Advisors or ... ?
For obvious reasons this comic has not made it to our lab wall; however, since this first appeared in an NIH's Analyst magazine, I guess it is okay. But who will bell the cat?
Mark Knopfler at Meadowbrook Music Festival
Not Deep Purple, not Bob Dylan, not Santana, not Eric Clapton, not U2, it was the sultan of swing - Mark Knopfler, who I’ve always waited for. It would be any ragpicker’s dream to see his guitar hero in the flesh. It was one concert I wouldn’t have missed for anything in the world. I have not spent money for nothing to own every record (almost) that he has ever made. Dear brothers in arms, here is the low-down on the concert.
Avoiding Telegraph Road which tends to get crowed in the evening, we (Romeo and Juliet) simply took I-75 to the Meadowbrook Music Festival. It is similar to, but smaller than the DTE Music Theatre and it lacks the fancy big screens making it, as some say, an ‘intimate atmosphere’. From my not-so-intimate lawn seat, the stage was so far away from me that I did not have the greatest view of the action. Some come to listen, others like me come to watch, especially to watch every expression and I love to see the fingers move. This time we were well-prepared with blankets and food. At end of the Santana concert, it was very late; we were starving; found nothing except a Denny’s, and Denny’s after midnight is one weird place. Why worry?
Coming back to the concert, the opening act was Bap (as in baap re baap, no really!) Kennedy (from Belfast), who was more of a filler than an opening act. It was Kennedy on the acoustic and another dude from Nashville - who was the real redeemer of the duo - on the lead/slide guitar. All the songs were in honour of, or honouring Elvis Presley or Hank Williams. I mean this guy is not playing Elvis or Hank but singing about/to them. You know that sort of inspiration leads to. He was ‘Less than OK’. Can’t they get anyone better to open for Mark Knopfler? In fact, anyone from the Ann Arbor Summer Festival could have done better.
Then just boom, like that Mark Knopfler burst onto the stage playing Why Aye Men. The reasons to like Mark Knopfler are numerous. Firstly, he is a finger-picking electric guitar god. Secondly, for all the guitar gods in the pantheon his songwriting is far above most, simply fantastic to say the least. His songwriting is inspired by Bob Dylan (who isn’t?) - Dylanesque, but not the same sort of impenetrable lyrics. Ever wondered as you want your MTV, how many rock-stars have mocked themselves and the music industry? He is a former English teacher and it shows. Some sample themes: Bonaparte’s failed Russia campaign, Imelda Marcos, Nazi war criminals, roadside Romeos, the Mason-Dixon line, the fast-food industry, Turkish guest-workers in Germany, gay strippers, the fading of jazz, the futility of war, and yes, great love songs too! You can’t like MK right away, I didn’t. He grows on you so subtly. You begin to hum through the hooks and refrains and then one day find yourself a fan. Thirdly, he has to be enjoyed slowly, and in bits; however, today I was prepared to relax that restriction and hear everything that the great red-bandana-populariser had to offer.
I managed to sneak in the ‘where-you-jangle-your-jewelry’ seats and take some close-up movies before I was kicked out by security. MK, I must add is among the few artists who don’t mind people taking movies or bootlegs as long as they don’t make commercial use of it. Good lad! Anyway I am still stuck with this camera with poor zoom and poor nighttime results!
I enjoyed him play on the Strat and the Gibson Les Paul, but the greatest moment of the day was to see him play the slide on the silver-steel National guitar on Donegan’s Gone. I can still see the vision of one floating on the cover of Brothers in Arms. The most amusing moment of day was his drinking tea in the middle of the set. Before that he introduced all the members of his band in his Scottish accent and while introducing, Matt Rollins he said, ‘He forgot his accordion on the bus, but I brought it in’. Can’t see how they could have played Done With Bonaparte without the accordion.
He played a lot of songs (see the Set List below) and yet I felt he did not play this song or that. This was supposed to be the Shangri-La tour, but he did not play much from that album except for two songs. I really wished he had played more from Shangri-La and I was dying to hear The Trawlerman’s Song. I also wished to hear Down to the Waterline and Why Worry?, I assumed that he would do the bonus track Do America from Sailing to Philadelphia.
