IIT – Page 3 – Pertinent Observations

Parents, IITJEE and arranged marriage

For a few years after I did well in IITJEE and joined IIT madras there was a steady stream of acquaintances and acquaintances of acquantances who came home to get “gyaan” about the exam. Initially I was fun to spout gyaan but later I got bored.

By then, though, my father and I had come up with a formula to assess the chances of the person who came home in cracking the exam. Usually they’d come in pairs, a candidate along with a parent. If the candidate spoke more than the parent, my father and I would think there was some chance that the candidate would be successful. In case the parent spoke more, though, it was a clear case of the candidate having next to no chance and going through the motions because of parental pressures.

As I watch the wife broker marriages as part of her marriage broker auntie venture, I see something similar there as well. Some candidates represent themselves and talk to her directly. Others are mostly inaccessible and use their parents as brokers in the market.

What the marriage broker auntie has found is that the candidates who represent themselves show far more promise in being matched in the market than those that are represented by their parents. And having being stung by candidates’ inflexibility in cases where parents represent them, the marriage broker auntie has stopped working with parents.

Sometimes, this happens.

“We’re looking for a boy for my sister. Anyone you know?”

“Ask your sister to call me”

“Oh but why? what will you gain by talking to her?”

A few minutes later the candidates mother calls. “Oh we’re looking for a boy for my daughter ”

“Ask her to call me. I don’t work with parents”

“Oh but why?”

And that one gets marked as a case with little chances.

do you remember this blog post I’d written a long long time back, soon after I’d met the person who is now my wife, about how being in a relationship is like going to IIT?

Acknowledgements

As I continue my progress towards publishing the book whose manuscript I’ve completed, I’ve started to think about the acknowledgements section, which I’m yet to write. Each time I read a new book now, I make sure I read the acknowledgements, and see who all people have thanked. I’ve not gone to the extent of formally collecting data from these acknowledgements, but I must say the effort is underway.

Based on a recent discovery, though, I think all this research is moot. Recently I was cleaning up an old cupboard (the kind that comes embedded in a cot) in my grandfather’s house, and happened to stumble upon my B.Tech. project. I’d brought it home and kept it aside, and happened to open it today.

Overall, in hindsight, I seem to have done a better job of my project than I’d imagined. I’ve always remembered that rather than solving the problem I’d taken up, I’d constructed a proof to show why it couldn’t be solved (something my mother always made fun of). But reading the report, it appears that I’ve gone beyond that, and constructed some approximate and randomised heuristics to tackle the problem – so I’m happy about that.

The more interesting bit is the acknowledgements section. It pretty much encapsulates my life at IITM. Again, I remember having done some research looking at other people’s acknowledgements to see who all they’d thanked, and I followed the same process – guides, professors, lab mates, etc. And then I’ve mentioned some friends.

The first part of the acknowledgements section is not particularly insightful so I’m not pasting it here. The second part makes for fun reading though, in hindsight. I like the way I’ve been fairly informal (in such a “formal” document as my B.Tech. project report), with puns and all.

The key thing to note is the last paragraph. I seriously mean it (even now) when I say that the best part of my life at IITM was the time spent at Patisserie, and all the discussions I had there. The discussions were diverse, with lots of different people, and we spoke about different things on different days.

It may not be a stretch to claim that I learnt more during my discussions there than during the time spent in classrooms. And if I today considered well-networked in my batch (and surrounding batches) at IITM, it’s again due to the time I spent there.

Now to think about how to adapt this acknowledgements section to something that makes sense for the manuscript I’ve written!

Third party life insurance

An alumnus of IIT Madras has made a contribution to the institute in a very interesting manner. He has assigned IITM as a beneficiary of his life insurance policy. The amount isn’t large – $100,000, which I would think is lower than the median amount insured in pure life insurance (as opposed to insurance combined with investment) policies in India.

The important thing is if there are any regulatory implications of this. Typically, insurance companies don’t allow you to assign your policies to random third party beneficiaries, since it can result in adverse incentives – the random third party can murder you, for example (it’s common, however, for employers to be beneficiaries of key employees’ life insurance). However, things might be different here since the receiving entity is an institution.

