personal – Page 30 – Pertinent Observations

Engagement Ceremony

The problem with a formal engagement (like the ceremony I went through yesterday) is that nothing fundamentally changes in your life. Especially if things had already been “fixed” well before the engagement and the engagement was more of a formality to let people know and to get family and friends from both sides introduced to each other.

Once the ceremony is over, you return to your respective homes. You wake up early the next morning, like you always do on Mondays, and go back to work. The only thing different is that ring on your finger. And maybe that you are now wearing those nice brown shoes you’d bought for the engagement.

In fact, when I mentioned to my boss (who is American) about my engagement ceremony, he didn’t quite understand what was going on. He said he was engaged when he took his then-girlfriend our for dinner, put a ring on her hand, asked her to marry him and she agreed (by that count I got engaged seven months back).

At the other extreme, in hastily-arranged arranged marriages, the formal engagement ceremony is significant since it performs the role that is performed by the going-down-on-one-knee-ritual in normal marriages. Again, there since the couple may not know each other too well, exchanging expensive gifts and getting their families to know each other does help bind the couple.

A colleague kindly informs me that there is no concept of the engagement in the Hindu scriptures and that modern ceremonies are essentially an adaptation of practices in the west (this is not strictly true – in North India they have a “roka” (stopping) function where they effectively instruct the to-be-weds to “stop flirting and settle down”). But then, given what my boss says about how engagements happen in America (over a dinner, with one ring and the groom down on one knee), I’m puzzled where this concept came from.

All said and done, I’m quite enjoying all the attention that I’m getting currently due to my recent change in relationship status (75 messages on facebook today! beat that! ) and so I’m not cribbing. Yet, I’m puzzled about the concept of a formal engagement function.

PS: I know why we organized the function yesterday. It was essentially to enable my extended family to interact with my extended family-in-law. And it was a completely non-religious ceremony. We exchanged rings (I’ll write about this in another post) and cut an awesome chocolate mousse cake and that was it.

Irony

At dinner last night she drank straight from the bottle. I sipped slowly from a glass, using a straw.

And she says she is extremely particular about gender roles, stereotypes and the like.

Twisted Shout

Apart from being the second birthday of this blog, today also happens to be the sixth anniversary of a sinister incident. The downside of the incident was that my spectacles were smashed, and pieces of it were found all over my eye. Even now, it hurts when I get tears ,in my left eye and I was really sceptical because of this when I was getting my contact lenses.

Amit Gandhi and I were playing badminton against Ezzy and Gotur (who had been the Bangalore University Badminton champions). Ezzy floated the shuttle high. Gandhi and I both went for it, me a couple of paces behind him. As he drew his racket back, it struck me flush in the face and my spectacles got shattered into my eye.

The upside of the incident is that it gave rise to Twisted Shout, the IIMB newsletter (yeah I think we are entitled to call it that; it was indeed a newsletter). Sadly, most of the material that went up on it was unpublished outside of the IIMB notice boards. The first ever edition, however, which was based on the incident I’ve described above is luckily online. Go read it. Having just produced that horrible novel called “I’ve read that somewhere” Kodhi was desperate to make amends and produced this masterpiece.

Politicians of Sec C cut across the party lines and outdid themselves in condemning the incident. From Dalal Street, Kapil wept, “They have taken out my right hand man. The people from Sec A (or was it B) should maintain some amount of decorum while trying to become DML1.” People nodded in agreement. The author decided to investigate the veracity of the first statement and found that it was indeed true. SK was the right hand man of Kapil .At least he sat to his right. The other leading luminary Push-Kar was more vocal in his protests. He decided to use Michael Moore’s quote and said, ” Aren’t you, at least feeling ashamed? Does your face ever turn red?” hard hitting words these.

Thursday, 22nd July 2004. The morning had also been eventful thanks to microeconomics class. Feeling too lazy to explain a certain concept, the prof asked someone in the class who knew the concept (I’ve forgotten what the concept is) to explain. Don, who had a bachelors in economics stepped up and made an attempt to explain it. He muttered a sentence as if he were chanting a mantra. It passed over most of our heads. Someone asked for a clarification. Don just repeated the sentence. Yet another question. Don repeats the sentence with different emphasis this time. Maybe a mantra in a different raaga. It had no effect. No one knew its meaning (apart from a handful of other Economics bachelors who had learnt the same mantra).

