Why is everyone going on and on about Twitter? Why?

Technology is weird. Everything happens in “Internet time”, a new combination of space and time in which none of the old rules matter, or so we are led to believe. In the late 90s, there were hundreds of new ideas that promised to magically “revolutionize the way we live, work and play”. These ideas became businesses overnight which got VC funding, making it look a lot more important than it was and making the VCs look a lot more inane than they were. The typical war cries of the day were “it’s different this time” and “you just don’t get it because you are so old fashioned” and “we live in the New Economy now”; all of which sounded admirably bold at that time, but turned out to be painfully wrong a few years later. In case you didn’t notice, revolutionary ideas are hard to come by (perhaps one every few decades?), else they wouldn’t be so revolutionary now, would they?

To me, all Twitter does is add more noise to an already tedius cacophony, 140 bytes at a time. A new way of communication it is most definitely not. It’s not going to enlighten millions and transform the way we conduct our lives. Neither is orkut, or Facebook, or Wave, for that matter. I guess we feel incomplete and idle if we don’t make a fuss out of something every once in a while, and Twitter happens to be that something right now. Perhaps tomorrow it’s going to be pets.com again?

But, I complain too much.

Let me put it simply. Twitter is not going to change the way we live, work, play or communicate. It’s just not. Sure, there are going to be interesting things done with it while it’s such a cool, hot thing, but I just don’t see it enduring the test of time. A whole bunch of people are going to check it out just so that they can be seen as hip and trendy, but the only way the whole concept is going is the way of the lovely yet extinct dodo bird. Nobody’s going to care in ten years.

There are a few very simple, fundamental reasons why I believe this is how it’s going to turn out.

First in line, Twitter does not solve a hard enough problem that people care about. In fact, as far as my cynical eyes go, Twitter doesn’t do anything. It might be around in some way, shape or form, but I seriously doubt if it’s going to be anywhere as revolutionary as its followers claim it’ll be. For instance, the telephone was revolutionary because it solved a real problem: removing the physical constraint in communication. Notice how videophones were touted as the next big thing and no one has one right now? Just like the incremental value of having a videophone versus a normal telephone was just not something people cared about enough to warrant lasting, widespread adoption, the incremental value of going from blogs to tweets doesn’t look like something people will care about in the long term.

Moreover, an idea that is fundamentally based on participatory narcissism doesn’t sound terribly life-changing to me. Why exactly does humanity need to keep everyone updated on what they’re up to every instant?

The most vehement argument for how Twitter is such a fantastic idea is the comparison to the success of blogs. Much as I’d rather not, let’s look at this (sloppy) comparison for a second. Blogs (again, who came up with this name?) became popular not because they created a new “revolutionary” medium of communication, but because it lowered the barrier to entry to creating a website all the way down to a certain psycho-technological tipping point that it pretty much forced mass adoption. In other words, blogs became popular because the barrier to entry to creating content on the Web dropped, essentially, to zero. That’s all there was to it.

And if you look at the quality of the millions of blogs that have surfaced out of this “new way to communicate”, only a tiny fraction are worth your time. To be fair, that has nothing to do with the Internet, or blogs, because the success behind a great website has very little to do with being a website and has everything to do with the amount of work, creativity and content you can generate and these, sadly, are not as easy to come by as completing a form and a captcha to sign up to blogspot.com.

The final nail in the coffin is the sheer mania surrounding it. Twitter is so enormously popular today that it’s all likely downhill from here. The press is all ga-ga about how great Twitter is (just like how great pets.com must’ve been in 1999) on mainstream media including the Financical Times, the International Herald Tribune and of course, TIME Magazine. This gives me more, not less, conviction that we have a dodo on our hands.

Here’s a thought: if you’re the hot new thing, the first sign of worry you should have about your product or concept or idea fading into insignificance is when it hits the cover of TIME. Journalists are not paid to understand (and hence not very particular about) how things are going to be, they get paid to report what was hot last month. Ergo, they are loth to making the classic mistake of extrapolating the recent past into the far future. Which is almost always wrong.

I don’t know for sure how the future is going to look like. But if I were a betting man, I would bet that Twitter would be forgotten (read: won’t be anywhere as popular) five years hence. That’s just me. And I’m not even getting into how they’re planning to create a sustainable business around it. There’s only so far that the words “ad revenues” will take you.

It’s so easy to lose context.

Naysayers like me are always made aware that thingamajigs like these are also an entertainment medium (“timepass”, as we say in India), just like orkut is, and entertainment is a basic human trait that has endured centuries. That’s probably got some grain of truth to it, but then, something else will come along tomorrow that will steal attention away from the current hot thing, just like attention went from MySpace to orkut to Facebook. In fact, the avante-garde in Japan are already on to something that the rest of us are going to find out only in a few years.

