Tag: blog

I can retire

I was playing with the “custom GPT” feature of ChatGPT. I asked it to build a bot to answer questions based on content in this blog. And then I started trying it out. Here is a sample:

You
explain the studs and fighters theory
NED Bot

The “Studs and Fighters” theory is a framework used to describe two distinct types of competitive individuals or entities, often in the context of sports, business, or any field involving competition. Here’s a casual explanation:

  • Studs: These are the naturally talented. They’ve got the skills, often inherent, that make them stand out with seemingly less effort. In sports, think of the athlete who executes plays with grace and makes it all look easy. In business, it could be that entrepreneur whose ventures just always seem to bloom.
  • Fighters: These folks might not have the natural flair of the studs, but boy do they have grit. They’re the ones who compensate for any lack of natural talent with sheer hard work and perseverance. They fight for every point, work relentlessly, and often overcome obstacles through tenacity. Think of the athlete who may not be the most skilled on the field but is always the last to leave practice.

The theory goes that in the long run, the Fighters tend to outperform the Studs because their success is not reliant on inherent talent, which can plateau, but on continuous improvement and adaptation. However, when a Stud also has the mindset of a Fighter, that’s when you get those once-in-a-generation superstars. It’s not just about what you’re born with or what you’re willing to do; it’s about combining the best of both worlds if you can.

You
who came up with this thoery?
NED Bot

The “Studs and Fighters” theory was popularized by the blog “noenthuda.com,” which is run by Karthik Shashidhar. He formulated this concept based on observations in various competitive fields, and it has since been referenced in discussions about performance, talent, and success. The theory encapsulates the dichotomy between natural talent and hard-earned skill, offering a lens through which to view competition and development in individuals.

Not bad, I must say! This took about five minutes to program.

I’ve published the bot. You can find it here. According to ChatGPT itself, you don’t need a premium ChatGPT account to USE this. Have fun, and stress test!

Getting into a new public hobby

As I had recently announced on Twitter, I’m planning a new “side gig”. It’s been a long time coming, mainly because when you are doing a portfolio life it is pretty much impossible to have a side gig – everything becomes a part of your portfolio instead.

Now that I’m in a full time job, and after a very long time, maybe for the first time I have a real “side gig”.

I’m planning to start a podcast, on all things data. I’ve started working on it, and recorded a couple of episodes already. Another 3-4 recordings are scheduled for next weekend, and if all things go well, I should start releasing in June. The podcast will be in a typical “interview” format, where I interview people about different things to do with data. So each episode needs a guest (or two).

So far so good.

The downside about picking up a new side gig at this advanced age (38) is that initially I’m not going to be good at it. And this has been something that is hard to accept.

After one of the recordings, for example, I realised that I’d not asked the guest a few questions I should have asked him. And that while these questions had been playing on my mind a while back I hadn’t thought of it in the lead to the podcast at all.

After another recording, I realised that the sound hasn’t been recorded properly for large parts (because of a failing internet connection – either at my end or my guest’s). What guts me is that it was a truly awesome episode (based on what the guest told me).

Rookie mistakes, basically. And I’ve been thinking so much about these rookie mistakes of late that there is a small downside that the side gig might “cost me” more than I had bargained for.  For example, yesterday evening I was listening to other podcasts while doing the dishes and instinctively started comparing them to my own, and about whether I’m doing mine properly.

Similarly, back in 2016, when I was writing and publishing a book, I had become conscious about how others were going about their books. I kept comparing my books to others, and worrying about what I did right or wrong. It was nerve-wracking.

Again while doing the dishes last night, though, I had another revelation – this kind of comparison or beating myself has NEVER happened in terms of my blogging. I’ve written because I’ve wanted to write, and the way I want to write, and not bothered about what others are doing or whether what I’m doing is “right”.

Maybe it helped that I started this at a young age (I was 21 when I started), and that gave me a period of fearlessness before I actually became somewhat good at it. Maybe it helped that I was writing as a way of “rebelling” (if you see some of my early posts (pre 2006), they’re really angsty), and so I didn’t care at all. And by the time I started caring, I had either become good at it, or that it had become second nature to me, and so I didn’t have to worry at all.

