Figure1: Basic plan showing the material required

We have two 4′x8′ (4 feet by 8 feet) raised beds, which we use for vegetable plants. Kavita has been asking me to either buy or build a trellis for her climbing plants (cucumbers, tomatoes and eventually some types of squash and gourds). I read several websites online and decided to build a simple trellis using PVC piping. It took one trip to the local Home Depot, and then about 2 hours of work. The cost for the material was under $10 (I already had all the tools needed).

We decided to build one and test it out before getting carried away and building more. We decided that we would roughly want the trellis to be 4 feet wide by 5 feet high. At the Home Depot we did some quick calculations based on the basic design we had in mind and came up with a total of about 29 feet of PVC tube. The calculation is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2: Materials and Tools for the project (4-way, + shaped, PVC connector missing)

The PVC pipes are sold in 10′ pieces. We got 3 pieces. We also got some string (I tried polypropylene string since I did not know any better, we’ll see how that works out).

Figure 2 shows most of the material and tools. The one caveat is, since I took this picture after completing the project, the one 4-way 1/2″ PVC pipe connector used at the center of the frame is missing from the picture. I had extra connectors of the other type, so I could use them for the picture. Also, one other thing that is missing from the picture is a power drill and drill bits. I used a 3/16″ drill bit to drill evenly spaced holes in the pipes to draw the string through, to create a framework.

Figure 3: Trellis plan with the stringing shown

Figure 4: Framework ready, stringing is yet to be completed

The spacing between the holes and how the trellis is supposed to look eventually is shown in Figure 3.

The thing that took the most time was measuring and marking the PVC pipes, cutting them to the right size with the saw, then measuring and marking the locations for the holes for the string to go through and then drilling the holes with the power drill. Since the PVC pipe keeps rolling about, making it stable before drilling is important. I just used an old rag to wrap around the pipe in order to hold it somewhat still.

Once the pieces were all ready, putting the trellis together took less than 10 minutes. There was no need for glue, since the connectors fit quite snugly. Figure 4 shows the trellis laid out on the lawn (with only one piece of string drawn through, Kavita will work on getting the rest of the mesh this evening).

We are not sure how well this will hold up, how long it will last etc. I will update the post with some pictures on the trellis in action, later.

Taking an Interest in Loan Mathematics

Let us first try to understand, in simple terms, the philosophy of any loan process. In particular, I’ll focus on the home loan process. You intend to purchase a house. Why purchase, and not continue to rent? Well, that is an interesting question in its own right. But, to not get distracted, let us say you got tired of the rent going up each year, or moving every few years, or actually figured that it was economically better to buy rather than rent. So, you decide to buy a house. You need money. You go to the bank (a mortgage lender). Say you want $200K ($200 thousand). The bank gives you the money at a certain interest rate, say, 5%. What does that really mean? Here in the US, the norm is to calculate the remaining balance every month. The 5% is actually 12*0.4166%, where 0.4166%, or 0.004166, is the monthly interest rate. That is, after the first month, the outstanding balance is $200K + $200K*0.004166. In other words, because the bank did you a favor by giving you $200K which you did not have, it wants $200K*0.004166, which is $833.33. As a quick aside, notice that because the interest is calculated monthly, the annual interest rate is, in reality, greater than the 5% we started with. The real annual interest rate would be 1.004166^12=0.0511, or in other words 5.11%. Nevertheless, the common practice is to quote this as 5% base interest rate, and that is fine, as long as we know what it means.

Now, continuing with our example, in the first month, the bank wants you to pay $833.333 as interest accrued over that month. Say you paid exactly $833.33. The outstanding balance at the beginning of the second month would then be exactly 200K again. And at the end of that second month, the interest would be $833.33 again. Say you pay the bank $833.33 again. The outstanding balance at the beginning of the third month will again be $200K. This pattern could go on endlessly. You may argue that this looks like renting. Every month you pay the rent. You don’t see any of that money. But with buying there is a fundamental difference. After 10 years of doing the above, that is, paying $833.33 each month, you decide to sell the house. The house itself, typically, appreciates in value. Say the value of the house is now $300K. You sell and make a $100K profit. You paid 10*12*$833.33 over the 10 years, which, coincidentally, comes out to exactly 100K. What that means is you basically lived in a house for 10 years for free (of course you did pay property taxes, painted the house a couple of times, bought a lawn mower, replaced light bulbs, and took care of the house in general). But overall, it sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

One word we all glossed over in this discussion is “typically”. Home prices “typically” appreciate. The bank does not gloss over that word. If the value of the house drops, say 10 years later, the value of the house drops to 150K. You have paid your “rent” for 10 years, and are ready to sell. The bank wants its 200K back, since you never paid any principal all these years. The sale, however, would only fetch you 150K. The bank has the title (ownership document) to the house. It will not let you sell. It says give us 50K first, then sell for 150K, and gives us that 150K as well. You do not have 50K to give to the bank. The loan is foreclosed – the bank keeps the title to the house, but the bank does not like this situation. The bank now owns the house. But the house is worth only 150K. The bank does not want to be in the business of selling a house, especially one that won’t bring them their original 200K back.

