Carbs vs Fats

In a comparison of macronutrients, the often misunderstood fats are way better than carbohydrates. Fats, especially the unsaturated ones, provide several essential functions such as protecting our inner organs, maintaining good cholesterol levels and reducing bad cholesterol. Outside of them, Omega 3 fats found in foods such as Tuna, Walnuts and Beans are one of the healthiest things you can consume for your brain function - improving memory, fighting depression, bipolar disorder and ADHD. In addition, it is good for your cardiovascular system and bone joints. Even some saturated fats, such as those found in Desi Ghee, help break down other hard to digest food and reduce the negative effects of other fried and spicy food you eat, making them easily digestible. The one category of fat that is unequivocally unhealthy is trans fats, which would be all fatty food items with a good shelf life - biscuits, chips, pies, donuts, cake etc. In comparison, there are no “essential” carbohydrates, that is, there are no essential body functions that require carbohydrates. So the only function carbs serve is to provide energy, which is provided in just as much quantity by more functional nutrients like fats and proteins.

Indian diet is very heavy on carbs, which provide energy but aid no body function, except that a basic amount is needed to aid digestion. You would be surprised that that basic amount is so little as 3 slices of bread a day for a full grown adult, and that is if that were all the carbs he were consuming. Of course, an average adult will also be consuming carbs in decent quantities from vegetables, beans and fruits.

__

Disclaimer: This is a log for my personal use and does not constitute medical advice from me. I am not qualified to give medical advice to others and you should consult your doctor before making any nutritional or medicinal changes. 

Making good on promises past.

So on the first day of the year I promised to write a blog post here about something I learn "almost daily" and then stopped after day 2. That is a familiar theme with new year resolutions. I see a problem there in that statement I made. It was the qualifier "almost". Qualified promises are like qualified love: imaginary. Secondly, vague goals detract from implementation. So, yeah, I shamelessly claim that I'll be updating it daily. Yes, that would be every day. One of the main motivations for writing things down on the blog is the belief that writing notes is not only helpful as a revision tool for committing things to memory, but also that there are things you learn while writing about a subject that you had not learned while reading about it before.

I have been spending a few hours everyday learning some interesting stuff, only I never got around to writing about that here - so I'm hoping to also backfill some entries retroactively for the lost 26 days of the year whenever I go back to revising that stuff.

Here we go again.

World changing developments

I read a lot of history stuff at the beginning of this year, where my focus was on breadth rather than depth. I did not study in great detail about any one period, wanting instead to get some sort of a hang of everything. Of course, I failed miserably. But I did come out at the end of those five or six days subconsciously wondering about the developments, from a very wide angle camera, that I thought really changed the world the most. Even though a lot of entries on my list are so obvious when I look at the list ex-post that I wonder why I needed to spend those days to arrive at it, but, in any case, here's my list:

1) Discovery of fire - Because duh uh.

2) Discovery that seeds can be cultivated - This was the single most important developments that changed humans from hunting gathering nomads to co-existing people in civilizations.

3) Mass Production and standardized parts - Pioneered by the development of the Chinese crossbow

4) Concrete - Changed the way structures were built forever. Introduced by the Roman emperor Claudius while getting Aqua Claudia built, an aqueduct colossal even by modern standards.

5) Printing Press - Because it changed literacy from 2-3% to 70-80% in the western world in a matter of decades. That is a great leap for mankind.

6) Steam Engine - Because it paved the way for the Industrial revolution which would give us trains, cars, other engines, heavy machinery, and pretty much everything.

6) Malaria and Polio vaccines - Because you can now expect to celebrate your kindergarten birthday party.

7) Internet - Because I say so.

And now, some trivia that I found fascinating. Two of the greatest empires - the Egyptian and the Roman - were decimated by people one would never guess were capable of it. The Egyptian one, the largest empire of its time and perhaps the most long lasting one ever with a period of continuous rule between 1000 to 1500 years, was brought down by people nobody knew at that time even existed, and historians still don't know where they came from. They were people whom the Egyptians called "People of the Sea", because they came from the sea. The Roman empire, the biggest  ever, was brought down, once again, by a small tribe of germanic people called The Vandals under the leadership of Gaiseric - not by another big empire of that time such as the Persian or the Chinese.

