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 !!

A tale of 5 cities

The last few months have gone away without any specific interesting incident/profound thought worth writing about. But still when I take a woods view of the experiences at each of the cities I have been to, every city has a unique story to tell, different from others and giving the place a distinct flavor.

Jamshedpur reminded me of the Ahmedabad of 90s. Things that we now take for granted were not readily available then. So when we had to buy a few dozen of dvds there was only one shop in the entire town which we could rely on, not to mention it proved itself truly unworthy of its reputation. The stay at xlri was astoundingly lazy except for a game of football and the dunking war.

Ahmedabad didn’t surprise at all. Felt like running away the moment I stepped on it and yet at the time of leaving the city I wished I could stay for a few more days. The recurring dream made its rare reappearance, this time semi-invited but wasn’t too sticky.

Bombay made me feel like Job of the ‘Book of Job’, and also like Alice of the Alice in wonderland (things that you read about happening to you, only this time in reality). I started to believe that the entire world was conspiring against me. A 5 kg lock with no matching keys to welcome me, a stolen mobile, missed buses, lost camera accessories were a bit too many mishaps for week long stay.

The news of Chennai training came as a pleasant surprise, anything that postponed real work was welcome. The three weeks I spent there fundamentally changed my views about myself. I could actually remember roads and places, never ever have I been so local geography savvy. By the time I left the city I had become an authority on theatres, restaurants, beaches, malls and autowalas of the town. I could speed-sms (without looking at the keypad, of course), a monumental achievement for someone who had cumulatively written not more than a dozen messages. I discovered my amazing ability to converse with people in languages mutually alien to each of us. Hours of casual talk with fishermen of Pondicherry and equally long haggling sessions with autowalas readily come to mind. I discovered that in my case, first impressions are never the lasting ones and in all likelihood they are quite the opposite. The last one sums up my evaluation of the city pretty well, the first impression not so difficult to guess ;)

Delhi has been strange, difficult to understand. It is good and bad to you alternatively, not unlike Eric Idle in the ‘meat sketch’ and the places seem familiar and yet new at times. A tough nut, will crack it sooner than later.

The return of the critic

It’s been quite a while since I last criticized the academicians. In today’s rather dull and monotonous ‘Infrastructure Appraisal, Financing, Privatization and Regulation’ lecture that dormant gene was once again activated. If you look at it, I have a tendency to nitpick on the concepts taught in subjects dealing in one way or the other with the institution of government, probably because ideas related purely to the art of business can’t be fundamentally incorrect.

So there I was sitting in the front, a certain fate if you arrive late in the class. The words of the professor somehow managed to register and the first thing I heard sounded like finest quality bullshit.

Here it goes, some researcher trying to figure out the inputs for growth, regressed the inputs such as capital, labor and so on against the dependent variable growth. And what he found was that a certain portion of the growth was not explained by these inputs. So that unknown something resulting in growth was ascribed to technology and infrastructure. And he proclaimed in the proud voice that infrastructure has no direct relationship with growth and that it is a ‘catalyst’ to growth. Now this train of logic is a perfect example of the result of a f***d up epistemology. The epistemology in this case is “ascertaining a thing by non-knowledge”. You in a most arbitrary manner ascribe an unknown to infrastructure and not just that, also mirror the properties of the unknown (Properties again deduced from your own ignorance) to infrastructure.

Without getting into the specifics, let me just leave you with the simple truth that in the sphere of economic calculation by the private enterprise, all inputs or costs are included even if it is such infrastructure such as education and a direct relationship is sought to be established. To deny this will be tantamount to ignoring the role of the ubiquitous H.R. department!!

Bangkok Diaries

Monday 4th dec
Thais are a perfect example invalidating my childhood theory that people close to the equator are black and vice versa. And the girls have the most beautiful legs which they flourish so casually that you can’t help notice them shopping in malls, traveling in the sky train, walking through Siam centre, roaming in the streets, learning to swim in Pattaya, shopping in Mo Chit weekend market……

Tuesday 5th dec
Soggy sugar boys
Thai food has only two characteristics, it’s soggy and it’s sweet. The first one usually implies a third characteristic, solid food is almost always cold. Solid food by the way is not their style, they not unlike South Indians soak their stuff in loads of water but unlike them they use some other fluids as well. Fluids extracted from such common species as the fish and prawn to the not so common octopus and jelly fish like creatures.

Thursday 7th dec
Traveling in the taxi to the office today, I had this sudden realization that although there was a huge traffic jam, there was not a single sound of honking. Can’t really place it correctly but had this feeling some days back traveling by the sky train. Scanning the city landscape standing besides the door, I was almost shocked to remember all of a sudden that the train was full of passengers….although the only faint voice I could hear was that of my friend’s mp3 player, which was playing too loud for my comfort.

The Thai people are a bit too polite and non-argumentative. They won’t haggle with you in the bazaars, which makes life really miserable for people like me who derive a greater amount of pleasure in bargaining than in the ownership of the loot.

