Lost on the sofa

I watched this travel series today, Stephen Fry in America, all episodes in one day. It was an amazing experience. The sheer geographical and cultural diversity of USA blows your mind, as does Stephen Fry's unmistakable charm. I have been watching a lot of travel shows lately, one other that I liked greatly was Happy People, a comparatively slow moving chronicle of the trials and tribulations, and most of all, unfading happiness, of the people that inhabit the Serbian lands in north Russia: the Serbians and the Russians. I could write long rambling posts on my experience of watching each of these two programs, but continuing being the lazy ass that I've been lately, I'd just briefly state how bloody significant I increasingly find it is to travel. And to end by the silvery consolation that watching travel shows, since not everyone can hope to travel so much while keeping up with their myriad, uncanny responsibilities, watching good travel shows can sometimes indeed be a great option.

Empathy as skill

Today, on linkedin, I saw an article headlined "Why empathy is your most important skill." I thought it was wrong on so many levels, I wonder where to begin. Also, I have no motivation to write long posts. So I'll just record that while I have nothing against skill-building, in fact it's a most noble activity, but the moment you start thinking of empathy as a skill, you miss the whole point of it, and basically guarantee that you probably won't be acquiring any, and stand to lose some of what you were born with. 

Momentous day

While recording only the third entirely sleepless work-night of my life last night, I submitted my last homework assignment at 4:30 pm today, exactly 24 minutes ago. Done with the last one. Well, hopefully.

Confession

For the last two months, I had been studying very hard. This mini-semester is famous for its insane inherent course-load, and to make matters interesting, I decided at the beginning of this mini that I would, on my end, also cover 3 full-semester CS courses in addition to my own course-load, during this mini-semester. I was working my way towards this fairly satisfactorily, and more often than not, the pain was sweet. Then yesterday, when I was coming to the college from the bus, I realized the bag was unchained when I got down, and the two registers of notes I had made over umpteen stolen hours on these 3 additional subjects had fallen from my bag. I lost them. Now it may not sound like a big deal to a distant listener, but to me, they were my single most valuable physical possession. I was really sad. And I could not concentrate on my studies the whole day yesterday, and the half-day that has passed today. It is not the first time something like this has happened: during the days I fancied myself a short-stories writer, my computer once crashed taking with it my twenty odd stories. True that I should have been careful. But, anyway.

The Unknown Man.

He's all about the things he doesn't talk about.
He is puzzled by his irrationality, because he (thinks he) can identify it.
He works hard. He doesn't know what for or why.
He is self-effacing but not not self-centered.
He (thinks he) can explain yourself to you.
He can explain himself to you.
He can not explain himself to himself.
He loves some people, who can be classified into those who don't know this, and, those who don't want this.
He likes walking on unknown streets.
He wants to be remembered by those who don't remember him.
He wants to be forgotten by most who do remember him.
He likes studying probability and liked studying philosophy.
He can kick his own ass.
He can not kiss it.

Some great articles

Banville on Kafka
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/different-kafka/


On Polymaths
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/anyone-can-learn-to-be-a-polymath/


Jim Rogers on India
http://www.livemint.com/Companies/pqNgQUDoOPsQCli4EgZLMM/Jim-Rogers-Why-Im-shorting-India.html

The richest banker in the world

For an industry infamous for being too rich, its richest person comes in at a surprisingly low rank (46th) on the forbes richlist. Joseph Safra is the world's richest banker. And another interesting fact is that his family has been a major banking player since the Ottoman Empire. What'd'ya'say ya Rothschilds.

Since it is hard to have people see just what's written instead of reading in between the lines, I should emphasize that this post is not making a case for having a society with even richer bankers in the future. I just thought it was an interesting piece of trivia.

More on Solitude

After an all too long intermission, my love affair with the idea of solitude continues (older entries here and here). Today, I read something on solitude that deeply affected me. Since it's not everyday that you read something that affects you deeply, it merits sharing.

So here goes: William Deresiewicz's lecture on 'Solitude and Leadership' in The American Scholar

Losing all hope was freedom

It's very quiet, very quiet today. All I can hear is an exhaust fan, running somewhere far, far away.

A little more on Truth

(My fanhood and fascination with the idea of truth continues. Older entries here, here, here and here.)

There are two kinds of people.

A:  Those who believe there is indeed a truth, and that it's the only thing that's constant.

and

B:  Those who think truth is somehow flexible, who say things like "Everyone has their own truth, and this is his truth and that is your truth", and those who sometimes will totally backtrack on their earlier declarations, and stand for something entirely at odds with their old stand while not admitting that the earlier stance was somehow wrong or misguided or false or just a lie but will rather protect it with statements like "that was the truth of last month and this is the truth of today".

It's only a subset of those who belong to the former group who will ever be willing to die for the truth. And it's only some out of those who'd be willing to die for the truth, that will make the world a better place.

You are one of A or B. And you always know who you really are. There's no fooling oneself.

Two bullshit pieces of advice

1. Set realistic goals.

2. Always have a plan B.

If doing great work, by which I mean work that you in your most honest and solitary moments can call truly great, as opposed to reaching prestigious positions that will get you the most number of congratulatory messages, is what you really want, the right advice is the very exact opposite of the two popular but pathetic bullet points above.

If it is the other thing you really want, you should probably stick to the two points above as best as you can. And, good luck.

