personal – Page 22 – Pertinent Observations

Career Progression

I’m close to two thirds my way into my “Project Thirty”. Parts of it aren’t going so well. I’ve hardly traveled, for one, save a bike trip across Rajasthan. My to-be-read pile is as tall as it used to be, and my DVR hard drive is almost full with movies that I’ve wanted to watch, but haven’t been able to watch. Despite this, at this stage I must say Project Thirty is heading to a success.

Soon enough, I should be signing my first really large consulting deal. That should keep me busy enough for the next six months, though I think I’ll have some time to do other interesting stuff. The interesting thing about this is that it all started off with an “incoming lead”. One of the senior managers at my prospective client reads this blog. So that can be considered as my blogging career’s second big achievement – this blog’s predecessor was instrumental in my getting acquainted with the woman I’m currently married to.

I’ve structured this consulting assignment in a way that I spend just over half my time on it, and I’ve decided to use the other half to do things that I find interesting, without really having a monetary objective. So I’ve built a new graphic for cricket, which I’m trying to hawk around. I’ve built a whole system to simulate cricket matches. I’ve taught myself R, and more R, and have now learnt to scrape data off the interwebs.

I’ve rediscovered my love for programming (through that cricket project), and have now started dabbling with some stock market data trying to figure out if I can come up with a statistical arbitrage based strategy (in which case I’ll try sell it to some hedge fund). I’m teaching a course for the Takshashila Institution and if things go well, I might be teaching more than that, and elsewhere. I’ve started doing corporate workshops. Later this week I’ll be attending a conference for networking purposes. I meet people over coffee, just to get to know them. And so forth.

Now the problem is sustainability. Being a lone wolf, trying to find six-monthly consulting projects that take half your time is not an easy task. You need to be careful about how much you commit, for you have no resources at hand if you are over-stressed, but then you need the pipeline to flow, if you need your life to flow. That tells me that the logical step is to recruit, and build a team. That way, I can spend my time doing more quality things, but that also means that I spend time doing employee-management, something I don’t particularly look forward to. I like my current life as a freelancer but sustainability issues mean that I might need to “settle down”.

Some of those over-a-cup-of-coffee meetings have been with old friends/bosses who are insanely brilliant people. These conversations have given me a real high, and I never seem to have had enough of them! The amount of positive information flow and idea flow that happens when I meet one of these people is phenomenal. Unfortunately I don’t get to meet them too often, given our respective busy-ness. However, it would be wonderful to find co-workers like that, who would keep me mentally stimulated all the time.

Another cup of coffee was downed last week with a couple of acquaintances who needed my help in analyzing a particular data set they were looking at. They are individually intelligent people (though neither belongs to the category I mentioned in the previous paragraph), but a little different from me in terms of world-views and backgrounds and expertise. It turned out to be another phenomenal conversation, though, as we exchanged notes on how to attack the data, with each of our views educating one another. We were different people, but we were comfortable working together, and there seemed to be a lot to learn.

Anyway, the point is that I’m looking for partners now, to run my consulting business. Of course, they need to be people who share my world-view in terms of quant and data analysis, but I do think there needs to be some diversity in terms of world-view and way of thinking. Again, they need to be self-motivated to pursue this field of quant consulting, and they need to remember that they won’t be drawing a salary – since they’ll be partners. The most important bit, though, is that I need to be able to work with them. I hope that over the course of the next few months I’m able to identify and convince one or two people who fit this description and who I would want to share revenues with.

I’m also looking for a mentor. I have a number of things I’m doing and I need to focus. I have a friend who has worked in consulting who is mentoring me with respect to the general stuff regarding my consulting assignment. However, I need someone who can guide me in a larger perspective. In terms of how I need to approach life, how I should go about building a partnership, building my business, building my team, etc.

I’m excited at this point in time, and I hope I can make things work in terms of my new-found career. I’ll keep you updated on this.

Sensitivity

This post is not about any statistical analysis. Neither is it about people’s sensitivity about others, which is associated with empathy. This post is about what I can, incorrectly but more specifically, call “self-sensitivity”. About people who are really thin-skinned and who are likely to “feel bad” at the drop of a hat. I argue that as far as social impact goes, it is no better than arrogance. For purposes of the rest of this post, the word “sensitivity” is to be read in this context – about sensitivity towards one’s own feelings.

A number of people see sensitivity as a positive trait. “Oh, she’s such a sensitive person” is usually bandied about as a compliment to the sensitive person. One is supposed to feel some sort of sympathy to the sensitive people, and remain sensitive (!) to their feelings while interacting with them. It somehow so happens that, more often than not, sensitive people also happen to be nice, and it is as if in return for this niceness you need to take extra care of them.

