Tag: counterparts

Doctors marrying doctors

So I’ve learnt that doctors prefer to marry other doctors. Well, there’s nothing new in this. When I think about my extended families, and doctors there, most of them I realize are married to other doctors. The ostensible reason, I’m told, is that it’s a different lifestyle, and only doctors can understand the lifestyles of other doctors, and hence this preference. It cannot be ruled out, however, that it is a fallout of pretty good gender ratios and long hours at medical colleges, which leads to coupling – with the “understand each other’s professions” only being a fig leaf.

While people in other professions also marry within their profession (again put down to ease of “meeting”), this tendency is especially exaggerated among doctors. The problem with this, though, is that it doesn’t make financial sense.

Now, the deal with doctors is that they don’t earn good money until very late. After you’ve finished your bachelors, you first need to slog it off for a few years before you get a masters seat. And once you’ve finished your masters, you need to slog for a few years at a hospital which will pay you a pittance, until a point comes in life when you become senior enough that you start getting paid well.

Typically, most doctors (in India) don’t make much at all till they are 35, and after that they get flooded with money. Now, if two doctors marry, that means they are starved of cash flow during their prime years – time when their engineer and MBA counterparts will be minting money, traveling the world, having kids and buying houses. By the time the doctor couple makes money, they would probably be well past their youth, and it is only their descendants that will get to really enjoy their cash flows.

If a doctor marries an engineer (or an MBA), though, cash flows are better hedged. While it is true of all professions that salary goes up with years of experience, the curve isn’t as steep for professions apart from doctors. So, a doctor-MBA couple (say) can live a good life on the MBAs salary till they are in their mid-late 30s, by which time the doctor’s career would have begun to take off and the MBA would have begun to burn out. And then the doctor’s enhanced cash flow starts kicking in! Great hedge, I would say!

So dear doctors, unless you have fallen in love with a classmate at medical school (which has effectively locked you in to a lifetime of poor cash flow structures), reconsider. Consider marrying out of your profession. Yes, it might be harder for you to get each others’ professions. But at least your finances are taken care of!

PS: Some other professions such as lawyers and accountants also have a fairly steep salary increase curve – starting off at a pittance and then later making money. But in these professions people end up getting to “partner level” at around 30, which is far superior to doctors. Then again, such professionals don’t inter-marry within profession as much as doctors do.

Something’s Itching

  • Recently I read this joke, not sure where, which said that the American and Indian middle classes are feeling sad that they cannot take part in a revolution, unlike their counterparts in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and other similar place. Instead, they can only vote
  • There needs to be some sort of an antitrust law for political parties. There is currently little to distinguish between the policies of various political parties. For example, all parties favour a greater role for the government (more govt => more opportunity to make money on the side => more corruption, etc.) .
  • Given the homogeneity in the political spectrum, there is little incentive to vote. This scoundrel may be only marginally better than that scoundrel, so why bother voting. So we have this large middle class which essentially removes itself from the political process (confession: I’m 28, and I’ve never voted. When my name’s in the list I’ve not been in town, and vice versa.)
  • Now this Anna Hazare tamasha has suddenly woken up people who never bothered to vote, and who are pained with excessive corruption. So they’re all jumping behind him, knowing that this gives them the opportunity to “do something” – something other than something as bland and simple as voting.
  • Supporters of Hazare care little about the implications of what they’re asking for. “Extra constitutional bodies”? “Eminent citizens”? Magsaysay award winners? Have you heard of the National Advisory Council? You seriously think you want more such institutions?
  • The Lok Ayukta isn’t as useless an institution as some critics have pointed out. But then again, this is highly personality-dependent. So you have a good person as a “lok pal”, you can get good results. But what if the government decides to appoint a compliant scoundrel there? Have the protesters considered that?
  • Basically when you design institutions, especially government institutions, you need to take care to build it in such a way that it’s not personality-dependent. Remember that you can have at TN Seshan as Election Commissioner, but you can also have a Navin Chawla.
  • So when you go out in droves and protest, you need to be careful what you ask for. Just make sure you understand that.

Useful links:

http://acorn.nationalinterest.in/2008/02/23/grammar-of-anarchy/

http://openthemagazine.com/article/voices/the-anna-hazare-show

http://calamur.org/gargi/2011/04/06/my-issues-with-the-proposed-jan-lok-pal-bill/

http://realitycheck.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/jan-lok-pal-caveat-emptor/

http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/772773/

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/the-hazare-hazard-/431045/

 

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/