Author: SK

Drivers in India

One of the recent data sets in data.gov.in is the number of driving licenses issued in different states of India until March 2012. Based on that, it is interesting to see which states have more drivers. The first chart here shows the proportion of population of each state that has a driving license (states for which data is unavailable have been left out). Note that this proportion is an overestimate since the number of licenses given includes people who have subsequently died, and thus not been counted in the state’s population as of 2011. Nevertheless, as a relative measure, this is useful:

dl

 

Notice that the highest numbers are in Goa, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, all of them among the more prosperous states. States at the bottom include Assam, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir. The latter two are extremely hilly, thus discouraging driving. Nevertheless it would be an interesting correlation between proportion of drivers in a state and its per capita GSDP. Which is what we do next:

dlgsdp

 

We see that apart from Delhi (where presumably a large portion of the population gets its licenses from other states?) and Sikkim (a hilly area where not too many are expected to drive), there is a strong correlation between the proportion of drivers and the per capita GSDP!

Finally, what proportion of drivers in each state are women? The following graph shows that:

dlwomen

 

Manipur, where over 30% of licenses have been handed out to women, stands way ahead of other states. The other state that stands out is Andhra Pradesh, where a measly 1.5% of driving licenses belong to women. Contrast this with neighbouring states such as Odisha (12%), Karnataka (15%) and Tamil Nadu (8%)!

Black Box Models

A few years ago, Felix Salmon wrote this article in Wired called “The Formula That Killed Wall Street“. It was about a formula called “Gaussian Copula”, which was a formula for estimating the joint probability of a set of events happening, if you knew the individual probabilities. It was a mathematical breakthrough.

Unfortunately, it fell into the hands of quants and traders who didn’t fully understand it, and they used it to derive joint probabilities of a large number of instruments put together. What they did not realize was that there was an error in the model (as there is in all models), and when they used the formula to tie up a large number of instruments, this error cascaded, resulting in an extremely inaccurate model, and subsequent massive losses (the last paragraph is based on my reading of the situation. Your mileage might vary).

In a blog post earlier this week at Reuters, Salmon returned to this article. He said:

 And you can’t take technology further than its natural limits, either. It wasn’t really the Gaussian copula function which killed Wall Street, nor was it the quants who wielded it. Rather, it was the quants’ managers — the people whose limited understanding of copula functions and value-at-risk calculations allowed far too much risk to be pushed out into the tails. On Wall Street, just as in the rest of industry, a little bit of common sense can go a very long way.

I’m completely with him on this one. This blog post was in reference to Salmon’s latest article in Wired, which is about the four stages in which quants disrupt industries. You are encouraged to read both the Wired article and the blog post about it.

The essence is that it is easy to over-do analytics. Once you have a model that works in a few cases, you will end up putting too much faith into the model, and soon the model will become gospel, and you will build the rest of the organization around the model (this is Stage Three that Salmon talks about). For example, a friend who is a management consultant once mentioned about how bank lending practices are now increasingly formula driven. He mentioned reading a manager’s report that said “I know the applicant well, and am confident that he will repay the loan. However, our scoring system ranks him too low, hence I’m unable to offer the loan“.

The key issue, as Salmon mentions in his blog post, is that managers need to have at least a basic understanding of analytics (I had touched upon this issue in an earlier blog post). As I had written in that blog post, there can be two ways in which the analytics team can end up not contributing to the firm – firstly, people think they are geeks who nobody understands, and ignores them. Secondly, and perhaps more dangerously, people think of the analytics guys as gods, and fail to challenge them sufficiently, thus putting too much faith in models.

From this perspective, it is important for the analytics team to communicate well with the other managers – to explain the basic logic behind the models, so that the managers can understand the assumptions and limitations, and can use the models in the intended manner. What usually happens, though, is that after a few attempts when management doesn’t “get” the models, the analytics people resign themselves to using technical jargon and three letter acronyms to bulldoze their models past the managers.

The point of this post, however, is about black box models. Sometimes, you can have people (either analytics professionals or managers) using models without fully understanding them, and their assumptions. This inevitably leads to disaster. A good example of this are the traders and quants who used David Li’s Gaussian Copula, and ended up with horribly wrong models.

In order to prevent this, a good practice would be for the analytics people to be able to explain the model in an intuitive fashion (without using jargon) to the managers, so that they all understand the essence and nuances of the model in question. This, of course, means that you need to employ analytics people who are capable of effectively communicating their ideas, and employ managers who are able to at least understand some basic quant.

