Aila! Shock laga kya ?

Background article here: http://www.cricinfo.com/ci/content/current/story/470835.html

First things first, Yuvraj Singh is my hero, for a variety of reasons:

1) He used to date Kim Sharma

2) He used to date Kim Sharma

3) He’s blessed with natural talent

4) He wastes his natural talent and still managed to land Kim Sharma

Most of all though what Yuvraj represents is hope. Hope that even average people like you dear reader and below average people like me can succeed. Think about it — despite making an ass of himself on national television by reacting to idiotic 4th grade taunts, at one point Yuvraj WENT OUT WITH KIM SHARMA. Imagine what you and I could acheive if we just worked hard, didn’t do anything stupid and had a little luck.

Thus, we derive the Yuvi equation:

Money + Fame – Class – Common Sense + Paunch = Hottie.

Thanks Yuvi, you’re an inspiration.

Also check out Yuvi’s new movie: http://www.cricketwithballs.com/2010/08/03/yuvraj-singh-starring-in-adam-sandler-remake/

How was your day ?

I hate this question, I hate this question almost as much as I hate managers who don’t understand code, so here’s my answer:

6:00 AM: Get up, must exercise today, looking more and more like the Indian uncles at work.

6:01 AM: F**k it, I’ll go tomorrow.

8:00 AM: Get up, check email / rss: new Harsha Bhogle article!, score. The day’s only gonna get worse from here.

8:10 AM: Shower / Shave / Leave for work.

8:30 AM: Get in, promise yourself that’ll you’ll get some work done today.

8.31 AM: Facebook! Joy of joys: 33% of desi friends went camping and feel “re-energized” 25% of desi friends went to an AR Rehman concert that “rocked” 20% of desi friends went to a potluck where the food was “yummy” 22% of desi chicks got married / engaged to rich NRI dudes 4 years older than you (at this point you promise never never to turn into “that” guy).

8:40 AM: Check work email: good day, broke only 3 things in production, maybe I’ll get a bonus this year.

8.50 AM: Try to organize yourself like the white guys: use post its!

9:00 AM: Status meeting: Repeat what you did last day in different words and thank God your desi manager doesn’t understand words longer than 6 characters but is too proud to admit this.

9:20 AM: Check the papers: damn that Maureen Dowd is a fox. Friedman is too bullish on India for his own good. The Economist continues to make sense. Read Harsha Bhogle article again (aah – heaven).

9:30 AM: Check work email: damn it! idiot chick who joined with you got promoted. Curse silently and update your resume. Search for jobs on Linked In for 30 minutes.

10:00 AM: Realize that you don’t have any new skills from the past year. Promise yourself to actually complete something and “show them”. Start coding

10:15 AM: You’re in the zone now. Headphones, Code and you, this is like a Basketball, the Playoffs and Ray Allen.

10:30 AM: Future ideal son in law on iyengarmatrimony.com comes by your desk and says: “Dude, you didn’t come to the AR Rehman concert did you ? It rocked!”.

10:40 AM: Nod and listen politely while thinking of interesting ways of mutilating the person in front of you.

11:00 AM: Now, back to the zone: Get an hour of work done.

12:00 AM: Lunch. Plan “exit strategy” to become “king” in India. Real estate baby, that’s the shit.

01:00 PM: Design meeting. Should have read the design patterns book. Promise to do this and contribute from next time.

2:00 PM: One on One with manager you don’t respect. Feedback not good: you should speak up more and interact with your colleagues more. Your attitude is wrong. I think: “F**k you”, nod politely and smile. Another person to short when I start my hedge fund.

2:30 PM: Check e-trade, damn it! RSU’s won’t vest for another month.

2:40 PM: Code baby Code. Pandora, Code and Me – the holy trinity.

3:40 PM: Coffee with real friend. “Really da ? ***sys isn’t hiring, dude, how will we go home man ?”

4:00 PM: Log onto chat. Aah, best friend from India is on support duty for his company and has found proxy!. Whine, bitch, moan and curse for the next half hour about state of the world.