Thinking about it, sensitivity arises thanks to some deep-rooted insecurity, or some kind of inferior complex. This insecurity means that the person is more likely to associate some kind of malevolent intent to the counterparty’s words or actions, leading to much disagreement and tears and loss of trust. While it is okay for a sensitive person to expect counterparties to be sensitive to their sensitiveness (!), it needs to be understood that over the long run, this could cause friction and be counterproductive to the cause of the relationship.

The problem with both sensitivity and arrogance is that it increases the effort involved in talking to a person. If you talk to an arrogant person, you need to put up with his/her arrogance and the possibility that he/she might put you down for no fault of yours. You need to be always prepared for the conversation to go unpleasant, and thus overall your costs of conversation go up, which as a student of economics, you will understand, decreases the total amount of conversation.

While arrogance is a well-known cause of friction in conversation, less understood is that sensitivity can also have a similar impact. While dealing with a sensitive person, you may not be required to be prepared to be humiliated, or for the conversation to go really bad. However, at all points during your conversation, you will need to keep in your head that the counterparty is extra-sensitive, and that means you have a constant background process that censors your speech, and makes sure you don’t hurt the counterparty. This can again have an adverse impact on the conversation itself, and might tire you out quickly. Again, simple economics tells us that it affects quantum of conversation adversely.

While in the short run, it is okay for sensitive people to ask people around them to be aware of their sensitivity, expecting similar support in the longer run, while making no effort on one’s own part to get rid of one’s insecurities or inferiority complex, is not fair on the part of the sensitive person. Like arrogant people, sensitive people need to understand that their sensitivity is a cause of friction and it can affect their relationships in the longer run; and they need to work on it.

Unfortunately, sensitivity is seen as a largely positive trait, mostly by people who are unaware of the friction it can cause. More importantly, how do you tell a sensitive person that he/she should be less sensitive while at the same time not hurting him/her? In that sense, dealing with arrogant people is simpler – you can speak your mind to them without much long-term impact, and the general understanding of arrogance in society means that it is easier for you to at least make an attempt to tell an arrogant person to be less arrogant.

But how does one deal with sensitive people? Who will bell the cat?

The stigma about mental illness

It saddens me deeply every time I see someone rubbish mental illnesses as a fad, and as a wall behind which the mentally weak strive to hide. Having myself being affected negatively by delayed diagnosis and treatment thanks to prevailing orthodoxies, and having seen the kind of lift timely recognition and therapy can provide, it is frustrating to know that most of the world still attaches a stigma to any kind of mental illness.

Earlier today, someone I know reasonably well complained that she’s feeling way too depressed nowadays, and that she needs to seek a counselor. Knowing her, I know that this is a deeply informed decision, but before I can throw in my support, her mother interjects saying “all this therapy and counselling is bullshit. Just move in back with us and you’ll be fine”. I had half a mind to interject with “your similar stupid judgments not so long ago drastically delayed someone’s recovery, I know. So I don’t think your daughter should listen to you”. But not feeling particularly combative, I kept my opinion to myself.

Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to do my bit, though, to help clear the stigma of mental illness. I was talking to some aunts today and told them, “Look, there’s nothing wrong in being clinically depressed. It’s just unlucky. It’s like having diabetes”. They nodded, and seemed to understand. Perhaps using analogies like this one, where people can evaluate mental illness on par with an illness that they understand well, help.

The problem with mental illness, though, is that too few possible evangelists are “out” (while reading homosexual literature, I see several parallels between the difficulties faced by the sexually queer and the mentally ill). So many possible evangelists are involved in professions that sees “mental strength” as a necessary trait that they are afraid of jeopardizing their careers by “coming out”. The only solution, as I heard in an interview a couple of months back, is for this to be a gradual process. People with mental illness “coming out” is now a trickle, but if we sustain that trickle, perhaps it will become a flood sooner rather than later, and that might help erase the stigmas associated with this class of illnesses.

A couple of months back, I happened to listen to cricketer Iain O’Brien’s interview with The Cricket Couch, where he talked about his depression, and about why he “came out”. It was a truly inspirational talk, and there he mentioned about the trickle turning into a flood theme. He talked about Marcus Trescothick, who probably led the way among cricketers with mental illnesses “coming out”, and the effect that had on mentally ill sportspersons. He mentioned that his own coming out was a step in sustaining that trickle.

A month back, I read Trescothick’s autobiography, “Coming Back to Me“. That is again a story very simply written and well-told, and hopefully that helps educate the larger population about mental illness, and about the fact that it can strike just about anyone. In fact, Tresco makes an interesting point there that mental illness is more likely to affect the mentally stronger people, for being mentally strong, they try to fight against the tide that inhabits their mind, unaware of its presence, and in the process sink deeper into the illness. We surely need more such evangelists.