Do I see humans using social networking and tweets as a fundamental basis of communication 50 years from now? No. Human nature works on time scales far longer than Internet time. It’s going to take hundreds of years to even begin to try and change the way we truly communicate (email might eventually get there, but emails are just letters, and we’ve been writing them for hundreds of years).

Till then, I’m going to be here by my non-touchscreen keyboard, writing complete words and sentences with no missing alphabets and all, ‘coz tweets just ain’t for me.

Quick anecdote, fresh from the English summer: I was playing at a local badminton club yesterday and realized that the scoring system I had always played in until as recently as 2007 back in business school (wherein one gains a point only after winning back the serve and games end at 15) had quietly become relegated, unbeknownst to me, into what was called the “old system”.

In the new era, games end at 21 and you wins points (and the serve back) every time you win a rally (even if that is off your opponent’s serve).  I must’ve looked like a complete dork for the first 15 minutes as I was utterly oblivious to such tectonic movements in the badminton world. After several instances of people shuffling me into the right “box” to serve from, and being appropriately befuddled, I had to stop and enquire what the heck was going on. Which is when someone explained that “things have changed some”!

In other news, I have had to “sanitize” some content on my site for compliance and legal reasons, so the astute visitor might find that some content has been moved around. Well, what can I say, “things have changed some.”

Update: Just talked to one of my old badminton buddies. It looks like it’s not a recent change and has been around for at least 3-4 years. Um, my bad.

So without further ado, here’s my investor’s bookshelf which will hopefully be updated as I read/buy more. Note that I’m putting up only books that I deem (hear, hear) directly relevant to investing and markets so regrettably this won’t include such gems as Understanding Comics and Influence. If I’m sufficiently motivated, I might even write one page for each category of books I read and enjoy.

Investing, capital markets and other such whatnots

• The Aggressive Conservative Investor. Martin Whitman is one of the two original ideas in investing – Whitman carries the immense force of his ideas lightly – a classic. The other is Value Investing.
• Graham & Dodd’s 1940 edition of Security Analysis. The Intelligent Investor is the more accessible version. One of the two original ideas in investing.
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits. Accessible yet superb – the “scuttlebutt” approach is outlined here by Fisher.
• Warren Buffett’s Shareholder Letters. Buffett is surely in the league of the greatest value investors of all time, but that’s not the only thing that’s special about his letters to Berkshire shareholders. These are shareholder letters like no other – straight-shooting, candid and bold. How many Chairmen of a publicly traded companies write about their mistakes as eloquently and fearlessly as their successes? Full of witty, poignant epigrams. Available online. Free.
• Ahead of the Curve. Pragmatic applications of macroeconomic indicators for stock market investing and forecasting, written by a very successful sell-side consumer/retail analyst on Wall Street.
• More than you know. Behavioral finance, psychological aspects of investing and thinking about how to think in the capital markers.
• Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. Both by Nassim Taleb dealing with meta-issues in finance and investing.
• One up on Wall Street. Get inside the head of one of the most successful equity fund managers of all time. I’ve met Peter many times and believe me, this is sage advice from the master himself.
• Inside the House of Money. Hedge fund investing.
• Market Wizards: Interviews with top traders. As advertised!
• When Genius Failed. A top finance journalist chronicles the meteoric rise and the precipitous fall of LTCM.
• Hot Commodities. Investment Biker. Adventure Capitalist. Very light reading, but deliciously litteredwith nuggets of investment wisdom from Jim Rogers, co-founder of the Quantum fund with George Soros.
• Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Lessons from history ranging from witch hunts, the South Sea Bubble and the tulip-mania.
• Manias, Panics and Crashes. It’s spooky how history repeats itself, how the cycle of boom and bust seems to flow inexorably from greed to fear to anxiety. Written by one of the foremost financial historians who peers back to the 1600s and 1800s all the way to the 2000s. Kindleberger clearly illustrates how human nature is unchanging and how manias, panics and crashes will look and smell just the same irrespective of what year it is.
• The Great Crash of 1929. A recount of those fateful years.
• Liar’s Poker. Michael’s Lewis’s hilarious classic. Lewis is an exceptional writer, with the uncanny ability to reduce all to nothing with his scathing sarcasm and wry, observational wit.
• Investment Philosophies. Prof. Damodaran takes a look at some of the most successful investors of all time and the strategies that they put to work for them. Buffett to Lynch to Soros.
• The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. Mandelbrot contends that the traditional view of finance that is accepted and practised by Wall Street today is nearly indistinguishable from balderdash and that a new world-view is imminent if we are to make any sense of how markets work. He uses fractal math as the backbone of this better world-view and explains why fractal randomness has better explanatory power than your friendly, neighborhood Guassian curve.

