The Lone Footballer

math in madness

2011-08-13T22:50:00.000-07:00

The cult of Andaz Apna Apna continues to impress and I have done my bit towards its continuing popularity. So I was watching it for the umpteenth time yesterday when I discovered a hidden mathematical message in the movie. It was almost like figuring out the mathematical references in Alice in wonderland.

The scene I am referring to is where Amar while recounting the fictitious Mohan Bagan football match shuffles the poisoned glass of juice (sharbat e jannat :D) with the non-poisoned glasses and gives all of them back to everyone. As it happens, in the end either Bhalla or Robert have the poisoned juice while the others evidently having drunk the non poisoned ones. At this point Bhalla swaps his drink with Robert.

Now this is a variant of the Monty Hall problem. With a twist. Bhalla’s decision to swap the glass turned out to be wrong, reinforcing my opinion.

Enough with the diaries already (go stream of consciousness way)

2010-08-20T13:44:00.000-07:00

Have’nt written in a long time, not like I haven’t got any ideas to put down on paper. I guess it’s visiting the whole perishibility of ideas concept again. Gotta make the most of a single idea. Makes me wonder, when is the right time to pick a unified philosophy of life (assuming of course the need to have one). This is not unlike the question one would face in a hypothetical social setup where you only get to choose your life partner once in a lifetime. It’s another matter, the situation described is not so hypothetical either in practical life or in the realm of a purely imaginary construct (‘life partner once in a lifetime’, get it?).

Have’nt written in a long time, not like I haven’t got any ideas to put down on paper. I guess it’s revisiting the whole perishibility of ideas concept again. Like it’s déjà vu all over again. Like you build redundancies and then one fine day get confused which version is which and in a rage delete everything. Memory loss is an over-psyched fear. I on the other hand almost find it a romantic idea. A clean slate, tabula rasa, no emotional baggage, no worrying about the baggage retrieval system they’ve got at Heathrow.

PS: Cultural references are italicized.

PPS: Discovered yesterday, I share the habit of ending a ‘letter’ with a post script with the great Marx (of the Groucho variety).

Tales from Gzbd - Vol III

2010-05-27T03:28:00.000-07:00

There was a time during early nineties when I used to watch all international cricket matches, including those of India. I used to admire the West Indies team the most. I was familiar with the bowling style of all the bowlers and could mimic them all including the likes of Paul Adams. You see, it was the nineties and I don’t know about others but I found cricket interesting mostly because of bowlers #.

Hero cup changed it all; the pure love for the game was tinged by nationalism. Not only would I root for the Indian team fanatically but gradually stopped watching neutral matches. This was not all, because the prime motive for watching cricket was to see India win the match, I would promptly switch off the TV as soon as I was reasonably convinced the match was beyond India (the strategy worked perfectly well for me except for the India -Pakistan quarter finals in 96). This for all practical purposes meant switching off the TV whenever Tendulkar got out.

The naive sense of patriotism was shattered in 2000 when Azharuddin and Co. were implicated in the match fixing scandal and I more or less stopped taking any interest in the sport. A year later I moved out of home and the next 6 years were spent without much exposure to the box.

IPL revived my interest to a great extent. I guess part of the reason was the flexibility it afforded, I could cheer Rajasthan (home team)/Delhi (home team)/ Bangalore (home team)/ Mumbai (Tendulkar). Modigate and the apparent match fixing in the 2010 season final have tainted the game but I don’t mind. I don’t find match fixing repulsive; in fact I have already accepted it as an integral part of the game – as long as the matches are close and hard fought. So much so that I secretly wish there would two different groups of match fixers in every match, bribing their respective sides. That would be a real test of losership, not to mention acting skills as well.

# And Tendulkar. I find it annoying that no one calls him Tendulkar anymore.

Some more on cricket and childhood memories.

Although I wasn’t a big fan of Prabhakar and in fact hated his bowling action (I still maintain he used to chuck) I secretly thanked him every time I used his example to refute the alleged cricket rule that one can’t open the batting as well as bowling in a match.

In ‘The Adventure of the illustrious client’, one of the characters says “….and that the opinion of all of the world is no more to me than the twitter of those birds outside….” What a remarkable anachronic coincidence, describing the opinion of the world in terms of tweets!

Did you ever notice how significantly different a choreographed dance you watch in a movie appears from the video of the exact same dance at the time of shooting. They look quite different; let me assure you that in case you haven’t had the opportunity of watching one of those movie previews where the director ~~mostly~~ only discusses song choreography and the exotic locations where the songs were shot.

Nothing scandalous there, the problem really is as follows. Remember how the enlightened (is that the right description?) Neo all of a sudden could ‘see’ the matrix in its real form – rows and rows of binary digits, that’s exactly how I feel now. Every time I see a touched up dance video in a movie I ‘see’ the crude live shooting of the dance on the sets. Stupid excess knowledge.

When I write my first novel#, I will either keep the last few pages of the book blank or keep a short story at the end of the novel. I wouldn’t like my readers to see the climax coming.

As an aside, there is no sadistic pleasure like the pleasure in reading out aloud the climax of novels others are reading. I like to believe that it’s this sinister temptation and not incompetence which is the reason why Indian reviewers do little more than spew out spoilers.

# No, it will not be a campus or corporate life novel. I guess it is the facebook syndrome – people honestly believe their life is interesting and others will be interested to know about the finer details.

Who would have ever guessed that the corporate department invented to improve employee productivity would evolve into the least productive of all departments? I wonder if there is any research which studies the productivity of hr department. More specifically if someone has enquired whether it’s the right aptitude for the profession which results in a certain personality types going for this career or is it the work and the work ethos of the hr department which moulds the personality of those who choose this career.

The not so recent SachinisGod trending topic set me thinking - I can not revere anyone, let alone worship. If Tendulkar (the doer type) doesn’t play the right shot it’s incompetence and if he does...…well that was the way he should have played it, so what’s the big deal.

Applies as much to the thinker types. If they are wrong (in my assessment, of course) they are idiots and if they say something new and true…well how difficult was that to figure out? In case you are wondering - what if they say something which I don’t understand? Well I ignore them; if they can’t express it in a manner intelligible to me they are not lucid and therefore must be wrong.

I am not a secretive person, in fact I am quite the opposite. However, I do treasure the luxury of dialoguing with myself (not aloud), sometimes even when I am in the company of others. I know its not considered civil, but does it give others the right to ask outrageously personal questions like ‘what are you thinking?’ or insinuate telepathic abilities by uttering axiomatic statements – ‘I know you are thinking about something’.

So last week turned out to be the detective week, reread ‘The casebook of Sherlock Holmes’ and Poe’s August e Dupin stories and started watching ‘Monk’. That’s when the series of coincidences (just coincidences, ‘there are no small coincidences and big coincidences’ ;)) started.

After I watched Monk for the first time, the next two movies I saw were ‘Searching for Bobby Fischer’ and ‘A life less ordinary’ respectively and both of them have cameo appearances by Tony Shalhoub (Guy who plays Monk’s). A few days later I watch ‘The Mom and Pop Store’ (Seinfeld Season 6) where the whole episode revolves around George buying a used car previously owned by Jon Voight (except that its not the actor Jon Voight but some dentist John Voight) and guess what, the next movie I watch is ‘Heat’ starring Jon Voight.

So keeping in mind an extreme version of Rava’s maxim – there are no coincidences, this is my interpretation of the events – the frequency of a person observing an obscure thing (obscurely placed in the later encounters) is inversely proportional to the exponent of time elapsed after the first encounter with the said thing.

