Thrills & Chills

you start out curiously,

the eager brain processes the view.

your mind races furiously,

you smile without a clue

then suddenly you stumble,

you don't know how or why.

now you start to fumble,

frustrated, you want to cry.

your ego is stripped away

you are made to lay bare.

you want to run away,

but you don't dare!

you frantically seek the unknown,

there's no time left to spare.

the arrogance is long gone,

now you really do care.

finally the belief sets in,

you know exactly what to do.

you start to redirect your efforts,

you know you'll make it through

the end is near,
neurons firing madly.
no more fear,
you surrender yourself gladly.

the brain goes into hyper drive,

oxygen it begins to guzzle.

this is what happens,

when you meet a fiendish puzzle! 

Chasing Infinity

We swim for fun

We swim for gain

We swim to run,

From all the pain

We swim by day

We swim by night

Sometimes it’s play

Sometimes a fight

We swim to burn

We swim to freeze

We swim to set,

Our minds at ease

We swim for love

We swim to pray

We swim because,

There’s no other way

But me, I swim

Towards the distant shore

I swim as much as I can endure

But the coveted land, it still eludes me

After all this time, I’m still at sea...

How much do you remember?

Imagine you are given a shuffled pack of cards and asked to memorize them in the correct order (number & suit). You are allowed to look at them for as long as you want. Do you think you can EVER complete the task? If yes, how long do you think it would take you? Take a moment to allow the enormity of this task to sink in…a complete deck of 52 cards. It may surprise you to know that someone has done this in just 21 seconds. On two separate occasions!

Or imagine an experiment in which a person starts reciting digits to you, at the rate of one digit per second for one hundred seconds non-stop. You are then asked to repeat the hundred digits in the correct order? Do you think you would be able to do it? Again, this has also been done by someone.

There is annual event called the World Memory Championships where enthusiasts from around the world congregate and attempt to outdo each other in extreme feats of memory including but not limited to the ones described above. The tests including memorizing lists of random words, entire passages of prose, random numbers, names & faces and even symbols!!   You may feel that doing these kinds of things is very silly and a complete waste of time. I am not trying to convince you otherwise. Extreme memory feats such as these are just a hobby like any other game or sport. But regardless of your interests, you have to admit that the above feats are pretty damn impressive!!

The people who can do these things are not really special or gifted for the most part (a few are though). They are regular folks like you and me, who have simply trained their memories in the same way that athletes train their bodies. Now let’s jump away from memory for just a minute.

It’s good to be physically fit, but you don’t need to be a Michael Phelps. It’s good to have peace of mind, but you don’t need to be a spiritual guru. It’s good to earn enough money to be able to support yourself comfortably, but you don’t need to be on the Forbes billionaire list. In a similar manner, it’s good to have a well-trained memory, but you don’t have to be a Dominic O’Brian or a Ben Pidmore or a Simon Reinhard. Physical fitness, peace of mind, comfortable income level - These are all attributes which you can easily correlate with certain associated benefits. It’s just obvious knowledge right? Making a case for any of these would be very easy. It’s a little harder to sell “good memory”.

Technology has enabled us to live a lifestyle with much reduced levels of physical exertion. But we still play sports and exercise, partly because we enjoy doing so and partly also because we know that if we don’t, it will eventually catch up with us and hinder our health. In a similar sense, technology has enabled us to get by without exercising our memory much. But that does not mean we can get away with it. The ill effects may not be “obvious knowledge” today, but I believe in the generations to come they will, once the science of the neurochemistry behind learning, catches up.

Our entire life experience is stored in our memory. Every single day, every single moment, our brain is retrieving old memories and forming new ones. How can it possibly not be harmful to let it rot by not stretching it or pushing it or exercising it even a little bit? I say challenge your memory a little every day. Give it a little work out to keep it young and energetic. Try memorizing a poem or a piece of prose. You’d be amazed at your own results! We used to do this in school so why not now? Or try memorizing a few URLs everyday instead of using bookmarks. How about memorizing a few phone numbers for a change? Or maybe learning a new language! Do whatever suits your fancy, but be sure to keep those synaptic fibres firing and firing and firing!!!

p.s. My next post will be a demonstration of my own memory exploits :P

In The Flesh

A few months back, the international governing body for snooker (aptly named World Snooker) announced a new tournament for the pro-circuit - The Indian Open, to be held in New Delhi in the month of October. For the first time ever, a tournament carrying ranking points would be taking place in India !! Immediately I decided that I had to attend it, despite knowing that Ronnie was not going to show up.

