(Foreign) Travel Best Practices

Below, I share a few observations and insights about the do's and don'ts of travelling, particularly travelling to other countries.

I start with a few disclaimers. One, I don't want to pass even a covert message that I am some kind of a professional globe-trotter who has hordes of knowledge about what works and what doesn't when you are travelling. Two, this post is not meant to be a compendium of travelling tips. These are a few of the observations very specific from my experience. Three, what I say below applies to people who are travelling for business or tourism; but may be not to those who are emigrating. Four, this is aligned to Indians travelling abroad, but may apply well to others.

Avoiding Goof-ups

One of the things which can mar a travel like nothing else are moments of anxiety. Delays, missed flights, lost luggage, passport, documents, money, getting stranded in an unknown/strange/dangerous place ... these are all best avoided. What can we do to avoid them.

Prepare/plan early. Preparing a foreign travel is very complex. Arranging funds, tickets, visa are the most important aspects of this preparation. Air tickets are much cheaper if purchased early. Finding out about the visa application process for the country of visit will help save last moment trepidations. It's always good to get in touch with someone in the circle who has either travelled or has stayed in the concerned country. Several finer details like the best way to travel inland, best hotels, places to visit etc. are best got from a person who has gone through the whole thing, rather than just browsing the Internet. Early bookings save money, but come with committing to a plan. Beyond a point, too fine grained a plan could backfire in several ways. First, it definitely rules out certain possibilities. Second, it may suffer over-fitting problem, in the sense that too much detailing makes it brittle. Such over-fitted plans may crumble if one of the components of it fails. As an example, there was a delay in our Bangalore-Heathrow flight. My colleagues had booked their onward train tickets for a train leaving within 3 hours of the original landing time of the flight. Obviously, they missed their train. In the process, they lost several hundred pounds.

Hence, it's more a matter of trade-off. Save money and last minute anxiety by planning early. But keep it sufficiently flexible for the novelty and fault-tolerance aspect. To be precise, I would say, it would be a good idea to make all the major bookings (e.g. long haul flights, and multi-night hotel bookings) early, and leave out the finer details (e.g. how will I spend my weekend in XYZ?) to later research.

Be connected. While travelling to a new place, it's good to know someone who stays there. Have their contact details with yourself, and share yours with them. Let's also accept that travelling abroad is expensive, and if we are to book hotels for every night we stay there, it would drill a hole in our pockets. Staying for a night or two at a friend's place is not merely a trick to save money. It provides a much needed window to catch up. And yes, don't forget to ask them clearly about their convenience and willingness to host you. Try and not be a burden.

Have backup plans. Identifying components of a plan which can fail, and providing backup options, is also a part of good planning. For example, if a flight/train gets cancelled, and you get stranded in a city, it would be good if there's someone in the city who would be ready to give shelter for the night, or you have enough foreign currency with you to be able to rent a hotel room.

Single-process. In airports, railway stations, buses, etc. it's best to avoid haste. Getting hassled and hasty is a very effective preparation to drop something (e.g. money, passport, credit card), or forget something (hotel room key inside your hotel room). I typically go very slow, and take my time to satisfy myself that I am done with doing one thing, before proceeding to the next. For example, if I decide to take coffee at the airport, I sit and have it in peace, and then proceed to security checking. Similarly, at the ticket counters, ATMs etc., I handle my things in a completely single threaded manner: tickets, travel card, cash, luggage. Remembering the 5S principle (of 'a place for everything and everything in its place') is a great idea. Of course, this means that I slow things down, and have to make up for the time by starting earlier than others. This, to me, never seems like a bad idea. I also am conscious that this sometimes comes across as clumsy and irritates bystanders. I consciously avoid feeling agitated by annoyed stares from strangers in such situations.

Your Attitude

Meeting with foreigners outside one's own country is sometimes a source of anxiety. How should we behave with foreigners, particularly when we aren't in the safety of our own country whose methods and means are well-known to us? I have found the following very helpful.

