WTF

What do you do on a lazy drizzly sunday evening with awesome weather -

1. watch cricket match
2. study for end term exam on next day
3. listen to a torturous discussion on topics hardly relevant to you

I happened to choose the third option today. Since the match was shortened to 22 overs and studying for exam is also no fun, there was a little consolation anyway.

From another standpoint, I took pity on life that offers only sucky choices.

How many things have you come across at a stretch which have left you with the feeling "WTF?"

• Your mentor prof asks to meet on a day before exam
• You are the first one to arrive, and prof comes when you are on your way back
• There are two groups apart from yours, yours will be discussed last, and apparently you need to sit in other discussions
• One group discusses their project for one hour, you sit quiet
  
• Prof says it will be over in another half an hour and actually means one and half
• Second group discusses for another hour, you are again forced to attend because apparently it is relevant to your project. In reality either
1. you already know it, or
2. you don't know it but it is totally irrelevant to you, your life, your project, and your exam on next day and you couldn't care less, or
3. you stopped listening while thinking "even this shall pass away" until you get bored of that thought or any other line of any poem too, or
4. you are lost in the thought of pending assignments and prof himself answers a question he has asked
   
• Your turn comes, prof asks more questions than you do, does not answer any and draws a diagram no one can understand later
• You want to ask a genuine doubt, but unlike everyone else in the institute, the prof who is the chairperson of computer centre, does not have office 2007 installed on his pc
• Update: Prof scans your pendrive in suspicion of a virus, but his own system is infected and it creates 68 trojan files in otherwise clean folders
  

I can go on. The point is, whatever I did ended in "WTF". You might have gone through something worse. But hey, you didn't blog about it.

On a positive note, it has probably made me more tolerant (or ignorant) of bullshitting.

Realise you're living in the golden years

To IIMB friends:

From the coast of gold across the seven seas
I'm travellin' on far and wide
But now it seems I'm just a stranger to myself
And all the things I sometimes do
It isn't me but someone else

I close my eyes and think of home
Another city goes by in the night
Ain't it funny how it is
You never miss it till it's gone away
And my heart is lying there
And will be till my dying day

So, understand
Don't waste your time always searching for those wasted years
Face up, make your stand
And realise you're living in the golden years

Too much time on my hands I got you on my mind
Cant ease this pain so easily
When you can't find the words to say
It's hard to make it through another day
And it just makes me wanna cry
And throw my hands up to the sky

So, understand
Don't waste your time always searching for those wasted years
Face up, make your stand
And realise you're living in the golden years

- from 'Wasted Years' by Iron Maiden

PS: A cousin asked me on orkut "dada what is that you do that you are paid 9 lakh per year", and I laughed out loud alone.

God

What is common between prisoner's dilemma, global financial markets, and law? All of them give good results if (and only if) everyone believes and complies with the rules of the system.

If I forsake other prisoner's trust, I gain in a single game. But in repeated games, my best strategy is to comply voluntarily and punish immediately (more specifically, copy other player's previous move, at times with small probability of forgiving defection). With a rational opponent, the sum of individual benefits in non-compliance is less than that in compliance strategy. A beautiful illustration of this can be found at S Anand's four philosophies arising out of pure mathematical logic. Communication, or any method of co-operation between prisoners helps.

In an investment bank I can earn fat bonuses for a few years using complex financial wizardry. But when it comes in an opaque and unaccountable manner (and same is done by other bankers as well), everyone loses trust in me, my company and overall market. The sum of individual paychecks and bonuses is less than overall loss faced by the market. In the long run, I would earn more if I (and others) believed in not cheating the system by not being transparent and circumventing the laws. Government's measures of restoring co-operation and faith help.

If I believe in god (of any kind), I am less likely to resort to atrocities, having faith in my own future. If I start creating a destructive distrust between different religious beliefs, I create a fundamentalist in someone's mind. Respecting the religious systems - mine and others' helps in cooperation and peace.

