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.