Making Religion Fun

Having spent the day before Sankranti (pongal) cribbing about how festivals mean so much work and how they are designed especially to create marital discord I was pleasantly surprised to see this amazing religious event on Saturday evening.

I was at the inlaws’ place in Rajajinagar, having spent the day doing two pradakshinas of Bangalore, and visiting some twenty relatives and distributing sugar figures  and sesame. And I was taken to the nearby main road (Dr Rajkumar road) to watch the ISKCON chariot festival.

And what an awesome event that was. While the chariot was some distance away volunteers came around distributing prasada in leaf bowls (donnes). And then there were some ISKCON Akshaya Patra vans that came around doling out yummy juice to all passerby. And then there was a mountain of people. And there were thousands of people lining the roads on either side.

There was a generator van, followed by people who were dancing as they marched along. The atmosphere was electric (pardon the Ravi Shastri-ism) and it was impossible to be not taken by it. I wanted to go join the dancers but there was more work to be done that night (visiting another half a dozen houses distributing sugar figures and sesame) so I stood by.

Then the chariot arrived, being pulled by two long ropes with some fifty people each. It was gender-segregated and the rope towards my side was being pulled by women so I didn’t have the opportunity to touch it (apparently if you touch the rope you get some good karma as it’s as if you’ve pulled the chariot). And volunteers continued to dole out prasada (sweet pongal) and juice.

I must confess I didn’t see the idol. When the chariot neared me, my focus was on catching the sweet packets which a monk seated at the side of the chariot was throwing. I must admit I missed quite a few good chances and let packets of coconut mithai fall into the gutter behind me. But i did manage to catch one, my days patrolling short midwicket in inter-section matches having come to good use.

It was awesome. It was so awesome that even a normally-non-believing me was completely taken by the whole festival. All the gloom of the previous day and tiredness of having driven around the city vanished in that moment.

And it made me wonder why we don’t make our festivals more fun. About why we don’t make religion more fun for people to follow, and instead waste our time and energy in mindless rituals. Thankfully Pinky also shares my thoughts and we’ve decided to celebrate only the fun festivals – where we have fun doing the required work.

But seriously, it would help making our lot more religious if we could let go of some rituals and adopt more of the fun components of festivals. But then people think they get good karma by enduring pain and all that..

Reliance Retail?

So on Sunday morning when I went to Reliance Fresh down the road I saw this guy who runs a vegetable store nearby frantically running between shelves, stocking up huge quantities of fresh vegetables. If this were a government store, and if this were license-permit raj, we could have said that this guy was hoarding vegetables.

While this explained why you seldom get fresh stuff at Reliance Fresh later in the day, it made me wonder if Reliance Retail is actually a retail operation. Given the amount of vegetables that this retailer was buying it seemed like it was more profitable for him to walk down the road and source the stuff from Reliance Fresh, rather than traveling a few kilometres down the nearby KR Road to source from the city market.

So thinking about it, this is probably reliance fresh’s strategy. Apart from selling to retail customers, they also make money out of supplying to nearby retailers, who take advantage of the lower prices at Reliance Fresh in order to make a margin for themselves and avoid the long trudge to the wholesale market.

I’m sure Reliance Fresh doesn’t particularly have a problem with the deal, except that they might lose out on customers who know about the poor quality of vegetables one gets there in the evening and so decide to not shop there for other groceries also. Customers know when to get good stuff so they don’t mind. The retailers obviously don’t have a problem.

Neat, ain’t it?

Ranji Reform

Perhaps the best thing that the BCCI has done in recent times is to hike the match fees given to players in First Class and List A matches. If i’m not wrong, first class players now get Rs. 2 lakh per game as match fees, and 1 lakh for List A games. Thus, if a player is a regular in his state team, he is assured of at least Rs. 15 lakh per annum, thus ensuring he can remain professional and not have to do a “day job”.

This is excellent in terms of option value for high school students who are good at cricket who are undecided if they should concentrate on their cricket career or if they should go to college and concentrate on studies. And this in turn leads to better quality of cricketers in the pool available for first class games.

For a fringe player, selection to the national team is a lottery. It is also a big step up from the Ranji game. And when you are an under 19 cricketer (unless you are Tendulkar of course; let’s talk about normal people here) there is little that indicates if you are going to be an international regular. However, your performances in school/college level and age group tournaments are an extremely good indicator of how well you are likely to do on the domestic circuit.

Now, the income that the domestic circuit offers means that it might be more profitable for you to concentrate on cricket and try and make it big, rather than giving up cricket and going to college. Even if you fail to make it big, you won’t end up doing too badly in life. So if you think you have a good chance of making the state team, you would rather go for it than playing safe and going to college.

And this means that several players who would have otherwise left the game (in the absence of reasonable income from playing domestic cricket) are available in the pool which makes it more competitive and raises the overall quality of cricket in the country, and consequently that of the national team.

At least the BCCI gets some things right.

