Big, BIG mistake.

People inexperienced in the art of gifting will often make serious mistakes, but a blunder of this scale is going to haunt him a lifetime. To understand why this is a massive mistake, read on.

You see, the ritual of gift giving is really an exercise in expectations management. The main problem with gifting is expectations escalation – If you give a gift of a certain value to your better half, then the expectation of a gift of greater value is automatically generated for the next year, which is a spiral that can only end in pain and suffering. Similar to Moore’s law in the field of computers that says that processing power doubles every 18 months, I have invented The Pointless Law of Gift Management, which states that “The expectations of the value of a gift doubles every year”. If the expectations are not actively managed, then the they can quickly escalate into unmanageable levels, resulting in the aforementioned pain and suffering.

Let us illustrate this with the example of my friend, who bought the Galaxy S II phone. He bought this as an engagement gift, which will raise the expectations of a wedding gift to a trip for two to Greece. If that is the wedding gift, then the first anniversary gift will have to be a diamond necklace, which will require the 2nd anniversary gift to be a trip on a private jet. By the time the 3rd anniversary comes around, my friend will need to buy Sri Lanka and gift it to his fiancee for her expectations to be met. I don’t think he’s going to be able to buy Sri Lanka, at which point the expectations will come crashing down, resulting in a lot of pain and suffering for my friend.

But don’t worry, my fellow compatriots. I have figured out a way out of this conundrum. The key is the first gift. It has to be cheap enough, so that the increase in expectations of the value will be offset by inflation, resulting in the same real value for the gift for eternity. Clever, eh?

I have taken my own advice in this area. The first gift I bought The Girlfriend was a keychain. Which was followed by a Masala Dosa the next year, followed up with the thoughtful gift of a Nickname the next year and so on. As you can see, The Wife’s expectations of gift are so lowered, that for the next year, even if I buy her a litre of petrol for her car, she’ll be very pleased with me.

Coming back to my friend – There’s no real way out for him. His only option is to cut his losses, and take the hit of pain and suffering right now, so that the expectations for the rest of his life can be managed properly. I would recommend that he gift her half-a-bar of snickers as a wedding present, which will reset her expectations back to a manageable level. Otherwise, he’s looking at a painful 3rd anniversary.

If Rahul has 20 mangoes and then he eats 10 of them and borrows 4 more and eats them too, then what does he have?

The correct answer, of course, is that Rahul has indigestion, but the teachers will never accept that answer. Plus, the teachers that actually teach maths seem to uniformly have some sort of boredom-inducing speech pattern, and the poor little kids have no defense to the boredom spell that the maths teachers cast.

But the reality is so different – Maths is filled with wild characters and soap-opera style dramas that the textbooks keep well hidden from the kids for reasons that I can’t understand. Take the example of Mr. Blaise Pascal. Text books portray him as this stuffy professor type character, but his closest modern day counterpart is probably Paris Hilton. Pascal was a gambler more than anything else. In his day, the concept of luck was attributed to the Gods, and there was no concept of probabilities. Gamblers believed that the Gods had blessed them if they won in a game of chance. Pascal, who was a rebel, decided that he was going to cheat the Gods by experimenting with the games of chance! He pushed the field of mathematics into probability theory. Not because he wanted to write a research paper or anything like that, but because he wanted to screw the other gamblers and take all their money.

After getting into a bunch of fights with other gamblers who were convinced he was somehow cheating, Pascal apparently had a religious vision (he was probably high at the time), and went to church, which was the rehab of his era. He tried to seek Gods forgiveness in church, got bored after a while and went back to gambling. He got into another bunch of fights, including a hindi-soap-opera style fight with his sister over his family’s wealth. And then went back to church. And back into gambling, and then back again into church. He probably went in-and-out of rehab as much as Paris Hilton.

At his death bed, Pascal was completely torn between God and his work with probability theory. He invented the now-infamous Pascal’s wager argument which made a round-about probability-theory based argument for why he’s a believer and why God will forgive him. If there was a talk-show in his day, he would be like that crazy rockstar guest who’s blabbering on about something that no one else can understand.

Tell me this story is not interesting to 10-year old kids! Why can’t teachers tell kids these stories? There’s far more soap-opera gold in the world of maths and science. Like the epic mudfight between Newton and Leibniz over who invented calculus and George Cantor, who literally went mad trying to figure out the concept of Infinity because he thought God was hiding behind it.

I think maths and science should be taught like soap-operas. If that doesn’t interest kids, I don’t know what will.

