Revisiting MIG Colony, Kalanagar

I first landed up in MIG Colony, Kalanagar, Bandra (East), Mumbai in the summer of 2006. I had just moved to Mumbai for my first job, and had heard lots of stories about the difficulty of finding accommodation in Mumbai. When my aunt’s friend told me that she had two rooms to let out in an apartment she owned in MIG Colony, I jumped. I didn’t bother taking a look at the house, or what it was like, or what the facilities were, and I jumped at it. And moved in.

For my first week in the house I positively thought it was spooked. I would hear strange noises, suddenly smell cigarette smoke though I didn’t smoke. There were lots of dark paintings on the walls (the house came furnished, and the landlady had kept one room for her family’s use), and I would imagine them coming to life and coming after me. I even remember taking a video of the house on my point-and-shoot camera and showing it to my folks in Bangalore, just to show them how lousy life was in Mumbai. And as if all this was not bad enough, the house was on the third floor of a building without a lift.

Soon enough my flatmate Brother Louie moved in, and life became better. There were times when we would lock each other out, or leave the key on the door itself (thus enraging the landlady), but things were better. There was this Maharashtrian restaurant called Amey close to where I stayed, where I would eat most of my dinners. The tea there was especially good. Then there would be fruit and vegetable vendors at the intersection closest to the house – and they would give coriander and curry leaves for free with vegetables. Louie found a guy to iron our clothes, and some others to deliver stuff home. But on Sundays I’d take the train and decamp to South Bombay, to just walk there.

And then things quickly went south. Work started getting bad. The monsoons arrived, and every day my worry would be if I would be able to get out of my apartment. Soon a point of inflection was reached. Ours was among the few houses in the colony whose balcony wasn’t barred. I remember standing there staring down, contemplating if I should jump. Then I decided I was much better off simply quitting my job. Two days later I literally ran away, with a one way ticket to Bangalore. I came back a week later, resigned, served notice and moved to Bangalore for good.

In the last one year I’ve had several opportunities to visit and live in MIG Colony. As you know, I’ve been freelancing as a management consultant for a while now, and one of my clients usually arranges accommodation for me at a guest house in Bandra East. Each time I’m here I want to just roam around the colony to see if it’s changed, and somehow never get to do it. It was only today, though, I managed to find the time.

Just before I moved back to Bangalore, my landlady had told me that there were plans to redevelop the area. All buildings were only four storeys high, a function of the time before elevators were commonplace, and also thanks to regulation given the proximity to the airport. However, with lifts having become common and the building height regulation also being relaxed, there was now scope to unlock the value in the unbuilt height of these buildings. All these four-storey apartments would be torn down soon, I was told, to be replaced by high rises. The owners had all agreed on this redevelopment, and I’m sure they had been adequately compensated.

I took a rather circuitous route back to my guest house this evening, after having finished off a fish thali at Highway Gomantak (one place I never visited during my stay here in 2006, since I was vegetarian then). The Bank of Maharashtra branch is still there – I remember looking at it in 2006 as a “useless” bank, since my SBI ATM card wouldn’t work there. A little down the road, Amey is also there, though now it seems like a little more jazzed up than earlier. In fact that road in MIG Colony (which also houses the MIG Cricket Club) has hardly changed in the last seven or more years.

However, that’s only one of the few things about this area that has remained constant in seven years. Redevelopment has started, and is in full swing. I’m writing this from a nine-storey building in this area, while there was no building taller than four back then. Near where I used to stay, there is an even larger complex coming up, and which looks like it’s near completion. Other old buildings still stand, but they have asbestos sheets around their compounds, indicating impending demolition. They look occupied, though.

The building in which I used to live still stands, though there is a board outside that indicates it is up for redevelopment soon. The bhelpuri stall just outside is still there, as are the vegetable vendors in the intersection nearby (who look more organized now, though). There are more tiny roadside stalls in this area now –  I don’t remember these petty shops occupied by tailors, barbers and tea stalls.

It is interesting, interesting to visit a place you were once familiar with after a long time. It is interesting to see what still stands, and what has changed. The question is which surprises you more – that which has still stood or that which has changed.

I’ll end this post with a few pictures from 2006, which I took the day before I left for Bangalore for good. Incredibly, those pictures are there in this laptop – having traveled through several other computers I’ve owned.