Default food preparations

Milk – Hot

Roti – Buttered

Cooked vegetables – With gravy

Sandwich - Has lettuce and onions

Lime water – Sweet

Gol gappe - With sweet chatni

I hate all these preparations. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Non native mathematician’s problem statements

2010-04-15T06:05:00.000-07:00

The first one is inspired from observations; the second is a bit more hypothetical. Needless to add, I think the second one is more difficult to solve and has more profound implications. I should be able to derive the results myself (at least the first one) having read statistics and probability distributions. However, I haven’t quite used that knowledge in more than 3 years now. Hence the title.

Das Bus problem

There is a route along which buses ply. There is a pickup and a drop point as well as a bus stop just around a kilometer from the pickup point. The fraction of passengers boarding from the bus stop is smaller. The commuters arrive at the bus stop individually or in groups, in any case the drivers don’t know where they come from or what their traveling habits are. The frequency of buses plying on the route is uncertain, also there is a likelihood of the coming bus at the bus stop to be fully occupied as it may have already picked up enough commuters from the pickup point. The passengers are not allowed to board fully occupied buses. Commuters want to minimize the wait time at the bus stop, there being no other quality criterion.

Some of the bus drivers decide one fine day to start plying between the middle of the route bus stop and the drop point. A week down the line they are all flustered. They face a peculiar problem. Since there are no bus stops on their route they have to make sure that they pick all their passengers from the bus stop. The commuters however, are not willing to wait for the bus to be fully occupied. They find it better to wait for the incoming bus and hop into it. But some of the bus drivers are of the opinion that if the passengers decide to board the parked bus the wait time will in fact be shorter – just that the commuters don’t want to take that chance and therefore end up waiting longer for an incoming bus with vacant seats.

Who is right? Who is wrong? And what is the outlook for the bus drivers? #

Strings of failure

A category of events (Let’s call these financial defaults by companies) is preceded by one or more of ‘n’ separate and identifiable events (Let’s call these as the causes). For the sake of simplicity, assume that all the causes are endogenous. Therefore the characteristics of each of the causes can be expressed as a set of performance indicators. Further assume that the performance indicators can be expressed in the form of cardinal numbers. Further, threshold values can be assigned to the performance indicators such that a fall in their value below the threshold value is occurrence of the cause.

The hypothesis is that there are strings of causes in every financial default and there is a certain degree of chronological order in the strings.

# If the first thing that comes to your mind is “please specify the data” you have missed the point altogether.

Economic Myopia

2010-03-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

One of the first articles I read as part of the Marketing Management course curriculum at IIMB was ‘Marketing Myopia’ an HBS article written in 1960 by Theodore Levitt. An influential article in its time it suitably impressed the novice me as well. The theme of the article is that companies should look beyond the obvious (their existing narrowly defined markets) and look for more opportunities by looking ahead in future and defining the markets as broadly as possible.

Being a student of Austrian Economics I was amused that the idea of looking beyond the obvious while readily accepted by the Marketing profession was shunned by the entire economist community (aren’t we all Keynesians) when in fact the idea was conceived much earlier in the field of economics (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/That_Which_Is_Seen,_and_That_Which_Is_Not_Seen)

Almost all the post mortem analyses of boom and bust cycles are focused on the asset class where the bubble burst, despite the fact that in each boom and burst situation it was a different asset class which tanked. There is no problem with such analysis, if and only if it is seen as a starting point. But without exception most of the economic commentators stop short at understanding the reasons why the particular asset class suffered (CDOs/Tech Stocks/Emerging Market Bonds/Oil etc) or even worse why a particular financial institution sank #.

Such concretization is not very useful as there are thousands of asset classes (and new financial instruments keep emerging) and if the economists keep their understanding limited to what went wrong with a particular asset class at a particular point of time in history the realisation that had it not been mortgages, the cheap money would have found its way to create some other asset bubble would never dawn upon them.

What is the solution to this economic myopia? The traditional and boring one is to think in terms of abstracts, which I think is a bit difficult because “theory is not really tangible and concrete”. I am tempted to add how much I hate such proud platitudes as “economics is all gas; you need to look at the real data” and why concretized thinking is the core problem in economics, but I will not.

A more colorful solution and this comes from a person who himself doesn’t believe much in economic theory but despite his ignorance of economic theory he is still to an extent immune to economic myopia because of his habit of visualizing ‘alternative histories’, the habit of not looking at a ‘realized outcome’ without reference to the ‘unrealized outcomes’.

But again, colorful as it may seem his is not the best way to prevent economic myopia. Precisely because there is no enquiry into the underlying factors which lead to the one ‘realised outcome’, the fact that he doesn’t proceed any further, choosing rather to label the ‘generator’ unfathomable. I guess the reason is his nihilistic approach to acquisition of new knowledge, his popperian view of the world.

# I however do concede that such specific enquiries into the causes of busts have a certain value, the same value that reading history has. Barnett Hart’s thesis on the failure of CDOs is the most coherent historical account of the 2007 depression that I have come across so far - http://www.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/students/dunlop/2009-CDOmeltdown.pdf

The Elevator Thumb Rule

2010-03-07T01:26:00.000-08:00

I have been witness to an interesting social experiment for the last 6 months. It has made me realize that we are living in a society full of idiots who are surviving only because the world around us doesn't require them to think for survival.

The setting:

I stay in a multi-storey building, so you have a lift in it. Now as usual there are two buttons – one pointing up or inverted V shaped (I’ll call it UP) and the other below it pointing downwards or V shaped (I’ll call it DOWN). There is no written instruction about which one to press for going up or down. The location of the lift can be seen in the display.

For a person operating the lift for the first time there are two possible ways of going up from the ground floor – you either press UP - ‘I want to go up’ or you press DOWN - ‘I am calling the lift down’.

The elevator is indeed programmed to operate as per the first rule and not the second. However, because the lift can not read your mind it will open up in front of you no matter which button you press.

So even if a person on 5th floor presses the UP button when he wants to go to ground floor the lift will nevertheless come to 5th floor if the lift is at a lower floor and is stationary or going up. It may then continue to move upwards if it was already moving in that direction (Even if the person on the 5th floor instructs it to go down to the ground floor, quite logically) or wait for the 5th floor person’s instructions.

The observed data:

I have made close to 500 observations so far of more than 100 different people operating the lift and in more than 80% of the cases the buttons were pressed incorrectly. That is:

When on the ground floor, people always press the DOWN button to go up and
When on their respective floors, people always press the UP button to go to the ground floor (when the lift is on a floor below them)

The data as provided is completely objective with if any only a minor error of estimation.

My reactions:

At first I was plain disgusted at this stupid behavior. But later I realized that probably they are operating the lift for the first time and so haven’t yet figured out the right way to do it. But even after a few months the behavior wasn’t changed a bit, if only the incorrect behavior became more prevalent over time. Now I was perplexed – How can all the people be fooled all the time when there is no one to fool them?

From the little knowledge I have gained* about the use of heuristics by acting men, I think people form thumb rules and work according to those till the established norms are challenged by an ‘adverse event’. An equivalent of the ‘adverse event’ in a purely logical process would be – a contradiction. However, as opposed to a contradiction which may be trivial yet by its very existence sufficient to falsify a hypothesis, the ‘adverse event’# has to be significant enough to force a rethinking of the thumb rule.

So I kept condoning these little illogical acts witnessed everyday assuming that even if people operated the lift incorrectly it did not affect their lives in a significant manner. That bounded rationality saves them from overusing their brains. That their brains are hardwired to tolerate minor inconsistencies in the otherwise extremely regular workings of a lift (an artificial thing) as their forefathers had no regularity of events in their lives (except for the dawn and dusk and seasonality in climate).