Earlier in the day on radio he said that his current line-up plays Dire Straits better than the Straits and after hearing the band today I admit that this is true and offer the videos as proof. Today I become one of those fans overcome with silliness to buy the ridiculously priced T-shirts. Baloney again, but that's worship, that’s what it is!
Videos:(will uploaded by Monday)
Walk of Life
Money For Nothing
Mark Knopfler
Venue: Meadowbrook Music Festival
Date: July 8th, 2005
Set List
1) Why Aye Men
2) The Walk of Life
3) What It Is
4) Sailing to Philadelphia
5) Romeo and Juliet
6) Sultans of Swing
7) Done With Bonaparte
8) Song for Sonny Liston
9) Rudiger
10) Donegan’s Gone
11) Boom like That
12) Speedway At Nazareth
13) Telegraph Road
14) Brothers in Arms
15) Money for Nothing
16) So Far Away from Me
New White Flight
In the 60s, White America fled to the suburbs. Bruce Ashby seems to be a representative of a new kind of White Flight!
Who's Monsoon is it Anyway?
From Nature (Since access might be required, I am posting the most relevant paragraphs):
' ... Researchers at a climate institute in India have voiced concern at what they see as attempts by the government to curb their scientific freedom after they were forced to remove monsoon forecasts from their website. The government says the move is necessary to stop the public being confused by conflicting forecasts. But the scientists are worried that it could prevent researchers in a range of disciplines from communicating their results..." '
'... but the monsoon season is notoriously difficult to predict. The country's official forecast comes from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), which is run by the government's Department of Science and Technology (DST). To predict rainfall, it uses a model based on statistics of past monsoons.
In 2002, scientists at the Center for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation (C-MMACS) in Bangalore began forecasting the monsoon with a more sophisticated global-climate model that uses equations to describe Earth's atmosphere. Since 2003, the researchers have been posting the results on their website, and the Indian media have been reporting them.
Last month, the DST issued a directive prohibiting the publication of any results that differ from its official forecast unless they have been peer-reviewed and cleared by the head of the researchers' agency. The DST will in future collect and disseminate monsoon data produced by research institutes to avoid confusion, DST secretary Valangiman Ramamurthi told Nature. "Monsoon forecasting is sensitive for the Indian economy," he says. "It's not a free-for-all..." '
'In its 27 June bulletin, the IMD admitted that June's rainfall was 35% below average — as forecast by the C-MMACS. Heavy rains in Gujarat over the following three days reduced the deficit to 20%, and the IMD insists that this will be made up in the next few months to make 2005 a normal year, as it predicted. '
A longer comment appeared in the Hindu a few weeks ago. It highlights the larger question at the end: Can Indian scientific institutions ever get along with each other?
MIT Blog Survey
Dear Raed, the Iraqi blogger made headlines, wrote a book and is now a celebrity of some sorts. All he did was blog! Blogs have exposed major scandals; they ask critical questions which the conventional media does not ask or bothers writing about.(I am sure Chomsky is pleased to see the effect that blogs are having.) Now people are writing books on blogs and on topics as specific as what it can do for your business, organization, etc. In short, a concept that did not exist 5 years ago is becoming more and more 'de-nerdified'; the rest of the world has begun to notice. So much, that a scientific study on it is being done by MIT.
I took the survey and was very impressed with its format. It has a neat method of grabbing stuff from your blog and asking questions adaptively depending on the context. It grabs links from your main page and sidebar; a good idea since these links are more indicative of the general nature of your blog than some specific post.
Lots of really good questions:
'How long do you think you are going to continue this blog?', ' How many blogs do you update?',
and the real scorcher: 'How much time do you spend on blogging?' .
The survey revealed stuff that I don't really analyze.
'What % of the content of your posts are: personal, informative, or on a specific topic ?' I write on whatever topic I feel like, but now I will be more conscious.
