the lair

Bangalore this weekend

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:17:37 GMT

Will be in Bangalore this weekend, starting Friday. I would have liked to meet a few of you but have just not been able to make the time. Drop me a line if your free and would like to get coffee. I am leaving the country on the 13th.

Popularity Contests

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:09:35 GMT

It’s a perennial theme in school life. To be popular or not to be. Some would argue that being popular is not a decision to be made. You are, or you’re not. And yet, personal perspectives could determine one’s style and hence, the outcome is a manifestation of a decision at some level.

So, at a certain level, the decision could be an answer to the question: Would you rather be loved by a few or liked by many? It’s not an easy question to answer, and for that reason, it’s even tougher to frame. “You” could answer it from a business perspective, like my friend who thought he’d rather sell a large volume of his books than have an exclusive club that absolutely loves his work. “You” could also answer it to suit your egoistic inclinations – in which case you would either care for external recognition or give two hoots about other people. Perspectives abound. But real situations might reveal more about your own personal choice.

I was never the popular kind. I have (always had) exclusive friends, whom I love and care for and have rarely looked for fulfillment beyond this group. On occasions, this attitude turned my interactions with outsiders into random events, colored by shades ranging from a dark grey difficult-to-approach to a bright orange extremely-friendly. However, the thought of all the friends I’ve potentially lost does not bother me. Some form of natural selection must be in action.

What does bother me is whether the love of a few people has made me a dull character.

Living a Story

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 17:12:01 GMT

Have you ever found yourself locked in a story? A story that must find its own plot and characters – characters who flesh out their ambitions and desires as the story unfolds – and eventually write its climax as well as the end. For there must be end to every story, long or short.

Now, one must not suggest even for a minute that life could be interesting in any flattering sense of the word. But one would like to believe that the sense of fiction lends it an air of mystery. To play a character, however close to one's real self, requires a sacrifice. It’s a commitment to lose a part of one’s identity forever. It’s also an understanding of drawing oneself out of the character once the story ends.

Earlier endeavors in theatre have bestowed the concerned one with a loose perspective of an observer, a perspective that can be quite disturbing (and confusing) at times. For example, one often “observes” the characters with different levels of insecurity and empathy, concluding, erroneously at times, that the adequacy of emotional and intellectual content must match that of the audience, which (thankfully) in this case consists exclusively of co-characters, and in fact, you, the anonymous reader. Nevertheless, such external observation remains a difficult but rewarding activity.

Currently, however, the main character is torn between (i) “providing” an end to the story and (ii) “being directed” to an end. The director happens to be kind. (S)He allows the characters the creative license to play a role that they have perhaps never played before, with no script to speak of. Should be fun.

PS: Aplologies to The One, for misuse of his trademark.

Night in Singapore

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:56:01 GMT

Last night, it was brought to one's notice that no trip to Singapore is complete without a drink at the New Asia Bar. Minor shopaholic and jelly-vodka weaknesses were overcome to cobble together a 3-person community of alcoholics anonymous.

Perched just above the 69th floor, we admired the creative genius of such stupendous numerological and architechtural endeavour that delivers the onlooker to a true over-the-top experience a la the 13th Floor.

A double-sambuca shot and a couple of delicious litchee martinis later, lofty-goaled cupid swung into action at the first opportunity. Having appropriately lectured the boy, complementary teasers were sent the lady's way. The two were obviously "interested" in each other, wildy complicated Indian courtship games notwithstanding. So, as the night unfolded, yours truly watched in blissfull accomplishment as the the couple tip-toed and later tangoed into each others arms. Needless to say, yours truly walked home alone.

Sidenote: Indian women have very high, dreamy and unrealistic expectations and must be periodically returned to the reality of an enjoyable dance over the 69th floor every now and then.

Investing wisdom

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:41:11 GMT

The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts.
- Marcus Aurelius

The true investor is scarcely ever forced to sell his shares, and all other times he is free to disregard the current price quotation. He need pay attention to it and act upon it only to the extent that suits his book, and no more. Thus the investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is pervesely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage. That man would be better off if his stocks had no quotation at all, for he would then be spared the mental anguish caused him by other persons' mistakes of judgement.