But then one fine morning as I entered the lift to go down from the 9th floor to the ground floor the other occupants of the lift, a 5 yearish boy and his mother looked quite agitated. The mother addressing me complains, “As it is we are getting late, why then did the lift have to come up instead of going down!” And then it hit me, if this wasn’t an adverse event what would be? The same evening while going up from the ground floor the lift stopped on one of the floors and after the gentleman entered in, the elevator’s upward journey visibly shook him. Not to mention the realization did not dawn on him.

So after all, the ‘adverse event’ did not result in a change of heuristic. Why? After much thought I realized that it is possibly because people are not aware they are using a heuristic. The analogy in the logical/scientific process would be this – a hypothesis can only be tested using evidence if the hypothesis is identified as contingent – contingent on its validity (or invalidity/falsification). If the assumption is not recognized as an assumption and is taken to be axiomatic there is no way for the reasoning to be tested in light of a contradiction.

So what is happening here in this bizarre building is people have formed an extremely sticky heuristic which no amount of confusing behavior by the lift is able to change. Because people are not conscious of their reliance on heuristics.

Nice, neat and clean conclusion. But wait a second! What explains the high incidence of use of the incorrect heuristic?

If people are relying on heuristics which have no basis, shouldn't there be an equal incidence of correct and incorrect behavior? Why this bizarre tilt towards incorrect behavior? I had to grapple with this paradox for a few days till the eureka moment** came to me a yesterday. The high incidence is linked to the gradual increase in prevalence of incorrect behavior mentioned earlier - People were pressing the wrong button simply because others were too !! The heuristic has remained stikcy because everyone is following it at the same time notwithstanding the sporadic occourances of 'adverse events'.

So people are in fact aware of the use of heuristic ('Calling the lift'), they are either unable or unwilling to recognize the 'adverse events' as contradictions - I don't know which one!

*I have no formal knowledge of heuristics; all of it is just refined first hand observation.

# I have another term for the ‘adverse event’ – the ‘tongue burning experience’, I think this term is easier to visualize and connect.

** Personally I prefer to call moments of such revelation 'aqaba moments'. Remember the scene in Lawrence of Arabia when T.E. Lawrence spends the entire night cogitating till early morning when the crossing of Nefud desert occors to him.

Three Mood Cycles

2010-01-30T23:17:00.000-08:00

A little known fact about myself revealed to me very recently is that I am a man of dual emotions. Two emotions that’s it. No fewer no more, contrary to the commonly held notion among friends that I know only one emotion – laughter!

The two emotions are extreme happiness and mild sadness and as a corollary there are three moods one can find me in - extremely happy, mildly sad (it doesn’t show) and busy. Yes, there is no typo in the last sentence the third mood is busy. The mood cycle again flows pretty er cyclically. The mildly sad mood lingers for some time before I make myself busy and then once I am exhausted the extreme happiness mood takes over.

The more I think about it, the three mood framework seems applicable in increasingly more kinds of situations. Or may be it is similar to the tendency to detect symptoms when one suspects to be suffering from a disease, a force fitting tendency that is. Assuming that there is no force fitting bias at play, another interesting observation comes out – the three mood cycle has meta-versions as well.

It’s the existence of meta-versions which probably establishes the validity of three mood cycle hypothesis, because they are observed over a longer time period and therefore are free of local stochasticity#

Since the above mentioned revelation, I have tried reviewing my life events to understand this unique psychological hardwiring. With little success. The main reason being as far back I can remember (all the way back to when I was three years old) is that the duality of emotions has been pretty much there. No evolution/life changing event whatsoever! Perhaps the following additional facts hold the key:

Both the mildly sad and busy states are marked by extreme inertia*
Mildly sad state is characterized by outward calmness but a high degree of internal unrest
All Ideation happens during the early phase of busy mood
Busy mood begins on its own and is not assisted by any inspiration acquired in the mildly sad period
The transition from extremely happy to mildly sad mood is quite sudden and yet the change is almost unnoticeable
The intensity and more importantly the time period of busy stage determines the time duration of mildly sad period. Much like the excesses of the Government during boom time determining the intensity and duration of recession.

Every once in a while one of my friends would ping me to inform he/she read some of my blogs (for the first time) and that he/she thinks I am different person when I write, ~~especially~~ only the serious kinds. The humorous ones are fine with them they concede. The three mood cycles therefore may shock those who know me well. To be honest I was also shocked a bit. But I think it’s a good discovery, it’s interesting to know there are so many things I don’t know myself about!

#One such meta cycle fitting neatly with the hypothesis has been observed in the wake up moods for the last couple of years with the second cycle starting some time in January last year. The mildly sad mood has continued for more than a year now and it seems to be making way for the busy mood, hope this state continues for a long time – in the previous cycle it lasted for only 4 months or so.

*For those who are puzzled – a body is in a state of inertia if it’s resting or moving at a constant speed

The Use of Frameworks in Society

2010-01-29T08:28:00.000-08:00

The puzzling question occurred to me first when I was in 9^th standard – Which area of human knowledge will make the greatest strides in future? My biased answer then was astronomy (closely followed by medicine), biased by the volumes of popular science books on astronomy at the Vikram Sarabhai Community Science Center.

The question has come back to relevance in the last couple of years in the wake of the great depression (correction/credit crunch/rough times/ period of uncertainty!?!). The two years at IIMB convinced me enough that all decision problems relating to the art of business can be solved using data and frameworks. Except that whereas in all other fields a careful application of frameworks (with complete or even partial data) gives reasonably reliable results, in the field of economics they result in colossal failures (the more sophisticated the frameworks, the bigger the errors)

I will leave aside all my knowledge of economics to understand the issue - ab initio is an amazing intellectual stimulant. So what can be the possible (and exhaustive) problems with Economics:

The frameworks at use are incorrect
The data processed is irrelevant
Both

The present blog will focus on potential issue #2, answering the first will necessitate analyzing the frameworks, which I don’t want to do before simplifying the problem a bit.

To evaluate possible problem #2, I’ll rephrase it – In order to make it framework centric - ‘(most of) the frameworks at use are immaterial’. To answer this question one needs to answer another question. Are the frameworks developed to understand observed events or are they developed deductively (don’t want to use - a priori) and then observable facts are used as data to validate their correctness. The first approach carries the risk of being too narrow in scope – frameworks looking at the immediate observable outcomes and therefore restricting the number of factors, assuming of course that that which is not visible can not have any effect. The second approach may suffer from the creator/user bias - framework developer/user giving undue importance to certain frameworks and neglecting certain others.

I guess at this stage I have no choice but to look at the major frameworks/theories and categorize them in 1), 2a) or 2b). Meanwhile I need feedback on the process used to understand the issue with economics.

PS: This exercise is a beginning in moving beyond Austrian Economics, which as per my current understanding falls in category 2b

Tales from Ghzbd Vol II (Non Veg)

2010-01-18T06:44:00.000-08:00

What’s with the blurred, zoomed in (only on the face) photographs of women writhing in pain! What is the point? You can't fool kids by blurring. Or is it that they don’t want grown ups to stare - anything longer than a peak and get a headache from the dizzying image. End up buying disprin instead of durex !

