Tag: countries

Famous people from little-known countries

I recently finished reading Svetlana Alexievitch’s Second-hand Time, a memoir of people in the erstwhile Soviet Union as the union broke down in 1991. It’s a long and rather intense book, and maybe it wasn’t the best choice for reading on days when I wasn’t able to sleep.

I don’t, however, regret reading the book at all. It was incredibly enlightening and taught me a lot of life in the Soviet Union and in the post-Soviet republics. This is what I wrote in review on Goodreads:

Absolutely brilliant book. Very very informative and enlightening, especially for someone for whom “USSR” was this monolith growing up, and then finding out that it was actually 15 different countries.

Only reasons I didn’t give it 5 stars are that it’s a bit too long (though at no point did I want to give up on the book – it’s very good), and that some of the stories are a bit too similar.

Also I would have preferred more stories from the non-Russian republics.

One of the stories in the book is about migrant workers from Tajikistan in Moscow, and how they are ill-treated and racially abused. They are called “blackies”, for example, a term that puzzled me since to my knowledge Tajiks are rather fair-skinned.

I had to “see it to believe it”, and what did I do? I googled the photo of perhaps the only Tajik I’ve heard about – Ahmed Shah Massoud, late leader of the Northern Alliance who fought in the early 2000s to expel the Taliban from Afghanistan.

(Now I learn that Massoud was Afghan and not Tajik, so I was actually mistaken. I somehow remember him as being the leader of the ethnic Tajiks in the battle against the Taliban (and General Abdul Rashid Dostum being an ethnic Uzbek leader as part of the Northern Alliance) ).

In any case, now that it turns out that Ahmad Shah Massoud wasn’t actually Tajik, it turns out that I don’t know of even a single Tajik. Not one. So this got me thinking about countries that have very few people who are present in popular imagination.

And I don’t think there are too many countries from where there are so few little-known people (I consider my own “general knowledge” to be pretty good, so me knowing someone “famous” from a country should count).

Some countries have charismatic or otherwise popular political leaders, and you are likely to know them by face. Then, there is sport – if you follow a handful of sports, you are likely to know at least a few people from most countries.

For example, my ability at guessing a European’s nationality from their first name comes from my following of football, a sport that is popular all over Europe, and has famous players pretty much from all countries (I admit I don’t know anyone from Moldova or Belarus, though the latter has a rather famous and nicely named football club).

I know of people from a lot of former Soviet republics (but not any Tajiks, or Uzbeks or Kazakhs) because I follow chess. Paul Keres from Estonia, Mikhail Tal from Latvia, Levon Aronian and Tigran Petrosian from Armenia, Teimour Rajdabov and Shakhryar Mamedyarov from Azerbaijan and so on are among the very few (or only) people I know from their respective countries.

Think about it – which are the countries from which you can’t name a single person? How many such countries might there be? In my case there may be a maximum of 50 such countries (there are about 200 independent countries in the world, IIRC).

I recently came across this blog post in EconLog which made a pretty interesting point comparing blacks in the US to Uighurs in China, which possibly prompted my post:

In most cases, oppressed groups tend to be relatively poor and powerless, and thus are often invisible to outsiders. Can you name a single member of the Uyghur minority in China?

It seems to me that African-Americans are somewhat different. Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most well informed people in other countries able to name and identify quite a few African-Americans? In politics the most obvious example is Barack Obama…

I can’t think of a single Uyghur either. Oh, and I forgot to mention the role of movies and books and other methods of popular culture that give you exposure to people from different countries.

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.

Bloomberg Watching

Two weeks back we were all given dual screens at office. A couple of days after that, those of us that had joined recently got Bloomberg logins. It’s a very restricted version of Bloomberg, with most of the strong features having been disabled. One feature that is enabled, though, is to get the graph of the daily price movement of a security, or an index.

It is necessary to have hobbies at work. It is humanly impossible to concentrate solely on the work for all the eight or ten hours that you spend at office. You need distractions. However, in order to prevent yourself from being too distracted, it helps having one or two very strong distractions. Distractions which can crowd out all other distractions. They can be called “office hobbies”.

In the past, my office hobbies haven’t really been constructive. In my first job, I was part of a PJ Club, and we would exchange horrible jokes. By the time I got to my next job, I had been addicted to Orkut, and kept refreshing it to check if I’d gotten any new scraps. Of course, when there is a cricket match on, the Cricinfo screen makes for a good office hobby. In the last ten days, the World Chess Championship has served my evenings well. However, it is important to have a sustainable hobby which could also be constructive. One which might have a small chance of making impact on your work. And most importantly, it would be ideal if the boss doesn’t really disapprove of your office hobby.

For the last week and half at work, my right screen (remember that I have two screens) has been reserved for Bloomberg Watching. A Bloomberg window is open there in full size, and I would’ve usually put the daily movement graph of the Nifty there. And it updates real-time. It’s like a video game. I just sit and watch. And get fascinated by the kind of twists and turns that the markets take.

Twenty years back, I would spend my evenings in the courtyard of my grandfather’s house in Jayanagar watching ants move about. I would be fascinated by their random, yet orderly movements. I would spend hours together watching them.

Around the same time, I used to play another game. I used to splash water on the (red-oxide coated) walls of my loo, and watch the different streams of water flow down as i crapped. I would get fascinated by the patterns that the water droplets would form, the paths that they would take, the way they would suddenly change speed when they intersected, and so forth. I would end up squatting there long after I’d been done with my crap.

So what I’m doing now is not exactly new. I just watch a point move. Orderly from left to right. Wildly fluctuating in the up-down direction. I look at the patterns and try to guess which animal they look like, or which country they look like. I get fascinated by the sudden twists and turns that the curve takes, and wonder about the collective wisdom of all market participants who are faciliating such movement. I occasionally scream out to my colleagues saying stuff like “nifty below 2600!” and they respond with a “behenchod…” or some equivalent of it.

As the day wears on, I realized that some animals I had recognized earlier in the day are hardly visible now. They are but specks in the larger graph that is the day. And then I realize that unless there was something truly special, the movement of the day will also soon be lost. It will be available for download from the same Bloomberg terminal but that will be about it. And so forth.

Occasionally I catch some unsuspecting soul on my GTalk list and spout such philosophy. I tell them about how after a while everything becomes insignificant. About how we will always be just small players in the larger system. The smarter among them will add their own philosophy to mine, and sometimes we come up with a new theory. The not so smart among them – they will ask me about my views on the market. And what would be good picks (this has been a regular question I’ve been asked ever since I got back into the finance industry but more about that later). And then they say something like how terrorists are the reason the stock markets are plunging, and how the government should protect investors’ money and stuff.

Some day I hope all of this will be useful. Some day I hope my eye for recognizing animals and countries where none exist will enable me to come up with some earthshaking strategy, which can make millions for my fund. However, now that doesn’t matter. All that matters is the unbridled joy of watching the ticker move up and down. Rise and fall. Take baby steps, and the occasional giant leap. It’s surreal.