Remembering Ravi

This spring, we ran into a familiar Indian looking guy by the pool bar at the Jacaranda Indian Ocean Beach Resort, one of the dozens of resorts on the Kenyan coast – after many awkward glances back and forth, we realized and were excited to see that it was Ravindra Ramrattan, known to us as Ravi.

This June, in the second week of my summer internship based in Upper Hill, Nairobi, I was sitting down at the Java House alone one morning, when the same familiar face walked up – Ravi and I were again both surprised and excited to see each other, and had breakfast together. We shared many more meals over the course of this summer, and in particular, shared an interest in exploring some of the more local eateries in Upper Hill – Meladen Club, a place which serves great tilapia, with beans, sukuma-wiki (well-cooked greens), cabbage and chapatti, was one of our big discoveries. I was lucky that my office was right next to his.

Some of our meals were planned with long strings of e-mails inviting our other friends also working in the area, and some were spontaneous – frequently we would just run into one another. I would sit down at Java, and a minute later, an Indian looking guy sitting two tables down from me would turn his head around, and turn out to be Ravi. I think he spent more time at the Java House than his office, and I pulled his leg about this whenever I ran into him there. He would then start ranting a little bit about his office and his work, in a quirky, self-deprecating sort of way – he was really good natured, and always meant it in good, entertaining spirit.

We knew Ravi socially in Nairobi – he was well known and loved across the young expatriate community, particularly for his open, fun, easy-going and quirky personality, but also for his intellect.

One of my lasting memories of Ravi took place over one of our several lunches this summer. Ravi is an economist and a solid econometrician – we were arguing about something in the development space (which he was really knowledgeable and passionate about), when he claimed that we were “omitting variables”. What he meant is that we were confusing correlation for causation, and using something that was merely correlated to an underlying driver or explanatory factor, and misconstruing it as the actual driver.

He was clearly extremely smart, and often framed his arguments as an academic would, which made conversations with him even more “fun” and unique (especially since you could make fun of him for his style, and he always took it in a nice, good-natured way) – it was always interesting to have someone like him weigh in on anything, but he was never arrogant or condescending, which is perhaps why people felt so comfortable and open around him.

In another “fun” conversation this summer, he quoted Sherlock Homes – “Data, data, data – I need bricks in order to make clay”. He took such pride in this quote that you had to be there and see his smile as he said it, in order to truly appreciate how he meant it. Not only did Ravi live and breathe his triple degree in Econometrics, but he was also truly passionate and absorbed by his work in the development space.

But my favorite Ravi story is from another set of interactions this summer – at one of our lunch meals he complained that he was suffering from a hangover. When I asked him how he got the hangover, he told me that he had gate crashed the cocktail party at the GSMA Conference in Nairobi the previous evening, and had too much to drink. He complained, in his usual stating-first-world-problems, self-deprecating sort of style that the wine was good, and completely free, so he had no choice but to drink too much of it, and that he now regretted his actions. Later that week, he attended or rather gate crashed many other GSMA Conference events.

The GSMA Conference is a big deal in Nairobi, and Ravi worked in the mobile money space, so it wasn’t too unusual for him to attend these events uninvited – and to be fair, many of his colleagues were invited, so he wasn’t entirely uninvited. But in one of our following lunches, he asked me randomly if I knew anyone at the IMF. When I asked him what he wanted specifically, expecting that it might be to look for a job, or help with a research paper or a report he was writing, he told me that he wanted to attend the IMF Conference in Washington D.C. later this year.

This is when I started pulling his leg – he clearly had a conference gate crashing habit. After a little bit of pushing, he confessed to many more such activities, and unlocked his secrets. He actually frequently gate crashed conferences – his methods included walking up to a conference welcome table, where often the name tags of invitees are pre-printed and on display for pick-up, and picking up the first name tag with an Indian sounding name. He got away with most of this gate crashing – one such event was for lawyers who had just finished the bar in London, and he had to pretend to be a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn for an entire evening. But he also shared stories of the couple of times he got caught. He was so good natured that he had no trouble making fun of himself for getting thrown out of these conferences

These memories of Ravi highlight two things about him. First, his intelligence and insatiable intellectual curiosity ran to the point where he took a little bit of pride in being an academic and a researcher, and this made him an extremely interesting person to interact with. And second, his quirkiness, and easy-going nature made him popular among so many in our community. Perhaps we share a lot of common personality traits, or I might be projecting my own likes and habits on his personality – but still, I have met few people like Ravi who have made me feel so at ease, and with whom I have connected so early on in our friendship.

