Category: arbit

Quick Update

I heard that some of you got scared after reading my last post. My apologies for that. I’m in Bangalore now, and don’t have proper internet access here. Use my phone to check email and twitter, so I’m available on those, but there is no easy-to-use mobile tool to access wordpress so haven’t been able to update this blog.

Things will remain this way for a few more days till I get broadband (at my new house on K R Road). Regular programming won’t resume until then. I’m getting thousands of kickass ideas for kickass blog posts but with net not being available readily, I’m not able to implement too well on them.

Oh and for the record, I “do nothing” now. In the sense of job, I mean. I don’t really know what I want to do next apart from the fact that I want to live in Bangalore. Medium term plan is to become a quantitative consultant, but I need more clarity on that.

Let me know if you guys have any kickass ideas for me. Regular service will resume here in about a week’s time (or maybe later).

The Mata Temple in Amritsar

It seems to be a slightly obscure temple. I don’t think it is on the map of most tourists who visit Amritsar. Or maybe with the increasing breed of auto drivers turned tour guides, it is now. The Lonely Planet Guide to India calls it the “Mata temple”. Locals call it the “vaishno devi temple”. The Lonely Planet guide says it is a must-visit for women who want to get pregnant. Anyway, we went. On the way back from our trip to the Wagah border.

It is an interesting temple, to say the least. The ground floor seems to be a normal temple, but the presiding deity is an old bespectacled woman in a sari which made me think that it is dedicated to some cult. Apparently not, and this is the way that Vaishno Devi is represented in most places (that is what my mother tells me). The ground floor is again noisy as most north indian temples are. As I enter, I notice this staircase that says “vaishno devi cave” or some such thing. And I go upstairs.

The first floor of the temple has been designed with The Crystal Maze (remember that awesome TV show on Star Plus?) in mind. I don’t know if it was designed that way to attract children, or if they actually decided to model the place after some famous temples, or if they just made it that way to make the place more interesting.

So in order to reach the shrine of the main deity (again a Devi), you need to go through a large number of “tasks”. You need to climb up and down a total of three flights of stairs each way (I think I counted it right). And then there is a stretch where the ceiling is so low that you need to crawl on all fours to get past. And you need to get past a blabbering madman (an employee of the temple) in order to stand in a queue – which leads into a second cave.

This second cave has ankle-deep water, and you need to wade through that. i was wearing cargo pants whose legs could be detached at the knees, but then I was afraid of misplacing them so just rolled them up. And while you were wading through the water, you had people who started shouting slogans in favour of the Mata. Death only it was. But at the end of the passage where you waded through the water, there was a wonderful sight. A one of a kind.

There was a statue of udders of a cow, and placed directly below that was a statue of a snake, and a lingam. Interpret this ensemble in whatever way you like. I first told my mother that this was a good way of ensuring middleman-less ksheeraabhishekam. Anyways we noticed people in front of us touching the udders and the lingam and the snake (yes, unlike most temple deities, these things were available for touching for general public).

When my turn came, not knowing how to handle it, I ended up groping the udders. And then stroked the lingam below. It’s been a week since we visited that temple, but my mother is yet to stop ragging me about what I did there.

That turned out to be the last of the “adventures” as we soon came to the main deity. The pujaris there gave us kadlepuri (puffed rice) as prasad, and put some saffron marks on our foreheads (eccentrically). And we were soon back downstairs enduring the noise of the main temple.

Scissors

It was our third term in IIMB. The institute had come up with this concept called “core electives” which no one had a clue about. These courses were neither core nor elective. And one of them happened to be Investments, taught by the excellent and entertaining Prof. R Vaidyanathan.

This was around the time when Kodhi and I had been trying hard to introduce the word “blade” (in the context of “putting blade” meaning “hitting on someone”) to campus. This word had been long established in Bangalore Slanguage, and we were trying to make IIMB also adopt the same. In order to further our efforts towards introducing this words, we even picked a batchmate each and actually started putting blade (ok I made that last one up).

So during the course of the class, Prof Vaidya said “the difference between a blade and scissors is that a blade cuts one way while a scissors cuts both ways”. I forget the context in which he said that, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that a collective bulb lit up in the first row, where Kodhi and I had been sitting. “Blade” now had a logical extension. A new slang-word had been born at that moment, and later that day at lunch we introduced it to the general public at IIMB.

