SK – Page 188 – Pertinent Observations

Anecdotes from school: Copying In exams

A couple of not-so-hilarious incidents from our pre-board exams in 10th standards. It being election year (1998) we had 2 rounds of pre-boards instead of the usual one. The formation in the classroom was interesting – we sat normally two to a desk, and there were two sets of question papers. Since these were pre-boards and not boards, many of us didn’t really take them seriously. I must say that the entire set of exams was a riot. After all, it was the last thing that we did in that wonderful school (the school didn’t have 11th and 12th, so all of us had to shift out).

The biology section of the science exam contained a question on habit-forming substances. Something on the lines of “what are habit forming substances and why are they bad”. A certain mahaanubhaavva thought he didn’t know the answer. Or maybe he didn’t understand the question properly. So using a set of excellently-planned cheat codes, he managed to communicate to the guy in the next row (note that he couldn’t ask the person next to him since she had a different question paper) about this question.

The guy in the next row wasn’t such a stud in dumb-charades, and decided to use standard gestures rather than excellently-worked-out codes. He wanted to show booze in as intuitive way as possible. Putting his fist near his mouth, and with a clever movement of his thumb, he indicated drink. Sitting behind him, I thought this was excellent for someone not well-versed in Dumb Charades. Unfortunately, people well-versed in Dumb Charades tend to think too much. In went the answer paper “the primary habitat forming substance is water. It is bad because people and animals can fall and drown in it”. He must count himself lucky he got the hall ticket.

This incident has had far-reaching consequences. The mahaanubhaava who didn’t know the answer was so traumatised by the incident that he is yet to taste alcohol. He is afraid of drowning in it – that dreaded habitat forming substance.

****************

One day later was the social sciences paper. Unfortunately I wasn’t part of the Dumb Charades study group, so I hadn’t been introduced to the art of communicating the question number across the class. I realized that with my skills I was unable to even communicate across the aisle. I wasn’t even as good as the guy in front of me who put his fist to his mouth. So it had to be the cute girl next to me who had to help me out with the question that I didn’t have a clue of. If I remember right, she was partially trained in Dumb Charades.

What I didn’t realize was that you are not supposed to copy if you are seated in the first row – it is too easy to get caught. Moreover, if you are in one of the middle columns (like I was) you are in the direct line of vision of the invigilator. So it is never a good idea to copy. But then, I’d never copied in my life, and I knew this was the last opportunity for me to make amends. So what if I didn’t know the codes? So what if I was seated on the first row? So what if the cute girl next to me had a different set of questions? This was my last chance to profitably copy, and I had to take it.

I usually pride myself on being good at eye contact. I pride myself on the fact that I can communicate anything to someone of the opposite gender by just looking deeply into her eyes. I know that if I were to copy from a girl who was seated in FRONT of me, I could have done it with just eye contact. Unfortunately, the only person seated across me and looking towards me was the invigilator. Obviously I couldn’t ask her the answer?

The rules of copying state that it is always the dumber person who copies from the smarter person. The class topper never copies. If he were a copycat, his topping could never have been this sustainable. By knownig the two names, you can easily know who is the copier and who is the copied. Things always go by the rules. So if you try to invert these rules, it is usually easy to fool the invigilator. And so forth.

So unlike the mahaanubhaava who hadn’t understood the question, I didn’t get caught for the attempt to copy. No one threatened to not give me my hall ticket – that honour went to the cute girl who had been sitting next to me. I didn’t do well in my social science pre-boards – I hadn’t been able to get the answer from the benchmate – she had got caught for copying from me before that. Despite now knowing the codes, and having zero experience in this department, I had played my cards well. I never repeated this experiment. Even if I wnated to, I think I’d’ve never found a counterparty.

Search Strings: May 2009

So I continue my series of publishing interesting search terms which people used to land on my blog. As I had mentioned before I plan to make it a monthly feature, and so far I’ve been keeping my word.

For the first time ever since I installed Google Analytics, the most searched for term that led to my blog wasn’t “noenthuda”. The honour went to “my friend sancho review” (google for it – my site is no. 2 or 3 for that) with noenthuda coming a close second. Coming in a close third was a phrase that had made last month’s list – “isb chutiya”. Some 60 people landed up on my blog in the month searching for this phrase. Seems like there are lots of chutiyas at ISB.

and close to 30 people landed up here searching for “mandelbrot noenthuda”. Maybe I should create noenthuda fractals.