The positive lesson to take away from that is that you are unlikely to be good at something the first time you do it. You will have a few duds. You will inevitably make the rookie errors. And irrespective of how well you plan or prepare, these rookie errors and duds will happen. The only way to get over them is to keep doing it again and again.

So now, before every recording I tell myself that it is okay if the first season of my podcast doesn’t end up being as good as I want it to. I might be “experienced” in other ways, but that in podcasting I’m a rookie, and I must judge myself like a rookie.

And after I’ve done it for a while, one of two things would have happened:

  1. I know that I absolutely suck at podcasting, which is a good sign to bury the side gig
  2. I actually become good at podcasting, in which case I will continue.

The important thing now is to recognise that there is a non-zero chance of 2 happening. And I should keep at it until this situation “collapses” (in the quantum physics sense).

 

Blogs and tweetstorms

The “tweetstorm” is a relatively new art form. It basically consists of a “thread” of tweets that serially connect to one another, which all put together are supposed to communicate one grand idea.

It is an art form that grew organically on twitter, almost as a protest against the medium’s 140 (now raised to 280) character limit. Nobody really knows who “invented” it. It had emerged by 2014, at least, as this Buzzfeed article cautions.

In the early days, you would tweetstorm by continuously replying to your own tweet, so the entire set of tweets could be seen by readers as a “thread”. Then in 2017, Twitter itself recognised that it was being taken over by tweetstorms, and added “native functionality” to create them.

In any case, as with someone from “an older generation” (I’m from the blogging generation, if I can describe myself so), I was always fascinated by this new art form that I’d never really managed to master. Once in a while, rather than writing here (which is my natural thing to do), I would try and write a tweet storm. Most times I didn’t succeed. Clearly, someone who is good at an older art form struggles to adapt to newer ones.

And then something clicked on Wednesday when I wrote my now famous tweetstorm on Bayes Theorem and covid-19 testing. I got nearly two thousand new followers, I got invited to a “debate” on The Republic news channel and my tweetstorm is circulated in apartment Telegram groups (though so far nobody has yet sent my my own tweetstorm).

In any case, I don’t like platforms where I’m not in charge of content (that’s a story for another day), and so thought I should document my thoughts here on my blog. And I did so last night. At over 1200 words, it’s twice as long as my average blogpost (it tired me so much that the initial version, which went on my RSS feed, had a massive typo in the last line!).

And while I was writing that, I realised that the tone in the blog post was very different from what I sounded like in my famous tweetstorm. In my post (at least by my own admission, though a couple of friends have agreed with me), I sound reasonable and measured. I pleasantly build up the argument and explain what I wanted to explain with a few links and some data. I’m careful about not taking political sides, and everything. It’s how good writing should be like.

Now go read my tweetstorm:

Notice that right from the beginning I’m snide. I’m bossy. I come across as combative. And I inadvertently take sides here and there. Overall, it’s bad writing. Writing that I’m not particularly proud of, though it gave me some “rewards”.

I think that’s inherent to the art form. While you can use as many tweets as you like, you have a 280 character limit in each. Which means that each time you’re trying to build up an argument, you find yourself running out of characters, and you attempt to “finish your argument quickly”. That means that each individual tweet can come across as too curt or “to the point”. And  when you take a whole collection of curt statements, it’s easy to come across as rude.

That is possibly true of most tweetstorms. However good your intention is when you sit down to write them, the form means that you will end up coming across as rude and highly opinionated. Nowadays, people seem to love that (maybe they’ve loved it all the time, and now there is an art form that provides this in plenty), and so tweetstorms can get “picked up” and amplified and you become popular. However, try reading it when you’re yourself in a pleasant and measured state, and you find that most tweetstorms are unreadable, and constitute bad writing.

Maybe I’m writing this blogpost because I’m loyal to my “native art form”. Maybe my experience with this artform means that I write better blogs than tweetstorms. Or maybe it’s simply all in my head. Or that blogs are “safe spaces” nowadays – it takes effort for people to leave comments on blogs (compared to replying to a tweet with abuse).

I’ll leave you with this superb old article from The Verge on “how to tweetstorm“.