So today, on no particular occasion, I have decided to do my bit for mental illness evangelism, to make my little contribution to what is currently now a trickle and will hopefully turn into a flood. I suffer from more than one illness that gets categorized under the class of “mental illness”. For over six months now, I’ve been on anti-depressants, trying to combat my anxiety and depression. I also suffer from this condition called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) , but don’t take any medication for it.

For a while I was suffering from “second degree stigma”, and hence not “outed” myself, though in general I keep my affairs public. Because I’ve known that mental illness has stigma attached to it, I was afraid that outing myself might harm me both personally and professionally. However, I realize that by not sharing my story of incredible transformation in the past six months, I was doing a great disservice to the class of mental illness patients in general by not contributing to the trickle. Having convinced myself that I can work (for the first time in over six years I completed a couple of projects recently), and that I can work well despite my illness, I think it makes no sense holding this back any more. I thank Marcus Trescothick, Iain O’Brien, Freddie Flintoff, Lou Vincent et al for showing the way, and I think it’s my duty to join the band.

My psychiatrist informs me that I must have had ADHD for, like, forever, but lack of knowledge of the condition in India meant I was never diagnosed. Back in 2002, my parents took me to a psychiatrist because they thought I wasn’t performing up to my potential at IIT. I got administered the Rorschach Test and some questionnaires and was put on a mild dosage of sleeping pills, which I soon stopped taking without much impact. In hindsight, my ADHD should have been diagnosed then, and perhaps that might have helped me make better career choices than quitting four jobs in a bit over five years’ time.

As the more perceptive of you might have already figured out by now, this “coming out” means that I’ll probably be writing more about mental illness on this blog. I know it might make some of you uncomfortable, but it is indeed part of my effort to make people more comfortable with dealing with mental illness, and to try and erase the stigma attached to the class of illnesses. If you are a sufferer, too, I encourage you to come out, and join this trickle. And help turn it into a flood.

Valuing a flexible week

For the last couple of weeks my wife has taken time off from work, and given that I’m freelancing, we as a couple now have a flexible week. Yesterday, we went shopping. We were at the Bangalore Central store in JP Nagar, and for the first time in a really long time, were able to shop without bumping into fellow-shoppers every other moment. My wife didn’t have to wait endless hours in the queue just to get into the trial rooms (yeah, this happens at large format apparel stores on weekends). We shopped at Food Bazaar sub-store, and could take our time in deciding what to buy, without sharing aisles with other shoppers. The checkout counter was empty, ABSOLUTELY EMPTY, and we had an extremely peaceful experience there. It was an awesome day of shopping.

There are certain things that are done so much easier on weekdays than on weekends. Shops are significantly less crowded. If you have to get work done in government offices, you are better off going there on a weekday than on Saturday (when there are more consumers, and the employees are pissed off at the end of a long week). You don’t need to book cinema tickets hours before. Restaurants aren’t crowded. If you go for a day trip, you can expect your destination to not be flooded with other tourists. Of course, there are activities which are so much easily done on weekends rather than on weekdays – this involves anything that involves driving across the city in “peak traffic” hours.

So it’s clear that the “flexible working week” that I have provides some intangible value. Of course, since my wife doesn’t have a flexible week, we as a couple don’t always get to enjoy my flexible week, but leave that aside for now. What I’m trying to understand is the extra value that I”m getting thanks to my having a flexible week, and if I can put a number on it.

One way I can think of valuing my flexible week is in terms of optionality. I’ve listed down some of the advantages of doing certain things on a weekday. Maybe I can quantify the value of each of them? Maybe the value of the time I save by not standing in a queue at a checkout counter? The economic value of buying more and better clothes because I can shop peacefully? The additional value I get by having the picnic spot to myself rather than sharing it with a hundred others. The option value of being able to walk into a movie hall and buy tickets a minute before the show. And so on. And all this multiplied, of course, by the probability of my wanting to do each of these activities. Sounds right?

Of course, I’m talking about a flexible week here, and not about a week where you have weekly holiday on a weekday, like my wife had earlier this year. Thanks to some power supply issues, the local electricity distribution company mandated different weekly holidays for heavy industries in different parts of the city, thanks to which my wife had her weekly off on Wednesdays. And they were among the two most disorienting months I’ve been through. We were unable to do all those things that we would have normally done on weekends (and which are more advantageous to be done on weekends). I couldn’t do a full day of work on Saturday to compensate for not working on Wednesday. And I would try to work on Wednesday but wouldn’t be able to because my wife had her weekly off that day. It was absolutely mindfucking.

So yeah, maybe the next time someone asks me how much I”m making as a freelancer, I must include the “value of a flexible week” in the number I tell them!

