I Saved 50 cents !!! A Simple Joy of Life :-)

Ofcourse not the rapper, which if I had did I would be now shaking my ass with bootilicious women instead of writing this post, but 2 quarters. Thats right, I saved 2 quarters coins !!! Eureka !!!

First I need to give my axiomatic definition of "Simple Joys of Life", as its highly subjective. The two simple rules that go into the definition are

1) It has to be simple...:-) I mean it should not involve expensive things or it should not be expensive, ie., it should be insignificant in monetary value...

2) Occurrence of that event has to be an extreme event...I mean the event shuld lie in the fat tails of the distribution of the random variable called Simple Joys...or in other words, probability of the occurrence of that event is very small...Some examples of extreme events, include occurrence of a nuclear explosion or that of an earthquake or tsunami...Assuming you live in an area that is not prone to above accidents, otherwise it would be repeating incidents and not accidents...

Last night when I went to do my laundry, I was half asleep. Thats because I did my laundry at near midnight..whatever...Now I dump my clothes in the washer that I normally I don't use. I normally use the first washer at the door. But last night I don't know why I chose the last washer from the door...whatever...So I dump my clothes in this washer, add detergent, and when I am about to add coins, I notice that it needs only 75 cents. Normally it requires a bribe of $ 1.25 to make it work. Blimey, someone added 50 cents and left the laundry !!!

Now this qualifies as "A Simple Joy of Life", as per my axiomatic definition outlined above. Lets look at the purchasing power of 50 cents. I mean what can one possibly buy with 50 cents? You can neither get a bottle of water nor a can of beer...:-( Even if you want to take advantage of economies of scale, and buy a pack of beer cans, to achieve your objective of getting a can of beer for 50 cents, you still need to generate money in an exogenous manner. So that doesn't really count. Even if you convert into Indian Rupees, that turns out to be roughly Rs.20, you could get a couple of keera vadais, one potato bonda or mysore pak, and one coconut poli, or one good pani puri and masala chai...well there are actually quite a lot of great combinations when you convert 50 cents to smiling Gandhis...But the cost of going to India to spend 50 cents is ridiculous...So it satisfies the 1st condition...

Now this event is also an extreme event...I mean what are the odds of coming across someone who would add 50 cents to the washer and decide to leave abruptly? Even if he doesn't want to use washer, he could have easily pressed the toggle next to the coin slot which would return his coins...So it satisfies the 2nd rule too !!!

So saving 50 cents in my fast dwindling bank balance qualifies as "A Simple Joy of Life" !!!:-)

In Pursuit of Happiness ( a mean-reverting property of life? )

Mind is the forerunner of states of existence. Mind is chief, and (those states) are caused by the mind. If one speaks and acts with a pure mind, surely happiness will follow like one's own shadow! - Gautama Buddha and also The Bhagavad Gita

Happiness is an emotional or affective state that is characterized by feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction. As a state and a subject, it has been pursued and commented on extensively throughout world history. This reflects the universal importance that humans place on happiness, courtesy Wikipedia.

I can't figure out my sudden surge in the philosophies of Happiness. I guess I just woke this Sunday morning and had a trailer of some pleasant flashbacks. An abstract business cycle alternates between contraction (recession) and expansion of the economy, saddled by peaks and troughs, as shown in the figure, reverting to an imaginary mean. Many other things in life imitates mean-reverting properties, for instance prices of financial instruments (stocks, bonds etc.)...How about happiness in life? Hmmm...it appears so.

After the mundane things this morning, I placed my mug with Bru instant coffee in microwave to heat it, and decided to clean up my closet. I set my eyes on a blue baggage that had a huge plastic bag inside. I couldn't recollect what it contained, as its been a while since I touched it. On opening it, I felt like the old man in the movie Amelie who is overjoyed on seeing his long lost trinkets. In the bag were audiocassettes/tapes of GNR, Nirvana, scorpions, AC/DC, Van Halen and David Lee Roth, Black Sabbath ( gosh, did I listen to these crap one point of time in my life?), great collections of the legendary M.S., and a whole lot of assorted collections MLTR, Michael Bolton (what the hell?), Cranberries (remember the popular song "Animal Instincts"?), Cardigans (remember "Love Fool" from the movie "Romeo and Juliet"?), Richard Marx, to name a few.