Update: 19/06/2009

• Mr. Market Miscalculates. Jim Grant’s latest offering. Not to be missed, especially if you read Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.
• Distress Investing: Principles and Technique. Martin Whitman’s latest on value investing.
• Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation. David Dreman’s words of wisdom on going against the crowd.
• Theory of Investment Value. John Burr Williams. A classic.
• The Economic Consequences of the Peace & The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; by John Maynard Keynes. ‘nuf said.
• Readings in Economics. A collection of essays in economics written by some of the best economists in modern history.
• Exchange Rates and International Finance. The first step in unraveling the mysteries of the FX markets–”how it ought to work.”
• The Handbook of Fixed Income Securities. Frank Fabozzi is the “Graham & Dodd” of the fixed income world. I spent many a sleepless night in Hong Kong bent over this weighty tome.

I have a problem with the word “blog.” No, really. I don’t mind “website”, “web page” or “webspace.” On a particularly delightful day, I might even be hand-wavy at “weblog.” But the word “blog” is a downright irritant and has the unfailing effect of bringing out a wince on my face.

What the hell kind of a person calls a weblog a blog? What the hell kind of a word is it anyway? Frankly, it sounds as if a set of jovial air molecules bounced off the diaphragm, all excited about tunneling through space, made their way to the larynx in unquestionable earnestness, well motivated to script a masterpiece in the oral cavity, and then, suddenly, for no good reason, got all muddle-headed, chickened out, and ran off the nearest bodily orifice that they could aim at–producing in sum total what I can only describe as a greasy half-choke from a wet, clogged and dingy windpipe.

Surely, there is only one other word that is even more irksome.

If the appalling insult from “blog” wasn’t quite enough, someone who was smoking some serious pot must have come up with “bllll-ogg-O-sss-pee-errr.” Don’t even get me started on that. Every time I think of it, I am overpowered with a blistering cavalcade of emotions that it tires me physically to even try and condemn it. I spend all my energy trying to choose which ridicule to throw at it that all I can finally do is grit my teeth, sigh heavily, roll my eyes (strictly in that order) and then, slowly, gently, smilingly, try and think of a particularly delightful day.

Exactly one day after I wrote that Jeff and Joel are two of my favourite writers, both of them announce a joint venture they’re doing called stackoverflow.com which is the new Usenet/newsgroup. For the dear reader who perhaps has not seen the wonder that is the Usenet – I learnt most of my real coding through Usenet usegroups – comp.lang.c and the like, so this is a huge deal and if successful, could be insanely significant to pragmatic software development as a whole.

The idea is, prima facie, the perfect solution (massive information portal for programmers) that solves a diffcult and real problem (getting better at programming) which is borne from correct observation (programmers learn programming through Q&A with other programmers) and which has only a poor current solution (information buried in newsgroups, forums, blogs and scattered all over the Internet).

But I have to say I’m a bit skeptical of how exactly they’re going to execute this. How will it be different from a normal forum? How will they centralize the current knowledge-base of information into the new site? How will they replicate the newsgroup-like feel of the late 1990s?

At any rate, it should be very interesting to see two incisive and sharp observational software developers tackle this problem.

What does a talentless, soporific New Age writer do when he realizes he is all three? Simple: he points elsewhere.

1. Abnormal Returns: I’m not a fan of talentless, soporific New Age writers who point somewhere else, but this is a happy exception. The average quality of content being pointed to is very high and it’s updated daily (content and fresh content). Everything is about the financial markets, so if you are like me, you’ll just read and nod your head, pretending to understand what all that means.
2. Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood: Two of my favourite software engineering writers out there who talk about the one aspect of technology that everyone forgets–human beings–are Spolsky (of Joel on Software) and Atwood. It’s been a while since I compiled source in a real programming language, but I still ardently follow the human side of software very closely. And I still think it’s the ubelievably rare manager who understands the human side of anything. I’ve been reading them for ages (and to my credit, much before say, Joel became so popular), and I can’t speak highly enough of them to practising professionals of the software craft.
3. Noah Grey photography: Stunning work. Again, a long-time fan and follower of Noah’s work and I recommend her to you. Her ahem, greyscale shots are powerful.
4. Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters: Absolute gems, each of them. If you have any interest in investing, you should read all of them, word for word, starting from 1977.

So there ya go, I’m now what you might call, “four point someone.”

WEDDING (n.) A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, and then spend the rest of their lives deciding which one.

Dear, Dear Reader:

(Nota Bene: The crucial details are right at the end, so if you are busy, maybe the scroll down button is a good idea.)

We find the prospect of authoring the perfect wedding invitation very daunting indeed – it is quite the Herculean task to string the right words in sequence, suggesting just just the right tone and quality and affection. Nevertheless, write we must, but pray allow us to indulge you in the slightly rocky path that led to it.

We tried everything. Believe us, we did. We tried the time-honored invite – “It gives us immense pleasure to solicit your gracious presence on the occasion of our wedding…”, but for some strange reason, copy-and-paste didn’t work, so that left us staring blankly at the keyboard again.

