Blog Rules

This blog is about everything except family and work.

This blog is not serious. This blog’s only intent is to amuse, engage, entertain.

This blog is not about my work. My work is serious. I will mostly steer away from work-related content. If I do touch on work-life, the views expressed here are strictly personal.

This blog is public. This blog is a third space. Comments are welcome. I will moderate comments to control spam and random rants.

This blog is mine. The content is mine. All copyrights belong to me (not to Google), unless I’m channeling content that is already owned by someone else.

This blog is not newsy. Pondering eternal, universal truths is more my style than keeping pace with contemporary news cycles.

This blog is alive. It will incarnate at midnight on The Night of the New Moon and stalk the streets of Mumbai meting out rough justice to those with impure hearts. Sort of. 

More specifically, this blog is a living document. It will change, it will grow. Nothing about it is defined apart from the basic rules of the road. I don’t know what it will develop into in this second coming. That is as it should be. 

Time lapse image of the North Star which shows how it does not change position.
Similarly, the Blog Rules on this post won't really change

Moonballs are Back!

Friends, Romans, countrymen, blog readers.

Rejoice! Moonballs are back!

Your correspondent has resolved to restart his beloved blog.

Yes, I've resolved to restart my blog before and not followed through. But this time the restart is for real. Blog posts will start flowing with reasonable frequency from this week on.

What happened? I celebrated a landmark birthday. Hundreds of friends got back in touch. Almost all these friends (now scattered all over the world and socially distancing) mentioned Moonballs from Planet Earth. They nudged/ cajoled/ hassled me to start writing again. I was touched. The nudging/ cajoling/ hassling worked.

And thus it is decreed that Moonballs will fly again.

Moonwalking with Einstein. On why I blog, and take pictures

Just finished this excellent book called Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. Among its many pleasures was this passage, which feels close to the heart of what keeps me blogging, or taking photographs, for that matter:

Until relatively recently…people had only a few books – the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two – and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.

But after the printing press appeared around 1440, things began gradually to change. In the first century after Gutenberg, it because possible for the first time, for people without great wealth to have a small library in their own homes...

Today, we read books “extensively”, without much in the way of sustained focus, and with rare exceptions, we read each book only once. We value quantity over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read…

We read and read and read, and forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michael de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them”, he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.”

He goes on to explain how “to compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory”, he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of that the tome was about and what he thought of it.

I know that works for me too. Synthesizing a thought on what a book, or movie, or trip was about, and writing it down, makes the experience itself richer, more memorable.

Joshua Foer

Be an interesting guy

Dom Barton of McKinsey & Company

I'm on my first day at a new job. I've just joined McKinsey and Company, one of the world's finest organizations.

My cohort of new joiners is meeting the Global Managing Partner, Dominic Barton. Very nice for our first day in. Dom welcomes us into the firm, tells us about the firm's heritage and values, and gives us some perspective on what it takes to succeed at the firm. Dom's advice: "Be an interesting guy".

Not client-centricity, thought-leadership, value-creation or some such corporate-speak, but "be interesting". Interesting.

That advice really resonated with me. To me, being interesting is a goal in itself, an essential part of a life well-lived. That is sort of why I started this blog, and keep at it; it keeps open a window to worlds other than family and work-life.

Easier said than done. My blog posting rate, and the complexity of my posts, have dropped off sharply since joining McKinsey. But still, it is nice to know that Dom Barton thinks being interesting is good for your career.

Happy Easter from Anthony Gonsalves

An old friend put me on the spot recently, and quizzed me on how I found the enthu to keep blogging.

I wasn't expecting the question. So, understandably, I lapsed into my native language: geek-speak. I chuntered on about "intrinsic motivation" and "the universal need for self-expression, for which there are only limited opportunities in contemporary corporate life". Instead, I really should have answered my friend musically, by serenading him with the Amitabh Bachchan - Kishore Kumar classic "My name is Anthony Gonsalves".

Anthony Gonsalves has a real insight into an amateur blogger's psyche. His phrase "you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity", is spot on. In fact, if I'm asked the same question this Easter weekend, I might enhance my answer by emerging from an egg, unless "such extenuating circumstances coerce me to preclude you from such extravagance".

Happy Easter blog readers. For further clarification, please refer roop mahal, prem galli, koli नंबर चार सौ बीस . Excuse me, please!

How to Play a Limca Cut

Perceptive readers have noticed that this blog's name has changed from Moon Balls from Planet Earth to Limca Cuts from Planet Earth, and have asked me what Limca Cuts are. Like a Moon Ball, which is a spinner's slower ball, a Limca Cut is an obscure cricket term. Unlike a Moon Ball, a Limca Cut comes from the street cricket played in Mylapore, Madras, back in the 1980s.

