Category: relationships

Tinder and Arranged Scissors

For those of you who have been following my blog for a while know, I was in the arranged marriage market for a brief period in 2009, before Priyanka magically materialised (from the comments section of this blog) and bailed me out. I may not have covered this in any of the Arranged Scissors posts that I wrote back then (ok I alluded to this but not really), but I had what I can now call a “Tinder moment” during the course of my time in the market.

So on this fine day in Bangalore, I was taken to this Marriage Exchange called Aseema. The name of the exchange is quite apt, since based on two data points (my own and one acquaintance’s), if you go there your search for a spouse is literally endless.

My uncle, who took me there and who was acting as my broker-dealer for that brief period, told me that they literally had binders full of women (note that this was three years before Romney), and that I could search leisurely if I accompanied him there on Saturday morning.

My uncle didn’t lie. This place did have several binders full of women (and men – I too ended up in one such binder after I signed up) and four binders that said “Smartha (my subcaste) Girls” were pulled out and handed over to me. My uncle probably expected me to spend a few hours ruminating through the binders and coming up with a shortlist.

It was nothing like it. Each profile in the binder followed a standard format. There was this 4 by 6 full-length photo. You knew where to look for educational qualifications. And professional summary. It was like LinkedIn meets Facebook profile picture. And that was it.

I remember having some criteria, which I don’t remember now. But once I had gone through the first few pages, it became mechanical. I knew exactly where to look in a particular profile page. And quickly come to a judgment if I should express interest.

Thinking back, I might have just been swiping (mostly left – I came up with a grand shortlist of one after the exercise) on Tinder. The amount of time I spent on each profile wasn’t much more than what the average user spends on Tinder. Except that rather than looking only at the photo, I was also looking at a few profile parameters (though of course whether I would want to sleep with her was one of the axes on which I evaluated the profiles). But it was just the same – leafing through a large number of profiles in a short amount of time and either swiping left or right instantly. Talking to a few other friends (some of it at the now legendary Benjarong conference) about this, my experience seemed representative (note that I’m still in anecdata territory).

Maybe there is a lesson in this for all those people who are designing apps for arranged marriage (including the venerable Shaadi.com and BharatMatrimony.com). That even though the stated intent is a long-term relationship, the initial process through which people shortlist is no different from what people follow on Tinder. Maybe there surely is a market for a Tinder-like arranged marriage application!

Dispassionate blogging and Wife Bonus

So I’ve figured out that the key to being a good and interesting blogger is to be able to look at things dispassionately and not let your value judgments crowd out your reasoning abilities. Of course, while saying this I’m assuming that I’m a reasonably good blogger (based on feedback, implicit and explicit, that I’ve received over the last decade, and given that I’m coming close to 2000 posts here).

So earlier this morning I was talking to a friend about long distance relationships and careers and marriages and responsibility sharing, and he sent me a link to this rather fascinating concept called the “wife bonus“. The money paragraph:

A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.

So I responded that this looks like a rather interesting concept, and started my own analysis of why this works and these bonuses have been structured in the fashion that they have. Unfortunately the discussion went nowhere.

Because my friend who sent me the link found the concept disgusting and abhorrent and demeaning to women, and he was fascinated that I had managed to actually analyse it without feeling the same kind of emotions. As I write this, the conversation continues (as the old Coffy Bite ad went). Ok I googled and found that it’s actually “the argument continues”. Here is the ad:

So based on this one data point, and a few other data points from my and my wife’s blogging past, I figured out that such dispassionate analysis (I’ll present my dispassionate analysis on wife bonuses later in the post) is key if you are to be a good blogger. Because such dispassion allows you to not get swayed by the emotion or repugnancy of a concept, and instead analyse it to its full merit.

In this case you start wondering why these highly qualified women don’t work, but are “interested in art”. You start wondering about how a family’s finances would work if the qualified wife doesn’t work. You start wondering who controls the budgets, and considering that one half is not contributing financially, how stable such marriages are.

So my hypothesis, which I’ve never bothered to test, is that people who have access to funds but don’t have an independent source of income are less careful about spending it optimally than those who have access to funds on account of their own sources of income. To be less politically correct, the hypothesis is that housewives (and househusbands, to be more politically correct) are less careful about their money than people who work.