4:30 PM: Ping pong. Show the chinki’s whose boss. (they are btw).

5:00 PM: Make sure manager sees you coding while he walks out. Yep, you’re sure as f**k getting a bonus this year. Damn it feels good to be a banker errr sorry coder.

6:00 PM: Desi Uncle passes you by on the way out, invites you to daughter’s Tamil Association of Santa Clara recital. Promise to go. Promise to kill yourself after.

6:30 PM: Get home. Shower.

6:50 PM: Dinner in front of TV with room mate

8:00 PM: Start reading design patterns book, promote me now!

8:15 PM: Stop reading design patterns book, workaholics are losers anyways.

8:16 PM: Need to do something else constructive now. One game of Halo won’t hurt.

10:30 PM: Reenergized baby! Now that it’s out of your system, you can focus.

10:36 PM: Must watch Jackie Chan movie: drunken monkey on cable. Good times.

12:15 AM: Ahh nice. You too shall be disciplined like the Chan from tomorrow.

12:30 AM: Sleep, but not before mentally updating your people to f**k list when you start that hedge fund …..

Damn you Facebook, damn you.

‘Sup dawgs ?

Random facebook rant: like most of my posts this applies to nouveau riche Indian MS students:

* Don’t for God’s sake post football scores as your damn status message, we all know how to use google and we know you’re a real fan but still

* Don’t tell me what an awesome weekend you had while seeing Big Sur, seriously dude, what exactly was *so* awesome that you just have to brag about it

* Do not pose for photos, you are not a model

* Do not take fb quizes please, please and don’t recommend I take them EVER

* Level of wannabe-ness = no. of fb status updates *after* getting a job / no. of fb status updates *before* getting a job

* Yes, you’re hooking up with random hotties in clubs, we know we know, great job! you’re awesome!

* You also have white friends, wow!

* Don’t go “camping”, order pizza and update your status saying what an appreciation you have for the great outdoors

* Don’t assume people who aren’t active on FB are losers, they’re probably doing more productive things with their time: like studying yield curves

* In short, don’t use facebook, use email.

* Add me on Facebook!

BCCI: What Goldman can do, we can do better

The only way Lalit Modi could have made more money than he already has is by working on  a derivatives desk. In light of India’s victory and my perfunctory understanding of derivatives, I’ve come up with the BCCI’s latest and greatest financial product: the cricketer default swap.

How to spend 268$

Last Christmas my old laptop died, yes — that’s a technical term, it literally refused to start, kind of like Vivek Oberoi’s career. Anyways, there were some good deals out there and I decided to get a netbook for a change. My new years resolution is to never buy a laptop made by Dull computers again btw. Anyhoo, the Netbook’s been working great and I’ve been trying to convert everyone I know into giving it a try, so here are my random reasons to buy a netbook:

1) They are cheap. So are you. Now get married, call me for the wedding and make sure there’s parking.

2)  They are small. I mean really small (my English teacher would be so proud, no ?). Seriously, netbooks are perfect to carry around, they’re light and actually feel like portable devices rather than Dull Finspiron laptops which need Salman Khan biceps to lug around.

3) They are deceptively powerful. I’ve been running Quake 4 on my netbook with no problems. Plus you can play almost all strategy games on a decent 1.6 Ghz / 1 GB RAM machine, and we all know real men play strategy games.

4) Given that netbooks are cheap, you can use them to do things you wouldn’t want to on your “proper” laptop, like streaming cricket for free for example. Spyware, kya spyware ?

5) You will be cool. Cos I said so.

6) You will develop insane typing skills typing on a ridiculously small keyboard.

