Gravity

News! News! News! Breaking News! It's just unbelieveable. When you finally come to accept that pigs could fly this comes along.

John Mayer.........discovers.....and whines about....* drum rolls *........Gravity!

Gravity *Whine*

Gravity is working against me What?! It is?? How dare it!! How could it be so cruel?
And gravity wants to bring me down Bawwhhhh Bawwwhhh life is soooo unfaaairrrr

Oh I'll never know what makes this man Ah ok. So Mr. Gravity it is then. Not a Mrs or a Miss. Not in a pretty flowing floral skirt.
With all the love that his heart can stand Oh so love it is. I guess everything is straight now.
Dream of ways to throw it all away And kaput it was. How shocking that you would fall out with Mr Gravity ?!

Oh Gravity is working against me Bawhh!! Life is soooo unfairrr....Wahhh...Bawwhh..Sniff
And gravity wants to bring me down How hateful! That heartless beast!

Oh twice as much aint twice as good You want less of it? Sure! Lets shoot you out into space.
And can't sustain like one half could Translation still awaited from John-Mayer-gobbledegook-touch-feely-adsgkj-speak speacialist.
It's wanting more More?! Didn't you want less 2 sentences back?!
That's gonna send me to my knees Sadism is cool.
(repeat) (ouch ouch ouch)

Oh gravity, stay the hell away from me And you want it go away?!
Oh gravity has taken better men than me you see now how can that be? Make up your mind!! Maybe its you and not 'him' who has caused the relationship malfunction. All the moodswings you know.

Just keep me where the light is Now you want light?! Ah! So you want the gravity to lead you to light. Let there be light!
Just keep me where the light is Gravity + Light => General Relativity. The effect of gravitation on the shape of space and the flow of time!
Keep you me where the light is Relativistic string theory!
Just keep me where the light is Photons! Gravitons! Manifolds !
Ohh… where the light is! D-branes! Supergravity!

As is apparent, Mr. John Mayer is at the cutting edge of thought on some of the most intractable problems that have puzzled humanity for thousands of years. Not surprisingly Mr. Mayer is currently in the company of Madam Jessica "Chicken of the Sea" Simpson. Amazing how a nice voice and a melting look can get away with something so inane and ridiculous.

Another week goes by..

The extended weekend in Utah was a lot of fun. We went skiing in Park City, a little town a few miles out of Salt Lake City. It is apparantly one of the top skiing destinations in the world. The winter olympics were held there a few years back. It was called the Salt Lake City Olympics, but Park City it was. Details, details.

There are primarily 4 types of slopes. Green, Blue, Black Diamond and Black Moguls. The Greens are the baby slopes, while the Black Moguls are those psycho slopes were these lithe visions writhe and glide through the snow. As this was my first time, I was stuck on the Greens. Most of the other folks in my group were these hardcore veterans that being unsatisfied with the Black Moguls, trek up random ridges and ski down jagged mountain sides. I actually wanted to do the Moguls as well. You know, break some bones and get a couple of months off. Alas, the others would have none of it. They refused to call 911 if I flew off a cliff.

Skiing is very hard because you instinctively tend to do the opposite of what you are supposed to. It is like how we tend to handle most things in life. So, they key to success is to do the opposite of what you think you should be doing. Thats probably how you should not be handling most things in life though. Anyway, it is like being on a continously slipping Banana peel. The reason why you slip and fall is because you panic, flail your arms around and lean back, allowing the peel to zip forward, propeling you back. The key to skiing well is to keep your arms well ahead of you, and your weight balanced ahead. That would ensure that the banana peel is pinned under your foot. Weight distribution. Weight distribution.

Anyway, as obvious as it may sound, the first step to skiing well is to not crash. I cannot empasize enough the not crash part. The key to not crashing is to not fly down the slope at 200mph, and the key to doing that (not fly that is) is keeping your speed under control. And, yes, you got that right, the key to keeping your speed under control is to be able to 'carve', i.e. cut left and right, against the direction of the slope, and bleed speed. Now carving isn't easy because as you weave, you could catch an edge and take the aerial route. You are caught between a rock and a hard place, carving could make you end up with legs twisted on the snow, and crashing could leave you decorated on the slope like christmas lights on a christmas tree.

