Category: arbit

The Benjarong Conference

According to the Hindu calendar, today is the first anniversary of the Benjarong Conference. The said conference took place at Benjarong, an awesome Thai place on Ulsoor Road in Bangalore on the second day (dwitiya) of shukla paksha of Chaitra maasa of whatever samvatsara finished two days ago. The main topic discussed at the conference was arranged scissors and considering how things are now, I must say that the conference was indeed a success.

The occasion was a long weekend that also included Ugadi. Monkee and I (I lived in Gurgaon then) were both down in Bangalore for a weekend of bridehunting, and both of us hadn’t been having much luck in the market. Giving us gyaan on how to go about the arranged scissors process was K, who had just gotten arranged married, and Mukka who had just gotten love married. Also present with (as usual) lots of general fundaes in life were Kodhi and Harithekid.

Back during the conference, I had been entrusted with the job of noting down minutes of the meeting and blogging them; however I didn’t have net access back then in Bangalore and by the time I got back to the Gaon I got busy in other things and so here I am a full year late trying to share with the world things discussed at this great conference.

So here we were, two twenty six year old (maybe Monkee was still twenty five then) guys who had never had girlfriends wondering where and how people would fall in love, and where we could find interesting and single girls (yeah we did talk about the Goalkeeper Theory also). We chatted about various kinds of girls, where each type would find boys, the odds of each type being currently available for marriage, what parameters for search to put in matrimonial websites to maximize our odds of finding good girls, and the like.

One specific kind of girl that we spent a lot of time discussing was what K called as “township girl” – girls who grow up in PSU townships. He proposed that girls who grow up in PSU townships are more likely to be smart and liberal compared to girls of comparable family background and intelligence who don’t grow up in townships. This theory was largely seconded by a lot of others at the conference and I passed on it since I didn’t have a clue.

As alternatives to this, I had proposed the non-home-state theory claiming that girls who grow up otuside their home states are smarter and more liberal. The others supported this claiming that girls who have less contact with relatives and family-social engagements are likely to be more “outgoing”.

Then there was this puzzle about boys-majority colleges which a number of us had independently wondered about. If you notice, a large number of the more preferred colleges in India have an overwhelming boys majority (yeah this applies especially to engineering but considering that engineering is one of the most preferred undergraduate disciplines I suppose this assumption isn’t too wrong) and so any girl who goes to any of these colleges is extremely unlikely to land up in the arranged scissors market.

And then, if you would notice, in high school (10th board exams), distribution of marks of boys and girls is roughly equal. So the question is about where the smart girls go! Especially in cities like Bangalore and Madras which lack quality arts (a course which is usually dominated by girls) colleges. We had probably closed the conference promising to investigate this mystery – of where all the smart girls go.

I don’t remember too much about the food at Benjarong that day but I remember we had an extremely overbearing captain who kept coming to us every minute asking us how the food was. We followed our dinner at Benjarong with ice-cream at Corner house – excellent as usual. That is probably the last time I ate a full cake fudge.

A lot of questions raised at that conference are now probably moot, considering that both Monkee and I are on the roads to our respective marriages (he in May, me in November). However, I do need to apologize for taking one whole year to make and publicize these notes. My apologies to the general public for holding back such awesome thoughts from them for one whole year. And my thanks to Harithekid, Kodhi, Mukka, K and Monkee for making the Benjarong Conference possible.

Update

Another issue that was raised at the conference was about the fate of this blog after I find a long-term gene-propagating partner. The other attendees were all of the opinion that I will need to stop blogging after I find someone, or at least not blog on relationship-related topics.

A couple of weeks back,  Pinky shouted at me for NOT blogging enough about her.

The TDS Scam

Tax Deducted at Source. TDS. A wonderful measure by the government to hide from us what they are taking away from us. The concept that there is a substantial difference between your “cost to company” and your “take home pay” has been ingrained in all off us, and so we don’t question the diffference. This way, it makes it easy for the government to take away large amounts of money as tax, without really making the taxpayers feel it.

I’ve messed up. Due to a combination of reasons I haven’t yet filed my tax returns for last year (2008-09) and now my tax advisor tells me I have two weeks to do it. And calculating the tax payable for the umpteenth time, I now notice that there has been an error in all my previous calculations. And the additional tax that I need to pay (has to be paid along with a fine for paying late) is not insubstantial.