Pride. Wear your cultural pride on your sleeves. We know of many problems in our country. There's no harm talking about them. But there's a thin line between being critical, and being downright disparaging. Being reasonably knowledgeable about one's own country and culture earns you respect. People seem to find India particularly interesting. So, it's nice to be able to help others with interesting bits of information. But there's no need to fake knowledge. On a related note, don't accept outright racist or discriminatory behaviour. But, don't raise hell if you merely suspect discrimination. Be forgiving to involuntary mistakes.

Curiosity and respect for other cultures. Equally important is not to put up a jingoistic face. Some of the most engaging exchanges with foreigners happen when they compare notes about their countries and cultures in a pleasant and scholarly manner. There should be a sense of equality and mutual respect in conversations between people from different geographies and cultures.

Things which always work. There are certain attitudes which always work (at least in my knowledge), regardless of culture and geography. A happy and smiling demeanour is way more effective and impressive than immaculate dressing and stylish mannerisms. Politeness, helpfulness, honesty are culture neutral attitudes which will always earn you respect and acceptance. If you are a guest to someone, appreciating their hospitality is a very right thing to do. Good work ethics like punctuality, keeping of appointments, concern for quality are always good in any professional setting.

Trying to fit in. Trying to blindly imitate someone's dressing style, mannerism and accent is useless and disgraceful. A decent, clean dress is good enough for almost any place. It doesn't make sense to be overly concerned about appropriate dressing beyond a point. Of course, if the climate demands a particular way of dressing, by all means, you should be flexible to change your dressing style. Also, reasonable degree of cleanliness and personal hygiene is important. Avoiding smelly clothes, leaving the bathroom clean after use, are more of little gestures of courtesy to people around you than anything. Similarly, faking accent is a useless ploy. Instead, if you are a good and articulate communicator, you are going to be miles ahead of anyone who breaks his head in sounding like an American or a British. In short, while we all are humans and are fundamentally similar, we should celebrate our little variations and try not to be apologetic about being different from others at a surface level.

Things to avoid

Certain things which are less of a concern in our (and in one's own) country may be more seriously taken elsewhere. It's good to be careful and conservative on such things. Avoid giving frank opinions on religion, sex and politics until an environment of trust has been developed. Don't take photos of strangers if possible. Never post the photos of people, particularly when seen in a family setting, on social networks, unless with express permission. Be careful in your exhibition of affection to people. In India, touching a person of opposite sex affectionately still raises eyebrows, but doing so with a child is acceptable in general. Elsewhere (where women are an empowered lot, and children are more vulnerable), the scenario seems quite the opposite. A shake of hands -- whether it's a person of the opposite sex, a child, or an elder -- to express any form of warmth is quite safe in most cases. Going anyway beyond this should be done after sufficient evidence of its acceptability.

Staying out of the way of dangerous/illegal behaviour, e.g. getting excessively drunk, driving without license or training, drugs, visits to prostitutes, trying to carry illegal/prohibited substances through the ports etc. is definitely a good suggestion.

Site-seeing

In my opinion, the most fascinating aspect of any place are its people and their lives. Ask yourself the question: what's unique about the place? Prior reading and conversation with locals gives you a true idea, and helps you shape in your mind what it is about that place that you would really like to learn and experience: its art forms, food, history, geography? Merely standing in front of a monument and clicking a photo is one of stupidest ways of wasting your time and money. Sorry, my personal opinion. In my recent visit to UK, I deliberately avoided London, though I passed twice through it. London is a major hub, and I anticipate several occasions in future to visit it. Instead, I chose to get up and close with the British countryside, its town-life and its history and culture. I had drives and walks in the wild fields and hills. I walked miles on the pavements of York. I spent time in the living rooms of British people, both recent immigrants and long-term settlers. I couldn't be any happier with my decision.

In summary, I would say that while travelling it's a good idea to try and maximise experience and enjoyment, staying within safe limits. A visit to a new place, whether within the country or outside, should be a source of personal enrichment, rather than a tick on a map, and matter of show-off. And this happens through taking a genuine interest in the place and its people, rather than posing for photographs before famous places.

