Chronicles - Cursed - Online - Barnes and Noble

I will admit at the very beginning, I am as guilty as anyone else of the thing I am about to write.

Yesterday, to entice Avni to come with me to Costco I promised her the box book set of “Chronicles of Narnia”. While in Costco we realized they were out of stock but the book set was available on their website and could be delivered home in a few days. Being still slightly old school and considering yesterday was Father’s Day, I decided to call my old time/all time favorite bookshop Barnes and Noble on Brodie Ln and they said they have it in stock.

When we arrived at Barnes and Nobles, it was as though old memories were gushing through all at once, the times I used to spend there picking out the classics, enjoying the coffee and even waiting in line for the final book of Harry Potter. Some how the fresh book smell was quite intoxicating. The place in itself hasn’t change much at all and as always has been the staff was very friendly and they had the book set we were looking for but the cost was almost 3x of what Costco was selling and one can argue that's the reason they are not growing and may go out of business (that would be a sad depressing day when it happens). Since we were in the bookstore and I wasn’t ready to spend 3x over a box set of books I had no idea if either me or Avni will read the books I asked them if they had a copy of the book “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”, a long time ask from Avni and I had been delaying for reasons unknown. They had and we bought the hard bound book and left the store.

I want to end the blog post with an appeal to all my book reading friends, Kindle and other reading apps and Amazon prime and all are great and wonderful but there is definitely great value in keeping a brick and mortar bookshop open. For one it is a great asset for the future generations and also a place where we spent our time exploring our interests and maybe even stumbled upon something that was totally unrelated to what we wanted but it expanded our horizons in other ways. Yes online is cheap and Amazon does a fine job of delivering in 2 days or even 1 day but considering books are such a tiny fraction of ones living expense the savings we make from this alone will not make you a millionaire or conversely will not break the bank either. If one plays the card of save the planet, I am sure both of us know that there are ten thousand better ways to do the same :).   

Freakonomics Dr. Raghu Rajan

I admit, I am a huge fan of Freakonomics radio and never miss their podcast (listening for the past year or so). I like the way host Stephen Dubner asks questions and doesn’t hesitate to put the guests in an uncomfortable situation during the interview process and in general always adds a different perspective to the topic at question.

Full disclaimer, I am did not live in India during Demonetization and quite frankly nor did Dr. Rajan.

So, this week Dr. Rajan was interviewed on Freakonomics radio and as with all things one of the topic discussed was the big Demonetization effort that happened in India 2 years ago. The nation was shocked at the sudden move and me personally thought that was a bold move and a much needed move to increase the tax base and make economy more transparent. Dr. Rajan did go on saying he was consulted and he had voiced his opinion strongly against the program for he was concerned about killing the parallel economy that runs on cash with people who do not even have bank accounts and also people would find a way of turning their stashed away money without paying taxes. He went on to say that the effort did destroy the economy of the cash transaction and 10-15 million jobs were lost in the process and a lot of them haven't been regained.

I agree with your comments Dr. Rajan but in what way will it be beneficial for the country to have 2 parallel economies? one formal where the government collects taxes and provides services with the money collected and other entirely out of the governments hand and no tax collected from that but only services availed? The question I believe Mr. Dubner failed to ask is about the widened tax base due to the Demonetization and didn’t the tax rates reduce in India overall? Also, what about the effect on counterfeit currencies and reduced naxalite activities (I am not talking of Pakistan supported terrorism in J and K)?, granted Mr. Dubner was interviewing Dr. Rajan with the point of view of the man who called the great recession of 2008 back in 2005 itself. Another point I didn’t really understand was when Dr. Rajan says the world has too many strong leaders and that somehow is bad for the world economy. Last one was Dr. Rajan claimed credit of his policies as RBI Governor for the current rate of inflation in India, I am not a financial expert but I thought when he was the governor the inflation was close to 7-8% and only in the last year or so inflation in India is 3-4%; Not even a paltry credit to the finance ministry Dr. Rajan?.

One last thing I believe Mr. Dubner should have realized is along with Demonetization came  with couple of other tighter controls on financial transactions, which I personally can vouch has made a difference. Example: the sky rocketing costs of real estate in India took a grinding halt and things started to become more realistic.

Maybe I am wrong, if I am then I know the one person who will enlighten me :).    

ps: I hadn’t heard him speak and I admit he has a great voice and now I know why media houses like NDTV love him.

Kiker Market Day

I wasn’t aware of this till Avni came to 2nd grade, market day at Kiker Elementary is 1 day in December when all 2nd graders put their entrepreneurship skills to test by making things and selling them. Ok, they don’t make/sell individually but in groups of 4. Parents and school provide the supplies, kids do the work under the guidance of the teacher and parent volunteer and they get to decide the price. Who are the customers? kids, parents of kids and teachers in the school are the customers for the market day. All proceeds will go to charity, not exactly sure who and how they pick the charities to support.

