Vaibhav Anand's Blog, page 19

Taran Adarsh proclaims Chetan Bhagat’s latest novel will make 100 crores

Dedicated to two national jokes... Chetan Bhagat and Taran Adarsh.Mumbai. After making news for having taken out a full page front ad in the newspaper for his upcoming book, Chetan Bhagat was in the news again when Taran Adarsh gave his book five stars and declared it a “100 Crore Blockbuster” without actually having read it. Yes, Taran is right!Even when his industry peers reminded Mr. Adarsh that the book had not even released for him to have rated it or that books unlike movies were unlikely to make 100 Crores, the intrepid critic refused to back down from his claim.“I am a trade expert,” Mr. Adarsh said to this reporter in an exclusive interview, while he was walking his dog. “I don’t really need to watch movies or read books to comment on trade. I saw the book’s name on TV and instinctively knew it was a five starrer and was going to make hundred crores.”When asked about his mechanism of rating movies or books, Mr. Adarsh pointed to his dog and then asked it, “Snoopy, do you think Half Girlfriend will make 100 Crores?” At this point, Snoopy wagged his tail furiously.“There you have it… it’s confirmed now,” Mr. Adarsh concluded.http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2014/08/13/taran-adarsh-declares-chetan-bhagats-latest-novel-will-make-100-crores-when-made-into-a-movie/

MBA chews up report after CEO calls everything in his presentation “low hanging fruit”

 Continuing my noble battle against corporate jargon. Satire.

Mumbai. A management intern at a consulting firm had to be admitted to hospital after he chewed up his summer internship presentation completely. The incident apparently happened after the CEO – to whom the intern had presented his 45-slides long ppt – ridiculed his presentation and called everything that he had presented “incredibly low hanging fruit that even my pet donkey could have thought of”.

HR officials at the company were unsure whether Tadapit Kumar – the MBA intern in question – was being sarcastic or was just incredibly stupid after he munched on the printouts of his report. “He came from one of the newer IIMs, where we went for recruitment primarily because the CEO’s wife’s friend’s dogwalker’s husband is the Placement Convener there,” an HR representative told Faking News on condition of anonymity. “So I don’t think he was trying to be sarcastic; he can’t do something that may put off the PlaceCom. I think he had never heard the phrase ‘low hanging fruit’ before, or maybe he was extremely hungry,” the HR representative added.

Tadapit was later admitted to a local hospital where doctors declared him out of danger in a flowchart.
“MBA types reports in general, and internship reports in particular, tend to cause short term damage only; the long term damage from them is usually minimal. Mostly because of lack of content... I mean, poisonous content,” a doctor said.

http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2014/08/mba-chews-up-report-after-ceo-calls-everything-in-his-presentation-low-hanging-fruit/

Justice Katju now reveals that Chetan Bhagat bad author, wrote latest novel with one hand only

Inspired by the inimitable Salman Khan of the judicial system. Satire.

After coming out with two belated revelations about corruption in the judiciary, Justice Katju has decided to make revelations about a few people in the non-judicial universe as well. Today, Katju trained his guns at Chetan Bhagat – who he revealed was an “atrociously bad author”.

“I know this is coming almost ten years too late when nothing can actually be done about it,” Katju said, in a telephonic conversation with this Faking News reporter. “But the nation must know. Chetan is an atrociously bad author… Additionally, my sources have told me that he wrote his last novel with his right hand only. Maybe that’s why it is called ‘Half Girlfriend’?”

Sources however said that the move was one of Chetan’s publicity stunts meant to drum up publicity for his latest book “Half Girlfriend”. Tadapit Kumar, an engineering student and like Katju, absolutely no authority on Chetan Bhagat’s writing said, “So what if Chetan wrote the book with one hand or is an atrociously bad writer. He is the Salman Khan of writing. We are all waiting to get our hand on Chetan bhai’s book.”

“Next I will reveal that Yo Yo Honey Singh’s songs are sung by computers and not by an actual human being,” Katju concluded. “Maybe.”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2014/08/12/justice-katju-now-reveals-that-chetan-bhagat-bad-author-wrote-latest-novel-with-one-hand-only/

Afraid of losing another test match, Indian team offers to attend Rajya Sabha on Sachin’s behalf

Finally, back to writing satire in full swing.

