Author: SK

The Silence

It was amazing, the silence that greeted us when we returned to Leh from Nubra Valley. We had heard from drivers passing the other way that there had been some sort of disaster in Leh the previous night and that a hundred people had died. There was absolutely no traffic coming from the other side, and the heavy rain didn’t help; not least those of our group who were on the bike (I had finished my turn on the bike a while earlier; more on that in another post).

The only sign of activity on the way was the Rimpoche’s procession. Stanzin Nawang Jigmed Wangchuk is 5 years old and is believed to be the reincarnation of former Ladakh MP Bakula Rimpoche  He was at Sumur monastery (in Nubra Valley) and on that day he was on his way to Leh.

The previous day, our driver had informed us to get up early so that we could go to Sumur in time to see the festivities there, in honour of the departing Rimpoche. Unfortunately, late night drinkage meant by the time we reached Sumur the procession had long passed. There was little sign of their having been any celebration by the time we got there.

Coming back, as we descended into Leh valley from Khardung La (supposed to be the highest motorable pass in the world) it looked the same. From on top of the hills, it looked pretty much the same as it did when we left for Nubra the previous day. Except for the lack of traffic in the opposite direction, nothing was different. And the crowd we saw at the Rimpoche’s procession (it was some distance off the main road) only reinforced the sense of normalcy.

Of course, we knew in our heads that things were far from normal. Having gotten back into the Airtel network we had called our families and figured what had happened. Our driver Jugnes had got a call from a relative saying the authorities had requested his village to be evacuated as it was supposed to be in a dangerous low-lying area. We had ourselves been caught in the rain and seen very few army men at Khardung La. All I’m saying is that by the look of things nothing at all looked amiss.

And then when we entered town (and got past another crowd of people waiting for the Rimpoche) it hit us. Not a soul on the streets. Not a single shop open. No one picking up as we called the travel agent’s office. Us not sure if we had a reservation at the hotel where we’d stayed two nights prior before embarking for Nubra (it turned out we did have a reservation; and the kindly hotel staff conjured up some sort of a sandwich for our lunch from whatever supplies they had). It was surreal. And scary. We thought after a couple of hours of rest we should go check out the affected areas to see what has happened. But before that could happen, we realized we ourselves weren’t out of danger.

The Polite No

When someone expects something out of you, and tells you explicitly, there is the chance for the moderate solution that can be described as “the polite no”. When they explicitly tell you that they want something, and for some reason you are either unable or unwilling to give that to them, you can politely refuse and reason out with them as to why you are unable to give them what they want.

On the other hand, if someone expects something out of you but doesn’t explicitly tell you that, that removes the possibility for this beautiful intermediate solution. Firstly there is the problem of guessing – you’ll have to somehow divinely guess that that is what they want. Secondly, if you fail to deliver, there is always the possibility that they ASSUME that you were UNWILLING to deliver, even if the reason you didn’t deliver was that you were UNABLE to do so. And this might lead to some sort of bad blood, or more misunderstanding.

Still, I don’t understand why some people never state what they want out of you. As to why they are being cryptic than being direct. I don’t know if they realize that they are ultimately putting themselves at a loss by means of this lack of communication.

Why I don’t blog about her

The sweetheart has one fundamental problem with my blogging. That I have hardly written about her on my blog. Being the girlfriend of a celebrity blogger she deserves better, she argues. And she pulls up the reams of posts that have been written here about my old crushes and accuses me of not loving her as much, given I don’t write about her.

While I agree that I haven’t written much about her, I believe there are several important reasons behind that. I don’t know if she’ll buy into this reasoning but I believe these points need to be made.

Firstly it must be recognised that angst is a major fuel for writing. When what you thought was a great “deal” (in terms of relationship) falls through, it creates immense angst which needs to be channelled somewhere. And writing about the subject that causes the angst is one of the ways of channelling the angst. There have been occasions where I’ve managed to channelize the angst in other productive ways but in the last few years writing about the source has been a good source of getting rid of it.

Then, there is the time and effort factor ( I think this is the reason she is least likely to buy). Running a successful relationship takes up a large amount of your time and effort, and that’s not necessarily bad. I’m not talking only about tackling fights, misunderstandings, etc. here. When you have found someone to share your life with, there is suddenly so much more to do. Your life changes in ways that you had never imagined. Your life becomes so awesome that trivial pursuits like writing get the short shrift. You might have noticed that my general quantity of output has diminished in the last year.