Arguing for Objective Definition

Abstract

This article talks about my idea about the relation of objectivity and science. After dwelling a bit upon how objectivity is the holy grail of scientific practice, we take the opposite stand wherein viewing and interpretation is not a matter that has been ignored and hushed up, but a subject of fascinating studies. We then discuss the question of what is the most significant characteristic of science. The purpose of this discussion would not specifically be to answer the question, but to analyse the undercurrents of the questions of objectivity in that. Finally, we make some simplistic prescriptions as to how scientists would make better scientists, not by hushing up the inherent subjectivity of their trade, but by capitalising upon it.

1 Objectivity in Science
“Not influenced by personal feelings or opinions, considering only facts.” That is the definition of the term ‘objective’ in Oxford dictionary. (Natural) Science (hereon referred to as just science) has come up as the de facto instrument of human race to create a body of knowledge which stands on such rigorous assessment that the possibility of its ever being contradicted can be
reduced to practically nil. The proof of this rigour has two vehicles – formal theory and experiments. In fact, the emphasis on the non-contradictability of scientific knowledge is so much that it has been decided to gradually shunt certain questions – by no means less interesting and challenging than any other – out of the purview of science study, at least for the present. These questions do not lend themselves well to a rigorous scientific study – at least
at the present time – due to the presence of one or more attributes which are difficult, if not impossible, to measure. Examples of such attributes – beauty, emotions, welfare etc. Such questions fall in the purview of arts and social sciences. We will devote a later section on developing more elaborate arguments about what could be a precise definition of science. For the present, the point of the matter is the stress laid on the need for objectivity in science.

What is behind the obsessive pursuit of objectivity in science? Philosophical beliefs of positivism, realism, dualism and idealism interplay with each other here to point us to the possible answer. In essence, the pursuit of science seems to rest on the belief that there is one unified truth about
everything. It may or may not be known or even knowable, but its independence from the knower is complete. That truth is absolute. There is an implicit claim in the idea of science that science is pursuit of the knowledge of that absolute truth.

2 Beyond Objectivity
We observe myriad things and events which are interesting and intriguing. However, their interestingness may often be associated with something beyond our power of measurement. Science refrains, in general, in claiming a central role in understanding such subjects. However, it hasn’t stopped any interested soul from pursuing such subjects. Let us use this section in iden-
tifying a set of such subjects. One important inference that can be drawn from this part of the discussion is that objectivity does not always count as the most important aspect of a scholarly pursuit.

2.1 Aesthetics and Art
Beauty, for instance, is intuitively a universally sensed attribute of various things. However, its actual immeasurability depends not only on its subjectivity, but also on the intractability of its physical origins. For example, it may be argued that a painting is beautiful owing to the faithfulness of its details to how people see the world. This isn’t true about paintings which
intentionally use effects which don’t add to the its realisticness, and yet add beauty value to it. The absence of this realisticness aspect is even sharper in a beautiful cartoon, where the artist’s achievement is in distorting the real world to the utmost to evoke humour. Perhaps, the beauty of a cartoon lies in the cartoonist’s ability to capture the essential features of a object, and
distorting it to a ridiculous degree, yet preserving the essential characteristic of the subject. The beauty might be tentatively identified as anything that evokes so called positive sensations in the onlooker, e.g. humour or surprise or admiration. However, that may not be true if we consider that works of art – drawings, movies, music etc. – demonstrating morbid things like death
and suffering earn tremendous accolade as excellent pieces of art. To say that they lack beauty would not be acceptable at all. Then perhaps, one would say that beauty resides wherever there is creativity and sensitivity involved in an act. Quite surprisingly, beauty of nature is the most undesputably beautiful thing. It does not require a believer to appreciate this beauty (though this statement could be disputed). Therefore, beauty is not necessarily associated with only a creation.
We are far from equipped to state with any confidence what causes the presence of beauty in something, let alone, to measure it with any degree of precision. Yet, this question has intrigued people for centuries. And the urge to create beautiful things is one of primal urges present in varying quantities in all human beings. Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy which
tries developing an understanding of the nature of beauty, particularly in works of art. The practice of creating beauty is art.