So now if you have a spouse with no independent income source, but want to make sure she has access to sufficient funds while making sure she doesn’t fritter away the wealth, the best way of achieving this is to ringfence the money under her control. Which means that giving her control of your bank account is not optimal, but creating a separate purse which is under her control is superior! And thus you create what can be classified as a “wife bonus”. As simple as that.

Now I realise many of my readers will find this blog post repugnant, for it is not politically correct, and they will allow their emotions to take over and brand me as a misogynist or a chauvinist or whatever else. All because I looked at an existing phenomenon logically without attaching a value judgment to it. And by doing so, they deny themselves the opportunity of reading my analysis. But there are others who are happy that there is someone doing this dispassionate analysis, and they will like such analysis. And my blog popularity grows on that front.

My wife has been blogging heavily through her life in business school (coincidentally I started blogging a decade ago when I was in business school; and we met each other through LiveJournal), and has already got to the stage where her professors read her blog. And while a lot of her classmates read her blog, there are some who have problems with it, that she writes dispassionately about everything without value judgments.

Anyway, I sent her the NYTimes piece on the wife bonus. She replied that she also wants one now!

Arranged Scissors 16: Liquidity

Ok so the last time I wrote about Arranged Scissors was more than five and a half years back, when the person who is now my wife had just about started on her journey towards ending up as my wife. And today she made a very interesting observation on arranged marriage markets, which made me revisit the concept. She tweeted:

It is a rather profound concept, well summarised into one tweet. Yet, it doesn’t tell the full picture because of which I’m writing this blog (more permanence than tweet, can explain better and all that).

Reading the above tweet by the wife makes you believe that the arranged marriage market is becoming less liquid, because of which people are experiencing more trouble in finding a potential partner on that market. And there is a positive feedback loop in play here – the more illiquid the arranged marriage market becomes, the more the likelihood for people to exit the market, which results in making the market even more illiquid!

But this makes you believe that there was a time when the arranged marriage market was rather liquid, when people were happy finding spice there, and then it all went downhill from there. The fact, however, is that there are two countervailing forces that have been acting on the liquidity of the arranged marriage market.

On the one hand, more people are nowadays marrying “for love”, and are hence removing themselves from the arranged marriage market. This is an increasing trend and has resulted in the vicious circle I pointed to two paragraphs earlier. Countervailing this, however, is globalisation, and the fact that the world is becoming a more connected place, which is actually increasing the liquidity of the market.

Consider the situation a century back, when most marriages in India were “arranged”, and when it was the norm to pick a spouse through this market. While that in theory should have made the market liquid, the fact remained that people’s networks back in those days was extremely limited, and more importantly, local. Which meant that if you lived in a village, you could get married to someone from a village in a small radius, for example. Your search space was perhaps larger in a city, but even then, networks were hardly as dense as they are today. And so there was a limited pool you could pick from, which meant it was rather illiquid.

And over time, the market has actually become more liquid, with the world becoming a more connected place. Even a generation ago, for example, it was quite possible (and not uncommon) to get “arranged married” to someone living in a far-off city (as long as caste and other such factors matched). In that sense, the market actually got better for a while.

But it coincided with the time when social norms started getting liberalised, and more and more people found it okay to actually exit the arranged marriage market. And that was when the illiquidity-vicious-circle effect started coming into play.

In recent times, connectedness has hit a peak (though it can be argued that online social networking has helped extend people’s connections further), and the vicious circle continues unabated, and this is the reason that we are observing that the arranged marriage market is becoming less liquid.

Oh, and if you’re in the market, do get in touch with the wife. She might be able to help you!

Matching problem in the Indian Dating Market

And no, this has nothing to do with Hall’s Marriage Problem.

As the more perceptive of you might have noticed, about a year and a bit back the wife started this initiative called “Marriage Broker Auntie”. Basically she thinks she is a good judge of people and a good judge of “matches” between people. As a consequence of this, there were many friends and relatives who would approach her to “set them up”. Having (successfully or unsuccessfully) made a few matches among such applicants, she decided to institutionalise it, and thus Marriage Broker Auntie was born.

