December 12, 2007
Manipal Motors doesn’t have a free slot for Palio servicing until December 20. Bah. Rocinante hasn’t been running properly since the middle of November, and I’m now into my fourth week of taking autos to work (and everywhere else for that matter).
This comes with the following disadvantages:
- Before 0830, autos refuse to go to MG Road because they don’t get fares back. After 0830, autos refuse to go to MG Road because the traffic is too heavy and they waste time.
- Autos are not fun at the best of times. Being stuck in Bangalore traffic for forty minutes in a vibrating and noisy auto while inhaling fumes from traffic all around you is even worse.
- I can no longer listen to RJ Malavika in the mornings. I suspect this is making it more difficult for me to face the trials and tribulations of work.
- Without a car, I can no longer go to the gym in the early morning. Work prevents me from going to the gym afterwards. Lack of gymming causes huge guilt while passing Nike/ Reebok/ Adidas outlets (and there’s one of each on 100 ft. Road). No gymming also means no outlet for work-induced stress.
In summary, not having a car means I face additional stress in the form of auto-rides, and that I no longer have outlets for stress (gym and Radio Indigo). And this will go on until 2008.
Death are there.
1 Comment | 
Rocinante | Tagged: 100 ft. road, car seva, fiat palio, gym, manipal motors, Radio Indigo, rj malavika, sneakers, stress | 
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Posted by Aadisht
December 12, 2007
I realise that the cost of doing one particular thing is that you can’t do another thing. And honestly, I loved computer symposiums and quizzing, and would regret never having done them in favour of something else. But I really wish I had learnt Bharatnatyam at some point in life.
This is not because of any newfound love of dance. It’s more because while I was researching fundaes for last month’s quiz, I realised that Bharatnatyam is not so much a dance form as a language which uses gestures, facial expressions, and body movements as its basic units. Compare this with Sanskrit, where the basic unit is a sound (or phoneme); Mandarin, where the basic unit is a character (or lexeme), and English, where there are really no atomic units – meaning is concentrated at the level of the word or even phrase thanks to English borrowing from other languages so relentlessly.
And right now I find that so totally cool. The whole idea that I can communicate a message without having to rely on words (spoken or written) is mindblowing. It’s a conceptual leap similar to understanding – grokking really – how for loops or function calls work for the first time.
Of course, the problem is that even if someone had pitched Bharatnatyam to me as a language instead of a dance back in school, I probably wouldn’t have been all that enthused. My fascination with languages didn’t really get ignited until after probably first or second year in college, where I learnt the joy of C++ and object oriented programming.
This is kind of tragic, considering learning Bharatnatyam is a tough ask now. It’s a three year commitment at least, and I have no idea if I’ll even be in the same city six months from now. As for other languages, my Mandarin lessons have been on hiatus for the past two months thanks to preoccupation with work and quizzes.
Sigh. Such are the things I miss out on.
Leave a Comment » | Language, Personal | Tagged: abhinaya, bharatnatyam, c++, classical dance, english, Language, lexeme, mandarin, opportunity cost, phoneme, sanskrit | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
November 22, 2007
My idiot flatmate hasn’t paid the electricity bill and the power’s been cut off.
The good news is that this happened during winter in Bangalore, and so this doesn’t lead to much physical discomfort. The bad news is that thanks to another decision by the idiot flatmate (viz., buying a manual defrost refrigerator instead of a frost free one), the kitchen will be flooded by the time I return today. I suspect all the salad inside the fridge will also spoil.
Also, this will lead to an absence of blogposts which required either the use of a scanner, or embedding YouTube videos (which I can’t do at work), or quoting stuff I saw on facebook (again, blocked at work).
Leave a Comment » | Blogs and Blogging, Domesticity | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
November 21, 2007
This year, Diwali was not as renumerative as it used to be. This is because I am now a grossly overpaid MBA (who is also no longer forking half his salary over to a Parsi thatha in Malabar Hill as paying guest charges) and noblesse oblige demands that:
- I no longer accept gifts from grandmothers with no independent income.
