odd man stands out

So how were the Nationals for Jispa. Haha.. I am sure she will never ever forget her first nationals. I am sure, we will never ever forget them as well.

The heats were scheduled for the morning and top 8 swim for the medals in the evening. I caught the 6 am flight just to try and be there on time. In spite of the Uber driver antics, I did manage to reach on time. As I came in I sought out Jispa and wanted to say hi to her. She did look out of sorts and a bit tense. She didn’t respond well to me talking and wasn’t interested in making any conversation. I decided not to interfere and let her be.

It was time for her to go for her swim. In the nationals, they call out and arrange the swimmers in batches of 8 at the side. Then one batch at a time they are lead to the starting blocks where they have the time to sit down and remove their track suits and be ready for the swim. It’s very professionally done with a lot of time given to the swimmers.

The lanes were called out and the swimmers stood on the edge. With the long whistle, they jumped into the pool to take their positions for the start of the back stroke 50 meter race.  Since the races are decided by touch pads, the start is a buzzer that the official presses. He says , on your mark, set and presses the buzzer. On Jispa’s most important race till now, I watched with baited breath as the official called out – ONE YOUR MARK… I think my heart beat faster as she was about to take off. GET SET. And off she goes… and then the official rings the buzzer; the rest then take off. Yup you heard that right. ON YOUR MARK. GET SET… Jispa takes off… and then the official rings the Buzzer. We are standing with all the parents from the Mumbai and a collective gasp is let off from our side. I am next to another swim father and we both hit our hands on our heads. Dam shit. Jispa has had a false start. In swimming it’s called a flick start. She flicked the start. By a huge perceptible second. She is bound to be disqualified.

Wow. A whole year of training and hard work and preparation and she flicks a start for the first time in her life. Never in her trainings, never in practice races, never in relays, Never.

I look away and look my friend beside me - she flicked the start! We tell each other. That’s it. We are done. Well well, no point seeing the race. I look back to see her finish. In the end she did swim a bad race in any case with timings worse than what she would have given. I smile. That’s the end to all this… the end to this year. The end. Now enjoy the rest of your holiday.

There is some silence in the camp.

When Jispa comes back to us after the race, I am smiling and holding the towel in both hands outstretched. She is smiling and she asks, “it was a flick start, right? Did I flick start”. Smiling, I answer her in the affirmative. I then wrap the towel around her and laugh while hugging her. “You flicked. Hahahahahaha. And it wasn’t like a small flick, it was the most horrible flick I have seen ever in my life. It was outrageous. Hahahaha” We both laugh. Jasmine showed her the video and she did not know where to look after that. She was laughing at herself.

I then told her its ok, this one was so bad that it was good. You didn’t do anything, I think were just too nervous and you just did something unnatural. Its ok. We made a few jokes about it and left it at that.

Jispa is a fair kid. She doesn’t cheat. She is not a perennial flick starter like some of the other swimmers. I think the nerves got to her. It happens to the best of us. First time nationals can do that to you.

There are few races that I remember of Jispa. The crazy ones being the ones she swam the relay and chased down the competition in the school race, to finish first by a hairs breath! She was fast and it was an amazing race.  This was one on the other extreme. The flick start just keeps playing in my head, again and again.

Well, memories. You remember the good ones and you remember the bad ones. Normal things are so forgetful. You have to have an odd experience for the experience to be memorable. When you grow old, you will remember these odd ones, not the boring life ones.

In many ways she probably gave me the most memorable swim race of my life, so far.

--

random other conversation

“kid in your class use bad words?”

“ya”

“bad words like F and all that”

“ya”

“do you give bad words?”

“no”

“why”

“I don’t know”

“you know its ok to give to bad words”

“ya”

“you know that I don’t mind if you use bad words”

“ya”

“you know that I use bad words in office and elsewhere”

“ya”

“how do you know”

“I have heard you give”

“when?”

“I don’t know, at times”

“ok. But you can give if you want to. I am ok… right?”