- Benjamin Graham

Why or Why not?

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 04:26:19 GMT

Among the trivial things in life that still amaze me is that this blog still receives comments. Mainly from people passing through my orkut profile, I presume. It is rewarding to hear encouraging words and there are signs that I might rethink my decision on posting through this medium, but that seems unlikely at this point.

Would like to know what you guys, my "livejournal" friends think. It would help to explain why I stopped posting in the first place, but that would take more than a few casual words of reasoning.

Btw, I am in Bangalore until late July. Drop me a line and hopefully we can catch up.

The Culture of Nations - Its who you are

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 08:13:17 GMT

Today's Sunday Times carries a guest column by David Brooks (original NYT article). Whether you get a parking ticket or not, would depend on a gazillion real life factors. Time, traffic, a fight with your spouse, a lost sock, vehicle malfuntion or whatever-god-wills. It might sound be unfair, even far-fetched to caliberate my cultural standing, and hence predict my economic growth, on the scale of parking tickets. But the numbers don't lie. Infact, the truth rings in, not uncharacteristically I might add, with a few racially charged conclusions.

Only last night, dad and I were talking about how cultural values can affect workplace policies and production strategies. "The Japanese need no incentives. Its a sin not to work," he pointed out. It comes as no surprise that they went from a comprehensively defeated nation to an industrial giant, in time that spanned a little over half of India's independent life. Germany, Israel and Britain are also relevant in a similar context. It would, however, be a spurious claim that their recovery was economically inspired.

The reason there are such wide variations in ticket rates is that human beings are not merely products of economics. The diplomats paid no cost for parking illegally, thanks to diplomatic immunity. But human beings are also shaped by cultural and moral norms. If you’re Swedish and you have a chance to pull up in front of a fire hydrant, you still don’t do it. You’re Swedish. That’s who you are.

People need the coherence their culture provides and value it even more than easy parking.

Veteran foreign aid worker, Lawrence E. Harrison has of course spelt out what has not exactly been stuff of arcane propellant technology: Cultural differences mostly explain why some nations develop quickly while others do not. All cultures have value because they provide coherence, but some cultures foster development while others retard it. Some cultures check corruption, while others permit it. Some cultures focus on the future, while others focus on the past. Some cultures encourage the belief that individuals can control their own destinies, while others encourage fatalism.

Writing about poverty or war on terror (does that suggest a bias or an insight?) , it is not clear which, he feels that cultural change can’t be imposed from the outside, except in rare circumstances. It has to be led by people who recognize and accept responsibility for their own culture’s problems and selectively reinterpret their own traditions to encourage modernization.

Brooks himself takes it a step further - Muslim men in Britain might decide to renounce freedom and prosperity for midair martyrdom. They are driven by a deep cultural need for meaning. But it is also foolish to think we can address the root causes of their toxic desires. We’ll just have to fight the symptoms of a disease we can neither cure nor understand.

But slightly more relevant to us in India, are the economic offshoots of cultural stagnation. Amartya Sen might continue to eulogise about Hinduism, but these papers suggest that religion can determine the level of corruption in a society. That's probably too simplisticly put and lacks authority. But if you've battled with Statistics (as I am hopelessly doing now), the application of regression analysis to predict the "systematic deviation" requires the most parsimonious model i.e. determining only the independent variables that most affect the dependent variable, not all possible (possibly interdependent) variables that try to establish "too perfect a fit" for the data.

Right, and this is where i run out of gas. No puns intended.

Search and such.

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 07:29:49 GMT

Guess what's the most queried term in AOL's search engine. Google. AOL eventually saw the irony, called it a "screw-up" and aplogized. The leak has become a search-query analyst's dream come true. What an outrageous intrusion of privacy? Yeah i know! Lemme see!