Considering all the kids in grade 2 are between the ages of 7-8, I wasn’t really sure as to what to expect from this big group but I was amazed at the talent that was showcased during market day. The entire cafeteria was filled with items for sale and by the time I entered at around 15mins after the sale started some of the kids had already put out sold out signs. There were fire breathing dragons, toy cars, book marks, Christmas ornaments, stress balls, Mancala games and so on.

All items were priced $1-$3, come to think of it I don’t remember seeing anything for greater than $3. Best part, kids got to decide the prices and they got to decide when they want to drop the price and so on.

Last I heard from Avni's class teacher, the second graders made an overall profit of $3100. If one thinks in terms dollars/sqft in 1 hour it is unbelievable. 

I am very happy to report all the things that Avni's class made were all sold out before the end of the market day. It definitely was a good combination or in engineering terms a resonance of kids talents and teachers encouragement. Great job Comets. 

My only gripe, why not do this for all the grades? why only second graders? :) 

ps: sorry I can’t post pictures due to privacy reasons :) 

Girl scout market place

Took Avni the other day to her second Girl Scout market place. Last year we went as buyers only and this year around we went in as sellers/buyers. For those who do not know, the market place is where the different troops of Girl Scouts put together items like arts/crafts/snacks for sale as a group to raise money for charity. Needless to say both the shoppers and the shop owners are all kids from Girl Scouts. I really do not know the max age limit of troops participating. The total event is about an hour to hour and fifteen minutes. 

The market place things like Chex mix snacks, Christmas tree ornaments, candies, simple games and one troop was selling marble necklaces. The interesting ones like the Tic Tac Toe and ornaments were on the expensive side with prices at $3 per item. While the simple ones like snacks were for $1. Needless to say the older kids had made more complex ones while the younger ones went for easy ones.

If you have ever heard Dave Ramsey on either radio or on podcasts you definitely would have heard him say “adults devise a plan and follow and children do what feels good. I could relate to what that meant watching the kids shopping with limited budget and going from stall to stall to see if they can buy the item sold or rather if they had the money to afford the same. Needless to say kids who started with inexpensive items at the start had more money to spare vs the other way round.  

About half way through the event some of the stalls started dropping prices to make the sale happen and some started giving buy one get one offers. One example I have is of the Tic Tac Toe game which started off at $3 per item eventually dropped to $2 per and with fifteen minutes to go went to $1 per item. Even at that price they still had a lot of items to be sold. Avni felt that it was not fair, for she had bought the game at $3 and if only she had waited she could have gotten the game for $1. and $2 to spare. I wonder if this is what we in the real world call bargain buy? But she corrected herself and said the kids have put in a lot of efforts to make the game and $3 is the fair price.

This begged the question, would they have been at an advantage to start off selling at $2? (Instead of starting at $3?). Even though I was apprehensive at the start but upon closer examination, I feel for the creative work and the effort involved the item probably would have sold on Etsy for $4 a piece. The market place they were aiming for is a limited window, limited audience and with very limited budget. Tic Tac Toe was just one example another one was the candy cane chocolate sledge which also was having similar effect.

Maybe that's the lesson for them? For Avni, I told her next time around it may be worth while to wait for sometime before making a buy :).

 

Wild Wild West – Netflix documentary

Back in 2003/early 2004, I remember arguing vehemently with my friend that “Bhagwan” Rajneesh wasn’t truly enlightened and was more half baked :). I was just too stubborn with my arguments and my friend had to agree with me just to end the argument. Come 2018 the documentary Wild Wild West on Netflix totally proved to me that I was right.

The documentary is a 6 part series starts from Poona ashram through Oregon experiment and ends with the death of Rajneesh. It is a great effort with capturing the story from a lot of perspectives including the followers, adversaries, interviews from those time and era, video clips from news casts in those days and so on. 

Overall I would say a well balanced view of the whole episode, worth a watch. It is disturbing at some levels specially if you are of spiritual oneself is an understatement.

Here are my n things

• Rajneesh (lets call him Mr. R for simplicity) didn’t leave India but was literally smuggled out of India in secret, no one knew where he went and all his visa applications were done in secret and flight also arranged in secret
• On the flight to USA, they celebrated with champagne, as a spiritual person I thought he would be aware that alcohol affects ones subconscious self 
• While his top aide Sheila was running the show in the Oregon Ranch by trying to rig elections, poisoning salad bars, plotting assassinations and so on, as her “guru” how come Mr. R wasn’t aware?
• His aide Sheila keeps repeating, I protected Mr. R while I was in charge of his safety, would an enlightened master really need protection and from what and who?
• Mr. R secluded himself in the ranch for almost 4 years and didn’t give a single public discourse during that time, Funny part that was the immigration case against him that he didn't do what he said he would be doing, giving discourses.. As a true master were you not interested in the growth of your disciples?
• Mr. R behaves as president or absentee CEO of a company who has the plausible deniability when all hell breaks loose and blame it on the underlings in this case Sheila. 
• Mr. R has fascination for finer things and the fascination doesn’t end till he owns it, the Rolls Royce, diamond watch and the list goes on. I am not saying he should not honor his devotees offerings but can he put forth a demand? I am not making this up it is one of the episodes “at one point the Hollywood people started showing up at the ashram and started showing Mr. R the different magazines with expensive things, Sheila had limited access to these for if Mr. R sees them he would want to have them”
• Towards the end when Sheila leaves the ranch after a series of failed experiments, Mr. R acts like a child who lost his favorite toy or as a scorned lover who is not able to handle the breakup gracefully. It is truly unbecoming of a spiritual master, to an extent one can argue he had a meltdown. Really, can a guru have a meltdown?
• In the end, when the law starts closing in on Mr. R, he does the same thing he did in India tries to fly away but USA is not India and they arrest him on his way out. I make fun of Saddam Hussein for hiding in a hole, our man as hiding behind the aircraft seat when they came to arrest him. Are you so afraid of death Mr. R?
• Mr. R while fighting the case in the court apparently said “if they fight fairly then I am willing to go to supreme court but I don’t think they will and (something about body can’t handle)”, wonderful I like that, if that were the case then why did you flee in your own personal aircraft?
• His death apparently was a case of slow-poisoning and no its not the American Government but his own network and himself are responsible     

