Thanksgiving

Well, its the eve of Thanksgiving. Its 5:45. I am sitting at my office writing this post. Which makes me wonder, why am I sitting at my office writing this post? To add injury, to this insult, I am coming in on Friday as well. See, Thursday is Thanksgiving. Saturday and Sunday are holidays (duh!). So, most people with a functioning brain take Friday off, and fly to the Bahamas. However, I took last Thursday and Friday off, on a trip to Vancouver to get my H1B Visa stamped. (Its one of those stupid semi-humiliating things you need to do to work in the US of A.) Given the fact that I have guilt issues, I have been unable to bring myself to taking this Friday off as well. I shall be coming into work, starting up emacs, and running crap through gdb, while the rest of the universe basks in the Bahamian sun. (If you didn't know what the first part meant, its just some technocrap.) Bah! Life is unfair!

To make things a little better, though not all that much, I shall be setting off to good old mid-western praire desert freezing cold and very windy dwelling place, Champaign-Urbana, in the Land of Lincoln, Illinois. This is like a fairly loser thing to do, but who am I to disagree.

Che

No more of this crap. I want to go to Madras. Madras nalla madras.

A nice apartment, a fun interesting job, and nothing really to complain about. However, there is no place like home :).

Besant Nagar Beach. Mount Road. Gangotree. They have the best Bhelpuri I have ever had. Its sad to see the prices being hiked over the last few years.

I want to sit around at home. Have my mom make tea for me in the afternoon. Nice food , nothing to do. Take a walk down the beach in the evening.

Kalakshetra has become so crowded. Why does everyone have to come there?

I miss my grandfather. What would he say if he saw me today? I can't even seem to remember him that clearly. He just seems to come in my dreams.

I want to meet my grandmother. I want to go to Tata house and just sit with all my grandfather's books.

I want to go to IIT. Go around the hostels. Pity I am likely to know little to no one. But, thats ok.

Its December. I have been to the Chennai Open ever since it opened. I probably won't be around this year.

Tennis at Nungambakkam Stadium. 50 bucks an hour. A little expensive but not all that bad.

I want to laze around at Landmark. Go to Satyam with my old school friends. Walk around Khader Nawaz Khan road. Nothing that complicated. None of the fancy bullshit. Just cheap nice pure fun.

Can I have that? I think not. That is life I guess.

On Ballerness

A couple of years back, a Professor from Princeton wrote a book called "On Bullshit", a fine commentary on the chronic human tendency to mis-represent information i.e. lie. That prompted me to name my piece "On Ballerness". It deeply investigates and explores the subject of ballerness.

Historically, balls have always been linked to strength and capacity, though some theorists assert that no real statistically significant link exists between the size of balls and the ability to swing from tree to tree (an obvious manifestation of strength and capacity). There are a number of problems that prevent an establishment of this link, reliable data points being one. However, as we have seen time and again, scientific accuracy has scarcely held back the establishment of beliefs, and this is no exception (Creationism for example).

With the passage of time, the variety of usage of this (spurious?) connection grew. There came to be many word forms.

"Balls to you!" - Which means, you don't possess the article.

"Balls!" - Which means, I posses the article. The article is big and strong, and is a noun, and not a verb. I can swing from tree to tree. If you bullshit me, I will wring your neck and chuck you down from the nearest Banyan.

Soon, this word transmogrified into a verb.

"Ballin" - It is an assertion of the ability to swing from tree to tree. It no longer refers to the possesion of the article that enables the act, but an actual reference to the act that results from the possesion of the article.

"Baller/Ballerz" - It refers to the person who posses large and copious amounts of balls.

The word that greatly interests us right now is the word "Baller". We have all agreed that it refers to this supersonic person who has the ability to swing from tree to tree with reckless abandon. However, as swinging from tree to tree is a dangerous activity, alternate forms of expression of the same primeval ability emerged. Also, the introduction of clothing could be interpreted as necissitating a proxy for the size, stregth and luminosty of the aforementioned article. Thus, different ballers are characterized by the kind of proxy they use. A natural heirarcy surfaces.

In ancient Nubia, your ballerosity was mentioned by the number of random people you could slaughter every day and get away with. The non-baller was the person who got slaughtered.

In ancient Arabia, your ballerosity was measured by the size of your harem. The uber baller had an harem, where each member of the harem had their own harem. Ballerosity was also measured by the number of humps on your camel.

In 1600's England ballerosity was measured by the tightness of the clothes you could get your companion to wear. The super-ballers got their wives to wear corsets. The non-ballers wore looser (and more comfortable clothes). It was also measured by the number of extra-marital affairs that could be had whilst escaping the guillotine.