I have come to believe that the hope essentially stems from the faith in the system. I am inclined towards being agnostic when it comes to religion. But given the above analogies, I think it is better for me that I believe in a system. If more people believe in a system (not specifically religious system), mutual cooperation can produce more benefit for the society on the whole. I am more or less willing to believe in god, if it helps coperation in the system, and I think it does as shown by researchers. This article in The Economist shows through economic games that belief in group/system helps. (Read the last para for humour.)

One may compare the belief in a system to an economic cartel of producers, in both the systems there is a short-term incentive to defect from given association, but not in long term. However, there is one important difference. In a cartel, the extra value created for producer is coming at the cost of customer, making it a zero sum game effectively. In a game of prisoner's dilemma cooperation creates value but not at someone else's cost.

Few days back one of my friends was trying to proxy in class. If I don't believe in the system of x% compulsory attendance in a class, I am likely to give/arrange for proxies. I hope the above argument is convincing enough for him not to proxy in class :-)

PS: Yesterday we had a fantastic talk by Shaheen Mistry from Teach For India. I am inclined towards volunteering, but not yet sure of it. Let's see.

social entrepreneurship

One of the courses this term is on the verge of changing all my priorities in life.

It is interesting that title of another course 'Self Transformation - Indian Approaches' is more appropriate to the result of Social Entrepreneurship course. STIA is about philosophy and spirituality in different religions and transformation of self. While STIA is also food for thought, SE has actually transformed me, or at least influenced my thoughts quite a bit.

Till now it was only a budding thought that I should take up something socially relevant - so I was trying to volunteer for different NGOs and help them in documentation or other MBA-like work. Though a management school leaves little time to volunteer in actual field work, this term did give some opportunities to do that through course work as well as voluntarily.

The thought was probably rooted right at my school Jnana Prabodhini, working itself for rural employment generation, education for children of sugarcane workers & tribal children and other such initiatives. Increasingly, I am coming to believe that I should work full-time in the development sector (poverty alleviation, NGOs, improvement of livelihoods, etc). I am not yet sure if I will take it up right after graduting from IIMB. If not immediately, I do want to, in near future.

PS: Even after putting it in to-do list, blogging has taken a back-seat. As part of that to-do, next I promise to write on some people I look up to - some social entrepreneurs, some mavericks, a couple of musicians. The common thing that connects them is probably their passion.

What to do

Earlier I had contemplated whether I will steal someone else's chappals, if I could not find mine outside a temple. My obvious answer was - no, I will not. I may have to go home barefoot, but I will stop the potential chain of unhappiness then and there. The fact I did not consider while answering was the price of new chappals. Then something happened after I wrote that post.

About 3 months back, my and my friend's laptops got stolen from our hostel room, during our summer internship in Hyderabad. It happened because of ignorance of many people, including us. The police were reluctant to accept the FIR, but we did lodge a complaint against the theft (without any bribe).

Meanwhile, as laptop is a must for academic (and entertainment) requirements in IIMB, I purchased a relatively cheaper one with a decent config, and returned to Bangalore. I occasionally missed the data I had not backed up (the bugger stole my USB hard drive as well, where I had most of the backup. Though I saved few CDs which turned out handy). Otherwise the incident was put in the backseat. Rather it was written off.

Lessons learned:
1) Ensure that your room is locked in an unfamiliar place, at whatever cost.
2) Back up your data on multiple media - CDs, online storage.
3) Do not keep all the eggs in same basket.

Now the twist: earlier this month, I got a totally unexpected call - from the police station, saying that our laptops have been recovered from the concerned person. They asked us to travel to Hyderabad and collect the laptops, no questions asked! We were ecstatic and astonished about their efficiency.

What was the last time you recovered a theft, via police? We were jumping with joy and celebrating. I almost gave a mini-treat to friends.