Switching Off

Since last night I’ve been terribly sick. I slept fitfully, if at all, all of last night, and I’ve been totally out of action all day today. It’s nothing particularly serious – just a bad attack of the common cold, and I expect it to take its normal course. Yet, through the day, as I’ve struggled to think, I’ve realized how hard it’s become for me of late to switch off.

When I tell people that I freelance and lead a “portfolio life”, the first question I usually get asked is if  I can separate my work and non-work lives. This is especially important since my office is just a room inside my house. Usually i say that I do it pretty well. I have some strict rules, for example – I don’t work beyond 6:30 pm. I don’t work on weekends unless absolutely necessary (this includes Saturdays when my wife goes to work). In the last six months, I use my iPad for reading, so that I don’t use my work computer for non-work purposes – so of late I don’t even switch on my work computer on weekends and holidays.

Yet, I think I have difficulty switching off, especially on an unplanned basis. I took a vacation in December, and didn’t carry my work with me (for the first time since turning freelancer I even put an Out of Office AutoReply into my email). Yet, when I got back ten days later it seemed like I hadn’t taken a break from work, and could actually continue from where I had left off before I went (this is a good thing).

I have no difficulty taking my mind off work on most weekends, and on holidays. Yesterday, for example, was a general holiday in Bangalore (on account of Makara Sankranti). I had no problem switching off. Yet, despite being terribly sick and unable to work today, it has been really hard.

The downside of a “portfolio life” is that at any point in time  there is something pending. It is seldom that all your responsibilities close at the same time, and you can declare yourself to be “free” (which is why it is important to switch off in the evenings, on weekends, etc., and take the occasional vacation irrespective of whether the “work” is “finished”). So it is very rare that you get to your desk some day and realize there is “no work” – there may be no immediate deadlines, but there is always plenty to do.

In this context, today has been hard. I realize today that the common cold not only affects you physically but also mentally – it eats into your mindspace, and doesn’t allow you to think, which doesn’t allow you to work. And when you decide to declare a holiday for yourself and not work, things you do, such as the things you read, remind you of one aspect of work or the other – another downside of a portfolio life – too many non-work activities have a connection with work. And then you feel guilty about not working.

I think I need to figure out a policy of “casual leaves” for myself, where I tell myself that it is okay to not work on certain days, despite all that is there to be done. I’ve done it for myself for scheduled holidays – such as weekends or vacations. I need to convince myself to do this for the occasional unscheduled holiday, too – days like today.

The moving solstice

Today is “Makara Sankranti”. If the name doesn’t already strike you, “Makara” is the Sanskrit name for “Capricorn”. The Makara Sankranti is supposed to represent the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, or the day when the Sun is directly over the Tropic of Capricorn.

However, we know that the winter solstice falls on the 21st or 22nd of December every year. Then why is it that the Indian version of the Winter Solstice falls on 15th of January?

I’m not sure if you remember, but a few years back, Makara Sankranti would usually fall on the 14th of January. After some back-and-forth movements, it has now settled on the 15th of January. You might have already noticed that this is unlike other Indian festivals such as Deepavali or Ganesh Chaturthi, whose dates according to the Gregorian calendar move every year (typically in a -11, -11, +19 cycle) over three years). This is because unlike Deepavali or Ganesh Chaturthi, which are observed according to the Lunar calendar, Makara Sankranti follows the solar calendar!

I recently read a book called “Solstice at Panipat”, about the third battle of Panipat in 1761 (my review is here). The Marathas went to battle four days after celebrating the Winter Solstice. The battle was fought on the 14th of January 1761, which means the solstice was observed that year on the 10th of January. So you see that the solstice, which is supposed to be observed on the 21/22 of December, was observed on 10th of January in 1761, and on the 15th of January in 2014.

This shows that there is an error in the Indian solar calendar. This error amounts to about 20 minutes a year, which means that the rate at which we are going, about 10000 years from now the Makara Sankranti (“Winter Solstice”) will fall in June, the middle of the summer!

That we know that the error in the Hindu solar calendar is 20 minutes a year allows us to calculate the last time the calendar was calibrated – we can date it to around 285 AD. Back in 285 AD, the calendar was calculated accurately, with the Winter Solstice falling on the actual Winter Solstice. After that, the calendar has drifted, and one can say, so has Indian science.

