It’s a little too late to write about the Tokyo Olympics. Everything that could be said has been said - It has been the best Olympics in terms of the medal count, we got our first gold in track and field events, and we won a hockey medal after 40 years. Even in places where we didn’t win, the fight shown by the Indian athletes was phenomenal, whether it was the women’s hockey team, Deepak Punia in Wrestling, or Aditi Ashok in Golf. By all measures, the Tokyo Olympics has been a big success.

There is another beautiful thing that happened at the Tokyo Olympics. All the Indian athletes, at the end of their game, whether they won or lost, ended it with a Namaste, be it was P V Sindhu after every Badminton game or Mirabai Chanu after every lift. I later learned that it was part of a sensitization program that Joy Bhattacharjya ran for the Indian contingent just before the start of the event, and he recommended it to all the athletes.

May is designated as the mental awareness and wellness month. As we end the month, it’s a good excuse to reflect upon the state of our mental health. Of the various aspects of mental wellness, the one I find most interesting is the effect of sleep on our mental well-being.

A good night’s sleep does wonders to the brain and the body. It enhances your memory, makes you more creative, makes you look more attractive, keeps you slim, and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia, wards off colds and the flu, reduces your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. It even makes you feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious.

Is there a more magical drug that can do all of this? Any of this?

Around the same time last year, I wrote that collectively we are going through the most challenging time of our lives. Back then, the country was in its first big lockdown since the emergency and at the cusp of what is now commonly known as the First Wave. At that time, there were around 100 covid cases in Bangalore, yet it felt like a lot. Saying I was wrong would probably be a huge understatement. Standing where we are today and what we have gone through in the last year, last April pales in comparison to where we find ourselves today.

The sad truth is that as a country, we have been found sleeping on the handle. Despite having a lucky escape from the first wave last year, we simply didn’t prepare ourselves for the second wave, which has hit us hard. There are no beds in the hospitals, no oxygen supply in the ICUs, and no medicines for the common man. And while the vaccine is out, there is simply no supply. Amit Varma captures this beautifully in his column where he writes, “our politicians have failed us, our bureaucrats have failed us, policymakers have failed us, the dysfunctional state stands exposed, and in so many ways, we have failed each other, but one thing that has not failed us is science.”

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact. - Warren Buffet

In 1974, Paul Slovic, a world-class psychologist and a peer of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking Fast and Slow, highly recommended!), decided to evaluate the effect of information on decision making. Slovic gathered eight professional handicappers and asked them to predict the winners of horse races. The task was to predict winners of 40 horse races in 4 consecutive rounds. In the first round, the gamblers would be given five pieces of information of their choice on each horse that would vary from handicapper to handicapper. E.g., one handicapper might ask for the jokey’s years of experience, while another might ask for the horse’s age or the fastest speed achieved by a horse. Slovic asked them to predict not only the winner of each race but also their level of confidence in their prediction.

Image credits - Quora

Let’s be honest. Most of us care only about ourselves. We don’t give two hoots about how the others feel. Evolutionarily, we are hard-wired to optimize for ourselves. In the African Savanna, when chased by wild animals, we would protect ourselves sacrificing a fellow tribe member, if needed. That gene has survived and evolved over the years, and it has made us very self-centered.