Marriage

I am in the mood. So might as well write this up.

The above captioned subject has been getting a lot of air at home off late. Zeenat has put me on the market and - from the looks of it – is pretty keen to get me hitched ASAP (as we business types say). While a post on Zeenat ‘Bharat Matrimony’ Amman’s antics will definitely prove to be entertaining – i have a slightly more serious subject in mind.

I was actually told to meet this girl (A, lets call her) to complete Level 2 due diligence (Level 1 is just paperwork. Level 3+ will mean serious news) and what i could deduce after a 15 minute, um, heart-to-heart was that there was nothing wrong* i could see, prima facie. Which is pretty much what feedback parents expect after Level 2.

(*This is dicey to explain. Because when i say ‘nothing wrong’ – it is based on a 15 minute assessment of this 21/22 year old, freshly out of college type female. One tends to discount a lot of things and concentrate on basic things like looks, native intelligence and the circumstances (background, adaptability potential etc) if you understand what i mean. After all, you’re not agreeing to get married on the spot. There’ll be fair amount of talking post Level 2)

Surprisingly – ‘A’ thought that i was too ‘serious’ ‘work oriented’ and a ‘reserved type’ etc. and  Zeenat & Co got psyched, called it off, got over it quickly and are now fully engrossed in fresh projects.

But I now actually think that this is whole process is not as easy as it once looked. It is going to take a while.

Let me explain why:

There's a fundamental mismatch between the emotional state we expect to feel for a potential spouse - we want to "fall wildly in love," experiencing that ecstatic stew of passion, desire, altruism, jealousy, etc - and the emotional state that actually determines a successful marriage over time **

I think it is fair to expect that any 21/22 year old girl Zeenat & Co will try to set me up will be wary, confused and in any case as clueless as anyone possibly can be (ANY person for that matter, in my opinion, who is not old enough / who has not actually worked for a few years outside the more relaxed settings of a college maybe will be) and hence will depend on the experiencing of ‘ecstatically stew of emotions’ & ‘falling wilding in love’ (whatever you can in 15 mins or 1 hour) as the principal guide to OK moving up from Level 2.

Thusly there was a ‘fundamental mismatch’ between what A expected to feel and what i signals i sent off. While ‘A’ was looking for reconfirmation of the ‘dopaminergic surge’ & i guess a certain amount of showing off – whereas here i was, actually telling her about my last month’s travels, real estate prices,  asking her about why she did not enjoy reading, why did not yet know what she wanted to do after college and explaining why i don't feel like using my facebook account that much (Romba reservedo ?)

There is some sort of a lesson or two in this for me i think:

While a successful marriage will eventually have to survive the rigors of ‘adaptation & Intimacy’ - i must work out a formula to screen a girl for potentially possessing these qualities, whilst offering a Common-minimum-level dopaminergic surge – & also get OKed in return.

So how does a normal 25/26 year old guy behave ? Some notes (mainly based on above mentioned experience. i’l probably add more as i gain experience)

• Learn important fundae like the location of ‘Prego’ inside the Taj Coromandel. How long it takes to drive to fisherman’s cove from MRC Nagar. GRT Vs the Residency towers (arguments FOR and AGAINST),
• Learn to  keep a straight face when bharatanatyam, music academy & carnatic music gurus are mentioned..
• Stay inside the girl’s comfort zone – locations, restaurants, movie genres, hobbies, overall knowledge base.
• Refrain from acting bored, refrain from expressing strong opinions about anything in general
• Acquire slightly trendier clothes & shoes and keep them specifically for such occasions
• Acquire new glasses. The old spare is from the 90s, the ‘new’ Reeboks are just about 7 years old.
• Do not mention eye power scores. Do not mention that you actually worked off 16 kilos recently and still are ‘Overweight’. DO NOT explain what BMI means. Theres really no need.
• Do not show signs of owning a blackberry. Turn it off and leave it in car.
• VERY IMPORTANT: Pay attention & work really hard on delivering a decent dopaminergic surge.
• DO NOT rely on Zeenat’s biographic fundae. DO NOT make personality assessments based on existing knowledge of parents. 

And if there are younger kids reading this by any chance, please remember that you’re better off finding someone on your own – trust me - you’re parents will be secretly relieved. They are, after all, more clueless & Inept at this than you probably are.