If insurance firms are willing to write such policies, I wonder if this could be a scalable and sustainable method to donate to institutions of one’s choice. Or if it is simply better to will the same amount of your life’s savings to go to the institution after your death.

PS: I found the original article on LinkedIn and found it incredibly difficult to link to the text and picture. Hence just put the picture here. Another reason why LinkedIn sucks.

A mechanical achievement

I’m an engineer. Rather, I have an engineering degree. I have an engineering degree from what is supposed to be among the best engineering colleges in India. If you look at my grades, you might think I did rather well in my engineering (CGPA of 8.91 out of 10). So you might assume that I’m a good engineer.

In my engineering I studied Computer Science. I consider myself to be pretty good at building algorithms and coming up with heuristics (better at latter than former). But I can’t write production code. I can’t write systems code. Fixing together a computer terrifies me. Any “normal engineering thing” is well beyond me.

My father used to rile me about going to IIT and yet being a poor engineer. “What did they teach you at IIT if you can’t even fix a lightbulb properly?”, he would ask. It didn’t help that he was pretty good at the small engineering stuff around the house, despite being an accountant by training and profession. Every time I did something stupid while trying to fix something, he would just say “IIT”. That didn’t mean that I made an effort to improve myself.

My father passed away in 2007. In 2010, I got married, and the wife took his place in riling me as a poor engineer. She is also an engineer by training, but she knows how to fix things. When our invertor gave way two years back, it was she who diagnosed what the problem was and what part should be replaced. Her father, also an engineer and also quite hands-on, procured the necessary part and fixed our invertor. I was quite lost. To give another example, I procured a lightbulb (a slightly complicated one, this one, for a fancy lamp) two months back. And then I waited another month till the wife came home for her vacation to get it fixed!

In this context, what I achieved this morning is surely a spectacular achievement. As I had mentioned on this blog earlier, I was going to meet my friend on Wednesday when my bike refused to start. Despite hitting the electric starter multiple times, despite kicking till my legs almost gave way, and holding down the choke while I was at it, there was no response. I ended up taking the bus that day.

I was dreading having to call Royal Enfield On Road Service and waiting for them to come and fix the bike. The bike is already due for service (I’ve taken an appointment for Tuesday), so I was wondering how I could avoid another round of repairs before that. In an earlier avatar, I would have just prayed (despite being mostly atheist) that the bike starts. This time, however, I was more resolute and decided to see if I can fix it myself.

A little bit of thinking convinced me that the problem was with the spark plug. I had replaced my battery just six months ago, so that was unlikely to be the problem. The noise when I tried holding down the electric starter convinced that. And considering that there was nothing else that was likely to have changed since the last ride (and there was fuel in the tank), and that the problem was in starting, it was clear that the problem was with the spark plug.

After putting NED for 2 days (the diagnosis happened on Wednesday), I decided this morning that I’ll fix it today. I googled for “how to change spark plug in Royal Enfield Classic 500”, and that gave me a few videos which told me where the spark plug is and how I should use a combination of the spark plug spanner (I had always wondered why I had such strange-shaped spanners) and the tommy bar to pull out the spark plug. And so I picked up my toolkit (for the first time in four years) and went down to check.

I located the spark plug (after all I’d seen in the video where it is) and pulled out its covering. The plug stood there bare. I now had to extract it. I tried with my hands and it didn’t work. I then found the spark plug spanner which fit over this plug snugly (a little bit of trial and error was involved in the process). Then came the problem of turning the spanner, which I knew I had to do with the tommy bar. So in went the tommy bar, and one whack I gave, and I felt something move. Soon the thing started getting unscrewed and I didn’t need to use the tommy bar any more. Presently the plug came out.

I realise I’d never seen a spark plug before, to know whether it was sooted and dirty. All I saw was one black tip, and assumed that that was the end that needed cleaning (I’d forgotten to see a video on how to actually clean a spark plug). So I picked up a cloth and wiped it. It took some effort but after some time most of the black stuff was gone from that end. I assumed that this should be enough to make my bike run until the service on Tuesday.

