When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?
IPL has sparked a betting craze. Crores of people, aspiring to be crorepatis, are trying all sorts of P&C to pick a team and place a bet.
So I picked the worst possible combination because I had no idea about many players. They offered me a discount, and allowed me to make my first bet of ₹39.
In the end, my rank was 1 crore something.
Here I have written about it in detail.
Game of Skill vs Game of Chance
Happy Reading. 🙂
It’s borderline racist, well, definitely some kind of ist, to judge a person’s laughter, but this neighbour really laughs in a disturbing manner. It’s so loud, wild and seismic that it can cut through vacuum, reach your soul and wring your senses from a tranquiliser induced sleep. It has such carefully crafted notes of sublime ugliness that every time I hear it, the strands of hair on my chest unscrew themselves and leap out of the third floor window. It is so far removed from the basic sense of art, and I am not even talking Michaelangelo, but the simple cave scribbles where you can’t tell people from noodles, that even the well intentioned, most gentlemanly, sensitive, empathetic, vegan listeners would confuse it with a mule’s mating call. I have no valid reason to attribute this to his daily ganja intake, which would make old Chinese opium addicts look like Buddhist monks, but I think putting things in your body, particularly where they certainly do not belong, is never a good idea. If nature wanted smokers to win the rat race of evolution, we’d have been brought up in the womb of Etna rather than the bushes of Ethiopia. Anyways, I have talked more than enough about my neighbor, who doesn’t deserve an emoji worth of attention.
So let me talk about my cook instead. The good thing about her is she is mostly quiet. The bad thing is that the mustard oil is out of stock again, just within a week. Frugality is certainly not a virtue, or even a word, in her dictionary. She thinks we are rich, even though we almost never pay on time. Maybe it’s because we make her cook tofu every other day (packaged “vegetables” are traditionally seen as food of the rich.) But to be honest, tofu is not only nutritious and lactose free, but it’s also cheap. Way cheaper than the off season Bhindi, especially if you buy it from grocery apps that offer discounts.
But today the cook talked non-stop for eons, mostly about her kids, who are keen to learn about computers. I told her to get them into coding and all because that’s where the money is. The food tasted better than the ones on other days.
There are like half a dozen countries named Guinea in Africa. It’s such a vast continent they probably ran out of names. So they just call one Republic of Congo and the other Democratic Republic of Congo. Similar is the case for Niger-Nigeria, Sudan-South Sudan. And there’s a country called South Africa, and another one called Central African Republic. I do appreciate this straightforwardness. Taxonomy would have been a sing song had Africans colonised the world. In such a just world, a spade would be called a spade.
Found a new hobby: Addition and subtraction without using smartphone/paper.
Totally orgasmic.
Just to be absolutely certain, I solved some CSAT questions through guesswork. And got those right.
At the end of it, I was so high that I’d have played the Russian Roulette with five rounds in.
“From Mahabharat to Modi-Bharat, betting and gambling are portrayed as escalators to moral and financial doom. Which is why the epic hero ended up gambling away his own wife, and the present government has permitted it under a Khiljian tax burden. Needless to say, it stifles free will and is a glaring manifestation of an authoritarian regime. “my full time communist, part time gambler friend whatsapped me yesterday. Since he fought the election for the post of student coordinator in the department 3 years ago, he has been talking in the manifesto language. He likes to take his chances, and has been trading for quite some time- an act of bleeding the capitalists internally (as he calls it). He has a betting whatsApp group called “The Awakened Proletariats”, which has more members than my contact list.
After convincing me that Betting was good not only for my iq and personality development, but also for my weight loss (neural activity burning calories- some high level bio I couldn’t understand since I wasn’t an awakened proletariat), he told me about this new app called Dreamy 11. It’s a popular platform with star cricketers promoting betting as a fresh, radical and rewarding investment. The stars stress the word crore, and there is a press conference with the winner, who always looks like a middle aged SBI official in need of money.
