Tales from Ghzbd Vol I

What is more difficult, organizing the commonwealth games or a delhi wedding. Sheila Dixit would have you believe they are quite the same. And I think she is not too far from reality. Before we proceed let me clarify this, I don't have any, and I mean not even an incidental experience in organizing weddings. The support for Sheila dixit isn't politically colored either, it just so happens that for the last one and half months I have been managing a project myself which draws a curious commonality with organisation of a wedding - working with dozens of small-time contractors/vendors.

If you can efficiently manage a project dealing with people who are not induced by money/recognition/threat (yes, we had to play this bluff as well) , who don't even understand the concept of simultaneous activities, who refuse to discuss anything in concrete terms preferring always to maintain a haze ("ho jayega aapka kaam" !), who always seem to be biting more than they can chew then organizing bigger projects with well documented scope, timeline and payment terms is no big deal.

There have been so many specific instances of well planned activities going haywire that I have renounced all faith in project management tools. Many are the tricks these contractors play on you. Ranging from 'i am helpless/my laborers have gone missing' - the most ingenious, you can't help but feel sympathetic - to the most ridiculous 'aujar nahi he/barish ho rahi he'.

And while you think you can play good cop bad cop with them, they are playing you on a different level altogether. The contractor will criticise the lazy laborers while the laborers will crib about what an unorganised fool the contractor is. And this mutual appreciation to disorient you doesn't stop here. While the painter will tell you how shoddy the carpenter's work is, the carpenter will use all his leisure time in pointing out the hundreds of flaws in painting of walls. Needless to mention, had they been in my position neither of them would have paid the other person a single penny for the worthless workmanship.

Of course, no matter how bad the work is if at all there was any work during the day, at e.o.d. you are expected to pay them. Because 'majoor ko dihadi chahiye' otherwise they will stop all work. Not that they will go on an indefinite strike or something, they will just go AWOL, and before you know, the contractor will go missing as well. And if some sunny morning the entire jing bang turns up at the site, you are made to realise that they had not fled its just that the mobile fell into water and wasn't working the entire week.

The one thing I have learnt from my experiences - the scale of a project is immaterial, if you are getting something done always go for turnkey solutions.

Of buliding high expectations

Creative writing, I have always believed is all about timing. And twitter has more than validated the hypothesis. Allow me to explain.

I am an inherently creative person and still somehow I am not very prolific at producing blog entries. One blog post a month just about borders a respectable average. Not to mention that the averaging period is chosen carefully to hide an immensely abysmal performance in the last one year (statistics, lies what is the difference !) . What can be a plausible reason? The Freudian will jump at the naive conclusion that I am deceiving myself - 'has anyone ever complimented you on your creativity, let alone creative writing'! Caution, don't be tempted to accept the simplest explanation (Screw Occam and his rusty razor). So what is the truth.

The truth is that the shelf life of an original idea does not extend beyond a few minutes, seconds in case you awake with a start from the spark of the idea (the latter one is very tricky, not because of 'false awakening' but on account of logistical problems like groping for a pen and paper in complete darkness of night). And therefore, you are more likely to preserve the idea in a scribblar form or worse forget about it than write about it. To conclude, creative writing is all about timing - you should be in a mood to write about an idea or you will never look at it again.

And how exactly has twitter validated the theory? Well it hasn't so far :D It will, in case I start tweeting big time !

The Curious Monty Hall Problem

This one was hidden in my blogs folder as an invisible document for the last four years, discovered it today while reorganising the desktop ! Penned the article after reading the ‘The curious incident of a dog in the night-time’. Found the book an interesting read, partly because I could relate to the mannerism of the protagonist !

In the novel ‘The curious incident of a dog in the night-time’ Christopher Boone tells only one joke. And the joke says that Mathematicians are the ‘best’. Better than economists, and logicians.

