Pertinent Observations

Archive for December, 2008

31 Dec

First name basis

1. I’ve noticed that people in the South use first names much more commonly than in the North. I can think if a simple explanation for this – south indians either don’t have family names (tn, old mysore) or have unpronouncable/hardtoremember family names (andhra/kerala). so a south indian Siddharth Tata is likely to introduce himself [...]

31 Dec

Bangalore Photowalk 5

Ok. So the Bangalore Photowalk has been resurrected. You might recall that I stopped coordinating them after I moved out of Bangalore, and Shande who had volunteered to coordinate had been out of town, and so the Photowalks had come to an abrupt end. Anyways, over the last few days, the photowalk yahoogroup has seen [...]

30 Dec

Location matters

The other day in my office we were discussing recruitment. I pointed out that placements this year in the IITs have been particularly screwed. We haven’t decided if we can wait till July for the new recruits to join, but if we agree that it’s ok, we might recruit from IIT. Given our size and [...]

24 Dec

What rate of interest did Kubera charge?

It is fairly well established that Tirupati Venkataramana (it is Venkataramana and not Venkateshwara – remember that it is a Vaishnavite temple) took a loan from Kubera in order to finance his wedding to Padmavati. And till date, Venkatarmana has been soliciting contributions from visitors to his shrine in order to help him pay off [...]

23 Dec

Tenure matching and jab we met

ok this is one of those lazy posts. Takes two earlier posts and finds a connection between them. This is the kind of stuff that bad professors do – take two old papers, find a link between them and publish a third paper. I do hope to become a prof one day, but I don’t [...]

20 Dec

Tenure Matching

One of the fundamental concepts of finance is to match the tenure of assets and liabilities. That the tenure of source of funds (equity, debt, etc.) need to match the tenure of what they are used for. So, if you need money to tide over till your next payday, you need to take an extremely [...]

16 Dec

Shoes

I bought these Adidas sneakers earlier this year. Maybe in February. I ddn’t really need a pair of sneakers back then – my old Nikes were just fine, but I thought some retail therapy might help cure my NED, and hence the new sneakers. The therapy’s effects were short-lived. I got back to my then-ground [...]

15 Dec

Disco Raaga – Taana – Pallavi

This is one of those posts that I’ve been intending to post for over a couple of months, but each time I think about this, I don’t happen to be in front of a computer, and even if I do, I don’t feel like writing about it. So here I am – finally blogging this. [...]

11 Dec

Thank God for the economic crisis

This post is based on my discussion with Baada yesterday. I hereby acknowledge his contribution to this post. One of the hundred thousand random headlines that The HIndustan Times put on their front page during the last couple of weeks was a statement that China won’t hesitate to help out Pakistan in case India were [...]

09 Dec

why is the level of English in North India so low?

I had sent this mail to a mailing list of 60-odd super-intelligent people. unfortunately, in their fondness for Savita Bhabhi, Vidarbhan farmers and child-eating, they weren’t able to come up with any convincing explanation for this. So I thought you super-intelligent readers of my blog might be able to help. I begin. Three months back [...]

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