- I no longer rely on my parents to finance Bhai Dooj chanda for my sisters.
Conscience and noblesse oblige may not be neglected. Social traditions which promote the voluntary transfer of wealth from the earning and productive to the weak and unemployed encourage the spread of Edwardian values. Failure to carry on such traditions will lead to a society in which free exchange and taking responsibility for one’s property are abandoned, precipitating the collapse of enlightened civilisation. Thus, all cash which came in on Diwali went out equally rapidly to sisters two days later at Bhai Dooj.
However, I face a dilemma. I would rather cut down upon cash gifts to the sister who brought shame upon the clan by marrying into a family of uncultured barbarians who steal electricity and whose approach to religion is to feed goats. The cash saved could then be given to the sister who brought honour upon the clan by eloping. And yet, I shy away from making gifts on the basis of virtue, when tradition demands that sisters be given gifts of equal value. More so because deviating from established processes on the basis of arbitrary valuations of virtue violates Saivite tenets of adherence to eternal law.
However, in this as in most other things, Tyler Cowen provides a solution: merit based gifting. Instead of giving people gifts on occasions like birthdays or Christmas (or indeed, Bhai Dooj), give them gifts at random times based on how much you value them.
This is excellent. Tradition only specifies giving gifts of equal value at Bhai Dooj. But I can give merit based gifts throughout the rest of the year, at random occassions. Edwardian objectives of rewarding virtue can be achieved after all!
I think the best way to do this going ahead is to avoid Bhai Dooj gifts completely. However, since all the sisters have kids, give the kids gifts in proportion to their virtue. This is a good thing, because:
- Noblesse oblige is even more vital when it comes to being a rich uncle who can give gifts to children with no source of income whatsoever.
- Nephews and nieces whom I approve of (because they bugger off to a secluded room and engross themselves in Roald Dahl) can be rewarded with more Roald Dahl (or Phillip Pullman for that matter). Gifts to nieces who watch Shah Rukh Khan movies and nephews who bite can be cut back accordingly.
- Gifting to nephews and nieces is an investment, while gifting to sisters is merely an expense. Investment is more Edwardian than expense.
The virtue of nephews and nieces must therefore be tracked going forward.
4 Comments | Business and Economics, Consumerism | Tagged: bhai dooj, cash flow, deepavali, diwali, edwardian values, family, gifting, householder, marginal revolution, merit based gifts, noblesse oblige, obligation, parsi thatha, presents, relatives, saivite neo-edwardianism, tyler cowen | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
November 15, 2007
Realised this just yesterday. I’ve been saving my old chequebooks just for the record of cheques. This has been adding to the clutter in my cupboard for no good reason. I can happily copy all the chequebook entries to Excel. This will let me write even more detailed narrations, slice and dice my chequebook data, and of course throw the paper chequebooks away and cut down clutter.
About 60 entries over the past year and a half to transfer to Excel. This will be done with great urgency once I’m done with Sunday’s quiz.
Leave a Comment » | Domesticity | Tagged: archival, chequebook, cheques, clutter, continuous improvement, data management, lifehack, organisation, personal finance, productivity, record keeping | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
November 10, 2007
Remember how I had been looking for bins to store my unironed laundry in? I found them!
Much joy. A mess of scattered clothes which was engulfing one side of my hall has now been transferred to the laundry bins. As you can see on close examination, there are separate bins for undergarmaments, socks, and everything else.
This still isn’t perfect. For starters, the ‘everything else’ pile is still too big. This makes searching for specific items of everything else difficult. However, there is an easy solution to this: more bins! Two more bins will allow further segregation into shirts, trousers, and t-shirts. Less mess for just a hundred and sixty rupees.
However, the unorganised laundry was only one mess. There is also this ferocious one still to be dealt with:
What you see above is the final frontier: quasi-mattresses (I refuse to call anything without springs a real mattress), newspapers, polythene bags stuffed with assorted papers, flatmate’s suitcase, and flatmate’s travel bag. However, this can also be dealt with – starting with more bins!
Another bin for newspapers will reduce the mess even further, and make it easier for the maid to carry the newspapers out for raddi. The most obvious contributor to clutter will be taken care of. That still leaves me with the following issues to deal with:
- Quasi-mattresses. Solution: donate them to maid, who wants them anyway. In case Beta Manav (or anybody else for that matter) visits, bring in a sleeping bag, which takes up less space than these things when it isn’t in use.
- Polythene bags filled with documents. Solution: buy display and clip files. File the documents which are needed. Throw away the ones which aren’t.
- Flatmate’s travel bag. Solution: throw it away. He doesn’t seem to notice it anyway.
- Flatmate’s suitcase. Solution: substitute flatmate’s medicines with arsenic (this was the plot of at least two Agatha Christies), stuff body in the suitcase, and dispose of suitcase and corpse by throwing it into the Indiranagar sewer. This prevents further messes from accumulating as well.
It is through small, continuous improvements, that we better our quality of life.
Leave a Comment » | Domesticity | Tagged: cleaning, cleanliness, clutter, continuous improvement, food world, home improvement, laundry, laundry bins, laundry management, mess | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
November 4, 2007
BESCOM is doing some sort of maintenance, and so there isn’t any power at my place until nine or ten o’ clock. Since I have to get a lot of questions for next month’s KQA Ranking open ready, I’ve brought my laptop and datacard to the CMH Road Cafe Coffee Day, and I’m blogging from a cafe for the first time in my life.
Much as I love my Dell laptop, I have to admit that in situations like this, you really wish you had a MacBook. Sitting in a cafe and blogging is pseud, but doing it from a MacBook is the sort of overwhelming pseud-put that is very hard to achieve.
Now, back to making questions.
Leave a Comment » | Bangalore, Blogs and Blogging, Personal | Tagged: blogging, cafe, coffee day, internet, laptop, macbook, wireless | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
November 2, 2007
CNN-IBN wants to interview me today for tips on cracking the CAT. If they do a live telecast instead of a pre-recorded one, the temptation to scream ‘Prakash Karat is a traitorous bastard!’ will be overwhelming.
Update: It was prerecorded. So I generally told CAT aspirants that there was no point mugging anything new two days before the test, and that they should go out for coffee or icecream. If only they had been running a story on what CAT prep over a year should be like, I could have furthered the free market fundamentalist agenda by telling everyone that the best way to prepare for the reading comprehension section is to regularly read Ajay Shah, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, and the Indian Economy Blog.
Leave a Comment » | MSM, Personal, Public Policy and Politics | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
October 24, 2007
Gak! Radio Indigo plays devotional songs before 7 am! Eldritch horror! So much for the biggest international hits.
What makes it worse is that these are all Ram bhajans. I look upon this with disapproval. India is a Saivite country. Why is Indigo trying to spread Vaishnavism? I demand that the scope of any anti-conversion ordinance that comes up in the future be expanded to a ban on Ram bhajans.
Also, putting gym in the morning rocks. 9.5 Kmph for twenty two and a half minutes on the treadmill, followed by ninety crunches, and a hot water shower, and then directly to office with breakfast in between. Are.
1 Comment | Personal, Radio Indigo, Religion | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
October 17, 2007
Does anybody actually use EDGE on Airtel? If so,
- what do you actually do with it?
- what kind of speed do you get?
- how do you activate it?
Your answers will help me form a decision about whether I should break the habit of four years and buy a high-end phone.
(Specifically, is it feasible to use it to Twitter and blog on WordPress? You know the sort of posts I write, so keep that in mind, please.)
Leave a Comment » | Appeal, Personal, Telecom | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht