Tag: age

Bangalore names are getting shorter

The Bangalore Names Dataset, derived from the Bangalore Voter Rolls (cleaned version here), validates a hypothesis that a lot of people had – that given names in Bangalore are becoming shorter. From an average of 9 letters in the name for a male aged around 80, the length of the name comes down to 6.5 letters for a 20 year old male. 

What is interesting from the graph (click through for a larger version) is the difference in lengths of male and female names – notice the crossover around the age 25 or so. At some point in time, men’s names continue to become shorter while women’s names’ lengths stagnate.

So how are names becoming shorter? For one, honorific endings such as -appa, -amma, -anna, -aiah and -akka are becoming increasingly less common. Someone named “Krishnappa” (the most common name with the ‘appa’ suffix) in Bangalore is on average 56 years old, while someone named Krishna (the same name without the suffix) is on average only 44 years old. Similarly, the average age of people named Lakshmamma is 55, while that of everyone named Lakshmi is just 40.  while the average Lakshmi (same name no suffix) is just 40.

In fact, if we look at the top 12 male and female names with a honorific ending, the average age of the version without the ending is lower than that of the version with the ending. I’ve even graphed some of the distributions to illustrate this.

  In each case, the red line shows the distribution of the longer version of the name, and the blue line the distribution of the shorter version

In one of the posts yesterday, we looked at the most typical names by age in Bangalore. What happens when we flip the question? Can we define what are the “oldest” and “youngest” names? Can we define these based on the average age of people who hold that name? In order to rule out fads, let’s stick to names that are held by at least 10000 people each.

These graphs are candidates for my own Bad Visualisations Tumblr, but I couldn’t think of a better way to represent the data. These graphs show the most popular male and female names, with the average age of a voter with that given name on the X axis, and the number of voters with that name on the Y axis. The information is all in the X axis – the Y axis is there just so that names don’t overlap.

So Karthik is among the youngest names among men, with an average age among voters being about 28 (remember this is not the average age of all Karthiks in Bangalore – those aged below 18 or otherwise not eligible to vote have been excluded). On the women’s side, Divya, Pavithra and Ramya are among the “youngest names”.

At the other end, you can see all the -appas and -ammas. The “oldest male name” is Krishnappa, with an average age 56. And then you have Krishnamurthy and Narayana, which don’t have the -appa suffix but represent an old population anyway (the other -appa names just don’t clear the 10000 people cutoff).

More women’s names with the -amma suffix clear the 10000 names cutoff, and we can see that pretty much all women’s names with an average age of 50 and above have that suffix. And the “oldest female name”, subject to 10000 people having that name, is Muniyamma. And then you have Sarojamma and Jayamma and Lakshmamma. And a lot of other ammas.

What will be the oldest and youngest names we relax the popularity cutoff, and instead look at names with at least 1000 people? The five youngest names are Dhanush, Prajwal, Harshitha, Tejas and Rakshitha, all with an average age (among voters) less than 24. The five oldest names are Papamma, Kannamma, Munivenkatappa, Seethamma and Ramaiah.

This should give another indication of where names are headed in Bangalore!

LinkedIn recos

LinkedIn in general is a useful site. It’s a good place to maintain an “online CV” and also track the careers of your peers and ex-peers and people you are interested in and people you are jealous of. If you are a headhunter, it is a good place to find heads to hunt, so that you can buzz them asking for their “current CTC; expected CTC; notice period” (that’s how most india-based headhunters work). It also helps you do “due diligence” (for a variety of reasons), and to even approximately figure out stuff like a person’s age, hometown, etc.

However, one thing that doesn’t make sense at all to me is the recommendations section. Point being that LinkedIn being a “formal” networking site, even a mildly negative sounding recommendation can cause much harm to a person’s career and so people don’t entertain them. Also, the formality of the site prevents one from writing cheesy recommendations – the thing that made orkut testimonials so much fun. And if you can’t be cheesy or be even mildly negative, you will be forced to write an extremely filtered recommendation.

Rhetorical question – have you ever seen a negative or even funny or even mildly unusual recommendation on LinkedIn? I haven’t, and I believe it’s for the reasons that I mentioned above. And if you think you are cool enough to write a nice recommendation for me, and that I’m cool enough to accept nice recommendations, I’m sure you and I have better places to bond than LinkedIn.

