Author: SK

i’m becoming way too restless nowadays. Not able to concentrate on anything. I’ve become a compulsive multitasker. And sometimes I’m reading so many things at the same time that it can get maddening. Even as I write this, my mind is on some six other things and i’m listening to music and trying to overhear some colleagues.

I think I need to start playing blitz chess again. With a human (I’ve been playing with a program, but in that case it’s easy to get distracted). And either using a chess board or blindfold. No computer screens please – there again I can get distracted and not concentrate properly. Also it’s important that it’s a blitz (< 10 mins per player) game. If I have a longer time to think there's the danger that I might take my mind off the game, which can defeat the very purpose.

• Read this article about Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. Strong fundaes are there in there. Particularly amazing is the fact that he made 97% of his lifetime earnings on “black monday” (oct 19 1987)
• I’ve started reading “Traders, Guns and Money” by Satyajit Das. In the prologue, he talks about this swap between an investment bank and a supposedly fictitious Indonesian noodle company (my guess is that the bank is Barclays – it is shown to have offices both in Canary Wharf and Singapore. I’m not aware of any other bank with offices in these 2 places)

  Coming back to the swap, the agreement was that the Noodle Company would pay fixed on the swap, say? $1000 a month. Now, in return, the bank would pay the noodle maker in rupaiahs, based on a complicated formula which went approximately something like this

  payout = $1000 * USD/IDR * 5% * (Libor^4/Libor^3 – Libor^2*Libor^-1) * constant

  Read the formula carefully and you’ll know what the bank had to pay the noodle guy. Incredible

• I somehow missed this news that came out a few days back. Karnataka has finally notified the APMC Amendment Act. The act itself had been passed by the JD(S)/BJP government which had fallen before it could be notified. While it’s definitely a step in the right direction, it doesn’t feel as good as the notification came under President’s Rule.

• A large proportion of commentary about the US housing crisis considers it extremely unfortunate that a large number of people couldn’t refinance their Adjustable Rate Mortgages before the rate got reset to “normal levels”. I don’t know what these people were expecting

  it seems like a lot of these people were made to believe that they only need to pay the artificially lower rate! and that it’s criminal of the bank to be asking for more

• Both Democratic candidates are talking about state support to help delinquent borrowers to help staying in their homes. They should concentrate on building more housing projects – only difference being that here the government is going to help people buy expensive houses!
• Sometimes I wonder why people working in IT services companies working on fairly low-end stuff are called “techies”. Sometimes even “software engineer” seems to be a bit of a stretch. What technology are they creating? What engineering are they doing? Aren’t they more like the assembly line guys on a shop floor?

  Disclaimer: I’m not saying this about everyone working in IT companies. There are a large number of firms that do engineering. There are a large number of people who work on technology. Most people, however, don’t fit this bill.

• Last weekend I finished reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I’ve been planning to write a long-ish post about the way history is taught in schools. Unfortunately NED has been happening. I should be writing this thing sometime soon.
• The Chepauk pitch seems to have been prepared with the IPL in view and not for a test match. Actually looking at the IPL team lineups the best pitch for a test might be found at Bangalore or Mohali
• I think i should “graduate” to writing in newspapers. I have a broad outline ready. I have the first post in my head. It’s going to be called “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” (I plan to name my pieces after Iron Maiden songs – which I think is quite easy). This post draws on learnings from the Ramayana to explain the current i-banking crisis. I need to figure out how to approach papers and all that.

At the KQA season ending quiz yesterday (done by

kvk

), I cracked my third ever western music answer in my 14 year old quizzing career (I managed to work out Freddie Mercury from the “surname comes from ‘native of Valsad'” funda). Unfortunately I spoilt it all as I missed a sitter on Pink Floyd in the same quiz.

Earlier, in

al_lude

‘s love quiz, I cracked the first ever Maanga answer of my 14 year old quizzing career. It was a question that had to do with the dream of the fisherman’s wife, and the question was dedicated to

beatzo

. I’m told we were one of 2/3 teams that managed to get Tentacle Rape.

Coming back to

kvk

‘s open quiz, we sorely missed a “sweeper” or a “holding guy” (however you would like to call it). The sweeper is basically a guy who sweeps all the easy stuff, the “obvious” stuff and the peters. The lack of a sweeper in our team meant that we comfortably missed the cutoff despite cracking several good answers.