Dazzled by the dream of being a crorepati, and forgetting all the wheels I had spun in Amazon General Knowledge contests without winning a cowrie worth of merchandise, I downloaded the app from the play store and contacted a veteran gambler from my college. He was a respected gambler, and would bet on everything from cricket to tic tac toe. Towards the end of his graduation, he became obsessed, and his sentences came out like bet calls. He used to go to dates and blurt out things like: I would bet ₹500 rupees that you’d order Honey Chili Potato. When the girls never contacted him again, he was ready to bet ₹1000 that they were all gold diggers and had found a wealthier sugar daddy. He also claimed to have made a breakthrough in game theory, which was a spectacular feat given he was a Sociology student. There was a whole mythical universe around the man. People stopped asking answers from the toppers during the exam, instead, they placed their faith in this guy. Sometimes, even the topper asked a question or two.
However, I couldn’t believe my eyes when the veteran gambler wrote that he’d quit gambling after he made losses of astronomical proportions, the figures of which he did not reveal, but it was sufficient to say he’d to pawn off some of his hard earned money and borrow some more, and was keen to discourage me from getting into what he had earlier called the “one true sport of human civilisation”. It felt so atrocious, as if a soldier had deserted his platoon and switched sides. I told him to teach me some game theory, and he said he had undergone hypnosis to forget that.
Instead of being a guide, he sent me some quora answers explaining Dreamy 11 winners were all bots. The quora guys wrote lengthy answers backing their claim, using high brow maths, and the only thing they could convince me of was that they were a bunch of sore losers.
I flipped a coin and called heads. Heads it was!
I flipped again and called tails. Tails it was!
I did this exercise for half a dozen times and got it right every time. My error rate was 0.00. Take that, losers! Tonight was my night.
Just to be absolutely certain, I solved some CSAT questions through guesswork. And got those right.
At the end of it, I was so high that I’d have played the Russian Roulette with five rounds in.
So I opened the app and it asked for my id. Then it offered me new user discount and allowed me to select players for tonight’s match. That was the first time it dawned upon me that I wasn’t a true cricket fan. Because apart from star cricketers, I hardly knew anyone. I couldn’t gather 11 recognised faces together.
But had I known the players, it wouldn’t be a game of chance, it would be a game of skill. And tonight was the night of chance. I have no idea how I don’t even require a molecule of ethanol to get as audacious as a barrel down pirate could only dream to be.
So I picked random players, including three that were not even playing. I had absolutely no idea about the pitch, I couldn’t tell the batsman from the bowler, and had no clue how they counted points.
But I already declared on all relevant whatsApp groups and chats, including NoBrokerz, that I was going to be a Crorepati. I asked them, just for fun, to list whatever debt I owed to them. Surprisingly, most of them came up with a large amount which I never borrowed of course. I also added to cart the iPhone I have been dreaming of lately, and planned to donate a significant amount to charity for kids suffering from major diseases. I was soaring so high in that terrain of Baronian affluence that I switched to sitting cross legged instead of the spiderist sprawl that comes natural to me. I wikihow-ed Victorian mannerisms, and for some reason google started showing me tooth aligners.
As the match began, it turned out it was a bowling friendly pitch. And I hadn’t selected Arshdeep. Rabada flopped. I didn’t know if the other two were bowlers. Head was my captain, and the first to fall. I was out of the winning zone in the 4th over of the first innings, and never came close.
At the end, my rank was some 1 crore 50 lakh in a contest of 1 crore 51 lakh people. I found other disturbing stats too. If my rank was even 50, I would have won only ₹15000. Imagine winning against 1.5 crore people and receiving 15k at the end. If this is not poverty of aspirations, I don’t know what is. I also found out that the player who topped had a female DP but a male name, and his 13th team had won it.
Needles to say, I was sunken with grief. I went back to quora, and surprisingly, all the math now made sense to me. Those wise people had demonstrated it so clearly, without a thread of doubt, that all the winners were bots. I sent the quora link to all my creditors, along with financial investment articles from Harvard alumni. The NoBrokerz people offered me a cheap 2BHK in consolation.
I called my communist gambler friend and yelled at him. He yelled back like a general, and said revolution was never a rosy path, and urged me to continue.
“I often run into losses. But I don’t stop. Rather I steal money from my capitalist father’s store counter. Bleeding the capitalist, but in another way. “
While I was trying to sleep, a random thought fluttered for a while. What if I have a better luck tomorrow!
I stretched my hand, got a coin and tossed it a few times in the dark.
Turns out when you toss a coin in the light, it’s a game of skill; when you do it in the dark, it’s a game of chance. And I’d say never take a chance, particularly if you’re a proletariat without a capitalist father.
I have forgotten what money smells like.
