365

I have actually managed to average a post a day for a full year.

This would be a good time to thank the many friends who have been following this blog every week, if not every day, for their encouragement. I would also like to thank all those who would post comments or even call in when they disagreed strongly; these have been thought provoking discussions and I have often had to recant in a subsequent post.

I would especially like to mention one person who on the very second day of the year posted on my facebook page, "What are the odds that this will happen for the full year". I need to thank this person most of all for cementing my resolve to stick with it. 

It has been an interesting exercise, not only in trying to improve my writing style, but also in discipline. There have been days when I have seriously contemplated admitting defeat, but the humiliation would have been more difficult to handle than the ordeal of writing every day. Coming up with topics was the toughest part of the project and I learned to use my time commuting to listen to audiobooks. These have been a great source of food for thought and topics to write about. 

As for the writing style, I daresay I see some improvement, but then one always tends to see one's own effort through rose coloured glasses. Friends have called in to tell me when they felt my writing had improved rapidly across a few days only to plateau out again for a few weeks. I suspect progress in most things follows just this pattern. There were days when the writing flowed, and there were days when it was clearly contrived. I can look back at the 364 posts and quite easily tell which ones I enjoyed writing and which ones were done under duress of commitment.

It has taken me a good part of a year to figure out that going public with the commitment to write a post every day was not the best approach I could have taken if the objective was to improve my writing. I intend to write to a private blog going forward and perhaps once in a while, if I feel particularly thrilled or riled about something, I might post it to this public blog. I trust this will make a number of people happy; some of whom have made no attempt to hide their irritation at my facebook posts announcing milestones of achievement. 

My new year's resolution for 2016 is to work on my fitness levels. I was looking through some old pictures of a handsome young man from a couple of decades ago and I intend to regain that level of health and fitness in the coming year. I am counting on my friends to call me out if I start to slip in my commitment.

Thank you for staying with me through the year and here's wishing you a great 2016.

30 December 2015

Big brother is watching you

My son noticed a sticker on the windshield of our car that said, "Please do not remove this RFID tag" and we got into a conversation about how RFID tags are now ubiquitous.

I checked the windshield of our other car and sure enough, there it was, and I am sure the R3 has one too. I read an article recently that said that most apparel has RFID tags sown in near the label on the collar to help track inventory as it moves across the supply chain.

Ostensibly, the tag has served its purpose after it has moved with the item across the assembly line and through the factory gate to the truck and to the store. But it does not stop functioning. Every time you take your car back for servicing, the RFID reader at the dealership picks up the telltale signs. In the US and in Singapore I hear, toll gates have RFID readers and so do most car park gantries.

Big brother knows where you drive and how long you park there and when you leave. If certain movements are out of character, perhaps an algorithm picks them up and flags them. If you have been paying for your clothes with your credit card, big brother knows not only where you are, but also what you are wearing, and if you arrive at the gym in your tennis attire but leave in your dress shirt for dinner, and he knows where you go after the gym everyday.

I had read about some people who nuke their new clothes in the microwave oven to fry the RFID tag and I thought that was a little paranoid. But here is something my son mentioned that has got me thinking. Most new smartphones, he said, are now equipped with a fingerprint scanner which makes it so much easier to unlock the phone and also to make payments with Android Pay or Google Wallet. Mobile phones by the very nature of the technology they rely on, are being tracked and located in real time. Now with fingerprint scanners built into them, and presuming some people will choose to use their fingerprints to unlock the phone instead of a passcode or pattern swipe, they are tracking not only the phone but actually the user. Someone is possibly storing your fingerprints too and there might soon be a black market for fingerprint scan databases. You have probably also noticed that new App you try to install on your phone pretty much insists on getting access to your location, your messages, your phone book, your calendar and other stuff you didn't even know your phone was tracking.

So let me see now. They know what time you wake up, they know how long it takes you to get ready and have breakfast before you get in your car and start your commute. If you pair your phone with your car, they know what make and model of car you own and what model year. They know how long it takes you to get to work. They know which restaurants you like to frequent and what you do in the evenings. They know if you are a fitness freak and if you wear a Fitbit device and if you use Nike running shoes to measure your stride and distance. They know what search terms you type into Google. And of course they know who you call and how often. They have algorithms to read your email and offer relevant advertising. For the few times that your phone is out of reach with their network, they can probably track you by the clothes you wear as you walk into buildings and into elevators. When I first watched Enemy of the State starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman I thought I was watching science fiction.

