Economics of love

Disclaimer: Its not recommended to take advice on love and economics from a moron who's only idea of a romantic conversation is following a celebrity and her dog's tweets.

So we were given this almost 2 month break in our MBA to get *practical* experience of whatever we learnt in the past year or so in our MBA. Being the very serious student that I am ;) I decided to use that to understand my barren and lonely life.

Economics talks about a monopolistic competitive market. In such a market there are many sellers each with a slightly differentiated product. The market permits free entry and exit of sellers until an equilibrium is reached (that is all the products that the sellers have to offer, have a buyer). Any more information you need, I recommend reading Mankiw’s book on economics.

The market for love in this capitalist world of ours, follows a similar trend. Guys in living beings are the sellers and women are buyers (I don’t want any arguments on this considering that in every species the guys have to go and woo the gals while they sit pretty and enjoy the show!).

Now I classify this market as a monopolistic competition because not every guy is exactly the same. Everyone of us is unique in someway or the other (not necessarily good!). So when you go after your target buyer (in this case a girl) you as a product have to appeal to the gal that you are selling yourself to.

The first lesson that any guy in this market has to understand is that there is no first mover advantage. The fact that you noticed the gal who you are going after means that she has already been approached by a million other sellers like you. So for her to show interest in you, you need something called your “competitive advantage”. Something that you can or have different than your nearest competition. That leads us to SWOT analysis of yourself. So before you even think of going after a gal, you have to identify your competitors and do a competitor analysis  and then find your strengths!

If you walk, talk and look like a melodramatic gorilla on steroids and try to be Mr. Nice Guy; you don’t have much of a competitive edge over the nearest Tom, Dick or Harry. This brings us to the other concept of a marginal seller. A marginal seller is the first guy to quit the market because he is already operating at the margin (in this case he has nothing to impress the gal!). So my advice to such people is – if you have nothing to market about yourself – stop praying for divine intervention and exit the market. You might as well channel your energy and your time to chase gorillas.

Finally – my take on monopoly in the market. These are guys who look like Greek Gods and are just too good to be true. You can act pricy and choose the buyers, cause in your case the buyers don’t really have a choice.

So I hope you took my advice seriously. This also brings me to the point that I tried to combine my learning in Strategy, Finance, Economics and Marketing in one single post. My next blog post is going to be on how to *sound* like an MBA while you are bull$hitting :) !!

Run from the cloud

The world is hyped-up about cloud computing. Everything seems to be magically transformed from sitting happily on your desktop, to be hosted somewhere in the "cloud". I know its kinda cool.

Everything, mind you, everything is going into the cloud. Just for simplicity sake look at "my things" (yeah, egomaniac I am) hosted in the cloud:

1. My address book
2. My calendar
3. My resume
4. My friends
5. My chats
6. My photos
7. My hobbies
8. My bank accounts
9. My SMSes (yeah equivalent to that)
10. My thoughts
11. Things that I read everyday
12. Things that I search
13. Places that I visit
14. Things that I buy
15. Absolutely every bit of music that I listen to

Well most of these things were already lurking out there. However two of my most personal things were securely stored in my computer till this month. My address data (in my Palm) and my bank account details (in Microsoft Money). But my Palm died last month and Microsoft decided it does not need to produce Money any more. That means the last two bits of privacy I had, are now hosted in the cloud too.

What does this all mean? Well, my dear friends, I have no privacy left. Everything about me is in the cloud now. That means, some sweet little intern sitting on a computer in a cubicle somewhere in this big bad world, can actually write a simple SQL query and dig a LOT of information about me.

The worst part is, along with my information, I am also posting your information in the cloud (My address book - with YOUR phone number, date of birth, address and place of work).

Its time my dear friend, to be scared, VERY scared :) !! Your personal data is no longer controlled or owned by you! And how easy is it, you say, for anyone to get this information? Well, dear, its just a stupid 6 character password away, which could very well be my dog's name that I use for every account that I mentioned above.

Priority Seating

The local train service (MRT) has something called as the "Priority Seat". Its meant to be voluntarily offered to old/disabled/pregnant women at your discretion if you are sitting on that seat.

All frequent travelers on the MRT know that priority seats are the last ones left empty on a train. The station that I get on to the train generally has only priority seats left empty, if in the first place there are any empty seats left at all. Now comes the funny part. Not giving up the priority seat to the people in need is not a crime. So you are expected to "judge" if a person is in need and give it up accordingly.

There is where the problem starts. So the moment you get up and offer your seat to a person standing in front of you, it automatically means that you consider that person to be either old or pregnant. (Chivalrous behavior is not expected! You are not expected to give your seat to the pretty lady or the fat aunty standing next to you.)

