The contact distribution

So, I have been backing up my contact list since today morning. Something that I used to do every year before has not been done for a long time now (3 years+). Smartphones and Google has progressively made me dumb and lazy. I have been accumulating contacts without purging the list.

Lately, I have been obsessed with analysing all this data that I keep collecting. So I thought I bombard my readers with a simple frequency distribution of my contact list.

So what do I get from this? 1 in 5 of my contacts had a name starting with S! 85% of my contacts have names starting with S, A, P, R, M, N, V, K, D, T, L, J. I am fairly confident that if you are reading this blog post your name starts with one of the 10 that I just mentioned.

Interestingly, since 2009 I made a new  contact starting with an “O” and dropped a contact starting with a “Q”.

Purging this list of 385 people was an administrative nightmare for me. I first started doing it alphabetically, and as you can see, going through the A list itself took me a while. Hence the distribution. Then I gave up and started walking from the tip of the long tail. So the last of the people who got purged were from “S”. I successfully got down my list by 26% to 283 people. Now people with names T and L are not in the top 10. I haven’t done any analysis about men vs women and Indians vs non-Indians, but I am sure that would be more insightful.

Now for people who are as frustrated as I am with all the contacts lying all around the place. Here is a simple tip – use Google Contacts. Then if you have an Android Phone, make sure that you save all your contacts by default to Google. Also make sure that you setup groups of contacts. Then religiously purge your list every year so that it remains manageable and you get rid of spurious contacts that you tend to accumulate. Enjoy.

How to setup your phone to save all your contacts to Google:

Go to Phone > Contacts > Settings > Save new contacts to > Google.

Boxer Invasion

Indian men (in my area) have taken a new affection towards boxers. Probably because they are ultra-comfortable, convenient and best suited for our climate. Or maybe because they are cheaper than buying shorts, and you can actually wear them around the house as opposed to running around in an underwear.

What is weird though is – many men actually wear these boxers in public places. So I can see men walking around casually shopping, eating, chatting and sipping coffee out there in the open in their boxers!

Men wearing boxers in public can fall into 3 categories – either they are ignorant, or are underwear models or are super cool men who don’t care what the world thinks about them.

If you are a secret undercover underwear model strutting your stuff in a boxer in public places and if you happen to read this blog, I am sorry I blew your cover. I didn’t know that you were trying to spread awareness about boxers to Indian men. I apologize.

If you are a super cool man, who doesn’t care what people think while you go about doing your stuff; beware in Mumbai you can be arrested under Section 110 of the Bombay Police Act 1951 excerpt from the act goes here:

Behaving indecently in public - No person shall willfully and indecently expose his person ill [sic] any street or public place or within sight of, and in such manner as to be seen from any street or public place, whether from within any house or building or not, or use indecent language or behave indecently or riotously, or in a disorderly manner in a street or place of public resort or in any office station or station house

I am assuming that wearing underwear in public in Mumbai can be classified as indecent behaviour?

And finally if you fall in the ignorant category, please read, understand and assimilate this blog-post and go buy some good shorts for yourself to wear in public.

Dhanyawad.

Horror-scope

I believe, there can be only types of people in this world - People who believe in horoscopes and those who don’t.

Now the people who believe – believe that whatever is told to them to be written in their fate will come true. Such people, subconsciously affect their life to bring the horoscope true.

The people who don’t believe in horoscopes, essentially believe that whatever the horoscope says cannot be true. So they subconsciously work against what is told to them to be written in their fate.

Lets say that your horoscope says you are going to die young. If you are a believer your unconscious mind will start affecting your daily routine to make you sick or put you in harm’s way. And if you are a non-believer you would take extra steps to remain healthy and out of harm’s way. So, whatever you do, you will end up changing your normal routine because of that prediction.

Essentially, horoscope is just a tool to manipulate your thinking about your fate. It’s a tool to introduce a paradox. Depending on the group that you belong to (believer or non-believer) you end up changing your true fate to fit your belief in the science of the horoscope.