My room, during my brief stay in Mumbai in 2006
My room, during my brief stay in Mumbai in 2006
The building I stayed in
The building I stayed in
Constructed in 1963. It better be redeveloped now, before it falls
Constructed in 1963. It better be redeveloped now, before it falls

Name mutilation

Like Bangalore supposedly became Bengaluru a few years back (when HDK was cheap minister), West Bengal is going to change its name to “Poschim Bongo” or some such thing. Now, unlike Bombay-Mumbai or Madras-Chennai, the thing with these name changes is that they are merely globalization of local names. Let me explain.

Bombay (bom bahia or good port in Portuguese) and Mumbai (of Mumba Devi) are fundamentally different. Madras (mad race? ) and Chennai (beautiful) are again fundamentally different. While I disagree with those name changes and still prefer to call those cities by their former names, I see that the change in those names at least has some merit. They wanted to get rid of their colonial British-given names (and i’m sure Tams wanted to prove they aren’t a mad race, though they might have achieved the opposite through this action) and chose local names in the local language.

When Bangalore’s name was supposedly changed to “Bengaluru” a few years back, Kannada newspapers (I used to subscribe to Vijaya Karnataka back then) had a tough time explaining the name change. Because Bangalore has forever been known as “Bengaluru” in Kannada. Even now, when I speak in Kannada I say “Bengaluru” but I say “Bangalore” when speaking in any other language. While it might have been a noble intention by HDK and UR Ananthamurthy and others behind the name change to get the non-Kannadigas to use the Kannada name, the effect has been completely counterproductive.

Till date, I’m yet to meet someone who is not conversant in Kannada to pronounce “BengaLuru” correctly. First of all, most people can’t say the “L” sound and instead pronounce it as “l” (in Kannada that can make a profound difference. for example “hELu” is “tell” while “hElu” is “shit” ). Next (this is the problem with most North Indians), people have trouble pronouncing the short ‘e’ sound. Finally, it’s hard for people to figure out that the first U in Bengaluru is to be pronounced long and the terminal u should be pronounced short. The combination of all these means horribly messed up pronunciation, which makes one wonder why they bothered to “change” the name at all.

West Bengal doesn’t seem to have learnt from this experience of Bangalore. They want to call themselves “Poschim Bongo” it seems. Not being a bong, I’m going to have major difficulty in pronouncing that name, and I might end up pronouncing it in a way that makes most bongs cringe. I really hope they see sense before they make this name change official and opt for a saner name, if they want to change their name at all that is.

One thing they could try would be to knock that “west” off their name (I believe the Times of India has been campaigning for this). West Bengal was the primary reason that I got my directions and geography horribly wrong till I was some eight years old. I used to assume that “West Bengal” was at the western edge of India! Especially since Bangladesh is no more called “East Bengal”.

Given that they are mostly commie, one thing they could try is probably to go the East Germany or North Korea way, and name themselves “Democratic State of Bengal” or some such thing.

Expat Living

When you live in a city other than the one you’re comfortable living in, and if you have a lot of disposable income, you try to live like an expat. By that, I mean you will try and use your disposable income in order to insulate yourself from the parts of the city that you’re uncomfortable with. You basically try to take the city out of your lifestyle, and try and live in a way that wouldn’t be different from the way you’d live in any other city.

So for example, two years back I had to relocate to Gurgaon since my well-paying job took me there. And I knew that water supply, electricity supply, security and public transport were major issues there. So the first thing I did when I got there was to find myself a comfortable apartment with assured water supply and “100% power backup”, with round-the-clock security. I also transported my car to Gurgaon to hedge against the bad transport system there. All shopping was done in malls, so I could avoid the heat and dust, and the unreliability of the traditional markets there. As long as I wasn’t driving on those roads in my air-conditioned car, I could have been living just about anywhere else. I had tried my best to take Gurgaon out of my life.

You find people like this wherever you go, except perhaps Bombay (where the cost of living is so high that very few people have “disposable” income), but is perhaps more pronounced in Gurgaon where there are few natives with disposable income so most of the people you’ll meet turn out to be fellow-expats. So essentially a lot of your income goes in just hedging yourself against the city.

Like in Bangalore, you’ll find that “expats” always want to take a “Meru cab” wherever they’ve to go, while us native folks prefer to take the humble auto. I don’t blame the expats – they are yet to learn the skills required in finding an auto here that will take you where you want at a “fair” price, so instead of choosing to learn the system, they get around it by using their disposable income. “Expats” usually shop in malls, try and travel only to those places where they can easily take and park their cars, live in the outskirts where they can get big houses with “amenities” like the one I had in Gurgaon, send their kids to “international schools”, and the like.

So this tendency to live like an expat shows up the cost differential between living in your “own” city, and living in another where you would rather prefer to buy your way around the parts you don’t like rather than trying to blend into the city. And this tendency to live like an expat means that expats will always be expats, which is an accusation (not unjustifiably) thrown at the Koramangala types.

When I returned to Bangalore from Gurgaon about two years back, the thing that struck me was about how comfortable I suddenly was. So many of the worries that had been worries in Gurgaon ceased to be worries now. I was comfortable enough with the system to not bother about any of those. And as I ran across my road and jumped on to a moving bus to take me to the city centre, I realizeed I was back, where I belonged.

NED Open

Happened today in three places. Chennai went in the morning, Bombay early in the afternoon and here in Bangalore in the evening. As part of the introduction to the finls we had written “if you are satisfied with the questions kindly let us know. If not, write to us in civil language and we will look into it”. I would encourage you to use the comments thread on this post to do the same.

Some personal comments at the end of it:

  • It’s insanely tiring for a single quizmaster to do a quiz this long (72 questions + LVC in finals). I can hardly talk right now and was shouting myself hoarse towards the end of the quiz (and as if it wasn’t bad enough, there was a tiebreaker to be conducted)
  • 72 questions plus a LVC is way to long for finals. True to the nomenclature of the quiz, I noticed several teams and part of the audience put NED towards the end. That it was late in the evening did matter i think. But again thinking about it, isn’t it fair that people put NED at the NED quiz?
  • One art I need to become better at is in terms of dividing points between teams in cases of partial answers. But then the problem there is however you do it, some team is bound to crib
  • Given it was such a long quiz, I was quite low on energy towards the end so probably did a worse job of point distribution, funda explanation etc. than I could have done
  • One needs to recognize that the concept of the LVC has been designed with an intention to irritate, and so some teams are bound to get pissed with it. As long as the audience enjoys you are good
  • One mistake I did (and I did this several times) was to continue wiht a question even after one team had given a “good enough” answer, and then finally give points tothe team that had originally given the “good enough” answer. This both wasted time as well as pissed people off
  • At the end of the quiz i was feeling so damn tired that all I wanted to do wsa to go to Dewar’s wine shop on St Marks Road and buy myself a bottle of Amrut Fusion and finish it off. But then, NED happened.

How do i describe my job?

One of the “problems” with my job, if I can describe this as one, is that it’s tough to explain my job to a layman. There are multiple levels of disconnects here, and multiple “pitfalls”, if I can call them that. So when someone asks me about my work, it gets tough indeed to describe to any degree of accuracy while at the same time being concise, and at the same time talking in Kannada.

I am a quant at a hedge fund.

My work involves coming up with trading strategies, and then developing them to a level where I can have the ultimate fighter – a computer – to trade using these strategies. Then, I will need to figure out how the computer is going to implement these strategies and this part involves some heavy engineering work. And finally I code. Ok now I haven’t been accurately able to describe in one paragraph, writing in English, about my job. How do you expect me to describe it to the layman speaking in Kannada?

Coding is a part of my job, but I’m not a coder.

I deal with financial products – equities and equity derivatives. But I’m strictly not a finance guy – as far as I’m concerned, each security is just a time series. A time series on which I can trade and make money. In fact, apart from my short stint selling interest rates swaps in London, I haven’t really done any finance. My entire view of the markets is based on my idea that a security is just a tradeable time series. I think I should do a separate post on that. Anyways, I’m not strictly a finance guy also.

One of my degrees is an MBA. A PGDM to be precise, from IIMB. But I’m not a manager also. I don’t manage people apart from myself.  I’m not sure I’ll find that interesting either – I sometimes think managing is too fighter a job for me.

And so on.

And then, I work for a hedge fund. Most people don’e have a clue what a hedge fund is. I sometimes make an approximation and tell them I work for a mutual fund. And immediately I get bombarded with questions like my opinion on whether the markets will go up or down, and about how long the recession is going to last. And then there are those who start telling their sob stories about their investments in the markets when the Sensex was at 20,000 and about how markets can’t be trusted any more.

Another level of contradiction is that I’m based in Gurgaon. All finance companies are supposed to be in Bombay, right? Surely, given that I’m in Gurgaon, I must be doing some back office kind of work?

Last night my uncle was filling up some arranged marriage exchange registration form for me. And he asked me to describe my job in a short phrase. I immediately came up with “trader” and that got quickly shot down since that would give the image of a lala sitting behind huge weighing scales. Next I tried “financial trader” and “quantitative trader”. No go.

Then I wanted the simple “quant”. My highly stud uncle himself had trouble exactly figuring that out, so fat chance anyone would appreciate that. So out again. I relaxed constraints a bit and said “hedge fund professional”. But most people wouldn’t understand “hedge fund”. “mutual fund” was no go for a written form. “quantitative analyst” was considered too country by my uncle. He then asked me my designation. “Associate” doesn’t mean anything, he said and shot that down too.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve unnecessarily complicated life for myself by choosing the path that I’ve chosen. If I were working for some software company I could’ve just written “software” over there and all would’ve been fine. The whole world would’ve understood, or at least claimed to have understood. Or even better, if I were living abroad, I wouldn’t have even been required to say that much. I’d’ve been just qualified as a “foreign huduga”, with most people not even caring for which city I was in.

For the record, my listing application records my profession as “financial services professional”, as country as it sounds. This was the only middle ground where my uncle and I didn’t disagree. And in it went. It increasingly looks like I’ll have to put fundaes to Cesares about why the stock markets have gone down in the last one year in order for them to allow their daughters to marry me. I have half a mind to start describing Ito’s lemma the next time someone asks me where the markets are headed. I’ll probably start off describing to them a random walk. And say that it’s a drunkard’s walk. And perhaps use that to change the topic. I think I might need to start practicing this. In Kannada.

I’m a quant at a hedge fund.

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 state of NED the following day. NED meant unwillingness to wear my new sneakers to the gym, or to work, or anywhere else. So they lay, in a box, until I brought them to Gurgaon three months back. The old faithful pair of Nike was left behind in Bangalore.

I don’t know if my feet have grown in the last ten months. Or if in my eagerness to shop way back in February, I didn’t check properly for the size. But the sneakers are simply too tight. One theory is that my right foot is bigger than my left, and when I had tried out these sneakers in the showroom, I had put the left one on, found it perfect, and bought the pair. This reasoning is based on the observation that it’s only my right foot that hurts, and my left one does fine. The length of the shoes is perfect. It’s a problem with the width. The fourth and fifth toes of my right foot end up getting squeezed.

Having made a mistake the last time I shopped for sneakers, I don’t want to take any chances now. I don’t want to buy another 2K+ pair. I want something cheap, yet comfortable. Went shopping last weekend, checked out all the major showrooms, and whenever I found what looked like a good pair, I would chicken out, head and feet full of self-doubt. I still wear the same tight pair to the gym every morning. And the fourth and fifth toes of my right foot still hurt.

It is winter in Delhi, and gets fairly cold in the evenings, and sometimes even during the day. In Bangalore, Madras, Bombay, etc. my normal footwear (when I wasn’t required to wear formals or sneakers) was floaters. That clearly doesn’t seem to be an option here in Delhi. Which means I need a general pair of shoes. So far in my life, I’ve owned only one “general” pair of shoes. The rest have either been uniform, formals, floaters, bathroom or sneakers. That one general pair I own has been left behind in Bangalore. It’s an old faithful comfortable Liberty pair. Now, the presence of that shoe in good condition, even though it isn’t accessible, deters me from making up my mind about spending on a new pair. Last weekend, I found some really good shoes at Woodland, but again chickened out. Maybe the scars of the wrong choice of sneakers has started affecting in my other shopping decisions also.

On a different note, one thing I’ve noticed here in Gurgaon is that service providers who come home (for example, the guy who fixed the washing machine) refuse to take off their shoes when they enter your house. They even don’t think twice entering the kitchen wearing shoes. Coming from a background where shoes inside the house are a strict no-no, I find this fairly shocking. I remember reading in A Farewell to Alms about differences between Japan and Europe. Japan seems to be like South India in this regard, outlawing footwear inside homes, while Europeans had no such restrictions and is hence like Gurgaon.