Discounting the fact that it was a joke, please bear with the hair splitting analysis. Taken out of context ‘best’ can mean anything, it may mean mathematicians are best at solving partial differential equations which is true (tautological that is). But it may also mean mathematicians are best at understanding purposeful human action, which is not true because economists are best at that.

Now because I like the novel so much and the way the protagonists explains things, I would also explain things in his style of narration.

Beginning of Christopher Boone style narration

Some mathematicians think that they can apply Probability to unique events to make decisions. For example, in the novel ‘The curious incidents of the dog in the nighttime’ Christopher Boone tells an interesting story about The Monty Hall Problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem). The problem is about a game of luck which he tells to show that numbers are not straight and how intuition can be wrong, and this is called an illustration.

He uses probability to justify Marilyn vos Savant’s claim that “you should always change and pick the final door because the chances are 2 in 3 that there will be a car behind that door”. But this is so stupid because it is silly to say that the chances are 2 in 3, since picking up the door is a one off event.

End of Christopher Boone style narration (rather difficult I say!)

If you try to pin down the meaning of the statement ‘chances are 2 in 3’ you really won’t achieve anything but a feeling of futility because in the context of a specific event it does not have any meaning. It is of course true that numbers are not straight and I think to an extent it is because mathematicians want it to be that way.

The statement that “the chances are 2 in 3 that there will be a car behind that door” implies that the specific event of choosing the door is part of a class of events and that 2/3^rd probability implies a frequency of occurrence of a particular event#. But the truth is a person playing the game is not going to play it more than once. So in such a case, does a probability of 2/3^rd play any significance in the decision making process of the person? None whatsoever!

The non-applicability of concept of class probability to case probability situations can be generalized to all situations where a person is gambling. Statistics and probability calculations may comfort a gambler punting on a victory for Australia meeting Zimbabwe but he is still a gambler and the past performance of the two countries still has no bearing on their next match.

#To illustrate the concept of ‘class of events’ and ‘class probability’, visualize a small island where the total population is 1000. For sake simplicity, assume that the population has remained at this level for the last 100 years. It has been observed that for the last 100 years, a total of 10 people die every year on the island. We then say that the number of deaths is a class of events and the class probability is 1%. L.I.C. can come and insure the population against an event of death with a fair degree of certainty that every year it will have to pay to families of 10 out of 1000 people.

This is different from case probability, where there is no class of events and the uncertainty is on account of a lack of knowledge regarding all the factors determining an outcome. In the example of the Monty Hall problem, the uncertainty is arising on account of the players non-knowledge of what is behind the door – a goat or a car.

Expliciting Knowledge

First the big news, I have quit ICICI Bank. I will be self employed for some time before the business grows and I can be an employer as well.

Sometime earlier this year I had decided to write down my experiences in the bank, and since at that point of time I did not foresee myself quitting immediately I did not put myself to do the task. Anyways I guess now is the right time, expect to find a series of sideways posts on the wayside bank.

Working at the bank one of the major time consuming activities used to be reporting data for various purposes. Most of the times it was for regulatory purposes but at times it related to the credit risk as well as business development indicators. The format for collecting the data was unique every time it was reported and almost always there was a feeling among the managers that it was a futile exercise. The main reason for this was that none of the data collation exercises was ever used by the relationship managers to guide them in business development. Collation of credit related data being any help to the credit managers in understanding the risk profile of the portfolio was anyways meaningless as the entity ‘portfolio’ was a) arbitrarily formed and b) quite fluid with companies changing hand every quarter.

So we had a situation where most of the knowledge was implicit and if at all there was an exercise to make it explicit, it was considered a waste of time as it was seldom used to arrive at new insights. Insights which would help the relationship manager take business development decisions or the credit manager to manage the portfolio risk.

Something was amiss and I never applied my mind to figure it out. If it’s alright for knowledge to be implicit in a corporate banking setup then there shouldn’t have been multiple data collation activities every week. And if it isn’t, by now they should have formalized the process to make sure that abstracting insights is the prime motive and equally importantly work is never repeated.