TDS is a necessary system in order to enforce compliance and putting in checks and balances into the system. It helps the government get its finances on time and save a large part of trouble in revenue collection. What it does, however, is to obscure the amount of tax that is being deducted. A clever method, I think, devised by governments to take away a large part of your money from you without you noticing it!

Of course this is accompanied by this ritual called filing tax returns when you do get a chance to see how much the government has taken away from you, but considering that for most people most of their taxes would’ve been accurately deducted, most people would just go through the process mechanically and few would actually look carefully at the numbers!

The next time you are doing your returns, I strongly urge you to look at the numbers carefully. Look at how much you have actually earned, and how much of it is being taken away by the government without you really noticing it! Open the calculator in your mobile phone and calculate the proportion of time you work every year for someone else – for someone called the sarkaar. There’s a good chance you’ll start demanding more from the government after that.

Chowka Baarah

Yesterday after a gap of about fifteen years, I played chowka-baarah. For starters, the name intrigues me. It translates into four-twelve (I suppose), but that doesn’t make sense. Essentially, there are two primary variations of this game depending upon the size of the grid used (5 by 5 or 7 by 7), and these two numbers are “big numbers” in different systems. In the 5×5 version, the “big scores” are 4 and 8, while in the “7×7” system, it’s 6 and 12.

A certain variety of seashells (called kavaDe in Kannada) are used as dice, four of them in the 5×5 version and 6 in the larger version. The “score” of the dice is determined by the number of kavaDes falling “face up”, and if all fall face down, the score is twice the number of dice. So if you have 4 shells and all fall face down, you get 8 points. I haven’t done much research on this but I do think the probability of a die falling “face up” is much more than the probability of it falling “face down”. I don’t know the exact probability.

The game itself is like Ludo; your pawns going round and round in circles and inward in order to reach the centre of the square when it “queens”. The first player to queen all their pawns wins. There are concepts such as doubling pawns (they act as a pair hten, move in pairs only on even throws of the die, etc.), cutting (if your pawn reaches a square where an opponent’s pawn is, the opponent’s pawn “goes home”, etc. Simple game, and widely played in a lot of “traditional households”.

Considering that I had stopped playing this game when I was still quite small, i had never realized the strategies involved in playing the game. Back then I’d just generally move whatever pawn i fancied nad somehow my grandparents would move in a way in order to simply enable me to win. It was only yesterday that I realized that the game is not as simple as I thought, and that strategy dominates luck when determining how you do.

It’s not like bridge, where card distributions are exchanged across pairs in order to take the luck out of the game. Nevertheless, I realize that the number of “turns” in the game is large enough for the probabilities in the seashells to balance out across players. Rather, the decision that you need to make at each turn regarding which pawn to move is so important that the importance of this drawfs the number you threw! Again you will need to keep into account stuff like the distribution of your next throw, your opponent’s next throw and so on.

I think I have a thing for games with randomness built into them rahter than those that are completely a function of the players’ moves (like chess). I think this is because even with the same set of players, games with randomness built in lead to a larger variety of positions which makes the game more exciting.

Coming back to Chowka Baarah, the other thing I was thinking of last night was if sunk cost fallacy applied in this, when I was trying to decide betwen a reasonably advanced pawn and a backward pawn to decide as to which one to save. Finally I decided that apart from the loss in terms of the pawn being sent home, other things that I had to take into consideration when I moved was about which pawn capture would be more valuable for the opponent, probabilities of differnet pawns getting captured, potential danger to other pawns, etc.

It’s a fun game, one of the most fun “traditional” games. Maybe one of the most “strategic” traditional games. Miss playing it for the last fifteen years or so.

Cutting and Bouncing

For the first time yesterday I watched a woman getting her hair cut and styled. Yeah despite having been earning MBA salaries for the better part of the last four years I’ve never really ventured into the “unisex salon” space and have always stuck to the neighbourhood hajaam such as the Noble Men’s Parlour at the end of my road. Till recently there was really no one to accompany so I had been deprived of watching this extremely interesting activity.

Yesterday I accompanied Priyanka to Bounce, supposedly one of “stylier” salons in the city, where she got her hair cut and styled. I had taken appointment by phone earlier in the day and hence there wasn’t much time we had to spend there reading Stardust or Filmfare (which I invariably do at Noble’s since there’s always a long line there). The whole process took about an hour and the distribution of various activities in this hour was extremely different from what I experience at Noble. Ok I must point out again that this is the only data point I have with respect to women’s hair cutting and am extrapolating based on that.