Non competitive hobbies

During my riding trip two months back, I was wondering why I enjoyed riding so much more than any of the other “hobbies” that I have indulged in over the last twenty years or so. It was tough for me to think about any other hobby that had given me as much pleasure in the early days as riding did, and no other hobby seems or seemed as sustainable as this one. As I rode, and daydreamed while I rode, I thought about what it was about riding that gave me the kind of unbridled joy that any of my other hobbies had failed to provide. The reason, I figured, was that it was not competitive (no I don’t intend to be a motorcycle racer, ever).

Looking back at the hobbies that I’ve had since childhood – be it playing chess or playing the violin or even writing, they have all been competitive hobbies. As soon as I got reasonably good at chess, I started playing competitively, and soon the pressures of tournament play got to me, I lost my love for the game and stopped playing. Violin was a little better off in the sense that for a reasonably long time I only played for myself (apart from the occasions when I had to entertain random visiting relatives). But then, I was asked to take up an examination, and then enter inter-school music contests, and I find it no surprise that I quit my lessons six months after my examinations. I must mention that I’m on the road to committing the same mistake again, in my second stint at violin learning. As things stand now, I’m scheduled to appear for the ABRSM Grade Three examination this October, but I have my reasons for that and don’t think the process of appearing for the exam will kill my love for music.

Writing remained a passion, and a hobby which I think I was rather good at, until the time I started thinking about monetization. The minute I started thinking about wanting to write for money, I lost the love for it, which might explain the deceleration in activity on this site over the last three years or so. I had lost yet another hobby to the competitive forces.

The thing with competition is that it puts pressure on you. You have to being to hold yourself to a standard other than your own, and that means you will have to do certain things irrespective of whether you think it makes sense to do that. Soon, your hobby ends up as a slave to your competition, and it is unlikely you’ll be able to sustain interest after that. You can say that the moment a hobby becomes competitive, it ceases to be a hobby and becomes “work”.

The reason I’m bullish about motorcycling at this moment is that I don’t see a means for it to become competitive. Since I don’t intend to race, and don’t care about whether others have ridden more than me or whatever, I’ll be mostly riding for myself. Yes, when I planned my Rajasthan tour, I did think of monetizing it by writing about it for the media, but that I think was more a function of wanting to monetize my writing than my riding. In the event, i didn’t get a mandate to write, and that in no way affected my enthusiasm for the ride. Rather I felt freer that I could enjoy the ride rather than thinking about what I would write about it.

As I go along, I hope to pick up one or two more such non-competitive hobbies. Of course I intend to make motorcycling a “major” hobby. As it is, I love traveling, doing it my own way and going off the beaten path. And I love the feeling as i accelerate, with the wind penetrating the air vents of my riding jacket and my thighs grabbing the petrol tank. Now if only I can convince Pinky to also take this up as a hobby..

Missing the Obvious

It was a year and a half back that I bought this desktop that I’m writing this post on. Given that the desktop was to be placed in my study, and the modem is in the drawing room, the most intuitive thing for me to connect up this desktop was to buy a USB wi-fi adapter, which cost me in excess of a thousand rupees. While it worked well in general, it gave problems once in a while, requiring reinstallation of the software and setting some random settings.

Last week, when I got some data from a client, I realized that my computer was wholly unsuited for big data operations, and I needed to upgrade, big time. I’ve now got myself a badass Intel I7 processor, with 8GB RAM and a 64 bit OS which will hopefully enable me to run my business successfully. The downside of this is that my old USB Adapter doesn’t work on a 64bit processor (it can be made to work, but the process is long and tedious). After getting my wife to dirty her hands on this (she is the in-house hands-on engineer), I realized that it wasn’t possible to get the USB Adapter to work, and thought of complicated options such as using this computer purely for analysis and using my laptop and a Pen Drive for the networking. Half a day of working thus told me it was way too inefficient. Then I thought of shifting the entire modem to the room, drawing a line from the telephone jack in the drawing room all around the house, a process that is not painless.

Finally, for two hundred and sixty rupees (less than a fourth of what I had paid for the USB Adapter) I got myself a 20 meter long LAN cable, and have simply connected my computer with that. Beautiful, intuitive, simple. The question, though, is about why I had never thought of this beautiful, simple, intuitive solution for so long! It turns out that I had never really taken this option into consideration at all, for had I done it there would have been no grounds to reject it at any point in time.

I have recently embarked on a career in consulting, and I believe that a significant proportion of my insights are going to be beautiful, intuitive, simple solutions which for whatever reason the client hadn’t particularly thought of. Why do such low hanging fruit exist at all?

What is it about our thinking that we get so tied up in complications and completely miss out the obvious? Is it a fallout of our spending large amounts of time trying to solve complicated (and in the larger context inconsequential) problems? Or is it that these simple obvious solutions have to “hit us” sometime (in the form of an insight) and when we sometimes approach the problem in too structured a manner we tend to miss out on these insights? What do you think?

