Eat Lopa Eat

Lopa, a fellow BIMite had legendary eating habits back in campus. As my fellow co-worker, those habits showed no signs of decline. The only time she is not busy eating is when she is playing Aguanta!

Quite frequently, given that I share the cube, she says "Santa, can you please pay for that Dahi Kachori, I will write it down!". I know one fine day, that piece of paper will disappear, and gone with it are my lifelong savings.

So, I decided to put together an online Application, using Zoho Creator (thanks, Kiki). You can access it here.

Click on the Reports tab on the top of the page. You will see that she already owes me Rs. 187 (the application has been live for 3 days!)

Long or Short

Warning: This post is fairly explicit in nature and may not be suitable for audiences of all ages. If my less than eighteen year old cousins are snooping around my blog, here is the link for Pogo TV.

I was demolished by the recent fall in the India equity markets. While personally I had very little exposure I saw my dear friends and colleagues shelving their early retirement plans.

And then it occurred to me. There must some aspect of human behavior that explains the markets.

Reasons why the stock markets are a lot like sex:

1. The longer you hold on, the better your returns.
2. Nobody likes it if it remains flat. Everybody is happy when it goes up. But what goes up needs to come down.
3. If it’s your first time, you are bound to lose. .
4. Its important to wait for the right time to get in and get out
5. Getting emotional is not a good option.
6. Its important of have a portfolio and churn it frequently.
7. If it’s an IPO, it’s always oversubscribed (primary market is difficult to enter, while secondary markets, they are all over the place. And yeah, primary markets can be very pricey!)
8. You can take a lot of risk before marriage. After marriage, stick to fixed deposits.
9. You need two people to complete the transaction (ok, I know there are exceptions)
10. If someone mentions greed, sex definitely follows next.

Reasons why the stock markets are not lot like sex:

1. While in the stock market you can either go long or short, I don’t think going short is a good option in sex
2. In the markets, 12600 is a good time to get out. In sex it’s a good time to get in!
3. In the markets if you get out early, you will definitely repent. While in sex, your partner will repent
4. While trading during the office hours is fairly acceptable, sex during office hours? Well, it depends!
5. While the market reaches its peak intra-day, with sex, it’s most after-hours.

Chaos is Good

I was watching the Wednesday night documentary on National Geographic channel. This series called Nat Geo Reveals, is an impressive line-up including the one I was watching - Katrina: Unnatural Disaster. The documentary uncovers the decisions and circumstances that lead to the sytemic failiure on the part of state and federal authorities in delivering relief and rehab for victims of the hurricane, especially in New Orleans.

I could not stop making comaparisons between the hurricane victims in New Orleans Super dome and the Tsunami victims in Nagapattinam who were housed in marriage halls and temples across town.

However, there is a key difference. Victims in the New Orleans were stuck without food and water for days. No relief reached them.

When we visited the Tsunami victims, the day after the big wave, most of them were well taken care of. The authorities were slow to reach, but food and water was supplied by people flowing into Nagapattinam to offer help. Each of the marriage halls and temples were adopted by some random group who came into help to help. It was chaotic, but it worked. Looking back, most of the relief that was happening in Nagapattinam, immediately after the Tsunami was driven by private citizens and organizations.

In comparison, the documnentary spoke about one group of aid workers, who came in from Texas, to help the hurricane victims. They even had proper certifications. But, they were made to wait two days before they can be given permission to help with the relief effort!

I guess Tsunami relief was one situation where chaos was good.

Mallika vs. Bipasha

One more wasted Saturday afternoon at office. I decided to put my analytical skills to proper use!

Below are a few valuable insights that I can offer, after rigging data from Google Trends:

1. Mallika Sherawat is more popular than Bipasha Basu!
2. More searches for Aishwarya Rai originated from Lahore, Pakistan than from Mumbai India.
3. You don’t have to conduct polls to determine George Bush’s approval ratings. Since the beginning of 2005, Salma Hayek generates more search volume in Google than President Bush.
4. Sania Mirza is much more popular than Sachin Tendulkar.
5. Shakeela is consistently more searched on Google than President Abdul Kalam. A large number of searches for Shakeela came from the UAE. But, I still can’t figure out why anybody would search for her in Italian, German, Chinese and French.

P.S. I initially named this post as Shakeela vs. Abdul Kalam. But, lately I have been generating undesired traffic from people looking for resources on the ‘movie star’. So, changed it to the above title!

Easy

We are getting out act together in setting up the pilot project at Salem. And yeah, nobody said it would be easy.

More of it here.