When you’ve debugged code, the greatest trepidation comes in the time when you’re testing the code after you’ve debugged it. For you know that if it doesn’t work now you’ll have to do it all over again! So it was with that trepidation that I fixed the spark plug back in its place (using first just the spark plug spanner and then adding the tommy bar). And I pressed the electric starter. And the engine roared to life!

I know this is trivial – that this is the first bit of motorcycle maintenance that everyone learns, and that an enfield owner is supposed to know something about maintenance and all that. Yet the fact that I managed to diagnose the problem and actually fix it is making me supremely happy. You can put this down as another item in the checklist that contributes to the “late bloomer” phrase in my twitter bio.

My first ever published piece of writing

So the first time ever I published something was in 2003, in The Fourth Estate, IIT Madras’s campus magazine. It was a rather scandalous piece. So scandalous that I declined to put my real name as the byline instead preferring to be called “The Wimp”.

I was rummaging through my computer and actually managed to find a soft copy of that issue of The Fourth Estate. I have no clue where I had downloaded it. In any case if any of you is interested, do let me know and I’ll send over the PDF to you. Anyway, here goes the piece. Copypasting from PDF, so might be some formatting issues. I’ve quoted the whole thing verbatim

Continue reading “My first ever published piece of writing”

Deresiewicz, Pinker and the IIT JEE

A few months back, William Deresiewicz, formerly of Yale, wrote a long piece advising people why they should not send their kids to Ivy League schools. He talked about students in Ivy League schools becoming single dimensioned, hyper-competitive, and less appreciative of the finer things in life. He spoke of the Ivy League system being broken, and not close to what it used to be once upon a time.

Now, Steven Pinker (he of the Stuff of Thought and Language Instinct fame) of Harvard has responded, and he has the opposite problem with Ivy League students. Halfway though the semester, the class is half-empty, he cribs, with students more involved in extra curricular activities rather than attending class. This implies that all the effort the university puts in building world-class libraries and laboratories and other facilities go waste. Pinker’s diagnosis is different – he blames the “well roundedness” criteria that universities use for admissions (supposedly initially put in place to restrict the number of jewish students, and then kept in place to restrict the number of asians).

I’m about halfway through Pinker’s article, and I remember reading Deresiewicz’s article in full, and my reaction to both is the same – “IIT JEE rocks”. By having a standardised exam to admit students, the IITs actually take pressure off high school students rather than imposing more pressure – since the criteria for admission are clear – that one examination, a student of class 11 or 12 has her objectives clear in front of her in case she wants to go to IIT – single-minded mugging of Maths, Physics and Chemistry.

With a more “well-rounded” criterion – say one that includes social service and extra curricular activities and sport and all such, the objective function is not that clear, and the student needs to slog towards an uncertain objective function, which is significantly inferior to slogging towards a known objective function.

Some of the cribs that Pinker puts in his post is true of IITs as well – I’ve had several professors lecture to me about the lack of seriousness on the part of IIT students, and how they would prefer students who might be less brilliant but more serious about their learning (an oft touted solution to this was to jack up the fees and make students dependent on education loans they had to repay. Not sure if the IITs have implemented this, but the IIMs have, for sure).

But then IIT Madras, where I studied for four years, and where everyone had come in after passing a rigorous standardised test, had no shortage of characters. While everyone who was in had necessarily shown single-minded devotion to mugging maths physics and chemistry in the preceding year or two, a large number of students there had interests that went much beyond those three scientific subjects. In that sense, if the Ivy League schools want to see a system where standardised admissions process actually lead to a fairly diverse class, they need not look beyond the IITs (a system they are no doubt familiar with since the IITs contribute generously to the grad student population of the Ivy League schools).

One of the frequent criticisms of the IIT JEE is that it can easily be gamed – rather than selecting the “brightest” students or those that have the best understanding of maths, physics and chemistry, the IITs end up selecting students who are best prepared for the standardised exam. An oft-touted solution to this is to make the entry process more “holistic” (in India that means including board exam marks (??!!) ), to make it less game-able. However, evidence from the Deresiewicz and Pinker pieces suggests that even the “holistic” admissions process that the Ivy League schools follow are easily gamed, and that the gaming of those systems is in fact biased towards kids with rich parents.