We then toyed around with the idea of creating waves by a brilliant and singularly ingenious piece of writing accompanied by a series of HDR enhanced photographs – but quickly realized that we had neither the creative genius nor the appropriate camera to perform such a feat.

Then came the idea of Pluto. There was a really, really, really cool idea about Pluto. Yes, most definitely something related to Pluto. And Godel. Pluto and Godel. (Sound of furniture against human head). Ah well.

Relentless in our pursuit, we thought maybe we should turn to China, with it growing 10% per year and all. Something about yin and yang struck us as a little, er, circular in logic, so we abandoned that as well.

(Now you get why it took us so long to get the invite to you, don’t you?)

But anyhow, throwing brevity to the winds and after much deliberation (some of which we have elected to impose on you in the above paragraphs), we finally came to a most surprising conclusion that the secret to the perfect invitation, of course, is to find the perfect name to put down on it and find the perfect person behind that perfect name. Voila! Double checking how to spell David Beckham and Victoria Beckham, we finally knew that we’d cracked it.

So. Where were we. Ah yes, the invite. Without much further ado (observe how we’ve not created much, ahem, ado), we’re just going to invite you to partake in our wedding as we embark on our journey together. Oil’s almost $100 a barrel and we have no car, so it would greatly help if you could bring along any of those as well. Just kidding! All we need is a private jet, actually.

But seriously, it would be wonderful if you could make it to our wedding and wish us luck – we already can’t stand each other. So scroll down to the very end for the details (venue, date and time).

We’d be delighted to make arrangements for you (however, we regret to inform you that due to unprecedented demand, time travel is currently fully booked) – so if you’d like us to, give us a shout and we can work out the logistics.

Hope to see you there, and do not hesitate to call either of us if you have any questions!

Much love and peace,
Ramesh and Rashie

Time for some trivia. I work out of the same building as the London Stock Exchange at Paternoster Square. Here is a view from the inside. What you see in the picture is the famed artwork of Greyworld called The Source, which is a physical representation of the stock markets, a full eight stories high! Wikipedia has this to say about it:

A cube of 9×9x9 (729 in total) spherical balls are suspended on cables that run the full 32 metres height of the main atrium of the newly designed building. These spheres, controlled by a computer running Python scripts, can move themselves independently of each other, forming dynamic shapes, characters and fluid-like motions that reflects the nature of the stock market itself. The sculpture opens the market each morning at 8am, with the spheres breaking free from their default cube arrangement to form elegant patterns and shapes. Throughout the day the sculpture responds to reputable news feed and displays snapshots of the current headlines, written in full height of the atrium. At the end of each day’s trading the spheres return to their cubed arrangement, resting on the sculpture’s base, and blue lights inside each sphere are illuminated to show the stock market’s closing price with an arrow to indicate how the market performed on that particular day.

Now this is the kind of stuff that geeks like me find way, way, way cool. Can’t help it!

Email

Email remains the same (both IIMB and GMail addresses still work perfectly). I am now able to access email through my mobile hand-held, so that’s the preferred first-stop mode of communication.

It so came to pass that I was digging through my old archives of backed up files and folders; and lo, I find this piece of writing in the mishmash. I post it here since I think it is valuable enough to not lose, and valuable enough to share. I have no clue where I got this from, but I think it is a translation of an Indian regional author’s work. Anyhow, I thought it was quite a powerful piece, which is why I typed it in almost a decade back. Here it is:

The Invaluable Moment

You and I – the reality is going to end any moment now. And then, you alone will remain.

You, alone.

The time for my final journey is fast approaching. The anguish welling up in my heart will burst forth like a rain cloud and shatter my very being.

My friends are unaware of this sad fact. When they visit me, I crack jokes as usual and they cannot contain their laughter. To entertain them, I narrate humorous anecdotes. Laugh with them. They do not hear the rumbling notes of sadness in my laughter.

Here I am. About to merge with nothingness.

Nothingness.

An inconsequential event – or is it a very important one? Something did happen. Is that what is important?

Anyway, I am that invaluable moment caught between two planes of existence–the past standing on the threshold of the present, and today which is goig to merge completely into yesterday… with the countless yugas… the chaturyugas… the eternal… the infinite… the neverending yesterday.

I bid farewell. It is all over.

No. It is going to be over.

From the next moment onwards, I will be a part of those countless yesterdays cast into oblivion.

Many of my friends and those who I loved dearly have gone already. Where are they, the multitudes who left before me? Memory constantly returns to the beginning.

The beginning…

I feel as if I have finally reached the unknown boundary of eternity’s mystery. Here it is! A resonant echo of Pranava’s jubiliation?

Are you listening?