The explicit objective of the initiative was to broker marriages (as the name clearly suggests. The wife was the “auntie”. The plural in the title was because briefly there was one more (mad) auntie involved but she’s since moved on). The methodology was to “know the customers” and then use an intelligent human process in order to find pairs who might be interested in each other and then set them up for a date. As simple and basic as it gets. The quant in me had already started dreaming up of an expanded business where I could use “big data” and “analytics” and whatnot to “understand” large sets of people and match them up.

But there was a small problem – ok the fundamental problem was that the number of people who had signed up was not very large, but let’s assume that can be solved through marketing – the problem was that the sex ratio on the website was skewed. Heavily. At one point in time I remember there being 20 girls and 5 boys being registered on the website (all heterosexual, perhaps a consequence of “marriage” in the title)! The ratio remained thus as long as the initiative was in existence.

Now this contrasts heavily with other “dating” sites that are operational in India, primarily global sites such as OkCupid and Tinder. The gender ratio on these sites is heavily skewed, too, except that it is heavily skewed in the opposite direction (too many boys, hardly any girls). For example, check out this piece in Man’s World on Tinder, which talks about users who think there is a “permanent bug” in the site that doesn’t allow matches, and of “all girls on the site being bots”.

The problem with most dating sites in India is that there are way too many boys and way too few girls (I should add Orkut also to this list, and should mention that I met my wife through a combination of Orkut and LiveJournal). This leads to girls on the site feeling like they’re “being stalked”, and getting freaked out and getting out of the site. A girl I know signed up on OkCupid India, just on a whim, only to find a hundred “interests” from boys within a few minutes of logging on.

Reading stories like this, you might be bound to imagine that there are no girls in India interested in dating, or getting married. But if you were to look at sites like Marriage Broker Auntie (small sample, I know, but significant gender bias) you know that this is simply untrue. There are girls out there who are looking for flings and relationships, to date and to get married. And they are short of ideas on how to meet such men. “Traditional” dating sites such as OkCupid or Tinder intimidate them, and shaadi.com and bharatmatrimony.com are in a completely different business altogether – they make matches on a different set of variables such as caste and gotra and stars and so forth.

So what we have here is classic market failure – of the Indian dating market (this, however, is NOT a call for government regulation! 😛 ). The market is surely fertile (no pun intended), and there is plenty of opportunity to make fat profits if someone can get the matching right. There are a number of players looking to enter the market as I write this (I’ve spoken to some of them), but none look particularly promising.

Oh, and you might want to know why Marriage Broker Aunties gets all the chicks – it’s because of a complicated sign up process (a five page google docs form if i remember right) which puts off any non-serious players. Also there is the promise that until matched, potential counterparties cannot see your profile, and there is a “trusted third party” (in the MBA case, my wife, but an algorithm should do reasonably well to scale) who does the matchings.

The most important bit here is the anonymity – the ground reality in India is that online dating is still seen as a “last resort” – to be resorted to only if you can’t find a match through your network. With Tinder and OkCupid being exclusively dating sites (unlike Orkut which was fundamentally a social network), signing up on one of these two sites is an admission of a degree of desperation (in the eyes of most people), and there is a chance people might see you differently after they know that you’re a member on such sites.

While this explains reasonably well why chicks flock to Marriage Broker Auntie, why is there a shortage of guys on the site? It can’t be that there are no serious guys around for whom the 5-page form is a massive transaction cost. The wife’s (and my) perception is that fundamentally guys want to “check out a girl” (i.e. know well what she looks like, etc.) before agreeing to meet her on a date (I remember scouring Orkut and Facebook for all possible pictures of my then-future-wife and “checking her out” before meeting for the first time). And in an anonymised matching site, this experience is not there. So men don’t like this!

It’s a hard problem but not intractable. There are many companies that are coming into this space now. Hopefully someone will get it right!

Why Petromax is Repugnant

Every time I talk about the concept of “Petromax”, people give me looks as if I’m from some other planet. Sometimes they shudder. Sometimes they think I’m uncouth. While I believe that the “problem” is just that I say things like they are (rather than couching them in niceties), given that everyone reacts in a negative way when I talk about Petromaxes implies that there’s something repugnant to it. And I think I’ve found the answer – the answer lies in Option Theory.

First of all, a recap on what petromax is all about. The concept was invented by Anant Nag in Golmaal Radhakrishna back in 1990. It goes “the wife is like the lamp you light in front of God. When the wife is not at home, the house plunges into darkness, and that’s when you need a petromax”. Those of you who understand Kannada might want to watch this youtube video from the movie:

Now that the definition is out of the way, let’s come to why the concept is repugnant. It is repugnant because being a petromax is like writing an option. And in the relationship business, nobody likes being a writer of options – it makes them look “cheap” and desperate. Let me explain.

I live in Bangalore. My wife lives abroad. So I’m in a long-distance marriage and going by the Petromax theory my house is “filled with darkness”. And the theory posits that I need a Petromax. Let’s say that you are interested in filling this gap and being “my Petromax”. So far so good. Where is the problem?

The problem happens when my wife comes home, and “fills it with light”. Remember that I’m still married to her, and deeply in love with her, and that I only took you on as a petromax. So for the duration when she is here, I don’t need you any more, and don’t bother about you! So in effect, I have an option of “being with you” whenever I want, while you don’t have the same option (unless you are also using me as a Petromax, but then I won’t be available whenever you want so I won’t be a reliable petromax). So under the petromax arrangement defined above, I have the right but not the obligation to be with you. You, the petromax, have the obligation but not the right to be with me. Effectively you’ve sold me an option!

Now, in the relationships business options don’t work. The writer of the option will start thinking that the “buyer” is using him/her. Being used is not a good thing in the relationship business. Among other things, showing the world that you are willing to be used reduces your “value” going forward. So you don’t want to do this. So you don’t like to be the petromax. So the deal doesn’t work for you. And so it doesn’t work for me, since when I’m looking for a Petromax I’m looking for optionality.

And so when you say that someone is someone else’s petromax, it is an implicit admission that the said person is willing to get “used”, and is thus willing to lower his/her value. Which is not a nice thing from the point of view of this person. And hence the term petromax is repugnant. And the concept of the petromax is also thus repugnant.

But the petromax concept has been seen to work in real life. How does it work then? Being part of a small community helps, since the valuation drop is seen only in that particular community. Then, there can be some restricted structuring where neither sells each other an option, and set up an “and condition” (being together if and only if both are available and interested at the same instant).

Ok I realise that this post itself might be repugnant to some of you but these things need to be explained!

Anniversaries past and present

I realise that whenever there is an occasion where I want to write something and I don’t know what to write, I can simply rely on my superior long-term memory, and do a this-day-that-year kind of thing. So here goes, recounting past anniversaries.

-1 (2009): The day began with some errands. I even remember what those errands were but it doesn’t matter here. I finished up with those errands and drove up to Rajajinagar and picked up the now wife and her sister (who I was meeting for the first time) from in front of the Nirmala toilet in Rajajinagar, in front of the Capuchin monastery. We drove up to the 100 ft restaurant in Indiranagar and had lunch.

Then we went shopping. Of course those were still early days for me to buy stuff for her, but she bought lots of things anyway. And that was the day I realised what it’s like to take out a woman shopping – hanging out in the area just outside the dressing rooms while she tried stuff, without trying to look awkward. And then Baada, who had brought his then-newlywed-wife shopping to the same place “caught” me there.

Later in the evening I visited her place for the first time, and had both “tiffin” and dinner there. And made small talk with the in-laws, whom I’d met for the first time less than a week earlier.

1 (2011): It was quite unremarkable, frankly. She went to work. I bummed around all morning and went for a lecture in the afternoon (all the way across town) and walked out of it in half an hour since it was so uninteresting. We went to RimNaam at the Oberoi on MG Road for dinner. Apart from the complimentary cake they gave us (since we told them it was our anniversary), it was quite unspectacular.

2 (2012): We were doing a week-long holiday in Goa, along with the in-laws. The day began with the mother-in-law picking flowers from all over the resort and making a small bouquet and handing it over to us. Presently we went to the flea market in Anjuna (it was a Wednesday) and got bored, since we hate bargaining. We then decamped to Calangute, and discovered Infantaria where we had an awesome lunch.

In the evening we went to Thalassa in Vagator where we emptied a bottle of Chilean wine and ate awesome Greek food. We hadn’t booked early enough to catch a cliff-side seat, though, but it didn’t matter since the sun set behind clouds that day.

