The Institutionalised Home

 
Paid the price for being just faithful. And goes..
Will miss you maggee.

 

Proud of You

 Mumbai District Skating Championship - 2010  

Two Gold Medals in her maiden race. Proud to be your Dad!!

God Sees the Truth but Waits

                  

For someone whose school and college life was spent very little in education but in full-time sports, i had always regretted having missed out on proper academic life. The vision of a midnight-oil burning studious character has eluded all my life. Instead all my overnight planning has been towards field-setting or stroke-rehearsal for the next day's match. Not sure if it is to compensate that loss of class-room education,  i  now love to write. And it's corollary, i hate speaking.  

    

Happened to read Leo Tolstoy's God Sees the Truth but Waits a few days back.

This essay was a part of my non-detail syllabus in my first year in college. I don't remember having even bought the book. Therefore i had some guilty affinity to this story. This is about someone, Ivan Aksionov, who pays the price for extreme innocence. The story runs as a parable of forgiveness. Was terribly touched by Tolstoy's narrative. Like the press said '... however hard you try to clench your fists in prayers, you should also move to protect your physical life'.  Many of us miss that part.   

    

Ctrl + S

I don’t know if English has a word to describe ‘fear of losing data’. But surely,  I have this well-recognised and difficult-to-overcome weakness of using  Ctrl+S almost every minute I type out something. Therefore I wanted to rummage through my old trunk to see what all have still been retained over the years.

Right from my first salary slip at State bank – to statement of account for almost all the years i  am employed - to copies (and extra photocopies) of my travel tickets (I don’t travel much so everytime I get to travel I must have taken printouts and many copies of the same) – to my first mobile handset of 1996 and the various defunct sim cards – to copies and more photocopies and further more Xerox copies of my passport (not just this, I found 12 copies of my daughter’s passport who is just 4 and would have hardly traveled), I stumbled into a warehouse of records that stands out for its redundancy of safety - defying logic and bordering on stupidity, if not exaggerated fear.  The best thing is I have a few boxes containing the almost-forgotten diskettes and floppy disks and I don’t even know what lies inside them. This is in addition to the half a dozen pen-drives and  HDDs. Have some 1,500 horoscope details of people as famous as Winston Churchil to as infamous as the rapist in Brookesfield. The funniest thing about this junk is I have some 2,000 odd sms messages in those disused mobile handsets, 25k odd mails  in back-up formats and 100 odd hand-written letters from various people - all, a veritable source of mirth and mystery.

Some of my friends tell me I have the best filing-system but they  better take a leaf out of my book to top theirs of “Don’ts..”. Life would be far more peaceful if there were fewer references available on any subject.

Hour Wise Day Foolish

    
Trying to save a few hours to devote for something very critically important, i end up spending a full day tending the wounded soul of a good friend. 

Man thinks of his monumental blunders in contrast to his spectacular achievements - what lies between these extremes is the daily life. This is better brought out by Schopenhauer "Opinion obeys the same law as the swing of the pendulum: if it goes beyond the center of gravity on one side, it must go as far beyond on the other. It is only after a time that it finds the true point of rest and remains stationary". 

Not sure if an hiatus would ever work, i am back. Taking a Miltonian approach '...they also serve who only stand and wait' 

Hiatus

           
Examples i could cite you more;
But be content with these four;
For when one's proofs are aptly chosen
Four are as valid as four dozen.
                                                    MP

Am taking a short break from blogging - have some urgent work to focus upon.  As  i mentioned sometime ago, have taken many things for granted in life. No better time than now to prioritize!! 

Desires

   
Not to set foot on the moon or go anywhere beyond my means and milieu, but visit these places near Bombay;

Insanity

     

People who go insane find in insanity a feeling of importance they were unable to achieve in a world of harsh realities. Not everything is always fair. In life, no man can be utterly impartial. Personal preferences, public taste, subconscious bias, enter into any decision or choice he makes.  I have always loved this quote "Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not".

      

Well Connected Dots

                                        
My wife must have been taking me for an unemployed and possibly to motivate me, she gifted me this book - "Connect the Dots" by Rashmi Bansal .

