#12: The Day Ryan Started Masturbating

And why it has public policy implications

When I was in college, I was half the weight I am now. I was so thin that if I wore a T-shirt and the wind blew against me, you could count my ribs. Even though I had normal ribs, I was embarrassed by this — especially in my early days in Fergusson College, Pune, which I came to straight from a boys school called Bishop’s School.

Fergusson had girls! And they could count my ribs if I wore a t-shirt and the wind blew against me! What is one to do?

This was one reason I liked winters. You could wear multiple layers. But in summer, I thought more about the wind than anyone I know. It was personal.

When I would finish classes — wait, I never attended classes — when I finished hanging out or whatever I went to college to do, I would have a choice to make. If you know the layout of the place, imagine this: I am standing besides the main building, and the entrance to the campus is at my back. If I turn right, I can go to the Fergusson canteen. If I turn left, I can walk all the way past Gokhale Institute and IMDR to the tapri outside and have tea there.

What is my heuristic for deciding, you ask? It isn’t vibe or mood or anything like that. It’s the direction of the wind.

Meet My Friend, Ryan

I was not alone in my thinness. There was also a chap called Ryan, who lived in the same hostel block as me when I shifted to the hostel. He was religious, didn’t seem to care about girls or books or music, and had as many bones in his rib cage as I did. He didn’t share my self-awareness of this gruesome defect that made us both unlovable and destined to live and die alone. He did have his hang-ups, especially when it came to religion, but more on that later.

First, I must answer the question on why I didn’t do something about my thinness if I was so bothered by it. Well, what to do? I ate normal food, even good food, and when I was in school, my mother would put fish pulao in my tiffin box. This is a digression, but I suddenly remembered that fish pulao. I have not had fish pulao like it in 30 years. I have not even thought about it.

Anyway, this is circa 1990, so there is no gym culture etc. And I’m eating everything. What else can I do?

When I was in school, a rich classmate named Zubin told me that I had a great frame, and if I worked out, I could have an amazing body and all the girls would want to be with me. He said he could help me with this — he was super-rich, and had a separate gym and outhouse in his family estate, and there were rumours that many girls from St Mary’s and St Joseph’s would go there to party alone with him. He was 14.

I didn’t follow his advice for two reasons. One, it involved work, and I am half-Bengali. I didn’t want to work. Two, he said girls would like me, and I already knew this could never happen. He was selling snake oil.

Ryan seemed to share my attitude to exercise. So imagine my surprise when I walked past his room in the hostel one day, and his door was open, and he was doing push-ups.

I blinked a few times, held on to the open door to support myself, and stared at him. He finished, and looked up at me from the floor.

“What are you doing?” I asked, betrayed.

“Push-ups.”

“I can see that, but why?”

Now Ryan sat up.

“Amit, I masturbated.”

“What?”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“But what does that have to do with doing pushups?”

I jerked off 104 times a day or suchlike back then. I was an expert in the subject through lived experience. I didn’t get the connection.

Now Ryan stood up.

He came close to me and said, in a tone of great seriousness: “Amit, masturbation is a sin.”

“So?”

“So I have decided that whenever I commit a sin, I will punish my body and exercise to repent for my sins. The punishment for masturbation is 25 pushups.”

I didn’t know what to say. I knew religion was nuts, but this was my first direct encounter with the nuttiness. I backed out of the room slowly and walked out of the hostel. Both the canteen and the tapri were in the same direction from here, and I set off in that direction as the wind blew against my lonely soul.

Six months later, Ryan was buff. These were the days before gymming, remember. And yet, he had that kind of a body. Muscles everywhere, and when he stood up straight, it was like a Greek statue had come to life and was speaking in a squeaky voice about how the Bible is its favourite book and you don’t need to read anything else. Clearly he had committed many sins, and repented for them all.

When Ryan and I walked together in college, the girls would giggle as we passed by, not in derision at my ribs but in nervous excitement about this divine hunk placed improbably in their vicinity.

