Saturday Musings

I just got off a wonderful game of chess with a champion of sorts. She defeated me with a mate in 3 combo.

For the uninitiated, let me break it down for you. She foresaw a mating combination 3 moves in advance no matter what i did. Think about it for a moment, there were so many things i could have done in those 3 moves (actually 5, to prolong the agony) and as you might have seen in Bayes Theorem, with every new information (move) the odds change on its head.

Turns out, there were 8 permutations and combinations that were possible and each leading to the same fate, which was my losing the game. And that son (daughter) of a bitch saw that.

While she was explaining me the postmortem, I could not help but relate this with Prof Sanjay bakshi's awesome post on VANTAGE POINT. Ability to see the same problem from 07 different angles.

Blame it on Johnnie Walker, but I am in a mood to dig a bit deeper. By seeing the problem with 07 different angles, we feel we are closer to the solution but R V.

What if there are 82 angles and we just covered 7. Who decides the causation. Human beings are susceptible to confuse correlation with causation all the time. A cat crossing your way and you meeting with an accident is the most common of them all.

You laugh at me saying, huh we are more rational than that, that is a orthodoxy for the uneducated people with no intellect. But in this case there was just 01 variable, in real life there are a zillion.

We don't know what we don't know.

Think about this for a while.



While I was playing that game, I didn't know that its going to end in 3 moves, I swear to god, i was actually thinking I am onto something here and might have my first win against her.

A better player than her probably would have figured my fate 5, 7 or 10 moves in advance.




And something like cosmos or universal intelligence can even figure out the mistakes i would do and the responses i would have based on my conditioning and upbringing. IT can actually create a road map of my entire life based on my personality.


This is a good time to do a thought experiment.
I am doing it on my life and putting it here, I would like the readers to do it as well and put it on Paper. (Its very important that you write it down, coz mind is a smart ass and would make you believe in current status as your desired choice)


When i was in class 8th, i wanted to be a customs officer, i don't know why, may b the sparkling white dress got me. forget that, may be that was just a crush and by 8th standard, you don't know what you want (unless u r a warren buffet)

I wanted to take science, i was very good at it, but i didn't,  I don't know why. I fell in love with the first girl i hooked up with and wanted to marry her but i couldn't (thank god for that, would have been child marriage)

I dated a lot of women, but again if i look back it was a hit and trial of sorts, no defined path to it. The ones i liked, didn't like me, the ones who liked me, were the rejects.

Some times i lowered my standards, sometimes a hottie lowered hers (due to a bad phase she was going thru) and we had a match ;)

my point is, I can't really say I exactly knew what I was doing.

Lets continue with my career. I could not have guessed in a million years what I am doing right now, when i started off. Lets rewind it to bring home the point. While I was working, I could not have figured my own career path. I started with a Travel consolidation firm as a management trainee

From there, one would think,that he is set to climb the ladder now and become a VP in 10 years in a travel company, right, WRONG.. I moved on to a call center (free meals, free transport, better pay, hotter chicks)

from there I hopped the Quality Assurance bus, became a manager at hyper Quality handling Disney as our client. You would say Now he has found his groove, he is going to become a VP here, right WRONG


I joined NAI GLOBAL a REAL ESTATE biggie in UNITED STATES. I was co heading their India operations. Just in case you thought I had found my calling. 1 one fine day, i decided to call it quits and be my own boss and become an entrepreneur.

I have done rather well in my investment journey. Averaging 29.61% CAGR. BUT if i take out 03-4 big bets that worked out well, my result wud not be half as good.


I do not have any doubt in my mind that there is a bigger force at play. We live in an illusion of control. We don't control nothing. we are just puppets being played by cosmic energy. Either that or I am too drunk.

comments are welcome.