So that is the origin of the term “scissors”. Now the title of my blog post series in “arranged scissors” might make sense for you. Scissors happens when louvvu “cuts both ways”. When a pair of people put blade on each other- they are effectively “putting scissors” with each other. So in most cases, the objective of blade is to convert it to “scissors”. And so forth.

While in the frontbenches of Prof Vaidya’s class Kodhi and I were inventing the term “scissors”, Neha Jain was in the backbenches actually putting scissors with Don. Now she has come up with a nice poem on this topic. Do read it. And I want to make a Death Metal song out of it. So if you have any nice ideas regarding the tune and appropriate umlauts, do leave a comment.

The Eighty-Twenty Rule

I first got this idea during some assignment submission at IIT. One guy in our class, known to be a perfectionist is supposed to have put in 250 hours of effort into a certain course project. He is known to have got 20 out of 20 in this project. I put in about 25 hours of effort into the same project and got 17. Reasonable value for effort, I thought. And that was when I realized the law of diminishing returns to effort. And that was the philosophy I carried along for the rest of my academic life (the following four years).

The problem with working life as opposed to academic life is that the eighty-twenty formula doesn’t work. The biggest problem here is that you are working for someone else, while you were essentially working for yourself while you wree a student. Eighty was acceptable back then, it is not acceptable now. Even if you are working for yourself, the problem is that the completion-rewards curve is completely diffferent now.

Imagine a curve with the percentage of work done the X axis and the “reward” on the Y axis. In an academic setting, it is usually linear. Doing 80% of the work means that you are likely to get 80%. Fantastic. The problem wiht work is that the straight line gets replaced by a convex curve. So even to get an 80% reward, you will need to maybe do 99% of the work. The curve moves up sharply towards the end so as to give 100% reward for 100% work (note that I’m talking about work done here, not effort. Effort is irrelevant)

Now, why did I cap reward at 100% in the previous paragraph? Why did I assume that there is a “maximum” amount of wokr that can be done? Note that if there is a ceiling to the amount of work to be done, and to the reward, then you are looking at a payoff like a bond – the upside is limited – 100% but the downside is unlimited (yeah I know it’s limited at 0, but it is so far away from 100% that it can be assumed to be infinitely far away). Trying hard, doing your best each time, the best you do is 100%. But slip up a bit, and you will get big deficits. It is like the issuer of the bond defaulting.

Almost thirty years back, Michael Milken noticed this skewed payoff structure for bonds, and this led him to invent “junk bonds”, which are now more politely known as “high yield debt”. Now, these bonds were structured (basically high leverage) such that a reasonably high rate of default was built in. In an ordinary bond the “default expectation” is that the bond won’t default at all. For a high-yield bond, the “default expectation of default” is much higher than 0 – so there is a definite upside if the bond doesn’t default. So that balances the payoffs.

So how does that translate to work situations? You need to basically get yourself a job where there is significant scope for doing “something extra”. So that if you take into account the “something extra”, the “expectation” will be say something like 90% of the work. So by doing only a bit more than your old 80-20 rule from college, you can fulfil expectations. And occasionally even beat them, resulting in a major positive payoff (either in terms of money or reputation or power etc.).

The deal is that when the expectation is lower than 100%, the reward-work curve changes. It remains heavily convex for the duration within the expectation (so if expectation is 90% of work for 80% of profit, the curve will be highly convex in the {(0,90),(0,80)} area). And beyond this, it gets less convex and closer to linearity, and so gives you a bit more freedom.

I’m too lazy to draw the curves so you’ll have to imagine them in your heads. And you can find some info on convex curves here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function

Anecdotes from school: Copying In exams

A couple of not-so-hilarious incidents from our pre-board exams in 10th standards. It being election year (1998) we had 2 rounds of pre-boards instead of the usual one. The formation in the classroom was interesting – we sat normally two to a desk, and there were two sets of question papers. Since these were pre-boards and not boards, many of us didn’t really take them seriously. I must say that the entire set of exams was a riot. After all, it was the last thing that we did in that wonderful school (the school didn’t have 11th and 12th, so all of us had to shift out).

