences, and is heavily influenced by family, upbringing, and peer group. Hence, changing the prior when the employee joins the corporate workforce may be a tad too late. However, little effort is done on exposing more favourable evidence. Occasionally there is a conversation to have biased people interact with people from the protected groups so that they realize that their biases are not fair. This largely occurs in a context where people are not just biased but actively antagonist to each other, but rarely in a corporate context. Nevertheless, the value of this in reducing bias cannot be underemphasized. Some ways evidence can be introduced in the workplace setting to counteract against prior is by designing teams and interactions which forces different people to interact with each other. Multiple repeated interactions will help move prior sufficiently to reduce bias over time. Reshuffling teams or seating to make them mix-gendered teams, for an instance, could achieve this outcome. There is a different Bayes’ Law in mind of each person holding bias for each of the protected groups. While we talked about affecting prior and evidence, we shouldn’t forget the concept of ‘group’. Workplace efforts to reduce biases are competing from Bayesian update of bias from evidence/incidents from the external world as well, which makes this a challenging task. Hence reframing the group into smaller groups actively can also reduce bias, at least in the workplace setting. For instance, group of “women” can be reframed as group of “working women”. Generating positive evidence for working women can be easier in business settings – and will have less competition from the external world – and so will help in reducing bias faster, even as we may not be able to reduce bias against all women”. How to do that in practice? We will have to modify our language, word choices, and reframe the context. While this is not ideal – none of this really is – but we are working with what we can manage effectively, and hopefully eventually reach the ideal outcome in long term. In the end, we must remember that tendency to be biased was a useful primordial heuristic, thus innate in human nature, and can only be reduced to the extent of the world we live in, but continuous focus on bettering prior, positive evidence, reduced level of human involvement in decision making, and reframing the group context will surely make a dent. It already has.

My weight loss journey for the last 6 years, and drastic loss in last 1 year

Before (Oct 2018) and After (Mar 2020) - from 78 kgs to 65 kgs

Here is my diet plan

Main principles

• Avoid junk food, processed food, packaged food
• Minimize refined/white sugar as much as possible, including honey
• Increase portions of nuts, vegetables, and fibers in the diet
• Reduce carbohydrate intake, specially avoid bad kind of carbohydrate during dinners
• Reduce milk intake as much as possible, limit to buttermilk, curd, and paneer wherever possible
• Increase protein intake significantly
• Eat very healthy breakfast, in a small portion, or skip the breakfast altogether and don't eat till noon
• Eat moderate portions during lunch
• Eat light dinner, and do not eat anything after 8pm
• Take fixed portions in the plate, and don't go for second serving
• Chew slowly, enjoy the food, avoid distractions
• Drink lots of water, about 4-6 liters daily
• Keep 3-4 hours gap before mealtime and bedtime

Cross-published at https://www.tripoto.com/trip/planning-your-own-foreign-trip-with-sri-lanka-as-example-5bfb9f5804051

This guide is about how I went about planning my own Sri Lanka trip. My actual itinerary and travelogue will be published in a separate post after I complete the trip. This is supposed to help you provide resources and steps in planning any trip your own, and is based on a series of steps I follow when I need to plan any foreign trip.

When and Duration

The first thing to plan is when you will travel, and for how long. Open-ended search on Skyscanner (e.g. from Chennai) can tell you what's the cheapest airfare you can expect to your desired destination. Now you can compare your own airfare for the proposed period against this to decide if your period of travel and any excess airfare is acceptable for you or not. Based on your vacations, leaves, personal desires, and so on you can choose to pay little (or very) more than the cheapest fare for your proposed period. You can also play around a few other months to check what's suitable costing for you. You can also go to Wikitravel to find if your period will have good enough weather. This decides your when.

New go to few tour operators to find out duration of ready-made packages to your destination. Selecting your holiday destination on (e.g.) MakeMyTrip, TravelTriangle, ThomasCook, and SOTC can give you idea of typical duration (and cost) of trip. For Sri Lanka, this was about 4-7 days. Quick Google search or Tripoto search can confirm your decision. This whole thing shouldn't take more than 15 minute as our focus is just overall duration and not cost and not itinerary. For Sri Lanka, I realized that less than 5 is too short and more than 10 is probably too long. This decides your duration

Flight Tickets

Flights being most expensive component, you want to nail this down first. Create permutations for duration based on your decision, say 22-28, or 23-29, or 22-29, etc. to find suitable option based on fare and convenience. I usually look at few websites like paytm.com, easemytrip.com, goibibo.com, airline's own website, and few offers if available on credit cards I hold and book the tickets. This step can take 1-2 hours across days.