All this time, you loved me with boundless compassion. You suffered me. And you knew me. For you, I am an open book you can read and sense leisurely at your own convenience.

But you are still a great enigma for me. In all these years, it has not been possible for me to know anything about you. Unawares, I loved you. Unawares, I hated you. Have I wantonly ever caused you pain? Even if I had, you loved me. Suffered me.

I have divulged many of my secrets to you. You have witnessed all my actions. Will you make me a laughing stock?

Here, I leave you. Even as I go, I continue to love you. When was it that you and I got to know each other? Or, did we ever know each other? I tried, though. Eventually, I learned only to love you. No, I never could comprehend anything clearly. Essentially, I knew nothing.

Nothing.

Alone I came into this world. Alone I go now. The time for that journey is drawing near. And you alone will remain.

You, alone.

[Unknown author and translator: if you know the correct source for this piece, do drop an email]

Three links for your browsing pleasure. Not one more, not one less. Three it shall be.

1. The Best Page in the Universe: is arrogant, funny and uses language that might be termed offensive in most Parliaments. “This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong.”
2. The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: is written by a “wanted dead/alive” anonymous blogger who writes the blog in first person. Well, in Steve Jobs’ first person. Hilarious! “I love beautiful objects. I love creating them. Negative people upset me.”
3. Yellowtext: is, as per Andy, a Colossal Waste of Bandwidth. Perhaps, but it sure won’t be a colossal waste of your time–if you like good-humoured writing, that is. Andy is a professional writer. He is also an entertaining comedian. And both traits show. “You Love me so much that you want to Hurt me.”

Bookmark ‘em away!

The news

IIM Bangalore has decided to go public and fully transparent with their flagship PGP selection process. I, for one, welcome that! Apparently, there’s been a heated debate amongst IIMB faculty regarding this move, but it’s now official. A 5-page document detailing the admission process is available on the IIMB website.

I’m sure the process is somewhat similar across the IIMs, though the big B is known for a lot of what is known in the circuit as single-calls, that is, candidates who are invited for interviewing with IIMB though they do not have calls from the other IIMs. The document sure answers a lot of questions about the admission process.

You can read the process description yourself and make your own judgments. But here’s the low-down, if you don’t want to bother.

Pre-GD/PI break-up:

• CAT: 20 points
• 10th Board Exam: 15 points
• 12th Board Exam: 10 points
• Bachelors Degree: 15 points

Post-GD/PI additions:

• Work experience: 5 points
• Group Discussion score: 7.5 points
• Group Discussion summary score: 7.5 points
• Personal Interview score: 20 points

Quick thoughts

One. The process is, as expected, rigorous (read the work-experience section in the document to get a feel of why I say that). It takes into account historical data of students and its correlation to their performance at IIM Bangalore to determine the weights and factors to be considered for the next batches. It’s a quaint field of math known as multivariate analysis. Don’t bother. It can’t be proved that it’s the best way to process admissions, but it sure is the only way that is objective and looks successful, from the outside, at least.

Two. Candidates with spikes in even one area (like super-stellar 10th Board exam scores (think, uh, 98.5% or more)) are invited for the GD/PI stage, though, however, their performance has to match with the general pool for final offer of admission.

Three. Past performance has to be both high and consistent.

Four. Work experience is surprisingly weighted at only 5 points. I personally think work experience has to be given more weight in admissions and believe (nay, know) that this is the single most important thing that the IIMs can do to take the IIM brand truly global. I wouldn’t have said this before my IIMB days. I wouldn’t have said this after one year of IIMB. But I sure do say it now. If you’re a CAT aspirant and don’t have any work experience, I strongly, strongly suggest that you work for 2-3 years in the real business world before you do your MBA. It will do wonders to what you will take away from your 2 years of higher education.

Five. The biggest surprise is, however, that the CAT score has only 20 points weight. And will account for an even lower weight when it comes to the aggregate total used for giving out final offers. Whoa. That sure sets a whole lot of delusions about the CAT to rest. The common perception had been that the CAT is well over 70% of your story, which I suspect has been a story constructed by coaching institutes. Ah well. Not that it’s going to change anything, but still, nice to know. The truth about the de-emphasis on CAT is bad news for under-performers during 10th, 12th and under-grad, but this was not entirely unexpected. If you took a walk inside any of the IIMs, you’d find that the place is densely populated with heavy academic performers who also happen to be great with extracurrics (which I think would probably be factored into the Personal Interview score).

Six. I would like to see career success (measured over the immediate 5 years after graduation) being incorporated into this. IIMB is old enough to have data on that and it sure as hell is one heck of an important factor. (Not placement salaries, mind you, but career success. I know that’s a whole Pandora’s hell-hole, but I also know it is more important a factor than CGPA.)

That’s that

I’m sure this will incite numerous debates and upheavals about whether the process is fair, correct, objective, sexist, racist, whatever. But it’s great that IIMB has taken the first step in making the process transparent. It at least gives you a chance to reasonably surmise where you lost out, if you didn’t get a call or an offer, rather than coming out feeling like a total idiot.

If nothing else, it’s saved about 250,000 good folk wasted hours of heated discussions on why they did or did not get calls. Amen.

You can’t escape it, can ya? It’s like potholes on Indian roads–all over the place. And you’ll run into one whether you like it or not, whether you see it or not, whether you approve of it or not.

Harry Potter. Quite like ah, potholes. Heh. (To all those fanatics who are sharpening a lead pencil to poke my eyes out with, I offer much love and peace. Hang on a moment more, please. I am not ah, growling against your beloved Rowling.)

But anyways, back to the show, which is this: a brief theory of Potterdom.

You are a die-hard Potter-head (not just the I-like-Potter kind, but the I-worship-Rowling kind), IF:

• Potter is your first dose of the fantasy genre or even science fiction. More specifically, you haven’t read, say, Ursula Le Guin’s (the Earthsea series), Tolkien (not just The Lord of the Rings) or Asimov (the Foundation series) before your eyes runneth over Rowling. [*]
• You’ve never read anything substantially different from Enid Blyton or Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew or Trixie Belden as a child.
• The unavoidable exception to the rule: is if your kids love it, and you read it out aloud for them during bed-time, though you are not yourself a Potter nut

(Yes, yes, I know there are exceptions. All that I’m saying is that the above hypothesis will hold for 80% of the Potter-nutty clan. I really am having difficulty figuring out what it is exactly that draws millions to Rowling, but not even Tolkien has had that effect.)

Now don’t get me wrong here. I am not bashing Rowling or the Potter series. I too have cult-like worshipping tendencies towards many authors (Tolkien and Conan Doyle for instance). I truly admire the way she has been able to rejuvenate reading for millions around the world. She’s done more to help instill the reading habit in youngsters than probably every previous author in history. In an age where kids waste away their precious youth in front of the Internet doing God knows what, she has been a wonderful Messiah.

It’s difficult to imagine the young adults who grew up reading Potter to suddenly abandon books altogether and go back to being couch and mouse potatotes right after the epilogue of the Deathly Hallows. The formative years of your life impact your reading habit more than any other phase. Kudos to Rowling–even if she didn’t intend it, she’s made it possible for GenNext (or whatever it is that they call themselves now) to finally know that Gutenberg exists on the same Web as orkut.

If anyone has a better theory of explaining Rowling’s success with both youngsters and adults alike, I’d love to hear it.

So long then, till we meet at one of ‘em potholes.

[*] Yes, there are others too. Terry Pratchett, Christopher Paolini, Douglas Adams, whatever. I just picked three.

Well, Chennai is hot. Smeltering hot. That’s not so bad in itself, but, I had to be in it for two days. And my primary mode of transport was auto-rickshaws, and so, as Ali would say, “Oh blimey.”

Now anyone who’s gone to Chennai knows the highway robbery and pillage that is the auto-rickshaw system. (It’s worse than Bangalore, if such a thing is possible.) Now, my mother tongue is Tamil, and in spite of living my life as a youngling in Kerala, I know how madly these rickshaw fellows love Rajni and all that, but that didn’t stop them from trying their hand at looting my money. The extortion ranges from charging 2x to 5x. I kid you not.

I wasn’t the one to let go, however. After getting ripped a couple of times, I perfected the strategy of the flat-rate fare. I refused to get into any rickshaw that charged more than Rs. 25 for 2 kms (which in itself is over-priced, but what the hell, I couldn’t do anything about it, and I’d be there only for a couple of days). Here’s how the conversation would go:

• Rickie (which is what we’ll call our friendly neighborhood auto-rickshaw driver): Enga ponam saar? (Where do you want to go, sir?)
• Me: Nungumbakkam, evalau? (To Nungumbakkam, how much?)
• Rickie: 80 rupees, saar
• Me: WHAT? 25. Are you coming or not?

At this point, 20% of rickies would smirk and ask me to get lost. Fair enough. Here’s how it would go for the rest of them.

• Rickie: Enna saar, anyayama sollarengo. (What is this sir, you’re quoting an unfair amount.)
• Me: 25. Varengala, illaya? (25. Are you coming, or not?)
• Rickie: 50 kudungo saar. (Give 50, sir.)
• Me: 25. Veena time waste pannathengo. 25. (25. Don’t waste my time. 25.)

At this point, 50% of the remaining 80% rickies would just drive away, swearing under their breath. For the remaining 50%:

• Rickie: 35 kundungo. (Give 35)
• Me (almost shouting at this point, for effect): TWENTY FIVE.
• Rickie: Seri saar, 5 rupees extra kudungo. 30. (Ok sir, give me 5 rupees more. 30.)