The Kannada phrase for Holi is “kaamana habba”, or Kama‘s festival. It is supposedly on this day that Kama, the Hindu god of love, danced in front of the meditating Shiva in order to gain his attention. Shiva got incensed and opened his third eye and burnt Kama down to ashes. This of course, is one of the legends of Holi, apart from the other more famous one (more prevalent in North India) concerning Prahalad.

I’m surprised that the anti-love day cabal doesn’t really recognize Holi as the Indian festival of love. Maybe such constructive activities are beyond them, and they would rather get mileage stoning Archie’s outlets on Feb 14. The Indian media, too, doesn’t really care for this particular interpretation of the festival and mostly restricts itself to showing politicians patting each other’s cheeks. Of course, nowadays, the jobless TV media has gotten creative.

2 years back, NDTV wanted to cover Holi celebrations at IIMB. It was only after vehement protests and threats of boycott that the media cell asked the channel to f*** off. Yesterday, a friend who works at Headlines Today asked me if I knew any IT company which would be celebrating Holi today! Absolutely jobless. I’m surprised people still advertise on these channels.

Now that the digression is out of the way, it is quite clear that Holi is the Indian version of love day. For starters, as I mentioned, it is to commemorate the decimation of the love God, the Hindu cupid. And the “rules” and “processes” at the festival clearly promote love. It is a festival that promotes touch, and who will really mind, if you make one touch too many on a member of the opposite sex (provided he/she doesn’t mind the touch, of course). Then, like most other Indian festivals, it is a community festival. And the way it is celebrated gives immense scope for flirting.

In the Holi atmosphere, it is easy to signal your intentions. Some extra colour, or an extra bucket of water, can be easily used to draw attention.? Traditionally, people dress in white, and you end up extremely wet. And all male “players” anyway get their shirts torn off. So, immense scope are there for lech also. And as if all this was not enough, there is Bhaang!

There is further evidence that Holi is the Indian day of love. Baada informs me that typically? the male and female deities at Srirangam are housed separately. It is only on Holi day that they are brought together. If this is the day of love for the conservative Iyengar God and Goddess, it is obviously the day of love for everyone else! In fact, Baada has traveled all the way to Srirangam to witness this spectacle.

Tomorrow

al_lude

is conducting? a quiz on Love at Daly Memorial Hall at one thirty pm. Knowing Arul, it should be fun.

PS

It is cloudy outside and there was a slight drizzle this morning. Traditionally, it is supposed to rain on Holi day – in order to cool down Kama’s ashes.

I’ll continue from where I left off yesterday.

Delhi

Bib has put in a decent XI, except that there aren’t enough Indians in it. I think I’ll try to stick as much as possible to the XI I had mentioned a few weeks back. The only forced change is that Virat Kohli is not available. Either Shikhar Dhawan or Mayank Tehlan or Mithun Manhas should replace him. Another option would be to replace McGrath by Yo and bring in Dilshan. It seems like Delhi will need to purchase 1/2 more local guys.

1. Virender Sehwag 2. Gautam Gambhir 3. Shikhar Dhawan 4. A B de Villiers 5. Manoj Tiwary 6. Rajat Bhatia 7. Dinesh Karthik 8. Daniel Vettori 9. Mohammad Asif 10. Glenn McGrath 11. Pradeep Sangwan

Hyderabad

Now we’ll come to three teams for which I have no history in predicting. Hyderabad didn’t pick up anyone during the second round of auction, and have instead filled their team with truckloads of Gults. They also have way too many foreign stars, which might make selection a bit tricky. Bib seems fairly non-committal about the team, but he’s done a decent job. Here’s my take.

1. Adam Gilchrist 2. DB Ravi Teja 3. VVS Laxman 4. Rohit Sharma 5. Venugopala Rao 6. Andrew Symonds/Herschelle Gibbs 7. Shahid Afridi 8. Chaminda Vaas 9. R P Singh 10. D Kalyankrishna 11. Pragyan Ojha

Bib lists Arjun Yadav as a certainty. I’m not so sure given his first class and List A averages (29 and 21). However, given his parentage, he could make the starting XI. He might replace Venugopala Rao in that case.

