चुप तुम रहो ...चुप हम रहें :)

This one is an old Hindi movie song, I guess this was sometime when they still had lyrics apart from Sheila and Munni.

I got some forwarded link from Youtube, some wise guy has put the track with Jodha Akbar movie clip.
Anyways this song is too soulful to be left unattended.

You are quite; I will be quiet too….

The silence between us …let it converse
The lives we have let they………do the talking
Let us just sit back and enjoy the silence

Your eyes are lost into mine….
My fingers are entwined into yours

Your breath .......meets mine…
Let’s get lost in each others arms…
Let our fingers talk…
Let our eyes converse………
Let them talk…let’s just sit back....... and enjoy the silence

You are quite; I will be quiet too….
The silence between us …let it converse
The lives we have let they………do the talking
Let us just sit back and enjoy the silence
 

Let your lips write on mine....... the song........ which has no words

This divine song of our bodies’ will resound from the earth to heaven
Let sensuality prevail….
Let romanticism take over….
Let them talk…let’s just sit back and enjoy the silence

You are quite; I will be quiet too….
The silence between us …let it converse

You are ……………quite; I will be ……………quiet too….
The silence …………..between us …let it converse

Ignoramus...It is Randomness .....of Course !!

This is a sort of read back of fooled by randomness by Taleb. I had a read through, sometime back and now am reading through it again, only this time it seems to make a different set of sense altogether.

Let me take for example, one statement of his.
 
“Outcome cannot be judged, merely by the efficacy of the output, in fact it needs to be judged by the cost of the alternates”.

Now the obvious reference to this statement given by him was that of trading. However my mind, went to look for alternates (Aha, I am judging the efficacy of his example by looking at alternate examples!!).

I am rich, is the output, ok so the next obvious question is that how rich you are. Never is the question judging the cost of alternate of rich that is poor, how less poor you are.

Another example I could think off, is of course related to my little head and of late all the arguments I counter to Amma.I am married is the outcome, good the judgment of the outcome is who are you married to, what does she do, where do you put up, blah blah.

Never is the outcome judged to the cost of alternates, that is now all your weekends are not your own, you have an additional responsibility, you are tied to one post for ad infinitum, you can’t blow a bundle in one night on a hooker (oops!!).

Anyways now back to randomness.

Similar is the case with the reference of buying a call or a put option. Similarly when you made money, using a particular trade, they are assumed causal, the alternate of the trade is not know that is how much money you would have lost if you had not executed the trade.(gain is not equal to loss here, so says Sirjee)

There was an excellent example, in it. One person, asked a trader to create an alternate trading strategy, if the building which housed them was gutted down by fire in an hour.

Now admittedly the possibility of these events is minuscule, but what these events lack in frequency they make up in magnitude and impact, (the same volume margin funda!!) Building on this he says it is a wiser path to lose small a mounts of money, and by the same logic make an obscene amount just once. (Incidentally he seems to be one of the guys who mad money in the sub-prime).

The flaw in current methods is that we just put the occurrence of random events in one bracket of error, noise or probability.

I am not a mathematician nor a finance guy, but with what little finance I have read the current methods ( say Black-Scholes) does not assign a correct impact value to it. That is you just take each action, drill down a binary outcome, assign a value to each outcome, and to the final value of outcome add some error percentage to get an estimated value, which by the above analysis seems to be wrong.

50K with VAT !

This is true and it happened yesterday!!

As a part of my work I am also in charge of creating brand value. That is fancy poster and visuals for displaying our products, capabilities and in short anything eye catching, to be given in places where it is not economical to go on a regular basis.

Business here is on relationships, however something pretty always helps, (it is human nature to be appreciative of form and structure!)

I got a dikat from the top management on creating on AV to be streamed continuously in our entry reception. Some contact was got out from the annals of web media and the MD of that firm landed for a discussion on how we could do it.

Ahhhh....the meeting reminded me of JWT.

The MD of the firm was a creative guy who somehow had landed on to the servicing side of the business. He tried to explain, certain things to me such as the importance of

1. Your branding strategy?
2. Competitive benchmarking
3. Points of differentiation?
4. Positioning statement
5. Branding construct.

My my...this is asking for fart from a guy who has no trouble in pulling out jargon's from anywhere.

 I picked up the marker and explained branding, among the following other things to him

1. How to execute branding?
2. On a rational construct?
3. To create an aspirational value in an industrial setting?
4. Without using the parameters of legacy and trust.

The MD was impressed and confused in equal measure. He had not done his homework and I always do it. I did not have time to spend on the nuance of a 180s AV, when I had to answer questions on booking expected in Q1, which I really did not know much about.

I gave him a flow chart, firmly explained what I want and also gave him an idea of visuals I had made using PowerPoint and told him to improvise on that, without changing the essence of information.

This alone took an hour, and I ran it through my boss and his boss quickly, they were okay with it. I told them the cost, and they said" Get T from sourcing to fix it".

Fine, I don’t want to dirty my hands there. I caught hold of T; he was a plain speaking veteran of a decade of expertise in sourcing high value items.

I explained the same to him and told him that the stream trickled from the top, so he had to fix it.

He asked the price and I said " 80k for a 180 seconds video"

T just said, " शादी ब्याह मैं तो मुहरत से लेकर बिदाई तक पन्द्र हज़ार मैं  निपट लेता है , यह ३ मिनट के अस्सी हज़ार कैसे हुए ?".

I chuckled inwardly at the plight of the MD of the advertisement firm when he tried to explain to T all the fast ones he tried to pull on me.

I had also to fix up stuff for the audit, so I asked him to take the discussion with them in conference hall, and said I would join soon. Meanwhile I asked another sales head to be present in there, because T sometimes gets very blunt.