2.2 History
Among all things man wants to know, his past is one. Man’s wish to know everything of the events that led to him might well have been the dominant reason for him to start studying history. Yet, history has evolved far from merely a subject which just tries to reconstruct the past. The concept of historical thinking or historical reasoning points to a skill of reasoning in
historians quite different in nature than scientific thinking. It is an interesting matter to ask why historical thinking must be sanctioned a different form. In my view, the answer partly lies in the sparseness of concrete evidences using which history is created. An account of an event that happened far removed in time and space from now and here can be expected to have lost many of the threads that lead it to us, and now could lead us back to it. However, the onus on the historian is an ambititious one – to construct a story out of those evidences. This story involves not just plain physical elements but human factors which are far more complex than anything else. Even in this information age, to discover the exact links of causality between various
interesting events is difficult. If we temporarily give space to the (dubious) assumption that societies of the past were simpler than the present, still their complexity was demonstrably daunting. Is it, therefore, hopeless to look backward as history does? Critics of history have strong arguments to provide. As per them, History neither qualifies as an art, nor as a science. Its interpretation are subjective and value laden. Historians have been charged of trivialising the individual man by placing disproportionate importance to the evolution of the human society. The worst aspect which is almost a conventional wisdom is that the chronicles created at every point, which later act as the principal tools of a historian, are at the mercy of the ruling powers of the age and country. Such documents are liberally used by many to serve their ulterior motives. How does one make use of such adulterated documentation to create an accurate account of the past?

Despite all these negative factors, study of history remains an interesting thing to do. The subjectivity – to some extent, even the sensationalisaton – of the accounts, instead of being detrimental to the cause of the study of the past, has turned into an effective method to create interesting narratives which can then be discussed in a lot bigger council of historians. Finally,
this should create consensus about the past – a simplistic, but necessary assumption.

2.3 Literary Interpretation
Literary criticism is the application of literary theory – a subject which deals in developing understanding about literary work. The central questions revolve around : What is literature? Good literature and bad literature? Various aspects of a literary work? The role of a critic?
Literary criticism as a practice is as old as literature itself. Its importance cannot be overstated, going by the fact that that there are now authorities on whom a general consumer of literary work can rely for informed and balanced review of literature. Like any study that tries to theorise an art, literary theory can be criticised for trying the place works of literature into
pigeon-holes. However, like any other field of scholarly study, literary theory has also developed tremendously, and is an approximation of the ideal of a complete and correct theoretical infrastructure for evaluation of literary quality.

From the point of view of our current discussion, the history of literary theory discloses an all pervading element of subjectivity in the process of criticism. The question of the role of the critic in fulfilling the meaning of a literary work is vividly studied. In a sense, a peculiar aspect of literature comes out : A literary work gets its many meanings when it goes into the
hands of its many readers. The subjective aspect of literature is an inherent and essential one. That’s a point rigorously accentuated by the subject of literary criticism.

3 How Objective is Science?
In this section, I summarise the ideas that raise an important question about Science: How objective is science, after all? These ideas have often come from authoritative figures in the world of science. This demonstrates that science, in its highest attire, perhaps never claims a total lack of subjectivity.

A good scientist doesn’t just accept the presence of subjectivity, but often seems to accept that its presence is an essential ingradient of what could be called science. Of the innumerable evidence of this widely recognised fact, I rather expectedly have had access to some which are close to my area of interest, Computer Science.

3.1 Knuth – The Art of Computer Programming
Donald Knuth, in his Turing lecture [1], spent a considerable hour emphasising how computer programming is as much an art as it is a science. The central argument of the lecture is that even though computer programming is now largely a science, it is an artistic activity at its core. Even though our understanding of what it means for a program to be correct becomes more
elaborate, programming itself is not on its way to dissociate itself with good taste, beauty and divergent thinking.

3.2 Penrose – The Emperor’s New Mind
The Emperor’s New Mind [3] is a monumental popular science book written by the famous Oxford scientist Roger Penrose. His central argument in this book is to convince the reader that with the given state of the art in our knowledge of Physics, it is impossible to build computers that could possibly think. The many arguments in this book are borrowed from various fields
– Theory of Computation, Quantum Physics etc. – all showing that it is fallacious to say that computers of the current day indeed do anything like thinking in the proper sense of the word.
A dominant theme of this book also expresses that critical aspects of human thinking are not algorithmic in nature. The book can’t be quoted as a book against objectivity as such, but it does disavowes the notion that mechanisms of human thinking, as we know it, are understood well-enough that they could effectively be mimicked by any machine in the short future.
The roots of the most critical features of human thinking – creativity, imaginativeness and visualisation – lie beyond what has been discovered about the physical world.
I dare to add that an important indication is that when that (or those) breakthrough understandings about the physical world do unravel themselves to us, our notion of objectivity will not remain untouched by that breakthrough.

3.3 Proof As a Social Process
A very active area of research in computer science is verification, wherein people create tools and methods to formally prove that a computer program meets its requirement. The motivation comes from the need of significantly enhanced confidence in a program’s correctness and quality. The central claim of the proponents of verification is that if a program can be automatically and undesputably proved to be correct, they will be of a higher quality, and the process of software development would be much faster and enjoyable. Alan Perlis, the first ACM Turing Award winner, writes in his 1979 paper Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems [2], how erroneous the basic assumptions of verification proponents are. Perlis et al. go on to argue that there is no interesting mathematical proof which is accepted and used without having gone through an elaborate social process. They claim that proofs are a very essentially human activity, involving immense stress, strong emotions, publicising, reviews and so on. Opposed to this, a verification proof would be an unreadable piece of automatically generated symbols, which nobody would be able to read in the first place. Consequently there is no hope of an automatically generated program verification proof to ever take the place of a mathematical proof. The field of verification has made significant strides since the above paper, though the progress has not significantly disputed the above claim. The interesting point from the point of view of this article is the stress that the authors put on the social nature of mathematical proofs of theorems and
hence programs. There is a strong indication that the authors believe that the activity of proving things is not algorithmic or mechanical; it’s inherently human.

3.4 The Lost Knowledge Argument
The superior credibility that science has earned for itself is perhaps not to be disputed. What could be questioned is the role of objectivity in that. The most respected findings of science have been simple, often intuitive. They have also been proved wrong after surviving for several centuries. The most rigorous theorems in science are at best cursorily understood by the wide
scientific community. Their details are often way beyond the comprehension of all but a handful working in that area. This puts a serious question on the universal claim of objectivity that is made in science. The barrier of tremendous complexity protects many scientific claims from both being understood and from being seriously questioned by a large number of people.
It becomes a proprietary property of sorts of its owners. How does such a piece of knowledge claim to be objective?
One argument in favour of objectivity would be: If you try hard enough... Let us examine this argument a bit closely. The statement is inherently value laden. Not only does it rest on an unmeasured quantity of ‘hard enough’, there is a subtle menace communicated which seems to glare negatively at both not trying hard enough (insincerity), and not being able to try hard enough (lack of intelligence). The fact that mathematical rigour is inaccessible to a large portion of the population should not be waved away as a state of affair, but should be given due importance in the definition of objectivity.
I am repeatedly tempted to liken scientists with mystic gurus of the orient who professed to have seen the truth. If you wondered to them: ‘Hey! But I can’t see it!’ They too would perhaps say, ’If you try hard enough...’ It is an important question to ask as to what really differentiates the mystic’s claim from a mathematician’s claim. While the mystic claims to have developed
a perception for things beyond the limits of our usual senses, a mathematician seems to have sharpened his skill of looking through the mathematical symbols to seeing what they mean. Unless, the difference between a mystic’s and a mathematician’s capabilities is well understood, the debate on the objectivity of science is far from over.
Another strong argument in favour of objectivity is: In case of science, there are at least some experts who can work the proofs out right from the start to the end. This is not true for mystical subjects, or subjects like astrology.
Try looking at the argument from the other side. What happens if, of our five senses (sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste), one of the dominant ones (say, sight) disappears? What would happen to the large body of scientific knowledge that requires the existence of this faculty. Were this faculty to disappear from the face of the Earth, there would be no way by which this
category of knowledge (in which, I am sure, a better portion of scientific knowledge can be put, directly or indirectly) could be proved or disproved. There would remain no expert on such vast volumes of knowledge. Would such knowledge continue to remain scientific? The situation appears contrived, but raises a fascinating question: Is a piece of knowledge objective owing to some inherent attribute of it, or due also to certain circumstantial parameters? It appears to me that the answer is the latter. Scientific knowledge of today could lose their status as scientific knowledge if certain circumstances were to arise. Or else, scientific knowledge would have to forsake its claim that at least some experts exist who can prove their truth. The existence of a sufficient number of such experts is not an inherent property of the knowledge; it’s partly circumstantial.

4 Conclusion – Science and Subjectivity
All the above briefly brings forth the idea that the practice of science has existed and excelled on many more factors than objectivity. A significant amount of creativity and taste categorically establish the artistic side of science. Therefore, it would be right to say here that instead of sweeping its subjective aspects under the rug, science should learn to accept them openly. I would even suggest that some degree of subjectivity would play an important role in making science more interesting to do, and accessible more widely. Follows a couple of prescriptions as to where such subjective elements would work in service to science. They may be simplistic and unpolished, but surely not grossly in the wrong direction.

4.1 Dialogue as a Communication and Pedagogical Tool
The ostensibly subjective nature of the subjects of interest in social sciences makes it a particularly challenging task to communicate the exact thought. The language of mathematics, which proves a fairly effective medium of communication in many of the scientific subjects, falls short in its expressivity in matters of social sciences. The activity of knowledge communication takes a very interesting form here: that of dialogue. There are long discussion on a matter, primarily not to work out details of an artifact, but to refine the understanding of a concept and create a consensus on the matter by establishing a common language (vocabulary and grammar). Such an exchange predates on looking at an apparently subjective issue from its various angles, weighing opinions, and likewise refining the language of discourse. Studying this method of communication would be of significant value to teachers of science. Scientific pedagogues struggle to make their otherwise dry mathematical subjects interesting by employing methods of exchange which are used rather commonly in social sciences, and have been developed to a very advanced level in such disciplines. Studying their methods would be of pragmatic value to scientific communicators. The tricks of these methods involve a narrative style, often studded with expertly moderated discussions between the instructor and the audience, among other things. Most scientists are woefully ignorant of such effective means of evoking interest in their audience. Somewhere deep down, all these tricks are rooted at a conventional appreciation of the inherent subjectivity of the subject, and also of the fact that the participants of a scholarly interchange are often human-beings. Their interpretation is by nature subjective.
The only effective methods of catalising such interchanges are not more and more excruciating details, but also those narrative styles, which scientists often dismiss as decorative.

4.2 Widened View
Science is done well if it involves focus. But it’s done better when there is a degree of widening of view. Science, despite its ivory tower self image has its takers, like anything else. It makes sense to situate oneself in a wider social context so the efforts are more goal-driven. The setting of context should happen in various ways. Something which is known as market research at the business level can be done also in the scholarly level by viewing one’s work as a part of a wider project. It would be too bold to claim that involving subjectivity in our world-view should bring in a revolution in scientific results, but surely, it could revolutionise the way we do science.

References
[1] D. Knuth. Computer programming as an art. In Communications of the
ACM, pages 667673–357. ACM Press, May 1974.
[2] R. A. D. Millo, R. J. Lipton, and A. J. Perlis. Social processes and proofs
of theorems and programs. Communications of the ACM, 22(5):271–280,
1979.
[3] R. Penrose. The Emperor’s New Mind. The Oxford University Press,
1989.