Yet another social media sabbatical

Those of you who know me well know that I keep taking these social media sabbaticals. Once in a while I decide that I’m spending too much time on these platforms, wasting both time and mental energy, and log off. Time has come for yet another such break.

I had a bumper day on twitter yesterday. I wrote this one tweet storm that went viral. Some 2000 plus retweets and all that. Basically I used some 15 tweets to explain Bayes’s Theorem, a concept that most people find really hard to understand.

For the last 24 hours, my twitter mentions have been a mess. I’ve tried various things – applying filters, switching from the native app to tweetdeck, etc. but I find that I keep checking my mentions for that dopamine rush that comes out of new followers (I have some 1500 new followers after the tweetstorm, including Chris Arnade of Dignity fame), new retweets and new likes.

And the dopamine rush is frequently killed by hate, as a tweetstorm like this will inevitably generate. I did another tweetstorm this morning detailing this hate – it has to do with the “two Overton Windows” post I’d written a couple of weeks ago.

People are so deranged that even a maths tweetstorm (like the one at the beginning of this post) can be made political, and you see people go on and on.

In fact, there is this other piece I had written (for Mint, back in 2015) that again uses Bayes’s Theorem to explain online flamewars. Five years down, everything I wrote is true.

It is futile to engage with most people on Twitter, especially when they take their political selves too seriously. It can be exhausting, and 27 hours after I wrote that tweetstorm I’m completely exhausted.

So yeah this is not a social media sabbatical like my previous ones where I logged off all media. As things stand I’m only off Twitter (I’ve taken mitigating steps on other platforms to protect my blood pressure and serotonin).

Then again, those of you who know me well know that when I’m off twitter I’ll be writing more here. You can continue to expect that. I hope to be more productive here, and in my work (I’m swamped with work this lockdown) as well.

I continue to be available on WhatsApp, and Telegram, and email. Those of you who have my email or number can reach me in one of those places. For everything else, there’s the “contact” tab on this blog.

See you more regularly here in the coming days!

Bring on the Blook

I’m normally not one to notice such stuff, but I was randomly browsing my site stats the other day and found that I had published 1997 posts till then (not including the three that I’d published and subsequently withdrew for various reasons). I’ve written two more posts after that which makes this one the 2000th post on this blog (including its predecessor). It’s taken a bit more than 11 years (I started blogging in August 2004) to reach this milestone.

A couple of years back, I’d considered writing a “blook”. “Blook“, for the uninitiated, is a book that is based on a blog. So you don’t really write a blook. You simply compile posts from your own blog, fix them in a logical order, write a foreword, and there it is! Back when I had considered the blook, I thought I didn’t have enough good posts on this blog. And then set myself a target of “another 200 blog posts”. I forget when I set this target. It doesn’t matter.

If I’ve written 2000 blog posts so far, I’m sure at least a 100 (5%) of them are pretty good, and good enough to share with a wider world than my readers? So this time, I’m seriously considering publishing a blook.

I’m looking for an editor to assist me in this exercise. The job of the editor is to go through my 2000 blog posts, and identify a 100 or so “good posts” (which are in a sense “timeless”) and figure out a way to compile and curate and put them together under  themes, perhaps, in order to compile a blook. I could possibly do it myself, but I might be biased, and attached in unhealthy ways to certain posts, so I’d prefer a trusted third party to take this up.

So if you think you can edit my blog into a blook, or know someone who can do that, please do let me know. I’m really serious about it this time. We can figure out a “structure” to compensate your efforts. And you will get editing credits for the blook.

A little celebratory speech before that: when I started writing in 2004, little did I know that I would hit 2000 blog posts one day. I thank all my readers, loyal and disloyal. I thank people who have cared to comment on this blog over the years (excluding the spambots), for it’s they who’ve kept me going. I thank people who’ve  brought up subjects from this blog for discussion in social gatherings. And last but not the least, I thank my wife, who I met through this blog (it’s predecessor to be precise), and who constantly berates me for not writing enough about her!

Oh, and don’t forget the blook!

Modifying old blog posts

The wife and I have both spent the last day of 2014 consolidating our blogs. I’ve imported my posts from the two other blogs that I’ve been writing for the last couple of years – bespokedata.in and rq.nationalinterest.in. The plan is that rather than having a dispersed voice across blogs, I’ll integrate everything here. As part of that exercise I’ve made some personal blog posts password-protected, and made some others private.

