Muses: Of Driving, Office, Isosceles Trianlge and the Moon

Driving is a mindless thing. No wonder drivers get paid measly. I realise I was more cautious a driver when I had started. Now I almost sleep through it. Sometimes completely oblivious of mirrors, indicators and even the traffic lights. I do not have a license and I have never been booked for jumping any of the umpteen traffic lights. The whole department of transport seems a joke; a fraud to me. While driving, absorbed in my inner sanctum, something rarely wakes me barring an occasional horn honked hard. Now slowly I am getting convinced that if I shall ever attain enlightenment it would be while driving. If Buddha had a Peepal I have my car...:)

Whatever little I understand, I realise that correlating variables is an important aspect in analytics. Rot mathematical techniques may aid or facilitate it but it also is an art and asks for creativity. It is easy to forget this while doing routine assignments one after another. Pressing clutches before shifting gears. Where's the scope to create? I do not have an answer but I am sure that mindless applying of tools, techniques, models etc without grasping the context may turn the whole exercise a joke to a point where everything appears nothing but a fraud.

Drivel apart if I do not check my driving habits I may be heading for a disaster!

So, when SS comes and announces a general training session on the whole lending business by some Mr.GF from US, I say yes within.SS while he goes individually to different people checking their availability he skips me. I am an outsider but it gives me a vantage point which is very dear to me. Like sitting at the back of a class, passing out last in the college, taken for a dumb at times. I try not to mind!

SS by the way also is the short for the’ Schutzstaffel ‘ the infamous German protection squad under Hitler which later assumed disproportionate powers committing worst crimes against humanity.

A little later I am sitting in this room too close to the whiteboard. GF's talk reminds me of the stereotyped pot bellied money lenders in old Bollywood movies. They would invariably wear white perhaps to inspire trust. Sitting with legs folded on a 'gaddi' behind a 'munshi table' wearing a cunning smile, these lenders mostly served as complicating agents in the movie plots. I look with disgust at GF for a moment. Rest of the talk I liked him for his organisation, humor and explaining clearly at outset about his concentric circle approach whose innermost basic cicle we couldn't somehow break away from during whole length of the talk.

Much of his content and explanation was also guided by the kind of questions he was asked so we couldn't blame it on him if we didn't like his talk. ‘The onus was on us’. Perhaps we didn't ask the right questions. At one point I felt a question rumbling inside me. I had just read an article prior to the talk about the credit card companies in US decreasing their lines due to weaning credit. It increased the Debt-to-Limit ratio by 50% in certain cases with a potential to affect the scores of concerning customers. Now, only if there were some less overt ways to manipulate the scores of customers so that only the manipulating company is left with the 'real' information while others are just left speculating over whom to offer a loan. I still think for the interest of the larger group I kept quite.. :))

The room was filled with smart people. I don't know if GF noted there were just two ladies. It was reconfirmation that analytics is similar to IIT when it comes to the gender ratio. Now how many girls would rack their brains trying to prove that if a triangle has two equal internal angle bisectors then it is necessarily isosceles?? My neighbour on the right warns me about its complexity. I take note and on the whole way back home while driving I think over it, driving oblivious of other fellow travelers, distracted couple of times only by the beautiful thin crescent the moon has been since last few days floating across the Delhi night sky. Earlier the way to the office was spent thinking of my father, revisiting old memories. I wonder how much we forget in relationships. I wonder how different people can get on a single day with their thinking alone.

I finally meet Neil Padukone at Green Park. I am disappointed he is not even remotely related to Deeepika Padukone but m delighted that he is writing a book collaborating with some think tank. Now what exactly is think tank I shall ask him sometime next. At present he is here to see the accommodation that I am planning to share with him. We go through the place. I explain him my plans. He listens attentively and leaves, deferring his decision until tomorrow. At the precise moment I receive a call from the property dealer that the room has been taken by some other client. As I turn looking upwards cursing my luck I see the bow shaped moon again behind the silhouette of a giant old tree. The yellow bow in the dark blue sky. It's beautiful and you don't have to steal glances at it. The moon doesn't mind being looked at lovingly.

Later in the night I google and come across the solution to isosceles triangle problem. I find sleep, contented that I was thinking in the right direction. I believe means if right shall eventually get you to the right end!