On Saturday we heard that Ravi was caught-up in the attack at Westgate Mall, and that no one had been able to hear from him. He had gone to the supermarket at the mall, to buy supplies for a BBQ, one of the many which take place across the young Nairobi expatriate circle on a typical weekend. On Sunday we got the news that everyone had dreaded – they found his body in a morgue.

The thought of what he might have gone through in the final moments of his life is extremely distressing. He was separated from his girlfriend as they were shopping at the supermarket (she was able to escape unhurt) – words will probably never be able to fully describe the shock and panic he probably went through as he saw the militants go through their rampage; and most disturbingly, as someone from an Islamic background, hearing their demand that Muslims in the mall state the Shahadah, or Islamic declaration of faith, so that they (the militants) don’t make the mistake or commit the sin of killing fellow believers.

Ultimately, I have never been this shocked and devastated by a terrorist attack – having known someone who has been killed makes it so real in so many ways that it is otherwise impossible to appreciate, at least for me personally.

I must be really honest here. Years of attacks have desensitized me to terrorism – my hotel was close to the bombing of the CID building in Karachi in November 2010. Not only was I caught in the middle of the events, especially the ensuing panic which lasted for a couple of hours, but I also walked past the pools of blood, and saw the horrifying white sheets with red stains at the scene afterwards. The smell of human flesh, and some kind of powder that they use to cover it up was shocking and I will never forget it – but all of it somehow faded in my memory.

The fact that an estimated 36,000 Pakistanis and many thousands more around the world have been killed by terrorists since 9/11 has almost just become a statistic. I have been desensitized to it all, so much so that the threat is just not real anymore – sometimes, I have even compared it statistically to the chances that one will die in a road accident, trying to make the case that it can be safe for foreigners to travel to Pakistan.

But it’s time that this issue became real, at least for me. In all the sadness and good wishes that we have shared across friends from Nairobi and more broadly across the world, I do not want to bring any anger in – but I am angry, partly for my own inability to be an effective part of the solution.

I think we need to understand terrorism better, in order to eliminate it – and terrorism simply cannot be allowed to become a new constant in our world, which we might eventually learn to live with and become completely desensitized to.

But I genuinely fear and foresee that this is how it might actually play out, and that Ravi may not be the last friend or family member that we will be remembering and mourning.

And while it’s a deeply complex issue which I do not claim to understand myself, I feel that we have a tendency to understand it only in terms of clichés, empty words and our own (often narrow and biased) beliefs. The “usual” words can be powerful, and obviously have their time and place – they help ground our own values and make us feel better in such times. But maybe it’s time we throw out what we want things to be like, or what we find comfortable to hear, and especially in such hard times, ask some really tough questions.

The people who carried this attack out are definitely “cowards” in the metaphorical or greater philosophical sense, but did it not take a serious ideological grounding and lots of guts to pull it off on their part? Were they not true to their strong beliefs, however misguided, and did they not perceive themselves to be (at least ultimately) doing good and something much larger than themselves?

It’s also easy to dismiss them as crazies – but just how common or uncommon are their views across the world? How many sympathizers do they have, and why are these people sympathetic towards them? Is it that they just attended madrassas, or are there real political grievances underlying their actions, in addition to the crazies? Will the crazies alone ever achieve something this significant, or are the political grievances a necessary part of their recipe?

Are these events of a narrow geographic scope, or are there broader and more peripheral pieces in the puzzle which we might actually be part of? Are the fairytales we read, or the beliefs we hold deeply, actually true or is there value to subjecting them to some skepticism?

And is this simply a problem of poverty and underdevelopment? Or would Ravi say that the causality actually runs in reverse?

Technology has so widened the possibility of asymmetric warfare, that even a tiny group with relatively limited capabilities, but a strong grievance can now cause significant damage – and it does takes a strong grievance for someone to take such a radical step.

It is impossible to eliminate these groups, as if one were eliminating cancer, and much more important to focus on eliminating the root causes of their grievances. What this means is that the room for moral and political error has narrowed far beyond what we have been used to in the past – and while people generally disagree on what is morally and politically right, and those of us who try to understand the world appreciate that it is messy, the perceived political injustices of the past simply cannot be an option any longer. We know where these flashpoints exist across the world, and we have a moral and ethical responsibility to resolve these conflicts in a truly fair manner, rather than persist with some of our own human stubbornness in the (effectively) zero-sum games that we are playing.

Not all is lost – I see hope that we can use these events to build stronger societies and political systems in places like Pakistan. To quote a famous philosopher: “When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher”. It is my vision and dream that several decades from now people will ask us how things turned around so dramatically, given how bad that they had once become – and perhaps our response will be that they had to get really bad, in order for the good to re-emerge so strongly.