Moving on to more modern times, the traditional homie homeboy type of mega baller, is measured by the amount bling, ka-ching, cribs, bi-syllabic vocabulary and hoes possessed. The lack of blink or ka-ching or cribs or hoes or a bi-syllabic vocabulary leads to lower ballerosity.

The ph d. toting research megaballer has a research area that is completely un-decipherable. For example, "Strings in AdS(3) and the SL(2,R) WZW model. Part 3. Correlation functions." is more baller than "A study of monkeys doing strange things in the jungle".

The high tech megaballer knows "XML and CORBA/RMI/XML-RPC based MOM (message oriented middleware) for Java/C/C++/Perl/Tcl/Python" while the not so baller can "Code a bit in Java".

In the investment banking industry, ballerosity is measured by the number of monitors the individual sits in front of. Information Techology (IT) slaves sit with 1. Analyst crum sit with 2. IT slave drivers sit with 4. Trader megaballers sit with 8. Relative ratio of money accumulated (quantified ballerosity) is given by 2^(# of monitors).

Thus, through this study we learn about the classical conservational property of balls. Balls cannot be created or destroyed, but can only go from one form to another.

PS: As you might have guessed it is random crap. No intent to offend anyone! It started of with an obervation of how people in my firm (especially the junior ones) measured their importance by the number of monitors they sat in front of. That kind of led into how people like to display how successful they are. Then, I couldn't make it a pedantic monologue. Hence, some dubious analogies. There!

Some people are attributing this fine piece of prose to insanity caused by excessive work. That would be open to interpretation. What is the definition of sanity?

Done with..

Exams! Yes, even though I am in a job, I have to write exams. In any case, they are done! No more exams for the next couple of years.

La Vie

I sit in my office writing this post. What does that mean? Nothing deep, just that I have some time to spare. The training program is winding down. I have passed all my courses, which is actually a big deal as 6/17 failed, and had to retake. Writing 3 exams in Investments, Options and Accounting, after a month of preparation, is a pain in the derriere. I didn't know a debit from a credit when I joined the job. Finance was this weird field whose point of existence I really couldn't get. See, its the only profession that doesn't produce anything of its own (e.g. Steel makers make Steel, Law firms make legal documents, Financial firms manufacture money?!). I wasn't even sure why I had quit my Ph. D. program.

See, I had no real problems with my Ph. D. I found my research interesting. We were developing computational methods to wade through the flood of experimental data that current high-throughput methods were producing (the days when you stare at the test tube for 2 weeks for something to happen are over!). I liked my advisor. I had a fairly fun social life. So, no real complaints. However, I was bored. A Ph. D. might be a number of things, but fast paced it is not. Also, I tend to lose interest quickly with most things. So, for fairly random reasons I got this job, and decided to take it up.

Then, life wasn't boring. It was the opposite of boring. Ok, not the opposite of boring but crazy. The opposite of crazy is sane, so technically life was the opposite of sane. In any case, I survived and learnt a fair bit about finance. For example, I know that Sarbanes Oxley is this new totally hep accounting rule, that is forcing companies to spend billions of extra dough on accountants, and give employment to all the Keshav Patels down in Bangalore. Then, as I said earlier, I wrote my exams. Didn't do that well, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, (usually I ***@#@ hate excuses, but an exception had to be made, or I have to dent my self image, and assume unto myself a less capable persona).

Then, lady luck decided to throw some change my way, and I found potential employment in this group that pays me to study nice problems. And so the tale comes back to the point where it started. Thus spake Zarathustra, throught Nietzsche, for no specific reason really.

In other breaking news, winter has arrived. It snowed a bit last week. So, the jackets and pullovers and skull caps and mufflers and gloves and snow boots and thermals are out. I live right by Lake Michigan, and as I walk back home from work, I feel like one of those heroes who against all odds, continue to trudge through the dark, foreboding, wind swept, snow laden fields, not knowing what miseries lie ahead of them, never slowing, never yielding, showing no fear, whatsoever.

Random Comments

- I saw Science of Sleep. A sweet idiosyncratic movie. Has Gael Garcia Bernal of Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien fame. It is weirdly humorous and bittersweet. Its a French production, so there is quite a bit of people speaking French. As you might think, its more on the arty side, and not a mainstream blockbuster type release. The Illusionist rocks too. The story is totally tight and gripping. The Covenant is a piece of shit.

