Mind Numbing Days

Hmm, so here were are, facing another one of those "mind numbing" days in the corner cubicles of an IT company. A couple of Emails, An open "technology white paper" (preferably PDF) to divert the attention of a curious onlooker, endless cups of hot coffee and possibly hourly fag breaks for some of us.

Worry Not! If you have a good internet connection and a standard web browser, let me introduce you to some of my favorite internet literature. It could be funny, sometimes even intriguing but is surely always entertaining.

Funny

PHD Comics
A comic strip about the Life (or the lack thereof) in Academia. Piled Higher and Deeper. You can definitely read this comic strip every other day for a few laughs. For a more avid fan who believes in procrastination there are several other articles worth of note.

Dilbert blog
If you have ever entertained yourself during boring meetings by looking up cartoons of Dilbert’s coworkers and bosses. The weblog is surely a more verbose entertainment for you. His notoriously, Famously, Unambiguously, Emphatically and Fantastically clear satirical writing challenges your mental landscape.

TheOnion
This website calls itself "America's finest news source”. A Parody news paper that is published weekly in print and online. Featuring satirical articles reporting on national (United States) and international news. It is a comment on current events both real and imagined.

Gyaan
ALDaily
Arts & Letters Daily is what we can call the baap of all link lists. You can find here the links for the best columns on philosophy, aesthetics, literature, language, ideas, criticism, breakthroughs, culture, history, music, art, trends, dispute, gossip and many more topics. You are sure to find a week-load of articles worth a read every time you browse through.

CEIBS Knowledge
If you are one of those management types, and turn to the case study pages of "business world" every time you picked it up from the corner newspaper stands, The China Europe International Business School publishes its knowledge base here. Excellent and relevant content. Ever participated in any of those "china vs. India" debates? You are sure to find columns that could help you in a more learned discussion

Brain food
Give your mind a workout with a devious collection of puzzles. There are hundreds of tricky puzzles and logic problems that require innovative and lateral thinking. The website gets '0' points for page design though, but, who cares as long as the puzzles require you too use your thinking power.

General Interest

Wikipedia
Wow! Simple. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit. You can never ever be tired of coming up of new topics to know more about. I have searched on topics ranging from Mysticism to Practicality and it has never been a bore. If you ever feel like updating the encyclopedia, wikipedia encourages it. Be sure that "inappropriate" changes are usually removed quickly.


Science and Technology

Grid Cafe
CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory can easily be considered to be at the forefront of Science and technology. When they talk about a technology, we better have our ears glued in. It is guaranteed to change the future. Know more about the Grid, how it work, what can it do for you.


Miscellaneous

agencyfaqs
For the latest on Indian Media and advertising. Cluttered with content and advertisements, this website surely offers some good browsing every once in a while.


Lastly, If you are arrogant enough to believe in the notion of 'making a difference' to your workplace and can stake such a claim, kindly don't mind it! but, get to work will you.

"Will the Real Slim Shady please stand up, please stand up"!

This is how Eminem puts it, quirky song perhaps but he sure does have a serious point. The "Real Slim Shady" represents triumph of choice over control, Victory of careful selection over chance. Not so long ago lack of choice simplified things. But it killed opportunity and hope stone dead.

The name of the game is no longer chance. Choice has liberated chance. Increasingly so in our country much like the western world, it is no longer a chance that you are bald before you turn 30, not a matter of chance that you never developed bigger breasts. Today Indians can choose to Work in London, Helsinki or LA. You can choose to work for Sun, Siebel, Siemens or which company you prefer. Oh! What the heck, you could even choose your gender too.

Here is the flip side of the victory of choice. Only Shining stars are guaranteed the luxury of choice. But of course money shouts louder than ever, cash has the capacity to determine the shape of our life. The freedom available to the great Mallya is a lot more than what is available for country bumpkin arriving from Orissa to be cook in Bangalore.

The greatest equator is education. Having no education is an economic death sentence. A unique talent can grant you a passport to the globe. In the new world Elites are cosmopolitan. The neo-elites possess both cash and competence.

The choice is clear, anyone can settle for remixing old music, or you can break free from the sameness of the music already heard. To succeed in business we need to dare to be different. Cash and Competence is the key to this. Then comes the point where you make up you mind, either to follow the tracks other people have left behind or express what you have come to say.

