Atul's random thoughts and theories

Thanks to a friend

Please accept my thanks for something that you taught me about life. It was at your dining table during a friendly discussion. It was many years ago so you may not recall, but it was shortly after the Super hurricane hit the coast of Orissa with a heavy toll. On some idealogical grounds, (namely that the victims should not have chosen to live on that well-known risky coast of Orissa), my approach towards the victims was rather indifferent.

At that time you had pointed out that cities in US are also susceptible to natural disaster. Your example was a mega-earthquake in Los Angeles. You had asked what my reaction would be if such a disaster were to hit one of those cities; whether I would shed even a tear for the victims. Since then that question has stayed dormant within me. It is the unfortunate and still unfolding tragedy in New Orleans that has reawakened the question. As I reflect on that question, that I realize what opportunity it has given me to learn about life, specifically about our roles as humans in supporting each other in good times and bad.

So thanks again,

Regards,

Atul

Chance encounter with a babushka

This saturday evening, my wife decided that my daughter needed to get some excercise, and thus I and my daughter were pushed out of the house. On our scooters, we headed out to the nearby park, and found the whole park to ourselves. After monkeying around, my daughter settled down to swing on a tire (is that contraption on the playstructure really called a Tire Swing?).

That is how we were in the park, when we spotted a small boy approaching us trailed by an elderly white woman. As is usual in such chance encounters, from a distance, the old lady and I exchanged smiles. What was unusual was that she seemed genuinly pleased to see us. When I tried to start some small talk about the weather, she seemed completely toungue tied. Guessing that she does not know English, I asked whether she spoke Russian language. It was a lucky guess, as she said 'Da', and her face brightened up when I said 'Ya Znau Ruski yazik. Plokho'' (I know Russian language. Bad.) What followed was a halting conversation in broken Russian with plenty of hand gestures. Just simple stuff. Like I told her my name, and she asked about my kids and told something about the little boy. Although I missed most of what she said in Russian, I caught the words for wife, son, daughter and work and responded suitably. Having run out of things to say, and as it was getting darker too, we bid goodbyes by saying 'Da Svidaniya'.

Thus I got a chance to talk in whatever Russian I had learnt as a 11-12 year old. On a vacation we visited my uncle in the distant town of Bhilai that had a steel plant built with Russian technology. My grandfather had a collection of books for learning Russian. Although I have always claimed that my grandfather knew the language I still do not know how much command did he actually have on the language. In any case that is where I brought back the books and spent hours reading the books (that were in English) to learn Russian.

This endeavour of teaching myself Russian language was a matter of pride, as it brought admiration/praise from distant relatives. It was only much later when I got to IIT that I learnt how humble that effort really was. Then I could contrast it with the effort of Utpal Lahiri who had taught himself a dozen languages by that age. That impressive collection included classic Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Oh well. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions that I had about myself!

The best part was really the conversation that followed with my daughter. I realized that she is now exactly of the same age, as I was when I started learning Russian. In my attempt to describe the challenges, we chanced upon the concept of grammer called 'Instrumental case'. That led us to talking about the concept of case in Sanskrit and Hindi grammer. By another strange twist, that took us to the idea of learning Latin together.

Wealth and power law

One of my pet theories was that the wealth among the wealthiest can be modeled using a power law. I used the ranking of top 100 wealthiest people in US that is published by Forbes magazine.
I used Excel to plot the log of rank against log of their worth and arrived at this amazingly straight line.

It turns out that over hunderd years ago this was observed by Pareto.

http://wsf2.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctb288.htm