I’m informed, however, that this 20 minute error in the Hindu solar calendar is deliberate, and that this has been put in place for astrological reasons. Apparently, astrology follows a 26400 year cycle, and for that to bear out accurately, our solar calendar needs to have a 20 minute per year error! So for the last 1700 or so years, we have been using a calendar that is accurate for astrological calculations but not to seasons! Thankfully, the lunar calendar, which has been calibrated to the movement of stars, captures seasons more accurately!

I’ll end this post with a twitter conversation (I’m off twitter now, btw) where I learnt about this inaccuracy :

Update: The link to the tweet doesn’t show the entire thread. See that here.

Update: Here is a piece by astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar on the Makara Sankranti. Basically due to a change in the earth’s axis, our divisions of the night sky into 12 constellations are not stationary, and hence the date when the sun moves from “Dhanur” to “Makara” is no longer the solstice date.

 

Long mails

As you might have noticed from my blog posts over the years, I like writing long essays. By long, I mean blog post long. Somewhere of the length of 800-1000 words. I can’t write longer than that, because of which my attempts to write a book have come to nought.

Now, thanks to regular blogging for over nine years, I think I’ve become better at writing rather than speaking when I have to explain a complicated concept. Writing allows me to structure my thoughts better, whereas while speaking I sometimes tend to think ahead of what I’m talking, and end up making a mess of it (I had a major stammer when I was in school, by the way).

Given that I like explaining concepts in writing rather than in speech, I write long mails even when it comes to work. Writing long emails is like writing blog posts – you have the time and space to structure your thought well and present it to your readers. This especially helps if the thoughts you are to communicate are complex.

The problem, however, is that most people are not used to reading long emails in a work contexts. People prefer to do meetings instead. Or they just call you up. For whatever reason, the art of long emails has never really taken off in the corporate sphere, Maybe people just want to talk too much.

This, of course, has never deterred me from using my favourite means of communication. It didn’t stop me when I was an employee and the people I wrote to were colleagues. It still doesn’t stop me now, when I’m a consultant, writing to people who are paying me for a piece of work. If they are paying me, I should communicate things to them in a form they are most comfortable with, you might argue. If they are paying me, I should communicate things as well as I can, I argue back, and my best means of communication is writing long emails.

The problem with long emails, however, is that, like long-form articles you send to a Pocket or an Instapaper, you tend to bookmark these long mails for later, intending to read and digest them when you have the time. So, when you send a long email, you are unlikely to get a quick response (note that you can sometimes use it to your advantage). This means that when you write long mails, you might have to follow it up with an SMS or a phone call to the effect of “read and digest and let me know if you have any questions”.

In my last organization, I worked with a number of technical people, some of whom had PhDs. It was interesting to contrast the way they communicated with my long emails. They too would put complex thoughts in writing, except that they would use Latex and make a PDF out of it. It would be littered with equations and greek symbols, in a way that is extremely intuitive for an academic to read.

And here I was, eschewing all that Greek, preferring to write in plain text in the body of emails. No wonder some of my colleagues started terming my emails “blogposts”.

Protein in South Indian food

So a number of people have recommended that I switch to a low carb high protein diet. The primary impediment to implementing this is the fact that most high protein foods are meat based and we don’t cook meat at home. However, of late I’ve started noting down the various vegetarian sources of protein and I think I should give this high protein diet a go.

Having decided I’ll embark on this high protein vegetarian diet from tomorrow morning I decided to have a traditional simple to make dinner tonight. I ate some poori-palya which was left over from breakfast and then followed it up with curd rice. And the. I started thinking about protein content in traditional South Indian food.

The traditional meal I’m used to is rice with sambar followed by rice with curd. Rice of course is carbohydrate only but the sambar is ideally made thick, with lots of dal and curd is also quite high in protein. So from that perspective the traditional meal I grew up with is not that low in protein – despite what a lot of people like to say. And contrary to what I’d said in a post in December there is plenty of vegetables also in home cooked food. So why is the traditional South Indian diet considered unhealthy?

I think it primarily has to do with bad implementation – usually a consequence of attempted cost saving. If you can’t afford thick curd you eat buttermilk instead – which is quite a dilution. And then lentils are expensive so you end up diluting the sambar too. And then you skimp on vegetables and you get a carb heavy thing!

