Waking up early in the morning
Formal shirt and trousers, neatly pressed
An hour’s commute each way
Conversations by the water cooler
Team lunches; Expense accounts
Hourly coffee breaks
Meetings. Conference calls. Presentations
Studs. Fighters. Free-riders.
Reviews. Deadlines. Status reports.
Salary credit!
I returned last night from a two day driving trip to mysore and surrounding areas. There are several things to blog about, but I felt too lazy to make notes in my mobile. Also, I was driving most of the time, so didn’t really have the time to make notes. I made a lot of mental notes, though, but I’m prone to losing those easily – I don’t have a very good short term memory.
I made two major stops on the way to Mysore – first at Kamat Lokaruchi near Ramanagara for breakfast, and then at Seringapatnam. At the latter place, I saw a couple of temples and a jail and a palace-cum-museum. The last named turned out to be pretty strong. Also, my car started making funny noises when I kept it parked in front of one of the temples. Turned out to be a problem with the A/C. This problem was going to become significant later on in the trip.
At Mysore, I stayed at the Ginger (subsidiary of Indian Hotels which runs the Taj chain) and was amazed at the kind of cost-cutting that they have put in compared to the extravagant 5*s. Then I went in search of the supposedly world-famous Mylari restaurants, found not one but two of them, both of which claimed to be the original, got put off by the amount of oil on the dosa and came out after having had just a coffee.
I walked around the palace area in the evening and was amazed by the respect pedestrians get in Mysore, at least in that area. Nice pavements, strictly enforced pedestrian crossings, etc. And there were millions of people walking around the area. And everywhere I saw boards that called Mysore a “JNNURM city”.
I also discovered that wearing shorts is a surefire way of announcing that you are a tourist. Hundreds of people started speaking to me in Hindi and seemed slightly startled when I replied in Kannada. I didn’t see a single other soul in shorts through my 2-day stay in the city.
Lunch and dinner on Tuesday was at the Dasaprakash, and yesterday’s breakfast and lunch at Siddharta. Got me thinking about pricing and delivery systems in sit-down restaurants (had done a series on pricing systems at darshinis in Bnagalore a few years back). Most intriguing is that “meals” are pre-paid while everything else is post-paid.
Then I went to the Chamundi hills, Nanjangud (beautiful temple), Somnathpur (again extremely strong ruined temples, but lousy roads) and the Jaganmohan Palace. Time constraints meant that we skipped going to the main Mysore palace.
On the way back, we stopped at a Sathya Sai Baba ashram in Seringapatnam after which the rain came with us. We would see dry roads ahead, and would hope that there would be no more rain. And soon, there would be rain. Heavy rain. Cupped a/c meant that the windshield kept fogging, and I could hardly see the road as I drove.
I think the rain got confused when we stopped for an hour for dinner at Kamat Lokaruchi, and decided not to accompany us all the way to Bangalore.
I took lots of pics using my phone camera. While at Somnathpur I was thinking about Aadisht’s 50mm low-light lens. I need to find my data cable now and then I’ll post pics. In the course of the next one week, I’ll also write half a dozen more detailed posts.
It’s been a long time since I wrote about the Studs and Fighters framework. I had overdosed on it a few months back, when I’d put some 3 posts in 4 days or something, but that was when I was hajaar enthu about corporate affairs.
It’s been almost two months since I quit my last job, and in this period, among other things I’ve lost all enthu for anything corporate. I don’t find Dilbert funny anymore. I usually just put well left to the office-politics posts that some of my friends on Google Reader share. And since the S&F theory was mainly meant to deal with corporate situations, that too has gone to the backburner.
I was thinking about Mitchell Johnson’s inclusion in the Aussie team in the Third Test. Given how badly he has been bowling all tour, and given that Stuart Clark hasn’t been bowling badly at all, it seems like a surprising selection. But dig deeper, and employ my favourite framework, and you’ll know why he’s still in the team.
It seems like Johnson is a stud bowler (as I’d remarked earlier, Test match bowling in general is stud). And the theory goes that form matters so much less for the stud. This is mainly because studs are significantly more inconsistent than fighters, which makes forecasting one data point based on historical data a nightmare. This also means that the last few data points say much less about a stud’s next data point than they do for a fighter’s case.