I had quite a few fairly nasty crashes early on. That was nothing as bad as what my friend had. So, we decide to go down this slightly tough Green that sloped down while turning left. These slopes aren't hard to do, as long as you keep your speed under control. Unfortuantely, we can barely even turn, let alone carve. My friend heads down the slope. As he goes down he gets faster and faster and faster, and the turn approaches. Not making the turn would mean flying off a little bit of a cliff into a nice messed up ditch. Since he has no clue as to how to turn, he gets panicky, and somehow manages to turn, but overcorrects. It hasn't helped his speed all that much. Instead of risking flying off the right end of the slope, he is about to fly off the left end. He barrels on at 40 mph at a crop of trees. Gets shell shocked. Drops his poles and falls back. As he result he flies on even faster and has this spectacular crash. It was like watching a car fly off a bridge into a brick wall. My experience was a little better. Fell down a lot more times, but nothing too dramatic. After all this initial anguish, we did get better at it.

So, my super-boss has a little condo in Park City. He also rented us a little condo, with hot tub and all. Ski all day, drink beer, get stuffed and soak in the hot tub all evening. These traders love playing games that resemble trading in some way, essentially gambling games that involve an element of skill - poker for e.g. However, I would advise you to avoid playing a gambling game with a bunch of derivatives traders, if you care about your money. I lost a bit, and wisely decided to sulk and stop playing. They are a pretty nice bunch though.

All in all it was a fun experience. Once in a while I do deserve a bit of a break from my good old 75 hour weeks. Entire companies go out of existence in 2 weeks. Lets not even speak about individual people. I do deserve a bit of a break. Do you think so? Or, do you think I need to be smacked on the head with a cricket bat?

Oh btw, in case you didn't know, in about 15 minutes the most cliched, overused, commericalized piece of shit day ever, Valentine's day, is going to come to an end. Thank god for kind mercies! I read on the BBC website that companies in India expect to make about 200 crores exploiting poor kids with no pocket money. And, whats this thing about women wanting to being treated on par with men? Do they really wan't that deal ? No more days like this then. Super sexist no? I have also been noting that increasingly, women wear engagement rings that are as big as a brick. I sometimes pity the poor finger that needs to keep carry the entire weight of the ego. The poor fellow must have slaved 5 months to pay the first instalment on that thing. Do you know that the diamond market is super manipulated? Do you know that diamonds would cost a fraction as much as they currently do if the few suppliers weren't controlling supply? A bit like oil (OPEC and all that). In any case, general crap shooting ends. Pardon. Merci beaucoup. C'est bon. Au reviour. Monday is President's day. 3 day weekend. Heaven!

Ca va?

Life is sucking a bit. Lets just say that it is sometimes challenging to be in the company of extremely smart and experienced people, who know what is going on while you dont, while you need to get things right and they don't.

One can never tell how much money a trader made or lost that day. Ha! Me?! I will probably get taken out in a stretcher in a week. Whining. Whimpering. Screaming. :).

You know what? I am going to Utah on Thursday. 4 days. Ski Trip. Not bad huh? Life doesn't suck at all, except when its sucking. I don't even need to take days off. I am officially on work. As you can see my group treats me quite nicely. Doesn't leave one as badly fried as the guy who left in 1.5 years to start teaching his own cooking class.

I must seem like one of those crazy super moody people, who keep flipping their outlook on life every 24 picoseconds. As a matter of fact, I am psychotherapizing myself with the whole sunny outlook deal, instead of paying some bloke 150$ a hour to do the same. Heh. That reminds me - did I tell you how much these dentists in the US charge ? You might have a better smile, but nothing really to smile about. You might even bare your teeth for a quick snarl. Thats when you are not scowling bitterly. Having been subject to money being sucked out me at 600$ an hour, I estimate they loot over 1.5 million $ a year. Ah! There I go again!

Bah!

-4F. -20C. #$%@$#^%$$%@^#$%@! The coldest day in 11 years, 2 weeks after the warmest winter day in 50 years. Global Warming ? What might make you think so?

Fun continues..

So, a lot of people gave me flak over my previous post. "You mean insensitive Grinch! You mongoose, bandicoot and rat! All you care about is money! Che you horrible person! Che che che! You animal of a man! Go talk to him and make the fellow feel better! " I attested that it was a bad idea for me to do so. Now in this episode I shall defend myself vigorously yet humorously. Endlessly.