- Science of Sleep has made me want to go back to France. I want to listen to people speak French. My French is too horrible to speak in, but is decent enough to pick up stray words and decipher meaning. And, I sorta like listening to people speak French. I want to go back to Lyon. Cathedral Fouvier. Perrache. Saone. Frankfurt will also be fun. Europe looks so classy in the winter. Darkness descending, with lights here and lights there, snow falling over the cathedrals and narrow lanes, shapes moving in the shadows.....you feel like you are in a WWII movie.

- I am likely to find employment with an exotic derivatives group. Usually, when nobody knows wtfigo (what the fish is going on), complex math comes into the picture. There is a lot of complex math in this stuff. Most earth shaking financial catastrophies (Barings for e.g, when Nick Leeson vaporized a tonne) come from the folks engaging in random fun with derivatives. Derivatives are like stock, except that you can make ginormous bets putting up close to no cash => lots of people get baited doing stupid things. The average lifetime of a derivatives trader is 3 years, in the business that is, I wouldn't think he commits suicide.

Fireworks

Finance is like one big movie. There are times when all is snug and cozy, and everyone is smiles and giggles. However, the most anticipated and fun parts of any movie are the action sequences. Well, we have good blow ups around here, albeit a trite expensive. In what might be the most expensive fireworks display ever, trader Brian Hunter blew up hedge fund Amaranth. Cost = $6 Billion. Newspapers expand out the number and multiply with the local currency to get a really big scary number, but you can do that yourself e.g. (6,000,000,000*45.53 Rs). Here is the story! Go to news.google.com, and search for "Amaranth" for more juice.

FAQ :
Whats a hedge fund?
Its a firm that trades the financial markets for a profit. Unlike a mutual fund which cannot do whatever it wants with investors money, a hedge fund can take huge risks. Thus, it has a potential to make a lot of money. As has been seen, it can also lose a tonne!

Power and Presence

So, the whole of last week was spent improving my "Power" and "Prescence". It is one of the many steps on my way to become slick and insinc..errm..smooth and sophisticated. There were 2 sets of people who came in -

1) Firstly, there were actors from The Actors Institute who came in to give us a quick image makeover. We were bundled into groups and made to do some role playing. Then, each and every little thing I said or did or appeared to say or appeared to do, was analyzed, dissected and basically torn apart. I was told that I use a lot of filler words - I feel, I think, basically, essentially, the point is etc. etc. At a deeper psychoanalytic level it appears that I don't like silence. From now on, I have to practice just saying a couple of words, and then staring intently at the other persons face.

2) Secondly, there was this marketing woman who used to work with "The Pitchdoctor", a guy who helps doctor sales pitches, so that countries can win rights to host Olympics and stuff like that. So, she imparted us gyan on how to ace "touchpoints", i.e. situations where there is potential to have your ass on fire if you don't talk and walk properly. I got imparted all kinds of vague fundas about body language, eye contact, tone of voice, gesturing and movement.

Its scary how subtle changes in tone and body language can drastically alter the context and meaning of a message. Sarcasm, anger, agitation, enthusiasm, friendlines are all incorporated at a subtle subconscious level, and much of the message is this stuff. Your actual words do not really matter that much! We had these examples where we had to say the same sentence in 2-3 different ways, with variations in tone, gesture and eye contact, and they came out so differently.

I somehow feel that all girls figure out this stuff almost as soon as they are born. So, they are free to wreak emotional havoc on poor guys, who have almost no idea what is going on. Its only after courses like this do they realize the true nature of their situation. That melting voice. Those soft eyes. Those fleeting looks. You dont fool me now!

Anyway, moving on. Quite interestingly, it also turns out that there are 4 types of people.

Type 1 : The Expressive - Like me. Keeps talking. Thinks in vivid descriptive form. Hates detail. Loves big fancy dreams.

Type 2 : The Driver - Get the job done. Type A heart attack case. Obsessed with closure.

Type 3 : The Feeler - Very relationship oriented. Hates conflict. Loves emotion. All those people who say "I don't feel the same way about you now, like I did", and go into high drama.

Type 4 : The Analytic - The detail obsessed person. All those people who describe holidays like this - Day 1 Place A Did XYZ Day 2 Place B Did X1Y1Z1 Day 3 Place C Did X2Y2Z2.

And, there was a lot more. You have to pay me for that. Nah, just kidding, I just dont want to type any more.

Anyhow, it was fun. A lot better than sitting in the office and reading 300 page annual reports of companies that make caskets and medical equipment (yes, there is one that makes both!!), and looking for 'misvaluations' (thats like the most misused term ever in Finance. Oh, there is another one 'alpha'. Which means 'risk free returns' a.k.a. free money, of which there is none obviously. Of course, none of my readers are likely to have got the context, but its ok. :). Just trust me.)