7) You’ll feel good about having bought something practical / useful and with solid computing power rather than spending the same amount on something “cool” like a WhyPad.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zieak/ / CC BY 2.0

Another helpful link: http://www.zieak.com/

Observations: India – South Africa 2nd Test, Kolkata

Some thoughts on the on going India – SA test in Kolkata:

• Ishant Sharma was inspirational. No two ways about it, on the first day, India were getting hammered, were it not for his spell after lunch, South Africa would probably be close to victory now. Daryll Cullinan said South Africa were about 1.5 hours away from victory, I agree. If things pan out as normal, Ishant Sharma may well have saved the test [and the series].
• I hate to say it, but yes South Africa are prone to collapse. I mean 7 wickets for 25 runs, seriously ?
• Finally, we have pace bowlers who can rattle the opposition. Not so long ago, the only purpose our seam bowlers served was to take the shine off the ball. Ishant and Zaheer are a real threat now a days, which poses the new problem that we can’t prepare dustbowls and get away with it.
• Harbhajan is so much more effective when he gives the ball some air rather than his usual ploy of cynically firing it into the pads to save runs [and his place in the team].
• South African commentators are under rated. They’re not full of macho nationalistic BS like our friends from down under [Healy, Taylor, Lawry], and they don’t parrot cliched drivel like messers Sivaramakrishnan, Lal, Singh.
• Virinder Sehwag and VVS Laxman can not be explained, seriously, these guys play the ball a foot away from their body and still make ridiculous amounts of runs against the best teams in the world, there’s no rational explanation why.
• People are being waaaaaaay too hard on the new guys – S. Badrinath / M. Vijay. The fab 4 had plenty of failures before their recent success. We went to Australia with Sachin as captain and lost almost every match and prior to that had our posteriors handed to us in South Africa. So spare me the future of the Indian team is scary crap. The gap between domestic and international cricket is so huge that the only long term fix is to increase the level of domestic play. Short term fix is to select players who have potential and back them for a run of games.
• Test cricket is frankly the most interesting form of the game at this point. Maybe I’m getting older (25 this year) but personally I feel test cricket is the only form of the game that offers a serious examination of a cricketers ability.
• The advertisements shown have become progressively worse over the years. Bring back the old ad-writers, the ‘youngistaan’ generation of ad men have the imagination and creativity of database administrators.
• This may well be the last time we see VVS and Sachin at Eden Gardens, privilege to see it.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/irishwildcat/ / CC BY 2.0

Sage advice

Sorry for the delayed post, I’ve been away — a combination of extra work and well laziness. Today is superbowl Sunday but more important it’s the third day of the India South Africa cricket series, [match summary: India have their backs to the wall and need to a decent performance to avoid defeat, highly recommend you try to watch it if you get a chance] which brings me to a recent article I read on (my home page and) the greatest site ever — cricinfo.

It’s about a young fast bowler — Abhimanyu Mithun who’s close to being selected for the Indian first XI. This is the piece of advice that really caught my eye — ‘whatever you are it is because of cricket, cricket is the ultimate, focus on the game, all other things will come, but start focusing on other things and everything is over’

Forget cricket, this advice is *extremely* applicable to our [Indian engineer with MS in US] lives as well. Every year you see hundreds of guys get their MS degrees and think they’ve cracked life, given dollar rupee rates, and the fact that India is likely to grow faster than the US for the a while it may be wise to keep updating that resume and doing that extra project, unless Irfan Pathan / Munaf Patel / or S. Sreesanth seem like good career models to follow.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbisaacs/ / CC BY 2.0

Why Wasim is better

Once again, let me say Cricinfo is the greatest site in the world, I recently saw this article about the great man Wasim Akram, a matter of great debate is whether Wasim was a better bowler than Glenn McGrath (GM), here’s my 0.02$ as to why Wasim was better —

1) Wasim had variety, he could bowl on dust-bowls in India or green tops in England and be equally effective, was GM ever as effective on dust-bowls ?

2) Wasim didn’t have the luxury of stability. Wasim had to contend with a lot of things — not always friendly team members, not always fair journalists, not always receptive captains and most of all a batting line up that didn’t always deliver. GM in his prime had the best batting line up on his side so opposition batsmen were under pressure even before he started bowling.

3) Unassisted wickets — Wasim had a much higher % of wickets unassisted (bowled / lbw) and common sense says it’s harder to do that than get some one caught in the slips.

Counterarguments:

1) Wasim had Waqar to back him up, I say yeah so ? GM had Shane Warne, Brett Lee (who was good in those days), Jason Gillespe (underrated).

