Category: personal

The Enhanced DTPH Theory

Dil To Pagal Hai (DTPH) was a nice movie. I really enjoyed it when I first saw it some eleven years ago. The only problem was the message it imprinted on my 15-year-old mind: someone, somewhere is made for you. It ended up completely messing me up for the next 3-4 years.  I took it at face value. Every time I met a new girl, I would start asking the question “is she the someone, somewhere who is made for me?”. I would be lucky if the answer was an immediate no.

As I had explained in a blog post almost three years ago, these kind of questions never give “yes” as an answer. They either say “no” or they say “maybe”. And the maybes are a problem, since a few years down the line they might be converted to a “no”. They will never turn into a “yes”, mind you, and if you are forced to make a decision, you’ll have to make do with the number of occurrences of maybe and the confidence bounds that it produces. So the maybes were a problem for me 10 years ago. I didn’t know how to handle them. And in the one case where the answer consistently came out to be “maybe” (even when i ask the question now, it comes out to be “maybe”), I royally messed up the blade. Disaster was an overstatement.

Now that the digression is done, DTPH similarly messed up thousands of young minds all over the country. It didn’t even spare the married. Everyone started asking themselves the question “is this the someone somewhere that is made for me?” I think Yash Chopra (he directed it, didn’t he?) should shoulder a large part of the blame for the spurt in suicides in the late 90s.

The theory I’m going to state now was first stated by Neha a couple of years back. Back then, I’d thought I need to blog it, since she wasn’t blogging then. She has started blogging recently, but still I think I’ll write about this. As you might have figured out from the title, I call this the Enhanced DTPH Theory. It is quite ironical that this is coming from the fairly irreligious me, since it somewhat endorses creationism. I know the inherent contradictions here, but I think I should write it anyway.

The theory states that there are several people, in several places, who are “made for you” (if you are religious) or are “inherently compatible with you” (if you are not). The key is in finding at least one of them and making things work.

I think this is easier on people’s minds. The constant quest to find “the best partner” should be laid to rest, I think, mainly because it is unlikely that you’ll find a “dominating partner” (someone who is better, in your eyes, than everyone else that you could’ve  gotten married to). Instead, what you will get is what I can call as a “dominating set” – a set of people who are collectively dominating over the rest of the population but cannot really be compared to each other.

Each person has his/her own different evaluation criteria. And based on that, each person has his/her own dominating set. And it is this dominating set that is the “several people who are made for you”. I suppose you are getting the drift. I know this is a bit confusing.

Then, you need to understand that the universe doesn’t obey the Hall’s Marriage Theorem. This is trivial to prove since the total number of men exceeds the total number of women. Actually, as a corollary to this, we can establish that the original DTPH theory is false, unless of course it assumes that the population of gays is significantly higher than the population of lesbians, or if it takes into account animal sex.

Some hand-waving here, but my next hypothesis is that Hall’s Theorem doesn’t hold for local smaller populations also. I’ll probably try give an explanation of this in a subsequent post (else there would be no reason for women to remain single).

Tailpiece: The cost of not marrying the “right person” is significantly lower than the cost of marrying the wrong person.

PS: I also acknowledge Baada’s contribution to the development of this theory.

Arranged Scissors 1 – The Common Minimum Programme

Now that I’m in the arranged marriage market, I’ll probably do a series on that. I think there has been this book that some female has written about it, but I haven’t read it. I periodically plan to write about this market, and its quirks, comparing it to the “normal louvvu market”. I’ll try my best to keep the identities of those I’m interacting with in the market secret – if not for anything else, because there is a good chance that they might be reading this.

A lot of people shudder at the thought of arranged mariage. They think it’s some kind of a failure. They say that it is a compromise. Some of them enter the market only grudgingly. If not anything else, presence in the arranged marriage market is an admission of failure to find a long-term partner without bankers’ support. Some people tend to take that personally. They think that they are failures in life because they had to request their parents to find them a partner in life.

Two years back, my good friend L Balaji (no, not the cricketer) came up with the hypothesis of a “common minimum programme job”, borrowing the phrase that our politicians are most likely to use when they form a coalition government, which is getting increasingly common nowadays. He defines a CMP job as one which “clears all cutoffs, but doesn’t perform spectacularly according to any criterion”. A CMP job offers you decent pay, keeps you in a decent city, gives you a good work-life balance, decent colleagues, etc. But you cannot really expect to get too much kick out of the job. You may not love the job, but it offers you enough to not get pained.