Lastly but most importantly, there is the issue of not wanting to rock the boat. When a deal falls through, you have nothing to lose from it. You don’t care what the counterparty of the fallen deal thinks about you anymore. And that lets you unleash. When things are good, though, there is a relationship to protect. You just do not want to rock the boat. Every time you write about her, you want to make sure you’re not writing something that might offend her. Or something that will take a great deal of effort to defend.

Every time you sit down to write about her, every line you write, you end up thinking four times what she might think of it. And that disturbs the flow in which you are usually used to writing your posts. And once that flow is disturbed, you don’t want to write anymore. You would rather write about something which you can write “in flow” than thinking four times about every line you write.

On a similar vein, you might have noticed that I hardly blog about my work nowadays. The number of work-related posts since I joined this job would be comfortably in single figures. And that doesn’t compare favourably at all given the volume of work-related posts in my earlier jobs. I love my current job and have settled down nicely into it, and intend to put gaaji here. There is little angst that this job creates. And because I like this, I spend that much more effort doing my job than writing about it.

Abou Ben Adhem

I’m a big fan of Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase). I don’t particularly consider myself religious but I like his philosophy (as described in the poem) about being a lover of fellow-men (no pun intended) being superior to a lover of god. I get extremely irritated by people who cause inconvenience to others by way of their religious acts.

Recently I happed to read this excellent (in my opinion) article in Open by Manu Joseph (Udupa, who referred the article to me, thinks it was written in my style. I would take that as a major compliment (to me, of course). It’s been ages since I’ve made arguments like those). The article is about Islam and cricket betting but Joseph makes some important points about religion itself. To quote my favourite part of the essay,

A religious person, having done his pilgrimage, having done his prayers and fasts, has no further motivation to be good in a way that is more useful to the rest of humanity.

I think on similar lines every time I’m invited for some pooja-cum-lunch where the lunch gets delayed beyond reasonable time because the hosts (who are also doing the pooja) are taking too long with the pooja; giving too much attention to God at the cost of the felllow-men and women who they have invited. There are several such examples you come across in daily life.

Thinking more about it, I wonder if this statement (from Joseph’s article) actually applies to a religion such as Hinduism (Sanatana Dharma, to be technically correct), given it’s Karma concept. The beauty of the Karma concept is that you accumulate points in God’s books (all well tabulated by the excellent Chitragupta) by being nice to your fellow men.

Now, with the Karma concept being around, and the efficient Chitragupta watching you, I’m not sure you need to “relax” and stop bothering to be nice just because you’ve said your prayers and generally been nice to God.

In this context, it surprises me further that supposedly deeply religious Hindus are nice to god at the cost of being nice to fellow men and women. Probably they just do some “religious things” blindly without really understanding what they are doing; mug up their prayers without understanding them properly. I think there’s a black swan risk in what they are doing!

In other news, during the Ganesha pooje today I tried my best to put my limited knowledge of Sanskrit to good use and actually understand the mantras that were being chanted while I was going through the motions. I’ll probably write in detail about that in another post.

Buffet Strategy

Skip the main course. I’ve come to this conclusion based on three buffet meals I’ve had in the recent and not-so-recent past – Khansama in UB city in early July, Barbecue Nation in JP Nagar last weekend and The Higher Taste at ISKCon tonight.

In all these meals, there has been significant variety in the starters. There have been various kinds of starters and salads (and anyways Barbecue Nation’s USP is the barbecues – which are starters). And significantly awesome desserts too – wtih a couple of Indian sweets, variety of cakes, fruit and ice cream.

The problem with main course in all these restaurants is that it’s too standard. There might be the odd innovation here or there but it is usually a close cousin of some standard item itself. The nature of North Indian main course meals (which is the main course of the main course in all these places) doesn’t lend itself to too much radical innovation and hence the main course ends up being not too much special.

So this is what you need to do at buffets – load up on the starters. They are usually the best part of the meal in these buffets. And if you combine all the starters judiciously, it should give enough nutrition (except maybe for calories). Maybe have a little bit of main course (something like rice) to fill up your stomach (density of food fundaes). And then thulpitmax on the desserts. I’m sure you’ll leave the meal feeling happy and contented and full.