Cut to October 14th, day 1 of the tournament. Despite all the ads in the newspapers, I have not been able to find any information about ticket purchases so I show up without one. As I walk down the corridors towards the main playing area I see many faces that I recognize - most of them are ranked within the top 16 in the world! It's quite a humbling experience to be surrounded by all these people, knowing just how good they are at what they do!

Finally I spot a ticket counter, right at the entrance to the main playing hall. I readily pay Rs.1,500/-, for a ticket that allows me to watch all the matches on that day. I see that at 4 o'clock Neil Robertson has a match scheduled. Now me let explain something about Neil Robertson. He is currently ranked world number 1, is a former world champion and my favourite player after Ronnie O'Sullivan. He has a rapid playing style & pots some incredible long shots. In short, he totally kicks ass!! Although the match was at 4 p.m., I decide to quickly wrap up lunch and grab a seat early. So by 2:45 I enter the main playing hall and seat myself in the first row. I am the only spectator to arrive so early :) :) I then wait patiently for 75 minutes as the table is ratified by the officials and the hall starts to fill up. Some official is trying to reserve a few first row seats for some VIP guests but he doesn't bother me. There is no way I am going to relinquish my seat even if he asks me!

Cut to 4 p.m. and the players are introduced. I am sitting not ten feet from the table and just five feet from the players. I see the breaks offs, the safety exchanges, the pots, the expressions, the cluster openers, the snooker attempt, the misses and it just blows me away. I can hear all the subtle sounds and feel the atmosphere which is something TV/YouTube can never convey. I can see that his opponent is a brilliant player but Robertson beats him effortlessly - such is the difference between the top few and the rest of the pros. By the time it's over, Neil Robertson has won 4-1 making three century breaks along the way !! What a treat!! Not to be immodest, but there is a certain amount of proficiency you need to acquire in any game/sport before you can really begin to appreciate the subtle touches & nuances that the pros display. But once you do, then watching a world class player live is really an experience to be relished.

Being a keen player and aficionado, I have followed the game online for many years, but watching it in person was just something else. If you follow a particular sport or player and have not seen a world class match live, I would strongly recommend that you put it high up on your list. It's worth the money, trust me! Neil Robertson is the current world number 1 and pure class. Watching him play blew my mind away. But more than that, it has given me a glimpse into the madness of live watching. I now realize that I cannot even begin to imagine how crazily fantastically insanely awesomely brilliant it would be to watch the mad genius Ronnie O'Sullivan playing in the flesh... I have to plan a Europe trip soon.

The Monkey That Wrote Daffodils

Imagine a million monkeys, continuously typing away at keyboards. Assuming each key is equally likely to be pressed and the typing is purely random, it is a mathematical certainty that eventually one of them will produce an exact replica of some sensible text (say Daffodils by Wordsworth). Most of you may not agree (but it's true nonetheless), and even those that do, might think this point to be of little or no interest.

However, just assume for the moment that it did happen, and I brought that one in a million monkey to you (the one who wrote Daffodils). Would you bet your savings that this monkey would produce another work of Wordsworth next?? To those who answered no, what if I showed you a video recording of the monkey's typing and explained how his/her typing although seemingly random was actually logical and was bound to produce a result? I might even come up with some statistical evidence of the typing, in some fixed time interval, being strongly correlated with the letter frequency in English texts. Would that convince you? I think not.

Yet, when we read about one mutual fund amongst a sea of funds, doing well in a certain year, we feel compelled to conclude that it might be a good investment. The same fund house might have four different funds, most likely in mutually exclusive financial instruments, and possibly mutually exhaustive too!. There is a good chance that one of them will do well in a given period!! Financial markets are a typical example but the cases are numerous.


We all too often conclude that "past performance" is indicative of "future performance". In many cases it might be, but it depends on how susceptible to randomness the task is. In a million coin tosses, we may get a string of ten consecutive heads. Does that mean those ten throws were of superior skill than the others?? In the same way, although it may seem hard to believe, a lot of "successes" that we observe in the real world may also simply be the result of chance. We forget that we are often looking at that ONE monkey and not able to see the several others that have failed. We don't see the failures because they have been wiped out and are not visible to us. This is what is called the survivorship bias.