I never had a great opinion of Mr. R and this documentary didn’t help the case in anyway. At a higher level, it was, as rightly pointed out was an experiment, that didn’t play out well. It was an experiment on how far one can push the envelope in the name of constitutional rights, an experiment on what happens when one only thinks of rights and forgets all about responsibilities, an experiment on what happens when you let the mind/ego dominate the entire process and not listen to the inner guidance.   

Always good to dust off an old book

For a while now I have transitioned to Kindle books and the my new fad is to switch to audio books (I am holding myself from doing that). Of course most books I have bought off late (in last 6-8 years) are non fiction related to finance, self improvement and the usual works. But I am proud to say I have a collection of paper back and hard bound books in my own small library. Considering the amount of time I spend these days in reading any book either kindle e-books or otherwise they have been eating dust :).

Anyways, I have become an avid listener to Dave Ramsey podcasts and he has been strongly advocating people to read a non fiction book for at the least 15 minutes a day. Come to think of it, it is a great habit and my father-in-law had recommended the same to me a decade ago and I had followed the advice for a while, as with everything in life fell off the band wagon.

With Facebook turned off, Twitter non existent and NPR given a boot, it appeared I had more time in hand and decided to pickup the reading habit again. This time around instead of picking up the ipad-mini and launching the kindle app I went down to my mini library and picked up a non-fiction book.  I had bought this one more than a decade ago and never turned more than 10 pages of the same. For the first couple of days, I literally had to drag myself to keep the book in hand for 15-20 minutes before bed time but in the last week or so I got into the groove and love reading this book.

The one wonderful unintended consequence of my new reading habit is it has caught Avni’s attention and she wants to know what is her dad reading? mind you I have had the ipad for almost 3-4 years and have read few books through kindle app on my ipad but it has rarely spiked her interest. I am guessing a combination of her age and her own reading habits that she has been questioning me constantly about what I am reading? and wants me to explain to her what I am reading? Indeed I am not successful yet at that. 

Anyways, moral of the story is "kindle, audible and other apps are good but sometimes a good old fashioned hardbound book is a great investment too".  

Movie review Padmavat

I really wanted to watch the movie in the theater but somehow missed the boat and finally caught up to it on Amazon Prime. If I can summarize the movie in one sentence “it is plain stupid” or as I told my relatives in Kannada “ಪೆದ್ದು  ಪೆದ್ದಾಗಿ  ಮಾಡಿದಾರೆ ”.

After watching the movie Sri Sri Ravishankar gave a green light, I would have told Mr. SLB to go back to the drawing board and make it a bit more realistic. Half way through the movie I lost interest, which I rarely do in a period drama.

Here are my top N things that I couldn’t comprehend in my logical brain

• The king of Chittor is in present day Lanka to get pearls and went for hunting, why was he alone where were his body guards? the same goes for the princess.
• When Ala-uddin lays siege on Chittor first time, why didn’t he come with siege equipment?, he had an insider to help and didn’t that insider give him tips on the kind of fortress he will be attacking?
• Fine he didn’t bring first time, but the siege was for frigging 6 long months and no one thought of getting them or building them?
• Rajputs knew in and out of Ala-uddin and Malik Kafur but they didn’t know who the traitor helping him and they all act surprised when they see him.
• When the Rajaguru was thrown out of kingdom why wasn’t there anyone following him, essentially where was the intelligence network
• The king goes to meet Aladdin in his almost burned out camp, so why were the body guards not surrounding the camp but were standing 200 feet away on one side?
• Besides why did the king go without his sword?, Ala-uddin didn’t put that condition to him.
• The last battle is beyond saving, the king no longer is the king but a lover fighting to save glory of his beloved.
• The contrast they have tried to show between Padmavati and the other wife of the king seems to be drawn from Ekta Kapoor’s serials.
• Escape from the prison in Delhi is totally laughable.

There are a few more but not worth my time. In the end, if you haven’t seen it, don’t waste your time. If you have, my sympathies for you.