I have always been a huge fan of cheap Hindi songs. I am of the firm belief that filmy songs have no business being serious or meaningful. If fate is a meaningful concept then moving to Ghaziabad was fulfillment of my destiny – discovering the treasureland of desi khazana. I had no idea what i was missing - satisfied with my tiny collection of bollywood songs, cocooned in the big city life of National Capital oblivious to the vibrant desi music scene just few coss away*

Yesterday I was listening to this beautiful song in which the lyricist in order to maximize the billing per hour kept on retelling the same incidence (from different perspectives though) – basically the adventures of the girl (age - 16) in a chana ka khet. A beautiful song, more so because of the extremely subtle (unbecoming of a desi song) connection of the girl's adventures to the fecundity of the Indo - Gangetic soil. Work of genius!

*The exponential rate change in cultural parameters when moving away from a big city as opposed to the normal linear rate of change in India is a topic that warrants a more detailed discussion (a blog post or a research paper depending on the author’s disposition)

Rocket Singh

2010-01-14T04:54:00.000-08:00

I am trying to deconstruct Rocket Singh and I must concede I find it a bit difficult to understand, just can’t figure out the theme. Was it having fewer clients and maintaining a good relationship with them(the movie doesn’t directly tell us the fewer clients part but it is very much implied in the business model chosen by them), was it about the zeal of a new entrant (and the propensity to bite more than one can chew – again not depicted directly in the movie but pretty much implied), was it revenge – in which case the plot is unduly biased against the superboss whereas the boss was equally guilty or was it about humanizing the sales process (the protagonist’s confession on how he doesn’t understand numbers but what makes the salesperson, the customer and his girlfriend happy). I really don’t know, nevertheless there are certain things I like about the movie:

The protagonist thinks. That the man applies thought and tries to bring about a change – for better or worse we don’t know – is enough for the movie to maintain a certain degree of interest level.
Characterization is consistent and convincing. I did not find any half baked characters except probably the childlike girl friend who is in all fairness not unnecessary.
The clandestine operations of Rocket sales corp.

But at some level the movie disappoints by focusing on a rather rare and irrelevant issue of corruption in corporate world. Wish they had just stuck to the revenge + tension of operating a company from within a company plot. I would rather have a sinister protagonist in a successful caper than a moralizing one caught in the middle of an interesting deceit.

James Ostrich Cameron

2009-12-24T07:28:00.000-08:00

A species advanced enough to explore and inhabit a faraway planet doesn’t have the technical know-how to extract subsurface minerals without clearing forests! That’s taking temporary suspension of disbelief a little too far. But this is not a trivial inconsistency in the plot of the movie, it is essential to defending the very philosophical premise of Avatar. The premise that ‘nature’ has to be saved irrespective of the wellbeing of humans and that if saving ‘nature’ means everyone on earth dies, so be it (Recall the climax of the movie)!!

The philosophical premise put into practice is the religion of environmentalism. A religion which doesn’t have the benevolent motive to provide purer air and water for men but which worships ‘nature’ upholding it as the highest value, with absolutely no regard for human life. For those who are not aware of the flaw in the environmentalist’s philosophy let me present it to you briefly.

An environmentalist sunders the value (environment/nature) from the valuer (human beings). The guinea pigs have to be saved even if it means not developing life saving drugs, the pelican eggs have to hatch even if it means millions die from malaria; upstream flora can not be inundated by reservoir even if it means men die alternately from droughts and floods, coal cannot be burned even if it means the human civilization regresses back to prehistoric times. As is quite clear from the examples, for the environmentalists ‘nature’ is an intrinsic value and has no relation whatever to human life !

But what if the environmentalist realizes the flaw in his logic that the a man’s actions have to be guided by understanding what is good for him that human life and not ‘nature’ is the standard for valuing anything? What if the environmentalist realizes ‘nature’ can not be intrinsically valued? And what if even after the realization has dawned upon him he chooses to defend environmentalism? - He makes Avatar!

Since he realizes that the professed aim of environmentalists – cleaner air and water is fundamentally a technological issue and that only technological progress and not religious fervor will ensure more hospitable living conditions for humans, he goes on to create a make believe world where this causality just doesn’t apply. He creates Pandora (where the minerals have to lie right under the mother tree) and throws in a bunch of people who both technologically advanced and stupid (to not figure out a way of neatly extracting the minerals) at the same time!

It is not a case of honest error of judgment for James Cameroon. He is consciously perpetuating a false and evil philosophy which he knows cannot be justified without making inconsistent representations or portraying blatantly unrealistic scenarios.

Tales from Ghzbd Vol I

2009-09-28T02:41:00.002-07:00

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

2009-09-27T02:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-24T10:02:00.000-08:00

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

2008-04-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-23T04:58:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-17T07:01:00.000-07:00

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

2006-12-20T10:07:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-20T09:19:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-19T09:37:00.000-08:00

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

2006-09-13T16:58:00.000-07:00

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.

of photography

2006-09-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

Had an argument with Banno a couple of days back about my photography style. Good thing….. resolving conflicts is a nice way of working out this lazy brain of mine.

I have this habit of avoiding close up photographs and zooming out to squeeze in a whole lot of things in the frame. This according to Banno is a mark of a novice, now coming from a novice himself I don’t think I want to believe that. Not that I would be disappointed if that is true, it will only give me an opportunity to differentiate from the old-timers.

Every photograph tells a tale and its background, the context forms an integral part of the plot. A non existent or hazy background leaves too many questions unanswered.

The most intriguing of plots have their background leading to the central theme, ‘Parson’s pleasure’ and ‘The champion of the world’ are the two stories that instantly come to my mind. The theme cannot be isolated from the contextual setting, the two make an indissoluble complete.

But a story is probably not the best of analogies. In a photograph the distinction between the background and the foreground is much starker than in a story. A photograph gives enormous scope in portraying a conflict or harmony, something which the interplay of context and theme can’t bring out easily in a story. No wonder the Chinese of old days said: ‘A pictures paints a thousand words’.

"dammit, i can hear the birds chirp"

2006-07-08T02:24:00.000-07:00

These commnets came in a few moments later, again by Pari. They are on "Who was the most influential of them all".

“just read your post on greatness and either it was too convoluted for me to understand it (dude, you should NOT try to write in ayn rand's style... it's very hard on the brain) or your ideas on greatness are not right according to me...
greatness is in some sense a prefix... and needs to be attached to a value/property for it to have any significance. and in that sense, the influence/greatness theory is correct. it might be wrong to say hitler was a great person, but he WAS a great LEADER... for exactly the reason that he could pull/organize/motivate/lead to action large numbers of people. he might be evil, but he was as great/greater than winston churchill in that respect.
the same stands for pele/gates/edison... they were/are great _____ (fill in the blank appropriately). full stop. bill gates is great in terms of the software and the company he build, his marketing skills etc. bill gates is not a great person for us when it comes to us having a choice. and every person is going to have different notions about what is a more important value.
dammit, i can hear the birds chirp. i should sleep. g'nite!”

The confusion clearly is in understanding the meaning of the word greatness, so refer to the good old dictionary. This is what dictionary.com says: Greatness: (Used of persons) standing above others in character or attainment or reputation. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/great

Guess this bit clarifies the confusion between ‘great’ as an adjective or prefix as you call it and ‘greatness’ when we talk of persons. “First, there ceases to remain any difference between great leaders like Winston Churchill and evil leaders like Hitler.” This sentence is the only place where I imply greatness in the first meaning of the word and it very clearly differentiates between the two.

And hey, the article is pretty lucid and intelligible!!!

Pari is always there

2006-07-08T01:20:00.000-07:00

Paritosh, batchmate, yaar and an Ayn Rand fan is always there to comment on my articles....this one is on "Must be tough being Managers". Came at half past 4 in the morning on Bracket.....