Now that I know better, I have to go and peel that RFID tag off my windscreen, microwave some clothes and pull my old Mitsubishi clamshell phone out of its box.

Persepolis

I have started reading Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. The book starts with her childhood, growing up in Iran just as the Islamic revolution was beginning.


The Iranian revolution is an interesting event to study, in that it was relatively non-violent, truly backed by the people, even legitimized by a referendum and started without a peasant rebellion, military action or financial crisis.


Things changed however after the referendum chose a supreme leader, who then took the country volte-face in an attempt to undo any and all western influence. The rest as they say is history.


You might want to order a copy of Persepolis.

Engine overhaul

I have a friend who is rather upset over the fact that his car went into the garage for rectification of a supposedly small problem and came back with a huge bill for an engine overhaul.

I asked him what had gone wrong with his car and what work had to be performed as part of the engine overhaul.

"I don't think you understand," he said. "You see, 'engine overhaul' is not a category of work. It is a category of bill."

Work Ethic

I was speaking with a young person who is about to graduate soon and we got to talking about how we expect candidates to handle campus interviews. I stated that our process is geared towards trying to find and recruit people who demonstrate knowledge, curiosity and drive and of course a strong work ethic.

This person asked how we could possibly test for work ethic in the short span of an interview.
I said we were still evolving the process, but one question that we like to ask is, "What would you do with your life if money were no object?" Work ethic, I clarified, is about seeking meaningful work and not whiling one's life away.

This person stared at me for a while and said, "It is incredibly difficult for me to answer this question if I have not thought about it before. And it would be unfair to expect 20 somethings to have thought about this before they meet with you. Most graduating students therefore, when faced with this question are likely to try and game the situation by trying to build an answer that they think you are looking for."

Even more important, this person pointed out, was that I seem to have a different definition of work ethic in my mind as compared with most people currently graduating from Engineering School. To most young people, work ethic implies professionalism; i.e. delivering promised output at the promised time. They have just been through a few years of meaningless work and the better students have worked hard to submit assignments on time. To them, work ethic is not about seeking meaningful work.

Given that I have not clarified what I am looking for with that question, namely a measure of work ethic, and that my definition of work ethic seems to be completely different from the people I am trying to measure, this question seems to be part of a rather unfair process.

Back to the drawing board then.

Tax on consumption vs tax on income

I had to pay advance tax a few days ago, and the feeling that some of my money was being unfairly taken away hit me again, as I am sure it hits you too.

Ostensibly, governments need to collect taxes to be able to provide public goods like law and order and water supply and garbage disposal. Also, ensuring a certain degree of social fairness is the job of the government, to try and provide equal opportunities to citizens from different socio economic strata and from underdeveloped geographical areas.

I have been thinking about how we could come up with a system of taxation that will not seem unfair to the tax payers. I have been wondering if the entire system of taxation was based on taxing consumption rather than taxing income, we would find it more palatable.

I think it is time I read 'Fair Tax' by Neal Boortz to find out more.

Recruiting for 'Fun to be with'

I have written in a previous post about how one of the criteria we recruit for is 'fun to be with'. In a conversation with a close friend a few days ago, I realized that this criterion is as subject to recruiter bias as any other.

Recruiter bias refers to the tendency of people to recruit people they approve of, generally, people like themselves. We thought we had a strong unbiased algorithm in trying to look for people who are driven, curious and fun to be with.

Drive is generally reflected in the CVs. Driven people have demonstrated that they have to drive to work hard for good grades and to get into good schools. Details of prior work experience can also provide indicators of drive. Indicators of curiosity can be sought in the interview, in the conversations.

But 'fun to be with' can be contentious. The unstated part of the statement is the weak link, the part that can be prone to recruiter bias. The unstated part of fun to be with is 'for me'. The recruiter is making the decision. Effectively the test reduces to, 'Does the recruiter think this person is fun to be with'?

Contemplating the funding of good times

There is perhaps something endearing about people like Bill Gates who worked hard to build a product that people were willing to buy, and then took the decision to use the power of that empire for the benefit of people less privileged.