MGM Channel

Yesterday I upgraded my Tata Sky package to Annual Mega Pack (with the would-be-ladywife wanting all Kannada and Telugu channels, and all movie channles; and with me wanting all sports channels this was most economical). And got service to this channel called MGM which was earlier part of an add-on package I wasn’t sure I wanted (along with TCM, Lumiere and Warner Brothers).

So last evening I celebrated the upgradation of my Tata Sky package by watching this random (isn’t close to the same league as the dollars trilogy or once upon a time in the west) western called Hang ’em High. Decent movie, but what made it immensely watchable is that there were no ads.

Yes, you read that right. MGM doesn’t show any ads in the middle of movies. Not one. And given the Tata Sky pricing, I guess it charges a reasonable subscription fee to fund itself! The sad part is that they don’t advertise this enough and so probably they aren’t able to collect as much subscription fees as they could. Nevertheless, this is a beautiful model and I just hope they sustain (my assumption is that if they didn’t show ads during a Sunday evening movie, they won’t show ads at all).

Given the surfeit of advertising that plagues most of our movie channels, I knew something like this was going to happen sometime. A channel that subsists on user subscription rather than spoiling the viewing experience by flooding the movie with ads. And what has made this possible is direct to home television, where your choice of channels isn’t dictated by your neighbour’s. And one in which it is easy for the channel to monitor the number of subscribers without the distributor (in this case , Tata SKY) fudging the numbers.

We need to be thankful to DTH for enabling such beautiful concepts like no-ad-movies, and thank MGM for taking a bold step and starting a no ad channel. Now, can sports channels create “plus versions” of themselves where they’ll show uninterrupted sport rather than cutting the first and last ball of each over and showing  the rest of the over in a smaller screen? I’m sure there are enough people who will be willing to pay a premium for it.

And I wish a similar model comes up for radio (Worldspace RIP but you didn’t offer radio in car). Again, too many ads.

Wedding Invitation Prefixes

It seems simplest in Tamil Nadu, where the  girl’s name is prefixed with “Sow” (or “Sou”; for Sowbhagyavathi) while the boy’s name is prefixed with “Chi” (for Chiranjeevi). Considering most Tams have only one initial to their names, this sounds fair.

As we move to Andhra, the boy’s prefix remains “Chi” while the girl’s prefix gets elongated to “Chi Lax Sow”. I guess this is in line with the practice of three or more initials in Andhra.

In Karnataka, where two initials are dominant (at least were dominant in my parents’ generation; though not in mine (for eg. my father decided “Gollahalli” sounded too country to be part of my name so he dropped it and gave me only one initial) ) both boys and girls have two syllable prefixes. Girls get “Chi Sow” (for chiranjeevi sowbhagyavathi i guess). Boys get “Chi Ry” (I have no clue what Ry stands for. Maybe Karnataka boys show a special fondness for rye-based drinks).

Found this pertinent given that this afternoon I journeyed to Sultanpet and bought cards on which we’ll print our wedding invites.

Fools on the Hill

6th August 2010

We had returned to Leh that afternoon after spending the previous day at Nubra valley, some hundred and fifty kilometres to the north of Leh. On the way back to Leh, we had been informed by the driver of a car passing the other way that there had been a cloudburst in Leh and hundreds of people had died. There were hardly any armymen at Khardung-La; on the way to Nubra the previous day, the place had been teeming with armymen and tourists.

Everything in Leh was closed; we were told everyone had gone to help out with rescue operations. Thankfully we found we had a booking at a hotel and checked in and quickly booked a ticket on the first flight the following morning. The evening was spent playing cards and watching news on some horrible Hindi channels (the hotel didn’t have any English channels). I was on the terrace, talking to Pinky over the phone. And I saw people in the street walking down towards a nearby hill.

Soon there were more people. And even more. All of them carrying some sort of luggage, like they were running away from something. Soon the street was filled with people running towards the hill. It was as if the whole town was running towards the hill. I went in and informed the others, who checked up with the hotel staff who instructed us too to proceed to the hill.

A couple of hours earlier we had found out that our hotel building had been built of mud, like all other buildings in Leh. Leh is earthquake-prone but it hardly rains there so mud houses are the norm. Given the floods of the previous night we had already been apprehensive about spending the night at the hotel. And now when we heard stories that some canal had burst and the street where our hotel was would get flooded we panicked. Picking up our bare essential belongings (basically the “hand luggage”) we followed the town down the road and up the hill, and settled in a reasonably comfortable place there.