Anyway, I was talking with a friend about this problem, who shall be called only Diri, and at the end of a rather productive brainstorm session around how to reduce the pain-points of the marriage ceremony, we came up with the WRAP methodology. Wedding Reception Annoyance Prevention.

You’ll remember that I’d earlier proposed a new protocol for conducting marriages. A simpler, more efficient and straightforward process that benefits all parties involved. It was called Marriage 2.0. Despite its brilliance, I notice that it didn’t catch on as widely as I’d hoped. This is a new and refined version of the original proposal.

Photos and Fake Smiles

The first observation is that most people that go to a wedding tend to feel obligated to get a photo clicked with the bride and groom. It’s almost like a payment for the free food that they’re about to eat. This tradition has no benefits at all. Here’s what we propose instead:  We’ll place cardboard cut-outs of the bride and groom all over the marriage hall. People can come in, stand next to the cutouts and get their pics clicked. The advantages of this approach are obvious: You can have several cutouts, placed strategically next to the food counters, so that the photo-taking process is highly parallelized, increasing throughput of the guests. Improved guest flow dynamics will result in better resource utilization.

Choice of Food

Previously, we had proposed that people go to any restaurant of their choice and order whatever they like, and finally send the receipts to the groom for reimbursement. Apparently, this is not a good idea, because one of the reasons people like to go to weddings is to meet other friends that they never otherwise see.

Fine.

So our slightly-modified proposal is to have everyone call their favorite Pizza/Restaurant place and get them to deliver their favorite food to the marriage hall. This way when you arrive at the marriage hall, your Pizza will be waiting for you. You can then take the Pizza to the cut-outs to get your pics clicked with the food you’re eating, so the bride and groom can later see what you ate. I assume this is an important feature – seeing what guests are eating – because at most weddings, the photo-and-video people keep following guests to the dining hall, clicking pics just when the food is about to enter my mouth. The other advantage of this process is now the reimbursement step is completely eliminated, since the delivery guy can go straight to the groom to get money from him.

Why leave the couple out?

You will notice that in this new and improved flow, there is no need for the bride and groom to be on stage. Instead of bring hungry and tired, they are free to go to the star attraction of the day, the food. However, appearing in the dining hall means that guests may be unable to resist the temptation to shake hands with the couple and wish them best of luck. In the worst case, this will degenerate into the couple having to shake hands with 100s of people congratulating them- The very thing we’re trying to avoid.

Therefore, our proposal is to have the bride and groom wear disguises, and mingle amongst the crowd and eat the food as it was meant to be. Apparently, Akbar, the Mughal Emperor and Shah Rukh Khan have both employed this strategy with great success. This way, the happy couple is really happy because they are well fed, instead of starved and tired at their own wedding.

The brilliance of this strategy is undeniable. This process makes the guests and the bride & groom happier. I can’t see why this shouldn’t become the default process for managing wedding receptions.

Every religion needs some basic tenets, which form the foundations of the principles of the religions. Based on this, the other stuff flows, mythology of the religion, the Gods (I’m thinking Angelina Jolie will be a uber-goddess) etc.. but I have to still figure this out. I do, however, have a draft of the 5 major tenets of Adityaism.

1. Rotating Gods and Goddesses
I’m thinking it is really important to have attractive Gods and Goddesses, since they must justify being worshiped. For example, I think Angelina Jolie will make a great Goddess, because she is just so easy on the eyes. However, if the Gods and Goddesses are given permanent status, then they might slack off, do some stupid things or just stop caring about themselves (case in point: Britney Spears), and then we’ll be in this embarrassing position of having a Goddess who’s in Jail or in Rehab.

To get around this, I think Gods and Goddesses will be initially appointed for a 2-year term, and their status will be subject to review and renewal at the end of the period. This should keep everyone on their toes and ensure that we don’t have any slacker Gods or Goddesses.

2. Flexible Vegetarianism
Most religions have a strong view of food – what is acceptable and not acceptable. Jains for example, are not allowed to eat roots, Hindus beef etc… I think this is too stringent, since it limits choice, but capitalism has comprehensively proven that more choice is always better. I mean just look at how many options we have for cell phone providers.

Dietary restrictions in Adityaism will follow a similar approach. Everyone will be required to be vegetarian, except when they feel like eating non-veg food. Acceptable reasons for someone to feel like eating non-veg food include (but not limited to): “It smells good“, “My friends are eating it“, “The restaurant is close by” and “I haven’t eaten non-veg all day“.

