Tag: 10 years

The Jairaj Model

So finally here is the follow-up to the Union Square Park post. Basically most parks in Bangalore follow what I term as the Jairaj model. Even a number of parks that are older than 10 years old have been remodeled using this model in the last few years.

K Jairaj became the commissioner of the BBMP around the turn of the millennium. The story goes that his parents, who live in Banashankari 2nd Stage, complained to him that they had no place for their daily evening walks. And so Jairaj takes this piece of barren BBMP land (on 24th cross, close to the BDA complex) and converts it into a beautiful park. So the park provides for walking paths, lots of shrubs and flowering plants and a small play area for children. Trust me, it’s really beautiful.

This was soon followed by the development of the Hanumanthanagar park by then-corporator later-mayor K Chandrasekhar. It again followed a similar model – and given its greater area included fancies like a musical fountain (if I’m not wrong). Again a big hit among the residents, especially the middle-aged and elderly who now had a nice place for their morning and evening walks.

The trend was set. Following the success of these two parks, all small parks in Bangalore started to be remodeled based on these two. Trust me, they are all really good looking and most are quite well maintained. But it remains that the primary purpose of most of these parks is to provide a venue for middle-aged and elderly to go for morning and evening walks, and a small area for children with slides and swings, and little else.

Normally we take this for granted and wonder what else a park needs to do. But if you visit some of the better parks abroad (I’m taking the example of the tiny Union Square Park here) you’ll know what you are missing out on. Parks are now gated and shuttered, and don’t let people in during the day time (which is good in the way that it provides time for maintenance). And they are unidimensional, which is sad.

And I’m told that there is now a major battle in several areas between youth and middle-aged, with respect to proposals for playgrounds to be converted to parks.

And these parks are strictly “walkers parks” and not “runners parks”. Not so long-ago I used to go to the nearby Krishna Rao park for a run every morning. I gave up because of the traffic jam inside the park. Narrow pathways on which aunties and uncles would walk abreast in large groups, and so it became more of an obstacle race than a leisurely morning run.

Arranged Scissors 10 – Modern Channels Protocol

So nowadays the process for arranged scissors has slightly changed, mainly due to the introduction of “modern” communication channels such as the internet and the phone. In earlier days, it was simple – the only way you could check out the counterparty was by way of meeting, and there was a protocol for that. There was a protocol about the kind of questions that one could ask, the standard templated answers to give, the answers you weren’t supposed to give, questions you weren’t supposed to ask, etc. And based on canned questions and canned answers, people would make the most important decisions in life.

Now you have the phone. And the internet. So you have people saying “my son wants to talk to your daughter on chat (sic) before meeting up. Hopefully you are liberal enough to allow that”. The typical answer to this is “what to do? youngsters nowadays are like this, so we have to allow this”. And the boy and girl talk “on chat”. And hope to be better informed than their counterparts 10 years back regarding the most important decision of their lives.

Now, from my very limited personal experience, it seems like some sort of protocol is being established in this “modern channel” also. Neha Vish had a nice article about this a while back on her blog, but I’m not able to find it – about a Sastri who sits behind a girl while she chats up a prospective NRI boy on Yahoo! Messenger, and gives her expert instructions. It seems like the generalized Sastri’s advise has now become part of common knowledge, and has become part of the “protocol” for “modern channels”.

The chat protocol is heavily derived from the single-meeting protocol that I had mentioned earlier. There are canned questions, and canned answers. It is in fact easier to give canned answers here since you don’t need to look into the counterparty’s eyes (though I don’t know how many “couples” actually put eye contact before making the most important decision of their lives). Heck – you can copy paste – or even have a friend chatting for you.

The essence of this protocol, as I see it, is what I call as the “direct approach”. You know that you are checking out the counterparty only for purposes of possible long-term relationship, and not to be friends, so you get straight to the point. One popular quesion seems to be “what kind of girl are you looking for?”. And then they ask about habbits and hobbits and rabbits and rapids, and about hobbies and jobs and career plans and settlement plans and so on.