Here is a step by step guide to playing a Limca Cut:

1. Stride. Get fully forward, right to the pitch of a ball on an off-stump line, and fuller than a good length

2. Stroke. Bring your bat down towards the ball in a smooth, vigourous vertical arc, with your left elbow held high, and with the face of the bat towards extra cover

3. Bamboozle. Mystify your opponents by striking the ball with the inside edge of the bat

4. Bisect. Direct the ball past the leg stump, along the Limca angle, bisecting the wicket-keeper and the fielder at fine leg

5. Acknowledge. Raise your bat and pump fists in the air, as the ball races past the diving fielder at fine leg to cross the boundary line and bring up the winning runs. Celebrate with Lime and Lemoni Limca as the crowd goes wild.

The banter after this shot typically goes:

Bowler: What kind of a shot is that?
Batsman: A stylish cut shot.
Bowler: A cut goes that way, man.
Batsman: No no. This is a special cut, a Limca Cut.

This shot is also referred to as a french cut in some other parts of the world, but hey, we are like that wonley. Mind it!

The Master of Disguise

This blog has a personality. It is a Doer. This blog is like a cool chick wearing shorts and two pony-tails, bouncing a ball. Doers are:

"The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time. "

This verdict was delivered by a web site which analyzes blogs and maps them to a psychological (MBTI) profile. Moonballs from Planet Earth is an ESTP blog: Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceptive.

This is not what I am like in real life. My preferred operating mode, as measured on most MBTI instruments, is INTJ: Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judgmental. INTJs are like the geeky guys who wear glasses and struggle to get dates:

"The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things.

They enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone. "

What's going on here?

One possibility is that the blog analysis tool is pure bunkum; a very real possibility.

Another interesting but speculative possibility is that this reflects the fact that I'm an amateur blogger.

I picked up the blog analysis tool from Greg Mankiw's blog. Mankiw is a professional economist. He is also an INTJ, an unsurprising personality type for a professional economist. His blog is linked to his work as an economist; it started as a teaching aid for his introductory economics class at Harvard. It's not surprising that his professional persona is reflected in his blog.

I am a professional analyst, a credit policy wonk. My time at work is spent wrestling with financial data, regression models and dodgy forecasts. I am blessed: I quite enjoy my job, it fits my INTJ preferences. The company I work for is dominated by NT personalities. But...the point of my blog is to get at stuff my mind wants to play with, but is not related to my work.

Maybe it's natural for extra-curricular activities to be coloured by people's shadow personality.

The Many Meanings of Moonballs

The word moonball has taken on an important new meaning: a type of squash serve.

This serve is played from the right-hander's forehand court, high and quite softly against the front wall (1). The balls descends steeply into the deep backhand corner (2), too high to comfortably play a backhand volley. It hits the back wall (3) and dies too quickly for a backhand drive (4). It's very effective, especially against average players like this blogger.

Click here for a demo of this serve on youtube, where it is unimaginatively described as a "lob serve".

The 100th Post

Thank you readers. Here's to the next 100 posts.

What are Moonballs?

This is my 50th post. It is time to clarify what moonballs are. Or more specifically, what moonballs are not. 

I have been surprised to learn that moonballs sounds risque to some of my peers and potential readers. While my imagination is piqued, I must confess that as a married, heterosexual, 37 year old banker of middle class south Indian antecedents, I am completely ignorant of the risque connotations of moonballs.

Rather than coarsen the tone of this blog by speculating on the possible risque connotations, here are a bunch of other possible meanings of moonballs: 

1. A nick name for idlis. A soft, white, round and iconic Tamil staple food 

2. A nick name for rossogollas. A soft, white, round, very sweet and iconic Bengali staple food 

3. Collector's item golf balls made from rocks that were brought back from the moon by Neil Armstrong 

4. Balls made of flubber, the material invented by The Absent Minded Professor in the film of the same name 

5. Formal dance balls (think Cinderella) held by the light of the harvest moon 

6. Brand name for a green cheese. This is a sphere of synthetically coloured cheddar cheese about the size and shape of a bulls-eye which is being test marketed as a healthy snack for American children 

7. Special white bowling balls used in the final, decisive round of professional bowling matches if the previous rounds fail to identify a clear winner 

8. A very high and slow lob played in tennis. As in: hit the ball all the way up to the moon. This is a cunning shot ideally played on floodlit courts. The ball is hard to spot if it goes above the height of the floodlights 

 9. Balls bowled by Mr Moon. Which translates to Mr Chandra in Sanskrit or Hindi. Planet Earth translates to Planet Prithvi 

10. A cricket delivery mastered by Jeremy Snape, captain of the Leicestershire Foxes and occasional England one-day specialist. A spinner's slower ball. Typically an offbreak bowled so slowly that the batter tends to mistime his hoick and holes out to mid wicket.

Blogger Econometrics

Greg Mankiw thinks he has had 3,000,000 visitors to his blog.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/10/3000000.html

This was my comment on his blog...with a helpful link to direct some traffic to my blog:

Sitemeter also measures the time each visitor spends on your site. Fifteen of the last twenty visitors had spend zero seconds. And the other five had spent less than a minute.

Sure, this blog is great. And fellow bloggers like me spend a lot of time here. But 3 million visitors is a huge over estimate of your effective reach.