Check out Paul Boutin's assertion of You are what you search. Filling, delicious piece. From the Pornhound, who goes from "talking parrot jokes" to "sexy dogs and hot girls" depending on which side of the hour he's on (11 pm Eastern and 11 pm Pacific are the bootilicious prime times) to the Basket Case ("i hurt when i think too much i love roadtrips i hate my weight i fear being alone for the rest of my life". Wtf did she expected to find?!).

I know what you're thinking. No, I'm not Obsessive about "swear words" and can go an entire week without "man/woman/love" talk. See...?

Phew! Some other news please...

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 16:05:05 GMT

So. Its ceasefire. Like a belated birthday wish, that arrives in true melancholic lyricism of a Shakespearan tragedy. Minus the finality.

After an eleventh hour huff-n-puff effort to bomb each other black and blue, it was conclusively decided that they had bombed each other into, well, a darker shade of black and blue. Frankly, atleast the Hezbollah was getting what it said it wanted - Israeli lives. More or less.

But 34 days and several dead children later, its amusing to watch Israel chase the Hezbollah ass into the Latini River, barely 15 miles north of the border, like anyone who doesnt run out of his already devastated house must surely have Hezbollah lineage. Further, Israel bravely promises to maintain its air and sea blockade on Lebanon to prevent re-supply of Hezbollah. With more than 220 (totally 4000) rockets having found their fiery asses burried into Israeli soil on the last day, I can almost hear the Nasarallah rap.

Bomb out your muthafuggin arse yeh yeh yeh
While you screw my sistah Pristine,
This aint no stinking funny maan,
coz i'm gonna bomb out you sodding jews clean.

To be fair, the Israelis left enough leaflets to rehabilitate the ruined paper recycling industry in Beirut. If anyone bothers to read them, they'll understand that Hezbollah had brought the people of Lebanon "to the edge of the abyss" and brought only "destruction, displacement and death." and that the Israelis could return "with all necessary might." Was this supposed to be funny or what?

The Lebanese, if not the Hezbollah, have plenty to laugh abt, though. Unifil(which suspiciously rhymes with some baby powder, i just cant recall which) and the Lebanese army will now achieve what the Israelis, half-witted and hot-blooded, could not do with their shiny stars-n-stripes balls of gunpowder. And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air...tra la la...

Contrarianism

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 04:49:05 GMT

In an eminently thought-worthy post, Don Boudreaux describes the virtues & vices of contrarianism.

Being contarian is admirable because it keeps the mind open and exploring; it's of a piece with one of the finest of all intellectual dispositions: skepticism.

When I contradict myself (which happens at the same frequency as that of trains departing from the Central Railway Station), i often take shelter behind the open mindedness of such full-blooded skepticism, sometimes affording myself a view from both sides of the blinds, so to speak. And with a frequency, not much less than the earlier stated, I fall prey to the contrarian vice - rejecting some piece of wisdom simply because it is widely accepted -- and of confusing the possible for the plausible.

He also goes on to frame a very likeable definition of wisdom, borrowing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's analysis ("To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom"). He fears, quite justifiably so, that too many contarians are content to bask in the brilliance of their cleverness even if this brilliance blinds them to wisdom.

Ahem. If you notice any similarities between this proclamation and a certain reckless blogger, you're strongly advised to ignore the feeling.

Marriages were made in hell

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 15:23:20 GMT

Marriages, though not all of them, are bad.

+ being short for the funtion of marriage, i.e. M(x,y)

1 Depressed person x + 1 Happy person y = 1 less Depressed x' + 1 less Happy person y'. What a leveller!
(I'm ruling out the possibility of 2 depressed persons marrying. They simply should spare the kids the trauma. I'll leave you to decide the probability of two happy people marrying. No, why would someone wanna go screw themselves over for life, is not a question we're trying to answer)

Someone must have been either really bonkers or unforgivingly smart to have gone "*blink*, eureka! let's have marriage". Seriously, if there ever was a problem it was meant to solve, it must have been scarcity of land. Afterall, not everyone can have their own sweet mansion and live in too. Alone, I might add.

