They say time is money. Indeed it is so, particularly if you spend all your time to acquire money. But money changes hand. So there is a continual process of exchange of money. Money is spent for your subsistence, surplus money is spent to enhance your quality of living and further to contribute to your saving.

Saving is important as it is to raise your rank in the society. Even further, money is invested and it multiplies. So money is added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. The ability of multiplication takes you up the ladder.

Money is ofcourse fugitive. The amount of money earned by you tries to escape your hand and lands up in other people’s coffer. It is happening every moment. Consumers are always letting it go in lieu of procuring some goods. So the ability to hold money is crucial.

The economists will say that the money has velocity and that means it has direction too. There is voltality; the evaporation that has a role to play. Left naturally in a society, the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. The Govt. intervenes and imposes tax. Then the money gets its colour: black or white.

Inflation hits hard to the poor and middle class. It is so because they have to buy things for their subsistence with a higher price. So their saving gets compressed and the extra bit of money gets deposited in the account of the rich, the manufacturers.

More than a century ago an Italian engineer, Vilfredo Pareto observed a peculiar thing. Irrespective of any society and time, it was noticed that, the distribution in money assumes a peculiar form. The tail ends (rich people) follow a universal character (mathematically a power law) which is still largely a mystery. The interpretation turns out to be that merely a handful of minority has an access to the lion’s share of the total wealth/ money in a society or in a country. This is popularly known as 80-20 rule. A 20% of the people hold 80% of the total wealth/ money. In a capitalist country like America, it is even 90-10 or 97-03 or so on. But the overall character is same everywhere even it was just the case during communist regime in Russia as it has been claimed. So the inequality or disparity is a hard fact and there is a tendency of it to increase all the time.

Let us now consider two propositions by a sociologist (John Angle):

Proposition #1: Where people are able to produce a surplus, some of the surplus would be fugitive and would leave the possession of the people who produce it.

Proposition #2: Wealth confers on those who possess it the ability to extract from others. So netting out each person’s ability to do this in a general competition for surplus wealth, the rich tend to take surplus away from the poor.

So if you are in the competetion, time is always running out!

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Success is such a magic that it erases the uneasy memories of all the previous failures. Thank you, Abhinav.
Your success is more of ours. This will perhaps make the spotlight shine elsewhere than just cricket...and in the sustained way. Now is the time.

Dedication, hard work and knowledge - these can be substituted neither by excuse or nor by rhetoric. Are our politicians listening? When politics is all, certainly the politicians should
be ultimate important. They are. But since they cannot win gold in Olympic, the realization should come from them to ask themselves how. If the asking is honest and serious there will be plenty of eligible people, who love their trade, to show the way.

The ‘honest asking’ of course has a lot of side effects. It defies your authority and denies your existence at any moment. Thus the path is hardly followed in our politics of win and loss. Instead, it is better to wait for an occasional success like this and encash it as much as possible. The philosophy is simple.

The sports bodies are infiltrated by seasoned politicians in this country. Their interest lies in the politics of game as well as in the game of politics. In any of the forms we are entertained. And entertainment is all that counts!

At the next step, the interest is calculated on the last balance amount and the new reducing balance amount is obtained in the same way. Balance amount = Previous balance amount + Interest on the balance amount – Repayment amount. This process is continued iteratively until the recalculated balance reduces to zero. If the repayment amount is to be given every month and a fixed amount is decided to be returned every month, it is termed as EMI (equated monthly installment). The period over which this repayment process will go on is decided by the amount of EMI, given a certain rate of interest. Conversely, the EMI can be decided if the exact number of installments for repayment is decided. For a fixed interest rate, the EMI and the number of installments can be fixed once for all (not exactly). For the floating interest rate, the EMI has to be decided over a projected period of repayment considering possible small revisions of interest rates.

We get panicked as some odd amount is often thrust upon us by the banks or financiers. Things remain sufficiently unclear (sometimes hidden) as we scratch our head- what to do? First we have to think if the mathematics is alright. There has to be careful scrutiny of any hidden amount or some misleading facts which may complicate the matter. The calculations can be easily done with a hand calculator or writing a small computer program. If you are keener, you can write an elementary algebraic formula to fiddle with.

Usually, if you take loan on the condition of floating interest, a EMI value is given to you when the loan agreement process is complete. The amount must be greater than a minimum value (‘critical’ amount). The critical value of EMI is basically the calculated interest at each month. The payable EMI amount should definitely be greater than this critical value as the balance amount has to be kept reducing to get it over finally.