“right”

Oh…The conversations I live for…

irreducible experiences

Ah> we are back from Bangalore, Jispa’s first nationals. The nationals have a heats format wherein the heats are in the morning and the finals are in the evening. You have to make it to the top eight to participate in the evening. Jispa’s heats were in the morning and Jispa with Jasmine had reached a few days before. Acclimatizing to the pool, water and the whole experience is also important. Jispa was telling me that every swimming pool is different. According to her, each pool has its peculiarity as regards the water. Some water is heavy and some is light to push. The feel of the pool, the starting blocks and everything is different. So a few days in advance make a big difference.

Jispa is now at an interesting age. I bought her two swim books that are supposed to help you swim and get your technique right. This is obviously meant for competitive swimmers and iron out some flaws while explain the technique with some science backing it. She read them both, surprising me. And then we had a chat about it as well. She was explaining to me how the book helped her understand stuff as well as help her put words to what she instinctively knew. One interesting thing was, as she told me, she searches for still water to push. While your hand flows through the water, it pushes in an S shape flow, as hand goes through the water. This is essentially searching for still water to push through. Next she explained that the book helped her change the technique a little bit as she now modified her arm to have a higher arm action as she pushes through with larger force. She feels it has improved her stroke.

Wow. It felt nice to have such conversations with her. I have been learning from everyone and everything, it was about time that my daughter taught me stuff.

So, off to Bangalore she went for her first Nationals. I was to reach the place on the morning itself, hopefully in time for the heats. I take an early morning flight to reach Bangalore by around 7:40 am. The plan was to take an Uber and get to the city. Uber and Ola have really made travelling much easier across India and I am sure, across the world.  Cabs, have always been a pain in most cities, with unreliable service, hard to get cabs, bad drivers and shitty vehicles. These guys have solved these problems with having a service that is cheap and reliable. In most of the Indian towns it removed the scourge of the rickshaw which would be notorious for charging whatever they want and being militant about it. The rickshaw fares would invariably be 4 to 5 times the normal fare and he wouldn’t even bother to respond to you if you were going in the wrong direction of his choosing.

Bangalore, Delhi or any city, you had to land at the airport and take a pre paid taxi, which was the only safe way to get anywhere without being fleeced. Even that was an issue with these jokers finding different ways to catch you and extort money from you. The simple non a/c cabs would have their meters doctored and I remember not even bothering to look at the meter every time I had to take a cab to home from Mumbai Airport. I would step out and just place a 100 buck note in his hand. I knew that was the real fare and I would walk out fast, while he screamed abuses at me. All this has been solved with the arrival of the cab aggregators.

Good service, no fleecing, nice cars and reliable bills.

But hell, this is India. For every good thing we have a lot of people, ready at the wings waiting o get in. When you have enough people and lot of them, what you have is a really large sample. When you have a large sample, you have enough to get a mean. And you will have what we know as mean reversion.

Let’s see the math definition:

“Reversion to the mean, also called regression to the mean, is the statistical phenomenon stating that the greater the deviation of a random variate from its mean, the greater the probability that the next measured variate will deviate less far. In other words, an extreme event is likely to be followed by a less extreme event.

Although this phenomenon appears to violate the definition of independent events, it simply reflects the fact that the probability density function  of any random variable , by definition, is nonnegative over every interval and integrates to one over the interval . Thus, as you move away from the mean, the proportion of the distribution that lies closer to the mean than you do increases continuously.”

Or in simpler English:

“The mean reversion is the theory suggesting that prices and returns eventually move back towards the mean or average. This mean or average can be the historical average of the price or return or another relevant average such as the growth in the economy or the average return of an industry.”

Or as I can explain – given enough instances – everything will become average. This is the truth of life. So while I was getting amazing experiences with Uber and yes the app experience is amazing – at some point mean reversion is going to happen and it happened (is happening as we speak).

