intention – Pertinent Observations

Project Thirty, Hippies and Capitalism

After getting out of Goldman Sachs (phew, now that I’m out, I can “out” myself. Was majorly stifling working for a company that stressed so much on “reputation” and stuff) two months back, I’ve put myself on a fourteen month long scholarship which I’ve titled as “Project Thirty”. As the title suggests, this scholarship will last till the day I turn thirty, which is in a little more than a year. There is no fixed amount of scholarship, but the funds are to be drawn out of the considerable savings I made having been a fat cat banker for a little over two years.

During the period of the scholarship, I’m forbidden to take up full-time employment. I am, however, permitted to pursue other money-making opportunities (as long as they don’t end up in my taking up a full time job). I’m setting myself up as a freelance quant consultant (right now the biggest pain point is it’s tough to explain to people what exactly I can do for them), and if things go well, that should provide some good supplementary income. However, the intention of this break is not to just take a shot at entrepreneurship, or explore non-linear opportunities for making money. It is fundamentally to do all those things that I’ve always wanted to do but never got down to doing during the first ninety percent of my twenties.

The Eureka moment happened some three-four months back, when I was reading some article on the internet about life expectancy. It was around the same time that I read the famous Steve Jobs speech, and I started thinking about what I’ve achieved in life so far. IIT, check. IIM, check. Brand name employers, check. Beautiful and intelligent wife, check. Some sort of local fame, check. I would be lying if I were to complain that I haven’t had a good life. However, several gaps remain. Found my calling in life, no. Stuck around in a steady job for an extended period of time, no. Made lots of money, not really. Traveled the world, not really. Wrote a book, no. Played for a band, no. And so it goes on.

It was around that time that I realized that it is not so bad to have regrets in life when you are twenty nine (which I’ll be next week). Thirty is still not too old, and you are still reasonably fit, and able to do all those things you’ve already wanted to do. What is not okay is to have regrets in life when you are fifty, or sixty. There is only so much of life ahead of you to make amends, and it could already be too late to do some of those things that you’ve always wanted to do but never gotten down to doing.

Project Thirty is the result a culmination of a lot of things. These thoughts. The fact that I’ve never really been happy in any of the high-paying high-pressure jobs I’ve been through. Stress. That though I’ve been married for a year now (today’s my anniversary), we still don’t plan to “start a family” for a while which gives leeway in terms of finances. That I haven’t yet really “found myself” and need to make an effort to do so.

So far, though, two months on, it has had mixed results. On the minus side (let’s quickly put that away) there’s been a lot of NED. I think I end up wasting too much time doing nothing (ok I’m not sure I should call that a “waste” but still I don’t feel good at the end of it). Then, a lot of writing which I want to get published in the mainstream media is lying on the hard disk of my desktop, as I haven’t really mustered the confidence to reach out to editors and send these out. I’ve identified one client for my quant consulting shop, but again haven’t been confident enough to approach them.

On the plus side, though, I have got a lot of writing done. I have started learning to play the violin again, this time in Western Classical style, and so far I’ve been really enjoying it. I’m associated with a public policy think tank and am doing some work for it. I gave (what I think is ) a rather well-received speech on auto rickshaw economics. For the first time in my life I set a quiz which didn’t receive much flak. Watched cricket and football. Traveled a bit (a week in Turkey). And overall I’ve had a lot of peace of mind.

So what are the hippies and capitalism doing in the title of this post? Essentially given my current situation I don’ get why hippies are anti-capitalist. Because capitalism is precisely the reason I’m able to afford a sort of “hippie life” (using Aadisht’s definition) currently. Had I been living in a communist country, under the “from each according to his abilities” paradigm, I wouldn’t have been allowed to take this time off!

Name mutilation

Like Bangalore supposedly became Bengaluru a few years back (when HDK was cheap minister), West Bengal is going to change its name to “Poschim Bongo” or some such thing. Now, unlike Bombay-Mumbai or Madras-Chennai, the thing with these name changes is that they are merely globalization of local names. Let me explain.