“hey, was going through your blog... some really interesting stuff. just read the post on social responsibility and responsibility towards the environment. the great thing about both of them is that they make (economic) sense, if you care to look beyond the confines of the immediate profits of the corporate. a couple of assumptions (which pretty much explain what i'm going to say) before i start:

1. the corporate is and intends to be a going concern
2. the law of nature is that every being in every species wants it's genes to survive (i hope this makes sense biologically, but i'm sure u get the drift)

so let's start with social responsibility. what is it that makes the tatas tick? mind you, though they may not be the largest or fastest growing conglomerate today in india, they've survived a 100 years. one of the reasons is that they have taken good care of not only their employees (which makes intuitive sense), but also other people living around... which is a reason why more people come and reside in the areas around tata companies (jamshedpur being a case in point), which in turn gives the tatas access to more of good people, more of good resources. secondly, people have faith in the tatas coz they've done good for the society... though they haven't really been involved in any scandal, to whom do you think the people will show their allegiance? the govt or the tatas? if those ppl think rationally (i mean the people living in and around tata companies/townships), they would gain much more out of lending support to the tatas...”

The actions of TATAs as you have described through your example of Jamshedpur is Charity. There is no point in trying to figure out the long term profitability of Charity, this is something that the owner of the concern has to decide. The number of owners and decision making process is irrelevant to this discussion.

Hmmm….so what does Social Responsibility mean and why it doesn’t make any sense at all, economic or otherwise. I searched for quite some time on the internet and the definitions are varied and inconsistent. This is what loosely what everyone means- Social responsibility is the obligation towards the needs of all those who are influenced by your actions. And this is precisely what I meant by “slavery” because charity is one thing, an obligation to charity another. Social responsibility if endorsed by a company is a blank check. A blank check which any ‘stakeholder’ can use to claim the unearned.

The last word - There is no conceivable choice between Freedom and Slavery. Economic calculation of profit and loss comes into picture if and only if there is a choice between two seemingly equally good alternatives.

“responsibility towards environment: couple of things, one more far fetched, which i will discuss second. do you see what is happening to the pollution levels in china? several of the main rivers are so polluted that they can't provide sustenence to people any longer, because in their rush for expansion, all environmental 'rules' have been flouted. now that is china (and i'm sure u're a capitalist), and the govt has the muscle to suppress people. what happens though in a democracy? people will bear such a thing for only so long... after that there's rebellion, bloodshed, a shift in power... possibilities are endless. so what's better? to follow some environmental norms or risk losing it all? secondly (and as i said earlier, a little far fetched), tell me, would you not spend whatever you have to save the life of your progeny or your grandchildren? similarly, would you not do the same to save the life of your future 'gene-bearers'? if yes, then does it not make sense to pollute less so that this world remains sustainable for humans (forget other species, though i could expand on that too) for longer?

lemme know what you think of this. i agree in principle with you that social/environmental responsibility for looking good in the newspapers/class does not make sense, but the acts themselves do make sense for very different reasons (than given in class).”

The China example is very curious. Taking it at its face value, it clearly shows how a mixed economy can ruin one group of people (those who were dependent on the rivers) for the common good.

I am glad you haven’t identified the environment as having any intrinsic value. There certainly are ‘rules’ of the nature, you can’t flout them and still get away with it. I’ll relate to you a short story to understand the concept of property rights in the context of pollution:

"Assume that we live on a tropical island. There is a certain kind of exotic coconut growing on this island that is very delicious, but it releases fumes when you crack it open. The fumes of a single coconut are harmless, but if people open more than 3500 coconuts a week, the combined fumes of the coconuts can cause people to go blind. For the sake of argument, also assume that the person opening the coconut is not necessarily the one likeliest to go blind from its fumes. (I hope this helps you appreciate how improbable a scenario of this kind is in the first place.) So what does a capitalist government do to keep people from making each other blind? Ban the eating of coconuts in all quantities? No. Put a tax on coconuts so people eat fewer of them? No. What it does is prosecute the guy who opens the 3501st coconut (and 3502nd, and so on) for causing the victims to go blind. This is why the option to open a coconut will become a scarce resource If there are 1000 people living on the island, each of them would get to open 3.5 coconuts a week. Those who want to open fewer of them could sell their options to those who want to open more. "

The story was told by a fellow member, ‘Capitalism Forever’ on an online forum. The story is very close to reality. There is an objective way of measuring the threshold limits of pollution beyond which it is harmful to men.

Does it make you wonder with all the attention paid to the environment, with the ‘Greanpeaces’ of the world devoting their lives to the cause of environmentalism why such a simple principle has not been operationalised so far. Are they dumb? Don’t they have enough ‘friends’ in the parliaments/senates? The answer is very simple. Environmentalists are not concerned with clean air, water or land. Their only goal is to make sure there is no intervention by humans in the environment because, according to them, environment has got an intrinsic value. The cheetah has to be protected regardless of anything, the dear spoiling the crops is to be protected come whatever, you can’t release any effluents into the river irrespective of everything else…….

The last word- Once you endorse their ideology of ‘responsibility towards environment’ try being consistent and productive at the same time. Bet you can’t because, every act of productive work by its very nature means altering the environment.

Freak Event

2006-06-29T08:06:00.000-07:00

Your average marks in the last 3 quizzes was 6. This quiz was no different from the others and you get a 9. Hmm....how do you explain it? Common sense, of course would ascribe it to a better performance. But wait, someone is saying it was a freak, an accident which can not be explained. A highly improbable event almost unlikely to take place in the next 5 quizzes.

This reminds me of an off the cuff remark made by our “Business, Government and Society” professor who had a way of making ‘not so obvious’ logical fallacies, stimulating interesting thought processes. According to him the American constitution was a product of pure accident, that a constitution based on life, liberty and the right to happiness was a freak. After all there has to be one such constitution different from the many variants of socialistic constitutions.

Another blatant abuse of the concept of probability. In this case that of probability distribution. The abuse of probability distribution to explain human action is not a very novel one. Back in my schooldays, in my over-enthusiasm to pick up any book with the word relativity written in it, I read a book on Relativism with a foreword by none other than Dr. Albert Einstein. The author at one point of time explained that even though you think you are exercising your choice in wearing a particular color of shoe or waving the banner of the Republican Party, you are but only a part of the group who have a liking for the new fashion or endorsement of the party's manifesto. A classic case of putting the cart before the horse- assuming the probability distribution to be a cause affecting the choice of allegiance.

Clearly a futile attempt to disprove the axiom of freewill. Little the author knew that any attempt to disprove freewill only in turn evokes freewill. In saying that there exists no freewill one has to exercise his freewill thus contradicting himself.

Free market and Relative grading

2006-06-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

Now I accept that I am not the brightest kid on the campus when it comes to acads, does that mean I don’t believe in Relative grading! Well never thought about it! But then no matter what, I have to believe in Relative grading as I am a self professed Capitalist. Right? This article was written after one of those ‘test the consistency of the Capitalist’ discussions.

Is relative grading a form of free market, ‘because the essence of a free market is competition’?

The most common way of perverting and vilifying capitalism historically has been distorting its definition. This is done by switching the ‘essence’ of capitalism. Some common examples are:

1. ‘A capitalist society is any society that relies heavily on businesses to produce and distribute goods and services’ (A typical definition by a student of political economy…the thing taught to us in microeconomics.)