I think the traditional problem with the arranged marriage market is that people assume that people are in the market to find CMP spouses. Someone who looks “decent enough”, is “smart enough”, is “nice enough”, etc. Traditionally it seems like the evaluation in the arranged marriage market is a series of tickoffs – looks good? check. Can talk grammatical English? Check. I good to talk to? Check. And so forth. So what one ends up with is someone who clears all criteria, and not necessarily someone spectacular. You basicallly try to find someone you can share a house with until you are sixty four, and little else. Even that one major cutoff, I think, sometimes is given short shrift.

This boiling down of the market to CMPNess is responsible for the “compromise” label that the arranged marriage market attracts. And amazingly, a lot of people (who are lucky enough to have found someone better than CMP in the market) start talking about how one needs “to adjust”, “to compromise” etc. Definitely not the kind of stuff that the young person fresh into the market would love to hear. In fact, I think these CMP people are what gives arranged marriage a bad name.

Thinking about it, I think the CMP nature of the market doesn’t have much to do with the people who ended up choosing CMPs, or who ended up as CMPs (note that one can be both). It has structural origins. The problem, I think, lies with the structure of the market, and that all the CMP people have simply adapted to this particular market structure.

When you don’t like a set of rules, there are two ways to deal with it, or maybe three (depending upon whether you count like a mathematician or like a social scientist). First is to adapt yourself to the rules, basically to compromise. Then, you can allow the rules to stay in place, and you can work around them. Find loopholes and exploit them. This is what lawyers excel at. The final option is to bend the rules.

In my next post on this topic, I will talk about the structure of the arranged marriage market, and try to explain why it differs from the normal blading model.

50% Stake Sale

It’s finally happening. My mother has decided for good that I’m unable to manage all of myself, and hence I should divest 50% in myself. “The better half”, she says. She has been utterly disgusted due to my utter failure, and lack of effort, in conducting this divestiture by myself, and has now decided to take matters into her own hands.

Her second sister, along with her husband, has been appointed the lead investment banker for this deal. My mother’s eldest sister is going to be the chief scout in order to scout for possible counterparties to the deal. It is preferred, and desirable, that there be a single buyer for this entire 50%, and the current understanding is that if we are not able to tie up any good single investor, we will rather postpone the sale rather than going in for an IPO and selling the stake in bits and pieces to retail investors.

Thinking about it, I wonder if it is technically correct to call this a stake sale, since I don’t plan to take any dowry. Maybe if you take all costs into consideration, and not just the monetary ones, and if you assume payment to be a continuous thing rather than like a lumpsum (these  investment bankers, they can arrange just about anything), it won’t be inaccurate to call this process a stake sale.

Usually, in these circumstances, most of the work is done by the bankers, but it seems that in this case that I, as the person divesting the stake, will need to put in considerable effort. The effort that I was too lazy to put when I was supposed to be trying to do the deal myself, without any asssistance from any bankers. Actually this is something that a lot of companies that indulge in M&A transactions forget about.

Think about your own incentives and the banker’s incentive. For the banker, this is just a deal. All they are caring for is to find a buyer for your sale, and a seller for anyone who wishes to buy stake. Once the deal is through and the cheques and documents signed, they ask you to sign on a set of fairly heavy cheques, and walk away; job done. It is you, as the company who is selling the stake, who has to deal with the new investor for maybe the rest of your life – transaction costs in these kind of deals are high, and it is preferable it be done exactly once.

One thing I realize is that the effort required here is of a different nature to the one that you need to put when in the market without bankers’ support. In the latter case, you need to engage in an elaborate ritual of tiki–taka, slowly moving towards the goal, and then unleashing a shot at the right moment. It is a well-respected and common algorithm, and any attempts to side-step it, and use short-cuts, usually end in disasters.

In the banked world, though, one thing is clear – you are sitting in that conference room together in order to strike a long-term deal, and not for a random networking meeting. All parties in the conference room are aware that the reason they are all sitting there, together, is so that they can work out a long-term deal. And thus, explicitly mentioning the deal, and explicitly working towards it, are not frowned upon – like it sometimes is in the outside market. You don’t need an y tiki-taka here. Tiki-taka is also seen as a waste of time. You better follow a direct approach and just put the ball in the box and then have a striker shoot it.