All that a stud needs to do to make amends for his hitherto bad form is to come up with one, or maybe a handful of moments of inspiration/insight. And that can happen any time. In fact, theory says that it is more likely to happen when the stud is defocussed on what needs to be done.
So even in the first couple of Tests, you could see Johnson occasionally coming up with the totally awesome delivery, which would produce wickets. Most of the time he was crap, but the occasional moments of brilliance were enough for him to make an impact. So the thinking in persisting with him is that sooner or later, he will produce enough moments of brilliance in a game that no one will look at all the crap he has bowled, and even that the moments of brilliance can push up his confidence which can lead to less crap.
This kind of thinking doesn’t apply to a traditional fighter, who isn’t capable of that “moment of brilliance”. He usually relies on consistency, and accuracy, and process to do what he needs to do. For the fighter, it has to be a steady rise from one “form situation” to another. And so persisting with the fighter doesn’t make sense. So for example, if Mike Hussey continues batting in the same way as he has been this series, there is a case of sending him to domestic cricket.
The problem with a lot of fighters is that they refuse to acknowledge the existence of studs and treat them too as fighters (on the other hand, most studs understand the existence of fighters). And this treatment of studs (assuming they are fighters) can have disastrous effects.
I spent some time this afternoon looking at the address book released by the association of descendants of my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandfather (yes, I’m serious; there does exist one such association). Since I didn’t have much else to do, I did go through much of the book in detail. The makers seem to have put hajaar fight in order to prepare it – calling up thousands of descandants and asking them for addresses and phone numbers. It also took quite long to make I suppose – my address and phone number that is put there are from last August.
The first thing I noticed about our family is that there is no such thing as a “family tree”. Us being Kannada Types and the customary incest being there, there are lots of cycles in the “family tree”. I noticed at least two cases of first cousins being married to each other. The book has handled this rather inelegantly – putting the same pair of names and addresses in two places. However, I don’t know how they could’ve handled it more elegantly without embarrassing the incestuous couples – since the concept has become taboo only recently.
It was also interesting to look at the geographical distribution of the family. As expected, the maximum number of addresses are from Bangalore. Interestingly, Mysore also seems to have a lot of people from the family, with not too many people inhabiting other parts of India. There is an incredibly large number of people from the family in America, and they seem to be distributed in almost all parts – though with a bias to California (not just the Bay Area – I saw a number of southern California addresses.
Interestingly, other countries have little representation. There is one family in Australia and a couple of families in the Gelf. Interestingly, there is no one in England (the book lists two families with England addresses, but both of them have since returned to India (one of them is scheduled to move to the US soon) ). There also seems to be a high proportion of ABCDs – a large number of people seem to have emigrated in the 60s and 70s.
It seems like a large number of ABCD cousins and aunts and uncles have ended up marrying people of non-Indian origins, but it is hard to say where their spouses are. In true Kannadiga tradition, everyone has been listed by given name only (with a few initials thrown in here and there) which makes it hard to determine who is from where (talking about in-laws of the family).
Another interesting phenomenon is the strange names that have been given to people who seem to have been born in the last 10 years or so (I’m only talking of people with two Indian parents). Some people still continued to get named after Gods and other popular Indian names, but quite a few names of this generation seem to be the types that won’t be found in any Sanskrit dictionary.
I had a few other pertinent observations as I was going through the book, but I seem to have forgotten the rest. I’ll add them here if I remember any of those.
This blog celebrates its first birthday today. It was on the 22nd of July 2008 that I wrote my first ever post on this site (prior to that I’d been blogging on livejournal). Exactly a year back, I wrote:
The concept of NED has existed as long as mankind. Maybe even longer. If you have read Christian Theology you would have read that God took six days to create the world, and then took rest on the seventh day (Sunday). The truth is that God wanted to create even more and wonderful creatures, and give them even more wonderful features. He just happened to put NED. Since at the time that the Bible was written no one had quantified the concept of NED, the writers decided to take the easy way out by saying that God took rest on Sunday.