While I’m happy that I’m connected again, and in such simple a manner, I’m cross with myself that a simple soluti0n as this didn’t strike for such an extended period of time.

The Quants

Since investment bank bashing seems to be in fashion nowadays, let me add my two naya paise to the fire. I exited a large investment bank in September 2011, after having worked for a little over two years there. I used to work as a quant, spending most of my time building pricing and execution models. I was a bit of an anomaly there, since I had an MBA degree. What was also unusual was that I had previously spent time as a salesperson in an investment bank . Most other people in the quant organization came from a heavily technical background, with the most popular degrees being PhDs in Physics and Maths, and had no experience or interest in the business side of things at the bank.

You might wonder what PhDs in Physics and Maths do at investment banks. I used to wonder the same before I joined. Yes, there are some tough mathematical puzzles to be solved in the course of devising pricing and execution algorithms (part of the work that us quants did), which probably kept them interested. However, the one activity for which these pure science PhDs were prized for, and which they spent most of their time doing, was C++ coding. Yeah, you read that right. These guys could write mean algorithms – I don’t know if even Computer Science graduates (and there were plenty of those) could write as clean (and quick) C++ code as these guys.

While most banks stress heavily on diversity, and makes considerable efforts (in the form of recruitment, affiliation groups, etc.) to ensure a diverse workplace, it is not enough to prevent a large portion of quants coming from a similar kind of background. And when you put large numbers of Physics and Math PhDs together, it is inevitable that there is some degree of groupthink. You have the mavericks like me who like to model things differently, but if everyone else in your organization thinks one way, who do you go to in order to push your idea? You stop dropping your own ideas and start thinking like everyone else does. And you become yet another cog in the big quant wheel.

The biggest problem with hardcore Math people working on trading strategies is that they do not seek to solve a business problem through their work – they seek to solve a math problem, which they will strive to do as elegantly and correctly as it is possible. It doesn’t matter to the quants if the assumption of asset prices being lognormal is widely off the mark. In fact, they don’t care how the models behave. All they care about is about their formulae and results being correct – GIVEN the model of the market. I remember once spending a significant amount of time (maybe a couple of weeks) looking for bugs in my pricing logic because prices from two methods didn’t match up to the required precision of twelve decimal places (or was it fourteen? I’ve forgotten). And this after making the not-very-accurate assumption that asset prices are log normal. The proverb that says, “measure with a micrometer, mark with a chalk, cut with an axe”, is quite apt to describe the priorities of most quants.

Before I joined the firm, I used to wonder how bankers can be so stupid to make the kind of obvious silly errors (like assuming that housing prices cannot go down) that led to the global financial crisis of 2008. Two years at the firm, however, made me realize why these things happen. In fact, the bigger surprise, after the two years there, was about why such gross mistakes don’t occur more regularly. I think I’ve already talked about the culprits earlier in the post, but I should repeat myself.

First, a large number of guys building models come from similar backgrounds, so they think similarly. Because so many people think similarly, the rest train themselves to think similarly (or else get nudged out, by whatever means). So you have massive organizations full of massively talented brilliant minds which all think similarly! Who is to ask the uncomfortable questions? Next, who has time to ask the uncomfortable questions? Every one, from Partner downwards, has significant amount of “day to day work” to take care of every day. Bankers are driven hard (in that sense, and in that they are mostly brilliant, they do deserve the money they make), and everyone has a full plate (if you don’t it is an indication that you may not have a plate any more). There is little scope for strategic thinking. Again, remember that in an organization full of people who think similarly, people who have got promoted and made it to the top are likely to be those that think best along that particular axis. While it is the top management of the firm that is supposed to be responsible for the “big” strategic decisions, the kind of attention to details (which Math/Physics PhDs are rich in) that takes them to the top doesn’t leave them enough bandwidth for such thinking.

And so shit happens. Anyone who had the ability to think differently has either been “converted” to the conventional way of thinking, or is playing around with big bucks at some tiny hedge fund somewhere – because he found that it wasn’t possible to grow significantly in a place where most people think different to the way he thinks, and no one has the patience for his thinking.

This is the real failure in investment banking (markets) culture that has led to innumerable crises. The screwing over of clients and loss of “culture” in terms of ethics is a problem that has existed for a long time, and nothing new, contrary to what Greg Smith (formerly of Goldman Sachs) has written. The real failure of banking culture is this promotion of one-dimensional in-line-with-the-party thought, and the curbs against thinking and acting contrary to popular (in the firm) wisdom. It is this failure of culture that has led to the large negative shocks to the economy in the years gone by, and it is these shocks that have led common people to lose money rather than one off acts by banks where they don’t necessarily act in the interest of clients. And irrespective of how many Business Standards Committees and Risk Committees banks constitute, it is unlikely that this risk is going to go away any time soon. And I can’t think of a regulatory cure against this.