England: In a move seen as being inspired by the fear of losing another test match on foreign soil, Mahendra Singh Dhoni – India’s captain – has announced that the Indian cricket team will forfeit the last test match and instead, attend Rajya Sabha on Sachin Tendulkar’s behalf. Faced with public/news channel pressure, Sachin had only recently applied for a leave of absence from the Rajya Sabha after revealing that his brother’s ill health had rendered him unable to attend RS, prior to his leave application.

“We are a team,” Dhoni said at a press conference. “Even when someone retires, he still remains a part of the team and being team players, we must support the person. So we have decided to forfeit the last test match and attend Rajya Sabha on Sachin bhai’s behalf. That way, we won’t have to lose another test match and Arnab Goswami will get enough cricketers in the Parliament so that he doesn’t have to ask any more ‘Nation wants to know’ questions again.”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2014/08/12/afraid-of-losing-another-test-match-indian-team-offers-to-attend-rajya-sabha-on-sachins-behalf/

Book Review: The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams

Bitter and cynical as ever, Scott Adams' book is peppered with unintentionally funny occurrences that are all too familiar if you work in a large organization. Somebody once told me that reading too much Scott Adams is bad for your brain, as it will end up making you cynical - it will make you call out the bluff, figure out the hidden meaning of otherwise perfectly innocuous sounding management phrases and words. (Can't say it didn't happen to me.) The book itself is decently funny though in places it does seem that Adams is trying too hard and his jokes become a tad repetitive.  

However, the one thing I realized after (and while) reading the book was that there is a law of diminishing funniness with Adams' books... Mostly because he ends up recycling some old jokes and cartoons. So if you have read one, that's almost the entirety of what Adams has to say about our unintentionally funny corporate culture(s).

Faced with prospect of watching Hate Story 2 or Kick on weekend, engineering students found actually studying

Dedicated to another mindless Salman Khan flick.Mumbai. Post the release of Salman Khan’s latest movie ‘Kick’, engineering students faced with the prospect of watching the movie were found studying in hostels across the country.“First it is written by Chetan,” said Tadapit Kumar from his hostel in IIT Bombay, “so there is almost a 100% guarantee it is a bad story. Second, Taran Adarsh has given the movie a billion stars, which generally means that the movie is intolerable. So I am in my hostel room, studying the ‘Rotational Dynamics’ chapter from H. C. Verma, which I have begun to find extremely entertaining.”“I saw the trailer of Kick and knew it was going to be a terrible movie that would go on to make 1000 crores,” Chaddha, Tadapit’s roommate said. “But thanks to Kick, everyone in our campus is studying without there being an exam the next day. I think this has to be some kind of record… Guinness nahin to Limca hee sahi.”In IIT Delhi, the scene was no different. “I was shocked,” Shuklaji, the librarian at IIT Delhi Campus. “Generally we get an average of five students every day – four of which are couples looking to spend quality time in free airconditioning. But today it seems the entire campus has come to the library.”“Itne log to exam time pe bhi nahin aate,” he added.

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2014/07/26/faced-with-prospect-of-watching-hate-story-2-or-kick-on-weekend-engineering-students-found-actually-studying/

Candy Crush addict found crushing real candies in office

Dedicated to all the Candy Crush requests I have ever received.

Gurgaon: In the first diagnosed case of “Candy Crush Mania”, a software engineer was found crushing real candies in office when his smartphone crashed. The engineer – called Tadapit Kumar – had reportedly been playing the game for 36 hours straight and had to resort to real life candy crushing when his phone got infected by malware the game had downloaded onto it.


Attempting to clear the air over Tadapit’s situation, his manager Chadha said, “No no no, there has been no pressure on him at work really. It is only this Facebook – Shacebook jee. Everybody is going mad these days.”

“I had been getting Candy Crush invites for a few years and had been ignoring them,” Tadapit said in an exclusive interview with this Faking News reporter, continuing to crush Pan Parag toffees between his fingers. “But yesterday I decided to accept an invite from a girl whose profile pic was really quite cute. I thought she would start noticing me in office if I accepted the invite. But what happened next was that I ended up getting really addicted to this candy-crushing business, with no time left for other things.”

“And worst thing was that even after my phone got infected with whatever virus that game has,” Tadapit said, “I still cannot stop crushing candies. In fact, I find crushing them terribly liberating. I don’t have a girlfriend, my career is going nowhere and my dad thinks I am a loser, but at least I am good at crushing candies!”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2014/07/21/candy-crush-addict-found-crushing-real-candies-in-office/

Times of India Movie Reviews: The Freakonomical Scam Underneath (Part Two)

So ever since I wrote on this topic (read Part One here), I have been getting congratulatory emails, requests for the data I used to run the analysis and a few emails/ comments on my post contesting the validity of the analysis. I think some people didn’t really get it. What I had analyzed, hypothesized and then proven using data was that the gap in movie review ratings between TOI and IMDB (and not the actual rating on TOI itself) moves up whenever there is a bankable star in a movie.
However, I just wanted to take this data analysis further. (So expect there to be a part three or four as well later.) Just to silence the handful of critics my previous article attracted, I ran something that could conclusively prove TOI’s complicity in scamming the public (apropos movie reviews). 
As I had explained in Part One, I have been, for some time, particularly pained by the disparity in TOI’s movie reviews versus reviews by independent reviewers like Masand/ Anupama Chopra. So what I did was take down movie reviews for 100 movies and compute the gap in movie ratings between TOI and IMDB (arguably the most unbiased movie reviewer possible).
Aside from my discoveries in part one, what is more damning is that the average movie review gap between TOI and IMDB goes up by a whopping 360% if the budget of a movie is higher than INR 32.76 Crore. (32.76 Crore was the average budget of the movie data set I analyzed.) In simpler terms, on average the gap in movie reviews between TOI and IMDB moved up by 4.6 times, if the budget of the movie being reviewed was higher than the average of the data set, which was Rs. 32.76 Crore.
At the median, the disparity is starker. The median gap in movie reviews between TOI and IMDB moved up by a mindboggling 6.5 times, if the budget of the movie being reviewed was higher than the average of the data set, which was Rs. 32.76 Crore.  So there you have it… We have a hypothesis that stands the test of the monetary challenge thrown at it. Higher the budget, higher the gap in movie review ratings between TOI and IMDB, which should only mean one thing – a part of the higher budget is being allocated to reviewers like TOI.

Times of India's Movie Reviews: A Scam of Freakonomical proportions

I have been a loyal TOI reader since I was about ten. Since then, my daily routine has revolved around reading the newspaper. I was also, in my school days, a TOI Young Journalist for two years and fleetingly considered a career in journalism. 

If you read a paper for a decade and a half as I have (and for several decades as have my parents) you grow addicted to it… you begin to take it seriously. The newspaper business is all about loyalty. People will tell you their breakfast/ tea didn’t go down that well if for whatever reason, they could not grab hold of their favourite newspaper (which was, by the way, a common occurrence during all my childhood vacations with my mother.)

Anyhow, back to me. What I did, when I did not become a journalist, was to become an engineer and an MBA. What that gave me in turn, was an introduction to several simple yet powerful mathematical tools… some of which I will showcase here today…

I have been, for some time, particularly pained by the disparity in TOI’s movie ratings versus ratings by independent reviewers like Masand/ Anupama Chopra. From a point where you could blindly trust TOI to rate a movie honestly, things have come to such a head that you need to verify the TOI’s movie ratings with more independent sources before making a movie-watching decision.

So here’s what I did using the modicum of mathematics I remembered from my engineering and MBA days. I painstakingly took down the ratings of 100 Hindi movies from TOI and from IMDB in an excel and then, subtracted the IMDB Rating from TOI’s Rating to create a dependent variable I shall call “Gap in Ratings”. I also googled extensively for the movies’ production budgets (this removed three movies from my data set whose budgets I could not find on Google: Filmistaan, Rangrezz and O Teri). On top of this, I added an (econometric) layer of whether the movie had a “bankable” star like one of the Khans (Saif included), Amitabh Bacchan, Akshay, Ajay Devgan, etc... And then, I ran a linear correlation and several regressions (going up to the power of seven), just to see if there was a pattern with which the “Gap in Ratings” between TOI and IMDB varied.