Finally, next on my history reading is "Guns, Germs and Steel", again a book that focuses on breadth (history of the world from pre-civilization to today) rather than depth into a particular place or era, although it does supposedly go into great depths vis-a-vis outlining some specific themes that pervade all of history. I have heard good things about the book, but I cannot say when I will get around to it. 

Filling time

It's 9:23 PM on a Friday night. I'm alone in the office. If I stand up and look across the hall, I see two hundred computer screens, most of them dead black, some of them blinking with screensavers. "We innovate" lights up the screen in bright yellow, followed by a bold screen-size "passion for performance" in green. A few TV screens hanging from the walls, muted of course, show a nameless man opening and closing his mouth in a magnificently determined way, and the old guy with the crew cut sits before him nodding sagely. The recycled fiber glass on my desk was filled with soy milk an hour ago. I drank it with corn chips from the vending machine. Later, I felt unsatisfied and went back and got a pack of cheese crackers. Then I thought I'd go back and walked out into the freezing parking lot. Suddenly dawned on my it was -12 degree celsius and I had forgotten my ear muffs on my desk. Who'll go back, I thought, and ran to my car about fifty meters away. The car's battery had broken down, so I had to come back anyway. I called car services, and the woman asked me my address thrice. I do not understand how my awful accent could be so awful that each time she mistook my three for a two. You know, it makes no sense to me. The second time, I had made sure to speak three with great emphasis on the ree, and also followed it by saying, you know, like free, like a tree? She repeated the address afterwards, again having noted down two in place of three, and told me she's sorry about my accent. I was, like, I love India. I'm now waiting for the guy to come give my car a jump start.

I never asked for roadside services in India, wasn't even aware that there was some such thing. Three times in my driving life in India, I had to change the tyre. I knew how to do it, and on top of that, each of those times I had friends with me. The first time was late 2009 in Gurgaon, when I used to live in Vipin's house, when Vipin and his dad helped me. Actually, that was the time I was taught how to do it by his dad. Then in the monsoons of 2010, at 2 AM in the night while leaving work, I found my tyre punctured. Vibhor and I fixed it, it took almost forty minutes for us newbies. The third time was a couple of months before I left India, in 2012. I had Kavish, Vaibhav and Gyanesh with me, and this time was the hardest, for none of them helped any more than cracking jokes in the background while I attached the stepney. I do not know why it is a fond memory. Really, I have no idea.

The guy just called. He said he'll be here in five minutes, so I better wind up the post quickly. Actually, it's no admissions essay, so I do not have to worry about an appropriate closing, I can end pretty much anywhere. What'chya gonna do about it?

The fine difference between GDP deflator and CPI

GDP Deflator and CPI or Consumer Price Index are both price level indices, with two crucial differences in the way they are calculated:

1) GDP deflator keeps quantities fixed at the "current year", whereas CPI keeps quantities fixed at the "base year".

So, going from 2013 (assuming that is the base year) to 2014 (current year), the value of the deflator in 2014 will be calculated using weights for different goods that correspond to their weights as observed in the 2014 economy. 

Deflator as of 2014 = Σ [P2014 (i) * X2014 (i)] / Σ [P2013 (i) * X2014 (i)] 

Or in other words, Deflator= (Nominal GDP in 2014 / Real GDP in 2014)

On the other hand CPI keeps quantities fixed at the "base year", so in this case:

CPI as  of 2014 = Σ [P2014 (i) * X2013 (i)] / Σ [P2013 (i) * X2013 (i)] 

(Fairly obvious, but let's note that P's represent prices, X's represent quantities)

2) In both cases above, I used a summation with variable i. It is important to note that in the case of deflator, the "i" loops over all the goods and services produced in the economy of that country, whereas in the case of CPI it loops over a well defined basket of goods that are identified as consumer goods.

This distinction is important for quite a few reasons. Inflation can be calculated both as the rate of change of deflator or as the rate of change of CPI, but the purpose for which that inflation estimate is required determines which of the two methods to use. For example, policy decisions often take CPI into account as it is a better indicator of inflation as it is felt by the general population. 

Secondly, CPI is much more volatile than Deflator. You would expect that to be the case since statistically the Deflator calculation seems to average (weighted-average, to be precise) a whole lot more quantities, and you'd expect the law of large numbers to kick in. But there's also an intuitive explanation on top of that: CPI has a large percentage presence of some of the most volatile sectors, such as, housing, energy and food.

For this reason there is another important measure, commonly called "core inflation", which when considering the rate of change of CPI excludes its volatile components like energy and food which vary a lot merely as a result of short term vagaries of weather, yields etc while not representing any structural change in economic trends.

A word of caveat. Both these measures are hard to estimate with precision, the GDP deflator more so because it has so many more moving parts. CPI estimations, although relatively simpler, have long been tainted with accusations of manipulation by government bodies that estimate them, and often have agendas that outweigh the pursuit of precision. Recently, the startup premise dot com has employed crowdsourcing principles to estimate food inflation from the ground up by having people send prices to them of food they buy everyday while their engine does the almost real time number crunching. You would be surprised at how much their estimates of food inflation differ from the "official" figures, especially for developing, populous countries like Brazil and India. 

Turn of the year musings

I used to think until fairly recently that people don't change. I still think so, by and large, but have mellowed down the firmness with which I think so. On the one hand, a person's character is something I'm still positive does not change, but on the other hand, I do agree now that it is possible for people to start experiencing the same old things in new ways that they had not known earlier. Somewhere in the beginning of last year, I found myself having entered a new kind of life where I spend a massive proportion of my waking hours entirely alone. I wouldn't say it changed the person I am, but things have started to happen that never did before. For example, I get unusually pensive while taking a shower. It works like magic, as if the knob of the shower were a switch into my sometimes dark, often colourful past. The moment I stand before the warm water springing onto me, I have recollections, very fine and vivid and almost hyper-real, of episodes of my past. Only I don't get to choose the episodes. It could be anything from a long day spent waiting for a phonecall, an evening where my dad corrected my spellings, to fighting over the sole plate of chowmein with five of my contending classmates, or reliving the heated anticipation of walking into a fresh acquaintance's apartment while she unnecessarily brings her cat for both of us to play with. It's amazing what a hot shower can do. And how life comes back to the forever nondescript present, the second the shower is stopped.

It's not a resolution, but I've planned to update the blog daily with a new thing I learn. Mostly, it's just to impel myself to keep learning, for I'm starting to realize that time spent away from any kind of learning really rusts your brains and makes you slower. And older. Which reminds me, I don't like getting older. In two months, I will be 29. I'm already at the age that if I were a world-class tennis player, which I'm far from, I would be considered a fading veteran by now. On my 29th birthday, I will take a picture of myself, and compare it to my older pictures, and try to conclude that I hardly look older. I am willing to resort to Adobe Photoshop to reach my goal.

Swimming in a Fish Bowl

This morning, Albert Wallace of the bent back but aristocratic nose woke up disheveled, shortly before a subdued autumn sunrise in a dimly-lit, painstakingly unadorned apartment, and after only a few moments of lying there in a trance, slipped his feet into his fading crimson rubber slippers, and promised himself he is so not gonna take shit from anyone no more. He straightened himself up and took brisk steps to the mirror, because of course the best way to avoid his fears was to confront them, and splashed freezing cold water into his face, furiously, fifteen times. 

“I’m gonna go out today, and I’m gonna talk to people!” he told his mirror image with an unsure enthusiasm, but with such loudness that one might as well imagine he was planning on conquering the Everest in his boxers. Once a popular creature with enviable looks, a reputation for expertise in all things from Probability to Literary Theory, and, even, a guilty taste for the rowdy humor of large groups, he had somehow found it difficult to get back on his feet after his former girlfriend, Anita, had suddenly left him for her long-time best-friend Patrick Boehner, who even Albert had grown a social fondness for, over time. But that was two years ago, and for what it’s worth, Patrick Boehner had by now married another fine woman, and Mr. and Mrs. Boehner are expecting a daughter next month, as some harmless facebook stalking has revealed.

For some months now he had felt no pleasure in most things people seemed to love, and often wondered how he, himself, had shown such keenness for the same activities in the years before. Every time he would discover himself tagged in a facebook photo by one of his acquaintances, the accompanying taglines that were usually on the lines of “Awesomeness”, “Amazing fun” or “Best day ever” left him nonplussed. If they hadn’t mentioned it I would never have known, he would muse. 

In the earlier days, he used to occasionally do stand-up at a local comedy club, and although he still appreciated the mechanics of humor and continued to be able to construct, methodically, laughter on other people's faces, he had found it increasingly difficult to elicit his own laughter, and felt uninspired, even, by the virtue in giving other people a good time. 

He had gradually become unmotivated to excel in his career as an Accountant, and the final straw came two months ago with his rather public firing, since which time, he hasn't applied for another job. It was the day after the firing that he first attended our yoga class. 

But today was different. He looked palpably determined in his freshly ironed, crisp white shirt and linen trousers getting ready for the Interstellar show at AMC New Brunswick. Unusually chirpy all morning, he played his favorite music from The Beatles to The Doors at full volume while he vacuum cleaned the whole place. But it was really when he began humming along and grooving rhythmically to the high points of these happy songs that I really knew today’s different. Very uncharacteristically, he also nudged me to wear my dark azure top, telling me how it enhances my breasts in a “menacing way". I was, like, woah!

I’ve been living with him for the last two weeks, but contrary to what others in the class think, we are not sleeping together; the only reason I’m living here is that we were both scared of living alone. Scared of ourselves, perhaps. We keep each other sane. And useful.  

“Let’s get going now” I cried at 5 minutes to noon, “we will have people from the class, all waiting. We’re also grabbing lunch before, alright!” 
“Just a moment, honey. I am shaving.”
“C’mon now. It’s not a party! And what’s with ‘honey’? I am not your girlfriend, okay?” I said, and put on Breaking Bad on Netflix. I was in the middle of season 5, and it’s getting crazier every episode. It’s so addictive, oh my god. It wasn’t until the episode was over that I realized Albert is still inside. What a bride-to-be, this guy.

“Albert! Dude. I’m gonna go by myself.”

No voice responded.

-- 

The doctors just told me there is scope for revival, but added that it was “in everyone’s best interest to be prepared for all eventualities.”

I don’t know whether we were lovers or just close friends or just two random depressed people who, as a matter of mere convenience, were each other’s support group. Whatever we were we weren’t anymore.

Sid Shoulda Said - Update

Just thought I'd post an update regarding the fictional series "Sid Shoulda Said". I've started posting newer installments of it on another blog, while this one continues to be more or less as 'twas before, that is, more personal and more lethargic.

Should you be interested, I'd be glad to have you follow "Sid Shoulda Said" at ohsid.quora.com. I think following it and commenting on its posts might require a quora account, but rss feeds and bookmarking etc should work just like any other blog and be relatively undemanding.

Sid Shoulda Said - Part 2 - Kruger Ganley, Then and Now

I’m feeling positive about an impending promotion. Last Friday, my boss asked me out to lunch. Well, to go together and pick up lunch from Sarvana Bhawan, to be precise, but that’s almost as good, definitely a signal. Then he got an important call so I had to go pick it up for us both. But why must I worry about a free lunch gone expensive, since what mattered was the signal, and that, as you’d agree, remains intact. I know that because he also complimented me yesterday on my work migrating the trading books to the new platform. “That was helpful”, he’d said. I’m actually a statistician working with market and macro data, so this was not, in the strict sense, a part of my responsibilities, falling clearly as you can tell in the domain of IT professionals, but it wasn’t terribly difficult and the whole exercise gained swiftness by orders of magnitude if I collaborated with the IT guys, so I figured why not. I can’t see how this isn’t exceeding expectations, unless the expectation is that I set up technology, do accounting, trade billions and serve chai and butter-toast to everyone while they play Oprah in the comments sections of Humans of New York.

So, yeah, it’s all looking good. Bonus and promotion announcements are still a month away, and my match dot com profile is already half-ready. In fact, what’s pending is just putting up my pictures, but, of course, that is the all important part. I do have a couple of nice pictures of mine from 2009 and 2010, and with just a little retouching, I should be all set. Uncle Baburam’s daughter Madhuri was very gracious about offering to “do amazing things with these pictures” at no cost, and although I’m quite tempted to take her up on the offer, I think I’ll hire a digital makeover expert from U2RHot for eight hundred bucks. What can I say, I’m not fooling around this time. And Madhuri should be focussing on her studies, Kindergarten is a crucial class.

You wouldn’t guess it from looking at me now, but my first six months at Kruger Ganley were a dream. I started at this job on the 23rd of June 2009, about two weeks after the graduation ceremony, and exactly four months from the day I’d started dating Swati. It was a phenomenal year, 2009. Everything about that year was perfect. If I left a problem in an exam because I’d have no clue how to solve it, I would later discover that the problem itself had being scrapped for some trivial linguistic ambiguity in the way it was written. This ball I hit out towards the hostel windows on the second floor, while playing cricket on the narrow alley next to the building this one time, went straight to the singular window without a pane, thus saving me the huge fine I was going red with dread about as the ball made its way up the projectile. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing could go wrong in the crazy unbelievable way that I now regret why I never dabbled in gambling or sports betting while it lasted. If I were ninety years at the time and left for a morning walk in a fit of rebelliousness and trembled on a rock, cursing everyone I ever knew in my head in the microsecond I imagined I had left with me on this planet before I hit the ground, a hot, top-naked girl would have come running from the woods, stopped me from falling, and kissed me passionately for no discernible reason. God was that kind of kind. 

The day I got the job, I got myself five Park Avenue shirts, one for each weekday. I would show up at work early, and smiled at everyone as they came in, just as uncle Baburam had advised. People seemed to like me, I stayed late and got everything done faster, taking workload off other people on my team who had been here a little longer, and have since all bought yachts and mansions and left the firm. My boss was supportive and treated us often, but I have to say under a different boss I might have learned a wee bit more. Most of his mentoring revolved around giving me such illuminating pearls of wisdom as “It is what it is”, “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do”, and “That’s what it should do, you’re right, but the reality is it does whatever it is it does”. He could spend an awful lot of words explaining things which were explained just as well in zero. During meetings was always on display his unique ability to talk for an hour about nothing except what he’ll be talking about for the rest of the hour, until the hour was over, and we exchanged pleasantries and left. Was this the secret to multiple Brooks Brother suits while paying for your kids’ piano classes at the same time, I always used to wonder. I only stopped when he was fired a couple of years ago. The new boss, let's call him Aurangzeb, has proved to be very hard to impress. In the last two years, he has only taken me out for lunch once. That was two months ago, at Suburban Tadka. At the restaurant, when the waiter turned towards me after taking his order and I was putting on my greedy smile, about to blurt out the most expensive dish on the menu, he butted in and ordered something for me entirely on his own discretion. “Just what I’d wanted”, I remarked heartily. The waiter gave me a look I will not go ahead and describe, before turning back to him, clearly aware of his only customer that mattered, “So how spicy would you like it, high, medium, low? Medium, I suppose?”
“Yes, medium.” said Aurangzeb.
“Ok, sir”, said the waiter and began to leave, when he was stopped again.
“Wait, wait, wait. Actually, do very medium. Infact, very, very medium.”

That is not the sign of a man who doles out promotions easily.

Alpenliebe

For the fourteenth time in as many weeks, Vasudev Bakhshi was faced with the question of what to do during the two and a half day long weekend, when the office admin girl, Alisha Bhatia of the blunt nose and domed forehead, began giving out candies at every desk with a cheerful, if shrill, cry of "Happy Friday", stopping at every desk, and before he knew talk of what everybody was going to do on the weekend filled the colossal yellow-lit hall lined with fifty thousand desks, or so they seemed to Vasu, who, obese as he was, had been running the tip of his index finger along the periphery of the opening created between two ridiculously stretched buttons of his grey linen shirt, and wondering what it was that he used to do with his weekends during the summer four months ago when Sonia, his wife and a professor of Geography at the University of Bundelkhand, was home for the vacation and, to his surprise, he couldn't remember anything of import, neither any elated partying like when they were both collegiate and hungry for each other's touch all the fucking time, nor, thankfully, any crazy, viscious fights characteristic of the year before when she was still working in the city, although he did recall a certain Aarohi's phone number scribbled on the last page of one of her books, a number that he had committed to memory with a suspicious, foreboding fear, a fear that it wasn't Aarohi, but whoever Sonia took her increasingly numerous cigarette breaks out on the backyard to probably converse with, always in what he imagined a voice so low her own shadow couldn't overhear, but why o why o why couldn't she have talked about it, what is the worst that could have happened? Little Ridhi wouldn't be screaming in her bed every night, and I would at least have been able to eat this candy.

Sid Shoulda Said - Part 1 - The Short Term Goals of Sid Chat

We broke up three years ago, Swati and I, but I have to confess I have been thinking about her a lot lately. Being a man of indubitable character that I am, however, I won't call her. I strongly believe that it is very cheap to constantly call and text your ex-girlfriends, especially when, as in this case, they categorically cut your calls upon feeling the faintest shadow of your number upon their phone screens the fifteenth time they see it in a day.

My ex-girlfriend, the one who, some would say, I obsess excessively about, was the proverbial woman of substance, intelligent and driven, and I the typical man of substance abuse. She was also conventionally good-looking, had curls, big eyes, exquisitely shaped, soft lips, and a slim, affable personality. I knew other guys wanted her. I have no idea why she ever decided to date me with my flowing nose and fluffy arms, even though I admit my hair were the stuff of many a man's envy when shampooed. But that was rare, and besides, my teeth are a shade of color between yellow and green for which there is no name yet, as no other specimen of said color has ever been found in recorded history. She, on the other hand, brushed and flossed twice a day, and visited the dentist often. Her nose was pointed yet smooth, very much like a carefully sculpted nose made by a meritorious master's degree student of nose sculptures. In contrast, my own was made by an underpaid fast-food worker, who, when given this unexpected, unseemly task of making a nose, said what the fuck and made another samosa.

So I can only guess that she misconstrued my ugliness for my nerdiness, and gave in to her sapiosexual tendencies. I forget what the modern expression is, way out of my league, I suppose? But it wasn't the fact that she was physically attractive that drew me to her initially. It was that she was a girl, who would talk to me. That really was all. To really understand my obsession these hundreds of years later, you have to consider what had been happening with me in the years before.

I was precocious. As a toddler, I was already challenging the stereotype the whole world had been cooking up for ages about how all kids were cute. I do not remember a great deal of those days, but I do remember being constantly passed from one eager pair of arms to another reluctant one, before the latter would begin a frenetic search for the next victim. I am often told by my parents that I was the miracle kid who never peed his pants. Little do they know it was because I was so embarrassed already, I couldn't afford it. When I grew a little bit and reached the age when children start thinking they know shit, I realized that I was, after all, at least, a real funny dude. That was a big respite, I have to say. Every morning when I walked into the class, my classmates burst into instant laughter. I never quite understood, though, why they would hide my tiffin-box and leave chewing gum and pins on my chair and fail to tell me. To tell you a little secret, I never enjoyed that part as much as they thought.

But enough about me. I have to do something about this obsession with Swati if I am to have any hope of getting promoted. I have been slaving away for 4 years as a Junior Analyst at this bank, and each passing year that I find out I did not make Senior Analyst, the guilt of being a total failure gnaws at my chest hair. Before uncle Baburam, who was then a Senior VP also at Kruger Ganley, set me up for this job interview with an effusive recommendation, I had been looking for a year already. For a long time before that I had struggled with the question of what to do with my life. Everything I tried always felt either too easy or too difficult. Nothing was just the right level of challenging, except probably getting naked, but I've got to admit I could never have monetized that. Anyhow, as soon as I started working here, I knew it was for me. Plus I was over the roof that I had money to spend on my dates with Swati. Here I go again! No more talking of Swati, that bloodsucking bitch.

I have to get promoted this year. I promised myself I will only send out matrimonial ads when I can mention I’m a Senior Analyst. My brother thinks I’m a moron for wanting to mention Senior Analyst, which, he says, is an oxymoron of a title. Yes, he says things like that ever since he interned at this literary magazine, Intellectuelle, that sells exactly as many copies as it has employees, because there are only as many people in the world as pretentious. “What are you trying to tell girls, that you are the senior-most junior-most person in the bank?” he goes. What does he know about online matrimonial MO with his average build and his face that is not remotely annoying, and who the hell awarded him the pedestal to consider himself qualified to pontificate his literary hogwash over me. Besides, isn’t Junior Analyst a pleonasm, smartass?

