Missing the Web 2.0 bus

Back when I started work, orkut was the rage. I spent a lot of time on orkut. A lot of time. It seemed like the right filler for days full of intermittent work. When you let the machine compile a huge jar file, there really isn't much you can do when the machine is compiling. Orkut filled this gap very well. Given the competitive nature of what I and my close friends were accustomed to, there was competition on orkut too: number of friends, number of scraps, fans etc. I know of people who came very close to screwing up academics (and hence life in a myopic sense) due to orkut. Orkut became a common noun, orkuting became a verb and an acceptable activity.

Orkut slowly gave way to facebook. There were a few other portals (which've been relegated to also rans - Friendster, Hi5, etc.) I was lucky to get early access to facebook thanks to being in a college that was covered by facebook. But I really didn't revel in facebook as much as I did on orkut. I found that it pushed people to be more phony than necessary.

The major difference between your orkut profile and your facebook profile was that the orkut relied on 'pull' in order to get recognition whereas facebook relied more on 'push' for recognition. It was a result of the basic design of the user homepage. Once logged in, Orkut opened to a page with your profile, your friends list and imminent birthdays of your friends. Facebook, on logging on, threw at you updates from what your friends were doing, saying and sharing.

This difference was stark. It meant that one would require different mindsets to navigate the two portals (soon they would become social networking sites) Facebook gave greater returns on pushy-ness, boldness and to an extant blatant self promotion. This came at a time when there was a mindset change in how people perceived the web.

This was around the time when Web 2.0 became a famous concept: when user generated content became the driver of the internet. Facebook fit better than orkut in the web 2.0. Also, let me not take anything away from facebook in terms of user interface, user experience and add-ons.

Close to the heels of facebook was twitter - a brilliant avenue to express, be-heard and self promote in the simplest of fashions. Twitter started a parallel network of connected people in a way nobody could imagine.

I heard of web 2.0 only after it became a huge talking point. Though I was on facebook, I had barely heard of twitter. When you have enough happening in real life, you rarely do look to the internet for excitement. It might have been a paucity of time which resulted in me not spending enough time or putting in enough effort on web 2.0.

I started using twitter regularly a month or so ago. Since then, I have been amazed by it. The design of the entire system is beautiful (I haven't figured it out fully yet) Between facebook and twitter, my vote surely is for twitter. It is smarter, quicker, adds greater value and doesn't damage once's personality as much. There are some simply outstanding people who make twitter what it is. It is almost like a large connected family out there which keeps the place abuzz.

But I have found that getting into the family is impossible (at least I haven't figured it out) And knowing social networks, being a male, out of college, with very few active friends on the network, the odds are stacked against me. Looking back, I feel that I missed the web 2.0 bus. I should have started being active on twitter long ago. But here I am, still searching, still trying to find my feet.

The Wedding Planner

Sorry for the catchy post title. This is not about classic wedding planning as we know it. This is a summary of my guide to attending weddings. Actually, the guide is applicable to family functions other than weddings as well.

Ever since I moved to Chennai almost a year back, I have been hit by a barrage of 'family functions'. I don't know if the last 12 months are representative. If they are, I should expect to attend more family functions in a year that I can count on my fingers.

Honestly, I don't mind attending family functions. I am reasonably well behaved in public, I like meeting people, I like playing the good boy, I know who I should 'mark attendance' with, I know whom to shake hands with (and whom not to - though this handshake strategy warrants a complete discussion in itself) and I've noticed that people in general are also eager to meet me. Presence in family functions also does a world of good to my positioning in the extended family. Family functions only get irritating if they eat into work or weekend relaxation or if they are the excessively religious type and thereby against my principles.

Broadly, there are 2 main things you need to ensure when attending family functions: indemnify yourself against possible goodwill erosion, and eat a lot of good food. These are the two most important agenda items. I might have used complicated words to describe the first one, but in simple terms it is about ensuring nobody in the future cribs about you not attending. This might seem like a small thing but many people do take it seriously. I have noticed that in Chennai, the invitation to a function comes with an unwritten covenant of compulsory attendance. The second aspect is as simple as I've described it - eating lots of good food.

There might be other things you will end up trying to do - dress well, buy a meaningful gift, show-off the latest Upanishad commentary you've read, etc. But the two I've mentioned are most important from my perspective. I have a logic for it as well. To me, the good food is the only motivation to attend functions. (Its a bit like saying an asset, at the end of the day is about the cash flows it generates) All other reasons pale in comparison. I don't really find joy in networking or showing off my latest shirt or veshti. I do not need to get introduced to either 'girls' or parents of possible 'girls'. I don't read the Upanishads or do network marketing of sarees or beauty products. Good food is good enough. But it is important to keep the good food coming. Attending one off functions is of little use. You need to ensure you are invited again and again. This is where goodwill comes into the picture. Its like having healthy and consistent cash flows year on year.