And remember that in such brokered deals, there is usually no goalkeeper.

PS: I need photos of myself for the offer document. I realize that I dont’ have too many of those. I’m not too narcissistic in my photography exploits, and I dont’ bother to collect pics that others have taken of me, and hence the shortage. Last night, my mother looked through my facebook pictures and pronounced each of them as “useless”. So, if you have good pictures of me, plis to be sending me. If you dont know my email ID, just leave a comment here and I’ll give you my email ID.

Yet Another QLC?

An article I was reading on Cricinfo a few minutes back had this line:

Taylor sat quietly beside his captain, no doubt trying to soak up the moment.

Thinking about it, I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve had such a moment. A moment which had a sense of achievement, where I just sat, quiet, trying to soak up the moment. It’s not that I haven’t felt this way before; it is just that this kind of thing hasn’t happened for a long time. And looking forward, there doesn’t seem to be much scope for this kind of a thing.

It seems like life has been reduced to short occasional moments of intellectual wankery, and nothing surronding them. Life seems to have become, to an extent, mechanical. It doesn’t seem like there is anything on the horizon which will give a sense of achievement. It seems like whatever good I will do will be slow and incremental; like an innings by Shivnarine Chanderpaul; rather than like a hostile spell of pace bowling by Jerome Taylor.

I’m only twenty six, and occasionally I have trouble convincing myself that I’m ONLY twenty six, and that twenty six isn’t that old, after all. When this brought up in conversations, most people like to comment that it is time for me to get married. I’m not sure if the tenure matching on that is right. Apart from perhaps one “achievement moment” when I finally end up successfully pataofying someone, I don’t see how that will solve the problem that I have described here.

Thinking about it yet again, I wonder if this “achievement model” is faulty and unsustainable, and if I should reorient myself to work towards incremental benefits. Kodhi (ok before I forget, I should credit him for the discussion that led to this post) said “Tendulkar of 98 is not the same as Tendulkar of 08”. It was a poignant comparison.

Maybe a time comes for everyone – when this time occurs is not a matter of importance, and varies across people – when ticking off achievements is not the priority, and priority is to just go on and do one’s duty (which, in Tendulkar’s case, is to play excellent cricket, and win matches for India). It is not exactly an encouraging thought, but is probably true. What do you think?

Gurgaon

I had initially been very skeptical about relocating to Gurgaon. Most of my friends who landed up here after graduating from IIM happened to flee within a few months. They went to several places, in lands far and near; but no one stayed back in Gurgaon. Around that time, the central theme of Allen’s blog was cribs about Gurgaon.

There were a few that managed to hang on, and they continued to crib about the place. One of my aunts relocated from Delhi to Gurgaon 5 years back, and she is yet to stop cribbing about the latter location. Yet another aunt (a grand-aunt, actually) had briefly visited Gurgaon for a few days, and declared that it is “as good as America” and people here had no right to crib.

When I got this job offer roughly six months back, there was only one question I was trying to answer on my flight back to Bangalore. “Is this job good enough for me to relocate to and endure Gurgaon?” Two hours of deep thought followed and I answered that in the affirmative, and here I am. So far, on the job front, there are no complaints – which, coming from me six months into a job, is saying a lot.

Having heard enough cribs about Gurgaon from various sources, I decided I needed to hedge, and I was willing to spend a little money in order to do that. I transported my car here (I got here and realized that car is a hygiene factor here and not an “enhanced life” product). I stretched my rent budget and got myself a nice house – I reasoned that it is important to feel comfortable at home, and so I shouldn’t compromise on that front. The day I moved into this house, I got unlimited Airtel broadband. I got Tata Sky. Did a few book binges. And so forth.

Of late I havent’ been very happy (ok the skeptics will ask when was the last time I was really happy, and that isn’t an invalid question, though I typically give the answer as “october 2005”). Some people misconstrue this and point out to all the good things that I have, and say that given all this, I have no right to crib. However, I believe that given all the good things that I have, my life is not as good as it can be, and so I need to push the limits as much as I can, and so temporary unhappiness in this quest is not an issue.