You may be tempted to try out many websites and offers, but my lesson is that these days prices are pretty consistent across portals and any offer is mostly teaser and benefit will be lost in transaction fee or convenience fee. Prices tend to go up (Murphy's law) during your search period so you should just book within 1-2 days. Do keep in mind arrival and departure times of flights and travel times too (and not just airfare) since odd timings may add to hotel cost at origin station, or have the inconvenience of night wait at the airport, or cost of an extra meal, or unreasonable cost of airport transfer, and so on. Airfare cost alone isn't everything!

Your Itinerary

This is biggest and most time consuming process. Goal of this is to come up with cities you will stay in, and the number of days within each, and transport between cities. This step may take 4-40 hours of time depending on how much in detail you want to go!

You will have to read a lot! Refer itineraries on tour operators websites, pickyourtrail.com, tripoto.com itineraries, and TripAdvisor forum's to identify potential cities you may be interested in. You can plot these on Google Maps to plan a route which is roughly circular and doesn't require returning back, and minimizes overall travel distance and time. You can also get a broad sense of distance and travel times between places so that you can incorporate travel time between cities in your daily plans. You need to decide if the day of travel can also accommodate some sightseeing or will only be spent on travel due to distance and exhaustion.

Refer to TripAdvisor's Things to Do for those places to decide for yourself what things will interest you — not every tourist spot works for everyone, I like slow paced vacations, and not much interested in historical buildings, for example — and how long you think you need to cover those. Read TripAdvisor reviews of tourist spots and see pictures. Split things into 'Must See' and 'Good to See' and 'Avoid' options based on your preference, cost and reviews. This will broadly inform how many days are needed to cover each city. Do note that many places may have ticket cost which isn't easily available (may have to read few reviews), or free days (may have to check attraction's website), or closed days (e.g. every Tuesday), or limited opening (e.g. morning 10am-2pm) which you need to factor in deciding your local route. Use existing itineraries to double-check you duration at each city. At this stage, you can also drop a city from your plan, or choose between cities if you are in two minds. You will have to decide if you want to shift hotel at each city, or can cover one city with another city as base in day's round-trip.

For each place of stay, plot your sightseeing places on Google Maps to broadly understand the density of activities which will, later on, help guide your hotel location and need for local transport.

Based on previous itineraries, your comfort level, and cost comparison you can also decide if you will drive your car (not an option for Sri Lanka), take public transport (an option if you are adventurous, in Sri Lanka), or have dedicated cab for the full duration. Documents on TripAdvisor's Sri Lanka forum have good information on this. Given that I was travelling with family and prioritized convenience, I chose to go with a dedicated cab.

Once your itineraries and places of interest are finalized, you will have to decide if you need to pre-book anything. For instance, Safari at National Parks in Sri Lanka may be pre-booked (but will cost extra) or booked via hotel or done on the spot. Similarly for Whale Watching tours at beaches.

Local Transport

Every country has different options with different cost, and you need to read a lot to find out what will work for you. Rome2Rio is a good portal to quickly get a list of various available options for local transport. As mentioned above, I decided to go with dedicated cab and hence shot an email to key tour operators Tangerine Tours, Red Dot Tours, Walkers Tour, and few others from google search. I also dropped an inquiry at srilankacaranddriverhire.com which is an informal collective of non-branded operators (link found from TripAdvisor's forum).

After comparing cost, few Q&A based on what is covered and what is not covered, and comparing cost of all day hire, or partial hire I decided to go with one operator. Before finalizing the operator, I read its review on Facebook and TripAdvisor, wherever possible, since not all operator have reviews. Be careful to not just go by star-rating but read reviews. It takes time but there are lots of fake reviews! Reviews which are not accompanied by description, or timed in short duration are suspect. You can even click on reviewers on FB to see their profile and ascertain if they are genuine tourists or not. I found many times operators or drivers or folks based in Sri Lanka themselves were giving 5 star to their page. I also found few operator having multiple FB pages. All these are unreliable in my mind, though of course I cannot claim that for certainty as I didn't avail their services.

You can also search on airport transfer options, based on your flight timings. Most airports will have taxis available 24x7 but public transport may be cheaper. You can go through the airport's website or search the internet to find suitable options. Your hotel may offer too though that's likely to be expensive. Pre-booking may work, or maybe expensive. Uber is omnipresent but every country has it's local taxi network as well.