Perhaps, we should consider other arrangements of sharing property - all friends should live together, with the exception that partners should never share a roof. The children, if they ever come, will join the community boarding school to find their own friends' circle. Ha! Now, why didn't they think of that earlier!?!

Letters: May thy tribe grow

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 07:07:55 GMT

He could be a literary genius or Javed Akhtar's baap or (for diversity's sake) he might even be a whizkid flooring his bosses with his spotless presentations. But the male stable rarely takes credit for letters in love, letters "of" love being a much more evil form of feminine conspiracy.

Watch those sleek memos and carefully crafted professional mails being manufactured with mechanised consistency. I would even imagine an occasional burst of prurient lust shot out in a rapidly typed mail, riding high on a fast deflating wanking charge on a sleepless Sunday night. But *sugar tits* (to borrow from Mel Gibson's plush vocabulary) is hardly a woman's idea of feeling wanted when she's not exactly finding the y in horny. (I'd be quite flattered, especially if it came from Mr. Gibson's gob, but it would make for little more than wanton girlie gossip)

Here, this piece joyously spells out the need to educate the letter-challenged population. One in five women say they've never received a note from a lover/admirer. Almost half complain they've not received one in a decade!

*Sulks and moans*. I havent received one since i was the size of Thumbelina :( Not even an email. Decidedly sorry state of affairs this.

To be or not to be?

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 07:21:50 GMT

...is the question the egg is asking this season. In a serious blow to the much-touted Brit wit, the British Egg Information Serives (ahh, thank God for small mercies) is now attempting to eliminate guesswork from a big issue - people cant even boil an egg.

In an abashed display of self-effacing catharsis, Britons admit that millions of them cannot boil an egg. And certainly not one in which the egg white coagulates, but the yolk remains runny. For no good reason, the task of world IQ caliberation just got tougher.

Link received from Akshay Kumar, the entrepreneur. Jiyo, chacha!

Innovation and Size

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 17:51:09 GMT

... dont seem to love each other's company. If innovative skills were any indication, Microsoft's pulse has long gone silent. As Guy Kawasaki would put it, if it were daisy wheel printer company, it would think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points.

Or if Microsoft were just Microsoft, it would set out to follow someone else's curve.

May be its gotta do with the fact that the bigger you get, the fewer risks you take? Which leads me to the next question - is there an optimum level to which a business entity should grow, beyond which it would only hurt itself?

Update: In another interesting article, NYTimes points out - its Consistency Vs. Wow!

..this penchant for speed and innovation can cause Google to zoom past the basics. When asked about the lack of an address book in Google Maps in an interview last fall, Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, said it was a gap in the product. She said it was much easier to get the company’s engineers to spend time developing pioneering new technology than a much more prosaic address storage system.

There are risks in each approach. Google tends to introduce a lot of new products and then watch to see what works. This has the potential to alienate users if there are too many half-baked ideas or false starts. At the same time, Yahoo risks being seen as irrelevant if it tries to put so many features into each product that it is always months late to market with any good idea.

This is a particularly interesting soundbite:

“Yahoo has lost its appetite for experimentation,” said Toni Schneider, a former product development executive at Yahoo who is now chief executive of Automattic, a blogging software company. “They used to be a lot more like Google, where someone would come up with a cool idea and run with it. While Yahoo’s processes have become too bureaucratic, it is still attracting an audience, Mr. Schneider said. “Google’s products may be more innovative, but at the end of the day, Yahoo is pretty good at nailing what the user really wants.”

The article continues..

So far, outside of the Web search business, neither company appears to be able to make a significant dent in the position of the other. Both companies are gaining users as AOL and MSN decline. Yahoo is the No. 1 site for e-mail and online news in the United States, while it is second in instant messaging, behind AOL, according to data from comScore Media Metrix.

Google, by contrast, is much less consistent. Its map service is now a very close third behind MapQuest and Yahoo. And the two-year-old Gmail is now the No. 4 e-mail service in the country, with 8.6 million users in June. That is not bad in a market where people do not switch e-mail addresses casually. But over the last year, according to comScore, Yahoo added 11.8 million e-mail users, more than Gmail’s entire user base.

