Tag: fifteen years

Live Music at Wedding Receptions

The problem with live music at wedding receptions is with the volume. If you keep the volume too low, the musicians find it offensive. If you keep the volume high, on the other hand, people can’t hear each other talk and get irritated. And I’ve never really attended a wedding reception where the live music has had the “right volume”.

Hence, at my wedding reception, we dispensed with live music and instead carefully put together a set of trance numbers which were to be played over a CD-speaker system. And two hours before the reception is to begin, we find that there was no music player in the hall, and no one had bothered arranging for one. Thankfully the photographer, who I’d fought with for the duration of the wedding, agreed to arrange for a music system at quick notice. And then, when the reception was about to begin, it turned out that the uncle who had the CDs had gone home to get dressed.

Ultimately, I think they played the music that we’d carefully put together. I don’t know really because it wasn’t audible on stage, but we’re told by a few people it was quite good (they even asked for and “borrowed” the CDs). If you attended my wedding reception, please to be telling me how the music was.

So before my wedding, when I sent the invite to Mammo, he replied asking who was performing at the reception. When I told him my reasons for not having live music at the reception, he explained that performing at a wedding was a good chance for musicians to experiment, and in some ways it was a “paid rehearsal”. And that it really helps in the development of musicians.

On the other hand, I remember, some fifteen years back, my violin teacher being furious that he’d been called to play at a wedding, and there was no one listening to him, and his volume was turned out to be quite low, and he had a really bad experience.

So I don’t know. I still think the best thing to do would be to put recorded instrumental music that isn’t too intrusive. What do you think?

Chowka Baarah

Yesterday after a gap of about fifteen years, I played chowka-baarah. For starters, the name intrigues me. It translates into four-twelve (I suppose), but that doesn’t make sense. Essentially, there are two primary variations of this game depending upon the size of the grid used (5 by 5 or 7 by 7), and these two numbers are “big numbers” in different systems. In the 5×5 version, the “big scores” are 4 and 8, while in the “7×7” system, it’s 6 and 12.

A certain variety of seashells (called kavaDe in Kannada) are used as dice, four of them in the 5×5 version and 6 in the larger version. The “score” of the dice is determined by the number of kavaDes falling “face up”, and if all fall face down, the score is twice the number of dice. So if you have 4 shells and all fall face down, you get 8 points. I haven’t done much research on this but I do think the probability of a die falling “face up” is much more than the probability of it falling “face down”. I don’t know the exact probability.

The game itself is like Ludo; your pawns going round and round in circles and inward in order to reach the centre of the square when it “queens”. The first player to queen all their pawns wins. There are concepts such as doubling pawns (they act as a pair hten, move in pairs only on even throws of the die, etc.), cutting (if your pawn reaches a square where an opponent’s pawn is, the opponent’s pawn “goes home”, etc. Simple game, and widely played in a lot of “traditional households”.

Considering that I had stopped playing this game when I was still quite small, i had never realized the strategies involved in playing the game. Back then I’d just generally move whatever pawn i fancied nad somehow my grandparents would move in a way in order to simply enable me to win. It was only yesterday that I realized that the game is not as simple as I thought, and that strategy dominates luck when determining how you do.

It’s not like bridge, where card distributions are exchanged across pairs in order to take the luck out of the game. Nevertheless, I realize that the number of “turns” in the game is large enough for the probabilities in the seashells to balance out across players. Rather, the decision that you need to make at each turn regarding which pawn to move is so important that the importance of this drawfs the number you threw! Again you will need to keep into account stuff like the distribution of your next throw, your opponent’s next throw and so on.

I think I have a thing for games with randomness built into them rahter than those that are completely a function of the players’ moves (like chess). I think this is because even with the same set of players, games with randomness built in lead to a larger variety of positions which makes the game more exciting.

Coming back to Chowka Baarah, the other thing I was thinking of last night was if sunk cost fallacy applied in this, when I was trying to decide betwen a reasonably advanced pawn and a backward pawn to decide as to which one to save. Finally I decided that apart from the loss in terms of the pawn being sent home, other things that I had to take into consideration when I moved was about which pawn capture would be more valuable for the opponent, probabilities of differnet pawns getting captured, potential danger to other pawns, etc.

It’s a fun game, one of the most fun “traditional” games. Maybe one of the most “strategic” traditional games. Miss playing it for the last fifteen years or so.

Death, etc.

Of late I’ve been smelling a lot of Ethyl Mercaptan in the kitchen. Especially in the fridge. I must point out that the architeture of my kitchen is such that the gas cylinder is placed right next to the fridge. But then, there is a thick wall and a door in between, so I fail to understand why the  mercaptan smell emanates from the fridge.

I’ve never been good at the business of connecting the regulator to the gas stove. In over fifteen years of gas usage (prior to that we didn’t have gas stove at home – parents worked for the electricity board and hence we had free electricity; so we used electric stove) I’ve somehow managed to avoid any sort of mishaps. Of course for the first half of those fifteen years I wasn’t really allowed close to the cylinder.

Sometimes I go mad, and think I must apply for the Darwin award. Yes, this is connected to what I’ve written in the earlier part of this essay. My normal reaction when I smell Ethyl Mercaptan in the kitchen is to pick up the lighter and strike it. That is my normal way of convincing myself that there is indeed no gas leak, and the smell is due to some internal demons in my head. Of course, if it indeed turns out that there was a gas leak, then I’ll surely get a posthumous Darwin awards, right? (as far as I know I haven’t impregnated anyone, so my genes will become extinct)

The downside of this process is that if I indeed die this way, and thus stake my claim at the Darwin awards, I will be classified as a “stove burst” case and get reported on the page three of all newspapers in the “crime beat” section. The story will be preceded by that of a man dying in a motorcycle accident, and will be succeeded by that of a woman filing a dowry harassment case against her in-laws. The problem with “stove burst” (despite the Darwin award) is that it’s such a womanly way to die. Have you ever read in the paper, either on Page 3 or otherwise, that a man died in a stove-burst?

It’s only women who die in stove bursts. And typically it is very weak women. Women trapped in bad marriages, with in-laws demanding tonnes of dowry. “Stove burst” is a convenient excuse for the woman’s death – it would in most cases be murder or suicide. Stove burst is definitely not a manly way to die. There are several other honourable bursts from which men die. Sher Shah Suri, they say, died when a gun burst in his face (during the siege of Kalinjar in 1545, if my JNU-authored NCERT textbook is to be believed). Tycho Brahe, on the other hand, died when his own bladder burst (he was at a royal dinner and felt it wasn’t done to excuse himself). Those are manly ways to die, not stove bursts. So maybe I should give up on the Darwin award, after all.

While on the topic, I’ve been kicking buckets quite often nowadays. I have lots of buckets at home, like any good Indian should. But unlike most good Indians, I don’t take good care of my buckets and leave them lying around in the pathways. Now that I don’t have any relatives in any electricity board, I try to conserve electricity, and so leave most of the lights off. And hence keep kicking the bucket. Each time I kick a bucket, I just lift it up (it would’ve usually toppled) and keep it to the side, unmindful that there is a very good chance that my next random walk will encounter it. And I kick the bucket again. And again.

Death.