I think that their survey questions on blogger location, nationality or ethnicity were not well-phrased. The way the questions were asked, I have been counted as an Asian-American blogger than as an Indian student in America. Also, the last part of the survey would redundant for any Indian, since any Indian would know all kinds of people as 'acquaintances' (by the loose definition provided). Such surveys that tap into a global audience need to be given more thought. It is quite obvious that the cultural, social assumptions were America-centric. There was a similar problem with the Harvard morality survey on which I wrote about here. However, I felt that the creators of this survey would be more prepared for global nature of blogging and the differences in countries and cultures. Answers to these questions should have changed the nature of the subsequent questions.
Also, it did not directly ask if blogging has really changed your life in some ways apart from the time spent on it! Like:
Has it changed your outlook?
Have you changed/reinforced your opinions on certain issues after reading about what someone wrote?
Have you learned something informative as a result of your blogging?
I learn a lot about myself and about things that I blog about because I have to think, research, think and then write about stuff. I felt that the survey overly emphasized how we meet different people and what means we choose to do it - SMS, email, blogs. That, is just an epiphenomenon - meeting different ideas and thoughts is what blogging is really about. Blogging has created these micro-communities that orders the vastness of the internet into some sort of shape that makes sense; or, maybe not since it gives 100 more interesting/distracting links to follow!
Mr. Smooth
If you can't afford the best tickets, then invest some money in a pair of binoculars.
Learning this the hard way, I was better prepared for this summer's concerts. The first of the season was Carlos Santana..
As is the case with most concerts that I go to, 80% of the people were in their 40s or 50s; a strong hint that my music tastes are quite anachronistic! I made a mental note of trying a little harder to listen to some music from 'my' generation. I just finished reading Kill Your Idols, a cynical relook at classic rockers and famous rock albums. The new generation of rock critics (DeRogatis, Marc Weingarten, Robert Christgau) tear the albums to shreds and I am filled with new-found scepticism. Among the more poignant passages talked about, " ... overpriced tickets and hordes of fans too eager to buy the dumb merchandise, when not even half original band was touring..." Wowing not to succumb to such nostalgic seductions, I entered the DTE Music theatre; it's a great venue - parking is free! You climb up Pineknob hill and the steep grassy slope looks down on lawn, then the expensive seats (Lennon might have called it 'where the rich jangle their jewelry') and then onto the semicircular stage.
I almost did not make it to the concert. I meticulously followed the directions and thanks to DTE's website's twisted sense of direction I found myself at The Palace of Auburn Hills (home of the Pistons and a music venue when they are not playing) and there there were 3 cars in the parking lot. Clearly, not the right place! After readjusting my coordinates and managing to get off the right exit on I-75, I found myself stuck in a massive traffic-jam. For the first time, I was happy to get stuck in a traffic-jam! At least, I was on the right road and there were a bunch of folks who were going to be late for the 7pm concert.
Los Lonely Boys
The first opening act was Salvatore Santana (Carlos's son), who studies at UCLA and apparently tours with his Dad during the summertime. Thanks to the traffic-jam I was late by about 15 mins and by the time I managed to trample over the people sleeping on the blankets and settled down at a 'good' vantage point - Salvatore Santana was waving goodbye. So I missed the opportunity to trash the son with a famous dad!
The real opening act was the Grammy winning Los Lonely Boys and they were great! Actually, only Michael Garza the lead guitarist is great, the bassist and the drummer are all right. Their songwriting skills are really poor and the rhymes are very contrived and often silly. For example from Nobody Else this gem:
I can't stand to be alone
Cause I go crazy when you're gone
You're the one that makes me whole
I pray you've known this all along
Everything is gonna be alright
I wanna be with you all of my life
Hilarious! What the did not have in terms of songwriting, they made up in terms of the music and there were some really fantastic jams. They also did the usual monkey tricks of jumping around with the guitars, playing behind their necks, etc., which are not that hard but who's complaining? There are striking parallels between Santana (the band) and the Los Lonely Boys. Both are(were) bands of brothers/relatives, Hispanic groups, have songs with Spanish lyrics and have a shrieking high-pitched lead guitarist. For a moment, you would believe that the LLB's lead was Carlos Santana; still Michael Garza is not Santana, not yet. They have some cool riffs and I loved this particular riff (see the video below).