That the business development related knowledge is implicit is beyond all doubt, the credit related knowledge on the other hand is documented and presented on a periodic basis. This narrows down our question, is it necessary to have all the statistics in place related to the clients to take business development related decisions or is it alright to just have a feel of things based on the relationship experience with the Company.

I don’t know the answer, but whatever it is my personal opinion is that the power of data is over hyped and more often than not the real motive behind all data collection exercises is a lack of trust in the decision making of the foot soldier.

The Big Bank Theory

Its almost impossible for me not to talk about something I have been involved with 10 hours a day, 5 days a week for the last 21 months. No I haven’t quit !

So what have I learned. I have learned enough to invent the Big Bank theory:

In ‘Better times’ the perceived credit risk of transactions is lower than the real credit risk.

Converse theorem:

‘Better times’ seem to be better (increasingly) because of the lowered (progressively) perceived credit risk.

Like all profound theories the Big Bank theory is quite a no-brainer, but there’s catch. The catch is that the converse theorem is the real theory, the Big Bank theory being a mere corollary ! Not even a corollary, an observation actually.

Delhi Diaries Volume II

Its been long since Delhi Diaries Vol. I, and being true to myself I will not offer any explanations. So here we have another edition of the Delhi Diaries…not so much on Delhi this time !

Not one of my school essays was decorated with quotes. Originality of thought has always been the primary. Things seem to have changed.

"Everyday I see the mornin' come on in the same old way.

I tell myself tomorrow brings me things I would not dream today."

Originality has eroded, hope creativity weathers the mind-numbing times.

I am a big fan of the ‘unrelated stories coming together to weave a single story’ concept....be it Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty, Amerros Perros or Suraj ka Satwa Ghoda, I have found them all quite interesting.

So it really came as a big surprise when I discovered that three of my favorite hobbies/interests namely Austrian Economics, Wikipedia, and Objectivism were interconnected. While doing a random search on Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia I stumbled across a surprising fact. The inspiration for Wikipedia was an article written by Friedrich von Hayek, protégé of Ludwig Von Mises and the poster boy of Austrian Economics.

If this was not a coincidence enough, the article (The Use of Knowledge in Society) was referred to Jimmy by Mark Thornton, whose articles on Mises Institute have always delighted the intellect. Also as it happens, Jimmy is a self proclaimed "Objectivist to the core", and has named his daughter Kira after the heroine in Ayn Rand's We the Living. If this was not all, in comes Dr. Leonard S. Peikoff, the legal and intellectual heir to Ayn Rand who has publicly denounced Wikipedia for reasons I cant remember and ironically, am unable to wiki about !

It is quite strange why ‘Godfather’ is such a hero of sorts for so many grown ups. I wouldn’t be making a eureka level discovery if I declare that he was nothing more than thug. Then why is he such a hero. To understand, let me pit him against lets say a stereotypical banker who “makes money no matter weather his clients are making or losing theirs” or the stereotypical surgeon whose “job is to treat his subjects and not forge a friendship with them”.

The difference lies in the way each of them treat the “professional life-personal life separation” issue. That’s where the godfathers of the world score over the otherwise honest but heartless professionals. Because the very success of their goon career depends on how good they are in involving themselves with personal lives of people around them !!

Imagine someone writing his autobiography in his twenties ! He could either be basking in the past glory or describing the fruitless journey that life has been. And I wonder which story would be more pitiable. Its probably the first time I am evoking pity to prove a point but I guess pathos is not all that bad a literary tool. Only if used scarcely or for the first time ;)

I think achieving what has driven you the entire life is more tragic then failing to achieve anything. Especially if you don’t have the courage to dream anything bigger and worse still if the goal you achieved itself was a borrowed one. There you are standing at the edge of a cliff with no means of going forward. So you sit there, grow a beard and become a Wiseman. The irony of the situation is that the people who you preach don’t think you are worthy of being a Wiseman and have already taken a different route to climb higher !

