Category: arbit

Why Bharadwajs are so numerous

This morning I was at the faculty lounge at IIMB, drinking coffee and conversing with a few professors. Soon, the discussion moved to Bharadwaj gotra and related stuff. And something a professor (who is a Bharadwaj) said explained very well as to why the gotra is so prolific.

So he said that the Bharadwaj ashram was quite well known in its ancient times for the quality of its food. Another professor related an anecdote about how Rama, on his flight back from Lanka made a detour to eat at the Bharadwaj ashram, even as his subjects back in Ayodhya were waiting fervently for him. Food at the Bharadwaj ashram was so good, he said.

Now there are two ways in which this explains why Bharadwajs are so numerous. Firstly, the quality of the food in the ashram meant that Bharadwaj’s children and grandchildren and other descendants were all very well fed. Now, considering that these were times much before the industrial revolution and there was generally a shortage of food, this meant that infant and child mortality rates were generally high. But not in the Bharadwaj ashram, thanks to the food there!

So that meant that the Bharadwajs grew up fitter and healthier than descendants of other rishis, and thus lived longer and were able to procreate more. The bullwhip effect caused due to enhanced longevity and fitness of the early Bharadwajs has resulted in the proliferation of Bharadwajs today.

The other explanation is that the superior quality of food at the Bharadwaj ashram attracted more people into the ashram, and these people would yearn to become part of the “family” (I’ll spare you the gory details here). That meant that Bharadwaj and his immediate male descendants had much more access to furthering their lineage compared to competing gotras. And hence you have so many Bharadwajs today.

In fact we might have had several more Bharadwajs but for the fact that the gotra system is designed such that no one gotra ever gets to big. That two people from the same gotra are not allowed to marry each other naturally keeps the size of a particular gotra in check.

Let’s say for example that more than half the Brahmins were Bharadwajs. Considering that a Bharadwaj can only marry a non-Bharadwaj, that would leave a number of Bharadwajs being unable to marry, which means that the number of Bharadwajs in the next generation would be lower!

It is interesting, though, that everything can be explained through food!

NED Video

So after looking at the videos of the first NED Talks which I had rather badly shot, I put NED for putting them together and uploading. That’s where the wife came to the rescue, as always. She scraped and collected bits and pieces of people’s talks which weren’t all that bad, and has put together this montage.

So presenting, the videos of the first ever NED Talks, held at our residence on Friday.

Next time we will get volunteers so that the videos are recorded better and we hope to upload complete individual talks!

NED Talks – First Edition

Back in 2009, the TED conference was held in Mysore. If there can exist TED Talks, I reasoned, there is no reason why we cannot have NED talks. And as is my wont, I had shot off a blog post in April 2009, announcing that the first NED Talks would happen in October 2009. Some of the points I had made in that blog post are interesting – I had said that it would be a day long (or even weekend long event), speakers would be “mango people”, and that talks would be uploaded on Youtube. I had no clue what would happen at the NED Talks.

Much happened though between April 2009, when I wrote that blog post, and October 2009, when the first edition of the talks were to happened. I moved jobs. I moved cities. My mother died. Life changed way too much for me to be bothered about NED Talks any more. And so I did what came naturally to me – put NED!

On several occasions in the last five years I’ve thought of “finally organising” the NED Talks, but they never came to fruition for a multitude of reasons, the most important of them being NED itself! I would think I would organise it, start thinking about how I would organise it, and then get confused, and then get into doubt, and thus, postpone! I went through several cycles of this until last month.

It was a day before the wife was to return to Bangalore for her winter holidays, and she suggested that we do the talks while she is in town. She was in luck that I was prepared to listen to her that day. And the idea took root. A guest list was quickly prepared. One guest was quickly signed up and with his help we froze what seemed like a convenient date. And by the end of the day, the first set of invites had been sent out!

The inaugural edition of the NED Talks took place last night, at our residence in Bangalore. There were a total of thirteen speakers, each of whom spoke for five minutes each. Both from our pertinent observations, and from the feedback we received from attendees, I think the event was a grand success. Like they say in Page 3 party reports, “everybody had a good time”.

The format was designed so as to be conducive to NED. One of the big barriers to hosting an event is to arrange for a venue. So we decided to do it in our own home. We didn’t want audience to put NED during the talks, so each speaker was allotted five minutes (though by my accounts most exceeded that limit). Getting professional video was NED-inducing, so we set up a DSLR on a tripod. Food came from the nearby Upahara Darshini and Gayathri Stores. Wine from Venus Wine Stores, also very nearby. The whole thing was set up such that there was no way for us to put NED.

