Pinnacles of preposterousness

In the very first front page I skim through this morning I come across two news items that are some of the best examples of preposterousness one can encounter. One in the sheer callousness it reflects, the other in the ridiculousness of the research project it publicises.

The first report is about an insurance lawsuit. The vaunted lawyer of a gigantic Indian insurance firm actually tried to convince a court that being left paralysed by a motor crash sixteen years ago was a "blessing in disguise" for the young woman asking for a larger compensation package. Can you imagine that?!

Shweta Mehta, now 27, is paralysed from the waist down. She has spent 16 years in a wheelchair and is unable to do much independently. Her medical bills are high and salaries for hired help have been steadily spiralling upwards. That's why she is asking the third party insurer for more.

So what's the insurance lawyer's logic for this absurd argument? "The accident, for the girl, was blessing in disguise as she could get better education and also compensation," he told a shocked courtroom in Mumbai. Jokes about lawyers being heartless abound, but this has to be a new low even for people in the profession with such a poor reputation. The judges, fortunately, immediately let it be known that this line of attack would just not cut it.

The other report I notice is about a research project that claims to have succeeded in putting a price on happiness and sorrow. Australian economist Paul Frijters has been tracking and valuing human emotion since 2001. He claims to have found that to a man, marriage is worth 18,000 pounds and to a woman just half that. (Now that challenges all previously held beliefs about men abhorring marriage and resenting the fetters they feel come with tying the knot). And Frijters says - more in line with contemporary thinking this time - divorce is worth over 61,000 pounds for a man and just 5,000 pounds for a woman. She, like Ivana Trump, clearly believes in not just getting mad but getting everything!

The researcher has also assessed the monetary worth of other human milestones like the birth of a child and the death of a loved one. According to him they affect a man much more dramatically (in terms of monetary worth, that is) than they do a woman.

Doesn't Frijters' research project sound like a decade-long exercise in futility? What's the point of research like this? What does it achieve? How can its findings be applied or used? What's more, who backs it? Who funds it? Who stands to gain from this farce?

I'm sure some would like to be able to study human emotion in a more dispassionate fashion, but isn't this going to an absurd extreme? Can we be as cold and calculating about feelings and sentiments as we are about money? And I absolutely do not believe, despite all of Frijters' findings, that anyone can put a price on human emotion. Mr. Frijters, I wish you luck but sincerely hope your next research effort isn't as pointless.