Varun Kumar Sinha Wants to Know

Then one day, a fellow hostelite from Patna named Varun Kumar Sinha came to me.

“Amit, I would like to talk with you,” he announced. “It is very important.”

The last time he had said this to me, he had wanted advice on how to propose to a girl. I don’t know why he had come to me for that. I had barely even spoken to a girl. But I was known to be well-read and smart, so he came, and I gave him advice. In fact, I prodded him to propose in my presence, because we had no internet and smartphones then, and were starved for entertainment. He proposed. He told her that he loved her and he wanted to marry her, and he also loved her parents, who he had never met, and he wanted to marry them too. She never spoke to him again.

“Yes, how can I help you?”

“Amit, that guy, Ryan, he’s a friend of yours, isn’t he? You’ve been hanging out with him for a long time.”

“Yes, that is true.”

“Amit, he has changed. What a body! Amit, tell me his secret. How did he build that body? What can I do to have a body like that?”

“It’s simple,” I said.

“What what what?”

“You have to masturbate.”

Ryan’s Masturbation and Public Policy

Now, it turned out that Varun Kumar Sinha was an experienced masturbator himself, and did not buy my explanation that Ryan had a good body because he masturbated. Correlation does not imply causation. And therein lies the public policy lesson in this story.

First A happens, and then B happens, but it doesn’t mean that A caused B. (This fallacy is known as post hoc ergo propter hoc.)

Or A and B happen together, and you decide that A caused B. (This is known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc, which in the context of the subject of this post, is a suitable name.)

Sometimes people even reverse the actual cause and effect. Michael Crichton calls this the “Wet Streets Cause Rain” effect.

We see this mistake being commited around us all the time. Most irrational beliefs come out of this. We fall ill with an ailment that gets better on its own, we pop sugar pills, we get better, and voila, the sugar pills are medicine. Or we are in a low phase in our lives, we pray to God, events regress to the mean, things get better, and voila, somebody up there likes me.

In public policy, people commit this fallacy all the time — often knowingly, to push their own narrative. Dear Leader was heading the government when Covid happened, Covid blew over, Dear Leader’s wise leadership brought the country out of Covid. That kind of thing.

This is muddy in the social sciences because causation is often impossible to establish. Shruti Rajagopalan once gave me an example that illustrates this. Let’s say you want to find out if putting a coin in a container of water raises the water level. How do you find this out?

In the hard sciences, you’d have a laboratory, you’d create a controlled environment, and carry out the experiment with the coin and a beaker of water. You’d get reliable results.

In the social sciences, you’re dropping the coin into a large swimming pool with 800 people bouncing around inside with a heavy downpour overhead, and you’re hoping to get reliable results.

It’s that difficult in the real world, because there are so many variables involved and you can’t control them all. So you carry out a policy that is supposed to help a specific group of people, but those people are also affected by a million other things. If their condition gets better, you don’t know if it’s because of your policy or a million other things. If it gets worse, does that mean the policy doesn’t work? Hard to say, and we never know the counterfactuals.

In the social sciences, in fact, if you quote the laws of physics and speak about how dropping a coin in water will of course raise the level of the water, someone will surely contradict you and point to studies that say otherwise.

Politics and ideology depend on building narratives, so post-hoc and cum-hoc are happening all the time. We should always be skeptical of these narratives, and watch out for these fallacies, as Varun Kumar Sinha was. Ryan’s masturbation was not the reason for Ryan’s amazing body.

Housekeeping: In my last post, I mentioned that this one would be about the creator economy. As you can see, it is not. The next one will be. In fact, it is half-written, but I woke up today with this memory from college, and asked myself why only I should suffer from the burden of remembering it. So I shared it with you, and now it’s yours as well.

PS. Reader Vatshal Raval, inspired by this post, has come up with the superb comic below!