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I finished reading the book quite some weeks back now, and here are the remaining quotes:

• The burden of happiness can only be relived by the balm of suffering.
• Real suffering is measured by what’s taken away from us.
• People always hurt us with their trust.
• A man must love his bear.
• She always told the truth, even when she was lying.
• Wealth and power were measured by the privacy that only money could buy and the solitude that only power could demand and enforce.
• I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us or our endless ability to endure it.
• Yes, what is it, Tariq? I’d asked him irritably. Oh, I’m sorry, he’d replied. Do you want to be lonely?
• A kings is a bad enemy, a worse friend and a fatal family relation.
• Some of the worst wrongs were caused by people trying to change things.
• Like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die as much as I wanted to live.
• The devil is in the details.
• She was beautiful, and she was just naive enough, just sanguine enough to stop sympathy slipping into pity.
• Silence is the tortured man’s revenge.
• You’re fucked. Your life is over.
• Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey.
• Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.
• Every risk we take contains a mystery that can’t be solved.
• The only victory that really counts in prison is survival.
• Cruelty is a kind of cowardice.
• Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims.
• Evil is the root of all money.
• A secret isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.
• If you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.
• You don’t inform on people, not for any reason.
• It is possible to do the wrong things for the right reasons.
• We can only avoid chaos in the world of human affairs by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of morality.
• Happiness is a myth; it was invented to make us buy things.
• They were unshaven, unwashed, and unkempt in appearance. They were also intelligent, honest, and unconditionally loyal to one another.
• If I’d been a different man, a better man, I would’ve cried. And who knows, it might’ve made the difference.
• The moment was lost.
• Such is life.
• A man has to respect himself before he can respect anyone else.
• Can one act of genius allow us to forgive the hundred flaws and failures that bring it into being?
• She had to become a widow for life, before she was even married.
• There is nothing so depressing as good advice.
• We never feel or express any one emotion without feeling something of its opposite.
• I think I love him, in a kind of insane way, but I don’t trust him. Is that a horrible thing to say about the guy you stay with?
• Every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.
• Danger was one of the lances I used to kill the dragon of stress.
• We were red-lining our lives.
• Fighing to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.
• The fully mature man or woman has about two seconds left to live.
• You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.
• If we envy someone for the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom.
• Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships.
• Fate gives us all three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives.
• We lived out a life together in that kiss: we lived and loved and grew old together, and we died.
• Sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her.
• The nothing that it gives you, the unfeeling emptiness it gives you, is sometimes all and everything you want. (it = herion)
• But I hadn’t asked the right question. I hadn’t asked about her. I’d asked about him.
• A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.
• The end mirrors the beginning.
• One of the agonising truths for a battle media is that you pray as hard and almost as often for men to die as you pray for them to live.
• The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly and with the eyes open.
• Negative space.
• It’s bad, loving someone you can’t forgive. It’s not as bad as loving someone you can’t have.
• Fate always gives you two choices: the one you should take, and the one you do.
• The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads.
• The wheel had turned through one full revolution.
• There is no man, and no place, without war.
• Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.
• No matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.

Of course the standard disclaimer applies: Quotes are fair use and the original right of the author is asserted.

I started reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts during the last days of my summers in Mumbai. A snippet worth sharing:

She loved the guy. She did it for him. She would’ve done anything for him. Some women are like that. Some loves are like that. Most loves are like that, from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independece. After a while you start throwing people out — your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it.

Few one-liners:

Civilization is defined with what we forbid, more than what we permit.

Never let anyone know what you are thinking. Corollary: Always know what others think of you.

Hypocrisy is just another form of cruelty.

Truth is a bully that we all pretend to like.

If you have to ask the question, you have no right to the answer.

Sometimes, you need to surrender before you win.

The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance is that it works so well.

Unfortunately, I came back to Kolkata for my second year, and didn’t carry the book with me. It’s still half read, so hoping to get hold of a copy from the library, and of course, hoping to get time to read it.