"So, Will the Real Slim Shady please stand up, please stand up"!

Because Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

Have you ever been in love? of course!, If not, you've got it to come. It is a lot like measles; we all have to go through it. It is the strongest of emotions, and emotions are the enemy of any rational argument, and love is the most potent one. It is the super predator of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. How can we then fail to heed the advice of people who have already been through it and the horrors that it has to offer? This is a lot like a mean uncle who tells scary stories to children and reduces them to quivers.

So how can you get over this problem without danger, scramble through this tangle, come down this slippery path without falling, look into the sun without being dazzled?

Lets face it; no one is more susceptible to these fears, so they spend a lot of time and energy being scared. Separating emotions from white noise can be hard work, and the pressure can be quite overwhelming that you can barely think for yourselves. There is no real answer to this; it is not a common cough for which anyone can suggest a lozenge.

"I have never known a person who could do less work in more time"

There is about his room an air of neglect, as though the occupant did not particularly give a damn whether he slept in this room or hell. The evidence can easily be seen by the absence of any attempts at decoration and by the presence of dirty laundry and books scattered about the room. The furniture consists of a bed and an almirah, the kind of almirah only used by jawans in the Indian army, probably has been to kargil war too

the occupant is an idle guy, heaven help him, he has done many good things that he should not have done, in spite of his laziness. That is one gift that he has, a genuine idler that he is, he actually has plenty to do. His sincere belief is that there is no fun in doing nothing, when there is nothing to do. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet has to be stolen it seems.

He looks forward to a time when he shall have nothing to do but lie in bed till 12 noon, read two novels a day, have a nice little five-o' clock tea. It is a glorious prospect.

Thank heavens not a lot of people who know me read my articles :-). I am sure one common comment would be "I have never known a person who could do less work in more time".

Monsoon – A Memory for life.

The one major event in Indian weather is the monsoon.

When I was in school: For days there was thunder. Winds came up suddenly, stirred up the sleeping dust. The summer had been hotter, hotter than anybody can remember. Day-by-Day in the month of June the tension grew. Farmers grew alarmed, the papers, the met department, the government start getting prepared for the dire prediction. The grandmother said “It is coming for sure” and yet it would not.

The schools wouldn’t start yet, summer holidays just about start getting boring, we almost started looking forward for schools to start, we let out air out of the tyres of scooters standing by in the colony, wrote obscene stuff on the walls of girls’ school. And yet, no fun.

Everybody was exhausted, needing rain to lubricate; the lakes and the rivers retreated from the rocks. There was barely enough water even to drink. Water tankers came into the interiors of our apartment complex. We kids had to stand in lines with buckets to fill up the brackish water.

Then one day you knew. You saw it coming by the smell in the air. There was a powerful wind and then a shower of dust, hell lot of dust. The dust entered your hair, your nose. You had been sweating all day and could not stand the summer even for one more second.

The clouds passed over your head with great speed. The sky is bluish black. The first drop, so light that you think it must have been an air conditioner leaking, windows slammed open and shut. Everything goes into frenzy. All at once, there is a massive crack in the sky, and a simultaneous massive roar form the kids playing cricket in ground. Big drops of water, walls of water, worlds of water, and you are in the middle of it. You raise your eyes and face to the water to wash the summer away, auntys run into the balcony to take the laundry in. It rains for hours after this.

When it stops, the air is sweet, it is time to pack those air coolers away, the city would sleep well that night and you, you are just happy coz school is just around the corner.

Welcome to the new Flat world

Every summer, waves of Indians living overseas come back for a holiday or at least send pictures: of their son in front of a new fifty-two inch TV; their daughter sitting on the hood of an SUV, the wife in an open plan kitchen, one hand on microwave ;-), the whole family laughing together in the small backyard pool, their bungalow in the background. These pictures planted little time bombs in the minds of their poorer cousins living in two room apartments here, the newly bought Sofa their father bought or the Akai two-in-one Stereo whose installments took so much time to pay-off seemed to look cheap and shabby in comparison. The parents used to reassure themselves at least my children are growing up with Indian Values :-)

Cut to 2005 Bangalore: This weekend I witnessed one such family reunion, and, you would be happy to know things have changed quite much here.

