personal – Page 19 – Pertinent Observations

Quotable quotes

Over the last week or two, I’ve been doing a fair bit of “social networking”. I’m not talking about online social networks – if anything I’ve significantly cut down on that (I’ve taken a break from twitter). I’m talking about old-fashioned social networking, where I meet old friends and acquaintances over coffee or drinks or a meal.

Since the last two weeks were “holidays” in most of the world, a number of people happened to be visiting Bangalore and I ended up meeting a lot of people. I’ve met so many people that now it’ tough to remember what I spoke about with whom. And it’s only a good thing, for nothing gives me a bigger high than a nice long intellectual conversation, and my discretion means that I’ve only met people who have afforded me such conversation.

During a couple of such conversations I think I said stuff that is rather quotable. Since the people I said these things to don’t have active blogs, I thought I should be rather pompous and put up quotes here from my own conversations.

Last week I was talking to a friend from IIT. I was telling him about getting some change.org petitions such as “IITians against article 377”. What is the point of putting all IITians as a group, I asked. Apart from the fact that we did rather well in a supposedly tough examination, I don’t see any particular feature that sets IITians apart from the rest of the population and I find this grouping of IITians rather amusing. The conversation went thus:

“I don’t see what is special about IITians. During my time at IITM I found 80% of IITians rather unspectacular and uninteresting”
“I agree with that number but what sets IIT apart from other colleges is that it is 80%. Elsewhere it will be 95%”
“Yeah, but that isn’t a big improvement”
“Of course it is a big improvement. 80% is so much better than 95%”
“Ah, now I get it. If we have a class of 100, and if 95% are uninteresting that means there are only 5 interesting people. With 80% uninteresting, it means that there are 20 interesting people! 4 times the number of people to hang out with!”

Ok I admit there’s nothing particularly quotable in that but I wanted to talk about the concept of inverse proportion here, and hence all the build up. And perhaps this thing about inverse proportions would have made more sense on my official blog, but since there is a little bit of bitchiness involved I’m putting it here.

Coming to the other quotable quote – earlier this week, a friend was asking my why I don’t push myself harder professionally. This guy has had an exceptional professional career so far, and was pointing out the benefits of his professional focus over the last few years. This is what I told him:

“I used to be like this, but after a few years and a few incidents, I realize I don’t have that appetite for delayed gratification anymore. I’m not willing to slog it out for a while to wait for the fruits of labour later on.

“So it is 10 pm in IIMB, and you need to submit your Supply Chain Management case analysis by 8 am the next morning. this guy who is in your discussion group comes by, ostensibly to work on the case. And he says ‘one game of AoE before we start the case?’

“And so we sit down to play AoE. It is 5 am by the time we have finished solving the case. We started, in fact, only at 1 am – we were playing AoE till then.

“Now, even if we had started solving the case at 10, there is no guarantee that we would have finished significantly earlier than 5. In that case, we would still have not slept, and not played AoE either. The way we did it, we didn’t sleep but we we at least managed to play a solid round of AoE.”

Why I became a Liverpool fan

In mid-April 2005, I was on the District Line train from Mansion House to South Kensington, in London, and in the Victoria station, a huge number of people got on to the train. They were all dressed in red, and carrying Liverpool scarves and cans of Carlsberg beer. They were on their way to Stamford Bridge, to watch Liverpool take on Chelski in the Champions League semis at Stamford Bridge. And they started singing.

It was magical, as they first sang “you never walk alone”, and then followed it up with personalized songs for each of the players, and for the coach Rafa Benitez. I remember one going “Steve Gerrard Gerrard, pass the ball forty yards .. ” . And another, to the tune of “La Bamba”, going “Rarararararafa Benitez, Xabi Alonso, Garcia and Nunez” (honouring all the Spaniards in the team). I was sold.

Till then, I hadn’t been much of a football fan, though I would watch the odd World Cup or Euro game. I had never really followed club football, and never supported any team. That day, things changed. I went to a crowded pub in Kensington to watch the game, perhaps I was the only Red fan there. I got to know the names of the Liverpool players (I’d heard of Gerrard and Milan Baros thanks to their exploits in Euro ’04, and I knew Alonso, Garcia and Nunez (never saw him play) thanks to the song). And quietly cheered for Liverpool in that semi final.