Saturday 9th dec
For some strange reason you start to wonder why four fifth of all the airport employees are female. Coming out of the airport you see the people on the street are overwhelmingly of the fairer sex and how fair!! Their universities have a higher number of girls, all the shops are manned, I mean womanned by females, and all occupations except taxi and tuk-tuk driving are a girl’s business. So it didn’t come as a surprise when I was told that male infanticide is a common practice in Thailand.

Saturday 9th dec
What do you do when you are a vegetarian in both the literal as well as the figurative sense of the meaning and land up in a country like Thailand which is predominantly non-vegetarian? You can basically do nothing much. You survive on French fries and hotdogs without the sausages in them and goes without saying, you are highly opinionated on issues of moral conduct. Makes me wonder about the different thought processes guiding people in deciding about doing something which in their opinion is probably inappropriate but still quite a few people do it.

Sunday 10th dec
Distantly remember back in engineering college a sage like voice declaring that you can’t consume a non-vegetarian diet daily, the anatomy of Indian humans have not really evolved to digest such food. How ignorant can such a person sound to someone who has lived for even a week in Thailand? In Bangkok a vegetarian living in KritThai Mansion would typically burn around 1.35 times the calories he consumes by walking miles in search of the elusive stuff. The coefficient increases as you move away from the location specified earlier.

Sunday 10th dec
Had my first hot water bath, the last few days were spent wondering if the Thais do have the concept of ‘hot’ at all. Must admit they had almost convinced me of their complete avoidance at creating anything hotter than the ice that they use more abundantly than water. An exception and a delectable at that would be the females in the country. Any attempt at describing their sculptured figures would betray the very purpose.

Sunday 10th dec
Thai people have an atrocious accent, the Thai girls validate the saying that girls must be watched and not heard. This is all true when they are speaking Thai, and not unlike all generalizations this one has its limitations. The same Thai girl whom you would secretly thank for having the politeness for speaking in a low voice will pleasantly surprise you when she says ‘extra cheese’ or ‘River Kwai’. The Thais speak English in a curiously elegant manner. They can’t pronounce certain phonemes and lay extra emphasis on certain others, making their sentences a treat to the foreigner’s ears.

Monday 11th dec
The trip to Thailand has forced me to revisit some of the most fundamental questions I used to raise in my childhood. Like how on earth can girls wear skirts in winters and not feel cold. But this question pales away in comparison to the graver ones bearing greater economic and socio-political significance like, why on earth would one like to buy things which he would never have the opportunity to use. The case in point being the large inventory of warm clothing displayed in each and every shopping mall of Bangkok. Thailand as explained by the marketing director of our client company has only 3 seasons, hot hotter and hottest. Fortunately we landed here in the hot part of the climatic cycle. The climate is pretty much like that of Ahmedabad in springtime. So am feeling quite at home.

Tuesday 12th dec
The incredible ability of Indians to adapt to alien conditions never stops to amaze me. Here we are, not even a week in Thailand and seems like we have adopted the new place as our own. Even the alien language which most of the times is the greatest hurdle now sounds so familiar, the special case in point being that of Deuri, one of the frontiersmen in our group of twenty. Now I am not sure if it’s his addiction to the T.V. but every morning Deuri gets up at 8 to watch his favorite Thai sitcom followed by some Asian games update and matinee stuff. By now he is updated on all the plots and subplots of all of his sitcoms and is quite content with the limited set of channels. Makes me wonder why the hell the Thais so bad at are spoken English, when a good chunk of their economy relies on tourism!!

Tuesday 12th dec
Traditional Thai music, an oxymoron!!
The music scene in Thailand is quite vibrant, live music in the bars, on the television, on F.M. radio and on the thousands of cheap mp3 players. Perhaps that’s the reason why so far I haven’t had any opportunity to listen to traditional Thai music. Not unlike India the music here is no different from the contemporary factory finish stuff. If you place two televisions with back to back music playing on the Thai MTV and Indian MTV the difference will be extremely difficult to spot from a distance. Everything is the same, right from the style of the music to the smallest detail like the haircut of the singer. By the way a more striking similarity between the two countries in the broad category of commercial works of art, and which came as a rather pleasant surprise was the desi nature of advertisements on T.V. The ads are really creative and have this universal appeal with a local and rustic touch, but the only problem is that these commercials won’t show the product even once during the entire act!!

Wednesday 13th dec
In the entire light hearted story that life generally is, suddenly out of nowhere comes that agent of devastation which pierces your soul so deep to paralyse you emotionally. For me these agents of emotional instability are those recurring dreams. Nobody invites them, despite the contrary myth that you dream about things that you think before sleeping, doesn’t apply to the damn recurring kinds. And you can’t forget them at will. And I should warn you against naturally assuming that the dreams are of the macabre kind, they are not. On the contrary they more likely to be labeled beautiful by someone else, its just that they are too emotionally powerful. The emotions which one normally doesn’t feel when he is awake and sane, the ones which a person with my kind of humor will find rather amusing.