To prevent this scenario, the bank employs two interesting tactics. Firstly, it does not let you pay only the interest of $833.33 each month. It requires you to pay off some of that principal on top of the interest. Secondly, the amount of principal you pay atop the interest is calculated such that the loan is guaranteed to be paid off in a certain “term”. Further, to keep the payment terms simple for the customer, the total payment each month remains unchanged. It is important to recognize that calculation of interest depends only on the interest rate. The calculation of the monthly payment which includes both the interest and some piece of the principal requires the notion of the “term”. The payment has to at least be the interest due that month. It is a bit more than that each month because of the principal paid. (In reality it ends up being even more because you pay a part of the annual property taxes, hazard insurance etc. each month � but we can ignore that for this discussion). Paying a bit of principal each month causes the outstanding balance reduce each month; this causes the interest payment to reduce a bit each month. This allows you to pay off even more principal each month, and that cascading effect finally ends exactly when the term runs out. Throughout this period, as mentioned earlier, the actual monthly payment does not change. The reduction in interest is compensated for by the increase in principal payment, which in turn reduces the outstanding balance and causes the next month’s interest payment to reduce even further. This constant monthly payment (interest + principal) is carefully calculated to achieve this effect. “Term” is the number of months the loan is supposed to be fully paid off by. The shorter the term, the better the rates, in general, because to pay off a loan faster (shorter term), you have to pay greater amounts each month. So there needs to be an incentive for you to pay more money each month to the bank. And that incentive is the lower rate. Otherwise, wouldn’t you rather go with the longer term, pay less to the bank each month and invest that leftover in the stock market?

By forcing you to pay a bit of principal each month, the bank is earning less interest each month. But the good news is that, if after 10 years, you decide to sell the house and the value of the house is only 150K instead of the 200K you bought it for, the bank risks less. You have already paid off about 40K. So the loss for the bank is only 10K instead of 50K, if it had allowed you to only pay the interest each month. So in other words, the bank wants you to pay principal each month not to help you reduce your interest payments, but rather to help it stave off any chance of losing money on the house if prices fall.

Black Magic – Calculating the Monthly Payment

When you talk to a mortgage banker on the phone, you will notice that they like to quickly tell you that your monthly payment would be some x amount. They use the phrase, “run the numbers”, with some pride. It is interesting and empowering to understand how the monthly payment is actually calculated.

We have all the information we need. At the beginning, we have a 200K loan. Let us use L to indicate this “Loan Amount”. Say, the monthly rate, which is 0.004166 in our example, is represented by c. Say, n represents the term, n months. Say, P represents the monthly payment. We want to determine P ourselves, instead of depending on our loan officer to tell us that information.

After the first month, the outstanding balance is:
L + L*c – P
= L(1+c) – P
This is because the loan amount L increases by the monthly interest amount, L*c, but then we make the payment of P. This is the outstanding balance for the second month.
At the end of the second month, the outstanding balance is:
{L(1+c) – P}(1+c) – P
= L(1+c)^2 – P(1+c) – P
= L(1+c)^2 – P{(1+c)+1}
At the end of the third month, the outstanding balance is
= {L(1+c)^2 – {P(1+c)+P}} (1+c) – P
= L(1+c)^3 – P {(1+c)^2 + 1+c) + 1}
If you are still with me, you may start seeing a pattern emerge. After n months, the outstanding balance will be:
= L(1+c)^n – P {(1+c)^(n-1) + (1+c)^(n-2) + … + (1-c)^2 + (1+c) + 1}
Which, can be rewritten as
= L(1+c)^n – P {1 + (1+c)^2 + (1+c)^3 + … (1+c)^(n-1)}
Now. The punch line. After n months, we *know* that the outstanding balance should be 0. So
0 = L(1+c)^n – P {1 + (1+c)^2 + (1+c)^3 + … (1+c)^(n-1)}
P {1 + (1+c)^2 + (1+c)^3 + … (1+c)^(n-1)} = L(1+c)^n
P = L(1+c)^n/{1 + (1+c)^2 + (1+c)^3 + … (1+c)^(n-1)}
There you go. That is P, your payment each month. Phew! Done? Well, almost. The denominator in the above calculation is not Excel-friendly. Remember, you want this to go into a spreadsheet that can help you with decision making. The number of terms depends on n. Not good. Let’s try to find a closed form solution for the denominator. Thankfully, it is not hard. Notice that the denominator is of the form:
1 + a + a^2 + a^3 + … + a^(n-1)
where I replaced 1+c with a. Let us call the above sum X.
X = 1 + a + a^2 + a^3 + … + a^(n-1)
Adding a^n to both sides (as an aside, this kind of intuition is the reason Kavita hates math)
X + a^n = 1 + a + a^2 + a^3 + … + a^(n-1) + a^n
Shamelessly using some more of that darned intuition, we extract out a common factor, a, from the last n terms to get to:
X + a^n = 1 + a {1 + a + a^2 + … + a^(n-1)}
But notice that the stuff inside the {} is precisely what we defined X to be. So:
X + a^n = 1 + a*X
X + a*X = 1 + a^n
X * (1 + a) = 1 + a^n
Therefore,
X = (1-a^n)/(1-a)
Replacing a with (1+c),
X = (1-(1+c)^n)/(1-(1+c))
X = (1-(1+c)^n)/(-c)
X = ((1+c)^n – 1)/c
Finally, substituting this into the equation for P:
P = L.c.(1+c)^n/{(1+c)^n – 1}
Now we are seriously done with this calculation.