Bombay (bom bahia or good port in Portuguese) and Mumbai (of Mumba Devi) are fundamentally different. Madras (mad race? ) and Chennai (beautiful) are again fundamentally different. While I disagree with those name changes and still prefer to call those cities by their former names, I see that the change in those names at least has some merit. They wanted to get rid of their colonial British-given names (and i’m sure Tams wanted to prove they aren’t a mad race, though they might have achieved the opposite through this action) and chose local names in the local language.

When Bangalore’s name was supposedly changed to “Bengaluru” a few years back, Kannada newspapers (I used to subscribe to Vijaya Karnataka back then) had a tough time explaining the name change. Because Bangalore has forever been known as “Bengaluru” in Kannada. Even now, when I speak in Kannada I say “Bengaluru” but I say “Bangalore” when speaking in any other language. While it might have been a noble intention by HDK and UR Ananthamurthy and others behind the name change to get the non-Kannadigas to use the Kannada name, the effect has been completely counterproductive.

Till date, I’m yet to meet someone who is not conversant in Kannada to pronounce “BengaLuru” correctly. First of all, most people can’t say the “L” sound and instead pronounce it as “l” (in Kannada that can make a profound difference. for example “hELu” is “tell” while “hElu” is “shit” ). Next (this is the problem with most North Indians), people have trouble pronouncing the short ‘e’ sound. Finally, it’s hard for people to figure out that the first U in Bengaluru is to be pronounced long and the terminal u should be pronounced short. The combination of all these means horribly messed up pronunciation, which makes one wonder why they bothered to “change” the name at all.

West Bengal doesn’t seem to have learnt from this experience of Bangalore. They want to call themselves “Poschim Bongo” it seems. Not being a bong, I’m going to have major difficulty in pronouncing that name, and I might end up pronouncing it in a way that makes most bongs cringe. I really hope they see sense before they make this name change official and opt for a saner name, if they want to change their name at all that is.

One thing they could try would be to knock that “west” off their name (I believe the Times of India has been campaigning for this). West Bengal was the primary reason that I got my directions and geography horribly wrong till I was some eight years old. I used to assume that “West Bengal” was at the western edge of India! Especially since Bangladesh is no more called “East Bengal”.

Given that they are mostly commie, one thing they could try is probably to go the East Germany or North Korea way, and name themselves “Democratic State of Bengal” or some such thing.

CTR

Ok this is a post that has been delayed by about a couple of weeks. One of those things that has been in my head now for a while so writing it. So some two or three Sundays back (more likely to be two) I went to the famous CTR in Malleswaram for breakfast. For the first time ever. Yeah I now it’s supposed to be a classic place and all that but it’s only now that I’m getting acquainted with north/west parts of Bangalore so had completely missed out on this so far.

So as per what several people had told me at various points of time in life, the Masala Dosa at CTR was brilliant. Unparalleled. The difference between CTR and Vidyarthi Bhavan is that the former makes masala dosa just the way that other restaurants do, but only much better and tastier. The dosa at Vidyarthi Bhavan is a different animal altogether and am told the has very different composition to what is made in other restaurants.

There is another important difference between CTR and Vidyarthi Bhavan and thats in terms of service and crowd management. Vidyarthi Bhavan does an excellent job in this regard, striving to “rotate table covers” as quickly as possible. Within moments of you taking your seat, your order gets taken, the dosa arrives, as does the bill and a look from the waiter asking you what the fuck you are doing there considering you have finished your tiffin. Extremely efficient from the point of view of the restaurant (in terms of maximizing capacity) and for customers looking for a quick dosa, but not so from the point of view of people who want to linger for a while and chat.

Unfortunately the one time I’ve been to CTR (2 sundays back) I was in a bit of a hurry since I had to go attend a quiz. Maybe the intention of the restaurant is to allow customers to sit for a while and chat up, but I don’t know if you can actually do that since at any given point of time (reports might be biased since this was a Sunday morning, 9am) there are four people waiting for you to leave so that they can grab your seat. This large crowd that is in waiting is also I think a result of slow service at the restaurant (simple queuing theory – for a given arrival rate, the slower the service rate, the more the average queue length).