Calcutta

In a tournament filled with teams with shady names, they have the shadiest name of them all. Their problem is that they don’t have any high-profile Indian batsmen. The best they could probably do is to try and take as few foreign bowlers as possible so that they could get an international batting line-up. Bib has made a mess of this line-up, putting L R Shukla at 5, and Agarkar at 6. Yes, you need to bat for only 20 overs but you don’t go in with four batsmen!

1. Aakash Chopra 2. Saurav Ganguly 3. Ricky Ponting 4. Cheteshwar Pujara 5. Chris Gayle 6. Brendon McCullum 7. Laxmi Rattan Shukla 8. Ajit Agarkar 9. Murali Kartik 10. Shoaib Akhtar/Umar Gul 11. Ishant Sharma

Shoaib Akhtar will play at home to draw in the crowds, while Gul, who is a significantly better bowler, will play in the away games. However, they still need some kind of Indian batting back-up. I won’t be surprised if they get S Sharath and Sadagopan Ramesh, who played for Assam (which is in the Kolkata catchment zone) last season.

David Hussey, Salman Butt and Mohammad Hafeez provide the back-up for Ponting and Gayle once Australia goes to the Caribbean. They’ll need backup for McCullum too, once NZ goes to England. I won’t be surprised if they add WP Saha to the squad. The guy can bat, and also keeps.

Jaipur

Lalit Modi’s team. They seemed to be doing a lousy (even comical) job, until they made a stunning recovery in the second round of auctions. They were initially cribbing that they couldn’t even make the catchment quota, but they now seem to have fulfilled the quota. Still, they are in desperate need for more Indian players. And they’ve been happily letting people from their catchment (Pujara, Pinal Shah) to off to other teams.

Bib seems to have done a good job of predicting this, and I’ll go with his choice. 100%.

1 Taruwar Kohli, 2 Graeme Smith, 3 Yusuf Pathan, 4 Mohammad Kaif, 5 Anup Revendkar, 6 Kamran Akmal, 7 Shane Watson, 8 Ravindra Jadeja, 9 Shane Warne 10 Pankaj Singh, 11 Munaf Patel

Yes, the middle order does look a bit weak. Hopefully they can get one more good Ranji batsman to fill in over there.

Before I could re-assess and make new starting line-ups for the eight teams following the second IPL auction and recruitment of locals and youngsters, cricinfo has done it’s own version. However, it seems like Bib had an extremely tough deadline to come up with this and most line-ups he has drawn up seem fairly random. Let me try compare what he has made to what I had “predicted” three weeks back, and then come up with a new prediction.

Before I proceed, it gives me a great kick that I had managed to predict that Uday Kaul would get picked up by Mohali. Of course, not too many of my other predictions went good, but I’m still kicked that I managed to correctly predict for such an obscure chap. On the other hand, I’m extremely disappointed that no one got my pun over Taruwar Kohli’s name. (here is the Mohali post where I predicted both these). One more reason I went wrong is that I assumed U-19 players would just join their home franchises, and hadn’t anticipated the draft.

Bangalore

Here is what I had predicted. Bib says that Arun Kumar will open with Bharat Chipli. Somehow I don’t see the former getting a game, and think he’s been taken in only to give Goa it’s notional quota. Apart from this, Bib gets it mostly right (though I’m not sure he took into account the limit on foreigners). Here’s my new take

1. Praveen Kumar 2. Bharat Chipli/Wasim Jaffer 3. Jacques Kallis 4. Rahul Dravid 5. Virat Kohli 6. Misbah-ul-haq 7. Mark Boucher 8. R Vinay Kumar 9. Anil Kumble 10. Zaheer Khan 11. Nathan Bracken

There is a good chance Zaheer might not be fit (though I think he’ll choose the 4-overs per game IPL to make his comeback). He might be replaced by one of the three left arm spinners who are in the squad, mostly Joshi. Also, note that right now it’s a squad of 23, which needs to be pruned to 16 by next week (so i’ll post again next week). I expect only one of the three left arm spinners to make the 16.