So coming to this month’s list:

course books at iimb
why do so many money managers have mbas?
amrita scissors
arjun shivlal yadav marital status
brahmin mess in jayanagar
cleavage “cleavage theory” pakistan
english education and english books in tamilnadu after 1990
good photographs of nri boys for marriage
how to end an arranged marriage engagement
i wana do regular graduation from gurgaon but did 12th 10 yrs back
pictures of inidan boys married foregins
upendra’s house kathriguppe
when burst of stove is accident and when suicide what is difference

More next month

Hajaam

This Monday, for the first time in my life, I got myself shaved by a hajaam (barber). Yes, for the ten-odd years that I’ve been shaving, I’d so far never let anyone put a blade on my face. However, a long vacation in Bangalore, absence of my usual Mach-3 and constant jibes by my mom about “wilderness on my face” led me to the hajaam.

I started off my shaving career sometime in 1999 when I was presented a Gillette Sensor Excel. After I earned my first ever salary (four years back) I upgraded myself to a Mach 3. I’ve had a few flings with cheap one-piece razors such as the Gillette Presto or the 7 o’clock Ready 2 Shave, but till a week back had never put a single blade on my face. It was always at least double. And I’d always do the act twice, once forward and once “reverse”. And for all these ten years, the part of the process that has taken the maximum time has been to ensure that my sideburns (I’ve always had them) are of equal length.

The act of getting shaved itself was pretty quick, maybe since it was so much easier for the hajaam to figure out if my sideburns were of equal size, or maybe since he didn’t care about it as much as I do. It was a bit uncomfortable as his hands, one of which held an ultra-sharp single blade, hovered over my face and neck. It itched a bit, and my face twitched a bit, but thankfully I didn’t get cut. It was again a “double shave” but unlike my own double shaves, both the shaves that the barber did were in the “forward direction”. Maybe the barber’s single blade isn’t suited for “reverse shaving”.

In the two minutes that I spent getting shaved, I started thinking of the history of shaving (no I’m not talking about the series of communist portraits here (Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao) ). About how if I’d been born a century earlier I’d have to go through this hajaamat on a regular basis – since safety razors weren’t yet in existence then. About how certain Hindu customs have failed to take into account the development of the safety razor and the fact that one can shave himself easily now. I was thinking about the total amount of business that barbers would have lost thanks to King Gillette’s invention – rather than making their money out of a daily shave, they now had to rely on monthly hair cuts only.

Another thing with the invention of the safety razor is that full beards are now less popular – back in the days when everyone had to go to the hajaam for a shave, people couldn’t afford to shave daily, and a full beard appeared significantly better than a stubble. Now that people can afford to shave daily, they never have a stubble and can thus be always clean-shaven.

The most uncomfortable part of the shave was when the guy was shaving the upper lip. With the nose on one side and the mouth on the other I was quite scared. I now reason that the coming of the safety razor has played a significant role in the decreasing popularity of moustaches – you feel so much more comfortable taking care of that sensitive region yourself rather than handing it over to a hajaam.

It was overall a quick, mildly scary, but decent experience. I got charged Rupees Twenty which I thought was okay for the shave. And I realized how much higher the barber’s “billing rate” was for the shave (twenty rupees for five minutes’ work) as opposed to a haircut (fifty rupees for twenty minutes’ work) . And I started wondering once again about the damage to barbers’ fortunes caused by King Gillette’s invention.

Temples

I’ve never been the religious type. I seldom go to temples. I seldom go to temples in my own city. I do visit temples when I’m traveling, but that is more as a tourist attraction. I’ve been to Tirupati once (Boxing Day 1991) and to Mantralaya twice and am not keen to visit either place again. After my first visit there in 1990, I would consider the Annapurna temple in Horanadu (near Chickmagalur) as my favourite temple. This was until a year ago when I visited it again and got pissed off by the crowds and formalities.