NED, for the uninitiated, stands for No Enthu Da. I don’t know how to explain it. In fact, no accurate explanation exists for this in English, for if it did, I wouldn’t have bothered inventing this phrase. By sacrificing some bit of accuracy I can say that NED is a state of mind where you don’t feel like doing anything. You just want to do nothing, and you don’t even have the enthusiasm to do nothing. Yes, if that confused you, you need to remember that there is no perfect explanation for NED in English.
I really don’t know how to celebrate the blog’s first birthday. I seem to be tending towards the trivial solution that Sanjeev suggested to me on facebook yesterday – to just put NED. If you have any bright ideas as to how to celebrate this, please let me know.
One blog fan has suggested that I get the blog a “new set of clothes”. That sounds like a good idea. If you can suggest any good 3-column wordpress theme (widget enabled, with sidebars on both sides), I’d be grateful.
A couple of days I’d mentioned about a strange condition that I’ve been having nowadays, which makes it tough for the erstwhile compulsive multitasker me have trouble in doing more than one thing at a time. Occasionally, I do end up drifting doing two things at a time – such as day dreaming and walking, and occasionally like last evening the effects can be disastrous.
It happened in Gandhinagar. Right in front of the erstwhile Central Jail, now renovated as “Freedom Park”. I was walking towards the bus stop, looking to take a bus to Jayanagar. I had been coming from ‘Majestic’ where I’d gone to put beat. I was looking at the remodelled jail, and wondering at the irony of calling the ex-jail as a freedom park. A Carnatic kRti (by Patlam Subramania Aiyer i think) was playing in my head. I was looking at the various buses trying to figure out where the stop was. I was trying to cross the road. Normally that much of workload, I think, would be very fine.
So I had to get past some stone barriers in order to cross the road to reach the half where there were no vehicles. It was much easier to walk there, I’d thought. I remember looking at the stones and assessing that they were two feet tall. I remember instructing my right leg to go up by that distance and cross the stone. I remember that at the first attempt, my right leg failed to go high enough, and then I had to bark out further instructions. If I remember right, this time around, my leg did go up the requisite height.
The next split-second was a blur for me. I don’t really know what happened, but I conjecture that when I instructed my right leg to adjust, I forgot to ask the left leg to slow down its ascent from the ground. Hence, what happened was that both feet went off the ground at the same time, and since fresh instuctions hadn’t gone out to my left leg, it happened to hit the stone and I tripped, with both my feet off the ground.
When I “regained consciousness” I realized that I was falling, forwards, and that both my feet were off the ground, and that my left foot had hit the stone. I remember putting forward my hands, elbows bent and wrists loose, so that I fell relatively harmlessly on my palms. No one was around, but I managed to quickly gather myself up, and it was then that various parts of my body started talking.
I have a badly sprained left big toe. I’ve twisted my right knee so it’s hard for me to turn while walking. I’ve taken a knock on my left shin (it’s slightly swollen) but it doesn’t hurt much. And my belt buckle broke. I had minor scratches on my right palm but they don’t hurt anymore.
Nothing is bad enough that I’ve to go to the doctor. But both legs hurt occasionally. Fallout of this is that i’m now afraid of walking. It’s funny. I’ve been walking so slowly today. I’m afraid of twisting my already twisted right knee further. Injury to left big toe means I don’t want to put much pressure on it.
I’m sure that if I make an attempt, I should be able to walk normally. But legs aren’t listening. They are too sceptical of injuring themselves further. I haven’t even started driving (either car or bike) yet. Hopefully things will heal soon.
Last night my twitter status was “had an occident this evening, and is now feeling all disoriented”
During some casual conversation earlier this evening, I realized that I get irritated when people talk about ‘MBA finance’ or ‘MBA marketing’. I realized that I feel like not continuing the conversation when someone asks me my MBA specialization. Later I spoke to Baada about this, and he too agreed about the lack of respect for the counterparty when this topic gets mentioned.
I think it has to do with a lot of people assuming that “MBA” is just a set of courses that one does in order to become a manager. Maybe they assume that one can become a manager in a particular domain by reading a set of books. Maybe they think that an MBA is just like any other course where you get “knowledge” rather than change your way of thinking (ok a lot of people say MBA is useless and suchlike but my MBA certainly changed the way I think).