Any moderately large family function will have a lot of people attending. The superset of attendees is determined the hosts of the function. Its elementary. If A and B are the hosts of the function, A and B will tend to decide the list of invitees with inputs from elders and other significant members of the family.

During most functions, the hosts are the busiest people. Marriage receptions might be an exception in which case the hosts (say A and B) might be the 3rd and 4th busiest. In general, it is OK to assume that the hosts are the busiest. But most hosts do acknowledge your attendance if you make the effort to make your presence felt. Hosts are usually very happy to see invitees attend. From their selfish perspective, that is all they would want - you attending. Like 'saala we took all the effort to invite but he did attend. Good boy'. Most hosts will not have time to look at your new shirt or listen to your latest Upanishad gyaan. As a safety measure, it always helps to also 'mark your attendance' with the host influencers (the ones helping out with invitee lists) Just in case hosts are very busy/unapproachable/dazed to notice you, the influencers are a viable second option. Of course in the event that neither the hosts, nor the influencers notice you during the function, there is a chance that the photographical evidence will act as proof. But nothing is as good as creating an impression in person.

Most family functions are followed by detailed postmortems where a lot of bitching is done about non-attendees. These bitching sessions will many times involve the hosts (A and B) and the influencers. Its these bitching sessions that you should avoid being a topic in. It leads to goodwill erosion. And in the high touch family-society of Chennai, goodwill is very easy to lose and near impossible to gain. Your missing the function might cost you half a dozen meals in the future.

So, to restate my point: it is necessary to attend and more importantly let the hosts and the host-influencers notice during the function that you have attended.

Regarding goodwill, you can play some long term strategies too. This would involve connecting with distant/long-lost relatives. Often these strategies will not have immediate pay-offs. It will take multiple meetings to start standing a chance of figuring in their invitee list. To me, that's too much effort for a possible meal in the distant future. Hence, I do not play this strategy.

Coming to eating the food, the strategy is pretty simple. More the better. Serving food is usually a batch process. There are pandhis one after the other. It is important to be shameless enough to capture your prized seat in the earliest possible pandhi. Earlier, I used to have reservations about eating early - a feeling that observers might find me too opportunistic for the food. But I then realized that people hardly bothered. And more importantly in many cases, eating early would ensure that you get a serving of all the dishes in the menu. As the pandhis go on, a few popular dishes might get finished without everyone getting to sample them.

In terms of your position in the dining hall, a useful idea would be to sit close to the end of the table where the cooks keep the food. This increases the number of cooks/servers standing close to where you are sitting and hence asking for extra helpings are easier.

An ideal plan would be that you enter the function hall, time your entry into the hall such that it is close to mealtime, meet the hosts and significant influencers, head right to the dining hall, finish the most important task and then collect the coconut in the bag and go back home.

An analysis of anger

Like most others, I get angry, furious, vengeful etc. As a kid, I was always known to have been endowed with an excess these the emotions. They blamed it on some kind of inheritance of traits. But post adolescence, I have learned to manage rage very well. Honestly, now I am proud of how well I can control anger. I thought I will put down my basic understanding of anger and tenets of my anger management strategy.

The change started when I first read about anger, the nature and causes of it. It was an article on the internet (I'm unable to find it now though). From what I remember, there were 3 types of anger. I shall call them Internal-A, Internal-B & External.

Internal-A: This is the long lead time type of anger and can sometimes be confused with your personality type or mental outlook. The cause of this anger is internal and the anger takes a long time to build up. The outwards symptoms are tough to identify and this type of anger rarely does produce fits of rage. Very often, this type of anger begins during the developmental phase of one's personality (sometimes even during childhood) when the person starts to harbor ill-feelings towards specific aspects of his circumstances, surroundings or upbringing. The specific cause of the ill-feeling is not external but is the incapability of the person to come to terms with the perceived external stimulus for anger. The usual examples are anger and hatred towards rich people, anger at parents for their behavior type etc. Such feelings once developed, continue to linger with time and are hard to let go off.

Internal-B: This is a more common anger type which is sporadic and short lived. This can be triggered by internal reactions to external stimuli. External stimuli which are not anger causing. Let's say this is very expectation dependent. Anger caused by jealousy, remorse, guilt etc. fall into this category. This type of anger can affect a wide range of personality types. A few might take this anger very seriously (or to put it correctly - a few will be affected very badly by this type of anger) Reversing this anger is usually easy.