At this point, depending on my level of patience, the time-sensitivity of my appointment, and other cheerful factors like the angular momentum of Jupiter, I’d give in and go with 30. Else, the story would go on till we hit 25. Note however, that the time required to go from 30 to 25 is the proverbial last mile. It takes as much shouting and bargaining as bringing it from X to 30.

(I also noticed an arguably understandable phenomenon. When I was dressed in formals, carried a folder and had no stubble on, the initial asking rate went up by Rs. 30-50. So inversely, if I were drunk, wore torn clothes, and spoke with a slur, maybe they’ll charge me reasonably?)

Democracy is kind of sad. It purpotedly gives people the power, but guess what, people are least bothered to use it. All we can do is sit and bitch about the notorious, money mongering drivers–those bastards–over dinner at a relative’s place, but to move our collective asses into action in demanding our own civil rights–not a single soul is prepared to do it. Talk about moral hypocrisy.

It’s cute as long as there are economic trickle-down effects. But there are more serious undercurrents. The very fact that one of the major transport services in a major metro in India can be like this is proof of middle-class apathy. We are not bothered. We are not even indignant. I’m afraid, then, that we fully deserve the kind of shit that happens to us.

All it takes, really, is to file a complaint with the Consumer Courts. Even online. Overcharging for services like transport is a civil offence under the Consumer Protection Act, and plying without a meter is an offence too. Ten complaints, followed up, is probably enough to do the trick. That’s it. 10 lousy complaints from a nation of a billion. These rickshaw-wallas can be taken to task. But do we want to take the trouble to fight for our rights? No! This is the second-best example of hypocrisy.

We don’t need a Gandhi; all we need is 1,000 souls, each doing one-thousandth of what Gandhi did: care for the country.

(Now, astute readers will be quick to point out that I am not doing anything in particular either. I confess that I’m nothing more than an armchair activist. When I had the time, I didn’t have the knowledge (that civil action is possible) and now, when I have the knowledge, I am not going to be where I can do it from.)

But well, Bangalore is about ten degrees cooler, and that partly makes up for it.

Euonymous aptronym: An appropriately named name that suits its owner.

A semi-recursive name, the hallmark of a true geek. I was very pleased with myself when I came up with it, and found that there was nothing comparable on Google. Now, searching for euonymous aptronym on Google yields my blog as the top result.

Ah, the simple joys of life.

“I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities… on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.” –Bill Gates at Harvard

After an hour of cleaning up comment spam, I’ve installed reCAPTCHA. From the website:

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

What I really liked about reCAPTCHA vis-a-vis other spam-fighting tools is that, every time a comment is posted after verification by reCAPTCHA, it helps digitize books! As the website explains:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

And what’s more, the developers have also thought about accessibility, so even blind people can use it! Way cool.

To learn more about reCAPTCHA, visit http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html.

One of the greatest miseries of one with a love for writing is that period in which one doesn’t know what to write. It would be safe to say that I am very much entrenched in that morbid space. Every day for the last week, I have fired up my blog editor, stared into the void that is the text box for fifteen unending minutes, and then shut it down with the exasperation of Nadal trying to outwit Federer. But I have to get myself out of it, and the best way is, as old advice goes, to just do it. The more you write, the more you can write.

So this one’s about chess. Or more specifically, about my continuing wrestle with mastering chess.

It began quite late, this fascination with chess, when I was somewhere in the final year of my undergraduate engineering degree. I was aware of the existence of the game befoe that, but I only faintly remember trying to learn chess from my father. The spark in me was ignited only much later (partly due to the fact that no one at home or around me was maniacally passionate about chess, as I am now).

I remember playing hours together on the Internet (on the Free Internet Chess Server), a server that mostly serious players use. I used to play 20 games per hour for weeks, such was my intense liking for chess. I used Yahoo first, but found the interface much to my dislike and the players not exactly professionals. FICS has a userbase that consists of a heck of a lot of serious players–club, tournament and professional–and quite understandably, as it was started as a substitute for ICC, the Internet Chess Club, which is known to the chess playing community as the best place to find top players–including a lot of GMs. Needless to say, all this mucking around had adverse effects on my grades. But one has to be clear with his priorities in life, I guess.

Well, I got hooked, to say the least. I tortured everyone who came home into playing at least three games of chess with me. I used to literally bully them into playing, badgering them until they quietly (most of the times, that is) succumbed and desperately tried to just get it over with. Some actually beat me with sticks. But anyways, I offer them my deepest apologies.

The chess mania continued for about six months, but I was seeking admission into MBA programmes around that time, and the two subsequent years of MBA from IIM Bangalore completely wiped out any time I had for chess. Now that I’m free again temprarily to torture anyone who comes my way, I’ve picked up chess with a renewed zeal. I now go to a great club here in Bangalore (the Bangalore Chess Academy) headed by Vedant Goswami, an international master with more than 14 years of professional chess teaching and playing experience. 10-year old kids routinely beat me at blitz there, so he must be doing something right.

