Author: SK

Madman theory redux?

Madman Theory refers to the policy employed by the US in the 1970s during Nixon’s reign. They convinced the Russians that Nixon was mad, and that he was liable to act irrationally if provoked. And this led to the US getttig an upper hand in the Cold War.

It seems like Pakistan is unwittingly doing the same nowadays. Given the general chaotic nature of the political “leadership” in that country, and also the fact that they have access to nuclear weapons, India dare not launch a full-scale offensive against Pakistan, irrespective of what the terrorists do.

So what this means is that Pakistani terrorists can come here and continue to have fun, and even if we know that they have been backed by Pakistan, we can’t do a thing because we are afraid that some madcap in Pakistan has control over the nuclear button and might end up nuking us.

And given that the democrats are in power in the US (irrespective of Biden’s pro-India leanings) you never know how relations between India and Pakistan shape out in the next few years.

If you have a bright idea as to how one can combat this Madman technique (I’m not sure if Pakistan is playing this deliberately), let me know. Actually, letting me know is of no use. I can’t do a thing. So do what you think is the best, but also let me know.

Be Right Back

BRB. Be right back. I think this has to be the most abused phrase in the history of Instant Messaging. The problem with the phrase is that it gives no indicator of the amount of time that the BRBer will be away. First of all, different people have different horizons when they say “right back”. It could range from as short as a pee break to as long as a two hour meeting. In certain cases, the person doesn’t reappear at all.

Then there are people who are plain insincere. When they don’t know how to wriggle out of a conversation and they have someone else to do, they just “brb”. And thus end up keeping the other person waiting endlessly. Just think about it – it’s so much easier to get out of a conversation with just these 3 letters rather than wasting 2-3 sentences in explaining to the other person why you’ve to go away. Here, there are no formal goodbyes. No greetings. Just a BRB.

In the last couple of months, I’ve been trying hard to make an attempt to minimize use of this phrase, or at least minimize the misuse. If I know the length of time for which I’ll be away, I’ll give the counterparty an idea about that. If I don’t have a good idea of the amount of time my distraction will take, I usually tell the counterparty what my distraction is. I sometimes instinctively say “brb” and then follow it up with the time or the activity. Examples – “brb phone” (the counterparty knows this can take from a minute to a few hours) or “brb leak” (here the counterparty knows i won’t be gone for more than a couple of minutes) or “brb dinner”.

In the larger interest of humanity, I request you people also to suitably modify your usage of this term. “Be right back” is meaningless today. Do something like what I do. Qualify your absences. It’s going to go a long way in reducing the total amount of time wasted by the world in waiting for the counterparty to be returning to the conversation. At this moment, if i were taking an interview for a consulting job, I’d ask the candidate to estimate this amount of time.

So what did Sven-Goran Eriksson tell captain David Beckham in the group match against Trinidad and Tobago when the injured Jamie Carragher was replaced by Aaron Lennon?

Be Right Back.

Pee-ball Wizard

I conceived this game around two o’clock this afternoon. It was during one of my several bio-breaks that I usually take during a hard day’s work. The amount of work done is directly proportional to the volume of fluid that passes through my system, and given the rate at which both input and output happened today, it seemed like i did a lot of work.

This is a very gross post. If you think you are going to get grossed out, read no further. And for your sake, let me put the rest of the post under the fold.

Continue reading “Pee-ball Wizard”

Community and age of marriage

I’ll be 26 within two weeks time. In fact, if you go by the Hindu calendar (which sacrifices short-term accuracy for long-term precision) I’m already 26. One question people constantly ask me when I bump into them is about when I plan to get married. Most of my friends also belong to the same approximate age group. When we meet up, discussion frequently veers towards “market entry”. About the arranged marriage market.

One common thread of discussion is “you belong to XXX community. you should’ve already fathered two kids by this age” or “you belong to YYY community. it’s ok even if you don’t get married for another six years”. Which makes me wonder why people from different castes and communities get married at different ages.

The Hindu scriptures divide a man’s life into four stages. At the end of the first quarter, which is brahmacharya, the boy is supposed to get married, and become a gRhasta. This division of life into four quarters in the Hindu scriptures is a clear indication that our ancestors knew about the Quarter Life Crisis so long ago. And they has prescribed a simple antidote to it – marriage. Yes, I admit that different people would feel the QLC at slightly different ages, leading to a small variation in marriage age. However, there seems to be no reason as to why this should depend upon one’s caste.