I got out of Bangalore airport to get an Uber. The guy did not know the Uber designated pickup point, did not know the location, in fact he did not even know anything about the city. His car was not so much in a good shape and then he wanted me to pay for toll (always paid for in bill), and the worst – he wanted to fill diesel on my time.

I was running late and wanted to catch Jispa’s swim but this guy ready to make me reach late. In the end – I had to shot at him, that you are not filling fuel on my time. You will take me to the place I have marked off, NOW. This was the limit, it wasn’t going to work.

Jispa sees this streak in me. Suddenly I will lose it at some random guy for some random reason and take his case. Jispa and I have been talking about this. I try and explain to her that this is not a random fight. This is a very genuine reason to get angry. Don’t do silly things and piss me off and give some bull reason. You have to use anger for a reason and at the time you must use it to get something done.

On the way back to the airport – we were getting late and we got the driver to wait while we get the bags from the hotel. When we got the bags down the guy had disappeared. He had locked the car and gone somewhere. It was really really painful and I was really angry. I explained to Jispa that ‘at the time I was really angry but did I raise my voice of show anger?” “NO”. because it was not beneficial. I had no choice, the deed was done, my anger would have helped me reach nowhere. I would only get more late and the driver would just simply not be affected. It does not help. So anger is a weapon that must be used properly and against the right guy.

So getting back to mean reversion. That is the truth of life. You are going to be controlled by the averages. Your performance is going to be controlled by average people around you. You are destined to be average unless you are really really aggressive in pushing the boundaries in terms of actively removing below average people you interact with. When you remove people who drag the average down you automatically get a higher average because you have only the higher ones left. Now your average is better than what it was, but there is a caveat to this… SCALE! If you want scale you cant just start removing all that is below the average.

Most ideas work when the proposition is small to start with. When you have a limited audience and you want to maximize the experience for that. When you think its successful and then you want to take that and spread it around, that’s when the average starts to kick in. the pressure of growth is so large that it becomes near impossible to grow at the speed of the opportunity in front of you, and not be ruined by the law of averages. You have to keep a constant eye on the average and weed out the ones that drag down the mean.

This also comes with a high human cost. No – I am not suggesting that high averages are desirable or the right thing to do. It’s a choice you have to make. Everything comes at a cost. Especially scale. The question you have to ask is what do you want to achieve in life and what is the cost of achieving that. There is human costs on both sides, yours and on the others who happen to be below average. It easy when it comes to the outliers, the complete losers who kill you but as the bell curve property shows, maximum concentration happens around the mean. So these are difficult calls to take.

A higher mean is good for your sanity and you tend to then focus on smarter people who surround you, but then you can’t have scale then. If you want to have scale then you have to have a mechanism that attracts and retains only the top of the totem pole. This would mean a higher concentration of real top average people. When that happens, you will have too many awesome minds trying to fight amongst themselves and you will have your own set of problems with that. Problems of higher politics and higher ambition and everything else.

Nature is a balance… I am reminded of a book written on managing software projects called The Mythical Man Month. One of the points that the author makes is about complex systems have a certain amount of irreducible errors:

The tendency towards irreducible number of errors

The author makes the observation that in a suitably complex system there is a certain irreducible number of errors. Any attempt to fix observed errors tends to result in the introduction of other errors.

I think something similar is - an irreducible number of awesome experiences. Its going to catch up with you. Just wait!

top 1%

This weekend was a day spent almost entirely at home. I think I needed all the time to rest and recuperate from the hectic week I had. Saturday morning was spent watching Finding Dory – the second part of the crazy hit Finding Nemo. Finding Nemo was a lovely movie that we had watched years ago when it was released. Our favorite story is that when Jispa was very small we made her watch Finding Nemo and she was terrified. She cried through the movie and we just couldn’t understand why would a kid cry in a Disney movie. I guess the basic premise is very scary – Nemo is a baby fish that ends up being separated from his dad. That is a very scary proposition and I think it’s enough to give nightmares to young kids. When adults make these movies in animation, its possibly impossible to understand the effect it has on younger minds. How scary can it get? Jispa refused to watch so many animated movies till she was much older. We kept taking her in the hope that she would like at least one. I think in Ratatouille she scolded me in the scene where the main guy is taking the rat down to the sewers to throw it there.