What was the point of telling you all this? I really don’t know, but let me get to what I really wanted to say.

What I wanted to articulate here was how my attitudes and impressions of learning (mastering) chess have changed since the last time I picked it up. (If you are not interested in chess, the following paragraphis are bound to be boring or incomprehensible to you, so feel free to skip it.)

I started out with the notion that one should learn opening theory as well as openings and variations intensely and then try to develop that into thinking strategically in the middle-game, use positional analysis to supplement them and then use your advantage in finishing the end-game. Turns out, this is an utterly stupid philosophy and the downright wrong way of becoming a strong chess player. Of course, anything goes if you happen to be a chess prodigy, a la Capablanca or Fischer, but I was pretty sure I was neither of them, so that was that. That explained why, even after going through many “advanced” books on chess, that study time translated into absolutely no increase in rating points.

Thankfully for that, I am much wiser now. The first major revelation was the discovery that it just simply takes time to become a stronger player. How much time will depend on how naturally gifted you are in terms of spatial visualization, prophylactic thinking and self-analysis. For me, I figure it’s going to take a year or two of consistent study before I reach expert amateur status. The learning curve becomes flatter after that, and I’d have to put in much more effort per increase in rating point to get to higher levels (namely, IM and GM).

But that’s a long way away. There isn’t a chance in hell that I’m going to be playing chess professionally, but I do want to become a strong player (ie, a player who doesn’t make obvious tactical errors, whose positional analysis is sound even if his strategic understanding of the game is underdeveloped–someone who can justifiably challenge a master, even if he loses the game.)

So here’s my improved game plan.

• Tactics, tactics, tactics. Most amateur games are lost on simply tactical inferiority. And I realized this when I played professionals. So I’m going to devote some time regularly on improving my tactical ability. I frequent the Chess Tactics Server, and I see my tactical vision improving already. I heartily recommend this to both strong and weak players alike.
• Master games. Study of annotated master games. This has had lesser effect on me (but of course, it’s too early to say, it’s just been four weeks), but I can clearly see the potential. This is something Vedant advises his students to do. The idea here is to go through games played by grandmasters. Vedant recommends the earlier masters like Morphy and Alekhine for initial study, simply because they were not guided by the vast amount of opening theory and analysis that is the hallmark of modern chess. Let’s say it’s a Morphy game. You take the place of Morphy and play out the moves on the board. You play the opponent’s moves from the game as it was played, but try to guess Morphy’s move (in other words, the best possible move). After you’ve made your choice, you compare it with what Morphy actually played and then analyze why his/your move is superior.
• Control of the game. That’s easier to describe. Just play a lot of games. As much as you can. The more you play, the more control you will have over the game. There is no point in reading Keres and Kotov’s The Art of the Middle-Game if you can’t control your pieces or see a mate in three. It makes a lot of sense–you’d have more control over a language if you read a lot. Control of the game is a very tacit concept–it refers to an instinctual understanding of the game and comes only with constant play and experience.
• Board vision. I have lost many an exchange just because I didn’t see a perfectly visible bishop in a fianchettoed position or a nasty rook hiding behind its own pieces at the end of a semi-open file. Playing blitz matches helps as you have to move fast and see the board faster to understand your position. It again relates back to tactics training. Another exercise that I found on the Web was something called the Stokyo exercise, wherein you take up a rich middle-game position and write out (yes, write out) all the different variations of play possible from it, without touching any piece on the board or moving it. You then pick out candidates for the most likely moves to be made by each side and decide on an evaluation of each position. You then take your evaluation to a good program (like Fritz) or a strong master (like Vedant) and analyze why each variation was good/bad and whether your evaluation was right/wrong, and why.

It’s pretty exciting, and I feel I’m finally on the right track to improving my game. Whether I will, the next couple of years will tell.

So that’s that. This has turned out to be a much longer post that I expected, so I’m going to do what the one remaining person reading this would want me to do: shut up.

If you have a comment about this, please drop a line at the feedback page.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things.”
–Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter

Why do I even bother? Why do I take the trouble to sit down and write, of all things!, knowing fully well that what I articulate will probably not be as ground-breaking or as eloquent or even as sensible as I would like it to be? What do I get out of it? What do I want out of it? What drives me? What drives writers in general?

Update: Penmanship and me.

I’m no master sculptor or typographer; neither am I a master web designer. But I’ve tried to incorporate as much of common aesthetic sense and reason into my page design as possible–borrowing and learning from the masters of the art, web style and design books, the print media, and using my own design sense (picked up from plain observation) as lagniappe.

Update: There’s more to Web design than just HTML.