Santana
Dressed in colors that suit a Jamaican reggae star more than an aging rocker from Woodstock, the hatted Santana made his way on the stage around 9pm with his trademark high-pitched guitar with Jingo. The crowd erupted - what a start!
Midway into his set, when quite a few people were already drunk with the copious amount of alcohol, Santana gave his anti-Bush spiel. There were cheers from the crowd, but rest of America does not seem to be listening to him, or the Dixie Chicks, or Bono. Then he started talking about '... achieving real Peace in our lifetime, if we only believe...' and other platidinous remarks. Then the screen had some 3D doves fly out and images of people around the world. Age has finally caught up with Carlos Santana. He was not making much sense; however other fans seem to agree with whatever crap he was talking and gave him a standing ovation at the end the 10 min speech; but Santana does believe in what he says, 50c from each ticket are donated to his Milagro foundation, but I would suggest: 'Santana do, but don't talk!'.
Thankfully, there were no more speeches from him for the rest of the night and the music in the second half was fantastic. I must give Santana credit for letting other musicians share the limelight, especially the musicians who seem to have the two-bit parts. We all know that he does not sing much these days and was mostly in the dark, while the light shone on other musicians during the songs. For the first time, I saw the 'unknowns' being given the stage for more than the 'one solo' in the concert. The brass section was really good and so was the drummer. Then he called the Los Lonely Boys to play on a song alond with - the biggest surprise of the day - Ray Manzarek of the Doors. The all came up onstage to play on two songs. It was great to hear Ray's tinkly keyboard on Evil Ways (see video below). Fantastic!
On the whole, this concert was better than the Eric Clapton concert because Santana did not treat this as just another stop on the tour. EC came, played and left - Santana connected and did three songs for the encore.
Hope some of you can catch him on tour this summer. Next up is: Mark Knopfler on the 8th.
Video clips
*Los Lonely Boys - Great solo by Michael Garza.
*Evil Ways - Carlos Santana and guest appearance by the legendary Ray Manzarek.
Santana Concert Set List
DTE ENERGY MUSIC THEATER
DETROIT, MI 6/25/05
1. JINGO
2. TABOO/HERMES
3. BROWN SKIN GIRL
4. EL FUEGO
5. CONCERTO / MARIA MARIA
6. FOO FOO
7. INTIMO
8. SPIRTUAL/SUN RA/YALEO (BENNY& DENNIS SOLO)
9. *BOOGIE WOMAN-
10. * EVIL WAYS/A LOVE SUPREME
- ENCORES -
11. AH SWEET DANCER/SMOOTH/DAME TU AMOR
11. CORAZON ESPINADO
12. BMW/ GYSPY QUEEN
13. OYE COMA VA
(*WITH LOS LONELY BOYS& RAY MANZAREK)
Is Early Rising a Problem for you?
I hope school adminstrators see this. I should forward this to the Registrar at the U of M. I don't think it will be hard to prove that:
No graduate student can perform useful work before 11 am; perhaps he/she can do some 'work' before 3pm, if supplied with enough coffee.
From the latest Nature Editorial:
That's not to say that scientific advances can't already help to inform educational policy. For instance, there is now a solid body of evidence that sleep patterns change significantly with age — and that, as a result, it makes little sense to wake teenagers up early to go to school, when their attention will be low as a natural consequence of their daily rhythms. Education authorities and schools are starting to hear this message, and some are adjusting their schedules accordingly.
The report on the NSF funded studies. I agree with Dr. Bauer in being skeptical about applying scientific methods too soon - except the one quoted above.
Smuggling?