For one to get married, one needs to earn enough in order to support a partner and still lead a fairly comfortable life. Typically, you won’t want a quality of life that is much inferior to what you were leading at your parents’ place, before you moved out. When you are still a bachelor, you might be willing to accept a lower quality of life in order to maybe further your career. However, by the time you get married, you want to be closer to the quality you were used to in childhood.

We need to remember that the caste system was initially intended to divide people based on their occupation. Thus, it is fair to assume that even fifty to seventy years back, when most people more or less “lived within their caste”, people from similar castes were likely to take up similar kind of careers. Some would choose to join the family business, others would go out to set up their own business, a few others would join the government, and some others would join the army, and so on.

You need to notice that each kind of occupation promises its own kind of cash flows, and so in each of these types of professions, you take a varying amount of time in order to reach the standard of living of your parents.

If you observe, in most parts of India, the people who get married the youngest are typically people who belong to Lala communities. Once you choose to become a Lala, you forego an income, and live on pocket money. And it’s your family which decides how much pocket money you get, and typically your father and uncles and so on won’t want you to live an inferior life to theirs. And so your standard of living is always equal to that of your parents’. And you get married quickly.

Then you have people who work for a salary. If you look back, back in the 50’s and 60’s, the only employer (there wasn’t much of a choice in this) was the government. And irrespective of what degrees you had, or what colleges you went to, you were subject to a pay scale based on number of years in the job. And your salary would typically start off obscenely low. And it would take ages for you to reach the standard of living of your parents.

So that explains it. I know I haven’t taken any data points in between, but I suppose it shouldn’t be too tough. Lalas always live at the same standard as their families, and are thus eligible to marry the earliest. People working for salaries had no choice. They had to wait till the sarkar paid them enough to reach the same standard of living as their parents. And they married really late.

It is all because of Nehruvian socialism, I tell you. In case India was more capitalist back then, more people would’ve gotten rich enough to marry sooner. And this caste-based distinction in age of marriage wouldn’t have existed.

So the next time someone brings up some caste or community related stuff when encouraging or discouraging you to get married, tell them that it is all Nehru’s fault. Talk to them about our great scriptures, and their recognition of the Quarter Life Crisis. Argue from the point of view of your own QLC so as to conveniently hasten or postpone marriage. I’m sure that the scriptures, properly invoked, won’t fail you.

Bangalore Trip

So I went to Bangalore on Thursday. And returned yesterday afternoon. It was a fairly eventful trip – just that most of the events that took place during the trip were planned. There weren’t too many surprises – either positive or negative, and this lack of volatility meant that it was a good trip overall.

I had ended my last post hoping that my bike would start. And start it did, dutifully. Unfortunately, it was to tell Jai later during the day, when it abruptly stopped somewhere in Gandhibazaar market. It was quite hot and I had to push it around a fair distance to find a garage that was open in order to get it repaired.

The thing with automobile repair shops is that most of them are owned by Muslims, and thus have their weekly holiday on Friday. While it might be convenient in normal times since you can leave your bike for service on a Sunday, it can be death when your bike breaks down on Friday afternoon. I had to go past two or three closed auto repair shops that day before I found a “Sowmya bike point” where my spark plug got replaced.

Two of my three breakfasts were consumed at Darshinis. Actually, on Friday, I had my breakfast in three installments. Saturday was the usual Masala Dosa at the Adigas in Jayanagar 4th block. Dinner on Saturday was at Shiok, the first time I was visiting it at the new location. The food, as usual, was excellent. One extremely under-rated starter at Shiok is Choo Chee Potatoes. I strongly recommend you to try it out the next time. I left the choice of my drink to Madhu Menon, and he recommended some pink stuff for me.

I met Baada, Harithekid and PGK at Shiok. I was meeting PGK for the first time. I was already a bit disoriented when I had arrived at Shiok (my head had gone blank a couple of times earlier that day, leading me to take an auto to Shiok rather than putting bike), and combine that with the pink drink and I think I’ve forgotten what PGK looks like. All I remember is that he too had a pink drink – which was different from mine.

I managed to submit address change requests at most of the places I had intended to. I went to SBI and Karnataka Bank, and extended my fixed deposits – taking advantage of the insanely high prevailing rates. I visited one aunt for dinner on Friday, and another for lunch on Saturday.

The only time during the entire trip that I was consumed by NED was when I went to inspect my house in Bangalore. It was after a gap of almost ten years that I was seeing the house empty. It was at that moment I think – three months after I moved to Gurgaon – that it hit me that I don’t live in Bangalore any more. And that I don’t intend to return for a while. It took a maddening auto drive to Shiok to cure me of this bout of NED.