In my very high opinion (not that high because I am not drunk), getting fired is something similar to getting dumped. While the woman (i.e. the dumper, assuming you are the guy) was the tap that filled all your emotional needs, the job is the hose that fills all your financial needs. Actually, it is a far more dramatic life change than just getting dumped. Love cannot buy you a plane ticket home for the winter. Love cannot pay the rent on a nice apartment. Love cannot buy that Nikon Digital Rebel that you so bady wanted. You get my point. However, on the other hand, if you have enough money you can buy the woman you love (your mom basically), a plane ticket, and in essence buy yourself more love and admiration and some most wonderful vendekkai curry. So, in essence getting fired can make you lose a whole bunch of the funky things in life, and thus can cause much stress and anguish.

Me having been the unwitting witness to multiple dumpings, have come to decide that the problem with dumpings is not the actual event but the crying and moaning and whining and complaining and ranting that comes after it. Though the actual interaction with the woman would have lasted for all of 32 seconds, the melodrama after it just goes on and on and on. Much of the trauma is due to blatant overdramatization of events that probably would never have occured in the first place ; sunset walks by the beach, hand in hand (she was 2 feet shorter than you, oops) , soft evenings on the couch watching tv (yeah right, and fighting over the remote), long drives through lush, undulating hills and valleys (and she bitching endlessly about everyone under the sun). There is this totally pointless mis-representation of reality in your head that leads to all kinds of problems. Thus, a true master keeps this trash out of his cranium, and focuses on what needs to be done next.

Which comes to getting fired. No point crying about something that has already happened. Just move on, and make sure you do not repeat your previous mistakes. Getting all self-piteous is a recipe for disaster.

Fun

I came into work on Monday and noticed that my friend why sits a couple of desks in front of me was away. His desk remained empty into the afternoon. That was way too long for a meeting. He couldn't possibly be on vacation. The 2nd week of January! Duh! After all the carnage of the holiday season, you should be insane to take days off now. I wondered for a bit and left it at that. Later on, someone told me he had been fired the previous Wednesday. Apparently, he had been called into a meeting with HR on Wednesday morning. Soon after, he took his jacket and left, never to return. So much for heart rending melodrama.

He was towards the end of trading, and had to find a desk to work in permamently, and no desk wanted to take him. He had done pretty badly in the tests. He was super enthusiastic about whatever he did, but had no idea what he was doing. Its one of those cases where too much energy and enthusiasm actually work against you as you go from one blunder to another. There really wasn't too much of a choice.

Frankly, I don't feel the least bit sympathetic or sorry for him. He had joined the programme that would eventually make him a trader. If you want to make the shit, you better be the shit! Don't expect mama to kiss you on the cheek each time you get into a bit of hot water! He had better been prepared for the reality of the business he had chosen to enter. Also, I am sure he would get a job elsewhere in a week or two. He has a fairly funky looking resume as well, so getting into grad school would be a breeze. And his brother took out the bank with a private equity firm. Its not like the poor guy with a family to support who got thrown out on the road after 20 years worth of blood and sweat.

I should probably speak to him though. Maybe sometime near the weekend.

India Etc.

In the London subway, there are more escalators going up than down. Why?

Its because people trickle into a train station in one's and two's but exit all at once. The distributions are different. Cool no (yeah right!).

India has changed a lot over the last few years - it is finally competing in the global marketplace, international firms are taking opportunities within India seriously, creating jobs and pushing money into the country, and the standard of living has improved substantially for the middle class. (It can be argued that all this development has done little for the poor, the people who most urgently need upliftment. I agree to a good extent.)

India is the fastest growing market for mobile phones in the world. It is expected to have atleast a couple of hundred million handset in a few years. I do not doubt it. A mobile phone costs about 2500Rs over its 3 year lifetime. Thats less than 100Rs a month, or 3 Rs a day. Very affordable.