A hypothetical discussion of this kind is meaningless and is definitely not my style. I have come across numerous such Wisemen in my life. They generally used to be professors during undergraduate days and now colleagues. The latter being of rarest of the rarest breed, ICICI is not a breeding ground for losers of all species of managers.

Two very potent ways of preventing the disease. One, be quixotic and you will never run out of dreams. Two, choose targets which have the nature of becoming ever more glorious as you reach closer. You’ll never feel like finishing them off, just reaching closer every day.

Today in one of the routine intellectually stimulating ideas exchange/gossip sessions, Ritesh made a very interesting observation. In matters of monetary investments, decisions made by females, more specifically wives are always profitable. The hypothesis is most elegant, because of its simplicity as much as the apparently non-economical (almost freakonomical) nature of the causation.

The reasoning goes thus…since the wife has made the investment she has to discuss it with her circle of friends. And since she has to discuss it with her circle of friends she has to glorify the purchase. And since all other wives have to match or better the acquisition, all of a sudden the number of bidders increase in the market. And in markets where even a small increase in the number of participants can significantly increase prices, the market prices increase in a quantum fashion. And this is how the wife, unaware of her own machinations makes yet another profitable investment.

The analysis only offers an explanation of localized markets (please note the avoidance of the term imperfect markets, an anti-concept ignorant dabblers in economics are so fond of quoting) but I believe the phenomenon can be observed even in markets with a sizeable number of participants.

Copter is by far the most interesting flash games invented by the human race. Its interesting the way you play the game. Either you can focus your eyes on the copter and scan the incoming blocks from the corner of your eyes or you focus your eyes on the incoming blocks and forget about the copter. The later one is the way masters and players in the zone play. You almost overlook the immediate and control what’s arriving.

Its when you are playing with this futuristic approach that you start guessing, almost subconsciously - How to anticipate the position of the next incoming block. Not that it is of much use. Because at times the blocks appear quite randomly, in a very innocent way(you get to score in the thousands) and at other times it seems the game is playing God with you, placing a block right in front of you just when you take a sharp turn.

So you go back to the primary question - is the game built to shuffle the position of blocks according to the movements of copter or do they appear randomly. In other words, what if the person who designed the game knew that people would be anticipating and decided to screw the smartasses. To complete the scenario build up, what if the two strategies are used by the game by turns in a random manner.

So you philosophize for a while and then it strikes you, it is just like the futile destiny debate. You cannot in one lifetime or in case of copter, in one game find out if it is destiny playing with you or you making your own destiny. And any in case the answer to the crucial question needs to be discovered in your lifetime only.

It doesn’t take the wisdom of my words to prove that words like destiny and kismat were put in the dictionary by sinister philosophers to misguide unsuspecting leisure-time thinkers !

Of all the cheap versions of info dumps, taglines commenting on the place one is visiting are the worst!

Last night I had the most Alice in wonderland like dream, full of all kinds of strange looking animals and creatures. And like always I remembered all of it when I woke up. This time however, I decided to write down the details of the dream, right down to the color of the strange looking reptile which was so wonderfully camouflaged by the foliage. But however hard I tried employing all my creative talent, I couldn’t quite translate the dream as I saw it into words ! Reinforces my belief that language was invented to think rather than describe.

Getting up early in the morning is the single most difficult challenge that modern day office goers faces. The most tried and tested means of dealing with the problem is fooling oneself. Instead of getting up at 7 am, you get up 7:30 am. The catch being that your watch is 30 minutes ahead of time. All this works fine with people who are stupid enough to fool themselves, doesn’t work with the smarter ones!

The trick I employ is a bit different, I surprise myself !! Everyday I reset my watch at the time of going to the bed. There lies the greatest deception. Since, I never go to bed till I am in a state of absolute stupor with very little sense of what is going on around me, the degree of tempering is pretty random. I might have set the clock 30 minutes ahead of time or for all I know 15 minutes behind the real time.