But wait, what if the trip to Hyderabad turned out meaningless? After all, taking a weekday off from life at a B-school was not that easy, not including the expenditure on travel. What if they demanded money to return the laptops? What if the process took too much time? What if the laptops were not ours?

We called the concerned officer. We enquired about all that. Later we also asked friends in Hyderabad to meet them. The police seemed to be worried about the court-case that was imminent from the FIR. They give us the laptops, we cancel the FIR, problem solved. So bribe was probably not required. About the processing time, they said that we will require at least another trip later, but they promised to solve the things quickly - remember, they had the responsibility on them and they didn't want the matter to reach courts.

And then we realized, that was the precise problem - they didn't want the trouble in their books. We asked them to describe the laptops. From the description, it was clear that one laptop could be ours, one surely was not.

Now here is the dilemma we faced. Should we take the laptops which are not ours? We have the following two options:

Option1: Take. Use in whatever way possible - sell, give to friend/family, donate. Police are also relieved. Live with the choice - possibly few sleepless nights about whom the laptops actually belong to.

Option2: Refuse. No hassle about going to Hyderabad, no time spent chasing papers and no visits required further. Possibly we were the lumberjacks in the folklore. Or possibly the laptops will be scrapped, nobody would claim them, and there was no chain of unhappiness.

We have made our choice mostly. Before revealing that I would like to see what you would have done in this situation. While making your choice, remember the temple connection, the old folklore of the lumberjack and his axe, and the opportunity cost of not taking the laptops.

Your thoughts?

//todo

I have been making todo lists in many formats so you'd have guessed that they work only partially. I have used google calendar, outlook calendar, add-on on thunderbird, post-its on vista sidebar, post-its on paperboard in the room and whiteboard till now. So this is the latest mode of making a todo list and sticking to it - blog. Below are few things I wish to do during next 3-4 months, and YOU are going to remind me :D

TODO in next 3 months (or losely speaking, keep doing it for some time):

1. Find a guitar/drums tutor to come to IIMB to teach interested junta.
2. Listen to more types of music, particularly explore more in rock.
3. Continue mp3-tagging by collection of songs.
4. Start composing, write it down. Explore song structures.
   
5. Try sculptoring soap.
6. Read the books lying in the room (esp. End of Poverty, remaining volumes of H2G2 series)
7. Blog more frequently. Start a series on social entrepreneurs.
8. Translate books into Marathi for GTS.
9. Continue working with Weflap.
   

Now you know why I end up not completing the do part in these lists, they are so long!

No but seriously, many of the above don't even need reminders - I will do them as I find time. At times I will squeeze time to do it. You just need to remind me that I will keep on finding such times. Tell me, call, chat or mail me in a while, and just say that you read this post. I will do the rest.

tired

Frankly I'm tired of the glorified rat race.
Not because we rats join it, but because the race breeds more rats, or so it is designed.
However, I should clarify that rats are the most supreme intellectual beings in the universe, as the conventional wisdom⁽¹⁾ goes.

Frankly, I've stopped looking forward to count Gandhiji's face.
Not because it's the means not ends, but because there's much more to get yourself aligned.
However, you may say that you need to buy that alignment too. I disagree. After me, my alignment goes.

Somehow, I've put my dreams on the backseat
With the faith that the spark⁽²⁾ will live for long
I am taking up more responsibilities, few which are a burden.

Somehow, there are no drums and no beat
With the assurance that my life will be song
I am falling in the trap, and not exploring the garden.

I am pushing time, another month passes
Buried deeply in work, study and classes
Not bothering to take a look outside
Snubbing others' existence⁽³⁾ in my own pride.

I will be another one among oh-so-glorious faces
Looking at the world from my rose-tinged glasses
This poem should become more structured, I decide
I lack the taste, but there's no restaurant I've not tried.


Notes -
1: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
2: Chetan Bhagat's speech: Keep the Spark
3: The Disadvantages of Elite Education, by William Deresiewicz