There were some simple tasks in which CTR didn’t do so well. For example, making a customer wait for ten minutes before you take his order is not only ten minutes wasted for him, it is also ten minutes of absolutely unproductive “table time” – something that a fast food place like this can’t really afford. And then the ordered items also took a long time to arrive (again, most people at CTR have the same order – one “masaal” so I do hope the make dosas “to stock”) – but then their kitchen capacity may not match up to the capacity of the seating area (which isn’t too much). You pay bill at the table itself rather than at the counter which means you sit there for even longer. And so forth.

This post is supposed to be a part of this series that I was writing some four years back examining the Supply Chain practices and delivery models at various fast food restaurants in Bangalore. I have only one observation with respect to CTR and based on that I don’t give it very high marks in terms of supply chain and delivery efficiency. However, the dosa there is so awesome that I’m sure that I’ll brave the crowds and go there more often and might be able to make better observations about the process.

NED Open

Happened today in three places. Chennai went in the morning, Bombay early in the afternoon and here in Bangalore in the evening. As part of the introduction to the finls we had written “if you are satisfied with the questions kindly let us know. If not, write to us in civil language and we will look into it”. I would encourage you to use the comments thread on this post to do the same.

Some personal comments at the end of it:

It’s insanely tiring for a single quizmaster to do a quiz this long (72 questions + LVC in finals). I can hardly talk right now and was shouting myself hoarse towards the end of the quiz (and as if it wasn’t bad enough, there was a tiebreaker to be conducted)
72 questions plus a LVC is way to long for finals. True to the nomenclature of the quiz, I noticed several teams and part of the audience put NED towards the end. That it was late in the evening did matter i think. But again thinking about it, isn’t it fair that people put NED at the NED quiz?
One art I need to become better at is in terms of dividing points between teams in cases of partial answers. But then the problem there is however you do it, some team is bound to crib
Given it was such a long quiz, I was quite low on energy towards the end so probably did a worse job of point distribution, funda explanation etc. than I could have done
One needs to recognize that the concept of the LVC has been designed with an intention to irritate, and so some teams are bound to get pissed with it. As long as the audience enjoys you are good
One mistake I did (and I did this several times) was to continue wiht a question even after one team had given a “good enough” answer, and then finally give points tothe team that had originally given the “good enough” answer. This both wasted time as well as pissed people off
At the end of the quiz i was feeling so damn tired that all I wanted to do wsa to go to Dewar’s wine shop on St Marks Road and buy myself a bottle of Amrut Fusion and finish it off. But then, NED happened.

Josh

This used to be such a commonly used word back in school. To do anything you needed josh. To do anything well, you needed “full josh”. You would suddenly “get josh” to do something. And when you didn’t want to do something you’d say “josh illa” (back in school, I hardly spoke English. Used to be mostly Kannada – this was till 10th standard).

There was this friend who was hitting on a girl in the junior batch. And on every saturday, he would wait for her to come out of class to take one glimpse of her before he went home. He would say he needed to “get josh” from her. And if he didn’t see her before he left for home on saturday, he wouldn’t have enough josh to last the weekend.

There were other ways to get josh. Listening to songs from David Dhawan-Govinda movies was one way. Towards the end of school came Upendra with A – again immensely josh-giving. Everything we did, every activity we planned, had the intention of maximizing our josh inflow. Wonderful times those.

This word faded away from my lexicon when i found it not being used much in IITM. IITese however had the common word “enthu” which I realized was reasonably similar to josh – basically it was similar enough to josh that I didn’t have enough of an incentive to establish josh in IITese. And I switched. Of course there was no exact match – for example, just having a glimpse of that special someone was usually not enough to give you enthu, nor would Tan Tana Tan TanTan Tara help.

Again doing something with “full josh” wasn’t the same as doing that with “full enthu”. You could “put enthu” for something but you “needed josh” to do it.

Of late I’ve been trying to revive josh. I find myself instinctively using the word when I think it is appropriate. I’m trying to distinguish between josh and enthu, and use the one that is more appropriate. It is not easy of course – had it been, I’d’ve made an effort ot establish josh in IITese.

And now, thinking about it, I realize that there was a good chance that this blog might have been residing on some “no josh da” or “josh illa maga” website. But again – josh is not exactly the same as enthu.