The amount I contribute to the Hundi in temples is also highly variable, and a direct function of how much I like the temple. I consider my contribution to the Hundi as my contribution for the upkeep and maintenance of the temple, and in support of the temple’s activities (for example, I tend to put in a higher amount in temples which serve free food). If I don’t like a temple, I just make a token contribution of Rs. 2 or Rs. 5 and flee. Also, I usually make my contributions to the Hundi, and not to the plate that comes along with the mangalaarathi. This is to ensure that the priest doesn’t kult my contribution.

Some temples do end up making me feel spiritual. It is hard to describe that feeling but let me tell you that it is the same that I felt when I smoked my first cigarette (and decided that smoking was too addictive to take up as a hobby and abandoned it). It is that feeling of inner calm. It is that feeling of being at complete peace with oneself. Sadly I haven’t felt that way at any temple since I started earning, else that temple might have been blessed with a fat contribution from my wallet.

I find the temples in North India too noisy. I remember literally running away from the ISKCON temple in Delhi six years ago because I thought it looked like a discotheque – loud devotional songs and people dancing. Today I went to a couple of temples near Connaught Place and it was similar – loud bhajans on one side, astrologers sitting all around the temple, and general disorder everywhere else. There was no way that temple could offer any peace or calm or any spiritual benefit. I fought with my mother when she insisted I should contribute at least Rs. 10 to the Hundi.

My contribution to temples is also an inverse function of its popularity – I usually contribute less at more popular temples because I can freeride on the rest of the visitors’ contribution. If it is a smaller temple and if i like it, I feel more responsible to contribute towards its upkeep.

And when I go to a temple, I always get archane done. That way, I definitely get some sugar candy!

And why do I not want to go back to Tirupati? Because I think it is too crowded to offer any kind of spiritual benefit. And Mantralaya? The last time I went there someone got a special pooja done in my name and as “prasad”, the swami there threw a towel on my back, and then threw an orange and asked me to catch it. I find that demeaning and don’t want to go back there again. Oh, and I wasn’t let in to the dining hall since I wasn’t wearing my sacred thread.

Length of Blog Posts

The problem with writing big blog posts is that it is difficult to acquire readers that way. It calls upon too much effort from the reader to read through the entire thing, and then decide whether to subscribe to your blog. As I have observed while looking at friends’ shared items on Google REader, the longer a post is, the greater the chance that I put NED and just mark it as read.

If you write consicely, it is that much easier to acquire new readers. It is that much easier for a new reader to quickly read a few of your posts, and decide that he likes it enough in order to subscribe. More of your posts that get shared on Google Reader are actually read, and there will be more click throughs to your full blog.

Look at some of India’s more successful bloggers – for example the two Amits – Varma and Agarwal. Amit Varma specializes in writing really concise stuff. His posts are usually quotes from some other article that he has linked to, and maybe a couple of lines of commentary (this is about his normal blog posts, not his Bastiat pieces which are longer). Amit Agarwal’s posts are longer but they contain so many pictures that they can be read very quickly.

The point is that these guys’ posts are so quick to read for a new reader that it is very easy to evaluate. If you don’t give potential customers a chance to evaluate you easily, the number of people who even evaluate you goes down and that has an impact on your overall readership.

I know that on this blog I’ve been guilty of writing extra-long posts. I try my best to finish stuff within 500 words but half the time I go beyond 900. Dear Readers, I appreciate your patience and thank you for still remaining loyal to this blog. The problem wtih me is that I never edit or proof-read my posts, and I write them in flow. So the posts represent the flow of thought through my head and that need not be concise. And hence I overshoot. However, henceforth I should make a conscious effort to keep my posts concise. And maybe you should do the same, too.

IPL Fixing

If Chennai beat Punjab today, then both RCB and DC will go through to the semis. Right now all three teams (Punjab, Bangalore, Hyd) are on 14 points and Punjab has a significantly lower NRR than the other two. So irrespective of who wins tomorrow’s game, it is likely that both are going to go through.

If Punjab lose tonight, then Kumble and Gilly can sit down and “cut the IPL melon” and decide among themselves who wants to face Chennai and who wants to face Delhi. And fix tomorrow’s match accordingly. As long as either RCB wins or if DC doesn’t win by a big margin, both go through. Splendid stuff.