2. ‘Capitalism is the most efficient economic system’ (A typical misguided apologist for free market economy….incidentally its worst enemy)

3.‘It’s a society in which the bourgeois class runs the government to serve its own interests.’(A Marxist)

Before analyzing whether the essence of free market is competition lets discuss the importance of ‘essentials’ in defining a concept. What is a definition? Is it the most apparent characteristics of a thing, is it a description of the collection of all the attributes of that thing or is it the thing itself. None of them. A definition is a description of the ‘thing’ in terms of the essential attribute which sets it apart from all the things which are alike it and the essential attribute which makes a particular object grouped under the umbrella of the ‘thing’ similar to the others in that group. A definition is a description of a thing by essentials.

To put things straight, the essence of capitalism is absence of force in the transactions between individuals. The definition of capitalism is: it is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights. The essential attribute which sets it apart from all other social systems is the recognition of individual rights. This implies that no man or group of men may initiate force against others. In simpler words in a capitalist society all transactions between men are voluntary.

The statement that ‘competition is the essence of capitalism’ wrongly identifies a more visible attribute of free market economy as its essential attribute. The very presence of free market does not necessarily imply competition; it depends on the way the citizens of the society decide to trade with each other.

Relative grading is not a form of free market economy but for a more mundane reason. It is not a social system; it is just a method of performance evaluation.

Chaos Art

2006-06-22T07:56:00.000-07:00

This article is more than an article. Actually its two articles, the first one written around 3 years back and the sequel to it a few months ago.

It might appear to be a contraction that a dyed in wool Objectivist has created and mastered an art that apparently implies ‘A is not A’.

The seeds were sown early. It’s a not so uncommon story of a restless mind forced to attend not so intellectually stimulating lectures. But a fascination with ink pens proved to be that adventitious factor which makes serendipities possible.

The invention of ink pen was a stroke of genius, but unfortunately no amount of research and development could make the ink pen change its habit of getting dry when kept idle for a while.

But a discovery by another genius made any such change unnecessary.

In order to keep the ink pen busy, I would scribble aimlessly to come up with a senseless, chaotic figure- a perpetual hatred for fastidiousness makes sure that it IS a chaotic figure. But, on closer observation the figure does starts to make sense. The trick is to observe. Observing a chaotic figure is like gazing at clouds on lonely nights or reading maps on worn out walls with peeled paint.

So to sum up, the appreciation of chaos art entails an ability to find the method in the madness of things.

When I wrote this stupid article a couple of years back I was barely introduced to the philosophy of Objectivism and not unlike many fledgling Objectivists believed the badge of ‘Objectivist’ to be a symbol of pride rather than as an identification of a person who has completely understood and has integrated each and every aspect of Objectivism. Now that I have a better understanding of Objectivism, the ‘apparent’ contradiction can be resolved.

According to Ayn Rand there are two interrelated elements of art which are crucial means of projecting an artist’s sense of life. These are the subject and the style. In chaos art the subject follows the style, because it’s the style that determines what you will end up sketching.

The style of an artist is the way he chooses to present his sense of life and it expresses a view of his consciousness. By sense of life Ayn Rand means a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, in other words it’s a general appraisal of the nature of reality- of men and of nature. It is a counterpart of a conscious philosophy which a person derives by an active process of concept formation. The sense of life of a person is reflected in his habits and his automatic response to the world around him.

So according to her a person whose normal mental state is that of full focus will choose to create a style of clarity and precision, projecting sharp outlines, cleanliness, purpose and a commitment to full awareness and clear identity. While a style characterized by blurred outlines indicates a person who is out of focus. So there was in fact no contradiction. My sense of life was in conflict with my consciously chosen philosophy of life.

Philosophy though can not replace a person’s sense of life which is after all an automatic sum of values; it does set the criteria of his sense of life according to a consistent view of life. So the period of transition from thereon was that of a programming of my emotions from an explicit metaphysics and epistemology of Objectivism. And this is reflected in the evolution of ‘Chaos Art’ over a period of 2-3 years. Now the sketch is no more a nebula which can be interpreted in any manner possible. It is no more like a cloud or a worn out wall- purposeless- but an accentuated and near clear cut figure, not a distortion of reality but a selective recreation, a more focused work of art.

"Who was the most influential of them all"

2006-06-22T07:43:00.000-07:00

Even now I am unable to understand the idea behind asking such a futile question. Was it to test our knowledge of history, because the answer to such a question does not tell you anything other than that.

Influence can be both good as well as bad. The degree of influence does not tell us anything about the kind of influence. “Measurements have no value significance – and acquire it only from the nature of that which is being measured.”

That was around a year back during the GD/PI sessions. Today I heard a stronger version of the ‘influence-greatness’ theory, as I call it. It says that the person who is able to speak up his mind, convince and make followers out of people is a great person. Greatness is defined by the degree of influence. The great masses of people who are lost in the oblivion of anonymity are not great regardless of the greatness of their individual acts. And the most despotic of dictators is great because he can rule over everyone.

The argument taken to its logical extreme implies that Hitler was one of the greatest persons of the last century. Whereas the honest businessman who is driven by self interest and has no ambitions to brain wash his fellows is worst person on the face of the world. Now assuming that the examples correctly illustrate the true definition of greatness, the question is what such a concept aims to achieve?

Concepts are tools we use to classify and categorize knowledge, to make it more amenable for usage. The importance of such classification can be encapsulated in a single statement, the one made by Prof. RamC in the competition and strategy lecture – “All knowledge is about classification”.

Now accepting such a definition for ‘greatness’ as given by my friend, the consequences are ghastly. First, there ceases to remain any difference between great leaders like Winston Churchill and evil leaders like Hitler. Second, the one word which appreciates the greatness of all extraordinary achievers such as Edison, Bill Gates or Pele is obliterated forever.

So much for the usefulness of concepts!!

Matki Phod

2006-06-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

Today we had a matki phod competition, being the most agile (that’s an assumption I am making) guy in the block I was chosen to break the matki. Well I had never done such a thing in my whole life before, so this was going to be one of those ‘there is always a first time’ experience.

…..It was all madness, people pouring water from the roofs, me shivering in the cold and the two teams fighting over the specifics of the foul I had committed……..

The game plan was not flawless and there were these doubts about how would I carry the stone to the top, or how the person supporting me would be supported and so on. This was after a number of practice sessions, and a couple of crazy falls into poodles of slush.

By the time it was our turn I was in a state of stupid stupor. Yelling war cries to get a feeling of reality, I started off in confusion. I don’t remember what happened after that except for the fact that there was a loud roar from the audience just as I hit the matki which I vaguely recollect as not being one of applause. Apparently I had not broken the stupid matki in the first hit, so I tried to hit it again but the matki was broken.

What happened?

By the time I got up after descending with a fall, I realized that I had broken the rule that you can’t hit the prize before both your legs are resting on the shoulders of the lower level of the pyramid.

But what exactly happened?

The theories ranged from psychological—‘nervousness getting the better of me’, technical—‘the slippery clay and the pouring water played the culprit’ to time motion ones—‘the delay in forming the base of pyramid caused an unnecessary haste towards the end’.

By the way after much negotiation we were not disqualified but penalized an extra 5 seconds. We ended up as the fourth team and a possible third had I not fouled.

The event has reinforced my resolve of committing all the mistakes I possibly can while at IIMB.

Switching Through

2006-06-22T07:36:00.000-07:00

One of the many stupid business ideas I keep getting, this one was penned sometime in the first trimester.

Switching through the channels got a glance of Karan Thapar talking to a pack of regular politicians. No two such discussions can be distinguished from each other as the subject of discussion is inevitably related to a recent incident. And incidents incidentally have a nasty habit of being recurrent.