3. Dynamic Holidays
Religious holidays are awesome (actually all kinds of holidays are awesome), but they suffer from a fatal flaw. They’re based on I-don’t-know-what-calendar, which means several of them are wasted on weekends, overlapping holidays and random distribution across the year etc… Wouldn’t it be great if there was an all-religion-holiday-rationalization summit where everyone agreed to move around religious holidays so that we could get 4 continuous weeks off during the summer? However, since the big religions are not going to do that, Adityaism will solve the problem by creating dynamic holidays.

All holidays are required to be either on Mondays or Fridays to facilitate long weekends. No two holidays can overlap, and they must be distributed throughout the year such that any 4-week period has at least 1 holiday. Plus, followers of Adityaism will be able to declare holidays on-demand as per their convenience to overlap with certain sporting events (Hint! Hint!)

But shopping is an inevitable exercise, even for me, so I have adapted some strategies to overcome the near-death-experience feeling I used to get when I went to shopper’s stop earlier.

The key is to think of shopping as a commando operation to strike deep into enemy territory. Just like how British spies didn’t like to spend more time than was necessary in Nazi Germany, I too want to minimize my exposure to departmental stores. There is a lot of planning involved ahead of time. I will usually create a mental map of the store, mark out all the places in the store that have the stuff I need, and plot a course through the store that hits all the targets and has a clear and fast exit strategy.

On the day of the assault, I come mentally prepared. I will also prep the wife for my shopping trip, warning her ahead of time not to get distracted by enemy installations that are scattered all around the store, which are designed to trap the weak mind. And once you are trapped in shoes-surrounded enemy territory, its the end for you. There is no way out.

The wife, however, deeply objects to my interpretation of shopping. She prefers to think of shopping trips as an excursion to a museum. The store has all this art work on display, and it is our duty to respect the artist and sample all the merchandise that has been presented.

As you’ve all probably guessed by now, these two strategies are deeply incompatible, and whenever the wife and I go shopping, we somehow end up in a situation where I think I’m about to be shot by an enemy sniper disguised as a perfume salesman, and the wife thinks she’s in deep philosophical discussion about human nature with Socrates disguised as the friendly fashion consultant at the store.

Anyway, I had a bit of an epiphany today when I saw a glimpse of what the wife did with her shopping strategy. She bought me a suit today, but the interesting thing is how she paid for it. Through a combination of discounts, a sale, store loyalty program, gift vouchers and credit-card points redemption, she bought the suit which was marked at Rs 7,000 WITHOUT PAYING ANY MONEY!!! That’s right, she effectively got it for free!

And since how much I like stuff depends inversely on how much it costs, I absolutely love my new suit!

I am also flattered with the confidence some of you have shown in me. Like this chat with a certain unnamed party called “X”

X: “Hey!!!!!!!! Gmail is Down!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Me: “I know… Some problem at google’s end”
X: “Did YOU screw it up?”
Me: “No… Why would you think that?”
X: “you know…. disaster is, after all, your middle name…”
Me: “#$@%%@*&!@!@$%^&@”

I mean, come on guys.

I know I’m prone to disasters, but you don’t have to assume that every time something goes wrong, I am responsible. I can assure you that it was not me this particular time.

There. That’s my whole review of this movie. WTF?!?

I mean what the hell is going on with this movie? The whole thing sounds like a moral science lecture. Start to finish. This entire movie is a Moral Science revision lesson from 6th standard.

This movie makes no sense at all. At any level. So this Abhisekh Bacchan comes to New Delhi from New York to help his Granny die. Oh yes, that’s not a typo. He brings her to Delhi to die. But what I can’t understand is how the hell does Abhisekh Bacchan get so many days leave from his job? Then again, maybe he’s a banker and just got laid off. Recession and all.

The director of this movie must have been at a party and someone told him about symbolism and metaphors. And an epic sense of realization came over him – “You mean we can show a pigeon that can’t fly and people will think it represents the middle-class girl who can’t fly into the real world? That’s just abso-frinkin-lutely brilliant!”

And so, after getting high on this new gyaan that dawned on him, he’s just created a movie with one metaphor after another, trying desperately to tie them together. And has failed spectacularly.

I mean, there are more metaphors in this movie than item-number-babes in Bollywood  The Kala Bandar as a metaphor for the darkness in our hearts, the Ram Leela as a metaphor for … errr… for the destiny of our lives? Then the dark alleys of Delhi -6 as a metaphor for the total lack of regulation in the electricity sector in India? Ridiculous. The only metaphor that made sense to me was the depiction of the burning tree, which seems to symbolize this frickin movie itself that is going to burn and go up in flames, taking the producers’ money with it.

That’s a metaphor that the producer is going to remember for a long long time. The rest of us should forget this meta-disaster immediately.

For a minute, I experienced an elated feeling of Schadenfreude – The pleasure of happiness derived from the suffering of others. Muahahahaaaa!

Asking me for married life advice is like asking a Tiger for advice on how to escape from predators. Not only is the tiger likely to screw you over, but you will also be staring down two dozen razor sharp teeth when you realize that you’ve been given incorrect advice. You know you are being had by the tiger, when it gives advice like: “The best way to escape predators is to use reverse psychology. Approach the predator with boldness, walk up confidently and say something like ‘I ate your mama for lunch, you big ugly beast’. That should save you from the predator”.

I was thinking I’ll give my friend advice like the tiger from the story above, but I was overcome with feeling of pity for the poor guy. I mean, he’s been already handed a death sentence, and he’s going to suffer it the rest of his life without me needing to make it any worse for him.

And it is for this reason, for the benefit of entire mankind that I have decided to come out and give some honest advice for all those guys out there who are on the fence. What follows is the great wisdom from the holy book of Adityaism. Read it, and you will be set free. (Either you or your soul will achieve Moksha, but there are no guarantees).

1. Do everything you can to get out of doing household chores
Back in the day, when guys would get married, they would get a lot of dowry that would make life awesome! These days, you get household chores that make life miserable. There are hundreds of things to do around the house, and if you break down and do EVEN ONE CHORE, then its the gallows for you. Doing just one chore is an admission that you are capable and competent, and that is an image you can’t afford to keep. You must do everything to display your incompetence at the fullest, so you don’t get asked to do any work around the house.

2. #1 doesn’t work. Hire a cook, maid instead.
No matter how hard you try, the one thing you learn in a marriage is that you can’t win. I think it violates some quantum mechanical laws if you win an argument with your wife, so don’t even try. The easiest way to get out of chores is to hire a maid and a cook to do all the household work. You know what they say: “Liberty comes at a price. About 2500 rupees a month.”

3. Never agree to a joint bank account.
I have learned from the wife that some women have a very strange understanding of finance and money. We’ve had many conversations that have raised some philosophical questions about how the world works. For example:

Wife: “I bought two sarees instead of one!”
Me: “What? Why?”
Wife: “Inflation”

Wife: “I was walking by the mall, and I bought a couple of bottles of the perfume ‘Chanel No. 5′ today.”
Me : “Why did you do that?”
Wife: “To improve liquidity.”
Me: “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
Wife: “Yes it does. I read it in Femina.”

There are many more tips, but not enough time today. I might write a book about this someday, but for now, I have to go now and put the clothes in the washing machine.

Résumé
Many people don’t know this, but “résumé” is a french word that means “fictional short story”. It is usually 2-3 pages long, and details the chronicles of your life in an entertaining fashion. What you write in your resume is very important, and if you are having trouble filling it up with funny anecdotes, this exercise may help:

Think about what Superman would do if he had Einstein’s IQ and could time travel. Write down all his adventures in your resume and put your signature at the end of it.

Hobbies
Most resumes have a “hobbies” or “interests” section. The key to filling up this section is to write unverifiable claims that show what an interesting person you are. Here are some tips to fill this section:
Wrong: “Hobbies: Lazing around, testing various sleep-inducing methods and collecting swear words in different languages”
Right: “Studying abstract impressionism, skydiving, helping impoverished poor people.”

No need to mention that the abstract impressionism is “TV”, skydiving is really throwing paper planes from rooftops and the impoverished poor person you are helping is yourself.

Interview
This may sound ironic, but the best way to do well in an interview is to have a misplaced sense of very high self-esteem. Most interviewers can immediately detect if you are low on what’s called “self-confidence”, so you have to go into the interview thinking you are Robert De Nero (or Julia Roberts for you ladies). Here are some tips to get you through the interview:

Puzzles
Think about it: there are more candidates than there are puzzles, so the interviewer is going to be asking the same questions over and over again. The best strategy is to ask your friends who went to the interview before you, and then act surprised when the interviewer asks you the same question. When asked a question you know the answer to:

Wrong reaction: “Aahaaa! I know this one. Page 45 of ‘100 most asked interview questions‘. Answer is 25″
Right reaction: “Hmm… Interesting. I will break down this problem into components…” (…5 minutes later…) “…and therefore, by equation 5 above, the answer is 25.”