The biology section of the science exam contained a question on habit-forming substances. Something on the lines of “what are habit forming substances and why are they bad”. A certain mahaanubhaavva thought he didn’t know the answer. Or maybe he didn’t understand the question properly. So using a set of excellently-planned cheat codes, he managed to communicate to the guy in the next row (note that he couldn’t ask the person next to him since she had a different question paper) about this question.

The guy in the next row wasn’t such a stud in dumb-charades, and decided to use standard gestures rather than excellently-worked-out codes. He wanted to show booze in as intuitive way as possible. Putting his fist near his mouth, and with a clever movement of his thumb, he indicated drink. Sitting behind him, I thought this was excellent for someone not well-versed in Dumb Charades. Unfortunately, people well-versed in Dumb Charades tend to think too much. In went the answer paper “the primary habitat forming substance is water. It is bad because people and animals can fall and drown in it”. He must count himself lucky he got the hall ticket.

This incident has had far-reaching consequences. The mahaanubhaava who didn’t know the answer was so traumatised by the incident that he is yet to taste alcohol. He is afraid of drowning in it – that dreaded habitat forming substance.

****************

One day later was the social sciences paper. Unfortunately I wasn’t part of the Dumb Charades study group, so I hadn’t been introduced to the art of communicating the question number across the class. I realized that with my skills I was unable to even communicate across the aisle. I wasn’t even as good as the guy in front of me who put his fist to his mouth. So it had to be the cute girl next to me who had to help me out with the question that I didn’t have a clue of. If I remember right, she was partially trained in Dumb Charades.

What I didn’t realize was that you are not supposed to copy if you are seated in the first row – it is too easy to get caught. Moreover, if you are in one of the middle columns (like I was) you are in the direct line of vision of the invigilator. So it is never a good idea to copy. But then, I’d never copied in my life, and I knew this was the last opportunity for me to make amends. So what if I didn’t know the codes? So what if I was seated on the first row? So what if the cute girl next to me had a different set of questions? This was my last chance to profitably copy, and I had to take it.

I usually pride myself on being good at eye contact. I pride myself on the fact that I can communicate anything to someone of the opposite gender by just looking deeply into her eyes. I know that if I were to copy from a girl who was seated in FRONT of me, I could have done it with just eye contact. Unfortunately, the only person seated across me and looking towards me was the invigilator. Obviously I couldn’t ask her the answer?

The rules of copying state that it is always the dumber person who copies from the smarter person. The class topper never copies. If he were a copycat, his topping could never have been this sustainable. By knownig the two names, you can easily know who is the copier and who is the copied. Things always go by the rules. So if you try to invert  these rules, it is usually easy to fool the invigilator. And so forth.

So unlike the mahaanubhaava who hadn’t understood the question, I didn’t get caught for the attempt to copy. No one threatened to not give me my hall ticket – that honour went to the cute girl who had been sitting next to me. I didn’t do well in my social science pre-boards – I hadn’t been able to get the answer from the benchmate – she had got caught for copying from me before that. Despite now knowing the codes, and having zero experience in this department, I had played my cards well. I never repeated this experiment. Even if I wnated to, I think I’d’ve never found a counterparty.

Search Strings: May 2009

So I continue my series of publishing interesting search terms which people used to land on my blog. As I had mentioned before I plan to make it a monthly feature, and so far I’ve been keeping my word.

For the first time ever since I installed Google Analytics, the most searched for term that led to my blog wasn’t “noenthuda”. The honour went to “my friend sancho review” (google for it – my site is no. 2 or 3 for that) with noenthuda coming a close second. Coming in a close third was a phrase that had made last month’s list – “isb chutiya”. Some 60 people landed up on my blog in the month searching for this phrase. Seems like there are lots of chutiyas at ISB.

and close to 30 people landed up here searching for “mandelbrot noenthuda”. Maybe I should create noenthuda fractals.