I’ve been cribbing about various things. About how I hardly meet “people” (I must point out that in my first month in Gurgaon, I made conscious effort to meet new people. Then NED happened). About how I end up spending most of my weekends at home, doing nothing. About how I sometimes feel that my life is too regimented. I mostly get standard replies. “Get yourself a new hobby”, they say, and list out a dozen “standard” hobbies. On my part, I think I already have enough things that give me a “kick” and I don’t want to make my life more regimented, so this won’t help. Then they say that I should actively seek out and meet new people, but they don’t say how. They say I should just get out of the house, but what should I do then? Hang out in a mall?

Frequently I lapse into introspection. And frequently, this introspection brings out an insight. The latest one might sound escapist to the skeptics, but I think it is the truth. It tells me that my life was no different when I wsa back in Bangalore. Then toom, I used to hardly meet any “people”. I would end up spending most of the weekend sitting at home, laptop on lap and watching football. I used to meet friends once in two or three weekends then, and it’s no different here. And I’ve picked up new hobbies here – such as reading and watching movies. So there seems to be a delta improvement.

The problem, I now realize, is that Gurgaon has denied me my favourite single-player hobby – of taking long and lonely introspective walks. Which is what I would do almost on a daily basis in Bangalore. Get out of the house and start walking, usually on main roads. Abruptly stop, and “observe life around me as it happened”. Make a few mental notes (mostly to forget those notes when I sat in front of a computer) and move on. Eat roadside food. Buy random stuff. When I get bored of walking, hop into a bus or into an auto. And then, when I’ve gotten really bored, walk back, or even take an auto back.

Every Saturday and Sunday evening I would do this. A version of this used to be done on weekday evenings also, when I’d do the long walks carrying my laptop on my back. Even now, I sudddenly get that spring in my stride when I start walking, taking giant steps. Unfortunately, given Gurgaon’s skewed geography, this can’t be done on a sustainable basis. In fact, there is no place to walk around in Gurgaon at all, unless of course if I’m inside the mall, but then there is so little else to do there.

I wondered if Mainland Delhi might be better, but people are skeptical about that, too. People simply don’t walk much in Delhi, I’m told. Even if they have to go 100meters, they take the car. The only place in Delhi that I’ve visited so far, and which I think offers me good walking space is Connnaught Place, but I have to go through a long drive in order to reach there, which leads to NED. Hopefully once the metro construction to Gurgaon is done, I’ll be able to get there easier. Till then, I don’t know. I think all I can do is to crib. And try and develop some alternatives, none of which is striking my head now.

IPL Structuring

I remember that this time, last year, I was eagerly looking forward to the IPL auctions. It also happened to be a time when I was actively looking out for a new job (i wasn’t going to find one till about six months later). And I was secretly hoping that one of the IPL franchises would employ me as a game theory and structuring consultant in order to help them out with the player auctions. While I tracked it online, I imagined myself sitting in the bidding room at the Trident, showing my excel sheet to the franchise owner and captain, and watch Preity Zinta enhance her Mata Amrita Index.

It was also a period of extreme NED, due to which i didn’t bother looking out actively to try consult for an IPL franchise. It was a period of low confidence, so I assumed I wasn’t good enough for this kind of work, and didnt’ bother doing anything in this direction. Frankly, I didn’t have a clue how to proceed, else i might have put SOME effort at least. A few months later, when the IPL was well underway, I figured out that one of my cousins is a big shot with Bangalore Royal Challengers, and he was among the people at the Trident who picked the Test XI to represent BRC. I wanted to kick myself, but for some reason I didn’t.

Currently, I’m comfortably employed, and so far have been happy with this job. Else I might have wanted to throw my hat into the ring. Once again, IPL team formation season is on. A few transfers have gone through already, and a few are currently in limbo. Bidding will happen next season for people who are joining the league this year. It promises to be an interesting time. And so far I’ve been deeply unhappy with the way the franchises are going about their business.