Then why did I bitch about the Andhra meals the other day? Why is it that Andhra meals is not as nutritious? The answer is that if you eat only the vegetarian component of what is essentially a meal that includes meat you end up missing out on the nutrition. What we get as meals in most Andhra restaurants is food that people who eat meat eat. So that food relies on the meat to provide the protein and so the rice accompaniments like the powders and chutneys need not have much protein in them. So when you leave out the meat and eat the rest you naturally get an unbalanced diet!

Anyway starting tomorrow I’m cutting down on rice, sugars and other carbs. I plan to be eating loads of eggs, cheese,tofu, mushroom and the like. Let’s see how far I go with this!

Who should the IPL franchises retain?

I have a proprietary algorithm for evaluating cricket matches. This algorithm analyzes matches ball-by-ball and then computes the “impact” of each player on the game, in terms of both batting and bowling.

I’ve been intending to do this for a while now but I finally got down to calculating the impact of different players in the past editions of the IPL, and who it makes sense for franchises to retain (incidentally, today is the last day for franchises to announce to the IPL who the players are who they are going to retain).

Let us go franchise by franchise and see who the best players are. The numbers in the brackets represent the impact of each player according to my proprietary system.

1. Chennai Super Kings

By a long way, their two best players are MS Dhoni (3.53) and Ravindra Jadeja (3.46). Interestingly, the primary reason for the latter’s high score is his batting  (2.86)- he has been bowling well, too (0.6), but it is his batting that has had significant impact.

These two are followed some distance behind by Raina (2.02) and the now retired Mike Hussey (1.75). Ashwin is some way behind at 0.7 (his bowling is at 1 and batting at 0.33; the algorithm tends to unfairly penalize bowlers for their batting abilities, or the lack of it).

Chennai have already made their decision on who to retain. They are going to retain Dhoni, Jadeja, Raina, Ashwin and Dwayne Bravo. The last is a bit of a puzzle, at -1.09. His batting has been excellent – he has contributed 1.52 but his bowling has been utter crap at 2.61. CSK would do well to use him as a batsman only

2. Delhi Daredevils

This is a team that has performed rather badly in the last bunch of IPLs, so they might be expected to dispense with some players. Virender Sehwag (3.14), though, has performed exceptionally in the rot, though this season’s domestic performance (or the lack of it) might go against him. Next is the injury-prone Irfan Pathan (1.72). Shahbaz Nadeem is a surprise package at 1.56. I wouldn’t expect them to retain anyone.

Umesh Yadav (-1.77) and Mahela Jayawardene (-2.33) have been especially poor performers

3. Kings XI Punjab

Another franchise that didn’t do particularly well in the last set of IPLs. David Miller (2.05) was their standout performer, followed by Gurkeerat Singh (1.24), Shaun Marsh (1.11) and Praveen Kumar (1.02). The latter two are highly injury prone and they may not want to part with a large part of their budget for the yet uncapped Gurkeerat. So if you expect them to retain any players, it would only be Miller.

At the other end, Parvinder Awana (-1.92) has been the standout performer.

4. Kolkata Knight Riders

Sunil Narine (4.48) and Gautam Gambhir (4.22) tower over the rest. Following them are Shakib al Hasan (1.63) and Iqbal Abdulla (1.13). One would expect them to hold on to the first two (Narine and Gambhir) and try to use their trump card to match a price for Shakib.

Jacques Kallis performed particularly badly (-2.81) and is unlikely to be retained.

5. Mumbai Indians

If you were to rank all players in descending order of impact, the standout player across teams would be Harbhajan Singh (5.04; 3.64 bowling, 1.41 batting). Despite his axing from the national team, one would expect him to be retained by the franchise. He is followed some way behind by Lasith Malinga (2.01), Kieron Pollard (1.97; with 3.05 in batting and – 1.09 in bowling) and Rohit Sharma (1.74). One would expect all of those three to be retained. Dinesh Karthik at 1.31 might also be retained, for they will only need to give up Rs. 4 Crore from their salary cap  to get him.

6. Rajasthan Royals

If one goes by the gossip, the Royals are expected to retain a large number of players. They are the “moneyball” team of the IPL. They don’t spend too much on salary but try to get otherwise undervalued players to play for them.

Brad Hodge (1.91) has been their star performer but his age might go against him – they might prefer to match him using their trump card. They are expected to retain Shane Watson (1.55 with 3.83 batting and -2.28 bowling), though. Stuart Binny at 1.34 is also a good bet to be retained.