By the way, I’m Chaturvedi, Siddharth Chaturvedi. Get used to the name, you will be hearing a lot of me. If there is one thing about me everybody strongly agrees with, it's that once I start coming, I keep coming.

The Spiral of D

Cry,

and think

how there's noone

to stop your crying,

but if there is, think

why're they not pained

when you cry like this,

but if they are, think

why are they not

pained enough

when you are,

and cry. 

Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Jagjit Singh

Some of you who have stuck with this blog for a long time, assuming there are some of you, would know that not too long ago (well at least until 4 years ago, anyway) I considered literature my foremost calling, but more importantly, my biggest purpose. All that had started after a particularly mind-blowing experience of reading Camus' 'The Fall' on a particularly hot evening in 2006, a day before my Fluid Mechanics finals. Ever since, I have maintained that that reading, and the ones that followed, had a great role to play in me coming into being as an individual, the kind of person I grew into.

And, and Jagjit Singh with his renditions that emphasized poetry before musical pyrotechnics unlike his compatriots even in the relatively thoughtful rarified world of ghazals, was to me divinity itself.

Kafka and Camus are no longer personal heroes, but just a couple of NoSQL technologies I try to get fluent with.
JS now refers not to a personal hero, but the almost as admirable JavaScript.

Ah, life's changes.

 

A room of one's own

In this very week, 17 years ago, I moved to a new place. It was a huge change. I moved from New Delhi to, well, New Delhi, but in my own little life it was a development of colossal proportions. The new place was, well, a mile from the old one, but it was still quite honestly a huge change. I don't live at the said new place anymore. Haven't for a very long time in fact, but it was quite something, the giddy euphoria I used to feel back in those days at the prospect of having my own private place, a den, as it were, a room of my own. I was eleven years old, and wasn't doing any of the things that people most require a room of their own for. But, anyway, those were the days.

Also, these. These are also THE days. But let's come to that later.

Since I believe the blog should betray continuity of some sort, let me fill the large absences on my blog with a quick recap of my whereabouts since I seem to have shifted base frequently in the last couple of years. After completing my education in Pittsburgh at the end of last year, I spent more than two months at my brother's place in Cleveland, traveled to Florida for a bit and have since been working and living in Princeton. Now that the ambiguity regarding my whereabouts has been resolved, the point of the post is that my parents flew in here from New Delhi a few days ago! I just can't remember the last time I had felt this happy. When I graduated? I have to say that was the culmination of 17 months of the hardest I ever worked, but, no. When I found a job? That was a massive relief, because it immediately freed me from worrying about paying off a gargantuan debt, but, hell no. What are some other candidates? When I first fell in love, that was close, but no, not really quite there.

Until a few days ago, I used to doze off on most weekdays at around 9. It was a major departure from my grad school days when I was wide awake at school at 3 AM everyday but for some reason, it felt as if after an eleven hour workday starting at 7 AM, and watching a nominal amount of TV, it was the a natural and even necessary thing. It doesn't help that I know, in a non-professional way, a sum total of zero people in the city I live in. Besides, you've got to get up on time, right? Wrong, apparently. The thirst for sleep vanished as if by magic, and cheesy as it sounds, I feel so effusively happy reliving my teenage days of watching news on TV every night with dad that it is even somewhat embarrassing to admit. So effusively happy, secretly. Also, again, as if by magic, I who could not bear to stay awake until last week can't possibly go to sleep now, and feel like I have all the energy in the world to cook my parents dishes I've learned to cook over the last 2 years, drive them everywhere and be the the world's best bad tour guide.

I must have been foolish when I was 11. Or I must be foolish now, that the thing I least want, almost dread, is a place of my own, even though I can no longer say that I amn't doing any of the things that people most require a place of their own for. Yes, yes, I admit I had begun watching Bigg Boss. But they're off season anyway.

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.