The Indian family is now ready to pickup their siblings in exile in a brand new car, Korean nonetheless. The door opens to a plush apartment with a large balcony. As soon as the family reunion over, there is no traditional opening of the suitcases, instead there is Biryani ordered from a restaurant and reheated from a microwave oven. The Elders start discussing property prices in no less than 10 minutes and the visitors realize that all the savings they have been making for the donkeys years can hardly fetch a decent apartment here. Even the children who came back from exiles speak the same argot music video channel language as their cousins here in India do.

There is no exclusivity of coming back from foreign anymore; there is no club of "We were in foreign too" people who want to take you in. It is party time in India, and, we Indians are especially frenetic about partying, The Indian siblings want to take their cousins club hopping while the uncles are settling down for a scotch.

Illusion of individuality

We drive down someplace close to MG Road and decide a Hotel that is on the first floor of the building, the staircase has no lights, and I think we are at a wrong place. A Man standing after about 50 steps asks us ‘Hotel?’ We are asked to climb up a little more and suddenly a flashlight comes on from the other end and we walk towards it. A burly man salaams us and passes us onto the next torchlight. Finally we get to the entrance of a “lounge bar”.

The door opens and the inside is ablaze with light and music and flowing with liquor and packed with people at 12 AM in the night, a huge hall packed to the walls. There about 10 or 15 ladies in the room dressed only a little provocatively in full sarees and tight backless blouses. The men in the audience my friend says are software engineers, bankers, traders etc, I think I recognize a fat guy sitting closeby, he also looks back at me a second longer than the genrally accepted definition of ‘casually’.


The customers here literally blow money on the dancers. They will walk up to the dance floor and stand with a stack of notes over the head of the favored dancer. These notes from the expert hand traverse the distance between the customer and the dancer on air and fluff out, forming a halo around the girl enveloping her in the supreme grace of currency, the wealth adds immensely to the radiance of her face, while the floor is littered with notes and the male attendants scurry around to collect them and deposit then in the dancer’s account. The timid people among these admirers will give their money to the waiter, who will in turn shuffle it over the dancer like a deck of cards downwards from the palm. There is another man who is singing dreamily along with the songs played, he has a stack of tens in front of him, which he holds up two at a time, singing all the while, not even looking at the girls who are old enough to be his daughters. The minute he drops this cash, the girls pickup the cash and dart away, like goldfish nibbling in quick jerks at the pieces of bread that you throw into the pool.

There are garlands of laminated currency (50, 100, 500), which is draped around the dancer’s neck and stays on her through the entire duration of the song that customer requested. If the customer is annoyed at her, or he wants to show off that he doesn't care about the money or the girl, he flings a huge stack of money at her face, then throw his hands into the air: “This is how little the girl and the money mean to me.”


Why are they doing this? What do they get in return? I ask my friend.


Apparently, just five minutes attention. Just 5 minutes of attention for the garage mechanic, IT Engineer or the trader. This is the place where the classes meet, where the only thing important is the color of the money. The moment the customer walks into this ‘Hotel’, he is the star in his own custom-made Hindi movie song. He’s Shah Rukh Khan. It is an easy deception, in the midst of a hundred other men just like him; he can sustain the illusion of individuality.

Success for the Swellhead

When asked for the reason for their success, most successful men are bound to come up with: “A lot of hard work”. Sounds good, doesn’t it. It works very well at home too, what with the wife who has been ignored for ages. But, if you tapped the shoulders of this successful people and asked them to answer honestly, they would most probably respond with factors such as

- Ability to recognise opportunity when no one else did..
- Fine-tuned decision-making.
- Friends at the right places at right time.
- An ocassional moral lapse.
- Luck.
- A little bit of hardwork to make the above happen.

I am really appalled by the number of people who swear by hard work in public. If this were true every other cloth vendor who roams around your streets could be the next Dhirubhai. People aspiring to be successful have to get rid of this notion, it isn’t healthy and it is not even true.

Here are a few postulates, which need to be unlearnt.

- Effort and Result are directly proportional
- Quantity of work is as important quality of work
- A few more hours at work always straightens out the problems
- Hard work alone is the secret to job security

Read these books. : First, Break all the rules, The Seven-day weekend, Anatomy of greed, Boo Hoo, Maverick.

Chicken feed for the IT Engineer

The ultimate consequence of higher productivity is unemployment. If we were to compare the IT economy to that of a chicken farm the analogy could be easily understood.

Basically the productivity of a chicken farm increases when chickens lay more eggs per day, The chicken farmers over a period of time noted that when the chicken are confined to a cage they could produce more eggs, instead of running around for food, being chased by cocks, or having to evade predators. To understand IT productivity, all you have to do here is replace the word chicken with IT worker and eggs with software.

Coming back to our theory, If chickens keep laying eggs and the price of the eggs keeps falling, too many eggs, too many cell phones or too much software will leave the chicken farmer or the IT major no scope to increase prices.

The IT business maybe producing more software than ever, but the bottom is dropping out. The Solution for a chicken farmer in a scenario like this would be to have the eggs converted to egg powder, but, IT engineers cannot be converted to powder, so, the obvious answer is unemployment.

Another complication is that while it is plain to see that using IT engineers in sweat shops all over the world increases productivity, who will buy all this produce; ultimately many of the chicken farmers (IT companies) will go have to go out of business.

So who will go out of business next?
Hint: Indian chicken produce more eggs on less food :-)

Answer: It is no miracle that to see jobs vanishing in the west when we link it up with productivity gains.

Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.

The truth it would seem, to most people, counterintuitive. The riskiest time to by stocks is during a roaring bull market. Because when the prices are highest, the downside is the steepest. The upside is founded on hope and hope alone. By contrast during a bear market the stock prices have scraped the bottom, stocks are cheap and downside is limited.

If you were buying stocks now, you are buying into a market that has doubled in 2 years. Whenever the market will revert to a mean, the investor who buys now is bound to loose a large chunk of his savings. And over time, the markets will always revert back to the mean. . The mean maybe different at different points in time, much depends on economic conditions, global politics, and investor expectations, but there will be a mean.

So how do we avoid the loss of savings?

- There is no one generic mantra for this, each investor has to assess his own situation, based on risk tolerance, age, and how much one can afford to loose. If you cannot afford to loose 20 to 30 percent of your savings, it is better to take some of your winning investments off market.

- You have to understand that information is not knowledge. Knowledge will come to us gradually as we digest information, reflect and rearrange bits and pieces of information. This is not to say that there is no excellent information available on the net, but some of it is inaccurate and most of it is irrelevant. It is difficult for anyone but the most astute investor to sort out the cream from the skim milk.

Mathematics, Marriage and finding a place to eat

There are a lot of situations where people have to make decisions and what is decided earlier affects the choices later on. One of the serious decisions a person makes is finding a partner. Most people want to find the best possible partner.

Generally we can have only one partner in a lifetime; at best we can change this rule to one partner at a time. Typically any person would go through a succession of friendships before you find the "Miss. Right" or the "Mr. Right" and then you make the decision of not to go looking anymore. The rules of social etiquette do not allow you to meet the person you have rejected earlier or have been rejected by. There isn’t much possibility of finding out much about anyone who might come later.

So, what’s the optimal strategy of finding a partner?
The idea is that a coherent picture of an ideal partner is typically built up after a certain percentage of friendships come along your way. The next person to fulfill this coherent criteria is most likely to be the partner. The situation described is very similar to problem of house hunting, although it is a little easier to find and change the house than a partner.

Say you could make 5 friendships at a random order in a lifetime, A permutation table of finding an ideal partner the number of choices would be 5*4*3*2*1 = 120, With 6 friendships the number of choices would be 720 and so on. The choices are obviously too many, and at age zero there is no way you could find the number of potential partners to meet.

The Suggestion is: A typical person should count about a dozen potential partners and start hunting seriously :-), The first dozen should give you enough information for a reasonable choice. When choosing a restaurant to eat it is ideal to look at 2 or 3 of them before selecting.

Hopefully you will be satisfied! :-)

Going short on the Market - Nobody is whistling when walking through the graveyard

The success of a short seller is rested on the research into fiscal metrics of the companies he shorted. He is just like any other value investor. The only difference is that while most value investors try to make a profit by buying low and selling high, short seller simply reverses this process: his aim is to sell high and buy low.