Now I think I am done with animation movies. There are very few movies that are clear lovely movies that appeal to all without being preachy. I think the last ‘adult’ animation movie was Inside Out. It was a movie that was lovely to watch and understand and it beautifully depicted the mind of a person and how it can work. I think they had very highly regarded psychologists advising on the script of the movie. It was one cracker of a movie idea, far beyond the realms of average people. It came and went in India without even causing a flutter. Hardly anyone saw it or knew of it. By comparison the movie Jungle Book in its new avatar did very well. I thought it had a really bad story line and hardly any great emotional moments or camaraderie between its protagonists. It was surely a visual extravaganza with the jungle coming alive in realism animation. The trailers were magnificent and very tightly edited. It was meant for an Imax 3D experience. The Hindi version was also awesome with some awesome actors dubbing the lines, but still –the story and the interplay between the characters left me very cold. It did not recreate the magic of the original Jungle Book in my head.

Finding Dory was also similarly cold. Dory was a great character who brought a lot of stupidness to the mission of the original movie. A father is in search of his son and there is a stupid fish with short term memory loss. The whole contrast in the desperate situation made for a memorable story. Here the whole thing just died out and too many leaps of faith had to be made with the fish moving from one place to another, across land forms. I think this movie was a miss.

On Sunday, it was time to simply vegetate at home. In the evening, the city saw the monsoon setting it and the climate became lovely. I tried convincing Jispa to play something with me. Anything. Any game. We tried playing one round of battle ship which we quickly abandoned as it was quite boring. Then I convinced her to come with me for a walk. She only agreed if we went for a walk to crosswords the book shop near our house. I agreed. Down I pushed her to walk along the longer route via the garden. I am desperate to have longer walks with her. While walking we started talking. She is easier to talk to when we walk. At home she answers in monosyllables but while walking a conversation can ensue. We spoke about the upcoming kabaddi tournament and how I get damn frustrated when dealing with individuals. I told her that people just don’t like to change and they can innovate. You have to first say yes, it’s possible and then think new. I was speaking about the stadium experience and how we must enhance it. In India we stop everything from being taken inside a stadium. You can’t take anything inside, no food, no music instruments, nothing. I was telling her that we should have a carnival inside and outside the stadium, have lots of face painting artists free inside the stadium with only your team colors. People should have fun and talk about eth stadium experience. Jispa then remarked, that yes, exactly – otherwise people will slowly stop coming. Yes., Jispa  - you said something that 99% of India and especially the sport operators just don’t get. You need to allow people to take photos, share selfies, post online, get families and have a great time. I think and I have been screaming hoarse – we must get the women and the children, if they come in then the families are in. If you attract men, you sell one ticket if you attract the families then you sell four tickets. This is an air-conditioned auditorium, with the best setting to get the best crowd, but we end up screwing things up. We should have very fair priced snacks at the stadium and in fact have many more hospitality seats that allow for seat delivery of food. Simple snacks and peanuts must be allowed. Plus allow for players to meet the fans after the game. The experience must be awesome, enough parking and enough food and enough experience enhancing gimmicks. A well thought out plan. And then there is the in stadium experience. Encourage the crowd to get in early, have a flash mob, have a band playing and have people in the crowd with trumpets to cheer the team. I was telling Jispa that many years ago, I had watched a cricket game in Wankhede stadium. It was West Indies versus India. I don’t remember the game  or the score or who actually won. All I remember is that suddenly in the crowd one Parsi looking gentleman would stand up randomly in the middle of the game and play a particular tune on the trumpet. It was a simple 5 tone tune and he would play it and the crowd without any encouragement or prodding would simply shout “hey” at the end of the tune. He would emerge suddenly and he would then go somewhere else in a different part of the stadium and play his tune. He would come and go as he pleased. This was extremely entertaining and that’s what I remember. Why can’t we do that? We will have a lion (our Pune kabaddi team mascot) roaming around, but the mascot is not told what to do, he probably does not even know how the game is, he has no signature moves and he like an idiot only moves in the VIP areas. He should be the CROWD where there are hundreds of people not in the VIP area where you seat a few. He should be running up and down the aisles, dancing and prancing around, cheering the team.