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Klaatu barada nikto

• My house will have directional and focused lighting
• Woofers are one of the best additions to entertainment systems
• Toilets need air conditioning; some of the best ideas hit you when you’re in the potty
• Mango Mousse is delighfully yummy
• Month-long salad diets are sustainable, and makes one appreciate other food
• It is easy to forget email subscriptions if they are auto-labeled and auto-archived
• The last one and a half years have been something
• 1.33 GHz is enough processing horsepower
• People are generally nice
• Webcomics are a perfectly useless but addictive waste of time
• Zoning out is healthy; not caring too, but only so much before it hits you back
• I’ll be 25 soon; that’s adult even by Middle Earth standards
• Too much happiness makes justifying existance difficult
• Lot of folks in the first- or second-degree of separation are getting married
• Bullet point lists are stupid, but hey, I’m an MBA in the making
• Business runs on common sense, everything else is simply fraud
• I have no clue why a donkey’s hee-haw is called braying
• New Zealand has 45 million sheep, and only 4 million people
• There are suspenders available for men’s “balls”, kind-of like a bra, when it becomes too painful to carry them around just like that; seriously though, it’s a medical aid
• Fluid motion still amazes me
• I will someday become the member of the Long Now Foundation
• Euthanasia should be legal
• The Butterfly Effect really exists; more so, because it’s a really small world
• The primary lighting in a room should be the left-most button on the switchboard
• Orange-brown-red-yellow are okay as corporate colours
• Wednesday is statistically the day when I read the most
• Thinking “think of something” does not help in thinking about anything
• Always have objectives at the back of the mind; but be human
• Our brains are rather good justification engines; helps us sleep well at night
• There was no particular motivation for this random post; I just wanted to write one-liners and did not want to abuse twitter and facebook
• Coldplay works only on certain moods
• Paul Oakenfold is still the best music to sleep to when travelling
• I still love PopCorn as a food
• I have been sleeping for over eight hours every single night; I still don’t have enough dreams
• Friend says that I do have dreams; I don’t make an effort to remember them; Maybe this is a more serious problem
• My memory sucks
• I think I think in English
• I will end this post when it exceeds 500 words
• My infrastructure upgradation policy: Shut down the city, and build whatever it is to be built in one week
• Sparrows bathing in the mud are relaxing to watch
• I like the Emma Watsonish model of the Ponds Dreamflower Talc ad that has the Gum Sum Gum Pu Chuk score from Bombay
• Numbers I remember: 61, 189, 303, 461, 3038, 3696909, 8936394, B123306
• The WYSIWYG editor in WordPress does not count numbers as words; now that I’ve written this, it seems logical
• I have a psychometric assessment tomorrow, for the entire day
• 500: Done

Originally written on 5th August, 2008  for IIM Calcutta’s IMZine:

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Imagine that you are an associate at the Boston Consulting Group, working for a project in the oil refining sector. Your client requires your help in estimating the oil prices three months down the line. What do you do?

You could either try to dig up information from the knowledge base that the Group has developed over the years and from other associates and partners, build an Excel model and pray that it gives you true values. Or, you can create a prediction market. That is to say, create some sort of a virtual market place where people (possibly other consultants and domain experts) can bet on what the prices of oil would be in the future. Then you seed the market with some initial funds, and let the natural tendency of the market play out – the market price will gravitate towards what people feel is the most optimum price. The lure of making profits in the market make people bet for what they believe will be the most appropriate oil price. And that is the prediction you wanted.

Prediction markets work because they can tap into the “wisdom of the crowds”. People generally have a lot of tacit information about a lot of things that would normally be held in isolated silos, rarely if ever available to the one who needs it. Prediction markets can tap into this information and bring to light a more comprehensive picture. Financial journalist James Surowiecki, who wrote the 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, explains: “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”

Prediction markets are essentially speculation markets developed for the purpose of making predictions. The market trades “Event Futures” (Will India sign the nuclear deal?) or “Parameter Futures” (oil prices after three months). The current market prices are interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. Prediction markets are thus betting exchanges, and present no risk to the bookmaker.

A lot of companies, including ArcelorMittal, Best Buy, General Electric, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, and Samsung, have started understanding the power of such markets in predicting public reaction to new products, sales revenues of the next quarter, future prices of a commodity or even shipping dates of software deliverables. Naturally there is a growing demand for software services that allow companies to set up such predictive markets. Companies such as Consensus Point and Inkling and open source software such as Zocalo are competing for a pie of the business. Chris F. Masse, a financial consultant in Sophia Antipolis, France, who specializes in prediction markets, says: “By 2010, 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies will have gone public about their use of internal prediction markets, and probably another 10 percent will be testing some projects.”

So how accurate are these prediction markets? Research suggests that they are at least as accurate as, if not more than, other models of predictions employed by leading analysts. For example, the Iowa Electronic Markets set up by the University of Iowa College of Business to predict the outcome of the US Presidential Elections has been accurate to the extent of 98.63 percent averaged over three elections. Tradesports, a commercial marketplace, was able to predict every single of the 33 US Senate contests held in 2006 – a feat unmatched by any public opinion polls. Hewlett-Packard Co., in Palo Alto, California let selected individuals bet on future sales of some of the company’s printer products. They found prediction markets to be “a considerable improvement over the HP official forecast.”