External: As the name suggests, this type of anger is caused entirely by external factors. These are external factors that specifically stoke anger in the psyche. This type of anger is most common and something which all animal species exhibit. External anger is driven by the mind's survival instinct. When someone hits you, you get angry and hit back. This anger is healthy and I would say 'right'. This anger is difficult to control, and in my opinion is wrong to try and control. It is supposed to be a natural reaction to external stimuli.

What I have found is that anger is very often a mixture of the three types. The pre-existence of one type of anger enhances the effect of the other. e.g. I've been feeling very angry at myself for driving carelessly thereby resulting in a scratch on my new car (can be classified Internal-B) Then this guy at the traffic signal bumps his car into the back of my car. I lose it completely (External anger enhanced by Internal-B).

Anger type Internal-A is very a existential angst type of thing. At a basic level, it can be overcome by logic and acceptance of life as it was and it is. If you've always been obese and hence hate slime people, relax. Give your genes their due. Being obese might be the right thing for you. At a more complicated level, Internal-A anger might need medical attention. Chronic cases of hatred, ill-feeling might lead to pathological depression warranting psychiatric care. But extreme cases aside, Internal-A can be overcome by right thinking.

Anger type Internal-B is the most unwanted type of anger. I personally find it the silliest and most useless type of anger. It is this type of anger that I have almost completely quashed from my mind. I often tell myself that it is I who lose when I'm angry for there is nothing to gain from this anger type. You never scare anyone, never make a point, never get someone to do things for you. I try and ensure that I never develop Internal-B anger. And believe me, it is easy once you realize that it serves no useful purpose.

External anger is good and necessary anger. The only challenge is to use it in a controlled and careful manner. External anger follows the pattern of diminishing marginal returns. Hence it is important to understand where you are on the curve and what the slope is. I rarely try and control external anger. The most I do is to examine where there's marginal benefit in continuing or increasing my anger levels.

All said and done, the most important step towards anger management is to understand which anger type one is experiencing and delve into the actual cause of the anger. Once there, one can use the skill of logic and cost-benefit analysis.

Accrual accounting

I do not know how the accounting system we currently follow came into being. At some level, the accounting system is an elaborate exercise in trying to prove a tautological premise. Let's say you have two dogs: Debit and Credit. You give each dog a set of bags. The number of bags given to either dog need not be the same. You then take an even number of beads and start distributing one bead each to either dog asking the dog to put the beads into one of the bags based on some complicated rule.

You keep doing this: pick up two beads, give one to Debit and the other to Credit. Do this for a year. And at the end of the year ask either dog to list the total number of beads against each of its bags. After a lot of fretting, the totals match. You are happy and someone responsible signs off the paper certifying that the totals match. Everyone is happy, Debit and Credit wag their tails, the beads for the new year start coming in.

I could never understand double entry book-keeping in B school. There was just too much pressure which prevented me from making a fundamental assessment of what was going on. It was only recently did I really understand the gist of it all. The difficulty lie in the rules that apply to determine which bead should go into which bag and the exacting exercise of choosing a few bags from either dogs and putting down the bead-count details of those.

Now that I understand accounting in the simple bead, dog, bag model, it is important to understand what constitutes the beads and the bags.

Statutory accounting is done on an accrual basis as against a cash basis. This I'm assuming was a decision taken after a lot of deliberation. Accounting on an accrual basis is more elegant, better for analysis and structurally easier to monitor/maintain. But at the end of the day cash is king, queen and most wanted. Cash accounting is reality. Cash accounting helps you sleep in peace.

Interpreting cash movement from accrual accounting detail can be a harrowing exercise. The problem is that accrual accountants (ergo all certified professional accountants) overdo the elegance bit, mostly at the cost of obfuscating reality.

Lets take a simple example: you own a company that sells soda ash. Your chief executive tells you that he's manufactured and sold 100,000 tonnes of soda ash to Charles Taylor in Sub Saharan Africa. You congratulate him on the sale and tell yourself that you're company is doing well. You order a glass of wine, eat an expensive dinner and go to bed imagining yourself in the new Armani.

A couple of months later your bank calls you and tells you that a 1,000 Rupee check drawn on the bank by the soda ash company is about to bounce. You flip. You ask your accountant to check on what's amiss. He tells you "Sir, yes we're overdrawn".

You look at the company profit & loss statement. It has been a great year; the super-large order from Africa had been the buzz. Your company had made windfall profits thanks to Charles Taylor. What could have gone wrong?