Or maybe it’s just that people find it easier to classify. Sometimes people overdo it, to the point of stereotyping. I’m reminded of my last company which worked on two kinds of products (let’s call them Product A and Product B – details are, er, classified). I started off doing a bit of A and soon I became “Associate for A”. Soon, I started doing some other stuff, which would easily fall under B. Yet, the CEO kept referring to me as “Associate for A”. It was ridiculous, but somehow he couldn’t get this classification out of his head – even when most of my time was spent doing B.
Anyways, point I’m trying to make is that people are used to classifications in education. For example, in engineering you have electrical, mechanical, etc. – all very easy. Similarly in postgrad for medicine – you can easily classify as ‘eye’, ‘bone’, etc. So isn’t it the duty of “management” also to get duly classified? And it did help the classifiers that there were three or four major areas in which most MBAs sought employment, and this made classification convenient.
Most local MBA colleges use this “specialization” funda to optimize on the number of electives that they need to offer. From a couple of interactions with people from local MBA colleges, I found that they had very few electives – the major choice that they had was in specialization. And once you picked your specialization, your set of courses would get more or less frozen which made it easy for the college to organize.
Some local MBA colleges seem to have taken this specialization thing to ridiculous levels. The other day, one of my cousins had come to me for career gyaan and he said “I’m wondering whether to do an MBA in Aviation or an MBA in media”. I completely lost it at that point and blasted him and asked him to work before thinking of an MBA. Hopefully the current bust will take care of such ridiculousness that exists in the colleges.
Even a large number of good colleges had this “specialization” funda. I’m told that IIMC had this funda of “major” where if you took five electives in a particular area, that would go on your degree certi as a “major”. However, I’ve never heard anyone from IIMC (even from those days when this classification existed) describing themselves as a “MBA in XXX”.
Anyway, the next time you ask me what my specialization was during my MBA, you’ll make sure that I lose all respect for you.
Read this article about the formalized Konkatsu process that has become a big hit in japan:
This year Japan has gone konkatsu-crazy, with the trend spawning countless magazine articles, a weekly TV drama and a best-selling book.
A Tokyo shrine now offers konkatsu prayer services, a Hokkaido baseball team has set up special seats for those looking for mates, and a Tokyo ward office arranges dating excursions to restaurants and aquariums.
A lingerie maker has even come up with a konkatsu bra with a ticking clock that can be stopped by inserting an engagement ring.
Japan – known for its strong work ethic that can squeeze social time, and for its declining birth rates – seems to be getting its mojo back.
Japan, like India, has had a “tradition” of arranged marriage. But in the last couple of generations, people have discovered louvvu, and because of the large number of louvvu marriaged, the arranged tradition seems to be getting lost. So the “elders”, matchmaking sites, the Japanese government, etc. have come up with this wonderful matchmaking concept.
Recently a friend of mine who is in the market told me that she planned to attend one such event in India. It was being arranged by some caste association, and one had to apply with triplicate copies of CV and passport size photos. A week before the event, one would get to inspect CVs from the opposite sex (no – this was before the court struck down 377) and make a tentative shortlist, and during the event there would be some sort of a speed-dating kind of mechanism.
Again a wonderful concept, and it is good to know these things have come to India also. But my friend wasn’t too impressed. The problem with the event, she said, was that it had been monopolized by parents of bride-seekers and groom-seekers who had come there representing their children. And because of this, potential brides and grooms had effectively been crowded out of this event, rendering it mostly useless.
That is the major problem with the marriage process in India. Parents assume they know too well about their kids, and appoint themselves as the bankers. I remember that after my latest case arenotted, my mom’s primary crib was that I had not appointed her as my lead banker for the deal. She was almost of the opinion that if she had been the banker, the case wouldn’t have arenotted.
It is a similar plague that has plagued the online matrimonial sites (links in the ad bar on the left) – too many of the users on these sites are people hunting for sons-in-law and daughters-in-law rather than those hunting for husbands or wives. Soon we may have the case of parents escorting their single twentysomething kids to bars in order to help them “pick up” people.