Just a snapshot of what the data looked like is here:


I found that there was a 47% correlation between the gap in movie ratings on TOI vs IMDB and the budget of a movie. Now what that technically means is that 47% of the value of the variable “Gap in movie ratings on TOI vs IMDB” can be explained by the independent variable “Budget of a movie” while the remaining 53% is determined by other factors. But 47% isn’t really strong enough; there’s still 53% that’s explained by factors we do not statistically understand (or haven’t accounted for).


What, however, is infinitely more interesting is that if you take the average gap in ratings between TOI and IMDB for movies with non bankable stars, it comes to +0.38 points on a scale of 10. However, throw bankable stars into the mix and the average gap in ratings between TOI and IMDB goes up to +1.11 on a scale of 10. 

That’s a 190% jump in the average gap in ratings between TOI and IMDB if a movie has a bankable star. Meaning, in non mathematical terms, the disparity in ratings given by TOI vs IMDB on average goes up by 190% if the movie has a bankable star. 

(For the record, I have counted the Khans including Saif, Sanjay Dutt, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgun, Hrithik, Ranbir, the Deols and Emraan Hashmi as bankable stars… bankable stars, by definition, are the marquee stars whose films always make money or are supposed to always make money, anyway)

Since averages can sometimes be skewed by a couple of data points, let us now look at medians. So if you take the median gap in ratings between TOI and IMDB for movies with non bankable stars, it comes to +0.2 points on a scale of 10. However, throw bankable stars into the mix and the median gap in ratings between TOI and IMDB goes up to +1.3 on a scale of 10. 

That’s a whopping 550% jump in the median gap in ratings between TOI and IMDB, if a movie has a bankable star. Meaning, in non mathematical terms, the disparity in ratings given by TOI vs IMDB at the median goes up by 550% if the movie has a bankable star.

Another interesting fact – if you look at movies with bankable stars, the minimum rating TOI has given (for the 97 movie data set going back a couple of years) is 2 (out of 5) whereas the least rating for a movie with a bankable star on IMDB is 0.85 (out of 5).

That’s a 135% higher minimum review, seemingly guaranteed, by the TOI.

Since numbers cannot lie, it is highly likely that the rumours doing the rounds in media circles are true and TOI actually charges money for maintaining a minimum guaranteed review. Consider this – Humshakals, a movie panned universally by almost all critics, got three stars from TOI. Himmatwala got 2.5, as did ‘The XPose’ and Rangrezz – all movies which were universally buried by the rest of the movie critic universe. The list goes on and if you are really interested in doing your own data analysis or going through my numbers, reach out to me at vaibhavrainmaker@gmail.com.

So where does this take us?

One – TOI is most likely on the take whenever there is a big budget movie with a big star involved to give them a Minimum Review of at least 2.5 or 3. If the movie is terribly terribly terribly terrible, the Minimum Review guarantee falls to 2 (eg: Chatur Singh).

Two – if the movie has a bankable star, just shave off 0.55 points off TOI’s review from a statistical point of view to arrive at its actual watchability potential.

And, dear Times of India, if you are reading this, you just lost a loyal reader. 
PS: Data analysis done on 97 hindi movies with available budgets. 41 of these had “bankable” stars.  

Book Review: Manhunt by Peter Bergen

Even though I have read three books on Taliban/ Al Qaeda/ Afghanistan already, "Manhunt" stood out as an extremely entertaining thriller which had the pages turning on its own. This is absolutely the best Bin Laden/ Al Qaeda/ Terrorism book that I have read (so far).

Peter Bergen peppers the book with fly-on-the-wall situations such as conversations between and the events of Osama's, George Bush's and Obama's inner circles. He chronicles the exact location, verbiage and even hand gestures of the various characters in the drama that ensued after 9/11.

If you are looking to understand how the animal called Bin Laden was captured and killed, "Manhunt" is THE book to read. Highly recommended.