In the whole process, less than five minutes went into the actual cutting of hair, with the initial ten-fifteen minutes spent in washing the hair and the last half in blow-drying and setting the hair. Another thing I noticed was that the hair was mostly wet when it was being cut, while the local mens’ salons usually just spray a little bit of water before cutting.

Actually I realize that this analysis is futile since there are two large factors that separate the two situations that I’m comparing here – and a more complete analysis will be possible only when I observe men’s haircuts at high-end salons – that way I can compare differences in procedure based on sex and also based on kind of salon. Currently, however, I don’t think I’m really ready for splurging that kind of money on a haircut so that analysis has to wait. And yeah, I did observe several men getting their hair cut at Bounce yesterday, but then didn’t observe any of them close enough to come up with any valid data points.

Then I noticed that several barbers at Bounce themselves had really unusual haircuts. This reminds me of this old joke (also there in the classic Anantnag starrer Gowri Ganesha ). If there are two barbers with shops next to each others’  and one of the barbers has a haircut like Amitabh while the other has horrible hair, who will you go to if you want your hair to be like Amitabh’s?

Defining Teenage Relationships

I got into my first ever romantic relationship at the ripe old age of twenty six. By then I had already got into the “settling down mode” (you might remember i was already in the arranged scissors market before that) and so essentially I was looking for a long-term settlement. I was essentially looking for “someone who’ll need me, someone who’ll feed me when i’m sixty four” and fortunately things have worked out well and I’m due to get married sometime later this year.

Looking at people around me – friends, cousins, friends’ cousins and cousins’ friends, I realize that people get into this “relationship industry” fairly young. You have people who are barely out of middle school who have “boyfriends” and “girlfriends”. Actually there’s nothing new in this phenomenon. I remember wanting to have a girlfriend when I was twelve years old. That it took fourteen years to find one is another matter. However, the point is I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten what I’d’ve imagined regarding my possible romantic life back then. I’ve grown so old now that I don’t remember at all why I wanted a girlfriend when I was younger.

Possible reasons I can think of:

  • It’s cool to be in a relationship. Its cool to have someone proclaim you as their significant other. It elevates your social status, makes you a more confident person and generally improves your outlook towards life.
  • It is good to have one person with whom you spend a lot of time. It is good to have one person with whom you share everything and who knows more about you than anyone else. It is good to have that one person who you know will always be there with you, beside you, through times happy and sad, and it helps that if you get addicted to each other you have the option of living together for life. Hence you want to get into a relationship.
  • You have a default partner for every activity that you want to do. There is one person with apprximately similar tastes whom you can bug to acccompany you in whatever you want to do. This way you never end up not doing something just because you couldn’t find someone to do it with
  • Economically it helps since in places such as clubs, discos, concerts, etc. couples get favoured treatment in terms of entry etc. I suppose this won’t be the major reason for getting into a relationship for anyone
  • It shows you as a responsible person who is able to think for himself/herself at a young age; who is able to make potentially life-changing decisions early

Anything else you can think of? On a related note, what do teenage couples do? How do they spend time with each other? If you get into a relationship in your twenties you can start planning for a shared future, etc. But what do you do when you’re still young?

Pillow Troubles

Every day nowadays I seem to be waking up with a pain in the neck, and I think the problem is with pillows. And thinking about it, I think i’ve figurd out where the problem lies. It’s with the fundamental concept of pillows itself.

So the basic funda is that the ideal height of the pillow is different when you lie on your back than when it is when you lie on one side! One look at the human body will explain why. If you’re not convinced, just go look at yourself in the nearest full-length mirror. First, stand facing the mirror and look at yourself. Next, look at your profile. And you’ll know what I’m talking about.

So basically when you lie on your back, you need a fairly thin pillow – assuming that like in all humans the neck is only slightly in front of the back (in fact this is the biggest difference between humans and monkeys – the angle between the head and the torso) so you’ll only need to compensate for this small difference. So if you’re the types that normally lies down on the back you need only a small pillow.

Now, if at some point during the night you flip over on to one side, you suddenly need a much thicker pillow, since now the pillow needs to compensate for the width of your shoulder!! And considering NED happens to change pillow when you’re rolling over in bed in the middle of the night so you end up sleeping with a pillow much thinner than what you need and wake up with a pain in the neck!