Of course there are some “arbit” posts that are still visible, and when I do end up putting my name on this blog they’ll come to be associated with me. But then I consider them to be part of my character – if you strip away the arbitness from my body of writing then it might as well have been not written by me. Impersonal writing is just not for me.

Anyway so while I’ve been consolidating my blogs and taking some posts private, the wife has been doing something similar. Today she started what she says is her eighth blog – she calls herself a “compulsive blog starter”. As part of the consolidation process, she has imported her posts from her seven previous blogs into this one.

Now, some of these seven blogs are old, really old, and contain posts that she is not currently particularly proud of. And she has spent a considerable amount of time today editing and deleting some of these posts – most of which had been written as far back as in 2006. She says that some of the stuff she had written back then is not consistent with the person that she is today, and hence it is worth deleting. I’m not so sure.

I think a blog is like an online diary. Among other things it’s a record of your thoughts at a particular point in time. Going back a few years to someone’s blogs helps us understand what that person was like at that point in time, and perhaps do a comparative analysis of what they were then to what they are now.

While the wife has been modifying and deleting some ancient blog posts, I’ve also been dealing with some old blog posts, but in a different way. I’ve been reading them. And reading my posts from 2004 and 2005 have helped me understood my thought process in those years, and what my life was like then. These posts help me understand some of the decisions that I had made then which I have subsequently questioned.

Of course there is more than a fair share of cringeworthy posts from that period, but my logic is that while they may not be consistent with the person that I am today, they need not be. By updating those posts to make them consistent with the person that I am today, I’m making them inconsistent with the date tagged to the posts!

Nothing is permanent, and that includes a person’s frame of mind and way of thinking. It is almost a given that one is likely to find one’s old writing (irrespective of how old it is) cringeworthy on some front or the other. That however doesn’t mean that a person goes back in time changing one’s thoughts to make them more contemporary! For doing so destroys information that is embedded in the post as it is!

So I must mention that I’m not particularly in approval of the wife’s updation and deletion of her old blog posts. While I’ve done something like that (taking some posts private) I haven’t destroyed any information nor changed them in an irretrievable fashion. Modifying old blog posts is like rewriting history!

Business School WAG series – day out with baby bulls

Ten years ago, I was studying in a business school. A few weeks before I joined IIM Bangalore, a friend told me about the concept of a blog. I was told about the existence of blospot and livejournal, and the concept of blogging seemed exciting (I’d just started writing earlier that year and quite enjoyed it). I signed up on blogspot and wrote a post perhaps in June or July 2004 (I’ve deleted the blog, and so have forgotten when). Then I found that most of my IIMB friends were on LiveJournal and I moved my blog to skthewimp.livejournal.com .

My blogging ramped up slowly during my two years at business school – the first increase in momentum was during my summer internship in an investment bank, when my readership improved. A series of fairly controversial posts in the next one year further improved readership. And then the blog did me a lot of good.

I’ve found a client and a couple of other business leads thanks to my blogging. It was also my blogging through which I got to know of the existence of <lj user=”favrito”> eight years ago. Four years ago, I married her, and earlier this year, she decided to go to business school. And I thus became a business school WAG.

My status as a business school WAG was first established two months or so ago when I got an email from “Club – IESE Partners and Families”. These business schools try to take themselves too seriously and sound too politically correct – they could have simply called it the IESE WAG Club (there is merit in the usage of the term WAG (with its origins as “Wives and girlfriends”) as a unisex term). But anyway, I’ve continued to get emails from this club about its various activities. So far none of them have impressed me, but some have freaked me out, such as “day out with kids at the beach”.

My status as IESE WAG was further enhanced earlier this week when I made it to Barcelona, albeit for a short period of time. I visited the school yesterday, where <lj user=”favrito”> introduced me to one and all and sundry, and they eschewed the “three way cheek peck” which is supposedly popular in these parts of Catalunya in favour of the humble handshake. I spent the day in the cafeteria sipping Coke Zero and Dark Hot Chocolate and watching students crib about their performance in placement tests, talk about “arbit CP” that others put in class, and indulge in the kind of nonsense that all business school students indulge in (I surely did ten years ago) which recruiters (mostly business school alumni themselves) pretend doesn’t exist. It was interesting to say the least, but not interesting enough to deserve a blogpost for itself.