Over the last several years, Yahoo has devoted so much of its resources to building up its search business that it has been slow to improve many of its other offerings. This has allowed Google to gain the initiative in areas like e-mail and maps. Indeed, even in stock market information — where Yahoo Finance is the dominant product — Google was the first to offer an interactive stock-price graph, a feature Yahoo has just started testing.

Sergey Brin, the company’s co-founder and its president of technology, said in an interview last week that he had been encouraging engineers to develop their ideas as add-ons for existing Google products, rather than as stand-alone services. For example, after Google Talk failed to attract much of a user base, the company added an instant message feature to Gmail that allows users to chat with people on the same Web page that displays their e-mail.

With this approach, Mr. Brin said, Google can take advantage of the users it already has, rather than trying to build new followings for each new offering.

Meanwhile, Yahoo says it is now trying to emulate Google’s faster method of creating products. Like most big companies, it used to develop software by first creating a comprehensive design that defined how features would be written and tested. Instead, it is now trying what is known as a scrum method, where it will plan, build and test parts of a product every 30 days..

Heartless & Bitchy

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 07:31:29 GMT

You heartless bitches, take this! Rock on!

My picks -

1. Does the sight of an incredibly handsome man turn you off, because too many of them have room-temperature IQ's, and obnoxious or non-existent personalities?

Inflated sigh. That's half the reason why I have been banished to singlehood in heaven. I think i should seriously amend that stereotype in my head. The JaneAustenesque pall of doom has ceased to depress me though. Most single women at 40 are happy :)

2. Are you fed up with women who feel they HAVE to be in a "Relationship" in order to be whole, and will sacrifice their self-esteem and personal growth in order to avoid being on their own?

Alright. Talking too much abt relationships and men erodes bitchiness. So, enough.

But the one I identify most with -

Have you HAD IT with people telling you that you are TOO LOUD, TOO ASSERTIVE, or TOO OPINIONATED?

Oh yes, bloody hell, YES!

Link received via email from five18pm.

Could Lisa Burnett be blonde?

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 10:57:13 GMT

Received via email from Chris, the batman.

What do they really want?

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 03:17:44 GMT

I dont find it shameful to admit that terrorism used to be something so far removed from my life as Iraq. Infact, when an Indian friend in Singapore expressed shock and sympathy for the victims of 9/11, it angered me. She had never felt a thing for the hundreds who die in the Kashmir valley every year. Why was she being so tearful abt Uncle Sam's fate? Afterall, she had not lost anyone she even knew.

Mumbai has changed that. There's a lump in my throat every time I read a story abt it. I always travel by the locals when I'm in Mumbai. Yes, it could've been me or anyone I love.

Back in Bangalore, companies are sending out disturbing security instructions: Avoid public transport, avoid hanging around crowded public areas. It makes me smile. Where are we headed? Is it really possible to stop this madness? Can any police in the world prevent bombs from being planted and at least a few of them from exploding?

I take a BMTC bus around 6:30 pm everyday. Its usually packed. And its a bloody soft target (there are even softer ones, if only you look hard enough). Sadly, there's little that can be done abt it. Any amount of intelligence effort or prior information cannot prevent it as for every move there's a countermove. For every act of prevention, there's another act of innovation. Hell, you dont even need to "innovate", just "observe".

Unfortunately, terror has no logic. TOI is carrying this madly absurd theory to explain it all. If they really wanted to kill Gujjus, isn't it obvious where one has the greatest probability of finding them? Or does terrorism work on the basis of "kill target, plus kill innocent, hence arouse anger"?

But isnt everyone (who dies) innocent? What do they really want? And can anyone ever do anything to stop it? May be I have a limited capacity to rationalise, but the silence is chilling.