On the other hand, we have the case of a certain large man who celebrated his birthday in style at a beach location a few days ago. While a birthday might be cause for celebration, one wonders about the code of ethics of hedonists who continue to party hard when they are in non-trivial debt; owing a ridiculously large sum of money, not only to banks but also to smaller vendors who have perhaps lost their life savings and gotten into debt to provide services to the Mr. Large's many shenanigans.

Clearly, there are people who have no qualms about first selling the family silver and later borrowing money to fund their lavish lifestyle, presumably with no intention of ever repaying. This in itself would not be so abhorrent if the lenders were all well-to-do aristocrats with abilities to write-off large amounts. It does hurt when the party is funded by the salaries of clerks and peons and folks in administrative jobs who worked for a few months without being paid their salaries while Mr. Large flew his private jet to his private yacht in Monaco to participate in a sporting event involving private parties with private escorts.

It speaks volumes of our law and order system that people can get away with spending other people's money with impunity.

Going to the mall

A few weekends ago, some family members who were visiting Pune invited me to go to the mall with them. I had been putting off buying some clothes for weeks and decided this would be a good opportunity to get it over with.

I noticed a very very strange thing when I was at the mall with these folks. They did not have a shopping list of things to buy. They were visiting the mall hoping to see stuff that they might want to buy. This was an eye-opening experience. Here were upper middle class people who were otherwise perfectly sane but were now hoping to spot opportunities to buy stuff that they did not even know they needed.

I can now see how almost 2 out of 3 Americans have less than $1000 in savings. If people start going out to malls to seek ideas for spending money on stuff they do not need, I am surprised so many people have so much saved at all.

Righteous Indignation

That book by William Irvine posits an interesting theory about anger. Anger is like a virus that can stay dormant within us for an indefinite period of time and flare up when we least expect it. Usually, most of us are sane enough to realize that anger is not enjoyable. We know it only serves to aggravate any situation and to stress us out. The one exception is the anger that comes from righteous indignation.

I have written in an earlier post about how when we are angry we are so sure we are right and then in another, a rejoinder from a friend who added that when we are angry we are also sure we have been wronged.

Righteous indignation stems from this feeling of having been wronged. It hits the most rational of us in irrational ways. We feel insulted. William Irvine has suggested a rather radical solution to this problem. He claims that for the last few years, he has become a collector of insults. His technique involves looking for insults so he can analyze them to try and figure out what exactly makes one angry.

Now there's a thought.

The force awakens after Christmas

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was released the world over on December 18. But here in India we get to wait another week; until Christmas.


There was a time, right after the economic liberalization in 1991 when old world Licence Raj exploiters formed something called the Bombay Club to try one last time to make some feeble attempt to keep the foreign manufacturers out. The foreigners will destroy the Indian manufacturers they said. Yeah right! 25 years later, Maruti is still the largest car manufacturer in the country and Hero Moto Corp is the largest two wheeler manufacturer in the world. Nilkamal plastics is the largest manufacturer of chairs in the world. Arcelor Mittal is the largest steel manufacturer in the world. The Tata group did not have to sell Tata Motors and Tata Steel and Tata Tea, they went out and bought Corus and Jaguar and Land Lover and Tetley. We can more than hold our own in the world when we are asked to face competition. Even Bajaj started making better two wheelers when they had to face the competition.

And just why was the release date of Star Wars: The Force Awakens pushed out? Because Rohit Shetty and Sanjay Leela Bhansali were worried that The Force would demolish Dilwale and Bajirao Mastani. That is nonsense. Utter rubbish. Those movies do not need Star Wars to ruin their chances at the box office. They are perfectly capable of doing it all by themselves.

National Herald

And what does this herald?

Keyboard scanning

I got into an argument with an electronics engineer some time ago about how amazing computers are vis-a-vis electric typewriters. Well, a discussion really, but it got rather animated.

I had made a comment about how fast the computers scanned the keyboard for input, for you could hit multiple keys at seemingly the same time and the computer would have scanned through the entire keyboard multiple times and caught all of the inputs.

The engineer argued that the computer was not really scanning the keyboard, but was only waiting for an electric circuit to close and as soon as the current came through, it registered the keystroke. Here is my argument on why I thought the computer was scanning each key in sequence as against just registering keystrokes when a key circuit was closed.

I figured that the average computer keyboard cable had no more than 5 wires in the plug that connects to the desktop unit. The average keyboard has about 100 keys. For the keyboard to work on a 'close-the-electrical-circuit' basis, one would expect the cable to have at least 102 wires. Given that the entire caboodle worked with only 5 wires, for GROUND, 5V DC, CLOCK and DATA, the computer had to be working on some system of coded signals on the same data wire to differentiate each key; implying that it needed to scan each key in sequence to be able to catch 2 keys that were simultaneously depressed. Somehow, I did not have him convinced.

I wonder how I could have made my case stronger.

How the planet takes care of itself

I have been thinking about evolution and how natural systems tend to be self-balancing. Before homo sapiens ruled the planet, a number of predator species kept the population of herd animals in check. The populations of the predator species were in turn kept in check by the availability of prey which might be affected by the shortage or abundance of fodder which in turn was affected by climate cycles. Homo-sapiens has been one of those evolutionary outliers that possibly threw the self-balancing mechanism off balance. Our ability to not only adapt to changing environs but also our tendency to bend the environment to our needs has perhaps been more than evolution bargained for.

Of course, nature did not give up easily. As recently as the first half of the last century, every so often an outbreak of cholera or the plague would reduce the human poluation by a not-insignificant percentage of the total. As we developed vaccines and cures for a number of diseases, the human population started to grow rapidly.

It would be interesting conjecture that all sexually transmitted diseases including Syphilis and HIV were nature's attempts to control the population of a species by making the very process of pro-creation a transmission vector.

PET menace

A few weeks ago, we visited a beach resort near Alibag for our annual outbound. A few kilometers before our destination we drove past an area that seemed to have become the de-facto landfill for the area. What struck me was the number of PET bottles and plastic bags that littered the ground. Organic waste was either far less voluminous or the friendly neighbourhood dogs and pigs were taking care of it in good order.

I momentarily lamented the use of plastic bags and PET bottles in our society and soon forgot about them. The next day, we had an event organized on the lawns of the resort and given that it was a humid day, the resort had arranged water for us on the lawns.

But here's the thing you see. They had laid out 250 ml PET bottles for us. Each of us probably consumed more than 4 of these bottles on that one evening, and I am sure the empty ones were carted to that same landfill the next day.

An outright ban on all PET bottles would be draconian I suppose. But I wonder if a ban on selling packaged drinking water in PET bottles smaller than 1 liter might be a good idea.

Inflection point in evolutionary design

The two biggest sources of unhappiness in our modern lives are our seeming insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control. It might be exactly these two traits however, that might be a direct cause of us being around today. Our ancestors who worried about that strange growling sound in the trees are more likely to have survived and bred than their happy-go-lucky neighbours who ventured out of the trees with total disregard for that growling noise. Similarly, our ancestors who worried about running out of food and therefore worked harder to collect more than they could consume are more likely to have survived harsh winters than their neighbours who lived each day as it arrived.

In our modern world, especially if we live in one of the more developed and civilized nations, our situation is somewhat different. We know with a fair degree of certainty where our next meal is going to come from and we do not have to worry about some fanged creature springing upon us for its own meal. The two traits that we can thank for our survival, the need to worry and the tendency to hoard, are now beginning to work against us.

Evolution is an amazing thing in that it not only favours survival of the fittest, but also automatically redfines fitness for contemporary times. If today, the need for food and safety is no longer desperate, then the fittest are those who have a better handle on life, and demostrate balance rather than anxiety. In today's day and age, people who are happier are more likely to find a mate than those who are perpetually anxious. And survival of the fittest would mean the passing on of genes from people who are better adapted to today's society.

A respectful nod to the blind watchmaker.

Unearned respect

I wrote a post a few days ago about a certain person in Private Equity who truly believed that the highest order of human beings work in Private Equity.

If the measure of the highness of human beings is the degree to which they amass their wealth usurping the effort of others who do real work, then a number of politicians in India should be of a higher order than those who work in Private Equity.

Come to think of it, and this thought occurred to me as I wrote the word 'highness' in the previous paragraph, royalty and other people who are addressed as your highness, have generally amassed their wealth riding on the backs of others.

So perhaps this person is right. We might need to now question if 'highness' is an honorific accorded to the respected or the mark of exploiters.