I further embellished my credentials as a WAG today, though, as I accompanied <lj user=”favrito”> and some of her classmates on a sort of picnic today. There was a fair number of WAGs at the picnic today, though I suspect I was the only male WAG. And I got introduced to a new “sport” in the course of the picnic today – amateur bullfighting, or as <lj user=”favrito”> described it, “Rajnikanth bullfighting”.

So there is a bullring. And they let a bull into the ring (it was a young bull that was in the arena today). And people can get into the ring by way of a ladder. There are these hiding posts all around the ring, behind which people can stand and be safe from the bull. And more than one human being can be in the ring at that point in time.

And they taunt and tease the bull, inviting him to attack and gore them. The bull is young and his horns aren’t sharp, so it is unlikely that it will cause much damage. But the bull is easily ruffled, and he gives short chases to the humans, who having provoked the bull in the first place try to dodge and evade the bull. Some wusses run to the shelter of one of the hiding posts when the bull is about ten metres away from them. Other wusses (including Yours Truly) don’t even bother entering the bullring, preferring to guzzle on the beer and sangria available and make pertinent observations.

And so it was an unequal battle, with several humans and one bull, though in true Rajnikanth tradition only one human would physically interact with the bull at one point in time (though others would hoot and clap and jeer). I was about to use the word “grapple” in the previous sentence but there was no grappling here – the bull would charge you and try and knock you down, and you would try and evade it. Some people even fell while trying to evade the bull and got hit by it, yet seemed unhurt.

This went on for a short period, and soon there were so many people in the bullring that there was no merit in entering it – the bull would surely get confused. And then we retired to this resort somewhere else in rural Catalunya for lunch and more drinks.

Later in the evening, at this resort, I visited the urinal. It was fairly busy at that point in time, with all stalls occupied. The guy to the left of me and the guy to my right had both brought a beer bottle along – they held the beer bottle in one hand and their penises with the other as they input and output liquids simultaneously.

I had half a mind to indicate to them that they could just eliminate the middleman, but then I thought it wasn’t appropriate for a business school WAG to give such advice, and moved on!

I plan to make a series on life as a business school WAG. Not sure how regular this will be though since I don’t plan to spend too much time in Barcelona. 

New Comment Policy

For about three or four years now the quality and quantity of comments on this blog has dropped. Earlier, there used to be some rather insightful discussions here in the comment section. Nowadays, people don’t seem to leave too many comments here. And I’m also a guilty party – for one I don’t promptly reply to comments on my blogposts, and I don’t usually leave comments on others’ blogs – preferring to add my two naya paise over twitter instead.

Also, of late I’ve been getting a lot of anonymous and sometimes abusive comments. So far I had tolerated them but henceforth will be marking all such comments as spam. Essentially I’ll be following a simple rule – if you leave a comment without leaving your name the comment will not be seen here for way too long. That will also be the case in case I feel that the comments are not adding to the discussion.

The best thing you can do while leaving a comment is to login – openid has been enabled and you can use the login of your own blog to leave the comment here. Next best thing is to leave your valid email id. If your comment follows neither of the above two conditions it will not be approved.

Thanks.

Pinda

I had written this as a note on facebook a long time back, in an introduction to another of my blogposts. It went largely unnoticed – I claim it is because it made way too many people uncomfortable. For posterity’s sake, I thought it needs to go somewhere more permanent – like this blog, so reprising it here. 

One of the several post-death rituals in the Sanatana Dharma is called “sapinDikaraNa” – in which the “pinda” (departed soul) of the deceased is “tied” to the pindas of their ancestors. This is apparently done to make sure that the pinda doesn’t end up as a free radical and come back to haunt its descendants.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this today, but the way they “connect” the pindas is quite funny. They just tell the gotra and given name of the deceased, and then the given names of the deceased’s father, father’s father and father’s father’s father (for women it is mother-in-law, mother-in-law’s mother-in-law and mother-in-law’s mother-in-law’s mother-in-law).