I’m especially upset with BRC, and have half a mind to call up my cousin who consults for them and give him a piece of my mind. How the hell could they let go of Zaheer Khan in exchage for Robin Uthappa? Yes, the latter is from Bangalore, and has that local pull factor. He has batted quite well this Ranji, though not anywhere close to what he played like 2 seasons back when he topped the batting charts. But he is supposed to be paid twice of what Zaheer was being paid! Is he really worth that much? I’m sure that BRC missed a trick here. I’m sure that had the BRC asked for a fee from Mumbai Indians in order to release Zaheer in exchange for Uthappa, the Indians would’ve definitely paid up. When Chelski can reportedly offer Anelka, Malouda, Alex and 15 million pounds in exchange for Robinho, Mumbai could definitely part with Uthappa and maybe a million dollars in exchange for Zaheer.

There were rumours of the Mumbai Indians negotiating a swap with Kings XI Punjab for a swap between Powar and Harbhajan, which reportedly got stalled because Harbhajan earns so much more than Powar. Once again, what if the Mumbai Indians paid a fee along with Harbhajan for Powar? I know it is ridiculous that Powar is worth Harbhajan plus a fee, but given their disparity in income, this is the only way that this deal is possible. And I’m sure that there is a particular fee, which if paid along with Harbhajan in exchange for Powar, will leave all the interested parties (Punjab, Mumbai, Harbhajan, Powar) better off. It seems like people are too lazy to find it.

The opportunities like this are endless. All that the franchises need is someone who has sufficient knowledge of game theory, coase theorem, a decent knowledge of cricket (interest in domestic cricket is a desirable quality) and who understands how to structure deals. I don’t know if franchises have already recruited such people but if they haven’t, they should try and recruit. The most obvious choice of person that I can think of who possesses all the above skills (including interest in domestic cricket) is me. Unlike last year, I’m not in the job market right now, but don’t mind doing some part-time stuff. I may not get paid, but I’m willing to work for a few IPL tickets and maybe invites to some parties with cricketers.

I’m also wondering if cricketers’ pay will go down starting the 2011 season onwards. The IPL auctions happened just before the downturn was to begin, and I’m sure that franchises have overpaid for most players. Since players have all signed three year contracts, their pay till the 2010 season is safe. Beyond that, I’m not sure if franchises will offer them fresh contracts at higher or equal salaries.

It would also be interesting to see if some version of the Bosman ruling is to operate in the IPL. We can only wait and see.

NED can be a good thing

Ever since the concept of NED was invented/discovered two years back, it has been painted as a bad thing. I have occasionally described it as a frankenstein – which, after being invented/discovered by me, has come out to consume me. There is a friend who refers to it as “the unspeakable” as she thinks even uttering the word “NED” will send her into NED. NED has been seen as an undesirable state, which everyone wants to get out of as quickly as possible. It is seen as encouraging sloth, and inefficiency, and has only grudgingly been accepted by people as an inescapable fact.

I’ll keep this short and provide only one example, but my point is that NED can also be occasionally a good thing. It is that “balancing force”, which prevents you from being over-aggressive. It is that force that helps cool down your blood, and makes sure you don’t act hastily. It is paramount in making you think twice, and maybe thrice before doing certain things. It makes sure that you are never over-efficient at work, and that will help in keeping your boss’s expectations low enough for you to meet them.

I had thought about one or two examples to quote here, but NED means there has been a long time since I started writing this post, and now. And now that I think about it, I don’t particularly want to mention those two examples. Let me generalize. Certain stuff happened. Some people said some things, which I didn’t like. And I felt like hitting back. Hitting back at a high level. That hit-back would’ve led to an escalation of the situation. And might have been harmful to me. But in the heat of the moment, my cost-benefit analysis would’ve shown this action to be producing positive results.

NED happened. I didn’t do what I was supposed to do. I didn’t do what I had planned to do, rather. Implementation was a bit of a pain so I put it off. And by the time I thought again about it, my analysis of the situation had changed, and it seemed like I would be better off not doing what I had planned to do. Things are all good now. All thanks to NED. If not for NED, I don’t know what I might have done, and I would’ve been in an inferior position right now compared to where I am now.

Two days back, I got a mail saying “sorry if this sounds silly, but what the hell is NED.” I suppose this is a good time to do a check-back. To revise our concepts. So I would encourage you to visit the about page of this blog, and read what NED is all about. And assimilate. And internalize. And recognize the fact that it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

On Booze and Language of Thought

Last Sunday, I was having a discussion with my mother about my drinking – which has been sporadic at best and non-existent at worst. She said she had a probelm with even my sporadic ingestion of alcohol, and demanded that I completely give up drinking. I tried my best to draw it away from a religious/emotional argument, and tried to draw her into a logical argument.