I grew impatient. When the prof didn’t notice my raised hand, I shouted “saar I can explain this in English”. Having no choice, he beckoned me to the blackboard. I remember the shirt I was wearing that day (it was grey), since I clearly remember placing the amplifier of the collar mike in my right breast pocket, and I have only two shirts which have two breast pockets.

I don’t remember much of what I explained also. All I remember is drawing some curves and some tangents and marking points as A, A’ and A” (I remember saying “prime” rather than “dash” for that extra pseudness). All I remember is making some sort of hand-wavng argument (yeah I did wave my hands). All I remember is loud thumping of desks as the mostly engineer class had understood my proof. All I remember is one of the other economics bachelors (not Don) cribbing later that what I said was crap and only the mantra made sense.

Kodhi says that the bad Karma I accrued by way of acting arrogant that morning led to instant punishment that afternoon, when I injured my eye.

Happy Birthday 2

So today this blog (on this website, not the earlier avatar on LJ) celebrates its second birthday. I request you to join me in wishing this blog a happy and prosperous second birthday.

It has been an interesting journey since I moved my blog to this website exactly two years ago. Initially, readership just took off, but for a combination of reasons I had to slow down the pace of my blogging sometime late last year so you don’t see this blog as prosperous as it used to be last year. Oh, talking about monetary prosperity, this blog has to date earned a sum total of two dollars in Google Adwords earnings.

I have a resolution to celebrate the second birthday of this website. Starting today, I’m going to make an effort to set aside at least ten minutes every day and write one post on this blog. I must warn you that the quality of writing might go down, that there might be occasions where I might be forcing myself to write which might compromise on quality and stuff, but at least there will be stuff to read. It saddens me looking at the amount of NED that I’ve been putting (on a website of the appropriate name) over the last few months resulting in a fairly barren blog, and strong resolutions like these, I think, are necessary to take this blog back to its glory days.

I still stick to my promises – no more posts here either on arranged scissors or on studs and fighters. Another disappointing thing I need to mention is that I haven’t really been able to do much work in terms of those two books. I hope to start some positive work in that direction towards the end of this year, I hope.

I must take this opportunity to thank you people, my readers, for helping me make this blog successful. I hope you continue to enjoy reading the stuff here and that my readership will grow.

Birthday Phone Calls

Pavithra was my benchmate for most of the nine years we spent together in Sri Aurobindo Memorial School. After we graduated, for a few years, we had a simple way of keeping in touch. Our birthdays are some four months apart, so we would just call each other on the other’s birthdays. And end up talking for a very long time, catching up on our lives, the lives of others and so on. For the period when it was working it worked really well.

I’m sure that this is an algorithm that several other people adopt. Though instruments such as blogs, twitter and facebook make it easier for people to keep in touch, sometimes when you aren’t that close to the other person you do need a reason to call (though once you call you’ll end up talking for long). And a good reason to call someone is to wish them happy birthday.

The problem with this, however, is one of correlation. The problem with algorithms such as the above is that they are too popular, and since they are too popular their value goes down.

To put it in simpler words, the problem with calling someone on their birthday is that they are likely to have been talking to several other people over the phone on the same day and so fatigue might have set in. The birthday boy/girl would have already spent so much time on the phone he/she wouldn’t want to talk for too long. And this decreases the value of the biennisal conversation.

I think I’m going to modify my strategy going forward. Everytime it’s someone’s birthday and and I think of calling, I’ll probably choose a date at random in the near future and make a note of that in my calendar. And then talk to them on that day. Since it is not their birthday, they are much less likely to have been flooded with phone calls that day so can talk to me for much longer. And having been deprived of the attention they suddenly received on their birthday, the senti value of this delayed phone call may make them feel better.

Maybe you should do this too. Call people on non-obvious days. I’m sure this will add value to both you and the person you are wishing.