Which is why, in football, in all leagues all last round games are played simultaneously. This happened after in the 1982 world cup, Germany and Austria figured out that as long as Germany would win 1-0, both would go through to the quarters ahead of Algeria. So Germany scored quickly, and then both they and Austria just passed the ball around for the rest of the game and chucked out Austria Algeria.

however, the iPL is more about money and about TRPs than about real competition so we are unlikely to see the last four games being played simultaneously.

Update

Ok so through some expert analysis I’ve come to the following conclusion after yesterday’s games.

1. Deccan Chargers are through irrespective of today’s result

2. Royal Challengers Bangalore can also be through even if they lose. All they need to make sure is that if Deccan bats first, then the margin of victory is not more than 75 runs. If Bangalore bats first, they need to make sure that Deccan takes at least 10 overs to reach the target.

Note that these numbers are approximate and will vary with the exact score that is made. But these two numbers can be taken as a ballpark.

Bottomline is that unless RCB mess up royally, Punjab are on their way home.

Alumni Dinner Pricing

So this is Anusmaran week. This is the week where all over the world, in over eleven cities, alumni of IIMB will meet in the annual alumni meet up. The venue for this is usually a convention hall or a lawn in a hotel, and people have to contribute an “entry fee” in order to pay for the dinner. Drinks are usually “extra” and you have to pay for each drink that you drink.

The problem with this is that for “pseud value” reasons the event is usually held in a reasonably expensive place. For example, in Delhi it happened at the India Habitat Center, with the “participation fee” being rupees eight hundred only. And on a Sunday evening, and you know how early or late parties in Delhi start. I didn’t go for it so I don’t really know about the response but I don’t expect it to have been spectacular.

The probelm with alumni meets is that the organizers (usually students doing their summer internship in the city where it is held) underestimate the elasticity of these meets. They don’t realize that people who want to be in touch with each other continue to be in touch with each other irrespective of efforts by the Alma Mater, and that there needs to be some sort of concrete incentive in order to come and attend the alumni meet up.

As I was discussing with Baada a short while ago, networking for networking sake does require a reasonably high level of enthu. It doesn’t come naturally for most people. You netwrok if you have a product to sell and need to meet potential buyers. You netwrok if you are looking for a job and hope to meet potential employers. You network if you are looking for some favour and there is a good chance you might meet someone who might do you that favour. You don’t naturally network for netwroking sake.

Given this, expecting people to shell out a not-so-inconsiderable amount to attend a networking event where food will probably be of dubious quality and you have to pay for each glass of booze is a bit too much. The more enthu people and people who want to network will turn up. The rest won’t. They will probably get together with their own little gang of people (maybe all alumni of the same college) and go elsewhere for good dinner and conversation.

The first time I attended Anusmaran was in 2005 when I helped organize it in London, where I was interning. All of us London interns were full of enthu for networking back then and turned up in good numbers. There were quite a few alumni also, and it was good fun. I attended Anusmaran in Mumbai in 2006, immediately after I’d joined my first job. I knew that a large number of people from our batch was in the city, and Anusmaran provided us a good opportunity to catch up. Extremely good fun.

In 2007, I had gone to the Bangalore meet and walked out looking at the extremely thin turnout. I went to the nearby Adigas for dinner along with Aadisht and GB. Was good value for money.

Yes I might be a cheap guy. But what the organizers need to keep in mind is that a large number of attendees are also cheap guys. So forget all the pseud value and hold it at a place where it doesn’t cost too much for the attendee in order to network.

Compensation Etc.

For a change I’m keeping up a promise that I’ve made on my blog – I’m actually writing a follow-up post that I’d promised. In the past, I’ve guilty several times of promising to continue something in a follow-up post and then conveniently forgetting about it.

So I had mentioned in my last post that the word “compensation” as used to describe salary is not really misplaced. There has been a lot of debate on this topic. The opponents of the word have said that you aren’t losing an arm or a leg in order to be “compensated”. They say that you are only getting paid for the value you add, and so the use of the word “compensation” is plain wrong. I must admit I haven’t really bothered to read the arguments of the people who support the use of the word.

The basic fact: you work because you need the cash flow to fund the rest of your life.

I know a lot of career-minded folks among you will jump on me for this, but I stand by this. Just get down a little deeper, and ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing. Maybe you don’t get the kind of questions in your head that I normally do, and described in my previous post. Maybe your jobs have put you in the kind of comfort zone where you don’t really need to ask yourself such questions (I was in a similar state not too long back, I must admit). But I encourage you to make that effort and ask yourself this uncomfortable question. And it will be down to the money.