The accuracy of the market depends largely on the fact that real money is being used to keep the bettors honest. The price one pays is set by the market’s opinion on the odds of that outcome. Even in corporate prediction markets, some sort of real incentives or trinkets are needed to prevent people from choosing random values out of sheer boredom or to advance their personal agendas. However, because in some scenarios, the people who bet are the ones who can change the outcome of the events, most corporate markets limit the maximum winnings an individual can receive.

Of course, some individuals will still think they know more than they really do and will make lousy bets. But this is by design rather than a failure. These erroneous bettors provide the market with fodder that the more accurate ones can use, and so long as the later group trumps the former with additional wagers of their own, prediction markets will continue to succeed. If everyone was an expert and knew the final outcome, there would hardly be any betting at all, and everyone would only win what they bet for in the first place.

To increase betting, the market bookmaker can contribute an initial amount of money into the pot or can provide subsidies to the bettors. Further, it is important to choose a diverse set of user pool in order to bring dynamism in the market. Every buyer must have a seller and vice versa for the double auction to work effectively. Even more important is the wording of the contract: Improperly worded contracts that leave things to open interpretation (vague definitions of success of an event), or those that don’t have clear cut objective outcome choices (“Will my wife get pregnant?”) will fail spectacularly; frustrating users who will lose money and no true prediction will come out of the exercise.

Despite all the positive evidence, many companies are still reluctant to use prediction markets. Managers have a hard time letting go of the fact that they can’t really control decisions that the market is predicting for them. It is difficult to see a negative prediction come true. Such a prediction can severely undermine a manager’s efforts to reverse the situation. For those companies that have no formal prediction methods in place, two major adjustments are necessary: one, deciding to make formal predictions about the future, and two, choosing to use prediction markets as the methodology. The first is obviously a larger issue, and needs buy-in from every stakeholder.

Further, it is difficult for vertically structure hierarchical organizations to accept the subversive outcomes of predictive markets. For example, increase of the market prices to questions such as “Should the CEO be forced to step-down?” when responded to by the workers of the company seriously threaten the established order. Truth, as they say, is bitter. Not everyone can digest the hard facts. Prediction markets can also be highly controversial, especially when tackling questions relating to politics or public policy and opinion. Another serious issue with accepting the predictions is that such markets are often counterintuitive. A group of people will always guess, fairly correctly, the number of jelly beans in a jar. Once managers start trusting the prediction markets and get past their initial doubts, they can create markets that can foretell problems when there is sufficient time to do something to rectify them. But such acceptance is hard to come by, given the human nature.

People often compare prediction markets to gambling, stating that they really are not any better off. However, they must note that stock markets too were initially thought to be worse than gambling. In fact, a lot of financial instruments, including short selling, options trading, commodity futures, derivatives and even hedge funds were thought of as illegal and unethical. However, these are not zero-sum games. They help the industry decide what to produce, how much to produce and when to produce. It is vital that the social utility of such instruments and markets not be lost amidst the fear of misunderstanding them.

I was playing Railroad Tycoon 3, an old favourite. And as usual, I’ve managed to win Gold in yet another scenario by manipulating the market and the game-world economy and finance.

It is rather easy, especially when there is no “regulation” and your firm does not have to be a going concern - both of which have been my pet peeves with all simulation games, including the ones I’ve played in more formal settings, even at IIMC.

Here’s what I needed to win gold in the scenario (based in the 1850s US): At least 50 oil tankers shipped, at least 30 coffee trailers shipped in from Mexico, company cash worth at least $15 million AND personal net worth worth at least $15 million.

Of course, I tried to play legit, but it was on the hardest difficulty, and I got frustrated after not making it the third time round. So here’s what I did:

Reloaded a saved game that was about two years from end-game, and started buying stock myself, in humungous quanitites to create what is called the self-fulfilling upward spiral. The stock price keeps on increasing because of the purchases I made, and that increased my total leverage allowing me to buy even more stock on margin (since I didn’t have the hard cash, but the company stock could be used as a collateral).

Simultaneously, I had my company issue 20 new 50-year bonds, each worth $500K. (The game only allows 20 open bonds.) The company rating of AAA helped in securing low rates of interest, and since I had rock solid performance in the past, lenders were more than happy to give the company their money. That’s how I managed the $15 million in cash for the company. I also had some excess, which I used to buy back stock, thus maintaining my inflated stock price, just for enough time to tide thru the next year when the game checked the conditions and since everything tallied, awarded me gold.

If the game lasted any longer, I’d not only be booted out of the company (which would soon head for a crisis), but also receive margin calls from my broker, forcing me to sell my stock in order to square-off the transaction, and that would’ve created what is known as the other self-fulfilling downward spiral. Selling of stock causes its price to fall, which means my net worth further reduces, and I keep getting bigger and bigger margin calls, which force me to sell more stock till I go bankrupt.