Wrote this about a year ago:
We had always been a family of limited means, but now and then, my mother would sacrifice some of her necessities to fulfill my luxuries. But now that she’s a decade old diabetic on a declining spiral, medicines have replaced the family photo frames on the shelf and inherited my parasitic claims to her wealth. Every next month, she goes down with an infection, which takes too long to heal. Add to it the cost of building a house in a town worth deserting and bank loans bleeding us with thousand cuts. Sure, my younger brother has started earning- while I continue to be a hole in the household purse- but savings are meagre in a metropolis. Whatever extra he manages, he sends it to my mother, who spends it on tiles for the steps. She is obsessed with building a house because we used to live under an asbestos roof once, and it leaked every time it rained. So we placed three bowls on the bed, and kept replacing those if the rain decided to stay longer. And this hurt her more because we were born poor but she had left her father’s mansion to move into my father’s shanty. And lastly, the cost of living in Delhi has shot up as if they have discovered crude oil under the Ranhola bridge. The moral fabric of merit-based competition never had a thread of empathy, so your poverty never mattered to anyone else but you. The more the applicants, the tougher the competition, and the easier it gets for the rich, as the only way of making competition tough is to make it unaffordable for sections of people.
Anyways, long story short, I am broke. I have forgotten what money smells like. I haven’t seen wealth for so long I can put myself up for adoption by Angelina Jolie. I can feature in the Multidimensional Poverty Index posters, as the side kick. In fact, I don’t even belong here. I belong to an LDC, the last ones in the list. But I am so poor that I’d probably have to swim to an LDC. I am as unfree as a serf, as incapable as a slave, and as unsustainable as a communist colony. It’s been months since I have tasted delicious juicy umami calories. I subsist on aroma, vicariousness and imagination.
Before the end of the month, I violate the minimum balance requirement of my elitist bank and survive on credit from there. At the beginning, I prepare the demand for grants, self censoring desires and counting only essentials. Whatever money is released is in the nature of tied grants, and must be spent on monthly payments first. There’s no contingency fund. And no surplus to invest in fancy mutual funds. Every time GROW people mail me, I get four units sadder.
Adult life is exceptionally difficult without a consistent inflow of money, especially if you have been used to a certain level of comfort in the past. Happiness doesn’t necessarily come from money, but whatever it comes from- be it objects or experience- has a price tag. Moreover, happiness definitely doesn’t come from the lack of money. The difference between charity and poverty is the difference of having a choice. You can donate everything if it makes you feel good, but you have to have everything in the first place. People departing with their money to demonstrate that money is useless, in my opinion, are using money to derive psychological fulfillment. Anyways, I am not a theorist, but I have seen Maslow’s pyramid, and if you go by that, money is the ladder to happiness. And me, I am just hanging by the base of the pyramid.
Poverty, I have come to realize, is of two kinds. One that’s relative to others and the other, that’s relative to oneself in the past. I have become worse off as compared to when I was in JNU, and even worse while in Ranchi. The question of affordability never crossed my mind because 1 GB was a sufficient monthly supply of data, and paperbacks made you sound intelligent. People ate either chowmein or rolls as delicacies and got movies through the local mobile accessory shop at five rupees per movie. In JNU, everything was subsidized, so I managed to save a few bucks and buy books, and even feel rich occasionally.
Then, middle class poverty is complicated. It’s not as if you’re in rags. In fact, you may have a decent house/car/assets, but you’d lack the ability to spend. Every unit money added goes into interest repayment/savings. Whatever little cash in hand you have, you save that as well, in piggy bank, or in the godrej locker. When that money becomes big, you buy furniture. If it becomes bigger, you take a trip to Vaishnodevi. If it becomes even bigger, you fear for its safety and park it in the bank to accompany the preexisting deposit. When that deposit gets bigger, you withdraw it and spend it on your kid’s marriage. The aspiration for one day of sherwani keeps your family clad in charity clothes all your life!
We do have money, we just don’t have it in our hands. All assets we have are inaccessible because they are not wealth but vouchers to be used during emergency or one time ceremonial extravaganza. Simplicity thus becomes a virtue for life, except for one day when it becomes a sin.
