general – Page 5 – Pertinent Observations

Union Square Park

So earlier today on my way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stopped over at Union Square for a bite. I picked up a falafel sandwich from the Maoz Vegetarian outlet nearby and walked over to the Union Square Park to eat it, while sitting on a parkbench and eyeing little girls with bad intent…

So while the park is not large, I really liked the way it’s laid out. Wide pedestrian pathways cutting across it in all directions. One side of the park playing host to artists selling artworks, a farmer’s market (this is on Saturdays I think) and the likes. The north side had a little children’s play area, which had swings and slides and similar stuff. And then in the middle there was a “dog run” area, where people brought their dogs and let them out to play ball. It was wonderful to watch.

The best thing about the park was that it was literally open to the street, and had no gates. While there was a notice there that the park was closed from midnight to 6am (I don’t know how that gets enforced) it was literally open to public, for people to come over and sit down for a bit, look at the kids (maybe with bad intent), the dogs, purchase something on the sidewalk, and all that.

Of course this being winter there were no leaves on the trees around, and little grass (the irony being a “keep off the lawns, they are freshly laid” signboard, while the said lawns were covered deep in snow), so one could look around far and wide.

Anyways I think there is a distinct lack of public places like this in India. The Union Square Park is not large, but it is well laid out and accessible which makes it so popular. The problem with parks in India (specifically in Bangalore) is that they have one objective – to provide good space for morning walkers. That way the effectiveness of the park is vastly reduced.

I hope city authorities develop spaces like this in Bangalore, and elsewhere in India; though not at the cost of playgrounds, of course.

MLTR

This has nothing to do with any pop group, or any Michael or anyone learning to rock. It’s about this awesome easy-to-miss long undiscovered eatery in Gandhi Bazaar. You should definitely eat at Mahalakshmi Tiffin Room.

Situated on DVG road between Gandhi Bazaar main road and North Road it’s an old-style sit down restaurants. Small marble-topped tables with benches. Communal seating where strangers can share your table. An ancient cupboard displaying “cool drinks”. Blue walls. Waiters in dhotis. A small section cordoned off with the sign “families only”.

And divine food. Really awesome masala dosa (real masala dosa, not the species served at Vidyarthi Bhavan). Soft and oil-free khali dosas (yeah the restaurant is so old; they call it khali dosa and not set dosa). And strong coffee. And all served quicker than you could look around and take stock of the place.

I had been walking past the place for several years but it was only when Priyanka noticed it when we walked past it last April that I actually ate there. We had shared a masala dosa and a coffee then. And were so impressed that we left a 33% tip.

And it so happened that the same waiter Raju was there when we went last weekend. Again quick and efficient service. Awesome dosas. I think they make to stock the khali dosas – for they arrived within half a minute of our ordering.

Oh, and they have a weekly off on Saturdays.

Reliance Retail?

So on Sunday morning when I went to Reliance Fresh down the road I saw this guy who runs a vegetable store nearby frantically running between shelves, stocking up huge quantities of fresh vegetables. If this were a government store, and if this were license-permit raj, we could have said that this guy was hoarding vegetables.

While this explained why you seldom get fresh stuff at Reliance Fresh later in the day, it made me wonder if Reliance Retail is actually a retail operation. Given the amount of vegetables that this retailer was buying it seemed like it was more profitable for him to walk down the road and source the stuff from Reliance Fresh, rather than traveling a few kilometres down the nearby KR Road to source from the city market.

So thinking about it, this is probably reliance fresh’s strategy. Apart from selling to retail customers, they also make money out of supplying to nearby retailers, who take advantage of the lower prices at Reliance Fresh in order to make a margin for themselves and avoid the long trudge to the wholesale market.

I’m sure Reliance Fresh doesn’t particularly have a problem with the deal, except that they might lose out on customers who know about the poor quality of vegetables one gets there in the evening and so decide to not shop there for other groceries also. Customers know when to get good stuff so they don’t mind. The retailers obviously don’t have a problem.

Neat, ain’t it?

Denial – The price you needn’t pay for.

As strange as it may seem, this is very true. Be it physical intimacy or work!

“What makes him come and bug us so much for the data?” That’s because we don’t give him the data. That excites him. That challenges him.

All of us love challenges.

If you were to make a pass at someone and they were to give in immediately, your first thought would be on the lines of either the woman being a nottie or you making a bad move.
And, if she didn’t give in immediately, then the woman’s a hottie and you wouldn’t stop trying till either she gave in and you gave up!
Here again, the enjoyment level is directly proportional to the amount of denial. Denial builds a false price around everything.

Now, if a kid was to ask for a lollypop and he/she was given one immediately, it’s no fun! If the kid were denied the lollypop and then after he/she pushed its luck far enough after crying and rolling all over the floor, then its seems like a major high for the kid.
The child feels like he/she has achieved something. Then there is more incentive to enjoy the lollypop.

How about a more adult situation like bargaining on the streets?
You want a lemon. It costs 3 bucks. You earn a million. Yet, you are not satisfied till you make him sell it to you for 2 bucks. The sense of achievement one might get for saving that a buck is higher than earning a million!!

And guess what, you would absolutely hate it if he agreed to sell it for a buck lesser quite easily. What we really enjoy is being denied, and not saving that 1 buck!!

This is also the underlying principle behind sexual harassment.

Why most married men make boring bloggers

Sri. (Something I write on top on the first page everytime I start writing in a new book. Its probably because of how the letter curves in Kannada)

I’ve heard enough complaints about the deteriorating quality of this blog over the last one year and I simply couldn’t help not thinking about it.

First of all, what made this blog so interesting was the occasional sprinkling of posts on women, relationship & love amidst the interesting fundaes on eco, politics, finance, etc which is not the case anymore.

The way a guy writes about a girl when he is single is so different from when he is married to her. The style of writing changes from starry eyed, inquisitive to mundane & cynical. The girl seems like a closed box of treasure to an open one now. Nobody cares about the box once you’ve seen what’s in it no matter how interesting it is. You get the hang of it, right?

When a guy says very sweet things about his wife, male readers know the truth in it and the female readers like to simply believe it and see how differently it works in their lives and don’t want to read anymore of it. Hence, you lose most of your readers.

P.S – The title is taking generalization a bit too far.

Life Update And Other Stories

So I got married. Oh, we made a wedding website also. Wanted to have a dating game at the wedding where people try chat up each other on the chat box in the website before they came for the wedding, but unfortunately the box wasn’t widely used and the wedding party (yeah, we did have a dance party after the “vara pooje”) went off “peacefully” without any one pairing up (as far as we could see).

The biggest pain point at the wedding was immediately after I had tied the thaaLi around Pinky’s neck. The stage of the hall (not very big, mind you – the stage that is, the hall was pretty big) was invaded by all and sundry. Random uncles tried to ensure some discipline and make people queue up, but to no avail. We were assaulted from several directions by people wanting to shake our hand and get introduced to the one of us that they didn’t know. I’m not sure if either Pinky or I actually got to know anyone during that process.

Then, despite a lot of thought and prior planning (a long time back), the inevitable happened. There was a long queue at the reception. Thankfully, there were large groups of people so the queue cleared out fairly quickly. But it was still painful looking at so many people wasting time there when they could have spent their time at the wedding more usefully, scouting, networking, flirting, eating and the works.

A large proportion of the guests have given us gifts. It seems like we’ll have a very festive 2011. Ganesha Chaturthi will be grand at our house, given the number of Ganesha idols (in various positions) that we’ve received. Dasara (navaratri) will also be grand, given the number of other sundry dolls we’ve got. And a large number of (mostly really pretty) candle stands means that Deepavali will also be grand next year.

One thing we fail to understand is why someone cares to give us something when they don’t put their name on it. I mean, what is the use of gifting if the gifted doesn’t know who the gifter is? Is the gratitude for the wonderful gift to be directed to the general public that attended the wedding? Why would someone want to let go of the good karma that they get by giving some nice gift?

During our honeymoon at Sri Lanka, we realized that both of us are package-tour kids. That when we were young, most of our vacations were “package tours” where you were made to wake up early in the morning and taken to a thousand different places with a really busy schedule. We realized this when we kinda got bored halfway into our day-and-half stay at a beach resort in Bentota. I think the most boring part of staying at a resort is that you get bored of the food! How many times can you eat out of the same buffet, irrespective of how large it is?

I take this opportunity to apologise to my readers for not writing in the last one month. I hope to be more prolific in the future. Given that my wife and I met because of this blog (technically, due to it’s predecessor on livejournal), she quite appreciates my blogging and is very encouraging and supportive. And as I’ve been writing this for the last ten minutes, she’s been busy in the kitchen making what I think will be delicious sambar.

When will people come?

So I was trying to estimate how many of my invitees will attend my wedding ceremony and how many will attend the reception (the former is at noon and the latter the same evening). While a large number of people have kindly RSVPd, not too many have really mentioned which event they’ll turn up for. So it’s my responsibility to somehow try and figure out how many will come when, so that the information can be appropriately relayed to the cooks.

Personally, if I’m attending the wedding of someone I don’t know too well, or a wedding I’m attending more out of obligation than out of the desire to be there, I prefer to go to the reception. It’s so much quicker – queue up, gift, wish, thulp, collect coconut, leave. The wedding leads to too much waiting, insufficient networking opportunity, having to wait for a seat in a “batch” for lunch, and the works.

Again, I hope that most people who are coming for my wedding are coming more because they want to attend rather than looking at it as an obligation. Actually I was thinking of a wedding invite as being an option – it gives you the option to attend the wedding, but you pay for it with the “cost” of the obligation to attend. In fact, over the last few days, I’ve felt extremely guilty while inviting people whose weddings I bunked (for one reason or another).

That digression aside, what upsets estimates for my wedding is that it’s on a Sunday, when more people will be inclined to come in the morning rather than at night. For one, they have the day off. Secondly, usually people like to spend Sunday evening at home, ironing clothes and the like, preparing for the grueling work week ahead.