A while back I was looking at the admissions process of some Ivy League schools – both undergrad and MBA programs. Now, all these schools tout diversity as one of their drawing criteria. But if you look a little deeper, you will notice that this purported diversity is only skin-deep (literally!). While these schools might do a fantastic job of getting students from different nationalities, skin colour, undergraduate backgrounds and work experience, the way their essays are structured implies that the students they get are largely similar in thought – students should have done some social work, they should have exhibited a particular kind of leadership, they should be politically correct, and so forth.

The reason I mention this is that “holistic” admissions criteria need not actually produce a student body that is necessarily more diverse than that produced by a standardised test – it all depends upon the axis that you look along!

PS: I happened to have a good day on 7th May 2000, when I wrote the IIT JEE and did rather well, so this post might be biased by that. I don’t know if I would have taken such a charitable view towards standardised tests if I hadn’t done so well in them.

Alcohol and Shit

I started drinking when I was 21, after I had graduated from IIT. To most, that might sound surprising, but it’s a fact. It wasn’t supposed to be that way – I had initially planned to make my alcohol debut in my last week at IIT, just before the final exams. However, I ended up falling sick and missed the occasion. It would be another two months and entry into another institute of national importance before I finally broke my duck.

There are several reasons that could possibly explain my delay in experimentation with alcohol (you read that right – despite ample opportunity I never even considered experimenting with alcohol at IIT). But thinking back at those days the most compelling one is shit. Yeah, you read that right. I delayed my experimentation with alcohol because I was afraid of what shit it would lead to. Literally.

In the middle of my first night at IIT, I ended up in hospital. Yes, you read that right. The first day had gone alright. My father had accompanied me and helped me set up my third of the room. I had opened a bank account, registered myself at the mess, and after my father left in the evening, went about exploring campus and venturing into other hostels to meet people I know (a cardinal mistake by an IIT “freshie” but somehow I escaped getting caught).

And then in the middle of the night it started. A few trips to the loo later I figured it was time to seek help (it’s not that I wasn’t prepared – my belongings included a sheet of Andial – reputed to put an instant stop to the toughest of shit. But I ended up puking it out that day). I woke up Paddy the Pradeep, who was the only person in my hostel I knew well. He called the institute hospital, which sent an ambulance, and I spent the rest of the night in the hospital, with some shots and on drips. The next morning I was fit enough to be attending the orientation ceremony.

As if this wasn’t enough, shit problems struck again a month down the line, this time during the first round of exams. To make matters worse, the hostel had water problems (always an issue in Chennai). And the institute hospital’s medications wouldn’t seem to help. It was a nightmare.

It was around then that my classmates had settled down in the institute and started experimenting in life. As they began their experimentation I began to notice, and be told stories of, some side effects. If you drank too much you would puke. If you drank too much, the next morning you would have a hangover. And it was only after you shat that the hangover would pass, i was told. It all sounded like so much of a nightmare to me, who was already scarred about any potential stomach problems. There was no way I was going to try something that would give me more shit.

It was after I moved to an institute with reasonably assured water supply that I started my experimentation. Experiments were mostly successful (except for occasional infringements like this and this and this ). Shit wasn’t so much of a problem at all, I realized. The experimentation, though delayed, had ultimately been successful.

It’s of late – perhaps in the last one year – that I’ve noticed a peculiar problem. Whenever I have a few rounds (few can be as few as one) of Vodka or Beer, it results in terrible shit the following day. You get the normal dump right in the morning. But the real bad shit comes out in two installments, usually one after breakfast and one after lunch. It’s really foul-smelling (normally you shouldn’t mind the smell of your own shit or fart, but this is exceptionally bad). It causes great pressure (which means you better stay not far from a toilet). And when it comes out it results in insane pleasure.

One interesting thing is that this happens only when i consume beer or vodka. It never happens with whisky (the kind of alcohol I most often imbibe) – not even with cheap IMFL whisky. With whisky I can drink copious amounts, get drunk, and carry on the next morning like I had fruit juice the previous night. But not with beer or vodka – does anyone have an explanation for this?

