Odds and Ends from Chennai September 2007

Couple of months ago I did something that pleased my parents a lot. I joined them on a visit to see their guru (teacher). On the way I spent my time looking at other vehicles, the drivers, various billboards, and just about anything I could read. Here are some that sounded interesting

"We two, Ours One" - This slogan does not sound nice in English. Anyone who has heard of family planning (euphemism for population control) knows it sounded better in Hindi "Hum Dhow Hamaare Dhow". The important thing to note is; parents are now being asked to have one kid!! Growing up in India, the ideal family size was four; two parents plus two children.

Trucks that ply on the road have many interesting messages and slogan on the rear; such as "Conserve water" and the one we saw earlier "We two, Ours One" to name a few. But I am missing a very important one that is almost an order; "Sound Horn". Folks that have driven a vehicle in the US know that honking is akin to giving someone the middle finger!! Fist fights have broken out over this and here we have people asking for the horn!! Some of them even have a polite touch "Please Sound Horn" as if that made it palatable!!

There was a sign for a some training institute named "Pengvin". I wonder if their course material had one on spelling.

Driving through Chennai one sees some unusual sights; there was a priest dressed in his traditional dhoti, bare chested, but driving a motor cycle!! Another one was the sight of a conservative Brahmin lady dressed in a 9-yards sari and driving scooter. I never missed a camera more in my life.

Blogs I Read

This post is one that will keep evolving as I find more interesting blogs.

The first one is Fake Steve Jobs. Although there is no mystery anymore over identity of Fake Steve Jobs, his posts are still hilarious. Here are a few of his posts I like a lot

1. Regarding my management style : The picture at the top is worth a thousand words. But here are a few gems.
1. "Never let people know where they stand."
2. You don't have to hire the best people. You can hire anyone, as long as you scare the bejesus out of them.
3. Hold people to an impossibly high standard, but here's the twist -- don't tell them what that standard is.
2. Regarding our iPhone
   
3. My lunch with Nancy Pelosi
4. Hassles with Yoko : This one is about licensing Beatles on iTunes and how Yoko wants the band to be named "John Lennon and the Beatles"

Then there is Joel on Software. This is techie blog; to use his own words "Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet". Some of the articles I have liked are

1. The Law of Leaky Abstraction: This article shows how most abstractions (a concept widely used in software engineering) fail for various reasons and reveal the underlying details they are meant to hide or abstract away. He uses the TCP/IP as a example of an abstraction to hide the network.
2. Pretty much every other article
   

I also like several article from Paul Graham. He was a founder of a company that was acquired by Yahoo and now he is a VC. He also is a great fan of Lisp and has written several articles on the subject.

1. Why startups condense in America? describes the conditions that make america an ideal place for startups. It also analyzes the reason other regions have not be so prolific.
2. Beating the Averages : This is also titled "Lisp for web based Development"
3. Pretty much every other article
   

I have also read a few blogs of Guy Kawasaki.

1. The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint
2. An open letter to CXO is a reference to a very nice post a from Pam Slim where she exhorts management to not treat employees with dignity and respect, "to avoid endless hours of PowerPoint, buzzwords and meaningless jargon like "our employees are our most valuable asset." If you suffer from (mis) management (or even otherwise) please read this.
   

How my wife one day broke the weight barrier

Now I have been married close to 15 years. So I know the answer to this really, really, very dangerous question which if not properly addressed, few marriages survive the answer.

Q: Honey am I fat?
A: Of course not. You are as slim as the day I met you (remember opposite of fat is not thin, it is slim)

Now unlike other hubbies, I really do not need to resort to this lie. No really, I mean it. I have not hypnotized myself into believing my own answer to a point where I ignore reality. My wife really has not put on weight in the past 15 years. But you could say that if the spouse were 300lbs to start with, there is not much more to gain. As you will see shortly this is not the case.

Anyway it came as a surprise one day a few months when she came crying to me

"Raag, I am fat, I just broke the weight barrier".

She then added how she had been binge eating and was unable to stop. I did not really hear much past the word "broke" as I rushed to the bathroom where we kept the weighing machine and was relieved to see that everything looked fine.

Since I am used to getting the latest update on my wife's weight every week, I knew what my wife weighed to within a pound or so. So I asked her what was her latest weight wondering if she had secretly gained 20 pounds or so which she could really be hiding under loose fitting clothes.

My wife sobbed "119lbs"!!

For those of you on metric system it is 54Kg. Now by no stretch of imagination could 119lb be considered fat unless one is under 4 feet and my wife stood 5ft 3in in stockings!! Besides this was also very much in the range of her weight since our marriage except when she was encumbered by two pregnancies.

But as I told you I am a pro and knew several ways to address this issue. So I started by simply blaming the poor machine by telling her how really these weighing machines are retail machines calibrated with as much as 5% error. Being technical helps. Being able to talk confidently about statistics, errors in measurement, etc makes it plausible.

I also asked her what she weighed the last time and prompt came the reply 117lbs. It did not seem so bad, but I knew better than to tell her that. So I casually asked her if she humor me by checking her weight again for my benefit.

Imagine my surprise and her shock when the machine stubbornly showed 116lbs!!

My wife no longer likes to talk about her weight problem with me.

Jannavi's Moment of Clarity

Jannavi sent this as an email to some of our friends on May 28, 2004. She says nice things about my writing, but you all will admit that when it comes from the heart as this one does, it is really good. A cliche definitely, I just wish I wrote such cliche :-)

Disclaimer: I have taken the liberty of fixing typos and reformatted the email. No other change has been made to the original email.

Hi Everyone,

Sitting at home yesterday, I was just thinking about things that happened in my recent past and I thought I should send this mail to all of you about how my life, our lives, has changed, and how it is actually helping me have a different perspective. I do apologize if it is a bit long and disconnected, i am penning this as my thoughts are forming....

When I met Raag, in 1991, he joked at the way I planned my life, I only saw in multiples of 5 and 10 into the future. I planned for us, with an attitude that, I would make it happen exactly as I envisioned. I planned.

When we had Devayani in 1995, I planned months ahead how I would bring her up. I had detailed plans of what she will be when she grows up. This, even before she knew how to walk! I planned.

When we were looking for a house in MD, I was paranoid I would not get into a good school district. My daughter was 3 and I was planning her high school graduation. Raag and I fought everyday about the house we wanted. He didn't care about schools, I didn't care about commute time. We bought a house far from his job, and not in the greatest school district and I was upset it did not go with my long term 'plan'.

When we started trying for a second child back in 1999, I was 'planning' yet again I wanted only a summer baby because I didn't want to have my child lose a year by being born in winter. I 'planned' for a summer baby because I thought it would suit Raag well during his trips to and from the hospital. I planned.

When I lost my job last year, my world came crashing down around me. We were going to have a baby. What were we going to do with one job down and how were we going to pay for college for two kids. My distant future plans were upset. I had to get a job, and I did. My plans were still intact, till the miscarriage.

After all this, here I am. Devayani is doing so well at her school, that I am happy we bought this house when we did. We survived a car accident that few can live to talk about. I have discovered that I have such a resilient daughter, she makes me proud everyday. In the end of March this year, I was laid off again. I realize I am actually happy. I am happy to be home. I haven't had any of the knee jerk reactions I had during last year's layoff like cutting down on expenses, vacations, activities for Devayani, none of that. We had such a wonderful vacation hiking in Utah and CA and for something we hardly 'planned', it was our best trip. And this was two days after I lost my job, very unlike me.

The events in our lives, has shown me what a fool I have been all these years. What was I thinking when I said I can tackle life and control it to my liking. How I have wasted my time planning into a future I have no control of. It is sad that we had to go thru the things we did to have such an eyeopener (I am not being sarcastic).

All I want to say is, live for the moment. Cherish what you have now, and don't think what all you can have in the future. Don't plan so far into the future, that you forget to enjoy the present. So if you ask me what my plans are for Labor Day or Jul 4 weekend, I will smile, and tell you, I don't know what I am doing tomorrow. And you know what, it is not because I am afraid of the future, it is because I am really enjoying life this way. Stopping for all the small joys around me because I don't know what is in store for me tomorrow, and I don't care to know about it
today.

I hope I didn't bore you.

Cliche

I never have original thoughts. I despair of ever having original thoughts. In fact I cannot recollect ever having had one. I have had a few quips, a pun here or there, some word play that resulted in a neat joke. But an original thought that can be go toe to toe with those by say Mark Twain; nah that does not seem to be in my fortune in this birth.

You must be thinking "What arrogance, guy can't bat 0.25 but wants to hit a Grand Slam!! He has to request, say please, sometimes pretty please, several times .... to get people to read his blogs and he has the effrontery to refer to Mark Twain. Get real!!"

Anyway, there have been times, albeit rarely, when I have had moments of clarity, when an epiphany arose (Disclaimer - moments not induced by LSD or any other stimulants). Later after passage of some time when I make an attempt to recapture those thoughts they no longer feel as impressive. In fact they come across as common place or cliched. But then after several days of inaction I am left with a feeling of discontent that maybe I had a good idea but never followed it up.