Now lets take the hypothetical case of a 70 year old man. He can beat the hell out of you in running, can do 20 push-ups and 30 pull-ups in the time you can do one. He looks old  though, and imagine offering the seat to such a person. Not only will he be feel insulted but he would prove to you that he isn't as old as he looks.

The second case - pregnant women. In my entire life, I have never been able to figure out if a woman is pregnant till like she is about to give birth to a baby. I know most of you will frown at this statement of  mine. But how do you actually figure out if a woman is really pregnant or she just had a lot of kaya toast for breakfast? And imagine a 20 something standing in front of you who is just fat, and you get up and offer your seat to her. The rest, they say, is history!

So after a lot of deliberation and conscience pricking, I decided that even if I occupy the priority seat, I would get up the moment *I think* that the person standing next to me is either old or pregnant. But then since I think so, I don't *offer* them the seat, but I just casually get up pretending that I don't need the seat anymore; presuming that if the person is really old or pregnant, he/she will get the signal and sit down. If not, they will ignore my gracious offer and then I can stroll back to my seat as if it was the wrong station and I wasn’t supposed to get down there!

I tried that a couple of times this month and I figured the moment I do that, a guy or gal much younger to me actually occupies the seat and there goes my chivalry and courtesy down the drain. Now I get to stand beside the old/pregnant person who gives me a smirk which screams - "Idiot".

The Contact Problem

Today my PDA, my beloved Palm Z22, left for its heavenly abode. Along with it left more than 8 years of Contact and Address book information that I had painfully collected. Doesn’t it sound really stupid that a wanna-be techie like me had no backup?

Well well, there is where I feel really bad. I “HAD” a  backup! But the backup was lost in my greed to get onto Windows 7. So the main pain for all this is … my stupidity! How you ask? Here is the story …

A month back I downloaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate to give it a test drive, and generally be lonely with my computer. But Windows 7 (though graphically fantastic on my MSI Wind Netbook) didn’t support most of my applications, right from my Anti-virus, and I had to uninstall it in less than 2 weeks. Coming back to my old setup required me to repartition, reformat and reinstall all my applications again. In this process, I somehow lost my backed up Palm data. I didn’t bother to backup my Palm to my desktop for the last 3 weeks. And today when I finally tried to, my Palm refused to come alive. So there goes all the birthday information and phone numbers I so painfully collected for so long. On last count I remember I had around 300+ contacts (yeah, I am no Mr. Popular, try collecting data of every person you meet in the last 8 years, and every normal person will cross a 1000)

Anyway thanks to Social Networking websites, I have already stopped wishing most of my friends on their birthdays. Cause these sites anyway remind everyone of everyone’s birthdays, and wishing someone on their birthdays doesn’t have the charm of the good old days, when we really had to make an effort to “remember” to wish people!

Since morning today I have been trying to collate all the left over information that I can get from my email contact lists and also my three social networking profiles – Orkut, Facebook and LinkedIn. And now I am facing a new nightmare! I haven’t come across any tool that can intelligently identify “John Doe Project Manager” from LinkedIn to be the same “John Doe” from Facebook and the “John Doe (Happy to be home!)” from Orkut. Now I have 537 contacts floating around in a spreadsheet on my desktop and I have no determination or inclination to collate the data!

So if most of you don’t hear from me, its time to call me up or email me :) !! Now I have a genuine excuse for not keeping in touch .. as for you .. you have none!

The Asian Pose

For the uninitiated – Singapore is in South East Asia and naturally I get to *notice* more East Asian and South East Asian girls than of the other variety. For the fear of sounding regionally biased, I never really mentioned to anyone that quite often when girls in this region pose for photographs they love to show the “victory” symbol.

Yeah the kind that you make with your two fingers to denote that you are victorious, and I was perplexed figuring out what the reason for them being victorious could be? (Probably the the fact that the photographer could successfully take your picture after fumbling with your camera controls for a while!)

Anyways, just like all the little things we observe in life but never talk about it for the fear of sounding anti-social I decided to ignore my observation and went about happily living my life till one fine day I came across this site. Its like the encyclopedia of Asian poses and I figured that many people on the internet have already researched and documented what I have observed (yeah yeah, don’t even get into probing how I reached that website – and NO – I was NOT searching for pictures of cute Asian girls on Google!).

Not only is the website a catalogue of all the peculiarities of the “Asian Pose” I also came across a video that shows the 10 different types of Asian poses :) !! So, here I am posting a link to the Asian poses …

I hope after reading this blog all my readers can act cute and pose for photographs! I hope I get to see many more of you doing something stupid in the near future, with your photographs!

Moved

I spent most of my last two days moving my stuff from one room to another in my hostel. We (hostel residents) have been ceremonially kicked out of our old abode and forcibly moved into another.

This time however, I have been moved far away from the rest of the civilization as I have been given a corner room on a desolate floor which is in a way “sound proofed” with limited access to the noise I generate. I bet one of my old neighbors didn’t like the fact that I woke up at 6:00 AM in the morning at times, listening to “Bad blood” by Ministry.

The best part of moving is, each time I move I figure out that 30% of the things that I have accumulated are useless and I dump them or give them away. I think the government should impose a rule to make everyone vacate their houses every 6 months and then get back in again. This will generate enough “good” stuff donated to charities all around the world.

However, the thing that I hate about moving is, you are already accustomed to a certain way of keeping things around in your room (that’s a sweeter way of saying “throw” piles of junk everywhere around) and then you have to figure out new ways of adapting to the new environment.

So now I have a room full of boxes lying around and I am writing an algorithm to figure out the most optimum way of keeping things in place (for the less technically inclined amongst us – I am thinking of ways to dump things from the boxes on the floor and the cupboards that have been given to us!).

Life’s Simple Pleasures

I finished the third trimester of my MBA end of May and have taken up a small internship out here. For those of you who don’t know, my university is on a deserted island surrounded by piranha infested waters and everyday getting outside the campus is a matter of life and death (yeah, I am kidding obviously!). Well, jokes apart, the truth is – getting to the business district is a 1.5 hours commute that includes catching a feeder bus to the nearest railway station (yeah I mean MRT) 20 minutes away and thereafter dangling by the handle bar for another 40 minutes inside the MRT, only to get down at the destination station and walk another half an hour to get to the office.

And over the last week I have suddenly realized how relevant Maslow’s theory of “Hierarchy of Needs” is! My quest to go for “Esteem or Love/Belonging needs” has suddenly gone down. Now I am more of the  “trying to satisfy my physiological needs” variety. I derive “pleasure” out of the following things:

• Reaching the bus stop and seeing the bus arriving, without waiting or running for it
• Making a dash for the only empty seat in the entire MRT cabin and getting it before anyone else occupies
• Seeing the signal turn green for pedestrians the moment I reach the intersection
• Getting a seat to sit with my food in the food court the moment I look for it
• Walking into a cold blast of air conditioning from a hot and humid walk outside

Pain ball

So I went for the latest craze in town – Paintball. Here is what happened in 8 easy sentences:

1. Got up at 07:00 AM.
2. Spent an hour travelling to the arena by road.
3. Spent 1 more hour waiting for our chance of the action.
4. Spent 1/2 an hour listening to the briefing – do’s and don'ts of paintball.
5. Entered the arena.
6. Got shot 5 times in 53 seconds.
7. Sat 2 more hours for everyone else to finish.
8. Travelled an hour back.

Now I got 5 bruises on Mr. T which proclaim my stupidity. I bet for my opponents I was just a sitting duck waiting to be shot at (target practice!). Or worst still, I looked like a grazing cow! But I consider myself to be a brave soldier. It takes more than guts (read sheer stupidity) to go head on into the line of fire of 5 Singaporean active military personnel poised to shoot anyone coming in there (It takes suicidal instincts :) !!).

All and all I figured I am not the paintball kind of a guy (I know that's what losers say ;) !). I am more of the bowling kind.

Live’s dilemma

Too much “Marketing” is going to my head :) !! Two posts on the same topic in a day does show that I am taking my courses seriously …

Read this article about how the most searched term on “Live.com” (formerly Microsoft MSN search) is actually the term “Google”. I can think of one reason why. Internet Explorer uses Live as its default search engine. And most people do not bother to change it (even though its quite easy to do so!). And then they go around searching for Google every day morning even to check their emails!!

This kinda reminded me of a very old Pepsi commercial in which a kid bought Coke cans so that he could buy Pepsi .. ultimate test of Brand loyalty?

Brand Loyalty

My Brand Management course has somehow made me more aware of the brands around me. In one statistic, it says that on an average every person sees close to 3000 advertisements everyday! And every advertiser yearns for is a loyal customer who would not only buy their products but would also recommend it to her friends!

That makes me an advertiser’s worst nightmare! I cant think of absolutely any brand that I am loyal to! I have changed brands in everything from shoes, clothes, microprocessors, speakers, MP3 players to Mobile phones. So much for brand loyalty!

Well the only brand that I might honestly recommend to anyone is CASIO. The kind of abuse that I met out to my G-shock, makes me wonder, am I evil? That watch has survived with me every where and anywhere I have ever been. White water rafting, kayaking, swimming (everyday!), shower (occasionally), holi, washing utensils and ahem … mud wrestling (haha, never, but I would wear it if I have to do that too :) !!).

Harley Davidson is the brand that most people are ready to tattoo on their body. This is an interesting statistic. If you think of a Harley owner (sorry for the stereotypes!), you always think of a guy in his late 50s, with flowing beard with a beer belly and ridding along his Harley wearing leather jackets and a huge tattoo on his arm. Well, you guessed it right, people who already have had tattoos are more likely to have one more. People like me, who never dreamt of having a tattoo wont ever wanna tattoo a CASIO on their arms even if we are loyal to them :) !! So this “most tattooed brand” metric kind of anyways skews the results in favour of a Harley.

