family – Pertinent Observations

Scrabble

I’ve forgotten which stage of lockdown or “unlock” e-commerce for “non-essential goods” reopened, but among the first things we ordered was a Scrabble board. It was an impulse decision. We were on Amazon ordering puzzles for the daughter, and she had just about started putting together “sounds” to make words, so we thought “scrabble tiles might be useful for her to make words with”.

The thing duly arrived two or three days later. The wife had never played Scrabble before, so on the day it arrived I taught her the rules of the game. We play with the Sowpods dictionary open, so we can check words that hte opponent challenges. Our “scrabble vocabulary” has surely improved since the time we started playing (“Qi” is a lifesaver, btw).

I had insisted on ordering the “official Scrabble board” sold by Mattel. The board is excellent. The tiles are excellent. The bag in which the tiles are stored is also excellent. The only problem is that there was no “scoreboard” that arrived in the set.

On the first day we played (when I taught the wife the rules, and she ended up beating me – I’m so horrible at the game), we used a piece of paper to maintain scores. The next day, we decided to score using an Excel sheet. Since then, we’ve continued to use Excel. The scoring format looks somewhat like this.

So each worksheet contains a single day’s play. Initially after we got the board, we played pretty much every day. Sometimes multiple times a day (you might notice that we played 4 games on 3rd June). So far, we’ve played 31 games. I’ve won 19, Priyanka has won 11 and one ended in a tie.

In any case, scoring on Excel has provided an additional advantage – analytics!! I have an R script that I run after every game, that parses the Excel sheet and does some basic analytics on how we play.

For example, on each turn, I make an average of 16.8 points, while Priyanka makes 14.6. Our score distribution makes for interesting viewing. Basically, she follows a “long tail strategy”. Most of the time, she is content with making simple words, but occasionally she produces a blockbuster.

I won’t put a graph here – it’s not clear enough. This table shows how many times we’ve each made more than a particular threshold (in a single turn). The figures are cumulative

Threshold	Karthik	Priyanka
30	50	44
40	12	17
50	5	10
60	3	5
70	2	2
80	0	1
90	0	1
100	0	1

Notice that while I’ve made many more 30+ scores than her, she’s made many more 40+ scores than me. Beyond that, she has crossed every threshold at least as many times as me.

Another piece of analysis is the “score multiple”. This is a measure of “how well we use our letters”. For example, if I start place the word “tiger” on a double word score (and no double or triple letter score), I get 12 points. The points total on the tiles is 6, giving me a multiple of 2.

Over the games I have found that I have a multiple of 1.75, while she has a multiple of 1.70. So I “utilise” the tiles that I have (and the ones on the board) a wee bit “better” than her, though she often accuses me of “over optimising”.

It’s been fun so far. There was a period of time when we were addicted to the game, and we still turn to it when one of us is in a “work rut”. And thanks to maintaining scores on Excel, the analytics after is also fun.

I’m pretty sure you’re spending the lockdown playing some board game as well. I strongly urge you to use Excel (or equivalent) to maintain scores. The analytics provides a very strong collateral benefit.

RSVP

I’m reminded of this anecdote from class 11. A girl in my class had invited me to her birthday party. Knowing that there was a clash, I had immediately responded to her saying that I was sorry but I wouldn’t be able to make it. She immediately got offended – that I had told her directly that I wouldn’t come. She would possibly have been less offended had I told her I would come and then not showed up.

A lot of people in India don’t get the concept of how to reply to invitations. Like my old friend, these people think it’s a sort of insult to tell someone that they can’t make it for an event or a function. And so they end up giving false responses or non-responses which doesn’t leave the host any wiser. That leads to massively messed up planning, and possible wastage of food and gifts.

I must say I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well – maybe affected by that 11th standard incident, I have started giving non-committal responses to events that I know I won’t go to. And messed up my hosts’ planning. Having been on the other side multiple times in the last one month, however, I hereby undertake that I will give accurate responses to any invite I get, as far as things are under my control.

