I am still alive and well
When I had first started writing my blog a couple of months ago during the summer of 2008 that was in response to ramblings of a different kind I had seen on the blog of a friend of mine. In his blog he was ranting against “corporate India” and how one of his friends had got too drunk at a corporate-sponsored New Years’ Bash and made a fool of himself and moreover, how doing so would be harmful for his friend’s career prospects. I thought to myself- well that is it! I have had enough of regular folks (and that does not include those nuts at the Huffington Post) being critical of corporations and all of what comes with it, little realizing that corporations are fictitious entities which have no existence outside of the people who work at them, like you and me, and the owners of the corporations, the shareholders which again includes people, like you and me. If you find the last bit surprising, you may want to check your company’s 401(k) plan in which you are invested or any of the mutual funds you might have invested in. Chances are that you are invested in Exxon Mobil or even worse, Halliburton if you can stomach that and what is best about it, those investments would have made money for you and your family over the last couple of years!
But I digress. This present post is not meant to be a rant against the socialists and their sympathizers. On the contrary, this is one of my first (and hopefully one of very few) blog posts which is meant as an explanation for my total absence from the site for the last couple of months or so. After all for the millions who depend on my blog to help them understand contemporary socio-economic trends, I am sure that my absence was much missed and I am sure that they were starved of information regarding the political candidates and the political parties. Come to think of it, I did not even have an endorsement going on my blog (wonder who that would have been for) during this cycle when it seemed that everybody and their grand mother were falling over back wards to endorse the Messiah!
I again digress. (It is hard writing a post on what I have been up to given all of what has been going on and given that I have not had a chance to reach out to you for what seems like a very long time.) The reason for that absence is quite simple: first year of graduate school. Given that many of you are also likely to have gone through that experience in the recent (or not so-recent!) past, I hope you can empathize with my situation. So what have been the first few months like? Not too bad. In all seriousness though, I have had to work pretty darn hard over the past few months to the extent that it has occasionally surprised me as well. I don’t think that coming back to school was necessarily the hard part. After all I haven’t been out of school for that long- my years at Unilever and McKinsey were punctuated by two years at Purdue getting my MBA. The differences this time around were two-fold: 1) On one hand, I come into the program with little formal course work in real analysis and practice with trying to proof results rigorously, compared to some of my class mates. While it may surprise you, it is also true that my lack of an extensive background in economics was far less of a drawback as compared to the former, because essentially all we were doing in our economics courses is trying to proof mathematically that an utility function is concave and differentiable over an appropriate range or the existence of a maximum given a certain set of conditions (If all of this doesn’t make much sense to you, don’t worry; it hasn’t made much sense to me either.) In any case, if I were to summarize my last 2 & ½ months for you in a single sentence, it would be this: Working on assignments and problem sets involving real analysis, optimization, optimal control, dynamic programming, parametric estimation and a bunch of other things that I wouldn’t bore you about today.
Shifting gears a bit, how has the move to Ann Arbor been outside of work? Well two thoughts come immediately to the top of my mind. First and foremost, I miss my Pittsburgh friends to a degree that I would find it hard to describe in words. I am sure that with time, the sweet memories of Pittsburgh and the endless post-movie post-mortem sessions would fade out but since it has been less than three months of having left the city, that is something which hasn’t happened as yet. The hours and hours of chatting (bhatting for some) with Amith, Reeta, KD, Manoj and Sonia on every topic under the sun (by no means limited to the eternal existential question which must have plagued every single Indian American: “India vs. America”) are the things that one treasures for a life time and values more highly than mere material comforts. Not to mention the frequent parties with our other friends who happened to have committed the sin of not having chosen to stay at Highland Park such as Amlan, Nita, Debdutta, Suddhashil, Mahesh, Bhuvi, Anirban and Nabanita. And don’t even get me started on Gullu! (For those in the dark of who I am talking about, this is the baby daughter of two of my close friends who happened to be staying in the same building as yours truly.) Indeed, I will go as far in saying this: Seeing a child grow up in front of your eyes and becoming “more like a human being” is a once-in-a-lifetime experience which cannot but transform you into a different person.
After having worn my heart on my sleeve, what is the next thought which comes to mind? Unfortunately that too is not such a happy one and something I am actually glad to have a chance to rant about to my dedicated readers. It’s quite simple: Ann Arbor is an extremely liberal town and the University also happens to be pre-dominantly liberal.L Of course, reference points for me (like all of us) are shaped by places where I have been and I can say that West Lafayette, IN and Pittsburgh, PA, don’t even come close to where Ann Arbor stands on the political spectrum. Every single of the 10 members of the city council are Democratic and my campus newspaper, the Michigan Daily happens to be hugely liberal and doesn’t seem to have any compunctions about endorsing Democratic candidates of every ilk at every single level of government, whether we are talking of the U.S. Presidential race or a State Senate race or (what the hell), even for the post of the City Dog-Catcher (OK, I made this one up). If there is one thing I could change in the 5 years (or maybe more!) that I would happen to be here, it would be to make the campus environment a wee bit more favorable for the Republicans so that one doesn’t have to feel so out of place like I occasionally do when I see the gazillion emails, flyers and postings on topics such as “securing reproductive rights for women” or “achieving distributive justice through inclusive human rights” or whatever other crap the liberals can come up with.
I have spoken for far too long than what I intended and so it is time to shut up and get back to my course on Game Theory where I am trying to characterize the Nash equilibria of a price setting game with fixed capacity. I hope to have at least one more blog post on something I have been thinking about for a while, viz. the legacy of George W. Bush (I know what you are thinking!) and then if I am motivated enough, even one post on getting my party, the Republican Party back on track so that it doesn’t lose moderates like most of the readers of this blog. Hope you will come back for those. Ciao!