I think this is a rather poor addressing system, and not one designed for today’s populations. Maybe back in the days when this was invented, not more than one person belonging to a particular gotra had the same name. So this system of addressing worked (like in villages and small towns, houses don’t have door numbers – the postman knows everyone by name). Why is it that the system hasn’t been changed even though there are possibly thousands of people with the same given names and gotras?

If religion truly ever worked, its working would have broken down through the ages when its addressing system became obsolete. Why then, do so many people still “religiously” believe in it?

It’s all pinda wonly, I must say.

The Aditya Birla Scholarship

I spent this evening attending this year’s Aditya Birla Scholarship awards function. Prior to that, there was a networking event for earlier winners of the scholarship, where among other things we interacted with Kumaramangalam Birla. Overall it was a fun evening, with lots of networking and some nostalgia, especially when they called out the names of this year’s award winners. My mind went back to that day in 2004, as I sat confident but tense, and almost jumped when I heard my named called out only to realize it was another Kart(h)ik!

You can read more about my experiences during that award ceremony here (my second ever blog post), but in this post I plan to talk about what the scholarship means to me. During the networking event today, one of the winners of the scholarship (from the first ever batch) talked about what the scholarship meant to him. As he spoke, I started mentally composing the speech I would have delivered had I been in his place. This blog post is an attempt to document that speech which I didn’t deliver.

People talk about the impact the scholarship has on your CV, and the bond that you form with the Birla group when you receive the scholarship. But for me, looking back from where I am now, the scholarship has primarily meant two things.

Back in the day, the scholarship covered most of my IIM tuition fee. When I’d joined IIM, my parents had told me that they wouldn’t fund my education, and I had taken a bank loan. However, the scholarship covered Rs. 2.5 lakh out of the Rs. 3 lakh I needed for my tuition fee, and the loan that I had taken for the remaining amount was cleared within a couple of months after I worked.

My first job turned out to be a horror story. It was six years before my ADHD would be discovered, but I was in this job where I was to put in long hours under extremely high pressure, and deliver results at 100% accuracy. I wilted, but refused to give up and pushed myself harder, and I’m not sure if I actually burnt out or only came close to it. But it is a fact that one rainy Mumbai morning, I literally ran away from my job, purchasing a one-way ticket to Bangalore and refusing to take calls from my colleagues until my parents told me that my behaviour wasn’t appropriate.

While my parents were broadly supportive, the absence of liabilities made the decision to quit easier. Of course I still had the task of finding myself another job, but I knew I would pull through fine even if I didn’t find another job for another six months (of course, I had saved some money from my internship at an investment bank, but the lack of liabilities really helped). The Aditya Birla Group, by funding my business school education, played an important role in my being free or financial obligations, and being able to chart out my own path in terms of my career.

My six-year career has seen several lows, aided in no small amount by my ADHD and depression, both of which weren’t diagnosed till the beginning of this year. I got into this vicious cycle of low confidence and low performance, and frequently got myself to believe that I was good for nothing, that I had become useless, and that I should just take some stupid steady job so that I could at least pay the bills.

During some of these low moments, my mind would go back to that day in September 2004 when I (at the end of the day) felt at the top of the world, having been awarded the Birla scholarship. I would then reason, that if I was capable of convincing a panel consisting of N. Ram, N K Singh and Wajahat Habibullah to recommend me for the Aditya Birla scholarship, there was nothing that was really beyond me. Memories of my interview and the events of the day I got the scholarship would make me believe in myself, and get me going again. Of course on several occasions, this “going again” didn’t last too long, but on other occasions it sustained. I credit the Aditya Birla scholarship for having given me the confidence to pull myself back up during the times when I’ve been low.

These are not the only benefits of the scholarship, of course. The scholarship has helped build a relationship with the Aditya Birla group. In the short run, when I won the scholarship, it helped me consolidate my reputation on campus. And last but not the least, it was a major catalyst in reviving a friendship which had gone awry thanks to some of my earlier indiscretions. Most important, though, was the financial security that scholarship offered, which made potentially tough decisions easier, and the confidence it offered me which has carried me through tough times.