Interestingly, the system shows a negative impact for the otherwise highly rated Sanju Samson (-0.17)! He is, however, another player they might retain.

7. Royal Challengers Bangalore

The Royal Challengers have already made their decision – they will retain Chris Gayle (4.93; with 6.51 batting and -1.58 bowling), AB de Villiers (3.12) and Virat Kohli (1.95 with 2.22 batting and -0.27 bowling). The one highly rated player they are not retaining is Zaheer Khan (3.69). Khan has been exceptional considering that his partners in the RCB pace attack are Vinay Kumar (-3.59), RP Singh (-2.83) and Abhimanyu Mithun (-1.69).

Their only other highly rated bowler is Murali Kartik (1.05). They will need to completely rebuild their bowling attack in order to compete this IPL

8. Sunrisers Hyderabad

Dale Steyn (3.43) is the standout performer and they would do well to retain him. The next best is Shikhar Dhawan, who is some distance away at 0.72. Given the paucity of quality Indian players, though, they might end up retaining Dhawan also.

I’m willing to share the full results of my analysis. Do reach out to me if you want to play around with it and I’ll send it to you. And let me know what you think of these ratings.

Quotable quotes

Over the last week or two, I’ve been doing a fair bit of “social networking”. I’m not talking about online social networks – if anything I’ve significantly cut down on that (I’ve taken a break from twitter). I’m talking about old-fashioned social networking, where I meet old friends and acquaintances over coffee or drinks or a meal.

Since the last two weeks were “holidays” in most of the world, a number of people happened to be visiting Bangalore and I ended up meeting a lot of people. I’ve met so many people that now it’ tough to remember what I spoke about with whom. And it’s only a good thing, for nothing gives me a bigger high than a nice long intellectual conversation, and my discretion means that I’ve only met people who have afforded me such conversation.

During a couple of such conversations I think I said stuff that is rather quotable. Since the people I said these things to don’t have active blogs, I thought I should be rather pompous and put up quotes here from my own conversations.

Last week I was talking to a friend from IIT. I was telling him about getting some change.org petitions such as “IITians against article 377”. What is the point of putting all IITians as a group, I asked. Apart from the fact that we did rather well in a supposedly tough examination, I don’t see any particular feature that sets IITians apart from the rest of the population and I find this grouping of IITians rather amusing. The conversation went thus:

“I don’t see what is special about IITians. During my time at IITM I found 80% of IITians rather unspectacular and uninteresting”
“I agree with that number but what sets IIT apart from other colleges is that it is 80%. Elsewhere it will be 95%”
“Yeah, but that isn’t a big improvement”
“Of course it is a big improvement. 80% is so much better than 95%”
“Ah, now I get it. If we have a class of 100, and if 95% are uninteresting that means there are only 5 interesting people. With 80% uninteresting, it means that there are 20 interesting people! 4 times the number of people to hang out with!”

Ok I admit there’s nothing particularly quotable in that but I wanted to talk about the concept of inverse proportion here, and hence all the build up. And perhaps this thing about inverse proportions would have made more sense on my official blog, but since there is a little bit of bitchiness involved I’m putting it here.

Coming to the other quotable quote – earlier this week, a friend was asking my why I don’t push myself harder professionally. This guy has had an exceptional professional career so far, and was pointing out the benefits of his professional focus over the last few years. This is what I told him:

“I used to be like this, but after a few years and a few incidents, I realize I don’t have that appetite for delayed gratification anymore. I’m not willing to slog it out for a while to wait for the fruits of labour later on.

“So it is 10 pm in IIMB, and you need to submit your Supply Chain Management case analysis by 8 am the next morning. this guy who is in your discussion group comes by, ostensibly to work on the case. And he says ‘one game of AoE before we start the case?’

“And so we sit down to play AoE. It is 5 am by the time we have finished solving the case. We started, in fact, only at 1 am – we were playing AoE till then.

“Now, even if we had started solving the case at 10, there is no guarantee that we would have finished significantly earlier than 5. In that case, we would still have not slept, and not played AoE either. The way we did it, we didn’t sleep but we we at least managed to play a solid round of AoE.”

Booth level coordinators for AAP

In today’s Economic Times, I was reading this article on the attempts by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to establish roots in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The article mentioned about the party already recruiting booth level coordinators in those two states and thus starting to prepare for the forthcoming elections.