Friday evening was spent in the cantonment area, though I regret to inform you that I visited neither of MG Road and Brigade road. I met Udupa and Woreshtmax Vishnu for tea at Koshy’s, and on either side of tea, raided the Premier Bookshop. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pics as I had planned. The only picture of Premier that I now have is the one taken with Neha Jain’s wrist that appeared in the ToI on 26th July 2004 (I don’t have a scanned copy; a few hard copies of the clipping are there somewhere in my house in Jayanagar in Bangalore).

I spent all my coupons, and Shamanth’s coupons also. I still have Lakshana’s coupon with me, and I intend to mail it to her. Here is what I bought:

  • The Human Zoo  – Desmond Morris
  • The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
  • An artist and a mathematician (a book about the fictional mathematician Nicholas Bourbaki; forgot the author)
  • India: A History – John Keay
  • Longitude
  • The Stuff of Thought – Steven Pinker

Once again, thanks to all those who recommended books to me. Unfortunately, a large number of those were not available at Premier. i’ll probably order them from Rediff Books once I’ve whittled down my have-and-unread list.

Bangalore Trip

I’m going to Bangalore tomorrow evening. Will be back on Sunday afternoon. My mother will be accompanying me to Gurgaon then.

It seems like there is a lot of work to do during my short stay there. Apart from the usual meeting relatives and friends, I have some tonnes of offical work to do which I hadn’t been able to do before moving to Gurgaon.

I need to give a change of address request to my banks, my brokerage accounts, my credit card account, etc. I need to take advantage of this temporary high-interest period in order to renew my fixed deposits. There are some other agreements which I’ll need to get prepared and sign. I need to go to Premier Bookshop and clear out my coupons.

As if all this was not enough, my mother had told me on Sunday that my market entry might be happening and I might even be required to meet a potential investor. Thankfully (?) that deal has fallen through before it even began, so I’m spared of that trouble.

Then, there is food. Two aunts have invited me to their homes for a meal apiece, but apart from that I’ve asked my mother not to cook for me. I will be putting a visit to Shiok, for the first time since it reopened. I still haven’t decided upon the places where I’ll eat breakfast, but the Adigas in Jayanagar 8th Block and SN in JP Nagar 2nd phase seem to be the favourites. I’ll probably have idli-vada-dosa for lunch also on one of the days.

This is the first time in almost 40 years that my mother will be moving out of Bangalore for an extended period of time, so there are thousands of relatives who expect us to visit them. I don’t think we’ll be able to entertain most of them, but still a few visits will have to be made.

Then, there is the meeting friends bit. I’ve set up two sets of meetings already, and I’m not sure if I’ll have time for more. Nevertheless, I think I must be having some time early on Saturday evening (5 to 7 types). So if you don’t belong to either of the two sets that I’ve mentioned here (if you do belong to either of those sets, you already know it) and want to meet me, give me a call. I also need to mention here that I won’t have net access from tomorrow afternoon to Sunday evening.

All in all, it seems like I have planned for a fairly heavy schedule for this visit to Bangalore, my first since I moved to Gurgaon. And all this heavy activity is contingent upon one thing – the condition of my bike. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with the schedule I’ve made for myself if I’m not able to use my bike. So please join me in praying that my bike is in good condition and won’t play truant during the length of my stay in Bangalore.

On how blogs have changed the way I look at books

I have more than a hundred feeds on my Google Reader. It could be much more, just that I haven’t bothered to keep track. Apart from these hundred odd feeds, I also read posts which have been shared by people on my GTalk friends list. And then, you have people who send you the odd link to some strong post or article, and I usually end up reading them too.

The point I’m trying to drive at is that most of my reading time nowadays is spent reading blogs and news articles and magazine articles. The kind of stuff that promises to offer a strong insight once every 1000 words or so, and usually delivers on that promise. Which, in effect, has spoilt me.

So, in effect, whenever I read something, I end up expecting an insight every few hundred words (no, i’m not that jobless to count words. this is just an approximate estimate). And this is the reason why, I think, I’ve stopped reading fiction. Fiction simply doesn’t offer the same kind of insights that blogs do. Yes, stories can be insightful. They do help you learn stuff. They definitely help you “develop as a person”. But if they are longer than a few hundred words (i still have appetite for short stories), they end up boring me. I quickly lose interest. I find no point in reading them.

