Sports Meet

I ended up taking Anisha to Kanteerava stadium for inter school atheletic meet as she was representing her school in the under 8 girls 200m and 4x50 m relay. The meet was organized by KPMG and there were about 170 schools that had signed up sending in a whopping 5000 kids. It was quite a scene seeing so many kids from so many schools. The traditional marchpast was very good and I was impressed by the size and efficiency of the organizers. One of the things that surprised me was a sea change in how schools/parents/kids approached these things. Most schools had their own colorful sports uniforms and many kids were dressed up in spikes for the races. I couldn't help wonder about when I participated in sports and ran on barefoot. There were many kids from govt schools who were participating in the races on barefoot. I was wondering what went over these kids minds seeing their more affluent competitors (since I certainly know what would have gone through my mind if I was there).

As most of you know, a 200m race goes round the curve and in order to compensate for the curvature, they have kids in the outer lane placed ahead than the kids in the inside lanes. Anisha was in the second inside lane and while she had bent down to take off, a thought went through which unfortunately ended up being true. The thought was, most kids of age 6 do not realize that they are all running the same distance although the participant on the outer lane seems little ahead of you at the start itself. As soon as the gun went off, the kids got off the block and when she saw the kid in the outer lane already so far ahead, she lost hopes and slowed down. She came crying saying that the other kids got a head start and I did not have the nerve to explain to her the geometry of why. I really felt sorry for her but the kind of girl she is, she forgot all that and went for her relay the next day. Her team mate ended up falling thereby affecting the team's chance. It was a good experience for Anisha watching and competing against so many kids and hopefully she walked away with something more than just memories.

Getting started with Investing

I recently decided to start exploring on how to go about investing in Indian stock market and so far have found the following two choices straightforward.
1) Sharekhan.com: This was suggested by my friend Sudarshan and is turning out be a real good company. Their web site is comprehensive enough and their service is excellent. The particular gentlemen I deal with is very responsive and never takes more than few hours to resolve any issue. Sharekhan is conveninently integrated with several online banks (ICICI, HDFCBank, CitiBank etc) to move your funds back and forth at the click of a few buttons. Applying for IPO as well is just an online process and ususally takes less than a minute to complete.
2) ICICIDirect.com: ICICI provides a 3 in 1 account (savings, demat and trading) just like most US brokers and is pretty easy to operate and move funds around. For those of you who do not know what "demat" means, it is holding shares in electronic form at your broker instead of physical share certificates under your mattress. For folks from US, it has always been in demat form and so no biggy except that you get confused when you hear this term for the first time.


TCS (Tata Consultancy Service) put up thier IPO and that is going to be my first investment here in the Indian markets. BTW, one of the interesting facts for those following Google IPO is that all IPO's now in India are being run on the dutch auction format (the same kind Google is planning) and so was surprised to find out, the general awareness on how this works.

Simple Pleasures

The other day I went to get a hair cut at the corner barber shop. One thing I have always felt and experienced it again, is the fact that, you have to give minimal instructions to the barber here and he invariably knows what you want and rarely screws up. In US, no matter which barber I went to, I always had to be very specific in providing the instructions and still there were these screw ups. Anyway, getting back to the story, after the hair cut was done, he asked me if I wanted to get a shave. I felt at my scratchy beard and gave him a go ahead. At the end of the shave, he asked me if I wanted to dye my hair which I promplty refused. However as soon as he mentioned about oil massage (to my head) I thought I will give it a try since I have always enjoyed the quick head massage before. After I had picked one of the 3 choices of oil, the oil did wonders in terms of cooling. It was as if, you had eaten mint using your head instead of mouth! The massage to the head was the best part. At the end of it, he suggested that I try steaming my oily head to stimulate the scalp. By now, he had me eating from his hand and I just suckered into one more of his service. He put this dome (the kind used on females for doing perm) and blasted some good steam all around the scalp for nice warm up. At the end of it he massaged the head again and had me walking out of the salon with a very light headed feeling (pun intended). The surpise was the cost, only Rs 100/- (hair cut + shave + oil massage + steam) which would have had been my tip in US for a regular hair cut. I went away promising myself a routine service with this guy but haven't had time to go back to him since. Even here, it is the same story; You may have a facility right next door to you but making time to use it is the hard part.