Banker Love

Not a typical post. But what to do? A break from 15 hour days, Bill's off in India (yeah, can you believe it? He apparently needs a vacation. From what I don't know), and I am feeling mean. So regular readers, give this a skip. Not worth your time.

I have always found righteous indignation in the blogosphere to be very entertaining. It might be what someone said on Rediff or TOI. Could be someone on the street or the train. What some old aunt thinks of say, women working. Or it might be about a bombing. Or someone bleeding to death. The point is it doesn't matter what it is - we of the blogosphere sincerely believe that if we write a proper indignant post about it, we have done our bit to save the world and everything must be alright with the world from then on[1]. Needless to say, none of us are immune to this though I'd like to believe that some of us have standards. Like I don't go around looking for a cause to be indignant about. Mostly because I have a real job and a real life that takes up too much of my time but I guess that's a different discussion.

Yeah, yeah, I am coming to it. So there's a new cause now - i-bankers. What, I hear you cry? Bankers need the blogosphere to fight their cause now? Ofcourse not. They know the nature of the game better than anyone else - as of now, they don't need anything other than taxpayer money[2] but hey, that is no reason why we bloggers shouldn't make a cause out of their misery. Look at the poor bankers and look how people are so filled with joy that they are losing their jobs! Bankers are people too, you know. First of all, i-bankers are poor? And second, we are doing what?[3] Then you try to explain that while none of us are jumping up and down with joy because we are after all only human, but hey, bankers aren't exactly the saints you are making them out to be - with a few exceptions, they are, well, I don't want to list them so we shall say A, A, A, B, S which (especially) when combined doesn't exactly cry out for the world's love and sympathy. And that it is understandable that people aren't exactly sorry to see a culture that (seems to) reward arrogance, agression, apathy and other such desirable traits go - no, wait, that means you are evil. And you are gloating over janitors losing their jobs. And you don't realise that the whole economy is going down and you are next. What? What are we talking about here? Well, welcome to the blogosphere.

So anyway. The point is I have decided to give in. We will not talk about undesirable i-banker stereotypes anymore. Instead, we will give the bankers our love. We will talk about their stereotypical good traits. Except that I can't remember any. Do you? Please to help. I need to be reformed.

[1] Please note that this affliction is very different from the one commonly known as a Falstaffian rant. A Falstaffian rant involves said blogger being bored and feeling like roasting someone alive. That I actually understand.

[2] Yes, there is a "Where your taxes go" post in there somewhere but again, that's a different post.

[3] I do realise that there are a couple of posts in the blogosphere in very bad taste (thanks Lekhni for the specific links) but to generalise it and say that the world is sitting around rubbing its hands in glee as it watches an i-banker leave the building with his boxes is something only we bloggers are capable of

PS: For the one banker and the two banker spouses who are reading this (you know who you are), you should also know that this is not about you.

PPS: A request. If consulting goes down (which it will) and I am at the verge of losing my job, please blogosphere, please do not write posts on why I need the world's sympathy. I don't. I know exactly what I am doing, I signed up for it and I could do without your indignation. Thank you.

You know those people....

who cannot read maps and are for some reason, very proud of the fact that they say it to all and sundry. I used to wonder all the time who hangs out with these people, and today I have my answer. In fact, I even know who gets married to them. People who buy furniture from Ikea and then pay "assembly professionals" to assemble said furniture. Really. They deserve each other, don't you think?

In other unrelated news, the only thing (concerning work) that I know everything about, or rather, no one's accused me not knowing has become unrecognizable now. Microsoft's gone and done it again. Does anyone recognize this? (Please click on it to see larger picture in all its goriness..err..Macness)


No, its not iTunes people. Its Excel 2007. Bill (No, not you dammit, and no, you do not tell me to switch to Linux[1]), WHY? I take a break for a month and this is what you do?

[1] Anoop, that's for you too.

PS: On the bright side, all old keyboard shortcuts work. So all's not lost methinks.

Bill on the JEE

All of you who know Bill, and all of you who read this blog do not need to be told about the amount of time the man spends staring at the ceiling. The claim is that he is thinking so that he can prove some theorem or the other. In reality, he ofcourse is sleeping during most of this ceiling-staring time. (Yes, he can sleep with his eyes open, trust me on this.) But there's a small % of time that he doesn't sleep. I have always wondered what he thinks about in these few moments and now I know - he is thinking about the JEE. You see, I think he's never really gotten over him not really cracking the JEE and in the interests of blaming someone else, he holds the JEE and all his Kota friends who were ahead of him responsible. So he spends his ceiling-staring figuring out ways to somehow get back at them. Sounds implausible? Well, then please explain to me why someone who cannot be bothered to write one line of proof an entire week sends me this long post out of the blue asking me to put it up on my blog. It's either that or he has gone crazy. Or turned over a new leaf like his brother. I seriously don't know which is worse.

So anyway, I give you (all footnotes are mine) Bill's rant on the JEE, the universe and everything:

There has recently been much discussion and criticism of the IIT Joint Entrance Exam, or JEE. This started me thinking about JEE, what it means to people, what it is meant to do, and what really happens.

JEE. An exam taken by perhaps a quarter million teenagers, of whom some 4000 will "pass" the test and make it to IIT. The ranking given out by JEE is a number that has an outsize significance. Sometime during my stint at CMU, I served on the admissions committee. We ploughed through hundreds of application packages, with their inevitably upbeat profiles and resumes. During one such, up popped a folder from someone at an IIT[1]. Among his notable achievements, he listed his All India Rank at the IIT JEE. Obviously, getting that rank is one thing that he is really proud of, something that he is going to talk about 5, 10, maybe 50 years after the fact. This attitude is not uncommon either. I remember being slightly saddened, because it reminded me of a documentary I saw of Nadia Comaneci 15 years after Montreal. There was the same sense of reminiscencing of the pinnacle of a career, an extraordinary achievement, something whose emotional impact may never be matched again.

Is it right that an entrance exam becomes in itself an achievement? What has led to this state of affairs? One obvious reason is that of the sheer numbers involved. Given the extreme number of contestants for a painfully limited number of seats, the pride in "having made it" is understandable. But that should not blind us to the many negative aspects of JEE, and maybe it is not doing a good job at all.

Many, including particularly professors at IIT, have noticed and complained about the increasingly crucial role of intensive coaching for the JEE. It does become noticeable when the candidates come from all over India but the bulk of the successful ones are from Hyderabad and Kota[2]. It is not that coaching in itself is a problem. Any system, particularly in the hypercompetitive scenario, will attract coaches and training. Witness the 30,000 dollar fees for advisors to buff up resumes for Harvard. The problem is rather that JEE creates an atmosphere where coaching is essential, and it is inconceivable for a successful attempt without intensive training, usually professional.

JEE has been designed to be brutally tough. Nothing wrong in that in principle. However, in practice this has meant that problems are well outside the scope of anything taught in schools. In fact, in my first year at IIT, we pretty much redid the syllabus for JEE. The questions in our semester exams would have been right at home in the JEE. Why is it that students in high school are being tested on undergraduate level stuff?

More to the point, is this really getting those with a passion for technology, or more generally, science, into IIT? A really small minority of students go on to apply anything learnt in IIT in their professional careers. Are they losing interest during their four to five years within IIT (which would be a dreadful indictment of the professors, if so), or were they never really interested in the first place? Yes, one aspect of the problem is that students are forced to make a choice at entry, when they know nothing of the subject. This is more a problem with the IIT system than JEE of course, since we need much more flexibility in changing branches/courses. In many US universities, even say a Stanford where for example computer science is a much-in-demand option, a lot of people drop out sometime in their undergraduate years and take another branch. For this to be feasible, we would need to move to Abi's Real Universities(TM).

The way the entrance exam stands now, IIT takes in students who are good at "cracking" exams. That is certainly correlated with ability, but the correlation does not seem to be very good. Abi points out the statistic that less than half the intake is that of first-time aspirants. In other words, to get into IIT, after spending time, money, and effort, single-mindedly devoting most of your waking hours to preparing for IIT for 2 years, maybe more, you should realistically be thinking of doing it for another year, or maybe more. Are we then surprised if students are burnt out?

A more pernicious effect of the supremacy of coaching classes is that they are unfair. Abi has talked about women, and compared it to the proportion of women in CBSE toppers. Vivek asked about women in science or math classes. But indeed, what is the proportion of women in the bigger coaching classes? I am sure that is indeed more correlated to the number of women in IIT.[3]

It is not jut about women of course. Those who cannot afford the steep fees, or cannot or do not want to go halfway across the country to stay in the feeder towns for two years are getting shut out of the system. We are losing out many bright students in smaller places. Is it not the idea that we should want the interested, brilliant, and motivated students from across the country? With the JEE set as it currently is, people like a good friend from Alleppey[4] studying on his own have to overcome almost insurmountable barriers.

Yes, we live in a deeply traditional society, with large inequalities. As last year's reservation ruckus made clear, caste is a deeply divisive issue. So is class, and income, and gender, and millions of other things. We understand that, and I am sure the designers of the JEE understand those realities. The question is, isn't there something wrong with a system that does not even attempt to redress those problems, and indeed skews in the direction of the more privileged?

Maybe we can argue that it is not IIT's place to try to solve these hard problems. I don't agree with that viewpoint (otherwise what is the point of calling them institutes of national importance?). But this brings to mind the question, what does IIT aim for? What kind of students do they want, and is JEE getting the students they want? After all, what kind of guidelines they set will not affect the competition (if IIT sets a paper on Ulysees, Joyce coaching classes will mushroom up[5]), but does affect the kind of students they will get.

We have heard much about merit through the JEE. Does merit, whatever it is, play a large role in clearing the exam? If so, certainly merit can be taught in coaching classes in Hyderabad. Or unsuccessful candidates can acquire merit by trying again in another year.

What does clearing JEE mean about the candidate, beyond the fact that they are good at taking exams? Is it intelligence, motivation, perseverance, ability to work hard, passion for science, engineering bent of mind? All of these? None of these? If these, or others, are qualities IIT wants, is JEE filtering the right kind of candidate? Should we not be asking these questions? Or are the good professors satisfied with doing things the way they have been done in the past?

[1] Err..are you trying to tell us that someone not from an IIT actually applies to the CS doctoral program at CMU? Since when? Or more importantly, WHY?

[2] See, he doesn't like Hyderabad or Kota. Obvious reasons.

[3] Okay. My one serious footnote. If one agrees that a) intensive coaching of the Kota variety is necessary for getting into the IITs, the vast majority of the people who get into IITs get this coaching and b) the percentage of women in these intensive coaching institutes is extremely small, then I don't see why it is difficult to see that the JEE is biased against women exactly in the same way it is biased against anyone (or group) who does not (or cannot) attend the coaching class. [Yes, I know that the question we should be asking is why is that the classmates of these men who attend these coaching classes cannot attend the same classes given that anyway there are going to write all engineering exams in the country. I see that but then, I also sort of see the point in parents being reluctant about sending girls at 5 AM / late at night or packaging them off to Kota for 2 years]

[4] Alleppey? Did you say Alleppey? You bloody Bong, next time you get the district wrong, I will get you to pay twice your share of the rent. And write down all districts of Kerala 100 times, ok? This good friend (who in reality is my friend who you have adopted as your friend) lived in Alappuzha. Get it? Alappuzha.

[5] Falsie, there is hope for you. You can start an IIT coaching center that teaches Ulysses and make zillions. I can so imagine this: kids comparing Falstaff Tutorials and Prufrock classes.

Violence, yes, history, why?

A year too late, but you know, better late etc. Every critic from J Rosenbaum to M Dargis (ya ya Dargis, I know but dammit, Rosenbaum loved it) raved about A History of Violence. Trustable Jai seemed to like it too. I meant to see it anyway, for the king if nothing else, but for some reason or the other it was the only movie that I didn't end up seeing in last year's nominee list. So went and borrowed it from Marylebone library this weekend (btw, the public libraries in this country are nowhere as big as the libraries of the States, but what they lack in space, they do seem to make up in quality, so I am not complaining yet) and it turned out to be a little, well, more than a little disappointing. Don't get me wrong, it is a really good movie and some excellent filmaking throughout but for moi it just didn't live upto expectations.

The basic problem, the way I see it, is with what the movie was meant to achieve. Is it about whether a man can turn over a new leaf, put his mobster past behind him, and live a completely different life? Is it about how violence begets violence and there's no way out of this endless cycle? If that's all it was, a thriller about one man's struggle to not let the ghosts of his past haunt him and his family, then A History of Violence is right on target. But hey, that's not really what I remember people (Cronenburg included if I am not mistaken) saying about it - It is supposedly a critique of the Bush administration's failed policies, it is about how violence lurks just beneath the surface of America's idyllic suburban homes, its about how little it takes to fire a shotgun. I am sorry, I must be a bit dense, but the movie did not tell me anything of this sort. You see, not all of us in America used to once belong to the mob, or married someone who did. So excuse me, but I really don't see how this movie holds a mirror to my face.

The saddest thing about the movie is that it holds so much promise in the first half only to squander it, shot after shot, through the second. Here's the gist of the story - Tom Stall, upstanding member of the community, loving husband and father, loved by all, becomes an overnight hero when he shoots and kills two men who attack his diner. Soon after, the east coast mob recognizes him as one of their own starts paying visits to Tom and his family, and our man has no choice but to go to Philly and kill a bunch of people he used to know in his mobster days in addition to the ones he shoots in his suburban lawn back in Millbrook. Where was the promise, you ask? Everywhere through the first 40 minutes actually - the deceptively simple Indiana town where you know something bad's going to happen, the first cheerleader sex scene, the way the son smart-talks his way out when confronted by the school bully, in the talk of monsters and pies, and right through the diner shooting, and when the son beats up the bully and that absolutely amazing scene in which Tom confronts his son, but pretty much right there was where it ended. The second the bodies pile up on the lawn and Joey says "I should have killed you back in Philly" you know its over. Might as well not see the rest of the movie. Unless you came in with different expectations.

Violence in America is not exclusive to the crime-ridden cities of the East Coast (ok, LA too if you insist) but we knew that already. Too well. Violence follows the mobster into suburban America and rears its head at the most inconvenient moment, but thats only expected, no? Where this movie could have gone, so easily considering how talented the crew is, is where only a select few have gone before - violence lies beneath the surface of every ordinary home, not just a seemingly ordinary one, not just the home of a man with a past. In refusing to do so, in not even willing to go the ambiguous route which personally would have been much more exciting, the movie exonerates you and me totally. We don't have history, you see, and so this is not our violence. Neither are we associated with anyone who has, and so, we do not have a stake in this. Which when you think about it is really not true.

PS: I am undecided about the last scene, yes, it was a little ambiguous and all but really thats the best he could come up with? I am not so sure. And please, do not get me started on the most talked about second sex scene. Violence and sexuality are closely related, so a lot of people think. All I can say is if you anyway discover you are married to this mobster guy and decide to stick with him, you don't have much of a choice, do you?

Update: After a bit of googling, I discovered why was it that I didn't see this movie earlier. Sepoy's review here. While I think he is being a little too harsh, agree with him on most things.