Stoicism 202 - Dealing with insults

That book by William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life' is a gold mine, with astute advice on dealing with fame, wealth, exile and here's my favourite, dealing with insults.

Most of us are particularly bad at dealing with insults. Our need for one-upmanship leaves us consumed with retaliation. Irvine presents an interesting perspective on insults though: he proposes that we try and categorize insults on a two-by-two grid.

On one axis, the insult giver can either be well informed or mis-informed.  On the other axis the content of the insult itself could be either true or false.

If the insult giver is mis-informed, we would be wise to ignore the insult for surely it is not worthy of further consideration. Walking away is usually the best recourse.

If s/he is well informed, but the content is untrue or out of context, we might want to address the situation by attempting to set the facts straight. This can only be done if we can communicate quietly, without anger, else the altercation can only escalate.

And finally if the insult giver is well informed and the content is true, then it is not really an insult but feedback. The best approach might be to inform the insult giver that the observation is valid and illuminating, and that we intend to start to work on the short-coming.

In either case, there is usually no value in getting worked up over being insulted.

Queue Density

I was at Bangalore airport a few days ago waiting to board a flight to Pune. A strange thing happened as soon as the gate agent arrived. Even before the airline announced that the flight was ready for boarding, people jumped up from their seats and formed a queue. It was good 20 minutes before the gate agent booted up her computer and made the announcement to commence boarding.

I was quite amused to see how long these people patiently stood in line for that long a time when it was clear that aircraft was not going to leave without them. I can perhaps understand the urgency for people who had large carry-on luggage for they might want to be the first to rush in and lift their bags to the overhead bins, but others, with nothing more than a laptop bag were also standing in line. My own strategy is to remain comfortably seated near the gate until the line has gone through the gate.

The other thing was how tightly packed the queue was. This is a peculiarly Indian thing. Perhaps, having grown up in queues at bus stands and railway stations and at the milk booth, there is an inherent fear in our minds that someone will cut into the line ahead of us if we leave any room there. Perhaps that approach still makes sense at a bus stand in rural Haryana. But here at Bangalore airport were grown men, most sporting Nike sneakers and toting iPhones standing nut-to-butt for a good 20 minutes. What gives?

Books and TV

What books are to curiosity, TV is to dissatisfaction.

Maus II

I have started reading Part 2 of Maus by Art Spiegelman. This second volume focusses on life in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The next time you think you have problems to deal with, imagine being pulled out of your house at the point of a gun, being shoved into the back of a truck without windows, traveling for indefinite hours in the freezing winter without warm clothes and without access to bathrooms, being hustled out at an unknown location at night, being separated from your spouse, being told to line up either on the left or on the right, not knowing which side would be marched off towards the 'chimneys', being taken to a large hall where gun-toting SS men asked you to strip and hand over your papers and valuables, being told to go to the showers, not knowing if water was going to come out of the shower heads or Zyklon-B, being subjected to the humiliation of someone shaving your head and tattooing a prisoner number on your forearm, being handed prison uniforms that were too big, being given no belt or string for your over-sized trousers causing you to hold up your trousers with one hand all the time, being given wooden shoes or shoes without shoe-laces, being whipped when you asked for a string, being shoved into sleeping quarters where you are assigned one bed amongst three people even when half the beds are empty, being assigned to the job of moving dead bodies from the gas chambers to the cremation ovens, being marched to the mess hall while some of your comrades are shot for sport, being fed one piece of bread with watery soup, being made to scrub the floor with your clothes and then being marched to your sleeping quarters where you find out that more inmates have arrived and you now have to share your bed with more people.

The next time you are complaining about something, think about how big your problems really are.

Electronic Toll Collection

Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) lanes on toll roads in India are an interesting phenomenon. They appear to deliver no benefit to any of the stakeholders. The drivers of cars equipped with ETC Tags have to sit behind a non ETC car that is arguing with the toll booth operator. The Toll Operators cannot move to a fully automated lane because there will be non ETC drivers trying to go through the ETC lane. The ETC Only lane in effect becomes an ETC-also lane.

I have been thinking about how Toll Operators could solve this problem. Given the challenges we face in India as discussed above, here is the solution I would like to propose.

The first change would be where the ETC only lane is located. In most civilized countries, ETC lanes are the fast lanes where drivers need barely slow down for the tag reader to read the car tag and to deduct toll charges. In India, we might want to locate the ETC lane at the slowest end, i.e. on the left side of the road and build two exits past the toll collection device, one that leads back to the road and the other that leads to a run-off area where you can hold and deal with the non-payers. The barrier at the toll-gate would need to be programmed to open in one of two directions: to channel traffic back to the road if the toll has been collected or to open the other way to direct cars to the holding area if the toll cannot be collected electronically in say 5 seconds. 

If the procedure in the holding area involves big burly men to argue with and a solid locked gate manned by a suitably large giant to let people out only after they have paid the toll through a suitably arcane time wasting procedure, drivers might eventually learn that it is not worth their time to try and sneak past the ETC lane without an ETC tag. Save for the odd MP with a shot-gun of course.

Maus

I have started reading 'Maus' by Art Spiegelman. It is the only graphic novel ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Spiegelman uses the 'comic-book' format to tell the story of the Holocaust and never has a graphic novel been so touching. The books gives you, in no more time than it takes to read a Tin-tin or Asterix comic, a stark reminder of what people can do to other people when they move into a position of absolute power. Spiegelman has mice depicting the Jews, cats depicting the Nazis, dogs depicting the liberating Americans and for some reason, pigs depicting the Poles - I am still struggling with that last metaphor.


I am writing this post to urge all of you to get to amazon or flipkart now and order yourself a copy.

When messages are designed in bad grammar

I was cleaning out my junk folder a short while ago when I noticed the following subject line.

"These technique will destroys the US Lottery system."

I have always wondered why the scammers do not bother to run a spell check and grammar check on the messages they send out. It would stand to reason that if you wish to snare someone gullible enough to believe that they could partake of a deceased despotic dictator's hidden riches, you might want to deploy a little more finesse in your communications.

After I ran a Google search for why Nigerian Scams have bad grammar, I learned that the scammers are far more devious. They have to send out millions of mail messages to get a few hundred responses, of which a few can be lured into transferring some money to an untraceable destination ostensibly to help grease the process of moving the millions. Here is where the bad grammar comes in. If the messages were sent out in better English and the contents seemed more plausible, the message might attract more educated people, most of whom would get suspicious soon enough and not transfer any money. Playing email tag with such 'false-positives' would be a waste of time for those blokes sitting in some cyber cafe in wherever.

By deliberately using bad grammar and ridiculous plots, the spammers are actively causing only the not-so-educated and gullible to self-select themselves into responding. The conversion ratio on these people is likely to be higher.

The best way to eliminate this scourge would be for educated people to respond to these scams in large enough numbers and cause the spammers to use up a lot of their time in responding to leads that are going to be dead ends. Eventually, they might figure out it is not worth their time. Unfortunately, you and I have better things to do with our spare time.

Perhaps it is time for some bright engineers from an IIT to start work on a project to write a bot that will respond to Nigerian Scammers with natural language responses and keep them occupied.

On politeness

I have been thinking a fair bit about how a little politeness goes a long way. Once you think about it, the revelation is not really extraordinary; it is something we have known or should have known all along. What then prevents us from being polite all the time, and causes us to try the "Do you know who I am?" approach.

I suspect it is our ego's need to feel important, and it is this need that gets us into trouble more often than not. It would be fair to reason that at least some of the time, our need to feel important will be at odds with the other parties need to feel important. More often than not, our demeanour works hard against our best interests rather than for them.

Imagine a person trying to check in for a flight that has been over-booked for some reason. The one person in the world who could perhaps help you get on that flight is the person behind the check-in counter at the airport. That is also the person that people try to berate when they are informed that they might not be accommodated on the flight. When the person behind the counter has some discretion on who to let on board; there should be no prizes for guessing that he or she would be likely to rule in favour of the polite person. Yet we find it easy to be rude to people who provide us with a service such as at an airport or at a hotel or at a restaurant. Interestingly, when the traffic cop stops us, most of us choose to be polite, unless of course we happen to live in Delhi where it would be sign of weakness to show politeness - Tu jaanta hain main kaun hoon?

Here is an algorithm I have just figured out that would lead to be more polite: Transact with every person we meet as if that person were in the position of power.

I realize that this is not a new discovery, for it is exactly what our parents and grandparents have tried to tell us: "It is nice to be important. But it is more important to be nice." Perhaps we will find this wisdom easier to inculcate into our behaviour when we see the purely selfish interest in doing so.

A little politeness goes a long way

I have been having a run of bad luck with traffic offenses lately. After being pulled over for speeding a few days ago, I was guilty yesterday of presuming that I could take a free left turn at an intersection that was not in effect a free-left.

Two cops pulled me over and I stepped out of the car, said 'Namaskar' with a smile and asked what I had done wrong. I think the difference was in my tone, for I asked what I had done wrong in a tone of humble enquiry and not in a tone of challenge. When the policeman informed me that I had taken a left turn at a red light, I apologized and admitted my fault. Without his asking for it, I produced my driving licence and handed it to him and asked him to prepare the challan.

I suspect he was taken aback with my genuine politeness and the fact that I showed no inclination of challenging his stand. I had admitted my mistake and was willing to pay the fine. He looked at my licence and saw that I was from Pune. He looked at the car's registration number and confirmed that the car was also from Pune. He handed my licence back to me and said, "Please drive carefully," and even opened the door of my car for me.

All this talk of corrupt policemen - I have no clue where all that nonsense is coming from.

Hoardings in Mumbai

Some months ago, I had written a post about how all billboards or hoardings in Pune and Bangalore seem to be monopolized by real estate ads.

Driving around in Mumbai yesterday, I noticed some sense of normalcy returning, for I saw advertisements for mobile phones, cars, clothing and chocolates.

I wonder if this is a lead indicator of the fact that real estate companies cannot afford to throw stupid money any more in an attempt to be louder than their competitors.

Is there a correction in real estate prices, long overdue, finally here for the reckoning?

Stoicism 201

There is a certain person who is employed at a Private Equity firm who not only believes, but has the gall to voice, that the highest level of humans work in PE and everyone else is necessarily a lower order human being.

The audacity is preposterous, especially given how fallacious the premise is. By definition, people in Private Equity are trying to partake of the success of people who are building a quality product or service and delivering it efficiently to the people who will buy it. The only thing that people in PE are doing is allocating capital on bets that they believe will pay.

It gets worse. Venture Capitalists in the good old days started out by investing money that they had made themselves, by having succeeded in the very game that they were now investing in; i.e. building a product or service that the market needed and was willing to pay for. They had sold their company to a larger corporation and were now trying to deploy their money, and perhaps experience, across a wider set of opportunities.

A number of today's PE employees have never really done anything real for a living. Admittedly, they have worked extremely hard through the best Business Schools to build CVs that PE and VC firms would shortlist. But for a living, these people essentially meet a lot of real entrepreneurs so that they can invest money that the founding partner of the VC / PE firm has brought in from other people entrusted to invest that money, who in turn got the money from people who have made it by, guess what, building and delivering a product or service that the market wants and is willing to pay for.

The hubris of someone who in effect lives off the success of others, to believe and to voice an opinion that suggests that the best people work in VC / PE and that others are a lower class of human beings is nothing short of atrocious.

And finally, here is where the title of this piece comes in. These people would do well to realize that they have a high paying job at the pleasure of the founder of the VC / PE fund founder, and that if they should lose this job at the whim of their boss, they would be pretty much unemployable anywhere else.  They would do even better to accept their good fortune with grace and gratitude and start building a real life skill in preparation for the day when they will lose their job.

Stoicism 101

I have started reading a little known but an eminently recommendable book, 'A guide to the good life' by William Irvine. Going by the title, one would imagine this book to be a how-to manual for enjoying the good life, for living it large, for living the big dreams.

Au contraire, the book has an entirely different perspective. My take home from the first couple of chapters of the book is this: The path to a fulfilling life comes not from chasing material goods that signal success but from training your mind to want stuff that you already have.

Let us think about this a little more. We strive to achieve our goals, get that coveted job, earn that promotion, marry the person of our dreams and give our children the best experiences that are available out there. After we achieve all of these things, we find ourselves not fulfilled yet. The rat race takes over. We berate our kids for not doing well enough at school, for not telling us sooner that something needed to be purchased for a school project due tomorrow. We crib about how the promotion we deserved was given to the person who must be brown nosing the boss. We take our spouse for granted. Life becomes a series of chores to be gotten through. It doesn't need to.