The Jayanagar Problem

I don’t know why there are no good mid-to-high end restaurants in the Jayanagar-Basavanagudi area. Ok I must admit there are a few that are quite good – Chung Wah Opus (run by the Kamats of Yatri Nivas fame) and Banjara come to mind, but there aren’t too many. What bothers me more is the profusion of positively bad mid-to-high end restaurants – Presto (Yediyur circle), Cable Car (inner ring road, near Raghavendra Swami temple), Baron’s Inn (9th Main 40th Cross) come to mind.

There are several other reasons as to why I won’t move out of this part of town (except maybe to Kathriguppe, where I own a house – and that area I must say is now quite well served in terms of restaurants) , but it is a big problem for us when we want to go out to a decent place for dinner and are in no mood to drive. One such occasion was last Friday and we ended up walking to Hotel La Marvella at South End Circle, which had an extremely awful lounge and fairly decent north indian food at the not-too-bad rooftop restaurant. Still, there was something missing (which I can’t describe here) which meant the experience wasn’t particularly fulfilling.

One thing to note is that this part of town is home to a lower proportion of upper middle class immigrants compared to other parts of town. Also, the fact that the growth in the mid-to-high-end restaurant industry in Bangalore is largely correlated with the growth in upper middle class immigrant population (read: the IT boom) lends credence to this line of thought.

Then, there might be people who argue that these are “traditionally traditional areas” so people won’t eat out much, and won’t spend much when eating out, and don’t look for diversity in cuisine and all that. But the fact that in recent times KFC has opened a few branches in this part of town (“few” is important – because it’s clearly been successful) refutes this argument.

I don’t have too many other ideas about why this is the case. If you do, plis to be enlightening me.

The Necktie Index

I’m currently reading Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed – about the rise and fall of the hedge fund LTCM. So when LTCM was in trouble, the employees there came up with a measure called the “necktie index”. I’m not able to find a good link to it, and unfortunately physical books don’t offer an efficient “Ctrl+F” option so I’ll have to paraphrase and put it here.

The necktie index states that the more senior officers of the company wear neckties, and the more the meetings they attend, the more trouble the company is in.

I think this concept is generally true, and applicable more widely and to all companies. The more the number of employees wear neckties (compared to normal business days), the more the trouble the company is in. The indexing to “normal business days” is important because different companies have different normal dress codes, so normalization is required.

On a related note, I read somewhere that sometime in the beginning of this decade, when most other investment banks had a business casual dress policy, Lehman Brothers insisted that all its employees wear suits and ties to office. And you know what happened to the firm.

Now UBS has released a 43 page dress code, insisting its employees wear ties, among other things. It probably gives you an indication of where the company is headed.

On a less related note, I used to work for a startup hedge fund whose first office was a room inside the office of a fairly large BPO/KPO company in Gurgaon. And every week, “inspirational quotes” from the founders of the BPO/KPO would go up on the walls, along with their photos. And this was fairly well correlated with the decline of the stock price of that company.

Antakshari

So while we were walking back from dinner tonight my wife and I decided to play Antakshari. And each time she started singing, I would instinctively stop listening and fast-forward the song in my head, trying to double guess where she would stop, and what letter that would imply, and search my mental database for songs starting with that letter.

Back when I was in 8th standard, I had challenged four of my female cousins at Antakshari, and had beaten them fairly soundly. Back then, Antakshari was considered to be a women’s game, so I was quite proud of my achievement (of course, I should admit that these cousins were younger to me) .

When I was in college, I would get into inter-hostel Antakshari teams even though my knowledge of Hindi film songs was quite limited compared to what some of the other guys knew. That was because the first written round of most intra-college and inter-college competitions was effectively a Bollywood quiz, and so I’d get taken for my relative expertise in that.

And then I remember this train journey in rural England (someplace in Kent to London Waterloo). Us three hardcore South Indian boys (Sathya, Gandhi and I; Gandhi despite being Gujju qualifies as South Indian having grown up in Bangalore) had thulped hollow hardcore North Indian girls (for the record – Bansal, Sikka and Shuchi). Playing Hindi film Antakshari! Must say I felt quite proud that day.

Thinking back, I wonder how much of an impact playing antakshari had on my Hindi vocabulary, though I would guess that hte answer is not much considering I never really got any of the lyrics. The problem persists. I still don’t “get” any lyrics, irrespective of language of the song.

Coding

Back when I was in school (11th/12th) I think I was an awesome coder. I think I was especially good at what they called as “logic coding”, i.e. coming up with algos. I used to experiment quite a bit (as much was possible with TurboC) and had a lot of fun too. I remember doing graphics in TurboC, making a “pong” game, brick breaker, and a lot of other cool stuff. For our 12th standard project, Hareesh and I built this totally awesome cricket scoring program, which we unfortunately didn’t take forward (and went to college instead).

It was my love for coding that meant I fought with my parents (who wanted me to study Electrical) and decided to study Computer Science at IIT Madras. And then I lost it. Somewhere along the way. I didn’t enjoy coding any more. Soon, I began to hate coding. I would love coding when I would write the odd program in “pure” C, or when I would participate in contests such as BITWise. But I’d completely lost it.