A story from the pre-mobile-phone era

Mrs. Sarita Jaiswal waited for her son at the schoolbus' designated stop but the bus did not come. She sat anyhow under a warm Gulmohur tree. Every five minutes or so a bus passed, and at the sight of each of them she would stand up, anticipating her son, and then go back under the tree. She called Mr. Anand Jaiswal, her husband and a generally thoughtful person. He was not on his desk, being engaged in a generally useless meeting, and could not take her call, so Mrs. Jaiswal called Mr. Subhash Khatreja, her cousin and a generally business-savvy marble trader. His shop was close by, and in fifteen minutes he arrived at the bus stop, fetched his cousin sister and just as they sat in his car to go to the kid's school, the kid, Vasu Jaiswal, a class fifth student at Delhi's Frank Anthony school and a generally mischievous kid, jumped down from the tree to tell them he had been here all this while. But the car had left just before he could yell at it, and he was left standing there with nowhere to go. He knew that the house would be locked so he did not bother going home but left instead for the closest video game parlour. At Frank Anthony, his mother and uncle were worried on finding that Vasu had been dropped at the bus-stop, and rushed back home in a frenzy expecting him to be sitting tired and hungry at the doorstep. But when they reached he was still playing video-games at the parlour, so they contemplated calling the police. An hour passed, and they had almost dialed hundred, when Vasu came leaping and bounding after having won all his games, his shirt untucked, and necktie tied to his forehead like a headband. Mr. Khatreja approached him aggressively, intending to give him a verbal dressing down, but before he could, Mrs. Jaiswal ran forward to Vasu and hugged him tight and long, and kissed him numerously. Mrs. Jaiswal, after all, was his mother, and a generally cool woman. Mr. Jaiswal could not be reached, when he was called again, this time out of a need for storytelling. 

Moral of the story: The useless meetings are generally the longest ones.

As we turn 66 ..

I have to admit I am pessimistic about India's future. When I first came to the US for graduate studies, India was definitely already on a declining track, but even so, I couldn't have imagined things were going to be this bad this soon. In its characteristic way of priding itself on things that deserve no pride, India has for the last several years prided itself on its attractive demographic dividend. There were doubtless proponents of this putative panacea elsewhere too. Many famous pop-thinkers such as Thomas Friedman, the big-4 consulting firms, even the likes of IMF never failed to remind us of what it means. Perhaps it would have paid to be careful to read it as what it 'can mean' than what it 'means'. Clearly, the demographic dividend comes with significant downsides too, that we didn't and in many ways still don't want to see. The foreigners' enthusiasm about it was justified; they didn't have to share the downside, and could participate in the upside at their discretion.  But for the Indian people and administration to be too happy about this demographic dividend, which is always a product of an uninhibited population growth rate, was like a stock-trader being too happy about financial volatility. True, the skilled and astute trader cannot make nearly as much money in a low volatility environment as he can in a high volatility environment, but a mediocre one invariably gets killed by volatility. Now the question that needs no answering is whether astute and skillful are words that better describe the Indian administration or is it words like mediocre. A huge percentage of Indian population today is already young, and unless population growth rate slows down, which it hasn’t been showing any signs of, the Indian population is getting progressively younger. If the Indian government and India Inc together are able to build the health and education infrastructure to support this huge young population, India can undo any and all of its previous failings. But that’s a big 'if' that we take very lightly. And it has gotten much bigger of late, with India's dismal current account deficits, depleting reserves, and the government's continuation of ever increasing and indiscriminate spending beyond its means. Foreign institutional investors have the most negative outlook for India amongst all emerging markets, and most if not all are decisively uninterested in having anything to do with India for quite some time to come. It is high time we face facts rather than languish mired in a web of emotional and ideology-ridden never ending discourse, and the fact of the matter is India has little chance of meeting its infrastructural needs for supporting the future of its young population in the absence of foreign investment. I hope that as Indians we show the courage to swallow the bitter pill for a brighter future, and I hope different people in different states of India, with vastly different and sometimes conflicting goals, can come together this time, because if we don't, the consequences are not pretty. A relapse into the sluggishness of the 1980s is not far, to begin with, but what lies ahead is more disheartening - an unimportant place in the global order, and maybe farther into the future, the need for foreign investment morphing into a need for foreign aid.

In the coming elections I am going to be rooting for Narendra Modi if for no other reason than that it would be a change from the present system. I do not think he is the miracle some people seem to think he is. It is important to notice that the state he inhabited as a chief and no doubt improved, was already prosperous, and had all the makings of a progressive society. Most of the rest of India is either only prosperous or only progressive or, in many cases, neither. Leading India with its remarkable heterogeneities is, if you ask me, a completely different ballgame. But he says that he can bring about a turnaround, and as a nobody, that and his past track record is all I have to go with. The other alternative that has recently emerged is AAP under the leadership of Arvind Kejriwal (who, most importantly, buys morning milk and bread from my best friend's general store but that falls just short of reason enough for me to support him). Despite his possibly good intentions, his campaign for the Delhi assembly elections proves beyond doubt that in finding the balance between populism and bitter-medicine, he tilts all too much towards populism. How else can we justify his plans for de-syncing of oil prices from the global markets, at a time when India's two biggest oil companies, both public sector undertakings, have already been incurring huge losses for several years running, owing to heavy government subsidies. How else to interpret a most juvenile claim to reduce electricity prices by seventy percent! Unless the power distribution companies are grossly manipulating their accounting statements, it seems unreasonable to believe that they can still be in business following a price slash of this magnitude. But besides these specific points, he has failed to come up with any ideas for India's growth going forward, except that he will let common people have their ideas implemented. This is what I have to say to that: the majority of the 'common people' are not intelligent enough (Actually they are not honest and well-intentioned enough either, but even if we assume they are) to guide India's road forward from the pit that we're currently in. And if it is true that the common people by and large will dictate India's economic, defence, home and foreign policy under a future AAP government, I am scared. And you should be too.

Things are not all bad, for sure. India still has vast untapped potential - no one can deny that. But potential alone is useless unless it can be tapped. While India Inc is getting increasingly disenchanted with India, and the government is as effete as it has ever been, India's social sector is also far from effective. Of the five nonprofits I closely worked with, two are downright corrupt, two are too lavish for a nonprofit and do creative things that really help no one, and the one that works hard is not well-funded. There are those like Teach-for-India which are great successes, but the number of such successes is very very few compared to how many we need. The most remarkable aspect of Teach-for-India's success is in being able to mesh the technically advanced graduates of IITs with the world of social work in a big way. We will need many more TFIs in the years to come. Broadly speaking, India needs more maths, more coding, and more manufacturing. I went to one of India's supposedly premier engineering colleges, and yet, I say with neither compunction nor doubt that most of my college's graduates were technically weak even in their own respective engineering trades, let alone the fact that an alarmingly high number of them didn't know how to code at all, and hardly any could code at a level that merits any special appreciation. Compare this to US universities, where everybody from Econ to Stat majors do a significant amount of coding. It might sound naive that I stretch the particular topic of coding so dear, but it is more naive yet to find it naive. All areas of enterprise, from manufacturing to banking to medicine, receive huge advancements in productivity from the simple sounding aspect of ‘coding it’ well. The thing common to the best mechanical engineers, best financial modelers, the best medical researchers, even the best movie studios of today is an abundance of coding talent. I cannot imagine a truly competitive economy of ten years from now, where a significant number of people cannot code well. Whether we like it or not, we today have huge unmet educational needs, and when your needs are as big as this, programs on philosophy and psychology are a forbidden luxury, and here I'm pointing to the massively expensive Nalanda University under preparation for the last few years. I truly hope India is rich enough one day to afford these indulgences, but till then that's what they are - indulgences we cannot afford, things to be put in the same bracket as the Commonwealth games.

