Rain, Salsa, and the Games

Well, officially this is the first post.

Yesterday I picked up my dinner order at the coffee shop - a thali full of bisi bele bath and some dahi to go along with it and sat down to watch the enthusiastic salsa (well we are talking about the dance) learners sweat it out in the atrium, the hub of all social activity here at the Indian School of Business (www.isb.edu). The heavens began to roar and the rain along with the trademark Hyderabad winds came down and the feeling was quite ethereal. The girls tried hard to keep their skirts down in face of the winds while the subtle lilt in their mid-bodies was as unrelenting as the winds themselves. The boys who were dancing with them, of course, couldn't believe their luck.

The buzz around the cafe was uncharacteristically subdued because of the newly opened Cafe Coffee Day in the courtyard - the most direct challenge yet to the monopolistic cafe here at ISB. The students who were praying for some competition to the existing cafe for a while finally took their business elsewhere. I didn't mind that because that meant I got my order delivered at an unprecedented speed and with a hint of ghee in the food as a bonus.

The day felt short, not a usual feeling at ISB, probably because the mid-term exams and the weekend assignments were behind us but also because the classes were great today - the impressive British-accented Prof. Waterman's multiple regressions and Prof. Allen's games (of the Game Theory kind). Two dominant strategies and no Nashes, Battle of the Sexes, Prisoner's Dilemma and so on kept coming back to me. "Good stuff - I should read more of it," I said to myself when my thought train was derailed by some non-South-Indian friends who couldn't comprehend why I was eating this gruel of a sambhar rice for dinner. The misty tease that the wind was playing ended as well. Some other time I will publish my salsa recipe, yes we are talking about the Mexican sauce this time.