So over the last six to seven years (after I graduated from IIT) there have been occasions when I have thought I’ve regained my coding mojo, only to lose it again very soon. I’m still very proud of that Excel+VBA model that I had written in the very first week of my third job. But a couple of months later, I was hating coding again. And so it was while debugging a complicated piece of code at work this morning that I realize why I have this love-hate relationship with coding.

It’s simple – basically I hate coding for others. I hate writing code that others will read or use. I don’t mind writing code that others would use as a black box, of course. But I think writing code that others will read or use puts too many constraints on the way you code. My instinct is always to stop doing something when I’m personally satisfied with it, and with code it seems like I’m satisfied sooner than others would be satisfied with my code.

At a fundamental level, I like coding and I think I’m pretty good at it, so it isn’t something I want to give up. But then the formal processes and endless testing involved with writing code for others really kills joy (as does GUI, and Java). Code saves a lot of time, and helps “studdize” what might be otherwise fighter work, so I like doing it.

In an ideal world, I would be writing code that I would alone be using, AND profiting from it (I never intend to sell code; I intend to sell the results of the said code, however; that would mean no one else would read/use my code per se, so I can write it the way I want). Hopefully I’ll get there, sometime.

The Teacher’s Village

Allen A D Rodrigues: 3 months
Krishna R Sundaresan: 6 months
Sangeet Paul Choudhry: 5 months
Vamshi Krishna R: 6 months
Karthik S: 10 months
Sriwatsan K: 3 years

Ok so this is a list of South Indian boys who got lured by the thought that “Gurgaon is a metro” or “Gurgaon is cosmopolitan” or as one of my grandaunts once put it “Gurgaon is like America”, and made their way North, only to realize that Gurgaon is actually a Gaon and not really fit for living in, and opted out. You will notice an outlier in the above data – Sriwatsan K  – and that is a result of him being married to a Punjoo.

By all absolute standards it is a horrible place – no public transport (save for the metro that’s just come up), hell, no autorickshaws, no proper water supply, no proper shops, unsafe roads and all that. Face it, it’s not a city. The only “advantage” that it has, if you could call it that, is that it is less than an overnight train journey away from most of the cow belt, and is hence attractive for educated boys and girls from the said area who don’t want to venture out too far.

Another major thing for these people is that Gurgaon represents a major “level up” for compared to the quality of life in their home towns (not talking about Delhi here; and Delhi, I think, is a wonderful city). Large houses, tap water, air conditioning, 100% power backup and the works.

And if you were to notice, there is no other city or town within some twenty hours of Gurgaon where there is substantial modern “industry” – the kind of industries where college educated people of nowadays will want to work in (IT/BPO/whatever). So, most people who do come to stay in Gurgaon, do so because it is close to “home”. So that they don’t need to live like “the_amit”s in Bangalore or Chennai. And that they can live in a land that celebrates Holi (need to write sometime about how uncivilised a festival that is, or I might already have) and Rakshabandhan.

So, most people who live in Gurgaon think it is a privilege to be living there, and wouldn’t really think of moving out. Hence, employers tend to consider them to be sticky and hence don’t make an effort to retain them and stuff.

Now, for South Indian boys from urban centres (like the ones named in the beginning of the post), Gurgaon represents a major level down in terms of standard of living. And hence, when they go there, they expect the job to compensate for it. And in most cases, given that employers are tailored to thinking that the employees WANT to live in Gurgaon, this ends up not being the case. And that leads to disappointment and hence the short shelf life of South Indians in Gurgaon.

Joint Blogging

So the more perceptive of you would have noticed a major change in this blog overthe last couple of weeks. It has now become a multi-author blog with my wife Pinky joining me here.

The chief motivation for this is feedback I received over the last one year that my blog had become boring and one-dimensional. Considering that I’ve been going through some sort of a mental block over the last few months, and am unable to produce posts with the same quality and frequencyas i used to earlier, I decided that the best way to spice up this blog was to bring in a co-blogger.

Around the same time, I got married to Pinky, who is herself a blogger,  so it  was natural to bring her in. And in the last couple of weeks, since I added her as an author, she has responded spectacularly, producing posts (albeit of a different flavour compared to what I produce, of course) with significnatly better regularity and quality compared to me.

So I just want to make it clear that the decision to make this blog a joint one is a conscious and well-thought out one, and not one that has been made due to marital compulsions or anything. Yes, we have markedly different writing styles, so you need not even look up or down to check the author’s name at the bottom of the post or the top of the RSS feed.

This decision to make this blog a multi-author blog is irreversible (yeah, I won’t rule out future expansion, if we are to get suitable co-bloggers; but that won’t happen for a while). So those of you who are trying to debate about the quality changes in the blog because of this change (in the comments section) are just wasting your time. And if you think that the quality is dropping for whatever reason, there is the “unsubscribe” button that your RSS feed aggregator offers you.

I’m working on producing author-specific RSS feeds, so that might allow people to selectively subscribe to posts. Essentially we are looking for a way by which our posts will appear on our respective facebook pages, rather than on everything appearing in mine. If anyone knows how to do that for a wordpress.org blog, plis to be letting us know.