And the fact that the venue is on the northern side of Bangalore, while most of my invitees live in the south (the fiancee and most of her invitees are in the north) makes me want to increase my “lunch” estimate and decrease the dinner estimate. And then the fact that I’m getting married on a seemingly “auspicious” day, when there are lots of functions all around, makes me wonder if I should discount the total attendance also.

After the wedding is over, I’m willing to anonymize and share the spreadsheet I’ve used for my estimates. Ok you might think I’m a geek but what I’ve done is to put an “attendance” probability for each event for each attendee, and then taken expected value to get my estimates. As I write this, I think I should take standard deviation also, and assume the law of large numbers (yes I’ve invited a large number of potential guests) in order to provide my in-laws (who are organizing the whole event) 95% confidence intervals for number of guests..

Anyways, I just hope that my (and my in-laws’) estimates are right and we won’t end up erring in either direction (shortage of food, or wastage) by too much in either direction. And the costs of the two (localized costs – as hosts, our costs of food shortage (in terms of reputation, etc.) is much higher than cost of wastage; though from global sustainability perspective it’s probably the other way round) have led our solution of the Newsboy Problem to be conservative in estimate.

And yesterday I was suggesting to my in-laws that after the wedding lunch, we can revise the estimates for dinner to M – X where M is the total number of guests we expect (counting double for people who we expect to attend both lunch and dinner) and X is the number of people who had lunch. It’s important, I think, to use as much information as possible in making decisions.

Crowding out with public transport

This is an idea that’s been in my head for a while. About whether it is possible to nudge people who normally travel in cars to use public transport by simply flooding the roads with buses. The motivation for this comes from the hassles associated with marking and enforcing bus lanes, a form of public transport that is generally considered superior to subway trains in terms of cost of implementation and effectiveness.

So the idea is that as the number of buses on the road increases, the average speed of cars comes down. And after a point, the number of buses on the road means there’s enough supply that one can travel comfortably in them. And there will come a point when people will give up their cars in favour of buses since they can now spend the time more usefully rather than waste it by concentrating on the road.

Of course, this point is still far away for a city like Bangalore, though the BMTC has been making efforts, with initiatives such as the Bus Day. Still, now I’ve begun to have my doubts about it. About whether just increasing bus connectivity and frequency and quality will be enough to take cars off the road. I’ve begun to think if the comfort of not having to drive but travel at the same speed is enough to compensate for the cost of walking to and from bus stops and waiting for buses. The other cost of traveling by bus is that once you get into a bus you travel by a fixed route rather than adapting to daily traffic flows.

The important thing here is the distribution of waiting time for catching a bus. If a passenger is convinced that he is very likely to get a bus within a certain span of time with a very high probability (using vague words to avoid putting random numbers) he is likely to wait for a bus. However, if there are no such bounds, then the passenger might choose to travel by an alternate means of transport.

Still it needs to be seen. From what I know, all cities that currently boast of great public transport actually built a lot of the basic public transport infrastructure before the boom of cars in the place. I can’t recall off the top of my head any city that has actually nudged passengers from personal cars to public transport after cars had become default mode of transport (if you know of such cases, please let me know). In that sense, this nudging towards public transport is still a hard problem to solve. Nevertheless, I still think it might still be a good idea to try crowd out private transport by public transport.

The Polite No

When someone expects something out of you, and tells you explicitly, there is the chance for the moderate solution that can be described as “the polite no”. When they explicitly tell you that they want something, and for some reason you are either unable or unwilling to give that to them, you can politely refuse and reason out with them as to why you are unable to give them what they want.

On the other hand, if someone expects something out of you but doesn’t explicitly tell you that, that removes the possibility for this beautiful intermediate solution. Firstly there is the problem of guessing – you’ll have to somehow divinely guess that that is what they want. Secondly, if you fail to deliver, there is always the possibility that they ASSUME that you were UNWILLING to deliver, even if the reason you didn’t deliver was that you were UNABLE to do so. And this might lead to some sort of bad blood, or more misunderstanding.

Still, I don’t understand why some people never state what they want out of you. As to why they are being cryptic than being direct. I don’t know if they realize that they are ultimately putting themselves at a loss by means of this lack of communication.

Wedding Invitation Prefixes

It seems simplest in Tamil Nadu, where the girl’s name is prefixed with “Sow” (or “Sou”; for Sowbhagyavathi) while the boy’s name is prefixed with “Chi” (for Chiranjeevi). Considering most Tams have only one initial to their names, this sounds fair.

As we move to Andhra, the boy’s prefix remains “Chi” while the girl’s prefix gets elongated to “Chi Lax Sow”. I guess this is in line with the practice of three or more initials in Andhra.

In Karnataka, where two initials are dominant (at least were dominant in my parents’ generation; though not in mine (for eg. my father decided “Gollahalli” sounded too country to be part of my name so he dropped it and gave me only one initial) ) both boys and girls have two syllable prefixes. Girls get “Chi Sow” (for chiranjeevi sowbhagyavathi i guess). Boys get “Chi Ry” (I have no clue what Ry stands for. Maybe Karnataka boys show a special fondness for rye-based drinks).

Found this pertinent given that this afternoon I journeyed to Sultanpet and bought cards on which we’ll print our wedding invites.