Let us try to use L=200K, c=0.004166 and n=360 (a 30-year term, which is quite common in the US), and calculate P, your monthly payment. P comes out to $1073.64. The interest component is $833.33, and the principal is $1073.64 – $833.33 = $240.31. Because you pay off a tiny bit of the 200K principal, the outstanding balance at the beginning of the second month is $200000 – $240.31 = $199759.69. The interest for the second month is therefore going to be lesser than $833.33. In fact, it is $832.33. This $1 we pay less in interest goes towards the principal, which increases from $240.31 in the first month to $241.31 in the second. Looking a few months into this process the interest payments are $833.33, $832.33, $831.33, $830.32, $829.30, etc., and principal payments are $240.31, $241.31, $242.32 etc.

Click on the thumbnails above to see the monthly and cumulative payment schedules. The first figure shows how much interest, principal and total payment needs to be made each month. The second figure translates that to a cumulative amount, that is, at any given point in time it tells us how much interest, principal and total payment you would have made. It is interesting to note from the first figure that in the first few years the bank makes most of the money it expects to make on the house (the interest tails off during the later years). The second figure shows that by the end of the loan term, you’d pay about 200K in interest!

Does Overpayment Make Sense?

At this point it is important to understand that by paying off the $240.31, $241.31, $242.32 etc. principal each month the benefit you are getting is in terms of reducing the interest you pay each month. By actually being vested in the house, that is, by owning that piece of the house, you do not get any direct benefit; when the house sells, its value will not depend on how much of the house you actually own. Think of it like this – the principal payments you make are investments where the rate of return is determined by the reduction in the interest payments.� Let us take an example. Say, somehow, you convince the bank to allow you to pay only the interest, $833.33, each month. You take the difference between your bank-determined payment of $1073.64 and your negotiated payment of $833.33 and invest it ($1073.64 – $833.33 = 240.31) in the stock market at 10% annual rate of return. Either way, after 10 years, we’d have invested $240.31*12*10 = $28,837.2. Since the investment is accruing a rate of return each month, we need to carefully calculate how much profit we make (I use an Excel spreadsheet to do this, however, we could use a closed form expression similar to the one we developed above). At a 10% rate of return, we make about $21,000. If we put this same $241.31 into the principal payment each month, after 10 years, our profit (the interest savings compared to the case where we do not pay any principal payment each month) is $8,478. Of course, the actual profit by investing is reduced by the tax you need to pay on that profit. Regardless, it is still a sweet deal to invest the money in the stock market, provided you can guarantee the 10% return on investment. Even if we assume a safe 6% rate of return (after taxes and everything), we stand to make $10,900 in the stock market vs. the $8,478 we “make” by putting it into the house. In any case, this is a moot point, since the bank will not allow you to make interest payments only. What this discussion is intended to drive home is that it may not make sense to overpay above the monthly payment of $1073.64, unless you intend to stay at the house for a shorter term. If you stay for a shorter term in the house, then the stock market rate of return may be too risky, whereas the paying into the house guarantees a certain rate of return.

The figures above show monthly and cumulative payments for a 15 year loan term – that is a loan for which the monthly payment has been calculated such that is supposed to be paid off in full in 15 years. Typically, 15 year loans have a slightly better rate than a 30 year loan, to give you the incentive to give up more of your cash each month in payment. However, since I am continuing to use a 5% interest rate to plot these curves, these really indicate how your overall payment time line changes if you overpay each month. The overpayment amount is basically the difference between the monthly payment shown in this figure and the minimum monthly payment shown in the previous section. As you can see here, even in the first month you pay as much towards principal as interest, and secondly, by the end of the loan term, you pay only about $80K in interest. The advantage of this scheme is that you are required to only pay in accordance with the 30-year term, but you may choose to overpay if you wish to reduce your interest payments. That way, if you occasionally miss your overpayment target, that is fine as long as you pay the minimum payment for that month. That said, like we discussed above, it may still make sense to not overpay if you can invest that money instead.

Does Refinancing Make Sense?

Now that we have understood some of the nuances of the loan process, let us consider how to make a refinancing decision. Refinancing is the process of getting a new loan in order to pay off an existing loan. If this were a free process, that is, there were no cost of refinancing, the decision would have been very simple. If the new interest rate is better than the old interest rate refinancing would make sense. However, there is, typically, a cost involved. The question then changes to how long do you need to stay in the same house after refinancing to recoup the cost of refinancing. Let us take an example. Say you currently have a 5% loan with $200K outstanding, and a different lender offers a 4% loan, with a $2000 closing cost. The current monthly payment is $1073.64. The new monthly payment is $954.83. Since the interest rate is lower, you�ll likely be paying less interest each month with the new loan. So over time the cumulative interest you pay the bank may be lesser with the new loan. For this example, after 1 year the total interest paid with the current loan is about $9900, whereas with the new loan it is $7900. This is about $2000 in savings in 1 year just from the interest rate reduction. Since the interest you pay is like the fees the bank charges for its services, you have found a low-fee option. So in 1 year you have overcome the $2000 cost of refinancing. From year 2 onward you stand to gain by doing this refinance. (Note: I am ignoring the fact that interest is tax-free money, that is, you get the taxes you paid on the interest in your next year’s tax returns. The absolute savings from interest reduction are therefore about 20 to 25% lesser than the savings I am quoting here and in the spreadsheet. It is easy to fix that though, if you choose to. Instead of saving $2000, you’d have actually only saved $1500 if you fall in the 25% tax rate bracket.)

Now, let us see what happens to the rest of the money you are paying each month, the principal. With the current loan the cumulative principal payment after 1 year is
$2950. With the new loan the cumulative principal paid in 1 year is $3522. That is, you own more of the house. But this is not important by itself. Yes, you own more of the house, but the net is you converted some cash into a bit of house. If you had not owned any of the house you’d have been left with cash which you could have invested and actually grown it. The house grows or falls equally in value regardless of whether you are invested in it or not.

But there is one more component to this equation other than the interest and principal. The overall monthly payment has reduced from $1073.64 to $954.83. That is a freeing up of $118.81 each month to be invested as you choose. Even if this was invested conservatively in a 6% rate of return investment, you end up with $1472 at the end of the first year. This is money that would not have been available at all with the current loan. So in fact, at the end of year 1, you have save $2000 + $1472, the former coming from the interest savings and the latter from investing the cash freed up. This means, the $2000 cost of refinancing will actually be made up even sooner than 1 year. Given the above 6% assumption it is more like 7 months. If you plan to live in this house for 7 months or more, go for the refinancing

The figure above shows the time to recoup the cost of refinancing, considering only the interest savings and also considering the case where the overall reduction in monthly payment can be invested at 6%.

Acknowledgements

My understanding of the issues involved in refinancing, in particular, and mortgages, in general, is based upon my going through this decision-making process recently. Much of this understanding was developed during discussions with my friends Gordie and Srini. If you find flaws in my understanding please let me know. Some online resources that helped me were http://www.mtgprofessor.com/formulas.htm , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refinancing and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage.

Even before I opened the iPhone box I was impressed with the immaculate packaging. The phone was surprisingly easy to learn using, and any non-obvious features were easy to search for on the web. The ability to download the applications of our choice and even develop your own applications is a tribute to and celebration of innovation and creativity embodied by the iPhone. I could rave about this Swiss-army knife of mobile gadgets or I could argue that no one really uses a Swiss-army knife in normal life. Indeed, I have not yet figured out how best to effectively use this phone. Some of the features that translate into time and money savings are the GPS when you are lost on the road, the ability to look up the Internet to get answers to simple questions when you are in doubt, the ability to entertain yourself when you have time to kill (books, podcasts, puzzles, YouTube, newspapers, iPod music), the ability to shoot video and ship them to your friends (thus avoiding hours of procrastination) and the ability to synchronize the contact list and calendar entries with Google. In short, this tool allows you to use small pockets of time more efficiently, either the educate or entertain yourself, or to rewind. This is important, to me at least, because then the time with family does not need to be compromised for trying to rewind in my own way. Simple example: if I feel like listening to Louis Armstrong I can listen to him and other jazz artists on Pandora while driving back from work. Then once I am home, I can spend time with Kavita, as she wants me to.

So, finally, thank you, Anu, Shankar and Sandeep, for live demos and persuasive nudges, and thanks Kavita for the final push. I’m on board and I am enjoying the ride.

(I posted this entire entry from the iPhone. I am getting very good at typing on this, something I was not so sure about only two days ago.)

I was looking out of my passenger-side window when I noticed a tall tower with two red lights, horizontally arranged atop the tower, a thin cloud of mist in front of it and a dark night behind. To be more accurate, I only saw the lights, and I imagined the tower’s existence. As those lights were flying past me, I craned my neck for a few seconds trying to keep my sights on those two red lights. In those seconds I realized something. The fleeting vision of those lights behind a cloud of dark, foggy mist and my fruitless attempt at trying to hold on to that view made me realize how I (we all, perhaps) crave focus. We want to be able to hold on to experiences. One after the other after the other. I realized, also, how fleeting the nature of all experiences is. What you experience, what you take in, is different from what you set out to experience, what you probably wanted to take in. The moment that you want to experience, is past by the time you actually are able to take it in. In this constant rush of fleeting images, fleeting thoughts, fleeting sensory experiences, we keep chasing that impossible goal. We crave an experience we can truly and completely call our own – an experience we can hold by the scruff of its neck and do with what we choose to. But alas, it unfailingly slips out of our grasp, always leaving us with a few tattered thoughts and shadowy images – and even these leftovers belong to a different moment altogether, not the one we were trying to go after. And what you take in is really what you want to take in. Can you ever truly experience a moment, when time keeps the scenery ever-changing? What you can hold on to is that which is not changing with time – that which is independent of time. And maybe the only such thing, which is within you control, is that which is within you. That which you can truly experience, necessarily, has to be an idea that is of your own creation – an idea that which you can readily recreate, that which is truly obedient. Does that mean that, that which is outside, that which is real, is really not? And that which is hypothetical, imaginary, and, obedient, is the reality we can experience?

These rhetorical questions apart, one other thing these fleeting lights maybe helped me see is one reason why I like photography. For once, I can hold time nearly still. A shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second is pretty close to being momentary for me – short enough to not allow multiple thoughts to cross my mind. And when I look at that picture later, I can study every detail at my leisure, without the nagging fear of something discreetly changing in the bottom left corner of my view while I was busy breathing in the top right.

I agree with most of Dr. Raghunathan’s observations though I find that some of the arguments could be further strengthened by factual details. I also felt that the article does not point out one factor which can elevate the status of sports in India – media. I see many children and young people nowadays finding no outlet for their natural instincts to exercise their bodies and minds via sports. Instead much of their energies are being channeled towards unimaginative, creativity-sapping shows on the TV and the inescapable din created by the industry that religion is becoming. Lot of it is because in population heavy urban areas, there are not enough facilities and open spaces for the young to play. In rural areas where there are open areas and, arguably, time at hand for kids to explore sport, facilities and, more importantly, awareness are severely lacking. There is no incentive to try to be great at a sport.

The young minds of the country, with no reason or facilities to go out an play, are increasingly being moulded by what the see on the TV. Some get influenced by the western media and the western culture they see on the TV and blindly jump on to that bandwagon. The remaining shun the western influence so much that they lean to the other extreme, and get swept by fundamentalist religious rhetoric. In either case, the TV influences their ability to think for themselves. Instead of making the youth broad-minded in their approach to cultures, science and entertainment, it makes them confused, at first, and, dogmatic and narrow-minded, eventually.  Religion in India is losing its real meaning; it has become a service industry. It is encroaching the airwaves via loud speakers and TV and radio shows. It is encroaching every free piece of land, which should have been left as play areas for children, by temple construction projects. It is sucking up every rupee anyone can and cannot spare to feed its furnace of the self-fulfilling prophecies. It is taking over people’s ability to think. Its misinterpretation and misrepresentation over the years is reaching a point where sense and rationality no longer prevails, and democracy itself, that fairest social system, might no longer be able to see right from wrong. The opium of the masses, as Karl Marx called it, is finally taking over the sanity of a democracy. If a majority in a democracy are disillusioned, I wonder what keeps a democracy from self-destruction? The economic prosperity that India now enjoys is a great opportunity to keep religious and other extreme influences in check by clearly communicating to the masses the true reasons for this economic upturn; this upturn is in spite of the religious fervor gripping the country, not because of it.

Coming back to the topic on hand, I think the media is best equipped to extricate the population from such extremes and let some sense prevail. Sports is a great leveler and is one of the best ways to bring a nation together. The media has a huge role it can play to help kids play in their free time, rather than watch soap operas and immerse themselves in religious discourses. Here is a snippet from an email I wrote on this topic to some of my family members.

“Media, especially television, has a tremendous control over the nation’s psyche. Media can make or break national opinions. The current fascination with game shows, song-and-dance competitions or soap operas is by and large a media created state of mass-hypnosis. The same power of the media can get people to start appreciating the importance of physical exercise and sport. More importantly, it can be an enabler for pulling in interest and, therefore, money into regional and national sporting events. An example is the recent city-based cricket leagues. An entire industry, a multi-billion dollar enterprise, can be built around sports in India. It is an largely untapped market. Doordarshan’s depressing, half-hearted, monopolistic attempts at covering sporting events in India makes people even more reluctant to try sports professionally. Sports is real-life drama and entertainment. It needs professionally trained media-men to bring out that drama on screen. Once that excitement, that tension, and the drama can be conveyed, the audience will pay attention. This might require bringing out the personal backgrounds of the players, their histories, their stories of hardships and determination to the people. Once people are latched, competition increases both in the sport and the coverage of the sport. The advertising revenue starts to flow in. With money flowing in, there is a feed back effect. More people want to take part in sports, more people want to watch sports, more people want to cover sports and make money. For example, why do we prefer Harsha Bhogle to Sanjay Manjrekar in the cricket commentator’s box, and why do we prefer Star Sports to Doordarshan for sports coverage? Quality. People can perceive quality differences. Similarly, why is Praveen Kumar, the cricketer, evoke national interest? Because of his background as a wrestler from a small town. These small-town heroes are the media pets. They help catch the public’s fancy. “If it can be him…it can be me!”, they aspire.

In India, shooting, archery, wrestling, boxing are relatively easy to make popular. The sports persons have to be cast into media demi-gods… only then will people know their names and their existence, let alone pay much attention. When the drama of sports is discovered and conveyed by the media to the audiences, even shooting can be made into a heart-racing, edge-of-the-seat thriller.”

One thing that I should clarify is “Why should children play sports – a rather mundane, pointless exercise?”, “Why is winning medals at the Olympics that important?”, “Why not let the entire nation, instead, spend all their energy and time learning their place in God’s scheme of things?”. The answer, I think, is because they will discover their God, their place in the scheme of things, their goals, better, by participating in sports and playing their heart out, than by cracking coconuts, lighting agarbattis, exchanging bananas or watching TV.

Change of Plans

Initially, we had planned that only Kavita would go to India, and I would just meet her in London on her way back. However, getting a Visa for UK was a mess. We were required to go to New York for fingerprinting, according to some new rule started in April 2008. Also, we’d have to figure out exactly where we would stay in London etc. even before applying for the Visa. Ludicrous enough as it was, it was made worse by the fact that travel to New York was quite expensive too. We dropped the London plan and decided to fly non-stop from the US to India, bypassing Europe altogether. This would avoid all transit Visa problems – many cities in Europe require transit visas even if you are not leaving the airport.

Preparation

Kavita handled the entire process of searching for fares and dates, reading out our XXL (Extra Extra Long) names to each travel agent going “M as in Mary, U as in Umbrella … ” and so on, and finally settling for the best deal she could manage. The journey was quadruped – 4 legs – Raleigh to New York by Delta Airlines, New York to Mumbai by Delta Airlines’ youngest aircraft a Boeing 777 200LR, Mumbai to Hyderabad by Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines and Hyderabad to Visakhapatnam by Godavari Express. The process of packing was broken into two phases. The first, drawn out, phase was to figure out what to carry and then dump it in the study room. This included small gift items we had been collecting over some time, our cameras, old clothes we wished to give away in India etc. The second phase, consisting of cramming all this into our suitcases, weighing them and rebalancing them for weight restrictions, took only a few hours. During this process, I spent some time to calculate how much money it costs (not to us, but in terms of the fuel burnt but the airplane) to carry each extra pound and came up with something like 40 cents given the distance we were traveling and the price of jet fuel nowadays. Although this seems like an irrelevant calculation, especially given that we were carrying only 75% of what we could carry without paying extra, I used this piece of information to convince Kavita that we should not carry a relatively heavy utensil (kadhai) which she wanted to take to India and give to somebody there.

Kavita + Vacation = Excitement

Kavita says that she is destined to never be able to travel without incident, and this time the incident that started the excitement was someone stealing the oxygen sensor from Kavita’s car just days before we were to leave. We managed to drop it off in the repair shop before we left, and used my car for all travel needs, including transporting our potted plants to a friend’s place. Then everything seemed to go on smoothly until the day of travel. We were all set on June 29th evening. Balan, our friend, dropped us off at the airport, we got our boarding cards, breezed through security and found ourselves sitting in the plane. Then, after about a half hour in the plane came the news that the weather in New York would not allow our tiny craft to land, and so we would not bother taking off. The high price of fuel had finally caught up with our plans! Fuel prices forced Delta to switch to a smaller craft, and a smaller craft could not handle the weather like a larger one could have; hence, we had to right shift our entire travel plans, including the last leg of the journey from Hyderabad to Visakhapatnam by train, by one day.

We decided to not go back home with all that luggage. Instead we picked to a motel near the airport and decided to spend the night there. The next day we had a relatively early flight to catch. The Delta agent, upon our flight’s cancellation helped us with our tickets for the next day. She was on the phone for almost an hour trying to rebook us. Getting us rebooked on the Kingfisher Airline flight from Mumbai to Hyderabadwas what took the agent the longest, as she was finding it hard to get in touch with them. Eventually, we we put on the flight form Raleigh to Atlanta, and then we were to catch the international flight at its origination point, Atlanta, rather than chancing another flight cancellation the next day. Meanwhile, the lady also informed us that our Kingfisher flight between Hyderabad and Mumbai, during the return journey, had been cancelled for some unknown reason. She booked us on a different flight, one day sooner than we wanted to leave from Hyderabad. Thus with our vacation kind of squeezed in on both its ends, we settled in the motel room, hoping this would be all the excitement we would be served up. What did we know.

We dined at a Waffle House near the motel. The omelet was a bit greasy, but the toast and hash browns were great. Back in the hotel, we again resorted to technology, to fix the mess caused by fuel. Indian Railways now has a half-decent website where you can cancel and book train tickets. The website is non-intuitive and crashes often. However, it is a remarkable improvement compared to how things were just a few years ago. I was able to cancel our existing reservation and get a reservation for the next day. It was a different train, however – Visakha Express instead of Godavari Express, and I had to reserve “Tatkal”, which is kind of like last minute reservations, which cost more. We should consider ourselves lucky that were able to get reservations at all, in the AC (air-conditioned) 2nd class compartment. Trains in India have different classes of service -AC 1st Class, 1st Class, AC 2nd Class (also known as AC two-tier), AC 3-tier Sleeper, 3-tier Sleeper and General (unreserved comparment). Compared to the US, fares are much cheaper. With the amount of luggage we had, we wanted to at least go with AC 2nd Class.

India

The craft that flew us from New York to Mumbai was Boeing 777 200LR, the youngest craft in the fleet operated by Delta. The seating was noticeably more comfortable than my previous experiences. There were fewer seats across the width of the craft, an arrangement of 3-3-3 instead of 3-4-3, giving everyone a few extra inches. Upon reclining, the backrest moved back as usual, but the base of the seat, which typically is stationary, also moved forward a bit, thus making it more comfortable. The in-flight movie selection was extensive. I saw many documentaries, and I especially recall one called “The 11th Hour” which was about global warming and how we are close to the tipping point of a headlong dive to no-return.

Mumbai’s Chattrapati Shivaji airport was under renovation. After customs and getting our bags, we took an internal airport bus to the domestic terminal. We had an overnight wait there, with our flight to Hyderabad scheduled for early next morning. Kavita had made many friends along the way, starting from Raleigh, and continuing making acquaintences on the flight. They all sat together in the waiting area, while I tried to find a quieter corner to try and catch some sleep. I realized that I am getting better with my ability to slow down my heart rate and rest, even while seated. I used to be a chronic failure when it came to sleeping while seated. Anyway, the few minutes of sleep I could catch here and there were enough for me to get back into the timezone. Next morning, we started with a machine supplied NesTea from a vendor at the terminal. The tea was not anywhere as good as I remember tea in India being, maybe because it came from a machine, but more likely because they used creamer instead of real milk and mixed up the proportions. I was also shocked by how the cup sizes for beverages had shrunk. Either that or I have gotten used to the mega-mugs of the US. But later in the trip, in a Hyderabad bus stand, where I would finally find some better tasting, authentically prepared, non-mechanized, tea, I would be shocked by the audacity of the shrinkage. I would find the size of the cheap, plastic, tea cup was exactly the same as the size of the cup you get with Benadryl or Robotussin cough syrup. It could probably hold no more than 4 tablespoons of tea. Maybe, that is way it was priced at 4 rupees.

Anyway, we made it to Hyderabad that morning, where my friend CK picked us up. After freshening up and being deposited into the Visakha Express train, we reached Vizag next day and thus began the actual vacation. It was the year we went to Bhilai – Kavita’s second trip, her first was when she was in the 5th grade.

(Sorry for an abrupt ending to this article. I started it in earnest right after this trip, but did not finish it and forgot most of the details of what happened. Just putting it up so this writing, even if partial, is not lost.)

I agree with this observation. More generally, this observation applies to any kind of decision making. We make many decisions in life – in everyday life and in the grander scale of life. In everyday life, we decide on things like which vacuum cleaner to buy, or, which hair conditioner to buy, both of which were decisions I had to make last week. In the grander scale of life we need to make decisions such as who to marry, or, which profession to work towards.

To make a decision we weigh pros and cons across several dimensions and finally settle on a decision. If we do a good job at making the decision, we have considered all the dimensions and all the pros and cons along those dimensions. We are happy that we have come to a global optimum across the search space of the solution, and we can pat ourselves on the back for it. As the number of dimensions grow, however, the search space explodes in size. The resources and time to do this optimization become overwhelming. We are forced to work with a smaller search space that we can handle within the time we give ourselves to make the decision. Say we have an hour to kill and feel like watching come TV. We sit in front of the box, pick up the remote and flip through channels. We want to decide which channel to watch. We do not want to spend that hour trying to optimize that choice. To make a decision in some reasonable time, we need to make more decisions first. We need to decide which dimensions of choice we want to ignore. This is choice-pruning. For example, we might not care for a show if it is not in Hi-Def. Then the choice-space shrinks by an order of magnitude. However, once we do shrink the choice-space, we have to settle for something that may be a sub-optimal solution compared to the global optimum. And that can take away from the satisfaction you draw from your, potentially sub-optimal, choice.

For some of these decisions there is no way to know the optimality of the solution. For example, once you marry a person, you better make appropriate adjustments and make happiness out of it. There is no point comparing the decision to anything – what if I had married someone else, what if I had taken up that other job offer 10 years ago? In some ways not knowing the optimal solution is a boon. You can rest assured that there is no such thing as an optimal solution in that case. The decision you make is the only decision that matters. No one can prove to you that a different choice would have definitely been better. It is calming to know that your decision is beyond judgment. Still, too much choice can be paralyzing in this case also. The only saving grace is that almost any decision is really a pretty good decision.

For some other decisions however, there is a direct measurable impact. These are the decision that can haunt. The stock you choose to invest your money in may tank, while that other option you were considering just as fervently, does really well. The vacuum cleaner you chose sucks, while the one that your friend bought for just a little bit more money, sucks better. And it is for these decisions that too much choice can not only be paralyzing, but also be humiliating. You blame yourself for the sub-optimality of your choice; after all, you have proof to justify that blame.

I routinely find myself presented with this overdosage of choice. And being mathematically and engineeringly inclined, I tend to at least give choice-pruning and optimization a fair shot. As I wrote to Sandeep in my response email:

“Being an engineer I tend to compare the available choices across many dimensions, and the search space grows multiplicatively. I was looking for a hair conditioner yesterday, the dimensions were – ingredients (should not have any obvious bad stuff), the company (should be something I have heard of), the quantity (should not be measured in gallons), the price (should be reasonable), delivery mechanism (spray vs cream), application time (dry hair or wet hair – further subdivided into needs rinsing after application or not) etc. Comparing all this across the 30 brands in the store left me tired.”

In fact, excessive choice wastes time and energy, and therefore, wastes money. Just by spending 20 minutes to decide on a hair conditioner, I am sure I bumped up the price of the produce by a few dollars. Time is money, and this was time I could have better spent elsewhere.

And the solution to this problem of excessive choice is not communism, or even reducing choice, necessarily. Availability of choice is not the root problem. The problem is the excessive demand excessive choice places on the decision-maker. The decision-making has to continue to be streamlined. The choice has to be presented to the chooser in a structured, standardized, unbiased way. This is really a service, which I like to call “choice pruning”. It can be an industry in its own right. An example of this is epinions.com, where people’s past experiences with their decision-making about buying a product are collected, analyzed and presented to the customer to help speed up his or her decision making process. The opinions are not strictly standardized, and I can spend days reading through the reviews there, as I recently did when trying to decide on a vacuum cleaner; but still, it does help. At least you know that with hundreds of respondents, there is a chance that any biased views and any person-to-person variation in the interpretation of the measurement scale are evened out.

By spending time on what we are choosing, we affect what we are choosing. If I spend 5 years to decide which stock to invest money in, I have already lost more money than a sub-optimal decision could have cost me. In other words, as the time to make a choice increases, by the time you finally choose, the choices available to you might end up being different than the choices you optimized for! Thus anything to speed up the selection, anything to assist with the optimization, anything to reduce future repenting, is a much-needed solution. For me, rigorous, instinctive, choice-pruning, indifference to the actual choice made, and a poor memory, help make this process faster, reasonably optimal, and guilt free.

In any case, the point of this whole entry is that catalytic converters are a relatively easy part of your car to steal. They contain precious metals like platinum, palladium etc. and when mined for the metals can fetch $50 to $100. Replacing them, of course, costs more than a thousand dollars usually. There is nothing you can do to avoid such theft except avoiding parking in desolate lots. When parking in public areas make sure you park at a location that is visible to pedestrian or vehicular traffic. Such visibility maybe a deterrent. Park close to mall entrances if malls do not have police cars driving around the lot or surveillance cameras. Comprehensive insurance is a good idea, as long as the deductible is low enough that you don’t end up paying the whole amount. Park inside a garage where possible. If you have any other ideas about how to reduce the chances of such theft, let me know.

However, the show never really managed to significantly challenge my expectations from a play. There were moments where it was inspiring, but most of it was a drag. The storyline, whatever little there was of it, was linear, going through each character’s circumstances and personalities one by one. There was hardly any complex, thought-provoking, interaction between the characters. The ballad, called the “The I Love You Song”, where one of the contestants remembers her mother who is in far-away India, seeking enlightenment, is powerful. Another sequence that I liked was one where a contestant, who, before spelling a word, always writes it on the floor using his “magical” right foot, does it in super slow motion. The sequence starts off at normal speed, ramps up in speed to a frenzy, and then slows down to a low frequency stupor, before rebounding to normal. The songs were not awe-inspiring, in general, and some dialogues bordered on being vulgar.

The stage and props remained quite static throughout, with not much in terms of visual impact. The literary impact, which must have been the main motivation behind making this a play, instead of letting it stay in the book that it originates from, was not terribly impressive either. I am sure I did not get all the subtle jokes, but before I denigrate myself too much, let me add that I did not want to go the show having done any homework. I went there to be entertained; if I did not catch all the subtle jokes, maybe they were too subtle. There was one piece of clever wordplay, where “what” is spelled by taking the w from a word where w is silent, h is taken from a word in which h is silent and so on. Such a “what” is never heard, claimed the contestant. Clever, but such cleverness would do just as well staying in a book. The theatre is supposed to be a feast for the eye and the ear, thought-provoking and awe-inspiring. This play does not manage to consistently meet such criteria, although it grazes those thresholds once in a while. There were some members from the audience who participate in the early stages of the spelling bee, providing some opportunity for seemingly impromptu, but potentially well-rehearsed, jokes, before their pre-planned elimination. Some of the commentary and references were from surprisingly recent political events. Participation by some members of the audience and this sensitivity to current news indicates that the script for the play lends itself to some modification and improvization.

Reviews I have read online were surprisingly positive, even rave, about the show. This is a small-budget production; maybe my expecting it to be comparable to the few other plays I have seen – “Phantom of the Opera”, “42nd Street” and “Annie Get Your Gun” – was wrong. However, even then, given that the tickets were priced just as any regular show would be ($21 to $70), I just did not guess that it would be a low-budget production. I am glad we did not buy more expensive tickets. I feel that plays are over-priced in the US. Except for one of the contestants walking into the audience throwing candy, most of the action was on the stage, which stayed pretty much unchanged as well. I do not see why I needed to go there in person to watch this show, when I could have probably seen it clearer, and, for less, on a DVD, feeling just as involved.