I hardly read. Many years ago i made a new year resolution that i will not read others' works because that would kill my thinking power.  When you read and follow, the other person does the thinking for you. 

And lately, have been so focused in my trading career that nothing interests me that is not about a new trading technique. That needs to change. Obsession kills. People are often ruined in the side of their strengths. 

This book is a good collection of short essays about successful people who have made it to the top all by themselves. By their exemplary entrepreneurial skills. That way, it complements my belief in life - nothing succeeds like hard work. 

Thanks Deeps!!

Drugs, Accidents, Scandals and Sports

                            

I could have plainly written CWG as this much anticipated sports event that could have been the simplest way to showcase our heritage and growing clout as a super-power gets underway. If not strictly in that sequence, the keenly awaited sports event in the capital is suffering a dress rehearsal like the caption.

First we had reports on corruption. Then the ban on athletes suspected of drug abuse. A bridge collapse. Floods. Sting on security (where in the world can this happen). Overseas athletes pulling out. What more to come.. If you pen down all these incidents on a piece of paper and tried to link it to a country or center, India could hardly have been the name. But it is.

We Indians lack pride. Scams and scandals are interwoven in the fabric of our society. Corruption and embezzlement is a way of life for some. But could we all not have rallied together to support a super event like this. I don't know if it is an irresponsible way to react but i strongly deplore the role of the media (i am sure  many reporters currently covering the Delhi Floods will be thoroughly disappointed if Yamuna doesn't cross the 410m mark). Like the ignorant grandma, i will have to sit through the next few weeks with prayer on lips and beads in hand.

Like a  popular new channel kept flashing, it is Common Wealth Games and not Commonwealth Games.

On Being Advised

                    

'Take the pace of a royal elephant and don't mind a few barking dogs alongside' I got this piece of advice from one of my mentors. That was a very powerful advice. How many people would you come across that takes serious interest in others' welfare. 

When i probed him why he said what he said, he further advised. 'One of the wonders of the world is that obviously intelligent people make elementary but serious errors in thinking'. That was a bit confusing for me as he was talking about intelligent people and we were only two of us.

Whatever, it makes us feel good when we are cared for.  Read this somewhere on bringing up children 'They may forget all you said. They will never forget how you made them feel'. How profound!

Thus Spake...

  
News Item :"India’s Planning Commission watched ‘Peepli Live’ to gauge the common man's perception of major government programmes....."

Was that a fashion statement or is it  possible that the Planning Commission's secretariat has been moved to Washington after 26/11.

Should we then exhort the film producers' guild to produce more movies on social issues so that the decision maker is able to get a glimpse of realities. 

Economic Chicanery

News Item: "The US recession had ended in June 2009......."

Was it on the 19th of June 2009 at 0847 hours EST?



ps: why am i so critical today - moodswings, perhaps!!
   

Dabang

Torture to a troubled mind - if cinema is a source of providing you escapement and relief from life's travails, it can sometimes add to your miseries, too.

Had so much of expectations (didn't actually read any review) that i wanted to sit through another 'GangaJal' kind of experience. Perhaps my preference for such surrealism  was driven by a need to puncture a society that was deceit laden.

Whatever, the movie appeared to be a remix of Quick Gun Murugan. Re-recording, the sole plus point. A talent like Mahesh Manjrekar is thoroughly wasted.

  

Toast of Twenties - Sensex at 20k again!

  

Not just cricket, even the stock market index in India has a date with Twenty.

Sensex scales the 20 thousand mark yet again.

The previous time it covered this handle, it was with tremendous momentum and large divergences. This time around, the move up has been by and large a slow grind and seemingly sustained.  And no divergence in key momentum indicators except in the dailies. But beware the ides of September. If i had my trading portfolio, i would be looking to book profit and square up. No one died taking profits.

Valuation-wise, one-year forward PE at around 21 for the Sensex is way ahead of the rest of the investment destinations and any investment decision, therefore,  needs to be tempered with caution.