As everywhere, evaluate options holistically for convenience and freedom and not just on price. You don't want to spoil you 100k vacations for saving 5k. Since vacations are experiences, day to day convenience matters a lot in making those memories happy or unhappy!

Hotels

Hotels may not be very expensive in overall cost of the trip, but have undue influence in your vacation experience. Different countries have different hotel booking websites which work better. booking.com, agoda.com, and kayak.com are good ones to start wtih. Airbnb can be explored and can come out cheaper for Europe and US, but for Asia, hotel operators have flooded listing on airbnb.com and it's not much different. Your map of tourist spots will come handy here and you can select few hotels based on budget, amenities, views, breakfast, and location on the map. Go through pictures and customer reviews of the hotel on TripAdvisor and Facebook to filter out some, and do remember to keep you 'fake review' detector on.

Do remember to email or call the hotel to confirm the booking, and don't just rely on booking portal's confirmation. Many a times inventory is not be updated or hotel may simply overbook and refuse you. You don't want to stuck searching at last minute in the foreign country. If you are staying longer at one place, or like to cook in, you can search a hotel with a kitchen. Hostels and dormitories are good options if you are single or have a tight budget.

Visa, Forex, and SIM Card

There are multiple guides on this on the web and this is a standard official process so you have to do what you have to do. For Europe, I have heard that some countries are more lenient than others in granting Schengen Visa so your itinerary should keep that in mind as a port of entry. For every other country, your Visa is specific to that country so you follow the official process. Sri Lanka Visa is online approval which took less than 30 min to fill and 5 min for approval.

These days you will be carrying a combination of foreign-currency pre-paid card and foreign-currency cash for your trip. Based on hotel cost, local transport cost, meal cost, attraction fee, and a healthy buffer you can estimate how much to carry. Depending on acceptance of card vs cash you can split your amount. For Sri Lanka, you need to convert into local currency in destination only and carrying USD is recommended, though INR may also be acceptable. TripAdvisor forums had good information on where to exchange money.

Similarly, local SIM card from airport, city, or pre-paid SIM card from your origin country can be taken based on price and convenience. For Sri Lanka, generally advise is to take local SIM from the city. You may search for telecom operator with decent coverage at cities in your itineraries. Google, google and google away!

Other Things

For some countries, you will be required to, or advised to take travel insurance and health insurance. Find suitable insurer from your origin country, or compare with WorldNomads. If you are self-driving, you need to find a convenient, reliable and cheap car rental company. Few other things to bother are transit visa, luggage allowance on your flight, and frequent flyer miles for your trip.

Plan and Unplan

There are generally two types of people in travel — those who plan everything, and those who leave everything impromptu. Depending on your persona and comfort level, you can plan further minute details of your day, or leave everything unplanned except flight tickets. Despite all the planning, you have to remember that things may take longer than expected, or unexpected hiccups may occur, or unplanned activities may be found interesting. Travel is for fun, and you shouldn't have to skip fun because you planned way too much! On the other hand, after visiting you may realize that somethings could have been done differently and better, and that's okay! Not everything will be perfect, and least you can do after coming back is to put your advise in travelogue to help someone else next time around!

I tried, and succeeded, in getting Learning License and Driving License in Bangalore without any intermediary and without any "under the counter" fee. Here is my experience related to Electronic City (KA-51) RTO in past one month.

Learner's License

1. Fill online application at Karnataka Transport portal.
1. You will have click on 'English' at top right few times to get the page in English. I filled application under Sarathi-3 system.
2. Really all they need is Application Number and few basic details. Application can only be done online and not on paper. You can either fill online and get printout or fill basic detail, submit, get application number, and then fill paper application.
3. If you need standard license, select MCWG (Motor-Cycle With Gear) and LMV (Light Motor Vehicle, Car, etc.). I had to make extra trip because I filled both Motor-Cycle With Gear and Without Gear but apparently first covers the second so both weren't wanted.
2. Provide supporting documents
1. Get right proof of age and address (original and copy)
2. Attach one photograph to application. Even though it asks you for 3 copies, they aren't required because you get photographed at RTO.
3. Go to RTO. Cash (Fee) counter opens until 12:30pm on Saturday and 2:30pm on Weekdays so you want to have 2-3 hours with you for whole process. Try to reach by 11am. New location in Begur Rd has functioning Enquiry counter so they try to help.
4. First pay the fee in Cash Counter 2 or 3 showing your application. I was charged 30/- for each class, 60/- in total. This was before fee hike happened in early January 2017. They will provide require receipts, called "challans". Cashier didn't try to overcharge me, but is direct and not-friendly. Given his workload though, I wouldn't complain, and he will answer question if you ask.
5. Get into huge queue to get your documents verified at Room 1. Staple (or Pin, available at Enquiry desk) your documents with challan at top, application in middle, proofs in the end. While your time reading about road signs hanging around.
6. In about 30 minutes you will enter room, and get your turn with Assistant Inspector of some sort. This guy was very particular about anyone not stepping an inch ahead of yellow waiting line but was clinical about process. If your documents are in order, he will tick or sign on papers. He will ask to see both your hands flattened out on desk, perhaps to do "high quality" medical due diligence about your driving abilities. If you are missing a paper, he will ask you to get one. Anything forms, envelopes, etc. which you need to buy can be obtained from tea-shops outside, of course, at heavy premium. You can usually skip the long queue if you are coming with additional documents on the same day.
7. Next you will go to Biometric Room 2 (nearby Room 1) where after showing your packet, and waiting few minutes, you will be photographed and thumb-printed. This shouldn't take much time.
8. You will be asked to go down (find stairs) and go to a place which is crowded with people waiting for their LL Test. Guy outside on desk will check your papers again and ask you to sign in register. As this stage they made me buy prepaid postage envelope (17/- Stamp, 30/- price, a trip to tea-shop again) but I realized that it's not required and others didn't have it.
9. Test is, of course, a joke. I had imagined computerized or written test, but I just got into Inspector's room with 50 others and he spend next 15 minutes explaining and asking to random people meaning of various signs. No one failed, and he was very particular about cautionary signs indicating caution "200 meters before". If you stay towards end of crowd, you can just get by mumbling something and trying to appear inconspicuous.
10. End of session, he will collect the document packet and you are done for the day. 2 sheets of LL, one for each MCWG and LMV will be available in a week's time. If you need to learn or take classes, you need to collect these and go about practicing. I didn't so I could've just collected them on day I applied for DL, and saved myself a trip to RTO.
11. If you don't make errors, you can do all this in one visit and 3-4 hours, which is achievement of the sort. Collect your LLs from Room 4 in few days. No identification needed really nor any register entry made, so anyone can collect anyone else's.

Driving License

IDP

Cycle of re-incarnation would have you believe that you will reap, as early as within next life, what you sow. While this is certainly a fancy notion, this isn’t truth by any notion of reasonableness. Hence even if you wouldn’t have enjoyed what you do now – for example, luxuries of material progress, benefits of freedom struggle, developments of modern technologies – there is hardly an obligation, let alone nagging sense of guilt, for doing something for future generation.

May be I am selfish but I’ve got only one life. Barely 40 years of pleasurable existence (excluding pre-puberty and senility). There is nothing wrong in me to want to live only life the way I like. I didn’t ask to born, so there isn’t any purpose I am supposed to fulfill. If I am dead tomorrow, why should I even care what happens to rest of the world and rest of the people (and ants, mosquitoes, etc. for that matter). I wouldn’t even know and feel ever.  Why should my narrow sense of kinship with fellow humans overshadow my sense of connectedness with the entire Universe? Should I feel depressed by falling of a star somewhere?

Admittedly, my progeny and kins will inhabit this planet after I’ve departed. Yet, what I do for future generation wouldn’t benefit them as much as what I do for my kids directly. If I think about it, I haven’t even met my descendants and I am not kind of person who gets worked up on what his bloodline is going to suffer in future. In that way, I am kind of a model citizen, beyond narrow interests of family and clan, equally indifferent to all.

Some will say that had this attitude been taken by our forefathers we wouldn’t have had what we do. But, who really knows? Could we have not been better? Did all those who worked on what they did do it for future generation i.e. us? What they did was their choice. My choice is to make optimal decision based on information in my hand at this juncture of my existence.

Assuredly, do what you like, and if it benefits next bunch of people in the world, well and good, but if it doesn’t, don’t worry. Want to buy plastic bags and drink water in paper cups? Be my guest (though you might want to check if it will start hurting you in this generation!) It’s a beauty of this big world that there will be some people who will disagree with even the best construed arguments. My role is to convince you that I (and you too) shouldn’t worry about future generation, with awareness that some of you wouldn’t get convinced, and end up doing (possibly) something good for future generation, which makes my not worrying not as troublesome as I could be. Ironically, success of my argument depends on the failure of my argument. But, either way, who gives a damn?