The only reason why a person would want to watch such a superfluous talk (full of vague references to ‘secularism, hindutva, public interest’) is to be reassured about their own ideologies. It’s more of wordplay than any new insight into the people or the ideas they believe in or the principles that guide them. The only audience such talk shows attracts is the ‘interested in politics’ kind.

So I thought about a talk show which will be much worthwhile to watch and will attract the interest of the most ordinary person on the street. A talk show which will be well crafted plot, complete in itself. A plot involving the simplicity of a grandma’s tale, at the same time has the twists and the climax of a Roald Dahl short story.

Most of us are people with mixed premises. There might be a businessman who is really efficient and knows how to make things work but holds a belief that socialism is ‘inherently’ good. His actions embody the explicit premises but his ideology is based on the premises he hasn’t identified and analyzed. The talk show will capitalize on this dichotomy between the actions and ideas. The modus operandi will come later.

There are another set of people, the policymakers and the media men. These are the people who absolutely make sure that they don’t explicitly state their premises. In order to keep the smokescreens of confusion floating around them. The talk show aims at blowing the smokescreen away.

The idea of how to go about the exposing these people, was inspired by a fellow member at a forum. While introducing himself to the forum he added that in order to judge the personality of a new acquaintance he starts a discussion on the Élan Gonzalez incident. Small incidents, real or fictional have that ability to bring out the unidentified or hidden premises of a person. The most profound realizations are usually made through observing and analyzing simple incidents.

Since a fictional story is complete in itself, it can be made quite water tight, ensuring a single correct answer situation. In other words, the story will basically test your principles and not your managerial skills (which are tested by case a study….I was kind of worried about the similarities between the two things). The magic of the interviewer will lie in how he can prod the interviewee into arriving at obvious logical contradictions.

The real trick is to find out:

1. Are there enough prominent people who may be exposed? The answer should be yes, going by the magnitude of crap one hears these days. So the challenge is to identify all those people and the fundamental contradictions which they may be made to realize.

2. If such water tight stories can indeed be created? I guess yes, and it will involve a great deal of research on the interviewee and a great philosopher in the stable.

3. Will the stories be fool proof? Will the interviewee be able to sense what’s coming next and strategize accordingly. Hmmm…. then we will need to have a plan B. Plan B will be relating a recent incident from the interviewee’s life which contradicts what he says. So the idea is to create a story which is similar in content to the life and times of the prominent guest.

4. Can the contradictions be made obvious enough for the audience to identify them. Will depend solely on the interviewer’s skill. So the crucial Q is where to find one.

Will the outsourcing model work? No one of us is an expert at writing stories, or interviewing people or in media business. Who will want to risk his reputation at as crazy idea as this. And the issue is not about finding money, it’s about gaining credibility. After all a talk show is only as good as the interviewer is.

The reason why I stumbled upon the idea was the crap that the Indian talk shows are all about. The idea of …. might work even in a country like America where there is a general interest among people in things other than politics.

Hope it’s a great idea……if yes it’ll be a tough job going about it……if not …too bad.

PS: Clearly the idea doesn’t seem to hold much water, but then it’s not all that bad….at least it has made a good blogging material.

Must be tough being Managers!!

2006-06-22T07:33:00.000-07:00

This one is inspired by the madness of BGS lectures...

It beats me why of all people, management students who passionately value the hard work that goes behind wealth creation endorse such bankrupt concepts like social responsibility , responsibility towards the environment and what not. Why would they advocate their own slavery? After all they are going to be the corporate heads of tomorrow.

Either they don’t understand the complete implications or they sincerely believe that their actions as businessmen will necessarily be inimical to everything: the society (why they will be gaining at the expense of the losers), the environment (yeah what about the rights of the cheetah their factories will displace) or the national heritage or the minorities or the underprivileged orrrr….And if that is the case, I don’t understand how they reconcile with their inner voice.

Must be tough being MBA students!!!

"There are no rights or wrongs"

2006-06-22T06:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, someone happened to mention that I shouldn’t be that blunt in making value judgments as there are no rights or wrongs. Eeverything is right, the difference lies in how you look at the issue.

Hmmm…..I am trying to decipher what the hell that is supposed to mean. After some time I rephrase the whole thing for him.

Me: “Do you mean to say that since real life issues are so complicated that there is always more than one possible correct solution. Because the amount of knowledge you have and the set of assumptions you make and the areas you might focus and prioritize over are bound to be different than those of others”

Him: “Yes exactly, like the different solutions we all came up with for the McGregor case we got for our mancom assignment”.

Me: “But did we differ on the basic premise that Mr. James McGregor needs to keep his business alive and kicking and that he has to make more money out of it”? “And if your answer to that is in the affirmative, than the way you described my problem is factually incorrect. I always make it a point not to take absolute stands on any one particular alternative solution to a real life problem until I am convinced that any further time spent on analyzing the different alternatives is not going to make any incremental profit worth it”.

“You are probably complaining about my absolute stand on principles, which by their very nature must be absolute and invariable, so there I must disappoint you. I am not going blunt my sharpness”.

Intellectual Procrastination

2006-06-22T05:48:00.000-07:00

The other day Phadnis and Sirji were trying to appreciate my dexterity in manipulating curves; I mean my skill with understanding things using supply-demand and indifference curves. I tried to explain that although I may be good at playing around with these curves, I believe in a field of economics which does not approve of the premises behind these tools. But I didn’t explain why and how Austrian economics disproved concepts such as constant equilibrium and total utility.

Just to keep the flow of the conversation going I went on to inform them that Austrian economics believes in unrestrained market economy. What I didnt tell them is that it has been logically deduced by such great economists as Ludwig Von Mises that a mixed economy is inherently unstable and the only logical progression (read degeneration) is a totalitarian state.

Speaking to myself…….
“It’s the first time I’ve happened to mention my interest in a hitherto unheard of subject. And I have been lazy enough not to embark on the project of undoing the damage caused by the bleaching action of BGS on their minds, I am quite sure that one of them will repeat in all sincerity one of those bromides that mixed economy apologists have infused into the vocabulary of the developing world intelligentsia”.

And here it comes…….“But the efficiency of the free market is under serious doubt”.
I say “hmmmmmm”, which means I’ll explain to you the real meaning of efficiency some other day.

Will need to change this stupid habit. The habit of being lazy. Lazy to explain things.

The Frozen Splash

2006-06-22T01:15:00.000-07:00

This one is close to me. I wrote it on my first midnight in IIMB.

Trying hard to sleep amidst all the hullabaloo of the f-block faccha introduction session; I started visualizing still photographs of the most animated and elegant motions.
The one that struck in my mind was the image of a drop of water falling into a pool of water and the coming alive of a placid substance. Strange how something as fluid as water can bounce back in such a consistent and regular manner when impacted by its own kind.

I don’t how it occurred to me but I started figuring out how such an image captured on a camera can be sculpted. Sculpted without using the obvious tools of a sculptor. A frozen splash of water hung in space, defying gravity and time. A sculpture created by the interplay of unperceivable physical forces creating the magic of the ‘sufficiently advanced technology’.

Like most of the articles I have written this one has remained incomplete but unlike others I have decided to put this up on the blog. For a special reason. I’ll complete the idea on the night when I leave IIMB.

Fair Play

2006-06-21T12:02:00.000-07:00

The other day the kids were playing ‘catch ball’ in my drawing room with chairs acting as the net. The only rule I formulated for them, a very simple one was that whoever strikes the net while throwing the ball is out.