It has been a roller coaster ride for the last eight odd years, with more downs than ups. The undoubted high came just a month after I’d declared myself a Liverpool fan, when they came back from 0-3 down to beat Milan in the Champions League finals in Istanbul. There have been several low points, the one that hurts the most is them failing to win the Premiership in 2008-09, when they came a close second. And then, they were to sell Xabi Alonso, who had been my favourite player.

The kind of passion I feel when I watch Liverpool play is unmatched, even by what I feel when I watch the Indian Test cricket team. There is a kind of tension that develops that I seldom feel otherwise. The disappointment when they lose (or fail to win) is the kind that I normally reserve for personal debacles.

And to think it all started with a random train ride with a bunch of loud drunks.

Zen and the art of shooting

So I was at this resort near Nandi Hills for a day-long workshop on Saturday (actually it was a three-day workshop but my session was only on Saturday so I went there only for one day). One of my colleagues and fellow-teachers had brought along an air gun and at a time when students were busy doing some homework we had given them, we went off for some shooting practice.

First we used cardboard pieces and drew targets on them. I remember taking some four or five rounds at it. First three times I shot way to the right of the target. The following time I decided to correct for this bias and aimed a little left of the target. However, it turned out I had overcompensated and I ended up shooting left.

This was the first time ever in my life that I was shooting (barring toy guns when I was a kid). The first couple of shots I was just getting use to the feel of the gun, the posture, etc. What I found tricky was that there were two viewfinders through which you had to look through simultaneously (genius design – to eliminate parallax error). And then you had to concentrate, focus and shoot.

My first few shots I figured that I thought too much about shooting. I took aim, and then held the position for a while till I was convinced that I was aiming right. Then I would get distracted (damn you, ADHD) and then I would have to try and concentrate again. This would happen a few times until I would go impatient and shoot randomly, and thus miss the target.

After a few rounds of shooting at the cardboard, we moved on to shooting a fruit. Four of us took two cracks each at the fruit, and I was the only one who didn’t manage to hit the fruit at all. On both shots I missed by a long way. I had that sinking feeling I always have when I’m trying to learn something as part of a group and end up being clearly the worst in the group. That’s a frequent feeling for me nowadays.

So for the last round where we used an empty Bacardi carton as our target (the aim was to hit the face of the Bat logo on the carton), I decided to adopt what one of my friends called the “Zen method”. “The first time you take aim, just shoot. Don’t over think”, he said. I had some reputation to salvage.

We all took two shots each at the carton. I did what I was told. As soon as I had taken aim, I shot. I ended up hitting the bat logo once on the tail and once on one of its legs. Here is a photo taken as soon as I had shot the tail (red circle; the other shot on the bat is a colleague’s). The Zen method worked!

PS: I think this is the first time ever I’ve put up my photo on my blog. So all those of you who read this but don’t follow me on any other social medium – you finally know what I look like.

Managing households and economies

Two years ago next next week, I was laid off from a large investment bank. Thanks to my then boss, I had a heads-up – it was only a question of when. I had started making contingency plans – which is the business I run right now. In fact, I had been planning to do this before I got to know that I wouldn’t last much longer at that firm, but that is an incidental point.

The point is that on one particular day two years back I realized that there was going to be a drastic reduction in my (and thus my family’s) cash inflows. And so we begun to make contingency plans. Now, remember that I already knew what I wanted to do next, but I knew that it would take time before it would begin to produce positive cash flows (in fact it would take a year). So the challenge was on how we were going to finance our living in the interim.

What puts me on a weaker footing in such discussions is that I’m not organized. If you ask me how much I spend in a month, I can’t tell you without checking my bank account statement. I believe I don’t spend too much but don’t calculate too much at the time of spending either. Yes, I’m a data scientist but I don’t quantify my life.

Coming back, we made an estimate of how much we spend and realized that there would a deficit that we would have to finance. I had ruled out taking up another job, as I had believed that the time was right for me to do my business. One option was dipping into savings – I had a fair bit tucked away in fixed deposits, and could break one of them. However, the wife wasn’t sure if we should dip into savings for day-to-day expenses. “Let us see how we can cut our expenses”, she said.