Anyway, so given that most recommendations on LinkedIn are filtered stuff, and are thus likely to be hiding much more than they reveal, isn’t it a wonder that people continue to write them, and ask for them? Isn’t it funny that “LinkedIn Experts” say that it’s an essential part of having a “good profile”? Isn’t it funny that some people will actually take these recommendations at face value?

I don’t really have an answer to this, and continue to be amazed that the market value for LinkedIn recommendations hasn’t plummetted. I must mention here that neither do I have any recommendations on LinkedIn nor have I written any. To those corporate whores who haven’t realized that LinkedIn Recommendations have no value, my sympathies.

Update

Commenting on facebook, my junior from college Shrinivas recommends http://www.endorser.org/ . Check it out for yourself. It seems like this cribbing about linkedin recommendations isn’t new. I realize I may be late, but then I’m latest.

Community and age of marriage

I’ll be 26 within two weeks time. In fact, if you go by the Hindu calendar (which sacrifices short-term accuracy for long-term precision) I’m already 26. One question people constantly ask me when I bump into them is about when I plan to get married. Most of my friends also belong to the same approximate age group. When we meet up, discussion frequently veers towards “market entry”. About the arranged marriage market.

One common thread of discussion is “you belong to XXX community. you should’ve already fathered two kids by this age” or “you belong to YYY community. it’s ok even if you don’t get married for another six years”. Which makes me wonder why people from different castes and communities get married at different ages.

The Hindu scriptures divide a man’s life into four stages. At the end of the first quarter, which is brahmacharya, the boy is supposed to get married, and become a gRhasta. This division of life into four quarters in the Hindu scriptures is a clear indication that our ancestors knew about the Quarter Life Crisis so long ago. And they has prescribed a simple antidote to it – marriage. Yes, I admit that different people would feel the QLC at slightly different ages, leading to a small variation in marriage age. However, there seems to be no reason as to why this should depend upon one’s caste.

For one to get married, one needs to earn enough in order to support a partner and still lead a fairly comfortable life. Typically, you won’t want a quality of life that is much inferior to what you were leading at your parents’ place, before you moved out. When you are still a bachelor, you might be willing to accept a lower quality of life in order to maybe further your career. However, by the time you get married, you want to be closer to the quality you were used to in childhood.

We need to remember that the caste system was initially intended to divide people based on their occupation. Thus, it is fair to assume that even fifty to seventy years back, when most people more or less “lived within their caste”, people from similar castes were likely to take up similar kind of careers. Some would choose to join the family business, others would go out to set up their own business, a few others would join the government, and some others would join the army, and so on.

You need to notice that each kind of occupation promises its own kind of cash flows, and so in each of these types of professions, you take a varying amount of time in order to reach the standard of living of your parents.

If you observe, in most parts of India, the people who get married the youngest are typically people who belong to Lala communities. Once you choose to become a Lala, you forego an income, and live on pocket money. And it’s your family which decides how much pocket money you get, and typically your father and uncles and so on won’t want you to live an inferior life to theirs. And so your standard of living is always equal to that of your parents’. And you get married quickly.

Then you have people who work for a salary. If you look back, back in the 50’s and 60’s, the only employer (there wasn’t much of a choice in this) was the government. And irrespective of what degrees you had, or what colleges you went to, you were subject to a pay scale based on number of years in the job. And your salary would typically start off obscenely low. And it would take ages for you to reach the standard of living of your parents.

So that explains it. I know I haven’t taken any data points in between, but I suppose it shouldn’t be too tough. Lalas always live at the same standard as their families, and are thus eligible to marry the earliest. People working for salaries had no choice. They had to wait till the sarkar paid them enough to reach the same standard of living as their parents. And they married really late.

It is all because of Nehruvian socialism, I tell you. In case India was more capitalist back then, more people would’ve gotten rich enough to marry sooner. And this caste-based distinction in age of marriage wouldn’t have existed.

So the next time someone brings up some caste or community related stuff when encouraging or discouraging you to get married, tell them that it is all Nehru’s fault. Talk to them about our great scriptures, and their recognition of the Quarter Life Crisis. Argue from the point of view of your own QLC so as to conveniently hasten or postpone marriage. I’m sure that the scriptures, properly invoked, won’t fail you.