Actually looking at this line-up, it resembles a Kiwi lineup, with four Dibbly Dobblys (Praveen, Kallis, Vinay, Bracken). Maybe Bracken could be replaced by Steyn, or Vinay Kumar by an extra batsman.

Madras

Here‘s the link to my take. One major “problem” that Chennai have is that they are filled with left handed batsmen, especially if the Australians are available. So, to provide a semblance of balance, it’s necessary that both Badrinath and Dhoni are in the top 6. They are likely to play two off-spinners (Murali and Ashwin), with Einstein on the bench. Again blessed with loads of dibbly dobblys, I think they’ll sacrifice a foreign batsman or two to accommodate Ntini – the only genuine quick.

Let me freeride on this one and give the probable team assuming Australians are NOT available.

1. Abhinav Mukund 2. S Anirudha 3. Suresh Raina 4. S Badrinath 5. MS Dhoni 6. Jacob Oram 7. Albie Morkel 8. R Ashwin 9. Sudeep Tyagi / Joginder Sharma 10. Makhaya Ntini 11. M Muralitharan

Bombay

This was one of the teams that I had missed out on last time due to my NED. So this is my first take on them. They have the same problem as the Indian team – potentially four openers will play in the XI. Jayasuriya has been dropped from the Sri Lankan ODI team, but I think Bombay will pick him due to his crowd pulling abilities. Bib has got this one mostly right – except that I won’t put two rookies (Saurabh Tiwary and Manish Pandey) in the middle order and will leave one of them out in favour of Abhishek Nayar, who is also a useful dibbly dobbly.

1. Sachin Tendulkar 2. Sanath Jayasuriya 3. Ajinkya Rahane 4. Saurabh Tiwary 5. Abhishek Nayar 6. Robin Uthappa 7. Shaun Pollock 8. Pinal Shah 9. Harbhajan Singh 10. Dilhara Fernando 11. Lasith Malinga

Once again, Malinga and Fernando have fitness issues. Also, they still haven’t completed their squad – they have only 15 guys so far. They don’t seem to have much bench strength in bowling, and I expect them to take a couple of local guys to shore up this department (the Ranji team didn’t have too many fast bowlers who played consistently). Maybe they might take Sandeep Jobanputra from Saurashtra – he’ll also provide the left arm angle. They also seem to be short on the U-22 quota – they need one more guy.

Mohali

I think I’ll still go with the line-up that I’d predicted a last month. Bib seems to have put too many bowlers in his line-up. Anyways, here’s my revised take

1. Tanmay Srivastava 2. Karan Goel 3. Kumar Sangakkara 4. Mahela Jayawardene 5. Yuvraj Singh 6. Ramnaresh Sarwan 7. Irfan Pathan 8. Brett Lee 9. Piyush Chawla 10. VRV Singh 11. Sreesanth

Again it’s interesting to see how they’ll prune their squad to 16. They have a good bench strength in the bowling department (Powar, Mills, Argal) and a good reserve keeper (Kaul). No Indian batsman on the bench though – this might be a problem

I’ll write about the other four teams tomorrow. Till then, put comments

I borrowed this book from

sw_aadisht

some six months back. It was only a month or so back that I finally started reading it. And after several false starts, and stoppages, I’m nearing the end. It’s a truly amazing book. Contains several insights about several seemingly unrelated things. And it’s extremely well-written and easy to read. Let me quote a few paragraphs from the book

American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment.
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In Japanese culture, which is ill-adapted to randomness and badly equipped to understand that bad performance can come from bad luck, losses can severely tarnish someone’s reputation. People hate volatility, thus negage in strategies exposed to blowups, leading to occasional suicides after a big loss.
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Dictatorships that do not appear volatile, like, say, Syria or Saudi Arabia, face a larger risk of chaos than, say Italy, as the latter has been in a state of continual political turmoil since the Second War.

I learned about this problem from the finance industry, in which we see “conservative” bankers sitting on a pile of dynamite

And all these quotes are from a single page! And this is not all. I’m not sure when exactly in 2007 the book was released but Taleb talks about the fact that even a small negative impact to the world financial system can lead to huge losses. He says there has been way too much consolidation in the financial industry, and that a small number of banks are sitting on large risks.

I urge you to pick up the book and read it. Oh, and if this helps, I intend to return the book to aadisht this weekend.