The situation worsens; the feeling drags on if you are alone and have nothing to divert your mind to. And it couldn’t have gotten worse today, getting up in the middle of the afternoon to find myself alone in the hotel room with just a stupid television set to give me company. Well here it comes, the knock on the door. The cleaning lady comes in and I am forced to take my lazy self out of the room. What a relief!!

Of mystical healing and historians

The office seemed to be very spacious. See-through class rooms with projectors, neat furniture and all. The reception guy promptly asks if we are some relatives of the director, I wonder if he was told that we were expected or was used to it.

The conversation starts flowing, the central theme being the enterprising Gujarati and his grand ambition- going abroad. You know Pappu uncle’s institute helps the Patels and the shahs reach their destinations via the legitimate route…he teaches spoken English.

In the flow of the casual talk he happened to mention that there was this seminar in some American university about India, an American lady presented her research on the tradition of mystic healing in India’s remotest places. Apparently the fact that there are people in America who are interested in things which we take for granted amazed both him and papaji.

Being the typical engineer-manager that he is, Pappu uncle went on to dissect the issue analytically, analyzing cases from real life and came to the conclusion that whether or not faith healing is genuine, the kind of faith people have in it demands a closer look at the rural India its superstitions, rituals and ceremonies from a different perspective. A perspective different from that of a person who has spent his entire life in some metro city, indifferent to the realities of the medieval world of Indian villages. Agreed, but then the discussion digressed and the eagerness to examine the issue was substituted with a subtle endorsement of the belief in mystic healing.

Why did that happen? I don’t know and I don’t care to find out either. But I can’t help relating the incident with a general observation, whenever a historian is studying a person, an era or civilization he is more likely to eulogize it than objectively evaluate it.

taglines

Thought a random selection of taglines on my gtalk would make for an interesting read. In fact the selection is made random by gtalk, which i wrongly beleived would remember all the taglines for me.

I doodle therefore I think (Doodito ergo Cogito)

Strategy and chess is for grandpas... young men play football and experiment

Trust any song with a monkey or horse in its title...it will rock you!!

There is this peculiar thing about Rolling Stones' songs....you need to do some priming, play the same song in a loop and after a while you are ready to enjoy any damn song by them

All of you who keep saying women can't be understood....welcome another member in the league

Reason no. 1 why I hate the way rural marketing is taught - "a category established by negative definition cannot convey anything of analytical substance about the items herded into it"

The complex workings of the dreaming mind never cease to amaze me (read awaken me with a start). Someday either I am going to get a Nobel or an Oscar because of it, by the rate I am savoring thrillers... Oscars seem more like it. After all it’s just a matter of inspiration!!

Two people arrive at the police station at the same time. One of them has engineered his own arrest, the other one is a witness for a crime committed by himself....timed to happen at the same time.....both of them equally insane and with an equally interesting and intricate story to tell.....stories which will weave another story, a story which will find its own plot and reveal itself in reality.

To all the cynics of the world.....watch 'Big Fish'.
"Tidal waves don't beg forgiveness. Crashed, then on their way. Father he enjoyed collisions; others walked away"

you just cant figure out

The wine was flowing, literally……

…………. Once again I demonstrated my lack of knowledge of all things which have alcohol in them, except of course the most exotic of cough syrups which I have had the opportunity to taste on several occasions. Trying to get a feel of the thing I shook it a bit, and to my surprise the bloody thing came frothing out of the bottle, spilling all over the floor. By the way the thing doesn’t taste any different from a cough syrup.

But this all is not important, what is important is the intellectually stimulating discussion which followed after the cleaning. The four of us decided on watching a movie, as the snacks kept in Lukhi’s room were perishing away. I happened to mention that I want to watch ‘The making of the mahatma’. As if that was not enough I stroke the stones again to throw in the spark, “The life of Gandhi was pretty interesting while he was in South Africa. Although some of the ideas that motivated him were not correct, the consequences of his actions were all good.”

I love discussions; they help me make others understand things correctly ;) But then there has to be a common basis for the discussion. In this particular case, as we were trying to evaluate Gandhi as a person, there can be no discussions if the other person asserts that he can not be evaluated at all. Just because he did all kind of things in his life time and half of them were good and the rest not so good. And that it is kind of futile to discuss and make value judgments on a person who died more than 50 years ago because the conditions back then were pretty different. In short, there is no way you can judge a person, situations always keep changing.

Now I can go on spending another hour describing what is involved in judging a person, both on the basis of his actions asam well as his ideas and convictions, but feeling lazy. Besides I have no intention of boring you with didactic monologue. Will leave you with this insightful quote by Leonard Peikoff:

“Justice — being an aspect of the principle that every cognition demands an evaluation — requires moral judgment of men and their works across-the-board, with no areas of life excepted or exempted”.

Btw couldn’t resist mentioning this interesting observation. Gandhi although loved to call himself a very honest person, was if you examine a little deeply neither truthful nor dishonest but quite arbitrary. By arbitrary I mean belief in ideas not out of reason but blind faith. The mere fact that he believed in God illustrates the truth of the observation.