This should not be confused with an escapist view that we can do anything we want and the results are all random. Rather, it is to become aware that randomness MAY be playing a major role in the outcome and accepting it. This allows us to make more optimal decisions for the long run and not be fooled by the randomness.

I'm not sure if I have been able to drive home the point as effectively as I wanted to. But I found it to be a remarkable insight into how our thinking can sometimes be flawed and lead us to make decisions that are unlikely to produce the results we expected. Rather than treat this as some holy grail (which it is not), I just try to be a bit more skeptical when I find myself trying to "predict" the future based on past events. For further insights, I highly recommend Fooled by Randomness written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Just Joking Around

I find some of the most offensive jokes in the world absolutely hilarious. Does that make me a bad person? I have been giving it some deep thought, and I've come to the conclusion that it does not. I'm writing this post as much to articulate my thoughts to myself, as I am to seek the approval (hopefully) and insights of the readers.

Some of the jokes that I enjoy, I know would deeply offend some of my closest friends. There are some in particular which I think would be enough to break friendships entirely. Despite this, I find these jokes funny but refrain from sharing them.

Somebody once said that ethics is "doing the right thing, even when nobody is watching". If one were to extend the same logic here, one could argue - that if I believe that cracking an offensive joke in the presence of someone that was certain to be offended, is wrong - and I do believe that, then laughing at the same joke privately inside my head would also be wrong - even though no one is being offended. But this depends on me "knowing" someone who is likely to be offended. What if I encounter an offensive joke about Eskimos. I don't know any Eskimos so does that make it okay for me to laugh at the joke privately? And if I then befriend an Eskimo tomorrow am I to feel guilty of laughing at the same joke? To me this seems absurd.


A person's sense of humour is a highly individual trait and the reaction to a joke often impulsive, maybe even emotional at some level. So we should not judge ourselves for this, no matter how dark the humour maybe. Especially since the act of enjoying a joke privately is not done with the intent of harming or offending anybody. I suppose one could draw an analogy here with the difference between "culpable homicide" and "culpable homicide amounting to murder" as defined in the Indian Penal Code.

That's it. I'm done feeling guilty. Time to listen to some Jimmy Carr :) :)

Stock Talk

As someone who has dabbled a little in the stock market and made some money, I have to admit that it sure beats the hell out of putting your money in an FD. And it ain't no rocket science either. But there is a tremendous amount of chance involved and you could lose.

But the simple truth is that last calendar year I invested in and made money on icici bank, maruti suzuki, jk lakshmi cement, sobha developers, kingfisher airlines and a couple of others. Small money. Nothing big :)

My strategy was simple.

1. I only played with an amount I was prepared to lose.

2. I didn't do derivatives.

3. I didn't day trade ie. buy and sell a stock on the same day.

4. I read the economic times every day.

5. I reacted to pseudo bad news and hidden good news.

When you play with small money (twenty to thirty grand for me), your absolute returns will be small. Accept  it. I understand derivatives theoretically but I don't understand the market forces that make them move and I avoid them. This limits me to being a bullish investor since I cannot profit from an expected downfall of a stock - but that's ok. Day trading is a tedious and stressful task and I just cannot be monitoring stocks all day along. I check stocks I am invested in, about twice a day only. Reading the ET is the real fun part. Scavenging for pseudo bad news that has a brought down a good stock unfairly and which you think will correct very soon. eg. during the manesar episode, maruti tumbled and I bought. Scavenge also for hidden good news which you think is likely to to push up a stock sometime soon. Un-hidden good news is no good since the market would have already reacted to the information before you ever got to know. eg. if you read in the headlines that infy has had stellar Q4 results do you really think the stock has not already moved up? but if you witnessed real estate prices sky rocketing in bangalore where sobha has many projects and decided to buy, you could be onto something - if you are patient.

I've not been active for many months now, but i know for a fact that using just these simple tricks I was able to nearly double my play money in just four months. Maybe I just got lucky with a bullish market, who knows? But luck or no luck, I hope you see now,  why the idea of a 7.5% FD sounds ludicrous to me!

What do you think?