You might have guessed that the gritter for this post was certain events last night and this morning. That’s right. At a party last night I didn’t realize that they were serving whisky, too, and went for beer (UB Export Strong – also known as “Yaake Cool Drink”). Having started I had more rounds of it. And after breakfast this morning it’s started acting! If only I’d gone for the whisky!

Correlated judgment

When you judge people about something, you do not normally judge them on that thing alone. You also judge them on “correlated traits”. For example, there is this popular adage (that was popular when I was in IIT) that goes “beauty times brains equals constant”. This implies that anyone who is above average in terms of looks is likely to be below average in terms of mental capabilities. Whether such a correlation exists is not known, but by instinct if we someone beautiful, we assume that the person is not great in terms of mental ability (in my later years at IIT, we recognized this limitation of the model and proposed “beauty times brains times availability equals constant”, acknowledging that beautiful intelligent people exist, but are most likely taken).

There is no end to such correlations, which usually make rounds around college campuses. For example, there is the “he is the partying types, so is unlikely to be a good worker”. Now, while it is true that the amount of time available to most people is constant, and that heavy partying can come at the cost of working, such an adage discounts the fact that some people could simply be better time managers, or don’t care much for some axis apart from partying and working (sleeping, for example!), which allows them to be good at two things that people are normally not good at!

It is common for people to judge people. However, thanks to implicit correlations of traits that are built into people’s minds, when you get judged on one thing, that is not the only thing you are judged on – you are also judged on the things that are correlated with that!

Time for more examples. Once my parents saw a friend of mine very evidently flirting with a girl. They immediately judged him as being “a flirt” and branded him thus. While judgmental, there is no mistake in that judgment – he was indeed a flirt, and would gladly admit to it. But then my parents, using their inbuilt correlation filters, went one step ahead. “He is such a flirt”, they told me, “We don’t think he is a good person. You should not hang out with him any more”!!

Back in 2005, in IIMB, I had stood for elections to the Academic Council. At a party a week before the elections I happened to get wasted, and ended up talking to people inappropriately. The next morning, as I’m trying to get over my hangover, I heard “dude, how could you get wasted if you are standing for elections?” I have no clue how getting wasted at one party would make me a bad Academic Councillor! I must mention I lost the elections.

It was at a discussion yesterday with Bharati and my wife Priyanka that this topic of correlated judgment came up, when we were discussing how life in a business school can be unforgiving. A few minutes later, Priyanka popped up “that baby was so cute, I expected him to be dumb!”

Quotable quotes

Over the last week or two, I’ve been doing a fair bit of “social networking”. I’m not talking about online social networks – if anything I’ve significantly cut down on that (I’ve taken a break from twitter). I’m talking about old-fashioned social networking, where I meet old friends and acquaintances over coffee or drinks or a meal.

Since the last two weeks were “holidays” in most of the world, a number of people happened to be visiting Bangalore and I ended up meeting a lot of people. I’ve met so many people that now it’ tough to remember what I spoke about with whom. And it’s only a good thing, for nothing gives me a bigger high than a nice long intellectual conversation, and my discretion means that I’ve only met people who have afforded me such conversation.

During a couple of such conversations I think I said stuff that is rather quotable. Since the people I said these things to don’t have active blogs, I thought I should be rather pompous and put up quotes here from my own conversations.

Last week I was talking to a friend from IIT. I was telling him about getting some change.org petitions such as “IITians against article 377”. What is the point of putting all IITians as a group, I asked. Apart from the fact that we did rather well in a supposedly tough examination, I don’t see any particular feature that sets IITians apart from the rest of the population and I find this grouping of IITians rather amusing. The conversation went thus:

“I don’t see what is special about IITians. During my time at IITM I found 80% of IITians rather unspectacular and uninteresting”
“I agree with that number but what sets IIT apart from other colleges is that it is 80%. Elsewhere it will be 95%”
“Yeah, but that isn’t a big improvement”
“Of course it is a big improvement. 80% is so much better than 95%”
“Ah, now I get it. If we have a class of 100, and if 95% are uninteresting that means there are only 5 interesting people. With 80% uninteresting, it means that there are 20 interesting people! 4 times the number of people to hang out with!”