You might say that you are doing some stuff “for the sake of career development”. Rephrase that and you will find that you are doing that in expectation of higher future earnnigs. You might say that you are doing something because you want to “achieve something”. Dig deeper and you may find that you define the fruit of your achievement in monetary terms.

So where does “quality of work”, “impact on society”, “value add”, etc. all fit in? I know that in the not-so-distant past, I’ve also talked a lot about these things. I have rejected a number of potential job offers because I don’t like the “quality of work”. This definitely needs to be incorporated into the model, right?

The next basic fact: work is inherently unpleasant.

I don’t think I’ll spend too much time elaborating this here. Maybe I’ll explain this in the comments if you want. So this is where things like “quality of work”, “value add” etc. all fit in – they make work so much less unpleasant. For example, I enjoy spreadsheet modeling. So if my work involves a lot of spreadsheet modeling, I’ll feel so much less unpleasant doing it. Of course, what I am doing remains “work” and it has to be done, in a certain way by a certain day, and so it remains unpleasant. But the fact that I enjoy the core activity makes it less unpleasant.

Similarly, if you think that the work that you are doing gives you a sense of achievement, then it is as if you are doing a part of the work for yourself, and not for someone else, and thus need to be compensated less. “Compensated less”. So this is where it fits in. You get “compensated” because work is inherently unpleasant. You need some incentive to do the stuff that is inherently unpleasant. So you get compensated.

You may have to live in a city that is not your preferred choice – you need to get compensated for that. You may face an extremely long commute where you waste your time – you need to get compensated for that. You might have to work long hours which can intrude on your personal time – you need to get compensated for that. You may have to deal with lousy colleagues or customers, you need to get compensated for that. The list goes on. And if you think about it, a large part of the money that you get out of your work is just that – compensation. Compensation for your time, your effort, your mindspace, your willpower, etc.

So why work at all, you might ask. Go to basic fact one. You work because you need the money. You are in a certain job because you believe that after compensating for all your “sacrifices” for the job, it will leave you with some more money to fund your life. If you think that the money your job leaves you if you take out the “compensation” part of it is lower than what you need to sustain life, you need to question why you are doing that job.

Investment bankers (the inside the wall type) usually end up spending a lot of their time at work, and despite the reasonable bonuses they get, they might feel they are not being compensated enough. They are doing it because they expect that when they ultimately get promoted they will make enough and more to cover for all this unpleasantness. It is basically an “investment”. If, however, you think you are in a job where you are inadequately compensated but don’t see any hopes of significantly higher compensation in the future, you are cheating yourself by not looking for another job.

This also explains why it is a bad thing to compare your salary with your peers and your old classmates and then feel good or bad about it. No two people have the same needs. No two people find the same things unpleasant to the same degree. No two people make the same trade-offs. Comparing your salary with you peer gives little information.

On a closing note (I know it’s already monstrously long) I find the phrase “work-life balance” amusing. I think it is a construct brought about by the pigs so as to con the sheep into workign harder for them. There is no “balance” between life and work. Life is the master and work is the slave.

Work Etc.

There are these days when you wake up and start wondering what the fuck you are upto. You start asking yourself why you are where you are, doing what you are doing. You ask yourself why you are not on that monthlong roadtrip of rural Karnataka, with the hope of maybe producing a shelf of books at the end of it. You ask yourself why you haven’t been doing stuff that you had promised yourself that you would do.

That new guitar has already started rusting, and the left index finger that you had cut the last time you played has long healed. The car mileage grows only in small increments – which approximately represents the distance you go to work. Half the days you cook rice, and mix it with copious quantities of Mother Dairy Dahi, and some pickle that has been sent from home. The other days you go to the same restaurant, sit at the same table and order the same set of items.

You are doing it for the sake of your career, you tell yourself. Career. Tha FUBAR thing. Which you are trying to marginally resurrect and repair by doing what you are doing, and trying to bring back to it some vague sense of recognition. You meet your friends. You hear them shag about their jobs. You hear about all the cool things that they are doing, and about how they are fast moving up the corporate ladder. About how you are a failure in life if you don’t work hard at this stage of life, and if you can’t win the rat race.

