Risk, Return and a Little Utility

The title is a hangover of the financial crisis and the numerous articles woven around it in the papers over the last month. Due to un-imaginable reasons i had been regular on papers and magazines , though my itinerary to the library had been messed up in the last week. To add to that , i had been reading editorials in Hindu (OK, i think i should stop blushing) . Yeah, whatever it is, one component that never changes in my daily life is 9 hrs sleep. :)

Now, the exercise of reading papers had been very interesting, one i had an underlying saddistic pleasure to see the markets go down - not because i am anti-capitalist(which i am not) - may be a bit because the arrogance of (a few) I-bankers is reduced to zilch if not humility, and more importantly, it had been an amazing story of postponing the effects of mediocrity under the disguise of sophistication (which is only a worked up form of arrogance). Anyway, my knowledge of the subject is only limited by the spate of opinions in the news papers, so cant really give authentic comments. But the fuzzy calculations of Risk and Return has just undermined the basic thing of the real value anyone gets out of it , which is nothing but the utility (i guess) . Utility till date is one of the most difficult items to quantify and just the point that it is so specific and different for each person in each action makes it an important discussion point for all the economists.

For now, my return(immediate) from reading the papers had been to come 2nd in the DRAC quiz based around the current affairs. It had been ages since i was in that position, thanks to my team mate who has a good run at quizzes. Well, i realised the real value when my team mate waived off a question saying 'I dont know this pa, this is all Fin based question'. Given that premise , i should be equally ignorant about it, however, my knowledge of that specific information left me with a nice feeling that nothing is so incomprehensible. Yeah, it is for sure very embarrassing to know that there was an east asian crisis in the late 90's while all i knew was world cup and my crush in school. But , i kinda realise now its never too late to start reading .(however for people like me, no habit is too steady to call it so, except for sleeping).

Classes had been kind of wierd this term. They atleast are not helping in giving any direction to the Mediocre But Arrogants (except for a few). Why would anyone learn ethics now? My inopportune doubt in class seemed to have irked the prof to earn me a sub-optimal grade(how is that for social experiment in ethics class). 

Scribbled a few lines in some class few days ago :

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One more moment of ignorance,

One more moment we delay;

One more moment of inaction,

is the moment of action.

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The dance of moonlight

from the nether world

seemed so still in water

until i touched it 

and a shock rippled through

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It had been long since i got back to writing these pieces, may be the boring classes will help. The following blog had been a great inspiration though.

http://irrationalrationalities.blogspot.com/2008/09/for-blue.html

P.S: earned myself a small unpaid job :)