The success and failure of Coupling, this blog and the Benjarong Conference

One of the few sitcoms that has remotely managed to hold my attention is Coupling, the series on BBC. I don’t think it runs “live” any more, and even when it did, the quality of the episodes fell off sharply in season three, and even more sharply in season four. Episodes of those two seasons simply cannot compare to the episodes of the earlier seasons. In possibly related news, a number of blog readers and commentators mentioned to me that they saw a sharp fall in quality in posts on this blog sometime in late 2009. None of them have told me that the blog has made any “comeback” of sorts. And given this theory, it is unlikely to.

Back in March 2009, there was a meeting of six great minds at Benjarong Restaurant on Ulsoor Road, which has come to be known as the Benjarong Conference. The main topic of discussion that evening was about chick-hunting, and more so in the controlled environment of South Indian Brahmin arranged marriages. The conference was a grand success in terms of the quality of discussion, and left lasting impressions on the minds of the participants. Kodhi, who is going to be arranged married later this year, mentions that over two years on, it was the proceedings of this conference that helped him make his decision.

The main attraction of Coupling, for me, was the theories that the character Jeff used to propound. Starting in Episode One of Season One, where he comes up with the concept of “Unflushable” as his best friend Steve repeatedly tries to dump his girlfriend Jane, and fails. And in subsequent episodes, when the three male leads (Steve, Patrick and Jeff) meet at the bar, Jeff always has a theory to explain why things happen the way they happen. Masterful theories, at a similar intellectual level that was exhibited at the Benjarong Conference. Jeff has a theory for everything, except that he is unable to implement his own theories and get hooked up. And what happens in Season Three? He gets hooked up (to his boss, as it happens)! And starts falling off the social radar, and even when he is there at the bar, he is incapable of coming up with theories like he used to. And in Season Four, he disappears from the show altogether, thus robbing it of its main attraction.

Four of the six participants at the Benjarong conference were single, with three of those having never been in a relationship. The two that were married were married less than a month, and one of them had met his wife not too long before. The conference drew its strength from this “singularity”. Single people, especially those that have never been in a relationship, have a unique knack of being able to dispassionately talk about relationships. The problem once you get committed, as readers of this blog might have noticed, is that there is now one person that you can’t disrespect when you talk or write. So every time you concoct a theory, you have to pass it through a filter, about whether your WAG will find it distasteful (most singletons’ theories on relationships have a distasteful component, as a rule). Soon, this muddles your thinking on these theories so much that you stop coming up with them altogether.

One of the pillars of strength of this blog between 2006 and 2009 was the dispassionate treatment of relationships. Then, in late 2009, fortunately for myself and unfortunately for my readers, I met Priyanka, with whom I have subsequently established a long term gene-propagating (no we haven’t started propagating, yet) relationship. And on came the “distaste filter”. And off went the quality of my posts on relationships. A large section of the readership of this blog knew me as a gossip-monger, and they would now be sorely disappointed to not find such juicy material on this blog any more. The only good relationship posts subsequent to that, you might notice, would have been on the back of some little domestic fights, which would have led to temporary suspension of the distaste filter.

Sometimes, though not in public forums, I do get my old distasteful sense back. Not so recently, I was counselling my little sister-in-law about relationship issues. After thoroughly examining her case history and then situation (examining case history and diagnosis is her domain. She’s studying to be a doc), I recommended to her that the solution for her then relationship woes was to get herself a Petromax. While it did help that my wife and her parents weren’t around then, the tough part was to convince her that it was a serious well-researched piece of advice. Maybe I should have packaged it less distastefully. And maybe it is time to accept that the distaste filter in my case is on permanently, and I’ll never be able to spout theories like I used to. And my dear blog reader, it is time you accept that, too, and stop holding this blog against its pre-2010 standards.

High Performance Schooling

At the outset I want to mention that I mean no disrespect for my schoolmates or teachers from Sri Aurobindo Memorial School, where I spent twelve mostly wonderful years. It is just a thought as to whether it would have helped me later on in life had I been shifted out of there when I was in say primary school into what I would call as a “high performance school”. Also, apologies at the outset if I were to sound boastful in this post. Unfortunately, there is no other way to get the point across.

Right from primary school, like say when I was in first standard, I was what can be described as a “high performer”. Yes, I was always first or second in class in terms of marks, but that is not so much of the issue here – there were a lot of people who did nearly as well and my marks were not so much of a differentiator. I’m talking more about being almost always significantly ahead of class.

For example, in first standard, they taught us addition in school. I remember being taught to do something like “two in the mind, four in the hand” and then count out the two in order to add two and four. By that time, however, I had already learnt addition at home and was pretty good at it. When called to the front of the class to solve one such problem for everyone, I just shouted the answer and ran back to my seat. I remember the teacher saying in a subsequent class that she would give me a “big sum” (which was 3-digit addition), and I solved that too in a jiffy.