So coming to this month’s list:

  • course books at iimb
  • why do so many money managers have mbas?
  • amrita scissors
  • arjun shivlal yadav marital status
  • brahmin mess in jayanagar
  • cleavage “cleavage theory” pakistan
  • english education and english books in tamilnadu after 1990
  • good photographs of nri boys for marriage
  • how to end an arranged marriage engagement
  • i wana do regular graduation from gurgaon but did 12th 10 yrs back
  • pictures of inidan boys married foregins
  • upendra’s house kathriguppe
  • when burst of stove is accident and when suicide what is difference

More next month

Hajaam

This Monday, for the first time in my life, I got myself shaved by a hajaam (barber). Yes, for the ten-odd years that I’ve been shaving, I’d so far never let anyone put a blade on my face. However, a long vacation in Bangalore, absence of my usual Mach-3 and constant jibes by my mom about “wilderness on my face” led me to the hajaam.

I started off my shaving career sometime in 1999 when I was presented a Gillette Sensor Excel. After I earned my first ever salary (four years back) I upgraded myself to a Mach 3. I’ve had a few flings with cheap one-piece razors such as the Gillette Presto or the 7 o’clock Ready 2 Shave, but till a week back had never put a single blade on my face. It was always at least double. And I’d always do the act twice, once forward and once “reverse”. And for all these ten years, the part of the process that has taken the maximum time has been to ensure that my sideburns (I’ve always had them) are of equal length.

The act of getting shaved itself was pretty quick, maybe since it was so much easier for the hajaam to figure out if my sideburns were of equal size, or maybe since he didn’t care about it as much as I do. It was a bit uncomfortable as his hands, one of which held an ultra-sharp single blade, hovered over my face and neck. It itched a bit, and my face twitched a bit, but thankfully I didn’t get cut. It was again a “double shave” but unlike my own double shaves, both the shaves that the barber did were in the “forward direction”. Maybe the barber’s single blade isn’t suited for “reverse shaving”.

In the two minutes that I spent getting shaved, I started thinking of the history of shaving (no I’m not talking about the series of communist portraits here (Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao) ). About how if I’d been born a century earlier I’d have to go through this hajaamat on a regular basis – since safety razors weren’t yet in existence then. About how certain Hindu customs have failed to take into account the development of the safety razor and the fact that one can shave himself easily now. I was thinking about the total amount of business that barbers would have lost thanks to King Gillette’s invention – rather than making their money out of a daily shave, they now had to rely on monthly hair cuts only.

Another thing with the invention of the safety razor is that full beards are now less popular – back in the days when everyone had to go to the hajaam for a shave, people couldn’t afford to shave daily, and a full beard appeared significantly better than a stubble. Now that people can afford to shave daily, they never have a stubble and can thus be always clean-shaven.

The most uncomfortable part of the shave was when the guy was shaving the upper lip. With the nose on one side and the mouth on the other I was quite scared. I now reason that the coming of the safety razor has played a significant role in the decreasing popularity of moustaches – you feel so much more comfortable taking care of that sensitive region yourself rather than handing it over to a hajaam.

It was overall a quick, mildly scary, but decent experience. I got charged Rupees Twenty which I thought was okay for the shave. And I realized how much higher the barber’s “billing rate” was for the shave (twenty rupees for five minutes’ work) as opposed to a haircut (fifty rupees for twenty minutes’ work) . And I started wondering once again about the damage to barbers’ fortunes caused by King Gillette’s invention.

Temples

I’ve never been the religious type. I seldom go to temples. I seldom go to temples in my own city. I do visit temples when I’m traveling, but that is more as a tourist attraction. I’ve been to Tirupati once (Boxing Day 1991) and to Mantralaya twice and am not keen to visit either place again. After my first visit there in 1990, I would consider the Annapurna temple  in Horanadu (near Chickmagalur) as my favourite temple. This was until a year ago when I visited it again and got pissed off by the crowds and formalities.

The amount I contribute to the Hundi in temples is also highly variable, and a direct function of how much I like the temple. I consider my contribution to the Hundi as my contribution for the upkeep and maintenance of the temple, and in support of the temple’s activities (for example, I tend to put in a higher amount in temples which serve free food). If I don’t like a temple, I just make a token contribution of Rs. 2 or Rs. 5 and flee. Also, I usually make my contributions to the Hundi, and not to the plate that comes along with the mangalaarathi. This is to ensure that the priest doesn’t kult my contribution.