Here’s wishing India well and hoping I can be of some use.

A few good men

"I am very good my school is very good thank you"

So went the first letter of a wonderful kid in Algiers I've recently made kind-of friends with. We will be sharing letters in a rather charmingly old-fashioned longhand way. The one that I sent him, I now suspect, was a little too formal and self-conscious to have felt endearing, but I hope he liked it anyway. Hopefully, whoever read it out to him, in case somebody did, made it funnier.

In other news, I hope Banville wins the Nobel this year, or else the Nobel will have to lose all its remaining credibility. Ancient Light left me with the feeling that he was right on the top of his game, but so had The Sea, The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable. It seems like he is always at his best. I have read just one more novel of his, or quarter-read it, and that was Copernicus, and I'm more inclined to believe that it was too good for me than to believe that it was not as good as the rest. Anyway, really hoping he wins it. The last time I rooted for anyone so much was for Sachin to win the man of the series in the '96 Titan cup. And at that time I knew inside, even if I never let it show, that he did struggle to play Fannie DeVilliers even at the top of his respective game. He did win it, and I was punished the next morning for not having done my school homework. 

In another news, my dad will retire from work in a few days. For me it's hard to even imagine my dad not a government servant. He has always been a big, big influence over me, and I have always felt incredibly lucky to have the most honest man with the most unbelievable goodness of heart, as my father. He worked for this organization for something like 38 years, much greater than all the time I've been in this world, and I'm sure his bank will miss him a lot, and I'm guessing he'll miss it a little bit too. I sometimes wonder about how to jazz up his post-retirement life, and then I realize the funny arrogance of my wondering - as if he needs me, he whose jazzed up my very thoughts all my life - to jazz up his days. He will light up, and lighten up, whatever he does.

When historical correlations fail to hold up

This summer had investors across asset classes and geographies puzzled by the "wrong" correlation between treasury yields and risk assets (such as corporate credit and equities). Historically, it was argued, that the correlation has been strongly positive. That is, when the treasury yields rise (or fall), the prices of risky assets rise (or fall). I would argue that the dismay with the rationality of this year's correlation was misguided in more ways than one. Firstly, when we talk of historical correlations, we tend to think of a continuous time series between, let's say, 40 years ago (assuming that to be a ballpark time at which markets, at least US markets, decisively matured) to today. While it is true that this correlation shows itself to be markedly positive, a strong positive correlation needn't necessarily allude to an economic thumb-rule. And in this case it doesn't. It is important to see that there have been pockets of time in the last 40 years when the correlation was negative, but since they weren't the norm, they don't affect your long term coefficient of correlation in any big way. But just because they weren't the norm does not mean they were periods of random noise. It might do us good service to identify those specific time-periods and then analyze the difference between those time periods and the rest of history. From a study such as the one I just outlined, my far from exhaustive observations suggest an element of causality as a big differentiator in the correlation behavior. That is, it is important to consider what's causing the rates to rise - good economic outlook (in which case the positive correlation does indeed make complete sense and holds up almost always) or something else (lack of confidence in the government (as in 2008), or Bernanke sneaking away his Santa Claus hand (this summer)).

Traditional wisdom for the positive correlation goes like this: The rise of treasury yields (or in other words the falling of treasury bond prices) reflects a transfer of the world's funds from riskless to risky assets and vice versa. Naturally, as a result of this transfer of funds into risky assets such as high-yield credit and equities, they rise. All very well, except this and that and that. We saw this in 2008 at the time of the financial crisis that the treasuries fell (yields rose) and equities fell too. Any positive correlation between yields and equities was thrown out of the window. Now lets try to see why the traditional wisdom is far from a holistic perspective. Most of all, it's because it relies too much on correlation and correlation alone, while only superficially digging into causality. At its core this conventional wisdom makes one grand assumption, that money either flows from risky assets (HY, Equities) to riskless assets (treasuries, gold) or the other way. Such a transfer always gives us a conveniently positive correlation between treasury yields and risky assets, and we rejoice. What it does not take into account is that in times of unprecedented uncertainty (such as Bernanke leaving the markets alone, in the present case) people don't necessarily merely shift their money from one asset class to the other - they may wait for the uncertain period to pass, holding cash, and taking off again only when the sky gets clearer. In such times, it is not uncommon to see both sovereign bonds and equities falling, as we saw this summer, and have before. This is also the reason why the 'aberrations' or breaks in the utopian positive correlation between yields and equities are much more common in the rising rates environment (associated with things going wrong) than in the falling rates environment.

Nonlinear jump diffusion

In wintry dims of after-rains

like filigree my fingers shiver

as does my mind, 

jumping back and forth in time,

one moment I remember

lying in my balcony in 1999

reading with teenage fascination

about Mohenjodaro at 2 in the night

and thinking "wow, how cool"

living vicariously in BC 2000,

as I now live in AD 1999,

and sometimes, farther back in time,

my dad, who lost to me in 100m sprints

to make me feel victorious and vain,

until he met with an accident,

in September, 1994.

After which I won no more.

And then I sit and wonder what

it must have been to have continued

watching "Johnny Gaddaar" that day in '09.

After all, it had been a wish of mine.

Growing up

In school I always wanted to be a good boy. If only a teacher ever came to me and told me she's naming her newborn after me, because 'you're such a good boy', it would have been the most delightful thing to have happened to me. But now being good is not that important. Being perceived good is to an extent still fairly important. And that's not entirely a bad thing, because to be perceived as good, invariably the most straightforward way is to actually be good. So while not much of a difference if you think about it this way, there is a major difference, if you are the kind that likes truth and wants to see truth. And the difference is what is popularly called 'the loss of innocence'. It's a big difference, and sooner or hopefully later, you'll realize why it is a 'big' difference.