Over the last ten days, the wife had kept a massive doll display at home on the occasion of Dasara. We had made an elaborate plan of calling people from different “sides” on different days – in the interest of not mixing groups, which can have a massive negative effect on conversation.

And then some people threatened to destroy these carefully made plans by asking if they could come at a time when they were not invited! Some people were nice enough to tell us that the time when we had invited them was not convenient for them, and requested us right there to give them an alternate slot which we did. Others, however, responded in the affirmative, failed to show up and then wanted to come on a day when we weren’t prepared to receive guests (or worse, on days when were expected other guests from other “sides”).

The other side is also a bit painful here – when people give you an open invitation and tell you to “come any time”. While this gives you greater optionality than a specific slot, this also creates greater pressure on you to accept the invitation. And I’m guilty of responding vaguely to some of these invitations as well. Next time someone gives me an open invite, I will either say no, or try to tell them as soon as possible a specific date and time when I’ll be there.

PS: Of late I’ve started becoming actively (but subconsciously) rude to people who show up at my door unannounced. It throws me off massively. Sometimes my wife wonders why I bothered coming back from England at all!

Seven

It’s a little over seven years ago that we got married. It was a traditional Hindu ceremony. It was so traditional that we began at around 11am and finished with a ceremonial lunch only around 5:30 pm. And tradition meant that the priests hurried through the mantras, not bothering to explain what they were supposed to say (it’s another matter that had they bothered to stop and explain, we would’ve been getting married for another two days).

It was later that I got to know that some of those mantras were rather insightful, though archaic and backward if you go by modern sensibilities. Like this one Mantra the search for which led me to a website titled “6 noble virtues of an ideal wife“. As the website explains, it is from “Neeti Saara”, written by a Telugu poet Baddena in 13th century (yes, some of the wedding rituals are only 800 years old).

I won’t go into explaining these “noble virtues” here, but as I look back at our seven years of marriage, I realise that Pinky has been a brilliant wife. And she has done so while either studying or keeping a (mostly demanding) full time job for most of the duration of our marriage.

I’m reminded of the time when we lived in Rajajinagar, when I was working as an independent management consultant. I would work from home, and having disposed of our cook a few months earlier, I had the task of making my own lunch.

Pinky would have none of it. She would wake up at 5:30 and painstakingly make tall stacks of chapatis (I was going through one of those “I don’t want to eat rice” phases at that time) before she ran to catch her factory bus, so that I could have a good meal. And the dutiful husband I was, I’d finish the full day’s quota in the afternoon itself which meant she would be forced to cook again once she was back after a tiring day and 40-kilometre commute.

I’m also reminded of the time earlier this year when we’d moved to London and I hadn’t yet figured out what I was going to do here. Pinky not only supported our family financially, but also ferry Berry all the way into town each day so that I could figure out life, possibly find a job and finish my book. And on most days it would be Pinky who would cook dinner after another long commute (usually with a screaming baby).

During my consulting life, every time I had to strike a deal or go through a tough negotiation, I would turn to Pinky. Each time she would unfailingly help me sort out my demons and give me sage advice. On several occasions she saved me from pricing too low. When she would see that I was getting into a bad deal, she would firmly pull me back.

She was insanely supportive when in late 2011 I decided to quit my job and lead a portfolio life. She would find her own cute ways of supporting me in every endeavour, like buying me a new fancy notebook when I was going to meet my first prospective big client, or trying to find me a fancy water bottle prior to my bike trip across Rajasthan.

When I would wake up at 4am to catch the first flight out to see outstation clients, she would wake up along with me, make coffee for me and polish my shoes. On two such occasions she wasn’t around. I almost missed my flight on one of those occasions, and missed my flight on the other!