And before I end, some more CASIO brand “goodness”. CASIO is apparently launching a new line of cell phones (G’zOne) which are resistant to even the kind of abuse that you would meet out to your enemy than your mobile. See the video to know what I mean :)

The Matrix

I just learnt that it has been a decade since “The Matrix” was released to us fellow minions, which means, it has been 10 years since my perception of reality changed. I am not much of a movie buff and my choice of movies generally is B-A-D. Especially in the recent past most of the movies that I saw left a very bad taste in my mouth. (I saw “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “Knowing” the first day they were released and was absolutely disappointed with them!).

Anyway, unlike what you think, The Matrix is not the movie that I have seen the most number of times in my life. That distinction is definitely held by “T2: Judgement Day”, which, if I mistake not, I have seen a quarter of a century times at the least! However, Matrix definitely takes full credits for having the most impact on my life :) !!

For those of you reading this blog if you have not seen Matrix yet

1. Get off your seat right now!
2. Go to your nearest video library and ask for “The Matrix”
3. Do not go to your office/college/school and cancel all appointments
4. Darken your room, keep your phone off its cradle, switch of the mobile, take a deep breath
5. Watch The Matrix
6. Amen

And then, those of you who saw “The Matrix Reloaded” and did not understand what the Architect was saying, here is the transcript and here is the speech:

Funny men

Read an interesting article about how funny men can literally laugh women to bed! Which probably translated in layman’s terms means – females like funny males. Ah ha, now that's interesting!

I bet there are levels of “funny” that attract different types of females (to bed). The funny level that I belong to kinda attracts only the females from a species called Anopheles.

If this was not  disheartening enough for me, I also chanced upon an article that bouts of sneezing are actually triggered by “sexy thoughts” (wonder what that means!). And I always blamed the mites in my room for all the sneezing and coughing I did. Huh, next time you see me sneezing, I hope you interpret it the way it is meant to be :) !!

And before you start questioning my intentions and “how” did I land up on these articles? Well, these are the top stories in the feed that I subscribe to for news from India.

Sesame Street

Have had a heavy dose of Sesame street and Elmo this last week thanks to a friend of mine introducing me to one of their videos lately! Haha, though I didn’t actually grow up seeing Elmo, I did spend a lot of my time in my summer vacations in school watching Sesame street. I thought I hated all those irritating characters from the series (now that I am grown up and all!), but still the sight of Oscar singing  “I love trash” is so endearing that I couldn’t help sharing it with all of you here! Give it a look …

“Oh, I love trash!
Anything dirty or dingy or dusty
Anything ragged or rotten or rusty
Yes, I love trash”

And then came across this video of Norah Jones singing “Don’t know why” on Elmo’s World because the letter of the day “Y” didn’t come :) !!

For those of you who do not remember the original song here it is ..

Friend with a ‘O’

Well, today I was backing up my phone book (once a year ritual, I know I should do it more often!) and I figured I have friends with names starting with every alphabet in the English language other than ‘O’. Haha, perks of having an international friend’s list is that you have friends with names starting even with X, Y and Z. Cool, so this means, I just need a friend with a name starting with an O in my phone book :) !!

(PS – I checked my calendar and figured that I indeed know a guy whose name starts with an ‘O’ – “Om” but the problem is, he is like 24 years younger to me, and is still too small to own a mobile phone!).

Encounter with a roach

So I went for my regular bathing ritual after a dip in the pool today and as I reached for my only saving grace in a public bath (my towel), I saw an angry looking cockroach with his two antennae staring at me intently. I am not generally afraid of cockroaches, and have been brave enough to kill a couple of dozen as a kid (Missed having a digital cam then .. else would have taken brave pictures of me with the dead cockroach hanging by his antenna in my hand!).

Anyway, when you are wet and have nothing to hold on to, and your only saving grace is under his control, things get a bit messy. I decided to fight it out and tried the oldest trick in the book .. “shooo” the cockroach with your hand. The only problem was, my hand was wet, and the cockroach decided to take flight at the same time, and lo behold his wings got stuck to my hand. Haha, now I had a fluttering cockroach on my hand and my towel in my other. Anyway, I had the presence of mind, and turned on the shower to get rid of the cockroach. Got my towel completely drenched in the process.

Since I had this amazing start of an eventful day, I thought I dedicate this post to the cockroach that I met in the morning. And for those of you who thought I killed a cockroach, don’t worry “No animals were harmed during the making of this blog (they were just splashed with water!)”. Wikipedia says that cockroaches can survive for 30 minutes under water. So I bet this one survived to scare someone else today!