When a short seller spots a stock that he thinks is overvalued, he borrows a block of its shares from a broker or an Institutional investor and then turns around and sells the borrowed shares. He then watches the stock hoping that it will tumble before the he must repay the loan. If he is lucky the stock craters, he buys the shares he needs to cover the loan and pockets the difference between what he pays for the new shares and what he made when sold the borrowed shares. But if the stock climbs, the short seller must pay more to replace the shares, and he takes a loss -- sometimes a big loss.

There is no sense of euphoria when the short succeeds; He is like a dooms day soothsayer. Unlike the so-called value investor he does not turn from a person of average intelligence to a genius overnight. He keeps silent when he succeeds, he has a deep sense of understanding that he has beaten the odds at other investors expense, have you seen anyone whistling when walking through the graveyard.

The Power of Dominant logic

All of us are prisoners of our own socialization. The lenses through which we perceive the world are colored by our own ideology, experiences and established practices. We just have to get rid of them. We have to discard many of the "for and against" views of the world. For example, Are you for capitalism or socialism?, Do you think we Indians should globalize or not?, do you believe big is better or small?, Do you want to be a techie or a businessperson?, Should you go abroad or live in your home town?, are you for love marriages or arranged marriages? .. This list goes on and on.

I am not concerned about this so-called dominant logic. I want to be concerned about what works, there is no debate about who is right. I am even less concerned about what may go wrong. Plenty can and has. I got to focus on the learning from the experiments that I do in my life.
These experiments will show me the way forward.

Mirza Ghalib - A Biographical Scenario

Here is an excerpt from the book Mirza Ghalib - A Biographical Scenario - Gulzar

"Mirza," Zafar addressed Ghalib, "Would you care to please recite the ghazal? Let tonight's session begin with a ghazal of yours."
Mirza cleared his throat, fumbled around his pocket, took out a piece of paper and sought Zafar's permission to recite the gazhal.

"Har ek baat pe kahte ho tum, ke tu kya hai"
On turn of every phrase you doubt my entity,

he recited

"Har ek baat pe kahte ho tum, ke tu kya hai"
The assembled poets picked up his verse.

"Tumhi kaho ke ye andaz-e guftagu kya hai"
Tell me after what fashion have you chiselled this tete-e-tete

Ghalib recited further. The gathering burst into an applause as did Zafar

"Ragon mein daurte phirne ke hum nahin qael,
Jab aankh hi se na tapka to phir lahoo kya hai."

Worthy Not of running in the veins,
the blood that does not trickle down the eyes.

Ghalib moved on to the next couplet. The Diwan-e-Aam echoed with appreciation of ghalib. Even Ustad Zauq joined in. Mufti stole a glance towards the piece of paper that Ghalib held in his hand but only a blank sheet greeted him. He looked at Ghalib and smiled. Ghalib winked at him in acknowledgement.

"Irshad.. Irshaad"
"Encore.. Encore.." the gathering said Ghalib recited his verse again

"Ragon mein daurte phirne ke hum nahin qael,
Jab aankh hi se na tapka to phir lahoo kya hai."

Worthy Not of running in the veins,
the blood that does not trickle down the eyes.

Ah! how delicious it is to turn over and go to sleep again

Ah! how delicious it is to turn over and go to sleep again : "Just five more minutes." Is there any human being, I wonder, except maybe Mr.Spock from Star-trek, who gets up willingly? For me getting up on time is an utter impossibility. If eight o' clock happens to be the time I should be out, then I will lie till half past eight, if circustances change and 8.30 becomes too early, then it is nine before I can rise. I've tried all kinds of schemes, buy alarm-clocks(they always go off at the wrong time to wakeup the wrong person). I've asked my friends to knock the door, and they do knock the door and call me and I grunt back 'okay..okay..' and then comfortably to sleep again. Ive actually tried to take a cold bath; and even that was of no use, for afterward i would jump into the bed again to warm myself.

Desi Aristocrats

When the Brits ran our country
The desi aristocrats played Cricket, sipped gin and tonic at the gymkhana and when sick or languid, drank Horlicks.

When the Yankees took over, They slipped into Levis and Adidas, and swigged Carlsberg, Coke and Pepsi.
Now they dine at Pizza Hut and talk in the yankee Accent.

The vanquished always imitate the victor.