Gradually, simplicity, read frugality, becomes embedded in your neurons. And it’s dangerous. I am ready to let my back suffer rather than order an ergonomic chair. One time payment of ₹5000 is unthinkable for me, even if the cost of not making that choice is a definite progressive spinal dysfunction. On some days, I and Cyan make peace with rice and dal, calling it the signature of simplicity. When you are poor, you have to give yourself the lies. Lies keep dignity alive.
We can’t get the ac repaired, because we don’t have that kind of drug money. So we spend the summer wrapped in sweat, cursing the heat and the world.
I’ll be taking up a job in June. Maybe learn some Excel. The world is changing too fast, and is racing towards the future. In doing so, it has left behind the past, making its custodians – history graduates- nearly irrelevant.
I can’t share this with people I know, so I am putting it here.
To end this long monologue, an advice to my younger 15 year old rebellious self:
Don’t watch 3 Idiots. Opt for science. No fucking questions asked. All jobs are forms of slavery. Just sell your soul for a higher price.
A lot happened between that and the time we said goodbye to Jade and watched him whittle away. But I want remember the parting in this way. 💕
Jade finally decided to say goodbye to Delhi because the Godpapa-state back home, which whatsApp uncles proudly proclaim has birthed a governance model which the west should emulate, withheld his parents’ salary since the last year, despite the repeated court verdict to release the money, like, before sunset. Since surviving in Delhi without a tree that grows gold is tough, Jade decided to sever his ties from the capital, and continue his prep from home, with his desi boys.
“There’s a library. ” He was hopeful, “and it is on the land purchased from my friend’s chachaji’s, who is a strongman. So it’ll be free of cost. I will be walking to the place, and that’s how I will integrate weight loss plan with studies. “
Jade had applied for jobs, but there was nothing at hand. He had a Btech degree, but it was of no use because, apparently, everybody needs coders these days. He did find one, but it required shifting to Bengalore and a life of slavery. So he declined.
In addition to that, with parents growing old, he thought it would be best to stay home and take care of parents along with managing study. The middle class nuclear family experiment in our society is a failure if you ask me. Each of us have old, diabetic, lonely parents, being constantly drugged by WhatsApp news peddlers, and we the degree holder prodigies, have no jobs good enough to take care of them. Which partly explains why so many IAS aspirants.
Anyways, to give Jade a good farewell, we packed for him his favorite besan laddoos, and some novels and left for his flat a day before.
He had already packed most of the stuff, and although his room had looked like an antiquarian’s den all the time, he had managed to stuff everything in 3 sacks and 3 trolley bags. It’s amazing how once out of bags, even solid objects tend to expand and occupy space!
Jade has always been a different man because he wasn’t a single man. A committed man and a single man look alike, and share 99% of the DNA, but they differ from us like Sapiens differed from Neanderthals. Jade had always been organised and clean, with all the civic sense intact- something I secretly admired- while we lived like fungi that revel in spreading without a pattern. He had an entire meena baazaar in his room- from lighters to sandwich maker- but it was all arranged well. Nothing seemed out of place. And now this abode was so full of emptiness, it seemed like Jade’s ghost will haunt this place till someone makes it a home again.
He welcomed us and we talked for a while, mostly about cricket. Cyan and Jade squabbled over whether selectors should shun Surya or Sanju, while I wondered if the laung lata shop was open. Having visited this place a few times, I had mapped my own memory spots, and the laung lata shop was the brightest of them.
After they were done with their prime time debate over the best team for World Cup 2023, we walked to the park, and were feasted on by mosquitoes. After Cyan googled the latest dengue case count, we chose to keep moving, and since Jade had started to miss this place, we decided to take a long and slow stroll.
When you depart from a place that was your home once, no matter how long you have suffered, you always want to take every piece of it with you. I could feel what Jade was feeling.
I remember leaving Ranchi. I didn’t have the time to properly say my farewells to the beloved city. It was hectic. My father arrived in the morning and we had a ticket for the evening. The day went in packing. We hailed a cab and just left.
I miss everything about the place. The ghost of Ranchi keeps me awake on many nights. Let’s not go there.
We walked and talked. Nothing sad. It was mostly about Don Number One.
And then we reached the store that offered a V S Naipaul book at the cost of an egg roll. So we bought half a dozen books- from Naipaul to Khushwant to Hobsbawm to Verne to Shelley- each costing ₹50. This was another bright spot in my memory. Jade’s canvas would be studded with hundreds of them, because he had spent his time with his girlfriend here.