Some temples do end up making me feel spiritual. It is hard to describe that feeling but let me tell you that it is the same that I felt when I smoked my first cigarette (and decided that smoking was too addictive to take up as a hobby and abandoned it). It is that feeling of inner calm. It is that feeling of being at complete peace with oneself. Sadly I haven’t felt that way at any temple since I started earning, else that temple might have been blessed with a fat contribution from my wallet.

I find the temples in North India too noisy. I remember literally running away from the ISKCON temple in Delhi six years ago because I thought it looked like a discotheque – loud devotional songs and people dancing. Today I went to a couple of temples near Connaught Place and it was similar – loud bhajans on one side, astrologers sitting all around the temple, and general disorder everywhere else. There was no way that temple could offer any peace or calm or any spiritual benefit. I fought with my mother when she insisted I should contribute at least Rs. 10 to the Hundi.

My contribution to temples is also an inverse function of its popularity – I usually contribute less at more popular temples because I can freeride on the rest of the visitors’ contribution. If it is a smaller temple and if i like it, I feel more responsible to contribute towards its upkeep.

And when I go to a temple, I always get archane done. That way, I definitely get some sugar candy!

And why do I not want to go back to Tirupati? Because I think it is too crowded to offer any kind of spiritual benefit. And Mantralaya? The last time I went there someone got a special pooja done in my name and as “prasad”, the swami there threw a towel on my back, and then threw an orange and asked me to catch it. I find that demeaning and don’t want to go back there again. Oh, and I wasn’t let in to the dining hall since I wasn’t wearing my sacred thread.

Alumni Dinner Pricing

So this is Anusmaran week. This is the week where all over the world, in over eleven cities, alumni of IIMB will meet in the annual alumni meet up. The venue for this is usually a convention hall or a lawn in a hotel, and people have to contribute an “entry fee” in order to pay for the dinner. Drinks are usually “extra” and you have to pay for each drink that you drink.

The problem with this is that for “pseud value” reasons the event is usually held in a reasonably expensive place. For example, in Delhi it happened at the India Habitat Center, with the “participation fee” being rupees eight hundred only. And on a Sunday evening, and you know how early or late parties in Delhi start. I didn’t go for it so I don’t really know about the response but I don’t expect it to have been spectacular.

The probelm with alumni meets is that the organizers (usually students doing their summer internship in the city where it is held) underestimate the elasticity of these meets. They don’t realize that people who want to be in touch with each other continue to be in touch with each other irrespective of efforts by the Alma Mater, and that there needs to be some sort of concrete incentive in order to come and attend the alumni meet up.

As I was discussing with Baada a short while ago, networking for networking sake does require a reasonably high level of enthu. It doesn’t come naturally for most people. You netwrok if you have a product to sell and need to meet potential buyers. You netwrok if you are looking for a job and hope to meet potential employers. You network if you are looking for some favour and there is a good chance you might meet someone who might do you that favour. You don’t naturally network for netwroking sake.

Given this, expecting people to shell out a not-so-inconsiderable amount to attend a networking event where food will probably be of dubious quality and you have to pay for each glass of booze is a bit too much. The more enthu people and people who want to network will turn up. The rest won’t. They will probably get together with their own little gang of people (maybe all alumni of the same college) and go elsewhere for good dinner and conversation.

The first time I attended Anusmaran was in 2005 when I helped organize it in London, where I was interning. All of us London interns were full of enthu for networking back then and turned up in good numbers. There were quite a few alumni also, and it was good fun. I attended Anusmaran in Mumbai in 2006, immediately after I’d joined my first job. I knew that a large number of people from our batch was in the city, and Anusmaran provided us a good opportunity to catch up. Extremely good fun.

In 2007, I had gone to the Bangalore meet and walked out looking at the extremely thin turnout. I went to the nearby Adigas for dinner along with Aadisht and GB. Was good value for money.

Yes I might be a cheap guy. But what the organizers need to keep in mind is that a large number of attendees are also cheap guys. So forget all the pseud value and hold it at a place where it doesn’t cost too much for the attendee in order to network.