Median salaries have shot up over the last few years, atleast from what I have got to observe. When I joined college in 2000, just after the technology bubble burst, the best job on campus was with ITC. I think it paid about 6 lakhs. Then came McKinsey the super high-profile consultant job paying about 7. That was around 2004. At that time I thought the scene was good. I had no idea! This year I found out that Deutsch Bank recruited for their NY Office, paying 100k+USD. Lehman Brothers, Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs came as well. I know for a fact that this is beyond the range of most of those recruited even from the fancy pancy Ivy League schools in the US. (This heartens me much. Wait till some of the Princeton and Harvard schmuks I work with hear this. Ha ha. To get you to understand my antagonism, 2 of them actually asked me if I had failed my training exams.) Even if it is argued that these are just some numbers out in the tail, the median has gone up to about 5 lakhs as well.

I drove down Old Mahabalipuram Road the other day. The amount of development is simply awesome, inspite of the road being a total wreck.

Though I feel there has been a lot of real growth, there seem to be some signs of a speculative bubble. I am quite the novice, and might be wrong, but do allow me my opinion.

The first thing that comes to my mind is the self-congratulatory rubbish that is filling the media. They make it sound like the only direction prices can go is up. I saw this flash across on NDTV Profit :

40% of Analysts Bullish on the Market.

A little common sense will tell you that if 40% are thinking that the market is going to go up, 60% think that the market is going to stay put or go down. The latter would be the more relevant albeit unpopular piece of information.

Real estate prices have doubled over the last couple of years. A 2 bedroom flat in Kalakshetra costs about 1.5 crores. Thats about 400,000 USD. It used to cost about 70lakhs a year back. In a reaction to this, the Association of Industry(..blah) said something to the effect that this was just the beggining and there is much more to come. I am sure the Seths behind the chamber have quite a few flats to sell.

The whole thing smells suspiciously like the hoopla that surrounded the technology bubble. Though the dot com revolution indeed revolutionaized our lives, it was nowhere near what it was made out to be. It ended up making a handful few absurdly rich (through selling their stock at absurd prices), and very many poorer and much disillusioned. A similar phenomena is going on in India, I feel.

Much of the price increases seem to me to be fueled by speculative buyers - people who buy hoping to sell it for a good profit a few months later. It works like this. Looking at the price go up, many people feel bad on having missed out on the bonanza, and enter the market. This pushes up prices further. This increase attracts more people who want to make a quick buck, and so on, and so forth. Eventually, the prices become so absurd that even the moneylust deranged back off. The bubble bursts. The guy who bought last is the biggest (and poorest) fool. The investment banker from Goldman Sachs and Mr. Behari Singhania, the first to buy, and the last to sell, are left much enriched. (Its called the bigger fool theory. There is some good material on the subject by Robert Shiller, and Charles Kindleberger.)

I heard that Japan had this huge spurt in the stock and real estate in the early 1990's. All kinds of folks started speculating, and when the bubble burst, things got messed up. Japan has still not recovered in 2007. The Nikkei is less than half of what it was in the 1990's. The housing market in the US is also going through a similar blow up right now, after going up absurdly over the last few years. It looked quite invincible before shit hit the fan (atleast by how things were made to sound in the popular press.)

My point is that India is being made to look invincible, and like nothing can ever go wrong. Economic trouble in the US can shake up the IT and BPO industries, and make the money dry up pretty quickly. It is sometimes a little surprising to me how short the collective memory is. It reminds me of the Indian cricket team. All previous performances are promptly forgotten, and we root for victory in the upcoming match with breathless enthusiasm.

Question

I was asked this very interesting question.

In the London subway, there are more escalators going up than down. Why?

One answer is that people don't mind walking down a flight of stairs, but hate walking up.

However, there is a more fascinating answer.

I am heading to India in a week. I very strongly think that the amount of nostalgia that you experience is inversely proptional to the time left before you head home. 90% of the Tamil movies that I watch in the US are in the few weeks preceding my flight :)!

It should be fun. Actually, much of next month looks good. I am returning back on Jan 7th, and heading to LA on the 12th for the Martin Luther King Day weekend. And then, its close to the end of Jan - 70% of winter is done with. At the rate at which this winter is going, it should feel like summer by then.

Ah Summer! Spring comes in between, but lets not get into that.

Also, there is work. In Finance, the 2 things that people obsess over day and night are volatility and correllation. Volatility is the amount by which a thing bounces around. Correlation measures if things bounce around together or not. Its fun when things go up, and not so much fun when things blow up. Well, the volatility in my life is highly correlated with the volatility in my work. If work isn't getting done, life sucks. If work is getting done, life is cool.