Bangalore Book Festival

So today I made my way to Gayatri Vihar in the Palace Grounds to visit the Bangalore Book Festival, on its last day. It was interesting, though a bit crowded (what would you expect on the last day of an exhibition? and that too, when it’s a Sunday?). I didn’t buy much (just picked up two books) given the massive unread pile that lies at home. However, there was much scope for pertinent observations. Like I always do when I have a large number of unrelated pertinent observations, I’ll write this in bullet point form.

  • There were some 200 stalls. Actually, there might have been more. I didn’t keep count, despite the stalls having been numbered. Yeah, you can say that I wasn’t very observant.
  • All the major bookshops in Bangalore barring the multicity ones had set up shop there. I don’t really know what they were doing there. Or were they just trying to capture the market that only buys in fairs? Or did they set up stall there just to advertise themselves?
  • It seems like a lot of shops were trying to use the fair to get rid of inventory they wanted to discard. All they had to do was to stack all of this on one table and put a common price tag (say Rs. 50) on every book in that collection, and it was enough to draw insane crowds
  • One interesting stall at the fair had been set up by pothi.com an online self-publishing company. I’ll probably check them out sometime next year when I might want to publish a blook. Seems like an interesting business model they’ve got. Print on demand!
  • I also met the flipkart.com guys at the fair. Once again, they were there for advertising themselves. Need to check them out sometime. Given the kind of books I buy, I think online is the best place to get long tail stuff.
  • There was an incredibly large number of islamic publishing houses at the fair! And have you guys seen the “want qur an? call 98xxxxxxxx for free copy” hoardings all over the city? Wonder why the Bajrang Dal doesn’t target those
  • There was large vernacular presence at the fair. I remember reading in the papers that there was a quota for Kannada publishers, but there was reasonable presence for other languages also, like Gult, Tam, Mellu, Hindi
  • A large number of stalls were ideology driven. Publishing houses attached to cults had set up stalls, probably to further the cause of their own cult. So there was an ISKCON stall, a Ramakrishna Mutt stall, a Ramana Maharshi stall, etc.
  • Attendance at most of these niche stalls was quite thin, as people mostly crowded the stalls being run by bookstores in order to hunt for bargains. Attendance was also mostly thin at publisher-run stalls, making me wonder why most of these people had bothered to come to the fair at all.
  • I saw one awesomely funny banner at the place. It was by “Dr Partha Bagchi, the world leader in stammering for last 20 years” or some such thing. Was too lazy to pull out my phone and click pic. But it was a masterpiece of a banner
  • Another interesting ideological publisher there was “Leftword books”. Their two sales reps were in kurtas and carrying jholas (ok I made the latter part up). And they were sellling all sorts of left-wing books. Wonder who funds them! And they were also selling posters of Che for 10 bucks each
  • I wonder what impact this fair will have on bookstores in Bangalore in the next few days. Or probably it was mostly the non-regular book buyers who did business at the fair and so the regulars will be back at their favourite shops tomorrow.

I bought two books. Vedam Jaishankar’s Casting A Spell: A history of Karnataka cricket (I got it at Rs. 200, as opposed to a list price of Rs 500) and Ravi Vasudevan’s “Making Meaning in Indian Cinema”.

How do i describe my job?

One of the “problems” with my job, if I can describe this as one, is that it’s tough to explain my job to a layman. There are multiple levels of disconnects here, and multiple “pitfalls”, if I can call them that. So when someone asks me about my work, it gets tough indeed to describe to any degree of accuracy while at the same time being concise, and at the same time talking in Kannada.

I am a quant at a hedge fund.

My work involves coming up with trading strategies, and then developing them to a level where I can have the ultimate fighter – a computer – to trade using these strategies. Then, I will need to figure out how the computer is going to implement these strategies and this part involves some heavy engineering work. And finally I code. Ok now I haven’t been accurately able to describe in one paragraph, writing in English, about my job. How do you expect me to describe it to the layman speaking in Kannada?

Coding is a part of my job, but I’m not a coder.

I deal with financial products – equities and equity derivatives. But I’m strictly not a finance guy – as far as I’m concerned, each security is just a time series. A time series on which I can trade and make money. In fact, apart from my short stint selling interest rates swaps in London, I haven’t really done any finance. My entire view of the markets is based on my idea that a security is just a tradeable time series. I think I should do a separate post on that. Anyways, I’m not strictly a finance guy also.

One of my degrees is an MBA. A PGDM to be precise, from IIMB. But I’m not a manager also. I don’t manage people apart from myself.  I’m not sure I’ll find that interesting either – I sometimes think managing is too fighter a job for me.