I wonder why no one has come up with any studmax invention to solve this problem. And I don’t know what the solution to this is. Assuming you are the types who can roll over 90 degrees in teh middle of the night what is the optimal size of the pillow you should use? And is there any other configuration through which you can effectively manage this problem?

Rajkumar Hirani Copycat

Ok this post has nothing to do wtih Five Point Someone or its related controversies. Yeah, the story is inspired by 5PS more than the claimed 3% but I’ll let Chetan Bhagat and his army of followers fight out that battle. Copying from others is honourable, at least you are taking inspiration from someone. What is just not done is copying from oneself. It simply shows lack of creativity and laziness to come up with new ideas.

Maybe when Rajkumar Hirani made 3 Idiots, he assumed that the public would have forgotten Munnabhai MBBS. He assumed that Munnabhai MBBS would be so out of circulation that it would have gone out of people’s minds, eclipsed by the more successful sequel Lage Raho. What he didn’t bargain for was that Munnabhai MBBS was on the menu on the New York JFK  to Dubai Emirates Airlines flight, and that people like me would watch it within 3 weeks of watching 3 idiots.

The similarities are uncanny. Both colleges are “Imperial”, have Boman Irani playing the “big prof” (diro here, dean there), and acting similarly in both. Both have a nerdy Tam who comes 2nd in class, 2nd to the hero. Yeah, Chatur is caricatured in 3I while Swami is given a more positive role in Munnabhai. Both are about the system, about how the larger-than-life hero fights the system and makes the big prof realize that the way he has been running the institution is wrong. The hero’s love interest is the big prof’s daughter. And so on..  Just that Munnabhai and Rancho use different methods to achieve their goals, that’s all.

I suppose most of you would have watched 3Idiots recently. I urge you to pick up a DVD or a torrent of Munnabhai MBBS and watch it, again. And keep an eye out for the similarities. You will be convinced that Rajkumar Hirani is guilty of copying, from his own stuff. It is indeed sad to see a good director such has him stooping to Anu Malik* depths.

While on the topic of 3Idiots, my esteemed colleague Baada wanted me to do a stud-fighter post on the movie. I suppose all of you who have seen the movie will easily figure out why the framework fits. I don’t think it needs any more explanation from the resident stud-fighter expert, that is me. Also, if you recall, I had taken a vow that I won’t do any more stud-fighter blogging. Though I must mention that my book on the topic is going nowhere.

* Listen to the prelude music of Ae Mere Humsafar from Baazigar, and then to the title song of Ishq. Next, listen to the interlude music of Kitaben Bahut Si, again from Baazigar, and then to the title song from Fiza. The self-copy is obvious. And I must mention that I had used this concept in a quiz question, twice. Yeah, I’ve also been guilty of “petering” my own questions.

Loos in India

Ok so this took a real long time coming. It might have been up to five years since I first thought of this post, but so far have never gotten down to writing it. The normal disgust warnings apply. So if you are either eating or have just eaten or feel remotely like throwing up, I request you to read no further. In this post, I want to talk about the culture of shitting (yeah I’ll use the shit word. Direct and disgusting it is) in India and effects of that on current culture and morality.

Before you read further, I would urge you to read about the Aryan Code of Toilets (1500 BC). Thanks to Amit Varma for the pointer. Quoting:

  • Before going for defecation it was prescribed that the sacred thread should be rolled to a smaller size and be put on the right ear.
  • The head was to be covered with a cloth. In the absence of cloth, the sacred thread was to be brought over the head and was to be hung on the left ear.
  • Then while observing silence and facing north in the day and south in the night one could defecate.

    • So one of my questions is now answered of course. I hope you read the article, it explains a lot more. So from this article it is clear that according to the great Indian tradition, shitting is a ritual no less. And though this document doesn’t mention it, it is generally understood that you shit once, early in the morning after you wake up. Shitting more often or at irregular times is a sign of illness or indiscipline.

    My hypothesis is that it is because of this “custom” or “cultural aspect” that we don’t have good public loos in India. Since shitting at irregular times is looked down upon, it wasn’t considered a good idea to encourage this “indisciplined” practice by providing good public loos. Ok it may not have been on purpose but since shitting at non-regular times (not early in the morning) wasn’t a done thing no one really talked about it and the results (abysmal public toilet infrastructure) are here to stay. It is only in modern offices where indisciplined foreignerrs visit regularly that you have good public loos!