3 (2013): The day itself was unremarkable. The previous day I was returning from a work trip to Bombay, and I hunted around the airport for a gift, not able to decide until they called for boarding when I picked up what was frankly an unremarkable pair of artificial earrings. She had put in more thought into my gift, though. I got a nice large notebook (which I’ve never used much) and a nice Parker ballpen (which I’ve used so much  that I’ve had to change the refill already).

The next day (technically speaking, since the flight was at 1 am or something) we went off to Singpur, where we enjoyed Sushobhan and Sudha’s hospitality, visited museums, got stuck in rain, waited for taxis and were again taken for a wonderful dinner by Sushobhan and Sudha.

4 (2014): Still early in the day yet, early for me and very very early for her. I’m in Bangalore, she’s in Barcelona. Our first long-distance anniversary. I might update this post tomorrow.

And finally, 0 (2010): It was a long day. I actually woke up late. Was paranoid while shaving since I didn’t want to cut myself on the day of my wedding. The late start meant I had the opportunity to eat good breakfast, a luxury she didn’t have since she was involved in some pre-ceremony poojes. The ceremony started at 11, and we went for a ceremonial lunch at 5 (yeah, South Indian brahmin weddings take so long). And then we had to get ready for the reception. Both of us started laughing at each other since we were both so badly made up! And then two hours of standing and shaking people’s hands and posing for photographs. And then some more ceremonies.

And then we went home, where I had some Absolut Orange stashed away. We hadn’t bothered getting the ceremonial glass of milk, so we just took a shot each of the Absolut. And we couldn’t even sleep in peace since there were remnants of the wedding ceremony the following day!

 

Meeting your husband’s old crush

I wonder what it’s like to meet your husband’s old crush. Someone who you know he was quite obsessed with back in the day, when he did all sorts of crazy things because his crush was hardly materialising, in honour of whose stillborn love he wrote short stories (something he has never ever done for you), and someone who he is still good friends with even a decade after his crush ended.

I wonder what it’s like to be in a new city, where you’ve only been for four days, and then venturing out to an unknown part of town to meet someone who you’ve never met before, who you’ve never even spoken to, and about whom you know only because of reading your husband’s blogs about her, and because of what your husband has told you about her.

I wonder if it feels weird, or if it is just a part of the game, that you are going to travel two hours to meet someone whose only connection to you is your husband, who is not going to be there with you when you meet her. He has made that introduction, told both of you perhaps more than you need to know about each other, but now he’s throwing both of you into the deep end, asking you to meet, to hang out, to make conversation. Is he asking too much of both of you?

What are you even going to talk about? Your husband, who both of you know very well, is one obvious topic, but what about that signboard in Bishop Cottons Boys’ School (that your husband told you about) that said “great mind discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people” (or some variation of that)? There is the professional stuff that you guys can talk about, which you perhaps would even prefer, but would you want to spend most of your time on your first meeting with someone you are likely to get along with, just talking about work? Then again, it helps immensely that both of you are outgoing and extroverted and generally good conversationalists, people who are inherently good at putting the counterparty at ease. But with two of you being of the same “type”, will there be a clash?

If not anything else, one good thing that will come out of this meeting is that your husband (evil guy he is) is going to call up both of you after you’re done with each other, and find out “how it went”. If not anything else, there will be value added in terms of some entertainment for him, as he will speak to the two of you and try and elicit gossip after you’re done meeting. As far as the universe is concerned, the cost that the two of you will have to pay in terms of possible discomfort and awkwardness will be offset by the value that your husband will gain by means of “entertainment value”. And then there is the option value of the two of you actually getting along and having a good time together!

So for the universe, it works out. For you and for your husband’s old crush, it may lead to negative value. But then such deals are precisely the kind of stuff that your evil ex-banker husband is good at structuring!

Good boys don’t get laid

Last night I bought Christian Rudder’s Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) and started reading it. I’m now about 10% into the book, well past the Kindle sample (I bought the book in entirety after I’d finished the sample). I’m past the first couple of chapters and am now reading a chapter on the contributions of Twitter to linguistics.

Rudder is a co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at the matchmaking website OkCupid, and he draws upon some aggregate data that his website has collected to point out some rather interesting stuff about how people think, view themselves, and the kind of partners they are looking for. One very interesting piece of analysis (which includes a couple of brilliant graphs) shows the preference for the partner’s age among men and women of different ages. So far the book has been absolutely spectacular.