Come morning and when the alarm rings, I am usually at a loss figuring out the real time with the add-on doubt about whether I had actually changed the time last night. So my only cue is the fake time. Now as soon as I look at the fake time I am really alarmed (please notice the operative word ;)) because I have to take it as the real time as I cant remember faking it in the first place. And if at all I remember changing the time, I most certainly don’t remember how much of tempering was involved. For all I remember I might have set the clock back a few minutes.

And by the time I get to know the real time I am quite wide awake ;)

Just like Fed chiefs shouldn’t speak too much and too often (Reveals how stupid they are !), movie trailers of definite flop materials shouldn’t be too long. They are more like warnings than advertisements.

And now for something completely different - The idea of a perfect revenge, inspired by the ‘the funniest joke in the world/killer joke’

The person avenged upon is hit but cant figure out if it is an accident or a result of careful planning. And the person who has avenged himself then craftily reveals clues which hints a conspiracy, but again the hints are not sufficient to figure out who is the culprit ! The pleasure is derived not so much from the harm done but the mental agony of the victim in trying to solve the puzzle.

Delhi Diaries Volume I

Observations, ideas, opinions and all that from my 3 month stay at delhi. Stayed in 4 different localities, excluding the office :) – moolchand, karol bagh, lajpatnagar and finally lodi colony….the days spent in lajpatnagar were lonely and therefore bitter ( and expensive – all the money spent on retail therapy !!). Happier times had to come, circumstances have never betrayed a person’s character. So presenting volume I of Dilli experiences, in no particular order…..

If there is one thing professional life has taught me, it is the ability to wade through hazy marshes blindfolded. Shooting in dark is no longer just a metaphor; it’s an everyday chore.

There was a time when I was a huge fan of Gandhi, now he is more like a curious historical figure who occasionally astonishes and frequently amuses me. One great thing I like about him is his courage in relating the most embarrassing incidents of his life. A most potent vaccine, makes one immune to ridicule. And gives one the license to trivialize almost anything and everything that is unreasonably sacred !

In his style, there is one confession I would like to make today. For the first time in more than three months after coming to Delhi I watched a movie in a theatre. And what a movie, not once during the movie I was tempted to come out of the theatre into the lobby and watch the India-New Zealand 20-20 match. Hockey truly scored over cricket this time !

E-mail conversations are far better than gtalk conversations, its time the software geeks find a way of putting display pics and all that jazz into emails. It sure will bring back the old man just like radio mirchi bought back f.m.

The easiest and surest test of whether your headphones are working properly is to play ‘Crimson and Clover’, and if you don’t have this one, any of the Beatles songs will do just fine.

Arvind came yesterday and among other things we shared music. Along came a bunch of Sufi songs. All of them untitled-so much like Arvind ! So browsing through the lot to see what all I got, I realised what a illusion people are living, they think “Yesterday” is the most covered single on earth. Cause they are so wrong. It is ‘lal meri pat’ a.k.a. ‘duma dum mast kalander’, a fact my dear old bhasad gang will readily testify to. For they had to bear with the more than dozen versions of the song, played back to back multiple times on the famed Bangalore-Tamilnadu-Kerala-Goa-Bangalore trip. The worst hit was Jas, his intolerance for my collection of Punjabi songs must have made him suspect even his fraud Surd status :)


On the fifteen minutes walk from my home to the office I pass by a Kendriya Vidyalaya and its such a pleasant feeling watching the children playing in the lawns just before the dull daily routine begins.

If I were to give a single sage like advice from my school life’s experience, it will be this. Never carry anything more than your lunch box in your school bag. If its not too much of a bother you may think of carrying a notebook or geometry box as well.