Whenever I look at a book now, I end up comparing the experience to reading blogs. I see if the book can promise insight at the same rates that blogs can. Which is why I hate single-idea books. i had recently read this book called Why Popcorn Costs So much at the movies. My crib with that was that it didn’t offer enough insight for it’s length. What could have been explained in 20 blog posts had been stitched into a book.

In the era before blogs, such books made sense. There was no quick fix way to get insights, and you would be willing to plough through long books in order to get some insights. And for the author, there was no quick and profitable way of disseminating insights – he was forced to write long books. It was a sustainable market.

Blogging seems to have changed all that. There is a quick and possibly profitable way of disseminating informationn. There is a quick and easy way of receiving it. Some books that were great ideas in an earlier era simply can’t hold up now. In these times, if you are to write a book, you need to make sure that there is actually enough material to hold up all the pages that it’s written on. That even if the main idea can’t hold for so long (it usually can’t), you put in enough sub-plots and side-stories to sustain it.

I want to write books some day. Maybe even take that as a full-time profession – though it’s too early to call on that. However, when I do get down to writing this, I need to keep this concept in mind. That I will need to fill the book with enough insights to sustain it.

PS: i don’t feel the same about movies. I don’t mind the slow buildup and long periods where nothing happens at all. maybe it’s because the movie lasts only about two odd hours in its entirety.

Book recos needed

I’m in Bangalore next weekend. I’ll be in town from Thursday late night to Sunday afternoon. Apart from finishing off some pending official work and catching up with friends and relatives, one of my agendas for the trip is to finish up my book coupons, which I had won in various quizzes.

I have about 2.5K to 3K worth of coupons with me (not sure of the exact amount). Of this, Rs. 1000 is at Crossword, and will expire in February. I don’t know if I’ll be visiting Bangalore again before that, and I have no enthu to hunt for a Crossword store in Delhi, so I plan to exhaust them then.

The rest of the coupons are for the Premier Bookshop, which I am told is going to close sometime next month. So, I need to spend these coupons too next week. Which means that during the course of the second half of next Saturday, I’ll be probably indulging in the second biggest book binge of my life, the biggest having been in 2004, when I spent Rs. 4000 worth of coupons at Landmark.

Now, I don’t really know what to buy. I don’t have any books in mind that i really really want. So please to be recommending. To help you people with your recommendations, a few pointers from my side. I don’t want you to spend your valuable time and energy recommending books that I definitely don’t want to read, right?

  • I don’t read fiction. I have limited reading time, and want to utilize that to get fundaes in life. So, no fiction please
  • I think I’ve outgrown popular economics books, so they are out too. The last one I read was “why popcorn costs so much at the movies” and it hardly added any value. I think I know enough economics that I don’t need to read such books anymore.
  • I really liked books such as Guns Germs and Steel and A Farewell to Alms. Books that are essentially historical but not really history books. Scientific history or economic history or social history or whatever you want to call it. If you know some really good books in these subjects, do let me know
  • I think I’m still up for popular science. I really loved Six Degrees by Duncan Watts (it helped that I really love Graph Theory, which is the foundation of social networks theory), and have bought his other book on social networks (small worlds, i think, it’s called). Despite four odd years after movin away from technology, I’m still up for some physics or math or computer science, as long as it is well written
  • Don’t recommend any books on financial markets unless they are really exceptional. I’m currently reading Mandelbrot’s “The (mis)behaviour of markets” and though it’s a great book, I’m having trouble ploughing through it simply because it feels like work. Every great idea I come across, I start thinking “how can I create a trade based on this idea?”.
  • Remember that the books you recommend need to be available in India. And I’ll be putting only a single visit, and won’t have time to order books.
  • Remember that the Crossword collection is fairly crappy, and so I need recos for at least Rs. 1K that are available in all popular stores. If it’s a slightly specialized book, it won’t be available at Crossword.

The other big question that has come up in my head is about which bookshop to visit first next Saturday. They are situated about a kilometer away from each other. The thing with Premier is that it doesn’t enable easy browsing, so I’ll need to go there with a long list of books. Remember that I’ve to finish off all my coupons next week only.

On the other hand, Crossword is so crappy that most of the books on my list are unlikely to be available there, and so I’d rather put a visit to Premier after I’ve put visit to Crossword. Anyways, this is the least of my worries now. So go ahead and recommend. Write comments here. Create buzz on this post. Even if you have some questions for me regarding these, leave a comment here. I’ll definitely respond.