After getting the food packed, we trudged back. A soulless room welcomed us. Jade showed us some photos from his trip to the mountains a few years ago. Memories always look happy, which is why they look so alien. But memories are our shelters from the horror of our present; the bias we exercise in building them is forgivable.
Cyan and Jade carried on with their conversation late into night. They were talking emotional stuff, like why men don’t cry, and Cyan asked if Jade knew a trick that could make him cry at will, but I preferred loneliness to vulnerability at that point, so I plugged my earbuds in and dozed off listening to Faasle. That song could definitely make men cry.
In the morning, we stuck to the routine of chai-poha, and then sat on a park bench amid a soothing breeze, educating Cyan about relationships.
“What do you mean I can’t tell her she looks bad? I want to give her an honest opinion. “
“If you have to give honest opinions, go write editorials. Don’t get into a relationship. ” Jade said, by now pissed off with Cyan’s idealism. Cyan was not ready to take this.
“Well, I can’t tell lies. And I appreciate a woman who respects truth. “
“Sorry, Gandhi Baba. ” Jade said.
The thing with Cyan is he’s grown up in an all boys school. So he’s as single as one gets. And these days, he is sick of his singlehood. So he has bought all kinds of multivitamins, dry fruits and peanut butter, and is trying to do pushups and everything. He says what’s stopped him from getting into a relationship is his lanky frame. I don’t think that’s the case, but he is so confident of the diagnosis that he doesn’t entertain any criticism.
The thing about truth, in my view, is that there are two kinds of truth- bad truth and good truth. Good truth should never be stifled while bad truth should not be spoken unless it has a nobler end. Saying that a person looks ugly is a pointless and hurtful perspective. It’s not even a truth.
Anyways, every morning, Cyan does exactly one push up, and he gets exhausted from all that effort, which is why he refuses to lift the grocery bag after purchasing two kilos of potato.
In the evening, we shifted some items from Jade’s house to the couple’s flat. We were eager to use the 5G wifi and download all the movies we had added to the cart. However, to our dismay, the wifi needed a recharge, and all of us were broke. Moreover, the room was bathed in a perfume that gave migraine to Cyan. When we insisted that a girl’s perfume was not to be criticised, he was visibly shocked and dragged us out of the room at once.
On our way back, we had Laung lata and samosa chaat. The Landlord had come to inspect the room before paying back the security. He checked the room with a magnifying glass and grumbled about some stain on the slab. Jade stared at him for some time like a ghost, which was enough to frighten him into giving the money back.
“He was a real parasite. ” Jade explained later, “would increase the room rent randomly and regularly, and threaten to toss me out every once in a while. At first, I tried to tolerate that, but he only got bolder. Then, one day while he came to conduct a surprise check of his flat, I pretended to call a fellow from my village and asked him to send a few thugs from our warrior caste. I said I needed to take care of this guy who troubled me in the park. Since then, the oldie pretends to be strict, but when I show him my displeasure, he settles like a good kid. “
In Delhi, landlords exist in extremes: they are either parasites (like Jade’s) or angels (like mine). More on this later.
We got an SUV on OLA and loaded all the luggage. On the way, the driver told us a lot of things: about the surgery of his spine, and that he couldn’t see well, but he was so experienced that he could drive with an overdose of desi daaru. He had once gotten into a fight with a passenger who had a relative in the police.
“I gave him an extra round of beating, because the owner of this SUV is a lawyer. “
And then he talked about ghosts, one he had encountered while crossing the Yamuna.
“It was a wailing lady. Could have been Yamuna itself. With so much pollution, you can’t tell whose ghost it is. “
To save ourselves from his macabre gossip, we switched on the radio, and the mood inside the cab suddenly turned into an exuberant one.
The song that came up was Musaafir Hoon Yaaron, and the driver, unable to keep his mouth shut, began to sing. But he could sing well, so Cyan jumped in. And then it was Jade. At last, I too found myself humming along. The cab with its throbs joined a cheerful chorus of four as it zoomed along under the starry roof of a sparkling city.
A lot happened between that and the time we said goodbye to Jade and watched him whittle away. But I want to remember the parting in this way. Four people singing in a cab on a bright night about the transience of being in a city that celebrated being.
On our way back, Delhi was quieter without Jade. Somehow, the lights had dimmed, and nobody sang.
roastedmoongfalis 