Why being a grossly overpaid MBA is brilliant: it lets you go berserk at the Crossword Sale.
Bookshopping
September 16, 2007
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Posted by Aadisht
The Yellow Peril
September 15, 2007Bwahahahaha. This is brilliant:
Link via Popagandhi.
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Vinayak Chaturthi
September 15, 2007It’s Vinayak Chaturthi today, and I’m slightly regretting not being in Bombay. A year ago, I saw a Bombay Vinayak Chaturthi for the first time, and I was absolutely blown over by it.
Out of all the festivals I’ve seen in India, nothing manages to be one big, cooperative street party the way Vinayak Chaturthi does in Bombay. Diwali in Delhi is pretty much every family against every other family in the firecrackers stakes, Baisakhi in Patiala is a community festival only for the kids, and all the festivals in Bangalore seem to be intensely private family affairs.
(Incidentally, this ties up with my theory of how public space is shared in Bombay, fought over in Delhi, and respected or at least treated with indifference in Bangalore. But that’s another post.)
The biggest culture shock to a Delhiite seeing the Vinayak Chaturthi celebrations in Bombay is the trucks. In Delhi, trucks on a festival day are associated with rowdies from UP crossing the border on Holi to rape and pillage. In Bombay, trucks are filled with happy middle class families who’re dancing and generally having a blast without making a nuisance of themselves. (Well, except for the noise.)
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s (somebody else’s) photos on the festival: Link, and link.
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I Am Tam
September 14, 2007It’s official. My loyal readers no longer make any distinction between me and other Tam stalwarts like Chandru, Chenthil, Anti, or Ammani.
Forward the New Chozha Empire!
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Congratulations, Nitin
September 14, 2007It’s been four years since Mr. Pai planted The Acorn.
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Reckless Stereotyping
September 13, 2007Marwaris become wholesale traders. Of steel. Or generic pharmaceuticals or cement or pretty much any commodity. Send their kids to a local Maadoo school and then a local Maadoo B. Com. college. The sons join the family business. The daughters are married off. The family’s black money goes as dowry and becomes an unsecured loan to the son-in-law’s family business. Which also trades the same commodity.
Punjabis set up garment export units. Send the sons to do a BBA in Australia. Send the daughters to NIFT. Both come back and run the family business. Then the daughter gets married and sets up her own business with her sister-in-law. The daughter’s family provides more seed capital than the sister-in-law’s.
So it goes.
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How to Curl Hair
September 12, 2007There are many crucial problems we face in this world. Pomeranians. The CPI(M). Jain continental cuisine. The Fed rate. But looming above all these is one critical, mother-of-all-problems problem: the scarcity of curly haired girls.
For all these problems there are solutions. But they are difficult solutions. Predicting the Fed rate will stop being a problem if we get rid of the Fed, and central banks altogether. Garlic-free lasagna can be wiped out if we conduct a Jainocide. How to rid the world of Pomeranians and the CPI(M) is something that lies outside my imagination, but there is surely a solution here as well.
But in his infinite compassion, the Jagadguru has ensured that the most difficult problem has the simplest solution. And He has spoken through His prophetess, Allison Barrows:
The simplicity and elegance of the solution is astounding. Bring out a well-muscled swimmer, and girls’ hair will curl automatically! Thus the aesthetic level of the universe shall rise, and the Jagadguru will be exalted.
Masabi, it’s time for you to take off the yellow T-shirt.
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Laundry Management
September 11, 2007Beloved readers (especially the Bangalore ones), please help. Does anybody know where I can buy the following things in Bangalore? Home Stop and Lifestyle don’t have them, and neither does the Dubai shop on CMH Road.
- A clotheshorse. As I mentioned earlier, drying clothes on the balcony puts them at risk of getting wet again in the rain, or being crapped on by pigeons.
- PVC bins. What I’m looking for is three or four bins with a small footprint, not too shallow and not too deep. The idea here is that when the clothes are dry, me or my maid can separate them into shirts, trousers, and miscellaneous, and store each category of clothes in its own bin through the week until I iron them on Sunday. Right now, everything is dumped into one undifferentiated pile on spread out newspapers, and it’s really quite distressing to look at. If the bins come in different colours, even better.
If you have a better idea for sorting dried laundry than bins, leave a comment about that, please.
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The Fundamental Interconnectedness of all Things
September 8, 2007You may have noticed that there’s hardly been any business/ economics blogging going on here for most of the year. Most of you probably didn’t care, but in case you did, please rest assured that I haven’t given up. It’s just that right now I’m preoccupied with an idea that is not fully formed.
The problem is that this idea is multiple intersecting ideas. And while I have a vague idea of how they link up, I can’t put it into words yet. And the the things linking up include:
- Nandigram, Singur, and eminent domain in general (especially Ila Patnaik’s more-than-one-year-old oped on it)
- IIMB’s internal instant messenger
- The lack of public spaces for performing artists in Bangalore
- Why people in slums have TVs but not flush toilets (this was a Nitin Pai post a while back)
- Bars in Singapore
- Why DRL got funding from ICICI Ventures while Ranbaxy did a public issue
- The Bangalore Central mall
- Reservations
- The Flickr API
- Open source software
All these are very diverse but rest assured that they link up. The problem, as I said, is in explaining clearly how they link up. Once I discovered two weeks ago that the Flickr API was also connected to all this, separating and sorting the linkages has become easier. It’s still a jumbled mess, but I’m closer to banging it into some sort of framework than before.
Until that happens, arbitfundablogging will continue as usual.
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Patelshot
September 8, 2007Masabi told me today that me and Mukka appear in the first page of results on a Google search for ‘patelshot’.
This is not because my page rank has suddenly skyrocketed, but because the mainstream spelling of the phrase is Patel Shot. Dropping the space and converting the phrase into a single word seems to have been an IIM-B innovation.
IIM-B innovations must be spread and popularised. Therefore, dear readers, I appeal to you: the next time you find a photograph of some random tourist in the foreground of a famous monument, please call it a ‘Patelshot’ and not a ‘Patel shot’. I will be very grateful to you for this act of kindness.
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