Ok I admit there’s nothing particularly quotable in that but I wanted to talk about the concept of inverse proportion here, and hence all the build up. And perhaps this thing about inverse proportions would have made more sense on my official blog, but since there is a little bit of bitchiness involved I’m putting it here.

Coming to the other quotable quote – earlier this week, a friend was asking my why I don’t push myself harder professionally. This guy has had an exceptional professional career so far, and was pointing out the benefits of his professional focus over the last few years. This is what I told him:

“I used to be like this, but after a few years and a few incidents, I realize I don’t have that appetite for delayed gratification anymore. I’m not willing to slog it out for a while to wait for the fruits of labour later on.

“So it is 10 pm in IIMB, and you need to submit your Supply Chain Management case analysis by 8 am the next morning. this guy who is in your discussion group comes by, ostensibly to work on the case. And he says ‘one game of AoE before we start the case?’

“And so we sit down to play AoE. It is 5 am by the time we have finished solving the case. We started, in fact, only at 1 am – we were playing AoE till then.

“Now, even if we had started solving the case at 10, there is no guarantee that we would have finished significantly earlier than 5. In that case, we would still have not slept, and not played AoE either. The way we did it, we didn’t sleep but we we at least managed to play a solid round of AoE.”

2 Jan

This post has nothing to do with the Indian Railways. Why would you think this has something with that? Because in its infinite wisdom the Railways has created a class of bogeys called “2 Jan Chair Car”! How did that materialize? Because a few years back they started this service called “Jan Shatabdi” which are all-seater trains with comfortable seating but no air conditioning. Essentially, a low-cost version of the Shatabdi. And they realized none of their existing bogeys fit this description, so they created a new class and called it “2 Jan Chair Car”.

So if not about the railways, what is it about? it is about the date 2nd January. The authorities at IIT Madras, I believe, have long known that students (most of them at least) don’t really have a social life, and not many of them are likely to celebrate new year in a big way (unless they are already on campus). Hence, every year the “even semester” would begin on 2nd January. The odd semester began at different times – sometimes in mid-July, sometimes in end-August. But the starting date of the even semester was fixed – 2nd January!

For people like me from nearby places such as Bangalore, it meant spending four consecutive New Years Days catching an overnight train. For people from farther away, especially closer to the north, it meant ushering in the new year on a train, for they had to start on the 31st (or earlier) to make it in time for classes on the 2nd.

Our “odd semester” results would have come out in the vacations and typically someone who had stayed back on campus would have had the responsibility of checking and informing everyone’s grades. On 2 Jan, we would go up to the notice boards and check our grades for ourselves. And occasionally we would go to professors who had taught us in the previous term seeking revaluation and a better grade. However, considering that final exam transcripts were “closed” (i.e. not available to the students) not much would come out of it.

Then we had this strange ritual called “registration” which we had to do every term. Administrative officials would be sitting in classrooms and we had to go fill up a form and sign on what courses we were going to take that semester. It was normally a pretty meaningless ritual, for we would have selected and been granted the courses the previous semester itself. But I suppose it served some administrative purpose.

The good thing about the start of the even semester was that this was the time of the year when Madras was at its coolest (relatively speaking, of course!). And then there would be Saarang (formerly Mardi Gras), the IIT Madras cultural festival to look forward to, and those that would be involved in organizing it (which I was in my latter two years at IIT) would spend pretty much all of January doing that.

Us people from Bangalore had another ritual – we would try and travel together to Chennai in the same train at the start of every semester. Sometime in the preceding holidays we would appoint a date when we would all meet at the Indian Railway booking counter in Jayanagar (most of us were from the south) and book tickets. Once, since we were booking in bulk, we were asked to fill a separate form. We had been asked what the purpose of our travel to Chennai was. We filled it as “pilgrimage”!

PS: some of you might have seen this blog post via Twitter. However, I’m taking a break from twitter (I’d gotten addicted, this is my version of a “quit smoking” new year resolution). So if you want to respond, please leave a comment here rather than replying on twitter.