The part of the book that I’ve found most fascinating so far is the one on averages and variances. Rudder looks at the average ratings of a large number of women registered on OkCupid (as rated by men) and tries to correlate their ratings with their success on the site (measured in terms of the number of messages they have received from men on the site wanting to date them). Given the scale of the data that Rudder has access to (rather large), the results are rather stupendous.

What Rudder finds is that for a given level of average rating for a woman, the higher the variance in her rating, the more the number of messages she receives. There are some quirky statistics he quotes (a lot of which has been extracted in this post on Brain Pickings – it was after a friend sent me this post that I got interested and bought the book) which show that women who are consistently rated a 3 (on a scale of 1-5) by men are much less likely to get a message than someone who gets a mix of 1s and 5s.

From this Rudder concludes that negative ratings actually boost a woman’s chances of getting a date – the fact that a number of men have rated someone unattractive means that there is something about her that a lot of men don’t like. This implies that the “competition” for getting her is possibly low, and you might be able to get a “bargain” or an “arbitrage” if you are able to get her.

While this is a plausible and rather palatable thesis, I have an alternate explanation for the same data – I posit that low ratings don’t matter. Some people might have rated you lowly but they don’t matter since they aren’t interested in you. What matters simply is the number of high ratings that you get – people are always on the lookout for spectacular people to date, and by getting a number of 5s, you are showing that you are found rather attractive by a number of people. The ratings of 1 that you have received are an anomaly – messages of rejection from people who don’t want to date you, and all they do is to pull down your average. A better way of comparing women would be to throw away the bottom 20% of all ratings that a woman gets and then calculate the average – and a lot of 3s that Rudder has analysed in his book are likely to come out as something more than that.

Irrespective of the reason for the correlation of variance with attractiveness, though, what is undisputed is that people look for spectacular people to date. If you are a consistent three, irrespective of whether you go by Rudder’s thesis or mine, a large number of men are likely to rate you as being “unspectacular”. When given a choice between dating someone who is a “common minimum program” on most dimensions and someone who has a “spike” (as recruiting management consultants like to put it), you are likely to be more interested in the one that has the spike. What you consider to be a spike might be considered to be a trough by others, which probably leads to an average average rating (but high variance), but it is the spike that attracts you to her.

The problem with the arranged marriage market in India is that it is set up such that people show off their “average” side. As I had argued several years earlier (back when I was in the market), the Indian arranged marriage market is dominated by people who are themselves “common minimum programmes” and who are looking for “common minimum programmes” to marry. Thus, if you want to enter that market yourself, you try to mould yourself as yet another common minimum program and try to hide your spike rather than to enhance it (it is also a result of counterparties sharing notes in the arranged marriage market, something that doesn’t happen in the dating market. If you have a spike that one girl considers to be a trough, her folks are likely to tell people known to them about your trough (which is actually a spike), and that might pull down your average rating).

Most Indian parents bring up  their kids to become good materials in the arranged marriage market, and since it is the unspectacular CMP that succeeds in that market, parents aspire to get their grown up kids to fit such moulds. Any possibly deviant behaviour is quickly dissed, non-standard careers are strongly discouraged, you are encouraged to dress unspectacularly and so on. Taking this together with Rudder’s thesis, what this means is that if you prime yourself for the arranged marriage market, you are losing out on the dating market!

What it takes to be a success in the arranged marriage market (solidity, unspectacularity, CMPness) are directly at odds to what it takes to succeed in the dating market (a spike, quirkiness, character) and so once you have decided to enter one market you automatically become a failure in the other. This thesis also explains why people who break up in their mid/late twenties and who consequently enter the arranged marriage market (possibly since it offers the quickest chance of a rebound) struggle significantly in that market – they have been primed for the dating market which makes them unhot in the arranged marriage market.

One “spike” that I consider to be a part of my character is this blog. Back in the Benjarong conference, I was given sage advice that I do not disclose this blog to prospective brides from the arranged marriage market, thanks to posts like this one and this one. Finally I ended up marrying someone who I met as a consequence of this blog (this post to be precise – she later told me) – who messaged me on Orkut saying she likes my blog, because of which we got talking and so forth. It was the spike – possibly considered abhorrent by many – that was responsible for my finding my wife!