Relationship Stimulus

This post doesn’t necessarily restrict its scope to romantic relationships, though I will probably use an example like that in order to illustrate the concept. The concept that I’m going to talk about any kind of bilateral relationship, be it romantic or non-romantic, or between any two people or between man and beast or between two nations.

Let us suppose Alice’s liking for Bob is a continuous variable between 0 and 1. However, Alice never directly states to Bob how much she likes him. Instead, Bob will have to infer this based on Alice’s actions. Based on a current state of the relationship (also defined as a continuous variable between 0 and 1) and on Alice’s latest action, Bob infers how much Alice likes him. There are a variety of reasons why Bob might want to use this information, but let us not go into that now. I’m sure you can come up with quite a few yourself.

Now, my hypothesis is that the relationship state (which takes into account all past information regarding Alice’s and Bob’s actions towards each other) can be modelled as an exponentially-smoothed variable of the time series of Alice’s historical liking for Bob. To restate in English, consider the last few occasions when Alice and Bob have interacted, and consider the data of how much Alice actually liked Bob during each of these rounds. What I say is that the “current level” that I defined in the earlier paragraph can be estimated using this data on how much Alice liked Bob in the last few interactions. By exponentially smoothed, I mean that the last interaction has greater weight than the one prior to that which has more weight than the interaction three steps back, and so on.

So essentially Alice’s liking for Bob cannot be determined by her latest action alone. You use the latest action in conjunction with her last few actions in order to determine how much she likes Bob. If you think of inter-personal romantic relationships, I suppose you can appreciate this better.

Now that you’ve taken a moment to think about how my above hypotheses work in the context of human romantic relationships, and having convinced yourself that this is the right model, we can move on. To simplify all that I’ve said so far, the same action by Alice towards Bob can indicate several different things about how much she now likes him. For example, Alice putting her arm around Bob’s waist when they hardly knew each other meant a completely different thing from her putting her arm around his waist now that they have been married for six months. I suppose you get the drift.

So what I’m trying to imply here is that if you are going through a rough patch, you will need to try harder and send stronger signals. When the last few interactions haven’t gone well, the “state function of the relationship” (defined a few paragraphs above) will be at a generally low level, and the other party will have a tendency to under-guess your liking for them based on your greatest actions. What might normally be seen as a statement of immense love might be seen as an apology of an apology when things aren’t so good.

It is just like an economy in depression. If the government sits back claiming business-as-usual it is likely that the economy might just get worse. What the economy needs in terms of depression is a strong Keynesian stimulus. It is similar with bilateral relationships. When the value function is low, and the relationship is effectively going through a depression, you need to give it a strong stimulus. When Alice and Bob’s state function is low, Alice will have to do something really really extraordinary to Bob in order to send out a message that she really likes him.

And just one round of Keynesian stimulus is unlikely to save the economy. There is a danger that given the low state function, the economy might fall back into depression. Similarly when you are trying to get a relationship out of a “depressed” state, you will need to do something awesome in the next few rounds of interaction in order to make an impact. If you, like Little Bo Peep, decide that “leave ’em alone, they will come home”, you are in danger of becoming like Japan in the 90s when absolute stagnation happened.

Volatility of Human Body Weight

Ever since I shed roughly 20 kilos over the course of the second half of last year, I’ve become extremely weight-conscious. Given how quickly I shed so much weight, I’m paranoid that I might gain back so much again as quickly. This means I monitor my weight as closely as I can, limit myself in terms of “sin foods” and check my weight as often as possible, typically whenever I manage to make it to the gym (about twice a week on average).

Having been used to analog scales lifelong (there’s one at home, but it is wrongly calibrated I think), the digital scales (with 7-segment display) that are there at a gym provide me with a bit of a problem. I think they are too precise – they show my weight up to 1 place of decimal (in kilograms), and thinking about it, I think that much detail is unwarranted.

The reason being that I think given the normal cycles, I think the weight of the human body is highly volatile and measuring a volatile commodity at a scale finer than the volatility (when all you are interested in is the long-term average) is fraught with danger and inaccuracy. For example, every time you drink two glasses of water, your weight shoots up by half a kilo. Every time you pee, your weight correspondingly comes down. Every time you eat, up the weight goes, and every time you defecate, down go the scales.