2) He had a better strike rate, I say yeah he did, because it’s easier to get wickets when you’re defending a 300 run first innings lead and have 7 men around the bat in Perth, try doing that on a flat pitch in Karachi having no lead — things change.

3) There was that one match where Wasim and co. couldn’t get Justin Langer and Adam Gilchrist out and they went on and …… yes I know, that was one match and everyone has off days.

Anyways that’s my 0.02$ worth of opinion for the day, later.

Yeah you won, so ?

It’s award season folks, Nobel prize season, Barack Obama won for well … he won but swades was also represented by our very own Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. A bit about our hero, he studied in India, went abroad and you know thirty years later won the big boys best science fair project.

Awesome! Congrats!

This is a nice piece about saar—

The part that bugs me is this: “Do these people have no consideration? It is OK to take pride in the event, but why bother me?”

Look, I don’t think emailing this guy is right, I don’t even think India or Indians taking pride in what he’s done is right, and if you’ve actually emailed this guy just cos he won well ….., having said that, Mr. Ramakrishnan given his awesome intelligence could use such things as spam filters to block out unwanted emails and quietly go about his day but no, wasting a couple of hours deleting unwanted emails from mistaken but likely well meaning people is such a hassle. If nothing else you got your undergrad degree in India sir, a little class wouldn’t kill you. Yeah people emailed you, so ? you win the noble prize everyday ? if you don’t want to reply don’t, but you don’t have to whine about it.

Nobody succeeds without a little bit of luck and acknowledging you’ve been fortunate to study abroad while plenty of unfortunate (but no less capable) children back home would have killed for the chance to do so would have been nice but then you’d need perspective for that. Why why why can’t we produce math nerds with a touch of grace about them.

Give Ratan Tata or Sachin the damn Nobel prize, at least they’d say the right things.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hmk/ / CC BY 2.0

Wearing the inside out

First things first, I don’t consider myself a great Pink Floyd fan — I haven’t listened to every song of every album 27 times but I’m knowledgeable enough not to wear a Division Bell shirt to a Roger Waters concert (people like that do exist, watch MTV India’s rock on if you don’t believe me). This post isn’t about proving how “cool” I am or being a “rocker”, it’s about Rick Wright.

Yeah, we all know he wasn’t best friends with Roger Waters, we all know a lot of not so good things happened when the band was breaking up, but given that it’s been a little more than a year since he left us, I’d like to focus on what he did. I think WTIO is about a man working his way out of depression, and ultimately succeeding, it could also be about Rick’s addictions, but I’m glad it ended on a positive note. I don’t think I can add much more to this discussion (this song means a lot of things to a lot of people) so it’s best if you listen to it on your own, make sure you hear the live version and the studio version (which I think is depressing but maybe that was the point), the live version has been embedded here.

Lyrics:

From morning to night I stayed out of sight
Didnt recognise what Id become
No more than alive Id barely survive
In a word…overrun

Wont hear a sound
From my mouth
Ive spent too long
On the inside out
My skin is cold
To the human touch
This bleeding hearts
Not beating much

I murmured a vow of silence and now
I dont even hear when I think aloud
Extinguished by light I turn on the night
Wear its darkness with an empty smile

Im creeping back to life
My nervous system all away
Im wearing the inside out

Look at him now
Hes paler somehow
But hes coming round
Hes starting to choke
Its been so long since he spoke
Well he can have the words right from my mouth

And with these words I can see
Clear through the clouds that covered me
Just give it time then speak my name
Now we can hear ourselves again

Im holding out
For the day
When all the clouds
Have blown away
Im with you now
Can speak your name
Now we can hear
Ourselves again

Hes curled into the corner
But still the screen is flickering
With an endless stream of garbage to
…curse the place
In a sea of random images
The self-destructing animal
Waiting for the waves to break

Hes standing on the threshold
Caught in fiery anger
And hurled into the furnace hell
…curse the place
Hes torn in all directions
And the screen is still flickering
Waiting for the flames to break

Richard Wright, wish you were here.