And so we sat and tried to analyze how we could reduce our spend without significantly affecting our quality of life. “Use the car only when absolutely necessary” she said, and I agreed it was a good idea. Then she suggested that we shouldn’t eat out (we were already paying a cook a fair sum every month), which I again agreed with. So we proceeded, line item by line item, trying to weed out unnecessary expenses.

Soon, we were out of low hanging fruit (eating out, car, etc.) and things started getting absurd. “Why should we spend Rs. 1000 per month on electricity? We should cut it down by 10%”. “We don’t need two business newspapers. Let’s stop getting Business Standard”. “We should cut our respective phone bills by 10%”. “Do we still need a land line?” While all these are excellent ways to cut expenses, the problem is that it did little to solve the problems. The deficits that we would have to finance every month was of a different order of magnitude, and while measures such as this helped chip away at the deficit, they had little impact on the overall deficit itself.

I’m telling you this long story now because it reminds me of how the Central Government is trying to save the rupee from falling further. For a long time, there were steady foreign exchange inflows into India, thanks to foreigners wanting to invest in our country. This flow of dollars made us complacent, and we weren’t particularly worried by our high import bill. We continued importing heavily, and with the fund flows subsidizing the dollar imports remained cheap, too. We didn’t bother to take steps to boost our exports, though.

So now, the fund flows have stopped coming. And the government needs to do something to make sure our deficit doesn’t grow. And so they have started chipping away at corners. They have increased taxes on gold imports. They want to restrict timings when petrol can be sold. They want to further tax import of apples (the fruit, not the computer). Yes, each of them will make a small dent in our burgeoning current account deficit. However, it will remain just that – a small dent. The deficit is of orders of magnitude more than these dents.

Just like we would not be able to manage the household budget by simply cutting down on small corners (newspapers, electricity, etc.) the country cannot manage to finance the deficit with small measures such as these. What we need is structural change (at least in my personal situation I knew I was starting a business so the structural change was coming; there is no such thing on the horizon at the government level). Currently it is not clear how that is going to happen. Analysts are predicting further fall in the rupee. Given how the government has gone about trying to defend the rupee, that wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

My household budgeting problem was partly solved by the generous severance pay that my employer gave me along with the pink slip. It kept us going for quite a while, then I cashed out some small savings and then my business started producing cash flows. Unfortunately for the country, investors are not in the habit of giving “severance payouts” when they remove their investments from a country.

Perfect and imperfect interviews

The movies give this impression of what is a “perfect” job interview. This usually happens during the stage of the movie when the protagonist has started turning things around, things are looking up for him/her. The “perfect” job interview barely lasts minutes, and the protagonist returns with the offer letter. As good as it can get. Unfortunately, this reversal of fortunes for the protagonist (who has hitherto been jobless, and desperate) happens only towards the end of the movie. And we don’t really get a chance to know how his job went.

I had one such “perfect” interview once. To be fair, I had sent my CV in advance and had done a couple of telephonic rounds (which were primarily about my would-be bosses telling me about what the company did, without them asking me too many questions) before I was called in for the interview. I remember going in around 10 am or so, first meeting the HR person in charge of recruitment and then the India head. No questions asked. I then met my would-be immediate boss. Again, few questions asked. Most time spent explaining what the role would be about. By lunch time I had an offer letter. As perfect as it could get, you might think.

The perfection, unfortunately, didn’t last too long. Within a few weeks (yes, back then I counted my tenure in a job by weeks, as I hadn’t ever lasted more than ten in any earlier organization), it was clear that there was a mismatch of expectations. Given my (then spectacular-looking) CV they had expected me to pull rabbits out of hats. I soldiered on. A year later I announced that there were no rabbits in the hats. Helpfully, two months later, I suggested how the design of the hats could be improved (all this is metaphorical, of course). But they were disappointed that I wasn’t able to produce rabbits. Soon, we parted.

Coming to think of it, given my disastrous career as an employee (which I don’t hope to resurrect), it’s hard to find a “happy” story. But to contrast the one above I must tell you about this other job I did, where I was significantly happier (while it lasted) and lasted longer. This time I faced sixteen rounds of interviews. Yes, you read that right. Sixteen. All extremely difficult. Each of which told the firm a different dimension of me. And more importantly, each of which gave me insight into what the team I was going to join did and the kind of people I was going to work with. After the last of these interviews, the firm took ages to decide on my offer. But when I joined, I slotted in easily. They knew me and I knew them. Yes, it might have unraveled once again (eighteen months on) but till then I could have only dreamed of eighteen months of being happy in a job!

So I was thinking about it yesterday when I was thinking of a meeting I have this week to explore a potential business opportunity. At first I imagined myself closing the deal quickly. Then I corrected myself. Considering that this is a longish engagement that I’m thinking of, it would be important for them to know me and me to know them well before we sign. It is important to know what each of us is bringing to the table, and for expectations to be clear. So yes, multiple rounds of talks could potentially delay this engagement, but it will put it on a firmer base.

And that’s what you should be thinking of every time you want to get into a potential assignment. Unless of course your intention is to fraud your counterparty.

PS: Think of how campus placements work given this framework. I think of it as purely an option value investment by the employer.

Mental Health: Update

It’s been over six months since I got off my medication for depression (venlafaxine) and ADHD (methylphenidate), so I thought I should just provide an update. The immediate trigger for this post is that I’m reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile, in which among other things he rants against excess medication, and explicitly picks on medication for depression and ADHD.

Overall, I must mention that I’ve managed pretty well these last six months. Yes, there are depressive bouts. Yes, there are times when I can’t concentrate and I get increasingly restless. Sometimes it is perhaps as bad as it used to be before I started seeing a psychiatrist. But it’s ok. The most important outcome of going to a psychiatrist for a year has been that I’ve gotten diagnosed.

You might have heard this in several places – that ninety percent (or maybe more, or less) of treatment of a disease is diagnosis. And in case of my mental health I find that to be absolutely true. Yes, I took medication for a year. Yes, it helped back then. Yes, as I’ve written before, having those medicines provided me the necessary stimulus to get myself out of the depths I’d gotten into over the last few years. However, I’m certain that I don’t need them any more. But the diagnosis helps.

Two years back my biggest concern was that I wasn’t able to explain my life. There was no story. I had done a lot of things that were seemingly disparate and there were a lot of things that I’d done which I would later regret. So I had a lot of regrets, and I would expend a lot of my idle processor time (in my head) dwelling on these regrets, and wondering why I did certain things the way I did, or why I took the decisions I took. Every time I tried to come up with an explanation for something, I would get the “but everyone deals with that, why can’t you” response.

The biggest advantage of having diagnosed is that it now all fits in. I now know why after getting into IIT with such a good rank I drifted away and completely lost interest. I now know why so many of my initial crushes didn’t work out (ADHD among other things makes you impulsive and blurt out things you aren’t supposed to). I now know why I chose to literally run away from my first job (that’s a long story in itself. Will save it for another day). And I precisely know why I went in and out of three more jobs in the five years after that.

Yes, I might be overfitting in some things (you can see that I’m doing that in the previous paragraph to explain why no relationships worked out). Nevertheless, after a long and ardous search for that one variable or set of variables that would explain a large part of who I am or what I did, when I all I found was noise, I think I’ve found the signal. Till I was close to thirty, I led my life without having fully understood myself. And trying to blame myself for being inferior to other people in certain ways, and constantly regretting my decisions. The diagnosis changed all that. Yes, after a discussion on a mailing list on ADHD some three years back I’d posited that I might have it. Yet, a formal diagnosis from a qualified psychiatrist helped.

So you may ask why I discontinued medication if I know that I have some problems. Two different reasons for the two medicines I was taking. As for Venlafaxine (which I used to take for anxiety and depression), I had a harrowing time in November of last year when I ran out of supplies of the drug and couldn’t find it in any store near my house for a couple of weeks. During this time I would feel weak, have a fever and feel extremely numb in the limbs, but had no clue why that was happening. Later, the psychiatrist told me that these were withdrawal symptoms for failing to take my drugs regularly. I panicked. i didn’t want to get addicted to mind-altering substances. More importantly, around this time I got the feeling that the drug wasn’t doing much help. I would still have the same old bouts of depression. The psychiatrist agreed that I had plateaued in response to the drug. So she recommended a rather slow taper off from the drug (to prevent withdrawal symptoms), which I followed and got off it.