So decide which market you actually want to be in before you prime yourself. “I’ll also casually look at the other market” is never likely to work.

The big deal about the half-girlfriend

When all of twitter outraged about Chetan Bhagat’s latest masterpiece “half girlfriend” I didn’t know what the big deal was. Given that concepts such as ladder theory, friendzone, GBF (Gay Best Friend), FGB (Foremost Girl Buddy), Goalkeeper Theory and Petromax are all so well documented and accepted, it doesn’t take much of a leap to get to the concept of “half-girlfriend”, as described in the flipkart summary of the book. 

It seemed to me that the people that were outraging were all pseud-types who had hardly been single in their youth and how looked down upon IITs and IITians (for lacking social skills; and guilty as charged on that count). That they were people who subscribed to a certain view of how friendships and romances and relationships should function, and who were incapable of appreciating any alternate mechanisms. I could think of them as the people who got madly outraged when I put out my now classic blog post on petromaxing in business schools nine Deepavalis ago.

But now that the book has already come out (I have no plans to read it since I don’t read fiction. Moreover, considering myself an authority on alternate mechanisms of romantic relationships, and am married to someone who considers herself an authority on conventional mechanisms of romantic relationships, I don’t think I can bear being lectured upon on such topics), and people that I know, or people that know people that I know have started reading it, I realise why the outrage is all about. Consider this sample which I got on one WhatsApp group this morning:

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The first reaction is that the quality of writing is horrible, but then that’s how Chetan Bhagat writes, and that’s how the audience he writes for wants him to write. And then the whole crassness of the implementation of the concept in the book hits me – while the concept of half-girlfriend might be a bloody good one, with wide-ranging implications and mechanism designs, it seems like (based on the above limited sample) the concept as instantiated by Bhagat doesn’t hold a candle to its potential!

I’ve now crossed the floor. I’m now in the camp of the people who believe that Chetan Bhagat’s Half Girlfriend is cringeworthy – and I find it cringeworthy not because of the concept (which I think is rather worthy), but because of the way that Bhagat seems to have butchered it and made it appear crass and “LS”. By writing this book, Bhagat has nipped in the bud what might have been a phenomenal alternative relationship concept. And that is unforgivable.

I don’t normally quote sitcoms, and I don’t normally watch sitcoms, but given we are on the topic of alternative relationships mechanisms, I can’t help but put a short video featuring perhaps the greatest purveyor of alternative relationship mechanisms of all time – Jeffery Murdoch from Coupling. I couldn’t find an extract from the episode, so here is the full first episode of the first season of Coupling in all its glory! May you be able to get rid of your unflushables!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvFs5S6A6LM

Back to bachelorhood

Starting tonight I’ll be a bachelor once again. For the next nineteen months or so. No it’s not that I’m returning my post graduate diploma and hence getting this downgrade (it’s been a while since I cracked a bad joke here so I’m entitled). It’s that the wife is going away. To get herself an MBA (yes I know that after this she will be better qualified than me since she’ll be getting a proper MBA while i have a post graduate diploma only. Maybe I can retire soon? ).

She’ll be going off to Barcelona tonight. The original plan had me moving there too. But then classic old NED happened and I ended up not looking for a job or assignment there and since it’s not an inexpensive place to stay I’m staying back. Plan to visit her every once in a while. And even though tickets to Europe are prohibitively expensive I now have a place to go to in case I need a break.

But for that I need to first get myself a visa. I guess one of my chief tasks in the next few days will be to get this bit of business done. But then I have my own business.

Regulars on this blog might be aware that I haven’t had formal employment for close to three years now. I freelance as a quAnt consultant – helping companies figure out how to make use of the volumes of data they collect in improving their business decision making. It’s been doing quite okay but my plan is to use the next few months when I don’t have any domestic commitments to see if I can take it to the next level.

It might also be pertinent to mention here that the first bit if business I got for this particular venture was through this blog – the last time I put out a post like this one a long time reader who was looking for quant assistance left a comment here and that led to a rather fruitful assignment. Perhaps mentioning this here might result in a repeat?

Now that I’m blogging more than I used to in the recent past I’ll also be using these pages to keep you updated on the long distanceness. I’ve also noticed that since I last put the update on leaving twitter and Facebook that there’s some more activity here. Keep that flowing and I hope for some good conversations on the comment pages here.