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Last time I went back to India I smuggled The Satanic Verses. This time I will smuggle James Laine's Shivaji. I wish to extend this smuggling operation to all of you back home who wish to read books 'others' have decided that you shouldn't. Luckily, books banned in India are not banned in the US and Amazon has most of them available. Let me know the title and send me the URL. US-India shipping is free.
This IE List is a good place to start, but is woefully incomplete. It left out The Satanic Verses and Taslima Nasrin's Dwikhandito!
The Book Tag Virus Spreads
My Spiel
The Book Tag Virus has reached here. It is indeed a great concept and has spread like a wildfire in the last few months. I still feel that the first two items were rather lame. What's the point? What difference does it make if you own 2 or 2 thousand books? What has the buying of books got to do with the reading of them? I must give credit to the second last item - A dose of guilt can be healthy for you sometimes.
Can anyone point me to the originator of this meme? It is quite possible that I got a distorted iteration of this meme, or perhaps I missed the point. The Scientific American had an interesting article on the genetics of chain letters (You might need access to read the whole article).
Total Number of Books I Own: I have not really counted, but should be close to about 500 books back home (this is not counting the other books in the family library.) After moving to the States, I have not bought many books: to keep some breathing space in my tiny room; and more importantly, to keep my wallet full. I am now convinced that buying books is a futile exercise. (More on this later.)
Last Book I Bought: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. It was for two reasons: One, because it is the book of the month for June on the Lit. Blog and second, there is an amusing anecdote involving The Wicked Witch of the West, the Ford Theater in Chicago, Borders and Probability. Buying seems contradictory to my previous assertion, but I am an addict on the mend.
Last Book I Read: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, who incidentally introduced the word 'meme'- if not the concept - in this book. Also, read the other book of the month - Hesse's Siddhartha this weekend.
One Book I Couldn't Finish:- Arms and the Man by Shaw seems to be perpetually on my reading list. I keep starting other books and this play always gets neglected. The ease of online renewal has really spoilt me.
Five Great Books??
Such questions are so tricky. It's often not who you include, rather who you exclude.
Can't really pin the top five or ten books: it seems unfair. At times there are authors whose body of work is more remarkable than one particular piece of work, e.g. - P.G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Steinbeck, etc. Then there are the one-hit wonders - Margaret Mitchell, Arundhati Roy, Harper Lee, and others who have said much in one beautiful book but then no more. Seems unfair to pick them over the others with a more substantial body of work. Such arguments can be endless, however I realised that these three were definitely unforgettable.
* Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera - A novel about all shades of love, marriage and relationships. Less magic and more realism as compared to his other books.
* Salman Rushdie's Ground Beneath Her Feet - One of the most fantastic books that I have ever read. His best work. A longish review was posted here.
* Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy - Not much of a story, but Seth is all about the writing. Seth writes prose that reads like poetry. The alternative index of chapters is proof enough.
This meme was inflicted on me by Paddy and though I can end the violence here, I have decided to pass the virus to the yet uninfected(?) -
Ashutosh, Javed, Anand Sivashankar and Anirudh.
There be changes made
"There'll be a change in the weather and a change in the scene
How is that?
I'm gonna start wearin' leather and change my routine
I'll wear dark glasses maybe a toupee
I'll get down and boogie and become risque
I'll start wearin' make-up like jackson and prince
You'll see me ridin' in my mercedes benz
Nobody wants you when you just play guitar
There'll be some changes made tomorrow
There'll be some changes made"
Mark Knopfler and Chet Atkins
Neck and Neck
There has been a template change. New wine in an old bottle. The old commenting system using Enetation proved to be the last straw. The Enetation commenting system has completely conked out and I was spurred into action.
The old blogger templates used tables (which were quite lame) and outdated HTML standards. The new templates use stylesheets which are infinitely better for making edits painlessly (once you set things up) and there have been a lot of improvements by blogger, e.g. Each blog has its own page. Not wanting to be a Luddite I have made the changes.