Today for the first time in life I made a list of all the people I would like to send to Antarctica (or probably a more depressingly inaccessible place than that, the hordes of adventurers have made it more crowded than Delhi’s markets after 9 in the night) if I have the means to. Like all great things that happened to humanity, this one began with a small step. It was, till a few moments back a single person list till I exerted my lazy brains to come up with an extended version with celebrities, cricketers, movie reviewers and others. The most illustrious one is Greg Chappell. Like him, I am quite positive the one person who inspired in me this great idea will also be on many other people’s similar lists.

Maybe she is not that bad, may be its only because she reminds me of my grandmother!!

Yesterday night consuming my customary six-pack of ‘The Simpsons’, in one of the usual unusually twisted episodes Bart has to invent a name to pull off a credit card fraud. And I realised he too like us (me and Keyser Söze) looks at his immediate surroundings to get inspirations of this kind. So I thought it’ll be a good idea to list all the passwords I can remember to see what all accidental inspirations I’ve got in the past couple of years.

Parkavenue (Dad’s shaving cream)
Casio (Digital diary)
Yellowstonefire (Cover story of the natgeo lying on the table)
Kingfisher (Headphones borrowed from Banno stolen from Kingfisher airlines flight reinmbursed from his summers company)
Paoloscali (Arvind’s wallet)
Adapter ( Laptop adapter)
Statistics ( Bulky quant book begging me to pick her up and read a few pages)
Northby,Northwest ( During the Alfred Hitchcock movie season)
Backspace ( Sitting in the computer centre with nothing more inspiring than the one key I use the most)
Cinemaparadiso ( Right after I watched the movie twice, back to back without the subtitles)
Imthewalrus, Walrusispaul (My first set of passwords after coming to Delhi, must have played the song /discussed the Paul is dead urban legend, moments before)

Btw, Bart signed himself as ‘Santa’s Little Helper’, his dog’s name who happened to be loitering in his room at that time !

Is it about the city or just a grand coincidence that everyone around me loves to argue, nitpick will be a better word I guess. But my chief complain is not the hair splitting analyses offered based on groundless assumptions, it is rather the avoidance of people to make a wager on their judgment. Now when I have to assert the superiority of my opinions I drive the other person to take a bet. That way I stand to gain at least something tangible, the bullcrap about ‘learning’ from discussions is just that, bullcrap !

In Delhi the evolution of homo sapiens has taken a different turn. There are not one but three unique species of animals resembling humans. The males, the younger females (a.k.a. homo cuteones) and older females (a.k.a. homo auntyjees). For the sake of maintaining reader interest levels the male species shall be conveniently ignored.

The relationship between cuteones and auntyjees is really intriguing since the cuteones eventually evolve into auntyjees themselves. Comparing this metamorphosis with the more popular one of caterpillars becoming a butterflies will be a blasphemy because the very sight of a cuteone with the auntyjee shudders the observer, it somehow makes you believe in fate !!

So about the relationship between the two species, the phenomenon – the auntyjee culture. The purest breeds of cuteones have never been sighted without the company of the auntyjees. The most popular explanation is that it’s an act of warding off the male species by making them aware of the coming transmutation. But the fundamental error in this approach is quite a no-brainer. In matters relating to cuteones, male time horizon limits to milliseconds.

Like in case of all complex natural phenomena there is an alternate school of thought which maintains that it’s a clear case of ‘Parasitical Psychological De evolution’, an attempt by the auntyjees relive the pre-auntyjee times by hanging around with cuteones !

Different things have different degrees of effectiveness in sending you down the memory lane. For me scents do the trick like no other stimulus. Next come songs, although they never remind you of specific incidents, places, people or moods. Too vague to move you !

Lajpatnagar it seems to me is the most severely sexually deprived locality of Delhi. Two observations to prove my point:
1. The really beautiful girls are never accompanied by their boyfriends, its either their brothers or their moms or both !!
2. Its not just the cycle rickshawalas or the auto rickshawalas checking out every other female…but, every and I repeat every girl checks out all the males their eyes can meet.

Heights of irony – singing out aloud ‘like a rolling stone’ dining alone at Nirula’s, teeming with families and stupid young couples !!