With my Bru in hand I went over to my desk, put my feet on the desk, leant back on my rocking chair, and closed my eyes to savor this moment. These audiocassettes, insignificant in monetary value, brought out a deluge of diverse emotions. That obnoxious boy who used to play mridangam at 4AM and wake everyone up, customary ablutions, morning prayer and sandhis followed by that great filter coffee, daily dosage of mathematics, idli for breakfasts, school and sweet girls, pretty girls and Sruthilaya (a dance school founded by actress Shobana), dosas and adais for evening tiffin, street cricket and fights for couple of hours, shower followed by sandhis, homeworks, rasam for dinner, few games of carrom board with friends and family, late night masala tea/milk at the street corner tea shop...hmmm...life was so stress free, laid-back and pleasant...Certainly those were the peaks of my happiness cycle. And if happiness in life is mean-reverting too, I hope I have reached my trough and look forward to the upward surge in that real-valued function called Happiness...For some desserts are "The simple Joys in Life...". :-) For me, a feeling of nostalgia of that long lost world is the big kick.

Does Happiness really have cyclical properties or is it a myth? If its not a myth, is it reverting to a mean that can be estimated with reasonable levels of confidence? What are the statistical properties of that mean? Using various monetary and fiscal policies, the Fed tries to avoid/delay recession and shocks to the economy by allowing a gradual slowdown. If Happiness indeed has cyclical properties, hope GOD tries something similar, to the fed, to slow down troughs (sorrows and pain) in the cycle of Happiness...

Bangalore's IT revolution and its (supposedly) dangerous impact on TN and Kerala !!!

There is no smoke without a fire - Someone Wise

All of us would have come across samaritans who wear placards about impending apocalyse, and how GOD is the ONLY savior on this judgement day ( as shown in the above pic). Well dear readers, I am sorry to break out that they are actually true, if you were to believe The Hindu, the respected and widely read newspaper in Chennai and which every Tam would love to read with a strong filter coffee every morning !!!

As very well documented, Bangalore's IT revolution and its subsequent rise from one of the prominent cities in South India to one of the prominent cities of the world is a stuff of the legend. Many firms with Bangalore as its base have a made a name of themselves in this IT revolution. With this IT revolution comes the inevitable changes to the Bangalore fabric. Migration of people, overcrowding, increase in traffic, law and order issues, vanishing greenery, soaring real estate prices etc., to name a few.

While many in the media have highlighted these and other various issues at various lengths, I was startled to find a new trend affecting the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. According to The Hindu dated July 9th 2007, two cities/towns of TN, namely Coimbatore and Salem, and Kozhikode from Kerala have reportedly migrated to Karnataka. Please look into, http://www.hindu.com/2007/07/09/22hdline.htm

Looks like these three couldn't resist the seduction of Karnataka's ever increasing real-estate prices, and have decided to migrate so as to not rot further in their states. This is the strongest message of Apocalyse to all the lunatic polictians in Tamil nadu and Kerala. If you politicians don't come up with an IT revolution of your own in TN and Kerala, expect more cities to migrate to Karnataka !!!

Either get HIGH (in IT) or your end is NIGH !!!

Satyameva Jayate - Adi Shankara from the Mundaka Upanishad

This is in response to my last post on how GOD and media gang up against good news. Here we see their other face...after all everyone has Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in them. :-)

The above quote in Sanskrit means that "Truth Alone Triumphs.". It is also one of the main pillars of the Indian Constitution, and it appears in our national emblem and the ever impressive Ashoka Pillar.

We are used to seeing the famous quote bear fruition only in movies, as truth rarely prevails in real-life. Its only in desi movies, the disgruntled and frustrated hero takes upon himself to right the wrongs with his one-man army against a gang of corrupt politicians and ruthless mafia. But thanks to the media uproar, justice was served in two ghastly murders that I have followed in the last decade. Certainly, it was heartening to see Ms. Jessica Lall and Ms. Priyadarshini Mattoo finally get justice against powerful men. For more details on these 2 cases, refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Lal and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priyadarshini_Mattoo.

While Jessica's case is more or less settled, it is disconcerting to note that Santosh Singh, the man found guily in Priyadarshini's case, is now appealing to the Supreme Court of India raising questions about the validity of DNA evidence. Hope this poor girl gets justice...

While it appears that media uproar did make a difference to these two cases, it makes me wonder if media uproar resulted in public uproar or the vice-versa? In other words, does media really care about doing good for the public or does it feed on public's fetishes? Another way to say that would be, does media highlight only those news that capture public's imagination, to make a few more quids, or does it ever highlight injustice even when it slips out of public's thoughts?...

Hmmm, maybe this will go down for another post, another time...:-)

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe ...

The world is HIS playground, and we are mere players - The Bhagavad Gita

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe is a children's counting rhyme, used to select "it" for games and similar purposes, whose desi counterpart is "inky pinky ponky...". My view on this is, that GOD gave humans the economic concept of utility theory so that they can make a decision on the choices based on their utility value. When presented with choices of identical utility value, humans use counting rhymes as above or toss a coin or any other means to break deadlocks. Another way to look at this type of decision-making is that GOD is unbiased, by default, when choices have identical utility value, and biased towards choice(s) (with higher utility values) when values are distinct. For all those atheists out there, substitute "GOD" by "Nature" as it is commonly modeled in neo-classical and evolutionary game theory.With all pun intended, ofcourse...

I first came across "Eeny, meeny,..." version in 90s in Pulp Fiction and later in Natural Born Killers. It is the latter movie that is more relevant for this post. A wonderful movie about a couple of psychopathic serial killers, Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, followed closely by a journalist Robert Downey Jr., highlighting how paparazzi follows useless people relentlessly, and ends up making them celebrities. Ofcourse all of you could come up with numerous instances in real-life. It seems that when there are so many good news that media could focus on, they always seem to rely on not-so good happenings around the world. While it is important to report about Kosovo, Darfur, Iraq, Paris Hilton, Shilpa Shetty (I'm really not sure about Paris and Shilpa) etc., many good news seem to get marginalized.

Contributions of two Indian mathematicians were acknowledged over the last 1 year or so, by very famous international committees, and the Indian media have ignored them (I would love to be proven wrong), forget the international media. The concerned mathematicians are Prof. Ramdorai Sujatha and Prof. Srinivasa Varadhan. Prof. Sujatha of TIFR was awarded The Ramanujan Prize in 2006 for her work on the arithmetic of algebraic varieties and her substantial contributions to non-commutative Iwasawa theory. Follow http://users.ictp.it/~sci_info/awards/Ramanujan/RamanujanWinners/Ramanujan06.html and http://www.norwayemb.org.in/Press+Releases/ramanujan+prize.htm, for more details. An award in the name of one of the finest Indian mathematicians of all time, founded in Italy, went practically unnoticed. :-(

Prof. Varadhan of CIMS, NYU was awarded the 2007 Abel Prize, regarded as the Nobel equivalent in Mathematics, for his contributions to Probability Theory and for his work in the Theory of Large Deviations. Abel committee's citation in Tamil certainly makes a wonderful read with rarely heard tamil words for quantum statistics, probability theory and various technical terms for concepts in probability. His biography, known to many students, is very poignant. It outline his struggle starting from humble roots in Chennai, his work with his advisor C.R. Rao ( of the famous Cramer-Rao bounds in Statistics) at ISI, Calcutta, his chancy meeting with Russian probabilist A.N. Kolmogorov, his early days at NYU, words of appreciation from another great probabilist Prof. Daniel Stroock of MIT, and lastly tragic death of his son in 9/11 bombings. For more details, look http://www.abelprisen.no/en/prisvinnere/2007/

It is very sad that Indian media failed to honor 2 of its great mathematicians. Such news has the potential to inspire few young kids to achieve something for India. Hope media, in future, will address GOD's/Nature's bias against good news' by dedicating some space and time towards such news.

While on a recent visit to Chennai, one of my uncles casually remarked that Varadhan's family lived a few blocks from where we once lived in East Tambaram. While I was overjoyed on hearing this, I was upset to find that my cousins had no idea of either Prof. Sujatha or Prof. Varadhan and were seemingly happy in discussing about Ash-Abhishek marriage, Shilpa Shetty and likes. This was the motivation for this post.

R.I.P Jeeva

The beauty will save the world - Dostoevsky from The Idiot

Right from a very young age I was fortunate to be part of various groups that loved to engage in animated discussions over movies. Some groups used to focus on screen writing, with Jayakanthan, Balachander, Mahendran, Sujatha, Anuradha Ramanan etc. to name a few that dominated our discussions. Some others were into more technical aspects of film making, more notably cinematography, with the likes of P.C. Sriram, Balu Mahendra, Ashok Kumar, Madhu Ambat etc, featuring in them. One of the young turks in cinematography, along with Rajiv Menon, Ravi Chandran etc., to make a name for himself over the last decade was Jeeva. Despite starting out with 2 big hits in Gentleman and Kaadhalan, Jeeva stood out in his third movie Indian. The vision, the color, the angles, the lighting were so good that Jeeva made headlines and held his own. Now thats no mean feat for a youngster when you compete for headlines with heavyweights like Kamal Hasan, Shankar, A.R. Rahman, Sujatha, Thotta Tharani, Lenin and Vijayan. Sadly, Jeeva passed away few days back at a relatively young age, with expectations unfulfilled. He was only 44.

Jeeva must have been an humble person in real-life too. After 2 blockbusters with Shankar, Jeeva donned the hat of camera assistant to Rajiv Menon for Manirathnam's Bombay, while Shankar was busy working out details for his next movie with Kamal. Now thats a big climbdown from stardom to just another boy under flashlights.

If Dostoevsky was true as to what he meant, the world needs to find a new savior. Rest in Peace Jeeva.