From time to time she plans fun activities for us to do together, like the time she took me to the A-Paul-ogy art gallery, or when she took me for a Japanese meal to Matsuri and totally bossed the menu (before I knew it she’d ordered a host of dishes which made for a wonderful and complete meal!).

In some senses, I feel I haven’t held up my side of the bargain at times. One thing she absolutely enjoys is for us to watch movies together, but we almost never do that since I don’t generally have the patience to watch movies. She would love to spend a Friday evening cuddling on the couch watching something together, but I prefer to be on my computer instead. She loves being surprised, but my ineptitude means that on most occasions I’ve tried it’s been a shock rather than a surprise.

And then I have my occasional bouts of extreme anger, and she’s borne the brunt of it on several occasions. Usually it involves shouting (I’m an absolute shouter and love to went out my frustrations; she’s the quiet types) and I have to try hard to not get violent at times (on some occasions I don’t succeed in restraining myself). On some occasions it starts with something seemingly silly. On others, I fuck up like crazy. Either ways, it occasionally gets ugly – something I’m definitely not proud about.

I know I have driven her insane. I know that my negativity and NED has rubbed off on her. It is normal for a married couple to influence and change each other, and I know I’ve changed her in ways she absolutely hates.

Yet she’s always been the forgiving sorts. She’s stood by me thick and thin through the seven years of our marriage. Thanks to her adventures during her MBA, I’ve managed to increase my country count (and also got to move to a new country!).

And she’s been a wonderful mother to Berry. One old friend who met Pinky for the first time last year later told me, “man, she is so sorted!”. She remains cool, and seemingly without taking much stress, has managed to turn Berry into a bright and naughty toddler – I’ve mostly been a freerider! Oh, and do you know that she writes an absolutely delightful letter to Berry each month?

It’s mostly been a wonderful seven years with Pinky so far! I know we’ve had the odd low moment, and I want to take this opportunity to apologise to her for that. But in my mind, these have been far far outweighed by all the wonderful times we’ve been through, and all the fun we’ve had together! I hope to get another seventy such wonderful years with this wonderful woman!

And for after that, there’s this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf36EDh27EQ

PS: The more perceptive of the readers here will know that this blog (its predecessor, rather) played a not insignificant part in us meeting. One of the posts that drew her attention, and which got us talking was this.

12/13: Family

As I got to know Pinky, one thing I was surprised with was how much of a family person she was. From the little I knew her I expected her to be of the rebellious sort, but she harboured no such thoughts, and was (and is) really close to her family.

She’s a massively home person, likes to spend her weekends lazing at home, eating traditional South Indian food and watching TV. She had once told me (long before we met) that her dream Sunday consisted of watching a Kannada movie on TV while sitting with her mother-in-law tying flowers into a garland.

That, of course, would never come to be, as a month after I met her, my mother passed away. My mother never met Pinky, though I’d told her about Pinky just before she was going in to what was to be her final surgery. So it goes.

Over the course of time, Pinky has gotten really close with a large number of my relatives. While I’m slack at keeping in touch with them, and almost never call, she makes sure to call a couple of my aunts and one cousin every week, and compels me to call them as well. She makes sure that I go to all family gatherings, and also keep in touch with parts of my extended family I don’t normally keep in touch with.

Her connection with my extended family has grown to such an extent that several of my relatives have made her the main contact person in our family, while strictly speaking I’m related to them by one lesser degree (to use one of Pinky’s crazy phrases, she’s our family’s “responsible PIC”).

Last January was my grandfather’s 100th death anniversary, and it was Pinky’s idea that we organise a celebration on that account. The event was a massive success and everyone who attended (basically the remaining descendants of my grandfather’s parents) loved the idea of having this kind of a memorial. And after the event was over, it was Pinky who wrote the match report.

That is just one example of how Pinky has kept in touch with my side of the family, and makes sure that I keep in touch as well. If she were yet another rebellious types, I’m not sure how much contact I would’ve continued to keep with my family. and for this, I need to thank her immensely!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements