Architecture - art of balancing ?

Better to invest time in architecture rather than fine arts. This seems to be a better use of time and resources than producing the next Van Gogh.

Leaning Tower of Pisa

Money out of thin air ...

Do not try at home

Few days back, I enquired my former colleague about the ways one can fill up a digital wallet. According to him, the source of money can be anything, such as, a credit card. 

The card companies usually put a high interest if cash is withdrawn and usually offer a interest rebate for real goods and services. In other ways, if you repay within the interest free period, then you only need to pay the actuals. 

Digital wallets on the other hand charge a fee for the reverse action i.e. when one pushes money back to the bank account. Let us assume, that all inbound and outbound transaction fees comes around 5% of the total cash.

If one is a good trader in the stock market and can make more than 5% in the rebate period, then he would have created wealth out of thin air. 

I hope such holes are plugged in the popular digital wallets. 

Automatic transmission - end of rationality

Automatic transmission have gained popularity over the years. The fuel efficiency is (probably) poor in automatic transmissions and it creates so much comfort in the driving experience that it results in fatal accidents.

You may call me old-school but I think its the end of rational thinking !!

More the sophistication, more the odds of failure. Imagine the cost of ownership for such fancy cars.

Abnormally high P/E

Suspect companies with abnormally high P/E. It is best to stay away from such companies.

All it requires is a cabal with a PSU. Ask the PSU to buy at high prices each day, generating a trend and inviting the idiot who studies technical analysis and invests in the stock. These moves are pumping up the price of the stock. The owner can now ask for loan and put as collateral his high priced stock. At this point, the owner buys goods from China or Malaysia and sells it to make money. At this point the PSU starts dumping the stock looting the ordinary investor. When the stock price falls below a level, the owner or the PSU may again buy it. The cycle repeats next year and the year after. 

Hence, with no interest payment, one can take a loan and generate income out of thin air (and of course China)

Rigging in the name of lottery

There has been rampant corruption by the government authorities on allocating plots at co-operative societies. And, all it requires is a freezer.

Put the names of those who bribed in a chit, or even better, in a metal ball, and put those inside the freezer.

Along with some random choices, pull out the ones those are cold.

This rationale lets us to think that horse trading and lotto games should be a fair place; however a steroid injection can make a horse run faster or a dog fight stronger. Every single game of strategy can be rigged with insiders in the bet. 

It is easy to rig people; difficult to rig and dig planet Earth. That is why my renewed interest to work in offshore oil rigs.

Day 6: Vommiting creativity and higher math

ভুতুড়ে প্রেম

কার যে ছায়া মারলো উঁকি

চোখের ভুল না মনের ফাকি

ধাপ্পা দিচ্ছে শাকচুন্নি

দত্তি বলে টুকি ...

The payment gateway that never rolled out ...

The Context

In 2011, while working at a major media house, I designed a solution for a market gap that predated the gig economy buzzword: connecting skilled blue-collar workers with households.

At the time, smartphone penetration was low, and data networks were unreliable. We didn't want to build a niche app for the top 1%; we wanted to build a utility for the common man. The goal was to engineer a Location-Aware Service Marketplace that operated effectively within the constraints of a 2G/SMS ecosystem.

The Architecture of Constraints

Modern innovators often default to high-bandwidth solutions. However, true engineering requires respecting the end-user's reality. Recognizing that millions of skilled gig workers were semi-literate and lacked data access, I designed a hybrid system relying on 2G protocols for communication and physical community networks for trust.

Solving the "Trust" Algorithm Offline

The biggest challenge in any marketplace is trust and payment reconciliation. Today, we solve this with APIs and payment gateways. In 2011—before Jan Dhan accounts or UPI—I architected a "Man-Machine" Escrow System.

1. The Supply Chain: Analog Data Ingestion
   Building the gig database required a manual, verified pipeline:

• Onboarding: Local newspaper vendors registered service providers (electricians, plumbers, beauticians, small kiranas, et.al) using paper forms.
• Logistics: These forms moved up the supply chain—from vendors to distributors to the media house.
• Digitization: Data was entered via manual pipelines (OCR tools like Tesseract were not yet mature enough for handwritten Indic scripts).
• Confirmation: A Unicode onboarding SMS was sent to the service provider, establishing a digital handshake.

2. The Transaction: Hybrid / Digital + Analog

• Discovery: Literate readers utilized a smartphone app to book services.
• Payment & Escrow: Money was deducted digitally from the reader’s account (piggybacking on existing newspaper subscription billing cycles) Back then, local newspaper vendors used to collect cash from readers upfront at beginning of month.
• Execution: Upon job completion, the reader verified via App/SMS. The system simultaneously triggered an SMS to the electrician confirming the "Amount Receivable.”

3. The Settlement: The Human Clearing House
This was the core innovation. The local newspaper vendors acted as distributed financial nodes.

• The money paid by the reader was escrowed by the system.
• At the end of the settlement cycle (weekly/monthly), the service provider visited their local paper vendor for a cash payout.
• Float Management: The reader pre-paid for subscription, that need not be paid till a month or more, plus full amount unlikely to be utilized by reader in one transaction resulted in float generation. We envisioned deploying the float into money market funds to generate yield, which could have funded incentives for the all participants in the system.

In financial engineering terms, this was an early attempt at active Float Management—similar to how modern wallets operate, though with a crucial difference. While players like Paytm are mandated by the RBI to park user funds in strict, non-interest-bearing escrow accounts (to protect the 'common man'), my 2011 architecture proposed an Asset-Liability Management (ALM) layer where the float would be deployed into low-risk liquid funds. This would have turned the idle 'trust' capital into a revenue engine to subsidize the platform's operational costs.

Avoid trading if ...

Avoid trading if you do not have powerful machines. High speed traders have their machines co-located with the best possible wiring, thereby reducing latency of price discovery. You don't have that speed. Read about spoofing. 

You may think yourself to be smart but you do not have good machines. And those with good machines who think they are smart are headed for disaster. Read it here.

Understand what is hedge fund - not in the way the popular comedian Punit Paniya explains. Those are used by billionaires and other endowment funds to hedge their risk globally. 

Not every day a corporate action takes place like a stock split or warrant?? Hence, the supply of the commodity i.e. stock is more or less fixed. The demand i.e. your hard earned money flows inside or outside. If a pension fund managed by a hedge firm needs to pay-out, it will pull out money from the market. Do you know when and how much that pay-out will be ?

Use your computer skills for something more better than trading. 

Recommendation: Algo-trading should be discontinued in BSE and only allowed in NSE (According to some estimates, 50% of successful trades are executed by the computer)

Day 5: Vommiting creativity and higher math

Plot for a mega-serial on one of Bengal's fictitious icon (Professor Shanku) is ready. 

Please contact for the copyrights. 

Day 4: Vommiting creativity and higher math

 UNLIKE ME ;-)

I CAN SPEAK, I CAN WRITE

I AM OK, I CAN RECITE

I CAN DO, DO NEXT TIME

I AM OK, I CAN RHYME

I CAN JUMP, JUMP HIGH

I AM OK, I CAN FLY

I CAN DO, DO RIGHT

I AM OK, I CAN FIGHT

Day 3 - Vommiting creativity and higher math

About love triangles ...

একটি  শালিক   দুটি  শালিক
 দুটি  জমি  একটি   মালিক
একটি  পাতা  দুটি    কুঁড়ি
দুটি  পুরুষ  একটি  নারী
দুটি গাল  একটি  চুমি
একটি জীবন একটি তুমি  ...