Category: relationships

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.

Mata Amrita Index

There are many kinds of people in the world. There are those that hug everyone they meet. Then there are those who start fidgeting when their bodies come somewhat close to that of other people (I assume these people don’t travel by Mumbai local trains). There are the sexist ones – who only hug people of their own sex, and there are those who reserve their hugs exclusively for people of the opposite sex. Some people don’t actively hug, but gracefully comply when someone goes out to hug them. And yet others say “tchee tchee” and run when someone wants to hug them.

Given such diversity, what we need is a simple measure to classify people, so that such classification might probably be of use to marketers. The measure that I propose in this essay is by no means simple, yet it is a start. The measure that I propose is a real number, no less than zero, no greater than one. The definition of this number isn’t clean. It involves a little bit of math, and by math I mean math, not just arithmetic. I also complicate it a little bit by proposing a couple of related measures, which, though not as simple as the main index number, are capable of offering much better insight.

The measure I am proposing here is named after the great Mellu saint Mata Amritanandamayi (Mata Amrita for short), also known as “the hugging saint”. Mata Amrita has the policy of hugging her followers in order to deliver her blessings, which is a marked improvement over most other Indian godmen and godwomen who ask their followers to touch their feet. In fact, there is probably no other public figure who is as famous for hugging people.  Another factor that goes into the choice of this name is that it is generally nice to have your concept linked to a holy person. If not anything else, the concept will be blessed with some good Karma.

Coming to the measure itself, Baada says that the word “index” might be misleading, and it should be called the “Mata Amrita Number” instead. However, “Index” sounds so much better in this context, and MAI is a much better acronym than MAN. I need to mention right up front that the MAI is an absolute index, and is not a relative index. Each and every man and woman and transsexual has his or her own MAI. And there is also a “bilateral MAI” which is defined for pairs of people, but we will come to that later.

The Mata Amrita Index for a person is defined as the likelihood of him or her hugging the next random person he/she meets.

The Bilateral Mata Amrita Index for a pair of persons is defined as the likelihood of this pair hugging each other the next time they meet each other.

Yes, as simple as that. Or maybe not, since likelihood is not such a simple concept. But then, I’m sure you are getting the drift. What complicates the first definition is the word “Random” (towards the end). The reason this un-natural random word has been inserted in there is to add stability to a person’s MAI. So that a person’s MAI is not influenced by the knowledge of who he/she is going to meet next. I hope you are getting the drift. If you aren’t, leave a comment and I’ll explain with examples. However, there is no such complication in case of the bilateral index since it is defined for a pair.

Now, I suppose that it is intuitive that a person’s MAI is a weighted average of the person’s BMAI with all the people he knows, weighted by the frequency of meeting each such person. So for example, there is a bunch of people whom I hug every time I meet them (high BMAI), but I don’t meet these people too often, so my overall MAI remains low. And so forth.

Oh, and by definition Mata Amrita herself has a MAI of 1, since she deterministically hugs every random person she meets.

Long ago, people used to say “honey, give me a hug”. That is so passe now. That is so 20th century. Now, you are supposed to say “let us enhance our Mata Amrita Index”.

Update

I hereby thank my FGB*, the Flower Of Tam Brahm Womanhood (FOTBW) Nityag and my stalker Priyanka for their cantributions to this theory. I also thank Kodhi and Aadisht for gratefully listening to the theory when I first proposed it to them. And I thank Baada also, for his critical analysis and constant encouragement. Last but not the least, I thank my school classmate Kavya who is the chief inspiration behind this concept. In fact, I dedicate this concept to Kavya.

*FGB = foremost girl buddy

Community and age of marriage

I’ll be 26 within two weeks time. In fact, if you go by the Hindu calendar (which sacrifices short-term accuracy for long-term precision) I’m already 26. One question people constantly ask me when I bump into them is about when I plan to get married. Most of my friends also belong to the same approximate age group. When we meet up, discussion frequently veers towards “market entry”. About the arranged marriage market.

One common thread of discussion is “you belong to XXX community. you should’ve already fathered two kids by this age” or “you belong to YYY community. it’s ok even if you don’t get married for another six years”. Which makes me wonder why people from different castes and communities get married at different ages.

The Hindu scriptures divide a man’s life into four stages. At the end of the first quarter, which is brahmacharya, the boy is supposed to get married, and become a gRhasta. This division of life into four quarters in the Hindu scriptures is a clear indication that our ancestors knew about the Quarter Life Crisis so long ago. And they has prescribed a simple antidote to it – marriage. Yes, I admit that different people would feel the QLC at slightly different ages, leading to a small variation in marriage age. However, there seems to be no reason as to why this should depend upon one’s caste.