P.s – The stuff in italics and phrases in single quotes are from here

P.s 2 – As always, if i am ashamed of this in the morning. I’l take it off.

The end of my world as i've known it

This is about work as well. I’ve been part of all aspects of our business in my last years at work – new business, customers, technology, purchasing, trade fairs, trials, projects, machinery – the works – i had never ever been actually doing what is truly expected of, say, a ‘head-of-business’ (‘Head-of-business’ is a grand word in this context – but it delivers the meaning right i guess)

Costing, tracking profitability and devising material / money flow strategies for each business are each essentially boring, but VITAL processes that can make a perfectly bleak-looking business interesting OR bugger up the most viable business opportunity.

I am sort of being pushed into this role and however i might consciously or un-consciously try and escape this process – i see that this is the one role that i cannot dodge. I see myself fulltime in this role in 3, 5 years down. The old man retired possibly – and this sort of his disengagement and my entanglement wont happen smoothly unless i actually WANT it.

If this is going to be my life’s work – then WTF, i might as well get on with it.

My old man does not understand what to do really – he is – i think – torn between the feeling that he’s screwing with my life by tying me up with heavier things earlyish – and the more practical conclusion that by preventing me from getting into this – he’ll be doing me and his enterprise a serious disservice.

Seriously, i now think that we’re really big enough in terms of capacity & revenues to not grow much for the next 3-4 years – i should just focus on getting a grip.

So I have to actually slow down for a while, cut out the noise and DEMONSTRATE control.

I think I am consciously trying.

Whatever else this means – this is surely the end of my world as i’ve known it.

So how’d y’all like my blog’s new do ? Thought i had wound this up for good, did ya’ll ? This is just a temporary blip in activity level, mind you.

Anyway regular posting of (hopefully) better quality stuff (and NOT sob stories like this) will resume once i settle down into a rhythm and i swear to get back to taking a crack at my lifetime goal of attracting 1000 sexy female followers on google friend connect.

P.s  The last one was a lame attempt at a joke. The amount of lameness thats crept in is an indication of how fucked up i really am. :P

Sunk costs & applicability in real life

Um, i have a big essay in progress on the above captioned subject. But somewhere in the middle, last week i think, I sort of felt that the whole thing was turning out to be too whiny and full of needless personal details – and will most probably not publish it here.

I wont let that stop me atleast introducing the idea here. WTF, it atleast makes up for my prolonged absence. No ?

( i might do an annotation job on this post with stuff from my earlier essay if i am in the mood later today.)

Here goes:

Quote

In economics and business decision-making, sunk costs are retrospective (past) costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Sunk costs are sometimes contrasted with prospective costs, which are future costs that may be incurred or changed if an action is taken. Both retrospective and prospective costs may be either fixed (that is, they are not dependent on the volume of economic activity, however measured) or variable (dependent on volume).

In traditional microeconomic theory, only prospective (future) costs are relevant to an investment decision. Traditional economics proposes that an economic actor not let sunk costs influence one's decisions, because doing so would not be rationally assessing a decision exclusively on its own merits. The decision-maker may make rational decisions according to their own incentives; these incentives may dictate different decisions than would be dictated by efficiency or profitability, and this is considered an incentive problem and distinct from a sunk cost problem.

Evidence from Behavioral economics suggests this theory fails to predict real-world behavior. Sunk costs greatly affect actors' decisions, because humans are inherently loss-averse and thus normally act irrationally when making economic decisions.

Sunk costs should not affect the rational decision maker's best choice. However, until a decision-maker irreversibly commits resources, the prospective cost is an avoidable future cost and is properly included in any decision-making processes. For example, if you are considering pre-ordering movie tickets, but have not actually purchased them yet, the cost remains avoidable. If the price of the tickets rises to an amount that requires you to pay more than the value you place on them, the change in prospective cost should be figured into the decision-making, and the decision should be reevaluated.

Unquote

- The whole thing is (rather shamelessly, if i might add) nicked, verbatim, from here.

I strongly encourage folks to go over to the main wikipedia article and make themselves familiar with fundae like ‘the Overly optimistic probability bias’, ‘The Sunk cost fallacy’, ‘The Sunk cost dilemma’ and ‘the bygones principle’.

P.s This is a pretty familiar concept actually. But off late - reading & writing pages of stuff on such gyaan is JUST the kind of wonkery that i enjoy spending time on.