Cash. And the bloody lack of it. The problem is sales, margin, EBITDA, profit are all accrual measures. What really matters is cash. Your profit tells you nothing about whether Charles Taylor paid you for the soda ash. It is designed not to tell you. Charles Taylor's payment or non-payment is hidden in the receivables. The beauty is that you could have gone around town claiming that your company made large profits and yet end up getting caught in a 138 offence on a piddly little check.

This illustration might be simplistic and anyone even remotely familiar with business will be able to spot the miss. But the point I emphasize is that financial reality is often hidden in the accounting statements and takes some finding out.

Accountants are strange people who seem to belong to some secret brotherhood. They seem to have designed things in a way to ensure their necessity is always felt.

The Cut and Run business?

My current job offers me multiple opportunities to meet investment bankers - the IBD type. Through two years of B-school, I harbored stereotypes of work in investment banks. As I understood it, there were broadly 2 categories: sales/trading and IBD. Sales/trading concerned with transactions in the the capital markets (debt and equity) and IBD involved transactions outside the capital markets and transactions that resulted in an entity gaining exposure to capital markets (IPOs, debentures, etc.) Of course I understand things better now.

The IBD side of the business intrigues me. These are people who do 'transactions'. Transactions are basically barters of economic interest of different kind; most often cash for ownership or cash for claim on future cash/assets.

Each side of the transaction hires a banker to help find the other side. It is in the banker's interest to see the transaction through. Most often banks are paid a success fee for culmination of the transaction. More money for the bank will mean more money for the people working for the bank and specifically more money for the people directly involved in the transaction. Given this, a banker would be happier if there were more transactions done by him.

Now a transaction by definition is a transaction - a point in time agreement between two or more parties for which the banker is witness or chief cause. The banker's fortunes is not linked to the future of either party post the transaction. This might be different in the case of the non-IBD banking system where the bank might have exposure to the underlying party.

So a transaction banker would do deal 1, make a cut from it, move to another situation with different parties, do transaction 2, make a cut from etc. Does this mean that the nature of business is cut and run?

At first sight, this seemed true. I was sitting at the airport trying to reason this out to someone when I realized the flaw. Banking is about relationships, about reputation. There might be cases where a banker cuts and runs, moves from one bank to another and hence able to continue his cut and run. But in the big picture, these transients will be few. A bank will develop a reputation based on the future performance of the party post the transaction it oversaw. Good banks and hence good deal makers will get a reputation of making the right deal and not merely cut and run.

The anatomy of failure

I have been wanting to write about this for a long time. This one is in the series of posts of self-reflection. By putting down whatever I do here, I hope to change and improve.

What is failure? What constitutes it? Failure is a condition of under-achievement: a feeling of not having done what you intended to or wanted to. I think wanting to do something and not being able to do is a better definition rather than intending to do something and not being able to do so.

There can be many reasons why people fail. The obvious one is that the goal they set for themselves is far beyond what they are capable of. This is failure by design. The system is structured for failure. You cannot be born in India and hope to be the President of the United States.

Failure by design is caused by bad judgements of goals and expectations. Such types of failures can be corrected by realigning goals and wants - the familiar expectation setting. Some people might be of the type who purposely set stretched, unattainable goals for themselves. This is a good strategy for people who know how to deal with it.

The other and more important type of failure is failure by choice. Some people just choose to fail. It is not because of the goals being stretched or their skills being inadequate. It is this nature of failure I personally want to avoid. Currently, there is an overwhelming feeling inside me that I will end up failing because I choose to fail. And the choice is not something I make consciously.

Why does this happen? I think the primary reason is a lack of confidence. It is a feeling inside which says 'success is not for me... I am meant to fail.' It is hard not to succumb to such a feeling when it is strong and sub-conscious. I am not saying that I have succumbed completely; but every now and then, I do believe (and believe very strongly) that success is not for me.

The whole proposition is very silly given that there is no basis for such a feeling. This is the exact logical way I am taking to fight my way out. If there are tendencies which my mind can take for an uncertain event, I might as well tend towards believing in success rather than in failure.

But believing in failure is the very essence of pessimism. It is something that (unfortunately) is a part of me.

My investigation into the nature of true statements

Off late, I have been trying hard to understand the nature of knowledge and belief. Knowledge to me is a higher idea than belief. Knowledge is something that is true whereas beliefs needn't be. But this differentiation isn't as simple as one would expect; because claiming that something is 'true' is not an elementary task.

Perhaps understanding the nature of 'truth' is a good starting point. Once we know what 'truth' is, then we will have a clear way to differentiate between 'beliefs' that are 'knowledge' and 'beliefs' that are merely beliefs.

There are many tests for truth; or the criteria of truth. The primary and most relevant criteria are objectivity, and consistency. I wish to discuss consistency first; objectivity deserves a longer, more detailed discussion.

By consistency, I mean that a true statement should be be consistent with everything else that is accepted as true. This is a very basic condition; if a statement is true but it contradicts another truth then one of two things: the statement is not true or the earlier statement which was accepted as being true is not entirely so.

This is perhaps how science and human knowledge grows: by testing the consistency of propositions with the accepted truth. A classic example is the idea that the world is flat. This was considered a true statement until somebody's claim which was inconsistent with this, started getting attention.

The second and tougher criterion is that of objectivity. The criterion of objectivity requires that a true statement stands alone without dependence of opinions and feelings. An objective truth should be external to the mind; for the mind's lens is a subjective apparatus.

Once we bring in objectivity into the picture, our sample of possible true statements shrinks alarmingly. For example, Adam tells Eve. "Shem tells me that it is a very hot day today in Canaan. Is it true?" If objectivity is a criterion for truth and the word 'hot' is as understood as it currently is, Eve can only reply "The temperature today in Canaan was 40 degree Celsius".

Shem's opinion about the weather would have been true if our system of communication had defined 'hot' has 'a condition where the temperature is greater than 39 degree Celsius' or something like that. But as we use it, the word hot is an opinion, a judgement of a condition.

This brings me to the next step: the difference between factual statements and judgements. A fact is an objective statement (hence external to the mind) that need not necessarily be true when stated or proposed. In a way, a fact is a true statement whose consistency hasn't been tested yet. And by definition, a judgement can never be a true statement.

The statement 'this colour is blue' can be true under the assumption that that blue is understood to be a colour that corresponds to a certain wavelength of light. What if Adam tells Eve. "the water is blue in colour"? Is this a factual statement?

This statement might have been termed factual. But one fine day someone identified colour blindness as a possible human condition. Given this possibility, Adam's statement cannot be factual in the strict sense. Adam's perception of colour is something that is still subjective. If Adam said "the wavelength of light reflected by the water is xx Angstrom", this can be called a factual statement (assuming that Adam has the standard equipment to measure such details accurately and he makes this statement after the measurement).

Is the act of measurement objective? It certainly can be. Assume a machine which just correctly reads the light and displays the wavelength on a screen. Adam can just read off this screen and make a statement on the wavelength of the light. This statement by Adam is no doubt factual; but its truth will depend on Adam's ability to read correctly.

There are a lot of things I want to discuss regarding the consistency of true statements. I shall get to that some other time.

On the nature of happiness

If I were to name three books that have had the greatest influence in the way I think and lead life, one of them would surely be Fooled by randomness by Nassim Taleb. I have read the book one and a half times and have been fascinated by some of the stuff in the book. In some places, the book is extremely immodest but that is the author's style. Amidst all the positioning and holier-than-thou, there is a lot of sense in what he says.

I would like to bring to your attention a quote from the book: Solon's warning - 'The uncertain future has yet to come, with all variety of future; and him only to whom the divinity has guaranteed continued happiness until the end we may call happy'. Taleb builds on this in a way and combines the good and bad effects of randomness to bring about his views of success, luck, etc.

I do not agree to Solon's statement completely. Happiness to me is more a stock variable: at any given point of time, you can either be happy or you are not; and the argument ends there. The state of being happy can change quickly thanks to uncertainity of the future. But calling only those who enjoy perpetual happiness as being 'happy' isn't something I wouldn't agree with.

Here I am tempted to think along the lines of what constitutes happiness and whether it is an abosolute term at all. Does happiness derive from the change in one state to another (whereby happiness is a relative perception of the mind) or is happiness absolute and stand alone? My answer tends more towards the former than the latter.

My best effort would be to define happiness as a state of mind. A state of mind which can further be broken down into a specific mental chemical balance (do I love this line of reasoning or what!) To that extant, happiness is an absolute state. We can, in some form describe happiness as - 'a mind state where the subject has an endorphin concentration of xx gm/Litre'. Depending on how you are as a person, the value of xx will differ. But this is not the 'non-absoluteness' I want to talk about.

Happiness is derived from relative improvements in situations. Abolsute situations do not guarantee happiness. E. g. If you beat Usain Bolt in a 100m race, the first time you are happy. Your endorphine level shoots up to 10xx or something. The 100th time you beat him in a 100m race, the end state is still the same in an absolute sense but you don't feel half as happy.

Humans are greedy by nature. Our happiness circuits follow the law of diminishing returns. It's as if the gland releasing the happiness hormones says "I've seenenough of this. Show me something better!".