Methylphenidate was useful, and wasn’t addictive (some literature has likened it to wearing spectacles. It affects you only when you’re taking it). Yet, I found that it changed me. Yes, I know that I’m attention deficit and possibly hyperactive, but I refuse to believe now that it’s a ‘disorder’. The problem with the drug was that it was changing my mind. Yes, it made me concentrate so much better. Long strings of meetings when I would visit the client’s office were a breeze thanks to the drug. My concentration levels shot up. Yet, I found that it had impaired my creative thinking. I’m extremely proud of my ability to connect disparate things, but I felt that this drug was impairing my ability to do so. I just wasn’t being myself. And I had found that on days when I would forget to take the drug I would be more capable of creative non-linear thinking. And I figured that with the drug I wasn’t being myself.

So yes, I’ve been off the drugs for a while now and have adjusted to life with it. Yes there are days when I’m constantly fidgety and can’t concentrate to get work done. Yes, nowadays work that takes long bouts of intense concentration gets delayed. But I’m back to being myself. And I’m back to being good at what I thought I was always good at – big picture thinking and making disparate connections.

Yes, one important factor that has helped me to deal with my condition (no, it’s NOT a disorder) is my work. As a freelance management consultant who mostly works from home (and visits client once every couple of weeks) I can set my own pace. If i’m feeling particularly fidgety some day, I can take a break till I’m doing better. I don’t have daily or sub-daily deadlines to bother me (this was my biggest issue with most of my jobs). More importantly there’s no one looking over my shoulder to see what I’m doing, so I can freely switch between my work screen and twitter. And trust me, this helps. Immensely.

Since I visit my clients once in 2-3 weeks I end up having lots of meetings during these visits. But I simply draw up on my energy reserves during those times and buckle down and concentrate. Yes, last two or three times after I’ve visited the client I haven’t got much work done for the following three or four days – since I’d be recuperating from that intense expense of mental energy – but again I’m okay with that.

I plan to write on this again in the near future after I finish reading antifragile. I find this to be a rather important concept for me given that I’m prone to making errors (I’ve now accepted that). I think I’ve already started designing my life along antifragile principles. But more on that in another post.

Meanwhile, some other posts I’d written earlier about my mental condition.
1. How ADHD is like being perennially doped
2. On the importance of admitting mental illness and going to a specialist
3. On anti-depressants being like an economic stimulus
4. On mental illness in elite colleges in India
5. On anxiety being like a computer virus
6. On how ADHD can sometimes be advantageous

Up North

So it’s exactly a year since I moved to the north. North Bangalore that is. For exactly the last one year, I’ve called a place in Rajajinagar 2nd Stage (not to be confused with Rajajinagar 2nd Block) my home. It’s been a roller-coaster ride, I must say. Lots of ups, lots of downs. I must admit a year in I still haven’t settled in completely, and for the record, I’m already plotting a move back south.

The problem with the area where I live is that it is an area of houses built on 30 feet by 40 feet plots. While that itself is not a problem (with an FSI of 1.5, you can build a 1800 square foot house here, which is pretty massive), the problem is that this area was “built” in the early 1970s. Back then, nobody had cars, and given the economic situation nobody aspired to have a car. This, coupled with the smallish plots meant that people didn’t make a provision in their plots to park cars. Again – given the economic situation when this layout was built, it is a perfectly rational decision.

Now, forty years later, with rapid economic growth in the last 20 odd, everybody has a car. And since there’s no space to park them inside the houses, people park them on the streets. So on every street in my locality, you will find cars parked continuously on both sides of the road. Unfortunately people haven’t figured out a protocol of one-ways, so sometimes that leads to traffic deadlocks when cars approach from both sides of the road. Thankfully we are spared of such deadlocks since we live on a road that leads to a dead end (a real dead end, not a “Bangalore dead end”, which is just a T-junction).