(konkatsu article via marginal revolution)
A large number of people I know have got rid of the land line phones at their homes and replaced them with a mobile phone for each member of the family. So now, there is no “home number” and each member of the family has their own personal number. And from talking to some of these people, apparently the economics work out well – an uncle I know says that the combined bill out of the five mobile phones that his family members own is far less than the bill he had to pay back when he had a land line.
Now, the reason for this reduction bill is fairly intuitive – now, one can keep track of how much each of the family members talks. Earlier, even with itemized billing it would be difficult to track who made which call and who is contributing to the inflation in telephone bills. However, now, it is possible to keep track of how much each person spends. And even if the “family fund” is willing to pay 100% of everyone’s bills, people are now wary of inflating the bills since everyone will now know who has been responsible for the inflation. And that automatically causes people to speak less.
I have a landline phone. The main reason I keep it is that it comes along with the broadband connection, which is a must for me. Apart from this, I think it is important to have a “home phone” or a “family phone” even if everyone in the house has a mobile. This is especially useful to give to relatives, etc. And last but not the least the landline phone feels good to the ear and the cheek, and is comfortable to hold in the hand – compared to a mobile phone which is likely to give you a pain in the hand and ear in case of long conversations.
However, when people are concerned about cutting cost and don’t need a broadband connection, it is intuitive to personalize people’s bills and thus get rid of the landline. In fact, I think nowadays some companies do it too, where employees are expected to make their business calls through their personal mobiles and then get it espensed from the company, rather than using the common office phone.
A couple of hours back, I renewed my account. It’s been a year since I purchased the noenthuda.com domain, and it definitely feels like it’s been much longer. This blog, however, is yet to celebrate its first birthday – it will do so on the 22nd, on the same day when there will be a Total Solar Eclipse in Central India. We’ll have more elaborate birthday celebrations then. Actually, if you have any good ideas as to how to celebrate the first birthday of noenthuda.com , please mail in.
So it was on the 7th of July last year that I registered noenthuda.com. It took about 15 days after that to decide on my host (I settled on totalchoicehosting), figure out how to organize the site, etc. As you might have noticed, the homepage (noenthuda.com) redirects to this blog (noenthuda.com/blog). The main reason behind this is that I’ve been too lazy to figure out what to do with my main site. I don’t really fancy turning this into a professional site – LinkedIn are there for that. All my writing is here on this blog, so no separate place needed for that.
There is another blog attached to this, called Twisted Shout. You can see a link to this from the right hand column of this site. You might notice that the site is defunct. The last post on that was several months ago. I had been using that site for discussing stuff such as the Petromax Theory, the Goalkeeper Theory and other similarly strong fundaes. Aadisht and Kodhi, my co-authors on that blog, had also planned to script our sitcom “rash driving” on that. Again, there was only a single episode of that and then NED happened.
Some of you might also know that NED is also the name of a quiz team, featuring Kodhi, Aadisht and me. It’s a subset of the erstwhile Sumo Yet So Far, which also featured Swami. It’s been a while since NED quizzed together, the last occasion being the QFI Open quiz in Chennai last summer. Our next collective performance will be at the Landmark Quiz in Chennai next month. Maybe I could have a section of the site dedicated to our quiz team. Maybe I’ll do that once our CV expands.
Then there are the NED talks, which I had announced a few weeks back. These talks will be held as planned, in October this year in Bangalore. I hope to make this a day-long event, in an auditorium. So basically it will be a series of lectures. We are looking for speakers, and listeners. We will also have 1-2 open house sessions so taht everyone can put CP (class participation).
I hereby call for speakers for the inaugural NED talks. The date is not fixed but it will be on some Sunday this October in Bangalore. You will have to give a talk in less than 18 minutes on any topic that remotely relates to NED. For example, I plan to speak on the Studs and Fighters Theory, and how it might impact NED. So if you are interested in speaking, write a short write up on yourself, and what you want to talk about and send it to me at skthewimp AT yahoo DOT com. I think we will need a total of TEN speakers.
In other news, I’ve got proper net access now in Bangalore (BSNL Broadband). So immense peace are there. Normal services should resume shortly.