In the old Blogger days they had no commenting system. I guess even Blogger did not realise what blogging was going to turn into. Their initial commenting system was quite poor. Thanks to Google's cash and some really irate users, Blogger completely revamped their commenting system over the past few months. I think it is currently among the better commenting systems out there. The switch has resulted in a loss of the old comments and I have not yet figured out how to support both systems. In the past it has been quite irksome to read blogs that have two sets of commenting systems and you don't know which to really use. I don't want to add to that sort of ugliness that is already quite pervasive but I am looking for some ideas to fix this problem (obviously, in a painless way).
Indian Buffet
The quirky taste of Indian restaurants in the US
1. There will always be a knife and a fork, but never a spoon.
How do the others get by without a spoon? It is hilarious to watch some Indian nut struggle with simply a knife and a fork.
2. Despite knowing that you are Indian, the waiters will always talk in English or worse, with an American accent.
You have to persist in the native tongue for quite some time before the waiter agrees to drop talking in English in his thinly-disguised North or South Indian accent.
3. All finger food, but never any finger-bowls.
It can be argued that if you get by the limited cutlery in 1., you will never get to this point. If you do manage to wield the knife and fork, thanks to the sheer effort involved, you will end up hungrier at the end of the meal than before. Indian food should be eaten with your fingers because it always tastes better that way.
Any more?
Half Knowing myself
0.5 Self Knowledge
The great thing about blogging is that you can always brag about yourself. I have often bragged about stuff on this blog over the past two years; this Sunday for the first time, I felt that I did something that was really worth bragging about. Sometimes, when you look back upon past achievements - even if you still are proud of them - they don't seem as wonderful as they did at that time.
This Sunday, I completed the annual Dexter-Ann Arbor Half-Marathon. Long ago, I read a tagline for a Boston Marathon poster that said:
"You will know everything about yourself in 26.1 miles"
It inspired me - the economy of it - imagine getting to know everything about yourself in just a little over 4 hours. So a logical step would be to try the distance with a 50% discount. The curious aspect of running marathons is that you never run the full distance while training. You go up and then down, slowly building stamina but never test yourself till D-Day.
On a bright sunny Sunday morning, I found myself at the starting line in Dexter. All I had to do was to run home to Ann Arbor. Unlike other runs, you get the specially designed Dexter-Ann Arbor Run T-shirt only if you complete the half-marathon. Only in homo sapiens would observe 2000 of its members running around and almost getting themselves killed just to get a T-shirt. This year's T-shirt was a panel of comics designed by a local artist which poked fun at some aspects of running (one panel below).
Arms (to each other): Is this torture worth it? Hell! Let's stop!
Legs: Next year, man!'
Brain: Banish those thoughts! It's not worth giving up when you have finished 75% of the race.
(A few minutes pass and then the body wants to revolt against the brain's dictates.)
Feet: I think I'm cramped. These feet are not rated for running more than 5 miles at a stretch and we are at 10 miles right now.
Lower Back: This is killing me. Can't we stop now?
Brain: No! You are a bunch of losers.
Legs: Brain, what do you do anyway? All you do is sit there and give orders!
Brain: Look, I am making a sacrifice too! I am ensuring that you guys get most of the blood. Can't you hang on for a few more minutes? I promise that you will get a lot of rest once we are done. Toughen up, guys!
Arms, Lower Back, Butt, Feet, Legs (in unison): Aw! Shut up!
Finally, you see the finish line loom in the distance and almost automatically you seem to be running faster and faster. Your legs hit the timing mat and you have FINISHED your first Half Marathon!
It has taken about 3 days to completely recover from the aches and pain from the 2 and a quarter hour run, but hell it was worth it! Perhaps, the only reason why people like to run is chemical. I have never felt such an endo-morphine induced 'high' as I did on Sunday. Can't wait to get started for Chicago.
***
One T-shirt caption read: More and more women are running the country.
Save Maharashtra
Save what from whom?
Tom Friedman's last bestseller is: The World is Flat, in which he writes about a New World Order. He says that in the last decade, through the spread of the Internet, underwater high-speed cables and satellite communication - the playing field of the world is being levelled. He says that America and other Western countries HAVE NO CHOICE but to compete with an highly-educated class of people from India, China and Eastern Europe. There will be no borders and mediocrity is not going to be rewarded because your job could be easily done by someone else across the globe.