Dreams, daydreams, movie scripts and Jab We Met

The last time a relationship I’d invested considerable time and energy in didn’t happen, my mother told me that it had to do with my dreams. And my daydreams. And the “movie scripts” that I would often make up and tell her. Most of these would have a similar ending. The boy and the girl will end up deciding they will just be friends. And to move on in life. Typically, the movie scripts would end with one of them walking away into the drizzle. Or both of them walking away in opposite directions in the drizzle. It was because of the kind of scripts I would “write”, my mother would say, that similar things were happening to me in life.

Two and a half years down the line, I don’t seem to have changed. I still feel the same about a number of scripts. I don’t daydream anymore, at least not as much as I used to a few months or years ago. I don’t write movie scripts for fun any more. If I think I have an idea for a movie script, I start thinking about it from a commercial aspect. And end up ruining it. And though I continue to dream, and dream heavily, I don’t seem to remember too many of them. However, I’m sure that this kind of script still occurs once in a while in my dream.

I was reminded of this when I was watching Jab We Met earlier this evening. I thought it was a fantastic movie. Though Shahid Kapoor was playing a Lala, I could fully identify with his character. The first half, or maybe three fourths, was brilliant. The way his initial exchanges with Kareena Kapoor have been written is awesome. The entire bit starting from the time he walks away from his car till he is back in his company was compelling. At that point, the movie held so much promise that I was kicking myself for not having watched it for almost a year after its release. (rest of the post below the post. spoilers are there)

Continue reading “Dreams, daydreams, movie scripts and Jab We Met”

Extending the studs and fighters theory

In a seminal post written over a year back, I had classified people into two, based on their working styles. I had called them “studs” and “fighters”. Studs, I had argued were people who had the knack of finding the easy way out. Who liked to work around corners, and find short cuts. And who would try to do things in as efficient a manner as possible.

Fighters, on the other hand, were supposed to be extremely meticulous, and process-oriented, and extremely hardworking. They would make up for their lack of natural talent by way of sheer hard work, and would be extremely determined in order to achieve their goals.

Today, thanks to a shared item on Google Reader by JP, I came across this article in The New Yorker. It talks about how humans get insights. The article talks about the process, or the lack of it, that leads to people getting insights. A large part of the article is a bit technical, and talks about a lot of biology. But if you can navigate through that, it offers a lot of insights on what goes into insights, and what might be needed in order to think in this sort of manner.

One major idea that is presented in this article is that insights are usually developed by the right half of the brain (for right-handed people), while most process-oriented stuff and calculation takes place in the left half. The article argues that in order to leave ourselves open to more insight, we need to take care not to focus too much of the problem. It also explains that you are likely to get your insights when you are least expecting them, such as when you are playing table tennis.

Ok, so going forward on these two lines of thought, I argue that “studs” and “fighters” can be extended to learning styles rather than as just working styles. It is the way in which the two categories of people understand things. Studs, I believe, are the people who tend to get most of their understanding by way of insights. People who are unable to put a finger on the process by which they learn a particular thing. Because of this, their thought is so unstructured that it is difficult for them to precisely and correctly follow processes.

Fighters, on the other hand, get their understanding incrementally, by following a process. They build up their understanding bit by bit. Slowly but surely. They are inherently left-brained people, and because their learning style is so processed and orderly, they thrive in orderly environments. Where all you need to do is to come together and go through a process. They are willing to work hard. They don’t mind if what they are doing is not insightful (partly because they experience insights so rarely). And thus lead low-volatility lives.

One other important insight from this article is that you are not consigned to a career in liberal arts or related fields if you are a right-brained person, as a number of people would like to convince you. Popular belief is that people who are good at math are inherently left-brained, and those good at languages are inherently right-brained. And that the paths for these people are disjoint. And they should stick to what they are good at.

However, what you might want to infer from this article is that all that it means by being right-brained is that you survive on insights. And that you are more likely to be a stud than being a fighter. The old school used to say that engineering is for the left-brained because they saw engineering as being process-oriented. And they saw the liberal arts as being insight-oriented. However, there are enough instances to show that the complementary skill is also important in both kinds of fields. You need studs in engineering, for if everyone would just follow the processes, there wouldn’t be anyone to think out of the box and come up with new stuff. You do need fighters in the arts, for on many occasions it’s a sheer execution game.

In any case, I would advise you to go read the article. It’s longish, but offers important insights. And if you think you are an insight-driven person, as I think I am, it might help to show this article to your bosses, and explain to them that making you focus may not exactly be the best thing to do in the interest of the firm.