When was the last time we took time out to truly enjoy that which we already have : our relationships and even our possessions that we worked so hard to obtain? I realize that I have been guilty of this too. I worked for years to be able to finally afford a German car. And what have I been doing ever since the prize had been bagged?

Starting tomorrow, I am going to find reasons to celebrate what I already have. Wish I had chanced upon this book a decade ago. On the other hand, perhaps there is a time and place when such wisdom will hit home.

Enthusiasm exhausted

We went recruiting at one of the super premier institutes a few days ago. We expected that we would meet the brightest minds in the country and that we would be hard pressed to exclude candidates from the shortlists or the final lists. Alas, we met very few such. We did meet a lot of people who had clearly worked extremely hard to make it into these hallowed portals, but somewhere along the way, they seemed to have forgotten why it was important for them to get there in the first place. It was almost as if getting into an elite institution was the end goal in itself - not as a portal to higher opportunity later.

I wonder if the process of preparing for the entrance test sucks all the juice out of a person; so much so, that there is no further ambition left in life.

December Short

Happiness comes from doing things you are proud of.

ATC Control Towers

As I rode back into T3 at Delhi airport, I noticed that they are still working on building the new control tower. Ever since the iconoclastic tower at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport

was made famous by its younger cousin at Singapore's Changi Airport,

a number of airports have been racing to build these new age towers that are situated outside the airport complex. Here is the new tower at Mumbai

and the one they have been building for years at Delhi.

In the old days, the ATC was no more than a glass cabin atop the terminal building and as I drove past the new tower in Delhi, I couldn't help wonder if these new phallic designs were no more than an ego boosters for the politicians that commissioned them; another manifestation of 'mine is bigger than yours', if you will.

A little more thought though, and one has to give the designers credit for coming up with an elegant solution to a modern problem. When airports were built, they were situated way outside the city with nothing more than open fields all around. The ATC glass house atop the terminal building had an unobstructed view of the surrounding plains all the way to the horizon to see the approaching planes coming in. With cities growing at the frenetic pace we have been witnessing for the last couple of decades, new buildings sprouted up near the airports and ATC clearly needed something taller to see over to the horizon.

So the next time you land safely at an airport in a crowded, congested city, you might want to thank the guys slaving away at a giant phallus nearby.

Riding with Lorenzo

I was invited to ride a Yamaha at the Buddh International Circuit with Jorge Lorenzo. Yamaha took care of all expenses including airport pickup, stay at a hotel in Greater Noida, Breakfast, Lunch, Track riding training, and the drop off back to Delhi airport.

The day at the circuit started with a safety briefing on dos and donts and rider training by ex Moto GP rider Kato-san. We then went out to the prep rooms and donned our leather safety gear - complete with ablative armour, elbow pads, knee sliders back protection and neck protection - and strode out to the 10 Yamaha R3s track prepped for us. Each bike was assigned a technician who would check out the machine when we returned to the pits.

Leaning the bike into the turns is one of those things that look macho - and it is - for I could not quite find the nerve to lean in all the way until my knee sliders touched the tarmac. It did not help to have another rider try it and then travel sideways with this bike's right fairing and silencer box taking over duty from the tyres. In a testament to the safety gear, he got back up onto the bike and went on to complete the ride.

As we entered the pit lanes after each practice run, the technician assigned to us would ask us if the bike was performing well or if there were any peculiarities.

At 2 pm Jorge Lorenzo arrived and donned his gear. Then for what seemed like the shortest half hour in my life, he led us out to the track for a few laps.

The event was called 'Ride with Lorenzo' and the name turned out to be a bit of a misnomer, for he might as well have been riding on some other circuit. All I saw of him was when he exited the pit lane, leading our train of bikes and when he banked right on Turn1 a right hander. By the time I got to Turn 1, he was easing into Turn 2 and accelerating out of the apex onto the straight and when I finally got to turn 3 I saw his tail lights banking again at the other end of the straight. I saw him next only in the pits.

The R3 is an awesome machine to ride on the track. The stated top speed is 105 mph, about 170 kmph and I glimpsed 155 on the digital speedo on the straight. For the rest of the lap I was hanging on for dear life.

Would I do it again? I can't wait for my next opportunity.