Given this, I find the digital weighing machine at my gym a bit of a pain, but then I’m trying to figure out what the normal volatilty of the human body weight is, so that I can quickly catch on to any upward trend and make amends as soon as I can help it. Over the last couple of months, the machine has shown up various numbers between 73.8 and 75.5 and I have currently made a mental note that I’m not going to panic unless I go past 76.

I wonder if I’m making enough allowances for the volatility of my own body weight, and if I should reset my panic limits. I have other metrics to track my weight also – though my various trousers are all calibrated as “size 34” some have smaller waists than the others, and my algo every morning is to start wearing my pants starting from the smallest available, and go to work in the first one that fits, and when I know that I’m having trouble buttoning up my black chinos, that’s another alarm button.

Yeah sometimes I do think I’m too paranoid about my weight, but again it’s due to the speed at which I reduced that I’m anxious to make sure I don’t go back up at the same rate!

Update

Economist Ajay Shah sends me (and other members of a mailing list we belong to) this wonderful piece he has put together on weight management. Do read. But my question remains – how do you measure your body’s weight volatility?

Death Ceremonies

Considering the number of times I’ve been through the death/post-death/death-anniversary ceremonies over the last three odd years it’s quite surprising that I haven’t really blogged about it. Maybe I considered the topic to be way to personal to blog about. Maybe I was so busy fighting relatives that I didn’t have the opportunity to observe things.

So most of the time during the death ceremony was spent with me shifting my sacred thread from left to right, and back, and back. The basic idea is that for all death-related stuff, one is supposed to wear the thread from right shoulder to left waist (it’s normally worn from left shoulder to right waist). But then, considering that it’s a religious ceremony, large portions are also spent praying, and when you are praying to the gods, you are supposed to wear the thread the right way.

And then these two kinds keep alternating, so you spend a lot of time just doing that! To aid this and to save time, the upper cloth is tied around the tummy (like an auxiliary dhoti) rather than over the shoulders. And by the end of every such ceremony, you would have figured out when you’ll have to switch the orientation of the thread.

Then during the annual death ceremonies, there are two brahmins who help in officiating. Apparently there’s something special about these brahmins. Once, a couple of years back, one of these guys failed to turn up on time because of which the entire ceremony was getting delayed, and I hinted to an uncle that since he too is a brahmin he should deputise. And then this uncle (a rather religious character) gave me a long lecture about the processes and sacrifices that these “special” brahmins (who are paid a pittance – their daily rate is about half of what an average junior skilled worker (carpenter, painter, etc) makes) have to go through to allow them to perform their duty.

Now, it is as if one of these brahmins plays god and the other plays the devil (something of the sort). The “god” is always addressed with the thread in the normal position while the “devil” is addressed with the thread from right shoulder to left waist. The “god” is worshipped with rice, while the “devil” is worshipped with black sesame seeds. It seems as if the devil is somehow supposed to represent some kind of companion of the people in the afterlife – in whose memory the ceremonies are being performed.

This time we had struck a package deal (inclusive of all ceremonies, offerings, gifts, lunch, consumables, etc.) but on earlier occasions we were plagued by the priests trying to blackmail us by demanding that we give them expensive gifts, over and above the fees that we had agreed upon. And then once, by drawing upon a clever analogy, I managed to convince one of them that the gifts that I’d given earlier were like advance payment for services and that I’d pay only the balance. Unfortunately some relatives ridiculed me for fighting with the priest and made me pay him the full amount (yeah it was my money. none of these relatives coughed up a naya paisa)

The ceremonies are in general disgusting affairs and the only way to go through them is to just go through the processes. Sometimes, thinking about what kind of a blog post to write on the process can help take your mind away from random wanderings.

Freestyle

Have been practising the violin for a bit of late. Maybe I’ve picked it up some 4-5 times in the last week or so. And some twelve years after I stopped formal lessons it is still a lot of fun.