Again in first standard, there was a spelling test. In all earlier such tests, I had done exceedingly well, getting only one or two words wrong at the max. I think by then I had already begun to read bits and pieces of the Deccan Herald which my grandfather subscribed to (my parents subscribed to Kannada Prabha, and I could read that quite well, as well). I was bored of getting everything right in every test. So I started writing wrong spellings on purpose. It was the only way to entertain myself.

This kind of stuff continued throughout schooling. I remember reading my neighbour’s 9th standard math textbooks when I was in 7th standards. History lessons never interested me because my grandfather had told me all those stories and I remembered. On several occasions in middle and high school, I would know that what the teacher was teaching was wrong, but would be too bored to point that out to her because it would lead to a pointless argument (to my credit, I did try a few times, and it was very hard for the teachers to back down. After a while I simply stopped trying).

One offshoot of this being ahead of class was that I would be constantly bored in class, and I would identify this as a potential cause of some behavioural issues I faced as a child. Being the teacher’s pet and a general geek (I was the first guy in class to wear spectacles) meant that I was a popular target for bullying and practical jokes. I would take advantage of my size (I was comfortably the biggest kid in class) and would respond by beating up people. My parents spent most of my middle school listening to complaints from teachers about my being a bully and violent type!

As I grew older and learnt the merits of non-violence, I managed to overcome this, but the more damaging effect of always being ahead of class was that I was never challenged, and hence I never developed the habit of working hard, and when I tried to (when I went to IIT), it was too late. While I didn’t particularly top or “max” every test and exam in school, I sailed through fairly comfortably and never really had to do anything like work hard till I finished my 10th standard.

Then, I went to National Public School, which had a reasonably rigorous criterion for admission into 11th standard, so in some sense it was a “high performance centre”. But the problem there was what I call as the “11th standard free-rider teacher problem”, the cause of which is the IIT-JEE. Let me explain. In 11th standard, in a school such as NPS, most kids go for JEE coaching. Consequently, some teachers assume that all kids go to JEE coaching, and thus slacken their level of involvement and quality of teaching in the classroom. Those that are going for “tuition” don’t mind/notice this drop in quality. The rest do, but are too small a minority to affect things in class.

So yes, I did feel challenged in 11th standard. But then I took a (probably wise, in hindsight) decision to not care at all about the class tests and exams, and instead look long-term – towards success in the board exam and IIT-JEE. Working at my own pace, without really pushing myself too hard, I did rather well in both of them (after having been mostly in the bottom half of my class at NPS, of course, but I didn’t care about that). And then I went to IIT, which is where the troubles began.

IIT, thanks to its (then) selection criteria, is truly a “high performance centre”, in if not anything but in the quality of the students it takes in. There is also a sharp jump in the level of tuition compared to school. You are truly challenged and considerable work is called for in order to stay abreast in class. Being in Computer Science also means you are flooded with rather intensive programming assignments. It is difficult to do well unless you are really willing to work hard, and that is where I failed to cope. I had never put in anything close to that level of involvement. Suddenly thrown into the deep end of the pool (in terms of working hard), I struggled, and the continuous nature of evaluation meant that there was no point in “focusing on big exams” here, like I had in high school. Every little exam and assignment contributed to your final CGPA. I graduated as the median of the class, and I’ve never recovered.

IIM wasn’t that hard compared to IIT, but again I didn’t work too hard in courses I didn’t get too interested in, and barely graduated in the top quartile, an under-achievement given my comfort levels in most subjects. And my lack of ability to work hard doggedly has cost me much in my corporate career also. Some tasks that most people consider “routine” have turned out to be insanely hard for me, and in some places I haven’t been able to cope with the workload. I have a problem working long hours with concentration. I’m good at problem solving but lack that “sheer fight” which is sometimes necessary to push things through.

And now, looking back, I think it has to do with my primary education. As Malcolm Gladwell says in his “10000 hours” essay in The Outliers, working hard is also a talent. And my comfort levels in school meant that I never had to develop on that front. It was all too easy, and I never had to work hard then. And then when I actually had to, I have been inadequate.

It makes me wonder if it might have made some sense for me to have been shifted to some sort of “high performance” school when I was found to be much ahead of class in primary school. Again, there would have been a problem in identification since being ahead of class is not necessarily correlated with performance in exams, but assuming I had been thus “identified”, what if I had been sent to say a special school where I had been challenged even as a kid? Where I never felt “oh this teacher doesn’t know anything, so no use listening to her” or “I know this is the wrong answer but I know this is what the examiner demands so I’ll write this”? Where I had been pushed to work hard in a meaningful fashion? I don’t know if I would’ve still been good at entrance exams and gone to the colleges I went to, but I have a sneaking feeling I would have been able to cope with life much better in that case. What do you think?