Thinking about it, I find the land use here rather suboptimal. Most plots have two-storeyed houses, and given the size of the plots, the plots are fully built. So there is less than five feet space between my window and my neighbour’s – and on Sunday mornings we get woken up because Neighbour Uncle likes to talk loudly on the phone sitting in his porch (the neighbours reconstructed their house a few years back, so they have a porch to park their car). Essentially there is little privacy.

There is little of other things also – like open spaces and trees, again a function of the plot sizes. I have a solution for this, but it is going to be hard to implement, and I don’t want to be the ones doing that. Yes, everyone has a plot of land to call their own. But they live in houses that aren’t too large and don’t have much privacy or open spaces or gardens.So I think it would be a profitable enterprise for a real estate developer to buy up the entire area (let’s say about two or three roads at least), merge the sites and build a high rise apartment here with all “facilities”. Even if the realtor were to pay above market rates (necessary since a lot of people wouldn’t want to sell) and compensate the incumbents handsomely in terms of houses, there is profit to be made. But then everyone wants their own “piece of land”.

Notwithstanding any of this, where I live is a great area. It is residential and solidly middle-class, and I can buy just about anything I want within a kilometer of my house. I only need to walk about 100m to catch an auto rickshaw, and it isn’t that hard to get an auto home at any time in the day. The biggest problem I find here, though, is infrastructure.

Malleswaram is a pre-car area. It was built in the 1890s to rehabilitate people from the old city (pete) area following an outbreak of plague. Consequently, the roads aren’t particularly wide. Which ever way I want to get out, I’m faced with narrow roads, and that combined with heavy traffic means travel times to the centre of town and beyond are large. And to make matters worse, Dr. Rajkumar Road (one boundary of “mainstream” Rajajinagar) is a highway, with buses leaving for all parts of Karnataka passing through this road.

I have a habit of living in cusps. My last residence was at the trijunction of Jayanagar, Basavanagudi and Banashankari. This one is on the border of Malleswaram and Rajajinagar. Maybe the next time I move, I should think of going into the “middle” of some area.

Levi’s Price Discrimination

So I’ve never managed to buy jeans on discount. Let me explain. Unlike most other people (if you go by what the store assistants tell you), I don’t like to wear faded jeans. It is perhaps an inherited hangover since my father used to consider jeans to be inherently dirty and would make me discard jeans as soon as they faded a little bit. It could also be more practical – since I sometimes like to wear jeans to official meetings, I want to wear jeans that look neat.

Now I’ve managed to drive my wife crazy with my shopping (and we’ve known each other for barely four years, shopped together for three maybe). She thinks I’m way too fussy about clothes, and can’t make up my mind easily. I’ve explained earlier on this blog why I take a long time over shoes (my sandals are now wearing out, so I’m getting ready for another ordeal). But the more fundamental differences that my wife and I have is with respect to jeans.

The problem is that we fundamentally disagree on what purpose jeans serve. I have traditionally looked at jeans as comfort wear. Trousers I’m absolutely comfortable in (I sometimes even sleep in my jeans), which I don’t need to wash too frequently, and which can be worn even after they get torn in non-strategic places. I’ve always bought “comfort fit” jeans, and after I graduated to branded jeans towards the end of my teens, my staple had been the comfort-fit Lee Chicago.

The problem is that my wife thinks of jeans as fashion-wear – things you need to necessarily look good in. Some of the jeans she owns are so skinny that sometimes she takes a really long time to change. She looks great in them, no doubt, but the problem is that she expects that I too wear such jeans. And so after some ten years, I have given up my loyalty towards Lee Chicago, and instead have to try out various skinny fits (as things stand now, I own only one pair of Lee Chicago, bought in 2009).

Ok all this is besides the point of this post (and the point of another post which I never wrote). Coming back to the point of this post, the deal is that nowadays I find it extremely hard to shop for jeans. Of course it doesn’t help that I don’t live in Kathriguppe (with its dozens of factory outlets) any more, and that in my part of town (Malleswaram-Rajajinagar) the only place you can find decent branded clothes is in malls, which are a pain. The bigger problem, though, is that it is very hard to find stores that stock my kind of jeans.

In the last couple of years, our strategy for shopping clothes has been to visit a multi-brand outlet in one of the two malls near our place, so that we have a wide variety of choice. Except that I have no choice. Because stores such as Lifestyle or Shopper’s Stop or Westside (which now mostly stocks private labels) or Central don’t stock my kind of jeans. At all. If you happen to locate a store clerk and ask him for “mid blue straight cut non-faded jeans” he will look at you as if you have just landed from another planet. He can be excused for giving you those looks, for his store simply doesn’t stock non-faded jeans, because of which he has never sold them!

So I happened to be on Brigade road over the weekend, and I had a small gap of about half an hour between two meetings, and thought I should visit the Levi’s flagship store there. I must mention that the salespeople there were definitely significantly more polite than I’ve ever seen at a multi=brand store. However, as soon as I repeated my mantra (mid blue straight cut non-faded jeans), the first thing the salesperson who approached me told me was “oh Sir, but there’s not discount on that!”.

It’s clever price discrimination by Levi’s, to not sell non-faded jeans on discount. For they know that people who buy non-faded jeans tend to be older (hey I’m only thirty), or will be buying them for office wear, and they are less price elastic than the typical college kid who buys faded stuff. So while the college kid needs discounts to be attracted during the “discount season”, the “formal jeans” buyer needs no such attractions, and will pay full price for his stuff.

It is interesting to note, however, that companies that make formal clothes (not Levi’s) also offer massive discounts during the “discount seassons” (one of which is on now). That, though, can be explained by the fact that most people need a few sets of formal clothes (even those that normally wear faded jeans), and discounts are necessary to attract customers.

Now I’m beginning to think that the market for “formal jeans” in India is extremely niche, and if I”m acting above my age because I prefer such jeans. I half-expect my wife to call me an “uncle” be cause of this.

Me, all over the interwebs this week

Firstly, on Tuesday, I got interviewed by this magazine called Information Week. Rather, I had gotten interviewed by them a long time back but the interview appeared on Tuesday. I spoke about the challenges of election forecasting in India and the quality of surveys.

Again on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, I wrote a pair of articles for Mint analyzing constituencies and parties. On Tuesday, I analyzed constituencies whose representatives have always belonged to ruling parties in the last 4 elections. There are 34 such constituencies. Then on Wednesday I wrote about the influence of states in the Lok Sabha, analyzing the proportion of MPs from each major state that was part of the ruling coalition.

If I had forgotten to mention earlier, I have a deal with Mint that lasts till next October where each month I’m supposed to write 3 articles on election data. You can find all my articles so far here.

Then, today, Pragati published my review of the book Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson. More than a book on economics or institutions, it is an awesome history book. Get it.

And in the midst of all this, right here, I wrote a “worky” post about the pros and cons of having a dedicated analytics team.

And if you didn’t notice, this website now has “new clothes”. It was a rather long-pending change and the most important feature of the new layout is that it is “responsive”, and thus looks much better on smartphones. I’ve heard a couple of issues with it already, and do let me know if you have any more issues. And for the first time last night I opened this blog on an iPad and I find that it looks fantabulous, thanks to the OnSwipe plugin I use.

Numbers and management

I learnt Opeations Research thrice. The first was when I had just finished school and was about to go to IIT. My father had just started on a part-time MBA, and his method of making sure he had learnt something properly was to try and teach it to me. And so, using some old textbook he had bought some twenty years earlier, he taught me how to solve the transportation problem. I had already learnt to solve 2-variable linear programming problems in school (so yes, I learnt OR 4 times then). And my father taught my how to solve 3-variable problems using the Simplex table.

I got quite good at it, but by not using it for the subsequent two years I forgot. And then I happened to take Operations Research as a minor at IIT. And so in my fifth semester I learnt the basics again. I was taught by the highly rated Prof. G Srinivasan. He lived up to his rating. Again, he taught us simplex, transportation and assignment problems, among other things. He showed us how to build and operate the simplex table. It was fun, and surprisingly (in hindsight) never once did I consider it to be laborious.

This time I didn’t forget. OR being my minor meant that I had OR-related courses in the following three semesters, and I liked it enough to even considering applying for a PhD in OR. Then I got cold feet and decided to do an MBA instead, and ended up at IIMB. And there I learnt OR for the fourth time.

The professor who taught us wasn’t particularly reputed, and she lived up to her not-so-particular-reputation. But there was a difference here. When we got to the LP part of the course (it was part of “Quantitative Methods 2”, which included regression and OR), I thought I would easily ace it, given my knowledge of simplex. Initially I was stunned to know that we wouldn’t be taught the simplex. “What do they teach in an OR course if they don’t teach Simplex”, I thought. Soon I would know why. Computer!

We were all asked to install this software called Lindo on our PCs, which would solve any linear programming problem you would throw at it, in multiple dimensions. We also discovered that Excel had the Solver plugin. With programs like these, what use of knowing the Simplex? Simplex was probably useful back in the day when readymade algorithms were not available. Also, IIT being a technical school might have seen value in teaching us the algorithm (though we always solved procedurally. I never remember writing down pseudocode for simplex). The business school would have none of it.

It didn’t matter how the problem was actually solved, as long as we knew how to use the solver. What was more important was the art of transforming a real-life problem into one that could be solved using Solver/Lindo. In terms of formulation, the problems we got in our assignments and exams were tough – back in IIT when we solved manually such problems were out of bounds since Simplex would take too long on those.

I remember taking a few more quant electives at IIM. They were all the same – some theory would be taught where we knew something about the workings of some of the algorithms, but the focus was on applications. How do you formulate a business problem in a way in which you can use the particular technique? How do you decide what technique you use for what problem? These were some of the questions I learnt to answer through the course of my studies at IIM.

I once interviewed with a (now large) marketing analytics firm in Bangalore. They expected me to know how to measure “feelings” and other BS so I politely declined after one round. From what I understood, they had two kinds of people. First they had experienced marketers who would do the “business end” of the problem. Then they had stats/math grads who actually solved the problem. I think that is problematic. But as I have observed in a few other places, that is the norm.

You have tech guys doing absolutely tech stuff and reporting to business guys who know very little of the tech. Because of the business guy’s disinterest in tech, he is unlikely to get his hands dirty with the data. And is likely to take what the tech guy gives him at face value. As for the tech guy doing the data work, he is unlikely to really understand the business problem that he is solving, and so he invariably ends up solving a “tech problem”, which may or may not have business implications.

There are times when people ask me if I “know big data”. When I reply in the negative, they wonder (sometimes aloud) how I can call myself a data scientist. Then there are times when people ask me about a particular statistical technique. Again, it is extremely likely I answer in the negative, and extremely likely they wonder how I call myself a data scientist.

My answer is that if I deem a problem to be solvable by a particular technique, I can then simply read up on the technique! As long as you have the basics right, you don’t need to mug up all available techniques.

Currently I’m working (for a client) on a problem that requires me to cluster data (yes, I know that much stats to know that now the next step is to cluster). So this morning I decided to read up on some clustering algorithms. I’m amazed at the techniques that are out there. I hadn’t even heard of most of them. Then I read up on each of them and considered how well they would fit my data. After reading up, and taking another look at the data, I made what I think is an informed choice. And selected a technique which I think was appropriate. And I had no clue of the existence of the technique two hours before.

Given that I solve business problems using data, I make sure I use techniques that are appropriate to solve the business problem. I know of people who don’t even look at the data at hand and start implementing complex statistical techniques on them. In my last job (at a large investment bank), I know of one guy who suggested five methods (supposedly popular statistical techniques – I had never heard of them; he had a PhD in statistics) to attack a particular problem, without having even seen the data! As far as he was concerned he was solving a technical problem.

Now that this post is turning out to be an advertisement for my consulting services, let me go all the way. Yes, I call myself a “management consultant and data scientist”. I’m both a business guy and a data guy. I don’t know complicated statistical techniques, but don’t see the need to know either – since I usually have the internet at hand while working. I solve business problems using data. The data is only an intermediary step. The problem definition is business-like. As is the solution. Data is only a means.

And for this, I have to thank the not-so-highly-reputed professor who taught me Operations Research for the fourth time – who taught me that it is not necessary to know Simplex (Excel can do it), as long as you can formulate the problem properly.