And no one put NED. The talks were all excellent, and thought-provoking. Though none of them were “ideas that can change the world” as TED promises, they were all interesting. So we had a demonstration on different kind of knives, and an exposition on the enduring appeal of late 80s-early 90s Bollywood music – whose musical qualities leave much to be desired. Someone spoke about the importance of being shallow, and someone else on what makes someone interesting. There was a demonstration on the engineering behind consumption of certain herbal products! Thirteen speeches. All very well received.

This being the first edition there were the usual glitches. I had taken upon myself the quadruple role of emcee, DJ, photographer and videographer, which meant that the latter three didn’t receive much attention. So soft background music which was supposed to be played during talks were never played. Some talks were not captured on video at all, while others were only partially recorded (so we will only be putting up a montage of the talks on youtube rather than individual videos). The same camera was being used for taking both photos and videos, which meant not many photos were taken!

Post the event one NED-inducing activity is to make a montage of the videos. We’ve put enthu and done the first part which is cutting up interesting sections from different videos. Now we have the job of stitching them together. Hopefully we’ll upload pretty soon!

Nevertheless the wife and I are extremely kicked that we managed to pull this off. That the much-awaited NED talks finally happened. And now that they’ve happened, we hope to have them on a regular basis. Given that they’ll continue to happen in our drawing room, they’ll remain invite-only events, though.

Jai to NED!

2014: Year in review

2014 was a big year in terms of changes in personal life, with two big events that might both end up being investments in potential bubbles.

In April this year, we completed the purchase of an apartment in Jayanagar, Bangalore. We had expressed our interest to buy it back in 2012, when the construction of the building started, but it took until 2014 for the building to get completed.

The first few months of the years thus went primarily into overseeing the final stages of construction of the house, getting the interiors done, and getting a bank loan to fund the purchase (which turned out to be harder than I expected). Finally, after what seemed like an eternity we moved into the apartment towards the end of May.

And barely two months later the wife moved out. In August she left for Barcelona to do an MBA at IESE Business School. She has completed one term and so far seems to be enjoying it. I’m back to a bachelorly life here in Jayanagar and so far I’ve been coping reasonably well.

I stopped making coffee at home in order to cut down my caffeine consumption. Now I walk 10 minutes to Maiya’s in Jayanagar 4th Block to get my caffeine fix. It costs eighteen rupees plus about five minutes spent standing in queue, but it’s really awesome and well worth it!

On the professional front, things have been quieter than I had imagined. My consulting continues, and I ventured into a new sector this year. I still need to up my business development, though, and that is going to be the focus in the new year. There have also been a couple of interesting opportunities for a change in line that have come up towards the end of the year but it now looks like I’ll continue what I’ve been doing.

There has been one exciting development on the professional front though – I started teaching at IIMB earlier this month. I’m an “adjunct faculty” and will be there for the length of one term. The classes started a bit slowly (in terms of student participation) but now I think I quite like the lot. And so far I’ve been enjoying teaching. I hope I can continue doing this going forward.

Another feature of my life this year is my constant in-and-out in my use of social media, primarily facebook and twitter. I was off twitter for all of January, August, September and October, and part of December. I was off Facebook for most of this time (all except January). The break helped and my blogging has picked up significantly. So much so that the hosting provider had to twice increase my bandwidth quota!

My plan for next year on the professional front is to ramp up on business development and hopefully expand my business. I want to write a book. I’d set a rather aggressive target for that but now it looks unlikely and I need to possibly extend it. And then I plan to see a little more of Europe (based in Barcelona – helps that Vueling has its hub there), and hopefully do a bike trip. Of course one can’t plan for everything!

Wishing all of you a happy new year 2015 and a great year ahead!

Idea types and person-event types

Last night GP, the wife and I were drinking at Brewsky, a nice microbrewery in JP Nagar, Bangalore. We were seated at the bar, and were checking out some other people who were seated elsewhere at the bar. The wife pointed to two of them and independently asked GP and me to assess which of them was potentially more interesting (the independence was achieved thanks to a timely bio break I took). Most of GP and my assessment of these people tallied, but then GP popped up with this really interesting funda that I have to blog about!

So GP said “the woman sitting across from us looks more of the ‘ideas type’ while the woman seated to the right looks more of the ‘events and people type’ “. And in that one stroke, he had introduced this rather profound method of classifying people. He had created one other dimension of putting people into two categories (and in that instant doubling the number of two by twos along which people can be plotted!). And he had brought back to memory something I had seen in Bishop Cotton’s Boys’ School back in 1996.

The board near the administrative building at Cotton’s said “great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people”. Profound in itself but a three-way classification. Now, three way classifications are not as intuitive as two-way classifications. People generally prefer the latter. And in one shot last evening, GP had reduced this cumbersome three-way classification into a rather interesting two-way classification! To use the Cotton’s framework, he had clubbed the average and small minds!

In the past I’ve blogged about the concept of “who else have you been in touch with“. This is a phrase that pops up, I’ve argued, when you have met after a long time and have nothing else to talk about. A related concept is perhaps “what movie did you see recently?” (though that can occasionally lead to fairly profound discussion on ideas). Now, analysing life from GP’s framework, you will notice that when one of the persons involved in the conversation is an events-people types, it is but obvious that the conversation will quickly devolve to discussing people or events, and the best anchor for devolving into such is to seek stories of common acquaintances!

So are you an “ideas types” or an “events-person types”? Would you think such a classification is context-sensitive (depending on who you are talking to) or context free? Would you get offended if someone were to classify you as a “events-persons types”? What happens when an I-types meets and EP-types – what do they talk about? Is is even possible to talk ideas with EP-types? And what are the odds that a largish group can sustain I-types conversation?

I’ll end this post with an anecdote. Not so long ago I met a few old friends. It was a largish group, and the entire contents of the two-hours-or-so conversation can be classified into two types – discussions on mutual friends and acquaintances and “who else you are in touch with” (standard EP-type stuff), and discussion of concepts discussed on one of my blogs! Maybe I should take credit for pulling conversation in that group to I-type stuff!

 

Receiving people and waiting for luggage

This morning was the first time ever that I’ve successfully received someone at the airport. Yes, the “successfully” was purposely inserted there, for I’d once driven up all the way to the Bangalore Airport only to find that the wife, who I had gone to receive, had already left by cab (her flight had landed early and baggage come out quickly). Apart from that one attempt in 2011, I’ve never ever gone to receive anyone at any airport – done a lot of receptions (not that kind of reception, silly) in railway stations, though!

So this morning I was again receiving the wife, who has come to town on vacation having completed one term of her MBA. I took the bus to the airport and reached at 8:30, in anticipation of the 8:50 flight, only to see that the flight from Dubai had “landed”, harbouring visions of the last time I’d (unsuccessfully) gone to receive her! Moreover, there was no way for me to reach her, for her Spain number doesn’t work here, and her India number was in my phone (I have a dual SIM phone!)! And so I stood at the arrival gate and waited, hoping that she had not missed me!

And while I was waiting there I realised that waiting for someone at the airport is like waiting for your luggage once you land. You know the flight has landed (in one of the cases, you actually travelled by it). But you know that the time taken for either your luggage or the person you’re waiting for to come is stochastic! And you hope that you’ve had a good day, and that the person/luggage comes asap!

In the luggage case, for a while the baggage belt is empty, and then bags start appearing. That’s when you start getting hopeful, waiting for your bag to arrive! Till there is baggage on the belt, you are at peace, using the restroom and retying your shoelaces and getting hold of a trolley if necessary! But once the baggage is on the belt you start getting anxious, and start harbouring notions of what if your baggage has not arrived!

Receiving your wife at the airport is also similar. Till you know that people from her flight have started to come out, you are at peace. You go get yourself a cup of coffee (have you noticed that coffee at Hatti Kaapi at the Bangalore arrival gate is much cheaper than that at Maiya’s at the other end of the airport? That’s for another blogpost!). You people watch, you observe the structure of the airport and (if you are a first-time receiver like me) observe what the arrival gate looks like from the outside.

And then people start arriving with Dubai Duty Free shopping bags (the wife flew Emirates) and that is the equivalent of the first bag arriving on the belt! And now you become tense, start wondering if the wife successfully made it to the flight (she was connecting via Dubai), and if her baggage made it to the flight, and why she’s taking so long. And then she arrives. It’s the kind of joy you have when you see your bag on the far end of the carousel and can’t wait for it to get to you! And then it arrives and you pick it up (in case of the wife, not literally) and off you go!

The Unpopular People’s Network

Recently I had blogged about how I find it hard to get along with people who are generally “popular”, and find it so much easier to get along with oddballs, people who have a reputation of being “arrogant”. So I’ve been discussing this with this one old friend, who is far from being universally popular, and (back when we had a large common network) had a reputation of being arrogant.

So we were recently talking about a mutual acquaintance and she said “She’s very cool. You’d like her. She’s far from ordinary and normal 🙂 “. Now, I must point out that this conversation was conditioned by our earlier discussion about my blog post, but it is interesting how this friend assumes that I’m going to like this mutual acquaintance because she’s also, like the two of us, an “oddball”!

So I wonder if there’s something about us oddballs that attracts us to each other. If there is some kind of inherent solidarity between us because we are all of the type that don’t make us particularly popular. There is no guarantee of course that a randomly chosen pair of oddballs get along, but I wonder if the probability that two randomly chosen oddballs get along is higher than the probability that one “normal guy” and one oddball getting along!