For one to get married, one needs to earn enough in order to support a partner and still lead a fairly comfortable life. Typically, you won’t want a quality of life that is much inferior to what you were leading at your parents’ place, before you moved out. When you are still a bachelor, you might be willing to accept a lower quality of life in order to maybe further your career. However, by the time you get married, you want to be closer to the quality you were used to in childhood.

We need to remember that the caste system was initially intended to divide people based on their occupation. Thus, it is fair to assume that even fifty to seventy years back, when most people more or less “lived within their caste”, people from similar castes were likely to take up similar kind of careers. Some would choose to join the family business, others would go out to set up their own business, a few others would join the government, and some others would join the army, and so on.

You need to notice that each kind of occupation promises its own kind of cash flows, and so in each of these types of professions, you take a varying amount of time in order to reach the standard of living of your parents.

If you observe, in most parts of India, the people who get married the youngest are typically people who belong to Lala communities. Once you choose to become a Lala, you forego an income, and live on pocket money. And it’s your family which decides how much pocket money you get, and typically your father and uncles and so on won’t want you to live an inferior life to theirs. And so your standard of living is always equal to that of your parents’. And you get married quickly.

Then you have people who work for a salary. If you look back, back in the 50’s and 60’s, the only employer (there wasn’t much of a choice in this) was the government. And irrespective of what degrees you had, or what colleges you went to, you were subject to a pay scale based on number of years in the job. And your salary would typically start off obscenely low. And it would take ages for you to reach the standard of living of your parents.

So that explains it. I know I haven’t taken any data points in between, but I suppose it shouldn’t be too tough. Lalas always live at the same standard as their families, and are thus eligible to marry the earliest. People working for salaries had no choice. They had to wait till the sarkar paid them enough to reach the same standard of living as their parents. And they married really late.

It is all because of Nehruvian socialism, I tell you. In case India was more capitalist back then, more people would’ve gotten rich enough to marry sooner. And this caste-based distinction in age of marriage wouldn’t have existed.

So the next time someone brings up some caste or community related stuff when encouraging or discouraging you to get married, tell them that it is all Nehru’s fault. Talk to them about our great scriptures, and their recognition of the Quarter Life Crisis. Argue from the point of view of your own QLC so as to conveniently hasten or postpone marriage. I’m sure that the scriptures, properly invoked, won’t fail you.

Dreams, daydreams, movie scripts and Jab We Met

The last time a relationship I’d invested considerable time and energy in didn’t happen, my mother told me that it had to do with my dreams. And my daydreams. And the “movie scripts” that I would often make up and tell her. Most of these would have a similar ending. The boy and the girl will end up deciding they will just be friends. And to move on in life. Typically, the movie scripts would end with one of them walking away into the drizzle. Or both of them walking away in opposite directions in the drizzle. It was because of the kind of scripts I would “write”, my mother would say, that similar things were happening to me in life.

Two and a half years down the line, I don’t seem to have changed. I still feel the same about a number of scripts. I don’t daydream anymore, at least not as much as I used to a few months or years ago. I don’t write movie scripts for fun any more. If I think I have an idea for a movie script, I start thinking about it from a commercial aspect. And end up ruining it. And though I continue to dream, and dream heavily, I don’t seem to remember too many of them. However, I’m sure that this kind of script still occurs once in a while in my dream.

I was reminded of this when I was watching Jab We Met earlier this evening. I thought it was a fantastic movie. Though Shahid Kapoor was playing a Lala, I could fully identify with his character. The first half, or maybe three fourths, was brilliant. The way his initial exchanges with Kareena Kapoor have been written is awesome. The entire bit starting from the time he walks away from his car till he is back in his company was compelling. At that point, the movie held so much promise that I was kicking myself for not having watched it for almost a year after its release. (rest of the post below the post. spoilers are there)

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An old delta hedge

I learnt finance only in 2005. It was around that time that I first came across the concept of delta hedging. However, I now realize that unknown to me, I had indeed used this concept to great effect in 1999.

That was the year when I had started preparing for the JEE. I had joined BASE, the best JEE factory in Bangalore. I was having a hard time since I hadn’t studied one bit in all of 11th standard when my friends had dilgently solved Irodov and other books. I had missed one whole month of prime summer holiday JEE prep thanks to the Math Olympiad Training Camp. I knew I needed to be focused. I knew I didn’t want to be distracted. However, I also knew that I would be under tremendous pressure for a year, and any means of easing a bit would be welcome.