By becoming part of the standard arranged marriage protocol, what has happened is that “modern channels” have also gotten demodernized, with standard templates coming into the picture. It seems like more innovation is needed if standard good old courting is to be brought back into the arranged scissors scene.

For the record, I’ve partially withdrawn from the market. I have delisted myself from the one exchange where I’d been listed. OTC search is still on but not in full josh. I like things this way, with the only downside being that I’m not getting enough material to fund this series

Update

Here is the link to Neha’s article on Boothalingam Sastrigal – the one that I had mentioned in the blog but was too lazy to dig up the link for.

http://www.withinandwithout.com/2007/09/fiction-fragment-sastrigal-and-engineers/

The Enhanced DTPH Theory

Dil To Pagal Hai (DTPH) was a nice movie. I really enjoyed it when I first saw it some eleven years ago. The only problem was the message it imprinted on my 15-year-old mind: someone, somewhere is made for you. It ended up completely messing me up for the next 3-4 years.  I took it at face value. Every time I met a new girl, I would start asking the question “is she the someone, somewhere who is made for me?”. I would be lucky if the answer was an immediate no.

As I had explained in a blog post almost three years ago, these kind of questions never give “yes” as an answer. They either say “no” or they say “maybe”. And the maybes are a problem, since a few years down the line they might be converted to a “no”. They will never turn into a “yes”, mind you, and if you are forced to make a decision, you’ll have to make do with the number of occurrences of maybe and the confidence bounds that it produces. So the maybes were a problem for me 10 years ago. I didn’t know how to handle them. And in the one case where the answer consistently came out to be “maybe” (even when i ask the question now, it comes out to be “maybe”), I royally messed up the blade. Disaster was an overstatement.

Now that the digression is done, DTPH similarly messed up thousands of young minds all over the country. It didn’t even spare the married. Everyone started asking themselves the question “is this the someone somewhere that is made for me?” I think Yash Chopra (he directed it, didn’t he?) should shoulder a large part of the blame for the spurt in suicides in the late 90s.

The theory I’m going to state now was first stated by Neha a couple of years back. Back then, I’d thought I need to blog it, since she wasn’t blogging then. She has started blogging recently, but still I think I’ll write about this. As you might have figured out from the title, I call this the Enhanced DTPH Theory. It is quite ironical that this is coming from the fairly irreligious me, since it somewhat endorses creationism. I know the inherent contradictions here, but I think I should write it anyway.

The theory states that there are several people, in several places, who are “made for you” (if you are religious) or are “inherently compatible with you” (if you are not). The key is in finding at least one of them and making things work.

I think this is easier on people’s minds. The constant quest to find “the best partner” should be laid to rest, I think, mainly because it is unlikely that you’ll find a “dominating partner” (someone who is better, in your eyes, than everyone else that you could’ve  gotten married to). Instead, what you will get is what I can call as a “dominating set” – a set of people who are collectively dominating over the rest of the population but cannot really be compared to each other.

Each person has his/her own different evaluation criteria. And based on that, each person has his/her own dominating set. And it is this dominating set that is the “several people who are made for you”. I suppose you are getting the drift. I know this is a bit confusing.

Then, you need to understand that the universe doesn’t obey the Hall’s Marriage Theorem. This is trivial to prove since the total number of men exceeds the total number of women. Actually, as a corollary to this, we can establish that the original DTPH theory is false, unless of course it assumes that the population of gays is significantly higher than the population of lesbians, or if it takes into account animal sex.

Some hand-waving here, but my next hypothesis is that Hall’s Theorem doesn’t hold for local smaller populations also. I’ll probably try give an explanation of this in a subsequent post (else there would be no reason for women to remain single).

Tailpiece: The cost of not marrying the “right person” is significantly lower than the cost of marrying the wrong person.

PS: I also acknowledge Baada’s contribution to the development of this theory.