    Then, in India, there was a major lag between urbanization and development of public sewerage system because of which loos had to be placed away from the rest of the house. Soon  this became a practice, and this further discouraged people from “going” at irregular times. And the delay in arrival of water closets and public sewerage kept the class of people called “night soil collectors” in business much longer than it needed to and this prolonged the incidence of untouchability (this is supposed to have been beautifully captured in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable).

    The other impact of shitting being a ritual is that it is not a done thing to go to the loo in other people’s houses. Some people plain get offended if you ask them if you can use their loo, and consequently it is a bit embarrassing for guests here to enquire if they can use the loo. Thankfully there have been no Tycho Brahes in India (wasn’t he the guy that died of a bladder burst because he thought it would be impolite to the queen if he excused himself? ), or if there have been they haven’t been reported thus!

    An unrelated (to the rest of the post) thought – steel and quality cement and elevators are all fine, but don’t you think one of the most important pre-requisites for the building of skyscrapers was the water closet? Just think about it.

  • Before going for defecation it was prescribed that the sacred thread should be rolled to a smaller size and be put on the right ear.
  • The head was to be covered with a cloth. In the absence of cloth, the sacred thread was to be brought over the head and was to be hung on the left ear.
  • Then while observing silence and facing north in the day and south in the night one could defecate.

    • Loos in America

    Ok I’ve spent quite a few (>1) blog posts after coming here on input so let me write one on output. In fact for a long time I’ve intended to write a post on loos in India but have never got the time. Hopefully I’ll sit down to write it some day. Today, you’ll have to make do with American shyte.

    The last time I found facilities in a loo for washing the arse (or thoLyin the thika) was at the Dubai airport on my way here where there was a health faucet. As has been well documented Islamic cultures place a lot of emphasis of keeping the arse clean and hence the ubiquity of this contraption in all Islamic countries (and of late in India also). As has also been well documented, western cultures prefer to keep the loos clean and hence use paper to wipe the arse after the process.

    In my serviced apartment I’ve been doing one of the usual Indian things – I’ve kept a drinking glass in the bathroom and use it as a mug. Yeah its volume is quite low but that’s the best I can manage. Thankfully the taps aren’t too far away so I can manage. My biggest fear, however, is that I’ll drop this glass in the bathroom and might injure my feet. Office, however, offers no such luxuries so I’ve to make do with paper. When in Amreeka, do your ass like the Amreekans do.

    My apartment and my office have two contrasting flushing systems, both of which seem superior to the system we have in India (the flush in my apartment in Bangalore is especially inefficient, especially when I download large volumes). At home, water starts swirling around in the WC as soon as I pull the trigger, slowly and steadily. Soon the pace picks up and the water level starts going down, pulling the crap along with it. And in a few seconds the pot is clean, and new water comes in so the level of water in the pot is restored. Actually I’ve noticed that the normal level of water in the pot in my apartment is much higher than it normally is in western loos. I think it’s similar to a football defence playing with a high offside line!

    Office is a new building so has even more sophisticated loo. First of all the flush is automated – as soon as you get up and start buttoning up your pants the thing goes, though there’s a  button which you can push in case the automatic thing fails. This is the first time ever that I’ve seen automatic flush in a pottystation. I’d earlier seen it only in urinals.

    So the flush operates with a vacuum mechanism, much like the flushes on flights. So some pump gets into operation and sucks in all the shit and the paper and everything else in one smooth motion. And then there is a water jet to clean up any remnants, and that gets sucked in too. Finally, there is some fresh water ready to take shit.

    The best thing I’ve found about my office loo, however, is the seat paper. So in this special compartment in the potty station you get paper that’s shaped in the plan of the commode (plan as in top view; I hope you can picturize). So when you go in, you pull out one such paper and put it on to the seat, and then take your seat and do your business. And once business is done, send this paper also packing into the WC!

    Excellent idea, I think, because the biggest crib that people have about commodes is that they have to rest bare arse on the same space that hosted some other bare arse and this may not be healthy. Providing this facility allows you to take insurance about that, and you need not put your ass-to-risk*. I hope this starts getting implemented soon enough in India also, especially in public facilities.

    Some links:

    1. Vikram Doctor’s excellent take on toilets
    2. One earlier time when I had blogged about toilets at work
    3. An earlier post of mine, on washing your arse in the Thames
    4. A post on loos and sacred threads. One of those one-liner posts I stopped posting after I started tweeting. This post would become significant later in my life in a most unusual manner