Tag: fallout

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.

The Personality Cult

So all business newspapers report that LK Advani had issued a “warning” to Yeddyurappa a while back that he was getting too corrupt. Nevertheless, several BJP “party workers” in Karnataka have been coming out in defence of Yeddy, saying he’s innocent and that he’s still their leader. Some of them have refused to accept the leadership of DV Sadananda Gowda. And some of the leaders themselves are quite silent on the issue, preferring to say that the “law will take its own course”.

This points to a larger problem that is afflicting Indian politics nowadays which is the “personality cult”. First of all, we have several parties (too many to name here) where the only ideology is “absolute loyalty to a certain party leader”. Even in parties that don’t fall under this definition (the BJP for instance), we seem to have several “local leaders” who carry significant weight, and local units of parties that are more loyal to their leaders than to the parties. In fact, if you were to objectively look at it, as a voter there seems to be no escape at all from this cult.

This has several disturbing consequences. One stems from the belief that “loyalty should be rewarded”. Given the loyalty that so many of our “leaders” get from “party workers” it is not surprising that the “leaders”, upon assuming power, accord to these workers plum rent-seeking posts, which will keep them happy. This can result in positive feedback – once a leader has shown that he  will “reward” loyalists, more people clamour to get close to him, and they too must get rewarded. And so it goes.

Another fallout of this personality cult is a dramatic increase in security, with not inconsiderable cost to the public. Given t he power that some of our “leaders” wield, the payoffs of bumping off an opposing leader are quite strong, both in terms of electoral politics and otherwise. Parties which have been built on “personal loyalty” as an “ideology”, upon losing their leaders, will suddenly have no “natural centre” and will tend to fragment. Hence, it is in the interest of all politicians to provide themselves “security”, which comes at the cost of the general public (cue traffic jams whenever there is “VIP movement” in some city, or the fact that our generally under-staffed police force has to spend so much of its effort in “VIP security” rather than other more important policing duties).

Then, we seem to be moving to a situation where parties are bereft of ideologies, and are simply collections of random leaders (who have lots of “followers”) thrown together. I’ll probably address this in detail in another post, but if you come to think of it there is very little to choose between different political parties now in terms of ideology. Yes, the BJP might have the nominal ideology of building a Ram Temple, but take that out and there is little to separate it from the Congress. The regional parties are even worse. The only difference you could probably see there is in terms of the dominant caste or lobby backing each party.

Again, it needs to be pointed out that multipolar politics in India is very young – it’s existed for little more than twenty years. Still, the future of Indian politics is worrisome, and I don’t know how we’ll get out of the rut we’re in.

Recession notes

Over the weekend I spoke to a few friends, over phone and GTalk. And enquired about their business. Some interesting insights:

  • On Saturday, I spoke to this guy who is a banker in the City of London. He says that one major fallout of the global economic crisis is that the financial markets have become highly inefficient.
  • Knowing that they won’t get bonuses, he says, bankers have no incentive to arbitrage these inefficiencies. Sadly, people refuse to believe that investment bankers perform socially useful and productive work
  • Yesterday, I was talking to this guy who runs a manufacturing SME. He says that apart from one really bad month (January) when orders fell over 50%, he is doing quite well.
  • Thanks to the downturn, a few manufacturing shops have shut down in various places in Europe. Now, the erstwhile customers of these erstwhile manufacturing shops are looking towards India for their sourcing. My friend is hopeful of bagging one such contract.
  • Thanks to the downturn, firms are integrating their manufacturing. For example, a prominent stationery manufacturer has decided to manufacture 100% of its products from its plants in India. My friend has been a long-term supplier to the india plant of this particular manufacturer, and now expects to get more business from them.

Interesting stuff overall.