The question, however, is why someone would want to be a booth coordinator for AAP. Before we examine that, let us examine why someone would want to be a booth coordinator for a party – some might see it as a stepping stone – having coordinated a booth, one might find a way into the higher echelons of the party, and might result in an MLA ticket the next time round.

However, in most cases this is rather unrealistic. Given the number of booth coordinators required in each assembly constituency, the promise of at most one of them being elevated to MLA is not enough to motivate them to work. The party needs to find a different way of compensating them.

Cadre based parties do this by paying their members a salary, and booth coordinators are thus paid to do their work. The salary may not be immense, but most cadre-based parties are ideologically driven and it is possible to find party workers who are willing to work as booth coordinators for the given fee.

Less ideological (and perhaps more practical minded) parties use a different method to motivate their booth coordinators – they are promised sweet deals and government contracts in return for their services. Given the size of the government and the discretion of the elected representatives, it is possible to suitably compensate each booth coordinator. For example, the guy who coordinated my booth for the sitting MLA’s party in the last elections also got the contract to desilt and cover the storm water drains on my road!

Coming back, how do you think the AAP will find booth coordinators? While it may be a strongly ideological party, it is still young and is unlikely to have the resources to find enough motivated people to man booths in quantities required to run a national election. Hence the nominally paid cadre route is ruled out. Then, the very ideology of the AAP means that the party is against corruption, and working out sweet deals for its booth coordinators will go against the party ideology, so that is ruled out!

So, the question remains – how will the AAP manage to find the requisite number of booth coordinators?

2 Jan

This post has nothing to do with the Indian Railways. Why would you think this has something with that? Because in its infinite wisdom the Railways has created a class of bogeys called “2 Jan Chair Car”! How did that materialize? Because a few years back they started this service called “Jan Shatabdi” which are all-seater trains with comfortable seating but no air conditioning. Essentially, a low-cost version of the Shatabdi. And they realized none of their existing bogeys fit this description, so they created a new class and called it “2 Jan Chair Car”.

So if not about the railways, what is it about? it is about the date 2nd January. The authorities at IIT Madras, I believe, have long known that students (most of them at least) don’t really have a social life, and not many of them are likely to celebrate new year in a big way (unless they are already on campus). Hence, every year the “even semester” would begin on 2nd January. The odd semester began at different times – sometimes in mid-July, sometimes in end-August. But the starting date of the even semester was fixed – 2nd January!

For people like me from nearby places such as Bangalore, it meant spending four consecutive New Years Days catching an overnight train. For people from farther away, especially closer to the north, it meant ushering in the new year on a train, for they had to start on the 31st (or earlier) to make it in time for classes on the 2nd.

Our “odd semester” results would have come out in the vacations and typically someone who had stayed back on campus would have had the responsibility of checking and informing everyone’s grades. On 2 Jan, we would go up to the notice boards and check our grades for ourselves. And occasionally we would go to professors who had taught us in the previous term seeking revaluation and a better grade. However, considering that final exam transcripts were “closed” (i.e. not available to the students) not much would come out of it.

Then we had this strange ritual called “registration” which we had to do every term. Administrative officials would be sitting in classrooms and we had to go fill up a form and sign on what courses we were going to take that semester. It was normally a pretty meaningless ritual, for we would have selected and been granted the courses the previous semester itself. But I suppose it served some administrative purpose.

The good thing about the start of the even semester was that this was the time of the year when Madras was at its coolest (relatively speaking, of course!). And then there would be Saarang (formerly Mardi Gras), the IIT Madras cultural festival to look forward to, and those that would be involved in organizing it (which I was in my latter two years at IIT) would spend pretty much all of January doing that.

Us people from Bangalore had another ritual – we would try and travel together to Chennai in the same train at the start of every semester. Sometime in the preceding holidays we would appoint a date when we would all meet at the Indian Railway booking counter in Jayanagar (most of us were from the south) and book tickets. Once, since we were booking in bulk, we were asked to fill a separate form. We had been asked what the purpose of our travel to Chennai was. We filled it as “pilgrimage”!

PS: some of you might have seen this blog post via Twitter. However, I’m taking a break from twitter (I’d gotten addicted, this is my version of a “quit smoking” new year resolution). So if you want to respond, please leave a comment here rather than replying on twitter.