I must have spent some three hours on the hill. Some friends spent double the time there, apprehensive of getting back to the hotel. While I was there I got conflicting news. Some people were saying that the floods had not hit our part of Leh. Others said it was only a matter of time and the entire area would be flooded with water. At times we worried if we were high enough on the hill, at other times we contemplated descending. It was crazy.

While on the hill, frantically trying to calm myself down, I thought this was just like the global financial crisis of 2008. The problem in 2008 after Lehman crashed was that nobody trusted anybody any more (coincidence: Lehman’s ticker on NYSE was “LEH”). So if I don’t trust you I don’t trade with you. The lack of trustworthy sources of information meant that nobody knew which financial institutions were in what state of health. So everyone just assumed the worst and refused to trade. It was only after the government (some sort of credible player, essentially) stepped in (TARP, discount window, etc.) that people began trusting each other and the markets calmed down presently.

It was similar on the hill. There were no credible sources of info. Nobody knew what was happening, and given the extreme risks involved (in the worst case we could have  been washed away, either by the rain on the hill (there wasn’t any when I was up there) or by floods on the street). People would go up the hill, and down the hill. Looking at them, others would try glean information (I decided it was safe enough to descend when most of the hill emptied; wisdom of crowds fundaes). But then there was distortion throughout the system. It was like all of us were playing one big game of Chinese Whispers.

It must be mentioned here that following the previous night’s cloudburst and floods there was a sense of panic all over town (just like there was in the financial markets back in 2008) so it was easy to spread rumours. The only way to have controlled damage was to have some credible sources (like say some armymen in uniform) to come and let us know what was happening. But then there were parts of town significantly worse affected compared to us so there was no help coming our way. And we continued to panic. And play chinese whispers.

The three hours I spent on the hill are probably the scariest of my life. Even now, thinking about that gives me the jitters. I’m happy I’m here, sitting at home at my ancient teak-wood desk in front of my laptop, telling you the story.

PS: the title of this post derives its name from a Beatles song of a similar name and has no other connotations

Successful IPOs

Check out this article in the Wall Street Journal. Read the headline. Does this sound right to you?

MakeMyTrip Opens Up 57% Post-IPO; May Be Year’s Best Deal

It doesn’t, to me. How in the world is the IPO successful if it has opened 57% higher in the first hour (it ended the first day 90% higher than the IPO price)? To rephrase, from whose point of view has the IPO been the “best deal”?

What this headline tells me is that makemytrip has been well and truly shafted. If the stock has nearly doubled on the first day, all it means is that MMYT raised just about half the cash from the IPO as it could have raised. If not anything else, the IPO has been a spectacular failure from the company’s point of view.

The US has a screwed up system for IPOs. Unlike in India where there is a 100% book-building process where there is effectively an auction to determine the IPO price (though within a band) in the US it is all the responsibility of the bank in charge of the IPO to distribute stock (as far as I understand). Which is why working in Equity Capital Markets groups in investment banks is so much more work there than it is here – you need to go around to potential investors hawking the stock and convincing them to invest, etc.

Now, the bank usually gets paid a percentage of the total money raised in the IPO so it is in their incentive to set the price as high as they can (and the fact that they are underwriting means they can’t get too greedy and set a price no one will buy at). Or so it is designed.

The problem arises because the firm that is IPOing is not the only client of the bank. Potential investors in the IPO are most likely to be clients of other divisions of the bank (say, sales and trading). By giving these investors a “good price” on the IPO (i.e. by setting the IPO price too low), the bank hopes to make up for the commission it loses by way of business that the investors give to other divisions of the bank. If most of the IPO buyers are clients of the bank’s sales and trading division (it’s almost always the case) then what all these clients together gain by a low IPO price far outweighs the bank’s lost commission.

It is probably because of this nexus that Google decided to not raise money in a conventional way but instead go through an auction (it made big news back then, but then that’s how things always happen in India so we have a reason to be proud). Unfortunately they were able to do it only because they are google and other companies have failed to successfully raise money by that process.

The nexus between investment banks and investors in IPOs remains and unless there are enough companies that want to do a Google, it won’t be a profitable option to IPO in the US. Which makes it even more intriguing that MMYT chose to raise funds in the US and not here in India.