My mother is a biologist by training (it is another matter that her career was in accounting) and said that she is concerned about her gene, and that given that I’m her only offspring, she naturally has incentive in my offspring, and she wants to make sure that they’ll be in good health, and live well. She also has this notion that if either of the parents drink, the children will be born dumb, and there is an increased risk of abnormality. I have no clue about these matters, and somehow managed to change the line of argument.

Then she released her brahmastra. Or what she thought was her brahmastra. Everyone she know who drank alcohol, she said, had ended up becoming a drunkard and a wifebeater. She gave examples of classmates from school, colleagues, colleagues’ husbands, relatives, etc. It was evident that she had prepared her argument well. And in each of these cases, there was no doubt that the person in question was a drunkard and a wifebeater, whose kids were most likely to end up as losers.

It is pertinent to point out here that the entire argument was happening in Kannada. In fact, I’ve never talked to either of my parents, or to any other close relatives, in any other language. I am in general fairly fluent at the language, at least at the Bangalore version which includes loads of English words. I have in general managed to hold my own in several debates and discussions at social gatherings, while talking exclusively in Kannada. I have explained to relatives complicated financial products, and how the sub-prime crisis unraveled, all in Kannada.

Getting back to the argument, the best way for me to handle my mother’s examples was to provide counterexamples. Of perfectly decent people who consumed alcohol. For statistical reasons and given the way the hopothesis had gotten framed, I would need a much larger list than my mother had produced. And in the spur of the moment, I decided that I wouldn’t do a good job at listing and I should continue with logic-based arguments. Phrases such as “selection bias” and “Bayes’ theorem” and “one-way implications” flashed across my head.

Holding up your end of the debate when you aer talking nomally, and in Kannada, is fair enough. However, when you are extremely animated, and speaking at 100 words per minute, things are a bit harder. I realized that my mother would understand none of the jargon that had flashed across my head, and I’d have to explain to her in normal language. My mouth was processing words at 100 words per minute, and suddenly my brain seemed to have gotten a bit slower. The pipeline became empty for a moment and i started stammering. And my mother started making fun of my stammering (i used to stammer a lot when I was a kid. took a lot of effort to get over it).

Coming to the crux of this essay – at this moment another thought flashed to my head. For a long time I wasn’t sure if I thought in any specific language, or if my thought was general. And even if I thought in a particular language, I wasn’t sure if I thought in Kannada or in English. I had always done well enough in both languages to keep this debate unresolved. Now there was the data point. The clinching data point. I quickly realized that had I been speaking in English, my pipeline wouldn’t have gone empty. In fact, when I was trying to explain stuff to my mom, I was doing two levels of translation – I was first translating jargon into normal English, and then translating that into Kannadal. Powerful evidence to sugggest that I think in English.

I was so kicked by this discovery that the original argument didn’t matter to me any more. I quickly promised my mother that I will never consume alcohol again, and she said “shiom”, a kid-word that means something like “ok what you’ve said is final and binding and no changing it”. So I suppose that is how things will stay. I will henceforth stop consuming alcohol. Not that I’ve been consuming much nowadays – average one drink every two months or so. It won’t be hard at all to make the transition.

PS: Interestingly, when I’m trying to speak in any Indic langauge (Hindi, Tamil, etc.) I instinctively form my thoughts in Kannada and then translate. Maybe it is because of similarities that the cost of translation from Kannada to these languages is much lower than the cost of translation from English, that it becomes profitable for me to think in Kannada, which is harder than to think in English.

Tenure Matching

One of the fundamental concepts of finance is to match the tenure of assets and liabilities. That the tenure of source of funds (equity, debt, etc.) need to match the tenure of what they are used for. So, if you need money to tide over till your next payday, you need to take an extremely short-term loan. If you need to borrrow to fund a house – an application that has a long tenure – you need to take a longer-term loan. And so on.

In fact, a common refrain about banking crises is that they happen mainly due to the tenure mismatch – banks borrow by means of short-term deposits, and then invest these in long-term loans. Most theories regarding liquidity crises cite this as a common problem.