And so on.

And then, I work for a hedge fund. Most people don’e have a clue what a hedge fund is. I sometimes make an approximation and tell them I work for a mutual fund. And immediately I get bombarded with questions like my opinion on whether the markets will go up or down, and about how long the recession is going to last. And then there are those who start telling their sob stories about their investments in the markets when the Sensex was at 20,000 and about how markets can’t be trusted any more.

Another level of contradiction is that I’m based in Gurgaon. All finance companies are supposed to be in Bombay, right? Surely, given that I’m in Gurgaon, I must be doing some back office kind of work?

Last night my uncle was filling up some arranged marriage exchange registration form for me. And he asked me to describe my job in a short phrase. I immediately came up with “trader” and that got quickly shot down since that would give the image of a lala sitting behind huge weighing scales. Next I tried “financial trader” and “quantitative trader”. No go.

Then I wanted the simple “quant”. My highly stud uncle himself had trouble exactly figuring that out, so fat chance anyone would appreciate that. So out again. I relaxed constraints a bit and said “hedge fund professional”. But most people wouldn’t understand “hedge fund”. “mutual fund” was no go for a written form. “quantitative analyst” was considered too country by my uncle. He then asked me my designation. “Associate” doesn’t mean anything, he said and shot that down too.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve unnecessarily complicated life for myself by choosing the path that I’ve chosen. If I were working for some software company I could’ve just written “software” over there and all would’ve been fine. The whole world would’ve understood, or at least claimed to have understood. Or even better, if I were living abroad, I wouldn’t have even been required to say that much. I’d’ve been just qualified as a “foreign huduga”, with most people not even caring for which city I was in.

For the record, my listing application records my profession as “financial services professional”, as country as it sounds. This was the only middle ground where my uncle and I didn’t disagree. And in it went. It increasingly looks like I’ll have to put fundaes to Cesares about why the stock markets have gone down in the last one year in order for them to allow their daughters to marry me. I have half a mind to start describing Ito’s lemma the next time someone asks me where the markets are headed. I’ll probably start off describing to them a random walk. And say that it’s a drunkard’s walk. And perhaps use that to change the topic. I think I might need to start practicing this. In Kannada.

I’m a quant at a hedge fund.

On Booze and Language of Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yede thumbi haaduvenu format is unfair

A month or so back, I had blogged about yede thumbi haaduvenu, a talent hunt show for young singers on ETV Kannada. I was full of praise for the event. About the format. About the way SPB comperes it. About the judging. Organization. And all that. I think I had written that post towards the end of last season. The new season has just begun. And I have a crib. It is not a minor one.

The format has changed. Last time around, it was a “normal knockout”, with round of 16, quarters, semis, final, etc. Each round would have four contestants of which two would progress to the next round and two would get eliminated. It was a nice and clean system – considering that any non-knockout format for a TV show isn’t a good idea.

Now, they have some sort of a serial knockout. Each episode has four kids, of which two get knocked out. The two who survive compete the following week, with two new people. Two out of these four qualify further. And so on.

This might have been an excellent format – if only the players were robots. If only the players didn’t have that human element called “form”. The format as it is right now is heavily biased in favour of kids who join the program in later rounds. Maybe they have been seeded there based on qualification placings. Nevertheless, it is wrong, and puts the kids who join early at too much of a disadvantage.

Kids who join early need to be at their top form for a larger number of episodes than those that join later. Sustaining an above-average performance over a larger stretch of time takes much more effort. You will also need to keep in mind that the pressure to perform in such events is huge. For the kids who join later, however, all it takes is for them to get lucky and produce terrific form for  a handful of episodes and they are through.

I suppose the producers of this event simply didnt’ realize that there is something called uncertainty. They would’ve looked at the format and said “this seems simpler for spectators and anyways the best will have to beat everyone else so this is ok”. I’m sure it the people who came up with this format are a bunch of fools who have no clue about either mathematics or about human tendency. I go back to one of my recent posts and call for the so-called “creative” or “qualitative” industry to cash in on the ibanking bust and take in some quants.

I’m reminded of one of the world chess championship (FIDE) cycles in the late 90s. They had a strenuous knockout tournament for a month to decide the challenger. And the winner of this tournament (Anand) then played the reigning champion Karpov who had been directly “seeded into the finals”. Anand got walloped by Karpov. And he had said something like “this is not fair. I have run the full marathon and in the last 100 meters this guy joins the race. what sort of a contest is this”

The current format of yede thumbi haaduvenu is no different. Now, if only the producers were to have some sense.