Maybe it is not merely having an epiphany that is important, it is what we do with it that makes it relevant. We need to develop them, polish them and finally present them to a discerning audience. Maybe all great ideas start as a epiphany, only in these cases the author has the extraordinary drive to take this idea from his brain and successfully plant it several million brains. It is our choice whether we let our ideas live or die. Does that make sense?

Hey maybe the previous para counts as a decent thought?

So when last time a thought occurred I took the decision to in the future put it down in writing. So rather than present it as original thought I decided to set it out in blogosphere and see what people think and let them judge its triteness. But thinking is hard and I do not mean idle thoughts of winning 100 million dollars in a lottery, but real, to the point, purposeful thinking. This is compounded by the fact that I am out of practice. If thinking is hard, writing is harder. Anybody can write, only a few can command the attention of the reader.

So what is the cliche for this week?

I am sorry I forgot what it is :-). It is probably not as important as the resolution it led to, which is --

In the future when a wonderfully cliched idea hits me you will be the first one to hear it.

NONZERO - Book

Games like Chess have a simple proposition; I win, you lose; you win, I lose. Both cannot win at the same time. Games like these are called Zero Sum Games. The opposite of this is Non-zero-Sum where the sum of gains and losses by the players are always more or less than what they began with.

This concept was developed in Game Theory where players choose different action to maximize their returns. It turns out that although developed as a tool at the height of cold war, it has ended up being a useful in day to day affairs involving negotiations between two parties.

Trivial as these concepts seem at first, it turns out the life itself is a large scale Non-Zero-Sum Game operating at many levels!! Nature has been doing its own research on Game Theory for billions of years!! Genes subsume their individuality teaming with other genes to form viruses, bacteria and other single celled creatures. Cells get together and form multi-cellular organisms with continuous evolution in complexity. At each point the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The implication here is that life presents us with scenarios that may seem adversarial at first glance only to reveal opportunities for cooperation.

The book I want to talk about is NONZERO is by Robert Wright

This book takes a slight slant in it that; it claims that cultural development is predictably always in forward. Although politically incorrect to label earlier cultures as progressing from "Savagery", "barbarians", "low barbarians" to finally "civilized", it was felt by looking back at over the past several millennium that historical forces inevitably forced a cultural evolution along those lines.

This book describes several cultures spread over several millennium with examples spanning five continents. In each case the author makes a convincing case for direction of the arrow of culture as moving forward; towards greater social complexity and interdependence. He shows by clear examples how repeatedly in history there has been major technology shifts that convinces that generation that they are living in a period of great change!! Each technological leap increases the possibility of Nonzero-sumness leading to even greater interdependence.

Read also The Evolution of Cooperation by Axelrod for more on this topic.

Importance of a 20 Rupees

As you all know (since I do not fail to mention it in all my conversations) I have been travelling to India often in the past year and a half. The past 3 visits have all been to Chennai which happens to be the location of the company we are doing business with. The name of this company is Adventnet and they have a unusual product line called Zoho. Adventnet is well known in network management circles and Zoho is now making a name for itself. Rather than describe the various Zoho Products in any level of details, I will just say this; very soon (no prediction on the time line) you will not be using Microsoft Office. Check them out. Consider this para as a plug for Zoho.

Getting back to my topic; I usually take a cab to go back and forth from my house in Indira Nagar where my parents live when they are not in Delhi. Yup, my parents are very Cosmo. I get my cab from Sai Cab, decently reliable guys, average cars, and affordable (definitely a plug). The bill for the trip is 280 rupees and I always round it to Rs. 300.

On one of the morning rides I did not have change and that is also OK with these guys, they do not mind accepting payment the next day. In the evening I got both the receipts but the evening driver (heretofore referred to as Driver II) was a different person and I was wondering how I could ensure that the tip from the morning trip reached the correct driver (heretofore referred to as Driver I). So I did a quick addition and proffered 600 rupees and asked for 20 back (280 from morning + 280 from evening and 20 for evening tip, in case you are wondering). Needless to say these guys do not carry almost any money!! I got a little flustered and it showed in my face.

If you are wondering where this is all going, be a little more patient. The end is near.

Driver II was quite astute (he in my opinion is under utilized) read my mind clearly. He told me not to worry and that the Driver I from morning had given him the bill from morning ride and told him clearly that I would give 20 rupees tip for the morning ride and that he (Driver II) better see to it that it reaches him (Driver I). The man actually gave clear injunctions to ensure that that this seemingly small amount (for american: 20 rupees = 50 cents) reached him!! Yeah, I intended to tip him, but I was also merely rounding the number to make it easy on myself!!