A Comparative Study of Marwari and Kannadiga Brahmin Weddings

On Saturday I was at a Marwari wedding. Actually it was a Marwari Hindu marrying a Gujarati Jain (it was arranged scissors, if you’re curious about that), but the ceremony took place according to Hindu rites. As Gandhi and Khushboo were getting married, I was reminded of my own wedding a little over a year back, and I started mentally comparing the two ceremonies. Here I attempt to put those mental notes “on paper”.

I must mention upfront that I have only one data point (this particular wedding) for Marwari weddings. Also, while the wedding ceremony was still on, I was invited for lunch (in a curious twist, bride’s relatives and friends ate out of a buffet while the groom’s relatives and friends were served a multi-course meal on a silver platter. The food for both was the same, though). So I do not have the complete picture, though the lunch was in the same hall so I managed to observe some stuff as I ate. Also, since the groom in this case was Jain, there is a possibility of some Jain rituals having crept in to the ceremony, so my one data point may not actually be representative. For the Kannadiga Brahmin wedding, I use my own wedding as a data point (again not necessarily accurate, since the wife is technically Gult).

The general impression about North Indian weddings is that they are “action packed”, and a lot of fun. There is known to be much singing and dancing, while South Indian Brahmin weddings are generally solemn religious affairs. There was a fair share of fun at the Gandhi-Khushboo wedding. The previous evening there was a Sangeet where relatives of the bride and groom put up dance performances, which was followed by a general free-for-all dance party, and even a Garba session (and also a Marwari Karaoke session). The cars that were transporting us to the wedding stopped 100m away from the venue, where the groom ascended a mare and there was a brass band and we all danced around to the actual venue. I didn’t attend the reception but I’m sure that had its fun components, too.

However, I noticed that when it came to the ceremony itself, my wedding was much more action-packed and “fun” than this wedding. Yes, at my wedding, the rituals took much longer (started at 11am and ended at 5pm, while here it lasted two hours), but at no point of time was either me or the wife just sitting there doing nothing, which was the case for large sections of this wedding. Most of the time when I looked at the stage, the bride and groom were solemnly sitting in their seats (they had a low bench to sit on, unlike us who sat cross-legged on a low wooden board) doing nothing, as the priests chanted mantras into the microphone. On the other hand, we were constantly doing something. There were “fun” elements like throwing rice on each other’s heads, bargaining for an elephant, getting surrounded by a rope that was spun around by relatives around us, tying the thaaLi, the “Challenge Gopalakrishna moment”, etc.

This is a recent inclusion in both ceremonies, I think, but both weddings involved a phase where the bride and groom are lifted by their respective relatives and friends as they try to get the upper hand (literally) in the muhurtham. In my wedding, the muhurtham involved throwing cumin seeds and jaggery on each other’s heads. Legend is that whoever throws first has the upper hand in the marriage. Here, it was the bride trying to garland the groom and he trying to escape it. At my wedding, the large crowd meant that at that critical moment I was unable to locate my big friends, and had to get lifted by two or three relatives. I resorted to jumping to gain the upper hand (Priyanka had a bunch of big cousins ready to hoist her). It was the opposite story at Gandhi’s wedding. The groom’s party was small, and his brother had told us to be ready to lift him, so we used our “matki phod” skills to good effect to hoist him high.

In both ceremonies, it was the bride’s maternal uncle who performed the “kanyaadaanam” (literally “donation of the virgin”) and brought the bride for the muhurtham. Tradition has it that the uncle should carry the niece, and Khushboo arrived that way. Priyanka’s maternal uncle has a bad back so he simply escorted her to the stage. Then, in both ceremonies, there is the “installation” of bride and groom as Lakshmi and Narayana, and their supposedly divine status for the duration of the wedding. The groom’s shalya (upper cloth) is knotted with the bride’s sari, though since Gandhi was wearing a sherwani, he wore a sash over it for this purpose. Our installation as Lakshmi and Narayana had a fun element as the priest described us as (for example) “Venkataramana Shastri’s great-grandson, Suryanarayana Rao’s grandson, Shashidhar’s son Karthik” which was similar to the refrain in Challenge Gopalakrishna where Gopalakrishna’s father addresses him as “Justice Gopalakrishna’s greatgandson … ” (watch from 7:55 in this video).

The other major point of difference I noticed was in the revolution around the fire after throwing puffed rice in it (it’s a common ceremony in both). At my wedding, I led the way around the fire, but here it was the bride who led the way. I wonder what accounts for this difference, or if it is a minor thing that was missed by the priests.

Overall, I had a fantastic two days in Indore, getting pampered and having sweets thrust into my mouth, catching up with old friends and overall having loads of fun. And not to mention, getting fodder for this double-length blog post.