Pertinent Observations

Everyone knows that time today is better than time tomorrow. And that money today is better than money tomorrow. The latter, of course is the reason we have something called interest rates, based on which ibanks are making millions. It is a concept that has been beaten to death, loads of authors have made millions on it, it is the ‘in thing’ in bschools today and all such crap.

Currently in my early twenties (i’m not yet 24, so i can still be in this bucket), I have a strong feeling that time today is much much more important than, say, time 10 years down the line. And I personally consider it to be more important than money today against money 10 years down the line.

different people, i believe have different interest rates for time, which makes it untrade-able (maybe thatz the reason no markets exist for this). and the rates of interest that people attach to this probably determines the career path one takes….

We moved into (what was then) this village in (what was then) the southern suburbs of Bangalore twenty two years ago. There was only one other house on our road, and parrots and butterflies used to frequent my parents? carefully tended flower garden. The nearest bus stop was ten minutes? walk away, and was served by one bus an hour to the city market. And there were only a few village shops nearby, as a result of which my parents would fetch most of our groceries all the way from Jayangar. How they used to carry all that (as well as me) on that faithful Bajaj scooter is still a mystery.

Life for the first few years was largely quiet, and we used to run to Jayanagar or Gandhi Bazaar for every little need. Our house was broken into once, and steel grill doors duly installed. The place was being connected by the newly built ring road (a 100-foot wide road to our area, such joy ? we had observed). and soon our road had few empty sites. However, autos would still loathe to ply to that area around the time we moved out (1996).

It seemed like a whole new city that we moved back into four years later. Anant Nag (the actor) had purchased two adjacent sites and built commercial property. First to occupy the complex was a Food World and the retail revolution had begun. A Madura garments factory outlet followed soon and Kathriguppa has never looked back.

People soon started selling out their houses for commercial property. Land use laws were put aside and residential sites shamelessly used for commercial purposes. A number of people who lived on the ring road built a commercial complex in the front part of their sites and continued to live behind that. From 2000 to now perhaps there hasn?t been a single day when there hasn?t been at least 2-3 construction projects on within 200 meters of my house.

Upendra, probably currently the best-known Kannada actor has constructed a house right opposite mine, and a Big Bazaar right next to his house has completed the ?development? of Kathriguppa. Or so we thought, until we were told that a PVR is coming up in the site next to the Big Bazaar.

There is a factory outlet of every conceivable clothing and footwear brand in the area, and three different pizza outlets have opened up within 100 meters of my house. Add to that the two mega retailers (and a Fabmall a little down the ring road), and restaurants of every possible cuisine. I first saw the impact of IT on the common man at small vegetable shop near my house ? the guy had installed an electronic weighing-cum-billing machine way back in 2002.

Living in this retail haven has completely spoilt me. Despite living in what is supposed to be one of the better localities of Bombay, I find several shortcomings. There aren?t enough restaurants around, I have to walk at least 10 minutes to find a medical shop, all shops close at 9, I have to go a little distance if I?ve to buy clothes? the list goes on.

There might not be parking space outside my house thanks to Upendra and Big Bazaar. We may find it tough to take out our car on Saturday evenings. There might be too much traffic on the roads leading to the place. The roads might be bad. Still, two months after moving out, I still miss Kathriguppa. Though I?m not sure I?ll want to settle down there in the long run ? I think I?d prefer Jayanagar for that.

the other day was cribbing that i haven’t written anything about my job. frankly, i haven’t had the time. this job is intense, extremely high pressure and at any given point of time there are at least half a dozen people bothering you with different things. the hours are long, and sometimes i’m made to work on weekends also, giving me little time to do the things i like to do, such as blogging. today my boss is on leave, so i’ve managed to take a few minutes out.

currently i’m a ‘data monkey’ and spend most of my life writing sql queries. there are a hundred different people who have a hundred different requests and me being in charge of the database have to design the appropriate query, pull out the data, put it in the appropriate format and give it to them. trouble is not too many of these people have used sql themselves, and thus don’t have even a faint idea of what it takes to pull data out of a complex database as i’m doing now. and expect me to meet impossible deadlines which i can’t. and i get badgered from all directions.

every day i wake up and ask myself why i’m doing what i’m doing. i find no answer. two paychecks have been deposited into my bank account, but have made no difference to my life, despite them being fairly substantial. the kind of work i’m doing i know i don’t want to do after this particular assignment is over. i’m not getting the time to do anything i want. i dream of excel sheets daily. this thing seems to have consumed me completely.

the other question i ask myself is, “if not this, what?”. and i’m afraid i can’t find an answer to that also, and that is exactly what keeps me going. i’m getting a fair idea of what i want to do and who i want to be 10-15 years down the line, but i have no clue what step to take right now to get there. the long term goals are the same as they were 7-8 months ago. which was when i decided to chuck my second investment banking job and try for this one. something has gone wrong somewhere.

people say it’s a problem with me that i’m not liking this job. “there are so many others who are uncomplainingly doing the same job”, they point out. “you don’t have the right kind of attitude”. maybe. maybe there’s something wrong with me. or it could just be the case that i’m not fitting in properly. need to figure that out, but don’t have time to stop and think.

my working style is very different from that of most others i know, and this job doesn’t seem to be suited to my style. i’ve talked to my bosses and asked them to cluster work and give me rather than giving it in bits and pieces. “i’m a compiler, not an interpretor”, i’ve told them. no avail. they say they’re the bosses and i should listen to them.

Most people are like Sri Lanka. At least the rest of my team is. When there is a target to be chased, they go all out in the first 15 overs and try to finish off the match by 25. Wonderful method. I’m more like Pakistan in 92. Keep wickets in hand, settle down, reach 100 in 30 overs, 150 in 40 and by then you have enough momentum to get to 250. Difficult to do it efficiently though, when you have someone behind your back who keeps telling you after each over that you’re behind the asking rate.

And yeah, of late Jayasuriya has been getting out early and sri lanka seems to be losing…

today i refused to debug my teammate’s code because he used goto statements. both he and i got blastetd by our boss – he for using gotos and me for being so arrogant!

On this particular project we are handling so much data that it’s infeasible to use excel. I being the compsci guy have been officially appointed as the “data monkey” of the team. and i’m trying to use M$ Access to crunch our data.

now, this is the first time ever that i’m working on a database thingy. frauded through my dbms course in IIT, and since haven’t touched a database with a bargepole. and here i am writing SQL queries day in and day out trying to manage our huge data. and i’m using probably the crappiest of all database management systems.

a few cribs i have about access. firstly, it doesn’t have the count distinct function! a fairly simple but extremely useful query, not having access to that has led me to using nested queries or creation of temporary tables.

secondly, access doesnt allow the concept of views! so i have this set of input tables and this other set of tables in which i store all the primary data and use for my queries. now, since there is no concept of views, i’ve to update all my tables each time a new piece of data comes in!

thirdly, which is the most pissing off thing, access is terrible at nested queries. it has absolutely no idea of this thing called dynamic programming and a query with a single nesting takes over half an hour to process (on a table of 150,000 lines).

i personally think M$ Access sucks, but have no idea of other databases. can someone provide me input on if the above problems exist with other databases also? also, is there some other windows based database which allows import and export of data to/from excel which sucks less than access so that i can use that?

most people in our client site don’t seem to know about the concept of a silent mode in a phone. and on top of that they have these shrill polyphonic ringtones that blare out across the hall; and make sure a meeting is disturbed every five minutes.

disgusting.

French open semis line-up:

Federer (1) vs. Nallapandian (3)

Nadal (2) vs. Ljubicic (4)

The top 4 men’s seeds are all in the semis! Something terribly gone wrong. Wonder when was the last time something like this happened at the French.

Or is this the signal of a wave of claycourters dominating men’s tennis?

Update

A little googling tells me that the last time such a thing happened (top 4 seeds in French semis) was in 1985 – a full 21 years ago!

i’ve noticed this reluctance among north indians a generation or half a generation older than me to give their first names. wonder why. so you have people introducing themselves as “R K Sharma” or even better “Mrs. R K Sharma” where R and K are the initials of the husband of the lady in question!

then, the other day i sent a mail to someone from my client (let’s call him Albert Pinto).

Dear Albert,
PFA some data. Can you do this work for me?

Regards,
Karthik

And our man replies (he’s at least 20 years older than me)

Dear Sir,
please blah blah kindly blah blah blah blah blah.

Regards,
A.S. Pinto

One conversation, several stories