The City of vadapav eaters’

The new job that I have taken up with my company allows me to travel a lot, so; here I am in Mumbai working all day with some tech issues. I just asked my colleague casually, so, whose city is Bombay, he did not understand my question, I had to give him cues like, Bangalore is a city of IT Engineers, Hyderabad is the city of nawabs, Calcutta belongs to the socialists, He immediately knew the answer to my question. It’s the city of vadapav eaters. It’s the food of rickshaw pullers, street urchins, clerks, police, gangsters and businessmen alike. It's not that I haven’t had vadapav before, but the new description that I had just heard made my desire for a vadapav so strong that I simply had to have it immediately.

It did not take too much persuasion to ask my newfound Bombay friend to take me to the best vadapav joint. I did have to foot the taxi bill though, which is roughly 100 times costlier than the delicacy itself.

I wait almost for half an hour along with dozens of people around me. I feel tense and anxious with the exact change in my hand for two plates of the delicious stuff. As soon as the ladle emerges from the wok of boiling oil full of vadas, the frenzy begins. People are thrusting their money forward. In front of the cook is a thali full of coins. Nobody is ordering for just one vadapav. Not everybody will get the vadapav from this batch. I some how manage to get two each for my friend and me at Rs.12.Each pav has been sprinkled with chutney -- the top half of the bun is dipped in green chutney and the bottom with red garlic chutney. The best part of eating a vadapav here is that the assistant fixes the vada into the pav, at most other places, I would have to do it myself.

I walk out of this makeshift shop that has been in the makeshift mode since past 20 years with my crispy vadas with peas crushed inside the fresh bun. It is delicious mixture of soft pav making the heat of the chutney slightly milder. I really feel like I am having something nourishing after and long spell of sobbing. This food has lived up to its name and made me a true vadapav eater'

lazy sunday

My eyes cracked open and my head shuddered violently as the my cellphone yanked me into conciousness. It took almost 2 minutes of stretching and scratching my groin.

'Sorry I did'nt return your call manish.It's just that.......'

I did not even recognise the voice, 'Don't be sorry' i said weakly, 'just tell me who you are' What ever was said on the other side really startled me. It's not daily that i recieve calls at 6 am. I did not even know such a time existed.

Thats how my lazy sunday started ..By 11 AM when I really wokeup..I was too damn hungry...but too lazy too cook anything. Just had a few spoonfulls of milkpowder and some water to drink. Slowly getting into the groove of things, This new apartment is quite good, except that I have to do a lot of work before I change the look and feel of this dumpster to that of a house.

What do I want?

• I want to move to a better flat
• I want to start my own business
• I want an adventure
• I want to be stronger physically
• I want to run for 30 minutes a day
• I want to have ginger chicken and naaan
  I want to be able to make a movie
• I want to live in canada at some point of time in my life
• I want to know why the sky is blue
• I want a huge dog in my flat
• I want to *** ******* ;-)
  
• I want a clean towel
• I want to believe in something that can be explained
• I want sonali bendre
• I want to be a hero
• I want to drive less to work
• I want to sleep

Starting of a Brand new day

what am I doing with my life : The answer to what I am going to do with my life was pretty obvious to me even when I was 15. My classmates wanted to be everyting from journalists to actors, from lorry drivers to spacemen. I for one thing always wanted to do in my life had something to do with computers. And I just did that, so what if I did not write the next "space invaders" or "Pacman", which was definetely my dream when I was 15, but I am atleast in the right area, so that one is ticked off ;-) About me : You see, In my world, when a bottle of beer enters the table it's consumed entirely in anything from 20 minutes on a rough day to 2 minutes on a not so rough day. This not because I am an alcoholic(not quite yet), but is simply due to the liking of beer combined with the fact that I have no self-control whatsoever. Right now my research topics are ranging from the existence to the ownership of these beer bottles. what is my blog about : My blog is about growing up. and my thoughts culled from my experience at the frontline of my life. I have racked up my brain and have come-up with some ever lasting thoughts which would summarize what I would be writing about. So, this is what I came up with. 1.Dont take anything for granted because when it's gone it's always too late 2.Look after your friends - and they will look after you. 3.The only thing that gets easier when you grow up is the ability to become totally silent in the middle of a conversation. 4. And finally Never go to a pub unless there is enough place to sit down and talk. But It is basically all about common sense.