While the world is fearing Asian domination in the decades to come, we have people like Parimal Sondawale who still seem to be waging senseless battles. I agree that Maharashtra, and India as a whole, needs to be saved, but saved from parochial Parimal Sondawales and their like.
SC-Amway!
Standard Operating Procedure:
1. You are an Indian graduate student walking in a mall, or in a Walmart, or in a grocery store trying to buy stuff on sale; you see an Indian couple or a man in his late 20s from a distance.
2. A minute later, you are only a few feet away and the man smiles and says 'Hello'. Seeing an Indian face and given your good and friendly nature you respond.
3. Then his hand shoots out, "Hi, I am XYZ". The hand seems to beg for completing the handshake and you have to shake his hand and make the obvious reply, "Hi, I am Hirak".
4. 90% of the time they will say, "Wonderful! What a nice name! What does it mean..."
5. Then, you spend the next minute explaining what your name means and unknowingly open the gates to more questions.
6. Now, you are asked- where you are from and what you are studying - and five minutes have gone by in conversation you don't want to indulge in.
7. Then, he starts talking about himself and says that he graduated 2-3 years ago and this is wife - EFG and he is now working in ABC company.
8. He then slips in the fact that he also runs a 'small business'. He will NEVER mention what he exactly does.
9. After this ten minute conversation, it is assumed that both of you are now best buddies and he will a) give his card and b) try to exchange phone numbers.
10. End of conversation. He promises to call; you shrug and move to get the chips that are 1$ today instead of $1.39.
A few days later, you will get a call from the same guy. He will shoot the breeze for a few minutes (thus wasting precious minutes on your cell phone) and after while let the cat-out-of-the-bag. He is looking for 'talented, bright young people like yourself' for a 'fantastic limited-time only business opportunity' that he is already a part of. He wants to give you a chance to make 'easy side-income'. He then invites you to a meeting later in the week.
The fantastic limited-time only business opportunity is some variant of an Amway pyramid-scheme called Alticor, Quixtar, etc. A pyramid scheme involves you selling some household products and taking a percentage of the profit. If you get others in the scheme you will get a percentage of their percentage. Everyone is told that at first you will not make much but, after a few generations of such hookups the effect will multiply and soon you will be so high up in the pyramid that you can even afford to retire and relax. The money accumulates in your account as people below you get more and more people to join; raising you higher in the pyramid. All you need is drive and determination and a year of hard work. Not to mention a 100-300$ charge for 'membership' and the 'training' material.
You can't imagine how many people are sucked into such schemes on the promise of easy money. Once stuck, you automatically become an associate (read: accomplice) and the only way to get out is to suck more people into it. How the proponents of these schemes play on the psychology of people is worthy of admiration. To the people who want to quit, there is a whole array of tapes on 'being self-motivated' and 'how to avoid getting discouraged by people who don't know better' also at a cost.
It would not take more than a few minutes of thinking to see why such a scheme is flawed. But people still cannot shake off the idea that there is something to be made and with relative ease. I see more often than not that, it is a person recently married, who wants to make that little 'extra' or a person recently graduated and now is working who wants a little 'extra' perhaps to get married who get stuck in such schemes. If business was so simple why did everyone not take up this idea?
I wasted a few hours one evening listening to man rave about Quixtar after quitting his high-paying, extremely satisfying job so that he could take care of his kids and not have to work at all. I questioned their logic and then mine. What I was doing there in the first place? I was lured into going by this guy, who met me in the Mall with this wife. I was trusted him since he was from Pune, an engineer from COEP and spoke in Marathi. That evening when the 'great business opportunity' and its hare-brained plan was revealed, I felt sorry for him and thought of sending him this link: The truth about Amway! Who was I to tell him that anyway? To each his own.
Now, I can smell them off by a mile. The moment an unsolicited Indian hand shoots out, I say to myself, "It's the Amway folks again, it's time to go".
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