One bright player derived a corollary- whoever’s throw falls before it is caught by the opponent team is out. The first kid to feel cheated by the rule protested but was silenced by the majority. To avenge for this, this kid started trying to persuade others into deliberately dropping the opponent’s throws. Surprisingly enough the scene didn’t deteriorate into a chaos.

But still it didn’t quite make sense and I had to chide the kid and stop the play.

But wait! Wasn’t the kid playing by the rules? After all isn’t a sport indifferent to such arbitrary judgments as fair or foul play? Doesn’t anything go as long as you are winning or trying to win?

Hmm…the argument sounds pretty logical except a small fallacy- the fallacy of context dropping. The argument ignores the larger context- the purpose of playing catch ball. The purpose of any game is to reward the better skilled person, in other words reward effort and not the lack of it (dropping the catch), and so the degenerated catch ball was not a sport but an exercise in loosership!

The Opus

2006-06-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite articles, this is the oldest of the lot. The writing style is a little crude and the article is awfully long, so if have the patience, do read on.

Do you know what is ‘malus pumila’?Of course you do, but the term 'malus pumila' is alien to you. It is the scientific name for apple, a fruit so common to all of us. The point being made is one cant attach any intrinsic value to knowing the term 'malus pumila' as, not knowing it will not diminish your taste for it, nor would it render you incapable of acquiring one.Let me give another example to reinforce my argument, knowing that there are 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in a yard have no intrinsic value attached to it because, if you are in a country where the metric system of measurement is prevalent this knowledge is useless.

Of course one may say that the knowledge of the scientific term for apple has no value for a layman but is significant for a student of botany, in the sense that it is elementary and a proficient student is expected know this much. But at this point many make the mistake of putting the cart before the horse, that is, assuming that the one who knows the elementary terminology essentially is proficient in his field.

So to make the knowledge of vocabulary as the basis to gauge ones proficiency is logically incorrect.Because a person might have done a path breaking research on the medicinal properties of apple and still be stumped when asked, what is ‘malus pumila’?

But what happens when students are in fact asked the same question again and again?The students stop worrying about everything else. When the students realize that it is the rote memory that is being rewarded you no longer expect them to think (the tendency to do least work-as perceived, to reap the same reward is one of the reasons…….but we’ll come to it later). Students, to coin a new word, start to vocabularize knowledge.

Vocabulary in this context means: the knowledge that is non-applicable or in more general terms ‘non-amenable to reason or manipulation’. And the term vocabularize refers to the process of assimilating useful knowledge in a way so as to render it non-amenable to reason or manipulation, or in other words accepting truth as uncorrelated list of names.

One of the extreme forms of vocabularization is manifested when students are unable to carry out basic operations in calculus when applied to elementary engineering problems despite the fact they have learnt the subject (calculus) in great detail.

The Modus operandi of vocabularization essentially consists of knowing the ‘end-product’ and understanding the ‘what’. As opposed to the rational method of knowing and understanding the initial conditions and following the dynamics that make the end product possible.

The end product here is any artificial creation of human mind and labor and hence the domain of the discussion is about the way we understand and apply abstract concepts like the calculus and the way we learn (analyse) and later design material objects like an earthen dam or a bridge.The initial conditions are the requirements or the inspiration (the original rudimentary idea of the creator) that trigger the process that culminates in an end product.Dynamics here mean the interpretation and application of the laws of the nature using his imagination and creativity by the creator to come up with the end product.

Vocabularization bypasses the law of causality and accepts the end products as thunderbolts out of blue that strike for ‘some reason’ of their own.This acceptance of an end product presupposes the validity of dynamics and ignores the initial conditions, thus obviating the need to understand the ‘some reason’, hence minimizing work.

From the forgoing discussion it follows that Vocabularization by the students is only a response to the teachers asking the ‘what’ and not the ‘why’. But the objective is only to minimize work (which is not an irrational thing per se)What gives the students the sanction to vocabularize is the belief that an understanding of the ‘some reason’ is unnecessary.

The root lies in the lack of respect for the individual capacity, the habit of escaping from responsibility and taking refuge in the ability of others.From this stems the notion that ‘I am’ not capable enough to comprehend a thing that others accept as such.

That’s why the teacher assumes that the person who writes the book is always correct(He takes refuge in the judgment of the publisher and the thousands others like him.) And tells his students to accept what he has to feed them on his authority. Any question from the students is taken to heart not because it challenges his conviction (he has no conviction of his own) but because it undermines his faith in others.

The creative faculty of the student gets progressively deteriorated, as the only thing he is taught to do is to repeat mechanically the procedures elaborated by others, and study passively the things made by others.In other words the student is trained to learn by observation, observing the existing end products as they exist and reproducing them as an when necessary.

Here the pragmatic person would interject: isn’t this the simplest of all methods which even the least intelligent person can use as it involves nothing more than a keen sense of observation.

The answer is NO. The rational method ensures that every possible end product can be explored as this method presupposes only a reasoning mind and the knowledge of the laws of the nature. On the other hand the person habituated to learn by observation can’t conceive of the ramification of even a slightest change in the initial conditions and needs to observe still more end products to find the one that suits the changed initial conditions. An end product, which may not exist in the first place. But a pragmatic person can’t wait for want of ideas, so the expediency of the situation allows for a poor imitation.

So to view the problem from another perspective the difference in the two methods lie in the amount of knowledge and the degree of understanding and creativity required.The pragmatic is incorrect on the count that to learn by observation is the simplest and the most practical way of learning. So are the students who vocabularize in order to minimize work when in fact they are choosing the most cumbersome way.

The system of learning by observation is faith masquerading as reason. It is a refuge of the second-handers and such a system of learning only produces second handers whose very existence primarily depends on others and unaided are incapable of doing anything.Whereas a reasoning mind, from a rational approach is capable to create new ideas and build things ab-initio. And it is to these reasoning minds who in most cases started form the scratch that the mankind owes the progress from the cave to the skyscrapers.

PS: Unlike most of my other articles, I have not tampered with this one since I wrote it around 4 yrs back. There are a lot of concepts I have learnt since then which apparently contradict the logic presented in "The Opus". I'll shortly come up with a revised version.

The Lone Footballer

2006-06-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

Time is the one thing I never take very seriously. Things just happen for me. It’s a disgrace to corrupt the purity of old memories by embellishing them with useless details like date, time and the temperature of the day. But since I am a very logical person and have this habit of keeping things in order, I have to give some order to the editorial milestones of my life. Not quite a chronology but almost it.

Now as the word blogging has almost replaced ‘diary writing’, I can take the liberty to say I have been blogging for the past 3 years. Ideas change and therefore people change. The causality is reversed most of the times, but that’s beside the point. The point is I have changed a lot and you will observe the change through my posts. But again, I have this stupid habit of changing my past, something I did shamelessly in writing my resume for the summer placements. So I revisit my articles and make changes to them to make them conform to my present style. For example the opening paragraph was added and an entire paragraph was done away with just before I put up this blog.

Talking about chronology, that’s how I got the inspiration to write ‘The Lone Footballer’. ‘The lone footballer’, the article serves as the datum in the chronology of the posts. All articles written before I thought of creating ‘the lone footballer’ are BLF and all those written afterwards are ALF.

The paragraph which was deleted offered some kind of a rationalization for the name I have chosen for my blog. Since the explanation was not essential to the purpose of this article I had to remove it.

Reality experienced first hand is curious but is limited. Pure fiction on the other hand lacks the autobiographical element, it doesn’t speak much about the author….may be there is no such thing as pure fiction. The stories in my blog are therefore a mix of real life and my imagination. Degrees vary!

Share your ideas and experiences with ‘The Lone Footballer’.