But I guess we only know how to milk the cow, not create an experience. The great Indian sport tamasha is the IPL. This was invented by a marketing genius in London who with the help of research brought innovation to the game. Of course he made it 20 overs but he also brought in a few innovations like cheerleaders and the dugout. The dug out makes the team sit out in the field in one corner and not in the dressing room, it brings the players out in the open giving the fans more time to see them. Simple innovations bring about a greater joy to the sport. If you don’t have the crowds in the stadium it makes for a bad TV experience as well. People want to live the stadium experience on TV!

This is the simple truth about sports that people don’t get. You are fighting for entertainment money and every time you will listen to organizers talking about – the core audience, the kabaddi clubs and they rue that the crowd is not the same. How will it be – what have YOU done to create your fan base? What have you given them to love you as a team, how have you helped them enjoy and support the team. You just show up during the tournament and expect magic to happen. Where are your camps, meet and greet sessions, coaching programs etc?

It’s easy to skimp on all these costs and then wonder – WTF? People don’t support the sport.

You need to have loyal raving fans who take the game to the others and bring about a ‘Junoon’ in the stadium. These are the guys who will cry and scream for the team. They will follow the team across the country and create a noise and a cheer that will spur your team. But It requires effort and care.

Jispa and I were discussing all this and she added to the discussion and she got it. She also said that you must enjoy the stadium and you must do all the exciting stuff. She can’t understand why the organizers don’t get it. I was telling her that this is the most frustrating part of the work. Working with people who just don’t get it. I was telling her that she has a good brain and she has the ability to think. It puts her in the 1% of Indian population. She did not believe me. She thought at least 50% should be good thinkers to which I corrected her – no way – only 1% will be good thinkers. It is impossible to get more than this.

I explained to her about me being a secretary at Matunga Gym. In spite of all my ideas and all my efforts I could hardly get a few wins. There are so many egos and other issues at play. People just don’t think clearly and what you have is just a slightly better pool. I wanted to change the bathrooms and get the women to have the bigger bathrooms with better facilities but I couldn’t do so. People have issues with everything but if I wanted to change stuff, it would take a whole lot of time and dedication at my end and I would need to get involved with the politics of it all. So then Jispa asked – in your new job here, you can do what you want nah! “nopes” I can’t do what I want. Of course I have far more power here than what I had in my earlier job, but its still not an autocracy, I still have people that I have to work with, people that piss me off and dumb ass guys who just don’t get the point. I have to manage them and its not like I can fire anyone at will.

I don’t think even an entrepreneur can do this. You can try and surround yourself with the best minds you find, but then you cant really grow. When you grow and scale you will have to take calls and get stupid dumb people on board. They will fill your system. Else the other option, run a consulting service with exactly 4 employees. But here to get anything done you will require to deal with clients who are dumber and you have ass lick and get your payment. After all if he were so smart why would he need a consultant. So the real real option is to work where you find the least amount of these jokers in your life. Accept that these jokers are a reality. People will not understand odds and people will refuse to accept mistakes and admit failures and repent. People will do stupid things all the time. Understanding that and living and making some amount of peace with it is critical to sanity.

Stupidity is just one angle to it. Insecurity mixed with stupidity is a Molotov cocktail. But that is another angle for another rant for another time.

Till then just live with the stupidity around you and try to reduce it. Very few people read, very few listen and very few change. Try to read, listen and change. Believe that you are wrong when you start the conversation then only can you change and then only will you improve and then only will you remain less stupid. DO IT!