This was after 7.30 PM.

I was done by 8 PM and peeked through the con hall glass partition. I could hear clearly through the partition, as the decibel levels sounded magnified in the night time empty office setting.

“Sir, I have a flight to catch tomorrow early morning, if you don’t have the budget this time no problem sir we can do it sometime later”, said the MD

T, ”Budget is always there and never there too, you tell me how is it 80000 for 180 seconds?”

The MD of the ad firm was distraught, almost ready to bite in frustration.

T ploughed on,” Are you married?”

MD suddenly looked puzzled; however, seemed to welcome any change from the 180 seconds and 80K conversation.

“Yes sir, it has been 10 years”, he replied glumly.

“Long time, I am sure you still have the photographs of your wedding?

A wary nod.

“And of course if they are not there, you can always look at the videos , right,”, said T. Then going for the kill he said , “How much did you pay for them?”

 “Sir, please understand we are creating a work of art over here something that can lead you company to the next league”. A slight pause and then,” I understand, that you had a budget of 50k”.

My mistake, alas, I had put in a number during my discussion.

No problems there it seems.

T said, “Yeah that was the idea”.

MD, “Okay sir, we can reduce the timing and still manage the high points”.

“It was 50k with VAT”, said T firmly.

I suddenly suspected had there been a window open in the conference hall the MD would have jumped out.

Anyway I pulled myself away, because it was getting late. But I wanted to know the moral of the story, I thought I would give T a call, later but then I wanted to hear from him live.

So I waited.

9.30 PM, T came out, waved them bye and came to his seat.

I asked, “Sir, how much you agreed upon”.

T replied, “50 K with VAT”.

Give me Wings!!

I am Blueline Delhi kind of guy, and NDLS, sleeper class most of my life.

When I first got way from home, for my job, it was at Reliance Jamnagar.My first pay, most of you would guess, that I would have bought some clothes, shoes and the typical wish list items.

Well, true partly.

I did buy clothes , but I bought a collection of designer underwear's and vests , much to the chagrin of my Dad and Mom.

 " Does somebody buy an underwear for the amount you get a pant," ? , my dad queried , as he saw me modeling around in an Armani ( yes Armani, I bought one from the boutiques in Gurgaon some 4 years back ...............that was the only place near Noida which had them !! )

My retort ," It is the stuff that sticks to you the whole day, and just let me see if it is really something different"

That took care of around 30% of the net value.The remaining 70% I blew it away on Captain Gopinath.Here is an account of my first journey from "office" to "home" by a flight !!

It was my first experience, away from home and in a new state, in a refinery city. It is a city by itself, we have everything and living there invokes a feeling of structure and discipline in life. But over a period of that time it becomes monotonous, very monotonous. The works, living, all become very predictable. But I loved my time out there.

I loved the place, for its serenity. The firm I had joined had a reputation of style and working there commanded a kind of respect from locals. This was much evident, when we received the red carpet treatment, whenever we walked the local market, not to mention the hyped up prices on non essentials such as clothes etc.

It had a very famous place, for ice creams Ram Diary , and I had never tasted flavors which they had there. Sundays, the entire city and outskirts of it (that is Relaince & Essar !!  ) seemed to be strolling outside.

We had just one Cineplex -Mehul.

It was the time when Malikka Sherawat, and the film Guru was much in vogue, the former I guess still charms a lot of people. The level of her attraction among the masses was seen, when I was in the theatre. My boss, was there with his family, and incidentally had seats in the same row as mine. It was dark and the guy was late, he stumbled across and seated his clan, and just sat down adjacent to me.” Arre bahiya who Sherawat wala dance chala gaya?”, asked my boss in anxious tones.
 
The kid I was, I couldn’t resist.
 
Leaning close to him, I replied” No sir, its still to come”. Surprisingly, the look on the strict bosses face was not of shock, when he saw me, but of a full and well intentioned smile.

So I guess it was Malikka Sherawat who helped me get on well with my boss. I spent part of my salary on phone recharges and the remaining on air tickets .Captain Gopinath had made it possible for people like me to fly, so every three or four months a carefully planned 3 days holiday, clubbed with some local festival could give a nice break.

I cannot forget my first flight to home. We had to take a bus to city centre, which was an overnight journey, and from there we had to take a flight. First time around I had limited baggage and it was already the last week of the month, so only pennies remained. Getting down at city centre, I found my way to another bus which could drop to the airport.

“Get down here, no bus will take you direct to airport, you would have to walk”, the conductor told.

I got down, and started walking but soon spotted a bullock cart with some machinery ambling past. I asked the “You going to airport?”

“Yea main gate construction is going on”, came the retort.

I flashed a smile and asked “lift”?

“If you can fit in the machines, “, then sure.

It was not a great choice, but I did not want to walk. The machines were packed, and had some nice designs on inside as well as outside. I leaned back and got some of the greasy designs on myself too. The bullock cart driver was hurtling on full speed, and the bulls, responded to his commands, rather obligingly. 

A bumpy 15 minute ride and the cart stops at the departure gates.

I got down, looking much like the second cousin of the driver. The entry guard frowned at me, as I started to move to the gate. I managed to get out the ticket with a little bit of grease as garnishing for it, and held it out.

Hey I got a ticket pal, I am here to fly, and I retuned his suspicious looks with an inward comment. He examined the ticket and then asked for an identity card. Out popped my employee card, and he loses all suspicions of me being able to afford a flight.

The airport had a bunch of immaculate counters serving food, and surprisingly it wasn’t overpriced. I am always hungry, courtesy a high metabolism rate, and I never begrudge myself any expenditure on food. I must have been a sight, a greasy long haired disheveled guy, eating sandwiches and chocolates, in the departure lounge.