An Astrologer's Moment

     
Like all traders, who are as good as their last trades, here is a moment of glory for the astrologer in yours truly.  Sometime back (Jan 25th to be precise) someone asked me what the future held for him in his career and if he will buy fixed assets, and showed his birth chart for analysis. Not someone to let go an opportunity like that in my spare time, i had a look at the chart (printed below) and said something like what follows:

• Will certainly invest in a fixed property
• Will win lottery
• Will suffer unexpectedly large losses in investments
• Will adopt a baby (as opposed to giving birth)
• Not to lend, be vigilant
• Will change job
• Will move to distant places
• And a few other personal delineations

Very surprisingly, the person writes back to ask what are the chances of me being wrong in the last three, more precisely the penultimate two.  Apparently he has lived to realize the first 5. Like all beneficiaries, he is yet to give his fees (usually Re 1) and details of how the first 5 materialized.
 

The biggest mystery for me is how is it  that astrology fails or is totally off-mark on some occasions (belonging to the half-glass full race!!). If i had a way to unravel that, life would be on a different plane, ain't it?

  

Reactions

       

Human reaction to an event is almost always similar through generations i suspect.

Had an experience recently of a mishap - where there was an incident, a perpetrator or two for sure, a handful of witnesses and a dozen odd self-proclaimed sleuths whose purpose in life was to die in Page 3. While the real incident or its fate is of little consequence, i am reminded of another entry in my old book.  I had written this some 21 years ago when i happened to see my couple-friend burn to death, alive. That was the goriest of anything i will ever get to see.  If their death was an irreparable loss to me, the trauma of handling public reaction and gossip was monumentally difficult - merely because i was present there or solitarily privy to their lives.

Extract from my diary against 2nd April 1989.

.......This is what happens when there are some witnesses to any incident - each one waits for another person to make the first move and then a collective paralysis sets in. A majority of them tries to pretend that nothing has happened or at any rate, there is nothing they could have done to prevent it and there is the minority Sherlock Holmes tribe that is looking to pillory anyone that was an inconvenience anywhere anytime. In the end, everyone gets everything but the real facts...

The Joy of Giving

Yes,  i am borrowing that phrase from a  legend.  Imitation is the best form of admiration. One of my bosses used to say 'we should give back to market what it gives us - liquidity'. Great thought.  I have always yearned to spend life in backward areas, teaching children. My present responsibility of having to support a few lives around me and the wafer thin bank balance are big deterrents. So what... I have someone with me who does this work with passion. Yet to get full-time into this, her sporadic effort is indeed something that i would want to emulate. 

Even if one of the above becomes educated, the mission is a success.

On a related note, i found this piece about education absolutely brilliant - again from my book and quite likely a straight lift.

Education is a companion

No misfortune can depress

No clime can destroy

No enemy alienate

No despotism enslave

At home, a friend

Abroad, an introduction

In society, an ornament

And in solitude, a solace...

How true

 

The Indian Rupee

 

Having started trading currencies in early 90s, i had the opportunity to quote Indian Rupee as a 100-unit base- currency. A Rupee trader is a rare commodity and a good rupee trader is rarer. For all those tracking rupee market over the last many decades, there are a number of milestones. Those twin devaluations, then the LERMS - which was the most messy part of life - and finally the real liberalisation process, we have come that proverbial 'long way'. Rupee is now talked about by everyone globally. I had always wanted to know how currency trading, rupee especially, was like in the 60s or 70s or even 80s but even google doesnt throw much light. Got this interesting data on how the rupee has moved in the last 37 years.

(These are average rates for the year - by courtesy of Forecast-Chart)

The Economy

   
RBI hiked yet again - this time the hike also tantamounted to a narrowing of the LAF corridor. It could be too early to think that  it is the beginning of a regime that would ultimately lead to a single policy rate and the re-emergence of Bank Rate as a signal rate. The decision to hike was logically compelling and it goes to RBI's credit that it yet again demonstrated its independence on monetary matters. From a market perspective, this could well be close to a last in the series of hikes as we may have reached  that vague theoretical 'normalisation' level. Normalisation of rates is much like the poverty-line concept of those days. We used to joke in our college days that the best way to move more people above poverty line is to lower the very line itself.

The next moves from now on should be on CRR or other tools that impact liquidity directly. With Credit to Deposit ratio showing appreciable downturn, policy transmission  gains that much more traction  by fair-pricing of liquidity.