You meet friends’ friends. The first thing they ask you is what you do – and you are likely to get judged on that. So you need to make sure that you have a good story to tell about your job, which makes you sound cool. Coming up with formulae to price the movement of sacks of rice is not cool, as I found out. Financial services is usually met with a question asking you to predict the direction of the index. Sales is usually met with “the sun is very hot nowadays, no?”. And IT is met with “are you a Java coder or a C# coder?”.

Occasionally you want to get away from all this. These are the times when you accept that you are doing what you are doing because of the increments it produces in your bank balance. Sometimes you realize that the monthly increments in your bank balance are not enough; and some of those times you console yourself saying that you are doing this in expectation of larger inflows in the future. You consider your job to be an investment – that the dough you are not getting now will get more than compensated for later in your life.

So when on certain days you wake up and ask yourself why the fuck you are where you are and doing what you are doing, you usually don’t have an answer. In those states of mind, “career”, “development”, “investment”, “corporate” etc. all don’t matter at all. Neither does “net present value of expected future earnings”. Your total costs look inflated. Your benefits look deflated. Every line of thought that runs in your head then tells you that you should go off into the Himalayas. You go to office instead.

I’ll stop this essay here. In a forthcoming essay I’ll explain about how a job is essentially about costs and benefits, and why they use the word “compensation” to describe your salary. I have occasionally argued in the other direction, but thinking about it again, I think the word “compensation” with reference to salary package does make a lot of sense.

My Friend Sancho – Review

I had mentioned in my previous blog post that I’ll not be attending the My Friend Sancho launch in Delhi because it was on a weekday. I had also mentioned that since I have a huge pile of unread books I wouldn’t buy this for a while at least. My boss happened to read that blog post and mentioned to me that he was planning to drive to mainland Delhi for the launch at the end of work on Wednesday evening. Not having to drive all the way there relieved me of the NED and I went. And given that I went, and that I was planning to buy it some time, I bought it at the venue and got it signed by the author.

I just finished my dinner. I know it’s a bit late, but I started reading the book at 8pm today. And got so engrossed that I didn’t get up to cook till it was around nine thirty, when I had finished about half the book. I got up and put the rice to cook and sat down with the book again. And didn’t get up until I was done (oh yes – I got up once in the middle to turn off the pressure cooker, and to take a leak). All two hundred and seventeen pages of it. Extremely easy read, and extremely engrossing. The drop in quality of Amit’s blogging during the time he wrote this book can be forgiven.

Overall it is a nice book. But I wonder how well it will be appreciated by someone who doesn’t know Amit at all. I know that a large proportion of people who will be buying his book are regular readers of India Uncut (which finds half a dozen plugs in the book), but thing is there is so much more you can get from the book if you know Amit. Now – given that I know Amit, and not just from his blog – I’m trying to imagine how much less a person who doesn’t know Amit at all will get out of this.

One of ther more delightful sub-plots in the book is the speech given by a policeman about “the beast called the Government” – while speaking in bullet points. It is a fantastic libertarian speech, and it is even more fantastic that it is delivered by the possibly corrupt inspector. Now – the problem is that a person who hasn’t read much of Amit’s writing – either on his blog or in his erstwhile Mint column will simply gloss over this monologue as some random meaningless gibberish.

There are a few other such pieces in the book – where a prior reading of Amit’s work will make you enjoy things a lot more. So my recommenedation to you is tha tif you wnat to read MFS, you should first go over to indiauncut.com and read a few dozen of Amit’s blog posts. And then begin reading the book and you should enjoy it.

Another reason why I was initially sceptical about the book was that I was told it features a talking lizard. I inherently don’t like stories that cannot be real. So if you put in talking animals, or creatures that don’t exist, I am usually put off and lose enthu to read the book. Amit, however, does a good job of limiting the number of lines given to the lizard – he does it in a way such that it appears as if the lizard represents the narrator’s conscience.

Overall it’s a really good book, and I recommend you read it. The story is simple and gripping, and the sub-plots are also really good. It won’t take too much of your time, or too much of your money (very reasonably priced at Rs. 195). Just make sure that you read some of Amit’s writing before you read the book.