And coming to the data that Christian Rudder has put in Dataclysm, on people getting 1s and 5s being more likely to get a date than straight 3s, I wonder how it will look if we are going to condition the data on the rating profile of the reviewer – maybe someone who has a lot of 1s and 5s is more likely to give 1 and 5 ratings to others? And 3s give 3s to others? It would be interesting to find out, except that the data is not public!

Hosting arrangements and expense accounts

So the convention when you meet someone who has traveled to your city for whatever reason is that the host pays. It seems to be a result of the commenting that you offer food and drink to someone who visits you. So meeting someone even in a restaurant in your city is like you hosting them at a meet and so you pay for it.

And this is a convention that I’ve followed for a while now. If someone’s visiting Bangalore and I meet them here I pay for the meeting. If I’m travelling and I meet someone and they insist on paying, I let them. It’s all part of the convention.

What turns this around, however, is corporate expense accounts. I just met an old friend for drinks and dinner, along with a few other old friends all of who stay in Bangalore. Now we had met because this guy from Gurgaon was visiting, and convention demanded that rather than him paying, all of us together would pick up the tab.

But then it turned out that this guy was in town on work, and hence on a corporate expense account, and so the dinner expenses would be taken by his employer! So when he pot in his corporate card and insisted on paying, and we protested, he said “next time any of you is in Gurgaon you can return the favour”.

It’s all quite bizarre! The conventions have been completely overturned! All Thanks to corporate expense accounts!

Update

I just spoke to the sponsor of tonight’s drinks and he has confirmed that he sponsored them out of his own goodwill and that our drinks were not sponsored by his employer. The error is regretted

YoY calculations should be based on Hindu calendar

Deepak Shenoy at Capitalmind has an excellent post dissecting the 4.2% drop in the Index of Industrial Production in October. One of the keys to the drop, he says, is that this year both Diwali and Dasara fell in October, and since factories give workers off for these two festivals output falls. He has an informative (but ugly) graph showing this:

I was talking to a retailer recently and he was talking about sales in terms of Indian festivals – like Diwali and Dasara and so on. Retail analytics, we figured, need to take into account things like “Diwali sale”, “Aashada sale” and so on.

So while we have been using the Gregorian calendar for most purposes, it seems like our business cycle still follows the Hindu calendar. From this perspective, issuing statistics based on Gregorian months (such as October YoY IIP) is simply wrong, and has the ability to mislead.

I hereby propose that we go back to our roots and start publishing these YoY statistics on Hindu months. The only problem is we won’t know how to deal with the “adhika maasas”.

Getting along with popular people

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now but it all came together a while back. The basic funda is that I find it extremely hard to hang out with people who are generally popular and who everyone wants to hang out with. On the other hand, I find it significantly easier to hang out with other people who generally most people consider as being “arrogant” and hard to hang out with.

I wonder if it is connected with what Christian Rudder writes in Dataclysm on people who have been rated a few 5s and a few 1s being more likely to find a partner than one who is rated a consistent 3 (holding average rating constant). Basically if there is someone who is generally popular, they are something like a consistent 5, and they are perhaps generally popular because they exhibit the kind of behaviour or attributes that most people like. Effectively they cater to what I can uncharitably call the lowest common denominator of popularity among people, and that generally means they spend most of their effort catering to that (being “generally nice” and all such) that there is very little idiosyncrasy that they can offer which makes them interesting!

And with time the fact that they are popular affects them, and they expect that everyone like them to the same (high) extent as everyone else! And when you start asking yourself what the big deal about them is, and start wondering why they’re so popular, there is a “respect mismatch” – the respect you are willing to offer them doesn’t match up to the respect they expect (thanks to being generally popular), and you can’t hang out for long.

With people who are generally not particularly popular and branded as “arrogant” by most people, firstly there is no expectation of respect as they generally know that they are not particularly popular. Secondly, the fact that makes them arrogant also makes them interesting to people who are interested along that axis. The fact that they are not generally popular means that there is an idiosyncrasy about them, and if you happen to like that you can get along very well with them!

Of course, I admit to selection bias here. There definitely exist people who are generally classified as “arrogant” who I also find arrogant and don’t hang out with. But there exist a lot of people who are generally classified as “arrogant” who I get along quite well with!

Going back to Rudder’s ratings, I’m likely to rate people who are generally considered “arrogant” either a 1 or a 5 – the idiosyncrasy sends them to either extreme. Thus there are a few of them who I love hanging out with irrespective of what the world has to say about them. As for the popular guys, I’m very likely to rate them a 3 – basically unspectacular, and going by Rudder’s theory, “meh”. And since they expect the general counterparty to rate them higher than that, there’s a mismatch when I meet them and things fall apart.

Makes sense? What has your experience been of people in relation to how other people rate them?