“What are your weaknesses?”
This is a very popular interviewing question, designed to measure your self-confidence. Be careful when answering this one.

Wrong Answer: “Chocolate is my biggest weakness. No, wait… French Fries. No, Chocolates. Wait…It’s really french fries…I think.”
Worse Answer: “Gossip”

The right answer is to say something that is really an advantage to the company, and you cannot help doing it.

Right Answer: “I tend to work too hard, sometimes late into the night, because I find it unable to give up on a problem without finishing it, because I want all my colleagues and bosses to like me so much, that I am willing to do their laundry too.”

“Do you have any questions for me?”
Most interviewers will end with this question. This question is one of the most misunderstood parts of the interview. Be careful of asking the wrong question here.

Wrong question: “Does the company make you work like a donkey while constantly beating your behind with a stick?”
Worse question: “Are you allowed to take office supplies like pens and staplers home?”

When the interviewer asks this question, what he is really saying is “I’ve had a long day taking to half-brained, overanxious kids who want nothing but money from this company. Do you know that the company is not even paying me overtime for interviewing you?”

So, in this situation, don’t trouble the interviewer by asking about the company. He is already frustrated with it, and don’t remind the interviewer about it. Ask instead about his dog, or if he saw the latest Rakhi Sawant movie.

Follow these steps properly, and you will not be disappointed. Let me know how it goes.

After cleaning the dining table yet another time, I sat down all exhausted in front of the TV. The news was coming on, where the TV news anchor was making a big deal about rising inflation.
TV anchor: “…and with the rising prices of petrol and food grains, it is the poor aam admi that is suffering…”

Me: “That’s stupid. The inflationary pressure is being created by the central bank trying to hold down the rupee to aid special interest exporters groups and not to mention the fiscal deficit created by the absurd agricultural and commodity subsidies meant for… you guessed it… the poor aam aadmi. See?”

The wife gives me a blank stare.

Me: “You don’t see?”

As soon as I said that, a profound understanding of the universe hit me. In that moment, I had the deepest inspiration o my life. It came to me like a bolt of lightning, and I suddenly saw the world crystal clear, and my brain had it all figured it out.

Economics! The impenetrable fog of misunderstanding that permeates our lives, the key to confusion and obfuscation.

Me: “I just had a great idea!”
Wife: “Really? What?”
Me: “Lets have an auction for all the household chores!”
Wife: “Excuse Me?”
Me: “Yeah! Like how the government auctions off the spectrum to the Mobile companies.”
Wife: “Ooo… I don’t know…”
Me: “This is a great idea! We’ll write all the household chores on a piece of paper, and then we can bid on them!”
Wife: “Is this like the time when you tried to convince me that the XBOX is an investment?”
Me: “THE XBOX IS A VERY GOOD INVESTMENT!!! WE SHOULD BUY 2 OF THEM! But anyway, that’s not what this is about.”
Wife: “This sounds like another of your schemes!”
Me: “No, really. It’ll be a fair and genuine auction. Here’s how it works: First, we take some fake money…”
Wife (voice dripping with sarcasm): “Real auction, fake money. This doesn’t sound suspicious at all…”
Me (ignoring, completely excited): “…and then we write “I won’t do chore XXX” on pieces of paper…”
Wife: “…wait… I thought this was about doing chores, and not avoiding them…”
Me: “and then we bid for the pieces of paper. At the end of the auction, I won’t do all the chores that I bought, so you have to do them and vice versa”
Wife: “Wait… This is ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense…”
Me: “No.. No… Think about it. It is completely fair. Since both of us have the same about of fake money, we have equal buying power, and we can buy chores that we REALLY REALLY don’t want to do, but we can’t buy them all, so we’ll have to do SOME chores…”
The Wife is holding her head and giving me THE LOOK.
Me (still not getting the hint…) “…and the price of the chores reflect the marginal scarcity… of.. the… err… hmm… Why are you holding your head? Headache?”

SCORE!!! Economic Theory: 1 Common Sense: 0

After much convincing and explaining, I finally managed to convince the wife that this was a fair scheme to divide the housework and it would work perfectly. I started writing all the household chores on pieces of paper, and lined up some fake monopoly money, and we were ready to start. This was going to be fun…

[Update: Part 2 is here]