Tag: lifetime

The City Lacks Bars

Yeah you might think I’m crazy to be cribbing like this about Bangalore, supposed to be India’s pub city and all that jazz. But I stick to my statements. Yeah we might have lots of good pubs and lounges but we don’t have lots of good bars.

I was on my way to dinner at Fava at UB City this evening when I noticed the City Bar, and it struck me as to how few such bars there are in the city. Like places where you just go to the bar, get yourself a drink and literally hang around (around random small darshini-style tables) talking to people. I was reminded of my trips abroad, of places like London or New York which are so full of places like this one – where one just goes, buys a drink and hangs around.

My hypothesis of the shortage of such bars got some weight on our way out of Fava when we noticed how full the city bar was. It was like BTS bus 201 in peak hour – there wasn’t even any standing room!

Which makes me wonder why the culture of mid-to-high end standing bars hasn’t taken off in the city, especially considering our glorious tradition of darshinis and of standing bars at the lower segments (I hope you’ve noticed this – every “wine shop” literally doubles up as a standing bar, where people get stuff from the shop in a dirty glass, stand around and quickly gulp down. I must confess I’ve never drank at this kind of a bar).

Is it because the notion of a quick drink isn’t very well defined at the higher segments of our society? Is it because a “quick drink” is associated with the lower end of the spectrum and so the richer people don’t want to indulge in it? Could it be because of the exorbitant price of liquor licenses that makes it uneconomical to serve liquor cheaply enough to get enough crowds to sustain a standing bar? (most shady standing bars don’t have a bar licence; they run on wine shop licenses)

I must admit I’m a bit of a novice at this one (in terms of total quantity of alcohol consumed during my lifetime) but this really intrigues me. Why hasn’t the concept of higher end standing bars taken off in Bangalore? Has it taken off anywhere else in India at least? Again shady bars don’t count.

P Polie Exclusion Principle

The basic concept is that for any given person, no two romantic partners fulfil the same kind of needs.

Let us take all the possible ways in which a romantic partner (since we are talking about multiple partners for the same person, usuallly happening at different points of time in the person’s life, I don’t want to use the term “long-term gene propagating partner”) can help you out. The kind of needs that she can fulfil. Make a list of them, and represent them as a vector.

And to this, add a vector of binaries. Let us call it the “need vector”. You might have guessed that an element of this vector is 1 if the partner fulfils this particular need and 0 otherwise. So for each of your romantic partners (spanning across space and time), construct such a vector. Yeah of course some of these needs are more important than others so you might think you might want to give weights, but that is not the purpose of this exercise.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle in quantum mechanics states that no two electrons can have the same four quantum numbers. Similarly the P Polie Exclusion Principle in romantic relationships states that no two of your romantic partners have the same need vector. That the needs vector of any two of your romantic partners have a hamming distance of at least 1.

This principle has certain important consequences. Given that any two of your romantic partners are separated by a Hamming distance of at least 1 and using the Neha Natalya-xkcd argument, the number of romantic partners you can possibly have in your lifetime is bounded from above by 2^n, where n is the length of your need vector. So contrary to intuition, this shows that promiscuous people actually have a larger set of needs from romantic partners than committed people.