Update: myrch states an interesting perspective in his post about Israel and its current offensive against Lebanon. He writes:

...the situation is complicated, and its history does entail a long list of offensive maneuvers; Arabs attack Israel, Israel attacks Arabs, Arabs attack Israel, etc. The fact that attacks have been wrought by both sides does not persuade a reasonable person to conclude Israel and its Arab neighbors are equally wrong. This sort of lazy thinking is regrettably common. If Israel and the Arabs are equally wrong, I doubt Jordan and Egypt would have signed peace treaties with Israel, tenuous as those treaties are at the moment.

I agree. And I do feel Israel is justified, to a certain extent, simply because it faces hostility for just existing.

What if India gave up Kashmir and allowed a democratically elected govn to be installed there? Is that the panacea we're looking for? Would that end all Pak initiated terror?

The Vidhan Soudha

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 16:26:31 GMT

Its prolly the most recognised symbol of Bangalore's identity. The seat of Karnataka Legislature. People tell me its the largest legislature building in India. I couldn't make out if they were joking.

This picture was shot from the Barton Center, from the 13th Floor, where you normally wont be allowed during the day. The reason i was there on this lovely Sunday morning was because I was taking a Victorian Bangalore Walk. Great fun and loads of gyan. And breakfast at Ebony's :)

La lêche-vitrine

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 03:50:32 GMT

By contemporary inspirational standards, this ranks UP THERE! Ok, its friggin hard to pull off on my own, without a partner for support and exchange... but I'm gonna give it a shot. A short shot.

I'm not gonna shop for a month.
No new clothes.
No movies. Rented or otherwise.
No eating out.
For the time being, i shall have to remain content with la lêche-vitrine (French for window shopping, literally translates to "licking window shops").

Btw, are books and hair-cuts necessities? and waxing and auto rickshaw rides?

On a related note, my recent days of penury have seen an admirable return to college-time frugality. Its much fun to watch the accounts get lean and mean just as its painful to leave that perfectly fitting black skirt that snugly makes up for the bulges. And yes, I am very much a liability of a friend. Innocent friends magnanimously offer to let me decide the dinner place, while i graciously let them take the cheque. Some even suggest that its the least they can do. Bless them, angels!

Last i checked, I owed a total of Rs. 766.70 in various debts to close and far friends. Yeah ok, you can leave a comment if i owe you, but no fake promisory notes will be entertained.

The Rules of the Empty Game

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 18:09:29 GMT

Since I've been allowing myself to indulge in politics these days, quite by serendipity, I stumbled upon this wonderfully lucid piece of gyan. Why does India have such terrible politicians?

Like academics and pickpockets, politicians too have rules which they can break only at great risk.

The Rules of the Empty Game

Rule No 1 is that only winning matters because the winner takes all. This zero-sum game characteristic of politics has two consequences.

First, the squeamish stay away. Second, the rules are made by those who regard honesty like people usually regard exercise or prayer—something to be admired in others but never emulated.

Rule No 2 is that your political worth is directly proportional to how much money you can bring to the table.

Rule No 3 is that no one but you will be responsible for your day-to-day expenses.

Rule No 4 is that you must recoup your election expenses in the first two years and devote the next three years to generating the margin money for the next election.

Rule No 5 comes out of Rule No 2: the political parties need you to bring in more than money if they are to bank on you.

Rule No 6 is “No squealing”. If you rat on someone, you may be ratted on next. And since you need the money, it is not in your interest to rat. So there is no internal pressure to remain honest.

Rule No 7 is that in the current framework each MP must spend more than the other. This comes out of a Prisoners’ Dilemma sort of situation where, although each MP is best off spending as little as possible, in reality none of them can.

This is because whenever one MP realises that the other is not spending, he can achieve a higher individual payoff by spending more, and thereby hoping to extend his reach amongst potential voters. Given that each MP stands to gain by spending more if the other does not spend, what ends up happening is that they all spend as much as they can.

If you're a Friedman fan, the last lines would remind you of his famous words abt spending your own money vs. somebody else's money.

The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 17:17:45 GMT

The Indian democracy is beginning to look like one humungous communist style monopoly. Though the communists themselves have found more electoral success in the world's largest democracy than any other political setup in the last 3 decades, its not communism that I wish to pontificate abt, at this date and hour (not that pontification ever got a blogger to the Vatican), but still...