But I digress. This present post is not meant to be a rant against the socialists and their sympathizers. On the contrary, this is one of my first (and hopefully one of very few) blog posts which is meant as an explanation for my total absence from the site for the last couple of months or so. After all for the millions who depend on my blog to help them understand contemporary socio-economic trends, I am sure that my absence was much missed and I am sure that they were starved of information regarding the political candidates and the political parties. Come to think of it, I did not even have an endorsement going on my blog (wonder who that would have been for) during this cycle when it seemed that everybody and their grand mother were falling over back wards to endorse the Messiah!
I again digress. (It is hard writing a post on what I have been up to given all of what has been going on and given that I have not had a chance to reach out to you for what seems like a very long time.) The reason for that absence is quite simple: first year of graduate school. Given that many of you are also likely to have gone through that experience in the recent (or not so-recent!) past, I hope you can empathize with my situation. So what have been the first few months like? Not too bad. In all seriousness though, I have had to work pretty darn hard over the past few months to the extent that it has occasionally surprised me as well. I don’t think that coming back to school was necessarily the hard part. After all I haven’t been out of school for that long- my years at Unilever and McKinsey were punctuated by two years at Purdue getting my MBA. The differences this time around were two-fold: 1) On one hand, I come into the program with little formal course work in real analysis and practice with trying to proof results rigorously, compared to some of my class mates. While it may surprise you, it is also true that my lack of an extensive background in economics was far less of a drawback as compared to the former, because essentially all we were doing in our economics courses is trying to proof mathematically that an utility function is concave and differentiable over an appropriate range or the existence of a maximum given a certain set of conditions (If all of this doesn’t make much sense to you, don’t worry; it hasn’t made much sense to me either.) In any case, if I were to summarize my last 2 & ½ months for you in a single sentence, it would be this: Working on assignments and problem sets involving real analysis, optimization, optimal control, dynamic programming, parametric estimation and a bunch of other things that I wouldn’t bore you about today.
Shifting gears a bit, how has the move to Ann Arbor been outside of work? Well two thoughts come immediately to the top of my mind. First and foremost, I miss my Pittsburgh friends to a degree that I would find it hard to describe in words. I am sure that with time, the sweet memories of Pittsburgh and the endless post-movie post-mortem sessions would fade out but since it has been less than three months of having left the city, that is something which hasn’t happened as yet. The hours and hours of chatting (bhatting for some) with Amith, Reeta, KD, Manoj and Sonia on every topic under the sun (by no means limited to the eternal existential question which must have plagued every single Indian American: “India vs. America”) are the things that one treasures for a life time and values more highly than mere material comforts. Not to mention the frequent parties with our other friends who happened to have committed the sin of not having chosen to stay at Highland Park such as Amlan, Nita, Debdutta, Suddhashil, Mahesh, Bhuvi, Anirban and Nabanita. And don’t even get me started on Gullu! (For those in the dark of who I am talking about, this is the baby daughter of two of my close friends who happened to be staying in the same building as yours truly.) Indeed, I will go as far in saying this: Seeing a child grow up in front of your eyes and becoming “more like a human being” is a once-in-a-lifetime experience which cannot but transform you into a different person.
After having worn my heart on my sleeve, what is the next thought which comes to mind? Unfortunately that too is not such a happy one and something I am actually glad to have a chance to rant about to my dedicated readers. It’s quite simple: Ann Arbor is an extremely liberal town and the University also happens to be pre-dominantly liberal.L Of course, reference points for me (like all of us) are shaped by places where I have been and I can say that West Lafayette, IN and Pittsburgh, PA, don’t even come close to where Ann Arbor stands on the political spectrum. Every single of the 10 members of the city council are Democratic and my campus newspaper, the Michigan Daily happens to be hugely liberal and doesn’t seem to have any compunctions about endorsing Democratic candidates of every ilk at every single level of government, whether we are talking of the U.S. Presidential race or a State Senate race or (what the hell), even for the post of the City Dog-Catcher (OK, I made this one up). If there is one thing I could change in the 5 years (or maybe more!) that I would happen to be here, it would be to make the campus environment a wee bit more favorable for the Republicans so that one doesn’t have to feel so out of place like I occasionally do when I see the gazillion emails, flyers and postings on topics such as “securing reproductive rights for women” or “achieving distributive justice through inclusive human rights” or whatever other crap the liberals can come up with.
I have spoken for far too long than what I intended and so it is time to shut up and get back to my course on Game Theory where I am trying to characterize the Nash equilibria of a price setting game with fixed capacity. I hope to have at least one more blog post on something I have been thinking about for a while, viz. the legacy of George W. Bush (I know what you are thinking!) and then if I am motivated enough, even one post on getting my party, the Republican Party back on track so that it doesn’t lose moderates like most of the readers of this blog. Hope you will come back for those. Ciao!
Labels: missing friends, moving to Ann Arbor, Personal reflections
posted by sutirthabagchi | 3:17 PM
2 Comments:
Very well written. Don't worry, you are not the only conservative on campus--I hear there is one in the biology department.
One note: Seeing a child turn slightly more human is something I highly recommend doing while working on a PhD. There is nothing more delightful than to come home from real analysis and games and metrics, and learn that your son learned to wave today, and to hear him giggle with delight as he shows off his new talent.
And I hear that there is one in the Museum of Natural History as well- a specimen of a conservative from the days long gone by when they still used to be found in the nooks and crannies of Ann Arbor.
Re: your comment on seeing a child make that transformation, that truly is a life transforming process. I hope I get to experience that myself first hand sooner rather than later.
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