For a loan of Rs.1 lakh with the floating interest rate of 9.5%, the critical EMI is around Rs.792. Therefore, the payable amount that is to be decided should certainly be more than this amount. If now the EMI is settled to be Rs.1000, the total loan is repaid within a period of 16 and half years. (One thus ends up in repaying Rs.1000 16.5 12 = Rs.198, 000 over the entire period.) If the EMI is decided to be Rs.800 then the loan period extends over a little more than 48 years! (In this case one ends up in repaying around Rs.800 48 12 = Rs.460, 800!) On the other hand, if the EMI is decided to be heavy, like Rs.1500 for example, the loan period ends within 8 years. (The total repayment is now Rs.1500 8 12 = Rs.144, 000 only.) In the course of repayment, if the interest rate is hiked, the critical EMI amount gets shoot up and the payable EMI should thus be increased in accordance so as to bring down the loan period. The general principle is that our payable EMI should be as far away from the critical amount as possible. The more we take time to repay the loan amount, the EMI may be within our comfortable margin, but we compromise in repaying larger and larger amount in aggregate over the entire period. If we think that is a huge loss then that is to be. The mathematics clearly says that. We are only buying time with that huge extra amount of money that we are forced to shell out. (So clearly, time = money, ha!)

All the interest calculations that are done most of the time, however, made on the initial loan amount whereas the rate hike comes into play after a period of repaying a certain amount of loan considering previously lower interest rates. Thus the actual number of installments, for example, will be somewhat less than that are mentioned here. The calculations have to be made on the actual balance amount every time and this fact is important to be checked from the bank statement.

The financiers or the financial advisers will perhaps all these things in mind (and what’s more) and give you some obvious tips like increasing the EMI or the time period or to pay a lump sum at some point to reduce the balance amount in a big way. However, you may play around with the simple calculation of compound interest and decide yourself!

Being atheist is often too much taxing. You explain people why. The common and domesticated people often doubt you about your convictions and depth of knowledge if you do not subscribe to any faith. Following rituals and taking part in religious festivals become social norms. If you are not active in that, your integrity may be at stake. You have to wade through hordes of excuses and feasible explanations in a very intricate way so as not to offend the believers. The believers, the most of them, keep on coaxing to include you in their herd. It is often not easy to come out triumphant. This is more so as the believers all around you are your good friends, your relatives or may be your spouse!

Being ethically correct and tactically right will be a constant effort on your part while practicing atheism. This is more so for the first generation atheists. I mean, if you are born to a religious family (in general), you will invariably be entangled with the rituals and disobeying those will not bring you in good light. You will be emotionally exploited, sometimes, to just go through some.

I remember the incidence when my father died long ago. I was a student then. Being born in a Hindu family I was supposed to go through a series of bizarre rituals after his death. It was quite an emotional situation. I declined and I proclaimed to have no faith in those ’meaningless’ rituals. It was quite a melodrama on the part of rest of the family members to make me do the things. Still I didn’t buzz. In such a time of criticality, arguments often do not succeed. Faith is everything. Even if the faith is not installed in you so strongly, you are driven to do things as those are being done through ages unquestionably.

God and Spirituality should be something inner realizations, very deeply rooted in people. So that must be respected and that should be kept inside. Expressions and discourses, scriptures and strictures through a ‘religion’ are unnecessary. Atheism is not just an awkward decision, it takes someone through a long winding logical deductions to arrive at a certain situation where the all pervading concept of ‘god’ no longer plays a role in his/her life.

(5-7-5 syllables)
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Romance has no bar-
Political patriots
Want no peace but war!

Violence strikes us once again. A series of blasts in Ahmadabad and Bangalore have made us dumb found once again. First we get scared, we get angry and frustrated, and we get worried of our future. We wonder why such things happen again and again. Wherefrom comes this much hatred? What kind of mental thought process put those act together? We wonder how meticulously that plans could be executed to kill the civilians, the innocent people at the end. ‘Terrorism’ - as we call it. Is it anything to do with religion? Is it a kind of politics of hatred or revenge? No true religion will permit such meticulously nurtured mental illness. The act of incompetence – surely it is! Do we call them cowards or are they themselves disturbed for some reasons?

The rich or the poor, the powerful or the powerless whoever they are, they definitely show a well networked activities with a presumably thoroughly trained army of youth for execution – a highly ‘disciplined work’ at place. The possession of their knowledge of certain technologies for destruction is nonetheless important. Alas! This energy and intelligence of the youth could well be channelized to achieve something great: some creative endeavor…could have been some scientific and technological marvels for the entire mankind. The world would be more livable.

The act of destruction makes us all vulnerable. Indeed, this kind of hidden act of destruction makes both us, the common people and the terrorists, unstable. May be the concept of peace or the normal life of creativity and love is not in their agenda. This needs to be addressed.

A bright young man is made to be terrorist by training. They are made to believe some ‘cause’, in the name of religion or so. The tender and beautiful minds are thus lost into the act of destruction, in a regimented group. They eventually begin to identify themselves with the ‘cause’ (whatever it may be) and get ready to kill lives or to kill even themselves. What a great loss of valuable human resources!