Now, my contention is that this banking/finance rule is just a special case of a much larger rule in life. Remember that funding, or raising money, can be looked at as a “problem”. By classifying it as a problem, I’m not necessarily saying it’s a very tough problem. All I’m saying is that it’s a problem. And when you do raise money, it is a solution to the problem. Thus, the generalized form of the rule

The tenure of the solution needs to match the tenure of the problem.

So before you look for a solution for any problem in life, you need to first figure out about the tenure of the problem. And then generate a list of possible solutions which have similar tenures, and then pick the best among them. And based on my limited anecdotal experience, most people don’t really appreciate this concept when they suggest, and sometimes even implement, certain solutions.

So on Monday I called up a friend and told her that I was going through a strong bout of NED and we should meet up. She started philosophising and said that this is a fundamental problem and that I should think of a fundamental solution. That I should get a new hobby, or learn a new instrument, or some such long-term thing. Of course, I know myself better than she does, and so I knew that my problem was short-term, and so all I needed was a nice evening out. A short term solution to a short term problem.

On the other hand, during my previous job, I used to go through prolonged periods of NED. A little analysis revealed that the fundamental reason for this NED was my job, and that until I got a new one, I wouldn’t be happy. It was a long-term problem that deserved a long-term solution – of finding another job. However, most of the advice I got for my NED was of the nature of “go get drunk, you will be fine”.

My mother also doesn’t seem to appreciate this tenure concept. Nowadays I’m afraid to crib to her about anything, because if I crib, she assumes it’s a long-term problem and suggests that I should get married and that she’ll intensify her efforts in the arranged-marriage market.

Yes – people not appreciating this tenure concept is a long-term problem. The solution to this should also, thus, be long-term. They need to be taught such a lesson regarding this, that they won’t forget this concept for the rest of their lives.

Twenty Six

The reason I’m writing this so late in the day is that I’ve been confused as to what to call this post. I started from a short list of maybe a dozen names, and then brought the list down to two – “twenty six” and “twenty fucking six”. Finally I decided to go for the former since the swearword in the latter doesn’t seem to add much value.

If I were to count my years using letters of the English alphabet, I would today increment it from Y to Z, taking into consideration that the Gregorian calendar may not be perfectly accurate. However, for this kind of a time horizon, and given our desired least count, it is definitely more accurate than the Hindu calendar so we will stick to it. Ok, if you have still not got the point, “aaj mEra happy birthday hai“. Imagine me wearing a yellow suit and shouting that line upwards as you look down from your balcony.

My original plan was to write about birthdays itself, as to how they seem to have lost significance, and as I’ve grown older, and started feeling old, they seem to have been reduced to a counter. I was planning to write about how I have to go really long back in order to find a memorable birthday, and about how it’s generally been a disappointment in recent time.

Vyshnavi Doss, who is older than me by ten days, decided to use her Twenty Sixth by writing something on these lines. It was as if she was exploiting her seniority by taking away words from my fingers. Here is a quote, but I urge you to read the whole thing. I completely empathise with the first part of the essay.

Now this is going to sound nutty, but I used to feel more pressure than elation on my birthday. Not counting my school years of course. That was when by default, either you distributed sweets to everyone at school, or your mom hosted a party for you and you got all the attention and gifts. Your birthday was announced at the assembly, your classmates sang for you, and you pretty much owned the day! Those were the protected years. Then I got into college where I had to work my way up towards making friends. I am a confirmed ambivert. I am a friendly person, but not necessarily popular in the zillion people on my friend-list sense of the term. So the birthday situation after I left school had always been very iffy – there was noone to really ensure it was special. To give me that “Surpriiiiiiseee!!!” People have always mattered a lot to me, and I believe that a good birthday is made up by the people around you. And while my birthdays after school were simple and pleasant, my expectation of something utterly out of the world remained the same. So the worry on my birthday could be attributed to mainly two things – a small closeted social circle, and high ambitions. Often my expectation has been met with disappointment. Don’t get me wrong – of course my parents, my relatives and my close friends have made all the effort in their capacities to make my day special. And I have been happy. But I think I’m quite a tough-to-please person. I’ve always wanted that climax.

Instead, I think I’ll do one of those this-day-that-year things. Given my superior long-term memory, I think this is the kind of stuff that I’m likely to be good at. Here are some excerpts.(rest under the fold)

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