Fortunately, the game ends there, and so I don’t care. But this isn’t all that difficult to do in real life. Despite all the regulations. That is scary.

There are other ways to completely mess with the economics and finances. For example, here’s an amazing way to siphon off money to my personal account from the company’s account. Let the company grow, strong and powerful. Keep buying a lot of shares. Nothing illegal so far. Then one fine day, sell all owned shares (possibly even short-sell) and stop all trains and revenue generating activities. Reduce dividend to zero. Let the stock price plummet. The buy back previously sold shares and then some, till I am the majority shareholder. Resume all stopped activities. Stock prices zoom skywards, rocketing my personal networth. And no, it doesn’t end there. Then crank up the dividend, maybe even 100% or more. So all company earnings are siphoned via the dividends to my personal account. Use any spare company cash to buy back shares, further raising the stock price, networth and dividend share. Enjoy life!

What I’ve described above is essentially insider trading in real life. Again, very much doable!

Want to be the sole surviving company? Here’s a simple trick: Buy stock of competitors early. In large amounts. Get a majority stake. Propose a merger. This is a sure-shot way to buy-out a company. But what if you can’t buy enough stock? Fret not. There’s always a way: Buy as much stock as you can, then using your cash-cow company, engage in a hostile take over bid. Might help to run-down the other company’s stock by short-selling its shares, and forcing your railroad into their profitable routes.  Let your company pay a huge premium for acquring the other company. Sure, in the long run, your company stock will fall and you’ll have to manage the acquired company well and all that. But if there’s no “long run”, who the hell cares?

True, short-selling is banned in most markets and margin buying has its limitations, and it is difficult to bypass all regulations and prudence that everyone else in the market has (or is supposed to have) in the real world. But it is only that - merely difficult. Not impossible. Welcome to the real world!

I was listening to BEP when I was reminded of some of their videos, which led to the following thought process:

All media should be at the maximum density and information content. If I want to just listen to the music, I should be able to turn off the video, and so on. The point being that if I want, I can get maximum immersion experience for everything.

Sure, it’s expensive to create content this way and all that. But it would be fun. Like the real world, it would all be there, and we’d be left to our avenues to decide what to take in and interpret.

But, I also like books, only for the reason that I can imagine the live picture in my head. And there are ample songs that I’ve heard and loved, which I’m sure I’d not have liked as much, had I seen their videos first.

Then again, I can also choose to ignore the media in its most dense form, and prefer to use a simpler and less information content version. But will I do that?

In other words, if given a choice of a detailed report and an executive summary, we’d probably choose the summary, because of the information overload. But what about entertainment? High-definition content at 1040p is all the rage! And what if we overlook something subtle that is only contained in the detailed higher tiered medium? I don’t think I’d want to miss that.

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Being overwhelmed by Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, FriendFeed, IIMC Extranet, Google Reader, email and of course, the physical interactions.

The recent fad (or not so recent, considering it has been going around for some years now, in different forms) of shutting down non-essential lighting and electrical appliances in what is called the Earth Hour, seems a farce to me.

The WWF says that the entire event is merely symbolic and has no real intention of reducing power consumption or helping the environment; it is merely to raise awareness. I doubt how much of that is really happening.

Anyway, my point is, turning off power and reducing demand suddenly for only an hour and then bringing it back up to the original values is not an excellent idea. In fact, the utility companies are going to have a headache. Here’s why:

Power, i.e. electricity, is generated in power plants. Large power plans, the likes of which supply our most contemporary cities are fired by coal. And coal plants (or for that matter most others) cannot be taken offline and brought online in a matter of hours; the process is rather elaborate and sometimes takes a day or two, and is very different from simply flipping a switch.

This means that your reduction of demand is not going to help. In fact, the utility companies will now have to decide what to do with all that surplus electricity. It cannot be effectively stored. And they cannot stop generating it, since soon the world will once again demand it. They will in all likelihood waste it in resistor-banks immersed in huge water tanks in order to smooth the sudden fall in demand.

Think about it. Is your symbolism really helping anybody?

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The above are my first thoughts on this matter. I did some more research, and found out that a Australian power company measured the reduction in demand, and found it to be only 2%. Now this is hardly any reduction at all. All power grids are capable of handling fluctuations of this order, so my original hypothesis stands nullified.

That is to clarify: Earth Hour will reduce demand for power by 2%, which the power plants can successfully follow by reducing the electricity production and there are generally no ill-effects of the same.

However, the true Earth Hour will be when everyone brings in more permanency to the reduction in electricity consumption.