Puzzle: Did the Father Serve Lethal Fish To His Son And Daughter?

A friend of mine gave me a story. And she asked me a question based on the story.

Here is the story:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/38291864/KAZUO-ISHIGURO-A-FAMILY-SUPPER

Or you can download the story as an rtf from

http://www.fhv.umb.sk/app/cmsFile.php?ID=1308

You can see that this is a story about a father and a son and a daughter. Now here is the question: Did the father serve lethal fish to himself and his son and daughter?

Provide rationale for your answer.

Divorce Rate And Cultural Issues

Friends of mine from Europe can't digest the fact that many Indians get into an arranged marriage. 

They say that this "arranged marriage" where the spouse is identified by the family and where at the time of marriage the couple don't "love" each other cannot work. Especially the idea of having sex with a partner whom you don't know well enough is appalling, say my friends. And they assert vigorously that it can never work.

Well interesting thought. Now let's see the data.

The divorce rate in India is the lowest in the world at about 11 divorces out of 1000 marriages (http://www.divorcerate.org/divorce-rate-in-india.html) which works out to a divorce to marriage percentage of about 1%.

In the European Union (EU) on the other hand, the average number of divorces is 1.8 per 1000 residents and the average number of marriages is 5.1 per 1000 residents (http://culture.polishsite.us/articles/art138fr.htm). This means that the divorce to marriage percentage is 1.8/5.1 = 35% for EU.

Now, Indian divorce per marriage rate is 1% and the same for EU is 35%. The data for EU is an order of magnitude higher. 

It is true that in India, many couples don't break up because of social reasons (divorces are not socially accepted) and hence the data for India should be interpreted carefully. Low divorce rates may NOT necessarily be indicative of things being honky dory.

So let's take another country which is like India where people face a similar (non-acceptance of divorce) issue. Let's take a catholic country like Poland. The catholic church is against divorce. And in Poland also, divorcees are not as socially accepted as married or "never married" people are.

And let's, for the sake of argument, assume that the issue of spouses sticking together despite breakdown because of "other" (social/religious) reasons are almost similar in extent in both Poland and India. My friend from Poland says this could be a decent assumption.

Let's take the data for Poland from the same link
(http://culture.polishsite.us/articles/art138fr.htm).

The divorce per marriage data for Poland is (1.2/1000) / (5.1/1000) = 24%. 

Remember that the same for India is 1%.

Now the last point. What percentage of Indian marriages are "arranged"? Read this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage_in_India). 

An overwhelming majority of marriages in India are arranged as per wiki. And what percentage of EU or Polish marriages are arranged? I would say it's close to 0%.

So a comparison of figures for India and Poland can be taken to be equivalent to a comparison of arranged and non-arranged marriages.

We are talking 1% divorce/marriage rate in India and 24% in Poland.

What does it prove?

Couples may and do stay together in India despite the relationship between the spouses being very poor. But so is the case in Poland. And we have seen the data for Poland. Not knowing your partner before marriage, per se, has very little impact on the (de)stability of the marriage. 

This is something my friends in Europe would do well to reflect on. While it is painful for them to even think of such a (arranged) marriage, data proves that it does work. And maybe even better (remember 1% vs 24%).

When people ask me "But how can you ... with a person you dont know well?", I tell about the people that fall in love over the internet with persons they have not met in real life, perhaps never even seen their pictures. I am reminded of a lovely story
http://tnsf.ca/heartstrings/stories/true_nature.shtml.

While the statement "The true nature of a heart is seen in its response to the unattractive." could be true, it is out of sync with the rest of the story (which is more about not judging a book to be unattractive because its cover is unattractive and hence contradicting the statement above. Would the man have loved the woman if she had scribbled junk in the margin of the book?). And can you imagine falling in love with a truly disgusting outfit?

Maybe love is not as much an accurate impersonal evaluation of the other person as it is about attributing to the other person all the good things that you imagined in an "anjaan" (unknown/imagined) lover and refusing to do any evaluation. Tolerating something that is unattractive is one thing.But loving something because it's unattractive is too disgusting to me.

Additional reading: http://vbala99.blogspot.in/2012/02/what-is-connect.html

Analysis, Lack Thereof

I realized one thing while reading news these days: 

• Gold rises because of inflation worries. 
• Dollar falls because of inflation worries
• Invest in real estate now because stocks are not doing well
• Invest in gold now because stocks are doing well
• Euro falls against yen because of political unrest in northern Africa
• Mid size IT companies in India will go through a consolidation phase because Apple's IPAD has little competition. (Well I am exaggerating a little here)

I mean what kind of headlines are these? Mostly they seem to report data. And some opinions which hardly prove the assertions. Articles which probably shouldn't even find a place in a blog. And we go on reading these? Why don't we get an in depth analysis to justify the statement being made?

When we make an assertion the first thing that is expected is: do we have data to support it? When we say A (some result) happens because of B (some cause), A and B should have a high correlation. 

What does a high correlation between A and B mean?

• When B rises, A rises and vice versa
• The relationship between a change in B and the resultant change in A is stronger than the relationship between C (any another possible cause) and A.

I am reminded of a survey conducted in a women's college and in a men's college. It was found that on an average alumni of the the women's college had 2.7 children each while those from the men's college had 2.1 children each. And a conclusion hence was drawn that women had more children then men.

Now number of children that a person has (let's say, result Z) was compared with with gender of a person (X = women, Y = men). And it was found that Z for X was 2.7 and Z for Y was 2.1. Now what's wrong with this analysis?

The problem is that Z (number of children) does not depend on gender. If the survey had taken a wider sample it would have obviously found that Z is the same for X and Y. (Common sense says that it cannot be different for X and Y). In this case, it was easy to identify the flaw.

But what do you do if the issue is more complex? When common sense may not be able to help?

• Look at larger/wider samples and see if the conclusion reached initially is still valid.
• See how Z correlates with other possible factors P, Q, R etc and see whether Z correlates better with any one or more of them.
• A good correlation (Cause and effect) has to satisfy the rules mentioned in bold and italics above.

I wish the analyses in the articles would do this before reaching a hasty conclusion.

Music Directors

I am a fan of old Hindi and Tamil movie songs as i have mentioned in earlier posts (http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2010/12/old-indian-movies-songs-and-actors.html).

I always used to wonder why there rarely were any Muslim or women music directors. There were a few muslim MD's: Naushad, Iqbal Quereshi, Khurshid Anwar, Khayyam, Sajjad Hussein, Sardar Malik, Ghulam Mohammad etc but not as many as Muslim actresses.

And when it comes to women MD's I know of only one: Usha Khanna. I loved her music in Dil Deke Dekho. All the songs are extremely melodious. She is as good as any other music director. But apart from her there has been no other female MD I can think of. I have heard of a MD called Saraswati Devi way back when. Why has this been so? Maybe creativity (music) and rendering (singing) someone else's stuff are different skills and some people can create while others can only render (sing) what someone else created.

Coming to the MD's, I did an analysis of their output - the songs they created for Hindi and Tamil movies in 1950's and 60's (and rare instances in 70's).

After about 8 years working on my music collection I now have categorized 9000+ songs with the average release year of the songs being 1963.  

Notes on my collection and the grades:

• Of the 9000+ songs, I could not locate the video (nor audio) for about 600 odd songs which are hence yet to be categorized. Of the balance 8500 odd songs, I have about 2800+ which I consider to be good. Initially I had a qualitative grading of each of the songs. Subsequently I gave numerical weights to the letters or grades as shown below. A good song refers to a grade assigned of G or above (above meaning Y or Y_).

• Rating for each song:

I rated each song from A (lowest) to Y_ (highest) as shown below.

Grade             Numerical Grade 

A:                      0

S:                      1

N:                      2 

G:                      4 

Y:                       8

Y_:                   16

• How I rated each song: Ones I dreaded hearing a minute into the song were rated A = Awful. In the last month (Jun 2017), I deleted more than 1000 songs which I felt were not good enough, being too new (1980s or later) and too awful - these would have been rated A's had I retained them. The song that I could just about tolerate, like a distant opinionated aunt whom one puts up with because she brings a lot of gossip, were rated S = So-So. Those songs that I thought I might want to hear again were rated N = Not Bad. G = Good were those songs which I would definitely want to hear again soon, maybe tomorrow. Y = Yes were those songs that that give me goose pimples and I would want to hear repeatedly. Y_ = Yesssss were those songs that make me forget all the sorrows in the world. Incidentally isn't this the way we grade anything subjective? Like relationships or ice-creams or vacation places? Would we go back for more is the acid test for goodness (after taking into account that there are no adverse side effects by going back for more).

• I do not claim that I was perfectly neutral to all (Hindi and Tamil) movie songs of all genres and all periods. I had a bias for the movie songs of 50s and 60s and hence I tended to choose those songs more than songs of other decades. On the rare occasions when I hear a song from 1990s or 2010's which is very good, I would add it to my collection. I was neutral enough that I made some surprising discoveries which I mention towards the end of this post.

• The ratings may not be universal meaning that the rating I gave a song may be different from the rating you give. That's all right. This is about my song collection and my ratings of the songs and hence of the MD's. 

• The ranking of MD's is based on my grading of their songs. And I may not have considered many of their songs in my collection - this could have affected the grading. The number of songs of Viswanathan Ramamurthy (in Tamil) or Shankar Jaikishan (in Hindi) in my collection would be much much more than Sardar Malik's or Sajjad Hussein's or Ghantasala's. Songs not in my collection could be a pure mistake on my part - that I just missed having them in my collection. Or it could be a deliberate action of having had them removed because they were too awful. Had I retained them the grade for the MDs concerned would have dropped from their current levels.

• I set the grade values to jump in geometric progression (GP) instead of in arithmetic progression (AP). It was my belief that each grade change required a substantial higher quality in music and I thought GP was more apt.

• How consistent was I in assigning the grades? Over a period of time when I hear a song again, the new rating may movie up or down a notch about 30-40% of the time. Very very rarely would the rating change by 2 or more notches. This issue of grade moving up or down one notch is to do with human subjectivity. I am only human! More on this subject here: http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/07/tu-mere-saamne.html

• How did I identify the songs in my collection? The first song in my collection was Aadha Hai Chandrama from Navrang. A friend of mine suggested this song. And then it led to more songs. I already had been interested in songs for more than 35 years. Whenever I came across a nice (typically old) song on TV or radio or on youtube or anywhere that wasn't in my collection, I would add the song to my collection. And well like any financial consultant would tell you, there is this power of compounding. And before I realized it I was sitting on a huge fortune (of songs). After addition of the song came grading - and deletion where necessary. Once the framework for grading was in place the reports came automatically.

I could now do a weighted average of song quality by year, by music director, by movie (even by actor or actress). And sure I did all this. Surprisingly I do not yet have reports by singer! 

Obviously this led to the next steps:

1. Finding the years in which the song quality was the highest. What else would I find. It was 1957-1968. Because I was biased towards songs of 1950s and 60s, this finding is quite expected.
2. I could find movies having high quality music which had a minimum of 4 (or if you wanted - 2 or 6 or any other number) songs. 
3. I identified music directors whose overall grade was high. And here I found some really interesting stuff.
1. Couple of Muslim MD's names came up high in ranking. Sajjad Hussein and Sardar Malik. I never expected them to score high. Of course the number of their songs in my collection is small unlike those of more established or well known MD's.
2. In Tamil I had thought of Viswanathan Ramamurthy (VR), KV Mahadevan (KVM) and G Ramanathan (GR) as the great ones. Some consider Ilaiyaraja (IR) as great. In my weighted scores, VR scored way above the rest, IR and KVM were distant 2nd and 3rd (so also MSV without Krishnamurthy, TG Lingappa) while GR was lagging way behind along with SN (Subbaiah Naidu). In all fairness GR was an MD of the 1940s and 50s. Music of the independence era was different and needs a different ear to appreciate. Even in Hindi, I do not like Naushad's songs of the independence era. I guess the issue of GR was more due to the era. Incidentally, GR's songs in Uththama Puththiran were very good.
3. In Hindi the best ones were Salil Chowdhury, OP Nayyar (OPN), Shankar Jaikishan (SJ), Sardar Malik at the very top followed by Naushad, SD Burman, Ravi, Madan Mohan (MM), Sajjad Hussein, RD Burman, Hemant Kumar. 
4. Song quality of some music directors (MD's) varied by periods. Shankar Jaikushan's music in the 1970's wasn't very good. Ravi's music in early 1960s was great. Naushad seemed to hit a high between 1963 and 1968 though he was in the field since the 1940's. VR stayed together from early 1950s till 1965, but their best music was in the 1960s. Half of RD Burman's best songs was in the 5 year period between 1970 and 1975. Same is true for Laxmikant Pyarelal's (LP). Though both RD and LP were there in the field over 20 years. During the same period 1970-75, SD Burman had produced only 20% of his best songs. See the difference?
4. Finally, the grade I gave to a song is consistent across language (Tamil and Hindi film songs comprise more than 90% of my collection). The grade does not depend on whether Rafi sang it or it has good guitar or a nice dance sequence etc meaning I tried to not be biased to any MD or singer. The grade depended only on how I found the music and the voices of the artistes. Lyrics had no part to play in the grade I assign to a song. Women pls note: No matter how many times the words Ghum, Jasbaat, Dhadkan, Kaadhal (in Tamil), Manam, Themmaangu etc occur in the song -  it would have no effect on the grade. Kannadasan and Sahir Ludhyanvi are wasted on me. 

Additional reading:

• http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2010/02/my-music.html (there are some interesting links in this post)

Maths Puzzle 11: I$ = 1c

Here is another maths puzzle.

Let's take one dollar. This is equal to 100c (cents)

Now,

1$ = 100c = 10c * 10c

= ( 1/10 $ ) * ( 1/10 $ )

= (0.1$) * (0.1$)

= 0.01$

= 1c

So, $1 = 1c

Where is the catch?

Maths Puzzle 10 - Geometry

A friend once gave me this interesting puzzle.

The question is this:

Both figures seem to be identical. The shapes A, B, C, D seemingly are present in both and of same size in both (but in different locations). How is it that the bottom figure has an extra (dark colored) square?

Have fun.

Thondrir Pugazhodu Thondruga

In an earlier post (http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2011/02/succeeding-your-parent.html), I had talked about learning from the previous generation.

Little did I know that I would be reading a lovely article on a related subject http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-new-manager/article1162854.ece. ("Patti" means grandmother). When I see a housemaker I expect to see the kind of caliber described in this article. 

I don't call a lazy person (as is typical in India) who chooses not to go to work, someone who stays and manages home with one or more maid/cook etc in an unextraordinary way a homemaker.

In every area, I like to see people who are authorities. An old Tamil poem from Thirukkural
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirukku%E1%B9%9Ba%E1%B8%B7) echoes what I said. Or should I say I echo the sentiment of the poem? It goes like this:

Thondrir pugazhodu thondruga akdilaar

thondralin thondraamai nandru.

Meaning,

if you are going to be born (rather, live) you might as well be famous. Else don't be born at all.

I am shocked when I see people who neither have the patience nor the talent nor the desire to be extraordinary. "How can you be so" is the question that keeps coming to my mind. They seem to be perfectly happy being ordinary. So ordinary and unexceptional at anything they do (by "do" I mean "create" here, for when it consumes to "consuming" they can give most people a run for their money), that it boggles the mind. They run relentlessly after consumption: I want this designer wear, want to go to Europe/Australia for a vacation etc etc.

Probably such people never had a "patti" as described in the article above. If you never had a role model to learn from, it becomes doubly more difficult to be good. I feel sorry for such people. 

That brings me to my favorite phrase: Do you have a passion for something that people will pay you for?

Succeeding Your Parent

How does life look when your only surviving parent dies, especially one that used to live in the same house with you? No matter even if you are in your 30's or 40's. 

All the while you have been thinking of yourself as an adult, as an independent person. And the day you find that you don't have any parents left you realize that you don't have a trusted person to discuss things with. You don't have a person who is immensely more disciplined than you are to slap some sense into your thick head when you are f*****g up.

An absolute anchor in your life is now no more there. Would people now see you as the head of the family? Are you the new Michael in the Corleone family who takes over confidently from Vito? Or do people see you as an ass who is certainly not good enough to fit into your parent's shoes?

While succession planning is a favorite subject in corporate houses, are we doing it in our houses? Are we doing what it takes to create 2nd line leaders in our families?

If you are a parent in your late 60's or 70's: can you list down a few points for succession planning?

Problem Solving And Prioritization - Expense Reduction

Sometimes we are faced with a problem which is quantitative in nature. It could be (but not necessarily only) in the form of having to reduce expenses. Let's take an example.

Assume we are forced to reduce our expenses because ... (well whatever the reason).

And let's assume that our top two major expenses heads are:

Expense Head          Expense Per         No. of Occurrences      Total Expense

                             Occurrence               Per Month               Per Month

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A                                100                        20                         2000

B                                 800                         1                          800

and let's assume all other expenses (Expense Head "C") are about 200 per month and the total expense is hence 2000+800+200 = 3000 per month.

Now, let's say we are in an unfortunate situation of having to reduce the expenses substantially. The initial feeling most of us have is "Oh No, I can't reduce A, its absolutely essential. And B uhhh uhhhh. No not that either." 

The interesting thing about this kind of a problem is:

1. We face a situation where expense has to be reduced. Substantially. And immediately.
2. The idea of reducing A and B is appalling to us. And we haven't a clue how to go about doing it. We know it is possible but it's very painful to even contemplate doing it.
3. We are not confident of our ability to solve the problem

The question is: How do we go about doing it? :)

The idea of expanding income as an alternative is out of scope here. Please remember that while the problem might seem theoretical, it is not. This kind of a problem happens frequently in life.

I think it's obvious that addressing C won't solve our problem. How should we go about solving this?. Why?

Comments welcome (I don't publish comments).

Maths Puzzle 9 - Simple Way To Calculate The Mean Of A Group Of Numbers

Let's say we have to calculate the mean (average) of a group of numbers.

54

36

45

57

49

39

28

There is of course the simple way of summing up all the 7 numbers above and divide the sum by 7.

Let's now say we want to do it fast. Speed is always important. Now how do we find the average faster. And let's say a small inaccuracy is allowed. (Example is when we know the possible solutions and we have to choose one or when all we need to know is an approximate answer within +/- 3%).

What does the average of the numbers seem to be? Maybe about 40? ok. Let's take 40 as the base and find out the differences of these numbers from 40.

Orig  Difference

No.    From 40

54       14

36       -4

45        5

57       17

49        9

39       -1

28      -12

---------------

Total   28

The sum of the differences from 40 is 28 as shown above. The average of this sum of differences is 28/7=4

Add it to the original base (40).

The actual average = 40+4 = 44.

Now, couple of points to be noted here:

1. The sum of the differences is easier to calculate than the sum of the original numbers because the differences are usually smaller. Where the differences are large this method will not be easier.
2. To make the differences small, we have to choose a base which is close in value to all the original numbers. This is done by a quick scan of the numbers for which we need to take the average. 
3. And then we should choose such a number from which the difference is easy to calculate. For example we chose 40 as the base. We would get the same answer for the average of the original numbers even if we had chosen 4 or 400 or 41. But out of these 3 choices for the base, which is the easiest to work with? 40, isn't it?

Using 40 as a base made it easier to calculate the average of the numbers given at the top. 

Maths is fun. We use it in everyday life. We can calculate faster if we know some "tricks".

Maths Puzzle 8 - Algebra

I was looking at sample questions for CBSE board for 9th grade (http://papers.icbse.com/sample/ix/2011/4.pdf).

Here is a problem and the solution.

Question No. 23:

Find the value of x³ + y³ + 15xy - 125 when x+y=5

There are two ways to solve this. Let's do it the formal way first

Solution 1:

Since x+y=5, y=5-x. Substitute this in the 1st equation

x³ + y³ + 15xy - 125 = x³ + (5-x)³ +15x(5-x) - 125

=x³ + (5³ - 3.5².x + 3.5.x² - x³) + (75x - 15x²) - 125

(using the formula for (a-b)³ )

=x³ + 125 - 75x + 15x² - x³ + 75x -15x² - 125 

= 0

Now let's go through an informal solution (note: this is just used to get a quick answer and it's not the "right" way...)

Solution 2:

Find the value of x³ + y³ + 15xy - 125 when x+y=5

Since there are two variables and x+y=5 with no other equation involving x and y, we may assume that it does not matter what the values of x and y are provided that x+y=5. So let's assume x=5, y=0

Substituting these values of x and y in the first equation we get,

x³ + y³ + 15xy - 125 = 5³ + 0 + 0 - 125 = 0

voila!!!