Writing me down

A month ago I started keeping a diary. At first it was merely one of the many diversions I had been trying. Except that this was one that began to take a life all its own, other than solely its diversion aspect, its reason of being. The first day I wrote a diary, there were only bad things to write. Actually, to be honest, that wasn’t just the first day. As noble as this month-old tradition now seems, its beginnings were rather rheumy. I distinctly remember the third day. Each new letter on that day’s entry seemed to me at that time an unwelcome, almost officious, replacement for a fullstop. I still call it a fullstop and not a period, as is the norm in polite society; I guess I’m somewhere still a stickler for dramatic effect. But when I look back today at that day’s page, it does not seem all that bad anymore. It does make me sad to read it, but then I notice that even at the tenterhooks of that sepulchral, sodden stillness I managed to make the cursives look delicately done and had made sure that the commas and semicolons were given their just due in the world. And then it’s better, in the worldy way.

Sometimes I write in the middle of a crowded subway ride, and it does occur to me when I do that that somebody might imagine me lunatic, but if reading tomes in the subway is kosher, I think that writing a page down shouldn’t be too conspicuous. Sometimes I write my diary sprawled prostrate in the Central Park. That is, now that I think of it, my favourite place to write the diary. With its vast green expanse all around you, and from beyond it peeking at you the colossal skyline of centuries of human enterprise, and all of it umbrellaed under the same blue sky that I gazed at as a four year old in Ranchi – the place has an aura of grandeur and intimacy all at once, and for a moment it feels like writing down the little details of my comparatively featureless life is the most natural thing to do, as if under this vast umbrella the trivialities of my day will assume a vastness themselves, an importance, a place.

The first time I went and lay down in the Central Park after work, I felt like sleeping there under the sun. And so I slept, in the crisp formals that interns at investment firms invariably wear. When I woke up a couple of hours later in the crumpled bleached white shirt and the crumbling green grass specks all over it, I felt the best I had felt in days. A feeling washed over me: that I was still a good person, despite whatever. Unreasonable, yes, that sleeping in the grass should in any way have that self-fulfilling consequence, but why would I complain.

When I woke up, people were hanging out all over the park. Couples mostly, all of them happy and uninhibited. There was also the occasional gang of girls. And then there were the solitary reapers, the people photographing everything and everybody. And of course kids. Kids and moms, actually. I realize that the women that I am most attracted to without personally knowing them at all, are increasingly women with their little kids. Sometimes pushing their little ones in a baby-walker while they shop at a mall, but more often playing with them at a park’s swings and inclines. It’s a dangerous predisposition, I know. “I don’t act upon it” as they like to say.

I didn’t write anything about work. I am not sure what to write here about it. You are never sure about these things – what would be appropriate, what would be deemed crossing the line, and all those auxiliary doubts. But I will mention that I had a conversation over lunch with someone who was some time ago the chief economist to the Treasury Secretary. I even had a theory about why the historical positive correlation between sovereign bond yields and risk assets is not holding up anymore, and he seemed happy with the reasoning. Somewhat cool, I guess.

Don’t know what else to write. Will come back, hopefully.

On being back in India after an year in US for the first time

Relatives like to ask you rhetrorically "wahan pe hain aise majey?" You have to stop yourself from saying "haan hain, isse zyada hain." even though if you said this you'd just be replying truthfully. But then hamaare kuch sanskaar hain.

You picked up a habit abroad: you say thank you to everyone - barbers, tailors, vendors, gatekeepers, doctors. No one responds. Most look back at you in bewilderment. But this is still OK, really. Then there are times you say thank you to friends or cousins too, when then they curve a contemptuous lip and go "Saale bhai ko thanks bolega!"

You notice how the following of queues is a philosophical abstraction, not a reality. And you suffer for it. Time and time again.

Girls once again start giving you the "come a step closer and I'll call the police" look when you weren't even thinking about her until she gave you this look. And there it starts feeling like home once again.

It feels very, very, very hot for the first day or two. But it takes a really short time to get used to it again if you've spent your whole life here.

Something quite the opposite of what happened when you first went to US happens. When you first go to US, you look at the simplest sandwich - this is at a grocery, mind you, not some fancy eatery - and see 6.99 and quickly convert it to something close to 400 and go "screw you" in your head, "I don't need this shit. No way." Now you come back to India and you want to have one samosa and your first impulse is to convert it into dollars, but no dollars dude, this is just 25 cents. Goodness gracious me, I'll eat four!

You appreciate how judiciously all resources are utilized in India. The West appears once again what it appeared to be when you first arrived there - a place where people waste things a lot.

April: The Month of the Library

Hunt Library, 29th April 2013

I spent all my April days at the Hunt Library. Somewhere between the last day of last year and the first day of this year, my relationship with my girlfriend of a little more than three years ended and I wallowed in a thick jelly of retrospection and introspection, oft times irrational and maudlin, for a long, long time, as is the case with me after every big loss, but towards the beginning of April a sort of panicky realization came over me. It occurred to me that my time at Carnegie Mellon was limited, and that when I had first come here I had been madly awed by all that it had to offer. But soon enough I had come back to my equilibrium state of procrastinating my assignments till hours before they were due, rambling on phone with my then girlfriend, chattering with whoever of my classmates wouldn't at any time be studying, making plans to study and circumventing them, issuing library books and returning them unread after some days etc. And then after January this year months passed without anything I would in my later life call constructive or even simply correct. Coming to the point, at the beginning of April I decided to spend more time at the library studying, and mastering the material that my superb professors so wonderfully and painstakingly introduce to us in the most lucid way, in my opinion, possible. At the back of my mind was the hope that even if I spend a lot of time not actually studying -- my focus and concentration of late had been as stable as a pigeon's neck -- the time that I spend not studying would be better spent in and around books than if I spent it on my bed thinking self-detrimentally about the past or if I spent it with my laptop, swimming through an ocean of 99% crap and 1% value which is invariably forgotten -- and is therefore in a way also useless -- after another hour of surfing because it is by then obscured by more of the said crap.

The last paragraph was just an apology for spending so much time, practically living, in the library. The main point of writing this post is something else. Since even now my focus levels are far from their best, I often get up from my desk and roam about the shelves. And I find that I am invariably attracted towards dusty, hardly-visited bookshelves like a hot girl to bad boys. These deserted bookshelves carry in their isolation old books and journals usually from the first quarter of the last century, with their pages ranging the whole gamut from yellow to downright brown in color. And when I look over their pages, half understanding their contents, I cannot help but think how their authors must have dreamed their works to outdo time. Having been an aspiring writer once, I can't help but think about how these authors must have imagined that these books which took years out of their respective lives to write, will still be read and discussed a hundred years later. And then to think how they are biting dust in a secluded, forgotten corner of a library. (But here's the important, although meta, part..) And then to think that a hundred years later I am (and maybe several others are) drawn to them everyday, that I am wondering about their 100 year old history, that I am writing a blog post about them.

I think if I were a writer I would have been happy with that fate! Guess they didn't fall too short of that, pardon the following clumsy words, hyperreal ultralonglivedness.

Beethoven

Someday I'll get around to drawing Mehdi Hassan too.

MBA

(n.) What it takes smart people to go from being creators of intelligent and diligent C++ code of real value and give it away for free cause they believe in OpenSource, to being hagglers of greater and greater prices for their bland and formulaic powerpoint presentations that add no value to anyone but them.

Statistically Significant Inference

The lesser I write, the more fake I become.

Cute

adj. 1. The good thing left about you, when you're neither beautiful nor intelligent. 

Random slices

I have ceased worrying about ceasing to write. At some level, I have grown more sure as days have gone that I would not cease to write, but at another level, I must confess, I have resigned to the feeling that if I do cease, it would be acceptable to me. It was never the case that I really knew why I wrote, or why I should write. It was never the case that writing gave me a sense of beautiful exhiliration. It provided me, mostly, a gentle resignation. I wrote, I wonder, in order to resign. To accept things I didn't want to accept, perhaps, I needed to write them down. And maybe I will need to do that forever, I think I will, but why should I be sad if I don't need to, someday.

I moved to US for graduate studies some months ago. A little over three months, now. When I came here I was impressed by the infrastructure, dammit I was mightily impressed. But such charms, or any charm for that matter, often last only as long as you take to get used to it. That is why I think seeking your life's joy from charms all and sundry is not as wise an idea as it seems. Recently, I went to New York city for three days, and nothing happened to me. I mean, from accounts of friends and acquaintances who had had something to do with New York city at some point in their lives, it was almost as if something was supposed to happen to you when you first go there. Everything was bigger than it usually is. The buildings, subways, bridge, road, the number of people - nothing was different, only magnified. If there was an "electricity in the atmosphere", I was unfortunately insulated. I would have liked it to move me, I really would. I seek things that might move me, mostly and increasingly in vain.

I remember reading about some people's almost lyrical accounts of how nothing happened to them when, for instance, they went to Amarnath or to Jerusalem. I haven't been to any of these places, but I do wonder if something happened to these people when they first went to New York city? That would embarrass their lyricism, if they were to admit it, anyway.

In contrast, I liked the serenity and some sort of filled emptiness of the village of Wilson quite a lot. The first thought that came to me as I reached there was that I could retire here. Better still, I could leave the rest of the humdrum and come here and sit in the sun under the vast open sky and write. Maybe, walk half a mile and get milk and bread every morning, waving at the odd morning-jogging person I came across on the way. Maybe, I'd jog down to the grocery store myself. With these thoughts I spent a day roaming about the village, a village, yes, but clean and tidy and equipped with everything one needs to live well. Living well, but then, is a pretty subjective thing. And discussion of this subjectivity a most depressing thing.

I'm now a graduate student here, training to become a quant. Quants do the more distinctly mathematical things in Finance. Usually, they are not a very popular lot, but people here do tend to stereotype them as very clever. And clever as you're aware always paves way for cunning. So far I've had one person explicitly tell me not to "screw up with their economy for your greed". That person's wife calmed him down and said sorry to me. She seemed a warm woman, friendly and of a welcoming disposition, and then she said she "likes to have smart people around herself". Both husband and wife were rather religious about their respective stereotypes of how quants are. It looked like the perfect occassion to excuse myself quickly.

As I write this, hurricane Sandy dances crazy outside the balcony. Winds blow like I have never seen, and as long as it doesn't hurt people, in and of itself it is beautiful. But reflecting on the beauty of winds and trees, even that of children and old people, or that of the commonplace and the exotic has sadly become a thing of the past. Beauty must now be sought and must, must also be found, in calculus equations, C++ code, and probabilistic models. They have beauty too, and as if with flickers of light, I see it sometimes and sometimes not.  But sooner or later you realise that it's all cool after watching a few comedy circus videos on youtube, especially those of Krishna & Sudesh, and of Kapil Sharma.

I was sitting on the window, you can't quite open the balcony door at this stage, before I came to this desk to write this post. When I stood up from the window the idea that had just struck me like a snakebite, the idea that made me want to get up and write, was that physical distance has a suspiciously low correlation with loneliness. If everybody I ever knew stood within a twenty feet radius of me, I would still feel alone, if I was otherwise feeling alone.

But then I came here to write a minute later and I wasn't feeling as alone anymore, so I let it go.

On the people who make the buildings that make India's big cities big

Next to my flat is a construction site for an upcoming shopping mall that you will go to, sometimes to buy yourself objects that will add to your list of acquisitions that will define your place in society, and more often to just chit-chat over a cup of coffee. The labourers who work at this construction site, just as in most others, get Rs 120 for a day of labour, which is less than the price of that coffee you will drink often for no particular reason. They work entire days in scorching sun and blowing mud. They are not spoken to 'professionally' : "Could you please take care of this task? - Regards, your site supervisor". Their work entails not sitting on their butts and complaining about the weather, or passing grand moral judgements like I'm about to, just now. Their work entails hard, physical work, with kilos and kilocalories of energy lost every hour. They do not get paid leaves, they are provided no home rent allowance, there are practically no rights they can avail. The work they do is harder than what you, dear reader, and I do. Is their work clearly less important to society than the work that you, dear reader, and I, do, that they are paid so much lesser than us? Unless you are a doctor who treats these same people for something they can afford, no. Their work is exponentially harder and maybe also more important to the functioning of our cities than our work. Those of you who think, as many of us do, that the work these workers do is only physically harder, while what you and I do is mentally much more challenging and therefore more difficult on the whole, are deluded. Actually, you are not deluded. You are corrupt (and every time you criticise our politicians for being venal, you should write in your diary - "I am phony"). Thinking like this suits you, because this way you can justify to yourself the worth our society accords you vis-a-vis them. If you can evaluate a balance-sheet they can't, or debug a piece of code that they can't, the one and only thing it means is that you were more fortunate to have been born in the right household. If you are a reasonable person, you can probably figure out that by no means does it mean that you are more talented. By the way, sshhh between you and me, not that it matters, but in all likelihood the work you do is actually pretty dumb, hardly requires anything that must especially be called intelligence instead of common-sense, and you know it. Anyway, my problem is not particularly that no one is doing anything about it - I am not doing anything about it either (and am pretty ashamed about it).  My problem is how it is a non-issue not only in our public discourse but also in our coffee-table intellectual manicures. How no one has it on their minds, is what is sad. Bright city youngsters will put all their neural firepower on show in their dismissal of reservations, in their advocacy for the wife-like rights for female live-in partners, in their tenacious arguments against scrapping of one exam in favour of another. They make me sad not because of what they fight for - all fairly valid issues generally, in their own right. What is saddening is how none of those smart and savvy youngsters ever include the plight of the construction workers in even their casual coffee-table conversations. How they choose to act totally oblivious to this glaring injustice. The labourers of India are discriminated against, and the mobile India consists of two types of people - those that exploit them, and those that ignore them altogether. Construction workers are just one of the many kinds of labourers that do not remotely get their due in the Indian society - parallels exist for labourers of all kinds. When I say that they do not get their due - I mean not just monetary but also social. It is not just the paltry 120 Rupees that they will earn for a day of work worth more than yours, it is also that they will be social downcasts after that day is over and they head home (if they have one). For the most part, it is as if their life is isolated from you, confined within their own world of abject living conditions and fellow hardworking labourers. It is as though they do not exist in the larger society, until they must physically arrive at your doorstep.  At which point, they will get your shortlived, suspicious glance when they come to repair the leaking tap in your house, and your maid or handyman will be asked watch over them while they are at work and talk them through with it, because you, yourself, won't do even that. If there's one thing that can be said about the concept of Dignity of Labour in India, it is that it's non-existent. 

Everybody observes everything, except their observations.

Chanakya

Today's workday wasn't as hectic as all others. This is what I made in the break today:

Yes, that's Chanakya. India's (also the world's ?) first real economist and the author of Arthashaastra.

And this is what I did with it after coming back home:

And

Years

I'm going to be 26 in a month. I really don't feel 26 in my head. I feel, well, umm, 21? Physically, yes, I think I'm not 21 anymore, and it would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise. But in my head (I hope you can know what I mean), in my head, in the way I think, I mean that hasn't changed much since I was 21. Infact I'd say that except for a greater readiness for failures in life, nothing has changed. I remember going to take the Mensa test 5 years ago, Rohit was there, Pyush, Adyansh. Two months later results of the test came from somewhere in Pune. I got 147 in the test and a letter reached me a day later that stated, well let me understate, that I was quite smart. I hate to admit it, but I was really full of hot air for a day. Sentences like Jason Bourne's "I'm always listening" and Sherlock Holmes' "Elementary, dear Watson" got recited in front of the mirror, I confess. I did a lot of googling and found much to my dismay that at 148, they called you a genius. But it was still good, my mom was so happy to see that thing that she showed it to all my relatives who came home the next one month. S*****t show that certificate! Other than that I can't quite recall how everything was back then. I also recall the 4th semester exams, Electronics in particular, but not much else. Harpreet was staying in the hostel for that exam. We studied till really late, Harpreet and I, while Khanka was off to sleep at 1 AM. Khanka's roomie was never there, so we also slept in his room. Just an hour or so in the morning. Oh, yeah, now I recall other things. Then Rohit and I joined an NGO. One day we roamed about the most godforsaken parts of Delhi to see how street kids live and if possible offer them a way to start getting educated through this NGO. It sounds fun, but at 48 degree celsius in May 2007, it wasn't. Neither of us had quite started driving yet, so it was 5-6 buses and an enormous amount of walking. At a different nonprofit event, one of the girls, a particularly pretty one, not knowing my name referred to me as the fat guy while talking with Rohit. By the time I got to know this, I knew she'd never see me again. But I felt so insulted, I really ran and ran the next two months. I think I must have still been a teenager at 21. In just fifteen days, I was running 7-8 kms at a stretch every morning plus cycling an equal distance every evening. In just over a month, I was running close to 10 kms every morning and I'd lost 9-10 kgs without any gym-advisor or dietician crap, and felt my healthiest best. This was both good and bad, I think. Bad because ever since then, I never panic about my weight because somewhere inside I tend to be overly overconfident (redundancy intended) that I can do it in 20 days whenever I really decide, so what's the hurry.

Everything was so straight and good. Anyway, I completed 1 year at Mumbai today. Not much to say on that as of now. Perhaps when I'm 31.

Artist ?

He started something unworthy and his conscience did revolt
He continued for fun, telling himself, “To confess I’ll write a ‘post’.

I’ll put some strange character in, one with a ludicrous name,
His descriptions very unlike mine, of a very different fame.

He’ll do the sin for me there, and invite furious curses;
While I’ll still digest applause, he will for me take the blame”

How that’ll free him of his guilt, the blogger never stopped to think
How it qualifies as a ‘confession’ has a rationale rather lame.

It is surely more unworthy, sinful, than what it’s meant to cover
The ruthless abuse of the non-living, of a character mute, helpless, tame.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. – Albert Camus

Teacher ?

वक्त इतना भी मेहरबान मुर्शिद तो नहीं है
करूं मैं एहतियात रोज़ ऐसी जिद तो नहीं है

नादां न वो बच्चा जो कहे वालिद हद-आलिम
हर सांच उभारी जाए, ज़रूरी तो नहीं है

हर ख़ता की तसल्ली कि भूल भी इक सबक है
हर सबक का यूँ सीखना वाजिब तो नहीं है

वस्ल को चला है जो राज़-ऐ-गुलशन की ले तलब
वो है तो कोई फलसफी ; समझदार नहीं है

The Girl at the Shopping Mall

Today at the shopping mall a girl had in her hand a rose.

That girl wore fabindia, was fair, and had a pointed nose.
I looked at her afar for long, only to eventually rue,
That you were not her, that she was not you.

Dumbest Ad Ever

Indeterminate

Last year X had his quarter life crisis
This year he is struggling with the midlife.
And you're wrong, genius, that he'd die at four
Because I'm already twenty five.

Observation 0198

Your friend who says "I'm sure you'll succeed" is not so confident about your impending success as your foe who says "I fear he'll succeed".

Arithmetic Progression

I have three friends. Out of whom,
one loves deserts, two are writers,
and three are imaginary.

Edit: Every now and then I feel the need to clarify that everything that's written in first person need not necessarily be referring to me. First-person just happens to be the way of writing I like most. Personally, these days, I have four, not three friends. And they're all overworked analysts.

Jagjit Singh

When he sang, the words felt true. "Banda sach keh raha hai" it felt. Nothing else ever mattered.

Words

I had been mulling over it for months. Five, six. I didn’t tell anyone. It was not something you could tell someone and still hope not to be evaluated. But I was consumed by the question like mint in ester. I wondered about it on my way to work every night. In the mornings, I couldn’t sleep because I wanted the answer right then, that very day, every day, for months. I was thinking about it when I dragged myself into the airport, for a new city now, and my parents waved me prolonged goodbyes from outside the glass wall. I was thinking about it also when I walked for the first time into my new place of work, the newly acquired free office stationery making things easier for a while. I was thinking about it when I knocked at the real estate agent’s door and a woman with manly sideburns, the receptionist as a matter of fact, welcomed me in. When I first visited home two and a half months later, there was a lovely little camera waiting for me. I was thinking about it as I stared into its lenses while it stared at others: why don’t I write more often? Why don’t I write?

When recently I met an old friend I was making mental notes of his adultnesses*. I liked him for them. I liked him by and large but I was on the lookout for giveaways at all moments all the same: those exaggerated truths, that baby lie, that question he’d ask me acting as if he didn’t know the answer.

The last I'd seen of him before this was when we were both nine: we weren’t as clever then, not by a long shot, but we weren’t as stupid either. I wasn’t. As a kid, I wasn’t writing a short story in my head when I should have been up with real, in-the-present-moment frolic.

(*except his round inchoate male breasts that came as not sucha pleasant surprise; I remembered him as a marathon runner in the making.)

Long story short: I was writing a short story when I met a long lost friend. But when I actually sat down to write, I couldn’t put pen to paper. Not only that. Whenever I would really get down to the business of writing – at this point you can imagine me in front of a blank word document on the screen, my fingers hanging just above the keyboard in paralysis, my eyes intent on the pixels laughing in my face – I suddenly wouldn’t want to.

While I tried to sleep today an answer the texture of an arrow seeped into my aching eyes. It was discomforting, and unlike what I had imagined, the coming of it didn’t make sleeping any easier. I like framing sentences, it told me, and I like adding one sentence to another. I like thinking up the odd witty remark, I like capturing the shy detail, I like imagining things in my head, I like hypotheses. It said I love how strings of words are jot together to resemble baritone musical notes, it said also that I like writing words and sentences and paragraphs that among themselves form mathematical patterns.

What it also told me, sadly, is that I have nothing to say to the world.
I have no desire to tell anyone what I think about what. Not directly, not through stories.

I didn’t want to believe all this, but it also told me, as if shoving evidence between my breaths, to go see people’s status messages on facebook. Not what’s in them, but just the fact that they were written. That these people, among them people who can’t put together a coherent phrase on being offered salvation as reward, that these people often had something to say to everyone. They wanted their voices to be heard, their thoughts to be known. While I didn’t, I really didn’t.

I know it’s not a happy or even an intelligent story, but what the heck, it is the story for today. I can't let the writer's block last forever just like that.


THE END
_________________________________________________





PS. Dear Curious Minds, mint in ester doesn't lead to anything or mean anything.
Except possibly that shallow frills excite smart minds.

I don't like myself. I don't know why.

But I liked this joke:

Manmohan Singh to Anna Hazaare: "Arre sir jab aapne kuch khaaya hi nahi to bill kis baat ka?"

The Silent Observer #023

I've recently enjoyed being part of a funny thread on a friend's facebook page, where all the rest of us are teasing him on how, as a consequence of this whole Anna Hazare and Lokpal movement, burning midnight oil studying towards his bureaucratic ambitions is no longer going to make him a millionaire. But really it's all in good humour, since he's definitely one of the most honest, upright people I've ever known, and personally I think he should definitely succeed, as India needs many more bureaucrats like him.

But that didn't stop me from making this tongue-in-cheek thing and sending it to him. Hope his dad doesn't see it!

Reflections on Krugman's "Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt"

Click [Here] for the piece by Krugman in question.


I don't understand Krugman's approach of trying to prove his hypothesis by attacking those with opposing views (in this case S&P) for their previous failures; and not by addressing the actual issue at hand, which he glibly papers over with a vague "if you do the math.." remark. In that case, please talk about the math Mr. Krugman and not about what S&P did some years ago. In any case, a lack of vigilance earlier (on the part of S&P, in this case) is no reason to rubbish a greater vigilance now.

US debt has been downgraded from AAA to AA+. AA+ is still a great rating, below it are the ratings AA, AA-, A+, A, and then BBB, which is India's rating*. And none of us here believe that India's going to default on its debt any time soon. My point here is what looks like a downgrade, and factually speaking indeed is, should be seen as a correction, a long delayed revision.

The US government has a debt of 14 trillion USD, roughly equal to the GDP of US. Each year the government makes 2.2 trillion in tax and other revenues (~15% of GDP) and its annual public spending is 3.6 trillion, which Krugman and some others argue (not without some reason I concede) should be increased well above 3.6. Surely the 2.2 trillion is enough to pay the interest on its debt of 14 trillion [and counting; {currently at 1.4 trillion a year (3.6 - 2.2)}]; and therefore they surely won't default on their interest payments. If anyone thought they would, they would have been rated CCC and not AA+. But we have to consider that these are globally uncertain times, and sooner or later some of US's creditors, due to their own difficulties, may want the return of their money rather than the return on their money. When that happens, how ready is the US? The current fiscal standing, coupled with an economic outlook that all investors, economists and even people inside the federal government find grim, if not downright dismaying, certainly called for a rating that was not AAA.

As a little sidenote, I want to highlight 2 more things that I feel are informative with respect to this discussion:

1. The net present value of future liabilities of US is nearly 60 trillion USD.

2. A downgrade should not be equated straightaway to fears of default, as the media most loves to do. No government/nation that has control over its own currency can theoretically ever be forced to default. They can print money. Of course there are huge inflation costs to that action, but the point is, all governments (except Eurozone nations like Greece; since they do not have much control over Euro) can print money to avert default, if push comes to shove.

* After BBB are BB, B, CCC, CC and C. And then SD and D; but they are for nations that have already defaulted.

Yaadon ki Baaraat

I'm blogging today mainly because I'm not getting any sleep. Oh, dear, that's what we've come down to.

I distinctly remember starting this blog with great gusto after having read an NSIT student's blog. I wrote a couple of sub-mediocre posts and naturally the gusto soon died out. That was in 2005. I was 6 years, or, oh just say it, 24% younger. (At least it's better than thinking that I am 31.5% older now*).

When I started writing again in 2006, this time too with great enthusiasm, I thought to myself that I was doing much better than last year's disasters. I remember writing the first post after a gap of one year, called 'Delhi Metro's Matchless Passengers'. I was incredibly happy with how it had turned out, and in a moment imagined such great humorists as Jerome K. and Groucho Marx chuckling in their graves. Too pleased with myself, I followed that up with several posts all similarly trying to be, and often being, funny. That's a sharp contrast from now I suppose, when most of my sparse output lingers on the border separating boredom from stupor. Another contrast, come to think of it, is that in those days people used to read this blog.

I can't distinctly remember the blog's journey from there. What remain with me are mere outlines - a post here, a rant there. Somehow people liked it, seemed to. It was somewhere in 2007 that I started writing verse. My initial response to my verse would put to shame my high opinion of my earlier humorous writeups. So happy was I with some of my poems that I was sad that the people at large (at this point let me insert that the average of IQ of human beings is by definition 100, and that this is not my invention) won't really get them. "It went over my head!" I imagined my post's comments to be, but they were all largely to the tune of "Nice poem. Keep it up. N plz visit mah blog at xyz.pqr.com". With some effort I managed to make myself believe these people actually read the poems, and that they actually found them nice. Let me admit that I would sometimes go so far as to entertain thoughts such as: "Actually they found them awesome, but they fear sounding effusive." Yes, yes, I know I should have rechristened the blog 'The Delusioned Observer' then.

2008, 09 and 10 came and went just too quick. They were gone before I could make sense of them, like a Ferrari coming from far behind and overtaking an Alto, and before the Alto driver knows, the Ferrari is not even in sight. Incidentally, I these three years I actually drove an Alto.

Anyway. Sleep's finally relented and come. Some other time.


______________________________________________________________
*For the mathematically challenged, I was 19 in 2005.

On The Simple, Unskilled Act Of Speaking The Truth

Some people can, some people can't and some people can't not.

Takings from a small list

A casual scroll down the list of Bharat Ratnas gave much pop trivia to indulge in.

Ever wondered how there's a marked increase in musicians getting the Bharat Ratna? All of our last three Bharat Ratnas have been musicians. Five out of the last eight Bharat Ratnas are musicians. Incidentally, these are the only five musicians to have received the Bharat Ratna till date. The first musician to be so honoured was MS Subbulakshmi in 1998, that is, forty-four years after the awards began. However, this must not be construed as some musical wave that has swept our country lately, as all these eminent musicians were born in 1910s and 1920s. Nearly a century back.

Eleven of the thirty nine Indians who've been given the Bharat Ratna were not alive to receive it. Add to this sixteen more people who received the award in the mostly uneventful last five years of their big, eventful lives, and you know that we in India think really long and hard before making this big decision.

The awareness of such thoughtfulness on the part of the authorities must be juxtaposed with another awareness: Of India's first nine PMs, six were from the Indian National Congress. The same six are all Bharat Ratnas.

As a sidenote, all of India's first four Presidents were awarded the Bharat Ratna, as was President number eleven, APJ Abdul Kalam. This does not seem odd or untoward as Presidents in India, thankfully, are anyway chosen from a pool of highly accomplished people. An exception being our present President who, as her saving grace, was justified to the public by virtue of her being the first woman to the post. A smart political statement needed to be made, I guess, so meritocracy had to take a backseat. That's quite alright, really.

Raingod

“Have you lost it?”

The person on the other end of the phone replied something. I don’t know what. But this distraught looking man standing next to me on the bus stand, with a large brown overcoat meant for someone larger than him and a large black umbrella meant for me, kept shouting the four words repeatedly on the phone, sometimes cupping his hand around his mouth, mostly not. If he released spit when he shouted, you could not know it: such was the rain.

The important part here is that I did not have an umbrella. It was raining furiously; the raindrops nearly hurt you as they made contact. The bus stand was not actually a bus stand, but a place where people waited anyhow and therefore buses stopped to fetch them. Meaning there was no shade, and I was feeling sort of cold in the rain, especially when a thick trail trickled down the back of my ear through my neck into my shirt. That shivered me, and for a brief moment I would shake like Shakria’s bum.

He was standing to my right. While telling you about how in this rain you couldn’t know if he unconsciously spat as he screamed, I forgot to tell you that you also couldn’t tell if someone's eyes had tears flowing down them freely if they stood unumbrellaed in the rain.

At least he didn’t seem to come to know.

But that could also be because he was so caught up in his own mess. You can never be sure.

You can never be sure about him, my husband.