During our monthly counselling sessions at BASE, the Director would call for us to create angst. “You need to have the fire in the belly”, he used to say. “And be able to channel it in the right direction in order to fuel your effort. Without fire in the belly, nothing can be done”

I must mention here that this was one of those unintended consequences things. I didn’t plan out this delta hedge. I realized the hedge only in hindsight. I had just followed my instinct in doing what I eventually did. Looking back 9 years down the line, I think it was a fair idea. Only, that like in everything else that I do, the implementation was horrible. Nevertheless, I think the learnings from this are going to be useful, and are going to have a net positive impact on society.

I put blade like naayi on a classmate, who is perhaps the most brilliant woman I’ve ever known. She was a good friend back then, at the point of time when I started the blading process. As you might have come to expect of me, I did a pretty horrible job. Disaster would be an understatement. It was depressing. I lost many nights of sleep to this. If I were less informed, I would’ve classified it as a blunder.

If you noticed, I had slipped in a little para where I mentioned the need for creating fire in the belly. This failed blade would fire it. This failed blading attempt would provide the angst, which I could channel in the right direction if I so wished. This failed blading attempt would make me angry, would make me upset, and would help me focus on my goals. And the sleepless nights this failed blading attempt gave me – I used them for mugging for the JEE.

I don’t know if I’ve told this particular bladee about it (I probably have), but I’ve always internally dedicated my success in the JEE to her.

However, this story was not to end happily. The delta was hedged, but the gamma would come back to bite me at a later date. The angst and the anger and the pain was fine when I needed them, but now (after I joined IIT) that I didn’t, it led to NED. Terrible NED. This would go on to be one of the biggest causes of NED during my life at IIT. As Shah Rukh Khan says in Baazigar, “kuch khaane ke liye kuch pona bhi paDta hai”.

Re-run of an old story

It’s been a strange evening. Maybe it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve left office really early, without a definite plan. My evening has followed approximately this kind of a pattern – nostalgia, delirium, nostalgia again, sadness (because Anand lost), yet another bout of delirum followed by yet another bout of nostalgia; then the inevitable full-blown NED, followed by declaration of NED, and then a long storytelling session.

I don’t write much fiction. In fact, I think I’ve written not more than two short stories in my entire adult writing career. There have been a number of other projects that I’ve started, but most have been stillborn. When I write fiction, my method of choice is what can be called in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) terminology as “sampling and interpolation”.

My memory is organized in a way that it mostly remembers snapshots. Usually in pictorial form. When I try to remember a certain incident, I remember it as something like a slide show. A series of images flash in my head. They are usually enough to tell the story, but not enough for the story to sound complete to a second person. Hence, I will need to supplement these pictuers with commentary. It’s like drawing a line through a set of points. Interpolation. It’s late in the night and I don’t want to get technical, but I suppose you perfectly understand what I’m talking about if you know DSP.

I revisited one of the two short stories a week back, and was horrified as to how badly it was written. This was written some four years back, within the first year of my writing career. And when I had written it, I had thought I had written a masterpiece. Now it seems all so juvenile, and cliched, and definitely not something I would be proud of.

After the storytelling session an hour back, I found reason to revisit the other short story that I’ve written. I’m not perfectly happy with it – I still think it needs a lot of polishing, but I like the basic construct. I like the way I’ve structured this story. Maybe two years down the line I’ll find this to be crappy too, but right now I still like it. I want to re-run it here for the benefit of readers who have started reading my blog in the last two years. As for the rest of you, I still think it’s woth it if you would read this story again. It’s fairly good, trust me.

I begin: (story behind the fold)

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Revisiting the Queen of Hearts

I stumbled upon this post I had written some two and a half years ago. I had drawn an analogy from bridge and had argued that if your achieving something is conditional on a certain uncertain event, you should assume that the event is going to go your way and take your best shot. I want to add a caveat. Let me take you back to the bridge analogy.

Suppose you are playing for IMPs (international match points). You have bid Six Spades. And after the lead and dummy come down, you know that you will make your contract if and only if the Queen of Hearts lies west. As per my earlier advice, you must just assume that and go for it. Unconditionally.

You think again. You see that there is a risk-free way of getting to eleven tricks – one short. And by taking this approach, you know there is no chance of your getting the twelfth. However, if you play for the Queen of Hearts to be with west, and if she turned out to be East, you will end up going say four under, and will be prone to lose heavily.

My earlier advice didn’t take care of costs. All it assumed was a binary payoff – you either make the contract or you don’t. And in that kind of a scenario, it clearly made sense to go for it, and play assuming that the Queen of Hearts lies West. However, when there are costs involved, and how many tricks you go under by makes a difference, you will need to play percentages. You go for the contract only if you know there is a reasonable chance that the Queen is West (you can figure out the cutoffs by doing a cost-benefit analysis).

There is one thing you can explore, though. Is there a play which gives you extra information about the position of the Queen of Hearts? While still keeping your options open? Can you find out more information about the system while still having the option to go for it or not? I think, if there exists this kind of a play, you should find it and play it. And the letter I wrote last week, I think, falls under this category.

Unifying the ladders

Following my post on Alonso and delta hedging, I’ve been involved in excellent conversations with a number of friends. I’ve got loads of advice, mostly solicited, on how I should go about the blading process. And there have been a number of other insights also, with a lot of theories having been generated on the Ladder Theory. Note that a working knowledge of this theory is a pre-requisite to your understanding the rest of the post. If you don’t know the theory yet, I request you to read the Wikipedia entry on the same right now, before you continue to read this.

I’ll start off with some insights from a few recent conversations

  • Anuroop says at the very top the two ladders converge.
  • Vyshnavi concurs. She says that one way of getting into a relationship is to climb the wrong ladder, and then hope that you get invited across the bridge.
  • I told this to Baada, who says that the funda of two separate ladders is not part of Indian culture, and that the ladder unification thing is true, and this is specific to India.
  • A while back, Nityag had told me that she would rather marry a friend rather marrying a raondom guy whom she met at the arranged marriage market
  • Earlier today, MC told me that she was scared about the arranged marriage market. That she was scared about committing to a stranger, scared of marrying someone she wasn’t in love with.
  • One of the rumours floating around regarding my cousin’s broken engagement is that she called it off after she got psyched out by the idea of marriage, and marrying someone whom she had met only a couple of times before.

Ok, now that the background has been set, here is the theory. What sets the scene in India apart from elsewhere is the presence of the arranged marriage market here. Here, if you have failed to find yourself a partner by a parental deadline, you are entered into the great arranged marriage market (in fact, occasionally you can be entered into this market even if you’ve found yourself a partner, but let’s not go into that). The thing about this market is that you need to make your decisions quickly, without giving or receiving much blade. It is likely that when you do commit, you are effectively committing to a stranger.

If you are a guy, you are in the arranged marriage market because no one who was sufficiently high up on your ladder (remember you have only one) was willing to marry you. Similarly, if you are a girl, you are in the arranged marriage market if no one who was sufficiently high up in your “good” ladder was willing to marry you. But what about your other ladder ?

Isn’t there a set of friends on your “friends ladder” who, if given a chance, would love to marry you? Isn’t there a subset of this set who are high enough on this ladder that you won’t mind sharing a house with them? Wouldn’t it be possible for you to convince yourself that you would be able to sleep with a subset of this subset? If this subset of a subset is non-null, then I think you are in luck. You do have hope.

Don’t you think it’s better for you to marry a friend rather than marry a stranger? Aren’t the odds of making the relationship work with a friend so much better than those of making things work with a stranger? That he is your good friend means that there is a certain basic minimum level of compatibility between you guys. Are you sure you can say that about the guy you meet in the market, after you’ve talked to him once, or maybe twice? If you are still reading, it is likely that you are going to accept the unified ladder theory.

So, my dear girls, what I’m saying now is not at all in my self-interest but I think it will be useful to you. Do enter the arranged marriage market by all means, but it would help if you could make a small list of boys high up on your friends ladder whom you won’t mind marrying, and who won’t mind marrying you. Use them as a benchmark while you evaluate the guys in the arranged market. And remember that you are more certain regarding compatibility with respect to your friends than the person you are meeting in your market.

Use your friend as a benchmark and all your doubts will melt away. If you do find a truly exceptional guy in the arranged marriage market (trust me there will be some; there will be at least one really exceptional in the market in a year or two) nothing like it. Else, you can think of “cultivating” the friends. Extend a ladder bridge to them. Convince yourself that it is ok to be in a relationship with them. And let them know the change in your stance, that you are willing to give them a bridge. Adn start this process early enough, so that even if all your friends ditch you, there is still the arranged marriage market to fall back on.

Anuroop, Vyshnavi, Baada – what you guys say is right. The ladders do converge at the top. But only in India. And I think i have the reason for that.

Kodhi, and all you others who consider yourselves to be master at being GBF* – there is still hope. This theory shows that there is still hope. Bless the arranged marriage concept for that. There is still a small chance that your GBF^(-1) might want to marry you. Keep up the good efforts. And never lose hope. There can be a bridge high up on the ladder.

*GBF: gay best friend. Refers to guys who are really really close to a girl, without any realistic chance of sleeping with them.