And as I practice I discover that I don’t find it too much fun playing songs, stuff for which someone else has written the notes. What I prefer is alaap/raga. Fix an up-scale and a down-scale (sometimes it might correspond to actually existing ragas, but I don’t care to check. And I don’t name my ragas). And just play, making up the notes as you go along. While making sure you don’t violate the rules of the raga that you’ve set for yourself.

Immense fun can result. I don’t think I’ve ever had this kind of fun trying to play something someone else wrote.

The Benjarong Conference

According to the Hindu calendar, today is the first anniversary of the Benjarong Conference. The said conference took place at Benjarong, an awesome Thai place on Ulsoor Road in Bangalore on the second day (dwitiya) of shukla paksha of Chaitra maasa of whatever samvatsara finished two days ago. The main topic discussed at the conference was arranged scissors and considering how things are now, I must say that the conference was indeed a success.

The occasion was a long weekend that also included Ugadi. Monkee and I (I lived in Gurgaon then) were both down in Bangalore for a weekend of bridehunting, and both of us hadn’t been having much luck in the market. Giving us gyaan on how to go about the arranged scissors process was K, who had just gotten arranged married, and Mukka who had just gotten love married. Also present with (as usual) lots of general fundaes in life were Kodhi and Harithekid.

Back during the conference, I had been entrusted with the job of noting down minutes of the meeting and blogging them; however I didn’t have net access back then in Bangalore and by the time I got back to the Gaon I got busy in other things and so here I am a full year late trying to share with the world things discussed at this great conference.

So here we were, two twenty six year old (maybe Monkee was still twenty five then) guys who had never had girlfriends wondering where and how people would fall in love, and where we could find interesting and single girls (yeah we did talk about the Goalkeeper Theory also). We chatted about various kinds of girls, where each type would find boys, the odds of each type being currently available for marriage, what parameters for search to put in matrimonial websites to maximize our odds of finding good girls, and the like.

One specific kind of girl that we spent a lot of time discussing was what K called as “township girl” – girls who grow up in PSU townships. He proposed that girls who grow up in PSU townships are more likely to be smart and liberal compared to girls of comparable family background and intelligence who don’t grow up in townships. This theory was largely seconded by a lot of others at the conference and I passed on it since I didn’t have a clue.

As alternatives to this, I had proposed the non-home-state theory claiming that girls who grow up otuside their home states are smarter and more liberal. The others supported this claiming that girls who have less contact with relatives and family-social engagements are likely to be more “outgoing”.

Then there was this puzzle about boys-majority colleges which a number of us had independently wondered about. If you notice, a large number of the more preferred colleges in India have an overwhelming boys majority (yeah this applies especially to engineering but considering that engineering is one of the most preferred undergraduate disciplines I suppose this assumption isn’t too wrong) and so any girl who goes to any of these colleges is extremely unlikely to land up in the arranged scissors market.

And then, if you would notice, in high school (10th board exams), distribution of marks of boys and girls is roughly equal. So the question is about where the smart girls go! Especially in cities like Bangalore and Madras which lack quality arts (a course which is usually dominated by girls) colleges. We had probably closed the conference promising to investigate this mystery – of where all the smart girls go.

I don’t remember too much about the food at Benjarong that day but I remember we had an extremely overbearing captain who kept coming to us every minute asking us how the food was. We followed our dinner at Benjarong with ice-cream at Corner house – excellent as usual. That is probably the last time I ate a full cake fudge.

A lot of questions raised at that conference are now probably moot, considering that both Monkee and I are on the roads to our respective marriages (he in May, me in November). However, I do need to apologize for taking one whole year to make and publicize these notes. My apologies to the general public for holding back such awesome thoughts from them for one whole year. And my thanks to Harithekid, Kodhi, Mukka, K and Monkee for making the Benjarong Conference possible.

Update

Another issue that was raised at the conference was about the fate of this blog after I find a long-term gene-propagating partner. The other attendees were all of the opinion that I will need to stop blogging after I find someone, or at least not blog on relationship-related topics.

A couple of weeks back, Pinky shouted at me for NOT blogging enough about her.