The BJP - yes, still the largest opposition party, and for some, the only real competition to the parthenium ubiquity, is IMHO at the brink of extinction. Perhaps, it is reasonable to expect a silent death of an entity whose legacy boasts of little, apart from alleged atrocities and mindless play on hindutva, not to mention the blistering heat of India Shining that understandably left some of us shorn of any real sympathy.

Since the previous general elections, it has only grown more confused and less sharp. Its obvious to the dumbest swayam-sevak-turned-politico-stalwart that ideology is in short supply. But no one mentioned "imagination" in the job profile, Adva-ratha-ni ji might say. The Congress, on the other hand, holds the Queen, all the aces and all the ideas.

As for the "real" issues, one could have just looked and looked and found nothing in as much as a comment that spelt out their stand, shaky as it may have been. Really, two lines from Arun Jaitley were all that were said on the contentious reservation issue, notwithstanding the theoritical support they extended to the reservation bill.

They did however, spend considerable fuel and sweat over Aamir Khan. For the sake of God in Heaven, get a rat's ass worth of reason to protest! Thats a tough ask for some retards whose preoccupations hop from one rude jolt to the next.

Sigh. The day these politicians and their dopedout sons realise that we admire the strength and gumption to confess, correct and restart with a fresh mindset, they would have found their ellusive ideology and a reason to exist in the ecosystem.

If only I had said what i still hide

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 17:46:33 GMT

Lovely post this.

If only I could turn back time

If only I had said what i still hide

If only I could turn back time

I would stay for the night

Cant change them? Train them!

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 14:15:43 GMT

This mildly amusing piece shares instances of how frequently men are percieved (or should be percieved) as animals. Sex drives them. So does training.

The central theme in the life of a manipulative and bitchy nutjob from the female species is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away. And this could, and most definitely would, drive a huge quantum of female energies into "making their men easier to love" - an acitivity that traditionally occupies 80%of all their intellectual endeavour.

All the best boys!

MBA wildlife - There are no trodden paths

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 11:44:14 GMT

In an interestingly titled article Was Earning That Harvard MBA Worth It?, one of the reasons mentioned for doing an MBA is that the M.B.A. is the most versatile degree out there — most of the others are very field specific, but you can apply an M.B.A. to any field.

Which basically means that the regular starry eyed MBA aspirant who wants to do an MBA, is not really sure of what he wants to do. An MBA is the vaguest answer to an equally vague question: What Next? Sure, it allows some interesting answers but "shooting in the dark" is not a very far fetched analogy in the said context.

A finding that sticks out: a certain Henry Mintzberg, a management professor, tracked the performance of 19 students who graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1990 and were at the top of their class academically. He claims: 10 of the 19 were utter failures. Another 4 were very questionable, at least. So 5 out of 19 did well.

Notwithstanding the subjective nature of his findings, these numbers are not something to write home about, although success is variously defined in terms of "personal satisfaction", "respect of peers", "leadership", "financial security" or "making a positive difference to society" by the alumni themselves.

And while we're on the subject, HBS is not exactly carving its name out in gold. Blake Gottesman, who carries President Bush's breath mints and makes his peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, has found special favour with the HBS. He has no undergraduate education but will still do the MBA.

Damn! I'm still pissed off that I got a reject from them. So what if I dont know how to make sandwiches. Grrr.

Fanaa

Sun, 28 May 2006 12:47:11 GMT

..is just another Yash-Raj-ikraar-bina-izhaar romance with dollops of shayarana and desh-bhakti. So while Amir does his ghalib act, looking old enough to be Lara Dutta's uncle, Kajol is not exactly a treat to watch. I always thought she overacts, and, for the benefit of the kareena-amisha-esha brat-pack, she doesn't disappoint. So a comeback is not gonna ellicit any more sympathy than her sister's debut.

But its worth a dekko, if only for the shayari and for some undeniable onscreen chemistry.